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cloudeulogy · 1 month ago

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wanna tattoo this fic in my eyelids so every time i blink i can read it all over again

EPISODE 1: HELP! MY HOT GIRLFRIEND CAUGHT ME CRYING AFTER GIVING HEAD! (NOT CLICKBAIT)

this is smut, do not interact if under 18

jisung thought tutoring the hottest girl on campus would ruin his GPA— not his pants. one month later, he’s somehow getting called ‘pretty’ mid-thrust and offering you pocky as a post-orgasm snack.

pairing: nerd!han jisung x popular!f!reader, established relationship genre/tags: college au, smut, fluff, jisung is a loser with a capital L, humor sprinkled in bc i’m unserious asf, lots of references to anime and other dumb stuff, lowkey perv!jisung, dry humping, oral (f. receiving), piv, protected s*x, kinda subby!jisung but he’s still a whore lol words: 5.4k (wasn’t expecting it to be this long… guess i yap too much)

[ note. ] — i had to make another nerd!ji fic bc i literally cannot stop thinking about him 😣 feel free to read my other fic for more context since it’s set in the same universe but i wanted to make a smut ver so here we areeee <33 also, i will be making more parts eventually, hence why it’s labeled as ‘episode 1’ so stay tuned for more !

Jisung thought for sure that was going to die a virgin. Not in a sad, self-loathing kind of way, but more in a “yeah, that checks out,” kind of way. The type of peaceful resignation one might have while unplugging a broken router for the eighth time before crying into a bowl of instant ramen. Because guys like him— guys who quoted Dragon Ball Z unironically, who panicked when girls sat next to them in lecture halls, who built custom keyboards for fun and screamed at League. They didn’t date girls like you.

And they most definitely didn’t sleep with girls like you.

Still, that didn’t keep him from fantasizing. Constantly, shamelessly, unhingedly.

He’d never known what it felt like to have warm walls wrapped around his cock. Never heard those broken whines girls in hentai would make— unless he counted the ones he accidentally let out when he edged himself too long. His hand was simply never enough, no matter how many times he convinced himself he could “recreate the pressure.”

The bottle of lotion and box of tissues on his nightstand weren’t even hidden anymore— they sat like holy relics beside his gaming PC, ready for immediate access the second he closed League and opened incognito mode.

Porn never fully satisfied his craving though, he always wanted more. Even the best JAV compilation or doujinshi fan dub couldn’t compare to the real sickness consuming his brain: you.

You, with the glossy Instagram that he scrolled through like it was the damn Louvre. You, wearing micro bikinis in pool selfies with captions like ‘hot girl summer’ while he rots in bed, sweating and crying at the curvature of your ass.

You, biting your glittery, gel pen in class, leaning across the desk to ask for help, accidentally flashing a glimpse of cleavage so dangerous it made him pause mid-equation like he got hit with a stun grenade. Stalking your Instagram, seeing you in the tiniest baby tees and mini skirts. It was the perfect gooner material.

He’d stroke himself under the covers while biting a t-shirt to keep quiet, muttering your name between gasps like he was summoning a spirit. Fantasies playing out in his head that ranged from soft and romantic— like kissing you breathless during office hours— to completely feral, like bending you over his anime pillow while you called him “pretty boy” and ruined his life.

It didn’t help that you flirted with him now.

That you asked him to tutor you.

That you sat so close during study sessions he could sense your perfume from a mile away and taste the salt from the fries you always stole off his plate.

You laughed at his jokes, called him cute, even once said he had “nice hands,” and he nearly evaporated on the spot. Had to excuse himself to the bathroom with a boner and a prayer.

Every night ended the same. Him, fisting his cock in pathetic desperation at the thought of your pussy swallowing him whole, whispering ‘please’ like a man on the verge of religious enlightenment.

And every night, after he came all over his own stomach, out of breath and guilt-ridden, he’d sigh dramatically and say,

“I’m going to die alone. I know it. I’ll be the guy with the Zero Two body pillow and the unopened condom pack from 2017 that he keeps in case of a miracle.”

He did not, under any circumstances, expect you to be that miracle.

Never in a million years did he think he’d actually have a chance, let alone be dating you. You were just too perfect. The literal girl of his dreams.

Popular. Gorgeous. Cool in the kind of way that made any and everyone want to be around you without knowing why. You had that magnetic charm about you, an easily contagious laugh, a confident stride when you walk, and that dangerous habit of licking your lip gloss mid-sentence like you were in a CW drama.

And yet, somehow, here he was, currently horizontal on his bed, shirtless, breathless, with you on top of him wearing his oversized Bleach t-shirt and not much else, grinning like you’d just won first place in a science fair and a dance battle.

“Are you glitching?” You asked, poking his cheek. “Do I need to unplug you and plug you back in?”

“I- uh- w-what? No- yes? No.” He stuttered like every word had just magically left his vocabulary, he was definitely malfunctioning.

You laughed, head dropping onto his bare chest as he laid stiff as a board, arms hovering midair like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to touch you even now. Even after dating you for a whole month.

“A month,” he whispered, still stunned by the timeline. “That’s like… thirty days of you voluntarily being seen with me.”

“Thirty one,” you corrected, lifting your head to smirk down at him. “Don’t forget the bonus day where you kissed me in front of the vending machine and the entire basketball team clapped.”

“I thought I was going to throw up.”

“You looked like you did throw up.”

Jisung covered his face with both hands and groaned.

God, he still didn’t know how this happened. When you had asked him to tutor you in stats, he assumed you were just kidding— or high. But you weren’t. You’d actually shown up. You’d flirted, sat on his lap one time when all the seats were taken at the library, and then acted like it was no big deal while his soul left his body.

And now here you were. Straddling him. Teasing him. Literally wearing his t-shirt with the anime print on it and calling him “baby” in the kind of voice that should be illegal.

“You’re so tense, Sungie,” you murmur, lightly dragging your fingers down his chest. “I know you like it when I touch you. You make these cute little gasps like a baby bird.”

“I-I don’t sound like a baby bird,” he mumbled, absolutely sounding like a baby bird.

You leaned down, lips brushing the shell of his ear.

“Chirp.”

Jisung squeaked.

You lost it, giggling into his neck while he covered his blushy face with a pillow. “Oh my god, stopp- why are you like this- why did you choose me,”

“Because you’re smart, and sweet, and you get all flustered when I call you hot. And because,” you sat up again, hips rolling ever so slightly and watching his pupils blow wide as you rocked against his clothed erect, “you say things like ‘This is just like my fanfic’ under your breath and then deny it.”

He groaned at the sudden friction, arms falling limp at his sides. “You heard that?”

“Babe, I hear everything. Like right now, I can hear how bad you want me to ride you.” You bit your lip, feeling your wetness growing at a rapid pace as you continuously grind on him.

Jisung whimpered. “Okay. I- this is really happening, right? This isn’t like, some kind of VR dream or like a… cursed hentai plotline where I wake up and you’re actually a sentient toaster?”

You blinked. “What the hell kind of anime are you watching?”

He slapped a hand over his eyes. “Nevermind, pretend I didn’t say that..”

You kissed him then. Slowly. Tenderly. Like you had all the time in the world and like you couldn’t believe your luck either. Because yeah, you were the cool girl, but Jisung was the first guy who actually listened when you talked. Who remembered your favorite boba order. Who’d stayed up until 3 am tutoring you and still walked you to your dorm with sleepy, nerdy affection twinkling in his eyes.

So yeah, you were gonna roast him forever— but you were also gonna ruin him tonight.

“Hey, baby,” you whispered, reaching down to tug his sweatpants lower.

Jisung was in the midst of catching his breath like he’d just run a marathon. “Y-yeah?”

“After I make you cum, will you tell me all about the sentient toaster anime?”

“…Maybe.”

“Okay,” Jisung panted, curling into your side like a baby koala clinging to its mother, “that was better than every hentai I’ve ever seen.”

You snorted into his shoulder. “High praise coming from the man who owns a $300 body pillow.”

“She was limited edition!” He quickly defends himself.

You playfully roll your eyes, kissing his flushed cheek. “So are you, Sungie. So are you.”

And yeah, Jisung still thought he was going to die a virgin once upon a time.

But now, wrapped in your arms with kiss marks littering his neck and your laughter still echoing in his ears— he was just really, really glad that he’s been proven wrong.

The moment you straddled Jisung and kissed him again, something shifted in the room.

And not just him having an outer-body experience for the sixth time in an hour.

You pulled back from his lips to look around, and the first thing you said was, “Okay, I have to say it- your room is the most aggressively virgin-coded space I’ve ever been in.”

“I told you not to look too closely!” He whined, burying his face into your neck as you giggled and craned to inspect the chaos surrounding you.

“Let’s see…” you started ticking things off on your imaginary list. “Anime wall scrolls? Check. Neon RGB light strips that make your room look like a gaming dungeon? Check. Is that Hatsune Miku in a glass case next to middle school spelling bee trophies?”

He groaned. “They’re collector’s items—”

“You were runner-up in 8th grade and you framed it.”

“I peaked early, okay?!”

You laughed so hard you fell forward onto his chest. “I love you.”

He froze. “Wh-what?”

You blinked. “I said I love you.”

He looked like you’d just offered him a lifetime supply of ramen and also stabbed him in the heart.

“…I love you too,” he whispered, barely getting it out before he hid under the covers.

You tugged the blanket back down just enough to see his red face. “Hey. Don’t hide. I wanna see you. Look so pretty when you blush.”

“PRETTY?!” He yelped.

You nodded in confirmation, brushing hair off his forehead. “Mmhm. Prettiest boy I’ve ever seen. Especially like this- messy hair, pink cheeks, all breathless under me…”

He made the most broken noise you’d ever heard.

His hands gripped your hips like he didn’t know what to do with them, like he was trying not to crush you or himself with how desperate he felt. His eyes were dark now, glazed and locked onto your every move as you slowly ground against the bulge in his sweats.

“This is real, right?” He meant to ask that in his head but blurted it out instead, voice slightly cracking. “This is really happening?”

You kissed the corner of his mouth. “Feels pretty real to me, baby.”

At this point Jisung was spiraling.

Not just emotionally. No, that happened daily.

This was a full-system shutdown.

You’d tugged your shirt off without warning and smiled down at him like it was the most casual thing in the world, and now his hands were hovering awkwardly mid-air like he wasn’t sure if he had permission to touch you or if he was being Punk’d by the gods of horny delusion.

Your skin. Your smile. Your fucking tits.

And worse— worse— as your fingers brushed through his messy brown locks and your thighs shifted over his hips, his brain suddenly screamed,

‘I can’t believe I’m about to get pussy before Jeongin.’

Jeongin, his slightly cooler, slightly taller, still-a-virgin roommate who had three rotating Discord kittens and a suspicious amount of cologne but somehow still never scored.

Jeongin, who walked around shirtless after push-up sessions and said things like “it’s not rizz, it’s charisma” unironically. Jeongin, who once said “I want my first time to be passionate and respectful” but also accidentally downloaded a virus trying to pirate a hentai dating sim.

Jisung had always assumed if one of them was gonna make it out of virginhood first, it’d be the guy with the Uzumaki clan symbol tattooed on his ribs and a social life.

But no.

It was him. Han Jisung. The guy who owned a limited-edition anime titty mousepad and squeaked like a kettle when a girl touched his arm. And now? You were grinding up against him slowly, teasingly, and he was barely clinging to reality.

“Y/n,” he whimpered, clutching your waist like you’d float away. “Can I- can I eat you out? Pleasepleaseplease.”

You blinked rapidly.

“…You wanna—?”

“So bad,” he choked. “I think about it all the time. Like in class. And when I watch those ‘how to’ videos online. Like, the diagram ones, not the porn ones, though I watched those too- but like educationally! For science!”

You stared blankly.

He was sweating.

“Okay,” you said softly, brushing your thumb over his cheek. “You’re really cute when you beg, y’know that?”

He nearly ascended.

You barely had time to giggle before he flipped you gently onto your back, hair falling into his eyes as he ducked down between your thighs like a man on a mission from God. His hands trembled as he slid your shorts down, breath hitching at the sight of your soaked panties.

“Oh my god,” he breathed out. “It’s real.”

You snorted. “What were you expecting? A hologram?”

“I don’t know!” He cried. “I was starting to believe you were some kind of high-level succubus sent to punish virgins.”

You cupped his flushed face. “Wouldn’t be the worst punishment.”

And then he locks in— eyes meeting yours as he sticks his tongue out, licking a long, fat stripe across your clothed slit. Soft. Slow. As if he was trying to memorize you with his tongue, the heat of it makes you jolt. He’s not just tasting you— he’s learning you, tracing intricate patterns with his tongue like he’s trying to decode you one flick at a time. Every motion is precise yet hungry, like he’s writing a love letter in Morse code directly to your pussy. His glasses slipping adorably down the bridge of his nose, solely focused on pleasing you.

You gasped at the feel of him against you, the pressure of his mouth sent heat curling low in your belly, it was torture. Too much and not enough. You needed to feel him without the barrier of soaked lace clinging to your folds, and he must’ve read your mind, because he groaned like he was the one being denied. He kissed your pussy like he was thanking it, mouthing over your clothed core before dragging open-mouthed kisses across your inner thighs, leaving your skin slick with spit and bites to your inner thighs. Your teeth sank into your bottom lip, everything about him felt so warm.

