PAIRING: Detective!Mingyu x f. Reader
SUMMARY: In a city where technology makes it possible to shed your body as easily as changing clothes, Mingyu has built his reputation hunting criminals who disappear behind new faces. So when you become the prime suspect in a brutal string of serial murders, he should have no trouble closing the case. Except… the more he investigates you, the less he’s convinced you’re guilty.
CHAPTER WC: 9,415
AU: Cyberpunk, Mystery, Crime
GENRE: Strangers to Lovers, some angst, smut
RATING: 18+ Minors are strictly prohibited from engaging in and reading this content. It contains explicit content and any minors discovered reading or engaging with this work will be blocked immediately.
WARNINGS: This contains vivid depiction of a dead body that has been intentionally disfigured/messed with by a serial killer - I will call this body horror simply because I want to play it on the safe side, mention of dead bodies in general, depiction of gore and blood (in the dead body scene), bodies being referenced to as ‘Skins’ because replacing the body is possible in this world, lots of commentary on wealth gap, lots of references to how humanity just doesn’t care about human livelihood the same way it did once, mentions of deep poverty, mentions of throw away Skins (bodies) being dumped in an alleyway, Mingyu is kind of emo, Mingyu is a cigarette smoker because what is a detective fic without cigarette smoking, lots of reference to a terrible justice system, reader is a stripper and there is a brief scene of her dancing on Mingyu, lots of random body modifications but nothing super weird or in detail, Mingyu in general just has a lot of general dislike for the world, explicit language, um.... I think that's it for this chapter?
A/N: This is for the Cyberpunk: Reload Collab hosted by @studiosvt and I could not be more excited to be bringing this to you! This is heavily inspired by Altered Carbon, Ghost in the Shell, and Blade Runner. This fic is a bit gritty because we all know me. I do not currently have a schedule set for the second chapter, but I am going to try to write the remaining three in total and then post them on a quick schedule basis to shorten the wait between them.
A/N 2: No beta we die like Jedi during order 66
BANNER CREDIT: Thank you to @joshujin for the amazing, beautiful banner!
MAIN M. LIST | ASK | CYBERPUNK: RELOAD M. LIST | TESSELLATION TWO
it has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world. - chaos theory
"THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT IS A PRINCIPLE IN CHAOS THEORY THAT STATES THAT SMALL, SEEMINGLY INSIGNIFICANT CHANGES IN INITIAL CONDITIONS CAN TRIGGER MASSIVE, UNPREDICTABLE, AND VASTLY DIFFERENT OUTCOMES IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS-"
Mingyu knows what the butterfly effect is. In fact, the exact audio recording playing on loop throughout the penthouse apartment is the same audio that's been haunting his dreams and the moments of almost sleep he's been having at his desk while filling out piles and piles of paperwork at the station.
Now, the audio is playing again at the third crime scene in as many months, and he's had it.
"Turn that shit off," he barks, walking through the flickering holograph of the caution barrier. His legs disrupt the light only for a second, shadows bounding off the walls as he enters the main living area. "I'm tired of hearing about the fucking butterfly effect."
He was tired of researching it, too. Researching why a serial killer would leave the same recording playing at each crime scene over and over again, researching what the murders could possibly have to do with one another. So far, the first five victims have no connection to one another, nothing that clues Mingyu into what's going on beyond the same audio on loop. He doesn't expect this sixth victim will have any connection to their predecessors, but he has to try.
A grisly scene paints the penthouse. It's a nicer home than anything Mingyu will ever afford with floor-to-cieling windows that overlook the neon smear of the city. Rain blurs against the glass, turning the glow beyond to a muted opaque color that clashes with the bright caution banners and the lights of the investigative unit called to the scene.
The penthouse reeks of the metallic tang of blood and the faint tang of the chemicals the collection team uses to take samples all around the apartment. The victim lies splayed across the massive obsidian coffee table in the main entertainment area, arms and legs extended at unnatural angles. It's a male body, the torso filleted open from sternum to pelvis with surgical precision, the ribs cracked outward like grotesque wings.
Mingyu has seen five of these now. Each one has been more elaborate than the last. Each one leaves him with the same hollow frustrating gnawing at his gut.
"Lee," he barks at the lead forensic tech hovering nearby. "Anything different this time? Prints? Core signature? A confession, perhaps?"
Chan shakes his head, his rain-slicked jacket shedding beads of water onto the floor. "Same as the others. No prints, and the audio rig is the same ghost job as the last. The victim owns the building, his name is Harlan Voss. He got a new Skin a few weeks ago at Sync Corp. Nice model, nothing too extreme."
Mingyu crouches beside the table, his boots squelching in the thin layer of blood that has spread across the marble. Through the windows, the city pulses below, bright signs for body rental shops and upgrade clinics flashing in the downpour. Towering buildings disappear into the clouds, connected by old elevated trains that rattle in the distance.
Mingyu looks at the body. Chan had said the Skin upgrade was nothing too extreme, but in a world where people swap bodies regularly, the word extreme has lost most of its value, especially for people like Harlan Voss who are wealthy enough to transfer the Core implanted in their brain stem to a new body anytime they want.
It makes permanent death uncommon for people of this caliber. Mingyu tilts his head to the side, examining the back of Harlan's neck where his Core is. Like the others, it's damaged, which means Harlan is dead dead. No transferring his Core to a new body after the death of this one, no regeneration.
It unsettles something deep in Mingyu like satisfaction, and he pushes it down. He has no time to be disgusted by the Skin jumping of the wealthy while the people below scrap together money to upgrade their Skins to something new or broken just for the prestige of doing it.
Mingyu pushes up to his feet, joints popping and back aching. He groans - unlike the dead victim in front of him, he can't pay to have the tiny device buried in his neck to be transferred to some upgraded flashy skin. One would assume that as law enforcement, he'd get some kind of special discount or offers to enhance his speed, strength or something, but Mingyu has quickly learned that only the wealthy benefit from anything in this city.
He looks around the room slowly, eyes scanning for anything out of place. A broken glass on the bar counter. A half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey tipped over, mixing with the blood into a pink mess. Framed pictures on the walls show vacation spots in brighter cities, the kind most people only see in ads. One frame lies smashed on the floor, exposing basic wiring behind the fancy cover. Typical rich place that looks expensive on top but cheap underneath.
"Why butterflies?" Mingyu mutters to himself. "Chaos theory. One small change leads to big results. Like a butterfly flapping its wings and starting a storm somewhere else."
The killer isn't hiding the message. Each killing has happened once a month - not on a perfect timing, but approximate. Each scene is bigger - more wing shapes, more lights, the same audio. But the victims are never the same and thus far, there's no link between them. No shared friends, no common jobs, nothing on the basic records. A nobody found in a cheap rental unit. An escort pulled from a job. Nothing ties them together except this ritual.
But Mingyu doesn't know what this ritual is.
Frustration burns in his chest. Five months of this, nights bleeding into days at the station, staring at paper files and holoscreens while rain water leaks onto his desk. His own body feels worn out - aches deep in his joints, eyes burning constantly from lack of sleep. Unlike the dead man in front of him, Mingyu can't afford a new Skin on a detective's pay.
"Detective Kim?" Chan calls, voice unsure. Mingyu spins on his heel to find Chan crouched by the body, holding a small device in his hand near the core in the victim's neck. "I think the core is damaged but not dead."
"What?"
Mingyu strides over, his long legs making it easy. Chan crouches lower, the glasses on his face sliding down his sweaty nose. Mingyu leans over, tilting his head as Chan gently nudges the victim's head to turn it more. The Core is exposed to the elements and cut, like the attacker had been cutting it out to kill it, but as it catches the light, there's a small blip of cyan along the side, flickering as it tries to regain connectivity.
"Holy shit," Mingyu whispers. "If it's still alive, can you re-gen this guy?"
"Maybe, but it's potentially damaged enough that he would come back with high-level personality disorders or other cognitive issues. We might be able to repair enough to access memory or information, though." Chan hesitates. "Legal might get involved. If he's got family or others left behind, they might demand the Core be delivered to them to figure out what to do with it or refuse access to us."
Mingyu's hums, thoughtful. The possibility of interference is higher than he'd like to admit. In the few cases that Mingyu has dealt with the elite, their spouses or family left behind have always been nearly impossible in active investigations. He's since learned that those who sit in gilded glass towers have more to hide than the criminals crawling on the ground, and they'd rather a case go cold than unearth their secrets.
"Are we required to notify them?" Mingyu asks, glancing at Chan.
"Yes?"
"What if we only found it was discovered functional later in a proper autopsy."
Chan looks uncomfortable for a moment before nodding. "Yeah. That would make sense."
"Autopsies get delayed, right?" Chan sighs and Mingyu grins, slapping him on the back as he stands again. "Glad we understand each other, Lee. Take care of this while I walk around the area, yeah?"
"Yes, Detective."
Mingyu leaves the apartment and takes the stairs instead of the elevator, his knees protesting with each step. The exercise feels good though, so he jogs down the winding stairs, mind racing. By the time he reaches the ground level, he's sore and his heart is pounding, both reminders that he's human and that he's in his natural body, two things he's grown to be proud of.
The lobby is sleek, made up of polished obsidian and soft blue recessed lighting. Mingyu strolls through the automatic doors, the air locks hissing as he lets himself out into the rain, shoes tapping wetly on the pavement.
Reaching into his pocket, he fishes out a cigarette - an ancient, old world habit in comparison to the sleek vapes most people use - and sticks it between his lips, digging around his pocket for a lighter. He finds it and flicks it, the orange flame licking upward as he lights the cigarette, taking a brief drag. The flame catches and he flicks it shut, taking a heavy drag and lets the smoke settle in his lungs before he exhales into the neon smear of rain.
The street level is quieter this time of night, most of the storefronts closed, their holographic signs still flickering anyway. The street is full of advertising and marketing for Skin modification services, Core implant repairs, temporary Skin rentals for people too poor to own one permanently but desperate enough to spend a night as someone else.
Neon bleeds across the wet pavement in streaks of magenta and cyan, reflecting off the rain to create a blurry kaleidoscope of light that makes Mingyu's eyes water as he takes another drag, flicking ash into a puddle where it melts.
He walks, letting his feet guide him around the perimeter of the building, cool raing tapping down on his head and neck like soft fingers. He doesn't bother with an umbrella, the rain sliding off his jacket as he examines the exterior, cigarette wedged between his lips.
The neighborhood is a mix of high-rises towering over strip malls, luxury boutiques selling pricey mods next to hole-in-the-wall clinics offering illegal and questionable upgrades. It's one of common liminal spaces in the city where the almost wealthy clash with the lower glass, each fighting for dominance on the ground while the megaliths of the city exist in their towers far above.
Mingyu wonders what the rest of them look like from on high. He imagines that they can't even see people like him, rotting beneath the clouds and scurrying around like ants beneath a boot that's constantly waiting to step on them. Mingyu has been stepped on plenty of times, but he hasn't died yet and he doesn't plan on it now, heading to the back alleyway behind the building.
Dumpsters filled with broken tech litter the alleyway, but Mingyu pauses when he sees a bunch of old, rotted Skins. He lifts his arm, covering his face with it to ward off the smell. Skins are still bodies - they're still organic material like any other living organism, and they break down the same way. Seeing tossed Skins isn't uncommon, especially near body-mod shops, but Mingyu is unsettled to see them just tossed, flies buzzing around them.
Pulling out his phone, he dials Chan up stairs. "Send a team down to the back alley, there's discarded Skins. None of them look fresh or functional, but maybe our killer tosses theirs."
"On it."
"Also have someone dispose of these before someone wanders around and tries to take them. They're rotted beyond use, the last thing we need is some kind of infection going around because people are re-genning bad Skins."
"Understood."
Mingyu hangs up the phone and takes the final drag of his cigarette before flicking it toward the dumpster. He continues on his way, searching - for what he doesn't know. Something. Anything. He just wants to find something to help him unravel the mystery upstairs, something he's missed previously.
As always, he finds nothing except the smell of wet concrete and biological decay, the distant hum of an elevated train line cutting through the noise somewhere. He circles back to the front of the building and finds himself looking upward. The building is a vertical monument to wealth that juts up into the rain-soaked sky, but it's got nothing on the monstrosities the corporation owners and mega-rich of the city live in.
The rain grows heavier, coming down in sheets. Mingyu slips under the overhang in front of the building, watching as the world vanishes to a blur of light behind the rain. From here, he knows the city by heart - it spreads out in layers, the commercial district with aggressive neon signage, the old industrial zones still smoking from plants that are ready to collapse any minute, and beyond, the entertainment and wealthy districts.
Trains arc across the space between buildings while autonomous vehicles move through the streets in perfect formation, headlights occasionally cutting through the dark toward him as they pass by the building.
They city pulses on despite the death upstairs, the desperation and money and excess and filth all tangled together, and somewhere in it, is the person Mingyu is hunting, the butterfly that haunts his dreams and all of the hours in between.
Mingyu sighs, jaw clenched as he watches the rain, the same words on loop in his head: The butterfly effect is a principle chaos theory that states that small, seemingly insignificant changes in initial conditions can trigger massive, unpredictable, and vastly different outcomes in complex systems.
-
Mingyu stares at the six projected faces in front of him, the cyan of the holoscreen only broken up by the flicker as he switches from viewing all six of them at once to one at a time. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzes, glitching for a moment as it threatens to go out. It's been dying for three weeks now, humming like an insect trapped in a glass. No one has bothered to fix it, of course. The maintenance budget at the precinct is nonexistent, most of the funding funnelling into the new autonomous patrol units they send to patrol through the wealthy districts.
Down here in the bowels of the city, everything is falling apart. Water drips from a crack in the ceiling two desks over, landing in the metal track can with a constant metal drip that drives Mingyu nuts. The air smells like mildew and stale air undercut by the burnt coffee that tastes like battery acid every time he takes a sip. He drinks it out of a chipped mug anyway, needing the extra jolt of energy and unwilling to take any of the stimulants or quick fixes the young deputies prefer.
Mingyu's fingers drum on his mug to the rhythm of the dripping. He cannot unstick his thoughts from the six victims over six months, struggling to find the connection. He drags his finger across the holoscreen to pull up the first victim's file again, despite having read it a million times. The first victim is a male nobody, found in a cheap Skin rental unit in the lower districts, his body laid out with the same surgical precision and same butterfly effect audio playing on loop. The victim had no family, no friends, and the damaged Core had said unclaimed in evidence for two weeks unclaimed and uncared for before being incinerated per protocol.
Sighing, he swipes to the second victim, a female escort pulled from a job in the entertainment district. She'd been with a wealthy client a few hours prior, but the client had a clean alibi and had no problem letting them scan his Core for memories of the entire night. The escorts Core, like the first victim, had been damaged beyond recovery, just like the first, though the job had been done a little cleaner, a little better.
The third victim comes up as Mingyu stares. Mid-level corporate suit who worked in data analysis and had an entirely boring and normal life. No enemies, no debts, no reason for anyone to want him dead. His family had come to claim his Core two days after they'd been notified, and Mingyu was surprised to discover that in a world full of abnormal, the man had been even keel and plain with enough money to provide for himself and his family but not enough to do much else than that.
The fourth and fifth victims' only similarities were their involvement in the black market, though neither had crossed paths. The fourth had been a street vendor selling neural mods, but the fifth had been a retired surgeon who'd started performing illegal Core augmentations that had landed him with a fine and warning - not jail. Never jail.
And now Harlan Voss, the owner of an apartment complex. All of the victims had been from different parts of the city, the only thing linking them together was the ritual by which they had been left for him. Though Mingyu can't prove it, he feels like there's a joking edge to it now, like each death is meant to tease him and his inability to figure it out.
He leans back in his chair, the springs groaning under his weight. His eyes burn. He hasn't slept more than three hours in the past two days, and even that was broken up by the fragmented dreams of the butterfly effect audio bleeding into his fucking subconscious until he woke up gasping, the words echoing in his skull.
There's something he's missing. Mingyu knows he's on a timeline to figure it out now that Voss has been killed. Before, his superiors hadn't thought much of a serial killer stringing together some useless skins - people who didn't matter in the system. Though Harlan Voss doesn't matter, exactly, he's a step closer to the people up top that the city is obsessed with protecting, the people worth protecting.
Mingyu had learned a long time ago that people have become disposable. Bodies are just shells now, things you can rent or buy or discard when they stop serving you. Cores get pulled, transferred, reinstalled into something younger and prettier, and the person moves on. Humanity has been reduced to data, consciousness stripped down to the electrical impulses that can be copied, moved, and erased.
Death is so common to those at the top that it barely registers. But when real death happens - Core death - it turns heads, especially when it's a little too close to the gilded.
Mingyu's jaw tightens. His body aches, knees stiff, lower back throbbing from too many hours in this shitty chair, too many hours in the field in his original Skin. He feels every year of it, and though it makes him feel human, he can't help but be bothered how the wealthy don't age like this. They just buy new bodies by the dozen. Transfer over. Keep going. It's immortality for anyone who can afford it, cheating death over and over again.
Cracking his neck, Mingyu refocuses on the work at hand and pulls up the financial records again, cross-referencing bank accounts, transaction histories, anything that might link the victims. There's nothing, of course. Everyone has different banks and different spending patterns, different lives and different histories. The only thing they have in common is the way they died.
The butterfly effect is a principle in chaos theory…
Mingyu's phone buzzes on the desk. He picks it up to see Chan's name flash across the screen and he answers right away. "Lee, what have you got?"
"Core is ready," Chan says on the other side. "I've stabilized it enough for a read of the memory logs. You should come down."
"How long do we have?"
"Hard to say. It's pretty damaged. Could be an hour, could be less. If we're going to pull anything, it needs to be now."
"Heard. On my way."
Mingyu ends the call and stands. The holoscreen glows faintly in front of him, the six faces of the dead he can't seem to bring justice too staring back at him until he swipes again and they vanish. He grabs his jacket from the back of the chair and heads for the door, shrugging the leather over his shoulders.
The forensic lab is two floors down, a section of the station most detectives like to avoid. Mingyu takes the stairwell, refusing to get stuck in the elevator for a sixth time, leaping down the steps as he takes two at a time.
Bright, sterile light greets him as he pushes into the lab, making him squint. Banks of equipment link the walls, shelves full of neural readers, Core analysis stations, data extraction devices and a section for biopsy and medical analysis. The air smells faintly chemical, kind of like the inside of a machine. He prefers the smell of the burnt coffee and damp upstairs than whatever it is that permeates the forensic floor.
Chan is standing at the far end of the room, hunched over a workstation where a cylindrical containment unit glows with a faint, sickly cyan light. Voss's Core floats suspended in the translucent gel, its surface marred with dark fractures that spiderweb across the neural casing, damaged from the attack. Mingyu watches as the light flickers, pulsing in irregular intervals while Chan tinkers with it.
"Lee," Mingyu greets, crossing the room in a few long strides.
"We've got maybe thirty minutes before this thing goes dark," Chan says without looking up, his fingers tapping on a tablet next to him. A holographic interface appears over the desk, cyan numbers and date reflected in Chan's glasses. "Give me a sec."
"Can we reanimate him?" Mingyu asks, crossing his arms over his chest as Chan works.
The lab technician shakes his head. "No. The damage is too extensive. A system reboot would require full neural integration, and the Core can't support that kind of load. It would collapse the moment we tried to initialize consciousness."
He taps a section of the holographic display, pulling up a three-dimensional model of the Core's internal structure. Half of it is shaded black, dead zones where the neural pathways have been damaged beyond repair. Mingyu sighs, nodding. They're lucky they have anything at all - a damaged Core is better than no Core at all.
"We can access the memory storage," Chan says, tapping something. "It's fragmented and corrupted in places, but there's enough intact data that we can pull maybe a few minutes worth of his life from it. Maybe more if we're lucky."
"How much is a few minutes?"
"Hard to say until we're in. Could be five, could be ten. Depends on how much the Core was actively recording before it got damaged." Chan glances at Mingyu, his expression cautious. "This isn't like interrogating a living witness, Detective. We're pulling raw sensory data that will be from Voss's perception. It'll be disjointed - memory isn't linear."
Mingyu nods. "Do it."
Chan's fingers move across the interface, initiating the connection sequence. The containment unit hums, a low vibration that Mingyu feels in his chest, and the cyan light intensifies, brightening until it casts sharp shadows across the lab.
The holoscreen shifts and for a moment, there's nothing but static and a wash of grey noise that flickers and shifts. Then an image resolves, making both Mingyu and Chan lean forward as Chan tampers with the interface, sharpening the image.
A penthouse. Floor-to-cieling windows. Rain. The perspective shifts as Voss moves, walking across the floor of his apartment to his kitchen and grabs a bottle of whiskey and pours two fingers worth into a glass. Voss takes a swig and then walks back to the living room where Mingyu recognizes the space and the coffee table where Voss's body had been cracked open.
"This is from earlier in the evening," Chan says, his voice quiet. "Before the murder."
Mingyu doesn't respond. He's too focused on the screen, watching as Voss sits down on the couch, picks up a tablet and scrolls. Nothing else seems to happen, nothing that screams he's about to be murdered. Mingyu is about to complain when the perspective shifts again to show a new scene.
Marble floors reflect overhead lights. The sound of Voss's footsteps echo across his memory as he passes a doorman in a crisp uniform and a name tag that reads Martinez.
Rain hits the screen, rippling across the holo in temporary distortion as Voss gets into a car. The driver takes off and Minguy watches as the city blurs past in a mess of lights and umbrellas, the sensory feed blurring and glitching as it tries to accommodate for the sights and sounds and thoughts and feelings of Voss in that moment.
Suddenly the image blurs and shifts so that Voss is standing in front of a strip club. The entrance is unmarked except for a single neon sign that flickers in shades of magenta and violet, hearts climbing up the side as holograms of girls beckon him in. He passes through the door and strobing lights cut through the feed, blinding both Chan and Mingyu like they're seeing it in the flesh.
Heavy base pulses through the feed as Voss moves deeper into the club. A stage dominates the center of the space, and on it, multiple dancers move with practiced precision, their bodies catching the strobing lights in fragmented movements. Here, the feed breaks off into fractal images as the Core flashes - a leg extended, an arch of the back, a turn that sends hair flying.
Mingyu tries to catalogue the faces as he sees them - a woman with pink eyes, someone with a swirling tattoo, another with sharp eyes that seem to track the crowd even as her body ripples across the stage like water. It's your eyes that makes Mingyu pause, cutting him down to the bone, your gaze more present than that of the far-off look of the others.
But then you're gone as the perspective shifts and the image bleeds into Voss in the bathroom, drunk and leaning heavily against the urinal as he relieves himself. Chan makes a disgusted sound as the memory jumps again to a small ramen cart somewhere in an unknown district.
"This is jumping around," Chan says, his voice cutting through the feed. "The Core is pulling fragments non-sequentially. We're seeing his evening out of order."
Another jump. More faces. A man in a leather jacket, arguing with someone Mingyu can't see. A couple pressed against the wall, kissing. A group of young people clustered around a table, their faces illuminated by the glow of their handheld screens.
And then, for just a moment, another face that belongs to a woman standing near the back of the bar, watching the crowd.
Mingyu's breath catches. He knows that face.
"Wait," he says, his hand shooting up. "Stop. Go back."
Chan's fingers freeze over the interface. "What?"
"That woman. The one in the back." Mingyu leans closer to the holoscreen, his exhaustion momentarily burned away by a spike of adrenaline. "I've seen her before. In the club footage. She was on stage."
Chan rewinds the feed, pulling up the earlier memory from the strip club. The perspective shifts back to the moment on stage. A woman with pink eyes, one with a swirling tattoo, one with sharp eyes. Mingyu points.
"Her," he murmurs. "She's in two of his memories."
"Could be coincidence," Chan says, but his tone suggests he doesn't believe it. "She could work multiple venues. Dancers do that sometimes."
"Or she was following him," Mingyu says. The implications settle over the lab like a weight. "Or she was part of it."
The perspective lingers on you for a fraction of a second longer than the others, just long enough for Mingyu to register your face clearly, and then Voss turns away and you're gone, swallowed back into the crowd.
The memory jumps again. Voss is back in his car, then in the lobby of his building, then in the elevator ascending to his floor. The doorman from earlier is talking to someone Mingyu can't see. Security personnel stand near the entrance, their faces blank and professional. A woman in a business suit walks past, her heels clicking against the marble, her face turned toward her phone.
Then Voss is in his penthouse. The perspective shifts as Voss moves, walking across the floor of his apartment to his kitchen and grabs a bottle of whiskey and pours two fingers worth into a glass. Voss takes a swig and then walks back to the living room where Mingyu recognizes the space and the coffee table where Voss's body had been cracked open.
"We're back at the beginning," Chan notes."
In the memory, the doorbell chimes. Mingyu leans forward, his pulse quickening when he realizes this must be it - this has to be the moment the killer entered the apartment. The image flickers and static washes across the holoscreen, distorting the feed. When it clears, the perspective has put Voss back in the living room again as the sound of the doorbell loops.
"It's corrupting," Chan notes, hitting a few buttons on his tablet. "Fuck, it's going to fry."
"Push it anyway. We're right there."
Chan obeys but the containment unit's hum rises to a high-pitched whine as warnings flash across the screen about the Core overheating. The holoscreen sharpens but Mingyu lets out an angry sound when he sees the memory loop back to Voss walking into the apartment building again, ignoring Martinez at the door as he heads for the elevator. The feed glitches, harsh reds and blues blooming across the screen before Voss is back at the club again, with you leaning forward, your eyes piercing even in the corrupted feed.
"No, go back to the apartment!"
"I'm trying," Chan shoots back. "I told you, this thing is damaged and we've got way more out of it than expected."
Audio fragments layer over each other, the pounding bass of the club's music mixing with the ding of the elevator, and the doorman's greeting. It's a mess of sound, too much information compressed into too little time, the Core's final desperate attempt to dump everything before it dies.
"Come on," Chan mutters to himself, trying to sharpen the feed as the containment unit whines. "Fucking come on!"
The doorbell rings again and Voss walks toward the door as Mingyu leans closer, his heart beating in his throat. Voss reaches out with one hand toward the door and the holoscreen goes dark, the containment unit's light dying as the hum cuts off sharply. An acrid smell comes from the Core where it smokes, the electrical wiring fried, filling the air with a metallic, burnt smell.
"Dammit!" Mingyu swears, punching a fist down on the lab table. The containment unit rattles and Mingyu leans on his hands, head hanging between his shoulders as Chan tries to pry the dead, smoking Core out of the unit. "Fuck. Fuck."
"Well," Chan sighs. "At least I recorded it all."
Mingy lifts his head. "What?"
"The data. I recorded it while extracting." He raises his brows. "Do you think I'm an idiot? I put it on a backup file so at least what we have - even if it's fuck all - is on a drive. I can run some facial recognition on everyone who passed through the memory."
Mingyu straightens, the tension in his shoulders easing slightly. "How long?"
"Couple hours, maybe more. Go home, Detective. Get some rest. There's nothing more we can do for a few hours and you look like shit, man."
Mingyu wants to argue, wants to stay and watch the facial recognition run in real time, but he knows Chan is right. He's been awake for thirty-six hours straight, his body running on caffeine and adrenaline, and his mind is starting to blur at the edges. He nods once, sharp, and turns toward the door.
"I'll call you when I have something," Chan says.
Mingyu doesn't respond. He walks out of the lab, through the sterile white corridor, and back up the stairwell to his floor of the precinct. It's quieter upstairs now, most of the day shift gone with only a few officers still lingering at their desks as they pour themselves over paperwork and their own cases. Mingyu grabs his jacket from the back of his chair, hits the power button on his computer, and heads for the garage.
Fluorescent lights flicker above his head as he jogs down the concrete stairwell, footsteps loud and echoing. The air gets cold and damp as he descends, the rain seeping in through the shitty insulation and clinging to the walls. By the time he reaches the garage level, he feels the moisture in his shirt and hair, clinging to him like a heavy second skin.
The garage is mostly empty, making it easy to spot his bike near the back. It's sleek and shining in the reflection of the light fixture above it, black surface gleaming. It's the single most expensive thing that Mingyu owns and his most prized possession, hours of learning how to take care of it and fix it because tune ups are out of his pay range poured into the machine.
He swings a leg over it and removes the helmet from where it hangs on the handle bars, popping it over his head where a cyan heads up display appears across the face shield. He presses the start button and the bike roars to life under him, vibrating as he nudges the footstand and rolls forward, twisting the throttle until he's coasting through the garage.
Rain hits him as soon as he hits the street level, cold and rushing off his helmet in neon rivulets. The streets are slick as glass beneath him, reflecting the towers of the city on either side of the road, ripping as he gasses it and his bike tears through the street.
He cuts through the lower districts and side streets, avoiding the elevated highways where there's always traffic and road closures because some rich asshole has paid a heavy fee for an expedited drive somewhere. Down here, the world is just like Mingyu likes it, all cracked pavement and burnt out street lights, the flickering holographic advertisements advertising very illegal clinics that he ignores because so long as they're not murdering anyone, he doesn't have time to care.
Mingyu doesn't go straight home, too wired to do anything but pace the walls of his tiny apartment in silence. Instead, he cuts into a mixed commercial district a few blocks from his apartment, heading for a stretch of storefronts and vendors that stay open late.
Above, the rain has softened to a drizzle, misting the air as he kills the engine and walks the bike forward to the curb before setting it on the kickstand. He pops the helmet off and takes it with him this time, not stupid enough to leave it unguarded downtown like he might in the garage of a police precinct.
He walks past a pawn shop with bars on the windows, the display cluttered with outdated neutral interfaces, cracked holoscreen displays and retro computers. The shop is closed, but he can see the security bot inside, patrolling as it tips back and forth while driving over uneven flooring.
Next to the pawn shop is a laundromat he's intimately familiar with from the apartment he lived in just two blocks away. In his earlier days on the job, he'd sit here on Sundays and listen to the machines hum, thankful for the warmth in the winter from the exhaust vents while he poured over cases and bitch work given to him until he could earn his keep.
Mingyu keeps walking, passing a convenience store with flickering signs and people that move with hunched shoulders against the drizzle. No one pays him much mind, everyone too preoccupied with their own lives as they scuttle along like beetles.
The automatic door of the 24-hour market hisses when Mingyu ducks in. Bright lights make him squint as he walks the aisle filled with bright neon prices and advertisements calling to him, products ranging from everything to instant meals, cigarettes and cheap liquor to disposable razors and batteries. A clerk sits behind the counter, scrolling through a tablet, ignoring Mingyu entirely.
Mingyu doesn't mind. He picks up a pack of ramen, a bottle of cold coffee from the refrigerated section, a pack of cigarettes, and a pack of caffeine gum in cherry flavor that he likes to chew late at night on the job for an extra kick of energy. The clerk rings him up without comment and Mingyu pays with his phone before scooping his things and heading back outside into the drizzle.
Pausing, he tears open the new pack of cigarettes with his teeth, rolling the plastic and tossing it into the trash. Fishing one out, he sticks it between his lips and searches for a lighter for a few seconds before lighting it and taking a deep drag, feeling his lungs expand as they feel with acrid smoke.
Mingyu can't help but think about you in Voss's memory, the dancer with the sharp gaze who appeared twice. It isn't much, but it can't be a coincidence - coincidences don't exist in Mingyu's line of work. He knows the city is full of people moving through the same spaces and crossing paths without meaning, but seeing you multiple times in Voss's memory is something.
The butterfly effect is a principle chaos theory that states that small, seemingly insignificant changes in initial conditions can trigger massive, unpredictable, and vastly different outcomes in complex systems.
Mingyu sucks in another drag and blows the smoke out in a sigh. As much as he hates for his killer to be right about anything, Mingyu feels instinctually that you are, that something about you has caused a ripple effect. He just needs to figure out how and why.
He finishes the cigarette and drops it, grinding it out under his heel while the smoke lingers in his lungs for a minute. Shuffling the bag in his arms, he heads back toward where he parked his bike, passing by a noddle stand on the corner with steam rising and the smell of frying garlic and chili oil cutting through the damp air. Mingyu considers stopping, but he's not hungry. He just needed to be somewhere that wasn't the station or his apartment.
Back at the bike, he opens the seat and dumps his belongings in the compartment before swinging back on and pulling his helmet on. The drive to his apartment is slow and winding, cutting through back alleys and misting rain until he's parking in the cracked-concrete garage and taking the stairs up to the fourth floor.
Mingyu shoulders into the apartment after unlocking the door, immediately toeing off his boots while he locks the door behind him. It's not much - just one room, a kitchenette, a bathroom with a shower that barely works and has no hot water, and one large window that overlooks the street, the view mostly obscured by the constant rain.
He sets the bag on the counter and pulls out the ramen before going through the motions, boiling water and tearing into the sauce packet with his teeth, mind far away from his little corner of the world while he thinks about you again, a thread among the chaos - a beat of a butterfly's wings, maybe.
-
Mingyu jolts awake in the dim glow of his apartment, his heart hammering against his ribs. The ringing that cuts through the haze is distorted and confusing until he realizes there's a small green hologram lighting up over his phone. He fumbles for it, hand knocking over his reading glasses, his pistol, and the tablet he'd been using to research the stupid butterfly effect again.
Chan's name displays as the phone continues ringing, lighting up the world as Mingyu fumbles to answer. "Hello?
"You sound like hell," Chan replies, the sound of a keyboard in the background. "Facial rec pulled a hit on that woman from Voss's memory. Cross-referenced with club surveillance feeds from the entertainment district, looks like she's a performer at the club Wings. High end joint."
Mingyu leans against his headboard, running a hand over his face. The single window in his unit lets in the never-ending neon glow from outside, casting dull patterns across his bedroom. He hears the rain tapping against the glass, a constant companion.
"Wings. Got it. Send me the address."
"On it. It's in the mid-tier entertainment strip near the old elevated line. I recommend caution. It's on the mid-tier strip but it leans high end - the entertainment there aren't standard rentals."
"Name?"
"Looks like the stage name might be Psyche."
Mingyu frowns as he gets out of bed and grabs a dirty pair of jeans off the floor to shove one leg in, jamming the phone between his face and his shoulder.
"Like the wife of Cupid?"
"Seems that way."
"Anything else?
"Clean on the surface. No priors, no traffic tickets. Nothing."
"Well his memory showed her twice. Can't be random."
Chan sighs. "I'm inclined to agree. Like I said, be careful. Security at these places crack skulls first and ask questions later. You don't have money for a new Skin."
"Heard. Talk later."
Mingyu finishes getting dressed, his heart hammering the entire time. This is the thread - the butterfly's wingbeat. He can feel it in his gut, something sharpening into something purposeful, an instinct that has led him on every hunt for a killer he's been on.
He moves quickly, pulling on a long-sleeved shirt that smells like sweat and cologne, pulling on boots with loose laces, and tucking his gun in the back of his pants before hiding it with the hem of his shirt. He tucks a badge in his pocket, and heads out of the room, knocking his shin against the corner of the bed and cursing loudly.
At the door, he grabs his helmet and heads out into the hall, nearly jogging as he takes the steps down to street level two at a time. Rain greets him outside, making his shirt cling to his frame as he straddles his bike. The engine roars to life, HUD on his helmet flickering alive with the address overlay. He twists the throttle and tears into the night, tires slicing through puddles.
The ride blurs into a streak of neon and the lower streets give way to the mid-level sprawl, where wealth brushes against grit. Autonomous cabs hum past, their passengers hidden behind tinted fields. Elevated tracks arc overhead, sparks occasionally flying from aging mag-rails. Mingyu leans into turns, the bike's vibration thrumming through his bones, chasing away the last dregs of fatigue.
By the time he pulls up to the curb outside Wings, the rain eases to a misty veil, but the air hangs heavy with the smell of gas and rusting metal, a permanent smell that never really seems to leave.
He parks the bike on a side street and heads toward the front door of the club, uncaring that he's a bit damp and messy. The club is impossible to miss, the facade bright with iridescent panels that shift colors under a massive holographic marque that reads: WELCOME TO WINGS, WHERE FANTASIES TAKE FLIGHT.
Security drones hover discreetly at the entrance, red scanner lights sweeping patrons as they stand in line. The line is mostly men who look better dressed than Mingyu, umbrellas in hand to keep the rain off their backs as a security guard stands at the door checking IDs and taking money.
Mingyu gets in line and ignores the way the others look at him, tucking his helmet under his arm. He's bouncing with energy now, craning his neck to look up at the holograms above, dancers in all manner of fantasy writhing and twisting in shades of fuchsia and red and lavender.
It takes about ten minutes to reach the door where a security guard with one augmented eye looks at him, his lens turning cyan as he scans Mingyu. He holds out his hand for an ID, which Mingyu hands over immediately.
"Cover is two hundred creds. If you want a private room, see the bar. Private rooms start at five hundred."
"Two hundred?" He asks, feeling himself stall out. "Fucking hell."
"Pay or get out."
Grumbling, Mingyu takes out his phone and transfers over the credits, swallowing thickly when he sees how close it brings him to the negatives. He's not sure this qualifies for reimbursement at the station, but he's going to file it anyway.
"Head in. Any trouble and you're out."
Mingyu steps by as the door hisses open. Inside, the air is thick with the scent of engineered pheromones being pumped in through the vents with the smell of liquor. Bass pumps through the room, vibrating through the floor and up his spine. The main floor sprawls under a vaulted ceiling alive with projected constellations that shift in real-time, stars turning as though the club is spinning in time with the world's real rotation.
Dancers move with unnatural grace, and it takes Mingyu a moment to realize that all of them have wings. He spots one with dragonfly wings that glitter as she spends, refracting light. Another has raven wings, inky black even as she twists around a pole under cyan light.
He hadn't expected the theme to be so literal, but he's glad that the wings are wearables and not uncanny body mods. He slinks through the room between patrons, noting the privacy feels that shimmer in the distance to hide the VIP booths from prying eyes. The private rooms are further back, a neon sign above a shadow hall with fly away above it.
Mingyu's eyes scan methodically, cutting through the sensory overload. He clocks exits, security nodes embedded in the walls, the faint hum of surveillance drones disguised as decorative moths fluttering near the ceiling. No sign of you yet, though, so he drifts toward the bar, ordering a cheap synth-whiskey to blend in, the glass cool against his callused fingers. The liquid burns familiarly as he sips, eyes never still.
Then he sees you and the world slows down a little.
You emerge from a side alcove onto one of the elevated platforms framed by gossamer curtains that part around you, moved by some sort of air effect. You're wearing delicate butterfly wings, spans of translucent fabric that looks like real membrane catching the light. You're dressed in minimal strips of iridescent material, accentuating each one of your curves while leaving the wings unobstructed.
Just like in Voss's memories, it's your eyes that make Mingyu freeze. It carries the same piercing quality as you dance, cutting through the room. It's not the same hazy allure of the other dancers, but something more focused like a predator among pretty things.
Butterfly wings. It makes him go cold, the butterfly effect audio recycling through his head over and over as he watches you dance, your wings fluttering. Despite being fake, they look real, catching the light as you shimmer, more beautiful than anything else he's ever seen.
Mingyu finishes his drink and sets it down harshly as he turns to the bar and hails down a bartender to ask for a private room. The bartender slides over a tablet and Mingyu scrolls until he finds your stage name - Psyche - and nearly vomits the whiskey back up when he sees the price.
"Eight hundred credits for thirty minutes?" He growls. He curses under his breath and charges it to his credit card, knowing he's never going to pay it off before it gains sixty percent interest. "Better be fucking worth it."
A room number flashes on the screen and he memorizes it before stalking off toward the hallway of private rooms, glancing at your platform as he does. You tilt your head, hand going briefly to your ear before turning to get off the platform. It's then that he realizes you have an ear piece in. He files that piece of information away.
The private room is small and blessedly clean, the seats plush with a low table in front of them. He throws himself down and shivers, the room unnaturally cold. He glances around but sees no clock or anything else in the room except a private bar which he knows will cost extra, so he doesn't dare, instead staring at the door until it opens.
Mingyu's heart starts to hammer as you slide into the room, sitting up straighter. It doesn't occur to him that up until this morning, he's never done this before. The realization makes him nervous, palms sweaty as you slink toward him, smiling and tilting your head.
"New face," you greet, sliding onto the seat next to him. You lean against the seat, facing him as you cross one leg over the other. "Pretty face."
Up close, the details on your face come into sharp focus: faint iridescence on your skin like starlight, the scent of jasmine and amber, pretty eyes that swallow him whole.
"Looking to forget the rain outside?" You ask him, voice sweet and soft. "I can fix that."
Mingyu leans back, forcing a lazy smirk that does not reach his eyes. He plays the part - client with creds to burn, interest piqued by the exotic. "Something like that."
A small smile tugs your lips. "What do you want tonight? Escape? Or just a pretty distraction?"
"Distraction sounds good. Start with a dance, yeah?"
If you sense his confidence is feigned, you don't show it. You stand, the wings spreading wide behind you, catching the low light and refracting it into soft gradients of color. The music shifts to something slower and heavier, the bass making Mingyu's skin itch. You move with practiced precision, hips swaying as you step closer, one hand trailing along the back of the couch.
Mingyu's breath catches. He reminds himself it's the job and that he's here for information, not this. But his body doesn't listen as he becomes hyper aware of you, his fingers twitching as he fights not to jump out of the booth and away from you. It's not that he's bad with women - he's not - but this is new to him, never having paid for a moment of attention this intimate and sensual.
You turn your back to him now, the wings folding slightly as you lower yourself onto his lap. The weight of you is real and solid, warm through the thin fabric of his clothes. You roll your hips slowly and Mingyu's hands grip the edge of the couch to keep from reaching for you or pushing you off - he's not entirely sure which.
Your hair brushes his jaw as you lean back, your head tilting to rest near his shoulder, and he feels the heat of your breath against his neck. He can't help but shiver, the smell of your jasmine and amber so overwhelming he feels his lashes flutter.
"You're tense," you murmur. "Relax."
He can't. His mind is racing, cataloging details like the way you move, the control in every gesture, the sharpness in your eyes when you glanced at him earlier. This isn't just a performance. There's something calculated about it, something that doesn't match the soft, breathy voice you're using now.
You turn again, straddling him now, your knees pressing into the couch on either side of his hips. Your hands rest on his shoulders, fingers light, and you lean in close enough that he can see the faint shimmer of makeup on your eyelids, the way your pupils dilate in the low light.
"Better?" you ask, smiling.
Mingyu swallows. "Yeah."
You laugh, soft and knowing, and shift your weight, grinding down just enough to make his pulse spike. The wings flutter behind you, a distraction, a spectacle, and he realizes that's the point. You're good at this and he doesn't know why but he hates that it works on him, even if it's your job to do this, to pull focus, to keep the client's attention where you want it.
He clears his throat, forcing himself to focus. "You're good at what you do."
"I know," you whisper, tilting your head so that your breath fans against his ear. "Don't you want to touch me?
"Actually, I uh - want to ask you something."
You pull away from him and though your smile doesn't falter, your eyes shift. "That's expensive."
"No," Mingyu protests quickly, grabbing you and pushing you back a little. You flinch when he touches you and he lets go immediately. "Sorry, I don't want to like - that."
"Okay. Then what do you want?"
"You know Harlan Voss?"
It's the wrong question to ask. Your entire body goes rigid and your eyes lock onto his as your delicate persona shatters immediately. What's left is sharp, cold, and predatory. Mingyu's pulse spikes as you get off of him and put space between you, your eyes icy.
"Who the fuck are you?" you ask. Your real voice is a little deeper than the breathy rasp you'd used moments ago. "And what the fuck do you want?"
Mingyu holds up his hands. "I just need to ask you a few questions-"
"Get the fuck out."
"Listen, I'm not here to cause trouble-"
You hit a button he didn't see near the door and the door opens immediately. Mingyu makes a sound of protest when he sees a security guard appear at the door, his eyes glancing between the two of you.
"Problem?" He asks.
"He needs to leave. Now."
Mingyu stands slowly, adrenaline cutting through the tension in his body. His pulse is still elevated from the dance, from the heat of your body on his lap. He pulls the badge from his pocket and the security guard stiffens further. So do you, taking a step away from him again.
"You need a warrant, buddy."
"Detective Kim. Homicide. I'm investigating a murder, and I need to ask her some questions."
"I don't give a fuck who you are," you seethe. "Get out."
He sighs. "Can we just-"
"Get a warrant," you snarl, barring your teeth at him like something feral.
Mingyu realizes you're afraid of him. Not like someone caught in a lie or someone caught with their hand on the gun, but like someone who is cowering, like he might strike. He thinks it's odd, watching as you shake, eyes wide and trembling.
He could push. He could insist, make this official, drag you down to the station for questioning. But something in him softens, and he pockets the badge, raising his hands. "I'll leave. No trouble."
The security guard steps aside and Mingyu walks toward the door as he looks at you one last time. Your wings are still spread wide, trembling slightly, and your eyes are locked on him. There's fear there, yes, but something else too. Recognition. Guilt. Something. Before he can decide what, the security guard steps between you and cuts off Mngyu's line of sight, ushering him into the hallway.
With a loud shout that's lost to the pound of music, you slam the door. Mingyu sighs, staring at the door for a few minutes before he turns and walks back through the club, the music vibrating through the walls as he winds past the stages and the strobing lights. His mind is stuck on you, of course. The terror. The gaze. The butterfly wings.
The butterfly effect is a principle chaos theory that states that small, seemingly insignificant changes in initial conditions can trigger massive, unpredictable, and vastly different outcomes in complex systems.
He pushes through the front door and into the rain, the cold hitting him sharply. Mingyu shivers but stands outside the door, letting the rain cut through him, washing away the smell of jasmine and amber, clearing his mind a little.
You know something. Mingyu doesn't know what, but he's sure of it. You're the butterfly at the root of it all, and now he just needs to know the cause of the effect.
hello, i recently put my blog behind a password wall because i was unsure if i wanted to continue writing. i realized that that is kind of counterproductive, because i've gotten messages from friends letting me know that people who interact with this blog have been asking about me and i wanted to apologize for disappearing without a reason. i am sorry.
this being said, i need to write something but i have no motivation to do it. instead of agonizing myself over what wip i could be writing, i am going to post a few banners here and run a poll to see what you guys want to read. hopefully, that will light a fire under my ass and get the ball rolling. the poll will be up for one week, and in the mean time, i will be writing the fics. thank you, i hope you guys enjoy literally any of these.
williamsburg, new york ⌁ j.ww [m]
synopsis: rendered utterly penniless after the biggest scheme of the decade is uncovered (and apparently, traced right back to the hefty pockets of your father) — you're stuck waiting tables in a frumpy mustard yellow uniform with no one other than wonwoo jeon...who just so happens to be the mastermind behind the perfectly frosted cupcakes in the carousel.
genre: 2 broke girls au ; idiots to ??? ; angst, fluff, suggestive/smut.
rating: 18+. minors do not interact.
ground zero ⌁ b.sk [m]
synopsis: after four gruesome years, you're officially out of undergrad. however, with graduation comes vacation — unless you're, well, you, and get asked by your best friend to house sit for the summer. a three-month-long staycation can't be that bad — until boo seungkwan is at the door, and making horrid jokes about it turning into a bae-cation. ugh, as if.
genre: best friend's brother's best friend (that's a mouthful, isn't it?) au ; suggestive/smut.
rating: 18+ minors do not interact.
parachute ⌁ c.sc [m]
synopsis: three years ago, your life changed in many drastic ways. you got married too fast, you quit pursuing your dreams, and you left your life in the bustling city to the too quiet, too serene suburbs. another thing that happened three years ago? you made choi seungcheol a father, and now you're constantly relying on him to save you from your bad decisions.
genre: baby daddy!choi seungcheol ; exes to ??? ; angst, suggestive/smut, fluff ; there will be mentions of infidelity.
rating: 18+. minors do not interact.
scorpius ⌁ c.sc [m]
synopsis: looking for peace of mind after years of leading a semi-incompetent nightly patrol crew, you venture out into the deep forests that surround your village. not only do you not find peace of mind, but you also find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of identity crisis and the idea of falling in love with the supernatural.
genre: vampire au ; strangers to ??? ; angst, suggestive/smut, fluff. there will be darker themes to this: murder, blood, etc.
rating: 18+. minors do not interact.
PAIRING: F.Reader x ot13
PACK MEMBER FOCUS: Soonyoung
PACK MEETING: Soonyoung is an irritable mess and no one can figure it out until he wanders in your room in the middle of the night.
REQUESTED BY: ANON
REQUEST: soonyoung got his rut earlier than expected and everyone has been wondering why hes so snappy these days, and it was answered when soonyoung goes to the omega’s room and yeah u know it lol
GENRE: Fluff, smut, mild angst
AU: Omegaverse
WC: 9,867
RATING: 18+ Minors are strictly prohibited from engaging in and reading this content. It may contain explicit content and any minors discovered reading or engaging with this work will be blocked immediately.
PACK WARNINGS: Some mild angst and fighting among members, Soonyoung is picking fights with everyone that are petty and stupid, lots of frustration, a single moment between Soonyoung and Mingyu where Soonyoung almost turns things physical but reader diffuses, some awkwardness because reader is still relatively new to the pack, lots of hormones and body chemistry, Soonyoung having some anxiety about spending a rut with reader, explicit language, explicit sexual content including unprotected sex, mild biting, some scenting, teasing, vaginal fingering, multiple orgasms, very very light dirty talk, Soonyoung being possessive, and a moment of Soonyoung being territorial to another member at the end briefly.
SMUT NOTICE: This chapter is centered around smut and shout be skipped if you don't like reading smut - it makes little sense to read without.
A/N: This does not lean into rut dynamics a ton nor does it lean toooo heavily into omegaverse smut dynamics because I wanted to lean into the idea that this is the first time since reader has joined the pack that she's helping with someone's rut and thus the dynamic is entirely different and slower/more personal than it typically would be among seasoned rut partners.
A/N 2: As usual this is not beta read this because I'm impatient and just wanna post these as I finish writing them. Also Hali stick to under 5k challenge failed again.
HOUSE RULES M. LIST | MAIN M. LIST | ASK
SOONYOUNG IS AN EASY ALPHA TO READ. As someone who wears his heart on his sleeve and his emotions on his face, you rarely have a problem reading him now that you know him well enough. Plus, whatever isn't on his face or in his tone is usually coming directly from the source himself, never the one to shy away from communicating exactly what he thinks of something.
So it's unusual when you realize on a Friday afternoon that something is wrong with Soonyoung but you don't quite know what that something is.
The sun is slanting through the western windows of the house, turning the floors honey-warm and catching the dust motes floating lazily through the air. You're curled into the corner of the sectional - a spot that has become yours over the last few weeks - with a book in your lap. It's some novel that Wonwoo recommended and that you're half paying attention to because Mingyu keeps singing off-key in the kitchen where he's baking and because there's base thrumming from Jihoon's studio basement, vibrating up through the couch into your spine.
It's the kind of afternoon that's calm but doesn't exactly leave space for reading, especially when Chan flops down on the couch next to you, immediately pushing into your side to nuzzle close and lay his head in your lap.
"Hi," he sighs dreamily, tilting his head back to look up at you. "This okay?"
You grin, running your fingers through his hair. "Of course it is."
He nearly purrs under your touch, melting into your lap as he settles, his dark hair soft against your fingers as he gets comfortable with one arm draped over his stomach and the other hanging off the edge of the couch. He smells like the laundry detergent the pack uses, warm and clean and the distinct lavender and sea salt smell that is so him.
Putting the book down, you continue to stroke his hair, feeling him relax into your lap, heavy and solid. You smile. You like this - you're glad that you finally have figured this out, the intimacy that's both physical and mental, both casual and sexual. Now that you've finally settled and figured them out, this kind of contact is easy. Welcome. Craved.
The afternoon light catches the side of Chan's face and you notice the faint freckles across his nose, the way his face is soft, eyes closed and content as he drifts. It's moments like this that make you understand why the pack works and why fourteen people in one house don't feel chaotic and feel like this instead.
Soonyoung's voice is what cuts through the silence, reminding you that the pack has its bad days too. You turn to look over the back of the couch the way his voice is coming, cutting through the ambient noise like a knife. Chan shifts too, the beta making an unhappy noise as he cracks an eye open.
"I said I would handle it, Seokmin," Soonyoung snaps somewhere. You straighten, the alpha's voice rigid and more severe than you're used to hearing. "So stop."
"I'm just trying to help." Seokmin's calmer voice barely reaches you, careful and placating. You can hear his confusion even without seeing his face. "If you'd just listen-"
"I don't need to listen."
Footsteps keep your attention pinned to the entryway from the hall. Soonyoung rounds the corner into the living room and the sight of him makes something in your chest clench. His jaw is tight, muscle twitching beneath the skin, and his shoulders are drawn up and rigid. There's something wild in his eyes that make your instincts prickle, a warning bell going off in the back of your head that's telling you there's an alpha in distress.
Seokmin trails behind him with his hands raised in a gesture of peace, his expression caught somewhere between apologetic and frustrated. He's still in his work clothes, dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and tie loosened around his neck, but the tension in his neck has nothing to do with Soonyoung.
Your book is long forgotten. Chan's head is turned in your lap, watching as Soonyoung storms into the room, Seokmin behind him. Seokmin looks at you before his eyes dart meaningfully between you and Chan, a silent request. You understand immediately and pat Chan gently. The beta stirs immediately, unfolding from your lap with a quick kiss to your forehead before he heads toward Seokmin.
"Help me with something in the kitchen?" Chan asks Seokmin, reaching for him.
"Sure," Seokmin sighs, moving toward the hallway. He shoots you one last look, mouthing thank you as he follows Chan out of the room, leaving you alone on the couch.
The moment they're gone, Soonyoung is moving toward you, his agitation evaporating. He falls onto the couch, settling against you instantly, head finding the curve where your shoulder meets your neck, his arms wrapping around you as he breathes you in.
"Hi," he says quietly, voice muffled as he presses in closer. "You smell good."
His scent washes over you as he burrows closer, deep teakwood with an undercurrent of warmth that you've come to associate with him, though there's something slightly off about it now. Something sharp and acidic underneath. It makes your nose wrinkle slightly even as your omega instincts purr at his proximity.
"Hi," you murmur, tugging him further into you.
"What are you reading?"
"Something Wonwoo recommended."
He hums, a low sound in the back of his throat, and leans even closer to peer at the cover. You can feel the heat of him along your side, can see the way his hair falls into his eyes as he tilts his head. "Is it good?"
"It's okay. It's a little slow."
"Do you want company? I can sit with you."
There's something almost desperate in the offer, something that makes your chest tight. You study his face, trying to understand what just happened, trying to reconcile the alpha who just snapped at Seokmin with the one who's looking at you now like he might die if you say no. You'd never say no, though, so you smile and nod.
"Always," you say softly, and watch the way relief floods his expression like sunrise breaking over water. “Just keep the teeth away, yeah?”
He nods and shifts, adjusting his position so he's lying more fully against you, his head pillowed on your thigh where Chan had been moments before. The weight of him is different, heavier and more solid, radiating a heat that seems to seep through the fabric of your leggings and into your skin. One of his arms wraps around your leg, holding on like you might disappear if he doesn't anchor himself to you.
Without thinking, you card your fingers through his hair, and the effect is immediate. He melts. There's no other word for it as the tension that had been coiled through his shoulders and jaw just dissolves under your touch, his whole body going soft and pliant against you. A sound escapes him, something between a sigh and a groan, and he presses his face harder against your thigh.
"That feels nice," he mumbles. "Don't stop doing that."
You smile, continuing the gentle motion, your fingers sliding through the dark strands. His hair is softer than you expected, still slightly mussed from where he'd been running his hands through it earlier, and you work through the tangles with careful attention. Each pass of your fingers seems to pull more tension from him, until he's practically boneless against you, his breathing evening out into something slow and deep.
The afternoon light has shifted, no longer streaming directly through the windows but casting everything in a softer, golden glow. That's when you notice it again. That off note in his scent. It's subtle, easy to miss if you weren't paying attention, but it's there, sharp and acidic beneath the familiar teakwood warmth, like something fermented or turned. It makes your nose wrinkle slightly, your omega instincts prickling with a vague sense of concern. You've never smelled him like this before. Usually his scent is all warmth and depth, grounding and steady, but this is different.
You frown slightly, your fingers pausing in his hair as you try to place what it reminds you of. Your first thought is rut, that sharp, aggressive edge that alphas get when their biology starts to take over, but you dismiss it almost immediately. You've been with the pack long enough now to know everyone's schedules, the careful tracking system they use to make sure no one's caught off guard. Soonyoung isn't due for a rut for at least another three weeks. You'd know. Seungcheol keeps a calendar, and you've seen it enough times to have most of the dates memorized.
So it's not that. Maybe he's just stressed? The thought settles uneasily in your chest. He has been more on edge lately, more irritable with the others, though you'd chalked it up to work or pack dynamics or any of the hundred other things that can make an alpha tense. Maybe it's manifesting in his scent, some kind of stress response you're not familiar with yet.
You let it go, resuming the gentle motion of your fingers through his hair. Whatever it is, he clearly needs this and you're not about to pull away because of some vague concern you can't even properly articulate. If it's serious, someone else will notice. Seungcheol will notice.
Soonyoung makes another one of those soft sounds and you feel your heart do something complicated in your chest. You smile, thinking about how much you like him. The realization isn't new - you like all of them. But it hits you fresh at this moment, with him soft and sleepy against you.
"You're really good at that," he murmurs, his voice drowsy and content. His eyes are closed, his face relaxed. "Like, unfairly good."
"Just scratching your head," you say, but you're smiling, your fingers finding that spot behind his ear that makes him practically purr.
"Mm, no. It's more than that." He shifts slightly, tilting his head to look up at you, and the expression on his face makes your breath catch. There's something raw in his eyes, something open and honest that he usually keeps hidden behind jokes and easy grins. "You make everything feel easier."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He reaches up, his hand finding yours where it's resting against his temple, and he threads your fingers together. His palm is warm, slightly rough, and the gesture feels impossibly intimate. "I really like being close to you. Is that okay? To say that?"
"Of course it is. I like being close to you too."
His smile is small but genuine, crinkling the corners of his eyes. "Good. Because I don't think I could stop even if you told me to."
You laugh quietly, resuming the gentle motion through his hair with your free hand while he keeps the other one captive, his thumb tracing absent patterns against your knuckles. His touch is comforting and you can feel the way his body has gone completely relaxed against you as the house settles around you, the sound of pack life continuing in other rooms.
You don't know how long you stay like that. Long enough for the light to shift again, the golden glow deepening toward amber. Long enough for your legs to start going numb under his weight, though you don't mention it. Long enough for you to memorize the exact shade of his hair in this light, the pattern of freckles across his nose, the way his eyelashes cast shadows on his cheeks when he closes his eyes.
"Thank you," he says eventually, so quiet you almost miss it.
"For what?"
"For not asking questions. For just letting me be here."
You want to tell him he never has to thank you for that, but the words feel too big, too revealing, so instead you just squeeze his hand and keep running your fingers through his hair, and hope he understands anyway.
He seems to. His eyes drift closed again, his breathing evening out. And despite that lingering concern about his scent, despite the confusion about what happened with Seokmin, despite everything, you let yourself have this, relaxing against the couch as Soonyoung dozes in your lap.
-
The second time you notice something off with Soonyoung is worse.
It's Saturday morning and the kitchen is alive with the weekend chaos you've come to expect now that you eat breakfast at more reasonable hours. Mingyu is at the stove making what smells like pancakes while Vernon sits at the island with his laptop and a cup of coffee that you think has gone cold. Joshua hums as he sets the table in the dining room while morning light streams through the windows, coffee and the scent of bodies filling the room.
You're standing at the counter making tea, watching the kettle when you hear the commotion start somewhere just outside the kitchen.
"I'm just saying," Junhui says, his voice measured and calm in a way that suggests he is trying very hard to be patient. "If you'd communicated better, it would-"
"I don't need you to tell me how to communicate, Jun." Soonyoung's voice cuts through the morning peace like a knife, sharp enough that you see Mingyu's shoulders tense at the stove, see Vernon's fingers still on his keyboard.
Your hands tighten on the edge of the counter, your whole body going alert. Not again. Please not again. You glance at Mingyu who winces and shrugs his shoulders before turning back to stare intensely at his pancakes, preferring to let the alphas argue it out.
"I'm not telling you how to do anything." Junhui's voice is still calm but you can hear the edge creeping in, can hear the alpha authority starting to bleed through. "I'm just saying that if you'd communicated better, we wouldn't have had the conflict with-"
"Right, so it's my fault."
"That isn't what I said-"
"It's what you meant!"
You turn your attention back to the kettle, listening with half an ear as the argument continues. It's not the first time you've heard pack members disagree, and it probably won't be the last. The whistle is building now, getting louder, and you're reaching for your mug when you hear a crash loud enough that you jerk your hand.
The kettle wobbles but you catch it, steadying it with both hands as you let out a breath. Your heart kicks up for a moment before settling back down. Just an argument. Just pack dynamics working themselves out.
Mingyu has turned from the stove, spatula still in hand, his expression somewhere between concerned and resigned. Vernon has closed his laptop, watching the doorway.
"Soonyoung." Junhui's voice is harder now, carrying that alpha command that says stand down. "You need to calm down."
"Don't tell me to calm down."
There's a beat of tense silence, and then footsteps, quick and purposeful before Soonyoung appears in the kitchen doorway. He looks wound tight, his chest heavy slightly, his eyes bright and a flush high on his cheeks that tells you he's stressed. His hair is a mess like he's been running his hands through it, and his t-shirt is rumpled, twisted slightly to one side. For a second he just stands there, breathing hard, his gaze sweeping the kitchen like he's looking for something.
Then his eyes land on you, and everything changes.
The tension bleeds out of his shoulders and his expression softens immediately, the wild edge in his eyes gentling into something warm. He crosses the kitchen in a few long strides, and before you can say anything, he’s pressing into your side like he needs the physical contact to breathe.
"Hi," he says quietly, his voice rough but softer than it was seconds ago. One of his arms wraps around your waist, and he leans into you, his forehead coming to rest against your temple. "You making tea?"
"Yeah." You can feel the heat of him along your entire side, can smell that sharp acidic edge underneath his usual teakwood warmth. It's more pronounced than it was yesterday. "Want some?"
"No. Just want to be here."
"Alright."
You reach up to run your fingers through his hair, scraping the blunt edge of your nails against his scalp. He hums, chest vibrating against you as his eyes flutter, scent blooming warm and rich, the acidic note vanishing. The kettle is whistling properly now, so you pour the water one-handed, Soonyoung still plastered to your side like he has no intention of moving. He doesn't say anything, just stands there with his arm around you, his breathing evening out as you finish making your tea.
Behind you, you can hear Mingyu returning to the pancakes, the quiet sizzle of batter hitting the pan. Vernon has reopened his laptop but you can feel his attention still on the two of you. Joshua appears in the doorway, takes one look at Soonyoung wrapped around you, and just nods to himself before heading back to finish setting the table.
"Breakfast is almost ready," Mingyu says after a moment, his voice carefully neutral. "If you guys want to sit down."
Soonyoung makes a noncommittal sound against your hair but doesn't move. You smile, wrapping both hands around your mug now that it's ready, and lean back into him slightly.
"Come on," you murmur. "Let's go sit."
He follows you without question, his hand sliding from your waist to tangle with your free hand, keeping you connected as you move into the dining room. The table is set thanks to Joshua, who looks between you and Soonyoung before winking.
You choose a seat near the middle of the table and Soonyoung immediately claims the chair right next to you, close enough that his thigh presses against yours when he sits. His hand finds your knee under the table, his thumb rubbing small circles against the fabric of your leggings, and you can feel the way he's still wound tight despite the softness in his expression.
Junhui appears in the doorway a moment later, and you watch as his eyes land on Soonyoung pressed up against your side. Something complicated crosses his face - frustration, maybe, but also understanding, and what looks like relief. He lets out a long breath, his shoulders dropping slightly, and when he meets your eyes there's gratitude there.
Thanks, he mouths silently and you nod.
He takes a seat across the table, his posture still tense but no longer aggressive. The argument isn't resolved, the set of his jaw and the tension in his hands making that much obvious, but it's set aside for now for when Soonyoung isn't whatever this is right now.
Soon, the table fills out with the rest of the pack and loud conversation backtracked by the sound of silverware on plates. Soonyoung serves you first, putting pancakes on your plate before his own, his hand never leaving your knee. He eats one-handed, the other staying firmly on you like he needs the anchor despite Seungkwan poking fun at him.
Soonyoung gradually relaxes against your side. His scent is still off, but his breathing has evened out, and the tension in his shoulders has eased. He's not talking much, just listening to the conversation around him, but every so often he glances at you like he's checking that you're still there.
Across the table, Junhui catches your eye again and gives you a small nod. The message is clear: Whatever you're doing, keep doing it.
So you do. You finish your tea and eat your pancakes and let Soonyoung stay pressed against your side for as long as he needs, and you try not to think too hard about what it is that's bothering him, ready to wait him out and let him come to you.
-
By Sunday, Soonyoung's tension has been noticed by everyone.
It's the kind of afternoon where the house has that lazy, syrupy feeling of the weekend as people scatter across the estate with their routines. You can hear Seungkwan's laugh coming through an open window, backtracked by someone playing music.
Sun bakes down on the top of your head as you stretch, sweaty skin sticky against the cloth of the cabana seating. Mingyu is tucked next to you, the smell of his clean, floral musk and sunscreen soothing.
The afternoon sun turns the pool surface into liquid gold, the light dancing and refracting in patterns that shift with every ripple. The air smells like chlorine and sunscreen and the jasmine that grows wild along the fence line, music playing from the speaker next to Mingyu softly while the two of you lounge
He's stretched out next to you in swim shorts that are slung low on his hips, his long legs crossed at the ankle, a book open in his lap that he's been so called reading for the past twenty minutes despite the fact he hasn't turned a page in at least ten. His chest is bare, shoulders already warming to a golden tan, and there's a faint sheen of sunscreen on his skin that catches the light.
You are definitely not reading your book. Instead, you're acutely aware of the way Mingyu's chest rises and falls with each one of his breaths, every defined line of his abs, and the way his muscles in his shoulders flex when he shifts his position. Your eyes drift from his collarbones to his sternum to the dip of his waist where his swim shorts sit low on his hips, and you have to physically force your gaze back to your book.
When you glance sideways, you catch the faintest smirk playing at the corner of his mouth. He knows. Of course he knows. Mingyu always knows when you're looking.
Footsteps draw your attention on the pool deck. Soonyoung is approaching, jaw tight and shoulders tense. You frown and his scent hits you a moment later as the wind shifts, sharp and acrid. You shift and Mingyu notices, glancing at you from behind his sunglasses before he realizes Soonyoung is there.
"Mingyu," Soonyoung says, voice clipped. He stops at the edge of the cabana, his eyes locked on Mingyu with something that makes the beta tense. "You left the fridge door open this morning. Again."
Mingyu blinks. "What?"
"Yeah."
"Soonyoung, I made breakfast at seven. It's been hours." Mingyu shields his eyes, looking up at Soonyoung, his tone more bewildered than defensive. "What even is-"
"And yesterday," Soonyoung continues, "You left stuff all over the kitchen counter. It's rude and messy."
You watch as Mingyu's expression shifts from confusion to something closer to exasperation. "I cleaned that up. Wonwoo saw me clean it up."
"Not very well, apparently." Soonyoung's voice is sharp. "And you were making noise in the kitchen at like six in the morning. Some of us were trying to sleep."
"You were literally in the gym at six." Mingyu closes his book deliberately and sets it on the small table next to the cabana. When he looks up at Soonyoung, his expression is guarded, not angry. "What's your actual problem Soonyoung? Spit it out."
"I don't have a problem. I just think it would be nice if people actually thought about the shared spaces instead of just doing whatever they want."
"Nobody's doing whatever they want."
Mingyu stands now so he's facing Soonyoung directly. He's a beta, but he's not small. He towers over Soonyoung, imposing in a way that makes your instincts flare, feeling the shift of tension between the two.
"You're picking a fight," Mingyu says, softer than before.
"I'm not picking a fight."
"Soonyoung, you're-" Mingyu cuts himself off and sighs. You can see him trying to control his temper, trying to figure out what Soonyoung is actually mad about. "You know what, whatever. You're right."
He turns to leave, his movements sharp and frustrated, stepping away from the cabana toward the pool deck. The afternoon sun hits him full-force, turning his skin golden, and for a moment you think maybe that's it. But then Soonyoung's hand darts out, wrapping around Mingyu's arm just above the elbow, fingers digging in hard enough to dimple Mingyu's skin.
"Don't walk away from me," Soonyoung growls, teeth flashing.
"Okay, enough."
Your voice cuts through the tension, sharp and commanding in a way that surprises even you. You're on your feet before you've consciously decided to move, a frustrated growling rippling through you at their bickering and Soonyoung's obvious struggle with something.
The effect is immediate and absolute. Soonyoung's hand drops from Mingyu's arm like he's been burned, his eyes going wide as they snap to you. Mingyu takes a step back, his posture immediately shifting from defensive to something closer to chastened. They're both staring at you now, and you can see the moment they register your expression.
"I don't know what's going on with you," you say, your gaze locked on Soonyoung, "but I am tired of watching you pick fights with everyone in this house. And Mingyu, you know it sets him off when you walk away like that."
"I wasn't-" Mingyu starts, but you hold up a hand and he stops immediately, his mouth closing.
"I don't want to hear it. Not from either of you. Soonyoung, put the teeth away."
The afternoon sun is hot on your shoulders, the chlorine smell sharp in your nose as a beat of silence passes. Soonyoung looks like he's been slapped, his expression crumbling from aggressive to something that looks almost like shame. His shoulders drop, his hands unclenching, and you can see the way his whole body seems to deflate.
"I'm sorry," he says, voice smaller than you've ever heard it.
"I know, Soonyoung." Your voice softens a fraction. "But you need to figure out what's going on with you, because this isn't okay. Mingyu didn't deserve that."
Soonyoung glances at Mingyu. "I'm sorry."
Mingyu is rubbing his arm where Soonyoung grabbed him, and you can see the red marks already forming, can see the shape of fingers pressed into his skin. His expression is a mix of anger and hurt, and you can tell he's struggling to not let his temper flare again. He takes a deep breath and nods, the frustration melting out of him in the way that betas are always good at.
"You need to talk to Seungcheol," Mingyu says, his voice much calmer now. "Today."
"I know."
Mingyu doesn't seem convinced. "I'm serious."
"I know. I'm going to."
For a second, Mingyu hesitates. Then he nods and glances at you, tilting his head toward Soonyoung subtly. You nod and Mingyu backs up a few paces, keeping his eyes on you until he's sure that you'll be fine with Soonyoung before he turns, sulky and irritated but knowing that Soonyoung needs space and recently, you're the only one who can reason with him.
Soonyoung looks wrecked, his expression apologetic. He's trembling a little, hands flexing at his sides like he wants to reach for you but can't or won't, his scent a mess. His pupils are blown wide, somewhere between fighting whatever instinct is making him so cagey and panic that he's upset you - he hates upsetting anyone, but most of all he hates when you're mad.
"Can I…?" He drifts off and gestures vaguely in your direction.
He's asking permission, deferring to you completely, and you can see in his eyes that he'll accept whatever answer you give. That he knows he just got put in his place and he's not going to push.
You let out a breath, some of the tension leaving your shoulders. "Yeah. Come here.
He crosses the distance between you in two quick strides, but when he reaches you, he's careful, his arms coming around you slowly enough to give you time to pull away. You don't and instead let him pull you close so he can bury his face in your neck, breathing you in and scenting you enough to make you both dizzy and clinging to one another. Your lashes flutter, a rush going through you as he brushes his nose against the softness of your neck, blood turning molten.
"I'm sorry," he whispers against your skin, and his voice is broken. "I'm sorry. You're right. I'm sorry."
Your hands come up automatically, one sliding into his hair, the other pressing flat against his back. You can feel the knobs of his spine through his shirt, can feel the way his muscles are locked tight with tension.
"I know you are," you murmur. "But you need to figure out what's wrong. This isn't like you."
You can feel the way he's trying to calm himself down, trying to match his breathing to yours, trying to use your presence to anchor himself. You feel a pang in your chest, hugging him a little tighter. Soonyoung is always hard on himself - harder than he needs to be - and he hates fighting with anyone, especially Mingyu. Especially in front of you.
You guide him back to the loungers, settling onto one and pulling him down beside you. He goes willingly, curling into your side like he's trying to make himself smaller, his head resting on your shoulder. The afternoon sun has shifted, the shade of the cabana stretching longer across the pool deck, and the water has gone still and mirror-smooth in the absence of any breeze.
"You should talk to Cheol," you murmur.
Soonyoung nods against you. "Okay."
You run your fingers through his hair, feeling the way he relaxes incrementally with each pass, the tension in his shoulders easing degree by degree. The strands are soft, slightly damp from the heat and humidity, and you work your fingers through them slowly, deliberately, the way you know he likes. His scent is still sharp underneath, still carrying that acidic edge that speaks to whatever is happening inside his body, but it levels out now, teakwood baked under sun.
"Better?" you ask softly.
He makes a small sound of agreement, his arm tightening around your waist. "Yeah."
-
Someone knocking on your door pulls you from sleep. You squint at the clock on the nightstand, the blurry numbers telling you it's well past three am. Your bed is warm, blankets tangled around you and the faint smell of Jeonghan lingering from the hoodie of his you have shoved under your pillow. You sit up, rubbing your eyes as you get your bearings.
"Come in," you croak.
Before the door even opens, you know who it is. You can smell Soonyoung before the door fully opens, but when it does, it hits you like a physical force. It's his normal warm, woody smell but there's something new now, something hot and thick and almost overwhelming. It makes your mouth water, omega instincts kicking in, warmth pooling low in your belly.
Soonyoung steps into your room and closes the door behind him with a soft click, and in the dim light filtering through your curtains from the streetlamp outside, you can see that something is very, very wrong. Or right, by the smell of him.
He's shirtless, wearing only a pair of loose sleep pants that hang low on his hips, skin gleaming with a thin sheen of sweat despite how cold the house is at night. You can see the way his chest rises and falls too fast, too shallow. His hair is a mess like he's been pulling at it again, and when he looks at you, his eyes are dark and dilated, pupils blown so wide there's barely any iris left.
"I'm sorry," he says, and his voice is rough, wrecked. "I know it's late."
You push the blankets aside and shift to the edge of your bed, feet finding the cool hardwood floor to stand. "What's wrong?"
His entire body reacts to the sound of your voice. He sways slightly toward you, nostril flaring as he scents you, a shiver rippling through him. You take a step toward him and he makes a pitiful sound, looking entirely at war with himself.
"I feel like I'm burning up," he mumbles. "Feel like I'm going to crawl out of my skin if I don't see you."
"Come here."
It's a command - softly given, but a command none the less. He listens like it's instinctual, crossing the room to you in three strides. You feel the heat radiating off of him when he stops in front of you and you reach up without thinking, pressing your palm to his chest. He's fever-hot under your touch, his heart hammering in his chest.
"You're burning up," you say softly, frowning.
"I know." His hand comes up to cover yours, pressing your palm harder against his chest like he needs the contact, needs the pressure. His eyes close and he takes a shuddering breath. "You smell so good. You always smell good but right now it's maddening."
Something clicks into place in your mind. The aggression. The clinginess. The way his scent has been getting sharper and hotter for days. The fever. The way he's looking at you right now like you're the only thing in the world that matters.
"Soonyoung," you say slowly, carefully. "Are you in rut?"
His eyes snap open, meeting yours, and for a long moment he just stares at you. You can see him processing the question, see the moment the realization hits him. His expression shifts from confusion to understanding to something that looks almost like relief.
"Oh. Um. It does feel like that."
"But it's early, isn't it?" You keep your hand on his chest, feeling the rapid thud of his heartbeat under your palm. "You're not supposed to go into a rut for another few weeks."
"Right." He seems to think about something and he makes a small sound, leaning into your touch. "I've never had an omega in the house though."
"Oh."
"I think having you here made my body kind of freak out and decide it was time even if it wasn't."
You can feel your own body responding to his proximity, to the thick, heady scent of him in rut. Your omega instincts are screaming at you to help, to soothe, to give him what he needs. But more than that, you want to. You want to pull him into your bed, want to feel his fever-hot skin against yours, want to take care of him the way every cell in your body is telling you to.
"Let me help you," you say, and your voice comes out softer than you intended, almost pleading.
His eyes go wide. "What?"
"Let me help you through it." You slide your hand up from his chest to cup his jaw, feeling the way he leans into your touch like he can't help himself. "You don't have to do this alone. You don't have to suffer through it."
"I can't ask you to do that. You haven't been here that long and haven't been through one…"
"It's pretty instinctual. I'll be okay."
He's trembling now, and you can't tell if it's from the fever or from nerves or from the effort of holding himself back. "What if I hurt you? What if I can't control myself?"
"Soonyoung, you won't hurt me."
"You don't know that." But even as he says it, he's leaning closer, his forehead dropping to rest against yours. His breath is hot against your lips, coming in short, uneven pants. "You don't know what it's like. What I'm feeling right now."
"Then take it," you whisper. "Take what you need."
He makes a sound low in his throat, something between a whimper and a growl, and his hands come up to grip your waist. His fingers dig in, not quite hard enough to hurt but firm enough that you can feel the desperation in his touch.
"But what if-"
You cut him off by kissing him.
It's soft at first, just a gentle press of your lips against his to turn off his spinning thoughts, but the moment you make contact, something in him breaks. He makes a desperate sound against your mouth and kisses you back like he's drowning and you're air. His lips are fever-hot and slightly chapped, and he tastes like mint toothpaste and something underneath that's purely him, purely alpha, purely Soonyoung.
His hands tighten on your waist and he pulls you closer, eliminating the last few inches of space between you. Your chest presses against his and you can feel the heat of him even through your thin sleep shirt, can feel the way his heart is racing, can feel the slight tremor in his muscles as he holds himself back from taking more than you're offering.
But you want him to take more. You want him to let go.
You part your lips and he groans, his tongue sliding against yours in a way that makes heat pool low in your belly. The kiss deepens, turns hungry, and you can feel the moment his control starts to slip. His hands slide from your waist to your hips to grip your ass, pulling you flush against him. You can feel him harden against your stomach, the way he's already straining against the low slung sweat pants.
Knowing he wants you this much makes your head spin. You omega preens and you shiver, sucking his tongue into your mouth greedily, driven by a more powerful want than you have ever felt in your life. He responds in kind, walking you backward toward the bed, feet tangling until you're falling backward and he's caging you in.
For a moment, he just hovers over you, his arms bracketing your head, his chest heaving as he stares down at you with those dark, dilated eyes. You reach up and trace his jawline and he leans into the touch, eyes fluttering. You've always thought he had the prettiest eyes, dark and hungry and so full of life. Right now they're burning with something hotter than you've ever seen and it makes you sing.
"You're so beautiful," he says, and his voice is wrecked. "I've wanted this for so long. Wanted you for so long."
"Then have me," you whisper. "Take me."
"Okay," he whispers. "Okay."
He kisses you again, slower this time, his lips moving against you with gentle purpose like he's memorizing the shape of your mouth. His hands start to wander, sliding up your sides, pushing your sleep shirt up inch by inch until his palms are pressed against your bare skin.
The contact makes you both gasp. His hands are so hot they're almost burning, and everywhere he touches feels like it's on fire. He explores slowly, his fingers tracing the curve of your waist, the dip of your ribs, the soft swell of your breasts.
"Can I?" He asks, twisting a fistfull of your shirt in his hand. You nod and he grins.
He sits back on his heels and helps you pull the shirt over your head, and the moment it's gone, his eyes go even darker. He stares at you like he's never seen anything more beautiful, his gaze tracking over every inch of exposed skin.
"Fuck," he breathes. "You're perfect. You're so fucking perfect."
He leans down and presses a kiss to your collarbone, then another to the swell of your breast, then another to your stomach. His lips are hot and soft, and every place he kisses feels like it's been branded. He works his way down slowly, kissing and licking and occasionally scraping his teeth gently against your skin in a way that makes you arch up into him, his name broken and shaky on your lips.
Soonyoung's sounds are equally as needy, groaning low in his throat in a way that makes your thighs close around his waist, the ache between your legs growing despite the way his hips pin yours to the bed. Friction. You need friction but any thoughts of asking for it vanish from your head when he leans down and takes a nipple into his mouth, the heat and wet slide of his tongue making you cry out.
Your hands fly to his hair, threading through the messy strands, holding him against you as he sucks and licks and occasionally scrapes his teeth gently across the sensitive bud. The sensation is overwhelming, almost too much, and you can feel yourself getting wetter with every pass of his tongue.
"So responsive," he murmurs, almost to himself. "So perfect for me."
He gives the same attention to your other breast, his hand coming up to play with the one his mouth just left, and the dual sensation makes your head spin. You're panting now, your hips shifting restlessly against the mattress, seeking friction that you need so badly.
"Soonyoung," you gasp. "Please."
"Please what?" He lifts his head to look at you, and his lips are wet and swollen, his eyes dark with hunger. "Tell me what you need."
"Touch me. Please touch me."
His hand slides down your stomach, his fingers light and maddening. When he reaches the waistband of your shorts, he pauses again, waiting for permission. You lift your hips in answer, and he hooks his fingers into both your shorts and underwear, pulling them down your legs in one smooth motion.
Cool air hits your overheated pussy and you whine. Soonyoung growls in response, looking down where your thighs threaten to shut. He keeps you pressed open, his hands firm on your thighs as he makes an appreciative sound low in his chest, almost a purr.
"You're so wet," he says, his voice rough. "Is this all for me?"
"Yes," you breathe. "All for you."
He stays kneeled there on the bed, his hand tracing down your thigh until he’s sliding his fingers through your sticky, heated folds. He explores slowly, the drag of his fingers making you tremble, thighs twitching until he presses gently against your clit and you let out a high-pitched sound, the contact sending a bloom of warmth spreading through you.
"There?" He asks and you can hear the smile in his voice, smug.
"Yes. Please."
Soonyoung obeys, circling your clit slowly, increasing the pressure as you buck under him. You feel yourself dripping, a wet mess as he plays with you, making little appreciative sounds as his slick fingers work you higher until you're tangling your hands in the bed and writhing under him.
When he slides one finger inside you, you cry out, your hands fisting in the blankets beneath you. It feels good but you want more, immediately asking him for more, mumbling and messy and lightheaded and overwhelmed with the thick scent of him and the heat of his finger pressing against your front wall.
"Yeah?" He asks. "You can take another?"
"Yes. Please. More."
He adds a second finger and the stretch is delicious, perfect. He curls them inside you, searching, and when he finds that spot that makes you see stars, you nearly sob with relief.
"There," you gasp. "Right there. Oh god, Soonyoung, right there."
He works you with single-minded focus, his fingers curling and stroking while his thumb circles your clit, and you can feel yourself getting close, the pleasure building higher and higher until you're teetering right on the edge.
"That's it," he encourages, his voice low and rough. "Come for me. Let me see you come."
You turn your head to the side, pressing it into the mattress as your hips roll toward his hand, letting him fuck his fingers into you until you're coming around them, clamping down hard on his fingers. He moans with you, pumping his fingers through it as you squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, the pleasure so hot you stop breathing for a second.
"Too much," you gasp, and he immediately gentles, his fingers slipping out of you carefully.
He brings his hand to his mouth and sucks his fingers clean, his eyes closing as he hums in delight. You stare at him, panting and sweaty, sheets sticky against your skin as he opens his eyes, the moon reflecting off them.
"Taste so fucking good," he growls. "Bet you taste better from the source, but if I don't fuck you right now I might lose my mind."
"Please," you beg. "Want it so bad."
He makes a desperate sound and reaches for his sleep pants, shoving them down his hips. His cock springs free, hard and flushed and leaking, and the sight of it makes your mouth water. He's thick and throbbing, and you watch like you're hypnotized as he grips himself, stroking slowly a few times as he settles on the bed between your legs.
Soonyoung leans forward, one hand braced beside your head, the other guiding himself to your wet cunt where he pauses, swiping the head of his cock through your slick folds. You whine and he grins, clearly loving the effect he has on you.
"You sure?" He asks after a minute, the head of his cock notching on your entrance but not pushing in. "We can stop."
"I want you," you assure him, wrapping your legs around his waist, pulling him closer. "Please, alpha."
Your words have an immediate effect. He shivers, a ripple going through him as he growls low in his throat and presses in. You're wet enough that he slides in smoothly, but you can still feel every inch of him, can feel the way your body has to adjust to accommodate his girth. The drag of him against your walls enough to make you gasp.
"Fuck," he breaths, pressing in until he bottoms out. "You feel incredible. So tight. So perfect." He rolls his hips experimentally, grinding deep, and the pressure against that spot inside you makes you cry out. "Yeah, there it is. I can feel you clenching around me already."
You can feel the fever-heat of his skin, the way his muscles are taut with restraint. His scent wraps around you, that deep teakwood gone sharp and heady with rut, overwhelming your senses until all you can smell is him. It makes your head spin, makes you want to pull him closer, to drown in it.
"Soonyoung," you gasp, your nails digging into his shoulders. "Move. Please move."
"Impatient," he says with a grin, but there's heat in his eyes.
He pulls out so slowly that you can feel every ridge and vein of his cock, all the way until just the head of him is inside of you before he snaps his hips forward, driving deep in one smooth thrust, and the sudden fullness makes you cry out. He doesn't give you time to adjust before he's pulling out and driving in again, setting a rhythm that's deep and steady and absolutely devastating. Each thrust hits that perfect spot inside you, sending sparks of pleasure racing up your spine.
"Oh fuck," you groan, going tight around him. "Fuck fuck fuck."
The sounds of the wet slide of him fucking into you fills the room backtracked by his breathing, ragged and uneven as he groans everytime you clench around him. You dig your nails in, scraping down his back to his waist where you urge him faster, your fingers sliding against his sweaty skin.
"That's fucking it," he pants. "Taking my cock so well, huh? Were you made to take it?"
You nod, his words making heat flood through you, making you clench around him involuntarily. He feels it and grins, that cocky, confident smile that makes your heart race.
"You like that?" he asks, his pace never faltering. "Like hearing how perfect you are? How good you feel wrapped around me?"
"Yes," you gasp as he thrusts hard, jostling you up the bed. "Fuck. Yes, Soonyoung."
He shifts the angle slightly, pressing deeper, and suddenly every thrust is dragging against your g-spot with devastating precision. The pleasure builds rapidly, a tight coil of heat low in your belly that winds tighter with each movement. He reaches between your bodies, his thumb finding your clit and circling it with just the right speed.
"I can feel you getting close," he says, and there's satisfaction in his voice. "Can feel the way this perfect pussy is clenching. You gonna come for me?"
"Yes!"
You can feel yourself climbing higher, the pleasure building to an almost unbearable peak, your cunt clenching hard, breath hitching as you start to shake. He drives in harder, finger speeding up until you're standing on the edge of your orgasm, breath held, waiting to dive over.
"Come on," he murmurs, leaning down to nip your heard. "Come for me, baby."
You do, the orgasm hitting you hard. It steals your breath and your entire body locks up as you cry out his name, your pussy clamping down on him. His rhythm stutters immediately as he groans, but he doesn't stop, working you through it until you're shaking and feeling like you're going to come apart again, unsure if your orgasm has stopped or if it's another one starting.
"I can't-"
"You can," he urges, breath hot against your ear. "You're going to give me another one, baby."
He pulls out suddenly, and the loss makes you whimper. But before you can protest, he's flipping you over onto your stomach, his hands gripping your hips and pulling them up.
"On your knees," he commands, and the authority in his voice makes you obey without thinking.
When he slides in from behind, the new angle makes him feel deeper. You can feel him everywhere, the stretch, the fullness, the way he's pressed against every single spot inside of you. His hands grip your hips hard enough to dimple the skin, holding you exactly where he wants you as he fucks you in earnest, hips snapping and bed hitting the wall.
"Fuck, look at you," he groans. "Taking me so deep. You're perfect. So fucking perfect."
One of his hands slides up your spine, pressing between your shoulder blades, and you let yourself collapse forward onto your forearms. The change in angle makes him hit even deeper, makes you cry out with the intensity of it.
"Too much?" he asks, but there's a teasing edge to his voice. He knows it's not too much. He knows you can take it.
"No," you gasp. "More. Please, more."
"Greedy," he says with a laugh, but he gives you what you want.
His pace increases, his thrusts getting harder, faster, and you can feel another orgasm building already. It's different this time, deeper and more intense, starting low in your stomach and spreading outward like fire.
His hand slides around to find your clit again, and the added stimulation makes you sob with pleasure. You're so sensitive, so overwhelmed, but you don't want him to stop. You never want him to stop.
"Come on," he urges, his voice strained now. "Give me another one. Want to feel you come apart on my cock again."
The orgasm builds and builds, the pressure almost unbearable, and when it finally breaks you scream into the pillow. Your whole body shakes with it, your inner walls clenching around him so hard you can feel him groan, can feel the way his rhythm falters.
"Fuck," he gasps. "Fuck, you feel so good."
His hips stutter, his grip on your hips tightening almost painfully, and then he's coming with a groan that sounds like it's torn from his chest. You can feel the heat of him spilling inside you, can feel the pulse of his cock, and the sensation triggers another small aftershock that makes you whimper.
He collapses over you, his chest pressed against your back, his weight pressing you into the mattress. You can feel his heart racing against your spine, can feel the way he's trembling slightly, can feel his breath hot and uneven against your shoulder.
For a second, the two of you lay there like that, hearts pounding in sync, the messy slide of your bodies warm and comforting, his scent blooming around you as the mess between your thighs runs down your legs and onto the mattress. You don't care, going near catatonic as Soonyoung presses closer to your scent gland, his tongue darting out to taste you. It makes you moan and push back into him, wanting more and he laughs.
He shifts slightly, starting to pull out, but you make a sound of protest. "Not yet. Stay."
"I'm crushing you," he points out, but he doesn't move.
"Don't care," you say. "Want to feel you."
He makes a soft sound and settles more comfortably against you, his arms wrapping around your waist. He's still inside you, softening but not pulling out, and there's something intimate about it that makes your chest feel tight.
You lie there in the darkness, your bodies cooling, your breathing gradually evening out. You can feel the way his scent is already starting to shift, still hot and thick with rut, but not quite as sharp, not quite as overwhelming.
"How long do ruts usually last?" you ask quietly.
"Three days, usually. Sometimes four." He presses a kiss to your shoulder. "But I don't know if this one will be normal. Everything about it has been weird so far."
"We'll figure it out," you tell him.
He's quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks again, his voice is soft, vulnerable. "Thank you. For this. For helping me. For not being scared of me."
"I would never be afraid of you."
"Even after the past few days?"
"Especially after the past few days." You turn your head to look at him over your shoulder, and even in the dim light, you can see the uncertainty in his eyes. "You were in pre-rut and you were still gentle with me. You were still asking permission. You were still you. That tells me everything I need to know."
He closes his eyes and takes a shuddering breath, and when he opens them again, they're suspiciously bright. "I don't deserve you."
"Shut up," you say, but there's no heat in it. "You deserve everything good. And I'm going to make sure you get it."
He kisses your shoulder, soft and sweet and perfect. When he pulls back, you can hear the smile in his voice.
"Round two?" he asks, and you can already feel him starting to harden again inside you.
You laugh, the sound surprised and delighted. "Already?"
"Rut," he says, rolling his hips experimentally and making you gasp. "Told you it was going to be intense. Think you can keep up?"
"Is that a challenge?"
"Maybe. Think you can handle it?"
"I can handle anything you give me," you tell him, and you mean it.
"Good," he says, his voice dropping to that low, commanding tone that makes heat pool in your belly. "Because I'm not done with you yet. Not even close."
"Prove it."
"Oh, I will," he promises. "We've got all night. And all day tomorrow. And the day after that."
"Good," you tell him, rolling your hips and feeling the way he's already fully hard again inside you. "Because I'm not letting you go."
-
The knock comes around late morning, soft but insistent.
You're half-awake when you hear it, drifting in that comfortable space between sleep and consciousness where everything feels warm and syrupy. Soonyoung is sprawled across your chest, his head tucked under your chin, one arm thrown over your waist. His breathing is deep and even, his body finally relaxed after taking you four more times throughout the night on and off. There's an ache between your legs but it feels good, feels right. Like you're right where you should be, pressed against a member of your pack, scents twisted together.
The knock comes again, a little louder this time.
"Come in," you call quietly, not wanting to startle Soonyoung awake too abruptly.
The door opens and Jeonghan steps inside, cradling bottles of water and bowls of rice and chicken. You realize it's what you both need to sustain yourself through Soonyoung's rut and you're immediately grateful, shooting Jeonghan a tired smile. He smirks in response, trailing toward where you and Soonyoung are tangled on the bed.
Soonyoung senses Jeonghan's presence, eyes snapping open. He's up on his elbows in an instant, his body going rigid, and a low growl rumbles from deep in his chest. His lips pull back from his teeth in a snarl that's pure territorial aggression, his pupils dilating as he positions himself between you and Jeonghan like a shield.
Jeonghan doesn't even flinch. Instead, he sets the food and water down on the dresser and turns to Soonyoung, face calm and placid before his face shifts, lips pulling back to bare his teeth at Soonyoung in kind. There's no anger in it, but rather a reminder to Soonyoung that Jeonghan is number two in this pack and Soonyoung's senior and he is not intimidated.
Soonyoung's growl falters. You can feel the moment he recognizes the dynamic, the moment his rut-addled brain processes the hierarchy and accepts it. His teeth retract, his lips closing over them, and he settles back down slightly, though his arm never leaves your waist.
"Keep the teeth away," Jeonghan snorts, walking toward the door. "Congrats on finally figuring it out. You cannot imagine the relief I felt seeing you crawl up here last night."
He turns and exits the room without another word, closing the door quietly behind him.
For a moment, there's silence. You can feel Soonyoung's heart still racing, but his anger is immediately replaced with a sheepish laugh and him awkwardly scratching the back of his head, looking at you.
"Sorry," he laughs. "I've never done that before."
"It's okay," you tell him, reaching back to run your fingers through his hair. "It was cute."
"Cute?" He scoffs. "I'm not cute. I'm tough. I have teeth."
"Uh huh." You lay back on the bed, looking up at him, grinning. "Use those big teeth on me then."
"Yeah?" he asks, his voice dropping to something low and hungry. "You want me to?"
"Yes."
That's all the invitation he needs. He moves fast, rolling you onto your back and pinning you to the mattress in one fluid motion. His hands find your wrists, pressing them gently but firmly into the pillows on either side of your head. His body settles over yours, his weight pressing you down into the bed, and you can feel him already hardening against your thigh.
His teeth find the sensitive skin of your neck, just below your ear, and he bites down gently, not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough that you feel it, hard enough that it sends a spike of heat straight through you. He works his way down your neck, marking you with his teeth, and every bite is followed by a soothing lick of his tongue.
"I'll show you teeth," he mutters, scraping them over the curve of your breast.
You grin, arching into him, finally feeling settled and feeling home.
MATING: F.Reader x ot13
PACK MEETING: The House Rules are made to make the pack function - they're vital to a pack this size, and everyone loves the House Rules. Especially you, the single omega in the entire pack, who the House Rules are designed entirely around.
FRIDGE NOTES: This collection functions as an interactive piece between myself and readers. Every chapter posted of this universe will be a request from you - the reader. Readers who would like a chapter of this written will fill out the request form, and that will serve as the framework for me to write a chapter. This collection is not meant to have a plot or overarching theme - it's entire purpose is to write smut, fluff, angst - whatever you, as the requester, wants, so long as it makes general sense to the pre-established universe where all of seventeen and reader function as an established back that live together!
RATING: 18+ Minors are strictly prohibited from engaging in and reading this content. It may contain explicit content and any minors discovered reading or engaging with this work will be blocked immediately.
PACK WARNINGS: Some chapters may contain smut. All chapters will be warned appropriately.
PACK SCHDULE: This series has no schedule. I fill requests as I see fit! This series also has no scheduled end - requests will remain open until I no longer want to work on the fic.
REQUEST RULES:
🌣 In general, ensure your requests are reasonable.
🌣 Requests must be within this initial concept of the pack together in a shared omegaverse. Requests outside of this concept will be deleted.
🌣 I will fill requests at my own pace.
🌣 Not all requests may be filled, either because they are duplicates, may make me uncomfortable, may not make sense to the overall work, or because there is something about them that doesn't work.
🌣 You may not change the pre-assigned sub-gender of a member in your request
🌣 Your request shouldn't force me to ret-con or backtrack/negate something already posted
REQUEST FORM: Request here
THE HOUSE RULES:
1. The omega is never allowed to eat alone unless she asks to - SEUNGCHEOL
2. If she falls asleep on you, carry her to bed. No exceptions - MINGYU
3. Nobody leaves for long amounts of time without scenting her goodbye - JEONGHAN
4. Her nest is neutral territory. Arguments end at the door - JOSHUA
5. If the omega asks anything during heat, the answer is always yes - THE PACK
6. No one is allowed to make her cry and leave the room afterward - WONWOO
7. If she steals your clothes, they belong to her now - MINGYU
8. The omega is not permitted to carry heavy things while alphas are present - MINGHAO
9. Whoever wakes her up is responsible for dealing with the consequences - VERNON
10. Use the omega as you please, but respect is mandatory - THE PACK
11. The omega is not allowed to beg and then act surprised when someone gives in - SEUNGKWAN
12. If she wanders into an alpha’s room after midnight, she knows exactly what she’s doing - SEOKMIN
13. The omega is not allowed to start things in shared spaces and then complain about being watched - JUNHUI
14. If she’s whining, someone should probably handle it - CHAN
15. The omega is not allowed to say “I’m fine” without at least one person investigating immediately - JIHOON
16. Arguments about whose turn it is to use her next must be resolved by rock paper scissors - SOONYOUNG
MEET THE ALPHAS: Seungcheol, Jeonghan, Junhui, Soonyoung, Seokmin, Minghao
MEET THE BETAS: Joshua, Wonwoo, Jihoon, Mingyu, Seungkwan, Vernon, Chan
PART 1 -> PART 2 -> PART 3 -> PART 4 -> part 5 (final)
⚬ pairing: ice hockey player! kim mingyu x fem! reader
⚬ word count: 20k (im sorryyyy)
⚬ warnings: alcohol, food, unrequited love and depiction of certain symptoms of depression, smut, violence, slutshaming and derogatory language, harassment and other mature themes MDNI
⚬ genres: uni au, forbidden romance, slow burn, angst, fluff sometimes, hurt/comfort.
playlist:
- i'm tired (long version) by labrinth
- TV by billie eilish
- liability by lorde
- chihiro by billie eilish (!!)
- thinkin about you by frank ocean
- purple rain by prince
- about you by the 1975
author's note: it was truly a divine intervention that held me back from killing them.
p.s. - tried my best to dial down the angst-o-meter in this one!
CHAPTER 16: the seven stages of grief
Your tears dried somewhere between Mingyu’s apartment and your dorm-building. You kept your hands wrapped around your torso throughout the walk, like you were holding the heartbreak in, waiting to reach home and let it all spill out.
You don’t know what hurts more — the fact that he had wanted her first, or the fact that he looked at you now in a way that felt too big to trust.
Your mind keeps wandering between the perfect morning, all sleepy affection and soft edges, and the afternoon that slipped right off your very fingers, collapsing in increments.
The harder the sun shines at you, the more surreal everything feels. You feel oddly betrayed by everything in the moment. By the world as it keeps on spinning, like it does not care that you can barely stand still right now. By the wind that flows abundant, crisp and fresh, even though you’re struggling to suck it in.
An ugly sob keeps on threatening to tear off your throat the closer you get to your room, like the proximity of your safe-haven is triggering its break-out.
But you somehow manage to gulp it down, keep it all in. Bundle it up under the clothes several sizes too big on you.
Your fingers fumble into your pockets before you realize that you don’t have your coat on.
That it’s his hoodie that you’re wearing.
Shit…
You are about to give up on the idea of saving face, the thought of just letting yourself crumble outside your door seems too enticing for your body which is at its limits now.
But then, your eyes catch it. The key already jammed deep inside the key-hole, the duck shaped keychain dangling like a taunt.
Chaeyoung’s set of keys.
Your first instinct is to turn around and run, you don’t think you have it in you to face her. Not right now.
But run where?
The house that you saved up to leave?
The apartment where everything collapsed?
You shut your eyes, wrap your fingers around the knob and push.
You thought that there was some chance of you going undetected, just slithering in your bed as your ever-crackling roommate’s attention is caught up elsewhere.
But there she is, sitting somberly on her bed, facing the door. Facing you as you open it.
She’s mid-conversation with someone else in the room as they lean against the table, at your blind spot.
Heather.
The girls inspect you almost in tandem, top to bottom. A hoodie too big to belong to you with the name Kim imprinted on its back, sweatpants that have dragged mud, the boots in your hands because you could no longer walk in their ridiculous heels.
You wish they won’t look closely at your face.
But they do— Heather grimaces at the mess of your hair while Chaeyoung’s frown deepens at the redness around your eyes and nose.
“Hey,” you croak, voice impossibly hoarse.
Heather’s eyes flit from you to your roommate and then back to you guiltily, like she’s been caught. Maybe they were talking about you.
And honestly, although you had once parroted your side of the story that you would present to your roommate when she came back— you just don’t give a fuck anymore.
“I was here cause I needed to make a call and my phone’s not working,” Heather jumps to explain.
Chaeyoung’s voice is less hurried when she adds, “yeah, but I couldn’t help because I think I left mine in Seungcheol’s bag.”
You don’t lift your eyes when you extend your phone towards Heather, the only thing you managed to grab when you left. “Here, use mine.”
Heather mumbles a quick thanks and hurries out with your phone.
Once the door shuts with a loud snap behind you, making you flinch, you manage to look into the mirror. You think you look no better than a half-trampled sewer-rat.
Chaeyoung relaxes, her gaze still glued onto every little movement of yours. She exhales, “you were with Mingyu?”
You give her a tight nod, take off the hoodie she must’ve recognized, and put your bathrobe on. You pretend that she’s not even there as you begin taking everything off, peeling his clothes off your skin like they have begun twisting around you.
You know it’s not justified, but there’s a certain, ugly resentment towards her that’s making you feel even worse about yourself.
She didn’t do anything wrong. She doesn’t deserve it.
And yet, you scuffle around the room collecting your toiletries like you cannot stand being in the same space as her. Like you don’t care about all that she has to tell about her long, romantic getaway with her boyfriend.
“How did that happen?” she asks, prompting you to pause.
“I’m sure Heather filled you in,” you answer, voice clipped.
“No,” she shrugs, “she just told me you gave her his number like I asked you to but he wasn’t interested.”
“Then I guess that’s what happened.” you turn to face her, exhausted and disinterested. “I’m sorry for disrupting your master cupid plan. I got too greedy for the money he offered.”
“That’s not what I mean—”
The door opens behind you and Heather pokes her head in. “Sorry for interrupting,” she gives you an uncomfortable grin, extending your phone back to you, “here. Thanks.”
When Heather leaves again, Chaeyoung stands up.
“Look, Chae, I’m not really—”
“I meant how did that happen,” she wiggles her finger wildly at your face, “because I know Mingyu would never make a girl cry like that.”
“Well he did,” a bitter laugh prickles out of you, “you both did.”
You know how unfair you’re being to her. But the ache in your heart is so big, so loud, that it is almost tangible. You want to reach for it, tear it off your chest and load its responsibility on someone else. Anyone else.
Chaeyoung blinks, taken aback.
“If only you had told me earlier… when you were—when you were going on and on about him.” You can feel yourself beginning to hyperventilate again, “or if he said something about you… I would have never let it get this big. I would have never fallen for him. I—”
She catches you before you slump onto the ground, your bones finally giving up after being weighed down by the worst pain you have ever experienced.
“Hey, hey, hey,” she calls out, and you let her yourself be embraced by her. “Breathe.” She reminds you, slowly walking you over to her bed.
“Sweetie,” she says, once you aren’t struggling to breathe anymore. “I need you to drink this water, take a warm shower, eat a banana and then tell me everything that happened, alright?”
⸻
The room is quiet in the way that makes everything feel heavier than it is. The fresh clothes on your body, the blanket she draped over your legs, the cup of tea she thrust into your hands… your favorite pink plushie that you clutch in your lap for comfort. It all weighs you down, gathered tightly in your lap, feeling less like solace and more like gravity—anchoring you in place, refusing to let you drift away from this moment.
You sit there, exhausted and unmoving, staring at the flickering string-lights twirled around her bed as they get used to being turned-on after so long.
Your vision blurs into the halos of their gold, distorting everything—even her. Especially her.
And you let it. Because you don’t want to see what expression her face has morphed into after everything you’ve told her.
Not even when you add, voice barely above a breath. “It felt like I was second to you… like I just… came because you said no.”
Chaeyoung bites her lip, sipping her own tea thoughtfully before asking, “did I ever tell you how when I met him, Seungcheol was four months out of breaking up with someone he had been with for six years?”
“Six years?”
“Yeah, that’s middle-school and high-school and the first year of Uni,” she chuckles, “they had their first kiss with each other, went to their first concerts with each other, said ‘I love yous’ and all that shit.”
“Yeah but,” you shrink in yourself further, “they had the opportunity to figure that they weren’t meant for each other. But with Mingyu, what if there’s a part of him that still wonders what could have been if you said yes?”
Chaeyoung’s brow lifts, sharp and immediate, cutting clean through your spiraling thoughts. “You really think he’s thinking about other girls when he’s with you?” she asks. “Did he ever make you feel that way?”
All your words fail you at that question.
No matter how much you try to rack through your memories, how much you contort them to validate your fears, you know that there was never a single time when he looked at you like you weren’t everything that ever mattered. Singularity.
Not when he leaned down each time to hear you better, even in the loudest crowds. Not when he’d follow your movements around with his watchful gaze like he wanted to learn everything about you. Not when he touched you like he was afraid that if he didn’t, he would not be able to believe that you were there, that you were real. Not when he softened his sharpest edges, like he was a stray dog in your house, trying to find his place.
It devastates you. Pains you. The kind of ache that no amount of suspicion can gloss over.
“I just can’t stop thinking about it,” you admit, slowly, “that if you were there in the room that night, if you opened the door for him, none of this would have…” You trail off, suddenly too conscious of sounding too pathetic, too insecure.
Chaeyoung rests her chin over her knee. Then exhales, audibly, “if I was here and if I opened the door for him, he would have cussed me out for not having found him a tutor yet and then he would have left.”
You open your mouth to respond, but she shushes you up with a raised finger.
“And then, the next day, he would have bugged me to hell and back to tell him more about my roommate with a pretty voice who hides behind her tea-mugs and notebooks.”
Your gaze slips away again, seeking refuge in the dim corners of the room. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“No, I’m just telling you the truth about how things are between me and him.” she shrugs, “how they have been for a long, long time now. Isn’t that exactly what you wanted to know?”
You finally look at her, brows pulled, eyes pleading.
“I don’t know about everything else that went wrong for him that year, but I know that I was one of those things that he moved on from. I can see it, I can feel it.” Chaeyoung scoots closer, her face smattered with worry and something much fragile. “You’re punishing him and yourself over something bygone that has no value anymore.”
Your fingers tremble as you finally let your thoughts tame down for the first time in hours. Not all at once, but enough for your perspective to broaden.
“I think… I think I was blindsided when I saw that letter.” you whisper, more to yourself than to her, like it is finally making sense now.
Like now that you can give it a name, it has become more bearable.
More solvable.
Chaeyoung doesn’t give you a warning before she hugs you, taking you in her arms by surprise. “Yeah, and he’s the biggest idiot ever for not telling you earlier. For letting it get this far. And I’m so sorry about that.”
Your grip over her wrist tightens, mind replaying what has been left unspoken for far too long now.
“He’s not the only one who took too long to admit, though.” you shift away, not immediately, but like you’re putting some much needed space when you speak. “I think it’s high time I told him something as well… something important.”
Something that might change everything.
⸻
That doesn’t happen all at once.
Not on impulse, not immediately. You tell yourself that you’re not stalling, but that you’re giving yourself enough time and space to be coherent. To find words. To address the storm-out on Saturday morning before you confess the only thing that has kept you from fully letting yourself be swept away by him.
The only truth you’ve ever hidden, the only one that makes you feel so guilty, so selfish. A tormenting regret that dwells on everything you should have said but didn’t—just to keep him near.
Sunday, you sleep until noon on your top bunk. Phone switched off, doors shut for anyone that isn’t your roommate. Every blanket you own is wrapped around you because you refuse to shut the window off. Open windows bring good luck.
You know he isn’t hopeless or vain. He knows when to show up and when to give you space.
And yet.
A part of you, the nonsensical one hoped that he’d show up somehow. Not because you feel entitled to being chased by him, but because you’re scared that if you take a step towards him, you might chicken out.
Monday, you have three classes. None of the ones you share with him. You linger awkwardly at the coffee-house you spent countless afternoons with him in this past autumn. It’s cozier now, more enriched with the aroma of burnt coffee and buttered pastries piping hot as bigger crowds flock in here, shivering and donning large coats dusted with snow. Yet, it lacks the warmth you once associated with it.
Maybe because he’s not here.
Tuesday, you come back to your room after wandering the sections of the library like revisiting those tucked corners, those sterile focus-rooms would somehow rewrite what feels like an unfinished ending of your favorite book.
Wednesday morning, Chaeyoung watches you with a frown as you get ready to go haunt the campus again, even though you don’t have any classes. And finally—finally, she tells you the reason behind why you haven’t caught the sight of him.
‘The team left Monday for a tournament, you didn’t know?’
Of course you didn’t.
You haven’t looked at your phone in ages.
When you turn it back on, there are no calls from him. Not a single text. Not even on Saturday after you left him… you were hoping he had at least asked if you reached home safely.
Something shrinks in your gut, something that was once wrapped safely in surety, in hope, in the reminders of all the ways he had loved you.
But you keep your head up high.
And still—still you text him, even when it feels ridiculously humiliating. Because your mind wouldn’t keep still if you didn’t.
You: i think we should talk.
It feels too demanding, too serious. So you delete that one and type a fresh text.
You: all the best for your game this week! can we talk when u come back?
That just might be the most out of touch text you’ve ever sent, uselessly cheeky and cheerful…like the last five days didn’t happen. That one goes to trash too.
Finally, after taking a nap that somehow ends up lasting six hours, you sit by the full moon hanging low by your window. The same moon that had been a constant in every night that you lost a bit of yourself to him. The same moon that witnessed every little date he planned for you, laughed along with every dumb joke he said, waned and waxed at every song you sang for him and cried with you the night he kissed all your pains away from every inch of your body.
You make the moon proofread the text you decide upon sending — because Chaeyoung is busy talking to Seungcheol in hushed tones, thinking that you’re asleep — and when it feels like she shimmers in approval, you hit send.
You: hey… i didn’t know u had a game this week, i hope it went well. i thought everything through, and was wondering if we could meet to talk when u come back? i need to tell u something important.
Thursday comes and goes, no response from him. Not even the tick signalling he read it.
You tell yourself maybe he is busy—playing, winning, traveling, leading. Maybe that’s what captains do on tournaments like these, turn their phones off so there are no distractions.
By Friday, you can no longer keep your body still. You’re pacing the room like you’re trying to get all your 10k steps right then and there, your hand never leaves your hair—pulling, threading, resting. You have rushed to the bathroom twice now, each time under the false alarm where you felt like you were going to throw up.
But you can only heave.
Eyes bloodshot and wild, lips quivering at the mere possibilities of things. Maybe he isn’t going to answer you ever. Maybe he doesn’t want to meet you at all. Maybe you killed whatever it was between the two of you.
“But it’s unfair,” you whisper, wiping your tears, “it’s unfair. I was hurt at that moment. I couldn’t think.”
“Everyone makes mistakes, but you showed him you don’t trust him when he made one,” your reflection shrugs, reapplying her gloss, “he begged you, cried for you, and you walked away.”
“He’d understand, he loves me—”
“Loved.”
By Saturday, you’ve given up hope.
It’s been more than twenty-four hours since the team came back. You know that, because you saw Chan hurrying towards the staff-room this morning.
So that was how it was supposed to end. Leaving you with nothing but a set of his clothes and his confession that you never returned.
Chaeyoung isn’t in the room tonight, so you decide to make use of all the space by pouring your attention towards yourself, pulling back your thoughts that have been running everywhere to focus on the feel of your vanilla body lotion as it glides over your skin after a hot shower.
You’re in the middle of painting your toe-nails when Chaeyoung comes back, knocking at the door. You don’t usually shut it off when she’s not here, but you’re in nothing but your towel at the moment.
“Jest a sec, Chae!” you call out, snapping the bright-red pigment off and waddling towards the door, foam-dividers still lodged between your toes.
You don’t think much before twisting the latch open and turning around.
But the shadow that falls over you is taller.
The glimpse of the body you caught is much muscular.
You don’t remember Chaeyoung wearing a grey hoodie and dark-washed jeans when she left… Neither do you remember her switching her cinnamon perfume for the citrus cedar.
So either Chaeyoung somehow transformed into his body, stole his clothes and perfume tonight.
Or it is actually him — Kim Mingyu, at your door.
Your fingers tighten over your towel as you turn back around, cowering behind nothing, like the air might cover you up. You weren’t expecting him, or anyone, not at this hour. Not like this.
His eyes are unreadable. Not soft, not playful, not angry either.
Just a bit stunned as he takes you in, from the soft hair that you just blew-dry, to the unfinished color on your toes, the exposed skin — blush and all.
And then, they are steady.
Like it doesn’t matter.
Like this isn’t the first time in a whole week he’s seeing you, and that he’s seeing you like this.
You step behind the door, just enough to shield yourself from anyone outside the hallways that’s not him.
And once the shock wears off, you see it.
The dark bruise over his cheekbone—so close to his eye, the busted lip.
You gasp before you can process it full, before you can see the bandages and ointment over the other injuries on his face.
“Mingyu, what—how…” the exhale splits midway on its way out.
As if the air around you isn’t already so viscous that you can barely see through it, he shifts a step back, densifying it further.
For a brief moment, you had thought that he had read your texts, that he was here to talk.
But his lips are set in a hard line and his face sports that formal expression that exhibits no intention of any communication further.
He just extends his arm towards you, a clean, paper bag dangling off his fingers.
“You forgot these at my place.” he says, clipped, serious. Terrifyingly conclusive.
You don’t say anything—you can’t say anything. Everything feels too unreal. Your throat is so dry that it feels more sand than voice. The same, granular dirt that seeps down and stuffs your chest until it feels too full, too tight.
You just confusedly accept whatever he’s giving you—literally and metaphorically—with trembling fingers. You almost drop the bag when he lets go. Like this is a dream where you can only reach, but can’t hold onto anything.
He catches it before it can fall, wrapping his fingers over your lifeless ones like an instinct, as if even just for a moment, he’s rubbing strength into them and steadying you like he always does. Something flickers in his eyes, but he soon covers it up.
“Be careful.” he comments, like an obligation, like something he’d say after helping a lady who almost tripped before him on a subway.
His touch reminds you that he’s here. Skin and flesh and bones that weigh down.
And yet…yet, he isn’t here.
Not the shape you knew him in.
Before you can look deeper to see if you can find your Mingyu into whoever this is that showed up, he’s retracing his steps.
You don’t have a plan, you haven’t braced yourself for an answer when you call out in the loudest voice you can muster.
“Mingyu—”
He halts, takes a breath, then faces you. The same, bloodied, bruised face that you thought might fix itself up if he just looked at you again.
“What?”
“What happened?” you ask, immediately realizing how stupid that sounds. “I mean… who did this?”
Mingyu blinks at you like he can’t believe you just asked that. As if that is the most nonsensical thing he has heard in a while.
His eyes squint, assessing you for any signs of intoxication. When he finds none, he laughs.
Actually laughs.
Nothing more than a puff of air, but heavy like a snow-storm in the middle of winter. Cold laced with an intent to freeze your blood.
When he steps closer, the sterile lights of the hallway catch his bruises. Cascading upon them in a way that shows the brown and purples more than the reds and blues. His injuries aren’t fresh. They’ve been there for quite a few days now, some of them already fading around the edges.
“Who did this?” he repeats, not unkindly but something in his eyes changes. “Really? You’re asking me that?”
“I don’t…” you swallow, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Are you joking right now or do you really not know?”
“What are you talking about Mingyu?” you ask, exasperated, even when your intuition tells you not to.
His jaw tightens. When he speaks, he speaks low, slowing down around every word like he wants you to understand them well.
“We had a match against NYU on Tuesday.” he says, and your gut immediately sinks, “there’s a guy on that team. Has been on my last nerve since high-school…since I earned a spot here over him. Acts like he has a personal vendetta against me.”
Your fingers slip off the door, the other palm loses its hold over the bag he came to drop.
But Mingyu continues, “he comes up to me, in the rink, all crazy eyes and teeth barred. Asks me how long have I been messing with his sister for.”
“No…” you choke. It’s not possible.
Ethan doesn’t know.
There’s no way.
“He caught me off guard.” Mingyu states.
You’ve gone pale, cold to the touch despite the warmth of the scalding shower. Your heart has been dropping in fragments at every word he spoke, but it crashes down loud and whole—echoing around the deserted hallway— when he tilts his head, watches you like he is taking you in one last time and then his lips twitch around something you can’t name.
“Take care.” he whispers with a finality you wish you hadn't heard.
CHAPTER 2: trust no man, fear no bitch
You don’t see what clothes you put on. Chaeyoung’s, yours, clean, dirty. All you know is that you’re still in the middle of stretching the jumper over your midriff while running out of your dorm, barefoot. Your vision blurs, your feet stumble over the sharp pebbles, the cold air infiltrates everything — numbing you to a point that you don’t know if you’re even in your body anymore.
Maybe he didn’t bring his car.
Maybe if you ran just hard enough, you’d be able to catch up with him.
And you do, he’s halfway across the quad.
You call out his name with everything warm that is still left in you. You think he’s not going to stop, that he’s going to continue walking away, that there's a chance he didn't even hear you over all the campus noise and blaring horns of cars that are heading out for the weekend.
But his steps slow down. Significantly, obviously. His shoulders slump and he lets his head fall, running his hands over his hair like he has to brace himself before turning around. And when he does, he looks at you like something inside him has finally cracked, something that he doesn’t know how to fix.
Your breath fogs the air between your bodies as you reach him.
“I was going to tell you about him…” you speak urgently, like every second that passes without the truth now is punitive, “I sent you the text.”
“What text?” his frown deepens.
You blink at him, confused and suspended. You fish for your phone inside the pocket of your sweatpants.
“The one that you didn’t reply to, didn’t even read.” you open the chat and turn the screen to him.
Even the cicadas hiding behind the trimmed strands of the grass begin to hush down, like everything around the two of you is holding its breath to not interrupt this moment. To not let any words hide anymore.
Somewhere behind him, a sprinkler is still leaking water, splashing his broad back with a soft mist as he steps in closer to see what you’re showing him.
And then—
“You have me blocked.” he says flatly, dull eyes flicking up to you.
“I didn’t block you.” you frantically shake your head.
He reaches down for his own phone now, “then tell me why after I sent you like… five texts asking if you reached home fine, you texted me not to call you or try to reach out to you—and when I tried to reply to that, none of my texts got through?”
He shows you his own phone.
The text history between the two of you on his phone is like a completely different one altogether.
None of which ever reached you.
There they are, the frantic texts from him sent to you, mere minutes after you stormed off his place.
Mingyu: babe, are you okay?
Mingyu: i am so sorry, it is all my fault. I should have told you earlier.
Mingyu: i know you need time… this must’ve been too much for you to process at once, but please tell me when you reach your dorm. Please.
And then, fifteen minutes later.
Mingyu: hey, did you reach? Why aren’t you answering my calls?
Mingyu: this is it, I’m coming to check, i’ll leave as soon as i know you got to your room just fine. pls don’t get mad.
Your phone had been silent all the way through, you were so busy breaking down you must have not noticed any of that.
But what stuns you the most is the fact that all of these texts are delivered and read from his phone to yours.
And you don’t remember even looking at a single one of them.
Your breath shortens as you scroll up with shaky fingers. And immediately feel like someone pulled the rug from right under you.
Because there’s a text you never typed, one that you didn’t even think about.
You: don’t ever talk to me again, don’t come looking for me. we are done.
“I… I didn’t—” you take a step back, shaking your head like that would make this all untrue. “I didn’t send any of these.”
Mingyu doesn’t look at you like he doesn’t trust you, but he doesn’t immediately reach forward to hold you either.
He just stands there, every bit as confused as you.
“I sent you so many texts that failed to deliver, called you so many times throughout the weekend.” he says, voice impossibly unsteady and low, “they’d ring, and ring. You never answered.”
“I didn’t get any calls!”
“It’s cause you have me blocked.”
“I would never do that to you…”
“I don’t know!” Mingyu’s voice rises, not at you, but at whatever this is which keeps on tangling around him, leaving him paralysed with confusion and helplessness. “I don’t know, okay? I thought you truly didn’t want to see me again. That I hurt you so much…”
His voice dissolves around the last word, thin and frayed, like something stretched too far for too long. The sound of it lodges somewhere deep in your chest, sharp and immovable.
For a moment, neither of you moves.
The mist from the sprinkler keeps drifting, catching in his hair, darkening the cotton of his hoodie in uneven patches. A droplet slides from the edge of his jaw, down his throat, disappearing beneath the collar. He tries to wipe it off with a frustrated brush of his palm, looking at the distance, contemplating, as his breath fogs up.
You try to suck your tears in, voice getting smaller, tighter. “You could have given whatever that was in that bag to Chaeyoung. Why did you come here if you really thought I never wanted to see you again?”
He turns his head to look at you. “Because I wanted to see you again.”
A stunted, unstable silence blankets everything as the two of you just look at each other, eyes glassy, chests heaving. There has never been a day that you didn’t trust him. But you don’t know if you can say the same about him right now… not after everything that happened.
You don’t miss it though, that slight possibility that maybe, just maybe, he does. Maybe he’s desperately trying to revive it, trying to believe you.
Hesitantly, your thumb reaches forward to touch the bruises on his face. He lets you, unblinking, unwincing.
His breath warms the skin of your palm as you brush the sensitive skin, the fading scars. A corrosive bile begins rising up your throat as you count each one of them.
“I swear I don’t know how he—” your voice chokes, “I never told him.”
“I thought you were so mad at me for the letters, for not telling you that you—that he…” he tries to finish, but his voice drops, like he is explaining it to himself. "I mean I would be angry too if someone hurt my sister."
Then, he shakes his head, a small, humorless smile tugging at his lips like a man making peace with something.
He steps back from your touch, leaving your hand hovering in the air.
And then, he says with the same clarity that he had painted his voice with for this night, “I think this was a bad idea…me coming here to see you, I mean. There’s messages on my phone from you, messages that I spent days losing my mind over, messages that you say you didn’t send. And I still don’t know how to feel about everything with your brother.”
Your hand drops— the way all hands do upon ultimate defeat.
There’s nothing you can say right now that will fix this. Not when you yourself don’t understand how this happened… who did this.
You try to look away, but you can’t. Not when he’s stepping away from you slowly, tentatively, like there are a million calculations in his mind sucking all his energy out.
“Go back inside,” he says before turning around, “you’ll get sick.”
⸻
Misty is the only one out of the three women around you who reacts when you order yet another strawberry slushie, her eyebrows curving up like they intend to touch her hairline.
It’s your sixth one in the last hour, afterall.
The server looks at you, then at the TV where a woman in a pristine, tanned suit predicts the possibility of the season’s heaviest hailstorm in the next two to three days.
“Maybe something to eat along with it?” he meekly offers, “or something warm?”
You shake your head slowly, making sure that he sees your eyes as they water at the mere thought of there not being a cup slipping with cold condensation in your hands.
“Just get her the damn slushie, man.” Misty waves her hand at him, undoing her own scarf and throwing it unceremoniously around you like a last ditch effort to save you from getting sick.
“But I’m afraid we’ve run out of frozen strawberries—”
Misty whips out a twenty dollar bill, slaps it in his hands secretly, and whispers (like you’re not sitting inches away from her), “bro throw a watermelon in or something, she's too out of it to know the difference.”
The server pockets the change, tucks the tray under his arm that he just brought out your previous identical dessert upon and scurries away.
You can’t stop yourself from digging into the soft, half-sweet half-sour thickness of indulgence. You suck at the straw like your life depends on it, ironing over the stuffy cold itch in your throat which is used to the gentle care of warm sweet teas so far.
Misty drags a big inhale out of her vape, eyes wide as she watches you suck the straw hard, meanwhile Jihyo and Chaeyoung exchange a look.
Finally, Jihyo breaks the silence, looking up towards the ceiling as she speaks, “God, if my homophobic aunt was right about the gays, then please make my pussy-eating lesbian ass burn in hell forever. But never, I repeat, never make me go through a Mingyu withdrawal like this one.”
You frown at her, lips still wrapped around the straw as you mumble, cheeks full of icy strawberries, “I’m doing just fine.”
“You watched Survivor for sixteen hours straight yesterday.” Chaeyoung comments, “one only watches Survivor to see someone else suffer more than them.”
Misty splutters around her vape as she tries to speak too soon. “Imagine how bad it is for him though. I mean, if the girl I loved went through my trash, got mad at me, had her brother beat my ass in front of a crowd and then stole my friends… man she’d have me fucked up cause that’s messy as hell.”
“She’s not stealing anyone’s friends, she needs us right now.” Chaeyoung says at the same time as you exclaim—
“For the last time, I didn’t get him beat up!”
“My bad, my bad!” Misty raises her arms up in surrender, “it was that bitch that snooped through your phone… what was her name—Harper?”
“Heather.” Jihyo corrects, then turns to Chaeyoung, “yeah did you talk to her? Why in the world did she do something like that?”
Chaeyoung takes a deep breath, throwing a cautious glance towards you. But you don’t care anymore. Not when your server just brought out another huge tumbler full of strawberry slushie with a hint of mint and lemon in it.
“I did,” Chaeyoung says, then turns to you, “she told me she only intended to make a call at first, but then she opened your gallery out of curiosity just to look and got carried away. She said there were so many pictures of the two of you together and it made her jealous. She scrolled a bit more and found family pictures, realized Ethan is your brother and anyone who follows college hockey closely knows just how bad things are between Mingyu and Ethan. So she connected two and two together— sent a picture of you and him to Ethan, texted Mingyu in a way that implied that you wanted to break up with him, wiped everything so you wouldn’t know, and then blocked both the boys so they couldn’t reach you for answers.”
The look of utter shock on Jihyo’s face only intensifies when Chaeyoung adds, “And because she knew that they were gonna be away from the city at the tournament, she figured it’d be too late for things to be solved by the time they returned.”
Still staring into your glass, you murmur, “I didn’t know because I didn't really check my phone. I thought… I thought he was just avoiding me. And Ethan never texts or calls me anyways so I didn’t realize he was blocked as well.”
Misty lets a dramatic exhale out, her fingers clutching her armrests tightly. “Damn… this is some fiction level shit.”
Chaeyoung sighs, “Heather seemed remorseful though, cried and hyperventilated and everything. Said she didn’t think it would get to a point of violence and that it was only meant as a prank.”
“Yeah bitch when you pull a prank on someone, you tell them. That’s the point of it.” Misty says, then turns to you, her clay earrings clacking like they want to make a point. “Mingyu and Ethan deserved to know that from you at your own timing, but she took that away from you.”
Jihyo grimaces, “yeah this wasn’t a prank, it was a full blown, menacing scheme where people ended up hurt.”
Chaeyoung rubs her palms over her face somberly, letting her head fall over the cushioned head-rest and fixing her eyes over the crescent shaped lights over the rustic ceilings. “It is my fault to be honest, I should have never entertained that psycho’s crush like I was cupid or something. I kinda fuelled her obsession.”
You have only been a passive observer in this commentary of your love-life so far, lazy eyes dragging around from one face to the other as your girls rule out each other’s opinions with sharp criticisms and witty reasonings.
But when your roommate says that, you reach forward to hold her arm with comfort—your way of telling her not to blame herself.
Chaeyoung gives you a small, sad smile, patting your hair in return — the hair she forced you to wash this morning by threatening to ban dry-shampoos from the room — as you continue chugging the slushie.
“What’s worse is that she didn’t even get anything out of it.” Misty shrugs, “she broke these two up but he’s still not interested in her sorry ass so what now, hoe?”
Chaeyoung’s head shoots up straight, “she did not succeed in making them break up. They just need some time apart to think everything through.”
“Mingyu has worn his black hoodie everyday since he came back,” Misty argues, “that’s basically a funeral. And take a look at this one eating her feelings away in sugar and ice in the middle of December and tell me with a straight face this is not a break-up.”
Chaeyoung raises her finger, “no, that’s just coping—”
“That man looks like he has been through a war, I saw him this morning and he was….”
The voices trail off and splice and braid into each other until all you can hear is a static ringing in your ears.
You look at the six empty glasses with half melted ice and crushed berries in front of you— and continue staring, already slipping away from your friends.
The bright, artificial red has dulled into something murkier now, melted ice watering it down into a color that looks nothing like strawberries anymore. You drag the straw through it, watching the small whirlpool form and collapse, over and over again, like you’re trying to find something at the bottom of it. Like there might be an answer sitting there, waiting for you to scoop it up.
There isn’t.
There never was.
Your mind wanders off to the little bag he had come to drop off. How you dragged your feet back into your room after he left and saw it lying there on the floor. Something shiny had spilled out of it. Purple.
You had crouched down to inspect it, and immediately collapsed into a mess of tears and snot and ugly cries.
Your clothes from the night of the party—the purple top and denim skirts with the butterflies on it— the ones you had shoved in a plastic trash-bag in his bathroom.
He hadn’t thrown them out, even though you very well remember how you had ruined them while taking them off. Sullied. Torn in places and ripped.
But he dropped them whole again, clean and stitched, like the damage never happened.
The buttons you had ripped were sewn tighter in their place with mismatched thread. The crooked butterflies ironed out. The strings that kept the top together at the back—the strings that you had ripped one by one—were replaced with smoother, stronger ones.
You had spent that entire night hugging the clothes to your chest, running your fingers through the threads he must have used to mend them — even after he thought you had been done with him. Almost like he couldn’t stop caring about you, couldn’t stop trying to retain every beautiful thing back in your life like it was his second nature.
Your chest feels strangely hollow now, like all the crying has carved something out of you and left it echoing. Debris scattered everywhere. Nothing where it used to be.
You can’t live like this… in these ruins. It chokes you.
You have to fix this. Rebuild it like you’d always rebuild all your things whenever Ethan would destroy them as a kid.
There’s a strange, tingling sensation all over your body. Some might call it a sugar crash, you prefer calling it survival revived with an epiphany. Divine intervention even.
Misty is looking at you, saying something along the lines of, “...if I was you, I would have dragged her by the hair and beaten her bitchass up. And Ethan’s too. Why are you as a grown man bothered about…”
“Misty, please don’t condone violence while you’re on the campus,” Jihyo winces.
“Jihyo, can I borrow your car?” you interrupt them with more enthusiasm than you intended.
“Oh shit, she’s gonna run them over.” Misty shifts uncomfortably in her seat, trying to shrink and avoid responsibility for what she might’ve caused. She turns to Chaeyoung and mouths, "she got the cray-cray eyes."
Jihyo scowls at her, “she won’t.” then turns to you, sliding her keys over, “sure, but only if you promise that you won’t be driving off a cliff.”
Misty shakes her head at her friends like she is the only one who can see a million things wrong with this. “Man, I don’t trust her.”
Chaeyoung is already grabbing her bag and coat from behind her chair as you clutch Jihyo’s keys until the metal digs into your palm uncomfortably.
“I’ll come with you wherever you’re going.” she says, shrugging her coat on.
CHAPTER 18: like they do it in the movies
You grip the steering wheel tight—too tight—as the car begins slowing down outside the sports complex. The boys have off-ice training today, Jihyo informed you.
“I haven’t thought this through.” you voice out loud, dissociating in the driver’s seat.
“Don’t chicken out now.” Chaeyoung says, snapping her seatbelt off, “you march in there with your head held high and go get your man.”
“What am I going to say to him?”
“Whatever is the first thing that comes to your mind. Now come on.”
“Chae, I really need to pee.”
“You’re making excuses.”
“I’m not—” you’re being yanked out of the car by the girl much taller and stronger than you. She wraps a sure arm around your body and makes you walk in with her. You squeeze your eyes shut, relying completely on her to not let you trip down, and pray that whatever’s going to happen is less embarrassing than every possible scenario that has been running in your head.
He could kiss you in the middle of the field like in the movies. Or he could kick you out while the rest of the hockey team watches, like in most cases real life.
Or he could—
“Oh fuck!” Chaeyoung mutters under her breath, her arm falling off from around you to grab her phone that won’t stop shrilling in her bag. She takes a quick glance at the caller ID, “I’m sorry but I need to take this one.”
You catch it, the caller profile flashing with a picture of her in Seungcheol’s arms, laughing into the camera.
“Sisters before misters.” you hiss at her, barely able to stand straight because of the discomfort in your lower belly.
“I know!” she seethes, “but I’ve been ignoring his calls for over a week now. Besides, it would be so awkward if I went in there with you like I’m your emotional crutch. Just go and talk to him!”
“Ugh, fine!”
Inside, it is chaos.
There’s sweaty people, half-naked people, red-faced people with flaky skin peeling off their nose, people with too much energy at eleven in the morning—all running around. Some are stretching or laughing or focused with their brows furrowed, counting numbers under each breath as they move with intent.
And you?
You’re just there… balled up in a knit cardigan and Misty’s scarf that smells like her peach-flavoured vape. The ballet flats you chose to wear today get soaked as soon as you step into the grass, mud climbing up their pristine pearly-white fabric with a permanent stain before you can do anything to salvage them.
They were your favorite pair…
You feel like throwing up.
“Focus,” you tell yourself, “this is more important than ballet flats.”
And so, you march in your soggy shoes that squish, head held high as you cut through the crowd between all the frisbees and balls being passed around without a single sense of direction or spatial awareness in your head. There was a time when you thought you wouldn’t even be found dead in a sports complex…and yet, here you are.
Mingyu, with all his height and broad shoulders and that irresistible gravity which makes everything orbit around him, should be easy to spot.
But you can’t see him anywhere.
You do spot the cluster of faces you recognize at a clear patch of the field, though. Dokyeom, Chan and a freshman you saw with them in the diner—as they stretch their calves.
You begin walking towards them, shoulders tight, eyes blank, mind on autopilot.
Your pace quickens in tandem with your breath as it shortens in uneven puffs. You walk and walk and walk until—
“Watch out, watch out, watch out!”
You shriek when Wonwoo, running at a speed unimaginable to you, nearly crashes into you.
Nearly.
Because just when you notice him too late and duck down, head clutched in your hands, you’re being pulled out of his track by the stronghold you’ve come to know very well. Your head falls on his chest, shoulders curled under his arm, skin humming with adrenaline and homecoming all at once.
Everything around you is suspended. Just you in his arms between everything that fades away inevitably. The air thins out, the noise gets sluggish, like you’ve been dropped underwater with weights around your ankles.
But you don’t fight it, don’t try to swim out.
Because you know this feeling.
You would know it anywhere.
The way his hand wraps around your arm — firm, instinctive. The way his chest rises against your temple, uneven, like he forgot how to breathe for a second too. The faint scent of soft detergent and something warmer, something sun-like beneath it, something that is just… him.
You don’t look up immediately.
You’re afraid that if you do, this will disappear. That it’ll turn into another almost, another almost-you, almost-him, almost-together that never quite survives the distance between you.
His grip tightens slightly as he makes you cross the running-tracks to get out of the way of others who are training.
When he finally lets you go, putting a safe distance between your bodies, the mind-numbing cold returns.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, concern lacing his voice, chased closely down by immense confusion.
You stare at him dumbfounded. At the scars that have blurred, only visible if you look closely now. At the deep set frown and the brown eyes smattered with flecks of gold under the sunlight. The bead of sweat that rolls down his jaw, disappearing down his neck in the plain black stretch of his t-shirt.
Your mouth opens, then closes. Then drops again in a pathetically failed attempt to form words.
‘Just say whatever is the first thing that comes to your mind.’
Firsts… it takes you back to the first time you spoke to him, in the diner. And then the night at your dorm, where it all began.
Mingyu flicks sweat off his forehead with his thumb, then curves his brows up at you, expecting an answer.
‘You have to tutor me,’ he had said, ‘I won’t take no for an answer.’
You shift uncomfortably because that’s the exact moment your bladder decides to cramp again. Those goddamn watery slushies.
Why were you here again?
There’s almost a crowd forming around the two of you—players impatiently waiting for him to return back to training, Coach Greer stepping in.
Mingyu looks at them, then at you. He mumbles your name, but you interrupt him right before the last syllable rolls off when you say—
“You owe me money.”
Wow, genius.
That’s all you could think of?
Mingyu blinks at you. “I’m sorry, wha—”
“You need to pay me.” you decide to stand your ground now, committing to the bit.
Mingyu scans you head to toe, holding his hips. “I—” he pauses to take a breath, before speaking in a hushed tone, like this is none of anybody else’s business. “I paid you for every time we met.”
You scoff, just a huff and a sound, like you can’t believe he is implying that you could be wrong.
“For the night at your apartment, you didn’t. I don’t work past ten, and I was there until one… that’s three hours of overtime.”
Mingyu looks like he’s about to give up and tell you that he will pay you whatever you want but you need to leave the field right now if that’s all you were here for.
But someone clears their throat beside you. Scratchy, authoritative, and serious in a way that makes you straighten your spine up.
“Coach.” Mingyu mumbles in acknowledgement. “I’m sorry for the—”
“What’s going on here?” Coach Greer demands, cutting him off.
“He owes me money for my services,” you parrot, almost on an autopilot of spreading false information with your thumb pointed towards the captain of a very confused looking ice-hockey squad.
“What services?” A horrified freshman asks from somewhere behind. You hear a hushed whisper, “isn’t that illegal on campus?”
“She’s talking about the time she tutored me,” Mingyu’s voice promptly rules over all the dubious discussions. It flattens when he turns to Greer, “I promise there’s no funny business coach.”
The old man turns to you, like Mingyu’s statement alone cannot be taken at face-value here. When you nod quickly, relief washes over his stern, wrinkled, old face.
“Sort your business out with this young lady, Kim,” he orders, “I need you back on the field in five.”
When he walks away, the crowd dissipates along with him like they know the consequence of not following their instructor—they don’t need to hear a command for that.
Mingyu exhales slowly, dragging a hand down his face like he’s trying to wipe away the absurdity of the last five minutes, and failing miserably at that.
“You came all the way here… for that?” he asks, voice quieter now, stripped of the earlier edge, but still guarded.
Your fingers curl sheepishly into the damp fabric of your cardigan, grounding yourself. Your heart is beating so loudly you’re sure he can hear it.
“I mean, I need to buy groceries.” you nod, convincing yourself.
“You live in a dorm, you don’t need groceries.”
“Just give me my money and I’ll go.” you blurt out, deciding that you cannot stand this humiliation ritual anymore.
“I can’t…” he begins, before quickly adding, “I mean, not right now. I don’t even have my phone.”
You shrug your shoulders at him, feeling like you’d cry if this doesn’t end here right now. That same fucking stage with the bright lights that you’ve been pushed in the middle of—one that Mingyu and Chaeyoung and Ethan and even Misty are good at performing in.
And you? You still don’t know your lines, or have your cues.
Mingyu’s eyes flit down to where you’re stretching your cardigan like it personally hurt you, to the legs that you keep crossing and uncrossing with discomfort, then back to the lower lip you’ve been gnawing at between your sharp teeth, almost drawing blood over your maroon gloss.
He knows you’re spiralling. He knows you’re lying not because you wanna hide something, but because you got overwhelmed with your feelings and couldn't remember what you were actually here for. You always do that. He knows you well enough by now to recognize the signs of your unravelling.
So he plays along, because he doesn’t want to add further pressure on you.
“Look,” he offers, “as soon as I get free and access my phone again, I’m gonna pay you first thing. I promise.”
Your shoulders sag, your face doesn’t feel as heated anymore.
You nod at the ground, feeling like an utter failure for even thinking you had the guts to pull this off — to confess your love for him and demand a second chance in the middle of the world.
You feel angry. So, so, so angry. At yourself, at him, at Chaeyoung for not accompanying you. At the server who kept on giving you the slushies without telling you that they were gonna wreak havoc in your bladder.
So angry that you can taste it bitter and hot at the back of your throat.
So angry that you reach forward in his collar to fish out the golden Aries pendant that you know is hidden under his t-shirt like a reminder of the last good night of your life, curl your fingers around it and—snatch.
Mingyu freezes with disbelief, like something in his brain short-circuited the moment the chain snapped. He stares at your face, then at your trembling knuckles turning white around his precious pendant.
“I’m gonna hold this as collateral until you bring the payment.” you put your entire Economics degree to come up with that one.
There’s a flicker over his face. That’s all it is—but you catch it. The corner of his mouth almost lifting with recognition. Like he knows exactly what you’re doing, even if you don’t.
“Okay…” he smirks, actually smirks.
God, this is a mess.
Your legs press together again as another sharp wave of discomfort hits your abdomen. Right. That. Still very much a problem.
But you won’t go without claiming the final word, not even when you are on the verge of pissing yourself.
“Okay!” you repeat, almost cattily, and whirl around.
You hear him call your name out, but you don’t stop walking.
You just give him an annoyed look over your shoulder, hair flipping in the air like whips. “What now?”
“The washroom’s that way,” he cocks his head to the opposite direction from where you’re headed.
CHAPTER 19: that mathematics textbook will save you
You spend the rest of the day obsessively pouring over your mathematics textbooks for the LSAT. It seems like the only thing in your life that is not rattling the foundation that your very existence is stacked upon. The only constant, tried and tested true for centuries now.
Mathematics is all accuracy, practice, and hard set structures that never waver, despite the circumstances… despite if there’s a guy knocking at your door with his heart on his sleeve in the middle of a storm.
You don’t have to consider outliers, you don’t have to refer to other material to seek their opinion on what the solutions should be. There is no Misty’s approach that differs vastly from Chaeyoung’s approach that stands nowhere near Jihyo’s approach. Just a set of steps that have been developed since the dawn of time that always makes you arrive at a root. A resolution.
How did the problem even come to be? It’s no nonsense… because if Jack wants to eat 87 pineapples while sitting on top of a 120 metres long pole, facing away from a source of light and wants you to calculate how far his shadow falls — you do that, no questions asked.
You don’t have to think why he climbed the pole? Why does he have all those pineapples? Why does he want to know about the length of his shadow? Why did you ever fall in love with Kim Mingyu? How do you fix a problem where the variables aren’t the usual x’s and y’s but actual, human feelings? How do you even approach it?
Because unlike life, the world of mathematics does not care about timing, or missed chances, or words said too late. It gives you everything you need—every variable laid bare, every condition clearly stated—and trusts you to arrive at the answer.
And you always do.
That’s the part that almost hurts.
How quickly your mind works here. How effortlessly you move through problem after problem with your brain sharp, decisive, unwavering. No second-guessing. No backtracking. No freezing in the middle of the sports complex. No lingering on what could have been done differently.
It is scary how quickly you solve each mathematical problem in your textbook and then some more over your computer.
And sometime later, you receive it.
A loud ping signalling money has been transferred to your phone. More than what was agreed, more than what you needed, like he’s already nipping the possibility of you asking for ‘interest’ on the sum he owed you at the bud. An account settled.
You don’t linger too much on it. That’s the beauty of spending days after days with Mathematics. It purges you of all the sugar that had once accumulated around your brain, clumping all the logic up.
It rids you of the adrenaline that pumped through your nerves as you watched trash TV all week long, hoping that watching someone get cancelled might give your hurt, guilt and embarrassment a companion of their own.
You feel centred now, no more nerves buzzing with sugar-high as you gulped servings after servings of slushies and sorbets. Returned back to square one.
And yet, not exactly.
Because this doesn’t feel like a re-start. There’s something… different about you.
Something sharper. Something that weighs and doesn't echo.
Something that makes you walk past her when Heather spots you in the dining hall and begins to ask if you can talk.
Something that makes you shrug at the white dress you’re supposed to doll-up in for your shift at the diner and put on a sweatshirt and jeans instead. Veronica gives you a pointed look when you arrive, you tell her it’s too cold for you to care about her aesthetics as you set your guitar up.
Something that makes you finally tell your aunt that she needs to start paying you more, not the same wage that you started on as a sophomore because you know your worth now. You know the clientele who flock here only on the days that you sing.
Something that makes you not stutter in your steps or duck and dive to hide when you eventually spot your twin brother’s car in the parking lot as you come out of your shift.
He’s leaning against the hood, obviously waiting for you.
You tighten your shoulders, roll your eyes and make sure he sees it. No longer softening yourself to make room for his harder edges. No longer playing the good, obedient twin who understood the rules so that he could go and break them on your behalf.
The way he scowls at you is so arrogant, so utterly sure of himself and his standing in the world. Like he gets to pick the stack of cards and deal them. Like he is entitled to divide the Universe between the two of you and punish you if you as much as even show interest in what he thinks he owns.
He fixes his dark gaze over you, and you turn your skin to steel under it.
“Get in.” He cocks his head to his car.
“Why?” you drawl, continuing to walk past him, “you wanna hit me too?”
Your body stumbles back as he holds you by your upper-arm, pulling you back in front of him and seethes, “I can’t believe you went this far.” you jerk your arm away from him and he lets go, “you’ve always been like this—so fucking hungry for attention, for a reaction. And you’d get so resentful when I got it instead of you. This is why you applied to my dream school and got in. This is why you began singing at gigs after seeing crowds cheer for me hoping that they’d cheer for you too. But this… this is so fucking low.”
“I got in because I am smarter than you and you know what’s actually fucking low? Attacking your opponent on the field.” you spit, “you should be so grateful that Mingyu didn’t press charges. It would have ended your professional career before it even began.”
He looks away, lips twisting with distaste and fingers trembling into his pockets. He knows it’s true. Everything that he ever worked for—everything that he ever knew—could have been swept away at a blink of an eye just because he couldn’t control the mere thought of his sister being with a guy whose only crime was putting his best foot forward in the game.
Your voice drops even though you try to hold it still, “you can’t do this anymore Ethan. You can’t dictate whom I can or cannot date simply because you don’t like them—”
“It’s not just about me or my dislike towards him.” your brother retorts, “he’s not good for you. He’s arrogant and loud and pretentious and the things I’ve heard about him…”
“Things you’ve heard about him,” you scoff, it’s vicious enough to capture his attention. “You of all people should know better than that.”
“That’s not the point, alright? Quit being so fucking naive, guys like him crush girls like you with their personalities.”
“I was an attention whore two minutes back but now I am naive?” you pretend to nod like you do when you come across some new concept.
“You know what I mean,” he stares at you with narrowed eyes, “look at yourself—your voice is so low that people can’t even hear you half of the time. You barely have any friends other than Cass who thinks you're still young enough to play dress-up with her and the only job you’ve ever had was at our aunt’s diner. Mom and dad pampered you like crazy.”
You suck in a shaky breath as your brother lists off everything wrong with you. Gives you every reason why you shouldn’t be with the only person you have ever wanted.
Some other day, a few months ago, you would have agreed with him.
But now, there’s only one thought that echoes in your mind—that he’s wrong. That he doesn’t even know you. And what hurts the most is that he doesn’t care to try and look past the box he drew around you since you were kids.
He only ever saw you in passing like an afterthought, like an inconvenience he had been bound to by birth.
Unlike Mingyu who… who saw through you.
“Don’t fool yourself by thinking that you’re looking out for me Ethan because that’s not what this is,” you shake your head, emotionless and detached, “you’re trying to control me because you’re insecure.”
Your words hang in the air long after you’ve said them. Your brother looks slightly taken aback, not enough for anything within him to let up already, but enough for him to take a step back without meaning to like you just narrated something out loud that he hadn’t wanted to read.
“I’m done looking after your pride.” you whisper, “I’m done letting you take my love away from me over your vain hatred. And even if you’re right about him… even if you think he’s going to hurt me, then you need to trust me enough to know that I can look after myself.”
You don't let him see the pearl of moisture hanging off your lashes when you pass him because you don't want to add anything more to his list.
CHAPTER 20: religious psychosis
It is only a soft shower at first. Dewy mist against your cheeks. One that you think you can outrun if you just walk a bit faster.
But soon, it begins to downpour.
And even with your trusted umbrella tucked close to your chest as you cower under its flailing cover, you know the strong winds are going to wreck you in the next five minutes.
In theory, you could handle that — you have walked in rain as much as the next human. But it is December and the cold that begins seeping within you is bone-chilling. One that makes it feel like a million needles are not just prickling you, they're stabbing you with the intent of replacing your blood with ice.
You cry out under the umbrella as soon as the next gust hits, even though the road is deserted with no one around to help. You know you’re not going to last longer. You know there’s a chance that you might not make it to your dorms from your shift at the diner tonight and they're going to find your body half-frozen and blue when Chaeyoung calls the police by midnight.
You know that even though you are fighting with him, you should have gotten into your brother’s car instead of walking out on him half an hour ago.
But you have morals, and currently, a resurging will to live that makes your feet carry you to the closest shelter that you know.
Even when it is a bad idea for you, but seems like an amusing one for the big guy up in the heavens who controls the weather.
Kim Mingyu’s apartment building is a five minute walk from where you’re standing right now; reaching your dorms—if you live long enough to do so—will take you at least twenty.
That is the other thing about overdosing on math. It makes you arrive at decisions based on numbers and probabilities, not emotional possibilities.
Your umbrella breaks the moment you cross the threshold of the property, just past the rusted, iron-gates. Like this is exactly how far the course of its life was supposed to be. From his palms to yours. From the first rain of September outside the library to the hailstorm near his home.
The security at the entrance is exactly how it is at student residential complexes—lousy.
The doorman throws you a disinterested glance, asks who are you there to see, and when you manage to huff out Mingyu’s name through teeth that won’t stop chattering, he lets you go ahead without checking in further. Maybe he took pity on your drenched state and the storm raging outside, maybe he recognizes you from all the times you’ve been here before. From the time you stormed out with puffy eyes and baggy clothes.
The short ride in the chrome elevator is empty and a little warm, allowing you to catch your breath as your body adjusts to not being pelted with ice continuously.
You don’t have the time to think this through, not when survival is on the line. But the moment your eyes catch your reflection in the smudged mirror of the sliding doors, you stutter.
Your hair is clinging to your face, to your heavy, damp, dark clothes. Your bag and shoes are full of water. The single lick of mascara you had put over your lashes for the shift is streaking down in faint, dark streams. Not dramatically, but enough to make you look like someone who tried to hold herself together but failed miserably.
Not broken, or ruined, just… undone around the edges.
For someone who is keen on always looking put-together, it is truly a surprise how you only sigh, accepting defeat.
Whatever bad could happen, did happen between the two of you, after all.
What worse can a broken armour do now?
You close your eyes, take a breath and knock at his door with caution, tsking at the puddle of water as it begins dripping down around your feet.
When you hear some shuffling behind the door, you straighten your chin, gearing up to look him in the eyes.
No more stolen glances. No more plays of words in an attempt to conceal secrets. No dramatic walk-ins fuelled by sugar and ice and girl friends. No more cringing away from the feelings that don’t translate into words.
Just answers and honesty.
And perhaps a change of clothes.
⸻
Mingyu opens the door without checking through the peephole.
The doorman Bartholomew, or Barty—as Mingyu calls him, knows only to let a handful of people in towards his apartment without notifying him first. His parents, his sister, Dokyeom, Jihyo, Chan, Chaeyoung, Misty—the usual culprits.
And the girl whose picture is on his lockscreen.
The one he had once told Barty to let in by giving her the spare keys even if Mingyu’s not home.
The one who is standing in his doorway right now—arms wrapped tight over the clothes that cling like a second skin, every inch of her body soaked to the bone and shivering in a way that one can’t control, even if they try to lock their limbs tight.
His heart immediately drops at the sight.
“Can I come in?” her voice comes out more like a wheeze as she struggles to blink. “Please?”
⸻
Mingyu never rushes. Never panics. At least you’ve never really seen him like that other than the time he abandoned the concert and came straight to you. But even then, you had seen it behind his eyes how he hadn’t just shown up. That there were words clear in his head. His intention stacked around him like armor, keeping him steady as he spoke his heart out to you.
But right now?
He’s a mess.
He shuffles around his apartment like he can physically make it warmer even when the thermostat is cranked up to maximum heat. Your head is still swimming, dizzy amidst the cloudy memories of this place as you succumb deeper and deeper into a corner. Already apologetic for all the water you’ve dragged in.
He reappears with not one, but three clean towels and stops in his tracks when he sees you still lingering in the hallway.
“Get in the bathroom,” he almost scolds, like he’s annoyed that you thought you needed his permission for that.
“Yeah,” you nod, throat constricting, dropping your bag and shoes and the broken umbrella in that corner.
Your limbs ache as you walk the short distance, weighing down a thousand tonnes heavier than what they actually are. You peel the clothes off, watching in the mirror above his sink how pale your skin has gotten, as he places a neat stack of warm sweaters and worn sweatshirts — whatever you might want to wear — over the counter beside the sink.
You’re left only in your underwear, ready to step into the shower when he reaches forward from behind you to turn the knob on and places his fist under it to check for the temperature like he doesn’t want anything to touch you right now that might startle you.
Your back brushes his chest and you let out a sigh without meaning to. This quiet intimacy, one which doesn’t even require any touch, helps your blood to rush faster than any amount of hot water ever could.
“Go on,” he says, softly, once the water runs hot. “I’m gonna go make some soup for you.”
You nod, your body dwindling instantly at the loss of him.
⸻
Mingyu watches you scarf down spoonfuls after spoonfuls of the soup he had put together haphazardly. Bundled up in his too big hoodie and sweatpants that dangle way beyond your ankles, with a towel thrown around your shoulders, trembling fingers curled over the giant ceramic bowl.
He reaches forward to offer you another piece of bread, another ladle of soup like he hasn’t been actively fraying around the edges ever since he accidentally brushed past you in the bathroom and his heart stopped beating for a second because of how cold your skin was.
It was like his body had sensed something ancient and made him believe — for a split second — that yours was a lifeless one, even when he knew full well that you were there. That you were moving. Breathing.
And that singular second was the worst one he had ever lived through.
But he doesn’t say it out loud.
Not when you’ve only now begun looking like your usual self. Warm features soft around the edges, patches of color dusted all over your skin.
Finally, you push the bowl away.
“I think,” you murmur, voice steadier now but still carrying the aftershocks of the cold, “if I take another bite, I might actually pass out.”
A breath of something almost like a laugh escapes him, though it doesn’t quite make it all the way. His shoulders drop a fraction, like he’s been holding himself up by sheer will this entire time and is only now remembering how to be human again.
“Good,” he says, head hanging low, “it means you’re not actively dying, at least.”
“That would have been such an embarrassing way to go.”
He takes the bowl away when you begin to get up and clean it, and loads it in the dishwasher instead.
