diet pepsi ⸺ camp counselor!jay (sounds to scenes collection)
( ★ ) ⸻ jay spent the entire summer pretending that he wasn't into you. ignoring every single one of your advances, because it made sense. you were younger. he was leaving. it just wouldn't work out. avoiding you just made the most sense. until he's letting himself slip on your last night together and he's quickly realizing that he's made a huge mistake.
۶ৎpairing: mentor!jay x mentee!reader ۶ৎgenre: heavy angst... smut. summer camp au. age gap (reader is 18, jay is 24). established relationships. ۶ৎtw: smut (mdni!) descriptive making out, loss of virginity, mutual pining. unexpected heeseung closure. fingering, dry humping. slight dirty talk. unresolved feelings. cortis!martin makes an appearance. bnd!jaehyun. car sex. subtle masturbation (m.), relationship ending. gone the next morning... post sex abandonment? unprotected sex (not in this economy pls). ۶ৎwc: 16.5k+
⸻ playlist | diet pepsi. addison rae, bound. the ponderosa twins plus one, late night talking. harry styles, electric love. borns, love grows (where my rosemary goes). edison lighthouse, tenerife sea. ed sheeran, perfect places. lorde, bad habit. steve lacy, get you. daniel caesar ft. kali uchis, summertime sadness. lana del rey, vienna. billy joel, the scientist. coldplay.
by the time the sun was setting, camp barely looked like camp anymore. the campers that had spent the past three months running from cabin to cabin had been picked up hours ago. said cabins cleaned up and empty, ready for the winter that slowly crept around the corner. the lake was still. for the first time all summer, there wasn't a schedule to follow, no activities, no headcounts. no one asking where the arts-and-crafts supplies were. you and the eleven other counselors were the only ones left, closing out the summer with a well deserved bonfire barbecue.
martin, sakai and jaehyun dragged picnic tables to the beach before setting the folding chairs up to surround the fire, while jungwon set up his speaker, viv and lex arguing about whose playlist should be shuffled. the smell of charcoal hung heavy in the air as heeseung started up the grill, expertly cutting thick pieces of beef while brin stole bites directly off the serving tray.
he's rolling his eyes the third time her tongs chase his, “those are for everybody,” he grumbles, she nods with a grin – pushing a big piece past her lips. “mhm!” she's reaching for another piece, but he's nudging her away with his hip. she easily reaches around him, popping the pork into her mouth before he can steal it back. “brin.” he tries to sound stern, but the natural softness of his voice never leaves him. “you've eaten like a full cow by now,” he jokes and she grins wide up at him, shoulders lifting in a shrug.
“put more on,” she says simply.
mindless chatter is heard all throughout the beach, a red solo cup clutched in every hand. sunoo is stationed behind a folding table he deemed the bar, two coolers hidden underneath filled with juice and several bottles that had been hidden for the better half of the summer and an obnoxious amount of fruit. mia argues as he hands her drink over, “you shouldn't eyeball vodka,” she nags and he's snorting out a laugh. “it literally won't matter in ten years, just drink.” he encourages, repeating what had become his mantra these last few days.
and no matter how scary that sounded, he was right. all the moments that seemed huge, everything that made you cry, smile, laugh – most likely wouldn't even matter ten years from now. but that's what made every last moment that much more special, what made the goodbyes that you all knew were looming that much more devastating. because despite promising to stay in touch, you all knew that this was all temporary and in ten years, everything would be so different. you all would be completely different.
you sit close to the fire with the other girls as the chaos settles, slowly rotating a marshmallow over the flames. the heat warming the bare skin of your thighs left by the dress you picked this morning. subconsciously putting more thought into your appearance, knowing what tonight meant. it was the last night, yes, but it always was a last chance. so you’re choosing the strapless dress that hugged your frame, a bright orange with pretty pink flowers scattered over it, the colors seeming to pop against your sun-kissed skin.
you hoped you looked as pretty as you felt and that a certain someone took notice, the moment he's drifting into your thoughts – your eyes shift to where he stands. leaning casually against one of the surfboards, head tipped back as he laughs at something jungwon said. jongseong park. jay. you remember reading his name on the welcome sheet on your very first day, the man in charge of the music lodge and all of the instruments inside. your mentor for the next three months and the man who you'd be replacing at the end of the summer when he left for grad school.
that's what he was introduced to you as, but after meeting him, after spending every single day with him for the last ninety-two days, he had become so much more. he was funny, smart, kind, generous and extremely talented. the kids loved him, looked up to him and he gave them a good reason to with how patient and encouraging he was with every last one of them. he was an all around good guy and him being without a doubt the hottest guy you've ever laid eyes on only added to that.
jay was sexy without even trying to be, from his facial expressions to the way his fingers moved over the strings of his guitar, everything he did seemed to draw you in. and god you were so bad at hiding it. from day one, you couldn't keep your eyes from finding him in the crowd, couldn't mask the insistent blush of your cheeks or the way giggles would slip past your lips before you could even think twice.
and the craziest part of all of it, was that he also seemed interested in you. you never missed the way the touches would linger, the way his eyes would drop to your lips before snapping back up to your eyes. you've even caught him watching you from the pier one night when you and the other girls went out for a late swim. but you never once made a move, just treaded dangerously close to the line and it all but drove you insane.
“you're drooling,” you hear from beside you and your body startles, nearly dropping your marshmallow into the fire. viv laugh besides you, leaning into your shoulder as she does. you can already feel the heat rising in your cheeks. “no i'm not,” you uselessly defend and she nods as if she actually believes you, “why don't you go say something?” brin makes an attempt at whispering, leaning across viv to look at you.
you feel the anxiety blooming in your chest before she's even finishing her sentence, “are you crazy!?” while you were like 89% sure jay also thought you were cute, there was still that 11% chance that he was just being nice. and you were terrified by that 11%. viv lifts her drink to her lips, taking a big gulp of it before she's setting in the sand, deciding she was done with it. “he leaves tomorrow... forever.” she reminds with a pointed look. “and then in ten years, none of this will matter...”
as if he could sense he was being talked about, jay's eyes drift in your direction. not even half surprised that he caught you and the other girls staring, it sort of been the theme of the summer. and the way he wiggles his fingers in a slight wave makes everything worse, because you're gasping, marshmallow actually hitting the ground as laughter erupts between your friends.
the night stretches just like that, conversations bouncing between you, drinks and food being passed and lingering stares between you and jay that everyone else pretending they didn't notice. by the time the sky was dark and the stars were twinkling, everything seemed to settle. the feeling of finality that everyone had been avoiding thickening with each flicker of the fire.
“i can't believe i won't be back here next year,” heeseung says, earning a chorus of loud eye rolls from each of you. he's only mentioned it a trillion times in the past three months. “oh my god, wait! it's your last summer!?” lex fakes a gasp that has laughter spreading, heeseung lifts his middle finger in her direction while brin slaps at her shoulder playfully. “cut him some slack, he's been here since they filled the lake.” she teases.
jungwon is quick to interject, a smirk playing on his lips. “nah, that was jay. he poured the water in himself, one cup at a time,” he punctuates his words with a tip of his own cup, letting the last few drops of his liquor hit the sand. “seriously, though, we're going to miss you guys.” sakai starts and you can already hear the quiver in her tone. “it's going to be so weird not smelling brin making bacon before sunrise, or hearing jay fighting with the kids for hiding his drumsticks, no more heeseung waking us up past midnight for ramyeon...” her lips form a pout before she can even finish her thought and you're reaching over to hug her.
“aw.” martin coos, setting down his drink before clapping his hands together. “think tonight calls for some goodbye speeches,” agreement is immediate and it's not long before brin is standing. she talks about her love for the camp, when she started and how close she's become with every one of you, highlighting funny moments, sad ones and ones that she swears she'll never forget. heeseung follows, starting with “i can't believe this is my last summer...” and ending with the same words, head shaking.
jay stands next and you feel the way your heart flutters for no good reason. his hand rubs at the back of his neck, teeth tugging at his lower lip as he fought to put the right words together. he looked handsome, face lit by the fire, hair dyed blond after losing a dare to one of the campers on the first week. it suited him. “i hate public speaking,” jungwon leads the chorus of boos that follow his words, pulling a laugh from him which seems to ease the tension between his shoulders.
he continues on despite the thump in his chest, despite knowing you're sat less than a few feet away, watching him. “honestly, this place has been home for a long time. i started when i was seventeen?” he ignores the groans that come from the group, out of all the counselors, he's been there the longest and he never let them forget it. “get off the stage, unc!” jungwon shouts, hands cupped around his mouth.
jay's eyes drift from the lake, over to the music lodge sitting at the edge of the camp, back to the friends he's grown closer to every summer. and then to you and the way you smile at him has him losing his train of thought for a full three seconds. “seriously, though, i've spent almost every summer here and i thought that would make leaving harder but it isn't. of course, i'll miss the campers, you guys and obviously my music room, but...” his eyes are back on yours and everyone notices the way his gaze, “i think the reason it's kind of easy is because i know everything i love is being left in good hands,” exaggerated gasps are heard around the fire.
jay does his best to ignore them, eyes never breaking from yours. his gaze said everything he had been swallowing for the past few months, mixed with the regret of not having the courage to make a move sooner. stood in his own way each and every time. “yn, i'm so relieved to know you'll be the one replacing me. you're so good with the kiddos, you're smart, funny... patient and creative... way more organized that i've ever been. thank you for making leaving a little bit easier, i appreciate you,” an unmistakable blush has settled on his cheeks and he's moving to sit, “and you look pretty in all your dresses,” the words are jumbled together, alcohol giving him just enough courage to mumble what he had been thinking every morning you walked into the music lodge.
the silence lasts for less than a second before obnoxious cheers erupt through the group. “better late than never!” jaehyun whistles, while sunoo claps wildly beside him. apparently, he had mentioned it to everyone but you the way they were reacting like it was this long awaited thing. it was. you ignore the flutter in your chest long enough to thank him. you can't stop replaying the last three words of his speech: 'all your dresses'. all like every one of them? which meant he had noticed every one. and he thought every one was pretty.
and he waited until the night before he was leaving to say something about it. bittersweet wasn't even the word.
the rest of the evening passes in a blur. all of your crowded around the fire, reminiscing and sharing secrets. it has the expected warm feeling the end of summer would, but you can't seem to fully enjoy it with the way your eyes keep drifting to jay. as the hours tick on, the group starts to break apart around the beach. heeseung and martin had volunteered to get more drinks and jay had hopped up to help, since then the three of them had been seated at the table a few feet away. they're talking quietly but you don't miss the not so discreet way one of them would point in your direction.
viv and mia only make it worse, shoving and hitting your arm wildly when jay finally stands to head toward the coolers. “okay, okay. go now.” you hear one of them say, nearly shoving you off of your chair. and you don't miss the kissing noises they make as you're walking away.
the coolers sit near one of the set up of kayaks that jaehyun swore he'd get put away before sundown. it was ten pm. jay is already crouched beside one when you approach, pushing aside melting ice as he searched for another drink. “hi,” your heart is pounding so rough against your chest, it's all you can muster. you catch the way his hand stills, body stilling for just a second before he's shaking it off – pulling two wine coolers from the ice before standing to face you. he hands one over with the prettiest of smiles.
“hey.” he says through one of his nervous laughs you've gotten so familiar with.
“i liked your speech,” it's all you can think of saying because it's all you can think about. his gaze drops to the sand, a hand lifting to rub at the back of his neck. and for the first time all evening, all summer even – jay actually looks embarrassed. the past three months, you've been the one blushing, the one caught staring, you've been so sure you've been making a fool out of yourself with your loud crush. when it reality, he's been noticing you this entire time too. he was just so much better at hiding it.
his shoulders lift in a slight shrug, “i was just being honest.”
“honest? you were flirting with me,” you accuse playfully and that has his cheeks going pink. “oh my god,” he laughs and it's a real pretty one, it has a smile lifting on your lips almost immediately. his eyes find yours for a moment, but he's quickly finding something else to focus on. and then he's slowly coming back, allowing himself to actually look. his stare is so intense that it has you shifting, searching for something to say, anything to fill the silence. your lips part, but he's beating you to it. “i meant it. i really like you, yn. but...”
he's getting ready to reject you, you can just tell. jay didn't like loose ends and despite all the quiet glances, subtle flirting that you're now just realizing was flirting, he was still leaving in the morning. he was starting a whole new chapter of his life and there could be no maybes left behind. so he needed a clean break. you're interrupting him before he has the chance. “and you said i was pretty in all my dresses. you know, i knew you were staring every morning... you'd always act like you were look at your bon jovi poster,”
jay is letting out a low laugh, “it's a nice poster!” he defends. “but yeah, it was you.” it feels so weird to say out loud, he had been so careful all summer and admitting that he had been admiring you this whole time didn't feel like him. “you looked good in every one. extremely distracting by the way.” he's twisting the cap off of his drink as he speaks, taking a long sip from it.
and you realize why he's not holding back anymore, the semi permanent flush of his cheeks and glossy look in his eye. “every one?” you prompt with a grin, following his lead and taking a sip from your drink too.
he nods without a moment of hesitation, “all of them.” the confidence in his voice catches you off guard, because this was jay we were talking about. the same jay that spent three months carefully putting distance between you every time you got too close. who would find excuses to rush away whenever you'd start flirting with him. the same jay who'd look away whenever you caught him staring, spouting off nonsense facts about bon jovi instead of saying what he truly wanted to.
that jay was looking at you through hooded eyes, gaze dragging over the curves of your body. and a lazy smile stretches on his face that makes your stomach twist. he's nodding his head as if he's confirming a question he had asked himself. “yeah, all of them.” he says quietly. “the long blue one with the slit on the side,” your lips part slightly, the exact morning flashing in your mind. it was only the third day and he called you in early to do one final sweep before the campers were arriving later that day. you remember just throwing the dress on, annoyed that you were up before sunrise when everyone else was sleeping in.
“you remember that?” he's nodding before you're even done speaking. “yeah, you wouldn't stop giving me attitude all day.” he's laughing with a shake of his head. he's taking a step closer, turning so he's facing you fully and you feel your stomach twist. “the white one you wore to the talent show,” he continues, lip tucked between his teeth. he had stood on the other side of the room the entire show, barely speaking two words to you when it was over.
“and...” his head tilts slightly, eyes dragging over you in the way that makes it so painfully obvious that he's been forcing himself not to look at you all summer. he's grinning. “the short orange one you're wearing now,” you actually feel the way your brain short-circuits, eyes wide as your jaw drops. it's usually the other way around, you coming onto him and him ignoring you. so now that the roles were reversed, you have no idea what to do with yourself.
“okay, stop.” you're laughing, hand lifting to slap his shoulder. “what? i can't compliment you? you compliment me all the time.” you shake your head quickly, “tit's different when you do it. especially now.” you point out and jay goes quiet, because he knows you're right. it is different. everything is. summer was over, all the campers were gone, he was leaving tomorrow morning and everything just felt... heavier?
before either of you can say anything else, a scream cuts across the beach. both of you turn at the sound to find sunoo pealing his shirt from his body, sprinting toward the water. “LAST SWIM OF THE SUMMER!” he shouts as he runs. chaos breaks out within seconds, your friends abandoning their drinks and kicking off their shoes. shirts and shorts fly through the air as they reveal the swimsuits they'd been wearing all night.
the firelight flickers across the beach as everyone runs toward the lake. viv jumps on jaehyun's back, his hands clutching her thighs as he runs. jungwon, martin, sakai and lex have already started climbing up a nearby cliff. mia and heeseung are in search of a beach ball. it's so obvious that everyone was trying to drag out time, trying to cram in as many 'lasts' as they could before morning was rolling in and all of this was ending.
you're smiling, gaze shifting back to jay. and you find him already look at you, he smiles brightly before tapping his bottle against yours, tipping it back and swallowing the rest down. you do the same. his head tilts toward the lake once you're finished, brow lifted slightly. “race you,” he's running off before you can even register what he's said, bottle ditched somewhere in the sand and you're quick to follow behind him.
jay's laugh is loud and unrestrained as he runs into the water, pulling his shirt over his head in the process. you've never heard him laugh like that, ever and it's incredibly contagious. your dress joins the liter of clothing at the shoreline as you rush in. the lake is freezing and you're squealing the second it hits your legs. jay turns to face you, he's already fully submerged himself into the water and he's reaching a hand out to you.
“you gotta jump right in,” you've been saying that to him all summer. the irony is funny to you. still, you take hold of his hand and he's easily tugging you toward him. the two of you float there, treading water and staring at each other. it's like he was getting in all the looking he had missed out in the past months. “what?” you're laughing and he's shrugging his shoulder slightly. “just remembering...” you hate the way his words make you feel. you don't want to think about it being the last night, or all the time wasted. so you splash him instead, a hard wave that soaks his hair. jay's laughing, hand pushing his hair back out of his eyes to see that you've swam away and he's quick to swim after you.
you're swimming right through the middle of the impromptu game of water volleyball, jaehyun deciding you're apart of his team and sending jay to join heeseung's side. sunoo teases mia about winning now that they had you and she had jay, she rolls her eyes before roughly serving the ball. it hits jaehyun in the chest and viv shouts from the pier for you all to be careful with her man, brin laughing beside her.
across the lake, jungwon, martin, sakai and lex have made it to the top of the cliff. their voices echo as they argue about what actually counts as a flip. martin deciding to shut them all up by launching himself off of the rock, body flipping naturally in the air whooping loudly just before he's hitting the water with a loud splash and lex follows behind him, looking less graceful but gaining a supportive chant from the girls when she resurfaces.
the game of volleyball melts into a shouting match after the first three rounds, arguments about points that nobody had been even keeping track of in the first place, sunoo swearing that he didn't cheat and heeseung and jay going back and forth about something neither of them seem particularly passion about. the beach ball floats away forgotten by both teams.
eventually, you're paddling your way back toward the dock, pulling yourself up beside viv and brin. water drips from your legs as you stretch them out in front of you, back laying against the warm wood. viv immediately scoots closer, grin wide as her eyes drift to where jay and heeseung fight to pull each other under the water. “so,” you feel the heat rise in your cheeks. “does he like you? does he want to kiss and get married and have five kids?” she's asking and you're barking out a laugh.
“yeah, right.” you roll your eyes. “we didn't say much, really. just that he liked me dresses.” you catch the way brin rolls her eyes, letting out a soft huff. “he's hopeless,” she sighs, but is quickly moving to change the subject, pointing across the lake as sakai shoves jungwon into the water before jumping off behind him. “can you believe she's going to be in charge next year?” brin had spent the past three months training sakai on how to run this place and come next year, she'd be the new head counselor.
viv is shaking her head, “wild. this is the same girl who faked pneumonia to get out of cooking duties, by the way.” you're snorting out a laugh. “i'm going to miss this,” the admission settles between all three of you. waking up and not have your friends right outside your door, no more staying up late to watch the stars. this place somehow became home without any of you noticing and in less than twelve hours it all would be over.
the dock shifts slightly, a large splash following and the sound of jaehyun's laughter. viv is rolling her eyes, kicking her foot out to him but instead of hitting him, he's catching it by the ankle. he's tugging her slightly, earning a swift kick with the other leg. he's laughing. “come here,” his thumb traces her ankle, hand slowly dragging up her calf. “i'm having a conversation,” viv says, gesturing between you and brin.
jaehyun is shrugging quickly. “you can have it in the water,” his fingers tighten around her leg, a sly grin spreading across his lips and anyone can guess what he's thinking. “jaehyun, don't.” he's looking up at her, mischief dancing through his eyes. “what? i'm just touching you. i love you. i can't touch you?” they're ignoring the gagging noises that come from beside them just like they always do.
“i can feel you–” she is not even able to finish her sentence before he's yanking his arm toward him, successfully pulling viv off of the dock and into the water. he catches her instantly, arms around her waist as her legs secure themselves around his waist. “say bye to your friends,” he says already swimming further into the water.
a few feet away, heeseung is waving both his arms in your direction. “are you two planning on sitting there all night?” he shouts with his hands now cupped around his mouth. “maybe!” you're shouting back and he's quickly shaking his head, waving you both over. “get in the water!” brin is quickly pointing at you, despite the fact her legs and hair were still dry. “she doesn't want to,”
“what!? you're still dry,” you point out. she's rolling her eyes, slipping in just as heeseung has started swimming over. you follow behind her. the group gathers together slowly, floating in the middle of the lake as conversations overlap. you're all drifting between each other, talking about plans for the next few weeks, sharing excitement for next year, worries. jungwon's group eventually get their fix of cliff diving and join the rest of you in the water. lex puling herself comfortably on sunoo's back, reaching forward to steal his drink. mia starts another argument this time with sakai about who slept in the most.
and somehow in the midst of all of this, you end up beside jay again, without even fully realizing it. at least that's what you tell yourself when your shoulder bumps against his. one moment, he's laughing at something heeseung says, the very next you're stealing his attention away, in your tiny yellow bikini that barely covers yours ass. he knows. he checked.
you're so close to him, but you're completely enthralled in conversations. laughing loudly and engaging freely. your legs brushes against his whenever a soft wave rolls through and each time neither of you move away or say anything about it. you don't realize that the two of you are floating away at first. you were listening to the others, jungwon's laugh carrying across the water as martin exposes him for never really being on duty.
their voices come and go with the ways, but slowly it seems like they're fading into the background. you shift onto your break, letting the water hold your weight as you stare up at the twinkling stars scattered across the sky. jay stays close to you, tanned skin glistening in the moonlight. his hair is wet and slicked back, dark eyes sparkling as he watches you.
“you stare a lot,” you're pointing out with a laugh.
he's quick to nod his head, not even bothering to deny it. his hands find their way underneath you, floating uselessly beneath your back as if he's holding you up – but not actually touching you. just looking for excuses to be close to you, to touch you. even if it was through the water. “you're so different tonight, i'm not used to this jay.” you're saying after a minute and jay's gaze is dragging up to your eyes.
“am i?” he's asking like it's not the most obvious thing. “yes. you're actually looking at me, complimenting me, not rushing away when i get too close. where was this all summer?” besides the time the two of you spent working together in the music lodge, there were very few times where you were alone. no matter how much you wanted to be. “i was trying really hard to be professional. i'm your mentor.”
“not anymore,” you're quick to point out and you notice the way his eyes drag down the line of your neck to to the swell of your breasts all the way down to the curve of your waist. his eyes catch the gold jewelry that dangles from your navel before he's snapping his eyes back up to yours. “not anymore,” he repeats with a nod. you feel the way the palm of his hand grazes your thigh as he floats closer to you.
you're sure the pounding in your chest can be heard by your friends on the other side of the lake. you try to appear as composed as possible. “so, what else have you been keeping to yourself?” jay's lips shift into a smirk, head tilting to the side slightly. of course you want to know what he's been thinking about you since he was first meeting you. and he's kept his cards so close to his chest up until now, it was only fair. “you want the whole list?”
your head tilts so your able to look at his face fully, eyes wide. “there's a list?”
“a long one,” he's nodding quickly. “like how cute i think you look biting your lip when you play the piano. the way i admired how easily you were able to bond with the kids in our class...” he's actually searching his mind for more things to tell you and you find that unbelievably adorable.
but still, something about all of this just doesn't sit right by you. “why'd you wait so long to say something?” he's letting out a soft sigh, stepping back slightly as his hand rubs at the back of his neck. “i'm leaving in the morning, yn. and i'm not coming back. i mean, i liked you from the start but it didn't seem smart to start something with you i knew i wasn't going to be around to finish.” it made sense. he wasn't coming back, this was his last summer before he went to start his life in new york or california or wherever life took him. this was his past now.
“and i knew you had a crush on me too, it just didn't seem fair.” he's explaining with a sigh and you're nodding, because he's right. you hated to admit it, but he was right. now you knew, though. and you still had the rest of the night. there was no sense in moping around about the fact that this would be the last time you'd see each other when you could be reveling in the time you still had.
you're shifting in the water so you're upright again. “you know, i really thought i was embarrassing myself all summer. turns out you were crushing on me just as bad,” you tease, sticking your tongue out at him that has him smiling. “no, you were.” he's clarifying and you reach over to slap at his chest. “i was not! you kept a mental inventory of my dress collection,” you're pointing out.
“yeah, but i was subtle. you knocked over an entire box of guitar pics when i touched your hand,” the memory makes him smile, you were wearing a green halter dress than, hair pulled into a sleek bun. and you smelt like caramel. “okay, but-” you try to defend yourself, but he's interrupting you. “and let's not forget the time you spilled juice in your lap when i sat by you,” white dress with red and pink flowers all over it. it was ruined. rip.
you embarrassed yourself in front of him more times than you could count and there was denying that, so you don't try to. “you know what,” you're grumbling, hands pushing the water hard enough to send a large splash toward him. it hits him directly in the face, soaking his hair all over again. and you don't miss the dangerous smile on his lips as he reaches up to wipe the water from your eyes, you're already swimming away before he's opening them.
“oh, you're done.” you hear from behind you and you make the mistake of looking back, catching the way he dips under the water. he's scarily fast. you're letting out a squeal as you rush away from him. he's laughing at how easily he's able to close the distance between the two of you. and you hate this version of him. no, actually that was a lie – you hate how much you like this version of him.
this is the jay everyone else around you apparently knew about it. the one that wasn't watching every word or always stepping back. he was no longer trying so hard to keep up with this stiff image of himself, he was just being. and you hate that it took until the very last day for you to finally experience him this way. you're laughing so hard you can barely defend yourself, screaming when jay is finally catching you. “jay!” you shout as he's easily lifting you over his shoulder and tossing you behind his back into the water.
you're resurfacing quickly, jumping onto his back without a bit of hesitation. jay stumbles forward, laughing as you wrap your around his shoulders trying with all your might to get him under the water. “i'm going to fucking drown you,” the threat comes between laughs, ruined by the fact that you're barely even able to move him. “you?” he says amused, a large hand lifting to wrap around the arm you've got around his neck. “are we sure about that?” the confidence in his voice should've been your warning, but you barely have time to question it before he's shaking you off and right back into the lake.
you're bobbing to the surface with a gasp, shoving wet hair from your face as your eyes find jay standing across from you. he's bent over laughing so hard he's basically wheezing, eyes shut as he clutches his stomach and you're taking the chance. you're jumping on him before he can react, sending both of your bodies under the water. you're quick with swimming to the surface, coughing and laughing as jay wipes water from his eyes. “get over here,” his laugh follows his words, and you're instantly swimming away.
you hear the water shifting behind you. way too fast. and you're swimming straight for the rocks, planning on getting out of the water entirely and getting away from him on foot, but you're barely able to touch them when you feel his arm wrap around your waist. he's pulling you toward him swiftly, your spine colliding with his solid chest – hands braced on the rocks in front of you. you were literally trapped between a rock and a hard place. “i warned you,” his voice is right beside your ear and you're suddenly becoming painfully aware of how close you were.
you can feel the way his breathing has changed against your back, hands dropped down to your hips as he holds your body against his. his grip tightens for half a second as another wave rolls between you. you feel him shift behind you, pulling you close and you're gasping when you realize what he's doing. your ass is pressed right against his crotch, his stiffness pressing against your ass. his head tilts slightly, a hand lifting to push your hair off of one shoulder. “done running from me?” he mumbles but you can't even form a proper sentence right now.
you're nodding, breathless, pulse is racing and slowly you're turning around in his arms, hands landing on his shoulders. he looks like he's ready to devour you. hair dripping into his eyes, cheeks flushed and eyes slowly drinking you in. and for once, he's not looking away when your eyes meet. instead, he's moving in closer. your bodies shift until your back is pressed against the rolls and there is no where else for you go besides into him.
his hand lifts from your body, finger latching onto the front strap of your bikini – right between your breasts. he grins at the sound of your breath hitching, the soft gasp you let out when he's tugging you toward him. the water ripples, your chest hits his and he's backing you back against the rock before his leaning down. you can almost hear his resolve snap before his mouth finds yours and you're immediately melting into it.
overhead, jungwon is launching himself off of the cliff after successfully convincing his group to climb back up. his body rotates easily through the air, the best backflip that he's all summer and he can hear the cheer of his friends as they look up at him. and then he's catching movement, seconds before he's about to hit the water. it's you and jay, further from the rest of the group still. standing a bit too close.
he's eyes are widening when jay is lifting his hand, finger hooking into your bikini top and tugging before he's tugging you toward him. “no way,” the words leave his lips just as he's hitting the water, the splash that follows is huge but he can't even reveal in that as he fights to the surface. he swims to the edge of the lake, pulling himself out of the water as he shoves his wet hair from his face. eyes finding the two of you again, still very much kissing. and when he reaches the top of the cliff again, you're in the same spot.
martin is still standing near the edge of the cliff, sakai trying to convince him to belly flop. lex spots jungwon first, brow furrowing. “you said last jump, why you back?” he nearly slips as he rushes toward the edge of the cliff, pointing aggressively down at the water. “look.” martin follows the direction of his finger, sakai tilting her head to the side as she squints and lex crouches down slightly.
“oh my god.”
jay's groaning against your mouth and the sound shoots straight through you. his mouth moves over your swiftly, tongue pushing it's way past your lips. your brain is reeling, completely drowning in the taste of him. everything in the background just ceased to exist, you were no longer worried about tomorrow, or next summer or even your friends that were right behind you. all you could think, breathe, feel was jay.
your mouth tastes like the blueberry wine coolers you've been drinking, you smell like caramel the way you always do, and the way you feel against him is enough to drive just about anyone insane. your arms are around his neck, chest pressed to his and head tilted as your tongue is rolling into his mouth. he doesn't miss the soft whine you're letting out, the sound muffled by his mouth but his dick responds anyway. pressing firmly against you, you're shifting closer.
jaehyun sits on the dock, hands spread out beside him with viv perched between his legs. she's droning on about her new campus and her new roommate that she was so excited to meet. he's half listening, but his attention seems to drift across the water. a habit he's picked up throughout the summer, sort of like canvasing. checking where everyone had ended up, what you're all doing.
brin is floating in the water by heeseung, talking about their first summer here... six years ago. she had these atrocious bangs and braces, he still hadn't even grown into his nose. it was crazy how to two of them grew up. mia and sunoo sit at the edge of the water, legs kicking in front of them as sunoo gushes about finally being reunited with his boyfriend back home.
jungwon, martin, lex and sakai are still on that damn cliff, but instead of doing flips like they had been all night, they're crouched down staring below them. jaehyun follows their gaze and he's nearly falls over when he's seeing what they see. “oh, no way.”
“baby, i'm telling you a story.” viv says from between his legs, turning to look at her man who was clearly no longer paying attention. his hand reaches for her jaw, turning her head in the direction of you and jay. she's gasping, moving quickly like the queen of gossip he knew she was. she's waving her arms dramatically trying to catch mia's attention and it takes less than a few seconds before she's looking over.
'what?' she mouths and viv is pointing in your direction. her eyes land on the two of you instantly and she's grabbing sunoo's arm, pointing across the lake. sunoo is letting out a loud gasp, leaning forward like he's about to charge right over to you. mia is holding him back just in case. “heeseung,” jaehyun is whisper-shouting, catching the older boy's attention pretty quickly.
'look at jay.' he mouths and heeseung's brows are furrowing before both him and brin are turning around. the grin that spreads on his face can only be described as proud. finally. after three months of pining, finally. he has to hold back from applauding his friend.
jay moves like he's been starving for this. hands dropping to your thighs and squeezing roughly until you're taking the initiative and climbing onto him, legs wrapping easily around his waist. he's sucking your lip into his mouth, teeth grazing it as he presses his hips forward, effectively pinning you against the rocks. your hands have made their way into his damp hair, tangled in the strands.
neither of you have any idea that all of your friends bought front row tickets to your first kiss and it's evident in the way jay is shifting his hips forward, half hard cock pressing against him and you're pressing down just as hard. he's humming out a moan and you feel it throughout your body, heat pooling between your legs. his fingers spread against your skin, slowly sliding up your thighs.
you're pulling back just enough to catch your breath, a soft laugh falling from your lips at the dazed look in his eyes. cheeks flushed pink beneath the moonlight, lips swollen from the kiss, chest rising and falling unevenly. droplets of water fall from the hair that covers his forehead. he doesn't say anything, just stands there taking you in. the sight alone has another giggle falling from you lips and that has his gaze dropping to your lips. he's leaning in again before he can think twice about it.
“let her breathe, let her breathe!” sunoo's voice echoes across the lake and you feel jay's body go rigid against you. his eyes squeeze shut as if he's suddenly remembering where he is and the fact that it wasn't just the two of you out there. “that's it! get your man!” mia is whooping, lifting her drink the air as she cheers for you. your shoulders shake, a horrified laugh escaping you as your forehead falls onto jay's shoulder. the sound is quickly swallowed by the shouts that come from your friends.
jay is letting out a low breath through his nose. his head lifting toward the sky for a second with a shake of his head. and when he's looking back down at you, this is the first time you've ever seen him have his composure rocked. usually so calm and careful, but here he looked almost boyish? obviously blushing as the teasing from your friends filled the air. his hands stayed resting on your thighs the entire time, holding your body close to his as jungwon shouts about having seeing it happen first.
“this is so beautiful!” sakai shouts from the top of the cliff, leaning on martin as tears well in her eyes. clearly more emotional about leaving camp than she let on. martin wraps an arm around her waist before leaning forward where jay is able to see him. “look what y'all did! you made kai-baby cry.” he points down at the girl in his arms who also cried after seeing all the beds made this morning.
“kiss again!” jaehyun is shouting from the dock, earning a supportive whistle from viv. the group erupts at the suggestion, childishly chanting 'kiss' as jay stands there mortified. and you think it's hilarious, he looks so cute embarrassed, trying to hide the fact that his heart wasn't pounding and despite how badly he wanted to kiss you, he was all of a sudden feeling shy.
“come on, the first one didn't count!” brin is shouting through the chants. “how would that not count!?” jay shoots back, finally turning back to look at your friends. his reaction only fueling their chants and you can practically feel the heat coming off of him now. they're all a perfect orchestra. heeseung leads the chants, hands cupped around his mouth as cheers for another kiss. lex is leaning over the edge of the rock, sending exaggerated kissy faces your way. and brin is holding her hands up, making them kiss as her lips pucker.
and despite how desperate jay looks to escape their attention, you're addicted to peer pressure. a laugh slips past your lips as your hand is reaching down, fingers pressing against his jaw gently – just enough to turn his head back toward you. the shouting gets louder instantly. you're leaning down against instantly, mouth slotted against his and he's letting out an involuntarily groan at the feeling. the cheers that follow are obnoxiously deafening and it has your laughs dying against jay's lips.
the cold of the lake slowly becomes unbearable and one by one, you all begin making your way back toward the shore. the like that had been full of shouting and splashing just minutes ago is now quiet behind you, water still. wet footprints trail through the sand, towels stolen and half finished drinks recovered from where they had been abandoned hours ago.
you're settling in front of the fire with jay who swiftly positions himself behind you. the fire crackles in front of you, casting a warm light across the campgrounds. hair and body still wet, but you're settling further into jay's chest until going to find a towel. he doesn't seem to care much either, arm looping around your waist as he holds you close to him.
neither of you seem particularly interested in talking about what just happened, instead you just smile way too wide each time your eyes meet. you can hear brin from across the grounds, hair wrapped in a towel and a large hoodie covering her frame. she's rubbing at her stomach as she speaks. “i'm starving!” heeseung snorts as he walks past, his wet swim trunks in hand a pair of dry short hanging loose on his hips. he's digging through the coolers, without even looking up.
“we still have a bunch of meat left. should we kill it?” he suggests and brin's body immediately perks up. “say swear,” she says, taking quick steps to where he stands. he's letting out a soft laugh, pulling two unopened packets of pork belly from the ice with one hand, three packets of brisket in the other. “swear,” brin is squealing, reaching up to take the packets in hand. “see? this is why you're my favorite.” she says, leading the way toward the grill.
heeseung is rolling his eyes, but following closely behind. “yesterday you said lex was your favorite,” he points out and brin is nodding happily. her hand extends so she's able to boop the tip of heeseung's nose, he's scrunching it immediately. “today it's you.”
you spot sunoo walking toward the fire a few seconds later carrying four drinks, two in each hand. “good news,” he announces in a sing-song tone, lifting the bottles toward his face. “i found a full box,” viv and jaehyun trail behind him, stealing one of the bottles before settling on one of the lawn chairs. sunoo hands you a bottle, before passing the next one to jay and plopping down by the fire. “this is starting to feel final,” you say with a pout and you feel the way jay stiffens behind you.
“we live close! we should plan something, yn.” viv reaches her hands out to you and you're agreeing instantly. you two were only a forty-five minute drive apart, it wouldn't be hard to make plans together before next summer, it was just harder when you weren't just a few doors away. rather than across the country.
lex, mia and jungwon take responsibility for the mess they spent most of the night helping create. jungwon is already collecting empty bottles to recycle, lex is carrying a trash bag that's somehow bigger than she is, while mia complains but about everyone being pigs while she cleans up the leftover food. she's mainly yelling at martin who's pretending he can't hear her from where he still sits at the lake with sakai beside him.
they're sat near the edge of the water in the sand, sakai is wrapped in a large blanket and martin has his head resting on her shoulder, fighting the sleep that's creeping up on him. sunoo is rummaging through his bag for something, his bottle pressed between his knees as he looks. “oh wait!” he's exclaiming loud enough that it catches the attention of the people sitting closest to him.
“what?” jungwon is asking, head peeking up from the trash bag he had been separating.
sunoo is pulling a small stack of envelopes from his bag, holding them up with a wide grin. “we forgot these!” he's standing before anybody call say anything else, shuffling through the envelopes and making his way around the camp to hand them out. they're goodbye letters. you know, because you written eleven of your own. everyone had to, it was camp tradition according to brin.
but as sunoo makes his way through the group, the energy changes, you can feel it. the distribution was like a blaring indicator that it was over. eventually, you'd all have to go to sleep and face tomorrow. the fire was going to die down, heeseung was going to run out of food to make, at some point you'll run out of memories to share, stories to tell. it had to end. and you all had to say goodbye.
“i'm going to miss how you always steal my hoodies, even though you have a man.” sunoo says dramatically to viv while handing her the letter he wrote, he's shooting jaehyun a pointed look at the mention of him and then shuffling to find the letter for him. viv is taking hers with a laugh, tucking it safely beneath her leg. “and i'm going to miss pretending not to notice when you and viv disappear,” jaehyun takes his letter with a roll of his eyes, drink still pressed to his lips.
“you never pretended.” he points out and sunoo is nodding with a laugh. “because you guys are gross,” he sings before turning to continue his rounds.
by the time sunoo is dropping back down beside the fire, you've noticed a handful of your friends disappearing into their cabins and coming back with their own letters. but none of you talk about it, none of you make an announcement to pass them out, it sort of just happens.
the grill sizzles, brin stealing a piece of meat before it's finished cooking and heeseung is meeting her with an individual plate with the letter he wrote her tucked underneath it. she doesn't make a big deal out of it, takes the plate and the letter before plopping down at the picnic table to eat. jungwon complains about people not separating recyclables correctly, pulling glass bottles from the trash bag that should only be filled with food. martin is standing above him, note extended in front of his face.
“if that's another bottle, martin, i'm going to drown you in the lake. and then myself,” jungwon grumbles as he looks up, eyes finding the crisp envelope inches from his nose. he takes it quickly, tucking it into his pocket then goes right back to complaining. martin walks up, making his way back to where he had been sitting with sakai before, only now she's standing.
the blanket he had lent to her folded neatly a sad look on her face as she hands it over, the note she wrote for him resting on top. “i'm going to miss you so much,” she says through a sob and martin is chuckling softly, plucking the note from the top before grabbing the blanket. unlike everyone else, he's tearing into his note immediately despite sakai's protests. his eyes move quickly across the paper before they're slowing, taking in every written word and the meaning behind them.
sakai notices the shift, she recognizes it. “martin?” her head tilts up to get a better look at his face but he's quickly looking away, folding the note and tucking it back into it's envelope. “i'm fine,” he rushes out, wiping at his eyes with his knuckle. “let's go help clean up,”
a note seems to fall from the sky as jungwon passes, hitting your knee and landing on jay's lap. “read it away from me,” he mumbles before disappearing with his trash bag. jay is picking it up with a small smile. leave it to jungwon to literally run from any type of emotional exchange. “let me go put this away,” jay says, nudging at you leg gently and you're standing to allow him to slip from behind you and disappear into his cabin. you take the chance to slip away as well, grabbing the stack of letters you had spent the past week writing from underneath your pillow.
jay catches heeseung on his way to the bathroom, “hyung, wait.” heeseung's turning to the sound of jay's voice, eyes instantly landing on the thick envelope in his hand. “what is that like ten pages?” he asks with a laugh, reaching his hand out to take it. “it's only like seven,” he defends and heeseung is shaking his hand, tearing into the letter before jay can say anything of it.
“you know i have to read it out loud,” he says through a chuckle. jay is rolling his eyes, both hands pushing his hair back on his head as he feels his cheeks darkening. “you're so embarrassing,” he says with a shake of his head, but he doesn't fight it. heeseung would just find him and read it out loud later, he did it every summer for the past six years.
he's straightening his back and clearing his throat before bringing the note up to eye level, reading it like it's a scroll. “hyung. i tried keeping this short...” he lowers the letter to shoot a deadpan expression toward the younger boy. “seven pages?” he teases and jay is waving him off with a roll of his eyes. “just hurry up and read it,” much to his surprise, heeseung continues reading. “thank you for spending the past years putting up with me. though, i've been here longer than you... i never truly had someone to look up to until you arrived. we're the oldest, so everyone looks up to us. but i'm thankful i have you to look up to too.” jay doesn't miss the way the playfulness leaves heeseung's tone. realization that this was the last letter finally hitting him.
“i don't know if anybody else realizes how much this place has your fingerprints on it. you came up with most of the things we know call tradition, you've helped me write more songs than i can count. i even heard martin repeat one of your inside jokes his first week here... half the things the campers think have always existed started because of you, you're the blueprint.” heeseung pauses to grin because he had been screaming that for the past four years and finally he was getting the recognition for it.
the letter continues on like that, highlighting the memories they made together in the past six years, how close they've become. jay's plans for the future and how he promises to keep in touch, though, no one ever really did. but heeseung can tell that he meant it. the only difference is, heeseung was leaving too. not for the summer, forever. they both were on different paths of their lives now and seeing each other every summer was going to be a thing of the past.
he doesn't ruin the moment by pointing that out, though.
“you've been apart of almost every version of my adult life and it's going to be so hard imagining moving into my next phase without you standing ten feet away making an unnecessary comment. i don't really know how to end this, because i feel there shouldn't be an end to us. to our friendship. so i'll just say, thank you for being my friend and i'll see you soon.” heeseung looks up at jay to find him trying to look anywhere else, he's shaking his head laughing softly while flipping the pages over in his hands.
there's a few sentences scribbled on the back of the last one. “oh! there's more,” sarcasm drips from his words and jay's letting out a laugh. “i had a lot to say, shut up.” heeseung continues reading. “ps. stop giving relationship advice. even if you're right 99% of the time, stop it. your 'i told you so' face is so annoying. but, you were right again... i regret not telling yn how i feel. and i regret not kissing her when i had the chance,”
heeseung is looking up with a knowing smirk on his face, brow arched and jay is shoving at his shoulder. “that face! you're so irritating,” he says through a laugh while heeseung is carefully folding the note back up. “you kissed her, though. what changed your mind?” judging from the end of his note, it's clear that jay had no intention to actually make a move with you. but he saw the way jay kissed you in the water and how he's been all over you all night. this jay was very different from letter jay.
jay is clapping his hand on heeseung's shoulder with a shake of his head, “those fucking dresses, man.”
the night officially starts to settle around you. letters distributed and tucked away safely. the fire that had been roaring all evening has started to die down, only crackling whenever a piece of wood breaks. the loud shouts of your friends have dwindled into soft murmurs heard throughout the grounds. each one of you losing the battle against sleep, it was impossible to keep fighting it.
the food is gone, the coolers are empty. jungwon has organized every single piece of trash he could get his hands on. there was nothing left to do, there was nothing left to say. sakai and sunoo disappear first, walking into the bathroom with arms linked to do their skincare routine together for the last time of the summer. brin is a few steps behind them, yawning loudly and rubbing at her eye with the heel of her palm.
viv is curled up in jaehyun's lap, his hoodie working as a blanket as her head rests beneath his chin. every few minutes, she'll mumble something into his chest and he'll reach down to smooth a hand over her hair. jaehyun is still wide awake, talking quietly with jay from across the fire. you still sit comfortably in jay's lap but you're zoned out staring at the burning embers of the fire.
jungwon, martin and heeseung have migrated into their cabin, changed into their pajamas and laying on their beds. they talk softly, finding random things to say as they fight off the inevitable sleep. their voices drift through the open window every so often before dissolving back into sleepy laughter. across the lake, lex and mia have claimed the hammock and have been laying there with the past twenty minutes. neither of them have managed to finish a complete sentence, settling for quiet sighs and toying with each other's fingers.
jay feels you shiver against him for the fourth time and it has him realizing rubbing his hands over your arms was useless in warming you up. “you cold?” he asks, head tilting to the side so he can look at you. you're tired but you're fighting it, long curls pulled in a bun at the top of your head and pretty orange dress doing nothing against the cool night air. you're turning to look at him, head bobbing in a nod.
“i have a sweater in the car, should we...” he says it because he wants to spend more time together, that part is obvious. he could've very much you suggest you go to bed, put on warm sweats of your own and call it a night. but in reality, he wasn't ready for his night with you to end and neither were you, which is why you're standing to follow him.
the walk to his jeep isn't long, he parked close to the entrance out of his need for efficiency. he was set to leave early tomorrow morning, had spent the better half of the day loading up his car. it only made sense that it would be parked a few feet away. his arm settles over your shoulders as you walk, a comfortable silence falling over you and you're finally finding the courage to ask him what you've been wondering for the past hour and a half.
“did you forget to write me a letter?” you try to keep your tone playful, masking the echoing doubts in your mind. everyone had a letter, each passed out one by one and you watched jay hand out a letter to each one of your friends. yet, the one that he should've written for you never came. you don't miss the smile that breaks onto his features, a soft laugh falling from his lips as he shakes his head. “no, god no. i just couldn't stop rewriting it,” that peaks your interest. because, yes there must've been unspoken feelings when he sat down to write it, but actually rewriting it felt different.
it took you a good three hours to decide what you were going to say to him. everything you decided just felt too elementary, but even still you only wrote one draft. and that was the one tucked away somewhere in his cabin. “you did? how many did you write?” you're reaching his car just as the question leaves the lips and he shrugs, pulling the car door open before leaning in.
“nine.” he says it so casually, half his body in his car, your eyes are widening anyway. “nine!? you wrote me nine letters!? jay...” he's standing with a black sweater clutched in his hands. it's one you recognize right away, he's worn it enough for you to. just a simple black hoodie with 'miami' written in bold red letters, the word cut off by the deep-v cut into the neckline. he's easily pulling it over your head, guiding your arms into it.
it's such a simple gesture but it's so jay that your heart flutters. hand reaching down to find the side of his neck as he straightens the hem of his sweater against your thighs. you're gently pulling him toward you, to plant a soft kiss to his lips which he returns instantly, arm wrapping around your waist to pull you into him. “nine letters?” you're saying again as he pulls away and his face breaks into a soft smile.
“relax, you're only getting one.” he's reaching back into his car, rummaging through a bag before pulling out the folded piece of paper. number nine. the final draft of his goodbye letter to you, but it felt outdated now for some reason. still, he's handing it over to you with a sad smile. “read it later,” he feels the need to clarify, traumatized by heeseung's traditional presentation.
you're tucking the letter safely into the pocket of his hoodie and silence falls between the two of you. it's a charged silence that holds the words that neither of you are willing to say. instead his eyes stay trained on you as your eyes drift into the back of his jeep. slowly, you're stepping forward to get a better look. and the sight makes your chest tighten. boxes stacked neatly on top of one another, duffel bags shoved into every available corner of his trunk. his guitar. his backup guitar. binders upon binders of sheet music. seven years packed into the back of a car. your breath catches in your throat as you're eyes shift to look back at him, body leaning against the frame of the open car door.
“so... this is really it, huh?” jay follows your gaze, a soft sigh falling from his lips as he nods. “yeah, i guess so,” you feel the way your heart drops, which is stupid, because you had known he was leaving. for the past three months it's all he could talk about. grad school, apartment hunting, moving dates. the weather in his new city, he was never not talking about leaving. but somehow seeing it packed into the back of the car hit differently. it felt real. “it's like you fit your whole cabin into your car, looks weird...”
jay lets out a quiet laugh through his nose, hand lifting to rest just above your head against the car. “tell me about it. my cabin looks weirder, all empty.” your eyes drift back to the boxes, trying hard not to picture how his cabin would look empty. you poked your head in too many times to see if he was around to now think of the reality of him never being around again.
“you did this all day?” you say it just to make conversation, because you have nothing else to say that didn't feel totally depressing. and jay seems to catch on, because he is playing along. he nods simply, lips pulling into his mouth as his eyes drift back to you. “yeah, some of it yesterday.”
“you cried, huh?” you tease and that manages to pull another pretty laugh for him, “i absolutely did not,” he defends halfheartedly, but you're not buying it. “oh, now i know you cried. you're such a liar,” your eyes narrow up at him and that has him laughing even harder and for a second it almost feels normal again. but then your eyes are drifting back, catching sight of his guitar case again.
you're changing the subject quickly. “you know...” your voice trails off, forcing a smile on your lips. “i thought you hated me for like the first two weeks.” jay's head snaps toward you so fast it makes you laugh, his brows raised high toward his hairline. “are you serious?” he says through a laugh, your hand slaps against his chest. “yes! did you forget about how you'd avoid me? and ignore me, even if i was talking directly to you.”
he's laughing, eventually nodding along. because it was true. the first few weeks he couldn't even be around you without his brain short-circuiting and when he'd try to say something, anything – he found himself getting tongue tied more often than not. but still, “you were impossible to ignore. but, yes. i did try.” he had it in his head if he just didn't talk to you, then his feelings wouldn't grow. he was so wrong.
“you'd walk into a room and all of a sudden everyone's attention would be on you. including mine.” his eyes drop to his hoodie and how it swallows your frame, covering up one of your many pretty dresses. then slowly back up to your face, you're staring up at him with the same heart eyed expression you've been giving him all summer. “you flirted with me constantly too, even when i tried not to look your way,” you're laughing, arms reaching up to wrap around his neck.
“i had a feeling it would end up being effective,” you grin and he's smiling, hand lifting to rest on the small of your back. “trust me, it was. it was all i could talk about with heeseung,” but never to you. he never gave away to the slightest bit of interest and that drove you insane every single day. it almost bothered you more that he waited until the last day to finally say something. he could've just left you clueless, able to move on and say that you tried. because you did try, so hard.
and for some reason him waiting until there was no time left to meet you halfway just didn't feel fair. the pout is forming on your lips before you can fight it, hand resting on his cheek. “i wouldn't change a second of this summer, truly. i loved meeting everyone and spending my days with you.” it's hard to ignore the sadness in your eyes, the obvious way you're fighting back tears as you speak. “but, fuck, jay... i wish we had more time,”
he knows exactly what you mean without you having to say it. you spent all summer wanting him, loudly. but every time he caught himself wanting you back, he'd find a reason to keep his distance. to walk away, to play it safe. he'd find a reason not too look too long, not too linger in conversations with you. especially if they were about your shared love for music.
he was so strategic in the way he interacted with you, careful not to let himself enjoy the way your fit lit up whenever you spotted him hanging out in his cabin. he had spent months convincing himself that this was the right way, that he was doing the right thing. the smart thing. that all of this would be easier if he kept his distance, and maybe that would've been true if tonight never happened.
because standing here now, knowing exactly what it feels like to kiss you, makes what should've been an easy goodbye feel impossible. “well,” he's saying with a soft smile, arm lifting so his wrist is in view. and you follow his gaze to the watch on his wrist. “it's only... 2:49AM. there's still five hours and eleven minutes until it's over.” he says with a proud smile, probably at his mental math and that has you laughing softly. “what should we do with that time?” his finger taps at his chin and you're tilting your head to the side.
without missing a beat, you're leaning up to press your lips against his. he's kissing back instantly. his hands fall down to grasp your hips, easily pulling your body against his. your worries about tomorrow seem to melt away as soon as his lips are on yours, your fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck as you hold him to you. jay kisses you with a rushed, starved almost desperate need and it makes it difficult for you to focus on anything but him.
his tongue is pushing past your lips easily, brushing against yours before he's changing his mind and catching your lower lip between his teeth instead. you're gasping, the sound pulling a soft chuckle from his mouth. it dies on your tongue. “you're so perfect,” he sighs, hand resting against the side of your face as he leans back enough to look at you. he's easily tilting your head to the side with his hand, revealing more of your neck to him.
his head is dropping to the side, soft lips finding your skin. salty from the lake but he sucks kisses against the length of it. “jay,” you're gasping, hand reaching out to clutch the fabric of his t-shirt, pulling him close. and his arm tightens around your waist, holding you tight against him as his lips roam your skin. he's focusing his lips just above your collarbone, sucking the skin into his mouth and it has your head lulling back. his body shifts, hands tracing the curves of your body before he's carefully lifting you into the backseat.
it's cramped between all his bags and boxes, and the idea of his new life. but he's climbing in behind you, letting the door slam behind him. closing the two of you in to your own private space and you're on him instantly. his back hits the door from the force of your lips, a soft laugh falling from both of your lips. you kiss him desperately, every push of your lips screaming finally and all he can do is try to keep up. he groans as your hands sneak underneath the fabric of his shirt, nails dragging over his stomach.
your tongue pushes and twists against his, his hands shoving his hoodie and your dress out of the way. his fingers spread over the skin of your ass, squeezing gently and the moan you let out has his dick jumping. jay is easily pulling you further onto him with the grip he has on your ass. it's so uncomfortable, you've got your legs on either side of his waist, he's hanging half way off of the seat, back pressed against the door. all of the crap from his cabin surround your bodies, making it that much more difficult to move. yet, he wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
not when you were hovering over him like this, panting into his mouth while pushing your ass back into the palms of his hands. “oh, fuck.” he's sighing when your lips trail down the length of his jaw, you follow the same pattern as he had before. sucking kisses into is skin, before grazing your teeth over it. focusing on a particular sensitive bit while your hips grind down onto his. a low, untamed growl catches in his throat as he feels the way your body moves against his.
the thin material of your bikini bottoms doing very little to mask the wet heat dripping from between your legs and onto his shorts. his head dips down to find your lips, mouth covering yours quickly and he wastes no time with licking into your mouth. jay's easily pulling you into a deep, needy, almost frantic rhythm that has your head spinning. you're moaning, hips pressing roughly against his. the length of his cock presses delicious against your clothed clit and your hips roll toward his, body shuddering as pleasure spreads throughout your core.
“oh my god,” you're whining into his mouth, hips moving frantically against his. he does his best to lift his hips to meet yours, fingers digging in to the flesh of your ass as heat rises up his neck. “you feel so... holy shit,” he's grunting, head falling back to rest against the door as you basically bounce on his lap. through hooded eyes, he watches the way your body moves against his. the needy roll of your hips paired with the look on your face just makes him harder.
you've got your lip tucked between your teeth, head dipped back as your hands travel up your torso. they find your breasts almost instantly and he watches as you squeeze and toy with them through fabric. he finds it hot how you refused to take off his sweater despite how much you probably want to. your hips move swiftly, pretty moans filling the cramped car as his hard length drags between your folds.
his hips lift to meet each one of your movements, using the grip on your body to press you down harder against him. every last bit of restraint has snap, he's no longer able to hold himself back. chest rising and falling in untimed breaths as a flush creeps onto his cheeks. he tries and fails to hold his whimpers back, but the way you're moving just feels too good. or he's just too sensitive, either way the pressure builds at the pit of his stomach and it's impossible to ignore.
and to make matters worse, jay can tell you're close too just from the unfocused timing of your hips and the helpless whines you're letting out. “jay,” you're gasping, fist clutching the fabric of his shirt as he watches the way your eyes roll back, your thighs squeezing together the best you can with his body between them. and he's quickly deciding he'd rather feel you cum, rather than see it.
“wait, baby... wait.” jay is shifting up, hands moving down to your thighs, stilling your movements. and he finds the pout that takes over your features especially cute, he's pressing a soft kiss to it without thinking. “i want to feel you,” he says simply. he's carefully leaning you back, your body resting against the boxes behind you as he moves to hover above you now.
his fingers sneak underneath the hem of your dress, latching onto the strings of your bottoms as his eyes drag up to look at you. you're shooting a nervous smile in his direction that has his heart softening. “is this okay?” he's asking softly, slowly tugging at the strings. you're nodding quickly, “please, jay.” you're breathing out, hips lifting off of the car seat to make it easier for him.
jay's letting out a soft chuckle before dragging your bottoms down your legs, tossing them somewhere behind him. his eyes drop down to catch the way your folds glisten, large hands pushing the hoodie and your dress up toward your belly button. “fuck,” he sighs with a shake of his head and you feel the heat rising in your cheeks, feeling unbelievably vulnerable under his lustful gaze. he's leaning forward, nose dragging along the length of your neck before his tongue pushes out to drag against your skin.
his hand slides expertly between your legs as his mouth moves to suck a hickey into your skin. your legs spread almost instinctively, moaning as his fingers trace between your folds. “you're so fucking wet,” he's groaning, fingers pushing slowly past your entrance. the warmth of your pussy surrounds his fingers as he slides in all the way to the knuckle. your hips lift to meet his hand and he's grinning down at you. “does it feel good? having my fingers stretch you out?” he asks softly as he curls his fingers inside you.
your walls clamp down around them, head bobbing in a nod. “yes... f-fuck, jay. it feels so good,” you're admitting. jay's fingers thrust deep inside of you, thumb pressing against your clit before he's rubbing slow cirlces against it. it's not long before he's falling into a steady rhythm, free hand lifting to hold your hips still as his fingers fuck into you. you're whining softly, legs spreading wide for him. “jay...” you're pleading, yet you have no idea what you're asking for.
his eyes lift to find yours, head tilting to the side slightly. “what, baby?” he grins, speeding up the movement of his hand and easily pulling a loud gasp from your lips. the sound of his chuckle follows, his eyes dropping back to your pussy. you're basically dripping around his fingers walls pulsing with each thrust. “i need... more, jay please.” your words break on a desperate cry, his fingers scissoring inside of you as his thumb presses harder against your clit.
“whatever you want,” he says, but the truth was he couldn't wait much longer either. not with this insistent throb between his legs, and the way you were looking up at him, so needy and ready. he had waited long enough for a moment like this with you, he was done waiting. jay pulls his hand away slowly, hands flying to push his shorts out of the way. his wet hand wrapping around his thick length and you watch as he strokes himself slowly, coating his shaft with your arousal.
the sight makes your mouth water. he stays knelt there for a few moments, just rubbing his hand over himself and watching you and the intensity in his stare makes your body hot. “spread your legs for me,” he's saying after a minute and you're separating your knees without a word, pussy clenching at the groan he lets out. “jay. fuck me, please.” you're whining, hand dropping down the length of your body to spread your folds for him, showing him just how badly you needed him.
he's leaning forward quickly, mouth covering yours in a needy kiss as the bulbous head of his cock bumps against your fingers. he takes his time with lining himself up with your tight hole, pushing his hips forward slowly until he's feeling you stretch around him. you have to remind yourself to relax as he pushes forward, breathing through the pain that comes with each inch of him. your fingers clutch his hair the moment that he's bottoming out and he feels the way your body stiffens.
“relax, baby. take your time.” he soothes, hand stroking your hair gently as he watches you adjust. he leans down to press soft kisses against your skin. switching between sucking hickeys into your neck and twisting his tongue with yours. he waits patiently for you to loosen up for him, but the moment he feels you shifting, he's taking that as his go and thrusting his hips forward. “fuck!” you shout, back arching as much as it can and he's pinning you back down with his hips.
slowly, he's pulling his hips back, allowing you to feel every rigid inch of his cock. “you're squeezing me so tight,” he says before he's quickly slamming back in. your body jerks, hips lift, whines falling from your lips as he falls into a steady pace. your hands are on his shoulders, nails dragging against his skin. jay fucks into you slowly and incredibly deep. his grip is tight on your waist, dragging your body down onto him with each thrust. his face remains buried in your neck, mouthing at your skin as his cock splits you open.
you feel him so deeply, he's no longer holding back and the desperate movement of his hips has an electric need shooting through your body. you needed to be closer. needed to feel him deeper. needed his hands on you like this forever. his teeth bite into your skin, muffling the long groan threatens to slip out and you're matching it with a needy whimper. his thrusts become brutal, hips snapping against yours in a overwhelmingly rough pace. your nails drag over the muscles of his back, legs spreading wider for him as desperate cries fill the car.
“jay, oh my god. i'm gonna...” you don't know if you should push him away or pull him closer, heat spreading throughout your body as the knot at the pit of your stomach tightens. jay keeps up with the pace as best he can, hand dropping down to find your clit again and he rubs figure eights into the sensitive bud. his head lifts so he can watch the way your face contorts in pleasure.
your orgasm tears through your body, eyes rolling all the way to the back of your head as your back arches off of the seat. it's unlike anything you've felt before, body going numb as his hips continue to move between your thighs – fucking you through it. “god, look at you.” he sighs, burying himself deep inside of you, balls slapping against your ass with each thrusts. he moves until you're coming down for your high, watching the way your body relaxes in his arms. and only then is he pulling back, slowly drawing his hips away from your body and twisting his body so he's sitting upright on the seats.
“fuck,” he breathes, hand wrapping over his cock to keep it from falling limp. “i had the craziest cramp in my leg,” he says through a laugh, eyes shifting to find you. you're half way off of the seat, back resting against a box and hair falling messily around your face. “you okay?” he asks, smiling softly the second you're nodding. his free hand reaches out toward you, beckoning you over with a grin.
you're lifting slowly, allowing his arm to wrap around his waist and for her to tug you onto his lap. “come ride me, i'm almost there,” there's quiet begging in his tone as he lifts your body slightly, enough to pull you into his lap. your heart jumps, body freezing as you stare over at him with wide eyes. “oh, uhm... i've never? i don't think i know how...” you feel the heat rising in your cheeks and jay's brow furrows at your words.
“you've never rode someone before?” he asks because it sounds almost insane. of course you've rode someone before. he takes in the look in your eye, the shy blush that darkens your cheeks. “well, no... that was my first time,” you say sheepishly and his eyes are flying open, his hand falling from his cock to push his hair back on his forehead. “what?” he says it, even though he's positive he heard you clearly.
he just couldn't believe it. didn't even stop and consider it. and now he feels terrible because he just took your virginity like it was nothing. like it was something you could just hand out. it should've been special, he should've made it special. “yn, you can't lose your virginity in the back of my car!?” you're laughing at his distress, the wrinkle between his brow as they furrow in pure worry.
you don't know why you find him so cute this way. your shoulders lift in a shrug, hands settling on his shoulders. “too late?” you're saying through your laughter and he's shooting you a pointed look. “not funny, yn. i should've been gentle,” you're quick to shake your head, hands covering his cheeks as you lean down to press a soft kiss to his lips. he kisses you back slowly, hands resting on your waist much lighter now. you're pulling back slowly, head tilting slightly.
“come on, you already took it. don't clam up now,” you're leaning down to plate a kiss to his lips that has his worries melting away. your tongue wrapping around his, fingers curling in his hair as you lift your hips to climb further up on his lap. his head rests on the back of the chair when you pull away, looking up at you through his lashes as your hand reaches down wrapping around his cock. his hips twitch as you position his head at your entrance, “teach me,” you say with a pout and just like that his restraint is gone.
again.
–
you're not heading back to jay's cabin until the sun is already peaking over the mountains. it's weirdly empty, just like you imagined. his bed made in the middle of the room. he doesn't let you dwell on the look of it for too long, not wanting you to sleep too deep in your thoughts while you're having such a good time. he's pulling you into bed beside him, easily tucking your body into his as the two of you finally drift off to sleep.
and you stay like that in his arms for god knows how long. your head on his chest and his arm wrapped securely around your waist. he doesn't dare move, even when sleep finally takes over. which doesn't last as long as he would have hoped, his alarm blaring at exactly 7:15am. he's careful not to wake you as he slips out of bed, showering and changing his clothes as you shift and pull at his sheets. you don't even budge when he's making his bed, or when he's taking the last bag out of his room and into his car.
there's so much more he wanted to say. and he hated that he had no more time. for a long while, jay just stands there. keys in hand as his eyes scan over his empty cabin, save for you curled beneath his blankets. the morning sun peaks in through his window, golden streaks fanning across the bed. and you don't even shift. you're dead asleep, drooling onto his pillows and the sight has a soft laugh falling from his lips.
“wow,” he's shocked because even like this, smushed face and messy hair – you still look so pretty. he should leave, he needed to get on the road before the gps estimated a different arrival time. there were a list of things that he needed to get done back at his apartment before he was heading to the airport, he needed to leave. instead, he's making his way back into the cabin. setting his keys back on his desk before pulling out the blank notebook from one of the drawers, stealing a page.
he starts writing. the words coming to him much easier now that he's no longer hold back. he's ran out of reasons not to tell you exactly how he feels. he spent the last nine drafts trying to sound reasonable and failed every single time. because, this wasn't reasonable. falling for you was the most unreasonable thing that he has ever done, but he loved every second of it.
jay doesn't stop once as he writes, not a single typo. his feelings hit the page unfiltered, for the first time all summer. he's saying everything that he's wanted to, to you, about you. for you. he doesn't make a single edit. every for sentences, his eyes would drift over to where you lay, curled in his hoodie and drowning in his sheets. and then three more sentences would come to mind, two more after that. he writes until he's filled the entire page and then some more on the back.
once he's finished he's folding it carefully, slipping it into an envelope before scribbling something across the front. he's moving to stand beside the bed one last time, setting the note on his empty pillow before his eyes drift over to you. the urge to wake you up hit him intensely, he wanted so badly to say goodbye properly, to steal one more kiss, one more touch, one more hour. but he knew that was wrong. that he'd end up wanting to stay longer, actually seeing him walk away might hurt you more.
so he doesn't. he just sets his hand on your head softly, brushing your hair back so he's able to press a soft kiss to your forehead. his lips linger there for a moment, silently hoping that you'd wake up on your own. and when you don't, he's standing. he grabs his keys from his desk, takes one final look at you, before he's heading out of the cabin, closing the door tight behind him.
you're stirring awake two hours later. the first thing you notice is that you feel warm, surrounded by jay's familiar scent. you sink further into the mattress, sunlight spilling from the windows and warming your skin and for a few seconds you don't open your eyes. instead, you nuzzle yourself into jay's warmth as moments from the night before flood your memory.
playing with jay in the lake. kissing jay against the rocks. jay holding you by the fire. walking with jay to his car, his arm around your shoulders. jay fucking you in that same car, in so many different ways. you could still feel the stretch of him between your legs. a smile spreads across your lips, remembering exactly how he felt beneath you as you rode him for the first time ever. and you're suddenly filled with the need to try it again. to feel him again.
you're reaching out before your mind can tell you differently, eyes snapping open when your hand is met with nothing but emptiness. your eyes find the clock sat on his nightstand, reading the flashing numbers that stare back at you. 10:17AM. your stomach drops, a deep frown replacing the sleepy smile you had been wearing before. “oh,” you're sighing as realization hits, jay was gone.
you knew he'd be leaving early, he told everyone that he was going to be gone before anyone was really waking up. but despite knowing, not seeing him beside you still stings. slowly you're sitting up in his bed, the over-sized hoodie shifting over your shoulders as you reach to rub at your eyes. everything feels heavy, your heart thumps uselessly in your chest as your eyes scan over the room.
he was really gone. the bathroom had been emptied out this morning, his desk was completely cleared off, posters torn down and folded neatly. there was no trace of him left in this room besides you and the fact that he took everything and left you behind has your throat tightening. your eyes drift back toward his pillow, eyes furrowing at the sight of the crisp envelope that laid on top of his blue pillowcase. you're reaching for it quickly, reading over the words written across the front of the envelope. “make it ten versions,” you read and you don't waste a second before tearing the note open.
❝ yn.
i've written this goodbye letter to you so many times that i almost forgot the point of it. the first few letters sounded like i was giving you a college recommendation... then i got too emotional about leaving the music lodge in your care. the third version was so embarrassingly raw that if you ever somehow read it i'd most likely evaporate where i stand. the one that I gave you, version nine, was the one that felt the most honest to me. at least at that time. now, it just feels like it was written by someone else.
someone that was still pretending he hadn't fell for you. i spent the last three months pretending that i wasn't looking for you in every room. pretending that i was fine with keeping things professional. wasted so much time pretending that i didn't feel the same way that you did and i think i owe you an apology for that. i owe you a lot of apologies, honestly.
i'm sorry that i waited until the last day to make a move. i'm realizing now, seated at my desk and you snoring behind me that, that was the wrong move. i should've said something sooner, i shouldn't have let you wonder if you were the only one with the crush. or at least stuck to my guns, said nothing, and left quietly. because this sucks so much worse. leaving after just one night of getting to know how it feels to be with you feels horrible. but i don't regret it, don't get me wrong. i'm happy that our last night together was every bit of perfect, i just wish i got it together sooner. for the both of us.
and that brings me to my next apology. i'm sorry that you spent all summer being brave enough for the both of us. you were so loud about your feelings, you never hid, you flirted with me in front of everyone despite their teasing. you made your feelings so clear and gave me every opportunity to meet you halfway and i kept coming up with excuses not to.
i convinced myself that keeping my distance would be best for the both of us. there was no point in starting something that i couldn't finish, but i realize now i was too focused on that small detail. because while the future was clear and we both knew this summer would end, we could've still enjoyed each other for three full months rather than one night. that's my fault, i'm sorry i robbed us of that.
for the last seven years, this place has been my home away from home. i know the walls, i know the smells, every last detail is engraved in my brain like a sixth sense. so naturally, i figured no longer having it as a constant would be the hardest thing of all, the thing that i'd miss most. but now i'm realizing (again) that i was wrong, because what i'm going to miss most is you.
i'm going to miss the way your face lights up when you talk about music, the way you manage to make every conversation last twice as long as they should. your laugh, your smile, the taste of your lips. i'm going to miss how warm you felt sleeping against me. and most of all, i'm going to miss all the things that i want to experience with you and now know it's too late.
fuck, i hate that it's too late...
for the first time ever, i have no idea what will happen next. because as you read this, i'm probably already on the road, heading home or toward the airport and even though, i know that has always been the plan, i can't help but wonder if i should be doing something different. or if it's stupid to make such huge life changes over someone you just met. for the first time ever, i don't trust my own plan and that scares the shit out of me.
but i kind of like it, because if there's one thing this summer taught me, one thing that you taught me... it's that all of life's best moments happen when you stop trying to control them. it took me until last night to realize it, that's why i kissed you when i did. none of that was part of the plan, but i'm so happy that i let myself enjoy being with you, even if it was just once.
i know i don't have to tell you this, but don't worry too much about me... enjoy your school year, enjoy your life. go on all the dates, make new friends and be as happy as you can possibly be. i hope that one day the universe will bring us back together, but in the meantime... keep my hoodie safe. it looks better on you, anyway.
Seoul’s boxing world is all champagne, flashing cameras, and designer suits — at least on the surface. Beneath it, the Shim empire was built on blood dressed up as luxury: violence, dirty money, underground fights. Men powerful enough to bury bodies and call it business. And you belong to the worst of them. As the daughter of Shim Group’s CEO, you’ve spent your entire life playing the role expected of you — untouchable, elegant, useful. But when YANG JUNGWON , a gifted fighter with bruised knuckles and quiet honesty, crashes into your world from Mapo-gu, and LEE HEESEUNG — heir to your family’s greatest enemy — starts pulling at secrets meant to stay buried, the carefully controlled life you’ve built begins to unravel. All while PARK SUNGHOON , your oldest and most familiar mistake, knows every ugly part of you that nobody else gets to see. The deeper the three of them pull you in, the harder it becomes to separate love from manipulation, loyalty from possession, and truth from performance. And when the truth finally surfaces, someone will bleed for it. Maybe everyone will.
featuring; yangjungwon x leeheeseung x parksunghoon x female!reader
estimated word count!! - 10.3k (ongoing)
themes! legacy as a prison , performance vs reality , love as consumption , class disparity , power imbalance , manipulation , violence hidden under beauty , the fantasy of escape , moral corruption , loneliness
content warnings for each chapter will be stated before. the following work is a work of fanfiction and does not reflect the personalities, thoughts and actions of the real people. this fanfiction will alternate between five different POVS including; reader, jungwon, heeseung, sunghoon and jake.
Synopsis: It doesn't hurt to fuck the hot frat boys you were tutoring right? Especially when they fulfilled all your horniest fantasies?
Pairings: Jake x fem!reader x Euijoo, includes members of Enhypen and &team and my glorious goddess Yujin of Ive
Warnings: SMUT MINORS DNI, actual porn, p in v, unprotected sex (not for you dumbfuck), threesome (2 scenes), double penetration, anal sex, dumbification, big dick ej and jake, oral (f and m recieiving), fingering, multiple orgasms, cock riding, dom ej and jake, vibrator use, ass slapping because duh, mayybee masochist ej and jake, masturbation (f), praise and degradation, reader gets called a cocksucker (lovingly), horrible use of frat terms, they're all freaky and horny dont ask me shit
A/N: the people of minhosimthings queendom, your queen has finally gone utterly mad. And with the madness, she's managed to craft the horniest, filthiest shit she's ever written because oh of COURSE her biases deserve the best treatment right? Jokes apart I lost so many braincells trying to think of scenarios so please don't get bored by everything ik im shit at writing threesomes. Also succesfully beat the 1000 block restriction by combining paragraphs yay. As always, enjoy, my darlings!
Word Count: 24.8k (get your pussies wet and ready)
Everyone on campus knew them. Everyone on campus loved them.
And you were about to suffer for the next two months.
How fun.
You had no idea how your professor even knew you. You were always in the second row seat in the corner, tucked away, fixed on your laptop. You procrastinated, studied, got the grades and went the fuck home, never speaking even once in class. Not when you dropped your pencil about 5000 metres away from you (right in front of your seat-partner) and they didn't notice so you chose to stay quiet for the rest of the class and went home and googled all the notes. Desperate times, desperate measures.
And then came your professor calling you to her office, telling you how perfect you’d be to tutor her weakest students for the upcoming final exam! Yipee!
Euijoo and Jaeyun. How could one even begin to describe Euijoo and Jaeyun?
They were such paradoxes, two bodies of complete irony, the sun and moon in one. They were part of the biggest and most famous frat on campus, &-En—the one known for epic parties, charity fundraisers that broke records and a roster of members who looked like they’d stepped out of a casting call for ‘University: The Musical’.
Both of them were campus royalty, the faces on every frat party flyer, every sports event poster, every stupid candid photograph people uploaded with captions about ‘college memories <3’. In summary, they were impossible to miss.
And ridiculously beautiful too.
Jaeyun with his soft black hair that always somehow fell perfectly over his forehead no matter how recklessly he moved, pretty in a quiet way that snuck up on you unexpectedly. He smiled at everyone, held doors open, remembered names; people talked about how he once carried an intoxicated freshman girl all the way back to her dorm because none of her friends could manage it properly.
Euijoo, his dyed hair a vibrant slash of autumn against the grey campus concrete, sitting on benches, gently coaxing skittish campus cats to eat from his hand. He had the kind of face people wrote songs about after making prolonged eye contact once. You’d once seen him climb a damn tree to grab an apple for some giggly group of girls who ran their manicured claws along his chest.