His teeth grazed you— playful, hungry— and your hips twitched as he whispered something nasty under his breath, half to himself, half to your cunt. By the time he slid your panties down, your thighs were trembling, tossing the flimsy fabric aside carelessly, like he didn’t care where they landed, only that they were gone. Then he buried his face between your legs like you’d been starving him for his entire life.

His tongue slipped between your folds, hot and greedy, lapping up everything you gave him like it was the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted. He flicked up and down with obscene precision, wet, messy, relentless— his nose bumping your clit as he moaned deep in his throat, like he needed this, like the taste of you could make or break him. You were soaked, legs shaking, lips parted in a silent cry, and all he did was keep eating like he was trying to crawl inside you with his tongue.

You were loving the way it feels, every bit of you being hit with electricity. Your fingers tangled in his hair the second his mouth met your pussy, gripping tight, yanking just enough to make him groan into you like he was grateful for the pain. He never slowed down. If anything, it made him hungrier, tongue flattening against your slit before flicking up again, sloppy and fast and fucking filthy.

“God- fuck, you’re so messy,” you gasped, thighs twitching around his head. “You like that? Being my dirty little mouth toy?”

He moaned. Moaned. Into your pussy.

Nodding obediently, even as you tugged harder, grinding him closer. His glasses were long gone, hair disheveled, chin dripping with spit and slick as he slurred out something unintelligible against your clit. His tongue working overtime like he was trying to spell your name in cursive with every flick.

“Holy shit,” he mumbled, words caught in his throat. “I could live here.”

You threw your head back with a laugh— and then a sharp gasp as he got bolder, messier, more desperate. His hands kept you spread, his tongue curling and licking and worshipping like this was the only chance he’d ever get. He was sure that he’d jizz his pants just from giving you head— sure it’s pathetic, maybe even tragic. But he couldn’t help it. You were just too hot, too perfect, too fucking unreal, and the taste of you on his tongue, the feel of your thighs squeezing around his head, it was better than anything his fist or filthy imagination had ever given him.

Your fingers remain tangled in his hair, holding onto him for anchorage. He looked up at you with glassy, pleading eyes, the lower half of his face glistening with your arousal and rosy cheeks. “Tell me I’m doing okay? Please? I read five articles about this. I practiced on a peach.”

You gasped. “You practiced on what?!”

“Nevermind. Just- keep calling me pretty. I swear I’ll die happy right here.”

You tugged his head back down, voice ragged and ruined.

“Then make me cum, pretty boy.”

And he did.

Like a man with something to prove.

Like a nerdy little virgin who had just found his true calling.

Your eyes closed shut at the feeling, falling apart at the seams. Every stroke of his tongue making your insides tighten. You suddenly couldn’t remember how breathing worked, all you saw were flashes of white invading your vision, cumming so hard that you almost saw stars. You cried out, high and broken, hands grasping at his head as you came hard against his mouth.

Jisung moaned through it— loud and messy— tongue never letting up, licking you through every twitch, every gasp, every last jolt of overstimulation until you were tugging at his hair for dear life and gasping for air. Only then did he pull back, lips shiny, eyes half-lidded, face absolutely drenched, and smiling like he just beat the final boss of his entire life.

Somewhere in the past twenty minutes between Jisung nuzzling your thighs like a man starved and moaning like he was the one cumming, you had apparently blacked out, transcended the mortal plane, and been reborn as a puddle of girl.

Now, you lay sprawled across his unmade bed, fully clothed from the waist up and violently ruined from the waist down, chest heaving, eyes wet and glassy, one sock half-off your foot like a casualty of war.

And Jisung?

Jisung was cuddled up beside you like the world’s horniest golden retriever, chin resting on your shoulder, looking so smug and soft it was almost offensive.

You could still feel the ghost of his tongue between your legs.

“You sure you’ve never done this before?” You croaked out, blinking up at the ceiling like it had answers.

Jisung tilted his head innocently. “What, that? Nah. I just… researched. A lot. And I… uh, practiced on a fruit.”

You turned your head slowly. “Was it the peach again?”

“…It might’ve also been a mango. For tongue agility. But I named it after you, so it was romantic!”

You tried to snort, but it came out as a wheeze. “I can’t feel my legs, Jisung.”

He beamed. “Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“Still taking it as one.”

He leaned in and kissed your cheek, then your nose, then your forehead like he hadn’t just destroyed your entire nervous system with his mouth.

“I feel like I just unlocked a secret side quest,” he victoriously cheered. “‘Satisfy hot girlfriend until she sees God.’ Bonus XP for oral stamina. Am I your favorite now?”

You blinked at him, still fighting for air. “I don’t even know my name right now. You’ve ruined me.”

Jisung squeaked and tucked his face into your neck, practically vibrating with joy. “You’re gonna make me cry.”

“You should. I saw the afterlife. It was just a video game buffering screen.”

He laughed, then rolled onto his back with a dramatic sigh. “I can’t believe this is real. You’re real. Your thighs are real. I had a girlfriend and head privileges all in the same night. I feel like I need to call my mom.”

“Please don’t.”

“Too late. She deserves to know her son peaked.”

You smacked him lightly with the nearest pillow, still grasping for air, still dazed.

And then he smiled at you— so big, so genuine, so sickeningly in love that your tired heart clenched.

“I’d do it again in a heartbeat, y’know,” he mumbled, brushing hair from your face. “Just say the word.”

You looked at him, the boy with anime figures on his shelf, lotion still on his desk, and love in his eyes, pulling him in for a kiss.

“Next time,” you whispered, “I’m returning the favor.”

Mindlessly reaching into his sweats, the second your hand wrapped around his length, you froze.

“…Jisung.”

“H-huh?”

You gave a blank expression. Looking down. Looking back up.

“This is- you’re.. how is this even—?”

“I DON’T KNOW,” he cried. “IT DOESN’T EVEN MAKE SENSE, I’M ONLY 5’7!”

You stared at him like he just told you he had a second life as a Marvel superhero.

“Oh my god, I just assumed you’d be, like—”

“Average?!” He gasped, scandalized.

“No! I just- I mean- look at you! You’re this cute little nerd with anime socks and a keyboard with cat ears.. how are you packing all this?!”

You were in utter disbelief, there’s no way your sweet, stammering little boyfriend had been walking around with a dick that big and had no idea what kind of weapon he was carrying. Just raw, untapped dick potential— XL stats on a man who still apologizes when his knees crack too loud. Poor baby had been lugging around a whole third leg, and didn’t even know the first thing to do with it ;(

He simply shook his head, fully tomato red now, flailing beneath you like he was about to spontaneously combust. He watched you like he was afraid to blink. You pumped him once, slowly, watching him shiver under your touch. His lips parted. His back arched. You hadn’t even gotten started and he already looked completely ruined.

“Can I ride you?” You asked sweetly.

He nodded so fast his head could nearly fell off. “Yes. Yes, oh my god, yes- please, I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?” You cocked your eyebrow.

“I’ll uninstall League right now if you ask me to—”

You giggled as you rolled the condom down over him, letting his hands greedily grab at your thighs. He was panting, forehead glistening with a sheen of sweat, like his brain was overheating just from the anticipation.

Then you finally lowered yourself, sinking down onto him, gradually, feeling the way you take him so easily from being soaking wet. Jisung mumbles something illegible under his breath as your cunt swallows his cock whole. It didn’t take long for you to reach the end of him since you were already so ready for him, staying in the same position to feel all of him inside you. His cock was splitting you open so nicely, it felt like you were in utter paradise.

And he made the sound.

Like his soul physically left his body, floated into the air, and gave you a salute on the way out.

“F-fuck.. you’re tight, I can’t—” he clutched your waist, eyes fluttering. “I’m gonna die. This is it. This is how I go.” He desperately bucks into you, wanting to feel more movement from you.

You move your hips to match his rhythm as you gain your balance, pressing both hands on his shoulder blades. You bounce slightly up and down on his cock, feeling your walls being filled up by every inch of him. You shifted from grinding on him real slow to picking up your pace indefinitely. Jisung threw his head back against the pillow from the pleasure, the sound of his balls hitting against your ass with the combination of it jiggling as you rode him like a bunny was enough to make him want to burst on the spot.

You leaned down and give him a chaste kiss. “Best way to go, huh?”

He nods vehemently. “Please don’t stop. Ever. I’ll cancel my Crunchyroll subscription for you. I’ll stop buying figurines. I’ll even delete my Genshin account.”

“Okay, now you’re being dramatic.”

He groaned helplessly as you continuously rode him like your life depended on it, breath hitching with every drag of your hips. He was so sensitive, so overwhelmed with it all that he couldn’t stop moaning into your mouth, mumbling broken, incoherent things like, “You feel soso good,” and “I can’t believe I get to have this,” and “Am I still breathing? No? Cool.”

You kissed down his jaw, showing no signs of stopping. You knew this was going to be one of those moments you’d both play on loop in your heads for a long, long time. “Still pretty, baby.”

He pants out. “You’re gonna kill me.”

You simply keep moaning as you kept bouncing on his cock, he was thrusting back into you, going even deeper. Your eyes reaching the back of your skull from the way he was hitting all the right spots. It wouldn’t take long before you started screaming his name and showering him with endless compliments.

“You’re so fucking pretty, Ji.” You were a broken record at this point, nothing but your whines and his grunts filling the room. You felt tense, your clit was throbbing, the pressure build up making you dizzy. Jisung couldn’t keep his eyes off you for a second, the way your tits bounced through your shirt, the way your long acrylics dug into his skin, he wasn’t even sure how he was still alive.

This was better than any of those fake scenarios that he’d absentmindedly create in his head, better than finally beating a level that he’d get stuck on for hours. He was in pure heaven, and he felt his high approaching any minute.

“I-I think ’m gonna cum,” he desperately choked out, rocking into you like a dog in heat.

Jisung was wrecked beneath you. Hands fisting into the sheets, mouth agape, his eyes rolling back every time you sank down fully and clenched around him.

“Fuck, please- please, I-I can’t,” he whimpered, voice shaky, flushed all the way to the tips of his ears. His stomach tightening with every motion, trying so hard not to lose it.

You leaned forward and cupped his face, riding him a little harder, the slap of skin soft but steady. “You said you could take it, baby,” you whispered, voice syrup-sweet. “You begged for this.”

“I know, I- just- pleaseplease can I cum?” he panted, nearly on the verge of tears. His voice was raw, wrecked, like every second you didn’t let him was a cruel punishment. “’m so close, I’m- I’ll be good, I swear, just let me.. please—”

You seal his lips with yours, just to quiet the begging, grinning against his mouth as his hands fumbled for your hips again. He moaned into the kiss, his hips twitching helplessly under yours.

“You’re lucky you’re cute when you beg,” you airly chuckled, pulling back just enough to look down at him. His eyes were wild, glazed over, the pretty sounds he made were like music to your ears.

“Th-thank you,” he sobbed, the gratitude in his voice borderline ridiculous. “’m gonna- I’m- oh my god—”

And with that, he finally let go. Releasing every last drop of his seed into the condom, muscles tensing up, gripping you like you were his only tether to reality. He looked down to see your arousal creating a white, creamy ring around the base of his thick cock, almost about to cum again just from the mere sight alone. Your legs felt like jello, you were weightless, collapsing onto his sweaty, sticky chest as you try to catch your breath, brain all foggy in your post-coital daze.

You didn’t expect him to cry.

Okay— not, like, full sobbing. But a little misty-eyed? A little “what did I do to deserve this?” A sparkle in his gaze as you lay draped across his chest, both of you blissed out and glowing in the soft, RGB-lit afterglow?

Yeah.

He was trying so hard not to sniffle.

“You okay, baby?” You murmured, pressing a gentle kiss to the curve of his jaw.

Jisung nodded, eyes wide and glassy. “I just… I thought my first time would be like, awkward. Or disappointing. Or I’d accidentally sneeze into someone’s mouth and get banned from touching boobs forever.”

You laughed against his skin. “Definitely didn’t happen.”

“No,” he grins, wrapping his arms tighter around you, “this was better than anything I could’ve ever imagined in my head. Better than my first SSR pull in Genshin. Better than when I tried the seasonal spicy chicken ramen and lived.”

You tilted your head up to meet his eyes. “That’s a pretty long list of victories to beat.”

“You’re the only victory that matters.”

“Oh my god,” you groaned playfully, “who is this smooth man and what has he done with my sweaty, anime-obsessed virgin boyfriend?”

He huffed, burying his face into your hair. “He’s still sweaty and obsessed with anime. He just… also happens to be madly in love with you.”

You smiled into his chest.

“Also,” he added, completely deadpan, “I think I saw the shadow realm.”

You snorted. “When?”

“When you said I was pretty and grabbed my—” His voice cracked. He covered his face with his hands. “Oh my god, I can’t say it. My ancestors are watching.”

You giggled, shifting to lay next to him and intertwining your fingers with his.

And for a while, it was just quiet. Safe. His hand slowly brushing over your side. Your heartbeat syncing with his. The faint whir of his PC fan still spinning in the corner because, of course, he never actually shut it down.

Then he jolted upright suddenly, as if he remembered something urgent.

“Wait.”

You blinked up at him, amused. “What?”

He slid off the bed, naked except for one, singular sock and scurried to his cluttered desk. You watched, dazed and curious, as he fumbled with drawers and cracked open a cabinet that definitely shouldn’t have had food in it.