You fiddle with the giant comfy sleeves, feeling utterly useless as he walks around the kitchen, cleaning up. Hesitantly, you begin, “I can… I can text Chae to come get me. But the weather is so bad and I don’t want her to be—”
“You’re staying here tonight.” he says, back turned to you, leaving no room for arguments. “I’ll take the couch.”
You peel your eyes away from him and towards your surroundings. That was the same living room where everything had begun falling apart, bit by bit. The same lights that cascaded upon him as he stood there in the hallway after confessing to you, lingering like he was waiting for a verdict.
It seemed like it all happened millennials ago.
Your breath hitches a bit when you spot the suitcases outside his bedroom, tucked neatly in the corner.
You know how he had moved in with Dokyeom after…
Was it happening all over again with him?
Did you cause it… trigger it this time around?
“Mingyu,” the words slip past your lips, “are you… are you moving out again?”
Mingyu turns around, brows knit in confusion. He follows your line of gaze and realizes.
“No, I’m just going home for Christmas.” he explains, gently.
Your shoulders drop, “oh.”
“Aren’t you?”
You shake your head and he doesn’t ask further. He doesn’t need to.
“I thought… I thought you were moving again cause of what happened here—between us, I mean.”
His hands slow down over the counter that he’s wiping, the guilt brimming your voice weighs down on him without meaning to.
“I told you, I like it here now. There’s peonies in my garden, good memories packed tight in these walls.” he says eyes fixed on yours sincerely at first, but then mirth begins taking over, “not to mention, damsels turning up at my doorstep, who’d help them if the knight moved out?”
You fix him with a glare. He smiles, mouths a small ‘kidding’ with his hands up in mock surrender.
You don’t say anything after that. Just keep on taking small sips of warm water he had slid to you as he finishes cleaning. Up close, you can see how you’re not the only one grappling with the aftermath of this frigid night. How he seems just as affected as you are—palms gentle as they work over the harshest of stains, like he doesn’t want to make a sound and startle you, eyes that keep flickering up to the bar-stool you’re sat on just to be sure that you’re still there. Real, and not freezing.
“Why didn’t you come to get your pendant?” you ask out of the blue.
He wrings his hands over the sink, dabbing them with a clean towel. “I did.”
Your forehead creases up with confusion.
“You weren’t home,” he explains, “Chaeyoung told me you had gone for your shift at the diner.”
“Oh…” you shake your head, like someone had erased the last four hours from your brain and he’s just now reminding you.
“I thought you’d be home by now.” He places his hands over the counter, leaning in. His gaze shifts to the giant analog clock hanging behind you, then back to you, “it’s way past ten.”
“I would have been, an hour ago.” you nod, “if my brother didn’t ambush me outside the diner.”
His demeanor immediately changes at that. Arms straining, brows creasing. Like a switch flipped. He takes a step closer, still careful not to crowd you, but close enough for his eyes to take in everything deeper. To look for any signs he must have missed while you were there in the bathroom that could indicate that your brother had been as much of a jerk to you as he had been to him.
People with anger issues—men, with anger issues—aren’t exactly known for their morals, after all.
“Did he…” he begins but can’t find it in himself to verbalize the mere thought.
You shake your head, realizing just what conclusions he must have been arriving on. Especially after everything.
“No—God no, he didn’t. He just wanted to argue with me,” you quickly clarify, “dad would kill him if he ever raised his hand on me.”
He nods, relief washing over his face but his shoulders still remain tense, like his body hasn’t caught up with the assurance just yet.
You bite your lip, hard, your eyes falling down to your twitching fingers when you add. “I’m sorry for not telling you earlier… I was afraid of—of exactly what happened. I tried to prevent it… and I swear I wasn’t the one who sent all those texts.”
“I know,” comes his low voice, “Chaeyoung told me about Heather.”
You don’t have to show the utter devastation on your face for him to know that you’re unravelling. He sees that in how hard you’re rubbing your skin with your thumb, like that would ignite some strength for a conversation that is bound to happen. One that has been locked away until it swelled and shattered everything that constricted it.
You hear his soft footsteps as he comes and sits beside you, yet you still hide yourself behind your hair. He tucks it back, like parting a dark cloud to see the moon better.
“I had no right to be cross with you for those letters when I was hiding something of this magnitude myself,” you say, voice hoarse. “I am really sorry for doubting you like that… and not giving myself the chance to trust you.”
The words hang in there like dust settling after a whirlwind. The dishwasher hums in the background in rhythmic waves.
His thumb quivers over your fingers where he’s holding them. Nothing noticeable, just a flutter, like he just let out a breath he had been holding in for too long.
“I wasn’t upset that you didn’t tell me about him.” he breathes, voice roughened with restraint, “I was upset that you thought you couldn’t tell me about him.”
You finally look at him, at the hurt, the ruin, the love that still manages to seep through the cracks.
His hands remain engulfing yours over the marble, just steadier now.
He continues, “It meant that some part of you thought that I’d react like him if I ever found out. That I’d be mad at you over something that you didn’t choose. When the truth is… I don’t care, I wouldn’t have cared.”
“It’s just a sport for me and he’s one of the many guys I have to play against, another moment that passes without brushing me. But you? You’re always at the back of my mind like a home I long to return to.”
You try to blink away the sharp sting in your eyes, your chest caving with utter disbelief at the reverence he still holds for you. At the silent worship behind his eyes.
“What happens now, Gyu?” you whisper helplessly.
His voice is strained as he holds something back. “What do you want to happen? Because you know where I am… still in that hallway, waiting for your answer.”
You turn to look at the spot you had left him at, then back to where he sits right now.
For a moment, all the noise and the colors of the world fade away until only his eyes remain. There’s an ache that plunges into you the more you stare at them. The brown of them is so deep like the wet Earth that sprouts life, radiant and utterly captivating.
Before you know it, you’re getting off your seat and walking closer to him. He welcomes you in by keeping his hands over your waist, parting his knees. You close your eyes, letting the weight of his touch ground you.
And then—
“When I found that letter, this dark, doubtful thing shrouded the memory of the night you had first come to my dorm. I thought that if she was there, we would have never happened.” your cheeks heat up in embarrassment as you admit the brief absence of your faith in the two of you, “but the truth is that right before you had knocked, I was… I was praying to the Gods I believe in. There was this ache that I couldn’t name—one that had been with me for as long as I could remember—and I desperately wanted to get rid of it.”
Your palms come up to hold his face, “and then you were there… and I never felt that ache again. Not when I was with you, not when I was without you. Like even in your absence, something looked after me. Something that you caused.”
You don’t think you’ve ever spoken anything with such conviction. Always second-guessing your words and your voice, always getting overwhelmed—you never thought the words that are tumbling out of your lips right now were strung by you.
And yet here you are, in the arms of the boy you love.
And you just can’t stop speaking.
You bring your fingers down to tie them together with his own, like you need to be one with him, begin with him and end with him when you finally give him the answer to his confession.
“I know that us being together means that I might lose someone I’ve cared about for as long as I have known myself.” you nod, “but that is a risk I am willing to take. Because I know whoever wrote me into this world… they wrote you in my blood, too.” your voice becomes one with your breath when you admit, “I love you, Mingyu.”
Once he knows you’re out of words, Mingyu begins standing up to his full height, fingers still intertwined with yours like a promise. He moves slowly, so slow like he’s holding that fragile confession carefully in his palms, allowing it to seep in, allowing himself to believe that you finally said it out loud.
You don’t shift away, letting your body press against him as if his is the weight you fall on now, stripped bare of your own.
His lips brush over yours with such tenderness that for a moment, you forget how to breathe. Like whatever you just said took his own breath away so now he’s borrowing yours. Your fingers fall over his biceps, holding them for your dear life as your knees threaten to buckle and make you fall. As if he would let you…
His arm snakes around the curve of your waist, just looping you close. And then, he presses his large palm over the small of your back, grounding you here—in the moment that has taken too long to happen.
You whimper in his mouth, repeating that you love him like you can’t get enough of how those words taste on your tongue.
And with that subtle sound, something transforms.
Mingyu’s arms shift from your body down to the curve of your thighs and with an effortless pull, he has your feet off the ground and coiled around his hips instead.
“I’ve been waiting so long for you to say that,” he angles his mouth, and you melt into the heat of his lips. “So long.”
“I love you so much,” you whisper, trailing kisses along his jaw, as he carefully carries you. “I’ve never felt this belonged to anyone else.”
He answers you with a groan, capturing your mouth again and pulling your bottom lip between his teeth. The air changes, warmed with a tantalizing charge, as his bedroom takes shape around you. Your toes curl instinctively behind his back, the memories of what happened the last time you were here binding around you in soft tendrils, intoxicating you beyond belief.
He lowers you down on his bed so slowly, almost ceremoniously, like along with you, he’s laying his soul down—threadbare.
All while you keep clinging on to him with your arms, your legs, your lips. One of his palms angles your head in a way so that it is steady when he kisses you harder, deeper. His tongue slides past your lips with ease, plundering everything. He is so close, so deep inside you already that it is almost like you’ve overdosed on him.
His palms slip from your waist to press flat over your ribs, under his sweatshirt. His fingers spread over the smooth expanse of skin, mapping every inch. When you groan into his mouth, he leans more into the fierce gravity of the moment. The heat behind it is something that builds and builds until you’re burning into the shared flame.
His lips leave yours with soft, wet sound. "Are we doing this?"
Your heart aches at how fragile it sounds. Heat creeps up your skin, settling somewhere deep and aching as you make the decision—
"Yes." you mumble, "it feels so right."
He slides the fabric over your head in a swift motion. Your hair sprawls over his mattress and a sigh breaks out of your lips like the agony of parting away from his body has been given a sound.
But he stills at the sight.
Because there it is, nestled over your chest as it rises and falls softly — his pendant.
You’re still trembling, but your voice doesn’t fall short of teasing when you hook a finger around the chain, tugging at it just enough that it catches the moody light of his bedroom. “Cat got your tongue?”
Mingyu’s gaze shifts from the locket to your flirty smile. Something dark clouds it when he leans back in, like rain succumbing to the pull of Earth.
“She did,” he smirks, skin flushed. “But I’m gonna need it back to put it to better use.”
The warmth between his skin and yours turns into a full-blown flame when he buries his face into the curve of your neck. You feel his lips at first and the ticklish softness of it almost makes you giggle. But the laugh breaks midway into a gasp when you feel his teeth sink into the delicate skin, breaking it just enough to leave a mark.
Your hand flies up to his hair instinctively, pulling at the strands, but his warm tongue quickly flattens out over the bruise, leaving you moaning, withering, whimpering for more.
"I was so scared at how cold your body was earlier," he huffs, "I wanted to hold you close until you were warm again."
"Then do that," you moan, "please touch me until I'm burning hot."
He pulls back just enough to see if you’re alright. To drink in the view of your swollen lips, blown out pupils and skin slick from sweat and saliva while he takes his own shirt off. The sweatpants are the next to go. First his, and then he helps you out of yours with careful fingers.
When he rejoins you in the bed, there is no rush towards it. Desire hangs heavy in the air, dripping down over your bodies, turning them impossibly slick and pliant. Mingyu kisses whatever spots he can find, making you arch into him like he is coaxing a surrender out of you—one which feels would last a lifetime and then more to come.
“I missed you,” you confess and begin getting up on your elbows, chasing his lips as he sits upright. “I missed you so much, I hated myself for everything.”
The cold slithers in from the open window behind his bed, cascading down your naked back like a cold shower and you shudder.
Mingyu’s eyes don’t falter, so full of love and worship and hunger at the same time. His lips are parted, soft pants stumbling out with fragmented restraint as you stare up at him, wide-eyed.
You don’t know what he intends to do when he takes your hands in his own, but you trust him so much in the moment that you don’t even care to ask. He shifts to sit against the cushioned headboard of the bed, pulling you along with little kisses on your wrists.
“Don't say that. You’re the love of my life… you’re as much mine as you’re yours,” he says, “so you’re going to treat yourself the way I treat you. With softness, with love, and care.”
Your breath catches when you’re about to straddle his lap but his palms tighten over your waist, making you halt.
Slowly, he turns you around so you’re sitting against him, back pressed to his chest, legs nestled over his parted ones.
“That means,” he whispers against your ear, “you’re never going to speak to or about yourself in a way that’s hateful. You’re never going to punish your body when you’re overwhelmed.”
His fingertips skim over the patch of skin over your hips that seems more irritated and sensitive than the rest. You often do that unconsciously—rub your skin roughly with soap, or lotion or anything in general when you want to feel centred. Only the sharp sting never really helps beyond just a few seconds.
His voice dips as he nuzzles his nose in the curve of your neck. “You’re going to touch yourself like I touch you... like you’re someone sacred and soft at the same time.”
You react to his words the same way you react to his touch — with eagerness and utter compliance. You shift your face to capture his lips with yours while one of his palms pauses over the swell of your breasts, squeezing it gently and savoring the moan you let out.
“Open your legs,” he mumbles right against your mouth, his hot breath brushing against your cheek.
A deep, scarlet blush blooms from the valley of your core all the way up to your cheeks. You just stare at him, dumbfounded, a breath hitching in your throat.
When you don't respond immediately, he helps you out.
His hands dip down to your thighs, just smoothing over the smooth skin with warmth. And then, they press over your soft flesh, curious at first, then rather deliberate. You feel the cold air settle against the growing wetness between your folds and your back arches, body dotting with goosebumps. His fingers trace over them, like connecting constellations in the stars.
“Just feel it,” he says, the hot tip of his tongue grazing your earlobe, “relax for me.”
Your body follows his command like it was made to do just that. Your toes that had been curling fervently over the sheets begin to loosen up. You rest your thighs against his own, fingers hooking over his forearms while the other arm snakes behind to hold his head.
His own arm tightens over your chest, holding you close as the fingers of his free palm begin inching closer to what throbs for him.
“This is gonna feel a bit different than last time,” he murmurs against your temple, “but you’re already soaking wet baby. I think you’re gonna like it.”
And like it, you do.
The moment his thumb brushes over your clitoris, your entire body convulses with a new sensation. The rough pads of his fingers are such a stark contrast from the slick, wet heat of his mouth that you remember pressing down there a few weeks ago. He had been so eager with his lips, so hungry and insistent like he couldn’t stop suckling at your taste. But he knows there’s only so much of his large fingers that you can handle. So he starts off heartbreakingly soft, just letting your arousal coat his skin as he brushes your core with tentative knuckles.
Your hips can’t stop bucking, eager for more as you moan into his mouth. There’s a shadow over his eyes, one that you don’t know the name of but recognize all too well. One that only bunches the knot tighter in your belly. He slips his fingers further down your slick folds, dangerously near your fluttering opening while his thumb rubs tight circles over your clit.
“Mingyu please,” you mewl, voice breathless and aching. You drag your lips between your teeth while he just feels the bare, sensitive skin around as wetness leaks out.
“You want more, baby?” he asks, nipping at your chin.
You nod with all your might.
“You want me to finger you?” he asks, and your thighs tighten around his hand, “you want your boyfriend to stretch you out?”
Your fist curls into his hair, slumping down to hit him on the shoulder lightly. “Please…”
“Needy,” he smiles proudly. “Then let me take care of you.”
He slides his finger into you with such delicate patience while his thumb stays teasing your nub, coaxing you to open. It wrecks you all over again. It is just a finger, slid almost halfway inside you, but you clench around it like the intrusion is too much and too little at the same time.
“You’re doing so good my love,” he pumps it out before slipping it in further than before and you gasp, “so good.”
There’s a sudden rush in your body, one that settles like a need to open up for him more. You nudge your face under his jaw, hiding away as you shamelessly part more of him. The sounds coming out of you are so desperate, so whiny and unreal as he curls his finger within you with more intent.
You jerk in surprise when he brushes against a specific spot in your clenching walls. Mingyu, since he hasn’t wavered his molten gaze from you for even a split second, notices it before you do. This time, he deliberately thrusts his finger towards it and you react more fiercely than before—fluttering fingers digging deep into his forearms until your nails draw blood.
“This spot feels real good, no?” he asks, “you wanna feel that again babe?”
“I—I don’t know.” you gasp, “I’m gonna…fuck. I—”
“Shh, baby, I know,” his fingers turn more languid now that you are fully moulded around him, soft, wet and clenching. He adds to the pleasure by slipping another finger in.
And despite your initial premonitions about the sheer size of him and if you’d be able to take it, you don’t pull back, and instead, find yourself giving in to it.
His fingers are all wet now, slick and warm as they pump in and out of you with a steady pace, readying you up for the inevitable finality of what would follow. You find yourself digging deeper and deeper into him, needing his steady presence as little black stars begin eating up your vision.
“Mingyu… oh… Gyu.” your ramble, voice fragile and pitchy. Your body stiffens, at a particular thrust of his fingers and you clamp down around him when he’s about to pull out. Your thighs snap shut and a desperate cry escapes your throat.
The orgasm that hits you is the kind that lingers in its intensity. One that makes you forget who you are, where you are other than a rattling mess in your boyfriend’s lap. One that consumes your body and devoids it of any sensation of heat or cold or sweat or slick. Just pleasure. Pure and raw and one that has you rolling over, along with him, face pressed down into his mattress.
His grip over you remains firm, even as you fall down from his lap. Fingers working the spent out core, drawing more of what you think is all drained out already.
Your cries are muffled into his pillows, hair sticking all over your skin.
You’re overwhelmed by just how far he takes you, but when he begins to slow down and draw them out, you find yourself clenching around nothing for more.
You hear the sound of his approved groan as he brings his fingers to his mouth, and wraps his lips around them, sucking at them for all their worth. Your eyes clasp shut at the mere imagination of what that might look like right now—you, lying on your stomach, legs curled and fists gripping the comforter. A total mess. While he looms over you, tasting you off his fingers like you are the most delicious thing he has ever had on his tongue.
You lift your head up, looking over your shoulder to find him already staring at you with eyes that burn with intense devotion. Your limbs feel like putty, yet you somehow manage to turn yourself around.
“I want more of you,” you whisper, voice sober and steady. “I want it all tonight.”
Your cheeks heat up as soon as you voice your carnal thoughts out loud. But there’s nothing you would do to take them back. You want him to hear it from you… you need him to know that you want this, as desperately as he does.
Mingyu’s eyes lock with yours and he leans in. His forehead presses against yours, and you open your legs once more, inviting him in. Only this time, when his hips press firmly to yours, sunken over your curves, you feel the big, rock-hard length as it pulses for you in need. You squirm, and end up rolling your heat directly against it. His palm flattens over the pillow with such ferocity when you do that, that you nearly flinch.
“Sure about that?” he asks, barely holding himself back. It doesn’t feel cocky when he says that, not teasing at all. But like he wants you to know very well just what you’re asking from him and if you think you will be able to take it.
“I am,” you kiss him sure like you are not actively unravelling.
“You’re so soft,” he kisses the pendant gathered between your breasts, “I don’t wanna hurt you.”
“You won’t.” You shake your head, eyes pleading, “Remember? I was made for you.”
Mingyu’s lips part to let out a sound that is borderline pathetic. You have no idea how he was able to hold himself back until now. Because the moment those words are said out loud, he is scurrying to adjust the pillows around you, gently laying you down upright against them like he has mapped this exact moment several times in his head. He has lived it. He has made it happen.
You look up at him and instantly flush. He is so much bigger than you—not just in size. But the air of him. The way he looks so ruined and devoted ogling every single detail of you, overdosing on you. And yet, so ready to take more of you. Because when it comes to you, you don’t think Mingyu has a saturation point. If he could, he would hollow himself out just to make more room for you.
Your fingers trail down over the hard ridges over his abdomen, feeling how they strain and move when he begins taking his boxers off, peeling them away like the last thread of whatever kept you tethered away from him. Not once do his eyes falter from you, watching every small gasp, every pinch of blush, the little creases in your forehead as he bares himself for you.
Your throat tightens, not with fear, but at the realization of just how much you want this.
He doesn’t have to ask you to part your legs for him this time, they spread open on their own. There’s waves of heat crashing in your belly, the kind that can only be tamed by his touch and whatever more he gives you. His chest heaves as he begins coating himself up with you, heavy and rigid against your fluttering folds.
“Breathe,” he asks, and you follow, instantly feeling how your quivering thighs relax.
He lines himself up against your entrance with great constraint before looping an arm around your waist to station you in place. He brushes your sweat-slicked hair off your forehead, kissing your head once before mumbling. “You’re gonna tell me if anything isn’t right, okay?”
You nod, gaze fixed upon where your bodies meet. And then you look at his face, and nod again.
“Good girl.”
Stars burn behind your eyes, low and slow and bubbling, when he begins sinking inside of you. You feel every single throbbing inch, every bit of control as it slips the deeper he buries himself inside of you, his chest humming as he groans in pleasure at the pressure. Your nose is pressed close to the pulse of his neck which goes wild as he hilts inside of you, letting you get accustomed to the size, to the very feel of something so big and hard buried between your legs,
The pain laced with pleasure is something that you can breathe through. But you have no idea how to hold the amount of love that seeps out of this moment. Thick and living… you don’t know how to breathe around it.
“Are you okay baby?” his voice has to cut through the headiness to reach you while he stays inside you, unmoving.
“Yes… God, yes.” you squeeze your eyes shut, wanting to preserve the feeling of this sacred act forever in your mind as you hug his shoulders.
“I’m gonna move.” he pants, voice roughened like it has been dragged through gravel. “You feel so good baby, so beautiful like this… so tight and warm.”
You don’t know the slew of praises isn’t just his heart being laid open, but also a distraction as he slowly begins pulling out only to gently thrust back in. Each time, he halts a little, like he wants to soak in everything before he eventually lets himself burn away by the open flame that takes form in whatever little space is there between the two of you.
You close that gap for him when your pain subsides in dull waves and you coil your arms tighter around his ribs, nails dragging through his skin like you’re carving your name in wet soil.
Whatever he had been holding back doesn’t snap, it melts away.
“You’re so perfect,” he grunts, “I could do this forever.”
Your head swims when he says that, because the truth is, you would too. Now that you’ve tasted what this feels like… what being with him, in every sense of those words, means, you don’t want to let go of him ever.
He dips his head to kiss the pendant you’re wearing, and then to taste the sweat on your chest by pressing his tongue flat over your nipples, making you latch onto his hair.
His movements become slicker between your legs, more fluid and consistent as your tightness loosens up. He doesn’t talk you through it, he carries you. Makes you swim in it. He holds you when you arch your back and whimper at the sting of him colliding with that same spot.
Your body is putty in his hands—soaked and pulsating, eager to be moulded. When he hooks his palm at the back of your knee, and lifts it to loop it over his hip, the friction begins to build.
You turn your head just enough to kiss him, to thank him as your body begins to respond to his movements with desperate attempts of its own. Each time he pulls out, you clasp around him like a vice, calling him back. The louder you moan his name, the tighter his grip over your skin gets, leaving imprints like reminders of the night where you lost it all to him and yet you feel victorious.
There’s hot tears streaming down your face, getting lost in his skin as you hide away into him when his pace quickens unintentionally. He keeps on overstimulating that sensitive spot, his cock only seems to harden and grow heavier with need the more you clench around it, he groans so loud that you feel it right against your chest. It is too much… too much for you to endure any longer without giving him whatever it is that he is after.
“I can’t believe you’re my first.” you blurt out, head falling back, “you’re so… so big. It is too much.”
He can’t help the chuckle that breaks out of him, but he does slow down. “Better?”
“Fuck, no!” you cry out, “why did you… Mingyu, go harder.”
“But you just said that it was too much—”
“Didn’t tell you to stop,” you keen as he begins picking pace, “I meant you have a huge, fat dick that is splitting me open! But it feels good.”
“Shit…” his movements falter, getting more erratic, “what has gotten into you?”
“I don’t know, I can’t stop speaking tonight.” you cry, you actually cry.
He muffles those cries between his own lips and begins thrusting in you shamelessly harder. Not aiming for his own pleasure but to heighten whatever it is that is making you lose it all like this.
His fingers snake between your bodies, beginning to imitate what he did earlier by tracing circles over your clitoris and that is all it takes to have you crashing.
“Fuck baby, yes… just like that. Come on lose it all for me, I’m right here.” he grunts.
And even though he had not given much thought to his own release, since all his attention had been focused solely on the girl of his dreams moaning and thrashing in his arms, he knows he’s not going to last long. Not when you’re so perfect and tight and clenching as you come around him, soaking him. Not when you keep on repeating his name like a broken record. Not when you still don’t push him away, and instead only hug him close like you need him to come as much as he had starved to see you experience that release.
An absolute, aching need vibrates through every inch of him as the want builds within him in hot and thick and absolutely unbearable waves.
“Fuck… baby, I think—I think I’m gonna…”
You’re still midway through your orgasm, body arching off the sheets to press tight around him, when he jerks into you with a shattered gasp. As if your own release wasn’t gut-wrenching enough, his is the one that sends you absolutely over the edge.
You forget how to breathe normally, like your body is making room to hold whatever he has given you. He slumps over you, forehead pressed against yours as he trembles. “I’m sorry… I should have warned you.”
Your thumb feels heavy when it comes up to feel the warm skin of his face. “It’s okay, I wanted it.”
He blinks his eyes open, they don’t seem as wild anymore. Glazed with reverence and love. He carefully slides himself out of you. The sound of wet skin and the loss of his hardness make you bury your face into your palms. But he tenderly holds them, and removes them one by one until your beautiful, weary face is visible to him again.
He kisses your lashes, your cheeks, your lips, the marks he has left all over your chest and neck. But this time, they don’t feel like they are leading up to something. Just undoing. Like taking off your clothes after a long, hot day.
The sensation between your legs is something that you’ve never felt before. It seeps out—the evidence of the moment that just unfurled, like love given a shape—in thick, slow drips. You try to clench around it with shyness, wanting to tuck it away in secret, but Mingyu’s eyes are there, surveying whatever has happened.
Your own eyes trail down to his hips and the sight devastates you—there’s a glimmer of red slick on his skin… your blood… coating him.
“Beautiful…” he mumbles, thumbs rubbing warmth over your hips, “everything about you is so beautiful. Even this—especially this.”
You don’t know what happens now — are you supposed to go take a shower? Are you supposed to stay here and continue to squirm, overstimulated and overwhelmed while he says things that destroy your sanity?
You don’t know, but you choose to believe him to get you through it.
He kisses your knuckles, promises you that he’ll be right back while you let your body weigh down on his bed, breathless and spent. Heavier than you first laid on it. Fuller with love and all the feelings you didn’t know you’d get addicted to on the very first try.
You fix your gaze at his ceiling, filing how you never really noticed the colour of it. Like everything just fades into swirls of pinks and reds when he's hovering above you with that charming smile and lovestruck eyes.
Your ears catch the faint sound of running water in his bathroom, the soft open and shut of the wooden door and you wait for it to hit — the notorious, post-sex dread. One that crushes in everyone’s gut, especially the first time. One that almost everyone has told you to prepare well for.
Only in your case, it doesn’t.
Not even a sliver of regret. Just gratitude and security. Like this had been the most natural thing to have ever happened. As easy as falling in love, as beautiful as the first ray of sunshine on a cold winter morning. Especially with him.
He comes back clothed in clean sweatpants, clutching a few things while his lips are set in that soft, assuring smile. One that tells you that he has got you from here. Your lids feel heavy, droopy with sleep and exhaustion. But you don’t let them close fully, worried that if you miss out even a single second of this, it might slip into something that is almost a dream.
But it’s not.
It is real.
He is real.
His hands, gentle and slow as they help you clean up, are real. His words, full of tenderness and truth about his love for you, are real. The way he presses a kiss into the blood-stained sheet while keeping his charged eyes on you is real.
You close your eyes and swallow everything that has been thickening in your throat, hoping that'll keep it all in. But it doesn't... and you cry... and cry.... and cry some more into his arms, mumbling confessions, promising eternities until his own eyes well up.
⸻
“You always wear this.” you murmur sometime into the night when he has you lying on his chest, your fingers fiddling with his Aries locket that you had clasped back around his neck while he washed your shoulders. “Can’t believe you let me take it away from you that day.”
He slots you closer, “I trusted you to take care of it.”
“You did that with your heart too,” you snort, “how did that go?”
He doesn’t miss a beat when he answers in your air, “Phenomenal. Wouldn’t change a thing about that.”
The night is so dark, the air full of the kind of cold that makes room for nothing. And yet, not cold or dark enough to crack his words as they sink deep into your skin.
Because that is the thing between the two of you, it always survives through everything that tries to crush it. As though whoever made him for you and you for him stitched the marrow of your ribs to his, threading your two lives together across the long fabric of eternity.
EPILOGUE: elle woods. mother.
A year later.
You straddle his waist without another thought, the impossibly gossamer night-dress from Cass's latest collection rides up your thighs. You’ve had enough.
Who the fuck sleeps until two in the afternoon on a beautiful, sunny winter day that is all gold and silver all at once?
Oh yes, your boyfriend who stumbled in exhausted at midnight, mumbling apologies that weren’t his to make. It’s not entirely his fault that he is so good at the job… being competent doesn’t mean his managers should load all the important projects up on him.
Your blood boils at the mere thought of such blatant workplace abuse disguised as favouritism and stacked up with praise.
Mingyu is too naive to see it, you reckon.
But now that you have the means to save him, you best believe you are going to.
“We have a flight to catch tonight,” you remind him when he begins to stir, “I’m not going to pack your shit, it stresses me out.”
“Mhmm, five more minutes.” he gruffs, voice thick with sleep. But his hands grab your waist, fully intending to do what he does every morning—take you into his arms and snuggle you close until you’re a breathless heap of sweat covered in his disgusting kisses and mortifying hickies that take twenty minutes to conceal.
“Don’t turn me around, I have stuff in my hands!” you yelp out and his eyes shoot open.
Mingyu’s glee is unsuppressable when the first thing he sees this morning, and almost every morning since you moved in together in the city, is your grinning face.
Only there is… something borderline evil lurking under that grin at the moment.
You wriggle your eyebrows at him and by the time his attention shifts to what it is that you’re holding in your hand, you’re pinning his hands together above his head.
Now in theory, this should never work. Because the size and the strength difference between the two of you is something that even a mildly observant pigeon that lives above your AC could clock from across the street.
Mingyu could bench press your entire existence along with your emotional baggage and still have room left over for a protein shake.
And yet…
He doesn’t move.
Not a twitch. Not a flex. Not even a half-hearted attempt to reclaim his dignity.
“What are you doing?” he asks, a bit terrified.
“Dolling you up,” you shake the makeup palette you bought after your brunch with Misty earlier during the day. It is full of lilacs and glitters and sticky stars.
Mingyu groans, but does little to remove you from above him or resist when you inevitably begin clicking the box open and dab the clean brush over the pigment that glitters the most.
“I haven’t even washed my eyes,” he complains.
“You would have had to wash them again anyways after I tested this out on you.”
He fakes a gasp, “I’m not your guinea pig.”
“Nope,” you reply, “you’re my emotional support golden retriever.”
“Does this mean I don’t have to pack?”
“You do,” you blow air over the excess product. “You’re gonna have to speedrun that, unfortunately.”
“Why can’t we just stay here?” his hands come up to hug your waist.
“Because I was the reason you couldn’t go home for Christmas last year, Gyu. And I feel guilty.”
The memories of this time, last year, flash across your mind as you continue lathering him up with colors and shimmer. All the slushies and the hailstorm had finally caught up with you and you had woken up in his bed coughing and hot skinned.
'Looks like you did touch me until I was burning up,' you had joked, referring to what you had said under uncontrolled lust the night before, red nose hidden behind the teas he was serving you like you were the Queen.
You still remember how worried he had gotten, afraid that he did, in fact, made you sick somehow by having sex—making love, as he insists you call it— with you, even after you had assured him it was just the flu.
And even when you resisted the idea of already upsetting your inevitable in-laws, he had cancelled his flight home at once and had Chaeyoung move your stuff in with him. The stuff that didn’t see its way back to your dorm ever because you moved in with him for the rest of your last term at Uni.
You had spent Christmas wrapped in a blanket burrito on his couch, giving him instructions on how to play it as he fiddled around with your guitar to sing you your favorite carolls in his raspy voice.
And then, he had given you the gift he got for you.
A necklace, with a pink pearl pendant, like the one you had stolen the sketch of from his house. But that wasn’t just it, because when you looked at the jewellery closely, at the little charms that hung around the pearl like little guards, you had broken your ‘no-contact-while-sick’ rule and showered him with kisses all night. It was all musical notes and mathematical signs.
It had been so perfect—he had been so perfect. But you felt so guilty of hoarding all his love for yourself.
So this time around, after spending a very tense Thanksgiving dinner with your parents at your house where your brother kept on staring daggers at him, you had decided to take a much needed breather for the holidays.
As you test out the last shade over his lid, you think that Mingyu has fallen back to sleep under you. His hands around you have grown looser, heavier and his chest rises and falls in a relaxed rhythm.
You let out a deep breath, kissing the little pout that’s always there when he sleeps and slowly get off of him. As you shut the curtains close, to stop the afternoon sun from seeping in and allowing him some more hours of rest, a polaroid strip taped over the wall falls off.
The pictures of you and your friends from your first night here in this apartment. Friends from Uni who could make it, acquaintances from your job at the non-profit and his architectural firm, your neighbors who always share it with the two of you whenever they cook adobo. Even Betsy and Bartholomew, who kept on giving you both sly smiles like they had predicted the night ages ago.
You walk over to pick it up, rip a new strip of tape and stick it back where it was—right above the housewarming gift from Seungcheol and Chaeyoung, a slightly crooked wooden frame with pictures of everything that had mattered during Uni. The first game they won as a team. The dorm-room you had shared with Chae, littered with soft, pink blankets and plushies that got so mixed up you had no way of telling which ones were yours and which ones were the ones she’d buy excessively. The night of your final gig at the diner which also was the last game that the team ever played and won under Mingyu’s captaincy. Teaching Misty how to drive as her nails dug into your arms. Jihyo getting ready for the first date with Rosalie, the girl she liked. The dramatic funeral that Mingyu had put together for your broken umbrella.
You had never thought your life would ever feel so full. Not at least until he had knocked at your door. That there would never again be a moment where you’d feel alone. Where you’d feel like you were a misfit trying to slot yourself into a world that was too loud.
But life has such ways of smoothing itself out.
You don’t know when you began humming it while checking your luggage, but by the time you reach the chorus of ‘there is a light that never goes out’ by the Smiths, Mingyu’s groggy voice joins you to sing, “and if a double decker bus, crashes into us,”
“To die by your side,” you continue, arms locked behind your back as you face him, “is such a heavenly way to die.”
“And if a ten-tonne truck,”
“You’re a ten-tonne truck!”
“..kills the both of us...”
“Okay enough singing about death.” you scold.
“Have I ever told you how much I love hearing you sing?”
“You have, every time you even catch me humming.” you roll your eyes, “enough flattery, now pack your bag.”
He manages to peel himself off the burrow of sheets, but exhibits no intentions of doing anything further. Not unless you give him his morning kiss. Of course.
Once you pad closer to him, it’s only a matter of time before he begins clinging on to you again.
“You look ridiculous,” you say, wiping the makeup off his eyes while actively dodging his grabby palms. “What will they say if you ever show up with me like this?”
“My family? They’re more liberal than you give them credit for.”
“No silly,” you rest your palms over his naked shoulders, balancing yourself over the floor which never seems to not give out whenever you say it out loud, “the people at Harvard.”
Mingyu blinks, like he’s still contemplating if he’s asleep.
“The who at what now?”
You bite your lips, barely containing the giggle in your voice when you tell him, “I got my acceptance letter this morning.”
Mingyu doesn’t react right away. For a split second, there’s just silence. The kind that stretches so thin it almost snaps. Then, he sits up straighter, eyes finally focusing on you, really focusing this time, like he’s trying to read every micro-expression on your face.
“You got into Harvard Law.” he states with utter admiration, like he is explaining himself a dream he saw in fragments.
And then his hands are on your face, your shoulders, your arms—like he needs to confirm you’re real, that this is real—and then he’s pulling you into him so suddenly you squeal, nearly losing your balance as he buries his face into your neck and lifts you up, twirling you around.
"You got into Harvard Law!"
You laugh, a little breathless now, fingers curling into his hair. “What? Like it’s hard?”
“God this is surreal,” he finally puts you down, tucking your hair behind your ears while keeping his hand cupped around your soft cheeks. “You worked so hard for it… I am so proud of you, baby.”
Your lips quiver a little when you whisper, clenching your fingers behind his head, “Can you imagine me in court? People will have to shut up and listen to me, no matter how slow my voice is.”
He lets out a soft laugh at that, but it isn’t teasing—not really. It’s warm, reverent almost, like he’s already picturing it. “I can… I absolutely can. And you would be so perfect there too.”
“And I’m gonna pile lawsuits after lawsuits over your firm.”
He fakes being surprised, “what did they do to deserve that?”
“Kept my boyfriend away from me?”
“Boyfriend…I’d never get tired of the sound of it.” he lies, knowing full well that he would drop that title for a better one in a heartbeat… that a ring he knows would perfectly fit over your fingers is encased in a purple, velvet box, warming the inner pockets of his coat.
But it can wait.
He can wait.
For you… forever.
.
.
fin.
so this was like 70k words of bullshit.
n e ways, ive always wanted to use the word bartholomew in my fic lmfao
yk what time it isssssss....me attaching all the memes and moodboards for this fic ehehehe
serious things first, the moodboard (this does nawt represent how y/n HAS TO look like, i hope i was inclusive in my writing, i've been trying my best to be. i mostly make moodboards that are a bit self insert skjnkerbgke GUILTYYYY)
2. how y/n was moving after that breakup:
3. biblically accurate misty: (its vape girl from euphoria)
thinking about how the girl from my fic normal people would just lie through her teeth whenever she'd get overstimmed meanwhile this one just shuts up stone cold or blurts out bullshit through most of this story lmao i love my girlies with abhorrent communication skills
also, whoever ever hated on my girl from this fic, JUST KNOW THAT HER MOST PLAYED SONG EVERY YEAR UNTIL SHE MET MINGYU WAS LIABILITY BY LORDE I HOPE U FEEL BAD ABOUT YOURSELF NOW
I WROTE HER FOR MY OVERSENSITIVE YOUNGER SISTERS ESPECIALLY THE LESSER LOVED TWINS
⚬ pairing: ice hockey player! kim mingyu x fem! reader
⚬ word count: 11k
⚬ warnings: alcohol, food, unrequited love and depiction of certain symptoms of depression, eventual smut, violence, slutshaming and derogatory language, harassment and other mature themes MDNI
⚬ genres: uni au, forbidden romance, slow burn, angst, fluff sometimes, hurt/comfort.
playlist for part three <3
- dead of the night by orville peck
- milk by garbage
- tower of memories by ivri
- deja vu by olivia rodrigo
author's note:
warnings for this specific part - portrayal of trauma and how it impacts victims, extreme distress, internalized shame, sexual content. reader discretion is highly advised especially for the initial chapter and any minors found interacting will be blocked.
i also combined what was supposed to be two distinct parts for this particular post, so feel free to take a breather between these two chapters since they're both a bit heavy.
CHAPTER 14: you were made for me
The smell of smoke and wet grass clings to your skin like the only good memory of the night by the time you come back inside. As promised, Mingyu is standing right by the glass door that separates the house from the yard, talking absent-mindedly to someone from the team. His eyes remain fixed on you as you step closer and closer, like they never left—even through the little meltdown, through the conversation with Jihyo, through the first drag that made you cough.
He leaves the conversation midway with a tap on the guy’s arm, and crosses the room with long, urgent strides. Like the space between the two of you had been unbearable to him.
“Hey,” he says, careful and soft, his thumb brushing off a strand of grass from your hair, “you okay now?”
Up close, you can see it all. The worry, the regret, the restraint as his eyes search for something in your eyes that he’s scared he might miss.
“Yeah,” you murmur, leaning closer.
Your fingers slip into his own almost instinctively, like they had been aching to return home.
It is such a small gesture, but it doesn’t slip past him. His gaze drops to your intertwined arms, then back onto your eyes like watching you reach for his comfort wrecks him like no other.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, “I’m sorry this happened.”
Your chest tightens, “Mingyu, it wasn’t our fault.”
“I know,” he nods, licking his lips, “but I just wanted you to have fun here tonight. You are always so busy and I just… I thought this might ease you up a bit.”
“It did. I loved meeting your friends.” You squeeze his fingers shakily, “I wasn’t here for the party. I was here for you.”
Mingyu tries to speak, but no words come out. He just stares at you—-the glassy eyes rimming red, the coat engulfing you whole, the glitter that you were so excited about which is nearly all smudged now like the night wiped it off you... and you let it.
He looks hard to find the girl who had just last week sleepily admitted to him that she didn’t like being alone in the dorms. That she wanted to make newer friends other than her roommate but felt that it was too late and didn’t know where to start.
He had been perplexed when you said, ‘maybe I’m just a bit boring,’ like you weren’t everything to him. Like he didn’t give his all during all his practices and drills because the idea of coming back to you tired and unguarded was the only thing that kept him going. He had wanted to prove you wrong, wanted to show you just how shallow all this noise was. How these invitations, these appearances—they really didn’t matter.
But not like this.
God, never like this.
So when you ask him, with a voice so small, “can we go home?” he sucks in a shuddering breath and nods eagerly.
“Of course baby.”
His hand finds your waist again, guiding you through the crowd that has begun thickening along with the night. He doesn’t cling closer to you like he needs your perfume to breathe, he doesn’t mash you into his side like he did before. This time, he gives you space and ensures everyone else does too.
The tension in your body dissipates the moment the door to his car shuts. You slump unceremoniously against the plush leather, undoing your boots and pulling your knees up.
Mingyu doesn’t start the engine right away.
He just lets you be.
The silence in the car isn’t the kind that presses down on you, but one that holds you. One that tells you that you can shut your brain off now.
“You can lie down if you want to.” he says quietly, glancing at you.
You shake your head. “Just stay like this for a second.”
Without thinking, he lifts his hand from the wheel to rest it over your thigh—warm, grounding, heavy. His thumb moves slowly, absent-mindedly, tracing small circles against your skin like he’s reassuring himself that you’re really here.
“Do you want something to eat?” he asks. “Or I can cook at home.”
“I was craving some pizza…” you mutter, a bit embarrassed.
“Pizza it is,” he gives you a soft smile, brushing your heating cheeks once with his knuckles before finally pushing the engine to start.
⸻
Mingyu gets the largest slices with your favorite toppings from the campus’s pizzeria just before it is about to close off for the night. You wait behind him as he pays in exact change before loading it up with a generous tip for the freshmen in-charge who had rolled his eyes when you both walked in this late.
The guy's eyes widen at the bill, flitting across the two of you. It is obvious that he’s only surprised because of what he’s being paid, yet, your mind plays tricks, making you assume that he’s judging you.
And without even intending to, you shrink.
By now, you are a bit used to the attention that comes along with dating Mingyu. So it is not unnatural when even the weekend partygoers, no matter how drunk they are, do a double take when they spot him and his car.
Yet, tonight, you feel their gazes scraping at your skin instead of gliding over it.
Not admiration, not curiosity. Just eyes.
That’s all that your brain reduces them to at this moment.
Your fingers shiver around the warm box as you give him a reassuring smile once you’re back in the car. You don’t know after spending so much of them on him and Jihyo, how many more such smiles are left within you.
Because the truth is, it is hard pretending that you’re not completely unravelling.
That you’re unaffected by what happened earlier at the party.
The lewd remark, the insult that landed like hot lava on your skin—it is impossible for you to shut all the memories that they pulled out of the pockets of your mind that you had sealed tight a long time ago.
You only manage to take a few bites of the pizza before it begins threatening to come up.
You shove it back down, making some excuse about eating it later at home and dusting the crumbs off his seat.
“It’s okay baby, I’ll clean it up later.” Mingyu says, watching you rub a napkin aggressively over the seat and the dashboard.
Yet you insist.
“My brother would always get mad if I spilled food in his car.” you explain.
“You have a brother?” Mingyu gives you a confused laugh, eyes flickering from the road and onto you, “how come I never knew that?”
You just bite your lip, giving him a half-shrug as the color drains off your face. Your fingers go tight over the hem of your coat.
“He’s older than me.” you offer the half-hearted truth, hoping that’ll cancel out what you're not telling him.
Mingyu just nods, like he has made peace with your deflections when it comes to your family. He gets it… not everyone gets along with their folks well, and he knows never to push that boundary—especially with you.
By the time you reach his home, the sky has dissolved into a sea of deep violet.
The hallway lights flicker in slow blinks like even they are tired of just how long this night is.
Mingyu holds the bag of pizza in one hand, and you in his other, like he is afraid that if he lets you go again, you’ll slip further away from him. He somehow manages to unlock the door without taking his hand away from you.
You don’t know if he can sense it— all the jagged edges of whatever broke inside you tonight.
The way he keeps on checking in on you, with pained eyes and careful hands, it feels like he can.
He flips a switch on and the warm yellow swallows the darkness. Giant cardboard boxes—some open, some taped shut—litter most of his drawing room. He is in the process of moving back in his apartment from Dokyeom’s place.
The air inside is somehow colder tonight.
“Shit, I forgot to close the windows before leaving,” he mumbles, carefully moving between the cartons to close it as the curtains flap wild.
“I…uh, I’ll go take a shower,” you call out from behind him before he can turn around and see you—really see you and the devastation that is slowly beginning to seep out of your chest and onto your face.
He nods, giving you a small smile over his shoulder, “I’ll get some clean clothes for you.”
⸻
The mirrors in his bathroom mock you more than they reflect you.
And you see it then—the smudged glitter, the desperation, the too-bright rhinestones trying to hide away the sad, sullen girl with the slowest voice that you actually are.
You lean your hands over the sink, observing her more carefully. Your eyes drop down to the clothes, and you don’t know if you want to put the coat back on and hide them forever or rip them off.
Your fingers clench over the marble, knuckles turning white.
‘I know desperation when I see it.’
You take the clothes off, letting them fall down on the tiled floor with silent swooshes. Maybe if they get wet and ruined, you’ll have a proper excuse to throw them away.
‘Don’t wanna fuck an obvious whore anyways.’
You turn the shower on, not even waiting for it to run hot before stepping in.
All the shimmer begins melting off under the scalding shower, slithering down the drain in bright purple streaks like a skin you put on that didn’t fit but maligned you instead.
Your fingers move up to your throat, the pads brushing the spots that had once bruised after a similar night that happened years ago. Violet. Cold. The winter-formal at your high-school when your date had gotten too aggressive while making out with you in his car, trying to push your head down even when you kept saying no. And when he finally let go of you after you had pushed him with all your might, he said he wasn’t going to force you; he just couldn’t hear your low voice over the music.
You had worn something similar that night too. Red, shiny, bright.
‘And if you didn’t want it, then why are you dressed like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Have some self-respect and don’t make me say it.’
Once you’ve scrubbed it all off, only the scent of his soap remains.
You blink down in the pool that has gathered near your feet.
You see her then— the girl who had indeed been desperate. Who had searched her closet for the most alluring top she owned, looked for the tiniest skirt that could fit her, browsed the internet to find the tinsel, the glitter, the makeup, the accessories that’d match.
You had been needy, yes.
But only for him.
For his eyes.
Because tonight… tonight you had thought would be the one where you’d finally give in.
You had seen how his touch would never stay with possession, it would always linger. The heat curling in his eyes whenever you’d pull apart after kissing him, like he wanted to chase you down and do it all over again. How his fists would tighten like he had to physically restrain himself from grabbing you.
Or how he’d just look at you… completely ruined and owned like he was witnessing all his prayers being answered whenever you’d as much as even smile at him.
And though you had never been as open and expressive as him when it came to it, you had thought tonight you’d show him just how much you had desired him too.
So you had spent so much time getting ready, putting on something that made you look deceptively cute.
It wasn’t all just for him, at least not initially.
Since you were a little girl, you always loved things that sparkled and whenever you’d look at the pretty girls on TV, you’d always think how you would do your makeup like them—loud and bold—when you grew up.
You never had the guts to do that, not until tonight.
But now, it all feels like a cheap attempt at garnering his attention.
You wrap a clean towel around yourself, hoping it’ll swallow you whole. You crouch down to look for a garbage bag under his sink and stuff the top and skirt in the opaque, black plastic, leaving it under there to deal with later in the morning.
Outside, on his bed, Mingyu has laid down the clothes you left when you last hung-out with him here.
You had excused it off by saying it’s good to have a pair of your clothes here just in case. When in reality, you knew you had been gearing up for the morning after a night that was bound to happen.
Only now, it embarrasses you.
Of course Mingyu would have sensed exactly what you were doing, he’s not a fool.
And it shames you more than it would have excited you.
You hurriedly put your underwear on but ignore your sweater he has laid out. And instead, you rummage his drawer for one of his worn hoodies.
When you find the navy one with his initials stitched over the collars, you instantly put it on.
It smells like him— like worn down citrus and icy cedar and lavender-scented soap. The giant sleeves conceal your trembling fingers and the hem flutters halfway past your thighs.
You suck in a shuddering breath, wiping your eyes with his sleeves and praying that they’re not swollen red when he knocks at the door.
“Yeah, you can come in,” you manage to squeak, worrying if he can even hear it.
The door opens gently, like even the hinges are trying not to startle you.
Mingyu steps in slowly, careful, his presence filling the space without overwhelming it. His eyes find you immediately and then soften, something in his expression loosening the moment he sees you in his hoodie instead of anything else.
“Hey,” he murmurs. It’s quieter than before. Not cautious, just… closer. “I warmed the remaining pizza if you wanna eat it now.”
You shake your head, not facing him. Instead, you busy yourself with rubbing his warm lotion over your legs with the same aggressiveness you were wiping his seats with.
“Something to drink then?”
“No.” you choke.
His gaze lingers for a second too long, taking in the damp strands of your hair as they stick to the raw skin of your cheeks, the way the sleeves swallow your hands, the faint redness around your irises that you tried so hard to hide. Just how sensitive your skin looks, like you rubbed it too harshly under scalding water.
And he doesn’t call it out. Doesn’t ask questions that would make it worse.
He just walks towards you, sits by your side on the bed and pulls your legs into his lap, not at once, but slowly guiding them there.
He takes the lotion away from you and squeezes some of it over his own palms, rubbing them together to melt it a bit before massaging it into your calves with gentle, grounding fingers.
His eyes don’t stray further from your knees— not towards your face to seek some sort of applause, or towards the rest of your much exposed body.
Just your legs, rubbing warmth in them with his sure palms—even the crevices between your toes, the soles, the ankles.
The reverence of it all makes you feel like you aren't living in the same world that you were a few moments ago.
“Mingyu,” you whisper before you can control yourself, “do you think I’m too easy?”
His fingers stall.
And finally, he looks up at you only to find you looking absolutely wrecked—lips parted, breaths shallow, eyes hollow and pleading.
It is a sight that pains him like someone broke his ribs one by one and left him to die under the sun.
“No.”
That’s all he says, like a question like that can be answered by that singular word alone.
Like it doesn’t need any frantic explanation and examples.
You nod, retrieving your legs away from his lap. He lets you go, watching as you pull at your sleeves further and stretch the hoodie until it’s covering your knees.
He takes a deep breath, his palm resting heavy over the mattress between your bodies.
“You know what I felt when I saw you tonight?” he asks.
You lift your chin up, just slightly.
“I felt happy. Not surprised, not confused. Just happy, and warm. Because you looked,” he pauses, like he’s struggling to put his memories into words, “you looked so excited, nervous and beautiful all at once. Like you were trying something new, and you were trying it with me.”
His palm slides over the smooth expanse of the white sheet. You drop your hand down to let him hold it and shift closer on your knees until you’re curled up on his lap.
Your fingers hook over the collar of his shirt and you bury your face in his chest, just breathing his scent in more than the air.
He wraps his arms over your waist, interlocking them over your hip to hold you close. “And baby, I was so proud. Not because of how you looked or what you wore, but because you let yourself do what you wanted to. That’s so brave.”
“I felt like I made a fool of myself,” you whisper, squirming away because you realise you’re crying, and you don’t want to get his shirt wet. “There were people who laughed when he said that.”
But Mingyu doesn’t let you run away like that because his palm is up in your head, pressing you back close…making you rest your head on his shoulder.
“You know the deal with guys like that?” he says, lightly kissing your hair, “They’re weak. They have got nothing going on for themselves. Men are so fucking insecure and uncreative. So whenever they see something beautiful that’s not for them or from them, they either want to own it or destroy it.”
Your breath hitches.
“Baby, you didn’t let him do any of that… you showed him how worthless he was, which is why he stooped so low. And I know you’ve heard this from Jihyo and you know it for yourself, but I wanna say it again… nothing you did caused it.”
You blink up at him, only to find him already looking down at you like your gravity had pulled and chained him there forever.
And for the first time in this entire night, your heart finally decides to settle in its place.
You pull at his collar, just lightly, but he instantly succumbs and kisses you. Soft, slow, gentle…almost tentative, like he understands the sheer tenderness of this moment and doesn’t want to rush it, doesn’t want to steal your breath away.
But he does.
Because right against your lips, he murmurs, “I know you love getting ready, baby. The way your eyes light up when you’re telling me about the things Cass made for you. The efforts that you put in lining your eyes every morning…all the shades of maroon gloss that you carry in your purse. I love seeing it all. Please don’t let a drunk bastard take that away from me.”
No one has ever seen you like this, no one has gauged your interests with the depth that he does.
And that alone makes you forget your own name.
“I won’t,” you promise him with a broken sob, “I swear I won’t.”
This time, you are the one who initiates the kiss. Hot, hungry, desperate— and no longer ashamed of it.
He follows your lead with an awed reverence, like it is an honor to have you lose it all like this on his lap right now.
“I never wanna let you go.” you confess, your fingers tightening over his hair with a claim.
And you mean it.
“Good thing,” he exhales, “cause I’m not going anywhere either, babe.”
He hooks an arm under your thighs and the other over your spine, and flips you both around so you’re lying flat in the middle of his giant bed. He hovers above you for a brief moment, palms pressed on either side of your head as you stare up at him, glassy eyes wide open.
He is never not completely wrecked by just how beautiful you are. The kind of beauty that only intensifies the more he stares at you. Long lashes fanning over your cheeks, how your brows knit together faintly like your body has finally begun catching up to the idea of safety around you. Your lips, bitten raw and red from all the crying and kissing… he still can’t believe he gets to feel them against his own now.
You undo him like no other. Thread by thread, bit by bit. And you don’t even have the faintest idea about just how gone he is for you.
You don’t reach forward to adjust his hoodie that has ridden up your hips. You don’t fuss about how your hair might be getting his pillow wet.
In fact, you don’t do anything at all.
You just lace your fingers through the hair on the back of his head, letting yourself weigh down and be warmed by the warm cotton of his sheets.
Watching that ease lull you into slow, gentle waves of tranquility pulls a smile out of him. Small, barely there… just a movement in the corner of his lips.
You don’t miss it though.
There’s no way you can, especially not when the expanse of his shoulders conceals everything from your view that’s not him.
His own hand comes to cradle your head with subtle support before he leans down to kiss you again. Your lips immediately respond, like they have been doing so often lately. Like it is second nature to you.
Just following his leads, surrendering to whatever pace he sets.
When you moan his name under your breath, he angles his face and deepens it, like he wants you to feed it to him right from your very mouth.
“You slow my blood down,” he whispers, “being with you feels like a dream I never want to wake up from.”
You cling on to him without really meaning to. Arms confused and latching all over his back, his neck, his hair, his shoulders. Nails biting into his forearms like you can’t get enough of the steady strength of them. Legs parted and inviting him to settle closer between your thighs.
And when he does, and you feel it— the hard strain in his pants, you break the kiss and let your head fall deeper into his pillow with a stuttered whimper, brain full of fog and steam.
Your back arches, like you can’t get enough of him, and you accidentally end up grinding your hips against his with more vigour than you intended to.
He lets out a broken sound when you do that, his lips falling in the curve of your neck and latching onto the delicate skin there like sucking the sweetness of it might make this agonizing pleasure bearable to him.
The more the two of you tangle yourselves around each other, the heavier the air gets with the possibility of what could happen.
The sheer realness of it.
Devastating, but not inevitable.
Mingyu senses that shift, that charge, too.
And as much as it pains him to detach himself from your softness, he knows to do the right thing.
“Baby, hey… look at me,” he says, straightening up just enough so that you’re no longer writhing under the press of him.
You open your eyes reluctantly. Lips swollen, eyes wild.
He licks his own lips, realizing his own state might not be much better than your flushed one. “Are you okay?” he asks, “I don’t wanna overwhelm you.”
You blink up at him, the earnestness of those words making everything soften within you. He is literally crumbling with need above you—-you can see it in the clench of his jaw, the tightness in his throat, the flames in his eyes warming the sudden cold between the two of you.
And yet… yet, he doesn’t want to go further and drag you along with him to a place you might not be able to fully recognize.
Except for the fact that you do.
You have mapped it out several times in the hush of the dark nights where the thoughts of him would plague you until they left you breathless.
“Mingyu,” you say, sitting up along with him, “what if I told you that this is what I’ve wanted—what I’ve been waiting for all night tonight?”
His eyes turn into a shade of dark that causes endless shudders to plunder your body. You have to pour molten courage in your nerves to stop yourself from squirming.
Yet you shift, just a little.
Not because you’re scared, but because it seems like the right thing to do when sex is on the table.
You offer him what you know is a cautionary thing to say because you don’t want to be too pushy, “Unless you don’t think it’s the right—”
His hand curls around your waist before you can shift further and in a swift, effortless movement, he pulls you back closer than before. Chest to chest, your hands flying up to his shoulders with a gasp.
It startles you, but does little to make your eyes avert from his.
“I want you in ways that’ll make you question my character.” he says, right by your ear like he wants you to heed every single word of that. Your thighs tighten together at the impact, something dangerous begins to catch fire in your belly.
“I have wanted this for so long,” he confesses, his fingers trailing up under your hoodie—his hoodie—tracing the soft curves of your waist, your ribs, like he is learning every little detail. “I’ve dreamt about it… I’ve played it out like a million times in my head.”
He pauses, his fingers firm over the hem of the sweatshirt now. His brow curves in question. You meekly nod, bringing your own fingers to the edge and helping him take it off in one, swift movement.
The loss of warmth is instant.
Your hair falls over your shoulders like a waterfall—languid, dense, dark.
Your body’s first reflex is to cover up— out of shame, out of the chill piercing at your soft skin… you don’t know.
But the way he’s looking at you—like he’s drinking everything in after eternities of being parched—it makes you fist your hands over the comforter to keep them from flying up.
His eyes do not drop from your face to your body, not until your breathing has evened out.
And when it does, he lets himself see you.
Truly see you.
How the silver glow of the moon and the amber of his bedroom glides over your silky skin. How you shiver—half shy, half curious—when he slowly brings his knuckles up to brush over the curve of your shoulder that slides down to the swell of your chest.
Your breath sharpens at the contact.
His eyes fly up, “is this okay?”
You bite your lip, nodding.
“Good.” he mumbles. He holds you again, gently laying you back down and presses small kisses all over your collarbones. “You’re so beautiful, baby… so soft… so perfect.”
He interlaces his fingers with yours, pressing them down over the pillow but not before kissing your wrists. “You always smell so sweet… it drives me insane.”
Your chest rises and falls with rapid successions, and for a long time, your ragged breathing and his name uttered like a prayer are the only sounds you can make.
“God, your voice,” Mingyu kisses the column of your throat, feeling your skin warm up under his lips the more he speaks. “My angel… I could hear you, and only you, forever.”
His kisses move downwards, not with hurry, but certainly with a heat.
His presence fills all your senses. He’s there—flushed cheeks and parted lips—when you open your eyes, he’s there when you close them. He’s under the tips of your fingers—solid, real; there’s traces of his blood buried in your nails. His scent is the only air you can breathe… smoky, woody, and something sweet and fresh. His lips are over your sternum, right where your heart beats.
He carefully cups your breast in his palm, his eyes flicking to your face to see your reaction.
Your expression is unreadable, like you’re still somewhere between wanting this and squashing all your wants.
He helps you decide by dipping his head low and capturing your nipple between the heat of his mouth.
You react almost instantly, holding his head but not pulling—like you want to tell him that it feels good. Because with the way he presses his tongue flat over the nub before sucking on it firmly, of course it does.
“Oh, Mingyu…” you breathe, your stomach flipping with constant combustions of nerves.
You don’t realize how you’re arching more towards him, like you’re offering yourself for him to lick you, taste you, devour you whole.
And he does, unapologetically, unabashedly.
Like kissing every inch of you is the most natural thing for him.
His lips move on to your other breast, giving it the same wet, wild attention while the thumb and finger of his other hand keeps rolling your other nipple between them.
When he does that, holds and pinches the most sensitive parts of you, you realize just how rough his palms are from all the training he does. You never noticed it before— he had always been so gentle whenever he’d hold your hand.
Your nails dig into his scalp like you want to call him back when he finally lets go. Your sensitive skin is warm, wet, puckered up under his relentless attention.
When you open your eyes, everything looks muted and blurry. Like the act in itself softened the edges around everything.
Mingyu is still palming your breasts—not with hunger, not with lust—but with a kind, gentle care… like he wants to elongate that pleasure for as long as he can.
“Everything alright?” he checks in again, a frown growing between his brows when he notices the stray tear slip off your lashes.
“Please… please don’t stop.” you beg him, kissing his palm when he brings it up to wipe your tears. “I want you so bad.”
“I know darling,” he whispers, “I know. And I got you baby, all you have to do is relax.”
His lips tremble against yours, like they missed you already. Then, they are on the mole over your right breast, the stretch marks over your hips, the soft curve of your belly that still hasn’t stopped fluttering.
Throughout that slow torture of his mouth on your skin, you keep on clutching the fabric of his shirt like it’s a tether. Fisting and twisting it with all your might until a button pops off.
Mingyu lifts his head from over your hip, pupils dilated and hair wild. “Want me to take it off?”
Bashfully, you nod.
He takes your palms in his own, bringing them to his chest.
“Then help me how I helped you, baby.”
You can’t keep them stable as your fingers work on his buttons. You only manage to get two of the top ones undone in the time he flicks the rest of them off with single, effortless movements of his wrists.
Your jaw slacks when he takes it off, the muscles of his shoulders and abs flexing smooth under his honey-like skin. He’s all hard lines and defined ridges, tall and strong in a way that doesn’t need some kind of performance. But his hands? Always so kind and gentle when it comes to you—especially to you.
Something golden on his chest catches the dim light of the room, glinting and catching your attention.
When he leans back in, you notice it—
“An Aries pendant?” you smile, feeling it against your finger-tips, “never pegged you for someone who was into astrology,” then, you give him a teaseful frown, “it’s like I don’t know you at all.”
“You’re the one to say that?” he smirks, letting the pendant fall over your bare skin. Cold, sleek. “You’re the most mysterious person I know.”
“You say it like that’s a bad thing.”
“Not at all,” he shakes his head, brushing stray hair off your face, “it only makes me more obsessed with you than I already am.”
Your heart thuds against the confinement of your ribs and you can’t help but just reach forward to hold his face. This stupid, grinning boy who never fails to make you feel so grateful for him. So possessive over him.
His fingers hook over the waistband of your underwear which you now feel has been growing damp for quite some time. He gives you a crooked grin, biting his lip a bit when he sees the pink lace.
“Cute.” he mumbles, pushing it off your legs and making you blush.
You hold on to his biceps—strong, golden—as he glides his fingers up and down your outer thighs.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, not teasing at all.
“Safe,” you admit. Before carefully adding, “Mingyu… can I ask you something?”
“Anything, my love.” His fingers halt over your knees. Warm, heavy and definitely there.
You gulp down the anxiety that you might ruin this worshipful moment. That you might scare him away if you ask that now.
But you have to… you owe it to yourself, even when you very well know the answer already.
“You’ll stop if I ask you to… right?” the last word barely comes out.
His gaze burns into yours, his grip over your skin flexes with this earnest sense of protection that is almost heart-breaking.
“Of course, baby.” he swallows hard.
“Even if my voice is too low?”
“Even if you flinch too hard,” he says, firm yet gentle, “this goes however you want it to go.”
You blink at him, your voice fragile when you nod. “Okay… okay.”
Your legs are already slightly parted, but your thighs keep on pressing together the more you look at him and his hungry, deliberate gaze. It is charged with enough worship to make you feel like the most desirable person who ever lived. Like a miracle who somehow ended up raw and exposed for him on his bed.
He gives you one slow look, like this image of you needs to stay with him forever, before he gently spreads your thighs apart.
You squirm a little, digging your heels deeper into his mattress as he bares you for his eyes.
He breathes like it is taking him great effort and grit to do so.
“God, you’re so pretty,” he says, leaning in like he is being pulled in.
You whimper when you feel his hot breath, his bitten lips, his slick teeth all over your inner thighs. Each press punctuated by a low compliment, a small thank you.
His overwhelming presence is everywhere but the place that aches for him the most.
Just warming your skin, like he’s preparing you for the heat of what’s about to happen.
“Mingyu…please.” you squeak out.
His eyes flick up to you, dark and glazed.
“You’re mine,” he says, almost out of nowhere, “mine to take care of… mine to love.”
You don’t know if he realizes the sheer significance of what he just said. He seems too entranced to care.
Your eyes widen, but before his words can fully dawn down on you, his mouth does.
That first lick of his tongue over your sensitive, soaked skin is like flames leaping on hot coal. Your back arches off the bed, arms flaying to hold onto something, anything.
You clutch a pillow in one palm, his hair in the other.
He lets you ride that first contact out for a moment, pressing his face into the soft flesh of your inner thigh before dipping down again. Your entire body jolts when he groans at the taste of you—a deep, raspy sound that sends shivers into your core.
His fingers over your waist tighten, anchoring you to himself as he buries his lips over and over between your legs. None of it is rushed, like he thinks he has the entire night to do this.
And maybe, he intends to.
His warm, slick tongue slides slowly but deliberately over your already wet folds. For some time, that’s all he does—tasting you…drinking you. Watching what parts are more sensitive than the others while you quiver uncontrollably under his lips.
Your grip over his hair tightens when he holds your thighs and jerks you closer—if that was even possible—until they’re wrapped around his head.
And just like that, all your worries, all your shyness flushes down under the press of his heavy hands.
He opens his mouth with even more greed, now shamelessly eating you out. Not once does he detach his tongue from you, even when the firm pressure of it makes your vision dot with a million bursting stars.
You don’t know how much you’re squirming, not until he presses one of his palms flat over your stomach, the weight of it calling you back into the room.
“So sensitive,” he says, his lips and chin and even the tip of his nose gleaming with your arousal, “I love how responsive you are, baby.”
And then, he goes back in—licking, flicking, teasing, sucking.
God… the way he wraps his lips around your clitoris and sucks at it.
Your limbs are so tight around him, around the sheets. And yet, you feel so loose. Like he’s melting something within you with the heat of his mouth. Untying knots you didn’t know existed with his tongue.
You know you’re dripping—you can feel it. But Mingyu is too quick to lap it all up before the mortification can take form in your mind. It's almost like he doesn’t want you to think of anything that’s not him. Or feel anything other than what he wants you to feel.
Pleasure. Raw, hot, intense pleasure.
Your thighs begin quivering around his face like you don’t want to let him go. Your chest heaves faster than before.
“Mingyu…” you moan, “Mingyu…I—I…”
“I know baby, you’re almost there.” he pants, “I can taste it.”
Your hips buck towards him as you whimper, “please don’t stop.”
“Never want to.” His words come out wrecked and muffled against your core, sending vibrations strong enough to set everything ablaze.
You remove your hand from the pillow to hold onto his palm like you’re standing on the edge of a cliff and he’s your sole tether. He grins against you, at your heartbreakingly adorable tendency to reach for him even when he’s doing the most unspeakable things anyone has ever done to you.
He begins sucking at you harsher, licking you with broader strokes. And before you can grapple with the aftermath of those tricks, you are coming undone from them. Hard. Impossibly quick.
Your palm flies over your mouth, as you gasp out loudly, like you want to hold at least something in, even if that’s just your sound.
But Mingyu is more adamant, still kissing you with open-mouthed smooches down there, making you ride out your orgasm right on his eager tongue like he doesn’t want you to stop screaming. He does slow down though, his lips more forgiving and fluid now.
When he finally lets you go, every inch of you is flushed scarlet. Just a shade deeper than his own skin which blooms red as he straightens up, his breaths staggered and laced with your taste.
His pupils are blown out and full of awe like he just witnessed something otherworldly. Like he wasn’t the one actively involved in it. Like he didn’t cause it.
You just keep on breathing, eyes barely open and body buzzing, while he stares at you with an all consuming admiration.
Your arms are listless, and yet, you extend them towards him, inviting him to your chest.
“You tasted so sweet,” he says, falling into your hug. “I almost wanted to do it all over again.”
You brush the strands of hair from over his brows—the ones that you pulled at so roughly—and whisper, “I think I would have passed out if you did.”
He brushes his nose against your temple, chuckling low and burying his face deeper into the dark mess of your hair over his pillow.
He shifts a bit further so that he’s not crushing you with his body.
But when he does, you feel it. His hips brush against yours…the hardness… the unmistakable girth poking through the dense fabric of his jeans.
“Fuck,” you whisper under your breath, your eyes flicking up to his, bracing.
He doesn’t look proud, nor teasing. Just… curious.
And then—
“Don’t worry about it, baby.”
“But we can…” you try, and fail, to convince him as he begins covering you up with his comforter. “Mingyu, seriously. I’m fine. We can do it…you know? I can take it.”
“I know you can, because you were made for me and me alone.” he says, tucking your loose hair behind your ear and staring intently at your face, “but baby, let’s just take it one night at a time.”
He gets off the bed, collecting the clothes that fell off. His shirt, the hoodie, your underwear. But instead of putting it away, he sits by your side, helping you slide it up your body with careful fingers.
“It’s cold,” he explains, ditching the sweatshirt and buttoning his dark shirt over your chest instead.
You just keep on looking at him with glassy eyes, swallowing hard like you want to absorb this once ruined night into every fibre of your being now.
You don’t think he understands just what he has given you. The enormity of what he has done for you, more than to you.
But of course he does.
Because that’s just who he is.
And he makes it evident when he comes back from the bathroom after having changed into sweatpants and curls up behind you, pulling you close like you’re the only thing that matters.
“What gave it away?” you can’t help but ask.
“What?”
“Quit playing cool, Gyu.” you murmur, “what gave it away to you that I’m a virgin?” you swallow around the word like it is something heavy, “you stopped because of that, didn’t you?”
For a moment, it’s like you didn’t say anything at all. The kind of quiet that suspends everything. Your eyes search for something, anything, into the darkness of his room.
And then, his fingers tighten over your stomach and he nuzzles closer.
His voice is so low that it almost gets lost in your hair when he speaks, “the way you looked… so innocent, breathless, almost confused—especially afterwards—like you didn’t know what to do with your own body. Like you wanted to ask me what happens now. I just…sensed it, I guess.”
He pauses after that, like the confession itself has weight to it—something fragile he’s set between you, careful not to bruise it.
Something in your chest folds in on itself.
The room feels smaller somehow, not suffocating, but intimate, like the walls have drawn closer just to hold this moment in place. The faint hum of the cold night outside seeps in through the window, distant traffic and the occasional whisper of the icy wind brushing against glass.
Everything else is just him. Solid and steady. His breath, warm at the nape of your neck. The slow rise and fall of his chest against your back, grounding you in a way you didn’t realize you needed.
You begin to relax, tucked in beside him. His arm draped heavy over you, fingers fiddling with the hem of his cotton shirt.
And then, you laugh. Almost sleepily.
“So you’re saying it’s cause I fuck like a virgin?”
His laughter steeps in the spaces of yours. “No, it’s cause you say shit like that. Because we didn’t even fu—have sex, baby that was just the foreplay.”
Your cheeks warm up and you try your best to pretend that the thought of the actual thing isn’t making you lose it all.
“Don’t worry,” he squeezes your fingers like he can sense your anticipation, “we’ll get there.”
“We will.” you mumble, letting yourself believe that you have the time to.
CHAPTER 15: always the fool with the slowest heart
You wake up pink and boneless, cocooned in his scent, his clothes, his sheets, and him.
Mingyu is so clingy—something you had observed about him even before you started dating. Always reaching forward for some kind of contact of skins, talking endlessly, asking stupid questions about things that don’t matter.
But like this, when it’s just the two of you tucked away from the world, it is almost concerning how he just doesn’t want to let you go at all.
Even in his sleep.
He hugs you tightly from behind to his chest, his thigh hooked over yours. His jaw rests in the curve of your neck, his sleep-warmed breath brushing in your hair. Sometimes, his lips move around words that you can’t quite hear, and you smile at just how adorable he is. A bit pouty, impossibly unguarded, talking nonsense in his sleep while gluing himself to you like your soft curves against his hard muscles are his one true salvation.
For a long time, you just lay there unmoving, too scared of disturbing something so precious.
But then, your eyes fall onto the clock hanging on the wall before you.
Shit.
It’s almost noon.
You wriggle around, trying to free yourself from his hold and hopefully save yourself from spending the entire weekend in his bed while you still can. Because you know that if you don’t act now, you might as well just stay here forever— in the quiet comfort of him seeped with safety.
Just when you think you’re getting somewhere and his hand lets up, he squashes all your hopes down by whining. Actually whining.
“Baby… why are you leaving me?” his voice is rough with sleep and disoriented, “come back.”
He begins reaching for you again, but you jump out of the bed with a yelp.
He blinks, startled and horrified.
“You hate me,” he accuses, planting his face deep into the pillow you were resting upon.
“Gyu, I need to pee.” you deadpan, hoping that’d make him give up.
“That sounds fake,” he mumbles into the pillow, voice muffled and deeply offended, like you’ve somehow betrayed him. “You were literally fine two seconds ago.”
You stare at him, unimpressed. “Yes, because I was asleep. That’s how bodies work.”
He peeks one eye open, hair a mess, lips slightly swollen, and you hate how unfairly hot he looks even when he’s being ridiculous.
“You’re making excuses to leave me.”
“I am making excuses to not pee on your bed, Mingyu.”
That seems to pause him.
For exactly half a second.
“Then go and come back quickly,” he negotiates, already reaching a hand out toward you again like he’s trying to cast a spell that’ll drag you back into bed. “Five minutes. Maximum.”
You snort. “You’re insane.”
“Three minutes.”
“I’m not speedrunning basic human functions for you.”
He groans, flopping dramatically onto his back now, one arm thrown over his eyes. “This is how it starts,” he mutters. “First you pee, then you check your phone, then suddenly you have ‘things to do,’ and I never see you again.”
You giggle, not answering his little rant as you shut the bathroom door behind you. You brush your teeth with the extra toothbrush he kept for you in the sink and decide to change out of his shirt into something warmer.
You steal yet another one of his hoodies, pulling up his giant sweatpants as high as you can.
By the time you come out, he has gone back to sleep, clutching the pillow like how he was clutching you. His nose is buried into the plushness of it, dragging whatever scent of you remains there.
You want to flick his forehead, but decide against it, thinking you should enjoy the few minutes of solitude while you can before he eventually wakes up after realizing you didn’t come back and hogs you again.
Carefully shutting the bedroom door behind you, you pad down into the kitchen and warm the kettle up. He got the tea that you always order and has it lined up in the bottom drawer—the one that you can reach easily on your tiptoes. The faint perfume of hibiscus and cardamom saturates the crisp air as you steep it in his favorite mug, the one with a puppy on its handle.
You take a seat on the comfortable rug in the drawing room, the same one that you had sat on when you first came here. It was only six weeks ago, and yet it feels so nostalgic, like something that happened decades ago. When he had first held your dress reverently between his fingers right here, you hadn’t known just how fast and how hard you were going to fall for him. How those would be the same fingers that’d soon strip you, bit by bit, piece by piece. How those lips stretched into that knowing, crooked grin would be the ones pulling out the most wanton moans out of you, face buried between your legs as he asked you again and again if he was allowed to do that.
Your stomach does somersaults at the fragmented memory of last night. It all comes and passes in blurs, tightening your abdomen and making your throat go dry.
It had almost been one of the worse nights of your life, before he turned it all around with all his tender love and care.
For the longest time, you had never thought you were one of those people to whom good things just happened. You thought you had to earn them, be good for them. Be the obedient daughter, the careful sister. Sing every night even when your throat hurts. Don’t even dare to wish for things that you are told are not for you.
But Mingyu… you don’t know just when did he creep in and flipped the script inside your head.
He makes you feel like good things just exist, because he exists. They don’t have to be struggled for, just felt. In the quiet of the library, in the pointless banters over lunch, in the warmth of his bed and in the home of his embrace.
You love him.
You really do.
So much… that it overflows, it overwhelms. So much that it makes you cry on his rug at eleven in the morning.
Because what did you ever do to deserve him?
You quickly wipe your tears away with the back of your hand, not wanting to be the weirdo who sobs over nothing at their boyfriend’s house. You turn your attention outwards, watching the golden slants of light filtering in, carrying with it the fresh smell of morning and the muted sounds of a lazy college-town waking up late on a Saturday.
The boxes are still piled up in the corner of the drawing room, outside what you know is the narrow studio he sometimes would sketch in before he moved out.
He had told you he was going to empty out the space, make room for newer projects.
You don’t intend to spy, but a crooked gold trophy peeking out of a box catches your attention. You pick it up and examine it, the engraving in italics informing you that it was awarded to him for being the most-valuable player in some tournament two years ago.
You’ve never really seen him play on ice, you always kept away from the game thinking that it was for the best. Yet, you can imagine him there. Cold wind catching his hair, his strong arms tossing the puck around with effortless accuracy. How he must reach out for his own team instead of celebrating towards the crowd whenever he’d score.
You sift through the box finding medals after medals, certificates and plaques containing recognition that somehow feel like an afterthought. You don’t know just why he decided to not go forward with the game anymore—he had just shrugged when you asked him that.
But you can feel it, more than you can see the reason.
Because now, you know him. You know that he doesn’t cook because he wants some reward in return. He just does because it fulfills him. You know that when he takes all his time taking care of you, there are no underlying motives—that’s just who he is. So full of love, and intention. You can see just why when the game began feeling more transactional than emotional and these awards diminished in their meanings, he gave up.
He told you he wants to build homes now.
That his apprenticeship at an architecture firm last year gave him more purpose than anything else. Talking to families—to the kids—about the kind of place they’d want to spend their lives in.
How his heart would melt whenever someone would request something specific for their significant other… ‘an awning over the backyard because my wife loves to read, but her skin is too sensitive’, ‘please make sure to install giant windows in my office so that he can paint in sufficient natural light while I work.’
He told you that making houses was like giving love a shape, a body, a place for it to bloom and thrive in.
It was so… him.
He even showed you the sketch of the very first house he had designed. Just a rough sheet of paper out of his mathematics assignment.
‘I know it’s kinda impractical and lame,’ he had scratched his head as you observed it between careful fingers.‘Wha—it’s not!,’ you exclaimed, ‘I can see myself living in a house like this.’‘You can?’ his eyes lit up. It had hit you then, like alarms ringing hard in your skull, the implication of what you had just said. Panic rose up like smoke in your gut when you attempted to take it back, ‘I mean, it’s not impractical.’
You had been so scared of appearing smothering, demanding more than what you were entitled for at the point.
It all seems so silly now.
Before you even know it, you are elbows deep into another open-carton labelled ‘trash.’
You frown, examining the stack of papers it contains. It is all sketches and handwritten notes on colored pages, all too pretty to be considered trash.
You pick up a sketch of roses dated all the way back to freshman year. Hues of pinks and reds blending into each other, each petal crafted with more care than the one before.
Then, another one—a pink pearl, encased in a shell. You smile and fold it before pocketing it… you love pearls too much to let the one drawn by your favorite boy go to waste.
If yours wasn’t a destiny marred by the tendency of everything good ending too soon, you would have stopped there.
But you don’t.
Below the sketches, you find a stack of letters.
A total four of them. Neat, smudged with charcoal fingerprints at the edges, not enveloped still.
You unfold the first one.
‘Happy Barf-day Mingoo! :3’ written with bold, glittering blue comes to view. You don’t have to read it full to realize that it’s from Chaeyoung—she has plastered funny pictures of the two of them together all over it with sticky glue and pointy stars. It’s from his nineteenth birthday, you gather, the first one he celebrated with his friends on campus. It is so sweet and full of her wishing him the nicest of things, a little hockey puck-shaped key chain still attached along with it.
You don’t understand why he would want to throw it away?
You move on to the other letter.
Again, from Chaeyoung. Dated to Christmas of the same year.
It is a bit stained from the smudges of something greasy, like she had stuffed it along with something edible and gave it to him.
‘Baked the carrot cookies you gave me the recipe for and they taste like ASS, so do me a favor and shove these up yours cause I definitely can’t stomach these, blergh!!!’
You chuckle in confusion at that, trying to ignore the prickling, dreadful feeling inside your chest… like a thorn lodged itself there and refuses to move. These are just harmless letters, so on-character to your roommate. You can literally hear her say all that.
And yet… the fact that he wants to trash them… it just doesn’t sit right with you.
So you move on to the third one, hoping it would have some answers.
‘Hey Gyu, heard about your grandma. I hope she’s feeling better now. I know you’re gonna be out of town for longer, taking care of her but I had some free time today and your spare keys so I decided to stop by and clean your apartment. I hope that’s fine? P.S. - Meal prepped a bunch of muffins and veggies for when you come back, it’ll stay fresh for up to a month. Check your freezer :)”
Something hits you square in the chest, like a precise bullet. Whatever few months you have spent living with her are enough to tell you just how big Chaeyoung’s heart is, especially for the people she cares about. It was one of the reasons why you nearly hated yourself for how you almost ruined her plans of setting Heather and Mingyu up.
But this… the pureness of the gesture. The abundant care and thought that went behind this, it makes something sit heavy under your ribs.
It feels so wrong to have it here, among the things that are to be discarded.
It must be a mistake, has to be.
Mingyu isn’t heartless like that.
You decide to keep them aside and ask him if he’s sure about throwing them away when he wakes up.
But not before reading the final letter.
Just to see if it’s something similar or actually a scrap.
Your fingers feel heavy when they fold it open, almost hesitating. The writing is different—no traces of hand-drawn doodles, it is devoid of her signature unfunny jokes or cusswords.
Because it is not written by Chaeyoung.
Instead, it is written for her.
‘Chae, I’m not as good with words written down on paper like you are. But I know that letters are your thing, so I’m writing one for you because that’s what feels the most sincere. I wanna tell you something that I’ve known for quite some time now because not saying it feels weird. And I don’t want there to be anything tense or weird between the two of us — you’re one of my best friends.
I think I like you more than just a friend.
Maybe, if you’re up for it, we could talk about it… hang out away from the others sometime?
—Mingyu’
The paper doesn’t make a sound when it falls.
Neither does your heart.
You stare at the letter on the floor for longer than you should, like maybe if you look hard enough, it’ll rearrange into something else. Something that doesn’t feel like a small, dingy room whose walls keep on caving in around you.
There’s a ringing in your ears, slow, languid, like you’ve been thrust under water and held there until the bubbles stop coming.
Jihyo’s sitting beside you in the dead of the night at some frat-house you don’t remember the name of. She says, ‘it’s all that PTSD from seeing what happened to Mingyu after rejection-gate last year.’
You blink, giant drops of tears rolling down your cheeks. And she vanishes.
There’s Mingyu, standing beside you in the kitchen during your first night here in this apartment.
‘...the truth about why I don’t really live here anymore is because, some time back, I said something stupid to someone here…’
You want to ask him who it was. But before you can, the smoke snaking out of the kettle swallows the apparitions whole.
That first sketch of the house he made, you realize, was a blueprint of someone else. And you— naively, embarrassingly— let yourself believe could be yours. Your hands fall limp off your lap, fingers scattering across the rug like petals torn from something that used to be whole.
Different patches of your skin still carry the tingles of last night. Especially your core. You ached with the ghost of his touch, only now, it feels like someone sliced open every spot that he had kissed.
How foolish you had been to believe something so pure, so honest could be yours and yours alone?
Did you forget that you even had to share your mother’s womb, let alone her love and attention, with someone else?
You could never deserve anything whole. Anything complete.
Always the remnants, always the fragments.
A familiar mix of despair and disappointment begins clawing its way up your throat.
“Baby,” his voice echoes from the hallway. Still carefree, still playful, like your heart isn’t shattered and spread all over the rug of his drawing room. “Where are you? Why didn’t you come back to bed—”
Mingyu freezes, like the air had been sucked out of the room.
His gaze drops to your pale body, then to the letters on the floor. The letters he didn’t think twice about before stuffing in the box he was going to trash. Something old, silly, worthless and even laughable now.
But of course, it wouldn’t look like that to you.
Carefully, he crouches down, “love—”
You instantly recoil like his fingers over your bicep burn you.
He lets his arm drop, and doesn't try to reach for you again.
“Were you ever going to tell me?” you ask, your voice wavering under the weight of your heart threatening to spill out of your throat.
You are the one asking questions, demanding answers, and yet, his eyes stay firm on you. Clear and honest. Meanwhile you don’t even have the guts to match his gaze.
Because the irony of it isn’t lost on you. Not when you know you haven’t revealed everything to him either.
“I was,” he says, voice firm but gentle at the same time.
“When?”
“I don’t know…” he pauses, then licks his lips, “honestly, I couldn’t even remember it anymore. Not when you were near me… it was all insignificant. But you have to trust me baby, I was going to tell you.”
Mingyu keeps his expressions sincere. Even though inside, he is crumbling, burning, fighting for every breath he takes. Because you are here, the love of his life, looking so small and heartbroken because of him.
Your voice breaks when you whisper, “you loved her,” like those are the three heaviest words you ever had to speak out loud.
Mingyu’s eyes widen, he immediately shakes his head like that’ll brush off what you just said. “No,” he huffs out, “No… it was all just a stupid crush— baby, where did I ever say I loved her?”
“You asked me to sing that song for you—for her—when we first met,” you slump deeper into the floor, your tears falling without a single regard, “how could I miss it all?”
“That…” he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, “that was just because that’s her favorite song. And my dumb friends thought it was hella funny to have it played right after I asked her out and she said no.”
“Would you have gone out with her if she said yes?” You know you sound crazy, but you can’t stop speaking whatever comes to your head.
“That’s irrelevant—”
“It’s a yes or no, Mingyu.”
His fists tighten over his knees, like there’s no easier way to say it. “At that time? Yes… I would have. Because I hadn’t known you… because I was stupid. Because I thought we were compatible when we absolutely were not. But I didn’t, because she was smarter than me and knew better.”
You let out a bitter laugh, not even a single word of what he said filters in through the wall of pain in your mind.
“So you settled for the stupid girl who opened the door for you when you came looking for her instead. The desperate, lonely, loser who would give you everything you wanted if you just asked nicely.”
His face falls under the weight of that accusation. Like it is the heaviest thing that has ever fallen upon him.
“You know that’s not true,” he croaks, “and you’re being very unfair to me… to us.”
“You still have her letters with you!”
“Because I wasn’t even living here until now.” he desperately explains, “I moved in with Dokyeom shortly after everything happened. You know that, I told you. And before that I was… I was a walking corpse in my own home baby. It wasn’t just because of her, but because everything was changing. My friends were mad at me, I was in the talks of being made captain to a team that disliked me, I had just ruined a good friendship—and I was scared. I didn’t have the time or energy to come back here and sort this all out. I only came back here because you gave me the strength to.”
Your voice cracks as you begin scrambling up, “I need to go home.”
“Baby, no. Don’t.” He follows you, “please don’t do this. I can burn those letters right fucking now. That’s what they are to me. Scraps.”
You stubbornly pull at your boots. You don’t hear him—you can’t hear him.
Until—
“I love you,” he says. Broken, small… still lingering in the hallway like a lost child. He sucks in a shuddering breath, his fingers clutching his hips like that’s the only thing keeping him in balance. Like his world isn’t tilting and tumbling towards where you’re standing. Like he isn’t yearning to crawl to you and beg.
When he finally looks up, his voice breaks around your name. “I love you… and only you. I can trash everything. I can leave this apartment, this place, walk away from anything that reminds me of her or the life I had before I met you—before I saw you. I can burn it all down if you tell me to. But how am I—”
He halts, catching his breath. Allowing his eyes to close for a split second.
“How am I supposed to look at everything soft in my life and not think of you?” he breathes, “I love you to a point where I want to strip everything that makes me not good enough for you. I love you enough to pick up a thousand broken versions of myself and fix them back up for you.”
A tear falls off his lashes, he quickly wipes it away. “You ask me if I would have gone out with her. Baby, even if I did… I know it would have never worked out and I would have found my way to you somehow. Because just as much as you were made for me, every part of me was carved with your name etched on it.”
“Don’t.” you shake your head, eyebrows pulling together with utter agony. “Please don’t say anything more.”
“Why?” he asks, pleading, and steps forward.
You take two steps back. Shivering, chest spilling open.
“Because you will make me stay… again.”
// the fmc for this fic just might be the most pisces-cancer hybrid character ive ever written, lol.
⚬ pairing: ice hockey player! kim mingyu x fem! reader
⚬ word count: 9k
⚬ warnings: alcohol, food, unrequited love and depiction of certain symptoms of depression, eventual smut, violence, slutshaming and derogatory language, harassment and other mature themes MDNI
⚬ genres: uni au, forbidden romance(!!!), slow burn, angst, fluff sometimes, hurt/comfort. seungcheol, chaeyoung, dokyeom (perpetual gyu bestfriend in lunaverse) and jihyo (perpetual lesbian icon in lunaverse because i refuse to give her to a m*n) make an appearance.
playlist for part two <3
- sullen girl by fiona apple
- when the sun hits by slowdive
- liv or die by noah cyrus and lil xan
- champagne coast by blood orange
- all i need by radiohead (lol the sole reason why i wrote this fic)
author's note: not beta read per usual, lol. pardon any major errors/overwriting.
CHAPTER 7: run, run, run cleopatra
Because he was born twenty minutes before you, Ethan claimed all the words in the world before you could even see its light.
As a result, most family dinners often look like this — him talking in lengthy details about whatever is going on in his life while allowing you just enough window of time to discuss any significant news that your family should be made aware of.
So far, in this dinner at Aunt Sylvie’s diner, that window hasn’t been granted to you. Thus, it does leave your parents a bit concerned when Aunt Sylvie comes to your table briefly to greet them and while hugging you, casually comments, “How have you been sweetheart? I’m seeing you here after a whole week.”
Three pairs of questioning eyes turn to you.
You flush, “Yeah, I’ve been cutting my shifts here because I began tutoring at Uni.”
“Tutoring?” Ethan questions, silently demanding you to elaborate.
“Unofficially…someone in class needed a little extra help.” You shrug, but your voice trembles under the doubt that somehow something will give away just whom you are tutoring.
And if that happens, Ethan probably wouldn’t be the most pleased.
“Why are you doing the TA’s job?” Ethan prods.
But at the same time, your mother’s voice drowns him out. “We are proud of you honey, it’s very sweet that you are helping someone out.”
“Helping your classmates out is indeed a very noble cause,” your aunt nods, her voice pinned under her very polished accent. “But I have to be selfish and tell you that it’s hurting my clientele. People miss you around here.”
You know her intentions are feather-light, yet you feel guilty of not doing as much for her anymore.
“Well good news, I’m gonna be staying back after dinner for my shift, Aunt Sylvie.”
“That makes me very happy.” she says, pressing a fleeting kiss to your cheek before departing with a nod towards your parents.
You keep your gaze lowered for the rest of the meal as Ethan recounts his last few matches. At some point, he turns to you when he’s narrating just how hard he’s training for the game against your University and you can feel all the food you have pushed down threatening to come up for some reason.
He describes it as not just a game, but a final battle of a cold war that has been brewing for the past half-decade almost.
Even though he is all set to play pro for the first team that offered to sign him during his junior year, Ethan seems still dead set on competing with the polar opposite trajectory of Mingyu's career who, by the looks of it so far, seems to have no intentions of continuing playing after college.
“What a waste,” he says at some point, “I guess he knows his game is worn out by now. It’s not high school anymore.”
By the time you are done with the meal, you feel more exhausted than fulfilled. The same, one-sided complaints settle under your skin like an itch that never departs. Before he can pivot to some other tangent that only your parents have the tolerance to follow, you excuse yourself to the bathroom.
“I need to freshen up for my shift. Don’t leave without saying goodbye.” you tell your mother as your father insists on settling the bill that Betsy keeps on refusing to bring.
Inside the muggy bathroom, you ironically feel your breathing return.
A ripple of ease threads through your nerves as you splash handfuls of cold water over your face. You seal that ease back into yourself by painting your lips with the thick, cherry-maroon gloss that you carry in your purse and trace the outline of your big eyes with kohl.
Under your jacket, you already have the ivory dress which upon Veronica’s insistence, you began wearing a few weeks into working here. She said it blended with the rest of the themes and uniforms well. Soft satin with silk ribbons sewn in the neckline, it flutters around your thighs. Cass had made it for your nineteenth birthday and back then, you didn’t know you’d be wearing so much of it until it caught your manager’s eye on a random Tuesday.
Putting it on makes you look one with the giant vase of lilies that you sing by. Perhaps, that has been the intention all along. To make you look pretty enough for the eyes of the customers but not in a way that disrupts their conversations, more like a detail that completes the room rather than commanding it.
A delicate presence, a pleasant after-thought.
You are midway through running your fingers through your hair and making sure the gloss settles strictly in its place when your phone buzzes with a text from your brother.
Ethan: dude, hurry tf up…
You stare at your reflection one last time before collecting your things and walking out to wish your parents’ goodbye. To maybe even tell them to stay for a song or two if the diner is not too busy.
But you only take two steps outside the hallway and into the dining room before you flinch and duck behind a curtained pillar that conceals you from it.
Your stomach drops so hard that the echoes of the impact ring in your ears.
No.
It must have been a mirage. A trick your eyes played.
He’s not supposed to be here tonight… there was no game, no victories. You made sure to check.
Yet, you lean just enough to steal a clearer glance at the group of boys who have just walked in and are now chatting away with Veronica at the entrance.
You recognize most of them — Chan, Dokyeom, Wonwoo. Around them are a few faces that you can’t put a name to. Possibly freshmen, judging by the rosiness of their faces that can barely hide that look of unadulterated excitement of finally hanging out outside of practices and drills with the big dogs, the seniors. It is Fresher’s week after all.
In the middle of them all, doing most of the talking and charming on behalf of the tired players is him.
Mingyu.
Even with the hood of his plain sweatshirt covering most of his face from your view, his distinct tallness and athletic build gives him away with ease. And if that had failed you, you are very aware of the fact that there are only so many people in this whole wide world who can make Veronica blush like that.
You don’t know if Ethan has seen him yet. You don’t want him too, just the thought of it makes your heart shrink on itself with heavy dread.
And more than that, you don’t want to walk out and have Mingyu spot you. Because you know he’s going to smile at you or attempt to talk to you in front of your brother who would rather swallow broken shards of glass than have his sister be remotely associated with his arch nemesis.
Your breaths continue to shorten as you type a text to Ethan with shivering fingers.
‘I just got my periods and it’s gonna take me longer to deal with it…you guys should leave, I’ll see you next month. Tell mom and dad I said I love them.’
His response comes in the form of three detached emojis with their eyes rolling to the back. But nothing more. And for a short-lived moment, you feel a breeze of relief brush past you, making it all bearable.
You press yourself closer to the cold hard wall, deciding to make it your hideout until you are sure your family has left the diner completely.
You count your breaths as you see them walking closer towards the exit—the same one to which Mingyu is standing near with his back facing them. You continue chanting silent prayers under your breaths as the distance between your two worlds shrinks smaller and smaller.
Please don’t make him turn around.
Please don’t let Ethan look up from his phone and see them.
But even your Gods seem to have abandoned you today because just as Ethan slides his phone into his pocket, Mingyu turns around, staring straight at him.
You flinch like you have just witnessed two unmanned trucks skid off the road and collide into each other.
The way Ethan tenses physically hurts you to watch. Jaw locked, shoulders straightened, fists curled.
For several moments, nothing happens.
Just the two of them surveying each other. Mingyu, amused. Ethan, agitated.
You hold your breath, preparing for the worst, but your mother dismantles it before a discord can even begin taking shape when she continues to walk past them like there is nothing to be tensed about.
“Hey, excuse me,” she says as she passes the team, offering a polite smile.
Mingyu steps aside immediately, all easy manners and gentle edges than Ethan ever credits him for. “Of course, ma’am.”
Your father nods, Ethan doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.
Even from here, you can feel the tension in the way his gaze lingers a second too long. Mingyu's demeanor sharpens too. You see it…the flicker of recognition, the almost-smile that never quite forms with a silent acknowledgement of the competition he has faced all his life.
Ethan shrugs him off with a scoff as he walks out.
Mingyu doesn’t even bother letting his gaze follow him all the way. Wonwoo mumbles something that makes the team laugh—most probably something at the expense of your brother, the captain of their rival team and the only one giving them something serious to worry about on the field.
And even though you find yourself disagreeing with your brother on most things, you cannot simply sever the connection you have shared with him ever since the cells in your mother’s womb had split to form you both simultaneously.
It makes you want to walk out of the shadows and protect him in the rooms he’s not in. It makes you want to ask Mingyu what it is that he thinks is so funny?
Surely, Ethan would do the same for you…won’t he?
Your phone buzzes in your palm, reminding you of its existence. You feel lightheaded as you answer your brother’s call.
“Guess who just showed up at the diner?” he says, not giving you a chance to speak. “That meathead, Mingyu. You sure you don’t wanna bail out on the shift and come with us?”
“Why would I want to do that, Ethan?” you sigh, ignoring his initial comments.
“I don’t know…I don’t want you to sing in front of that jackass.”
“I have sung in front of worse people.”
“Tell me if he does something. If he even looks at you weird—”
“Ethan, you're acting crazy. He doesn’t even know me.” you bite your lip hard until you taste metal.
Growing up, you were always able to tell whenever he lied. You wonder if Ethan shares that intuition, if he can tell you are lying through your teeth right now.
“Whatever…just don’t look at him.”
“I won’t.”
You end the call before you are forced to tell more lies to deflect the overwhelm. You press your palms over your face, a shuddering breath escapes through the crevices of your cupped fingers. Once you are sure you are not as flustered to a point that makes it obvious, you step out of the shadows and into the lights.
Mingyu’s head tilts instantly like even your muffled footsteps against the plush carpet drew his attention. Like a magnet pulling north, inevitable and unthinking.
His eyes find yours before you can pretend to look elsewhere. His face visibly relaxes out of what seemed like a mask he had been wearing all night when he smiles at you, giving you a small wave.
Yet, you pretend not to see him and walk with hurried steps like you cannot wait to get away from him.
Because you can’t.
Because not getting away from him would only intensify this unwelcomed, unwanted ache in your chest that keeps on insisting that you are physically incapable of ever hating him, even when all your circumstances make it the most sensible for you to do so.
CHAPTER 8: i never, never want to go home
You do not meet Mingyu after the night at the diner.
He doesn’t understand why. But he doesn’t push either. Perhaps it is because you both have your mid-terms week to prepare for.
Still not too confident in his preparation so far, he thinks he could use some help. But something about the flip in your demeanor makes him stall from asking, which is strange to say the least because prior to this, he has never had any issues admitting defeat when he’s with you.
There’s just something about the way you look at him whenever he gets stuck somewhere — not like a tutor, or someone who holds something above him — but more like a friend sitting by his side giving him directions. Or each time you tell him not to go as per the index of the book, but by what makes sense to learn in a sequence that one can only understand when they’ve been through the material several times already.
Mingyu has always lived a life on easy mode. Not essentially relaxed or lazy, but doing just enough that would satisfactorily get him by without any underlying ambitions of being best of the best. Besides, things just naturally happen for him. And he always thinks there's better aspects of life he could make time for, the softer ones.
But seeing you so put together often makes him push himself harder. It is one of the reasons why he has begun replaying the voice notes you send him explaining concepts instead of his usual playlist when he’s on the bus with the team returning from a game. Or why he has begun waking up an hour earlier to go over your notes until he can almost recite them just from memory.
It is all for you, and from you.
But it isn’t just the same without you by his side.
So when you text him a week before the mid-term, asking if he wants to hop on a Zoom call to go through the syllabus once and resolve any doubts if he has them, he replies back with an enthusiastic ‘yes, that sounds great!’ so quickly that it is embarrassing. Like he already had your chats with him open when you sent him the text, because of course he did.
He knows it is so silly, yet he wipes the surface of Dokyeom’s dining table meticulously before setting his laptop and organizing all the text he’d need along with four extra pens lined by it.
The moment he joins the call, it only takes a second worth of static before the sound of your laughter is filtering in through his earphones like music.
He smiles back without meaning to, too caught up in the image of your dimly lit but beautiful face on his screen to enquire what is it that’s making you laugh so much.
“Okay, this is very funny, I’ll give you that…” you manage through broken wheezes before a flurry of giggles takes over you again.
He blinks, checks behind himself to see if Dokyeom’s playing any tricks, before remembering — his background on Zoom is that of the teletubbies with the red teletubby making up his costume.
“Oh shit, sorry.” he chuckles too, quickly working around to fix it back to normal as you wipe your tears on the screen. “Forgot to change that after Dokyeom borrowed my computer.”
“Yeah, sure, blame it on Dokyeom.”
He has only ever seen you laugh like that when he said some poorly timed joke about how Statistics deserves the PR that Mathematics got because ‘that shit is nuts’ after you walked him through the Bayesian theorem. And he wishes you were physically here with him so that he could witness it again up close. How your fingers fly to your mouth when the laughter gets uncontrollably hard like you’re trying to physically seal it in. Or how your hair escapes from behind your ears when you duck your face low to hide it from the world.
He stays rooted there, not saying anything, not doing anything— just admiring, with the faintest smile curving his lips until your laughter dissolves.
“Anyways, I thought we should revise the third unit again.” you shake your head, avoiding looking at him like you didn’t just have his heart do somersaults in his chest.
You continue revising for nearly two full hours while he pretends to read something on another tab when actually, he’s just staring at you.
Your eyes downturned to focus on your handwritten notes. Your eyebrows scrunched with that little frown between them as you scribble something endlessly. Your face is illuminated just by the soft white glow of your screen while your hair catches the mellow gold emanating from your fairy-lights behind you. Effortlessly delicate.
You only look at him whenever he asks you something and after quickly solving his query, return back to your tasks.
He hates it — he hates that in the library and he hates it even on this zoom call.
If he could, he'd willingly let himself be held captive by your deep, dark gaze and live all his days under that said captivity like the happiest man on the planet.
By the time midnight rolls around, he’s a mess. Like a desperate dog trying to get your attention in any way possible. Each time you as much as suggest dropping off the call, he interrupts you with a “sure but I just can’t understand why we are taking the present values here…”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” you yawn, blinking slowly and trying to keep your watery eyes open for him. “Truce?”
His heart skips a beat hearing you sleepily say that word. The word you both decided upon and one that is uttered a million times across the globe. Yet, it feels intimately personal. Like a shared language the two of you made up.
“Truce. Tomorrow sounds cool.” he nods eagerly, already feeling guilty about keeping you up later than what was needed all so he could stare at you.
“Good night, Mingyu.” You give him a little wave because maybe sleep has worn down your usual armour which restricts you from ever saying goodbye to him.
“Sleep well.” he smiles, not turning the screen off until you do.
He cracks his neck from side to side, stretching his arms up as if attempting to make the warm, euphoric feeling in his chest melt and seep into every fibre of his being.
A jarring clink of metal hitting ceramic pulls him out of his dreamy haze. Dokyeom is leaning against the kitchen counter since God knows when, eating spoonfuls after spoonfuls of soggy cereal as he eyes him like a hungry cat stalking an injured sparrow.
“Hey,” Mingyu clears his throat, toughening up his voice as if he wasn’t just wishing you like your personal teddy-bear. “What’s up?”
Dokyeom lifts the bowl up to his lips and finishes the remaining, cold milk in a go. He shakes his head, wiping his lips with the sleeve of his shirt. “Can’t believe girls slip off their numbers into your jacket, man.”
⸻
The day before the exam isn’t all sunshines and rainbows though. At least not for Mingyu.
He hasn’t really budged off from his makeshift study-table at Dokyeom’s dining table in days. Only leaving the space for his daily four-hour long practices and workouts or to sleep.
He just doesn’t want to disappoint you — even though you have told him that mid-terms for this specific Professor would be harder than finals so a lower average is pretty much guaranteed.
Yet for each question that he gets wrong, Mingyu’s conviction diminishes to a point that he questions if in the past month or so, he learnt anything from you at all or was he just busy being mesmerized by you?
He doesn’t know if the two of you are even at a point in your ‘friendship’, if he can even call it that, where he can just call you and rant about it. You’ve made it very clear with your disinterest in any other topics that he brings up for him to believe that.
He spends the entire afternoon reworking his most common errors and doesn’t even notice the sun set behind him until Dokyeom comes up to him.
“Dude,” he says, slapping Mingyu on the back, “Jess's coming home tonight, hope you don’t mind.”
Shit—
He totally forgot about Dokyeom’s long-distance girlfriend who he was told would be visiting the town.
“Yeah, yeah, I made arrangements to crash at Jihyo’s for the week.” he lies.
“No I’m good with you here,” Dokyeom says, quickly, “we just might need the place to ourselves for tonight.”
“Nah dude, I don’t wanna interfere. Just give me a moment.”
Dokyeom gives him one, simple nod of gratitude, telling him to stay back for dinner with Jess before disappearing out of the door to pick his girlfriend up. Mingyu collects his things, tidies up the place and even puts the chicken out to thaw that Dokyeom forgot about — but doesn’t overstay his welcome.
⸻
Mingyu hates how pressure-inducing libraries can be during exam-periods. But studying at the campus café, he realizes, seems performative to the onlookers because even with his laptop and notes out all over the table, he has lost count of how many times people come up to him to strike a conversation. Girls reminding him not to bail out on their invitations, freshmen coming up to tell him how they’d love to hang sometime.
He smiles at all of them, flirts back until they’ve been charmed enough to leave him alone when he apologizes with a ‘would love to…just need to get through these mid-terms right now.’
Perform, pretend, please.
That’s what he does until his face is buzzing with exhaustion curving and contorting into fake smiles.
He packs up his things, nearly accepting defeat and realizing he still needs a place to sleep tonight before the big exam tomorrow.
He is about to text Jihyo when his phone lights up with an unexpected call.
You.
The phone rings twice as he blinks, trying to figure out if you actually called him or if it’s just his tired eyes playing tricks before he hurriedly answers it right before the call cuts off.
“Hello?”
“Oh hi,” his favorite voice answers, gentle and calm, “I… uh, I just wanted to call and check in to see how you’re doing. Hope you’re not stressing much.”
He scratches the back of his neck, thinking of another fake answer to appear cool as ever. But something within him unlatches at the mere presence of you, only if it’s just your voice, as it presses against his ear. And he crumbles.
“Actually,” he sighs, “I am kinda struggling.”
“Do you need my help with something?”
“As much as I’d want it to be otherwise…I do.”
“Mingyu,” your voice softens even more like it is trying to cushion his fall. “You don’t have to feel bad about asking for my assistance. Can we meet somewhere?”
He wasn’t expecting you to offer that. At least not physically, given the fact that out of the six of your last study sessions, four of them were all online.
“I would…I would love to.” he nods, even though you can’t see. “Library?”
“Gosh no, I hate libraries during exam weeks. Everyone’s like a zombie in there.”
“Same,” he laughs, “uh, I’m at the café but it’s…not quite ideal either.”
“The girls next door are having a slumber party,” you reply, “so that checks out my room as well.”
A hopeless silence stretches between the two of you, heavy and desperate. Mingyu is about to drop the plan altogether.
But then, you interrupt his thought before he can even verbalize it when you ask, too small and doubtful, like you are always bracing for some impact.
“How about your place, Gyu?”
He feels his chest collapse on itself.
But this time, not with dread.
Instead, a quiet possibility of something that feels too fragile for him to hold tight upon. Yet, he does.
“Yes,” he answers, “we can go to my place.”
CHAPTER 9: on my last strength against you
You had tried.
Since the night at the diner, you had really tried your best to avoid Mingyu in spaces of your life he didn’t belong in.
You had tried to suppress it — the craving you felt for his effortless ease. The warm breeze of movement whenever he’d walk in, or lean in, like the air displacing itself to make room for his citrusy scent. The weight of his voice that somehow just made everything pause.
But mostly, you had craved the sense of safety you felt around him.
How even his shadow would loom over you as you both strolled through the bookshelves searching for a textbook, like it was looking after you.
Or how his fingers would always reach forward to carry your books before his own. How he’d lean coolly across the table, often making it look narrower than it was with his knees bracketing yours.
You had tried not to think about it, hold it all in, until you just could not.
You wanted to hear him complain about portion sizes again. You wanted to make fun of the way he’d write his g’s and y’s, almost identical.
And above it all. You had just wanted him.
Kim Mingyu had done what Kim Mingyu does best — saturated your mind and soul with his endearing existence until you just could not look away.
Even after knowing the costs… even after fearing the truths… even after watching the wordlessly icy encounter between him and your brother, you wanted nothing more than to just be near him.
So you relented and called him, making some excuse about ‘checking in’ when all you were looking forward to was hearing the sound of his voice.
You had instantly regretted suggesting to meet at his place — because what if he took that suggestion otherwise? What if, to him, you were another one of those trying to just slip into his bed with him?
You shake your head, that is a ridiculous thought. Mingyu would never think of you like that…
Yet, you put on an additional armour — a jacket — over the dress you had spent fifteen minutes choosing because you thought it made you look pretty. And for some reason, you wanted to feel pretty.
It is so vain, you think, dolling yourself up like this for a study date.
But a startling knock at your door jerks you out of your never-ending train of dilemmas. You quickly smooth the dress one last time before picking up the spiral-bound book that contains everything you’d need to take a look at the night before the test.
A strong wave of nostalgia hits you right when your fingers curl around the doorknob.
Almost a month ago, this was the same door that had separated you from him. The same pull of the knob that had twisted with it all the certainties that you knew, and turned them into uncertainties you didn’t know would make you this happy.
The hinges of the door creak when you open it, and for a moment, you forget where you are. For it is not the same Kim Mingyu you had opened the door to all those days ago. Back then, he had leaned in the doorway, smiled at you with recognition, made the conversation flow too easily and made the room seem too small.
Right now, though, he stands there somewhat nervous. Strange.
Some of his hair falls over his brows messy and abandoned, like he gave up on brushing it back. Faint shadows loom over his face, enough to tell you he has had a long, long day.
Still, he smiles at you.
“You look really… nice.” he says, slowly, so slowly that it is almost devastating.
“Thanks,” you tuck your hair behind your ear.
“Sorry for the delay though, I uh,” he clears his throat, “I needed to tidy up my place.”
“Don’t worry Mingyu, I can survive at your bachelor pad for a few hours.”
He laughs, “that’s not what I meant. It was just a bit dusty.”
The girls next door shout the lyrics to some song on top of their lungs as you shut and lock your door behind you while he slips the bag containing your books off your fingers and slides it onto his own shoulders. You let him. Because you know it’s little things like these — this constant contact of skins, words, eyes, gestures — is what grounds him.
“You okay?” You ask him as you begin walking side by side across the dimly lit hallways of the dormitories that smell faintly of mildew.
He tilts his head, already looking more at ease than earlier.
“I am now.”
⸻
Mingyu’s apartment is a fifteen minute walk off campus. A neat, spacious place which comes with a balcony and whose rent you know would make you roll your eyes at him.
Walking in, you’re hit with the scent of cedar and fresh laundry — which judging by the constant hum of the washer in the distance, is a pile he most probably stocked in right before coming to pick you up.
The lights are a welcoming, mellow gold which shine just a tad too bright and flicker like they’re adjusting being turned on after some significant underuse over time.
The carpet looks freshly vacuumed too.
But it’s the seemingly unnoticeable things that give it away. Like the plants shrivelled dead in his balcony. Or the bag of some basic groceries that still lies unopened on the polished kitchen counter. The absence of dishes in the sink and the books overstuffed into the shelf, forgotten.
It looks like a home deserted, which is only recently witnessing its first signs of life after months.
“You have a beautiful place.” you tell him regardless, your eyes taking in the details of the arched doorway leading into the drawing room.
“Thanks,” he answers, already in the kitchen, "it's a shame I barely ever come here anymore. Water or tea?”
“Just water’s fine.” you answer, “but why though? And where do you live if not here?”
“Dokyeom’s.” he says quietly, almost like he doesn’t want to say it out loud. “It’s just more convenient. For practice, I mean. Closer to the campus and everything.”
Your fingers cup the glass of water that he offers you, but your eyes remain on him. Lingering and loaded.
He stares back into them, then licks his lips. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” your heart races.
“Look at me like you know I’m lying.”
A short titter escapes your lips with the ease of a breath. “Well, then don’t lie. My intuition is just stronger than average.”
He leans by the counter next to you, his fingers tapping against the marble casually like his close proximity isn’t making you dizzy. Whenever he is near you, like this, you’re always reminded of just how much taller he is to you. And you probably shouldn’t be reveling in the feeling of it this much.
But some carnal part within you…this uncontrollable thing…it does. It often makes you want to reach up and just feel his firm shoulders under your palms, or see if your fingers could even reach the back of his head if your lips were to ever meet—
“What gives it away?” he asks, a small smirk tilting his lips like he just heard your thoughts out loud.
“Wh–what?” you stutter, unintentionally taking a step back.
“What gives it away to you when I’m lying?” he asks, lolling his head to a side almost curiously. “You always seem to catch me with those big, beautiful eyes of yours.”
You choose to ignore that last bit because you know that if you focus too much on it, you’d lose your goddamn mind.
“You just seem very unhappy when you do.” You shrug, peeling your eyes away from him, “and your face drops and drains like you can’t stand being dishonest. But for some reason, you do.”
“Don’t we all?” he asks, “I mean, do you never lie?”
The glass almost slips out of your grip. The question hits you like a morning alarm, too loud and eager to disrupt the dreams you had been knitting lazily, carelessly. You want to tell him that of course, you do lie. That this entire arrangement is based on one of those lies. That you’re dreading seeing Ethan again because of one of your lies and you’re not too sure what it would be that finally breaks you.
“I do, sometimes…” you whisper. “I guess my face is just not as expressive as yours so people don’t catch it.”
Maybe he can sense your discomfort or see your jitters because he only nods, keeping those observant eyes all over you — taking in your trembling lips, your avoidant eyes before slipping down to the visible stretch of your collarbones.
Just when you think you should pivot by pulling out the notes for the night, he exhales.
“Well, the truth about why I don’t really live here anymore is because…some time back, I said something stupid to someone here. And then it resulted in this tense disagreement in our friend-group.”
His breath shudders like it has just put down something heavy after carrying it for a long time. You stay silent, but you do move in a bit closer, your thumb finding its way over his fingers. Not soothing, not rubbing. Just staying with the quite presence of your touch.
“We all used to hang out around here all the time, you know? Always too loud that the neighbours would complain, always too full that I had to arrange for extra seats. But it all just abruptly stopped.”
He glances at your face like he’s looking for some signs of wariness, or judgement. But you only shift closer.
“So when a pipe burst some months back, I just took that as an escape — or at least that’s what my friend Jihyo thinks.”
You let what he has just confessed settle somewhere between the two of you. It’s not heavy, nor ugly. Just so, so human.
And it breaks you to see that he believed otherwise for so long.
“Not an escape, but maybe a break?” you suggest, gently, carefully. “Because if you were running away from it, you wouldn’t be here tonight. You wouldn’t have cleaned it all up and invited me here.”
He doesn’t stop staring at you, like hearing you speak soothes something within him.
“I really wanna come back here. I just feel so shitty that I abandoned it for so long.”
“Well,” you say, “if I were you, I’d start by getting some flowers back into those pots.”
“And what flowers do you suggest I grow here in my humble garden, your highness?” he says, painting his voice with a fake British accent that makes you laugh.
You match his playfulness, “Only the most beautiful ones, of course.”
“Which are…?”
“Peonies,” you exclaim, “you idiot.”
⸻
Just an hour worth of pep-talk is all it takes for the both of you to feel more at ease about the exam tomorrow. And because he is able to miraculously understand all the concepts he was struggling with all day in a matter of minutes now, Kim Mingyu has been getting too brave with his antics.
Sometime between nine and ten p.m., you both had abandoned the comfortable, plush couch to sit on the cushions on the ground with all the books scattered over his coffee-table. Well, you are the only one who’s sitting it seems, because Mingyu has long given up on the idea of yet another ‘one last revision’ and now lays on his side with his head propped up over his fist.
You roll your eyes at him again when he mentions dinner for the tenth time in the last fifteen minutes, but your smile gives it away — which only fuels his audacity to disrupt.
Because after only a few short moments of pindrop silence, you feel the ghost of his touch almost brushing the skin of your thighs as he fiddles with a small corner of your dress’s hem.
And just like that, you forget how to breathe.
Your eyes shoot towards him, wondering what he’s thinking, only to find his lips twitch into something small, something unreadable, as he holds the fabric reverently between his fingers. This isn’t the first time when Mingyu has made it evident that he can’t stop touching what you wear…or just you, for that matter.
He thinks he’s too smart, that you won’t notice it when he sits by you, rests his arm over the back of your chair and lets his fingers twirl ever so softly with your loose hair.
Or when he sometimes places his palm flat over your back — only momentarily, to get your attention or to guide you through an overcrowded cafeteria.
But this time, the lack of subtlety and the sheer rawness of the act makes you stutter.
“Silk?” he asks, finally tilting his head back just enough for his shadowed gaze to melt with yours.
"Wha...what?" you somehow manage not to trip your words over your breaths.
"Your dress...is it made of silk?" he says, too curious over something so irrelevant.
“It’s satin,” you can only squeak, your skin suddenly too aware of the smooth fabric that hugs and clings to it at various angles under his watchful gaze. “My friend Cass stitches most of my clothes for me.”
Mingyu nods, letting the lush fabric drop down from his fingers. But he makes no attempt at retrieving them away, just lets his hand fall over your knee.
Not grabbing or squeezing, just a soft warm press of skin on skin.
“They’re beautiful on you… she seems like a lovely friend.”
“She is.” you pretend to return back to writing in your notebook, even though all your attention has pooled in the spot where his fingers sit over your body.
“I used to make a few designs too.”
“You did?”
“Yeah…here and there, during my free time. Nothing serious.”
“Do you have any of those designs right now?”
He glances away from you towards a door that you aren’t too sure conceals what.
“I actually do.” he replies, then looks back at you with sheer excitement. “Wait a second.”
⸻
Mingyu reappears with a giant, black binder with a few loose sheets poking out.
“This is just unfair,” you complain, flipping through his hand-drawn designs — some apparel, others just patterns. “You are the best at the sport that you play, your average is almost as good as mine, and you are creative too?”
“Says the girl with a voice that one hears only at the pearly gates of heaven.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“So are you.”
“I’m not!” you retort, pointing to a sketch of a jacket. “Look at this — the details, the drape, the structure. You’re so good at this.”
Mingyu watches you instead of the drawing, the usual flaming passion in his eyes mellowed down into the toasty warmth of dying embers. “You think so?”
“Mhmm.” you’re too busy admiring the designs that you almost miss it when your stomach grumbles loudly.
Almost.
Because Mingyu begins laughing like that was some cue. That loud, open laugh that is raspy at the edges and emerges right from his chest. You feign offense to hide your blush. But he’s already up on his feet and pulling you up on yours with his sure palms supporting your much smaller ones.
“Let’s get something to fill Mr. Grumbly Grumps up.” he teases, “also, please don’t tell me if it tastes horrible, it’s been very long since I last cooked for someone else. I will, as a matter of principle, cry if you complain.”
You help him out by emptying the groceries out of the bag and onto the counter.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.” you scoff, “the only other things I’ve heard more about than your stupid abs are your cooking skills.”
Mingyu gives you that tongue-in-the-cheek smile while slicing garlic, the one that suggests he is having a hard time holding back whatever it is that he wants to say out loud.
“What?” you press.
“Nuh uh.”
“No, you have to tell me.”
“It’s just an observation that my father and I have.”
“What observation?”
“You know? The one that goes that whenever a girl wants something really bad, she’s most likely to affix the adjective ‘stupid’ to it. For example, my mom is always like ‘ugh, I could kill for one of those stupid oatmeal cookies right now,’ or my sister who is always complaining about her stupid crush.”
“Okay first, that’s gross. And second, that’s untrue.”
“Backed by research and scientific data,” he shrugs.
“You’re being really stupid right now, I don’t want you or your stupid abs.”
He ducks just in time as you hurl a cherry tomato at him.
“Just keep hammering my point to the wall, princess.”
CHAPTER 10: i'm a moth, who just wants to share your light
It is a cloudy day when you both meet after your mid-terms.
Being back in the library packed with buzzing bodies after spending your last meeting at the hushed intimacy of his house, and all that you shared, seems like hitting restart on a game you didn’t know you were playing.
Sitting by each other now with a single computer shared between you both feels oddly distant, despite the physical nearness. Especially after he had made you taste the sauce as he cooked it and then licked the spoon that you had in your mouth clean. Especially after he had driven you back to your dorm—even though you insisted you could walk—simply because he refused to let you do so in the dark.
Especially after you had taken him by surprise when you turned after unlocking your door and wrapped your arms around him, pulling him in for a hug that lingered longer than it needed to.
Especially after several strands of your hair had gotten stuck to his warm hoodie, refusing to part even after you pulled back and wished him luck for the exam while he stared down at you like he was hanging on by some thread. A thread that was actively loosening up.
But you know it had been the right call to decline his invitation to meet at his house again and suggest the library instead.
You can’t believe it had taken Heather appearing at your doorstep, asking for a specific charger, to rattle you out of the fantasies you had been weaving in your head.
Fantasies that had felt beautiful because they were a kaleidoscope of someone else’s broken wishes.
The guilt that had consumed you at the mere sight of her smiling face was so enormous that it felt like all your blood had drained out of your system to make space for that corrosive thing as it ate you alive.
You had attempted to right your wrongs by promptly giving Heather Mingyu’s number, telling her that Chaeyoung left it before leaving.
Still, you weren’t brave enough to confess fully, so you carefully omitted out the details about the whole tutoring fiasco.
Now, he sits beside you as you shoot down yet another attempt of his to crack a joke. He doesn’t look confused though.
Just…curious, with his eyes scanning across you once.
He shifts back in his seat, allowing you space. Like by now, he understands that this isn’t something that he caused. That maybe you’re just having one of your tougher days where him being playful irks you more than it entertains you.
What he’s blissfully unaware of is the fact that you plan to make this permanent now.
He leans back in his chair, his knee pressing against your own in that way that always makes your skin tingle.
Except this time, you shift yours further away.
He notices it, momentarily glancing up from the screen of his phone like someone reached forward and stole something precious away from him, but doesn’t comment.
You hear him answering a few texts, snorting at the others before—
“Huh? Strange.”
You turn to face him, “what?”
He shakes his head, pocketing his phone. “This girl named Heather. She just invited me to a charity concert her club is organizing tonight. It’s strange cause I don’t really know her.”
“Heather? She’s sweet.”
“You know her?”
“Who do you think gave her your number?” you pretend to snort, going back to your notes because you don’t think you have it in you to see his reaction.
There’s a long pause that stretches so tight, it almost creates a rift in time and space.
“You did?” he asks, voice small.
You hum, still unable to look at him. “I mean…so many people have your number, she would have gotten it from somewhere.”
Mingyu scoffs before you can even finish that sentence, like he wants to physically brush off your words that just landed on him. You finally look at him only to find him watching you. Not with anger, not with disappointment.
Just disbelief.
Pure, unadulterated disbelief. Like he somehow misunderstood the entire story that you had written and narrated to him.
And that desolate look scares you more than if he was, in fact, cross with you.
“You think I should go with her?” he asks with a low, humourless chuckle. But his voice remains dull, lacking any edges that could make you flinch.
It only fuels your cruel bravery.
“If you wish…we’re almost done here. I’m no one to stop you.”
“Right,” he says, letting his eyes wander off into a distant corner before returning back to you. “Right. Because you’d only stop me if it were interfering with our schedule and nothing else.”
“Precisely.” your jaw locks and you shut your book off with more force than necessary.
Mingyu doesn’t utter another word, something so uncharacteristic for the boy whom you have grown accustomed to reciting his entire post-study schedule and what he’s planning to eat for dinner after all your sessions.
He just collects his things, not furiously, but certainly with an edge.
The air between the two of you distorts into an energy that you’ve never experienced with him. You blame it on the humidity and not the sinking feeling inside your gut.
Still, Mingyu waits for you to walk you out until your paths diverge. And just before they do, right outside the library, you turn to him.
“Mingyu?” you call out and he jerks his head towards you, something hopeful budding in his eyes.
You crush it before it can bloom as you reach into your bag and pull out the umbrella you always carry. “You should take this, the weather’s only gonna get worse... have fun at the concert.”
You turn around before he can notice the moisture in your eyes, or how your voice cracks.
⸻
Mingyu has never really been the one to decline an invite, especially not when the said invite comes with the prospect of meeting new people, enjoying free drinks and good music.
But lately, he has taken a liking to slowing down more.
He prefers listening to softer music over loud noises, the kind of voices where he has to hold his breath to not miss it. Staring at a specific pair of wide, glossy eyes instead of neon lights. Calling truce when the overwhelm gets too much, instead of smiling and performing through it. Being held between the softest arms outside the world’s smallest dorm room as the voice of an angel wishes him luck for his exam, right by his ear.
He doesn’t know what he did to scare her away like that.
Was he too big? Too loud? Too demanding and insistent?
When he had first fallen in love — if one can even call it that — some deep, untouched part of him had remained untouched. Like his soul knew that even though he loved her, he wasn’t really in love with Chaeyoung.
Mingyu never understood when people told him that loving someone and being in love with someone were too vastly different things.
But now, he does.
Because with Chaeyoung, it had felt like he was falling off a cliff he knew very well the height, the perils, and the climb of.
But with you? It was like an unseen force had just hurled him off the edge of something — perhaps the Earth, perhaps the sky.
His fall had been inevitable, unending…it had already happened. And all that was left was the slow drift downwards.
And God he wanted it to go on forever. Just suspended somewhere he couldn’t name, being pulled towards something he had known primordially.
That untouched part of him? He didn’t know when he had reached for it and handed it to you himself.
Yet now, it seems like you have lent it to someone else.
Or worse, discarded it, like it was some ugly, rotten thing.
He really wants to understand why. He thought he had this mapped out this time around, thought he was more observant, more careful, more receptive. But as Heather snakes her arms around him with a sense of possession he didn’t know he had given her, he wonders if he really had been all that. Or did he just make it up in his head?
Heather is, indeed, a very sweet girl.
Yet, the more she clings on to him, the more she laughs at whatever he says — he feels like he has never been more misplaced in his whole life.
Her perfume is sharp, floral. Nothing like the quiet, almost-there scent you carried. Like old paper warmed under sunlight.
She passes him yet another chilled can of beer, bringing it up to his lips and tilting it even after he tells her he’s good. When he carefully takes it from her fingers, and places it back on a table to be forgotten in a sea of bodies colliding with each other, she pouts. But not for long, because the very next moment, she is pulling him along to flaunt him to her friends.
He lets her pull him along. He smiles at the names that dissolve the moment they reach his ears. He lets the music settle deep and hum in his bones, a cruel mimicry of the way his ribs would sing whenever he touched you. He smiles — the practiced movement of the stretch of his lips and ease of his breaths.
But none of it lands.
None of it sticks.
This concert is a place for him to be, a place he would have never complained about. Yet all the noise that once drowned his thoughts out seems muffled now.
His mind keeps on betraying him, dragging him to the same quiet place that he doesn’t own but had only rented out from you.
He doesn’t pay much attention to the song that is nearing its end. But even as Heather coils tighter around him, dancing to it, he catches a lyric or two and knows that it’s about grief muffled between loud bass. The lights are a pulsating red like they’re signalling an end to something.
You… sitting beside him in the library, pretending not to look at him.
You… shifting your knees away like his touch had turned into something offensive.
You… handing him the umbrella under the thickest grey cloud ever, biting back something under your tight lips like you weren’t actively unravelling him at the seams.
The song shifts to a duller, more romantic one. Heather’s hold loosens, she tells him she needs to go somewhere quick and leaves. The lights change to pure white.
You, sitting on the floor of his house with a pot of ramen shared between your bodies, making it seem worth spending a life in.
You, trying to hide your smile at his oddly timed jokes when you think he’s not looking in the library.
You, with your skin flushing pink whenever he tells you you look beautiful, which is almost everyday.
You, opening the door to Chaeyoung’s room with confusion in those deep dark eyes, stuttering and changing his life forever.
You, with a guitar on your lap and exhaustion in your throat, still somehow making a space for him to take refuge in your softness forever.
Something shatters in his chest the moment the song ends. Its jagged edges poking at his heart, deflating it until nothing remains.
“You wanna try Molly backstage?” Heather shouts over the music, having appeared out of nowhere, “I know a guy.”
You had looked… resolved. Like someone choosing to amputate their own limb to stop an infection from spreading.
He exhales sharply, tipping his head back as the ceiling lights blur into abstract orbs.
“Mingyu?” Heather calls, “hey are you drunk already?”
He’s thinking about that thread again.
The one he didn’t even know existed until it started tightening around his ribs, pulling him toward you in ways that defied logic, timing, consequence. The one he had seen reflected in your eyes that night outside your dorm when you hugged him — fragile, trembling, but undeniably there.
He had held onto it.
God, he had lived inside it.
And today, in the library, it snapped — clean and mercilessly.
“Dude?” Heather’s voice cuts through again, this time accompanied by a gentle shake of his arm. “Are you even listening?”
He looks at her then. There is nothing unkind in his expression. Just absence…like you took away everything that warmed his eyes in exchange for a small umbrella with your initials painted on the base.
“Yes?” he says automatically, but even to his own ears, it sounds hollow. Like a placeholder. Like something meant to fill silence rather than to convey truth.
Her smile falters, just slightly. “You’ve been off all night.”
He almost laughs at that.
All night.
As if it had only started tonight.
As if something fundamental inside him hadn’t been displaced hours earlier, in a quiet library where the loudest sound had been the turning of pages and the breaking of something neither of you had dared to name.
“I think I should go,” he says suddenly. “I need to be somewhere.”
Somewhere that exists in fragments — your voice, your hands, the way you had said his name like it meant something fragile and worth protecting.
Heather blinks. He hands her the drink, untouched.
“I’m sorry,” he adds, and this time, he means it — for the inconvenience, for the confusion, for being physically present while being irreparably elsewhere.
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “I figured.”
// im not lying when i say i looped 'all i need' by radiohead like crazy while planning this fic, all thanks to the person who introduced me to that song!
i probably shouldn't have released this already but welp, i hope this didn't sound too rushed.
pls let me know if you would like to be added to the next part. as always, comments, reblogs and asks about the fic are always appreciated <3
@woo-wonwoo @meowchella @yoongihan @berry-s-stuff @slut4kwon (im sorry i also tagged people who reblogged this asking for the next part, please let me know if you would like to be taken off the taglist, no hard feelings at all!!)
⚬ pairing: ice hockey player! kim mingyu x fem! reader
⚬ word count: 12k for part one
⚬ warnings for part one: alcohol, drinking, food, unrequited love and depiction of certain symptoms of depression, eventual smut, violence, slutshaming and derogatory language, harassment and other mature themes MDNI
⚬ genres: uni au, friends to lovers to enemies, forbidden romance(!!!), slow burn, angst, fluff sometimes, hurt/comfort. seungcheol, chaeyoung (bp or twice, your choice), dokyeom (perpetual gyu bestfriend in lunaverse) and jihyo (perpetual lesbian icon in lunaverse because i refuse to give her to a m*n) make an appearance.
playlist for part one <3
something stupid by frank and nancy sinatra
lacy by olivia rodrigo
high and dry by radiohead
the greatest by billie eilish
scar tissue by red hot chilli peppers
credits: to @uzmacchiato for the gorgeous lace dividers and to my pookie @nerdycheol for reading the first few chapters and telling me not to trash this.
author's note: none of this is beta read so please do not expect this to be perfect. this one's going to be quite a long fic so i shall be releasing it in a total of three or four parts, please let me know if you want to be added to the taglist <3
CHAPTER 1: no longer who i used to be
Kim Mingyu never thought that a day would come where he’d step into his favorite restaurant in the town after a day of gruelling practice and his first thought would be that he’d rather die than face his friends over dinner.
But life is full of surprises — it has its ways of blanketing the brightest of suns with a grey cloud of gloom. And as he tugs at the knot of tie for what seems like the seventh time in the last one minute as the hostess leads him in, Mingyu already looks exhausted.
“You’re the first one of the party to arrive,” she looks over her shoulder, her maroon-coated lips stretched into a professional curve.
He nods.
She shows him to the largest table draped in lilac satin as per Chaeyoung’s request and replaces the ‘reserved’ sign with a menu-card.
“Should I get you some water?” she asks, wiping the table again, just in case. “Or anything to start. Your server will be here shortly.”
“No, I’m good for now.” he clears his throat and tries to unlock his jaw, “I’ll just wait for the others.”
She smiles and walks away like she has done multiple times in the last one year that he has been frequenting this place.
It is one of his favorites, truly.
Rustic interior drowned in darkness with moody lighting cascading only upon the things that matter. Familiar staff who humor him every time he shows up with his friends or his team after a game. Music tuned just enough to allow loud conversations of joy to echo while filtering out the ones weighed down by feelings that, in his opinion, do not belong over good food.
But tonight feels…odd. Misaligned and misplaced. Just wrong.
The hostess never asks if he’d want something. The lights are never this bright and why does it clash with the color of his tie? Why is he even wearing a fucking tie in the first place—
Oh right.
Birthday girl privileges and a request—threat—from Miss Chaeyoung herself to tidy up in formals and dress up at least once.
Regardless, the tie needs to go.
And so he tugs at it until the knot gives away. But as soon as the noose loosens and falls soundlessly in his lap, he feels his throat tightening again with yet another inconvenience.
Why does the music sound different? Quieter, much more mellow and slower than usual. It ruins everything, he thinks, because what if he sighs differently and they catch it? What if there’s some obvious change in tone that someone latches on to? What if he scrapes his knife too harsh against the porcelain when someone says something cruel to get a reaction out of him?
No.
He’s never the one to complain or be grumpy, it is so uncharacteristic for him. But the music needs to be what it usually is…a tad bit louder. Just tonight, especially tonight.
Just as he’s about to lift his head to inspect what’s up, his line of sight gets blocked by the server who usually takes their table whenever the ice-hockey team of the college or any of its members visit the restaurant.
It is comical how quickly Mingyu is able to slip on his happy-go-lucky, ‘all-is-well in the world with sunshine and rainbows’ mask when Betsy, their server, smiles at him.
“What’s the celebration tonight?” She asks, her wrinkled face deepening with delight when she notices the tailored-suit. “Seems quite fancy.”
“Are you jealous Betsy?” he teases, a small smirk maturing on his face, “don’t worry I’m here for a birthday dinner. Not on some date.”
The older woman feigns surprise like she isn’t used to his effortless charm and flirtatious tendencies by now. She hits him lightly with her notepad. “I am married, young man.”
“And I score on defended nets all the time.” he winks.
“Find yourself a suitable girl and stop wasting your charms on older women.”
“Talking like you are not my only perfect match in this whole wide world.”
Betsy gasps and shakes her head, ignoring his words but the blush creeps up regardless. “Flattery won’t get you free dessert, boy. Now quit playing around and tell me what you would like before your loud pack of hooligans arrive.”
“Just water for now,” Mingyu allows himself to give her his actual, real smile. The kind which lights up his eyes and allows his jaw to relax more.
“I will get you the cucumber one, it is better for you,” Betsy says, stuffing the notepad back into her apron, “in the meantime, enjoy the new addition we have got here.”
With that, she steps away just enough for Mingyu to see the epicenter of his earlier dilemma. The change in music.
“A new, live singer in the house,” Betsy offers. She further says something about the name of the singer, about how she attends the same University as him, about how she’s the niece of the owner.
But it all fades.
She is sitting on a bar-stool in a dark corner, her only companions being the mic-stand tangled up with haphazard wires at the base and an acoustic guitar in her lap. Her eyes are either downturned, or closed—it is hard for him to tell from where he’s sitting. But even from the distance, the view of her—small and contained in that little corner that already feels like it belongs to no one but her—it heals something deep within him. And for a moment, he feels like all is, actually, well.
This soothing, balmy feeling.
Like when he’d used to stare up at the moon that hung low outside his window.
Her skin glows with its own mellow, moonlight too. Or perhaps it’s just the amber from the chandelier that falls with romantic shadows over her. Her hair, long and open in loose waves curtain half of her face away from his gaze. But he can hear, more than he can see, the anxiety undercutting her voice as she sings some old Billy-Joel song. All her words carefully clipped and never gliding over each other or over the music, as if the quiet control will undo the dread of doing something wrong on her new job.
“Do you like her?” Betsy asks, not out of the blue, but as a follow-up to something she must’ve said earlier.
Mingyu feels the strain behind his eyes when he drags them away from the singer with the dreamy voice and back to Betsy as she stares at him with this unspoken look in her eyes—one that older people give you when they can foresee something that you don’t.
Mingyu tries to play it cool, toying with his cufflinks. “Dreaming about setting me up with her or what? At least introduce me to her first.”
“Don’t even think about it, player, at least not while she’s at work.” Betsy warns, “I’m just taking feedback—do you like her?”
“She’s good,” Mingyu tries to physically shrug off the urge to look in that certain corner again, “a little nervous, I think.”
“Uh huh, well she is quite young.”
“When did she start?”
“Last month?” Betsy pauses to think, “yeah, last month. Said she needed some extra cash but had no experience in hospitality. Her aunt suggested we put a nice little set-up in the corner without the windows for her.”
A month.
Mingyu hadn’t been anywhere since before that. In fact, this might be his first night out and about ever since the party where it all went down. Because since then, he had been cooped up in his apartment, just sketching and writing his feelings away and surviving on half-eaten bowls of ramen that he’d forget about before reheating it again for dinner.
If Mingyu seems uncharacteristic tonight, it’s not a switch flipped. But a culmination of everything that had beaten it into his head that whatever he knew about love and affection had been just wrong. Impure. Insincere. Even when he didn’t mean for it to be.
And without love, what else is there for him to even define his character upon?
Betsy disappears just in time for Chaeyoung and Seungcheol to arrive with Dokyeom, Misty and the freshman named Chan who has been following Seungcheol around like a lost puppy.
Chaeyoung squeals before she hugs him. “Oh my God, Gyu!”
His palm flattens over her bare back—almost. He blames it on muscle memory before correcting himself by letting his fingers awkwardly rest over her lower back.
“Happy birthday, Chae.”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” sincerity brims her eyes when she takes a moment to look at him, really look at him.
Everyone else settles behind them, pretending they are not all thinking the same things or feeling the same tensed air weighing down upon them.
She squeezes his hands as Mingyu nods once, his smile tight when he settles in the corner seat next to his ice-hockey team’s captain, Choi Seungcheol. The guy gives him a tight nod—formal and clean.
The entire table of his friends falls back into that practiced chatter. Jokes from Dokyeom as he surveys the menu, hushed whispers between Seungcheol and Chaeyoung as they decide upon what dish they would like to share, Chan and Misty complaining about their own schedules.
And he can hear it all because the music is too soft.
Mingyu keeps on shifting in his seat, pretending to read the menu and failing at it…almost as if his own body doesn’t understand how to function at this moment. He is grateful for it when Dokyeom—ever observant and quick to read the room—orders the exact same thing for him.
Wonwoo and Jihyo join them a bit late with a present wrapped in silver, blaming the delay on traffic.
Mingyu doesn’t miss it though, the look that the two share when their watchful gazes shift from the interlinked fingers of Chaeyoung and Seungcheol on the table to Mingyu who looks like he is trying to swallow something down but failing gloriously at it.
He looks away before he can detect pity in their eyes.
Leaning his head back, he thinks it is going to be a miracle if something can keep him afloat in the tsunami that is this night.
He finds that anchor in the voice that melts into the music of an acoustic guitar like liquid gold.
⸻
“Oh, I love her voice,” Chaeyoung mumbles mid-bite when Betsy asks her the same question about the singer. “Very fresh.”
Misty, who surprisingly hasn’t said anything peculiar throughout the night so far, no longer seems to be in the mood to hold back anymore as she watches Mingyu carefully chew down on the last bits on his plate.
“Hey, Mingyu!” she calls for his attention, breaking some trance that the boy has slipped into. “Why don’t you go down there and ask her to play Chaeyoung’s favourite song, huh?”
Dokyeom interrupts, quickly dabbing his mouth, “I don't know if that is allowed…is it Betsy?”
“Oh I’m sure Veronica would let it slide,” Misty says, referencing the manager of the property, “it’s a beloved patron’s birthday after all. So, Mingyu, would you?”
There it is. The test. The show. The jibe.
The thing he had been dreading all evening. Like something he hasn’t prepared for, but something he must excel at to prove he isn’t all that vain.
Chaeyoung cuts in smoothly, trying to defuse the smoke before it overtakes all the airy lightness of the night. “It’s very unnecessary, really. We are not kids anymore…” But after taking a quick sip of the water, Mingyu is already getting up from his seat. Chaeyoung probably doesn’t think it through when she grabs his hand, “Mingyu really. Don’t.”
Misty files the seemingly small but weighted interaction, reveling in how Seungcheol’s eyes oscillate between the two.
“Come on Chae,” she pushes, “she sings so sweet and besides, Mingyu is good with people.”
Good with people.
Good with feelings.
The irony behind the words isn’t lost on Mingyu and the fact that they’re coming from his friend only makes him laugh. Just a small huff of air—something that he cannot hold back in unlike everything else he did all night.
It is a humiliation ritual almost—because the song that is Chaeyoung’s favorite might just be the one that fits his situation perfectly.
Something stupid by Frank Sinatra. Of course Misty would ask Mingyu to get it played. And if he says no, everyone would conclude what they have already been suspecting to be true—that he is still affected by it all. The rejection. The humiliation. The stupid confession.
It leaves him with no choice but to oblige.
Chaeyoung had long slipped her fingers off his wrist, yet he gently explains. “It’s your birthday…no big deal. I’ll go ask her.”
“Try not to get her number plastered all over your chest in red lipstick!” someone calls out from behind. Mingyu only shakes his head, playing along. That’s all he has learnt to be good at.
CHAPTER 2: stand still like a hummingbird
“Hey—” Kim Mingyu says, standing barely a foot away from you.
To say that it startles you would be an understatement when you almost slip off the stool. But your fingers instinctively curl around the mic, stationing your balance under the pretense of checking if it is off.
“Oh, hi!” you squeak, a bit embarrassed.
In your defence, being on a chair with no back support for three whole hours, trying to sing every word with perfection so that your being off-tune doesn’t ruin anyone’s dinner, all while carefully balancing your guitar over your thighs wasn’t the most comfortable position to be in.
Especially not when someone whom you have avoided eye-contact with all night decides to knock all the air out of your system by hogging the space around you.
For a moment, after you regain your composure, none of you speaks. He just stares at you like his vision has been blurry the entire night and you are the first thing he can focus upon. That he can anchor upon. You visibly see his uneven breaths slowing down when you tuck your hair behind your ear, blinking at him confused.
“Can I help you?’
“Uh…I’m sorry if this is too demanding but it’s my friend’s birthday today,” he points back to the table and you assume the girl in the middle, who is currently busy talking to someone, is the one he’s talking about. “Can you maybe please sing something stupid by Frank Sinatra for her?”
You almost turn him away by telling him you aren’t allowed to take requests from customers. That your aunt is very serious about you sticking strictly to the neat, organized playlist she carefully curates for every day of the week depending on the weather, the ambience, even factoring in the special menu items of the night to generate the ultimate dining experience at her diner.
But he looks so…heartbreakingly small.
You purse your lips together in contemplation and your eyes almost fall off his face as you gear up to mumble a careful rejection. But he interrupts you.
“Please.” he says, so low and heavy that it falls on your lap like a plea you have no words to use to reject.
Your fingers press over the guitar, surprised and confused. You look around—for Veronica, for a senior staff, for answers. But some of his friends are already getting up from their seats to see what’s taking so long. He nervously glances back at them, giving them an easy smile though nothing about him when he turns back to you seems easy.
“Alright,” you nod. “Yeah, I can sing that.”
His shoulders slump and he stands there for a moment like he needs to make himself breathe. Then, he nods at you with a small, tight smile before joining his friends and says something to them with the effortless cool he always sports—on and off the rink.
You, like most people on campus, had never seen his armor creak. Mingyu has always been too easy to like, too tall to be ignored, too charming to not smile at and too easy to not talk to.
But tonight, right in front of you, you could swear you had seen him nearly crumble. Like everything you had known about him until now was a lie, a heavy mask that was making it hard for him to breathe.
And you have never been the one to not care. Even if it meant nothing in return for you.
So you strum the guitar and sing the song he had asked…no—begged you to sing. It is such a slow song. Simple lyrics. Easy cords. But it can be sung in so many voices and ways.
You can make it melancholic and draw attention to his drooping lips as he sways in a corner with his friend—not the birthday girl though, because she is dancing with somebody else, your college’s ice hockey team’s current captain Choi Seungcheol.
Or, you can make it more romantic for every couple who have joined the young crowd to dance along to your song.
But then you remember the tender bruises denting his voice when he had spoken. And the decision finishes forming itself in your throat before you can rationalize it.
The song belongs to him.
So you soften your voice and purposefully emphasize on the lighter lyrics while breezing past the wistful ones. You ensure to smile through it all, because one of the first lessons you had learnt in music was that listeners can hear the smile or the frown in your voice when you sing. And it has the tendency to rub off.
You utter a small prayer under every word you sing with your most honest smiles, hoping that they land on and soothe whatever scars the dancing people in this dimly lit diner carry on their souls.
⸻
Your head is swimming by the time you return back home. Not with exhaustion or delirium, but with the surrealist nature of everything that unfolded.
Your ears still rang with the cheers that had followed after the song ended with everyone raising their champagne flutes to thank you. Some were wiping their eyes, while the others leaned more into their partners. The hundred dollar bill that Mingyu had quietly slipped into the tip-jar meant for you that still weighs down in your purse.
When you come down for dinner, you wrap your hands around your stomach like you can somehow hold it all in and preserve it under your skin forever to return back to it whenever you feel too small or too lonely. Hold it from bubbling over and spilling at a home where there are rules associated with how his name must be spoken.
Rule number one: well, it shouldn’t be.
Because once uttered, Kim Mingyu’s name is enough to sour the moods of everyone in the family for days if not weeks.
You don’t get it though.
Sure, your twin brother and him might have had the fiercest of rivalries when it came to being drafted for your college's ice-hockey team throughout their junior and senior years in highschool. But it has also been almost two whole years since Coach Greer offered the opportunity to Mingyu and your brother had to go with his second choice at NYU.
In theory, he should be over it by now.
But he evidently isn’t, as can be seen at the monthly dinners for which he joins you and your parents, always grumbling about how it seems like he is the only one with a hockey-IQ on his team.
“It’s like I am carrying that team throughout the season, and I am only a Sophomore.” he pierces the vegetables on his plate with more force than necessary, causing you to flinch.
Your dad’s eyes dart between the two of you. Even though you are twins, you and Ethan couldn’t be more distinct from each other.
There is almost an inverted mirror between you both, reversing every image that reflects on it.
You clear your throat, trying to deviate the topic of conversation before it crooks into something else. “Well, I don’t know if you know Ethan, but I got a job at Aunt Sylvie’s diner.”
“What do you need a job for?” he frowns. “Isn’t your course already too demanding?”
“It is, which is why I want to save up to move into the dorms by next term…or maybe by Junior year at least. The workload would be harder then and I think living on campus would be better than commuting everyday—”
“On campus?” he scoffs, “you sure about that?”
You blink at your parents, confused, because you already had this conversation with them so you really don’t understand where this doubt is emerging from.
“Yeah,” you say, “why?”
Ethan leans back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest and dragging the air from around you and towards himself like he has always done.
“I don’t know…the stories that come out of your campus are pretty wild. It seems like you guys are more famous for your parties more than anything.”
You don’t think much before you scoff.
“You’re just jealous.”
The impact of your words is so loud, it’s deafening. You only meant it as a light banter, but you know just how Ethan—and even your parents—are going to perceive it.
You study at a University Ethan had made vision-boards about.
You attend classes that he only got to tour when he was sure Coach Greer would pick him.
You walk the same hallways as the guy who took that chance away from him. In fact, you even sang upon his request tonight.
You cannot begin to bring yourself to look up and tally the damage that your careless remarks have caused. Slowly, you put your fork down.
“I…uh, I’m done,” you announce, voice small, “besides, I promised Cass I’d meet her today.”
You grab your jacket and zip it in a blur, mumbling a quick promise to your mom that you’d come and help her clean up before bed. Once outside, you drag your palms down your face and groan hard.
You barely make it to Cassidy’s front-poarch before you hear your brother’s truck roar in the driveway and see him leave—even though he had plans to stay the weekend.
CHAPTER 3: promises, unkept
A year later.
Here’s the thing about being exceptionally silent—everyone glosses over your existence.
Yours is a tiny dorm room that has just enough space for a bunk bed, a shared closet and two tables. And yet, with her entire life upturned onto her bed and the floor, your roommate moves around like she has a personal agenda to bump into everything that makes a sound.
You have been lying on the top bunk, wide awake and occasionally flinching since six in the morning each time she drops her metallic flask.
Now you do not like checking your phone first thing in the morning, but you have been scrolling endlessly because there’s nothing else you can do. With Chaeyoung’s open suitcase and bags littered all over a floor which seems like it was hit by her wardrobe-blizzard, there simply isn’t enough ground for you to step on.
You muffle a groan in your folded forearm when your bladder cramps yet again.
This is getting ridiculous, and no amount of distractions can make you look away from the fact that you need to use the restroom in the next five minutes or less.
You accidentally hit play on a random video of Olivia Rodrigo on twitter, attracting your roommate’s attention. You hear her drop the notepad she had been reviewing her to-pack list from before you feel her take a step on the ladder that connects her bed with yours.
“Hey,” her face pops up by your pillow and you instinctively scoot backward, “you’re awake!”
“Uh, yeah…” you rub the heel of your palm over your eyes, trying not to make it seem like her commotion disturbed you out of your sleep even though it absolutely did.
“Oh how long?” her face scrunches up with concern, “shit, did I wake you up?”
“No, no,” you insist, getting up and fixing your sleepgown even though Chaeyoung doesn’t really seem to mind. “Just need to use the restroom.”
“Fuck, sure.” she clamors around to make way.
You keep on smoothing over your nightgown as you climb down, making a mental note of buying some bunk bed friendly PJs. Grabbing your essentials, you pad down the hallway towards the bathroom and to your surprise, Chaeyoung follows you, mumbling endlessly about how totally overwhelmed and unprepared she is for this trip.
“And I told Cheol that I can absolutely not shut my internet off for two whole months but he insists that it’s gonna be rewarding.”
You adore your roommate, there is no reason for you to not do so. She has been nothing but welcoming and friendly since you moved in a few weeks ago. But you have also only known her for so long to express any personal opinions about her relationship with the college’s former ice-hockey captain and now Boston Bruins’ defenseman Choi Seungcheol.
“Are you going to be completely offline?” you ask a diplomatic question instead as she leans outside.
“Not totally…I mean I still need to take the classes I enrolled online for. But I guess that’s it because apart from that, he has told me he has planned a lot for the two of us.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It’s sweet, yeah. But also—he’s the celebrity, not me. Why am I hiding away in a cabin for eight weeks? All I wanted was to take some time off this semester, not go on a whole ass retreat.”
You wash your hands and splay some water over your face, trying to jolt your brain awake to come up with an appropriate response, and preferably a conclusion, to this conversation.
From what you have observed so far, Chaeyoung is one of those people for whom a ten minute walk to the class ends up taking twenty because of the amount of times she has to stop and say hi to a billion people she knows. Every night when you return from your shift at the diner, there is always a friend or two occupying your room as she brews tea or just gets ready with them for a night-out. And when it is just the two of you and you have succumbed yourself to your own corner, unable to entertain her anymore, she’s on her phone talking to her family or Seungcheol.
It is hard for you to imagine Chaeyoung cut-off from the world in a luxurious but distant wooden cabin somewhere up North.
But it isn’t so hard for you to imagine the relief of having the entire dorm room to yourself for such a significant chunk of time… besides, you do not want to be the reason behind a romantic getaway as this one falling apart.
“I think it’ll be something new, fun, exciting,” you say, avoiding her eyes in the mirror as you melt your moisturizer between your fingers, “just the two of you, it could be quite romantic.”
Behind you, Chaeyoung leans her head against the doorframe of the bathroom, a little pout puckering her lips. “Ugh, I know. I could use some time away from all the chatter. Like I don’t wanna sound ungrateful but it can be quite loud sometime, you know? Everyone is always telling things to me or asking me stuff and it can get very overwhelming very quickly.”
Your roommate goes on yet another one of her fifty mile long rants about a topic that irks her while you hurry to finish up your morning skincare.
“Which reminds me,” her voice booms another note all of a sudden—in volume and in speed—making you jolt. “Please tell me you have Heather’s phone number.”
It takes you some time to rack your brain and match a face to the name she’s referring to.
“Heather…as in, the girl on the third floor?”
“Yes, her!”
“I don’t.”
“Ugh, yeah…why would you have her number? You barely know her.” Chaeyoung zips her last bag shut, lugging it over her shoulder, “I guess I’ll have to leave a task unfinished. I don’t even know what room she’s in.”
“If you have a message, I can pass it on.” you offer.
Chaeyoung presses her knee over her mattress, gnawing at her lower lip and considering. It is so easy to read her, you think, as her forehead creases up with dilemma and she chews on her own skin harder. Then, she drops her shoulders like the weight of whatever it is isn’t worth carrying around like this.
“Fine…but promise you won’t laugh.” she says.
You help her with her luggage as she pockets her set of keys and begins walking out. “I promise, I won’t.”
“Okay so I have a friend, you might know him,” she looks over her shoulder as you follow her down the stairs, “Kim Mingyu.”
You stall halfway down a step, but the weight of the luggage in your hand swings your body forward regardless and you nearly topple down.
“Woah woah woah,” Chaeyoung rushes to stabilise you, “are you okay?”
“Yeah I just…slipped.” you do your best to hide your frozen face behind your hair. “I’m fine.”
“Please don’t be another girl who falls for him — literally and figuratively.” Chaeyoung blinks, but takes one of the bags from your reluctant clutch. “Anyways, I was saying, Mingyu — he was just made captain of our ice-hockey team.” she says like she’s trying to polish your memory until some recognition of him sparks.
As if you can ever not know him. His existence has followed you around, completely unbeknownst to him, for five whole years now.
And truth be told, you are tired.