But despite the frat parties and loud crowds and expensive jackets and stupidly attractive friends, neither of them had ever seemed cruel. Frat-boyish? Absolutely. They roughhoused with their friends on campus lawns, walked around in sweats and sleeveless shirts like they were born for magazine covers, and showed up to lectures smelling faintly of expensive cologne and sleep deprivation.
But they were gentle, kind. You noticed things. The way Jaeyun always bowed politely to professors, the way Euijoo slowed his pace whenever someone walked beside him, the way they listened when people spoke.
Soft boys hidden beneath loud lives.
So when Professor Choi had asked you to stay behind after class, you genuinely thought you were being accused of plagiarism or tax fraud or something equally horrifying. Instead, she folded her hands together over her desk and smiled.
“I have two students who desperately need help before finals,” she said. “And I think you’d be perfect for tutoring them.” You had opened your mouth to reject the offer immediately—because absolutely not—before she continued.
“Euijoo and Jaeyun.”
“…What?”
Professor Choi laughed softly at your expression. “They’re struggling badly in biology.”
“That can’t be true,” you blurted before you could stop yourself. You had never, not once, spoken a word to either of them. Which was exactly why this whole situation was so bad. Because now you had to speak to them. Repeatedly.
“For two months?” you repeated weakly.
“Just until finals.” Professor Choi nodded sympathetically. “They’re both nice boys, it would be a pity if they failed.”
Yeah it would be a pity if you just jumped off a building right now.
You stared at her. She smiled brighter, like this was a gift. “They specifically asked for someone academically reliable, someone focused.” Which was apparently professor-code for antisocial. You sighed into your hands while she slid a paper toward you containing their schedules. “Please try your best with them,” she said gently. “They’re good boys.”
Good boys.
Right.
That was how you ended up back in your tiny one-person dorm later that night, sitting cross-legged in front of your mirror with your skincare half-done and biology notes scattered across your bed. The dorm was only yours because of your grades—a tiny mercy granted by scholarship credits and endless academic validation. It was small but quiet, and right then, it felt painfully too quiet. It was the kind of silence that amplified the impending doom.
You stared at your reflection. Tomorrow. Tomorrow you were going to sit across from Euijoo and Jaeyun for two entire hours pretending you were capable of functioning like a normal human being. You imagined awkward silences, you imagined humiliating yourself instantly, you imagined them leaning over your shoulder to ask a question and your brain physically short-circuiting.
Maybe they’d hate tutoring, maybe they wouldn’t show up, maybe they’d stare at you waiting for conversation while you slowly dissolved into the floor. Your stomach twisted as the harrowing reality closed in around you—tomorrow you were going to translate the Krebs cycle and mitochondrial DNA to Jaeyun, with his pretty, sharp eyes, and Euijoo, with his pretty, flame-kissed hair. Tomorrow, your beautifully silent, anonymous world was going to crack wide open. You dropped backward onto your mattress with a groan, one arm covering your face.
There were going to be the longest months of your life.
_____________
“Tutoring.”
“For the fifteenth fucking time—” Euijoo sighed, massaging his temple, “—yes. Tutoring. Biology. Final exam. Two months. Do you need me to draw a diagram?”
Nicholas stared at him like he’d just told him he was someone from an alien planet who’d travelled to earth to study humans. Beside him, Sunghoon chomped away at his jar of cheese balls.
“Why are you so interested anyway?” Jaeyun asked, not looking away from his game on the tv, “You usually don’t give a shit about either of us.”
“Yes I do.” Nicholas said in a defensive tone, “I give a shit about you two more than anyone else. Right Hoon?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny.”
Nicholas threw a cushion at his head. The frat house was unusually calm for once. Music still hummed faintly somewhere upstairs, and people moved through the halls every few minutes, but the main lounge had settled into the lazy atmosphere that only existed after midnight.
Jaeyun sat cross-legged on the carpet in grey sweats and a black hoodie, controller in hand. Euijoo occupied the far end of the couch, long legs spread comfortably, hair messy from showering. Both of them looked unfairly good for someone discussing biology tutoring at one in the morning. Nicholas, meanwhile, looked personally victimized.
“I still don’t understand how this happened,” he muttered. “You two failing biology feels very incorrect. You’re the only ones here who actually study.”
“Ew studying.” Sunghoon said, his silver hair gleaming in the soft light.
“We’re not failing,” Jaeyun defended.
“You got a thirty-two.”
Jaeyun paused. “…Okay but the class average was bad too.”
“The average was seventy-one.”
Sunghoon snorted into his cheese balls. Before Jaeyun could throw something at him, the front door opened, letting in a burst of cool night air and two more of their brothers.
“Heard the death sentence was finalized,” Fuma said, hanging his jacket by the door.
“It’s not a death sentence,” Jaeyun muttered, his car on screen crashing into a wall. He tossed the controller aside in defeat.
Jungwon blinked. “Still talking about tutoring?”
“Unfortunately,” Euijoo muttered.
“Oh, you guys got lucky.” Fuma dropped onto the armchair with a grin.
Jaeyun looked over. “How?”
Jungwon pointed lazily toward them. “I talked to Professor Choi earlier this week.”
Euijoo frowned, the reddish-orange of his hair seeming to burn a little brighter under his suspicion. “Why were you talking to Professor Choi?”
“She likes me.”
“You literally helped her carry boxes one time.”
“And now we’re connected spiritually,” Jungwon said seriously.
Sunghoon made a thoughtful noise. “That’s beautiful.”
“Anyway,” Jungwon continued, “I told her to get you idiots the best tutor possible before finals destroyed your GPAs.”
Nicholas gasped softly. “You care.”
“I care about the frat reputation,” Jungwon corrected instantly. “If two of our members fail biology, people will think we’re stupid.”
“We are stupid,” Sunghoon said.
“That’s not the point.”
Fuma leaned back comfortably. “I know who your tutor is, actually.”
Euijoo lifted his head slightly. “You do?”
“Top of the class,” Fuma said simply. “Like ridiculously top of the class.”
“Great.” Jaeyun groaned immediately. “So they’re gonna hate us.”
“Nah.” Fuma said. “She’s just quiet.”
Silence. Actual, physical silence. It was like the entire world had just collapsed, the way all of them stared at Fuma.
“…She?” Nicholas repeated slowly.
“It’s a she?” Sunghoon sat upright so fast the jar of cheese balls nearly flew off his stomach.
Fuma blinked at them. “Yes?” The room exploded.
“No one said it was a girl!” Nicholas yelled.
“Why would we assume that?!” Jaeyun shouted back.
“Because tutors are always men named Daniel!” Sunghoon argued passionately.
Euijoo rubbed his face tiredly while Nicholas looked personally betrayed. “You let me picture some forty-year-old economics major this entire time.”
“She’s not even an economics major,” Fuma said.
“That’s not the issue.”
“Wait.” Jaeyun stared at Fuma suspiciously now. “You know her personally?”
“Not really,” Fuma admitted. “We’ve talked a few times.”
Nicholas gasped dramatically. “Oh my god. Fuma has female acquaintances.”
“Please grow up.”
“Wait. Is she at least normal?” Jaeyun asked, head tilted like a curious pup.
Fuma stared at him. “You’re asking if someone’s normal while Nicholas is currently wearing sunglasses indoors.”
Nicholas pointed at him. “Fashion never sleeps.”
Sunghoon grabbed another handful of cheese balls. “Important question though.”
Euijoo already looked tired. “What.”
“Is she pretty?”
Jaeyun groaned loudly. “Why does that matter?”
“Because,” Nicholas said as though explaining basic mathematics to children, “if I’m being forced into academic rehabilitation, I at least deserve visual motivation.”
“You’re not even being tutored,” Euijoo said.
“I’m emotionally involved.”
Fuma shrugged. “I mean…yeah.”
Immediately, Nicholas sat upright. “Yeah?” he repeated eagerly.
Fuma looked amused now. “Pretty. In a scary smart way.”
Jaeyun sighed deeply and leaned back against the couch behind him. Sunghoon winced, “Oh you guys are finished.”
“Fantastic.” Euijoo groaned into his hands.
“Don’t act miserable,” Jungwon said. “You’re the ones who ignored every warning sign before exams.”
“We were busy,” Jaeyun argued weakly.
“With what?” Sunghoon asked. Jaeyun opened his mouth. Then closed it again.
Nicholas pointed at Euijoo accusingly. “You better not flirt your way out of this.”
Euijoo looked offended. “I don’t do that.” All four of them stared at him. Jaeyun burst out laughing first.
“Bro,” Sunghoon said through laughter, “you once got an extension because Professor Lee said you looked exhausted.”
“I was exhausted.”
“You smiled at her once and she extended the deadline for the whole class,” Nicholas corrected.
Fuma, meanwhile, looked entertained. “Honestly? I can’t picture her tolerating either of you.”
“Great,” Jaeyun muttered. “Love that for us.”
“She’s really quiet,” Fuma continued. “But nice.”
Nicholas narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Pretty and quiet.”
“Yes, Nicholas,” Jungwon sighed. “Women exist.”
“Do you think she’s mean pretty or cute pretty?” Sunghoon asked seriously.
“Can you freaks focus?” Jaeyun said.
“No, wait,” Nicholas interrupted. “This matters.”
“It absolutely does not.”
“It does,” Sunghoon insisted. “There’s a psychological difference.”
A moment later, both of their phones buzzed at the exact same time. Nicholas lunged forward instantly like a starving animal detecting food.
“Ohoho.”
Jaeyun narrowed his eyes. “Don’t.”
Too late, Nicholas had already snatched Jaeyun’s phone from beside him while Sunghoon practically folded himself over the couch trying to read Euijoo’s screen upside down. Nicholas read aloud in the most robotic voice imaginable:
“Hello. This is regarding tomorrow’s biology tutoring session.”
Sunghoon lost it immediately, nearly choking on a cheese ball. “Oh my god,” he wheezed. “That’s terrifyingly formal.”
Nicholas continued dramatically. “Would 4:30 PM at the science library be suitable for both of you? Please let me know if adjustments are needed. Thank you.”
The room dissolved into laughter. Jaeyun dragged a hand down his face. “Why does it sound like an email from the government?”
Euijoo, despite himself, smiled a little. “It’s polite.”
Nicholas clutched his chest. “‘Please let me know if adjustments are needed.’ Euijoo, she thinks you pay taxes.”
Sunghoon wiped tears from his eyes. “You’re gonna show up tomorrow and get assigned homework and a retirement plan.”
Jaeyun grabbed his phone back with an exhausted sigh. “She already hates us.” He decided.
“I don’t think she hates you,” Fuma said.
“She texts like she’s the dean.” Nicholas argued. The phone buzzed again suddenly and Nicholas immediately lunged for it like a feral animal. “Oh my god there’s more.”
Euijoo held the phone out of reach effortlessly. “Get away from me.”
Jaeyun checked his own screen first and snorted. A follow-up message.
“Also, please bring any previous test papers if possible so I can identify which topics need the most attention.”
The room went silent again. Then Nicholas whispered, horrified, “She’s so organized what the fuck.”
Sunghoon looked genuinely afraid now. “You guys are meeting a real academic weapon tomorrow.”
Jaeyun dropped backward onto the carpet dramatically. “I’m calling in sick.”
“You can’t call in sick to tutoring,” Jungwon said.
“Watch me.”
Fuma laughed quietly while Euijoo typed out a reply. “4:30 works. We’ll be there. Thanks.” Short and simple. But he reread it twice before sending anyway. Nicholas noticed immediately.
“Oh?” he said slowly. “Why are you typing so carefully?”
Sunghoon clutched Nicholas’s arm with faux shock. “He wants the tutor to think he’s literate.”
Jaeyun pointed accusingly at Fuma from the floor. “This is your fault for telling them she’s pretty.”
“I said she seemed nice!”
“Same thing,” Nicholas argued.
Euijoo ignored them completely, tossing his phone beside him before standing. “I’m sleeping.”
“Same.” Jaeyun agreed, running a hand through his hair. “We’re gonna pass biology. Which is why we,” he said, emphasizing the word as he looked pointedly at Nicholas and Sunghoon, “are going to bed at a reasonable hour so we can actually focus tomorrow.” This announcement was met with exaggerated gasps and mock applause.
“The &-En pillars, turning in before midnight? For studying?” Nicholas clutched his heart. “The world is ending.”
Jungwon made a dramatic gagging noise “We’re witnessing history here.”
Sunghoon pointed at them solemnly with a cheese ball between his fingers. “Good luck, scholars.”
“Can’t wait to hear all about your future A pluses tomorrow.” Nicholas crowed.
Euijoo flipped him off lazily as he headed toward the stairs, but despite the chaos behind him, his mind lingered strangely on tomorrow. Jaeyun was on the same thing, the stiff, painfully formal text not leaving his mind. It was like someone was trying very hard not to say the wrong thing and something about it felt strangely endearing.
Till tomorrow it was.
__________
You were about to combust. You were about to die.
It was 4:31. One minute late, yeah of course they hated you. Why wouldn't they? You were the one who sent that grandma ass text to them last night so now they obviously thought you were some stuck up nerd who ate data reports for breakfast.
‘Would 4:30 PM at the science library study hall be suitable for both of you?’ Suitable for both of you—you sounded like someone’s divorced aunt scheduling a dentist appointment. Cool, this was so cool.
You sat tucked into the far corner of the science library, half-hidden behind a stack of biology textbooks you’d arranged in front of you like defensive barricades.You’d arrived twenty minutes early out of sheer panic and now you were spiraling. Your outfit situation certainly wasn’t exactly helping either.
Every decent shirt you owned had apparently decided to unionize overnight and sit in the washing machine damp and unusable, leaving you with exactly one option: a white button-up that dipped lower at the collar than you normally liked. One wrong move and you’d be in jail for flashing everybody. Which meant you’d spent the entire walk to the library awkwardly tugging at it every thirty seconds like a Victorian woman protecting her honour.
Your thumb mindlessly scrolled through videos as you waited, desperate distraction after desperate distraction until you landed on some stupid clip of a raccoon stealing cat food while dramatic orchestra music played in the background. The raccoon knocked over the bowl and you snorted before you could stop yourself.
And immediately after, the universe decided it hated you as a laugh sounded behind you—warm and surprised and very close.
“Oh my god,” a voice said through barely contained laughter. “Is that a raccoon edit?”
Your soul left your body and you nearly launched your phone across the library. You whipped around so fast you nearly elbowed your water bottle off the table.
And there they were.
Tall—that was your first coherent thought—just offensively tall.
Jaeyun stood slightly behind Euijoo, black hair falling messily over his forehead, soft eyes crinkled from laughing. Even in something so simple—a navy hoodie with the sleeves pushed up and loose grey sweatpants—he looked so majestic, a sort of Adonis.
And Euijoo—jesus fucking christ. The hair was somehow even worse in person, softer-looking under the library lights, messy in a way that looked accidental and intentional all at once. He wore a black zip-up over a white shirt, rings glinting faintly as he adjusted the strap of his bag.
You were going to die here.
“I—” you stammered instantly, locking your phone screen so fast it nearly slipped from your hand. “It just came up on my feed, I wasn’t—”
Jaeyun lost it. “No, no,” he said quickly, holding his hands up. “I’m not judging you. The music made it ten times funnier.”
“It just autoplayed,” you said quickly, fumbling to lock your phone so aggressively you almost dropped it. “I wasn’t searching for raccoon content specifically.” There was a pause and Euijoo’s mouth twitched slightly.
“Specifically?” he repeated quietly. Heat rushed into your face so violently you considered throwing yourself through the nearest library window.
You closed your eyes for one brief moment. “Okay,” you thought to yourself. “This is horrible.”
“You text exactly how I imagined.” Jaeyun was visibly delighted now. “The ‘please let me know if adjustments are needed’ almost made me stand up straighter.”
Euijoo nodded beside him. “Very professional.”
“I don’t talk like that normally,” you defended instantly.
Jaeyun raised an eyebrow. “You sure?”
“Yes,” you lied. Of course your antisocial dumbass always talked like that.
Euijoo finally sat down across from you, movements easy and relaxed while you sat there like a frightened woodland creature. “I’m Euijoo,” he said gently.
You nodded too fast. “I know.” Silence, your eyes widened. “I mean—not like weird know,” you corrected immediately. “Not stalker-ish. Just like campus-knowledge know. Like everybody knows—not everybody, probably, statistically speaking that wouldn’t even make sense—”
Yeah the universe should have just killed you already.
Euijoo looked down for a second, hiding a smile. Jaeyun had physically bent forward laughing now. And somehow, impossibly, the panic in your chest loosened a little.
“I’m Jaeyun,” he offered kindly, like you weren’t actively self-destructing in front of them.
You nodded again. “I know that too.” Jaeyun stared at you. You stared back in horror. “Jesus Christ,” you mumbled, covering your face with one hand. “Can I restart this entire interaction?”
“No,” Jaeyun said immediately. “Absolutely not.”
Euijoo leaned back slightly in his chair, watching you fumble with an expression that was far too entertained for someone who was supposed to be struggling biology students.
“This is the best first meeting I’ve ever had.” He added softly.
You peeked through your fingers suspiciously. “You’re making fun of me.”
“A little,” Jaeyun admitted.
“But affectionately,” Euijoo said.
Oh.
Oh ok where was your gun.
You dropped your hand back onto the table and immediately knocked your pen onto the floor. The three of you watched it roll away in silence. You stared at it. Then stared ahead instead.
“I’m leaving it there,” you decided quietly.
Jaeyun laughed so hard he had to lean back in his chair. Euijoo shook his head, smiling properly now before leaning down to pick the pen up for you. Your heart nearly stopped from embarrassment when his fingers brushed yours lightly handing it back.
“Thank you,” you said far too formally.
“You’re welcome,” he replied with equal seriousness, “Now should we start before any more accidents happen?”
“Yep.” Jaeyun replied enthusiastically, pulling out a genuinely massive folder from his bag, “You wanted all our tests right?”
Universe, where was the damn gun.
The session itself started chaotically. Mostly because Jaeyun and Euijoo apparently shared one singular brain cell when placed together. At one point, Jaeyun confidently identified the mitochondria as “the thing that does vibes.” Euijoo had immediately buried his face in his hands while you stared at them in genuine disbelief.
“It’s the powerhouse of the cell,” you said weakly.
“Right,” Jaeyun nodded seriously. “That’s what I meant. Vibes.”
And somehow—somehow—it got easier after that. The tightness in your shoulders slowly disappeared the longer the session went on. The awkwardness never fully vanished—you still nearly choked on your water when Euijoo leaned closer to look at your notes once—but it became manageable.
Jaeyun asked questions constantly, even if half of them sounded ridiculous at first. “So wait,” he’d said at one point, frowning at his worksheet, “if enzymes speed reactions up, why don’t they just keep going forever?” And instead of pretending to understand when he didn’t, he genuinely waited for your explanation, brows furrowed in concentration.
Euijoo was quieter. He absorbed things carefully, eyes flicking between your diagrams and textbook while he listened. Sometimes he’d go silent for a full minute before suddenly asking something terrifyingly specific that forced you to rethink how you explained the concept. You liked that a lot more than you expected.
And they were nice. God, they were annoyingly nice. Jaeyun apologized every single time he interrupted you, even accidentally. Euijoo kept sliding your highlighters back toward you whenever they rolled too far across the table because apparently your motor skills deteriorated under stress.
At one point, while you were explaining cellular respiration, you’d gotten too into it and started gesturing aggressively with your pen.
Jaeyun blinked at you. “You really like biology.”
You froze mid-sentence. “I mean,” you said awkwardly, “academically.”
Jaeyun laughed softly. “No, I mean it’s cool.”
Now why did your chest suddenly feel so tight? Probably because nobody usually called your interests cool.
Then, near the end of the session, something genuinely shocking happened. Jaeyun got a question right. Not partially right. Actually right. You’d stared at his paper for a full three seconds before looking up slowly.
“See?” Jaeyun immediately pointed at the answer triumphantly. “Academic weapon.”
Euijoo leaned over to look and blinked. “Wait, you actually got that?”
“Why do you sound surprised?”
“Because I know you.”
Jaeyun looked offended while you laughed before you could stop yourself. Both of them looked up immediately. And for one horrifying second, you realized that was probably the first time you’d laughed properly around them for the past three hours.
Jaeyun grinned instantly like he’d won something.“You’re way less scary when you laugh.”
.By the time the session ended, your notes were scattered everywhere, Jaeyun had somehow eaten two protein bars during a lesson on DNA replication, and Euijoo had finally understood something he’d been stuck on for weeks.
And weirdly—you’d had fun.
__________
Once you got back home, a realization hit you that made you genuinely sit down and think about life for a second.
That tutoring session had been….actually great?
You were back in the sanctuary of your dorm, the door locked firmly against the world. You’d dumped your bag, kicked off your shoes and were about to collapse into your usual post-social-interaction coma when it hit you, so foreign and unexpected that it made you genuinely stop and think about life for a second.
They hadn’t laughed at you meanly even once. Okay, they laughed at you constantly, but not cruelly—a particularly mind boggling difference. And they’d listened to you too, to your very quiet voice which was akin to the flap of a butterfly’s wing. Jaeyun had looked genuinely excited when he finally understood something. Euijoo had quietly thanked you after you re-explained transcription for the third time without sounding annoyed. Nobody had treated you like some awkward invisible thing sitting in the corner.
You sat down on the edge of your bed in complete silence, staring at your wall like you’d just uncovered a government conspiracy. Then you fell backward onto your mattress, staring at the ceiling. You’d expected arrogance, disinterest—frat boys who’d spend two hours scrolling through their phones while you suffered quietly beside them.
Instead they’d just been…..two guys who were genuinely disgusting at biology and genuinely grateful for the help. It was cool. It was, dare you think it, great. The feeling that settled in your chest was weird—a low, warm hum of something like accomplishment, mixed with a strange, lingering awareness of Jaeyun’s eager eyes and the careful way Euijoo had handed you your pen. It was nice, suspiciously so and now you felt strange; like maybe these months weren't going to destroy you after all.
Shaking your head slightly to dispel the peculiar buzz, you decided the best course of action was a hard reset. A return to your most reliable, private comfort.
The cursor hovered over the familiar title. You’d bookmarked this one last week, a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers fic in your favourite fantasy fandom, renowned in the comments for its particularly… thorough eighth chapter.
The tags were a delicious wall of text, you immediately spotted your favourites: size kink, bondage, degradation, a mating press and a full fucking nelson? Oh weren’t you in for a treat tonight. You skimmed them, a ritual as comforting as the first sip of tea. Your eyes caught on something and a faint, unrelated echo of Jaeyun’s voice—“For real? Oh, hell yeah!”—flitted through your mind before you firmly pushed it away. This was your time, your space.
You clicked open. The prose was immersive, pulling you instantly into a torch-lit chamber where the two protagonists, after chapters of biting dialogue and fraught glances, finally faced the precipice of their desire. The author was a master of the slow reveal, of the aching detail—the hesitant brush of a calloused knuckle against a jawline, the hitched breath that was more telling than any confession.
You read curled up on your bed, the dim glow of your laptop the only light. As the characters’ verbal sparring dissolved into breathless, urgent whispers, your own breathing began to subtly sync with the rhythm on the screen. A familiar, low thrum of heat started in your belly, a pleasant counterpoint to the weird buzz still lingering from the afternoon.
One hand scrolled slowly, absorbing every beautifully crafted sentence. The other drifted down, slipping beneath the waistband of your sweatpants and underwear. Your touch was light at first, exploratory, mirroring the tentative explorations described in the text.
The hero’s voice in your head, low and rough with praise—“You’re doing so well, just like that…”—coalesced with the memory of a different kind of approval, of two sets of eyes fixed on you with grateful focus.
You pushed the thought away, focusing on the fiction, on the safe, controlled fantasy. Your fingers moved with more purpose, circling in the slow, practised rhythm that you knew worked. Your back arched slightly off the mattress as a particularly vivid line of description—a bite against a collarbone, a whispered command—sent a sharp jolt through you.
The sensations built, a steady crescendo. The warm hum in your chest from earlier seemed to migrate, to fuse with the physical heat coiling tighter and tighter low in your body. The images from the story—tangled limbs, sweat-slicked skin, desperate pleas—flashed behind your closed eyelids.
For a fleeting second, the fantasy blurred at the edges; the careful hands in the story weren’t entirely fictional, they were unexpectedly gentle, handing you a pen, and the voice murmuring praise was eager, relieved, saying you got one.
It was that confusing, illicit overlap—the real, strange warmth of the day colliding with the reliable, fabricated heat of the story—that finally tipped you over the edge. Your breath caught, a soft, stifled sound in the quiet room as the tension shattered into waves of release, leaving you trembling and spent against your pillows.
For a long moment, you just lay there in the aftermath, the blue light of the laptop screen casting everything in a cool, unreal glow. The peculiar buzz was gone, dissolved into a heavy, physical lassitude. The weird feeling of accomplishment was still there, but it was quieter now.
You closed the browser tab with a soft click, the finality of the sound sealing the chapter on both the story and the day. The months stretched ahead, but the dread was now just shadows, and for now, the shadows felt manageable. You suddenly couldn't wait for the next session two days later.
Meanwhile on the other side of the campus—
“So…”
“So.”
“She’s hot.”
“Oh my god she’s so damn hot.”
Jaeyun was lying on his back on his bed, one arm behind his head, staring at the constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars stuck haphazardly to his ceiling. Euijoo was perched on the edge of his own meticulously made bed, ostensibly examining a highlighter as if its chemical composition was the most fascinating thing in the world.
They were supposed to be reviewing the notes you’d helped them make. The pages were open on Jaeyun’s desk and Euijoo’s bed, covered in highlighted terms and doodles on the margins. Neither was looking at them.
Jaeyun turned his head on the pillow, his dark eyes finding Euijoo’s profile in the dim lamplight, whose shoulders slumped as if released from a wire. He dropped the highlighter.
“What the fuck are we even thinking about?” He breathed, his words fervent.
“How we find our tutor hot.” Jaeyun deadpanned.
It was a floodgate opening. The careful focus, the respectful masks they’d worn for two hours in the library fell away completely, revealing the sheer, dizzying impact you’d had on them. Another silence followed, mostly because neither of them knew where to even begin. Because it wasn’t just one thing. It was everything all at once. Their minds (hive mentality perhaps) were fixated on the ravishing beauty of you. And the shirt.
Oh that damn shirt.
Cut so dangerously, both of them could see everything when you leaned forward, unaware of your own skin because you were so engrossed in biology. But neither of them was willing to admit how much heat had flushed between their legs at the sight of your cleavage.
Jaeyun groaned into the mattress dramatically. “The glasses thing almost killed me.”
Euijoo looked over immediately. “Right?”
“Like why was she pushing them back up every thirty seconds?” Jaeyun sat up halfway, scandalized. “How am I supposed to focus on mitochondria during that?”
“The way she explains things,” Jaeyun continued, his gaze drifting back to the ceiling, seeing not stars but the intense, thoughtful furrow of your brow. “It’s like…..her voice just cuts through all the noise in my head about this stupid class. Kinda hot.”
“I know,” Euijoo agreed, running a hand through his hair, messing it. “And she has this…this tiny little frown she does.” He breathed, “I think I almost lost it.”
“And her hands,” Jaeyun said, almost to himself, “I’m going to be so weird about her hands.”
“Go ahead.” Euijoo laughed, then sighed, “Wow. We’re kind of the worst people to ever exist right now.”
“We are.” Jaeyun conceded, a grin tugging at his mouth. “Man what the hell would she think of us right now? She’s just so…”
“Hot.” Euijoo finished for him, the word definitive. “Incredibly hot.”
“I was going to say innocent but yeah that too.” Jaeyun hummed.
Euijoo laughed under his breath. You did look so….soft. Warm eyes, nervous hands, pretty lips constantly pressing together after you spoke like you were mentally reviewing every sentence for errors. Euijoo leaned back in his chair smiling helplessly now while Jaeyun buried his face into a pillow.
“She looked so excited when we understood something,” Euijoo murmured.
“She looked at me like I’d solved world hunger when I got that answer right.”
“To be fair,” Euijoo said, “I was also shocked.” Jaeyun threw a pillow at him.
“But seriously,” Jaeyun continued, “she’s weirdly easy to be around.”
That was the strangest part. Usually people acted different around them. Too eager, too shy, too damn performative. But you were so fucking awkward that it circled back around to honesty. Every expression showed on your face immediately, every embarrassed thought practically announced itself out loud. And the funniest thing? You clearly had no idea how pretty you were.
Euijoo remembered the exact moment you laughed properly for the first time. How you’d immediately looked startled afterward, like the sound escaped accidentally. Jaeyun remembered the way you frowned at your notes while concentrating, lips moving silently as you reread things. Both of them remembered how softly you’d thanked Euijoo for picking your pen up.
Jaeyun turned his head toward Euijoo suddenly. “She definitely thinks we’re cooler than we are.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
Jaeyun sighed dramatically. “This is bad.”
Euijoo raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Because now I actually wanna go to tutoring.” A beat passed.
Then Euijoo admitted quietly, “…Yeah.”
They lapsed into silence again, but this one was charged, buzzing with shared, stunned realization. Jaeyun sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “We can’t be weird about this,” he said, his tone serious but his eyes still bright. “We cannot fuck this up by being…you know. Us. Around girls.”
“What are you talking about? We’re amazing around girls.”
Jaeyun stared at him. Then burst out laughing. “No, we’re not.”
“Yes we are!”
“Euijoo, you accidentally flirt with baristas.”
“Yeah and you once thanked a girl for handing you a receipt and she turned red.”
“That sounds like her issue.”
“Exactly this.” Euijoo pointed accusingly at him. “You can’t do this cool boy shit with her.”
“You can’t do it with her either then!” Jaeyun said.
Euijoo leaned back in his chair looking deeply unbothered. “I’m naturally charming.”
“You’re naturally annoying.” Jaeyun ran a hand through his hair before dramatically breathing out and putting on the face of someone who hadn’t devoured two tubs of (Jungwon’s) ice cream an hour ago. “Okay. New rule.”
Euijoo already looked tired. “Why are you like this?”
“We act normal.” “We do act normal.”
“No flirting.”
Euijoo barked out a laugh. “You say that like we planned to flirt with her.”
“You smiled at her like three times.” “That’s literally normal human activity, Jaeyun.”
“You picked her pen up.” “It rolled near me, you freak?”
Jaeyun pointed at him triumphantly. “Ahh, getting defensive are we?”
Euijoo threw another pillow. This one hit him directly in the face.
“Okay,” Jaeyun mumbled through laughter, shoving the pillow away. “Fine. Maybe we’re both screwed. But—” He shrugged his shoulders, “We’re gonna be normal, good students. We’re gonna sit down and learn and pass this godforsaken final.”
“And we don’t stare,” Euijoo added, as if making a pact.
“Right. No staring. At her hands, or her mouth, or the way her hair falls—”
“Jaeyun.”
“Sorry.” He flopped back onto the bed with a groan, draping an arm over his eyes, “You really think we’ll be able to survive the next one?”
Euijoo didn’t have an answer. He just looked at the neat, precise handwriting on the notes you’d helped them create—your handwriting—and felt a confusing, thrilling surge of anticipation that had absolutely nothing to do with cellular respiration and everything to do with the quiet, brilliant girl who had, in two short hours, rewritten their entire expectations for the months ahead. Euijoo then realised just how high their libidos were.
Yeah, they were absolutely fucked.
_______________
You were not a virgin by any means.
You’d had sex approximately one time in your life, a virginal sacrifice with your first, shitty boyfriend.
The memory of your first and only time was less a memory and more a clinical footnote, a checklist of sensations: pressure, a little pain, a lot of awkward shifting, the smell of his cheap cologne, and a profound, echoing sense of ‘is this it?’ It was over quickly, and the only thing that had trembled was your resolve to ever do it again.
You hadn’t cum, not even close. You hadn't known you were supposed to, not really. The messy, overwhelming crescendos described in books and movies felt like mythical geography, a place you’d heard of but never visited.
Even by yourself, with your own fingers, the journey often petered out into a gentle, sighing plateau—a soft orgasm that was more a relief of tension than a transformation of it. Pleasant, but faint, like hearing a symphony from another room five kilometres away.
That distance, that gap between what you read and what you felt, was precisely why you’d plunged into the world of fanfiction.
The stories were a map to a territory you couldn’t seem to reach on your own. The authors didn’t just describe sex; they charted the emotional and physical crevices of pleasure—the winding paths of anticipation and the seismic shifts of release. You read them to understand, to feel it vicariously, to try and translate the words on the screen into a language your body could finally speak.
You’d always been able to recognize when someone was objectively attractive—you had eyes after all. But that recognition was a detached, aesthetic appreciation—like admiring a painting or a well-designed car.
It had never, not once, translated into a visceral, physical want. The idea of actually fucking someone from your real life had seemed vaguely abstract, and entirely separate from the specific hunger you cultivated with your curated stories.
Until today.
Until the fifth tutoring session. Because as always, the universe hated your very existence.
Somewhere between the first session and the fifth, things had shifted so naturally that you hadn’t even noticed it happening at first.
The formality disappeared in pieces. First went the painfully stiff texting—your original messages had looked like official university announcements. By the second session, Jaeyun had replied to one of your carefully structured texts with: coming rn don’t perish without us. And somehow after that, the entire dynamic cracked open.
Then went the awkward silences. Not completely—you were still you, unfortunately—but enough that tutoring no longer felt like performing a social experiment under observation.
Now Euijoo and Jaeyun just…..talked to you, which you couldn't even believe was humanly possible. They talked to you casually and constantly.
Jaeyun, especially, had apparently decided that your concentration existed solely to be destroyed.
“You know,” he’d said during the third session while leaning dramatically across the table, “if mitochondria are powerhouses, does that technically make me an energy source?” You didn’t even look up from your notes.
“No,” you replied flatly. “You make everyone around you more tired actually.”
Jaeyun gasped like you’d stabbed him directly in the chest while Euijoo laughed quietly beside him.
And the worst part? You liked it.
You liked it so damn much it made your chest physically hurt.
Euijoo started sitting closer without realizing it, shoulder occasionally brushing yours when both of you leaned over the same worksheet. Jaeyun started stealing your pens constantly because apparently he lost every writing utensil he touched within seven minutes.
Both of them had developed this annoying habit of looking at you whenever something funny happened, like your reaction was somehow part of the experience now.
And outside tutoring sessions—
God.
That was where things became genuinely surreal.
The first time Jaeyun called your name across campus, you genuinely turned around expecting there to be another person behind you. Instead, you found him jogging down the library steps toward you with Euijoo beside him.
“Yo.” Jaeyun said breathlessly, like this was a completely normal way to address your tutor, “did you finish the bio review sheet?” You nearly walked into a pillar and Euijoo noticed instantly.
“She does that a lot around us,” he murmured thoughtfully.
“I hate both of you,” you replied automatically. But your face burned the entire walk afterward.
Then came the coffee. The horrifying, relationship-coded coffee. By the fourth session they’d started showing up with drinks already in hand, not even asking anymore. Jaeyun remembered your order after hearing it once and Euijoo started quietly sliding pastries toward you whenever your studying went too long and you forgot to eat.
“You look dead,” he’d said simply one afternoon while placing an iced coffee beside your laptop.
“That’s because I’m studying.”
“We never noticed.” Jaeyun drawled sarcastically.
You stared at both of them suspiciously over the rim of your coffee. “You’re weirdly caring.”
Jaeyun blinked. “Were we supposed to let you deteriorate?”
“Yes,” you answered immediately. “That’s what most people do.” The way both their expressions softened afterward made something uncomfortable twist warmly in your chest.
And somehow, impossibly, people had started noticing. Because apparently being repeatedly seen around two of the most well-known boys on campus transformed you from ‘that quiet girl from Biology 212’ into a subject of active campus curiosity. You started catching looks, whispers, double takes. The first time it happened, you nearly had a nervous breakdown.
You’d been sitting on the edge of the basketball court one afternoon trying desperately to finish a lab report while Jaeyun and Euijoo played with some of the others from the frat.
You weren’t even supposed to be there. Jaeyun had somehow convinced you by saying: “Just sit there and work. Your academic aura might help us.”
Which was stupid and yet you came anyway, because you were a dumbass. You sat cross-legged on the bleachers with your laptop while the sound of sneakers squeaking against the court echoed around you.
At first you genuinely managed to focus.
Then Jaeyun yelled:
“THIS SHOT’S FOR YOU, MY TUTOR.”
The entire court erupted immediately. You looked up in horror just in time to watch him completely miss.
Nicholas collapsed onto the floor laughing and Sunghoon screamed so loudly someone from the next court turned around.
Jaeyun pointed accusingly at the hoop. “She distracted me!”
Euijoo grabbed the ball next, grinning toward you lazily.
“This one’s for her then.”
“You are not helping—”
Swish.
The ball went clean through the net. The entire gym exploded. You physically covered your face with your hands while Jaeyun shouted betrayal at the top of his lungs.
After that, it only got worse. Now people knew you. Or at least knew of you.
You earned the following monikers:
“The bio tutor.”
“The girl Euijoo keeps looking for.”
“The one Jaeyun annoys constantly.”
It should’ve made you uncomfortable and maybe it did a little. But every time one of them spotted you across campus and their entire face brightened in recognition before they waved you over like it was the most natural thing in the world, you somehow forgot to care.
And then came the damned fifth session.
You were in the zone, explaining the intricacies of protein synthesis, when Jaeyun had gotten a question spectacularly right, a complex one about tRNA anticodons.
“Holy shit, I did it!” he burst out, a grin splitting his face. He turned that brilliant, triumphant smile directly on you. “You’re a genius, honey. An absolute genius.”
Honey.
The pet name landed like a spark on dry tinder. It was casual, warm, dripping with unthinking affection and your pencil stilled on the page.
Not even thirty seconds later, Euijoo, who was quietly connecting another dot, looked up from his notebook, his hair falling into his eyes. “So if I follow this….it’s like an assembly line, and the ribosome is the foreman reading the blueprint?” At your nod, a look of profound satisfaction had settled on his face. “Huh….you make it make sense, doll.”
Doll.
Two pet names in under a minute.
Honey. Doll.
Your calm shell developed a hairline fracture and a slow heat began to pool in your stomach. You finished that session on autopilot, your mind replaying the words in their voices.
And now, you were back in your dorm and the heat felt like a wire about to bust. You could feel the hunger at the bottom of your throat, screaming at you to satiate it.
You didn’t even wait to change out of your clothes, your mind fixed on wanting those calloused hands that fumbled highlighters to be steady on your naked skin.
You wanted to know if Euijoo’s focused intensity in solving a problem would translate to the focused intensity of his gaze on your body. You wanted to hear Jaeyun’s saccharine sweet voice groan against your neck for a reason that had nothing to do with biology.
You opened your laptop, bypassing your usual bookmarks. You navigated to a story you’d saved but never dared to read: a lengthy, explicit fic.
Un, deux, trois.
Perfection.
You clicked on it, the threesome tag seemed to wink at you.
As the story unfolded—two devoted knights finally claiming their wary, brilliant queen—you didn’t see fictional characters in a fantasy castle.
You saw a library study carrel pushed against a wall. You saw Jaeyun’s broad shoulders blocking out the lights, his eager mouth finding yours. You felt Euijoo’s careful hands, the ones that took such neat notes, mapping your ribs with a scholar’s attention to detail.
In the story, one lover whispered praises while the other drove the heroine to the edge.
In your mind, it was Jaeyun’s voice, hot in your ear, “You’re so smart, honey, so perfect for us,” while Euijoo’s steady, relentless touch between your legs unraveled every coherent thought you’d ever had all while he was moaning, “Such a good doll for us, yeah?”
You chased the feeling, the image of the two of them—their contrasting hair, their gentle focus now turned devouring—so vivid behind your eyelids. The soft, sighing plateau you were used to wasn’t the destination tonight.
You were climbing that staircase to heaven, the coil of heat tightening beyond its usual limits, spurred on by the illicit, perfect fantasy of them.
Your breath hitched, your back arching off the bed. The release, when it crashed over you, was not a faint echo from another room. It was a symphony played right in the heart of you, loud, shuddering, and utterly transformative. For the first time, your body understood the map perfectly.
And it had two very specific, very real guides to thank for the journey.
Oh well.
Wasn't this so fucking great for you?
__________
They say ladies and gentlemen, that necessity is the mother of invention. In this situation, the necessity was your pussy yelling to be touched…….to the thought of both of them.
The aftershocks of that first, real orgasm left you feeling like a new person inhabiting an old skin. The world had shifted on its axis, and the new gravitational pull had two names: Jaeyun and Euijoo.
By the ninth tutoring session, your situation had officially evolved from “minor academic inconvenience” into “active psychological horny warfare.”
Because apparently both of them had decided pet names were part of your curriculum now.
Every “honey, can you explain that again?” from Jaeyun was a bolt of heat straight to your core. Every low, thoughtful “doll, I think I’ve got it now,” from Euijoo made your breath catch.
“Honey, pass me the worksheet.”
“Doll, you skipped question four.”
“Sweetheart, if I fail this exam I’m blaming you personally.”
You were going to pass away. At first you’d genuinely thought they were doing it accidentally but then Jaeyun called you “pretty tutor” after getting an answer right and winked when you nearly inhaled your own spit. So no.
Definitely intentional.
Which was exactly why your dignity had deteriorated enough for you to do something deeply embarrassing one night at two in the morning.
You copied the entire text of that life-altering fantasy threesome fic into a blank Google Doc. Then, with a feverish, shameless focus, you used ‘Find and Replace.’ The fictional knight with the eager heart became Jaeyun and the one with the careful hands became Euijoo. And of course you even rewrote some parts on your own with details that reminded you of them. Then you immediately hide the document inside three different folders.
It was a raw, unvarnished act of carnal need—nothing else was fucking satisfying you anymore.
The document became your secret altar, a place where their imagined voices—“That’s it, honey, take it,” and “So perfect for us, doll, so good”—could play out in explicit detail against the stark white page. You returned to it often, each visit a temporary balm that only deepened the ache.
You’d told yourself it was harmless. But even you knew it wasn’t.
The present session was another exercise in sustained composure. You were all reviewing for the upcoming midterm, a thick cloud of shared academic stress mingling with your own, far more potent, personal tension.
You’d joked around in the beginning, a rare comedy moment from you, that you’d made report cards for the both of them before the exam, just for motivation. They’d tried to sneak a peek at your laptop and you immediately pulled it away.
But now, nature was calling, so you sighed and closed your textbook with a decisive thump that made them both look up
“I’m trusting you both alone for five minutes,” you warned, pushing yourself off your chair. You pointed at both of them threateningly. “And don’t touch my laptop.”
Euijoo raised both hands innocently. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
As you walked towards the library restrooms, the echo of your words felt hollow. Your laptop sat open on the table, your Google Drive a single careless click away.
The second you disappeared around the corner, Jaeyun leaned back in his chair dramatically. “She still doesn’t trust us.”
“To be fair,” Euijoo said calmly, “you do act like a raccoon with Wi-Fi.”
“I trusted you.” Jaeyun gasped.
But despite the joking, neither of them actually touched your things at first. Jaeyun flipped through his own notes while Euijoo absentmindedly reread one of your annotated diagrams. Then Jaeyun noticed the document tab still open behind your biology slides. His eyes narrowed.
“…What’s that?”
Euijoo glanced over lazily. “Probably notes.”
“Maybe it's the report cards.” Jaeyun snorted.
“Report cards.” Euijoo snorted, shaking his head.
But his eyes drifted to your laptop. Jaeyun followed his gaze. The unspoken thought passed between them, a current of shared, guilty curiosity.
“Just… a quick look?” Jaeyun whispered, his finger already hovering over the touchpad. “To see if she actually made us report cards?”
Euijoo didn’t say no. He just leaned in, his heart hammering a strange rhythm against his ribs and Jaeyun clicked before common sense could stop him.
And both of them froze instantly.
Complete silence.
Jaeyun blinked once. Then twice. Euijoo leaned forward slowly, eyes widening the further he read.
The document that filled the screen had no title. But the first line stole the air from the room.
‘Jaeyun’s mouth was hot and demanding on yours, while Euijoo’s clever fingers slipped beneath the waistband of your—’
A jolt, white-hot and seismic, went through both of them. Jaeyun’s hand jerked back from the laptop as if burnt and Euijoo’s breath left him in a silent rush.
For a second, there was only the hum of the library and the deafening roar of blood in their ears. Horror—at being caught—flared for a single, blinding moment. But it was instantly, overwhelmingly, drowned out by a surge of pure, undiluted relief so powerful it was dizzying.
You thought about this. About them. Like this.
They scanned the text, their eyes flying over phrases, seeing their own names woven into acts of breathtaking intimacy—praise, possession, shared focus. It was their fantasy, the one they’d only whispered about in their room, written out in your unmistakable prose.
“Oh my god,” Jaeyun breathed, his voice ragged.
Euijoo couldn’t speak. He was re-reading a line where he was described as ‘methodical, worshipful, leaving no inch of skin uncharted.’ His face was on fire.
“No way,” he whispered, dragging a hand over his face slowly, stunned disbelief melting into something dangerously close to delight. “You’re kidding.”
Jaeyun let out a quiet laugh of pure disbelief and leaned back in his chair. “Oh my god.”
The sound of footsteps approaching made both of them sit up immediately. Jaeyun clicked back to the biology slides at lightning speed while Euijoo tried very hard to look normal—which failed instantly because both of them looked visibly brighter when you sat back down.
You paused immediately. “…Why do you both look guilty?”
“Crazy accusation.” Jaeyun said quickly. Euijoo picked up a pen before he laughed accidentally.
Your eyes narrowed. “Oh my god. What did you do?”
“Nothing,” both of them answered far too fast. You stared harder.
Jaeyun cracked first. “There’s a party tonight.”
“What.”
“At the frat house,” he continued casually. “You should come.”
You blinked.
“No.”
“Why not?” Euijoo asked, quieter.
“Because I enjoy surviving social situations.”
Jaeyun leaned across the table dramatically. “We’ll stay with you the whole time.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“It should be.”
You looked between both of them suspiciously. Something definitely felt off. But there was also something strangely warm about the way they looked at you now.
Every shred of self-preservation you’d ever cultivated screamed at you to say no. Frat party? With them? It was a spectacularly bad idea, a one-way ticket to a social and emotional disaster.
Then Jaeyun hit you with the look.
His dark eyes went wide and pleading, his bottom lip jutting out just a fraction. It was a full-force, hopeful puppy-dog stare, completely at odds with the sinful things he’d just read about himself.
Beside him, Euijoo didn’t say a word. He just watched you, a small, knowing smile playing on his lips, as if he could see the exact moment your resolve would crumble.
It crumbled instantly.
“…For like one hour,” you muttered.
Jaeyun actually cheered, a soft, triumphant “Yes!” that he immediately tried to smother, looking around the library with a guilty grin. Euijoo ducked his head, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter, strands of his hair falling forward to hide his face.
“Why am I getting the feeling my life’s about to get really complicated?” You chuckled weakly.
They both laughed then, a shared, relieved sound that eased the last of the tension. It was a laugh that said, ‘Yeah, it is, and we’re in it together.’
“I should… probably head out early,” you said, gesturing vaguely towards seemingly nothing. “To, uh, get ready, for my one-hour sentence.”
Euijoo watched you for a second before asking quietly, “What are you gonna wear?”
“Oh my god, good question.” Jaeyun immediately looked delighted.
You stared at both of them in betrayal. “Why are you acting like this is the Met Gala?”
“Because this is important,” Jaeyun replied seriously.
“It’s literally a frat party”
“So you’re saying you don’t respect our respectable establishment.” Jaeyun pouted up at you. Stupid pretty pink lips.
“I hate when you say things with confidence because it makes me nervous.” You groaned.
Jaeyun laughed while Euijoo leaned back in his chair, still looking strangely pleased just from the fact you’d agreed at all. You slung your bag over your shoulder and stood.
“Okay. One hour,” you warned again. “And if either of you abandon me there, I’m transferring universities.”
“We’ll text you the address.” Jaeyun said, his voice still bright with victory.
“Don’t be late.” Euijoo added, the quiet command in his tone sending a fresh shiver down your spine.
You disappeared around the corner before either of them could answer. The second you were fully out of sight, silence dropped over the table again.
Jaeyun slowly leaned back in his chair and Euijoo exhaled through his nose, dragging both hands over his face briefly. Jaeyun looked over immediately.
“So.”
Euijoo already knew where this was going. “Don’t.”
“She likes us.”
Euijoo stared at the ceiling like he was seeking divine patience.
Jaeyun grinned helplessly. “No, because actually think about this. She wrote about us.”
“Jaeyun.”
“She thought about us enough to write things down.”
“I’m aware,” Euijoo muttered, ears burning all over again. Because unfortunately, he was very aware. Jaeyun drummed his fingers against the table thoughtfully before glancing sideways at him.
“You know why I invited her, right?” He said, biting his lip, an annoyingly attractive habit he had.
Euijoo lowered his hands slowly. “Because you have no survival instincts?”
“That too.”
Jaeyun’s grin turned slightly nervous underneath the humor now.
“But also because…” He hesitated once. “Maybe tonight gives us a chance to actually talk about it.” Euijoo went quiet.
Talk about it.
Oh.
Euijoo would have been lying if he said he wasn’t going to combust if he didn’t do all the things he’d read in the document to you in real life.
Jaeyun sighed dramatically, though his smile lingered. “If we don’t talk about it,” he muttered, “I’m gonna keep thinking about it until I fail biology again.”
Euijoo laughed quietly at that, though his own heart was beginning to race. Then after a second, he quietly admitted,
“…Yeah. Me too.”
___________
Your dorm looked like a small-scale crime scene.
Clothes covered half the floor. Makeup products sat scattered across your desk like evidence. Three separate outfits had already been rejected and thrown violently onto your bed over the course of forty-five minutes. You stared at yourself in the mirror with narrowed eyes.
This was stupid.
You were acting stupid.
It was just a party.
Not even a date, definitely not a date. Just one hour at a frat house with two boys you unfortunately found devastatingly attractive.
Cool.
So normal.
Your gaze drifted back toward the black dress hanging from your closet door which you had been trying hard to ignore. You’d bought it months ago during one of those dangerous online shopping spirals that happened at two in the morning when your brain convinced you that yes, actually, you were the type of person who attended rooftop parties and drank sparkling cocktails while looking mysterious.
Reality had proven otherwise and so the dress remained untouched ever since. Until now.
You grabbed it cautiously. It was short, scandalously short, short enough that your legs were on full display and your ass was perfectly framed and your chest was accentuated. The fabric hugged you more than your usual clothes did, soft black material dipping slightly at the neckline while the hem stopped mid-thigh. You stared at your reflection in silence. You looked pretty. Which was honestly a little alarming. Why the fuck were you putting in this much effort for some dumb party you wouldn’t have even heard of two months ago?
A knock sounded at your door before you could spiral further.
“You alive in there?” your friend Yujin called.
“Debatable.”
Yujin pushed the door open anyway and immediately froze. Then her jaw dropped. “Oh, you bitch.”
You blinked. “What?”
“You’ve been hiding all that under cardigans?” she demanded dramatically, stepping fully inside. “That is criminal behavior.”
Heat rushed into your face instantly. “It’s too much, isn’t it?”
“Too much?” Yujin repeated like she was personally offended. “You look hot!”
You glanced at yourself again uncertainly. The dress really did look good, which unfortunately made you even more nervous. Because they were going to see you in it. Your stomach flipped violently.
You groaned into your hands. “Why did I agree to this?”
“Because they’re hot and nice to you.” Yujin replied instantly, fixing one of your earrings for you.
Yujin had been one of your only real friends since first year—mostly because she’d adopted you against your will after catching you eating dry cereal alone outside a lecture hall once. And she knew you all too well.
You grabbed your small bag while trying very hard not to think about how Jaeyun would probably whistle obnoxiously the second he saw you. Or how Euijoo would look at you quietly for one dangerous second too long.
Your heart was already beating too fast. This was a disaster.
The frat house was visible from halfway down the street. Music pulsed through the night air loud enough that you could feel the bass before you even reached the front lawn. Groups of students crowded outside laughing loudly beneath strings of warm lights wrapped around the porch railings.
You stopped walking. Yujin kept going for three steps before realizing.
“Oh no,” she sighed, turning back toward you. “Don’t do this.”
“I can still leave.”
“You absolutely cannot.”
“I suddenly remembered I love staying home.”
Yujin grabbed your wrist before you could retreat. “You survived tutoring sessions with two campus heartthrobs,” she informed you firmly. “You can survive one frat party.”
People moved around you constantly as you approached the house, music and laughter spilling from open windows while colored lights flashed faintly inside.
Your nerves worsened with every step. Then the front door opened and you were about to evaporate into thin air.
But instead of Jaeyun or Euijoo, Fuma appeared in the doorway first. He blinked once when he saw you. Then slowly grinned.
“Well damn.”
You immediately wanted to disappear. “Please don’t start.”
“I didn’t even say anything.”
“You implied it with your face.” He chuckled, “Never thought you’d actually come.”
Yujin snorted beside you while Fuma stepped aside to let both of you in, music immediately swallowing the conversation the second you crossed the threshold.
The frat house was warm and loud and overwhelming in the exact way you’d feared. Lights flashed dimly across crowded rooms while people moved everywhere at once, laughter rising over music, conversations overlapping into noise. Someone nearly ran into you carrying chips before apologizing and disappearing upstairs again. You instinctively moved closer to Yujin. Fuma noticed immediately.
“You’ll survive,” He laughed quietly before guiding you through the hallway. People looked over as you passed and somehow that made you even more aware of the tight fabric clinging to your skin.
“Where are they?” you asked, trying to sound casual and failing spectacularly.
Fuma’s grin widened knowingly. “In the kitchen.”
You barely had two seconds to mentally prepare before Fuma led you around the corner and there they were.
Oh, this was just fucking unfair.
Fuck you universe.
Jaeyun sat on the kitchen counter laughing at something Nicholas was saying, sleeves rolled up over his forearms, dark hair messy like someone had run their hands through it repeatedly. A silver chain rested against the collar of his black shirt and—
Right.
You need to be breathing.
Very important for life.
Beside him, Euijoo leaned against the counter with a drink in one hand, hair pushed back slightly from his forehead. He wore a dark grey shirt that fit annoyingly well beneath an open black jacket.
What you would have given to be fucked stupid on that stupid counter with their stupid fingers.
Stupid stupid hot boys.
Both of them looked up at the exact same time. The conversation around the kitchen kept going normally, but the second their eyes landed on you, something shifted.
Jaeyun straightened slowly. Euijoo’s gaze moved over you once before returning to your face. A chill ran down your spine instantly. You suddenly became hyperaware of every inch of exposed skin.
Jaeyun recovered first. “Holy shit, am I in heaven?”
“You look beautiful.” Euijoo said quietly over the noise before Jaeyun could speak again.
Your heart betrayed you so violently you almost considered going to church and confessing your sins. But then again you probably would have imagined them fucking you in that tiny little booth so you steered away from the idea.
Nicholas whipped around so fast he nearly dropped his drink. “Oh my god,” he gasped dramatically. “Academic weapon spotted.”
Sunghoon looked up from where he’d been stealing fries directly off Jungwon’s plate and actually paused mid-bite. “Wait,” he said slowly. “Fuma undersold this situation severely.” You opened your mouth to respond and nothing came out.
Jaeyun’s grin widened immediately. “There she goes.”
“I’m—” you started, then stopped. Because unfortunately your brain had ceased functioning the second both of them looked at you like that.
“Thank you.” You managed finally, voice weirdly high. “I almost didn’t wear this.”
Jaeyun blinked. “Why?”
You gestured vaguely at yourself like that explained everything. “This is…a lot of skin.” You immediately looked down at the floor. “This is why I wear cardigans,” you muttered.
Jaeyun laughed softly. “No, seriously,” he said, still looking at you with that same dangerously warm expression, “you look really pretty.”
You physically short-circuited.
“Okay,” you said quickly, pointing at him. “You can’t just say things like that immediately after I arrive.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” You said as if it was the most obvious fact in the world, “I need adjustment time.”
Nicholas burst out laughing. “Adjustment time?” he repeated.
“Yeah.” You defended instantly, “Not everyone’s a social butterfly like you guys.”
Sunghoon nodded thoughtfully. “Honestly valid.”
Euijoo smiled beside you now, placing a protective hand on the small of your back, “I think we’re gonna get a drink before she faints.”
“Excuse me—”
“Great idea!” Jaeyun hopped off the counter, “I’ll come with.”
Getting a drink was number infinity on the list of tasks that required three persons. But hey, who were you to complain? Some sort of pure angel who didn’t thirst over the two boys she tutored?
"Come on." Jaeyun chirped, already weaving through the crowd. "The good stuff's out back, quieter there."
Quieter was an understatement.
He led you through a chaotic kitchen, out a creaking screen door, and into a small, enclosed back porch. It was shrouded in shadows, lit only by a single, buzzing yellow bug light. A large, dented cooler sat against one wall, filled with ice and bottles. The roar of the party was muffled here, reduced to a dull thump. It felt secluded, dare you say intimate.
“See? Much better." Jaeyun said, rummaging in the cooler. "What's your poison, honey?"
You asked for something simple, so that you could hold onto it like a lifeline. As he fished out a hard seltzer and cracked it open, Euijoo leaned against the doorframe, blocking the most obvious exit back to the house.
Handsome motherfucker.
"So," Jaeyun began, handing you the cold can. His tone was light and conversational. "The tutoring's really helping. I think we might not totally bomb the midterm."
"It's all you guys," you said, taking a small sip. "You're doing the work."
"We have a good teacher," Euijoo said from his post. His voice was quiet, but it carried perfectly in the hushed space. "Very…..thorough."
There was a beat of silence, filled only by the distant bass. The air, which had been cool, suddenly felt thick and warm like being covered in sticky honey.
Jaeyun took a swig from his own beer. "Thorough is a good word for it." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes finding yours in the dim light. "Like that document you were working on. That was incredibly thorough.”
The can in your hand felt like a block of ice.
The document.
Oh.
Euijoo pushed off the doorframe. He didn't move aggressively, but with a slow, deliberate intent that made your breath catch. He walked towards you, his steps quiet on the wooden planks, until he was standing right in front of you.
Then he lifted an arm, placing his hand flat on the wall just beside your head, leaning in slightly. He wasn't touching you, but he’d effectively caged you in, his body blocking one side, the rough wall of the house at your back.
Jaeyun didn't move from his spot by the cooler, but his watchful gaze was just as potent. He took another slow drink, his eyes never leaving your face.
"No more running, doll," Euijoo said, his voice a low, intimate rumble. The stupid, stupid pet name, here and now, was a weapon, said in that deep and husky voice of his. "We saw our names on it.”
"All of it." Jaeyun added softly.
"So we need you to be truthful with us, doll." Euijoo continued, his free hand coming up to gently tilt your chin up, forcing you to meet his eyes. "Was that just a fantasy? Or do you want it to be reality?”
You could lie. You could try to laugh it off. But under the weight of their combined focus—Euijoo's searching gaze and Jaeyun's patient silence—all your defenses shattered. The truth was a living thing in your chest, pounding to get out.
You swallowed, your voice barely a whisper. "I do.”
“What was that, doll?” Euijoo said, tightening his grip on your chin, “Speak up, pretty girl.”
“I—” You said, drawing in a shuddering breath, “I want it to be real.”
The words seemed to change the very atmosphere. Euijoo's eyes flared, a hot, satisfied gleam in the dim light. Jaeyun let out a slow, controlled breath, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
"Aww, honey. You like us that much?" Jaeyun pressed, needing the final confirmation. You nodded, unable to form more words.
For a long moment, no one moved. Your confession hung in the air like a paper lantern, transforming into a new reality that they were enjoying far too much.
Then, Euijoo’s thumb brushed once, softly, against your jawline before he dropped his hand. He straightened up, removing his arm from the wall, breaking the cage. The sudden lack of his proximity felt like a winter chill.
Jaeyun stepped forward then. He didn't touch you, he simply took your limp hand and wrapped your fingers more securely around the cold can of seltzer you'd almost forgotten you were holding.
"Good," Jaeyun said, his voice strangely gentle. "That's all we wanted to know."
Euijoo gave you one last, unreadable look—a mix of that blazing heat and something softer, almost approving. "Enjoy the party, pretty girl.”
And then, just like that, they turned and walked back through the screen door into the roar of the house, leaving you alone on the quiet, shadowed porch, clutching your drink with trembling hands, your entire world having just been thrillingly upended.
What the actual fuck had just happened?
And why the fuck were your panties so drenched?
________________
Whilst agreeing to come to the party, you had forgotten one very important detail.
You were the world’s most antisocial person who detested crowds with every fibre of her being.
Pushing back into the house had been like diving into a wall of sound and heat. The earlier introductions felt like a distant dream. Now, every shouted conversation, every burst of laughter, every accidental brush against you in the crowded hallway felt like a violation, the bass from the speakers an assault on your sternum.
Anxiety, a cold, slithering thing, began to coil in your stomach, tightening around the lingering heat. You scanned the pulsing mass of bodies for a familiar face—specifically, Yujin. You finally spotted her near the kitchen island, but any hope of rescue died instantly. She was draped over Nicholas’s shoulders, laughing uproariously at something he was shouting, a red plastic cup held aloft in a toast. She was in her element, completely and utterly off-duty as your safety net.
A wave of pure, claustrophobic panic crested over you. You couldn’t breathe. You needed out. Now.
Your feet moved before your brain fully caught up, carrying you on a desperate search through the shifting crowd. You found them—of course—in a slightly quieter corner of the living room, holding court with a small group. Euijoo was leaning against a bookshelf, listening to something Sunghoon was saying with a faint smile. Jaeyun was animatedly telling a story, his hands flying.
You didn’t have the capacity for social grace. You walked right up to them, interrupting the flow. Jaeyun’s story trailed off. You knew you probably looked wild-eyed and pale, a deer caught in a wolf pack’s den.
“I need to go home,” you blurted out, your voice strained over the music. “Now. Can one of you…?” You glanced desperately between Euijoo and Jaeyun, unable to finish the sentence. Take me? Save me?
The easy smiles faded from their faces. Euijoo straightened up, his gaze sweeping over you, taking in your tense posture and your white-knuckled grip on your bag. Jaeyun’s expression shifted from surprise to immediate concern.
“Where’s Yujin?” Jaeyun asked, his voice cutting through the noise.
You just gestured vaguely, miserably, towards the kitchen. “With Nicholas. She’s…..busy.”
Euijoo didn’t ask another question. He simply nodded, a decisive dip of his chin. “I’ll get my keys.” He pushed off the bookshelf.
“I’m coming.” Jaeyun said instantly, already falling into step beside him. He shot an apologetic look at their friends.
Yet another task that did not require three people. Especially when the panties of one of the person’s was wetter than water itself.
Minutes later, you were sliding into the backseat of Euijoo’s clean sedan, Jaeyun got in the passenger side. The moment the doors closed, the cacophony of the party was severed, replaced by an absolute, crushing silence.
The engine purred to life. Euijoo navigated out of the packed street, his eyes fixed on the road. Jaeyun stared out the passenger window. No one spoke.
The silence in the car was thick with everything that had been said and everything that hadn’t. It was louder than the party had been. You sat in the back, curled slightly into the door, watching the streaks of streetlights pass over their profiles—Euijoo’s focused stillness, Jaeyun’s uncharacteristic quiet. The only sounds were the soft hum of the engine and the turn signal’s steady, mocking click.
Enjoy the party, he’d said. You were definitely not enjoying the car ride.
The silence stretched through every turn, every stoplight, a suffocating blanket over the three of you. By the time Euijoo pulled into a visitor spot near your dorm, the tension had coiled so tight you felt you might snap. You moved to unbuckle your seatbelt, a mumbled "Thanks for the ride" already forming on your lips.
"Which floor?" Euijoo's voice cut through the quiet, calm and matter-of-fact. He was already turning off the engine.
"Oh, you don't have to—I can get up on my own," you stammered, the idea of them escorting you amplifying your anxiety tenfold.
"It's late." Jaeyun said, his tone leaving no room for argument as he popped his door open. The finality in his voice brooked no protest.
The walk across the dimly lit quad was just as silent as the car ride, their footsteps a synchronized echo behind you. The main lobby was deserted, the fluorescent lights humming overhead. You jabbed the elevator button, wishing for the stairs but knowing your heels—chosen in a moment of foolish, fantasy-inspired bravery—made that impossible.
The elevator doors slid open with a soft ding. The three of you stepped into the mirrored box, and the close quarters made the silence even more profound. As the doors closed, sealing you in, your awareness of your own body became acute, screamingly so.
Your little black dress, which had felt so daring and powerful when you'd put it on, now felt like a trap. The hem was so short, the neckline plunged so deep. In the mirrored walls, you could see everything—the expanse of your thighs, the shadowed curve of your cleavage. And you could see them. You didn't dare look directly, but in the reflection, you caught it.
Jaeyun's gaze, usually so open and bright, was dark and fixed—not on your face, but tracing a slow, deliberate path down your reflected form. Euijoo stood with his hands in his pockets, his posture relaxed, but his eyes in the mirror were like lasers, burning with an intensity that made your skin prickle. He was staring right at the deep V of your neckline, his expression unreadable but utterly focused. They weren't even trying to hide it. The acknowledgment of your fantasy had stripped away all pretense.
You stared rigidly at the ascending floor numbers, your face flaming, your earlier dampness returning with a vengeance. The elevator seemed to crawl.
Finally, with another merciful ding, the doors opened on your floor. You practically bolted out, the click of your heels on the linoleum too loud in the empty hallway. You led the way to your door, fumbling with your keys, painfully aware of the two presences looming behind you.
You got the door open and stepped across the threshold into the familiar, safe darkness of your dorm. You turned, a hurried "Okay, well, thanks again, goodnigh—" already tumbling out.
But before you could swing the door shut, a hand shot out. Jaeyun’s fingers curled around the edge of the door, not forcefully, but with an undeniable firmness that stopped its motion completely. You looked up, your heart hammering against your ribs.
Euijoo took a single, slow step forward, crossing the threshold to stand just inside your doorway, crowding your personal space. He looked down at you, a faint, cocky smirk playing on his lips—the same smirk you’d imagined a hundred times in your writing. His voice was a low, teasing rumble that vibrated in the small space between you.
“What, doll?” he asked, his eyes glinting with challenge and promise. “Aren’t you going to invite us in?”
The air in your doorway vanished, replaced by the heat of their presence. They were inside your space, their taller frames casting shadows over you in the dim light from the hallway.
You stumbled back a step, your heels catching on the rug, and they followed, a synchronized unit. Jaeyun released the door, letting it swing shut behind them with a soft, final click. The sound sealed you in with them. The familiar safety of your dorm was instantly transformed into an electrically charged arena.
You were backed against the edge of your desk, with nowhere else to go. Euijoo didn’t touch you, but he stood close enough that you could feel the warmth radiating from his body. Jaeyun leaned against the closed door, his arms crossed, watching with a lazy, predatory interest.
“You’re shaking.” Jaeyun observed, his voice soft but clear in the quiet room.
“It’s cold,” you lied, your voice a thin thread.
Euijoo’s smirk deepened. He reached out, not to grab you, but to gently take a strand of your hair between his fingers, rubbing the silky texture.
“Liar.” He murmured, his tone conversational, almost casual. “Pretty little liar. Thinking about things you shouldn’t be thinking about with the guys you tutor standing right here.”
His words, so blunt, so filthy in their simplicity, sent a jolt straight through you. You whimpered, a tiny, pathetic sound you immediately wished you could take back.
Jaeyun pushed off the door and took a few steps into the room, his gaze sweeping over your cramped space before landing back on you.
“This where you wrote it?” he asked, nodding toward your laptop on the desk behind you. “Where you dreamed up all those pretty little scenes? Where you imagined what we’d feel like?”
Each word was a gentle probe, prying you open. They were talking about your deepest secret like they were discussing the weather, and the casual confidence of it was unraveling you faster than any overt aggression could have.
“I…” you tried, but no other words came.
Euijoo’s finger released your hair and trailed down the side of your neck, a whisper of a touch that made you shudder violently.
“You described it so well, honey,” he continued, his voice dropping to that intimate rumble. “The way you wanted to be touched, the way you wanted to be praised. Damn, almost made it seem real.”
Jaeyun was right in front of you now, standing beside Euijoo, boxing you in completely. “So here’s the question,” Jaeyun said, his eyes locked on yours. He reached out and cupped your cheek, his thumb stroking over your cheekbone. “All that imagination…..do you want to see what the reality feels like?”
The question hung there, immense and terrifying. Your fantasy, your secret, was being offered back to you, in flesh and blood and breath. Your mind screamed a dozen warnings, but your body, still humming from the elevator, from their stares, from their filthy, casual words, had only one answer.
You swallowed, your throat dry. “Yes,” you whispered, the word barely audible.
“What was that, doll?” Euijoo’s head tilted. “We didn’t quite hear you.”
They were making you say it. They were making you claim it. The humiliation was a fire in your veins, mixing with the desperate want. Oh how pathetically you wanted them.
“Yes,” you said again, your voice trembling but louder.
Jaeyun’s thumb stilled on your cheek. A slow, beautiful smile spread across his face. He glanced at Euijoo, and they shared a look—a look of shared understanding, mutual hunger and triumph.
“Alright then,” Euijoo said, his smirk softening into something devastating. His hand came up to cradle your other cheek, so you were held between them, the center of their dual attention. “Good girl.”
Jaeyun leaned in, his lips brushing your ear. “That’s our clever girl,” he murmured, the praise sinking into your soul like a brand. “Now, let’s see how real we can make it for you.”
You always knew that you had a penchant for staying in the clouds, in the solitary heaven you’d created for yourself where everything was perfect and you were perfect and all was rainbows and cupcakes. Daydreaming was such a good way to escape this depressing and dark, real world.
But now?
Reality had never felt like such a fucking dream.
The first thing you registered after that was the solid press of Jaeyun's body against yours. One of his hands found your waist while the other cupped your jaw, tilting your face up to meet his kiss. There was nothing tentative about it—he kissed you like he'd been waiting for permission for weeks, mouth warm and demanding, tongue sliding against yours before you could even think to part your lips.
You made a sound against his mouth, somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, and he swallowed it whole. His palm slid down from your waist to grip your thigh, hitching your leg up around his hip. Your dress rode up higher, the fabric bunching around your hips as his fingers found bare skin.
"Been thinking about this aaall night, honey," he murmured against your throat, lips trailing down to the sensitive spot behind your ear. “You wore this tiny little thing for us, yeah?” His fingers pressed into the soft flesh of your inner thigh, teasing, luxurious. “You’re too damn sweet, baby."
A rustle of movement from across the room reminded you that you weren't alone. Your eyes fluttered open, dazed, and found Euijoo settled into the desk chair he'd pulled into the corner. He leaned back, legs spread wide, one hand resting casually on his thigh. His gaze was heavy-lidded, tracking every movement Jaeyun made against you like he was studying something precious.
"Oh please, don't stop on my account," Euijoo said, his voice low and smooth. A small smile curved his lips. "I'm enjoying the show, doll."
Heat flooded your cheeks, but before you could formulate a response, Jaeyun's fingers found your cunt through the damp fabric of your panties. Your breath hitched, head falling back against the wall. He pressed two fingers against you, rubbing slow circles over the soaked cotton, and you felt yourself clench around nothing.
"Already this wet?" Jaeyun's voice was husky with surprise and satisfaction. He hooked his fingers into the waistband of your panties and pulled them down, letting them fall to your ankles. "God, you've been hiding this from us all this time, haven't you? Sweet little girl, so quiet and proper—"
His words dissolved into a groan as he dipped his fingers between your folds, finding you slick and ready. He circled your clit once, testing, and your whole body jolted like an electric shock.
"That's it," he breathed. "That's it, honey."
Jaeyun worked you open slowly, one finger sliding inside, then two, curling and pressing until you were gripping his shoulders, nails digging into the fabric of his shirt. The stretch was delicious, the pressure building low in your belly as he pumped his fingers in and out, his thumb pressing against your clit in rhythm.
Euijoo watched unmoving, but you saw the way his hand tightened on his thigh, the way his jaw tensed—when your breathing turned ragged, when your hips started rolling forward to meet Jaeyun's hand, he spoke.
"Look at him, doll. Look at what he's doing to you."
Your eyes found his across the room—dark, intense, focused entirely on you. The eye contact sent a thrill straight through you, and your walls fluttered around Jaeyun's fingers.
"You gonna cum for him?" Euijoo's voice dropped lower. "Let him feel it."
Jaeyun pressed harder, palm grinding against your clit as his fingers curled deep, hitting that spot inside you that made stars burst behind your eyelids. "That's it, honey. Let go—I've got you."
The orgasm hit you like a wave breaking, sudden and immense. Your back arched off the wall, a cry tearing from your throat as your body seized and shuddered around his hand.
It was nothing like the careful, solitary orgasm you'd given yourself in this very room before—this was devastating, all-consuming, pulling you under and leaving you gasping for air.
"Fuck….” Jaeyun muttered, watching you come apart against him. "Look at you. Fucking beautiful."
Before you could catch your breath, strong hands were lifting you. Perhaps it was under the stupor of your newfound pleasure that you didn't even notice Euijoo crossing the room, his arms sliding under your knees and back as he carried you the few steps to your bed. He laid you down gently, the mattress dipping under your weight.
“My turn?” He said, and it wasn't a question.
Euijoo settled between your thighs, pushing your dress up past your hips until you were bare to him, glistening and sensitive.
Jaeyun moved to the head of the bed, propping himself against the wall, one hand reaching down to brush the hair from your face.
Euijoo's first touch was a kiss—soft, almost reverent, pressed to the inside of your thigh. Then another, higher; then his tongue, flat and warm, sliding through your folds from bottom to top.
You whimpered, hips bucking, oversensitive from your first orgasm. But Euijoo held you down with firm hands on your thighs, anchoring you as he worked you open with his mouth.
"Easy, doll.” Euijoo murmured against your cunt, and the vibration made you gasp. "We're not done yet."
He ate you like a man starving, tongue circling your clit, dipping inside you, lapping up every drop of wetness. He found a rhythm—long, slow licks that built pressure deep in your core, punctuated by sharp sucks that made your vision white out.
His nose pressed against your clit as his tongue fucked into you, and you heard yourself begging, words falling out of your mouth without permission.
"Please, please, please—"
"One more," Euijoo said, pulling back just enough to look up at you, his chin slick, his eyes dark with hunger. "Give me one more, doll. I know you have it." He sealed his mouth over your clit and sucked, two fingers sliding into you, curling in that same devastating spot Jaeyun had found.
The combination was too much, exactly enough—your second orgasm crashed over you like a thunderstorm, harder and deeper than the first, ripping a scream from your throat that echoed off the dorm room walls.
Euijoo didn't stop—riding you through it, tongue gentle now, lapping at your sensitive flesh until you were twitching and moaning, your hands fisting in the sheets. Only then did he crawl up the bed, his lips and chin glistening, and press a kiss to your forehead.
"There she is," he whispered, thumb brushing away a tear you hadn't realized you'd shed. "Perfect little thing."
Your body was a trembling sea of aftershocks, floating in a haze of endorphins and praise. Euijoo’s gentle kiss on your forehead felt so sweet and searing. You could feel him shift beside you on the bed, his weight dipping the mattress.
From the other side, a low, appreciative chuckle broke through the heavy silence. You turned your head to see Jaeyun. His own need was evident in the tight line of his jaw and the heat in his eyes. He was leaning against your headboard, having shed his shirt at some point you couldn’t remember.
“Look at her.” Jaeyun said, his voice rough. He reached out, his fingers tracing a path from your knee up your inner thigh, a touch that was both an angelic caress and a possessive claim. “Absolutely ruined. And we’ve barely even started, baby.”