Finally, he turned around triumphantly. Holding out a white, rectangular box.

“Pocky.”

You stared. “…Seriously?”

“I always imagined I’d give my girlfriend Pocky after her first time with me,” he said solemnly. “Like a weird little anime reward.”

You sat up and grinned. “You are a weird little anime reward.”

He climbed back into bed beside you and opened the box, pulling out one, white chocolate-dipped stick and offering it with both hands like it was a sacred gift.

You bit it gently from his fingers.

“Mmm. You’re such a good boy,” you purred with a playful smile, “giving me snacks after ruining me.”

He short-circuited. Almost choking on his own Pocky. “You’re going to be the death of me.”

“I hope so.”

You kissed his cheek, then his nose, and then— just to mess with him— you whispered, “Still thinking about how big you are, by the way.”

Jisung made a noise so high-pitched it could only be heard by dogs. He flopped face down into the sheets, flailing helplessly while you laughed and straddled his back.

“You have to stop saying things like that,” he muffled into the pillow.

“Why?” You asked sweetly, brushing his hair back. “You’re my pretty boy. I’m just appreciating what’s mine.”

He peeked up at you, still pink, still glowing.

“…Promise you’re mine too?”

You leaned down and pressed your lips against his, soft and slow.

“Always.”

#*ficrecs #*jisung rec

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jakesimfromstatefarm · 5 months ago

Text

no doubt ── s. jy

↳ summary ── struggling to balance a world tour, endless responsibilities, and...well, the sting of getting dumped by his girlfriend, jake finds peace & comfort confiding in you—one of his closest friends. what begins as lighthearted late-night phone calls while he's away on tour deepens into something more, quickly pulling you both into uncharted emotional territory. as your connection with jake intensifies, so does your inner turmoil—torn between the comfort of your easy relationship with him and the terrifying possibility of falling for someone you're not even sure you can have in the first place. but jake? jake has absolutely no doubt of what he wants—and spoiler alert? it's you.

↳ pairing ── jake x f!reader, [ft. childhoodbestfriend!jungwon, bestfriends!enha]

↳ genre ── idol!jake, friends to lovers!au || angstttt, fluff, crack

↳ ✎ᝰ. 23.7k [never beating the allegations of getting too attached to my works and having too much fun writing i fear...]

↳ contains ── angst! very angsty but only after a lot of fluff...the cheesy cringe type but then it goes downhill real quick...but happy ending i swear!, mentions of insecurities, maybe one or two curse words, fic starts with jake dating og character named jenn, the use of pet names, jungwon practically plays therapist, jake is absolutely whipped for reader but is terrible at communication and a certified idiot . also jungwon is reader's best friend so the beginning sets up the context for that lolz

↳ addie's ✉ .ᐟ ── she's DONEEE [do u hear me crying in the background]...so some backstory lore abt this fic—basically two years ago i had a dream about the ~angsty scene~ of this fic and ever since then, i've had this itch of putting it into words. and when i finally decided to do it, no doubt came out and i thought it was literal fate since the lyrics match the vibe so well...don't tell me it isn't fate guys :') anyways..this is a little different than my typical writing style even though of course i had to include summm crack..but i am still nervous abt how it came out so i really really hope you guys like it :') thank u for all the support and love always <3

↳ update .ᐟ ── check out the sequel series of this fic here!

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。..・。.・゜✭・.・

You and Yang Jungwon were literally born to be best friends.

Like, there was no other option.

Your mom? Their high school's poster child for academic perfection—top of her class, president of every club imaginable, a certified teacher's pet.

Jungwon's mom? Their high school's unofficial social chair—life of the party, karaoke queen, probably responsible for half the faculty's headaches.

Nothing alike.

So naturally, of course, they were inseparable. By their junior year, they'd already started planning their futures together, including one very specific and totally realistic goal that all teenage girl best friends make when they're young:

"We should have our first kids around the same time and force them to be best friends!"

"Oh my gosh, yes," Jungwon's mom agreed enthusiastically. "Like, we'll make them share everything! Matching outfits, playdates, joint birthday parties!"

But what your moms didn't realize as they were giggling over the playful promise that probably didn't hold any meaning to them at the age of 17?

The universe was taking notes.

So fast forward a couple decades later, and there you were, baby best friends from birth, fulfilling the shared dream of your mothers—the true puppeteers in this scenario.

All your moms had to do was execute their promise as planned, but the rest of it? The rest of it was easy.

You and Jungwon clicked before you even knew what words were, communicating in a series of shared giggles and unintelligible baby noises. By the time you turned two, you were finishing each other's sentences in your made-up gibberish language, and by preschool, the bond was unshakable.

You two—just like your moms—were inseparable.

By high school, everyone knew you were a package deal—where you went, Jungwon followed, and vice versa. So, when he announced your sophomore year that he was leaving to compete on a televised idol survival show, you were, understandably, skeptical.

"Are you sure it's not a scam?" You had asked, rolling lazily around on his bed while he scrambled around his room, packing his bags.

"It's not a scam," Jungwon laughed, carefully folding his clothes.

"Did they ask for your social security number?"

"Y/N."

"Exactly. I'm just saying—if you end up on one of those exposé documentaries about fake talent shows, don't say I didn't warn you."

Despite your teasing, you knew how much this meant to him. Jungwon had been dreaming about being in the music spotlight since he figured out how to work a karaoke machine at the age of six.

So when he eventually did make his debut with his group, you weren't surprised at all—it was inevitable, written in the stars, just like how your friendship with him was.

What did surprise you, though, was how seamlessly you got roped into his new world.

Sure, Jungwon's life got infinitely busier overnight, but there is no universe that exists in which he'd forget about you—his non-conjoined twin, ride-or-die, and ultimate life-long nuisance (his words, not yours).

And so naturally, you became an honorary member of this new life of his. The boys' practice studio might as well be your new home—the endless days camping out on the floor of their dance studio with your head in your textbooks while they drilled their choreography for the hundredth time proved that. Or maybe how you crash on their dorm couch so often that Sunoo coined you your new nickname: their unofficial eighth member.

Which brings you to now: a marketing major by day, unofficial idol by night, and, as always, a certified magnet to chaos.

Case in point? Whatever madness was happening around you at this exact moment.

"Okay, but hear me out," Heeseung says, gesturing dramatically with his pizza slice—one of many scattered across the coffee table everyone was sitting around. "Pineapple is the perfect combination of sweet and savory—"

"It's a crime against humanity," Sunghoon cuts in.

Tomorrow? The boys leave for their five-month tour.

Tonight? Tonight is tradition: the pre-tour pizza bash.

Naturally, it's chaos, as no one has bothered with the last-minute packing they're supposed to be doing.

Not a single bag is packed.

"It's fruit on bread," you scrunch your nose, taking a bite of your own normal pepperoni pizza. "This isn't dessert, Hee."

"Thank you!" Sunghoon reaches across the table to high-five you.

From the couch behind you, Jake chuckles and nudges your back with his knee, "Big talk coming from someone who claims pickles belong on everything."

"Uh, because they do," you whip your head around to glare at him. "Pickles are versatile."

"Versatile my ass," Jungwon mumbles from his spot beside you. "I love you, but you're deranged."

"Look who's talking, Mr. 'I-put-hot-sauce-on-everything'," you shoot back, eyes narrowing at your best friend. Everyone chuckles from around the table at your dramatic, yet endearing, overreaction.

"Hot sauce is different," Jay chimes in without even looking up from his phone. "It's an enhancer."

"Pickles enhance flavor too!"

"By making everything taste like vinegar," Sunoo deadpans from your other side. "Gross."

"Whatever," you roll your eyes. "You're all uncultured."

"And you're a menace," Jake quips from behind you, his voice dripping with amusement. You don't even have to turn around to see the smirk on his face—you can hear it loud and clear.

"Careful, Sim," you say with a sly glance over your shoulder. "Keep talking, and I'll start adding pickle juice to your coffee."

The room fills with laughter, but before Jake can fire back, his phone buzzes aggressively against the couch. You watch him glance down at his screen before his playful smile instantly fades.

"I'll be right back," Jake mutters, getting up and heading towards the kitchen without another word.

You frown as you watch him disappear around the corner, the sudden shift in his mood gnawing at you, and you can't help but wonder what's gotten under his skin.

After a few more minutes of heated debates over pizza toppings—and yet another round of everyone ganging up on your weird pickle obsession—you decide it was time for a drink refill.

Excusing yourself, you step into the kitchen, only to find Jake leaning against the counter, his arms crossed and gaze fixed on the empty wall in front of him. His phone sits abandoned on the counter, screen dark.

"Jake?" You call out softly, approaching slowly.

Your voice breaks through his haze, his expression flickering as he registers you standing in the doorway, your brows furrowed in concern.

"What's going on?" You ask, moving closer to stand in front of him.

"Nothing," Jake says too quickly, forcing a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.

You give him a look and he knows that you know he's lying, "Jake.."

He exhales, his expression crumbling as he runs a hand through his hair, "Just...Jenn called."

Ah. Of course. Jenn.

You almost flinch at the sound of the name, the weight it carries instantly souring your stomach. Jake's on-again, off-again girlfriend of two years was a constant source of heartbreak—not just for the poor boy, but for the entire group who helped pick up the pieces of his broken heart after every messy break-up…and even messier make-up.

"She broke up with me," Jake admits quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. "For real this time. Something about me leaving for tour and how it wasn't going to work out."

Your heart hurts at the sight of him in front of you—shoulders slumped, hands nervously twisting the hem of his shirt, as if trying to distract himself from the conversation.

"Oh, Jake...," you murmur, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder as you lean against the counter next to him.

"I'm fine," he insists, waving it off, but the expression on his face clearly betrays him.

"No, you're not," you say, trying to catch his eyes. "And that's okay."

Jake lets out a shaky breath, finally looking up from the ground to look at you, before shrugging, "I don't even know why I’m surprised. We've been...really off for a while now. Like, more than usual. But still, it sucks."

“Of course, it sucks," you nod, agreeing softly. "You guys were together for a long time. You cared about her."

For a moment, the two of you sit in a heavy silence with an unspoken understanding, the only sounds coming from the muffled chatter and laughter in the other room. You stay close, letting him process without pushing further.

Still, you can't entirely suppress the annoying flare of emotions bubbling in your chest—a tangled knot of sympathy and…something else. Relief, maybe? Not that you would ever wish any sort of pain on Jake—but you hate the way Jenn always leaves him like this: drained, doubting himself, and trying to piece together what went wrong, where he went wrong.

"Come back to the living room," you say finally, nudging his side gently. "Ni-ki is freaking out over which hoodies to pack. And I swear, they're all the same black hoodie."

Jake lets out a small, tired laugh, "You don't need me for that. He's gonna end up packing all of them, just watch."

"You don't know that," you tease. "Besides, I need someone's back up to help me convince him he's not actually going through an emo phase."

His eyes carry a faint smile as he looks at you, the corners of his lips lifting just enough to remind you of the warmth he usually carries.

"Okay," he says in a whisper, pushing himself off the counter.

You start towards the doorway, forgetting about your drink refill entirely, but his voice stops you.

"Y/N?"

You turn to find him still standing there, his eyes filled with warmth and appreciation.

"Thanks," he adds, a small smile on his face. It's such a simple statement, but the way he says it—soft, sincere, and maybe just a little desperate—makes something twist in your stomach. "For just...always being here."

You smile back up at the boy, "Of course, Jake. I'll always be here for you. You know that."

For a moment, he holds your gaze, as if taking a mental note of something. Then he nods, his shoulders relaxing.

"Okay," he says, exhaling as he gestures toward the doorway. "Let's go.”

You follow behind the boy back to the living room, silently hoping he knows just how much you mean your promise to him.

Jake's body is on autopilot at this point.

Another city, another show, another string of flashing lights and deafening cheers. It's a month into tour, and the endless loop of responsibilities has left him no room to just breathe.

And he loves this life—he really does. But tonight, for reasons he can't explain, the adrenaline that usually keeps him afloat isn't enough. Pure exhaustion lingers in his bones, heavier than the applause and screams echoing in his memory, and he just can’t seem to shake it.

When his head finally hits the stiff hotel pillow, Jake exhales with a heavy sigh. The city around him is alive, the neon lights brightly dancing against his windowpane, but he feels none of it.

Instead? He just feels the weight of homesickness and the ache of being alone.

Normally, he would push through, shove these thoughts into the back of his mind, call it a night. But tonight, the ache feels different—sharper, louder—and before he knows it, his phone is in his hand before he can talk himself out of it, his thumb hovering over your name on his screen.

A familiar battle wages in his mind, one he’s been battling more recently ever since tour became a little heavier on him. Slowly, the quiet yearning has been creeping in, and he’s been missing home more and more, craving the feeling of familiarity. But it isn’t just the physical places or the comfort of his regular routine that he craves.

It’s something else, something harder to name.

And for some other reason he can’t seem to explain, he thinks it’s you.

Jake doesn’t know when it started. Maybe it was hearing the sound of your voice through the phone whenever the guys called you to check in every now and then. Or maybe it was the way you would text in their shared group chat, your messages always tinged with humor or a sense of calm that somehow made everything feel a little less overwhelming.

Whatever it was, it stuck with him. He finds himself craving that unexplainable comfort only you seem to bring. He tells himself it’s nothing special, just the natural pull of familiarity. You’re back at home, the place he misses the most, so obviously, through association, it makes sense.