While leaving your home, you had thought you won’t have to hear that name again. Not because you hate him—that is a right only your twin brother can exercise—but because you have reached your limit.
Despite your strongest desires against it, Mingyu is practically inescapable on campus. He’s the guy people ask about at parties — ‘is Mingyu gonna show up?’ or the one whose name girls use the brightest, boldest red glitter for in their banners which they bring to the home games in support of the team. His is the name that pops up so many times on your campus’ confession page, it is actually concerning that so many people fantasize about him all at once.
Chaeyoung trails off, “it is insane how much clout each year’s hockey captain gets though. Like… What do you mean the guy who took ketchup shots with me is now some sort of campus deity?”
“What about him?” you press your lips, dragging the suitcase outside.
“Okay so ever since he was made captain, his workload significantly increased and I guess he is struggling with a few classes this semester. It’s not like he needs a formal tutor—he is freakishly smart. But just someone to help him out with the material when he can’t make it to classes. And with how busy this season is, he’s gonna miss a lot.”
You nod, wrapping your arms around your middle and trying your best not to look absolutely disinterested at the mention of a boy who follows you around like a shadow, even in rooms he doesn’t belong in. Instead, you fix your eyes on the road, cursing Seungcheol internally for not being here already.
“He asked me for help with finding someone who can assist him like that. And Heather once told me she has the biggest crush on him…they share most classes you know? So I thought why not play Cupid and have her ‘tutor’ him?”
A chilly gust of morning wind sends your hair flying all over your face. You attempt to tug it back behind your ear and fail.
“But wouldn’t it…I mean, doesn’t he need serious help?”
Chaeyoung shrugs, “a glorified study-partner whom he pays.”
“And do you think Heather would be the best for that given…y’know?” you can’t help but counter.
“What?”
You purse your lips hard, digging the balls of your feet on the ground like it would rescue you from this tumultuous mess you have hurled yourself into simply because you care too much.
“I don’t know Chae…from what I’m understanding, I think he needs some sure help and—”
“Someone consistent,” Chaeyoung finishes for you. She breathes thoughtfully, “huh, I guess I never thought about it that way.”
You nod. A small, careful movement. “Just a suggestion.”
Chaeyoung exhales, long and dramatic, as if clearing her head. “Ugh, whatever. He’s gonna figure it out himself. But if you do see Heather, give her his number, just in case.” She taps quickly on her phone, “I just shared it with you.”
Seungcheol’s truck revs in the driveway, getting visibly closer as you stand there stunned. Your phone blinks as it receives her text.
Chaeyoung jogs over to the grinning guy who stepped out of the driver’s seat with his arms spread wide for her.
You almost can’t believe what just happened.
But he’s her friend, a part of her life whom she has autonomy over. And you’re nothing more than a messenger to be feeling this much about it.
“I’ll pass it on to her.” you mumble when Chaeyoung hugs you goodbye and reminds you about Heather. “I will.”
CHAPTER 4: miscalculations and misrepresentations
The first week after Chaeyoung leaves passes like smoke from between your fingers. Your days are like a bunch of sugar-cubes, clumped and melting into each other as you attended all your classes, finished your shifts at Aunt Sylvie’s diner, studied for the LSAT and applied for other jobs in your free time because the singing gig had begun costing you.
The paycheck was good. But the management—too demanding. Even after you had told her that too much singing could damage your vocal chords for the long term from all the overuse, Veronica would insist you show up for almost all the major nights.
And with nowhere else to turn to for your monthly income and with an aversion of upsetting your aunt, you’d almost always relent.
But with your evening teas becoming more of a crutch for your sore throat than a relaxing ritual, you knew things had to change before you lost whatever remained of your already small voice.
It is one of those nights as you rot over your mattress—tired down to the bone, nursing a warm cup of tea and reviewing the mock questions you practiced after another long day at the diner.
The room, with you just in it, feels sterile. Like Chaeyoung took all the character away with her when she left.
It is dimly lit, not in the comforting way that lulls one to sleep, but rather dull. The kind which makes you aware of how even your fairy-lights blink like it is taking an effort for them to glow.
Meanwhile all of Chaeyoung’s expensive, quirky lamps lay cold and turned off by her bed.
No one has been into your room since she left.
You tell yourself that you like it this way, that it’s better to focus. You’ve never had too many friends anyways—it was always just you and your quiet ambitions and dreams that sound awfully silly when spoken out loud. And you have been fine like that so far.
But something about living on campus, in the dorms that are buzzing with girls getting ready with each other to spend this Friday night out and about, makes your solitude seem depressing.
A small thought keeps poking its head in your mind… you wouldn’t mind if there was at least one other person here right now. Someone whom you wouldn’t have to invite. Someone who could talk your share of talk because you’re too tired to speak.
A friend.
A companion.
You sip harder on the tea and tell yourself the bitterness at the back of your throat is the aftertaste of hibiscus and not your own self-pity. Squinting your eyes harder on the papers, you try to figure out just where you went wrong with eigenvalues.
So far, nothing turns up.
And just when you are about to give up and call it a night, a knock at the door rattles the entire still air of your room with an unwelcomed pulse.
You’re barely halfway down your bed before whoever is on the other side knocks again—urgent and hard.
You shouldn’t—because this is your room—but you rush towards the door at the commanding, insistent knocks.
“Chaeyoung I swear to God if I fail—”
He is about to knock again when you open the door, evident from his fist raised halfway up. He instantly drops it when his eyes fall on you.
“Oh hey—I’m sorry,” Mingyu quickly takes a step back, then checks the room number plastered on your door before looking at you again. “I…uh, I didn’t mean to—is this not Chaeyoung’s room?” his frown grows the more he stares at you, but not with accusation, more like you’re a puzzle that is occupying his entire mental-capacity right now.
Something about the intensity of his gaze, the sheer heat of it as he studies you, thaws you out of your frozen, aghast state.
“It is,” you mumble, “she’s not here though. I am her roommate—”
“The girl who sang the song.” he replies under his breath, his eyes softening as the recognition settles in.
You blink, confused. “I’m sorry?”
“Uh, like more than a year ago… at Lorenzo’s? I requested you to sing a song and you did…” he trails off.
Your fingers over the door tighten inadvertently. You hadn’t expected him to remember that. Chaeyoung didn’t. It was just a night out of many.
Why would he?
Except that he did. And now, he stands there in front of you with a small, honest smile on his lips. This subtle look of victory almost.
“Yeah,” you pause before quickly covering it up with a lie, “I mean, I don’t remember what you’re referring to but I do sing there sometimes. So I guess I must have.”
Something further softens in him as he leans down to hear you over the noise emanating from the room opposite to yours. His shoulders drop and graze the door as he relaxes by it, already covering most of it with his broad frame.
You clear your throat, trying to speak louder than usual. “Chaeyoung isn’t here though, can I help you?”
“Do you know when she will be back?”
“Uh, like two months?” you answer. When you see his frown deepening, you realize he isn’t aware of your roommate’s little retreat. “She is on vacation with her boyfriend.”
Mingyu’s eyes drop from you to the floor—so does his smile. But only momentarily. You don’t think Mingyu is the type of person who’s never not smiling, even if he has to fake it.
He scratches the back of his head. “She didn’t tell me, I think.” but then, he hastily adds, “or if she did…guess I forgot.”
You nod. That’s all you can do because this unplanned encounter with him is like being dragged out of your sleep and right onto the middle of a brightly lit stage. Something that people like Mingyu, Chaeyoung and even your brother Ethan have always been naturals at. But not you. You always freeze, you always forget your lines. You don’t know how to perform.
Like he’s offering you a cue, Mingyu drives the conversation forward. “Sorry for disturbing your night,” he says, “but Chaeyoung told me she was going to help me find a tutor. She said she had someone—”
Your eyes widen when the memory hits you.
“Oh yes! She told me about that.” you blurt out and instantly regret it.
You were only supposed to pass his number on to Heather, not confess to him about knowing about Chaeyoung’s masterplan on hooking them up. A plan you are not too sure he’s in on or not.
“She did?” He pockets his hands further into his jeans, leaning his head to a side more coolly now. Not curious, just aware of something more… “Interesting.”
You walk back into your room, “I was about to—”
“I’m sorry but do you mind speaking up? I can barely hear you…”
“Oh just come in.”
You squeeze your eyes shut the moment you yell that. Messy, messy, messy. What the hell are you doing inviting him in your room alone?
You’re fiddling with the scattered notes all over your table and mattress to look for your phone when you feel him enter the room and push the door just enough to leave it slightly ajar.
“You know, I am just realizing I never saw you sing at the diner again.” he remarks.
‘It’s because I never took the shifts on the nights after your games because I knew you’d be there to celebrate.’
Instead, you reply, “I have sporadic shifts. No specific schedule.”
Behind you, Mingyu nods like he is a bit unconvinced but is kind enough to let you have it.
“You’ve been roommates with Chaeyoung since…?”
“Last month,” you answer before you finally locate your phone.
You scroll through it in vain, praying that Heather’s number would somehow miraculously appear somewhere—in some group-chat or otherwise.
Mingyu just takes a seat on Chaeyoung’s desk-chair, his long fingers fiddling with the paperweight on the table. The more he eases up, the more the room collapses around him, warping until it shrinks significantly. He looks cartoonishly big compared to all the dainty decor that there is, but nothing about the scene looks out of place. He is more like a giant teddy placed down between your little stuffed animals. It is almost as if there has never been a place he has not belonged in, made a home in.
Unable to not speak for long, Mingyu hums again. “Chaeyoung and I haven’t been able to talk much, I guess that’s why I missed out on such major life updates from her. I mean the vacation and you.”
“Me?” you pause.
“Yeah, you.” he smiles, bright and polite, like he has to make you feel included even though you didn’t ask for it. “The last time I talked to her, it was only about my tutoring situation. Told her I was ready to pay double what the TAs earn hourly. She said she had a friend in mind.”
You had tuned him out since the phrase ‘pay double what the TAs earn.’ Your heart picks up pulse as the gears behind your mind start churning with a newfound velocity. Suddenly, you feel like you can solve all the eigenvalues and as an extension, all your problems, if you just tweaked a few things just right.
“Why don’t you ask the TAs for help?” you ask, your voice breathy and shallow.
“I did, our schedules just never aligned. I captain the Ice-hockey team and the TAs only have so many spots and open slots.”
“What subjects do you need help with?”
“Eh…I can do most theory and research on my own. Just have to read up during my free time. It’s the Mathematics and Stats that are bothering me. Not that I’m bad at them, I just don’t get the time to follow through what’s happening in the coursework.”
“Yeah Chaeyoung mentioned that.”
“So you’re her?” Mingyu grins, “the ‘friend’ Chae was talking about?”
“Wha–I…” you shut your phone off, then turn it on before shutting it off again. You toss it somewhere on Chaeyoung’s mattress, marinating in your own blunder. “I mean she spoke about your situation, yes. But—”
Mingyu’s attention drifts towards the reference book lying unopened on your table. “Hey, that’s the exact material Professor Blyth has recommended. You’re taking the same Calculus?”
“I am.”
He’s already flipping through your neat notes. The clean sheet of paper carrying the perfect score to your pre-mid terms from a few days back catches his attention.
“I totally tanked it. But you have…a near full grade.” his thumb brushes over the unmistakable 98 marked in red on top of the sheet.
Guilt begins clawing up your gut the more he stares at your answers and practice sheets with awe.
This isn’t your glory to revel in.
This isn’t how it is supposed to be.
This isn’t what Chaeyoung had planned for it to be.
This is going to ruin your plans of steering clear of Kim Mingyu…for Ethan’s sake. Why the hell would you ever even agree to help the guy who ruined the perfect trajectory of your brother’s professional hockey dreams.
Well, he didn’t do it directly…or deliberately.
But still.
“I won’t take a no for an answer,” Mingyu shakes his head, placing the papers back on your table, “you have to tutor me. You have to help me.”
“Mingyu I—”
“Please.”
There it is.
That word.
Spoken with the same cadence that he had carried over a year ago. Tender, polite…begging. It is as if he has mastered speaking a language that doesn’t contain anything equivalent to rejection. At least not in your books. And no matter how hard you try to contain it, freeze it, something in the very centre of your chest aches as it melts at the warmth of his voice.
“It will be a huge favor,” he stands up from the chair, all serious yet still gentle somehow like he’s trying to persuade you, not convince you. “I will do anything in return. Your laundry, your dishes, I can even clean your room every weekend or be your date for all important appearances this term. I can make your exes jealous, heck I can even beat one up. Well, not if it’s a girl but you get the drill?”
You stare at him with your eyes wide and jaw slacked. “I think…I think just money would be good for now.”
The angel on your right shoulder that is in charge of keeping your conscience intact is practically drilling holes into your skull when you reach for a printed copy of your schedule and hand it over to him.
“This is my schedule.” you murmur, not daring to meet his eyes, “I work most evenings from Tuesdays to Saturdays. But I guess I can cut a few shifts off at the diner if I’m going to be tutoring you now. Just tell me whatever works for you.”
Mingyu doesn’t mind your sudden aloofness or even if he does, he doesn’t comment on why you are trying to practically become one with the wall as you shrivel further and further. He just grins like you have handed him over the keys to the Universe.
Before he leaves, he takes his phone out and asks you to give him your number.
You don’t miss it though, how he repeats your name under his breath when you put it in there or how he stares at your face like he’s trying to match you to it. Like he’s trying to understand why you were named what you were named. All while that same, sweet smile blooms further and further over his lips.
The sheet of paper, the same one where you were struggling with the eigenvalues problem on, slips and lands at his feet.
He picks it up, briefs it over before handing it over to you and points out what you were doing wrong.
Relief washes over you and you scratch your head. “Ah…I wasn’t even considering that.”
“See,” he winks, “we’re already one very strong team.”
CHAPTER 5: i swear i don't murder puppies
Your room is a warzone of sweaters and dresses at seven in the morning. Not because you somehow left your window open and a storm wrecked through your wardrobe, but because it is the day you meet Mingyu to decide upon a schedule that is in alignment with his practices.
The September weather is always so confusing—all your sweaters feel too warm and your summer dresses flutter way more for your comfort with the rain-soaked wind. You cannot bring yourself to put on a plain old hoodie because it is only Monday, and all your giant sweatshirts and grays are preserved for anything post-Wednesdays.
You wring your hands before pressing them to your face.
“You’re just trying to distract yourself from your real problems by making up these stupid ones,” you whisper to yourself.
It is the truth.
You should have never agreed to this.
You should have never given him the impression that you were the girl whom Chaeyoung was talking about.
You should have gone out of your way to look for Heather and tell her what happened instead of waiting to run into her.
You suppress another groan before your little guilts whirlwind into self-hatred. It's for the money, you tell yourself. And money often transforms people into someone unrecognizable.
You choose a mid-length dress that Cass made for you. No flashy colors, modest neckline but sweet strappy sleeves. It is formal without being strict.
The bag of make-up sits untouched on your dresser. You tell yourself everyday that you will find time to put it on, look more presentable. But each day, it’s just your sunscreen, lip-gloss and kohl-liner against the world.
As you massage the vanilla-scented lotion over your collarbones, you weigh upon the pros and cons of this situation.
This tutoring gig is too lucrative for you to pass on. Not only it pays more than your singing job, but it would also mean that you won’t have to walk all the way out of campus, put heavy layers of pigment and glitter on your face, smile and sing until everything aches and come back half a corpse even during your busiest weeks.
Not to mention, helping him review whatever happens in class would also make you revise simultaneously.
You lift the mascara closer to your face and lean into the mirror. And perhaps, it is something about the out reflection of your somber eyes in the dulled out mirror that makes you see the risks clearer than ever.
Not only are you taking it away from someone else, but by agreeing to help him out with something—anything—you are in a way betraying your brother.
You do not harbour the same animosity in your heart towards Mingyu like Ethan does. But you had also planned on steering very clear out of his enemy's way the day you received your acceptance letter to the college and Ethan didn't.
Besides, what the hell will you tell her when Chaeyoung returns with that expectant gleam in her eyes and asks you if you forwarded her message?
You lose count of the amount of times you almost stab yourself in the eye with the wand. Eventually, you give up on it and just sit there on the floor with your knees curled up.
By the time you are up and ready to face the day—and him—you have what seems like a fool-proof plan up your sleeve. You mentally rehearse it while applying the last coat of your gloss.
You are going to head out, be stoic and get the job done with him hopefully before Chaeyoung returns.
Hell, you can even push harder and cut on more shifts to help him be ahead of the schedule in class so that you can get rid of him faster.
You’re not going to strike a friendship with him—you are not even going to talk about anything beyond just what’s necessary. No mentions of a vengeful sibling, no mentions of the wicked game of ice-hockey.
Whenever you run into Heather, you’re going to make amends by dutifully passing Chae’s message to her and giving her his number. Hell, you might even make him warm up to the idea of her if that’s what it takes to have them go out together per Chaeyoung’s wishes.
You will have this all wrapped tight and dusted in under seven weeks if you just manage to do what you’ve promised yourself to do.
Exhaling deeper than usual, you take one last look at the mirror.
You push down the thought that there is certainly an additional gilded glow illuminating your features today.
You tell yourself it’s just the morning sun.
⸻
(mingyu’s POV)
He sees you before you see him, and something within him hollows out.
You are fiddling with your thumbs, letting your eyes lightly sweep across the space before promptly giving up and succumbing to your phone—most probably texting him.
He quickly collects the orders from the counter and walks over to you.
“There you go,” he says, extending the warm tea towards you, “I just took a wild guess that you’d prefer tea over coffee cause that’s what I saw in your room.”
You look startled. Or maybe that’s just how you usually are. So calm and ethereal in your own world before he comes and disrupts it with his loud demands and ramblings.
Yet, you accept it from his hand with a polite ‘thank you’.
Small wins.
He cocks his head towards the empty table in the café. “Shall we?”
You walk ahead of him, something that he actually appreciates because it gives him the time—however small of a window—to stare at you longer. Your hair fall over your smooth shoulders like curtains and your dress sways with the light breeze.
You look so soft, you always do. He has to clutch his bag and his espresso harder than usual to avoid reaching forward and detangling your tresses that are catching up with the dainty chain of your locket behind your neck.
But then, you put an end to it when you finally settle down into the booth and pull your laptop out along with a few loose sheets, some already printed or scribbled upon while the others are a blank canvas.
“Did you fill out your schedule in the Excel file I shared?” you ask in that low, gentle voice of yours.
He loves hearing you speak because your tone is so serene and tender that it requires him to put all his attention to it. Sometimes, he even has to physically lower himself, or lean closer, to hear you better.
And Mingyu always thinks that there is something irresistible about people who require the world to bend and adapt to them.
“Well?” you ask again, quirking your eyebrows up.
“Wh—ah, yes, I filled it out.”
“Already losing out on attention?” you mutter, before throwing a pointed glance at him, “we can’t afford that.”
He laughs to himself. “Didn’t peg you as someone who’d be so strict.”
“You’ve seen my schedule. We’re already operating on a tight timeline.”
“Fair,” he replies, “although, I would promise you that I am a quick learner.”
“Don’t promise me, surprise me.”
“You know what? I actually quite like it,” he leans back into his chair, emptying a whole packet of sugar into the steaming coffee, “this whole strict teacher bit. It’s…compelling.”
You shoot him a deadpan look and continue typing.
You quickly breeze through all the hours of the week that you’d be able to meet with him and prepare a list of priority topics that he missed out on or needs to cover before the mid-terms. Mingyu meets you halfway through it all, giving his inputs wherever necessary and letting you know what all he could work upon alone.
It doesn’t slide by him about how different you seem today compared to the previous times he has spoken to you. You are more guarded in the moment, like you took time to stitch an armour around yourself in the morning before coming to meet him.
But it often slips—that usual softness that he has begun associating with you. Like the time you accepted his request to sing or when you invited him into your room, unguarded and trusting. It’s there when he sheepishly apologizes for adding to your burden and you assure him it’s alright. It’s there when he goes blank about most topics you initiate and you quickly pivot to something he might know.
You keep on covering up that softness each time he diverts from business though. Like throwing a wet-blanket over a warm hearth.
This additional layer of caution. Another boundary etched.
When Chaeyoung had told him she had someone in mind who might be interested in helping him out, she had completely omitted the information that that someone was her new roommate who also happened to be the girl whom he sometimes still thought about. Someone whose voice still hummed in the back of his mind.
Perhaps, if Chaeyoung hadn’t been too excited about telling him that the girl had a huge crush on him, she would have remembered to share that vital piece of information.
But watching how you’ve been acting around him today, it seems like his friend probably exaggerated your fascination towards him. Why else would you be shooting down his attempts at being anything beyond just a chore if you did in fact like him like that?
It’s not like it hurts his pride though, he had never really weighed down on the possibility of any romances with his tutor. All he desperately needed was for someone to help him and if a little charm and flirtation was gonna help him get there, then what was the harm?
It is a relief that you don’t seem like you are interested anymore though—or at least that’s what he tells himself.
Because telling himself that makes it hurt a bit less when he asks you if you’d like to stay back and chat over coffee after you’re done and you deny it without a second thought.
Telling himself that makes it feel less cruel when he offers to walk you to your class and you look at him like he has just admitted to killing a million puppies.
He doesn’t know what prompted it, but since the last time he saw you, it seems like you have made some judgments of your own.
And he’s not too sure if he likes the idea of it.
CHAPTER 6: truce? truce.
No matter how hard he runs across the campus from the ice-rink to the library, Mingyu is still ten minutes late to your study session.
You are already in one of the study-rooms surrounded by two distinct sets of stapled papers and a workbook that you’re scribbling hurriedly upon with a short, dull pencil. His heavy, fatigued footsteps against the otherwise polished tiles startle you out of whatever it is that is making you frown and look up at him.
At once, his breathing significantly slows down. Like his body is trying its best to behave and be proper under the captivity of those big, soft, doe-like eyes of yours.
“So sorry, Coach Greer had us run extra drills,” he pants, “and I couldn’t exactly show up here without washing up.”
Despite all the exhaustion, he still flashes you that full grin that can make even a shrivelled flower blush and bloom as he drops his bag over the small table separating two chairs in the small room.
He thinks you have ignored him when you return back to flipping through your book.
But then, you slide your bottle of water towards him.
“You should take five.” you suggest. “Catch your breath.”
And then, you go back to acting like you were before he showed up.
Still, he thinks it is very sweet as he uncaps the bottle and takes a swig out of it. Not because he is particularly thirsty—but because you offered.
His breath evens out as he studies the focus-pod. It is literally a box with a single small window and a giant glass door. Two squeaky chairs placed thoughtlessly with a table that looks like it would collapse from the weight of his arms alone if he leans over it. Sunlight filters in hot, rectangular slants, warming the scratched surface and making it a tad too warm for comfort.
No one ever studies here. Not really. Unless they have an important meeting to attend or a call to take.
“Why are we meeting here instead of the actual library, again?” he can’t help but ask.
You look up from your work to briefly glance at him before returning back to it. “Because you talk too much.”
“Right, but doesn’t the library have a much better ambience?”
“Not worth getting rebuked by people studying there because you won’t stop speaking.”
“I’m going to speak here regardless.”
“You can,” you answer, finally shutting your workbook, “because I’m getting paid to hear you speak. The others are not.”
“You majoring in business?”
You correct him, “Economics.”
“You should switch to majoring in business though.”
“Are you calling me greedy and unkind?”
“No, I am saying you would make a terrifying CEO. You are very practical and efficient.”
You sigh, keeping your face uninterested as you speak, “as fun as this was, let us return to ANOVA, shall we?”
Mingyu folds his hands over the table, resting his chin over his crossed fingers. “I was hoping to stall further.”
Your knuckles tighten over the stack of books and for a moment, Mingyu thinks he toed a line he shouldn’t have dared crossing. But then, your eyes soften—just by a beat—and you suggest. “We can call a truce whenever you feel like it’s getting too much…y’know? You can just say the word and we’ll take a break.”
“Wait, really?” he perks up, just enough for his eyes to flash with something refreshing. Like hope.
You shrug, “I don’t want to force you into doing something that you are too tired to.”
“So like,” he nearly giggles—and it is fucking ridiculous watching a man as tall and buff as him giggle like that—before even finishing the joke, “a safeword?”
Your face goes back to that blankness that feels like a curtain of indifference being drawn.
“For studying,” you respond flatly, “don’t make it weird.”
But the corners of your mouth give it away by curling up. Barely. Just a flicker that you quickly hide by looking in your bag for nothing. It is gone before he can be sure if it was even there.
But he grins anyway because he decides that it was.
“Right,” he nods like he’s signing a contract. “A truce.”
“A truce.” you shrug, like it doesn’t matter.
⸻
You both work in relative silence after that.
Mingyu tries his best to focus each time you lean over to explain something to him. But he just can’t. He fidgets too much, stretches his arms too often, cranks his neck side to side even though there is no stiffness.
He isn’t his usual self and he can feel it.
And something about you tells him that neither are you.
You see, he might not have known you that well. But he for sure had observed you. And each time he said something stupid or attempted anything beyond just discussing the numerical problems on paper, it felt like you were restraining yourself. A smile, a retort, an answer. It wasn’t a mask, but a heavy door that you kept on shutting up with all your body-weight.
“Hey, did I do something?”
He finally asks towards the end of the session when you have already briefed him over the concepts and given him a worksheet to practice upon until your later session.
You blink, “No…why?”
He doesn’t want to tense this up…doesn’t want to end a productive session on a needlessly confusing note just because of the faulty projections of his mind.
So he lets out a little laugh, trying to lighten the weight of it when his observation lands, “I don’t know, you seemed a bit annoyed.”
He expects you to snap back at him, tell him that you are not some doll who’d always smile at him or shut him off by telling him that it’s because he is in fact—annoying.
But your shoulders drop, “oh?” you tuck your hair behind your ear, “I…I am not annoyed at you Mingyu.”
It is the first time you have spoken his name to him. And he can’t understand why it feels like the first time anyone has ever spoken it right.
“Just a bit tired.” you further explain, avoiding his eyes as you begin fiddling with something inside your bag.
He doesn’t prod further. Just lets the sound of your breathing thread through the tight-packed walls of the sterile room.
But then, very cautiously, he adds, “You know you can always tell me to shut it if I’m speaking too much. I am a talker, but I get it.”
“I don’t mind you talking,” you interrupt him so quickly that he frowns. You bite your lip, “sorry if I made you feel that way. I guess I was just bickering earlier.”
“No, no, really. I didn’t think much about it, just giving you a heads up that I can be quiet if you want me to be. We don’t have to continue meeting in these coffin cubes just because I can’t shut up.”
You nod, just a small movement. He feels at ease when he spots a small smile over your lips. Hidden and fluttering like a newly hatched butterfly. This strange sensation of pride surges behind his ribs—something on you that he can finally claim some possession at most and contribution at least, after all.
Mingyu doesn’t know where this urge comes from—this almost need to give you something, anything, worthwhile in return. If he tallies all the hours he has known you, it might not even add up to a full day. Yet he feels like he already owes you half his lifetime for some reason. A debt of eons.
You pile up on that debt when you slide a neat stack towards him. It feels warm in his hands.
“I printed out a copy of my notes if you want to refer to them.” you inform as he looks through them with this undisclosed wonder.
Around eighty sheets of material. You even printed out the pages with additional workings that explain the main solution better, along with the alternatives. The margins that people often hide because of the simplistic explanations that are meant for their eyes alone and no one else’s.
But you copied it all out for him.
“This is…wow,” he slowly gets up after you, “I really have no idea how to thank you enough for this.”
“Literally the least I could do.” you shrug. “I will meet you Friday?”
“Yeah,” he repeats, his voice unstable, “Friday.”
You don’t give him a departing smile or a ‘take care’ before turning around. But you do halt at the door, lingering for a suspended moment.
“Just for the record…I like it when you talk. Because I don’t speak much myself, but I also hate silence.”
⸻
Ever since the beginning of senior year, Dokyeom hasn't hosted much.
It wasn’t because he didn’t want to. But because of the giant golden retriever living in his drawing room who, through the virtue of his squatter's rights, had turned into a roommate he didn’t sign up to have.
Ever since a gnarly water-leak at his apartment some two months ago, Mingyu had practically moved in with him, taking refuge on Dokyeom’s worn-out couch. His place was all fixed now. Yet, whenever Dokyeom as much as even hinted at the prospect of him moving back, Mingyu reacted like he had lost all sensations in his ears.
Tonight though, Dokyeom had invited a couple friends over and asked Mingyu to help him organize.
“I really can’t believe you pay full rent for your own place and still break your back on this couch.” Jihyo, who had arrived a bit earlier than the rest, fluffs an additional pillow on Mingyu’s makeshift bed, “seriously dude, are you even getting the rest you need?”
Mingyu jokes, “I sneak in and sleep on DK’s bed when he’s not home.”
“I swear to God Mingyu, don’t even joke about it.” Dokyeom deadpans as he sets the dinner table. “You know I have that mild OCD shit or something.”
“Move out bro, it’s getting embarrassing.”
Pausing from the salad he is assembling, Mingyu tosses two olives at both of them, “seriously? Can I not just live with my best-friend in the whole wide world for a few weeks? We’re all gonna graduate in under a year and I am already missing you.”
“Or,” Jihyo chimes, swinging her legs off the couch, “you were looking for excuses to move out of your apartment ever since the rejection-gate and now that you’ve found it, you’re using DK’s space like a crutch.”
Mingyu’s fingers tighten over the cherry tomatoes he’s splitting in the middle.
“It’s not like that.” he shrugs, despite it.
“Except for the fact that it is.”
He lets out a light, airy laugh. Just a puff of it to make it seem like he can glide through this conversation like he does with all the other ones. But for some reason, today, he cannot.
“It’s fucking lonely in that apartment." he finally admits.
He turns his back to his friends, checking up on the cherry pie. In the reflection of the shiny surface, just momentarily, he catches his friends exchanging a look behind him. He opens the oven before he can discern if it’s worry or mockery.
The ceramic dish lands harsher than he intended on the counter top. He slides his mitten off like he needs his palms to feel air before they sweat so much that his skin melts off.
He rests his fists over the marble, leaning all his weight over them as his eyes clench shut. He instantly regrets that little comment, feeling a sense of dread rising like bile up his throat as he hears them shuffle behind him.
Here come the pitiful looks and careful words.
He doesn’t need them—he hasn’t needed them for so long.
“I will move out,” Mingyu announces just before Dokyeom can offer him another futile assurance. “I just need a little more time, I guess.”
Dokyeom doesn’t argue that. He can see just how a few weeks away from his apartment has helped bring the Mingyu he knew back into the body which had been rotting away in that place. Dokyeom had seen how Mingyu had cooped himself up in his place. Depressed and dull. Curtains always shut off. His art-studio collecting dust.
He barely ever cooked anymore.
So when he had told Dokyeom about the pipe that burst in his apartment, it was a no-brainer for him to let Mingyu in.
And by the looks of it now — and despite all the inconveniences — Dokyeom thinks that he wouldn’t hesitate to do it all over again.
“You can be here for as long as you want, bud.” He slaps him over his back. “That’s what friends are for.”
Jihyo adds, “Yeah I guess I was just being a jerk…I think you needed this change. It suits you.”
Mingyu nods at them, the way one does when they’re overwhelmed to a point that even words fail them.
He goes back to arranging the forks by the spoons on the table when Dokyeom clears his throat, leaning against the counter and announces to Jihyo, “It’s not just the change of place that’s suiting him though.”
Jihyo reflects his playfulness, “Ahan? What do you mean?”
“A little birdie told me our puppy has made a new lady friend.” Dokyeom answers, his voice sporting that dramatic lilt that makes Mingyu roll his eyes. “Chan saw him smiling like an idiot with a girl in the library the other day.”
Mingyu protests, “she’s just helping me study—”
“No, wait.” Dokyeom interrupts, “my apologies, because Chan said he saw you smiling like an idiot at a girl in the library. She wasn’t even looking at you.”
“I spy a little crush situation,” Jihyo squeals, hopping up on the marble counter between Mingyu and Dokyeom, “come on, spill. Who, when, why, where?”
“There is no crush situation,” Mingyu scoffs, “besides, I think I learnt my lesson about not crushing on my friends.”
“She’s not your friend.” Dokyeom corrects, “like I said, she doesn’t even look at you.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I have my ways.”
Jihyo throws two napkins at the both of them, “Dokyeom, shut up. Mingyu, man up. Who is this new friend of yours? Tell me all about her.”
“There is nothing to tell. Dokyeom’s right, we aren’t even friends. She’s just someone…well, she’s Chaeyoung’s roommate, and we share similar classes so she’s helping me out with whatever I miss out on.”
“Chae’s roommate?” Jihyo’s eyebrows arch, “well, that’s a new angle.”
“It’s nothing serious. Really. I was talking to Chae the other day and I mentioned needing help with a few classes. She thought her roommate had a little crush on me and decided to set us up, I guess. I think she misread it though because the girl is farthest from interested in me. But it works.” he shrugs, like this entire rant and all the specific details he gave out mean nothing.
“‘Just a great tutor,’” Dokyeom mocks, imitating Mingyu’s very hurried and very raspy tone, “then why the hell were you smiling to yourself while reading her notes like they were love letters at three in the morning?”
“I was not.”
“You so were.”
“I was admiring her penmanship.”
Jihyo completely glosses over their back-and-forth and turns to fully face Mingyu with the same grin she has whenever she’s watching her favorite rom-coms. “What if Chae is right and the girl is indeed into you? What if she’s just playing hard to catch?”
Mingyu leans down until he’s eye-level with Jihyo’s moony ones. “Or what if, we all stop being so obsessed with this cause I don’t wanna creep her out.”
Jihyo’s smile drops. Stoically, she asks. “Do you like her?”
“Not like that…”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s pretty…and seems like a good person. But that’s it. I barely know her.”
“Then make an effort and get to know her!”
“You guys don’t get it…” Mingyu finally says, “she is very distant and guarded and I don’t know what Chae has told her about me. I mean, for all I know—”
“Don’t even finish that thought.” Jihyo interrupts, “you and I both know Chaeyoung would never do that.”
Mingyu sighs, placing his hands over his waist and letting his head drop with defeat. When he finally has the energy to look at his friends again, all the lightheartedness has evaporated out of the room.
“Let’s just drop it. I can’t even enter my apartment on my own for fuck’s sake.”
// lemme know if u wanna be tagged pookies <3
reblogs, asks and comments are not only appreciated but fucking threatened on here dont make me block u if i catch u just liking my fics smh!!!!
happy early birthday to my man ugh i love him saurrrr much
IN WHICH Kim Mingyu has been on your mind ever since he first joined the team. Not only is he attractive, but his gameplay makes it impossible for you to look away. You want to get to know him more than anything, only if everything wasn’t so complicated. Despite you thinking otherwise, Mingyu has nothing against you. But with you and Jake constantly hanging out, he has no reason to talk to his coach’s daughter. After all, you’ve always been just a little too out of bounds.
pairing » basketball player!mingyu x coach's daughter!reader
genre » fluff, smut, lil angst
featuring » other svt members, original characters, jungkook, lee heeseung, jake sim, nishimura riki
contains » alcohol consumption, some angst, basketball player!mingyu, coach’s daughter!reader, basketball terminology (nothing that would be too hard to understand tho), reader lives with her dad, no mention of reader’s mom, student!reader, reader in education, Mingyu calls reader Blue, age gap
warnings » SMUT, dry humping, manhandling, body worship, oral (f. rec.), fingering, dirty talk, pathetic!dom!mingyu, soft!dom!mingyu, sub!reader, multiple orgasms, unprotected sex, breeding kink, aftercare
word count » 32k
↪ izzy adds... happiest bday to my all time favorite <33 as some of you know I crashed out many times while posting this fic but hopefully all is good now!! Frankly, this fic is very me myself and I but I still hope you get to enjoy this as well <3 Huge shout out to @livmarauder for making this banner it's literally perfect and I cannot get enough of it
playlist | mingyu m.list
The buzzer echoes in your ears. You missed it. You fucking missed it. Doing your best to hide your disappointment, you continue pouring the beer. You can't be mad, not really. You were never supposed to see it either way. With the way your snack bar is stationed — having a view on only half the court unless you step out — it was never meant to be a place you'd watch the game from. But you still hate that you couldn't be a part of the win. You'll just have to live with having no idea what they are talking about once the players join you here.
But if you are honest, you have bigger problems at hand now. Because before you can even blink, the line in front of you is already much longer, everyone asking you for a drink. You'd love to be able to split in half at the moment. It's always like this, and yet you are never ready for it. Rush hour is every halftime and end of the match for you.
You wave your hand to your colleague so she can collect the money, quietly praying for the beer cooler to work faster. There's not much for Dae to do when everyone is waiting for a drink — your specialty. And as much as you love being at the drinks duty, you regret not switching with her every time this happens.
Handing out one beer after another, you listen to the chatters about today's game. There are lot of praises passed around, creating a smile on your face. You might have not seen most of the game, but you know the guys killed it tonight again. How could they not with their talents finally being put to use with their new coach? You might be biased, but you do think they'll take it far this year.
"Sunshine, can you also pour me one when you have time?" You look up to meet your dad's eyes, nodding.
"You'll have to wait," you shrug, softly pointing your head at the line. He nods, waving you off like he doesn't care at all, reminding you to take your time. You wish more people would be like this. At least your family if no one else. But your uncle is a prime example of the behavior your hate when you are already busy. He pushes past the line, handing you his empty pint. "Yeah, yeah," you mumble, placing it down and focusing on the people that came before him.
You're not sure how much time passes, but you sit down again eventually. Plopping down with a heavy sigh, you exchange a glance with Dae. She gives you a sympathetic smile, glancing at your dad who has the same one as he leans against the wall with his beer in hands. "It's going to calm down again now. They won't all be coming at the same time."
You hum back, stretching your hands above your head. "How did it go? Did you finally figure out the rotation?"
"Pretty much," he nods. "I liked how they played today so if it continues like this, we got the perfect core five."
"That's good," your smile grows. "If nothing, then the points show they've gotten better since you started training them."
He rolls his eyes but you see the smile tugging on his lips. You like seeing your dad like this. He's always been happy no matter what category he was training, loving it when he could see the enjoyment on his player's eyes, but there is something different about watching him coach a team full of adults who could really take it far if they want to.
"Let's not assume how the rest of the season will go." You peek over when you hear Jake's voice, a smile on his face. "Who says I won't replace Seungkwan and give us the well deserved win."
"Not if you keep avoiding working out," your dad reminds him and Jake just shakes his head, mounting to you that he is lying.
You chuckle, "right, right."
He steps forward, still smiling as he opens his wallet. "Could you give me two? Promised Heeseung I'll buy tonight."
"He doesn't stay for stretching after trainings but he stays to get drunk?" You shake your head as you take the cash from him. "You should keep an eye on that."
"At least he stays to drink with us and team bond. Nishimura doesn't even look me in the eyes before disappearing."
"I think he is intimidated by you, coach," Jake explains and your dad's eyes widen in the most your dad way you know. He somehow manages to look shocked as well as not surprised at all, offended but also making fun of the situation. You've seen this look a lot. With his eyebrows raised and arms crossed over his chest, he looks exactly the same as whenever you tell him about a dumb date you've been on. The amount of times he's been surprised at something the guys you went out with said or did is not something you could count on both hands. Every time, the conversation ends with the two of you agreeing that guys just need more time to mature.
"By me?" He questions and you laugh as you pour Jake his two beers. "Tell him he'll be running ten extra laps for that." All four of you laugh, including Dae who has far from knowing anything about basketball.
Your dad leaves after a short moment to talk with the rest of the coach staff and some of the players while Jake stays with you, chatting with Dae about their upcoming assignment. You try to listen in but your attention starts drifting elsewhere, the debate about the physics paper they have to submit passing by you completely. Zoning out, you stare at the nearest wall, thinking about anything but the situation around you. For the first time today, you get to turn off and not worry about whether you gave the right change or not.
You are glad Jake and Dae found something in common when you introduced them for the first time. If they didn't, you'd never be able to just shut off like this, worried it would get awkward and would try your hardest to keep the conversation going. But when they met for the first time and found out they share a physic class, all your worries disappeared as you watched them talk about their lessons. Both of them still rely on you sometimes but you'd say they are good friends now.
It's good knowing your friends are getting along.
"I love you so much," Heeseung sings as he comes into your sight, making you snap out of your thoughts. You blink up at him, seeing four more players behind him. The foam on his beer has already fallen off but he doesn't seem to care, taking his drink from Jake with a grin on his face.
"Can I get a better one if I also tell you I love you?" Seungcheol smiles at you and you shake your head, standing up again and getting four pints ready, assuming all of them are here for the same thing.
"You can try," you shrug, a smile tugging in the corner of your lips as well. It only makes his smile grow wider.
"Sure he could," Joshua wraps his arm around his shoulder. "If he wants to die while explaining to his coach why his daughter is suddenly pregnant and needs to leave school."
"Now now," you quickly interrupt him, your eyes widening. "Don't even joke about that."
"Exactly," Seungcheol joins you, shaking the younger man off him. "If I knock anyone up in the near future I'll assume it's your curse and what will you do then? I don't have the time or resources to raise a kid right now."
"At your grown age?" Heeseung pipes from the side, grinning through his drink. Seungcheol ignores his comment but you chuckle.
"And here I was going to give you a tip," he sighs.
"Yeah? What kind?" Dae tilts her head innocently and you have to hold back a laugh, handing all four players their drinks while the eldest pays for them while exchanging a few words with Dae that you can't catch. You think you're glad you don't by the way her ears turn red.
Everyone on the team has always been friendly with you. Whether it's because you sell them alcohol or that your dad is their coach, you have no idea. But it doesn't really matter. As long as they keep being nice to you, then you don't need to know. It still feels a little weird being a part of conversations like these with them as if it was completely normal, but you're trying to get over that. And honestly, with the captain's welcoming smile and kind words — despite his friends joking about him making you pregnant — it's all a lot easier.
You'd say you are pretty close with the team. You are able to hold small talks and they often hang out with you and Dae here after their games. So while you can't say you consider all of them your friends, you aren't strangers either.
Well, expect for one man on the team.
Possibly the only one you've ever wanted to be close with.
It was a year ago, you think. Around the time the previous season started. The team gained a few new players — including Jake and Riki who you'd say you are the closest to out of all of them — and your eyes immediately locked in on one of them.
Kim Mingyu, tall, tanned, and handsome, was impossible not to look at.
It only took one game and you were hooked, unable to look away from him whenever he was on the court and you had some time to watch. His smooth movements, the control he has of the ball, and the incredibly beautiful smile on his face when he scores a point all made you so much more interested.
But you never got to talk to him as you wished you would. Because right after the game ended, you saw him with the only person you didn't want to see him with — Jungkook. Watching the guy you have a silly little crush on laughing with your ex boyfriend might have been the best way to get you to turn around again and reconsider talking to him.
You have no idea what or if Jungkook ever told him anything about you, but with the way Mingyu never even tried to talk to you outside a few hellos and ordering unlike the rest of the team, you think it's safe to assume he doesn't think of you nicely.
You and Jungkook didn't exactly end it on bad terms, you just both had different views on things. All you wanted was to focus on your studies and to do something with yourself, while all he wanted was a family to settle with as soon as possible. At twenty, the idea of turning your life around to make a family with your boyfriend was wild to you. It was simply never supposed to happen. You never spoke badly of him after the breakup but you also never talked to him again, so you have no idea how he and his friends look at you.
It's as if you've manifested them, the two of them coming into your sight of view. Jungkook doesn't come closer but you see him standing in the hall while Mingyu walks over to you. "I'll take two, please." He only meets your eyes briefly before Seokmin tugs him into their conversation. You glance at him a few times as you pour the beers, watching the easy smile on his face. Despite knowing it's not going to happen, you can't help but admire him. He is so handsome, it's unfair to you. How are you supposed to not look at him when he looks like that?
You quote the price to him, just like you've done many times today. Your fingers brush when he hands you the cash and you feel like you're going insane, the nervousness you suddenly feel driving you crazy. As if it wasn't enough, he practically holds your hand in his as he takes the drinks from you. You have to look up at Jungkook to remind yourself this is nothing, that Mingyu thinks who knows what of you and it's only your own delusion making this into something that it's not.
He doesn't stay for any longer, saying his goodbye to the rest of the team and leaving to hang out with your ex. Dae nudges you and you take your eyes off him, offering her a brief smile. It's been like this for a year now, so why do you unconsciously keep hanging onto a thread of hope?
"Sunshine." You nod when you hear your dad's voice, taking his pint from him to pour him his drink. "Thank you. What are you all standing here for?" He nods towards the team, all of them holding their own beer. "Good game today but how do you want to bond the team together if you aren't drinking with us?"
"We were just about to join you, coach," Seungcheol grins. "How could we possibly afford to miss the president's drunk blabbing about our game?" Your dad shakes his head and Seungcheol sends both you and Dae a wave, saying his see you later before leaving with the team to join the coaching staff in their staff room. You're sure they'll be back for another round but for now, as soon as you hand your dad his drink and he leaves as well, you are left alone with Dae and the thoughts of how much you want Mingyu to talk to you.
When your dad told you you'll be home alone on the weekend because he's got away games, you found yourself questioning how far you're willing to go for a stupid crush. You always liked watching sports, but not to the point you'd come out of your way for them. If you were already coming to the game to sell drinks, then you wanted to watch as well. If you were hanging out with your friends and you happened to find a group of people playing street basketball, you'd watch as well. But you never went to watch a game in your free time just because.
Which is also why your dad was so surprised when you asked him to come with instead of enjoying the free house. Still, he wouldn't say no to you, not even if he wanted to.
Humming along to your playlist, you watch the road ahead as your dad drives. He follows Joshua's car, who's taking most of the bench players except for Riki who sits behind you. Your dad's way of taking revenge and trying to intimidate him, you're certain. It seems to be working since he hasn't said a word ever since you picked him up, looking into his phone the entire time. No doubt texting his best friend.
There are two more cars behind yours — Seungcheol's and Mingyu's. You feel bad a little. If you weren't going, they could easily fit into just three cars and everyone would be comfortable. Your dad assured you they were planning on driving four cars either way and there is no need for you to worry but you can't help it.
"Jake's asking if we can stop by the nearest gas station." It's the first time you hear Riki's words since you said hellos and both you and your dad glance at him. You see him swallow his nerves when your dad's eyes find his, unable to hold back your laugh. It's funny to see him so freaked out when you know your dad is the sweetest person you know. Most of the players know it too, you're sure. It's only a matter of time before Riki realizes it too.
"Will we be on time?" You ask, biting back your laugh.
"We should be," you dad nods. "Let the others know as well. If they don't want to come with they can drive straight to the stadium but they better not get lost."
"Yes, coach," Riki nods eagerly and your lips form a straight line, your eyes closed as you do your best not to let the laugh out. Turning your head towards the window, you hide your smile behind your hand. You already know this will be a fun trip.
You all park in a line and Jake immediately rushes out, not bothering to look back once as he heads straight for the bathroom. Riki steps out as well, using the opportunity to breathe properly without your dad near. Shaking your head, you stretch your arms over your head, melting into your seat.
A knock on your window interrupts you and you glance to the side, your eyes widening when you see Mingyu leaning down besides you. Your dad rolls the window down and you want to curse him out for not keeping the barrier between you and him up. "I'm grabbing a coffee, do you want anything, coach?" He asks, his hands bracing the edge of the open window as he looks inside, and you can't help but watch his toned arms.
It's insane how invisible he makes you feel. You become one with the seat, looking down into your lap as your dad refuses his offer. A beat of silence passes and you look up again, finding Mingyu's eyes on you, waiting for your answer. "Oh," you breathe out. The feeling of invisibility disappears instantly. "Could you get me an ice coffee? I'll give you the money, wait."
He shakes his head, straightening his back again. "Don't worry about it," he brushes you off and leaves before you can argue further.
You pick your purse from the floor either way, finding your wallet. "He's not going to accept it," your dad says simply. You meet his eyes, tilting your head slightly. "I've tried before as well. He even bought me lunch one time last year when I was subbing for their assistant coach and he refused to take any money from me. I think he likes treating people."
"I don't want to owe him, though."
"You can give the money to me then and I'll do my best forcing it to him. If I fail, I'll just keep the money and we'll all be happy."
"Listening in on other people's conversation is not a great look, Lee," your dad warns him. Heeseung just smiles in return, copying Mingyu's pose from before and leaning down onto the window.
"Isn't it great when I overhear our opponents tactics, though?"
"You're terrible," you shake your head at him with a laugh.
"Tell me you use your time for better things as well. Like, for example, learning our tactics."
"You know I only do my best, coach," Heeseung assures him. "Which is why we've been singing out lungs out the entire ride." When your dad gives him an annoyed look, he clears his throat, immediately switching the playful vibe to a more serious one. "We'll focus on it for the rest of the drive." After one last look from your dad, he runs away again, mumbling something about starting to get it as he approaches Riki.
You scroll through your playlist, picking the songs for the rest of the ride as you wait. Jake comes back shortly after with a new hat, that you rather not question where he got from, and Mingyu right after him. He hands you your ice coffee and when you try paying him back, he dismisses you just like your dad said he would. A heavy sigh escapes your lips as you open the can, thanking him while Riki takes a seat in the back of the car again. You keep your eyes on the older man, your hands wrapped around the cold drink, cooling yourself at least that way when your entire body feels so hot.
You'd like to say you don't think about Mingyu. In fact, you'd love to be able to say thinking about the way he is best friends with your ex made you snap out of it and you weren't looking at him as anything other than one of your dad's players.
But you apparently have no control over your emotions because while your head tells you that's an enough reason for you to give up on the idea of him, your heart does the exact opposite and just keeps thinking about him the entire car ride.
With your music on and free time, it doesn't take much for you to start daydreaming. A certain basketball player who towers over you and has arms the size of your head keeps lingering in your mind, all sorts of scenarios taking over you. If your dad and Riki manage to exchange some words, you don't hear any of them. All you can focus on is how great you know you'd be together if only things were a little different.
Shifting in your seat to make yourself more comfortable, you force yourself out of it, staring at the road ahead instead.
♡⸝⸝♡⸝⸝
It's a chaos as soon as you arrive at the stadium. While the guys go find their changing room — which you genuinely hope they'll be able to as the map at the entrance wasn't any helpful — your dad tries to convince the organizer to let him have two assistant coaches. It's not against the rules, you know that, so why is it that the opposite team's coach has so much trouble with letting you in?
"Okay," the organizer sighs. "We'll need to see your coach license and it won't be any problem. I'll talk it over with the Tiger's coach. As you said, the rules state up to maximum of eight extra people accompanying the coach and team members."
"Oh," you breathe out, panicking as you glance between the stranger and your dad. You do not have a coaching license. Why would you? You stopped being involved in this sport back when you were fifteen. Your dad realizes it as well. Deep down he knew trying to let you in on the bench was a bad idea since if anyone wanted to check, they'd know you have no previous experience. Still, he wanted to try in case he could have his little girl beside him during the game.
"To be honest, I think it'll be better if you just do it with Seojin. The two of you work well together and it'd be a chaos if there were three of us. I'll be watching from the audience," you smile, briefly stroking your dad's arm. Looking over at the organizer, you thank him again for trying to hard to make it work for you both.
"If that's what you guys want to do," he nods, pointing towards the audience entrance and telling you to go up the first stair you see. You nod, giving your dad a quick goodbye before disappearing into the hallway.
You need to hurry if you want to grab a good spot in the front. It's still early, forty minutes until the game officially starts, but people are already coming in and you don't want to risk a good spot. Not today when you already came all the way here to watch the team play.
Rushing through the hall, you don't pay attention to where you are going, accidentally bumping shoulders with one of the players. "Shit, sorry," you apologize quickly before glancing up, your eyes slowly trailing up his figure until they settle on the chocolate eyes you know so well.
Mingyu's eyes wander all over your figure as well as he shakes his head softly, assuring you it's okay. Look at where you are coming from and then back at you, he tilts his head in confusion. "Where are going? the court is the other way around."
"Ah. The audience— I'm going to watch from the seats."
He hums and you want to melt into floor beneath your feet. It's embarrassing. In the past year, you haven't talked to him outside of exchanging hellos and grabbing his order. You have no idea how you're supposed to talk to him like this, how to make it seem like you aren't an awkward loser. Even though, honestly, you might be.
A part of you wonders how he sees you. If your interactions today made his opinion on you final and he can now finally say with no trouble that you are weird and he's glad he never spoke to you before.
"Okay," he nods, and you swear you aren't imagining the emptiness of his words. Why even ask in the first place? You raise your head to find him looking at you, his eyes unlike his words the opposite of empty. You frown without properly realizing what you're doing, questioning why he is staring at you. "Your eyes," he points out, "they have a bit of yellow in them."
You blink up at him. Out of all the things you expected him to say, commenting on the color of your eyes was on the bottom of the list. "I…I guess?"
"Didn't you say you'd practice free throws before we finish changing?" Joshua calls as he nears the two of you, the rest of the team right behind him. Mingyu looks at them and takes a step away from you, naturally falling into pace with them and excusing how it's not his fault he couldn't even get on the court yet. You think you see him glance at you one more time before giving the boys his full attention but you're honestly not sure. It could be just your head playing tricks on you.
"Cheer loudly for us, okay?" Jake smiles at you as he passes you and you give him and encouraging nod, wishing them all good luck. The hallway gets empty again and you get back to why you found yourself here in the first place. You need to find good seats.
You sit right above their bench, second line. Most of the first line is already filled and you honestly don't want to be sitting between men your dad's age who have been eyeing you ever since you started wandering around the seats. So, you decide for a seat still close to the players but also comfortable. You'll just have to hope your luck isn't terrible and you won't find yourself squeezed between someone weird after all.
Your dad finds you with his eyes as soon as he orders for Seungcheol to lead the stretching, offering you one of his smiles. You return it, smiling at Seojin, his assistant coach, as well. He's been friends with your dad for as long as you can remember, and it's nice seeing them coach together now. Seojin has always trained the younger kids, teaching them the basics of basketball and how to handle a ball, but ever since the men's team has got a new coach, the entire staff needed an update as well. And from what you know, Seojin has always been on top of your dad's list.
"Is this seat taken?" You look up upon hearing a woman voice, relief washing over you immediately.
"Please, take it." She laughs softly, thanking you as she folds her jacket in her arms and sits down, resting her bag between her legs. She doesn't look much older than you. Twenty four if you had to guess. She is pretty, with her brown hair in a ponytail going down to the middle of her back, matching eyes gazing into yours and an adorable smile. You can imagine how easy it's for her to have guys folding at her feet. Especially if she is into their sports. "Who are you here for?"
"SK Knights," she answers, her eyes trailing the players on the court. "You?"
"Same," you grin, doing the same. "My first away game with them, kinda nervous," you joke and thankfully, she matches your humor, chuckling as she wishes you good luck. "I don't think I've ever seen you on their home games?"
"It's only been a few weeks since I started cheering for them," she explains. "I got interested when I saw them beat my brother's team. He hates them now, obviously."
"Obviously," you nod, unable to hide your smile. It's probably the excitement you feel from knowing you'll be able to talk about the game with someone similar to you and not a fifty year old man staring at your body instead of the game that makes you this giggly. You extend your hand out to her, your name falling off your lips.
"Bora," she shakes your hand with a smile. The two of you watch as Seungcheol controls the free throw drills before she nudges you with her shoulder, bringing your attention back to her. "So which one is it?"
"What do you mean?" You blink up at her.
"Oh come on," a knowing smile spreads on her lips as she eyes you up and down. "Sisters usually aren't that immersed into their brother's games — speaking from experience — so I crossed that option out. And that look in your eyes doesn't look like you're deeply analyzing the forms of the players or anything."
"Oh," you breathe out, glancing back at the court. Have you been looking at Mingyu without noticing? You did watch him and cursed a little under your breathe when he missed the shoot but were you that obvious? You quickly shake your head, getting the thoughts out of your head. There is no reason why you would be looking at him differently, you remind yourself. You have nothing to worry about. "The coach."
"The coach?" She blinks and you can tell she is surprised. "Well, you go girl then," she laughs quietly. "How big of an age gap is that?"
"God no! Not like that!" You interrupt her before her mind can wander further. "He is my dad. That's why I'm here," you finish your thought.
Bora sighs in what you could only classify as relief, "That makes so much more sense."
"And we have thirty years between us so please."
"Some girls are into that," she shrugs. "I couldn't but how am I supposed to know what your range is."
You think about it but don't answer her, your mind only coming up with the five years older player with annoyingly beautiful eyes and perfectly white teeth he shows every time he smiles. That seems like a reasonable difference. The last time your boyfriend was five years older than you it might have not lasted long but who ever said you are one to learn from your mistakes? You'll gladly try again and better if Mingyu lets you.
"Do you have a player you are here for? Or is it just the team in general?"
You watch her eyes flicker to the players, trying to follow her line of sight. But with everyone so close to each other right now, it's hard. "I think it was number twelve that caught my attention at first. But the entire team is great and I genuinely just want to watch a good game."
"Seungkwan?" Your eyes widen, less in a surprise and more in a pure excitement. Just based on what you know about him, you know he'd love her. But then again, who wouldn't? Looking at her, you might fall as well. "You should get his number after the game!" You encourage her. "You can come with me after and I'll introduce you."
"Please," she shakes her head, laughing. "I don't need his number. I'll be happy watching from the side lines and cheering the team on while my brother prays for my and their down fall. And if I were to get anyone's number tonight," she meets your eyes with a soft smile, "It'd be yours."
You shake your head at her as you pull your phone from your pocket, gladly handing it to her. Looking forward to all the games the two of you can watch together from now on, you are happier and happier you decided to join today's game.
The dopamine you feel as soon as the game starts is much bigger than you expected. The starting five is the same as at the last game — Seungcheol as center, Mingyu and Seungkwan as guards, and Jeonghan and Hansol playing forward. It worked last time, and with every inch of your body you hope it does today as well.
They had advantage last time, playing on home land, so if they work it out this time as well it'll mean your dad found the core five. Ever since he started coaching them two months ago, he kept on trying different rotations, trying to learn what worked together and what didn't. You watched him sit over his notes at home late at night sometimes and gave him your two cents when you had something to offer.
You were the one to point out how well Seungkwan plays when he has Hansol on the team with him, how relieved he seems knowing they have a strong defense that allows him to make risky plays. You're glad you did. They seem way more stable now.
You cheer for the team along with the rest of your section, frowning when they lose the ball, and raising your hands in the air when they score a point. It's incredibly loud around you but you don't mind, only focused on the play. Your dad has never been one to argue with referees or yell at his players about what they should do when they are in the zone, and that hasn't changed with the men. It's not your dad's voice that keeps echoing in your ears. But there one — two actually. Seungcheol leads his team on the court, with the help of Mingyu, who isn't scared to call for a ball or suggest a play.
Without having to see his face, you know your dad is proud. You know exactly what kind of look he has because the same one is on your face. There is a weird sense of accomplishment knowing they are doing well.
It's a close match, no one letting the other team get too far ahead. As soon as the gap widens more than they'd like, they pull a new move and turn it around again, leaving the entire audience in chaos. You watch with wide eyes, unable to take your attention off. This has got to be one of the best games you've ever seen. It makes sense why they play in the league now. While you were always a fan thanks to your little crush and one of your closest friends being on the team, it's moments like these that remind you the players aren't just hot but actually talented.
You know Bora feels it too, loud encouragements leaving her lips every time one of the Knights gets the ball. The team work is amazing, their passes perfect and shots clean. You can tell they are in a zone, likely only seeing the ball and the rest of the players on the court.
It's the second quarter that the opponents defense starts to be more aggressive, the referees having to stop the game because of fouls before you can comprehend anything. Luck seems to be on your side through, because every time they foul, it happens to be Mingyu they make contact with. Your smile grows more and more as you watch him take his place at the free throw line, knowing he'll make it without having to look.
If you know anything about him, it's that his cleanest shots are from the free throw line. You've never seen him miss in a game, but it's not only that. You know his stats. 98% success rate in free throws is fucking amazing. Based on the look on the opponent's faces as they take their positions, you know they realize it too.
He isn't missing.
Your section grows quiet as Mingyu dribbles the ball beside his leg briefly, getting the right grip of the ball before holding it in both hands. The ball leaves his fingertips and your eyes follow it eagerly, the loudest cheers leaving your lips when it goes straight in. Glancing at the score board, you high five with Bora when you see the 43:33. They made it to the ten point gap.
You seriously couldn't be prouder.
It's Riki's eyes you find first when the halftime begins. Jake joins him right after, both of them yelling at you how they hope you know they'd play way better if they were on the court before your dad dismisses them. You laugh, watching them get scolded over not knowing when to stop. It's all playful, they know it too, but it still must look heavy to everyone who doesn't know your dad personally. Thankfully, a lot of the people in your section have left when the second quarter ended to go to the toilet or buy drinks.
"You guys seem to be close," Bora nudges your shoulder and you roll your eyes with a scoff. Encouraging her to stand up, you both walk to the railing at the front, leaning forward and looking down at the players.
"We are close in age, it was natural," you explain, smiling at the two youngest
"If it isn't our two biggest fans," Seungcheol comes into view, offering you both a smile. "I'm pretty sure I could only hear your voices throughout the game." You doubt that's true but with the confident grin on his face, he could make you believe a lot. He looks around at his teammates to add to his words before he opens his mouth again, "Shouldn't we know the name of our biggest fan?"
Exactly what you expected. You shake your head at him as Bora introduces herself, praising their game play in the first half. You take the opportunity and scan the court with your eyes until you find what you've been looking at. You meet Mingyu's eyes briefly, smiling at him. A smile appears on his lips in return and it's impossible how weak your heart suddenly feels. Jesus. You need to get a grip.
His eyes don't stay on you for long though, the warm feeling in your chest leaving as soon as it came when he focuses his attention on Heeseung and calls him over so he'd practice passes with him. You're used to this, though. It'd be weirder if he kept his focus on you. You tear your eyes off him when Bora asks you if you want her to get you a drink and shake your head, joining her conversation with Seungcheol and Joshua.
Your eyes trail to number 17 every now and then, but you don't meet his eyes again until the very end of the halftime when you tell them all good luck.
You say your goodbye to Bora at the entrance after the happy win, your grin growing wider when you see her talking with Seungkwan before leaving, praising his game all over again. He seems frustrated, and you just know he'll be thinking about the interaction for a while. When he asks her if she'll be in the stands tomorrow as well, it only confirms everything.
"Let's go, we need to settle in," your dad calls for everyone to gather and they listen. The cars fill shortly after, Jake joining you this time so Riki won't be alone anymore. It's not like he was since you were in the car as well, but honestly, you enjoyed the tension between him and your dad too much to actually provide him some of the support Jake will by sitting in the back with him.
This time, your car leaves first. "We need to rearrange the rooms when we arrive," your dad reminds you and both of the guys peer up from their phones.
"Why?"
"I was booking for twelve, not thirteen. And I know since Seokmin ended up not coming today there is an empty bed, but it'd be uncomfortable having our only girl room with three men."
"Dad, I'm fine—"
You don't get to finish your sentence as he interrupts you. "It's uncomfortable for me."
You chuckle, shaking your head. "I'm okay sharing the room with the guys. We are all adults and I know them."
"Yeah, that's what I'm worried about the most. We should switch our room with yours so she can room with me and Seojin," he suggests, glancing at Jake in the back through the rear view mirror. "Heeseung can go instead of Seokmin and the two of you will take our room."
"No," you stop him immediately. "Dad, I'm not sharing a room with you and Seojin. That'd be uncomfortable for me. Let me room with the guys instead. It's fine."
He hesitates and you can see all kinds of thoughts running through his head as he stares at the road ahead. "Okay," he finally sighs. First win of the night for you. "You can take my room with one of the guys, but I'm not having you stay in a room with three of them."
"Yes, sir," you laugh.
"Shall we room together?" Jake leans forward, holding onto the seat in front of him. You glance back at him, nodding without a second thought.
"Sounds good."
"Wait, does that mean Heeseung and I will be in the room alone or what?" Riki leans forward as well and your dad's grin widens. Oh good god.
"No. Heeseung will sleep in the four people room like I said. The room switch also still stands. Just this time, you'll be the one in the room with us and not my daughter."
You watch as Riki's face gets pale, holding back a laughter. You can practically see the curse on his lips, needing to look away to hold it in. Things may not be working out for Riki, but this is one of the funniest trips you've ever had.
♡⸝⸝♡⸝⸝
Despite your dad's stare, Jake helps you carry your bag up to your room. You immediately jump on the closest bed, your arms and legs stretched out. "You wanted to room with me because you knew the room for coach staff would be the biggest one, didn't you?" You prompt yourself up to look at him and he laughs, dropping your bag besides your bed.
"Obviously. What did you expect? That I would want to share a room with three stinky men instead of enjoying my free space? Absolutely not."
You laugh as well, nodding. "Valid point."
"I'll go shower first, okay? I need to get all this sweat off me."
"Sure," you nod. "Go ahead."
"This is also what I love about this room," he says as he stretches his hands above his head, going to check out the bathroom. "I can just shower without waiting for everyone else to get it over with because they love to make things by age order."
"I hope you like using me to your advantage," you shake your head with a smile, taking out your phone from your pocket and looking at messages you missed while you were at the game.
"It's the best!" Jake yells before the bathroom door shuts behind him, the sound of the shower being turned on coming shortly after.
Jake has a towel wrapped around his waist when he comes back, apologies leaving his lips as he rushes to his bag to get a set of fresh clothes. You sigh heavily, ignoring his presence and continuing to scroll on your phone. He is gone again in a second anyway. He doesn't close the bathroom door fully this time, though, wanting you to hear him. "The guys have texted about wanting to go out for drinks. Do you want to come with? It'll be fun."
"Everyone's going?" You ask back and he agrees. Thinking about it for a moment, you go through all the possibilities of how tonight could go.
One, you get awfully drunk and embarrass yourself in front of everyone.
Two, you get awfully drunk and give into Seungcheol's joking and flirt back with him, all of it leading to one big, drunk, mistake.
Three, you get awfully drunk and call your ex just to ask him about what him and his friends think of you so you can know what your chances with Mingyu are.
Four, you get awfully drunk and confess your feelings to Mingyu, who will then turn you down and you'll spend the rest of the night heartbroken, not even wanting to come to the game tomorrow. Things will be weird, he'll talk to you even less than before, your dad will see that something is going on, and you'll have to explain to him what happen and feel embarrassed all over again.
Yeah, you don't think you want to drink tonight.
"I'll pass!" You call back at him. "I don't feel like drinking tonight."
He peers from the bathroom, fully dressed now. "Just come and don't drink then? I'd feel weird leaving you here alone while we are out having fun."
You wave him off. "It's okay. I won't stay here. I wanted to go out and explore the city a bit so you don't have to worry about that," you assure him. "You guys go have fun and I'll see you in the morning. Hopefully I won't be cleaning your puke by then."
"I promise you you won't," he laughs. "If you get bored and change your mind, just call me and I'll tell you where we are so you can come hang out, okay?"
"Okay," you nod.
Standing up from your bed, you reach for new clothes in your bag as well, going to steal the shower for yourself now.
You don't hear Jake leaving the room through your playlist, but when you come out again twenty minutes later, he is nowhere to be seen. You look at the time on your phone, deciding to go out as well and have something for dinner when you see the 7:53. It surprises you how fast time passes, but then again, it was a long game, and even longer settling into your hotel rooms.
It's only the end of March but the cold air has already been replaced. You brought a jacket with yourself in case you'd get cold but you don't think you'll be needing it after all. Walking through the quiet streets, you admire the city slowly. You've always loved exploring new places, so tonight is only looking more and more perfect. There is no rush, no one telling you to stop taking pictures of random stuff and just hurry so you can have dinner already, and you love that about it the most. You're glad you decided not to go for drinks with them tonight.
A part of you feels disappointed, the hope you still have for you and Mingyu lingering and telling you to go so you can get to know him more. But a bigger part of you knows you shouldn't. All your worries earlier were right, and you're not sure how you'd behave if the guys got you drunk. Kim Mingyu is hot when you are sober. You don't want to find out what you think of him when you're wasted.
Snapping a picture of a fountain you pass, you hide your phone in your pocket again when your eyes fall to a small restaurant nearby, the atmosphere pulling you in immediately. The only thing better than amazing food is amazing food with a nice vibe.
Jake and Riki both send you videos from the bar as you have your dinner, making you laugh out loud. One of the servers looks at you weirdly but you do your best not paying it any attention, refusing to let this good night be ruined by anything.
You take a different route on your walk back, checking your phone's map every once in a while just to make sure you aren't going in a completely different direction.
It's when you see an outside basketball court that you stop in your track completely, the urge to go and play growing with each second you're looking at it. It's still far so you can't see if anyone is there or not, but you surely hope there is.
It's been a while since you last played. Sure, there were PE lessons in high school and you'd play sometimes then, but it's been almost ten years since you played properly. You don't regret quitting back then, you still believe it was the right decision. Pushing yourself into doing something that was no longer fun would have only made you hate the sport, and you never wanted that to happen. You prefer this more — the feeling of still caring for the sport and wanting to play at times like these.
The sound of dribbles reaches you before you can see anyone. You debate texting Bora if she's free and doesn't want to come meet you so the two of you could play together, but as soon as your eyes land on the only person occupying the court, you rethink it. It would be fun to play with her and get to know her more, but if you're honest, you are more interested in playing and getting to know the person practicing free throws.
"I thought you guys went out for drinks," you say softly, trying not to scare him by suddenly breaking the silence you are sure he's gotten used to. Despite your attempt, you watch as he flinches when your voice reaches him, the ball changing trajectory and missing the hoop. "Sorry."
"No worries," he mumbles, jogging for the ball again. "They did go. I think Seungcheol said the bar was like five minutes from the hotel." You nod, awkwardly standing on the side as he comes back to the free throw line before locking his eyes with yours. "Wanna play?"
Before you can think it through, you are nodding, wanting nothing more. That's why you came here after all — to see if there was anyone you could play with. You surely didn't expect it'd be a league player but he'll have to do this time.
Mingyu watches you as you rest your jacket on a nearby bench before coming to him. He hands you the ball and steps aside so you can shoot as well. You seem nervous but he doesn't point it out, not wanting to make you uncomfortable. He takes the sight of you in as you stand at the line, trying to get into the same position you've seen him take many times during today's game. Your shirt rides up slightly but it's barely noticeable since a bit of your stomach was already revealed. You're wearing an off-shoulder blue shirt — a different style from the red tank top he saw you in at the game — that you tucked into what he assumes is your bra on one side, your jeans hugging your stomach unlike the baggy bottoms.
Your hair is the only thing still same, the brown locks reaching down your back. It's simple, and yet he can't help but think about how much he loves your outfit. Blue suits you.
The ball leaves your hands but doesn't go as you'd like, missing the hoop. You close your eyes shut in defeat, slowly trailing to pick it up again. "You need more power, Blue. Otherwise it was great."
You look over your shoulder when you pick up the ball, blinking at him confusedly. "Blue?"
"Oh," he breathes out, realizing he let the nickname escape. "That was just—" he hesitates as he takes a place at the free throw line again, extending his hands forward for you to make a pass to him. You do, giving him the ball and slowly coming to his side. "I noticed you wear it a lot, it kind of escaped."
It's you who is breathing out a quiet 'oh' this time, your heart doing weird back flips at the mention of him noticing what you usually wear. It's shocking since you always thought he avoided looking at you as much as he could. "I see."
His eyes find yours again as he takes a step to the left, encouraging you to come closer to him. He dribbles the ball besides him briefly before taking his position, letting you watch him from up close as the ball leaves his fingers again, this time landing in the hoop perfectly. You smile at the sight, unable to hide how you feel as he comes to stand under the hoop, passing you the ball.
You stand with the ball in your hands for a moment, trying to figure out what he's doing. "Come on, Blue. You just saw how it's done. You can do it too if you try. We aren't moving on until you make it in."
You knew you wouldn't need your jacket but now he just confirmed it. There is no way you'll get cold tonight when he makes you feel so hot, your entire body heating up over his words. Come on, Blue. Does he know you are crazy for him? If he did maybe he'd pay more attention to what he says. Playing with you is one thing, but trying to help you like this on top of giving you a nickname? He isn't fair to you at all.
You do your best aligning your arms perfectly, watching the hoop in front of you as the ball leaves your hands. As soon as it does, you know you missed. It felt wrong. Just like you thought, the ball falls short again. Mingyu catches the ball with ease, passing it to you right away. "Are you sure you want to be here all night? I'm not making it in. The hoop is too high."
"You are making it," he shakes his head. "What would your dad say if he saw you whining like this? The hoop is too high? Don't play dumb now." He tilts his head and it's the pretties you've ever seen him. With his dark short hair, a knowing raised brow, a comfortable sweats and a black tank, he is absolutely gorgeous. Maybe your crush on him isn't as little as you've been convincing yourself. You are obsessed. Obsessed with how he watches you right now, how he looks, and how he talks with you.
"I'm not playing dumb," you argue but still listen to him and try to get into position again.
"Then you're not as smart as I always thought you were."
God fucking damn it.
You are in no way Mingyu's strongest soldier, and he just keeps proving you that.
Shooting again, you get a better feeling than before. You miss again, but this time the ball at least hits the hoop. Maybe he is right and you can do this. "What happens when I get it in?" You wonder as he passes you the ball back.
You hold the ball under your arm while he thinks, waiting for his answer. "We move on to a real game. Match for ten points, hm?"
"I'm supposed to try to match a league player?"
"You came here to play, didn't you, Blue?"
You hesitate, averting your eyes from him. "This just seems like an unfair bet for you to jerk your ego," you mumble under your breath, shooting again. This one is terrible and you both know it but he doesn't say anything about it, simply passing you the ball again.
"It gets easier without all the complaining," he points out and you scoff, ignoring him as you try again.
It takes two more bounces off the hoop, but by your third try, the ball makes it in. You cheer loudly when it does, your hands raised in the air in celebration. Mingyu carries a similar proud smile on his face as he picks the ball again and dribbles over to you. "I knew I still got it," you scoff playfully, looking up at him to meet his eyes.
"Of course you did," he shakes his head, the grin never disappearing from his face. "With how great you are, you have no problem playing against me, right?"
A wave of nerves suddenly washes over you, your confidence dropping. You swallow, nodding, "Sure." Your voice comes out a lot quieter than you expected, the uncertainty clear as day.
"I'll give you five points to start, that's fair, isn't it?"
"Eight," you argue immediately and he raises his eyebrow.
"You need eight points difference to beat me?"
"If I need to beat you then I want to start with ten points right away otherwise I have no chance, but if playing for more than five seconds is what we want then eight points will do."
"You'll get seven. I can't underestimate you so much, what if I'd lose?"
"Then I'd need to tell my dad to reconsider your position on the team."
The atmosphere is easy, much more comfortable than you through the two of you would ever able to be. He steps behind the three point line, dribbling the ball around his leg while you watch him, trying your hardest to focus on the ball and not his face. Chasing after him, you do your best guarding the almost head taller man. It doesn't work, obviously, but both of you laugh at your attempts and that makes you feel a lot better than stopping him would.
He easily makes a point in and you rush in to get the ball. He lets you dribble to the three point line without guarding you, slowly walking to you only once you cross it to make your way towards the basket. As soon as he reaches you, you know you don't stand a chance. You knew he was big, but standing against him now, as he guards you so you don't get to the basket, he is fucking huge. Not only does he hover over you, you also feel like you suddenly grew smaller when he outstretches his hands, easily blocking both sides. You dribble back again, cursing quietly as you try to figure out a way around him.
The only possibility you see is trying to shoot from the three point line, but there is no way you're making that in. With how long it took for you to get the free throw in, a three pointer will seriously take all night — if you'd even manage to get it in then.
Is this how he wins his games? By intimidating his opponents until they run away and settle for the last possible option just to lose the ball? Fucker. An incredibly tall and handsome fucker. You never want to stand on the opposite side of the court against him again.
You try to run around him but he blocks you again, this time stealing the ball from you. He runs behind the line with ease, making his way past you even easier before dunking the ball in, scoring another point for himself. "I don't want to do this," you groan. He chuckles, passing you the ball as a small pay back. But it's no use when you won't be able to shoot anyway.
"Just try, hm? What's the worst that happens?"
"I embarrass myself in front of you," you mutter, not meeting his eyes as you try as he said, dribbling around him.
"In front of me? Who cares what I think," he shakes his head. "Just have fun, Blue. Play around, miss the shots or make them in, lose or win — it doesn't matter." He doesn't stand in your way this time, his eyes following you as you dribble to the basket before shooting your shot once you are close enough to confidently make it in. The shot is clean, the ball falling through the hoop perfectly. "What matters is that you keep that smile on your face and don't worry yourself with anything."
It's easy for him, isn't it? You want to argue that you can't possibly stop worrying about what he'll think of you but you stop yourself in time, realizing just how wrongly that conversation would go. Your best shot today is to just listen to his words and try to enjoy this as much as possible. Even if you do lose at the end.
You never went into this considering you'd win so it should be fine. You can have fun with Mingyu without worrying yourself with anything.
Once you let go, you feel a lot better. Laugh fills your ears — both your own and his — accompanied with the sound of the ball hitting the hoop and bouncing off. You stopped playing for points a long time ago, Mingyu easily scoring ten more points before you could get another one in. But because Kim Mingyu can't be anything if not perfect, he encourages you to keep trying, cheering you on as you keep trying to get around him to shoot. Eventually, you give up on trying to be perfect and just shoot from your spot. The ball won't make it and you know it, but he seems to believe in you a lot more as he turns around to watch the ball go.
Taking your chance, you run past him and catch the ball as it falls short, shooting again once you have the right grip. It's only then that he realizes what you did, rushing to you to stop the ball from going in. But he is too late, and the ball falls into the hoop before he can catch it.
"Yes!!" You yell loudly. "Did you see that?? I figured it out! I outplayed you for real!"
He laughs as he turns to face you, nodding. "I saw that," he assures you. "You did great, Blue."
Your cheeks heat up as soon as your eyes lock with his, his words making your heart do spins for the nth time today. It's incredible how he makes you feel, and how much more you want him to talk to you. He's always been attractive, but now, when you know you enjoy spending time with him as well, you are just so much more interested. It's been a while since you felt like this, and even then your feelings weren't as strong as they are now.
"Let's take a break," he suggests, motioning to the bench you laid your jacket on before. "I've got water in my bag, you should hydrate yourself." You nod, unable to argue as you follow him to the bench. Taking a seat on the edge, you watch him reach into his backpack, handing you his water bottle. You take a long sip before handing it back to him, prompting him to do the same.
You lean back in your seat, looking up at the night sky. The stars are much clearer from here than Seoul. Taking a seat besides you, he rests the bottle of water between you in case you want to drink again, following your line of sight.
"How come you didn't go drinking with them?" You wonder out loud.
It stays quiet for a second so you glance his way, finding him looking up at the sky. "Didn't feel like it," he shrugs when he feels your eyes on him. "I wanted to practice more and coach said there was a court nearby, so I found this." You hum back. "Why didn't you? I'm sure they asked you to join."
"Yeah, but I didn't want to get drunk in front of them," you explain. "Jake kept texting me to come join them after all but it didn't feel right." It didn't feel right to get drunk and confess my feelings to you, but you don't finish that sentence. After all, not going ended up being the better option. When else would you get a chance to play basketball with him?
"Jake is nice," he hums.
"Yeah," you agree, trying not to sound too confused. "He is great."
"How long have you been together?" Mingyu wonders next and you almost choke on your saliva.
"What??" His eyes shoot to you when he hears you coughing, quickly patting your back in an attempt to help. "We aren't together," you correct him as soon as you can breathe properly again. "We are friends. Just friends."
"Oh?" He blinks, a little confused. "I thought you guys— never mind."
"You thought we what? Does it look like we are together? God, do people seriously think that?" You groan and his lips curve up at your panic.
"No," he shakes his head. "I guess it was just me who thought so," a soft, almost disbelieving, chuckle leaves his lips. The realization slowly settles in, all the interactions he's seen you have with his teammates — the jokes and conversations — making much more sense now.
A beat of silence passes by as the two of you sit under the moonlight, watching the night sky together. "Can I ask something?" You break the quiet, too nervous to even look at him.
His eyes rest on you though, wondering what you're thinking about. "You just did," he teases, trying to ease the situation when he sees how anxious you seem. It doesn't help at all. You fidget with your fingers, trying to find the right words as your eyes fall down to your lap. Mingyu's eyes follow yours, his brows furrowing when he sees you playing with your nails. "Ask me away, Blue."
You're suddenly rethinking everything you did today; how you look, how you acted, how you played, even how you're sitting right now. Putting yourself out there is your least favorite thing. You usually don't mind having attention on yourself, at least not to the point where it would actually influence your behavior. But as you sit here now, wondering what goes inside Mingyu's head when he looks at you, you feel like throwing up as soon as the words leave your lips. "Why do you never talk to me?"
"What do you mean?" He tilts his head.
You still don't meet his eyes, staring holes into your thighs. "Like— the team talks with me after games or whatever but we barely say hi to each other," you quickly blurt out, unsure if he can even understand you. He sighs and you finally look up. "Is it because of Jungkook?"
"Jungkook?" His frown deepens. "What does he have to do with anything?"
"Is he not—" you stop yourself from finishing the sentence, cursing yourself mentally as you gaze into his confused eyes. Jungkook has nothing to do with it. He never had anything to do with it. You're not sure if that makes you feel better or worse. Why has he been avoiding you like the plague then?
"I didn't mean to avoid you," he assures you, his gaze dropping to your fingers again. You are still playing with them, but it's gotten better now. "To be honest, I didn't even think you noticed we weren't talking."
"I did," you mumble. "I wanted to talk to you."
"You did?" He questions and your cheeks heat up, nervousness washing over you again.
"You are part of the team and others talk to me so I just—" you quickly try to excuse it, hoping he doesn't notice how red your ears are. "I didn't want anything to be awkward between us, so I wanted to get to know you as well."
He chuckles, nodding. "I'm sorry I made you feel like it was ever awkward between us." His eyes soften as he looks at you, all your previous interactions crossing his mind. He understands why you could think he didn't want to talk to you or that he feels indifferent towards you, but that was never his intention. "I never had anything against you — actually I always thought you were pretty damn cool based on how the guys talk about you — but I didn't want to overstep because I thought you were with Jake and it could make him uncomfortable."
"I'm not with Jake," you remind him again.
He laughs, "Yes, I know that now."
"Okay, good. Just remember that."
"I will," he shakes his head in amusement, a smile on his face as he takes the sight of you in again — no longer fidgeting with your fingers and wearing a smile on your face.
He likes you like this much more. You are pretty when you are happy.
By the time you came back to your room last night, it was already midnight. You'd love to blame it all on Mingyu, but you didn't want to leave either. The longer you could spend time with him, the happier you were. The two of you played again — and this time he actually allowed you the advantage of eight points — betting on who'd reach ten points first. You lost, obviously.
You probably should have been sad you lost, but somehow, you were glad. Because losing and having to keep your word that the winner gets a wish, means you'll have to talk to him again. It means you'll have an excuse to talk to him and get to know him further. The fact you need to fulfill his wish is just a minor disadvantage.
The two of you walked back together, chatting about anything and everything that came to mind. You're not sure how much he remembers, but you told him a lot about yourself and he did the same in return, the questions you've always had for him slowly disappearing just for new ones to appear with every answer. You think it's safe to say you're interested him.
You're not sure when Jake came back to the hotel room, but it was long after you were already asleep. Luckily, he didn't throw up or anything, keeping his promise, but he still ended up hung over in the morning, whining your ears off.
"Is there anyone sober?" Your dad complains. "I don't have players to play with if you guys don't do something about yourself right about," he looks at the watch on his hand to add to his point, "now."
"We are all pretty much sobered up," Seungcheol argues. "My head does hurt though."
You laugh quietly as your dad contemplates his choices to be their coach. "Coach, me and Vernon stopped drinking before midnight, we are good to play."
"I also feel good," Riki pipes up.
"Nishimura, you'll see my daughter married before you play on the court," your dad deadpans and your eyes widen, unsure if you should question what he means by that or laugh at your friends misery.
"I didn't drink anything last night, coach," Mingyu joins the conversation and your eyes find him immediately. He stands with his hands in his pockets, dressed in comfortable gray shorts and a black graphic shirt, sunglasses sitting firmly on top of his head. Have you mentioned yet how attractive he is? Because if not, maybe you should get your laptop and start writing a book about it.
"Exactly why you're my favorite player," your dad snaps his fingers, visibly excited. "We can work with this. Okay, whoever can drive will drive, we'll stop at a gas station and everyone will try to sober up as best as they can. Only if I know no one will want to test you for alcohol is when I let you guys on the court."
A loud, "Yes, coach!" is heard from everyone, making you blink in surprise while Seojin besides you looks pleased, expecting nothing less from their team. When you see the look in his eyes, your eyes soften, a small smile tugging at your lips.
You settle yourself in the passenger seat of your dad's car, Jake and Riki right behind you again. You watch as Mingyu gets into his car, Seungcheol right behind him. Seojin drives Seungcheol's car this time, taking in Jeonghan and Heeseung, while Seungkwan drives Joshua and Hansol in Joshua's car. Every part of you wants to switch with Seungcheol and sit besides Mingyu, watch him drive and talk with him the entire ride, but there's no way you'd be able to do that with your dad around.
Fastening your seatbelt with a heavy sigh, you bring the attention of all three to yourself. Quickly shaking your head when you notice them, you brush them off, claiming you just sighed because you feel tired. As soon as your dad hums and focuses on the road again, you send Dae a quick text about how you'll need to talk with her about Mingyu when you come back before switching chats to the one with Bora you started last night, asking her to wait for you in front of the stadium when she arrives.
Jumping out of the car as soon as it comes to a stop, you join the guys, planning to buy yourself coffee and your dad a soda per his request. You swear it's not on purpose, that you have nothing to do with it, but as you walk you find yourself by Mingyu's side, the two of you trailing together at the very back.
"Hi," you smile up at him. His smile is gentle as he greets you back, his chocolate eyes finding yours with ease. You love his eyes. "Did you sleep well?"
"Surprisingly fell asleep shortly after showering," he nods. "The guys were a mess when they came back, though. Shua and Hee were singing for the entire floor to hear before Hansol and I shut the up." You chuckle at the imagine in your head. You'd love to see that as well. "It was little after three when they got back but they fell asleep as soon as their faces hit the bed so it wasn't too bad."
"How are they even functioning right now?" you ask, more curiously than judging them. Even though, considering the situation, you do hate it on behalf of your dad. Despite them winning the yesterday's game, they still need to do their best today, which is not something that can happen with half of his players under the influence. If anyone finds out, they could be in serious trouble.
"They are used to it," he shrugs. "Not to say they are alcoholics, but it's not the first time celebrations were like this."
"Do you usually no drink with them?"
"Oh no," Mingyu laughs as you enter the store together. "I drink with them way more than not. I just wasn't in the mood last night. And, to be honest, I did not want to risk having alcohol in my system for today's game. I want to be at my best today."
"When are you not at your best?" You mumble, taking a turn to the right immediately to browse the drinks they offer. Mingyu blinks at you curiously, your words repeating in his head. There are a lot of moments he could answer with, but he likes the fact you believe in him so much to think he does no wrong. If anything, it's a great motivation.
"Hand it to me," Mingyu encourages when you reach the counter to pay. You look up at him, eyebrows furrow in confusion as you hold the bottle of coke for your dad. You give it to him hesitantly, watching as he hands it to the worker for her to add it to his bill.
Your eyes widen immediately, "Wait, Mingyu, no, I'm buying that."
"It's fine. Did you want anything else?"
"Mingyu," you shake your head. "Stop buying me stuff every time we stop somewhere," you try your best to sound convincing, but by the lazy scoff that leaves his lips, you don't think you managed anything. "Can you please take it off? I'll pay for it myself. And I'll also get a latte please."
"Add the coffee as well. How much is the total?" Mingyu smiles innocently at the girl behind the counter. He really is no good for you. While you want to keep arguing with him, fight him that there is no reason for him to buy you drinks, the tingly feeling in your chest when he does stops you.
"Mingyu," you try once more.
His gaze drops to you, his smile widening. "Yes, Blue? Just accept the offer when I'm making it, okay? You can buy next time." You both know next time will look the same, that he'll fight you for paying again, but neither of you say anything about it. You sigh in defeat, nodding when the cashier asks you if she should ring him up with your drinks on as well.
"I think you misunderstood the terms of our bet," you mumble as you walk outside again, sipping on your coffee. "Since you won, I'm supposed to fulfill your wish. Not the other way around. There is no reason for you to be doing this."
Mingyu shrugs, not a single care in the world. "I know what we bet on. Trust me, I'll use my wish well when I figure out what I want. But for now, I'm simply bribing my coach by buying him and his daughter a drink."
"So this is what it's about?" You fake gasps and he nods, biting back a smile. "What would happen if he found out you're using me like this? Your good boy image would fall off."
"I don't need a good boy image when I am in fact a good boy," he sends you a wink that makes you feel like your heart will jump out of your chest before sending you off with a grin on his face, getting back to his car.
Kim Mingyu is so terrible for your health.
He is also, apparently, a good boy.
♡⸝⸝♡⸝⸝
Your eyes land on Bora's figure as soon as you step out of the car. You're not the only one looking at her, though. Watching as Seungkwan takes the sight of your friend in with a smile on his face, you have to smile too. They might not know what awaits them in the future, but you can already seem them getting together and being happy. Seungkwan deserves this, and you root for him with everything you have.
"We'll go in first," you wave at your dad, locking arms with the brown haired girl waiting for you. "Let's pick good seats."
"Let's go," Bora nods eagerly.
You tell her about the guys' celebration yesterday and how your dad was pretty annoyed in the morning, not knowing who to send on the court without risking a penalty for a player under the influence. You leave out the fact Mingyu was the only one not drinking because he was with you, shrugging and saying that he probably just didn't feel like drinking when she asks. There is a somehow proud smile on her lips when you tell her that Seungkwan is one of the players ready to play today, making you roll your eyes. She's super obvious.
A part of you wonders if you look the same when you think or hear about Mingyu. If you wear a similarly adorable smile without even realizing. While you have a feeling you do, you hope it's not like this in your case. Because if it is, everyone probably knows what goes on in your head, and that's not something you want.
You find seats in first row this time. It's not that huge of a change from yesterday's game, but it still feels like you are a lot closer to the players. Your dad and his assistant coach are the first ones to appear on the court, quickly finding your seats before settling at their own bench.
"I saw this video last night, I wanted to show it to you, wait," Bora says as she opens her phone quickly, easily getting your full attention again. There is forty minutes until the official start of the match, and you spend the entire time talking with her, barely noticing other people come in and occupy the seats around you. You talk about things you have in common, what interests you, and she also tells you about her family and how she's been into the sport her whole life thanks to her brother. Explaining how you grew up around basketball thanks to your family as well, you bond over your experience all over again. You're convinced you'll keep this girl in your life as long as you can, and you just hope she feels the same about you.
The starting five is different this time, just like you assumed when you saw how Seungcheol was doing. You've seen worse before, but with how tired he seems and how he's been complaining about his head hurting, it makes sense for your dad to swap him out. What you didn't expect was for Jeonghan to be sitting this time as well. He looked fine to you, but who knows what your dad was thinking.
Mingyu, Seungkwan, Hansol, Heeseung and Jake all come onto the court along with five players from the opponent's team, Mingyu taking his place in the middle circle instantly, getting ready for the jump ball. With his tall figure, it's only natural for him to be doing it. Despite other players often being around his height as well, his jump ability gives him the needed advantage. You watch him from your seat, looking forward to the play he shows today.
Waiting for the referee to take position as well, Mingyu takes his time scanning the crowd. He looks at all of their fans, noticing the red color in the audience a lot more than the opponent's green. You matched color to his team today as well. Your jeans are black, the same ones you wore to the game last night, and your shirt red. It's not a bad look, the opposite actually, but it's not blue.
"On three." Mingyu snaps out of it, his eyes immediately flickering to the referee besides him. Nodding, he gets ready, briefly looking at his opponent before focusing his attention on the ball. He doesn't hear the count anymore, only jumping once he sees the ball being tossed in the air. His opponent is shorter than him this time but it doesn't stop him from jumping as high as he can, stealing the ball into his side. He hears your cheers from the side but he doesn't have the time to look, instantly running forward so they can score the first basket.
Becoming friends with a guy you've liked for around a year is not for the weak. It seems like the dumbest thing ever when you think about it, but that doesn't change the fact your heart skips a beat at any and every mention of him.
It was a follow at first. Once you told Dae about your weekend and how you played basketball with him late at night, she immediately encouraged you into messaging him, claiming you should strike the pot while it's still hot. You didn't have the nerve to text him yet, but you sent him a follow, one he returned in the span of a minute. Deep down you know it doesn't mean anything, but at the moment, when the following turned into friends, you couldn't be more excited.
You exchanged simple likes after, a smile on your face every time you'd watch the stories he'd post. It's mostly pics from the trainings or his friends, but a picture of him in the gym occasionally pops up and you're down bad for him again. Even with his forehead full of sweat and tired eyes, he is just as attractive as ever.
Mingyu can't give you a moment to rest, though. So as soon as you started getting used to his notification popping out every time you'd post something — because he apparently is the nicest person on earth and likes everything he sees — he found a new way to get you jumping up from your seat. After posting a picture of you and one of the little girls you met at your internship, holding the drawing she made for you, he popped into your messages for the first time, asking about it.
You spent the next two hours on the phone with him, talking about your internship and all the kids you've got to teach so far, as well as some other things you've manage to learn thanks to your classes. To your surprise, you don't feel nervous at all talking to him. Maybe it's because of the topic, or how excited you always get when someone asks you about teaching. He is eager with his follow up questions as well, reassuring you he truly cares every time he interrupts you to ask something that caught his attention.
When he interrupted your texting by calling you the first time, you almost didn't pick up at time, but the more you talk to him, the more at ease you feel. If you could pick one thing you like the most about him, it would be how important he makes you feel every time.
You stayed on the phone with him until he made it to the sport hall, hanging up only because he needed to change and start training.
Ever since then, the two of you somehow managed to turn your calls into something normal, usually at least texting a few times during the day if you weren't calling later. If someone told you just a month ago that you'd be talking to Mingyu on the daily, you wouldn't believe them. It's something you once dreamed of, so having it now still feels out of this world.
Smiling as you send him a quick message, laughing at the picture he sent of his spilled coffee. Turns out, Mingyu is the clumsiest person you know, stuff like these happening to him on the daily. From spilling drinks, to breaking stuff or bumping into things. You're honestly surprised he is still alive at this point.
He sends you a pouty selfie right after seeing your laughing emoji, your grin only widening. "That's a boy!" Your eyes widen and you immediately turn your phone off, turning around to see Jiho, one of the loudest kids you look after.
"A boy?" Jia peers up instantly, blinking at you curiously. She's adorable, every part of you wanting to tell her all about the boy in your phone when you meet her big brown eyes.
"A boy," you nod. "Just like Jiho is a boy, and like Sunghoon is a boy."
"No!" Jiho argues quickly. "That was a grown boy! Like my dad!" You know he probably doesn't mean it that way, but thinking about how he just compared his dad, who is in his late thirties, to your Mingyu, makes you laugh.
Your Mingyu. You like thinking about him that way.
Before you can blink, a small group of kids surrounds you, all of them looking at you as if you just introduced them something foreign. Awkwardly smiling at them, you search for your supervisor, begging her with your eyes to come and help you out. She just smiles at you from across the room, leaning against the wall in amusement. Taking a deep breath, you prepare yourself for the wave of questions about to come.
"Was that your husband?"
"I don't have a husband," you shake your head quickly, raising your left hand to show off that it's empty. "See this finger? What do we call this finger?"
"The ring finger!" Jooyoung yells immediately.
"Exactly!" You grin happily, proud of her for getting it right. "And since there isn't a ring on this finger, it means I don't have a husband."
"Then it's a boyfriend, right? My sister says she needs a boyfriend all the time!"
"The boy Jiho saw isn't my boyfriend either," you answer her question, trying not to get swayed by the idea. "He is a friend of mine. He is nice to me, which is why I like him so much and talk to him. You guys remember how we talked about friendships last week, right?"
Everyone around nods and you do as well. "Great. Can anyone tell me what a friendship is?"
"When two people share their toys together!"
"When we play together!"
"When we are nice to each other!"
"Yes, yes, precisely," you agree. "So how about you all gather your friends, and go play with them?" It works better than you expected. All the kids glance at each other before running off with a laugh, making you breathe out in relief. You're glad you managed to get out of it so easily.
"That was great," your supervisor, Mrs. Choi, says as she joins your side. Looking up at her from your chair, you offer her a brief smile as well. "You took care of it well."
"I'm sorry for being on my phone while working," you lower your head again with an apology. Truth is though, you don't regret it. You never regret texting Mingyu and learning what he's doing.
"At least say it like you mean it," she scoffs playfully, pulling out a chair besides you and sitting down. "It's okay if you answer some texts when you're not busy, just please don't let it distract you to the point you aren't paying attention to the children."
"I won't," you promise instantly. "It could have waited and that was my fault."
She shakes her head, brushing you off. "Back when I was your age, I also couldn't wait to answer the phone when a boy I liked texted me. And look at me now, I'm still doing the job and I married him," she points to her ring finger. "So believe me when I say I'm okay with you being on your phone from time to time."
"It's not like that," you try to argue, but by the knowing smile she wears you don't think she believes you. To be fair, you don't believe yourself either. Talking to him every day, constantly texting and laughing at things together, it's impossible not to hope for something more. It's incredibly easy to love Kim Mingyu.
"Darling, eyes are the one and only thing that doesn't lie."
♡⸝⸝♡⸝⸝
"Blue."
You're fully convinced you'd recognize his voice anywhere. Looking up, your eyes widen when they meet the chocolate ones you fall in love with every day more and more. "Mingyu?" You blink confusedly, standing up and dusting your jeans off. Glancing at the kids — who are watching you curiously instead of focusing on their drawings — you debate what the right move here is. "What are you doing here?"
"That's him!" You hear Jiho exclaim, quickly grabbing Mingyu's sleeve and pulling him with your outside.
"Woah, woah, ask me out to a dinner first," he laughs but still follows you voluntarily. You don't answer him, not stopping until you are far away from everyone.
"What are you doing here?" You repeat your question, slowly letting go of him.
His eyes briefly fall to the piece of fabric you were holding until now, a move you notice and only makes you more confused. "I texted you but I don't think you saw my messages," he meets your eyes again, an easy going smile on his face as he fixes the gym back hanging on his shoulder.
Pulling out your phone from your pocket, you scan the new messages truly waiting for you. He asked when you finish and if you want to go home together, as well as sending you updates on his position so you know when to expect him. "Shoot," you mutter, apology written all across your face as you look up. He simply shakes his head, assuring you it's okay. "I'm sorry I didn't answer and you walked all the way here for nothing," you frown. "I have another hour left until I can leave."
"I can wait," he shrugs. "I don't mind."
"But—"
Mrs. Choi calling your name interrupts you and you peek over Mingyu's side to see her, quickly apologizing to her for rushing out like that. "It's okay," she shakes her head, a calming sign you saw from Mingyu just seconds ago. "Who may this gentleman be?"
"Kim Mingyu," he introduces himself with a grin, extending his hand forward for her to shake. She gladly does, the knowing smile of hers making you close your eyes in regret. "I'm sorry for interrupting like this. I thought I'd come by and walk her home."
"Oh, please, come inside," she encourages him and your eyes widen. Inside? You can't leave right now, she knows that as well. The kindergarten is opened until three and you just promised the kids you'll draw with them. "I can make you a cup of coffee and you can wait comfortably there. No need to wait outside."
"Mrs. Choi—"
She completely ignores you, nudging Mingyu in while talking about how grateful she is to have you here and is glad you won't have to go home alone. You sigh, watching their backs as they disappear in the door. This could go terrible. You do feel bad about keeping him waiting for you, but you also can't stop thinking about the fact he decided to come here and pick you up, not even batting an eye when he found out he has to wait an hour if he wants to go with you.
With your cheeks flushed and heart beating out of your chest, you quickly fix your hair before following the two of them back inside.
Mingyu is crouching down at the same spot you were when he showed up, a smile on his face and a pencil in hand as he helps Jooyoung draw on her paper. It's not the first time your body has reacted to Mingyu, but it certainly is the first time your ovaries are dancing this much, all because he is doing the same thing you love the most — teaching.
Good God.
"What are you guys doing?" You ask softly, your eyes flickering between the drawing and Mingyu as you gently pat Jooyoung's hair, your other hand resting on Gyu's back instinctively.
"This kind sir is helping me draw a flower," she explains and you laugh when his shoulder's tense at the name.
"Call me Mingyu, hm?" He smiles at her before shooting you a look for laughing at him.
"Mingyu sir," Sujin besides her smiles.
A snicker escapes your lips and you quickly hide your face behind your palms. "Looks like you are getting old, Mingyu sir," you tease, unable to stop laughing.
"Oh yeah?" He taunts, dropping the pencil in his hand on the table and pushing himself up, instantly towering over you. "I'm getting old? Aren't you little daring, miss?" He leans down, his face only inches from yours. It's hot. Is it only you who feels hot right now? Swallowing, you open your mouth in an attempt to answer, but no words leave your lips.
"Ew! Mrs. Choi, they are about to kiss!"
You've never taken a step back as fast as now, forcing more space between you when you hear the complain. You were not just about to kiss him. Definitely not. Just like you definitely aren't staring at his lips, and how it definitely isn't distracting you to the point you don't know where you're putting your foot. Your eyes widen as you step on something, losing your balance.
Fortunately, you don't hit the ground like you expect to. A strong arm wraps around your waist, catching you just in time. He looks panicked, his cheeks flushed and eyes wide as he stops you from falling. Exhaling in relief, he helps you stand on both of your feet again, ignoring all the groans and complains coming from the kids. "You okay?"
"Yeah," you breathe out, trying to blink out of the shock and look anywhere but at him. "Thank you."
"I got you," he smiles again, slowly letting his hand fall back to his side.
You clear your throat, clasping your hands together as you look around the room, refusing to meet eyes with your supervisor, knowing exactly how she's looking at you right now. "Alright, guys! Who wants to have Mingyu give them a piggyback ride around the room?"
Mingyu stares ahead confusedly, wondering if he's heard you right. But when he looks at you and sees the smile on your face as you encourage the first kid to come forward, he can't complain about anything.
It's probably the most you've laughed in a while. Watching Mingyu get dragged around the room, all of the kids wanting to play with him, has you absolutely head over heels. It's adorable, he's adorable. Grinning at you every chance he gets, seemingly proud of how well he is doing, you fall for him again. You're sure a lot of the kids feel the same, refusing to let go of him even when their parents come pick them up. They only let go once he promises to play with them even more next time, and while deep down you know there won't be a next time, his words manage to spark hope in you as well.
"Thank you so much for today," Mrs. Choi smiles at Mingyu warmly, handing him back his sports bag. "The kids really loved spending time with you."
"I'm glad to not have been a burden," he smiles before glancing at you. "It was nice learning what it's like to take care of a group of children like this."
"Hopefully it's not the last time we are seeing you here."
"I hope so too," he nods and you bite back your smile, trying not to show how excited that makes you. "Let's get you home?" He tilts his head and you nod, unable to meet his eyes as you grab the rest of your stuff and say your goodbyes to Mrs. Choi, following him out.
You walk side by side, your hands sometimes brushing each other on the way. Neither of you pulls away though. You try to convince yourself it doesn't mean anything and that he probably doesn't even notice the electricity his touch sends through your body, but it's hard to believe it's all just coincidence. He has to feel something too, right? You don't want to get your hopes up, that's the last thing you'd want, but why would he be doing all this if it was only meant to lead you on?
"You really didn't have to wait for me," you mumble, your voice barely loud enough for him to hear. "I could have just called you once I was done or something. You didn't have to walk me."
"I wanted to," he states casually. "It doesn't bother me at all, Blue," he assures you when he sees the look in your eyes. "I wanted to walk with you so I did what I could to walk with you. Don't even think for a second that you are bothering me or anything like that."
He shuts you up immediately, your lips forming a straight line as you look down at the ground beneath your feet. How does he manage to mess with your head so easily? "You're too good to me," you whisper.
Shaking his head, he allows himself to lace his fingers with yours, careful not to freak you out. Your head shoots up immediately, your eyes finding his in surprise. "If there is anyone too good for someone, it's you, Blue." His eyes drop to your tangled fingers and you do the same. He's holding two of them, his large hands covering them fully. "Who else would sit on a call for hours with me and listen to my ramblings?"
You could name girls. You are certain if he wanted to, he could have any girl he wants doing the same. Loving Mingyu is easy for you, so why wouldn't it be for other girls? "Have I ever told you you confuse the hell out of me?" You slowly lift your eyes again, your expression a mix of happiness and fear. You watch something flicker in his eyes, something you can't name at the moment. It makes him drop your hand, though, and that's all you need to know.
Clearing his throat, he averts his eyes from you, "Let's go. I'm sure you have things you need to do instead of just standing here with me."
A part of you wants to argue with him and tell him that you don't care what you are doing as long as you are with him, but then you remember the look in his eyes and decide not to, nodding instead. "Yeah, let's go," you agree, not waiting for him to lead this time and simply stepping forward. It takes him a second to pull himself again but he catches up to you, doing his best to stay calm in the bothersome silence that embraces you afterward.
The walk isn't exactly awkward, but it doesn't feel nice either. You both feel it. While you gently kick the rocks under you, coming in terms with the answer you just got, Mingyu eats himself alive for his earlier reaction. It was far from what he wanted to do, but he can't figure out how to tell you what goes in his head. For now, he'll just have to hope you don't hate him too much after this.
Despite the way your last real interaction with Mingyu went, nothing much has changed. As soon as you closed the door behind you, finally able to breathe alone, you were convinced that was the end of what you managed to build together in the past weeks. You hated the idea of it, of not spending hours on the phone with him anymore and hearing his voice through out the day, or not being able to text him when something would happen, having to deal with it on your own.
But he never stopped interacting with you like before, constantly texting you and calling you at night to talk about your day. It almost made you feel like he didn't reject you back then.
Almost.
But truth is the memory crosses your mind every time the call gets quiet enough, every time you aren't busy focusing on something and your mind gets a moment to think. You still see his eyes clearly, the fear of what your words mean and the instant pull back when he processed it.
At times, you feel like you are losing your mind thinking about all the moments you thought meant something. They didn't, you need to remind yourself. Mingyu is the nicest guy you know, and even though you don't want to blame him, it's because of that that you're left feeling like this. Maybe if he wasn't so nice, if he wasn't so good for you, it wouldn't hurt this much to admit to yourself it isn't happening.
"You need to stop drowning in that pain," Dae's voice makes you snap out of your thoughts. You turn to face her, forcing a smile on and shaking your head gently. "He wasn't all that anyway," she waves her hand, trying to cheer you up. "If you ask me, Seungcheol — who has been flirting with you this whole time mind you — is much better."
You chuckle, your eyes following hers and locking on the very man you are talking about, his jersey sitting on top of a white shirt that hugs his biceps perfectly as he dribbles across the court before passing it to someone you can't see from your place. "It's all jokingly," you remind her. "You should know that the best, hasn't he been flirting with you? Like, actually flirting."
Her cheeks catch the color red and you already know the answer. "That's jokingly as well," she tries to brush you off. Raising an eyebrow at her, you eye her up and down. "Come on, you know him better than I do. Shouldn't you know he flirts with everyone? I don't need that."
"I do know that," you shrug. "But I still think he flirts a tiny bit more with you. Who knows, maybe if you gave him a shot, the two of you could have something great."
"Sure," she rolls her eyes at you. "Just like—" she stops herself before finishing the sentence, swallowing the rest of her words.
"Just like what?"
"Nothing," she blurts out quickly.
Narrowing your eyes at her suspiciously, you try to see through her. "Were you just going to mention my failed….whatever with Mingyu?"
"No!" She argues.
"You were!"
"I wasn't!" She raises her hands in the air, shaking her head so hard you think it'll cramp soon. "I was just, you know, talking faster than I think. I don't know what I was going to say."
"Sure," you sigh. It's okay if she was going to mention it. She'd only be voicing what you've been thinking anyway.
"Do you want to watch the game? It doesn't look like anyone will come anytime soon so let's just step out for a moment," she suggests, wanting to make you feel better. You hum, standing up from your place and following her out of the stand, settling at the entrance. You see the entire court now instead of just half of it, your eyes quickly scanning the score board before dropping to the players.
They are doing amazing as always. The score is sitting at 64:61, but you have no doubt they'll win. They are your favorite team after all. No matter what happened or still awaits you, your cheers for them won't change. You've been their fan all throughout last year while crushing on Mingyu as well, so why wouldn't you be now?
You watch the exact moment Hansol and Seungkwan get into it, running faster than before and getting past all the blockers with ease. Passing the ball around until they make it under the opponent's basket, it's all perfect. Cheering loudly, you watch as Seungkwan jumps in the air, the ball leaving his fingertips precisely. The ball makes it into the hoop, the score board switching to 66:61 in a second.
It's time to go into defense, but thankfully the guys don't lack there either. Hansol gets to work again instantly, doing his best not to let them get past him. Getting in the player's way, he blocks him until he steps out of the line, the referee's whistle ringing in your ears immediately.
There aren't many referee signs you remember, but the ball going out of the bounds is one of them. He points towards the sideline that was crossed, pointing out the violation of rule eight. Your dad tried to teach you these signs before, but all you ended up remembering was this one and the one for a player taking steps without dribbling. It wasn't like you necessary needed to know them when you were still playing.
Just like that, the ball goes to the Knights again, allowing them the opportunity to make another great play.
Dae besides you cheers when Seungcheol gets the ball, yelling tactics at his team. They are making Mingyu score. You've seen your dad planning enough to know what his words mean. So while the opponents might be confused on what their next move is, you know exactly who the ball is going to.
Seungcheol makes a low pass to Mingyu, who jumps without any hesitance, aiming at the basket before shooting the ball out of his hands, landing on the three point line again. You watch as the ball spins on the hoop, knowing exactly how to make the entire crowd tense. The whole court is silent as they wait if the ball makes it in or bounces off, until a loud cheer erupts in your ears again as the Knights gain three more points.
You watch Mingyu jog to the other side of the court quickly, getting ready to defend. His eyes find you briefly, but you quickly break eye contact, turning around on your heel and excusing yourself so you can go to the toilet. Dae doesn't question you at all, her eyes still glued to the game as you leave to the back.
Despite your heart aching when you look at him, you are still his biggest fan. You think you'll be for a while. Unless he plans to break your heart entirely.
♡⸝⸝♡⸝⸝
Just like you thought they would, the guys won tonight. Celebrations were hard, especially on you with the amount of people needing a drink. But you managed, and an hour after the game finished, you are finally cleaning up.
"What about these?" You ask your dad, holding up the knifes and paper towels left here. There aren't any home games planned for the time being, so there is no need to be leaving your things here.
"Take them to our changing room, there is a box in the back for towels and things like this." Humming, you let him wash the counter as you walk around him, heading straight for the changing rooms. The men's changing room is still where it was when you grew up, remaining the only changing room dedicated to the team. Other teams usually just take whatever room is free when they arrive, including your children teams.
You stop right in front of the door, unable to walk inside when you hear the familiar voice. You don't know if they are changing at the moment or not, but you aren't risking it. Taking a step to the side, you settle besides the door, waiting for the guys to finish before you go put this away.
"Bora is amazing," you hear Seungkwan tell the guys and your lips immediately turn up into a smile. From what you know, they've been talking lately, and you love that they are getting along. The only other pair you need now is Dae and Seungcheol, but that might need a lot more effort than Bora and Kwan did. "She couldn't make it today but I can't wait to see her again next week at the ball."
"Are you two going together?" Seokmin question, the grin on his face obvious in his tone.
"Yeah," Seungkwan answers sheepishly and you cheer internally. You're just as happy to have Bora on the ball as he is. It's something you've been looking forward to for a while.
"What about you?" Jeonghan is asking this time. "Are you coming with Blue or are you both going on your own?"
"Don't call her Blue," Mingyu grumbles immediately. You suddenly feel like you are invading their space. You should go. You should go and act like you never heard anything.
Your feet don't move, though. Despite your head telling you to go, you stay glued in place, unable to leave. "Someone is possessive again," Seungcheol laughs.
"I'm not," Mingyu argues, clearly annoyed. "And she's going with coach, I think. We didn't talk about it."
"Why not?" Seokmin wonders. "You should just ask her to come with you. We all know you'll be together all night anyway. Ever since you started talking to her, you have been unable to be with anyone else."
"You're acting as if you mind," Joshua scoffs. "All his girls are falling at your feet now."
"I know! It's great!"
You should really leave. You aren't supposed to be a part of this conversation. If they knew you are outside the door, they wouldn't be talking like this.
"I don't get why you don't make it official," Jake shakes his head. "It's clear you like her, and we both know she likes you as well, so why are you hesitating so much?"
"Is it because of coach?" Riki adds another question.
"It's not like that," Mingyu finally huffs, the sound of a locker being slammed shut following right after. "We aren't like that. We are friends. That's all there is. We both feel that way, so can you stop saying things like this?" You swallow as you listen to his voice, the last bit of hope you have searching for any sign of him lying as he speaks. "Even if anything you guys think we have going on was true — which it's not — it's not like we'd ever be anything. We have a championship to win. I have a clear goal I need to reach. I can't have anything holding me back. Especially not my coach's daughter."
There goes the last bit of hope you had. It leaves out the window, your eyes closing shut as you take a deep breath. If his answer weeks ago wasn't enough for you, this certainly is. There is nothing between you and Mingyu. Never was and never will be. You are friends at best. Even though you aren't sure if you want that after tonight.
"What are you doing here?" Dae tilts her head confusedly and you finally push yourself forward, quickly walking to her.
"Can you put this inside?" You hand her all the stuff you are holding, only confusing her further. "There should be a box or something in the back. Or maybe the guys know if you ask them." Your eyes flicker all over her, unable to stay focused on one thing for too long. "I'm going back to the stand to check if we got everything and then leave, okay? I'll see you next Saturday at the ball."
"Wait—" She turns after you as you rush off, blinking into the empty space as your back disappears from her sight. You feel sorry for leaving so abruptly, but you need to get home and into your bed. You need to get as far away from Mingyu as you possibly can and do something with yourself so you can act like you didn't just overhear their entire conversation.
"Are you sure you want to be getting ready with me?" You ask again, eyeing Bora from your bed. "Aren't you going with Seungkwan?"
She brushes you off, "I told him we'll meet there. There is no need for us to come together, anyway. And, I want to get ready with you. Do you know how long it's been since I last went out with a girl who wasn't fucking my brother?" You shake your head at her, standing up to help her grab her things. "But if you think fucking my brother might help you stop looking so gloomy all the time, I'm pretty sure he is single at the moment."
"No, thanks," you laugh, hanging her dress on the open door of your room. "But if Seungcheol doesn't dance with Dae the entire night, offer it to her. She'll need it."
"I thought you said she doesn't expect anything out of it?"
"She says she doesn't," you correct. "But I know better than anyone she hopes he asks her out instead of just flirting with her all the time, trust me." Bora sighs, plopping down on your bed. "Don't give me those pitiful eyes," you warn her.
"How can I not? If you didn't want me to hate his guts, you shouldn't have told me what was happening with you and Mingyu. He's an ass!"
"He isn't," you roll your eyes. "I get him, really. It's fine. I never expected anything out of it in the first place."
"Liar," she calls you out. "I saw you when you were telling me about how he makes you feel. Which is even more of a reason for you to be mad at him. You can't just excuse him and act like what he said wasn't terrible. Who does he even think he is?" she huffs and you chuckle, shaking your head.
"Feel free to hate him all you want while I go take a shower, but I hope we aren't still talking about this when I come back so we can start getting ready."
"Yes, ma'am," she salutes, both of you laughing as you leave your bedroom to go to the bathroom at the other side of the hall.
As you stand in front of your mirror, Bora beside you, you feel happy for the first time in the last week. You feel pretty. Your hair falling in soft waves thanks to her help and your brown dress hugging your curves perfectly, you aren't his Blue tonight. You are just you. Your makeup turned out well as well, and you truly couldn't be more excited tonight.
Your cat, Snowy, seems to think the same as he rubs his head against your feet, all loving. You smile as you look at him before checking yourself again, making sure everything is perfect.
While deep down you don't think you look too different from your usual self, Bora certainly does. You are used to her hair being up and her clothes being sporty, so seeing her hair fall down the length of her arms and her body hugged by her purple dress is a blow. You already know Seungkwan will be falling to his knees when he sees her. She is perfect.
"Girls! Let's go!" Your dad calls from downstairs just in time. Bora nudges your side, picking her purse from your desk. You do the same, quickly collecting your phone and wallet before heading with her down. Your dad is already waiting at the door, a smile on his face as he watches you walk the stairs with your friend.
You know organizing this ball with the rest of the staff was hard, so it's nice to see him so happy now. Grabbing your jacket from the hanger, you pull it over your shoulders. "Let's go," you encourage with a smile.
It's not too far from your home, so you all walk together, enjoying the fresh air. The walk back will be perfect for sobering up. You can't wait to get drunk tonight. To be honest, you've been needing it. You need to get some alcohol into your system and enjoy your night freely without wondering what Mingyu is doing or who he's dancing with.
You avoided his calls all week and only answered his messages briefly, so you are hoping to keep that up tonight as well and have fun without him. It'd be great if he'd only leave your head fully and you wouldn't be thinking about him all the time.
You swear you don't do it on purpose. One second you are focused on something and your head is empty, but then you breathe again and he is everywhere, annoying every inch of your mind. No matter where you look, you see him. One night without drowning in pain is all you ask for tonight.
Giving the worker in the dressing room your jacket, you step aside as soon as you are done, waiting for Bora and your dad. You take a look around in the meantime, admiring the decoration. Everything is in the team colors, and it looks amazing with the lights. Red and black line the walls, balloons attached anywhere they could put them and the music from the main hall playing in your ears even out here.
"It looks awesome!" Bora exclaims as soon as you are all together again.
"It truly is," you agree. "You guys did a great job with the decorations."
"It was all the club president," your dad shakes his head. "He made this all happen. I don't think we would have been able to restore this tradition without him."
You can't remember when the last ball organized by the basketball club happened. It was definitely when you were still little, barely paying attention to these things. You are glad they decided to start planning events like these again. You'll have to praise the president for his hard work when you see him later.
"Let's find out table," your dad encourages.
Nodding, both of you follow him into the main hall. "And drinks right after," Bora whispers into your ear, making you giggle. Who cares if Mingyu likes you or not when you have your girls you'll be spending tonight with?
You do. You care. You absolutely do. Because as soon as Seungkwan shows up, he steals Bora from you. They both assure you they don't mind hanging out with you — Bora keeps asking you to stay with them on the contrary — but you know when you are being a third wheel. You'll be happy if they just enjoy themselves. You don't need them to keep you occupied.
You find Dae shortly after, linking your arms with her instantly as she leads you towards the bar, offering to buy the first drink. You don't tell her it's already your second one, grinning as she hands you a shot glass. You grimace as the liquid goes down your throat. Dae has a similar expression, settling the glass down on the bar again.
"Let's dance!"
"I'm not drunk enough for that," you shake your head no, making her roll her eyes.
"Just say you want another drink, no need to find excuses."
You giggle softly, "anything but what we just had please."
You stay near the bar with her, talking about anything that comes to mind while drinking together. You're both just mostly complaining about school, the other nodding in understanding. The only difference between your usual hangouts is the music playing in your ears.
"Have you told her yet about the terrible physics assigment we have for next week?" You look up when you hear Jake's voice as he joins Dae's side. She groans at just the mention of it, making you laugh. "What are you guys drinking?" He wonders, looking at the empty glasses in your hands. You were so busy talking you didn't have time to order another one yet.
"Are you buying?" You raise an eyebrow in question.
"No, but I'm sure you guys can just wink at Seungcheol and you'll have your drinks for the rest of the night secured," he smiles. "You both look amazing, by the way."
"Thank you," you and Dae chant in union, smile spreading on your lips. "You don't look too bad yourself," Dae shrugs and he fixes his tuxedo, suppressing his grin.
You shake your head at him, looking around the room to find the rest of his teammates. Seungcheol is standing with Jeonghan and Heeseung in the line, chatting about something as they wait for their turn to order. "Shall we try our luck?" You nudge Dae's shoulder, her eyes following your line of sight.
You leave Jake behind for now, making your way past the crowd to reach your new favorite players. To be fair, you think that'll be anyone who buys you drinks tonight. As long as that someone isn't Kim Mingyu. In that case, the person buying you drinks won't be your favorite. Not that you plan on letting him buy you any tonight either way. The only plan you have for tonight is to keep avoiding him and forget all about the pain you feel when you think about him with alcohol.
Heeseung whistles as soon as the two of you come into his sight, his two older teammates turning around instantly. Jeonghan offers you a warm smile while Seungcheol's eyes take their time taking all of Dae in. You have to fight back the urge to tell her you were absolutely right about him looking at her differently. While Seungcheol is known to be a flirt, getting girls anywhere he goes, there is a difference in the way he looks at them and your friend.
"Let me see a spin," he grins, raising his hands in the air for the two of you to hold and spin under. You brush him off, shaking your head. It makes him roll his eyes, but both of you know it doesn't mean anything. Just like you know it's not actually both of you he wants to see from the back. Dae doesn't give into his tactics either though, blinking at him innocently as she covers her ass with her hands and slowly turns around. All he can see is her hair, but he doesn't seem to mind that either. "Beautiful as always. The both of you."
"Think you can manage to keep it in your pants tonight, Choi?" Your eyes close shut at the familiar voice. You refuse to look his way, but even then you know there is a beautiful man towering over you.
Seungcheol raises his hands in defense, a lazy smile on his lips. "I was just about to buy them a drink. You don't possibly have anything against that, do you?"
There is a moment of silence before Mingyu grumbles a whatever, cutting in line and finding his place behind Heeseung. You don't acknowledge his presence, standing with your back facing him as you ask Seungcheol for a drink. You catch his eyes flickering between you and Mingyu in a question but you ignore it, pulling Dae into the chat instead.
As soon as you get your drink, you leave the group, heading towards Joshua, Seokmin and Jake, who you catch leaning against one of the tables. Dae follows you, leaving the four guys behind. Avoiding Mingyu means having to avoid some of his teammates at times as well, no matter how much you want to hang out with them.
"Your idea worked," you raise your glass for Jake to see, catching his attention as you join their table.
"Didn't even need to show him my ass," Dae smiles, making you chuckle at the memory of her spinning. "I call that a win."
"No idea why we got blessed like this but I'm glad we did," Seokmin grins, ear to ear.
"Where do you have Hansol and Riki? They are the only ones I didn't see yet," you wonder, looking around the place to prove your point.
"I haven't seen Hansol since we came either," Joshua shrugs.
"Who I've seen though," Jake starts, the smirk on his face telling you he knows something, "is Riki."
"He's with a girl, isn't he?" Dae reads right through him and Jake nods as he takes a sip of his drink. "I think I caught a glimpse of him before."
"He started talking to a girl as soon as we arrived. He wanted to dance and it worked. I left him then because I didn't want to third wheel," Jake explains. You immediately reach your hand to him, offering him a fist bump, saying you understand that quite well. "You know you don't need to third wheel tonight, though, right?"
"What do you mean?" You tilt your head, your eyebrow raised.
"I'm pretty sure there is a guy who is dying to talk to you," Jake points somewhere behind you and you turn around, your eyes widening when you see the group you left earlier. They are in the middle of a conversation and somehow, it's you who Mingyu has his eyes set on. Swallowing a lump in your throat, you quickly avert your eyes.
"We should go dance. You still want to dance, right Dae?"
She nods to your question and you look at the guys hopefully, needing to get out of here. "I'm not risking that," Seokmin shakes his head as he looks at you, his eyes flickering to who you can only assume to be Mingyu. "Seungcheol I'll gladly rile up, though. May I?" He extends his hand towards your friend, palm up. She giggles at his smile, holding his hand in hers and letting him pull her towards the dance floor.
"Guys," you plea, glancing between Jake and Joshua. They lock eyes together, neither one looking like they plan to dance with you tonight.
Jake meets your eyes again, debating what he should do. He is one of your closest friends and you'd like to think he won't let you down like this, but judging by his expression, you can't tell for sure. "Okay, wait here. I'll get you someone who doesn't have anything to lose by dancing with you."
"And what do you have to lose?" You grumble, annoyed. He is already gone, though.
"Don't take it to heart, please," Joshua offers you a comforting smile. "It's not like you did anything wrong, but we don't want to be the ones delivering the final blow. I'm not sure what happened between the two of you," he hesitates for a second, looking at the rest of his teammates, "but Mingyu has been ticked off since you stopped talking to him. It just feels like we are waiting for a bomb to go off."
You blink at him confusedly, your brows furrowing together. "And why would dancing with me have anything to do with it?"
Joshua gives you a knowing look, telling you you know exactly why that's connected. You open your mouth to argue and tell him that it's stupid, but no words come out. Thankfully, you don't have to look at his pitiful expression anymore though, your attention drifting away when you feel someone's hand settle on your lower back. You instantly relax when you see Seungcheol and Jake standing behind you, blinking up at them curiously.
"I told you I'd find you someone who doesn't fear the consequences," Jake shrugs when he meets your eyes.
"They are exaggerating," Seungcheol rolls his eyes.
"Thank you! I think so too," you nod.
Jake and Joshua exchange a look again but you don't pay it any attention, asking Cheol if he wants to dance with you. "I thought you wouldn't ask," he laughs, offering you his arm and tugging you away.
The music is loud in your ears as you sway your hips in the rhythm, laughing. Unlike Jake and Joshua, Seungcheol doesn't make you feel weird about the situation at all, acting as if nothing happened. He makes you laugh and forget about everything, doing exactly what you wished for tonight. You don't think about anything, only focusing on the man in front of you.
Seungcheol's arms stay on you, whether it's on your waist or simply holding your hands in his. You don't mind, barely noticing the touch. It doesn't feel like anything unusual or what you should be paying attention to. The two of you are friends after all.
You keep inching towards him due to the group of guys dancing behind you, trying your best to get further away from them so you wouldn't be bumping your ass into them every time you move. With the amount of space behind Seungcheol, there isn't much to do, the two of you naturally ending up close. You don't think anything of it, but Mingyu certainly can't say the same.
It's one thing for you to avoid him at all cost, but it's a completely different one to be climbing his friend's body while he is forced to watch from afar.
When Jake came to their group, wrapping his arms around Seungcheol while trying his hardest not to make eye contact with Mingyu, he already knew something was wrong. Turns out, everything was wrong. When Jake asked if Cheol would mind dancing with you because you are looking for someone who'd take you for a spin, he wanted nothing more than to interrupt their conversation and say he'll dance with you. Before he could, Seungcheol agreed and left with the younger one, leaving him there with Jeonghan and Heeseung.
Having to watch Seungcheol take your hand in his and lead you towards the dance floor has to have been one of the worst things he's had to see. Well, turns out it wasn't. Watching you actually dance with him and letting him touch you however he wants is much worse.
Gripping the glass of beer in his hands, he keeps his eyes on the two of you, completely ignoring the conversation Jeonghan and Heeseung are having beside him. He honestly could not care less about the training schedules in the upcoming week.
It hurt seeing Seungcheol take your hand and dance with you, but he could live with that. He could bear watching you dance with Seungcheol because you were having fun, and he would never wish to take away your fun. But now, you are just forced to squeeze together with him because the guys around you are being asses and he is sure it's making you uncomfortable.
So, logically speaking, he isn't ruining your fun anymore if you are already uncomfortable.
Plus, he really hates the sight of you and Seungcheol together. Somehow, he thinks if it was Jake in his place, he wouldn't care so much. Maybe because of the amount of times you made it clear to him there is nothing going on between you and Jake. He liked seeing you convince him so eagerly.
Seungcheol's hand slides down your back, resting dangerously low. There is a lazy grin on his lips as he talks to you, and it's the first time he's wanted to beat up his friend so bad. He can't see your expression since you are standing with your back to him, but he can see his friend's hand and that's all he needs. Even if he might be destroying your fun, he'll manage. He'll take whatever you throw his way, whether it may be your screams or punches. He'd much rather have you yell his ears off than continue watching you and his friends climb each other. At least then you'd be talking to him.
"Here, have this," he mumbles, handing his beer to Jeonghan. "I'm not drinking anymore."
Mingyu doesn't wait for his friends' response, not giving a damn if they are watching him or not as he makes his way through the dancing crowd, needing to get to you.
"Hey," he interrupts your giggles, his blood boiling for some reason at the idea of you laughing at something Seungcheol said. Both of you look his way, your big eyes staring right into his. It makes him feel a bit better about the situation for a moment, at least until you avert your eyes again. He wishes you'd look at him for longer than two seconds just once. He's been watching all night, unable to take his eyes off. It'd be nice to know you watch him too.
"Hey," Seungcheol slowly drops his hands to his side, wrapping one around Mingyu's shoulder. Mingyu sends him a glare, not playing with him at all. He snickers when he sees the serious look on Mingyu's face, taking his hand away again. "What are you doing here?"
Mingyu ignores him completely, only looking at you. "It's late, Blue."
You swallow hard upon hearing his voice, closing your eyes as if that'd magically make him disappear. Spoiler alert: it does not. "We should go home."
You frown, meeting his eyes. "We," you point between the two of you, "aren't going anywhere. I'm dancing if you haven't noticed. So if I'm going anywhere with anyone, it's Seungcheol."
"Blue," it comes out as a warning, only making you feel worse. He has no right to talk to you right now. He has no right to command what you do and who you do it with.
"I'm not going anywhere," you state, redirecting your attention to Seungcheol. "Plus, why do you even care?" you huff, resting your arms around Seungcheol's shoulders.
Mingyu's annoyance only grows. Pulling your hand away from the older man, he forces you to look at him again. As soon as he notices the look in your eyes he loosens his grip, allowing your hand to slip away. Fuck. He found another thing he hates more than being forced to watch you be so close with someone else. He absolutely despises how you look at him right now, like he is hurting you.
"Leave me alone, Mingyu," you beg him.
"Please just come with me, Blue," he pleads in return, completely forgetting about Seungcheol beside him. All he sees is you, everything else blurred together and forgotten.
"I don't want to," you whisper, your voice strained as you shake your head.
"Love," he tries again, desperate. His eyes widen as soon as he realizes what he just said, yours not doing any better. He shocks the both of you, but it seems to work as you slowly offer him your hand. He doesn't hesitate for a second, lacing his fingers with yours and tugging you away, as far from everyone as possible.
He only stops once you are standing outside and you slip your hand away again, hiding it behind your back. "I was having fun," you mumble, staring at the ground beneath your feet. "Do you hate me so much? Is that what this is about?"
"I don't like you having fun with Seungcheol of all people."
"Then let me go have fun with someone else!" You look up, locking eyes with him. You hate this conversation with every inch of your being, and you're sure it shows in your expression. You just want to go back and pretend this never happened, that you didn't just give in to him so easily again after everything. You were doing so good. So good. But he just had to ruin it again. He had to remind you he exists. "Since you can't even look at me all night, so why do you even give a fuck?"
"I wasn't able to look anywhere but at you tonight," he corrects you.
"Stop lying to me, dammit! I'm going back there, I'm having a drink, and I don't care if you like it or not!" You huff, turning around on your heel. You don't get a chance to walk away, though, his hand wrapping around your wrist and stopping you. It only takes him one swift tug to pull you flush into him, your hands landing right on his chest to stop yourself from falling.
"Please don't go," he begs again, his voice getting more and more desperate each time. You hate that you know it's coming from his heart, that he needs you to stay here with him and talk to him again. "Can't you just like me for the night, Blue?"
You'd like to blame it on the drinks you had tonight. You'd like to say you're hallucinating things by this point and this entire conversation is just a figment of your imagination, but you know damn well it's not. It's not even the alcohol in his system speaking and making him do dumb things. You hate him. You hate how easy it is for him to make you feel like this. Like you are on cloud nine.
You're lucky he can't see your face. Your cheeks are flushed, and most definitely not because of the liquor you had. You like him much more than he realizes, and you hate that as well. It'd be a lot easier if you knew how to pretend like you don't care, like you don't feel happiness when you are with him, and like his words don't effect you. But truth is, it never sucked more than in the past week when you were repeating his words in your head over and over again.
"Aren't you the one who doesn't have time for relationships?" You mumble. "Who would never date his coach's little daughter because it's not worth it?" You feel his arms stiffen on your back, the realization of what your anger is about settling in. You try hitting his chest, hoping to get him to answer, but your punch comes out more like a gentle nudge.
Tightening his hold, he embraces you in a warm hug. Pulling away from you, just enough to see you better, you are forced to look up at him, your eyes watery. "Is this what's been troubling you?" He asks, his voice gentle. He cups your face, his thumbs slowly stroking your cheeks. "What I said to the guys in the locker room?" He sighs heavily, every regret he felt in the past week regarding you in that little exhale. "I was stupid to think I could ever push aside my feelings towards you and focus on anything but those beautiful eyes of yours."
"Blue, my blue," he continues, refusing to break eye contact with you again. "This past week when you were ignoring me? Was so much worse for me than anything else I ever had to go through. I could not go a single minute without thinking about you, wondering what you are up to, and if someone else gets to enjoy your attention instead."
"That week fucking sucked," you complain.
A tiny smile appears on his lips, "Yeah," he agrees with a nod, his eyes dropping to your lips. "I'm sorry for being an idiot. I'm sorry you had to doubt anything and that I wasn't the one dancing with you tonight. But most importantly, I'm sorry for not realizing how important you are to me sooner." He finished his speech by leaning down and pressing his lips to yours. You melt in his touch instantly, the softness of his lips on yours helping you forget about everything that was bothering you until now.
It's the first time a kiss makes you feel like this — as if the world peace just happened. It's the happiest you've been in a long time, and you cannot express how grateful you are it's with Mingyu of all people. You did think about the slim chance of going home with someone later tonight, but truth is, you couldn't bring yourself to smile at the idea of anyone other than him having you like this.
Mingyu cradles your jaw, tilting your head for a better access. You slowly glide your hands up from his chest, wrapping them around his neck. It's the best kiss you've ever had. Maybe because it's the one you've felt the most during. Jungkook was nice, but he could never compare to how much you love Mingyu.
"Don't go up there again," he whispers against your lips, only to kiss you again. "Stay here with me."
"It's cold here," you tease him, knowing you'd stay anywhere with him right now.
"I'll warm you up," he promises, his hands moving from your face down to your back, feeling your curves before resting on your ass, giving it a squeeze as his lips meet yours again. He needs to get in all the kisses he missed out on by convincing himself you were nothing more than a friend he cared deeply about. He doesn't think it'll be a problem. He is getting addicted to you already, unable to let you go. As much as he loves kissing you, though, he pulls back again. "Please."
You don't answer him right away, looking up at him. He's truly beautiful from up close. Have you mentioned that yet? You don't think you say it enough. The mole on his nose, the brown of his eyes, the lips, he is the definition of perfect. "I can't just leave," you sigh. "I came here with my dad, remember? He'll be looking for me."
"Can we please not talk about my coach while I'm getting hard," he groans, throwing his head back and exposing his Adam's apple. Oh yeah, he is gorgeous.
Your eyes drop down to his crotch, not even hiding it as you gaze at the boner. Oh-oh. "Oh yeah, let's not talk about him," you shake your head.
"My eyes are up here, Blue," he reminds you.
You nod, "I know where your eyes are, Mingyu."
His chuckle bubbles in your ears as he leans down and presses a kiss to the top of your head. "Please, baby. Stay with me just for tonight. Tell your dad you'll stay with Dae and be with me. Let me catch up on what I missed."
Meeting his eyes again, you nod this time. Honestly, you want nothing more than to go with him. Not only because your core is aching now thanks to the outline you got to see through his dress pants, but also because you've been longing for this — to be able to be with Mingyu as more than friends. You want to kiss him all night long, cuddle until you fall asleep, and wake up with him still in the bed. You want to do all the domestic things couples do when they are in love.
A part of you also thinks you need to fully believe it's not just the heat of the moment for him. You need to see it happen with your own eyes before you truly believe there is a future and he won't change his mind later again, remembering where his priorities lay.
"My jacket and purse are still up there," you tell him and he nods instantly.
"I'll get them."
"I can go for it," you argue but he just pins you down with his look, showing you there is no way you are going anywhere right now.
"Please just stay here and look pretty for me, hm? I'll get it. I'll be out before you can start missing me."
That's not possible. You miss him all the time, even when he is right there with you. You don't tell him that, though. You need to keep his ego in check a little, take your time before you show him just how much you love him.
"Mingyu," you call as he jogs away towards the entrance. He turns to face you, his eyes finding yours curiously. "Don't let other girls see that boner, will you?"
He laughs, a sound so pretty you want to keep listening to it. "That's only for you, my love." He adjusts his clothes to prove his point before disappearing inside. You watch the door close behind him, his words echoing in your ears. Tonight will be a long night.
♡⸝⸝♡⸝⸝
You are quite certain your driver hates you. Mingyu managed to not only grab your things, but also call a taxi and find Dae to beg her to cover for you. As he told you, she was dancing with Seungcheol at that moment, so he also had to apologize to him, only for him to brush him off and focus on the girl holding his forearms again. You told him you were glad Cheol got some sense and asked her for a dance as well, which only lead to Mingyu kissing you all over again because he didn't like you talking so much about his friend.
Jealousy looks good on him. So good.
Kissing him back, you held his hand on top of your thigh the entire ride, trying to ground yourself as to not ask him to fuck you right then and there in front of the driver. That'd be embarrassing.
But truth be, you wanted nothing more but.
Mingyu leads you inside his apartment, kicking his shoes off as soon as he steps inside. You bent down to undo your own heels, but he stops you before you can. Blinking up at him, you watch him confusedly before he hooks his hand around your waist and picks you up, throwing you over his shoulder as if you don't weigh anything. A yelp escapes your lips, a disbelieving laugh following right after as you frantically look over his apartment. His hands are wrapped around your thighs as he holds you in place, a clear goal in his mind.
You only get off him once you are in the bedroom, your back hitting the softness of his mattress. Prompting yourself up on your elbows, you watch him from his bed. It's the one place you dreamed about a lot before. It's so much better than you imagined, though. You're not sure if it's on purpose, or if he even realizes it, but his sheets are navy, his room decor matching it. His walls are white, lined with all kinds of pictures and posters of basketball players. If you were to explain his room in two words, you'd use blue and basketball. Your smile grows. It suits him.
Just like the suit he is wearing does. God. As he stands in front of the bed, his hair messy from when you ran your fingers through it as you kissed him in the car, you are unable to look away. "Why am I in my shoes still?" You tilt your head without breaking eye contact.
"Because they look so fucking good on you I need to look a bit more." He doesn't hide how hungry he is as his eyes scan your whole, from your ankles up to your face.
"They are uncomfortable, though," you complain and he doesn't hesitate any longer, climbing onto the bed to you, bending your knees and forcing them up. The bottom of your dress covers your view of him, making you frown. "Mingyu," you call, wanting to see him.
He hums, bringing one of your feet to himself, slowly undoing the heel and slipping it off. You stretch your leg out, clearing your view again. Pressing your foot to his chest, you watch as he wraps his hand around your ankle before dipping under the hem of your dress. He caresses your calf, eyes gazing into yours. Following the same process, he gets your other shoe off as well, releasing you of the pain.
"You look stunning tonight. I'm sorry for not telling you sooner," he presses a kiss to your ankle, looking up at you. You bite back a moan at the sight, shaking your head. "I should have done so many things earlier, I'm sorry."
You don't get a chance to answer before he is scooping you up and pulling you onto himself with ease, putting you right where he wants. This time a moan escapes you as you crash your lips with his, stranding his lap. He groans at your reaction, gripping your ass tightly and helping you roll your hips forward. "I'll make it up to you," he promises softly — a completely different feeling from how hard he grips your flesh. "I'll be so good to you."
His name falls off your lips as you rock your hips on top of him, chasing the well needed friction. "That's it, baby. Take what you need," he coos, lowering his lips to your shoulder. Brushing one of the straps holding your dress off, he replaces the fabric with his lips, pressing kisses to your skin. He needs to focus on something else. But it's hard when you moan into his ear so prettily. If it continues like this, he might as well come in his pants from how you ride his clothed erection.
Your fingers tangle in his hair, pulling him away from your neck so you can look at him. His big eyes stare right into yours, nothing but want behind them. "So beautiful," he praises, pressing his lips to yours. He buckles your dress at your hips, sliding his hands under and gripping your ass again. His fingers toy with your thong, pulling on the fabric and making you moan. "Please tell me you wore this for me," he groans.
You nod frantically. Even though you didn't expect to end up here when you were getting ready, a part of you has been dressing in hopes of him getting to see for a while now. You'd like to convince yourself you wore it so no line would be shows on your dress, but that's not the only truth. If it were, you wouldn't have worn any panties at all.
Maybe that's what you should have went with actually. Right now, as your thong gets soaked in your wetness, definitely leaving a stain on his pants as well, you wish you would be bare.
His name leaves your lips in a desperate plea. You're not sure what exactly it is you are begging for, but you need him. In any way he gives you. He tilts his head, a teasing smirk on his lips. "What do you need, baby? Use your words."
"Need to come," you answer immediately, rocking your hips forward. It's not enough, though. You need more. "Can you please help me," you whine, your head falling to his shoulder, "Please, just this once."
He doesn't need to hear more, throwing you back onto the bed, a needy whine escaping you when you lose the friction entirely. He takes a second to take you in again, your dress bucked up at your hips and your lower half covered in only your soaked panties and stockings. He's going to lose his mind soon. Your messy hair sprawled all over his pillow, your cunt soaked because of him, your lips chanting his name, what could be better?
Settling himself between your legs, he spreads them apart, taking a good look at your pussy. It's embarrassing, your cheeks heating up. You feel hot all over, a shiver running down your spine as he rubs your clit with his thumb. "Just so we are clear," he tugs at the fabric of your stockings harshly, ripping it apart. "We aren't doing this 'just this once'," he states firmly. "I don't think I'll ever get you out of my system again."
You try to cover your pussy with your hands when he tugs at your thong, the fabric sliding between your folds. It's no use though, Mingyu simply shaking his head at your attempt before taking your hands away with his free one. He pins them above your head, taking the opportunity to kiss you again before lowering himself. "Be a good girl and hold them there, will you? I'll make you feel good in return." He waits for your agreement, watching as your nod eagerly.
Smirking, he hooks his fingers in your thong again, pulling it to the side this time. You can feel his breath on your throbbing clit, your hips thrusting forward on instincts. "Tell me what you like, Blue," he prompts as he gives a soft kiss to your clit. "How do you touch yourself?"
When he doesn't move again, waiting for your answer, you open your mouth. "Slow rubs at first," you mumble, raising your head to see him better. He presses two of his fingers to your clit, doing as you tell him. Fuck. It feels way better like this. You are convinced he can read your mind because he is doing exactly what you always do.
"How about here?" He circles your hole with his thumb, looking up to see your reaction. "Do you ever finger yourself?"
"Sometimes," you moan.
He hums back, replacing his fingers with his tongue, licking slow circles around it while his fingers nudge you open. He thrusts two digits inside, curving them in hopes to find your sweet spot. "God," you gasp instantly, clenching around his fingers at the pleasure.
"Not my name," he shakes his head slightly, his lips wrapping around the bundle of nerves and sucking, speeding his movements at the same time. Your head falls back, your back arching off the bed. It feels too good. Your orgasm quickly builds up, your moans filling the room. The sound is a pleasure to his ears, his cock twitching in his pants every time he feels you clench around his fingers or your hips thrust up against him. It's not an exaggeration when he says you're the best pussy he's ever eaten, every inch of his body craving more. If he could, he'd have you laid out on his bed like this forever, eating you as every course of the day.
Your hands shoot to his hair, keeping him close as you feel your orgasm approaching, needing to find that release. He let's you ride his face, his fingers still thrusting into you. It's only when you finish with a loud moan, your legs shaking around him, that he pulls them out, licking them clean while looking at you. "I was going to tell you how fucking good you taste, but where are your hands, baby?" You whine as you quickly pull them away, pinning them above your head, exactly like he put them before. "And to think I had plans with you," he shakes his head, trying to sound disappointed. "But girls who don't listen shouldn't get a reward, should they?"
You whine, shaking your head. You're not sure why, if you're trying to agree or argue with him. His voice makes you wet all over again, the fact you just came doing nothing to stop how much you want him. "Please, Mingyu," you beg, desperate to get more, just one more orgasm. "I'll be good. I'll be such a good girl for you."
Oh fuck me — is the only thing Mingyu can think about as he looks at you, his eyes rolling back as he listens to you. It's safe to say he is addicted. How could he not be? He seriously believes everyone who let you go before was an idiot, as much as he appreciates they did because now he gets to be the one seeing you like this. His Blue. Oh how he loves the sound of that. "How could I ever say no to you?"
Finally taking off your clothes fully, you lay in front of him naked, your eyes glued to him as he stands in front of the bed, undoing his tie. You've never seen anything more attractive. Dipping your hand between your legs, you rub your clit slowly. His eyes fall down to your hand instantly, enjoying the view as he takes off the rest of his clothes, peeling off layer by layer.
He takes his time, teasing you while you desperately finger yourself in a poor attempt to reach your orgasm again. It doesn't feel as good as when he did it, though. Your fingers don't feel like enough, sad whines leaving your lips. "Oh, baby," he coos, joining you on the bed. "Do you want one more that badly?" You nod, unable to answer with words.
You take your chance as soon as he is close enough, your free hand reaching for him, wrapping around his cock. You had no doubt he'll be big but getting to feel him for yourself makes it so much better. Rubbing your thumb over his tip, you blink up at him to see his reaction. "Blue, if you want me to fuck you tonight you need to stop or I'll come before learning how it feels like to have you on my cock."
Your eyes roll back at his words, your hand not doing anything to stop. You jerk him off slowly, your legs wrapping around his hips to bring him even closer. "My needy little girl," he shakes his head, leaning down to press his lips to yours. You stop moving your hand, only holding him now before he takes your hand in his and brings them up. "Play with your boobs for me."
Listening to him, you pinch your nipples with your fingers. "You're so beautiful," he praises, kissing your cheek before moving down. He presses a kiss to your neck, to your breast, to your arm, to your belly, even to your thigh. He doesn't kiss where you need him the most, though, only teasing your further. He wraps his hand around his length, slapping his tip against your clit a few times. His eyes flicker between your pussy, to your chest, and then your face, trying to remember everything about this moment as well as he can.
"Mingyu, please," you cry, squeezing your boobs while thrusting your hips forward. Chuckling, he reaches into his nightstand, pulling out a condom from the first drawer. Your quickly wrap your hand around his wrist, stopping him before he can open the wrap. "I'm, uh, I am clean. I haven't been with many people before. I'm not on birth control but I could," you avert your eyes from him, embarrassed now that you started talked. "I could get the after pill in the morning. If you want."
"Are you sure?" His eyes widen, his hand holding your chin instantly and making you look at him. "There is no pressure here," he assures you. "I'm perfectly fine with a condom."
You shake your head, biting your lower lip nervously. "I want to feel you."
"Fuck," he groans, throwing the condom somewhere on the floor as he steals a kiss from you again. "I've never fucked without one before," he whispers between kisses, absolutely drunk on you.
"But you would with me?"
"My love, you are the only girl I'd want to feel bare," he proclaims, aligning himself properly without breaking the kiss. You feel his tip slide into you, your mouth falling open at the sudden stretch. "I got you," he promises softly, brushing your sweaty hair out of your face while slowly thrusting into you.
He takes his time, not wanting to rush anywhere. You feel incredible.
You think the same way, your eyes rolling back as your walls wrap around his cock, feeling every one of his veins. You're starting to understand why people don't use condoms. You never imagined you'd go without one, considering you aren't on the pill, but you wouldn't change it for anything now that you know what it's like. If there is anyone you'd risk it for, it's Kim Mingyu either way.
His left hand slides down your sides, feeling every inch of your body. You are sweating, but so is he. "I love these curves," he tells you, squeezing any flesh he can find. "I love these lips," he kisses you to prove his point. "This brain of yours, these hands, this soul, this fucking pussy," he thrusts into you harshly, groaning at the same time. "God, I love you, Blue."
Your back arches from the bed, your moans growing louder. You don't think you can tell him now, not even sure if he means what he says at the moment, but it's exactly how you feel. You definitely love him, there is no questioning that. You'll tell him another time for sure. You'll tell him exactly how much he means to you once your mind isn't fully occupied by his dick.
You run your hands down his back, leaving your prints as you slide your hands down until you get to his ass, holding it as he thrusts into you. "I'm going to spill all over you," he groans between thrusts, his movements becoming sloppy as he gets close to his orgasm. "Fill you up so nicely, hm?"
"Yes," you gasp, nodding frantically. The idea itself makes your head spin, and while you are in no way ready to have a baby and definitely will get the pill in the morning, Mingyu filling you up with his cum just made it to the top of your to do list. Your heels dig into his lower back, making it impossible for him to pull away — which you both know he doesn't want to do anyway.
"Get you pregnant," he moans at the thought, caressing your belly with his hand, feeling himself thrust into you. "Fuck, you'd look so good with my baby."
"You want to put a baby in me?" You blink at him prettily, rolling your hips forward to reach your orgasm as well. He curses under his breath, claiming your lips in his. He doesn't need to say it because you can see it in his eyes that the answer is absolutely yes. God, how you'd love to have his kid in a few years. "So close," you moan as he pulls back, feeling your orgasm approaching.
"Me too, love," he tells you, running his hand down to your clit, rubbing circles around the sensitive bundle to help you.
It doesn't take much longer for the two of you to come together, Mingyu's cum covering your inside white just like he said he would. You're so fully, your breath heavy as you ride out your high. He lets you, holding you through it before pulling out, running his fingers through his hair to get the sweaty stands off his face.
"You did so well," he praises with a smile on his face, kissing you so lovingly you fall for him all over again. Wrapping your arms around his neck, you keep him close as you kiss him back, melting into his sheets. "Let's get you washed up, hm?" He nudges his nose with yours. You don't think words could ever express how he makes you feel. He makes sure all the doubts you could possibly have are gone, his gentle touch and words grounding you in the exact way you need.
You nod to him and he scoops you up with ease, one of his hands under your thighs and the other holding your back. Wrapping your arms around him, you hold onto him tightly while he carries you into his bathroom, sitting you on the edge while setting the temperature. "I'll get you some clothes. The water is warm enough so you can get in if you want. I'll be right back here." You nod, watching his naked butt as he leaves the bathroom, closing the door behind himself to prevent the warmth from escaping.
You take a look around his bathroom, around his products in the shower and the interior, smiling. It's exactly how you expected. No three-in-one shampoos or questionable laundry products but genuinely good stuff instead, fragrances and everything organized. You wonder if he realizes his towel is also blue. Chuckling, you turn around on the edge of his tub, slowly getting in. You let the water fill it up slowly, closing your eyes and letting yourself relax.
When the door opens again, Mingyu is still naked. Holding a shirt and a pair of his boxers in one hand, he loads the washer with his dirty sheets with the other one. You watch him from the comfort of his tub, leaning your chin on your arm. He's got an incredible body. Broad shoulders, pretty back, pretty ass and legs. He is absolutely perfect. He smiles at you, his grin full of genuine happiness. Returning his smile, you scoot forward to make space for him, waiting for him to join you.
He sits behind you, wrapping his arms around your waist and pulling you into him. You lean back against him, closing your eyes again. "Thank you for being so great," you whisper into the silence.
He shakes his head, pressing a tender kiss to the top of your head. "Thank you for not giving up on me."
Mingyu helps you wash your hair as well as clean your whole body off, his touch nothing but gentle. He kisses you all over, whispering praises from the bottom of his heart. He wraps you in one of his shirts as soon as you're dried off, not wanting you to get cold. It's big on you, enough for it to be the only thing you could wear, but you reach for his boxers as well either way. He looks like a little boy who just got his birthday present when he looks at you in his clothes, needing to hold back not to take you all over again in his bathroom. He has to remind himself he'll have more time for that later, helping you sit on his washer instead so he could dry your hair.
The sheets are already changed when you leave the bathroom again — the reason he took a while before joining you in the bathroom, you assume. There are still blue, though, and it makes you smile. Falling into his bed, you feel on cloud nine instantly. He joins your side, letting you lay on his arm while he hugs you with the other one, embracing you in a hug. His blanket is warm enough to make sure you don't get cold during the night, but you can't say you would complain about his way of keeping you warm. Resting your head against his chest, you fall asleep to the soft sound of his breath, already looking forward to the next days you'll be spending together.
You love your boyfriend. You haven't been able to tell him yet, but you absolutely do. And now, seeing the flowers in your hands, you are sure to tell him the next time you see him.
There weren't any questions or doubts about where the two of you stood the day after the ball, Mingyu apologizing all over again in the morning over breakfast before asking you if you'd be his girlfriend. You couldn't say no even if you wanted to. He got you flowers as he walked you home later that afternoon, forcing you to come up with a bunch of excuses when your dad saw you holding a bouquet of tulips.
It's been a month since then, and it's now the third bouquet you received. It's lilies this time around, and they are absolutely beautiful. He had them delivered to you shortly before his training, after your dad was already out of the house thankfully. You have not been able to stop smiling since then, rereading the messages he sent you before he needed to go.
Who knew a twenty-eight year old could be so sappy? He is adorable, acting like a teen in love for the first time at times. But those moments are often quickly suppressed by him reminding you he is older after all, taking care of you in any and every way before you can even realize you're in need of something. From checking on you all throughout the day and sending you food when you don't have the time to make something for yourself, to making as much free time as possible for you. You see each other often, but it still doesn't feel like enough.
You sometimes just lay in his bed, studying, while he does his work out, or the two of you go out together, taking a stroll around as a form of break. He always knows what you need, and you're incredibly grateful to him for that. You haven't been able to see each other in the past week at all due to your schedule crash, but it's okay. You can't possibly complain when he is so in love he just sent you flowers just because he could.
Replacing your old peonies with the lilies on your bedside table, you smile before resting in your bed with your study materials, ready to dive into work again.
It's shortly past eleven when your phone starts blowing up. Frowning, you almost kick your cat off your bed as you turn around to shut it down. You were just about to fall asleep, finally in the right position, but someone just needed to make your night worse.
Or in this case, actually, better.
You peek one eye open to see if it's anything important, blinking confusedly at the bunch of messages and missed calls from Mingyu. You sit up straight, rubbing your eyes with the back of your hands before looking at your phone again. You don't even read what he said, immediately dialing his number to see what's going on.
It rings twice before it stops and his voice comes through, "Come open the door so I don't have to climb through the window like some fucking teenager."
You blink confusedly, his words slowly turning around in your head until they clock together. "You're here?"
"Not reading my texts anymore? Is this the 'I hate my boyfriend' I've seen around?"