Euijoo propped himself up on an elbow beside you, his gaze moving from your dazed face down your splayed, spent body. “She took it so well, didn’t she?” he mused, his tone one of proud admiration. “Just like she wrote she would.” He chuckled, “Our smart girl, yeah?”
The reminder of your own words, of the script they were now following, sent a fresh, dizzying thrill through you. You were living your own story.
And fuck did the line where reality and fiction blend feel like taking nectar in your tongue.
Jaeyun’s hand slid higher, his thumb brushing through the wetness Euijoo had left behind. You jolted at the contact, still impossibly sensitive. “Think she’s ready for more?” he asked Euijoo, though his eyes never left yours.
Euijoo’s hand came to rest on your stomach, a warm, heavy weight. He leaned down, his lips grazing your ear. “That’s the question, honey,” he murmured, the petname a velvet command. “You gave us two beautiful, perfect little gifts. But we’re not done, are we?”
He pulled back to look at you, waiting for an answer. Your mind was foggy, your body pliant and humming. All you could do was shake your head weakly. Not done at all.
Jaeyun’s smile was sharp as he moved, swinging his legs off the bed to stand. You heard the soft sound of his belt buckle clinking, “Good.” He said, his voice dropping into a deeper register. “Because we’ve been sharing you so nicely, I think it’s time you felt what that’s really like.”
Euijoo pressed another kiss to your temple before moving as well. He sat up, his back against the wall, and patted his thigh. “Come here, doll. Let’s get you comfortable.”
With trembling limbs, you let him guide you, pulling you up to straddle his lap, your back to his chest. He wrapped his arms around your waist, holding you securely against him. From this vantage point, you watched Jaeyun finish undressing, the intent in his movements clear and devastating.
“Remember what you wrote about sharing, clever girl?” Euijoo whispered into your hair, his hands smoothing over your hips. “About being ours?” You could only nod, your breath catching as Jaeyun approached the bed, his gaze burning into you.
“Time to make it real,” Jaeyun said, his voice a soft rumble as he kneeled on the mattress before you. He reached out, tilting your chin up with a finger. “You’re doing so well. Just keep being good for us.”
The shift in position was fluid, almost choreographed—Jaeyun guiding you onto your side, his body molding against your front as his arm wrapped around your waist. His chest was warm against your back, or rather, your front against his, and you felt the hard length of him pressing against your thigh through his jeans. Behind you, the mattress dipped as Euijoo settled in, the heat of his body sealing against your spine.
"Comfortable, doll?" Euijoo's breath ghosted over the back of your neck, and you shivered, nodding weakly.
Jaeyun's hand slid down your stomach, fingers grazing your hypersensitive clit, making you jolt. "She's more than comfortable," he murmured, pressing a kiss to your forehead. "She's perfect. Ready for us, honey?"
Before you could answer, Euijoo's hand found your hip, guiding your leg back, opening you up to him. You felt the blunt head of his cock pressing against your slick folds, not entering, just teasing, sliding through your wetness. At the same time, Jaeyun aligned himself with your entrance, his tip nudging against your opening. You never knew the both of them to be so mean, but fuckkkk did it feel so good.
"Who do you think will make her cum first?" Euijoo's voice was low, his lips brushing your ear.
Jaeyun chuckled, the sound vibrating against your chest. "She's already cum twice from my fingers and your mouth. But inside? I think I've got this one, baby."
"Bet." Euijoo said, and before you could process the word, he pushed inside you in one slow, steady thrust.
The sound you made was broken, a high keen that turned into a gasp as Jaeyun entered you at the same time, filling your other hole with equal slowness. For a moment, you were suspended between them, stretched so fucking full in both ways, the sensation overwhelming—too much and not enough, a perfect, aching fullness that made your eyes roll back back back.
"Oh—fuck! nghhh…” you heard yourself whimper, your voice thin and wrecked. You felt like a sinner in church and an angel roaming Eden all at once. But what thoughts were even required when both of their cocks inside you had your brain going quiet for once?
"That's it, honey." Jaeyun breathed, his forehead pressing against yours. His hips were still, letting you adjust, his hand rubbing soothing circles on your waist. "Take your time. We've got you."
Behind you, Euijoo let out a low groan, his fingers digging into your hip. "Fucking hell doll, you're so tight. Squeezing me like you were made for this."
“She is made for this, yeah?” Jaeyun said, his warm breath tickling your skin.
They stayed still for a long moment, letting you feel the stretch, the heat, the weight of both of them buried inside you like roots in earth. Your breath came in ragged pants, your body trembling between them; the fullness was maddening, a deep pressure that made your head spin.
Then Jaeyun moved, pulling back out halfway and thrusting back in, a slow stroke that had your mouth falling open. Euijoo followed his rhythm, withdrawing and pushing back in counterpoint—one sliding out as the other slid in, creating a continuous wave of sensation that built with every movement.
"Oh, oh, oh—" The sounds fell from your lips unbidden, broken and desperate, a lamb on the altar begging to have her pretty throat be marked red.
"Listen to her," Euijoo muttered, his pace quickening. "Listen to those pretty sounds. She's been so quiet all semester, and now look at her."
Jaeyun's hand found your chin, tilting your face up to meet his gaze. His eyes were dark, pupils blown wide, a sheen of sweat on his brow. "Yeah, honey. Let us hear you. Let everyone in the hall hear what we're doing to you."
They fell into a punishing rhythm, each driving into you with increasing urgency. It wasn't gentle—it was rough, demanding, but the way Jaeyun kept brushing the hair from your face, the way Euijoo pressed open-mouthed kisses to your shoulder—fuck for a moment, it made you feel like they actually cared.
"Who's gonna make you cum first, baby?" Euijoo growled, his pace quickening. His hand slid around your hip, fingers finding your clit and pressing hard. "Me or him?"
Jaeyun answered by driving deeper, hitting a spot that made you cry out. "Her pussy's squeezing me like she's close. Come on, honey, cum for me. Beat him to it."
The competition spurred them both, each trying to outdo the other—Jaeyun fucking you harder, Euijoo's fingers working your clit faster, their words blurring into a stream of praise and encouragement. You were caught between them, unable to think, unable to do anything but feel as they used your body for their race. And you did not give a single fuck about anything else at that moment.
"Fuck, she's clenching around me," Jaeyun groaned. "She's close, she's so close—"
"Cum for us, doll," Euijoo demanded, his thrusts growing sloppy. "Cum with me. Now."
Your orgasm cracked through you like lightning, sudden and violent, tearing a scream from your throat that was muffled by Jaeyun's mouth crashing against yours. Your body convulsed between them, waves of pleasure ripping through you as your walls clamped down around both of them.
"That's it, that's it, fuck—" Jaeyun's hips stuttered, and you felt him spill inside you, hot and thick, his groan swallowed by the kiss.
Behind you, Euijoo followed, his body tensing as he buried himself deep, a guttural sound escaping his throat as he came. His hand never stopped pressing against your clit, riding you through the aftershocks until you were sobbing, tears streaming down your cheeks, your body limp and trembling.
When it was over, the only sounds were heavy breathing and your quiet, hiccupping sobs. Euijoo pulled out gently, collapsing behind you, while Jaeyun eased out with a wince, his hand immediately coming up to wipe the tears from your face.
"Hey, hey," he murmured, his voice soft now, all the roughness gone. "You okay, honey? Was that too much?"
You shook your head, unable to form words, tears still leaking from your eyes. Euijoo's arm wrapped around your waist, pulling you back against his chest, sandwiching you between them.
“Yeah she’s alright. Just sore yeah?” Euijoo said, his lips pressing to the back of your head. "That means we did our job right."
Jaeyun laughed, a breathless, satisfied sound, and pressed a kiss to your nose. "Told you she was perfect. Look at her, pretty little thing.”
You lay there, cocooned between their bodies, the warmth of them surrounding you as the tears dried on your cheeks and your breathing slowly steadied. Nothing in your life had ever felt like this. Nothing had ever come close.
And you knew that nothing ever would for the foreseeable future.
__________________
Three days.
Three days of aching muscles, of tender reminders every time you shifted in your chair or climbed the stairs to your dorm. A delicious, secret soreness that made you blush whenever you remembered its source.
You’d missed Intro to Psych on Monday, texting your professor a vague excuse about a migraine. An hour later, there was a soft knock on your door. It was Jaeyun, holding a neatly bound set of notes and a small white pastry box from the expensive French bakery downtown.
“Compliments of the house,” he’d said, his smile easy but his eyes holding a familiar, knowing heat. “Euijoo sends his regrets. He’s…tied up with family.”
Inside the box were two perfect, flaky pain au chocolat. The apology was unspoken but clear, and it made your stomach flutter. They’d wrecked you, and then they’d brought you pastries. The absurd domesticity of it was almost more overwhelming than the night itself.
Now, it’s Wednesday afternoon. You’re in the library, tucked into a secluded carrel on the third floor, the quiet hum of study around you. The scent of old paper and lemon-scented wood polish filled the air. Biology 201 notes were spread before you, but they might as well be hieroglyphics.
Because Jaeyun was here.
Euijoo, true to his word, was at a family function so it was just you and Jaeyun. He’d suggested the library with a perfectly straight face, citing the need for a “distraction-free environment.” The irony was a breathing thing between you.
He was sitting right beside you, close enough that his arm brushed yours whenever he turned a page. For the first twenty minutes, he was the picture of academic focus, explaining enzymatic pathways with his usual patient clarity. But then his hand, which had been resting on the table, found its way to the back of your chair. As always.
His fingers began to play with the ends of your hair, idly twisting a strand around his index finger. The touch was casual, almost absent-minded, but it sent a jolt of awareness straight down your spine. You tried to focus on the diagram of a mitochondria.
“You’re not following,” he murmured, his voice low so as not to carry in the quiet library.
“I am.” You whispered back, your eyes glued to the page.
“Mmhmm.” His fingers left your hair and for a second, you thought you were safe. Then his hand dropped below the solid wood of the table, out of sight of any wandering eyes, coming to rest on your thigh, just above your knee. Of course it had to be the one day you wore a skirt.
Jaeyun didn’t move for a long moment, just let his hand sit there; then his fingers began to stroke a gentle, up-and-down caress along the inner seam of your jeans—a chaste touch through the thick fabric.
“Jaeyun…” You breathed out, a desperate, quiet plea.
“Shh,” he hushed you, his face the picture of scholarly concentration as he looked at your textbook. His hand slid higher, his thumb now pressing in a slow circle against the sensitive muscle of your inner thigh.
You whimpered, the sound swallowed by the vast, quiet room. The words were blurring, all you could feel was the relentless stroke of his hand, moving steadily higher.
Jaeyun leaned in closer, his lips almost brushing your ear, his breath warm. “You’re thinking about it again, aren’t you?” he whispered, the words a secret just for you. His fingers reached the juncture of your thighs and pressed, a firm pressure.
Your whispered "yes" was barely audible, but Jaeyun's eyes darkened with something that made your stomach flip. He closed your textbook with a soft thud, slid it into his bag, and stood, extending his hand to you.
"Come on.” He said, his voice calm and collected, as if he asked you to follow him to the library's storage room every day. Not like you would have minded if he asked everyday.
You took his hand, your legs unsteady as he led you through the maze of shelves until you reached a narrow door tucked between two towering bookcases. He pushed it open, revealing a small storage area—old filing cabinets, boxes and a single dim bulb casting weak light over the cramped space. The door clicked shut behind you, and suddenly the world outside ceased to exist.
Jaeyun turned to face you, backing you against the wall until your shoulders pressed against the cold metal of a filing cabinet. His hands found your waist, gripping the hem of your skirt, bunching the fabric in his fists.
"You've never done this before, have you, honey?" He asked, but it wasn't really a question. His thumb traced your lower lip, pressing slightly. You shook your head, heat flooding your cheeks.
“That’s ok, I’ll teach you, hmm?” He smiled, a soft, almost tender expression that contrasted sharply with the hunger in his eyes. "Just do exactly what I say, and you'll be perfect."
Jaeyun guided you down, his hands gentle but firm on your shoulders until you were kneeling on the dusty floor, the cold tile seeping through the fabric of your skirt. He stood over you, tall and imposing, and you watched as his hands moved to his belt, unbuckling it with slow movements.
"Open your mouth," he instructed, his voice low.
You obeyed, parting your lips. He pulled himself free, his cock already hard and straining, the tip brushing against your lower lip. The taste of salt and skin hit your tongue before you'd even taken him in.
"Good girl.” He breathed, and then he fed himself into your mouth, one slow inch at a time.
The sensation was overwhelming—the weight of him on your tongue, the stretch of your lips around his girth, the musky taste of him flooding your senses. Your hands flew up to grip his thighs for balance, and you felt the muscles jump under your fingers.
"That's it…fuckkk…” He groaned, his head falling back. "Just like that. Let me feel that pretty mouth."
His hand found the back of your head, fingers threading through your hair, and he began to guide you, setting a slow rhythm that had you bobbing your head against his hips. You tried to relax your throat, to take him deeper, but the instinct to gag fought against your willingness.
"You can take more," he murmured, his voice strained now, losing its composed edge. "Relax your throat for me.” You tried, focusing on the instruction, and when you managed to take him a little deeper, his whiny groan was your reward.
"Fuck yes…ohhhh..” Jaeyun hissed, his grip tightening in your hair. "You're doing so well, baby. So fucking perfect on your knees."
His hips began to move, a shallow thrust that pushed him deeper into your throat, and you felt tears prick at your eyes as you struggled to accommodate him. But the taste of his approval, the sound of his voice breaking for you—it drove you forward, made you want to be better, want to make him feel as good as he made you feel.
"Close.” He panted, his rhythm faltering. "I'm so close, honey. Where do you want it?" You couldn't answer with your mouth full, but you looked up at him, eyes wet and pleading, and he seemed to understand.
Jaeyun pulled out abruptly, his hand moving to stroke himself twice, three times, before he spilled across your lips and cheeks—hot, thick ropes of cum that painted your skin. The sight of you, kneeling before him with his release marking your face, made him groan again, his chest heaving.
"Fuck.” He breathed, staring down at you. "That's the prettiest thing I've ever seen." He crouched down, using his thumb to wipe a stripe of cum from your cheek and bring it to your lips. "Taste it," he instructed. You parted your lips and let him feed it to you, the bitter taste filling your mouth.
"One more," he said, his voice already thick with renewed arousal. "You can give me one more, can't you?"
You nodded, your throat raw but eager, wanting to feel him in your mouth again and again again. Cock drunk slut, you thought to yourself. Jaeyun smiled, a sharp, possessive curl of his lips, and guided your mouth back to him. He was already hardening again, sensitive and swollen, but he didn't hesitate to push himself past your lips.
This time, he was less patient, less gentle. You’d learn your lesson, time to put it to the test right? His hand fisted in your hair, holding you in place as he fucked your throat with shallow thrusts. Each push made you gag, tears streaming down your cheeks, but the noises he made—the desperate, whiny gasps that fell from his lips like angelic choruses—were worth every second of discomfort.
"Fuck, your mouth is—hah—so good…”groaned, his hips stuttering. "Such a good little cocksucker. Taking it so well for me."
Your hands clutched at his thighs, nails digging into the denim as he used you, chasing his second release with single-minded focus. The sounds you made were wet, obscene, gurgling around his length, and the shame of it only made the heat between your thighs burn hotter.
"Look at me," he demanded. You forced your tear-blurred eyes up to meet his. "Watch me cum for you again."
And then he was spilling down your throat, hot and thick, a broken moan tearing from his lips as he emptied himself into your mouth. He held you there, his cock twitching against your tongue, until the last wave passed.
When he finally pulled out, you slumped forward, your forehead pressing against his thigh, chest heaving as you gasped for air. Your throat burned, your jaw ached, and your face was a mess of tears, drool, and cum.
But when he crouched down, cupping your face in his hands and wiping away the mess with gentle thumbs, you felt nothing but a warm, glowing gratitude.
And also the urge to do this a hundred times over.
_____________
It really seemed to be a sort of schedule at this point—a ritual of horniness even.
If Jaeyun got you coffee one day, Euijoo would get it for you the next day. If Euijoo fixed the ribbon in your hair in the morning, Jaeyun would brush dust off your shoulder in the evening.
So if Jaeyun had taught you how to use those pretty little lips of yours, Euijoo had to teach you something too?
Which is how you ended up in the situation you were in.
To be fair, it had been fairly Jaeyun’s fault. After all, nobody told him to get crap drunk and pass out in the middle of the day, completely forgetting the fact that they’d invited you over to the frat building for tutoring in view of your usual library being closed.
So after being invited in by Jungwon and being told to wait in the kitchen while Euijoo came back from class (he’d also told you all about his pet cactus in the meanwhile before Fuma dragged him off by the collar of his shirt), you were finally sitting in his. Alone. With him. Yeah, completely survivable situation.
It was neater than you’d expected—books arranged by subject and color on a shelf, a single succulent thriving on the windowsill, the scent of clean laundry and his cologne—something crisp and subtle with a hint of sandalwood. The door was closed, muffling the distant sounds of a video game and shouting from elsewhere in the house.
You’d set up at his small desk, your biology textbook open to a chapter you were not interested in. Euijoo had pulled his desk chair right beside yours, his arm brushing yours as he leaned over the page.
For the first fifteen minutes, it was productive. He was nodding along to all your explanations, tracing his fingers over the particularly harder sections and chuckling whenever you made some ridiculous analogy to explain. But then his gaze, always so careful and respectful, drifted.
It landed on the V-neck of your shirt, on the sliver of skin and the hint of lace-edged cleavage the dip of the fabric revealed. Had you worn this top on purpose? Of course not. But with the way your inner thighs were heating up at the moment, the way you were sitting, the subtle arch of your back—it all felt like a swan dance to seduce him.
He didn’t say anything at first. He just…..looked. His pen, which had been tapping a rhythm on the page, stilled. The atmosphere in the room shifted, growing thicker and warmer.
“This is a complex system,” You said, trying not to let your voice waver. His finger came to trace a line on the textbook, but his eyes lifted to yours as you continued. His gaze dropped back to your chest, lingering.
“Explain it again?” He asked, though his eyes never seemed to go to the actual words on the page. Euijoo’s voice was so rough and low pitched now, practically a growl that your breath hitched.
He reached out then, not for you, but for the pencil cup on his desk, selecting a pen, his movements slow. As he pulled his hand back, the back of his knuckles grazed the upper swell of your breast, just above your shirt’s neckline. The touch was fleeting, accidental in its choreography but devastating in its effect. A bolt of pure, liquid heat shot straight to your core. You flinched, a tiny, involuntary jump.
A faint, knowing smile touched his lips. “Sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. He went back to the textbook, pointing at a paragraph, “Can we do this again?”
But you couldn’t even answer him. He shifted in his chair, turning his body more towards you, his knee pressing against yours under the desk, “I don’t think I get this part, principle of concentration or whatever.”
Euijoo was looking at your mouth, then your eyes, then back at the revealing dip of your shirt. The academic pretense was a thin, shimmering veil now, and you were both watching it dissolve.
The scent of him—that clean sandalwood and something uniquely, essentially Euijoo—enveloped you. His hand came up again, but this time there was no pretense of reaching for a pen. His fingertips brushed the column of your throat, then drifted down, skimming the sensitive skin just above the neckline of your shirt. You stopped breathing.
“Euijoo,” you managed, a weak protest that sounded more like a plea.
“Yes, doll?” he asked innocently, his fingers pausing, his thumb now stroking a hypnotic little circle on your collarbone. “What is it?”
This handsome asshole.
“You know, Jaeyun told me something interesting.” He leaned in even closer, his lips beside your ear.
His breath was warm. “Taught you how to use that pretty little mouth, hmm?” He murmured, the words a soft, sinful secret. “I think it’s my turn to teach you something else, don’t you think darling?”
His hand finally slipped past the barrier of your shirt, his palm curving over the lace of your bra, cupping you fully. You gasped, arching into the touch despite yourself.
Euijoo hummed, a sound of deep approval. His thumb found your nipple through the lace and rubbed, slow and firm. “Learning pretty quick, aren’t you doll?”
So that was how you’d ended up in the position you were currently in. Sitting comfortably on his lean waist, while his hands gripped your hips as he looked up at you with a look of worship in his eyes. Like you’d become his new deity to shower praise upon.
The offer had slipped out so casually, like he was asking if you wanted another cup of coffee. “Let’s take some of that stress off, yeah?” Euijoo had said, his voice low and steady, eyes fixed on yours with that intense focus. Your mouth had gone dry, but you'd nodded before your brain could catch up with your body.
Now here you were, perched on his waist, his bed creaking softly beneath the two of you. He'd stripped off his shirt somewhere between the desk and the mattress, leaving him in just a loose pair of grey sweats that did nothing to hide how much he wanted you. His hands found your hips, thumbs pressing into the soft skin just above the waistband of your skirt.
"You're so pretty," he breathed, looking up at you like you were something sacred. "God, look at you. Sitting on me like you own me." Your hands braced against his chest, feeling the firm muscle beneath warm skin. His heart was racing—you could feel it hammering against your palms.
"You need to take this off, doll.” Euijoo said, fingers hooking into the hem of your pink shirt. "Can't teach you properly with it in the way."
You let him pull it over your head, tossing it somewhere behind him without a second glance. His eyes dropped to your chest, and the sharp inhale he took made heat pool low in your belly.
"Fuck," he whispered. "Can I touch them, pretty?"
You nodded, and his hands were on you instantly, cupping the weight of your breasts through the thin fabric of your bra. His thumbs traced over your nipples, already hard and sensitive, and you gasped at the contact.
"Please…" you managed, the word barely a whisper.
Euijoo's fingers found the clasp of your bra with practiced ease, and soon the garment joined your shirt on the floor. The cool air hit your bare skin for half a second before his mouth was on you, lips wrapping around one nipple while his hand worked the other. You cried out, your hips bucking forward against his stomach. The pressure was perfect, his tongue flicking against the sensitive peak while his thumb rolled the other between his fingers.
"That's it," he murmured against your skin, switching to give the other breast the same attention. "God, your tits are perfect. Been thinking about them all week."
"How long?" you gasped, fingers threading through his hair.
"Since the first time you wore that pretty little pink top," he admitted, lips trailing up your chest to your collarbone. "Couldn't focus on a single thing you said.”
You should have been embarrassed, but the confession only made you wetter, made you grind down against his hard length with more desperation. The friction through his sweats was maddening, not nearly enough. Euijoo's hands guided your movements, showing you how to rock your hips against him, how to find a rhythm that made his eyes roll back.
"Feel that? Feel what you do to me, doll?" he asked, voice strained. "You nodded, focusing on the motion, on the way his cock pressed against you through the layers of clothing. It wasn't enough, you needed more.
"I want—" you started, but the words caught in your throat.
"I know what you want," he said softly, his hands sliding down to grip your ass. "But you have to ask nicely, baby.”
Heat flooded your cheeks, but the ache between your thighs overpowered any shyness. "I want you inside me. Please, Euijoo."
"Yeah?" His voice was thick, almost reverent. "You wanna ride me, sweet girl?”
"Yes, please, please—"
The sudden tightening of his hands settled on your hips told you everything you needed to know. Jealous, jealous Euijoo, how dare Jaeyun have you alone before him? His thumbs pressed into the jut of your hip bones, grounding you, holding you steady as you hovered above him.
"Then take what's yours," he breathed, the words barely a whisper but he heard them.
Your fingers, trembling with need, fumbled for the waistband of his grey sweats. The fabric was soft, worn, and the simple intimacy of undressing him like this sent another jolt of heat through you. He didn't help, just watched you with heavy-lidded intensity, his chest rising and falling in a quickened rhythm.
You hooked your thumbs under the elastic and the thin cotton of his boxers beneath, pushing them down in one urgent motion. His cock sprang free, thick and flushed and already leaking at the tip, straining upwards against his stomach. The sight stole the air from your lungs, he was so painfully and beautifully hard for you.
"Look at you," Euijoo murmured, his voice rough with awe and impatience. "So pretty for me.”
"Slow," he instructed, his voice low and controlled, nothing like the breathless, whiny sounds Jaeyun had made in the library. Euijoo was so very attractively calm. "Lower yourself onto me slowly, doll.”
You positioned yourself, the blunt, hot head of him nudging against your soaked entrance. A shuddering breath escaped you. You already felt so full in a way that felt like coming home. Your hands braced against his chest, feeling the steady thrum of his heartbeat under your palms. You whined high as you sank down, inch by inch, the stretch of him filling you in a slow, burning glide that made your vision blur. His fingers tightened on your hips, a sharp inhale escaping through his nose.
"Good girl…" he breathed. "Just like that. Take all of me."
When you were fully seated, his pelvis flush against yours, you stilled, your chest heaving as you tried to catch your breath. He was so deep inside you, hitting a spot that made your thighs tremble. He let you adjust, his thumbs stroking soothing circles into your skin.
"Now," he said, his voice patient, almost gentle, "roll your hips baby, take it slow.”
You tried, moving your hips in an awkward circle, and his hands guided you, showing you the rhythm. His grip was firm, correcting your angle, tilting your pelvis until the motion felt natural. The friction was maddening, his cock dragging against your walls with every slow rotation.
"There," he murmured, satisfaction lacing his tone. "You're learning so well doll."
Then his hands were on your skin, cupping the weight of your breasts in his palms, his thumbs brushing over your nipples in slow, teasing passes. "Beautiful," he said, almost to himself.
You moaned, your rhythm faltering as pleasure spiked through you. He pinched lightly, rolling the hardened peaks between his fingers, and your hips stuttered, grinding down harder against him.
"No," he corrected, his grip on your breast tightening just enough to make you gasp. "Don't change the pace. You can feel good and still follow instructions like a good doll."
You nodded, biting your lip, forcing your hips to return to that slow, rolling grind. He rewarded you by bowing forward, taking one of your nipples into his mouth. The wet heat of his tongue against the sensitive bud made you cry out, your fingers threading through his hair as he sucked and laved at your skin.
His hands never stopped moving. One stayed at your breast, kneading and squeezing, while the other slid down your side, gripping your ass to help guide your movements. His mouth switched to your other nipple, giving it the same attention, and you felt the coil tightening in your belly, hot and insistent.
"Euijoo…." you whimpered, your voice breaking.
"Not yet," he said, pulling back, his lips glistening. He looked up at you, his eyes sharp and focused. "I want you to cum with me. Can you do that, baby?" You nodded, desperate, willing to do anything he asked. "Then keep riding me. Just like this. Don't speed up."
The minutes stretched into an eternity of sensation—his hands on your breasts, pinching and teasing, the slow, torturous grind of your hips, the feeling of him buried so deep inside you that you couldn't tell where he ended and you began. The pleasure built in waves, each one higher than the last, until you were trembling on the edge, your breath coming in sobbing gasps.
"Now," he said, his voice strained, finally losing its composure. "Cum for me."
And you did. Your orgasm crashed through you, your back arching, a broken cry tearing from your throat as your walls clenched around him. He followed immediately, his hips bucking up into you as he spilled inside you, his groan low and guttural, his hands gripping your hips so hard you knew there would be bruises.
You collapsed forward, your forehead pressing against his, both of you breathing hard, sharing the same air. His hands softened, sliding up your back, holding you close as you trembled through the aftershocks.
Well there went another three days of losing all motor function in your legs.
And you were still going to ask him for another round.
_________________
It was almost funny how fast two months had passed by.
Perhaps it felt like that because now, every other day you were being filled to the brim by either one of them or both of them at the same time. And to be honest, you were too thoroughly, blissfully fucked-out to even think about asking the infamous ‘what are we’ question. The answer, in every touch and whispered praise, felt obvious: you were theirs. Their perfect girl.
The proof was in your grades. The final biology exam results had been posted, and you’d passed with flying colors, a crisp ‘A’ gleaming beside your student ID. The more surprising—or perhaps not surprising at all—revelation was that Euijoo and Jaeyun had also scored remarkably high. Jaeyun, who’d claimed to be “barely passing” before, had landed a solid A. Euijoo, predictably, had aced it with an A+. They’d celebrated your collective success that night in Euijoo’s room, their congratulations taking a deeply physical and profoundly satisfying form.
But that had been a week ago. A long, torturous, dry week.
How rude.
Since turning in their final projects, both of them had become suddenly, maddeningly busy with “end-of-semester logistics” for their frat. Brief, distracted texts, apologies muttered through yawns when you saw them in passing, a peck on the cheek that felt brotherly at this point—it was infuriating. The constant, humming attention you’d grown addicted to had vanished, leaving you twitchy and empty.
You were frustrated, more than frustrated—you were a live wire of neglected need. And tonight, they were throwing a party to mark the end of exams. Revenge, you decided, was a dish best served looking utterly devastating.
That was why you were standing in front of your full-length mirror, critically examining your reflection. The dress was baby pink, a shade so innocent it bordered on absurd. The fabric was soft and clingy in a way that left exactly nothing to the imagination.
It was shockingly short, the hem brushing mid-thigh only if you stood perfectly still. The neckline was a deep, sweetheart cut that showcased the swell of your breasts, and the back? The back was practically non-existent, a few strings holding it together. You’d paired it with the highest, most precarious strappy heels you owned.
You looked like a confection, a delicious, bite-sized, walking sweet cherry pie.
A slow, determined smile spread across your lips. Let them be “busy.” Let them try to have a meeting, organize a party, do anything at all while you walked in looking like this. You knew their tells—the way Jaeyun’s jaw would tighten, the way Euijoo’s eyes would darken and track your every move like a predator. You were going to remind them exactly what they’d been neglecting. And you were going to make them beg to fix their mistake.
With a final, satisfied nod at your reflection, you grabbed your small clutch. The party was just starting and it was time to make an entrance.
______________
“You’re going to spill your drink.”
“I’m going to light this house on fire.”
The bass from the sound system pulsed through the floorboards of the frat house, a physical thrum in the air. The party was in full, chaotic swing—bodies packed tight, laughter spilling over the music, the sharp tang of cheap beer and sweat cutting through the usual scent of pine cleaner and boyish neglect.
You’d made your entrance. A ripple had gone through the crowd near the door when you walked in, a subtle shift in attention you felt like a physical touch.
You’d caught sight of Jaeyun first, over by the keg, laughing with a couple of his brothers. His eyes had found you, and the laugh died on his lips. His gaze had traveled from your face, down the scandalous plunge of your neckline, over the sinful shortness of your skirt, all the way to your treacherous heels. His expression had shifted from surprise to something hot and intense, his grip tightening on his red plastic cup.
Euijoo had been beside him, leaning against the wall, looking effortlessly cool in a black tee. His reaction was quieter, but no less potent. His eyes had narrowed, his head tilting slightly as he took you in, a slow, unreadable mask settling over his features. You’d given them a small, breezy smile—a mere flick of acknowledgment—and then deliberately turned away, melting into the crowd without a word.
That had been twenty minutes ago. Now, you were on the makeshift dance floor in the living room, the space cleared of furniture.
And you were dancing with Fuma, his hands respectfully placed on your waist as you moved to the beat. You were leaning in close to hear him over the music, laughing at something he said, your hand resting lightly on his shoulder. You knew exactly how you looked: the pink fabric clinging to every curve, the dim light catching the sheen of your skin, your head thrown back in a laugh that was just for him.
From across the room, near the archway to the kitchen, two pairs of eyes were burning holes into you.
“You’re going to spill your drink,” Euijoo said flatly, his voice barely audible over the music. He wasn’t looking at Jaeyun; his gaze was locked on the way Fuma’s thumb was stroking a tiny, infuriating circle on the bare skin of your waist.
Jaeyun didn’t even glance at his cup. His knuckles were white around it. “I’m going to light this house on fire.”
Euijoo finally tore his eyes away, cutting a sharp look at his friend. “She didn’t even say hello. Walked in here looking like…..like that,” he hissed, “and didn’t even come over.”
“She saw us,” Jaeyun growled. “She looked right at me and smiled like I was a fucking stranger.”
He took a savage gulp of his beer, his eyes tracking your every move. The way your dress rode up when you swayed, the flash of your thigh, the way the neckline threatened to spill its contents with every bounce. He was so hard it was painful, a relentless ache that had started the second you walked in and was now a throbbing, jealous fury.
It was Fuma. Fuma who had always been their anchor in a storm, older and widely respected in the frat, someone that the both of them leaned on when things got too hard. But right now? All that stuff was going down the drain just at the sight of him pressed so close to you. The memory of Fuma being the one to tell them about you first was also hurting like a bitch.
Euijoo watched as you whispered something in Fuma’s ear, saw the other man’s smile widen, a possessive snarl threatened in Euijoo’s chest. That was his ear to whisper into. His girl to make smile like that. “She’s doing this on purpose.”
“No shit,” Jaeyun spat. “A week of nothing, and now this?” He gestured violently with his cup towards you. “This is a fucking declaration of war.”
They both watched, helpless and seething, as Fuma leaned down to say something else, his lips too close to your hair. Your resulting laugh was bright and clear, a sound that used to be reserved for them in the quiet of a dorm room.
Euijoo’s jaw was clenched so tight it ached. The sight of you in that dress, on another man’s arm, moving with a confidence they’d coaxed out of you themselves…it was the most potent aphrodisiac and the most bitter poison he’d ever tasted. He wanted to tear you away from Fuma, throw you over his shoulder and carry you upstairs. He wanted to ruin you in that dress, mark every inch of skin it revealed so everyone would know exactly who you belonged to.
“She wants a reaction,” Euijoo said, his voice low and deadly calm.
Jaeyun’s smile was all sharp edges. “Oh, she’s gonna get one.”
___________
Any protest you might have mustered died in your throat, swallowed by the heady thrill of their focused, furious energy. They’d descended on you and Fuma like a pair of storms, their polite-but-icy smiles belying the fire in their eyes.
A few terse words to a bewildered Fuma, a “she’s with us” that brooked no argument, and you were extracted from the dance floor and ushered through the chaotic party, up to the familiar sanctuary of their room.
The door clicked shut, sealing you in the sudden, profound quiet. The only sound was the ragged pull of three sets of lungs.
Now, you sat perched on the edge of Euijoo’s neatly made bed, your arms crossed tightly over your chest, doing your best impression of indifference. Your lower lip was pushed out in a defiant pout, your eyes wide and attempting to project wounded innocence, though the fire in them probably betrayed you. Your dress which had felt like armour downstairs, now felt flimsy and exposing under the twin spotlights of their gaze.
Jaeyun and Euijoo stood side-by-side at the foot of the bed, a study in contrasting, coiled tension. Jaeyun’s earlier rage had condensed into a smoldering intensity, his eyes dark and hungry as they raked over you. Euijoo was deceptively still, his expression unreadable, but the air around him crackled with possessive intent.
For a long moment, they just looked at you, their gazes traveling over your defiant posture, the exposed length of your legs, the rise and fall of your chest.
“Well,” Jaeyun drawled, "Look who decided to join the party.” His voice was a low, rough scrape that sent a shiver straight down your spine. “And dressed for the occasion too.”
Euijoo’s lips quirked in a ghost of a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Such sudden bravery, doll,” he murmured, taking a slow step closer. His gaze lingered on the desperate clutch of your arms over your chest, on the way the dress’s neckline strained with the motion. “Parading yourself downstairs, letting just anyone put their hands on you.” He tsked softly, “Real bold, sweetheart.”
Jaeyun’s smile was wolfish. He took a step closer, his eyes tracing the neckline of your dress. “You knew exactly what you were doing in that dress, didn’t you honey?”
You lifted your chin, refusing to answer, but a flush crept up your neck. Fuck why did they have to look like five course meals?
“Of course she did,” Euijoo answered for you, his tone almost conversational. He took a step to match Jaeyun, closing the distance. “Bet you wanted every man in that room to look at you didn’t you, pretty girl?” His voice dropped, filling with a raw, appreciative hunger. “But you know who you belong to hmm?” The praise, wrapped in sheer possessiveness, made your traitorous body hum.
You swallowed, the defiance in your posture softening into something more pliant under the heat of their combined stares. “I… I was just—”
“Just what, honey?" Jaeyun cut in, his voice deceptively soft. He was close enough now that you could smell the clean scent of his soap and the faint, lingering hint of beer. “Just reminding us what we’ve been missing?” He reached out, a single finger tracing the fluttering pulse at the base of your throat. “Trust me. We didn’t need a reminder. We’ve been thinking about you every damn second.”
Euijoo’s hand joined Jaeyun’s, his fingers gently but firmly prying one of your arms away from your chest. He laced his fingers with yours, pulling your hand down to rest on the rumpled duvet. The implication was clear, and a fresh wave of liquid heat pooled low in your belly. Your pout was gone, replaced by parted lips and breath that was coming a little too fast.
Jaeyun watched the transformation, a dark satisfaction in his eyes. “Since you were so…..creative with your little display tonight,” he said, his thumb stroking your captive hand, “we thought we’d get a little creative too.”
Euijoo’s free hand went to the pocket of his dark jeans. He pulled out a rectangular box, wrapped in simple matte black paper. “A little gift,” he said, his voice a low murmur. “From both of us.”
Your eyes widened, flicking between the box and his face. A gift? Now?
Agonizingly slowly, he unwrapped it, letting the paper fall to the floor. Nestled inside against a bed of black velvet was a vibrator. It was sleek, elegant and a soft, shimmering shade of pink that somehow perfectly matched your dress.
“Saw it last week,” Jaeyun explained, his gaze fixed on your reaction as he began to unbutton his own shirt, his movements lazy and deliberate, “Thought you’d like it, our little slut.”
Euijoo picked it up, his fingers curling around it familiarly. With a soft click, it hummed to life, a low, steady buzz that seemed to vibrate in the very air of the room. He held it up, the pink silicone catching the dim light. “Pretty, isn’t it?” he mused. “Just like you.”
As the persistent hum filled the silence, Jaeyun finally closed the last of the distance. He leaned over you, caging you against the headboard, and captured your mouth in a deep, claiming kiss. It was all tongue and teeth and a week’s worth of pent-up frustration, and you melted into it with a helpless whimper. His hands went to your dress, sliding it down your body.
“Let’s get you out of this, honey,” he murmured against your lips, his voice thick with desire. “We’ve admired it long enough.”
Euijoo had you spread out on his bed in a matter of seconds, the vibrator humming against his palm as he watched you squirm around. God how horny was your brain? To not even have noticed the way they were handling you between them like a toy.
"Look at you," he murmured, running the buzzing tip along your inner thigh, avoiding where you needed it most. "So needy already. And we've barely started."
You whimpered, your hips twitching, trying to chase the sensation. He clicked his tongue, pressing the vibrator flat against your thigh, holding it there until you stilled.
"No." He said, his voice patient but firm. "You don't get to decide when you feel good. I do."
He finally pressed the head of the vibrator against your clit, and you gasped, your back arching off the mattress. The sensation was sharp and immediate, pleasure flooding through you in waves. But just as you felt the familiar tightening in your belly, he pulled it away.
"No!" you whined, the sound pitiful and desperate, “Euijoooo….”
"Shhh," he soothed, trailing the toy down your stomach, over your hip, circling your navel. "You'll get there, doll. But not yet."
He did it again and again and again—pressing the vibrator against your clit, letting the pleasure build until you were teetering on the edge, then pulling it away. Each time, your body would shudder, your breath hitching, tears pricking at the corners of your eyes.
"Please," you begged, your voice breaking.
"Please what, doll?" He tilted his head, feigning ignorance. "Please let you cum? But you haven't earned it yet, have you?”
Your hands fisted in the sheets, your hips grinding against nothing. The room was filled with the wet sound of your arousal and the low hum of the vibrator, and you felt completely at his mercy.
After what felt like an eternity of teasing, Euijoo finally set the vibrator aside. He gripped your hips, pulling you toward him until you were sitting up, and then guided you onto his lap at the edge of the bed. His cock was hard beneath you, pressed against your ass, but he made no move to enter you.
"Good girl," he murmured, his hands settling on your waist. "Now stay."
You heard movement, and then Jaeyun was there, dropping to his knees in front of you. He looked up at you with that hungry, worshipful expression, his hands sliding up your thighs, pushing them apart.
"Jaeyun's going to make you feel good," Euijoo said against your ear, his breath warm. "And this time, you're going to let go. You're going to cum all over his face. Understand?" You nodded, your throat (and pussy) tight.
Jaeyun leaned in, pressing a kiss to your inner thigh, then the other. His tongue traced a slow path upward, and when he finally reached your folds, you cried out, your hips bucking forward. He didn't waste time—his tongue lapped at you, broad and flat, then focused on your clit, flicking and circling with practiced precision.
"Oh, god…." you gasped, your hands flying to his hair, gripping the strands, “Jaeyun! Fuck ohhhh…” Fuck it was like he’d mastered the art of female oral pleasure for centuries—the way he was eating you like a starved god.
Behind you, Euijoo’s hands roamed your body, pinching your nipples, sliding down your stomach, gripping your hips to hold you steady. "That's it, doll. Let him eat you—bet you taste soooo good for him, don't you?"
Jaeyun moaned against you, the vibration sending sparks through your core. He devoured you, his tongue sliding inside you, then back to your clit, alternating between sucking and licking until you were a trembling mess.
The pleasure built faster this time, without the torturous pauses, but it was overwhelming, too much and not enough. You felt the pressure mounting, coiling tight in your lower belly, and you knew this time it would be different.
"Ju…" you sobbed, "Ju, I'm—I'm going to—"
"Let go," he commanded, his voice low and rough. "Cum for him, doll. Let it all go."
And you did. Your orgasm crashed through you like a wave, your body arching, a guttural cry tearing from your throat. But it didn't stop—it kept building, pushing past the peak, and you felt the release of something more, a hot gush of liquid that spilled from you as you shuddered and moaned.
Jaeyun didn't pull away. He drank it all, his tongue working through your climax, lapping at you as you squirted over his chin, his lips, his tongue. Your thighs clamped around his head, but he didn't stop, coaxing every last drop from you until you were limp, gasping, your body trembling uncontrollably.
Euijoo’s arms wrapped around you, holding you against his chest, pressing kisses to your shoulder. "Such a good girl," he whispered. "You did so well."
Jaeyun finally pulled back, his face glistening, a satisfied smirk on his lips. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, but his eyes never left yours.
“So fucking sweet, pretty girl." He said, his voice husky, “Sweet like honey, yeah?”
You were too spent to respond, your head falling back against Euijoo’s shoulder, your body humming with aftershocks. They held you between them, warm and possessive, and for a long moment, the only sound was your ragged breathing and the soft hum of the vibrator Euijoo had discarded on the bed.
You heard the rustle of fabric, then felt his hands on your ass cheeks, spreading them wide, cool air kissing your exposed holes.
“Round two, pretty girl?”
The words were fleeting in your ears, neither of them had the patience to wait for your answer. You asked yourself that question again: just how orgasm-drunk were you that you didn’t even protest the change in position? It was a matter of minutes before you found yourself in the position you were in.
Did you really give a fuck? Nope—all you wanted was for your wet little pussy to be filled by her usual favourites.
The bed creaked beneath you as Euijoo positioned himself behind you, his hands gripping your hips while you hovered over Jaeyun’s cock. Your thighs trembled, slick and ready, as Jaeyun’s hands found your waist, guiding you down.
"That's it, honey," Jaeyun breathed, his eyes locked on yours as you sank onto him, inch by inch. "Taking me so well."
A choked gasp escaped your lips as he filled you completely, the sensation spreading through your core, stretching you in a way that made your vision blur. Before you could adjust, Euijoo’s hands spread your cheeks, and you felt the blunt pressure of his cock pressing against your ass.
"You think you can take us both, doll?" His voice was low, dripping with challenge. "Or are you going to break on us?" You nodded, words failing you, your fingers digging into Jaeyun’s shoulders for support.
"Use your words," Euijoo said, slapping your ass hard enough to make you jolt. "I want to hear you say it."
"Yes," you gasped, your voice cracking. "Please, I can—I can take it."
Euijoo pushed in slowly, the pressure building until it became a dull, overwhelming ache, then a sharp fullness that made you cry out. Your body clenched around both of them, the dual intrusion too much and exactly what you needed.
"Fuckkkkk" Jaeyun groaned beneath you, his head falling back. "She's so fucking—hah—tight. Squeezing me like she's trying to milk me dry, yeah?”
"Because she's such a desperate little slut," Euijoo said, his voice softening into something almost affectionate, wildly in contrast to his words. "Aren't you, honey? Can't get enough of us filling you up."
You whimpered, your hips starting to move on instinct, rocking back against Euijoo while grinding down on Jaeyun. The rhythm came naturally, the three of you finding a pace that had your breath hitching and your body shaking.
Euijoo’s thrusts were so damn deep, each one hitting that spot inside you that made your toes curl. Jaeyun met your movements from below, his hands gripping your waist, his hips snapping up to meet yours. They set a punishing rhythm, alternating their thrusts so that one was always filling you while the other pulled back, a mean oscillation.
"Look at her…." Euijoo said, his hand tangling in your hair, pulling your head back. "Riding you like a good girl, taking my cock in her ass like she was made for it."
"Made for us," Jaeyun corrected, his voice strained, his eyes burning into yours. "Perfect little cocksleeve for both of us."
The pleasure built, coiling low in your belly, your moans turning into broken sobs as they fucked you from both ends. Every nerve in your body was alight, the sensation overwhelming, consuming.
"Please," you begged, not knowing what you were asking for. "Please, I'm—I'm going to—"
"Not yet," Euijoo said, slowing his thrusts, denying you the friction you craved. "You don't cum until we say you can."
Jaeyun followed his lead, stilling beneath you, leaving you suspended on the edge. A frustrated whine tore from your throat, your hips grinding uselessly against them.
"Please," you tried again, tears pricking at your eyes. "Please, I need—"
"I know what you need, doll." Euijoo’s voice was softer now, almost gentle. "You need to be good for us first. Can you do that? Be our good girl?" You nodded frantically, desperation clawing at your chest.
"Then cum for us," Jaeyun said, his hands sliding up your sides, cupping your breasts, thumbing your nipples. "Let go, honey. Let us feel you."
They started moving again, faster now, harder, driving into you with a relentless pace that had you seeing stars. The pleasure hit you like a wave, crashing over you as your first orgasm tore through your body. You cried out, your back arching, your walls clenching around them.
"Fuck, yes….." Euijoo groaned, his thrusts growing erratic. "That's it pretty girl, oh fuckkk squeezing me so good fuck…”
But they didn't stop. They kept fucking you through your climax, the overstimulation pushing you higher, building toward something even more intense.
"One more," Jaeyun commanded, his voice rough, breathless. "Give us one more, baby. I know you can."
"Please nghhh—I can’t " you sobbed, your body trembling, every nerve on fire. "I can't—"
"You can.” Euijoo said, his hand sliding down your stomach, his fingers finding your clit. "And you will."
He pressed down, circling the sensitive nub as they fucked you, and the second orgasm hit you before you could brace yourself. It ripped through you, harder and deeper than the first, your vision going white as you screamed, your body convulsing around them.
"Fuck—" Jaeyun's voice cracked as he came, his hips bucking, his cum flooding you. Euijoo followed a moment later, a guttural groan escaping his lips as he spilled inside your ass, his grip on your hips bruising.
The three of you collapsed together, tangled and breathless, your bodies slick with sweat and cum. Euijoo pulled out slowly, kissing your shoulder, while Jaeyun traced lazy patterns on your thighs.
"So fucking perfect," Jaeyun murmured, his voice thick with satisfaction.
"You did so well, doll." Euijoo added, his hand carding through your hair.
You couldn't respond, your body humming with aftershocks, your mind blissfully blank. They held you between them, warm and possessive, and for a long moment, the only sound was your ragged breathing and the steady beat of their hearts against your skin.
Somewhere between the border of sleep (“Is she sleeping?” “Should we change her clothes or..?”), you had a fleeting thought.
You were happy. Really happy.
Because somewhere along the way, the fear disappeared entirely—you stopped overthinking every text before sending it, stopped panicking when they touched your shoulder casually or leaned too close over your notes, stopped feeling like the quiet girl hidden in the second row of lectures. Somehow, without you noticing, the lonely little world you’d built around yourself had cracked open.
And standing in the middle of it were two boys who brought you coffee, listened to your rambling biology explanations, made you laugh when you forgot how, and looked at you like you were someone worth knowing. And fucked you crazy stupid too of course.
The months you thought would destroy you had ended up changing your life instead.
Funny how that worked.
Cause fuck were you into it.
fin.
A/N: this is one of those fics where i genuinely felt myself lock in HARD and lowkey felt much melancholy when i finished it like this fic is my child ykwim. Never in my life did i think I'd ever write four smut scenes in one singular fic but hey my biases made me do it yay. Shoutout to Jaeyun and Euijoo edits for getting me through the hell of writing threesomes i will now go be their fucktoy byeee
divider by @honeyluvsw
@eu1joo @kwnnies @nichozzystuffs @blueuijoo @pglpblm @ikigaijo @antonh0lic @dearvampyr @riri4andy @tokunodoll @sunsoomi @makizdoll + Shoot me an ask or comment to be added! @berrybittynetwork my beloveds
Hi I love your theme and wanted to ask you for some advice on how to get an aesthetic theme. Also on how to do masterlists as well 🥲
okayy, thank youuu
So for my theme I js pick a colour and go to Pinterest and search for *insert colour* icons, like beige icons. And if I have like a theme I js do like pink and green cottage core icons. Something like that. (Also works for idols eg. "Beige Beomgyu icons")
You might not always get your results at first but it really really really helps to basically go down kind of a rabbit hole.
So you do your initial search,click on the photo that best fits what you're looking for and then just look through the results that come after you click it then keep repeating. Eventually you get better and better pics trust.
Then for colorized text I basically use stuffbydavid text colorizer
Small tut:
First you open the site, type in your text and pick colours. You can do up to like three colours and vertically and horizontally i think and even solid colors:
Next copy the code under html code for this text.
Come back to tumblr and open your draft and tap those three dots in the corner the go to text and switch from rich text to html.
Then from html ( by now your text should already be in the post, if not you can type it quickly) select the word you want to color
And js paste your text in place of it then go to preview to see if it's to your liking. Then from there you can switch back to rich text and edit like normal.
Fair warning that if you have pics on a row, like i do, whenever you switch from rich text to html it messes the arrangement up and basically there are no more rows and they're js like lined up idk how to say it so I think you should get all your text done before you arrange your pics in a row.
You can also use font styles and emojis to make it cute i personally use emojidb. The font styles may not always appear when you use a text coloriser BUT it can easily be solved. Just type it onto the text colorizer in normal font go back to html, select the letter(s) that aren't showing up and replace them.
They'll be in between the two span> like this.
for masterlists I use canvas for all my banners. I get ideas then use a bg remover to remove the background for the pictes like idols photos or other cute elements I gwt off Pinterest.
I do the same for some dividers though if you're lazy you can find a TON of divider creators on Tumblr just search the aesthetic / volour of dividers you want.
For your overall theme my go to is using song lyrics like rn the text in my pinned post is js the first verse of panic by beomgyu in english and make random words hyperlinks to your masterlist or faqs or rules or anything honestly.
For themes honestly creativity is key and I honestly used to SUCK at ts. Practice is key + it helps in thw start to change your theme pretty often like idk it js makes you better the more you do.
++as you're working on your stuff once in a while try and save the draft bc tumblr CAN play in your face and not back up your work randomly...
Also for a lit of these things pc is much better than using a phone.
Masterlists you can apply the same concepts as for the theme but it has a lot of links.
Idk if you can do hyperlinks but I'll js add a tut bc I struggled with them at first lmao.
So you first copy your link, then come back to tumblr and select the word you wanna link it to
tap yhy link icon then enter your link and tap on done then you got your masterlist hyperlinks!
If there's anything you want me to go deeper into or something i left out don't hesitate to let me know and thank you for liking my blogg🥹🫰🏾
𝓒ontains : midieval au, angst–ish, comfort, mentions of war, reader is taller than jw, kissing, slight pda, reader is slightly objectified as jungwon's woman, they fall in front of others but it's cute.
𝓦c : 593
𝓝ow playing : Distant Lover – Marvin Gaye
𝓕rom this ask based on this video.
Tears streamed from your eyes for the nth time that day, rolling down in a torturous promenade to join the half dried rivulets staining your cheeks.
The symphony of waves crashing against rocks by the shore complemented by brids chirping while continuing their daily course failed to calm. On the contrary it felt rather mocking—the way everyone and everything could go back to the way it was before as if nothing had happened.
As if you weren’t missing 5,000 men—including your husband.
Your fists clenched on the sand beneath your skin, absurdly hoping it would somehow bring him back. As if he would surge right through the earth and return to your arms.
After all, desperation birthed delusion.
Even the sound of a ship carrying a whole army hitting the dock couldn't wake you up from your agony induced slumber. You'd completely passed out on the beach partially in hopes you'd rise to meet Jungwon.
"Is she okay?"
"Why is she here all alone?"
"I think that's Yang's woman."
"Y/n is it?"
The call of your name stuck out from within the clamor. Jungwon had learned to remain on his toes at any second, even in his sleep. But he didn't need any kind of training when it came to you.
Pushing and shoving past the men he'd just shared months of trauma with just to find out if you were really there.
His face melted into one of concern and adoration at the sight of you looking so peaceful. You'd pulled him into to a trance just by being there—unconscious too. At that moment it was just him and you, not considering the 100 other men surrounding you.
"Sweetheart" Jungwon shook your body slightly, watching your brows twitch as his voice slowly pulled you back into sensibility. Your eyes fluttered open languidly, Jungwon's visage gradually coming together like a puzzle you'd solved before.
"J–" a sharp gasp left your throat while you attempted to sit up and regain your composure, "Jungwon?"
Your hands flew to his face touching every part you could ensuring he was real and not a figment of your imagination.
"I'm here darling" Tears bordered the ducts of his eyes, a cry threatening to capture wrap itself around his speech. "I'mnot going anywhere anymore—we won, we made it."
You couldn't care less about your legs wobbling beneath you as you struggle to stand on your feet. He met you halfway though, scooping you in his arms and helping you up.
You threw him slightly off guard whe your lips suddenly connected with his in a kiss that tasted of tears, the seashore and pure unadulterated yearning.
You managed to stand on your feet but bent your knees and arched into him feeling engulfed in his embrace.
He held you as close as humanly possible and you gripped him from behind his shoulders. The unfavorable position had you sinking back into your prior position but neither of you cared. Jungwon chased your lips resulting in the both of you falling downwards into the sand.
A round of cheers erupted from the men who watched the interaction from start to finish. A few snickers were heard here and there but the two of uou were far from embarrassed. The relief of being reunited overshadowed any kind of shame.
You lay next to your lover, resting your head on his chest and listening to the pattern of his heartbeat.
Jungwon planted a chaste kiss on your head and swore to you, "I'mnot going to leave you my love, ever again."
GENRE/CW: smut, angst, fluff, porn with plot, slow burn, multiple smut scenes, unprotected sex (wrap it before you tap it), lots of kissing, cunnilingus, blowjob, dry humping, fingering, car sex, mutual masturbation, spit kink, multiple orgasms, marking, crying. mentions of nicknames, pda, messy feelings and bets, subtle mentions of jaywon. lmk if i missed anything!
WORD COUNT: 30.9k words
SYNOPSIS: Jake is utterly oblivious to the fact that you are well aware how his sudden devotion to you is stemmed from nothing but a pathetic little bet. He is also unaware of the fact that you have been matching his energy, playing your part so convincingly that the line between performance and truth starts to blur, and you are not sure what is real anymore. OR, the classic bet trope twisted into bet inverse.
A/N: hihi loves <3 so i finally used my 2 year old idea and made it into a fic, it was soo fun to write and i could not have done it without doll (ily for sprinting w me always), i hope you guys enjoy it <3 all likes, comments, reblogs are highly appreciated! it keeps me motivated! iloveyou all and happy reading <3
CHAPTER ONE: Raised stakes.
If there was one word to describe Jake, it would be carefree.
Some deeper parts within him would care to disagree, however, he had perfected this art of burying them six feet under layers of easy smiles. At twenty-three, Jake was the hot Physics student pursuing Masters with a killer arm (or leg in this case) on the football field.
He had always been good at drowning out uneasiness with a bright grin, a well-timed joke that he somehow laughed at harder than the others, the easy way his hand would find the small of someone’s back as he guided them through a crowded party. It worked, it always worked.
Hardworking to a fault, he balanced brutal training sessions, demanding coursework, and still found time to be the social glue of every group he touched. Clumsy in the most endearing ways—tripping over his own feet during victory celebrations or spilling his coffee down his jersey—he’d just laugh it off, turning mishaps into stories.
So, in a word, Jake Sim was considered to be carefree by any living creature that had the slightest pleasure of meeting him.
And to put it simply, he enjoyed it. He basked in the attention thrown his way, not in a way that would label him as arrogant, it just came to him as easy as, well, breathing. All that effortless energy around him kept him sane, coming from a loving family, to having friends he could call his second family, he truly cherished it to the core.
Tonight the spring kickoff party in the quad thrummed under strings of warm fairy lights, the bass from the speakers mixing with the scent of grilled corn (to Jay’s absolute delight), spilled beer, and early cherry blossoms. Jake stood right at the center of it all, lean athletic build relaxed as he leaned against the brick pillar, red solo cup in hand, black hair falling in soft tousled waves. He ran his fingers through it absentmindedly while Heeseung gestured wildly mid-story, the group around him already cracking up at the enthusiasm of it all.
“—and then she just looks at me after the game, all flushed and smiling, and says you looked really good out there tonight. Next thing I know we’re back at her place and I’m thinking, damn, maybe I should score more goals if this is the reward,” Heeseung said, smile wide as he took a swig from his cup.
Jay laughed at that, “you’re too fucking easy,” he mumbled, taking a bite of corn, pairing it up with vodka right after.
Sunghoon leaned back against the pillar, smirking as he shook his head, “you two are hopeless, now let me tell you guys about what real pleasure is—”
“Spare us the details,” Jeno mumbled, a tad bit tipsy with the amount of booze he’d been consuming, Jaemin holding him up, but his mind was elsewhere, planning something rather crazy to wash out the usual mundane conversation.
Jake’s laugh rolled out bright, head tilting back and shoulders shaking with genuine amusement, “you guys are practically whores,” he clicked his tongue, “but yeah—nothing beats that post-game high when someone’s waiting for you looking like that. Makes all the bruises worth it.” He bit his lower lip lightly, still grinning as he scanned the lively surroundings, eyes crinkling warmly at the corners.
Across the grass, you stood with Jungwon and Karina near the low stone wall, Jungwon had dragged the two of you here earlier, insisting it would be lowkey fun because his Jay hyung had invited him and “it’s not like we have to stay forever.” The music played in the background, but your attention stayed on them—sharp little remarks about random campus drama, Karina’s latest story about a disastrous blind date, the usual easy flow that made the noise somewhat bearable.
Jungwon glanced toward the center of the party, a small, reluctant smile tugging at his lips as he watched Jake’s group, “Jake’s in full golden-boy mode tonight. Look at him— Jay says he’s the same off the field, always cracking jokes even when everyone’s half-dead from practice.”
Karina nodded, swirling the last of her drink slowly, “It’s almost unfair how he does that, wish i could’ve been that extroverted honestly.”
You followed their gaze without meaning to. Jake was mid-laugh again, black hair falling messily into his eyes as he ran a hand through it. The light catching the sharp line of his jaw, the way his whole body seemed to lean into the moment. Everyone around him was leaning in too, feeding off that bright, effortless warmth.
It made something tight and irritated coil low in your stomach. Not jealousy, no, just exhaustion at the performance of it all. The way the entire party seemed wired to orbit one guy who never seemed to run out of smiles or energy.
You shrugged, “he’s too loud. Must get exhausting pretending the world’s that fun all the time.”
Jungwon bumped your shoulder lightly, his laugh soft and familiar, “c’mon, he’s not that bad. Jay swears he’s actually decent when you get him one-on-one. But yeah, he looks a wee bit too jolly tonight.”
Karina smirked, eyes glinting with teasing as she glanced at you, “you’d probably shut him down in two seconds flat if he ever tried talking to you. I’d pay to see that.”
You pressed your lips together for half a second, the thought of Jake Sim turning that sunshine smile on you—of him thinking he could just waltz into your carefully guarded space—sent a flicker of pure distaste through you. You weren’t interested in being another notch, another story he told his friends the next day.
Your life revolved around the quiet satisfaction of getting things right, majorly focusing on, well, studies. Romance, especially the loud, golden-boy kind, had no place in it.
“Exactly,” you said, tone edged with dry sarcasm, “not interested. Let’s grab something from the food trucks and dip before it gets worse. I’ve hit my limit on forced fun for one night.”
You didn’t mind being in the crowd as long as your friends were with you, however, you did mind the exhaustion creeping upon your body. No one but you were to be blamed for it. Going to the gym in the morning, catching up on lectures later, getting groceries, and now being at a party—you’d tired yourself out with the simple mindset of being busy is a blessing. It was true to some extent, albeit not in a way that your friends would agree. The conversation didn’t dull as you started making your way out to eat with your best friends.
On the other side of the quad, Jake was only half-listening to the guys now, he felt himself getting comfortable in his smaller circle, it was exactly the kind of night Jake usually loved.
But his eyes kept drifting.
It wasn’t as if it was his first time seeing you, especially when Jungwon was always around too, it was merely the fact that you kept your distance, always. Jake wasn’t blind, he appreciated beauty which you carried around effortlessly. The lack of general courtesy to acknowledge strangers? Not so much.
You looked like you wished to be anywhere but here (which was true), making him wonder why. He ran his hand through his hair, messing the soft waves before smoothing them back down, a habit he barely noticed anymore.
Jaemin, who had been unusually quiet for the last minute, suddenly leaned in closer, voice dropping low enough that only their small circle could hear over the music, “wanna make things interesting?”
Jay groaned, knowing his proposal would cause damage in the name of merriment, because that’s how Jaemin thrived. Sunghoon was rather interested in knowing what was gonna be the deal here, and so, he continued.
“See her? Jungwon’s friend?” The group turned and looked your way, Jay already opening his mouth to stop him, but of course, Jaemin was quicker, “make her fall in love with you in a month.”
“Wait—me?” Jake echoed, the word half-laugh, half-disbelief, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes the way it usually did.
Jaemin leaned in closer. His grin was sharp, almost scary, “yeah, you, in one month. Make Jungwon’s friend fall for you, hard. Like, actually in love with you to the point it gets public.”
Jay’s head snapped up so fast the corn on his plate nearly toppled, “Jaemin, no. She’s not—fuck, she’s not gonna be interested, at all. I literally know her, she keeps everyone at arm’s length, especially guys like Jake, no offence.”
Sunghoon’s smirk didn’t falter, but his eyes narrowed, interested now in a way that made Jake’s stomach twist, “stakes?”
Jaemin didn’t hesitate, “If Jake wins—makes her say it out loud, in front of us—he gets the M4. Keys, papers, the whole matte-black beast. Mine for a month, and if he wants to keep it after that, it’s his. No take-backs.”
The circle went quiet for half a second before Heeseung let out a low whistle, cup frozen halfway to his mouth, “your car? The one you won’t even let me sit in without a fucking background check?”
“Yep.”
Jay dragged a hand down his face, shoulders tight, “Jake, this is messed up. You’ll hurt her, and then you’ll feel like shit, and she’ll hate you, and the whole group’s gonna be stuck in the middle because Jungwon’s her best friend. This isn’t a game, It’s gonna blow up in both your faces.”
Jake’s fingers found the back of his neck, then slid up into his hair without thinking. He messed them further, his eyes drifting across the quad again to where you were still walking away with Jungwon and Karina, posture straight, silver ring catching the light as you twisted it mindlessly.
He should say no. He should clap Jaemin on the shoulder, laugh it off, steer the conversation back to the upcoming football match or the thermodynamics midterm that was currently trying to murder all of them.
But something stubborn flickered in his chest. The same part that hated the idea of failing at the one thing he was supposedly best at, making people feel seen. You hadn’t even looked at him twice.
One month, one girl who looked like she probably just needed someone nice to talk to and share her worries—right?
Jake bit his lower lip for half a second, the way he did when he was locking in on a tricky play. Then the grin came back as bright and effortless, the one that always worked.
“Deal,” he said, not confident at all, though great at hiding it.
The group exploded, clearly not okay with the idea itself. Jay groaned louder, already shaking his head, “you’re both idiots. This is gonna end badly.”
Sunghoon just laughed under his breath, leaning back against the pillar, “I’ll take that bet too. Odds on Jake cracking first?”
Heeseung was already pulling out his phone, demanding proof in the form of media. Jaemin slapped Jake’s shoulder hard enough to make his red solo cup slosh over the rim.
“Day one starts tomorrow, Jakey. Better bring everything you’ve got.”
Jake laughed again, but when it settled, it left something quieter behind. Something that tasted a little (a lot) like doubt.
Later that night, when the place had emptied and the only sound left was the low hum of crickets, Jake lay on his back in his room. The mellow playlist he always played when the noise finally stopped drifted from his phone. His small notebook—the one no one ever saw—was open on his chest, a half-finished football formation doodled in the margin. He wrote one line.
She doesn’t like loud spaces, or crowds.
He closed the notebook, pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, and exhaled into the dark.
“What the fuck am I doing?” He whispered.
Across campus, you were already in your room, bullet journal open on your desk, silver ring still on your finger. You didn’t know about the bet yet. All you knew was that Jake Sim had never looked your way before last night, and something about the way his eyes had followed you across the grass fell off.
You pressed your lips together, biting the inside of your cheek once, then wrote in the tiniest handwriting in the margin of tomorrow’s schedule.
Keep your distance from Jake Sim.
CHAPTER TWO: Bet inverse?
Jake’s alarm went off at 6:47 in the morning like it always did, but this morning he didn’t bother hitting snooze. He stayed there for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling, the bet from last night practically sitting on his chest. Jaemin’s evil smile and Jay’s warning kept on repeating in his mind.
He should have let it go, instead, he rolled out of the bed, pulled on his black hoodie and shorts, laced up his running shoes after freshening up. He knew where Jungwon lived, the dorms near the science buildings where there was always an influx of food carts nearby.
The distance wasn’t long per se, but his breathlessness certainly made it seem like it was, and the little hope he had to spot you in the cold of this morning.
The sky was soft gray before the sun decided to show up, and Jake’s lungs were burning in a way that made him feel good, hair sticking to his forehead by the time he slowed to jog near the coffee cart.
To his absolute luck, he spotted you right there as you thought what you should order from the coffee cart, looking too proper in your jeans that fit you just right as if it wasn’t so early in the morning, and he took a moment to observe you, breathing hard, wiping his face on the sleeve of his hoodie. He stepped up beside you, the scent of your perfume overtaking his senses.
His friends called him weird for this rather peculiar habit of his where he leaned in too much to get a sniff of, well, practically everything. So, it was hard fir him to control himself at the moment.
“Y/N,” he said, voice low so it wouldn’t startle you, “uh—hey.”
You turned, eyes meeting him before you granted him the smallest nod of acknowledgement, “Jake.”
The barista waited and Jake kept his hands in his hoodie pocket so he wouldn’t fidget, “one Americano for me, and whatever she’s having—I’ll cover it.”
You frowned at this because Jake truly had no reason to be talking to you here, much less paying for your drink, “you really don’t have to.”
“I know.” He offered a half-smile, the real one, “but I want to. We’ve been around each other enough—Jungwon’s parties, that study hall last semester. Felt kinda stupid that we’ve never actually talked.”
You studied him a second longer, like you were trying to decide if this was a line or just politeness. Then you told the barista your usual—vanilla latte, extra shot, and stepped aside while the machine hissed to life.
The silence between you wasn’t awkward exactly, Jake could feel the bet sitting heavy in his throat, but right now it was better—the way your perfume kept drifting over every time the breeze picked up. He wanted to lean in again, but he didn’t.
When both cups came out he handed yours over carefully, no fingers touching, just the warm cardboard passing from his palm to yours.
“Uh—thanks,” you said simply before you started walking.
He fell in beside you, matching your stride without crowding your personal space. The path was empty enough to give you both privacy which you didn’t need as his heartbeat felt a little too loud in his ears, and for the first time, he found himself being nervous to talk to someone.
After half a minute you spoke again, “so how do you always act all nice for people you barely know?”
His lips curved, “I don’t do that, not really. Usually I’m the one everyone expects to keep things light,” he mumbled, “I saw you last night, you looked—bothered? Made me wonder what it’d be like to actually talk to you instead of just watching.”
You took a sip, wondering how he so casually admitted to staring at you, “and what’s the verdict so far?”
He glanced sideways, the early light was starting to hit the side of your face, “still figuring it out. But the coffee seems like a decent start.”
You didn’t smile, not really. But something in your expression eased, and it made him feel a little accomplished, as if he’d won something small and fragile that could disappear any moment.
The path split ahead, biotech building looming on the left. You slowed, turning to face him fully. For a second the guarded look cracked open, and he caught something underneath it—irritation, maybe, or the faintest flicker of curiosity you didn’t want to admit to.
“I’ve got lab,” you said.
Jake nodded, the easy warmth still on his face even though his stomach twisted with how badly he wanted to ask one more question, “yeah, of course. See you around, Y/N.”
You gave one small nod then turned and walked toward the doors. He stood there until you disappeared inside, the taste of black coffee bitter on his tongue and the ghost of your perfume still clinging to the air around him. He breathed it in once, almost guilty, then let it go.
Back in his dorm he dropped onto the bed still in his hoodie, the room quiet. The small notebook he never let anyone see was already open on his lap. He stared at the blank page for a long moment, before writing: Vanilla latte with an extra shot, morning lectures in lab 291.
He closed the notebook, pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, and stayed like that until the pressure behind them eased.
Meanwhile, you were beyond confused narrating it to Karina later, who gave you a dry chuckle, “yeah, don’t entertain him,” she said, and you scoffed—as if you’d ever do that.
But three days had passed since the party, and it was as if Jake had made it his personal mission to accidentally run into you whenever you least expected him to. Somehow, he had managed to get your schedule, which is why he was standing outside your lecture on the very next day.
Jake was a poor actor and highly unaware of the same, so his exclaimed Oh, Y/N, felt rather comical to you, granted he had two coffees in his veiny hands. You chose to ignored him, face pulling into a natural smile for a second, and he stood there shocked, only to realize you were waving at Jungwon who stood behind him.
Jake stood there for a few minutes, not moving even when you had left while Heeseung and Sunghoon stood right there, judging him. Your smile—as brief as it was, had been pretty, too fucking pretty, and doubt crept up Jake. He wondered if he’ll ever be able to coax that smile out of you himself.
The thought followed him through the rest of the day, sharp enough to make him reroute his afternoon lecture so he happened to be near the vending machines right as you stepped out of lab. He was there again the morning after that, leaning against the wall outside the biotech building with a single vanilla latte in hand, the extra shot already marked on the side in the barista’s neat handwriting. Each time he appeared, he kept his voice low, never demanding more, though it felt like a blow to his ego how you actively tried to avoid him. He genuinely wished to talk to you (for the bet, of course).
By the third afternoon the rain had started, insistent against the library windows. You had slipped into the far back study nook, the one buried behind the tallest reference shelves, you needed it—needed to bury yourself in studies and forget how Jake’s persistence was beginning to thread through your days like a melody you couldn’t quite shake.
You pulled out your bullet journal and started annotating protocols for the upcoming lab, pen moving with sharp precision, and you felt a presence behind you. You were most ready to snap at Jake, but it was Jaemin who found you instead.
He dropped into the chair across from you, smirking, like he had been waiting for this exact moment, “Jake’s been hanging around you a lot lately,” he said, voice light but knowing, “you might fall for him.”
You set your pen down slowly, “what makes you think I’ll fall for him?”
Jaemin’s smirk deepened, “well, chances are less but certainly never zero.”
You frowned, irritation rising, “what do you want, Jaemin?”
“I was getting to it.” He leaned forward, eyes glinting, “I wanna propose another bet since I’m bored and I clearly care for you.”
“Another bet?” You asked, brain finally working. Jake was following you around for a fucking bet, you should’ve known.
Jaemin watched your face change and his grin widened, “I give you thirty days to make him fall for you. And I mean truly head-over-heels kind of fall, then reject him, then you win, since you clearly don’t care about him.”
You stared at him, the words tasting bitter on your tongue, “I don’t want to be involved playing with feelings.”
“If he didn’t care for your feelings, why are you holding back?”
“Cause I’m not like him?”
“Fair, but here’s the deal—” Jaemin leaned in closer, voice dropping.
“Isn’t he your friend?”
“Yeah.”
“So?”
“It’s fun.”
“You’re insane.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“What is he getting out of this?”
“My car.”
Another scoff left your mouth at this, and Jaemin said he’d give you anything you wanted if you’d win. Nothing was in your mind honestly, but you were too pissed to let it go.
“And what will I get?”
“A chance to absolutely shatter Jake’s ego, and that trip to Paris with your friends, you’ve been eyeing it for a while now.”
“How the fuck did you—”
“I have my ways,” he shrugged, but his eyes, oh his eyes were glimmering with joy. He almost seemed like a Cheshire cat.
So you agreed. Jaemin only smiled, walking away from you now, leaving you rather disturbed.
As if the universe itself had been listening, Jake walked past the end of the aisle at that exact moment, eyes scanning the shelves until they landed on you. You met his gaze head-on and gave him the smallest smile you owned, and he paused mid-step, lips parting like he might say something, then you looked away, not bothering with him anymore than you had today.
The game had just begun. And this time, you were the one holding the cards.
CHAPTER THREE: Ignorance isn’t bliss
You ignored Jake.
It was rather easy to do so despite all the plans you had brainstormed to make him fall in love with you hopelessly. The day had been too hectic, and to say you were exhausted would be an understatement—even the slightest voice would absolutely make you scream out in frustration given the state of your mind. Which is why you found yourself sitting in the bleachers, all silent and calm.
Truth be told, you didn’t wish to get into this mess by any means, however, Jake wasn’t one to give up. You scoffed at how he’d trade any stranger’s feelings for a stupid car, and even then he’d be celebrated for winning a bet.
Jake didn’t know why but the past few days had been weird for him. He couldn’t understand why you smiled at him in the library only to abruptly disappear from the face of the earth next—and yes, it bothered him because the time was ticking by. Maybe Jake was a lucky guy, cause right then, he found you at the bleachers, sitting up there as if trying to hide from the world.
It was clear you didn’t wish to be disturbed, by Jake of all people, but his feet carried him before his mind could keep up, and that’s how he found himself sitting three seats away from you, prepping to show his absolute best flirt game, but the only thing that came out of his mouth was, “are you okay?”
“Why are you everywhere?” You exasperated, finally turning to look at him despite knowing he’d found you before.
For once he didn’t jump in with some easy line. He just sat there a second, elbows on his knees, watching you like he was actually trying to read the mood instead of skating past it.
“I saw you from the path,” he said, “you were up here alone, I figured I’d check if you were okay. That’s it.”
You let out a sharp breath, the exhaustion from your day mixing with the frustration that had been building since Jaemin dropped his little bomb about the bet. This is all fake, you reminded yourself. He’s only here because he wants that stupid car, that bet.
“Checking in, right. You’ve been turning up at the coffee cart, outside my lectures, the vending machines, now here. I’m not in the mood for whatever this is.”
He shifted one seat closer, jacket creaking a little, but still left space between you, “I’m not trying to push. I know it probably comes off like I’m in your face every day. It’s just—you always seem like you’re carrying a lot and you’re doing it alone. I guess I wanted to see if you were actually alright or if you were just pushing through.”
You turned to face him, eyes narrowing, “pushing through is what students do, Jake. I don’t need an audience for it.”
“Yeah, I see that,” he said, gulping as he stared at your side profile, “you’re pretty resilient about it. Most people would’ve already vented to someone by now—and maybe you did to your friends but yeah.”
“Resilient?” You let out a short laugh, “or just tired of everyone expecting me to perform. Unlike the quintessential golden boy who’s always got a smile ready.”