It’s logical. Nothing more.

That’s what he tells himself as his thumb hovers over your name. It’s not about you specifically—it couldn’t be. It’s just the connection to home. The grounding warmth of your voice. The way you somehow make the distance feel a little less suffocating.

Obviously. Nothing more.

He presses call.

Two rings. That's all it takes before your voice cuts through all the static in his head. Groggy, soft, and achingly familiar. Like home.

"Jake? It's late, is everything okay?"

Jake glances at the clock. 10:13PM where he is. Much later for you, he imagines. Guilt stirs, but...

He doesn't want to hang up.

Hearing your voice feels like the first breath of air after surfacing from deep water. He instantly feels more comfortable despite the heaviness in his chest.

"Hey," he mumbles, his voice quiet. "I'm okay. Just...needed to hear a friendly voice, I guess."

"Wow, are the boys that bad that you need to call me?" You tease warmly, despite the sleepiness lingering in your words.

Jake chuckles, the sound low and tired, "Nothing against them, really. It's just...sometimes you need someone who reminds you of home, you know?"

The other end of the line goes quiet for a moment. He can hear you shuffle, and he braces himself for a teasing comment about him being sappy and sentimental. But instead, your voice softens.

"Well, I'm glad I could be that for you," your voice telling him you're smiling brightly on the other side of the screen. "Though if I had a private jet, I'd send it right now. Bring you back instantly."

"A private jet, huh?" Jake's eyes flutter close as he's engulfed into the usual, playful rhythm that's always there between the two of you. "You'd do that for me?"

"Only if you bring back goodies, preferably snacks," you quip back, and the warmth in his chest grows.

There's another pause, the kind that feels comfortable rather than awkward. Jake shifts in his spot and before he can stop himself, he blurts out, “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make everything feel...lighter. Like, I can’t explain it, but just hearing you makes me feel like I’m not carrying all this stuff by myself.”

Your voice softens at his sudden vulnerability.

“Because you don't have to carry it all on your own, Jake. You know that, right? That’s what friends are for."

Jake hums in response, a low sound of acknowledgement as he keeps his phone pressed close, your voice instantly soothing the heavy emotions he's been carrying.

"You sound exhausted," you say after a beat, your tone cautious but filled with genuine care. "How are you holding up? With everything—the tour, the...break-up, just...you?"

Jake lets out a low groan, his fingers brushing through his hair. "You sound like my mom."

"Well, someone has to," you tease lightly, a relieved laugh slipping into your voice, as if you'd been afraid you overstepped. "Seriously, Jake. Are you doing okay?"

Jake hesitates, the question catching him off guard. He hadn't let himself think too much about Jenn or the breakup since leaving for tour a month ago. The boys knew better than to bring it up, and Jake had been grateful for that—for the distraction.

But now, with you, it feels different.

Safer, easier. Natural.

“Honestly? I don’t know,” he sighs, the sound heavy through the phone. “Some days it feels like I’m fine, like I’ve moved on, and other days...it’s like I’m stuck in this loop of ‘what ifs.’ Like, what if I did something different? Or..."

He trails off to a pause, his throat tight, before he finally admits to you, and himself, "...what if I just wasn't enough?"

“Jake,” you say gentle but firm, cutting through his spiraling thoughts. “You are enough. You've always been enough. Jenn...she just wasn’t the right person for you. That doesn’t mean you did anything wrong.”

He swallows hard, your words settling into the cracks he didn't even realize were there.

"Thanks, Y/N. I mean it. It's just...hard, you know? Haven't really talked about it since it happened. But talking to you helps—a lot."

“I’m glad." He can hear the quiet sincerity in your words. “And for what it’s worth, I think you’re doing an amazing job. With tour, with...everything. You've got this, Jake. I’m really proud of you.”

Jake lets out a breathy laugh, the warmth in your words settling something in his chest—a knot he didn't even realize was there.

“You always know what to say, don’t you?”

“It’s a gift,” you easily reply, and he can hear the grin in your voice, the easy banter making him feel lighter.

"I missed this," the words tumble out before he can stop himself. Then he quickly adds, as if to explain himself, "It's weird not having you around. The boys are great and all, but you give the best advice. Don't tell them that."

You giggle on your end, the sound making Jake's lips curve into a small smile and his heart twists.

In both a comforting and terrifying way.

"I miss it too," your voice quieter now. "But I'm here. You know that, right? Even if you're on the other side of the world, or if you call me at four in the morning like you're doing right now."

Jake lets out a chuckle followed by a sleepy groan, "Sorry about that. But...thank you, Y/N. For picking up."

"Always," you reply, and he hopes you mean it.

A beat passes. Jake knows he should hang up, that he should let you sleep. He tries to convince himself that you need the sleep more than he needs this call.

But he can't help himself.

"You'll yell at me if I don't sleep, won't you?"

"Absolutely. Go to bed, Jake. Or at least try. Zombie mode doesn't suit you."

"Fine," he sighs dramatically, but his eyes feel heavier and he knows he's falling asleep, the tension in his body from before easing away. "But only because you scare me sometimes."

You laugh. "Good. Now get some rest. And call me whenever you need to, okay?"

"Okay," he mumbles into his phone quietly, his mind already slipping into a deep sleep.

"Goodnight, Y/N."

"Goodnight, Jake."

"Don't you have a bedtime, Sim Jaeyun?" You tease, answering the call. The clock reads 1:27AM, and you should be asleep—you really should—but you smile anyways when Jake's name appears on your screen.

"Bedtime? I don't know her," his voice slightly groggy, but as usual, still warm. "Besides I knew you'd be awake. You don't sleep like a normal person either."

You roll your eyes, knowing fully well he can't see it, "Yeah, well, I don't have to dance around a stage for two hours tomorrow."

"True, but you do have to deal with my constant calls and keep me entertained. That's way harder."

"Oh yeah, obviously," you say with mock seriousness. "Being your emotional support human is a full-time job."

“Emotional support human,” Jake repeats, chuckling softly. “You’re right. I guess I really owe you, huh?”

“Oh, 100%,” you shoot back, a grin in your voice. “I want one of those tour hoodies you guys keep posting with.”

“Done. What size?”

"The oversized one."

Jake pauses. “Let me guess—so you can sleep in it?"

You hesitate, suddenly sheepish at how he knows you too well, “Hey, it's only cozy if it's oversized!"

You hear his soft laugh on the other end of the line.

“Cute. I’ll make sure to steal one for you.”

You try not to overanalyze the way your stomach flips at the word cute, and the easy way he says it, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

You shake the thought off immediately. This wasn't new, after all, Jake's always warm and easy to talk to. But lately—over the past month of phone calls—the way he says certain things, the tone he says them in, and the way they make you feel? It carried a weight you weren't sure how to hold.

In both a comforting and terrifying way.

“So, how was your day?” you suddenly bring up, trying to redirect your thoughts.

"Tiring," Jake sighs, his voice muffled as he shifts around in bed. "And Jungwon keeps beating me at Mario Kart during our break time. My pride is in shambles, Y/N."

"Let me guess," you smirk, repeating his words from earlier. "He picks Yoshi, and you keep picking Toad because you think he's underrated."

"Excuse me," Jake scoffs. "Toad is underrated. But, for your information, I choose Toad because your go-to character is Toadette."

Your heart does that stupid flip again. His words are light—I mean, you guys are talking about Mario Kart for god's sake—but it's stuff like that that keeps you questioning the true meaning behind his words.

You ignore the feeling, instead, a laugh bubbles up in response, an attempt to sound unaffected.

"You're so weird."

“But you like it,” he quips, voice dipping just slightly, like he’s testing the waters.

You're caught off guard by the sudden shift in his tone, but you recover just as quickly.

"Debatable."

“Liar.”

His tone is teasing, but there's something softer behind it, “You wouldn’t still be on the phone with me if you didn’t like me at least a little.”

“Maybe I’m just bored,” you shoot back, though your cheeks are burning at his sudden forwardness, questioning if he’s serious or just messing with you.

You hear him hum in response, "Then I guess I'll have to work harder to keep you interested."

“Oh yeah? How are you planning to do that?” You try to match his teasing tone, but internally, you feel unsteady under the implication of his words.

“By being my usual charming self, duh,” he says, his voice dropping into a smooth tone. “And, you know, calling you every night so you don’t forget about me.”

Your heart squeezes. "You already do that, stupid. You think I'd forget about you?"

“Never,” Jake's reply is immediate, almost instinctive, leaving no room for doubt. “But just in case…I like hearing your voice. Makes me feel like I’m not a million miles away.”

His words linger in the space between you, heavier than the playful banter from earlier. You swallow hard, trying your best to keep your voice steady.

“You’re not a million miles away, Jake.”

“Feels like it,” he murmurs. You hear a pause in his voice, as if he's thinking hard about his next words. “I miss home. I miss...you."

Your chest tightens, and your hands grip the sheets beneath you, as if the fabric could somehow ground you. Your heart is doing that thing again—the erratic, terrifying thing that makes you want to believe in something you're not sure is even real.

And at the same time, your thoughts are scrambling to say something lighthearted before the conversation steers into that dangerous, dangerous territory you were sure you weren't ready for.

Not yet.

"Well, you better win at least one round of Mario Kart for me while you're out there," you force a laugh, trying to mask the tremor in your voice.

Jake laughs, the sound genuine, "I'll try. But if I lose, just know I'm dedicating every race to you."

"Wow, I'm so honored," you try to deadpan, but he can sense the grin in your voice.

"You should be," his voice softens again. "Thanks for picking up tonight, by the way. I know it's late."

He never fails to thank you every night, as if you haven't been picking up every day for the past month and won't be picking up tomorrow, and the next day...and the day after that.

And, somehow, the same, genuine appreciation makes it so hard for you to ignore that weird, warm, fluttering sensation growing inside you every time you talk to him.

But, regardless, you always give him the same reply:

"Always," your voice matching his softness. "Call me whenever, okay?"

"Don’t say that," Jake warns, the teasing edge creeping back into his tone. "I'll actually do it."

"Fine," you giggle. "But if you call me at four in the morning again, I'm putting my phone on Do Not Disturb."

"Deal." He pauses, then adds, "Goodnight, Y/N."

"Goodnight, Jake."

As you hang up, you stare at your phone for a moment longer than you should have, your room feeling oddly quiet and too empty without his voice.

It's just another call, Y/N. Just another call between two friends.

But deep down, a part of you tells you it isn’t that simple anymore.

And maybe—just maybe—he knows it too.

“Are you busy?” Jake’s voice sounds more tired than usual, heavy with an overwhelming amount of tension.

“Never too busy for our calls,” you easily reply without hesitation as you lay back in your bed, phone close to your ear. Your voice is light, a stark contrast to the weariness laced in his, and when he doesn’t respond with his typical chuckle, you immediately sense his mood. “Hard day?”

He exhales slowly, the weary sound answering your question. Today was a lot. Hours of rehearsal followed by a concert, the adrenaline rush of performing, followed by the chaos of having the guys’ hotel information leaked. Crowds of paparazzi and fans swarmed the entrance, the relentless flashes of cameras breaking through whatever little pieces of calm he had left within him. The noise, the pressure, the endless cycle—all spiraled into a mental mess he doesn’t seem to shake.

The second he settled into his hotel room, all Jake knew was that he needed to talk to you—the one person who could steady his racing thoughts.

"I just...I didn't think this would get to me, you know? The cameras, the people, the flashes in my face—I'm just—it's like I'm never alone."

Your heart twists at the vulnerability and rawness in his voice, as if he’s admitting something for the first time—not just to anyone else, but to himself.

"I—I don't know. Sometimes I wish I could just disappear, just for a little while. Just to breathe, you know?"

You close your eyes, your grip on the phone unconsciously tightening as if it could anchor him somehow.

"I know it's not the same," your voice steady, even as you internally ached for him, "but...you can disappear with me, Jake. Even if it's just through the call. No cameras. No noise. Just...you and me."

He lets out an exhale—shaky, but relieved.

"You're really good at this. Making me feel like it's all gonna be okay."

"Because it is going to be okay, Jake," you reply softly. "You're not alone, Jake. Not with me."

"Yeah," he murmurs, his voice barely above a whisper, and he wishes more than anything else in this moment that he actually was with you. “I know.”

"Jake," you groan, sitting cross-legged on your bed, staring at the flustered boy through your laptop screen. "I'm begging you—just wear the black jacket. It's literally impossible to mess up black."

"But what about the beanie?" He whines as he pops back into view, his face scrunched up in genuine distress. "Do you think I can pull it off, or will I look like I'm trying too hard? Be honest, Y/N."

What started as a simple fashion-advice-question over the phone turned into a two-hour wardrobe emergency—all because Jake couldn’t figure out what to wear to the airport the next day (because, apparently, airport fits matter—his words, not yours).

"Jake, you could wear a literal trash bag to the airport and fans would still lose their minds," you tease, biting back a laugh.

He rolls his eyes at you, but the smile tugging at his lips says otherwise.

"Okay, but seriously, you’re trying too hard. Just go with the jacket, no beanie," you add on, just to end this two-hour long madness.

"Hmm," Jake plops on his bed and turns towards his phone camera, and you swear you can see the pout forming on his lips. "But I already posted a preview of the jacket last week. Isn't that, like, repetitive?"

