✦ ݁˖ ᴛᴀʟᴋɪɴ’ ᴄʜᴇᴀᴘ. sim jaeyun
You thought the worst thing that could happen after your breakup was running into your cheating ex. Then you got pregnant by JAKE SIM. Captain of the Caldwell Wolves, campus golden boy and the most notorious heartbreaker on campus. He’s the last person you’d ever trust. Unfortunately for you, he’s also the father of your baby.
𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 19.4k
𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞: college au, unexpected pregnancy, slow burn, enemies-to-lovers adjacent, angst, fluff, smut
𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: fingering, oral sex, cum eating, unprotected sex, multiple orgasms, praise kink, dom!jake, breast/nipple play, dirty talk, riding, bump worship, penetrative sex, accidental injury, unexpected pregnancy, morning sickness, cheating (backstory), past relationship trauma, physical altercation, toxic male behaviour, jealousy, emotional manipulation, brief mention of abortion, alcohol consumption
𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭: Delicate - Taylor Swift // Kiss Me Right - keshi // Sugar Talking - Sabrina Carpenter // It Ain’t Over ‘Till It’s Over - Lenny Kravitz // Please - BTS // striptease - carwash
𝐋’𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐞: i genuinely had the best time writing this fic and getting way too emotionally attached to these characters! please feel free to leave a comment, scream or simply stare into the void thinking about these idiots (i know i will be). your support means more than you know and every notification makes me kick my feet like a Victorian lady seeing an ankle. i hope this fic made you experience at least one completely unnecessary emotion. thank you for ready and PLEASE enjoy!
The party is Mina’s idea. It always is. You’ve stopped pretending otherwise — stopped doing the thing where you spend twenty minutes debating whether you’re really feeling it before Mina gives you the look and you both know you’re going regardless.
It’s a Friday in late September, the air outside finally tipping from warm to something with a bite in it, and you’ve been in your dorm room since two in the afternoon staring at the same paragraph of Middlemarch without absorbing a single word.
“You need to get out of this room,” Mina says from your bed, where she’s been watching you not read for the past hour. She’s already dressed — black top, dark jeans, the gold hoops she only wears when she’s decided the night is going to be worth the effort. She decided before she came over. The last hour has been a courtesy. “You’ve been staring at that book like it cheated on you.”
The word lands between you, briefly. Mina’s face doesn’t change “George Eliot is a menace,” you say.
“You love George Eliot.”
“I love George Eliot when I’m not trying to produce fifteen hundred words on her narrative voice by Monday morning.” You close the book. It’s not like you’re reading it anyway.
The thing about Delta Kappa parties is that they are, by any objective measure, too much. Too loud, too hot, the bass sitting somewhere in your sternum, red cups and bodies everywhere you look. Mina thrives. You tolerate it with the specific resignation of someone who knows they’re going to have a good time despite themselves and finds this faintly irritating.
You’re on your second drink when you see Sunghoon. He’s across the room near the kitchen doorway, mid-conversation with someone you don’t recognise, laughing at something. Head tipped back the way he always did — that particular way, unhurried and a little private, like whatever amused him was his alone. You used to love that about him. You watch it for maybe three seconds before you look away, which feels like a victory of some kind.
Four months. Four months since you’d found out, since you’d sat on your dorm room floor and read a conversation thread you were never supposed to see, since everything you thought you’d built with him had turned out to be built on something rotten underneath.
Two years of your life. Your first real relationship. You’d thought it would last.
You look away. You drain the rest of your cup.
“He’s here,” Mina says, appearing at your elbow with the precision of someone who has been watching.
“I know.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“No.” You mean it. “I’m not leaving a party because of Sunghoon Park.”
She studies you for a moment with that particular look — the one that measures the difference between actually fine and performing fine with uncomfortable accuracy. Whatever she finds seems to satisfy her, because she clinks her cup against yours and says, “Then let’s get another drink.”
You’re at the makeshift bar — someone’s kitchen counter pressed into service — when you become aware of someone standing beside you. Not waiting for the bottle. Something else. A specific quality of attention that you register before you’ve consciously clocked it. You look up. Jake Sim looks back.
You know who he is the way you know most things about the people who exist in Caldwell’s uppermost stratum — passively, through cultural osmosis, without ever having chosen to learn. Captain of the Wolves. Dean’s son. The name that comes up in a specific tone of voice, like a warning dressed as gossip.
Up close he is, unfortunately, exactly as good-looking as that reputation implies. Tall, built through the shoulders and chest in the way that years of hockey builds — not showy, just solid, like his body was designed to take up space and does so without apology. Dark eyes. A jaw that should probably be illegal. A mouth curved at the corner like he’s already three steps ahead of the conversation and finds this mildly entertaining.
“You’re doing maths,” he says.
You blink. “What?”
“Your face.” He nods at you, vaguely. “Very intense for someone just standing at a bar.”
“I’m making a drink.”
“You’ve been staring at that vodka for forty-five seconds.”
“I didn’t realise I was being timed.”
“You weren’t.” He reaches past you for the bottle — close enough that you catch something clean and faintly expensive — pours his own cup, sets it back.
“I’m Jake.”
“I know who you are.” Something moves through his expression. Amusement, maybe, or the specific satisfaction of a fact confirmed.
“Most people do,” he says, and there’s no arrogance in it, just a statement of observable reality, which is somehow worse. “And you’re—”
“Also a person,” you say.
That gets a real smile. Brief, but actual. “Fair enough.”
You should find Mina. You’re aware of this the way you’re aware of the coursework due Monday and the fact that it’s past midnight — true, noted, irrelevant. Instead you stay where you are and let the conversation go where it goes, and it goes somewhere you didn’t expect.
He’s good at this. That’s the thing you clock first and keep clocking — the way he makes conversation feel like it has momentum, like you’re building toward something together, the timing of his humour landing slightly off-beat in a way that catches you. He asks questions and actually listens to the answers. You know it’s a formula. You know it has worked on an uncountable number of girls at an uncountable number of parties exactly like this one, and knowing that should make you immune to it, and it doesn’t.
Mina finds you at some point, clocks the situation in under a second, raises her eyebrows precisely two millimetres — a full paragraph in two millimetres — and disappears back into the crowd.
At some point his hand finds the small of your back. Light. Questioning. You don’t move away from it. At some point, close enough that you feel the words more than hear them, he says: “We could get out of here.”
You think about Middlemarch, which you’re not going to read tonight regardless. You think about the two years you spent being someone’s person and the four months since that have felt like learning to walk in a body that’s been subtly rearranged. You think about Sunghoon somewhere in this house with his head tipped back, laughing.
“Okay,” you say.
His room is in the east block upperclassmen housing — a single, because of course, because Jake Sim has probably never had to negotiate space with anyone in his life. It’s tidier than you’d have guessed. You file this away without meaning to, the way you’re still filing things even now, even when you’ve told yourself you’re not doing that anymore.
He closes the door and you’re already turning toward him and then his mouth is on yours and it’s nothing like how he acted downstairs — no charm, no ease, just heat and intent, his hands gripping your face and kissing you like he’s already decided exactly how this goes.
You grab his shirt and walk him backwards and he turns you instead, smooth and immediate, your back hitting the wall beside the door hard enough to knock the breath out of you and you don’t care, you’re already pulling at his shirt and he’s already got your top halfway up your body.
He strips it off you and his mouth drops straight to your throat, open and hot, and then your bra is unclasped and gone before you’ve fully registered his hands at the back of it.
Then his mouth is on your tits and he makes a sound low in his chest like the sight of them was specifically designed to ruin him. His hands cup them, squeezing, thumbs dragging slow over your nipples and watching your face while he does it. You feel your cheeks go hot because his expression is entirely too focused, too attentive, like he’s cataloguing your reactions and filing it away for later use.
He bends his head and takes one nipple into his mouth, tongue working in slow wet circles. Your head drops back against the wall on a moan you didn’t mean to let out that loud.
“Yeah,” he says against your skin, rough and pleased, “get loud,” and bites down lightly you gasp and your nails find his shoulders through his shirt.
He marks you up like he has all the time in the world — mouth dragging from your tits to your throat to your collarbone and back again, teeth and tongue, leaving his work on your skin with a thoroughness that should feel like too much and instead just makes you want more.
His hips grind into yours against the wall, the hard line of his cock pressed against your core through clothing, slow and deliberate, the friction makes you roll up into it and he does it again to which you make a sound that’s honestly embarrassing.
“Bed,” you manage, and he pulls back just enough to look at you — mouth-bitten, dark-eyed, satisfied with himself in a way you don’t have the capacity to be annoyed about right now — and walks you to it.
You land on the mattress and he’s over you immediately, his mouth back on your tits before you’ve stopped bouncing on the mattress, you’re pulling at his shirt until he lets you get it off him and then his jeans are gone and yours are gone and he’s settled between your thighs in just his boxers and the weight of him is — a lot, in the best way, solid and warm and pressing you into the mattress, his hips grind down slow as his cock drags against your pussy through the thin fabric of your panties, you grab his shoulders to hold onto something.
He does it again. Slower.
His mouth is still at your nipple, tongue working it stiff while his hips keep that maddening rhythm, grinding into you with enough friction to make your thighs clench around him but not enough to give you anything real, you can hear how wet you are, can feel it and judging by the way his jaw tightens he can too.
“Jake,” you say, and it comes out more desperate than you intend.
“I know,” he says, like that’s an answer, and then he’s moving down your body.
He hooks your underwear off, throws it somewhere and finally puts his mouth on your pussy. Your back comes off the mattress.
He licks into your folds slowly, taking his time, his tongue dragging from your entrance up to your clit in one long stroke and then doing it again, his hands are spread flat on your inner thighs holding you open and still and there is nothing to do but take it.
He’s good — infuriatingly good — like he’s genuinely interested in making you cum, like this is something he wants to do rather than something he’s doing to get to the next thing. You’ve got one fist in the sheets and one pressed to your own mouth to which he pulls your hand away from your face without looking up. “Don’t,” he says against your cunt, and goes back to work.
His tongue finds your clit and stays there, tight focused circles, two fingers then press at your entrance and push in slow, curling immediately, finding the spot that makes your hips jolt and working it with patience that feels almost cruel.
The sounds coming out of you are loud and continuous and undignified and he hums against you like he approves, the vibration travelling straight up your spine, and you can feel yourself getting close embarrassingly fast, your walls clenching tight around his fingers, your whole body chasing it.
“Don’t stop,” you manage, “don’t — please —“ and he doesn’t, his tongue relentless on your clit and his fingers curling deep, and you cum on his mouth with your thighs shaking, his name coming out broken and too loud for the room.
He works you through every second of it, tongue gentling, fingers slowing until you’re twitching and oversensitive and pulling at his hair to get him off you, he comes back up your body looking composed in a way that feels like a personal attack. There’s something dark and satisfied in his expression as he looks down at you and kisses you before you can say anything, slow, and you taste yourself on his tongue.
His cock is hard against your hip, straining against his boxers, you reach between you and wrap your hand around him and feel him shudder. He’s thick and heavy in your palm, already slick at the tip and when you stroke him his composure cracks — hips pushing into your grip, jaw tightening and a low rough sound forming against your mouth.
You work him slow and watch his face and feel something warm and powerful settle in your chest. “Condom,” you say.