Jake winced, looked out at the empty field for a second, then back at you, “golden boy—ouch, fair though. That’s the label I got stuck with.”
You crossed your arms tighter, “so, why are you up here trying to talk to me instead of being there with your friends? It doesn’t add up.”
He rubbed his palm over his knee, “uh—with them it’s nonstop noise, like I love my friends but it’s all just football practice, jokes, keeping the energy up no matter what. With you—it doesn’t feel like I have to be that version of me.”
You scoffed, how cliché, “right. So now the guy who’s always the center of everything suddenly wants to sit in silence on the bleachers?”
Jake leaned forward a fraction, elbows on his knees, “there’s this whole dichotomy between what everyone sees and what’s actually going on inside. Talking to you, it’s not like that.”
“Not like that,” you repeated, the words coming out flat, “how convenient, Jake.”
He swallowed again, eyes flicking to your face as you said his name, “It’s not convenient, It’s just true. You don’t expect me to keep the vibe going, y’know? You just say what you think.”
You felt your chest tighten. He sounded so damn eloquent even when he was lying, “you’re really good at this, you know? Making it sound like you actually get it.”
“I’m not trying to be good at anything,” Jake said, voice dropping, “I just keep showing up because every time I do, I see more of the real you. Not the version you show everyone else.”
You let out a breath, he could definitely get a few points for acting, “okay, so listen then—my lab did suck today. Equipment kept failing, I’m behind on three lectures, and I came up here to be alone, that’s it. Nothing exciting.”
“Hey—i didn’t ask for exciting,” he said, staring at the way your fingers still twisted the ring, “my day was shit too—coach rode us hard about tomorrow’s game and I barely studied for my midterm. Sometimes I just want to sit somewhere and not pretend everything’s perfect.”
You stared at him, “so you picked me to sit with? Out of everyone on campus?”
“Yeah,” Jake said simply, meeting your eyes, “because you don’t expect anything from me. You call me on my shit. It’s nice, I guess.”
“Whatever, I’m fine keeping my distance and acting like you care won’t change that, okay?”
“I do care,” Jake let out too quickly, surprised at his own words, “that’s the part you don’t believe, but it’s true.”
The conversation was getting too real, too fast, and the knowledge of the bet made every word feel like a trap, “It’s exhausting trying to figure out if any of this is real or if you’re just—”
Mid-sentence, just as your voice rose, Jake closed the gap by embracing you into a hug. His arms wrapping around you without hesitation, one hand settling at your back, the other across your shoulders. The dark jacket was soft against your cheek, still warm from the afternoon sun, carrying that clean, steady scent that was just him.
You practically froze as his heartbeat thudded against your ear—fast, as if the move had surprised him too. It was warm, really warm, making everything feel a little less heavy for a second. Even though you knew this was all part of the cursed bet, the gesture was still something, making your eyes sting. You couldn’t remember the last time someone had held you like they actually meant it.
Jake’s own breath caught as he held you. His pulse wouldn’t slow down, guilt and something else he couldn’t pinpoint made his heart seem heavier. For those few seconds he just held on, chin resting lightly against the top of your head, breathing you in like he could somehow make the whole stupid situation disappear.
It was awkward, because you in fact did not reciprocate the hug that well, proceeding to pull back with your cheeks burning. Jake’s hands stayed on your shoulders for half a second longer than they should have before he let go, looking just as thrown as you felt. He closed his eyes, biting on his bottom lip too hard, panicking cause for once, he didn’t know how to handle the situation.
The anxiety only rose as you grabbed your bag, planning on getting up, however, his slender fingers wrapped around your wrist, “I’ve got a game tomorrow—It would mean a lot if you came, no pressure. You don’t have to stay the whole time or cheer or anything. Just come—if you want to for a break.”
You didn’t answer right away, watching him mutter it out all breathless, hair messy and cheeks seemingly red now. You barely caught on to his words, still processing the warmth, but a part of you did wish to reject him on the spot and walk away before the things got more complicated.
Another part wondered what would happen if you actually showed up, since you did have your own bet to take care of.
CHAPTER FOUR: Like a rom-com actor
The next afternoon the stadium was already packed and buzzing when Jake stepped onto the field for warm-ups. He was supposed to be loosening up his legs, listening to the coach bark instructions, getting his head in the game. Instead his eyes kept flicking up to the stands every few seconds. The wind was blowing hard across the pitch, constantly shoving his black hair into his eyes no matter how many times he tried to push it back.
Jay jogged over and bumped his shoulder, “dude, earth to Jake? You’ve been staring up there like you’re waiting for the love of your life to appear. You good?”
Sunghoon, who was retying his cleats a few feet away, let out a low laugh, “he’s been doing it nonstop. Head snapping up every ten seconds. What’s got you so distracted today? You never get like this before a home game.”
Jake rubbed the back of his neck, forcing a casual laugh even though his stomach was doing flips, “I’m fine, just looking for someone.”
Jay raised an eyebrow, exchanging a quick glance with Sunghoon, “someone? As in a specific someone who’s basically a bet? Damn, this must be serious if it’s got you this antsy within a week.”
Jake didn’t get the chance to answer, because he finally spotted you.
You were sitting a few rows up with Jungwon and Karina, the wind tugging at your hair the same way it was messing with his. The second your eyes met his across the field, Jake’s breath caught hard in his throat. His heart slammed against his ribs because—you actually came? For a second he forgot how to move, just standing there staring like an idiot while the wind kept pushing his hair everywhere.
You gave him a small smile and lifted your hand, waving at him softly.
Jake’s whole face lit up before he could stop it. Without thinking, he waved back enthusiastically, arm swinging high and wide as if he was trying to reach you from the middle of the pitch. His hair flew wildly in the wind as he did it, the motion so eager and over-the-top that Jay choked on his water and Sunghoon doubled over laughing so hard he had to grab onto Jay’s arm to stay upright.
“What the fuck—” Sunghoon wheezed, “you just waved like a little kid who spotted his mom after school. I’ve never seen you do that in my life.”
Jay was cracking up too, wiping water off his chin, “yeah he’s absolutely finished. Down horrendously bad and it’s not even been a few days.”
“Guess we know who’s gonna lose the bet,” added Hoon in a singsong voice.
“He never stood a chance honestly.”
Meanwhile, around you, a bunch of girls in the stands noticed Jake’s dramatic wave and immediately started squealing, waving back excitedly and calling out his name like he’d waved at all of them. A few even stood up, cheering for him loudly.
You raised an eyebrow, watching the chaos unfold with a mix of amusement and slight disbelief, “damn,” you muttered, glancing at the crowd, “he sure is famous.”
“And a player,” added Jungwon.
“And an asshole,” quipped Karina, arms crossed over her chest.
You had told them, of course you did, and watching them get so enraged on behalf of you did make you feel tons better, which shouldn’t have been the case since they did threaten to chop Jake’s dick off, but hey, the way Karina said it was quite comical.
Down on the field Jay spotted Jungwon in the stands and lifted his hand in a casual wave with a clueless grin on his face like nothing in the world was wrong. Jungwon just stared back with his jaw tight, not waving back as he was convinced Jay already knew about the bet and was somehow backing Jake up, and the thought made his expression go hard.
You nudged Jungwon’s side with your elbow, keeping your voice low, “c’mon, be normal, wave back or he’s gonna think something’s weird.”
Jungwon let out a reluctant huff, but he finally lifted his hand and gave a small, stiff wave. Jay’s grin widened like nothing had happened at all, and he turned back to the field, completely oblivious.
Karina groaned beside you, pulling her knees up to her chest against the wind, “I still can’t believe we’re freezing our asses off here when we could be on your couch watching Harry Potter for the nth time.”
You let out a small laugh despite everything, the sound almost swallowed by the growing roar of the crowd as the teams lined up, “you said you’d come for moral support.”
“Yeah, well, moral support is currently questioning every life choice that led me here,” she muttered, but there was a reluctant smile tugging at her lips anyway, “at least the view isn’t completely terrible.”
The whistle blew and the game kicked off in a whirlwind of motion. You tried to follow the ball, the quick passes, the way the players cut across the pitch, but your eyes kept drifting back to Jake. He moved with this radiant energy that pulled focus without even trying, hair whipping in the wind, legs eating up the grass, every sprint full of that effortless, captivating drive. The crowd’s cheers rose and fell in effervescent waves, but you didn’t feel any better, still suffering with that familiar push-pull of suspicion and something warmer you really didn’t wish to name.
The first half was all back-and-forth tension, both teams trading chances without anyone breaking through. Jungwon kept up a quiet running commentary under his breath, trying to keep things light, while Karina complained about the cold seeping through her jacket and how much better butterbeer would taste than the lukewarm soda they were selling. You nodded along, but your attention stayed glued to Jake, much to your friends’ dismay. Every time he glanced toward the stands, even mid-run, your chest did this annoying little flip, which pissed you off.
Then the second half heated up. The score stayed locked until the final minutes, the air thick with anticipation. Jake got the ball near the edge of the box, dodged one defender, then another as he cut inside. The crowd held its breath as he struck it clean, a powerful curving shot that sailed straight into the top corner, past the keeper’s desperate reach.
The stadium lit up into celebration but Jake didn’t celebrate with the team right away. He turned straight toward the stands, eyes scanning until they found you. Then he pointed, right at you, his whole face breaking into this bright, almost whimsical smile as he jogged backward, arm still extended like he was making sure the entire world knew exactly who that goal was for. His jersey had ridden up in the sprint, revealing the sharp, glistening lines of his abs under the stadium lights, every defined ridge catching the late afternoon sun for a fleeting second before the fabric fell back down.
Your heart raced, oh that traitorous little thing, thudding hard enough that you could feel it in your throat. Heat rushed to your cheeks even as the knowledge of the bet sat heavy in your stomach, whispering that none of this was real. Still, for that split second, with the roar of the crowd and his hair messy in the wind and that radiant look aimed straight at you, it felt too much. Too real perhaps? Too dangerous regardless. The enigmatic pull of him was getting harder to ignore, and you hated how easily your body responded anyway.
Karina snorted beside you, rolling her eyes so hard it was almost theatrical, “oh my god, could he be any more performative? Pointing like he’s the hero in some cheesy romance movie, puh-lease.”
Jungwon chuckled quietly, but his eyes flicked to you with that same protective glint from earlier. You didn’t say anything, just stared down at the field as Jake got swarmed by his teammates, the final whistle blowing and the win sinking in. The crowd was still cheering wildly, but all you could feel was the lingering echo of that pointed finger and the confusing satiation it left within your chest.
Jungwon turned to you, voice low so only you could hear, “so, you’re actually going through with the plan?”
You let out a long sigh, shoulders dropping as you pushed yourself up from the bleacher. The metal was cold under your palms, “yeah, I kinda have to now. It’s the only way to beat him at his own game.”
Karina stood too, brushing off her jeans with a dramatic huff, “let’s get out of here before I turn into an icicle, you better make him drop down on his knees, babe.”
You nodded, hugging them both, but instead of heading toward the exit, your feet carried you toward the locker room area. You hated this part already, leaning against the brick wall, arms wrapped around yourself against the biting wind, you waited, every second dragging like you were standing there on purpose just to prove a point to yourself.
The door eventually did swing open and you watched Jake stepping out, hair still damp from the shower and curling softly at the ends, a fresh black hoodie hanging loose over his frame. He was laughing at something one of the guys said behind him when his eyes landed on you, causing him to stop mid-step.
For a second he just stared, surprise flickering across his face before it melted into this softer, brighter, almost disbelieving expression. His lips parted, and then he broke into the biggest, most genuine smile you had seen on him yet. It was radiant, boyish in how uncontained it was, his eyes lighting up like you were the best part of his entire day, and it made your throat go dry.
“Hey—you’re still here,” he said, voice warm and a little breathless as he walked straight over to you.
You pushed off the wall, trying to keep your expression casual even as your heart picked up speed, “you played really well out there. That last goal was incredible, it was the first time I experienced the whole stadium going crazy,” you said, completely ignoring the part where he dedicated that goal to you.
Jake’s smile grew even wider, the kind that made the corners of his eyes crinkle. He ran a hand through his damp hair, still looking at you like he couldn’t quite believe you were standing there, “you really stayed for the whole thing. God, that means a lot. I kept looking up into the stands and there you were. I—it motivated me, I can’t even explain it.”
He looked so happy, so openly thrilled, his eyes bright and captivating under the fading stadium lights. The way he was looking at you, like your presence genuinely made his day, made something dangerous flutter in your chest despite the reality of it all. You stepped a little closer, heart hammering, and did what you had to do.
You rose onto your toes and pressed a soft kiss to his cheek, letting it linger for a second, “Uhm—I’ll see you around,” you murmured against his skin, starting to pull back.
But Jake’s hand gently caught your wrist, stopping you. His touch was light, almost careful, like he was afraid you’d vanish if he held on too tight, since this did seem like a dream to him. Behind him, Heeseung had paused in the doorway, watching the whole exchange with an amused little smirk he wasn’t even trying to hide.
“Wait,” Jake said softly, still processing the kiss, his thumb brushing once over your skin, “you’re leaving already?”
You swallowed, “yeah. I have an assignment I need to finish tonight.”
He nodded, but didn’t let go right away, “right, of course.” Then, a little shyly, he added, “there’s a party at the house tonight—but if that doesn’t work, we’re having a smaller one at the dorm in a few days. Just the guys and whoever shows up. You should come, I promise I’ll make it worthwhile for you.”
You hesitated, the warmth of his fingers and the hope in his eyes making it harder than it should have been, “I’m not really a party person, Jake.”
“I know,” he said quickly, voice gentle, “that’s why I’m telling you it’ll be chill. No pressure at all, just come hang out for a bit. I’ll even make sure there’s something better than cheap beer. Please?”
The way he looked at you, so earnest and a little nervous, made you feel guilty just a smidge. You could feel Heeseung’s amused gaze on the both of you, but you kept your focus on Jake.
“I’ll think about it,” you said finally, offering a small smile.
Jake’s eyes lit up like you’d already said yes. “That’s all I’m asking for.”
You gave him one last nod before gently pulling your wrist back and turning to leave, but Jake’s hand caught your wrist again, gentle in his action, like he couldn’t let the moment slip away just yet. He gave a light tug, drawing you back toward him until your back pressed against his chest. For a heartbeat you felt the solid warmth of him behind you, the faint dampness of his hoodie, the steady rhythm of his breathing. Then he leaned down, one arm slipping loosely around your waist as he pressed a kiss to your cheek.
His lips were plump and soft, warm from the shower, staying there for a second longer than necessary. The touch was rather unhurried, sending a quiet shiver through you that had absolutely nothing to do with the wind.
“Jake—”
When he pulled back, he bit his lower lip, eyes bright and a little shy as they met yours, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, voice hopeful, like the words were a promise he was already holding onto.
You managed a small nod, heart still stumbling over itself, and finally stepped away. The spot on your cheek stayed warm long after you turned the corner, and you wondered how this game was gonna end.
CHAPTER FIVE: Soaked and blue balled.
She gets cold so fast, shoulders hunch up the second wind hits.
She keeps twisting the rings on her index and ring finger.
She has a faint dimple on her right cheek.
She fits perfectly in my ar—
Now, Jake had not the faintest clue where he was going with this, yet he kept on writing under the pretence of keeping all the minute observations in a precise manner for his advantage. He stared at the page for another moment, then shut the notebook and tossed it onto his desk.
The ever so unforeseeable rain had started hammering against his window, and he watched one single raindrop cascading down the surface before he sat right up, grabbing an umbrella to head out without any destination in his mind. Well, he did have to bring Jay back from Jungwon’s dorm (who was facing this taxing challenge of acting normal around his hyung). It didn’t go beyond that really.
He wasn’t used to this silence and peace, he never really went out in the rain, calling it the perfect time to just play games with his friends. However, it was truly hard to pinpoint what made him rush out like this, only coming back to reality once he reached the lecture hall area. He was about to keep walking when he saw you pushing through the doors with Haechan beside you. Jake knew him, he was Jeno’s friend and also one of the dude who fucked around a lot.
Jake wasn’t any better by any means, but he hadn’t even thought of such a thing in the past eleven days. He simply stopped, watching how your umbrella showed no signs of cooperating in this windy weather, and your shoulders were starting to hunch in the same way Jake had noticed during his half time game yesterday.
He jogged to you, dismissing any other thought, especially the one that sounded a lot like Jay’s voice laughing at him for being too involved, “hey—wait up!”
You turned around, rain evident on your lashes already, and in that fleeting second, your mind was quick to admit his beauty under the dimness of the evening.
He lifted his umbrella higher, covering you completely as you lowered yours, the wide canopy shutting out the worst of the storm and pulling the two of you into a small, private bubble.
“Jay’s over at your dorm with Jungwon right now,” he said, a little out of breath, water dripping from the ends of his hair. “He needed some notes or something. I was heading there anyway to pick him up. Come on, my umbrella’s bigger.”
You glanced at your own umbrella, which was flapping uselessly, “I have one.”
“Yeah, but it’s not doing you much good,” Jake replied, stepping closer so the shelter stayed perfectly over you. His shoulder brushed yours as you started walking, “seriously—you’ll be soaked before you even get halfway. Let me walk you.”
Haechan gave you a quick, amused look and muttered something about seeing you in lab tomorrow before disappearing down another path with a wave, making you roll your eyes as he made missy faces, which Jake noticed.
The two of you fell into step under the umbrella. Jake kept it tilted toward you even when it meant his own left side kept getting wet. The closeness was apparent, his arm warm against yours, the faint clean scent of his shampoo mixing with the wet earth and rain. Every time you stepped around a puddle, his sleeve brushed your wrist, sending a small spark up your arm.
For a minute the only sound was the rain. Then Jake spoke, voice low and a little playful, “you know, I was halfway convinced you’d avoid me today after yesterday.”
You let out a small breath of laughter, “I thought about it, then I remembered I don’t own a boat and the campus flooded.”
He grinned, glancing down at you. The way the rain made your lashes look darker, the little droplets clinging to your skin, made his stomach flip, “lucky for me then. I would’ve been stuck walking alone, getting soaked, feeling so sorry for myself.”
“You’re still getting soaked,” you pointed out, noticing how his left shoulder was dark with water. Without thinking you shifted a little closer under the umbrella, your arm pressing more firmly against his.
Jake bit down his smile, “worth it. Besides, you’re warm and It’s nice.” His voice dropped a fraction, “are you always freezing or is it just me that brings the chill?”
You rolled your eyes, but your lips curved despite yourself, “It’s the rain, genius. Though you do have a habit of making normal things seem complicated.”
“Complicated in a good way, I hope,” he said, the words light but his eyes searching yours for a second longer than necessary. His free hand brushed yours again as you both avoided another puddle, and this time his fingers lingered for half a second before he managed to pull himself back.
The rain kept falling, steady and heavy, but under the umbrella everything felt smaller, rather warmer, you noticed how steady his breathing was, how the warmth of him seemed to chase away the chill seeping into your bones. He bit the inside of his cheek because in that moment, he wasn’t really acting, the wanton ease you provided him with was too real.
“You’re weird,” you muttered, clearly not meaning any bit of it, and he knew the implication behind it, or maybe it was his maladaptive daydreaming.
The dorm building appeared through the silver curtain of rain. Jake slowed deliberately, drawing the last few steps out as if the walk could stretch forever. When you reached the small covered overhang by the entrance, he lowered the umbrella but didn’t step away. Instead he moved in closer, guiding you gently until your back met the cool brick wall. The overhang sheltered you both from the downpour, but the world narrowed to the narrow space between your bodies and the solid wall behind you.
He was close now, so close you could see the tiny freckles across his cheek, the way his damp hair curled softly at the temples yet again, the faint flush across the bridge of his nose from the cold. His gaze moved over your face with quiet hunger, taking in every detail—the way rain glistened on your skin, the soft flush on your cheeks, the faint dimple that appeared when your lips parted slightly. You looked so pretty like this, natural and glowing in the dim light, and the sight made his throat tighten.
You raised your eyebrow, heart hammering against your ribs, “Jake?”
He only smiled, slow and unsteady, biting down on his bottom lip as he leaned in closer, closer, until the space between you was almost gone. His eyes dropped to your mouth, dark and wanting, then lifted again to meet yours. In that suspended second neither of you were thinking about the bet, about the car, about the game you were both playing. There was only the rain, the warmth of his breath against your skin, and the dizzying pull that made everything else disappear.
Right then the dorm door swung open with a loud metallic scrape.
Jay stepped out, nearly walking straight into the moment. He stopped short, eyes widening as he took in how close you and Jake were standing against the wall.
“Whoa, Y/N?” Jay said, a smirk already spreading across his face, “am I interrupting something?”
Your eyes widened in realization and you slipped sideways, ducking under Jake’s arm without a word. You pushed through the door and disappeared inside, cheeks burning, the echo of the almost-kiss still buzzing hot in your mind.
Jake stayed frozen, then groaned hard. He turned and leaned back against the same brick wall, eyes falling shut as the rain continued to fall around him, umbrella now lowered. His heart was still racing, loud and unsteady, the ghost of your warmth lingering against his chest.
He let out a slow breath, jaw tight. I’m going to kill Jay.
CHAPTER SIX: Jaemin the instigator.
Jake had only read a few books in his life, only one of which had a plot that truly stuck with him as someone who was never an avid enjoyer of reading literature. There was a line that kept replaying in his mind lately, more often than he cared to admit.
As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was going to happen.
Funny enough, it was from Winnie the pooh.
It isn’t a romantic line, not even remotely, but he manages to fit it into his narrative perfectly, especially during the quiet. Mind drifting back to when the rain had been dripping from the eaves and your back had been against the brick and he’d leaned in close enough to feel the warmth of your breath. The bet had started as a stupid game. Now it felt like the kind of quiet adventure he hadn’t seen coming.
Unfortunately, the distraction followed him to the practice field.
During a simple change-of-direction drill, his mind slipped again. The ball came low across the turf and Jake planted his left foot to cut inside, making his ankle roll with an ugly twist. It wasnt anything dramatic, just a sharp flare of pain that shot up his calf and dropped him to one knee, breath hissing between his teeth.
Jay reached him first, crouching down fast, “shit, Jake, what the hell? You good?”
Heeseung slowed beside them, still breathing hard, “dude, you’ve been completely zoned out all week, like—really zoned out. This bet is fucking with your head too much, just call it off, man. For real.”
Sunghoon hung back a step, arms crossed, watching quietly, “coach is gonna notice, y’know? It’s not worth it.”
Jake sat back on the grass, testing the ankle with a careful flex, the place already swelling under the sock. Minor, probably, but it hurt enough to make his eyes sting for a second,“It’s fine,” he muttered, forcing the usual half-smile, “just a tweak—I’m good.”
From the edge of the drill Jaemin let out a soft, pleased laugh, “or this is actually perfect timing. Wounded-puppy Jake? She’s gonna eat it up.” He clapped Jake on the back once, “I’ll handle it. You just stay looking all soft and grateful.”
Jay shot him a sharp look, “Jaemin, I swear to God—”
But Jaemin was already jogging off to find you.
You were stepping out of your last lecture when Jaemin fell into step beside you, which was kind of scary.
“Jake’s in the medical room,” Jaemin said casually, making your eyes go wide at the sudden voice, “twisted his ankle pretty bad at practice. Trainer’s got him taped up with ice, might even sit out the next game if it swells.”
A flicker of worry did pass through your head, but then you shrugged, “hm, kinda sounds minor.”
Jaemin’s smirk was small, “c’mon, this is perfect for the bet. He’s all vulnerable right now, best time for you to go and play nurse, make him fall a little harder. You’re already halfway there anyway.” He bumped your shoulder lightly.
You sighed, the worry sitting heavier than you wanted to admit. Pretty bad, he’d said, “fine—I’ll check on him.”
Jaemin grinned, satisfied, “atta girl.” He peeled off toward the dorms.
You told yourself you weren’t going to bring anything. But the cafeteria line was short, and the smell of warm rice and simple broth pulled you in anyway. You ended up with a container of congee, a cold can of the original red bull, and two slightly squished steamed buns. Your hands stayed steady, but your pulse? Yeah, it didn’t.
The medical room door was halfway open. You knocked once with your elbow and stepped inside.
Jake was on the padded table, left leg propped up, ice pack soggy at the edges. His practice jersey hung open, undershirt damp against his chest, dark curls still messy and sticking to his temples. He looked tired—shoulders a little slumped, the usual bright energy dialed way down. For a second you just stood there in the doorway, and Jake’s eyes lifted to meet yours.
He gulped at the sight of you, the way a few strands of hair had slipped loose after class, the small crease between your brows that you probably didn’t even realize was there. You looked pretty like this.
Jay and Heeseung were hovering nearby. The second they saw you with the bag, they exchanged a quick glance.
Jay cleared his throat, lips twitching, “well, look who showed up.”
Heeseung pushed off the wall with a low chuckle, “we were just leaving anyway. Coach wants us back on the field.” He gave Jake’s shoulder a gentle clap. “Don’t be an idiot, yeah?” The two of them slipped out, the door clicking shut behind them and leaving the room suddenly quieter.
Jake cleared his throat, bottom lip bitten as he observed you walking closer, “I—you didn’t have to come,” he mumbled, flustered all of a sudden.
“You’re really being shy at me visiting you? Aren’t you the flirt of the campus?” You chuckled, “but yeah, heard you fucked up your ankle pretty bad, figured you’d be hungry.”
His ears flushed red, “yeah, well—I wasn’t expecting anyone here, least of all you showing up here with food,” he shifted on the padded table, wincing a little, “thanks, genuinely. I was mentally preparing myself to order takeout today.”
You set the bag on the counter, pulling out the container and a spoon, handing them over. Your fingers brushed his, absorbing the warmth of his skin, and he took the food with a grateful smile.
He peeled the lid back and took the first bite. His eyes fluttered shut for half a second. “God, this is actually really good,” he murmured, “way better than anything I would’ve scavenged later.” He ate quietly after that, the spoon scraping softly against the plastic, but every few bites his gaze lifted to you.
You dragged the plastic stool closer and sat down beside the table, elbow resting on the edge near his good leg, watching the way his throat moved when he swallowed, the small crease between his brows when he shifted his ankle, the way his damp hair fell across his forehead. He looked softer like this, stripped of the usual energy—which you had grown accustomed to.
“Does it hurt too much?” You asked.
Jake shrugged one shoulder, “throbs like a bitch when I put any weight on it. Nurse said it’s just a swelling, I’ll survive.” He took another bite, then glanced at you again, heart warm at the sight of you going out of your way to be here—even though it stemmed from Jaem’s instigations. “You didn’t have to do this, you know. I know you had a full day.”
“It wasn’t that far out of the way,” you lied, because admitting you’d gone to the cafeteria on purpose felt too revealing, “besides, someone had to make sure you didn’t try to be a hero and walk on it.”
He let out a low chuckle, “guilty, I probably would’ve.” He set the container down for a moment, fingers brushing the edge of the table near your arm. The contact was light, accidental, but it stayed there a second too long, “you’re really something else, you know that?”
You felt the heat creep up your neck but didn’t pull away, instead, you leaned in a little closer, resting your chin on your folded arms on the edge of the table, “eat the rest before it gets cold, idiot. I’m not carrying you anywhere.”
Jake grinned, small and crooked, but his eyes stayed soft on your face. He kept eating, slower now, like he was dragging the moment out. Your eyelids grew heavy. The day pressed down on you all at once—the lectures, the walking, the quiet ache of pretending this was still just part of the game. You let your head rest fully on your arms, cheek against the cool edge of the table, close enough that your breath stirred the fabric of his shirt. Just for a minute, you told yourself.
You didn’t mean to fall asleep, but the warmth of the room, the steady sound of his breathing, the faint scent of ginger and him all mixed together, and your eyes slipped shut completely.
Jake went completely still.
He set the spoon down without a sound and lowered himself back onto the table until he was lying flat, turning his head so he could look at you properly. You were right there—head pillowed on your arms on the edge of the table, breathing slow and even, lashes dark against your skin, lips slightly parted. A strand of hair had fallen across your face. He reached out without thinking, fingertips barely grazing it before he caught himself and pulled back.
Would it make any sense for Jake to feel this unexpected emotion he still couldn’t quite pinpoint? Maybe his friends were right, he didn’t really need to follow through with whatever the bet was about. It really wasn’t worth hurting you, or himself—but then, did you even think of him as someone close to you? Perhaps as a friend at least?
He let out a slow, shaky breath, and resorted to watching you—the way your shoulder rose and fell, the way your fingers formed a cute fist, how you let your guard down enough for your body to trust itself to fall asleep right next to him. Perhaps it was something small, yet to him, it was grand.
So, he just lay there, inches away from you, letting the silence settle as his mind spun in circles he couldn’t stop.
CHAPTER SEVEN: Holy stalker
“So, you spent hours sleeping with him?”
“You’re literally wording it wrong Jungwon.”
“And you almost kissed right outside the dorm—”
“Can you guys stop?” You groaned, but Karina was far from done, she was just getting started actually.
“—you can’t fucking lie to us, like genuinely you were smiling when you came in yesterday and today. What’s next? Fucking him at a party?”
“Oh god—nothing is happening, what is wrong with you both?” You stand up from the couch, turning to stare at both your friends, who sat rather comfortably with their arms crossed.
“This is not nothing, I’m just asking you, what’s the end point? Where would you draw the line, hm? If it requires physicality for him to actually fall in love with you, would you do it?”
Well, Karina did have a point.
“We’re grown adults with active sex life so, why would that change anything?” You finish, almost defensive.
Karina’s eyebrows shot up so fast it was almost comical. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, that wicked grin spreading slow across her face, “oh my god, listen to you. Active sex life, babe, you haven’t had dick in months and now you’re out here acting like it’s no big deal if Jake Sim rails you for the sake of the bet? Be so fucking for real right now.”
Jungwon nearly spit out his coffee, “Rina—”
“No, no, let me speak,” Karina cut him off, waving a hand without breaking eye contact with you, “I’m not judging, I’m just saying—if he’s already got you smiling like an idiot and almost-kissing you against a wall in the rain, what’s stopping you from seeing how far it goes? You gonna let him fuck you on the kitchen counter just to watch his ego implode when you ghost him after? Because honestly? I’d pay to see that. But don’t lie to yourself and say it’s all strategy when you’re feeling that way for him.”
You felt your face burn hot, “It’s not like that. I’m not—god, I’m not planning on sleeping with him, okay? I’m still in control.”
Karina barked out a laugh, “look, I love you, but if you’re gonna play this game, at least own it, and you’re allowed to enjoy the ride before you drop him and collect our Paris trip. Just don’t catch feelings and cry to us when the car means more to him than you do.”
Jungwon rubbed the back of his neck, looking equal parts amused and concerned, “she’s got a point, even if she’s saying it like a psycho. Just be careful, I still don’t trust him around you, but you’re always welcome to cry to us.”
You threw a pillow at Karina’s head. It bounced off her shoulder and she just cackled harder, “you two are the worst. Go to class before I actually kick you out.”
They finally dragged themselves up—Jungwon pulling you into a quick, tight hug and muttering, “text me if it gets weird,” before heading out, Karina pausing in the doorway to shoot you one last teasing smirk, “If you do end up letting him hit, at least make him beg first. Love you, bitch.” The door clicked shut behind them, leaving the dorm suddenly, blissfully quiet.
You let out a long breath and flopped back onto the couch, staring at the ceiling. Your lab had been cancelled last minute—the TA had blown up the group chat at 8:47 with some excuse about electrophoresis set up not working—and now the whole morning stretched out empty in front of you.
Too much time to think about yesterday, or the day before that, or—
Your phone buzzed on the coffee table, thankfully breaking the train of your thoughts. You grabbed it lazily, expecting another spam message from the group chat. Instead it was an Instagram DM.
jake.sim:
hey
didn’t have your number so i figured i’d slide in here like a normal person instead of showing up at your door like a creep
Your lip twitched, just a smidge, because of course Jake would find your instagram and text out of nowhere.
you:
hi
and you still managed to sound like a creep anyway
The three dots popped up instantly, like he’d been waiting with his phone in his hand.
jake.sim:
fair actually
listen, random question
is your oven working? mine’s been dead for two days and i’m craving something sweet
You stared at the screen, thumb hovering. Of course he had friends with working ovens. Half the football house probably had better kitchens than you did. But he was asking you, specifically.
you:
yeah it works
why
jake.sim:
can i come bake a cake at your place?
i’ll bring everything
just wanna spend time with you, if that’s cool
Your stomach did a stupid little flip, and you groaned. What have you even come to?
you:
sure
door’s unlocked if you’re fast enough
Twenty minutes later there was a soft knock. You opened it to find Jake standing there in his black hoodie and grey sweats, hair still a little damp from a shower, maybe. Arms full of grocery bags, and he looked unfairly good, but when he shifted the bags higher on his arm you caught the tiniest wince in his leg. He hid it fast with that easy grin.
“Hey,” he breathed out, staring at just how comfortable you looked in shorts, “thanks for letting me invade, i come bearing burgers to show my gratitude.”
You leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, trying to ignore the way his eyes dragged down your bare legs for half a second before snapping back up, “didn’t you say you wanted a cake?” You raised your eyebrow.
His grin turned a little sheepish, “cake’s the whole point, yes. Burgers are just—extra, i saw you eating this with Jungwon two days back so—”
“So you are a stalker—”
“Just observant,” he finished quickly, stepping inside as you moved out of the way. The door clicked shut behind him and he realized that your flatmates were not home, leaving the place to you and him, “not in a creepy way though.”
You just nodded, as if humouring him, eyes fixed on his hands—which were veiny as hell somehow—unpacking the stuff including flour, sugar, eggs, and well, every ingredient needed for a good cake, before giving you a burger (he got two extras, just in case).
Hopping on the edge of the counter, you unwrapped the burger as he took all the bowls out with you pointing around the cabinets. The room itself was silent but his eyes? Pretty shameless, you’d admit, because his focus was more on your ridden shorts than the flour.
Jake caught himself after a second, lips twitching like he knew exactly what he was doing, “you really gonna sit there and not help me?”
You took a bite of the burger, chewing slowly while holding his gaze, “you’re the one who begged to come over and use my oven. Eyes on the bowl, Jake.”
He laughed under his breath, and went back to the flour, but the glance he stole at your legs was anything but subtle, “easier said than done when you’re sitting right there looking like that,” he mumbled to himself as he started scooping ingredients, movements smooth despite the way he kept most of his weight on his left leg, “pass me the sugar?”
You did so without getting down. He reached past you anyway, arm brushing the side of your thigh, and didn’t pull back right away. When you finally slid off the counter to actually help, he didn’t give you much space, he handed you the whisk and stepped right behind you, chest brushing your back as he reached around to adjust your grip on the handle.
“Easy circles,” he murmured, voice dropping close to your ear, “you can be gentle with it, y’know?”
Be gentle with me—is what he wished to say, but he’d be lying if he didn’t admit how much he enjoyed your grumpiness as well, and he was almost eager to find what more you had to offer.
His hand stayed over yours, so warm and steady, the other settled lightly on your waist, thumb slipping under the hem of your tank top to brush bare skin. You could feel every small shift of his body against yours, the clean scent of his hoodie mixing with the butter and vanilla already in the air.
“You’re crowding me,” you said, dry but not moving away.
“Am I?” His thumb traced one slow line along your hip, “didn’t hear you telling me to back up.”
You elbowed him lightly, feeling lightheaded, because it was odd how he actually achieved to bring out your playful side in what? Fourteen days since his bet started. But it wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be, “focus on the cake, not my legs.”
He leaned in, “trying and failing pretty badly.” His thumb traced one slow circle on your hip, right where your tank top had ridden up, and your pulse jumped harder. The touch was light, but it felt deliberate, like he was testing how long you’d let him stay this close.
The banter stayed easy after that, but every word felt—crazy. He teased you about not knowing how to bake (you actually didn’t). You told him he was being annoyingly precise for a guy who claimed he just wanted to hang out. Finally the batter came together, perfectly thick, smooth, and chocolatey. You scraped it into the pan he’d already greased, and Jake slid it into the oven without a word. He set the timer, then turned to you, leaning against the counter with that crooked grin.
“Twenty-five minutes,” he said, eyes flicking over you again, “think we can behave ourselves till then?”
You raised an eyebrow, still catching your breath from how close he’d been, “you’re the one who can’t keep his hands to himself.”
Before he could answer, you flicked a leftover pinch of cocoa at his cheek—light, almost absentminded, but enough to leave a small dark smudge, shocking yourself at the easiness of it all.
Jake blinked, then his grin turned wild, “oh, it’s like that?”
He scooped a small handful of leftover flour from the counter and flicked it right back at you. It exploded in a soft white cloud across your tank top and collarbone. You gasped, eyes widening, and retaliated instantly—grabbing more flour and tossing it at his chest. Another puff burst between you, dusting the front of his black hoodie and catching in his hair.
“Seriously?” He laughed, already scooping more, “you started it, babe.”
You tried to duck behind the island, but the kitchen was tiny and he was faster, even with the slight limp. He caught you around the waist mid-step, pulling you back as he flung another handful. Flour went everywhere—exploding in soft bursts across your arms, your hair, the counter. You twisted in his hold, laughing despite yourself, and managed to smear a streak of cocoa down his cheek before he spun you again.
He couldn’t explain it, but having you laugh so freely in his presence—him making you laugh, yeah, it felt pretty damn good, and this smile was way better than you had given Jungwon in the earlier days of Jake chasing you—not that he was comparing (he was).
Your back hit the edge of the counter, both of you breathing harder now, covered in white powder and cocoa streaks. His hands stayed locked on your waist, thumbs pressing in, meanwhile yours ended up fisted in the front of his hoodie, pulling without thinking. Flour clung to his lashes, dusted his hair, streaked across his jaw. Your heart was hammering, butterflies rioting in your stomach, every inch of you hyper-aware of how close he was, how warm his body felt through the thin layers between you.
“Fuck,” he breathed, eyes dropping straight to your mouth, “you’ve got flour on your lip.”
“So do you,” you whispered.
Jake didn’t wipe it away. He leaned in slow, giving you every chance to stop him. Your breath caught again, but you closed the last inch anyway.
His lips were just as soft as they appeared to be, but more hungry than you could fathom, or manage. It felt consuming, the way his mouth moved against yours with this urgency but also a silent battle of him holding back. A low sound rumbled in his chest when your lips parted, granting his tongue the excess it so desperately craved.
It slid in slow, tasting faintly of the bitter cocoa and flour, your heart slammed against your ribs so hard you were sure he could feel it. Butterflies erupted low in your stomach, fluttering all around hard enough, it made your thighs press instinctively around his hips.
Bet. Bet. Bet.
The words flashed sharp in the back of your mind, but it dissolved rather quickly when Jake’s hand slid higher under your tank top, palm hot and rough against the bare skin of your back, fingers spreading wide as if he was trying to cover the expanse of your skin. His other hand stayed locked at your waist, thumb digging in just enough to anchor you against him while he kissed you deeper—slower, learning the shape of your mouth.
Everything else was forgotten for both him and you. All that existed was the warmth of his body pressed flush to yours, the faint scratch of his hoodie against your arms, the way his breath hitched when you tugged harder at the front of it.
“Yeah—fuck, like that,” he murmured against your lips, “kiss me back harder, c’mon, pretty.”
And so you did, tongue sliding against his in a messy push-pull that made his breath hitch, “you came over here to bake a cake,” you managed between kisses, sarcastic even as your hips rolled forward to meet his, “not to end up grinding on me in my kitchen.”
Jake laughed low against your mouth, the sound wrecked, and pressed his hips forward harder, letting you feel exactly how hard he was getting through his sweats, “pretty sure you started the flour fight, sweetheart. Don’t act like you weren’t waiting for this.” He kissed you deeper, tongue stroking yours in a filthy rhythm while he ground against you slow and deliberate, the friction pulling a sharp breath from you, “there, yeah. Feel that? That’s what you do to me every time you look at me like that, so fucking pretty.”
“Shut up,” you shot back, nipping his bottom lip hard enough to make him groan, then soothing it with your tongue. You rocked your hips right back into his, matching his pace, “you talk too much.”
He grinned against your mouth, that cocky little curve you could feel more than see, and rolled his hips again, slower this time, dragging right where it made your breath catch, “and you fucking love it.” His hand tightened on your waist, holding you steady as he kept that steady, grinding rhythm, “but keep doing that with your hips—yeah, baby, just like that—fuck.”
The oven timer went off, making you realize exactly how much time you’d devoted to this unholy activity.
You both froze, foreheads pressed together, chests heaving. His lips were swollen, eyes dark and glassy, breath hot against your mouth. Jake let out a rough, breathless chuckle, still holding you close, thumb stroking slow circles on your waist like he couldn’t stop touching you, “cake’s done.”
You dropped your head to his shoulder, a quiet laugh escaping you too, “this is insane.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, lips brushing your temple before he kissed the corner of your mouth once, lingering for a few seconds, then helped you slide down off the counter, hands steady on your hips the whole way, like he wasn’t quite ready to let the moment slip away.
It felt too—intimate, not that the act of making out wasn’t on par, it clearly was, but this? It carried more emotion than just your everyday lust.
While the cake cooled on the rack, he prepared the frosting, letting everything take place before he reached into one of the bags and pulled out a small box of candles, trying to focus on regulating his breathing, and you started with your eyebrows lifted.
“Candles? For a random cake?”
He shrugged, cheeks going a little pink under the flour, “It’s for you, actually. Kinda a thank you? You sat with me after the practice when my leg was fucked, nobody else would’ve stuck around like that. Figured I owed you something sweet.”
You stared at him for a second, because this felt too genuine again, “Jake, that’s—”
“Crazy?” He laughed softly, lighting the candles anyway. They flickered golden in the morning light, “yeah, maybe. But you make me want to do crazy shit.”
You shook your head, the word “dork” slipping out quiet and fond before you could stop it. He just grinned, making you blow the candles, and yet again, you indulged in his theatrics before he managed to cut two big slices, sliding one over to you.
The cake was actually perfect, and it was clear that there wasn’t anything Jake Sim couldn’t do, maybe he couldn’t make you fall for him, but even you weren’t too sure, granted that you’d been smiling, and it wasn’t fake by any means. You took a bite and hummed in surprise, Jake watched you the whole time with a satisfied look on his face.
Then he scooped a bit of frosting onto his finger and held it out, eyes locked on yours, “here—try it this way.”
You leaned in and took it off his finger with your lips, slow. His breath hitched hard, and when you pulled back, he brought the same finger to his own mouth and licked the rest off, shameless and unhurried, tongue dragging over the pad like he was tasting you instead of frosting.
“Fuck,” he murmured, stepping close again, hands finding your waist like they belonged there, “you’re gonna kill me, YN.”
If domesticity with you felt like this, then Jake swears he can give up his parties just to spend an extra minute holding you close to his heart—which never lied. Jake was never dumb, not even now. He had always been quick to acknowledge his feelings, which screamed at him that nothing else mattered in this moment, just him and you. When you started to look in his eyes again, you gulped.
Because all that existed was him looking at you like this was exactly where he wanted to be.
CHAPTER EIGHT: Redbull gives you wings
“The fuck?”
Jay frowned, staring at his best friend.
The sight was diabolical to say the least, the smile on Jake’s face despite it all—idiotic. There was no way to describe it, at least for Jay, who couldn’t fathom what absurd war Jake had gotten into to return back home with flour on his hair and body, and wait was that a Tupperware full of chocolate cake in his hands?
Jake didn’t bother with explanations, simply dropping the box on Jay’s lap, courtesy of you packing some up saying how he’d managed to make way too much for a single person.
With how loud Jay’s voice had been, Sunghoon and Heeseung managed out come out of their rooms, equally as confused.
“Explain,” Sunghoon muttered, sitting next to Jay and grabbing a piece of cake.
“Nothing really, i just went to bake a cake with Y/N,” he managed to let out, still dazed.
“And she decided to maul you with flour?” Heeseung winced, brushing some power off of Jake’s hair, “seems like you lost the fight.”
“C’mon, she started it, so of course I didn’t stop at that—and things, uhm, escalated.”
Right then, Hoon took a big bite of the sweet, regret clear on his face, nose wrinkling, “what the fuck, dude—there’s a whole patch of raw flour in the middle.”
Well, that batch was put in after the flour fight, which would explain the quality difference.
Heeseung, who had already taken a forkful, shrugged and kept eating happily, “tastes fine to me. A bit lumpy, but the chocolate fixes it.”
Jay refused to touch it, not being polite in the way he pushed the whole container towards Heeseung, “yeah, I’m not eating that. And why do you look like you just got laid?”
Jake rubbed a hand over his jaw, the corners of his mouth still curved up, “we may have gotten a little distracted after the cake went in the oven.”
Heeseung choked, “distracted, how?”
Jake shrugged, not even trying to hide how pleased he was, “by kissing—a lot, oh god it felt good.”
Jay dragged both hands down his face, “you went over there to make her fall for you and ended up making out with her in the kitchen? Jake, what the hell is going on with you? You’ve barely looked at any other girl in weeks.”
Jake didn’t answer right away. He just picked up a piece of the slightly floury cake and took a bite, chewing thoughtfully even though it really wasn’t that great.
“I’m thankful though, I can finally sleep without having to hear moans each fucking night,” Heeseung shudders, mind drifting back to how loud Jake and his night partners used to be.
Sunghoon barked out a laugh, “yeah, we went from daily noise complaints to peaceful silence. Did you catch feelings or did she put her tear drop into the cake batter?”
“Shut up, it’s not like that,” Jake mumbled, though the tips of his ears turning red said otherwise, “and we’re not in Descendants.”
They all just stared at him, till he managed to huff, sitting down on the couch which offered no space to him, dirtying it in the process, “it’s just—it’s nice, okay? I don’t have to be loud or use up all my energy around her, it feels calm to be there even in silence.”
Jay almost gagged, “calm? Did you just change your whole personality cause you’re in love now?”
Sunghoon was grinning, “next thing you know he’ll be holding her hand on campus and calling her baby in public, and trust, I’ll be documenting every bit of it.”
Jake threw a small piece of cake at him, missing on purpose, “you guys are annoying as hell. Can we talk about something else?”
The boys kept teasing him for a few more minutes—throwing in dramatic predictions about Jake turning into a full boyfriend and suggestions to get him a I’m in my soft era shirt before finally letting it go and arguing about tomorrow’s practice instead. Jake just leaned back on the couch, half-listening, the small smile never quite leaving his face.
Because he knew things had changed, and so did you. It was a gradual shift, from you tolerating Jake’s presence to enjoying it (well, some part of you did at least). The idea of seeing him often didn’t make you groan in agony, it felt like a routine granted Jake had your schedule memorized to his bones, and he made it his mission to randomly appear and fall in step with you without making it awkward.
“Hey, got you some coffee,” he’d naturally say, always bringing the latte, but he did make you try out an overly sweet drink which he fancied, and somehow, you didn’t hate it.
It was concerning to say the least, your friends being more concerned than you, but of course no one was blind to the fact that maybe Jake was more deep in this than you were, and that bit was not an act, not anymore at least.
It only escalated when one afternoon, you showed up at his practice session without him having you ask, a cold can of coconut berry red bull tucked in your bag. When you tossed it his way, his whole face lit up and he stared at you with such warmth, it seemed like his eyes were shining. It wasn’t a big deal, right?
Wrong. Jake knew it didn’t take a lot to do something for others, but you’d noticed his favourite flavour—you’d managed to remember it despite him having not mentioned it.
He was glad it was break time, cause he immediately cracked it open, “you remembered?”
You wanted to slap yourself for how hard it was to not smile at him, so you managed a shrug, “yeah, not a big deal.”
He stepped closer, still in his practice jersey, hair slightly damp from running drills, and you noticed how they’d grown longer, the afternoon sun catching on the sharp line of his collarbone. For a second he just looked at you, “it’s a big deal when you do it.”
The way he said it was enough to send a warm flutter through your chest that you quickly tried to ignore. You crossed your arms, pretending to watch the team stretching behind him, “don’t make it weird, Sim.”
“I’m not,” he replied, but the small grin tugging at his lips said otherwise. He took another sip, eyes never really leaving your face, and he swore, it was the best drink he’d ever had.
It almost felt like you were flying in the moment, as cheesy as it might be, maybe you’d blame redbull for giving you wings or whatever.
There were other small things too. He started saving you the quiet corner seat in the library because he knew you liked your back to the wall. You’d gotten him a hair tie when you noticed the length of his hair again, and the second he tied his hair, even you were rendered speechless for a moment.
The way it exposed the clean line of his jaw and the sharp cut of his cheekbones made something in your stomach tighten unexpectedly. You quickly looked back down at your notes, pretending you hadn’t noticed, oh but he noticed, and leaned in till his nose brushed against yours, “how do i look?” he’d asked.
“Good,” you remember breathing out, making him smile and lean in further, pressing a soft kiss on your lips before jogging back to the field, where three of his friends stood with their mouths hung open. It was a rather comical sight for anyone who watched from a distance.
At least to Jaemin, it was. He was always lurking around, and no one knew what he was trying to achieve. Jeno could only shake his head standing beside him, but well.
Anyway, as if that wasn’t enough, Jake would send you random memes at 2 a.m. when he knew you were still up studying, and you’d reply with a dry “go to sleep” that always made him smile at his phone like an idiot.
Jake had truly forgotten about the bet.
The whole stupid game barely crossed his mind anymore. He wasn’t playing anymore. He just wanted to be around you.
You were trying to bury the memory of the bet deep inside too. Every time it tried to creep up, you shoved it back down. You told yourself you were still in control, that this was all part of the plan. But the truth was simpler and scarier—you liked having him around. You liked the easy quiet when you studied together. You liked the way he looked at you when he thought you weren’t paying attention.
And that terrified you more than anything.
CHAPTER NINE: Jealousy allegations?
“Are you like a hundred percent sure?”
You sighed, plopping on your bed with ease as you stared at Karina, who’d asked you this question at least, give or take, a million times.
“Yes, I am sure—gosh, you gotta stop,” you mumbled, running a hand over your skirt, while Karina shook her head.
“Trust me I have a feeling that something will happen tonight,” she exasperated for the nth time.
Jake was finally throwing that party he’d mentioned after his game a few days back, and to Heeseung courtesy, it wasn’t a small gathering anymore, but a full blown party at their dormitory which won’t even fit the amount of people he’d invited.
“What would happen? C’mon, I’m really okay,” you tried to reason.
“Okay? Girl, you’re practically beaming, and you got ready before I did, is that not proof enough?” She went on, doing her eyeliner by side, “you look hot as hell in that skirt by the way, I’ll be praying for Jake.”
You rolled your eyes but couldn’t fight the small smile tugging at your lips. The black skirt sat high on your waist, paired with a simple fitted top that showed just enough skin, and most importantly—you felt confident about yourself, which just completed the look altogether.
“Whatever. Let’s just go before I change my mind.”
Jungwon was already ready and waiting outside, and so you three went on as they both kept mumbling warnings in your ear, as if a child going outside alone for the first time.
“Seriously, if he gets weird just text me,” Jungwon said, half-joking.
Karina bumped your shoulder. “Or I’ll drag you out myself. I’m still not convinced this is a good idea.”
You just shook your head and kept walking.
The dorm was loud when you stepped inside, music playing from the living room and voices overlapping in every corner. The place smelled like pizza and cheap beer (of course), the usual Saturday night mess. People were everywhere—some chilling on the couches, others crowding the kitchen for drinks.
You hadn’t even taken three steps before Jake spotted you.
He was mid-conversation with Jay near the counter, cup halfway to his mouth, when he froze. His eyes locked on you and stayed there, dragging slowly from your face down to the skirt and back up again. For a second he looked completely thrown, like someone (you) had knocked the air out of him. Then he was moving, crossing the room in a straight line without saying a word to anyone, and Jay only shook his head with a small smile.
The second he reached you he pulled you into a hug.
His arms wrapped around you tight, one hand splaying across your lower back, the other sliding up to cradle the back of your head. He buried his face in your hair for a long moment, breathing you in like he needed it. You felt his chest rise and fall against yours, warm and solid, completely forgetting your friends who tried to process the situation from a respectful distance.
“Fuck,” he muttered into your hair, voice low and rough, “you look—I don’t even know what to say right now.”
You laughed softly against his shoulder, letting yourself relax into the hug, “hi, Jake.”
He didn’t let go right away. His thumb rubbed a slow circle on your back, almost absentminded, and when he finally pulled back just enough to look at you, his eyes were darker than usual, a little dazed, “you’re actually trying to kill me tonight, huh?”
You raised an eyebrow, fighting a smile, “It’s just a skirt.”
“It’s not just a skirt,” he said, voice quieter. His hand stayed on your waist, thumb brushing the edge of the fabric like he couldn’t help it.
You were about to tease him some more when he finally loosened his hold, stepping half a step back so he could actually look at you properly. His eyes flicked down again, then back up, and he let out a small breath like he was trying to collect himself.
That was when Sunoo wandered over from the kitchen, two cups in hand, spotting you both.
“Hey, Y/N,” Sunoo said, voice bright and easy like it always was in lab, “you actually came. I was starting to think you’d bail after that nightmare protocol we had last night.”
You turned toward him with a small laugh, “yeah, I almost did, Karina basically dragged me here,” you lied easily.
Sunoo grinned, holding out one of the cups, “here, sprite with lime. I know you hate the sweet crap they make in the kitchen.”
Jake raised his brow, almost ready to scoff because you did like sweet drinks, and whoever this man was clearly didn’t know you enough.
“Thanks,” you said, taking it, “needed that, the last lab almost killed me too.”
“Tell me about it,” Sunoo replied, leaning casually against the wall, “I spent twenty minutes trying to fix my gel after it kept tearing. Thought the TA was gonna cry with me.” He glanced at your outfit and nodded appreciatively. “By the way, that skirt looks really good on you. Way better than the lab coat.”
You let out a soft laugh, “appreciate it. Lab coat does no one any favors.”
Sunoo chuckled, “right? Anyway, how’s your presentation prep going? You were stressing about the lack of research papers ast class—”
From the corner of your eye, you saw Jake’s hand tighten slightly on your waist. He hadn’t moved away completely, still standing close enough that his shoulder brushed yours.
Across the room, Karina caught your eye from where she was standing with Jungwon near the couch. She raised her brows in a clear what the hell look, while Jungwon just shook his head slowly, arms crossed like he was already bracing himself. Jay, leaning against the kitchen counter with Heeseung and Sunghoon, muttered something that made all three of them glance over. Heeseung smirked, while Sunghoon shook his head again, amused. Jaemin, kicked back on the armchair nursing a drink, was outright grinning like he’d hit the jackpot.
Sunoo kept talking, completely unaware, asking a casual question about the upcoming quiz. You answered easily, laughing at the right moments because talking to Sunoo was just—simple? He was the same bubbly guy from lab who always offered to share notes honestly.
Jake’s jaw ticked though, he wasn’t happy with this situation at all.
After another minute of the easy back-and-forth, Jake’s hand slid firmly from your waist to your lower back.
“Hey,” he said to Sunoo, voice calm but edged, “mind if I steal her for a second?”
Sunoo blinked, then gave an easy, unbothered smile, “yeah, of course. Nice catching up, Y/N.”
Jake didn’t bother waiting really. His hand stayed steady on your lower back as he guided you through the living room, weaving between people chatting and laughing. You could feel the tension in his fingers, the way they pressed a little harder than necessary against the fabric of your top. He didn’t say a word the whole way down the hallway. The party noise faded behind you, turning into a muffled hum.
The second his bedroom door clicked shut, Jake turned to face you, eyes dark, stepping in close, backing you up until your shoulders hit the door. His hand came up, fingers brushing your jaw, tilting your head just slightly to the side.
“Ignoring me the second he came in to talk, hm?” He asked, voice low as his breath ghosted over your neck as he leaned in, lips barely brushing the skin just below your ear, “looking this good while doing so?”
You swallowed, “Jake, he was just—”
He cut you off by pressing a slow, open-mouthed kiss right under your jaw. You felt his teeth graze lightly, then the warm drag of his tongue.
“Answer me,” he murmured against your skin, voice smug, “what was so funny?”
Your breath hitched, “It—it wasn’t anything, just talking about the lab—”
He simply granted you another kiss, slower this time, right by your pulse. His hand slid down to grip your waist, holding you in place as he sucked lightly on the same spot.
“You stuttered,” he said, the words warm against your neck, you could hear the smirk in his voice, “so fucking cute.”
You let out a shaky laugh, even as heat pooled low in your stomach, “you’re actually jealous right now, aren’t you?”
Jake pulled back just enough to look at you, not waiting as he leaned in and kissed you on the mouth—soft at first, almost sweet, like he was trying to shut you up gently. It didn’t last, the kiss deepening fast, his tongue sliding against yours until you were gripping his shirt tighter.
When he broke it, he was breathing harder, “yeah, I am. I don’t like watching you smile at someone else when I’m standing right there.”
You opened your mouth to tease him again, but he kissed you once more, firm, before you could get the words out.
“See?” He muttered against your lips, smirking, “try and be bratty if you want me to kiss you stupid.”
“Jake—” you started, voice already breathy.
He cut you off with another kiss, this one deeper, his hand sliding up to cup the back of your neck. When he pulled away, his forehead rested against yours for a second.
“Keep going,” he chuckled, “tell me how ridiculous I’m being.”
You tried, you did, “you’re being ridiculous. Sunoo was just—”
Jake’s mouth was on your neck again, sucking a slow, wet mark right below your ear. You gasped, fingernails digging in his skin now.
“Wrong name coming out of your pretty lips, baby, try again,” he murmured, kissing the fresh mark.
“You’re fucking jealous,” you managed to say despite his previous confirmation of the same. Maybe you wanted to hear it again, maybe you wanted to feel the conviction of truth behind those words, the reality of it all.
He kissed your lips hard, swallowing the rest of your sentence, then moved back down to your neck, sucking another mark lower this time.
“Yeah,” he admitted yet again against your skin, “I hate it—hate how easy it was for him to make you laugh like that when it took me days.”
Your head tipped back against the door with a soft thud. He kept going—kissing, sucking, marking you up like he needed to claim every inch Sunoo had made you smile at. Every bratty little comment you tried to throw at him earned you another kiss on the mouth or a deeper suck on your neck until your legs were actually trembling.
Finally Jake straightened up, eyes hungry. Without a word he bent down, hooked his arms under your thighs, and lifted you. You wrapped your legs around his waist as he carried you the few steps to his bed and laid you down.
To have you so close to him was a maddening experience, words leaving his lips with ease, “you’re beautiful, you know that?”
Somewhere between the bet and the reality, you started getting used to his blatant sincerity he put into words. But this praise? It made you sigh blissfully, eyelids fluttering close despite not wanting to be separated from the sight of Jake getting closer to where you needed him the most.
He crawled over you, settling between your legs, and kissed you again—slow and deep this time.
“Still think I’m ridiculous?” He asked against your mouth, hand sliding up your thigh, pushing your skirt higher.
You nodded, breathless, “very.”
Jake grinned, that same smug, jealous little smile, and kissed you once more before moving lower. He took his time with your neck again, sucking fresh marks while his hands worked your skirt up around your hips. When he reached the lace edge of your panties he paused, thumb brushing over the delicate fabric.
“These are pretty,” he murmured, hooking his fingers in them and slowly dragging them down your legs, tossing them aside somewhere, taking a note to pick it up later.
Then he settled between your thighs properly, spreading them wider. He looked up at you, hair falling messily around his face from the small ponytail, eyes gleaming as he mumbled the praises of your beauty as if he was here to worship your being instead of what seemed to be a punishment for making him jealous.
“Still got something smart to say?” He asked.
You opened your mouth, but the second his tongue dragged over you, slow and so perfectly warm—the words turned into a broken moan.
Jake groaned at the taste of you, the sound vibrating right against your clit. You reached down without thinking, fingers finding the hair tie at the back of his head. You pulled it out, letting his dark hair fall loose, then slid your hand into it and tugged hard.
Jake moaned louder against you, the vibration making your hips jerk.
“Fuck—do that again,” he breathed, voice wrecked.
You did, tugging on his hair as he ate you out like he had all the time in the world—long, deep licks followed by quick flicks of his tongue that had your thighs shaking around his shoulders. Every pull on his hair earned you another low groan that went straight through you.
“C’mon, tell me how it feels,” he spoke against you, and you groaned merrily.
It’s not that you didn’t have any experience before, because you did. But never once a guy made you feel like they actually cared about getting you off rather than them chasing their own pleasure. Their flick of tongues did nothing, but Jake? He seemed like even having his whole face pressed against you wasn’t enough, as if nothing could satiate how desperate he was to have not a molecule of space between you two.
A lot of things were in your mind, but you could only manage to choke out a few words, “so good—baby, it feels so good.”
If Jake hadn’t already lost his damn mind, your nickname certainly made him lose the last few of his working brain cells. The moan he let out was downright pornographic, and you could swear there wasn’t a sound prettier than that.
You were completely gone, back arching off the bed, fingers tight in his hair, lost in the wet heat of his mouth and the smug little sounds he kept making against you.
While you were wrapped up in this little bubble of unadulterated pleasure, outside the things were a bit different as Jay, Heeseung, and Sunghoon stood together, shaking their heads.
“He really just dragged her straight to his room,” Jay muttered.
Heeseung sighed, “not even trying to be subtle anymore.”
Sunghoon smirked, “a hundred fucking pounds says they don’t come out for a while.”
Karina, standing with Jungwon near the couch, crossed her arms and muttered, “I knew something was gonna happen tonight.”
Jungwon just sighed, looking resigned, “this is exactly what I was worried about.”
Jaemin, on the other hand, was leaning back in his chair with the biggest grin on his face, looking far too pleased with himself.
“This is even better than I planned.”
CHAPTER TEN: Bet versus feelings.
“Are you out of your damn mind?”
The voice seemed to have echoed, because the same sentence was being uttered at the exact same second inside two different dorms, by two different people.
First being Jungwon, clearly directed towards you once you were done giving your side of the story to him.
Jake was undergoing the exact same procedure of questioning, causing Jay to scream in agony.
Things were clearly going perfectly, Jake was in too deep, you were in too deep, all for the bet, right? Right?
Because as far as acting was concerned, even it had limits, which certainly didn’t include getting eaten out and fingered all night. Cherry on the top was when you both fell asleep in each other’s arms with Jake caressing your back so gently, you learned the meaning of comfort in its truest scene.
So, why did it feel so easy when Jake kissed you in the morning, when he walked you back home with ease, talking normally as if everything was fine. Your heart broke a little at the thought of him just using you, and trust was a delicate topic for you. How could you even let yourself think that he actually wanted you when the whole relationship of yours was built on a pathetic bet. Which is why, you let yourself fall in deeper, to feel more of his warmth before it ends.
Before he could ask what was bothering you, a gentle kiss was placed on his lips, “bye, Jakey.”
The simple fact that you initiated the kiss had Jake smiling like an idiot before you walked inside your dorm, and he left for his own, heart thumping fast, almost in a way that it was synchronized.
And now you were here, eyes watering in front of your friends who could only pull you in a deep hug.
“Y/N, just tell him, just end this I swear,” Jungwon mumbled, and you didn’t know what to say, so you resorted to hugging them both till you fell asleep again.
Jake on the other hand—he couldn’t stop pacing around as the three watched him like a hawk, eyes moving in sync with every step he took across the living room.
Jay leaned back on the couch, arms crossed, looking way too smug, “I told you you’d fall for her.”
Jake stopped dead in his tracks, spinning around so fast he nearly tripped, “I didn’t fall. I’m not—fuck, okay maybe I did, but shut up.”
Sunghoon let out a loud laugh, slapping his knees “you dragged her into your room in front of everyone. You’re on your knees for her at this point.”
Heeseung was already cracking up, head thrown back, “the way you looked at Sunoo? Pure murder like, he didn’t even do shit.”
Jake groaned, running his fingers through his hair, “you guys are the worst. I was standing right there and she was laughing with him like it was the easiest thing in the world. I hate it.”
Jay raised an eyebrow, “you hate it? Or you’re jealous as hell?”
“Both,” Jake muttered, then dramatically dropped to his knees right in the middle of the living room, forehead hitting the floor with a thud, “I’m so fucked. What the hell is wrong with me?”
Jay let out a loud laugh, leaning forward on the couch, “wrong? It’s literally called love, Jake.”
“On your knees in the living room because a girl, you’re not yours by the way, smiled at someone else? Yeah, you’re fucked.” Sunghoon added helpfully.
Heeseung clapped slowly, “soft boy Jake is real. We’re witnessing history.”
Jake stayed on the floor for a second, breathing hard, face pressed against the carpet. His mind wouldn’t stop replaying last night—the way you’d gasped his name when he had his mouth on you, the way your thighs had shaken around his shoulders. How he couldn’t stop staring at you even after you came down, all soft and sleepy in his bed, lashes resting against your cheeks, lips slightly parted. You looked so beautiful like that, relaxed and trusting, nothing guarded in your expression for once. He’d kissed your forehead then, slow and careful, while you dozed off against his chest. Later, when he still couldn’t sleep, he’d grabbed his diary and sketched you—just the curve of your cheek, the way your hair fell across the pillow, the small peaceful smile you had even in sleep. It wasn’t weird. It was just—you. He needed to remember exactly how it felt.
He groaned again, louder this time, “I’m so fucked.”
“So you’ve said.”
The boys kept teasing, but Jake was already thinking ahead.
He pushed himself up, hair a mess, cheeks still flushed, “whatever. Laugh all you want, I’m gonna ask her on a proper date.”
The room went quiet for half a second, observing him closely to find out any signs of humour or a joke.
Jay blinked, “you’re serious?”
“Yeah,” Jake said, grabbing his glasses, “I’m serious.”
Sunghoon raised an eyebrow, still amused but skeptical, “you sure that’s a good idea right now? Things are already messy as hell.”
Heeseung nodded slowly, “moving kinda fast, don’t you think?”
Jake just shrugged, the stupid smile creeping back onto his face, “I don’t care, I want to do it right.”
The problem now was that Jake had never planned a date before, heck he’d never even dated before. He knew that something grand wouldn’t work, not right now at least, so when he woke up the next day, he had a few errands to run. Thankfully, he had only one lecture, after which he found himself running around the campus with a list, more motivated thann he’d ever been.
By late afternoon he found himself standing outside the biotech building, leaning against the wall near the main exit with his hands in his pockets. He knew your schedule by heart now. When you finally stepped out, backpack slung over one shoulder, he pushed off the wall and walked straight up to you.
You stopped, surprised, but the second he pulled you into a hug your expression softened. His arms wrapped around you tight, one hand rubbing your back like he needed the contact more than air, “hey,” he mumbled into your hair.
You smiled despite everything, pressing your face into his chest for a second, “Jake? What are you doing here? Don’t you have practice right now?”
He pulled back just enough to look at you, hands still on your waist, “I skipped.”
“You skipped?” you asked, eyes widening a little.
“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck, looking a bit awkward but determined. “I want to take you out right now, just us, if you’ll let me.”
Your heart skipped. He was being so boldly awkward about it, standing there in the middle of the hallway like skipping practice for you was the most normal decision in the world.
You teased, trying to keep your voice light, “what if I say no?”
Jake’s face fell instantly, that hurt-puppy look laughed at you right in the heart—big eyes, slight pout, shoulders slumping just a little like you’d actually kicked his favorite ball into traffic. It was funny how you could compare him to puppies so often and he didn’t seem to mind.
“Then—I guess I’ll go back to practice,” he said quietly, voice cracking at the end, “but you’re really gonna say no?”
You didn’t know what to say, skipping classes wasn’t really something you did, unless you were sick beyond your ability to stand, however, a small voice within you screamed, skipping once wouldn’t hurt, right?
You reached out and took his hand, lacing your fingers through his, sending a shiver up his arm, “lead the way, Sim.”
Jake’s whole face lit up like you’d just handed him the world, and maybe you did. He squeezed your hand once, tight, and started walking, pulling you gently along with him.
You walked side by side across the quad, the late afternoon sun warm on your skin. His thumb kept brushing slow circles over your knuckles, and the simple touch felt so grounding, so comfortable.
“Where are we going?” You asked after a minute, glancing up at him.
Jake grinned, giving your hand a gentle squeeze, “It’s a secret.”
You raised an eyebrow, but couldn’t fight the smile tugging at your lips, “you’re really not gonna tell me anything?”
“Nope,” he said, voice light and playful, “just trust me, okay?”
From a distance near the science building, Heeseung stood watching the two of you with a small smile, “they’re already acting like a couple,” he murmured to himself, shaking his head fondly.
When you reached the parking lot, Jake stopped in front of a sleek black car you didn’t recognize.
You looked back at Jake, “wait—you drive?”
Jake grinned, a little cocky as he opened the passenger door for you, “yeah, borrowed it from Jay. Figured walking you around campus wasn’t gonna cut it today.”
You slid in, the leather seat cool against the back of your thighs. Jake got in on the driver’s side, started the engine, then turned to you, looking a little nervous but hopeful.
“So, uh, what’s your favourite flower?” He asked, voice casual but his fingers tapped lightly on the steering wheel.
You raised your brow, surprised by the question, “Tulip, why?”
Jake let out a small, relieved breath. He reached into the backseat and pulled out three bouquets—a bright bunch of fresh tulips, a classic dozen roses, and a smaller mixed one with daisies and soft white flowers.
He handed them to you carefully, almost shy, “I wasn’t sure which ones you liked, so I got a few options. Just in case, thank god you chose one of those—”
You stared at the flowers in your lap, heart squeezing so hard it almost hurt. He had gone out and bought three different bouquets because he didn’t want to get it wrong, for you.
Before you could stop yourself, you leaned across the console and kissed him midway through his nervous ramble.
It was soft and grateful at first, but Jake melted instantly, one hand coming up to cup your cheek like he needed to hold onto the moment. When you pulled back, his eyes were a little dazed, lips parted, that stupid, lovestruck smile back on his face.
“God,” he whispered, thumb brushing your cheek, “you’re gonna kill me one of these days.”
You laughed softly, cheeks warm, and settled back into your seat with the bouquets still cradled in your lap. Jake grabbed your hand again, lacing your fingers together on the center console like he couldn’t stand not touching you.
He started driving, thumb still tracing slow circles over your knuckles, stealing little glances at you every few seconds like he still couldn’t believe you were here with him.
You were so fucked, and now, you didn’t even care.
The drive was short, just ten minutes out of campus to a quiet spot by the river. You’d passed it a few times before, always packed with students on weekends, but on a weekday afternoon it was practically empty—just the soft rush of water, a few birds, and the warm sun filtering through the trees.
Jake parked and killed the engine, then turned to you with that soft smile you’d grown to love, “wait here.”
He got out, popped the trunk, and came around to your side with a big picnic basket and a folded blanket. You watched him spread the blanket on a sunny patch of grass near the water, setting everything out with careful hands. There were little sandwiches you liked, fresh fruit, the coconut berry Red Bull he knew you’d steal from him, and even a small box of those chocolate cookies you’d mentioned once in passing.
You stepped out of the car, flowers still in your arms, feeling suddenly shy that was very out of your character, “Jake—you did all this?”
He looked up at you from where he was kneeling on the blanket, eyes bright, “yeah. Figured we deserved something nice, just us.”
You sat down beside him, cheeks warm, and he basked in it—the way you ducked your head a little, fiddling with the edge of the blanket, the small smile you couldn’t hide. He loved seeing you like this, unguarded and a little flustered because of him.
The sun got brighter as the afternoon stretched on. After you’d eaten and talked about nothing and everything, Jake stretched out and laid his head in your lap, looking up at you with those pretty eyes. No big smile this time—just quiet, almost reverent.
You reached down, fingers finding the hair tie at the back of his head, and gently pulled it out. His dark hair fell loose around his face. You slid your hand into it, playing with the strands, slow and gentle.
Jake let out a contented sigh, eyes never leaving your face.
“You know I have a dog named Layla?” He said quietly after a while, voice warm.
You smiled down at him, still running your fingers through his hair, “yeah? Tell me about her.”
“She’s a Border Collie. Super hyper, loves chasing balls, but she’s the biggest cuddler when she’s tired. She always knows when I’m having a bad day and just—sits next to me until I feel better.”
You laughed softly, “she sounds perfect.”
He hummed, eyes soft, “she is.”
Time passed easily between you. The river flowed steadily nearby, birds chirped overhead, and the sun warmed your skin. Jake told you how he loved singing but almost never did it in front of people because it felt too embarrassing. You told him how you were terrified of roller coasters and how you liked cats because they were quiet and independent. He almost gasped when you admitted you loved horror movies, cause they scared Jake half to death.
“You ever scream at the screen?” He asked, grinning up at you.
“Never,” you admitted, “do you?”
“A lot,” he mumbled, and you chuckled—that sound becoming Jake’s favourite each passing second.
Jake’s eyes stayed on your face the whole time, soft and full of something deep. He felt surreal having you like this—so close, so willing, so in love with the version of you that no one else really got to see. The way your fingers moved through his hair, the gentle way you looked down at him, it made his chest ache in the best way. It made no sense how you looked so fucking pretty even from that angle, so perfect.
At one point he reached up, hand gentle on the back of your neck, and pulled you down for a soft kiss. It was slow, sweet, full of everything you both weren’t saying yet. You got goosebumps all over, your body reacting so perfectly to him, to the quiet love blooming between you.
When he pulled back, forehead resting against yours, he whispered, “I’m really glad you said yes.”
You kissed him again, softer this time, heart so full it almost hurt.
You could feel how down bad he was—the way his hand rested on your thigh like he needed the contact, the quiet reverence in his gaze every time he looked up at you, the small, content sighs he let out whenever your nails scratched lightly against his scalp. He didn’t say any of it out loud, he didn’t need to, really. It was all there in the way he looked at you.
After a while he sat up slowly, hair messy from your fingers, eyes soft and dark. Without a word he reached for you, hands gentle on your waist as he pulled you into his lap. You settled against him easily, knees on either side of his thighs, and he grabbed your chin with careful fingers, tilting your face down to his.
The kiss was soft at first, full of everything that had been building between you all afternoon. His lips moved against yours like he had all the time in the world, thumb brushing your jaw in the gentlest way.
When he pulled back he wrapped his arms around you, hugging you tight against his chest. You held him just as tightly, arms looped around his neck, face buried in the crook of his shoulder. You didn’t want this to end, not the warmth of him, not the steady beat of his heart against yours, not the way he made the rest of the world feel so far away.
Jake pressed a kiss to the side of your neck, slow and lingering. You whispered his name, soft and breathless, “Jake—”
He smiled against your skin, the curve of his lips warm and pleased. Then he licked over the same spot, and your breath hitched.
You pulled back just enough to look at him, cheeks warm, “you’re terrible,” you complained, but there was no real heat in it.
Jake’s eyes sparkled with that smug little glint. Before you could say anything else he pulled you back down into a deeper kiss, filled with everything he felt—the want, the softness, the quiet desperation of someone who was completely, utterly, helplessly in love with you. His hand slid into your hair, the other pressed against your lower back, holding you close as the kiss turned slow and emotional, tongues brushing, breaths mingling, hearts beating in the same unsteady rhythm.
You melted into it, fingers curling into his shirt, losing yourself in the way he kissed you like you were the only thing that mattered.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Foggy façade.
It was the third time Jake had rerouted the car to go away from the campus, and you couldn’t help but chuckle at his antics, a pout on his plump lips as you pointed out that he was, in fact, not willing to take you home.
“I just don’t want the day to end, is that so bad?” He spoke so freely and you wondered how he got the confidence to say things like that without sounding ridiculous, his hand stayed laced with yours on the console.
“You’re literally driving in circles,” you said, squeezing his fingers, “we’ve passed that same coffee shop twice now.”
Jake glanced over at you, eyes bright even in the fading light, “worth it. Every single time I look at you I forget where I’m supposed to be going.”