"Jake,” you blink at him, "it's an airport. Not a fashion show."

He stares at you for a beat, then lets out a dramatic sigh, "Fine! Jacket, no beanie. But if I see even one criticizing comment calling me basic, I'm blaming you."

You laugh, shaking your head at his ridiculousness, "Deal. Now go to sleep, Sim Jaeyun."

His grin softens as he adjusts the camera to fully look at you, pout gone, eyes glistening.

"Only because you said so."

"Hey," you say softly, answering the call as you snuggle deeper into your blanket, letting it engulf you completely.

The familiar sound of Jake's quiet breathing fills the space between you, and before he even says a word, you already know.

"Rough day?" You ask gently when he doesn’t say anything after a few seconds.

"Yeah," he murmurs, his voice quieter than usual, almost drowned out by the low hum of background noise. "I just...I don't really feel like talking right now, if that's okay."

"Of course," you reply without hesitation, your tone gentle, no questions asked.

On the other end, Jake presses the phone closer to this ear in an attempt to feel closer to you, instantly feeling better from your pure understanding of how he’s feeling, and he thinks—not for the first time—that you might be his favorite person in the world.

The warm silence engulfs the both of you like a shared blanket, unspoken yet understood. You can hear the faint echoes of his surroundings: the muffled laughter of the boys somewhere nearby, the distant honk of traffic outside his hotel, and then the quiet shuffle of Jake shifting positions in his hotel bed. You catch his breath catching slightly, like he's finally allowing himself to relax—to just be.

You don't try to fill the silence. You know that he needs this—a moment of peace in the chaos. Instead, you similarly press the phone closer to your ear, as if doing so can somehow bridge the miles between you, hoping he can sense your presence reaching out for him.

Minutes pass like this, and for a moment, it’s so quiet you begin to wonder if he's falling asleep. But then, a deep exhale breaks the stillness.

"Thank you, Y/N," he says finally, his voice low but steady, carrying a weight of sincerity that makes your heart clench.

"You don't have to thank me, Jake," your voice matches his softness. "You know that."

"Still," his voice is low, so quiet, it feels like a secret meant only for you. "I appreciate you. More than you probably know."

You smile to yourself, your heart aching in the best way possible, and you desperately try your best to ignore it, no matter how much excitement it brought you.

"Always, Jake."

“Tell me something about you that I don’t already know,” you challenge him, your voice carrying that light and endearing tone over the phone that Jake’s come to crave.

“Hmm,” Jake hums thoughtfully as he lies in his bed, eyes closed, just simply treasuring the small moments, like this one, with you.

Even though it’s definitely 3AM where he is right now. And he definitely has to be up in a few hours for rehearsal.

Oh well, completely irrelevant. Talking about everything and anything with you just felt so right.

“I don’t know,” he eventually exhales, his brain too foggy to think of anything logical right now. “I feel like you know me better than I know myself at this point, Y/N.”

“You’re so corny it physically hurts, Jake,” you scoff, and Jake swears he can feel your exaggerated eye roll from thousands of miles away.

“Oh—wait, wait! I have one,” he perks up, his eyes shooting open as he turns towards the phone in excitement.

“Hit me,” you say, unconsciously smiling at how cute he sounds.

“I’m allergic to flowers.”

The line falls silent for a beat before you erupt into a storm of giggles so wild it makes Jake feel sick from how fast the butterflies in his stomach start fluttering.

“That’s your fun fact? That’s so tragic, Jake,” you gasp through your giggles. “Like, depressingly tragic.”

“Hey! It’s not that sad, it could be worse,” Jake hopes you can hear his pout over the phone (you can).

“So you’re telling me you’ve never bought a girl flowers before?” You tease, smiling to yourself as you stare at your ceiling.

“Guess not,” Jake lets out a laugh, which surprises himself. “Jenn used to always get mad at me for never getting her any, but what am I supposed to do? Show up with a bouquet and an epi-pen? I literally start tearing up whenever I’m around any kind.”

You lose it all over again, your laughter spilling through Jake’s phone like sunshine, and Jake doesn’t even realize he’s smiling so widely until his cheeks start to ache.

But what Jake does realize is something unexpected: for the first time in forever, he can talk about Jenn without a single pang of…anything. No weird tension, no lingering sadness—just a casual mention and then…nothing.

It’s freeing, this feeling of lightness, like an invisible weight he didn’t know he was even carrying has suddenly lifted. He wonders if this is what moving on really feels like, if he’s found his emotional freedom. He wonders when it changed.

He wonders maybe it’s not when—maybe it’s who.

And he wonders if it’s you.

Today was supposed to be Jake’s day off. The golden ticket to rest, recharge, and not think about anything.

Key term: supposed to be.

Instead, Jake found himself knee-deep in the trenches of emotional warfare—and losing spectacularly.

The morning started innocently enough. No alarm, no schedule, just the soft promise of freedom that was so close within his reach. But by noon, Jake came to a harsh realization.

Freedom was a lie.

Because every step, every sight, every breath, was haunted by one inescapable thought: You.

It started with a boutique. Him and the boys had wandered down a cobblestone street in a city that Jake had already forgotten the name of—city number ten or eleven of tour? He barely knew anymore. But then his gaze caught on a mannequin in the window.

Big mistake.

The outfit on display—similar to his mind—had you written all over it. Immediately, his brain spiraled.

Y/N would love that. She'd probably drag me and all the guys in and force me to hold her bag while she tried it on.

He had to physically stop himself from dragging the group inside to purchase it on the spot.

Next? A coffee shop. And there it was: a poster featuring some limited-edition iced peach latte. Jake froze, staring at it like it held the answers to life itself.

You’d love it. You would order it, (well, you'd make Jake order it, because you hate talking to cashiers), sip it, smile, and probably rant about how overpriced it was—even though Jake would pay for it—yet you’d still finish the entire thing.

And then, you'd steal half of his drink, too.

Because you always did.

And Jake always lets you.

The final straw? A cat. Just a random stray, peacefully lounging on a sunny part of sidewalk, looking like it had zero interest in the world around it. And even that didn't escape Jake's you-obsessed filter. Without even thinking, Jake whipped out his phone.

It was instinctual at this point.

Jake [1:06PM]: (attached - one image) Jake [1:06PM]: thought you'd like this one :)

Because obviously, you needed to see that cat. Immediately.

By the time Jake collapses onto his hotel bed that evening, he feels like he’d run a mental marathon—except instead of a finish line, every road led back to you.

He flops onto his bed, hoping sleep would save him from the storm raging in his brain.

Spoiler alert: it doesn't.

Instead, it leads him to the complete opposite. He stares at your name on his phone, your contact picture, your last messages to him.

You texted him two hours ago—a sweet goodnight message that ended with your usual, 'Don't hesitate to call if you need me.'

Casual. Normal.

But it probably didn't mean, 'Hey, please interrupt my sleep from the other side of the world so we can discuss your ongoing emotional crisis over me.'

Don't do it, Jake. The remaining rational brain cells within him beg him to stop. You're being dramatic. She's not the air you need to breathe.

But at the same time, deep down, Jake really thinks you are.

The worst part? You two already had talked on the phone earlier—when Jake had another fashion crisis and couldn't decide what to wear for his day off exploring with the guys. Of course, you laughed at him, teased him, but then helped him pick something out anyways. Typical.

Personally, if it was up to him, he'd spent his whole day off on the phone with you. Talking about everything. Or nothing. Whatever you wanted, Jake would've done it, no hesitation.

Don't do it, Jake, his brain warns him again. What kind of obsessed-lunatic calls the same person twice in one day?

Answer: Jake.

But as Jake lies in his hotel bed, thoughts heavily clouded with the image of you and the sound of your voice, he realizes...this wasn't just a phone call thing. No, this was deeper, worse. And somewhere between staring at the same patch of ceiling and replaying every memory of you on a mental loop, Jake tries to rationalize it.

She’s just a good friend, Jake. A best friend, even! You think about her a lot because she’s cool and funny and…and she has the laugh of a Disney princess...But it’s normal to think about your friends, right? Right??

But the more he tries to downplay it, the clearer it becomes. This was something else.

And then it hits.

Like, really hits.

Oh my god. I like her.

Jake shoots upright, widened eyes filled with horror, as if the realization itself just physically smacked him across the face.

No, no, no, no, no. This can’t be happening.

Jake buries his face in his hands, groaning. But the groan quickly turns into a muffled scream, because the more he thinks about it, the worse it gets.

Because he thinks you're going to be the death of him. He really, really likes you. Not in the vague, 'Oh, she’s cute' way, but in the write-her-name-in-a-heart-and-doodle-little-stars-around-it kind of way. The stare-at-her-texts-like-they’re-poetry kind of way. The imagine-her-laughing-at-your-dad’s-jokes-and-enjoying-your-mom’s-meals-forever kind of way.

And this feeling? It's new. It's terrifying.

It's exhilarating.

Jake realizes in this very moment that he's never experienced this heart-pounding, face-flushing, breath-taking kind of feeling towards anyone. Sure, his past relationship had been meaningful in its own way, but now Jake is realizing that the foundation of his past relationship was tangled up in obligations and unspoken expectations. A tightrope act of Jake having to be the perfect boyfriend, the perfect idol, the perfect...everything. He never realized how suffocating it was until now—until you. Because this feeling with you?

This was pure. Simple, clear, and undeniable.

Your sheer existence proved that it's possible for someone to understand him better than he understands himself. Your laugh had a way of making everything feel lighter, like the weight of the world had been momentarily suspended. Just one look from you alone somehow always manages to make him feel like he was still worthy even on his worst days.

With you, Jake felt...himself, for once. Not Jake Sim, global popstar. Not Jake Sim, the boyfriend of so-and-so. Just...Jake.

Jake's heart pounds as the realization sinks in. He's now transitioned from screaming into his hands to his poor hotel pillow.

Because as clear and strong as this feeling is, the doubt is just as overwhelming. What if you don't feel the same? What if this ruins everything?

But at the same time...what if you do feel the same way?

What if this is his chance? The butterfly effect that changes everything? What if you're it? You have to be.

And so, like an idiot possessed, Jake's finger is one millimeter away from pressing call on your name again.

Because, obviously, the best way to deal with overwhelming feelings is to confess them from a hotel room five countries away.

Obviously.

Because what if he didn't call? What if he spent the rest of his night spiraling into an endless pit of unspoken feelings and overthinking, arms flailing as he knows the only way out of the pit is with your help?

What if his brain explodes with the sheer amount of feelings he has for you and he never has the chance to tell you ever again?

He presses call.

The line rings twice before you answer.

"Jake?" Your voice is soft, laced with surprise and just the faintest trace of sleep. "It's late for you, is everything okay?"

Jake's brain short-circuits. What time even is it for him? He has no idea, and frankly, he doesn't care.

"Yeah," he blurts, far too quickly that he winces at himself. He clears his throat before trying again, "I mean, yeah. Everything's fine. I just...couldn't sleep."

"Oh," you hum softly and Jake swears the sound alone could single-handedly resolve global wars.

Yeah, he definitely likes you.

"Is something stressing you out?" The genuine concern in your voice makes his chest tighten.

"No—well, nothing like that," Jake rushes to assure you, sitting up straighter in bed now, as if you could see him. His voice lowers, almost shy, "I just...I was thinking about you."

Silence. Jake's heart pounds so loudly, he's sure you can hear it through the phone.

"About me?" You finally tease, light and playful, but there's something softer underneath. "What did I do to deserve such an honor?"

Jake lets out a nervous, breathy laugh, running a hand through his hair, “You exist. That’s what.”

Another pause. He hears you exhale softly, and the sound alone sends his heart into overdrive.

"That was smooth," your voice is quiet, soft, as if teetering on the line of teasing and nervousness at the same time. "Ten out of ten, Jake."

"I'm serious," Jake tries his best to keep his voice from cracking, the weight of his feelings pressing down on him. "I was lying here, thinking about everything, and I realized something."

"And what's that?"

Jake's throat goes dry. His heart is screaming at him to say it, but his brain begs him to reconsider.

But Jake's sure he's lost all his rational brain cells for sure at this point, so he swallows hard, and braces himself for impact.

"I like you, Y/N."

The words spill out, raw and unpolished, but so utterly true.

“I mean, I really like you," Jake continues, his voice barely above a whisper now. "More than a friend, more than anything.”

The line goes silent, and for a split second, a lifetime of pure awkwardness and torture of not having you in his life anymore flashes in his vision, and he rushes to fill the void.

"I know this is probably the worst timing ever, and probably really scary...and it's okay if you don't feel the same way," his voice definitely cracks this time, laying everything bare, but he doesn't care anymore. "But I had to tell you. I can't pretend around you, not when being around you feels like the only time I'm really me."

Then, you let out a soft exhale—a disbelieving, breathless sound that makes Jake's heart skip a beat.

"Jake..."

"You're...you're everything, Y/N. You make life better just by being in it. And I haven't even seen you in four months, but you're all I think about," Jake lets out a small laugh, swallowing the remainder of all his pride and dignity. "I promise, when I'm back...I'll prove it to you. I'll show you how much you mean to me. Anything it takes. "

For once in his life, Jake feels completely vulnerable—and yet, strangely, it feels right.

Because he means it, every word.

He's never meant anything more.

The line had gone quiet after Jake’s confession, his words echoing in your ears.

“I like you, Y/N.”