“Yeah,” he says and reaches for the nightstand.
He pushes in slow and you feel every single inch. The stretch of him opening you up, thick and relentless, your walls giving way around his cock, you dig your nails into his back and breathe through it until he’s fully seated. You’re so full it sits somewhere between pleasure and pain and then he rolls his hips and it tips firmly into the first one.
He starts slow — deep, grinding strokes, his cock dragging against every nerve of you, the weight of his hips pinning yours into the mattress and his mouth finds your tits again immediately, like he can’t help it, tongue working your nipple while his hips keep their deep rhythm and you stop being capable of thoughts that go anywhere.
“You’re so fucking tight,” he says against your breast, low and rough, and bites down on the swell of it and soothes it with his tongue and does it again somewhere else.
“Jake—”
“I know,” he says, his thumb finds your clit. The added pressure makes you gasp and your hips jolt up to meet his and he makes a sound that isn’t quite a groan and picks up the pace.
The slow grind gives way to something sharper. His hips snap against yours and the headboard knocks the wall and the wet sounds of it fill the room. You have completely stopped caring about anything except the way his cock fills you on every stroke, deep and thick, the drag of him pulling back and driving in again setting off a chain reaction of sensation that climbs fast.
He shifts your leg up higher over his hip and the angle changes, deeper, and the sound you make at that is genuinely obscene. “Yeah?” he says, doing it again, deliberate. “There?”
“Yes,” you manage, “there, don’t stop, please—”
“Dirty when you want something,” he says, low and pleased, and fucks you harder.
His thumb circles your clit without stopping, his cock drives into your cunt again and again and his mouth marks your throat. The build crests too fast to catch — you cum for the second time harder, walls clenching rhythmically around him, his name coming out wrecked and he follows you over with his hips buried deep and his face pressed to your throat, low broken sounds against your skin as he cums.
The room goes quiet. You stare at the ceiling. Your body has been taken apart and put back together slightly differently and everything feels warm and loose and heavy.
That, you think distantly, was either the best or worst decision you’ve made in months.
Possibly both.
Jake disposes of the condom, comes back, drops onto the bed beside you. The quiet settles. It’s almost comfortable — the dark, the warmth, both of you just breathing. And then…
“You can go whenever,” he says. Flat. Casual. Already looking at the ceiling like you’re no longer the most interesting thing in the room. Like you’ve been downgraded, in the last thirty seconds, from a person to an inconvenience that’s resolved itself.
You blink. You can go whenever. Not you don’t have to rush, not do you want some water, not even basic human decency. Just — you can go. Door’s there. Thanks for coming.
Something cold moves cleanly through the warmth in your chest and extinguishes it. You sit up. “Right,” you say. Your voice comes out level. You’re proud of that.
He says nothing. He is staring at the ceiling with his arms folded behind his head like a man with absolutely no awareness that he’s just been profoundly rude, or perhaps perfect awareness and total indifference, which is worse.
You find your clothes in the dark with quiet methodical efficiency — jeans, top, shoes, bra shoved into your bag because life is short. You do not look at him while you dress and he does not look at you. At the door you pause, and you genuinely don’t know why, some reflex kicking in from a life spent being polite to people who haven’t earned it.
“Bye, then,” you say.
“Mm,” says Jake Sim, at the ceiling not even at you. You want to scoff in his stupidly hot face.
You close the door behind you.
The walk back across campus takes twelve minutes and you spend all twelve of them with the cold night air doing its best against the heat in your face. Not embarrassment — or not only that. Something sharper. The specific anger of someone who knew exactly what they were walking into and walked into it anyway and is now annoyed at themselves for being annoyed.
I knew, you think, with each step. I knew what he was. Everyone knows what he is. I just—
You’d let the hour at the bar do its work. You’d let the conversation and the hand at the small of your back and the dark eyes and the unfair jaw do their work, and you’d told yourself it was fine because you were going in clear-eyed, and the sex had been — god, the sex had been amazing — but then he’d opened his mouth and reminded you exactly who he was and now here you are, at one forty in the morning, crossing the quad with your bra in your bag.
You text Mina. still up?
The reply is immediate. obviously. how was it?
You stare at your phone for a moment. come to mine, you type back.
Mina is sitting up in your bed when you get back, laptop open, a bowl of cereal balanced on her knee that she definitely made while waiting. She takes one look at your face as you come through the door and sets it on the nightstand. “Tell me.”
You drop your bag, toe off your shoes, and sit on the end of the bed. You press your fingers to your eyes for a moment. “The sex,” you say carefully, “was genuinely incredible. Like — top three of my life, Mina. Easily. Potentially top two.”
“Okay—”
“And then, the moment it was over, he looked at the ceiling and told me I could go whenever.” You drop your hands. “In the tone of someone dismissing a tradesman. Like I’d come to fix his boiler.”
Mina’s expression moves through several stages. “He did not.”
“He absolutely did.”
“What did you say?”
“I said bye then and closed the door.”
“Bye then?”
“I panicked and defaulted to manners.” You flop backwards onto the duvet. “I knew. That’s the thing. I knew exactly what he was before I ever spoke to him and I did it anyway because—” You gesture at the ceiling. “I don’t know. Because I’m tired of being careful. Because Sunghoon was across the room being beautiful and I wanted to feel something that wasn’t about him.”
Mina is quiet for a moment. Then: “Was it, at least something that wasn’t about Sunghoon.”
You consider this with the ceiling. “Yes,” you admit. “Annoyingly, yes. Right up until he opened his mouth.”
“He really is the worst,” Mina says, with the conviction of someone delivering a verdict.
“He really, genuinely is.” You stare upward. “He’s got such a good cock though, Mina. Like. I’m annoyed about it. I’m actively annoyed.”
Mina puts her face in her hands. You watch her shoulders shake. “It’s not funny,” you tell her, and then you’re laughing too, and the tight mean thing in your chest loosens by a fraction, and outside the window Caldwell goes on being loud and indifferent and fully lit up, and you are fine.
You’re fine. You’re completely fine.
The week after the party you are, by any reasonable measure, completely fine.
You turn in the Middlemarch essay on Monday morning — fifteen hundred words on narrative voice, mostly written Sunday afternoon in a single focused stretch that you attribute to having gotten something out of your system.
You go to your Tuesday seminar and your Wednesday lecture and you have coffee with Mina on Thursday at the place near the English building where they do the good almond croissants, and you do not think about Jake Sim.
Or you think about him the normal amount. The amount that is appropriate for a person you slept with once at a party and will probably never speak to again, which is to say occasionally and without weight, the way you might think about a film you watched on a plane — enjoyable in the moment, not something you’d seek out again, largely irrelevant to your actual life.
This is what you tell yourself. Mina does not challenge it, which means she’s either convinced or she’s decided to let you have it, and knowing Mina it’s the second one.
Sunghoon texts you on Wednesday. Just — hey, saw you at Delta Kappa Friday. you looked good. You stare at it for a long time. You don’t reply.
You see Jake on Monday. You’re crossing the main quad, coffee in hand, bag over one shoulder, running approximately four minutes late for your seminar, and he’s coming the other direction with Jay Park and someone you don’t recognise, all three of them in Wolves gear, clearly post-practice.
He’s laughing at something Jay said, head tilted back, and he looks — easy, and loose, and completely unbothered by anything in the known universe, which you knew, which is exactly what you expected, and yet something about seeing it in person at ten forty-three on a Monday morning makes your jaw tighten anyway.
He doesn’t see you. Or he does and gives no indication of it, which amounts to the same thing. You look straight ahead and keep walking and do not think about it for the rest of the morning.
You think about it a little bit in the afternoon. By evening you’ve filed it away under irrelevant and moved on, which is the correct and mature response and you’re proud of yourself.
The sickness starts on Wednesday morning. You wake up with your stomach doing something wrong — not dramatic, not the sharp unmistakable rebellion of food poisoning, just a low persistent nausea that sits behind your sternum like it’s made itself at home. You lie still for a moment, waiting for it to pass.
It doesn’t.
You get up, make it to the bathroom, sit on the edge of the tub for ten minutes breathing carefully, and then it eases enough that you can brush your teeth and get dressed and tell yourself you’re fine.
You’re not fine by Thursday morning.
The nausea is worse — still not acute, still this low insidious wrongness, but it’s there when you wake up and it doesn’t fully lift, and your coffee tastes like something burnt and metallic and you push it away after two sips which Mina clocks immediately from across the table at the place near the English building.
“You’re not drinking your coffee.”
“I’m not feeling it today.”
Mina looks at the cup. Looks at you. “You have never in three years of knowing you not felt like coffee.”
“There’s a first time for everything.” She watches you for a moment with that look. You look back at your laptop and don’t say anything else.
By Saturday you feel actively, genuinely terrible.
Not sick-sick — no fever, no aches, nothing you can point to as a specific illness — just this relentless creeping nausea that is worst in the morning and fades by afternoon and makes the idea of eating before eleven o’clock an abstract and unpleasant concept.
You cancel your Saturday morning coffee with Mina, which you have never done, and she’s at your door by noon with a container of crackers and a forensic expression. “Talk,” she says.
“I think I’m coming down with something.”
“What kind of something.”
“I don’t know, Mina, a virus. A bug. Something that’s going around.”
She sits down on your bed and opens the crackers and holds them out to you and you take one because the sight of them is, somehow, the most appealing thing you’ve encountered all week. You eat it slowly. Your stomach does not immediately rebel. You take another one. “How long?” Mina asks.
“Since Wednesday morning.”
“And it’s worst in the morning.”
“Yes.”
“And you can’t drink coffee.”
“It tastes wrong.” Mina is quiet for a moment. You eat another cracker and look at the wall. “I’m sure it’s just a bug,” you say.
“Yeah,” Mina says, in a tone that means something else entirely. “Probably.”
The conspiracy theories start that evening, though. It’s the two of you on your bed with Mina’s laptop open and a bag of pretzels between you, and it begins reasonably enough — you googling nausea worse in morning possible causes and working through the list with the detached efficiency of someone who is definitely not spiralling. Stress. Acid reflux. Inner ear issues. Viral gastroenteritis. Dietary changes.
“Have you eaten anything different lately?” Mina asks.
“No.”
“Stressed about something?”
“When am I not stressed about something.”
“Fair.” She scrolls. “It says here inner ear problems can cause—”
“I don’t have inner ear problems, Mina.”
Mina scrolls further. You eat a pretzel and watch her face and wait for it. You know it’s coming. You’ve known since Saturday morning, if you’re being honest, since she’d sat on your bed with that specific expression and said probably in that specific tone, and you’ve been not-thinking about it with considerable effort for the past several hours.
“Okay,” Mina says, carefully, still looking at the screen. “What if.”
“No.”
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You don’t have to.” You pull the laptop toward you and close the tab. “It’s been less than two weeks. It’s too early for that. It’s a bug.”
“You used a condom?”
“Obviously.”
“They’re not a hundred percent.”
“It’s a bug,” you say. “It’s a completely normal bug that normal people get and it has nothing to do with — it’s a bug.”
Mina looks at you with the expression of someone who has several more things to say and has made a strategic decision to not say them yet. “Okay,” she says. “Bug.”
By Sunday you can’t keep breakfast down. You sit on your bathroom floor at eight in the morning with your back against the tub and your forehead against your knees and you think about the party, and Jake’s room, and the nightstand, and the condom, and you think no very firmly and repeatedly and it doesn’t help at all.