You rolled your eyes, but the smile on your face gave you away completely, “smooth talker. Take me home, Sim, I have an assignment due tomorrow.”
He made a dramatic whining sound, slowing the car at a red light, “one more hour. Please? I’ll be good. I’ll even let you pick the music.”
You laughed, leaning your head back against the seat, even though you couldn’t deny it yourself, you didn’t wish to go back, “you’re impossible.”
The light turned green and instead of turning toward campus he took another random right, the river still sparkling in the distance behind you. You narrowed your eyes at him, “Jake.”
“What?” He asked innocently, but the grin tugging at his mouth was anything but, “I’m just—taking the scenic route.”
You were still bickering lightly when he suddenly pulled off the main road into a quiet, tree-lined side street and parked under the shade of an old oak. The engine cut off. For a second the only sound was the soft tick of the cooling car and your own heartbeat.
“Jake,” you said again, softer this time.
He turned to you fully, eyes dark and a little desperate, “I can’t stand not kissing you for one more second.”
Before you could even tease him about it, he was leaning across the console, one hand sliding into your hair as his mouth crashed into yours. The kiss was messy and urgent, like he’d been holding back the whole drive. You kissed him back just as hard, fingers curling into his shirt, the taste of the picnic strawberries still lingering on his tongue.
“Backseat,” he mumbled against your lips, already fumbling with both your seatbelts, “c’mon, baby.”
You laughed breathlessly into the kiss, “Jay’s gonna actually murder you if he finds out what we’re doing in his car.”
“Let him,” Jake grinned, nipping at your bottom lip before climbing over the console in that surprisingly smooth way he had. He tugged you with him and you tumbled into the backseat together, legs tangling, laughter bubbling up between more kisses, “totally worth getting murdered for.”
You ended up straddling his lap, your jeans rubbing against the front of his as his hands gripped your waist tight. The humping started almost immediately—slow rolls of your hips that had you both groaning at the friction. Denim on denim felt stupidly good, the thick seam of your jeans pressing right against your core every time you rocked forward.
“Fuck,” Jake breathed, head falling back against the seat as you ground down harder, “even through the jeans you feel incredible.”
You leaned down, kissing him again while you kept moving, slow and teasing, “you’re so impatient, Jakey,” you murmured against his mouth, smiling when he chased your lips.
“Can you blame me?” He bucked up to meet you, hands sliding under your top to grip your bare waist, “been hard since the river. Watching you play with my hair, looking so fucking pretty, I couldn’t help it.”
The laughter died down into heavier breaths and soft moans, and you fucking loved how vocal Jake was. You kept rolling your hips in lazy circles, feeling how hard and thick he was beneath you. Jake’s hands roamed higher, thumbs brushing the underside of your breasts, and every little sound he made went straight to your core.
Eventually you slid lower, kissing down his neck, then his chest, until you were kneeling between his legs in the cramped backseat. Your hands worked open his belt and jeans, and when you pulled him out, his cock was so big and thick it made your mouth water.
Jake let out a shaky breath, fingers gently threading into your hair, “baby, you really don’t have to—”
“I want to,” you said, looking up at him. You nuzzled your cheek against the heavy length first, pressing soft, open-mouthed kisses along it, feeling it twitch against your skin.
“Fuck,” he groaned, low and wrecked. “Look at you—nuzzling my cock like that. So pretty.”
You licked a slow stripe from base to tip, then took the head into your mouth, sucking gently. Jake’s groan was loud, head tipping back against the seat.
“Shit—yeah, just like that,” he panted, fingers tightening in your hair but never pushing, “you look so fucking good with your lips around me.”
You took him deeper, tongue swirling every time you pulled back. He was so thick it stretched your mouth perfectly, and you loved the way he filled you.
“Jaeyun,” you moaned around him, the name slipping out soft and needy.
Jake’s whole body jerked hard, “fuck—say it again,” he groaned, voice breaking, “god, I love when you call me that. Say it again, baby, please.”
“Jaeyun,” you whispered, taking him even deeper, eyes watering a little as you looked up at him through your lashes.
He let out a wrecked sound, hips twitching up just slightly before he caught himself. His fingers tightened in your hair, not pulling, just holding on like you were the only thing keeping him grounded. You could feel him throbbing against your tongue, the way his thighs tensed every time you hollowed your cheeks.
But then his hand slid down to your shoulder, gentle but urgent, “come here,” he breathed, voice rough, “I need you closer.”
You pulled off with a soft pop, lips shiny, and he didn’t waste a secon—he tugged you up into his lap again, hands already working your jeans open. You shoved his jeans down further, wrapping your hand around his cock, stroking him slow and tight while he pushed two fingers into you without warning. The stretch made you gasp, forehead dropping to his shoulder.
“Fuck, you’re so wet,” he muttered against your neck, curling his fingers just right, “all this for me?”
You nodded, breath hitching as you kept stroking him, thumb swiping over the head on every upstroke. The car was getting warmer, windows starting to fog, the cramped backseat making everything feel even more intense—elbows bumping seats, knees knocking, but neither of you cared. You rocked into his hand while he fucked you with his fingers, messy and uncoordinated and perfect.
Jake’s mouth found your neck, sucking hard enough to leave a mark. You moaned, head tilting to give him more space, and he took it, kissing, licking, biting down gently before soothing the spot with his tongue. Another mark right below your ear, then one on your collarbone. He was claiming you in the quietest way possible, and it made your stomach flip.
His fingers sped up, thumb pressing against your clit, and you squeezed him tighter in response, stroking faster.
“You feel so good,” he panted, voice low and broken against your skin, “I—I can’t even think straight when you’re like this. I think I lo—”
You cut him off with a kiss, hard and desperate, swallowing whatever he was about to say. Your heart was hammering too loud, the guilt and the want twisting together until it hurt. You weren’t ready, not yet. Not when everything still felt like it was built on something you couldn’t admit out loud.
Jake groaned into your mouth, kissing you back like he understood anyway, fingers still moving inside you, thumb circling faster. You kept stroking him, messy and slick, both of you breathing hard between kisses, bodies pressed so close you could feel his heartbeat against yours.
He pulled back just enough to rest his forehead on yours, eyes dark and glassy, “you’re everything,” he whispered instead, the words thick, “don’t stop, baby.”
You didn’t, kissing him again, slower this time, the act so devastatingly soft, your bodies couldn’t help but react by reaching the peak of unadulterated pleasure you both provided each other with, messy and desperate, but none of you cared in the moment, enjoying the bliss of it all.
Letting the mess of feelings stay buried under the heat of his mouth.
CHAPTER TWELVE: The forgotten bet
You didn’t know what to do with yourself anymore, and somehow hiding in the library was the best you could do to get away from everything you wanted to be close to. Choosing a seat which you normally didn’t opt for was even worse, and the notes in front of you seemed to be in an entirely different language when your mind was elsewhere.
But someone had this weird idea about the whereabouts of practically everyone in the campus, which is why Jaemin found you sulking in a corner, his smile as bright as ever as invited himself to sit next to you.
“Bet not going too well, I presume,” he started, breaking your train of thoughts.
That shit eating grin on his face infuriated more, and there was nothing more you wished to do than punch him at the given moment.
“What the fuck do you want?” You snapped, not even bothering to look up from the notes that might as well have been written in ancient Greek.
“Relax,” he said, leaning back like he had all day, “I come in peace. Just checking in on my favorite partner in crime.”
You finally glanced at him, jaw tight, “there’s no bet anymore. So, you can leave.”
Jaemin laughed under his breath, spinning one of your pens between his fingers, “sure looks like there is to me. I saw you two at the party, the way he dragged you into his room right in front of everyone. Then yesterday? Jay’s car parked on that quiet street for almost an hour, windows completely fogged up. Jake came back to the dorm looking like he’d just won the lottery. He’s been skipping practice, smiling at nothing, telling the guys he’s taking you on a date again very soon. He’s in deep, Y/N. Like, actually gone.”
Your stomach twisted. Of course he knew. Jaemin always knew everything that happened on campus.
He leaned in a little, voice dropping but still smug, “you’ve got him right where you want him. One more good date, a couple more nights like yesterday, and he’s gonna say it. The whole i’m in love with you speech. Then you reject him, take the Paris trip, and we both win. Easy.”
You stared at him, chest tight, “you’re actually serious right now.”
“Dead serious,” he said, grin still firmly in place. “This was your plan too, remember? Make him fall hard, then crush him. Don’t go soft on me just because he bought you three bouquets and looked at you with those puppy eyes. You’re winning. Don’t fuck it up now.”
He stood up slowly, tapping the table once with his knuckle, “think about it. He’s already forgetting the car even exists. Finish the job before it gets too messy.”
Jaemin walked off without another word, even though you did scream your answer, garnering the attention of students who weren’t pleased about it. But yes, he did leave you alone with the heavy knot in your chest and the notes you still couldn’t read.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Too good to be true
This wasn’t the plan.
Sitting in the bleachers, supporting Jake, clad in this jacket as if you were his girlfriend. To make things worse, Jake absolutely preened in showing you off, not one care about embarrassment, not when he was the one who had insisted you wear it before the game even started.
“Looks better on you than it does on me,” he’d said with that easy grin, tugging the collar straight and pressing a quick kiss to your forehead right there on the sidelines where half the team could see. You’d rolled your eyes at the time, but now, with his name printed across the back in bold white letters, you felt the weight of every curious glance from the crowd.
The game was loud to say the least, Jungwon and Karina agreed, but they also silently agreed that your happiness came first, and at the moment, you looked really happy. Jake was everywhere—stealing the ball with sharp precision, setting up plays that made the stands roar, running like the field belonged to him alone. Every few minutes his eyes would flick up to the bleachers, searching until they landed on you. The second they did, his whole face would change. That bright, boyish smile would break through the concentration, and he’d give you this tiny, secret nod like you two were the only ones who understood what it meant.
“I’m not doing it,” you whispered to yourself.
Jungwon only smiled, “we know—we’ve always known.”
You turned to look at him, “how?” Somehow the question itself made you seem small, especially the possibility of Jake finding out and losing trust in you—seemed way worse.
“You try to act all tough, but we know how soft you are,” Karina spoke softly.
“And with Jake? There was no way we didn’t see this coming, you really can’t fool us,” Jungwon added with a dimpled smile, making you chuckle despite the breakdown you were going to have.
You didn’t realize how heavy the bet felt till you got it off of your chest, eyes watery as you turned to look at Jake in his element yet again, watching how he moved with ease under the burden of the timer ticking. But Jake was really good at what he did, kicking the ball straight into the net as it curled around in the corner left just as the whistle blew in the background.
You didn’t even realize you were screaming until your own voice hit your ears. You shot up fully, hands in the air, cheering so loud your throat hurt. “Yes, Jake! Go!” The words just flew out of you, completely unfiltered. Jungwon and Karina were jumping beside you, all three of you yelling like idiots.
Jake didn’t celebrate with his teammates. He broke away from the pile and ran straight for the stands, jumping the barrier in one smooth motion, and before you could even catch your breath he was right there in front of you, chest heaving, that huge, bright grin on his face.
He grabbed your waist with both hands and spun you around once, fast. Your feet left the ground, the roar of the crowd blurring into one big cheer.
“Jake!” You squeaked, laughing but instantly embarrassed as people around you whistled and shouted, “put me down—everyone’s watching—”
He didn’t listen. He spun you one more time, slower this time, eyes locked on yours like the rest of the stadium had disappeared. “Let them watch,” he said, still grinning like an idiot, “I scored that goal thinking about you, I want them to know it.”
When he finally set you back on your feet he didn’t step back. He cupped your face with both hands and kissed you right there in front of everyone—deep, a little messy, his jersey was damp with sweat, his heart still hammering against yours, but the kiss felt steady.
Your face burned hot the second his lips touched yours. You could feel hundreds of eyes on you, phones probably out, people cheering and laughing, but Jake didn’t care at all. He kissed you like the crowd wasn’t even there, like this was the only thing that mattered.
When he finally pulled back just enough to rest his forehead on yours, he was breathing hard, eyes shining, “I—I, uh,” he tried to find words, but with you looking at him so sweetly, he just melted, “you’re my good luck charm.”
And gosh, you smiled, pecking him softly, reciprocating the exact feelings he’d been harbouring towards you. His teammates were yelling his name from the field, and so he left with a promise to be back soon.
It’s normal for any sane person to get scared when things feel too good to be true, exactly how they felt for you and Jake, so the flicker of worry didn’t go unnoticed by Jake after the whole team came out. When they came out of the locker rooms, hair damp and smelling like fresh soap, Jake made a face at the idea of the big victory party happening across campus.
He glanced at you, really looked at you for a second, and caught the tiny flicker of worry that crossed your face, clearing his throat, “guys, I’m tired, let’s just go to the dorm and get some food and drinks ordered in.”
Jake looked down at you again, voice softer just for you, “that cool? We can keep it small.”
You managed a small smile and nodded, “yeah. That sounds perfect, actually.”
He smiled back, the kind of relieved, soft smile that made your chest feel a little lighter, and pressed a quick kiss to the side of your head, “good, let’s go home then.”
Jaemin, who had wandered over to join the group at some point, grinned wide. Jeno, standing a step behind him, shot Jaemin a sharp look and shook his head once, trying to warn him without saying anything out loud. Jaemin just smirked and ignored him completely.
Jake didn’t notice. He was too busy lacing his fingers with yours again, already tugging you gently toward the dorms. It was new to you, the feeling of being held in someone’s arms—in front of everyone, as if the concept of personal space was foreign to Jake, but did you actually want him to let go of you? Absolutely not, even if you won’t admit it out loud.
Jake hadn’t let go of you once. He kept you tucked right against his side on the couch, one arm looped around your shoulders, fingers tracing lazy little patterns on your arm like he couldn’t stop touching you. Every few minutes he’d lean in and press a soft kiss to your temple or the top of your head or the corner of your mouth, completely unbothered by the others being right there.
Was it really that easy to fall in so deep for someone within a month? Take yourself for example, wrapped up in Jake’s embrace, it certainly did seem true to some extent.
“You okay? You’ve been quiet since we got back, was I too much?” He asked, thumb brushing the side of your neck, a worried pout on his face.
You shook your head just a bit, “I’m just happy, you did so well out there, Jakey.”
He sighed with happiness, all worries gone in a second, “couldn’t have done it without you.”
Sunghoon groaned loudly, “dude, you’re so gone it’s painful to watch.”
Jake laughed, pressing another kiss to the top of your head, “leave me alone, man. I earned this.”
You were about to tease him back when the door swung open.
Jaemin strolled in with Jeno beside him, grabbing a slice of pizza from the nearest box and dropping onto the arm of the couch across from you, taking a big bite. His eyes flicked over the scene—Jake’s arm still wrapped around you, the way Jake was still leaning into you like he couldn’t get close enough. Jaemin’s grin sharpened.
“Damn, look at you two,” he said casually, chewing, “still going strong, huh? So Jake, did you finally drop the L-word on her yet? Cause you have two days left till the bet ends.”
You stilled, staring at Jaemin with wide eyes, just like everyone else in the room. Jeno groaned at the back cause he did try to stop Jaem, but to no avail. But it was almost as if he couldn’t pick up context cues, and so he continued, “you told her about it right? Since you’re smitten now, that’s why you’re together, right?”
“Jaemin,” Jake warned him, his hold tightening on you, “shut the fuck up.”
Jungwon and Karina were ready to take you back, almost jumping to their feet, but that’s not where Jaem stopped. Jungwon was already shifting closer on the couch until his knee pressed against yours, one hand resting lightly on your arm like he was ready to pull you out of there the second you needed it.
“What? You didn’t tell her?” He smirked, now staring right at you, “well, too fucking bad cause she already fucking knows you’re playing her for a car,” he smirked, leaning back against the couch, finally letting the drama unfold.
Your chest tightened so hard it hurt to breathe. You felt the heat rush to your face, then drain away just as fast, leaving you cold. Jay was staring at the floor like it had answers. Heeseung’s hand froze around his beer. Sunghoon looked like he wanted to sink into the cushions. Karina’s eyes were wide, looking at you knowing exactly how you felt right now—especially after the nights you cried with her. Jungwon’s fingers tightened on your arm because of the same.
Of course his friends had known the whole time.
You pulled away from Jake’s arm slowly, like your body was moving through water. The walls you’d been trying so hard to keep down slammed back up, higher than before. You felt small, exposed, stupid even. Like every soft kiss, every my girl, every time he looked at you like you mattered had been watched and laughed at behind your back.
You stood up, “I knew it the whole time,” you confessed, observing just how panicked he seemed at the moment, “Jaemin told me everything at the very beginning—how you just bet on my feelings for his car,” you tried to stop yourself from getting emotional, letting a shaky breath out as Jake’s shaking hand held on to yours, “so he asked me to do the same, to show you how it hurts to play with someone’s emotions.”
His face went pale, and even though he opened his mouth, no words came out, just throbbing pain in his heart, and eyes wide as if he’d gotten punched in the gut.
Maybe him accepting it would’ve made it better, but for Jake, there wasn’t an option between fight or flight, only freezing on the spot. Everyone stayed silent, watching it unfold and Jay tried to shake Jake’s shoulders, but all he could see was your trust crumpling, and his heart breaking.
“You—you don’t actually like me?” He asked, voice breaking.
“I do—I fucking do,” your voice cracked as well, “going through with the bet was not my intention, but what about you, Jake?”
Jake’s hand, still reaching for yours, started to tremble. His mouth opened again, but nothing came out. The guilt on his face was so raw it made your stomach turn. He looked hurt—really hurt, and you weren’t sure how to feel anymore, the hypocrisy of it all sinking in deeper, making everything worse. You’d planned to use him too, you were no better. The walls around you shot up even higher at the absence of words, of reassurance.
So you asked again, “Jake, was any of it real?”
Jake finally spoke, voice barely above a whisper, broken, “you—you knew the whole time?”
You nodded, a tear cascaded down the curve of your cheek freely, “yeah. I knew.”
He let out a shaky breath, like the words physically hurt him, “and you still—you let me fall for you anyway? You let me get this deep even though you knew I started it for a stupid bet? Why didn’t you tell me?”
The rise in his voice almost made you laugh, “so now you’re hurt cause I knew? After you started the whole thing for a car? That’s rich, Jake.”
Jungwon stood up right beside you, shoulder brushing yours, protective, “Y/N, you don’t have to explain anything else to him, not right now.”
“No, no—Jake just fucking tell me, is it real?” You waited for an answer, to get absolute silence in return, “Jake?”
You tried for the last time, just to find tears streaming down his flushed face, but nothing came out of his mouth. He was too in his head, cursing himself, cursing Jaeming for letting it happen, but you? How could he ever hate you?
Wiping your tears roughly, you let Karina embrace you, who kept glaring at all the boys. It wasn’t awkward for them, they felt guilty too, but knew better than to speak up in between them.
You stepped back, “fine then—I’m done, we’re done. Don’t follow me, don’t text me. Just stay the hell away from me.”
You turned toward the door. Jake shot up after you, voice cracking, “Y/N, wait—please, just let me explain—”
“Don’t,” you snapped, not turning around.
Karina was already grabbing your jacket, “c’mon, let’s get out of here.”
Jungwon stayed right at your side until you reached the door, then spun around, glaring at Jay, “you should’ve stopped him, you knew what he was doing from the start. You let him play with her feelings like it was nothing. What the fuck, Jay?”
Jay looked wrecked, never expecting Jungwon to get angry, “I tried, man. I told him it was fucked up—”
“You all knew!” Jungwon’s voice rose, “every single one of you sat there and watched her fall and didn’t say a word. That’s fucked up—you couldn’t reassure her after she told you everything, huh, Jake?”
You didn’t wait to hear more, stepping into the hallway, Karina right behind you, her hand gentle on your back,“I’ve got you,” she whispered, “just breathe, okay?”
Behind the closed door, it only got worse, Jungwon’s voice only got louder as Jay tried to explain himself.
As the boys gathered to calm down Jungwon, they completely missed the way Jake got up and headed towards Jaemin. Only the sound of a loud crash got their attention—Jake’s fist connecting with Jaemin’s jaw.
“You fucking asshole,” Jake snarled, his voice raw and broken. Another punch landed, his knuckles splitting open against Jaemin’s cheekbone. Blood smeared across his hand and dripped onto the floor. Heeseung and Sunghoon tried to pull him back, but Jake was swinging again, tears streaming down his face as he cried freely, angry and devastated all at once.
“Fucking get off me!” He shouted, his voice cracking between sobs, "this is your fault—all of it! You ruined everything!”
Furniture scraped against the floor. Someone yelled for them to stop, but it fell deaf to Jake’s ears. He kept swinging, his knuckles bleeding worse with every punch, tears falling fast down his cheeks, until Heeseung and Sunghoon finally managed to drag him back, both of them breathing hard.
Jaemin didn’t care much, he looked rather amused at the situation as Jeno tried to pull him up in furious whispers of urging him to stop being messy.
Jake stood there in the middle of the mess, shoulders shaking, blood on his hands and tears still streaming from his bloodshot eyes. He looked completely destroyed.
And you? You didn’t look back.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Salvation
So maybe you did jinx yourself for thinking everything was perfect. However, it made no sense to you, or to anyone for that matter. You weren’t an expert about feelings by any means, yet it was clear to anyone with working eyes that whatever you and Jake had was far from fake.
Why couldn’t he say it?
You knew the stakes, you came clean to him, and god knows you couldn’t be mad at him for telling you that it, in fact, started off because of a bit. But the silence hurt.
“I love him,” you whispered, and Karina hugged you tighter at how raw the confession sounded.
“I know,” she mumbled, “it’s okay, it’ll be okay.”
You stayed quiet for a while, letting her hold you. The numbness had settled deep, leaving you strangely serene even as your heart ached. There were no more tears left. Just this heavy, enthralling ache that refused to let go.
Karina eventually pulled back and brushed a strand of hair from your face, “I’m gonna make you some tea, okay? I’ll be right back, yeah?”
You nodded mutely and watched her head to the small kitchenette. The soft clink of the kettle and mugs filled the room as you sat there on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing.
Karina was busy with the kettle as a knock came at the door, making her pause her ministrations. She walked over and opened the door just a crack, hoping it’d be Jungwon.
It was Jake.
He looked utterly destroyed. His eyes were bloodshot and had started to swell from crying, cheeks still damp with fresh tears. His knuckles were split open and bleeding, dark red smeared across his hand and the sleeve of his hoodie. He was breathing hard, like he’d run the entire way here without stopping.
Karina’s eyes widened in horror, “Jake—what the hell happened to your hands?”
He didn’t even look at her. His gaze was fixed past her shoulder, desperately searching for you, “please,” he said, his voice hoarse and broken. Without waiting, he slowly lowered himself to his knees right there in the hallway, bloody hands clasped in front of him, “please, Karina, just let me talk to her. I need her to know it was real, I’m begging you.”
Karina stood frozen for a long moment, clearly torn. She glanced back at you, then down at Jake kneeling on the floor, tears still slipping down his face, knuckles dripping blood onto the tiles.
She let out a heavy, reluctant sigh.
“I—come in,” she said quietly, stepping aside, “but if you make this any worse, I swear to God, Jake—”
Jake didn’t even stand up right away. He stayed on his knees for another heartbeat, bloody hands still clasped like he was praying, before he pushed himself up on shaky legs. God, his eyes—they were red-rimmed and glassy, the golden-boy sparkle completely shattered. He looked like he’d been run over by a truck and then backed over again for good measure.
Karina shot you one last warning glance before she slipped into the kitchenette, muttering something about giving you two five minutes and that she’d be right there with a knife if needed. The door to your room clicked shut behind her, leaving nothing but the sound of Jake’s ragged breathing and the faint drip of blood onto your floor.
You stayed rooted on the edge of the bed, arms wrapped tight around your middle like you could physically hold yourself together. Your heart was hammering so hard it hurt. A part of you wanted to scream at him to get the fuck out. The other part—the stupid, traitorous part that had fallen anyway—ached at the sight of him like this.
You swallowed hard, voice coming out sharper than you meant, “what the hell are you doing here, Jake? What now?”
Jake ran a shaky hand through his hair, smearing a thin streak of blood across his forehead, “I don’t know,” he groaned, “I really fucking don’t. You said all that shit after the game and I just—I just froze, okay? I punched Jaemin so hard I think I broke something, and it still didn’t make me feel better. Nothing did.”
You looked away, “so you came here?”
“Yeah, I came here,” his voice was rough, frustrated. He took another step closer, boots scuffing the floor, “what else was I supposed to do? You just walked off, were my actions not enough for you, huh? I sat in my room staring at the wall like an idiot for an hour.”
You let out a sharp laugh, finally looking at him again, “oh, poor you. Must’ve been real hard.”
“Don’t,” he warned, “don’t do that. You told me you knew everything and you fell anyway. And then you just—left. What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?”
You stood up fast, arms dropping to your sides, “what did you expect? A hug? You started this whole thing. You came after me for a bet. I only played along to fuck you over and now look at us. I’m the dumbass who actually caught feelings, while you couldn’t even admit it in front of your friends.”
Jake’s jaw clenched so hard you saw the muscle jump, “I broke the bet off before the date, Y/N. Before I even took you out. That morning I told Jaemin I was done with the whole thing. He was just stirring shit tonight to fuck with both of us.”
You stared at him, the words hitting like a slap, “you—you what?”
“Yeah,” he whispered, “I ended it days ago. Because it wasn’t a game anymore, not for me. But you still think I was using you the whole time, don’t you?”
Your hands started shaking, “then why the fuck didn’t you tell me? You let me keep thinking it was all fake while I was falling for you like an idiot? While I was lying to my friends and to myself?”
“Because I was terrified!” His voice cracked, louder now, “I knew the second I said it out loud you’d look at me like this—like I’m the enemy. I didn’t want to lose you and I still fucking don’t. I’m in love with you, okay? Not for the bet or the stupid car.”
You shoved at his chest, hard, but your fingers stayed twisted in his hoodie at the confession. He loves you, and he was never once hesitant to show it till now, “you’re such a fucking coward, Jake.”
“I know,” he breathed, eyes glassy as he pressed closer, forehead almost touching yours, “I’m the biggest coward on campus. But I’m yours if you still want me.”
You yanked him down by the hoodie and pulled him into a deep kiss as Jake groaned into your mouth, hands sliding under your shirt, bloody knuckles rough against your skin, and you could taste the saltiness of his tears on his lips.
“I love you,” he gasped right against your lips, the words spilling out shaky between kisses, “fuck, I love you—”
You whined into his mouth at how freely he said it now. Jake had always been truthful to his feelings, while you’d been insecure, which is why you couldn’t do much but kiss him back, hoping that it’ll show how you reciprocate the feelings.
The sharp tang of blood hit your tongue when his injured knuckle brushed your jaw. You pulled back, breathing hard, eyes dropping to his right hand. Only that one knuckle was split open, still seeping a thin line of red.
“Jake,” you muttered, fingers wrapping around his wrist gently and turning it over, “you’re still bleeding.”
He tried to pull you back in, eyes dark and hazy, “don’t care—”
“I do.” You slid off his lap before he could argue, legs a little unsteady as you crossed to the shelf by your desk. Your hands shook slightly when you grabbed the antiseptic wipes, a small tube of ointment, and a strip of gauze. When you turned back he was still sitting on the edge of the bed exactly where you’d left him, watching you with this raw, open look that made your stomach twist in the deepest way—cause gosh, he looked beautiful.
You knelt between his thighs again and took his injured hand. The wipe stung when you pressed it to the cut. Jake hissed softly through his teeth but didn’t pull away. He just stared at your face like the sight of you taking care of him was something he couldn’t quite believe was real.
“You’re really doing this right now,” he said quietly.
“Someone has to,” you whispered, dabbing the blood away carefully, then smoothing ointment over the split skin. Every small touch felt heavier than it should—the faint tremble in his fingers, the way your own heartbeat was slamming so hard against your ribs it felt like it was echoing in your throat. You wrapped the gauze around his knuckle slowly, and the quiet intimacy of it settled somewhere deep in your chest, warm and aching and terrifying all at once.
When you finished he caught your face with both hands and pulled you up into another kiss as if pouring every ounce of emotions he’d ever felt towards you, his lips slotting perfectly against yours, a bit messy with how reverent he was. He even wish to breathe anymore, just accepting the warmth of your mouth as a way to live.
“You’re so fucking perfect,” he breathed against your mouth again, the words vibrating through you, “god, I love you so much it feels like it’s in my bones. Like every time I touch you I remember how close I came to losing this.”
You climbed back into his lap, straddling him, and kissed him harder, hips rolling once against the obvious hardness straining in his sweatpants. The friction made you both moan softly. His bandaged hand slid up your back under your shirt, palm warm against your spine, while the other cupped the back of your neck like he was scared you’d pull away.
He broke the kiss just enough to rest his forehead against yours, breathing ragged. His eyes were glassy, voice cracking when he spoke.
“Do you actually want me?” He whispered, lips brushing yours with every word, “not because we’re both fucked up right now. Just—tell me, if not i’ll just stop. Say it against my mouth, pleasw, I need to hear it.”
Your heart felt too big for your chest, a heavy, aching throb that matched the pulse between your legs. You leaned in until your lips touched his with every syllable.
“I want you,” you breathed right against him, “I want you so fucking bad, Jake. Just you—all of you.”
The second the words left your mouth you grabbed his bandaged right hand and pressed his palm flat to the center of your chest, right over your racing heart. His fingers spread wide, the gauze rough and warm against your skin, and Jake let out this low, broken groan that vibrated straight through you.
“Fuck—baby,” he rasped, eyes fluttering like he was barely holding it together, “for me?”
You’d seen how Jake got during intimate moments, but the way he was acting right now—breathing hard against your skin, you weren’t sure how much longer you’d be able to handle without confessing all your feelings for the pretty boy in front of you. The fact that he came running so soon, that he wished to clear things up, it was enough. Staying mad at him wasn’t ever a choice when every single cell within you yearned for him.
“For you,” you whispered gently, eyes never leaving his face.
He looked stunning to say the least, perhaps the prettiest crier you’ve ever laid your eyes upon. His face was flushed, this beautiful shade of red gracing it, and you couldn’t help but trace your thumb over his swollen lip, “you’re so pretty,” you whispered without thinking twice.
In one smooth motion he flipped you both, laying you down on the bed and settling between your thighs, his body pressing you into the mattress. The sudden weight of him, the heat rolling off his skin, the way his pendant swung forward and rested cool against your clavicle—it made you shiver. You looked down and saw it, your initials, small and delicate on the silver chain around his neck, nestled right there against your skin.
A soft, involuntary moan slipped out of you.
Jake’s breath hitched hard against your neck, “you see it, baby?” He whispered, his lips—so fucking soft and plush, brushed your throat as he spoke, “got it the next day after our date, been wearing it since.”
“You’re crazy,” you managed to say, but your eyes were shining just as bright as his own, his usual smile stretching, making your heart race faster than usual.
The proximity was maddening. His chest pressed flush to yours, heart hammering so hard you could feel it through his ribs. The heat of his body soaked into every inch of you, his breath hot and ragged on your neck. He took his time to take your scent in, shamelessly so, doing exactly what he couldn’t when he first talked to you, and swore he was rather drunk on it.
He buried his face deeper into the curve of your neck and inhaled again, slow and shaky, like he was trying to memorize you, “fuck—wanted to do this when I first met you,” he mumbled, lips dragging along your pulse point, open-mouthed and wet.
You shivered hard, fingers sliding up into his hair and tugging lightly, “then stop holding back now, Jake. Touch me.”
He groaned, “yeah? You want that?” His bandaged hand slipped under your shirt, palm hot and trembling as it cupped your breast, thumb brushing over your nipple until it tightened, “like this? Tell me if it’s good, baby. I need to hear you.”
“Feels so good,” you breathed, arching into his touch, “don’t be gentle. I want to feel how bad you want me.”
“Fuck,” he rasped, voice cracking, “I’m gonna show you how sorry I am. Gonna make you feel it with every fucking inch of me until you know I’m yours.” He pushed your shirt higher, mouth following right behind, kissing and sucking down your chest like he was starving, “god, look at you—so fucking pretty under me. Can I take this off? I need to see all of you, baby. Please?”
You nodded fast, lifting your arms. He peeled your shirt off and tossed it aside, then just stared, chest rising fast, “fuck—these tits. Been thinking about them every night.” His mouth latched onto one nipple, plush lips sucking slow and deep while his hand palmed the other one, thumb teasing the peak until you were squirming.
“Jaeyun—shit, that feels so good,” you moaned, back arching.
“Yeah? You like my mouth here?” he asked, switching sides, tongue swirling lazy circles. “Tell me, baby. I need to hear how good I’m making you feel.”
“So good,” you whimpered, fingers tightening in his hair, “don’t stop.”
“Won’t stop,” he sighed in pleasure, sucking harder as his teeth grazed just enough to make you gasp, the pendant dragging cool over your skin with every move of his head.
You couldn’t take it anymore. You pushed at his shoulders and flipped you both again, straddling his hips, grinding down slow and filthy against the hard line of his cock through his pants.
Jake’s eyes rolled back, a wrecked groan tearing out of him, “Jesus Christ—yeah, keep going, pretty.”
You leaned down, hair falling around both of you, and kissed him deep, tongue sliding against his, his fingers digging into the flesh of your waist, as if no amount of kissing could satiate his hunger.
You pulled back just enough to look at him, lips still brushing and his eyes were blown wide, chest heaving under you. Holding his gaze, you gathered spit in your mouth, and let it drip slowly right onto his waiting tongue.
Jake’s whole body jerked hard beneath you. A wrecked, filthy moan tore out of his throat as the warm spit landed on his tongue. He didn’t even hesitate before swallowing it down with a shaky groan, then leaned right up and licked into your mouth like he was chasing the taste of you, tongue sliding against yours again, ever so messy and eager.
The absolute joy of being here, so free and filthy with Jake despite everything, had you getting freakier by second knowing damn well how Jake would be thrilled, and he did. He wasn’t sure what he’d do with himself if you didn’t accept his apology, or if you’d admit that it was a game to you. But seeing neither was the case, he had to take the next step—to show exactly how much he wanted you.
“So dirty for me, huh?” He smirked, sucking on your tongue, “fucking perfect, you’re mine, yeah? Made for me.”
“Getting possessive already?” You chuckled deeply, licking up his neck, nibbling on his earlobe, confidence boosting by second at the sight of him shivering with your ministrations, “you like it when I spit in that pretty mouth of yours, Jake?
He tugged your bottom lip between his teeth, gentle but playful, giving it a light pull before letting it go with a soft pop, “like it?” He murmured, eyes sparkling with that familiar mischief even now, “darling, I fucking love it. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted you to be this comfortable with me—this filthy.”
You grinned, rolling your hips down against the hard line of his cock, “then stop talking and do something about it.”
Jake clicked his tongue, rolling over so you were under him again, pinning you to the mattress with his weight, eyebrow cocked up, “bossy tonight, aren’t you?” He teased, lips brushing yours as he spoke.
You traced your finger up his spine, grabbing the hair on his nape with a tug that had him groaning, “why wouldn’t I be? You’re mine now, aren’t you?” You challenged.
“Claiming me now, hm? Not mad anymore?” He caught your wrist, pinning it beside your head with his bandaged hand while his other slid down to grip your thigh, spreading you wider under him.
The weight of him was heavenly, you could feel the faint ridges of his abs through his hoodie, the way his heart was slamming against your ribs like it was trying to reach you. His pendant swung forward, cool metal kissing your skin right between your breasts, and the sight of your own initials resting there made you whine yet again.
“Want me to be mad?” You pecked his neck, “want me to go ask someone else to please me—”
Jake’s head snapped up so fast it was almost comical, “you fucking dare say that again,” he almost groaned, his grip on your thigh tightening, fingers digging in like he needed to remind himself you were really here, “don’t even joke about that shit, the thought of someone else even looking at you the way I do makes me want to lose my fucking mind.”
You blinked up at him, surprised by how quickly the jealousy hit, “Jake—”
“No,” He he you off, voice rough as he shoved your shorts and panties down your legs in one impatient yank, the fabric tearing slightly at the seam. He didn’t care. He tossed them off the bed and settled between your thighs like he belonged there, his big nose brushing the sensitive skin of your inner thigh as he inhaled deep, shameless.
“Fuck,” he muttered, eyes locked on how wet you were, “you’re actually dripping. All this for me, just for me, hm?”
You tried to answer, but the words died in your throat when he dragged two fingers through your folds, spreading the wetness before pushing them inside you in one smooth thrust. The stretch made your back arch off the bed with a sharp gasp.
“Jake—”
“Yeah?” He curled his fingers deep right away, thumb brushing your clit in slow circles. His nose rubbed against your inner thigh as he leaned in closer, breath hot against your pussy, “keep talking. I wanna hear what you wanna say while my fingers are buried in you like this.”
You clenched around him, hips rolling up to chase the feeling, absolutely enamoured with how possessive he was—maybe that’s what you wanted, him claiming you so freely, “you’re so fucking jealous,” you managed, half-laugh, half-moan, “god—I fucking love you.”
It didn’t take much for you to say it, but to Jake, it was everything.
His fingers froze deep inside you for a split second. Then he yanked them out so fast you whimpered at the sudden emptiness, but before you could even protest he was surging up your body, cupping your face with both hands, thumbs pressing into your cheeks as he stared down at you like you’d just knocked the air out of his lungs.
“Say it again,” he demanded, chest heaving and eyes wild.
“I love you, Jaeyun,” you whispered, looking straight in his eyes.
“Fuck—I love you too,” he managed to say desperately, he crushed his mouth to yours, kissing you like he was trying to crawl inside your skin, “i needed to hear that.”
He pressed open mouthed kisses all over your torso, only stopping to take his hoodie off in a go, revealing the faint lines of his abs and the light scatter of freckles across his shoulders. The sight of him all flushed, made heat flood between your legs even more.
He slid back down your body fast, shoving your thighs apart wider. He hooked one of your legs over his shoulder, opening you up even more, his big nose brushed your inner thigh as he inhaled deep and shameless. “Fuck, you smell so good when you’re this turned on,” he groaned, then dragged his tongue in one long, filthy stripe up your pussy, moaning loud when he tasted you, “mine, hm.”
His nose rubbed firm and perfect against your clit as he licked, the pressure making your hips jerk.
“Jake—godd,” you gasped, fingers twisting in his hair.
He looked up at you, lips shiny, eyes dark, “yeah? You like my mouth on you?” He sucked your clit into his mouth, fingers pushing back inside you, curling just right, “tell me, baby, I wanna hear how good I’m making you feel while I eat this pretty pussy.”
“So good,” you moaned, thighs shaking around his head, “your nose—right there, it feels so fucking good rubbing my clit like that.”
He caressed the soft flesh of your inner thighs with his veiny hand, thumb stroking back and forth.
Placing open mouthed kisses on it made it worse (better), and you twitched hard.
Jake’s eyes flicked up to yours, lips curving into a filthy little smirk, “oh? Sensitive here?” He dragged his teeth along the inside of your thigh, then sucked hard, leaving a dark mark right where his thumb had been stroking, “fuck, I love that. Gonna mark every spot that makes you shake for me, yeah? My good fucking girl.”
He didn’t give you time to recover. He buried his face between your legs again, eyes never leaving your face, and just how perfect you looked shaking for him, memorizing every bit of it.
He sucked harder, fingers pumping faster, nose pressing firm and relentless. “Mhm, cum for me, baby. Let me taste how much you want me right now.”
You came hard, thighs clamping around his head as you cried out his name, pulsing around his fingers while he kept licking and sucking you through it, moaning like your orgasm was the best thing he’d ever tasted.
He didn’t stop until you were whimpering and pushing weakly at his shoulders, over-sensitive and trembling.
Only then did he crawl back up your body, kissing you deep so you could taste yourself on his tongue. His cock was straining hard against his pants, the front completely soaked with pre-cum.
You reached down and palmed him through the fabric. “Take these off,” you said, voice hoarse, “I want to see you. All of you.”
Jake sat back on his heels, eyes locked on yours the whole time as he shoved his pants and boxers down his hips, keeping it on the side. His cock sprang free, thick, flushed dark, and leaking at the tip. He wrapped his veiny hand around it and gave himself one slow stroke, watching your reaction.
“Better?” He asked, a smirk tugging at his swollen lips even as his chest still heaved, “this what you wanted?”
You bit your lip, heat flooding through you at the sight of him so flushed and bare, freckles standing out across his nose and shoulders, faint abs flexing with every breath, cock heavy in his hand.
“Better,” you breathed, sitting up just a little, reaching out to wrap your fingers around his thick length.
He let out a shaky laugh that turned into a groan when you stroked him slowly from base to tip, thumb swiping over the leaking head, “love your hand, so fucking pretty,” he mumbled, hips twitching forward into your fist, “been hard for you for so long it hurts. C’mon, get on your back, baby, I need to be inside you.”
You lay back, spreading your legs for him. Jake settled between them, rubbing the thick head of his cock up and down your soaked folds, coating himself in your wetness, being thick enough that the first push made your breath catch.
“Easy,” he murmured, voice strained as he pressed in slowly, making you feel every inch he gave you, “you’re so tight—fuck, just breathe for me. I’ve got you.”
It took time. He worked himself in with shallow thrusts, letting you adjust to the stretch, his jaw clenched tight, sweat already beading on his flushed chest. When he finally bottomed out, buried to the hilt, the fullness made your eyes flutter shut and a broken moan slip out of you.
“Shit, Jaeyun you’re so deep,” you gasped, nails digging into his shoulders.
He stayed still for a moment, forehead pressed to yours, breathing hard, “you feel so fucking good,” he groaned, “like you were made for me. Tell me when you’re ready.”
You rolled your hips experimentally and moaned, “yeah, yeah—please.”
He started slow, deep rolls of his hips that dragged against every sensitive spot inside you, building the pace slowly with steadier strokes that made your back arch and your moans louder. Every thrust pushed the air out of your lungs, the wet slap of skin on skin filling the room.
“God, look at you taking me,” he panted, eyes locked on where you were stretched around him, “so pretty and full of my cock.”
You wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, “harder, Jake. I can take it.”
He groaned and gave you exactly what you asked for, hips snapping faster, the pendant with your initials swinging between your breasts with every thrust. His veiny hand slid down to rub your clit, drawing eights on them.
You were moaning his name, right on the edge, when you suddenly pushed at his chest, “wait—I want to ride you.”
Jake didn’t hesitate, in fact, he was already drooling at the image of your pretty tits jiggling right in front of him. He flipped onto his back, pulling you on top of him in one smooth motion. You straddled his lap and sank down onto his cock in one go, both of you moaning loudly at the new angle.
“Fuck—ride me, baby,” he groaned, hands gripping your hips as you started moving. His thumbs brushed your nipples, pinching and rolling them while you bounced on his thick length, “so fucking pretty riding my cock like you own it.”
You leaned forward, pressing your chest to his, and started sucking dark hickeys into the side of his neck, right below his jaw, “I do own it, baby.”
Jake’s head fell back, a low moan escaping him as you marked him up.
“You do, just you” he panted, one hand sliding up to cup the back of your neck, holding you against him while the other kept playing with your nipple, “want everyone to see I’m yours.”
He reached blindly to the side, grabbing his discarded pants. From the pocket he pulled out a delicate silver pendant—his initials engraved on it. He had planned on asking you out properly before Jaemin fucked it up, but he didn’t plan on waiting anymore, caressing your neck as he clasped it around you, letting it sit beautifully on your clavicle.
“Wear this for me,” he said, voice rough as he watched it bounce lightly with every roll of your hips. The cool metal rested against your overheated skin, a constant little shock that made you shiver, “now say it. Say you’re mine while you’re riding my cock.”
You sat up straighter, rolling your hips deep, warmth blooming inside you at how beautiful the small accessory was, “I’m yours, Jake,” you moaned, looking down at him, “all yours.”
His eyes rolled back for a second, hands tightening on your hips as he helped you ride him harder. “That’s my girl,” he groaned, thumb still playing with your nipple, “keep saying it. I wanna hear it every time you sink down on me, baby.”
You pressed your face into his neck again, sucking another mark there as you rode him faster, both of you lost in each other, sweaty and desperate and finally, completely real.
Jake’s grip on your hips turned bruising, fingers digging in as he thrust up to meet every roll of your body.
“Fuck—baby, I’m so close,” he panted, voice ragged, eyes half-lidded and wild, “I should pull out, shit, I didn’t even ask—”
You shook your head fast, nails digging into his shoulders as you kept riding him, “It’s a safe day,” you gasped, lips brushing his, “I want you inside. Don’t pull out, please.”
Jake’s breath hitched hard, like the words alone almost broke him, “I can’t ever deny you anything, my love,” he groaned, “not when you ask me like that.”
He slammed up into you twice, burying himself deep as he came with a wrecked moan of your name, loud enough to reverberate, hips jerking as he spilled hot and thick inside you. The feeling of him pulsing, filling you, pushed you over right after—you clenched around him hard, thighs shaking, a broken cry of his name leaving your lips.
For a long moment you both just stayed there, trembling. Jake didn’t pull out, wrapping both arms around you and flipping you gently onto your back so he could hover over you, still buried deep, bodies pressed together with no space left. His chest heaved against yours, sweat-slick skin sticking, heartbeat slamming so hard you could feel it through your ribs.
He didn’t speak at first. He just looked at you, eyes glassy and a little wide like he still couldn’t believe this was real. Then he started kissing every mark he’d left on you tonight—the dark bruise on your inner thigh, the ones on your neck, the one just above your breast. Each kiss was slow, open-mouthed, his nose caressing your skin, warm breath fanning over the fresh hickeys like he was memorizing them with his mouth.
You carded your fingers through his damp hair, letting him take his time.
“I was so ready to beg on my knees tonight if that’s what it took,” he finally whispered against your collarbone, “don’t ever make me do that again.”
You let out a soft, breathless laugh, still a little dazed, “I wouldn’t mind seeing you on your knees, actually.”
Jake lifted his head, eyes meeting yours, he leaned in and pecked your lips once, letting it linger before he rested his forehead against yours, eyes closed like he needed the contact more than air.
“Brat,” he murmured, the word warm and fond against your mouth, but the way he said it was so full of quiet, desperate attachment it made your chest tighten. He stayed like that, still inside you, arms wrapped around you, one hand gently stroking up and down your back while the other traced lazy circles over the pendant now warm against your skin.
“I love you,” he finally said, cupping your cheek.
“I love you,” you smiled, letting him be as clingy as he wanted to be.
“Wanna make a bet?” Jake asked, eyes gleaming as you raised your brow.
You laughed under your breath, thumb brushing his bottom lip. “Depends. What are we betting on this time?”
He grinned, pressing a kiss to the corner of your mouth, “that I’ll spend the rest of my life proving this was the best bad idea we ever had.”
You smiled against his lips, pretending to think which only made him whine further. But maybe, this one was worth spending time over.
“Bet.”
MEANWHILE:
Jay was repenting for Jake’s sins, staring up at Jungwon, who still appeared to be dissatisfied, half pressed against the man who kept on mumbling, “sorry, Wonie. I’m sorry Jungwonie, please?”
Jungwon only huffed, arms crossed tight even as Jay clung to him like an oversized koala, “you knew about the whole stupid bet and didn’t say a word. I had to watch my best friend get emotionally waterboarded for weeks.”
“I tried to stop it!” Jay whined, nuzzling his face into Jungwon’s shoulder, “I told Jake it was a terrible idea at least thirteen times—”
“Fourteen,” Sunghoon and Heeseung deadpanned from the couch.
Jaemin, already sprawled in the armchair rocking a fresh black eye and split lip, let out a smug little snort, “relax, you babies. I was trying to get them together.”
Jeno, sitting on the floor looking two seconds from committing murder, dragged a hand down his face, “they didn’t even fucking know each other, Jaemin.”
Jaemin shrugged, completely unfazed, “but I saw the bigger picture.”
Heeseung threw a pillow at his head, “there were better ways, you absolute menace.”
Jaemin dodged it with a grin, “yeah, but none as entertaining.” He popped a chip in his mouth and asked casually, “now who do I do next?”
The entire room exploded at once.
“No.”
“Fuck no.”
“Touch another person and I’m punching you this time.”
“I swear to God, Jaemin—”
Jaemin just laughed, raising his hands like he was innocent, “fine. Jay’s next.”
The poor guy looked up in horror.
“Absolutely the fuck not,” Jungwon snapped, yanking Jay behind him like a human shield who only blushed at the display of power, “you stay the hell away from him, Jaemin. End of discussion.”
Synopsis : you finally get to live close to your brother again after spending 2 years in Japan. You love getting to see your childhood friends again despite the fact you have to struggle with fitting in at a new university, living issues, your overprotective brother and his... best friend?
IN WHICH jake keeps telling himself he’s fine with whatever this thing between you is, so he decides that a friends with benefits situation with his best friend's girlfriend's best friend, who also happens to be his other best friend's older sister, is a completely reasonable idea. until he wakes up alone for the nth time and realizes that this friends with benefits situation is not benefiting him at all.
⤷ pairing: jake × fem!reader | ⤷ genre: friends with benefits; college au; romcom; slow burn; situationship dynamics; mutual pining; smut (mdni) | ⤷ playlist: sally, when the wine runs out - role model | casual - chappell roan | calling after me - wallows | whistle for the choir - the fratellis | ⤷ word count: 32k
!! smut warnings: power play / switching; sub jake, switch jake, brat taming, fingering, oral (m receiving), handjob, creampie, cum eating, anal play, spanking, spit kink, praise kink
⤷ ronnie's notes: this fic was originally a birthday gift i wrote for my girl addie @jakesimfromstatefarm <3 even tho her birthday was over a month ago already but a few things happened in between that kept me from finishing it earlier aka i deactivated this blog and also managed to break my thumb lolll but now it’s finally done and i’m posting it here. i know i deactivated my blog and i’m not really active here anymore and this doesn’t mean i’m coming back or anything, i just really wanted to post this as a little love letter to one of my best friends ever !!! addie i love you so much pls come back already, i miss u like crazy and i really hope you like your present 🫶
YOU ALWAYS THINK YOU'RE SMARTER THAN YOU REALLY ARE AT 21, AND THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT JAKE SIM THOUGHT HE WAS. Jake was the kind of guy who had everything figured out before anyone else even realized there was something to figure out. And honestly, for the most part, he was right, even though that was annoying, because Jake had this easy kind of confidence, which made it infinitely worse for everyone around him, because you can't even be mad at someone who's not even aware of how charming they are. Or maybe he was aware and just pretended not to be. Either way, same result.
Jake was doing well, Jake was having fun. He was, by every reasonable metric, absolutely fine. I mean, he was fine – until he decided to be on this friends-with-benefits situationship with you.
Here's the thing about friends with benefits, and you know how this goes, don't you? You've been there, or you know someone who has, or you've watched enough movies to understand the basic architecture of the disaster. It feels logical at the beginning, it feels like two adults making a mature, reasonable decision with full awareness of the consequences, which is almost always a sign that neither person has the faintest idea what they're actually getting into. You tell yourself you can keep things clean, you tell yourself you're not the kind of person who catches feelings over something casual. You tell yourself a lot of things at 21, and most of them are bullshit, but the thing is: you can see all of that coming, you can name every single red flag while it's happening in real time, and you still can't keep it in your pants. That's just the human condition, babe. And obviously, Jake Sim was not immune.
You were a year ahead of him, which at 21 felt like a significant and meaningful gap in the same way that six dollars feels like a lot of money when you're eight years old and then completely irrelevant the moment you grow up. But at the time it meant something, or at least, Jake told himself it did, because he needed a reason to keep things simple, and "she's older and she's got her life more together than I do" was a convenient enough excuse to file away in the back of his head and never really look at again. That should've been his first warning sign. Jake ignored it, because he was 21 and smart, remember?
He knew, on some level, that this was not going to be uncomplicated. And maybe that was the most honest thing about Jake – he didn't pretend he didn't know. He just decided he didn't care. Which, to be fair, is a very 21 year old thing to do, and also, if we're being honest, a very Jake thing to do.
But Jake is not 21 anymore. He is 24 now, which sounds like it's not that different, and in the grand scheme of things, it really isn't – three years is nothing. But the frat parties had lost their charm somewhere around year three of college, when he realized he'd been to enough of them to recognize the exact same playlist and the exact same drama playing out with slightly different people every single time. His liver had filed a formal complaint sometime in junior year and he'd actually listened to it, which was personal growth, honestly. He cared less about being in every room, cared less about showing up to every event, and less about performing the version of himself that he thought a 21 year old was supposed to be. He is a little bit more settled. Jake is still charming (still annoyingly so) but in a way that felt more like his actual personality and less like a habit.
The only thing that hadn't changed – and this is the part where Jake would probably prefer we didn't talk about, but we're going to anyway – was you. Specifically, this weird, comfortable, elastic thing that existed between the two of you that neither of you had ever sat down and properly defined, because defining it would require a conversation, and having that conversation would require one of you to be brave enough to go first, and neither of you had managed that yet. The dynamic was still the same: friends, technically, with all the benefits and none of the labels, which worked great on paper and was actively insane in practice.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's go back to the beginning.
Because the beginning is important and also kind of embarrassing, and Jake would tell you himself if he wasn't so committed to maintaining a certain image. The beginning starts when he was nineteen, maybe twenty, fresh enough into college that everything still felt enormous and consequential in a way that it really, objectively, wasn't. You ran in the same friend group, which sounds like it should make things easier except it didn't, because you had this presence about you that was not intimidating exactly, but more like the kind of person that everyone in the room was a little bit aware of without quite being able to explain why. Jake would later come to understand that this was just because you were genuinely funny and kind and the sort of person who remembered small details about people and asked about them later, honestly you just had a good personality, but when you're nineteen everything gets mystified beyond reason.
But, there was also the small, significant detail: you had a boyfriend.
His name was Yoongi, and he was older – a senior, maybe already graduated, the timeline was fuzzy – and at the time Jake had constructed an entire mythology around this guy based on approximately four interactions and one very intimidating eye contact across a crowded hallway. In reality, Yoongi was probably fine. In Jake's 19 year old brain, Yoongi was the final boss of a video game. You know how it is when you're that age, everything is heightened, everyone seems more powerful and more permanent than they actually are, and a slightly older guy dating the girl you've been trying not to stare at in group hangs becomes this enormous, immovable fact of the universe. Jake was not going to be weird about it. Jake was totally normal about it, actually.
The first time you two actually talked was at a party, of course. A proper college party, and Yoongi was there doing his whole thing (being mysteriously cool or whatever) and somehow he had ended up near Jake with a shot glass in hand and the very specific energy of someone who finds it entertaining to watch freshmen suffer. It was a hazing thing, one of those dumb tradition adjacent rituals that everyone knows is stupid and participates in anyway because the social pressure of a crowded room is genuinely one of the most powerful forces known to man. Yoongi handed Jake the shot with this completely unreadable expression, and Jake, because he was an idiot and also because you were somewhere nearby and nineteen-year-old boys will do genuinely unhinged things when they're trying to seem cool, took it without even asking what was in it.
Big mistake. Historic mistake. The kind of mistake that becomes a bit in the retelling. Because whatever was in that glass was absolutely not meant for human consumption at that volume, and Jake knew it approximately four seconds after swallowing, when the room did a thing rooms aren't supposed to do. He found a wall. He became one with the wall. And then suddenly there was a hand on his arm and a cup of water appearing in front of his face and a voice saying, "you need to drink this right now and also sit down, oh my god, are you okay?"
It was you. You stayed with him for a while, you got him water, you made him eat something, you were practical and a little exasperated in a way that felt weirdly maternal except not weird at all, and Jake sat there feeling like absolute garbage physically while also, somehow, feeling like the luckiest idiot at the party. You left when he was clearly going to survive the night and you gave him this look on the way out, the kind of look that says I saw this coming and I will not be elaborating further – and that was it. That was the whole interaction.
And Jake, because he was a disaster wrapped in a very appealing exterior, developed a crush immediately. Which, great, great news! Really excellent timing, since you were dating someone and that someone had just handed Jake the drink that nearly killed him, so the whole situation was already a little Shakespearean without adding unrequited feelings into the mix.
Having a crush on someone who's taken is its own specific kind of hell. You see them in group settings and you have to be normal about it. You hear their name and your brain does this annoying little thing. You watch them laugh at someone else's joke and you think, I could've said something funnier, which is insane and also definitely not the point. It's not heartbreak, it's more like a splinter small enough to ignore most of the time, present enough to be really fucking annoying. So Jake ignored it, mostly. He was good at that for a while, at least.
And when I say you think you're smarter than you really are at 21, I mean it in the most specific way possible, because Jake genuinely believed he was smart enough to just decide not to have a crush on you anymore. Like it was a setting he could toggle off or like feelings operated on some kind of rational opt-in system where you could just look at the situation, assess that it was inconvenient and counterproductive, and choose to feel something else instead. He told himself he'd gotten it out of his system, he told himself it was just a moment, just the water and the kindness and the fact that you'd looked at him like he was simultaneously the most pitiful and most entertaining thing you'd seen all week, and that was just a normal human response to someone being nice to you when you felt like death. Totally understandable and completely manageable.
Jake thought he was over it. Well, no, Jake was not over it. But he was, to his credit, respectful about it, which deserves acknowledgment, because being respectful about a crush you're pretending not to have while the person is in a relationship is genuinely harder than it sounds.
He didn't do anything weird or didn't hover. He was just Jake, friendly and easy and exactly the right amount of present, and the friendship between you two grew slowly and naturally in the way that friendships do when you share enough people and enough spaces that proximity eventually just becomes familiarity. Part of it was architecture, honestly – you were Jay's older sister, and Jay was close with Heeseung, and Heeseung was one of Jake's closest friends and his roommate and was also dating one of your closest friends, which is the kind of social tangle that somehow becomes the entire foundation of your social life for three years because that's just how friend groups work when you're in college and everyone is always in the same five locations.
So, yeah, Jake saw you around a lot. He got to know you better, the actual you, not the mythologized untouchable version he'd invented in his head in freshman year. And Jake liked you, genuinely, actually liked you, which was its own separate problem from the crush because it made the crush worse in a way that simple attraction never would have. He also, occasionally, saw you with Yoongi, which, well, he didn't love that. He wasn't going to make it a whole thing, but he didn't love it. Yoongi was fine, probably, Jake just thought he was deeply, profoundly wrong for you in ways he couldn't fully articulate and definitely wasn't going to examine too closely.
But Jake didn't spend those two years pining into the void. He had a life. He went out, he met people, he kissed girls at parties and went on dates that were sometimes good and sometimes awkward and sometimes both in quick succession. He even dated someone for four months and she was lovely, and it ended badly in the way that things end badly when two people are both doing their best but ultimately want completely different things and wait too long to admit it. He learned some things about himself and moved on with his life, which is what you're supposed to do, and he did it. He was genuinely actually doing it.
And then, on a completely unremarkable thursday afternoon when Jake was sitting on his couch doing nothing, something miraculous happened. You posted a photo. It was, and he means this with full awareness of how he sounds, a thirst trap of the highest order.
Jake saw it, sat with it for approximately three seconds, and then his brain did the thing brains do when they've been quietly keeping a file on something for two years – it connected the dots immediately and instinctively. Because you and Yoongi had been very much a unit for a long time, and this photo had a very specific energy that did not read as "person in a happy relationship," and Jake noticed, because he was paying attention in the way that people pay attention when they've been pretending not to pay attention for so long that the pretending has become its own full time job.
He went to your profile just to check out of curiosity. Because he was a normal person doing a normal thing. And every single photo with Yoongi was completely gone, which meant it wasn't an accident and it wasn't recent, it was deliberate. Jake put his phone down. He picked it up again. He put it down. He texted Heeseung.
The conversation that followed was, in Jake's own words, purely informational. He was just asking questions because he was curious, in a totally casual way. Heeseung, who had been friends with Jake long enough to see directly through every single layer of that framing, answered anyway, because he was a good friend and also because watching Jake try to be chill about something he was extremely not chill about was genuinely one of his favorite pastimes. Yes, you and Yoongi had broken up. No, Heeseung didn't know all the details. It had happened a few weeks ago, apparently. It was a quiet breakup, you know when long relationships sometimes end, in a mutual understanding that it had run its course, and then one day it's just over and you're taking photos off your instagram and posting thirst traps? Yeah, in that way.
Jake absorbed this information calmly and maturely. But then he also texted Jay, which was insane because Jay was your brother and therefore the least neutral possible source, but Jake had entered a particular mode of information gathering that had suspended his better judgement. Jay's response was approximately four words long and communicated very clearly that this was not a conversation he was interested in having with Jake specifically, which honestly is fair enough. Sunghoon was more helpful, he gave Jake exactly the information he asked for: yeah, you broke up because Yoongi was being a dick. And then Sunghoon looked at Jake for a long moment and said, "so what are you going to do about it," and Jake said, "nothing, I'm just asking," and Sunghoon made a face that communicated profound disbelief without saying another word.
But then, Jake realized something terrible but also incredibly awesome happened: You were single now. And you know what happens when a pretty girl is single, right? The radius expands overnight. Guys who had been perfectly respectful and well behaved for two years suddenly remembered that they had personalities and things to say, and they started saying them, loudly, in your direction, with this very specific energy of people who had been waiting for their window and were not going to waste it now that it had opened.
And you – and this is the part that was making Jake's life genuinely difficult – you were nice about it. You were nice about everything, that was the problem, you had this way of making people feel like they had a shot without ever actually saying anything that confirmed they had a shot, which is both an art form and a form of psychological warfare and you deployed it completely unconsciously, which somehow made it worse.
The conclusion Jake was slowly, painfully arriving at was that everyone had suddenly decided you were interesting, and he had been here, he had been here respectfully for two years, watching from a completely appropriate distance, and now all of a sudden it was fashionable. It felt deeply unfair in a way he couldn't logically justify and felt anyway. He'd been paying attention since before it was the thing to do, and now half the people he knew were acting like they'd just discovered something he'd been sitting with for ages, and it made him irrationally, disproportionately annoyed in a way that he expressed by being slightly quieter than usual and, also, going to the gym more.
So he watched, from his very appropriate and not-at-all-pathetic distance, as you went about your newly single life with the energy of someone who was doing genuinely great and wanted everyone to know it. And he didn't do anything about it, because what was he going to do? Walk up to you and say hey, so I've had a crush on you since you gave me water at a party two years ago while I was actively dying, want to grab coffee? No, obviously not. Jake Sim had many qualities and complete emotional recklessness was not traditionally one of them. So he did nothing, he just observed and he did nothing, and he told himself this was wisdom and not cowardice, and maybe it was a little of both.
He even ran into Yoongi once in the corridor, and the guy looked – well, not bad exactly, but he had that specific kind of distracted, slightly hollow look that people get when something ended and they haven't fully metabolized it yet. Jake recognized it because he'd had it himself after that one girl, and he felt a brief, involuntary flash of something that might have been sympathy before his brain reminded him of the context and he moved on. He did think, privately, that if he had somehow managed to have you and then let that go, he would probably also look like that in a university corridor on a wednesday. Honestly, Jake'd look worse, so he understood completely, he wasn't even mad at the guy. Well, actually, no – he was a little mad at the guy.
And then there was a party because of course there was a party, there's always a party. Nobody ever makes a monumentally stupid life decision at the campus library or over a quiet coffee place, because if they did this would be a romantic kind of story. And this story is about a lot of things but it is not a romance, and the fact that it consistently takes place in environments with bad lighting and worse decisions and 2000s pop hits should tell you everything you need to know about the choices being made here.
Jake was fine at this party. He was having a good time, talking to people, being his usual self, doing great. And then he saw you across the room talking to Sangwon, and something in his chest did something extremely inconvenient.
Sangwon was – okay, look, Jake could be objective about this. Sangwon was objectively attractive in this very specific way that Jake personally found annoying: the delicate, effortlessly pretty kind of attractive that read as completely unthreatening and therefore somehow more threatening than anything else. Tall-ish, soft looking, the kind of guy who probably had nice handwriting and remembered to water his plants. Girls today would call it twink energy – Jake wasn't entirely sure he was using that word right but he was about sixty percent confident it applied here, and the point was that Sangwon had it, and you were currently laughing at something Sangwon had said, and Jake was standing across a party watching this happen and feeling something he was not proud of feeling.
Jealousy is such a stupid emotion. It doesn't feel like the movies make it look! It's not this hot, dramatic surge of passion, it's more like a deeply irritating pressure behind your ribs that you can't breathe out properly. It makes you look across a room too many times and then feel embarrassed about looking and then look again anyway. It is, in summary, the worst, and Jake was full of it, and he was twenty-one years old and smart, so he made the extremely smart decision to do something about it.
He found the tequila.
If you have ever done tequila at a college party, you already know how this goes, I don't need to tell you. Tequila has this specific evil quality where it gives you confidence that feels completely real and is entirely fabricated, and the worst part is it feels indistinguishable from actual confidence until you're already three shots in and saying things out loud that were supposed to stay in your head. It's warm and it's fast and it makes you feel like the version of yourself that has everything figured out, which is exactly what Jake wanted to feel, and it worked, in the sense that he stopped feeling the jealousy quite so sharply and started feeling like a person with a plan. (Jake did not have a plan. Jake had tequila. These are not the same thing.)
He found you on the balcony, you were alone, leaning on the railing with your drink, looking out at nothing in particular. Jake walked over and stood next to you, and you glanced at him, and he opened his mouth and said:
"Do you think I'm a twink?"
You turned to look at him fully, almost choked on your drink. "I'm sorry," you said, "what?"
"A twink," he repeated, with the confidence of someone who had rehearsed this in his head and it had gone differently. "Do you think I am one."
"I heard you the first time, I just –" you stared at him for a second. "Where did that come from?"
"I'm just asking," he said. "I feel like it's a thing right now. Like girls are really into it."
You looked at him for a long moment with an expression that was doing several things at once. "Some girls," you said carefully, "are into that, yes."
"Are you?"
You tilted your head. "Why does that matter to you?"
"It doesn't," he said, very quickly, which was a terrible answer. "I'm just curious. About the demographic. Generally."
"About the demographic," you repeated.
"Yeah."
"Jake," you said, slowly, like you were choosing each word with intention, "you are the least twink person I have ever seen in my life."
"Okay but is that a bad thing."
"I didn't say it was a bad thing."
"You didn't say it was a good thing either."
You made a face that was fighting very hard not to become a smile. "What is happening right now? How much have you had to drink?"
"A normal amount," he said, which was a lie and you both knew it. "I'm just making conversation."
"You opened the conversation by asking me if you were a twink."
"It's a valid question."
"It's genuinely not," you said, and lost the fight with a smile, and there it was, that thing you did where your whole face shifted and Jake's brain momentarily stopped doing its job. You shook your head. "What are you actually trying to ask me, Jake?"
"I'm asking what you're into," he said, and it came out more direct than he intended, tequila smoothing over the part of his brain that normally installed a filter between what he thought and what he said. "Like. In general. What your type is."
You looked at him over the rim of your cup. There was something in your expression now that was different from the amusement, like more measured and more deliberate, like you were deciding something. "You're asking about my type," you said.
"Yeah."
"At a party."
"Yeah, we're at a party."
"After asking if you were a twink."
"I'm trying to get context," he said, with great dignity.
You laughed then, and looked away from him out in the dark, and Jake stood there next to you feeling like an idiot and also like things were going slightly better than he deserved given the circumstances. You were quiet for a second and then you said, without looking at him, "I don't really have a type."
"Come on, everyone has a type."
"Then maybe mine is just –" you paused, and glanced at him sideways, "– interesting."
Jake's brain was working on a response but the tequila had reorganized his priorities and for a second he just stood there looking at you looking at the city and thought, with extraordinary clarity: I am going to make so many bad decisions. "It's just," he started, and then stopped, and decided to just say it, because the tequila had apparently also reorganized his sense of self preservation. "You were talking to Sangwon in there and I kind of assumed you were into him. Like, into the whole twink thing he has going on."
You stared at him for a second then you laughed, and you tried to cover with your hand when it surprised you. "Jake," you said, "Sangwon is not only a twink. Sangwon is actually gay."
"Right," he said immediately. "Yeah. Obviously."
"Did you think he was hitting on me?!"
"I mean." He shifted his weight. "There's been a lot of that going around lately. It's not an insane assumption."
You turned toward him a little more, and there was something in your expression that was enjoying this more than was necessary. "You've been paying attention to who talks to me at parties?"
"No," he said, and then, because the tequila had completely destroyed his ability to maintain a coherent lie, "I mean. It's hard not to. You know, pay attention to you. Generally. That's – that's all I'm saying."
You were quiet for a second, looking at him with this expression he couldn't fully decode, and he became acutely aware that he had just said that out loud to your actual face with his actual mouth and there was no taking it back now. "Are you hitting on me?" you asked, and your voice was genuinely curious, not teasing, just asking.
"I think I might be," he said, "but I should be transparent that my execution is suffering because I've had a lot of tequila and I feel like I could've come at this with a much better angle sober."
You bit your lip and chuckled, and Jake watched you do it, and his brain said several things in quick succession that he chose not to act on. "You're cute, Jake," you said, and your voice had shifted into something more deliberate. "You're really cute."
And here's the thing – Jake had been called cute before. He had been called significantly more than cute before, by people who meant it and he had received it normally, like a human being. But something about you saying it, on this specific balcony, after this specific conversation, with that specific tone, completely short circuited whatever normal wiring he had for receiving compliments and he just stopped. Jake just stood there and just looked at you. His brain presented him with approximately three possible responses and then quietly took all of them off the table and left him with nothing, just this blank, slightly overwhelmed stillness, because he couldn't tell if you meant it or if this was just the thing you did, this friendly, warm, effortlessly charming thing that made everyone in your orbit feel special without any of them actually being special, and the possibility that he was just another guy on the list of guys you'd smiled at this month was enough to freeze every single instinct he had.
You watched him not respond for what was probably five seconds and felt like significantly longer. And then you laughed again and looked at him. "Okay," you said. "But you're clearly very drunk, so I genuinely can't tell if you're actually hitting on me or if this is just tequila being tequila."
"I'm trying to hit on you," he said, with more clarity than he'd managed in the last five minutes, because that part at least he was sure of. "I've been trying to for – that's a separate conversation. But I'm hitting on you. I'm just not being very good at it right now."
"No," you agreed pleasantly, "you're really not."
"Yeah I know."
You smiled at him, and then you looked down at your drink for a second, and when you looked back up there was something more open in your expression, like you'd made a small decision. "I've been posting on instagram for like three weeks," you said, very casually, "and I was kind of hoping you'd say something. Or do something. Or literally anything." You paused. "You never did."
Jake's brain processed this sentence. Then it processed it again. Then it took it apart and looked at each individual word to make sure he was understanding correctly. "Those photos were –"
"I mean, they were for me too," you said fairly. "But also a little bit for you to notice."
"I noticed," he said, immediately and with feeling.
"Well, I could see when you watched my stories." You said it without any particular accusation, just stating a fact, and Jake made a mental note to turn off his read receipts on instagram stories 30 seconds after they were posted. "I just thought you weren't interested. I figured you'd seen them and moved on."
There were so many things Jake could say to that, starting with the fact that he had absolutely not moved on, had not been moving on, had been doing the opposite of moving on for a frankly embarrassing amount of time, and also that he had literally asked Heeseung and Jay and Sunghoon for information about you like some kind of deranged private investigator, and none of that was going to come out of his mouth right now in a way that sounded good.
"Next time," you said, picking up your drink and pushing off the railing, "maybe drink a little less first and we can figure this out in a way that's slightly more coherent, yeah?"
You said it like it was simple, like it was already decided. Like the next time was a given, a scheduled thing, something that existed in the future that you were both just waiting to arrive at, and then you gave him one last look, the one he was starting to understand was specifically designed to make him lose his train of thought – and went back inside.
Jake stood on the balcony alone. He stood there for a while, by the way. She was posting for me, he thought, with the slow, dawning comprehension of someone receiving information his body couldn't immediately process. She was posting for me and I watched every single story and did absolutely nothing and she thought I wasn't interested. The tequila, which had felt like such a good idea two hours ago, was now sitting in his stomach like a personal insult. There had been a very clear, very explicit open door just now and he had stood in front of it and stared at it like an idiot while you held it open and eventually you'd gotten tired of waiting and closed it and gone back inside, and he had done nothing, nothing, chickened out completely, frozen up like someone had unplugged him.
The next morning, Jake was sitting on his kitchen floor with his back against the cabinet and a glass of water he'd been working on for forty minutes, trying to convince his body that survival was worth pursuing, when he told Heeseung and Sunghoon what happened. They laughed, hard.
"Wait, wait, wait," Heeseung said, holding up a hand, because he needed a second to process. "You opened with – you asked her if you were a twink."
"I was establishing context, dude," Jake said.
"What context? What context requires you to ask a girl if you're a twink?"
"I thought she was into Sangwon–"
"Bro, Sangwon is gay!"
"I know that now!"
Sunghoon had been quietly losing it since the twink part and had not fully recovered. He was sitting against the opposite cabinet with his legs stretched out, shaking his head slowly like a man confronting something he hadn't expected to encounter on a Saturday morning. "So you saw her talking to Sangwon," he said, walking through it, "got jealous, did tequila shots about it, went out to the balcony, and the first thing you said to her was do you think I'm a twink."
"When you say it like that–"
"How else is there to say it?"
"I was building up to something."
"To what? What was the twink question building up to?"
Jake drank his water and said nothing, which was answer enough. "And then," Heeseung continued, because apparently they weren't done, "she told you – she literally told you, with her mouth, using words – that she'd been posting on instagram for three weeks to get your attention. And you stood there."
"I was processing."
"Jake, what the hell is wrong with you, she handed you everything, she did everything except write it on a sign," Heeseung said.
"I panicked, dude, okay?" Jake said, with the quiet dignity of a man who had accepted his losses. "I didn't know if she meant it or if she was just being like that."
"Being like what?"
"You know how she is. She's like that with everyone. She makes everyone feel like–"
"She told you she was posting for you," Sunghoon said flatly. "That's not her being like that with everyone. That's her telling you specifically a thing about you specifically."
"I know."
Heeseung had migrated to the kitchen counter at some point and was sitting on it eating Jake's cereal, which he'd helped himself to without asking, which was normal, which was just what Heeseung did. He pointed the spoon at Jake. "Okay but what are you gonna do now."
"I don't know," Jake said. "Die, maybe."
"Tempting, but no," Sunghoon said. "You should text her."
"And say what?"
"Literally anything. Hey, sorry I malfunctioned, I like you, let's try this again."
"I can't say that."
"Why not?"
"Because it's–" Jake gestured vaguely at the air. "It's embarrassing."
"More embarrassing than asking a girl if you're a twink at a party?" Heeseung asked, genuinely curious.
Jake had no answer for that. Sunghoon stretched his arms above his head and said, in the tone of someone remembering something important, "also, unrelated, but I really hope she doesn't tell Jay about the twink thing. Or any of it, honestly. I don't know what he'd do with that information."
Oh, right. Yeah. That was also another thing entirely: your brother.
Look, Jay was one of Jake's closest friends. They had the kind of friendship that runs on shared history and the specific comfort of knowing someone well enough that you don't have to explain your references, and that is genuinely one of the most valuable things a person can have. Jake loved Jay. Jay was great. Jay was also, when it came to you, a little bit insane.
Jay wasn't the kind of brother who made issued warnings or anything that overt – he was too self aware for that, and also you were older than him, which he was fully cognizant of, and bringing up the age thing would've gotten him absolutely demolished and he knew it. But there was this thing Jay did, this very specific thing, where if someone made a comment about you – like if someone in the group said something offhand, like oh your sister's pretty funny or hey your sister was at that thing last night – Jay's face would do this extremely subtle shift, this microscopic recalibration, like running a quick background check on the speaker's intentions before deciding how to respond. He never said anything directly. He didn't have to, because the shift was enough.