No, not like. Really, really like.

You spent the last few days replaying his words over and over, dissecting every syllable, every tiny inflection in this voice. At first, it didn't even seem real.

A part of you still thinks it isn't—that this is all a cruel dream and you're going to wake up any second now back in the real world. The one where Jake Sim, the boy who turns heads and steals hearts without even trying, didn't just confess his deepest, most vulnerable feelings for you in a single phone call.

But no. He said it, alright. Clear as day.

First, all you felt was pure happiness. Maybe it was hearing his voice everyday, or maybe it was seeing how his face lit up through the screen when you picked up his video calls—but somewhere along the way, you knew it was something deeper.

Something that made your heart skip when his name lit up your phone, something that left you craving his voice to make your day feel complete. And now? Now the boy who’d effortlessly become your favorite part of every day was telling you you’d done the same for him.

But then, came the fear.

Because what if this was just a rebound? What if you were just a soft landing for him, a way to patch up the holes left behind by his past? Here you were, standing at the edge of something terrifyingly real, wondering if you were just a step in his recovery process—a way to fill the cracks, but not the kind of permanence you were beginning to crave.

You weren’t naive enough to see Jake’s past relationship didn’t still linger in the corners of his mind. You’d seen him struggle with it before, how hard he’d tried to convince himself he was fine. What if you were just the next step in his healing, rather than something real—a Band-Aid for a wound that wasn’t even yours to heal?

And worse—what if you let it happen? What if you let yourself fall, only to hit the ground at an alarming speed, and...splat. Not just a regular, embarrassing tumble, no. But the kind that leaves you flattened on the pavement like a cartoon character who ignored every warning sign.

Because that’s exactly what it would feel like, wouldn’t it? Giving it, letting yourself hope—only to crash and burn spectacularly.

Deep down, you knew you weren’t just risking a little heartache. Because Jake? Jake had quietly claimed a permanent spot in your heart at this point.

You were risking everything.

And the worst part?

You were already halfway there.

That was the reason why you told him you needed time. The reason why all you could manage to respond was a meek, 'I just...I need to think about this.' And to his credit, Jake hadn't pushed. Of course, not.

But now, three days later, you were no closer to an answer. If anything, the time apart had made everything worse.

Because as the days stretched on, with every passing hour, every text you didn’t send and every call you didn’t make, one thing became gut-wrenchingly, undeniably clear:

You were already his.

You miss Jake’s voice, his laugh, the way he rambles about the most random things late at night. You miss how, somehow, he made you fall asleep with a smile on your face from the other side of the world. You miss him, that even in his absence, he was still your first thought in your mind when you woke up and the last before you drifted to sleep.

And no amount of overthinking or second-guessing could change the truth that finally settled in your chest like a secret you weren’t ready to admit to yourself:

You were his. Completely.

The only question now was whether you’d let yourself believe he was yours too.

"Y/N?"

"Jungwon," you groan helplessly into your phone. "Help me."

A pause. Then, "Are you sure you meant to call me? It's Jungwon, not Jake," he teases lightly. "I can go get Jake if you meant—"

"Jungwon!" You cut him off, panicked. "I'm being serious. It's about Jake, dummy."

"Oh," his tone shifts instantly as he senses the seriousness in your voice. "Did something happen? Because I swear, for the past three days, Jake's been moping around like a kicked puppy, and I was gonna ask you about it because I know you guys have been talking a lot more, but I didn't want to push, and—"

"That's exactly it, Jungwon!" You wail into your pillow, your voice muffled. Great, now you feel even worse, knowing Jake is moping around, waiting for you.

"What's exactly it?" Your best friend presses, voice curious. "I need specifics, Y/N."

You hesitate, the words clinging to the back of your throat like they're too heavy to admit. Finally, you take a deep breath and force them out.

"Jake told me he likes me, Jungwon. Like really, really likes me. He gave this whole monologue about how I'm all he can think about, and it was so cute, and it made me want to explode from joy and fear all at once, and I don't know what to do!"

A beat of silence.

Jungwon sucks in a dramatic breath and then, "Wait, wait, wait. Back up. First of all, this is not news to me."

You blink, as if he can see your look of shock over the phone, "What?"

"This was obvious, Y/N. The guy's been smitten with you for months. You guys literally have been talking every day since we left."

Your jaw drops, "So what? You and I talk every day! How is this any different?"

Jungwon snorts, "Y/N, we text every day. About minuscule things. Like me reminding you not to forget your keys and you ghosting my last text. But you and Jake? You guys talk for hours—into the illegal hours of the night, mind you. Trust me, I know. Hotel walls are thin."

You feel your cheeks flushing, "That doesn't mean anything."

"Doesn't it?" Jungwon's voice is laced with amusement. "When's the last time you called me just to hear my voice?"

"Jungwon."

"Exactly."

You groan again, "But Jungwon, what if…what if he's not over Jenn? What if I'm just a rebound?"

Jungwon goes quiet for a moment, his tone softening when he finally speaks, “Jake’s not like that, Y/N. You know that. He wouldn’t tell you he likes you unless he meant it.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Look," he interrupts. "Jake’s a lot of things—annoyingly loud, for one—but he’s not the kind of guy who’d use someone, especially you, as a rebound. If he said he likes you, he likes you.”

You bite your lip, his words settling over you like a warm blanket—because you know they're true.

“And for what it’s worth,” Jungwon continues, “I think you like him too.”

“I..,” you falter, your heart hammering in your chest. “I do.”

“Then what are you waiting for?”

You sigh, a small smile tugging at your lips despite the nerves coiled in your stomach, “I don’t know. I guess I’m scared.”

“That’s okay,” Jungwon says gently. “But don’t let fear stop you from something that could make you happy. You deserve that, Y/N. And so does Jake.”

You close your eyes, letting Jungwon's words sink in. Deep down, you know he's right, he always is.

"Thanks, Jungwon," you say, your voice softer now, tinged with gratitude.

"Anytime," he replies, and then, with a teasing lilt, "But seriously—you should probably tell him soon. I can't stand watching him mope around like a sad, abandoned puppy. It's seriously tragic, like, to the point where I’m gonna have to start letting him win at Mario Kart."

A small giggle escapes you, light and genuine for the first time in three days, "I know, I know. Eventually."

"Y/N," his voice turns playfully stern, like a parent lecturing their toddler. "Eventually isn't a time. Just call him. You've been thinking about him nonstop, haven't you?"

Unfortunately, Jungwon knows you too well. Your silent response betrays you, and Jungwon lets out a triumphant hum.

"Thought so. Well, you should go. You have a call to make."

You sigh, a mix of nerves and a new determination bubbling, "Okay, okay. But if this goes horribly wrong, I'm blaming you."

"It won't. But deal," his tone is reassuring, confident, like he already knows how this story ends. "You got this, Y/N."

The call ends, and the quiet still of your room taunts you. For a moment, you sit there, staring at your phone, the little icon of Jake's contact picture—a selfie the two of you took together many years ago—staring back at you like a challenge.

Your fingers hover. Your heart races, your palms feel clammy, and your stomach twists.

But then you remember Jungwon's words.

You deserve this.

And so does Jake.

You take a deep breath, then you press down on his name.

The phone doesn't even reach the second ring before he picks up.

"Y/N," Jake’s voice is rushed, a little breathless.

"Hey," you say softly, suddenly unsure where to start. "Um, were you busy?"

"No, no," he quickly responds. "Not at all. You could call me at 3AM, and I still would’ve picked up."

"That's unhealthy, you know," your lips twitch as you lay back in your bed, taking a deep inhale. You missed this—you missed him.

"For you? Worth it," you can hear the smile in his voice, but along with the slight tension just beneath it—the faintest tremor that tells you he's been waiting for this call, maybe agonizing over it just as much as you have.

You swallow hard, gripping the phone tight, "Jake, about...our last call..."

"Take your time," he says gently, though you don't miss the way his voice wavers ever so slightly. "I mean it, Y/N. There's no pressure."

You exhale shakily, closing your eyes, “I’ve been thinking a lot, too. About you. About…us.”

Jake stays silent, but you could hear the faint sound of him shifting, like he was bracing himself.

You squeeze your eyes hard, as you let the words finally come out, "I like you too, Jake. A lot. So much, honestly. It's just..."

"It's just...?" Jake's voice repeats softly, as if that's all he can manage to let out in the midst of his nervousness.

You hold your breath, scared of what you're about to admit—to Jake and to yourself.

"It's just...I'm scared," your voice comes out barely above a whisper, "I'm scared that this is too good to be true. That you're saying all of this because...I don't know—you're trying to move on...from the past, or because you're lonely on tour, or—"

"Y/N,” Jake's voice cuts through firm, but gentle.

"You're not…a rebound, or a distraction, or anything like that," he starts quietly, each word deliberate. "And this isn't about...Jenn, or me being lonely, or whatever else you think. This is about you."

Your breath hitches as you take in his words and open your eyes, hoping that staring at the ceiling above you could somehow ground you.

“You’re the one who makes me laugh when I’ve had the worst day,” Jake continues. “You’re the one I want to talk to, even when I’m running on zero sleep. You’re the one I think about when I’m on stage and wish I could just look into the crowd and see you there. It’s you, Y/N."

His words are overwhelming, too much, and you're unsure how to even process them. Your throat tightens, and you can feel the subconscious tears prickling at the corners of your eyes without even realizing they were forming.

"Are you sure, Jake?"

"More than anything else, Y/N," he says immediately, like the words have been waiting on the tip of his tongue. "And I want to do this right, Y/N. No rushing, no expectations. Just...tell me what you need from me, and I'll do it. Whatever it takes, I'll do it."

The sincerity in his voice makes your chest ache. You can picture him on the other side of the line, sitting in some unfamiliar hotel room, his brows probably furrowed in that adorable way they always do whenever he tries to find the right words.

You bite your lip, a small laugh escaping despite the tears sliding down your cheeks, “You’re so cheesy, you know that?”

Jake lets out a small laugh, immediately easing from the tension that hung in the air.

"Only for you," he mumbles, his voice soft but steady.

You sigh, the sound reaching Jake on the other side. There's a pause, a moment of mutual understanding in silence, just listening to the quiet, peaceful hum of each other's breathing.

“Jake?” You say finally, your voice trembling.

“Yeah?”

“I think…” You take a deep breath, and you think your heart is about to break out of your chest. “I think I want to try too.”

The silence on the other end was electric, and for a moment, you think maybe the call dropped. Then, you hear the unmistakable sound of Jake’s laugh—soft, relieved, and filled with so much warmth that it instantly makes your own heart feel lighter.

“You're driving me crazy, Y/N,” he says, his voice almost breathless, but tinged with humor.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says, a smile clear in his tone.

“I hope I am,” you quip, and it makes him chuckle, the sound warm and full of relief. “Guess I’m stuck with your cheesy lines now huh?”

“Stuck with me?” Jake repeats, pretending to sound offended. “No way. I’m stuck with you, Y/N. And trust me, I’m not going anywhere.”

His words are so simple, yet so full of promise, and it leaves you feeling a little breathless.

“Good,” you whisper, your cheeks warm. “Because I don’t want you to.”

“Hi Jake,” your voice bright as you immediately pick up his call and see his face appear on the screen, his expression softening when he sees you.

“Hey pretty,” he replies, without missing a beat, his voice laced with a soft fondness that never fails to make your stomach flip.

You roll your eyes, failing miserably to hide the blush rising to your cheeks, “Oh, so now I’m pretty, huh?”

Jake smirks at your words, leaning closer to his phone, “Nah, you’ve always been pretty. Just didn’t have the guts to say it to your face before.”

You groan, dramatically planting your face into your pillow as an attempt to bury the smile on your face, your voice muffled, “You’re gonna be the death of me, Jake.”

“Stop that, don’t hide. Let me see your face,” his tone dips somewhere between playful and pleading, and you give in, lifting your head just enough for him to catch a glimpse of your red cheeks.

“Cute,” he says with a knowing grin, leaning back against the headboard of his bed.

“Whatever,” you murmur, but the smile on your face remains. “How was your day today?”

“Mmm, it was good,” Jake says, running a hand through his messy hair. “Busy, but good. I forget how loud the fans get each time. But it’s nice. Makes it feel worth it, you know?”

“I’m glad,” your smile grows as you watch him speak, feeling nothing but proud of him. “You deserve all of it, Jake.”

“Stop,” now he’s groaning, throwing a hand over his face to cover his shy expression. “You’re going to make me blush.”

“Mm, looks like you already are, Jakey,” you shake your head, laughing softly.

“Maybe a little,” he admits as he peeks at you through his fingers, his grin boyish and infectious, and you can’t help but laugh again.

The call falls quiet for a moment, but it’s not awkward—just comfortable, like a shared breath. Jake shifts, turning on his stomach and propping his phone up against some pillows to make sure you can still see him.

“I miss you,” he says suddenly, and there’s something raw in his tone, something unguarded that catches you off guard.

Your heart stutters.

“Jake, I literally called you this morning,” you tease, your tone light and sweet. But still, you can’t resist, “I miss you too.”

“You don’t sound convincing enough,” his eyes narrow at you, the pout forming on his lips quickly turning into a small smirk. “Say it like you mean it.”

“Fine,” you huff, rolling your eyes. “I miss you so, so much Sim Jaeyun, that it’s physically painful and I might conbust on the spot if I don’t see you soon. Happy?”