You text Mina. can you come over
She’s there in seven minutes. She doesn’t say anything when you open the door, just looks at your face, and you nod back at her.
The Caldwell campus drugstore is a five minute walk from your building and has, blessedly, a single-occupancy bathroom at the back that Mina sweet-talks the Saturday cashier into letting you use on the grounds that you’re not feeling well, which is at least entirely true. It’s a very small bathroom.
The two of you fill it completely — you on the closed toilet lid, Mina with her back against the sink, the test sitting on the edge of it between you with three minutes on Mina’s phone timer counting down. Nobody says anything.
The tile is white. There’s a motivational poster on the back of the door — you’ve got this! in yellow letters — that you stare at with a feeling you can’t fully name.
Two minutes.
“It’s probably negative,” you say.
“Probably,” Mina says.
“The condom—”
“Yeah.” “And it’s been less than two weeks. Like. The timing—”
“The timing is actually about right,” Mina says, gently, “for symptoms to—”
“Stop,” you say.
One minute.
You watch the timer. The timer watches back. Your hands are completely still in your lap which surprises you — you’d have expected them to shake, but instead you feel very calm in the specific way that you get sometimes when something is about to happen and your body has decided that panic is a resource to be conserved.
The timer goes off.
Neither of you moves for a second. Then Mina picks up the test and looks at it. Her face does something — a flicker, fast and controlled, there and gone — and she hands it to you without speaking.
Two lines.
You look at it for a long time.
“Okay,” you say, finally.
“Yeah,” Mina says.
The motivational poster on the wall says you’ve got this! in yellow letters and you stare at it and think about Jake Sim telling the ceiling you can go whenever and feel something move through you that is too big and too complicated to have a name yet.
“Okay,” you say again. Like if you keep saying it, it’ll start meaning something useful.
—
You don’t go to him straight away. That feels important somehow — that you don’t just spiral out of that drugstore bathroom and make a beeline for the Hargrove Center in a panic, that you go back to your dorm first and sit with it for a while like a person with some degree of self-possession.
You and Mina order food you mostly don’t eat and sit on your bed with the test face-down on the nightstand like if you can’t see it it’s less real, and you talk around it for a while before you talk about it directly, which is its own kind of processing.
“You don’t have to decide anything today,” Mina says.
“I know.”
“You don’t have to tell him today either.”
“I know.” You pull your sleeves over your hands. “But I feel like — I don’t know. He should know. Like in or not he’s — it’s his. He should know.”
Mina is quiet for a moment. “Okay,” she says. “But eat something first.”
You eat half a portion of noodles. It’s the most you’ve managed in days and your stomach accepts it cautiously, like it’s making no promises. Then you change your top, put your shoes on, and look at Mina.
“Don’t come with me,” you say.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were absolutely going to.”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. “Text me the second you’re out.”
The Hargrove Center is a twenty minute walk across campus and you use all twenty minutes to rehearse what you’re going to say, which turns out to be a complete waste of time because the moment you push through the side door and the cold air of the rink hits you — that particular sharp smell of ice and equipment — your prepared sentences evaporate entirely.
Practice is just wrapping up. You can see them from the entrance, the Wolves coming off the ice in clusters, helmets off, sticks in hand. Jay Park says something that makes Riki Nishimura laugh. Jungwon Yang is already halfway to the boards.
And Jake is — there, centre ice, still, talking to one of the assistant coaches with his helmet under his arm and his hair pushed back from his face, and even from here he looks like someone who has never had an uncontrollable variable in his life.
You wait.
You’re good at waiting. You’ve spent the last two weeks being good at things you didn’t choose to be good at.
He sees you when he comes off the ice — clocks you in the way that people clock something unexpected in a familiar space, a brief recalibration. Something moves across his face, too fast to read. Then it’s gone and he’s walking toward you with the easy unhurried stride of someone who has decided to be unbothered and you stand your ground and wait for him to reach you.
“Hey,” he says. Like you’re an acquaintance. Like he’s mildly surprised to see you and finds it mildly unremarkable.
“I need to talk to you,” you say. Something shifts.
The easy expression doesn’t disappear exactly but it adjusts, becomes more guarded. He glances around — Jay is watching from the boards with open curiosity, Riki less subtly — and then jerks his head toward the corridor off the main rink.
You follow him into it. It’s quieter here, the noise of the rink muffled, the overhead lights slightly too bright. He turns and faces you with his arms crossed and his weight back, and waits. You had sentences. You had very good sentences, all the way across campus.
“I’m pregnant,” you say.
The corridor goes very quiet. Jake looks at you. His expression does several things in quick succession that he doesn’t quite manage to keep off his face — shock, and something that might be fear, and then a shuttering, a closing, something careful dropping down over all of it.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” you repeat.
“That’s — okay. How far—”
“I just found out today. So.” You fold your arms across your chest. “Not far.”
He nods slowly. His jaw is working. He looks at the floor for a moment and then back at you and the careful expression is fully in place now, composed and unreadable, and you don’t know whether to be relieved or furious about it.
“Are you sure it’s mine,” he says.
The corridor goes even quieter somehow.
You look at him. “What did you just say.”
“I’m just—” He shifts his weight. “We don’t know each other. I don’t know who else you’ve been—”
“Are you calling me a slut.” It comes out flat. Not a question.
“I’m not calling you anything, I’m just saying I don’t know—”
“You’re the only person I’ve slept with in four months.” Your voice is very level. “I was in a relationship. It ended. I haven’t — there’s been no one else. There’s only been you.” You look at him. “And I can’t believe I’m standing here explaining that to you.”
“I’m not trying to—”
“You literally just implied I could have slept with someone else.” The level voice is beginning to fray at the edges. “You literally said that. To my face.”
“Look, I just—”
You slap him.
You don’t plan it. Your hand moves before the decision has fully formed, the sharp crack of it landing across his cheek, and then there’s a ringing silence and your palm is stinging and Jake’s head has turned with the force of it and he’s looking at you now with an expression you haven’t seen on him before. Not angry. Something more complicated than angry.
“Don’t ever,” you say, quietly, “imply something like that to me again.”
He says nothing. His hand has come up to his cheek, not pressing, just — there. His jaw is tight.
“I thought you should know,” you say. “That’s all. I thought you deserved to know because it’s yours and you deserved to know. I haven’t decided anything yet and I’m not asking you for anything.” You pull your bag higher on your shoulder. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he says. Low. You walk back out into the cold. You text Mina out and she sends back seventeen question marks which is fair.
You tell her you’ll explain when you get back and spend the walk home feeling the particular hollow exhaustion of someone who has done the thing they needed to do and now has no idea what comes next.
You’re back in your building, one flight up, when you hear him behind you. “Hey—”
You turn. Jake is in the stairwell, still in his practice gear, slightly out of breath like he walked fast to get here, and you have absolutely no idea how he found out which dorm you’re in and you’re going to have questions about that later.
“How did you—“
“Jay knew,” he says, which explains nothing and everything.
He comes up the last few steps and stops on your landing and runs a hand through his hair and looks like someone who has been having a very difficult internal conversation at speed. “Can I—”
“No,” you say.
“Two minutes.” You look at him. He looks back. The mark from your hand has faded from his cheek but his expression is still doing that thing — complicated, unreadable, something working behind it.
“Two minutes,” you say, and unlock your door. Your room is small and suddenly smaller with him in it. He stands just inside the door like he’s not sure he’s allowed further in, which is the most uncertain you’ve seen him, and you sit on the end of your bed and look at him and wait.
He reaches into his jacket. He puts a stack of bills on your desk. You look at the money. You look at him. “Jake.”
“It’s enough to cover — whatever you decide.” He’s not quite meeting your eyes. “I’m not — look. I don’t want a kid. I’m not in a place for that. We don’t know each other. But I’m not going to just—” He stops. Starts again. “Take it. Whatever you need it for.”
You stare at the money for a long moment. “Are you going to want to be involved,” you ask. “If I decide to keep it.”
Something crosses his face. “I don’t — I haven’t—” He exhales. “I don’t know.”
“Okay,” you say. “That’s honest at least.”
“Are you going to keep it,” he asks. Quietly. Like he’s not sure he has the right to ask.
You look at the money on your desk. You look at him — standing in your doorway in his practice gear, jaw tight, trying very hard to look like someone who has this handled and not quite managing it — and you think that this is the first time he’s looked like a person to you. Not the reputation, not the corridor composure, not the ceiling of his bedroom. Just a person who is as blindsided as you are and coping with it badly.
“I don’t know yet,” you say. “I’ll let you know when I do.”
He nods. He looks at you for a moment longer than necessary. Then he picks up the money from your desk and puts it on your nightstand instead, like the desk was somehow wrong, like the four feet of distance makes a difference, and you don’t say anything about it.
“I’m sorry,” he says, at the door. “For what I said. At the rink.”
You look at him. “Which part.”
“All of it.”
He closes the door behind him and you sit on your bed in the quiet of your room for a long time, the money on your nightstand and the weight of everything pressing down, and then you pick up your phone and call your sister.
She picks up on the third ring. “Hey, you.” Hannah’s voice is warm and slightly distracted in the way it always is — you can hear one of the kids in the background, the particular high-pitched negotiation of a five year old who wants something and has decided now is the time. “Give me two seconds.”
Then, away from the phone: “Lily, baby, I said after dinner. After. Yes. Because I said so, that’s why.” A door closing.
Then: “Okay. Hi. Sorry. What’s up?”
You open your mouth. You’ve been sitting on your bed for forty minutes since Jake left, the money on your nightstand and your phone in your hand, and you’ve composed this conversation approximately thirty times in your head and all thirty versions started more coherently than what actually comes out, which is: “I did something kind of stupid.”
“How stupid.”
“Significantly.”
A beat. Hannah has always been good at letting silence do its work, at not rushing in to fill it with the wrong thing. It’s one of the things you’ve always loved about her. “Okay,” she says. “Tell me.”
So you tell her. All of it — the party and Jake and the test and the corridor and the slap and him in your room with the money — and Hannah listens through all of it without interrupting, which is its own kind of gift, and when you’re done there’s a moment of quiet that feels like her sorting through it.
“Okay,” she says again. “First question. Are you physically okay?”
“Yes.”
“Second question. Do you have someone with you?”
“Mina’s coming over in an hour.”
“Good.” You can hear her moving around, the soft sounds of her kitchen. “Third question, and I want you to actually think about it before you answer — not what you think you should say, not what’s practical, not what he wants or what anyone else wants. Just you.”
She pauses. “Do you want to keep it?”
You look at the money on your nightstand.
You think about the question the way she asked it — stripped of everything else, just you, just the truth of it underneath all the noise.
The thing is, you already know. You’ve known since the bathroom floor this morning, since you sat with your back against the tub and your forehead on your knees. It’s why the knowing has been so terrifying — not because you’re uncertain but because you’re not, and being not uncertain makes it real in a way that uncertainty would have postponed.
“Yeah,” you say. Quietly. “I do. I just — I don’t want it to be his. I don’t want to be tied to someone who—” You stop. “I don’t want the situation. I just want—”
“The baby,” Hannah says. “Yeah.” She’s quiet for a moment. “Those are two separate things,” she says. “The situation and the baby. They feel like the same thing right now but they’re not.”