"No!" You quickly shake your head as if he could see you, quickly getting from your bed. You don't bother sliding on your slippers, rushing out of your room barefoot. Snowy looks up to see what you're doing but doesn't follow you downstairs, staying in your bed.
Mingyu laughs on the other side of the phone while you run down the stairs, doing your best to stay quiet and not wake up your dad. You open the door, finally exhaling as you look at your boyfriend standing outside. His eyes trail down your figure, his smile widening as he takes the sight of you in. He hangs up the call without averting his eyes from you, enjoying the view you provided him.
It's only then that you realize what you're wearing — a baby blue tank with lacy lines and matching shorts. You clear your throat, stepping aside so he could walk in. "What are you doing here?" You wonder, covering your chest by crossing your arms over it.
He raises a questioning brow at that. "You do remember the fact I saw you with less on, right?"
"That's different, though," you mumble and he shakes his head.
"Would you rather I take it off then?" He crosses the space between you, closing the door on his way. Not waiting for your answer, he cups your cheek and presses his lips to yours in a greeting. "Hi."
"Hi," you smile. "I was just about to fall asleep. I almost didn't even know you were here."
"It's eleven," he states, as if you weren't already aware of that.
You shrug, "I was tired."
"I'm sorry for keeping you up," he finds another excuse to kiss you. "I missed you."
"I missed you too," you kiss him back, your hands falling down to your sides again before lacing with his. "Are you going to stay with me?"
"Do you want me to?"
"Always," you assure him.
Leading him upstairs again, you keep your hands locked as you walk through the hall. You are quick to lock your bedroom door just in case, not taking any chances. It feels weird sneaking around like this when you are a grown adult, but it's the only option you see at the moment. You don't want to be explaining to your dad you are dating his player just yet.
"There's my little guy," Mingyu lets go of your hand as soon as his eyes land on your cat sprawled out on your bed. You watch him lovingly as he pets his head, rubbing the top of his head. Snowy isn't the biggest people loving cat, and often takes time to warm up to others, so seeing him lean into Mingyu's touch makes you smile. It may be because of how tired he is, but you like thinking it's because he knows Mingyu is a good guy. "Were you keeping my girl company while I was busy? Yeah?"
"He seems to like you," you whisper, wrapping your hands around his waist from behind.
"Your family seems to do that, yes," he grins.
"Don't ruin it for yourself."
"I couldn't." Turning around, he stands face to face with you again, sitting on the edge of your bed and resting his hands on your sides. You stand between his spread legs, cupping his face as you gaze into his eyes. "Hi," he smiles again.
"Hi," you smile back, leaning down to give him a kiss. It's tender and sweet, conveying exactly how you feel having him in your room.
Mingyu's hands slide under your tank, needing to feel your skin on his fingers. You let him, melting into his touch instantly. You seem to do that a lot. In return, you slide your hands under his shirt as well. Unlike him, though, you take the fabric off, dropping it to the ground. "Take your pants off."
His smile turns teasing, his hands dropping to the waistband of his pants without a second of hesitation. "Do I get to see you naked in return or is it only you having fun tonight?" He pushes the pants to the floor and you roll your eyes.
You don't answer him, walking around him to the other side of the bed. You can feel his eyes on your ass as you walk, your smile growing. You lift the covers, sliding under them without another word, ready to go to sleep. Snowy gets up at the same time, looking offended as he jumps down. You chuckle at his reaction. You barely brushed him as you got into the bed, but he seems to have taken that as a hint to get off either way.
"That was mean," Mingyu complains, and you're not sure if he's referring to your cat or the fact you left him sitting in just his boxers, expecting something more.
"You should get used to it," you tell him simply, closing your eyes. You can't suppress your smile as he slides under the covers with you, his hands finding you instantly. He pulls you flush against him, your legs tangling with his.
"Good night, baby," he whispers, kissing the top of your hair. You relax in his hold, resting your head against his bare chest.
"Hey, Mingyu?"
"Hm?" He hums back without moving an inch.
"I love you."
You don't need to look at him to know he is smiling, his hold tightening.
"Hey, Blue?" You hum in response, knowing where this is going. "I love you."
♡⸝⸝♡⸝⸝
You're the first one to wake up in the morning, which isn't a surprise to you. Mingyu likes to sleep in, just like he likes staying up late. You fell asleep almost instantly after, the last thing you remember being Mingyu's lips on your shoulder. You turned your back to him while trying to find the perfect position, and he immediately used that opportunity to brush aside your tank top stripe and kiss your skin all over. It was easy falling asleep like that. You couldn't guess when he fell asleep, but hopefully it didn't take him too long.
You slip from his hold, taking a minute to wake up properly as you sit on the edge of the bed. Mingyu is sleeping soundlessly, hugging the blanket. Snowy jumps up to join him as soon as you make the space for him, glancing at you briefly before cuddling up to Mingyu's side.
"You like him a lot, huh," you whisper, rubbing him behind his ears before standing up.
Your dad is already awake as well when you get downstairs. "Good morning!" You call to him, disappearing into the kitchen. You hear him greet you back from the living room, the sound of his favorite video game playing on the TV. You look through the cabinets and fridge, trying to figure out what you should make for breakfast. You have no idea when Mingyu will wake up, so it makes it harder to decide.
You eventually take out a few eggs and bacon from the fridge as well as the toast from the cabinet. You'll just wake him up when you come back up. Hopefully, he won't mind. You move around the kitchen while listening to your dad play his game, humming to yourself. There is still a huge problem waiting for you, but you're choosing to leave it up to your future self to somehow sneak Mingyu out of the house.
You finish planting everything, taking the two plates out of the kitchen with you. But because your luck apparently sucks, your dad is on his way to the bathroom at the same time, eyeing you confusedly upon seeing how much food you're taking upstairs.
"I'm really hungry," you blurt out quickly. "I didn't have dinner last night so I'm starving right now."
"Why didn't you put it all on one plate?" He questions, trying to understand your trail of thoughts.
You shrug, trying to stay as casual as possible. "I'll wash it later, don't worry." He simply shakes his head at you, brushing you off and going upstairs first. You feel the weight lift off your shoulders instantly, relief washing over you. That's one question out of the way. You jog up the stairs after him, disappearing in your room while your dad goes to the bathroom.
As if he could read your mind, Mingyu is already awake when you come in. He is sitting in your bed, his clothes still on the floor and Snowy still on his side. He has one hand on your cat, rubbing the spot behind his ears while scrolling on his phone with the other, his eyes lifting up when he hears the door closing. "Good morning," you greet him, crossing the room and handing him his breakfast.
"Good morning," he leans over to kiss you.
You sit between his opened legs, resting the plate in your lap. "I just had to explain to my dad how it totally makes sense I'm eating two portions," you sigh.
"Yeah? Did he believe you?" He wonders, taking a bite. "This is really good!" He signs.
You roll your eyes at his reaction. "Eggs," you remind him. "There is no way you just complimented the way I make eggs." Kim Mingyu, who is the greatest cook you know right after your dad. Yeah, right.
"What?" He shrugs. "I'm a simple man."
"You're an idiot," you shake your head, taking a bite yourself. "I don't think it even crossed his mind I might be hiding a boy in my room at my age, so I think we are good."
"At your age," he repeats with a laugh. "Do you feel old or something, baby?"
"I feel quite annoyed if you ask me," you nudge him with your feet, only for him to nudge you right back. Your morning is already filled with giggles and playful fighting as you eat your breakfast together, reminding you how much you love this man.
"I forgot to ask," the door of your rooms comes to an open, your dad's face falling into your vision. Right. "Did you get the message about Saturday's schedule—" he stops mid sentence as his eyes land on you and Mingyu in your bed, his bare chest on full display and his clothes on the floor. You close your eyes shut, regretting not locking the door after you came in.
You knew there was going to be a time he'd find out, you just didn't want it to be now. Truthfully, you liked having him just to yourself. Being able to live in this little bubble with just you and him without everyone knowing. Dae knows, of course. After covering for you the night of the ball, it was only natural for her to ask a bunch of questions, questions you didn't feel like lying about. Most of the guys probably have an idea as well, but that's all. Other than that, it was just you and Mingyu living in your own world, and you liked that.
"Yeah, Saturday, the, uh, men tournament. I got it. I said I'll be there," you answer as if nothing happened.
Mingyu clears his throat, glancing between you and your dad. "Good morning, coach." He sounds awkward, which you certainly don't blame him for. Closing your eyes shut, you run through all the possible worst case scenarios that could follow. You just hope he doesn't take it out on Mingyu and bench him for the rest of the season.
"Mingyu," he blinks, finally acknowledging his presence. "Do I want to know what you're doing shirtless at my house so early in the morning?"
"Having eggs?" He raises his plate to prove his point, looking at you for some sort of help when your dad's eyes stay locked on him. Mingyu sighs when your eyes tell him you have no idea what to do, deciding to take it into his own hands. "I came in last night because I missed my girlfriend, coach. I'm sure you know how busy her classes have been keeping her lately. I slept over, and I'm sorry for not saying hello earlier?" He offers a sheepish smile, one that might work on you but you're not sure will have the same effect on your dad.
"You looking to end your career anytime soon?"
"If I have any say then no, sir," Mingyu shakes his head instantly. "I want to keep playing."
"So no pregnancy leaves or anything like that?"
"Dad!" You yell immediately.
"What? I need to make sure one of my best players isn't looking to quit when we just gained him last year," your dad shrugs as if it was the most obvious thing.
"I'm not planning on doing that anytime soon," Mingyu assures him and your dad nods, his eyes briefly flickering between you and him before sighing. He turns on his heel, ready to leave the room again. You blink confusedly. That went a lot better than you expected.
"And Mingyu?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Wear your clothes, will you?"
It's cold today. The goose bumps on your arms only prove that. You regret not bringing something warmer with you as you stand in front of your shop, watching the game from the entrance before your snack bar. The only thing making it a little easier for you is the fact you catch Mingyu's eyes every once in a while, his smile widening every time he is reminded you are wearing his jersey number on your back.
Dae called you out on it as soon as you came in before the game started, teasing you the entire time. You couldn't even care. Not when you are this proud to be wearing his number on your back while he keeps winning all his games, getting closer to his goal.
The crowd is buzzing with excitement, cheering loudly for both teams on the court. You and Dae aren't far behind, screaming your lungs out as well. You were a little scared before when you saw the change in the core five, but Riki and Jake are doing perfect in the game so far.
People keep coming in and out, but Dae takes care of most of their orders, allowing you to keep watching the game. She excuses it with the fact you'll have more to do once the game is over, but you know deep down she's doing it because she simply wants to give you the opportunity to watch them.
"If it isn't the new Mrs. Kim." You glance at the customer beside you, offering an awkward smile. He used to play with your dad when you were little, but it's been so long you can't remember his name. "He is doing great today. I'm sure your dad is proud to have him in the family."
You clear your throat, glancing at Dae for some sort of help. She only gives you a look, one telling you she finds this just as weird. "We, uhm, definitely aren't at that stage yet," you shake your head, joining Dae behind the counter and taking your position. "I'll let him know you think he played well today, though. I'm sure he'll appreciate that."
He brushes you off, "No need. We are all waiting to tell the team ourselves how well they are doing once they win." There is no doubt in his voice about how today's game will turn out and it makes you smile. You know they'll take the win as well. Despite it being a tie right now, both teams at their best, you don't question them even for a second. "You should come with us later. I heard there is a ceremony drink ready for the team."
"I don't know if we'll be able to," you turn him down gently. As much as you'd love to go for a drink with the guys once the game is over, it's not like you can when you're behind the bar, being the provider of their alcohol. "Maybe next time."
You serve him a beer, waiting a bit after he leaves before going to watch the game with Dae again. 68:63 for the Knights. They scored four more points while you weren't looking, and it makes you so much prouder. They got this. Just five more minutes like this and they'll have their spot in the finale guaranteed. You cheer as loudly as before, if not louder.
Watching the game, you realize how much you truly missed the sport. You can't say you'd want to be in their spot again, but you love watching the game and cheering for the team, cheering for your boyfriend. It feels great.
The entire crowd erupts at the buzzer beater, all the guys running together to the center, huge grins and loud noises filling your ears. They won. 81:79. It was Seungcheol scoring the final two points, and you don't think you've ever seen Dae more excited about the game than at that moment. She's been learning the rules lately and understanding the principles more and more every time. And while she says it's because she realized it's more fun when you know what's going on, you know a certain captain has his hands in the sudden change.
You both clap as best as you can while the guys hug themselves, pulling your dad in as well. It makes you laugh seeing them practically drag him down. Your eyes flicker around all of them, trying to find the number 17 you're the most excited to see. You frown when you don't see his messy hair anywhere, standing on your tip toes in an attempt to see better.
Your vision is quickly clouded with the image of a red jersey though, your eyes trailing up his body until they finally lend on the chocolate eyes you love so much. "Hi," he smiles sweetly, all sweaty and his hair sticking to his forehead.
"Hi," you greet him back, unable to hide your smile.
"That's my number you're wearing," he points out, his grin as big as yours.
"Oh? This thing?" You turn around to show him your back with his name on it. He's seen the jersey many times already, but his reaction never changes. "I just threw something on."
"The prettiest shirt ever," he crosses the space between you, wrapping his arms around your waist as he pulls you in for a kiss. By the sounds around, there are already people coming in to order a drink, but he doesn't care at all, keeping you as close as he can. "My name looks perfect on you."
"I've been told," you giggle, your palms pressed against his chest. "Pretty sure someone told me just last night."
"Must have been a genius," he hums, his hands sliding down to your ass and giving it a tight squeeze as he kisses you again, just because he can.
"Celebrate on your own time." There is a slap coming to Mingyu's shoulder, one you know is encouraging as soon as your eyes land on Bora.
"I can't. I'm too impatient," Mingyu argues, offering Bora a soft smile. You tap his chest with your palm, bringing his eyes to yours again. He sighs when he realizes what you want, stealing one last kiss from you before taking a step back.
"Go celebrate with your team, this is big for all of you," you nod your head towards the rest of the guys still on the court.
He doesn't even glance their way, keeping his eyes on you. "I was celebrating with my team before I was interrupted." You roll your eyes at him despite finding him adorable.
"Ignore his corny ass," Bora shakes her head, but the smile on her face as she wraps her arm around your shoulders tells you just how much she loves this for you as well. "There is a line of people waiting for a drink, and I'd love to use my friend card and cut in line, so hurry."
You laugh with her as you walk to the bar, glancing over your shoulder at Mingyu once more. He is still watching you, so you take the opportunity and pull your head to the side, showcasing him the name on your jersey once more. He is right, you also think Kim looks great on you.
⚬ pairing: ice hockey player! kim mingyu x fem! reader
⚬ word count: 12k for part one
⚬ warnings for part one: alcohol, drinking, food, unrequited love and depiction of certain symptoms of depression, eventual smut, violence, slutshaming and derogatory language, harassment and other mature themes MDNI
⚬ genres: uni au, friends to lovers to enemies, forbidden romance(!!!), slow burn, angst, fluff sometimes, hurt/comfort. seungcheol, chaeyoung (bp or twice, your choice), dokyeom (perpetual gyu bestfriend in lunaverse) and jihyo (perpetual lesbian icon in lunaverse because i refuse to give her to a m*n) make an appearance.
playlist for part one <3
something stupid by frank and nancy sinatra
lacy by olivia rodrigo
high and dry by radiohead
the greatest by billie eilish
scar tissue by red hot chilli peppers
credits: to @uzmacchiato for the gorgeous lace dividers and to my pookie @nerdycheol for reading the first few chapters and telling me not to trash this.
author's note: none of this is beta read so please do not expect this to be perfect. this one's going to be quite a long fic so i shall be releasing it in a total of three or four parts, please let me know if you want to be added to the taglist <3
CHAPTER 1: no longer who i used to be
Kim Mingyu never thought that a day would come where he’d step into his favorite restaurant in the town after a day of gruelling practice and his first thought would be that he’d rather die than face his friends over dinner.
But life is full of surprises — it has its ways of blanketing the brightest of suns with a grey cloud of gloom. And as he tugs at the knot of tie for what seems like the seventh time in the last one minute as the hostess leads him in, Mingyu already looks exhausted.
“You’re the first one of the party to arrive,” she looks over her shoulder, her maroon-coated lips stretched into a professional curve.
He nods.
She shows him to the largest table draped in lilac satin as per Chaeyoung’s request and replaces the ‘reserved’ sign with a menu-card.
“Should I get you some water?” she asks, wiping the table again, just in case. “Or anything to start. Your server will be here shortly.”
“No, I’m good for now.” he clears his throat and tries to unlock his jaw, “I’ll just wait for the others.”
She smiles and walks away like she has done multiple times in the last one year that he has been frequenting this place.
It is one of his favorites, truly.
Rustic interior drowned in darkness with moody lighting cascading only upon the things that matter. Familiar staff who humor him every time he shows up with his friends or his team after a game. Music tuned just enough to allow loud conversations of joy to echo while filtering out the ones weighed down by feelings that, in his opinion, do not belong over good food.
But tonight feels…odd. Misaligned and misplaced. Just wrong.
The hostess never asks if he’d want something. The lights are never this bright and why does it clash with the color of his tie? Why is he even wearing a fucking tie in the first place—
Oh right.
Birthday girl privileges and a request—threat—from Miss Chaeyoung herself to tidy up in formals and dress up at least once.
Regardless, the tie needs to go.
And so he tugs at it until the knot gives away. But as soon as the noose loosens and falls soundlessly in his lap, he feels his throat tightening again with yet another inconvenience.
Why does the music sound different? Quieter, much more mellow and slower than usual. It ruins everything, he thinks, because what if he sighs differently and they catch it? What if there’s some obvious change in tone that someone latches on to? What if he scrapes his knife too harsh against the porcelain when someone says something cruel to get a reaction out of him?
No.
He’s never the one to complain or be grumpy, it is so uncharacteristic for him. But the music needs to be what it usually is…a tad bit louder. Just tonight, especially tonight.
Just as he’s about to lift his head to inspect what’s up, his line of sight gets blocked by the server who usually takes their table whenever the ice-hockey team of the college or any of its members visit the restaurant.
It is comical how quickly Mingyu is able to slip on his happy-go-lucky, ‘all-is-well in the world with sunshine and rainbows’ mask when Betsy, their server, smiles at him.
“What’s the celebration tonight?” She asks, her wrinkled face deepening with delight when she notices the tailored-suit. “Seems quite fancy.”
“Are you jealous Betsy?” he teases, a small smirk maturing on his face, “don’t worry I’m here for a birthday dinner. Not on some date.”
The older woman feigns surprise like she isn’t used to his effortless charm and flirtatious tendencies by now. She hits him lightly with her notepad. “I am married, young man.”
“And I score on defended nets all the time.” he winks.
“Find yourself a suitable girl and stop wasting your charms on older women.”
“Talking like you are not my only perfect match in this whole wide world.”
Betsy gasps and shakes her head, ignoring his words but the blush creeps up regardless. “Flattery won’t get you free dessert, boy. Now quit playing around and tell me what you would like before your loud pack of hooligans arrive.”
“Just water for now,” Mingyu allows himself to give her his actual, real smile. The kind which lights up his eyes and allows his jaw to relax more.
“I will get you the cucumber one, it is better for you,” Betsy says, stuffing the notepad back into her apron, “in the meantime, enjoy the new addition we have got here.”
With that, she steps away just enough for Mingyu to see the epicenter of his earlier dilemma. The change in music.
“A new, live singer in the house,” Betsy offers. She further says something about the name of the singer, about how she attends the same University as him, about how she’s the niece of the owner.
But it all fades.
She is sitting on a bar-stool in a dark corner, her only companions being the mic-stand tangled up with haphazard wires at the base and an acoustic guitar in her lap. Her eyes are either downturned, or closed—it is hard for him to tell from where he’s sitting. But even from the distance, the view of her—small and contained in that little corner that already feels like it belongs to no one but her—it heals something deep within him. And for a moment, he feels like all is, actually, well.
This soothing, balmy feeling.
Like when he’d used to stare up at the moon that hung low outside his window.
Her skin glows with its own mellow, moonlight too. Or perhaps it’s just the amber from the chandelier that falls with romantic shadows over her. Her hair, long and open in loose waves curtain half of her face away from his gaze. But he can hear, more than he can see, the anxiety undercutting her voice as she sings some old Billy-Joel song. All her words carefully clipped and never gliding over each other or over the music, as if the quiet control will undo the dread of doing something wrong on her new job.
“Do you like her?” Betsy asks, not out of the blue, but as a follow-up to something she must’ve said earlier.
Mingyu feels the strain behind his eyes when he drags them away from the singer with the dreamy voice and back to Betsy as she stares at him with this unspoken look in her eyes—one that older people give you when they can foresee something that you don’t.
Mingyu tries to play it cool, toying with his cufflinks. “Dreaming about setting me up with her or what? At least introduce me to her first.”
“Don’t even think about it, player, at least not while she’s at work.” Betsy warns, “I’m just taking feedback—do you like her?”
“She’s good,” Mingyu tries to physically shrug off the urge to look in that certain corner again, “a little nervous, I think.”
“Uh huh, well she is quite young.”
“When did she start?”
“Last month?” Betsy pauses to think, “yeah, last month. Said she needed some extra cash but had no experience in hospitality. Her aunt suggested we put a nice little set-up in the corner without the windows for her.”
A month.
Mingyu hadn’t been anywhere since before that. In fact, this might be his first night out and about ever since the party where it all went down. Because since then, he had been cooped up in his apartment, just sketching and writing his feelings away and surviving on half-eaten bowls of ramen that he’d forget about before reheating it again for dinner.
If Mingyu seems uncharacteristic tonight, it’s not a switch flipped. But a culmination of everything that had beaten it into his head that whatever he knew about love and affection had been just wrong. Impure. Insincere. Even when he didn’t mean for it to be.
And without love, what else is there for him to even define his character upon?
Betsy disappears just in time for Chaeyoung and Seungcheol to arrive with Dokyeom, Misty and the freshman named Chan who has been following Seungcheol around like a lost puppy.
Chaeyoung squeals before she hugs him. “Oh my God, Gyu!”
His palm flattens over her bare back—almost. He blames it on muscle memory before correcting himself by letting his fingers awkwardly rest over her lower back.
“Happy birthday, Chae.”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” sincerity brims her eyes when she takes a moment to look at him, really look at him.
Everyone else settles behind them, pretending they are not all thinking the same things or feeling the same tensed air weighing down upon them.
She squeezes his hands as Mingyu nods once, his smile tight when he settles in the corner seat next to his ice-hockey team’s captain, Choi Seungcheol. The guy gives him a tight nod—formal and clean.
The entire table of his friends falls back into that practiced chatter. Jokes from Dokyeom as he surveys the menu, hushed whispers between Seungcheol and Chaeyoung as they decide upon what dish they would like to share, Chan and Misty complaining about their own schedules.
And he can hear it all because the music is too soft.
Mingyu keeps on shifting in his seat, pretending to read the menu and failing at it…almost as if his own body doesn’t understand how to function at this moment. He is grateful for it when Dokyeom—ever observant and quick to read the room—orders the exact same thing for him.
Wonwoo and Jihyo join them a bit late with a present wrapped in silver, blaming the delay on traffic.
Mingyu doesn’t miss it though, the look that the two share when their watchful gazes shift from the interlinked fingers of Chaeyoung and Seungcheol on the table to Mingyu who looks like he is trying to swallow something down but failing gloriously at it.
He looks away before he can detect pity in their eyes.
Leaning his head back, he thinks it is going to be a miracle if something can keep him afloat in the tsunami that is this night.
He finds that anchor in the voice that melts into the music of an acoustic guitar like liquid gold.
⸻
“Oh, I love her voice,” Chaeyoung mumbles mid-bite when Betsy asks her the same question about the singer. “Very fresh.”
Misty, who surprisingly hasn’t said anything peculiar throughout the night so far, no longer seems to be in the mood to hold back anymore as she watches Mingyu carefully chew down on the last bits on his plate.
“Hey, Mingyu!” she calls for his attention, breaking some trance that the boy has slipped into. “Why don’t you go down there and ask her to play Chaeyoung’s favourite song, huh?”
Dokyeom interrupts, quickly dabbing his mouth, “I don't know if that is allowed…is it Betsy?”
“Oh I’m sure Veronica would let it slide,” Misty says, referencing the manager of the property, “it’s a beloved patron’s birthday after all. So, Mingyu, would you?”
There it is. The test. The show. The jibe.
The thing he had been dreading all evening. Like something he hasn’t prepared for, but something he must excel at to prove he isn’t all that vain.
Chaeyoung cuts in smoothly, trying to defuse the smoke before it overtakes all the airy lightness of the night. “It’s very unnecessary, really. We are not kids anymore…” But after taking a quick sip of the water, Mingyu is already getting up from his seat. Chaeyoung probably doesn’t think it through when she grabs his hand, “Mingyu really. Don’t.”
Misty files the seemingly small but weighted interaction, reveling in how Seungcheol’s eyes oscillate between the two.
“Come on Chae,” she pushes, “she sings so sweet and besides, Mingyu is good with people.”
Good with people.
Good with feelings.
The irony behind the words isn’t lost on Mingyu and the fact that they’re coming from his friend only makes him laugh. Just a small huff of air—something that he cannot hold back in unlike everything else he did all night.
It is a humiliation ritual almost—because the song that is Chaeyoung’s favorite might just be the one that fits his situation perfectly.
Something stupid by Frank Sinatra. Of course Misty would ask Mingyu to get it played. And if he says no, everyone would conclude what they have already been suspecting to be true—that he is still affected by it all. The rejection. The humiliation. The stupid confession.
It leaves him with no choice but to oblige.
Chaeyoung had long slipped her fingers off his wrist, yet he gently explains. “It’s your birthday…no big deal. I’ll go ask her.”
“Try not to get her number plastered all over your chest in red lipstick!” someone calls out from behind. Mingyu only shakes his head, playing along. That’s all he has learnt to be good at.
CHAPTER 2: stand still like a hummingbird
“Hey—” Kim Mingyu says, standing barely a foot away from you.
To say that it startles you would be an understatement when you almost slip off the stool. But your fingers instinctively curl around the mic, stationing your balance under the pretense of checking if it is off.
“Oh, hi!” you squeak, a bit embarrassed.
In your defence, being on a chair with no back support for three whole hours, trying to sing every word with perfection so that your being off-tune doesn’t ruin anyone’s dinner, all while carefully balancing your guitar over your thighs wasn’t the most comfortable position to be in.
Especially not when someone whom you have avoided eye-contact with all night decides to knock all the air out of your system by hogging the space around you.
For a moment, after you regain your composure, none of you speaks. He just stares at you like his vision has been blurry the entire night and you are the first thing he can focus upon. That he can anchor upon. You visibly see his uneven breaths slowing down when you tuck your hair behind your ear, blinking at him confused.
“Can I help you?’
“Uh…I’m sorry if this is too demanding but it’s my friend’s birthday today,” he points back to the table and you assume the girl in the middle, who is currently busy talking to someone, is the one he’s talking about. “Can you maybe please sing something stupid by Frank Sinatra for her?”
You almost turn him away by telling him you aren’t allowed to take requests from customers. That your aunt is very serious about you sticking strictly to the neat, organized playlist she carefully curates for every day of the week depending on the weather, the ambience, even factoring in the special menu items of the night to generate the ultimate dining experience at her diner.
But he looks so…heartbreakingly small.
You purse your lips together in contemplation and your eyes almost fall off his face as you gear up to mumble a careful rejection. But he interrupts you.
“Please.” he says, so low and heavy that it falls on your lap like a plea you have no words to use to reject.
Your fingers press over the guitar, surprised and confused. You look around—for Veronica, for a senior staff, for answers. But some of his friends are already getting up from their seats to see what’s taking so long. He nervously glances back at them, giving them an easy smile though nothing about him when he turns back to you seems easy.
“Alright,” you nod. “Yeah, I can sing that.”
His shoulders slump and he stands there for a moment like he needs to make himself breathe. Then, he nods at you with a small, tight smile before joining his friends and says something to them with the effortless cool he always sports—on and off the rink.
You, like most people on campus, had never seen his armor creak. Mingyu has always been too easy to like, too tall to be ignored, too charming to not smile at and too easy to not talk to.
But tonight, right in front of you, you could swear you had seen him nearly crumble. Like everything you had known about him until now was a lie, a heavy mask that was making it hard for him to breathe.
And you have never been the one to not care. Even if it meant nothing in return for you.
So you strum the guitar and sing the song he had asked…no—begged you to sing. It is such a slow song. Simple lyrics. Easy cords. But it can be sung in so many voices and ways.
You can make it melancholic and draw attention to his drooping lips as he sways in a corner with his friend—not the birthday girl though, because she is dancing with somebody else, your college’s ice hockey team’s current captain Choi Seungcheol.
Or, you can make it more romantic for every couple who have joined the young crowd to dance along to your song.
But then you remember the tender bruises denting his voice when he had spoken. And the decision finishes forming itself in your throat before you can rationalize it.
The song belongs to him.
So you soften your voice and purposefully emphasize on the lighter lyrics while breezing past the wistful ones. You ensure to smile through it all, because one of the first lessons you had learnt in music was that listeners can hear the smile or the frown in your voice when you sing. And it has the tendency to rub off.
You utter a small prayer under every word you sing with your most honest smiles, hoping that they land on and soothe whatever scars the dancing people in this dimly lit diner carry on their souls.
⸻
Your head is swimming by the time you return back home. Not with exhaustion or delirium, but with the surrealist nature of everything that unfolded.
Your ears still rang with the cheers that had followed after the song ended with everyone raising their champagne flutes to thank you. Some were wiping their eyes, while the others leaned more into their partners. The hundred dollar bill that Mingyu had quietly slipped into the tip-jar meant for you that still weighs down in your purse.
When you come down for dinner, you wrap your hands around your stomach like you can somehow hold it all in and preserve it under your skin forever to return back to it whenever you feel too small or too lonely. Hold it from bubbling over and spilling at a home where there are rules associated with how his name must be spoken.
Rule number one: well, it shouldn’t be.
Because once uttered, Kim Mingyu’s name is enough to sour the moods of everyone in the family for days if not weeks.
You don’t get it though.
Sure, your twin brother and him might have had the fiercest of rivalries when it came to being drafted for your college's ice-hockey team throughout their junior and senior years in highschool. But it has also been almost two whole years since Coach Greer offered the opportunity to Mingyu and your brother had to go with his second choice at NYU.
In theory, he should be over it by now.
But he evidently isn’t, as can be seen at the monthly dinners for which he joins you and your parents, always grumbling about how it seems like he is the only one with a hockey-IQ on his team.
“It’s like I am carrying that team throughout the season, and I am only a Sophomore.” he pierces the vegetables on his plate with more force than necessary, causing you to flinch.
Your dad’s eyes dart between the two of you. Even though you are twins, you and Ethan couldn’t be more distinct from each other.
There is almost an inverted mirror between you both, reversing every image that reflects on it.
You clear your throat, trying to deviate the topic of conversation before it crooks into something else. “Well, I don’t know if you know Ethan, but I got a job at Aunt Sylvie’s diner.”
“What do you need a job for?” he frowns. “Isn’t your course already too demanding?”
“It is, which is why I want to save up to move into the dorms by next term…or maybe by Junior year at least. The workload would be harder then and I think living on campus would be better than commuting everyday—”
“On campus?” he scoffs, “you sure about that?”
You blink at your parents, confused, because you already had this conversation with them so you really don’t understand where this doubt is emerging from.
“Yeah,” you say, “why?”
Ethan leans back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest and dragging the air from around you and towards himself like he has always done.
“I don’t know…the stories that come out of your campus are pretty wild. It seems like you guys are more famous for your parties more than anything.”
You don’t think much before you scoff.
“You’re just jealous.”
The impact of your words is so loud, it’s deafening. You only meant it as a light banter, but you know just how Ethan—and even your parents—are going to perceive it.
You study at a University Ethan had made vision-boards about.
You attend classes that he only got to tour when he was sure Coach Greer would pick him.
You walk the same hallways as the guy who took that chance away from him. In fact, you even sang upon his request tonight.
You cannot begin to bring yourself to look up and tally the damage that your careless remarks have caused. Slowly, you put your fork down.
“I…uh, I’m done,” you announce, voice small, “besides, I promised Cass I’d meet her today.”
You grab your jacket and zip it in a blur, mumbling a quick promise to your mom that you’d come and help her clean up before bed. Once outside, you drag your palms down your face and groan hard.
You barely make it to Cassidy’s front-poarch before you hear your brother’s truck roar in the driveway and see him leave—even though he had plans to stay the weekend.
CHAPTER 3: promises, unkept
A year later.
Here’s the thing about being exceptionally silent—everyone glosses over your existence.
Yours is a tiny dorm room that has just enough space for a bunk bed, a shared closet and two tables. And yet, with her entire life upturned onto her bed and the floor, your roommate moves around like she has a personal agenda to bump into everything that makes a sound.
You have been lying on the top bunk, wide awake and occasionally flinching since six in the morning each time she drops her metallic flask.
Now you do not like checking your phone first thing in the morning, but you have been scrolling endlessly because there’s nothing else you can do. With Chaeyoung’s open suitcase and bags littered all over a floor which seems like it was hit by her wardrobe-blizzard, there simply isn’t enough ground for you to step on.
You muffle a groan in your folded forearm when your bladder cramps yet again.
This is getting ridiculous, and no amount of distractions can make you look away from the fact that you need to use the restroom in the next five minutes or less.
You accidentally hit play on a random video of Olivia Rodrigo on twitter, attracting your roommate’s attention. You hear her drop the notepad she had been reviewing her to-pack list from before you feel her take a step on the ladder that connects her bed with yours.
“Hey,” her face pops up by your pillow and you instinctively scoot backward, “you’re awake!”
“Uh, yeah…” you rub the heel of your palm over your eyes, trying not to make it seem like her commotion disturbed you out of your sleep even though it absolutely did.
“Oh how long?” her face scrunches up with concern, “shit, did I wake you up?”
“No, no,” you insist, getting up and fixing your sleepgown even though Chaeyoung doesn’t really seem to mind. “Just need to use the restroom.”
“Fuck, sure.” she clamors around to make way.
You keep on smoothing over your nightgown as you climb down, making a mental note of buying some bunk bed friendly PJs. Grabbing your essentials, you pad down the hallway towards the bathroom and to your surprise, Chaeyoung follows you, mumbling endlessly about how totally overwhelmed and unprepared she is for this trip.
“And I told Cheol that I can absolutely not shut my internet off for two whole months but he insists that it’s gonna be rewarding.”
You adore your roommate, there is no reason for you to not do so. She has been nothing but welcoming and friendly since you moved in a few weeks ago. But you have also only known her for so long to express any personal opinions about her relationship with the college’s former ice-hockey captain and now Boston Bruins’ defenseman Choi Seungcheol.
“Are you going to be completely offline?” you ask a diplomatic question instead as she leans outside.
“Not totally…I mean I still need to take the classes I enrolled online for. But I guess that’s it because apart from that, he has told me he has planned a lot for the two of us.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It’s sweet, yeah. But also—he’s the celebrity, not me. Why am I hiding away in a cabin for eight weeks? All I wanted was to take some time off this semester, not go on a whole ass retreat.”
You wash your hands and splay some water over your face, trying to jolt your brain awake to come up with an appropriate response, and preferably a conclusion, to this conversation.
From what you have observed so far, Chaeyoung is one of those people for whom a ten minute walk to the class ends up taking twenty because of the amount of times she has to stop and say hi to a billion people she knows. Every night when you return from your shift at the diner, there is always a friend or two occupying your room as she brews tea or just gets ready with them for a night-out. And when it is just the two of you and you have succumbed yourself to your own corner, unable to entertain her anymore, she’s on her phone talking to her family or Seungcheol.
It is hard for you to imagine Chaeyoung cut-off from the world in a luxurious but distant wooden cabin somewhere up North.
But it isn’t so hard for you to imagine the relief of having the entire dorm room to yourself for such a significant chunk of time… besides, you do not want to be the reason behind a romantic getaway as this one falling apart.
“I think it’ll be something new, fun, exciting,” you say, avoiding her eyes in the mirror as you melt your moisturizer between your fingers, “just the two of you, it could be quite romantic.”
Behind you, Chaeyoung leans her head against the doorframe of the bathroom, a little pout puckering her lips. “Ugh, I know. I could use some time away from all the chatter. Like I don’t wanna sound ungrateful but it can be quite loud sometime, you know? Everyone is always telling things to me or asking me stuff and it can get very overwhelming very quickly.”
Your roommate goes on yet another one of her fifty mile long rants about a topic that irks her while you hurry to finish up your morning skincare.
“Which reminds me,” her voice booms another note all of a sudden—in volume and in speed—making you jolt. “Please tell me you have Heather’s phone number.”
It takes you some time to rack your brain and match a face to the name she’s referring to.
“Heather…as in, the girl on the third floor?”
“Yes, her!”
“I don’t.”
“Ugh, yeah…why would you have her number? You barely know her.” Chaeyoung zips her last bag shut, lugging it over her shoulder, “I guess I’ll have to leave a task unfinished. I don’t even know what room she’s in.”
“If you have a message, I can pass it on.” you offer.
Chaeyoung presses her knee over her mattress, gnawing at her lower lip and considering. It is so easy to read her, you think, as her forehead creases up with dilemma and she chews on her own skin harder. Then, she drops her shoulders like the weight of whatever it is isn’t worth carrying around like this.
“Fine…but promise you won’t laugh.” she says.
You help her with her luggage as she pockets her set of keys and begins walking out. “I promise, I won’t.”
“Okay so I have a friend, you might know him,” she looks over her shoulder as you follow her down the stairs, “Kim Mingyu.”
You stall halfway down a step, but the weight of the luggage in your hand swings your body forward regardless and you nearly topple down.
“Woah woah woah,” Chaeyoung rushes to stabilise you, “are you okay?”
“Yeah I just…slipped.” you do your best to hide your frozen face behind your hair. “I’m fine.”
“Please don’t be another girl who falls for him — literally and figuratively.” Chaeyoung blinks, but takes one of the bags from your reluctant clutch. “Anyways, I was saying, Mingyu — he was just made captain of our ice-hockey team.” she says like she’s trying to polish your memory until some recognition of him sparks.
As if you can ever not know him. His existence has followed you around, completely unbeknownst to him, for five whole years now.
And truth be told, you are tired.
While leaving your home, you had thought you won’t have to hear that name again. Not because you hate him—that is a right only your twin brother can exercise—but because you have reached your limit.
Despite your strongest desires against it, Mingyu is practically inescapable on campus. He’s the guy people ask about at parties — ‘is Mingyu gonna show up?’ or the one whose name girls use the brightest, boldest red glitter for in their banners which they bring to the home games in support of the team. His is the name that pops up so many times on your campus’ confession page, it is actually concerning that so many people fantasize about him all at once.
Chaeyoung trails off, “it is insane how much clout each year’s hockey captain gets though. Like… What do you mean the guy who took ketchup shots with me is now some sort of campus deity?”
“What about him?” you press your lips, dragging the suitcase outside.
“Okay so ever since he was made captain, his workload significantly increased and I guess he is struggling with a few classes this semester. It’s not like he needs a formal tutor—he is freakishly smart. But just someone to help him out with the material when he can’t make it to classes. And with how busy this season is, he’s gonna miss a lot.”
You nod, wrapping your arms around your middle and trying your best not to look absolutely disinterested at the mention of a boy who follows you around like a shadow, even in rooms he doesn’t belong in. Instead, you fix your eyes on the road, cursing Seungcheol internally for not being here already.
“He asked me for help with finding someone who can assist him like that. And Heather once told me she has the biggest crush on him…they share most classes you know? So I thought why not play Cupid and have her ‘tutor’ him?”
A chilly gust of morning wind sends your hair flying all over your face. You attempt to tug it back behind your ear and fail.
“But wouldn’t it…I mean, doesn’t he need serious help?”
Chaeyoung shrugs, “a glorified study-partner whom he pays.”
“And do you think Heather would be the best for that given…y’know?” you can’t help but counter.
“What?”
You purse your lips hard, digging the balls of your feet on the ground like it would rescue you from this tumultuous mess you have hurled yourself into simply because you care too much.
“I don’t know Chae…from what I’m understanding, I think he needs some sure help and—”
“Someone consistent,” Chaeyoung finishes for you. She breathes thoughtfully, “huh, I guess I never thought about it that way.”
You nod. A small, careful movement. “Just a suggestion.”
Chaeyoung exhales, long and dramatic, as if clearing her head. “Ugh, whatever. He’s gonna figure it out himself. But if you do see Heather, give her his number, just in case.” She taps quickly on her phone, “I just shared it with you.”
Seungcheol’s truck revs in the driveway, getting visibly closer as you stand there stunned. Your phone blinks as it receives her text.
Chaeyoung jogs over to the grinning guy who stepped out of the driver’s seat with his arms spread wide for her.
You almost can’t believe what just happened.
But he’s her friend, a part of her life whom she has autonomy over. And you’re nothing more than a messenger to be feeling this much about it.
“I’ll pass it on to her.” you mumble when Chaeyoung hugs you goodbye and reminds you about Heather. “I will.”
CHAPTER 4: miscalculations and misrepresentations
The first week after Chaeyoung leaves passes like smoke from between your fingers. Your days are like a bunch of sugar-cubes, clumped and melting into each other as you attended all your classes, finished your shifts at Aunt Sylvie’s diner, studied for the LSAT and applied for other jobs in your free time because the singing gig had begun costing you.
The paycheck was good. But the management—too demanding. Even after you had told her that too much singing could damage your vocal chords for the long term from all the overuse, Veronica would insist you show up for almost all the major nights.
And with nowhere else to turn to for your monthly income and with an aversion of upsetting your aunt, you’d almost always relent.
But with your evening teas becoming more of a crutch for your sore throat than a relaxing ritual, you knew things had to change before you lost whatever remained of your already small voice.
It is one of those nights as you rot over your mattress—tired down to the bone, nursing a warm cup of tea and reviewing the mock questions you practiced after another long day at the diner.
The room, with you just in it, feels sterile. Like Chaeyoung took all the character away with her when she left.
It is dimly lit, not in the comforting way that lulls one to sleep, but rather dull. The kind which makes you aware of how even your fairy-lights blink like it is taking an effort for them to glow.
Meanwhile all of Chaeyoung’s expensive, quirky lamps lay cold and turned off by her bed.
No one has been into your room since she left.
You tell yourself that you like it this way, that it’s better to focus. You’ve never had too many friends anyways—it was always just you and your quiet ambitions and dreams that sound awfully silly when spoken out loud. And you have been fine like that so far.
But something about living on campus, in the dorms that are buzzing with girls getting ready with each other to spend this Friday night out and about, makes your solitude seem depressing.
A small thought keeps poking its head in your mind… you wouldn’t mind if there was at least one other person here right now. Someone whom you wouldn’t have to invite. Someone who could talk your share of talk because you’re too tired to speak.
A friend.
A companion.
You sip harder on the tea and tell yourself the bitterness at the back of your throat is the aftertaste of hibiscus and not your own self-pity. Squinting your eyes harder on the papers, you try to figure out just where you went wrong with eigenvalues.
So far, nothing turns up.
And just when you are about to give up and call it a night, a knock at the door rattles the entire still air of your room with an unwelcomed pulse.
You’re barely halfway down your bed before whoever is on the other side knocks again—urgent and hard.
You shouldn’t—because this is your room—but you rush towards the door at the commanding, insistent knocks.
“Chaeyoung I swear to God if I fail—”
He is about to knock again when you open the door, evident from his fist raised halfway up. He instantly drops it when his eyes fall on you.
“Oh hey—I’m sorry,” Mingyu quickly takes a step back, then checks the room number plastered on your door before looking at you again. “I…uh, I didn’t mean to—is this not Chaeyoung’s room?” his frown grows the more he stares at you, but not with accusation, more like you’re a puzzle that is occupying his entire mental-capacity right now.
Something about the intensity of his gaze, the sheer heat of it as he studies you, thaws you out of your frozen, aghast state.
“It is,” you mumble, “she’s not here though. I am her roommate—”
“The girl who sang the song.” he replies under his breath, his eyes softening as the recognition settles in.
You blink, confused. “I’m sorry?”
“Uh, like more than a year ago… at Lorenzo’s? I requested you to sing a song and you did…” he trails off.
Your fingers over the door tighten inadvertently. You hadn’t expected him to remember that. Chaeyoung didn’t. It was just a night out of many.
Why would he?
Except that he did. And now, he stands there in front of you with a small, honest smile on his lips. This subtle look of victory almost.
“Yeah,” you pause before quickly covering it up with a lie, “I mean, I don’t remember what you’re referring to but I do sing there sometimes. So I guess I must have.”
Something further softens in him as he leans down to hear you over the noise emanating from the room opposite to yours. His shoulders drop and graze the door as he relaxes by it, already covering most of it with his broad frame.
You clear your throat, trying to speak louder than usual. “Chaeyoung isn’t here though, can I help you?”
“Do you know when she will be back?”
“Uh, like two months?” you answer. When you see his frown deepening, you realize he isn’t aware of your roommate’s little retreat. “She is on vacation with her boyfriend.”
Mingyu’s eyes drop from you to the floor—so does his smile. But only momentarily. You don’t think Mingyu is the type of person who’s never not smiling, even if he has to fake it.
He scratches the back of his head. “She didn’t tell me, I think.” but then, he hastily adds, “or if she did…guess I forgot.”
You nod. That’s all you can do because this unplanned encounter with him is like being dragged out of your sleep and right onto the middle of a brightly lit stage. Something that people like Mingyu, Chaeyoung and even your brother Ethan have always been naturals at. But not you. You always freeze, you always forget your lines. You don’t know how to perform.
Like he’s offering you a cue, Mingyu drives the conversation forward. “Sorry for disturbing your night,” he says, “but Chaeyoung told me she was going to help me find a tutor. She said she had someone—”
Your eyes widen when the memory hits you.
“Oh yes! She told me about that.” you blurt out and instantly regret it.
You were only supposed to pass his number on to Heather, not confess to him about knowing about Chaeyoung’s masterplan on hooking them up. A plan you are not too sure he’s in on or not.
“She did?” He pockets his hands further into his jeans, leaning his head to a side more coolly now. Not curious, just aware of something more… “Interesting.”
You walk back into your room, “I was about to—”
“I’m sorry but do you mind speaking up? I can barely hear you…”
“Oh just come in.”
You squeeze your eyes shut the moment you yell that. Messy, messy, messy. What the hell are you doing inviting him in your room alone?
You’re fiddling with the scattered notes all over your table and mattress to look for your phone when you feel him enter the room and push the door just enough to leave it slightly ajar.
“You know, I am just realizing I never saw you sing at the diner again.” he remarks.
‘It’s because I never took the shifts on the nights after your games because I knew you’d be there to celebrate.’
Instead, you reply, “I have sporadic shifts. No specific schedule.”
Behind you, Mingyu nods like he is a bit unconvinced but is kind enough to let you have it.
“You’ve been roommates with Chaeyoung since…?”
“Last month,” you answer before you finally locate your phone.
You scroll through it in vain, praying that Heather’s number would somehow miraculously appear somewhere—in some group-chat or otherwise.
Mingyu just takes a seat on Chaeyoung’s desk-chair, his long fingers fiddling with the paperweight on the table. The more he eases up, the more the room collapses around him, warping until it shrinks significantly. He looks cartoonishly big compared to all the dainty decor that there is, but nothing about the scene looks out of place. He is more like a giant teddy placed down between your little stuffed animals. It is almost as if there has never been a place he has not belonged in, made a home in.
Unable to not speak for long, Mingyu hums again. “Chaeyoung and I haven’t been able to talk much, I guess that’s why I missed out on such major life updates from her. I mean the vacation and you.”
“Me?” you pause.
“Yeah, you.” he smiles, bright and polite, like he has to make you feel included even though you didn’t ask for it. “The last time I talked to her, it was only about my tutoring situation. Told her I was ready to pay double what the TAs earn hourly. She said she had a friend in mind.”
You had tuned him out since the phrase ‘pay double what the TAs earn.’ Your heart picks up pulse as the gears behind your mind start churning with a newfound velocity. Suddenly, you feel like you can solve all the eigenvalues and as an extension, all your problems, if you just tweaked a few things just right.
“Why don’t you ask the TAs for help?” you ask, your voice breathy and shallow.
“I did, our schedules just never aligned. I captain the Ice-hockey team and the TAs only have so many spots and open slots.”
“What subjects do you need help with?”
“Eh…I can do most theory and research on my own. Just have to read up during my free time. It’s the Mathematics and Stats that are bothering me. Not that I’m bad at them, I just don’t get the time to follow through what’s happening in the coursework.”
“Yeah Chaeyoung mentioned that.”
“So you’re her?” Mingyu grins, “the ‘friend’ Chae was talking about?”
“Wha–I…” you shut your phone off, then turn it on before shutting it off again. You toss it somewhere on Chaeyoung’s mattress, marinating in your own blunder. “I mean she spoke about your situation, yes. But—”
Mingyu’s attention drifts towards the reference book lying unopened on your table. “Hey, that’s the exact material Professor Blyth has recommended. You’re taking the same Calculus?”
“I am.”
He’s already flipping through your neat notes. The clean sheet of paper carrying the perfect score to your pre-mid terms from a few days back catches his attention.
“I totally tanked it. But you have…a near full grade.” his thumb brushes over the unmistakable 98 marked in red on top of the sheet.
Guilt begins clawing up your gut the more he stares at your answers and practice sheets with awe.
This isn’t your glory to revel in.
This isn’t how it is supposed to be.
This isn’t what Chaeyoung had planned for it to be.
This is going to ruin your plans of steering clear of Kim Mingyu…for Ethan’s sake. Why the hell would you ever even agree to help the guy who ruined the perfect trajectory of your brother’s professional hockey dreams.
Well, he didn’t do it directly…or deliberately.
But still.
“I won’t take a no for an answer,” Mingyu shakes his head, placing the papers back on your table, “you have to tutor me. You have to help me.”
“Mingyu I—”
“Please.”
There it is.
That word.
Spoken with the same cadence that he had carried over a year ago. Tender, polite…begging. It is as if he has mastered speaking a language that doesn’t contain anything equivalent to rejection. At least not in your books. And no matter how hard you try to contain it, freeze it, something in the very centre of your chest aches as it melts at the warmth of his voice.
“It will be a huge favor,” he stands up from the chair, all serious yet still gentle somehow like he’s trying to persuade you, not convince you. “I will do anything in return. Your laundry, your dishes, I can even clean your room every weekend or be your date for all important appearances this term. I can make your exes jealous, heck I can even beat one up. Well, not if it’s a girl but you get the drill?”
You stare at him with your eyes wide and jaw slacked. “I think…I think just money would be good for now.”
The angel on your right shoulder that is in charge of keeping your conscience intact is practically drilling holes into your skull when you reach for a printed copy of your schedule and hand it over to him.
“This is my schedule.” you murmur, not daring to meet his eyes, “I work most evenings from Tuesdays to Saturdays. But I guess I can cut a few shifts off at the diner if I’m going to be tutoring you now. Just tell me whatever works for you.”
Mingyu doesn’t mind your sudden aloofness or even if he does, he doesn’t comment on why you are trying to practically become one with the wall as you shrivel further and further. He just grins like you have handed him over the keys to the Universe.
Before he leaves, he takes his phone out and asks you to give him your number.
You don’t miss it though, how he repeats your name under his breath when you put it in there or how he stares at your face like he’s trying to match you to it. Like he’s trying to understand why you were named what you were named. All while that same, sweet smile blooms further and further over his lips.
The sheet of paper, the same one where you were struggling with the eigenvalues problem on, slips and lands at his feet.
He picks it up, briefs it over before handing it over to you and points out what you were doing wrong.
Relief washes over you and you scratch your head. “Ah…I wasn’t even considering that.”
“See,” he winks, “we’re already one very strong team.”
CHAPTER 5: i swear i don't murder puppies
Your room is a warzone of sweaters and dresses at seven in the morning. Not because you somehow left your window open and a storm wrecked through your wardrobe, but because it is the day you meet Mingyu to decide upon a schedule that is in alignment with his practices.
The September weather is always so confusing—all your sweaters feel too warm and your summer dresses flutter way more for your comfort with the rain-soaked wind. You cannot bring yourself to put on a plain old hoodie because it is only Monday, and all your giant sweatshirts and grays are preserved for anything post-Wednesdays.
You wring your hands before pressing them to your face.
“You’re just trying to distract yourself from your real problems by making up these stupid ones,” you whisper to yourself.
It is the truth.
You should have never agreed to this.
You should have never given him the impression that you were the girl whom Chaeyoung was talking about.
You should have gone out of your way to look for Heather and tell her what happened instead of waiting to run into her.
You suppress another groan before your little guilts whirlwind into self-hatred. It's for the money, you tell yourself. And money often transforms people into someone unrecognizable.
You choose a mid-length dress that Cass made for you. No flashy colors, modest neckline but sweet strappy sleeves. It is formal without being strict.
The bag of make-up sits untouched on your dresser. You tell yourself everyday that you will find time to put it on, look more presentable. But each day, it’s just your sunscreen, lip-gloss and kohl-liner against the world.
As you massage the vanilla-scented lotion over your collarbones, you weigh upon the pros and cons of this situation.
This tutoring gig is too lucrative for you to pass on. Not only it pays more than your singing job, but it would also mean that you won’t have to walk all the way out of campus, put heavy layers of pigment and glitter on your face, smile and sing until everything aches and come back half a corpse even during your busiest weeks.
Not to mention, helping him review whatever happens in class would also make you revise simultaneously.
You lift the mascara closer to your face and lean into the mirror. And perhaps, it is something about the out reflection of your somber eyes in the dulled out mirror that makes you see the risks clearer than ever.
Not only are you taking it away from someone else, but by agreeing to help him out with something—anything—you are in a way betraying your brother.
You do not harbour the same animosity in your heart towards Mingyu like Ethan does. But you had also planned on steering very clear out of his enemy's way the day you received your acceptance letter to the college and Ethan didn't.
Besides, what the hell will you tell her when Chaeyoung returns with that expectant gleam in her eyes and asks you if you forwarded her message?
You lose count of the amount of times you almost stab yourself in the eye with the wand. Eventually, you give up on it and just sit there on the floor with your knees curled up.
By the time you are up and ready to face the day—and him—you have what seems like a fool-proof plan up your sleeve. You mentally rehearse it while applying the last coat of your gloss.
You are going to head out, be stoic and get the job done with him hopefully before Chaeyoung returns.
Hell, you can even push harder and cut on more shifts to help him be ahead of the schedule in class so that you can get rid of him faster.
You’re not going to strike a friendship with him—you are not even going to talk about anything beyond just what’s necessary. No mentions of a vengeful sibling, no mentions of the wicked game of ice-hockey.
Whenever you run into Heather, you’re going to make amends by dutifully passing Chae’s message to her and giving her his number. Hell, you might even make him warm up to the idea of her if that’s what it takes to have them go out together per Chaeyoung’s wishes.
You will have this all wrapped tight and dusted in under seven weeks if you just manage to do what you’ve promised yourself to do.
Exhaling deeper than usual, you take one last look at the mirror.
You push down the thought that there is certainly an additional gilded glow illuminating your features today.
You tell yourself it’s just the morning sun.
⸻
(mingyu’s POV)
He sees you before you see him, and something within him hollows out.
You are fiddling with your thumbs, letting your eyes lightly sweep across the space before promptly giving up and succumbing to your phone—most probably texting him.
He quickly collects the orders from the counter and walks over to you.
“There you go,” he says, extending the warm tea towards you, “I just took a wild guess that you’d prefer tea over coffee cause that’s what I saw in your room.”
You look startled. Or maybe that’s just how you usually are. So calm and ethereal in your own world before he comes and disrupts it with his loud demands and ramblings.
Yet, you accept it from his hand with a polite ‘thank you’.
Small wins.
He cocks his head towards the empty table in the café. “Shall we?”
You walk ahead of him, something that he actually appreciates because it gives him the time—however small of a window—to stare at you longer. Your hair fall over your smooth shoulders like curtains and your dress sways with the light breeze.
You look so soft, you always do. He has to clutch his bag and his espresso harder than usual to avoid reaching forward and detangling your tresses that are catching up with the dainty chain of your locket behind your neck.
But then, you put an end to it when you finally settle down into the booth and pull your laptop out along with a few loose sheets, some already printed or scribbled upon while the others are a blank canvas.
“Did you fill out your schedule in the Excel file I shared?” you ask in that low, gentle voice of yours.
He loves hearing you speak because your tone is so serene and tender that it requires him to put all his attention to it. Sometimes, he even has to physically lower himself, or lean closer, to hear you better.
And Mingyu always thinks that there is something irresistible about people who require the world to bend and adapt to them.
“Well?” you ask again, quirking your eyebrows up.
“Wh—ah, yes, I filled it out.”
“Already losing out on attention?” you mutter, before throwing a pointed glance at him, “we can’t afford that.”
He laughs to himself. “Didn’t peg you as someone who’d be so strict.”
“You’ve seen my schedule. We’re already operating on a tight timeline.”
“Fair,” he replies, “although, I would promise you that I am a quick learner.”
“Don’t promise me, surprise me.”
“You know what? I actually quite like it,” he leans back into his chair, emptying a whole packet of sugar into the steaming coffee, “this whole strict teacher bit. It’s…compelling.”
You shoot him a deadpan look and continue typing.
You quickly breeze through all the hours of the week that you’d be able to meet with him and prepare a list of priority topics that he missed out on or needs to cover before the mid-terms. Mingyu meets you halfway through it all, giving his inputs wherever necessary and letting you know what all he could work upon alone.
It doesn’t slide by him about how different you seem today compared to the previous times he has spoken to you. You are more guarded in the moment, like you took time to stitch an armour around yourself in the morning before coming to meet him.
But it often slips—that usual softness that he has begun associating with you. Like the time you accepted his request to sing or when you invited him into your room, unguarded and trusting. It’s there when he sheepishly apologizes for adding to your burden and you assure him it’s alright. It’s there when he goes blank about most topics you initiate and you quickly pivot to something he might know.
You keep on covering up that softness each time he diverts from business though. Like throwing a wet-blanket over a warm hearth.
This additional layer of caution. Another boundary etched.
When Chaeyoung had told him she had someone in mind who might be interested in helping him out, she had completely omitted the information that that someone was her new roommate who also happened to be the girl whom he sometimes still thought about. Someone whose voice still hummed in the back of his mind.
Perhaps, if Chaeyoung hadn’t been too excited about telling him that the girl had a huge crush on him, she would have remembered to share that vital piece of information.
But watching how you’ve been acting around him today, it seems like his friend probably exaggerated your fascination towards him. Why else would you be shooting down his attempts at being anything beyond just a chore if you did in fact like him like that?
It’s not like it hurts his pride though, he had never really weighed down on the possibility of any romances with his tutor. All he desperately needed was for someone to help him and if a little charm and flirtation was gonna help him get there, then what was the harm?
It is a relief that you don’t seem like you are interested anymore though—or at least that’s what he tells himself.
Because telling himself that makes it hurt a bit less when he asks you if you’d like to stay back and chat over coffee after you’re done and you deny it without a second thought.
Telling himself that makes it feel less cruel when he offers to walk you to your class and you look at him like he has just admitted to killing a million puppies.
He doesn’t know what prompted it, but since the last time he saw you, it seems like you have made some judgments of your own.
And he’s not too sure if he likes the idea of it.
CHAPTER 6: truce? truce.
No matter how hard he runs across the campus from the ice-rink to the library, Mingyu is still ten minutes late to your study session.
You are already in one of the study-rooms surrounded by two distinct sets of stapled papers and a workbook that you’re scribbling hurriedly upon with a short, dull pencil. His heavy, fatigued footsteps against the otherwise polished tiles startle you out of whatever it is that is making you frown and look up at him.
At once, his breathing significantly slows down. Like his body is trying its best to behave and be proper under the captivity of those big, soft, doe-like eyes of yours.
“So sorry, Coach Greer had us run extra drills,” he pants, “and I couldn’t exactly show up here without washing up.”
Despite all the exhaustion, he still flashes you that full grin that can make even a shrivelled flower blush and bloom as he drops his bag over the small table separating two chairs in the small room.
He thinks you have ignored him when you return back to flipping through your book.
But then, you slide your bottle of water towards him.
“You should take five.” you suggest. “Catch your breath.”
And then, you go back to acting like you were before he showed up.
Still, he thinks it is very sweet as he uncaps the bottle and takes a swig out of it. Not because he is particularly thirsty—but because you offered.
His breath evens out as he studies the focus-pod. It is literally a box with a single small window and a giant glass door. Two squeaky chairs placed thoughtlessly with a table that looks like it would collapse from the weight of his arms alone if he leans over it. Sunlight filters in hot, rectangular slants, warming the scratched surface and making it a tad too warm for comfort.
No one ever studies here. Not really. Unless they have an important meeting to attend or a call to take.
“Why are we meeting here instead of the actual library, again?” he can’t help but ask.
You look up from your work to briefly glance at him before returning back to it. “Because you talk too much.”
“Right, but doesn’t the library have a much better ambience?”
“Not worth getting rebuked by people studying there because you won’t stop speaking.”
“I’m going to speak here regardless.”
“You can,” you answer, finally shutting your workbook, “because I’m getting paid to hear you speak. The others are not.”
“You majoring in business?”
You correct him, “Economics.”
“You should switch to majoring in business though.”
“Are you calling me greedy and unkind?”
“No, I am saying you would make a terrifying CEO. You are very practical and efficient.”
You sigh, keeping your face uninterested as you speak, “as fun as this was, let us return to ANOVA, shall we?”
Mingyu folds his hands over the table, resting his chin over his crossed fingers. “I was hoping to stall further.”
Your knuckles tighten over the stack of books and for a moment, Mingyu thinks he toed a line he shouldn’t have dared crossing. But then, your eyes soften—just by a beat—and you suggest. “We can call a truce whenever you feel like it’s getting too much…y’know? You can just say the word and we’ll take a break.”
“Wait, really?” he perks up, just enough for his eyes to flash with something refreshing. Like hope.
You shrug, “I don’t want to force you into doing something that you are too tired to.”
“So like,” he nearly giggles—and it is fucking ridiculous watching a man as tall and buff as him giggle like that—before even finishing the joke, “a safeword?”
Your face goes back to that blankness that feels like a curtain of indifference being drawn.
“For studying,” you respond flatly, “don’t make it weird.”
But the corners of your mouth give it away by curling up. Barely. Just a flicker that you quickly hide by looking in your bag for nothing. It is gone before he can be sure if it was even there.
But he grins anyway because he decides that it was.
“Right,” he nods like he’s signing a contract. “A truce.”
“A truce.” you shrug, like it doesn’t matter.
⸻
You both work in relative silence after that.
Mingyu tries his best to focus each time you lean over to explain something to him. But he just can’t. He fidgets too much, stretches his arms too often, cranks his neck side to side even though there is no stiffness.
He isn’t his usual self and he can feel it.
And something about you tells him that neither are you.
You see, he might not have known you that well. But he for sure had observed you. And each time he said something stupid or attempted anything beyond just discussing the numerical problems on paper, it felt like you were restraining yourself. A smile, a retort, an answer. It wasn’t a mask, but a heavy door that you kept on shutting up with all your body-weight.
“Hey, did I do something?”
He finally asks towards the end of the session when you have already briefed him over the concepts and given him a worksheet to practice upon until your later session.
You blink, “No…why?”
He doesn’t want to tense this up…doesn’t want to end a productive session on a needlessly confusing note just because of the faulty projections of his mind.
So he lets out a little laugh, trying to lighten the weight of it when his observation lands, “I don’t know, you seemed a bit annoyed.”
He expects you to snap back at him, tell him that you are not some doll who’d always smile at him or shut him off by telling him that it’s because he is in fact—annoying.
But your shoulders drop, “oh?” you tuck your hair behind your ear, “I…I am not annoyed at you Mingyu.”
It is the first time you have spoken his name to him. And he can’t understand why it feels like the first time anyone has ever spoken it right.
“Just a bit tired.” you further explain, avoiding his eyes as you begin fiddling with something inside your bag.
He doesn’t prod further. Just lets the sound of your breathing thread through the tight-packed walls of the sterile room.
But then, very cautiously, he adds, “You know you can always tell me to shut it if I’m speaking too much. I am a talker, but I get it.”
“I don’t mind you talking,” you interrupt him so quickly that he frowns. You bite your lip, “sorry if I made you feel that way. I guess I was just bickering earlier.”
“No, no, really. I didn’t think much about it, just giving you a heads up that I can be quiet if you want me to be. We don’t have to continue meeting in these coffin cubes just because I can’t shut up.”
You nod, just a small movement. He feels at ease when he spots a small smile over your lips. Hidden and fluttering like a newly hatched butterfly. This strange sensation of pride surges behind his ribs—something on you that he can finally claim some possession at most and contribution at least, after all.
Mingyu doesn’t know where this urge comes from—this almost need to give you something, anything, worthwhile in return. If he tallies all the hours he has known you, it might not even add up to a full day. Yet he feels like he already owes you half his lifetime for some reason. A debt of eons.
You pile up on that debt when you slide a neat stack towards him. It feels warm in his hands.
“I printed out a copy of my notes if you want to refer to them.” you inform as he looks through them with this undisclosed wonder.
Around eighty sheets of material. You even printed out the pages with additional workings that explain the main solution better, along with the alternatives. The margins that people often hide because of the simplistic explanations that are meant for their eyes alone and no one else’s.
But you copied it all out for him.
“This is…wow,” he slowly gets up after you, “I really have no idea how to thank you enough for this.”
“Literally the least I could do.” you shrug. “I will meet you Friday?”
“Yeah,” he repeats, his voice unstable, “Friday.”
You don’t give him a departing smile or a ‘take care’ before turning around. But you do halt at the door, lingering for a suspended moment.
“Just for the record…I like it when you talk. Because I don’t speak much myself, but I also hate silence.”
⸻
Ever since the beginning of senior year, Dokyeom hasn't hosted much.
It wasn’t because he didn’t want to. But because of the giant golden retriever living in his drawing room who, through the virtue of his squatter's rights, had turned into a roommate he didn’t sign up to have.
Ever since a gnarly water-leak at his apartment some two months ago, Mingyu had practically moved in with him, taking refuge on Dokyeom’s worn-out couch. His place was all fixed now. Yet, whenever Dokyeom as much as even hinted at the prospect of him moving back, Mingyu reacted like he had lost all sensations in his ears.
Tonight though, Dokyeom had invited a couple friends over and asked Mingyu to help him organize.
“I really can’t believe you pay full rent for your own place and still break your back on this couch.” Jihyo, who had arrived a bit earlier than the rest, fluffs an additional pillow on Mingyu’s makeshift bed, “seriously dude, are you even getting the rest you need?”
Mingyu jokes, “I sneak in and sleep on DK’s bed when he’s not home.”
“I swear to God Mingyu, don’t even joke about it.” Dokyeom deadpans as he sets the dinner table. “You know I have that mild OCD shit or something.”
“Move out bro, it’s getting embarrassing.”
Pausing from the salad he is assembling, Mingyu tosses two olives at both of them, “seriously? Can I not just live with my best-friend in the whole wide world for a few weeks? We’re all gonna graduate in under a year and I am already missing you.”
“Or,” Jihyo chimes, swinging her legs off the couch, “you were looking for excuses to move out of your apartment ever since the rejection-gate and now that you’ve found it, you’re using DK’s space like a crutch.”
Mingyu’s fingers tighten over the cherry tomatoes he’s splitting in the middle.
“It’s not like that.” he shrugs, despite it.
“Except for the fact that it is.”
He lets out a light, airy laugh. Just a puff of it to make it seem like he can glide through this conversation like he does with all the other ones. But for some reason, today, he cannot.
“It’s fucking lonely in that apartment." he finally admits.
He turns his back to his friends, checking up on the cherry pie. In the reflection of the shiny surface, just momentarily, he catches his friends exchanging a look behind him. He opens the oven before he can discern if it’s worry or mockery.
The ceramic dish lands harsher than he intended on the counter top. He slides his mitten off like he needs his palms to feel air before they sweat so much that his skin melts off.
He rests his fists over the marble, leaning all his weight over them as his eyes clench shut. He instantly regrets that little comment, feeling a sense of dread rising like bile up his throat as he hears them shuffle behind him.
Here come the pitiful looks and careful words.
He doesn’t need them—he hasn’t needed them for so long.
“I will move out,” Mingyu announces just before Dokyeom can offer him another futile assurance. “I just need a little more time, I guess.”
Dokyeom doesn’t argue that. He can see just how a few weeks away from his apartment has helped bring the Mingyu he knew back into the body which had been rotting away in that place. Dokyeom had seen how Mingyu had cooped himself up in his place. Depressed and dull. Curtains always shut off. His art-studio collecting dust.
He barely ever cooked anymore.
So when he had told Dokyeom about the pipe that burst in his apartment, it was a no-brainer for him to let Mingyu in.
And by the looks of it now — and despite all the inconveniences — Dokyeom thinks that he wouldn’t hesitate to do it all over again.
“You can be here for as long as you want, bud.” He slaps him over his back. “That’s what friends are for.”
Jihyo adds, “Yeah I guess I was just being a jerk…I think you needed this change. It suits you.”
Mingyu nods at them, the way one does when they’re overwhelmed to a point that even words fail them.
He goes back to arranging the forks by the spoons on the table when Dokyeom clears his throat, leaning against the counter and announces to Jihyo, “It’s not just the change of place that’s suiting him though.”
Jihyo reflects his playfulness, “Ahan? What do you mean?”
“A little birdie told me our puppy has made a new lady friend.” Dokyeom answers, his voice sporting that dramatic lilt that makes Mingyu roll his eyes. “Chan saw him smiling like an idiot with a girl in the library the other day.”
Mingyu protests, “she’s just helping me study—”
“No, wait.” Dokyeom interrupts, “my apologies, because Chan said he saw you smiling like an idiot at a girl in the library. She wasn’t even looking at you.”
“I spy a little crush situation,” Jihyo squeals, hopping up on the marble counter between Mingyu and Dokyeom, “come on, spill. Who, when, why, where?”
“There is no crush situation,” Mingyu scoffs, “besides, I think I learnt my lesson about not crushing on my friends.”
“She’s not your friend.” Dokyeom corrects, “like I said, she doesn’t even look at you.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I have my ways.”
Jihyo throws two napkins at the both of them, “Dokyeom, shut up. Mingyu, man up. Who is this new friend of yours? Tell me all about her.”
“There is nothing to tell. Dokyeom’s right, we aren’t even friends. She’s just someone…well, she’s Chaeyoung’s roommate, and we share similar classes so she’s helping me out with whatever I miss out on.”
“Chae’s roommate?” Jihyo’s eyebrows arch, “well, that’s a new angle.”
“It’s nothing serious. Really. I was talking to Chae the other day and I mentioned needing help with a few classes. She thought her roommate had a little crush on me and decided to set us up, I guess. I think she misread it though because the girl is farthest from interested in me. But it works.” he shrugs, like this entire rant and all the specific details he gave out mean nothing.
“‘Just a great tutor,’” Dokyeom mocks, imitating Mingyu’s very hurried and very raspy tone, “then why the hell were you smiling to yourself while reading her notes like they were love letters at three in the morning?”
“I was not.”
“You so were.”
“I was admiring her penmanship.”
Jihyo completely glosses over their back-and-forth and turns to fully face Mingyu with the same grin she has whenever she’s watching her favorite rom-coms. “What if Chae is right and the girl is indeed into you? What if she’s just playing hard to catch?”
Mingyu leans down until he’s eye-level with Jihyo’s moony ones. “Or what if, we all stop being so obsessed with this cause I don’t wanna creep her out.”
Jihyo’s smile drops. Stoically, she asks. “Do you like her?”
“Not like that…”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s pretty…and seems like a good person. But that’s it. I barely know her.”
“Then make an effort and get to know her!”
“You guys don’t get it…” Mingyu finally says, “she is very distant and guarded and I don’t know what Chae has told her about me. I mean, for all I know—”
“Don’t even finish that thought.” Jihyo interrupts, “you and I both know Chaeyoung would never do that.”
Mingyu sighs, placing his hands over his waist and letting his head drop with defeat. When he finally has the energy to look at his friends again, all the lightheartedness has evaporated out of the room.
“Let’s just drop it. I can’t even enter my apartment on my own for fuck’s sake.”
// lemme know if u wanna be tagged pookies <3
reblogs, asks and comments are not only appreciated but fucking threatened on here dont make me block u if i catch u just liking my fics smh!!!!
happy early birthday to my man ugh i love him saurrrr much
Pairing: Lord! Mingyu x Reverend’s daughter! F. Reader
Themes: Smut | Angst | Regency AU | Opposites Attract | Rake vs Saint | Forbidden Romance | Religious Control | Found Family | Inspired by 'Bridgerton' | T.W.: mentions of arranged marriage, punishments, public humiliation, physical violence, whipping, abuse of power
Wordcount: 62.4K (Yikes!)
Smut Warnings: Explicit sexual acts - Masturbation (M. Solo) - Unprotected intercourse - Slight breast play - Oral (F. and M. Receiving) - PIV - Cowgirl - Implied virginity (Periodical context) - Use of petnames
Second part of the series ‘The House of Carat’.
This story is intended for an adult audience only. Minors do not interact.
The bell calls you to holiness the way a chain calls a prisoner to roll-call.
The sound threads through the stone and the polished wood and the careful bodies gathered inside—threading through bonnets and black coats, through gloved hands folded over obedient paper, through the quiet that is not peace but performance. It is a bell that does not invite so much as it summons, a sound that has always meant be good, be seen, be still, and you answer it the way you have been trained to answer every call that comes with God’s name tied around it. You sit where you are placed, the way you have always sat, beside the man the parish calls Reverend Marlowe with the same reverence they reserve for Scripture itself.
You are his best passage.
Your collar is pinned high enough to make the shape of your throat feel like a secret—high enough that swallowing feels like a challenge, like you are not meant to forget that even breath can be controlled. Your sleeves are tidy. Your wrists are still. Your hands rest together, pale and proper, as though they have never trembled around anything more dangerous than a teacup, as though they have never wanted to do anything at all. Your eyes are lowered on command—not because you are meek, not because you are shy, but because you have been trained to understand that looking is a kind of hunger, and hunger is the first sin.
Beside you, your father’s presence is a wall: tall, dark, cleanly cut, everything about him sharpened into righteousness. His Bible lies open on the lectern. He does not need to look at you to know you are behaving. He does not need to touch you to remind you what happens when you do not.
The church is full in the way churches are always full—less desperate than dutiful, more attentive to who is seen than to what is said. But your father has always enjoyed a certain kind of congregation: those who like their God respectable. Those who like their judgment refined. Those who whisper about sins the way they whisper about lace—softly, with delight, as though it is not cruelty at all. They have come to be reminded that they are better than someone. And your father—your father is very good at giving them a someone.
A sunbeam lays itself across the aisle, pale and uninvited, and for a brief moment it looks like an escape route. You do not move. Escape is a word that lives in novels and scandals and other people’s lives—not yours. Your life is built in measured steps and locked doors and the expectation that you will be grateful for your cage because it is gilded with praise.
In your palm, hidden by the fall of your sleeve, your beads press warmth into your skin. Red, small, smooth—carnelian stones strung on a thread strong enough to withstand the thousands of prayers your father has made you speak into it. He called it a rosary with the severe satisfaction of naming something useful. You think of it less as a holy thing and more as a tally of obedience. Tiny coals. Tiny counts. Tiny proof. Your thumb finds the next bead and turns it, turns it, turns it until the pressure becomes a low ache—until pain becomes the simplest kind of certainty, the only certainty you are allowed to own.
Around you, the parish settles: skirts sighing against pews, a cough politely disguised, the low rustle of hymnals opening like wings. A child fidgets; a mother stills him with a gentle hand. The small rebellions of bodies are corrected quietly. In your father’s church even restlessness has consequences. The organ settles into a hymn. The first notes rise, solemn and measured, as if even music must behave. The congregation rises and falls like the notes told them when to move, bodies trained into worship the way your body has been trained into decorum. You follow the motion precisely. You have always been good at precision. You have always been good at making the outside of you match the story everyone needs. Because you are a story. Because you are not allowed to be anything else.
Your father steps forward to begin, and the church breathes in as one body. His voice arrives the way winter arrives: without apology, without softness, making even warmth feel like a mistake. He does not speak to be heard; he speaks as if he is entitled to silence. “Beloved,” he begins, and the word does not sound like affection. It sounds like ownership.
You keep your gaze lowered. You keep your hands quiet. You keep your heartbeat where no one can see it—tucked behind bone and pinned beneath prayer, hidden like a shameful thing. Your father likes the illusion of serenity. He likes a congregation that believes discipline produces peace, not bruises. He reads, and the sound of Scripture unfurls through the nave. He reads from the Gospel of Matthew with the cadence of a man who believes he is not merely interpreting God’s word but enforcing it. “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction… Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life.”
The narrow way. The phrase sits in your muscles like a familiar bruise. He speaks of the wide gate the way other men speak of vice—half warning, half fascination. He describes temptation as if it is a living thing stalking the city, slipping into ballrooms and drawing rooms and bedrooms with its painted mouth and soft hands. He does not use the word desire as a human thing. He says it as a contagion. Your thumb moves along another bead.
He paces slowly, not because he needs to, but because movement keeps eyes on him; because the rhythm of his steps makes his sermon feel inevitable, like the Last Judgment approaching. He speaks of sin as though he has never tasted it, as though it is a smell he can detect on other people, the way a hound detects blood. “You will be tested,” he says, voice smoothing into certainty. “Not perhaps with hunger or poverty—no. The devil is not so crude with the well-fed.”
A ripple of discomfort moves through the pews, quickly disguised as attentiveness. He has struck a nerve, and the parish respects him for it, the way they respect a wound when it is inflicted on someone else. “You will be tested with opportunity,” he continues. “With novelty. With charm.” Charm. The word feels like it shouldn’t belong in a church at all, and yet it does, because your father understands something about the world: the most effective warnings are the ones that make people imagine what they are being told to fear.
Your father’s gaze sweeps the flock, and you feel it skim across every face, every secret, every careful lie. It passes over the men who look harmless in their restraint. It passes over the women whose devotion is measured by the severity of their smiles. It passes over you, and when it touches you, the whole church seems to straighten. Because you are the illustration he likes best. He pauses. Then he turns—deliberately, unhurriedly—and his hand lifts, palm open, a gesture that is almost gentle if one does not know what his gentleness costs. “Come,” he says. The word is not loud, but it is absolute.
Your stomach gives a small, obedient drop. Your beads shift between your fingers. You rise. The movement feels as though every eye of the parish hooks itself into you. You step into the aisle with grace, your skirt whispering over the stone. Your father’s hand extends, not to help you, but to guide the moment. He takes your wrist—lightly, properly—so the congregation can see the intimacy and mistake it for affection. His fingers are warm through your sleeve; his control is cold. He looks at them, voice deepening into pride dressed as piety. “This is my daughter,” he announces, and the word daughter lands like a title you did not choose. “Raised in discipline. Raised in prayer. Raised upon the narrow path.”
A murmur moves through the pews—approval, envy, hunger. Your father’s fingers tighten just a fraction at your wrist. A reminder. “She understands,” he says, “what the world has forgotten: that restraint is not cruelty. It is mercy.”
You stand at his side like a carved saint, posture perfect, face serene. The inside of you stays very, very quiet, because quiet is safer than truth. Your father tilts his head toward you as if inviting you to speak. The invitation is a command. “Recite,” he says softly.
Your throat tightens. Your mind reaches automatically, conditioned as breath, toward the verse he has made you say until it lived behind your teeth. You lift your eyes just enough to face forward—not to meet anyone’s gaze, but to look in the direction of the congregation without truly seeing them. You feel their attention like sunlight on skin. You inhale carefully. Then you speak, voice steady, neither too loud nor too small, a voice that has been trained to sound like devotion. “Proverbs 4:23 — Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”
The verse leaves your mouth and settles over the pews. Keep thy heart. Keep it guarded. Keep it shut. Keep it obedient. Your father nods, satisfied. He turns to the congregation with the pleasure of a man displaying a flawless instrument. “Do you hear her?” he asks, as though you are not standing there as a person but rather as proof. “A young woman in a city determined to make daughters forget they have souls.”
A few ladies press handkerchiefs to their lips, touched by the performance. Your father’s hand slides from your wrist to your shoulder, a possessive blessing. “She does not ask what she wants,” he says, and you feel the words land in you like pebbles. “She asks what is right.” He looks down at you, finally, and there is no tenderness in it—only assessment. “Is that not so?” You answer because you must. “Yes, Father.”
The congregation hears obedience. They do not hear the quiet scraping inside your ribs. They do not see the way your thumb, hidden against your palm, presses a bead so hard it hurts. They do not see the flinch you swallow, the breath you control, the fire you smother beneath layers of performance. Your father’s smile is small, collected, reassuring. “The narrow path,” he repeats, and the church murmurs as if reciting a prayer.
He guides you back to your seat with the same light touch. You sit as you are placed. You fold your hands. You lower your eyes. Only when your body is safely back in its assigned stillness does your heartbeat begin to thud again, as if the performance has loosened something inside you that refuses to return to perfect quiet. Your thumb finds the bead again. Press. Turn. Ache.
Your father continues as if nothing happened, as if he did not just use you like a parable. He speaks of women and virtue without saying the word woman because the implication is always there—folded into every line, stitched into every warning. Their purity becomes, in his mouth, a garment that must remain spotless—white fabric held up to the light, inspected for the smallest stain. He speaks of the world outside these walls as mud waiting at the threshold, of certain men as the street itself: slick, tempting, careless with consequence. Men drawn to vice, men who make ruin look like entertainment, men who carry charm the way others carry prayer. He does not name anyone. He does not have to. His followers readily supply faces; it is one of their favourite pursuits.
Behind you, a lady rustles her skirts and settles more comfortably, as though the sermon has given her permission to be interested. She leans toward her companion, and the whisper slips out—thin as ribbon, sharp as a pin, soft enough to pretend it is not there. “It is said he has returned,” she murmurs. Her friend answers with a quiet thrill, the kind people reserve for scandal they can pretend to condemn. “From Wrotham. The second Ashbourne brother. The one who—oh, you know—” A small pause. A shared smile. “—never learned to behave.”
You do not turn your head. You have learned how to hear without appearing to listen. You have learned how to let gossip wash past your face without changing it. The art of not reacting is one of the first disciplines your father taught you—because reaction invites interrogation, and interrogation invites punishment. The name arrives a second later. “Mingyu.”
Ashbourne. A house with too many sons and too much attention. Not the Viscount. Not the one who has been steadied by marriage and a wife who fits beside him as though she has always belonged there. A brother. The one London has not watched grow proper under its eyes. The one who has been elsewhere—long enough for “elsewhere” to become a story people tell when they are bored of their own lives. Notorious, perhaps. Reckless, perhaps. Or merely ungoverned in a city that worships governance.
Your father’s voice tightens. “There are those,” he says, “who believe the wide path is freedom.” He lets the word sit there, bait for the foolish. “They mistake indulgence for liberty. They mistake sin for life.”
Your stomach makes a small, traitorous turn. It is not a romantic flutter. It is not girlish nonsense. It is something older and uglier and more honest: a momentary, instinctive hunger for difference. For anything that is not measured and scheduled and contained. For a day that does not repeat itself endlessly. The hunger appears and you hate it immediately, because you have been trained to hate yourself for starving. Your thumb tightens around the bead. Shame rises quick and hot, a familiar burn, and you do what you have always been taught to do when your mind strays: you take up Scripture like a lash. “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God… But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.”
The words flare behind your lowered eyes like a warning painted on the inside of your skull.
Your father continues, his gaze sweeping the congregation, taking inventory of every bowed head and folded hand. It passes over the young—girls with bright eyes, boys with restless knees—and you can feel the weight of his attention settle on that collective youth like a warning. “All children of the Lord,” he continues, and the words are broad enough to include everyone while still somehow feeling aimed at you, “must understand this: the enemy does not begin with ruin. He begins with permission.”
Permission. A shiver goes through you that has nothing to do with cold. Permission is what you have never been granted. Permission is what your life has been built to deny. Permission is the closed door you press your palm against in the dark, not even daring to knock—because you have been taught that wanting the other side is proof of wickedness.
Your father lifts his hands once more, gesturing outward—toward the whole room, toward every obedient posture like it is an altar he has built himself. “We are blessed to live in a world where the narrow path is still visible, still walkable, still—by God’s grace—chosen.”
Chosen. As if choice is not a luxury. As if the narrow path is not a corridor with the doors nailed shut. He continues, his sermon widening like a net. “The flesh is weak,” he speaks. “And so we must be vigilant. We must be disciplined. We must be obedient.”
Discipline. Vigilance. Obedience. The three words you have carried since childhood—three stones in your pocket, dragging at you no matter how carefully you walk.
Your father’s gaze drifts again—slow, inevitable—and though you do not lift your head, you feel it find you anyway. He does not need to speak your name this time. The congregation does not need him to. They know who sits beside him. They know what you are meant to represent. You refuse to meet his attention. You fix your stare on the grain of the pew in front of you and pretend you are simply listening like everyone else. But your mind does what it always does when he speaks of discipline: it opens a memory you have spent years trying not to touch.
Your knees bare against wood—no cushion allowed, your father insisting comfort makes sinners soft. Candlelight trembling on the wall, making the shadows look like they are moving closer. Your father’s voice above you, patient and relentless, guiding you through verses the way a man guides a blade along a whetstone. Again, he had repeated. Again. Again. Your hands clasped so tightly your fingers ached. Your throat raw from repetition. Your head bowed until your neck burned, because lifting it would have meant defiance, and defiance was always punished first by silence, and then by something worse. You remember the way he corrected the smallest things—your posture, your breath, the angle of your hands—as if even the shape of prayer could be sinful if not performed properly. And then his voice, soft beside your ear, the most intimate kind of threat: “If you cannot govern your thoughts, you will never govern your life.”
The memory closes again as quickly as it opens, but it leaves heat behind it—shame, yes, but also something cramped and furious that you do not have words for in this place. A refusal that cannot surface because refusal would be the end of everything you have been permitted to be.
Your father’s voice continues. “Some believe temptation is obvious. That it arrives loud, vulgar, easily refused. But temptation is more often polite.” A pause. “It is dressed well. It speaks pleasantly. It makes you laugh. It makes you feel—” He stops there, as though the idea of feeling itself is something dangerous. Then, with controlled calm: “—entitled.”
You feel bodies shift in the room. You feel people thinking of ballrooms, of charming men, of the city beyond these walls. You feel, too, the way your father’s gaze returns to you, as if he is checking that you are absorbing the lesson properly. Your mind reaches for verse the way it reaches for breath. “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
You keep your posture perfect. But beneath it all, beneath the hymn and the stone and your father’s steady voice, you feel the weight of expectation settle onto you again, the way other girls might feel the weight of a lover’s hand—heavy, constant, shaping you.
Another whisper rings out behind you, and this one carries the kind of delighted disgust the parish does best. “They say he is a scandal in fine tailoring.” A suppressed laugh answers, quickly smothered into a cough. “Unserious. Immoral. And pretty enough to make women forget their prayers.”
The words should disgust you. Your father has taught you that they should. Your father has taught you that a man like that is a trap with a smile. And yet—curiosity pricks at you before you can stop it, a spark landing on dry kindling. You feel it, immediately, like wrongdoing. Like heat in a place there should be only calm. Shame rushes in to stamp it out. You repeat Scripture in your mind as correction, as penance, as self-violence dressed as invocation. “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God… But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.”
You roll the next bead under your thumb and then the next, until sensation returns you to the only safe truth: pain you can control.
Your father leans into the second part of his lectern, his voice lowering, as if he is sharing something intimate. “The devil does not need force,” he declares. “He needs only permission.” The ripples of his words travel through you silently, so no one can see the disturbance. Your father speaks of freedom like it is a lie men sell to women who are too hungry to see the cost. “Freedom is not the absence of restraint,” he says. “Freedom is the presence of righteousness.”
The church breathes in rhythm with your father’s authority. He returns again and again to the same axis—sin and temptation, restraint and righteousness—circling it like a hawk, as if repetition can hammer obedience deeper. “Abstain from all appearance of evil.”
He glances at the congregation, then at you, and in that glance, you understand the real sermon is not for them. It is for you. It is always for you. You are praised publicly because praise is a leash. Because being called virtuous makes it harder to disappoint them. Because being called pure turns any desire into disgrace. Your father’s mouth curves into satisfaction. “We are living in a city that worships indulgence.”
A murmur of agreement. A shared sense of superiority from those who indulge privately and condemn publicly. He continues, “London offers a thousand wide gates.”
The way he says it makes the city sound like a woman with her dress loosened, waiting to ruin men. You picture the streets outside the church—carriages, footmen, silk, mud, laughter. London, alive. London, immense. London, full of things you have never been permitted to taste. And then you picture your home: controlled, quiet, grey. Your father’s study. Your prayer kneeler. Your window that looks out but never invites you to step through. You think of the wide gate and you hate yourself for wondering, for even a moment, what it looks like. “For the wages of sin is death.”
The line rises in your mind reflexively. Death. But you have been living a kind of death for years—breathing and smiling and obeying while everything in you that wants to run beats itself bloody against the inside of your ribs.
The service moves like it always does: measured, orderly, unavoidable. You stand when you should stand. You kneel when you should kneel. You bow your head the way you have bowed it since girlhood, a motion so practised it feels like part of your being. The stone beneath your knees is cool through the fabric of your dress.
There is something in you, buried deep, that is not meek. It is not shy. It is not a plant. It is a flame. It is a want that has never had a name that wasn’t condemned. You keep it hidden because you have learned what happens when it shows. You have learned the way your father’s disappointment feels like punishment even before the true punishment begins. You have learned the weight of his silence. You have learned the hours, the recitations, the bare knees, the prayers repeated until your mouth goes numb and your mind goes hollow. And yet—somewhere inside you, something still burns. Not for romance, not for love as the ton likes to pretend it believes in, not for a husband’s approval. For life. For the sensation of choosing a direction and moving in it. For a day that is not prewritten like your father’s sermons. For a breath that belongs to you. That is what you want. That is what you do not say.
When the final prayer is spoken, the congregation rises as if released. You rise too, smoothing your skirt. Your father closes his Bible with finality. People turn, smiling, murmuring, gathering themselves into their social shapes. Church, here, is not only worship—it is theatre. It is a place to be seen being good. And you are the best actress.
Your father’s hand touches the small of your back, guiding you into the aisle. You walk beside him at an exact pace—half a step back, never beside him. A daughter, not a companion. An ornament, not an equal.
Outside, in the churchyard, faces brighten at your father’s approach. They gather like moths to a flame they do not understand is burning them. At the doors, the ritual begins: parishioners lined in polite order, offering thanks, offering praise, offering themselves as good people who listen to good sermons.
Your father stands at the threshold like a gatekeeper. You stand a pace behind—close enough to be displayed, far enough to remain secondary. A woman steps forward first, all pearls and propriety. “Reverend Marlowe,” she greets, voice syrupy with approval. Your father inclines his head. “Lady Henshaw.” He says her title precisely. He is always precise. Her gaze flicks to you, and her smile grows brighter. “Your words were bracing,” she says.
“Truth should brace,” your father replies. Lady Henshaw’s eyes linger on your collar, your posture, your hands. “And your daughter,” she adds, “is a blessing. Such a picture.” A picture. Yes. That is what you are.
Your father’s hand settles on your shoulder. “She is devoted,” he says, and the words sound like a boast. Lady Henshaw sighs, pleased. “The narrow path, indeed.”
You can feel her assessing you the way one assesses a gown: the cut, the fit, the expense. You can feel her measuring how useful your virtue might be to her own social story—how closely she should stand to it, how loudly she should praise it. Then, she turns her head slightly, leaning in as though sharing a prayer. “And to think,” she murmurs, “that such a city is about to welcome Mr. Ashbourne back into its arms.”
Your father’s jaw tightens. “The city will welcome any corruption if it is wrapped in charm,” he says. Lady Henshaw’s lips press together in pious agreement. “He is said to be… untamed,” she whispers, and the word sounds too pleased on her tongue. Your father’s gaze moves, briefly, across the churchyard—across the men, across the carriages, across the world you are not allowed to enter without supervision. “Then he should be avoided,” he says simply. Lady Henshaw’s eyes return to you, and there is a question in them—unspoken, but clear: Will she be avoided? Will she avoid?
Your father answers for you by tightening his hand at your shoulder, gentle enough for the world, hard enough for you. You smile, small and correct. You do not speak. You are the obedient daughter. You are the narrow path. You are the proof.
When the line thins, and the last hand has been shaken, and the last compliment has been received like a tithe, your father’s fingers slide from your shoulder to your forearm, stopping you with a quiet authority. The parish is still close enough to watch. Your father is aware of that the way he is aware of everything. “You did well,” he measures.
“Thank you, Father.” His gaze searches your face—not for emotion, but for deviation. “You will remember,” he says, “that the world admires ruin. It claps for it.” Your throat tightens. You keep your expression calm.
“Yes, Father.”
He nods slowly, satisfied you understand the lesson. “And you,” he adds, the gentleness turning sharper, “are not for applause.” Not for laughter. Not for charm. Not for men the parish whispers about with heat disguised as disgust. You bow your head the way he likes.
“No, Father.”
His thumb presses once—barely—into your elbow, right where your pulse beats. A reminder you cannot pretend not to feel. Then he releases you, and together you step away from the church doors.
The carriage ride home is quiet. Your father’s carriage is always quiet. Silence is his preferred atmosphere. Silence is where his authority breathes easiest. You sit opposite him with your hands folded in your lap, your beads hidden in your palm. The carnelian stones are warm from your skin, as if they have absorbed the heat you do not show. Outside, London moves. The city passes like a page you are not allowed to read: shopfronts, pedestrians, the brief flash of a painted sign, the clean curve of a bridge. The world is enormous. Your life is small.
Your father watches you without moving his head. He does not need to stare to make you feel seen. His presence alone is surveillance. At last, he speaks. “You heard them.” It is not a question. Your thumb stills on the bead. You do not make the mistake of pretending you did not understand. “I heard whispers.”
He leans back, folding his hands over his cane, the picture of composed authority. “The city loves to speak of sin as though it is entertainment,” he says.
“Yes, Father.”
“And you?”
The question slides under your collar, cold as a blade. Your throat tightens, but your voice does not waver. “I have no interest in such talk.” It is the correct answer. It is also a lie. Your father’s eyes narrow slightly, as if he can taste dishonesty in the air. “Curiosity is how the devil enters.”
The carriage rolls over a small unevenness in the street. Your rosary shifts in your palm. Your father’s voice continues. “Mr. Ashbourne is not for your notice.” Not for your notice. Not for your eyes. Not for your thoughts. Not for your life. “No, Father,” you agree.
He watches you a moment longer, then looks away, as though the matter is decided. But your mind—traitorous, alive—catches on the name again. Mingyu.
You imagine the way it might be spoken without disdain. You imagine the way it might be spoken with laughter. You imagine—briefly, dangerously—what it would feel like to be someone the parish whispered about with fascination instead of approval. Shame slams down again, quick and hard. You pray, not because you want to, but because you must. “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” The words taste like water poured over fire.
Your father’s carriage turns onto your street. The house rises ahead: neat, respectable, symmetrical—built like a sermon. Home is not loud, not warm, not cruel in obvious ways. Home is controlled. Home is schedules and measured footsteps and your father’s study door that never truly feels open. Home is servants who speak quietly because the reverend prefers his household to sound like a church.
You step inside, remove your gloves, hand your bonnet away, and move through the hallway like a ghost. Your father disappears into his study, as he always does after service, to write letters and plan lives that are not his to plan. You are guided upstairs by habit.
In your room, the air is still. Your bed is made with strict neatness. Your dresses hang like obedient bodies in the wardrobe. On your vanity sits a small Bible, a brush, and a bowl for pins. Everything in its place. You close the door behind you, and for a moment—one breath, one heartbeat—you let your shoulders loosen. Not collapse. Just loosen. It feels wicked.
You move to the window and look down at the street. Carriages pass. A pair of young women laugh as they step into a shop. A man hurries past with a bouquet tucked under his arm. There is motion everywhere. There is choice everywhere. And you are trapped behind glass.
Your fingers lift toward your collar, then stop. Even alone, you hesitate to undo anything without permission. That is what your father has built inside you: a warden that looks like your own hand. You lower your hand and instead bring your beads out fully, letting the rosary settle across your hand. The carnelian stones glow darkly in the light, like something alive. You count. One bead. One prayer. Two beads. Another prayer. The prayers are mechanical, memorised the way children memorise songs. But today, the words snag. Because behind them, behind the verses and the warnings, there is a whisper. A whisper that is not the parish. A whisper that is not your father. A whisper that is only you. Live.
Your breath shudders slightly, handled before it can become anything visible. You tell yourself the whisper is wicked. You tell yourself it is the flesh. You tell yourself it is the devil scratching at the door. But you have lived with your father’s voice in your head so long that sometimes you do not know where he ends and you begin.
If you want, you are bad. If you hunger, you are weak. If you imagine, you are already fallen. That is the equation your father has written into you. And yet—your thumb pauses on a bead, and your mind does something unbearable: It wonders what kind of man could make a parish whisper with such heat. It wonders what kind of life is so bright that even condemnation sounds like envy. It wonders what unserious feels like.
It wonders what it would be like to laugh without immediately paying for it. Your cheeks warm. You close your eyes, as if closing your eyes can close your mind. You press the beads to your lips—not in sweetness, but in desperation. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
You open your eyes again. London continues outside. You remain inside.
You swallow the syllables like you swallowed the dullness in church. But unlike the dullness, the sensation does not disappear. And when you finally look down at your hands, you realise, with a small flare of horror, what you have done. The cord of your rosary has been wound around your fingers, loop after loop pulled tighter until it has cut into the soft skin at the base of your knuckle.
A bead of blood pools at the wound, round and glossy, and then it touches the carnelian stones—those tiny coals you have been counting—so that blood meets red bead, flesh meets symbol, and suddenly your devotion looks like something else entirely. You don’t let it fall. You don’t wipe it away. You simply watch it, breath shallow, as if even this small proof of your own body—this single, trembling bead of red—might betray you for wanting to live.
The first thing London asks of Mingyu Ashbourne is that he button himself up. He refuses it in the most intimate way imaginable—by dragging his travel shirt over his head in the tight, velvet-lined confines of the carriage, the fabric catching for the briefest moment upon his shoulders before it yields and leaves him bare-chested in the half-light: all warm skin and careless confidence, with the faintest bruise of road-wear where a collar has rubbed him raw.
The coach is too small for three grown men and one Soonyoung, and yet somehow Soonyoung contrives to occupy the greater share of it—knees angled out, hands everywhere, laughter loaded behind his teeth like a musket awaiting a spark. Wonwoo sits opposite with the composed patience of a man long resigned to being outnumbered by disaster. Jeonghan reclines as though he has been poured into the cushions, not even pretending to be surprised. He studies Mingyu’s bare torso with exaggerated solemnity, as if inspecting a scandal for flaws. “Saints preserve us,” Jeonghan drawls, voice slick as syrup. “If you undress any slower, the footmen shall begin charging admission.”
Soonyoung’s laugh bursts out—cheerful, uncontained, the sort of laugh that makes respectable men forget they are meant to frown. “Let them!” Soonyoung says. “We’ll make a fortune. Mingyu, do it again. For art.”
Wonwoo’s hand appears with a folded shirt before the chaos may become a carnival—crisp linen, London-approved, the colour of propriety itself. “Put this on,” Wonwoo says, flat as a verdict. “Or at the very least stop flexing like you’re trying to seduce the upholstery.”
Mingyu catches the shirt with an easy hand and an easier smile, and there it is—what London recalls of him; what London forgives in him; what London uses as proof that charming men are permitted to be dangerous: sunlight, trouble, laughter that makes people soften against their will. He shakes his hair back from his brow as though he has nowhere to be hurried to, no one waiting to weigh him, and then he leans forward to draw the London-approved shirt over his head. It is crisp where his travel clothes have been softened; proper where foreign habits have grown lax. The collar settles at his throat like a polite hand. It does not, however, alter the fact that he is Mingyu.
He fastens the buttons with the same carelessness he brings to everything that matters too much—quick, neat, rehearsed—as if making himself presentable is only part of the joke. The carriage wheels roll over Mayfair stone. The rhythm of the city changes. Even the air beyond the window feels altered—thicker with expectation, thinner with mercy.
Jeonghan watches him with the lazy interest of a brother who knows every mask Mingyu owns and which ones crack first. “You are late to your own reputation,” he says. “London has been insufferably bored without you.”
Soonyoung leans in, elbows upon his knees, eyes bright. “How many days, do you think, before someone writes a poem about Mingyu Ashbourne ruining a debutante with nothing but his smile?”
Wonwoo’s mouth makes the smallest movement—almost a smile, then thinks better of it. “It will not be a poem,” he says. “It will be a warning.”
Mingyu secures the last button and tilts his head, pleased. His grin is a currency he has never yet been refused. “Warnings are still literature,” he says. “Let them write.” He says it as though he means it—as though nothing may reach him through ink. Yet the truth sits under his ribs: London’s writing has always been sharper than any knife, and his name is a favourite blade.
The carriage turns. Through the window, Ashbourne Hall rises—townhouse proud and dark against the pale sky, its front steps swept clean as though the very building has learned to fear judgment. Footmen await direction, lanterns await their lighting. Everything about the house is designed to appear effortless, and everything about the house is labour. Mingyu exhales as though he has come home and also as though he has walked back into a trap. “Smile,” Jeonghan murmurs. “You know they’ll be watching.” Mingyu’s grin widens, because that is the game. And he is excellent at games.
The carriage slows. Somewhere outside, a woman laughs too loudly; a man’s voice answers; the city hums with its endless appetite. Mingyu draws in a breath and lets it go, slowly—an old habit learned abroad, where breath was the only thing a man could control without paying for it. Then the carriage stops, and the footman opens the door, and Mayfair’s gaze finds him.
Ashbourne Hall is louder now than it used to be, and it has nothing to do with the number of brothers under its roof. It is a subtler alteration—an adjusted gravity, a new centre of warmth. It is the Viscount. It is the new Viscountess. Even before Mingyu sees them, he feels the difference their presence makes in how the house moves around itself. The air holds a new kind of certainty, as though the household has been reminded it is not merely enduring life but directing it.
Mingyu’s boots cross the threshold. The door closes behind him with a finality that feels almost ceremonial. He is met with the familiar flurry—footmen taking coats, an elderly butler feigning indifference whilst plainly relieved, the faint echo of laughter drifting down from somewhere higher. Joshua crosses the entrance like a constellation: with a ledger tucked beneath one arm, already half inside Carat & Co. And then Seungcheol appears.
Not the Seungcheol of whispered grief and clenched strategy, not the one London has watched with hungry suspicion—the new Viscount, cut into his title like stone into a signet. He moves like a man who has learned where to place his authority. Like a man who has ceased apologising for the space he occupies. His gaze catches Mingyu’s. There is something like relief there—quick, undeniable—before it becomes composure again.
And at Seungcheol’s side—Lady Whitlock. His brother’s wife. Not a rumour, not a wedding portrait, not a gossip column’s attempt at poetry. She stands with her shoulders back and her chin level, wearing her title not as though she was born to it, but as though she decided it would be hers and dared anyone to contest it. There is nothing fragile about her. Nothing simpering. Her kindness is not soft; it is deliberate. Her attention is not scattered; it is exact. She looks at Mingyu as though she has already counted him into the family’s heartbeat. And Mingyu—who has always lived as the youngest brother, the spare laugh, the pretty problem—recognises her with the sudden, unsettling clarity of a boy who has always known what he lacked. Not a mother. Not a governess. A sister. A woman who will not treat him like a liability to be managed, but a person to be understood.
She steps forward—not with the grand flourish of a new bride playing her part, but with a grace that suggests she has been learning their habits and adjusting herself without losing herself. “You have returned in one piece,” she says, and the smile that accompanies it is small but true—no performance for the servants, no pious sweetness for the world. Mingyu bows, because manners are easier than feelings. “I make everything look accidental,” he replies.
Seungcheol’s hand settles at the small of her back—so unconsciously protective it is nearly an admission. Like he is reminding himself she exists. Like he cannot bear a room without her in it. Mingyu has seen men love women, of course. He has watched it in taverns and upon bridges, in theatres and in foreign streets. He has watched it in the way husbands call their wives “my dear” whilst looking elsewhere. But this—this is different. This is Seungcheol with his edges softened in the one place he never used to. This is Seungcheol looking at his wife as though strategy finally met devotion and lost. Lady Whitlock’s hand lifts to Seungcheol’s sleeve, fingers resting there briefly—a quiet correction, a quiet calm. As if she is reminding him he need not carry everything alone. As if she is teaching him a new way to stand in a room. Mingyu feels something in his chest tighten.
He laughs instead, because laughter is his first language and his safest. “Should I congratulate you,” he says to Seungcheol, “or apologise to London?” Seungcheol’s mouth curves, barely. “Both,” he says. Lady Whitlock’s eyes brighten with amusement, and for a heartbeat, Ashbourne Hall feels less a fortress than a home. It is disorienting. Mingyu detests disorientation. He lives in it anyway.
A servant takes Mingyu’s gloves. Another takes Soonyoung’s hat. Jeonghan charms the butler with a compliment delivered like a bribe. Wonwoo inclines his head at Lady Whitlock the way he inclines his head at very few people. Lady Whitlock’s gaze follows each brother in turn—like she is understanding their angles, their weaknesses, the places where they fray. And when her eyes return to Mingyu, there is the same unasked question: who are you when you are not performing?
Mingyu brightens his smile like a lantern being lit. “We are home,” he declares. Soonyoung throws an arm around him at once. “Home!” he echoes, delighted. “Which means—”
“Don’t,” Wonwoo says immediately. Jeonghan’s grin turns wicked. “—we ought to celebrate,” he finishes for Soonyoung, eyes fixed on Mingyu like a promise. Seungcheol exhales through his nose, the long-suffering sound of an eldest brother who has learned command is often only a suggestion. Lady Whitlock, impossibly, smiles. “You will come to dinner first,” she says, and it is not a question; it is a command placed gently into chaos. Mingyu’s instinct is to rebel. He does not. Not because he is obedient—God, no—but because her tone is not his father’s tone, nor society’s. It is not a leash. It is an invitation to belong. That, Mingyu thinks, is far more perilous than rules.
Dinner is a glittering thing even within the family dining room.
Candlelight makes the silverware look almost liquid, pouring gold along the edges of plates and goblets. The long table is dressed like a stage—linen stretched smooth, crystal glittering in flashes—yet it does not feel cold. Not tonight. Not with the house full, not with laughter threading itself between courses.
The first course arrives: a clear soup, pale and steaming, ladled with reverence; warm bread set in a basket lined with cloth; butter shaped into neat curls that look too pretty to touch. Everything is proper in the way propriety loves—restrained, polished—until the brothers make a gentle ruin of it simply by being themselves.
Soonyoung eats like a man who has spent too long in the country air—too hungry, too joyful, too unbothered by the fact that forks were invented to slow people down. He tears into his bread as though it has personally offended him, talking between bites, laughing at his own jokes, and Jeonghan—ever delighted by any breach of decorum—encourages it with the kind of smile that could start a war and blame it on charm. “You’re meant to wait,” Wonwoo remarks, watching Soonyoung butter a slice. Soonyoung blinks, genuinely confused. “Wait for what?”
“For shame,” Jeonghan supplies, and lifts his glass as if toasting it. Joshua makes a soft sound that is half-laugh, half-sigh, the sort of sound that smooths the moment. He steers the conversation with an easy gentleness—asking Wonwoo about the book he’s been seen reading, asking Soonyoung whether he truly means to scandalise the cook by requesting seconds before the fish course has even arrived. Wonwoo answers in spare sentences that somehow still feel full—like he has chosen each word for its weight. When he does speak, it isn’t loud, but it turns heads anyway, simply because he never wastes air. Jeonghan keeps the room warm the way a hearth keeps a house warm: not by being earnest, but by being impossible to ignore. He leans back in his chair, loose-limbed, telling some ridiculous story from the road—painting it with flourishes, making even the footman pause at the edge of the room too long, forgetting his invisibility because Jeonghan’s laughter feels like permission.
The second course shifts the table: fish set upon greens, lemon cut and placed like a bright accent; then a roast brought in, the meat carved, the gravy poured like indulgence. A bowl of potatoes, crisp at the edges; carrots glazed; something dark and sweet set in a small silver dish that Soonyoung eyes in temptation. “If Father could see you,” Wonwoo murmurs, watching Soonyoung reach for the sweet dish again. Soonyoung pauses, spoon mid-air. “Which father?” Jeonghan’s grin turns wicked. “Any of them.”
Joshua clears his throat like a gentle warning. “Eat,” he says. “But do not die.” Soonyoung beams as though this is endorsement. Mingyu takes his wine and lets it sit on his tongue, the taste rounding out the edges of the day. He listens to their voices overlap until it feels less like a dining room and more like a living thing.
At the head of it all sits Seungcheol, and Mingyu cannot decide if it is startling or inevitable how well the position suits him now. Seungcheol does not have to raise his voice to command the room. He simply looks, and the room understands. Yet he laughs, too—small, rare, real—when Soonyoung tells a story badly and insists it is brilliant. He corrects Jeonghan with a single glance that says, “Do not push your luck”, and Jeonghan looks delighted by it, as if being chastised by an eldest brother is its own intimate amusement. And then there is Lady Whitlock.
She sits at Seungcheol’s right, not like an ornament placed to be admired, but like the spine of a book that has always belonged on this shelf. The candles throw soft light along the line of her cheek, catch the gleam of her onyx wedding ring when she lifts her glass, and Mingyu sees, in the smallest gestures, how she alters the house around her.
She watches Joshua when he speaks—not with the cool, appraising gaze of someone taking measure, but with something gentler: a kind of respect that settles. As if she knows how he redirects without making anyone feel corrected, how he makes space for the quiet ones to remain quiet without being swallowed by louder ones. Her attention moves to Soonyoung with fond indulgence, yes—but it is more than humour. There is warmth there, the sort reserved for souls too bright to be dulled and too loyal to be doubted. When Soonyoung eats too fast, she does not scold; she simply slides the breadbasket closer, as if offering him the comfort of abundance.
When she glances at Wonwoo, it is quieter still—respectful, careful. She does not demand he speak more; she allows him the dignity of silence without treating it as rudeness. When Wonwoo does speak, she listens as though she expects his words to matter. Jeonghan earns her amusement easily—he always does—but even there, her smile has a watchfulness beneath it, the knowing look of a woman who understands that charm can be both a gift and an edge.
And when her gaze finally turns to Mingyu, it does not land like judgment. It lands like curiosity. Not curious about his scandals. Curious about him. It is the worst sort of curiosity: the kind that might see through him. So Mingyu does what he always does when people draw too near the part of him that aches. He performs.
He offers stories of travel as though they are nothing more than caricatures. He paints foreign cities in bright strokes—sunlit harbours, crowded taverns, women who laughed and taught him new ways to sin. He boasts about escapades like trophies rather than distractions. Jeonghan eggs him on with a grin. Soonyoung howls with delight. Even Joshua’s mouth quirks once, reluctantly. Lady Whitlock listens with the tolerance of someone who knows when a man is charming because he is pleased, and when he is charming because he is afraid.
At one point, Mingyu mentions Greece offhandedly, as though it is merely another place where he was adored and fed and forgiven. But when he says it, he feels the sea again: salt upon his lips, sun upon his shoulders, the ache of a horizon that asks nothing of him. Lady Whitlock’s head tilts. “You speak of it as though you miss it,” she says. Mingyu’s smile remains. Something beneath it shifts. “I miss being unknown,” he answers—too honest, by accident. The table stills.
Seungcheol’s gaze flicks to him sharply. Joshua’s brows lift slightly. Wonwoo’s eyes go quiet. Jeonghan’s smile softens a fraction, as though he has seen the crack before. Soonyoung looks between them, sensing the mood the way a dog senses thunder. Lady Whitlock does not flinch. She does not pity him. She does not chastise. She nods as though she understands. “Unknown is a kind of rest,” she says. Mingyu laughs quickly, covering the moment as one might cover a flame with a hand. “If rest were what I sought,” he says lightly, “I should become a clergyman.”
Jeonghan makes a delighted sound. “Can you imagine?”
Soonyoung’s eyes widen, theatrical. “Mingyu in a pulpit? He would flirt with the choir.”
Wonwoo deadpans, “He would flirt with God.”
Mingyu bows his head, mock-humble. “I have always been drawn to unattainable things.”
Seungcheol cuts in. “You may cease attempting to shock her,” he says, nodding toward his wife. “It will not succeed.”
Mingyu’s brows lift. “That sounds like a challenge.”
Lady Whitlock sips her wine and replies, very calmly, “If you shock me, Mr. Ashbourne, I shall reward you.” Soonyoung chokes on laughter. Jeonghan claps as though the room were a theatre. Joshua looks down at his plate like he is trying not to smile. Wonwoo’s mouth does that almost-smile again and abandons it. Mingyu feels his grin widen. “A reward,” he repeats. “I have always been motivated by praise.”
Seungcheol’s hand finds Lady Whitlock’s beneath the table—an unconscious tether—and Mingyu watches it like he is watching a language he does not speak. He clears his throat, brightens his smile, throws another story into the air. He does not mention that every time he leaves a woman’s bed, he feels colder than when he arrived. He does not mention that laughter may be armour and also a prison. He does not mention that he has never known what he is for.
When dinner ends, London waits outside with its open mouth.
Soonyoung is already standing. “We are going out,” he declares, as though the city belongs to him. Wonwoo’s gaze flicks toward Mingyu. “Try not to break anything important.” Jeonghan takes Mingyu’s arm, leading him toward the door. “Only his heart,” Jeonghan says, and smiles as though he knows precisely where Mingyu keeps it hidden. Lady Whitlock watches them go with fond exasperation—the sort of expression a woman wears when she has adopted a houseful of trouble and chosen to love it anyway. Seungcheol’s eyes follow Mingyu one beat too long. A warning and a plea in one. Mingyu lifts two fingers in a salute. “I shall be good,” he calls. And then he laughs, because even he does not believe it.
Mayfair at night is a different religion. It is lit by gas and gossip. It is worshipped with coin and consequence. Men in tailored coats spill out of clubs and into the street. Carriages glide like sharks in water. Laughter blooms and dies behind curtained windows. Mingyu takes to it like a man returning to a vice he never truly quit.
Soonyoung leads them first, hungry for noise—somewhere loud enough that no one may hear a thought. A tavern, then a private room above it, then another place with quieter doors and louder women. Mingyu buys drinks as though generosity were absolution. He flirts with a barmaid as though flirting were prayer. He winks at a married woman as though the world were a stage and he the only actor who knows his lines. He is unserious in the manner London expects. He makes it look effortless.
Men clap him on the back, delighted to have him back in rotation. Someone calls him a “sly dog” with affectionate envy. Someone else calls him “harmless” as though that were the category men like Mingyu should be grateful for. Harmless. As if it is not a carefully concealed insult. He laughs, because laughter keeps the word from clinging.
Soonyoung is deep in conversation with two girls who have no business being in this room unless they are business themselves—his hands moving as he speaks, his smile too bright to be anything but dangerous. Jeonghan has arranged a card game in a corner, and somehow looks as though he is winning before the first card is even dealt.
Mingyu tells a story about an Ottoman dock and a woman with a knife tucked into her boot, and the room roars. He embellishes it—of course he does. He turns danger into comedy, turns loneliness into applause. What he does not tell them is the moment after, when the laughter died, and he stood alone upon the dock and felt the sea wind cut through him. He does not tell them about the nights abroad when he lay awake and listened to silence, wondering whether he might ever be missed in any manner that mattered. He does not tell them he came home because he was tired of being a story without an ending. Instead, he leans close to a woman with too-red lips and says something that makes her giggle, and he lets her giggle become proof that he remains the man London wants.
Later—much later—he slips somewhere discreet, where the curtains are heavy and the women smile like professionals. He pays, because payment is simpler than promise. He returns to Ashbourne Hall before dawn with his collar slightly askew and his grin still in place. The footman pretends not to observe. Mingyu pretends not to be lonely.
Morning arrives with bright light and no mercy, and if Mingyu were a different sort of man—if he were Joshua, perhaps, or Seungcheol—he might spend the day in penance: tea, ledgers, careful conversation, the slow labour of being respectable. Mingyu spends it in preparation. A valet assaults him with linen and fuss, with the severe assumption that a cravat may keep a man from disgrace if tied tightly enough. Mingyu sits still only because Wonwoo is there, quietly watching, and Wonwoo’s patience is a rarer thing than affection in this family. Mingyu’s fingers drift toward a ring he does not wear—toward a necklace he does not possess—toward any talisman that might explain him to himself. He has none.
By afternoon, he wanders the ground floor of Ashbourne Hall like a visitor in his own inheritance—because it is not his inheritance, not truly. He pauses by the portrait gallery, not out of reverence, but habit. Faces stare down: men who owned their lives without apology; women who were owned and called it destiny. Mingyu looks at them and feels the familiar old ache: being adopted means your life begins with someone choosing you—and never letting you forget it. It is kindness. It is also a sentence.
He thinks of the Viscountess who raised them—formidable, terrifying, brilliant. The sort of woman who could turn boys into men through sheer force of expectation. The sort of woman who could love you and still make you feel love must be earned anew each day. He thinks of Seungcheol, now Viscount, now steadied by a wife who looks as though she was born to calm his storm. Mingyu thinks: And what am I?
The answer London gives him is immediate: trouble. Unreliable. Entertaining. Mingyu gives London what it wants because it is easier than asking for something else.
After dinner, Jeonghan appears at Mingyu’s shoulder like temptation dressed as a brother. “Cards,” he says simply. Mingyu’s eyes narrow. “You mean to ruin me.” Jeonghan smiles. “You are already ruined. I mean to make you wealthy.”
Wonwoo, passing by, pauses. “Try not to get robbed.” Soonyoung bounds down the stairs with the energy of a lit match. “May we be robbed?” he asks, hopeful. “I have never been robbed in Mayfair.” Mingyu points at him. “Give it time.” They go out into the night as though they own it.
The card room is private, polished, chosen for discretion—dark wood, low light, men who speak softly because they know power does not require volume. Haversham is there, lounging like a man who thinks bloodline absolves him of decency. Dalrymple as well—loud enough to be a nuisance, influential enough to be dangerous. They greet Mingyu like a returning toy. “Ashbourne!” Dalrymple booms. “Our wandering son! Come to lose money with grace?” Mingyu bows perfectly. “I only lose with style.”
Jeonghan slides into his seat like a fox into a henhouse. Wonwoo stands behind, watchful, shadowed. Mingyu sits opposite Haversham and smiles as though he has never been wounded by a room like this. Cards are dealt. Coins are stacked. Mingyu plays as he always does: recklessly, beautifully, as though losing cannot hurt. It is a lie, of course. Losing hurts. Winning hurts too. Everything hurts, if one is paying attention.
Haversham leans in at one point, voice low, eyes glittering. “Heard your brother married well,” he murmurs. “Made a spinster into a Viscountess. How charming.” Mingyu’s smile does not move. “It is only charming if you do not know her.” Haversham’s eyes gleam. “Oh, I believe I should like to.”
Dalrymple drinks and grows louder. Someone at the table—some lesser lord with an expensive sneer—lets his gaze travel over Mingyu with contempt disguised as humour. “Adopted sons make such entertaining men,” the lord says. “So eager to prove they belong.” The room quiets: not shocked, not offended—interested. Curious. Waiting to see what Mingyu will do. Mingyu smiles. He has been trained for this, too. “Eager?” he repeats, pleasantly. “No. I merely dislike boredom.” The man laughs. The table laughs. They let it pass, because Mingyu made it light, made it easy, made it forgivable. But the words slide under his skin all the same: adopted. charity. ornament. He has heard them his whole life. He will hear them until he dies.
Jeonghan wins a hand with lazy grace. Mingyu loses one deliberately to keep the room friendly. Then Dalrymple—drunk enough to be bold, foolish enough to be cruel—leans back and says, loud as judgment: “Charity sons,” he declares. “Pretty little ornaments your late Viscountess collected—”
Mingyu’s chair scrapes back. The sound is ugly. The room inhales. Jeonghan’s eyes flick up in warning. Wonwoo’s gaze narrows, already measuring exits. Haversham smiles like he has been waiting for this show. Mingyu smiles too—sweet as venom. “Say it again,” he says softly.
Dalrymple laughs, believing it is still a game. “Charity sons,” he repeats, louder. “Collected so the Ashbournes might pretend at generosity—” Mingyu’s fist meets Dalrymple’s jaw with a speed that shocks even Mingyu. The sound is wrong—flesh upon bone, a crack of consequence. The room gasps. Dalrymple collapses back into his chair with a curse.
Jeonghan swears beneath his breath. Haversham’s smile widens. Mingyu stands there, breathing a touch too hard, knuckles stinging, grin gone. For a split second—only a second—he looks like the truth of himself: not harmless. Not unserious. Not a boy. A man who can be wounded. Jeonghan’s hand closes around Mingyu’s sleeve firmly. “We are leaving,” Jeonghan announces. Mingyu lets himself be pulled, because he knows when to flee—and because he does not trust what he shall do if he stays.
They spill out into the night. The carriage ride home is full of the sort of silence Mingyu detests—the silence where consequences are tallied. Jeonghan leans back, eyes closed, as though resisting the urge to laugh and the urge to scream in equal measure. “You idiot,” he murmurs, not unkindly. “You absolute, beautiful idiot.”
Mingyu flexes his sore hand. “He was asking for it.” Wonwoo’s voice comes from the corner. “So were you.” Mingyu laughs then, but it does not reach his eyes. “London likes me bloody,” he says. “It proves I am still entertaining.” And because he cannot say the truer thing—that he is tired of being entertainment—he adds lightly, “Besides, Dalrymple’s face required rearranging.”
Jeonghan exhales. “Seungcheol will kill you.”
Mingyu’s grin returns, quick as a curtain. “He may try.”
But when they reach Ashbourne Hall and the house is dark and still, Mingyu’s steps soften. In the mirror of the entrance hall, he catches his own face: smile too rehearsed, eyes too bright, jaw too clenched. He looks like a boy desperately trying to become a man. He looks away.
Seungcheol does not kill him. Seungcheol does something far more unsettling: he looks disappointed. Mingyu finds him the next morning in the study—ledger open, ink set out, the new Viscount’s life arranged in papers. Lady Whitlock is there as well, standing by the window with a letter in hand. Mingyu arrives with his knuckles bandaged neatly and his grin armed. Seungcheol does not rise. He does not shout. He simply says, low: “Dalrymple?” Mingyu shrugs like a boy caught stealing sweetmeats. “He was speaking out of turn.” Lady Whitlock’s eyes flick to the bandage, then to Mingyu’s face. Not anger. Not pity. Assessment. “And you?” she asks. Mingyu’s grin falters a fraction. He recovers. “I was listening.”
Seungcheol’s gaze hardens. “You are not a child.”
Mingyu’s mouth curves. “No, but men like him like to pretend I am.”
Seungcheol’s hand closes around his pen, too tight. Lady Whitlock steps forward, and her voice is calm enough to settle storms. “What did he say?”
Mingyu’s breath catches—because she is asking for truth, and truth is not his preferred sport. He gives her something adjacent. “He insulted Mother,” he says lightly. Seungcheol’s jaw ticks. “He insulted us.”
Mingyu laughs softly, “Much the same.”
Lady Whitlock’s gaze holds his. It does not drift away. It does not soften him with kindness. It demands he meet it like a man. “You need not bleed to prove you belong here,” she says. Mingyu opens his mouth to make a joke. Nothing comes.
Seungcheol’s voice is quieter than his anger. “Stop giving them stories.” Mingyu’s brows lift. “London will write them regardless.” Seungcheol leans forward, eyes dangerous. “Then do not hand them the pen.”
Mingyu smiles, because smiling is easier than admitting he does not know how to stop. “Yes, Viscount,” he says, mock-sweet. Seungcheol’s gaze narrows. Lady Whitlock’s hand comes to Seungcheol’s shoulder. He eases back a fraction, as though reminded he is not alone in his anger. Mingyu watches that touch like thirst. Then he bows, turns, and leaves before anyone can ask him what he truly feels.
Night three is where Mingyu doubles down. Because that is what he does when something draws too near to hurting: he becomes louder. The bruise upon his knuckles becomes a jest. The whispers about the fight become proof of vitality. He walks through Mayfair that evening as though he owns the street, as though consequences are for other men. Soonyoung meets him at the door with a grin wide enough to swallow shame. “I heard you struck Dalrymple,” Soonyoung says. “Did it feel good?” Mingyu lifts his sore hand and flexes it theatrically. “Like prayer.” Soonyoung laughs like a bell. “Then we ought to worship.” Jeonghan appears behind Soonyoung with a look that says I will assist you in sin and then drag you from the gutter afterwards.
“No cards tonight,” Jeonghan declares. “Cards require patience. Mingyu possesses none.” Mingyu drapes an arm over Jeonghan’s shoulders affectionately. “I possess patience.” Wonwoo, passing by, murmurs, “For women, perhaps.”
Mingyu gasps, offended. “Wonwoo.” Wonwoo’s eyes flick up. “For applause, then.” Mingyu points at him. “That is also a kind of woman.”
Soonyoung’s grin sharpens. “We are going somewhere scandalous.” Mingyu’s smile is already set. “Somewhere that will make Seungcheol regret not killing me.”
They go to a party where the chandeliers are too bright and the laughter too indulgent. A drawing room full of bored women and hungry men. Someone’s country house just far enough from Mayfair to pretend it is not Mayfair at all. Mingyu flirts as though it were his birthright. He dances with a Marquess’s wife as though husbands are scenery. He tells stories that make women lean closer, and he makes men envy him for precisely the wrong reasons. He kisses a gloved hand and watches the woman’s eyes soften, and he feels the familiar ache—hope, stupid and tender, flickering within him like a candle. He smothers it with another drink.
Jeonghan is in his element—smiling, listening, gathering secrets the way other men collect watches. Soonyoung is a comet—bright, beloved, disastrous. Wonwoo remains near enough to intervene if required, far enough to let Mingyu hang himself with charm.
A man corners Mingyu near a sideboard and speaks with the smirking intimacy of someone who believes rakes are animals one may pat. “You will never marry,” the man says, half-taunt, half-envy. Mingyu lifts his brows. “Is that a warning or a blessing?” The man laughs. “A pity. Women like a man they can reform.”
“Then they should find someone broken enough to enjoy it.” The man blinks, uncertain. Mingyu’s laughter smooths it over at once—mask secured.
Later, outside upon a terrace, Mingyu leans on the stone balustrade and looks down at the garden where lanterns swing like captured stars. He laughs at something said near him, and then—when the laughter fades—he is left with himself. The night air is cool. The sky is indifferent. London glitters as though it is determined to distract him.
A sense of longing creeps up without a name. Of being the youngest, the spare, the one with no title waiting at the end of the line. No inheritance carved into his future. No business dependent upon his decisions. He has always been told his purpose is to be charming, to be useful as a smile in a room, to be the brother who lightens the air. He has been excellent at it. He has also always suspected that excellence does not equal meaning.
A woman slides up beside him—perfume, laughter, intent—and presses close, fingers brushing his sleeve like an invitation. Mingyu turns, offers his smile like coin. “Mr. Ashbourne,” she purrs. “I have heard you are wicked.” He bows, close enough for scandal. “Madam,” he murmurs, “I have heard you are bored.” She laughs. He takes her inside, because it is easier than being alone.
He leaves later, because staying would mean pretending it mattered. He finds the discreet house again—quiet curtains, paid smiles, a woman who calls him “love” without meaning it. He clings to the lack of meaning like safety. He pays. He thanks her. He departs for Ashbourne Hall before dawn.
Mingyu slips up the stairs like a thief returning to the scene of his own crimes. In the corridor, he passes Seungcheol’s closed door. He hesitates—an absurd impulse to knock, to ask his brother something he has never dared ask any member of his family: What is the point of me?
He keeps walking. Because he already knows the answer he would be given. Be useful. Be charming. Be quiet about your hunger. He reaches his own room and shuts the door. The silence within is thick. He rests his forehead against the cool wood and closes his eyes, smiling though there is no one to see it. “Unserious,” he whispers to himself, tasting the word like a prayer and a curse. He laughs once. Then he straightens, washes the night from his hands, and sleeps like a man who has run out of places to run.
On the fourth night, White’s receives him as though he never left.
It is a different sort of establishment than the taverns Soonyoung favours—less raucous, more assured. The lamps throw their amber over polished wood and well-cut coats, over brandy glasses and newspapers folded with disdain. A room in which men may be boisterous without being vulgar, and careless without ever calling it carelessness. Mingyu goes because it is familiar ground—because it is one of the few places in London where a man may be entirely himself, provided his self is agreeable enough.
Jeonghan comes with him, naturally—games are Jeonghan’s religion and he is never so devout as when money is on the table. Wonwoo is there too, his presence less companionable than it is protective; he does not hover, but the room seems to notice him anyway. Soonyoung arrives late, hair slightly disordered, grin intact, as though chased by delight and only barely escaped it.
Dalrymple is present—of course, he is—installed at a far table with a cluster of men too proud to move their chairs even when resentment makes the air taste faintly metallic. His jaw is still tender if one looks closely enough; his eyes, when they catch Mingyu across the room, are sharp with the kind of grudge that insists on being seen. Haversham lingers near him like a man who enjoys other people’s injuries. They do not approach. Mingyu does not oblige them by looking troubled.
Heads turn when he enters—not in scandal, not in outrage, but in recognition. Someone calls, delighted. “Ashbourne! Back amongst the civilised at last!” Mingyu spreads his arms as though welcoming applause. “Civilised?” he echoes, and his grin lands like flirtation. “I thought this was where gentlemen came to pretend.” The room laughs—because he makes it easy, because he makes everything sound like a joke.
A familiar figure rises from near the fireplace: Lord Pembroke, a pleasant sort of acquaintance—young enough to still enjoy mischief, old enough to know when to keep it discreet. Pembroke’s eyes are bright with amusement as he takes Mingyu in from collar to cuff, as though measuring how well the Continent has worn him. “We heard you became positively shameless abroad,” Pembroke states, a grin tugging at his mouth. “It seems the rumours were modest.” Mingyu inclines his head with mock humility. “Rumours always are.”
Pembroke snorts. “I’ve three sisters. They’ve been talking of you like you’re a storm on the horizon.”
Mingyu’s brows lift, delighted. “I do hope they bring umbrellas.”
Pembroke laughs again, then leans closer, lowering his voice in that intimate way men use when they’re trading currency. “Tell me the truth,” he says. “Are the Frenchwomen truly as obliging as London insists?”
Mingyu’s smile turns dangerous at the edges—not cruel, simply pleased at having an audience. “The French,” he says, as if offering a lecture, “are honest about wanting what they want. It is remarkably restful.”
“Restful,” Pembroke repeats, incredulous and envious. Mingyu’s gaze flicks, briefly, to a group of men watching him from the far side of the room—men whose wives will pretend not to notice him while ensuring their daughters do. He feels the weight of London’s appetite the way a man feels weather about to change. “London,” he adds lightly, “prefers to want in secret.”
Pembroke’s grin sharpens. “And you, Ashbourne? Do you prefer secrets?”
Mingyu lifts his glass. “I prefer whatever the room will forgive.”
The answer is meant as charm. It is also truer than he likes.
Mingyu moves further into the club, accepting a drink, refusing another, accepting a third—because refusal is a power play and Mingyu enjoys power games almost as much as he enjoys being adored for pretending he does not.
He tells a story—Naples, a balcony, a woman who stole his coin purse and kissed him for the privilege—and the men around him roar with delight. He is careful with the details, wicked enough to entertain, clean enough to repeat. He knows where the line sits in this room, and he dances along it like he was born on the edge.
A man with a sharper nose and a sharper laugh—Sir Vale, new to Mingyu’s orbit—leans in with the proprietary air of someone who believes charm is an invitation. “Is it true,” Vale asks, “that you broke a duchess’s heart in Vienna?” Mingyu’s smile flashes. “It is not. I have never broken a heart.”
Vale’s brows rise. “Never?”
Mingyu’s gaze turns innocent. “I only misplace them temporarily.”
The men laugh again. They love him for it—love the ease, the irreverence, the way he makes depravity sound like sport. Vale, encouraged, nudges further. “You are becoming something of a legend,” he says. “My cousin swears you could seduce a nun.”
Mingyu’s eyes glitter—because that is the sort of line that spreads through Mayfair like flame through lace. “A nun,” he repeats, savouring it. “How very ambitious of your cousin.” Pembroke laughs from behind his shoulder. “He’s the youngest Ashbourne,” he says to Vale, as though that explains everything. “He has nothing to inherit but trouble.”
Mingyu’s smile holds—beautiful, bright, well-trained. “I inherit charm,” he says lightly. “It is far more useful than land.”
Vale’s laugh is sharp. “And what do you do with it?” Mingyu lifts his glass, tilting it as though saluting the room. “I spend it,” he says. “Freely.”
Across the room, Dalrymple shifts in his seat, jaw tight, gaze burning—but he stays where he is. Haversham murmurs something to his companions, and they all glance over, hungry for a second round of humiliation. Mingyu does not give them the satisfaction. He turns his shoulder, blocking them out as one blocks out an ugly painting. He is not here for grudges. He is here for the familiar comfort of being wanted—if only for the story of him.
Soonyoung reappears, triumphant, with a glass in each hand. “They’ve missed you,” he declares, settling close with giddy satisfaction. “One gentleman called you ‘a blessing to boredom,’ Mingyu.” Mingyu’s grin deepens. “That is the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
Pembroke shakes his head, laughing. “You will be the ruin of half the Season.” Mingyu’s eyes flick over the room—over the men who will go home to wives and sermons, over the ones who will go home to silence, over the ones who will go home to nothing but themselves. “Half?” he says. “What restraint you credit me with.”
Vale leans in again, voice dropping into the tone men use when they think they are sharing something delicious. “Speaking of the Season,” he says, “there is a new fascination.” Mingyu’s brows lift—polite, faintly bored. He pretends he is not always listening for the next story to swallow him whole. “Is there?” he asks, as though it hardly matters. Pembroke chuckles. “You’ve been gone too long, Ashbourne. You’ve missed the newest saint.” That word—saint—lands with a curious weight, as though it has been polished for effect. Mingyu tips his head, amused despite himself. “A saint,” he repeats. “In Mayfair. How novel.”
Pembroke supplies the name like the punchline to a joke.“Miss Marlowe.”
It lands softly, and yet something in the air changes—the faintest click of a latch somewhere across the city, as if a door has been opened in a house Mingyu hasn’t yet visited. Mingyu does not react. He is far too adept at not reacting. But his attention—quiet, quick, predatory in the gentlest sense—tilts. Pembroke speaks with the relish of a man delivering gossip. “Reverend Marlowe’s daughter,” he says. “Devotion made flesh. The sort of girl men speak of as though she were carved of marble and placed on an altar.”
Vale snorts. “Her father displays her like proof,” he adds. “Like virtue is a bauble he may polish and hold up to the light.”
Soonyoung makes a face. “That sounds miserable.”
It should have been enough to dull Mingyu’s curiosity. It does not. Because anything described like that—anything displayed, polished, praised for stillness—sounds like a performance. Or a cage.
Mingyu takes a slow sip, letting the taste of challenge settle upon his tongue, and then repeats her name as though testing it for sport. “Miss Marlowe.”
Pembroke watches him over the rim of his glass as he leans closer, eyes gleaming with the wicked enjoyment of a man who has found a new way to entertain himself. “They say she has never been alone with a man. Never so much as accepted a private word without her father hovering. They say she recites Scripture as easily as she breathes,” he murmurs. “And they say,” he adds, “that she’s the most virginal creature in the ton.”
There it is—not admiration, not piety: the core of the thing. A conquest framed as purity. A woman turned into an object simply by remaining untouched. Mingyu should be disgusted. Instead, he feels—terribly—something like interest bloom, bright and reckless, because boredom has always been his greatest enemy and Mayfair has just offered him a new distraction dressed in holiness. Vale gives him a look, half-taunt, half-invitation. “Surely even you wouldn’t,” he says, voice too casual to be innocent. Pembroke laughs, and the laugh carries the thrill of a wager. “No,” he agrees. “Even Ashbourne must have limits.”
Mingyu’s smile widens. “Is that what you think?” he asks. Pembroke’s brows lift. “Do you mean to tell me,” Pembroke says, “that you could draw a saint off her pedestal and have her thank you for it?”
Soonyoung groans, already weary. “Oh, here we go.”
Vale’s eyes gleam like a man watching a match meet oil. “Prove it,” he states simply.
The room around them continues—games, laughter, quiet cruelty—but in this small circle something tightens, becomes intent. Men have always liked to dare a man like Mingyu. They like to see if the legend is true. They like to borrow danger for an evening and then go home to their respectable beds. Mingyu turns his glass slowly in his hand, considering. Not her, not really. The story of her. The idea of a girl kept so carefully holy that her life must feel like a room with the doors nailed shut. The possibility of making Mayfair gasp. The delicious ease of leaning into the persona he has perfected: rake, flirt, pretty trouble, a man who takes what he wants and laughs while doing it.
He lifts his eyes to Pembroke and Vale—two men grinning like boys holding a stick over a kennel, waiting to see what bites. Mingyu’s expression remains warm, lazy, amused. “Gentlemen,” he says, “you make her sound like a locked room.” A pause—just long enough for the image to settle: a door, a key, a secret kept too carefully. Mingyu’s smirk curves, wicked at the edges. “And I’ve never met a lock I didn’t wish to pick.”
The effect is immediate. Pembroke brightens as though he’s just been handed an excellent story. Vale leans back, satisfied—challenge accepted, wager sealed. Soonyoung lets out a long, suffering breath, as if he can already see the scandal unfurling like a banner across the Season. Pembroke raises his drink first. “To trouble,” he declares—pleased as a man who will not have to carry the consequences. Vale follows at once. “To trouble,” he echoes, laughing into the rim of his glass. Soonyoung mutters, then lifts his glass anyway, resignation painted over reluctant amusement. “To trouble,” he says.
Mingyu lifts his glass last, letting the room around them hum on, ignorant of the small pact being struck at its centre. “To saints,” Mingyu replies. “May they finally learn to live.”
The room around him chortles—already composing tomorrow’s version of the tale: Mingyu Ashbourne and the reverend’s perfect daughter, vice leaning close to virtue for the amusement of a man. Mingyu lets them. But somewhere deep—beneath the laughter, beneath the mask—something in him awakens, alert and hungry and terribly alive. Not for innocence. For what innocence so often hides: a want sharp enough to cut through holiness, if only someone dares touch the weapon. He drowns it in laughter before it can become anything so dangerous as hope.
Music, in your father’s world, is only holy when it does not sound like pleasure. The charity performance is held beneath a ceiling painted with saints who seem, from the floor, to be either ascending or falling; it is difficult to tell which, and perhaps that is the trick of such ceilings—to make collapse look like devotion from a sufficient distance. Tonight, London has dressed mercy in satin.
Your father approves of this sort of event because it allows goodness to be seen. It permits charity to become a spectacle; piety to become architecture. Ladies in pale gowns carry sympathy in their posture and diamonds at their ears. Gentlemen lower their voices when speaking of abandoned children, as though quietness itself might be mistaken for depth of feeling. A list has been published. A sum has already been whispered about with satisfaction. Names matter as much as donations. More, perhaps. Your father likes that. He likes rooms where virtue may be measured publicly. He likes rooms where you may be measured too.
The journey there is performed in silence, as most things in your father’s company are. He sits opposite you in the carriage, immaculate in black, his gloves folded beside him, his Bible absent only because this is an evening of respectable society rather than open worship. Yet his authority travels with him the way incense clings to church walls. Even in a carriage lined with velvet, even beneath the muffled rattle of wheels over stone, he manages to make the air feel arranged. You sit as you have been taught to sit: straight-backed, hands folded lightly over your lap, chin neither too high nor too low, your face composed into that gentle attentiveness people call sweetness. The gown chosen for you is dove-grey, because your father distrusts colours that appear to enjoy themselves. The neckline is modest. The sleeves are neat. A narrow ribbon trims the bodice with such restraint that even the ornament seems apologetic. At your throat, there is nothing bright enough to accuse you of conceit. At your wrist, hidden beneath your sleeve, the red carnelian beads press quietly into your skin—your rosary, your burden, your small chain disguised as prayer.
“You will remain near me,” your father says at last, and though the instruction is unnecessary—though you have already arranged your entire body around obedience—the words still settle over you like an iron fence lowered into place. “Yes, Father.”
He studies you, not with tenderness but with exactness, as though checking a lock. “This is not a ball,” he continues. “Nor a place for frivolity. The purpose of the evening is charity, not display.” A small pause. “You understand.” Of course, you understand. You always understand. Understanding is rarely the issue. Endurance is. “Yes, Father.”
His gaze lingers on your face, perhaps searching for any sign that your mind has drifted into vanity, vanity being his preferred name for any spark of selfhood he did not authorise. “There will be many present,” he says. “You will answer when addressed. Briefly. Kindly. Without encouragement.” Without encouragement. As if warmth in a woman is a door left ajar. “Yes, Father.” He nods once, satisfied, and the silence returns. You watch the blurred lantern-light through the carriage glass and think, not for the first time, that London is a body in constant motion while your own life has been reduced to posture. You are being taken somewhere full of music and money and fashionable concern, and still it feels less like an arrival than an arrangement. Your thumb presses, once, against the hidden bead nearest your wrist. A prayer without words. Or perhaps only pressure.
The hall is already full when you arrive. Names meet names at the entrance with softened exclamations. Gloves are surrendered. Invitations are shown. Somewhere within, instruments are tuned—the delicate complaint of strings, the low testing breath of winds, the anticipatory murmur of a room learning how to become an audience. Your father offers his name and title with that measured gravity which makes even a simple introduction feel like a correction. People move to greet him quickly. A woman in plum silk curtsies too low. A gentleman with side-whiskers and moral enthusiasm praises the cause and looks at your father as though the Reverend Marlowe himself might have personally rescued each abandoned infant from the streets. You stand at his side, a pace behind and half-turned toward him, exactly where years of conditioning have taught you to place yourself.
You are looked at. Not stared at—staring would be vulgar—but considered, noted, approved of in glances. A daughter such as you reflects well. You know this. It is one of the first truths your father built into you: that your body, your speech, your stillness, your very expression, may all be made useful to another person’s reputation if properly arranged.
Lady Henshaw is among the first to approach, all pearls and quiet hunger. “Reverend Marlowe,” she greets, her voice smooth with the pleasure of being seen in the right place for the right reasons. “How good of you to attend. And Miss Marlowe—” her smile settles on you, “—such grace in so young a creature.” Your father inclines his head. The compliment is accepted on your behalf. You lower your gaze by the exact degree expected. “You are kind, Lady Henshaw.”
Her eyes flick over your face, your gown, the disciplined line of your posture. “And so modest,” she says softly, almost to herself. You have learned that praise, from women like her, is often only a prettier form of inventory.
Another group approaches. Another introduction. Another set of approving glances. Another remark on your father’s sermon last Sunday, on your father’s admirable devotion, on the cause tonight, on the state of the city and the mercy due its lost children. The irony is not lost on you. Abandoned children. Foundlings. A room full of titled concern raising funds for those the world has discarded.
The announcement ripples through the room not formally, but in that subtler way of good society—a bend in conversation, a turning of heads, the faint collective adjustment of attention as though half the room has been tugged by the same invisible thread. A lady, midway through a sentence, lets the words die prettily on her lips. A gentleman near the aisle shifts to gain a clearer view while pretending not to. Your father notices the change and stiffens almost imperceptibly. You do not look immediately. That, too, is training. But eventually your gaze lifts with polite delay, and there they are. The Ashbournes enter not as one body but as a constellation—related, distinct, impossible not to trace together.
The man at the front can only be the Viscount. There is something about him that settles the question before reason does: the way he carries the room without performing for it, the grave assurance in his posture, the sort of composure that stopped trying to prove itself and became authority instead. He is darkly dressed, impeccably cut, broad-shouldered without ostentation, his expression held in that line between courtesy and reserve. At his side—just enough to preserve decorum, just close enough to undo it—is his wife. The new Viscountess Ashbourne.
You know her for no better reason than that no woman in this room could be mistaken for anyone else while walking beside him like that. She is not fragile in the pretty way the ton likes its brides to be. There is something unshakable in her. Her elegance does not plead to be admired; it assumes the room will sort itself out around her, and, most irritatingly for many present no doubt, the room seems inclined to do exactly that. She turns her head as someone greets them, and the Viscount inclines toward her, as though the axis of his attention has been altered by marriage. A touch follows—brief, unconscious perhaps, the kind of touch that should not feel intimate in public and yet does. They are not making a display of devotion. Which is, perhaps, why everyone keeps staring as though they are.
A pace behind them, or perhaps merely orbiting at a distance chosen by habit, come the others.
One of the brothers—beautiful in a manner almost too deliberate to be innocent—seems to wear charm not as instinct but as strategy. There is something too smooth about him to be harmless, with a ledger-minded sort of expression in evening dress. He pauses almost immediately to acknowledge a committee member. You place him, tentatively, as the one connected to the family business. Jeonghan. If any of the brothers could step from a counting room into a ballroom without changing expression, you think it would be him.
Another remains half in shadow longer than the others, enough that people register him only after they have finished registering those more obviously brilliant. His stillness has a different quality from your father’s. Not rigid. Not corrective. Simply observant. He moves little and misses nothing. There is something almost private in the severity of his attention, as though he has not entered the room to be seen but to take measure of everyone else already in it. That one, you think, must be the silent one—Wonwoo. The brother whose name is usually spoken with a small shrug and a curious sort of respect, as though nobody can quite understand what he thinks and suspects it might matter.
Then another turns slightly, speaking to some older woman near the entrance with a smile so polished and a face so open and handsome it nearly constitutes insolence. There is a softer grace to him than to the others—not weakness, but steadiness, the kind that suggests he knows how to make space in a room rather than occupy it. He does not glitter the way Jeonghan does, nor brood the way Wonwoo does. That must be Joshua—the one whose name tends to surface in conversation with less scandal than the others and yet never without affection, as though even gossip struggles to sharpen itself against him.
And then there is one more—a flash of movement, of barely-contained life—who seems as though he might at any moment remember that standing still is an option and decline it on principle. He says something to one of his brothers and is answered with what can only be fraternal tolerance. Even from where you stand, you can sense the brightness of him, the kind of man who enters a room as though rooms are opportunities rather than obligations. Soonyoung. It is almost enough to make you smile, though you would sooner confess a crime than permit that in front of your father.
Near you, two women lower their voices into the polite hush of people pretending not to gossip. “The foundlings,” one murmurs, as though charity itself has become somehow more pointed by their attendance. “Yes—well,” the other replies, “one can hardly imagine a more suitable cause.” The words are quiet. Soft enough to pass for sympathy. Biting enough, still, to draw blood if one wished.
Then the last of them enters your notice, not because he was hidden before, but because the eye arrives at him differently. A pair of young ladies farther down the row lower their voices and yet lean perceptibly forward. One gentleman near the gallery smiles in that knowing, mildly envious way men smile at the mention of a well-liked rogue. Even Lady Henshaw’s attention, for one indecorously honest instant, strays from the patroness she is flattering. You know him at once without having ever seen him. Not by certainty. By instinct. Mingyu Ashbourne.
Not because he is louder than the others—he is not—but because he seems to move according to some private rhythm of his own. Everything about him is correct—his evening clothes immaculate, his cravat tied precisely, his posture easy in the way only very well-born or very reckless men can afford. And yet there is something in him that resists the polish. Something half-loosened. Sun-warmed. Unrepentantly alive. He is smiling at something said beside him, and though you cannot hear the words, the smile itself is enough to explain why his name arrives wrapped in warning wherever it is spoken. It is not merely that he is handsome, though he is. It is not merely that he looks charming, though he does. It is that he carries ease like a provocation. As though the rules pressing down on everyone else have slipped from his shoulders without his ever once apologising for the relief of it. You understand, suddenly and unwillingly, why the women at the sermon had not sounded wholly disapproving.
Beside you, your father says, low enough for only you to hear, “Do not stare.” Only then do you realise that you are. Heat flashes through you—part shame, part irritation, part the old childish resentment of being corrected before you have even committed a crime. “I was not, Father.” He does not answer. He merely offers his arm, and you place your hand there because refusal is not among the choices available to you. You are guided deeper into the hall.
The performance space has been arranged with all the grandeur money can purchase and taste can justify. Rows of chairs fill the central floor. The orchestra sits assembled in a half-moon of poised instruments. Music stands catch the candlelight. Programs printed on cream paper have been left on every seat. There are flowers, of course—white and pale gold, chosen to signal purity. Your father has already decided where you will sit.
The second row, slightly to the side, near enough to the front to be visible and near enough to the aisle to be managed. He seats you first and only then takes his place beside you, which is his way of ensuring the arrangement feels less like subordination. You smooth your skirts. Fold your hands. Lower your eyes to the program. Messiah. Selections to be performed in aid of the Foundling Hospital.
People continue to take their seats. Murmurs rise and fall. Programs rustle. Somewhere to your left, a young man whispers with indecorous excitement to his friend until his mother hushes him with a glance. Somewhere to your right, an elderly lady clears her throat like a woman who believes all cultural undertakings improve in proportion to her audible approval. When at last the house settles and the anticipatory murmur thins into something more disciplined, the conductor lifts his hand. And then the first notes rise.
The strings lay down their bright foundation; the winds answer; and the sound, once begun, behaves like something older than every person gathered beneath the painted saints above—older than rank, older than fashion, older even than the pieties this room has dressed itself in for the evening. You have always thought there is a species of cruelty in sacred music. It awakens. It reaches. It dares the body to feel. And then, in the same breath, it reminds you that feeling itself must be governed.
The chorus rises after—each voice submitting itself to a greater order and thus becoming, by some impossible contradiction, more piercingly human for the surrender. Sorrow is clothed in harmony. Hope is arranged. Grief becomes something lustrous enough to bear witness in public. Around you, the audience receives it with the solemn pleasure of people permitted, for one evening, to be moved respectably.
Your father sits beside you in absolute stillness. He does not cough. Does not shift. Does not betray, in any visible manner, that music may enter him at all. Yet you know the severe attention of his listening face: the narrowing about the eyes, the tightening of the mouth, the look of a man defending himself against any sensation not already sanctified by doctrine. You listen too, because not listening would be impossible. Because however carefully your father has spent the years of your girlhood attempting to train every inward motion into order, music still slips where sermons cannot. It touches without permission.
A soprano rises from the body of the chorus, and the note she holds is so brilliant, so startlingly human, that something within your chest answers before you can forbid it. Not with tears—you are not a child. Not with any blush of romantic foolishness. With ache. With that old, half-buried sense of being called toward something unnamed and then condemned for hearing it. The audience is very quiet. A page turns somewhere three rows ahead. A lady’s bracelet gives a delicate chime against the stem of her glass. Outside, faint beneath the walls and the candlelight and the velvet intentions of the evening, a carriage rolls over stone. Inside, music opens door after door.
You try not to think of freedom. You think of it anyway. Not freedom as scandal. Not freedom as some breathless impropriety whispered about over tea. Nothing theatrical. Only freedom as motion. As breath taken without anyone listening for irregularity. As thought permitted to remain your own. As laughter that does not require repentance after. The notion enters your mind with such absurd untimeliness that you nearly resent the music for having loosened it there. Your fingers tighten, once, over the hidden beads at your wrist. Then, as though the thought itself has conjured consequence, some instinct turns your head. One glance cast over the line of your shoulder, a look meant for nothing and therefore all the more dangerous for what it finds.
He is behind you. Not near enough to scandalise, not near enough even to claim significance, merely one gentleman among many gathered in polished rows beneath candlelight and charity. And yet your gaze finds him at once, as though recognition had preceded acquaintance and merely waited for sight to confirm it. Mingyu Ashbourne is not watching the conductor. He is watching you.
It cannot have been for long. Perhaps he had only that instant looked up. Perhaps your own traitorous awareness has dressed accident in meaning. Yet when your eyes meet his, his expression alters—not with insolence, not with the easy predatory satisfaction of a man pleased by being admired, but with something far more aggravating: a flicker of interest so immediate and so unforced that it feels less like being looked at than being found. You turn away first.
Heat rises along your throat with the swiftness of shame long-practised. You lower your eyes to the cream-coloured program in your lap, though the neat black print swims for a moment before it steadies. “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” The verse rises in your mind like a hand at your throat. Guard the door. Shut the gate. Still, that brief look remains—small as a spark, ridiculous as a spark, and yet capable of setting something alight if you are foolish enough to cup your hands around it. You force yourself toward the music.
A printed subscription list is passed down the line. Your father signs—his hand neither ostentatious nor mean, his donation proper enough to be admired and modest enough to be called sincere. You watch the black line of his name dry upon the page and wonder, not for the first time, whether children ever truly benefit from events like this, or whether the greater sum is paid merely to purchase the right to call oneself compassionate. The list passes on. The next selection begins.
By the time the final notes of the piece fade and the room rises into applause—the restraint cracking just enough to admit genuine admiration—your nerves feel peculiarly taut, as though the performance has not calmed you but stretched something thinner beneath the skin. People stand. Your father stands. You rise with him as naturally as a shadow rises with the body that casts it. The hall loosens at once into its second life: no longer an audience, but society again. Chairs scrape back. Programs are folded. Footmen appear with trays. Committees reform in conversational knots. Gratitude begins to circulate as visibly as the refreshments.
Your father is immediately drawn into the orbit of significance. A donor of consequence greets him. A patroness praises his continued support. Some ecclesiastical acquaintance requests a word on the morality of charitable theatricals, as though tonight’s event had not already answered the question more profitably than theology ever could. You remain where you are placed—half a pace to his side, a degree behind—answering when addressed and only then.
“You are very kind.”
“It is an honour to attend.”
“The cause is worthy.”
Small polished responses, shaped by repetition, each one giving away nothing not already approved.
A slight disturbance in the current of attention near your father’s shoulder tells you before sight does who has approached. Viscount Ashbourne.
He offers your father the formal courtesies first. His thanks for the Reverend’s attendance. A word on the evening’s success. Another, lower and more sincere, upon the cause itself. There is no theatricality in him. No effort to display virtue because he does not seem to mistrust its existence in himself. And that, perhaps, is what gives the exchange its brief, surprising weight.
Your father receives him with the kind of civility he extends only when refusal would itself become noticeable. You lower your eyes because you are not the person being addressed. Yet you are aware, sharply, of details all the same. The Viscount’s voice—deeper than your father’s, steadier, not built for laughter but capable of gentleness when turned toward it. The simple gleam of his signet ring when he gestures. The unmistakable fact that he has given generously tonight, and not because fashion required it.