“Very,” he grins into the camera, making your heart beat faster. Ugh. "But please don't combust for me. Who else am I supposed to call every day?"

"Oh, please, you'd survive," you shoot back, smirking. "I'm sure anyone else would be more than happy to fill the spot."

Jake clicks his tongue, shaking his head dramatically. "Nope, no one could keep with you, Y/N. You're a handful."

"Excuse me?" You scoff, mock offense all over your face. "You're calling me a handful? Jake, who's the one that texts me random song lyrics at 3AM and expects me to interpret their deep meaning like it's poetry?"

"Okay, first of all, they are deep," he argues, his grin widening into something boyish and utterly unfair. "And second of all, I know you secretly love it."

You let out a laugh as you roll onto your side, propping your phone against the pillow next to you.

"Maybe I do," you admit with a shrug, trying to sound nonchalant despite the smile on your face. "Or maybe I don't. That's up to you to find out."

Jake shakes his head, laughing softly, his eyes twinkling as they linger on your face.

"You really are a handful, Y/N," his voice teases while his eyes remain on you through the screen, as if studying you, and it makes your stomach flip.

You glance away, suddenly feeling shy again under his unwavering gaze, "Stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?" His voice is innocent, his eyebrows lifting in feign obliviousness.

"I don't know—like you're trying to memorize my face or something," you mutter, your cheeks burning.

"Maybe I am," his voice dips, low and soft. "Honestly wouldn't complain if that's the last thing I ever got to remember."

His words hit you square in the chest, and despite how ridiculously corny they are, they manage to take your breath away. You don't know if you'll ever get used to this newly discovered side of Jake—the one that speaks so candidly, so sweetly—like you're the only person in his universe.

But honestly? You love it. You love how he makes you feel, how his words wrap around you perfectly like they were tailor made just for you. But as much as you love it, you fear it too.

Because the more you fall into this feeling, the more you wonder if there's anything solid beneath it. Despite all the soft words shared and sweet nothings exchanged, at the end of the day, deep down inside you can't help but ask yourself if his words, if he, is even yours to begin with.

"Jake..."

"Hmm?" His voice is gentle now, the teasing edge in his voice fading.

"You really mean it, don't you?" You ask, your voice quieter now, the question laced with your vulnerability. "You're serious about...this? About us?"

"Of course I am," he answers without hesitation. His soft eyes stay trained on you as he sits up in his spot in bed, as if to show just how serious he is. He lets out an exhale, as if mentally encouraging himself to continue, "I know we're not...whatever this is, officially yet. But I do know that I like what we have."

He brings his phone closer, a small smile on his face, his expression earnest, "And that I like you. A lot."

You swallow hard, his words settling in your chest in the best way possible. Because despite everything—the doubts, the undefined boundaries—you can't deny the truth of how you feel.

"Me too," you admit, your voice steady and honest. "I like what we have too. And I like you."

You pause, a small smile tugging at the corner of your lips as you feel the remainders of your walls crumbling down, "You make me happy, Jake. Like annoyingly happy."

"Good. Because you make me happy too," His smile spreads wide, the kind that is contagious and could light up an entire room. "Annoyingly happy, if we're being specific."

You roll your eyes again, though you're smiling just as much, "We really are insufferable, aren't we?"

"Oh, completely," Jake nods, his tone playful. He's more relaxed, back to leaning against his headboard as he looks at you with a softened gaze. "We'll figure it out, Y/N. I promise. Whatever this is, or whatever it becomes, I'm not going anywhere. And honestly? I just can't wait to see you. Finally."

"Me too," you perk up, your eyes sparkling with excitement as you bring your phone closer, "It feels like it's been forever. This tour feels so much longer than the other ones for some reason."

"It does," Jake hums in agreement, his eyes thoughtful. "But you know what? I think It's because, this time...I actually have something waiting for me. Something—or someone—I want to come home to. And that makes every day feel so much longer."

You think, at this point, you should check yourself into the emergency department for the sheer amount of times you thought your heart was going to pound out of your body from Jake's words alone.

“You're ridiculous," you laugh, the sound bubbling out so naturally you couldn't hold it back even if you tried. "It's getting kind of out of hand how cheesy you are, Jake."

"And yet," he fires back with a smirk, "you love it. Admit it. I've cracked the code."

"Maybe I do," you tease, repeating your words from earlier as the corners of your mouth tug up into a smile you can't suppress. "But don't let it get to your head."

"Too late," he grins. "It's already there."

Jake [2:15AM] : can I call you? Y/N [2:16AM]: jake isnt it like 2AM for you? Jake [2:16AM]: well…yea but I was thinking about you so…

Your feet are kicking before you even realize, and before you can type up a response, your phone lights up with Jake's name and contact picture.

“Hi,” you answer softly, trying not to let the giddy smile growing on your face take over.

“Hey pretty,” he greets, voice warm and easy as he brings a hand through his messy hair. The lights in his room are off, and the dim glow of his phone screen casts a soft light over his features, making him look unfairly good for someone who should be fast asleep.

“You have two seconds to give me a good reason why you’re here talking to me instead of getting a good night’s rest before your concert tomorrow,” your eyes narrow in mock disapproval as you give him a knowing look.

Jake laughs lightly, “Hey! Okay, hear me out. I couldn’t sleep, so I did something.”

You raise an eyebrow, “You did something? That sounds ominous, I’m scared.”

“Yeah. For you,” he states plainly, leaving you even more confused for a second more before he continues. “I made you a playlist.”

Your brain stalls at how simple he says it—so casual, as if not packed with so much meaning.

“A playlist? You—wait, why?”

Jake shrugs, “I don’t know—I guess I just wanted you to hear what I hear when I think about you. Which, by the way, is a lot. So..”

You blink at the screen, your mouth slightly agape at the boy who's watching you with that lopsided grin that makes it practically impossible to function. You scramble to collect yourself, but the more you try, the worse it gets, and by now, you think he definitely took some secret class on how-to-make-Y/N-completely-flustered.

And aced it.

And of course, he notices—because Jake always notices.

“You okay there?” His voice breaks you out of your overwhelming thoughts, his teasing tone laced with curiosity.

“Define okay,” you mutter, rubbing a hand over your face in an attempt to cool down the warmth spreading like wildfire across your cheeks. “Because if it means not feeling like a complete fool over a guy who’s halfway across the world, then no, I’m absolutely not okay.”

Jake lets out a low laugh, the sound affectionate as he leans closer to the camera, the light reflecting off his shining eyes, “If it helps, you’re not the only one losing your mind here.”

“Oh yeah?” you arch an eyebrow, “What’s your excuse, Sim?”

“My excuse?” He tilts his head with a small, exaggerated frown, pretending to think. “Hmm…let’s see…I’m hopelessly into this girl who somehow makes being teased fun, who makes me smile just by hearing my name come out her mouth, and who—“

“Okay! Stop, stop, enough,” your voice strangled as you try to talk through the fit of giggles you couldn’t hold down. “You’re gonna kill me, Jake. Like, actually. I’m not strong enough for this.”

Jake laughs at your flustered reaction, holding up a hand of surrender, “Fine, fine. But seriously, look.”

You hear the sound of faint typing in the background before your phone buzzes with a text containing a link.

“It’s called Songs That Remind Me of Y/N. Creative, right?”

You open the link, and your thoughts are dazed at the sight of the endless playlist of songs. Some new to you, some you recognize—all of them feeling like little pieces of Jake's heart he's handing to you.

"I think it's perfect," you murmur softly, scrolling through the titles, the warmth and appreciation for him now feeling almost too overwhelming.

"Yeah?" Jake's eyes shine with a mixture of pride and hope as he watches your reaction.

"Yeah," you repeat, switching your phone screen back to his face and giving him a genuine smile. "I love it. Thank you, Jake."

Jake hums in response, the look on his eyes gentle as a beat of comfortable silence falls between you two.

"Well, I should probably sleep for real now, but...listen to it when you miss me, okay? Because chances are, I'm probably doing the same."

You pause, letting the weight of his words settle over you—vulnerable, yet undoubtedly honest. "Deal. I'll listen to it right now, then."

"Good," his smile grows, eyes crinkling at the corners. "Because I am too. I miss you, too."

You both linger for a moment, neither wanting to end the call just yet, simply enjoying each other's pure, raw presence.

"Sweet dreams, Jake," you finally say, your voice gentle as you slowly let sleep take over.

"Only if they’re about you," he quips, grinning.

You roll your eyes, your chest feeling lighter, "Go to bed, Sim."

"Yes, ma'am," he winks, and with one last fond look, he ends the call, leaving you smiling at your screen like the absolute fool he's turned you into.

"I can't believe you're finally coming back tomorrow," you murmur into the phone, your voice soft but buzzing with excitement as you take in the sight of Jake sprawled out on his bed. The dim glow of his phone highlights just enough of his face to remind you how impossibly cute he is—even with the pillow creases on his cheek.

"I know," Jake sighs dramatically, flopping onto his side. His head sinks into the pillow, and you hear a soft fwump as he shifts to find a comfortable spot. "I just wish I wasn't landing so late. If I could, I'd come see you the second I land. Like, bags in hand, running to your door."

"You'd probably trip and knock yourself out with your carry-on, Jake," you snort but then smile, the imagine of Jake rushing to get to you playing in your head.

"First of all, I'm very athletic," Jake raises an eyebrow, pretending to be offended. "Second, that's exactly what would happen, but at least I'd be unconscious on your doorstep, which is still closer to you than I've been in months."

Your heart does a little flip at the sound of the sincerity in his voice as you try to keep your tone casual, "It's okay, Jake. I'm not going anywhere. We'll see each other the next day? If you're free, maybe."

Jake's face softens in that stupidly adorable way he always does when he knows you're just trying to play it cool. "Free or not, I'll find a way. Nothing's stopping me from seeing you, Y/N. Not jet lag, not my schedule, not even my manager if he tries to barricade me in the building."

A giggle escapes you, partly at his sheer determination and partly to cover up the butterflies constantly causing the havoc in your stomach when it comes to him. And Jake, of course, looks all smug, like he knows exactly what he's doing to you. Typical Jake—sweet, determined, and impossibly endearing.

But as much as his words make your cheeks warm, there's another reason why you're holding back your smile.

Because, despite what Jake thinks, you're going to see him much sooner than he expects. All thanks to a message you got earlier from the group's manager:

Y/N! Hope you’re doing well! We all miss you and can’t wait to see you soon! As you know, the boys are returning tomorrow late at night, but the staff and I want to plan a little surprise party at their apartment, they have no idea. The team’s already prepping everything. We’d love for you to come—it wouldn’t be the same without you. 10 PM! See you!

You're practically vibrating with excitement, each passing minute on the call with Jake making it harder and harder to not just blurt it out and tell him you'll be seeing him in less than 24 hours. And, somehow, hearing his sleepy voice on the other side of the call, completely oblivious, just makes it even harder to contain yourself.

Jake's brows furrow as he watches you try (and fail) to suppress your grin, "What's up with you? You're smiling so much, and I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything that funny."

"Me?" You blink innocently, even though your heart skips a beat. But you shrug casually, masking your smile with a feigned yawn. "Nothing's up, you've just been acting too cute tonight. That's all."

"You're lucky you're cute," Jake narrows his eyes at you, but even you can see through the dim lighting the red creeping across his face, "And that I'm tired. Or else I'd call you out for how you're gaslighting me right now."

"Gaslighting?!" You sputter out, breaking out into laughter. "How am I gaslighting you for calling you cute?"

"Because I know you're hiding something—" Jake replies, his pout audible in the way his voice drags. He yawns mid-sentence, the soft sound and the image of his eyes fluttering closed making your heart melt. "—and you're using my sleep-deprived state against me. It's not fair."

"I'm not hiding anything!" You protest, your face one second away from cracking into a guilty smile. "Go to sleep—you're barely holding it together over there."

"Like I'd ever fall asleep on you," he mutters, his voice heavy with drowsiness. "You're way too important for that."

His words hit you like a train, and you have to physically restrain yourself from squealing, burying your face in your pillow before you let out a strangled, "Okay, enough sap for one night, Romeo. Go to bed."

"Mmhm, fine, fine," Jake hums before he yawns again. "Goodnight, pretty. Dream sweet dreams, okay?"

You let out a breath, losing the last remaining bits of your composure at this point—but in the best way possible, of course.

"Goodnight, Jakey. I'll see you soon."

The day flies by in a whirlwind of anticipation and sheer chaos, the emotional hurricane brewing up inside you rooting from one source and one source only.

Because ever since you woke up this morning, every step, every sight, every breath was haunted by one inescapable thought:

Jake.

The morning was a blur of pacing around your room like a Sims character who was glitching after being told to "Go Here", overthinking every possible scenario for how tonight—when you finally see Jake in person—could go down.

Because, really—how exactly do you approach the boy you've been friends with for years, who you've fallen for, in a room filled with people, including yours and his closest friends, all while pretending your heart is trying its hardest to not control, alt, delete itself?

Not exactly something you can Google.

Like, do you hug him? Does he hug you? What if he doesn't hug you? (Unacceptable, you decide, before pacing faster.)

By the time afternoon rolls around, you're about 78% sure you've developed three-and-a-half migraines from the sheer pressure of it all. Not to mention, the borderline illegal amount of caffeine coursing through your veins isn't helping—why did you think drinking four cups of coffee was a good idea? (You didn't. Your brain has officially gone rogue.)