You hear her sit down somewhere. “Marcus and I — when I had Lily, things with us were not good. You remember. We were not in a good place. And I thought about it the same way — I want her, I just don’t want this. And it was hard. It was genuinely really hard. But she’s five now and she’s the most annoying, amazing person I’ve ever met and I can’t — I can’t imagine.”
You press the back of your hand to your mouth.
“I’m not telling you what to do,” Hannah says quickly. “I promise I’m not. Whatever you decide I’m with you. I just — you asked.”
“I know,” you manage. “I know you’re not.”
“Is he terrible?” she asks. “This Jake person.”
You think about the corridor. The money. I’m sorry. For what I said. All of it. “I don’t know yet,” you say. “He’s — I don’t know what he is.”
“Okay.” Hannah’s voice is careful and warm. “You don’t have to know yet. You don’t have to know anything yet except what you want. Everything else gets figured out.”
You sit with that for a moment. “I’m keeping it,” you say. Out loud, to another person, for the first time. It lands differently than it did in your head — more solid, more real, like something that has been decided rather than something being considered.
“Okay,” Hannah says, and she says it the way Mina says it — not okay as in fine but okay as in I’ve got you. “Then we figure out the rest.”
You tell Mina when she comes over and she holds your hand and doesn’t say anything for a long moment and then says “okay, what do we need to do” in the tone of someone rolling up their sleeves, which is exactly right, which is why she’s your person.
You tell Jake two days later.
You find him after morning practice on a Wednesday, same side entrance to the Hargrove Center, and this time he sees you coming and something in his posture adjusts — not quite bracing, just becoming more careful, more deliberate, the way he gets when he’s paying attention. “Hey,” he says.
“I’m keeping it,” you say.
He goes very still. You watch him process it — the stillness and then the almost imperceptible movement of his jaw, the way his eyes go somewhere internal for a second before coming back to you. He looks like someone doing rapid and complicated mathematics. “Okay,” he says finally.
“You don’t have to be involved. I meant that when I said it. I’m not — I’m not asking you for anything except to know. You deserved to know and now you know and whatever you decide to do with that is up to you.”
“I said I’d provide,” he says. “I meant that.”
“Money isn’t the same as involved.”
“I know.” He shifts his weight. His hands are in his pockets and he’s looking at you with that careful expression, the one you can’t fully read. “I don’t — I’m not going to be the guy who just throws money at it and disappears. That’s not—” He stops. “I don’t know what I am yet. But I’m not that.”
You look at him for a long moment. There is, underneath the practice gear and the careful composure and the history of the last two weeks, something that might be decency in there. It’s buried. It’s inconsistent. You’ve seen it appear and disappear enough times already to know better than to trust it yet. But it’s there. “Okay,” you say. “Then figure out what you are and let me know.”
You turn to go. “Can I—” He stops. You look back. “Can I have your number,” he says. “Properly. So we can — so it’s easier to—”
“To what.”
He looks, briefly, like someone who hasn’t thought this far ahead. “Talk,” he says. “If we need to.”
You look at him for a moment. Then you take out your phone and hold it out. He puts his number in and hands it back and you save it under Jake Sim (do not text unless necessary) which you do not show him. “I’ll be in touch,” you say.
Jake doesn’t mean to tell his friend— or he does, but not like this, not in the locker room with his gear half off and Riki eating a protein bar on the bench across from him and Jay taping his wrist in the corner and Jungwon doing something on his phone. It comes out the way things come out when you’ve been holding them too long and the effort of holding them finally exceeds the effort of saying them.
“I got someone pregnant,” he says.
The locker room goes quiet. Riki stops chewing. Jay puts down the tape. Jungwon looks up from his phone. “I’m sorry,” Jay says, with the careful enunciation of someone who wants to make sure they’ve heard correctly. “You what?”
“You heard me.”
“I heard you, I just want to make sure I—” Jay sets down the tape fully and turns to face him. “Who.”
“Girl from Delta Kappa. Three weeks ago.” Another silence. Jay is looking at him with an expression that Jake doesn’t particularly enjoy — something between concern and the specific look of someone doing the maths on how this could have happened and arriving at several uncomfortable conclusions about Jake’s general life choices.
“Are you—” Jungwon starts.
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I was going to ask.”
“Then what.”
Jungwon looks at him steadily. “Is she okay.”
Jake opens his mouth. Closes it. Thinks about you in the corridor at the rink and your voice going flat and your hand cracking across his face, and then you in your dorm room — calm and certain and telling him you weren’t asking him for anything, which was somehow the part that landed hardest. “I think so,” he says. “She’s — yeah.”
“Do you like her?” Riki asks, with the bluntness of someone who has not yet learned that some questions require more runway.
“I don’t know her,” Jake says.
“That’s not what I asked.” Jay shoots Riki a look. Riki shrugs and takes another bite of his protein bar.
“What are you going to do?” Jay asks, turning back to Jake.
Jake leans his elbows on his knees and looks at the floor. The locker room smells like it always does — ice and rubber and effort — and it’s familiar in a way that is almost destabilising right now, how normal everything around him is when nothing feels particularly normal. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “Be there, I think. As much as she’ll let me.”
“As much as she’ll let you,” Jay repeats. Something in his tone.
“She’s not — she’s not soft.” Jake looks up. “She’s not going to make it easy.”
“Should she?”
Jake looks at him. Jay looks back, steady and unhurried. “No,” Jake says, after a moment. “Probably not.”
Jay nods once. Picks the tape back up. “Then figure it out,” he says, like it’s simple, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Jake sits with that in the familiar smell of the locker room and thinks that he probably needs to.
—
The truce, when it forms, is not announced. It happens gradually over the following week — a text from him checking if you need anything, which you respond to with I’m fine thanks and nothing else. A text from you three days later telling him your first appointment is booked for the following week, which he responds to with do you want me there and you respond with not yet and he responds with okay and that’s it, that’s the whole exchange, and somehow it’s the most civil conversation you’ve had.
He doesn’t push. You note this without letting it mean too much. You’re not friends. You’re not anything with a name. You’re two people who made a mistake that turned into something neither of you planned for, and you’re figuring out how to exist in the same orbit without either of you combusting, and most days it feels manageable and some days it feels impossible and on the days it feels impossible you call Hannah, who answers on the third ring and lets the silence do its work.
It’s something, you think. It’s not much but it’s something. For now, that has to be enough.
The thing about Caldwell though, is that it’s a big campus until it isn’t.
Thirty thousand students, four faculties, two libraries, a quad the size of a small park — and yet somehow the people you most want to avoid have an unerring instinct for occupying the same coffee shop, the same corridor, the same stretch of pavement at the same time.
You’ve been navigating this for four months with Sunghoon and you’ve gotten good at it. You know his schedule well enough to avoid it without meaning to, the way you learn the shape of someone after two years and can’t quite unlearn it.
Which is why it catches you off guard when he’s just — there. The library café, a Tuesday afternoon, three weeks after the test. You’re at a corner table with your laptop and a cup of tea you’ve been nursing for an hour because coffee is still wrong and probably will be for the foreseeable future, and you’re halfway through a close reading of Middlemarch chapter forty-two when someone pulls out the chair across from you and sits down and you look up and it’s Sunghoon.
He looks, as he always looks, like something assembled with unreasonable care. Dark hair, clean jawline, the particular quality of stillness he has that used to make you feel calm and now just makes you feel tired.
“Hey,” he says.
You look at him. Then at the chair he’s sitting in. Then back at him. “I didn’t say you could sit.”
“I know.” He doesn’t move. “I just wanted to talk.”
“Sunghoon.”
“Five minutes.”
You close your laptop. Not because you’re agreeing, but because whatever he’s about to say you want to be looking at him when he says it. “Five minutes,” you say. “And then you’re going to go away.”
Something moves through his expression — not quite hurt, but adjacent. He folds his hands on the table. He has nice hands. You spent two years noticing his hands. “I saw you at Delta Kappa,” he says.
“I know. You texted me.”
“You didn’t reply.” He looks at you steadily. “You were talking to Jake Sim.”
There it is.
You keep your face very neutral. “I was at a party. I talked to a lot of people.”
“Jake Sim isn’t a lot of people.” Something in his voice shifts — not quite possessive, not quite jealous, threading that needle with the precision of someone who knows he doesn’t have the right to either and is trying to disguise it as concern. “He’s not a good person to get involved with.”
“Thank you for that,” you say. “I’ll bear it in mind.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” You look at him. “Sunghoon. You don’t get to come sit at my table and tell me who I should and shouldn’t talk to. You gave that up.”
His jaw tightens. “I know I did.”
“Then why are you here?”
He’s quiet for a moment. Outside the café windows the quad is grey and overcast, students moving across it with their heads down against the wind, and Sunghoon is looking at you with an expression you know — you’ve catalogued it, the way you’ve catalogued everything about him, two years of accumulated knowledge you can’t seem to put down. It’s the expression he gets when he wants to say something and is choosing his words with care.
“I miss you,” he says.
You look at him for a long time. The honest answer is that you miss him too — or you miss the version of things you thought you had, which isn’t exactly the same as missing him but lives close enough to it that the distinction is hard to maintain on a grey Tuesday afternoon with him sitting across from you looking like that.
You miss having a person. You miss the shape of your life before it got complicated in every possible direction.
But you also know what he did.
You know it with the specific clarity of something you’ve gone over enough times that it’s stopped being sharp and started being just — true. A fact about him. A fact about what he chose. “I know,” you say. Carefully. “But that’s not my problem to fix.”
He nods. Slow. Like he expected it and it still costs him something. He stands up, pushes the chair back in, and then pauses with his hands on the back of it. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Actually? You look—” He stops.
“I look what.”
“Tired,” he says. “You look tired.”
“I’m fine,” you say.
He looks at you for a moment longer. Then he goes, and you open your laptop, and you stare at Middlemarch chapter forty-two for a while without reading any of it.
You don’t tell Jake about Sunghoon.
There’s no reason to.
You and Jake are not — whatever you are, it doesn’t include telling each other things. It includes occasional texts, one appointment you went to alone where a doctor confirmed what you already knew and gave you a due date that made it real in a new and specific way, and a strange careful politeness that exists between you like a temporary structure neither of you fully trusts.
He texts you on a Friday evening. how are you feeling
You look at it for a while. Fine. Less sick this week.
that’s good
A pause. Then: do you need anything?
You think about your sister’s voice. You don’t have to know anything yet except what you want. You think about Jake in your dorm room, the money on your nightstand, I’m not going to be the guy who just throws money at it. You think about how many times in the past three weeks he’s almost been decent and then done something to complicate it.
I’m okay, you send back. Thanks.
He sends a thumbs up and you put your phone face down and tell yourself this is fine, this arrangement is fine, and mostly you believe it.
You find out about the girl on a Saturday night.
You’re not looking for it — you’re not the kind of person who goes searching for things they don’t want to find, you learned that lesson with Sunghoon — but Caldwell is a big campus until it isn’t, and Mina’s friend group overlaps with the hockey crowd in the specific way that happens at schools where athletes are their own ecosystem but not a fully separate one.
It’s Mina who tells you, with the careful expression of someone who has been sitting on information and decided you’d rather hear it from her. “I heard Jake hooked up with someone last weekend,” she says. Not leading with it, not burying it either. Just: here is a thing that is true.