Jake had witnessed this shift several times over the years and had been extremely careful to never be the cause of it, which meant he had spent a non-trivial amount of energy making sure that nothing he said about you, ever, in Jay's presence, could be interpreted as anything other than completely neutral. He had not said you were funny in a way that implied anything. He had not said your name with any particular emphasis. He had been, in this specific arena, disciplined in a way Jake was almost never disciplined about anything else.
The fact that he had been nursing a crush on you for two years was information that Jay did not have and that Jake had every intention of keeping that way, because the version of that conversation he played out in his head never ended in a way he liked. Jay wasn't irrational about it – he knew you were a grown woman who could do whatever you wanted – but there was a difference between knowing that intellectually and finding out that your close friend had been quietly down bad for your older sister since freshman year and had just drunkenly asked her if she found twinks attractive at a party. That was a specific combination of information that Jake did not feel ready to present to Jay at this time.
So when Jake saw Jay again later that evening, he was operating on two simultaneous hangovers: the physical one, which was tequila doing what it was supposed to, and the moral one, which was the specific psychic weight of having had an entire moment handed to him on a silver platter and having dropped the platter, the moment, and his dignity all at once.
The reason he had to look Jay in the face that evening was because Heeseung – his best friend, his roommate, the person who knew everything and had spent the morning laughing at him – had invited everyone over to play NBA 2K, because Heeseung had the emotional intelligence to understand that the best thing for Jake right now was probably to be around people and not sitting alone in his room refreshing your instagram profile, and also because Heeseung just genuinely wanted to play NBA 2K and this was a convenient excuse. Both things were true. That was Heeseung.
Jay showed up at seven with beer and absolutely zero indication on his face that he knew anything about twinks or balconies or his sister telling Jake she'd been posting for him for three weeks. They played for a while and talked shit, the party came up because parties always come up the day after, there's always a debrief, always someone who saw something or heard something or made a decision that needs to be collectively processed.
"Honestly solid party," Sunghoon said, not looking up from his controller. "Better than the last one."
"The last one was terrible," Jay agreed. "Fucking Beomgyu didn't even mind opening the window before making his apartment feel like a hot sauna after smoking 3 tons of weed."
"There was a balcony at least," Heeseung said. "Too much tequila, but a balcony."
Jake said nothing. Sunghoon did not look at him. Heeseung did not look at him. They were both being very normal about this. "Oh, Jay, by the way," Heeseung said, with the casual tone of someone who had absolutely planned this segue, "my girlfriend told me your sister was excited to go, said she seemed like she was having a good time."
Jay made a sound that was half acknowledgment, half something more affectionate that he would've denied if you'd pointed it out. "Yeah, she needed it, honestly. She's been kind of in her own head since the Yoongi thing, I think it was good for her to just go out and not think about it."
"How's she doing with all that?" Heeseung asked, with the perfectly calibrated innocence of a man doing Jake an enormous favor and knowing it.
Jake kept his eyes on the screen. Jay shrugged, the loose kind of shrug that means I've thought about this enough to have an answer ready. "She's good, actually. Better than I expected," he paused. "As far as I know she hasn't hooked up with anyone or whatever, she told me she didn't want anything serious for a while and honestly, I'd be the same way."
"Totally makes sense," Heeseung said, nodding like this was a general philosophical point and not targeted intelligence.
"Mm," Jake said, contributing nothing, which was the correct amount. Sunghoon glanced at him for exactly half a second and then back at the screen. Jake felt it anyway.
Jake lay on his bed that night staring at the ceiling with the specific stillness of someone whose brain is moving very fast. Okay, you didn't want anything serious. And well, you'd said it yourself, to your own brother, which meant you meant it, as an actual position you'd taken on your own life after thinking it through. That's okay, that's valid, honestly. But you had also told him, on a balcony, twelve hours ago, that you'd been posting on instagram for three weeks hoping he'd notice. Which meant you'd noticed him, at some point, enough to want him to notice back, which meant something. He wasn't sure exactly what shape that something was, but it existed, it had been confirmed by your own mouth, and it sat alongside the other thing (the not wanting anything serious thing) in a way that felt less like a contradiction and more like information. Like two coordinates that, taken together, pointed somewhere specific.
Jake'd spent the whole weekend in this horrible intermediate state of wanting to text you and talking himself out of it on a loop, going back and forth, and eventually he'd landed on not texting you, which was a decision he'd made approximately eleven times and kept having to remake every hour or so. He would text you eventually but that was a problem for future Jake. Future Jake would handle it. He had no idea when future Jake was showing up exactly, but present Jake was not equipped and needed more time and also more water.
Future Jake, he thought, was going to have to get his shit together pretty soon. And future Jake saw you on Wednesday, which he had not planned and was not ready for in any capacity. He'd just come out of basketball practice, which, okay, look, Jake played recreationally with a group of guys and it was one of his favorite parts of the week, except for right now, because right now he was standing in the corridor outside the gym in a sweaty tank top with his hair doing something he couldn't see but could feel, smelling like a person who had just done significant physical activity in an enclosed space. He was, by every possible measure, not looking like someone who was prepared to have a conversation with a girl he'd almost-but-not-quite made a move on four days ago while drunk on tequila at a party.
You were coming from the other direction, you saw him before he had any real chance to do anything about how he looked, which was fine, it was totally fine, it was just – he would've liked a second, that's all. "Hey, Jake," you said like nothing was weird, like you were just two people who ran into each other in a corridor, which technically you were but also, come on.
"Hey," he said, and shifted the strap of his bag on his shoulder, which did nothing for the overall situation but gave his hands something to do.
You slowed down without fully stopping and your eyes did this thing where they went from his face down to – look, he was wearing a tank top, that's just context, that's just what he was wearing, but the way you looked at him was not nothing, and he clocked it immediately, and then he clocked that he'd clocked it, and he had to work very hard to keep his face doing something normal. "Basketball?" you asked.
"Yeah. Just finished."
"I can tell," you said, pleasantly.
"Is that a nice way of saying I smell."
"I didn't say that." You were smiling, just a little. "You look good though."
The thing about you was that you said things like that completely straight, not like a joke and not like a big deal, just as a casual, factual observation, and that was so much more effective than if you'd made it into a thing, and you probably knew that, and that was genuinely evil of you. Jake decided the only reasonable response was to match your energy and not make it weird. "I feel disgusting," he said.
"That's fine. You don't look like it."
"You're being very nice to me considering the last time we talked I asked you about twinks."
You laughed at that, a quick one, and stopped walking properly, which meant this was now a real conversation and not a corridor pass-by, and some part of Jake's brain quietly celebrated while the rest of him stayed focused on being a normal human person. "I've been thinking about that," you said, "and I've decided it's one of the best things anyone's ever opened with."
"That's a low bar."
"It really is," you agreed. "But you cleared it." He laughed despite himself, because that was the thing about talking to you – it was just easy, even when it shouldn't have been, even when there was all this other stuff underneath it. "So," you said, head tilting slightly, "you never texted me."
"Should I have texted you?"
"Well, I thought you were going to."
"I'm a thorough person. I was figuring some stuff out."
You looked at him for a second with that expression that meant you were deciding how far to push it, and then you said, "and did you figure it out?"
"Getting there," he said, which was true in the sense that he was standing here having this conversation instead of watching your stories from a safe distance, which was progress, technically. And look, Jake was not exactly proud of what he said next. I mean, he was proud of it, very much so, he just couldn't believe he actually had said it without thinking about it first, but he said it anyway: "Are you free tonight?"
You blinked at him in the way of someone who had been expecting the conversation to go one direction and watched it go another, and were recalibrating in real time. There was a second, just a beat, where you looked at him and then something in your face settled and you said, "yeah, I am."
"Okay, cool," he said, with a confidence he was mostly performing. "Give me like twenty minutes to shower and we can do something, if that's fine."
"Sure," you said, and the corner of your mouth did the thing. "I'll wait."
So you waited outside while Jake went back into the locker room, and yeah I know, the locker room situation was not ideal, because it was still mostly full of guys from his session who were in various stages of packing up and being loud about it, and Jake had to navigate all of that while also internally processing the fact that you were standing outside waiting for him, which was a sentence he hadn't expected to be true today when he woke up this morning. He found a free shower, turned it on, and stood under it trying to organize his thoughts into something resembling a plan.
Jake had no plan. He had asked you if you were free tonight with the energy of someone who had a plan and he absolutely did not. He didn't know where you were going, didn't know what doing something meant in this specific context, didn't know if this was a hang or a date or something in between that didn't have a clean name yet. He was showering at a speed that was not fully compatible with actually getting clean and he was also having what could generously be described as a mild internal crisis, which was a lot to do simultaneously.
He was out in eleven minutes, and that was a personal record and also probably not great for his hair but there was nothing to be done about that now. You were where he'd left you, on your phone leaning against the wall, and you looked up when he came out and you looked at him for just a second before saying anything. "There's a bar near the east exit," he said, because he'd spent eleven minutes in the shower and that was the one concrete thought he'd produced. "They have good beer and it's not too loud."
"Yeah, I know that place," you said, pushing off the wall. "Let's go."
That was the whole planning process, Jake had produced one idea and you'd accepted it and now you were walking side by side toward a bar on a wednesday evening and he still had no idea what this was.
Here's the thing about a first whatever-this-was with someone you've been down bad for – you spend the whole time doing two things at once, which is actually being there and having a good time, and also running this constant background process trying to figure out what category the evening falls into. Like, is this a date? It felt like a date in the sense that you were there and he wanted to be there and there was a thing between you that both of you were aware of. But it also felt like two people getting a beer after running into each other, which is just a normal human activity with no inherent romantic weight. The not knowing is its own specific kind of torture because you can't calibrate how to act. If it's a date you can be a certain way. If it's not a date you have to be a different way. If it's somewhere in between you just have to pick one and hope. Jake picked somewhere in between and hoped.
You talked, and it was good, it was easy in the way that talking to you was always easy even when it was also making him insane. You talked about the semester, about a class you were taking that you hated but couldn't drop for scheduling reasons, about something stupid that had happened in your friend group that week that he'd heard a partial version of from Heeseung and now got the full story on. He told you about basketball, about a guy on his team who took recreational sports way too personally and made everyone's day slightly worse for it. You laughed at that and added something from your own experience and the conversation just kept going the way good conversations do where you don't feel the time passing until you look up and realize it has.
The whole time, his brain was doing the background thing. Because on one hand you were sitting across from him at a bar table being funny and warm and looking like that, and on the other hand Jay had said clearly that you didn't want anything serious, and you'd said it yourself apparently, to your own brother, which was not a thing you say casually. And this was a beer on a Wednesday. Was a beer on a Wednesday serious? By most definitions, no. But you'd also posted thirst traps for him on instagram and told him about it to his face, which was not something you did with someone you thought of as just a friend getting a beer on a wednesday. So what was it then? What was the correct interpretation of all available data? Jake ran the numbers and kept getting different answers and at some point gave up and just looked at you instead, which was the better use of his time anyway.
You were on your second beer when you nudged his foot under the table with yours, just lightly, and said, "you know, you really did just completely ignore every single photo I posted."
"I was being respectful."
You looked at him with an expression that was somewhere between amused and genuinely baffled. "Respectful," you repeated.
"Yeah, you know, I didn't want to just slide into your stories two weeks after you broke up with someone, that feels weird, that's a weird thing to do."
"Okay but who told you I wanted respectful?"
Jake opened his mouth and then closed it because that was a very good question and he didn't have a great answer to it. You were looking at him with this expression that was patient in the way that people are patient when they've already made a decision and are just waiting for the other person to catch up to it, and Jake sat there for a second genuinely recalibrating, because there was a version of you he'd built in his head over two years and it was accurate in a lot of ways but apparently had been missing some information. Specifically this information. The who told you I wanted respectful information.
"I was trying to read the situation," he said finally.
"And what did the situation tell you?"
"That you'd just gotten out of something long and probably needed time."
"I'd had plenty of time," you said, easy as anything, taking a sip of your beer. "The last few months of that relationship were not exactly great, Jake, I wasn't as blindsided as everyone assumed."
Jake was doing a full system reboot. Because there was the version of this he'd been preparing for, and that involved being careful and measured and not pushing too fast because you'd just ended something serious and probably needed space, and then there was the version that was apparently actually happening, which was you sitting across from him telling him that you'd had plenty of time and nobody had asked him to be respectful about it. And those were two very different versions with very different implications and Jake was standing at the crossroads between them trying to figure out which road he was actually on.
What he landed on, quietly, in the back of his head, was that he'd maybe underestimated you a little. He'd been so busy being careful around the idea of you that he hadn't fully accounted for the actual you, who was sitting here being pretty straightforward about what she wanted and had been this whole time, and he'd been the one making it complicated. Which was funny, sort of. Kind of embarrassing, sort of. Did it make things better or worse, knowing that? He genuinely didn't know. Better, probably, in the sense that it clarified things. Worse, possibly, in the sense that he now had significantly less reason to stall and significantly more reason to do something about this, which meant the next move was on him and he was going to have to actually make it.
He looked at you across the table. You looked back at him, completely unbothered, like you had nowhere else to be and no particular investment in how long this took. And then Jake did something he genuinely hadn't planned, which was becoming a theme with you. He looked at the space next to you on the booth seat, looked at you, and said "can I sit there?" with the energy of someone who had made a decision approximately one second before the words came out.
You looked at the space, looked at him, and said "yeah, sure" like it was a stupid question.
So he sat down next to you, close enough that your arms were touching, and he put his arm along the back of the booth behind your shoulders in the way that is technically not putting your arm around someone but is absolutely putting your arm around someone, and you let him, and you turned your head to look at him with this expression that was patient and a little amused and something else underneath that that Jake was trying very hard not to read too much into. He looked at you for a second. Then he said, "what do you want, Y/N?"
You raised an eyebrow. "I thought I'd made that pretty clear."
"You have," he said. "I just want to hear it."
"Seriously?"
"Yes, please."
You looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone deciding whether to find this charming or annoying, and Jake held the eye contact and did the thing – he knew he was doing it, he was fully aware, this was a conscious deployment – where he looked at you like that, a little helpless, a little earnest, the face that had gotten him further in life than he was entirely proud of but that worked, consistently, empirically, and he was not above using it right now.
You saw it, and he could tell you saw it because something in your expression shifted. "Well," you said, and your voice had dropped just enough that he felt it, "I want you."
Jake's brain received that sentence and did several things with it at once, the main one being a kind of full-body recalibration that he had to keep off his face, and then it handed him back one clear thought which was: okay, do something, do it now, you have been waiting two years for a version of this moment and she just handed it to you on a plate so for the love of god do not stand there like an idiot again.
He didn't. Jake closed the distance and kissed you, and Jake had kissed people before, he had a functional amount of experience, this was not new territory, but the first second of kissing you was still enough to make his brain go briefly offline in a way that was embarrassing and also completely out of his control. And then your hand came up and grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling slightly, like you knew exactly what you were doing and were in no particular hurry about it, and that was – yeah, okay, that was new information, that was the kind of thing that reorganized a person's entire understanding of a situation. You kissed him back like you'd thought about it, which apparently you had, which was a concept Jake was going to need some time to fully process.
Your lips parted against his and Jake felt the soft slide of your tongue just barely teasing the seam of his mouth. He made a low, helpless sound he didn't even mean to make and opened for you, and the second he did you took it, kissing him deeper, hotter, like you'd been waiting two years too and you were done being patient. The booth was small and the angle was awkward and none of it mattered because you were kissing him hard, harder than Jake thought you would. Jake's hand found your waist, sliding under the hem of your top without thinking, and you made this little approving hum against his mouth that short-circuited half his brain.
You smiled into the kiss, clearly pleased with yourself, and then one of your hands left his shirt and slid up the side of his neck with your fingers threading into the hair at the back of his head, nails scraping lightly. The shiver that ran through him was so obvious there was no hiding it. Jake pulled back after a moment, not far, just enough to look at you, because he'd waited long enough that he felt like he'd earned the right to look at you for a second. "Fuck," he said. "Okay."
You pulled back just enough to look at him. "What?"
"I wasn't expecting this today," he said.
You looked at him for a second with that expression that was doing several things at once and then you said, "well, it's still better than the time you asked me if I thought you were a twink."
Jake laughed, and so did you, and then somehow you were kissing again and the twink conversation was the last thing either of you were thinking about.
You kissed a lot that night. And then, because apparently one night was just the beginning of a much longer pattern neither of you officially agreed to, you kissed a lot over the next three years. That's not a metaphor for anything, that's just literally what happened: you and Jake kissed in a lot of places over a lot of time and it never quite resolved into something clean and it never quite went away either, and that combination of things is basically the entire story, condensed.
But let me give you the highlights, because the highlights are worth it.
There was the time in the library, second floor, which should've been a terrible idea and was, but the terribleness of it didn't occur to either of you until after, which is usually how it goes. There was a rooftop at a party and it felt significant enough that Jake remembered what clothes you were wearing, there was also a cab home from somewhere, and you'd fallen asleep on his shoulder and he'd stayed completely still the entire time like an idiot so he wouldn't wake you up. There was his kitchen at seven in the morning, you in his hoodie, him making coffee badly, and the specific kind of easy that existed between you two in the mornings that he tried very hard not to think too much about because thinking about it led places he wasn't sure he was allowed to go.
And it wasn't just kissing, to be clear. This is a story about friends with benefits and we're all adults here, so, yeah. It was more than that, it was a lot more than that, and it was good, consistently, annoyingly good, the kind of good that makes it harder to keep things in the category you've agreed to keep them in. Jake was aware of this problem. He noted it. He filed it away and took it out occasionally and looked at it and put it back, because what else was he going to do with it?
Because here's where it got complicated, or more complicated, or a different flavor of complicated than it had already been: every time things got a little more real, a little more weight to them, a little more like something that had a name and a shape and a future – you disappeared. One day the texts would slow down, or you'd be busy, or you'd show up to the same group hang and be perfectly warm and perfectly normal and perfectly distant in a way that only he could tell was distance because he knew the other version of you, the close one, and the difference was noticeable if you were paying attention and he was always paying attention.
And every single time, without fail, Jake would feel it coming the way you feel a change in pressure before it rains, and he'd think, with the tired resignation of someone who has been through this enough times to recognize the opening notes: aw shit, here we go again.
Jake could not do this, and he knew it, but he did it anyway. There were moments where he'd lie there and wonder how long a person could exist in something undefined before it started to cost too much. He never landed on an answer. He'd fall asleep and wake up and you'd text him something funny and the question would go back in the drawer where it lived.
But that's all later. That's the three years of it, the accumulated weight of a thing that was never fully named and therefore never fully dealt with. That's twenty-four year old Jake's problem, and we'll get there.
Right now, tonight, it's still that bar, and you've just kissed him for the first time and none of the rest of it has happened yet. And he's not thinking about patterns yet, he just knows that you're here and he finally did something about it and your lip gloss is slightly smudged and you're pretending not to notice and honestly, for right now, that's good enough. It was good enough for a while, actually.
But you know what was really good? What happened between you two later that night.
After the bar closed out and the tab was paid and you were both a little buzzed and grinning like idiots, Jake finally got his shit together enough to say it out loud. He was like, "hey, Heeseung's not home tonight… you wanna come over?" and he said it so casual but his ears went bright red, which was hilarious because you could tell he'd been thinking about it the whole walk to the car. You just raised an eyebrow at him and said "yeah, obviously" and that was it. Heeseung could not find out, like, ever, so the empty apartment was basically a gift from the universe as far as Jake was concerned.
The second the door shut behind you guys he was already kissing you again, hands a little shaky on your waist, but you took over pretty quick. You pushed him back toward his room without even asking which one was his, and the whole time he was muttering stuff like "fuck, this feels good" under his breath. You laughed at him, soft and mean in the best way, and once you got him on the bed you climbed right on top and started peeling his shirt off.
And here's the part that still cracks Jake up when he thinks about it: Jake had always figured he was pretty normal in bed, you know? Take charge, make the girl feel good, the usual. But the second you pinned his wrists down and told him "don't move" he just… folded. Like instantly, eyes wide, breathing all shaky, looking up at you like you'd hung the moon and also maybe ruined him forever. He didn't even realize it was happening until you were grinding down on him slow and he let out this pathetic little whimper and you smiled like you'd won the lottery.
You kept teasing him, hands everywhere but never quite where he wanted, and every time he tried to touch you you'd just push his arms back down and go "uh-uh, ask nicely." He actually whined, and when you finally let him speak he was all cracked voice going "please… fuck, please touch me" and you made him say it again, louder, like he was begging for it. He did. He did it twice. Looked so embarrassed and so turned on at the same time it was actually kind of beautiful. You kept calling him good boy in that low voice and every time you did his brain just shorted out more. He was legit acting like a puppy, pressing up into your hand, following every little movement you made with his hips, mumbling "please, please, I'll be good" while you rode him slow enough to make him lose his mind.
When you finally let him come he buried his face in your neck and shook the whole time, arms wrapped around you so tight like he was scared you'd disappear if he let go. Afterward you just lay there on his chest, both of you sweaty and laughing a little because yeah, neither of you expected it to go down quite like that. Jake kept saying "fuck, that felt so fucking good–" and you'd just kiss him and tell him to shut up and enjoy it.
So the morning after, Jake woke up and reached over without thinking about it, the way you do when you fell asleep next to someone and your body just assumes they're still there, and they weren't. You were gone. The bed was cold on your side, which meant you hadn't just gotten up, you'd been gone for a while, and Jake lay there for a second staring at where you were supposed to be processing that information with the dawning comprehension of someone whose brain hadn't fully booted yet.
He looked for a note. There was no note. He checked his phone, there was no text. He got up and did a lap of the apartment like you might've just migrated to the living room, which you hadn't, and then he ended up in the kitchen where the only evidence that you'd ever been there at all was a glass in the drying rack next to the sink washed. You'd gotten up, gotten dressed, had a glass of water, washed the glass, and left, and Jake stood there in his kitchen at eight in the morning naked looking at a clean glass like it had personally wronged him.
He was, to be direct about it, a little pathetic that week. Not in a way that anyone else would've necessarily noticed, he kept it mostly internal, but he was going over the previous night on a loop with the specific energy of someone trying to figure out if they'd misread something, except he didn't think he'd misread it, he was pretty sure he hadn't misread it, but then why was there a clean glass in the drying rack and no text and no note and nothing. He waited two days, which felt like a reasonable amount of time to not seem insane, and then texted you: hey. had a really good time the other night.
You responded six hours and forty two minutes later. He was not counting, he just happened to notice. You said: me too, sorry been swamped with coursework this week, how are you?
How are you? Okay, normal, friendly, completely unreadable. He stared at that text for an embarrassing amount of time trying to extract information from it that probably wasn't there. You texted back and forth for a bit after that and it was fine, it was good actually, you were funny and easy to talk to like always, but it had this quality of a conversation between two friends catching up, and Jake kept waiting for some acknowledgment of the thing that had happened (you literally had called him a good boy and he came and he couldn't stop thinking about it) so he expected at least some small signal, but it never came. You were warm but you were also just normal, and Jake couldn't tell if that was you being cool about it or you genuinely treating it as a casual thing that didn't require any particular follow up, and not knowing which one it was made him feel insane.
He took a step back after that, more like a self preservation instinct kicking in before he did something embarrassing like double text you about your feelings. He told himself it was fine, casual was fine, he could do casual. He was a 21 year old guy, casual was supposed to be his native language. He was completely miserable about it, but quietly, which he felt was at least dignified.
Heeseung noticed, but Jake had made a decision to keep this one close to his chest for a while, at least until he understood what it was, so every time Heeseung gave him that look Jake just said he was tired or stressed about school and Heeseung let it go with the patience of someone who knew he'd find out eventually and was willing to wait.
Heeseung found out on tuesday. Jake was on the couch doing something on his laptop when he heard the front door open harder than necessary and Heeseung came in with the specific energy of someone who had just received information and had walked home with it at an elevated pace. He looked at Jake. Jake looked at him. "You absolute dick," Heeseung said. "Why didn't you tell me you hooked up with Y/N?"
Jake didn't know how Heeseung got that information. Jake was shocked. Jake closed his laptop. "How did you– I– I didn't know if I was supposed to."
"What does that even mean?!"
"It means I didn't know what it was yet and I didn't want to make it into a thing by telling people."
"I'm not people, I'm me," Heeseung said, dropping his bag on the floor with the energy of a man deeply personally offended. "Also you forgot that she's one of my girlfriend's best friends, so I was going to find out regardless, and instead I had to find out from her like an idiot keeping secrets."
"I wasn't keeping secrets, I was just–"
"You told me about the twink thing in real time," Heeseung said, pointing at him, "like I got a full play by play of the twink conversation the morning after, but then something actually happens and you go completely silent?"
Jake opened his mouth and then closed it because that was a fair point. "I didn't know what she wanted," he said, which was the honest answer. "She left in the morning without saying anything and then texted me like everything was normal and I couldn't figure out if it meant something or nothing and I didn't want to tell you and then have it be nothing."
Heeseung looked at him for a long moment and then came and sat down on the other end of the couch with slightly less aggression than he'd entered with. "Okay," he said. "That's actually a real reason."
"Thank you."
"Still should've told me."
"Yeah, okay, sorry."
Heeseung picked up Jake's abandoned throw pillow and held it for a second and then threw it at him anyway, not hard, more ceremonial. Jake caught it. They sat there for a second in the way that they did when a conversation had finished being an argument and was transitioning into something more useful. "For what it's worth," Heeseung said, in the tone he used when he was relaying information he'd been given permission to relay, "from what my girlfriend said, it sounds like she had a good time."
Jake looked at him. "What?"
"That's what I'm told."
"Did she say anything else?"
"I'm not a messenger service dude," Heeseung said, but he was almost smiling, which meant there probably was more and he was choosing not to give it up yet, which was an absolutely classic Heeseung move. Jake threw the pillow back at him.
"You're useless," Jake said.
"I'm extremely useful actually," Heeseung said. "You're just impatient."
Which was true. Jake was very impatient, and also still confused, and also still thinking about you calling him a good boy, and also apparently you'd had a good time, which meant something, even if he wasn't sure yet what it meant or where it went from here. It was a start, Jake figured. A weird, inconclusive, slightly maddening start, but still.
The first time Jake saw you after that night was at Jay's place, which was, in terms of ideal settings for navigating whatever the hell was happening between you two, pretty much dead last on the list.
He'd gone over with Sunghoon and Heeseung on the weekend and Jake had shown up expecting a normal saturday, maybe some games, maybe they'd order food later, nothing that required him to be mentally prepared for anything. And then Jay opened the door and Jake walked in and saw you sitting on the couch next to Sunoo, and you were wearing this little top that kept riding up just a little every time you moved and those jeans that sat low on your hips and hugged your ass in a way that made his brain immediately supply very unhelpful memories and very difficult to immediately look somewhere else, which he did, eventually, after approximately two seconds too long.
You looked up at the same time he looked away, which meant you definitely caught him, which meant you knew exactly what those two seconds were, and you just smiled and looked back at whatever you and Sunoo were talking about like absolutely nothing had happened.
The thing was, you were subtle about it in a way that was actually not subtle at all, it was just subtle enough that no one else was catching it. You weren't doing anything obvious, you'd say something to the group and let your eyes land on him a beat longer than necessary. Or you'd laugh at something and angle yourself slightly in his direction. Or you'd reach across the coffee table for something so your top pulled tight across your chest, or cross your legs in a way that made the seam of those jeans shift against your thighs. Every little movement felt deliberate, like you were putting on a private show just for him in a room full of people who had no idea. He'd catch the movement in his peripheral vision and have to actively redirect his attention back to whatever conversation he was supposed to be in. It was a very specific, very targeted kind of casual, and Jake was losing his mind about it while maintaining a completely normal facial expression, which was one of the more athletically demanding things he'd done recently.
At one point Jay said something to him directly and Jake had to ask him to repeat it because he'd been looking at the TV but actually thinking about absolutely nothing related to the TV, and Jay gave him a mildly suspicious look and said "are you good?" and Jake said "yeah, sorry, tired" which was the same excuse he'd been using for weeks and was starting to wear thin. Sunghoon, from his spot on the floor, did not look at Jake. He was very pointedly not looking at Jake in the specific way that meant he was fully aware of everything that was happening and had chosen to be Switzerland about it, which Jake both appreciated and found slightly irritating.
Heeseung was on the other couch next to his girlfriend, who was next to you, and at one point his girlfriend said something to you quietly and you laughed and glanced over at Jake for just a second and he caught it and then had to pretend he hadn't caught it, and he looked at Heeseung with an expression that said please help me and Heeseung looked back with an expression that said you're on your own, buddy.
Eventually you got up to go to the kitchen and on your way back you stopped right next to his armchair, leaned down slowly to grab your phone from the side table, and your body was suddenly so close he could smell your perfume. You looked right at him for a second, lips curved like you were enjoying this way too much, and asked the room in the most innocent voice, "Has anyone decided what we're doing for food?" and Jake stared straight ahead at the TV like a man who had seen god and was not ready to discuss it.
"Pizza?" Sunoo offered.
"Pizza it is. Okay, I'm ordering right now. I'll go down and grab it when it gets here," you said, straightening up. "Jake, you can come with me so I'm not carrying it alone."
It was said so casually. Just a totally normal thing to say. Nobody in the room looked up. Jake said "yeah, sure" in a voice that was completely regular and betrayed nothing and then went back to looking at the TV.
The elevator ride down was eleven floors. Jake stood on one side and you stood on the other and it was fine for approximately four seconds and then you looked at him and smiled, not the group hang smile, the other one, the one that meant something specific, and he looked back at you and thought about the clean glass in the drying rack and the six hour forty two minute text response and how you'd spent the entire afternoon driving him insane in a room full of his friends and your brother.
The doors opened at the lobby and you both went and got the pizza and on the way back to the elevator you were walking close enough that your arms kept almost touching, and he held the elevator door open for you and you walked in and he let the doors close and before the elevator had even started moving he said, "what the hell are you doing?"
You turned to look at him with an expression of absolute, practiced innocence. "What?"
"You know what."
"I really don't," you said, which was a complete lie delivered with complete confidence, and you said sweetly, stepping a little closer even though there was plenty of space. Your eyes dropped to his mouth for a second, then back up and somehow you were still managing to seem like the most irritating and attractive person he'd ever encountered in his life. "I just asked you to help me carry pizza, Jake."
"That's not –" he stopped and looked at you. You looked back at him, waiting. "You've been doing that thing all afternoon."
"What thing?"
The elevator was moving, seven floors to go. "You know what thing."
"I genuinely don't know what you're talking about," you said.
Jake looked at the elevator doors then back at you. "You're going to get me killed by your brother," he said.
"Jay's not going to do anything to you."
"You don't know that."
"I know Jay," you said. "He'll be annoying about it for like two weeks and then he'll get over it."
Jake stared at you. "That implies there's something for him to get annoyed about."
"Isn't there?" you said, and the elevator doors opened on Jay's floor, and you walked out with the pizza like that sentence hadn't just happened, and Jake stood there for a second before the doors started to close and he had to stick his arm out to stop them.
And what happened between you two that night was, in Jake's words, the best sex he'd ever had.
After everyone said their goodbyes at Jay's and the group started splitting up, you turned to him with the sweetest, most innocent little smile and asked, "Jake, can you give me a ride home? I don't feel like taking an Uber this late." He just nodded, trying to look normal, and said "yeah, sure" while Sunghoon and Heeseung gave him one last knowing side eye. The car ride was quiet at first, but the second you two pulled up in front of your building you looked over at him and said, "Come up for a bit?"
Jake didn't even pretend to hesitate. Your apartment was cute as hell, by the way. Soft lighting, a big comfortable looking puff in the corner that screamed "perfect for sitting and getting straddled," and a whole shelf full of those little Hirono figures lined up like a tiny army watching everything. He was still busy scanning the place, smiling at how it was so you, when you decided you'd waited long enough. The second the door clicked shut you were on him.
You grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and pulled him into a kiss that was anything but innocent, even a little bit desperate, tongue immediately sliding against his. Jake made a surprised sound into your mouth but kissed you back just as hard, hands finding your waist. "I couldn't stop thinking about you since last time," you breathed against his lips, biting his bottom one right after. "Kept remembering how pretty you sounded begging." Jake let out a low chuckle, the smugness creeping in now that he wasn't trapped in an elevator with you. He walked you backwards until your back hit the wall, pressing his body against yours.
"Oh really?" he murmured, voice dropping. His hand slid down to grip your ass, squeezing hard. "You spent all afternoon teasing the shit out of me in front of your brother and now you're admitting you were horny the whole time?"
You grinned, and rolled your hips against him. "Maybe. What are you gonna do about it?"
He kissed you again, slower this time but filthier, tongue licking into your mouth while he pinned you harder against the wall. When he pulled back just enough to speak, his lips brushed yours. "I think I'm gonna make you beg this time," he said. "Since you had so much fun with me the other night."
You laughed softly but there was a challenge in it. "Good luck with that, Jakey."
"Yeah?" He slipped his thigh between your legs, pressing up just right, and you couldn't stop the little gasp that escaped. "You've been acting like such a fucking brat all day. You wanted me worked up, didn't you?"
You rolled your hips against his thigh again and looked him straight in the eyes. "Yeah, I did," you said, voice already a little unsteady. "I kept thinking about how you'd look trying to hide it in front of everyone. It was hot."
Jake's expression shifted, something hungrier crossing his face and he didn't answer with words. Instead he grabbed your waist, turned you and pushed you back onto the bed in one quick motion. You landed on the mattress with a soft bounce, and before you could push yourself up he was already over you, knees bracketing your hips, one hand catching both your wrists and pinning them above your head against the pillow. He leaned down close, mouth right next to your ear, voice low. "You really like pushing me, yeah?" His free hand pushed your top up slowly, fingers dragging over your skin.
You tugged at your wrists just to test him, but he held them firm. A shiver ran through you when he kissed down the side of your neck, open mouthed and wet, then sucked lightly under your jaw. "Jake…" you started, but he cut you off by pressing his thigh between your legs again, this time with more pressure.
"Tell me what you were thinking about," he murmured against your collarbone. "When you were teasing me in front of your brother. Be honest."
You bit your lip, trying to keep some control, but your breathing was already getting faster. "I was thinking about how you sounded last time…"
He let out a quiet laugh, almost surprised, and pulled your top the rest of the way off. His eyes moved over you for a second before he lowered his head and kissed between your breasts, then lower, across your stomach. He took his time undoing your jeans, sliding them down your legs along with your panties, leaving you completely bare under him. When he settled between your thighs he pushed them wider apart with his hands, thumbs stroking the sensitive skin there. He looked up at you, hair falling into his eyes, and there was that smug little edge in his expression again. "You're already this wet," he said, running one finger slowly up your pussy and spreading the slickness. "Just from teasing me all night?"
You opened your mouth to answer but he leaned in and licked a long, slow stripe from your entrance up to your clit. Your hips jerked and a moan slipped out before you could stop it. Jake hummed against you, the vibration making your thighs tense. "Fuck… Jake–" He did it again but slower, tasting you properly, then closed his lips around your clit and sucked gently. Your back arched off the bed and you pulled hard at the hand still pinning your wrists, but he didn't let go.
He pulled back just enough to speak, lips shiny. "You taste so fucking good." Then he went back in, licking and sucking with more focus, and every time you tried to roll your hips up to get more he'd press you back down with the hand on your stomach, keeping you right where he wanted. You were breathing hard, little sounds escaping despite yourself.
"Shit– Jake, please…" you gasped.
He lifted his head with his lips wet, eyes dark as he looked up at you. "Please what?" His voice was low, almost sweet. "You gotta tell me, baby. I wanna hear it."
You glared at him even as your cheeks burned, still trying to hold onto that bratty attitude. "Don't stop… keep going."
Jake smiled, slow and knowing. "That's not very specific." He pressed a soft, teasing kiss right above your clit. "You made me beg last time, remember? Fair's fair."
He licked you again, deliberately slow, dragging the flat of his tongue over your clit before pulling away completely. You let out a frustrated sound and tried to move your hips toward his mouth, but he held you still. "Jake, come on–"
"Use your words like a big girl," he said, pressing another kiss to your inner thigh, then biting lightly. "Tell me exactly what you want me to do to you."
"I wanna cum," you whispered. "Please, Jake… make me cum." The smug little smile he gave you was almost unbearable, but then he dipped his head again and there was no more teasing. He licked you like he was starving for it with hungry strokes of his tongue, then focusing on your clit with steady pressure, sucking gently and then harder when your moans got louder. He kept your wrists pinned with one hand and used the other to hold your hip down so you couldn't squirm away from the intensity. "Fuck– right there–" you gasped, head tipping back against the pillow.
The pressure built fast and sharp, and when it finally broke you came hard, thighs clamping around his head, a broken moan spilling out of you as your whole body tensed and then melted. Jake didn't stop right away, he kept licking you through it, slower and softer, until you were twitching and pushing at his shoulder. Only then did he kiss his way back up your body with open mouthed kisses along your stomach, between your breasts, up your neck, until he reached your mouth. He kissed you deep and you could feel how hard he was against your thigh.
"You sounded so fucking pretty," he murmured against your lips. "Love when you beg like that."
You let him enjoy his victory for about ten seconds. Then you smiled, sweet and dangerous, and in one quick move you pushed his shoulder and rolled, flipping him onto his back so you were straddling his hips. Jake's eyes widened in surprise, a startled laugh escaping him. You settled on top of him, your hands sliding up his chest, he was still fully dressed from the waist down and you could feel how hard he was under you. You rolled your hips slowly, grinding against his bulge, and watched his breath catch. "Think you can just get away with it?" you asked, leaning down to kiss along his jawline. You sucked lightly on the spot right under his ear, the one you already knew made him weak, and smiled when his hands gripped your thighs tighter.
"Baby–" he started, but you cut him off by palming him through his jeans, squeezing just enough to make his hips jerk up.
You kissed down his neck, biting softly, then whispered right against his skin, "You looked so good between my legs… but I like you like this too."
Jake let out a shaky breath, head tilting back against the pillow as you kept kissing and biting along his jaw and throat. His hands slid up your sides but didn't try to take over, he was letting you have this, and the way his breathing kept stuttering told you he was enjoying it more than he wanted to admit. You popped the button on his jeans and slid your hand inside, wrapping your fingers around him. He was hot and heavy in your palm, already leaking, and you stroked him slowly, thumb brushing over the head. "Fuck…" he groaned, eyes fluttering shut. His hips twitched up into your hand, chasing the touch.
You kept kissing his jaw, his neck, the corner of his mouth, while you worked him with your hand with slow, tight strokes that had him breathing through his mouth. "Look at you," you murmured, voice low and teasing. "You like it when I take over, don't you?"
Jake swallowed hard, cheeks flushed. He opened his eyes and looked up at you, that mix of smug and submissive that made your stomach flip. "Yeah… shit, I do," he admitted, his hands squeezed your thighs like he needed something to hold onto. "Keep going… please."
You smiled against his neck and stroked him a little faster, twisting your wrist just how you knew he liked from last time. He let out a broken sound that went straight between your legs. "Yeah," you whispered, nipping at his earlobe. "Be good for me again, Jakey."
And oh boy, he was good. Jake's head tipped back against the pillow, eyes half closed and his mouth open as every slow twist of your wrist pulled another broken little sound out of him raw and helpless. His hips kept twitching up into your fist, chasing the tight heat of your hand, and you could feel him throbbing, getting impossibly harder, the head of his cock slick and leaking over your fingers. "Fuck– baby, slow down," he gasped, but his body was saying the exact opposite, pushing up harder like he couldn't stop himself. You didn't slow down, you stroked him faster and watched his abs tense, his thighs shaking under you.
You leaned down, lips brushing his ear again. "You close already, Jakey? Gonna cum all over my hand like a good boy?"
He made a strangled noise, hips stuttering. "Shit yeah, I'm– fuck, I'm really close–"
You slowed your hand at the last second, squeezing the base just enough to edge him right there on the brink. Jake's eyes flew open, desperate and glassy. "Tell me," you whispered, still stroking him slowly and torturously. "You wanna cum like this or do you wanna cum inside me?"
"Inside you– fuck, please, inside you, I need it so bad," and it came out so fast and desperate it was almost funny. You laughed softly and kissed him once, quick and dirty, before you sat up and shoved his jeans the rest of the way down his thighs.
You didn't even bother taking them all the way off. You just swung your leg over him, lined him up, and sank down in one smooth motion. The stretch was perfect, it was thick and hot and so deep you both groaned at the same time. Jake's hands flew to your hips, fingers digging in hard as you bottomed out, your ass flush against his thighs. "Oh fuck, yes," he breathed, voice hoarse. "You feel so fucking good baby–"
You didn't give him time to adjust. You started moving right away, rolling your hips in slow, filthy circles at first, then lifting up and dropping back down harder, finding a rhythm that made the headboard knock softly against the wall. Every time you sank down he hit that spot inside you that made sparks shoot up your spine, and you let yourself moan loud and shameless, not caring who heard.
Jake looked wrecked underneath you with flushed cheeks, messy hair, lips parted, eyes locked on the way your tits bounced every time you rode him. But he wasn't completely gone, his hand cracked against your ass with a sharp smack, the sting blooming hot and perfect. "Fuck– yeah, just like that," he groaned, voice breaking. He slapped your ass again, harder this time, and you clenched around him so tight he cursed.
You leaned forward, hands braced on his chest, and started bouncing faster, thighs burning in the best way. "You like it when I ride you like this?" you panted, grinding down deep on every thrust. "Like being good to me?"
Jake whimpered and nodded frantically, hips snapping up to meet you. "Yes shit, yes, use me, I don't care– fuck–"
The switch was so easy between you two now, flipping back and forth without thinking. One second he was slapping your ass and thrusting up like he was trying to ruin you, the next he was looking up at you with those big, needy eyes, letting you pin him down and take whatever you wanted. You rode him harder, grinding your clit against him on every downstroke, the wet sound of skin on skin filling the room. Jake's hands were everywhere – squeezing your ass, sliding up to pinch your nipples, then back down to slap you again when you started slowing down just to tease him.
You felt another orgasm building fast and you didn't fight it. You leaned down close and grabbed his jaw with one hand, forcing him to look at you. "Open your mouth," you ordered, voice rough.
Jake's eyes widened but he obeyed instantly, lips parting, tongue just barely showing. You didn't even slow your hips, you just kept riding him deep and steady while you leaned in and spit right onto his tongue. He moaned like it was the hottest thing that had ever happened to him, eyes fluttering shut as he swallowed without being told. His hips jerked up hard, slamming into you, and the slap of skin got louder, messier. "Fuck, that's so hot," he gasped, voice completely shot.
You kept riding him like that for a few more seconds, hips grinding down deep while he swallowed and looked up at you like he was completely gone. But Jake had clearly reached his limit. "Enough," he said, voice low and rough. He grabbed your hips hard and flipped you over in one fast move, putting you on your stomach. "On your knees, baby. Ass up."
You didn't even think about arguing. You pushed yourself up, arching your back the way he wanted, and felt the mattress dip as he knelt behind you. His hands spread your cheeks almost immediately, thumbs digging into the soft flesh. "Fuck, look at you," he muttered. "All wet and messy from riding me. Such a good girl."
He rubbed the head of his cock up and down your pussy a couple times, teasing your entrance, then pushed in deep in one smooth thrust. You moaned loud into the pillow, fingers gripping the sheets. He felt even bigger from this angle, stretching you open perfectly. Jake gripped your hips and fucked you hard with deep strokes that made your whole body rock forward.
"That's it," he growled, one hand sliding up your back to press between your shoulder blades, keeping your chest down. "Take it just like that. Fuck, your pussy is squeezing me so tight." You were slipping fast into that softer, needier headspace, moaning every time he bottomed out. He leaned over you, chest against your back, and spoke right next to your ear. "You like it e when I fuck you from behind, don't you?" He gave you a particularly hard thrust that made you whimper.
His hand moved down, and you felt his thumb circle your asshole, pressing lightly. You tensed for a second, then moaned louder when he pushed the tip of his thumb inside, just a little, while still fucking you deep. "Yeah? You like that?" he asked, as he worked his thumb in and out slowly, matching the rhythm of his cock. "Want me playing with your tight little ass while I fuck this pussy?"
You nodded frantically against the pillow, pushing back against him. "Yes– fuck, Jake–"
He groaned and gave you more, sliding his thumb deeper while he kept pounding into you. The double sensation was overwhelming, making your legs shake. Every thrust pushed you closer, and Jake could feel it. "You gonna cum again?" he asked, breathing hard, still fucking you deep.
"Yeah," you moaned into the pillow. "I'm so close, Jake. Don't stop– please don't stop."
He groaned at how desperate you sounded and picked up the pace, slamming into you harder. The wet slap of his hips against your ass mixed with the filthy sound of his cock sliding in and out of your soaked pussy. His thumb pushed a little deeper, stretching you just right, and the overwhelming fullness made your eyes roll back. "Fuck, you're gripping me so tight," he growled. "This pussy is gonna make me cum if you keep squeezing like that."
You were right on the edge, every hard thrust pushed you closer until you couldn't hold it anymore. "Jake– I'm gonna cum," you gasped, voice breaking. "Please cum inside me. I want it. Fill me up please, please cum in me."
The words barely left your mouth before your orgasm hit you like a wave. You cried out, clenching hard around his cock and his thumb, whole body shaking as pleasure crashed through you. Jake cursed loudly, hips stuttering. "Shit– yeah, take it," he groaned, burying himself as deep as he could. "Gonna fill this pretty pussy up."
He came hard right after you, thick and hot, pulsing deep inside while he kept fucking you through both your orgasms. You could feel every twitch of his cock until you were dripping and messy between your thighs. For a moment the only sounds were both of you trying to catch your breath. Then Jake slowly pulled out, his cum already starting to leak from you. He grabbed your hips keeping your ass up and leaned down. "Stay just like that," he murmured.
He spread your cheeks with both hands and dragged his tongue all the way from your swollen clit up to both of your holes, licking up his own cum in one long stripe. You whimpered at how sensitive you were, but he didn't stop. "Fuck, Jake…" you moaned weakly, twitching every time his tongue passed over your clit.
He hummed against you, clearly enjoying himself way too much. "Taste so fucking good together, can't waste any of it."
He kept licking you lazily from behind until you were trembling and oversensitive, then finally kissed the curve of your ass and collapsed next to you, pulling you into his chest.
And remember when Jake said that was the best sex he'd ever had? Well, he lied. I mean, he didn't, but the thing is he had the best sex of his life with you multiple times after that, so that meant the bar kept moving, which meant he kept revising the statement, which meant at some point the statement stopped being a useful metric for anything and he just had to accept that you had broken something in his brain that was not going back to its original position.
What that night did, more than anything else, was open a door. And once a door like that is open you don't really close it again, you just kind of agree to keep walking through it whenever it makes sense, and then it starts making sense more and more often, and before you know it you've been doing this for five months and nobody has said a single word about what it is. That's not a criticism, that's just what happens when two people are having a genuinely good time and neither of them wants to be the one to introduce paperwork into the situation.
The thing about having that kind of arrangement with someone in your twenties is that it's good in a way that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't been in it. It's casual in the best sense of the word, there's no pressure, no performance, no having to show up as anything other than exactly who you are on any given day. Jake could text you at eleven on a tuesday and you'd say come over or you wouldn't and either way it was fine, nobody's feelings got managed, nobody had to have a conversation about expectations. You'd show up, it would be great, one of you would leave, and then a few days later it would happen again. Transactional sounds like a bad word but it wasn't, it was clean and easy and it worked.
Except for the parts where it didn't.
Jake kept bumping what was the waking up alone situation, and that never fully stopped being a thing. He'd gotten better at it, in the sense that he'd stopped expecting otherwise, but there's a difference between not expecting something and being fine with it, and Jake was operating solidly in the first category while telling himself it was the second. Because, well, you always left. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes early morning, once while he was still technically in the shower, which he found out when he came back to an empty room and a text that said had fun, talk later with a little waving hand emoji that he chose not to analyze too deeply.
There were good stretches and weird stretches and stretches where you'd disappear for a couple weeks and he'd go about his life and not text you first because he'd learned by then that pushing got him nothing, and then you'd come back and it would be like the reset button had been pressed and everything was fine again. He'd had enough of those cycles by month three to recognize them as a pattern. Recognizing a pattern and doing something about it are different skills and Jake had only fully developed one of them.
The moments that got him, specifically, were the ones that didn't fit neatly into the casual box. Like that day you showed up at his and Heeseung's place with no particular agenda and that had never happened before, you'd always had a reason, a direction, somewhere to be after. But that day you just came over and sat on his couch and said put something on, and Jake put something on and you watched a movie and somewhere in the middle of it you ended up sideways with your legs over his and his arm around you and you fell asleep for twenty minutes on his shoulder, and he sat there not moving and watching the rest of the movie and thinking, okay, this is a different thing, this is a new category.
He made dinner after, just pasta because it was what he had and neither of you had eaten, and you sat at his kitchen counter and stole pieces of bread while he cooked and complained about your thesis advisor and he gave you genuinely useless advice that you told him was genuinely useless and you both laughed about it, and it was domestic in a way that nothing between you two had been before. It was easy in a different way than the other easy.
You two did have crazy monkey sex afterwards, obviously, a cozy evening apparently had a very natural endpoint when it was you two involved, but the point is the cozy evening happened first, and Jake went to sleep that night thinking maybe this was shifting into something with more weight to it. Jake woke up alone, of course.
By month six Heeseung had watched enough of this play out from a front row seat to have developed opinions about it, which was inevitable, and those opinions had been accumulating for long enough that they required a formal airing. "We need to talk about the Y/N thing," Heeseung said.
"There's no thing. It's casual." Jake said.
"It has been months of casual dude," Heeseung replied. "You haven't hooked up with anyone else in five months. You cancelled on that girl Jungwon introduced you to because you were, and I'm quoting you directly here, not really feeling it right now. You got quiet at that party two weeks ago when she was talking to that guy."
Jake put his hands down. "I wasn't —"
"You were," Heeseung interrupted, not unkindly. "I'm not saying this to give you a hard time, I'm saying it because you're my friend and I've watched you go through this loop enough times and you've gone there anyway and you need to either say something about it or accept that you're going to keep waking up alone and feeling like shit about it."
Jake looked at the table. Then at his cereal. Then at Heeseung, who was looking at him with the patient, slightly tired expression of someone who had been waiting for this conversation for a while and was just glad it was finally happening. "She doesn't want anything serious," Jake said, which was the thing he always came back to.
"Did she tell you that? Directly? To your face?"
"No but Jay said –"
"Jay said that months ago man," Heeseung said. "That's not the same as her telling you now, those are two different infos and you're using the old one because it's easier than asking about the current one."
Jake had nothing to say to that because it was correct and he knew it was correct and knowing something is correct and being ready to act on it are still two different things. So Jake did what he did best, which was absolutely nothing. He filed the whole thing under "will deal with later" and went about his life with the practiced ease of someone who had been avoiding his own feelings since approximately age nineteen and had gotten very good at it. The situation was what it was and he was an adult and adults could handle ambiguous situationships without imploding, that was just a thing adults did, he was doing it, everything was under control. He managed this for about three more weeks.
Then he saw you with Soobin. Now look, Soobin was – okay, there's no way to say this without it sounding insane but Soobin was objectively one of the most disarmingly attractive people Jake had ever met in his life, and he meant that in the most objective, non threatened way possible. Soobin had this face that looked like someone had put in a very specific request with the universe like big eyes, the guy was massive, tall as hell, and still he had this soft energy that made everyone around him feel immediately comfortable and also vaguely like they wanted to protect him, which was funny because Soobin was not a person who needed protecting, he was just built in a way that made people feel that instinct.
And there you were standing way too close to each other and you were laughing at something he'd said with your hand on his arm and Soobin was smiling at you like you were the funniest person he'd encountered all semester. It was objectively innocent and it was probably completely innocent. Jake watched it from across the courtyard for about fifteen seconds and felt his entire chest do something unpleasant.
Jake at twenty two was marginally more self aware than he'd been at twenty one, and that meant he knew that what he was feeling was jealousy and that jealousy was his problem to manage and not a logical basis for any decisions. He knew this. He sat with this knowledge for approximately four days and then went and texted Minjeong, which was either proof that self awareness and self control are completely separate skills or just proof that knowing better and doing better have never been the same thing and probably never will be.
Jake dated Minjeong for a few weeks before, not actually dated but more like the kind of thing that had been easy and low stakes and had faded out naturally because neither of them had been particularly invested, which in retrospect made her a terrible choice for what Jake was trying to do, because Minjeong was smart and she knew him well enough to immediately clock that something was off. She responded to his first text warmly enough but when he tried to suggest hanging out she said, with the directness of someone who had no interest in being a supporting character in someone else's drama, "are you doing okay? you seem weird." He said he was fine. She said okay but you seem like you're in your head about something. He said he wasn't. She said she believed him and also that she was busy this week, and that was pretty much that.
Minjeong was not going to be a pawn in whatever this was and honestly, fair enough. Jake deleted the thread and lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about how even his attempt to be stupid about this had failed, which was a new low.
He'd been doing this for about two weeks, going back and forth and getting nowhere, and then, when he was heading to his car after his last class that week, thinking about nothing except that he hadn't eaten since noon and needed to fix that, he heard his name from behind him and turned around and it was you, slightly out of breath like you'd jogged a little to catch up.
"Hey," you said, falling into step next to him. "You walking to the lot?"
"Yeah," he said. "You need a ride?"
"No I'm good, I'm meeting someone." You paused. "I just wanted to ask you something."
"Okay."
You were quiet for a second in the way that meant you were deciding how to phrase something. "Are you seeing Minjeong again?" you asked, and your voice was totally casual, just a question, except it was not just a question and you both knew it.
Jake stopped walking. You stopped next to him. He looked at you. "Where did you hear that?"
"Around," you said, which was not an answer.
"Around meaning who."
"Does it matter?"
"Kind of, yeah."
You looked at him with this expression that was doing a lot of things at once. "So are you?" you asked again.
Jake looked at you for a second and then almost laughed, not because it was funny exactly but because of the specific absurdity of the situation, of you standing here asking him about Minjeong with that look on your face, after weeks of him watching you with Soobin and saying nothing about it, after months of him waking up alone and saying nothing about that either. "No," he said. "I'm not seeing Minjeong."
"Okay," you said.
"I texted her like twice and she was busy," he said, and he wasn't sure why he was giving you that level of detail except that something about your expression made him want to be honest about it. "It wasn't anything."
You nodded slowly. "How come you texted her then?"
"I don't know," he said, which was a lie, and by the way you looked at him he could tell you knew it was a lie, but you didn't push it, you just stood there with your arms crossed and your head tilted slightly like you were waiting to see if he'd say the rest of it on his own. He didn't, Jake e was not ready for the rest of it on his own.
"Okay," you said again, and there was something in your voice that sounded like it wanted to be more than okay but had decided against it, so Jake filed away to think about later when he was alone and could turn it over properly. You uncrossed your arms. "I'll see you around, Jake."
"Yeah," he said.
You walked off in the direction you'd come from and Jake stood next to his car with his keys in his hand watching you go and thinking, she asked. She came over here specifically to ask me about Minjeong, which means she noticed, which means she was paying attention, which means there is something here that is not nothing and we are both standing right next to it and pretending we can't see it.
Jake got in the car, drove home, and spent the entire ride being quietly, unreasonably annoyed at everything. Not at you specifically, or at least that's what he was telling himself, more at the general situation, at the specific cruelty of the universe for engineering something that felt this close to something real and then consistently making it impossible to get there. He was annoyed at Minjeong for being perceptive, at Soobin for existing and being objectively very pretty, at himself for texting Minjeong in the first place, which he knew was stupid while he was doing it and had done anyway because apparently knowing something is stupid is not sufficient protection against doing it. Twenty two years old. So much growth.
The Soobin thing, to be clear, had no evidence behind it. Jake knew this but he had convictions, not proof, which is the worst possible combination because convictions without proof live entirely in your head and your head is not an objective narrator. He'd seen you together twice and you were touchy with people you liked, that was just how you were, he knew that, he'd watched you do it with your friends a hundred times. The hand on the arm meant nothing, probably. The laughing meant nothing, probably. Soobin was in your friend group adjacent circle and it made complete sense that you'd have a normal friendship with him that involved proximity and laughter and absolutely nothing else and Jake had zero basis for any of the conclusions he'd been drawing for two weeks.
But he wasn't going to say any of that to you. He wasn't going to say anything to you because saying anything to you meant talking about why he'd texted Minjeong which meant talking about seeing you with Soobin which meant explaining why seeing you with Soobin had bothered him which meant having the exact conversation Heeseung had told him to have weeks ago, and Jake was not ready, had not been ready, kept moving the goalposts on when he would be ready, and in the meantime was going to deal with this the way he dealt with everything which was poorly and quietly.
So you two didn't talk, at all. You didn't fight or anything, just because neither of you reached out and the silence settled in the way silence does when two people are both waiting for the other one to go first. It was one of the worst months Jake had had in a while, which embarrassed him slightly to admit because (objectively) nothing had happened. Nothing had been lost that he'd technically had to begin with. You weren't his girlfriend, you didn't owe him texts, the silence was not a punishment and he had no logical claim to feel as bad as he felt about it. But feelings are not interested in your logical framework, they just do what they do, and what Jake's were doing was making him terrible company for approximately five consecutive weeks.
Week one he was mostly just annoyed and told himself he'd feel better eventually. Week two he did not feel better. Week three Sunghoon asked him at lunch why he looked like that and Jake said nothing's wrong I'm just tired, and Sunghoon nodded in the way that meant he did not believe a single word of that but had chosen to let it go.
Week four was genuinely bad. He saw you across the courtyard with a matcha latte and your headphones on, clearly going somewhere, clearly fine, and he had to make a very deliberate choice to keep walking in the other direction and then felt sorry for himself about it for the rest of the afternoon, which was pathetic and he knew it was pathetic and could not stop. He typed a text to you three times and deleted it three times and then put his phone face down on the table and watched TV for two hours without taking in a single thing that happened on screen.
Week five he was sitting in his morning class not paying attention to anything when his phone buzzed with a text from you that just said hey, you good? and Jake stared at it for long enough that the professor made a comment about phones and he had to put it away, and he spent the remaining forty minutes of class with the focus of someone who had something much more important to attend to the second he got out.
He texted back the second he was out the door. Yeah, I'm good. You? and what followed was the most aggressively normal conversation two people have ever had, you talked about nothing for about twenty minutes – something about a class, you mentioned a show you'd started watching and he said he'd heard of it, and that was genuinely it, that was the whole exchange.
The thing was Jake knew what the problem was. He wasn't confused about the problem. The problem was that every time he was actually talking to you his brain split into two tracks – the one that was present in the conversation and the one running in the background doing risk assessment, calculating how much of what he actually wanted to say was safe to say, how much would land okay and how much would make things weird, and by the time the background track finished its calculations the conversation had moved on and the moment was gone. He'd been doing it for years, it was not a new problem. He just couldn't figure out how to turn the background track off.
Jake looked at his phone then. He typed a few things and deleted them, which was a habit he'd developed since you two started hanging out. He typed I miss you mostly just to see how it looked, fully intending to delete it like everything else, and then sat there looking at it for a second too long, and then sent it before the part of his brain that managed his decisions could intervene. He put his phone face down on the cushion immediately after, like creating physical distance from it would somehow change what had just happened.
You'd seen it – no response. So he put it face down again.
The thing about sending a text and watching it get read and then getting nothing back is that it's one of those experiences that is objectively minor and feels catastrophic for reasons that are hard to explain to anyone who didn't live it. The message just sits there read out in the open. And your brain, which is not your friend in these moments, starts generating explanations for the silence at a pace that is not useful and cannot be stopped. She's busy. She's thinking about what to say. She's showing it to someone. She's not going to respond. She thinks it's weird. She's fine with it. She hates it. She hates me. She saw it and put her phone down to do something else and forgot and she'll respond later. She's not going to respond. She wants me dead. I should never have asked her if she thinks I'm a twink.
Jake went to bed without a response and woke up the next day to nothing (he checked before he was fully awake) so that added its own specific layer of bad to the morning. And somewhere around mid afternoon, having run out of productive options, he made the executive decision to smoke a completely unreasonable amount of weed and play video games for the rest of the day, which was not a solution to anything but was at least a suspension of the problem, and that was good enough for right now. He was deep into it, and when his brain finally quieted, the doorbell rang. He paused the game and sat there for a second like maybe if he waited long enough it would sort itself out, and then it rang again and he got up, slow, and opened the door.
You were standing in the hallway with your bag on one shoulder and this expression on your face that he couldn't immediately read, and you looked at him and then did a quick scan of the general situation – the slightly glazed eyes, the very specific energy of someone who had been horizontal for hours – and said: "are you high?"
"A little bit," he said, which was generous. "What are you doing here?"
"You said you missed me," you said, just like that, straightforward, and Jake stood in the doorway and looked at you and felt his brain (which was not operating at full capacity) attempt to catch up to what was happening.
"I did," he said.
"I didn't know what to text back so I just didn't, and then I felt bad about not texting back, so." You gestured vaguely at the hallway, at yourself, at the general situation.
Jake looked at you standing at his door at four in the afternoon because he'd said three words and you hadn't known what to say and had shown up instead, and he thought, not for the first time and probably not for the last, that you were the most confusing person he had ever met in his life and he was absolutely crazy about you and those two things were going to be true simultaneously for the foreseeable future. "Okay," he said, and stepped back to let you in.
You dropped your bag by the door and went and sat on the couch like you'd been there a hundred times, which you had, and Jake went to the kitchen and got two glasses of water on autopilot because he needed something to do with his hands and also because he was dehydrated and still a little high and the combination was making him feel like he was watching the situation from slightly outside himself.
He came back and handed you one and sat down on the other end of the couch, not too close, and for a second neither of you said anything. You were looking at your water glass. He was looking at the middle distance. Very cinematic, very unnecessary. "So," you said.
"So," he said.
You smiled a little at that, and then it faded and you went back to looking at the glass. "I've been kind of weird lately," you said. "I know that."
"It's fine," he said, automatic, and then caught himself. "I mean, it's not, like – I noticed. That's all."
You nodded slowly. "The Minjeong thing threw me off."
"There was no Minjeong thing."
"I know that now." You paused. "I didn't know it then. And I didn't really have a right to care about it either way, made it more annoying to care about it."
That was more than you usually gave him, more direct than you tended to be about anything that touched on the actual situation between you two, and he wasn't sure if it was an invitation to say more or just a thing you were putting down and moving past. He decided to treat it like an invitation. "Why didn't you have a right to care," he asked, and it came out more careful than accusatory.
You looked at him for a second. "Because we're not — this isn't a thing where I get to have opinions about who you talk to."
"I have opinions about who you talk to," he said.
You were quiet, receiving information and sitting with it instead of deflecting immediately, which for you was actually something. "Soobin is one of my best friends, you know, since like sophomore year of high school."
"I didn't know that."
"Well, you didn't ask."
He picked up his water glass and put it down again without drinking from it. "I'm not – I'm not trying to make this into a fight. I just think we've been doing this thing where we're both aware something is going on and neither of us is saying it and I'm kind of tired of it."
You looked at your hands. "Yeah."
"So I'm saying it," he said. "I like you. I've liked you for a long time, like a stupid long time, and I know that's not what we agreed to and I'm not trying to pressure you into anything, I just, I think you should know, because I'm done pretending it's purely casual on my end because it's not, and hasn't been for a while."
The room was quiet. You weren't looking at him and he was looking at you and the weed had not prepared him for this level of conversation but here you were, doing it anyway. You took a breath. "I like you too," you said it plainly. "That's not – that's not the issue for me."
"Okay," he said carefully. "So what is it?"
You were quiet for long enough that he thought you might not answer, and then you said, "I don't know how to do it. Like, how to date someone, not anymore... I think." You said it to the middle distance, not to him, which he'd learned meant you were being more honest than comfortable. "I was in a relationship for a long time and it was fine for most of it and then it wasn't and when it ended I realized I'd spent like two years just, like, going along with something because it was already in motion and I didn't know how to stop it. And I don't want to do that again. And you're –" you paused. "You're someone I actually like being around. Like, outside of everything else. And I don't want to do the thing where we try to make it into something and it goes wrong and then that's gone."
"So it's easier to keep it as nothing."
"It's not nothing, Jake," you said, with a bit more edge, and looked at him properly for the first time since you'd sat down. "It's never been nothing, that's the whole problem."
Jake looked back at you and felt the specific exhaustion of two people who are on the same page about all the wrong things. You liked him and he liked you, but you were both scared of different versions of the same outcome and the overlap between those fears was exactly the space where nothing could grow. He understood it and he hated that he understood it. "So what do we do," he said.
You looked at him for a long moment and he could see you working through it. "I think maybe we should just be friends," you said. "I think we skipped a lot of steps and now everything is – tangled, and I don't know how to... untangle it."
It landed the way he'd expected it to land and it was not great, but not as bad as it could have been either. It wasn't a no, exactly. It was more like a not like this and not right now, so his brain tried to file as encouraging and his chest filed as disappointing regardless. "Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"I mean, no, not okay, it kind of sucks," he said, and you laughed a little at that, surprised, and he felt the tension in the room drop half a degree. "But I get it. I don't love it but I get it."
So that being said, the whole just friends thing lasted for three days.
In retrospect, it was optimistic of both of you. The conversation had been mature and the intentions had been real and Jake had genuinely gone to bed that night thinking okay, this is the reset, this is the thing that changes the dynamic, we talked about it like adults and now it's going to be different. And then three days later there was a thing at Heeseung's girlfriend's place, just a small group and a few drinks, nothing that should've led anywhere, except you were there and Jake was there and at some point the evening got late enough and the drinks got sufficient enough that the careful distance you'd both agreed to maintain started feeling a little abstract and unnecessary, and then you were in the kitchen alone for five minutes while everyone else was in the living room and that was that.
The night ended the way it usually ended. His place, late, Jake came when you called him a good boy, you two had crazy monkey sex, Jake fell asleep next to you and woke up reaching for something that wasn't there anymore. The bed was cold, the glass in the drying rack was clean. Aw shit, he thought, here we go again.
The difference this time, the thing that made this loop slightly different from the one before, was that Jake had promised himself he wasn't going to pretend. He'd done enough pretending, enough filing things away and leaving them for future Jake and treating honesty like it was optional. So when you texted him two days later like nothing had happened he didn't just go along with it, he said can we talk and you said yeah and you did, and it was fine, it was actually fine, you were both adults about it and nobody cried or slammed doors or said anything they couldn't come back from.
You agreed, again, to be just friends, and that lasted about a week. And then it happened again, and you agreed again, and it lasted less time than that, and somewhere around the fourth or fifth cycle Jake stopped counting because the counting wasn't useful and the cycle was the cycle regardless of how many times it had completed. This was just the shape of the thing. You two were apparently constitutionally incapable of maintaining the resolution long enough for it to stick, which would've been funny if it weren't also slowly making him insane.
The loop went like this, roughly: something would happen, one of you would pull back, there'd be a stretch of weird distance, then a conversation, then just friends, then three to ten days of actually being just friends which was fine except for the part where it wasn't, and then something would shift (you were both horny and crazy for each other) and the whole thing would reset. Sometimes you'd disappear after. Sometimes he would, genuinely, just to see if it felt different from the receiving end, which it didn't, it just felt like he was being petty (he was). Occasionally one of you would get weird about something the other one had done and it would surface in a conversation that started about something else entirely.
Like the time Jake saw a guy dropping you off outside your building and spent two days being normal about it until you came over and he was so aggressively, transparently normal about it that you noticed immediately. "What's wrong with you," you said, not even five minutes in.
"Nothing," he said.
"It's clearly something, I know you."
He looked at you. "Who dropped you off on thursday?"
You blinked. "Yeonjun. He's in my thesis group." You looked at him for a second. "You saw that?"
"I was walking back from the gym."
"And you've been weird about it for two days."
"I haven't been weird?"
"Yes, you have?"
He stopped. "Yeah, okay, I've been a little weird about it."
You sat back and looked at him with an expression that was more tired than annoyed. "You can't do that," you said. "You can't be weird about that if this isn't a thing. That's not fair."
"I'm not saying it's fair. I'm saying it happened."
"So what do you want me to do with that?"
"Nothing," he said. "I'm not asking you to do anything with it. I'm just being honest about it because you asked."
Or the time you showed up at his place at eleven on a week day and you'd clearly had a bad day and you didn't really want to talk about it, you just wanted to exist somewhere that wasn't your apartment, and Jake let you in and didn't ask questions and you watched something on TV for two hours and it was easy and comfortable and at some point you fell asleep on the couch and he put a blanket over you and went to bed, and in the morning you made coffee and you both sat in the kitchen and it felt so much like something.
Or the time it turned into an actual argument. You'd gone quiet for two weeks after a particularly good night together that had felt like more than its usual self, and Jake had waited and waited and finally said something about it and it turned into the kind of conversation that starts about one thing and ends up being about everything underneath it. "You always do this," he said, and he hadn't meant it to come out with that much edge but it did. "You disappear every time it gets close to something real so you just check out. And then you come back and it's fine and we don't talk about it and then it happens again."
"I'm here right now," you said.
"You're here now because enough time passed that it felt okay to come back. That's not the same thing."
You looked at him and he could see the thing that happened when you felt cornered, this slight closing off, and he knew pressing wasn't going to get him anywhere but he was tired, genuinely tired in a way that had been building for months. "I told you from the beginning I wasn't good at this," you said.
"You told me you didn't want anyone to get hurt. Those aren't the same thing."
You were quiet for a long time, long enough that he thought the conversation might just end there unresolved like everything else. And then you said, "I don't know how to change it," and your voice was honest and Jake looked at you and felt the specific ache of two people who want the same thing and keep arriving at it from incompatible directions.
"Okay," he said, softer.
"I'm sorry," you said.
"Stop apologizing."
"I don't know what else to do."
"I know," he said. "Me neither."
You stayed that night. In the morning you were still there when he woke up, which was unusual enough that he lay still for a second just registering it, and when you woke up you didn't immediately reach for your phone or your bag, you just looked at him in the grey morning light and said "hi" and he said "hi" back.
And, well, that kept going for two years.
Two years is a long time when you're in your twenties. It doesn't sound like a long time but when you're twenty two and then you're twenty four it's actually enormous, it's the difference between who you were and who you're becoming, and you can feel it in the way you carry yourself, in the things that stop being funny and the things that start being, in the specific peace that comes from knowing yourself well enough to stop pretending you don't. Jake was not the same person he'd been at twenty one, or twenty two, or even twenty three. It wasn't a sad thing, it was just a true thing.
He didn't go to every party anymore, he'd gotten selective about where he put his energy, which is something nobody tells you happens in your twenties but it does. Jake was, by most measures, doing well. He had good friends (Heeseung), a job he didn't hate (Heeseung helped him get it), an apartment he and his roommate (also Heeseung) had quietly made into somewhere worth coming home to. The bones of a life, assembled slowly and without much ceremony, the way actual lives get built as opposed to the way you imagine they will be when you're nineteen and everything feels enormous and provisional.
The only thing that remained exactly as chaotic as it had always been, the one constant in three years of otherwise gradual maturation, was you. At some point over two years of this loop the loop started to look less like a loop and more like a life, and you both settled into it the way you settle into anything that's been around long enough. So you basically started acting like a couple.
He knew how you liked your matcha latte, you kept a charger at his place, and then a hoodie, and then a toothbrush. When something good happened, he texted you before he texted anyone else, even before Heeseung. You showed up to things together and left together and the space between you in a room had narrowed to something that everyone around you could read even when you were across from each other and not touching.
The arguments had quieted down too, which was maybe the most telling thing. Not because nothing was unresolved (plenty was still unresolved) but because the situation itself had worn down through sheer frequency of contact. Jake knew when you needed space before you asked for it. You knew when he was in his head about something before he said anything. That kind of knowledge doesn't come from a label, it comes from time, and you two had put in the time whether you'd meant to or not.
All of your friends knew, they'd known for a while, they'd probably known longer than Jake had known himself. Heeseung had stopped asking about it, which meant he'd accepted it as a permanent condition of Jake's life and had filed it accordingly. Sunghoon made exactly one comment once, which was just "you know this is kind of obvious, right," and Jake had said "thanks, Sunghoon" in a tone that closed the subject, and Sunghoon had let it stay closed but the look on his face had communicated volumes. Even Jay, who had made his peace with the situation through a combination of being a reasonable person and genuinely not wanting to know the details, had stopped doing the subtle check in thing he used to do, had stopped reading the room when Jake and his sister were in it together, because the room was always the same and he'd adjusted.
Everyone had adjusted and everyone could see it. Your friends, his friends, people who barely knew either of you, anyone who'd been in the same space as you two for more than forty minutes. Everyone except, apparently, you and Jake.
You both had an unspoken agreement to keep not naming it that had outlasted all reasonable explanations and was at this point less a decision and more a deeply ingrained habit that neither of you knew how to break without acknowledging that it existed. There's a specific kind of relationship that exists in the space between what it is and what it's called, and it's comfortable there, in that space, in a way that's hard to explain to someone on the outside because from the outside it looks like avoidance, and it is avoidance, but the reason nobody names it isn't always fear of losing it, sometimes it's just that the naming feels like the least important part when the thing itself is already so thoroughly present in your daily life that a word for it seems redundant. Well, that's what you told yourself, at least.
But accommodation isn't the same as acceptance, and acceptance isn't the same as being done with it, and Jake was twenty four now and not the same person he'd been at twenty one, and the things he was willing to keep accommodating indefinitely were getting fewer. He just hadn't done anything about it yet. Which was, if you'd been following along, extremely on brand. Somewhere in those two years a lot of small things accumulated that neither of you addressed directly because addressing them would've required acknowledging what they were, and you two had gotten very practiced at not doing that.
There was the running thing, which started because you had a route along the river near your apartment that you did a few times a week, and Jake had mentioned once that he'd been wanting to run more and you'd said come tomorrow then, casual, and he'd shown up the next morning and then the morning after that and then it just became a thing. He was faster than you over distance and slower than you on hills, and you'd figured out pretty quickly that the route worked better if you didn't try to talk for the first twenty minutes and just ran, and then the last stretch you'd slow down and talk about whatever, and it was one of the most genuinely easy things between you two, which was saying something. He started keeping a spare pair of running shoes at your place but neither of you mentioned it.
Every time he went home to visit his family he came back with food. Dumplings once, vacuum sealed, with a note from his mom that you were pretty sure was in part addressed to you even though Jake claimed it wasn't. He'd hand it over like he hadn't specifically told his mom what you liked, like his mom hadn't specifically made extra of it because her son had mentioned you enough times that she'd started cooking for two. You ate it and didn't say anything about the implications and neither did he.
Jay was around more, which was its own thing. Not because anything had been said between Jake and Jay about the situation – as far as you knew that conversation had never happened – but just because Jake and Jay had gotten closer over those two years in the natural way that happens when someone becomes a consistent presence in your life and you start to actually know them. Heeseung's girlfriend had started referring to the four of you as the four of you, which was something she'd done so naturally and so early that by the time anyone might've pushed back on it the window had passed. Movie nights at the apartment happened at least twice a month, board games that got competitive enough that Heeseung's girlfriend once threw a card across the room, dinner sometimes, the four of you at a table, splitting the bill, walking home in pairs. Heeseung and his girlfriend held hands. Jake and you walked close enough that your arms touched and sometimes his hand would find yours and you'd let it and you'd walk like that for a block before one of you found a reason to need that hand for something else. It was a whole thing, everyone could see it was a whole thing.