You have heard enough of the Ashbourne history to understand why this cause would draw them. Foundlings raising money for foundlings. The city finds such circles poetic when they end in wealth.
Your father says something about Christian duty. The Viscount answers with a politeness so controlled it nearly disguises the weariness beneath it. They begin to speak of the hospital itself, of governance, of obligations, of the practical burdens charity prefers not to name when music is still in the air. And because your father is listening—truly listening, which is rarer than most people realise—his attention shifts just enough for your leash to lengthen. Not drop. Never drop. But lengthen.
You remain still. You would not know what else to do. There is nowhere to go. No legitimate reason to move. Only a table near the wall where lemonade gleams in crystal and little sugared cakes go untouched by all but the very young and the secretly greedy. A low warmth enters the air at your shoulder, and before surprise can form, a voice says, close enough to belong to you and yet wholly unentitled to the position: “If I am not mistaken, I have found the only person in the room not pretending to enjoy lemonade.”
You turn. He is there. Mingyu Ashbourne holds an untouched glass in his hand and another in yours before you have consented to the exchange, as though conversation is a current he has stepped into and naturally assumes you will be carried with him. He bows, though not deeply enough to suggest obedience. “Miss Marlowe.” It is not a question. He has guessed you correctly. You are vexed by the accuracy of it. “Mr. Ashbourne.”
His mouth curves, as if pleased less by being answered than by the fact that you have not fled at once. “I considered introducing myself more properly,” he says, glancing lightly toward your father and the Viscount, “but your father looks as though he would have me excommunicated for breathing near you.”
You should be horrified. You are horrified. And yet something perilously like amusement stirs beneath the horror simply because no one—no one—speaks of your father as though he might be inflated. As though he belongs to the natural world rather than to God himself. “Then you ought not breathe near me at all.”
He smiles at that—not broadly, not triumphantly, but with the bright private pleasure of a man who has just discovered that a statue has opinions. “A harsh sentence,” he says. “Especially after such a holy evening.”
You do not answer. The lemonade in your hand feels absurdly cold. Mingyu glances toward the flower arrangement, then back at you, and there is something almost infuriating in the ease with which he seems to stand in the room, as though architecture and hierarchy and expectation alike are only furniture to be moved around his own comfort. “Did you like it?” he asks. The question is so simple that you do not at first understand it. “The performance,” he clarifies. Not whether it was worthy. Not whether it served the cause. Not whether the chorus was admirable or the evening elevating or the charitable attendance sufficient. Whether you liked it. The indecency of the question nearly steals your breath.
No one asks women such things unless they mean to flirt with trivialities—ribbons, pastries, weather, dances. To ask whether you liked music, as though your pleasure in it might matter independently, feels unnervingly close to asking whether you exist somewhere beyond obedience. You answer the way you have been trained. “It was beautiful.”
One of his brows lifts. “Yes,” he says. “It was also long. And solemn. And full of men congratulating themselves. I asked whether you liked it.” You stare at him. He ought to offend you. He does offend you. Yet not cleanly enough to spare you the second, worse sensation: curiosity.
“It is not always the same thing,” he continues lightly, “beauty and liking. I have known ladies admired by entire ballrooms whom their husbands found intolerable by breakfast.”
You cannot help it. Your eyes flick to his face in startled disbelief. His own remains perfectly grave—so grave, indeed, that the line ceases to be wicked and becomes ridiculous. Which is when he ruins you. He lowers his voice, glances at the untouched cake nearest the lemonade tray, and says with the utmost solemnity: “Though I do think the sugared ones may yet save the evening. They possess more warmth than half the gentlemen present.”
You look at the little cakes. At his face. At the terrible earnestness with which he appears to place their moral significance above the sermon of the evening. And something in you—something starved, something buried, something that has been held too tightly for too long—slips its leash. A laugh escapes. It is not loud. God, no. It is scarcely more than a startled breath shaped suddenly into brightness. But it is unmistakably a laugh. Your world—built of lowered lashes and measured answers and the constant vigilance of never permitting too much life to show—falters around that one small betrayal. You hear it yourself as though from outside your own body. A laugh. Like a crime. Your hand flies to your mouth too late.
Mingyu stills. He looks at you not with self-satisfied delight, but with something far more disarming—something startled and almost tender, as though he had not expected the laugh either and now cannot quite believe it exists. “There you are,” he says softly. The words strike you with far more force than the joke that produced them. As if he has found something. As if there is, beneath all your father’s discipline and your own careful stillness, a version of you waiting to be heard. You hate him for the intimacy of it. “You are impertinent,” you say, lowering your hand. His smile returns, though quieter now. “Frequently.”
“And intolerable.”
“Less often than I deserve.” The answer comes so promptly, so smoothly, that your mouth threatens treachery again. You force it into composure.
“Miss Marlowe.” Your father does not raise his voice. He does not need to. The quietness of it is far worse—edged so finely it slices through the moment without disturbing a single other note in the room. Shock turns you before thought can. Reverend Marlowe is no longer wholly occupied by Viscount Ashbourne. The conversation has been severed with all the cold elegance of a man too disciplined to make a scene and too displeased to conceal himself. Seungcheol stands beside him, his expression unreadable save for the fact that he has understood, at once, what has occurred and what it has cost you. But it is your father’s face that arrests you.
Not anger. Not in any vulgar, visible sense. Something worse. His gaze rests first upon Mingyu, then upon you, then returns to the fact of the two of you standing near enough to suggest familiarity, near enough to suggest ease, near enough to make the blood in your veins turn suddenly to ice. Mingyu straightens at once.
Whatever lightness had softened him before is banked. Disciplined. He inclines his head with a courtesy suddenly exact. Your father gives him less. “Mr. Ashbourne.” The words are polite enough for the space. Cold enough for you. Mingyu answers in kind. “Reverend Marlowe.”
A beat passes. In it lives every whispered warning from the pews, every sermon sharpened by implication, every instinct in you already recoiling toward punishment. Then your father turns to you. “We are leaving.”
No explanation. No room for protest. No raised tone. Yet the sentence lands with the full weight of command. Your breath catches. For one absurd instant, you are aware of Viscount Ashbourne standing there, of his presence becoming witness by accident, of the unbearable mortification of being seen at the edge of discipline by a family whose very existence seems to offend and fascinate your father in equal measure. You lower your gaze at once. “Yes, Father.”
Only then does Reverend Marlowe conclude the interruption with the bare minimum of social grace. He inclines his head toward the Viscount, offers some final, measured phrase regarding the evening’s admirable purpose, and receives the Viscount’s reply without allowing even the shadow of disorder to show upon his face. Then his hand comes to your arm. To anyone watching, it is guidance. To you, it is a warning given flesh. His fingers close just firmly enough over your elbow to make the meaning plain.
You do not dare look at Mingyu again. Not now. Not with your father’s hand upon you and consequence moving toward you with the dreadful certainty of a carriage set on rails. Yet as Reverend Marlowe turns you toward the exit and steers you from the hall with a speed only barely restrained into respectability, you feel the echo of that one impossible laugh still caught somewhere beneath your ribs—bright, illicit, living— like contraband you have not yet learned how to surrender.
By the time you return home, your father’s displeasure has shed whatever public shape it was obliged to wear and become something infinitely more dangerous. He says nothing in the entrance hall, nothing while your cloak is taken, nothing as he mounts the stairs. It is not until he has led you, not toward your chamber, but toward his study, that your pulse begins to beat in hard, distinct strokes beneath your skin.
The room is exactly as it always is—shelves lined with theology and commentary, desk squared to the carpet, candlesticks trimmed, Bible laid where it ought to be. There is the prayer kneeler in the corner, the straight-backed chair near the hearth, the faint smell of lamp oil and paper and extinguished fire that belongs only to this room where man mistakes control for righteousness. He closes the door behind you, and the sound lands ike a lock.
When he tells you to kneel, your body obeys before your mind has completed its recoil. The rug beneath your knees is thin enough to remind, thick enough that he may still call what follows small. Small, in your father’s lexicon, has never meant merciful. It has only ever meant invisible. You fold yourself down with care—knees together, back straight, hands in your lap—while he goes to the desk and opens the Bible with those calculated fingers of his. The candlelight sharpens the severe line of his profile. He does not look at you immediately. That, too, is part of it. He likes a punishment to gather itself before it falls.
At length, his voice cuts through the room. “Repeat James,” he commands, and your lips part, the words rising because they have been made to live inside you. “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.” He does not let the verse settle before telling you to continue, and so you do. “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.”
The word enticed seems to hang there, newly sharpened by the memory of lemonade, candlelight, and a laugh that was never meant to escape. Your father does not look up from the page and bids you say it again. Then again. Then once more, until the verse begins to loosen from meaning and become rhythm only—the way repeated correction often does, sanding language down until it ceases to illuminate and serves only to bruise. Your knees feel a gradual ache. The carnelian beads hidden at your wrist burn quietly against your pulse.
When at last he closes the Bible, he does not raise his voice. He merely asks, in the manner of catechism, what a woman’s first defence is. “Discipline, Father,” you answer. He asks for the second and third, and you give him “modesty” and “silence” in turn, because you have known these responses so long they sit in your mouth like prayers. He inclines his head once. “And what did you fail in tonight?”
The truest answer lodges like a stone in your throat: that you failed in letting something living in you be heard. But that is not the answer he seeks, and so you give him the one he does. “Silence, Father.” He asks what came before that, and you answer “discipline.” Before that? “Modesty.” The order scarcely matters; what matters is the confession. Your father is not interested in sequence. He is interested in surrender.
He steps nearer—not enough to touch, but near enough that his shadow reaches you first and lies itself across the floorboards. “A woman’s reputation,” he announces in that gravely even tone, “may be ruined first in sound. A laugh. A tone. A response too eager. Men hear invitation where foolish girls imagine they have merely been pleasant.”
Pleasant. How swiftly, in his mouth, even warmth is made suspect. You keep your eyes lowered and answer “Yes, Father,” because there is no utility in refusing a truth he has no intention of allowing you to contest. When he tells you that you are not foolish, the words ought perhaps to resemble mercy. They do not. “No, Father,” you reply, and his answer comes at once: “Then do not behave like one.”
He moves to the kneeler and returns with a square of rough cloth folded once over itself. You know it before he places it upon your outstretched hands. There are objects in this house whose purpose is so constant they become as eloquent as law. The cloth scratches through your gloves; then he sets the Bible upon it. The weight is not unbearable. That is the point. You are told you will hold it and pray for discernment, and you answer “Yes, Father” as the burden settles itself first into your palms, then your wrists, then the line of your shoulders. Your father returns to his desk. “Aloud,” he says, and so you begin.
Not your own prayer. Confession first. Protection from temptation. Then at last he directs you toward the psalm he has favoured since your twelfth year. “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” Again. “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” Again.
The minutes cease to move after that. They lengthen and soften at the edges until they become something more like weather than time. Your arms grow heavier by degrees. Your knees throb steadily beneath the fabric of your skirts. The Bible reveals its full shape to your body only slowly: first as weight, then as drag, then as a demand not to tremble. From the desk comes the quiet scratch of your father’s pen, for even your punishment need not interrupt his usefulness. The humiliation of that—of being made to strain and pray and hold while he writes as though one more letter mattered no less than your correction—settles over you almost more heavily than the book itself.
Once, your right hand trembles. He does not even look up when he tells you to steady it. You do. You always do. The heat gathering at the corners of your eyes is not quite tears, only pressure; you blink it away before it may become visible. Again the prayer leaves your mouth, and again, until the words fracture and reveal their rawest shape beneath the piety. Make me easier to govern. Make me less audible. Make me less alive where I ought to be.
Yet, beneath the prayer—because the mind is its own treacherous country and your father cannot patrol every field of it, no matter how fervently he believes he should—another voice returns, warm with amusement and impossible now to unhear. There you are.
You hate yourself for the comfort of it. You hate him for having spoken it. You hate the fact that even here, on your knees, under Scripture, beneath your father’s eye, some small hidden part of you reaches toward that remembered tone as though toward heat. You pray louder.
Finally, your father rises. He comes toward you and lifts the Bible from your hands, and the sudden absence of weight is so abrupt it leaves your arms suspended before you may lower them into your lap. Needles of relief and pain race through your wrists. You do not flex your fingers. You do not give your body away. He does not yet tell you to stand.
Instead, he looks down at you and asks, “What will you do if Mr. Ashbourne addresses you again?” Your throat tightens around the answer before you shape it. “I will withdraw, Father.”
He studies you for a long moment, perhaps searching for sincerity, perhaps contenting himself with obedience. Finally: “You may rise.” Your knees protest when you stand, but you keep the wince from your face. Years of practice. Years of necessity.
He closes the Bible with finality. “You will take no supper tonight,” he tells you, and though the punishment is small, it carries all the force because it is not hunger he intends, but reminder. “And tomorrow morning, before breakfast, you will recite James again,” he adds. You answer as expected. “Yes, Father.”
He dismisses you with a turn of his hand. You leave the study on unsteady legs and close the door behind you without sound. Your chamber receives you exactly as you left it—neat, still, obedient in every corner. The bed has been turned down. The washstand prepared. The curtains half-drawn against the night.
You remove your gloves slowly. The marks the beads have left upon your skin are faint but visible, small red impressions where carnelian pressed into your wrist. Higher up, beneath silk, your father’s fingers have already left their deeper ache. Your knees throb. Your palms bear the shape of the Bible’s edge. Yet when you sit at the vanity and stare at your own face in the mirror, nothing is obvious. That is the point of small punishments. No bruise another person might be required to notice. No tear-swollen eyes. No disorder dramatic enough to testify for you. Only a little more caution fitted beneath the skin. You ought, perhaps, to feel corrected. Instead, you feel divided.
The obedient daughter sits here now in dove-grey silk, one pin at a time loosened from her hair. The other girl—the one who laughed—is nowhere to be seen and yet somehow more present than ever. You hate her for emerging. You hate him for hearing her. There you are.
You shut your eyes. No. You do not belong to a sentence spoken by a man you have met once. Then, so quickly it startles you upright, another thought flashes behind it, bright and terrible as a struck match in the dark: you do not belong to your father either.
When you open your eyes again, your own face in the mirror looks like it belongs to someone else. Because now that you know what it is to answer without permission, to be seen not as proof but as presence, you cannot unknow it. And desire, in your father’s theology, begins not with action but with memory.
Later, when you kneel at your bedside—because distress seeks the posture—you bow your head and pray for the things you have always been told are worth praying for: forgiveness, restraint, silence, the removal of temptation, the forgetting of one man’s face, the forgetting of your own laughter. But when you finally lie down, the house dark around you and your body sore in all the small, hidden places discipline favours, it is not Scripture that returns first. It is his voice. There you are.
You turn onto your side and press the heel of your hand hard against your mouth, as if you might physically punish the shape of future laughter before it can betray you again. Sleep comes slowly. And somewhere in the long darkness between one hour and the next, horror arrives with the knowledge of it: you want to hear him say something foolish again. You want to hate it. You want, impossibly, to laugh.
The church bells drag Mingyu out of sleep with all the tenderness of a creditor pounding at the door.
For one suspended, fog-thick moment, he does not know where he is—only the heavy velvet drapes admitting a thin wash of morning light; the banked warmth of a fire gone mostly to ember; the scent of extinguished candles, perfume, and sweet sweat gone faint with the passing of hours; the pleasant ache in his body that belongs to a night spent too fully to be called restful. There is silk beneath one hand and skin beneath the other. A ribbon is looped somehow around his wrist. His cravat has died elsewhere in the room with all the dignity he ever truly expected of it. The bell tolls again, dragging its iron across the morning as if God Himself has developed a personal interest in Mingyu’s schedule. He opens one eye.
A bare shoulder lies half across his chest, the curve of it marked where a mouth—his, certainly—has been less reverent than the church presently demands of all gentlemen. Dark hair fans across his arm and pillow both, tangled through with a strand of pearls that have fared no better than his cravat. At his other side, a warm leg remains draped over his thigh in the soft, proprietorial weight of someone who fell asleep still bargaining with pleasure. One woman breathes against the hollow of his shoulder with the deep and unguarded calm of satisfied exhaustion. The other has taken half the blanket and not one ounce of shame with it.
There is a stocking hanging from the edge of the canopy. A glass overturned on the bedside table. A candle guttered to a wax lake on the mantel. His shirt is on the floor. One of the women’s stays has been flung over the back of a chair with the dramatic despair of a heroine from a novel, midway through Chapter Twenty. Mingyu stares at the ceiling and lets the bells finish telling him what sort of man he is. Late.
He groans, though without conviction, and the movement stirs the woman against his chest. She makes a sleepy sound of displeasure and lifts her head only enough to narrow one eye at him through the blur of sleep. “If that expression means regret,” she murmurs, voice rough, “I shall be offended.”
He turns his head toward her and smiles at once, because smiling is easier than repentance and infinitely more useful. Then he leans down and kisses her—slow enough to be an apology, brief enough to remain magnetic.
“That is cruel,” the other mutters from somewhere amid the linen, one arm flung over her eyes. “If you are kissing her, I must object to being excluded.” Mingyu laughs, low and rough with fatigue, and obliges with the helpless fairness of a man who has made a career of distributing pleasure. He leans across the sheet’s chaos and kisses her, too. Her hand slips behind his neck as though last night has not yet fully ended and might, with the proper encouragement, be persuaded to continue. The bells disagree.
He pulls back with a sigh that is mostly theatrical and swings his legs over the side of the bed. The floor is cold. His head is not precisely aching, but it is not thankful either. He reaches for his shirt and finds instead a stocking, one glove, and another ribbon from someone’s stays. The women watch him with increasing amusement as he begins excavating his clothing from the room as if from the site of a very elegant crime. “You are not leaving,” says the dark-haired one, propping herself up on one elbow. The sheet falls low across her stomach. “It is criminally early.”
“On a Sunday,” adds the other, appalled on principle now that the hour has made itself known. “No decent man is conscious on a Sunday.”
Mingyu locates his trousers, triumph in motion, and steps into them while hopping toward his waistcoat. “I have never claimed decency,” he says.
The women exchange a look over the wreckage of the bed—one of those silent female conversations men are permitted to witness only because women know men never fully understand what has passed between them. “That,” one says dryly, “is the first honest thing you’ve said since midnight.”
He grins. It is automatic, that grin. Sunlight where there ought perhaps to be apology. He fastens buttons with the brisk inattention of a man dressing not for dignity but for speed, shoving his hands through his hair, locating his cravat by smell rather than visual, abandoning any hope of true neatness the moment the bells ring again. He should go home first. Bathe. Change. Present something to God and Mayfair that at least resembles a gentleman rather than a rake given limbs. Instead, he snatches up his coat, finds his boots, and begins assembling himself from last night’s remains.
The dark-haired woman watches him with narrowed, entertained eyes.
“Where are you going?” she asks. He should lie. It would be simpler. Some men become more honest in vice. Mingyu has always preferred to spend honesty where it might cause the greatest confusion. “Church,” he says.
The room goes very still. Then both women laugh so suddenly and completely that the sound of it follows him as he wrestles one cuff into place. “You?” says the fair one, incredulous. “Darling, did someone die?”
The question hits harder than she intended.
His hands still for the briefest of moments on the button at his wrist.
His mother’s face rises from whatever part of him stores old grief with old weather: the cool severity of her profile, the immaculate line of her collar, the chapel at Wrotham heavy with flowers and men pretending it was not the strongest force in their lives they were burying. Mingyu smiles before his silence can grow teeth. “Not today,” he says lightly.
One of them catches his wrist as he reaches for his gloves. The other traces a lazy finger down his side, as though the bells are not still tolling. “If that means you are coming back later,” the dark-haired one says, “I may forgive the sacrilege.”
“You may certainly try,” he answers. The fair one laughs into the pillow and reaches for him again. He bends just enough to kiss her goodbye once more, because it costs him nothing and leaves things easier than apology ever does.
He splashes water over his face from the basin with no regard for precision, runs damp fingers back through his hair, and accepts that whatever he looks like now, it will have to pass for respectable. There is no time for returning home. No time for self-invention. Only the strange urgency beating beneath his ribs with each receding bell note.
He should not be hurrying to church because of a girl. He is not hurrying because of a girl. He is hurrying because men at White’s had challenged him. Because a challenge, once thrown, ought to be met with elegance. Because Reverend Marlowe’s daughter has become an excellent way to relieve the city of boredom and himself of any inconvenient introspection. That is what he tells himself. It is, like most of Mingyu’s best lines, only partially true. Then he is out into the corridor, into the thin bite of early morning, into the full and immediate absurdity of racing from a night like that toward a pew.
You are kneeling. Not with any theatrical bloom of piety meant to turn heads. That would almost be easier to dismiss. No—you kneel like you have done it too often for the motion to mean choice any longer. Spine straight. Hands folded. Head bowed with such exactness it no longer looks like humility.
Where you were dove-grey at the concert, you are now in church colours more severe—soft cream perhaps, or pale morning blue muted by shadow, everything about you arranged. The line of your neck is modest. The turn of your head obedient. Your mouth, which he now knows is capable of laughter, is held in perfect stillness. You look, from a distance, exactly what men like Reverend Marlowe would be proud to have made of a daughter. And Mingyu—who came here prepared to amuse himself with conquest—feels something shift under the neat structure of his plan.
Because now that he sees you here, in the place that made you, the thing no longer feels simple. He had thought it was a challenge. He sees, instead, an apology. Not once offered. Lived in. Kneeling like you were born to ask forgiveness for taking up space. The thought enters him and goes deeper than he means to allow.
From the pulpit, Reverend Marlowe is speaking of temptation in the way such men always do—with too much intimacy for true innocence and too much certainty for real mercy. Mingyu catches fragments only because he is not trying to catch them, and perhaps that is how sermons most effectively wound.
“The flesh invites ruin where discipline has not first been laid.”
“The appearance of virtue must be guarded.”
“A woman’s modesty is her shelter.”
Once, while the congregation bows their heads in prayer, you press your thumb faintly against the inside of your sleeve as though feeling for something hidden there. A seam? A wound? He cannot tell. But the gesture is intimate enough to unsettle him. He thinks of your laugh.
He thinks of the immediate terror after it. He thinks, unexpectedly, of his own mother—not her face exactly, though he remembers that well enough, but the sensation of loving someone formidable enough that the world mistook discipline for control. Of being shaped by expectation so completely that even rebellion grew in the shape of performance. Of learning very young that one may be grateful to be chosen and still ache beneath the conditions of being kept.
The organ rises. The congregation answers. Mingyu remains at the back, hands in his gloves, feeling suddenly as though the church has trapped him in a far less amusing sort of intimacy than he came seeking. This is supposed to be sport. He reminds himself of that as Reverend Marlowe speaks on and you kneel on. A lock. A challenge. A lovely, impossible thing to put his wit against. That is all. Then the service ends, and you stand, and Mingyu realises he has not heard a word of the final prayer.
Church releases people differently than a ballroom.
No instant brightening. No rush into appetite. No laughter flashing openly across rows of chairs. Instead, the congregation unfolds in careful degrees, reverence loosening at the seams into social order. Hands reach for gloves. Prayer books are closed. Murmurs begin, each one initially shaped to still sound like worship. The respectable filters of society slide back into place.
At the front, Reverend Marlowe is immediately claimed by those eager to be seen claiming him—parishioners with earnest concerns, widows with carefully folded questions, men who enjoy discussing doctrine when others can overhear. You remain beside him, exactly where he expects you to remain, gaze lowered, body arranged into usefulness.
Mingyu waits. Not because patience is his virtue. Because he has learned, in rooms like these and far worse, that direct pursuit is rarely elegant if a little gravity will do the work. He lets the congregation thin around the edges. Speaks lightly to an old gentleman near the back who looks scandalised to find an Ashbourne in church at all. Smiles at a matron who clearly intends to report his attendance to half of Mayfair before luncheon. Offers an answer, charming and sufficiently vague, when asked if he has returned to grace. “Returned to London,” he says. “Grace remains to be negotiated.” She clucks. He grins. The transaction is successful.
Reverend Marlowe is caught by a vestryman with a ledger and a face that suggests eternal distrust of joy. You stand half a pace aside, no longer the object of direct attention and yet still held by its shadow. You do not wander. Of course, you do not wander. But the leash slackens by inches, and in rooms governed by severe men, inches are opportunity enough.
Mingyu positions himself not in your path but near enough that coincidence may be politely argued by anyone desperate to preserve the fiction. When you appear beside the courtyard steps, the change in light catches you fully and he has the odd, inappropriate thought that you look younger outside your father’s sanctuary and older in the face than you ought to. There is no one directly beside you. Reverend Marlowe remains detained within.
Mingyu steps forward. Not too close. Never cornering. He has cornered women before, socially if not physically, in the harmless-seeming ways handsome men are allowed to do because the room assumes their intentions are a form of flattery. He knows precisely how it looks. He knows how to weaponise ease. But something about the way you held yourself in prayer has rearranged the game. Careless pressure feels wrong here. Not chivalrously wrong—he would laugh at himself if that were the motive. Intuitively wrong. You are strung tight enough already. Any harder a touch and the whole instrument may snap. So he stops at a respectful distance and bows as though this meeting is less improbable than both of you know it to be. “Miss Marlowe.”
Your gaze lifts. Recognition comes first. Then caution. Then something he likes far better and should not—annoyance. Good. Annoyance is alive. Annoyance answers back.
“Mr. Ashbourne.” There it is again—that small exact way you say his name as though you would rather it not have become familiar to your mouth. He smiles. “I begin to suspect we are destined to meet only in worthy places.” Your mouth does the faintest thing, almost not there at all. “Then perhaps you should avoid them.” The answer delights him out of proportion.
“I have tried,” he says. “The worthy places keep insisting.”
You should walk away. He knows you should. Every line of your posture knows it too. And yet you remain where you are, gloved hands folded, shoulders squared beneath all that careful modesty, looking at him as if you cannot decide whether he is a nuisance or a symptom. He glances back at the church doors. “You make the place look more severe than it already is.” A faint crease appears between your brows. “That is an odd compliment.”
“It was not a compliment.” He pauses, lets the edge of the smile return. “Those are usually more successful.”
You should not be listening. You are. He can see it in the minute stillness you have not yet turned into escape. The churchyard moves around you—parishioners drifting past, greetings exchanged, wheels shifting in the street—but the sound seems to recede slightly at the edges while he watches you decide whether politeness is stronger than instinct. “Why are you here?” you ask at last. A dangerous question, because the true answer has changed since dawn, and he would prefer not to inspect that too closely. So he chooses a prettier lie. “Repentance.”
Your eyes sharpen at once, and for one glorious second, he thinks you might laugh again. Instead, you say, “You do not look sorry.”
Mingyu presses a hand lightly to his chest. “You wound me.”
“I imagine it takes more than that.” It does, and does not, and he cannot decide if your saying so is insult or insight. He tilts his head, studying you. There are faint shadows beneath your eyes. Not enough for others, perhaps. Enough for him. Your composure today looks less effortless than deliberate, as though it cost you sleep to rebuild it after the concert. The thought lands uncomfortably. He ignores it with practised speed.
“I was told church improves a man.”
“By whom?”
“Men less entertaining than me.”
Your gaze flicks away, then back, as if you do not trust yourself to look at him for too long and dislike him for making that necessary. Mingyu leans just slightly, not closing the distance, merely shifting the angle of attention. “And you?” he asks. “Do you come willingly?” The question leaves his mouth before he decides whether he should ask it. It is not flirtation. Not exactly. It is too direct for flirtation and too curious for safety. You go very still. Then, with that careful tone people use when stepping around a precipice, you say, “Does it matter?”
There it is. A touch of the hidden thing. He should make a joke. Smooth it over. Return to the game. Instead, because some damned stubborn honest streak in him refuses to behave once fully provoked, he says, quieter, “It might.”
You look at him then—not at his cravat, not at his smile, not at the charming broad outline of him that London has taught itself to consume without chewing. At him. And all at once, he has the sharp bodily sensation of being seen too clearly by a woman who has been ordered all her life not to look directly at anything dangerous. It is exhilarating. It is also not at all what he came here for. He reaches reflexively for mischief like a man reaching for his coat in rain. “At the very least,” he says, letting warmth back into the words, “I wanted to know whether you laugh in church as well as concert halls.”
The flush that rises is quick and real enough to satisfy the worst parts of him immediately. There. That is easier. A challenge again. A game. A little bright offence in your face, and he can breathe properly. “I do not laugh in church.”
“Pity.”
“Mr. Ashbourne—”
Your mouth tightens, and he can hear the warning in the use of his name.
The pleasure of this is not simply that you resist. It is that you resist with intelligence. Most women of his acquaintance are either too accustomed to flirtation to be surprised by him or too deeply invested in appearing unschooled by it to do anything but blush and retreat. Miss Marlowe does neither. You hold yourself against him with the concentration of someone fighting for an inch of ground she was never promised. It makes him want to push. Just enough to see where the walls are sound and where they only look it. He softens his smile before it can turn mocking. “Forgive me. I forget sometimes that not everyone treats conversation as a blood sport.”
“Some of us were not trained to.”
The answer lands so neatly that he nearly misses what lives beneath it.
Not taught. Not raised. Trained. Mingyu feels, with a flicker of something too close to understanding, the shape of your life hidden inside that one choice of word. And then the church doors open wider, and Reverend Marlowe steps toward you.
His black coat falls severely around him. His face is controlled into civility, which makes the intelligence in his eyes all the more cutting. Men like this do not erupt; they reduce. As he approaches, Mingyu sees several things at once. Your silence. The Reverend’s gaze flicking over the distance between you, measuring it as if proximity itself is a moral substance. The fact that his own instinct—to meet disapproval with wit, to laugh first and thereby own the room—rises immediately and is, for the first time in recent memory, checked before it reaches his mouth. Reverend Marlowe stops near enough to claim his daughter without touching her. “Mr. Ashbourne.” His tone makes the name sound like a smear of dirt on boots. Mingyu bows. “Reverend.” The older man’s eyes rest on him with all the warmth of a shut gate. “I had not realised the church had broadened its welcome so far.”
Mingyu should smile. He usually would. He should offer something about grace, repentance, prodigals, all the lovely ironies available to a man who has spent the night as he has and the morning as he has chosen to. He almost does. Then he glances at you. Shame has risen in your face so quickly and so silently that it chills him more effectively than the morning air. As if his reputation has splashed onto you merely by standing near.
And Mingyu knows exactly what reputation has reached Reverend Marlowe’s ears—cards, women, the discreet houses that are not truly discreet—because he knows what sort of man he seems here in morning light against a Reverend’s daughter’s careful stillness—because he suddenly understands that if he jokes now, the joke will not land on the father but on you—Mingyu does something nearly incongruous. He goes careful.
“My attendance is irregular,” he says mildly. “But I was under the impression salvation encourages persistence.”
The Reverend’s mouth does not move. “Salvation and spectacle are often confused by men who have not the seriousness to distinguish them.”
That one would sting more if Mingyu had not heard its variations since boyhood. Pretty boy. Spare son. Charming waste. Delightful until consequence. London has always found him easiest to adore when simultaneously preparing to despise him. Still, he feels the old defensive wit rising again. Still, he checks it. Because your gaze has lowered again and your gloved hands are now too tightly clasped. “No doubt,” Mingyu says. “I am frequently improved by the opinions of my elders.”
Reverend Marlowe turns to his daughter. “We are expected elsewhere.” Not come along. Not shall we. Expected. As though duty itself has sent for her and disobedience would offend heaven. “Yes, Father.” Your answer is immediate, careful, and it irritates Mingyu disproportionately—no, not the answer, but the speed with which you erase yourself into it. The Reverend’s hand comes to your elbow. The gesture is perfectly respectable. Mingyu dislikes it on sight. He should leave it there. Let you go. Let the Reverend imagine victory too early. That would be wiser. It would also be dull. So before prudence can intervene, Mingyu says, with just enough lightness to remain plausibly harmless: “Miss Marlowe, if worthy places continue to insist on our meeting, I shall be forced to develop a better reputation.”
Your head turns, just slightly. It is the tiniest movement. But he catches it. Reverend Marlowe’s fingers tighten visibly at your sleeve. “That would require a foundation, Mr. Ashbourne,” the Reverend says. Mingyu meets his gaze.
There are men who can terrify with volume and men who can terrify with force. Reverend Marlowe is of the more pernicious species—the ones who have weaponised calm so thoroughly that anger becomes almost unnecessary.
“Then perhaps,” Mingyu says, “I am overdue construction.” He means it as irony. He hears, even as it leaves his mouth, the dangerous possibility that he does not entirely. Reverend Marlowe does not grant him the courtesy of a response. He turns his daughter fully toward the waiting carriage. That should be the end. It almost is.
You step forward. Mingyu moves back half a pace as good manners require. The churchyard gravel shifts underfoot. A lady passes on the path behind them, forcing the alignment of bodies into the briefest, narrowest adjustment. Your hand brushes his. A gloved slide of fingers against his knuckles, so slight it could be nothing. An accident born of morning crowds and movement and too many sleeves too close together.
It does not matter. The sensation is minute and immediate and entirely disproportionate in effect. Not heat—there are warmer things than this. Not shock exactly—he has been touched by women a hundred times with far less cloth and far more intention. But this is different for the absurd reason that it means almost nothing and therefore means far too much.
He looks at you. You do not look back. Yet he sees the smallest tightening at the corner of your mouth, the faint stutter in the line of your breath before you master it. Then you are moving on, the Reverend’s hand guiding, the carriage swallowing you both in black-painted order and polished restraint. The door closes. The wheels begin. And Mingyu stands in the churchyard with the morning all around him and the impression of one gloved touch lingering across his hand like a mark nobody else can see.
He should laugh. He should turn on his heel, make some wicked remark to the nearest acquaintance, and go in search of late breakfast, stronger coffee, and perhaps Jeonghan to make all of this sound amusing. Instead, he remains where he is until the carriage has disappeared into Sunday traffic. People move around him. A cluster of parish ladies descend the steps with the self-importance of women carrying both gossip and hymn verses. A gentleman nods and remarks upon the sermon. Mingyu answers something smooth enough to dismiss him and barely hears himself say it. His mind has snagged.
Not on the Reverend—men like Reverend Marlowe are everywhere, though usually less honest in their cruelties. Not even on the challenge, though the challenge is still there: prove the impossible thing less impossible than the city thinks. It snags on the look of shame on your face when your father named him corruption without using the exact word. On the stillness with which you absorbed it. On the possibility that he, Mingyu Ashbourne, London’s well-tailored problem, might accidentally have hurt you simply by arriving as himself. The notion is both irritating and unfamiliar. Mingyu dislikes unfamiliar notions.
He walks his horse rather than mounting immediately, taking the long way down the church lane towards Ashbourne Hall. The bells have finished. The morning is fully underway now—vendors, carriages, children too scrubbed for comfort, ladies discussing luncheon. He passes a window and catches his own reflection in the glass: slightly wind-roughened hair, tie imperfect, coat not quite sitting right at one shoulder because he pulled it on in haste, mouth set in thought when he would far rather see a grin there. He looks as if church has done something to him. Disgusting. He fixes the mouth into something easier and swings up into the saddle.
Ashbourne Hall on a late Sunday morning has its own peculiar softness. The house is quieter than on business days, its bustle gentled rather than gone. Somewhere downstairs, a servant is laying breakfast. Somewhere else a fire is being built. Doors open and close without haste. The family settles into itself differently on Sundays—some reading, some escaping, some pretending rest is a moral achievement rather than merely a temporary absence of obligation. Mingyu hands off his coat and gloves and goes first not to breakfast but to his room, because he cannot with dignity sit across a table from Lady Whitlock while still faintly carrying last night’s scents beneath his clothes.
A valet has prepared fresh water. Shirts have been laid out. Boots aligned. His life, once he enters a house properly run, is always being tidied on his behalf by men who know better than to comment on what state he returns in. Mingyu is half grateful, half resentful, and wholly dependent on it. As he strips off the clothes that have carried him from scandal to sermon, he catches himself replaying the churchyard conversation with embarrassing accuracy. Do you come willingly? Why had he asked that?
It was too pointed. Too curious. Not nearly enough like the sort of smiling nonsense he usually throws at difficult women when intending only to charm them. The plan, insofar as there had been one, required wit and patience, not interest. Interest is dangerous. Interest has depth. Depth leads men to do foolish things, like attend church in yesterday’s sins because a girl laughed once in a concert hall.
He drags a comb through damp hair, splashes clean water over his throat, and tells his reflection sternly that he is being ridiculous. He is curious. Curiosity and conquest have always made excellent companions in him. He likes stories that resist finishing themselves. He likes women who are not too easy to read. Miss Marlowe simply happens to be a finer puzzle than most. And perhaps, a quieter voice suggests, a lonelier one. He ignores that voice so completely he almost deserves praise.
By the time he comes down to the breakfast room, washed and reassembled, the household has mostly gathered. Lady Whitlock is there, seated with a cup of tea and a small stack of correspondence that she is sensibly pretending not to prioritise over food. Seungcheol sits near her, reading a letter and looking as if he distrusts every word in it. Joshua is speaking softly with Wonwoo about a matter related to the shop. Jeonghan is buttering toast with the concentration of a man preparing sustenance. Soonyoung has arrived before him and is already on his second helping of something sweet.
Lady Whitlock looks up as Mingyu enters and, because she is far too observant for his own comfort, takes him in with one swift glance that notes the changed clothes, the newly washed face, and perhaps the faint remainder of whatever expression he has not yet masked. “Well,” she says lightly, “a resurrection. We had begun to fear the church kept you.”
Mingyu bows toward her chair. “It tried.”
Jeonghan snorts into his coffee. Soonyoung, traitor that he is, grins like a lit fuse. “He went for the saint,” he announces to no one who asked. Joshua closes his eyes briefly. Wonwoo looks up only enough to prove he heard and would rather not. Seungcheol lowers his letter with deadly slowness. Lady Whitlock does not so much as blink. “Did he now?” She asks. Mingyu reaches for coffee before he answers, because caffeine is preferable to familial scrutiny. “I went to church,” he says. “The rest is my brother’s embroidery.”
“Your brother rarely embroiders,” Lady Whitlock replies. “He sets fires and calls them decoration.” Soonyoung beams at the accuracy. Seungcheol’s gaze remains on Mingyu; older-brother suspicion sharpened by knowledge of exactly what sort of plans his younger siblings call harmless.
“Her father dislikes me,” Mingyu says, because stating the obvious sometimes moves a room along. “That was guaranteed before you arrived,” Jeonghan murmurs. Mingyu pours cream into his coffee. A laugh touches Lady Whitlock’s mouth before she reins it in. Seungcheol, however, does not smile. “Leave the girl alone.”
Mingyu looks up. There are many ways an eldest brother may speak. This is not amusement. Not advisory teasing. Not even the mild contempt reserved for predictable bad behaviour. This is a warning. Under other circumstances Mingyu would answer it with pure insolence just to hear the resulting argument. Today, he finds himself unexpectedly defensive. “I haven’t touched her.” The sentence lands harder than intended, weighted by truths nobody here asked for. Jeonghan’s brows lift. Joshua glances discreetly down. Soonyoung, for once, has the good sense not to grin. Lady Whitlock watches him with that infuriatingly intelligent calm of hers, as though she is reading not the words but the truth beneath them. Seungcheol’s gaze remains fixed. “That is a very low standard.”
It should anger Mingyu. Instead, it does, annoyingly, shame him. He covers the sensation with a sip of coffee and lets the warmth buy him half a second. “I only meant—” He stops. Reconsiders. “She is not what the men at White’s think.”
That gets everyone’s attention. Wonwoo is the one who speaks first. “And what do the men at White’s think?”
“A wager. A prize. A saint to ruin for sport.”
Lady Whitlock’s fingers still on the handle of her cup. Seungcheol’s jaw tightens visibly. Joshua says nothing, but the silence around him changes texture—the way still water changes when something has been dropped into it. Jeonghan, who has likely known this from the start because Jeonghan knows too much, studies Mingyu with open interest.
“And what do you think?” Lady Whitlock asks. There it is again—that damned ability she has to ask a question in such a way that the joke routes vanish and only truth, or a convincing counterfeit of it, will do. Mingyu sets down his cup. He could say a challenge. It would be neat. Expected. Close enough to his own understanding to satisfy without exposing anything vulnerable. So naturally, he hears himself say something else. “I think she is watched all the time.”
No one answers immediately. Lady Whitlock’s expression shifts into recognition. Jeonghan looks at Mingyu as if weighing whether this is genuine perception or merely the latest angle of the game. Wonwoo, inscrutable as ever, gives nothing away. Soonyoung looks unusually subdued. Joshua exhales once through his nose. Seungcheol breaks the silence. “Do not make her pay for your boredom.”
Mingyu’s instinct flares at once. “You think so little of me?” Seungcheol meets his gaze without flinching. “I think exactly enough of you to know charm can be careless.”
That lands. Because the thing Mingyu cannot say—will not say—is that Seungcheol is right. Charm is his first language and, too often, his bluntest weapon. He has spent years making himself into a performance that lets him move untouched through rooms that would otherwise ask what he is for. He knows how often women have mistaken his attention for more than it is. He knows how often he has preferred them dazzled rather than truly seen. And now he has looked at one woman kneeling in church and felt the shape of his own carelessness before committing it. It is intolerable. It also means he cannot honestly promise to stay away. Not because he intends harm. Because he intends pursuit.
He smiles at last, though quieter than usual. “I haven’t decided yet whether she is a temptation or a lesson.” Lady Whitlock lifts a brow. “Men generally assume the two are different.”
Soonyoung chokes on his tea. Jeonghan closes his eyes as if receiving divine satisfaction. Even Seungcheol’s mouth curves. Mingyu lets them laugh. Better that. Better not to examine why Reverend Marlowe’s daughter, of all women in London, has managed to rearrange the furniture in his mind after two meetings and one laugh.
The better part of the afternoon is spent pretending to read in the library, and another part allowing Jeonghan to drag him into a conversation with a tailor about evening coats he does not care about. He says the correct things. He laughs in the correct places. He flirts absentmindedly with a widow at tea and catches himself halfway through, not because the flirtation is unwelcome but because he wonders what you would make of widows who laugh openly over marmalade. He discards the thought and fails to discard it fully.
By evening, when London’s lamps awaken and the city shifts toward appetite, Mingyu stands at his window with a glass in his hand and watches the street below move in contained glitter. There are easier women. Kinder ones. Bolder ones. Women who would answer his smile with smiles of their own, women who know the shape of games and choose them gladly, women who would not bring a Reverend’s judgment and a churchyard’s shame and all this absurd self-interrogation in their wake. He knows this. He also knows, with terrible useless clarity, that none of those women laughed like you did. He lifts the glass and drinks.
Tomorrow, perhaps, he will be sensible. Tomorrow, he will remember that you are a conquest and ought to remain one. Tomorrow, he will construct his approach properly—gifts small enough not to accuse, encounters plausible enough to survive scrutiny, words pitched carefully between insolence and warmth. Tomorrow, he will become strategic again. Tonight, he allows himself the private pleasure of anticipation.
Because Reverend Marlowe may think him corruption incarnate. White’s may think him a sly dog. His brothers may think him bored enough to hunt trouble for the sake of it. But Mingyu knows something they do not. A laugh like that does not disappear once heard. And a woman taught all her life to kneel does not accidentally touch a man’s hand without that touch meaning something to herself, even if only in the dark. That is enough. More than enough. He turns from the window, already thinking of Sunday next.
The painted man stands above a world that refuses to end.
He is turned away from you, booted upon black rock, his coat pulled close against a wind you cannot feel, and before him the earth dissolves into whiteness—not emptiness, not absence, but a sea of cloud and vapour so vast and luminous it gives the eye nowhere to rest. Peaks rise through it like thoughts not yet named. Distance becomes possibility. The whole canvas seems to breathe in that peculiar way certain landscapes do, as if what is being depicted is not merely a place but a condition of the soul.
You stand before it longer than decorum requires.
Around you, the gallery murmurs with curated approval: patrons and subscribers moving from canvas to canvas beneath chandeliers and commentary, silk hems brushing parquet floors, gloves lifting spectacles toward landscapes no one in this room has ever truly walked. Voices soften instinctively before beauty, though never so much that social recognition is interrupted by it. A gentleman two paces behind you is praising the handling of light to a woman who is plainly more interested in being overheard admiring him than the light itself. A widow in violet tilts her head just enough to look intelligent beside a still life. Someone says the word sublime with such satisfaction that it becomes less an observation than a self-congratulation.
Your father is not at your shoulder for once. He stands some yards away in grave conversation with a patron whose enthusiasm for moral seriousness appears equal only to the width of his side-whiskers. The invisible leash he keeps on you has not vanished, but it has lengthened by precisely the number of minutes required for one man to finish praising another man’s sermon. In those minutes, you have found yourself here: before a painted precipice, looking at a figure turned outward toward whatever comes after the known world, and wondering with a kind of quiet ache what it must feel like to stand so high above one’s own life and not immediately think of falling. Your fingers press lightly at the hidden beads inside your sleeve. The carnelian rests warm against your skin. Tiny counts. Tiny chains. The man in the painting has no visible chains at all.
“He looks intolerably pleased with himself,” a voice says beside you, warm with mischief and far too familiar now to be a surprise. You turn.
Mingyu Ashbourne stands beside you in evening black so perfectly cut it ought, by right, to have made him look respectable. It does not. Nothing ever quite manages the feat. He wears propriety the way some men wear cologne—lightly, attractively, and with every intention that it remain the most superficial thing about him. There is colour in his face from the cold beyond the museum doors, brightness in his eyes as though the evening itself has amused him from the first step inside, and that impossible, infuriating ease about his mouth that makes everything he says sound half like an admission and half like a joke. For one appalled moment, all you can think is that he has done it again—appeared in one of your approved places like some smiling contamination your father has warned you against too often.
“Mr. Ashbourne.” His smile deepens at once, as if your use of his name is a private blessing. “Miss Marlowe.” He glances back at the painting. “You looked as though you meant to follow him.” The answer rises before prudence can stop it. “Into the fog?”
“Into whatever he has mistaken for freedom.”
The words leave him lightly, but they do not fall lightly. You look back at the canvas before you can be caught looking at him too long. That, at least, is still under your command. The painted figure continues to face outward into uncertainty and some immense white promise the world below could never permit. “Perhaps,” you say, and then wish at once that you had not, because perhaps is a treacherous word. It admits desire merely by declining to deny it. Mingyu seems to hear that treachery and enjoys it. “You see it too, then.”
“I see a man standing on a rock.”
“No, you do not.” It is intolerable how gently he says it. Intolerable, too, that he is right.
You ought to move. Your father may turn at any moment. Lady Henshaw may notice. Some moral aunt with a talent for scandal disguised as concern may already be filing away the image of you standing before a landscape with Mr. Ashbourne at your side. Still, you remain.
The room behind you continues to hum—fabric and scholarship, compliments and candlelight—yet here, before the painting, there is the distinct and private sensation of having stepped slightly outside the approved arrangement of the evening. Mingyu tips his head toward the canvas again. “If he turns around,” he says, “I expect he’ll find the path behind him has disappeared entirely.” You should not answer. You hear yourself do it anyway. “Then he ought not have climbed so high.” A soft laugh leaves him—not loud enough to turn heads, not sharpened enough to mock. “And miss the view?”
There is something deeply aggravating in the ease with which he inhabits possibility. He speaks of cliffs as if they are invitations. Of fog as if uncertainty were merely another word for adventure. He speaks, in short, like a man who has never once been told that safety is holier than joy. You should despise him for it. Instead, you feel the old inward tightening: curiosity, shame, a kind of starving astonishment that such ease exists at all outside novels and very bad examples.
A small group passes behind you too closely, forcing the width of the gallery into a momentary narrowness of bodies. Someone’s sleeve catches against the edge of your own. Your slipper turns slightly on the polished floor. Mingyu’s hand comes to your elbow. Only for half a moment. Less, perhaps. A steadying pressure. Entirely proper in its function and entirely improper in what it does to the rest of you. You right yourself at once. He removes his hand at once. But the place where he touched you behaves as though it has been marked.
“Careful,” he says. It is the sort of word other men use thoughtlessly. From him it arrives with just enough softness to be dangerous. Your fingers close once more around the hidden beads at your wrist. “I am.”
His eyes flick to the movement of your hand hidden beneath your sleeve, and something in his expression alters. “You are,” he agrees, though the answer contains entirely too much amusement for a man supposedly accepting correction. Mingyu glances once more at the painting and then, with infuriating satisfaction, says: “I think you should follow him.”
“That would be improper.”
His eyes return to yours. “Then perhaps improper things are not always wrong.” That sentence goes through you like a draft under a door. You do not have time to answer. Reverend Marlowe’s voice, calling your name from somewhere down the room, reasserts the shape of the world immediately. You step back. Mingyu inclines his head. There is no insolence in the gesture, only that same bright, impossible ease. “Good evening, Miss Marlowe.”
You leave him there before the painting, before the cloud-sea, before the suggestion of high ground and vanished paths and all the rest of the metaphors your life cannot afford.
That night, your father waits until the house has quieted into its accustomed obedience before sending for you to come to the study. He does not tell you to kneel this time. Instead, he directs you to the straight-backed chair near the hearth and places a stack of sermon pages before you. Your workbasket is set at your feet. A pen, an inkwell, and several clean sheets await beside the pages. “You will remain here,” he says, “until these are copied.” You glance at the neat pile. There are more pages than there ought to be for one evening. “Yes, Father.”
He opens his Bible and turns the pages not toward you but for himself, as a man might prepare a mirror before a difficult grooming. “And beneath each page,” he continues, “you will write the verse I give you. Ten times.” Of course you will.
He speaks it slowly, and the words are familiar enough to feel written into your flesh. “Abstain from all appearance of evil.”
You take up the pen. Copy the first page. Then again. Then the verse, ten times, each line smaller and sharper as the hours stretch and the muscles of your hand begin to stiffen. The rosary remains hidden beneath your sleeve; every so often, when your fingers cramp, you press the beads into your wrist until the pain steadies rather than distracts.
Your father writes at his own desk while you work. That is the worst part—not the labour, not the hunger when he dismisses supper from your routine, not even the slow burn in your limbs—but the quiet scratch of his pen accompanying yours, as if your correction is no more extraordinary than his correspondence.
By the time he finally tells you to stop, your fingers are ink-marked and aching and the verse has detached itself from language entirely. It has become pattern. Punishment does that. It sands meaning down until only submission remains. When sleep comes much later, it is treacherous.
In your dream, the man in the painting turns. It is not a stranger’s face beneath the wind. It is Mingyu’s. He stands above the cloud-sea with his coat snapping open in light that belongs nowhere on English soil, and when he holds out his hand to you, there is laughter, as though he means to show you something beyond the fog. Beneath that laughter, the single terrifying knowledge sits that if you stepped where he stood, there would be no path back to the version of yourself your father approves of. You wake with your mouth parted and your heart beating too quickly for morning prayer.
Lady Henshaw’s community breakfast takes place three days later in the parish assembly room.
Long tables run the length of the room beneath white cloths and a modest profusion of preserves, buttered rolls, tea urns, boiled eggs, and dishes whose virtue lies in nourishment. It is all brightened beyond its natural dignity by flowers, polished silver, and the determined cheer of women who understand that benevolence is more persuasive when served on good china. The event is meant to aid parish widows, orphaned children temporarily placed in respectable houses, and several industrious families who have recently become poor enough to deserve notice.
Your father stands near the head of the room, greeting benefactors and receiving gratitude in equal measure. You remain close as instructed, helping where directed, speaking when spoken to, passing plates, refilling cups, and allowing yourself to be used exactly as a correct daughter ought to be used on a philanthropic morning.
A little girl with scraped knuckles curtsies too earnestly at you when you hand her bread. An elderly widow tells you your eyes are kind. A gentleman from the vestry praises your father’s continued zeal and adds, in the same breath, that it is reassuring to see a young lady still take interest in useful work. You smile because smiling is easier than answering. You do not think of the painting. You do not think of church bells. You do not think of a warm hand at your elbow. You think, resolutely, of eggs.
This lasts until the door opens and Soonyoung Ashbourne arrives carrying a basket of oranges on one shoulder as though he has single-handedly provisioned the Empire.
He is all brightness and movement, apologising to no one in particular for his lateness and somehow making lateness itself sound generous. There is laughter immediately in his wake, because Soonyoung appears to belong to the species of man for whom rooms reorient out of pure amusement. Behind him come Jeonghan and Joshua, the latter carrying the grave patience of someone who has volunteered for the practical parts because practical parts actually matter. And with them—Of course. Mingyu.
He is not carrying anything at all, which should not surprise you and still does. He enters as if attendance were enough of a contribution, and then, with a grin to Lady Henshaw and a compliment too warm to be innocent, he rolls up his sleeves and takes charge of the tea tray with such conviction that three matrons forgive him on sight. You should not be watching. You are.
The other Ashbournes scatter into usefulness in exactly the way foundling boys grown into men might do when asked to serve in public: Joshua balancing accounts and practical arrangements, Jeonghan charming the money out of women without ever appearing to ask for it, and Soonyoung carrying more than anyone sensible would carry and laughing when half of it nearly slips.
Mingyu catches you looking from across the room. He does not smile broadly. He only tips the kettle a fraction in your direction, as if toasting you with tea. You look away at once.
There is no reason at all that your pulse should alter for so little. Yet it does, enough that you overfill one cup and have to apologise to the woman receiving it.
An hour into breakfast, when the room has settled into the pleasant fatigue that follows successful nourishment, Lady Henshaw directs you toward the sideboard with a list of names and asks that you see to the distribution of wrapped loaves meant for several parish households. It is a simple enough task. You are glad for anything that requires movement. Stillness has become too aware of itself where Mingyu is present.
You cross to the sideboard and begin matching names to parcels. One loaf for Mrs. Bell, two for the Cartwright sisters, one with preserves for the widow on King’s Lane whose sons are both at sea.
A plate appears beside your hand. On it: half a roll, one boiled egg neatly cracked, and a small wedge of seed cake no one has yet claimed because seed cake is always either the first thing gone or the last thing touched. “Mercy,” says Mingyu at your shoulder, “is less persuasive on an empty stomach.”
You do not turn immediately. “You ought not sneak up on people in charitable institutions.”
“I was under the impression charity improved me.”
You look at him then, because the answer is too polished not to have been prepared in advance. He is holding a second plate for himself, though his own breakfast appears to consist mostly of coffee and insolence. “I am working.”
“So am I.” He glances at the orderly arrangement of loaves. “Though I admit your method looks more trustworthy.”
The room stirs around you. Children are wrapped into shawls. Lady Henshaw receives praise as if she personally invented bread. Your father is engrossed in conversation with a parishioner devout enough to keep him still. The morning is full of witnesses and yet, somehow, this small square of space at the sideboard feels bracketed off from the rest. You should refuse the plate. It would be the safer thing.
Instead, because no one is looking and because you have not eaten since a supper denied in silence two nights before and because there is something unnervingly considerate in the way he has not chosen sweetmeats or indulgence but simple sustenance, you take it. “Thank you.”
He watches you with unearned satisfaction. “See?” he says. “Already church has made me useful.”
You peel the shell from the egg with perhaps more concentration than is strictly necessary. It is a relief to focus your eyes on something not him. “If this is repentance,” you say, “it is oddly cheerful.”
“I have always thought gloom rather vain in sinners.” That answer should not please you. It does. A sound catches in your throat before you can prevent it—too small to be called laughter, too bright to be mistaken for anything else.
His expression changes with immediate warmth. Not triumph. More like delight finding the door it had hoped for. “There,” he whispers. “You do know how.” The rebuke rises before gratitude can do something more dangerous. “I did not say I wished to.”
“No.” He picks up his own cup of coffee from the tray beside him. “That is why it interests me.”
You ought not let him say things like that to you as though interest itself were something flattering rather than compromising. Yet the room is so crowded, so obviously harmless, the morning so publicly kind, that forbidding the conversation begins to seem almost unwarranted.
Mingyu leans one shoulder against the sideboard. “Tell me,” he says, nodding toward the row of loaves, “do you always organise benevolence alphabetically?”
You stare. “No.”
“By household need, perhaps?” The absurdity of the inquiry is exactly calibrated. Beneath it lives a more dangerous curiosity, and both of you know it. That is why it works. “By direction,” you confirm. “West streets first. Then the lanes.”
“A woman of systems.”
“A woman trying not to misplace other people’s breakfasts.”
“Heroic,” he murmurs. Something in his tone undoes you just enough that you look down quickly at the plate in your hands and discover, mortifyingly, that your mouth is smiling. That is the precise moment your father turns his head.
By the time your gaze lifts, his eyes are already on you. Not on the plate. Not on the loaves. On the expression you have failed to erase quickly enough. Mingyu notices the shift. Of course he does. He notices everything one most wishes him not to. His posture alters at once—not retreat, but a loosening of focus that would allow anyone to preserve the comfort of calling the exchange ordinary. He bows lightly. “Miss Marlowe.”
Then he is gone before your father reaches you. Not fled. Simply absorbed elsewhere into Lady Henshaw’s event with the effortless ease of a man who has never had to fear what follows being seen.
Your father’s voice, when it comes, is smooth enough to pass in company. “You have neglected the Cartwright parcel.”
You look down. Indeed you have. Your fingers tighten once around the rosary under your sleeve until the beads bite. “Forgive me, Father.”
“Attention,” he voices softly, “is the first duty of a woman who would remain blameless.” The words follow you home like a ruling.
That night, there is no desk and no copying.
Instead, your father sends your maid away, removes the shawl from your shoulders with his own hands, and instructs you to sit upright in the straight-backed chair near his fire with your palms open upon your lap.
He loops the rosary around them. Not around your wrist where you may hide its pressure in a sleeve. Around your open hands, crossing the beads over skin so that every movement presses them deeper.
Then he resumes his place at the desk and begins the long, patient work of sermon preparation while you sit beneath his eye and the slow weight of his silence. Each time your fingers curl instinctively inward, he speaks one word without looking up: “Open.” You do. Again. Again. Again.
By the end of the hour, the beads have bitten so deeply into your skin that pain ceases to feel sharp and becomes instead a slow, bright throb. Blood has begun to gather where the cord has cut deepest, small red beads swelling slowly before slipping free and trailing into the centre of your palm. No verse is assigned. No explicit accusation offered. Only posture. Only exposure. Only the unmistakable lesson that your hands, like your laughter, are not yours to close around whatever warmth they please.
Later, in your room, you unwind the rosary with shaking fingers and watch the wounds bloom beneath the lamplight. You press your marked palms against your face, and behind your closed eyes, the dark fills not with blackness but with red.
Saint Joseph brings not one clear dream but fragments. A church aisle flooded with sunlight. A breakfast table stretching into the sea. A man’s voice saying your name as though it is neither proof nor property but merely something worth saying again.
You wake before dawn, the marks of the beads still visible, and feel filthy for being relieved that they are there. Punishment, at least, you understand. It is wanting that ruins everything.
The lecture is held in the hall adjoining a private collection newly opened for scholarly admiration. Antiquities, travel, accounts of ruins, objects brought back from abroad and set beneath glass for the improvement of those too well-bred to admit they are merely looking at other people’s freedom. You sit beside Reverend Marlowe in a row of severe chairs while a gentleman with an admirable profile and an overconfident relationship with maps speaks of coastlines, ancient ports, islands flung bright against seas no English sky has ever properly imitated.
The lecturer’s voice, though dry, cannot entirely strip wonder from what he describes. Each place named feels like proof that the world contains distances your father’s theology cannot fold neatly into a parlour. Cythera. Corinth. Naples. Rhodes. The words themselves sound less like geography than freedom.
You do not realise how intently you are listening until the lecture concludes and your father says, under his breath and without turning his head: “An appetite for elsewhere is often only ingratitude in finer dress.”
Heat rises in you—shame first, because shame is quickest, then something more rebellious behind it. “Yes, Father.”
The hall empties slowly. Scholars gather in knots. Gentlemen dispute dates. Ladies examine sketches of columns and coastlines while pretending not to prefer the coastlines. You remain where you are placed until your father is drawn into one of those excruciating post-lecture exchanges in which men repeat one another’s opinions until someone important hears them.
There is a table near the side wall laid out with pamphlets, catalogues, and a modest row of books for sale. You should not drift toward it. Yet your father’s attention is claimed, and the books are there, and your own feet seem to decide before your conscience does.
A slim volume bound in faded blue catches your eye. Not a novel. Not a scandalous romance. A travel account—letters from the Mediterranean, or perhaps notes kept during a tour. The gilt at the spine is modest. The corners are worn by previous hands. It is exactly the kind of harmless object that feels, to you, improper. You do not even realise you have leaned slightly nearer until a voice behind you says: “That one is dangerous.”
You turn too quickly. Mingyu is there with a catalogue tucked beneath one arm, and that look in his face which suggests he has been watching for some time already. “You cannot appear in every room in London simply because it interests you,” you say.
“Can’t I?” You hate the way your pulse reacts before your temper does.
He looks over the table of books as though considering them on your behalf. “That one begins with a storm off Trieste,” he says, nodding toward the blue volume. “And ends with the author in love with a country he cannot afford to remain in. It seems to me an efficient arrangement.”
You look back at the book. “You have read it?”
“No.” His smile turns brighter. “But I admire any object that pretends to be practical while smuggling escape.”
The answer is so exactly pitched to your weakness that for one mortifying instant, you suspect strategy. Then again, perhaps everything with him is strategy. Charm rarely grows wild; men cultivate it. “You ought not say such things to women in public.”
“Then it is fortunate,” he replies lightly, “that the room considers books morally strengthening.”
Mingyu picks up the blue volume. He turns it in his hands, glances at the title page, then at you. “Have you ever seen the sea?” The question arrives so simply it steals the breath you might have used to fend it off. “No.”
His expression does not change into pity. It only sharpens—interest again, interest with light behind it. “Then the first thing you should know,” he whispers, “is that it looks nothing at all like the maps men draw of it.”
Something in your chest aches. Mingyu sets the book down again, nearer to you than before. “Mr. Ashbourne—”
“You’re allowed to want,” he says. There is no flirtation in the line. The words are almost grave, which makes them far more dangerous than any wink or suggestive tone could have managed. You stare at him. Want.
The word, in your father’s house, is usually followed by punishment. Rebuke. Fire. Rot. Ruin. Never permission. Never this impossibly gentle unmaking of all the old machinery. You ought to step away. Instead, you say, because honesty bursts in strange places when one is least defended: “That is not what I have been taught.”
His eyes remain on yours. “No,” he says. “I thought perhaps not.”
Footsteps approach. Your father’s voice sounds in the distance, thanking someone for their instructive observations. The world rushes back around you.
Mingyu does not press. That is perhaps the most disarming thing of all. He simply lifts the book, tucks it beneath the catalogue under his arm, and says with infuriating ease: “Good afternoon, Miss Marlowe.” You think that is the end. It is not.
When the carriage is brought around and your father is delayed in one last exchange on the steps, a small parcel appears on the seat beside you just before the door shuts—a brown-paper wrapping tied with plain string, no note, no flower, no flourish, only your name in a hand too clean to be accidental. You stare at it as if it might explode. Your father gets into the carriage opposite you.
The parcel sits between you like contraband. “What is that?” he asks. You do not lie well under direct scrutiny. You have never had reason to practice it. “A pamphlet from the lecture, Father.” He extends his hand. For one vicious second, you are certain everything ends there.
Then the carriage jolts slightly as it turns into traffic, and his hand, reaching for the parcel, turns to reach for the strap at the window instead. He glances at the paper wrapping, finds nothing beautiful in it, and apparently judges the matter too dull to pursue. Your heart does not resume its ordinary function until halfway home.
The parcel stays hidden under your cloak all throughout the evening. You do not unwrap it until your room, where even then you listen before touching the string. It is the blue volume.
Inside the front cover, on the blank endpaper, there are only six words. For the days you travel nowhere. No initials. No impropriety. Nothing that could be called an offence by anyone not already looking to condemn. It feels more scandalous than a love letter.
You hide it first beneath your mattress and then, dissatisfied, in the false bottom of the cedar box where your winter gloves are kept, wrapped inside an old handkerchief embroidered with your mother’s initials. Your room has always been full of approved objects. This one unapproved book changes the atmosphere. From then on, every time you cross the room, you know exactly where it is.
And because your father senses change in you as other men sense rain, punishment follows before the night is through. Not because he has found the book. Because when he speaks to you before dinner, you answer half a second too slowly—as though some portion of your mind remains elsewhere, perhaps on a coastline you have never seen, perhaps on six words written in a hand far too warm to be safe.
He sends you to the small chapel room at the back of the house with a bucket, rags, and the candlesticks from the family pew. They have been deliberately left unpolished from the previous week’s use; wax has run down the brass in ugly little hardened rivers. “Brightness,” your father says, “belongs to holy things. If you admire it so much, you may earn the sight of it.” You kneel on stone and scrape wax until your knuckles redden and your wrists burn and the candlesticks glow.
When you are dismissed to your room, you bolt the door and kneel not in prayer but at the box. You slide the hidden panel and find the blue cover still there. Untouched. Yours. There are sketches inside—coastlines, ports, a columned ruin above dark water, quick notes in the margin in an unfamiliar hand. The first line mentions morning light on stone so warm it burns the soles of feet. You read three pages only. That is all you dare. Because to want a book, a place, a line of sky you have never seen, a laugh, a voice, a man—your father has taught you to file all of it under one word. Temptation.
Nevertheless, alone in the dark, you know that word no longer fits cleanly. This is not lust, not in any simple form. It is hunger. For air. For elsewhere. For a life that does not arrive preinterpreted. That knowledge makes you feel filthier than desire would have. Because desire might at least be admitted to the body and condemned there. This—this touches the soul.
The ball, hosted by the recently widowed Lady Rutledge, comes at the end of the third week.
It is held in a house whose chandelier-light flatters everyone and forgives no one. Gold climbs the walls. Mirrors multiply the crowd into greater abundance. Musicians tucked above the floor draw out the evening’s pulse in waltzes and quadrilles and polished orchestral commands. Everything glitters. Everything watches.
Your father has dressed you in soft blue tonight, perhaps because grey would have looked too penitential for an event built to display girls. The gown is modest still, of course. Your throat remains spare of ornament. But the fabric catches candlelight at the sleeves in a way that makes you feel, uncomfortably, a little more visible than usual.
The room is full of the familiar cruelties of fashionable society—smiles that inventory, compliments that measure, laughter that excludes by tone rather than volume. You move through it at your father’s side, answering what is required and no more. You are not looking for Mingyu. That would be a vulgarity of mind as well as eye. You do not need to look. Awareness of him has become a skill your body performs on instinct.
Somewhere across the room a warmth changes shape. Somewhere, a current of amusement shifts course. Somewhere, a woman lowers her fan and pretends not to notice whom she notices. Your gaze skims the room in brief escape and lands on him, regardless.
Mingyu stands between his brothers near one of the mirrored walls—all black evening clothes and impossible ease. He sees you seeing him. His mouth curves. You look away. Which is when your father says, with an almost satisfied gravity you have learned to dread: “Lord Carroway wishes to make your acquaintance.” The name means nothing. Then the man steps forward.
Older, certainly. Not merely older in the acceptable way mature bachelors are called older by girls too green to know better, but older in truth: nearer your father’s age than your own, the hair at his temples silvering, his cheeks padded by indulgence, his mouth too thin for generosity. His evening coat fits him expensively and badly, as though he believes cost a sufficient substitute for taste. He smells faintly of pomade, starch, and the stale righteousness of a man convinced God admires him personally. His smile appears by effort rather than instinct. It does not reach his eyes.
“Miss Marlowe.” He bows. Not low enough. “Your father speaks highly of your steadiness.” Not wit. Not kindness. Not intelligence. Not grace. Steadiness, as one might praise a horse that startles at nothing. You lower your gaze. “My lord.” Your father is pleased. You can hear it in the silence beside you.
Lord Carroway asks you no questions that require an answer longer than yes or no. He inquires whether you enjoy music, then interrupts your cautious reply to inform you that a wife’s fondness for accomplishments ought always to remain secondary to her domestic usefulness. He remarks that the modern world has become too lax with daughters. He praises your father’s “excellent severity” as though complimenting the condition of a hedge. “Girls are far better directed than indulged,” he says, smiling that warm-less smile. “A young wife, properly guided, becomes the crowning peace of a household.”
Carroway continues as if addressing property transferred in principle, if not yet by contract. “I have always said,” he remarks, “that affection in marriage is best understood as obedience.” Something in your stomach turns over, cold and final.
He asks you for the dance and does not wait for your answer before your father gives it for you. The set begins. Carroway’s hand at your waist is heavy, proprietary, and too knowing in its certainty that such contact has already been sanctioned. He guides you correctly through the figures, yet even his correctness feels like a kind of trespass. Each time he draws you in and sets you out again, there is in him no play, no ease, no delight in motion for its own sake. Only possession disguised as courtesy.
When he leans nearer to speak over the music, his breath warms the side of your face. “A wife should be content to be known by her husband’s household,” he says. “Ambition in women has made untidy things of very good families.”
Your heartbeat is so loud that the music recedes. You wonder—with the sort of clean terror reserved for truths one cannot unknow—if this is what your father means by solution. Not safety. Continuance. One cage opening neatly into another. When the figure turns, your gaze lifts involuntarily across the room. Mingyu is still watching. Not at the dance as a whole. At Carroway’s hand. On your waist.
Something has altered in him. Not enough to be called anger. More dangerous than that, perhaps, because it remains leashed. Jeonghan says something in his ear; he does not answer. Lady Whitlock, standing with a cluster of ladies near the edge of the floor, follows the line of his gaze and understands at once.
The next several minutes occur with the efficiency of an Ashbourne operation you do not have the language to name. Lady Whitlock glides toward your father under the cover of congratulating him on the success of last week’s sermon and requests, with disarming gravity, his opinion on a charitable petition Carroway himself is said to support. Joshua appears as if conjured from the air and speaks to Carroway at the close of the set about a benefaction that requires his immediate comment. Soonyoung collides lightly, impossibly, with a passing footman carrying champagne, creating just enough sparkle and apology and mild disorder to shift everyone by half a yard. Jeonghan says something to Lady Henshaw that causes three matrons to turn at once and block your father’s direct route toward you.
It is done so neatly that anyone not born and trained among brothers who cover one another like weather fronts might have missed the intention entirely.
One moment, the set ends and Carroway turns toward you, preparing to reclaim the conversation as though it belongs to him by right; the next, the room has opened in an entirely new direction, and Seungcheol’s calm hand at your sleeve redirects you with the softest murmur. “The ballroom is rather warm, Miss Marlowe. Do take a breath.” It is not permission. It is rescue wearing perfect manners.
You slip through the gap he has created and walk quickly through the edge of the crowd, past a pair of palms in great porcelain urns, into the side gallery where portraits look down over a less crowded stretch of corridor lit in diluted gold. A window stands cracked somewhere farther along. Cool air moves in faintly. Your heart has not yet resumed any civilised rhythm. You press one hand to the wall. For one shameful instant, you think you might cry. Instead, you breathe. Once. Twice. And then: “I leave you alone for three minutes, and society proposes livestock arrangements.”
Mingyu stands at the mouth of the gallery, not close enough to corner, not smiling enough to tease. The relief that goes through you is so immediate it feels like another kind of risk. “You should not be here,” you say.
“That is becoming a very dull refrain between us.” He comes nearer, slowly, giving you time to object. You do not. That, too, is a decision, however much you later disguise it from yourself.
In the softened light away from the ballroom, he looks less polished and more real somehow—the line of his mouth firmer, the bright carelessness banked rather than extinguished. Music reaches you here as through walls of water. The glitter of the ballroom has become distant enough to feel almost imaginary. “Who is he?” Mingyu asks, though clearly he already knows enough.
“Lord Carroway.” The name seems to offend him on instinct.
“He dances like a mortgage.”
You should not laugh. You almost do. “My father approves of him.”
“Then I dislike him already.” He says it lightly, but the lightness does not wholly disguise what sits beneath: a kind of sharp protective amusement, as though he is trying not to let something harsher into the room. You look away. The cracked window admits a thread of cold air. Beyond the glass, night has settled over the square in black silk and lantern-fire.
“He is generous to the church,” you say.
“How admirable.”
“He is… proper.” That word tastes foul tonight. Mingyu watches you silently. “And are you?” he asks. “Grateful?”
The question opens something. Not enough for tears. You do not weep easily and never where anyone may see. But enough for honesty to become less impossible than performance. “No.” It is the first clean truth you have spoken all evening.
His expression changes by a degree—less wit, more attention. “Good.” The word lands with scandalous softness. You fold your hands together too tightly. The rosary hidden beneath one glove presses into your skin like a warning. “You make everything sound easy.”
He leans back against the window frame, one shoulder braced, and looks not at you but out into the dark square for a moment before answering. “No,” he says. “I make it sound possible. Those are not the same thing.” Something in your chest gives way.
He tells you then—not in the tone of a man performing exotic adventures for ladies hungry for novelty, but more quietly than he has spoken to you before—about Greece.
Not the cities listed by lecturers. Not the scholarly parts. He speaks of light first. Of the way morning on the water arrives not grey but gold. Of cliffs above whitewashed villages where the wind smells of salt and thyme. Of ferries and little harbours and fishermen shouting across blue so bright it appears invented. He speaks of standing above a coastline at sunrise and feeling as though the world has not yet decided what it means to make of you. You listen. God help you, you listen with all of yourself.
“It is not cleaner there,” he says. “Not simpler. Men still lie. Priests still preach. Money still behaves like a petty god. But the light…” He smiles then, not at you, at the memory. “The light refuses to apologise for itself.”
The painted man above the white sea returns in your mind with startling force. “You speak of it,” you say, though your voice has gone soft, “as though it set you free.” He looks at you then, and something in his face—some brightness usually spent upon wit—turns unexpectedly bare. “It reminded me,” he says, “that there are places where a man may breathe without first being explained.”
The music from the ballroom swells faintly, then recedes again as doors open and close in the distance. “I have never left England,” you confess.
“I know.” The answer startles you. He continues. “You look at maps like a woman reading scripture for loopholes.” You should be offended. Instead, you say, because the truth has become treacherously near the surface tonight: “I do not know what I would do with freedom if it were placed in my hand.”
His mouth softens. “You needn’t know.”
You stand very still. He takes one step nearer. Still not touching. Still not pushing. His voice, when he speaks again, is quiet enough that it feels like something placed carefully rather than thrown. “No one knows what they would do with freedom before they have any,” he says. “That is hardly a crime.” You give a breath that is almost a laugh and almost not. “In my father’s house it likely would be.”
“Then your father has made a religion of the wrong things.”
The words land somewhere between blasphemy and truth, and it is precisely because you cannot decide which that they unsettle you. “You should not speak of him so.”
“Why?” he asks, and there is no mocking in it, no easy provocation. Only that maddening, dangerous sincerity he produces when you least expect it. “Because he is your father? Or because he is accustomed to no one speaking of him frankly?”
You turn away from him, just enough that your gaze may go somewhere other than the terrible steadiness of his. A portrait hangs on the wall opposite—some deceased lady in lace and pearls, her painted face arranged into the sort of calm that requires no actual contentment beneath it. You have known that expression all your life. You could wear it in your sleep. “It is very easy for you,” you whisper, “to speak as though rules are only furniture one may rearrange.”
The air between you narrows. When he answers, his voice is lower than before. “No,” he says. “It only looks easy from the outside.”
That brings your eyes back to him. There is no grin waiting for you this time. No cleverness poised to soften the line. Only Mingyu, standing with his evening coat catching the dim light, and all his careless brightness banked for once into something steadier and far more difficult to survive. “People forgive me for laughing,” he says. “They call it charm, and because they call it charm, they do not ask what it covers.”
The confession is so bare, so unexpected, that it steals whatever answer you might have made. Mingyu looks down for a moment, then back up, and there is something almost rueful in the set of his mouth. “You think I do not know what it is to be performed back at the world,” he says. “I do. I only learned to grin first, that is all.”
You have seen it, of course. The polished ease. The bright deflection. The way rooms forgive him because he makes their cruelty entertaining to itself. But this—this is the first time he has turned even the edge of that knowledge toward you and let you see the machinery rather than the gleam. You do not know what to do with the tenderness that rises in answer. Tenderness is far more dangerous than desire. Tenderness lingers. Finds reasons. Makes room.
“That is different,” you say, though the protest lacks the conviction you intended. One dark brow lifts, very slightly. “Is it?”
You open your mouth and then close it again. Because no—no, perhaps it is not entirely different. Because there is a kinship in being made useful. In being turned into a shape the world prefers. In learning how to survive within the role given, even when the role begins to feel like a cage one carries on one’s shoulders. The recognition of that kinship feels indecent. You lower your gaze to your hands. “If you were sensible,” you say, “you would leave me alone.” He laughs once under his breath, but there is no mockery in it. “Almost certainly.”
Mingyu shifts then—one step closer, no more than that, but enough that the air alters with him. Your breath catches and betrays you instantly.
He hears it. But if he is pleased, he is merciful enough not to show it. “Do you know what I think?” he asks. You should not answer. You do. “No.”
His gaze stays on your face. “I think you have been told so often what sort of daughter you ought to be that no one has thought to ask what sort of life would make you happy.” You look away so quickly it feels like flinching. “Happiness is not the measure of a good life.”
“Perhaps,” he says. “But misery should not be mistaken for it either.”
You think of Carroway’s hand at your waist—heavy, proprietary, already certain. You think of your father’s fingers pressing meaning into your arm, into your wrist, into your every answered breath. You think of scraped wax from brass candlesticks, of copied verses until your hand cramped, of open palms and rosary marks and a hidden blue book wrapped in your mother’s handkerchief. And then you think of this man speaking of sunlight on foreign water as though light itself may belong to whoever stands in it.
Your voice, when it comes, is scarcely more than air. “You know nothing of my life.”
He takes another half-step. The restraint of it is beginning to undo you more thoroughly than any boldness could have done. “No,” he says. “Not enough. But I know what you look like when you are trying not to want anything.”
The whole gallery seems to narrow. Your hand tightens around nothing.
He is too close for safety, though not for scandal. Close enough that you can see where one dark strand of hair has slipped free near his temple, where his pulse beats once in the hollow of his throat as though he is not half so unaffected as he pretends. You should make your leave. Instead, you hear yourself say the one thing you had never meant to tell anyone, least of all him. “I do not think I was made for this.”
His expression stills. “For what?”
The answer takes everything. “For smiling when spoken to and saying the correct thing and calling it peace. For being handed from one set of rules to another and being grateful that both are respectable.”
Mingyu’s eyes darken. “No,” he says softly. “You were not.”
No sermon has ever answered you so quickly. No prayer has ever returned with such immediate force. You do not know whether the thing that rises in you is relief or grief. Perhaps they are too close to separate.
He is very near now. “You should stop,” you say, though the plea is ruined by the fact that you do not move away.
His voice drops. “Tell me to.”
The whole of you goes still. Not because the words are forceful. Because they are not. Because they are the opposite of force. An offering of choice. A handing back of will. No one in your life has ever made permission sound so intimate.
Trust arrives where it has no right to be, where it has not been earned, where it should not be possible after so little and yet somehow is—because he has not once cornered you, not once pushed, not once taken one inch you did not first leave undefended. Your hand lifts of its own accord—uncertain, almost not daring to complete the motion—and comes to rest against his sleeve. A gloved touch against dark cloth. His eyes drop briefly to the place where your fingers rest and then return to your face, and what lives in his expression is so carefully held it makes your pulse stumble.
You think, absurdly, of standing on the edge of something vast enough to terrify and tempt in equal measure. Of how a person might step forward without meaning to and still know, in the deepest part of themselves, that the step was chosen. You move. Not much. Only enough to make the space between you no longer his to guard alone. He does not close it. That, perhaps, is why you do.
Your mouth meets his with all the trembling certainty of a woman doing the most reckless thing she has ever done and understanding, even as it happens, that recklessness is not the same thing as regret. Your fingers tighten around his sleeve.
Mingyu’s mouth answers yours. His lips are soft and warm and devastatingly certain, parting just enough to make the kiss real—undeniable, impossible to mistake for accident. You feel the breath leave him, feel the sharp contained force of his wanting as it meets yours and folds into it.
His hands come to your waist—not snatching, not claiming anything you have not already placed in his keeping, but closing there with a heat that goes through fabric and bone and every starved place inside you that has spent years mistaking deprivation for virtue. His grip tightens just enough to tell you he is feeling the same vertigo, and when you sway into him, the kiss deepens by its own terrible logic.
His mouth moves over yours again. He tilts his head, and the kiss turns hotter, deeper, as though he has made some swift and private decision to give you exactly as much as you are asking for and not one inch more.
The world contracts. The cool draft from the cracked window. The distant pulse of violins through the wall. The warmth of his hands at your waist. The scandalous, ruinous fact of his body so close to yours.
You make a small sound against his mouth—half breath, half shock—and the answering flex of his fingers sends molten desire through you. The pressure of it, that first real crack in his discipline, makes you bolder in a way that would have horrified you an hour ago. Your hand slips from his sleeve to the line of his lapel and then higher, into the thick dark of his hair, and when your fingers tighten there, he gives a breath against your mouth that feels almost like a groan swallowed before it can become a sound. It emboldens you further.
Your mouth opens beneath his with a desperation that is no longer trembling or accidental, and when your tongue brushes the fullness of his lower lip in one instinctive, shamefully curious motion, Mingyu’s hand shifts, sliding to the curve of your hip, and squeezes—enough to let you feel the shape of his restraint cracking. You moan softly before you even understand the sound has come from you. The sound undoes him. His head dips lower, his mouth taking yours again with a heat that is no longer innocent. Your fingers pull faintly at his hair. His breath catches sharply through his nose.
Then something clatters in the corridor beyond the gallery. A tray, perhaps. A servant’s misstep. Glass against silver. It is not a loud sound, not truly, but it strikes through the moment like cold water dashed over fire. You break apart at once. The loss of him is immediate and brutal. Your mouth aches with him. Your whole body feels suddenly lit from within like a chapel full of candles no one has yet thought to snuff. His eyes are on you—dark, wide, the careless brightness gone entirely. He looks less as though he has been kissed than as though he has been struck open. You take a step back.
The gallery spins back into shape around you—the line of portraits, the dark window, the pulse of music through the wall, the dreadful ordinariness of everything that should no longer be ordinary at all. “I must go.” Your voice does not sound like yours.
Mingyu moves as if to say something—your name, perhaps, or a warning, or nothing more than a breath made audible—but you do not wait to hear it. You turn before he can speak, before his gentleness can undo you further, before the memory of his mouth can become anything more dangerous. And you run.
You go into the music, into the chandeliers, into the ballroom still glittering with all the polished certainty of society while your body rings with the memory of something stolen and living and utterly unsanctioned. When you find your father again, lips cooled and pulse still in ruin, you know with a terrible, thrilling clarity that nothing in your life may remain quite as it was before the kiss. Not because he kissed you. Because you kissed him. And if Mingyu looked at you again and asked what you wanted, the answer would no longer be freedom.
Mingyu wakes before dawn with your name nowhere near his mouth and everywhere else. Not spoken—not even in sleep, for he is vain enough to be grateful for that much dignity—but lodged behind his teeth, in the pulse of his blood, in the abrupt and furious awareness of his own body where the morning has found him uncompromisingly honest. The room around him is dim with the last softness of night. Ashbourne Hall keeps its silences well at this hour; doors have not yet begun their careful opening and closing, and servants have not yet fully set the machinery of the house in motion.
His sheets are warm. His breath comes out once, hard, through his nose. His hand, flung sometime in the night across the empty breadth of mattress beside him, closes on nothing at all. Nothing but the memory of your mouth.
The recollection arrives with such violent clarity that he shuts his eyes against it and only succeeds in sharpening every detail: the cool dimness of the side gallery; the softened throb of the music beyond the wall; your fingers at his sleeve with all the desperate uncertainty of courage being invented in real time; the first startled contact of your lips against his and the immediate impossible understanding that you had chosen it. Not he. You.
There are men in London who would have made a triumph of that. Men who would have rolled onto their backs afterwards in some club chair and told the story as proof of irresistible charm, proof of feminine weakness, proof of their own particular brilliance in teasing innocence into surrender. Mingyu is humiliated to discover that his first and strongest feeling on waking is not triumph. It is want.
Not the easy bodily kind alone, though his body makes its own hard case beneath the sheets and refuses to be denied. Not even the rakish vanity of having been wanted by a woman who should, by every story London prefers to tell about girls like Miss Marlowe, still be blushing at the concept of lips. No—what grips him is something more dangerous and infinitely less forgivable: the aching, reverent shock of being chosen by someone who had no practice choosing anything for herself.
He rolls onto his back and stares up at the canopy with the sort of bleak irritation usually reserved for sermons and bad port. This is ridiculous. He has kissed women in private houses and theatres and dark corners of stairwells. He has kissed women in carriages and gardens and one memorable library in Vienna that smelled strongly of dust and scandal. He has kissed women who wanted from him a story, an evening, a vanity to remember later. He has kissed women who wanted to be chosen where other women could see it. He has kissed women because he was lonely and because they were lonelier and because loneliness, when well-dressed, is often mistaken for appetite until morning proves otherwise. None of those kisses followed him into sleep and came back in the dawn like this.
He presses the heel of one hand over his eyes and exhales a curse too quiet to be heard by anyone but God, who seems lately to have developed an unhelpful interest in his habits. He should get up. He does not.
He recollects the exact moment your mouth softened against his—not awkwardly, not innocently, not as a child might steal a peck in ignorance of what was being done, but with a tremulous certainty that had gone straight through him and lodged itself somewhere under his ribs where wit has no jurisdiction. Your hand had tightened in his hair. Your breath had broken. The small sound you made when he kissed you back with enough hunger to answer—God.
His body has already concluded its own argument. His cock is hard enough that the ache of it has become almost abstract, no longer sensation so much as insistence. The linen beneath him shifts. Mingyu opens his eyes, stares at the dark line of the bedhangings, and says to the room with all the dignity of a condemned man, “Excellent.” No answer comes, which is perhaps for the best.
He lets his hand slide beneath the sheet with the brisk, annoyed efficiency of a man handling an inconvenience that would be much less inconvenient if it were not attached to his own mind. His fingers close around his cock and strokes once, slow, testing, and he nearly laughs at the absurdity of it—that after years of women, after rooms full of perfume and paid smiles and all the easy arrangements, it is a reverend’s daughter and one stolen kiss who have reduced him to this. His jaw tightens.
He works his hand a little faster, breath catching in uneven measure. The sheets tangle around his legs. His free arm folds behind his head as if that could lend the whole scene some parody of ease. It does not. All ease has deserted him. What remains is urgency sharpened by memory.
You in blue under Lady Rutledge’s chandeliers. You in the side gallery saying you were not made for smiling and calling it peace. You saying, “I do not think I was made for this.” You kissing him.
The pace of his hand turns rougher. His head tips back against the pillows. The room remains dark and decent and wholly ignorant of the fact that the youngest son of Ashbourne Hall is coming undone quietly beneath his own sheets to the thought of a woman who still probably prays after touching him. That thought should cool him. Instead, it nearly finishes him. Because he can see it too well: your knees on hard boards, your mouth moving over penitential words while the memory of his mouth burns through all that holy repetition like fire through paper. Something in him twists—want and anger and awe wound too tightly to separate.
His orgasm comes with a low, rough moan bitten off before it can rise into the room, body locking around the release with all the graceless force of a man betrayed by his own imagination. For a few moments, he lies utterly still, breath hard, pulse hammering, one hand fisted in the sheet and the other covered in his own sticky release.
The silence in the room is immense. When it settles over him fully, he is left with the cooling awareness of his own body and the far more difficult truth that the thing he feels for you has already begun the alarming process of outrunning language he trusts.
Conquest will not do. Challenge, perhaps, but only barely, and even that is beginning to rot around the edges. Sport has vanished. What remains is sharper. He stares up towards the ceiling and thinks, with the deep unwilling sincerity reserved for only the most inconvenient revelations, that he wants to deserve what happened in that gallery. He wants to be the thing your mouth would choose again. Worse still: he wants to deserve the choosing.
The thought so thoroughly disgusts him that he throws back the bed covers, rises, and goes to bathe in cold water before the house can catch him in anything so undignified as reflection.
By breakfast, the house has resumed its civilised structure, and Mingyu has put himself back together with enough care that no one outside the family would think him altered at all. The valet has tied his cravat into something fit for daylight. His hair is obedient by force rather than conviction. His coat sits neatly on his shoulders. He looks, in short, like a gentleman who slept soundly and woke with no greater concern than coffee. Mingyu steps into the room with his usual smile already in place. It would probably fool anyone who did not know him well. Unfortunately, the Ashbournes are the least gullible audience in London. Apparently, that includes those married into it.
Lady Whitlock looks up from her paper. Her gaze travels once over him, and in that swift assessment, he feels the peculiar nuisance of being read by someone too intelligent to be fooled and too kind to be tactless. “Well,” she says, “you look dreadful.”
“Good morning to you too, sister.” The Viscountess does not smile. That would have made the exchange easier. Instead, something in the corner of her mouth threatens amusement and then settles into composure again, which is far worse. “Coffee,” she says, gesturing toward the silver service. “Before you attempt a defence. I should like you to be fortified if you mean to lie to me.” Mingyu pours for himself a cup when he discovers, with a private stab of aggravation, that his hand is not quite as steady as he would prefer.
Lady Whitlock folds the paper and returns it to the table. Her attention remains on him, which suggests she has no intention of making this a trial and every intention of hearing what he will reveal by trying to avoid one. Mingyu sets down the pot. Lifts the cup. Drinks. Lady Whitlock waits until he has put it down. “Was she worth losing sleep over?”
There is no flourish to the question. No teasing. No false innocence. It lands between them with graceful inevitability. Mingyu reaches for the toast, if only because his hands ought to be seen doing something. “You have become alarmingly direct since marriage.”
“That is because I no longer require courtship to disguise my opinions.” He glances her way at that. She is seated in morning blue, one elbow resting lightly against the arm of her chair, looking not like a woman prepared to pry but one entirely content to let silence make the first confession. It is a strategy he recognises at once and resents on principle. “I had not realised,” he says, with careful brightness, “that a ballroom conversation now merits post-mortem over breakfast.”
Lady Whitlock folds her hands. “A ballroom conversation does not.” A pause. “My husband’s brother looking as though he has either fallen in love or lost a war does.”
Mingyu nearly chokes on his coffee. She waits patiently while he recovers enough dignity to answer. “You overestimate both my sincerity and my fragility.”
“Do I?” The question is mild. It is also a trap, and he knows it. He has spent years laying gentler ones for other people. He should laugh. He usually would. He should say something careless, something about challenge, something with enough easy rot in it that the whole subject may return to the category of sport and remain there. Instead, he hears himself say, “It is not as simple as that.”
Lady Whitlock’s gaze softens—not into pity, thank God, but into understanding restrained by good manners. “No,” she says. “I did not imagine it was.” Mingyu tears off a piece of toast he does not particularly want and regrets the motion at once.
The memory of the previous night has done him no service. It sits too near the surface. Even now, even seated at breakfast beneath his sister-by-marriage’s calm regard, the recollection threatens to alter his pulse in some visible and humiliating fashion. Lady Whitlock interrupts his train of thought before it can make him bold. Or reckless.
“You need not tell me anything you do not wish to,” she says. “Though I will note, for the sake of fairness, that whatever happened in that gallery appears to have improved your posture and ruined your rest.”
That draws the smallest smile from him despite himself. “Cruel woman.”
“Observant woman.”
He leans back a little, studies her over the rim of his cup, and thinks—not for the first time—that Seungcheol did absurdly well for himself. “And if I said it was nothing?”
Her expression does not change. “Then I should assume it is either much worse or much better than nothing.” Mingyu laughs then, softly, because there is no resisting a line like that when it lands so cleanly.
The silence settles. Lady Whitlock does not rush to fill it. That, perhaps, is the kindness of her. She does not press where another person might. She does not begin arranging his heart for him as if she had some right to its shelving. She merely allows him the dignity of coming to his own ruin in proper order. At last, he says, looking down at the coffee rather than at her, “I do not know what to call it yet.”
The answer seems to satisfy her more than certainty would have done. “That sounds,” she says, “surprisingly sane.” He glances up, affronted on instinct. “I am always sane.”
This time, she does smile. “Mingyu, I watched you stand across a ballroom and forget every woman in it had a face.” The accuracy of that is intolerable. Mingyu rises to it with what remains of his vanity. “I have always been selective in my attention.”
“No,” she says calmly. “You have always been generous with it. This is rather different.”
Mingyu lets out a breath that is not quite a sigh. He sits in his daylight coat and immaculate cravat, and feels for the first time in years as though his own life has become a room in which all the furniture has shifted overnight.
Lady Whitlock reaches for her cup again. “I trust you,” she says, so simply that for a second he nearly misses it. He looks at her. She keeps her gaze on the tea as she continues, as if the matter were too obvious to require ceremony. “Not to be wise,” she adds. “You have never given anyone reason for that. But to know when carelessness would make you contemptible.”
His throat tightens with a sudden and wholly unwelcome flare of gratitude. She lifts her eyes then, at last, and there is warmth in them. “Do not make me regret that distinction.”
Mingyu should answer lightly. He should bow and grin and tell her she credits him with too much virtue, too much depth, too much anything at all. Instead, because she has earned better than performance in this one moment, he says only, “I will try.”
Lady Whitlock nods once, accepting that for what it is worth and no more. Then, in a mercy so complete it nearly undoes him, she picks up the paper again and says in the mild, domestic tone of a woman restoring the world to manageable proportions, “Now eat something before Seungcheol comes down and assumes I have been bullying you on an empty stomach.” Mingyu obeys because he is still too off-balance to think of a graceful refusal.
Across the rustle of newsprint and the quiet clink of china, the house remains civilised. Morning remains morning. He still looks, to anyone outside these walls, like a gentleman with no greater concern than coffee. But when he reaches for the knife to cut his eggs, he finds, absurdly enough, that his hand is steadier now than when he first poured his coffee. And that, more than any of her questions, tells him how deep the crack has gone.
Mingyu does not go back to the house on Half Moon Street. It had been incidental, at first. A matter of mood. Then, it became a matter of opportunity. Then, embarrassingly fast, a matter of impossibility. Because each time he had thought of it—of wine-dark rooms and easy transactions by which loneliness is softened into forgettable pleasure—your face had intervened.
One madam sends a note as delicate and discreet as a butterfly pinned to paper, asking whether ill health has removed him or only ingratitude. He sends flowers in return and no promise. Another sends word through a footman that Miss Celeste still has his cufflink. Mingyu tells the footman she may keep it and means it.
Jeonghan notices the change by the end of the week. He finds Mingyu in the library with a book open and unread before him, which is itself enough to provoke suspicion. The room is warm with afternoon light. It slants gold across the rows of leather spines, some of which have not been opened in decades. Jeonghan leans in the doorway and studies Mingyu the way one studies a horse with a limp—curiously, not unkindly, with every expectation of pursuit. “How long has it been?” Mingyu does not look up. “Since what?”
“Since you’ve paid for forgetting someone.” That gets his attention. He glances up at once, closing the book on a finger he has not once moved from the same page. “Have you come here to be insufferable on purpose?”
“No,” Jeonghan says, pushing off the doorway and crossing into the room with the lazy grace of a man who rarely hurries. “I came because the staff is beginning to miss your patronage and because you look like a poem written by someone recently denied.”
Mingyu laughs, but it is a near thing. “What a horrifying sentence.” Jeonghan lowers himself into the opposite chair. “You’ve stopped going out properly. You attend church. You forget to flirt with widows who are practically sending written invitations through their earrings. And yesterday at White’s, when Vale spoke of Miss Marlowe as though she were a card trick, you very nearly put your glass through his teeth.”
“Dalrymple,” Mingyu corrects.
“Yes,” says Jeonghan, “which rather proves my point. You are distracted.” Mingyu looks away toward the window. It would be easy to dismiss this. Easier still to feed Jeonghan some bright version of the truth and let him enjoy the shape of it without the depth. Yet there is something exhausting in performance when performed too close to someone who has long ago catalogued all your tricks. “I am thinking.” Jeonghan makes a low sympathetic sound that contains no sympathy at all. “My deepest condolences.”
Silence settles, companionable only because Jeonghan has no respect for solemnity and therefore does not sit like a priest waiting out confession. He picks up a paperknife. Sets it down. Studies Mingyu with open, feline interest. “Do you love her?” Mingyu turns so fast that the movement is enough of an answer. “For God’s sake.”
“You do, then.”
“I did not say that.”
Jeonghan’s expression remains insufferably serene. “No,” he agrees. “Your face did.” Mingyu should leave the room. Instead, he stays precisely because leaving would be even more revealing. “I kissed her.” It is the first time he has said it aloud to another person.
The room does not change. The library remains a library. The afternoon light remains indecently calm. Jeonghan’s face, however, loses its ease by one thoughtful degree. “Did she want it?”
Mingyu’s answer comes before reflection. “She chose it.” Jeonghan studies him for a long moment, then leans back. “Ah.” That single syllable contains more understanding than Mingyu strictly wished to endure. “Don’t,” Mingyu says. Jeonghan’s mouth curves. “I haven’t done anything.”
“You are doing that thing where you look at me as if I’ve become a sonnet.”
“No,” Jeonghan says. “A tragedy, perhaps. Sonnets are shorter.” Mingyu throws the nearest cushion at him. Jeonghan catches it one-handed and laughs, which is probably the kindest possible response. Finally, he speaks, quieter: “Then stop treating her like a prize and start behaving like a man who understands the difference.”
Mingyu understands because he has just begun trying to do exactly that and already knows the work will not be easy. When Jeonghan leaves, he does so with no further prophecy, which Mingyu appreciates almost as much as he resents everything already said.
The pew behind yours has ceased to belong to chance. There had been a time, not so very long ago and yet already belonging to some former arrangement of your life, when his attendance might still have been mistaken for whim, for one more bright inconsistency in a man made, so everyone said, of appetite, laughter, and the sort of handsome carelessness society forgives because it finds the spectacle flattering. There had been a time when Mingyu, if he appeared at all, belonged to the back of the nave, to the loose and unreliable margins of worship, to the final row and the half-mocking murmur of matrons who liked their sinners visible enough to condemn. There had been a time when, if you felt him in church, it was as one feels a draft from a door left open—an interruption, a passing thing, a disturbance the room would right itself against once the latch had fallen shut again. No longer. Since the ball, Mingyu has missed no service. Not one.
Mingyu does not make a performance of this newly formed habit. That would be too easy, too vulgar, too plain in its intention, and if there is one thing he understands better than most men, it is the value of not handing the whole shape of one’s purpose at once. He arrives dressed as he always dresses—too well, too beautifully, too composed for the rumours that inevitably rise around him. He bows his head when the congregation bows. He rises with the hymns, kneels when the rest kneel, and says nothing that might allow the church ladies the pleasure of calling him irreverent. Yet no one in Reverend Marlowe’s church is foolish enough to mistake him for devout. Even piety, you are beginning to understand, has a way of recognising when it is being used for purposes that have little enough to do with God.
He sits behind you more often than he sits at the back. Not beside. Never so close to offer your father a visible offence he might condemn. He sits one pew back. Sometimes directly. Sometimes offset by half a row, the way a gentleman might sit if he wished to preserve the fiction of indifference while remaining near enough to matter. Always close enough that your body, traitor and witness both, recognises his presence the way other bodies recognise heat from a fire at their backs. If you were to turn quickly, if your neck were to betray the whole rigid architecture of your upbringing, he would be there exactly where your blood has already imagined him. You never turn quickly. You do not need to.
You sit at your father’s side with your prayer book opened to the proper page, your hands folded in your lap with all the obedient serenity expected of Reverend Marlowe’s daughter, your throat bare of ornament and your ribbons chosen under scrutiny, and still your whole body keeps count of the pew behind you. The scrape of boots. The discreet little disturbance in parish order when an older lady shifts to admit him. The exact moment your father’s sermon moves from doctrine into the bright, dangerous severity of warning, and you feel the quality of attention behind you alter by a single intolerable degree. You tell yourself it is imagination. You tell yourself many things.
Then there are the smaller proofs, too intimate to deny and too small to confess aloud even to yourself.
A prayer book slipping from the pew ledge when you rise too quickly, caught by his hand before it can strike the floor, his fingers brushing the leather cover and then—inevitably—the edge of your own gloved knuckles as he returns it wordlessly. A crowded church vestibule where the departing line tightens unexpectedly, bodies pressing closer than decorum likes to allow, and you feel the careful hover of his hand at the small of your back—not touching, not even quite daring, only ready—prepared to steady if needed, refraining just enough that the lack of contact burns worse than a touch might have done. A hymn ending in so much gathered stillness that your own breath leaves you too sharply, and his answer comes, low enough to vanish under the organ’s dying note and yet clear enough to find you: “You sing more loudly now.”
Your composure has not shattered in public. That is the miracle and the misery of it. It only cracks in bright, private places between one moment and the next.
In the churchyard, where your father is detained by wardens and vestrymen and widows whose charity sits upon their lips, Mingyu drifts near with all the false ease of a man willing to let coincidence shoulder the blame. The exchanges remain brief because they must. He understands that in the marrow of him. He arrives, offers a line half-teasing and half-true, lets you answer or not answer, and withdraws before danger grows visible. These little conversations accumulate. That is the danger of them.
No one moment, taken by itself, would justify the treachery of your pulse or the marks left by beads pressed too hard into your palm later that evening while your father reads aloud from Proverbs or Paul or whichever male saint best suits his corrective purposes. Yet no one moment remains alone. They stack one upon another like kindling kept dry beneath a roof. A sentence here. A look there. A hand hovering and not touching. Breath catching where no breath ought to catch. The memory of the kiss has not faded under repetition. It worsens.
It returns at the strangest hours. In prayer. In the small domestic stillness, while your maid fastens the final hooks at the back of your gown. In the cold pause before your father says grace. In the minute before sleep, when your body lies in the dark and the shape of his mouth against yours comes back with such heat that you turn onto your side and press the rosary into your palm until pain makes wanting easier to survive. You had thought, in the first immediate days after it, that shame might cauterise desire if only it were given enough time and enough scripture. It has not. Shame has merely learned to live beside it.
The whispers come as nothing more than a slight sharpening beneath ordinary conversation. Not gossip, not if one asked directly. Concern is the preferred perfume of women who enjoy ruin most when it arrives in satin shoes and sweetened voices. Lady Henshaw’s smile changes. It remains bright, remains all the things it has always been when turned upon you in rooms full of flowers and parish ladies and properly funded benevolence. Though now there is a sharpened edge beneath the brightness, a tiny inward thrill beneath the kindness, as if your presence has become more interesting than your father’s sermons. A widow in navy lace who once praised your modesty asks, in a tone almost too innocent to challenge, whether you find Mr. Ashbourne’s sudden diligence in matters spiritual “encouraging.”
Two ladies from the church circle fall silent as you approach the hat stand after service and resume, once you have passed, with lowered voices and a quick glancing urgency. A matron with cheeks like sugared apples murmurs to another, while examining the fastening of her glove, that “gentlemen who reform so suddenly generally do so in pursuit of a witness.” The other answers, “Or a temptation.”
You are not meant to hear either line. That is why they are placed precisely where hearing becomes inevitable. There is indecency to the implication that open accusation never quite manages. The ton, you are beginning to understand, drinks scandal the way certain men drink claret—not because thirst compels it, but because it warms the blood and lends ordinary conversation the glamour of risk.
These whispers have not yet travelled upward into the more official structures of your life. They have not reached your father as fact, only as atmosphere. They have not yet reached Lord Carroway in any form he would recognise as threat. Yet you feel them gathering at the edges of rooms like mist over water. And each time they gather, your father’s gaze grows a fraction cooler, his silences longer, his instructions more exact. As if he smells smoke before ever seeing flame.
Lord Carroway’s visits arrange themselves into the shape of inevitability. Outwardly, they remain what men call respectable: A glass of port in your father’s study after vespers. Conversation upon church subscriptions, the state of the poor, municipal obligations, the dangers of modern laxity, and the alarming decline of proper reserve among younger generations. He brings no flowers. Men like Lord Carroway do not understand flowers except as evidence of waste. He speaks of household order. He looks around the Marlowe estate drawing room with the calculation of a man imagining which furnishings he would keep. One Thursday evening he stays through supper.
Candlelight burns steadily in the candelabra between the courses, polishing the crystal, flattering the china, throwing soft gold along the edge of the decanter by your father’s hand. Everything about the table has been arranged with enough care to suggest welcome. The linen is spotless. The roast has been carved properly. The wine is decent, though your father has chosen restraint over indulgence. Your place has been set as it is always set. Napkin folded, water glass full, knife aligned. It is, in every outward way, a respectable dinner. That is precisely what makes it worse. Respectability is so often where cruelty hides best.
Your father sits at the head of the table in black evening clothes severe enough to pass for mourning. Lord Carroway sits at his right, broad and expensively upholstered, his waistcoat strained only just enough to suggest appetite. He is less polished here in the private candlelight than he had been at the ball. Or perhaps you are merely seeing him more clearly now that there is no music to disguise him. You sit lower down, where a daughter sits: visible enough to be included, peripheral enough to be forgotten whenever men begin discussing matters they think too important to be interrupted by the presence of a woman whose life they are arranging.
The conversation starts within the boundaries of public decency. The state of the parish. The latest subscriptions. One benefactor’s tedious gout. The alarming laxity of younger men in matters of observance. Carroway speaks with the heavy assurance of a man who believes agreement the natural effect of hearing him long enough. Your father listens with the grave patience he reserves for men whose money, reputation, or theological vanity make them useful.
Then the fish is removed. The second bottle is opened. And whatever scruple had hitherto made the arrangement decorous enough to survive your presence appears to dissolve with the port. “A household requires order,” Carroway says, cutting his meat with the same deliberate force he brings to the opinion. “One sees the consequences when women are encouraged to imagine companionship where obedience would have served them better.” Your father inclines his head. “Quite.”
You keep your eyes lowered to your plate because looking directly at either man would require some expression, and you can afford none. Your fork lifts. Lowers. You have no memory of tasting the food. Only the act of making your hand perform while something inside you begins, slowly and with terrible certainty, to recoil.
Carroway glances toward you—not as one looks at a person participating in conversation, but as one glances toward a field under consideration. “Miss Marlowe has the advantage of excellent formation.” The sentence should not be survivable. It is said with almost absent approval, as if discussing the straightness of a row of hedges or the temperament of a mare. Your father’s mouth settles into that faint line which passes, in him, for satisfaction. “I have always considered discipline a father’s first mercy.” You grip your napkin beneath the table so tightly that the linen twists in your fist.
Carroway continues as though you have not heard, and perhaps in his mind, you have not. Perhaps in his mind, women hear arrangements only after rings are placed and papers signed; until then, they remain conditions rather than witnesses. “My late wife,” he says, and there is no softness at all in the mention, no grief, no tenderness—only ownership extended beyond death, “understood the comfort of a rightly ordered house. Submission spares a woman confusion. She need not form opinions on matters for which she has not the training.” Your father lifts his glass. “A rare understanding.”
You might have thought yourself prepared. You were not. The worst part is not that they speak of marriage. Marriage has hovered at the edge of your life from girlhood onward, not as a dream but as an eventual transfer. You have always known some hand would one day open the door of your father’s house and direct you toward another. No—the worst part is the ease with which the conversation proceeds as though your future were a practical matter already discussed behind closed doors where you were not required. Not if. Not even when. Only how. How best to settle you. How best to place you. How best to ensure that Reverend Marlowe’s well-kept daughter passes from one righteous authority into another without ever making the vulgar mistake of believing herself consulted.
Carroway lays down his knife and dabs at his mouth. “Of course,” he says, “a young wife must occasionally be corrected before she grows accustomed to indulgence. But a husband’s task is a sacred one. To guide. To shape. To preserve.”
His gaze comes to rest on you again. This time, he smiles. It is not a kind smile. It is not even a lustful one, which would at least possess the honesty of appetite. It is the smile of a man congratulating himself on ownership. Your father follows his glance. “Miss Marlowe has always responded well to instruction.”
A hot wave of humiliation moves over you so swiftly that the room goes thin and bright at the edges. The candle flames appear too sharp. The silver too polished. Carroway too close, too broad, too secure. Your father’s voice too calm. You are not in the room. That is what they require of you: the correct kind of daughter, the correct kind of prospective wife. Present enough to prove modesty. Absent enough that the terms may be discussed over your head. Something in your chest goes frighteningly still.
When the supper ends, your body feels as though it has been left elsewhere, and only your posture remains at the table. You rise when your father does. Curtsy when expected. Leave the room because women leave the room and that is called virtue instead of exclusion. Yet the men’s voices continue from the study once the door closes, and because your father has never thought it necessary to protect your hearing from your own fate, you catch enough through the wall to understand what is being purchased.
That night you do not cry. You stand at your window with the hidden travel book in your hands and feel something more useful than tears settle into you. Freedom, you realise, is not some poetic longing after all. It is a fact from which you have been excluded. The distinction changes everything.
Your first rebellion is so small it would look laughable from the outside. At breakfast the next morning, you take sugar in your tea. Your father prefers it plain. Has always preferred it plain. So the household takes it plain. You have never questioned this any more than you would question gravity, because in your father’s house, preference becomes principle at astonishing speed.
The spoon slips into the bowl, lifts white crystals, and tips them into the tea before you can fully consider what your hand is doing. One spoonful. No more. You stir. Nothing in the room changes. The servants do not cry out. The windows do not break. The house does not split. You lift the cup, taste sweetness, and nearly laugh from the perversity of it—not because sugar matters, but because choice does. Your father notices. His gaze rests on the cup, then on your face, and because it is only tea and only sugar and only one spoonful, he says nothing. That is worse. It means he is storing the moment. Counting.
The second rebellion is the ribbon. Not scarlet or gold or anything dramatic enough to announce itself to the house. You are not suicidal. Merely tired. When dressing for Sunday service, you choose a pale cornflower ribbon instead of the ash-grey one laid out by your maid under your father’s instructions. It is nearly the same shade as modesty itself, only brighter by a degree small enough to be denied and large enough to feel like insolence against your skin. Your father says nothing as you descend. At church, however, two parish ladies look at the colour, then at one another, with the identical, sharpened smile of women scenting proof. Mingyu sees it too. While Reverend Marlowe speaks of modesty from the pulpit and the ribbon at your throat seems to burn in the sight-lines of every respectable woman in three pews, you only feel Mingyu’s gaze touch the back of your neck and then, faintly, your shoulder where the colour lies. He says nothing. Your pulse spends the entire sermon behaving as though it has forgotten itself.
The punishment waits until afternoon. No study this time. No desk. No prayers on bare boards. Instead, your father receives two ladies from the parish in the front drawing room and sends for you to join them, dressed not in your ordinary visiting gown but in plain white muslin entirely stripped of ribbon or trim—purity turned penitential. The dress is not ugly. That would at least feel honest. It is bleached of any selfhood and presented as simplicity. You are made to pour tea. To stand while the ladies speak of young women and vanity and the necessity of vigilance in an age of loosened morals. Your father, from the hearth, remarks upon the spiritual value of humility. One of the women smiles at you with a pity so sharpened by pleasure that you understand at once this is punishment made public and called instruction.
When one of them remarks that young girls often fail to understand how colour excites the eye, your father says, “Miss Marlowe is learning the difference between being looked at and being seen well.” The humiliation is surgical. No titles. No accusation. Only implication placed so neatly in the room that everyone may admire the cleanliness of the cut. Afterwards, in the privacy of your room, you take the ribbon and hide it inside the travel book. A silly rebellion. A stupid one. It matters more than whole catechisms.
The white muslin appears more often. You are made to accompany your father on parish visits where he speaks, before assembled women, of the necessity of humble daughters who do not seek admiration. He has you read aloud from conduct manuals after Bible circle under the guise of “benefiting from edifying passages.” Once, after a Lady remarks too sweetly that youth is prone to excitement, your father thanks her and then asks you to distribute alms in the vestibule while matrons smile and call you dutiful. It is not literal public repentance. It is worse. It leaves room for everyone to say, if challenged, that no humiliation was intended at all.
At another Sunday service he calls you forward after the final hymn—not before the whole congregation, no, he is too cruel for that, but before enough of the church ladies and vestry wives gathered near the front that the effect spreads instantly through the room—and asks you to recite “Let your moderation be known unto all men” as an example to the younger girls. Your voice does not shake. The triumph you take from that is tiny and bitter and entirely your own. Back in the carriage, he says only: “A daughter who must be corrected publicly is a father’s quiet grief.” The line is fashioned to wound and sanctify the wound in the same stroke. You stare out the window and think of coastlines, islands and sun-kissed skin.
The day your father announces the betrothal, the church is fuller than usual. You know why before he speaks. Women have dressed with an extra degree of care. Carroway stands nearer the front than he has any right to in a parish not his own. Lady Henshaw’s expression has honed into that concerned expectancy which means she knows something and relishes being among the first permitted to hear it. Mingyu is in his accustomed place behind you. There is no comfort in that. There is too much of it. You can feel him all through the final hymn, all through the prayers, all through the rustle of the congregation rising into that post-service half-order where news travels quickest because people are still arranged into listening.
Your father steps forward and clears his throat. The church quiets. He speaks first of blessings. Of gratitude. Of the comfort of divine provision. Then, with all the dignity of a man delivering what he believes to be both good news and moral correction, he announces that Lord Carroway has made honourable intentions known and that, with prayerful consideration and paternal gladness, those intentions have been received favourably. You hear the words. You understand them. Yet the meaning remains outside the body, as if language itself has become too far away to enter flesh.
Then the church ladies begin their little sounds. Surprise arranged into approval. Smiles sharpened by relief. Carroway inclines his head as though receiving a minor distinction. Your father’s hand settles on your shoulder with solemn proprietorship. Your future, such as it is, has been spoken aloud before the church before it was ever spoken to you as a matter of your own choosing.
Mingyu does not move. That is how you know the news has struck him. If he had laughed, if he had shifted, if he had muttered some blasphemy under his breath, the world might have stayed intact enough for you to survive it. Instead, he goes so still that the silence behind you becomes a thing with shape.
The congregation dissolves into congratulations. Women turn toward you with all their sympathy arranged around their satisfaction. Men gravitate toward Carroway and your father, eager to approve another man’s arrangement of female obedience. You smile. You have been trained well enough to smile.
By the time the church begins to empty, you no longer feel your face. What remains is motion. Your father directs. Carroway receives hands. Lady Henshaw tells you, clasping your fingers too tightly between her own, that stability is a blessing many girls are too foolish to appreciate until it is too late. You answer nothing that can be remembered later.
Someone—a churchwoman, perhaps, or one of the older girls from Bible instruction—mentions that the front pews have not yet been scrubbed after the alms distribution, and Reverend Marlowe, hearing it, instructs you to remain behind and help with the pews. “Since humility,” he says in the hearing of two matrons, “becomes a bride better than excitement.” You bow your head with a composure that no longer feels like obedience but like vacancy. He leaves you there.
Sunlight weakens over the stained glass and turns the coloured patterns on the floor into something duller and less magical. The vastness of the nave becomes more apparent in emptiness, more cold. The silence after a congregation leaves is not true silence. It is the sound of all the prayers and judgments and hypocrisies still hanging in the air after the bodies that made them have gone. You kneel between the pews with a bucket and a rag.
The wood is cold beneath your hands. Polish stings faintly at the skin around your knuckles where the rosary has already marked you this week. Your white muslin gathers at your knees. You scrub at the polished rail as though effort might return you to some earlier version of the day before your father stood before the church and gave you away to a man who spoke of wives as though they were livestock.
“Miss Marlowe.”
Mingyu stands half in shadow where the side chapel opens toward the confessional alcove, coat still on, gloves absent, face stripped of every easy public brightness. There is no grin. No light line prepared to make this bearable. Only him.
You straighten so abruptly the cloth slips from your fingers. “You should leave,” you rush, too low for any echo but sharp with fear all the same. “If anyone sees—”
“No one is here.”
“They will be.” He comes no nearer. That restraint hurts more than pursuit would have. You pick up the rag. “Go.”
Mingyu does not obey. Instead, he glances toward the side aisle where the confessional stands—dark wood, curtained, half-hidden in the architecture of the church—and then back at you. “Come here.”
You stare. “Absolutely not.”
His mouth almost moves, but what rises in it is not amusement. Something lower. More frayed. “Miss Marlowe.” He says your name like a plea dragged through discipline. “If I stand here another minute, I shall either say something ruinous in open church or do something worse. Spare us both.” The words should horrify you. They do. They also work.
Perhaps because the church has already become a site of humiliation, and some furious inward part of you refuses to let it claim every possible thing. Perhaps because your father has named your life before half the parish, and you cannot bear to stand obediently in the wreckage of it. Or perhaps because this is Mingyu, and every terrible thing between you has so far begun with the world telling you to remain where you were.
You rise. Bucket, rag, white muslin, rosary, betrothal, shame. You carry all of it with you into the side aisle as if bearing offerings to the wrong God. The confessional door closes softly behind you. The cramped dark of it changes everything.
The church remains beyond the wood lattice and curtain. God remains wherever men insist He does. Yet inside the narrow, enclosed space, the world feels abruptly reduced to breath and shadow, and the shape of him, half-visible, where the dividing screen catches the light. Mingyu is close. Close enough that you can see where the tension sits in his jaw. Close enough that the heat of him enters the small box and alters the very air. No laughter survives in either of you. The absurdity of the place presses around you—a confessional, of all things, built for rehearsed guilt and holy absolution, now holding the two most dangerous truths in your life. Mingyu rests one hand against the dark wood beside the screen, fingers spread. “I should have said something.”
You look at him. “In there?”
“No.” His mouth tightens. “Before.”
The distinction undoes you in some small private way. “There was nothing to say.” His gaze sharpens. “There was everything to say.” Somewhere beyond, a door closes in the nave with the mild thud of ordinary church business. The sound makes your pulse leap. “My father is here.”
“I know.”
A kind of helpless anger rises in you then—not at him, not even at yourself precisely, but at the unbearable calm with which he says I know as if knowledge itself were a hand held out over water. “Then you know I should not be here.” His eyes hold yours through the dimness and the carved lattice. “And yet you are.” You hate him a little for the truth of it.
The rag remains clenched in your hand like a ridiculous remnant of obedience. When you speak again, your voice has gone thin with effort. “You should not have come to me after… that.”
He understands what that means. The announcement. The public betrothal to a man you cannot bear to picture touching you outside a ballroom set. “No?” His voice is very low. “Then where am I to go with it?” The question catches you. “Go with what?”
Mingyu laughs once under his breath, not because anything is funny, but because men like him have always used laughter where other people would bleed. “With the fact,” he says, “that I have spent three weeks trying to behave as though what happened in that gallery could be made smaller by any means.”
The words enter you with impossible force. You had not known, until that moment, how badly you needed him to say it had not been small for him. Your hand tightens harder around the rag. The bucket at your feet seems absurd. The church walls absurd. The whole truth of your life absurd.
Mingyu leans his head against the dark wood beside the screen. “I thought,” he says, “that if I kept moving loudly enough, I should not hear myself think. It worked for years.” His eyes lift again. “Noise is easy. Laughter. Cards. Women. Clubs. Cities. You go far enough and fast enough and no one asks what you are running from, least of all yourself.”
There is no pose in him. No rakish sheen. He does not look like the man Mayfair prefers. He looks younger. Not boyish. More dangerous than that. Honest. “What are you running from?” you ask.
His mouth curves without humour. “Stillness.” The answer is so simple you almost miss its terror. “When my mother died,” he declares, and your breath stills because you have never heard him speak of her, “everyone in the house became useful. Seungcheol became duty. Joshua became reason. Wonwoo vanished into silence. Soonyoung became noise before I thought to claim it for myself. I learned quickly that if I was laughing, no one asked whether I was grieving. They only called me charming and made room.” The confessional seems smaller now than before. Not because the wood has moved. Because something in him has. “And if I was desired,” he adds, voice flattening into a kind of self-disgust, “it meant I was not being left. Even if only until morning.”
You close your eyes. The line enters too close to the heart and strikes places your father’s theology never reached because it had no language for abandonment except sin and no language for hunger except weakness. When you open your eyes again, the lattice between you feels suddenly very thin. “My life,” you say quietly, “has been one long hallway in a house I never leave.”
You had not meant to say it like that. Yet once the image arrives, it insists on staying. You see your own childhood suddenly not as years but as rooms connected by locks—bedroom to breakfast room, breakfast room to church, church to study, study to drawing room, drawing room to carriage, carriage to other women’s drawing rooms where your father’s respectability might be reflected back at him in polished form. “Everything in it,” you continue, because the words have broken loose and will not be called back, “has been decided by someone else. The colour of my ribbons. Which books remain in my room. Whether the window may be open. How long I may stand in sunlight. What I say. What I do not say. What is useful. What is vain.” Your throat tightens around the next line, but you force it through. “I do not know who I am without permission.”
Mingyu’s hand leaves the wood. It falls to his side with visible effort, as if keeping it from reaching through the lattice toward you has become a labour more serious than any sermon your father preached that morning. “Then learn,” he tells, and the force in the whisper nearly undoes you. “Even if it is in scraps. Even if it begins with sugar and ribbon and hidden books and hating every second of what it costs.”
You stare at him. The confessional has become a place where truth cannot pretend to be anything other than itself. He knows. He knows about the scraps. Perhaps not each one. Not the exact shape of them. But enough. The ribbon. The changed look. The fact that something has begun resisting in you and is not yet big enough to be called revolt, but too alive now to be mistaken for peace. “You make rebellion sound easy.” His answer comes immediately. “No.” A pause. “Only worth it.”
The silence between you is so taut it seems to hum. Your whole body is aware of the nearness and the wood and the screen and the dark and the fact that if he reached for your hand, you do not know whether you would pull away. “I am to marry him,” you remind. The words remain unbearable even in whisper.
Mingyu’s face changes. No bright remark. No sharp joke at Carroway’s expense. Not even anger, though anger is there if one looks deeply enough. What moves across him looks more like injury. “No,” he says. You almost laugh. “That is not a thing you may contradict into being untrue.”
He slides a fraction nearer. The confessional is too small for such movements not to count. “No,” he says again, quieter. “I mean, I don’t believe it belongs to him because your father says so.”
The room tilts. You are becoming too bold in private. You know it while it is happening and cannot seem to stop. All you can think about is kissing him again. How his mouth felt. How your body had answered before doctrine could. How he had stopped with you and not despite you. His breath catches. So does yours. He knows. That is the worst of it, perhaps—that he does not need a confession for this part. The wanting is all over the air between you. Neither of you moves. Finally, he says your name. It sounds unlike any other person’s use of it. Not because he says it more sweetly. Because he says it as if it belongs to a woman and not to a role.
Your hand loosens on the rag. Falls a little. His fingers lift—not quite toward the screen, not quite away. Hovering in the narrow dark, the gesture half-made and full of everything unsaid. If he touched you now, you think you might break into light. If he did not, you might go mad.
The church beyond the confessional is very quiet. Too quiet. Mingyu seems to feel it too. His gaze flicks once toward the seam of the door, then back to you. “You should go.” The disappointment that goes through you is so immediate it nearly startles you into speech. He sees that too. God help you, he sees everything. “Not because I want you to,” he corrects. “Because if I keep you here, I’ll forget every sensible thing I’ve spent three weeks learning.”
You think of White’s. Of the women, the city assumes he keeps. Of all the easy bright appetites he could have spent himself on if he wished. And here he stands in a dark confessional looking at you as though restraint itself has become a form of suffering.
You should leave. You do not. Instead, your hand rises and comes to rest against the lattice between you. Your palm fits where his would fit on the other side if he chose to mirror it. He looks down. Then he lifts his own hand and sets it there too, separated from yours by carved oak so thin it might as well be non-existent.
In the nave beyond, a floorboard creaks. Mingyu’s gaze flicks once toward the door. His hand leaves the lattice. It moves, slow enough that you could stop him if you wished, around the edge of the dividing screen where the wood opens near the hinge. He does not take your hand. Does not drag, does not grasp, does not claim. His fingers only touch the inside of your wrist, where the rosary remains tangled around your skin. The contact is feather-light.
Mingyu says your name again, so softly it feels like the opposite of prayer. And then, before sense or safety or fear can recover sufficiently to govern either of you, he bends and presses his mouth against your forehead. A blessing in the wrong chapel. A tenderness so unguarded it feels more perilous than hunger. Your mouth parts. No sound leaves it. When Mingyu straightens, his face is close enough that the dark of his eyes feels like a storm gathering. “Go,” he says again, and his voice is frayed with effort. “Before I forget what sort of place this is.” You pull your hand back too quickly, and the loss of warmth is immediate. The blood in your ears is so loud you cannot tell whether the church itself has shifted or only the shape of your composure. You leave the confessional.
The pews wait. The bucket waits. Everything in the church has remained exactly where it was, and yet the world no longer appears arranged in the same order.
You do not see the figure standing half-screened by the vestry door. You do not see the black coat held perfectly still in shadow. You do not see Reverend Marlowe’s face—gone to that terrible, prayerless stillness which means he has seen enough.
Your father’s anger, when it finally sheds its church clothes, is not loud. You had imagined—foolishly, perhaps—that if Reverend Marlowe ever truly lost command of himself, it would arrive in thunder. In a raised voice. In some visible collapse of the solemn discipline he has worn for years like a second skin. But fury, in your father, does not come unravelled. It comes sharpened.
The door of his study closes with the same finality with which he has closed it a hundred times before—for prayer, for correction, for private interviews with churchmen and benefactors and those respectable little violences by which a household is kept “orderly”—and in the instant after it shuts, the room remains precisely as it always is: the desk squared to the carpet, the Bible laid open upon it, the shelves standing close and watchful in the lamplight. Nothing in the room has altered. The setting remains constant. Only the sentence changes.
You are still wearing white. The muslin hangs from your shoulders in that punishing purity your father had been using for public corrections, plain enough to pass for humility, colourless enough to strip the wearer of anything approaching selfhood. Now, beneath the low light of the study, it makes you feel less like a daughter and more like a prisoner.
Your father stands between you and the door. He does not demand confession because confession would grant you the dignity of interior life, and Reverend Marlowe has never believed his daughter possessed one independent of his governance. He voices, louder than if he were requesting a chapter and verse at the table, “Hold out your hands.”
You do not move. The refusal is not grand. It does not ring through the room as rebellion might in a novel. It is smaller than that, quieter, and therefore more dangerous. Your hands remain where they are, hanging at your sides and trembling in the still air, and in that one disobedient action, you feel all the narrow corridors through which you have been guided and folded and trained until even your breath seemed to arrive by permission. Something in that structure gives, just slightly, with the simple fact that your hands do not rise.
Your father looks at you. His face does not change. Or rather, it changes in the one way his always has when displeasure deepens into something more dangerous: the stillness grows finer. “Hold out your hands.” The words fall again, thinner, honed.
You think of the confessional. Of shadow and wood and that impossible, devastating tenderness of Mingyu’s mouth at your forehead. Of the way his hand had touched the inside of your wrist where the rosary had rested and marked. And because you think of these things, perhaps, because your body has been kissed and witnessed and taught, in scraps, to imagine the existence of choice, your hands still do not rise.
The slap comes so quickly, you only understand it after it has already happened. The crack of it strikes through the room and through your face and through whatever childish expectation you had once preserved that his cruelty might always remain deniable. Pain blooms bright and immediate across your cheek. Your head turns with the force of it. The room lurches. The taste of metal arrives at the edge of your mouth before the breath has even fully left you, and for one sickening second, you are no longer certain whether what shocks you more is the violence or the proof of how calmly he can carry it. You stagger once against the chair. Catch yourself. Straighten.
Your father does not raise his voice. That is the line, and he has crossed it without surrendering so much as a thread of his composure. “I will not,” he declares, each word a separate instrument, “be shamed by a daughter who has forgotten her place.”
His hand closes around your arm and turns you toward the desk. There, beside the open Bible and the trimmed pens and the papers waiting to be filled with righteousness, lies a crop—no doubt once for horses, perhaps for discipline in some practical country sense, now made useful here for a lesson more intimate and more vile. For one heartbeat, you cannot breathe at all.
Then you wrench from his grasp, instinct exploding before strategy can form. The movement is useless. He is larger than you, older than you, so fortified by certainty and by custom and by the legal sanctity of fatherhood that your resistance only clarifies the shape of what is to follow.
The first stroke lands across the backs of your calves through the muslin. It is not the agony described in novels. It is worse. Sharp, immediate, shocking enough that your knees nearly give, the pain trailing behind the impact in a line of fire that seems at first too bright to belong to the body at all. The second follows before the first has settled. The third catches where cloth no longer protects, and the sound that tears from your throat is no proper cry, no lady-like gasp, only the involuntary sound of flesh receiving what flesh was not made to welcome.
Your father speaks while doing it. That is perhaps his greatest obscenity. Not cursing. Not shouting. In that grave, clerical tone with which he has spent years interpreting God for lesser souls. “A daughter—” the crop whistles through the air and finds you again “—who invites corruption—” another strike, another line of heat and ruin “—must be corrected before she mistakes appetite for liberty.”
The room contracts. The world becomes impact and breath and the impossible dignity of not wanting him to hear you beg. You taste blood where you have bitten your lip. The fourth blow lands lower. The fifth higher. By then, your body has ceased separating pain into individual moments and has become, instead, one great, bright field of it, every nerve lit and shuddering. You hear the crop sing through the air before each strike and begin dreading the sound even more than the contact, because the dread gives time for imagination to do its own work.
And somewhere inside the heat and humiliation and the old well-trained instinct to obey, something else rises. Not meekness. Not collapse. Something feral. It gathers slowly, with dreadful clarity, in the very place your father means to break. Each stroke strips away one more layer of obedience until what remains is no longer the frightened, dutiful creature who could once be led back into herself through prayer and silence and copied verses. What remains is fury—white, clean, unornamented. Not the sort that screams. The sort that survives.
By the time he stops, your legs are shaking too hard to hold you upright, the white muslin has become a red, miserable witness to what has been done in this room, and your cheek still burns with the earlier blow as if your father had meant to mark your face and your body with separate signatures.
He lays the crop down. “You will pray,” he says. “And you will thank God that I have corrected you before the world is forced to.”
You straighten by sheer hatred. Your face is wet. You had not noticed the tears. They do not feel like grief. They feel like the body overheated, spilling what it can no longer contain. When he tells you to kneel, you do not. You look at him.
Not with childish rebellion. Not even, perhaps, with anything he can safely name. You look at him with a stillness he has spent your entire life attempting to monopolise, and in that look lies something colder than disobedience and more dangerous than tears: the knowledge that pain has not led you back into his keeping. It has pushed you beyond it. Your father sees enough to go pale at the mouth. “Go to your room.”
You go. Not because he commands it. Because you have decided not to remain in it.
Your maid draws breath sharply when she opens the door.
She does not cry out. She has been in this house too long to waste shock where walls may echo it back to the wrong ears. Yet her candle trembles in its brass holder and her free hand rises halfway to her mouth before she masters herself. You shut the door behind you with your own hand. “Do not call anyone,” you say. The sound of your own voice startles you. It is low, scraped raw, as though the evening has stripped away the final coating and left only the hard grain beneath.
She sets the candle on the dressing table and comes nearer. In the warmer light, she sees the mark on your cheek, the split at your lip, the way you are holding yourself with all the painful precision of someone who cannot permit her body to admit what it has just endured. “Miss—”
“I need your help.”
There is no room left for delicacy. Your maid’s face changes. Not into horror —horror is a luxury, and women who serve in clerical houses learn very quickly which feelings are safer than others. What takes its place is something fiercer, quieter, and entirely more useful. She nods.
It is one of the great secret generosities of womanhood that some of the most life-saving loyalties are formed not through declaration, but through immediate practical understanding. She asks no moral questions. Does not tell you to be still while she fetches your father. Does not whisper of duty or patience or the Lord’s refining fire. She draws the bolt, goes to the washstand, and begins assembling what is needed as if tending damage done by righteous hands were as ordinary a domestic labour as brushing hair. You sit where she places you.
The act of lowering yourself is enough to make your whole body seize. A hiss escapes you despite yourself when the fabric shifts against the raw lines at the backs of your legs. Your maid’s jaw tightens. With small, quick movements, she loosens the gown and lifts the blood-marked chemise away from the places where cloth has begun to cling. Cool water touches your skin, and every inch of you burns in answer. You do not cry out. You grip the edge of the chair until the bones of your hand stand white under the skin.
When she finishes cleaning what may be cleaned, the marks remain livid and unmistakable, crossing your calves and thighs in angry lines that will blacken by morning. Your cheek has begun to swell. Your lip is bloodied. You look, in the mirror’s blurred candlelight, not like a girl seduced into error, not like a penitent daughter reclaimed, but like someone who has had the final excuse for obedience taken from her by force.
Your maid wraps a shawl around your shoulders. “He’ll bolt the lower hall after midnight,” she says, keeping her voice low. “The side servants’ door will still catch if Cook has gone down and the scullery maid’s asleep.”
You look at her. She meets your gaze and knows, from that alone, that there will be no sleeping in this house tonight. “Where will you go?”
The answer leaves you without pause, without surprise, as if your body had chosen long before the rest of you had the courage to admit it. “Ashbourne Hall.”
Her eyes widen once. Then narrow, not in judgment but in the swift, hard arithmetic of women who understand what must happen next. She fetches your darkest cloak. Not elegant. Not costly. Plain enough to vanish in shadow. Your stoutest boots. A small purse. Pins your hood with capable fingers while the room hums with the quiet urgency of conspiracy. When she draws the fabric around you, there is tenderness in her hands and fury too, though she says little. “You must go quickly,” she murmurs. You stand. Pain answers from every place your father touched. You no longer care.
The narrow lane behind the house lies washed in a thin grey-silver moonlight and the weak amber of distant lamps. Somewhere farther off, wheels move over stone. A door closes. The city breathes its enormous dark breath around you, and, for the first time in your life, there is no carriage wall between that breath and your skin. The cold is bitter and clean enough to make everything feel sharper. Your cheek. Your mouth. The places where the crop bit. The place inside you that has gone beyond sorrow into something more earnest.
You are not some girl stealing into the night because a gentleman smiled too beautifully in church. Not a blushing fool ruined by a side-gallery kiss and a little bright talk of Greece. The blood beating in you has nothing to do with girlish softness. You are running because Reverend Marlowe’s hand crossed a threshold tonight, and Lord Carroway’s name has become the polite face of a lifetime’s continuation of that threshold. You are running because your body has been used as a sermon. Because your life has been arranged in rooms where you were visible enough to be traded and absent enough not to be consulted. Because if you remain where you are, every small scrap of self you have begun gathering—sugar, ribbon, sunlight, pages hidden in cedar, a kiss, a hand against a lattice, one impossible forehead blessing in the wrong chapel—will be taken back away from you.
By the time Ashbourne Hall rises before you, black and elegant against the sleeping square, your breath is ragged and every step sends hot pain up through your legs in jolting lines. The great townhouse looks impossibly self-possessed, as though houses such as this one never imagine women arriving at their doors with bruised cheeks and a will only half held together by fury.
The footman who opens the door nearly forgets his face. Servants are trained against surprise. They are not trained against seeing a clergyman’s daughter standing on the steps past midnight in a dark cloak, mouth bloodied, eyes bright with something too hard to call tears. “Miss Marlowe?” His whisper contains the whole scandal and none of the cruelty. “I need Mr. Ashbourne.”
He hesitates only long enough to understand the stakes belong well above his station and far outside ordinary service. “Come in, miss.” He steps aside and closes the door behind you with respectful discretion.
Ashbourne Hall at midnight is all softened and possessed luxury: a banked glow from wall sconces, the gleam of polished banisters, the hush of an expensive house built to look effortless even in sleep. A clock ticks somewhere deeper in the hall. “Wait here,” the footman murmurs. “I’ll fetch him.”
You stand there, cloak still clasped shut at your throat, trying not to breathe too hard and not to think too much. The hall swims at the edges of your vision and rights itself only because you force it to. Your fingers are numb with cold, and yet you can feel, through layers of fabric, the pulsing burn of your feverish skin. Every second waiting seems to expose the enormity of what you have done: a lady in a gentleman’s house, no chaperone, no excuse that may survive daylight. Then Mingyu appears at the head of the stairs.
His shirt lies open at his collar. His dark hair is roughened from running his hand through it. Sleep is nowhere in him. He is moving before the footman has fully vanished from the hall. “Miss Marlowe—” He stops. Starts again, lower. “What happened?”
You had not intended to tremble until he spoke. You do now. The sound of your own breath seems far too loud in the silence. Mingyu’s eyes move over you quickly—not with the slow appreciative notice of a man taking in a woman’s appearance, but with the terrible precision of someone searching for injury. Your cheek. Your mouth. The way you cannot quite stand evenly. Something in him hardens.
You do not want questions. You do not want sympathy. You do not want, above all things, for him to look at you and see a broken thing instead of a woman who has made one last selfish, furious choice before the world closes over her. “Take me somewhere private,” you say. He obeys at once.
He brings you not to a drawing room where the house might overhear, nor to the library with its long respectable echoes, but to his own room, where the fire still lives low in the grate and the bed stands half-turned in the warmth of the room and everything in the air smells faintly of clean linen, extinguished candle, and him.
When the door closes behind you, the privacy becomes immediate. So does the danger. Mingyu turns. There is no humour in his face at all. “What happened?” The words come rough, almost hoarse.
You should tell him. You should speak plainly and be done with it. Yet the humiliation of naming what your father did feels almost worse than the pain itself. You look away. Mingyu crosses the room slowly, as though approaching some skittish, wounded thing that might either bolt or bite. “Miss Marlowe.” Then, more softly, because the use of your formal title in this room suddenly sounds absurd between you, “Angel.”
Your mouth shakes. That is all. A little treachery in the line of it. Yet Mingyu sees the whole fracture. His hand comes up and hovers near your face. Not quite touching until you give the slightest nod. His thumb brushes the edge of your cheek where the swelling has begun. The pain is bright enough that your breath jerks. His hand stills at once. He looks at you. “Who hurt you?” he asks, and there is such concentrated softness in the question that you nearly weep from it.
“My father,” you confess. Mingyu lets his hand fall then, not away from you but lower, until he takes hold of the clasp at your throat and loosens it. The cloak slips from your shoulders. The shawl with it. His breath catches when the movement bears the full damage of the evening to the gentle lamplight. The white muslin has become an obscenity—too innocent a fabric to carry such evidence, and so making the evidence appear even crueller for the contrast. His fingers follow the line of your arm until they reach the edge of the muslin, where the fabric has shifted against your calf. He does not lift it. “May I?” he asks. You whisper, “Yes.”
Mingyu gathers the hem with both hands and lifts it only enough to see. The silence that follows is terrible. His gaze takes in the raised welts striped along the backs of your calves and higher, where cloth has not fully spared your skin. His mouth parts and shuts. The muscles of his jaw work with visible effort. When he speaks, the words are so soft you almost miss them. “I’ll kill him.”
Mingyu’s eyes lock with yours, and there is such naked fury in them that for one unstable moment, you think if you said yes, he truly would leave the room, walk out into the night, and kill Reverend Marlowe with his bare hands. That thought should frighten you. It does not. It reaches you as protection reaches a creature too long kept in captivity—warily, disbelievingly, with instinct answering before reason can. “No.” You shake your head, and the room rocks with the movement. “That would still leave him having had the last word.”
Mingyu rises to his full height. Whatever first violence had flared in him at the sight of you has gone inward, banked behind control, leaving only that grave, steady purpose in its place. One hand comes to your waist, the other to the nape of your neck—not to claim, only to guide. He means to turn you toward the chair near the fire, to press you gently down into it before your shaking legs betray you entirely. “Sit down,” he voices lowly.
You do not. Before he may steer you further, your hands close over his wrist. The touch arrests him. You stand there between his hands, trembling and upright, and something in your face tells him more clearly than any protest could: you have not come here to be handled softly back into helplessness.
The words have been building in you from the moment the study door closed behind your father, all the way across the square and up the steps of this house, and if you do not speak them now, you think they may tear their way out of you by force. “I did not come for pity.” Mingyu’s brows draw together. “I came because…” Your voice catches. You taste blood again where your lip has reopened slightly from the force of speaking. “Because tonight he touched what belongs to me as though it had never once belonged to me at all.”
The hand at your waist tightens. The fire gives one small sound in the grate. The silence that follows seems to gather itself around the two of you until even the room’s shadows feel like witnesses. You force yourself to continue because stopping now would be another kind of death. “Take me,” you say, and your voice shakes, though the decision does not. “Before I forget I’m allowed to belong to myself.”
For one breath, perhaps two, Mingyu says nothing at all. He stares at you as if you have placed some holy and unbearable object directly into his hands and asked him to profane it beautifully. His thumbs move—small, unconscious motions that tell you how near he is to losing himself. “Don’t ask me that if you don’t mean it,” he pleads.
“I mean it.” Your answer comes without tremor. That surprises even you.
Mingyu shuts his eyes. Just long enough to seem as though he is bracing against the blow of your want. When he opens them again, what looks back at you is naked wretchedness. “You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”
“I know exactly what I’m asking.”
“No.” His mouth twists, not in refusal, but in the agony of resisting the austerest path laid before a starving man. “You know what you need. That isn’t the same.”
You want to strike him—not from anger, but because refusal after all this would be unbearable and because the gentleness of his resistance hurts more than if he had simply reached for you like every cautionary tale ever whispered about him. You lift your chin despite the pain in your cheek. “Are you refusing me?”
He laughs under his breath, not from amusement but from disbelief. “Christ, no.” His fingers flex at your waist. “I am trying, for perhaps the first time in my miserable life, to be better than what’s easiest.”
The confession warms the whole room with its honesty. You do not reply. Mingyu goes on because if he does not, he will touch you, and then all the lines will be ash. “Because once I touch you like that,” he whispers, “there is no pretending it can be swept away after. Not for you. Not for me. Not if anyone learns it. Not if no one ever does.”
Something in you, held too tightly for too many years, breaks with a kind of terrible calm. “Nothing can be swept away after this.” You hear your own voice and barely know it. “That happened before I came.”
There is no gentleness left in the world capable of saving you tonight. Because your father’s study still lives in your nerves, Carroway’s smile does too, and because you have not come across the city to be given back whole to those men who call damage duty. All of that presses against your back while the only free space seems to exist in the narrow distance between your body and Mingyu’s. You step into that distance and put your hand flat over his heart. “Do not give me back to them tonight,” you assert. “Not untouched.”
His breath leaves him as if you have driven it out with force. “Angel,” he says again, and the word is no longer an endearment, but a man’s last coherent prayer before ruin, “you will unmake me.” Your fingers close in the linen of his shirt. “Then be unmade.”
His mouth takes yours with all the wrecked restraint he has been trying to keep standing between the two of you, and can no longer hold upright. The first press of it is almost savage in its relief. You feel him try for gentleness and lose it halfway through because you are kissing him back like a woman taking something owed to herself by blood and right. His hands move, one sliding up in your hair to hold you in the angle he wants, the other tightening at your waist until the space between your bodies ceases to exist.
You make a sound against his mouth. He answers it with another kiss, slower and deeper, his lips parting yours; it sends heat straight through your aching body and gathers low, hot, insistent, in your core. “If you want me to stop,” he says against your mouth, kissing the words apart, “you say it once.” You shake your head. “No.”
His lips ghost over the corner of your mouth where the split has begun to clot. He pauses there, not kissing the wound itself, only hovering close enough to honour the hurt without making worship of it. “No what?”
It is not cruelty. He is making you choose again. Giving the choice back and back and back each time you move toward him so no one—least of all you, tomorrow, in whatever room your father locks you in—may ever tell the story differently. You answer by taking his lower lip between your teeth and letting your hands slide upward into his hair. “That,” he groans hoarsely, “is not fair.” You do not know what fairness has to do with anything left in your life.
He kisses you again, the hand that was in your hair sliding down towards the fastening of your gown, while the other spreads broad and sure at your back. The white muslin loosens under his fingers. The simplicity of it feels vulgar now, this dress your father chose for punishment becoming, under Mingyu’s hands, merely another thing to be opened and shrugged away from skin. He draws the fabric down your shoulders until it pools at your feet.
Mingyu’s mouth breaks away from yours to touch the bruised side of your face. Then he switches to the unmarked side. Then down the line of your throat, where he kisses you as if beginning there might remake what has been done. Your hands tighten in his hair. He moves lower. His mouth finds the slope of your shoulder. The hollow just beneath. The upper curve of your naked chest as your chemise, loosened in the struggle of the evening, ceases to offer any meaningful defence against his hands.
The first touch of his palm over your breast sends a violent shiver through you. Not because you are innocent. That word has been used on you too often to mean anything. But because no one has ever touched you like this—like your body is not a thing to be regulated or displayed or bargained over, but a country he intends to cross slowly and with wonder. His thumb passes over your nipple and your whole body arches with a raw, helpless response that makes him curse softly into your skin. “God.”
Mingyu pushes the chemise lower and bares you fully to the room. The heat of his gaze moves over your breasts, and is enough to make your knees weaken. “You’re beautiful, do you know that?” he asks. You shake your head. His mouth curves—not mocking. Struck. “No,” he murmurs. “Of course you don’t.”
Then he bends and takes one breast into his hand while his mouth closes over the other. The sensation is so shockingly, exquisitely wet and warm that the moan you make tears out of you before shame can stop it. His tongue rolls with purposeful slowness around the tight aching peak until the ache becomes something far hotter. His hand kneads the other breast in time with the pull of his mouth until your head tips back, and you are no longer standing so much as held upright by the hand at your waist and the impossible steadiness of his body. “Mingyu—”
You have never said his name like that. He shudders. The sound goes straight through him. He lifts his head only long enough to drag his mouth across the swell of your breast and say, voice gone velvet-thick with desire: “Say it again.” You do, because you cannot not.
Mingyu answers by taking the neglected breast into his mouth in turn, giving the first one over to his hand and a rough brushing of his thumb that sends another helpless cry from you. He seems to like that very much. Not in the vain way of men who enjoy being admired. In a far more dangerous one—the way a famished man likes proof that the food before him is real.
His kisses trail downward. Across your ribs. The soft inward curve of your waist. The skin of your stomach where his hands follow, soothing and possessive all at once, holding you open to him as he lowers you, slowly, onto the edge of the bed. He kneels between your knees. The sight of it almost stops your heart.
A man like Mingyu, on his knees before you, shirt open, mouth reddened from kissing you, and body still leashed by the effort not to frighten or rush you—that sight alone might have unbound a better-trained woman than you. He looks up. “Still yes?” The room has narrowed to him. To the fire. To your own pulse beating like a struck drum through every nerve. You whisper, “Yes.”
His fingers slide up your bare calves, parting your knees wider over the coverlet. The motion pulls the welted skin there into fresh awareness, and when he sees the flinch cross your face, he stops immediately. “Tell me where not.” You swallow.
“Not there.” Your breath hitches as you guide one of his hands higher, past the worst of the damage, to the inside of your thigh where the skin is untouched and already hot with anticipation. “Here.” His thumb strokes the soft inner flesh once, twice, and your whole body tightens in answer. “That,” he says very softly, “I can do.”
He kisses the inside of one knee. Then the other. Up the tender inner length of your thighs in slow, ruined increments, his mouth turning reverent over skin that no one has ever touched except to dress, cleanse, or correct. Each kiss leaves heat behind in its wake. Each one seems to teach your body a new language you had not known it was capable of learning. When he reaches the edge of your drawers, he pauses only to look up at you once more. You are breathing too hard now to bear suspense. “Please.” The word escapes you before your pride can stop it. His eyes darken.
“That,” he says, fingers hooking delicately into the ribbon of your drawers, “you may say again.” He draws the fabric down. The room’s cool air touches your naked core, and you nearly close your legs on instinct. Mingyu’s hands are already there, broad and sure against your thighs, keeping you open.
The first touch of his mouth on your pussy is so shocking that your back leaves the bed. Not because it hurts. Because it does not. Because no sermon, no warning, no whispered disgust from church ladies had prepared you for the devastating ruin of a man kissing you there as though it were not shameful at all, but something worth kneeling for.
His tongue strokes between your folds slowly, as if learning the taste of your arousal. Then again. Deeper. More deliberate. Your hands fly to his hair with no memory of deciding to move them. He moans—actually moans—into you when your fingers tighten, and the vibration sends such a fierce, hot shudder through your clit that your whole body jolts. “Mingyu—God—”
He laughs, low and wrecked, without lifting his mouth. The sound melts into another long stroke of his tongue, then a slower, crueller circling on your clit already pulsing and throbbing as if it has waited all your life for recognition and is now furious in receiving it. His hands smooth your thighs, holding you apart when you close them around his shoulders against the unbearable intensity. He works you open with the sort of mastery that turns pleasure into something nearly impossible to survive in silence. You do not survive it silently.
The room fills instead with every breath you cannot catch, every small broken moan his mouth drags out of you, the wet, warm rhythm of his tongue and the occasional wicked suckling of his lips around your nub just long enough to make your whole body go rigid. It builds too quickly. No—that is not true. It builds exactly as quickly as he means it to, and the truth is worse because it means he already understands the places where your body will betray itself. Your thighs are shaking. The hand in his hair becomes a fist. “I can’t—”
He lifts his head only enough to speak against the inside of your thigh, his lips leaving a damp, shining trail there. “You can.”
Then his fingers join his mouth, sliding through the wetness he has made of you with obscene ease. One finger enters you first, pressing carefully, slowly, and the stretch of it is enough to pull a sharp little cry from you that is not pain so much as newness. He stops there, knuckles white where he is bracing himself on the bed, eyes fixed on your face. “Breathe,” he commands. You do.
He kisses your pussy again, his tongue soft and ruthless, while his finger eases farther inside your walls until your body stops fighting the intrusion and begins, to your own astonishment, to take it greedily. A second joins the first. The angle changes. His mouth closes over your aching clit harder. And suddenly the whole world contracts into one violent line of pleasure running from the base of your spine to your throat. You cry out and his name breaks apart in it.
The heat rushing through you is unlike anything you have ever known. Your body tightens helplessly around his fingers while his mouth drives you higher and higher until the sensation becomes too much to endure in any human shape. Then it breaks. Your climax takes you with a force that feels almost like anger turned into light. You arch hard, one hand in his hair, the other braced uselessly against the coverlet, and whatever sound tears from your throat scarcely resembles speech. Mingyu holds you through it, his free arm pinning you gently where you would otherwise have slid off the bed, his mouth working you through every shaking aftershock.
Mingyu lifts his head from between your thighs with your release still glistening upon his mouth. He bends over you, one hand braced beside your hip to accommodate the height of the bed, the other sliding to the nape of your neck as his mouth finds yours again. The kiss is deep and immediate and far more obscene for the softness with which this night began. You taste yourself on him, and the shock of that—of the intimacy, of the proof, of the wickedness of having him carry your own pleasure back into your mouth—draws a broken sound from you that seems to tear straight through him. Your fingers go to the buttons of his shirt. He breaks the kiss only far enough to look down. “What are you doing?” The question falls from him half as a laugh, half as a groan.
“I want to touch you.”
He hesitates—not because he does not want it, but because wanting has become the least of what troubles him now. Then he releases your wrists and lifts them one by one to his mouth, kissing the tender places where the rosary has marked you permanently before setting your hands back against his chest as though returning something important to its rightful owner. You open his shirt.
The linen parts under your fingers. One button. Then another. Then all of them, until the cloth hangs loose from his shoulders, and you push it down enough to bare him to the waist. The lamplight catches on the breadth of him—the hard planes of his chest, the lean pull of muscle down his abdomen, the quick rise and fall of breath that has lost every trace of ease. He stands between your knees, looking like something too beautiful to have been let into your moral world at all.
Your palms move over his warm skin. Over the flat, tense shape of his stomach. Around his sides. He shivers beneath your hands with the involuntary force of a man whose body has been waiting for your curiosity almost as desperately as your mouth. You bend and kiss him. Not his mouth. His chest. The hollow beneath his throat. Your lips travel lower over skin gone hot beneath the room’s quiet warmth, and the hand that had been resting at your waist slips into your hair with a rough, unsteady tenderness as though he does not trust his own legs through the sensation. When your mouth reaches the line of his stomach, he gives a breath that is nearly a curse. “You do not know,” he murmurs, fingers tightening at the back of your head, “what that does to me.”
You do not answer. You only look up through your lashes as your hands go lower, to the fastening of his trousers. “Angel,” Mingyu says your name. You open him fully. The sight of him bare before you—his cock hard and flushed and heavy with want—sends a fierce answering heat through your own body. You have no experience with this. Only imagination, hunger, and the memory of the way his mouth had worshipped you just before. You let your hand close around his girth and feel, with an almost violent jolt, the full living weight of what you hold.
A strange power enters you then. Not vanity. The bewildering knowledge that this body—this beautiful, dangerous body so many other women have touched with confident hands—has gone rigid beneath yours. You sink to your knees. Mingyu makes a sound and reaches for you at once. “No—”
You look up. His mouth is open. He has one hand gripping the bedpost so hard the knuckles have gone pale. “No?” you ask, and there is challenge in the question, and something of your new ferocity, too. “You may do as you like with me, and I am to do nothing with you?”
His eyes close briefly. When he opens them again, they are darker than before. “That is not what I said.”
You stroke him once, then again, learning by feel and by the way his body answers. How his stomach tightens. How his jaw sets. How the hand at the back of your head tightens its hold in your loosened strands. You lower your mouth to him.
You do not know precisely how a man is to be taken this way, only that you want to try. You kiss the heavy crown where he is already leaking, and the taste of him is startling—warm, salt-edged, heady. He jerks as if struck. “Angel—”
You do not stop. You kiss him again, then you part your lips and take him in only a little, enough to feel the shape of his length against your tongue, enough to hear his breath break above you. “Slow,” he mutters, and the word costs him. “Here—like this—”
His fingers gather your hair away from your face, and his thumb traces the corner of your mouth, showing rather than instructing, urging your lips to soften, to open more fully. You try again. Better this time. Deeper. He sucks in breath through his teeth, and his hand tightens around your chin. “That’s it,” he whispers hoarsely. “Easy—God—yes, like that.”
You move because you want to know. Because hunger has made curiosity fearless. Because the fact of his cock in your mouth is so astonishing that your body cannot bear to remain still. You let your tongue sweep over him, clumsy and earnest, and when another low, involuntary moan leaves him, something in you grows bolder. Your hand joins your mouth. You stroke what your lips cannot take, inelegant at first, then less so as his own body teaches you. Mingyu’s head falls back. One hand releases your jaw to brace against the canopy. “Christ,” he says, and this time the curse is shredded by pleasure. “Don’t—no, don’t stop—”
You do not stop. You take him farther, the stretch of it making your eyes sting and your throat protest, but you do not pull away. You are past caring for elegance. You pull back for breath, then lower your mouth again, more determined. Mingyu makes another broken sound, and the hand in your hair closes hard enough to betray what even his mouth cannot. Your palm works him while your mouth follows as much as it can manage. It is not pretty. It is not polished. It is wet and sloppy and a little desperate, and that seems to undo him far more thoroughly than any practised seduction might have done. “Angel—enough.”