You look at your coffee. You’ve graduated back to coffee this week, weak and milky, which feels like a victory. “Okay,” you say.
“You’re allowed to have feelings about that.”
“We’re not together, Mina.”
“I know.”
“He can do whatever he wants. We’re not — there’s nothing between us. We’re just—” You move your hand in a vague gesture that encompasses the entire situation. “This.”
“I know,” Mina says again, in the tone that means she has more to say and is choosing not to. You continue to drink your coffee.
The thing is — and this is the part you don’t say out loud, the part you turn over privately in the quiet of your own head — the thing is that you know she’s right.
You are allowed to have feelings about it.
You do have feelings about it, somewhere underneath the very reasonable and correct observation that Jake Sim owes you nothing beyond basic decency and whatever co-parenting arrangement you eventually figure out.
You have feelings about it the way you have feelings about a lot of things lately — in the muffled, at-a-distance way, like they’re happening to someone slightly removed from you and you’re watching through glass.
You’re pregnant with his baby and he’s sleeping with someone else and you’re not together and you have no claim on him and all of that is true simultaneously and you’re not sure what to do with the fact that it still sits in your chest like something uncomfortable.
“I don’t care,” you tell Mina. She looks at you with the expression that means I know you and I know that’s not entirely true but I love you so I’ll let you have it.
“Okay,” she says.
—
Jake texts you on Sunday.
heard you’ve been doing better. that’s good
You stare at the message for a long time. Yeah, you type back. Thanks.
A pause. Then: can I take you to your next appointment?
You put the phone down. Pick it up. Put it down again.
The question sits there, simple and direct, and the thing about it is that it isn’t nothing. It’s not the gesture of someone who is just throwing money at a situation. It’s — something. Small and tentative and probably not enough and something nonetheless.
It’s in two weeks, you send back. I’ll let you know.
okay, he says. no pressure.
You put the phone down and look at the ceiling and think about a girl you don’t know and a Saturday night you weren’t part of and the specific stupidity of having feelings about either, and then you think about your next appointment and the due date the doctor gave you and the small impossible reality of all of it, and you decide that you are going to take a nap and deal with every single one of these things later.
Later, you think. All of it later.
He comes to the appointment, in the end you let him. You texted him the details the night before — time, building, room number — and he’s there when you arrive, standing outside the health centre with his hands in his jacket pockets and his breath fogging in the cold, and he looks up when he sees you coming and something in his expression does that thing, that complicated unreadable thing, and he falls into step beside you without saying anything.
Inside, in the waiting room, you sit next to each other in plastic chairs with a magazine between you that neither of you reads. A couple across the room are holding hands. You and Jake sit with six inches of space between you like a demilitarised zone.
“You okay?” he asks, quietly.
“Fine,” you say. “You?”
“Fine,” he says.
The nurse calls your name and you both stand up and Jake follows you in and stands slightly to the side while the doctor talks and asks questions and pulls up the scan on the screen, and you look at it — the small impossible blur of it, the heartbeat a flickering certainty on the monitor — and you feel the thing in your chest that you’ve been keeping at distance move closer without permission.
Beside you Jake goes very still.
You don’t look at him. You look at the screen.
“Everything looks perfect,” the doctor says.
You nod. You don’t trust your voice.
In the corridor after, walking back out into the cold, Jake is quiet for a long time. Longer than usual even for him.
You’re almost at the path that splits — his way, your way — when he says, without looking at you: “That was—”
“Yeah,” you say.
He nods. Puts his hands back in his pockets. “I’ll walk you back,” he says.
You think about the girl he slept with. You think about Sunghoon in the library café. You think about the scan on the monitor and the heartbeat that is real and certain and not theoretical anymore.
“Okay,” you say.
He walks you back. You don’t talk much. It’s not uncomfortable exactly — it’s something more complicated than that, something neither of you has a name for yet, and when you reach your building he stops at the bottom of the steps and looks at you and opens his mouth and then closes it again.
“What,” you say.
“Nothing,” he says. “Just — take care of yourself.” You look at him for a moment.
“You too,” you say, and go inside.
—
Sunghoon doesn’t give up. You’d half expected him to — one conversation in the library café, you’d said your piece, he’d said his, and you’d thought that would be the end of it. Sunghoon has always been precise about things, economical, not the type to repeat himself unnecessarily. You’d thought he’d take the answer and file it and move on.
Instead he texts you on a Wednesday. Just — how are you doing. No punctuation, which for Sunghoon is practically shouting.
You don’t reply.
He texts again on Friday. can we get coffee sometime? just to talk?
You stare at it for a long time.
You show it to Mina, who makes a face. “Don’t,” she says.
“I’m not going to,” you say.
He finds you on campus on Monday — the English building, your own territory, which feels deliberate. He’s waiting near the entrance when you come out of your seminar and you see him before he sees you and for one uncharitable second you think about turning around and going back inside.
You don’t. You keep walking. “Hey,” he says, falling into step beside you.
“Sunghoon.”
“I just want to walk with you.”
“I didn’t say you could.”
“I know.” He walks with you anyway, hands in his coat pockets, quiet for a moment in the way that used to feel comfortable and now just feels like pressure. “How are you feeling?”
You glance at him. “Fine.”
“You look better than last time I saw you. Less tired.”
“Thanks,” you say, flatly.
He’s quiet again. The path curves toward the quad and you keep walking and he keeps pace and you’re aware — acutely, uncomfortably aware — that you’re starting to show. Not dramatically, not in a way that’s obvious under your coat, but enough that you know. Enough that it’s a matter of time.
“I meant what I said,” Sunghoon says. “In the library.”
“I know you did.”
“I’m not trying to pressure you.”
“You’re walking next to me uninvited,” you say. “What would you call that?”
He stops. You stop too, half a beat later, and turn to look at him. He’s standing in the middle of the path with that precise, careful expression and something underneath it that isn’t quite what he’s performing, and you know him well enough to know the difference and wish you didn’t.
“I made a mistake,” he says. “I know I did. I know what I did and I know it was—” He stops. Starts again. “I just want a chance to—”
“Sunghoon.” You keep your voice even. “I can’t do this right now. I genuinely cannot — there is too much happening in my life right now for me to also be doing this. Okay? Please.”
He looks at you. Something in his expression shifts — a question forming, something he’s noticed that he can’t quite place. “What’s happening?” he asks. Carefully.
“Nothing that’s your business,” you say. “Please just — let me go.”
And he lets you go.
But the problem is that Caldwell is a big campus until it isn’t.
The problem is that two weeks later you’re at a party you didn’t particularly want to attend — a smaller thing, a friend of Mina’s, an apartment off campus — and both of them are there. Jake and Sunghoon.
You don’t notice Jake first. You notice Sunghoon, across the room with his circle, and you note it and move on, you’re good at that now. You get a drink — water, the specific reality of being the only sober person at a party hitting — and find Mina and settle into the corner and decide you’ll stay an hour and then leave.
You notice Jake about twenty minutes in.
He’s near the kitchen with Jay, and there’s a girl — tall, dark-haired, laughing at something he’s said with her hand on his arm and her body angled toward him in the specific way that means something. You see him lean in to say something close to her ear. You see her laugh again. You look away.
You look back to Mina, who is mid-conversation with someone and hasn’t clocked it, and you drink your water and you are fine, you are completely fine, this is exactly what you knew was happening and seeing it in person doesn’t change anything and you are fine.
You last another twenty minutes before you decide you’re going to get some air.
The problem is that getting air requires passing the kitchen. Jake sees you at the same moment you see him and something in his expression shifts — that recalibration, that adjustment — and the girl’s hand is still on his arm and you keep walking, eyes forward, almost past— “Hey.”
His voice.
You stop. You turn. He’s stepped slightly away from the girl, who is watching with a politely curious expression. “Hey,” you say.
“You’re here,” he says, which is not his most articulate moment.
“Briefly,” you say. “Don’t mind me.” Something moves across his face.
“You okay?”
“Fine.” You smile at him — pleasant, neutral, the smile of someone who is absolutely fine. “Enjoy your night.” You keep walking.
The air outside is cold and you stand on the small concrete step outside the apartment and breathe it and tell yourself the tightness in your chest is just the stuffiness of the party and not anything else.
You hear the door behind you. “Hey—”
You turn, expecting Jake, and it’s Sunghoon. Of course it’s Sunghoon.
He’s in his coat, hands in his pockets, and he looks at you with that careful expression and says “I saw you come out” like that explains what he’s doing here, which it does, which doesn’t make it better.
“I needed air,” you say.
“I know.” He comes to stand beside you. Close, but not touching. “You looked upset.”
“I’m not upset.”
“You have a face,” he says, gently, and you hate that he’s right, hate that after four months and everything that happened he can still read you like that. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Is it Sim?” Something in his voice changes — not quite hard, not quite angry, threading the needle. “Are you involved with him?”
“That’s not your business.”
“I’m asking because I’m worried about you, not because—”
“Sunghoon.” You turn to face him. “Please stop. Please just—”
The door opens behind you. Jake comes out. He takes in the scene — you and Sunghoon, close, Sunghoon’s expression, yours — in about half a second and his jaw tightens in a way you’ve learned to read as something being suppressed.
“Everything okay?” he asks. Looking at you, not at Sunghoon.
“Fine,” you say, for what feels like the hundredth time tonight.
“She said she’s fine,” Sunghoon says. His voice is even. “So you can go back inside.” Jake looks at him. Something passes between them that has nothing to do with you — some older, unnamed thing.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Jake says.
“Then walk away.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Jake.” Your voice is sharper than you intend. “It’s fine. Go inside.”
He doesn’t go inside.
He stays where he is with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on Sunghoon, and Sunghoon stays where he is with that precise stillness, and the cold air between all three of you is doing a lot of work.
“You’re the one she’s been seeing,” Sunghoon says, to Jake. Not a question.
“That’s not your business,” Jake says.
“It is when you’re—” Sunghoon stops. Something has crossed his face — he’s looking at you, at your coat, and the realisation moves through his expression slowly and then all at once.
His eyes find yours. “Are you—”
“Don’t,” you say.
“Are you pregnant?”
The step goes very quiet.
Jake goes very still.
You look at Sunghoon and there is a specific kind of exhaustion that moves through you — the exhaustion of someone who has been managing too many things for too long and has just watched one of them slip out of their hands.
“That,” you say, carefully, “is none of your business.”
“It’s his, isn’t it.” Not looking at Jake. Looking at you. Something in his voice that you don’t have a name for — not anger, not hurt, something more complicated and less clean than either. “You hooked up with Jake Sim at a party and now you’re—”
“Sunghoon—”
“What were you thinking?” And there it is — the composure cracking, the precision slipping, something rawer underneath. “What were you actually — with him, of all people—”
“Hey.” Jake’s voice is hard. “Watch yourself.”
“You stay out of it—”
“She told you it’s none of your business—”
“I’m talking to her—”
“Then talk to her with some respect—”
“Oh that’s rich, coming from you.” Sunghoon turns to Jake fully now and the precise stillness has sharpened into something else. “Everyone knows what you are. Everyone knows how you treat—”
“And everyone knows what you did,” Jake says, low and flat. “So don’t stand here and act like you’ve got the moral—”
“Stop.” Your voice cuts through both of them. They both look at you. “Both of you. Stop.”