You'd started staying over more, and that happened gradually enough that there was no single moment where it became the new normal, it just did. And then you started staying the whole night, not leaving before he woke up, which he noticed the first few times and tried very hard not to make obvious because he didn't want to spook you by making it into something. You'd wake up and he'd be in the kitchen and you'd come out in whatever you'd slept in and he'd hand you coffee already made the way you took it, and it was domestic in a way that should've felt strange given the official status of things and somehow just felt like tuesday. He stayed at yours too, more than before. Your roommate had stopped asking who he was approximately three weeks into this pattern and had started just saying hi Jake when he came in the door and offering him whatever she was eating.
The hand holding happened without ceremony too, his hand would find yours and you'd be holding hands and that would be that. You went to a farmers market once and walked around for an hour and a half and held hands the entire time and talked about produce and absolutely nothing else, and on the way back he'd bought you something you'd looked at twice and you'd told him not to and he'd already paid for it.
You'd gotten into this habit somewhere along the way of always being in the same car. If you were going to the same place, which happened more often than it probably should have given that you weren't technically together, Jake drove or you drove and the other one got in and that was it. It was efficient and practical, he told himself. Good for the environment, even. Spring break came around and it turned out you were both heading back toward the same general direction of the country, your hometown was about forty minutes from his, and the route passed through his anyway, so the road trip thing made sense logistically, he told Heeseung, who did not ask about the logistics and also did not bother hiding his expression. "Have fun," Heeseung said.
You left on a friday morning, your bag in his backseat, matcha latte from the place near your condo because you'd insisted on stopping even though it added twelve minutes and he'd complained about it the entire way there and then drunk half of yours when his ran out somewhere around the first hour. You didn't say anything when he reached over and took it, just handed it to him without looking up from your phone, which was somehow more intimate than most things and he noticed but didn't say anything about it.
The first hour was easy the way things between you two were always easy. You told him about something that had happened with a friend of yours that week, and he asked questions in the right places and you filled in the gaps. Around hour two you'd migrated into the particular road trip intimacy where you'd turned slightly sideways in the passenger seat so you were half facing him. Jake had one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the center console and at some point you put your hand over his, just placed it there, and he turned his hand over so your fingers could settle into his, and you stayed like that for a while without commenting on it.
The playlist cycled through something slow and you sang along under your breath to a part you knew and he watched the road and listened and thought about how this was just a thing that was happening, a normal friday, two people driving to their hometowns for break, nothing remarkable about it, and somehow it was also one of his favorite days in recent memory and he had no idea what to do with that information.
"You missed the turn," you said.
"I didn't miss it, I'm taking the other way."
"The other way adds like twenty minutes."
"Yeah but the other way has Weendy's."
You stared at him. "You're taking a twenty minute detour for Wendy's."
"Wendeez nuts."
"Jake." You tried not to laugh.
"You want some or not, pretty?"
"Deez nuts or Wendy's?” You asked, smirking playfully.
"Wendy's.” Jake answered, laughing. “Unless…”
You laughed out loud, and you did want some. You both got chips and sat on the hood of his car in the rest stop parking lot for twenty minutes eating them and watching other people's road trips pass through, and you stole from his bag even though you had your own, and he let you because he always let you. The last hour he had his hand on your knee for most of it, not consciously, just where it ended up, and you had your head tipped back against the seat looking out the window at the trees and you were quiet in a good way, and he drove and thought about nothing in particular and everything loosely related to it.
He pulled up in front of your house and your bag was already in your lap and the engine was still running and you sat there for a second without moving. "Thanks for the detour," you said.
"Best Wendy's in the state," he said.
You smiled and looked at him and he looked at you and there was a moment, a couple seconds long, where neither of you said anything and the car was quiet and it would've been very easy to just stay there. Then you leaned over and kissed him, soft and unhurried, one hand coming up to his jaw and he kissed you back. You pulled back and he could still feel the warmth of it. "Drive safe," you said. "Text me when you get there, okay?"
"I will," he said. You got out and shut the door and he watched you go up the front path, your bag on your shoulder, and he lowered the window because there was something – he didn't plan it, he didn't think about it, it came out the same way things sometimes come out when you're not monitoring yourself closely enough –
"Love you," he said.
And then he drove away.
He was at the end of the street before his brain fully processed what had just come out of his mouth. He kept driving. He went through a green light. He merged onto the main road. His hands were on the wheel at ten and two like a person who was being very normal about something.
Jake had not waited to see your face. He had not waited for anything, he'd just said it and put the car in drive like he could outrun it if he moved fast enough, which was insane, which was possibly the most insane thing he'd done in three years of consistently insane behavior, and that was a high bar. His phone was in the cupholder but he did not look at it. He drove for twenty minutes before he accepted that he was going to have to look at it eventually and pulled into a gas station and sat in the parking lot and picked it up. No messages, thank God. Thank.. God?
Okay, Jake thought. Okay. That happened. He'd said it and you'd heard it clearly and he'd driven away before you could respond and now he was in a gas station parking lot forty minutes from his hometown and twenty minutes from yours and he had no idea what came next and his heart was doing something loud and inconvenient in his chest. So he called Heeseung. "Hey," Heeseung said, background noise of the TV behind him. "You get there okay?"
"I told her I love her," Jake said.
A pause. "You did what?"
"Yeah and I drove away before she could say anything."
Silence. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" Heeseung said.
"You gotta be more specific," Jake said.
"You said I love you and then you just –"
"I drove away, yes, I'm aware, I was there –"
"Why would you do that, you absolute moron?"
"I don't know, dude!" Jake said, which was true. He genuinely did not know. It had come out and his foot had hit the gas and now here he was in a gas station parking lot having the worst and best moment of the last several years simultaneously. "What do I do now?!"
Heeseung was quiet for a second. "I mean," he said, "you could start by driving back."
Jake did not drive back. He sat in the parking lot for another ten minutes being a coward about it. But eventually he drove the rest of the way to his hometown with the radio on and his phone in the cupholder and the specific stillness of someone who has done something irreversible and is still in the process of understanding what that means. His family's house looked the same as always, his mom had left the porch light on, and he sat in the driveway for a minute before going in, kinda expecting his phone to buzz and it didn't, and he went inside and ate dinner and was normal about it with his family in the way that you're normal about things when you have no other option.
He texted you saying he got home. Delivered. He checked his phone before bed to see if you had texted back, nothing. Woke up the next morning, still nothing. Day two? Yeah, nothing. Aw shit, here we go again.
The thing about being home is that it does something to your memory, it pulls things up from storage without asking permission. Jake lay there on day two and day three with nowhere particular to be and found himself thinking about things he hadn't thought about in years.
He thought about being fifteen and having a crush on a girl in his class who'd looked at him exactly once with any particular intention and he'd spent three months treating that one look like a compass, orienting everything around it, which was a lot of weight for a single look to carry. Nothing came of it but he'd survived. He thought about being seventeen and thinking he understood what it meant to care about someone, the specific confidence of that age where you feel things enormously and interpret that enormity as depth when sometimes it's just volume. He'd been loud about his feelings at seventeen without being particularly honest about them, which is a thing that takes a while to notice about yourself.
He thought about his ex (yeah, sad, I know) who had been genuinely good and genuinely wrong for him in equal measure, and how the ending of that had been the first time he'd understood that caring about someone and being right for someone were separate questions with separate answers. He'd learned something from that. He thought he had, at least. He'd carried it forward, applied it, tried to be more careful about the difference.
And then he thought about you, which was where everything kept ending up regardless of the route it took to get there.
Jake'd spent three years worrying about the shape of what you two were, the category, the label, the question of what to call it and what it meant and whether it was going anywhere and whether anywhere was even a place worth going. He'd had that conversation with himself more times than he could count, lying in various beds in various states of having just woken up alone, and it had never resolved because it was the wrong conversation. He'd been so focused on the uncertainty of the situation that he'd spent three years treating his own feelings like they were also uncertain, like they were part of the question instead of the one thing he'd actually known the answer to for a long time.
He thought about a cup of water at a party when he was nineteen years old and everything felt enormous. He thought about how you'd texted first after five weeks of silence and how that had been enough to make the whole week retroactively survivable. He thought about the way you fell asleep in the passenger seat and trusted him to get you there, the way you said things that were true in voices that were quiet like you were only willing to be honest at low volume. He thought about all the times he'd watched you leave and missed you in the mornings with the tired resignation of someone who'd accepted a situation instead of examining it, and he thought about how for three years he'd framed his own feelings as a problem to manage rather than a fact to just live in, and how exhausting that had been, and how unnecessary.
Jake'd said love you out of a car window and driven away and the world hadn't ended. It was still there, he was still there. You were somewhere not texting him, which was familiar territory and not his favorite place to be, but underneath the silence was still the fact that he'd said it and he'd meant it and meaning it turned out to be the most uncomplicated part of all of this by a significant margin.
Jake loved you. He'd loved you for a long time, longer than he'd let himself call it that, long enough that the feeling had become structural. It wasn't the enormous, operatic thing he'd maybe expected love to feel like when he was seventeen. It was knowing how you liked your matcha latte and your favorite Hirono figures, and the face you made when you were about to say something honest and the specific way, how you played The Sims when you were tired of living life or when you went to the movies by yourself when you felt like it. It was the thing that had made him stay in a loop for three years that any rational person would've exited, because the loop still had you in it and the exit didn't, and that was the math he'd been doing without ever writing it down.
He didn't regret saying it. That was the thing he'd been slowly arriving at across three days and two nights in his childhood bedroom. He'd driven away like a maniac and you'd gone silent and he was lying here in the house he grew up in with no idea what you were thinking and he still, genuinely, did not regret it. Which was new information about himself. He'd expected to feel more like he'd made a mistake and instead he just felt like someone who'd finally said out loud the thing that had been true for a long time.
The silence still sucked, though, that part wasn't better with context. But the thing underneath the silence was solid in a way it hadn't felt before, and he lay there on day three and looked at the ceiling of the room he'd slept in since he was a kid and thought, okay, I love her, that's just a true thing, and whatever she does with it is her thing to do, but I'm done pretending it's a question.
So Jake stopped pretending. And I know this sounds clean and decisive, but it was neither of those things. What it actually looked like was Jake sitting at his childhood desk at eleven at night opening a notes app and typing things I could say to her and then staring at the blank page for twenty minutes before writing one bullet point and deleting it. He tried writing a letter, an actual letter with pen and paper, which lasted about four sentences before he read it back and physically cringed at himself and folded it into eighths and put it in the bottom of his bag where it would never see daylight again. The sentences had been fine, objectively, they just sounded like him trying to sound like someone who wrote letters, which was worse than just sounding like himself.
He watched a movie the next afternoon because he had nothing else to do and his mom had suggested it and it turned out to be a romantic comedy, which under normal circumstances he would've been fine with but in his current state of mind he watched with the attentiveness of someone studying for an exam. It was Crazy, Stupid, Love, and he'd seen it before but not like this, not with this level of critical analysis and thought that it would not work for him because the grand gesture thing required a certain kind of confidence he didn't currently have and also a soundtrack, and real life didn't come with a soundtrack, and without the soundtrack it was just a guy standing somewhere looking hopefully at a girl and that was just a regular tuesday. (But if real life had a soundtrack, he would've picked Mistletoe by Justin Bieber, even though it was spring, and not Christmas).
He watched another one the following day because apparently this was his life now. This one was 10 Things I Hate About You, his sister had put on and he'd stayed for because he had nothing better to do, and there's that part where Heath Ledger sends Julia Stiles a delivery of flowers at school, this whole thing, very public, very committed, with Can't Take My Eyes Off You playing in the background – and he thought about flowers with genuine seriousness before concluding that showing up to your hometown with a bouquet for a girl you'd been sleeping with for three years without ever officially dating was so tonally confused that no flower arrangement could survive it. What did the flowers even say? Hey, I said I love you out a car window and drove away, here are some peonies. No, dude, absolutely not. Also Heath Ledger had also paid a marching band to serenade her on a football field and Jake was not doing that either, he had limits.
He thought about texting, but texting felt small for what this was. He thought about a voice note and then immediately dismissed it because he'd once sent a voice note instead of a text by accident and the experience had been traumatic enough that he'd never fully recovered.
Eventually, Jake picked up his phone and stared at the screen for a solid ten minutes deciding what to do with it. Calling had its own energy he wasn't sure he was ready to sustain, you call someone and they pick up and then you have to have something to say in real time with no editing with no backspace, no fourteen minutes to collect yourself first. Facetime was worse because then you'd see his face, and his face lately had the specific quality of someone who had spent four days watching romantic comedies and writing letters he was never going to send, and he didn't think that communicated the right thing.
He sat there long enough that his screen went dark and he had to unlock it again, which felt like a sign that he needed to just pick something and do it. So he called you because the thinking hadn't produced anything useful in four days. It rang twice and you picked it up. "Hey," you said, normal, like nothing.
"Hey," he said, and settled back against his headboard and felt something in his chest unclench slightly just at the sound of your voice, which was embarrassing and also completely out of his control.
"How's home?" you asked.
"Good," he said. "My mom's been cooking every single meal like I've been away for a year, I've had a full lunch and dinner every day since I got here, I physically cannot say no to her."
"That sounds amazing actually." You said, and Jake could sense you smiling on the other side.
"It is, I'm not complaining, I'm just saying my body is not used to this schedule anymore." He shifted against the headboard. "She made her carrot cake yesterday, with the chocolate frosting."
"Oh my god," you said, more invested. "I love that cake."
"I know, she's making another one before I leave so I can take some back with me."
"Yeah you better," you said. "God, your mom," you said, in the tone of someone genuinely fond of a person. "I love everything she makes."
"I told her that, she said she'd cook for you when you –" he stopped. When you what, Jake. When you come over, which presupposes a version of this situation that hadn't been discussed. He of course corrected smoothly enough. "She said she'd make more of it."
You either didn't notice or chose not to notice, and either way you let it go, and he appreciated it. You told him about your days, and your days sounded genuinely good – Jay had arrived the day before and you'd watched movies until two in the morning, which he absolutely tracked as a Jay thing, and you'd taken the family dog out twice a day and apparently the dog had gotten dramatically more chaotic since you'd been at school, and that took up a full three minutes of conversation. You'd gone to the Target near your house because your mom needed things and you'd ended up wandering for forty minutes buying nothing, which was the Target experience. You'd seen two friends from high school, one of whom had a baby now and that fact had done something strange to your concept of time, and one of whom was exactly the same as at seventeen and that had done a different strange thing to your concept of time.
He told you about his days, and that was a creative exercise because his days had consisted almost entirely of overthinking and romantic comedies, so he gave you the surface version like helping his dad with some stuff around the house, going for a run, and seeing an old friend from school for an hour. All technically true. Jake did not mention the letter. Jake would never mention the letter.
And then there was a pause and Jake looked at the ceiling and thought, okay, just say the thing, you've been doing nothing but thinking for days and the thinking hasn't helped, just say the thing. "Hey," he said. "I miss you."
He heard you go slightly quiet. "I miss you too, Jake," you said, and your voice was soft and straightforward about it.
"Can I come through on the way back? I can like, stop and get you and we drive back together." He said it casually because that was the only register he had left, the planned approach having long since been abandoned. "If that's okay."
"Yeah," you said. "That's okay."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." And there was something in your voice that he couldn't fully name over the phone but that sounded like it had been waiting, like you'd been in your hometown watching movies with your brother and walking a chaotic dog and going to Target and carrying something around the whole time, the same way he'd been carrying it. He didn't know that for sure, but it sounded like that. "And then we can go to the best Wendy's in the state again," you said.
So on Saturday morning, Jake woke up earlier than he needed to, and that was not a thing he did voluntarily under normal circumstances but he was already awake at seven thirty staring at the ceiling and there was no going back to sleep after that so he just got up. He showered, packed his bag, ate the breakfast his mom had made before he could say he wasn't hungry, accepted the tupperware of carrot cake she handed him at the door and got in the car.
The drive to your hometown was about forty minutes and he spent most of it thinking about what he was going to say, which was a thing he'd been doing for a week and which had not produced results yet but his brain was apparently committed to trying one more time. He ran through versions of it like the direct version, where he just said look, I meant what I said, here's what I want, what do you want. The casual version, where he eased into it through normal conversation and let it arrive naturally. The version where he just said nothing and let the drive do whatever it was going to do and trusted that you'd both know what needed to happen.
Jake didn't love any of them, but he was twenty minutes away and the options weren't improving so he was going to have to pick one and commit. He pulled onto your street and saw your house and his brain (that had been running scenarios for forty minutes) went quiet like it just stopped producing options and left him with whatever was actually there.
You were outside already, sitting on the front steps with your bag next to you, and you looked up when his car pulled up and stood and got inside to grab something, and then he saw Jay come out the front door behind you, jacket on, hands in his pockets, and Jake thought, ah. Of course. Obviously.
He got out of the car. "Hey man," he said to Jay.
"Hey," Jay said, and he was doing a thing with his face that was neutral enough to be readable only if you knew him, which Jake did.
"You need a ride back?" Jake asked, because it was the polite thing to ask and also because he genuinely had no idea what else to open with.
"Nah, I got my car," Jay said. "I'm leaving later anyway." He picked up your bag and put it in Jake's trunk. Jake and Jay were standing in the driveway and Jake became very aware of the fact that this was a thing that was happening. Jay looked at him. "She really likes you, you know," Jay said.
Jake felt something land in his chest. "I really like her too," he said.
"Yeah, I know," Jay said, like it was obvious, like it had been obvious for a long time and he was just stating it for the record. "How long has this been going on? Like two, three years?"
"Yeah," Jake said. "Something like that."
Jay nodded slowly. Then he said, "you could've just told me, bro. I'm not an idiot."
"I know you're not."
"You've been acting like I wasn't gonna notice my sister basically living in your place."
"She doesn't live in my –"
"She has a charger and a toothbrush there, Jake."
"That's not –" Jake stopped. "Okay."
Jay looked at him for a second and then did something that was almost a smile. "I'm not gonna do a whole thing about it," he said. "She's older than me, she can do whatever she wants, I'm just saying. Next time skip the three years of sneaking around and just talk to me like a normal human being."
"Yeah," Jake said. "That's fair."
"It's very fair," Jay said. "I had to find out from Heeseung's girlfriend, not ideal, you know."
"I know, I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry, just –" Jay gestured vaguely at the situation, at the car, at all of it. "Figure it out alright? Like actually figuring it out."
"Yeah, that's the plan," Jake said.
"Good," Jay said, and that was apparently the whole thing, because he picked up his coffee from the porch railing and looked at his phone and the conversation was over in the way that conversations with Jay ended when he'd said what he meant and didn't need to keep going. Jake stood there and thought, that was the most reasonable that interaction could have possibly gone, and also, I probably should have just talked to him like two years ago.
The front door opened and you came back out with your charger in hand slightly out of breath, looking between the two of them with the expression of someone calculating how much had been said in the last two minutes. "What," you said.
"Nothing," both of them said, at the same time, which was not suspicious at all.
You looked at Jake. He looked at you. "Huh, okay," you said slowly, and went around to the passenger side. Jay caught Jake's eye over the roof of the car before he got in, and did the thing with his face that said I mean it, figure it out, and Jake nodded once, and that was that.
He pulled out of your street and you were putting your seatbelt on and pairing your phone to his car's bluetooth with the familiarity of someone who had been a passenger in this car enough times to have opinions about the music, and Jake drove and watched the road and thought about what Jay had said, she really likes you, said like it was a fact he'd been sitting on for a while and had finally decided to put down somewhere.
And then you turned to say something to him and he looked at you for a second before looking back at the road, and he understood, in that moment, with the tupperware of carrot cake in the backseat and Jay's voice still in his head and hours of highway ahead of him, exactly why he'd said it out the car window without thinking. It wasn't a slip, it wasn't the kind of thing that comes out wrong; it had come out exactly right, in exactly the right direction, because it was just true. Jake loved you and every time he saw you it was there, this simple, inconvenient, load bearing fact, and last week it had just gotten out before he could catch it, which was maybe the most honest thing he'd done in three years.
"What did Jay say to you," you said, narrowing your eyes at him.
"Nothing," he said.
"Come on, I know he said something."
"He just said to drive safe."
"He absolutely did not say that."
"He said that… and other things."
You looked at him for a long moment. He kept his eyes on the road and tried to look like a person who was not thinking about being in love with you, which was a thing he'd been attempting with mixed results for approximately three years and was not about to crack the code on now. "Other things like what?" you asked.
"I'll tell you at Wendy's," he said.
You made a face. "But that's so far away."
"Twenty minutes."
"Jake."
"Twenty minutes, baby," he said, and turned up the music, and you huffed and looked out the window and he drove and thought, okay, twenty minutes, and then the Wendy's, and then whatever comes after that. He could do twenty minutes.
Jake pulled in and you both ordered at the drive through and he parked facing the road and you ate in the car the way you always ate in the car, just the two of you and the food and the radio on low. You stole his fries before you'd finished your own. You were working through your burger when something dripped and he reached over without thinking and wiped your chin with his thumb, and you went slightly still for a second and he didn't move his hand away immediately, just let it stay there against your jaw for a second, and you looked at him with your burger still in your hands and he leaned over and kissed you, soft and easy, and you kissed him back and you tasted like french fries and he didn't care at all.
He pulled back just enough to look at you. You had that expression that you got sometimes, the open one, the one that didn't have the usual layer of deflection over it, and he thought about how much he liked that face specifically, and then thought about how he had approximately a hundred thoughts like that a day and had been filing them away for years. "Okay," you said, settling back in your seat. "Are you going to tell me what you and my brother talked about?"
"He said he already knew," Jake said after a second. "About us. He just wanted me to know that he knew."
You made the face that meant you were not surprised. "Of course he knew."
"He said he had to find out from Heeseung's girlfriend."
"Oh god," you said.
"Yeah." He smiled and reached over and stole one of your fries, you watched him do it with an expression of betrayal that was entirely performed. "He also said something else," Jake said.
"What?"
He leaned back in his seat, looking at you, and let himself be a little smug about it because he'd earned it. "He said you really like me."
You opened your mouth and closed it. "He did not say that."
"He did."
"No, he did not."
"He really did," Jake said, enjoying this more than was strictly necessary. "Very straightforward about it. Just, she really likes you, you know." Jake mimicked Jay's voice.
"Oh my god," you said, turning to look out the windshield, and your ears had gone slightly pink which he was also filing away. "I cannot believe him. Or you."
"What? I thought it was helpful information," Jake said while he grabbed your hand.
"I'm sure you did," you said flatly.
"Very useful," he said. "Really rounded out my morning."
"Jake, I swear to god –"
He laughed and reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind your ear and you stopped mid sentence and looked at him, still flustered in the way you rarely let yourself be, and he kept his hand there against the side of your face and felt the conversation shift into something quieter. "But I told him something too," he said. "That was also true."
Your expression changed, just slightly. "What?"
"That I really like you too," he said. "Which you know. But I wanted it on record with your brother, so."
"Jake…" you said, soft, a little warning in it, the way you said his name when you were about to close off, when you felt something getting close and your instinct was to redirect it.
"Let me say something," Jake said, and his voice was easy but he meant it, and you heard that he meant it because you went quiet and looked at him and didn't redirect, so he took a breath. "I've been trying to figure out for a week how to say this the right way," he said. "I wrote an actual letter and it was bad, like it sucked. I watched like three romantic comedies looking for ideas and none of them were applicable, and oh my God, I even thought about flowers –"
You blinked. "Flowers?!"
"I decided against it."
"Oh."
"The point is," he said, "I've been making this complicated for days and it's actually not that complicated. I said what I said last week because I meant it and I've meant it for a long time and I'm done pretending I don't." He looked at you, at your face in the afternoon light, at the open expression you were still wearing despite your best efforts. "I love you. That's it. That's the whole thing. I'm not asking you to say it back right now, I'm not trying to make you feel like you have to do anything with it, I just – I'm done not saying it. It's been true for long enough that it feels stupid to keep it in my head."
The car was very quiet. Outside, a truck passed on the highway. The radio was playing something neither of you was listening to. You were looking at him with an expression he hadn't seen on your face before, or maybe he had but not this clearly, not without the usual layer of armor over it. Your eyes were a little bright and you blinked once and looked down at your lap and then back up at him, and he waited.
"I hate that you said it and drove away," you said finally, and your voice was a little unsteady.
"I know, I'm sorry," he said. "In my defense, it came out before I decided to say it."
"That's not a defense."
"I know," he said, softer. "I know it's not." He reached over and took your hand where it was sitting in your lap and held it, and you let him, and your fingers curled into his. "I'm saying it now though. Properly. To your face." Jake smiled when you looked up at him. "I love you."
You were still a little bright eyed and you said, quiet and plain, "I love you too, Jake."
He heard it and his brain did something that wasn't quite a thought, more like a full system restart, just a second of complete blank before everything came back online at once. You'd said it back, plainly, to his face, in a Wendy's parking lot on a saturday, and he sat there for approximately three seconds just holding that fact in both hands like he was making sure it was real.
And then he kissed you. Not on the mouth first, he kissed your cheek, and then your other cheek, and then your forehead, and then the side of your face, just going at it, and you started giggling, trying to lean back and not quite managing it because he followed you. "Jake –" you said, still laughing. He kissed your cheek again. "What is happening –"
"Nothing," he said, into your cheek.
"You're insane," you said, but you were giggling now, the kind that you couldn't control, and your hand had come up and was sort of half heartedly pushing at his shoulder while the other one was holding onto his jacket, which was contradictory and he appreciated it.
He pulled back enough to look at you, your face all open and laughing, and he felt so straightforwardly happy about it that he couldn't do anything except be honest. "What? I'm in love, bro, damn." he said.
You stared at him. "So I'm your bro now."
"No," he said, "you're my girl, and I'm pampering my girl with little kisses, those are different things."
"Pampering your girl?" you repeated.
"Yes," he said, and kissed your nose, and you scrunched it and laughed again. "You deserve little kisses. I have three years of little kisses to make up for and I'm very behind," he said, very seriously. "I have a deficit."
"You are so –" you started, and then stopped, and were looking at him with that smile that was softer and he looked back at you and felt the thing in his chest. "Say that again," you said.
"What, that I have a deficit –"
"No," you said. "The other thing."
"That you're my girl?"
"Yeah," you said, quiet.
"You're my girl," he said. "If you want to be." You laughed a little and looked down, and he watched you sit with it for a second, this thing that had been true for so long that naming it should've felt redundant and somehow still felt enormous, and then he said, "Come on, baby, we gotta communicate," because you'd gone quiet and quiet with you could mean anything and he needed to know which kind of quiet this was.
You looked up at him and smiled, and it was the unguarded one. "Yes," you said. "I want to be your girl."
He felt it all the way through. "Yeah?"
"Yes, Jake," you said. "I'm tired of pretending I'm not ready for it. I want you."
He stared at you. "For real? You wanna be my girlfriend?"
"I want to be your girlfriend," you said, a little laugh in it, like you were trying the words on and finding they fit. "I've wanted to be your girlfriend for a really long time and I've been really stupid about it."
"We've both been really stupid about it," he said.
"Yeah but I was stupider."
"I asked you if you liked twinks because I was jealous of Sangwon," he said.
You pointed at him. "Okay, it was even."
Jake laughed and kissed you again, properly this time, and you kissed him back with your hand in his jacket and you were kissing at a Wendy's parking lot, and he couldn't have cared less because you were his girlfriend now and that was the only relevant information. He pulled back and looked at you and you were smiling into the kiss the way people smile when they're too happy to keep a straight face, and he thought, I have been in love with you since I was nineteen years old and you gave me water at a party and I've been an absolute idiot about it ever since and somehow we still ended up here, and somehow here was exactly right.
"Hi," that's all Jake managed to say.
"Hi," you said back.
"Hi, girlfriend."
You covered your face with your hand. "Oh my god."
"Hi, my girlfriend, my baby, my precious," he said again, delighted with himself.
"You're the worst," you said, into your hand.
"You literally just agreed to date me," he said. "You did that. You made this choice."
You looked at him through your fingers, laughing, and said "I know" in the tone of someone who had absolutely no regrets, and Jake thought, aw shit here we go again, but this time he meant it like a beginning.
You always think you're smarter than you really are at 21, and that's exactly what Jake Sim thought he was. And look, he wasn't wrong, not entirely. He was smart enough to know what he was getting into, smart enough to see it coming, the problem was that being smart about something and doing the right thing about it are two completely different skills, and Jake had only developed one of them at 21, and it wasn't the second one.
He's 24 now. And here's what 24 looks like, for the record: it looks like knowing your limits and mostly respecting them. It looks like going to bed at a reasonable hour without feeling like you're missing something. It looks like three years of the most circular, exhausting, wonderful situationship of his life finally becoming something with a name, which happened in a Wendy's parking lot on a Saturday afternoon, which is not how Jake would have written it if he'd been given creative control over the situation, but which turned out to be exactly right anyway.
For Jake, being twenty four looks like you. Specifically, you in his passenger seat, which is where you've always been, except now when you steal his fries he calls you his girlfriend and you tell him to shut up and he does it again. It looks like your charger in his car and your hoodie on his couch and the specific way you say his name when you're trying not to laugh at something he said, which is a sound he's been collecting since he was nineteen years old at a party with a cup of water and an audience of exactly one. It looks like waking up and you're still there, which still gets him every time, which he suspects will keep getting him for a long time, and which he has decided to just let get him instead of filing it away somewhere.
The thing about being 24 and not 21 is that you stop pretending the things that matter don't matter. You stop performing indifference about the stuff you're actually not indifferent about. You get tired of the gap between what's true and what you're saying, and at some point the gap gets small enough that closing it feels less like bravery and more like just, finally, telling the truth. Jake told the truth out a car window and drove away and it was embarrassing and it was worth it and he'd do it again.
He knew, on some level, that this was always where it was going. Not the Wendy's specifically, but the version where you're his and he's yours and the loop finally closes into something that isn't a loop anymore. He'd known it since he was 21 and smart and absolutely full of shit about what he was and wasn't capable of feeling. He'd just taken the scenic route to get here, which, given that the scenic route included three years of you, he couldn't bring himself to regret.
So yeah, Jake Sim thought he was smarter than he really was at 21. Turns out he wasn't smart enough to avoid falling in love with you, wasn't smart enough to keep it casual, wasn't smart enough to protect himself from any of it. But it was the best thing that ever happened to Jake Sim, honestly.
Pairing: senior!heeseung x loser!fem!reader
Genre: slowburn, college!au, smut MDNI, comedy, fluff, socially challenged fem!reader, misunderstanding, he fell first he fell harder, angst? (idk about it but I think you guys will understand when reading)
Synopsis: The hopeless romantic you are decided to confess and give a heartfelt letter to your all time crush but fate decided otherwise and made you confess to the wrong person...the so-called womanizer of campus, Lee Heeseung. Maybe you should have just keep your feelings to yourself...or maybe it was a sign from the universe.
Warnings: unprotected!sex (don't risk it), swearing, oral (fem!rec), backshots, fingering, softdom!heeseung, first time, instructional (whatever that means)
WC: 26k
Note: I honestly didn't want to divide it in two more parts so I just posted it as it is...it's fuck ass long I knoooow but please it's worth it :,) Like I said from now on I will try to write more often on the longer format I hope you guys will like it!!!! There’s gonna be a spicy epilogue too so stay tuned!!!!
"You're a disaster...but God help me if I don't want to be a disaster with you for the rest of my life"
🎧Mini playlist : Who knows by Daniel Caesar, Dream by Keshi, Lovers by Anna of the North, Wus Good/Curious by Partynextdoor, WGFT by Gunna
The campus café is a small, cozy establishment nestled between the student union and the art building. You have been here exactly twice before, both times with Yunjin, and both times you have spent more money on a single drink than you usually spend on an entire meal.
Today, the café is moderately busy. A few students hunch over laptops, a couple in the corner have what looks like a very intense conversation about something, and a barista with an impressive mustache wipes down the counter. The smell of espresso hangs in the air.
"Why don't you grab us a table?" Heeseung suggests, pulling out his wallet. "I'll order. What do you want?"
You blink at him. "You don't have to pay for me."
"I'm the one who invited you. It's the least I can do." He tilts his head, that curious expression settling over his features. "Consider it part of the starting slow thing. Coffee first, then maybe a meal, then eventually I'll work up to buying you a gift."
You don't know how to respond to that, so you just tell him your order: a vanilla latte, the most basic thing on the menu, and flee to a small table near the window before your face can betray you any further.
Okay, okay, okay. This is fine. This is manageable. You are just having coffee with Heeseung, the guy who thinks you confessed to him, the guy you have been actively trying to repel, the guy who starred in your extremely inappropriate dream three nights ago. This is fine. Everything is fine.
You watch him at the counter, chatting easily with the mustachioed barista like they are old friends. He laughs at something the barista says, and the sound carries across the café, warm and genuine. A group of girls at a nearby table glance over at him, then put their heads together and whisper. Heeseung doesn't seem to notice. Or if he does, he doesn't react, doesn't do any of the things you would expect from someone with his reputation.
It's infuriating.
A few minutes later, he walks toward your table with two cups in his hands. "One vanilla latte for the lady," he says, setting yours down with a flourish, "and one Americano for me. I got you an extra shot of vanilla. You seem like you could use it."
"I could use a lot of things," you mutter, wrapping your hands around the warm cup. "Vanilla is a start."
Heeseung settles into the chair across from you, his long legs stretching out under the table. "So," he says, "do you want to tell me why you were hiding behind a bulletin board earlier? Or should I just keep guessing? My current theory is that you're secretly a spy for a rival university and you're gathering intel on our science department."
"Your theory is wrong."
"Then what's the real reason?"
I was hiding from you, you don't say. I was hiding from you because I dreamed about you eating me out and now I can't look at your face without spontaneously combusting.
"I'm just… very committed to checking bulletin boards," you say instead. "There's a lot of important information on them. Club announcements. Study group postings. Lost and found notices. Someone lost a cat last week. Did you see that poster? Very sad. I hope they found the cat."
"You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"Rambling. You ramble when you're nervous." He takes a sip of his Americano, his eyes never leaving your face. "It's cute. But you don't have to be nervous around me, you know. I'm not going to bite."
The word "bite" should not make your stomach flip. It is a normal word. A mundane word. A word that people use in completely innocent contexts all the time. But your brain, still apparently haunted by the ghost of that dream, chooses to remind you of the part where Heeseung's lips trailed down to your collarbone, and suddenly you can't look at his mouth anymore.
"I'm not nervous," you lie. "I'm just… naturally like this. I'm a naturally weird person. This is my baseline."
"Your baseline is being weird?"
"Extremely weird. The weirdest. I once alphabetized my entire book collection by color instead of author name because I wanted to see what it would look like. It looked terrible. I kept it that way for three months."
"I also talk to my plants. All of them. Individually. I have a succulent named Jason and I tell him about my day."
"That's just being a good plant parent."
"I cannot snap my fingers. I've tried for nineteen years and I simply cannot do it. My fingers make no sound. It's like they're broken but specifically only for snapping purposes."
Heeseung smiles now, that same genuine smile that appeared in the cafeteria when you talked about League of Legends. "Okay, that one's a little weird. But in an endearing way."
Endearing. He called you endearing. This is not going according to plan.
"I should go get napkins," you say abruptly, pushing back your chair. "We need napkins. For the coffee. In case of spills. You can never be too prepared."
Heeseung glances at the napkin dispenser that is already sitting on the table between you. "We have napkins."
"These aren't… good napkins. I need the good ones. The thick ones. From the counter. I'll be right back."
You escape before he can protest, weaving through the tables toward the counter where the barista is busy steaming milk. You don't actually need napkins. You need a moment to breathe, to collect yourself, to remind your heart that it is supposed to be beating for Jungwon, not doing gymnastics every time Heeseung smiles at you.
The barista hands you a stack of napkins without you even having to ask. You clutch them to your chest like a shield and turn back toward your table.
Heeseung is watching you, his chin propped on his hand, his expression soft and curious and completely unguarded. The afternoon light from the window catches the angles of his face, the sweep of his hair, the slight quirk of his lips. He looks like a painting. He looks like something you would pin to a Pinterest board titled "dream boyfriend" and then immediately feel bad about because no real person should look that good while just sitting in a café.
You start walking back toward the table, your mind a whirlwind of panic and confusion and the desperate need to get through this interaction without making a bigger fool of yourself.
And then your foot catches on the leg of a chair.
It happens in slow motion. One moment you are walking, your napkins clutched to your chest, your eyes fixed on Heeseung. The next moment your toe hooks around a wrought-iron chair leg that is sticking out slightly from a nearby table, and your body pitches forward, and the napkins fly out of your hands, and the coffee, dear God, the coffee who's sitting on the table gets knocked off and sloshes out of your cup in a great wave.
Time speeds up again. You hit the floor with a thud that rattles your teeth, and the coffee hits you approximately 0.3 seconds later, soaking through your sweater and your jeans and possibly your very soul. The liquid is still warm, not scalding but definitely not pleasant, and it is everywhere, on your clothes, on your hands, dripping from the ends of your hair, pooling on the floor around you in a sad, beige puddle.
The café goes silent.
You sit there, on the floor, covered in your own vanilla latte, and stare at the puddle spreading beneath you. The napkins have scattered across the tiles like confetti, completely useless now. A drip of coffee rolls down your forehead and off the tip of your nose.
This is it. This is the moment you finally break. All the stress of the past week, the letter, the misunderstanding, the dream, the bulletin board incident has been building toward this, and now, sitting in a puddle of expensive café coffee with every eye in the establishment fixed on you, you feel the tears prick at the corners of your eyes.
You are going to cry. You are going to cry in front of Heeseung and the mustachioed barista and the couple in the corner and those girls who have been whispering about Heeseung earlier. You are going to cry, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.
But then you look down at your hands, and you realize something.
His coffee. The Americano. The cup who's been next to yours, you have managed, in the chaos of your fall, to keep it upright by holding it. Your arm lifted it above your head at the last second, some primal survival instinct kicking in to protect the beverage that isn't even yours, and the Americano is still sitting perfectly intact in its cup, not a single drop spilled.
You are covered in latte. Your sweater is ruined. Your dignity is in shambles. But his coffee is safe.
"I saved yours," you say, your voice coming out as a croak. You hold up the Americano like a trophy, your arm trembling slightly. "Look. I saved yours."
Heeseung is already out of his chair, already crouching beside you, his expression shifting from shock to concern to something else entirely, something soft and wondering and absolutely devastating.
"You saved my coffee," he repeats.
"It was a reflex. I don't know why. I don't even like you that much. I mean, I like you a normal amount. A regular amount. The amount you're supposed to like someone you accidentally-" You stop yourself before you can say more. "I saved your coffee."
Heeseung stares at you for a long moment. Then, very deliberately, he reaches out and takes the Americano from your hand. He looks at you, covered in vanilla latte, sitting in a puddle on the café floor, your glasses askew and your hair dripping.
And then he pours his own coffee over his head.
Just… tips the cup over and lets the dark liquid cascade down his hair, over his forehead, along the sharp bridge of his nose, soaking into the collar of his black hoodie and leaving trails of coffee across his skin.
You gape at him. The entire café gapes at him.
"What-" you start, but your voice has stopped working.
Heeseung sets the empty cup down with a quiet click and smiles at you, a warm, genuine, completely unhinged smile that makes your heart do a full backflip inside your chest.
"Now we match," he says.
You can't speak. You can't think. You can only stare at him, this absurd, beautiful, incomprehensible boy who has just poured coffee on himself in the middle of a crowded café for no other reason than to make you feel less alone in your humiliation.
"But… your hoodie," you manage. "Your hair. The floor. The-"
"I have other hoodies. My hair will dry. And the floor can be mopped." He reaches out and gently straightens your glasses, which have gone crooked during your fall. His fingers brush against your temple, feather-light. "You looked like you were about to cry. I couldn't let you cry alone."
"Alone?" Your voice cracks. "You couldn't let me cry alone?"
"I mean, ideally you wouldn't cry at all. But if you are going to cry, I figure I should give you company. Solidarity in humiliation, you know?" He's still smiling, still crouching in front of you, still covered in Americano like it is the most normal thing in the world. "We make a pretty good pair of disasters, don't you think?"
Your heart flips. It doesn't flutter. It doesn't skip a beat. It does a full, acrobatic, Olympic-level flip inside your chest, and you feel the sensation reverberate through your entire body.
Why is he like this?
Why is Lee Heeseung, reputed womanizer, notorious player, the guy everyone warns you about, sitting on the floor of a café covered in his own coffee just to make you feel better about spilling yours? Why is he looking at you like that, with those dark, gentle eyes, like you are something precious instead of the absolute disaster you clearly are?
You don't know. You don't understand. And the not understanding is starting to become a problem, because every time you think you have Heeseung figured out, he goes and does something like this, and your careful mental categories crumble a little more.
"We should probably…" You gesture vaguely at your coffee-soaked selves. "Clean up. Or something."
"Probably," Heeseung agrees. He stands up and offers you his hand, his coffee-stained, still-damp hand and you have no choice but to take it. His grip is warm and solid, and he pulls you to your feet with an ease that suggests you weigh nothing at all. "There's a student services office around the corner. They keep spare t-shirts for emergencies. We could both use a change of clothes."
You look down at your sweater, which is now more latte-colored than its original blue. "That's… probably a good idea."
Heeseung pulls out his wallet and drops several bills on the nearest table, far more than the cost of two coffees with a nod to the mustachioed barista. "For the mess," he says. "Sorry about the floor."
The barista nods slowly, his expression suggesting he has seen many things in his years at the café but has never quite witnessed anything like this.
And then Heeseung guides you out of the café, his hand hovering at the small of your back but not quite touching, and you walk through the student union in matching coffee-stained clothes like the world's most unfortunate pair of twins.
The student services office is a small, cluttered room tucked into a corner of the union building. It is staffed by a perpetually exhausted-looking graduate student who has clearly seen too much in his years of dealing with student emergencies. When you and Heeseung walk in, dripping coffee and smelling like a coffee explosion, he doesn't even blink.
"Coffee incident?" he asks flatly.
"Yes," Heeseung says.
"Both of you?"
"I'm told we match now."
The student stares at him for a long moment, then sighs with the weariness of someone who long ago stopped questioning the absurdities of university life. "We have spare t-shirts in the back. They're not fashionable. They have the university logo on them. You don't get to complain about the design."
"We wouldn't dream of it," Heeseung says.
The student disappears into a back room and emerges a moment later with two folded shirts. They are, as promised, aggressively unfashionable, a mustard yellow color with the university mascot printed on the front in peeling letters. Beneath the mascot are the words "Embrace the process!"
"These are incredible," Heeseung says, holding up his shirt with genuine delight. "I'm keeping this forever."
"The bathrooms are down the hall," the student says, already turning back to his computer. "Please don't track coffee into them. I just had the floors cleaned."
You and Heeseung change in separate bathrooms, and when you emerge, you are confronted with the sight of Heeseung wearing a mustard-yellow shirt that is slightly too small for him, the fabric stretching across his shoulders in a way that is definitely not doing things to your heart. The coffee has been wiped off his face, but his hair is still damp, curling slightly at the ends, and the combination of the terrible shirt and the wet hair and the ridiculously attractive face is so absurd that you actually laugh out loud.
"What?" Heeseung asks, grinning. "Do I look as good as I think I do?"
"You look like you traded shirts with a child."
"A very fashionable child. This slogan will hype me up for my next exam." He looks you over, his eyes crinkling. "You don't look half bad yourself. Yellow's a good color on you."
You are wearing the exact same shirt. You look like a banana. But Heeseung says it like he means it, and you feel that traitorous flutter in your chest again.
"We should go," you say, because standing in a hallway with Heeseung while wearing ridiculous matching shirts is doing something strange to your brain chemistry. "I have… I need to… there's a thing…"
"The mysterious thing," Heeseung says. "Your nemesis. Your arch-enemy. The eternal obstacle to us spending more time together."
"It's a very busy thing. It takes up a lot of my schedule."
"Right." He is still smiling, still looking at you with that soft, curious expression. "Well, before you run off to your very important thing, let me walk you to-"
"There you are, Heeseung! I've been looking everywhere for-"
The voice comes from the end of the hallway, and you know that voice. You know it the way you know your own heartbeat, the way you know the lyrics to every Ariana Grande song, the way you know that vanilla lattes are now your mortal enemy.
Jungwon walks toward you, his phone in his hand and a slight frown on his face, like he has been searching for Heeseung for a while. He looks so unfairly beautiful that your heart does the thing it always does when you see him, that painful, hopeful, aching thing that feels like a bruise that won't heal.
But then his eyes land on you, and he stops walking.
"Y/N?" His gaze travels from your face to your shirt to Heeseung's matching shirt to the general air of disaster that still clings to both of you. "What… happened to you guys?"
"Coffee incident," Heeseung says, with the casual air of someone explaining something completely normal. "She spilled hers, so I spilled mine too. Now we're twins."
Jungwon blinks. "You poured coffee on yourself?"
"Matching disasters. It's a new concept. We're pioneering it."
You want to say something, anything, to salvage this situation. Jungwon is looking between you and Heeseung with an expression you can't quite read, and your brain screams at you to explain, to clarify, to make sure he doesn't get the wrong idea about what he is seeing.
"It's not… we're not-" you start, but your voice comes out squeaky and strange. "The coffee was an accident. Well, my coffee was an accident. His coffee was on purpose. But not in a romantic way. In a… solidarity way. Against the humiliation. We are fighting humiliation together."
"Fighting humiliation," Jungwon repeats slowly.
"Enemies," you say, nodding too hard. "We're humiliation enemies. Humi-nemies. It's a whole thing."
Heeseung watches you with that amused expression again, and you can tell he is biting back a smile. "Humi-nemies," he echoes. "Right. That's what we are."
Jungwon is quiet for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he smiles, but it isn't his usual warm smile. It is something smaller, something more careful, something that makes your stomach drop even as you can't identify why.
"You guys make a cute couple," he says.
The words hit you like a physical blow. Your mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. No sound comes out.
"We're not—" you try, but Jungwon is already stepping back, already half-turning away.
"I've got to get to class," he says. "Heeseung, I'll catch up with you later. Y/N… nice shirt."
And then he walks away, and you stand in the hallway with your heart in your stomach and Heeseung's matching shirt still warm against your skin.
"We're not a couple," you say, but it comes out as barely a whisper.
"Not yet," Heeseung says cheerfully, apparently completely oblivious to the emotional devastation that just occurred. "But we're off to a good start, don't you think? Coffee disasters, matching outfits, running into my friends, this is basically a textbook meet-cute progression."
You turn to stare at him. He is grinning, still radiating that unshakeable, inexplicable joy that seems to follow him everywhere. He has no idea. He has absolutely no idea that the boy you actually like just saw you in matching shirts with someone else and assumed you were a couple.
"Are you okay?" Heeseung asks, his smile fading slightly. "You look a little pale. Was the coffee too hot? Do you need to sit down?"
"I'm fine," you manage. "I just… I need to go. The thing. The very important thing. It's calling me."
You don't wait for him to respond. You turn and walk away, not running, because running would be too obvious, but walking very quickly, your mind a tornado of panic and regret and the image of Jungwon's smile fading as he says the words that just shattered your entire world.
You guys make a cute couple.
He thinks you are a couple. Yang Jungwon, the boy you have been pining over for four months, the boy you wrote a three-page love letter to, the boy who poked your cheek in the library and called you cute, he thinks you are dating Lee Heeseung.
You are trapped. You are so, so trapped.
By the time you reach your dorm room, you are practically vibrating with suppressed emotion. You close the door, lean your back against it, and press your hands to your face.
You guys make a cute couple.
"We're not a couple," you whisper to your empty room. "We're not a couple. We're humi-nemies. That's a real thing that I definitely didn't just make up because I can't communicate like a normal human being."
Your room does not respond.
You slide down the door until you are sitting on the floor, your legs stretched out in front of you. You look ridiculous. You feel ridiculous. Your entire life has become a comedy of errors, and you are the punchline.
But even as you sit there, drowning in self-pity and the lingering scent of vanilla latte, you can't quite forget the look on Heeseung's face when he poured his coffee over his head. The way he smiled at you, open and unguarded. The way he said I couldn't let you cry alone like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Why is he like that? Why is he so… him?
You don't have an answer. And that, more than anything else, is starting to scare you.
The library has become your second home.
Not by choice, exactly. More by necessity. The library is neutral territory, a place where you can exist without fear of coffee-related disasters, unexpected bulletin board ambushes, or tall informatics students appearing out of thin air to pour beverages on themselves in acts of solidarity. The library has rules. The library has silence. The library has mercifully dim lighting that hides the dark circles under your eyes from three consecutive nights of restless sleep.
It has been four days since the coffee incident. Four days since Jungwon looked at you in your matching shirt and said those fateful words: You guys make a cute couple. Four days of replaying that moment over and over in your head, analyzing every micro-expression on his face, every nuance in his voice, trying to determine if there was something else there, something like disappointment, or regret, or maybe even jealousy.
You have come to no conclusions. Your analytical skills, apparently, are useless when applied to matters of the heart.
So you do what any reasonable, emotionally overwhelmed STEM student would do: you throw yourself into your studies with the intensity of someone trying to forget their entire life. You have read the same paragraph about cellular respiration seventeen times. You have highlighted so many sentences that your textbook looks like a rainbow has thrown up on it. You have consumed approximately four hundred milligrams of caffeine in the past three hours alone, and your hands shake slightly as you turn another page.
It is fine. Everything is fine. You are fine.
"You're going to burn a hole through that book if you keep staring at it like that."
The voice comes from directly above you, and you jolt so hard that your highlighter goes skidding across the table and rolls onto the floor. You look up, your heart already doing that familiar, traitorous leap, and there he is.
Jungwon.
He stands beside your table with a gentle smile on his face, his backpack slung over one shoulder, his hair slightly messy like he has been running his fingers through it.
"Sorry," he says, stooping to pick up your fallen highlighter. "I didn't mean to startle you. You just looked so intense. Like you were trying to intimidate the biology into making sense."
"The biology is winning," you admit, accepting the highlighter with a hand that trembles slightly. From the caffeine. Definitely from the caffeine. "I've been reading the same page for twenty minutes and I still have no idea what oxidative phosphorylation is."
"It sounds like a spell from Harry Potter."
"That's what I've been thinking! But apparently it's something about electrons and I just-" You gesture vaguely at the chaos of papers spread across your table. "I'm losing the war."
Jungwon laughs, that bright, sunny sound that never fails to make your heart flutter. "Mind if I join you? I've been looking for a quiet spot to study, and honestly, sitting next to someone who's fighting for their life against biology sounds way more entertaining than sitting alone."
Your heart, the same heart that belongs to this boy, that has belonged to him since the moment he slid gummy bears across a library table at 2 AM, screams YES with the force of a thousand suns. Your brain, the traitorous organ that got you into this mess in the first place, reminds you of all the reasons this is a terrible idea.
"You probably don't want to sit with me," you say, the words tumbling out before you can stop them. "I'm not very good company right now. I've been mainlining caffeine and I think I can hear colors."
"That sounds like excellent company." Jungwon pulls out the chair across from you and sits down without waiting for permission. "What colors can you hear?"
"Biology textbook beige, mostly. It sounds like despair."
He laughs again, and the sound settles into your chest like a warm blanket. This is fine. This is okay. You can study with Jungwon without making it weird. You have done it before, you have spent a whole hour in this very library, watching him take notes and push his glasses up his nose and poke your cheek with that devastating smile. You can do it again. You are a professional. You are a master of emotional compartmentalization.
For a while, you actually do study. Or at least, you both pretend to. Jungwon opens his philosophy book and starts reading, his brow furrowed in concentration, his pen tapping absently against his notebook. You stare at your biology textbook with renewed determination, willing the words to make sense.
But your eyes keep drifting up, against your will, over the top of your book, to the boy sitting across from you. The way the library light catches the highlights in his hair. The way he bites his lower lip when he is thinking. The way his fingers curl around his pen, elegant and deliberate.
"You're doing it again," Jungwon says, not looking up from his book.
Heat floods your cheeks. "I'm not doing anything. I'm reading about oxidative phosphorylation. It's very interesting. Lots of electrons."
"Y/N." He looks up then, and his expression is softer than you expected. Gentler. "It's okay. I told you before, right? I don't mind being looked at like that."
"Like what?"
"Like I'm something worth looking at." He sets down his pen and folds his hands on the table, giving you his full attention. "You have a very particular way of looking at people. Did you know that? It's like you're trying to memorize them. Every detail. Like you're cataloguing things that most people wouldn't notice."
Your heart pounds so hard you are certain he can hear it. You want to say I'm only looking at you like this because it's you. But the words won't come. "That's… that's my STEM brain. I'm very analytical. I notice things. It's a curse."
"I don't think it's a curse." Jungwon's voice is quiet, thoughtful. "I think it's actually really special. Most people don't pay attention like that. Most people look at you and see what they want to see, not what's actually there." He pauses, his eyes searching your face. "You're different, Y/N. You actually see people."
The words hang in the air between you, heavy with meaning. This is it. This is the moment. The conversation has shifted into something deeper, something more intimate, and you can feel the confession building in your chest like a wave about to break.
You can tell him. Right now. You can tell him everything, the letter, the misunderstanding, the way your heart has been his since the very beginning. You can clear the air and finally, finally be free of the tangled web you have accidentally woven around yourself.
"Jungwon," you say, and your voice comes out steadier than you expect. "There's something I need to tell you. About Heeseung. About the confession. About everything. It's not what you think. It's never been what you think."
Jungwon's expression flickers, surprise, confusion, something else you can't quite name. "What do you mean?"
"I mean-" You take a deep breath, gathering your courage. "The letter. The one I gave to Heeseung. It wasn't-"
"Wait." Jungwon holds up a hand, stopping you mid-sentence. "Before you say anything else, can I say something first?"
You nod, your heart hammering.
Jungwon leans back in his chair, his eyes never leaving your face. "I've been watching you and Heeseung," he says slowly. "The past few weeks. Ever since he told me about the confession. And I've never seen him like this before."
Your stomach drops. "Like what?"
"Like… happy. Genuinely happy. Not the surface-level people-pleasing happiness he shows everyone else, but something real. Something that goes all the way down." Jungwon's voice is earnest, almost protective. "Heeseung is my friend. One of my best friends. And I know what people say about him, that he's a player, a womanizer, that he'll charm you and then move on. But that's not who he really is."
You don't know what to say. You don't know where this is going. But you can't seem to interrupt, can't seem to find the words to stop him.
"Heeseung is…" Jungwon pauses, searching for the right words. "He's the guy who will stay up all night helping you debug code even when he has his own assignments due. He's the guy who remembers everyone's birthday and always gets them a gift that shows he actually paid attention to what they like. He's the guy who can't say no to anyone, ever, because he's so terrified of disappointing people that he'd rather burn himself out than let someone down."
He smiles, but there is something sad in it. "Girls think he's flirting with them because he's nice to everyone. And he won't correct them because he doesn't want to hurt their feelings. So he just… lets them believe what they want to believe, and then he feels guilty when they get attached, and the whole thing becomes this cycle he can't break out of. It's not malice. It's the exact opposite of malice, it's too much kindness, too much caring, and not enough ability to set boundaries."
Your throat is dry. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I think you're different." Jungwon meets your eyes, and his gaze is steady and sincere. "I think you actually see him. Not the reputation, not the rumors, but the real him. And I think he's starting to see the real you too." He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer. Almost fragile. "So I need you to promise me something."
"What?"
"Take care of him. Please." Jungwon's smile is gentle, but there is something behind it, something that looks a lot like pain, carefully hidden, expertly concealed. "He's been alone for a long time, even when he's surrounded by people. I don't think he even realizes how lonely he is. But you… you could change that. I can see it."
The wave of emotion that crashes over you is so overwhelming that you can't speak. This isn't how this conversation is supposed to go. You are supposed to confess to Jungwon. You are supposed to clear up the misunderstanding. You are supposed to finally tell him the truth.
Who knows - Daniel Caesar playing now
But Jungwon isn't finished.
"There's something else I should tell you," he says, and his voice drops even lower, barely above a whisper. "Something I probably shouldn't say. But I think I need to, or I'll regret it forever."
"What is it?"
Jungwon looks down at his hands, folded on the table. When he speaks, his voice is steady, but you can hear the effort it takes to keep it that way.
"I like you."
The words don't make sense. They can't make sense. You hear them, understand them individually, but your brain refuses to assemble them into a coherent meaning.
"What?" you breathe.
"I like you," Jungwon repeats, and now he looks up at you, and his eyes are so full of something, regret, maybe, or longing, or both, that it makes your chest ache. "From the first day of philosophy class. You sat in the front row, near the window, and you had like eight different colored highlighters lined up on your desk, and you took notes so furiously that your pen ran out of ink halfway through the lecture. I remember you made this little frustrated noise and searched your bag for a spare, and you looked so genuinely distraught that I almost offered you mine."
The library. The philosophy lecture. The day you ran out of ink. You remember it, vaguely, distantly, a moment so mundane you never thought about it again. But Jungwon remembers. Jungwon has been watching you, just like you have been watching him.
"I noticed you after that," he continues, and his voice is achingly soft. "The way you always sat in the same spot. The way you organized your notes. The way you bit your lip when you were concentrating. I kept telling myself I'd talk to you, but I could never find the right moment. And then midterms happened, and we were both in the library at 2 AM, and I saw you looking exhausted and stressed, and I just…" He laughs, but it is a sad sound. "I gave you gummy bears because I couldn't think of anything else to do. It felt so stupid at the time. Who gives gummy bears to a stranger at 2 AM?"
"A stranger who hadn't slept in thirty-six hours and was about to cry over organic chemistry," you whisper. "It wasn't stupid. It was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me."
Jungwon's smile flickers. "I was working up the courage to actually talk to you. To ask you out properly. But then…" He trails off, and his expression shifts, something closing off behind his eyes. "Then Heeseung told me about the confession. And I saw the way he looked when he talked about you. And I knew… I knew I'd missed my chance."
No. No, no, no. This is wrong. This is all wrong. He hasn't missed his chance. The chance is right here, right now, sitting in front of him with a heart full of feelings that have always been meant for him.
"Jungwon," you say, and your voice cracks. "The letter… it wasn't-"
"I'm not telling you this to make things awkward," Jungwon interrupts gently. "I'm telling you because I want you to know. I like you. I really, really like you. And sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I'd been braver, if I'd said something sooner, if I hadn't waited until it was too late." He pauses, and his eyes meet yours, and the weight of what he says presses down on your chest like a physical force. "But I'm glad it's Heeseung. He deserves someone like you. And you deserve someone who sees you the way he does."
"You don't understand," you try, desperation creeping into your voice. "It wasn't supposed to be Heeseung. The letter was meant for-"
"Take care of him," Jungwon says again, and this time his voice is final. Resolute. Like he has already made his peace with something you haven't even realized he was struggling with. "That's all I ask."
He stands up, gathering his book and his notebook, and you watch him with a growing sense of panic. This can't be how it ends. You can't let him walk away without knowing the truth.
But then he pauses, looking down at you with that devastating smile, the one that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes your heart do somersaults, and he reaches out and gently pokes your cheek.
"Boop," he says softly.
The gesture that once made you giddy with joy now feels like a knife twisting in your chest.
"Liking you was never a waste of my time, Y/N," he says, and his voice is tender in a way that breaks your heart into a thousand pieces. "I don't regret it. Not even for a second."
And then he walks away, and you are left alone at your table with a biology textbook you haven't read and a heart that is shattering into so many fragments you don't know if you will ever be able to put it back together.
I like you.
I gave you gummy bears because I couldn't think of anything else to do.
Liking you was never a waste of my time.
He liked you. He liked you this whole time. All those months of pining, of yearning, of writing and rewriting that letter and he has been feeling the same thing. You have been two ships passing in the night, each carrying the same cargo of unspoken feelings, and you have missed each other by a margin so narrow it is almost laughable.
But it isn't laughable. It is devastating. It is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to you, and you are sitting in the middle of a silent library trying not to fall apart.
You don't remember packing up your things. You don't remember leaving the library. One moment you are staring at the spot where Jungwon was sitting, and the next you are walking across campus in the fading evening light, your backpack hanging heavy from your shoulders, your feet carrying you automatically toward your dorm.
And then the tears come.
They start slow, a burning sensation behind your eyes, a tightness in your throat. You try to swallow them down, try to hold them back, but they won't be contained. By the time you reach the pathway between the science building and the student union, you are crying openly, tears streaming down your cheeks in hot, relentless rivers.
This isn't a romantic cry. This isn't the kind of crying that happens in movies, where the heroine looks beautiful and tragic and a single perfect tear rolls down her cheek. This is an ugly cry. A messy, hiccuping, snotty cry that makes your nose run and your shoulders shake and your breath come in ragged gasps. You are crying because the boy you liked liked you back, and instead of ending up together like you were supposed to, everything has gone terribly, irreversibly wrong.
You stop walking. You can't keep going. Your legs won't carry you any further. You lean against the rough bark of a tree and press your hands to your face, trying to muffle the sounds that escape from your throat.
You cry for the letter you sent to the wrong person. You cry for the courage it took to write it, and the cowardice that has kept you from correcting your mistake. You cry for Jungwon, who liked you and gave up on you because he thought you wanted someone else. You cry for yourself, for the hopeless romantic who dreamed of grand gestures and perfect moments and has ended up with nothing but misunderstandings and a heavy heart that breaks into smaller and smaller pieces.
You cry until your throat is raw and your eyes are swollen and you don't think you have any tears left to shed.
And then a voice, gentle, concerned, painfully familiar, cuts through the fog of your grief.
"Y/N?"
You look up.
Lee Heeseung stands on the pathway a few feet away, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his expression shifting from casual curiosity to alarm as he takes in your tear-streaked face and trembling shoulders.
"Hey," he says, and his voice is softer than you have ever heard it. "Hey, what's wrong? What happened?"
You should make an excuse. You should say you are fine, that it's allergies, that you just got something in your eye. You should tell him to leave you alone, to give you space, to let you fall apart in private.
But the words won't come. All that comes out is another sob, and your knees buckle slightly, and then Heeseung is there, his hands on your shoulders, steadying you.
"It's okay," he says, even though he doesn't know what is wrong, even though you haven't explained anything. "It's okay. I've got you."
"No, you don't understand," you choke out. "Everything is messed up. Everything is so messed up and it's all my fault."
"Then we'll fix it." He says it with such simple certainty, like it is the most obvious thing in the world. "Whatever it is, we'll fix it."
"You can't fix this. No one can fix this."
"Maybe not." Heeseung's hands move from your shoulders to your upper arms, his grip gentle but grounding. "But I can be here. I can listen. And I can promise you that whatever it is, you don't have to deal with it alone."
Something in his voice, the steadiness, the sincerity, the complete lack of judgment, cracks through the last of your defenses. You stop trying to hold yourself together. You let the tears fall, let your shoulders shake, let yourself be exactly as broken as you feel.
And Heeseung doesn't flinch. He doesn't look uncomfortable or try to escape or offer meaningless platitudes. He just stands there, his hands warm on your arms, his presence solid and unwavering, letting you cry without asking for explanations or justifications.
After a while, you don't know how long, the tears begin to subside. Your breathing steadies. The storm inside you quiets to a dull, aching calm. You wipe your eyes with the back of your hand, suddenly aware of how awful you must look, how puffy and red and wrecked.
"I'm sorry," you whisper. "Your jacket is probably wet."
"My jacket has survived worse." Heeseung's voice is gentle. "Come on. Let's sit down somewhere."
He guides you to a bench nearby, a small wooden bench tucked under a cluster of trees, partially hidden from the main pathway. You sit down heavily, your legs still shaky, and Heeseung sits beside you, close enough that you can feel the warmth of his body but not so close that it feels invasive.
Dream - Keshi playing now
For a long moment, neither of you speaks. The evening settles around you, the sky shifting from pale blue to soft pink to deeper purple. A few stars start to appear, faint pinpricks of light against the darkening canvas overhead. The campus is quiet, most students already back in their dorms or the library, and the only sounds are the distant hum of traffic and the occasional rustle of leaves in the breeze.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Heeseung asks eventually.
"Not really."
"Okay." He doesn't push. He doesn't pry. He just sits there, his shoulder almost touching yours, his presence a quiet comfort in the gathering dark.
"You're not going to ask questions?"
"You'll tell me when you're ready. Or you won't. Either way, I'm not going anywhere."
The simplicity of it, the uncomplicated, undemanding kindness of it, makes your eyes sting with fresh tears. You blink them back, determined not to start crying again.
"Why are you being so nice to me?" you ask, your voice hoarse.
Heeseung turns his head to look at you, and his expression is unreadable. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"Because… because I'm a disaster. Because I've been weird and awkward and I ran away from you and hid behind bulletin boards and spilled coffee on myself and I can't seem to do anything right. Because you barely know me, and what you do know is mostly just me making a fool of myself."
Heeseung is quiet for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he smiles. Not the smirk or the teasing grin, but something softer. Something realer.
"Can you guess the movie I've watched recently?"
The question is so random that you blink. "What?"
"A movie I've watched recently. Can you guess?"
"Am I supposed to?"
"No, because I've never told you." He leans back on the bench, tilting his face up toward the emerging stars. "I don't usually tell people. It's kind of embarrassing."
You sniffle, curiosity temporarily overriding your grief. "What is it?"
"To All the Boys I've Loved Before."
You stare at him. "The Netflix movie? The one with Lara Jean?"
"The very same." He doesn't look embarrassed at all. If anything, he looks almost proud. "I've watched it like eight times. Maybe nine. I lost count somewhere around the sixth viewing."
"But… that's a teen romance. That's a movie about fake dating and love letters and-" You stop. "Oh."
"Yeah." Heeseung's smile turns wry. "The parallels weren't lost on me. Girl writes love letters she never meant to send. Letters end up reaching the boys. Chaos ensues." He glances at you sideways. "Sound familiar?"
Your heart does something strange, something fluttery and uncertain. "Why did you watch it?"
"Because Lara Jean is a hopeless romantic who's terrified of actually living the romance she dreams about." Heeseung's voice is thoughtful, almost contemplative. "She's brave on paper but scared in real life. She has all these feelings and no idea what to do with them. And she's convinced that if she actually tries to be vulnerable, everything will fall apart."
He turns to look at you fully, his dark eyes catching the faint glow of the distant streetlamps. "Does any of that sound familiar to you?"
Your breath catches in your throat.
"You write beautiful letters," Heeseung continues, his voice dropping lower. "You pour your heart onto paper because it's safer than saying things out loud. You make graphs about video game balance because you're passionate and detail-oriented and you can't help but go all-in on the things you care about. You talk to your plants and name your succulents and hide behind bulletin boards because real life is scary and rejection is terrifying and it's easier to dream about love than to actually risk your heart for it."
You can't speak. You can barely breathe. He is describing you, not the surface-level you, not the "weird first-year STEM student" you, but the real you. The you that lives in daydreams and love letters and the safety of your own imagination.
"The letter you wrote wasn't just a confession," Heeseung says quietly. "It was a work of art. The calligraphy, the words, the way you talked about noticing small things and finding beauty in ordinary moments, that's not something you write to just anyone. That's something you write when you've been paying attention. When you really see someone."
He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is almost a whisper.
"You remind me of her. Lara Jean. The girl who was so busy dreaming about love that she almost missed it when it showed up in front of her. You are Lara Jean. My Lara Jean."
Your heart races. Your palms are sweaty. The evening has grown dark around you, the stars fully emerged now, and Heeseung's face is half in shadow, half illuminated by the distant campus lights.
"Why are you telling me this?" you whisper.
"Because I think you're scared," Heeseung says simply. "I think you've been scared since the moment you handed me that letter. I think you're scared of what it means, scared of being vulnerable, scared of letting someone actually see you. And I want you to know that I see you anyway. Even when you're trying to hide."
He reaches out, and his hand finds yours in the darkness. His fingers are warm, his grip gentle.
"You don't have to be scared with me," he says. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going to hurt you. And I'm not going to stop being interested just because you're awkward or clumsy or you spill coffee on yourself or you ramble about League of Legends until you run out of breath." He squeezes your hand. "That's the stuff I like about you. That's the stuff that makes you real."
You stare at him, your eyes still swollen from crying, your nose still red, your heart still aching from the conversation with Jungwon. And yet, sitting here on this bench with Heeseung's hand in yours and his words echoing in your ears, something shifts. Something changes.
"I don't know what I'm doing," you admit, your voice barely audible. "I don't know what I want. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel."
"Then don't figure it out tonight." Heeseung stands up, still holding your hand, and gently pulls you to your feet. "Come on. Let's get you back to your dorm. You need rest and probably some water. Crying is dehydrating."
Despite everything, the heartbreak, the confusion, the complete emotional chaos of the past hour, you almost smile. "That's a very practical observation."
"I'm an engineering student. We're practical by nature." He falls into step beside you, your hands still joined, and begins walking you toward your dorm building. "Also, I may have done some research on crying. You know, for science."
"You researched crying for science?"
"It was for a psych elective. But also for life skills. You'd be surprised how many people don't know that emotional tears contain stress hormones that need to be flushed out of your system. Crying is literally good for you."
"You're very weird," you say, but there's no bite to it.
"Coming from the girl who named her succulent Jason, I'll take that as a compliment."
You walk in silence for a while, the campus quiet and peaceful around you. The stars are bright overhead, and the air is cool against your tear-stained cheeks, and Heeseung's hand is warm in yours, steady and reassuring.
When you reach your dorm building, he stops at the entrance, turning to face you. The light from the lobby spills through the glass doors, illuminating his features, the sharp line of his jaw, the gentle curve of his lips, the way his dark eyes fix on your face like you are something worth looking at.
"Y/N," he says.
"Yeah?"
"I meant what I said earlier. You don't have to figure everything out tonight. You don't have to have all the answers. But whatever you're going through, whatever made you cry like that… I hope you know you can talk to me. About anything. Even if it's hard. Even if it's confusing. Even if it's not what you think I want to hear."
Your throat tightens. He has no idea how relevant those words are. He has no idea that the thing that made you cry is, in part, him or at least, the situation he is unknowingly caught up in.
"Thank you," you whisper.
Heeseung smiles, that same soft smile that appeared when he poured coffee over his head, when he called you a little mouse, when he listened to you talk about video games for fifteen minutes straight. And then, before you can react, he leans forward and presses a gentle kiss to your cheek.
It isn't romantic or it isn't supposed to be. It is brief and soft and chaste, the kind of kiss you might give a friend who is hurting. But his lips are warm against your skin, and when he pulls back, your cheek is tingling, and your heart does that traitorous flutter again.
"Goodnight, little mouse," he says. "Get some sleep."
And then he walks away, his hands in his pockets, his silhouette disappearing into the darkness of the campus night.
You stand there for a long moment, your hand pressed to your cheek where his lips have been, your heart a tangled mess of grief and confusion and something else, something warm and growing, something you don't want to name.
This is supposed to be simple. You are supposed to like Jungwon. You have liked Jungwon for four months. You wrote him a letter and dreamt about him and catalogued his habits and built an entire future around the idea of him.
But Jungwon walked away. Jungwon made his choice. Jungwon told you to take care of Heeseung and then poked your cheek one last time, a goodbye disguised as a signature gesture.
And Heeseung… Heeseung poured coffee on himself to make you feel less alone. Heeseung held your hand and told you that you were his Lara Jean. Heeseung kissed your cheek and called you little mouse and looked at you like you were something precious.
You don't know what to do anymore. You don't know what to feel. The map you have been following, the one that leads straight to Jungwon has crumbled in your hands, and now you stand in unfamiliar territory with no compass and no guide.
You push open the door to your dorm building and walk to your room in a daze, your mind still spinning. When you finally collapse onto your bed, still in your clothes, still wearing the tear tracks on your cheeks, you stare up at the ceiling and try to make sense of the chaos in your heart.
Jungwon liked you.
Jungwon gave up on you.
Heeseung said he wouldn't go anywhere.
Heeseung kissed your cheek.
You press your fingers to the spot where his lips have been and close your eyes.
"I don't know what I'm doing," you whisper to your empty room. "I really, really don't know what I'm doing."
Your room, as always, offers no answers. But somewhere in the distance, you can almost hear Heeseung's voice: You don't have to figure everything out tonight.
So you don't. You let the exhaustion pull you under, let sleep claim you, and try very hard not to think about the fact that the boy who just comforted you through your heartbreak is the same boy who might be slowly, quietly, unexpectedly stealing your heart.
The university, in its infinite and questionable wisdom, has decided that what the student body really needs is a three-day trip to a skiing station.
You received the email three weeks ago, skimmed it with the vague interest of someone who has never skied in her life and has no intention of starting now, and promptly archived it into the dark abyss of your inbox alongside seventeen other emails you will never open again. The trip is optional, after all. Attendance is not mandatory. You can simply stay on campus, enjoy the quiet emptiness of the dorms, and continue your ongoing mission of avoiding all tall informatics students while trying to piece together the shattered remnants of your romantic life.
It is a perfect plan. Flawless. Foolproof.
Until Yunjin gets involved.
"You're going," Yunjin says, standing in the doorway of your dorm room with her arms crossed and her expression one of immovable determination. She has just finished reading the email over your shoulder, and the glint in her eye is the same one she gets when she is about to bulldoze through every objection you can possibly raise.
"I'm not going," you reply, not looking up from your biology textbook. "I don't ski. I don't snowboard. I don't even own a proper winter coat. The heaviest thing I own is a cardigan, and I'm pretty sure it's made of acrylic."
"Then we'll get you a coat."
"Yunjin."
"Y/N."
"I can't go to a skiing station. I have studying to do. I have lab reports to write. I have approximately eight hundred flashcards to review before the next exam. My social life is already a disaster zone, I don't need to add frostbite and potential avalanche-related injuries to my list of problems."
Yunjin steps fully into the room, closes the door behind her, and fixes you with a look that you recognize as her "I'm about to say something brutally honest and you're not going to like it" expression. "You've been moping for two weeks."
"I haven't been moping. I've been processing."
"You've been moping. You've been staring at walls, listening to sad music, and eating instant ramen for every meal. I saw you crying over a nature documentary the other day because the baby penguin got separated from its family."
"That was emotionally manipulative editing! They set it to sad piano music! Anyone would have cried!"
"Y/N." Yunjin sits down on the edge of your bed, her voice softening. "I know about Jungwon. I know he told you he liked you and then walked away. I know you've been carrying that around like a weight on your chest. But hiding in your room isn't going to make it better. You need to get out. You need fresh air. You need to do something that isn't just staring at the same four walls and replaying the same conversation over and over in your head."
You set down your highlighter. "What if I run into Jungwon on the trip?"
"Then you'll be a normal human being about it. Or you'll be weird and awkward, which is your default state anyway, so nothing will have changed."
"Comforting."
"What if you run into Heeseung?"
The question catches you off guard. Your hand stills on your textbook, and you feel that familiar, complicated flutter in your chest, the one that has been appearing more and more frequently whenever someone mentions his name. "I don't know. I haven't really talked to him since…" Since the night he kissed your cheek. Since the night you realized that maybe, just maybe, your heart is no longer as firmly in Jungwon's camp as you always assumed.
"Exactly," Yunjin says, as if your silence has proven her point. "You need to figure things out. And you can't do that if you're hiding in your dorm room subsisting on sodium and self-pity. The ski trip is three days. Three days of fresh mountain air, hot chocolate, and the chance to actually talk to people face-to-face instead of through a fog of depression ramen."
"The ramen isn't that bad."
"The ramen is a cry for help."
You are quiet for a moment, staring at the pages of your textbook without really seeing them. Yunjin is right. You know she is right. You have been hiding from Jungwon, from Heeseung, from the tangled mess of feelings that you still haven't sorted out. The past two weeks have been a blur of avoidance and overthinking, and you are no closer to clarity than you were on that bench under the stars.
"Fine," you say finally, the word escaping before you can stop it. "I'll go."