You look up, lips parted around his cock, breath unsteady. He is watching you with an expression so nakedly wrecked it sends heat straight through your already-aching body. “Enough,” he says again, voice ragged and frayed, “or I come in your mouth and this ends here, and I am not—” He breaks off, swallowing hard. “Not like this.”
Before you can decide whether disobedience might be worth it, he bends, catches you under the arms, and hauls you up from the floor. You make a startled sound, half-laugh and half-protest, and find yourself upright against him, your knees weak, your mouth swollen, his breath hot at your temple. Mingyu holds you there for a moment as if his own balance now depends upon the fact of your body against his. Then he kisses you once more—hard, open, with all the force he has been biting back while you knelt before him—and when he breaks away, both of you are breathing like porters. “If I put you in that bed,” he says, “I am going to fuck you.”
You do not lower your eyes. “Yes.”
A sound leaves him—a helpless, ruined exhale that might once have been a laugh in some earlier, lighter life. “That is not how ladies are expected to answer me.”
“Then perhaps ladies have been taught badly.”
His eyes flash. The next moment, Mingyu lifts you with terrifying ease, one arm behind your back, the other beneath your thighs, just clear of the worst of the welts. He lays you back against the coverlet and comes down over you, bracing on one arm so his weight does not bear fully on your bruised body, and kisses you slowly until your own tension begins to melt into the mattress beneath you.
“Look at me,” he voices quietly. You do. His hand moves between your thighs, finding the wetness he made there earlier, gathering it to ease what must come next. When he presses the heavy blunt head of his cock against your entrance, the stretch of it feels impossible. Your breath catches so sharply you nearly bite through your lip to hold it in. “I know,” Mingyu whispers, one hand finding yours and lacing your fingers together hard enough to anchor. He enters you slowly.
No sermon ever uttered could have prepared you for this. Not the pressure. Not the fullness. Not the way your body resists before it yields and then seems suddenly to know, in some deeply hidden place, what to do with him after all. The first breach hurts. There is no virtue in pretending otherwise. A hot, sharp pull and a breathless ache that makes your eyes sting, and your body go rigid around him.
Mingyu stops at once. His forehead comes to rest on yours. “Angel.” You shake your head, not in refusal but in fury at the interruption. “Don’t.” His eyes search your face. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like I’ll break.” Something hard and bright moves through his expression—understanding, desire, respect, all wound too tightly to name. “You won’t,” he replies. And very slowly, Mingyu moves again. The second advance is easier. The third easier still. The ache does not vanish, but it changes, softening under his patience into something thicker, something fuller. He fills you until there is nowhere in your own body that is not aware of him.
Your joined hands shift over the coverlet. Mingyu’s free hand travels up your side, cups your breast, strokes your throat, and returns to your hip. When he is fully inside you, he stays there for one suspended moment, both of you breathing hard, both of you feeling the scale of what has been done. Then he begins to move.
The first strokes are shallow, testing, almost maddening in their control. Mingyu watches your face, not because he doubts your consent, but because he is learning how pleasure changes your mouth, your eyes, your breath. The angle shifts. He goes deeper. A cry catches in you, and his whole body tenses around it. “There?” he asks, voice shredded thin. “Tell me.” You answer by dragging your nails lightly down his back. He groans into your mouth.
The rhythm grows. Slow at first, then slower still in that deliberate torment men think women do not understand because they are fools. You understand it now very well. Each thrust drags against your aching walls and pushes lower and lower inside you. You want more. “Mingyu.” He lifts his head. Your cheeks burn. Your body no longer cares for modesty. “More.”
The word transforms him. His mouth opens on a rough breath. His eyes go dark and molten. He kisses you, hard, before he changes the angle, hooks an arm around your waist, and pulls you up. He sits back against the headboard with you gathered into his lap, his cock still inside you, the change in position driving him deeper all at once, making both of you groan at the same time. Your knees fall to either side of his hips. His hands settle at your waist, broad and firm enough that you know he could move you if he wished. He does not. He lets you feel the choice. “Take what you came for,” he commands.
You brace your hands on his shoulders and move. The first rise-and-fall of your hips is inelegant. The second less so. By the third, your body has found the rhythm and the room disappears—gone into firelight and breath and the stretch and drag of his length filling you over and over. His hands keep hold of your waist only enough to keep you from losing the angle that makes each descent hit the sweetest, deepest place inside your core. You ride him, and he lets you. “That’s it,” Mingyu says, mouth at your throat, each word broken by a kiss, by a breath, by the contained strain of not taking over. “Yes—just like that—Christ, angel—”
You rock faster. His head falls back against the bedboard with a thud. One of his hands slides to your hip, gripping hard enough that the coming bruises will bear his shape. The other clutches your hair at the nape of your neck and drags your mouth back to his. Your breasts brush his chest with each motion. His cock drives into you from below in answering force every time you come down, and the wet, hard friction of it becomes so overwhelming your whole body begins to shake. “Look at you,” Mingyu murmurs against your lips. “Look at you taking me.”
Something tightens again low in your belly, fiercer this time, built not from his mouth or fingers alone but from being joined to him like this, from the angle, the fullness, the terrible rhythm that makes your body feel both wholly yours and wholly undone by what it is choosing. Mingyu’s hand slips between you. His thumb finds your aching clit that had already yielded so helplessly to his mouth and strokes it in devastatingly quick circles. The world blurs white at the edges. “Mingyu—”
“I know. Come for me.” Your second climax hits harder than the first. It tears through you with such force that you cannot breathe through it, can only cling to his shoulders and ride the breaking of it while he holds your waist and works you through every convulsion. Your mouth falls open against his neck. Your whole body clenches around him in sharp, relentless waves that make him swear into your hair and lose, finally, the last of his restraint. Mingyu takes over then. His hands lock on your hips and drive up into you once, twice, harder, the bed striking the wall softly behind you in time with the force of his thrusts. The sound of your name is torn raw from his lungs. His head drops forward against your chest. “God—yes—”
Mingyu comes with a shuddering violence that seems to rip straight through the elegant man the world thinks it knows, leaving only the body beneath—hot and hard and spent and holding you as though letting go now would mean dropping something sacred and breakable and wholly his to protect.
The fire ticks low in the grate. The lamplight breathes. You remain in his lap, boneless with the aftershocks of your combined release, forehead against his shoulder, the room spinning quietly around the edges. Mingyu’s mouth finds your temple. Then your cheek. And you realise, in the long, trembling silence after climax, that the thing most dangerous in the room is no longer freedom. It is that what you have taken for yourself tonight now wears his face, too.
The journal still smells faintly of salt when Mingyu draws the envelope from the back cover.
It is near midday now—far enough from dawn that whatever private indignities the morning brought have been dressed, washed, and buttoned into something resembling a gentleman again, yet not so far that the memory of the night has lost any of its edges. Even his own room has been put right around him with the discreet efficiency of wealth. Fresh water. Fresh linen. The fire coaxed back to proper life. The bed smoothed of what it knows. He had woken alone.
That fact lives in him still, though he has made a point of not standing too near it. Only the impression of you remained: warmth gone from the sheets, a strand of hair caught against the pillow where your head must have turned, the ghost of cold night air and woman still clinging to the coverlet as if the bed itself refused to be practical about what had happened in it. He had lain there longer than he ought to have done, staring at the canopy and understanding with a sort of savage humiliation that you had gone back. Gone back into the world that would punish you for coming. Gone back marked by choice in ways no one must know, and he will never be able to forget. Mingyu ought to have felt victorious. Instead, he had felt flayed.
There is no appetite pure enough to explain what passed between you last night. Not merely because he had had you—that is the sort of language boys use at White’s when they want to reduce women to proof of one another’s masculinity—but because you had come to him with your body burning from another man’s violence and asked for the one thing no one in your life had ever permitted you: a choice that belonged wholly to you. Mingyu has been trying, since breakfast, not to think about that, too. He is failing.
The leather cover of the journal is worn at the edges where weather, travel, and his own restless handling rubbed it smooth. Within, the pages tilt slantwise with salt-stiffened ink and impatient handwriting—notes on harbours, on white houses above blue water, on cliffs, on inns, on nights too bright with wine to be worth remembering and mornings too clean not to be. Between one page and the next are pressed fragments of maps, receipts in foreign hands, one dried olive leaf ground almost to dust. The boyish theatre of a man who thought movement itself might one day amount to a self. Mingyu turns a page. A sketch of a little harbour, all angled masts and white walls. Another. A line written in the margin and crossed out: stillness is worst at sea because there is nowhere to throw it.
His mouth hardens at that. The old arrogance of it. The old fear dressed as wit. He had written such things with the confidence of a man convinced no one would ever be foolish enough to read them except himself and, perhaps, one day a woman in a foreign bed who preferred mystery to honesty.
At the back of the journal, tucked where he had left it months ago simply because keeping it hidden felt easier than opening it, lies the envelope. His name is written on the front in a hand that turns his chest unexpectedly hollow at the sight of it. No title. No rank. Only his name, as his mother used it when he was young enough to believe being loved and being understood might prove the same thing in the end. He breaks the seal. The paper inside is still heavy, folded exactly, the ink preserved. Mingyu sits at the desk with the Greek journal opened beneath his hand, the room warm around him, and reads.
My dearest Mingyu,
If you are reading this at last, then one of two things has happened. Either you have found someone who makes a mockery of your usual vanities, or you have managed to confuse wanting with worth and require maternal intervention from beyond the grave. If it is the second, put this away and do not touch the ruby until you have learned the difference.
You have always been the easiest of my sons to underestimate. That was your gift and your danger. Rooms brighten when you enter them, and people, being lazy in their judgments, mistake brightness for lightness. They call you charming when they mean harmless. They call you unserious when what they truly mean is that you make seriousness look less lonely than they would like. You have encouraged this, of course. I know you too well to pretend otherwise. It is easier to be adored for delight than known in depth.
The ruby was chosen for you because it keeps its fire in plain view. It does not apologise for its heat. It does not ask permission to burn. Let it remind you of this: passion is not performance. Heat is not the same thing as love. A fire may warm a house or destroy it. The difference is not in its beauty, but in whether it has learned how to remain.
If you place the ruby in a woman’s keeping, it must not be as an ornament, nor as a conquest, nor as some pretty proof that at last even you have chosen to behave. It must mean that you will not make a theatre of what ought to be sacred. That your constancy, once given, will not be another trick. If you love, let it steady you into purpose rather than send you racing once more into escape.
Stand still long enough to tell the truth, Mingyu. Not only that you want her. That is the easiest confession a man may make. Tell the harder one. That you mean to remain.
Your mother
He reads the last line again. Then once more. Tell the harder one. That you mean to remain. Those words would have struck him differently half a year ago. Even a month ago. Three weeks past, he might still have smiled at them with that fond, dismissive contempt reserved for maternal omniscience, folded the page back away, and gone on to White’s, to cards, to women who laughed in all the proper places and forgot him by breakfast. Three weeks past, he had still been capable of believing that want—provided it were dressed sufficiently well and made amusing enough—might pass for a life.
Then you had stood before him in church, composed of discipline and hidden fire, and looked as though kneeling had become less an act of faith than a posture your body had been forced to learn. Then you had laughed. Then you had kissed him. Then you had come to his door with bruises on your face and fury in your blood and asked for him not because he was easy, but because he was yours to choose. Such things alter the mathematics of a man.
Mingyu lays the letter flat and stares at his own hand beside it. The same hand that had once written clever little evasions in the margins of travel journals. That had thrown coins carelessly onto tables in foreign ports. That had known women by eagerness, by skill, by the confidential shape of one-night confessions soon forgotten. That had touched you last night with every power in him bent toward not making theft of what you had brought to him in trust. He closes his eyes.
The challenge is gone. More than gone. It shames him now to think of the first small male vanity that had attached itself to your name. The saint. The Reverend’s daughter. The locked room. He had imagined himself amused by difficulty, intrigued by denial, interested in the elegant puzzle of virtue. Looking back from here, the whole thing appears juvenile in the ugliest masculine sense. Not merely young. Trivial. Because none of this is about difficulty any longer. It is about you.
You in white, turned into an emblem by your father’s cruelty. You in cornflower ribbon beneath church eyes too eager for proof. You in the confessional saying your life had been one long hallway in a house you never left. You in his bed, not soft and grateful and dazzled to be wanted by the notorious Mr. Ashbourne, but furious and feral and determined to take ownership of yourself. The truth comes not with fanfare, but with the dreadful steadiness of recognition. Mingyu loves you.
The phrase ought to have sounded grander. More theatrical. Catastrophic, perhaps. Instead, it settles into him with the calm of something that has already been true for some time and has merely, at last, been cornered into language. He loves you. Not your innocence, though God knows Mayfair has tried to make that the only notable thing about you. Not your beauty, though he is neither blind nor a fool. Not the glamour of transgression, nor the exquisite danger of wanting what ought not be wanted. You.
The woman who takes sugar in her tea because choice matters even in a spoonful. The woman who hides ribbons in books and still finds room in herself to feel ashamed of wanting air and sunlight as though such things were sins rather than ordinary human needs. The woman who kissed him in a side gallery because she wanted to, and came to him last night because she refused to be given back to the men arranging her life as though she had never once inhabited it. The room feels smaller with the knowledge. Or perhaps he has simply grown too large for the man he was pretending to remain.
A knock sounds at the door. Two measured taps, then the handle turns without waiting for permission, which reduces the field of possible visitors to family alone. Wonwoo steps in and shuts the door behind him with the quiet economy he brings to all things. He is dressed already for the day, though with less ornament than Jeonghan would permit and less casual disregard than Soonyoung ever manages. His expression remains, as ever, unreadable to anyone who does not know that unreadability is simply the shape his attention prefers to wear. His gaze goes first to Mingyu’s face, then to the desk, to the Greek journal spread open, and finally to the unfolded letter beneath Mingyu’s hand. He does not speak.
Mingyu, still too raw from his mother’s hand and his own belated honesty to tolerate any performance in himself or anyone else, leans back in the chair and lets out a breath without humour. “If you’ve come to tell me I look dreadful, our dear sister got there first.”
Wonwoo crosses to the desk and stops at the far side of it. His gaze lingers for a moment longer on the letter, recognising perhaps the kind of private weather required for Mingyu to have opened it at all. “You do look dreadful,” he says at last. The line, delivered in Wonwoo’s plain, unadorned manner, is ridiculous enough to draw the faintest curve from Mingyu’s mouth despite everything. “This family is becoming repetitive.”
Wonwoo does not trouble himself to acknowledge that. He glances once toward the bed—made now, smoothed, betraying nothing—then back to Mingyu. “The footman on last night’s duty has developed an impressive respect for discretion.” It is not an accusation. Not even curiosity, precisely. Merely a fact laid down upon the table between them. Mingyu’s hand tightens slightly over the edge of the letter. “Has he?”
Wonwoo’s voice does not alter. “He said only that a lady called after midnight. He did not name her.” A pause. “He did not need to.” Mingyu laughs once, low and brief and without mirth. “You always were intolerably observant.”
“No,” Wonwoo replies. “You were always easier to read than you thought. People simply preferred not to look too carefully.” That lands because it is true. It is precisely the sort of truth Wonwoo specialises in: quiet enough to pass for conversation, sharp enough to bleed all the same.
Mingyu looks down at the journal. At the letter. At the old notes written by a man who thought movement might keep him forever from having to stand still inside himself. When he speaks again, his voice has roughened around the edges. “She came to me bruised.” Wonwoo’s face changes by almost nothing, which is how Mingyu knows the line has struck hard. “Her father?”
“Who else?”
Wonwoo moves then, not to the bed nor the window, but to the hearth where he rests one shoulder against the mantel and folds his arms. It is an old posture of his, perhaps learned from years spent watching rooms before deciding whether to speak in them. He looks not outraged exactly. Outrage would be easier. What settles into him instead is something colder. “And she went back.” Mingyu’s mouth hardens. “She had to.”
“Yes.” There is no comfort in the agreement—only fact. Fact is often more difficult to survive than grief because it makes no claim to tenderness. For a while, the fire performs most of the speaking. Mingyu remains at the desk, while Wonwoo watches the flames with the same grave severity he brings to books, balls, and people who insist on lying to themselves in his hearing. When he speaks again, it is with that same unembellished directness that has always made his clearest lines. “Do you know what men like Pembroke and Vale would do now?” Mingyu tips his head back against the chair and shuts his eyes. “Something idiotic, I imagine.”
“They would call it rescue.” That opens his eyes again. Wonwoo’s voice remains level. “They would decide she had been driven to them by cruelty and therefore required immediate, dramatic action. Elopement. A duel. A scene in the churchyard. Some public gesture large enough to flatter their own sense of heroism.” He lets the image hang between them. “They would make her life more visible and call the spectacle devotion.”
Mingyu’s jaw tightens. The fantasy possesses enough appeal to prove its danger. He has imagined exactly that species of glorious nonsense often enough in less disciplined hours—carriages, confrontations, declarations made in morally satisfying places where everyone might hear him tell Reverend Marlowe what kind of man he is and what kind he is not. The vision burns bright because it is simple. Which is precisely why it would be useless.
Wonwoo lifts his gaze from the fire and fixes him with it. “You do not save a woman by stealing her agency and calling it protection.” The sentence falls into the room without drama. It has no need of any. “You save her,” Wonwoo continues, “by standing beside her when she chooses. Not in front of her. Not over her. Beside.”
Mingyu says nothing. There is too much that feels uncomfortably like rebuke and, worse, like instruction he already knows to be correct. He thinks of last night. Of your voice saying Take me. Of the force with which he had almost refused, not because he wanted to, but because he understood too well that choosing for you, even under the pretence of caution, would itself have been a theft. Wonwoo sees the thought pass across his face and does not name it. For that one mercy, Mingyu could love him more. “I know,” Mingyu says at last. Wonwoo’s mouth moves by a fraction. “Good.”
It is astonishing how much relief may fit inside a single syllable when given by a brother who has no fondness for extravagance. Mingyu looks back down at the letter. A corner of the page lifts in the draught from the fire and settles again. Without meaning to, he traces the edge of his mother’s folded hand. Wonwoo watches the gesture, and his expression alters—not private exactly. Softer. “You opened it.”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s bad.” That makes Mingyu laugh despite himself. “That was your first interpretation?” Wonwoo shrugs one shoulder. “If Mother has been dragged in from the grave, the situation is never good.”
“She was unbearable.”
“She was usually right.”
The small exchange eases something in the room without diminishing the gravity beneath it. Mingyu glances again at the line that has gutted and steadied him in equal measure. Tell the harder one. That you mean to remain. He says, more to the paper than to Wonwoo: “I thought I wanted her because she was impossible.” Wonwoo does not interrupt. “I thought the challenge was the point. The woman everyone else said I ought not want if I had any sense.” Mingyu lets out a breath. “And somewhere between the first laugh and the church and the gallery and last night, it stopped being any of those things.” Wonwoo tilts his head slightly. “Stopped?”
Mingyu meets his gaze. It is one thing to realise love alone at a desk beneath his mother’s handwriting. Another to say it aloud to a brother who has spent half his life understanding him without encouragement. Yet he has been instructed today by ghost and blood alike to stand still long enough to tell the truth. The harder one. “Yes,” Mingyu says. A pause. Then, quieter still: “I love her.”
Wonwoo receives this with the same composure he might have brought to the weather, if the weather had at last admitted itself fatal. He does not grin. Does not offer fraternal mockery. Does not call him ruined, though the term would not be inaccurate. He only nods once. “I know.” Mingyu stares. “Does everyone know before I do?”
“Frequently.” That earns Wonwoo a black look and, because Wonwoo is neither Jeonghan nor Soonyoung, offers no greater display of satisfaction than the almost imperceptible settling of his shoulders. He pushes off from the mantel and crosses back toward the door. There, with one hand resting on the knob, he glances over his shoulder. “Joshua had a note from Wrotham this morning.” Mingyu frowns, still too deep in other matters for the turn to land at once. “And?” Wonwoo’s expression remains even. “The jewel chest has been inventoried for the season.” His gaze flicks once to the letter, then back to Mingyu. “If you decide you are, in fact, a man who means to remain, Joshua can have the ruby pin sent to Ashbourne Hall.”
Mingyu sees it as though it were already in his hand: the dark, steady fire of the stone, elegant and unapologetic, chosen for him by a woman who knew too much and loved him anyway. The heirloom still at Wrotham, still in Joshua’s careful keeping, waiting not for appetite but for certainty.
Wonwoo opens the door. “Carat & Co. can remake it into whatever shape you want,” he says. “A ring, if you prove you deserve one. Something else, if she prefers it. Joshua will know how.” Then, because he is Wonwoo and constitutionally incapable of leaving truth half-driven once he has begun, he adds with the faintest edge of dry emphasis, “Provided, of course, you do not behave like an idiot first.” The door closes behind him with quiet finality.
By the time Mingyu reaches Reverend Marlowe’s church, the afternoon has turned the stone a colder colour. The square outside lies half emptied of traffic, the respectable hour thinning into that quieter interval between luncheon calls and evening obligations, when London appears, for a little while, to have stepped out of its own noise. The church doors stand open, not in welcome but in routine, and the air within carries that familiar mingling of candle wax, damp stone, and the stale remains of piety breathed too often into a confined place. Mingyu enters with his hat in one hand and his purpose in the other.
Reverend Marlowe is alone near the front of the nave, standing beside the lectern with a ledger half open before him. He is not praying. Men like him rarely are when no one is watching. He appears instead to be taking stock of subscriptions or alms or whichever form of moral arithmetic presently occupies him. The sound of footsteps carries farther than it ought in an empty church. Reverend Marlowe looks up and his face hardens, not in surprise, but in recognition sharpened by dislike.
Mingyu comes to a halt a few pews short of the altar rail. The winter light filtering through the upper glass turns everything severe: the polished wood, the brass fittings, the black cut of the Reverend’s coat, the cold set of his mouth. There is nowhere in the space for softness to hide. Reverend Marlowe closes the ledger with deliberate hands and says, “Mr. Ashbourne.” The name sounds less like a greeting than contamination. Mingyu inclines his head. “Reverend Marlowe.”
The older man studies him, and in that study Mingyu feels all the old judgments gather at once—rake, foundling, sinner, ornament, danger—each one sharpened by whatever was seen in the church two Sundays ago and whatever has been suspected since. Good. Let him sharpen them. Mingyu has not come here to be forgiven into God’s grace. Reverend Marlowe rests one hand upon the closed ledger. “If you are here to offer an apology for the disturbances your attentions have caused, you are late.” The line is an invitation to defence. Or wit. Or embarrassment. Mingyu offers none of the three. He sets his hat down on the nearest pew and says, with a steadiness that surprises even himself, “I am here to ask for your daughter’s hand.”
Reverend Marlowe does not blink. Then something small and ugly passes through his expression—not shock, nor outrage in any vulgar fatherly sense, but contempt confirmed in its worst predictions. He lets out a breath through his nose. “No.” Just that. No incredulity. No raised voice. Only refusal delivered with such immediate certainty it seems less answer than doctrine.
Mingyu had expected anger. He had expected pious disgust, perhaps, or one of those long sermon-shaped speeches by which men like Reverend Marlowe turn their prejudices into moral architecture. The simplicity of the refusal is almost more offensive. He does not move. “You have not heard the request.” Reverend Marlowe’s mouth hardens. “I heard it. It is the answer that remains unchanged.”
Mingyu feels, very distinctly, the old instinct to smile. To go bright. To make this into a game of superior nerves. To lean one hip against a pew and say something easy and cutting about devils quoting Scripture and clergymen mistaking control for righteousness. It would have been simple. It would also have been exactly the version of himself Reverend Marlowe expects and therefore exactly the wrong weapon. So he remains still. “I intend to marry her.” Mingyu does not say it like a boast or a dare. He says it like a fact, not yet legally arranged.
Reverend Marlowe steps away from the lectern then, leaving the ledger where it lies. He comes down one step from the chancel and stops, elevating himself by only a little and thus making the distance feel chosen. His hands fold behind his back. “You intend,” he says, with a thinness that approaches disgust, “many things beyond your station, Mr. Ashbourne.” There are a dozen answers available. Mingyu selects none of them. The Reverend continues, each word growing colder for its control. “You are corruption dressed in a fine coat—a man who mistakes appetite for character and charm for worth. Your affairs are discussed in every decent drawing room in Mayfair. Your irreverence is public. Your habits are notorious. If you imagine that such a name may be laid beside my daughter’s and make anything but ruin of her, then your vanity has finally overtaken even your judgment.”
Mingyu lets the whole thing pass over him without flinch or smile. The list is familiar. White’s has said worse, if less biblically. Reverend Marlowe’s gaze narrows, as though the lack of visible reaction itself has become another irritation. “No daughter of mine,” he says, “will marry an Ashbourne.”
There it is then. Not simply disgust for vice, but the old classed and blooded contempt beneath it. Foundlings polished into gentlemen. A family built by choice where men like Reverend Marlowe prefer lineage to masquerade as moral legitimacy. Mingyu feels the truth of it settle with a cold and almost welcome clarity. Very well. “Because I am myself,” he says quietly, “or because I am theirs?” The Reverend’s face grows stiller. “Do not play clever games in my church.”
“I am not,” Mingyu states. “I am trying to learn which part offends you most. That I am not respectable enough to want her, or that I belong to a family built by something other than blood and your kind of approval.”
For the first time, something like open anger flashes in Reverend Marlowe’s eyes. “You belong,” he says, with cutting emphasis, “to a house in which excess has always disguised itself as feeling. You are proof that indulgence, if given sufficient money and tailoring, may pass itself off as distinction. My daughter has been raised for steadiness. For obedience. For a life under God. Not for spectacle. Not for vice. And never for a man who has spent his years bedding whores and calling himself charming while the city laughed.”
The word hangs in the nave with a vulgarity sharpened by being uttered beneath a church roof. Mingyu’s hands tighten once behind his back. He had thought, on the way here, that if Reverend Marlowe descended to open insult, he might feel rage first. What comes instead is a colder, more clarifying thing. Because the Reverend speaks of you as though you were an object he has polished and therefore owns. Because nothing in his face suggests he believes he is discussing a life that belongs, in any measure, to the woman he calls his daughter. Mingyu takes one step closer. Not enough to threaten. More than enough to refuse dismissal. “You may think what you like of me.” Reverend Marlowe’s lip curls slightly. Mingyu continues. “I am not asking your blessing for my vanity. I am asking because I mean to remain. Because what I feel for your daughter is not appetite, and because whatever else you believe of me, you will not call it corruption simply because it has displeased your plans.”
The Reverend’s expression darkens, as if each word forces him into closer contact with something he would prefer remain abstract. “You presume too much.”
“Do I?” Mingyu asks. The church has grown so quiet that the very air seems to wait between them. Mingyu thinks, fleetingly, of you in white muslin, in bruises, in fury, coming to his door because every other man in your life had mistaken authority for right. He thinks of the Ashbourne name itself, and of all the men who once wore it uneasily until they chose to stand inside it by conviction rather than inheritance. He has no wish, suddenly, to make this pretty. Let Reverend Marlowe have the whole shape of it. Let him hear, in full, what sort of enemy he has made. The older man speaks again before Mingyu may answer, and there is steel in the composure. “You will leave this church.”
Mingyu looks at him. Looks, too, at the pulpit from which so many judgments have been pronounced, at the pews in which you have been made to kneel and listen and smile and be shaped into other people’s reassurance. Then, with a precision that seems almost like obedience, Mingyu inclines his head. He takes up his hat. Turns and walks down the aisle at an unhurried pace, the sound of his footsteps carrying him back through the nave. He does not look back. It is this, perhaps, which makes the thing more unnerving than if he had stormed or argued or flung one last bright insult over his shoulder. He appears to comply. To accept. To leave. Reverend Marlowe remains where he is, hands clasped behind his back, the posture of a man who believes dismissal and victory to be near relations. Mingyu reaches the end of the aisle.
There, with the church doors before him and the light lying pale beyond the threshold, he pauses. He sets his hat beneath one arm. Then he turns. The distance between them is greater now, and for that reason, the line, when it comes, strikes harder. There is no heat in his voice. No youthful recklessness. No attempt at wit. Only certainty—cold, plain, and perfectly beyond negotiation. “You do not own her future.”
The words fall into the church and remain there. Mingyu does not wait to see what shape they make of Reverend Marlowe’s face. He has said what he came to say, and saying it in that place is warning enough. He turns again, steps out, and lets the doors stand open a moment longer than courtesy requires before they close behind him.
Inside the nave, Reverend Marlowe is left with the echo of the line, the ledger upon the lectern, and the first clean understanding that the danger represented by Mingyu Ashbourne does not lie in seduction, nor in appetite, nor even in scandal. It lies in the fact that he means to remain.
The sentence is delivered before supper and enforced before you are allowed the dignity of breath. By now, your father’s study has ceased pretending neutrality. It is simply the place where his authority most enjoys hearing itself pronounced. The desk remains squared to the carpet. The Bible lies open, though not because he requires Scripture any longer to justify himself; habit is enough for men like Reverend Marlowe. The fire has been laid but not lit. The room feels all angles and waiting.
You stand before him with your hands folded so tightly they ache. The mark upon your face has yellowed at the edges. Those hidden beneath your clothes no longer burn with the same white violence as before, though the flesh still protests with every careless shift. Your father has not mentioned the punishment. He has not mentioned the crop. He has not mentioned what he saw in the church. Men who prefer their own hands translated into doctrine rarely like to name the hour in which their cruelty became too human to disguise. He looks at you over the desk. He does not ask you to sit. He does not invite questions. “Lord Carroway has withdrawn his intentions.”
The words fall without preamble. You had imagined, once, that if the thing ever shattered, it might at least do so noisily enough to feel like mercy. Instead, it breaks with the clean, administrative neatness of male pride. Withdrawn. As though marriage were a subscription one gentleman had elected not to renew. You do not move. Relief comes. It arrives bright, involuntary, almost instantly soured by your father’s face—by the fact that he is not sorrowful, nor startled, not even properly angered so much as offended. Something has happened. Something has been said. Some certainty has been disturbed. Carroway, in preserving his own dignity, has evidently found yours expendable. “Why?” you ask. Your voice is steady enough to sound borrowed. Reverend Marlowe’s mouth hardens. “That does not concern you.”
Of course, it concerns you. That is precisely why he will not permit the answer. You know at once, with the sort of instinct women learn in houses ruled by men, that Mingyu has not allowed the matter to lie quietly where it was placed. The knowledge flashes through you in a dangerous kind of heat. Your father sees the colour move in your face and mistakes it, as he always does, for something he may still control. “Do not flatter yourself with romantic fictions,” he says. “A man like Carroway withdraws only when a thing ceases to recommend itself.” You lower your gaze because if you do not, something ungovernable may appear in yours. “Since marriage no longer offers the correction it ought,” he continues, “you will be removed from society entirely.”
This time you do speak. “You cannot—” You do not finish. Your father is around the desk before the sentence fully leaves you. His hand closes hard around your upper arm, fingers digging through cloth and skin alike, and the force of the movement swings you half toward him. Pain sparks hotly through the half-healed places your body still keeps secret beneath its proper layers. He does not shout. That is the worst of it. “You will not speak over me.”
The words are low and cold enough to cut. Your arm throbs in his grip. You try to wrench it free on instinct, and the motion only tightens his hold. His face is close now. Close enough that you can see the little broken vessels at the side of his nose, the faint dryness at the mouth, the absolute prayerless composure of him. “A house of religious discipline in the country has been recommended to me,” he says, as if your attempt to interrupt had been no more consequential than a dropped fork. “Its governance is strict. Its society modest. Its atmosphere appropriate to repentance.”
A convent. It rises all at once in the imagination: stone corridors, female silence, veils, prayer, years rubbed smooth by obedience until a woman becomes so pale of spirit that even her own reflection might fail to know her. “For how long?” You hate that the question still comes out. You hate more that he hears the fear in it. “As long as is necessary.” Which means forever if he may arrange it. Or until another man of sufficiently righteous and convenient and may be persuaded to take what remains of you. Duration is beside the point. The point is removal. You try once more. “Father—”
That earns you the other hand. Your father catches your jaw, hard enough that your teeth strike together, and holds your face where he wants it. “You will go this evening,” he says. “You will take what is necessary. Nothing frivolous. No novels. No adornment. You will be grateful that I have acted before your soul was entirely lost to your own disobedience.” His fingers leave your face. Then your arm. The absence of pain there feels almost as cruel as its presence. He steps back. The dismissal is immediate. “Go and prepare.”
You do not ask again. Not because obedience has suddenly returned, but because protest now would only delight the part of him that believes correction most holy when it is resisted. He has made the boundaries clear. This is not a conversation. It is a sentence pronounced by a man too certain God sounds like his own voice. You curtsy. Not from submission. From exhaustion so complete it has learned how to pass for grace.
Your maid says nothing when you tell her. That is how you know she understands the shape of disaster. The trunk brought out is not one of the handsome travelling cases meant for Bath or visits to relations. It is the plain one used for practical storage, the one that smells faintly of cedar and old winters. Your maid folds your underthings with quick, neat hands. Sets aside a second dress. A shawl. Gloves. A Bible. She does not ask whether you wish to bring music. There will be none worth imagining. She does not ask whether you wish to bring ribbons. That would be mockery. She does not ask whether you wish to bring the travel book because she has already tucked it quietly at the bottom of the trunk beneath folded linen, wrapped in an older petticoat, as though hiding not a volume but an organ. The kindness of it nearly undoes you. Nearly.
You sit at the dressing table while she works. The light outside has begun to thin. Somewhere below stairs, a maid laughs and is immediately hushed. Somewhere else, a door closes. Your face in the mirror does not look tragic. That would at least feel satisfying. It looks pale. Tired. Your mouth seems older than it did a fortnight ago. There is no bloom left in you that society might call maidenly. What remains is something barer, less forgivable, and infinitely more real: awareness.
You think of Mingyu. Not in the soft, dangerous way you allowed yourself the night you ran to him. You think of him as one thinks of a hidden blade or a coin sewn into a hem—something real that once proved the world need not be only what your father called it. You had left him before the house properly woke. Not because you regretted it. Never that. But because staying would have made the tenderness visible, and tenderness has become the most dangerous luxury in your possession. When he stirred as you rose from the bed, when his hand caught at the sheet as though some sleeping part of him already knew you were going, you had stood looking at him in the first weak light and understood, with a kind of private terror, that escape alone was no longer the whole truth of what tied you to him. Now, in your room, with exile being packed around you in clean, folded layers, that truth returns with renewed cruelty. You do not merely want freedom any longer. You want him in it. The distinction hollows the body.
Your maid closes the trunk. “You should eat something before you go,” she says. You shake your head. Food belongs to ordinary days and manageable futures. Your stomach has become a locked thing. She does not press.
The carriage is sent for before the last light has gone. Your father does not accompany you to the door. He stands instead in the front hall with his hands clasped behind his back and his face composed into that solemn vacancy by which he prefers to enact great domestic severities. A servant carries the trunk. Another brings your cloak. The footman waits at the open door of the carriage as if this were an entirely ordinary departure and not the burial, in all but name, of Reverend Marlowe’s daughter. The house has chosen propriety over grief. Your father offers no embrace. No blessing. Not even a final admonition, which is almost worse. The whole matter has moved beyond speech in his mind. You have become absent to him, the sort of woman who may be mentioned later in lowered tones as having required removal for the good of her soul. When you step into the carriage, the movement drags sharply at all the half-healed injuries across the backs of your legs. Pain comes hot and familiar. You make no sound. The door closes. The house vanishes behind glass and gathering dusk.
For the first stretch of the journey, you feel nothing at all. The sky dims from bronze to violet to that iron-blue hour which makes every familiar thing look like a half-memory. Your hands lie folded in your lap. The trunk rattles faintly behind you whenever the wheels strike a rut. You keep your back straight. Your mouth closed. Your eyes dry. Numbness is not peace. It is only grief grown too tired for emotion.
You think of the convent as little as possible. Whenever the image rises, you turn instead to the window, to the last lights of the city. But the road lengthens, and even London cannot accompany you forever. Houses grow fewer. The dark widens. Open country begins. And with country comes the true knowledge of it. The convent is not punishment in the common sense. Punishment ends. This is erasure arranged to resemble mercy. A life emptied of choice, of colour, of witness, of every small gathered thing you had begun to call your own. The numbness cracks.
The rosary lies in the pocket of your cloak. You take it out without fully knowing you are doing so. The carnelian beads catch what little light remains, red-brown and glossy, warmed for years by your skin and prayer and pain. Your father had called it devotion. You had called it obedience. Here, in the failing blue of the carriage, it appears for what it has always also been: a tally. A counting-chain. A little portable artefact of guilt. You wrap it once around your hand. Then twice. Your breath comes harder. The carriage rolls on. Something rises in you—not tears, though they exist somewhere behind the eyes. Something more intense. An anguish too hot to remain orderly. The knowledge that if you arrive where you are being sent, the pieces of yourself you have fought so hard and so badly and so magnificently to gather will be pressed out of you one by one until even memory has been taught to kneel. You pull. The cord snaps. Carnelian beads fly from your lap and strike the floor of the carriage in a hard scatter. They bounce against the opposite seat, roll into corners, vanish beneath the hem of your skirt. In the dim light, they look like drops of blood thrown across dark wood. You stare at them while your chest heaves with the aftermath of the motion, and the violence of that tiny act seems to split your whole life into before and after.
The carriage stops so violently that you are thrown sideways against the squab. The driver swears above. Horses scream in harness. A male voice answers from the road—low, commanding, impossible to mistake even through the carriage wall and the sudden hammer of your blood. Your heart knows before reason does. The door is wrenched open. Night stands outside in a dark coat and riding boots and wind-roughened hair. So does Mingyu.
He is on horseback still, one gloved hand holding his reins, the animal turned broadside across the road before your father’s carriage like a line drawn by will alone. Another horse waits behind him, riderless, saddled for speed and intention. The driver is protesting in frightened outrage. A groom or lad from the convent carriage has half risen from the box and then thought better of it when faced with the expression on Mr. Ashbourne’s face. Mingyu looks only at you. The lantern light from the carriage catches the planes of him in gold and shadow—the line of his jaw, the set of his mouth, the dangerous stillness in his shoulders. He does not look reckless. He looks certain. He steps down from the horse and comes to the open door. The whole world seems to narrow to the space between the carriage and the road.
For one blinding moment, you think he has come to seize you and carry you off in one of those glorious masculine follies men call rescue when they mean possession in better tailoring. The fear of that flashes white-hot through you. Then Mingyu holds out his hand and says, very quietly: “I have not come to rescue you.” The night stills around the words. His hand remains where it is, open, unforced. “I have come to ask.”
You cannot speak. The broken rosary lies scattered at your feet like a small dark slaughter. Your breath is unsteady. The road smells of horse, damp earth, and the fields cooling under the evening. Somewhere in the distance, an owl gives one sound and falls silent. Mingyu’s gaze does not leave yours. “If you stay in that carriage,” he says, and there is not one grain of false comfort in his voice, “it goes on to the convent. If you step out of it, you step into everything that follows me instead.” The words hang between you, grave and exact.
“Your father will disown you.” You already know this. Hearing it aloud still hurts. “You will have no dowry. No churchwoman will ever call you proper again. Society will say you were ruined before I touched you and damned after.” His mouth tightens very slightly in contempt for the world he is naming. “There will be no soft version of it. No pretty lie to make it easier.”
The numbness shifts, not back into terror, but into something that can at last feel the truth in pieces. “Why?” you whisper. The question means more than one thing. Why are you here. Why this road. Why me. Why now. Why should I trust you when every man in my life has made authority sound like care and ownership sound like holiness. Mingyu understands. Of course, he does. He rests one hand on the edge of the carriage door, nearer to you, but still he does not touch. “Because I love you.”
The wind moves at the edge of the road. Your dress swirls around your ankles. Somewhere under your shoes, the carnelian beads shift when the carriage settles on its springs. Mingyu goes on, and though the words remain sober, there is something in the tone that belongs not merely to gravity but to hope held with both hands. “Because I asked him properly.” His eyes darken at the memory, though his voice remains controlled. “Because he said no as if your life were a thing he had built and therefore owned. Because I told him what I will tell any man, in any room, until my last breath if I must.” A pause. “And because I will not steal this from you and call it devotion. I am asking.” He draws in one breath, not to steady himself, but to steady the world around the question. “Marry me.”
It is not a proposal wrapped in satin phrases, though something in the way he looks at you makes the bare honesty of it feel lovelier than ornament could have done. No polished performance. No courtship speech memorised for effect. Only a man standing in the road before the carriage meant to erase you, offering not safety but a future chosen in the open. Your pulse begins again in earnest, not the frightened beating of a trapped thing but something wilder. “If I come with you,” you say, and the words feel as though they are being shaped by a mouth no longer wholly numb, “I lose everything.” He gives the smallest shake of his head. “No.” His eyes remain fixed on yours. “Not everything.” It sounds like a promise spoken by a man who knows the cost and is willing, still, to stand there beneath it.
You look past him into the dark road and see the whole constitution of it. Your father’s face when the empty carriage returns. The church ladies with their sharpened pity. Carroway receiving the news with relief disguised as disgust. Doors closing. Invitations vanishing. Your name travelling through Mayfair in tones of pious regret. No dowry. No portion. No father. No return. Fallen, they will call you. And yet the word does not fit. You have not fallen. You have been kept. Kept in hallways, in pews, in white muslin, in correction, in prayer, in all the narrow little cages by which your father teaches women to mistake captivity for moral worth. Kept until the keeping itself became a theology. Now the carriage door stands open. The night enters. Mingyu waits. The road stretches dark and unpromising in two directions, and for the first time in your life, no one is moving your body except by invitation.
Your hand tightens around a single carnelian bead hidden in your palm. Then you open your fingers and let it fall among the others. The sound it makes on the carriage floor is very small. It feels like a conclusion. You shift toward the open door. The moment your fingers close around his, the whole of your life seems to move. Something old releases. Something long-strangled inhales. His hand closes around yours—warm, firm, real. You step down from the carriage. The road receives you. It is only common earth beneath the soles of your boots, and yet the sensation of standing there outside the vehicle meant to deliver you into disappearance is so violent in its simplicity that you cannot breathe.
Behind you, the driver has gone silent. Good. Let him carry that silence back to Reverend Marlowe’s house like a proper servant carrying a tray. You look at the open carriage, at the trunk inside, at the little dark scatter of beads, at the life that would have gone on without you if you had remained seated and obedient. You turn your face fully to Mingyu. “I choose you.” Your voice is stronger than you expected. He searches your face as if making room still for retreat if retreat is what you truly want. It is not. God help you, it is not. You had thought freedom might feel like triumph. It does not. It comes instead like this: your hand in his and the knowledge that fear has not vanished and yet has ceased to govern. It comes in the form of the steadiness of the man before you who has not stolen, not commanded, only asked—and in the answering certainty with which your whole life steps toward him.
Mingyu says your name, low and almost disbelieving, as if he cannot quite trust the miracle of hearing yes where so much of the world taught him to expect refusal. Then he turns, keeping hold of your hand, and leads you toward the waiting horse and the dark beyond it. This time, when you follow, it is not because someone has told you where to go. It is because you have chosen.
“There,” Mingyu says, nodding toward the waiting ship with infuriating satisfaction. “A perfectly respectable vessel, a decent captain, and a scandalous quantity of sunshine. I have outdone myself.” You look at the ship, then at him. “I was under the impression the Aegean was the point.” His mouth curves. “Angel, I am always the point.”
The harbour is all rope-creak and gull-cry and salt wind worrying at cloaks and ribbons, though the latter concerns you less now than it once would have done. Morning lies bright upon the water, turning the harbour to hammered silver where the sun catches it. Beyond the masts and rigging, the sea opens itself in one long impossible line, blue and bluer still, as though your world has finally remembered it was not built only of walls.
Mingyu stands beside you in a travel coat the colour of dark ink, hat in one hand, the other reaching—as it has done so often as of late—for yours. Wedding gold glints on his finger. So does yours. The ruby that once sat in the old cravat pin now burns dark-red upon your hand, remade into a ring that catches the light. On his wrist, just visible when the sleeve shifts, a slim bracelet of carnelian beads rests warm against the pulse that once knew only restlessness and now, improbably, seems content to be tethered. You glance down at it. “You wear my old sins very elegantly.” Mingyu lifts his hand as if examining a work of art. “Your old sins are excellent craftsmanship.” Then, softer, with that private warmth he has learned to let into his voice when you are involved: “And they suit me better than escape ever did.”
He takes your left hand then, turning it palm-up before bringing the ruby to his mouth. The kiss he presses against the ring is not possession. It feels instead like vow and wonder and some gentler form of worship than any you were ever taught at your father’s knee. When he lowers your hand again, his thumb lingers over the stone. “Still time to change your mind,” he says lightly, though there is no lightness at all in the way his eyes hold yours.
You look beyond him to the ship. To the gangplank. To the sea stretched out with no pew at its end, no pulpit, no father’s hand waiting to direct your face toward the proper angle of obedience. “And miss the scandalous quantity of sunshine?” you ask. “Never.” That wins the grin from him—the true one, bright and shameless and so entirely Mingyu that even now it can still surprise joy out of you.
A little way off, your family waits without intruding, each of them making a valiant, transparent attempt to grant privacy by standing only just near enough to hear everything. Seungcheol has one hand settled at the small of his wife’s back, though every so often it slips lower, more protective than absentminded, while Lady Whitlock’s own hand rests over his and then, in a moment when she turns toward the light, drifts briefly to the gentle new curve beneath her dress before returning to him. The gesture is small enough that another person might miss it. You do not. Neither, from the look on Joshua’s face, does anyone else in this family. Soonyoung waves the moment he catches you watching and immediately ruins the dignity of the scene by calling, “If you return with a tan and stories, I expect both in proper detail!”
“You will get neither,” Seungcheol says.
“He’ll get both,” Jeonghan replies, adjusting one immaculate cuff. “Mingyu has never in his life come back quietly from anywhere.”
Joshua laughs under his breath. Wonwoo, hands folded behind his back, looks toward the ship and then toward the horizon beyond it with the expression of a man regretting everyone else’s noise in advance. Mingyu follows your gaze. “They are pretending not to watch us.”
“Poorly,” you say.
“It’s a family talent.”
The wind freshens. The water shifts. You look once more at the sea and feel, with a strangeness still tender enough to catch at your ribs, that devotion has not left you after all. It has only changed its object. You are still reverent, in your own fashion. Still moved by things larger than yourself. Light on water. A horizon without end. The hand of the man beside you. The truth that holiness was never meant to resemble captivity, however often men dressed the cage and called it sanctuary.
Behind you, Jeonghan says, in a tone of lazy wickedness clearly intended for Wonwoo, “Well, another one of us has done the decent thing and married for love. I suppose the rest of the season must now content itself with Her Majesty’s newest obsession.” Soonyoung brightens at once. “The Crown’s Choice?” Joshua’s mouth twitches. Seungcheol looks resigned already. Wonwoo, after a pause that speaks volumes, says only, “I should like one season in which none of you behaves like lunatics.”
Jeonghan smiles like a man smelling future entertainment on the wind. “Then this family will continue to disappoint you.”
Mingyu laughs, low and delighted, then offers you his arm toward the gangplank. You take it. And when you step forward with him toward sun, salt air, and a horizon that no longer ends in submission, it feels less like leaving than like finally, gloriously arriving.
A/N: Ouffff, I’m finally done with this monstrosity. Is this the longest fic I have ever written? Probably. Am I happy with it? Meh. Somehow, this was extremely hard to write, and I think I must have rewritten it five times. But I guess this is the final version. Hope you enjoy it, anyway!💟
Pairing: Viscount! Seungcheol x Lady Whitlock! F. Reader
Themes: Smut | Angst | Regency AU | Enemies to Lovers | Marriage of Convenience | He Falls First | Protective Eldest | Found Family | Inspired by 'Bridgerton'
Wordcount: 52,8K
Smut Warnings: Explicit sexual acts - Unprotected intercourse - PIV - Fingering (F. Receiving) - Implied virginity (Periodical context) - Semi-public intercourse - Use of petnames
First part of the series ‘The House of Carat’.
This story is intended for an adult audience only. Minors do not interact.
The Ashbourne gates swallow your carriage whole.
Iron scrollwork rises like black lace against the lanternlight, and the world narrows to the rhythm of hooves on stone, the hush of well-trained horses, and the faint creak of leather harnesses that have carried a hundred families into a hundred nights like this—hope dressed as satin, panic sewn into hems, reputations balanced on the thin edge of a smile. Then the wheels slow. The footman drops down from his perch. The latch clicks, and the door opens, the cold slipping into the carriage.
Georgina shifts so quickly the cushion gives a little sigh beneath her. She’s been trying to sit still for the entire drive and failing with enthusiasm, her excitement too big for her bones. Her gloved hand grips the edge of the seat as if she might launch herself out and into the night. Cecily, beside her, is composed to the point of stillness—chin lifted, shoulders neat, hands folded in her lap as if she has trained herself to take up as little space as possible in case the world decides it does not have room for her. You go first, because you always go first.
The step down is small, but it feels like a threshold. Your boot meets stone, and the chill bites through the sole. You straighten without thinking—shoulders back, chin level—because you have learned that the body must hold the composure even when the mind is crowded.
Ashbourne Hall is not ostentatious the way new money shouts. It doesn’t need to. It is old enough to be certain. A wide, pale façade. Tall windows glittering with candlelight. The faint, warm pulse of music pressing through glass like a heartbeat behind a door. The entrance is alive with motion: servants in dark livery threading between arriving carriages, a doorman receiving invitations, ladies stepping down like swans pretending they are not balancing on thin ice. Each laugh, each murmured greeting, each rustle of fabric is a small performance. You can taste the powder in the air, the faint sweetness of perfume, the smoke of torches, the damp iron scent of spring edged by the last bite of cold. You turn and offer your hand to Georgina.
She takes it like she’s already halfway into the ballroom. She looks up at the hall with eyes that shine as if it might be a promise. “It’s bigger than I imagined,” she breathes. “Everything is bigger before you step into it,” you murmur, and help her down. Cecily follows carefully. Her fingers rest in your palm with one brief tremor—one heartbeat of betrayal from her body—before she steadies. She doesn’t look up at the hall as Georgina does. She looks at the steps, as if numbers are safer than wonder.
You hear your name before you are properly inside. It is not spoken to you directly, but rather threaded through the air like a ribbon someone is pulling. Your family is known. Not powerful enough to be untouchable, not obscure enough to be ignored. Your father’s barony gave you a title and a place at the edges of rooms like this. His death gave you—quietly, efficiently—everything else. The account books. The responsibility. The precariousness disguised as dignity.
A lady in pale lilac turns her head as you pass. Her smile is polished, her eyes sharper than her pearls. Her companion leans closer, fan half-raised like a shield. “That’s Lady Whitlock,” the companion murmurs—softly, but not softly enough. “Poor thing,” the first replies with a sweetness that could curdle cream. “Two sisters out at once. I heard the estate is… strained.”
“Strained,” the companion echoes, pleased with the word, as if it tastes better than simple truth. “And she chaperones alone. How brave.” A third voice slides in, amused. “Or desperate.” There is a small laugh, quickly hidden behind lace.
The phrases land in you like the familiar press of a bruise. Not new pain. Just pain you recognise. You keep walking. Georgina leans close, curls brushing your shoulder. “Are they talking about us?” she whispers—half offended, half thrilled by the drama of it. “They are always talking,” you reply evenly. “Let them waste their breath.” Cecily’s fingers tighten around yours. “I don’t want to be a topic,” she murmurs. You squeeze her hand once—an answer more than comfort. “Then we make them speak about what we choose,” you tell her. “Tonight they speak about your poise. Tomorrow they speak about your prospects.”
The doorman takes your invitation without looking at the name—because he already knows it. He stands aside. Warmth spills over you as you step in. The entry hall is wide enough to host a battle. Marble underfoot, rugs soft enough to swallow sound, paintings that watch you with inherited judgment. A servant appears as if summoned by your breath.“Lady Whitlock,” he says, voice trained to respect. “May I take your cloaks?” You hand them over. Your gloves stay on. You always keep your gloves. Then you step forward, and the ballroom opens like a jewel box snapped wide.
Light everywhere—chandeliers glittering like cut stars, mirrors multiplying the crowd into a soft infinity of movement. Silk moves like water. Fans flutter like nervous birds. Laughter rises and breaks and reforms. Music coils through the air—violins bright and quick, the deeper structure beneath keeping everyone in time whether they wish to be or not. It is beautiful, yes. And it is hungry.
The marriage mart dresses itself as celebration with startling skill. The rules are softened by music, the stakes disguised by champagne. Young ladies carry dance cards as if they are harmless paper, when in truth they are maps—who you allow close, who you refuse, who you are seen with, and therefore assumed to be aligned with. Mothers angle daughters like chess pieces. Men hover with smiles that mean different things depending on the weight of their title. And everywhere—everywhere—you see the theme of the house that built itself on stones pulled from the earth and turned into power.
Diamonds wink at throats. Sapphires hang from ears. Emeralds flash on fingers. Pearls gleam like soft temptations. It is not subtle, and yet it is not vulgar. It is a declaration, perfectly executed. Carat & Co. does not need to advertise here. The ballroom is its showroom. At the far end of the room, set on a side table, is a display—tasteful, almost restrained, but still arranged like an art exhibit. A velvet tray holds a necklace of pale diamonds, a brooch shaped like a spray of leaves, and a ruby pin so small it looks unpretentious until it catches the light. You steer Georgina and Cecily away from the display and toward the edge of the room where you can see everything: the doors, the exits, the corners where trouble likes to grow. You have learned that visibility is a kind of power, and vigilance a kind of protection. Before you can begin the careful work of introductions, a familiar, steady presence is suddenly beside you. Lady Halstead.
“My dear,” she says, and the affection in the words is real enough to press briefly at the back of your throat. “If you stand any straighter, I shall assume you are being fitted for a coffin.” A laugh threatens, small and treacherous. You keep your smile neat. “Lady Halstead.” She takes your gloved hands between hers anyway, as if she has never cared much for rules that do not serve her. She is draped in deep green velvet that makes her silver hair look like moonlight. Widowed, wealthy enough to be unbothered, sharp enough to be feared by those who pretend not to fear women. Your late mother’s friend.
Her gaze sweeps over your sisters with quick precision—measuring without viciousness—then returns to you. “They’re grown,” she murmurs. “And you’ve made them look like they belong.” It lands oddly—not praise, but acknowledgement of the work no one applauds. Georgina curtsies with enthusiasm. “Lady Halstead,” she says brightly, “I have heard you can reduce a lord to stammering in three sentences.” Lady Halstead’s eyes twinkle. “Only the foolish ones,” she replies. “The clever ones learn to keep their mouths shut.” Cecily curtsies more softly. “Good evening, Lady Halstead.”
Lady Halstead’s attention settles on her with a gentleness that does not condescend. “Miss Cecily,” she says. “You look very lovely. Don’t let anyone persuade you that quiet is the same as invisible.” Cecily’s cheeks colour. She nods, grateful, slightly overwhelmed. Lady Halstead turns to you again, voice lowering. “I’ll stay near,” she says, practical as always. “You cannot be in three places at once, no matter how determined you look.”
“I can try,” you murmur.
“Try less,” she returns, and her tone makes it a finality. You draw in a breath and let your shoulders loosen by a fraction. Lady Halstead tips her chin toward a nearby cluster—an impeccably dressed mama with two daughters, both in fresh, hopeful colours, both wearing the careful brightness of girls who have been told this night matters. “Come,” she announces briskly. “I’m going to introduce you to Lady Northcott and her girls. They’re new enough to the Season not to have learned all the cruelty yet.”
“Lady Halstead,” you murmur, half-admonishment. “Oh, hush,” she says, and steers you forward anyway.
Lady Northcott turns as you approach, her smile widening with relief at an introduction offered by someone of Lady Halstead’s standing. Her daughters—Amelia and Alice, as Lady Halstead names them—brighten like candles catching flame. They look at Georgina and Cecily with immediate curiosity, eager for friends, eager for any tether that feels safe. Polite phrases begin—the oil that keeps the machinery running. Compliments on gowns. Remarks on the music. A mild exclamation about the splendour of Ashbourne Hall as if splendour is not the entire point. Georgina is already halfway into charm—voice perfectly pitched—when a footman passes with a tray and she reaches for a second glass of champagne as though the night might be improved by bubbles alone. You stop her without making it a spectacle. Two fingers around her wrist, gentle and unyielding. “Lemonade,” you murmur, smiling as though you’re teasing. Georgina pouts. “It is a ball,” she whispers back, scandalised by your restraint. “It is also a battlefield,” you return softly. “Hydrate.”
Lady Halstead’s mouth twitches as if she approves. Georgina, defeated by your tone, releases the glass. You take one instead—only to set it aside untouched on the nearest table at the first chance. Lady Northcott prattles on, relieved by your attention. Her daughters ask Cecily questions—where she prefers to walk in the park, whether she enjoys music, whether she has been to Vauxhall. Cecily answers carefully, grateful for conversation that doesn’t demand too much of her at once. It is, for a moment, almost pleasant.
Then the room realigns. Not a hush. A ripple. A collective awareness turning toward the grand staircase. At the top of it, the Ashbourne brothers appear. Not one man, but a line of them—five—each cut from the same belonging, and yet utterly different in the way they wear it. They don’t descend like boys eager for attention. They descend like a family returning to its post. Hosts first, gentlemen second.
Jeonghan leads—too composed, too smooth at the edges. His expression is calculating in the way a ledger can be, and you have the sudden sense that he watches the room not for beauty but for leverage, for weakness, for the hidden seam in any conversation he might later pull apart. Beside him walks Joshua, whose quiet feels deliberate rather than shy. His gaze moves like a lantern—soft, searching, finding faces rather than exits. If Jeonghan looks like strategy, Joshua looks like conscience forced to operate in a world that rewards neither. Hoshi follows with a brightness that isn’t foolishness; it’s energy held on a short leash. He smiles at someone in the crowd, quick and dazzling, and you can practically hear the older matrons deciding what kind of trouble that smile might become if it ever stops being decorative. Wonwoo comes next, half in shadow even under chandeliers. He doesn’t scan the room so much as mark it—eyes narrowing, attention landing on corners, on doors, on the spaces where people think no one is watching. He has the air of a man who would rather be somewhere else, and the deeper air of a man who knows he must be here anyway. A pace behind, Mingyu’s absence is a shape all its own—noticed even if no one names it aloud. A missing piece in a set like this is always noticed. It becomes its own kind of story. Then, inevitably last, as though the staircase was built to deliver him: Viscount Ashbourne. Seungcheol. He is dressed like any gentleman—dark coat, immaculate linen, cravat tied with accuracy—yet the clothes look like they obey him rather than the other way around. He carries himself with a calm that reads as confidence from across a room. Up close, you suspect it is something more like control.
The brothers reach the bottom of the staircase, and a cluster immediately forms—mothers and titled men, a slow-moving knot of anticipation. You can see the choreography from across the room as they begin their rounds: greetings executed; nods precise; smiles rationed. Jeonghan speaks and people lean in, eager to be chosen for his attention. Joshua answers questions with quiet care, and somehow that makes him even more disarming. Hoshi is swallowed for a moment by young ladies with dazzling smiles, then rescued by a brother’s hand at his elbow. Wonwoo disappears with him into the shadows as if the shadows were waiting for them. The room barely notices his exit.
Seungcheol speaks to Lord this and Lady that, and receives compliments and condolences with the same guarded expression. He listens. He answers. He never lingers. His gaze lifts then, not to you, but beyond—toward the doors. Toward the exits. A man who keeps counting ways out is a man who never feels fully safe. Your chest tightens with an emotion you refuse to name. Because you know the story of the woman who is not here. Because you know what it means to lose a parent and immediately become something else—something useful.
Lady Halstead’s presence anchors you back into conversation—Lady Northcott still speaking, her daughters still eager—until Seungcheol’s circuit bends naturally toward you. Partly because you are a guest of standing, partly because Lady Halstead is not subtle when she decides someone should do their social obligations properly. “Lady Halstead,” he greets her evenly. Lady Halstead inclines her head. “Lord Ashbourne.” He acknowledges Lady Northcott with polite efficiency, his gaze flicking over her daughters the way a host checks the room is functioning as it should. Then his attention comes to you, attentive in the manner of a man trained to speak to whomever is placed before him. “Lady Whitlock,” he says. You curtsy. “Viscount Ashbourne.”
He offers a brief nod to your sisters. “Miss Georgina. Miss Cecily.” Georgina curtsies with too much energy. Cecily’s is more modest, but still impeccable. The Viscount’s attention lingers an instant too long to be meaningless—on Cecily’s soft, uncertain smile and Georgina’s eager brightness. Finally, his eyes return to you. “You look tired,” he observes. It is not a line. It is not said like a compliment disguised as concern. It is said like a truth no one else has dared to speak aloud. Heat pricks behind your ribs—annoyance, surprise, something more treacherous that feels like relief. Because he is not pretending you are fine. You hold his gaze because if you look away, you will feel like you’ve lost something you didn’t agree to gamble. “I am,” you say, and the honesty shocks even you. Then you correct, smooth it, so it sounds less like resignation: “But it is nothing, my Lord. Merely the ordinary wear of keeping a household afloat and two young ladies untrampled.”
“It must be… efficient,” he says, the pause almost invisible, “to bring them out together. To have it done.” Done. As if this is an errand. As if Georgina and Cecily are tasks to complete rather than girls with hearts. It lands wrong. You keep the smile. You let the correction slip out just as smoothly. “Not done,” you say, sweet enough for the room to accept it as pleasantry. “Settled. Happily, if we are fortunate.” Seungcheol’s gaze holds yours for the briefest moment—steady, unruffled. He doesn’t falter. He doesn’t apologise. He simply acknowledges the rebuke by not reacting to it at all, which somehow makes it feel more like a challenge than a mistake. “Fortune is a fickle ally,” he replies.
“Then we must be more loyal to ourselves than to fortune,” you return instantly. The Viscount studies you, and you can’t tell if he’s surprised or simply recalculating. Before you can decide what to do with his statements, a gentleman approaches from behind him—murmuring his title, waiting to be acknowledged. Seungcheol inclines his head once—hostly, final. “Enjoy the evening,” he says to the group, and moves on without another glance, swallowed back into the circuit of duty.
Lady Northcott exhales as if she’s just spoken to royalty. Her daughters whisper behind their fans. Lady Halstead says nothing, because she doesn’t need to. You breathe in carefully. The music shifts. The next set is called. A new dance begins. And then Georgina is approached. A gentleman—young, confident, dressed well enough to have money and titled enough to have ambition comes her way. He bows. “Miss Georgina Whitlock.” Georgina curtsies, her eyes already daring him to entertain her. “Good evening.”
“May I have the honour of the first set?” he asks. Before you can even catalogue his face properly, a second suitor arrives from the other side—dark-haired, smiling, a little too pleased with himself. He bows, quick and eager. “Miss Georgina,” he says. “The second, perhaps?”
Georgina’s eyes flick to you—conspiratorial, asking permission in the only way she ever does: by already deciding she will take it. You give her a small nod. Two dances are a safe amount of visibility. Enough to be noticed without being overwhelmed. Enough to make her desirable without letting anyone assume she is easy to corner. Georgina beams. “You may both,” she says brightly, as if granting favours rather than accepting them. She offers her dance card, and their pencils scratch dutifully—two names inked like claims. Her excitement is contained, barely. She looks like she might float. Lady Halstead leans toward you, voice dry. “She’ll have half the room by midnight if you let her.”
“I won’t,” you murmur, even as you watch Georgina glide toward the forming lines with the first suitor. Her set begins, and the dancers take the floor. Music rises, crisp and bright. Bodies move in a practised rhythm. Skirts flare. Hands meet and separate. Cecily stays beside Lady Halstead. No one approaches her. It isn’t cruelty, not always. Often it’s simply the way rooms like this behave—chasing what is loud, what is radiant, what seems easy to want. Cecily’s beauty is quieter. It asks you to look twice. Most people, in a marketplace, refuse to spend time on second glances. Cecily’s fingers twist lightly in her gloves.
Lady Halstead notices—because Lady Halstead notices everything. “Stay with me,” she tells Cecily, as if it’s the most natural thing. “We’ll let them exhaust themselves chasing fireworks. Someone will eventually notice the stars.” Cecily’s lips part in a small, uncertain smile. “Yes, Lady Halstead.” You should feel relief. You do—some. Cecily has protection. Someone steady at her side. A woman who will not let her be swallowed by the room. You watch Georgina’s set end. She returns flushed and triumphant, accepting her second partner’s arm with delight as if she’s already learned to breathe in applause. Cecily remains beside Lady Halstead.
You stand between them in spirit even when you cannot in body—tracking Georgina’s brightness, guarding Cecily’s softness, holding the whole of it together with the kind of composure that costs you more than anyone will ever see. For the first time since stepping through the Ashbourne gates, you allow yourself to want air. Not a dramatic escape. Just a moment of quiet. “Go,” Lady Halstead says under her breath, not looking at you. “Five minutes. I’ll keep Cecily beside me, and I have eyes for Georgina as well. I may be old, but I still know how to stare down a man.”
“I cannot leave them,” you begin automatically. Her fan snaps open with an assertive flick. “You can,” she says. “And if you do not, you will crack in a way that will be far more inconvenient.” The permission feels strange. Like stepping off a ledge. You take it anyway. You slip from the ballroom—neither hurried nor lingering—through a side door left slightly ajar, into the cooler quiet beyond.
The corridor is dimmer, the sound muted. You pass a footman carrying a tray, a maid adjusting a sconce, a butler moving as if he belongs to the walls. No one stops you. A chaperone stepping out for air is not scandal. Outside, the garden air hits your lungs clean and cool. You welcome it. Your boots find the gravel path, lanterns casting soft pools of light across clipped hedges. Somewhere, water moves—a fountain or a stream—quiet enough to feel like a secret. The muffled music follows you through the walls, distant now, like a life you once might have wanted. You walk—only far enough to loosen the tightness in your ribs. Only far enough to remember what it feels like to be alone inside your own skin. You stop near a stone bench, one hand braced lightly against its cold edge. You draw in a breath. Let it out.
And then you hear voices. Two men, close by—emerge from the shadow of a clipped yew. One is tall, familiar, moving like controlled weather. Viscount Ashbourne. The other walks beside him with a different kind of presence—lighter, gentle. Joshua. They are close enough that their voices reach you easily, carried by air and the false privacy of gardens. They do not see you.
You should step back. You should announce yourself. You should not eavesdrop. But your body holds still. Joshua’s voice comes first, lightly teasing, as if attempting to coax a secret out into the open. “You’ve done three rounds. Are any of them suitable?” The Viscount’s reply is immediate and flat, as if the question itself is an inconvenience. “None.” Joshua exhales a faint laugh, half in disbelief. “That is not an answer.”
“It is the only honest one.”
Joshua’s tone shifts, warming gently. “You cannot look at an entire ballroom and feel nothing.” Viscount Ashbourne’s voice remains controlled—too controlled. “I can look at an entire ballroom and see what it is,” he replies. “A parade of over-powdered, over-trained dolls. A market.”
Your hands tighten at your side. Joshua stops walking. You can hear it in the way his breath changes. “Seungcheol—”
The Viscount cuts him off. “All of them,” he says, and you can picture the sweep of his gaze, the same measured verdict you felt earlier. “Smiling like they’ve been instructed where to place their teeth. They speak in rehearsed compliments and wait to be applauded for breathing.”
Joshua’s voice tightens. “They are young women,” he says. “Raised to this. They are not the enemy.” The Viscount answers with a soft, humourless chuckle. “I know they aren’t,” he repeats. “But still, they arrive with expectations as tall as the chandeliers. They want devotion and poetry and a husband who looks at them as if the world ends at their waist.”
You feel heat rise behind your ribs, sudden and furious, because you have stood in that room all night holding your sisters upright, and he speaks as if every young woman there is nothing but a tedious decoration. Joshua tries again, quieter now—because he is trying not to make it a fight. “So what do you expect, then?”
Viscount Ashbourne answers like a man stating terms. “I expect competence,” he says. “I expect sense. I expect a woman who can keep a household from collapsing when the ton decides to tear at it for sport. I expect someone who does not weep at every inconvenience and mistake it for depth.” Your breath catches—not with admiration, but with the sting of recognition. Then he continues, and the sting becomes a cut. “I do not require sweetness,” he says. “I do not require innocence. I do not require a girl who thinks marriage is a fairytale.” His voice drops, colder. “I require someone suitable.”
Suitable. Your stomach turns, not because you do not understand strategy—God, you understand it more than most men in that ballroom—but because of the way he says it, as if women are simply collateral. Joshua’s voice sounds troubled. “And if she wants more than that?” Seungcheol doesn’t hesitate. “Then she will be disappointed.”
There is a silence so sharp you feel it in your toes. Finally, Joshua replies: “And what of your own heart?” Seungcheol’s reply is so calm, it is brutal. “Irrelevant.” Joshua exhales—a sound like defeat, like love, like fear for his sibling. “You are not made of stone, brother. Even if you insist on acting like one.”
Viscount Ashbourne’s response is final, leaving no room for rebuttal. “If I act like stone, it is because this house cannot afford softness, brother.” You don’t hear what Joshua says next, because your pulse is suddenly too loud, because your anger has climbed high enough to blur the edges of the world. Their footsteps shift, moving again down the path, and you remain pressed into shadow. So that is what he is.
A man who can look at a room full of young women and reduce them to dull. A man who thinks marriage is ledger work, wives are requirements, love is irrelevant. You think of Georgina—bright enough to be burned by a man who wants a pretty ornament beside him. You think of Cecily—soft enough to be crushed by a world that mistakes quiet for consent. Something in you hardens. A line draws itself through you, clean and absolute, like a blade dragged across silk. You slip back into the house like a ghost returning to its haunt.
The ballroom is still gleaming, still hungry, but now you can see it for what it truly is: a marketplace with better manners pretending to be celebration. You find your sisters easily. They stand half-turned toward a pair of girls you recognise from earlier: the Northcott sisters. Alice is in full bloom, face animated, fan fluttering like a conductor’s baton as she leads the conversation. Amelia is the softer echo—leaning in at just the right angle, smiling as though she is sharing secrets.
Cecily has her shoulders tucked in, but her eyes are brighter than they were at the start of the evening. She is listening. She is answering. She is present. It is a small thing, yet it nearly undoes you. Georgina, of course, is doing what Georgina does—tilting the air toward herself without appearing to try. She laughs at the right moments, offers little sparks of commentary that make Alice giggle and Amelia widen her eyes, and even from a distance, you can see the rhythm of attention gathering around her like moths around a flame. Lady Halstead stands a short distance behind them, her gaze drifting over the crowd like a hawk that has decided, for tonight, to lend its shadow. When you approach, her eyes meet yours—just once. Not a question. Not permission. Simply acknowledgement. For one brief moment, gratitude loosens something tight in your ribs. They’re with other debutantes. They’re supervised. They’re safe. You take two steps toward them.
Alice brightens the moment she sees you, as if your arrival is the next planned part of her little performance. “Lady Whitlock!” she chirps, her voice perfectly pitched. “We were just telling your sisters that the music tonight is divine—Viscount Ashbourne must have excellent taste.” Amelia nods earnestly. “It feels like something out of a novel,” she adds, eyes glancing toward the dancers. “As though the whole room might turn into a story if one simply stands still long enough.”
Georgina laughs, delighted. “If that is true, then I intend to be the heroine.” Alice claps her hands softly, thrilled by the idea. “You would be,” she declares. “You have the look of it. The confidence. The—oh, the way you move as if the world is obliged to make space.” Georgina preens without shame. Cecily, beside her, gives a small, careful smile. “The music is very fine,” she agrees shyly. Alice’s lashes flutter faster. “And the Viscount, did you see him?” she breathes. “Lord Ashbourne does not smile often, but when he does, it is—”
“Dreadfully handsome,” Amelia supplies, with the sort of sincerity that makes it impossible to mock. Georgina hums, amused. “He did smile. Once.” Cecily’s gaze dips, but you catch the flicker of interest anyway. “He spoke very kindly,” she says. “To everyone.”
Your stomach twists—small, sharp—like a ribbon pulled too tight. Because you can picture him. Picture the calm of his voice. The way he spoke of wives and debutantes as if they are tools meant to fit neatly into the machinery of his house. The Northcott sisters are still floating on their own delight, unguarded in a way that feels almost sacred in this room. You do not want to spoil it. Not here.
You let the moment breathe just long enough to keep it natural—just long enough that it does not feel like you have arrived merely to snatch your sisters away. Then you smile, light and polite, and slide neatly into the conversation as if you have been part of it all along. “Miss Northcott,” you say to Alice, “you must be careful praising a host too loudly. You will convince him he has done his duty perfectly, and then he will stop trying.” Alice giggles, delighted by the tease. “Oh, I should never wish that.”
“Nor should any of us,” you reply pleasantly. Your eyes move to your sisters—one, then the other—softening just enough for them to hear the truth beneath the tone. “But you have both made your entrance, and have made acquaintances, and I think we have stolen all the triumphs we may safely claim from one evening.”
Cecily blinks, surprised. “Already?” she murmurs, then quickly, as if the fault must be hers, “Did I—did we do something wrong?” You reach up and tuck a flyaway strand behind her ear. “Nothing wrong,” you tell her. “You were excellent. Both of you.” Georgina’s face collapses, as if you’ve stolen a breath from her lungs. “But I’ve only just begun,” she protests under her breath. “Alice says there is another set soon and—” You catch her wrist gently, the way you might catch a bird before it flings itself at a window. “Georgina,” you say, final. She meets your eyes and glares as if the room itself has turned against her personally. Then, with an exasperated sigh that is half theatre and half surrender, she nods. Alice and Amelia exchange looks, unbothered, already distracted by the next sweep of music and movement. “We will see you at the next ball,” Alice declares eagerly.
“And you must tell us if Lord Ashbourne—” Amelia begins, then stops herself with a bashful little laugh, as though she has caught her own romantic imagination in the act. You interrupt swiftly. “If Lord Ashbourne does anything at all, I suspect all of Mayfair will know before breakfast.” They giggle at that, satisfied, and the moment is done.
You shepherd your sisters through the crowd—through laughter, through swirling skirts, through men who step aside and men who don’t until they must, all while keeping your expression neutral enough to invite no further conversation. The entry hall feels cooler. Serener. The world narrows again into marble and candle smoke and the muted hum of the ballroom behind you. A servant brings your cloaks. Another fetches Cecily’s shawl. Georgina snatches hers with the impatience of a girl who doesn’t yet understand the mercy of leaving, who still believes the night might reward her if she stays long enough. A footman bows as your carriage is called.
As you turn toward the doors, your gaze cuts back once—instinct more than choice. And there, through the open archway, near the edge of the dancers, where the light is strongest and the faces are thickest, stands Lord Ashbourne. His head is angled as if he is listening to someone speak, but his attention is elsewhere—elsewhere being you, now, as his eyes lift at the exact moment yours do. As if he sensed your departure. Your eyes lock. The room collapses into a thin line between you and him—nothing else exists but the fact of his gaze, the weight of it, the way it found you, as if you are a point on a map he’s already marked. You feel your mouth tighten, not from fear, but from certainty. Whatever he is—brilliant, ruthless, burdened, beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful—he is not a man you will allow near what you love. You turn away, because you refuse to be held by anyone’s attention, least of all his.
Outside, the air clears the last clinging sweetness of the evening from your lungs. Your carriage waits with its lanterns glowing, horses stamping impatiently against the stone. Cecily climbs in without hesitation, grateful for the cocoon of velvet and shadow. Georgina pauses on the step as if to mourn the loss of a night she is convinced could have changed everything. You touch her elbow—gentle, unyielding. “Another night,” you murmur. Georgina exhales a long, suffering sigh and ducks into the carriage with a sulk that is half performance. You follow, settling opposite them. The door shuts. The world becomes velvet-lined again.
For a few moments, only the sound of wheels and the soft shift of fabric fills the space. Cecily sits with her hands folded in her lap. Georgina stares out the window, jaw set, watching Ashbourne Hall retreat into glittering distance. “You cannot snatch me away every time the night becomes interesting,” Georgina finally mutters, still facing the frosted glass. You keep your voice light, because you refuse to turn your fear into her burden. “If you wish to stay until dawn, you may do so when you are married and your husband is obliged to suffer it with you.”
Georgina turns, eyes flashing. “I would not inflict that on any man.” Cecily’s mouth twitches, the smallest hint of amusement. “You would,” she whispers, almost too quiet to hear. “You would enjoy it, too.” Georgina looks briefly startled—then delighted, as if Cecily has delivered a punchline. “See?” she says triumphantly. “Even Cecily is learning wickedness.” Cecily ducks her head, but the faint pink in her cheeks remains. You watch them both, and the familiar ache settles in—tender and heavy. You have brought them here to find happiness. You have brought them here to be seen. And you will not let the cost be paid in pieces of them.
The carriage rocks over the cobbles. Ashbourne Hall recedes behind the frosted glass, a bright mouth of light in the dark, glittering as if it can outshine consequence. Georgina watches it fade with restless resentment. Cecily watches the window. You let the motion lull you into stillness—the kind of calm you can only find when your sisters are contained, when the world cannot reach for them without reaching through you first.
Ashbourne’s chandeliers can glitter until dawn. Its name can shine until it blinds the ton. But Viscount Ashbourne has made one thing clear, whether he intended to or not. He wants something. And he will learn, if the Season insists on testing it, that the ladies of Whitlock are never to be taken.
The shopfront of Carat & Co. is a different world—glass cases gleaming, chandeliers softened into an intimate glow, Jeonghan’s voice smooth as poured honey as he tells a lady how light will behave on a throat if the stones are cut correctly. Out there, everything is seduction. Out there, everything sparkles. Back here, nothing sparkles until Seungcheol makes it.
He sits at the long table beneath the high window, sleeves rolled efficiently. Rough stones rest on a velvet pad in neat, ugly piles—unapologetic chunks of earth dragged into London under seal and stamp and bill of lading. Next to them: order sheets, an opened ledger, and a scale so precise it feels almost indecent to watch it decide truth. The shipper stands opposite, hat in hand, his coat still smelling faintly of river and horse. He is the sort of man who knows how to look respectable while lying. He has perfected it. It is how men like him survive.
Seungcheol lifts the first stone between his thumb and forefinger. The cut of it is nothing yet, just promise. He sets it on the scale. The needle settles. He writes the number down without looking away. Second stone. Third. Fourth. By the seventh, the silence has thickened. By the ninth, the shipper’s smile has started to sweat. Seungcheol turns one of the stones, eyes narrowing at the grain. He flips the order sheet once, then the ledger, then back to the order sheet. The numbers line up the way they always do when they are not being manipulated. He reaches for his pen and gently taps the scale, as if it might change. It doesn’t. His gaze lifts to the shipper. “Your weights are short.”
The shipper blinks. “Short?” He laughs softly, the sound meant to be friendly. “Surely not. I weighed them twice before—”
“An eighth,” Seungcheol says, and the room goes colder. The shipper’s throat works. His eyes flick to the stones, then back up—calculating. Deciding whether denial might still win. “My lord,” he tries, “with respect, the stones are rough. Naturally there’s—”
Seungcheol doesn’t raise his voice. He taps the order sheet once with his pen, then the ledger, then the scale. “There is my order.” Tap. “There is what I paid for.” Tap. “There is what you have brought.” Tap. “An eighth short.” The shipper goes still. The sheen of confidence slips. Defensiveness rises in its place. “It could be the scale,” he says quickly, as if Seungcheol is a fool who might be swayed by the suggestion that numbers are subjective. “I can fetch mine from the cart—”
“I have three.” Seungcheol’s eyes do not leave the man’s face. “Would you like to test your honesty against all of them?” Silence. The shipper swallows loudly. “No,” he mutters. Seungcheol returns to the stones as if the conversation is already finished. He places the third stone back on the velvet pad and writes a single line in the ledger—short, final. The shipper shifts, nervous now. “My lord, I—”
Seungcheol cuts him off with the gentlest thing in the room: certainty. “You will bring the remainder by noon,” he says. “Or you will return every piece and forfeit your fee. And you will not bring me another parcel until you learn that Carat & Co. is not a place you test.”
The shipper nods too many times, too eager, as though obedience might erase intent. “Yes, my lord. Yes, of course. By noon.” He backs out the door as if it might bite him. When the latch clicks shut again, Seungcheol remains where he is, eyes on the stones.
An eighth. It is a small theft, almost delicate. Not enough to trigger outrage from a man too busy to count properly. Not enough to be obvious without attention. A theft designed for a man who does not have time. Seungcheol’s mouth tightens. He has time. Not because he is fortunate. Because he makes it. Because he bleeds it out of his hours, trims it from sleep, carves it from anything that might feel like softness and calls it duty instead. He closes the ledger carefully and ties the string around it with a neatness that suggests ritual. Then he reaches for the next order sheet. There is always a next one.
A row of commissions, names written in hands that never shake because the people who write them have never had to fear being refused. A bracelet requested “for the Duchess’s dinner” as if a jewel is as necessary as air. A pair of earrings for a bride whose mother insists they must outshine the groom’s gift. A repair—urgent—on an heirloom brooch that has survived three generations but cannot survive one careless maid. On paper, all of it looks manageable. On paper, his life is tidy lines and sums. In reality, the weight sits on his shoulders in ways ledgers do not record. He hears it in the footfalls around him—Jeonghan’s easy drift in the shopfront, the bell over the door announcing another client, another demand. He hears it in the steady scratch of his own pen, in the steadying rhythm of numbers that do not care whether his mother or father is dead. He thinks, briefly, of the ball—of how the chandeliers at Ashbourne Hall glittered too brightly for a house in mourning, and how the ton’s condolences were followed by a pause long enough for speculation to slip in. He does not allow himself to linger there. He returns to the stones. The scale. The truth.
By noon, the remainder arrives. The shipper brings it himself, cheeks flushed, eyes too humble. He does not attempt another smile. Seungcheol checks the weight anyway. He does not say well done. He does not reward compliance with warmth. Warmth is how men begin to believe they can bargain with you again. He gives a single nod and turns back to his work. The shipper leaves like a man released from a sentence. Seungcheol continues as if nothing happened. But in his mind, the ledger entry sits like a splinter.
It is not the eighth that troubles him. It is the instinct behind it—someone thinking Carat & Co. is distracted enough now to be tested. Distracted. As though grief is not merely another weight he has learned to carry without dropping. As though the death of the Viscountess has loosened the seams of the house. If that is what the world believes, then the world will keep pulling.
On the second morning after the ball, Bond Street continues its elegant churn: carriage wheels over cobbles, the flash of parasols, the faint bark of a coachman, the slow glide of women past shopfronts as if the street belongs to them. Inside Carat & Co., the air is cool and expensive.
Jeonghan is in his position behind the counter, elbows resting on the glass with the lazy entitlement of a man who knows the room will orbit him. His hair is perfectly arranged. His smile is faintly bored. Seungcheol moves behind him without being seen. That, too, has become a skill—how to exist in the back while ensuring everything in the front remains flawless. He takes the stairs down to the office again, where the walls close in and the work becomes honest. A clerk is waiting with a stack of correspondence. “My lord,” the clerk says, bowing too deeply. “The customs office has sent notice.”
Seungcheol takes the paper. His eyes scan. A parcel held at the docks. A fee “reassessed.” A delay imposed “for verification of provenance.” The phrasing is polite. The intent is not. He feels the familiar tightening in his chest. Not panic. Not anger. Recognition. They are not satisfied with what he pays. They want to see whether he will pay more just to make the problem disappear. A bribe dressed as bureaucracy. He hands the notice back. “Send Hargreaves to the docks,” he says. “Have him bring the manifest and copies of our previous clearances. If they claim confusion, we will educate them.”
The clerk hesitates. “They—ah—mentioned the Viscountess’s name,” he admits quietly. “As though the approvals were… personal.” Seungcheol pauses. His mother’s signature used to open doors without question. The Viscountess Ashbourne. Patroness. The kind of woman who could make a man’s career live or die with a single invitation—or lack of one. She is gone, and London has noticed. Seungcheol sets the ledger down with care. “Her approvals were earned,” he says simply. “Ours will be, too.” The clerk nods quickly, relieved by direction. He leaves.
Seungcheol sits alone with the ledger, its pages filled with numbers that do not care about grief, do not care about bloodlines, do not care about whispers. Numbers are faithful that way. He inhales slowly, counting the breath the way he counts stones. Then he writes a letter to the customs office with the kind of politeness that cannot be argued with and the kind of precision that cannot be ignored. It is a language his mother taught him well. He seals it with wax. He does not press the signet too hard. A clean impression. A clean declaration. Ashbourne. Carat & Co. Still here.
That evening, Seungcheol returns home and finds the house waiting to be managed as faithfully as the business.
Ashbourne Hall is quieter than it ought to be. The staff moves softly; doors are closed with care; footsteps soften on rugs. Even the fire in the drawing room seems to burn lower, as if it understands restraint. The front door shuts behind him and he stands for a moment in the entry hall, the familiar scent of home filling his lungs. In the mirror above the console table, his reflection looks like a man who has not slept properly in weeks. The butler approaches, deferential, eyes steady in the way servants’ eyes are when they have learned not to be startled. “My lord,” he says, “Mr. Pelham is waiting in your office.”
Pelham. The steward. The man who can turn acres of Kent into columns of ink and speak of tenants’ lives as if they are sums. Seungcheol nods once and crosses the house without pausing in rooms that still feel wrong without his mother in them. He passes the music room and hears nothing. He passes the Viscountess’s sitting room and feels the absence like a stone in his stomach. In his office, Pelham rises quickly. He is a careful man—respectful, tidy, reliable. The kind of man his mother trusted, which is why Seungcheol trusts him too. But tonight Pelham’s face looks slightly strained, as if the paper in his hands is heavier than it should be. “My lord,” Pelham greets. Seungcheol gestures to the chair. “Sit.” Pelham sits, papers aligned on his knee. “Wrotham’s quarterly accounts,” he says. “And correspondence from Kent.”
Seungcheol takes the stack and flips through. Rent lists. Repairs. Notes on harvest stores. A request for funds to mend a section of fence that has begun to lean. A complaint from a neighbouring landowner about “boundaries”—always boundaries, always men who believe land can be shifted simply by insisting. There is also a letter from a magistrate, asking whether the Viscount intends to “confirm” certain arrangements with tenants in light of “recent changes.” Seungcheol’s eyes flick over the words, then lift. “Tell me.” Pelham clears his throat. “There have been… questions, my lord.”
There it is again. Questions. Whispers with manners. “From whom?” Pelham hesitates only a moment. “From the magistrate’s office. From Lord Caversham’s steward. And—” He swallows. “—from some of the tenants.”
Seungcheol’s jaw tightens. “Why would the tenants question anything?” Pelham’s gaze drops, uncomfortable. “They hear what they hear,” he says carefully. “The village hears London. London hears the ton. And the ton…”
The ton makes sport of people’s lives. Seungcheol rubs a hand once over the bridge of his nose. He is tired in a way that makes even anger feel like effort. He looks back down at the papers. A list catches his eye: arrears. Not many, but enough to notice. He recognises several names. Not because he has spent his life wandering fields—he hasn’t—but because his mother made a point of learning them. She would sit with Pelham and ask after families the way other women ask after dresses. She treated tenants as part of the house, not props beneath it. Seungcheol points with his pen. “This.”
Pelham nods. “The winter was harsher than expected,” he says. “Several families lost livestock. One lost a roof beam in the storm. They are struggling.” Seungcheol responds flatly, “And the magistrate thinks this is the time to question arrangements.” Pelham doesn’t deny it. “Some will see an opportunity, my lord.”
Seungcheol flips to the repairs request. The roof beam. The fence. A note about the mill requiring maintenance. All of it money. All of it necessary if he wants Wrotham Castle to remain not just a symbol but a functioning place that does not bleed its people dry. He looks up at Pelham. “We will cover the roof beam.”
Pelham’s eyes widen slightly. “My lord—”
“We will cover it,” Seungcheol repeats, and there is no room in his tone for argument. “We will also reduce rents for those families until harvest. Write it as an adjustment in light of losses. No charity.”
Pelham exhales. He nods quickly, already calculating. “Yes, my lord. Of course.” Seungcheol turns the page again. “And Caversham’s steward.” Pelham’s mouth tightens. “He has sent a ‘courteous inquiry’ about the southern boundary,” he admits. Seungcheol sets the papers down. “Send him our deeds. Send him the map. Invite him to bring a surveyor if he enjoys wasting his own time.”
Pelham nods again, lips pressing into a line. “Yes, my lord.”
Seungcheol leans back in his chair, the leather creaking softly beneath him. For a moment, his eyes catch on the inkstand on his desk—a small thing, silver-edged, used by his mother once. Her hand used to rest right there, fingers ink-stained. He feels something in his chest tighten, not quite grief anymore. Grief has become a structure. A room he lives in. Pelham clears his throat gently. “There is another matter.”
Seungcheol’s gaze returns, steady. “Speak.”
Pelham shifts. “The household expenses. For your brothers.” Pelham produces a second list—tailor bills, club accounts, carriage repairs. One line stands out: damages paid to a host after “an incident” involving one of the younger brothers. Hoshi, likely. Or Jeonghan, if he felt bored enough to make a mess. Seungcheol reads the amount and feels the familiar surge of irritation, immediately pressed down by responsibility. He doesn’t have the luxury of being a brother first. He is Viscount first, always. “Who?” he asks. Pelham hesitates. “Lord Soonyoung,” he admits. Seungcheol closes his eyes. Hoshi’s grief has been loud since the funeral, disguised as laughter and movement. Seungcheol has watched him burn himself out on purpose and called it coping because there were too many other things demanding attention. “Pay it,” Seungcheol whispers. Pelham looks startled. “My lord?”
Seungcheol’s eyes open again. “Pay it,” he repeats. “And remind him that if he wants to break things, he may do so in a rehearsal room where the cost is sweat, not scandal.”
Pelham swallows. He does not push. He gathers his papers, bows, and retreats. When the door clicks shut, Seungcheol remains alone in the quiet. He rubs his thumb once over the edge of the desk where his mother’s wrist used to rest, then stops himself. Sentiment is a loop that drags you under if you let it. He opens Wrotham’s accounts again and forces his mind back into numbers. This is what he does. This is what he is. There is no room for collapse. Not when his brothers still have the luxury of falling apart. Not when the ton has begun to prowl. Not when the house is being tested at every seam.
He works until the candle stubs low and the ink begins to thicken. When he finally stands, his body protests—an ache in his shoulders, a heaviness behind his eyes. He realises, distantly, that he has not eaten since morning. He cannot remember tasting anything all day. He crosses the hallway toward his chambers and pauses when he hears a murmur from the drawing room. Joshua’s voice, low and calm. Another voice responding—one of the housemaids, perhaps. Comfort offered, quietly. The sound of gentleness in a house that has learned to survive without it. Seungcheol stands still for a moment, listening like a man outside a door to a life he cannot afford. Then he turns away and continues down the corridor. Duty is oxygen. He breathes it in.
He goes to bed. He sleeps for three hours. At dawn, he wakes, already counting.
Three days later, a bank manager calls. Not in the way a bank manager calls on a viscount—no rush of servants, no grand bows. Instead: a letter requesting his presence “to review the terms of ongoing arrangements in light of recent changes.” Seungcheol goes, because ignoring a request like that is impossible.
The bank smells of polished wood and old ink and men who believe their money makes them immortal. Seungcheol sits in a high-backed chair across from a desk too large for the man behind it. The bank manager smiles and smiles and smiles, the way men do when they plan to ask for something they have no right to. “Viscount Ashbourne,” he declares, voice thick with false warmth. “Our condolences, of course. Your mother was a woman of considerable—”
“What do you want?” Seungcheol interrupts. The manager’s smile falters, then reassembles a little tighter. “Directness,” he says, chuckling as if they are friends. “Very well. We must ensure stability. For the sake of all parties. You understand.”
Seungcheol does not respond. The manager shuffles papers, the sound too loud in the quiet office. “There have been inquiries,” he says. “Concerns regarding continuity. The title is, of course, secure—” Of course. “—but the business,” the manager continues, “is a different matter. Carat & Co. has expanded considerably under the late Viscountess’s influence. Some of our board members are merely mindful that a household with… unconventional circumstances may face heightened scrutiny this Season.”
Seungcheol watches the man’s fingers twitch on the paper, watches him avoid Seungcheol’s gaze. A man about to insult you always looks everywhere else first, as if the room might absolve him. “Say it,” Seungcheol murmurs. The manager laughs again, weaker. “There are whispers,” he admits, and finally, inevitably: “about lineage.” There it is. Blood. Seed. Womb. As if a family is only real if it is biological.
Seungcheol’s hands rest on his knees. He could crush the man with a title. He could ruin him with influence. He could speak a single name—one of his mother’s friends, one of the duchesses who wears Carat & Co. stones like a crown—and watch the manager beg for forgiveness. He does none of that. Because this is not one man. It is the ton. It is a city that has decided the death of the Viscountess means the sons she chose are unworthy. He leans forward slightly. “Carat & Co. has been stable through wars and recessions and the shifting favour of courts,” he says. “It was stable before my mother, and it will be stable after her. If your board is concerned, they may look at our ledgers. They will find no weakness there.”
The manager’s Adam’s apple bobs. “Naturally, naturally—”
“If their concern is not the ledgers,” Seungcheol continues, “but the story they wish to tell about me, then I suggest they consider whether it is wise to challenge a house that supplies half of London’s throats.” The manager’s eyes widen. There is the briefest, ugliest flicker of fear. Good.
Seungcheol stands. He does not offer his hand. “The terms remain,” he says. “If you wish to renegotiate, you may do so with my solicitor. You may also inform your board that I do not respond well to insinuation disguised as stewardship.” He leaves.
Outside, the air is colder than it was when he entered. The street is busy, oblivious. Seungcheol’s carriage waits. He sits inside it and lets his head fall back once, just once, against the upholstery.
His mother should be here. Not because he cannot do this without her. He can. He has been doing it for years already, even when she was alive—catching problems before they reached her, holding the house steady while she held Society. But he is tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. Society has caught the scent. Rivals are sniffing. Men are testing weights, customs offices are holding parcels, and bank boards are whispering about blood. Carat & Co. is more than a shop. It is a fortress built of light. A fortress his brothers will inherit, whether they deserve it or not.
The decision forms without drama, without emotion, without flourish. A solution. A shield. A Viscountess. Not a romantic dream. Not a bride in white and poetry. Someone who can stand in a room and make people stop trying him. Someone who can handle the household, the invitations, the politics, the subtle war of cups of tea and seating arrangements. Someone competent enough that even the cruellest tongues hesitate before they speak. He will marry. Not because he wants to. Because he must.
The velvet pad is still warm from the last pair of hands that dared to touch it.
Jeonghan stands on the opposite side of the counter, his fingers hovering over the display. Across from him, a gentleman in a dove-grey coat clears his throat for the third time—each sound a plea, each plea an insult. The necklace between them is not merely diamonds. It is proof. It is leverage. It is Carat & Co.
Seungcheol watches the man’s gaze snag on the stones—how it lingers, how it calculates, how it tries to pretend it is not calculating. He watches the pulse at the man’s jaw. The slight dampness at his hairline despite the shop’s chill. A man with nothing to fear does not sweat over a clasp. “The Duchess believes the setting is… bold,” the gentleman says, with the smile of someone delivering bad news on behalf of a woman too powerful to be contradicted. “Perhaps a more delicate mounting would better suit her grace.”
Jeonghan’s mouth twitches. Not quite amusement. More like hunger. “A more delicate mounting,” Jeonghan repeats lightly, as if tasting the words. His eyes do not leave the necklace. “For stones that were cut to throw light across a room.” The gentleman’s smile strains. “Her grace adores subtlety.”
Seungcheol says nothing. He turns the necklace a fraction, letting the diamonds catch the pale spring sun that slants through the shop’s tall windowpanes. The stones flare—brief, undeniable—and the gentleman’s pupils widen like a confession. Subtlety. Yes. Subtlety is what people demand when they want to dull another person’s power into something manageable. “Her grace,” Seungcheol says finally, voice even, “requested the Ashbourne cut.”
The man’s gaze flicks up—sharp, then quickly respectful. “Of course, Viscount Ashbourne. Naturally.” Seungcheol watches the gentleman swallow, watches him choose his next words carefully, like a gambler sliding coins forward without showing his hand. “There is, however,” the man adds, “the matter of provenance.” Jeonghan lifts his gaze then, and something in his eyes turns from idle to bright. “Provenance,” Jeonghan echoes. “For a necklace.”
The gentleman laughs faintly, as if this is only a conversation. “For a name,” he corrects, still smiling. “Her grace is… mindful of appearances this Season.” Seungcheol feels it before he hears it—the shift in the air. This is not about diamonds. This is about them. Jeonghan leans one elbow on the glass case, casual as sin. “If her grace is mindful,” he says pleasantly, “she will be mindful that Carat & Co. has placed stones on the bodies of women who outrank her.”
The gentleman’s nostrils flare. He cannot deny it. He can only pivot. “No one disputes the work,” he says quickly. “It is beyond dispute. But Society is restless. There are whispers.”
Whispers. He heard them everywhere this week. Adopted. Not blood. Chosen child. A Viscount by permission rather than birthright. The gentleman clears his throat again, emboldened by his own insinuation. “Her grace would simply hate to be associated with controversy,” he says. “It is a sensitive time. The late Viscountess’s passing, the new Season—”
Seungcheol’s fingers close around the velvet pad. Not hard enough to crush it, but hard enough to remind himself that restraint is a choice, not a weakness. Jeonghan’s voice stays light, almost bored, and that is what makes it dangerous. “Controversy,” he murmurs. “Do you mean grief? Or do you mean gossip?”
The gentleman’s smile falters. “I mean the ton is watching,” he says, and the truth finally slips out. “Some are uncertain. The name—” Seungcheol sets the velvet pad down. “The name is Ashbourne,” he interrupts. “And the workmanship is Carat & Co.”
The gentleman quiets. Jeonghan’s eyes gleam, delighted in that private way of his—as if he can taste the moment where someone realises they have misjudged their opponent. Seungcheol continues, tone polished as marble. “If her grace wishes for a more ‘delicate’ mounting, she may commission another house. Our stones do not apologise for their presence.”
Pride wars with practicality on the gentleman’s face. He is a messenger, yes—but he is also a man who enjoys being the mouthpiece for power. Being dismissed feels like being unmade. “Viscount Ashbourne,” he begins, attempting a warning, “you will find that Society does not respond well to—”
Jeonghan tilts his head, smiling, the kind of smile that makes people instinctively check their pockets. “To being told no?” he supplies. “Tragic.” The gentleman’s eyes flick to Jeonghan with irritation, then back to Seungcheol, as if hoping the Viscount will be the reasonable one. Seungcheol is not. He watches the man make his choice.
Finally, the gentleman exhales through his nose, a thin surrender. “Very well,” he says, too quickly. “Her grace will consider. She values quality above all, of course.” Quality above all, except the kind that comes from a mother’s love rather than a father’s seed. Seungcheol inclines his head. Courtesy, not concession. “We remain at her service.”
The gentleman takes his hat and leaves with the stiff dignity of a man who has lost and wants the street to believe he has chosen to go. When the door shuts, the quiet rushes back in.
Jeonghan’s shoulders lift in a silent laugh. “That,” he says, voice warm with delight, “was entertaining.” Seungcheol watches the street through the glass—wheels turning, lives moving, people who will never know how close they stand to ruin because their names are old enough to be unquestioned. “That was predictable,” Seungcheol replies. Jeonghan tuts, the sound comical. “Predictable is when the curate faints at the sight of an ankle,” he says. “This was strategy.” Seungcheol reaches for the ledger behind the counter and flips it open. The only truth that doesn’t lie to his face. “This was a warning.”
“They’re circling,” Jeonghan murmurs. “Like they always do when they smell a change.” A Viscount newly seated. A household full of sons without bloodline—sons with wealth, yes, and influence, yes, but also a vulnerability the ton can taste. Jeonghan taps the glass case—three light taps, like a knock on a coffin. “They’ll try to make you prove you belong,” he says again, softer. Not repeating for emphasis—repeating because it needs to be held twice to fully accept. “Over and over.”
Seungcheol looks up, meets Jeonghan’s eyes, and lets the decision exist there—quiet, absolute—without giving it the softness of further words. Seungcheol’s gaze stays on the street, but his voice is certain. “I will choose.” Jeonghan grins wickedly. “God help them,” he murmurs. “And God help you.”
Seungcheol doesn’t believe in God’s help. He believes in action. And if marriage is the only armour the ton will respect, then he will forge it—cold, perfect, and unbreakable.
Rotten Row is a river of display. It flows in both directions at once—carriages gliding like lacquered boats along the gravel, riders sitting tall as if the sun has been hired to shine only on their shoulders, ladies strolling in clusters with their mamas and their parasols and their measured laughter. Everything is motion. Because standing still in Hyde Park is an invitation. An invitation to be approached. To be watched. To be weighed.
Georgina keeps half a step ahead, her body refusing to remember that she is not meant to run, not meant to dart, not meant to look too eager. Her bonnet ribbon flutters with every turn of her head. Cecily stays close on your other side, gloves immaculate, gaze soft. She walks like she is afraid of taking up too much of the path, even though the path is wide and the city would never dare tell a young lady she does not belong on it. Lady Halstead strolls with you—not pressed into your formation like an officer guarding a prisoner, but near enough that her shadow is a comfort and her presence a quiet threat to any gentleman tempted to become bold. Her cane taps lightly against the gravel, the sound a punctuation. “Look at them,” Lady Halstead murmurs, eyes sliding across the river of people. “All pretending they came for the air.”
“They did come for the air,” you reply, keeping your tone mild as you guide Cecily around a puddle with the smallest touch to her elbow. “They simply intend to breathe it while being admired.”
Georgina gives a delighted little hum. “That is the only proper way,” she declares. Lady Halstead’s mouth curves. “You’ll be devoured or crowned, Miss Georgina. Try not to do both in the same hour.” Georgina’s grin widens as if she’s been offered a challenge.
You keep walking because the rule is simple: if you meet someone and wish to speak, you do so while moving. Stopping makes a circle. Circles attract attention. Attention breeds interpretation. Interpretation breeds gossip. Gossip becomes a rope around a girl’s throat the moment she can no longer wriggle free.
The park is crowded with it—examinations disguised as glances, judgments hidden behind fans, conversations turning fractionally quieter when you pass. You do not turn. You learned a long time ago that the quickest way to give a whisper power is to acknowledge it. Georgina, however, is made of matches and curiosity. Her gaze flicks toward the source, her lips parting, ready to bite. You tilt your head toward her without looking. “No mercy,” you murmur. Georgina’s mouth snaps shut. She exhales through her nose like a dragon forced to behave. Lady Halstead’s cane taps once. “Good,” she approves. “Save your teeth for men who deserve them.”
Men who deserve them are everywhere. There—two young lords walking together, laughing too loudly, eyes skimming the crowd. There—a baronet with a belly and a smugness, arm hooked through his daughter’s as if she might run away if he releases her. There—a gentleman with a polished smile and a gaze that lingers too long on hems, as if the measure of a woman’s worth can be found in the cost of her stitching. And then, inevitably, there are the Ashbournes.
A cluster of girls tilt their faces toward them like flowers turning toward light. A small knot of people ahead subtly rearranges itself, not from command, but from habit.
Jeonghan’s presence is the first you register, his smile coaxing little blushes from passing girls. Joshua walks beside him, calm as a steady hand at the small of someone’s back. Hoshi is bright with energy, contained only by the fact that he is being watched. Wonwoo keeps to the edge, as if the crowd is too loud for his liking. And there—at the centre of it, because he always seems to become the centre whether he intends to or not—Lord Ashbourne. He does not smile. He does not perform as easily as other men do. He carries himself with a control that appears calm from afar. You feel your jaw tighten. Lady Halstead notices the shift in you the way she notices everything. Her gaze flicks up, follows yours, and her mouth twitches—fondness, tempered by instinct. “Ah,” she says softly. “There’s your favourite.”
“He is not my favourite,” you reply, too quickly. Georgina’s eyes brighten immediately, delighted. Cecily’s gaze flickers up and away again, shy as a bird. Lady Halstead’s voice remains airy. “Then try not to look at him like you intend to shoot him where he stands.”
You focus on the path. On your sisters. On the way Georgina’s posture straightens as the Ashbournes near—as if her body cannot resist the possibility of being seen by men from their standing. On Cecily’s instinct to shrink. You cannot shrink. Not when you are the hinge that holds them both.
The brothers’ pace slows as they pass close enough for courtesy to become inevitable. Jeonghan’s eyes dart to Lady Halstead, brightening with recognition. He tips his head. “Lady Halstead.” Lady Halstead inclines her chin, and the gesture holds a familiar warmth. “Lord Jeonghan.” Hoshi’s smile flashes. “Good morning.”
Wonwoo gives a small nod. His gaze glances past you, not unkind, simply distant. And then Seungcheol’s eyes land on you. It is not dramatic. It is not lingering. It is the precise way a man looks at something he intends to understand. You feel the irritation rise like heat under your collar. How dare he look at you like a problem he might solve? You do not slow. You do not stop. You do not allow the river to become a pond. Lady Halstead, however, is not governed by your desire to avoid him. She shifts her formation slightly, turning just enough that conversation becomes inevitable. Seungcheol bows his head. “Lady Halstead.”
“Lord Ashbourne.” The exchange is polite, but there is history beneath it—not favouritism, not bias. Simply familiarity earned. He acknowledges that history with the smallest softening—so brief you might think you imagined it—then his gaze slides to your sisters. Georgina curtsies with the sort of grace that still contains fire. Cecily’s curtsy is perfect and quiet. Then his eyes return to you. “You are out early,” he observes. It is a harmless sentence. It is also a test. You can feel it in the way he says it—like he is assessing how you respond to ordinary pressure. You offer the smallest, most neutral smile. “The park does not belong only to those with leisure, my lord.”
His mouth might have twitched. It is impossible to tell with him. “No,” he agrees. “It belongs to those who understand visibility.”
Lady Halstead’s cane taps lightly. “Now that is an honest thing for a man to say.”
Jeonghan laughs under his breath. Seungcheol doesn’t react to Jeonghan’s amusement at all, which is its own kind of control. His gaze flicks, briefly, to Georgina—as though acknowledging the obvious. “Hyde Park suits you, Miss Georgina,” he says to her. Georgina’s cheeks colour. “It suits everyone who knows how to use it, my Lord.” You could pinch her. Gently. Fiercely. You don’t.
Seungcheol’s gaze catches yours, and you swear—just for a breath—you see something like assessment sharpen into interest. “Enjoy your promenade,” he responds, and then he is past—his stride measured, the line of brothers continuing with him, the river swallowing them back into its glittering current as though it never noticed your stone dropped into it. Except you did drop a stone. You can feel the ripples in the glances from nearby debutantes, the quick tilt of a mama’s fan. You keep walking. Your sisters keep walking.
Lady Halstead’s voice slides into your ear. “If you want to keep him away, you must do it with elegance. Anger is a lantern.”
“I am being elegant,” you mutter. Lady Halstead’s eyes shimmer. “You are being obvious.” You inhale. You adjust your posture. You smooth your expression until it becomes again the mask you have worn through funerals and debt notices and nights of quiet panic where you lay awake counting what you owed to the world.
Cecily stumbles on a loose stone in the path. Not visibly. Only a small hitch in her step, a falter. You catch it instantly, your hand steadying her wrist. “Breathe,” you murmur. Cecily nods, cheeks pink. “I am,” she whispers back, as though she is not certain. You shift Cecily slightly closer to the centre—away from the outer edge. Georgina, meanwhile, becomes a beacon. A gentleman reaches her from across the path—young, pleasant, his coat expensive enough to show sense. You lift your chin. “Miss Georgina,” he says, bowing. “I hope I do not intrude.” Georgina’s eyes sparkle. “Only if you are boring.” The gentleman blinks, delighted rather than offended. “Then I shall endeavour to be remarkable.”
Cecily’s mouth twitches faintly, amused despite herself. You step half a pace to the side. You allow the conversation to form, but you remain the gatekeeper. The person who decides how close a man may come, how long he may linger, whether he may call.
“Lord Brampton,” Lady Halstead greets sharply. “Are you going to speak to the young lady, or are you going to flirt with her shadow?” Lord Brampton flushes. Georgina laughs, delighted. He begins, more carefully now, addressing Georgina properly. You watch his posture. His gaze. His eagerness. He is acceptable. For now. You let him walk with you for a few minutes, long enough for Georgina to sparkle, long enough for him to feel successful, long enough for Cecily to be included when Georgina turns and says, brightly, “My sister plays the pianoforte beautifully.”
Lord Brampton turns toward Cecily. “Do you, Miss Cecily?” Cecily’s mouth opens. Closes. Her fingers tighten around her reticule. “I—” she begins, then her voice falters as if it has tripped over its own shoes. “A little.”
Lord Brampton’s smile remains courteous, but his eyes drift away too quickly. He is drawn back to Georgina like a moth to flame. You feel the familiar pang—the quiet ache of watching Cecily be overlooked by men too impatient to see properly. You shift the conversation, gently redirecting. “Lord Brampton, will you be at Lady Dalrymple’s musicale next week? My sister enjoys music immensely.” It is a small push. A rope tossed gently in his direction. If he is worth anything, he will catch it. Lord Brampton hesitates—just a breath too long—before smiling. “If I am fortunate enough to receive an invitation, of course.”
It is not a yes. It is not a no. It is polite cowardice. Georgina’s laughter covers it. Cecily’s eyes dip. You catalogue it, file it away, and move on. Lord Brampton bows eventually, peels away toward another cluster of girls like he is shopping. Georgina watches him go with a grin that is half triumphant, half hungry for the next.
Lady Halstead’s gaze slides to Cecily. “Stars,” she murmurs, soft enough that only you and Cecily hear. “Remember what I told you.” Cecily nods once. She swallows, steadies. You admire her for it. Quiet bravery is still bravery. Then a shadow shifts into your peripheral vision, and a voice enters your river. “Good morning.”
A gentleman marches up to you with effortless ease, coat dove-grey, cravat tied with enough care to suggest he respects himself. His smile is open. Not oily. Not sharp. The sort of smile that makes mamas relax and daughters giggle because it is sincere. Lady Halstead’s eyes narrow immediately—not hostile, simply alert. Georgina brightens. Cecily looks up, startled by the attention of a man who does not look bored already. He bows first to Lady Halstead. “Lady Halstead.” Then to your sisters. “Miss Georgina. Miss Cecily.” His gaze flicks to you last—deliberate—and when it lands, it lingers a fraction longer than propriety demands. Just long enough to feel like choice. “Lady Whitlock,” he greets, and there is a careful respect in the title. “Edmund Hartwell. I hope you’ll forgive the liberty—I’ve wanted to make your acquaintance properly.”
You have heard the name in passing the way you hear most names in Mayfair—floating through drawing rooms, attached to whispers about old money and newer charm, about a gentleman who smiles too easily and somehow never seems to be refused. You have never, until now, been forced into the full weight of his attention. You offer a smile that invites no more. “Mr. Hartwell.”
His eyes brighten, as if hearing his name from you is a victory. “The day is too fine for a drawing room,” he says easily. “And too crowded for anyone to pretend they dislike being seen.”
Georgina’s brows lift, delighted by any whiff of romance. Cecily watches him as if he is a portrait come to life. Mr. Hartwell continues, unbothered by the attention. “May I walk with you?” he asks. “If it would not be unwelcome.” You glance at Lady Halstead, because she has more authority in this world than most men. Her expression is unreadable. She gives the smallest nod. You permit it. Mr. Hartwell steps into alignment with you, matching your pace perfectly. “Do you always choose the cleverest line to stand in,” he asks mischievously, “or is the park simply rearranging itself to make room for you?”
The question is so absurdly flattering you almost choke on your own composure. You feel a laugh threaten—small, traitorous—you press it down. “If the park rearranged itself for me, Mr. Hartwell, I assure you it would do so with far less mud.” He glances at the hem of your skirt, then looks back up. “So you do possess mercy,” he says. “You could have accused me of poor eyesight.”
“I am saving that for later,” you reply, and the laugh you tried to restrain slips out anyway. His gaze catches on your mouth like he’s surprised to have won something so easily. “There it is,” he murmurs, pleased. “I was hoping you could do that.” You lift a brow. “Do what?”
“Laugh,” he says simply, as if it is the most natural desire in the world. Georgina, still walking ahead, tilts her head slightly as if listening without turning. Cecily’s gaze flickers to you, and you see it—the faint relief in her eyes, the small happiness that you are not entirely made of iron. Mr. Hartwell continues, tone easy, as if he is not trying at all while clearly trying very hard. “Do you prefer the park to the ballroom?” he asks. “Ballrooms always feel like rooms where everyone is waiting to be judged.” You reply lightly. “The park judges too, it simply pretends it does so kindly.”
“Then perhaps you prefer honesty.”
“Perhaps I prefer air,” you answer. He gives a small, thoughtful hum. “And what do you do with it,” he asks, “when you have it? When you are not being surrounded by all this?”
The question is angled. You feel a flicker of wariness—quiet, instinctive. You offer him something true that still keeps your door locked. “I read,” you say. “And I drink tea that is never as good as people pretend it is.”
His grin widens. “A woman after my own heart. I despise tea.”
You blink. “Then why is every gentleman always offering it?”
“Because it is socially acceptable to offer,” he says, eyes dancing, “and socially unacceptable to admit one would rather offer brandy at ten in the morning.”
You laugh again, a little louder this time, and feel your cheeks warm with it—annoying, inevitable. Mr. Hartwell watches the colour rise as if it is the prettiest thing in the park. Cecily, beside you, seems to gather courage from the sound. Mr. Hartwell turns his attention to her, gentle in it. “Do you read as well, Miss Cecily?” Cecily’s cheeks flush. “Yes,” she murmurs.
“Then you are both in danger,” Mr. Hartwell says gravely. “London fears a woman with opinions and a library.”
Cecily’s mouth twitches. A small smile, real. Your chest tightens unexpectedly. Because you are not used to watching a man choose to make space for Cecily. Then Mr. Hartwell’s gaze returns to you, and you feel the river shift again. “Tell me one thing,” he says lightly, as though he is asking about the weather. “If you could go anywhere in London right now without being stared at, where would you go?”
The statement is impossible. And yet it makes something loosen in you—some part of yourself that remembers what it is to want something as simple as a walk without being gauged. “Nowhere,” you confess. “That place does not exist.” He doesn’t look disappointed. He looks delighted by the challenge. “Then I’ll amend it,” he says. “Where would you go if you did not care that you were being stared at?”
You glance at him, caught. Your guard tightens. Your honesty does not disappear. It simply becomes careful. “I would go to a bookshop,” you say, “and buy something scandalous.”
“A novel?”
“A pamphlet,” you reply. “One that suggests men are not as clever as they insist.” His laugh boisters with admiration. “Then I should like to see it,” he says. “So I can decide whether to be offended or corrected.”
You almost laugh too loudly. You stop it before it becomes obvious. Somewhere behind you, a carriage rolls past. Somewhere ahead, a game of pall-mall flares. The park continues its elegant performance. And then—like a pin to a balloon—you catch it. A gaze.
Lord Ashbourne has turned on the path further ahead, angled as if he intends to continue on, yet his eyes have landed on you with that same ledger-like focus. His face is unreadable. But his attention is unmistakable. It hits you like cold water. The faint ease Mr. Hartwell has coaxed out of you vanishes, replaced by sharp annoyance so swift it feels instant. You hold Seungcheol’s gaze—one clean, stubborn moment—then look away as if he does not exist.
Mr. Hartwell does not seem to notice the exchange. Or if he does, he is too polite to acknowledge it. Lady Halstead, however, does. “Come,” she announces. “We’ll turn back. The river’s grown crowded.”
You obey because it is sensible, because it is safe, because you cannot afford to let your sisters drift into a current you cannot control. But as you turn, you feel the presence behind your shoulder—the sense of being watched even when you refuse to look. It is infuriating. It is also, you tell yourself firmly, irrelevant.
The stands vibrate before the horses even appear. The announcer’s voice carries across a sea of spectators—calling names, and amounts, and bets. “Final call for wagers—final call!”
Coins clink. Tickets tear. A bookmaker rises from below the stands. The air smells of trampled grass and crushed petals and the faint, metallic tang of excitement—part champagne, part risk, part the simple human desire to win.
You sit with your sisters pressed safely to either side of you on the wooden benches, the crowd packed so tight behind and around that the whole structure feels like it breathes when people shift. Georgina leans forward as if she might will the race into beginning. Cecily keeps her hands folded in her lap, gaze flicking from the track to the crowd as if the crowd is the more dangerous animal. Without Lady Halstead here, the responsibility sits heavier. There is no older woman’s shadow to discourage boldness. There is only you—your posture, your expression, the quiet authority you have learned to manufacture on command. A gentleman in the row below turns around, smiling too widely. Another glances toward Georgina and lingers. You angle your body, not rude, not dramatic—just enough to remind them there is a chaperone with eyes.
The crowd roars as the horses parade into view—sleek bodies, restless heads, hooves biting at the turf like they resent being made to wait. The jockeys sit low and tense, bright silks flashing like exotic birds. The sound is enormous. The world here is louder than any street in Mayfair could ever be. Less polished. Less forgiving.
Mr. Hartwell appears at the edge of your row, somehow unruffled by the crush. “May I?” He inclines his head to the empty seat beside you. He doesn’t hover. He waits—patient, gentle—for the smallest opening. You give him a fraction of it, and he takes the seat swiftly, close enough to be companionable, not close enough to invite comment from the wrong mouths. He bows once he’s settled, the gesture neat even with knees crowded and skirts pressing close. “You see?” he murmurs, as if continuing a thought begun days ago. “The track is louder than a ballroom, but it’s kinder. Everyone’s too busy shouting to listen for whispers.” You keep your eyes on the line of horses, the way they stamp and toss their heads, but you feel his statement settle behind your ribs. “And here I thought you came only to gamble.”
His smile widens. “I came to be wrong about a few things,” he says softly, “and to see whether you would smile at me a second time.” The warmth rises, quick and ridiculous, along your cheeks. You blame the wind. You blame the sun. You do not blame the way he says it, as if it were harmless, when it is not. “It seems your odds are improving.”
“I’ve always been a persistent man,” he replies earnestly, “I simply try to do it without making anyone wish to push me into the tracks.”
Georgina, hearing the tail end, makes a quiet sound of delight that she tries to hide in a cough. Cecily’s mouth twitches—a small smile, like she is pleased for you.
The announcer’s voice swells. The horses move toward the starting line. The crowd rises as one organism, skirts rustling, coats brushing, gloves gripping the rails. You stand too—not because you wish to, but because standing is the only way to see over the heads in front.
A new weight settles behind you on the bench. The Ashbournes have arrived. They take the row behind you as if it has been waiting for them, their presence sliding into the space with the unhurried certainty of men who know they will be accommodated. Behind your shoulder, close enough that you can feel the warmth of breath when he speaks, Viscount Ashbourne takes his seat. You do not look back. You do not give him the satisfaction. But you can feel his gaze—first on your sisters, then on you, and finally—like a deliberate choice—on the space Mr. Hartwell occupies at your side.
The starting bell rings. The horses surge. The sound is thunder—hooves tearing at turf, the crowd roaring as if their voices can push the animals faster. Georgina clutches the rail, shouting something you don’t quite understand. Cecily stiffens, then relaxes when she realises she isn’t required to understand the sport to survive the noise. You watch the race with your face composed, your attention divided three ways—track, sisters, the awareness behind you that refuses to leave.
When the horses flash past the bend, the crowd erupts again. Men slap each other’s backs. A woman gasps as if she has witnessed a proposal. Someone below curses loud enough to make you wince. The winner crosses the line; hats are thrown; laughter breaks like waves. And in the breath of aftermath—before the next race, before the crowd settles—Georgina speaks. “Do you wager, Lord Ashbourne?” she calls up and back before you can stop her, bright with curiosity and a reckless kind of delight.
“No.”
Georgina twists, startled. “No?”
“I don’t enjoy losing money,” Seungcheol says simply, as if the entire world isn’t built on men enjoying risk. Cecily, quiet until now, turns her head slightly, courage slipping out on the tide of noise. “I thought gentlemen enjoyed the risk,” she murmurs. There is a moment—small, deliberate—before he answers, and when he does, his tone is not unkind. “Some do,” he replies, “Those who can afford to.”
Cecily blinks, surprised by the practicality of it. Georgina hums, half impressed, half offended on behalf of her own taste for bedlam. Seungcheol is not finished. His attention—still that ledger-like focus—settles on you, and he speaks again, lower, quiet enough that only you can hear over the shifting crowd. “You’re everywhere,” he observes.
You keep your posture immaculate and your voice light, as if he is nothing more than an inconvenience seated behind you. “It is remarkable how often one finds oneself in public places when one leaves the house.” You can feel the faint pause before his reply, as if he enjoys the shape of your defiance. “Remarkable,” he repeats, “Or strategic.”
You smile as if you are speaking to the air. “I have no interest in strategy, my Lord.” His answer comes too smoothly. “Of course, you simply have an interest in outcomes.” It is too straightforward. Too accurate. It irritates you in a way that feels like being seen.
Then Lord Ashbourne’s voice changes direction—just slightly—addressing the space beside you without raising volume, without making it a scene. “Mr. Hartwell,” he greets politely. “Final call was a moment ago. The book closes quickly if you intend to place a wager.” Mr. Hartwell turns his head. His smile stays intact—pleasant, almost amused—as though the Viscount has merely offered him weather advice. “How considerate,” he replies lightly. “I had nearly forgotten London runs on deadlines as much as it runs on horses.”
“It does,” Seungcheol agrees. “And it is unforgiving to men who hesitate.”
A harmless sentence. A perfectly reasonable one. And yet something in it lands like pressure placed on a bruise. Mr. Hartwell’s gaze flicks to you, as if checking whether you are enjoying the joke, then he inclines his head with a gentleman’s easy surrender. “Then I shall not keep it waiting,” he states, still charming, still unruffled. “Miss Whitlock. Miss Cecily. And you—” his eyes settle on you, longer, warm, private, “—enjoy the next one. I’ll return if the crowd allows it.”
He rises, neat as a man stepping out of a drawing room rather than squeezing past knees and skirts. It doesn’t take long before he is swallowed by the crowd below, disappearing into the sea of men and money. The space beside you feels colder for his absence. You refuse to acknowledge that. Behind you, Seungcheol shifts back slightly, the bench creaking under the redistribution of his weight. The next race is called; the announcer’s voice slices through the stands again. “They’re at the post—prepare yourselves!”
“Enjoy the race,” Seungcheol says, as if granting permission. As if you need it. “How generous,” you murmur, sweet as poison. He does not answer. The horses assemble again. The crowd rises. The world surges back into anticipation, loud and hungry. He turns away. Only then do you realise you have been holding your breath. Georgina exhales a huff. “He is odd,” she whispers.
“He is a Viscount,” you reply evenly. “That explains most oddities.”
Cecily’s mouth curves. “Does it?” she murmurs, and there is something in her tone that suggests she is not entirely convinced. You ignore it. You have too many things to manage.
At home, management does not stop simply because the curtains are drawn. Your house runs on quiet truths—laundry lists, bills, meals, repairs, letters that must be answered with the right words and the right seals. The servants move with the coherence of people who have learned to read your moods the way sailors read the sky. You review the week’s expenses at your desk with ink-stained fingers and an ache behind your eyes.
A request for extra coal that you approve because Cecily’s chest is still delicate in cold weather. A letter from a distant cousin, politely inquiring whether you might consider selling a small parcel of land. You set the letter aside and write a response that says, in careful language, no.
Then you fold Cecily’s ribbon properly because she’s too flustered to do it herself, and you scold Georgina gently because she’s laughing too loudly with the maid in the hallway and forgetting that walls carry noise.
In the late afternoon, when the house is momentarily peaceful, you stand at the window and watch the street outside and feel the exhaustion settle into your bones.
You miss your father in the way you miss a structure you lean on. Not because he would have enjoyed the marriage mart—he would have hated it—but because he would have stood behind you like a wall. You miss your mother in flashes, sharp and sudden: the scent of her gloves, the curve of her handwriting, the memory of her voice saying your name. You do not indulge the grief. It is not a luxury you allow yourself. The next invitation arrives before you can finish your tea.
Lady Dalrymple’s idea of restraint apparently involves only one orchestra instead of two.
You are not so much arriving as being immediately absorbed—drawn into a current of light and noise and movement the moment you pass through the hedged archway that marks the entrance. Lanterns hang in extravagant clusters from tree branches, layered so thickly that the leaves glow from within like stained glass. Silk ribbons—too many, in colours too bright to pretend they’re natural—trail from trellises, fluttering in the breeze. A parquet dance floor has been laid over the lawn, polished to a shine, framed by garlands that look as if they were ordered in bulk.
There are peacocks. Actual peacocks—strutting between guests, feathers dragging like embroidered trains. One pauses near a table of petits fours and looks down at the pastries with the same judgment the ton reserves for debutantes. A young lady squeals delightedly and lifts her skirt a fraction to avoid a trailing feather; her mama hisses something about propriety as if the peacock might be shamed into manners.
Somewhere to your left, a pair of circus performers move through the crowd with impossible balance—one girl in glittering tights on a tightrope strung between two trees; below her, a man juggles burning torches. People gasp and clap and laugh, delighted in the way the ton always is when danger is contained and decorative.
Music drifts from a pavilion dressed in florals. Violins bright, a harp chiming like spilt coins. Footmen glide between clusters with trays of champagne and iced lemonade. There are tables laden with arrangements so high you must crane your neck to see over them, and every few yards another spectacle has been staged—an ice sculpture already sweating into a silver basin, a fountain dyed faintly rose for no reason other than to be remarked upon, a trellis of roses positioned precisely where the light is kindest.
Guests move through it all in lazy circuits: pausing at the performers, drifting toward the dance floor, hovering near the refreshments, migrating toward whatever looks most impressive in the moment. Lady Dalrymple herself floats through her creation like a queen who has mistaken grandeur for taste, laughing too loudly, touching too many arms, showing off her peacocks as if she personally invented feathers.
You keep your sisters close as you navigate the spectacle, Lady Halstead at your side. People talk over the music. People talk through the music. Everyone is determined to be heard.
A peacock strolls past as if escorting you; Georgina whispers something wicked about its arrogance, and you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing. But everything here is staged for collision.
You see Seungcheol before he reaches you—his path aiming toward you. Not rushed. Not eager. Just a gradual narrowing of distance, polite inevitability in the making.
You pivot smoothly, drawing your sisters into a conversation with Lady Something-Important and her bright, giggling daughters, allowing Georgina to charm and Cecily to be included, whether she wishes it or not. Lord Ashbourne passes behind a cluster of men, slowed by a bow demanded of him, and you slip away—toward the refreshments, where a footman offers lemonade and a peacock tries to steal a sugared violet.
A second attempt comes not much later. The same calm inevitability, the same measured approach. This time, you steer Georgina toward the dance floor, where partners are changing in neat patterns, where propriety is disguised as choreography. You allow her to be swept up by a gentleman who asks for her hand. You bring Cecily toward Lady Halstead and place yourself at the edge of a circle of conversation. You become, momentarily, simply another guest—another moving piece in Lady Dalrymple’s glittering board. It works. It also costs.
Because in all your wrangling, Cecily is spoken to by a gentleman. He asks about the music, about whether she plays. Cecily answers softly, and she is fine. Then the conversation dips into silence, and Cecily, nervous, stumbles on a word. The gentleman’s gaze drifts away, drawn toward louder laughter and brighter ribbons. Cecily’s shoulders tighten as if she is bracing for being forgotten.
You feel the rush of guilt and irritation—at the man, at the world, at yourself for having to choose where to place your attention like a shield that cannot cover everyone at once. You turn toward Cecily—
And you collide, abruptly, with another presence. Lord Ashbourne has stepped into your path. “You are avoiding me,” he says, low enough that only you hear. “I have no idea what you mean.”
His gaze does not waver. “You do.”
You let your smile sharpen. “I am busy, my lord. As you can see.”
His eyes flick, briefly, to where Georgina laughs too brightly. To where Cecily stands too quietly. Then back to you. “You are busy,” he agrees. “And yet you find time to steer.”
You feel your irritation flare. “Is that an accusation?”
“An observation,” he replies. Never raising his voice. “You steer everyone.”
“Someone must,” you return, sweetness layered over steel. His gaze shifts, as if he is considering something he has not decided whether to say aloud. “Do you enjoy it?” he asks.
The question hits you off balance, because it is not what men usually ask. Men ask whether you are enjoying the party. Whether you are enjoying the music. Whether you are enjoying the weather. They do not ask whether you enjoy carrying the weight. You refuse to show the impact. “Enjoyment is not the point,” you reply. “We are here to do what must be done.”
His eyes narrow. “Ah.”
The sound is soft. Almost recognising. It infuriates you. “If you’ll excuse me,” you say, turning slightly as if you intend to leave. He does not move out of your way. “I wished to speak with your sister,” he says calmly.
Your spine stiffens. “Which one?” His gaze flicks toward Georgina, then Cecily. His answer is too honest. “Either.”
Either. As if young women are interchangeable. “My sisters are not items on a display table, my lord,” you say lethally. “You cannot simply point and ask to be handed one.”
Seungcheol’s gaze holds yours. He does not flinch. He does not apologise. He simply replies, even softer: “And you cannot simply decide what they are allowed to want.”
The words strike like a slap. You feel heat rise behind your ribs. You keep your face composed anyway. “My sisters are allowed to want happiness,” you say. “They are allowed to want love. They are allowed to want a man who does not treat marriage like a transaction.”
Seungcheol’s eyes darken. Something unreadable passes across his face—too quick to catch fully. “And you,” he asks. “What are you allowed to want?”
You almost laugh. Not because it is funny—because it is absurd. “I am allowed to want silence,” you declare sweetly. “Which you are currently denying me.”
“Then deny me,” he replies.
You stare at him, vexed enough to taste it. Then you step to the side, slipping around him. You leave him standing there as if he is merely another piece of spectacle. Your pulse does not agree with your composure.
You stop near Lady Dalrymple’s coloured fountain. The dusty pink makes space for an electric green. You inhale. You exhale. You tell your shoulders to unhook themselves from your ears. You let yourself be nothing but a woman looking at water.
“You have the look of a woman who is pretending she is not enjoying herself.” Mr. Hartwell arrives at your shoulder as if he has always belonged there. You blink, caught. Then, against your will, you smile. “That is an accusation.”
“A compliment,” he corrects gently. “It takes skill to look unimpressed by lanterns and violins.” You let out an involuntary chuckle. “I am not unimpressed,” you say. “I am simply… cautious.”
His eyes gentle, as if he admires the honesty. “About the lemonade?”
“About gentlemen,” you reply. He places a hand over his heart with theatrical solemnity. “Then I shall endeavour to be the least dangerous one in the garden.”
The fountain shifts colour again—green fading into pale blue. The light catches on the wet stone and throws it back at you, too bright. You keep your gaze on the water because looking at him too directly feels like giving him something. Mr. Hartwell’s voice stays easy, conversational, as if you are not alone in a garden full of watchers and rules. “May I bring you lemonade?” he offers. “Or would you prefer something stronger, if society were not listening?”
“If society were not listening, Mr. Hartwell, I suspect half of these guests would be drinking brandy out of teacups.”
“Then you and I would be the only honest ones.”
You feel your cheeks warm again, absurd and unmistakable. You hate that he can do that—make you blush as if you are a girl with nothing to manage. “Lemonade will do,” you agree lightly. Mr. Hartwell inclines his head—polite, satisfied—and turns away to fetch your drink, disappearing into the flow of guests and ribbons and trays. The moment he leaves, the air changes.
Not because he is gone—because you are aware again of everything around you. Of how the fountain’s coloured water draws eyes. Of how lanternlight makes every face visible. Of how a woman standing alone becomes a question. And then you feel it—sharp, immediate, undeniable.
Lord Ashbourne stands at the far edge of the dance floor’s perimeter, half in the spill of lanternlight, half in shadow, as if even Lady Dalrymple’s grandeur cannot fully claim him. He is not speaking. He is not laughing. He is watching. Your eyes meet his. The world around you fades away: the orchestra, the laughter, the peacock’s shriek, the ridiculous fountain trying to impress God Himself. There is only his gaze. Not warm. Not kind. Not cruel. Assessing. You look away, but the moment does not dissolve simply because you choose to ignore it. It lingers. It clings. As if his eyes have left an imprint.
Mr. Hartwell returns quickly—too quickly for it to be nonchalant—and offers you the glass. “There,” he says. “A small mercy.”
“You are generous with them,” you reply.
“Only with you,” he says, so softly it slips under the music.
Somewhere behind you, you sense movement—perhaps the shift of bodies, perhaps your own awareness sharpening—but you do not turn. You keep your gaze on the lemonade, on the condensation beading along the glass, on anything that is not the fact you can still feel Lord Ashbourne’s eyes in the space you just refused to give him.
Mr. Hartwell shifts closer, just enough to turn the space between you into something that belongs to him for a moment. “May I call on you?” he asks, almost cautiously. “Tomorrow, perhaps. Or the day after. I should like to continue our conversation somewhere less crowded.”
There it is. Not a flirtation that can be laughed away. Not a harmless compliment. A request with shape. With weight.
You keep your response kind, because kindness is how you refuse without humiliation. You lift your glass slightly, as if considering. “You are very attentive,” you say. “But my household’s calendar belongs to two young ladies this Season. They are merciless tyrants.”
His brows lift, as though he enjoys the challenge. “Then I shall appeal to the tyrants,” he says lightly. “Or to their chaperone.”
You meet his gaze. “Appeal to the hostess,” you suggest gently. “If she continues to invite us, you will surely find us again in public. It would be a pity to deprive society of its favourite pastime.”
“And what pastime is that?”
“Watching,” you answer. You think he might push—might press the point harder, insist on a promise. Instead, he only nods his head, smile intact, as if he has accepted your answer while clearly not accepting defeat. “Very well,” he agrees softly. “Public, then. For now.”
The words are mild. The implication is not. You lift your glass in the smallest toast and take a sip to seal the moment. Lemon and sugar flood your tongue. Across the garden, the orchestra swells, the dancers turn, the torch-juggler’s flames flare once more for a cluster of delighted ladies. Lady Dalrymple’s spectacle continues.
And you stand there—between your sisters’ futures and your own exhaustion, between a man who speaks like he sees you and a man who watches as if he is measuring what you are worth—feeling, for the first time this Season, the uncomfortable realisation that the market has noticed you too.
Behind you, through velvet-draped doors and carved arches, Rossini’s notes of La Cenerentola spill like champagne.
The audience’s laughter rises and falls in waves, trained and delighted. Inside, they are all watching a man in a ridiculous dream of power, watching the greedy family preen and posture as if the world cannot possibly humiliate them. You can hear the humiliation coming. Everyone can. That is half the pleasure.
A footman had hovered at your elbow—breathless in that polite way servants have when something is wrong but must not sound wrong. “Begging your pardon, my lady,” he had murmured. “There is… an issue with your carriage.”
Your stomach had tightened with the familiar irritation of inconvenience. In a house, you can command a problem into submission with a glance. In public, everything must be handled without anyone noticing there was ever a problem to begin with. “What issue?” you had asked softly.
“The near wheel,” he had replied. “A loose bolt, it seems. The coachman says it is best tightened before we depart. He fears—”
“—a spectacle,” you had finished for him, because of course he did. The footman’s throat had worked. “Yes, my lady.”
You had drawn a careful breath, smoothing your expression into calm. “Very well,” you had said. “Tell him I will speak with him myself in the carriage passage.”
The bolt had taken longer than expected. The coachman, face apologetic beneath his hat, had insisted he would not risk London streets on a quick tightening. Better to take the carriage straight back to the mansion and set it right properly, no matter the hour, no matter the inconvenience. You had agreed, because responsibility is often nothing more than saying yes to disruption before it becomes a disaster.
Now, with the carriage passage’s air still lingering in your lungs, you walk back alone, your task done. Your sisters are still inside your private box—safe, contained, protected by velvet and gilt and rank. And Lady Halstead. She resides in the box beside yours, close enough that she could lean and speak through the shared partition if she must, close enough to notice if either of your sisters so much as breathed too fast. A reprieve, she called it when she insisted you attend. “Even taskmasters require entertainment,” she had sniggered, as if your responsibility were a vice.
Inside the theatre, Act II is continuing with gleeful cruelty. You had watched, earlier, the moment Dandini’s act dropped. The false prince’s charm disappeared. The audience leaned forward. A lie collapsed. Magnifico’s pride crumpled under the weight of being laughed at, and for a heartbeat, the whole theatre felt like a lesson: greed is always punished—onstage, at least. In the stalls, where real men barter daughters and reputations, greed is simply dressed better.
You press your palm lightly to the wall as you walk. The corridor bends, drawing you nearer again to your seat—past closed doors, sconces that burn low, and past gilded mouldings that look like frozen lace. The sound of the opera sounds muffled and distant, as if the music is taking place in a different life. You are halfway down the hall when you hear a soft step behind you. “Lady Whitlock.”
You stop and find Edmund Hartwell smiling at you as if he has been expecting you. His charm, tonight, is dressed in propriety. You curtsy. “Mr. Hartwell.”
“I hope I am not intruding,” he says, and his tone makes it sound like he is doing you the favour of asking permission instead of taking it. “You are,” you reply pleasantly. “But I am certain you will manage to survive it.” He grins, delighted. “You always do that,” he notes, as if you are private entertainment. “You cut without drawing blood.”
“It is a talent developed out of necessity,” you answer. “Why are you here, Mr. Hartwell?” He spreads his hands in an almost apologetic gesture. “For air,” he says easily, mirroring the excuse you have used a dozen times this Season. “The theatre is magnificent, of course, but it can be stifling.”
“I find the company far more stifling than the air,” you reply calmly. His smile does not waver. “Then perhaps we share a preference,” he says. “I find crowds exhausting. Everyone is always trying to be seen.”
“And you are not?” you ask.
“I prefer to see,” he admits. You reply with continued steadiness. “If you have followed me for a philosophical conversation, I fear you will be disappointed.” He laughs softly, as if charmed by your refusal to soften. “No,” he says. “I followed you because you disappeared.”
“I had an errand,” you state. “I will return to my sisters shortly.”
“Always the dutiful one,” he murmurs. “Always thinking of others.” You do not like the way he says it. As if he has been studying you. “As you should,” you tell him. He tilts his head. “Should I?”
“Yes,” you say. “Because I have no interest in lingering in empty corridors with gentlemen, Mr. Hartwell.”
The corridor is empty in a way you did not notice at first. The constant foot traffic near the boxes is absent here. The theatre’s servants move mostly behind doors, in passages you do not see. The patrons remain in velvet and laughter. Hartwell’s gaze flicks briefly past you, down the corridor behind, as if confirming what you have just confirmed. Then he looks back at you and smiles again. “You speak as though I am a danger,” he says mildly.
“You are a gentleman,” you reply. “That is reason enough for caution.”
“And yet you are alone,” he points out. “Without your sisters. Without Lady Halstead’s cane-tapping warnings.” Your mouth tightens. “Lady Halstead does not require a cane to frighten men.”
“Nor do you,” he says, and there is feeling in his voice that might have been flattering if it did not feel like a hand reaching for your throat. “But you should not have to.”
You hold his gaze. “I am accustomed to what I must do.”
“And what of what you want?” he asks. There it is again—the question he keeps circling like a hound around a rabbit hole. “I want to return to the opera,” you say. He takes a small step closer. “Then let me escort you.”
“No.” His brows lift. “Why not?”
“Because it will be noticed,” you answer. His smile remains, but something shifts behind it—an impatience, a flicker of annoyance quickly re-painted. “You are always speaking of what must be seen,” he says. “What must be avoided. What must be managed.”
“Because that is the world we live in,” you reply.
“And yet,” he says, voice lowering as if sharing a secret, “I have seen you in public. I have watched you steer conversations as if you were born to command a room. You cannot tell me you are frightened of a gentleman walking beside you.”
“I am not frightened,” you correct. “I am careful.”
He takes another step. The corridor seems to narrow, though it has not changed. The sconces throw his face into half-shadow, making his eyes look deeper, darker. Careful,” he repeats softly. “Always careful.” His gaze drops to your gloved hands. “Do you know what careful looks like from the outside?” he asks. You do not answer. “It looks like distance,” he continues, and the warmth in his voice is gone. “Like coldness. Like punishment.”
You feel your spine stiffen. “If you feel punished by my boundaries, Mr. Hartwell, then you are free to seek softer company.”
He laughs again, but there is no humour in it. “Softer company,” he echoes. “That is what you think I want?”
“I think you want what most men want,” you reply. “A girl who smiles and says yes and never has an opinion sharp enough to sting.”
His eyes darken. “And you believe you are not that girl.”
“I know I am not,” you answer.
“You are,” he insists, and his mask slips. “But you are always with your sisters. Always with Lady Halstead. Always in the middle of crowds. It is as though you are determined never to be alone.”
Your pulse picks up. The opera’s muffled laughter sounds too far away. Somewhere, around a corner, you hear voices—two men speaking low, a lady’s laugh—just close enough to remind you that you are not entirely hidden. Just far enough that they will not see you unless you turn the corner with someone’s hands on you. You lift your chin. “If you have followed me here merely to complain that I have chaperones, Mr. Hartwell, then you have wasted both our time.”
“I followed you here because I am tired of being treated like I am asking for something unreasonable.”
You blink once. “You are asking for something unreasonable.”
His jaw tightens. “I am asking for a moment.”
“A moment becomes a scandal,” you reply.
He takes another step closer. It cuts into your space, too forceful, compelling you to either retreat or make contact. You retreat—one measured step back. He follows. Your heart thuds, hard. “Mr. Hartwell,” you say, keeping your voice polite to mask that you are shaken. “Move aside.” He does not. Instead, he reaches out—not to take your hand in the proper way, not to offer his arm, but to touch your forearm. Glove. Fabric. Wrong. You go still. His fingers tighten slightly, as if testing what you will allow. “You have been smiling at me for weeks,” he says, voice low. “You have laughed. You have spoken with me. You have accepted my company. Do you think I do not understand what that means?”
“It means you are pleasant in public,” you reply. “It means nothing else.”
His grip tightens. “You cannot be so naïve.” The word lands like a slap. Heat flares in your chest—anger first, and then, beneath it, something colder. “Let go,” you say quietly. He does not let go. Instead, he steps even closer, and suddenly his body is a barrier between you and the corridor’s open length. He pins you against the wall. “Why are you doing this?” he asks accusingly. “Why are you making it difficult?”
Because difficult is what men call a woman who refuses to be easy. You swallow once, forcing your breath steady. “Because you are behaving improperly,” you say. His mouth twists. “Improperly,” he repeats. “We are in a corridor, not a bed.” Your stomach drops. The words are too close to indecent to be accidental. You feel your skin prickle beneath your gown. “You will step away,” you say, and there is steel now beneath the silk.
His smile is gone. “Or what?” he murmurs. “You will shout? You will call for help? And then the theatre will turn, and someone will look, and they will see you alone with a gentleman, and they will assume the worst.”
Your blood runs colder. He knows. Of course he does. Men like him know exactly where the trap lies. “You would not,” you say, and your voice is softer than you want it to be. He leans in, close enough that you can smell wine on his breath, faint beneath the perfume of the evening. “Wouldn’t I?” he asks. “Do you truly believe I have spent my life being refused by women like you? Do you think I do not know how to make a refusal… costly?”
Your pulse slams hard against your throat. You twist your arm, trying to pull free. His fingers clamp down. “Stop,” you whisper. He moves again, caging you in, and his free hand rises—toward your waist, toward your face, you cannot even register which because panic blurs the edges of the world. His fingers brush your cheek. Your whole body recoils. He catches you, hand at your waist, keeping you from stepping away. The touch is not tender. It is ownership. Your breath stutters.
Around the corner, the voices laugh again. A man says something about the prince’s foolishness. A lady’s fan snaps open. Life continues, bright and secure, while you are trapped in a dim hallway with a man whose smile has become teeth.
“You are frightened,” Hartwell murmurs, pleased, “Good.” and then his face dips, aiming for your mouth. Instinct takes over.
You shove at his chest with both hands. Your palms hit solid muscle beneath his coat. He barely moves. He grabs your wrists—quick, efficient—pinning them together in one hand like you are a child. A sound tries to rise, but is strangled by the terror of what the sound will cause. If you scream, someone will come. If someone comes, they will see. If they see, they will decide for you. And in this world, decisions about women are never made in women’s favour. Hartwell’s mouth is inches from yours. His eyes are dark, intent. “This would be easier,” he breathes, “if you stopped pretending you don’t want to be wanted.”
Rage flares through the fear like a match struck. You jerk your knee upward, aiming for his shin. Your skirt tangles, but the blow lands enough that he hisses, grip loosening for a fraction. You wrench your wrists free. You twist sideways, trying to slide past him into the open corridor. He catches you again, faster than you are, arm hooking around your waist, hauling you back. The sound you make is small and ugly—a gasp turned into something like a sob. His hand clamps over your mouth. The world tilts. Your eyes burn. Your chest heaves against his arm.
He leans in, voice harsh in your ear. “Don’t,” he whispers. “Don’t make noise. Don’t ruin yourself.”
Ruin yourself. As if he himself is not your ruination. Your teeth sink into the palm covering your mouth. Hard. Hartwell jerks back, swearing under his breath. His hand pulls away, shaking, and you breathe in fast, greedy gulps of air that taste like dust and terror. “Bitch,” he spits, and the word is the truest thing he has said all evening. He reaches again—
But a hand clamps onto Hartwell’s collar from behind, yanking him back with a force so sudden that he stumbles. Your body lurches forward, freed. Air rushes into your lungs like salvation.
“Touch her again and you’ll leave this theatre in pieces.”
Hartwell turns in the grip, furious, breath sharp with pain and outrage. His face is flushed, his mouth twisted, dignity scrambling. “Oh—so this is how it is?” he spits, voice harsh in the hush. “The righteous Viscount prowling corridors to pull women off men’s hands—”
Seungcheol moves before the sentence can finish. A punch, clean and brutal. Hartwell’s head snaps sideways with it. There is a sickening crack—bone meeting knuckle, cartilage giving way—and Hartwell staggers, half-caught by Seungcheol’s grip before his back hits the wall. For a second, he looks stunned—then blood pours down from his nose, spilling over the line of his mouth. He laughs—hoarse, broken, smiling through the pain.
“There it is,” Hartwell murmurs, voice thick, as if delighted by the proof. He wipes at his nose with the back of his hand and smears the blood across his cheek. His eyes cut to you again. “Did you enjoy that?” he says, and the question is meant to shame you. “Watching him hit for you like you’re worth it?”
Seungcheol’s jaw flexes. He steps in, seizes Hartwell by the lapels, and slams him back into the wall hard enough that the sconce above them trembles. Hartwell’s grin widens. “Go on,” he breathes, taunting. “Everyone will believe whatever you want them to believe. You’re a Viscount—you can bruise anyone and call it justice.”
Seungcheol’s fist drives forward again. Hartwell makes a choking sound as his head jerks back. He spits—thick and red—onto the floor between Seungcheol’s boots. “She’ll still be what she is,” Hartwell rasps, eyes feral with humiliation and spite. “A woman alone in a corridor. A woman who—”
Seungcheol hits him again And again. And again. Hartwell’s knees buckle. Seungcheol’s fist pauses mid-air—because for a fraction of a second it looks like Hartwell might fall. Seungcheol doesn’t let him. He catches him by the collar and holds him upright only to make sure the lesson lands. You see it then—Seungcheol’s restraint isn’t soft. It’s contained. And the container is cracking.
“Stop.” The word tears out of you. You step forward without thinking, breath sharp. “Lord Ashbourne—stop. Please.”
Hartwell coughs, laughing and choking at once, blood dripping from his nose, from the corner of his mouth. His eyes lift toward you—glass-bright, triumphant in his own sickness. “Tell me,” he pants, “do you feel safe now? With him?” His smile splits wider. “You’ll always be safe with a man who can bury your story.”
Seungcheol’s fist twitches again. You can feel the corridor narrowing, the corner voices too near, the risk of witnesses like a blade at your throat. “Stop.” You command once more.
Seungcheol stills. His chest rises and falls like he has been running. His knuckles are bruised. His jaw is clenched so tight it looks painful. Hartwell hangs there, dazed and upright only because Seungcheol’s fist is still in his collar. Seungcheol’s gaze flicks to you for a brief, dangerous moment—fury there, yes, but something else too: a question, a check, a tether.
Then he turns back to Hartwell and drags him closer until Hartwell’s boots scrape, until their faces are inches apart. Seungcheol whispers something in his ear. It is too quiet for you to catch—swallowed by the theatre’s muffled roar, by the blood in your own pulse. But you see the effect. Hartwell’s grin falters. His eyes widen—just slightly, but enough. Something in his face tightens, and for the first time since he cornered you, something like fear crawls across his face and stays there. Seungcheol releases him with a small shove.
Hartwell stumbles two steps, catches himself on the wall, then straightens with shaking hands, wiping his mouth and nose as if he can smear the colour of humiliation away. “You’re both cursed,” he hisses, voice slurred, “Both of you.” His eyes flick to you, and the last of his charm curdles. “Enjoy your saviour.” Then he turns and staggers down the corridor, cursing under his breath, one hand clamped to his bleeding face. He does not look back.
You do not move. Your hands are trembling so badly your gloves whisper against each other. Your breath comes in ragged pulls you cannot smooth. Your heart is banging as if it is trying to escape your chest. Seungcheol turns to you. “Are you hurt?” he asks, and the question is clipped.
You open your mouth. Nothing comes out. Your throat feels like it has been squeezed from the inside. Seungcheol’s gaze drops briefly to your wrists—where Hartwell’s fingers held you too tight—and something in his eyes hardens. His fists curl and unclench once. “Speak,” he says, less harsh than it sounds. “Tell me.”
You swallow. Your voice comes out thin. “No,” you manage. “I—no. I am—” You cannot say fine. The word feels like a lie too large to fit through your teeth.
Seungcheol exhales through his nose. He steps closer—not into your space like Hartwell, but near enough that you can feel the warmth of him, near enough that if someone came around the corner, they would see a man and a woman standing close and assume—God, they would assume.
You flinch, not away from him, but from the idea of being seen. Seungcheol notices instantly. His gaze flicks toward the corner, toward the distant voices. He lowers his head slightly, blocking you with his body in a way that is almost instinctive. A shield. “We cannot be found here,” he says, voice low. “Come.”
You do not move. Your legs feel like they have forgotten how to obey. Seungcheol’s expression tightens, impatience wrestling with something that looks dangerously like tenderness. He reaches out slowly, offering his hand. Not grabbing. Not taking. Offering. “Lady Whitlock,” he says, and the title steadies you. “Take my hand.”
You stare at it for too long, as though it belongs to someone else. Then you put your gloved fingers into his. His grip closes around yours—not gentle, not soft, but firm in a way that says you will not fall, not while he’s holding you. He guides you down the corridor, away from the corner, away from the risk. Your steps are small at first, then steadier as your body remembers motion.
Somewhere behind closed doors, the opera barrels toward its end. Somewhere, the audience cheers at Angelina’s triumph, delighted by forgiveness that costs them nothing.
You and Seungcheol slip into a small antechamber—empty, shadowed, a place meant for servants to wait or patrons to adjust gloves without being seen. Seungcheol releases your hand only once the door is shut. Silence rushes in.
You lean one palm against the wall, steadying your composure. Your other hand rises to your throat as if you can hold your voice there and keep it from breaking. Seungcheol stands a few feet away, rigid. Something is pulsing beneath his restraint, as though the punch he gave Hartwell was the smallest portion of what he wanted to do. “Why were you alone?” he asks.
“I had an errand,” you say, too quickly. “My carriage—”
“You don’t leave your sisters for air unless you have no choice,” he interrupts, and the accuracy of it makes you bristle even through the shock. “So what was it?”
You lift your chin. “A bolt,” you state. “Loose. It needed tightening.”
Seungcheol’s mouth tightens. “And he followed you.”
“Yes,” you say, voice sharp with the anger you can finally afford now that you are not trapped beneath Hartwell’s hand. “He followed me. Like a dog that thinks if it waits long enough, it will be rewarded.”
Seungcheol’s gaze stays fixed on you. He watches you the way he watches ledgers—seeking cracks, seeking truth, seeking exactly where the damage landed. “Did he—” he begins, then stops, jaw working as if the question tastes like poison. You refuse to let the implication become something bigger by naming it. “He tried,” you say, and that is enough.
Seungcheol’s hands curl at his sides again. He turns away sharply, one step, as if he must move the rage somewhere or it will burn through his skin. “He will not try again,” he says, voice like steel. You laugh bitterly. “You sound very confident.”
Seungcheol’s expression doesn’t change. “I am.” The certainty in his tone does not comfort you. Because certainty is a man’s privilege in this world. Your ruin is always closer than his.
“How convenient,” you say, and the words come out with a tremor you hate.
“It was not convenience,” he replies. You stare at him. “Then what was it?” He holds your gaze. Then he answers, and the answer is not what you expect. “It was inevitable.”
The word makes your temper flare because it sounds like fate, and fate is just another excuse men use to do what they want. “I do not believe in inevitability,” you say.
“You believe in outcomes,” he counters smoothly. “And in preventing them before they happen.”
He continues, not allowing you to cut him down with your pride because he is doing something rare for a man like him: he is moving directly toward the problem rather than circling it. “Hartwell will not be the last, you know that.”
Your spine stiffens. “I can handle myself.”
“You bit him,” Seungcheol remarks, and the bluntness of the observation shocks a small, ugly laugh out of you. You hate that he saw it. Hate that it’s now part of the story between you. “I did,” you admit. “And if he had not let go, I would have done worse.”
Seungcheol’s mouth twitches—approval, dark and brief. “Good,” he says, and then his tone shifts again. “But it won’t stop them.” You narrow your eyes. “Opportunists,” he clarifies. “Men who sniff out a weakness and think they can take.”
“And you have decided I am weak,” you snap. Seungcheol’s gaze holds yours, unflinching. “No,” he says firmly. “I have decided you are visible.” You swallow hard.
“Lady Whitlock,” he says, and your title sounds different in his mouth now. “You are the gatekeeper of two debutantes. You are an heiress in your own right. You are alone without a father’s wall behind you, and you move through the ton like a woman who refuses to bend.” He steps closer.
“That draws attention. Good attention. Bad attention. Hungry attention.” You hate him for being right. “Tonight,” he continues, voice dropping, “it almost cost you everything.” Your throat burns. You lift your chin anyway. “I did not ask you to rescue me.”
“I didn’t do it because you asked,” he replies.
Seungcheol breathes in once, restrained, as if he is about to say something he is already regretting. “We need a solution. Not comfort. Not apologies. A solution.”