A beat. “I’m going home,” you say. “This is—” You gesture at the three of you, at the step, at all of it. “I’m not doing this.”
“I’ll walk you—” Both of them, simultaneously.
“Neither of you will walk me anywhere.” You pull your coat around you. “I want to go by myself and I want both of you to leave me alone tonight. Okay?”
Sunghoon opens his mouth.
And then — later, when you try to reconstruct the exact sequence, it’s hard to isolate the moment it tips — he reaches for your arm, a gesture, just trying to stop you leaving, and Jake moves at the same time, stepping forward, his hand coming out to push Sunghoon back, and Sunghoon turns, and the angles are all wrong, and Jake’s elbow catches you across the side of your face.
It’s not hard. It’s not a real blow — it’s the edge of the motion, glancing, the kind of thing that in any other circumstance would be an accidental knock in a crowded corridor that you’d shake off and keep walking.
But you make a sound and stumble back.
Jake turns and sees your face and goes completely white. “Fuck—” He reaches for you.
“Don’t touch me.”
Your hand comes up. Your voice has gone very quiet. The side of your face is throbbing, low and dull, and underneath it everything else — the tiredness, the party, Sunghoon’s face when he realised, the girl’s hand on Jake’s arm — all of it presses in at once and you are so, so tired.
“I didn’t — it was an accident, I didn’t mean to—”
“I know it was an accident,” you say. Still quiet. Still very controlled. “I know that.”
“Are you okay? The baby—”
“I’m fine. It was my face, not—” You stop. Press your fingers briefly to your temple. “I’m fine.”
Jake is looking at you with an expression you haven’t seen on him before — something undone about it, all the composure gone, something almost desperate. “Let me take you home—”
“No.”
You look at him. Then at Sunghoon, who has gone very still and very pale. “I’m going to get Mina. I’m going to go home. And I don’t want either of you to contact me tonight.”
You take out your phone. You text Mina. You wait on the step with your back to both of them until she comes out, takes one look at your face, takes your arm, and walks you away without saying a word.
Behind you, you don’t look back.
Jake texts at midnight. I’m so sorry. please tell me you’re okay
You look at it for a long time. I’m fine, you send back. Goodnight Jake.
He sends: I’m sorry again
Those two words, and you put your phone face down and stare at the ceiling of your dorm room and Mina is asleep in your desk chair with a blanket over her because she refused to go home and you love her for it, and the small dull ache in your temple has faded to almost nothing, and the baby is fine, you’re fine, everything is fine.
You don’t text him back.
He tries on Sunday.
A text at nine in the morning — can we talk please? — that you look at and put face down without replying.
Then at eleven: I know you’re angry. you have every right to be. I just want to talk.
Then at two in the afternoon, which shows either impressive persistence or a complete inability to read a room: I’m going to keep texting until you tell me to stop.
You text back: stop.
He texts back: okay. I’m sorry.
You put the phone in your drawer.
He doesn’t stop.
Well, he stops texting — he respects that, or he tries to, mostly — but he finds other ways. There’s a bag outside your dorm room door on Monday morning: crackers, the specific brand you’d been eating in the early weeks, ginger tea, a punnet of the green grapes that you’d mentioned once in passing to him that you’d been craving. No note. Just the bag.
You stand in your doorway looking at it for a long time.
You bring it inside. You eat the grapes. You do not text him to say thank you and you do not text him to say stop and the not-texting feels like its own kind of answer that you’re not ready to examine yet.
On Tuesday he’s outside your building.
Not lurking — he’s sitting on the low wall by the entrance with his hands between his knees and his jacket on against the cold, and he stands up when he sees you come out and he doesn’t move toward you, just — stands there, and waits, and lets you decide.
You stop on the steps. “Jake.”
“Five minutes,” he says. “I know I don’t deserve them. Five minutes and then I’ll go and I won’t — I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want.”
You look at him. He looks back. He has, you note, the specific appearance of someone who hasn’t been sleeping well — not dramatic, just a tightness around his eyes, a quality of having been somewhere difficult in his own head for the past two days.
Good, says a part of you.
The other part steps down off the steps and stands in front of him and crosses her arms and says: “Five minutes.”
He exhales. “I’m sorry,” he says. “For Friday night. For — all of it, the whole night, but specifically for—” He stops. His jaw works. “I should never have let it get to that point. I should have walked away from him the second it started and I didn’t and you got hurt and you’re — the baby could have—” He stops again. Something in his face that isn’t composure. “I will never forgive myself for that. I need you to know that. It keeps me up.”
You look at him. “It was an accident.”
“It was an accident that happened because I couldn’t keep my head.” His voice is flat with self-assessment. “Same difference.”
“It’s not the same difference.”
“It’s close enough.” He looks at you steadily. “I’m also sorry for the girl at the party. I know you saw. I know we’re not — I know you don’t have any claim on me and I don’t have any claim on you and technically I didn’t do anything wrong but I’m still sorry because I saw your face and I knew and I did it anyway and that’s—” He stops. “That’s not who I want to be. With this. With you.”
The wall by the entrance is cold and grey and a girl from your floor passes you both with her earphones in and doesn’t look up and the world keeps moving indifferently around this conversation.
“You hurt me,” you say. Not the elbow. The other thing. The girl at the party and the ceiling of his bedroom and the weeks of almost-decency that kept getting complicated. “Not — not physically. You just keep—” You stop. “Every time I think maybe you’re a person you do something that reminds me why I shouldn’t think that.”
He takes that. Doesn’t deflect, doesn’t explain, just takes it. “I know,” he says.
“I need you to be consistent,” you say. “I can’t — I’m going to have your baby, Jake. We’re going to be in each other’s lives for a very long time. I need you to be someone I can rely on or I need you to be completely absent because the in-between is—” Your voice doesn’t shake. You’re proud of that. “It’s too hard. I can’t do the in-between.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The wind moves across the quad and he looks at you with that expression — the undone one, the one without composure — and says: “I don’t want to be absent.”
“Then be consistent.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it? Okay?”
“What else do you want me to say?” He’s not defensive — it’s a real question, earnest in a way that sits oddly on him, like a piece of vocabulary he hasn’t used much. “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it. Specifically. I’m not good at—” He moves his hand. “Guessing. Feelings. Whatever this is. But if you tell me what it looks like I’ll do it.”
You look at him for a long moment.
“No more girls,” you say. “Not while we’re — not while this is what it is. I know I have no right to ask that but I’m asking.”
Something shifts in his expression. “Done,” he says. No hesitation.
“And show up. When you say you’re going to show up, show up.”
“Done.”
“And don’t fight people on my behalf. I can handle my own situations.”
His jaw tightens slightly. “That one’s harder.”
“Jake.”
“Done,” he says. “Okay. Done.”
You look at him. He looks back. The five minutes has long since passed and neither of you has moved and the cold is starting to get into your fingers.
“The grapes were good,” you say finally.
Something in his expression — brief, warm, gone almost immediately. “I’ll get more,” he says.
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” He says it simply. No performance in it.
You nod. You pull your coat tighter. “I have a seminar,” you say.
“I know. Go.” He steps back, hands in his pockets. “Thank you. For the five minutes.”
You go.
He tells his father that evening.
He doesn’t plan to. He goes to his dad’s office on the east side of the admin building for what is ostensibly a standing weekly dinner that they do on Tuesday evenings — a thing they’ve done since Jake’s freshman year, his dad’s attempt at maintaining something normal in the specific abnormality of being the dean’s son at your own father’s university. They go to the Italian place two blocks off campus. They talk about the team, the season, coursework, the usual rotation.
Except tonight Jake sits down across from his father and picks up the menu and puts it down again and his dad looks at him over his own menu with the steady, unhurried attention that has always been the most disarming thing about him — the way he looks at you like he has all the time in the world and means it — and says:
“What’s going on.” Not a question. His dad has never really needed to make them questions.
Jake puts his menu down. He looks at the table. He thinks about you on the steps this morning saying every time I think maybe you’re a person and the specific accuracy of it, the way it had landed not like an attack but like a diagnosis.
“I got someone pregnant,” he says.
The restaurant is quiet around them — mid-evening, not full yet, the soft noise of other people’s conversations providing cover. His dad sets his menu down with the deliberate care of someone who is choosing his response carefully.
“How far along,” he says.
“About eight weeks.”
His dad nods slowly. He’s a big man — Jake has his build, the same broad shoulders, though his dad carries more grey now at his temples and something steadier in his face, something earned. He looks at Jake with the expression that Jake has never been able to fully decode — not anger, not disappointment exactly, something more complicated and more patient than either.
“Tell me about her,” he says.
Jake blinks. Of all the things he’d expected — “What?”
“The woman. Tell me about her.”
Jake opens his mouth. Closes it. He thinks about you — the flat voice in the corridor at the rink, your hand cracking across his face, I can’t do the in-between. The grapes. The way you’d said the grapes were good like it cost you something to admit it.
“She’s—” He stops. Tries again. “She’s a third year. English lit. She’s sharp. Like — she doesn’t let me get away with anything, she just looks at me and calls it and moves on. She’s not—” He shifts. “She didn’t want this to be mine. She told me that. She wants the baby, she just didn’t want it to be complicated, and I’ve made it complicated.”
“How.”
Jake looks at the table. Lists it. The slap he deserved, the money that was clumsy, the girl at the party, Friday night and the elbow and her face and the specific look she’d had, controlled and exhausted and done.
His dad listens to all of it without interrupting. When Jake finishes there’s a pause — his dad picks up his water glass, drinks, sets it back down.
“Do you like her?” he asks.
Jake looks up.
“It’s a simple question,” his dad says.
“We don’t — I don’t know her. Not really.”
“That’s not what I asked, son.”
Jake is quiet for a moment. He thinks about you outside your building this morning, arms crossed, giving him five minutes you didn’t have to give. The way you’d said I need you to be someone I can rely on like it was the most reasonable thing in the world, like you weren’t asking for anything extraordinary, just — consistency. Basic human consistency. The thing he has never had to be for anyone.
“Yeah,” he says. Quiet. “I think so.”
His dad nods. Like that’s the piece he needed. Like everything else was context and that was the information.
“Then be someone worth liking,” he says. Simply. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s the only thing that matters and everything else is just logistics.
Jake looks at him.
“You’ve never had to work for anything,” his dad says, and it’s not unkind — it’s just true, delivered with the directness of someone who has been watching this coming for a long time. “Not really. Not the things that count. You’re talented and you’re smart and things have always — moved for you. And that’s partly my fault.” He meets Jake’s eyes. “But she’s right. You can’t be the in-between. You’re going to be someone’s father. That’s not a thing you can be inconsistent about.”
Jake absorbs this.
“I know,” he says.
“Do you?”
“I’m trying to.”
His dad looks at him for a long moment. Then he picks his menu back up. “Good,” he says. “That’s the right answer.” He glances over the top of it. “Order something. You look like you haven’t eaten good in a while.”
Jake looks at the menu.
“Dad,” he says.
“Mm.”
“I really—” He stops. “I’ve really made a mess of this.”
His dad lowers the menu slightly. Looks at him with that steady, unhurried attention. “Yes,” he says. “But messes can be cleaned up.” He raises the menu again. “The carbonara is good tonight.”
Jake picks up his menu.
He end up ordering the carbonara.