Yunjin's face lights up. "Really?"
"But I'm not skiing. I refuse to ski. I'll sit in the lodge and drink hot chocolate and judge people from the window like a ghost."
"That's the spirit."
The morning of the trip arrives with a gray sky and a biting chill in the air. You stand outside the student union with your hastily packed duffel bag, which contains exactly zero items suitable for winter sports because your wardrobe is approximately eighty percent oversized sweaters and twenty percent academic stress, and watch your breath fog in the cold morning air.
The bus is already parked at the curb, a massive coach with the university logo emblazoned on the side. Students mill around, dragging suitcases and carrying thermoses of coffee, their chatter filling the air with a buzz of excitement. You spot a few familiar faces from your classes, a group of engineering students comparing snowboards, and your heart lurches, a flash of dark hair that might be Jungwon disappearing into the bus.
Yunjin has already boarded, abandoning you for a seat near the front because she wants to "network with the economics majors" or some other nonsense that you can't relate to. You are alone, clutching your bag and wondering if it is too late to fake a sudden illness, when a voice speaks directly behind you.
"Need help with your bag?"
You spin around so fast that your duffel bag swings in a wide arc and nearly takes out an innocent bystander. The innocent bystander, thankfully, has very good reflexes. He ducks, straightens up, and smiles at you with that familiar, devastating smile that has been haunting your dreams for weeks.
Heeseung.
He wears a black puffer jacket that makes his shoulders look even broader, a gray beanie pulled low over his hair, and a pair of snow boots that actually look like they belong on a ski trip. His cheeks are slightly pink from the cold, and his eyes are bright with that unshakeable, inexplicable cheerfulness that seems to follow him everywhere.
"Hi," you say, because your brain has apparently decided that monosyllables are all you can manage.
"Hi," he replies, his smile widening. "Fancy meeting you here. I thought you said you were photosensitive and couldn't be exposed to direct light. Is snow-light different from regular light?"
"That was a lie and you know it."
"I know." He reaches out and gently takes your duffel bag from your white-knuckled grip. "Come on. Let's find seats together. The bus is filling up."
"I… what… together?"
"Unless you already have a seatmate?"
Yunjin has abandoned you. You have no allies, no escape routes, and no valid excuses. "No," you admit. "I don't."
"Great." Heeseung starts walking toward the bus, your bag slung easily over his shoulder like it weighs nothing. "Fair warning, I'm a chronic window-seat person. I need to be able to stare dramatically at the scenery while contemplating the meaning of life."
"That's very specific."
"It's a lifestyle choice."
You follow him onto the bus, your heart doing that complicated gymnastics routine that it has perfected over the past few weeks. Heeseung navigates through the aisle with practiced ease, nodding at people who call out to him, exchanging quick greetings, but never stopping until he reaches an empty row near the middle of the bus.
"Window seat's yours," he says, gesturing for you to go first.
"I thought you said you were a chronic window-seat person."
"I am. But I'm making an exception." He stows your bag in the overhead compartment, then steps back to let you pass. "Consider it part of the whole starting slow thing. Sacrifices must be made."
You slide into the window seat, your heart hammering, and Heeseung settles in beside you. The seats are closer together than you expected. His shoulder brushes against yours, and even through the layers of your coats, you can feel the warmth of his body. You press yourself slightly closer to the window, trying to create more space, but the universe, in its infinite comedic wisdom, has clearly designed this bus to maximize accidental physical contact.
"Comfortable?" Heeseung asks, his voice tinged with amusement.
"Extremely. Never been more comfortable in my life. This is peak comfort."
"You're pressed against the window like you're trying to phase through it."
"The window is cold. The glass is… nice. I like glass."
Heeseung laughs, that genuine, surprised laugh that you heard in the cafeteria and the café and on the bench under the stars. "You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"The rambling thing. The nervous rambling thing." He turns in his seat slightly, facing you. "You know you don't have to be nervous around me, right? I thought we established this. Coffee disaster solidarity. Matching shirts. The whole thing."
"I'm not nervous," you lie. "I'm just… the bus is very… bus-like. It's making me feel things."
"Bus-like feelings."
"Exactly."
Heeseung shakes his head, still smiling, and pulls a pair of earbuds from his jacket pocket. "Here. Music helps me relax on long trips. We can share if you want."
He offers you one of his earbuds, holding it out between his fingers like it is something precious. The gesture is so simple, so unexpectedly intimate, that your breath catches in your throat. Sharing earbuds means sitting close enough for the cord to reach. Sharing earbuds means listening to his music, hearing the songs he likes, experiencing something together in the quiet space between words.
"Okay," you whisper, taking the earbud.
Your fingers brush against his, just for a second, and the contact sends a spark of electricity up your arm. You quickly insert the earbud, focusing very hard on not thinking about how close he is, how warm his shoulder feels against yours, how the faint scent of his cologne fills the space between you.
"What are we listening to?" you ask.
"A playlist I made," Heeseung says, scrolling through his phone. "It's kind of all over the place. Some indie, some R&B, some stuff I found on TikTok that got stuck in my head. I'm not very organized with my music."
"That's shocking. I assumed an informatics engineering student would have their music meticulously categorized by genre, mood, and decade of release."
"You assumed wrong. My playlists are chaos. This one is literally called vibes idk."
"That's the worst playlist name I've ever heard."
"It's an accurate playlist name. You'll see."
Lovers - Anna of the North playing now
He presses play, and music fills your ear.
"We should play a game," Heeseung says after a few songs have played. "To pass the time."
"What kind of game?"
"Twenty questions. But the version where you can skip questions if you don't want to answer. No pressure, no judgment, no awkwardness."
You consider this. Twenty questions with Heeseung is a dangerous proposition. There are so many things you don't want to answer, so many topics you have been carefully avoiding, so many truths that are still tangled up in misunderstandings and misplaced letters. But there is also something disarming about the way he offers the terms, no pressure, no judgment, no awkwardness, like he genuinely cares about making you feel safe.
"Fine," you say. "But you go first."
"Okay." Heeseung leans back in his seat, his shoulder still pressed against yours, his expression thoughtful. "What's your favorite movie of all time?"
"Pride and Prejudice. The 2005 version with Keira Knightley."
"The hand flex scene?"
You turn to stare at him. "You know about the hand flex scene?"
"Every person with a functioning heart knows about the hand flex scene. It's cinema history. Mr. Darcy flexing his hand after helping Elizabeth into the carriage because he's so overwhelmed by touching her? Iconic. Revolutionary. I think about it at least once a week."
You don't know what to do with this information. Lee Heeseung, reputed womanizer, hot informatics engineering student, the guy who is currently wearing a beanie and looking unfairly attractive in bus lighting, knows about the hand flex scene from Pride and Prejudice. He thinks about it weekly.
"You're very strange," you say.
"I prefer culturally literate."
"You said you've watched To All the Boys I've Loved Before at least six times."
"That's one of my favorite modern movies. Pride and Prejudice is my favorite classic. I contain multitudes." He nudges your shoulder with his. "Ask me something else."
The questions flow back and forth as the bus winds its way out of the city and into the mountains. You learn that Heeseung has an older brother who he FaceTimes every Sunday, that he chose informatics engineering because he loves the logic of coding but secretly dreams of being a music producer, that he loves Shin ramyeon and has created his own way of eating his instant noodles. He learns that you started collecting highlighters in middle school and now own over forty different colors, that you have named every plant in your dorm room after characters from classic literature, that you once won a poetry contest in high school but never told anyone because you were embarrassed.
The landscape outside the window shifts as the bus climbs higher into the mountains. Snow begins to appear, first in patches, then in sweeping blankets that cover the trees and the slopes and the distant peaks. The sky is a pale winter blue, and the sun glints off the snow.
The question hangs in the air between you, weightier than the ones that have come before. You could give a surface-level answer, spiders, heights, the dark, but something about the quiet intimacy of the bus, the warmth of his shoulder against yours, the gentle music in your ear, makes you want to be honest.
"Being seen," you say quietly. "Really seen. By someone who matters."
Heeseung doesn't respond right away. When he does, his voice is soft. "Why?"
"Because if someone really sees you, they might not like what they find. It's easier to stay on the surface. To be the version of yourself that you can control." You pause, watching the snow-covered trees blur past the window. "I'm good at dreaming about things. Imagining them. Writing them down. But actually doing them… actually putting myself out there… that's the scary part."
"That's why you write letters," Heeseung says. It isn't a question.
"Yeah. It's safer on paper. You can edit a letter. You can cross things out and start over. You can't do that with real life."
Heeseung is quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks, his words are careful and measured.
"For what it's worth," he says, "I've been seeing you for a few weeks now. The real you, I mean. The one who rambles and spills coffee and hides behind bulletin boards. And I haven't found anything I don't like yet."
Your heart stutters. You don't know what to say, so you say nothing, just let the music fill the space between you and try to memorize the exact timbre of his voice saying those words.
The skiing station is everything the brochure promised and more. A sprawling complex of wooden lodges and snow-covered slopes, nestled in a valley surrounded by towering peaks. The air is crisp and clean, carrying the scent of pine and woodsmoke, and the snow glitteres under the afternoon sun like a carpet of crushed diamonds.
You step off the bus and immediately sink three inches into a snowdrift.
"Excellent start," Yunjin says, appearing at your elbow and grinning. "Really graceful. Ten out of ten."
"I didn't see it."
"It's snow. It's everywhere. How did you not see it?"
You extract your foot from the drift and shake the snow off your boot with as much dignity as you can muster. "I was distracted by the scenery."
"Uh-huh." Yunjin's grin widens. "And by the scenery, you mean the six-foot-tall informatics student you spent the entire bus ride cuddled up with?"
"We weren't cuddling. We were sharing earbuds. There's a difference."
"There's really not."
You grab your duffel bag from the luggage compartment and follow the crowd toward the main lodge, your cheeks burning despite the cold. The lodge is a massive timber-frame building with a soaring ceiling, a massive stone fireplace, and windows that look out over the slopes. Students are already scattered across the lobby, checking in, collecting room keys, and making plans for the afternoon.
Your room is small but cozy, with a window that faces the mountains and a bed that looks impossibly inviting. You dump your bag on the floor, plug in your phone to charge, and then immediately find yourself staring out the window at the snow-covered landscape.
Yunjin finds you an hour later, dragging you out of your room and into the lodge's main café for hot chocolate. The café is warm and bustling, filled with students comparing ski passes and swapping stories about near-misses on the slopes. You find a table near the window, and Yunjin wastes no time in grilling you about the bus ride.
"So," she says, stirring her hot chocolate with a cinnamon stick, "Heeseung."
"What about him?"
"You spent three hours cuddled up with him on a bus."
"Sharing earbuds is not cuddling."
"You let him listen to music with you. You played twenty questions. You told him about your highlighter collection and the poetry contest you never told anyone about." Yunjin fixes you with a knowing look. "Those are not casual bus acquaintance topics. Those are I'm emotionally vulnerable with this person topics."
You stare into your hot chocolate. "I don't know what I'm doing, Yunjin. Everything is so tangled up. I started this whole mess because I was too scared to confess to the right person, and now the wrong person has been nothing but kind and thoughtful and unexpectedly perfect, and the right person told me he liked me and then walked away, and I don't know what I'm supposed to feel anymore."
Yunjin is quiet for a moment. Then she reaches across the table and places her hand on yours. "Maybe there isn't a supposed to. Maybe there's just what you actually feel, when you strip away all the expectations and the plans and the ideas about how things were meant to go."
You look up at her. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, you've been so focused on the idea of Jungwon, the letter, the confession, the grand romantic gesture, that you might have missed what's been happening right in front of you." She squeezes your hand. "Heeseung poured coffee on himself so you wouldn't feel alone. He held your hand while you cried. He looked at you on that bus like you were the most interesting person he'd ever met."
"That doesn't mean-"
"Y/N." Yunjin's voice is gentle but firm. "When are you going to stop being scared and start being honest?"
The question hits you like a punch to the chest. Because she is right. Yunjin is always right, that is the infuriating thing about her. You have been scared since the moment you walked into that PC room, scared of rejection, scared of humiliation, scared of what would happen if you actually let someone see you. And that fear has led you into a labyrinth of misunderstandings and half-truths, and somewhere along the way, you have gotten so lost that you can't even see the exit anymore.
"I need to tell him," you say quietly. "Heeseung. I need to tell him the truth about the letter."
Yunjin nods. "I think that's a good idea."
"He might hate me."
"He might. But he also might not. And either way, you'll finally be able to stop carrying this around." She leans back in her chair, blowing on her hot chocolate. "Besides, from everything you've told me about him, I don't think hating you is high on his list of priorities."
"What if it ruins everything?"
"What if it fixes everything?"
You don't have an answer to that. You just sit there, watching the snow fall outside the window, and feel the weight of your decision settling onto your shoulders. Tonight. You will tell him tonight. Before dinner, maybe, or after. You will find a quiet moment, away from the crowds and the noise and the chaos of the ski trip, and you will finally, finally tell him the truth.
Finding Heeseung turns out to be easier said than done.
The ski station is massive, a maze of slopes and trails and lodges that all look exactly the same. You wander through the main lodge, check the café, peek into the game room, and even brave the equipment rental shop where a terrifyingly efficient employee tries to convince you to try snowboarding. You escape with your dignity barely intact and a pamphlet about beginner lessons that you immediately stuff into the nearest trash can.
It isn't until you step outside, squinting against the glare of the sun on the snow, that you spot him.
He is on the intermediate slope, a dark figure against the white expanse of snow, cutting down the mountain with the kind of effortless grace that makes your heart lurch into your throat. He is snowboarding, of course he is snowboarding, because apparently there is nothing Lee Heeseung can't do and he moves like he was born on a board.
You have two options. Option one: wait at the bottom of the slope like a normal person and flag him down when he finishes his run. Option two: try to reach him now, which will involve navigating the snowy terrain between you and the slope, a task for which you are woefully underprepared both in terms of footwear and basic motor coordination.
You choose option two, because you are an idiot.
The path to the slope is a gentle incline of packed snow that looks deceptively easy to traverse. You take three steps and immediately realize your mistake. The snow is slippery, not the powdery kind of snow that crunches satisfyingly underfoot, but the packed, icy kind that has been trampled by hundreds of skiers and snowboarders and now has the texture of a skating rink.
You take a fourth step. Your foot slides. You windmill your arms frantically. Your other foot slides in the opposite direction. For one glorious, suspended moment, you do something that might generously be called a split, and then gravity takes over and you go down in a tangle of limbs and snow and absolute humiliation.
"Y/N?"
The voice comes from above you. You look up, snow clinging to your hair and your eyelashes and probably places you don't want to think about, and there is Heeseung, standing over you with his snowboard tucked under his arm and an expression somewhere between concern and barely suppressed laughter.
"Hi," you say weakly. "I was looking for you."
"You found me." He kneels down beside you, brushing snow off your shoulder. "Are you okay? That looked like a pretty spectacular fall."
"I've had better. I've also had worse. This is somewhere in the middle."
"Your standards for falls must be very high."
"I'm an overachiever."
Heeseung laughs and offers you his hand. You take it, and he pulls you to your feet with the same easy strength he showed in the café, steadying you when you wobble on the slippery snow.
"Come on," he says, still holding your hand. "Let's get you somewhere less treacherous. The beginner slope is over there, it's flatter and a lot less likely to attack you."
"I don't snowboard."
"I'll teach you."
"Heeseung-"
"It'll be fun. I promise." He already guides you toward the beginner slope, his hand warm and solid around yours. "Besides, you came all this way to find me. The least I can do is give you a snowboarding lesson."
The beginner slope is, as promised, much less intimidating than the intermediate one. It is a gentle hill with a slow incline, populated by other beginners who fall over with the same frequency and enthusiasm that you anticipate for yourself. Heeseung finds a quiet spot near the edge, props his snowboard in the snow, and turns to you with an expression of exaggerated seriousness.
"Okay, lesson one: standing on the board without falling."
"That sounds fake."
"It's very real. I've done it many times."
"Show-off."
He grins and proceeds to walk you through the basics of snowboarding with the patience of a saint and the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely loves sharing his hobbies. He holds your hands when you wobble, catches you when you fall, and laughs with you instead of at you when you face-plant into a snowbank for the third time in ten minutes.
"You're getting better," he says, pulling you upright after your fourth fall. Snow dusts his beanie and clings to his eyelashes, and his cheeks are flushed pink from the cold. "That time you almost made it five feet."
"Almost being the key word."
"Almost is progress. Almost is the first step toward eventually."
You look at him, really look at him and feel something shift in your chest. This is it. This is the moment. You can't put it off any longer.
"I need to tell you something," you say, your voice coming out steadier than you feel. "Can we sit down for a minute?"
Heeseung's expression flickers, curiosity, concern, something else you can't name but he nods. "Of course."
You find a bench near the edge of the slope, tucked under a pine tree whose branches are heavy with snow. The afternoon sun starts to sink lower in the sky, painting the mountains in shades of gold and pink, and the air is cold enough to make your breath fog. You sit down, and Heeseung sits beside you, close but not too close, his snowboard propped against the bench.
For a long moment, you don't say anything. You are gathering your courage, trying to find the right words, trying to figure out how to start a conversation that might change everything.
"The letter," you say finally. "The one I gave you in the PC room. There's something I need to tell you about it."
Heeseung doesn't react. He just waits, his dark eyes steady on your face.
"It wasn't meant for you," you say, and the words come out in a rush, tumbling over each other in their hurry to escape. "I wrote it for someone else. For Jungwon. I'd been planning to confess to him for weeks, and I'd written this whole letter, and I asked someone where he was and they said he was in the PC room, and I walked in and I saw someone sitting at the computer and I just assumed it was him, and I didn't look, I didn't check, I just handed over the letter and started talking, and then you looked up and it wasn't him at all, it was you and I was so embarrassed and everyone was watching and I couldn't correct you in front of all those people, and then everything spiraled and I kept trying to tell you but I couldn't find the right moment and then Jungwon found out and I couldn't correct it in front of him either and now everything is a mess and I'm so, so sorry, and I understand if you're angry, I understand if you hate me, I just… I couldn't keep lying to you anymore. You deserved to know the truth."
You stop talking. Your heart pounds so hard you can feel it in your temples. Your hands shake, and you press them together in your lap to keep them still. You don't look at Heeseung, you can't look at him, can't bear to see the expression on his face.
The silence stretches for what feels like an eternity.
And then Heeseung says, in the most casual voice imaginable: "I know."
Your head snaps up. "What?"
"I know the letter wasn't meant for me." He smiles, not a smirk, not a grin, but something gentle and warm and completely without judgment. "I've known since the beginning."
"But… how… since when-"
"Since I read it." Heeseung leans back on the bench, looking out at the snow-covered slope with a thoughtful expression. "The letter was beautiful. Every word of it. But it wasn't about me. It was about someone who smiles a certain way, someone who gave you gummy bears at 2 AM, someone who studies hard during free time at the library." He glances at you sideways. "I've never given anyone gummy bears. And I'm an informatics student, I don't take philosophy."
Your brain short-circuits. "You knew. This whole time. You knew."
"I knew."
"And you didn't say anything?"
"What was I supposed to say?" Heeseung's voice is gentle. "You were so flustered and embarrassed, and I could see you panicking in front of everyone. If I called you out right there, you would have been humiliated. And then I kept waiting for you to tell me yourself, but you never did, and eventually I just…" He shrugs. "I got curious. You wrote this incredible letter, and you were so weird and skittish and interesting, and I wanted to understand you. So I kept showing up."
"You kept showing up because I was interesting?"
"At first. Then it became something else." He turns to face you fully, his expression open and earnest. "You're not like the other people who confess to me. They want the idea of me, the reputation, the image. You didn't even want the real me. You wanted someone else entirely. And that was… refreshing. You weren't trying to impress me. You were trying to get rid of me. It was the first time anyone ever hid behind a bulletin board to avoid me."
"I wasn't… I didn't…" You bury your face in your hands. "This is so humiliating."
"It's not humiliating. It's human. You made a mistake. A very entertaining, very elaborate mistake." He gently pulls your hands away from your face, forcing you to look at him. "And somewhere along the way, while you were busy trying to make me lose interest, I got to know the real you. The one who names her plants after literary characters. The one who writes passionate essays about video game balance. The one who cried over a baby penguin last week."
"Yunjin told you about that?"
"Yunjin and I have been texting. But don't worry she didn't spilled all your dirty secrets."
You gape at him. "You and Yunjin have been texting?"
"She reached out after the coffee incident. Said she wanted to make sure my intentions were good." He smiles, a little sheepishly. "I think I passed the test. She said I was less of a disaster than expected."
"I'm going to kill her. I'm going to kill both of you."
"Before you do, let me finish." Heeseung's voice softens, and he takes your hand in his, the same way he did on the bench under the stars, steady and warm and reassuring. "I knew the letter wasn't for me. But I also know that somewhere along the way, something changed. Maybe it changed for you too. Maybe it didn't. Either way, I wanted to give you the space to figure it out on your own terms."
You stare at him, your mind reeling. He knew. He has known this entire time, and instead of being angry or hurt or humiliated, he just… waited. Gave you space. Let you come to him when you were ready.
"You're not upset?" you whisper.
"I'm not upset."
"You don't feel… I don't know, betrayed? Lied to?"
"Y/N." He squeezes your hand. "You were scared. I get it. I've spent my whole life being scared of disappointing people, scared of saying no, scared of letting anyone down. I know what it's like to be trapped in a situation you didn't mean to create. I'm not going to hold that against you."
The tears threaten again, not the ugly, heartbroken tears from that night on the pathway, but something softer. Something that feels almost like relief.
"I'm sorry," you say, your voice cracking. "I'm so sorry for not telling you sooner."
"You're telling me now. That's what matters."
"I don't know what I feel," you admit. "About anything. About anyone. Everything is so confusing."
"Then don't figure it out right now." Heeseung stands up, pulling you gently to your feet. "We have three days at a ski station. There's a jacuzzi. There's hot chocolate. There's an entire mountain to explore. Let's just… enjoy it. See what happens. No pressure, no expectations, no misunderstandings."
Just like that, the weight you have been carrying for weeks, the guilt, the anxiety, the tangled knot of secrets, begins to loosen. Not disappear entirely, but loosen enough that you can breathe again.
"There's really a jacuzzi?" you ask.
Heeseung grins. "There's really a jacuzzi. I saw it on the map. Outdoor, heated, with a view of the mountains. Very romantic. Very much the kind of thing you'd put in a letter about someone."
"You're making fun of me."
"A little bit. But also, I'm serious." He picks up his snowboard and tucks it under his arm. "What do you say? After dinner? We can go check it out."
You think about it. The jacuzzi. With Heeseung. In a swimsuit. In warm water under the stars, surrounded by snow-covered mountains. It is terrifying. It is ridiculous. It is exactly the kind of thing the hopeless romantic inside you has always dreamed about.
"Okay," you say. "After dinner."
By the time dinner rolls around, you are a nervous wreck.
You have spent the rest of the afternoon in your room, alternating between staring at the ceiling and frantically texting Yunjin for advice. Yunjin has responded with a series of increasingly unhelpful messages:
Yunjin: wear the cute swimsuit
You: i don't OWN a cute swimsuit
Yunjin: wear the one you borrowed from me for the pool party last semester
You: the black one???
Yunjin: YES the black one. he won't know what hit him
You: i don't want him to be HIT i want this to be NORMAL
Yunjin: nothing about your life has been normal since the moment you walked into that PC room. embrace it. wear the swimsuit.
You wear the swimsuit.
Underneath your clothes, of course. Underneath a thick sweater, a pair of jeans, and the oversized winter coat you borrowed from Yunjin specifically for this trip. You feel like you are wearing armor, except the armor is actually a swimsuit, and the battle is against your own nervous system.
Dinner is a blur. The lodge's restaurant is packed with students, the noise level somewhere between "lively" and "chaotic," and you barely taste the food on your plate. You keep glancing toward the table where Heeseung sits with a group of his friends, and every time he catches your eye, he smiles at you, that same soft, knowing smile that makes your stomach do complicated acrobatics.
At one point, you accidentally make eye contact with Jungwon across the dining hall. He sits with a group of philosophy students, and when your gazes meet, he raises his hand in a small wave. His expression is unreadable, not sad, not angry, just… neutral. You wave back, and then you both look away, and that is it. A quiet acknowledgment of everything that has happened and everything that hasn't.
After dinner, you return to your room and proceed to have a minor meltdown.
The text from Heeseung arrives at exactly 8:47 PM.
Heeseung: jacuzzi? meet in the lobby in 10? bring a towel
You stare at the message for approximately three full minutes. Then you type out seventeen different responses, delete all of them, and finally settle on:
You: okay
Just "okay." No punctuation. No enthusiasm. Just the monosyllabic response of someone who is either incredibly chill or seconds away from spontaneous combustion.
You grab your towel and make your way to the lobby. The lodge is quieter now, most students either in the game room or in their own rooms recovering from the day's activities. The fireplace in the main lobby still crackles, and a few people gather around it with mugs of hot chocolate.
Heeseung is already there, leaning against the reception desk with a towel slung over his shoulder and that same gray beanie pulled over his hair. He has changed out of his snowboarding gear into something simpler and when he sees you approaching, his face lights up with that genuine smile that never fails to make your heart flutter.
"Ready?" he asks.
"No," you admit.
"Good. Let's go anyway."
The jacuzzi is on the outdoor deck of the spa building, a steaming oasis surrounded by snow-covered rocks and pine trees draped in lights. The mountains rise in the distance, dark silhouettes against a sky so full of stars it looks like a painting. The air is freezing, the kind of cold that makes your lungs ache, but the water is perfectly, blissfully warm, and when you finally shed your coat and your sweater and your jeans and slip into the bubbling water in your borrowed black swimsuit, you let out a breath you didn't realize you have been holding.
"This is nice," you admit, sinking down until the water reaches your chin. "This is really, really nice."
"Told you." Heeseung slides into the water across from you, his towel discarded on a nearby bench. The lights catch the angles of his face, the curve of his shoulders, the way his hair curls slightly at the ends from the steam. "Sometimes I'm right about things."
"Sometimes."
"Rarely. Occasionally. Once in a blue moon."
You laugh, and it feels good, lighter than it has in weeks. The warm water, the cold air, the stars overhead, the boy across from you who has known the truth all along and hasn't run away, it all feels like something out of a dream.
"I'm glad you told me," Heeseung says quietly. "About the letter."
"Me too."
"And I'm glad you're here. At the ski station. In the jacuzzi. With me."
Your heart flutters. "Me too."
"So what happens now?" Heeseung asks, but there is no pressure in his voice. Just curiosity. Just openness.
"I don't know," you say honestly. "But I think… I think I'd like to find out."
Heeseung smiles, soft and real and full of something you are only just beginning to recognize.
"Then let's find out," he says. "Together."
The jacuzzi is bathed in purple light.
You don't know if it is intentional or if someone just installed colored LEDs and called it a day, but the effect is undeniably, unfairly romantic. The water glows with a deep violet hue, shifting to indigo where the bubbles break the surface, and the steam rising into the cold mountain air catches the light and turns it into something almost magical. It looks like a movie.
A romance movie, specifically. The kind you have watched a hundred times in your dorm room, wrapped in a blanket, dreaming about the day something like this would happen to you.
And now it is happening. And you are absolutely, catastrophically unprepared.
Heeseung sits across from you in the bubbling water, his arms stretched out along the edge of the jacuzzi, his head tilted back slightly to look at the stars. The purple light paints shadows across the planes of his face, the sharp line of his jaw, the curve of his lips, the column of his throat disappearing into the steam. Droplets of water cling to his skin, and when he tilts his head forward to look at you, his dark eyes reflect the violet glow in a way that makes your stomach drop straight through the floor.
"You're doing it again," he says, his voice low and amused.
"Doing what?"
"Staring at me like you're trying to figure me out."
"I'm not staring. I'm… observing. It's different."
"Is it?"
"It's scientific. I'm conducting research."
Heeseung's lips curve into that familiar smile, the one that is definitely a smirk's first cousin by now, maybe even its sibling. "And what has your research concluded so far?"
"That you're very annoying," you say. "And that the purple light is doing unfair things to your bone structure."
"Unfair things to my bone structure," he repeats, laughing. "That's a new one. I'll add it to the list of compliments I've received."
"You keep a list?"
"Mentally. It's not written down anywhere. I'm not that egotistical."
"Debatable."
He laughs again, and the sound echoes across the water, mixing with the gentle hum of the jacuzzi jets. You try very hard to be normal, to act like you aren't sitting in a bubbling hot tub with a boy who has known your secret all along and has still chosen to be here, in the purple light, looking at you like he wants to kiss you.
And then he reaches for your foot.
His hand closes around your ankle beneath the water, warm and gentle, and before you can process what is happening, he lifts your leg, guiding your foot toward him. Your heel presses against his chest, against the firm warmth of his skin, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, and your breath catches in your throat so abruptly that you make a small, strangled sound that is definitely not dignified. The memory of your wet dream surges instantly, and you mentally thank the purple lights for hiding the sudden flush on your face.
"What are you doing?" you manage, your voice coming out several octaves higher than normal.
"You were floating awkwardly," Heeseung says, like this is a perfectly reasonable explanation. His thumb traces a slow circle against your ankle bone, feather-light and devastating. "I thought you might want something to anchor you."
"My ankle. You're anchoring my ankle."
"Ankles are very anchorable."
"That's not a word."
"It is now. I'm an engineering student. I can invent words."
Your heart pounds so hard you are certain he can feel it through the sole of your foot. His hand still wraps around your ankle, warm and steady, and the position is so unexpectedly intimate, your leg stretched across the space between you, your foot pressed against his chest, his thumb drawing lazy patterns on your skin, that you don't know where to look or what to say or how to breathe.
"You know what's funny?" Heeseung says, his voice conversational, like he isn't currently holding your foot against his heart. "The jacuzzi scene in To All the Boys I've Loved Before."
Your brain, which is already operating at approximately ten percent capacity, struggles to process the shift in topic. "The… jacuzzi scene?"
"Lara Jean and Peter. The ski trip. The hot tub." He gestures vaguely at the purple water around you. "They're in a jacuzzi together for the first time, and Lara Jean is all nervous, and Peter is trying to be cool about it, and there's all this tension because they're fake dating but they're both starting to feel real things."
"I know the scene," you say, your voice faint.
"It's kind of the turning point in the movie. The moment where the fake relationship starts becoming real." Heeseung tilts his head, and his eyes meet yours, and there is something in them, something dark and warm and knowing—that makes your skin tingle. "Funny how we ended up in a jacuzzi too. At a ski station. Just like them."
"Are you saying we're in a romance movie?"
"I'm saying the parallels are getting a little uncanny." His thumb traces another circle on your ankle, slow and deliberate. "The letter. The ski trip. The hot tub."
"Well, technically the parallels are there but it's still different…"
"You're right. At the end of the day we're not in a movie… This is real life."
"Which means…"
"Which means we're in uncharted territory now." Heeseung's voice drops, becoming something lower, something that vibrates through the water and into your bones. "No movie to reference. No script to follow. Just… whatever happens next."
Your mouth is dry. When did your mouth become so dry? You are surrounded by water, and yet every drop of moisture has apparently evaporated from your body.
"That's terrifying," you whisper.
"Is it?" His hand tightens slightly on your ankle, grounding you. "I think it's kind of exciting. Don't you?"
You don't know how to answer that. You don't know how to articulate the complicated knot of fear and anticipation and something else, something warm and fluttering that has taken up residence in your chest. So you do what you always do when you don't know what to say: you deflect.
"You're very smooth, you know that?" you say, aiming for teasing and landing somewhere closer to breathless. "Has anyone ever told you that? The ankle thing, the movie reference, the uncharted territory line, it's a lot."
Heeseung's lips twitch. "Is it working?"
"I'm not answering that."
"That's an answer in itself."
"You're insufferable."
"And yet you're still here." His eyes flicker down for just a moment, barely a second, but enough to make your skin flush. "Letting me hold your ankle."
You pull your foot back, but he doesn't let go. His grip remains gentle, steady, his palm warm against your skin. "I'm not letting you do anything. You just… did it."
"And you didn't stop me."
"I was being polite."
"Polite." Heeseung's smile widens. "Right. That's what this is. Politeness."
The purple light flickers slightly, casting new shadows across his face. The bubbles swirl around you, warm and enveloping, and the cold mountain air nips at your exposed shoulders, creating a contrast that makes every sensation feel heightened. You are acutely aware of everything, the heat of the water, the chill of the breeze, the rough texture of the jacuzzi edge beneath your fingers, the steady pressure of Heeseung's hand on your ankle.
"Can I ask you something?" Heeseung says.
"You're going to anyway."
"True." He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer. More curious. "Have you ever done this before?"
"Done what? Sat in a jacuzzi?"
"Been physical with someone. Intimate." He says the words without embarrassment, without leering, just genuine curiosity. "You get so flustered every time I touch you. Earlier, when I kissed your cheek, I thought you were going to combust. And I'm not trying to make fun of you, I'm genuinely asking. Is this… new for you?"
Your cheeks, already flushed from the heat of the water, burn even hotter. "That's a very personal question."
"You don't have to answer. Remember? Twenty questions rules. No pressure."
You are quiet for a moment. The bubbles churn around you. The stars glitter overhead. Heeseung's thumb continues its slow, hypnotic circles on your ankle.
"I've kissed people before," you say finally. "A few times. But it was always… quick. Awkward. Spin the bottle at parties, that kind of thing." You pause, gathering your courage. "I've never had a real relationship. I've never… you know."
"Made out with someone?"
The bluntness of the question makes you choke on air. "I… that's… yes. That. I've never done that."
"Okay," Heeseung says simply.
"Okay? That's all you have to say?"
"What else would I say?"
"I don't know. Something. Most people would say something."
Heeseung is quiet for a moment, his expression thoughtful. Then he says, "I haven't either. Much, I mean. I've had my few moments but the amount you can count on your fingers. People assume I have, because of the reputation, but the truth is I've never really… connected with someone like that. I've had opportunities, I guess, but I didn't want to do it just for the sake of doing it. I wanted it to mean something."
The confession catches you off guard. You assumed, everyone assumed, that Lee Heeseung was experienced, that his womanizer reputation was built on a foundation of romantic conquests. But here he is, in the purple light of the jacuzzi, telling you that the reputation is just that: a reputation. Smoke and mirrors. Assumptions built on his inability to say no.
"We're both disasters," you say.
"Absolutely. But at least we're disasters together."
"Disaster twins."
"Matching shirts and everything."
You laugh, and it comes out lighter than you expected. The tension that has been coiling in your chest begins to ease, replaced by something warmer. Something that feels almost like comfort.
Wus Good/Curious - PARTYNEXTDOOR playing now
Somewhere in the lodge, someone has connected their phone to the outdoor speakers. The song that starts playing is slow and sensual, the timing so absurd, so perfectly, comedically timed, that you can't help but laugh. "Did you plan this?"
Heeseung laughs too, shaking his head in disbelief. "I swear I didn't. The universe is just showing off at this point."
"This is the least romantic song that could have possibly played."
"I don't know. It's got a certain vibe." His eyes meet yours, and there is a glint of mischief in them. "Very sensual. Very on-the-nose for a jacuzzi scene."
"It's about-" You stop, your face heating.
"It's about what?"
"You know what it's about."
"I want to hear you say it."
"You're the worst."
Heeseung grins, and the purple light catches the curve of his lips, the sparkle in his eyes, the way the water droplets trace paths down his neck and across his collarbone. The song continues playing, and you are suddenly very aware of how close he is, how the space between you has somehow shrunk without you noticing.
"Come here," he says softly.
"What?"
"Come here. I want to show you something."
Your heart hammers so hard you can feel it in your throat. "Show me what?"
"Trust me."
And you do. That is the terrifying thing. Despite everything, the misunderstandings, the secrets, the weeks of chaos and confusion, you trust him. You trust the boy who poured coffee on his head to make you feel less alone. You trust the boy who held your hand while you cried. You trust the boy who has known your secret all along and has never once made you feel foolish for it.
You move through the water, closer to him, and the purple light swirls around you like something out of a dream. When you are within reach, Heeseung's hands find your waist beneath the water, gentle but sure, and he guides you until you are straddling his lap, your knees on either side of his hips, your faces inches apart.
"Is this okay?" he asks, his voice barely above a whisper.
Your breath comes in short, shallow gasps. His hands are warm on your waist, his thumbs tracing slow circles against the curve of your hips. His face is so close you can see the individual droplets of water on his eyelashes, can count the shades of brown in his eyes, can feel the warmth of his breath against your lips.
"Yes," you whisper. "This is… okay."
"You're shaking."
"I'm nervous."
"I know." His hands slide up from your waist, over your ribs, coming to rest on either side of your face. His palms are warm against your cheeks, his fingers threading gently into the wet strands of your hair. "We don't have to do anything you're not ready for. We can just sit here. We can talk. We can get out and go back inside. Whatever you want."
The gentleness of his voice, the patience in his eyes, the way he holds your face like you are something precious, it makes your chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the realization that you are in very, very deep trouble.
Because this boy, this absurd, beautiful, incomprehensible boy who stumbled into your life through a misplaced letter and a catastrophic misunderstanding, has somehow become someone you can't imagine letting go of.
"What I want," you say, your voice barely steady, "is for you to kiss me."
Heeseung's eyes darken. The purple light flickers across his features, and his thumbs trace the line of your cheekbones, and his lips part slightly, and for one suspended moment, the entire world holds its breath.
"Okay," he murmurs. "But we're going to do this right."
And then he kisses you.
His lips meet yours softly at first, gentle, exploratory, the barest brush of contact. He tastes like the mint tea he had after dinner, and his mouth is warm, and the kiss is so sweet and so tender that you feel your entire body melt into him. Your hands, hovering awkwardly at your sides, come up to rest on his shoulders, and you feel the muscles beneath his skin shift as he pulls you closer.
But then you try to deepen the kiss, and it goes wrong.
Your nose bumps against his. Your teeth clack together with an audible click. You pull back, mortified, your face burning. "I'm sorry… I didn't… I don't know what I'm doing-"
"Hey." Heeseung's voice is gentle, his hands still cupping your face. "Hey. It's okay. Look at me."
You force yourself to meet his eyes, expecting to see amusement or frustration or something worse. But all you see is patience. Warmth. Something that looks a lot like affection.
"Everyone's first real kiss is awkward," he says. "That's normal. That's how it's supposed to be."
"It wasn't supposed to be with someone who actually knows what they're doing."
"Then let me teach you." His thumb traces your lower lip, feather-light. "We'll go slow. You follow my lead. And if at any point you want to stop, just say the word. Okay?"
Your heart pounds so hard you can feel it in your temples. "Okay."
He leans in again, slower this time, giving you every opportunity to pull away. When his lips meet yours, the pressure is deliberate, gentle but firm, guiding you. His mouth moves against yours in a slow, languid rhythm, and you follow, mimicking his movements, learning the dance as you go.
"Tilt your head a little," he murmurs against your lips. "There. Like that."
You adjust, and suddenly the angle is better, the kiss deepening naturally. His hands slide from your face down to your waist, pulling you closer, and you feel the length of his body against yours, warm and solid and very, very real.
"Now try parting your lips," he whispers. "Just a little."
You do, and the kiss changes. Becomes something deeper, more intense. His tongue brushes against your lower lip, a question rather than a demand, and when you open for him, the sensation is so overwhelming that a soft sound escapes your throat, something between a sigh and a gasp.
"Good," Heeseung breathes. "You're doing so good."
The praise sends a shiver down your spine. Your fingers curl into his shoulders, gripping him like he is the only solid thing in a world. The kiss deepens further, his mouth moving against yours with a confidence that makes your head spin, and you follow his lead, letting him guide you, letting yourself get lost in the warmth of his body and the taste of his lips and the steady, grounding pressure of his hands on your waist.
"Now," he murmurs, pulling back just enough to press a kiss to the corner of your mouth, "there's variation. You don't have to do the same thing the whole time."
"Variation," you repeat, your voice dazed.
"You can kiss here-" His lips brush the edge of your jaw. "-and here-" A kiss to the sensitive spot just below your ear. "-and here." A kiss to the hollow of your throat that makes your breath catch and your fingers tighten on his shoulders.
"That's… a lot of places."
"There's more." He pulls back, and his eyes meet yours, dark and warm and full of something that makes your stomach flip. "But we can save those for later. If you want."
"If I want," you echo, still dazed.
"Only if you want." His hand comes up to cup your face again, his thumb tracing your cheekbone.
"This is insane," you whisper.
"Completely insane."
"I can't believe this is happening."
"Neither can I." He presses his forehead against yours, his breath warm against your lips. "But I'm really, really glad it is."
"Can we try again?" you ask, your voice small but steady. "The kissing thing. I think I need more practice."
Heeseung laughs, and the sound vibrates through his chest and into yours. "Practice makes perfect."
"I'm a STEM student. I believe in empirical evidence."
"Then let's gather some data."
He kisses you again, and this time, you are ready. Your lips meet his with more confidence, your hands sliding from his shoulders into his hair, it is soft, damp from the steam, and the way he sighs against your mouth when your fingers thread through it makes you feel powerful in a way you have never experienced before.
This time, when you deepen the kiss, it's less clumsy. It's more natural, instinctive, the kind of kiss that feels like it has been waiting to happen for weeks and is finally making up for lost time. Heeseung's hands tighten on your waist, pulling you impossibly closer, and the water swirls around you.
Your hands roam over his chest, feeling the firm muscles beneath your fingertips. Heeseung's tongue teases your lower lip, seeking entrance which you grant without hesitation. The kiss becomes hungrier, more desperate as your bodies press together in the warm water. He has been patient with you, letting you set the pace, never pushing for more than you are ready to give.
You feel something hard pressing against your thigh through the thin fabric of your swimsuit. You pull back slightly, breathless, your cheeks flushed with both desire and embarrassment.
"Don't mind it," Heeseung murmurs, his voice husky with arousal. "It's just a natural reaction to kissing someone I find incredibly attractive."
But instead of shying away, something bold awakens inside you. You've been waiting for this moment, wanting to take your relationship to the next level. Taking a deep breath, you meet his gaze directly, though your words come out in a clumsy rush.
"I want to... I mean, if you want to... I think I'm ready to... do it," you stammer, feeling your face heat up even more. "With you."
Heeseung's eyes widen slightly before softening with affection. "Are you sure? Here? Your first time should be special."
"It is special because it's with you," you insist, trying to sound more confident than you feel. "I want this. I want you. I want to be honest with myself."
A slow smile spreads across his face. "Okay," he murmurs, his hands moving to cup your face. "But we need to prepare you properly. I don't want to hurt you."
His thumb brushes against your cheek as he continues, "Have you ever... touched yourself before?"
You shake your head, feeling a mix of embarrassment and excitement.
"That's okay," he assures you. "I'll teach you. I'll make sure you feel good."
WGFT - Gunna playing now
Heeseung shifts slightly, adjusting your position on his lap. One hand trails down your back, over your hip, and between your legs. Even through the fabric of your swimsuit, his touch sends sparks through your body.
"First, I need to make sure you're ready," he explains softly. His fingers find the edge of your swimsuit bottom, toying with the fabric. "May I?"
You nod, your breath catching in anticipation.
Slowly, his fingers slip beneath the fabric, finding your folds. You gasp at the contact, your body tensing for a moment before relaxing into his touch.
"It's twitching," he murmurs against your ear. "That's good. It means your body wants this too."
His fingers explore gently, learning your anatomy as you bite your lip to hold back moans. He finds your clit and circles it slowly, watching your face for reactions.
"When I touch you here, it should build pleasure." he explains.
He demonstrates, applying a bit more pressure. You can't help but arch your back, a soft cry escaping your lips.
"Like that?" he asks with a knowing smile.
You can only nod, lost in the sensations he's creating.
After a few minutes of this delicious torture, he slides one finger lower, testing your entrance. "I'm going to prepare you," he warns softly. "It might feel a little strange at first, but I promise it will get better."
His finger enters you slowly, carefully. There's a slight discomfort, but as he begins to move in and out, the sensation transforms into pleasure. He watches your face intently, adjusting his movements based on your reactions.
"Does that feel good?" he asks.
You nod, your hips beginning to move in rhythm with his hand.
He adds a second finger, stretching you further. "You're so tight," he groans. "I can't wait to be inside you."
His words send another wave of desire through you. His thumb returns to your clit, rubbing in circles as his fingers continue their work inside you. The dual stimulation is overwhelming in the best way possible.
"Heeseung," you gasp, your hands clutching at his shoulders.
"I know, little mouse," he murmurs, kissing you deeply. "Let it build. Don't fight it."
The pleasure intensifies, coiling in your stomach like a spring. Your movements become more erratic as you chase the feeling building within you.
"That's it," he encourages. "Good girl"
With a cry, you shatter, waves of pleasure washing over you. Heeseung continues his movements, drawing out your orgasm until you collapse against his chest, trembling and breathless.
"You're so beautiful when you come," he whispers, kissing your forehead. "Can you do more?"
You can only nod, still recovering from the intensity of your first orgasm with someone else.
He slides down his shorts slightly just to reveal his already hard cock and slides your swimsuit to the side. His hands move to your hips, and you begin to grind against him instinctively. The water sloshes around you as you move, his lenght sliding between your folds, creating a delicious friction under the water. Lost in the moment, you shift your hips, trying to get closer, to feel more of him.
Suddenly, you both freeze as you feel him slip inside you. There's a sharp pain, followed by a sense of fullness that takes your breath away. Your eyes widen in shock as you look at Heeseung, whose expression mirrors your surprise.
"Oh my god," he gasps, his hands tightening on your hips. "I... I didn't mean for that to happen. Are you okay?"
You nod, still processing what just happened. The initial pain is already fading, replaced by a strange mix of discomfort and pleasure.
"I'm so sorry," Heeseung continues, his cheeks flushing with embarrassment. "I should have been more careful. I didn't..."
As he stammers through an apology, you can't help but let out a small laugh. The absurdity of the situation , your first time happening so accidentally, so clumsily, suddenly strikes you as hilarious.
Heeseung looks at you in confusion before a smile breaks across his face. "You're laughing?"
"We're so clumsy," you giggle, the tension breaking between you. "All that careful preparation and then..."
He joins in your laughter, the moment transforming from awkward to intimate. "Well," he says once the laughter subsides, "since we're already here... are you okay to continue? We can stop if you want."
You shake your head, a new determination filling you. "No, I want to continue. Show me what to do."
Heeseung's expression softens with affection. "Okay," he murmurs, his hands guiding your hips. "Just relax and let me do the work. Move with me, but let me lead."
He begins to move slowly, guiding you in a gentle rhythm. The water sloshes around you as you find a pace together. With each thrust, pleasure builds, different from before but just as intense.
"You feel so good," Heeseung groans, his control beginning to slip. "So tight around me."
His praise only heightens your arousal. You try to meet his movements with your own, but your motions are awkward and uncoordinated. You feel clumsy, unsure of exactly how to move to maximize pleasure for both of you.
"Don't worry about doing it perfectly," Heeseung reassures you, noticing your frustration. "Just feel. Let your body respond naturally."
He adjusts your position slightly, changing the angle of his thrusts. A gasp escapes your lips as he hits a particularly sensitive spot.
"There," he murmurs, repeating the movement. "How does that feel?"
"Amazing," you breathe, your hands clutching at his shoulders.
Heeseung's hands roam your body, caressing your breasts, your back, your hips. His mouth finds your neck, sucking gently at your pulse point. Marking you as his.
"I've wanted this since the moment we got in the jacuzzi," he admits between kisses. "But I was too scared you would run away if I decided to act up."
"I want it," you assure him, your voice breathy with pleasure. "I want all of you. I'm not scared anymore."
Your words seem to unleash something in him. His movements become more deliberate, more purposeful as he chases his own release. One hand moves between your legs again, finding your clit and rubbing in time with his thrusts.
The dual stimulation quickly pushes you toward another orgasm. "Heeseung," you cry out, your nails digging into his shoulders.
"I know," he groans. "Come with me this time."
His words are all it takes to push you over the edge. As you clench around him, Heeseung finds his own release, burying his face in your neck with a guttural moan.
For a moment, you stay connected, catching your breath as the water continues to bubble around you. Heeseung presses soft kisses to your shoulders, your neck, your cheeks.
"Are you okay?" he asks softly, pulling back to look at you.
You nod, a contented smile spreading across your face. "Better than okay. That was..."
"Incredible," he finishes for you, returning your smile. "You're incredible."
As you slowly separate, Heeseung adjusts your swimsuit back into place before
As you both recover in the warm bubbling water, you notice something pressing against your thigh again. You glance down and see that Heeseung is already getting hard once more. A blush spreads across your cheeks as you meet his eyes.
"Already?" you ask with a small laugh.
Heeseung grins, a hint of embarrassment in his expression. "I can't help it," he admits. "You feel so good, and I've wanted this for so long. My body seems to have a mind of its own around you."
A boldness takes hold of you, spurred by the confidence your first time gave you. "If you want to do it again... your way this time... I don't mind," you say, trying to sound casual despite the flutter in your stomach.
Heeseung's eyes darken with desire at your words. Without warning, he pounces, lifting you effortlessly from his lap. He carries you to the edge of the jacuzzi and gently sets you down on the edge. The contrast between the warm water and the cool air sends a shiver through your body.
"My way?" he asks, his voice husky with arousal. "I like the sound of that."
He kneels in the water between your legs, his hands spreading your thighs apart. His eyes never leave yours as he leans forward, pressing soft kisses to your inner thigh. You watch, mesmerized, as he works his way upward, leaving a trail of fire on your skin.
When he reaches your core, he pauses, his breath warm against your most sensitive flesh. "I've wanted to taste you since the first time I saw you in that swimsuit," he confesses, his voice low and intimate.
Then he dives in, his tongue exploring your folds. You gasp, your hands flying to his hair as waves of pleasure wash over you. Heeseung maintains eye contact as he eats you out, his dark eyes watching your every reaction, learning what makes you moan, what makes you arch your back.
"You taste so sweet," he murmurs against you before returning to his task, his tongue circling your clit before dipping inside you.
The sensations are overwhelming, building quickly toward another orgasm. Heeseung seems to sense your approaching release and redoubles his efforts, adding his fingers to the mix, curling them inside you as he continues to lavish attention on your clit.
"Heeseung," you cry out, your hips bucking against his face. "Please don't stop."
He doesn't. Instead, he increases his pace, his tongue and fingers working in perfect harmony until you shatter, crying out his name as waves of pleasure crash over you. He continues his ministrations, drawing out your orgasm until you're trembling and breathless.
Only then does he pull back, a triumphant grin on his face as he licks his lips. "Delicious," he declares, rising from the water.
He kisses his way up your body, over your stomach, between your breasts, along your collarbone, up your neck, until finally his lips claim yours. You can taste yourself on his tongue as the kiss deepens, passionate and hungry.
Without breaking the kiss, Heeseung positions himself at your entrance. This time, there's no accidental slip, he enters you deliberately, slowly, filling you completely. You moan into his mouth at the exquisite stretch and fullness.
He begins to move, his hips thrusting in a deep, slow rhythm that drives you wild. Each stroke is measured and controlled, hitting all the right spots. His movements are faster and harder than before, but still gentle, still considerate of your inexperience.
"You feel incredible," he groans, his voice thick with pleasure. "You're taking it well."
His hands roam your body as he moves, caressing your breasts, your hips, your thighs. His mouth finds your ear, his warm breath sending shivers down your spine as he whispers praises and encouragements.
"You're doing so well," he murmurs. "Taking me so deep. You feel amazing wrapped around me."
His words only heighten your arousal, pushing you closer to another peak. You wrap your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, matching his rhythm as best you can despite your inexperience.
After a few minutes, Heeseung pulls out gently. "Turn around," he commands softly.
You obey, positioning hands at the edge of the jacuzzi. He enters you from behind, this new angle allowing him to reach even deeper inside you. You cry out at the intensity of the sensation.
"Is this okay?" he asks, his voice strained with restraint.
"More than okay," you manage to gasp. "Don't stop."
He resumes his movements, his hands gripping your hips as he thrusts into you. The water sloshes with each movement, adding to the sensory experience. Heeseung's pace increases, his thrusts becoming more urgent as he chases his release.
His moans fill the night air, raw and uninhibited. "I'm getting close," he warns. "Where do you want me?"
"Inside me," you answer without hesitation.
Heeseung hesitates for a moment. "Are you sure? We didn't use anything."
Your mind races for a second before you respond, "I'm on the pill. It's okay."
With a groan of relief, Heeseung continues his movements, his pace becoming erratic as he approaches his climax. With one final deep thrust, he buries himself inside you, his body trembling as he finds his release.
For a moment, he stays inside you. Then he pulls out gently and helps you turn back over. He leans to slowly kiss you while stroking himself a few times before releasing again onto your stomach, warm and sticky.
You look at him in surprise.
"I couldn't," he explains, noticing your confusion. "I couldn't resist, I wanted to see you covered of me."
He reaches for a nearby towel, gently cleaning your stomach before pressing a soft kiss to your lips. "Next time," he promises, "I'll be more gentle. We'll take our time, explore everything properly."
"There's going to be a next time?" you ask with a smile.
Heeseung grins, pulling you into his arms. "Oh, there's definitely going to be a next time. And a time after that, and after that... I'm never getting enough of you."
The walk back to your room feels like floating.
Not literally, of course, your feet are very much on the ground, leaving wet footprints on the wooden floorboards of the lodge hallway, but your mind is somewhere else entirely. Somewhere purple-lit and steaming, somewhere filled with the taste of mint tea and the feeling of warm hands on your waist and the sound of Heeseung's voice murmuring instructions against your lips.
You have had sex. In a jacuzzi. Under the stars. With Lee Heeseung.
The hopeless romantic inside you does cartwheels. The realistic part of your brain is still buffering, stuck on a loading screen that says "please wait while we process what just happened." Your body is somewhere in between, pleasantly warm despite the cold air, tingling in places you hadn't known could tingle, wrapped in your borrowed coat and your towel and the lingering sensation of his skin against yours.
Heeseung walks beside you, his hand intertwined with yours. He hums softly, and when he catches you looking at him, he smiles that devastating smile and squeezes your hand.
"What?" he asks.
"Nothing. Just… processing."
"Processing what?"
"Everything." You gesture vaguely with your free hand. "The conversation. The jacuzzi. The… everything after the conversation."
"The everything after the conversation," he repeats, his smile widening. "Very descriptive."
"I'm a STEM student, not a poet."
"You wrote a three-page love letter with calligraphy. You're absolutely a poet."
"That was a one-time thing. A fluke. I've since retired from poetry."
"Tragic. The literary world has lost a great talent."
You reach your door, and Heeseung stops, turning to face you.
"Are you okay?" he asks, and his voice is gentle. "Really okay? That was… a lot. I know it was a lot. And I want to make sure you're not freaking out."
"I am absolutely freaking out," you admit. "But in a good way. I think. It's hard to tell. My brain is still catching up."
"Good freak-out or bad freak-out?"
"Good. Definitely good. Just… overwhelming." You pause, searching for the right words. "It wasn't how I imagined my first time would be. It was awkward and clumsy and it accidentally went in, and I'm pretty sure I made some very weird sounds, and-"
"It was perfect," Heeseung interrupts softly. "It was real. It was you. That's all I want."
Your heart, which has already been through approximately seventeen different emotional states in the past hour, does another complicated flip. "You're very good at saying the right thing."
"I'm not trying to say the right thing. I'm just telling you the truth." He reaches up and tucks a damp strand of hair behind your ear, his fingers lingering against your temple. "You're amazing, Y/N. And I'm not saying that because of what just happened. I'm saying it because it's been true since the moment you walked into that PC room and handed me a letter that wasn't meant for me."
"You're going to make me cry again."
"Please don't. I've seen you cry twice now, and both times it made me want to fight whoever made you sad. I can't fight myself. That's a conflict of interest."
You laugh, and it comes out a little watery. "You're ridiculous."
"I'm aware." He leans down and presses a kiss to your forehead, soft, gentle, lingering. "Goodnight, little mouse. Get some sleep."
"Goodnight, Heeseung."
He pulls back, his hand slipping from yours, and walks backward down the hallway for a few steps, still smiling at you. "Dream about me."
"I make no promises."
"I'll take that as confirmation."
He turns the corner and disappears, and you are left standing in front of your door with the lingering warmth of the best night of your life.
The moment you step into your room, Yunjin is on you like a hawk on a field mouse.
"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?"
You close the door behind you, leaning against it with a dazed expression. Yunjin sits cross-legged on her bed, her phone in her hand, a half-eaten bag of chips on the nightstand. Her eyes are wide, her expression a mixture of curiosity and accusation.
"The jacuzzi," you say faintly.
"For three hours?"
"Was it three hours? It doesn't feel like three hours."
"Y/N." Yunjin shuts her laptop with a decisive click. "You're wearing a towel. Your hair is wet. You have that look on your face, the one that says I just did something and I don't know how to process it. Spill. Now. Every detail."
You push yourself off the door and collapse onto your bed, staring up at the ceiling.
"We had sex," you say.
"What?!"
"We had sex, don't make me repeat it please or I'm gonna die…"
Yunjin is silent for exactly two seconds. Then: "YOU GUYS FUCKED?"
"Yeah…"
"IN THE JACUZZI?"
"There aren't exactly a lot of alternative locations. The water is warm. There's purple lighting. It's very atmospheric."
Yunjin scrambles off her bed and crosses the room in three steps, grabbing your shoulders and pulling you upright. "I need details. I need all the details. How did it happen? Who initiated it? Was it good? Was he good? Did he-"
"Yunjin!" You press your hands to your burning cheeks. "I can't just… I don't know how to-"
"Start from the beginning. The jacuzzi. What happened?"
You take a deep breath, gathering your scattered thoughts, and then the words start tumbling out of you as you tell her everything.
Yunjin is quiet for a moment, processing. Then she lets out a long breath. "So your first time was in a jacuzzi, under the stars, with a hot informatics engineering student who knew you'd accidentally confessed to the wrong person and liked you anyway."
"That's… yeah. That's basically the summary."
"And you're telling me you're still worried this is some kind of disaster?"
"I'm not worried," you say slowly. "I'm just… confused. About what we are. We don't exactly have the what are we conversation. We just kind of… had sex. And now I don't know if we're dating, or if it was a one-time thing, or if he's going to wake up tomorrow and realize he made a huge mistake and-"
"Stop." Yunjin holds up a hand. "Just stop. I'm going to tell you something, and I need you to actually hear it."
"I'm listening."
"Lee Heeseung has known your secret for weeks. He's seen you at your absolute worst, hiding behind bulletin boards, choking on lettuce, spilling coffee all over yourself, crying on a bench in the middle of the night. He's seen you ramble about video games until you run out of breath, and he's seen you face-plant in the snow eight times in one afternoon. And after all of that, he still chooses to spend three hours in a jacuzzi with you and make sure your first time is special and safe and good."
Yunjin leans forward, her expression intense. "That's not the behavior of a guy who's going to wake up tomorrow and change his mind. That's the behavior of a guy who is completely, thoroughly, absolutely gone for you."
The words settle into your chest. "You really think so?"
"I know so. And I think you know so too. You're just scared to admit it because admitting it means this is real, and real is scary."
"When did you get so wise about relationships?"
"I've been watching you be a disaster for months. I've picked up a few things."
You laugh, and it comes out lighter than you expected. "So what do I do?"
"Tomorrow, you go find him. You see how he acts. And if he acts like nothing's changed except that he's even happier to see you than usual, then you'll have your answer."
"And if he acts weird?"
"Then I'll key his snowboard."
"Yunjin!"
"Kidding. Mostly." She grins and flops back onto her bed. "Now go to sleep. You've had a big night. You need rest. And honestly, I need time to process the fact that my best friend had a romantic jacuzzi rendezvous while I was sitting here eating chips and doomscrolling on TikTok."
"You could have come to the jacuzzi."
"And interrupt whatever is happening between you two? I'm a good friend, not a saint. I'd be third-wheeling so hard I'd need a snowplow to get out."
You laugh again, and for the first time in weeks, you feel light. Unburdened. Like the weight you've been carrying since the moment you walked into that PC room has finally been lifted.
"Goodnight, Yunjin."
"Goodnight, you absolute disaster of a human being. Dream about your hot engineer boy."
"He's not my-"
"Yet. He's not your boy yet. But I give it twenty-four hours."
You throw a pillow at her. She catches it and tucks it under her head with a satisfied grin.
The next morning, you wake up with a start, your heart racing. Dreams of purple light and warm water and hands on your waist and a voice murmuring good girl, you're doing so good against your lips haunt your memory.
You press your face into your pillow and scream.
It is a happy scream, mostly. A disbelieving, giddy scream. But it is also a nervous scream, because in approximately one hour, you are going to have to go downstairs and face Heeseung in the cold light of day, and you have absolutely no idea how that is going to go.
Would he be awkward? Would he be distant? Would he pretend nothing happened? Would he-
Your phone buzzes on the nightstand.
Heeseung: good morning little mouse. breakfast in 30?
You stare at the message for a solid ten seconds. Then you type back:
You: okay
Heeseung: you're very eloquent in the morning
You: i haven't had caffeine yet
Heeseung: i'll have a vanilla latte waiting for you. extra shot of vanilla. just like last time
Heeseung: hopefully with less spilling this time
You: no promises
You get dressed in a daze, pulling on approximately four layers of clothing because you still don't own proper winter gear and the borrowed coat can only do so much. Yunjin is already gone, she has left a note on the nightstand that says went to find the economics majors. don't do anything I wouldn't do. (do everything I wouldn't do), so you are alone with your thoughts as you make your way down to the lodge's dining hall.
You spot Heeseung immediately. He sits at a table near the window, two cups of coffee in front of him, his hair still slightly messy from sleep. When he sees you approaching, his entire face lights up.
"There you are," he says, standing up and pulling out a chair for you. "I was starting to think you'd bailed."
"On breakfast?"
"On me. On this. On everything." He says it lightly, but there is a flicker of vulnerability in his eyes, a tiny crack in his usual confident demeanor. "I wasn't sure if you'd want to see me this morning, or if you'd need space, or-"
"Hey." You reach out and touch his hand, just briefly. "I'm here. I want to see you."
The relief that washes over his face is so genuine, so unguarded, that your heart clenches. "Okay. Good. That's… good."
You sit down, and he slides the vanilla latte toward you. Your fingers brush as you take the cup, and the contact sends a spark of electricity up your arm. You both pretend not to notice, but the way Heeseung's ears turn slightly pink suggests he feels it too.
"So," you say, taking a sip of your latte to give yourself something to do with your hands. "Breakfast."
"Breakfast," he agrees. "Eggs. Bacon. Possibly a pastry if we're feeling adventurous."
"Very adventurous."
"I'm a risk-taker."
You try to eat normally. You really do. But every time you look up from your plate, Heeseung looks at you with that soft, wondering expression, and you forget how to chew, and you end up staring at him with a piece of toast halfway to your mouth like you've been frozen in time.
"You're doing it again," he says.
"Doing what?"
"The staring thing. The I'm trying to figure you out thing."
"I'm not trying to figure you out. I already figured you out. You're a people-pleaser who can't say no and you have a secret soft spot for romantic comedies."
"Then what are you thinking about?"
You set down your toast. "I'm thinking about last night. And what it means. And what we are now."
Heeseung's expression shifts, becoming more serious. "Do you want to have that conversation? The what are we conversation?"
"I don't know. Do you?"
"I asked you first."
"That's very mature."
"I have my moments." He leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. "Look, I know we did things kind of backwards. Most people start with coffee and work their way up to jacuzzis. We started with a misplaced love letter and somehow ended up in a hot tub under the stars. It's not exactly a conventional timeline."
"When has anything about us been conventional?"
"Fair point." He reaches across the table and takes your hand, his thumb tracing circles on your palm. "I don't know what we are. Labels feel… complicated. But I know what I want us to be."
"What's that?"
"Something real. Something that isn't built on misunderstandings or accidents or letters that weren't meant for me. Something that's just… us. Figuring it out together."
Your heart does that fluttering thing again. "That sounds terrifying."
"I know. But you've been scared this whole time, and you've still kept showing up. That's the bravest thing I've ever seen."
"I haven't felt brave. I've felt like a disaster."
"Disasters can be brave. The two aren't mutually exclusive." He squeezes your hand. "So what do you say? Want to be brave together?"
You look at him, really look at him, and see the boy who poured coffee on his head, the boy who held you while you cried, the boy who knew your secret and waited for you to tell him in your own time. And you feel the fear, familiar and insistent, coiling in your stomach.
But beneath the fear, there is something else. Something warmer. Something that feels a lot like hope.
"Okay," you say. "Let's be brave together."
Heeseung smiles, real and open and devastating. "Okay."
The afternoon finds you back on the beginner slope, strapped into a snowboard and wondering how you let Heeseung talk you into this again.
"You said you wanted to practice," he reminds you, tightening the bindings on your boots. "Snowboarding, I mean. Not… other things."
"My entire body is sore from yesterday. Both from the snowboarding and from the… other things."
"Then we'll take it slow. No jumps, no tricks, just a gentle run down the beginner hill." He stands up and offers you his hand. "I'll be right there the whole time."
"You said that yesterday, and I still fell eight times."
"And you got up eight times. That's the important part."
You take his hand and let him pull you to your feet. The beginner slope stretches out before you, populated by other beginners who fall over with roughly the same frequency as you.
"Okay," you say, taking a deep breath. "Okay. I can do this. I'm a capable human being. I understand physics. Snowboarding is just physics with extra steps."
"That's the spirit."
"I'm going to fall."
"Probably."
"And you're going to catch me?"
"Always."
The word hangs in the air between you, heavier than it should be. Always. Not just on the ski slope, but everywhere. Always.
"Okay," you whisper. "Let's go."
You push off.
The first few seconds are wobbly, your balance shifts, your arms flail slightly, your heart pounds in your ears. But then something clicks. Your body remembers the lessons from yesterday, the way Heeseung taught you to lean into the turns, to keep your weight centered, to trust the board beneath your feet.
You pick up speed, and instead of panicking, you lean into it. The wind rushes past your face, cold and exhilarating.
And then, miraculously, impossibly, you reach the bottom of the slope without falling.
"I DID IT!" you scream, your voice echoing across the mountain. "I DID IT! I SNOWBOARDED!"
You are laughing, giddy with adrenaline and triumph, and you turn around to find Heeseung, to share this moment with him, to see the proud expression on his face.
But Heeseung isn't at the bottom of the slope.
He is still at the top.
And he is shouting something.
"Y/N! Y/N L/N!"
The entire slope seems to go quiet. Other skiers and snowboarders slow down, turning to look at the boy standing at the top of the beginner hill, his hands cupped around his mouth, his voice carrying across the snow with startling clarity.
"I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY!"
Your heart stops. Then starts again, twice as fast.
"I'VE BEEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SAY THIS FOR WEEKS!" Heeseung shouts. "AND I REALIZED THAT THE BEST WAY TO TELL YOU IS THE SAME WAY YOU TOLD ME, WITH WORDS THAT I CAN'T TAKE BACK!"
People are staring. Everyone is staring.
"LEE HEESEUNG, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" you shout back, your voice cracking.
"I'M CONFESSING!" he yells. "PROPERLY! IN FRONT OF EVERYONE! BECAUSE YOU DESERVE A CONFESSION THAT'S JUST FOR YOU! YOU DESERVE THE LOVE YOU'VE DREAMED ABOUT!"
"THE FIRST LETTER WASN'T FOR ME!" Heeseung continues, his voice ringing across the snow. "BUT I WANT TO WRITE YOU ONE! I WANT TO WRITE YOU A HUNDRED LETTERS! I WANT TO LEARN YOUR FAVORITE HIGHLIGHTER COLORS AND THE NAMES OF ALL YOUR PLANTS AND THE EXACT WAY YOU LIKE YOUR VANILLA LATTES!"
Someone in the crowd lets out a wolf whistle. Someone else starts recording on their phone. You can't move, can't speak, can't do anything except stand at the bottom of the slope and stare up at the boy who shouts his heart out for everyone to hear.
"YOU'RE A DISASTER!" Heeseung yells, and his voice is full of joy, full of affection, full of something that looks a lot like love. "YOU'RE A HOPELESS ROMANTIC WHO'S TOO SCARED TO LIVE THE ROMANCE YOU DREAM ABOUT! YOU HIDE BEHIND BULLETIN BOARDS AND YOU CHOKE ON LETTUCE AND YOU SPILL COFFEE ON YOURSELF AND YOU MAKE GRAPHS ABOUT VIDEO GAME BALANCE AND YOU CRIED OVER A BABY PENGUIN IN A NATURE DOCUMENTARY!"
"This is the worst confession I've ever heard!" you shout back, but you are laughing, tears streaming down your face, your heart so full it feels like it might burst.
"I'M NOT FINISHED!" Heeseung takes a deep breath, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer, still loud enough to carry, but more intimate, more vulnerable. "YOU'RE A DISASTER, Y/N L/N! AND I'M A DISASTER TOO! I'M A PEOPLE-PLEASER WHO CAN'T SAY NO, I HAVE A REPUTATION THAT DOESN'T REFLECT WHO I ACTUALLY AM, AND I POURED COFFEE ON MY HEAD BECAUSE I COULDN'T STAND TO SEE YOU CRY ALONE!"
He starts walking down the slope toward you, his snowboard forgotten at the top, his boots crunching through the snow.
"AND I THINK, NO, I KNOW THAT I'VE BEEN FALLING FOR YOU SINCE THE MOMENT YOU WALKED INTO THAT PC ROOM AND LOOKED AT ME LIKE I WAS THE WORST THING THAT HAD EVER HAPPENED TO YOU!"
He gets closer now, close enough that you can see the nervousness in his eyes, the vulnerability beneath the bravado, the way his hands shake slightly despite his confident posture.
"SO I'M ASKING YOU, IN FRONT OF ALL THESE PEOPLE, ON THIS VERY EMBARRASSING SKI SLOPE, IF YOU'LL BE MY DISASTER. OFFICIALLY. NO MORE MISUNDERSTANDINGS. NO MORE LETTERS MEANT FOR OTHER PEOPLE. JUST US."
He stops a few feet away from you, his breath fogging in the cold air, his dark eyes fixed on your face.
"WHAT DO YOU SAY, LITTLE MOUSE?"
The silence that follows is deafening. Every person on the slope watches you, waiting for your answer.
And you, you, the hopeless romantic who has always been too scared to live the romance you dream about, you take a deep breath, throw your arms out wide, and shout at the top of your lungs:
"I LIKE YOU TOO, YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT! I'VE LIKED YOU FOR WEEKS AND I DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO SAY IT AND YOU JUST SHOUTED IT FROM A MOUNTAINTOP LIKE A CHARACTER IN A KDRAMA!"
Heeseung's face breaks into the biggest smile you have ever seen. "IS THAT A YES?"
"THAT'S A YES! THAT'S A THOUSAND TIMES YES! NOW COME HERE AND KISS ME BEFORE I PASS OUT FROM THE EMBARRASSMENT OF HAVING THIS CONVERSATION IN FRONT OF LITERALLY EVERYONE!"
He doesn't need to be told twice. He crosses the distance between you in three long strides, catches your face in his hands, and kisses you, deep and thorough and joyful, right there at the bottom of the beginner slope, with the snow sparkling around you and the crowd erupting into cheers and someone's phone recording what will undoubtedly become the most-watched video on the university's social media for the next month.
When he pulls back, his forehead pressed against yours, his breath warm against your lips, he grins like he has just won the lottery.
"You shouted your feelings from a mountaintop," he murmurs. "You, the girl who was too scared to even correct a misunderstanding, just shouted your feelings from a mountaintop."
"You started it."
"I did. And you finished it." He kisses the tip of your nose. "I'm so proud of you."
You have never been more embarrassed in your entire life, and you have never been happier.
"We're still disasters," you say.
"Absolutely. But now we're disasters who are dating."
"Are we dating? Is that what this is?"
"This is me, shouting from a mountaintop that I want to be with you. I'm pretty sure that counts as dating." He pauses, his expression shifting to something more serious. "Unless you don't want-"
"I want." You grab the front of his jacket and pull him closer. "I want everything. The letters and the coffee disasters and the matching shirts and the snowboarding lessons and the jacuzzi conversations and the ridiculous mountaintop confessions. I want all of it."
Heeseung kisses you again, and this time it is softer, sweeter, full of promise.
"You know what this means," he says against your lips.
"What?"
"We're going to have to tell Jungwon."
You groan. "Can we wait until after the trip? I need at least twenty-four hours to recover from this before I have another emotionally complicated conversation."
"Deal." He pulls back, taking your hand in his. "Come on. Let's get out of here before someone asks us for an interview."
And hand in hand, laughing like fools, you run away from the crowd and the chaos.
START WITH THE TRACK ! - f1 racer gf manon headcannons ! ☆
pairings : f1racergf!manon x gf!rea
warnings : fluff, praise, manon is referred to as manz, implied top manz, munch manz, reader is a cutie nything else lmk!! because this does contain smut, MDNI. eng = not first language🥹
f1racergf!manon always keeps her eye on you. when shes gearing up for a race, she watches you from the corner of her eyes. when her coach is lecturing her for taking too much of a sharp turn, shes gazing at your pretty eyes. she wonders how she scored someone like you.
f1racergf!manon LOVES to edge you. fingering you just right "mm right there baby? words, love. i need words." she'd coo into your ear, watching your teeth clamp down on your lip, close to drawing blood "m-mhm! right ther-" "nonono baby, you took too long. guess you'll have to try again" and she'd keep at it until you finally got to muster a sentence without her telling you to :((
f1racergf!manon made sure you were front-seat propped up at her tournaments. she didn't care if you had some sort of excuse, she just wanted you there 24/7. she felt as if without your presence, she couldn't preform to the best of her abilities.
f1racergf!manon eats you out like she can't breathe without it. her hands keeping your thighs clamped to her head, whilst she licks long strips of your heat relentlessly. "you like that, huh baby?" she'd move her face away from your hole ever so often, loving how flustered you got under her gaze. the way your eyes shut, your eyebrows furrowed, and the way your mouth couldn't stop repeating her name like a prayer. and when you came? best shit ever. she wouldn't move away from you until she sucked up every last drop of whatever holy water your body could produce "don't want any of this going to waste my love" she'd say, as she slowly began to move away from your thighs with a bright smirk on her face. you? oh, you were staring at her in awe. awe of how perfect she looked after practically sucking every liquid other than blood out of you.
f1racergf!manon has some sort of tough persona when being in the space of others, but always melts when it comes to you. she finds it adorable how you rush over to her as soon as her matches finish. "manz, i swear you went even faster this time!" manon smiled at you. "baby love i placed 6th, no need to lie." "no, manz i swear- " you began ranting, going on and on about how perfectly she was positioned, how her pace was perfect, etc. watching you ramble on and on about how well she did, even if she didn't want to admit it, made her heart skip a beat. god, she was so lucky to have such a lovely person who made her days seem brighter.
a.n : hey everybody😍 when i saw those f1 pics i couldnt take it and had to write!! lwk ass im sorry enjoy loves<33
Hey it’s the orange blood anon and we both share the same favourite tracks (Still Monster and Blind)
They performed Blind and guess what I predicted I was like "Hopefully if they perform Still Monster or Blind. I hope Jay or Jake gets the "Blinding lights, Blinding lights" Part in Blind"
GIRL GUESS WHAG JAY GOT THAT PART 🥹
STOP twins! Though I miss heeseung I'm glad Jay is getting recognized for his vocals too. He's my other bias after Jungwon ofc. But I really hope they get a break they've been really overworked smh.
Also what should I call you anonie—like an emoji or something 🥹
pixelskylines
jbbartram-illu
2087
dededos
origamiaround
kianamaiart
dailybridgerton
izzy806