You let out a small, humourless laugh. He doesn’t react. “You can be furious with me later,” he states calmly. “Right now, listen.”
You fold your arms, hugging yourself without meaning to. “Speak, then.”
Seungcheol’s gaze flicks briefly toward the door, toward the distant swell of applause. The crowd will spill into the grand hall soon—champagne, conversation, judgment dressed as merriment. Time is short. “I will court you,” he says.
The room seems to tilt, as if the world cannot quite believe what it has heard. “You will—” you begin, and your voice cracks with disbelief. You clear your throat, forcing it steady. “You will not.”
“I will.”
You feel heat flare in your cheeks. “Absolutely not.”
“It will stop men like Hartwell,” he says, as if you have objected to a business proposal rather than an insult to your pride. “It will stop most of them, at least. Because the ton respects ownership more than it respects a woman’s refusal.”
Your stomach twists. “I am not property.”
“I know,” he says, and there is a strange sharpness in his tone, as if he is angry at the world for forcing you to speak this way. “But they do not.” You take a step back, needing space. “And why,” you demand, “would I agree to let you parade me around as—what? A shield?”
Seungcheol’s eyes darken. “Because your shield is currently a set of gloves and a sharp tongue, and it nearly wasn’t enough.”
Your hands curl. “You are presuming a great deal.”
“I am stating what happened,” he replies.
The applause in the distance swells—finale near. The audience is beginning to stir. Time is shrinking. You stare at him, trying to find the angle. “And what do you gain?” you ask, because nothing in this world is offered without cost. Seungcheol doesn’t pretend otherwise. “I gain jealousy,” he says evenly. “Speculation. Interest.” You blink.
“Debutantes want what another woman has,” he confesses bluntly. “If they see me paying attention to you, they will assume you are worth competing for.”
It’s so cold you almost laugh again. “So I am bait,” you say, voice sharpened to a point. Seungcheol’s gaze holds yours, and something flares there—annoyance, yes, but also a kind of reluctant respect for how quickly you understand the ugliness of the mechanism. “You are not bait,” he says. “You are armour. For yourself. For your sisters. And—” he pauses, jaw tightening, “for me.”
“For you,” you echo.
Seungcheol’s voice stays calm, but the words are edged. “My household is being tested,” he says. “My name is being weighed. People are waiting for weakness. A courtship—visible, respectable—reminds them I am anchored. It reminds them Ashbourne is stable.”
He’s not asking you to marry him. He’s asking you to stand beside him. To be seen. To be used. To be protected. To be trapped in his orbit in a way you have been trying to avoid since the first night you heard him speak of suitability. “No,” you say again, because your pride must say it even if your mind is beginning to see the bars of the alternative.
“Then Hartwell will try again,” Seungcheol says softly. “Not in a corridor, perhaps. He will wait. He will follow. He will find a moment where you are tired, where your sisters are distracted, where Lady Halstead is speaking to someone else. He will trap you again, and he will make sure there are witnesses next time.”
“And the ton will not ask whether you wanted it. They will ask why you were alone.”
You swallow, eyes burning. “You are cruel,” you whisper.
“I am honest.” You hate him for it. You hate that the honesty feels like a hand under your chin, forcing you to look at reality. “What about my sisters?” you demand. “What about their prospects? What if—what if people think—”
“They will think you are respectable,” Seungcheol interrupts. “They will think you are protected. And by extension, your sisters will be protected too.”
You shake your head, anger and fear tangled. “You speak like a contract.” Seungcheol’s eyes narrow. “Because that is what this is.”
You want to refuse. Your whole body wants to refuse. You can feel the stubbornness rising like a wall. And then, like a ghost with teeth, the memory of Hartwell’s hand over your mouth returns. The noose of scandal. The corner voices. The trap. Your hands tremble. Seungcheol sees it. His expression softens—barely. “I am not asking you to like me,” he says quietly. “I know you don’t.”
Your lips part, ready to deny it—
He cuts you off. “I’m asking you to survive the Season without being ruined by a man who thinks he can take what he wants.”
The theatre beyond the walls erupts in applause—curtain falls, the whole audience rising in delighted approval. Act II ends with the greedy being humiliated. Real life ends with women being punished.
You close your eyes, feeling the tremor in your hands, the aching strain in your ribs where panic still sits like a lodged stone. When you open them again, Seungcheol is watching you as if he has already decided what you will do. You hate him for that, too. “What are your terms?” you ask, because if you must step into the trap, you will at least choose the shape of the cage. Seungcheol is alert now, as if he respects you more when you negotiate than when you refuse.
“We appear together,” he says. “We speak politely. We allow people to speculate. We do not give them anything improper to feast on.”
“And my sisters?” you press.
“I will not interfere with their suitors,” he says. “Unless a suitor becomes a threat.”
“And you will not speak of them as if they are interchangeable.”
He nods once. “Fine.”
“And you will not—” You force the words out. “You will not touch me without permission.”
Seungcheol’s gaze holds yours. The pause is only a mere second, but it feels heavy. Then, very quietly, he whispers, “I’m not Hartwell.”
You nod. “Then we are agreed.”
Seungcheol’s gaze flicks to the door. The applause has faded into the rumble of movement—people leaving, drifting toward the grand hall. Time is up. “We need to return,” he says. He steps closer again and offers his arm. The gesture is so ordinary that it is almost obscene after what happened. His forearm is solid beneath the fabric of his coat. A structure. A public signal. You stare at it too long.
Seungcheol’s voice drops, low enough to feel like a private thread between you. “If you hesitate,” he murmurs, “they will notice.”
You place your hand on his arm. The contact is immediate, startling—not because it is intimate, but because it is easy. Because your body knows the shape of propriety as instinctively as it knows panic. Seungcheol’s hand rises briefly to cover yours—a shielded gesture of possession that makes your stomach twist and your spine straighten in equal measure. Then he drops it again, guiding you toward the door.
The grand entrance hall is filled when you step back into it. Champagne trays glide past. Fans flutter. Men laugh too loudly, voices warmed by music and brandy. Ladies tilt their heads together like conspirators. Everywhere the ton swarms—hungry, alive, eager for new stories to chew.
You and Seungcheol move into it as if you have always belonged like this—your hand on his arm, his pace measured to yours, his posture calm and assured. Nobody turns at first. Then the attention shifts—like clouds rolling in. A mama’s fan pauses mid-flutter. A gentleman’s laugh stutters. A debutante’s eyes widen. You feel the ripple of recognition catch and spread. Lord Ashbourne. Lady Whitlock. Together. It is astonishing how quickly a room can rewrite a narrative the moment two people offer it a new shape.
Seungcheol guides you through clusters with the familiar confidence of a man who compels every room he enters. His gaze stays forward, but his awareness is everywhere. He is watching for danger, for gossip, for the sharpness in someone’s smile. You are watching too—because you have always watched. Ahead, near the edge of the hall where the light is softer, you spot Lady Halstead with Georgina and Cecily.
Georgina looks flushed with the opera’s energy, eyes bright, cheeks warm. Cecily looks calmer than she has in weeks—her shoulders less tense, her gaze softer, as if the music has soothed something raw inside her. Lady Halstead stands between them like a fortress, her cane resting lightly against the marble. Her eyes lift and catch on you. Her expression barely changes. Only the smallest lift of her brows. A question asked without words. You cannot answer it here.
Seungcheol’s mouth drops close to your ear. “Smile,” he murmurs. “If you look hunted, they’ll scent blood.” Your stomach twists, but you obey. You curve your mouth into something that could pass for ease. Seungcheol’s breath brushes your hair as he continues, lower still, a whisper only you are meant to hear. “Let them be confused,” he says. “Confusion buys us time.”
Us. The word lands strangely, unwanted yet undeniable. You keep walking. You reach Lady Halstead, and she steps forward with an immediate, perfectly pleasant smile. “Lord Ashbourne,” she greets. Seungcheol bows his head. “Lady Halstead.”
Georgina’s eyes flick from him to you to your hand on his arm, and her expression blooms with curiosity so bright it is almost dangerous. Cecily looks at you first—not at him. She watches your face, as if searching for a crack, a signal, a truth. You give her none. Georgina is the first to cut through the moment—innocent in its boldness. “Why were you gone so long?”
“The carriage took longer than expected,” you say lightly. “The coachman would not risk it—he’s taken it back to the mansion to have it set properly.”
Georgina’s brows jump. Cecily’s eyes widen slightly, already thinking ahead—how you will all return, what you will do without your own carriage waiting. Seungcheol steps in smoothly, the lie fitting his mouth like a well-worn glove. “I came upon Lady Whitlock in the passage,” he announces. “She mentioned the trouble. I offered my assistance—and my carriage, of course. It would be improper to leave the ladies inconvenienced.”
Lady Halstead’s gaze flicks between you, then softens just enough to signal she understands more than she will ever say aloud in a hall full of listeners. “How fortunate that you were nearby, my lord,” she expresses.
“Yes,” he agrees.
You feel Seungcheol’s arm shift slightly beneath your hand, a subtle adjustment that draws you closer by the smallest degree—protective, possessive, correct. Your fingers tighten slightly on his sleeve. Seungcheol’s voice brushes your ear again, almost gentle in its direction. “Breathe,” he murmurs. “And keep your hand where it is.”
The hall continues to watch. It is terrifying how easily the performance fits. It is even more terrifying how quickly the ton accepts it as truth. And you are suddenly, horribly aware that you are standing on a stage without having chosen to step onto it.
The housekeeper has been speaking for three corridors. Her voice is dutiful and so perfectly measured it begins to feel like another layer of stone—part of the castle itself, as fixed and unyielding as the cold plaster beneath your fingertips when you trail them along the wall. Mrs. Wilson walks as if she has been built for this place, not simply employed by it. Her keys jingle at her hip with every step she takes. “—and the third Viscount had the gallery extended after the French scare of 1793,” she announces, “He believed a longer corridor made intruders easier to spot.”
You hum politely, because you have learned the art of listening while your mind ticks elsewhere. Behind you, Cecily makes a sound in agreement. Her gaze keeps catching on the carved moulding, the tall windows, the tapestries that hang like frozen scenes of hunting and conquest. She looks as if she isn’t sure whether she is allowed to stare. You don’t tell her not to. This is not your house. You are, in every possible sense, a guest. It is the first thing you remind yourself every time your instinct tries to correct a servant’s angle or smooth a crease that is not yours to smooth.
The corridor opens into the portrait gallery. Mrs. Wilson slows, pleased—this is the part of the tour she enjoys. Here, history is framed and varnished. Oil-painted eyes follow you as you walk. long-dead men with proud chins and indifferent eyes; women in stiff gowns and softer expressions that still somehow look like they would judge you for breathing too loudly. There is a rhythm to them, to the lineage: the same restraint in different generations, the same ownership repeated like an inheritance.You stop before a portrait of a Viscountess with a gaze like polished ice. “Her Ladyship was not born an Ashbourne,” Mrs. Wilson says. “Married in. Kept this house in order during the old Viscount’s… difficulties.”
The word ‘difficulties’ can hide anything. You glance at the painted woman’s hands—folded, composed, rings glinting. You imagine those hands signing letters, balancing accounts, choosing who to bless and who to ruin with a single invitation. You wonder, briefly, what it must feel like to be the kind of woman who can afford to be revered.
Mrs. Wilson moves on to the next portrait without waiting for your thoughts. “And this was the seventh Viscount, and that was his first wife, and this is—” She doesn’t point at the absence. But you notice it anyway. Between two portraits—one a Viscount in a red sash, one a woman in a pale gown—there is a space in the line that has been made ready. Not empty. Prepared. The wall has been measured, the hooks are there, the panelling looks slightly newer, slightly cleaner, as if it has been maintained in anticipation. A place for someone who is not yet there.
As the tour continues, more rooms unfold: the morning room with its embroidered chairs and flawless symmetry; the blue drawing room, colder than it looks; the long dining room, where the table seems to stretch on. Mrs. Wilson points out wainscoting, hearths, renovations, the view from each window as if the landscape has been curated for inspection.
Your attention drifts, despite yourself, toward the living details—the way the servants move like they have perfected not being in the way, the way the house smells faintly of old wood and something mineral from the stone itself. You notice the small signs of modern life that no tour mentions: a pair of muddy boots placed neatly on a tray near a back entrance; a half-forgotten riding crop by the hall table; a shawl draped over a chair like someone abandoned it in haste. There are brothers here. Young men. Lives that do not sit still for portraiture.
Mrs. Wilson leads you up a gently spiralling staircase. “The guest rooms are on this floor,” she informs you. “We keep them aired, of course. No damp. No drafts. The Viscount insists.”
“Mrs. Wilson,” a voice announces behind you, “that will do. I’ll steal them from you now.” Jeonghan appears as if he has been conjured by boredom. London’s stiffness has slipped off him somewhere between the gates and the country. He is dressed for ease but still looks unreasonably polished, sunlight slanting through the leaded panes and catching in his hair like pale thread.
Mrs. Wilson stops in her tracks. “Lord Jeonghan,” she says, disapproving by habit rather than truth. “I am giving a tour.”
“Yes,” Jeonghan replies brightly, “I can tell. Lady Whitlock looks like she’s being marched into a sermon.” You lift a brow, amused despite yourself. “If this is a sermon, it is exceptionally long.”
Jeonghan’s eyes flick to you, satisfied. “She has that effect,” he confides, and then he steps closer to Mrs. Wilson with the easy affection of a man who has survived her discipline since childhood. “You’ve done your duty. You’ve spoken for—what—five corridors? Six? Give the poor women air.”
Mrs. Wilson makes a disapproving sound, but it lacks conviction. “The young ladies must learn the house.”
“They will,” Jeonghan promises. “But if you keep them trapped inside much longer, Miss Georgina will come in through a window out of spite.”
As if on cue, laughter cracks through the glass somewhere around you—bright, unruly, unmistakably Georgina. It drifts down the corridor, followed by a second sound: a man’s shout, delighted, unmistakably Soonyoung’s. Cecily’s mouth twitches. Mrs. Wilson’s lips press together as though fighting a smile. She loses. “Very well,” she relents. “But do not break anything.”
Jeonghan’s grin widens. “We never break anything.” Mrs. Wilson’s gaze is pointed. “That is a lie.” Jeonghan places a hand over his heart, offended only for performance. “Not a lie,” he says. “A belief.”
Mrs. Wilson gives you a curt nod. “The ladies’ rooms are at the end of the corridor. A maid will assist. Dinner at seven.” Then she is gone, keys chiming away with every step. Jeonghan turns back to you, sweeping into a bow that is too playful to be proper. “Come,” he says. “Before she changes her mind and locks you into the portrait gallery until you can recite every Viscount by name.”
“That would be a cruel fate,” you answer.
“We are a cruel family,” Jeonghan replies lightly. “But only to each other.”
He offers his arm as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You hesitate—habit tugging your hand toward independence—then you remind yourself: you are here because of an arrangement that requires visibility. Warmth. Ease. You place your hand on his arm. Jeonghan immediately guides you down the staircase, his pace matching yours as though he has done this a thousand times. Cecily follows, a little less tightly wound now that Mrs. Wilson’s voice has been removed from her ears.
The moment you step outside, the world changes. The lawns stretch wide and impossibly green, sloping gently toward a line of trees that sway with the wind. A tent has been erected near the terrace—white canvas, poles lacquered, chairs arranged beneath like a little pocket of calm. Someone has dragged out a basket of mallets and wooden balls, and the grass near it is already scarred with play. And in the middle of it—spinning like a comet—Georgina. She is flushed with motion, her cheeks bright, her hair slightly loosened beneath her bonnet. Her skirts are lifted just enough to run without tripping, and her laughter is unrestrained. Soonyoung is chasing her in a half-serious, half-theatrical lunge, his sleeves rolled, his grin feral with delight. “You’re cheating!” Georgina shrieks, darting away.
“I am winning!” Soonyoung shouts back, as if those are synonyms. Jeonghan calls out, voice carrying over the field. “Miss Georgina, if you cripple my brother before dinner, Seungcheol will make you repair him.” Georgina skids to a stop and turns. “I would,” she declares shamelessly. Soonyoung throws a hand to his chest as though wounded. “See?” he complains. “She has no mercy.”
“We already knew that,” Jeonghan says. “It’s practically her hobby.”
Georgina finally spots you, and her grin softens into something like triumph. She runs toward you, then remembers herself at the last moment and slows into a walk, attempting composure. She fails. She bounces on her toes like she cannot keep the joy contained. “You were taking forever,” she complains immediately, as if you have been doing something frivolous rather than enduring corridors of history. “I was being educated,” you reply. Soonyoung reaches you and bows dramatically. “I attempted to rescue her,” he announces, gesturing grandly to Georgina. “But she is feral.” Georgina flicks her wrist. “You like it.”
Soonyoung beams. “I do.” There is no flirtation in it. Only the pure, childish thrill of having found someone who matches your speed. Georgina looks at him like she has found a brother made of fire instead of obligation. Jeonghan leans closer to you, murmuring as if sharing a secret. “He hasn’t laughed like that since the funeral.”
The words land softly, yet heavier than their tone suggests. You glance at Soonyoung again—at the bright motion, the gleeful chaos—and you suddenly see the edges beneath it: the way his laughter is slightly too loud, the way his hands never quite go still. You know that costume. You’ve worn a quieter version of it for years.
Jeonghan straightens, clapping his hands once. “Now,” he declares, “we are going to play. Because if Seungcheol finds out we have guests and we did not provide entertainment, he will create an itinerary.”
Georgina makes a dramatic choking sound. Cecily’s eyes widen, amused. “He does that?” she asks quietly. Jeonghan’s smile turns wicked. “He does worse.” Soonyoung grabs a mallet and holds it out to Georgina like a sword. “My lady, your weapon.” Georgina snatches it with a grin.
Cecily hangs back at the edge of the grass, uncertain. She watches the mallets, the hoops, the balls. She watches the brothers with a softness that is less fear and more curiosity now. You touch her elbow lightly. “You don’t have to play,” you murmur. Cecily shakes her head quickly. “No, I— I can,” she says, as if the fact that you offered her an out has made her want to refuse it. Before she can be swallowed by doubt, a quiet figure shifts beneath the shade of the tent. Wonwoo. He is seated in a chair angled away from the chaos, a book open in his hands. His posture is relaxed, but his eyes are alert, watching without demanding to be included. When Cecily’s gaze flicks toward him, he lifts his head slightly, raising the book as if offering it. Cecily’s shoulders loosen. She drifts toward the tent like someone stepping toward safer air. Wonwoo doesn’t stand. He doesn’t bow. He simply makes space—shifts his chair slightly, and sets a second chair at an angle. Cecily sits.
Wonwoo turns a page, then tilts the book toward her so she can see the illustration. Cecily leans in, and the movement is so small, so natural, that your chest tightens unexpectedly. This is what she needs: not pursuit, not performance. A quiet place to exist without being evaluated. Jeonghan notices too. His grin softens. Then Soonyoung shouts something about rules that no one listens to, and Georgina smacks a ball so hard it shoots through a hoop by force. “That was not a proper stroke,” Jeonghan calls.
“It went through!” Georgina yells back. Jeonghan spreads his hands. “Force is not skill.”
“It’s my favourite kind of skill,” Georgina declares.
You pick up a mallet. It’s heavier than you expect. Solid. Jeonghan’s smile brightens when he sees you take it. “Oh,” he announces. “You’re going to be good.”
“I’m not going to be anything,” you reply, already measuring the distance, the angle, the grass. Soonyoung points at you dramatically. “If she wins, I will accuse her of witchcraft.”
“If I win,” you correct calmly, “you will accept it.”
Jeonghan laughs sharply. “She speaks like Seungcheol.”
As if summoned by the mention, a door opens on the terrace above. Seungcheol steps out. He appears the way he always seems to: suddenly, inevitably, like the house itself has decided to give him shape. He is dressed less formally than you have seen him in London—no severe black, no hard structure. His sleeves are not starched to perfection. His hair is slightly tousled, as if the wind has dared to go through it. He stands at the top of the steps, gaze sweeping the lawn: Soonyoung shouting, Jeonghan grinning, Georgina in her element, Cecily under the tent with Wonwoo, and you holding a mallet like you might use it as a weapon. His eyes meet yours. The contact is brief. But something shifts in your stomach anyway, irritating and unwanted. He descends the steps with his hands behind his back. Jeonghan calls up, “We’re corrupting our guests, brother.” Seungcheol’s gaze flicks to Jeonghan, then to you. “I can see that.”
Georgina curtsies quickly. “My lord!” Cecily rises under the tent and curtsies softly. Wonwoo doesn’t stand—he simply dips his chin. Seungcheol gives him a look that is not reprimand, just acknowledgement. Then Seungcheol’s gaze returns to you. He steps onto the grass, stopping at a respectful distance. He bows. “Lady Whitlock.”
The way he says it is different here. Less like a title being tested in a room full of predators. More like a name being placed carefully on the tongue. Your fingers tighten on the mallet. You force your voice steady. “My lord.”
Jeonghan’s grin turns feral again. “We were just beginning. Will you play?” Seungcheol’s eyes narrow faintly. “I wasn’t aware I was invited.” Soonyoung scoffs loudly. “You live here.”
“That doesn’t mean I enjoy being hit by wooden balls,” Seungcheol replies. Georgina lifts her mallet. “Then don’t stand in the way.”
Seungcheol’s gaze slides back to you. His mouth might—might—have curved. “Are you playing?” he asks you directly. It’s a simple question. It shouldn’t feel like a dare. It does anyway. “Yes,” you reply.
He studies you as if measuring whether this is performative or true. Then he reaches for a mallet. The movement is unexpected enough that Jeonghan’s brows lift in surprise. Soonyoung cheers. Georgina claps like a child. Your competitive instinct stirs, quick and sharp. And then the game begins.
Soonyoung swings too hard and sends his ball skittering into the flowerbed. Georgina hits hers clean through two hoops in a row. Joshua appears from nowhere—as if he’s been watching the madness like a fond spectator—and takes a mallet. You take your turn. You line up your stroke the way you line up your life: measured, careful, unromantic. The mallet connects with a satisfying thud. The ball rolls straight and true through the hoop. Jeonghan makes an appreciative sound. Soonyoung groans theatrically. Georgina looks offended that you are so competent. Seungcheol watches intently. Then it is his turn. He steps forward and adjusts the ball with his foot. He swings. The ball shoots forward with force, arcing through the hoop with aggression. He looks up at you and raises his eyebrow. Jeonghan claps slowly. “Oh, he’s decided to enjoy himself.”
“I’m not enjoying anything,” Seungcheol says.
“You are lying,” Jeonghan replies instantly.
The game turns, slowly, into a battle between you. Not declared. Not announced. Just inevitable. You hit clean, and he answers cleaner. You take a risky angle; he counters with one more precise. You steal a point by sliding your ball through a hoop that should have been impossible; he responds by knocking yours slightly off course. “That was improper,” you remark, voice mildly murderous. Seungcheol’s eyes flick to you. “It was strategic.”
“You could have warned me.”
“Then you would have avoided it.”
You stare at him, incredulous, and the absurdity of it—this Viscount arguing over a game like a boy—tugs a laugh out of you before you can stop it. The laugh is small. But it’s real. Seungcheol freezes, as if he isn’t sure he was allowed to hear it. His gaze returns to the game, but something has shifted. Something like pride, quickly extinguished.
Soonyoung declares you both tyrants. Jeonghan claims he is a victim. Joshua tries to keep score and fails because everyone argues over what counts. At one point, Seungcheol leans slightly toward you as you line up a difficult shot. His voice is low in your ear. “You’re angling too far left.” You don’t look at him. “Are you trying to help me, my lord?”
“No,” he says smoothly. “I’m trying to make sure you fail properly.”
You smirk without permission. “How generous.” You swing. The ball shoots forward and hits the hoop dead centre, rolling through with obedience. Seungcheol’s eyes narrow. “Damn.” The word is quiet. It shouldn’t be as satisfying as it is. You turn, lifting your chin. “Was that improper?”
The game continues until the sun dips low enough to make the grass glow gold. Georgina ends up with grass stains and doesn’t care. Soonyoung attempts a victory dance and nearly trips over a hoop. Wonwoo closes his book to watch the final shots, and Cecily leans forward in her chair.
When it ends—when someone declares a winner and someone else declares it invalid—it doesn’t matter who “won.” Not really. What matters is the strange, startling feeling that settles in your ribs when you look around and see your sisters… lighter. Georgina, laughing as if her lungs had been starved for it. Cecily, speaking more than she has in days, quietly answering Wonwoo’s gentle questions. Even you, with your hands aching from swinging a mallet, feel something like breath return to your chest.
Seungcheol steps away from the lawn as if suddenly remembering himself. As if he has allowed too much crack in the structure and now must rebuild. Jeonghan calls after him, “Don’t disappear into your office, brother.” Seungcheol doesn’t look back. “I have work.”
“You always have work,” Jeonghan sings. Seungcheol pauses at the bottom of the terrace steps. His gaze flicks to you again—quick, intense, as if checking something. Then he goes inside. The shift is immediate: the game disperses, the servants appear to gather equipment, and Mrs. Wilson re-emerges to shepherd everyone inside for tea with the authority of a woman who can outlast chaos.
Joshua finds you in the hour between daylight and candlelight.
It is the softest hour at Wrotham Castle—the sky turning lavender at the edges, the wind cooling, the house glowing from within like a beacon. The servants move faster now, preparing. Somewhere above, you hear footsteps, doors closing, water being poured into basins. You are near the small sitting room Mrs. Wilson designated for “lady’s use,” mostly because you needed somewhere to stand without being in anyone’s way. Cecily has gone to change, her cheeks still warm from the afternoon. Georgina has vanished with Soonyoung—likely to commit some final act of mischief before being forced into supper. You can already imagine her bursting into the dining room with a grin and hair undone.
“Lady Whitlock,” Joshua greets softly. “May I steal you for a moment?” You incline your head. “If it is not a trap.”
Joshua’s smile deepens. “We’re Ashbournes,” he says. “Everything is a trap. But this one isn’t. I promise.”
He gestures toward a door you hadn’t noticed—half-hidden behind a tapestry. You follow him through, down a short corridor, into a smaller room that smells faintly of cedar and lavender. Glass-fronted display cases line the walls, lamps turned low and angled so the light falls exactly where it is meant to fall. Velvet trays rest beneath the panes—deep jewel tones, carefully chosen. You step in slowly. Your footsteps soften on the rug. For a moment, you don’t speak. You simply take it in. Because you recognise some of it. Not from Bond Street, not from town gossip, but from oil paint and varnish—the pieces you glimpsed earlier in the portrait gallery, caught on pale throats and gloved hands. A pendant at a collarbone. A brooch pinning silk. Earrings like small moons. Seeing them here, close enough to cast a shadow, makes the portraits feel suddenly less like history and more like memory preserved. You drift along the cases, unhurried. Joshua stays near the door, letting you take your time, the way London never allows.
At the far end, set apart not for lack of splendour but for gravity, one display case is broader than the others. Its velvet is darker, its lamp angled lower. And inside it—arranged together, as if they are meant to be seen as a set rather than separate temptations—six pieces sit in quiet formation. A ruby cravat pin—too red, too alive. A sapphire watch-seal, colder, deeper than ink, meant for a palm or a pocket. A diamond pendant that seems modest until it tilts and turns bright enough to throw fractured light. An amber brooch holds warmth as if it stored the sun for years. An emerald locket, forest green, the sort of thing that could hide a portrait or a lock of hair. And beside them—darkest of all, simplest of all—an onyx ring. A smooth, heavy stone set into gold, the surface so polished it drinks the lamplight instead of throwing it back. It should be the least interesting thing in the case.
And yet, you find yourself—without meaning to—leaning closer. You cannot explain why your chest tightens. Then you can, and you dislike yourself for it. Because it isn’t merely a ring. It is responsibility made physical. A thing that doesn’t glitter because it doesn’t need to. A thing meant to be felt, not admired. A mark.
Behind you, Joshua takes a few steps into the room, stopping at your shoulder. His gaze moves over the velvet, over the spread of heirlooms, then he looks to the onyx. His voice reaches you gently, as if he’s careful not to snap the thread of your attention. “It’s his.” You don’t look back at him. You keep your attention on the ring as you hear your own voice come out quietly. “Why doesn’t he wear it?” Joshua’s breath leaves him slowly. “Because if he puts it on,” Joshua murmurs, “it becomes… a statement.”
You tilt your head. “Everything about him is a statement.” Joshua’s mouth curves faintly. “Yes.” The agreement is gentle. “That’s exactly the problem.”
“So he keeps it behind glass.”
Joshua’s voice lowers another fraction. “He keeps everything behind glass,” he admits, and then—seeing your expression tighten—he corrects himself. “Well, not everything. Not the house. Not the business. Not the rest of us.”
You can hear it in his tone: affection you only earn by being loved long enough to frustrate someone safely. Your fingers hover near the glass, stopping short. The case is closed. And still the onyx feels like it might absorb everything around it and give nothing back.
“He wears duty instead,” you say, sharper than you mean. Joshua’s eyes lift to yours. “He wears responsibility,” he corrects gently. “Every day. Where everyone can see it.”
“And these?” you ask, gesturing faintly toward the spread—ruby, sapphire, diamond, amber, emerald. “They’re meant to be seen.”
Joshua’s gaze slides over the pieces again, fondness flickering, then settling. “They’re meant to exist,” he says. “Whether we’re brave enough to claim them or not.”
There’s your answer without being an answer. You don’t say the obvious—that none of the pieces looks warmed by skin, none of them have the careless scuffs of daily wear. They sit too perfectly, too untouched, like relics awaiting hands that keep refusing.
You let the silence stretch, and in it you hear the castle beyond the door: distant movement, a muffled call, the soft rush of servants preparing the next scene of the evening. Joshua speaks again, carefully, as if he’s choosing how much truth to set down. “Our mother chose these,” he says, and the word mother changes the room, no matter how steady his voice remains. “Years ago. Not for mourning. Not as some lesson.” His gaze traces the line of velvet. “She liked certainty. She liked things that held their shape.”
You keep your eyes on the case. “Then why these?”
Joshua’s mouth quirks, almost reluctant. “Because she believed each of us should have one thing that was ours,” he says simply. “Not a toy. Not a reward. Something that could sit on a body and say who you are before you speak.” He nods toward the jewels—his attention passing over them the way someone passes over scripture. “A signature for each son.”
Your throat tightens unexpectedly. “And now?” you ask, because the now is what presses. Joshua’s eyes lift. “Now she isn’t here to see them worn, so they stay where she left them.”
He doesn’t launch into a story. He gives you what you asked for, the truth—plain, direct—because it’s kinder that way. “Soonyoung keeps his feet busy,” he says, gaze flicking toward the door as if he can hear the movement outside. “If his legs aren’t moving, he ends up in here staring at the glass like it might open for him.” His eyes drift to the sapphire. “Wonwoo disappears into pages. If he’s reading, he doesn’t have to look at anything that’s missing.” The diamond catches as he speaks, flashing once as if it resents being ignored. Joshua’s gaze touches it—brief, betraying. “Jeonghan fills rooms,” he says drily. “Noise, charm, trouble. Anything but quiet. Quiet makes you hear the house.” You’ve seen enough of Jeonghan already to believe it without effort. Joshua exhales. “And I…” His fingers flex once at his side, a restrained tell. “I keep things in order. Because if I move them, if I put one on, it stops being a heirloom and becomes a conversation with someone who can’t answer.”
Joshua’s gaze shifts, as if acknowledging the brother-shaped absence. “Mingyu couldn’t stand being watched while it happened,” he says simply. “So he left. It’s what he does. It’s what he’s always done.”
Flight as survival. You understand that, too.
Then his eyes return—inevitably—to the onyx. His tone gentles, not lower, but heavier. Like the floor settling. “And Seungcheol...” Joshua exhales, “He didn’t have the luxury of any of it. He became what was needed. Structure. Schedule. Answers.”
You stare at the ring again, and suddenly you don’t see only cold strategy. You see a boy—once—being handed keys and ledgers and expectations heavy enough to cripple. You see a man who learned to swallow grief because someone had to keep the walls standing. Joshua watches your face the way kind people do—without prying, but without pretending not to notice the shift.
“Dinner will be… lively,” he says at last. “Jeonghan will make sport of everyone. Soonyoung will knock something over and pretend it was the furniture’s fault. Seungcheol will pretend he is not listening.”
You breathe in. “And you?”
Joshua’s smile warms. “I’ll make sure no one burns down the house,” he says, and the emotion in it makes your chest tighten in that unpleasantly human way again. He bows slightly. “Thank you for coming,” he adds. “Whatever the reasons.”
You don’t answer that. You can’t. So you nod once and follow him out, leaving the jewel room behind like a secret you weren’t meant to see.
Dinner at Wrotham is not the battle you expected.
It is warm. Not simply in temperature—though the candles burn steady and plentiful, and the hearth along the far wall keeps the edges of the room heated—but in the way the house holds its people. The long dining table is set with precision: silver cutlery, crystal glasses, linens pressed tightly. Food arrives in swells—soup steaming, bread warm enough to fog the air when it’s torn, different cuts of meat carved and cured and roasted, sauces rich and fragrant. It smells like comfort. The noise arrives too. It comes alive the moment everyone gathers. Chairs scrape, laughter bursts too loud then settles into something continuous, the kind of sound that fills a room and makes it harder for fear to find anchors.
Seungcheol stands at the head of the table as the others take their places, hands behind his back, gaze tracking the room the way he tracked the lawn earlier—counting bodies, counting comfort, counting what needs adjusting before it becomes a problem.
Soonyoung is already talking, too loud and animated, as if his voice exists to prove the day was real. Georgina matches him without effort, her laughter skipping between sentences like sparks. Jeonghan slips into his chair with an easy elegance, watching the entire room as if he’s been handed a match and is deciding where to set the first fire. Wonwoo is quiet, attention angled toward Cecily with the kind of gentleness that doesn’t demand anything. Cecily sits nearer to him, and she looks less small here. Not loud. Not suddenly bold. Like she understood the castle’s vastness gives her permission to take up an inch more space without apologising for it. Mrs. Wilson stands at the edge of the room, supervising the servants with eyes that dare anyone to spill.
You take your seat to Seungcheol’s right. He watches you pull your chair out. He doesn’t reach in front of you. Doesn’t perform. He simply steps closer as you begin to sit, one hand coming to the chair back—steadying it, guiding it in once you’re settled, as if the smallest discomfort would be unacceptable on his watch. The gesture is subtle enough to pass as ordinary courtesy. But you feel it anyway. He waits until your skirt is arranged and your hands have found your napkin. Only then does he take his own seat. Conversation surges again immediately, loud enough to drown out most things.
Soonyoung begins telling a story about a cricket match that devolves into an accusation that Jeonghan cheats at everything. Jeonghan agrees with a smile and claims cheating is simply “creative strategy.” Georgina adds fuel to the fire. “If cheating is creative, then Soonyoung is an artist,” she declares. Soonyoung clutches his chest. “Miss Georgina, you wound me.”
“Good,” she replies cheerfully. “Now you’ll remember it.”
Jeonghan lifts his glass. “To remembering wounds,” he says. “It’s the only way we learn.” Joshua makes a soft warning sound. “Jeonghan.” Jeonghan’s smile turns innocent. “What? It’s wisdom.”
Wonwoo murmurs something to Cecily that you don’t catch—quiet enough to be theirs alone. Cecily’s mouth curves, small and real, and she answers in a voice that doesn’t tremble. Joshua leans slightly, listening, offering a comment that makes Cecily’s eyes brighten again. The table has split itself into currents: loud and bright on one side, quiet and steady on the other. It leaves a pocket of space—strangely private—in the centre of all that noise, right where you sit.
Seungcheol fills your glass without asking. He pours a measured amount—enough to warm, not enough to loosen. Then, without drawing attention, he shifts a dish closer to you so you don’t have to reach. He sets your bread plate within an easier distance. He doesn’t hover. He doesn’t make a show of care. He simply notices. You keep your gaze on your plate as you accept the small accommodations like they’re nothing. Like they don’t make your heartbeat falter.
It’s in the brief lull—between Hoshi’s next proclamation and Georgina’s next provocation—that Seungcheol leans the slightest bit toward you, voice low enough to be lost under your sibling’s theatrics. “Is your room comfortable?” The question is simple. Practical. It shouldn’t feel like anything. And yet it lands with a quiet intimacy you don’t want to name. “Yes,” you answer evenly, cutting into your dinner. “Very.”
Seungcheol’s gaze stays on you a moment longer, as if he doesn’t trust one-word answers. “No drafts?” You glance up, meeting his eyes. Candlelight makes them look darker than they do in daylight. “No drafts.” His jaw eases—barely. He takes a sip of his wine, and you can tell he’s filing it away like a checked box.
Soonyoung’s voice erupts again. “And then—listen—then she hit it so hard it flew into the roses. The roses!” Georgina slaps the table lightly with delight. “It was an excellent shot.”
“It was violence,” Jeonghan corrects, amused. “We should all be afraid.”
You try very hard to focus on the food and not the way Seungcheol keeps glancing at your glass to measure whether it needs refilling. Then his voice comes again. “Do you sleep well in new places?”
You pause, fork hovering in the air. “Not always,” you admit softly. “New beds are… loud.” His brow lifts faintly. “Loud?”
“Different,” you correct, the corner of your mouth tugging despite yourself. “The mattress feels unfamiliar. The sheets sit wrong. The air smells like someone else’s house.” Seungcheol’s gaze holds yours. “And the silence.” You blink. He’s guessed too easily. You look down again, cutting a carrot with measured care. “The silence, too,” you concede.
A pause. Then, “If it’s too loud, ring.” You nod once, because refusing would be more noticeable than accepting.
On the far end of the table, Georgina and Soonyoung have begun whispering like conspirators. Their shoulders are too close. Their eyes gleam with that particular cleverness that means trouble has already been decided. You feel it before it happens. So does Seungcheol. Georgina has a roll in her hand. Soonyoung has a grape. Jeonghan is leaning back in his chair, watching them with the indulgent smirk of a man about to enjoy the consequences. Georgina whispers something, and Soonyoung snorts, laughter trapped behind his teeth. Then—because they are incapable of restraint—Soonyoung flicks the grape. It arcs through candlelight and bounces off Jeonghan’s shoulder.
“Georgina.”
“Soonyoung.”
Georgina freezes mid-grin, caught red-handed. Soonyoung sits up straighter as if posture could retroactively undo a launched grape. Their eyes go wide with the shock of being reprimanded by the same kind of voice at the same time. Jeonghan’s gaze flicks from Seungcheol to you, his smirk deepening into something wickedly pleased—as if he’s just witnessed a trick he intends to remember. Mrs. Wilson takes one step forward, expression stern. “Miss Georgina.” Georgina straightens instantly. “Yes, Mrs. Wilson?” Mrs. Wilson’s eyes cut to Soonyoung. “Lord Soonyoung.” Soonyoung attempts dignity. He fails. “Yes, Mrs. Wilson.”
Mrs. Wilson doesn’t raise her voice. “If anything else flies across this table, I will remove the tray myself and you may eat in the kitchens.” Soonyoung looks appalled. Georgina looks delighted by the concept. Jeonghan lifts his glass in silent applause for Mrs. Wilson’s restraint. The room settles back into food and laughter, but Jeonghan has shifted his attention—like a cat deciding it wants a different toy. He tilts his head towards you. “So,” he says, voice light as lace, “should we pretend we’re not all curious?”
Seungcheol doesn’t move. He doesn’t tense visibly. But you feel a quiet change beside you—the way he becomes a fraction more still, a fraction more prepared. Jeonghan’s smile stays sweet. “When did this begin?” he asks. “I mean, our brother doesn’t pursue. He strategises.” He looks at you openly now. “And you, you don’t strike me as a woman easily persuaded.”
Joshua makes the same warning sound as before. “Jeonghan.” Jeonghan ignores him. Georgina adds, far too cheerfully, “I didn’t expect it.” The words aren’t unkind. They’re simply honest—bright, blunt, Georgina’s nature. “I thought you had no interest in marriage.” Your throat tightens. You keep your expression composed, the way you always do when the world tries to corner you with truth. Seungcheol speaks before you can. “I didn’t pursue her because she wants marriage,” he says, and every head at the table turns to him. “I pursued her because she does not.”
Jeonghan’s brows lift, intrigued. Soonyoung looks confused. Joshua’s expression shifts—surprised, thoughtful. Cecily’s eyes widen. Georgina blinks, giddy. Your pulse stutters. Seungcheol turns his head toward you, gaze heavy. It pins you—not unkindly, but completely. Like he is forcing you to stay present for the story he is telling. “She doesn’t need saving,” he continues. “She doesn’t need to be dazzled. She doesn’t need a man to tell her what her life should be.” A pause. “She already holds her world together.”
Your cheeks warm so fast it is infuriating. Because that sentence—spoken in this room, in front of these people—sounds dangerously like affection. And the worst part is that it sounds sincere.
Jeonghan leans forward slightly, “That,” he murmurs, “is far more tender than I expected from you, brother.” Seungcheol doesn’t look away from you. “It’s honest.”
You can feel your control slipping—just a fraction—under the weight of being looked at like this. Seen like this. You force yourself to breathe. You recover fast. You have to. You lift your chin, letting a small smile curve your mouth. “Lord Ashbourne is correct,” you confirm, meeting Jeonghan’s gaze. “I don’t require dazzling.” You turn your gaze toward Seungcheol now, because you must. Because you cannot let him hold the narrative alone. “He didn’t try to convince me I should want something I don’t,” you confess, and the candlelight suddenly feels too close to your skin. “He simply… met me where I already was.”
The admission hangs in the air. You remind yourself—firmly—that this is performance. That he is saying what he must. That you are responding because the table is watching and Jeonghan is baiting and Georgina is too delighted to be careful. Still, Seungcheol’s expression holds something you can’t name, and it makes you feel oddly unbalanced.
Then he reaches and places his hand over yours on the table. The contact is simple. Proper. Barely anything. And yet it sends a strange heat up your arm. Seungcheol’s thumb passes once over the fabric of your glove. A grounding touch, subtle enough no one can accuse, but present enough that you feel it. He doesn’t squeeze. He doesn’t trap. He simply holds.
Jeonghan lifts his glass again. “Well,” he says lightly, “if our brother is going to be honest, we may as well all try it.”
Dinner ends with laughter and a mild argument about whether Soonyoung should be allowed to host games unsupervised. Mrs. Wilson’s look implies the answer is no, and the table agrees with the solemnity of men who have been threatened with kitchens before. As chairs scrape back and servants move in, Seungcheol stands when you stand. He offers his arm. You don’t hesitate before placing your hand on it. The gesture is easy now. Too easy. Jeonghan watches with a satisfied grin, like he’s seen exactly what he wanted.
You guide your sisters toward the staircase, your hand still on Seungcheol’s arm. Georgina chatters, still energised, describing some ridiculous plan involving Soonyoung and a lantern. Cecily indulges her, surprisingly, her steps lighter than they ever were in London. At your door, Seungcheol pauses. He inclines his head. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” you reply. His gaze lingers on you longer than propriety allows. Then he steps back—releasing you without fuss. You close the door behind you and exhale. Only then do you realise your shoulders have been tense all evening.
You cannot sleep. The storm makes sure of it.
Rain lashes the windows in heavy sheets, the sound relentless, like the sky is trying to scrub the earth clean. Wind pounds against the glass hard enough to make the panes tremble in their frames. Every so often, a gust shoves at the castle as if it is testing whether the walls will yield.
It is not your room. It is not your mattress. It is not cold. It is not a solvable problem. It is simply the weather. Loud. Wild. Uncontrollable. And it reminds you of nights when you were younger, when thunder made Georgina cry, and you held her until she stopped shaking, when Cecily clung to your sleeve, and you pretended you weren’t afraid, too. It reminds you of being awake in a house that was once full and is now missing the two people who should have made storms feel smaller. You stare at the candle until your eyes blur. It doesn’t work. Eventually, you rise.
Your robe is soft, tied at the waist. Beneath it, your chemise clings lightly to your skin, thin enough that you feel the chill the moment you step into the corridor. You take your candle, shielding the flame with your hand.
The hallway outside your room is dim, lit by occasional sconces that throw pools of light on the carpet. The castle is quieter now, the day’s warmth folded away. Somewhere far off, a door clicks. Somewhere else, a floorboard creaks in the old way houses do. The library is where your feet take you without debate. You don’t know why until you arrive. Perhaps because libraries feel like places where sound is punished. Where storms can rage outside, and still you are surrounded by paper and silence and order—things that do not shout. You push the door open and step inside.
The room is enormous. Shelves climb to the ceiling, packed with spines that look like they have been touched by generations. Ladders rest on rails, ready to slide. A fire burns low in the hearth, banked but not dead, throwing a faint orange glow that fights the storm’s cold. Your candle adds a smaller, trembling light, making the shadows of books stretch long and strange. You move toward the shelves, scanning titles. You don’t know what you’re looking for until you see it. Gulliver’s Travels. The spine is worn. Loved. The leather softened at the edges from hands that returned to it again and again, like a habit, like a comfort. You reach for it, fingers brushing the cracked gold lettering. The book slides free with a soft sigh. You hold the candle high, the storm’s wind making the flame twitch and bow, and find a quieter corner near a window. You open the book.
Your thumb falls naturally where the pages loosen most, where it has been opened the most. Then, as if you have been caught doing something intimate, you flip back to the first page. There is a note. A woman’s writing—neat, elegant, affectionate. Just a few lines, penned with care. A private blessing disguised as ink. Your breath catches.
“Who left a candle burning?” a voice murmurs behind you, edged with practical annoyance. “Wilson will—” The door opens with a soft click. Footsteps enter the library. Seungcheol stands in the doorway.
He is not dressed like he was at dinner. No coat. No stiff formality. His shirt is loosened at the throat, collar open as if he stopped caring the moment he closed his office door. His hair is slightly curled at the edges, as if he ran a hand through it too many times. His sleeves are rolled up towards his elbows, exposing his forearms. He looks like a man caught off duty—and briefly uncertain what to do with himself. His gaze lands on you. His eyes narrow—first in confusion, then in something like immediate calculation. “Lady Whitlock,” he greets, voice level, but not entirely masked. You swallow. “My lord.”
He steps closer slowly, carefully, as if he doesn’t want to startle you into bolting. “I saw light,” he explains. “I thought one of my brothers—”
“I couldn’t sleep,” you interrupt. Seungcheol’s gaze flicks to the window, where rain smears the glass. The wind booms again, rattling the frame, and his expression softens. “Your room,” he says immediately. “Is it cold? Drafty?” There it is again. The instinctive solution. You almost smile. “It’s not my room,” you say gently. “It’s… the rain.”
Seungcheol’s jaw tightens faintly, as if irritated by problems he cannot fix. “I can move you,” he offers anyway, because he cannot help himself. “There are rooms farther from the west windows. Less wind. Less noise.”
You stare at him, and the candlelight makes his face look sharper, more carved. It also makes him look… younger. Less invincible. Less like the Viscount and more like the man beneath the title. “Why do you always do that?” you ask quietly. His gaze flicks up. “Do what?”
You take a step forward. “Offer solutions,” you say. “Even when there isn’t a problem to solve.”
“There is a problem. You cannot sleep.”
“Yes,” you agree softly. “And the rain will still exist even if you change my room.”
Seungcheol’s eyes hold yours, and you see something flicker there—something like being caught. Like being seen. He looks away, gaze sliding to the shelves as if books are safer than your face. “It’s habit,” he says finally.
“Habit,” you repeat, stepping forward until you’re close enough that the heat from the hearth brushes your shins. Seungcheol’s voice is almost reluctant. “If you solve things quickly,” he says, “they don’t become larger.”
The words land like the kind of confession that slips out when you are tired, and the room is dim, and the storm is loud enough to swallow pride. The candle flickers between you like a fragile boundary. “And if they become larger?” you whisper. Seungcheol’s gaze returns. He looks at you the way he looked at Hartwell in that corridor—like he can destroy something if he chooses. But the thing he wants to destroy now is not you. It is helplessness. “Then you build something strong enough to hold them,” he says.
Outside, the wind hammers the window again, unforgiving. A log shifts in the hearth, making the fire flare briefly. The light dances over Seungcheol’s hands. His knuckles are stained with ink. You don’t comment. Instead, your gaze drops to the book. Seungcheol’s eyes follow it. “Gulliver,” he murmurs, and the word is not said like a title. It’s said like a boyhood. You lift it slightly. “Is it yours?”
His mouth tightens. Then he gives a small nod. “It was my favourite.” The admission is so simple it nearly steals your breath. Not ours. Not the house’s. His.
“You don’t sound like a man who had favourites,” you say before you can stop yourself. Seungcheol’s gaze flicks up to yours, and something almost warm moves through his eyes. “I was a boy,” he answers, as if that is explanation enough. Then, more quietly, as if he’s surprised the truth still exists: “I liked… how it laughed at everything.”
Your eyes flick to the first page again, to the note in his mother’s handwriting. You don’t point at it, but you think he sees you see it. He steps closer. He reaches out, not for you, but for the book. His fingers hover, as if asking permission without asking. You hand it to him. Your fingers brush his for the briefest instant. Seungcheol stills, as if his body registers the feel of your bare skin before his mind does. Then he takes the book fully, thumb sliding over the worn leather with an almost unconscious tenderness. “Our mother read it to us,” he states. The confession loosens something in you that has been tight since the opera. Since Hartwell. Since the Season began. “All of you?” you ask softly.
Seungcheol nods. “Yes,” he says. “Even Jeonghan. Even Mingyu.” A flicker of amusement shadows his mouth. “Soonyoung never listened,” he admits. “He’d act it out instead. Climb furniture. Pretend to be giants. She’d scold him without scolding him.”
You can picture it too easily: a boy with too much energy, a stern housekeeper somewhere in the distance, and a woman laughing as if laughter is a kind of protection. Seungcheol’s gaze drops to the first page. His thumb brushes the note there, careful—reverent without making it a shrine. “She wrote little things like that,” he says quietly. “For each of us. As if ink could… stay.”
The storm rolls another gust into the window. The glass rattles, but inside the library, the air feels suddenly still, listening. Seungcheol’s voice softens further, and the hardness you’ve associated with him unspools at the edges. “She had a voice for every character,” he adds, the memory taking over. “And she’d pause at the worst parts—right before the cruelty landed—so we’d all groan and beg her to continue.”
Your mouth tugs. “Did you?” His eyes lift to you. In the firelight, he looks almost startled by his own honesty. “Yes,” he admits. “Every time.” You tilt your head. “Why did she pause?”
He hesitates, then exhales in surrender. “Because she wanted us to learn that the world can be ridiculous and cruel at the same time,” he says. “And that if you can still laugh, you haven’t been swallowed.”
The words hang between you. You realise, suddenly, that you have never heard him speak of his mother as if she were alive in the room. Not a title. Not a loss. A person—laughing, teasing, pausing on purpose. You step closer without meaning to. The candlelight catches the loosened strands of your hair—hair you didn’t pin properly because you were too tired to care. Seungcheol’s gaze lifts, quick and instinctive, and lands there. On the softness you forgot to hide. His expression changes. Not outright desire. Awareness. As if he has been seeing you in armour for weeks, and only now registers what it looks like when you are not strapped into it. “I like your hair loose,” he confesses, and the words are so unguarded they feel like they don’t belong to him. Your breath catches.
You should step back. You don’t. Seungcheol shifts closer, still holding the book. He looks at you like he’s about to say something practical to cover the intimacy of what slipped out. Instead, he does nothing practical at all. He lifts a hand and slowly tucks a strand behind your ear. The touch is gentle. An instinct that surprises you both. Your skin prickles where his fingers brushed. Your pulse stutters, then races as if it has decided to ruin you all on its own. Seungcheol’s hand lingers too long. Then his fingers slide—almost without thought—to your cheek. He cups it. Your breath stops. His thumb rests near the corner of your mouth as if he is holding the fact that you exist. The library shrinks. The storm becomes distant. The crackle of the hearth quiets.
Seungcheol’s gaze drops to your lips, then back to your eyes. You don’t move. You can’t. You are suddenly too aware of your own breathing, of the thin fabric beneath your robe, of how close you’ve drifted. He leans in. Not rushed. Not aggressive. Like gravity. Your lips are millimetres apart. So close you can feel the warmth of his breath, the faintest tremor of it, as if even he is not entirely steady. As if he’s measuring something he wasn’t meant to want. Your hand—traitorous—lifts slightly, hovering near his wrist, not pushing away. Not pulling closer. Caught between impulse and fear. And then—
A violent gust slams the window. The glass rattles hard enough to make you flinch. The candle flame bows, sputters, and dims. The spell breaks. You jerk back, the sudden movement making your robe gape open—your chemise, your bare collarbone, the scandal of being undressed in the wrong kind of company. Heat floods your face so fast it makes you dizzy. You tighten your robe, fingers fumbling at the tie. Your hands shake, ridiculous and disobedient, as you knot it too tight.
Seungcheol stills, his hand falling away as if it never touched you. His jaw flexes once—shock, restraint, something he’s swallowing hard. The book is still in his other hand. He looks down at it as if it might save him. Then he extends it toward you, an offering, a correction, a way back to sanity. You take it quickly, clutching it to your chest like proof you came here for ink and paper and not—whatever that was. Your voice comes out too fast. “I should— I should go.”
Seungcheol’s mouth opens as if to say it’s fine or I’m sorry or something sensible that would make the moment less dangerous. You don’t let him. You step backwards toward the door, already turning, already escaping yourself. “Goodnight,” you blurt. You don’t wait for his reply. You leave the library with the candle trembling in your grip, the book pressed tight to your sternum, your heart pounding so hard it feels like it might bruise you from the inside.
When you reach your door, you slip inside and shut it behind you with shaking hands—too quietly at first, like you are trying to pretend you were never there at all—then, because you are human and furious and mortified, you slam it hard enough that the frame rattles. You lean your back against the wood, breath ragged, robe tied too tight, cheeks burning. In the storm beyond the glass, the wind howls again.
And you stand there in the dark, clutching a childhood book, trying to understand why your mouth still feels like it remembers the heat of a kiss that never happened.
Tea has been poured three times before the first name is even spoken. “Lord Brampton calling on Miss Georgina,” Mrs. Wilson announces, voice ringing with the crisp finality of a bell.
The Wrotham drawing room has been arranged to look effortless, which means it has been arranged with near-military precision. Chairs are angled so no one can corner a girl against the wall. Tables are placed so teacups remain within reach but never become an excuse to linger too close. The windows are thrown open just enough to let spring air soften the room—fresh grass and budding leaves slipping in beneath the perfume of bergamot and polished wood. Even the curtains look disciplined, gathered back as if they’ve been instructed not to flutter too theatrically.
Your sisters sit together on the settee, as they have been instructed, as they must—Georgina with her spine too straight and her eyes too alive, Cecily with her hands folded neatly and her lashes lowered. You sit a little apart, positioned to be a chaperone without being a warden, the way you’ve always been this Season: present, watchful, never interrupting unless the world gives you no other choice. You tell yourself, as Mrs. Wilson’s announcement echoes through the room, that this is only a tea. It is never only a tea.
Across the room, the Ashbourne brothers have arranged themselves. Not in a line, not in formation—nothing so obvious that it would look like guarding. Joshua is by the fireplace with his hands folded behind his back. Wonwoo sits near the shelves, a book open in his palm, eyes up more often than down. Jeonghan is perched on the arm of a chair as if a seat exists only as a suggestion. Soonyoung hovers near the windows, restless energy barely leashed by the knowledge that Mrs. Wilson is watching and that this is, in fact, a room meant for respectable courtship and not competitive shouting.
And Seungcheol—Viscount Ashbourne himself—is no longer merely a hinge at the doorway. Today, he is everywhere without being anywhere: a quiet presence that shifts, repositions, and becomes suddenly beside the tea table when a man leans too far forward, becomes suddenly behind Cecily’s chair when a suitor’s gaze lingers too long. He sits when it suits him. He stands when it suits him. His attention is the sort that doesn’t need to declare itself to be felt. You don’t look at him. You do. You don’t. If you look, you will remember last night. The library. The warmth of his breath. The way his thumb hovered at the corner of your mouth like it belonged there. The way your own body leaned in before your mind had time to veto it. You lift your teacup and pretend you care deeply about the temperature.
Mrs. Wilson steps aside as Lord Brampton is shown in. He is exactly what his name sounds like: respectable, well-fed, confident in the way that tells you he never had to wonder whether he would be welcomed in a room. His coat is a shade too loud for your taste—fashionable, yes, but eager. His hair is too perfectly arranged, as if a valet has combed through it at the door. He bows, and his gaze goes immediately to Georgina, drawn there like every suitor is, because Georgina is a lighthouse and men in the marriage mart are ships with questionable navigation. Georgina rises. Curtsies. Smiles. The smile is sweet. It is also a warning, if one knows how to read her.
“Miss Georgina Whitlock,” Lord Brampton greets. “You are even more—” he pauses, searching for the right flattering word as if selecting fruit, “—radiant in daylight.” Georgina tilts her head. “Radiant is what one calls a hearth. I prefer to be called dangerous.”
Silence falls, the sort that makes you feel every inch of carpet beneath your shoes. Then Soonyoung makes a delighted choking sound from the windows, and Jeonghan laughs openly into his hand like an unrepentant sinner in church. Lord Brampton blinks, as though he has been struck by a gust. “Dangerous,” he repeats, trying to make it flirtation, trying to turn it into praise rather than challenge. “A charming quality.”
“Is it?” Georgina asks brightly. “Or is it simply inconvenient?” Lord Brampton’s smile wobbles. He glances at you, as if expecting the eldest sister to rein her in like a horse. You lift your teacup and take a sip you don’t taste. Joshua drifts forward with a cup in hand, the perfect gentlemanly interruption. “Lord Brampton,” he says warmly, “we’re honoured. Tea?”
Brampton turns, grateful for a safer target. “Ah—yes. Thank you.” Joshua pours as if this is a sacrament. Then, as if making light conversation, he asks, “How is Kent treating you this spring? I heard your tenants had trouble with flooding.”
Lord Brampton’s face shifts, caught. The question is polite. The implication is not. Georgina watches with growing interest. Lord Brampton clears his throat. “Yes, well. A nuisance. But these things happen.”
“They do,” Joshua agrees pleasantly. “And what is your approach when they do?”
Brampton glances—inevitably—toward Seungcheol, as if searching for rescue. Seungcheol doesn’t move. He simply lifts his cup, takes one measured sip, and watches as if he’s listening to a man recite his own character under oath. Lord Brampton gives a vague answer about stewardship and responsibility that sounds well-rehearsed and means nothing. Georgina’s eyes narrow with boredom. He tries to pivot back to compliments—your sister’s hair, her gown, the way she “brightens the room”—and Jeonghan slides in with a grin as if summoned by the scent of dullness. “Do you hunt, Lord Brampton?” Jeonghan asks, as if curious. “I—yes,” Brampton answers, a little too eager. “Of course.” Jeonghan nods thoughtfully. “Then you must tell Miss Georgina about your favourite kill.” Georgina’s brows lift. “His favourite kill?” Jeonghan looks at her with sweet sincerity. “You said you prefer to be called dangerous. I assumed you’d want to compare notes.”
Soonyoung loses the war against his own laughter and makes a sound so undignified Mrs. Wilson’s eyebrow twitches in the corner. Lord Brampton flushes. Georgina smiles wickedly. You should step in. Smooth it. Rescue him. This is your sister’s future, after all. But you don’t. Because Georgina is not cruel. She is simply frank. And men who can’t survive frankness will never survive her. Brampton tries anyway. He straightens, clinging to dignity like a lifeboat. “I favour pheasant,” he states. “A noble bird.” Georgina’s words are almost tender. “How tragic.” “Tragic?”
“Yes,” Georgina replies. “Imagine being born noble only to be shot by a man who calls himself sporting.” Jeonghan presses a hand to his chest. “Miss Georgina,” he breathes, as if scandalised. “That’s nearly a thought.”
Soonyoung cackles. Cecily’s lips part in a faint, shocked smile. Brampton’s gaze darts to Seungcheol again, now clearly panicked. Seungcheol finally speaks. “Lord Brampton,” he asks, “do you prefer your wives noble birds as well?” Brampton’s mouth opens. Closes.
“Just curiosity,” Seungcheol adds, tone unchanged. He rotates his cup slightly in his hand, thumb gliding along the rim with absent-minded control. It’s such a small movement. It shouldn’t mean anything. Your mind betrays you anyway—his breath on your lips; his hand on your cheek; the pause before he leaned in. Your stomach tightens. Your breath stutters once, traitorous, and you stare at the floor as if it’s suddenly fascinating.
Brampton fumbles into a speech about “cherishing” and “protecting” and “providing,” and Georgina listens as if she’s watching a play she already knows the ending of. He stays ten minutes. Fifteen. Long enough to recover his dignity, to try again, to fail again. He leaves with a bow that is a fraction too stiff.
The moment the door closes, Georgina exhales. “I liked him,” she announces cheerfully. You blink. “You terrified him.” Georgina shrugs. “That’s how I decide if I like them.” Jeonghan claps softly. “Excellent system.” You lift your cup again, this time to hide your smile—and to hide the fact you are still watching Seungcheol’s hand on that teacup like it’s an indecent thing.
Mrs. Wilson returns with the next suitor before Georgina can fully bask in her first victory. “Mr. Pritchard calling on Miss Cecily,” she announces—same tone, same precision. Cecily’s fingers tighten around her teacup.
Mr. Pritchard arrives looking as though he has been dressed by his mother and frightened by the act of walking into a room at all. He is young—too young, almost. His ears are pink. His eyes keep flicking to the floor as if he fears stumbling. He bows so low he nearly loses his balance. “M-miss Whitlock,” he stammers, then corrects, panicking, “Miss Cecily Whitlock.” Cecily rises. Curtsies. Her voice is soft. “Good afternoon.” Mr. Pritchard looks as though he’s been granted mercy by an angel.
He sits on the edge of his chair. His hands grip his hat like it might fly away. He tries to speak about the opera from last and ends up praising the weather, then apologising for praising the weather. Cecily listens with gentle patience, which is the most dangerous kindness in the world because it makes timid men believe they are safe. Wonwoo, from his chair by the shelves, turns a page in his book and says without looking up, “It rained last night.” Mr. Pritchard startles. “Yes! It did! Terrible. I mean, beautiful for the crops. Not terrible. Not—”
Soonyoung bites his knuckles to keep from laughing. Jeonghan looks as if he’s about to burst. Cecily’s mouth twitches faintly. A smile, small and real, tries to happen. It does. Mr. Pritchard sees it and brightens as if he’s found the sun. “You—you smile,” he blurts, immediately horrified by what he’s said. “Forgive me. That sounded—”
“It’s all right,” Cecily says softly. “You said nothing wrong.”
Mr. Pritchard swallows, visibly relieved. Then, with the courage of a man who has decided to try again, he begins to speak about books—about how he was made to read sermons as a child and rebelled by reading poetry instead. “My mother says poetry is frivolous,” he confesses, voice lowering as if he’s admitting a crime. “But I—well, I think it’s… It’s useful.” Cecily tilts her head, interest flickering. “Useful?”
“Yes,” he says. “It gives you words for things you cannot say properly. Or things you shouldn’t say properly.” That line—unexpectedly clever—lands like a small spark. Cecily’s eyes brighten. “What do you read?” she asks, and the question is so natural, so steady, that your chest tightens with pride. Mr. Pritchard fumbles the name of a poet—stammers, shakes his head, embarrassed—
Wonwoo murmurs, still not looking up, “Cowper.” Mr. Pritchard latches onto it. “Yes! Cowper. Exactly. And—” he exhales, laughing at himself, “forgive me, I’m not usually this—”
“Human?” Jeonghan supplies. Mr. Pritchard turns toward him, eyes wide. Jeonghan smiles like a cat. “You look like you’re awaiting execution,” he says conversationally. “It’s making everyone nervous.” Mr. Pritchard’s face goes scarlet. He opens his mouth, closes it, tries again. “I—my apologies—”
Seungcheol lifts his gaze and speaks calmly. “Mr. Pritchard,” he says. Mr. Pritchard nearly levitates. “Continue,” Seungcheol adds evenly. “Miss Cecily asked you a question.” The order is not cruel. It’s simply firm. It gives Mr. Pritchard rails to hold on to. Mr. Pritchard inhales, steadies, and turns back to Cecily. “I—yes. I also read Swift.”
You feel the name land inside you with a ripple. Swift. Last night. The book. The note. His mother’s handwriting. Seungcheol’s voice: "Our mother read it to us." Your mind flashes an image of his thumb sliding along the page, careful as prayer. Your cheeks warm before you can stop them. You glance up without meaning to. Seungcheol is watching you. Not Cecily. Not Pritchard. You. His gaze drifts to your mouth, as if the curve of it has become a problem he can’t solve. You turn away so fast you nearly spill your tea.
Mr. Pritchard continues, talking about his favourite books with earnest passion, and Cecily—Cecily answers. Not stumbling. Not shrinking. She laughs softly when he confesses he cried over a poem and then apologised for it. “You needn’t apologise for feeling,” Cecily says.
Mr. Pritchard stays longer than Brampton did. He forgets to be afraid. He becomes, for a little while, simply a young man speaking to a young woman who doesn’t require him to perform. And then—inevitably—his gaze flicks again to Seungcheol. Seungcheol’s expression hasn’t changed. Mr. Pritchard’s spine goes rigid. He rises too quickly, knocks his teacup slightly, catches it before it spills. “I—I shall not keep you longer,” he stutters, bowing to Cecily. “Miss Whitlock. Thank you. Thank you for your time.” Cecily curtsies, still polite. “Of course.” He flees. The door shuts.
Cecily’s cheeks are pink with a mixture of embarrassment and the strange thrill of having been engaged with, truly, and then complimented for something other than her quietness. Wonwoo looks up and says softly, “He’ll recover.” Cecily glances toward him, and her smile grows by half an inch. You sit back, tea cooling in your hands, and realise—slowly—that you have not spoken in several minutes. Not once. No one has needed you. It is unsettling. It is also relief, sharp enough to make your ribs ache.
“Lord Ellison calling,” Mrs. Wilson announces next, and you feel the room tighten before the man even arrives. Even Georgina stills a fraction.
Lord Ellison enters like he has been born for a stage—handsome, sure, too comfortable with attention. He carries his charm like a weapon he enjoys polishing. His eyes sweep the room, take in both sisters, take in you, and pause with quick calculation. He bows. “Miss Georgina. Miss Cecily.” Then, because he knows precisely who holds the gate: “Lady Whitlock.” You incline your head. His gaze flicks toward Seungcheol, assessing. “Lord Ashbourne.” Seungcheol nods once. Ellison smiles as if unfazed. “A fine house.”
“It is,” Seungcheol replies, and the simplicity of the words makes Ellison’s smile tighten. He takes the seat offered and begins with Georgina first—because it is easiest. He tells a story about a man at White’s who tried to charm a duchess by comparing her eyes to brandy. Georgina laughs, delighted, then says she would have poured the brandy into his lap for insolence. Ellison brightens, pleased by her fire. “You’d have ruined him.”
“Ruination is so fashionable,” Georgina replies. Ellison turns to Cecily. “And you, Miss Cecily—do you enjoy spectacle?” Cecily hesitates. You feel her reflex to disappear. Seungcheol’s voice cuts in smoothly. “She enjoys sincerity,” he says. Cecily blinks, startled—then her mouth curves. “Yes,” she says softly. “That.”
Ellison’s smile doesn’t falter, but his eyes sharpen. He pivots, sliding compliments like cards. “And you, Lady Whitlock,” he says, gaze landing on you like he’s decided you’re the true prize. “I’ve heard you are formidable.”
“How unfortunate,” you reply. Jeonghan makes a delighted sound. Soonyoung grins. Joshua’s gaze flicks to Seungcheol, as if checking whether Seungcheol is enjoying this. Seungcheol is not smiling. He is watching Ellison like a hawk watches a mouse from a bell tower.
Ellison’s gaze flicks between you and your sisters with a faint, careless hunger. He asks Georgina what she wants in a husband. Georgina says, “A man who doesn’t expect me to be quiet.” Ellison laughs. “Then you’ll die unmarried.” Georgina’s smile turns sour. “Then I shall die happier than many wives.”
Ellison’s eyes glitter. He likes the fight. He likes the heat. And that—somehow—makes you dislike him more. He shifts his gaze to Cecily again. “And you, Miss Cecily—would you be content with a quiet life?” Cecily opens her mouth, then closes it. Her fingers tighten in her lap. Seungcheol’s cup touches the saucer—soft, controlled, but the sound lands like finality. “Lord Ellison,” he asks, “what are you looking for in a wife?” Ellison leans back, amused. “A wife?”
“Yes,” Seungcheol replies. “A wife.”
Ellison smiles. “Beauty. Temperament. A pleasant household.” Seungcheol’s gaze remains steady. “And what do you offer?” Ellison blinks. A man like him is used to being asked what he wants, not what he provides. “My name,” Ellison says lightly. “My title. My—”
“Temperament,” Seungcheol repeats. “And your household. And your expectations.” Ellison’s smile falters. His eyes flick to you, as if hoping you’ll intervene. You don’t. You sip your tea, letting it glide down your throat while your pulse continues to misbehave for entirely different reasons. Seungcheol continues. “Miss Georgina is not a trinket for a bored man’s mantle. Miss Cecily is not a quiet thing to be ignored until convenient. If you’re here to collect either of them for sport, you’ve mistaken the house.”
Ellison’s jaw flexes. He forces a laugh. “My lord, you speak as though I’ve insulted them.” Seungcheol shakes his head. “You have not,” he says. “Yet. I’m preventing the opportunity.” Jeonghan, ecstatic, cannot resist. “Lord Ellison,” he says, “do you cheat at cards?” Ellison turns, startled by the abrupt shift. Jeonghan’s grin widens. “If you do, I’d like to know in advance. I prefer to lose only by skill.”
Ellison takes the escape. He rises with polished grace, bowing. “A pleasure,” he says, voice a fraction too tight, “to be… enlightened.” He leaves. When the door shuts, Georgina turns to Seungcheol with open admiration. “That was exquisite.” Seungcheol looks at her, expression softening. “It was necessary.” Georgina hums. “Necessary can be exquisite.”
Your cheeks warm unexpectedly, and you hate yourself for it. Because your mind, traitorous, repeats: Necessary. Outcome. Preventing. His language. Your language. You tighten your grip until your knuckles whiten beneath the glove. You are fighting for your life today and no one in the room knows it. Not because of the suitors. Because Seungcheol is a distraction made flesh.
By the fourth caller, you feel as if you can breathe.
Not because you trust this. Because the Ashbournes—strange, infuriating, chaotic—become a wall at your back, not because they owe you, but because they understand predators. They understand appetite. They understand the way people test what they think is weak. And you understand, with reluctant clarity, that you have been holding your household alone for so long you forgot what it feels like to have someone else lift a weight.
Mrs. Wilson announces the next name. “Lord Halbrook calling on Miss Georgina.” Georgina’s posture changes immediately—less fire-for-the-sake-of-fire, more interest. You notice.
Lord Halbrook enters with confidence that isn’t loud. Younger than Brampton, older than Pritchard. His coat is well cut but not eager. His smile is easy in a way that suggests he isn’t afraid of being refused.
He bows. “Miss Georgina.” He turns to Cecily. “Miss Cecily.” He acknowledges you properly. “My lady.” Then, with a respectful nod: “Lord Ashbourne.” Seungcheol returns it, gaze already measuring. Halbrook doesn’t fidget under it. That alone makes you sit up.
He takes his seat and begins not with compliment, but with honesty. “I was told,” he says to Georgina, “that you are difficult.” Georgina’s grin flashes. “I was told you were brave.” Halbrook’s eyes brighten. “Then perhaps we’ve both been warned properly.”
Georgina leans forward. “Do you fear difficult women?” Halbrook lifts a brow. “I fear bored ones.” Georgina laughs, bright as a match struck. They speak of horses. Of travel. Of ridiculous incidents in the park. Halbrook tells a story about nearly being thrown into a lake as a boy; Georgina declares she’d have pushed him in just to see if he could swim. Halbrook says he’d have deserved it. Then, because Georgina cannot help herself, she tilts her head and asks sweetly, “And what do you do when a woman refuses you?”
The question is a trap. You hold your breath. Halbrook doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t laugh it off. He answers simply. “I leave,” he says. “Because refusal is a kind of honesty. And I prefer honest company.”
The room goes subtly quiet—not fully, not dramatically, but enough that you feel the shift. Cecily’s gaze lifts, surprised. Joshua’s eyes soften. Even Jeonghan’s grin stills, interested. Seungcheol’s voice enters quietly. “Lord Halbrook,” he asks, “what do you consider a partnership?”
Halbrook turns, surprised, but not defensive. He thinks. Actually thinks. “A person who doesn’t become smaller beside you,” he answers at last. “Someone who grows. Someone you’d rather be honest with than impressive for.” Georgina blinks, then smiles in a way that looks softer than you’ve seen on her in a long time. You swallow. Seungcheol holds Halbrook’s gaze, then nods once. Not approval, exactly. Permission to continue.
Halbrook speaks a little longer, asking Georgina questions that aren’t about her looks: what she reads, what she hates, what she’d do if she were born a man. Georgina answers with gleeful wickedness. “I’d duel,” she says. “Frequently.” Halbrook’s smile widens. “And win?”
“Obviously,” she replies. “I don’t do anything halfway.”
When Halbrook finally leaves, Georgina watches the closed door like she’s just been offered a life that might actually fit her shape. “That one,” she murmurs, almost to herself. Your chest loosens, relief flooding in so hard it nearly makes you dizzy. Because if Georgina chooses, she will be safe. And if Georgina is safe, maybe—maybe—you can stop bracing for catastrophe at every turn.
“Sir Lionel Hartmere calling on Miss Cecily,” Mrs. Wilson announces next, and you know immediately this will be unpleasant.
Not because Cecily cannot handle unpleasantness. Because men like Sir Lionel are the ones who don’t notice a woman’s discomfort until it inconveniences them. His smile is too wide. His eyes travel too quickly. He bows to Cecily, but his gaze keeps darting to Georgina as if checking whether the “brighter option” is available. Cecily sits with her hands folded and her chin lifted—quiet courage, held like a candle against the wind.
Sir Lionel begins by complimenting Cecily’s gown, then compliments Georgina’s laugh, then—without even noticing what he’s doing—compliments you. “And you, my lady,” he says, eyes lingering too long, “you look as though you could run a parliament.”
You smile thinly. “How kind.” Sir Lionel chuckles. “Yes, well, some women have that air.”
Cecily’s cheeks flush. She carefully answers a question about music. Sir Lionel nods once, not truly listening. Then he asks, cheerfully, “Which of you ladies prefers the countryside?”
Cecily blinks. Georgina cocks her head. You see it—how he doesn’t care which answer belongs to which girl. How he’s shopping. Jeonghan, who has been silent out of sheer boredom, perks up. “Sir Lionel,” he says, “a question.” Sir Lionel smiles, flattered to be addressed. “Of course.”
Jeonghan’s tone stays fair. “Are you here for Miss Cecily or Miss Georgina?” The room goes so still you can hear the soft tick of the mantel clock. Sir Lionel laughs, thinking it’s a joke. “Oh, now—does it matter?”
Cecily’s fingers tighten around her glove. Seungcheol moves for the first time in several minutes. He shifts forward—not looming, but inescapable. He doesn’t raise his voice. “It matters,” he says simply.
Sir Lionel’s words stutter out. “My lord—”
“Miss Cecily and Miss Georgina are not interchangeable,” Seungcheol continues. “If you don’t know which one you came to court, you may leave.” Sir Lionel flushes, offended. “This is high-handed.”
Jeonghan tuts softly. “And yet, here you are,” he murmurs. “Still standing.”
Cecily lifts her chin a fraction higher. Her voice, when she speaks, is soft, but it doesn’t tremble. “I think,” she says gently, “that if you cannot decide, Sir Lionel, you are not suited to either of us.”
Sir Lionel splutters. “I—well—”
Mrs. Wilson, from the edge of the room, clears her throat. Sir Lionel stands abruptly, bowing too stiffly. “My apologies,” he says, not apologising at all. “Good day.”
Cecily sits very still for a moment. Then she exhales slowly, as if she’s just stepped out of deep water. You want to go to her. Touch her shoulder. Praise her. But you don’t—because she’s done it. She’s found her own spine in front of an entire room. And it is extraordinary.
Wonwoo murmurs, delighted, “Butterfly,” as if he’s witnessed something rare hatch in real time. Cecily looks down, cheeks pink, but her mouth tugs into a smile. You look away too quickly, pulse skittering. You tell yourself you’re simply tired. You tell yourself you’re simply relieved. You tell yourself you’re not being ridiculous. You are.
By the time the final caller is shown out, the drawing room looks faintly ransacked.
Teacup rings bloom across polished wood like pale ghosts. Half-bitten cakes sit abandoned on plates. Lemon peels curl in silver dishes. The air is sweet with jam and warm pastry, but underneath it all lingers the sharper scent of male cologne and performance.
Mrs. Wilson claps her hands. At once, the maids appear like clockwork. Cups are collected. Plates lifted. Napkins are whisked away. One maid bends at your elbow for your saucer and cup; you surrender both with a distracted nod. The room exhales.
Georgina springs upright before Mrs. Wilson has fully turned her back, immediately talking over herself as she turns toward Soonyoung—who is already half out of the door, delighted by the mere fact that men came, spoke, stumbled, and survived. He launches into an exaggerated imitation of one suitor’s bow; Georgina nearly folds in half laughing before she swats his arm and attempts it herself, making it even worse on purpose.
Jeonghan, sprawled elegance a moment ago, straightens only enough to fall into conversation with Joshua near the hearth—something practical, by the sound of it, though Jeonghan keeps interrupting with lines that make Joshua close his eyes as if asking heaven for patience.
Wonwoo closes the book he has been pretending not to read and turns—quietly, as he always does—toward Cecily. “Miss Cecily,” he asks, “would you care to see the library?” Cecily stills, then blinks up at him. “The library?” Wonwoo nods once. “If you like. It is quieter than this room. And there are illustrations in one of the travel volumes I thought you might enjoy.” Cecily’s mouth parts slightly. It is not often one sees her want something quickly enough for it to show before she has time to school it away.
Your mind betrays you with images: leather worn soft at the edges, a low fire, rain on the windows, his hand reaching for the book, his thumb brushing the page. Without thinking, you look up. Seungcheol is watching you again.
He is standing upright, no cup in hand, no excuse left. There is no crowd to hide behind. No gentleman to interrogate. No sisters to shield. Just you, and the thing neither of you has named.
Something in his eyes shifts when he sees your expression—recognition, immediate and unnervingly exact. The library. Last night. The fact that you both went there in your heads the moment Cecily spoke. He starts toward you. “Lady Whitlock—” he begins lowly, private even in a crowded room. You are on your feet before the sentence is finished.
“I need some air,” you say, too quickly and yet perfectly smooth, because panic has made you excellent at sounding composed. You turn to no one and everyone at once. “Excuse me.”
Before he can step into your path—before he can say something sensible, or dangerous, or kind—you move past him, past the remnants of tea and conversation, past the drawing room threshold and into the corridor like a woman escaping a house fire with her dignity pinned in place. You do not run. Running would be noticed. You simply walk quickly enough that no one can call it fleeing unless they know you well. And he does.
Wortham Gardens takes you in at once.
You keep walking, down the terrace steps and along the path, not looking back, not allowing yourself to think about whether he follows. The late afternoon has softened into that golden hour the castle seems to wear too well. You should feel calmer. You do not.
Your hand rises to your cheek, fingertips pressing the heated skin, as if the memory of his thumb has left an imprint there. You drag your hand down to your throat, then lower, flattening your palm against your bodice where your heart is behaving like a frightened bird. Your other hand presses to your stomach, as though you might force your body back into order by sheer insistence. Breathe. You draw in air. It catches. You try again. You take the long way on purpose.
Past the rose walk, where the first blooms are unfurling pale and pearlescent. Past the yew hedge clipped into geometry. Past a stone bench warmed by the sun and half-shadowed by a willow. You pause once at a narrow path lined with lavender, close your eyes, and try to let the scent pull you into yourself. Instead, it drags up his voice.
In the drawing room: asking a suitor what he offered, not what he wanted. In the library: “It’s habit.” Just now, starting your name before you fled. You keep walking.
By the time the pavilion comes into view—white-painted, half-veiled in climbing ivy, tucked beyond a curve of hedges like a secret too pretty to trust—your pulse has steadied only enough to make room for anger. At him. At yourself. At the unbearable fact that both feel the same in your body.
You step inside the pavilion and stop in the centre, breathing through your nose. Sunlight slants through the lattice and lays patterned shadows across the floorboards. The bench along the side is smooth with years of use. A breeze stirs the ivy at the entrance, making the leaves whisper against painted wood. “Running to ground, Lady Whitlock?” His voice cuts through the quiet behind you.
You startle hard enough that your breath catches, spinning toward the entrance. Seungcheol stands there, one hand braced on the post, expression composed in that way that only makes the strain underneath more visible. He has followed you, then. You lift your chin on instinct. “If you came to mock me, my lord, your timing is poor.”
He steps inside, eyes not leaving your face. “I came because you left the room as though it were burning.”
“It was warm,” you retort. His mouth tightens. “You fled from me.”
“Do men of your station always flatter themselves so thoroughly?”
A flicker of his temper sparks in his gaze. Good. Let him feel what he keeps stirring in you. “I am not here to fight,” he says.
“No?” You fold your arms, because if you leave them at your sides, you may do something foolish with them. “Then you have chosen a curious expression.”
He exhales, short and heavy. “I came to apologise.”
“For which offence?” you ask coolly. “Today’s? Last night’s? The general burden of your existence?”
“Don’t,” he says sharply. You hold his gaze. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t pretend it meant nothing.” The words come out hard, as if dragged up against his will. “Not after the way you have looked everywhere but at me since this morning.” Heat flares under your skin. “You mistake me for a woman who arranges her day around your notice.”
“Do I?” he returns, stepping closer. Not enough to trap you. Enough to make the air change. “You flinched every time I spoke. You answered everyone but me. And the moment I addressed you without spectators, you vanished.”
Your pulse jumps, furious at being seen so clearly. “I was occupied,” you say.
“So was I,” he replies, the edge in his voice cutting cleaner. “And yet I managed to do my duty in that room.” The implication lands exactly where he intends it to. You laugh once, brittle. “Yes. Duty. You do wear it beautifully. Forgive me for failing to meet your standards, my lord. I know how very high they are.”
His brows draw together. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You tell me.” You step to one side, needing movement. He tracks it instantly. “I have spent two days learning the rules of your house, your arrangement, your expectations. It seems I was remiss in learning the rules of your moods as well.” His jaw flexes. “Speak plainly.”
You stop moving. “I heard you,” you say. “At your first ball.” The quiet in the pavilion thickens. “In the gardens. Speaking to your brother,” you continue. Something ugly flickers across his face—anger first, quick and defensive, and beneath it something darker, something like shame. “You were listening,” he says.
“You were talking,” you reply.
“That conversation was not meant for—”
“For women to hear?” You cut across him, venomous and cutting. “How noble.” His eyes flash. “For anyone beyond my family.”
“And yet it was about women.” You snap. “Women like merchandise. Suitability. Convenience. As if we are all simply pieces to be selected and arranged.”
“I was speaking of the ton.”
“The ton includes my sisters.”
His voice darkens. “Your sisters are not what I was describing.”
“Not what?” you demand, stepping toward him. “Not trainable? Not decorative? Not interchangeable?” For the first time since you have known him, he hesitates. Then, very quietly: “Not interchangeable.”
You hate how your body reacts to the truth when you are trying so hard to hold onto anger. You take a breath and force the emotion back into your voice. “Then why did you make yourself sound exactly like every man I have spent years protecting them from?” His face hardens. “Because you wanted me to be that man.”
Rage blooms hot and immediate. “How dare you.”
“How dare you,” he fires back, control cracking, “hear one bitter conversation and build an entire man out of it.”
“I built him from your own words.”
“I spoke like a man drowning.”
The sentence stops you. You stare. “Drowning?”
His nostrils flare, as if he regrets the word yet refuses to take it back. “Grieving,” he enunciates. “Being watched from every side. Carrying a title I had no time to prepare for while society waited to see whether I fail.”
You scoff because if you do not, sympathy will ruin you. “Grief is not a license for contempt.” His breath leaves him unevenly—the mask slipping from the man who has built himself on control.
“Do you think I do not know that?” he asks. “Do you think I have not replayed that night? Do you think I have not despised myself for sounding like him?”
“Him” hangs between you without a name. Hartwell. Men who take. Men who smile and press and assume. You feel your anger falter. You seize the safer part. “So you admit it was cruel.”
“I admit I was angry.”
“And arrogant.”
“Yes.”
“And afraid?” you press, because he said it and you still do not know what to do with it. His eyes lock onto yours. “Afraid of failing,” he admits quietly. “Afraid of needing what I cannot afford to lose.”
You know that language. Not the words, perhaps—but the shape of it. The private exhaustion of being the structure everyone leans on. The panic of imagining one weak point and watching the whole house come down. Recognition flickers. You hate that he sees it happen. He takes another step closer. “That night, I was trying to convince myself I did not need anyone.” You force your chin up. “Then be comforted. You do not. Especially not me.”
His breath catches so faintly you might have missed it if the space between you were any larger.
“Is that what you believe?” he asks.
Not mocking. Not triumphant. It is far worse. Humiliated.
You mean to say yes. You mean to say, of course. You mean to say something sharp enough to end this. Nothing comes out.
His eyes change when he hears your silence. He comes closer. You take one step back and hit the pavilion wall with your shoulder blades. Cool painted wood. No more room. His voice drops, every word forced out against his restraint. “Say it, then. Say you hate me.”
You shake your head, breath shortening. “What are you doing?”
“Giving you an exit.” His gaze drops to your mouth and returns. “Tell me you feel nothing. Say it plainly, and I will leave you.”
Your heart beats so hard it hurts. “You are impossible.”
“Say it.”
You inhale. Exhale. Try again. “I cannot,” you whisper, and the truth sounds like surrender.
Seungcheol falters. Then something in him gives way. Not temper. Not violence. Need. Bare and immediate and devastating. “You say you hate me,” he murmurs, stepping into the last breath of distance. “And yet you cannot say you feel nothing.” Your throat tightens. “I do hate you.”
The lie is thin. You both hear it. His hand lifts, pauses near your face. His fingers settle along your jaw, thumb against your cheek. The gentleness of it nearly undoes you. It is so unlike being taken it feels more dangerous than force.
He studies your face with a kind of fierce disbelief. “What do you do to me,” he says, words fraying, “that I cannot think when you look at me like this?” Your pulse stumbles. “Then stop looking.”
His mouth curves, but there is no humour in it. Only heat. “You first.”
You should push him away. You should remind him of propriety and scandal and the fact that the house is not far, and voices travel, and this is how women ruin themselves. Instead, your hands fist in his coat. That is all the permission he needs.
Your lips crash together.
It is not tentative. It is not careful. It is two people who have been holding themselves like walls finally deciding to collapse. Your head tips back with the force of it. His hand slides behind your head, fingers into your hair, holding you steady. You kiss him back with equal fury, because anger and wanting have become impossible to separate.
He moans against your mouth—low, rough, half relief, half desperation—and deepens the kiss until your lungs forget their work. You grip him harder. He breaks from your lips only to drag his mouth along your jaw. Your breath stutters. “Seungcheol—” His name leaves your lips, and the sound seems to strike straight through him.
He kisses the sensitive skin beneath your ear. Slow. Then again. And then lower—to your throat, where your pulse is wild and betraying you. His lips press there, deliberate, learning. His tongue flicks once at the spot beneath your jaw, and a gasp tears out of you before your pride can catch it. The sound is indecent in the quiet pavilion. You know it. He knows it. Neither of you stops.
His free hand finds your waist and pulls you in until your bodies align, until the shape of him against you makes your mind go white at the edges. He is breathing hard against your skin, control hanging by a thread.
“Tell me again,” he murmurs against your throat, “how much you hate me.”
A broken laugh catches in your chest and turns into something softer, stranger. “I—” you start, but he kisses your skin again and the sentence dies unborn.
Your hands slide up, over his shoulders, the back of his neck, and into his hair. He shudders at the contact, and the reaction is so immediate, so unguarded, it sends another wave of heat through you. He lifts his head and looks at you. God. He looks ruined.
Not weak. Not insecure. Ruined in the way men look when they have finally allowed themselves to want something and realised precisely what they have been missing. It should frighten you. It does. And still you pull him back in. The second kiss is worse. Wilder. Hungrier.
Somewhere beyond the hedges, a voice rises. Footsteps scrape faintly across gravel. Reality returns like a dose of cold water.
You wrench back with a sharp breath, fingers flying to your mouth. Your lips feel swollen. Your chest is heaving. The world is suddenly too bright, too open, too close to witness. Seungcheol freezes where you left him, breathing hard, eyes fixed on you as if he cannot quite believe you were the one to stop.
“You—” you begin, but there are too many endings to the sentence and none of them safe. He steps toward you, something urgent rising in his face—as if he is about to say something that could change everything or make it worse. You do not let him. You run.
Skirts gathered in your fists, gravel spitting beneath your shoes. You do not care how it looks. You do not care who might see. You do not care that your steps are loud, uneven, unbeautiful.
The hedges blur at the edges of your vision. Your mouth burns, your tongue remembers him, your body feels the shape of his hands as if you have carried the whole pavilion away under your skin. You do not look back. You cannot.
At the edge of the path, you falter just enough to betray yourself. You turn your head. He is still in the pavilion, one hand braced against the post, head slightly bowed before he lifts it and finds you. His mouth is parted. His eyes are dark and far too full. The whole garden seems to hold its breath with you. And you know—cold and certain and far too late—that whatever was supposed to be between you has slipped beyond recall.
You wrench your gaze away and run on. But your mouth still burns. And the taste of him follows you back to the house like a secret you will not be able to pray out of your body.
Bond Street wakes in pewter.
Mist clings to lamps and windowpanes, turning every shopfront softened —gold behind glass, silks behind velvet, jewels behind the kind of locks that imply someone is always watching. Carat & Co. glows as always. Even before the shutters come down, the place holds its own light. Seungcheol is there before the first clerk.
He likes the quiet hour when the counters are bare and the cases are still empty of hands. When the only sounds are the building settling into itself, the faint tick of the clock, and the careful work of men who understand that beauty is made with patience and sharp tools. He hangs his coat, rolls his cuffs back, and opens the ledger. Ink, numbers, inventory—his holy trinity. The neatness of columns. The honesty of sums. The relief of problems that have solutions. He tells himself this, repeatedly.
Because the moment the pen touches paper, his mind slips—just a hairline crack—and ivy appears. A white pavilion. Sunlight in lattice shadows. Your mouth, hot and furious, colliding with his like the world had finally stopped pretending. He presses harder with the pen, as if pressure can pin a memory to the page until it behaves. It does not.
A jeweller’s loupe sits beside his inkstand. He picks it up without thinking, turns it between his fingers. The glass catches a stripe of morning light and fractures it into pale colour. It reminds him of you pulling away—breathless, eyes bright with shock—as if you’d startled yourself by wanting. And then you ran. He’d stood there like a man struck. His mouth still tasting you, his whole body demanding he follow—now, now, now—as if the world would end if he let you get too far away. He hadn’t moved. He thinks about that more than he thinks about the kiss.
He thinks about stillness. About restraint. About how he has built his entire life around control—and how easily you unmade it with the simple, impossible truth of your mouth against his. He sets the loupe down as if it has burned him.
A door opens. “Morning, my lord.” Mr. Everett, the senior clerk, enters with a bundle of post. “We’ve had three notes delivered at dawn. And Mrs. Dalloway’s man insists she’ll be in today for the sapphire reset.” Seungcheol nods his head. “Put the notes on my desk.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Everett hesitates—barely—but Seungcheol sees everything. “And… there’s a gentleman waiting. Says he requires a word. A Mr. Hartwell.”
The name falls flat in the silence of his office.
Seungcheol’s expression doesn’t change. It cannot. His face is a kind of armour—built in the same way Carat & Co. is built: carefully, with intention, without flaws anyone can hook a finger into. “Send him in,” he says. Everett bows and leaves.
Seungcheol doesn’t rise. He doesn’t pace. He doesn’t prepare a speech. He simply sits, his hands folded over the ledger, and waits. Hartwell enters with a new nose and an old smile. The bruising is gone, but the memory of blood is not. Hartwell’s eyes flick to Seungcheol’s hands, as if he’s checking whether the knuckles remember him. “Lord Ashbourne,” Hartwell greets, voice slick as oil. “How industrious. I always find it fascinating when men of title pretend to be men of trade.”
Seungcheol looks at him. Lets the silence do the work. Hartwell clears his throat. “Of course. Forgive me. Carat & Co. It must be gratifying. Playing at legacy.”
Seungcheol’s gaze drops—briefly—to Hartwell’s collar. He remembers hauling him back in that opera corridor like a misbehaving dog. He remembers the sound of your breath when Hartwell’s hand covered your mouth. His voice stays level. “Why are you here?” Hartwell spreads his hands, the picture of injured innocence. “A social call.”
“This is a jeweller.”
“It’s also Bond Street.” Hartwell’s eyes gleam with that bright, intrusive interest. “And you are quite… fascinating.”
Hartwell paces one step, just enough to show he believes himself untouchable in a room full of glass and gold. “You hit me,” he says lightly—too lightly, like he’s trying to pretend it was nothing. “In public. In a theatre. You broke my nose for a misunderstanding.”
Seungcheol doesn’t correct him. There was no misunderstanding.
Hartwell’s smile thins. “Then, very conveniently, you begin a courtship with the very woman I—” His eyes flicker, as if the memory of his hand on you still pleases him. “—admired. How swift you are, my lord. How… decisive.”
Seungcheol’s fingers tighten on the ledger. Hartwell leans in, voice dropping as though sharing a confidence between gentlemen. “I confess, I wondered.”
“Wondered what.”
Hartwell’s gaze slides toward the front windows, where the street beyond is misty and awake, where anyone might walk past and glance in and think of safety and luxury and permanence. “How the courtship was progressing,” he says. “If Lady Whitlock was enjoying being claimed.”
Seungcheol’s jaw hardens. Hartwell’s smile brightens, cruel with pleasure at having struck a nerve. “Or if she still enjoys empty corridors.”
Seungcheol’s gaze narrows. “Be very careful.”
Hartwell’s lips part in a soft laugh. “Oh, do forgive me. It’s only that Mayfair is… attentive. And Lady Whitlock—your lady with her resolve of steel—has been seen in curious circumstances.”
He lifts a finger, as if counting. “Once, alone in a theatre passage with me.” Another finger. “And again—so I hear—in a library corridor, late at night, with you.”
Seungcheol’s blood goes cold. The library. Wrotham. Who talked? Hartwell watches Seungcheol’s face like a man studying a lock for weakness. “It would be a shame,” Hartwell murmurs, “if anyone began to ask why the eldest Whitlock sister wanders empty halls and meets men when she believes herself unseen.”
Seungcheol does not move. His restraint becomes something vicious and calculated. Hartwell’s voice becomes venomous. “A woman’s reputation is such a fragile thing. And the Whitlocks’ position is already… delicate, is it not?” His eyes sparkle. “No father. No mother. Just an inheritance and three unmarried ladies.”
Seungcheol’s spine goes rigid. Hartwell continues, enjoying the way each word feels like a thumb pressed into a bruise. “If the ton thought Lady Whitlock’s virtue was—how shall I phrase it—careless…” He makes a vague gesture, like he’s wiping dust from a sleeve. “Suitors might vanish. Not only for her.” Seungcheol’s gaze turns razor-sharp. “For the sisters as well. Such a pity. An entire household punished for one woman’s little… strolls.”
Seungcheol finally speaks. “Say it plainly.”
“I want my pride restored.”
There it is. Not morality. Not justice. Not concern. Just ego bruised and hungry. “You embarrassed me,” Hartwell says, and now the civility disappears to show the snarling thing beneath. “You took what I wanted and turned it into your trophy. And now everyone is whispering about you, about her, about how quickly she folded. I want the whisper to change.”
Seungcheol’s fingers uncurl from the ledger. “You’re threatening a woman because a man struck you.”
“No, my lord. I’m reminding you how the world works.” Hartwell’s gaze sweeps the counters, the cases, the jewels. “You have so much to lose.”
Seungcheol pushes to his feet and steps into Hartwell’s space, bringing them face to face. He doesn’t lunge or posture—he simply stands, broad and solid and suddenly far too close, and Hartwell’s bravado flickers. “You will not speak of her.” Hartwell’s brows lift. “Or what?”
Seungcheol’s voice lowers. “Or you will learn the difference between a broken nose and a ruined life.” Hartwell falters—then recovers, brittle. “Ah.” He exhales. “There’s the animal beneath the Viscount.” Seungcheol doesn’t blink. “Get out.”
Hartwell’s face turns insolent because insolence is what men use when they sense danger but refuse to show fear. “Mayfair will talk,” he states softly. “And you can’t punch a whisper.”
Seungcheol doesn’t back down. Hartwell holds his stare for one last moment—two men measuring which one will break first. Then Hartwell bows, mockingly correct. “Enjoy your courtship, my lord.” He turns toward the doors. “Let’s see what survives when people remember where you came from.”
Hartwell walks out. The bell over the door gives a polite chime as it closes behind him, like the shop itself is unaware it has just hosted poison. Seungcheol stays standing until his breathing steadies. Then he turns to Everett—who has reappeared like a ghost, trying desperately to look as though he heard nothing. “Double the men at the door,” Seungcheol demands calmly. “And if anyone asks after me, they wait.” Everett swallows. “Yes, my lord.”
“And send for Jeonghan.” Everett blinks. “Lord Jeonghan?”
“Now.”
Everett goes. Seungcheol sits again, picks up his pen, and stares at the ledger until the columns blur. He thinks of Hartwell’s words like fingers around your throat. He thinks of your sisters—Cecily’s quiet bloom, Georgina’s fire—both of them vulnerable to the ton’s appetite for punishment. He thinks of you, always the wall, always the shield. And he feels something shift in him that he does not like. Because Hartwell came for you. And Seungcheol did not feel strategic. He felt protective. He felt possessive. He felt the raw, ruinous impulse to burn the whole world down for the crime of imagining you ruined.
The first tremor arrives in the form of a note with too much perfume. Everett brings it on a silver tray. “From Lady Dalloway, my lord.” Seungcheol breaks the seal. Lady Dalloway’s handwriting is elegant. Her words are polite. “Regretfully,” she writes, “I must postpone today’s appointment. There is conversation in my circle, and my husband insists we avoid anything that might appear imprudent until the Season settles.”
It is an excuse in the form of a compliment. The sapphire reset has been in commission for months. Lady Dalloway is not the sort of woman who postpones jewels unless her fear is sharper than her vanity. Seungcheol folds the letter once. Twice. Places it aside. “Send her my respects,” he says evenly. “And let her know her stone will be held safely until she chooses to be brave.” Everett flinches at the words but bows. “Yes, my lord.”
The second tremor arrives in the form of absence. The shop is not empty—never truly. Foot traffic remains. The curious remain. But there is a difference between a crowded street and a room full of buyers. Three ladies enter together late afternoon—veiled, gloved, expensive. They pause at the cases. Their eyes skim the pieces. One of them laughs softly behind her fan. They do not ask to see anything. They leave without buying a single stone. Everett looks ready to weep with frustration. Seungcheol stands behind the counter and feels something cold settle between his shoulder blades. This is the ton’s language. Not refusal. Not accusation. Just the slow withdrawal of comfort, like a hand pulling a blanket away inch by inch until you are shivering and pretending you are not.
Jeonghan arrives an hour later, looking as though he has been insulted by the concept of urgency. He takes one look at Seungcheol’s face and stops. “Someone died,” Jeonghan states. “Or you want them to.”
Seungcheol doesn’t answer. Jeonghan wanders behind the counter and picks up the note from Lady Dalloway with two fingers. “Mm.” Jeonghan scans it. “She’s afraid.”
“She’s vapid,” Seungcheol declares.
“Both can be true.” Jeonghan folds the letter and sets it back down. His gaze flicks toward the street, toward the people who drift past the windows without stopping. “Hartwell?” Seungcheol’s eyes narrow. “How do you know?” Jeonghan’s mouth curves. “Because his type never loses quietly. And because the air in Mayfair tastes different today.”
Jeonghan leans closer, voice dropping steadier beneath the flippancy. “What did he say?” Seungcheol’s fingers curl. “He threatened her.”
Jeonghan’s smile vanishes so quickly it’s almost frightening. “How.” Seungcheol stares at the ledger. The columns. The numbers. The neatness. The lie that any of this can be controlled with ink. “He suggested,” Seungcheol speaks slowly, “that Lady Whitlock’s refusal could be… corrected. Publicly.” Seungcheol’s words grow colder. “Hartwell’s pride is bruised. He wants to punish her for not accepting what he thought he was entitled to.”
Jeonghan’s hands curl into fists at his sides. He inhales, then exhales like a man forcing himself not to shatter something expensive. “He wants you to react,” Jeonghan says finally.
“He wants her ruined,” Seungcheol answers quietly.
“He wants you to blame her.” Jeonghan steps closer, blunt in that brotherly way that doesn’t soften.“Don’t let his poison make you treat her like she’s the problem.”
Seungcheol’s throat tightens. He thinks of you—stiff-backed at the Opera, perfect, controlled, still placing your hand on his arm like you are not trembling inside. You are not the problem. Hartwell is. Mayfair is. And Seungcheol—Seungcheol is becoming something he didn’t intend to become.
Jeonghan picks up a stack of invoices and flips through them like he’s looking for something to stab. “All right,” he says briskly. “We’ll play.” Seungcheol’s eyes narrow. “We?” Jeonghan glances up, grin returning like a blade sliding back into its sheath. “You dragged me here. I assume you want my charming face to reassure the frightened little lambs.”
Seungcheol doesn’t have the patience for Jeonghan’s theatrics today. Jeonghan doesn’t care. He steps out from behind the counter and begins greeting the next patron with warmth bright enough to make the sun envious. He flatters. He smiles. He makes a countess laugh. He is good at this—better than Seungcheol—because Jeonghan looks like ease, and Mayfair always trusts ease more than it trusts competence. Seungcheol watches Jeonghan work and feels something else twist in him: gratitude he doesn’t know how to express without making it uncomfortable.
And beneath it—still, always—you. Because even while he talks of stones and settings and commissions, his mind keeps turning to the pavilion, to the way your hands fisted in his coat like you meant to ruin him. He had thought work would be refuge. Work is only another place your name follows him.
By the time he goes to White’s, the rumours have gained shape. He hears it in the way men greet him now—smiles a fraction too bright, bows a fraction too deep, as if they are trying to prove they are not thinking the thing they are thinking. He tastes it in the small hesitations—doorways held open too long, a whisper clipped short when he turns his head, a laugh that stutters and then recovers as if nothing happened. Hartwell said it: you can’t punch a whisper.
Seungcheol takes a seat with a glass he doesn’t want. He listens to a conversation he doesn’t respect. He waits for something useful.
Lord Haversham—loose around the mouth—leans forward with a grin like he’s about to share a joke. “Ashbourne,” Haversham says, “you sly devil.” Seungcheol regards him. “Pardon?” Haversham explains. “The Whitlock sister. I didn’t think anyone could catch her, and you’ve done it in a week.” Another man—Sir Dalrymple—chimes in, eyes filled with envy. “The ice queen,” he says appreciatively, as if describing a rare horse. “Steel composure, sharp tongue, makes grown men sweat and calls it sport.”
Haversham continues. “And the inheritance.” He lifts his glass slightly, toasting. “Well played.”
Seungcheol’s jaw tightens. “She’s not a card to be played.”
Haversham waves a hand. “Oh, don’t sulk. We’re admiring you.” His eyes gleam. “Truly—how did you do it?” Dalrymple leans forward. “Did you corner her? Was it a scandal? Did you frighten her into it?”
Haversham chortles. “I’d wager he simply promised security. A woman like that must be exhausted. Offer her relief and she’ll sign any contract.”
The words twist in Seungcheol’s gut because they’re not entirely wrong—and that truth makes him want to break something. Because yes: he offered you protection. Yes: he offered you a shield. Yes: he built a plan. And then you kissed him like you could not bear the lie anymore. And now these men sit here and call you a prize and ask him which method worked best, as if your mouth isn’t yours. Seungcheol sets his glass down carefully. Then he looks at Haversham. “You’re speaking of Lady Whitlock as if she doesn’t have ears.”
Haversham blinks. “What?” Seungcheol’s voice stays level, which is worse than shouting. “As if she isn’t human. As if you’re entitled to discuss her like she’s meat on a table.”
Dalrymple laughs uncertainly. “Come now—”
Seungcheol’s gaze cuts to him. “Stop.” Haversham’s grin falters, annoyance creeping in. “All right, all right. We meant no disrespect.”
“You meant envy.”
Haversham’s eyes flash. “Of course we envy you. Do you think men don’t notice a fortune?” Seungcheol leans forward slightly. “If fortune is all you see when you look at her, you are unfit to speak her name.” Haversham scoffs, trying to recover his humour. “Listen to him. The adopted Viscount lecturing us on virtue.”
The room changes. Not everyone laughs. Some of them go quiet, because even here—especially here—the rumour becomes truth. Seungcheol’s spine goes rigid. He feels, all at once, Hartwell’s smirk in a shop full of diamonds. Blood. Not legitimate. Puppy story. Title. Haversham thinks he’s won. “Strange, isn’t it?” he muses. “A man without Ashbourne blood guarding Ashbourne jewels. Makes one wonder how long the ton will tolerate it.”
Seungcheol watches him. He watches Haversham’s mouth move and thinks of his brothers—six men bound by different blood and the same name, the same house, the same grief, a bond stronger than most men ever earn. He thinks of his parents. He thinks of loss, of the shape it carved into him, of everything he had to become before he was ready. He thinks of the scrutiny now turning toward his lineage—cold, entitled, eager to question his right to stand where he stands. And then he thinks of you. Of what that scrutiny will cost you if it sharpens. Of how quickly Mayfair takes a man’s uncertainty and lays the punishment at a woman’s feet. He thinks of Hartwell’s threat: no suitor will go for either of her sisters. And he feels something in him tilt—dangerously, irrevocably—away from diplomacy.
“Say that again,” Seungcheol murmurs. “Say that I do not belong.” Dalrymple clears his throat. Someone else shifts in their seat. The air tightens, thick with the knowledge that Seungcheol does not bluff. Haversham swallows, tries to laugh it off. “Come now, Ashbourne, don’t be—”
Seungcheol rises. “You want to know how I did it?” Seungcheol asks. Haversham’s eyes flicker. Seungcheol steps closer, just enough to intimidate. “I didn’t.” Haversham blinks. “What—”
“She wasn’t caught,” Seungcheol says. “She wasn’t cornered. She wasn’t frightened into anything.” His throat tightens around the next truth because it tastes like surrender. “She chose.” Haversham’s mouth opens, then closes.
“And if any of you speak of her like property again, if any of you so much as imply she can be purchased with a dowry or a rumour, I will make it my personal pleasure to ensure you never enjoy another Season.”
Seungcheol turns and leaves. Not because he fears them—because he cannot stand breathing the same air as men who think you’re a ledger entry. Outside, the night hits his lungs like retribution. He walks. Away from their laughter, their entitlement, their smug certainty that women exist to be discussed and acquired, the ease with which they assume they are entitled to you. He hates that. He hates that he understands it.
Ashbourne Hall is lit when he returns. Seungcheol gives his coat to a footman and takes the stairs without slowing. He tells himself he wants silence. He reaches his study, shuts the door, and stands in the dark with one hand still on the latch, breathing like he has outrun something only to find it waiting inside him.
The door opens again. Joshua steps in with a bottle of brandy in one hand and two glasses in the other, which means he already knows enough. “Jeonghan talked.”
Seungcheol turns his head. “He always does.”
Joshua sets the bottle down on the desk and fills the glasses without asking. “White’s?”
“Yes.”
Joshua offers one. Seungcheol takes it and downs it in one swallow. Joshua watches him. Seungcheol reaches for the bottle, refills, and drinks the second just as fast. When he tips the bottle for a third, Joshua catches his wrist lightly and eases it from his hand. “No,” Joshua says, gentle but firm. “You don’t get to disappear into this.”
Seungcheol’s jaw hardens. For a moment, he looks like he might argue simply because he hates being managed. Then he drops into the chair behind the desk instead. Joshua sits opposite him with his own untouched glass. “What happened that has you looking like you’d cheerfully break your hand on brick?” Seungcheol stares at the desk. “They spoke about her.” Joshua’s brows lift. “You mean Lady Whitlock.”
Seungcheol answers too quickly. “I mean us.” Joshua leans back slightly, studying him. “They were needling you.”
“They were vile.”
“Yes.” Joshua nods. “But it got under your skin.”
Seungcheol’s gaze goes distant—Haversham grinning into his glass, the word inheritance tossed across the table like bait, men speaking about you as if you were a purchase with a pulse. “They congratulated me,” he says at last. “As if I’d cornered her.” Seungcheol gives a humourless exhale. “Then they wanted details. How I ‘managed it.’”
Joshua inhales slowly. “Cheol.” Seungcheol’s eyes cut to him. “What?” “I believed this arrangement was duty.” Seungcheol’s face hardens on instinct. “It is.”
“Then why is Hartwell’s rumour eating through you by the hour?” Seungcheol stills. The rumour is not only after his name. It is after the business. The house. The legitimacy of both. It wants Ashbourne to look borrowed. It wants Carat & Co. to look precarious. It wants your courtship to look like calculation made desperate. Seungcheol leans forward. “He threatened her.”
“That’s the game,” Joshua says quietly. “Make you furious. Make you rash. Make her panic.”
“I’ll ruin him.” Joshua does not flinch at Seungcheol’s vow. “You probably can.” He pauses. “But don’t confuse punishing him with protecting her.”
“There’s a difference?”
“A very large one.” Joshua supplies. “One soothes your temper. The other keeps her safe.”
The words hit harder than Seungcheol wants them to. Because the truth is uglier than his anger. He does not only want Hartwell chastened. He wants him erased. He wants the world taught not to put its hands on your name. He wants, somewhere dark and ungoverned in himself, to close his fist around every room you enter and decide who breathes. Joshua watches the silence work through him. He has known Seungcheol too long to mistake that silence for peace. “Look at me,” Joshua whispers. Seungcheol does. “Tell me this is still only a plan.”
“It is.” Clipped. Instant. Joshua’s gaze drops to Seungcheol’s hand on the armrest. “Then why are you shaking?” Seungcheol looks down. A tremor, slight but there, runs through his fingers. He tightens his hand until it stops by force. Joshua exhales through his nose. “Cheol.”
“Stop.”
“Stop what?”
Seungcheol’s voice catches and comes out sharper because of it. “Looking at me like I’ve gone soft.” Joshua’s expression shifts—fond, tired, too perceptive. “I don’t think you’ve gone soft.” Seungcheol’s jaw clenches. “Then what is it?” Joshua holds his gaze. “I think you’re attached.”
Seungcheol looks away at the confession. He wants to scoff. Deny it. Turn it into annoyance and move on. But denial feels idiotic with the memory of your lips still living under his skin. Attachment. Not duty. Not optics. Not strategy. Attachment is how men get careless. He has built his life on never being careless.
Joshua lets the silence stretch before speaking again. “If this turns messy, it won’t be because you care. It’ll be because you lie to yourself about caring.” Seungcheol’s mouth tightens. “If I lose control, she pays.”
“Not if you choose where the control goes.”
That lands, too. God, he hates how cleanly Joshua says things. Seungcheol looks at the desk—the bottle, the glasses, the papers stacked in exact lines like order is a spell that still works if he arranges it neatly enough. Joshua studies him for a long while, then says it with infuriating kindness: “You’re falling, brother.” A beat. “And harder than you meant to.”
Recognition moves through Seungcheol. He does not deny it. How could he? It is everywhere—in how quickly his temper rises when men speak of you, in how his eyes find exits and doorways when you’re in a room, in how Hartwell’s threat narrowed his vision to a point.
Joshua stands, finally taking his own drink and finishing it. He sets the glass down with a soft clink. “All right,” he says, moving toward the door. “Call it a plan if that helps you stand upright.” Seungcheol stays seated, gaze fixed on the desk. Joshua pauses with his hand on the knob and looks back. “Just remember,” he says softly, “plans do not keep men awake.” Then he leaves.
Seungcheol sits in the dim study long after the door closes. The house settles around him. Pipes, boards, distant footsteps, then quiet. He listens to his own breathing and tries, for once, to picture you without the poise, without the gloves, without Mayfair looking on. He cannot. Every attempt drags him back to that kiss. He grips the desk edge until the wood bites into his palm. The truth is brutal in its simplicity: Seungcheol is becoming reckless in the one way that matters most—emotionally—because the lie of the courtship no longer feels like a lie inside him.
He reaches for his pen. Tries to return to figures, orders, stone weights, and delivery dates. But the first word his mind offers is not a number. Not duty. Not strategy. You. And the worst part—the part he cannot file, cannot master, cannot discipline away—is that he is no longer certain he wants to.
By the third quadrille, your smile has become a discipline. Lady Halstead’s ballroom is all light and scrutiny—mirrors multiplying every glance, chandeliers making everyone appear a fraction brighter and a fraction more false, the floor crowded with silk and moving in measured patterns while the room itself hums with that particular kind of excitement that means society has scented something and has not yet decided whether it is scandal or sport. The Whitlocks and the Ashbournes are placed on opposite sides of the room as if by accident. It is not an accident. You arranged it so in the first ten minutes.
Not with anything so crude as a command. A pause here, a turn there, a gracious acceptance of Lady Halstead’s suggestion that you stand nearer the second row of pillars where the widowed countesses like to collect, and a gentle redirection of Georgina toward Lord Halbrook before she could drift too near the Ashbourne side of the floor. Cecily was easier. Cecily goes where she is invited if the invitation is kind. You have become very good at architecture.
It’s been two weeks since Wrotham. Two weeks since the pavilion. Two weeks since the library before it, and the storm, and the almost-kiss that became a real one the following day in sunlight and ivy and ruin. Two weeks since you last saw Seungcheol. Not a call. Not a note. Not a chance encounter so much as a carriage glimpsed through rain.
Only whispers with no bones yet—his name in passing, Bond Street mentioned beside the phrase conversation in town, someone at tea remarking that Carat & Co. seemed busy and not busy at once in that irritating way people use when they know half of something and want credit for the whole. Nothing direct. Nothing you can take hold of. Nothing that lets you ask. So you do not ask.
Across the room, the Ashbournes stand in a loose, gleaming knot beneath one of the mirrored panels. Jeonghan is cornered by two mamas and appears to be enjoying himself far too much for a man being interrogated about siblings and prospects. Soonyoung is pretending to listen to a countess while making faces over her shoulder at Georgina whenever he thinks no one sees. Joshua is speaking to an older gentleman, and Wonwoo is at the edge of the group, seemingly trying to blend in with the wallpaper. And Seungcheol— You do not look at him. You do.
He is doing exactly what a viscount should do: standing where he can be seen, speaking when required, bowing to the right women, allowing himself to be surrounded by debutantes and ambitious mothers. His face gives little away. It always did less than yours. That used to comfort you. Now it only infuriates. Because he is speaking to other women with perfect courtesy, and every time one of them tips her head up at him and smiles as though she has been singled out by fate, something mean and hot twists under your ribs. Because he has barely spared you a glance all evening—if that. Because it has been two weeks.
A turn of the set takes you farther along the room. When the figure ends, you step back beside one of the gilt chairs and let your gloved fingers rest lightly on its carved edge. For the first time in longer than you know how to measure, your sisters do not need rescuing.
Georgina is across the room with Lord Halbrook and looks, infuriatingly, like herself and like a woman discovering she can be adored without being reduced. Their courtship has not become quieter since Wrotham; if anything, it has become more dangerous in the best possible way. He laughs when she startles a room. He asks follow-up questions when she says something outrageous. She says something to him now—chin tipped, eyes filled with wickedness—and Halbrook throws his head back laughing instead of attempting to tame her. She looks pleased. Not triumphant. Pleased. There is a difference. You notice because you have spent years watching for the opposite.
Cecily, miracle of miracles, is not fading into shadow. She stands half-turned beneath the long mirror near Lady Halstead’s fern stands, speaking with Lord Montague, grandson to the Duke of Montague, who began calling a week after Wrotham and has not once made her look as though he expects gratitude for being kind. He is not loud. He is not dazzling. He is, perhaps most importantly, attentive in the right direction. He listens when she answers. He does not interrupt to improve the shape of her thoughts. When she speaks, he leans in—not because he cannot hear, but because he wants to. Tonight, he has somehow coaxed her into discussing astronomy with a seriousness that makes her forget to be afraid. Cecily’s hands have come alive while she speaks. Her shoulders are lower. Her eyes lift and stay lifted. At one point, she even laughs—not into her glove, not apologetically, but openly, a soft, bright sound that carries farther than it should. Montague smiles like a man who knows better than to touch the moment with praise.
Your burden has not vanished. Burdens like yours do not vanish. They settle. They redistribute. For one suspended stretch of time, you are only the eldest sister standing alone at a ball while both your girls are occupied by men who appear, astonishingly, to deserve the time. The relief is so sharp it almost feels like salvation.
“Lady Whitlock.” Lord Haversham bows over your hand with polish. You know him by sight, of course. One always knows men like Haversham by sight before one knows their names: unearned confidence, expensive boredom. He smiles as if you are old allies in a private joke. “You are unclaimed for the set,” he says, glancing toward the floor, where couples are reforming in lines. “Will you allow me the honour?”
There is a pause in which you could refuse. You feel—without looking—where Seungcheol is in the room. You hate that you can. You have spent the better part of the evening proving distance. To everyone. To him. To yourself most of all. And here is a gentleman of acceptable standing, asking in full view of Lady Halstead’s chandeliers and half of Mayfair. You smile. “Of course, Lord Haversham.”
His satisfaction is almost imperceptible. Almost. He leads you into the set with impeccable manners and a grip just this side of presumptuous. You do not like him, but you have danced with worse men and smiled through worse reasons. Around you, the room rearranges. Silk turns. Gloves brush. Partners bow and cross. At the edge of the next figure, your gaze betrays you and finds Seungcheol.
Three young ladies have formed a crescent around him, with two mamas behind them like artillery. One of the girls says something earnest. Another laughs too quickly at nothing. Seungcheol inclines his head, answers, and then—because God is cruel—looks up at exactly the moment your hands join Haversham’s for the turn. His expression does not change. The change is in you.
Something defensive and defiant lifts in your chest, and before you can reason with it, you are dancing more brightly than the figure requires, answering Haversham with crisp wit, allowing your smile to appear as though you are enjoying yourself immensely instead of staging a demonstration no one asked for. Haversham leans slightly closer in the next pass. “You dance like a woman making a point.”
“Do I?” you reply smoothly.
“Most certainly.” His gaze slides, not subtly enough, toward the Ashbourne side of the room before returning to you. “I admire clarity.” You look at Haversham then and think, with sudden bitterness, that it is absurd. Seungcheol on the sidelines with women he does not want. You in the middle of the floor with a man you would never choose. The ton, no doubt, questioning your courtship. You continue on.
The set breaks and reforms. Lady Halstead, who treats choreography like warfare, has chosen a cotillion that delights her precisely because it trades partners every few turns and leaves everyone pretending not to care where they end up. The room shifts into fresh lines. Across the floor, a small ripple passes through the mamas near Seungcheol. One of them wins. You do not mean to watch. You watch him take the hand of a lady in pale blue. She is lovely in the way the ton rewards—fair, polished, delicate without looking fragile. She smiles up at him, and he gives her the kind of perfectly proper attention that makes older women nod approvingly into their fans. He bends his head to hear her over the music. His hand settles at her waist. He turns her through the figure. It hurts. You look away too late. Haversham notices it. Men like him always do when they think it will be useful. “Ah,” he says lightly as the figure moves you apart and back again, “now there is an instructive arrangement.”
You meet his eyes. “If you intend to spend this dance discussing other people, my lord, you may return me to the wall.” He laughs and lifts both hands in surrender. “Forgive me. I am chastened.” You do not believe him, which at least gives you something steady to stand on.
The music drives on. Partners trade. A gentleman bows, a lady curtsies; hands touch and release, and touch again, according to rules strict enough to survive the chaos. You move where the dance demands. Once to the left. Once forward. Once away. Haversham is replaced by a baronet’s son with damp palms. Then by a married colonel who smells of starch and certainty. Then by—
A hand you know before it closes around yours. You look up. Seungcheol bows as though this is an ordinary turn in an ordinary set and not the first time his body has been this close to yours since he kissed you in a pavilion. “Lady Whitlock.” Your curtsy is flawless. “Lord Ashbourne.”
He leads you into the next figure with devastating precision. Not too close. Never too close. Not in public. His fingers at yours are steady and impersonal and impossible. “You’ve been avoiding me.” You keep your smile for the watching room. “Have I? I thought we were both attending the same ball.”
“For the ton, perhaps.” His gaze doesn’t waver. “Not for me.” You turn under an arch of joined hands, another couple briefly passing between you. When you face him again, your heart is thudding so hard you can feel it in your ears. “Then you should not have spent two weeks proving absence suits you.”
Something flickers in his face. Regret, maybe. Anger, certainly—though not, you think, at you. The figure pulls you apart and returns you. When Seungcheol takes your hand again, his voice drops a fraction beneath the music. “I was handling what followed Wrotham.” That lands badly. You hear business. Damage. Consequences. A mess to be contained. You hear yourself, somehow, included in a ledger. You lift your chin. “How diligent.” His jaw tightens. “Do not do that.”
“Do what?”
“Turn every word into a weapon before I can finish it.” Your laugh is small and bright and entirely false. “You mistake me, my lord. I am merely trying to follow the plan.” The word hits him. You see it. For one raw moment, his composure slips enough to show the man underneath—the one in the library, collar open, voice tired; the one in the pavilion with your name breaking in his throat.
The next figure brings you closer. Too close for safety. Not close enough for honesty. Seungcheol’s hand closes around yours for the crossing turn. “That is exactly what I have been trying to do,” he says, each word forced through his locked jaw. “Put duty back where it belongs. What happened at Wrotham…” he continues, and his gaze flicks to your mouth, then away again. “…was not part of our arrangement.”
The ballroom does not change. The chandeliers still burn. The strings still play. Lady Halstead still smiles from her chair like a queen surveying crops. And yet, all you can hear is the echo of that line inside your own skull. Not part of our arrangement. He means to continue. You see it in the way his mouth parts, in the urgency that flashes too late through his eyes. Perhaps there is more. Perhaps there is some explanation buried beneath that brutal, tidy phrasing. You do not let him reach for it. Because shame is quicker than patience, and pride is a better shield than hope. “Of course,” you say.
The figure ends. You curtsy before he can stop you. A beautiful, correct curtsy that gives nothing away except, perhaps, the speed with which you rise. Then you turn and leave the set before the next exchange is called. You move through the room with your spine straight and your breath gone thin, past Lady Halstead’s circle of seated matrons, past a knot of gentlemen pretending not to stare, past the mirrored wall that throws your face back at you, too pale, the mask slipping. Behind you, the music stumbles on. You hear your name once—low, cut short by the crowd. Then, you hear what you knew you would. His footsteps, leaving the floor.
You do not stop walking until the corridor gives way to the rear of the house, then to the glass-lit hush of Lady Halstead’s orangerie. You slip inside and let the door fall shut behind you. Moonlight and house-light catch in the panes and iron ribs overhead, turning the rows of citrus trees into shadow. Marble urns stand pale at the edges. Leaves whisper faintly in the draught. The tiled floor gleams in broken strips of light. Your chest rises sharply under your stays. Not part of our arrangement. You press your hand flat to your sternum as though you might quiet the line where it lodged. It does not move.
The door opens again. You close your eyes before you turn. Seungcheol stands just inside, one hand still on the latch, the ballroom’s light framing him before the door settles and leaves him in the same dim silver you stand in. His expression is held together by effort. His eyes are not. Neither of you speaks.
Then, low and rough—more exhausted than angry, though the anger is there too—he asks, “Why do you always run from me?” You laugh, breathless. “Why do you always come after me?”
“Because you leave before I can finish a sentence.”
“You finished enough of one.” The words leave you too fast. “Quite clearly.” Something flickers across his face—frustration, then immediate regret for it. He takes one step closer, stopping well short of you. “I know what I said.”
“Do you?” You fold your arms because your hands are unsteady and you refuse to let him see that. “In there, you looked me in the face and called Wrotham a mistake in better tailoring.”
“I did not call it a mistake.”
“No,” you say, voice thinning at the edges despite your best efforts. “You called it outside the terms. How much kinder.” He inhales slowly, visibly, like a man trying not to break something fragile with the force of his own temper. “That is not what I meant.”
“Then perhaps you should stop speaking in duty when you mean to address me.”
His mouth hardens, but not at you. At himself. At the truth of it. “You think I do not know that?” he asks quietly. “I have spent two weeks knowing it.” You blink. The hurt in you does not lessen. It sharpens. “Two weeks,” you repeat. “And still you chose that.”
“I chose control,” he snaps, then checks himself instantly, lowering his voice. “Because I have been losing it everywhere else.” The words hang between you, abrupt and too honest for the room they are in. You lift your chin. “And I am what suffers when you decide to recover it?”
His gaze cuts to yours. “No.” Immediate. Certain. “That is exactly what I have been trying to prevent.”
You do not answer. The silence pushes him. Seungcheol steps closer, and when he speaks, the anger in him has gone silent—made raw by emotion. “What happened at Wrotham was not part of our arrangement,” he says, and for one blinding second the wound opens fresh—until he continues, voice frayed at the edges, “because what happened at Wrotham had nothing to do with the arrangement at all.”
You go still. He looks at you like the confession hurts. “I said it badly in there. God, I know I did. I was trying to say I cannot keep pretending that what is between us sits neatly inside anything I planned.” Seunghceol takes another step. Close enough that you can see how tightly he is holding his hands at his sides. “I have tried,” he says. “For two weeks. Duty. Work. Business. Every sensible thing I know how to bury myself in. And every time I think I have managed it, I remember your mouth and I stop being sensible.”
Your throat tightens so suddenly you hate him for it. “Do not say things like that when you have just spent an entire night making me feel like an embarrassment you must tidy away.”
“Is that what you thought?”
“What else should I think?” you fire back, finally losing the carefulness you have worn all Season. “You avoid me for two weeks, then speak of duty and arrangement and control as if I am some error in your schedule. You dance with another woman. You—” Your voice catches. You hate that too. “You looked at me as if you were forcing yourself to.”
He stares at you for too long. Then, very softly: “I looked at you like a man trying not to drag you out of the room.” The air leaves your lungs. Seungcheol closes his eyes, as if he did not intend to say that either. When he opens them, he does not look away. “I danced with her because if I stood still any longer while you let that fool put his hands on you, I would have caused a scene Lady Halstead would dine out on for years.”
Something hot and helpless turns in your chest. You hate the relief. You hate how quickly your body believes him. “You do not get to speak as if I belong to you,” you whisper.
“I know.” An exhale. “And still I cannot seem to watch another man touch you and feel anything I am proud of.”
You should leave. Right now. While the floor still feels steady beneath you, and your heart is merely loud instead of reckless. Instead, you ask, because you are as doomed by honesty as he is, “Then what is it you feel?” He comes closer. This time he does not stop until there is only breath between you. His hand lifts, hesitates near your cheek, and falls back to his side—not from disinterest, but because he is waiting. It is the waiting that nearly ruins you. “Everything I was not supposed to,” Seungcheol says. You shake your head as if you can physically shake sense back into the moment. “You are impossible.”
“You have said that before.”
“Because it remains true.” Your voice is thin, breath-frayed. “You anger me. You command rooms as if you own the air in them. You speak in rules and then break them yourself. You make me feel—”
He leans a fraction closer. “What?” You swallow. Hard. “Unsteady.” Something in him softens so visibly it is almost unbearable. “You make me unsteady, too.”
You stare at him. He looks tired. Beautiful. Undone in a way only you can see because everyone else gets the Viscount, the stonework, the precision. You get the man standing in an orangery asking for words he has no practice saying. Your anger is still there. So is the hurt. So is the bruised pride. But underneath all of it, something older and more honest rises and reaches for him. You grab his lapel. “I should hate you,” you whisper. His gaze drops to your mouth. “I know.” He murmurs. “And if you kiss me anyway, I will spend the rest of my life being grateful for your poor judgment.” A broken sound—half laugh, half sob—leaves you. Then you pull him down and kiss him.
He answers like he has been starving. Hunger held in careful hands until you open your mouth to him and he makes a low, wrecked sound into the kiss and gives up the pretence of restraint. His hand comes to your waist, firm and warm, drawing you in as though he is afraid you might disappear again if he does not keep hold of you. You kiss him harder.
He turns you gently, guiding rather than pressing, until the backs of your knees meet the edge of a low stone border near one of the planters. He breaks from your mouth only to kiss your cheek, your jaw, the corner of your lips again, as if he cannot quite decide where he wants to begin now that he is allowed. “You are shaking,” he murmurs against your skin. “So are you.” Seungcheol’s mouth curves against your throat. “Yes.”
The admission is so soft it feels intimate all on its own. You slide your hands up his chest, over the broad line of his shoulders, to his cravat. Your fingers work at the knot and he stills for you, eyes on your face while you tug the fabric loose. When it slackens, he exhales as if something in him unclenches with it. He catches your hand and kisses your knuckles. Then your wrist. Then the pulse there, slow and intentional, eyes never leaving yours. “Seungcheol…”
He answers by touching your face—finally—his palm warm along your cheek, thumb brushing once beneath your eye. “Tell me if you want me to stop.” You stare at him, heart pounding. Then you shake your head and kiss him again. Whatever remains of his restraint melts. He sinks with you to the floor, careful of your skirts, your limbs, the hard tile beneath. His coat comes off and he folds it under you without thought, the same maddening instinct to make comfort where he can. You should laugh at him for it. Instead, your heart aches.
Your gloves are worked free and set aside. Seungcheol kisses the inside of your palms when he bares them. You undo his waistcoat with impatient fingers while he nuzzles beneath your jaw, mouthing soft, open kisses that make your head fall back against the dark wool of his coat. His hands find the back of your gown. He pauses. You nod once, already breathless.
He opens your dress with reverence that borders on worship—hooks eased loose, ribbons drawn through, layers parted only as needed, every shift of fabric accompanied by a glance to your face as if he would rather burn alive than miss the moment you hesitate. The room seems to narrow to his hands and your breathing. When he loosens your stays enough for you to inhale fully, the relief steals a moan from you. He freezes, searching your face. “Too tight?”
You catch his wrist and guide his hand lower, beneath the loosened edge of your bodice, over the heat of your skin. “No.” Your voice comes out soft, unsteady, far more yielding than either of you expected. “Just… don’t stop.” His eyes darken with something that is not triumph but awe. He kisses you again—slow, deep, almost careful until you arch into him and the care roughens into need. Your hands move inside his shirt, pushing linen apart, palms sliding over the hard planes of his chest and the heat of him. He shudders when your nails drag lightly over his skin. “You undo me too easily,” he breathes against your mouth. “Good.” The word is barely more than a whisper, but it makes him kiss you even harder.
When his hand slips beneath your skirts, you part your legs for him instinctively. The first touch of his thumb against your clit pulls a helpless cry from your throat. He stills just long enough to look at you, a silent question in the pause. You answer by lifting your hips toward his hand. “That’s my girl,” he murmurs, and the words are so soft, so devastatingly fond, that your whole body melts. He touches you again.
His fingers slide through the slick heat between your folds, circling your entrance in slow, precise strokes, before dipping in. He learns you in real time—what makes your breath catch, what makes your thighs tense around his wrist, what makes your mouth fall open on his name. “God, look at you,” he breathes, eyes fixed as much on your face as on his hand between your legs. Seungcheol curls his digits, drawing each upwards stroke out until you’re almost shaking with it; when your hips jerk up in protest, he huffs a soft, frayed laugh and does it again, watching you fall apart. You clutch at his shoulders, then his hair, then the back of his neck, losing track of where to hold because the pleasure keeps building, flooding, pulling you under in warm, rolling waves. “Seungcheol—” you gasp, the syllables breaking. “Please, I—”
“I know, sweetheart.” His mouth is everywhere—your throat, your cheek, the top of your breasts—words brushing your skin as soft as his kisses. “Let go for me. I have you.” You do. Your body seizes and then releases for him almost instinctively, the fight draining out of your limbs as your orgasm crests hard and hot. It rushes through you in a sharp, blinding sensation; your thighs clamp around his arm, and a high, broken whine spills from you, impossible to swallow back. He keeps you there, his fingers working you gently through it, praising you under his breath, his hand never leaving your soaked core until your breathing turns ragged and your inner muscles spasm around him. You cling to him, dazed, pulse thundering against his mouth where he kisses the spot just below your ear.
When you finally manage to focus, you realise he’s shaking—subtle tremors running through his arms and shoulders with effort, with his own need held in check for your sake—and something in you melts completely. Your hands go to his face, thumbs brushing the flush along his cheekbones. “Come here,” you whisper, voice breathless, invitation threaded through every quiet word. He looks wrecked by the invitation alone, pupils blown wide, lips parted like the air has been punched from him. You undo more of his shirt with unsteady fingers, pushing it aside to bare the heat of his chest, and he helps you in silence, clumsy in his urgency. He kisses you between each hurried movement as if he cannot bear to let more than a heartbeat pass without touching you somewhere. When your hand slips lower, over the hard line of his stomach to the ridge of his cock straining beneath his trousers, he exhales your name like a prayer. The sound is rough, wrecked, dragged from somewhere deep, and it runs straight through you. His hips jerk once, instinctive, a helpless push into your palm before he catches himself. He grabs your wrist gently, brings your fingers to his mouth and presses a kiss against your digits, then guides your hand back to his chest. “Later,” he breathes. “If we start that now, I won’t be patient with you the way I should.” You feel the shiver that goes through him as he says it, the hard, undeniable proof of how much he wants you, and your whole body answers with a fresh, helpless ache. He settles between your legs, caging you against the floor. His weight is a comfort, his warmth a shield. “Look at me,” he whispers. You do. His hand comes up to cup your cheek, thumb sweeping once along your skin. “If anything feels wrong, you tell me. Anything at all.” You nod, drawing him down by the nape of his neck. “I will,” you breathe. “I promise.”
There’s a brief, fumbling shift of his weight; you feel the subtle drag of fabric as he reaches between your bodies, the muted clink of buttons, the quick, unsteady exhale against your mouth as he frees himself from the last barrier between you. Then he’s there again, closer than before, the head of his cock nudging against your slick, sensitive centre with no more cloth in the way. The first careful thrust of him inside steals the air from both your lungs. He pushes forward slowly, his eyes searching your face even as his own composure frays. You are warm and open and aching for him, and he moves with a gentleness that makes your throat tighten.
When he finally sinks fully into you, filling you with a deep, slow thrust, your mouth opens on a sound you cannot soften. It’s half-gasp, half-moan, the kind of desperate little cry that sounds like you’ve been holding it in for years. His eyes slam shut. A strained, reverent groan leaves him at the same time, low in his chest, torn straight from somewhere under his ribs, and the sound of it—so unguarded, so full of feeling—makes your hands fly to the back of his neck to hold him there, as if you could keep him from slipping away. He kisses you through the first roll of his hips, all softness and heat and impossible patience. His free hand lands at your waist, braced just where you need it as he rocks into you, letting your body learn the girth of him. “There,” he murmurs when some deep, clenched part of you finally yields to the size of him, when the sharp edge of stretch gives way to something molten and unbearably good. “That’s it. Just like that.” You moan into his shoulder, fingers digging into his back, no longer caring how loud you might be, no longer caring about the walls or the glass or the woman who owns this house. The world narrows until there is only the glide of his cock within your walls, the weight of his body on top of yours, and the heat of his breath against your ear.
Your knees fall wider, skirts bunched around your midriff, and your hips rise to meet each slow thrust. The effect is instant—his breath shatters on a curse against your throat, his next thrust losing its perfect control as he follows your lead. “God,” Seungcheol whispers against your lips, already half-lost. “You feel…” The sentence breaks on a groan when you move with him just right, and he laughs softly, helplessly, kissing you again like he can’t help himself. “No. I cannot speak and survive this.” You smile against his mouth, drunk on him, and then the smile melts into a whimper when he slides the hand that was around your waist under your backside to haul you up, the new angle lighting up every nerve. Your thighs straddle his, and the position allows him to thrust deeper, faster, driving any coherent thought from your mind. His hand slides between your bodies, and his fingers find your aching clit again. The combination is devastating. It’s like being pulled in two directions at once—sharp and soft, pressure and release—until your whole body feels like a live wire, every nerve tuned to the rhythm he sets. A cry spills from you before you can stop it, high and unrestrained.
“That’s it, sweetheart. Let me hear you.” Another deep thrust, another circling stroke of his thumb. “Don’t hide from me.” You don’t. You can’t. You can’t. Your moans turn softer, then higher, breaking apart around his name in a way that makes his jaw clench, and his rhythm falter.
The pleasure builds fast—too much and not enough, tight and trembling, a sharp, coiling pull low in your belly that will not let you go. Your thighs shake around his, your fingers slip in the fabric of his shirt, trying to hold onto something solid as the room seems to tilt. “Seungcheol, I—” The rest breaks off on a choked moan as his thumb circles more tightly, and the head of his cock brushes against the most sensitive part inside you. “I know, love.” The words slip out of him instinctively while his hips keep their rhythm. “Take it. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
Your orgasm breaks over you all at once. Your core locks around his cock and then releases in a shudder that tears a full, desperate cry from your throat. It rips through you in waves—sharp, dissolving, too much—and you feel yourself come, fingers clawing at his shoulders. He follows not long after—one, two, three thrusts—before his body stutters and then surges. Your name leaves him in a shattered whisper into the space between your lips as he comes and his seed fills you.
The orangerie settles around you again—leaf-rustle, distant music through walls, the thin hush of night at the glass. You look at his profile in the moonlight, hair disordered, mouth reddened from your kisses, shirt open, and the truth arrives with terrible clarity. You love him.
Wrotham is quieter in the morning than any church he has ever entered. Not because the house is empty—it never is, not truly. But this quiet is older than sound. It sits in the walls. It waits in the rails polished by generations of hands. It lingers in the portrait gallery, where men in oil and gilt look out as though blood alone could keep a house from breaking. Seungcheol moves through it alone. He has not come to inspect accounts. He has not come to review tenants’ letters. He has not come because a steward requires correction or a roofline needs repair. He has come because he is out of excuses.
The key to the jewel room turns with familiar resistance. He enters, closes the door behind him, and stands for a moment without moving while the lamps throw their careful light over velvet and glass. Ruby. Sapphire. Diamond. Amber. Emerald. And the onyx. The ring sits where it sat the last time he saw it, dark and patient, as though it knew he would eventually return once he had finished pretending not to understand himself. He unlocks the case. The click sounds indecently loud. When he lifts the ring, the weight of it lands in his palm. Cool gold. Smooth stone. No shimmer. No plea to be admired. It does not flash. His mother chose it for him for a reason, and he has spent years resenting how precisely she knew him. Beside the ring, tucked beneath the velvet lip, lies a sealed letter. His name is written on the front in her hand. Not Viscount Ashbourne. Not my eldest son. Just his name, as if she knew titles would be the first place he hid. He breaks the seal. The paper opens with that soft sound old letters make, like breath released after being held too long. He reads.
My dearest Seungcheol,
If you are opening this, then either you have chosen someone at last—or you are about to make a noble mess of a woman’s life in the name of duty. If it is the second, go wash your face in cold water and begin again. You have always mistaken endurance for virtue and restraint for wisdom. Sometimes you are right. Just as often, you are frightened and call it discipline. If you have found a woman worth standing beside, do not insult her by offering only the useful parts of yourself. A title is not tenderness. Protection is not devotion. Duty may build a house, but it does not warm one.
The onyx was chosen for you because it holds its depth in bright rooms. Let it remind you of this: if you place it on her hand, it is not a claim. It is a vow. That she will not become smaller beside you. That your strength will never be used to cage what you love. If you are afraid, good. Men who feel nothing are never afraid to lose. Tell the truth, my son. And for once, let devotion be the braver thing.
Your mother
He reads it twice. The first time like a son being scolded by a ghost. The second like a man being handed his own reflection and told, with motherly precision, to stop lying to himself. By the end, a short, disbelieving laugh escapes him. Grief is still grief, even when it comes dressed in affection. He folds the letter carefully and slips it inside his coat. The ring remains in his palm, heavy and unignorable. A vow. Not a shield. He closes his fingers around it and exhales. For the first time in weeks, the path ahead does not feel like strategy. It feels like terror and certainty walking side by side.
He leaves Wrotham before noon. By the time he reaches Whitlock House, he is dressed for a proper call and breathing like a man headed for execution. The footman opens the door, sees him, and goes instantly formal in the way servants do when they are about to lie. “Lord Ashbourne.” Seungcheol inclines his head. “I am here to call upon Lady Whitlock.” The footman does not blink. “I am afraid Lady Whitlock is unwell, my lord. She is not receiving callers.” He studies the man’s face. Admirable composure. “What is the nature of her illness?” he asks. A fractional pause. “A headache, my lord.”
“When did it begin?” The footman holds his breath too long. “This morning, my lord.” Seungcheol’s mouth nearly twitches despite the war in his chest. “Of course.”
Before the footman can attempt another defence, Georgina appears. She is bright-eyed, unbothered, and assessing him with unnerving accuracy. She takes one look at his face and understands enough to become, for once, efficient instead of theatrical. “Thomas,” she says sweetly to the footman, “you are a dreadful liar. Kindly stop suffering for our household’s honour.” The footman bows and retreats with the expression of a man who has survived many Whitlock women and expects no reward for it. Georgina turns back to Seungcheol. “She is not ill. She is hiding.” He nods his head. “I gathered as much.”
Georgina steps closer, lowering her voice. There is no mockery in it—only sharp, sisterly warning. “Back garden. Near the old rose wall.” Her gaze flicks once to his coat pocket, then back to his face. “I am telling you because I am tired of watching two intelligent people behave like wounded aristocrats from a novel.” A pause. “If you upset her, I shall make Halbrook shoot very badly in your direction.”
Seungcheol almost smiles. “I will do my best to avoid being shot.” Georgina steps aside, something approving flashing in her expression. “Do better than that, my lord.”
He goes through the house, past a corridor lined with family miniatures, through a side door opened by a maid who pretends not to stare, and out into the back garden where late spring has begun. You are exactly where your sister said you would be. Near the old rose wall, armed with pruning shears you are not currently using, standing very still in front of a rosebush that does not need your attention. You hear the door before you hear him. Your shoulders tense. You do not turn. He stops several feet away. For a moment, neither of you moves. Then you turn. And there, all at once, Seunghceol feels the thing that has been chasing him since Lady Halstead’s orangery: not simply wanting you, not simply missing you, not simply anger at himself for what he said—fear. Fear that he has made you believe the wrong story about him and about what passed between you. Fear that he is already too late.
You knew he would come eventually. That is the most humiliating part. Not that he is here. Not that Georgina betrayed you in all of five minutes. Not even that your stomach dropped so fast when you heard his voice in the hall that you had to grip the stone edge of the rose wall to remain upright. The humiliating part is that some vicious, hopeful piece of you has been listening for him since the orangery. You turn and find him standing in your garden as if he belongs there. Perfectly dressed, of course. Coat immaculate. Hair neat. Gloves in one hand. The other close to his coat pocket, like he has come holding on to something he does not trust himself to reveal too quickly. Your pulse gives one hard, traitorous beat. You refuse to let your voice do the same. “My lord. You were told I am very ill.”
Warmth flickers at the corner of his mouth. “Indeed, I was informed.”
“You should not approach me, then.” You tilt your chin. “Contagion.” He exhales through what might have been a laugh in a kinder universe. “If wit were contagious, all of London would be unsafe.”
You hate that the line sounds like him again—the man from Wrotham, from the library and the pavilion, not the one in Lady Halstead’s ballroom who cut you open with one sentence. You set the shears down because your fingers are too tight around them and because stabbing a viscount in your mother’s rose garden is probably poor form. “Why are you here?” you ask. His gaze does not leave your face. “To speak properly.”
You decide to strike first, because fear has always worn precision best in your body. “If you’ve come to propose because of what happened at Lady Halstead’s, do not.” He goes very still. You keep going before courage can fail. “I know what the world expects after that kind of intimacy. I know what men call ‘honour’ when they are trying to cover up guilt. I know what duty looks like. I have spent years arranging my life around other people’s versions of it.” Your throat tightens. “You do not owe me a rescue from my own choices.” His jaw flexes. “If this is guilt, I will not take it. If it is protection, I will not be purchased by it. If it is scandal management, choose a better strategy than me.” He closes his eyes. When he opens them, there is no anger there. No distance. Only a kind of fierce, exhausted resolve that makes your breath catch in your lungs. “Are you quite finished?” he asks quietly. The question should offend you. It does not. It sounds like a man asking whether he may stop bleeding through his teeth and finally tell the truth. “No,” you say, because pride is a sickness and you are apparently violently ill. “But continue.”
That earns a short, helpless laugh from him. He reaches into his coat. He draws out the onyx ring. You recognise it at once. Old gold. Dark stone. The ring you saw at Wrotham behind glass, untouched and waiting. Your mouth goes dry. He looks at the ring in his hand, then back at you. “I went to Wrotham this morning.” You swallow. “I opened my mother’s letter.”
Something in your face must change, because his expression softens—not in triumph, but in recognition. He knows exactly what that admission costs him. He comes closer. Another step. Then another. You do not move. “You were right to be angry,” he says. “At the first ball. At Wrotham. At Halstead’s. I have hidden behind duty so long I speak it even when it is the wrong language for the truth.” His fingers close around the ring, hard enough to whiten at the knuckles. “So I will not use that language now.”
Your pulse is loud enough that you are convinced he can hear it. He stops in front of you, close enough that the roses at your back brush your skirts when the wind moves. “I am not here because of guilt,” he declares. “I am not here because you need saving. I am not here because of gossip, or the ton, or what happened at Halstead’s, though I will answer for all of it if I must.” He inhales deeply. “I am here because I love you.”
You forget to breathe. The garden remains. The house remains. Somewhere inside, Georgina is almost certainly restraining herself from storming outdoors and demanding progress. The world around you does not stop turning.
He keeps going, because of course he does. Because once Seungcheol chooses honesty, he does not do it by halves. “I love your temper. I love the way you hold a room without begging it to notice. I love the way you steady your sisters and think no one sees what it costs you. I love that you challenge me when I deserve it and when I do not. I love that you make me a worse strategist and a better man in the same breath.”
Heat floods your face so quickly it hurts. Your eyes sting. You hate that too. He glances down at the ring, then back to you, and for the first time since you have known him, there is no armour left between you—only a man standing upright inside his hope. “Duty built the arrangement,” he says. “It may have brought me to your door. But duty means nothing to me now if you are not beside me.” His voice catches, then steadies. “I do not want a wife I can protect from a distance. I want you. In my house. In my days. In all the difficult years after society grows bored and turns its attention elsewhere.”
You hear your own voice come out thin, disbelieving, and far more wounded than you meant it to sound. “At Halstead’s, you said what happened at Wrotham was not part of the arrangement.” He nods immediately. “It was not.” He steps close enough now that if you lifted your hand, it would find him without effort. “I said it badly because I was trying to speak like a careful man in a crowded room when I was one breath from saying too much. What happened at Wrotham was not part of any plan I made.” His gaze drops to your mouth and returns, open and wrecked. “That is exactly why it mattered.”
He opens his hand and lifts the ring between thumb and forefinger. The onyx catches nothing. It drinks the daylight. “This is not a claim,” he whispers. “It is not a leash. It is not me asking you to become smaller so I can feel stronger. It is a vow, if you want it. If you choose me. That I will stand with you—and ask you to stand with me.”
There it is. Not belong to me. Not let me save you. Not be sensible. Stand with me. Your throat closes around a hundred answers. Most of them impossible. One of them true enough to terrify you. You look at the ring. You look at his hand, steady only because he is forcing it so. You look at his face and see him without title or plan standing between you: the man from the library, the pavilion, the orangery floor—the man who can be severe as a blade and gentle as prayer at the same time.
You think of Georgina laughing at Wrotham. Of Cecily unfolding, slowly, into herself. Of the weight in your spine easing for the first time in years because someone strong enough to carry the burden offered to share it—and then had the decency to ask instead of assume. You lift your hand. It trembles. “You are still impossible,” you whisper. His mouth curves, shaky and helpless. “I know.”
You take one more breath and give him the answer that feels like stepping off a cliff and landing on solid ground. “Yes.”
He goes utterly still. For one absurd moment, you think he has not heard. Then his eyes close, and the relief in his face is so naked it nearly undoes you on the spot. When he opens them again, they are bright in a way that has nothing to do with sunlight. “Yes?” he repeats, afraid to trust good news while it is still warm. You almost laugh through the tears you are refusing to let fall. “Yes, Seungcheol. Though if you make me repeat myself, I shall change my mind on principle.”
A real laugh breaks from him then—low, startled, alive. He takes your hand with such care your knees weaken. When the onyx ring slides onto your finger, it is cool and heavy and startlingly right. Not possession. Promise. His thumb brushes your knuckles. Then again, as if checking the ring and hand are both real. You stare at it. Then at him. “It’s very severe,” you murmur, because if you do not say something dry, you may cry, and Georgina will never let you live. His gaze follows yours to the ring. “It suits you.” You lift your brows slowly. “That sounds like an insult.”
“It’s a compliment.”
You do the only sensible thing left to do. You step into him. His exhale leaves him hard from the impact. Then his arms are around you—careful for one second, then not careful at all, pulling you in with an urgency that says he has imagined this and feared it and now cannot quite believe his hands are allowed the reality of it. You press your face to his shoulder and close your eyes. He feels like steadiness and surrender all at once. He feels like home. His mouth brushes your hair, then your temple. “I love you,” he says against your skin. This time, you do not hide behind silence. You pull back just enough to see him. Your hand lifts to his face. His eyes close briefly as your fingers touch his cheek. Your throat feels dry, but you force the words through it because this is something you refuse to keep. “I love you too.” The sentence shakes on the way out. It is still the truest thing you have ever said.
His eyes open. Then his forehead comes to yours, and he laughs under his breath—half relief, half disbelief. “Say it again,” he murmurs. You narrow your eyes through tears and a smile that betrays you completely. “Absolutely not. You heard me the first time.”
His mouth curves. “Cruel.”
“You chose me.”
“Gladly.”
He kisses you then. Not with the desperate, incendiary hunger of the pavilion. Not with the wrecking urgency of the orangery. This kiss is slower. Fuller. No less devastating for it. It feels like a vow learning your name. When he lifts his head, your lips are warm and your breath unsteady and the world looks altered around the edges. He rests his hand over yours, over the onyx on your finger. “Stand with me,” he repeats. You look at the ring. At his hand covering yours. “I will.”
He keeps your hand in his as you turn toward the house together, and for the first time in a very long time, the future does not feel like a burden braced across your shoulders. It feels like something you are walking toward—side by side.
“Sister!” Georgina’s voice barrels down the corridor with all the restraint of a thunderstorm. “If you are still in bed, I will personally drag you out by your ankles—We have been waiting ages—Mingyu is arriving!”
You make a strangled sound that is half laughter, half panic, and lift your head just enough for the world to tilt. Linen. Warmth. The dim gold of morning filtered through heavy curtains. And Seungcheol—decidedly, scandalously—under the blankets, as if the concept of interruption is something that happens to other people. You turn your face into your pillow to muffle a laugh, then call back, voice pitched deliberately bright. “I’m coming!”
You feel Seungcheol shift below you, slow as a cat stretching in the sun. Then his head appears from under the sheets—hair mussed, eyes dark with wicked, lazy satisfaction—and the sight of him like this still does something to your lungs that is profoundly unfair. He looks up at you as though you are the only thing in the world worth devoting time to. “So soon, Viscountess?” he murmurs, voice rough with amusement. “I’ve only just started.”
You swat his shoulder, light but scolding, and he catches your wrist, pressing a kiss to the inside of it that steals the edge right out of your outrage. “We have duties,” you warn him, trying—trying—to sound stern. He blinks up at you with feigned innocence that would fool no one who has ever lived under this roof. “We do,” he agrees.
You slide out from under the blankets on sheer determination and the knowledge that Georgina will, in fact, break down your door. Cool air skims your naked skin. You reach for your shift and your stays. Behind you, Seungcheol turns onto his back, utterly unbothered, and watches you dress as if it is a sacred painting and he is the only man alive who understands it. His ring—his pinky ring—catches the light when he lifts his hand, onyx gleaming darkly. Your own wedding ring, the matching half set into gold, sits heavy and familiar on your finger—proof and promise and the quietest kind of devotion. He makes an appreciative sound that you pretend not to hear. “If you keep looking at me like that,” you mutter, struggling with a ribbon that suddenly feels determined to ruin you, “we will never leave this room.”
“That,” he says calmly, “is not a tragedy.” You shoot him a look over your shoulder. He smiles like a man with no intention of behaving. “There are, however, other duties I’m much more concerned with,” he adds, voice softening into something more dangerous. You huff, tugging your gown into place. “Oh?” You try to walk around the bed.
He catches you by the wrist and pulls—gentle, unyielding—and you stumble back toward him with an undignified little gasp, landing on the mattress beside his hip. His hand slides to your waist as if it has always lived there. You glare at him, breathless with annoyance you do not feel in any useful way. “And what duties might those be, my lord?” you ask, daring. Seungcheol’s gaze drops to the place where your ribs rise and fall beneath fabric. His hand follows, settling flat against your stomach with an intimacy so simple it makes your throat tighten. He leans in, close enough that his breath brushes your skin. “Making an heir,” he whispers.
Your mouth betrays you into a smile. Because the words should feel like pressure. Expectation. The world’s oldest demand dressed up as romance. But with him—here, like this—they feel like an exciting premise. A vow spoken in laughter and heat and the knowledge that you chose each other. You cup his jaw and pull him into a kiss that tastes like mischief and the life you built in the wreckage of what society expected. When you pull back, you rest your forehead against his and let your breath mingle with his. “Well,” you murmur, voice gone soft and treacherous, “you know how particularly important duty is to me.”
His laugh is delighted. “I do,” he says. And then he tugs you down into the sheets again—utterly shameless—while outside your door, Georgina continues to shout about the scandal of lateness and the triumph of Mingyu’s return, and the whole castle carries on as if it hasn’t just been handed its favourite sort of truth: that this is what you always meant when you insisted duty mattered.