—
The thing about consistency is that it’s quiet.
It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with a gesture or a speech or a moment you can point to and say — there, that’s when things changed. It just accumulates, slowly, in the background of your ordinary life, until one day you look up and realise the weight you’ve been carrying has shifted without you noticing.
Jake shows up.
That’s the only way to describe it. He shows up in the small ways, the unglamorous ways, the ways that don’t make for a good story but add up to something anyway. He texts when he says he will. He’s outside your building on Wednesday mornings because you have a seminar and the walk takes you past the science quad where the wind is brutal and he started walking with you three weeks ago without asking and has not stopped. He brings food — not always the crackers and ginger tea, sometimes just the grapes, sometimes something from the good Thai place near the rink that you’d mentioned once you were craving and didn’t expect him to remember.
He remembers things.
This is, you find, the most disarming thing about him. More than the jaw and the shoulders and the specific quality of his attention when he’s fully in a conversation.
He remembers that you take your tea with one sugar and that you’re writing your dissertation on George Eliot and that your sister’s youngest is called Lily and that you cannot watch medical dramas right now because they make you anxious in a way you can’t fully explain. He files things away and uses them with a quietness that suggests he’s not doing it to impress you — he’s just paying attention.
And god, it’s harder to be angry at someone who pays attention. You’re still trying.
Your bump begins appearing at eleven weeks.
Not dramatically — not one morning you wake up transformed, just a gradual undeniable softening of the line of your stomach that means your jeans sit differently and your favourite hoodie, the oversized one you’ve worn for three years, suddenly doesn’t hang quite right. You stand in front of your mirror on a Thursday morning and put your hand flat against it and stay there for a moment with the strange doubled feeling that has been following you for weeks now — the unreality of it and the complete reality of it, existing simultaneously, refusing to resolve.
Mina notices before you say anything. She’s been noticing for two weeks, you suspect, and has been waiting for you to bring it up, which is one of the reasons she’s your person.
“You’re showing,” she says, on Friday afternoon, without preamble.
“A little,” you say.
“How do you feel about that?”
You think about it genuinely. “Weird,” you say. “Good weird. Mostly good weird.”
Mina nods. “Have you told Jake?”
“He’ll notice,” you say. “We’re — we’ve been spending time together. He’ll see.”
Mina looks at you with the expression that means she has registered the significance of we’ve been spending time together and is choosing, for now, not to make anything of it. “Okay,” she says.
“Don’t,” you say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I really wasn’t,” she says, in the tone that means she absolutely was.
He notices on Saturday.
You’re at this Thai place — his suggestion, your agreement, the two of you in a corner booth with menus neither of you needs because you’ve been here enough times now that you already know — and you’ve taken your coat off because the restaurant is warm and you’re wearing a fitted top and when you reach across the table for the soy sauce you catch him looking.
Not rudely. Not in a way that makes you want to cover yourself. Just — looking, with that attentive expression, taking in information.
“Don’t,” you say.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You have a face.”
“I have a face,” he says, which is almost a smile. “You’re showing.”
“I know.”
“You look—” He stops. Considers his word choice with unusual care. “Good,” he says finally. “You look good.”
You look at him across the table. “That was very diplomatic.”
“I meant it.”
“Jake.”
“I genuinely meant it.” He meets your eyes. “You look good. You’ve looked good for a while. I just—” He stops again. “Didn’t say it. You looks beautiful actually.”
The restaurant is warm and smells like lemongrass and the couple at the next table are arguing quietly about something and the ordinary world is going on all around you and Jake Sim is sitting across from you saying you look good with an expression that has nothing performative in it, no angle, no formula.
You pick up your menu that you don’t need and look at it. “Thank you,” you say, at the laminated page.
He goes back to his menu too. Neither of you says anything else about it. But the air between you has shifted by some small degree and you both know it and neither of you is ready to name it yet and that, you think, is okay.
For now that’s okay.
The not-naming becomes its own kind of language eventually.
He walks you to your seminar on Wednesday and waits fifteen minutes in the wrong direction from the rink to do it, which you know because you’ve looked at the campus map, which you will not be telling him. You bring him coffee one morning — just once, without explanation, the specific order you’ve heard him give three times now — and he takes it without making anything of it which is exactly right. You text him a photo of a onesie Mina finds online that says future hockey player as a joke and he sends back a voice note that is mostly him laughing, genuine and unguarded, and you listen to it twice.
You do not examine why you listen to it twice.
Sunghoon texts once more — I hope you’re okay. I mean that.
You look at it for a long time. You think about the library café and the step outside the party and the way his face had looked when he realised. You think about two years and what they were and what they turned out to be underneath.
I’m okay, you send back. Take care of yourself.
He sends a single: you too.
And that, you think, is the end of that chapter. It doesn’t feel like closure exactly — closure implies a clean line, and there is no clean line, just a gradual and mutual putting down of something that had gotten too heavy to carry. But it feels like something finished. Something that needed to be done.
You feel lighter, after.
Jake finds out about the dissertation.
Not in a dramatic way — you’re in the library one afternoon, the two of you at adjacent tables because you’d both ended up there independently and moving would have been more pointed than staying, and he leans over at some point and looks at your screen and reads two sentences and says: “You write like this normally?”
“Like what.”
“Like—” He gestures at the screen. “Like that. Like it means something.”
You look at him. “It’s an academic paper.”
“I know what it is.” He looks faintly annoyed, the way he gets when he’s trying to say something and the words aren’t cooperating. “I’m saying it’s good. It sounds like you.”
You turn back to your screen. You are not going to make anything of this. You are a reasonable and self-possessed adult and you are not going to sit in the library and catch feelings because Jake Sim said your writing sounds like you.
“Thanks,” you say, at your laptop.
“I’m serious. It’s—” He picks up his pen. “Good.”
“You said that.”
“Because I mean it.”
You look at him. He looks back, pen between his fingers, entirely unaware that he’s just done something dangerous, and you look back at your dissertation and breathe carefully and remind yourself of all the reasons this is complicated.
There are many reasons. They are good reasons. You know them all.
The night it almost becomes something, it’s late November and it’s cold enough that your breath fogs and Jake has walked you back from the library and you’re standing at the bottom of your building’s steps in the dark and neither of you is moving.
“I should go in,” you say.
“Yeah,” he says.
Neither of you moves.
You’ve been doing this — the standing, the not-moving, the conversations that go slightly longer than they need to — for three weeks now. It has a shape, this thing between you, even if it doesn’t have a name. It has weight. You’re both aware of it and both moving around it with the particular carefulness of people who have been burned recently and are not in a hurry to be burned again.
“Jake,” you say.
“I know,” he says. Like he already knows what you’re going to say. Like he’s been having the same conversation in his own head.
“I just need it to stay—” You gesture between you. “Like this. For now. Okay? I need it to stay manageable.”
He looks at you. “Is it not?”
You look back. “Less and less,” you admit.
Something moves through his expression. Warm and complicated and controlled. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll keep it manageable.”
“Okay.”
“I just need you to know—” He stops. Starts again. “I’m not going anywhere. Whatever this is, whatever speed it goes. I’m not going anywhere.”
The cold is sharp and the steps are lit by the yellow glow of the entrance light and you are eleven weeks pregnant and standing in the dark with the father of your baby who is looking at you like you’re something worth staying for, and you think about all the reasons this is complicated and you think about your sister’s voice — those are two separate things — and you think that maybe, maybe, the situation and the feeling don’t have to be the same thing.
“Goodnight, Jake,” you say.
“Goodnight,” he says. You go inside.
At the top of the first flight of stairs you take out your phone.
You open his name — Jake Sim (do not text unless necessary) — and you look at it for a long moment.
You change it to Jake.
Just Jake. Nothing else.
You put your phone in your pocket and go to bed.
—
He asks you out on a Tuesday.
Not dramatically — not with any of the ceremony you might have expected from someone who has spent the better part of four months being alternately infuriating and disarming. He just falls into step beside you on the Wednesday morning walk to your seminar and says, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes forward: “Let me take you to dinner. A real one. Not Thai because we’ve done that.”
You look at him. “Are you asking me on a date?”
“Yes.”
“Just like that.”
“Did you want me to make it complicated?”
You look back at the path ahead. The quad is grey and cold and a girl on a bike nearly takes out a first year near the fountain and life goes on all around you, indifferent and ordinary. “No,” you say. “I didn’t want it complicated.”
“Friday,” he says. “Seven. I’ll pick you up.”
“I know where the restaurants are, Jake. I go here too.”
“I know you do.” He glances at you sideways. “Let me pick you up though.”
You look at him. That expression — patient, certain, not performing anything. Just asking.
“Friday,” you say. “Seven.”
He nods. Looks back at the path. The corner of his mouth does something that isn’t quite a smile and is better than one.
The restaurant he takes you to is small and Italian and not the kind of place you’d have expected from him, which you’re finding is a theme — Jake Sim consistently failing to be what you expect in the specific ways that make him hardest to keep at distance. It’s candlelit without being try-hard about it, the kind of place where the pasta is made that morning and the wine list is handwritten and the tables are close enough that you’re aware of his knee near yours under the table for the entirety of dinner.
You talk. That’s the thing — you just talk, the way you have been talking for weeks now on walks and in the library and over Thai food, except tonight there’s no pretence of it being anything other than what it is. He asks about your dissertation and actually listens to the answer. You ask about the season and he tells you about the conference standings with genuine animation, hands moving, and you watch him and think about the ceiling of his bedroom in September and the corridor at the rink and the bag outside your dorm door and all the distance between those things.
“What,” he says, catching you looking.
“Nothing,” you say. “You’re different.”
“From what?” He laughs.
“From who you were in September.”
He’s quiet for a moment. He turns his wine glass slowly on the table. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I am.”
“Is that — do you mind that? Being different?”
He looks at you. “No,” he says. Simply. “I don’t mind it at all.”
You look back at your pasta.
Under the table his knee settles against yours and stays there and you don’t move away from it and neither does he and you eat your dinner in the warm candlelit ordinary of it and let yourself be there, fully, without managing it from a distance.
Outside afterward the cold hits and you’re pulling your coat around you when his hand finds yours. Not reaching, not making a thing of it — just his hand finding yours in the dark like it already knows the way, fingers threading through, warm and certain.
You let him.
You walk back across campus like that, not talking much, and when you reach your building you stop at the bottom of the steps and he turns to face you and you look at him in the yellow entrance light and you think about goodnight, about all the goodnights, about the careful distance you’ve been keeping.
“Come up,” you say.
His expression does that thing — complicated and warm and something that isn’t quite controlled anymore. “You sure?”
“I just asked, didn’t I?”
He follows you up.
Your room is warm and small and familiar and he’s been in it before but not like this — not with the door closed and the lights low and both of you knowing exactly what this is. He stands just inside the door and looks at you and you cross the room and kiss him.
It’s different from September.
September was heat and momentum and two people who didn’t know each other doing something that felt like a decision.
This is — slower. His hands come up to your face the way they did at the party but gentler, more deliberate, like he’s paying attention to something he nearly missed before. He kisses you like he has something to say and this is the only language that fits, and you feel it move through you differently than anything has moved through you in a long time.
“Hey,” he says, against your mouth.
“Hi,” you say back.