A/N: Hello mes chéries, with this, book 1 of my new series is finished! It took a bit longer than expected because I did feel some (positive) pressure, but I'm pleased with the results. As always, I hope you enjoyed it! 💟
⚬ pairing: actor! kim mingyu x author fem! reader
⚬ word count: 15.7k
⚬ warnings: (pls read carefully) mentions of food, alcohol, smut warnings: sex against a wall, squirting, oral (f. receiving), v minor possession kink, he repeatedly calls her a sweetheart hehe, switches to his POV sometimes
⚬ genres: fluff, romance, tiniest bit of angst but not really, not to toot my own horn but i fink i just wrote a killer romcom.
jungkook, @jakedustry and @livmarauder make minor appearances!!
not beta read and written in a single day cause im cray cray like that, dont judge!! pleek support authors by REBLOGGING and reviewing our works!
credits: to @strangergraphics for the pretty dividers <3
playlist -
- robbers by the 1975
- borderline by tame impala
- stargirl interlude by lana del rey and the weeknd
author's note: part of my valentine's day event, lmk if you'd want to be tagged :)
There is something about the scalding airport coffee, that you over-saturate with at least double the amount of sugar than what you would usually go for, that always screws all your exhaustion-weighed muscles back into your place and gives you that additional skip in your step as you checkout.
That, when paired with the radiance on your skin and your self-satisfied grin as you feel the weight of your recently completed manuscript tucked proudly under your arm, would make no one suspect that you have just gotten off a sixteen-hour long flight. After a full summer of nursing tans under the West-coast sun and enjoying the Californian lifestyle, it feels so good to be back with yet another story that you want to eagerly share with your team and eventually, your readers.
Talking about the readers…it is definitely strange just how many of them have recognized you and asked for your autograph today. While you do expect such a reaction when something new comes out, it is definitely uncalled for when you’re just simply returning from a vacation. Your latest book was published over a year ago and though it was a best-seller on every lists that matter, the frenzy had since died down only to be reignited again this winter when your fans began fancasting famous actors and actresses when they caught wind about one of the prominent production houses acquiring rights to adapt one of your books on screen.
You didn’t know much about the social buzz, you had learnt better than to go online to gauge fan-reaction when it comes to your art. But you do know the name that often seems to pop up when it comes to the dream casting of the male leads of your books.
Kim Mingyu.
Arguably one of the most sensational names in the current cohort of young actors with an unimaginable fan following across all social media platforms and a generational talent backed by critical acclaim.
People—your readers—always tell you just how similar he is to the romantic leads that you write.
Take the current one for example, who is hovering near baggage claim with a dog-eared paperback of one of your best-sellers while you sign autographs for her and her sister.
“Any news about the cast for ‘The Art of You’?” she asks.
You politely shake your head, even if there is some news about it, you are yet to turn your work phone back on to read the texts or emails from Hunter, your manager, pertaining to the subject.
“It’s still in the talking stages.” You answer, accepting another paperback to sign from the guy beside her.
“Well I don’t know if you saw…but Kim Mingyu was seen wearing this coffee-stained white cable-knit sweater at dinner that totally reminded me of Matthias from that first date scene in ‘The Art of You’ when Allie spills coffee over him,” she squeals. “He had the classic Matthias tortoise-shell glasses on too!”
Your fingers stutter around the pen, it is such a peculiar outfit—the sole reason why you decided to write it in was the distinct nature of it and its relevance to that specific scene and storyline. It is certainly odd that someone with a full team of stylists would be caught wearing something like that in a similar setting.
“Oh,” you give her an awkward laugh, “is that so?”
When she nods eagerly, expecting you to say more with her camera pointed right in your face, you feel yourself flush even deeper. This—the recording, the unforeseen prodding—this is exactly what you did not sign up for when it comes to being a published author.
You lug your bag over your shoulder, watching your manager Hunter drawing closer and closer to you behind the sparse huddle of ten odd people that have surrounded you.
“That’s a weird coincidence.” You mumble to the girl who is still expecting a better response from you, before adjusting your sunglasses and letting Hunter pull you closer to herself.
But before you can fully walk away from them, you catch a round of murmurs between the girl who was recording you and her friend.
“She totally got flustered when you said his name!”
“I know right? I think it’s true.”
“What a fairytale if it is…”
⸻
You don’t even wait for her to fasten her seatbelt before you ask Hunter, “What was that about?”
She clears her throat. Odd.
Because Hunter never clears her throat like that.
“Just some fans…y’know, excited to see you.”
“No, that was definitely very strange,” you say, already unlocking your work-phone to go through any important emails or texts that you must have missed. There are none. “Awh, come on Hunty, just tell me what it is! I don’t see anything specific in the mail.”
Hunter peels her eyes off from the road, only momentarily, to give you this very plastic, very fake grin.
“I think it’s best if you hear that from your beloved publicist.”
Instantly, you feel all the radiance and heat that you had nurtured under your skin on your vacation perspire at the back of your neck.
“Is–is it something serious?” you ask, “No, but…Jungkook would tell me if something terrible happened on the publicity front, won’t he?”
Hunter sighs, rubbing her brows with this given-up look she gives you each time you show even an ounce of trust towards your friend and publicist Jeon Jungkook.
“All I’m gonna say is this,” Hunter says, slowing the car down at the red-light, “you trust that bunny-teethed boy way too much.”
Your head oscillates from Hunter, your manager, on your right to Khadija, your literary agent on your left before finally setting on your publicist whose ears are turning pinker with every moment passed without any words from you.
You try to exert authority in the room—you are their employer after all—by tightening your posture and holding your head high, but your sigh betrays you by shuddering right before you speak.
Three pairs of eyes turn to you, concerned and anticipating.
“A dating rumour.” You repeat Jungkook’s last words from before his smile had disappeared, bit by bit, as you sank down on the seat you are currently seated on when he said:
‘Oh, nothing serious. Mingyu has been spotted wearing and doing shit that is so much associated with you and your works that people think something’s going on between the two of you. Just a dating rumor.’
“A dating rumour.” You let your head fall back, contemplating consequences.
Beside you, Hunter snorts. “Except it isn’t “just a dating rumour” when the studio wants to milk this by casting Mingyu in the lead role for ‘The Art of You’.” She turns to you, “See I told Jungkook to control this when it started…I knew something like this would happen.”
In front of you, your publicist scoots closer, trying to garner your attention away from your manager before she fully convinces you to fire him.
“But think about it!” Jungkook insists, “these are just fan-made theories from your readers that have no validity to them…it only stirs up interest among public and if the studio does decide to cast him, that only means more sales for us because his fans would certainly be rushing to their nearest bookstores to get your books to look for ‘clues’.”
Jungkook gives you an expectant look, before conclusively adding with a shrug.
“His fans will gravitate to benefit you, your fans are already doing him a favor by hyping him up as Matthias—that’s basically cross pollination. What’s the harm?”
Beside you, Khadija quips in, “The harm is, Jungkook, that I am trying to have the literary industry take her seriously. Dating rumors with a world renowned actor only brings unwanted attention to her personal life…and while it might work for actors, it is never favorable for authors.”
Hunter, who has been quite beside you for far too long, rests her head on her fist and sighs, “You can never write a character that’s an actor if this gains more wind than it already has. Scandal, scandal. Drama, drama.”
“Not just that,” Khadija adds to it, “in fact every book you write about romance will be taken by the public as a morsel of your love-life. It’ll be all ‘oh did she write this about him?’ and nothing more.”
You stare at Jungkook with a worried frown, waiting for him to present something more concrete than just ‘higher sales’ in defense of these very valid concerns about the long-term consequences of this little rumor.
Jungkook straightens in his chair like he’s been waiting for this exact cue, palms pressed to his knees, eyes wide and earnest.
“Okay, okay,” he says quickly, holding up both hands before either ladies on your side can berate him more. “I hear you. I do. And you’re not wrong. All of that could happen. But it also doesn’t have to.”
Jungkook powers through anyway. “First of all, no confirmation. No denial. We don’t say a word. We let it fizzle on its own because people on the internet have the attention span of a goldfish with Wi-Fi.”
“That’s optimistic,” Hunter mutters.
“It’s strategic,” Jungkook shoots back, then turns to you again. “Second, this isn’t a scandal. There are no blurry photos, no secret dinners, no leaked texts. The man wore a sweater and drank coffee like a civilian. That’s not dating, that’s…autumn.”
Khadija’s eyes widen with disbelief. “That is not the only thing that has happened, you—” she turns to you, “he’s only mentioning the sweater incident because you heard about it at the airport. There have been far weird consequences…it’s almost like Kim Mingyu is campaigning to get the lead role for all your books.”
“Yeah, tell me why did that man have a whole magazine photoshoot wearing a pink linen shirt with blue orchids in a museum out of all places like that’s not exactly how Nathaniel proposed to Evie in your book ‘Method loving’.”
Jungkook jumps in to defend the guy like Hunter just personally offended him, “okay that magazine photoshoot was not—”
Hunter cuts him off, “she’ll always be known as the silly little romance author who—”
“Okay I am going to stop you there because I have so many opinions about the phrase ‘silly little romance author’.”
“Oh get over it, you know what I meant.”
“Enough you guys!” You finally stand up, your hands firm around your hips. “I have heard enough.”
You bite your lip as your team shifts around you uncomfortably.
“I don’t think this—me being linked to a superstar romantically—is a good idea. It has too many long term shortcomings.”
You cross your arms before your chest, fixing Jungkook in his place in front of you, “Kookie, this should have been handled way before it snowballed to this extent. But bygones are bygones, I want you to handle the narrative before my new manuscript gets green-lighted to be released and before the production for the movie begins.”
Jungkook slumps a little, but nods regardless, already pulling his phone out to make calls and do what he does best. Hunter gives him that ‘told you so’ smirk meanwhile Khadija has already forgotten the discourse as she flips through what is going to be your next best-seller.
It has been such a weird day. And while you were basking in the sunshine trapped deep inside your skin and the feel of the warm beach sand loose under your toes just a few hours ago, now all you want to do is take a suffocatingly hot shower, draw your curtains tight and sleep all the jet lag away.
But before you leave the living room as your team scrambles to handle the slight damage and prepare for all the big plans that would soon begin unfolding now that you’re back in business, you turn over your shoulder to give them one last verdict.
“Call the production house and tell them that I request them to cast literally anyone as Matthias but Kim Mingyu.”
Turns out, it is not so easy to just pick and choose the actors of your choice for your own story when a studio that is about to invest millions into it is involved. Especially not when the smarty-pants with finance degrees from Harvard and Yale at the said studio have already made predictions about the potential hefty gains that a particular casting would bring in based on the current metrics.
After a whole week of back-and-forths with the studio representatives over emails and calls that lasted for hours to no avail, they have invited you in for one last-ditch attempt to convince you about Mingyu because a sole disagreement is definitely not worth stalling such a profitable project over.
You enter the elevator in a daze, mumbling a quick 'thank you' to whoever was holding it for you without looking up from the freshly painted pink ribbons on your nails as you contemplate.
When you had spoken with the director and the casting manager some four days ago about considering someone else apart from the popular fan-vote by citing the example: ‘I mean, everyone wanted Sabrina Carpenter to play Rapunzel but that didn’t happen, how about we consider someone else too? Someone new?’, they had tried to make peace with you by saying they’ll be casting a new face for the female lead.
And when you still insisted, they had told you that upon your earlier request, they had reached out to the agents of the actors whom they deemed would be a good call but all of them were either unavailable or nervous due to Kim Mingyu’s interest and his name being associated with the project for so long—which was just a professional way of saying that the (not so) little shit was most probably threatening other actors from taking the role.
Your nails dig into your fist at the very thought of such blatant bullying.
You are supposed to meet the director along with Kim Mingyu today to work out whatever it is that is worrying you. And even though there is a certain stubborn part of you that is convinced that there’s no way you can be at complete peace with this casting, you are open to the possibilities.
The elevator door opens with a ping and you realized you never pushed the button for the floor that you were supposed to be on. Yet, here you are regardless. Perhaps the person in the elevator was also going to the same floor as you.
Whatever.
You begin walking out of the elevator and towards the director’s office, feeling how the weight of someone’s presence around you still hasn’t shifted. You clutch your bag hard, not because you think it is about to be snatched in this multi-billion dollar building, but because you are intrigued about the person who has been walking just two steps behind you. Perhaps they are going to the room adjacent to the one you are supposed to be in, that would explain it. But you are too shy to look up and see for yourself who it is…an awkward eye-contact, that tight-lipped smile and a stuttered ‘hi’...you’re doing everything to avoid it.
By the time you reach the director’s office, you expect your companion to keep walking further. But a bigger, strong hand grabs the doorknob, twists it and opens the door for you. It is then when you blink up, confused…only to be greeted by a watered down version of the dazzling smile that has been a staple across billboards and advertisements ever since his debut in a blockbuster hit.
Kim Mingyu.
An unmistakable shiver runs down your spine at the sight of him so close to you. You look and feel so small compared to him. Not just in size, but the very charismatic and open warmth of him that is so large that it feels like a hug even though he isn’t touching you.
He smirks, tilting his head just slightly and the world tilts towards him—you feel your own gravity tipping further and further into him to a point that you have to clutch the doorway to station your balance.
“After you,” he mumbles in a gentle voice.
Your head jerks from his face, to the empty office, to the elevator then back to him.
“You were…in…” you point to the elevator, “oh my gosh I’m so sorry I didn’t notice.”
“Yeah, you have pretty poor spatial awareness.” He laughs, nudging you in and once you are both inside the office, he closes the door behind with a soft click.
You wait for him to say something else, or give you a cue…anything. But he doesn’t. He simply walks around the small table, eyeing the several magazines and begins flipping through the one that has his face on its cover.
So cocky.
“I guess we are both before time.” You mutter under your breath, checking your wrist-watch before slipping your bag off your shoulder and taking a chair.
As if just like you, he had been waiting for a cue as well, you hear a chair scrape against the floor as he sits down after you.
Is he nervous?
You get the answer to that question when he slumps back with that comfortable kind of ease that makes the office seem like his bedroom. The way his legs stretch on either side of your tightly pressed ones, almost bracketing them under the table without touching doesn’t go unnoticed by you. It is such a simple gesture, but it eases you nonetheless.
You busy yourself with nothing on your phone, just opening and closing your text messages, trying your best to conceal the shiver in your fingers from him. You don’t look at him, not properly at least, but the two times that your eyes were able to make it past his broad chest and onto his face, you caught that soft smile as he watched you.
“So,” he says lightly, finally breaking the silence, “why don’t you want me to be in your movie?”
The question prompts you to look at him, your eyes wide and mouth slightly parted at the directness. Before you can rush to smooth this over by throwing some half-lies and diplomatic reasons at him, you notice the amused twitch in his lips and that playful glaze in his eyes. It makes you stare at him, for some reason, like it is irresistible not to.
Perhaps that is why he is such a successful actor—one cannot simply not look at him.
And because you are staring with such rapt attention, you finally catch it.
The slight mullet.
The linen white shirt.
Your mouth drops open…because he looks very much like a medieval Prince who has been cursed to live in the current timeline where he falls for an eccentric librarian who believes that her aunt’s forgotten library is a time portal in itself—which is exactly the plot of the book that you have just finished writing on your vacation and which is currently being edited to be released.
If someone had photographed him coming here looking like this, or if he decides to grow the mullet even more and lean into that Princely look, you’re going to have problems. A very specific, a very personal one because this would only stir the already overheated pot more.
And here he is asking you why don’t you want to be associated with him?
Stupid.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid!!
You realize the intensity of what kicking an actor as big and influential as Kim Mingyu might entail only after you have already hit his shin—hard—with your wedged heel.
He instantly recoils his leg away from you with a confused scowl. “Did you just…” he blinks, “what was that for!?”
“It was an accident.” You hiss.
“No it wasn’t! You totally kicked me deliberately.”
“Well maybe stop spreading your legs in other people’s spaces!”
You can only wish he realizes the metaphor hidden in your statement—you need him and the mention of his name around you to be gone.
Whatever banter that could have happened soon dissolves when the door creaks open and the director Izabelle, her assistant and the casting director join you with their polished smiles which are enough to tell you that they have come armed with all the tricks they can use to make this work.
But you are a tough cookie—at least that’s what you tell yourself even though you are unable to scowl strictly, like how you planned to, and end up smiling at them instead.
Mingyu is already in a much better place confident-wise as he reaches forward to give them all friendly side hugs asking questions about their health, family and things that only people who have worked closely together might ask.
You feel awfully a lot like an outsider in a room of people who are meeting to discuss something that you created.
Thankfully though, Mingyu doesn’t mention your weird behavior, just shrugs and ropes you into the conversation by saying ‘yeah we were just talking about that’ on some topic that you definitely weren’t talking about.
Once everyone is seated, you feel the energy shift a little. The discussions go on for a better part of the next hour with not a lot of inputs from Mingyu beyond an occasional grin that he shoots your way every time you talk about Matthias. So far, the discourse has yielded nothing concrete because you stand your ground about wanting a new actor to play Matt and Izabelle presents pretty compelling arguments against that.
So you re-strategize.
“If he’s casted, then people will just see Kim Mingyu, not Matthias Knight.”
The director’s assistant intervenes with the stats he must have jotted down on his tablet. “Uh actually, our social media intern Olivia ran surveys and arrived at the conclusion that people are very much against anyone who isn't Kim Mingyu to play Matthias.”
Across from you, the actor shoots you a wink.
“You believe your interns more than the writer of the story herself?” You feign offense.
The assistant’s eyes widen as he scrambles to apologize. “That’s not what I—”
“So are you concluding that I can not play Matt without even seeing me act?” Mingyu interrupts, straightening his spine up to appear more serious, “I would say you are making unfounded assumptions against me if I didn’t know any better. Do I not ‘look’ like Matt to you? Because I have read him, and I know I can act like him.”
You roll your eyes, “Why are you even here, Mingyu? Shouldn’t it be your agent doing these negotiations while you go try to start new rumors about us.”
A weighted silence engulfs the room. You didn’t mean to rip that band-aid off unwarned, you wanted to give him the benefit of doubt…but you’re also tired of everyone tiptoeing around the obvious elephant in the room.
Mingyu blanches, scratching the back of his neck and shrinking a little. “Is it that bad?”
The director Izabelle's eyes oscillate between you both, then to her assistant. “Wait, am I missing something?”
The casting director purses her lips tight, gesturing between you and Mingyu in this specific way with a quirk of her brows. Recognition flashes across the director’s face.
“Oh…that,” she gulps, turning to you. “Glad you brought that up. We actually sensed that the recent gossip might have been the reason behind your aversion. But we actually have some solutions that we’d like to suggest.”
You shift in your seat, ignoring the weight of his eyes from across the table.
Izabelle's assistant takes the cue to start explaining. “Before that, we have some clarifying questions. Are you both dating anyone currently?”
“No.” You both speak in unison.
You weren’t expecting Mingyu’s answer to put you at ease—but it does. Maybe because it makes you worry less about some random partner of his hating your guts for how the internet swoons over the mere idea of you and him.
“And you are vehemently against the idea of people linking you with him romantically?” The question is directed to you.
“Precisely,” you answer, your tone clipped, “it is too damaging for my career in the long term.”
Before the assistant can speak further, Mingyu interrupts him.
“Scared of the spotlight?” He teases, circling the ring on his pinky with his thumb.
“No.” you deadpan, “scared of the reputation of being an ex-girlfriend who writes sad books about how a superstar broke her heart.”
“Why are you betting against us? You could be the girlfriend who writes happy books about how love triumphs all.”
“We aren’t dating, Mingyu.” You draw that line. “I write about fictional people. Not you. Not me. Characters. And I’d rather remain that way.”
You know he was only teasing, but watching his smile fade by a beat makes you feel a little triumphant.
From your right, the assistant clears his throat drawing both your attention towards himself, “so, circling back to the issue at hand…since you are so against being associated with him, we are planning to crush out that rumor not by remaining silent or making any major statements, but through something that feels genuine and believable.”
Mingyu’s fingers stop thrumming against the table, and it is only when it halts that you realize that whatever tune he was playing against the wood felt so relaxing to your ears.
“How so?” He asks.
This time, it is the director who answers, “How about the two of you present yourself as these really great friends to the public? We can push the story that you two met at a party and became friends, she began reaching out to you to ask you questions about the acting industry and your experiences to research for a book she was writing and you got close. That’s it. Don’t act like lovers, but don’t try to avoid each other either.”
The assistant adds, “yeah our intern Olivia, also concluded from her research that any hushed out narratives only fuel the general public’s intrigue and if you both appear as ‘just friends’, the interest might soon die down.”
“To seal it shut,” Izabelle says, “we can also have Mingyu romance the actress we cast as a publicity stunt. The chemistry between the two leads will intrigue the public more than that between the actor and the author.”
You feel a pang of something hot and heavy drop down in your gut when she says that, even though it shouldn’t.
Mingyu shakes his head slowly as he gives his first serious input since this meeting started, his tone heavy with that sense of finality that leaves no room for negotiations.
“I don’t do P.R. relationships.”
Oh…so this is where he draws the line? He has problems being shipped with his co-star which is often harmless and even motivated—but not a single one when he was giving the internet all that fodder by cosplaying your characters.
“That’s fine,” the director raises her hands in surrender, “whatever makes the two of you comfortable. Just let us know if this sounds good?”
You wrap your arms around your midriff, slouching a little. You fiddle with your pendant, trying to make sense of your thoughts and make a decision amidst this unspoken tension that has settled in the room and weighs down on you most of all the others.
The director tries one last ditch attempt. She calls your name softly, “Look…we really want to make this movie and this issue is very fickle and manageable. The production house is dead set on casting Mingyu as the male lead, it’s too profitable to ignore.”
“And I really want to act in this movie.” Mingyu adds sincerely, his voice not at all authoritative, but a kind plea instead that pulls at your heartstrings.
Usually, you are very good at sensing things of that nature, but nothing in Mingyu’s soft request is accompanied by any ulterior motives. If anything, it seems like he is an honest admirer of your stories who wants nothing more than just to grab a chance of being a part of it when the opportunity has presented itself. Even though you know the production house is certainly being a little manipulative in this case, you are also aware of the truth that saying no to this might disappoint a lot of people—fans, investors, him.
But would it disappoint you? You, who had no real visions about a dream cast or things of that nature when the offer of turning your book into a movie was made to you. You don’t harbor a grudge against him, not really. In fact, you would be lying if you said that your heart didn’t surge with this warm, fuzzy, prideful feeling for a second when you got to know that the biggest actor in the scene right now was interested in and being considered for the role.
You draw in a deep breath, and hear someone slide something towards you. Mingyu passes you a glass of water with a low smile. “I swear I am not that annoying of a company…you just have to hangout with me a little and lie about being my bestie who lets me proofread her scripts and asks me for insider information.”
That manages to pull an honest smile out of you. You wrap your trembling fingers around the glass, cold condensation settles like relief over your sweaty palm.
“Fine,” you mumble into the glass, an act that causes some of the water to slip past your lips and onto your chest.
Your eyes flick up to him, only to find his own unreadable ones slipping over the curve of your chest as the drops roll down and disappear into the sweetheart neckline of your dress.
You feel your skin heat up under the warmth of his attention and you fluster.
“I can work with that, but only if he loses the mullet.” You announce, but the words aren’t yours…they're hypnotised, curious, needy as you continue staring at him.
Mingyu doesn’t reply to that, just gives you that casual nod with his lips caught between his teeth that makes your stomach clench.
The fourth time you meet him for these orchestrated hangouts is two months into the production. It is one of those high-end cafes whose clientele includes anyone who is a someone. Playback singers to pop icons, all stripped off their usual glam and performance just sipping on the ridiculously overpriced matcha for brunch.
You’ve never been to places like these before—you never had to. Even if they might have your book waiting face down on page 203 back home, anyone who isn’t a superfan of yours passes you without as much as a second glance for they don’t recognize you by face.
But it is different with Mingyu. With him, you cannot simply go to the local sandwich shop to ‘catch-up’. Because one, it is too performative and raises suspicion against the two of you only doing this to make a point when the pictures come out. And two, it is impossible for him to not get swarmed in public.
So Jungkook, your publicist, along with the public-relations team hired by the production house is tasked with searching for places like these where the paparazzi are always on the curb at some distance waiting like vultures with cameras while the indoors are private and quaint enough for no one to really bother you.
“I like this place because of the ambience.” Mingyu says, scarfing down the scrambled eggs you couldn’t finish and wordlessly slid towards him.
Your fingers don’t pause at your keyboard as you continue reworking the prologue for your final draft.
“I like it because I don’t have to pretend to talk to you here.”
You hum, remembering how your cheeks ached after all the fake smiling you had to do when you last hung out with him in public knowing full well cameras were pointed at you.
It is rare for the two of you to do this alone—usually, you have Hazel, the actresses cast against him as his love interest, along with you as you pretend to be just a bunch of friends hanging out after work and bonding over common interests.
But today, Hazel bailed last minute citing a mean headache that made her want to rest until her next schedule.
So here you are, hanging out with the guy you were rumored to be dating. The social media intern was right though, the rumor did die down when it lost all its heat because the real spice—the hidden signs, the speculations, easter eggs and drawing links—is all gone, vanished into thin air.
So far, only Mingyu has been the one who was asked about it directly during one of his press tours because Hazel is too new to be getting interviewed in the industry and all the rare interviews that you give usually stick to the literary theme and is often approved by Jungkook before getting to you.
Mingyu handled it well, you’d give him that. Such a great actor, his body language didn’t falter, not even once, while he gave them the parroted story about your friendship with enough charm and ease that it convinced most shippers to leave their accounts vacated.
Across from you, he finishes the last of your bagel before making a low sound that is akin to a whine.
“Why are you so mean? This is the third time you’ve gone for me, unprovoked, in the last hour.”
You sigh, adjusting your glasses up your nose, “why are you so loud? This is the fifteenth time I’ve told you to shut it.”
That shuts him up. For a full two minutes.
“What are you working on?”
His voice comes out muffled as he rests his cheek on one of his fists.
Your lips twitch as you steal a glance at him from over your laptop—cheeks stuffed full of food as he chews soundlessly, eyes curious and expectant as he waits for you to answer. You had never really pegged him to be so cute…but he is, in that effortless way that makes him so endearing that it annoys you.
Because you shouldn’t be feeling like this.
He is not your friend, not really. If anything, he is just another task, another meeting listed on your Google calendar that you have to mark off every two weeks.
“Wish I could ask you the same but you never work.”
“Come on don’t be like this,” he insists, dabbing a napkin across his lips. “We are supposed to be friends.”
You don’t think twice before blurting out. “You’re not my friend.”
He flinches a little, just a slight twitch and all of a sudden the wall is back between the two of you—up and rigid.
You didn’t know it was possible for a six-feet-two man to look like a kicked puppy, but the heartbreak on his face makes him look so small and harmless.
And it splits you open.
Because you hadn’t meant to hurt him like that…especially when he has been nothing but cordial to you.
“Look, Mingyu…I’m sorry,” you say, a little embarrassed and disgusted at your own snide as you slowly shut your laptop to face him fully. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just…I always choose my friends. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have chosen you; but just that we met upon such unfortunate circumstances and this was thrust upon us. I need some time to make sense of this, that’s all.”
Something delicate flashes over the hurt in his eyes when he nods. You feel his thumb drawing small circles over the back of your palm and you realize that you had reached forward to hold his hand with both of yours while talking to him.
This.
This lack of control over your own emotions and reactions is what has made you so wary of the people around you and the relationships you have with them.
Especially people like him—foolishly open and honest. Those who make life feel so simple and fluid. Those who know how and when to speak something and to whom.
Meanwhile with you, it is all or nothing. You either open your heart to them at moments like these or shut them out so cruelly before they can get a chance to perceive you and have some sort of understanding over you.
Because having someone know you makes you vulnerable. You hate being vulnerable.
You gingerly retrieve your palms away from his.
Maybe it is just a trick that your eyes and the dim lighting of the place plays on you…but you think you see his long fingers stretch a little at the loss of your touch, almost as if he wanted to chase it and hold your hand between his bigger, more comforting one once again.
With him, and his eyes, touch and attention always pulled towards you, you feel magnetic.
“I get it.” he mumbles, drawing and undrawing the strings of his hoodie. “We don’t have to do this so often if that makes you uncomfortable.”
“I think it is the public aspect of it,” you reply, folding your arms under your chest on the table, “I have to put on this act of having known you for so long even though I barely know you, and I know it is so silly because this brunch is precisely the type of opportunity for me to get to know but I…”
You sigh, rubbing the heels of your palms over your eyes. “I am sorry I am complicating this.”
“No you’re not,” he shakes his head, “acting can be draining, especially if you don’t feel the part you are assigned.”
You can see this additional layer of carefulness around him now… it is truly admirable how quickly he was able to adapt himself to make this easier for you once you told him what the problem was. You can hear caution laced in everything he says, like he is afraid of saying something that might push you further away from him and into a shell that people around you try to break all the time. But he doesn’t.
The two of you work in silence for a few minutes after that—him reading and replying to some emails on his phone while you struggle to put what you feel and what you want the readers to feel by proxy in words. You haven’t written anything worthwhile in a long, long time.
Occasionally, a few people stop by your table for a brief conversation with him as they come in or leave. All of them from the industry, all of them Mingyu’s friends. You do not stare at them, not obviously at least. But you do steal glances, your fingers pausing over your keyboard here and there to focus better on their effortless conversations. Pleasant and light and almost joyous.
Maybe it is just him making it easier for people around him to come talk to him, to adore him.
Or maybe it is just everyone except for you who realize that not every relationship is bound by rules and expectations…that sometimes, things just flow.
You give up when no matter how hard you rack your brain, you still can’t come up with a proper opening.
Watching you begin to pack, Mingyu signals for the attendant and after paying for the meal and a hefty tip, he wordlessly slides your bag bulging with your books, planners and computer over the table and slings it on his shoulder.
He doesn’t really reach out for you beyond his usual moony smile.
You halt before he can open the door, placing your hand over his own at the doorknob.
“I want to feel the part.” You say, watching his brows dip in confusion. So you clarify, a bit slower this time, “what you said earlier about not being able to act if you don’t feel the part…well, I want to do it, feel like your friend, I mean.”
You can’t stop fiddling with the sleeves of your oversized jacket, but he looks so cool like he always does. No weird tension, no big deal at your little dramatic rant that could have just been a ‘Mingyu I want to be your friend but I hate that we have to do this for cameras.’
He just reaches down for your hand, squeezing it between his long fingers like telling you without words that he is very glad you asked.
“I’d love for you to feel like that.”
You don’t try to remove your hand from his hold this time.
“How about lunch at my place this weekend?”
(mingyu’s pov)
When you had invited him for lunch, it slipped your mind that you already had plans with Khadija, Jungkook and Hunter to go out for drinks on the weekend.
But this was your first attempt at forming something meaningful out of this situation that was birthed from chaos and mess. So you decided to meet with him anyways and after a full noon of cooking together and eating just half of all the dishes you had experimented on with him, you find yourself rushing to get ready in your room while he lounges outside on the couch in the living room, finishing the last bit of hummus that he had to salvage after you messed it up twice.
“I am so sorry for doing this Mingyu,” you huff out, getting out of your room in the shimmery pink scarf that you have tied for a top and your favorite pair of denim that hugs the soft dips of your curves without suffocating your flesh.
He peers his head over the armrest of the couch as he half lies on it, his mouth slightly parted with his long, dark hair falling messy over his head. You snort at his pleading doglike longing stare as it follows you around while you search for your strappy heels.
If you hadn’t been so busy and actually looked at him watching you, you would have seen him shift uncomfortably at the sight of you—undone and dazed. Like you had done something to strip him of all of his senses just by getting all dressed up in a cheeky outfit and encasing a blushing joy under your skin.
Unaware of the effect you have on him, you flop down on the couch beside him, picking up the two earrings you had been debating between all day long and placing them on either ear before turning to him, “Which one?”
He clears his throat, sitting up straighter and answers in a low voice, barely above a whisper. “This one.” He smiles, pointing to the one with the pearls.
You sigh, satisfied that he chose the one you were leaning towards and put it on. Then, you loop the long chain of the matching pendant between your fingers and begin fastening it around your neck. Or at least, you try to. The lock keeps getting stuck in your strands or you keep losing hold of it.
He watches you struggle, this look of half amusement, half admiration at your little frustrated grunts before scooting closer to you. You feel his longer fingers enveloping your skin as he pulls at the chain and offers, “Let me.”
Wordlessly, you turn your back to him, bunching up the loose waves of your hair in a ponytail. Some of it manages to escape your hold, cascading down over his hands softly. He hitches for a moment, letting himself breathe in the scent of your floral shampoo—just one, little inhale that feels like a homecoming after eons of yearning. In the middle of your bare back, there’s that big knot of fabric tied together holding your top in place and digging a little into your soft skin.
His eyes almost flutter shut, but he clutches the delicate chain of your jewelry and focuses on the little red mole below your left shoulder, using it as an anchor out of his dream where everything is suspended and senseless except for the idea of you in his arms while he kisses that mole over and over again.
“I’m sorry for cutting our day together short.” You mumble that apology again even though he has told you multiple times that it’s fine and you should go have fun. “I should be here spending time with you instead of running around getting dressed and ditching the afternoon we planned.”
“Don’t apologize, really.” He says, placing his palms on your bare shoulders to signal that he is done. “Besides, after getting scolded by you last time I brought work to keep myself busy.”
He flips the script that he has to memorize for the scheduled shoot by Tuesday.
You beam up at the sight of it, “oh, what scene are you guys filming?”
“The one with Matt and Allie’s first kiss.”
“I wanna see what it looks like…did they change it significantly from the books?”
“Uh, not really.”
But you are already practically glued by his side, reading the screenplay held in his hands. The press of your tender body against his rigid one makes his head spin as his mind floods with all the other places in his body that he’d love to feel you against. Your beautiful face between his hands, swollen lips stretched in that shy smile of yours as he kisses you. Your cushy chest mashed against his own—heavy with need as you make out with him on top. Your smooth waist and how good it would feel to hold it while he—
“Show me how you’re going to act this.” You beam up at him with this wonder in your eyes that makes him almost feel guilty of imagining you in ways that speak to the raging desires of the most depraved parts of his mind.
Almost.
Because Kim Mingyu likes you very much…and he doesn’t want to feel shy about wanting you.
If he did feel shy, he wouldn’t have asked around to find out more about you, read every single interview you ever gave and every single book that you ever wrote after getting blown out by one of your novellas that he had read once on set just to pass time.
If he did feel shy, he wouldn’t have asked his long term friend and your publicist Jeon Jungkook for intel about your upcoming books so he could alter his appearance to fit whatever characters you were falling in love with through your words.
If he did feel shy, he would have used his much stronger connections in the industry to shut down the dating rumors long, long time ago.
If he did feel shy, he wouldn’t be so persistent about pursuing you after getting his ego bruised by your sharp humor multiple times.
On the contrary, he’d do anything to make himself deserving to be your lover.
Even if it means acting his ass off and delivering an Oscars-worthy performance in your living room just cause you asked him to, then so be it.
“Sure,” he smirks, “but I need a partner to act this scene out.”
“Yeah I can do Allie’s lines,” you reply, tucking your hair behind your ear and gearing up for the job seriously, like you do not realize that this is a kissing scene he’s talking about…
He hands the script over to you, telling you that he has already memorized his dialogues.
“Don’t expect me to be a professional, I am just going to read this.” You give him a disclaimer, even though your shoulders are practically jumping with your bubbling excitement.
“Alright, let’s go…whenever you’re ready.”
⸻
(the reader’s POV)
You make a show of clearing your throat and begin reading the description of the scene where Matthias is walking Allie back to her dorm from the library during an autumn evening, their last one on campus together.
Your voice slips into a softer cadence as the scene takes shape and Allie finally speaks, “Matt, do you ever feel like different moments of our life have different weights to them?” Your eyes flick up to Mingyu, you don’t have to read this from a script, it is a dialogue that is etched forever in your heart. “Like if you let some of them slip along with the others, something will shatter when they fall?”
“Matt slows down,” you continue, eyes skimming the page, “like he’s afraid if they reach the dorm too fast, something will end before it has even begun.”
Mingyu shifts closer, like the blocking is already written into his bones, and speaks without the paper, without any hesitation. “Sometimes…but then I remember that it is us who assign meaning to these moments and not the other way around, y’know? ‘Define the circumstances, don’t let them define you’ theory.”
Your breath hilts. For half a second you forget you’re supposed to be reading as he continues staring into your eyes. All the worries that you had about Mingyu not being to emulate Matthias evaporate that very instance because this man in front of you… he isn’t the playful superstar basking in his hard earned glory and demanding what he deems fit. He isn’t the skillful actor who has managed to convince half the world that he has been your close confidant for ages even though you have barely known him for two months. He isn’t the clingy guy asking for attention in sneaky ways and finishing off your food with a pout like he was born to.
This is a man in love. With all the hearts bursting pink behind his eyes and that honest smile weighed down by devotion towards the woman in front of him…he is Matthias who has been in love with Allie for as long as he can remember.
They weren’t lying when they said Mingyu is a generational actor because holy sh—
“I know I am gorgeous to stare at, but read your lines!” The mask slips.
“Oh okay,” you splutter, recovering your scattered thoughts. “Allie glances at him…she wants to joke, but she doesn’t. Her mouth parts, but no sound comes out. Then, finally, after they’ve stopped fully, she whispers, ‘I want to define this evening with you Matt.’”
You lift your gaze again, meeting his. The room has shrunk down into a cocoon of warmth and force…a force that is making the two of you shift closer and closer.
Mingyu is near enough now that you can see the tiny crinkle near his eyes when he speaks. “I want to define it too.”
⸻
(Mingyu’s POV)
Matt and Allie are supposed to kiss next. But Mingyu had stopped following the script way back when he forgot he is supposed to be acting after your big, kohl-lined eyes bound his soul and nudged it out of his ribs and into your palms some five minutes ago.
He doesn’t lean in and continues to speak out of script, wondering at what point would you tear your wide, glassy, entranced eyes away from him and onto the script to notice that Mingyu has gone wayward from it.
“I am tired of pretending to be normal about you,” he says, his voice breathy and careful as he wonders if you think this is him improvising Matthias. “I am tired of acting like I don’t want to give this a better name. I am tired of pretending to be just your friend like every inch of my skin doesn’t ache to feel you closer than friends ever should.”
He thinks…no, he knows that you have caught onto him because your lips part with a broken gasp of his name. How can you not? This is your story, your characters, of course you know Mingyu isn’t Matt anymore. He hasn’t been since that very first dialogue.
He didn’t even try to be.
He waits for you to react by shifting away from him like you always do, by scolding him for crossing a boundary you have carefully put around yourself.
But you don’t.
Instead, he feels your fingers shiver like they always do when you’re overwhelmed as they curl around the collar of his dark hoodie and you pull him towards yourself until there is no space left between the two of you.
Your lips, softer than he imagined and slippery with a thick coat of your tinted pink gloss, glide against his own slowly at first. So tender and bashful, like you’re not sure if this is something you should be doing.
But it is precisely what he wants you to be doing.
So he winds his arm around your waist while cradling your head into the other as he deepens the kiss. You blink, startled, when he pulls you so close that you’re sitting on him more than on the couch. But then, he feels you thaw against him as your body slumps over his harder one in surrender. Your strands tickle between his fingers as you continue to explore his mouth with your lips. Eager and hurried one moment, then fragile and uncertain the other.
He feels it in his very bones when you mumble his name against his lips like a prayer right before he angles your face to kiss your cheek and jawline better, your eyes fluttering close at the feeling of your own gloss on his lips now ruining your makeup.
Those same eyes fly open when in a fit of passion, his fingers dig into the flesh of your bottom with this steady heat and he gives it a firm squeeze before flipping you so that you’re flush on your back on the couch as he hovers above you—all ragged breaths and stained mouth.
The cold metal of the pendant he helped you tie gathers under your chin.
Mingyu eyes it with his lidded gaze before dipping his head down and kissing the little pearl encased in its golden shell, effectively planting a hot, open-mouthed kiss on your throat. He moves down to kiss each swell of your breasts as you writhe before returning back to your face to make out with you again.
Your breaths tangle together like hot steam meeting unforgiving fog leaving everything around itself wet and parched at the same time.
For a second, he worries that he’s crushing you with his body-weight—you are so much smaller than him! But you whine like you’re complaining, your brows furrowing with this needy urge when he shifts away. You wrap your thighs around his waist and pull him back closer, all while keeping your mouth attached to him.
Just when you’re beginning to rut against his hips—a small, stuttered movement that refuses to be contained in your shy body—you both hear the loud gasp of someone else in the room.
Mingyu is quicker to recover than you as you simply freeze in this utter mortification, your fingers hooked over his shirt with such intensity that you might rip the fabric off. Mingyu doesn’t pull away from you instantly, but he does make the both of you sit upright, gathering you in his warm arms as Hunter’s eyes bulge out of their sockets.
“Wha…you…wait…” She stammers while you shrivel up.
You’re still tangled with him with your thighs pressed against his and his arm looped around your upper body keeping you straight up as you continue brushing nothing out of your hair.
“I called you but—”
You put an end to the awkwardness when you manage to pull your reluctant limbs away from him, grabbing your purse out of the chair and jog over to her, dragging her out with yourself.
“I was just helping him rehearse a scene!” You explain before disappearing out of the door.
Mingyu wants to call out your name to tell you to enjoy the evening… or maybe that this kiss was nothing short of ‘everything’ for him… or maybe to tell you that you are leaving your house unlocked with him still inside of it.
But the heat of the kiss and of the moments that led up to it has already melted all his words and senses.
Mingyu spends the rest of the evening—all five hours that you’ve left him here alone—cleaning up your space. Of course, he doesn’t dare touch your bedroom. But he does wipe the kitchen counter clean off all the sauces you spilled while cooking with him. He washes the dishes, carefully wiping every single one of them with clean towels before storing them methodically in the cabinets before packing up the leftovers in glass dishes and aluminium foils in your refrigerator. He organizes all the books you were showing him earlier back into their place but not before dusting the entire small library of yours clean. He vacuums the rug in the living room and then sprays disinfectant around all the surfaces just for good measure.
Once the place breathes fresh and smells like a clean home where you could relax better, he allows himself to slouch down on your couch. The same couch where you had held onto him like he was your anchor in that kiss that hit you both like a tsunami. The same couch where you had said his name, moaned for him, like it meant something. The same couch where you told your friend you were just helping him practice his lines at.
The memory of your flustered self blurting out that excuse makes him chuckle.
Do you even realize just how unintentionally sexy you are?
Because if practicing his lines with you always entails the scorching make-out session that had followed, he’d fire all his acting instructors and work with you full time for that little reward.
He hears the fragile giggles and the unfocused click-clacks of heels hitting the tiles behind it before he sees the front door open as you practically spill inside. Your hair is messy and catching between your lips, a kohl on your right eye smudged at the heel of your palm and those little laughs that bubble straight out of your chest, making the entire home throb with a pulse of its own.
With you, life returns to every inch of it and it no longer matters how clean or messy your apartment is.
You try kicking your heels by the door like one would do with their sneakers, getting frustrated with each passing second when they don’t come off. You lean against the doorway, trying to lodge your fingers into them and jerk them away, forgetting that they’re the strappy kind whose straps you had tied all the way up your shin.
He walks over up to you with a smile that is impossible for him to hide and crouches down. One of his large hands comes up to hold your waist as he stations you in place, meanwhile the fingers of the other one work around the thin knotted ropes on your legs, carefully tugging it open. He runs his palm reverently over the imprints it left on your skin and you sigh when your blood flows normally again under the warmth of his touch. Then, he proceeds to do the same with your other leg all while you remain clutching his hair to maintain your balance.
Just as he places the heels in a tidy corner, Hunter enters your apartment too after paying the cab below. Not as drunk, but definitely buzzed.
“Oh, you’re here.” She mumbles, too embarrassed from the earlier encounter as he straightens up and you slump against his chest. “She didn’t drink as much as it seems like, she’s just very lightweight.”
Mingyu feels you smush your face deeper into his cushiony chest, your hot breaths graze through his shirt as you continue taking deep drags of his perfume. He rubs your back like you are something so precious to him at this moment and doesn’t even ask you if you can walk. He simply goes ahead and lifts you in his arms, containing you like you’ve never been before.
Upon Hunter’s instructions, he carries you to the ensuite in your bedroom. She tries to make you stand up straight and brush your teeth while he makes your bed and fluffs your comforter outside. When you continue insisting against it, refusing to coordinate and demanding your computer because you just had an insane idea about a new story, Hunter walks out, clutching her forehead.
“It’s okay, you rest. I’ll take care of her.” He offers without even thinking twice.
Hunter considers it for a moment, but the raging headache makes this seem like an offer too generous to pass. She slips into your bed that he just made, leaving some space for you.
“I helped her change into her pajamas.” Hunter hums, “just make sure she brushes her teeth and drinks some water.”
When Mingyu walks into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar to ease her concerns if Hunter had any, he finds you sitting on the lip of the bathtub, swaying a little while narrowing your eyes to focus on the glaring screen of your phone while your fingers furiously type in your notes app.
Your spectacles are pushed up against your hair, which is obviously making it harder for your eyes to focus. He wraps an arm around you to still you before you can slip into the bathtub and pulls the glasses back in front of your eyes. Instantly, in his embrace, you relax, forgetting whatever new novel you had begun working on as the phone skids out of your fingers and onto the bathroom rug.
He places it back on the sink as you slur, your lips pressed close to his shoulder, “Head is hurting.”
“Then let us take this off.” He says, removing your glasses. “How does washing your face sound right now?”
“Tempting,” you hum, “but it's so cold….”
“We can use warm water baby.”
“And will you hold me? I love being held…especially by someone big and warm, like you. But I live alone so I have no one to hold me.”
Mingyu’s brows jump up in awe as you pout and complain. In your dynamic, he has always been the clingier one, the one who overshares random facts about himself to you at midnight citing the necessity of friends knowing these little details about each other, something you often ignore and leave on read.
You are the smarter one, the wittier one with dry sarcasm and hard set boundaries that you make sure everyone around you knows and respects. Variant and resolute and oh so beautiful even when you hide that bewitching smile by pursing your lips hard.
The fiercely intelligent writer who writes about love like she’s the only one who understands the concept of it. A master of stories who speaks about the underlying themes of her tales that not a lot are able to grasp but when they do, it leaves them aching to create something akin to her works.
But like this, so open and small in your teddy-printed pink pajamas as you stare up at him with your expectant doe-eyes, it makes you look so heartbreakingly human.
And yet, his devotion only surges as he carefully helps you up and makes you stand against the sink between his arms on either side. He doesn’t trap you, he contains you. He keeps you from falling over nothing by holding you by your waist with one arm and brushing your teeth with the other.
“There you go,” he praises when even in your dazed state you follow his command of spitting the froth out.
But instead of rinsing your mouth with the water cupped in his palm, you turn to him, lips still stained with the toothpaste as you grumble, displeased.
“Are you going to do that with her too?”
He blinks, “who?”
“Hazel,” you pout, “are you going to kiss her like you kissed me too?”
A low laugh escapes out of his chest, he brings the water closer to your lips and you obediently comply while he assures. “No sweetheart, never.”
“You are always laughing at me.” Your words come out garbled as you swish the water lazily around your mouth.
“Okay, no talking until we’re done here,” he states, “and I only laugh because one, you are adorable and two, laughing is my nervous tick and you make me nervous.”
He gently splashes the warm water over your face and you clench your eyes shut, letting him wipe your skin with his careful palms before dabbing it with an equally cozy towel.
“Me? I make you nervous?” You ask as he puts little drops of moisturizer over your skin before rubbing it in with his gentle fingers. “Stop shitting me Kim Mingyu, you basically run this world.”
And yet I malfunctions when it comes to you, he wants to say—but doesn’t. Because the more his fingers massage the knots in your shoulders while rubbing your vanilla scented lotion into your skin, the more you doze off against him.
By the time he finally gets you into bed with Hunter, his muscles feel heavy from the confession he has stitched deep inside of himself. It hits him like something inevitable when your breath grazes his fingers as he tucks the comforter over your chest and he realizes just how badly he wants days and nights like these to become a regular occurrence every day. Till the end of his days.
(the reader’s POV)
Things have been weird between you and Mingyu since he hung out with you for lunch and ended up taking care of you when you returned home drunk. You don’t expect it to be back to how it used to be between the two of you, not after you dragged him in for a kiss and almost dry humped him on your couch.
But you also didn’t expect him to bail out on this little picnic situation with you, Hazel and Izabelle, calling it ‘too phony.’
His demeanor towards you hadn’t changed though, not even a bit. But the two of you have since spent only some time together, here and there, on the set and in private, away from the cameras. And when you had steeled your nerves enough to ask him if he regretted kissing you, he had just tilted his head and said no.
That should have been the end of it.
You initiated a kiss in the heat of the moment—he is an attractive man and you were acting out a very romantic scene.
And then he kissed you back in an even hotter moment—because you were all dolled up and again, he was too acting out a very romantic scene.
But it’s not.
Because it feels like things have been left unsaid and incomplete…a painting of something beautiful abandoned midway through.
So, when he texts you, inviting you for this get together he is planning with the team at his place to celebrate the filming being finished halfway, you don’t think twice before letting him know that you want to come earlier than the rest to help him set up and return the favor of him cleaning your apartment and tending to you in your drunk state.
You smooth over your dress one last time before pressing the doorbell to his penthouse expecting a smiling assistant or his manager to open the door. But it is the sight of all six-feet-two of him in a lemon-printed apron dusted with flour that lets you in with his usual grin.
‘I only smile so much because you make me nervous.’
You aren’t sure if he actually said those words to you or if you read them somewhere and dreamed it up.
Regardless, you feel your confidence shrinking with every step you take inside of his house. You are unable to meet his eyes when you hand him the champagne you brought in and only give him a faint, fake smile when he thanks you for it.
What made you think you’d be able to order him around or be sarcastic with him like you used to after you practically used him like your lipstick remover the last time you two were alone?
But this is Mingyu, and this is what he does…making people feel at ease around him is almost a skill inherent to him.
So he works around you without any tense glances or snide remarks, just brimming with joy as he asks for your opinions about what tablecloth would look better with the flowers he had chosen.
You’re both cutting up the fruit for the decoration of the enormous cake he has baked, two hours until the guests start arriving, when your resolve breaks.
“Why do you not come to the scheduled outings anymore, Mingyu? And don’t tell me it’s a ‘schedule thing’ because we had this planned months ago.”
His knife pauses midway through the strawberry. He presses it harder when he answers, “I told you, I think we’re overdoing that now.”
Then, he turns his back to you to open the fridge and check up on the iced-cake even though he did that not more than five minutes ago.
“We’ve made our point,” he says, “no one, other than a handful of obsessive fans who will always be there, is shipping us anymore. It's a forgotten buzz, they won’t even hint at this during the press tour.”
You ignore his explanation. “Is it because I kissed you? Is that why you’re avoiding me?”
He turns around, an unmistakable confusion etched deep into the creases of his face. “What? Where’s that coming from?”
“You tell me.” You snap, pressing the lemon you’ve been squeezing for the meringue harder than you need to. “We only meet in private now—on set! Did I act…did I act inappropriately when I was drunk? Oh God, no…don’t answer that—”
You try to stop the tears but they’re there— fluid, hot and stubborn. You make the mistake of wiping your eyes with the same fingers that you were working on the lemons with. The sting is an instant burn, making you cry out more in pain.
“Oh fuck.” Mingyu is by your side in a flash, leading you to the sink and washing your eyes for you. “It’s okay…it’s okay, just let it out…it’ll subside.”
But it doesn’t. Because your eyes aren’t the only organs that hurt. Your chest has been caving in since that very day, hollowing your ribs and wringing you inside out.
Mingyu helps you until the sour pain dissipates, carefully washing your eyes and wiping your face with a towel—an act that brings back the memories of the night you ruined everything with him by failing to control your extremes.
This is why you don’t let people in. Because whenever you try to, you ruin whatever pure thing you could have had with them by acting reckless.
You bite the inside of your cheek until you feel the metallic taste of blood burst on your tongue—anything to prevent any more tears from slipping out.
But they do and Mingyu only hugs you close into his chest, holding you away from the world, away from your own ruinous thoughts until your breathing evens out. You clutch onto his hoodie harder, because if he didn’t hate you earlier, you know that he definitely does now. He might not even want to hangout with you in private after you just ruined his merry plans for a hearty get together by putting him in an awkward spot and crying in his kitchen just hours before it.
You try to press yourself closer into him, trying to overdose on the feeling of him, on the scent of him before you lose the right to consume it. Before he decides never to speak with you.
You feel his breath fan over your hair when he speaks, “You didn’t do anything wrong…God, how could you ever? I am so sorry for making you feel that you did, sweetheart.”
His palm rubs over your back.
“You’re lying,” you hiccup, “it’s okay, you don’t have to. Just tell me—”
“Shh, listen to me.” He pulls you away so that you can face him and immediately winces at the sight of your red-rimmed eyes and creased forehead. “I wasn’t…I wasn’t improvising that day when I said all those things to you.”
Your fingers curl over his wrists as he cups your face.
“I wasn’t acting. I wasn’t playing Matthias.” he confesses, “everything I said that wasn’t in the script, and even what was in there, it was me talking to you.”
He licks his lips before resting his forehead against yours, “I am not normal about you.”
The image of him from that day on your couch, moments before the kiss, saying those same words that entranced you to act on your suppressed desires towards him, flashes behind your fluttering lids.
“I haven’t been, for long.” He says, “ever since I read the way you write about love. Ever since I saw you lost in your own thoughts in that elevator, too occupied by your own worries to give a damn about who else was in there with you—”
“You didn’t even make a sound!” You interrupt, laughing through tears.
“Because I was too afraid to disturb you,” he smiles, “I held my breath all the way up.”
“Oh God…”
“I am a goner for you…desperate and pathetic…I ache for you to touch me and smile like stupid when you consider me worth talking to because I’m nervous of saying something stupid in front of someone as smart as you. Like even right now, I don’t know if I am able to express my love for you as well as the leads in your books do.”
A broken, ugly sob emanates out of your lips, filling the floaty space between you both. His thumbs come up to catch your tears before they fall onto the ground, like even they are precious to him.
“Words aren’t my thing,” he says, “but theatrics— that’s what I am good at. Good at pretending to be like the characters from your books. Good at pretending to be fine with just being your friend. But not anymore…not after I’ve experienced what holding you feels like. Not after I have felt your body slump against mine, all unguarded yet safe…I can’t—”
His voice dies down, and you sense how it is not always easy for Kim Mingyu to talk, just like how it is not always easy for you to finish all your stories.
But you want to give this one the happiest ending, you want to see the boy with the moons in his eyes in front of you smile like he did when you had kissed him stupid.
So you stretch up on your tippy-toes and bury your fingers into his hair to pull him closer. The kiss this time around is nothing like its predecessor. While your first kiss with him had felt like a test, moody and unreal, this one hits you like an explosion. A confirmation of everything your soul had suspected each time you’d find him looking at you with those dreamy eyes. Like the final bow on a Christmas present that you spent all year thinking about.
Your lips move a little frantic against him, like your body is having a hard time processing this new onslaught of information. Kim Mingyu is in love with you? The idea makes you smile against his lips.
His arms explore the length of your waist before travelling down to wrap around your thighs and then, he pulls you up, making you lock your legs over his hips and behind his back. That deepens the kiss like never before, making your bodies slot so well against each other that your heartbeats begin to sync on their own.
He kisses you like he is completing his confession directly against your tongue, and you respond to it with an eager understanding. The haze he concocts around you is so thick that you don’t even notice it when he has you pressed against a wall.
Only when he removes his lips from yours, and begins to take a step away from you that you feel your back slide against the cold, hard brick surface. His breathing is uneven and hot against your wet lips as he visibly strains himself from something.
But it seems like you are on an agenda to break his resolve when you hook one of your legs around him again, pull him closer and moan against his jaw. “More, Mingyu…please.”
He doesn’t speak, but his hands do wrap back around you like a reflex, grounding you in the present moment. This quiet, surreal tension sits heavy behind his ribs. He knows so well that by “more” you don’t mean that you just want him to kiss you more, but everything that follows too.
Yet, he wants to hear it from you. You can see that desperate plea in his eyes as he hovers around you, not quite touching, giving you space to gather your thoughts and just ask.
Always the gentleman, always so careful with you...especially with you.
“Mingyu,” you breathe, “can we…please?”
“Right now?”
“Right here.” you gulp, “please…I really want to.”
“Fuck sweetheart, don’t beg. I could fucking die for you if you asked me like that.”
“I’ve dreamt about you taking me up against a wall far too many times than I should admit,” you mumble bashfully, feeling the blood rush to your face, but nothing can seem to stop you anymore.
You feel his fingers tighten over your hips as he closes his eyes and sucks in a sharp breath. When he opens them again, the heat from his gaze locking with your needy one sends something dangerous to curl around in your veins and settle into your abdomen like a low flame.
A flame that transforms into a wildfire when places a feathery kiss over your lips before falling onto his knees before you. He kisses you all over your hips, your upper thighs while his palms slide up and down over your smooth legs, making you whimper as heat pools in your core. He keeps his eyes steady on you while hooking his fingers around your underwear which has gotten so wet that it is practically useless and slides them off your legs and stuffs them into the back pocket of his jeans.
You don’t even get a moment to breathe before he is burying his face under the skirt of your dress and kissing your core harder than he has ever kissed your lips.
Your head hits the wall with that first, long swipe of his tongue over your swollen folds and you find yourself bucking your hips in a confused motion when he repeats it over, and over again.
His lips gently wrap around your pulsating clit and he sucks, knocking whatever air was trapped inside your lungs out of your body with a hitched cry.
One of his freakishly long arms comes up, mapping your skin on its way, before settling over your abdomen in a way that keeps you from losing balance as he makes you put your thighs over his shoulders—all while eating you out like a starved man.
“You’re so fucking sweet baby,” he groans as his tongue caresses more wetness out of you, “sweeter than I ever imagined.”
The fact that he has imagined this too makes your head spin, leaving you at a loss of coherent words.
"I think I am going to get addicted to this."
You feel his fingers tighten over your flesh when upon a particular pressure of his tongue over you, you squeeze his face inadvertently between your thighs.
“Mingyu—” you gasp, feeling him place a lazy, open mouthed kiss over your clit before his mouth travels down a little, now teasing your opening with his slick tongue while his nose nudges against your thrumming nub.
He grunts even louder when his tongue slips past your entrance and the sound of it, raw and rough between your thighs, sends you over the edge earlier than you were anticipating. He continues to lick you, throughout your shuddering release, and even as black begins dotting your wide-eyed vision, you trust him to not let you fall as you succumb to this raw pleasure as he continues worshipping you with his tongue to his heart’s desire.
⸻
(Mingyu’s POV)
By the time he is able to convince himself to detach his mouth from your sweet, drenched core, you have gone listless and sweat-soaked above him. Holding himself back from kissing you—any part of you—he realizes, isn’t his strongest skill. He carefully places your legs back on to the ground, holding you by your waist because you keep on quivering, he barely manages to wipe his mouth clean with the back of his palm before you’re slumping against him like you always do when you let your guard down around him to let him unravel you like a miracle only he gets to witness.
You squeeze him hard between your arms, mumbling little ‘thank yous’ and ‘mine, all mine’ while his hands explore your curves, slow and trembling.
He can’t believe he just got to do that…what did he ever do to deserve to have you fall apart in his arms, right on his tongue, like you just did.
His fucked out smile is so full of glee as he buries it in your neck. The tent in his jeans strains harder than ever and judging by how you are basically coiled around him like a second skin, he knows you feel it too.
So it isn’t much of a surprise when he feels your hips begin jerking against him, desperate and erratic. He lodges his thigh between your own, making you yelp as you feel the rough fabric of his denim right against your naked folds. It is so rough and harsh, but you can’t stop rubbing yourself against him, not even when a patch of it begins staining with your glossy wetness.
He lets you rut against his thigh, his tone encouraging when he whispers, “Go on baby, ride me like that…take all that you need from me, it’s all yours.”
You bury your tears-soaked face between his collarbones, your nimble fingers working unfocused over the buttons on his shirt as your second release inches nearer. You are so close to coming that you feel it soak every single nerve in your body, gliding past all twitching muscles as they clench around nothing. Your fingers twist around his shirt, your teeth clamping down on his skin and your nails dig at his biceps but right before the band snaps, he jerks his thigh away and replaces it with his fingers.
The crash is so confusing and overwhelming that you don’t realise he has slipped two fingers past your entrance as the orgasm spirals through you like angry waves lapping the edge of an overflowing sea.
It is only when you clench around him almost suffocatingly that it hits him of how unprepared you are—even after two orgasms—to even handle his two fingers inside of you.
“Babe…” he whispers in your hair, almost apologetically, “are you okay?” He pulls apart, just an inch, to look at your face. “Am I…am I hurting you?”
You shake your head vehemently, “no—no, god, no. Just…slow, please?”
“Of course,” he nods, wiping your tears with his thumb, “of course baby, we go how you say.”
With that, he begins pumping his fingers in and out of you, slowly and steady, until you sigh with the stretch instead of whimpering because of it. He massages your clit with his thumb in tight, controlled circles to ease it even more. And once you’ve stopped flinching each time he scissors his fingers inside of you, he begins setting a maddening tempo and curling his fingers against your walls to find the spot that makes you shake the most.
You double over at a certain brush of his fingers while he’s playing with your fragrant tresses between his free hand. The reaction makes him repeat it, just to test it out…and this time, you choke on your own breath. He smiles realizing that it’s this spot that he should be aiming for when he buries himself inside of you next and pulls his fingers out of you to avoid further stimulating you.
He allows you to catch your breath as much as you can while he slowly undoes the zipper of his denim, keeping his eyes locked on your glazed ones. He’s smiling again, and this time, you know it’s not because he’s cocky, but because he’s nervous of somehow doing something wrong with you.
One of your arms comes around to soothe his neck assuringly as he pulls himself out of the restraint of his clothes meanwhile the other wraps around his length. You move your wrist over it in slight, jerky movements, feeling it twitch and leak at the tip with precum and your mouth visibly waters. His lips part in wonder when you spit on it without a warning, jerking his cock even more before looking up at him with those same, begging eyes.
He swiftly removes your dress in a smooth motion, undoing your bra shortly after to join the rest of your clothes on the floor. His own shirt follows suit, but then he runs out of patience and hoists you up by the curve of your thighs.
It is admirable, how your bodies synchronize in this harmony because you are following all his cues without any instructions by wrapping your arms tight around his shoulders, feeling your sweat soaked skin slide against his tanned muscles.
“Sure you don’t want me to take you to bed?” he asks one last time, sliding his length up and down your folds, coating himself with your excess wetness that leaves no requirement for a lube.
“No, do you?” You reply, before adding in a smaller, more worried voice, “am I too heavy for this?”
“Sweetheart, I can stand here carrying you all day, all night and then some more if it means that I get to bury myself in that irresistibly tight cunt of yours over and over again.” He whispers, kissing you sweetly as you blush, “I was just asking to see if you’re comfortable like this.”
“I am,” you tell him with an honest smile, “now please…just, fuck me.”
His laugh comes out raw and hazy, like smoke when he says, “always so polite, my sweet girl.”
⸻
(the readers POV)
That is the last thing you are able to hear before you feel him angle his cock in a way that just the tip of it enters your fluttering hole. He isn’t even halfway in, but fresh tears are beginning to gather around your lashes because the stretch is a burn you’ve never felt before.
“You okay?” He asks, his voice strained.
“Ye…yes,” you blabber, “don’t stop, Mingyu. Keep…keep going. It hurts more if you stop.”
You think each time you open your mouth, it undoes some latch within him that unleashes something ferocious and dangerous in him. You make a mental note of being vocal with him—it’s not like you have any choice when you can barely keep anything in as he continues filling you with all the glorious length of him.
And once he is fully inside of you, flushed with hips pressed hard against yours, you feel your nails drag against his back as you struggle to make sense of it all sandwiched between his hot, rigid body and the cold tile.
Your ankles lock tighter over the waistband of his jeans when he pulls back only to thrust back in harder. There’s an unspoken urgency now as the clock ticks behind you—one which makes you meet his thrusts by bouncing the best you can while pressed down like this. Hard muscles flex under the tanned skin of his biceps as he aids your movements while fucking you raw against the wall.
His mouth finds yours with a fierce gravity while your bodies move against each other in a drunk tandem of their own. Midway through the kiss, he hits that spot again—the same one that had made you see stars just a few moments ago and this time, when it’s the bulbous tip of his dick that bullies it over and over again, you find yourself squirting all over the place.
He breaks the kiss midway to stare down where your bodies are connected, watching your overused folds stretched out around his thick cock while you continue to drench him.
“I am sorry…I am so…so sorry,” you cry out but do nothing to stop yourself from drowning in this sea of hot white lust.
“Sweetheart, never apologize for that,” he says, his own stomach clenching when you grasp him tighter, “I wanna see you make a mess, it only means I made you feel so good, didn’t I?”
“Yes Mingyu,” you bite down on his shoulder as his fingers come down to fiddle with your clit, “you make me feel so…so good.”
“Then take it baby, take it all like the sweet girl you are.”
It shouldn’t turn you on to the point of insanity when he calls you a sweet-girl while bullying your cunt with his dick until you feel him in your very guts. But it does. God—it does to a point where you lose control over everything when you fall apart again with the prayer of his name riding your lips like it is the only word you ever learnt. In that heady, charged space that reeks of sweat, sex, him and you, he follows suit too, half in you and half out of you as he slips out, jerking himself rough until his hot semen makes a mess between your thighs and over your abdomen.
You whimper at the sticky, warm feeling and the sound twists something carnal in his chest. Your toes barely touch the hard ground below before he is turning you around and having you arch for him bare with your sweaty palms planted over the wall.
You think he is going to fuck you again, like this, from behind. But he just kisses the mole you know you have below your left shoulder and kneels back down. You feel his steamy breath over your ruined core.
“You’re so pretty baby,” he whispers, and you feel his words against your skin as he parts your flesh to reveal the evidence of what just happened to his lustful eyes, “and you’re mine…all of this, all mine.”
(a year later)
You brush your fingers through his hair as he cuddles closer to your chest after your night routine of him helping you put lotion over your body. It is the night before a major literary award show of yours as you relax together with him in your hotel room, barely catching any sleep.
Not because of nerves or excitement, but because your heart keeps doing somersaults inside your chest remembering that little clip you saw before. You’re itching to see it again and you know Mingyu hasn’t dozed off either judging by the little kisses and his attempts to suckle on your nipples through the silk of your nightgown.
So you break your own rule of no phones in the bed after seven in the evening by grabbing it from the dresser and quickly searching for it to play the clip again. You smother him with your chest in the process, but he’d be the last one to complain in this scenario as he grins like an idiot, pulling you closer.
The screen flashes with a bright light in the dark room and he whines when it pierces his tired vision. But you don’t care, you want to hear the pride in his voice again when he had said that…you want to see the way a light pink blush had settled right under his eyes at the mention of it.
It is a short clip plucked out of an interview he gave at the red carpet of an award show last month. The interviewer asks him in a cheery voice towards the end of the segment, “Any celebrity crushes right now, Mr. Kim?”
And without missing a beat, he gives the camera his honest smile, the one he often only shows around you—unpolished, real, nervous, before answering.
“Yeah, my missus.”
Someone snipped it out of the whole interview and posted it across different platforms where it has now garnered millions of views and hundred-thousands of comments. Each time you look at it, you can’t help the warm giggle from bubbling out of your lips as you read through the comments which are all overwhelmingly positive.
‘Never seen him like this!’‘They tried to cancel us for speaking the truth, but we clocked his tea so hard more than a year ago 😭’‘We’ve BEEN telling you guys they were a thing!’‘Wait are they married?? Why is he calling her his missus? Someone explain, English isn’t my first language.’‘imagine finally getting to marry the guy you’ve always written books about, girlie is living everyone’s dream 🤩’
“Okay I am reporting that one for false information because that was the other way around!” You seethe, sitting up as best as you can with his strong arms caging you. “You should hold a press conference to tell them about our love story.”
“Or,” he suggests, propping his chin over your chest, “you can write a book about it.”
“I told you Mingyu, I write about fictional people. Not you. Not me.”
“But don’t you think the world deserves to know our fairytale of a love story?” “Mhmm,” you hum, sliding your glasses on and pulling your laptop onto your folded legs like you used to all those years ago, “maybe I’ll write a short fanfiction on Tumblr about it. Fifteen thousand-ish words?”
⚬ pairing: cinema worker! hansol x fem! reader
⚬ word count: 9.8k
⚬ warnings: (pls read carefully) mentions of food, alcohol, homophobia, misogyny, themes of lavender marriage and class divide, major mentions of war (world war I) and war related injuries, main character death, smut.
⚬ genres: psychological horror, tragedy, romance, 1920s nyc setting.
credits: to @strangergraphics for the dividers, to literal angels on earth @gyuswhore and @shinysobi for being the best beta-readers ever!!
This fic is written for the puttin on the ritz collab by @studiosvt, forever grateful to the team for coming up with such amazing collab ideas and being the most supportive fam ever! <3
playlist
- lo vas a olvidar by rosalia and billie eilish
- exile by taylor swift and bon iver (!!)
- safe and sound by taylor swift and the civil wars
author's note: part of my valentine's day event, lmk if you'd want to be tagged :)
i really recommend reading this one very carefully akshually there are a lot of easter eggs i left hehehe
Prologue
1918, the western french front
He somehow stumbles into a makeshift safe-house. The bullet that had pierced his upper chest is still lodged somewhere between his rippling flesh. Warm, sticky blood oozes out of the deep cut slashed across his chest, splitting his skin apart.
Outside, it is a cacophony of shots being fired and the constant thuds of bodies that follow. He doesn’t remember when was the last time he inhaled air that wasn’t saturated with soot and the metallic scent of blood…or when was it that he looked up and saw a clear sky instead of the orange fumes of fire, death and decay.
There is no sensation in his left leg anymore...just angry violet skin hosting several broken bones within. The iron smell of his own blood and that of others around him swarm his senses as he waits it out.
Just a few more hours.
Ceasefire for the day.
Someone would come and help him. They ought to.
For now, he must find some way to avoid attracting attention with his garbled moans of pain. His fingers shake, or perhaps it’s his vision wobbling with intense agony, as he reaches down in his pocket to retrieve a long, sweat soaked strand of wool. It must’ve been white someday, but now, it is more rusted from dirt, blood and overuse. Yet he holds it reverently between his fingers and begins looping, spinning and tangling it between his digits. The machine guns dull, his vision clears and through the dense war around him, something soft and pure envelopes him.
Between his fingers is now stretched a smiling string figure. A doll. The tear that clings to his lower lash is thicker than the rest, heavier with meaning and memory and love. He carefully bunches the thread up and places it back into his pocket. His chest feels warmer now.
Or perhaps, it's just his shirt soaked with his blood.
(three years later)
Manhattan, New York, 1921
The woman in the turquoise cloche hat rolls her eyes when her weepy husband demands yet another napkin from her. She reaches for her purse regardless, shoving another bunched up piece of clean fabric in his fist for his damp cheeks.
“Keep it down, will you?” she hisses, embarrassed eyes darting around apologetically when he sniffles again.
But the man grumbles something fleetingly unkind about women and their inability to interpret and empathize with art, and ruins another one of her lacey handkerchiefs with an abhorrent mixture of snot and tears.
The woman only shakes her head.
He has always been like this—loudly and pretentiously emotional over things that might barely jerk a half-hearted wince out of her at best.
Now, before one labels her apathetic—she has tried...heavens know how hard.
For him, she has pretended to laugh until her cheeks hurt at the unfunny displays of rowdy caricatures of foreigners at the theaters.
For him, she has dabbed corners of her drier-than-the-Arizona-summer eyes after his colleague’s daughter’s revoltingly off-tuned piano recitals.
For him, she has ooh-ed and aah-ed at the paintings of things that don’t matter simply because he rejoiced when someone validated what he deemed was the reasoning behind the choice of a certain hue by the artist.
But it’s not the early 1900s anymore and she’s no longer his shy, teen bride. They’ve been married for over twenty years, and even the most skilled actresses can perform for so long.
Now she only waits for his seemingly endless sobbing to halt so that she can focus on what remains of the film casting greys and blacks on the ivory sheet.
The movie—sensational among the crowds of her husband’s likeness, and laced with a very predictable ending—that plays in front of her is named ‘Fool’s Paradise.’
What an appropriate name, she thinks to herself while eying her husband clench the fabric in his wrinkled fists and stare wide-eyed at the screen as if it were some holy revelation.
She grows wary of the sight pretty quickly, and returns her focus back on the screen only to be ambushed by the sudden appearance of half a dozen alligators whom the once blind hero tries to fight to win over his lover.
Exasperated, the woman wrings her head away from the screen, from her husband, from the lazy reconciliation that’s bound to happen on screen, counting down minutes until she can leave her seat.
A rosy valentine’s evening—wasted.
As she mulls over her fate, still soured over the now wasted tickets to a new and emerging jazz singer from the orient, Lee Seokmin's show that she had wanted to attend instead of coming to the cinema, a brief movement outside the flapping wooden paneled door catches her eye.
The figure looming outside is hidden under a huge hat, an enormous tweed coat and looks fragile and small…perhaps a young boy?
Strange.
It’s the last show of the day. Then what is he waiting outside for?
His occasional peeping through the gaps puts her on alert. Something about the jittery energy, the nervous fidgeting, the constant hiding and seeking makes her conclude that it must be a pickpocket—there have been way too many of them in Manhattan lately.
The thunderous round of applause, the final few sniffs and the spluttering compliments as the movie ends drown out the alarms ringing in the woman’s head. But she’s already on her toes, determined to corner the supposed crook before he can wipe his hands on the bulging wallets of New York’s nouveau elite.
“Hey, you!” she calls out as soon as she bursts out.
She gears up her throat to scream for help in case the figure attacks her or makes a run for the exit. But her angry exclamation only makes him flinch. He buries his flushed face deeper into the scarf.
Behind them, the cinema-goers have already begun milling out of the stuffy, dark room—immersed deep into the discourse about the actress’s beauty and blissfully unaware of what’s unfolding at the entrance.
The woman takes a closer look, or attempts to, because her captive is already fleeing. But instead of running away, he seems to be sliding towards where she has just emerged out of.
Taking advantage of his lithe body, he attempts to slip inside the now emptying room—no visible solicitation of theft or mischief.
But the woman is smart enough to grab onto the sleeve of his coat, even though he begins wringing his hand.
Something is not right about the person in front of her.
It takes her a moment to realize what it is that grated on her about this overenthusiastic attendant in the first place…the softness of face, the swell of chest under the low buttons of the coat, the doe-eyes…
No.
That’s an absurd thought.
The community here is still too conservative for that.
So she presses on:
“The show has ended.” She exclaims, “you cannot go inside now.”
Another short lived struggle. Another hand tightening over the coat. The flesh under her fingers seems too soft to belong to a…
“Let me go.” The person grumbles.
Any doubts that were holding the woman away from believing what her gut had concluded melt away the moment her captive lets their voice slip out. The person in the woman’s stronghold isn’t some naughty pickpocket or a bony little servant—but a young girl dressed in a man’s clothes.
The woman lets her go at once, and when she does, a soft strand of the girl’s hair escapes from her hat which she quickly tucks back in and disappears inside the dark room leaving the woman more confused than she was before.
The projector inside the room is dying slowly—nothing more than a haggard glow trembling in the stale air—and her husband is glancing impatiently at his pocket watch as he waits for her outside the theater.
“What was that about?” He asks, only having witnessed a sliver of the encounter. “Who was the boy?”
“Pippa’s son.” The woman lies, tightening her shawl over her shoulders. “Told him to say hi to his mother for me.”
⸻
You look around one last time.
Fifty odd seats. All empty.
Still, just for precaution, you crouch down and search underneath them too.
Once you’re satisfied that you’re alone in the room with a flickering projection of ‘Thank you!’ on a washed blanket, you finally clutch the hat in one hand and the scarf in another and free yourself from the claws of their itching, swampy heat.
Your skin sighs deeper than your lungs, the scarlet flush watering down to a faint pink as you begin unbuttoning the coat several sizes too big on you. The air inside the room is stagnant and salty with all the tears it has witnessed today, but it seems as good as a fresh morning’s breeze when it settles in your hair.
Maybe it’s the freedom from your hefty paraphernalia, maybe it’s the tingling, funny feeling beginning to climb its way from the butterflies in your stomach to the fireflies in your chest—but you find yourself giggling mere moments before he creeps up behind you to cage you and pull your back flush to his chest.
“Hansol!” you laugh, even when nothing about the little kiss he presses against your temple is funny.
But perhaps laughter is the only sound of homecoming.
“You almost got caught there.” He remarks, resting his chin over your shoulder and slipping his fingers over your own to undo the last few buttons of your coat.
You help him take it off you by shrugging your shoulders out, “I thought she was about to screech and cause a scene.”
“Well, you are unchaperoned and cross-dressed in Raymond’s cinema house.” He drapes the coat over a seat lazily, “and if that’s not scandalous enough, you’re trespassing at midnight.”
“Oh, please.” you huff out, plopping onto the cushiony seat and tapping the one next to you for him, “there’s women out there finishing off their evening shifts right now and having a smoke in the parlour next door. Not my fault your employer is still stuck at least half a century behind.”
Hansol tries his best to block your view of the giant pamphlet peeling off a corner on the side wall that reads, ‘NO UNCHAPERONED WOMEN ALLOWED PAST SIX IN THE EVENING’ among other outdated rules.
But you read it out loud, like you do every night you come and visit him. Always alone. Always disguised.
“You know Raymond only keeps that up because he’s terrified his clientele will complain…the people around here are still too traditional about stuff like that,” he mutters, sinking down beside you. “If it were up to him, he’d let dogs and ghosts in, so long as they paid.”
“And yet,” you say, plucking an invisible piece of lint from his lapel with theatrical delicacy, “here I am. A woman. A scandalously unaccompanied one at that. And your ghosts-and-dogs-loving boss would have a fit.”
Hansol brushes a hand, warm and careful, against your jaw.
“You aren’t unaccompanied. Not anymore.”
“That’s what makes it worse,” you tease. “I’ve been accompanied by a criminal.”
“A criminal?” He blinks.
“Aiding and abetting, Hansol. Harboring a fugitive in your cinema of all places.”
He laughs quietly—soft, pressed-through-his-teeth, the kind of laugh he only ever lets out when he knows the walls won’t listen. The lamp behind the projector sputters one last time, dimming the room into an amber-tinted hush. Outside in the street, taxis honk and someone shouts a drunken goodbye; the world moves on without knowing you’re here, perched between shadows and the sweet leftover scent of celluloid.
He leans back, shoulders touching yours, knees angled towards you like he’s always been pulled by your gravity. For a long moment you listen to the projector cool, clicking and shrinking as metal contracts.
He reaches for your fingers—tentatively, as though asking without words—and you let him lace them between his.
“You looked so terrified when she held you,” he murmurs. “Sure you’re alright?”
“I am…now,” you assure him, resting your head on his shoulder. The rhythm of his heartbeat under your cheek slows your blood down. His shirt smells faintly of the oil used on film reels—sharp, metallic—but underneath it is something familiar, something that always softens the parts of you the world keeps trying to harden. His shirt brushes your jawline as you curl instinctively closer.
He adjusts you slightly in his arms, like it is nothing and everything all at once.
Hansol hums. “I hate that you have to hide like this…by dressing up like—”
“A man?” you supply. “I think I make a fine one.”
“You make a terrible one,” he corrects, grinning now. “You’re too pretty for it.”
That makes you kiss him. Just a quick peck—short, but oh so sweet.
“Happy Valentine’s day, Hansol.”
You begin to pull away, but his hand cups your face—calloused yet gentle—stationing you nearer for him to kiss you better. Deeper. Tentative yet passionate at the same time. His breath shudders before it mingles with yours, warming every single fibre of your physicality.
The kiss is slow…so slow that it makes you feel every single movement, every single touch, with such profoundness that it almost aches. Almost. Because Hansol has this way of dulling every pain that exists in your being until it withers down into nothing but a blossoming warmth in your spine.
And just like that, something scarlet blends into the night-sky.
“Happy Valentine’s, my love,” he mumbles against your skin. And then, as if the kiss was still unfinished in his books, he recaptures your trembling lips with his scorching ones. This time, more territorial and surer, like a dying flame leaping right back onto a new, diesel drenched log. Your knuckles shiver as they graze his jaw, too stimulated by his kiss.
By the time your bodies detangle, your toes hurt from curling too much inside your shoes and the perfume on your wrists has fully bled into his collar.
Instinctually, you suck your bottom lip in, wanting to soak whatever it is of him that’s lingering on them.
An affectionate titter escapes him at the sight of you so wrecked and gone by a simple kiss. He cradles your head, resting his forehead against yours, “I need to show you something.”
You take a moment to catch your breath before whispering:
“Go ahead.”
The knot in your belly tightens with anticipation when he gives you another little kiss, gets up and disappears behind the seats. You hear the familiar whirring of metal and plastic as he skillfully loads a strip of film on the reel, adjusts the apparatus and after a few short minutes, the once ghastly white sheet in front of you is drenched in sepia tones again.
“Is this some new movie?” You ask when he reappears.
“Yes, I want you to be the first one to see it.”
“Oh, lovely,” you squeal, winding your arms around his bicep when he leans closer to you, “what’s it called?”
“Rites of Passage.”
Displeased, you scowl, “what an unfortunate name.”
You had expected it to be a romantic melodrama—they’re all the rage these days.
As if sensing your unease, he assures, “it is a love story.”
“I hope it doesn’t have a tragic ending.”
Hansol stays silent at that.
And then, “it ends the way it needs to.”
“Do they find happiness in the end?”
He smiles, “yes…yes, they do.”
“Then I have no qualms with what happens in the rest of the story.”
Before you, the first flicker of a vibrant amber light quivers on the makeshift screen. Dust motes drift lazily through the projector beam, catching gold as the picture sharpens into focus. You lean further into Hansol’s chest, watching it half-heartedly, expecting the familiar grand opening shot—rolling hills, a train station, something suitably dramatic.
But the opening is rather quaint and even though it is a new one, you feel like you’ve seen this film before.
A serene shot of a garden tucked somewhere between a row of terraced houses—narrow, almost secret, the sort of place only two kids would know how to find. The projection is all black and white, like new movies always are before they rot into sepia. But you think you know just exactly what the color of flowers that the little boy picks in a little basket is, or what shade of green is the little girl’s coat. There is no sound, but you’re already in on the jokes the boy tells to make the girl laugh.
Not like an imagination. But like a memory.
Hansol rests his cheek on the crown of your head, his warm breath brushing over the wisps of your loose hair.
The boy on the screen tangles a long strand of wool between his little fingers, spins it around skillfully, and in a matter of seconds, conjures up what seems like a string doll between his stretched palms.
“Remember when you used to perform these string tricks?” you ask him, fondly remembering all the different stars and animals and figures he’d entertain you with.
He laughs, soft and balmy, “yes, and you’d always ask me to make a doll at the end of them all.”
“I loved the string-dolls you’d make.”
“I know, dolly.” You feel his fingers tighten over your shoulders when calls you by the name only he ever calls you by.
Before you, childhood matures into teenage—an uneven mix of awkward yearning and silent confessions. Distances grow, but so do the depths of feelings. Glances in public squares or intense staring under the old pine tree on a hill-top—as if the juvenile hero wishes to etch every curve and blip in the heroine’s face into his psyche.
It is so saccharine, so dreamy.
Yet you feel a build-up…like any moment now, the bubbling potion of love is going to tip over and spill into a dark, rotten goo. Like every little dream that floats over a cloud for so long, this one too is about to meet its scorching fate when it crosses the sun.
Your breath hitches and with the sudden tension in Hansol’s jaw, you wonder if he feels it too—this near dread.
But before anything could happen—a villain bursting in and kidnapping the girl, or the ground splitting open by some ancient curse and swallowing the hero whole and leaving her to embark on a quest to bring her lover back—the reel stutters.
The sound is jarring, like something snapping between the rusty metal but refusing to let up. A rhythm of defiance to break, but also a refusal to let the pictures move forward leaving you stuck with a static scene where the hero is halfway through a door as the heroine holds his hand back.
“It’s stuck.” Hansol announces, gently unwrapping you from around him to go examine the projector, “I guess we overused it.”
“But we couldn’t even make it until the intermission.” You pout, a bit too upset over not finishing a movie you had no intention of seeing in the first place.
“Next time, dolly,” he promises, still fiddling with the film-strip.
You stay at the cinema for a little while after that, carefully vigilant yet carelessly in love at the same time. You whisper the happenings of your weeks to him so softly that even the room seems to shrink smaller for the walls to be able to hear you clearer. But the very next moment, you fail to swallow in your overenthusiastic squeaks when Hansol shares just what new movies Raymond plans to showcase at the theater next week.
He shushes you, barely controlling his own beaming smile at your fanatic spirits.
“Ah, Rudolph Valentino is so charming in the posters,” you exclaim, clasping your palms together, “I’ve heard it got a background score so romantic that it makes the audience weep!”
“We plan on handling the weeping by playing the new movie of that Chaplin fella right after,” he says, “what’s it called…’the kid’?”
“Oh Hansol… I feel so alive these days.” You have no idea where it comes from, but the sparkle in your eyes is enough to light up the whole midnight. “These films…these flickering little miracles—they’re not just stories. They’re… they’re the city.”
He tilts his head, and you lift your hands as if sculpting the feeling out of thin dust motes drifting through the projector beam.
“New York is growing so fast I can hardly ever catch my breath. Every week there’s a new building stretching higher, a new crowd pushing through Times Square like they’ve been summoned by some invisible conductor. And these movies…they move just like the city moves. Quick. Restless. Unafraid.”
You turn to him and aren’t surprised when you find his face mirroring the utter reverence your words hold for a place that others might brush off as nothing more than an amalgamation of concrete and blinding lights. Maybe this is why you hold all your words, all your thoughts within yourself all day long—as excruciating as it is—because you know no one that’s not him would ever listen to you with this relevance.
There seems to be this invisible thread that ties the centre of your chest with his and syncs your heartbeats until they’re nothing more than a background score for the movie that is the city you both grew up in.
“Sometimes I think New York is dreaming right through us. That she’s sitting in these seats with us, humming along to the Valentino score, laughing with Chaplin. She’s becoming something bigger than any of us can grasp, and the cinema… it’s the only place I can hear her properly.”
Hansol watches you, the corners of his lips tugging upward with a quiet awe. You feel a blush rise, but you continue, unable to stop now that the words have burst open.
“I love this city like I love you,” you confess. “Like a friend, or a secret, or something I’m afraid to lose. And when I watch these films…these new, daring, impossible films, I feel like I’m watching someone I adore so deeply grow up in front of me.”
Outside, a distant streetcar clangs its bell—sharp, urgent, alive. The sound threads into the stillness of the empty theater.
“Ah,” you breathe, sitting back with a little laugh. “Hear that? That’s the city reminding us she’s awake. She never sleeps anymore.”
“She never sleeps,” he agrees, something softer than mere amusement in his eyes…deeper and more sincere, like devotion. “But I know she sighs when you talk about her like that.”
Your lips dip into an irrepressible smile. He always does this—effortlessly putting these profound conclusions to your spirited ramblings as if putting a final bow on a bunch of randomly picked wildflowers and turning it into an expensive bouquet.
It only motivates you to carry on with a discourse that many would brush off as nothing more than a nonsensical love letter penned by a dramatic, young girl towards something so inanimate. “People say the rush in the veins of this city is unbearable now…this maddening passion—they think it's ruinous.”
“Isn’t that exactly what they used to say about us when we were growing up?” Hansol prods, “it is always unnerving for them to see life stretch and expand in its own skin. The city, just like kids, isn’t pliant anymore…you cannot hold it back from chasing what it seeks.” Finally, his eyes settle on yours, “just how they couldn’t hold us.”
Your lashes flutter shut, your face inching further closer into the curve of his shoulder. Your voice is half muffled into his sweater when you speak, “I wish we were as brave as New York. I wish that we didn’t have to hide, that we could just run wild like her.”
Hansol doesn’t immediately answer, he lets your rueful grief settle down in the air around you—breathing it, soaking it. And once he can feel the shallowness dissipate from your inhales, he speaks, “you know why the lights here shine so bright now?”
There are a hundred logical explanations to that, but you’re aware that logic is long forgotten in this exchange between you and him.
He continues, “you light a flame to illuminate something. But it also means you’re casting a shadow at something else at the same time—something you don’t want to see. It only makes you think, there could be so many secrets New York nurtures in these shadows behind its bright lights.”
“Just like us?” You ask.
“Just like us.” he affirms, his low voice the only evidence of his existence in the pitch darkness that envelopes you.
You wonder what would happen if someday the spotlight tilts and shines directly at the two of you, when no matter how hard you try to outrun it and seek the shadows, it catches up to you. Because that’s what light does, doesn’t it? Finds and blinds.
But for now, you choose to hide here—shadowed enough that the world can’t quite catch you, yet bright enough that he can.
⸻
Lee Seokmin’s birthday arrives every year with a reminder of whom he shares it with.
He tries to cheer up, attempts to brighten the gold in his smile even more on this particular day, answers all the letters and cards he receives. But always, in the back of his mind, there’s the shadow. His shadow. It’s been over three years, yet there’s no escaping the truth behind the life that he lives now. The ring on his finger. The woman who resides in his guest-room.
On this particular day, she sleeps until late noon.
Good, he tells himself as he pretends to read through the details of the show he is supposed to sing at the upcoming week, it’s good that she’s resting.
The flimsy curtains do little to stop the breeze that carries the remaining frost of the East-coast winter inside his townhouse. Seokmin stutters, contemplating shutting the glass-panels up, but ends up deciding otherwise and rather walks towards the open balcony to feel the sun on his skin.
It’s a serene neighborhood, safe, suburban and saturated with greens—of nature, and of money. The houses all around are occupied by people like him, people whose life flourished when the city began flourishing a few years back. Bankers, performers, business owners, hoteliers…he’s the only celebrated Jazz singer around, though.
So celebrated, in fact, that the glimmer of his raw talent and the honey in his voice drown out the color of his skin. There’s white men begging him for tickets to his shows now—can you imagine?
He should gloat and yet, he doesn’t. Because Seokmin, before anything else, is someone who is aware. He worked hard for this, trained until his throat felt akin to sandpaper, sang like a madman at gigs that paid him in half a loaf of bread. But he also knows that all that talent, grit and experience can only mask so much about his identity that the people in this country are ‘willing’ to tolerate.
His fame and riches helped him gloss over his foreignness, but he can never overlook the significance of the attribute that the woman fast asleep right now adds to his life.
Slotting himself into the New York high-society as a Korean man with nothing but sheer luck and acumen to back it up is one thing.
Trying to explain why he had no wife or fiancee or any romantic inclination towards women without painting himself red like a target is another.
Thus, there’s nothing for him to gloat about without first acknowledging the lifeline he has been given by his ‘wife’, even if it means that he has to—
“Good afternoon,” your voice is softer today, yet strong enough to pull his attention back inside the house, “and happy birthday, Mr. Lee.”
You’re all dressed up already. A giant coat that hides whatever it is that you’re wearing, only a hint of your stockings and the new pair of your low-heeled Mary Janes visible for him. Despite all the color that you’ve dusted over your face, the softened edges of your features and the droplets of water still clinging on to the tips of your hair make you feel strangely unfinished. Like a painting waiting for its final stroke.
“Thank you,” he smiles, clearing his throat.
This…arrangement, carefully crafted and deliberated on by the both of you, has allowed the two of you to co-exist for almost half a decade now. Yet, he still finds himself at a loss of proper words that he can say to you. Where are the lines here? What are the oddities?
You seem more at ease around him than he does, though. Because you’re beaming, extending something towards him. That’s when he notices it—the tray full of little sweet treats clutched between your palms.
“Oh, right.” he stutters, quickly grabbing the first dessert his fingers reach and scarfs it down whole.
Thank God, they had been on the cooling rack for a while, or else he would have put himself out of business for a week by burning his throat with molten sugar straight out of the oven.
That makes you laugh. This awkward, nervous energy which you’ve tried to soothe out of him through repeated assurances and affirmations. You always tell him that you feel safe around him and that you can just exist like friends. Perhaps, siblings?
But he finds it hard to come around.
And considering just how grave his situation already is when it comes to definitions and labels, you let him be.
You place the tray back onto the counter but box two pieces of cakes into a tin container, clearly planning on taking it out with you.
“It’s his birthday too, you know?” You inform Seokmin, even though he doesn’t ask.
Seokmin considers his words for a long moment, still standing in the middle of the room, his hands sticky with the powdered sugar.
“Ah yes,” he finally says, “I remember. Vernon—”
“Hansol,” you correct him sharper than you intended.
Seokmin blinks, watching you uncertainly as this strange rage surges and ebbs within a split second between your brows.
“I…I’m sorry,” you stutter, “he just…Hansol is his true name, you know?”
“Yes,” Seokmin nods, “yes, indeed. We ought to respect that.”
“I am glad you understand.” You lower your gaze, feeling impossibly ashamed of your little outburst.
The next few moments pass in thick silence as you press the lid shut and move towards the coat-rack to fetch your hat.
Seokmin tries to ease what just happened there.
“It’s a bit too obsolete,” he points at your enormous hat, clearly teasing, “don’t you think?”
You scrunch your nose in faux annoyance, “but I love it. Even though it's a thing of the past.”
Seokmin’s smile flutters at the corners but you miss it completely, too busy smoothing over your outfit one last time before you leave.
“Things of the past…” he mumbles, strolling back inside the kitchen. “Things of the past.”
⸻
You meet Hansol again on his birthday, four days after the eventful valentine’s evening. This time, you don’t have to crossdress as a man to enter Raymond’s cinema-house.
‘I took special permission to have you here today.’ Hansol had told you, while gearing up the projector to reload the movie, ‘The rite of passage’, that you had left unfinished from your last meeting.
Strangely enough, the reel ended up getting stuck again, this time, a mere thirty minutes before the ending. That wouldn’t have dejected you as much had you not been left hanging at a rather depressing part of the story—a scene where the boy gets drafted to be shipped off across the Atlantic for war.
Turns out, the plot twist whose dread you could feel in your bones ever since the movie began only took a mere five minutes to play out on the screen. A letter, a summon—decisive and final.
A crest in the budding romance. A tearful goodbye. An anxious audience.
Uncharacteristically, you had burst into tears…not when the scene played out, but when it got stuck on the creased forehead of the heroine. Almost like you were being made to wait with her for her lover’s return.
“Do you…do you think he’ll come back?” you ask, the wet patch under your temple on his sweater beginning to dry now that you’ve gotten a better hold over your tears.
Hansol’s voice reverbates under your cheek pressed to his chest, “people do not always return from wars, dolly.”
“But you did,” you whisper, “you came back.”
You begin to sit up, the damp strands of wild grass poke into your skin through the flimsy fabric of your stockings as you shift from his lap and onto the ground.
Hansol follows you, sitting halfway up and leaning back against his palms planted over the mud.
The hillside he brought you on for a stroll after seeing just how wrecked the abrupt interruption made you is a mere blip against the New York skyline. The city throbs below you like it is preparing for bed, muted pastels washing over every building as the sun begins to soften. The skyline stands tall, quiet and sure, like it has seen generations of lovers unravel and rebuild on the very patch of soft foliage you are sitting on.
He watches the infamous city-lights begin to flicker to life, one-by-one, before finally answering you.
“I came back, but not the same.”
You shift to look at him, but he’s staring into nothingness, like he’s also still remembering that movie scene from before. The frozen moment of grief suspended in dim light. A soldier arrested in time, a girl paused at the edge of loss.
You don’t know whether he’s thinking of his own war that shaped him, or the years between then and now.
But after a moment, he turns to you, eyes gentler than his voice.
“Not the same…” you hate the way his words tremble, like he has to forcibly wring them out and leave them to find their own meaning.
So far, your lives have been shaped by circumstances so colossal and way beyond your control that persistence is not just a trait, but a mechanism of survival. It is the only way you know how to keep moving—through grief, through joy, through the quiet, brittle moments that fall somewhere in between.
Thus, even in the fragility of this dipping evening, your persistence to make this better stands its stubborn ground.
“Things don’t have to remain the same for them to be good.” You eagerly cup his face between your cold palms, “don’t you always say how change is the only constant?”
That reminder of hope, of those tid-bits of philosophy that have somehow succeeded in not letting his smile succumb to the horrors that life has thrown at him—it gently guides him back to you.
The veil of the past grows thinner and thinner over his eyes, and it only encourages you to distract him more.
“I mean look,” you laugh, trying your best to mask the nervousness as you begin unbuttoning your coat. “You always make fun of me for wearing those drab, shapeless garments, don’t you?”
The coat slips off your shoulders, pooling around your knees pressed on the soft grass. Underneath, the curves of your body sway shyly under a weightless fabric that, surprisingly, ends at your mid-thighs.
You had felt too brave putting it on earlier in the day. The dress, a gift from your friend Mildred who insisted it was all the rage these days, was so unlike your usual tailored attires of long skirts and lace-colored blouses. The thin straps barely holding the attire together make you feel so naked to a point that the blush on your cheeks flushes down and settles over the exposed skin of your shoulders, prickling it with this strange sense of heat.
“It’s the flapper look,” you explain to his gawking eyes as Hansol watches you as though you’re something holy and forbidden. “I thought it was time for some change in myself.”
For a long moment, he says nothing. Just looks.
His throat bobs. Once. Twice. Like he’s trying to swallow down everything he’s feeling in the moment—wonder, fear, longing, the aching edges of a man who doesn’t know if he’s allowed to want something soft again.
Finally, quietly, he murmurs, “You look like trouble.”
You huff a laugh, pretending it doesn’t shake. “Good trouble, I hope.”
“The best kind,” he says, more like a revelation to himself than a confession to you.
Your fingers brush over the loose fabric skimming your hips. You curl them into fists, trying to subdue the itch which makes you want to grab your coat and put it back on and just bolt away—but not before making Hansol promise that he’d forget what he just saw…what you made him witness…what you just offered...
But his fingers work faster than yours, curling over your waist and pulling you flush until your chest mashes against his. Little knots of burning desire bunch up and explode all at once in every single inch of your body when he does that. Your lips part at the audacity—of his, and that of yours—and the sight of you like this…shell-shocked and wild-haired twists something carnal in him.
Instead of pulling you out of this state of collapse, he only submerges you deeper when he kisses you like he has never before. Hungry, open-mouthed, lustful. You don’t even attempt to fight it when his tongue slips inside your mouth, stealing away the sweetness that lingers inside of you.
And that act of submission only seems to fuel him further into searing his touch deeper into the form of you.
“Divine,” he pulls away just enough to whisper that, his voice dark and hoarse, “that’s what you are.”
He worships you with his words and his tongue some more before he’s pushing you around until your back meets the ground with a harsh impact. It’s not enough to hurt you, but just right to make you moan.
“Hansol,” you plead.
For what? You have no answer.
His lips come down on whatever trembling flesh he can find—your wrists, your collarbones, your shoulders, the slight swell of your chest.
He moves lower and lower until your thighs press together with the foretaste of what’s about to follow.
No matter how many times you’ve been here in this exact state, the sight of his face pressed between your legs—curious eyes gaging every little scowl, every little whimper that escapes you while his parched tongue laps at you, prods against you, cajoles you to let him in deeper—never fails to ravage your sanity.
Hansol can’t help but grin when the much shorter, looser skirt pools around your hips on its own. His fingers have already worked through the layers of fabric that shield you from him and when the slickness that has gathered at your apex coats the tips of them, his head spins.
“Oh, heavens,” he huffs out, dipping his finger deeper into your fluttering walls. The warmth, the soft clench, coupled with how you clasp your eyes shut but the tears still roll down—it almost undoes him right then and there.
His breaths turn ragged with every plunge of his fingers that make you convulse and arch off the ground. Air, he needs some air in his brain to better remember what is unfolding before him until eternity. He half-heartedly unlatches his fingers from your weeping core after a particularly passionate stroke against your nub to remove his sweater. All through it, you continue to tremble on the ground, cold mud clinging onto your skin as you attempt to reach out for him with your arms.
“Hansol,” you call him back, “please…”
“I know, love, I know.” He muses, still lost in the fierce gravity of you.
You feel something small and hard pelt against your skin—the buttons of his shirt as he wildly rips it open.
The white linen finally gives way for your vision to settle on his skin—taut with labor and illuminated just by the moonlight under this pine tree.
The need to touch him that emerges out of you is so palpable, that it makes him lean down a bit, allowing your fingers to rake all over the hardened ridges on his abdomen to the smooth expanse of skin over his chest. His heartbeat turns chaotic and relentless when your touch lingers on the long, scarlet scar that runs across his sternum—a ghost of his skin that they took away from you.
“You’re perfect,” you admit, regardless.
“I’m yours.” He echoes, like that somehow concludes the whole truth of him.
You don’t falter, “then make me yours, too.”
A guttural sound escapes from the back of his throat as he half undoes, half rips your undergarments and kisses you down there with this undeniable hunger. You can only arch further into him, offering more. The taste of you never ceases to tip him over the edge of control.
He eats you out greedily, alternating between long stripes and shameless, open-mouthed kisses to a point where every exhale of yours comes out with a desperate moan. He sucks you so hard that you feel he intends to break you.
Your fingers fist around the strands of something—his hair or the grass, you can’t discern anymore. As a matter of fact, you don’t want to. Because that would mean shifting a part of your attention from him towards something that’s not him. And you don’t want to do that, not even for a split second.
“I wish you could see how you look right now,” he mumbles, the vibration of his voice amplifying your pleasure tenfolds. “So ruined already…yet begging for more.”
That prompts you to imagine—your body, lying dishevelled and open on a patch of grass somewhere so public as clay accumulates underneath your fingernails while he buries his face deeper and deeper between your legs like a parched man searching for an oasis.
You feel your limbs beginning to go limp under his ministrations, a telltale sign of the arrival of something that snatches all your coherence away from you and leaves you a blushing, blubbering mess of Hansol. He makes you welcome it with open arms with a final, scorching kiss on top of your aching folds, right over the little root of pleasure that has been bearing the delicious torment of his calloused fingers.
By the time the coil of tension snaps, you are sobbing. Tears flow freely down your face, collecting the dirt that has gathered on your face from the struggle.
A molten blush crawls up from the column of his neck and flushes throughout his face when he re-emerges from between your legs that lie listless on either side of his body. From one side, the city lights cast just enough illumination across his face for your half-lidded gaze to catch the thick arousal that coats his gleaming lips.
The sight makes you shut your eyes close for good before you lose your mind.
Strong hands wrap around your thighs, angling your ankles to settle around his waist while he holds you down with his body weight. Your lips part with an involuntary moan as humiliation of reveling in the feeling of being overpowered this way begins shrouding your mind.
Hansol calls your name under his breath, then his hand departs from fondling your chest in favor of his rock-hard length.
He lines himself up with your entrance, the blunt head positioned right by your gaping, quivering hole. He nips at your skin once, perhaps to distract you from the overwhelming pleasure laced with pain as he pushes deeper into you.
But the ache doesn’t subside, not when your hips gyrate against him eagerly, effectively pulling him halfway inside of you.
You mewl, suddenly too aware of the fact that you can never get used to the feeling of that first stretch, that delicious ache.
“Doll…be patient.” He begs.
“N-need you…Hansol.”
“I know, love, it’s written all across your body.” He slots his fingers with yours, “breathe for me, go on, breathe.”
You obey, or try to. Because every single one of your inhales crests, and every single exhale splutters. The only thing you can do without struggling is calling out his name again and again.
Hansol whimpers when you cry, the pressure of your walls around him an intoxicating bliss. He plunges his remaining length inside of you with a breathless gasp causing your vision to blur.
The fact that you can’t determine where pain melts into pleasure and where you end and he begins is already so nervewrecking. So when he begins rocking in and out of you, gentle one moment and reckless the other, you find yourself scrambling for control before Hansol can drive you to utter lunacy. You don’t know how it happens, but you succeed in pushing him until he’s on his back. His length slips out of you in this brief tussle, making you whine. But you don’t stay at loss for long because the very next moment, you’re climbing on top of him. His whole body jerks as he pants and the only thing that makes sense is for you to push him back inside your sensitive core.
The lust on his face makes you shiver when you brace your hands on top of his broad shoulders for support.
Grass and dirt dig deeper into your knees as you begin moving up and down over and over again on his hard length. Your entire body convulses with every debauched plunge, your breaths breaking before they can even make it out of your throat.
Below you, Hansol watches you with actual stars in his eyes, his mouth still wet and pupils blown out yet gleaming with the brilliance of a thousand moons even in the exhausted darkness.
It is a trance—nothing more, nothing less.
He smoothes his palms under the hem of your dress to clutch either side of your waist, providing you additional support with your erratic movements. The action aids you gain better control, but your desperation is no less frantic.
You clench him like you’re proving some claim. You call out his name like that’s the only prayer you ever learnt.
You begin to find a rhythm in how to roll your hips in a way that pleasures you both, but your lover offtracks your entire train of thoughts when he begins angling his hips to meet you halfway up. Even from underneath you, he dominates this sinful act as he begins pistoning in and out of you, forcing you to adjust to the pace he sets for the both of you.
You have no choice but to clamp your drooling mouth over his and oblige. His grip over your waist tightens like a punishment as he penetrates your tight heat, making you succumb entirely to his mercy.
This isn’t just sex, this isn’t some fleeting desire.
This is love, finally given an act…and boy does Hansol make you perform.
The hot, white daze rapidly expanding from the corners of your vision quickly overtakes your senses, choking you with overwhelming pleasure as he continues to sink in and out of the messy wetness between your thighs. You shatter with a broken gasp on top of him and like he had been waiting for just that, he quickly follows suit. Warmth and bliss bloom into something tangible and thick inside of you as he fills you with all he has to give you in the moment.
“I love you,” you break apart, sure and unwavering even when his eyes turn into a shade of onyx that you cannot recognize—such is the intensity of this moment.
“I love you,” you drawl, your eyes rolling behind your lids as your bodies sway in tandem in the aftermath of this heat.
“I have loved you,” he says, long after your world has suspended. “And I will always love you.”
⸻
The water instantly turns murky with dirt when Seokmin rinses the washcloth in it.
The household helper changes the basin almost instantly, bringing in another set of fresh towels before leaving the couple in the privacy of their bedroom.
Seokmin tries again, softer this time. The water is warmer, but the grime plastered behind your ear is impossibly stubborn—won’t come loose unless he applies at least some pressure against your raw skin.
Your face scrunches up in pain and you hiss, the sound is so soft, so little, that it shatters him all at once. He pauses, letting you shift into a more comfortable position. There are no visible injuries on your body, just a weary kind of damage.Your skin is chilled to the touch, still holding onto the bite of a cold night’s wind even though you’ve been inside for nearly an hour. Tiny goosebumps pebble your arms and legs, never fully settling. The dirt isn’t just on your face; it’s dusted throughout your hair, accumulating under your nails and in the little crevices of your arms.
“Shall I?” he asks, long fingers fisted over the damp, warm towel.
Meekly, you nod.
He pats your skin with utmost tenderness, wiping away the little trails of mud with his thumbs, picking the dried bits of dead leaves and shriveled flowers from your hair. The tactile act provides the benevolence needed in this moment against the things that hang heavy and unsaid in the air between you two.
“Staying out all night like that,” Seokmin finally thaws the uncomfortable ice, “I thought you were smarter than that.”
The light rebuke isn’t that of annoyance, but rather disappointment. Your lashes cast down with a prickling sense of shame.
“Your temperature is abnormal,” he continues, quite concern weighing his expressions down, “there’s a possibility that the scratch on your knee is infected…we need to—”
“It’s not fair.”
Your voice comes out so hoarse and jagged and you immediately wince when your throat burns.
Your statement startles Seokmin. What exactly is unfair—his rightly placed concern? The cruel gossip amidst the servants outside?
“What is not fair?” he asks quietly.
Your lips part, but your voice betrays you—still too raw to be overused.
Seokmin shakes his head pitifully, offering you a cup of warm water and honey. But you don’t even attempt to reach for it—your wild eyes focused in a corner of the room where the carpet peels off the floor.
Just when he tips the cup closer towards your cracked lips:
“It’s not fair that Raymond keeps him away from me all the time,” you begin to complain, “he had to leave for work before I could even wake up.”
The cup almost slips out of Seokmin’s grasp, but he quickly recovers. By now, he is very well versed with the drill.
You barely even notice that though, because you’re already off on a tangent of your own.
“I must talk to Raymond about this,” you declare, fumbling with the blanket draped over your knees, “this is simply cruel and inhumane!”
Your resolve doesn’t falter when you finally look at a very stoic looking Seokmin with this impervious hope, “say, Mr. Lee, you’d employ Hansol to work for you, won’t you? I don’t know how that never crossed my mind—”
Before he responds to you, he abruptly gets up from the bed and asks the servants waiting for his next orders outside of the room to just take it off for the day.
Then, he marches back into your bedroom and opens the curtains wide.
You squeeze your eyes shut at the onslaught of sunlight, your lids flutter as they struggle to adjust to the sudden brightness. They feel impossibly dry, yet brimming with tears at the same time.
Seokmin calls out your name—not like a command, but more like an urge. He’s holding your elbows, you realize. By the time you finally recover, the first thing you gage is the absolute anxiety over Seokmin’s face. This pale look of utter horror and discomfort like he’s choking onto something—perhaps his own words.
“Mr. Lee,” you whisper, it comes out like a question. “Why are you holding me back? I need to—”
Seokmin says your name again, softer this time. And then, “please, listen to me.”
“But it’s—”
“No, please. Just breathe for a moment.”
“But Hansol—”
“Isn’t here anymore!” Seokmin didn’t mean to blurt it out like that, but he does.
And with how the color drains from your face, he instantly regrets it.
He can see the truth that you’ve stitched deep inside your bones, in an attempt to forget, curl its way up your spine and towards your head. But there’s still that stark defiance that your heart pumps in your very veins—one that you’ll let yourself be blinded by, even if it means never seeing even a speck of light ever again.
Seokmin tries to fight it on your behalf, “he isn’t here…hasn’t been for years. Ever since—”
You jerk your arms away from his hold.
“Stop lying!” you scream, “all you do is lie. Your entire existence is a lie!”
Seokmin knows exactly what’s happening—this provocation, this reflection of pain turned outward because your mind cannot hold it in any longer. It’s the same script every time, but it never gets easier to watch.
“You just…you just don’t want me to be with him because that ruins your perfect little plan,” you speak more to yourself than to Seokmin now, “because if Raymond lets him go, you’re afraid you’d lose your pretend-wife and hence, your reputation. People will know you only married me to save face! That you prefer men over women!”
“Hansol is not here,” he repeats, barely audible. “You know this. You do know this, even if you—”
You press your palms over your ears, cheeks completely soaked with hot, uncontrolled tears.
“Stop it! Stop lying to me Mr. Lee…” you stumble off the bed, away from him, “for the love of God, stop being so cruel!”
Seokmin can feel his own composure beginning to fracture, but he pushes through it, because someone has to stay steady. And it will never be you.
He takes a step forward as you struggle to put your coat back on, his hand carefully extended towards you. But you gasp with sheer horror, your eyes bulging wide as you flinch away from him like he’s your predator.
“I can’t—I can’t do this anymore.” You shake your head frantically, “I can’t stay married to you to save your face while the love of my life rots away in a dingy cinema-room loading and unloading love stories that he might never get to live.”
Seokmin watches you helplessly as you put your shoes on with this haphazard urgency. Like if you don’t act now, something precious and pure will once again be swallowed into the belly of the Earth. A vicious act of thievery, a cruel annihilation of love.
“I need to finish watching the movie…” you repeat, “I must finish watching the movie…”
Seokmin knows better than to stop you right now, so he waits for a beat until you disappear down the stairs and then, he follows you to the theater where your childhood sweetheart Hansol once worked before getting forcefully conscripted into the army half a decade ago.
⸻
Raymond sees her every time when she pretends to sneak in, but never stops her. His weathered, grey irises are full of sorrow for the poor girl.
Today, she rushes in unabashedly. No disguise. No attempt to be invisible.
Her steps are erratic, her coat half unbuttoned. Her hair sticks to her sweaty forehead in rivulets and if anyone saw her eyes, they’d be flinching away from her as if she were a rabid animal.
Raymond considers going after her when she barges inside an empty cinema-room, one that she always slips into. The same one that her lover once helped operate.
Sometimes, she stays there for a few minutes.
Most times, she spends hours.
Just when he’s about to check in on her, a hand clasps his shoulder. Lee Seokmin, the jazz singer…her husband.
“Please…just, let her be.” He pleads, reaching inside his pocket to settle whatever loss this interruption would cause Raymond.
Raymond doesn’t accept the wad of cash.
Just walks up to the chalkboard and erases all the schedules for the day.
⸻
The screen is already drenched in the images stuck where you had left them. Hansol must’ve loaded the projector already. Hopefully, this time, it won’t stop…even though you wish it did.
“Hansol…” you call out in the dark, this little beacon of naive hope shadowing what you already know—that perhaps, now, he won’t show up.
Persistence—the language of your love letters to him.
You try to wield its powers again. “Hansol, love, don’t hide now. I have enough saved…even if Mr. Lee refuses to help us, we can go—”
A loud screech, the tell-tale sound of plastic reel spinning against metal.
The movie…the rite of passage…begins to play again.
What a grotesque name.
You refuse to acknowledge it by prying your eyes away from it even though the faces on the screen begin morphing into the ones you recognize. Yours. His. Seokmin’s.
You try to run away, but something cements you on spot.
‘I need to show you something…’
Lovers severed by war and tethered by longing.
‘...it is a story of love…’
And one of loss, too.
‘...it ends the way it needs to…’
An ending stripped off contentment for anyone involved.
You feel a strange sensation—something whirring inside your ears and making your focus wobble…a weird vertigo. Almost like you’re peering down the edge of a cliff, your naked feet sweat-slicked and taut over the loosening sand.
The world seems like a single flip away from something irreversible…yet, inevitable. Time. Like you’re one with the clock. No coming back. No bringing back.
On the screen, the hero is plucked out of his lover's arms and given an anglicised name.
Vernon, a name that traces back to an alder tree. Hansol, a name linked to a pine tree.
Did everyone who ever named him felt his presence akin to a balmy shade of a tree as well? Away from the blinding lights…a soft life that tumbles and giggles in the shadows.
At the end of the movie, the hero dies.
The heroine goes mad.
The once opaque, ivory sheet of the projector turns into a mirror.
There’s a gap inside of you now…like something scooped out of you. Something akin to a sweet poison which had to be sucked out or else it would have melted your insides.
You wonder if you would have liked that gradual necrosis. If that heaviness that seems to have been vaporized out of you was the only thing harnessing you here.
The hinges of the door creak when it opens and Seokmin enters, the matured yellow of the afternoon sun slanting its brilliance on you.
But you don’t shrivel away anymore…you don’t close your eyes.
makes no sense to me when you guys enjoy a fic and do not reblog it and it's just so...??? what even is the point of that and how many times do authors need to beg you all for reblogs and reiterate that communities on tumblr thrive on reblogs and not likes and comments. seriously it's very discouraging to see the abysmal likes to reblogs ratios or getting comments that it was a good fic and how you loved it but no reblogs on it?
edit: for the people who have the following excuses behind only liking and not reblogging fics:
1. "I only like them to save them to read later" — you can reblog with a TBR tag and still save them on your blog for later.
2. "Im a silent reader" — you're as useful as a strainer on a beach ig. no one knows you here, no one is judging you for reading and supporting what you read and support so there really isn't any point for you to be not reblogging and keeping your blogs empty.
Most authors here are either full time students or have a full time job or honestly, just lives of their own yet we create because it's something that not only satiates us but also keeps fandoms alive and thriving. We do not get anything material in return and only hope for support and community from you guys which we often do not amass. I really don't understand how reblogging with a few thoughts or even the tags of the fandom is a big deal to you i really don't get why you guys don't reblog.
⚬ pairing: choi seungcheol x fem! reader
⚬ word count: 8k
⚬ genres: uni au, fluff, smut, strangers to lovers, v romantic (might be one of my fav things ive written in a while)
⚬ warnings: mentions of food, spice/nsfw mentions and smut - filth, filth filth, minor spit play, spanking, they fawk sideways lol and other mature themes MDNI
credits to @strangergraphics for the beautiful dividers as always <3
<3 synopsis: you take one for the team when you allow your friend to bail on you last minute for a date with her dream guy thinking that playing cupid might amass you at least some good karma - not knowing that the said good karma comes with a loaded bank balance, buff arms and wearing a merch of your favorite band.
<3 songs recommended
- better together by jack johnson
- kingston by faye webster (!!!)
- everybody wants to rule the world by tears for fears
- cruel summer by taylor swift
author's note: part of my valentine's day event, lmk if you'd want to be tagged :)
p.s. - all these fics come with a lil letter hehe, here's one for u!
seungcheol's love letter for @nerdycheol and to whoever is reading.
dear you,
you and i both know the pleasure of a good company more than anyone. it is how we fall in love, don't we? spending time with the ones we love— doing fun things sometimes and just existing in the silent presence the others. This valentine's, i promise to make sure that every moment, when it comes to us, counts. Let me choose you in the small ways…in unhurried conversations, in drives that lead nowhere, in hours that slip by unnoticed because we were together. Not because you need me, but because love, at its gentlest, is two people deciding not to rush past each other.
yours in every moment that you need me, and even more in the ones that you don't,
cheol <3
"So sorry babe," Keira extends a freshly brewed cup of latte with a flower-heart foam design on top towards you. Her smile is painfully soft and her cheeks pinched with pink embarrassment as she offers, sheepishly, "This one's on the house."
"Kei, I told you, don't feel apologetic!" You wave your hand frantically, accepting the cup full of sugary, frothy goodness made by your friend.
You try to pay for the coffee, but Keira does not relent. Somehow, you manage to slip a five dollar bill in the tips jar.
You take a quick sip of the beverage, smiling and nodding at Keira who disappears to the back to prepare the next orders, before grabbing a bunch of napkins and leaving the campus coffee-house with your lab-partner Fiona.
Beside you, Fiona scrunches her brows in confusion. "What was that about?"
"Nothing much," you inform her, "I won these tickets at this giveaway last month, it's for this new girl-group Kei and I are obsessed with, 'Lunaris'. We were planning on going together but she has a date with Mingyu that night."
Fiona huffs, "Well, that sucks… what are you going to do now?"
"I'm thinking of selling them online because I just can't find someone to go with me." You shrug, acting like it doesn't hurt. But the way you quickly sip the scalding concoction of fine-ground coffee and coconut sugar, it is enough for Fiona to see that you're trying your best not to pout at this situation.
"Oh honey…I know how much you love that group."
"I do," you sigh, adjusting your bag bulging with Ethics notes over your shoulder. "But I love Keira too and I don't want her to feel more guilty than she already is by complaining about it. I want her to have fun on their first date."
Fiona nods in agreement for she, just like the rest of the campus, doesn't know anything about the elusive barista of the coffee house apart from her very publicly known crush on Kim Mingyu. She has seen how Keira's world tips over in his direction every time he is around or how just last term, when he walked into the coffee-house and complimented the espresso she made for him, Keira's cheeks gave the strawberries on her apron a run for their money. She can see just why Keira would give up going to a concert with her friend over a date with someone she has been pining over for years now.
At the same time, she can't help but feel bad for you.
"Why don't you sell just one of the tickets instead of selling them both?" Fiona suggests, beaming like a light-bulb just flipped in her head, "that way, you'll have someone to go with you!"
"Uhh…I don't know how I feel about going to a concert with a stranger, Fi." You grimace.
Fiona clucks her tongue, incredulous and annoyed, "Dude, you go to concerts to befriend strangers over your shared interests. That's the whole point of them."
You gnaw at your lower lip, giving her suggestion a thought as the classroom around you begins filling up with students. The coffee cup in your hand isn't hot to touch anymore as you bring it to your lips, letting the sweet steam settle over your nose. It is almost Valentine's and though you never care for things of the nature, it wouldn't be so bad to at least try to meet somebody new in this blossoming month of pink hearts and red roses.
Just before the professor walks in and as the TA starts handing out the day's worksheets, you pull your phone out to put a story on your public account:
"Hey! I got a spare ticket for the Lunaris concert next weekend. Anyone interested? Please DM!! :)"
You place your phone screen-side down on the table for the next two hours and pray to the Gods of the internet's mockery and mirth that the story you just posted doesn't come across as too miserable to the viewers.
No one texts you the entire day the story is up and you're beginning to lose hope. Seriously? Does no one have good music taste anymore?
You watch the story disappear in front of your very eyes at the same lecture the next day, not sure on what should you be more dejected over—the fact that you couldn't convince any one of your two-thousand odd followers to go with you or the fact that you're too proud to post another story about selling two tickets now.
Maybe you should just let it go and allow the two seats remain empty at the arena. You squash down the ridiculous thought of one of the girls of the band noticing and feeling sad about the vacant seats at the show—but you do file in the possibility of that happening…and it saddens you enough that your breathing turns a little emptier.
You tuck your chin over your folded palms, thinking hard about what to do with the two nosebleeds seats at the concert of your beloved group that might go to waste.
Sighing, you flip through your notes mindlessly. You're never one to check your screen in between lectures, but today, there's this queasiness in you that is making it harder and harder for you to focus. You grip the pages more firmly.
Focus, you tell yourself, you will figure something out.
But there's only so much determination that you can harbor in your humble body, so when your Professor goes on another tangent about how the words of Nietzsche are relevant to some profound experience of hers on her recent trip to Indonesia, you give up and scroll through your texts.
Surprisingly, there's a new message from an unknown sender that popped up on your screen some ten minutes ago. You tap it open.
Unknown: Hi! I am sorry if I am too late but a buddy told me you were selling tickets to the Lunaris concert and gave me your number…is the offer still up?
You stare at the text, wondering if your eyes are playing tricks on you. Why didn't this person DM you on Instagram? What friend?
Doesn't matter, you decide.
Because there is a person in your DMs, who—by the grammar and the syntax — seems human and a decent one at that (apologies and all).
'hi :) i am not selling the ticket, i just happen to have a free, spare one and…' you begin to type out before backspacing through it in a go.
What the fuck? You can definitely extort this situation in your advantage…whoever this is clearly has no idea that your tickets are free!
You type out a new message instead.
You: hello :)
You: yes, the offer is still up but a few others have reached out to me so idk for how long 😬
The reply comes almost instantly
Unknown: Oh, is that so?
Unknown: Well, it's totally your call but I would love to attend the concert, truly. I'm ready to give you whatever you ask for!
You: OMG u seem like such a big fan!
You: well, i'm not asking for much, just what the ticket costed me, yk >.<
Unknown: And that would be…?
You bite your lip hard, quickly opening a google tab to research how much does a Lunaris ticket costs on average.
And then, you add fifty dollars to it.
You: Just around $300 dollars :)
You feel stupid once you hit send, three-hundred dollars for nose-bleeds, really?
But it seems like the person texting you isn't the sharpest tool in the shed either, at least if you judge the said sharpness by his prompt reply.
Unknown: Awesome, I'm ready to pay right now.
Woah.
For a moment, a sense of guilt grips you. Should you really be taking advantage of someone like this?
The next text you receive helps answer that question.
Unknown: It's Choi Seungcheol btw.
Now, you regret not asking for more.
Choi Seungcheol, arguably the richest brat on the campus, is apparently a Lunaris super-fan.
Now you're not someone who fancies drawing boxes around people. But the idea of him—all Rolex studded wrists and Ralph Lauren sweaters—swaying bright pink banners at Lunaris or dancing in their glittery crowd while belting the words 'caught you glancin across the room! my heart's a rocket baby watch it zoom!' is almost an AI- generated sloppy image in your head.
You try to bite your lips, waiting outside your dorm where he said he'd meet you to pick you up an hour before the concert. As January overturns into the month of shared cups of cocoa and sappy rom-coms, the wind carries the last hush of winter shyly, almost as if it conspires with the seasons to push couples further closer to each other's body heat. You shiver even with a jacket on.
Well, to be fair, it's not much of a jacket, just another layer of faux leather with a careful length and fit to show off the deliberate neckline of your very backless, bright yellow top. But at least you have your denims on, so no frosty knees for you tonight.
You wait some more, tapping your heels impatiently against the gravel and feeling slightly disrespected at his three-minute delay. You're about to send him a scathing text in a tone that you've only reserved for Uber drivers who complicate directions for you when the unmistakable whirring of a sleek engine and polished wheels rolling smooth over the asphalt catches your attention.
You recognize the black Bentley of the college's heartthrob and instantly perk up, already imagining the sigh you're going to let out once the warmth of his car cushions your bare skin. He slows down in front of you and you wait to see what expensive sweater in what shade of navy or black will greet you when the door opens.
But he surprises you by getting out of the driver seat in a pink hoodie unzipped to show the white tshirt that beams with the logo of Lunaris peeking underneath. He walks towards you with a cheery smile, reaching to open the door for you and just when he's about to say something, you beat him to it.
"You have their merch!" you almost shout, an accusing finger pointed at the logo on his chest.
"Uh, yeah," he answers you like you just offended him big time.
This guy just spent three-hundred dollars on a single nosebleed seat for the concert, what's thirty more for a t-shirt?
Still, you gape. "Woah, so you are actually a real fan."
He pauses for a moment, still holding his car door open for you as he blinks, incredulous.
"Why else would I be here practically skipping over my own feet?"
"I don't know man," you shrug, "for all I know, you could be pranking the sad lonely girl who has no one to go to a concert with."
You slip into his passenger seat, immediately feeling cozier than you do in your dorm bed when the soft leather of it presses against your thighs.
"Wait, didn't you say there were people lining up in your DMs for those tickets?" Seungcheol immediately catches your slip-up.
You pretend that the Google Maps on your phone are collapsing and etching new paths right in front of your eyes to avoid looking at him. But your cheeks heat up, your ears ringing a little with a jingle that goes 'uh-oh' again and again.
You recover quickly, buckling your seatbelt in, "I mean…people asked. 'Lining up' is a strong phrase."
He hums, clearly unconvinced, but doesn't push it. Instead, he pulls your door shut and circles back to the driver's seat, hoodie strings bouncing as he goes and you realize that they have little pink pom-poms attached to the ends of them. Ridiculous.
When he settles behind the wheel, he shoots you a sideways glance, lips twitching.
"So," he says, starting the engine, "I'm assuming I ranked above these 'people' who asked?"
You scoff, rolling your eyes dramatically. "Don't flatter yourself too much, I only chose you because you were practically begging me to."
"Fair." He hums, "I can't help it, I'm too fond of them."
"You're too rich too…if you're such a fan, why couldn't you afford the tickets yourself?" You feel like you're gaining an upper hand in this game of 'aha, I caught you!' that the two of you have been subconsciously playing.
Seungcheol hitches for a moment. "Well I was busy with….stuff, and the tickets always sell out at the speed of light."
"Fair." You mimic him, somewhat satisfied by his answer yet still not fully convinced.
All of this seems too good to be true—his eagerness to grab the obviously over-priced tickets, his insistence on driving with you, his…paraphernalia…which honestly seems too performative the more you look at it.
Maybe he's just too much of an honest fan and that's what irks you more because you've followed the girls since their debut and you're yet to acquire one of their merch. Meanwhile Mr. Rich Guy beside you already has his scent mingled in one.
So not only does he have the goodies, he has the passion too?
The rest of the drive, you quiz Seungcheol on everything Lunaris. You start off small, 'Favorite album? Why?' before quickly picking up heat with the 'what composer of theirs do they not work with anymore? What was the beef?'
And much to your dismay, he gets them all right.
Fuck.
You're so jealous of him—of his stupid car, of its sleek leather seats, of the expensive oak-moss scent that infiltrates your senses, of the shirt on his chest…By the time you reach the concert venue, you've already hatched a plan of robbing him tonight if he pisses you off once more.
The bass thumps loud outside, making you feel the vibrations on your very seats as Seungcheol parks the car. You can see the bright, neon-pink beams flashing in arches as the line outside begins to thicken. You try to gulp down the nerves that are bunching up in your throat, trying to focus more on the mellow orange of the setting sun more than the metal bars of the high stage that are visible to you.
The same stage that will soon be occupied by Vee, Katie, Lucy, Tia and Madz—the girls you've only ever obsessed and giggled over on screen.
You will be seeing them live today…in front of your own eyes…breathing the same air of the same arena while watching the same sunset—NO. You squeeze your eyes shut, realizing you're so unprepared for this.
"Excited?" Seungcheol's annoyingly cheery voice disrupts this surreal moment of epiphany for you.
"Cheol," you whisper, staring off in a distance as though you've been shell-shocked. "Turn the car back."
The guy beside you hitches, killing the engine off with broken movements.
"What?" He frowns, "Are you for real?"
"I can't face them…I can't—" Your grip your knees, squeezing your eyes shut again. The material of your jeans turns damp under your sweaty palms.
"Oh come on!" You can hear the pout in his voice, "don't be like this now."
"You don't get it," you shake your head, debating dramatically running a hand through your hair but then deciding against it because it did take you a whole hour to style it a certain away. You choose to scratch your forehead instead. "This is like…this is like ordering the extra hot ramen at Ichiran…you wanted it, but now you're scared you can't handle the heat."
"Uh, okay…wow, fascinating metaphor—"
"Simile."
"Yeah, that. But also, come on now, you've been looking forward to this for months."
"I know," you whine, pushing your face into your hands, "this is too real."
You know you're being unreasonable because the more you hesitate here, the more the crowd grows outside. But you're thankful that Seungcheol doesn't mention it, and that he doesn't get impatient with you. Rather, he reaches forward to caress your shoulder, not sensually, not to indicate hurry, but with this strange softness that does help you ease a bit.
"Would it feel better if I hold your hand through it?" He offers.
You don't know if it will, but what's the harm in trying?
You peer up at him through your lashes when you whisper, embarrassingly slow. "Would you mind the fact that my palms are sweatier than a marathon runner's armpits right now?"
He looks at you, his lips stretched thin as he considers your words with this expression of utmost seriousness. You think he's about to calling you disgusting or scoot as far as you as possible when he removes his hand from your shoulder. But, the very next moment, he reaches forward in the car's glove box and pulls out something in his other hand, then, he grabs your palm and beams that disarming smile at you, "Well, good thing I got tissues."
You'd be lying if you said that for a brief moment, you hadn't absolutely despised Keira when she showed up at your dorm with a tray of muffins and a sorry smile a week ago. As happy as you were helping her choose the perfect red dress for her date, you couldn't brush off the feeling that you'd be happier had you been helping her pick out an outfit for your concert date instead.
Though now, after two whole hours of jumping and dancing with Seungcheol as he holds your hand tight, the weight of his fingers so steady and secure around your clammy palm, you don't feel the lack of your girl friend's presence even a bit.
Your seats are too far from the stage to a point that even the projector is a small, square screen flashing unclear images of the girls on stage. But you don't mull over that…because when you scream along with the lyrics, Seungcheol screams too—equally unashamed when both of yours' voices crack on the high notes.
At one point, he lifts the lightstick you purchased just outside the venue so enthusiastically that it nearly smacks you in the forehead, and you laugh so hard that you almost miss the opening of your favorite song. Almost.
Because as soon as it comes on, Seungcheol quickly reminds you to focus and pulls his phone out to take several videos of that segment. You too, take a small video, just one clip of him singing 'caught you glancin across the room! my heart's a rocket baby watch it zoom!' with the pom-poms on his hoodie-strings bopping along with the chorus.
Somewhere between the sixth song and the confetti cannons, you realize something quietly important…you're not as opposed to the company of a random rich kid of your campus as much as you thought you were. Right now, you're not the self proclaimed lonely girl scamming people to spend the valentine's week with her. Right now, he's not the stupid super-fan with a shitload of money in his hand walking straight into your trap. You're both just there. Two bodies singing and dancing—sometimes in sync, sometimes offensively off tune and slamming into each others only to break into random fits of giggles. And despite all the odd circumstances that led to this evening, you find yourself not wanting to change it, even in the slightest bit.
The two of you also make friends with the people around you, especially when the official set-list is over and you're about to leave after half the encore to avoid traffic.
"Oh my God, your boyfriend is so sweet!" A girl from your left remarks, her face as flushed as yours from all the dancing and jumping as you wait for Seungcheol to get you another water-bottle. "Mine kept on scrolling through his phone throughout the concert."
"He's not my—" You begin, only to be interrupted by the said assumed boyfriend returning with a bottle of water and another full of juice.
"Hey, hold this." He hands you the drinks before shimmying off his hoodie and wrapping it over you.
You almost protest it, but the warmth that engulfs you is so calming that it slows your entire blood-flow down. A deep sigh escapes your lips, you hadn't realized how harsh the evening gusts had been on your skin until he cocooned you into his loaned-out comfort. His pink hoodie is unimaginably gentle on your skin, just like how he has been throughout today. You wordlessly slip your hands into it and he automatically reaches for your half-covered fingers when you're done, leading you out of the venue while making sure no one bumps into you in the dazed, spent crowd.
You don't know why you agree when he asks if you want to get some fast-food in the drive-through of a local diner—you don't even feel hungry!
But when he hands you the large strawberry milkshake, topped with thick cream and infused with fresh crushed berries along with a giant bag of greasy fries and burgers after thanking the server, you find yourself ripping the largest chunks of the meaty delicacy with your teeth over and over again without even chewing the mouthful.
The watery ketchup smears your fingers and the corner of your mouth, bothering you a little. You frown at the discomfort, too lazy to put the food down and do something about it. But Seungcheol notices it, because he shakes his head with a small laugh while you blabber on and on about your favorite segments of the show, and reaches forward with a napkin to dab your skin clean.
You let him, thinking it's such a small, kind gesture. But the moment his fingers leave the corner of your lips, you find yourself craving the press of them more than anything you've ever wanted before.
You're sipping the last of your milkshake, eating the whipped cream and fruit with a spoon when he gives in to your request of playing the videos he took of the concert.
To your surprise, all of them are of you instead of the performers on stage.
You whine about it, telling him how stupid and ugly you look screaming with your eyes popping out of your skull in each one of them. He ignores you, insisting that it's cute before playing the next one.
"You know," you say, running your finger inside the cup to collect the cream off its side and pop it into your mouth, "I never pegged you for a Lunaris fan."
He pockets his phone back into his pocket, "Well, I never pegged you for a scammer, but here we are."
Your finger jerks inside your mouth, your nail digging into your tongue at the embarrassment of being caught. Shyly, you slip it out. "You knew?"
He sighs, turning the radio up just slightly as if this isn't the point where he's about to kick you out of his car or at least demand his money back.
But he only smiles, his eyes shining soft under the moonlight. "Come on, I'm not that dense. Those seats were horrendous."
"Why did you play along?"
You're gaping now, your breaths a little shallow like that of a sly cat that has just been caught stealing off a feast.
Seungcheol only chuckles, reaching forward with his thumb to wipe something off your bottom lip. The whipped cream. He then brings it to his own mouth, sucking the sweetness off of it before answering.
"Because I wanted to."
"That's not an answer," you insist, "Why?"
Seungcheol takes a deep breath, looking down as he briefly rubs the back of his neck. "Would you think it's weird if I said that it's cause I wanted to be with you?"
You blink at him, brain buffering like it's just been handed a pop-quiz you absolutely did not study for.
"Be with me?" you repeat, dumbly, because those words are so unbelievably dreamy that they need a second lap to make sense.
He nods innocently, eagerly. There's a nervous smile tugging at his lips now, preventing it from growing too much or dropping altogether.
"I've liked you…for quite some time now." He leans closer, voice quiter, more sincere now. "I've seen you around the campus—in the library when you're studying with a single earbud in; at the coffee-house when you're complaining to the barista about having to study ethics as a computer-science major even though you're the one who enrolled in that class in the first place. You're too present, yet too elusive."
He didn't look up at first, but when he did, it hit you—that honest softness in his eyes. That unmistakable honesty of his words. You notice the slight tremble in his bottom lip when he licks it or how his voice shakes ever so slightly around your name, almost as if he's carefully choosing what words to associate with the idea of you.
"I always find my attention drifting towards you, even when I'm surrounded by people." He says, "and I felt like I knew so much about you already, but didn't know you at all. So when the opportunity presented itself, I took it without any complains."
When he watches you intently, you realize just how flustered you are to function. Your mouth is ajar and your lashes can't hold still—like if you blinked enough, this dizzying haze will clear up and you'll wake up from some dream without him, without the music that is still humming in your bones, without the sweetness that is still coating your tongue.
But this evening is real.
He is real.
The clasp of his hand over yours and how easily your fingers slotted against his own, this confession—unhurried and deep, like the calmest ocean…it is all real.
"You could've…you could've just approached me on campus if you wanted to know me." You say, biting your cheek when you realize just how fleeting and stupid that response is to his heartfelt revelation.
He smiles slowly. "I could, but then I wouldn't have gotten the chance to dance with you, scream those stupid words with you…I wouldn't have choked on confetti while you laughed, patting me on the back."
You stifle a laughter at the memory of that.
"Be honest, Cheol, do you even like Lunaris?"
He leans back, putting some distance between you both like he's afraid you might swat him.
"Hadn't even heard about them before your story."
You gasp, "Seriously? You…you learned all those facts about them, their discography—"
"All in three days," he affirms, "yep. Though I did have a little help from someone."
"So you endured all that, just to spend some time with me?"
You can't help the moisture that is beginning to form behind your lids. Thankfully, it's not something you can't sniffle away, but your nose does turn pink.
"I endured all that just to spend some quality time with you," he corrects you, reaching forward to boop your blushing nose, "and see you get all pink when you're flustered and overwhelmed."
For some time, neither of you speaks. The silence between you doesn't feel heavy with tension, but saturated with the heady presence of all that has been said. You allow it to seep into your skull, making you lightheaded.
Before you even know it, the space between the two of you begins growing shorter and shorter, almost like the world is folding in on you two.
Or maybe you're just leaning in.
Just when the song on the radio changes to Kingston by Faye Webster, your lips collide in tandem with the first romantic dip of the song.
You kiss Seungcheol to the sweet honesty of the words 'the day that I met you, I started dreaming'. His lips brush against yours in a practiced rhythm, coaxing you with sweet kisses to open up more. And when you do, he angles his mouth deeper to taste the lingering sweetness of the milkshake on your tongue. One of his hands stations at your waist, actively pulling you towards him while the other cradles your face, his thumb drawing circles over the little hearts you had drawn with your eyeliner on your cheekbones for the concert.
Your own fingers are lost in the thick, midnight tresses of his hair, tugging at it simply because you enjoy the sounds he makes into your mouth when you do that.
One of the windows is cracked open to let the fresh air in. Yet, the air around you grows hotter and damper with need the more you part yourself open for him to ravage.
It's almost steam—his breath on your face. There's these waves of heat, pulsating and unfurling inside of you and making you want to take all your clothes off. You begin by shimmying off his hoodie first, your jacket soon follows suit—all while you make sure to keep your lips on him. That's how eager…no, that's how hungry you are for him.
His fingers shiver when they skim over the naked expanse of your back and he groans in your mouth at the sheer sexiness of your form as you press yourself into him more and more over the console.
Your chest crushes against his rock-hard one when he lets loose over his self-control and just tug you closer to him, his fingers no longer shy as they dig deep into your flesh with possession. When he sucks at your bottom lip, you feel an answering tug in your nipples. There's a burning sensation in your lower belly, pooling all the way down to your core each time he grunts your name between the kisses and presses sloppy ones over your jaw, your neck, your cheek…any skin that he can find.
Your entire body is aching for his touch, the pain of it all making your core weep as you begin squirming at the growing wetness between your legs.
Like a true sadist, he chooses that exact moment to break the kiss, pulling apart from a gasping, writhing mess that is your swollen, flushed body.
"We can't…not here, not like this." He says and you immediately pout, trying to give him your glassiest, most pleading eyes. He winces at the sight, adding quickly, "My place?"
You're too disoriented to form a coherent thought, so you just nod.
Throughout the ten minute drive from the diner's parking lot to his house, there's a million things that you want to tell him. 'I don't always sleep with guys on the first date itself' being top of that list. But the intensity of that kiss, that sweet torture of it, has rendered your thoughts groundless.
You feel like all your words are floating in an abyss somewhere inside of you, bursting into little heart-shaped explosions of his name the more his knuckles brush your thigh when he shifts the gear or when you inhale and with it, in comes the lingering scent of him on your lips.
When he parks his car and opens your door, pulling you into his arms in a swift tug and making you secure your legs around his waist while his lips press soft, reverent kisses all across your collarbones, you feel like you don't need to do any explaining to him. That he wouldn't think any different of you even if you sleep with him tonight. Besides, the anguish in every inch of your body begging to be sated by his addicting touch blurs the rules of modern dating in your mind.
He somehow manages to push both of yours entangled bodies inside his house, kicking the door shut with his heavy boot while you whimper in his mouth, sucking in short, ragged breaths.
"Just hang on baby," he says when you whine for the n-th time like you can't believe he didn't take you right there on the floor by his front-door.
His fingers slip inside the back-pockets of your jeans and he pulls you further in while taking you up the stairs. It's only a single layer that is decreased between his fingers and your skin, but it makes you burn nonetheless.
"You're such a fucking mess already," he coos, biting down hard on your skin, "what am I gonna do with you?"
"Fuck me, perhaps?" You grab his face, letting your nails dig deep into his jaw as you make out with him.
He presses you against a wall to let you cool that heat off, but the more you grind on the growing tent in his jeans, the more it riles you up.
"Oh I will fuck you," he promises, "thoroughly, at that."
Seungcheol doesn't even care shutting the door of his bedroom. He simply pushes you down onto his mattress and leans down as if sucked in by your gravity.
For a few moments, he doesn't kiss you or touch you, just watches you with wild, blown out eyes as if you're some miracle personified with twitching limbs and soaked, swollen lips.
He watches just how beautiful your hair looks sprawled on his light blue sheets which only looks like the vast stretch of the dawn sky under your sun. How your fluttering fingers graze his body with just the soft tips of them like the first of sunlight kissing Earth.
The thin strap of your slinky top has already slipped off one of your shoulders, almost revealing the soft curve of your breast to his hungry eyes. You dig your hips deeper into his mattress one moment but then in the next one, you're arching up to him…you just can't stop writhing.
And that wrecked state of you is a sight for sore eyes. His sore eyes.
He lets his eyes sweep across your skin as it glows with a gossamer silver sheen of the moonlight streaming in from his open window one last time.
You look ethereal, you look celestial, you look divine.
Even in the dark of this night, you—with all your gilded beauty—are nothing less than a:
"Ray of sunshine." he mumbles, not caring for how dumb and cheeky that sounds. "You're like the first ray of sunshine…elevating everything you touch."
With that, he dives in to capture your lips again. This time, the kiss is short-lived, but no less passionate. In fact, when he leaves your lips with a wet smack, you feel the room spin around you. He travels lower, pressing open mouthed, hot kisses on your skin as he goes. One of his palms takes advantage of it when you arch off the bed as he licks your naval, and he slips it under your spine to undo the sole knot keeping your racy top in place, the fingers of his free hand are already working on buttons of your jeans.
As he slides the fabric off your legs, you help him out by discarding your top before tugging at the hem of his t-shirt—the one with the smiling faces of all members of Lunaris who just saw you get naked.
He pulls it off for you, taking his sweet time to run his fingers through his disheveled hair to allow you to gawk at the hard ridges of his abs.
"Fuck…you're gorgeous." You admit, more to yourself than to him.
"I work hard," he laughs, but you don't miss the underlying gratitude in it.
Your fingers trace the defined lines, feeling how his taut muscles flex under his skin. In return, he crushes your nipple a tad too hard between his fingers and his thumb.
"Ow!" you squeal, smacking at his chest. That only motivates him to grab both of your soft mounds, give them a generous squeeze before teasing them with his tongue in alternative motions until you're pulling at his hair, begging for mercy.
He grants you some pity, but only for a few short-lived moments because the very next, he's gripping your hips on either sides and flipping you over in one, swift motion.
"S-Seungcheol…" you stutter, stabilizing your balance on one arm and pushing your tousled hair off your face with the other as he adjusts your knees to a width of his liking.
He admires your form when you're arching by running his eager palms all over the vulnerable expanse of your stretched body. Then, he squeezes your waist almost as if searing his claim on you.
Who could've predicted that the guy blushing as he confessed his crush for you in his car after spending the whole evening dancing to the cheesiest pop-songs would be this bossy in bed?
But Seungcheol is brimming with dominance—you feel it in the weight of his calloused palms as he adjusts you like you're a toy, his toy. You feel that dominance, that claim, in the cold of his metal chain which pools over the back of your neck when he leans in to push your hair to a side and kiss your temple. You feel it in his words when he guides you to let him put a pillow under your hips.
"You're so hot baby," he says, his knuckles running against the curve of your spine, "spread out and bent over, all open for me. Look at you, dripping already."
A nervous quiver jolts through your entire body when he rips your panties open.
"Oops," he chuckles, "you ruined them so much I figured you wouldn't need them after all."
Despite all the gloss that he ruined and spread all over them, your lips feel too dry. The duality of the boy you're surrendering all your control to is already nerve-wrecking, so the fact that you can't see his face to at least predict what he's about to do next…is devastating.
"Cheol…" you beg. For what? You don't know.
"Yes, baby?" he replies, his lips hovering above your spine. He places a kiss there, soft and wet, before proceeding to kiss you between your shoulders.
"I'm cold," you whisper, unable to suppress your shivers anymore.
"Then let me warm you up, my ray." He says, shortening the earlier nickname he had given you with such stricken reverence.
You brace yourself by digging your nails into your arms for the inevitable pressure of this position. But that force never comes, what you feel instead is something far worse—the wet warmth of his tongue licking at your weeping folds from behind and a guttural moan that follows like he just couldn't help it.
"Cheol!" You yelp, doubling over.
You instinctively try to squeeze your legs shut, your knees and hips digging harder over the mattress. But with his strong grip over your thighs, he keeps you open for his ministrations. He eats you out like a savage man, sucking at your bundle of nerves and spitting at your fluttering hole before diving in to lick it clean.
Your head swims at not just the sheer intensity of pleasure, but also the shame that comes along with the awareness of just how vulnerable you are to him. Surrendered and taken. Too open, too visible.
Tears begin streaming down your face as you find yourself reveling in this shame and wanting more of it, rather than hiding away. You press your hot face deep into the mattress, just as he presses his own harder against your cunt. He's practically making out with your nether lips, his tongue flirting with your sensitive nub, his teeth grazing at the soft flesh of your thighs from behind. You feel his nose nudge against your opening, and it is a sensation unlike anything you've felt before.
"You're doing good babe," he pants, not even bothering removing his lips away from you as he makes you arch more, "such a pretty little thing…so sweet."
His tongue rubs circles over your clit while his palms grip the flesh of your ass to spread your folds open for him. It doesn't take much for you to start bucking against the pillow he put under you. And when one of his punishing hands come down hard over the supple curve of your ass to spank you, you scream into the bed, spasming as you come undone on his tongue.
He continues to suck the sweet nectar out of you until your knees threaten to give out. And when they do, he doesn't force you back up. Your chest heaves as you manage to turn around on your side, the pillow still tangled between your thighs that feel like jello while your upper body weighs down heavy with need for his touch as you watch him wipe the glistening evidence of what just happened from his lips with the back of his palm.
"Ready for round two?" He smirks, beginning to unbuckle his belt.
You're too enamored by the sight of him undressing to register what he just said. When he's stripped bare of his denims and his boxers, and all the hard, enormous length of him is visible for your wide eyes, he gives your thigh a harsh slap. "I asked you a question."
You suck in a sharp breath at the delicious sting, not knowing what the question was but nodding regardless. You'd do just about anything for him at this point.
He nods, tearing on a silver plastic wrapper with his teeth and rolling a condom over himself.
"Good," He says, holding you still on your side when you begin to turn over on your back, "no, stay like this."
Your brows knit in confusion only to arch up in surprise when he lifts one of your legs, kisses your ankle before throwing it over his shoulder and begins nudging himself against your hole. If you felt like the earlier position was an overwhelmingly vulnerable one, this one makes it seem modest and shy.
You mumble a quick thanks to God for the biweekly Yoga classes you still remember to take even during your busy schedules.
You're stretched out open for him as he slots his entire body between your legs at an angle that allows you no room to clench them shut. The back of your thigh feels soft against his chiseled abdomen and you try to focus on that sensory pleasure instead of the maddening split you feel at your apex when he begins pushing in.
"Seungcheol," you sob, and he isn't even fully in.
By the time he's flush against you, your knuckles are turning white clutching the duvet. His breathing is sharp and uneven, the grunts that he tries his best to suppress slip out regardless as you flutter around him.
"God, you're tight." He says, "tell me that I'm not hurting you…please baby."
"You're not," you quickly shake your head, gasping for air and so stuffed full, "please, just move."
"Sure 'bout that?" He asks, slipping out regardless, slowly…too slowly.
"Yesss!" you hiss, your head limping back when he only moves out halfway before slamming back in.
He repeats that motion a few times—slow and deep, just to get you used to the position, to his size and the power that his body exerts over yours.
Once the tension of your body fades and you feel moulded enough against him, he picks the pace up. His strokes grow longer and more angled as he hunts for your sweet spot with careful, calculated motions of his hips. One of his hands remains clutching your trembling leg and he occasionally places kisses against your calf. His other one travels down to fondle your neglected breasts, pinching them, squeezing them when they bounce wild each time he gets too harsh.
Throughout it all, you continue blubbering his name like a broken record, sometimes tugging at your own hair, sometimes gripping onto his forearm as he plays with your body.
His knees bracket your tilted body, keeping you in place as he dives deeper and deeper and when after a particularly thrust you jerk like you are some naked wire with electric shots zapping across every single inch of your wet body, he knows he has hit jackpot.
"This one? This one right here?" He taunts as he continues to abuse that spot to see more of that same wide-eyed, limp mouthed reaction from you.
And you do give him just that, over and over again until you feel all sensations shrinking inside your body into a little ball of lust and heat in your lower belly.
His fingers move from your breasts to grip your neck as he begins plummeting inside you, sensing your release close. Bending forward, and nearly folding you in half, he chokes you lightly, making stars explode behind your eyes with all this cruel overstimulation.
You scream out so loud that you can't even recognize it comes from you when you burst around him in waves, spasming and clenching around him over and over until it subsides. He rocks your body gently, guiding you a little down from your high by letting your listless leg fall off his shoulder.
He remains inside you though, and as fucked out as you are, you don't miss the hardness that remains thrust inside you.
"Seungcheol, please just cum." You cry, squeezing him the best you can.
He laughs that low smoky laugh that undoes you all over again as he jokes, "we really need to work on that stamina."
"I will…k—AH" He jerks his hips against you at that exact moment, plunging in and out of you deeper and more mercilessly than before. You instantly wound your legs around his hips.
He grips your face with a single palm and squishes your cheeks together until your lips pucker up and just before you think he's going to kiss you, he spits. Shocked as you are, you feel your lips part on their own accord, letting it slip in but his tongue is chasing you down, sucking his own spit back from your mouth.
He continues fucking you—raw, hard and deep, making you arch off the bed and scream so loud that the neighbours who weren't familiar with him would sure know his name now.
He pushes two fingers deep in your mouth, "I love the sounds you make baby," he pants, "but we gotta…we gotta…argh!"
He doesn't get to finish that because his own release catches up to him. His movements turn jittery and sharp as he bucks wild against you, almost crushing you with his weight as he empties himself inside of you. You press your tears and sweat streaked face deeper into his neck, hugging him from under his arms and smoothing over the angry scratches that you didn't even realize your nails left on his back when he was fucking you like an animal.
The more he swells and slumps against you, the more you feel the aftermath of this night lighting up your chest.
You wait for the regret to peek its ugly head from behind your conscience like it always does after every rash decision. But as Seungcheol recovers, helping you settle down better with a warmth bath, gentle aftercare and just the mellow presence of him, you find yourself grounding more and more in the belief that this night, and all the scheming that followed, were some of the best decisions you've ever taken.
You're wearing nothing but his Lunaris t-shirt from earlier when you feel his arm tighten around your waist during the middle of this very long night. He keeps on placing little, fleeting kisses over the crown of your head—that's how you know he's as much awake as you are. But clearly, not for long because rhythm of his heartbeat under your cheek lulls you deeper and deeper into the waiting arms of a long, comforting slumber.
Right before you knock out cold, you mumble, half muffled into his chest. "Cheol?"
"Mhmm?"
You breathe in the scent of soap of his fresh sheets. "I don't do this often."
"Do what, Ray?" he asks.
You tilt your head, just enough for him to see your droopy eyes, your pouty lips. "Scam people…then sleep with them on the first date."
He can't help but laugh at how adorable you look, trying your best to keep your eyes and heart open for him to see that deep down buried between whatever chaos you've showed him, you're indeed, a good person.
"I know baby," he agrees, brushing your hair that is still a little wet from his shower off your face, "guess I'm just prone to being scammed and getting fucked on first dates."
You snicker, stealing another kiss from him in the dark before surrendering to sleep.
The next time you see Keira, she's getting off her shift from the coffeehouse with her new boyfriend in tow holding her bag. She's saying something to him, deliberately slowing her words down because of her tendency to talk fast when she's nervous, or excited, or both—and he's listening to her, with all the patience and attention in the world.
You somehow manage to wriggle out of the stronghold of your own boyfriend, who whines at the loss of your body from between his hands and lips.
"Cheol, stay." you order him over your shoulder before jogging up to the couple and when you reach them, though your friend is clearly the excited one to see you, you instead reach to pat the shoulders of her boyfriend like a bro.
"Thanks for taking her out the day before Valentine's day, Mingyu." You tell the guy whose confused gaze oscillates between you and his girlfriend laughing beside you. Yet, you continue, even when he has no context, "I really owe you a big one."
"Uh…cool, I guess?" He smiles at you, puzzled, before turning to his girlfriend, "but babe, wasn't our first date on the—"
"The details don't matter, baby." The speed at which Keira replies with that jittery smile is almost too quick—even for a fast-talker like her.
But you choose to brush it off, too happy to worry over little details lately. You extend your palm towards Mingyu in a businesslike manner, "I mean it, Kim. Feel free to reach out to me whenever you need my help."
Mingyu laughs, not because anything is humorous, but because he doesn't know how else to react to the bizarreness of this situation. Yet, he concedes, shaking your hand as formally as he can—briefly, because all of a sudden, he is slipping his hand out of your grip and stepping a little away from you when he spots someone behind you.
You roll your eyes, you don't even have to turn around to see what's going on.
"Cheol, are you glaring at him?" You ask.
"Yeah." Comes the disgruntled reply.
"Well, are you planning to stop glaring at him?"
"Not really."
"Do you want me to ask Keira to go to the next concert with me?"
"But Ray—"
"I think we should get going," Keira butts in, tugging at the sleeves of her boyfriend's sweatshirt and pulling him away.
You don't miss it though, the knowing smile she throws towards Seungcheol and that's all it takes for you to start wondering about the loophole of this entire story—