He pulls back just enough to look at you — really look, the way he does now, the full attentive weight of it — and his thumb traces your cheekbone and he says, quietly: “You’re so beautiful. Do you know that?”
“Jake—”
“I mean it.” You can tell he means it. It’s in his face, unguarded and certain. “I’ve been — I should have said it a long time ago.”
You look at him for a moment. Then you pull him back down.
He undresses you slowly, which is new — September was efficient, purposeful, barely stopping. Now he takes his time like he’s making up for it, his mouth following the line of your throat, your collarbone, his hands sliding your top off with a care that makes your breath catch. When he gets to the soft curve of your stomach he stops.
He goes to his knees.
You look down at him, breath held, and he puts both hands flat and warm against your bump and just — holds them there. His forehead drops forward to rest against you. The room is quiet. You put your hand in his hair without thinking about it.
“Hey,” he says softly. Not to you.
Your throat tightens.
He turns his head and presses his lips to the curve of your stomach, gentle, then again, then moves his hands slowly like he’s learning the shape of it, and you feel something in your chest come undone quietly and without ceremony.
“Jake,” you say, and your voice is not entirely steady.
He looks up at you. His eyes are dark and very serious. “Okay?” he asks.
“More than okay,” you manage.
He stands back up and kisses you again and walks you back to the bed.
He lays you down and settles over you and his mouth goes back to your tits immediately — you’d forgotten, or you’d tried to forget, the specific focused obsession of it — his hands cupping them, heavier now, thumbs dragging slow over your nipples until you’re arching up into his mouth.
“Perfect,” he murmurs against your skin, “you’re so perfect,” and the praise lands warm and low in your stomach and you pull at his shirt until he lets you get it off.
He’s as good-looking as you remembered, which is annoying.
His mouth works down your body and his hands slide your underwear off and then he looks up at you from between your thighs with an expression that makes your brain go briefly offline. “Okay?” he says again.
“If you don’t—” you start.
He puts his mouth on your pussy and the rest of that sentence evaporates.
He goes slower than September. That’s the difference — the same precision, the same devastating accuracy with his tongue on your clit and his fingers curling deep into your walls, but slower, like he wants to take you apart carefully this time, like he’s paying attention to every sound you make and adjusting accordingly.
Your hands find his hair. Your hips roll up. He holds them down with one forearm across your hips and doesn’t stop, doesn’t change pace, just keeps that steady merciless rhythm until you’re shaking and pleading and your walls are clenching around his fingers and you cum on his tongue with his name coming out wrecked and too loud for the room.
He comes back up your body looking — different than September. Still composed, still that infuriating ease, but underneath it something open. Something that wasn’t there before.
He reaches for his jacket on the floor. Finds his wallet to grab a condom.
You start laughing.
He looks at you confused. “What.”
“Jake.” You press your lips together. “We don’t — I’m already pregnant.
He looks at the condom in his hand. Looks at you. Something crosses his face and then he laughs too — real and unguarded, the laugh from the voice note, the one you listened to twice — drops it back on the floor and comes back to you.
“Fair point,” he says, against your mouth.
“Incredible,” you tell him. “You’re incredible.”
“Shut up,” he says, warmly, and kisses you.
He flips you over.
Not roughly — carefully, one hand at your hip and one at your shoulder, mindful, and you end up straddling him and looking down at him and his hands settle on your hips and he looks up at you like you’re the best thing he’s seen.
“You good?” he asks.
“Very,” you say, and sink down onto him.
The sound he makes is low and immediate and deeply satisfying. You feel every inch of him filling you, your walls stretching around his cock, and you go slow — partly because of the bump, partly because you want to, partly because watching his face as you take him is something you want to draw out. His jaw is tight. His hands on your hips are firm but not directing, just — there, holding on.
“Fuck,” he breathes. “You feel—”
“I know,” you say, and roll your hips.
His head drops back.
You find your rhythm — slow, deep, the grind of your hips meeting his, and his hands tighten and his hips push up to meet you and his mouth falls open and he is, you think, the best-looking thing you’ve ever seen like this, undone and flushed and completely present, all the composure stripped away.
“Perfect,” he says, rough and low, watching you move. “You’re so perfect, look at you—”
The praise moves through you like heat and you move faster, his thumb finds your clit and you gasp and his other hand spreads warm and careful over your bump and the gesture — the gentleness of it, the instinct of it — tips something over in your chest that you’re not going to examine right now because you’re busy, but you feel it, you feel it clearly.
You cum the second time with his cock buried inside you and his thumb on your clit, his hand on your stomach and his eyes on your face. He follows you not long after with his hips driving up and your name in his mouth, said like it means something, said like he’s been saving it.
Afterward you lie tangled together in your narrow dorm bed, which is not really built for two people but is managing. His hand is resting on your stomach with a naturalness that would have been impossible three months ago and you’re staring at the ceiling and feeling the particular peace of someone who has been braced for a long time and has just, finally, put it down.
“Come to my game next week,” he says.
You turn your head to look at him. “What?”
“Home game. Friday.” He’s looking at the ceiling too. Casual. Except you know him well enough now to know when the casual is covering something. “Come watch.”
You look back at the ceiling. “Okay,” you say.
He turns his head. “Actually?”
“Don’t make it weird,” you say. “Yes. I’ll come to your game.”
The corner of his mouth. That almost-smile that’s better than a real one. “Okay,” he says, and looks back at the ceiling, and his hand stays where it is, warm and certain.
—
The following week is small moments.
Tuesday he brings you the grapes and stays to help you outline your next dissertation chapter, sitting on your floor with his back against your bed and your notes spread between you, and he asks better questions than you expect and you don’t tell him that.
Wednesday the walk to your seminar, his shoulder bumping yours, the coffee he brings without asking — your order, exact, without you saying anything.
Thursday a voice note at eleven at night: just wanted to check you were okay. don’t reply if you’re asleep.
You reply and end up talking for forty minutes.
Friday morning he’s at your door.
In one hand, coffee. In the other, folded fabric — dark blue, the Caldwell Wolves crest on the chest, white lettering across the back. SIM. 9.
He holds it out. “You don’t have to,” he says, before you can say anything. “It’s not — I’m not trying to make it a thing. I just thought—”
You take it from him.
You pull it over your head immediately. It’s enormous on you — falls to mid-thigh, swamps your shoulders, the fabric soft from washing. You look down at it and then up at him. His expression is something you don’t have a word for.
You reach up and pull him down by his jacket lapel and kiss him, there in your doorway, in the yellow morning light, slow and certain.
When you pull back he looks — stunned, almost. Like he didn’t expect it even after everything.
“What was that for,” he says with a big grin.
“The jersey,” you say. “Come on. We’ll be late.”
The Hargrove Center is loud in a way that is different when you’re in the stands rather than the corridor — a living, moving noise, four thousand people and the echo of the ice and the announcer’s voice bouncing off the rafters. Mina is beside you, which you’d insisted on, and she’s wearing a Wolves scarf she definitely did not own before today and is eating a pretzel with the focus of someone who has decided to enjoy this.
Someone sits down on your other side.
You look over. He’s older — Jake’s build, the same broad shoulders, grey at his temples, a Wolves cap and a measured, unhurried expression.
“You must be—” he starts while smiling at you with the same grin Jake gave you not long ago.
“Dean Sim,” you say. “Hi.”
He looks at you for a moment with that steady attention that is so recognisably Jake’s that it almost makes you laugh. He’s smileing — warm, real. “He talks about you,” he says. “Quite a lot.”
“Good things, I hope.”
“Mostly.” He settles back in his seat. “He told me about the grapes.”
You look at him. He looks back with an expression of someone who finds this mildly amusing and is being polite about it.
“He remembered I was craving them,” you say.
“I know,” Dean Sim says. “That’s why he told me.” He looks out at the ice where the Wolves are warming up, Jake moving with that particular ease that is the same on ice as off it, unhurried and certain.
“He’s better than he knows how to show yet,” his dad says, quietly. Not performing it. Just — true. “But he’s getting there.”
You watch Jake on the ice.
“Yeah,” you say. “I know.”
The Wolves win.
Not narrowly — convincingly, the way they do when Jake is in the kind of form he’s been in lately, sharp and present, the kind of player who makes everyone around him better just by being fully there. You find yourself on your feet twice without meaning to be and Mina is absolutely losing her mind beside you in a way that suggests she has been quietly wanting to attend a hockey game for some time and has simply been waiting for the invitation.
After the final buzzer the arena stays loud, the celebration on the ice spilling into the stands, and Dean Sim shakes your hand and says it was lovely to meet you with a warmth that is entirely genuine, and you watch him go and think that Jake got the best of him, underneath everything.
And then the jumbo screen above the ice lights up.
You see it before you process it — your name, in big white letters, and then: JAKE SIM WANTS TO KNOW — WILL YOU BE HIS GIRLFRIEND?
The arena does not go quiet because four thousand people do not go quiet, but there is a definite shift — a ripple, a collective awareness, people turning and pointing and the noise changing character. Mina grabs your arm. You stare at the screen.
“Oh my god,” Mina says.
“Oh my god,” you say.
“Are you — are you going to—”
And then he’s there.
Full hockey gear, skates and all, somehow having gotten from the ice to the stands in the time it took you to register what the screen said, and he’s standing at the end of your row with his helmet under his arm and his hair damp and his face doing that thing — the unguarded thing, the thing without composure — and four thousand people are watching and Mina has both hands over her mouth.
“Well?” he says. Over the noise. Just to you.
You look at him. You look at the screen. You look back at him.
“You’re insane,” you say.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Is that a yes?”
You laugh — real and helpless, the kind that comes from somewhere you haven’t accessed in a while — and you step over Mina’s knees and go to him and he meets you halfway and you kiss him in the Hargrove Center in front of four thousand people and full hockey gear and the crowd does what crowds do when they witness something and the noise is enormous but you don’t hear any of it.
When you pull back his forehead drops to yours.
“Yes,” you tell him. “Obviously yes.”
He exhales — slow, like something released. His hand comes up to your face. His thumb at your cheekbone, the way it always is. “Good,” he says.
“Good,” you say back.
Behind you Mina is making a noise that suggests she is going to be telling this story for the rest of her natural life.
—
Three weeks later you are officially four months pregnant and the bump is undeniable now, round and real, and you’re sitting on Jake’s bed in his room — tidier than September, same room, different everything — with your legs across his lap while he reads something for class and his hand rests on your stomach with the absent certainty of someone who has stopped thinking about it and started just doing it.
The Wolves won again last night. His jersey, what you wore last night and have been to every game, is on the back of his chair.
Outside the window Caldwell goes on being large and indifferent and fully lit up, and in here it is warm and quiet and ordinary in a way that is — everything, actually. The whole thing. The specific ordinary of someone else’s presence that you’ve been missing without knowing how to name it.
“Hey,” Jake says, without looking up from his page.
“Hey,” you say.
“You good?”
You look at him — at the line of his jaw and the hand on your stomach and the room that used to be just a room and is now something else, something yours — and you think about September, about the corridor and the money and the slap you don’t regret. You think about Mina in the drugstore bathroom and Hannah on the third ring and the heartbeat on the monitor that made everything real.
You think about how none of this was the plan and how a plan was never the point.
“Yeah,” you say. “I’m good.”
He turns a page. His hand stays where it is. Outside, Caldwell. Inside, this.
Good, you think. I’m more than good.
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