And now, here you are. The buzzing apartment of the boys is alive with the sounds of laughter, the crinkle of party streamers being hung up, and two staff members arguing about where to put the over-dramatically large "WELCOME HOME" banner. You, along with everyone else, await for the signal, passing time by keeping up small conversation with the friends and staff you've gotten to know over the years—all the while you desperately try to keep your nerves from causing a mental crash out right here and now.

Eventually, one of the staff gets the alert that the group has landed and is minutes away, the energy immediately shifting, both in the apartment and mentally. You settle in place in the back of the crowd, near the door but not too near the door—because 1) you're 99.99% sure you're not emotionally stable enough to be front and center, and 2) the staff and camera crew are already hogging the entrance as if this was the world's greatest comeback (and spoiler alert—to you, it really is.)

The lights dim, the chatter fades, and the room hums with anticipation. And meanwhile? Your heart won't. Stop. Pounding.

Any second now.

Your nerves bubble up even more than you thought is humanly healthy, and you're not sure if you're about to a) pass out, b) puke, c) or both.

Simultaneously.

The sound of multiple footsteps echoes faintly in the hallway, followed with muffled voices—one of them the unmistakable sound of Jake's laughter. Your breath catches.

And then the door swings open.

"SURPRISE!"

The boys freeze in the doorway, their suitcases still in hand, the looks of genuine, yet pleasant, confusion plastered on all their faces. Sunghoon's eyes dart to the snacks table, Jay looks like he's deciding whether to laugh or roll his eyes, Sunoo is on the verge of tears, and Jake—Jake looks beautifully, stupidly confused.

Your eyes immediately find Jake's face, like some natural gravitational pull you can't fight, and suddenly it hits you: he's here. In front of you. No blurry video calls, no glitchy Wi-Fi interruptions—just Jake.

It feels surreal, like you're living in a sugar-induced dream that you aren't sure of is real yet or not. Last time you saw him in person, he was merely just Jake, one of your best friends, your go-to guy for bad jokes and late-night rants about life. But now? Now he's Jake—the boy who's somehow become the main character of your life (and brain capacity) over the past five months.

Every memory of your late-night calls, every teasing smile, every time his sweet, groggy voice promised he'd prove himself to you—it all comes rushing back. Like those cheesy montage scenes in a rom-com, except instead of a whimsical romantic song playing in the background, it's the sound of your brain, and heart, screaming WHAT NOW Y/N?!

But then, finally, his eyes land on you.

The moment your eyes meet, you think your lungs give up on life. Breathing? Never heard of it. It's like someone hit the pause button on the entire universe, and you're convinced that the only thing to ever exist is Jake looking at you with that soft, unreadable expression.

But you manage half a second of calm—half a second—before that softness on his face disappears. Just as quickly as it appeared, it's replaced by...something else. Something you can't quite put your finger on. Something you've never thought could exist on his face. A flicker of...conflict? Hesitation? Like he's staring straight at you…but also from miles away at the same time.

His jaw tightens slightly—so slightly only you would notice with how intently you're looking at him—and for a split second, his hands fidgets at his side before he quickly clasps it over the handle of his suitcase. And right as you process it, right as you're about to convince yourself it's just the million grams of caffeine rushing through your blood that's making you hallucinate and see things—

He looks away.

He looks away. As if you're not even standing there, as if he didn't just short-circuit your entire brain. His attention shifts to the nearest staff member, greeting them with a quick nod, and suddenly he's smiling and laughing at something they're saying like nothing just happened.

And just like that, the universe hits the play button again, and you're left standing there—staring, blinking, wondering if the last thirty seconds of your life was, indeed, a caffeine-induced hallucination after all. Surely. Right?

Because Jake definitely didn't avoid you on purpose. Nope. Because that would be insane. Insane, you think to yourself, as the invisible angel on your shoulder continues to whisper into your ear the same sweet words Jake's been telling you the past five months about how much he cares for you, how much he likes you—remember all those times he said it?

Right. Right. Of course, he does. But still, you stand there frozen, trying to ground yourself, even though your hands start fidgeting at your sides anyway. Great. Fantastic. Cool, cool, cool. This is fine.

You mentally curse yourself for not being closer to the door after all, and then, you mentally curse every single person in this room for not magically gaining telepathic powers and knowing that you, personally, were trying to have a moment.

It's fine. You'll find him again. He's just too preoccupied with all the staff members and people to greet. Busy Jake. Social Jake. You're just imagining things. Definitely.

Trying to distract yourself, you glance around the apartment, everything suddenly feeling suffocating. Maybe a snack. Maybe a drink. Maybe a portal to another dimension.

Shaking your head out of your spiraling thoughts, you bite the inside of your cheek to ground yourself and turn away from the crowd, quickly settling yourself near the beverage table, pouring yourself a cup of...whatever this is—your mind too cloudy to even bother looking at the sign on the table.

You don't know how much time passes, and frankly, you don't even know if you're fully conscious. Your mind is still living in the past, lingering in that moment where you locked eyes with Jake for the first time in five months, and despite all the overthinking you did this morning of all the possible scenarios that could happen—this was not one of them.

You're about to pour yourself a second drink just to keep your thoughts busy when you feel a tap on your shoulder.

"Y/N!"

Before you can fully turn around, you're engulfed in a warm hug, the familiar scent of Jungwon's cologne immediately grounding you, "Oh god, I missed you. Took me forever to find you with all these people."

"Jungwon!" You exclaim, a genuine smile lighting up your face despite the emotional tug-of-war in your chest, because, of course, leave it to your best friend to immediately ease your inner panic. You squeeze him back, playfully ruffling his hair as you pull away, "I can't believe they made you grow out your hair. Now you actually look older than me for once."

He stares at you, blinking. "Y/N. I am older than you."

"Literally by a week. We all know I'm mentally older," you deadpan, crossing your arms.

"Okay, I take it back. I didn't miss you after all," he scoffs as you laugh, pulling him into another hug for good measure just to annoy him.

"I'm so glad you guys are back," you say as Jungwon grabs the drink in your hand and takes a sip himself as he listens to you. "I was dying of boredom without you guys."

Jungwon raises an eyebrow, "Uh-huh. Definitely didn't sound like boredom all those nights you called Jake at 2AM."

You freeze. Oh. Great. The one topic you were trying to avoid (how you were going to avoid it—given you're at his literal apartment, with his literal group members, and literal staff members that all work for him—you're not sure. Avoidance was a doomed plan from the start, I fear).

But before you could answer, Jungwon continues, "So...are you guys, like, a thing now? I know you guys were just talking this whole time, but now that we're back, are you guys gonna be in a relationship and all that stuff? Because if so, I need a heads-up. As much I love you both, I don't know if I can stand you two being all couple-y right in front of me—oh, and also—"

"Jungwon."

"—if he hurts you in any way, I swear to god I will not hesitate to—"

"Jungwon!"

He stops, wide-eyed, before flashing you a sheepish smile. "Sorry. But seriously, what's happening? You haven't given me any updates!"

You open your mouth to respond, but the words get caught in your throat. Because if he had asked you yesterday—or even an hour ago—you would've been able to answer confidently. But now? After Jake's apparent Olympic-level avoidance of you? You're not so sure anymore.

"I...I don't know," you mumble, the words barely audible. Jungwon tilts his head, leaning closer to catch them.

"What do you mean, you don't know? You guys haven't talked about it?" His brows furrowing as he studies your face, clearly picking up on your hesitation in true best friend fashion.

"I, uh, I haven't...seen him yet," you admit, hoping the crack in your voice doesn't reveal the real reason you haven't approached the boy in question. "Everyone's busy, and I didn't want to get in the way."

Jungwon gives you a look like you just said the earth is flat.

"Get in the way? Y/N, you're insane. This is the guy who's been counting down the days to see you. If anything, everyone else is in his way."

You give him a helpless shrug, but Jungwon isn't having it. He grabs your shoulders and spins you around, pointing across the room to one of the other snack tables past the crowds of people.

"Look. He's right there. Alone. Perfectly free to talk to you. Go."

Your eyes land on Jake, back facing you and Jungwon, casually scooping chips into a bowl. You hesitate, scanning his relaxed posture, and the knot in your stomach tightens. Because that's exactly the problem. He's perfectly free. And if he's so excited to see you, how come he hasn't spoken to you yet?

But before you can voice your doubts, Jungwon gives you a not-so-gentle nudge forward, "Go talk to him before I carry you over there myself."

And next thing you know, Jake's right there. In front of you. His back is to you still, his eyes scanning the various snacks lined on the table, completely unaware of the full-on mental breakdown occurring just behind him.

This is your moment, you tell yourself, despite the endless alarms going off in your brain. Every single nerve in your body is on high alert, screaming at you to abort mission, abort! But before you can give in to your panic, your hand is already reaching out, lightly tapping his shoulder.

"Jake!"

Jake turns around, and for a moment—a fleeting, fragile moment—you catch it. The way his eyes widen slightly at the sight of you. The way his lips part as if they're about to break into that familiar smile you've missed for months. But just as quickly, similar to earlier, it vanishes, replaced by that flicker of hesitation, and it's enough to make your breath catch.

"Y/N."

Your name on his lips used to sound like a warm promise. Now?

Now it feels like an afterthought.

His voice is calm, steady—too steady, stripped of every ounce of emotion, and not at all like someone who's been counting down the days to see you. He rubs the back of his neck, his gaze flickering to the crowd behind you before reluctantly meeting yours, "It's been so long."

Your stomach sinks. That's all he had to say? You were completely wrong. You spent precisely 23 minutes of your morning debating if he was even going to give you a hug—but now? Screw the hug, he won't even give you a full sentence. Something's off, and your mind races to figure out what happened, as if you missed a major chapter of your own life.

Trying to ignore the sharp pang of something lodging itself in your chest, you offer a small smile, hoping to break the tension.

"Are you...okay? I thought...I don't know, I thought you'd be more excited to see me," the words spill out before you can stop them, and you want to crawl into a self-dug hole from how raw and vulnerable you feel.

Jake shifts uncomfortably, glancing at the floor, then at you, "No, yeah, of course I am. I'm just...really tired. The flight, you know. And all this," he pauses to gesture at the environment around you two, "it's a lot."

You stare at him in disbelief, waiting for him to crack—silently begging for some sign of the Jake you thought you knew. But all you get is a shrug.

A shrug.

Suddenly, his words feel like a punch to the gut, let alone the way he can't even fully look you in the eyes. In just those few seconds, the invisible angel on your shoulder—whose voice sounded just like Jake's—whispering those promises into your ears suddenly disappeared with no trace in sight, as if it was never there—as if it was never yours—in the first place. Every late-night call, every whispered promise, every shared laugh.

As if they never belonged to you.

You swallow hard, trying to keep the growing lump in your throat from choking you, hoping your emotional turmoil isn't blatantly obvious to the boy in front of you.

"Right," you murmur, nodding as if his excuse makes perfect sense. But it doesn't. "That's...understandable."

The silence that follows is suffocating. Not the comfortable kind of warm silence you two used to share, but the awkward, unbearable kind that makes you claw at your own skin and makes you wish the ground would open up and swallow you whole right then and there.

Jake shifts again, and for a moment, his eyes meet yours. There's something there—but before you can grasp it, a voice from the crowd calls his name.

"I—I should go," he mutters quickly, stepping back. His voice is quiet, his tone almost apologetic, but his words feel like he's hammering the nails to your coffin. "I'll...see you later though, yeah?"

He doesn't wait for an answer. He's gone before you can say anything, before you can process his words, and for the second time that night, he leaves you standing there with your heart in pieces and your thoughts in chaos.

For a moment, you swear you're paralyzed. You can't move. Can't breathe. Your vision blurs as every doubt you'd buried for months comes rushing back, screaming in your face louder and crueler than ever. You've never felt smaller, more foolish.

Your heart beats erratically now, fighting against the realization of the truth settling in your chest—a heaviness so suffocating it threatens to take you under. The Jake who stood in front of you just now—guarded, distant, a stranger—was so unlike the boy who had made you laugh until your sides ached, who'd stayed up with you on countless late nights, sharing secrets no one else knew.

The Jake who made promises.

Your mind spirals. Maybe...maybe those promises were never meant to be kept. Maybe they were just words to fill the time.

Maybe you were just someone to fill the time.

Your breath starts to pick up and you're frantically scanning the room, desperate for an escape from your thoughts through any familiar face. Your eyes finally land on Ni-ki and Heeseung casually sitting on one of the couches, their carefree laughter a stark contrast to your inner implosion. You beeline to them, forcing a smile on your face as you plop down beside them.

"Y/N!" Ni-ki grins the moment he spots you, scooting over to make room. "Where've you been hiding? Thought you ditched us for good."

"I've been here,“ you give the boys a small smile, praying they don't notice the way your hands tremble as you sit down, “just...mingling."

Heeseung raises an eyebrow at the faint crack in your voice, but doesn't push further, "Well, we all missed you. Pizza pig-out sesh and games tomorrow? You can tell us everything we've been missing out on."

You laugh, trying to keep the conversation light, but it comes out shaky, your voice tight under the weight of your hidden emotions, "I think it's you guys who need to catch me up."

Ni-ki tilts his head, narrowing his eyes at you, "Are you okay? You look...off. What—did someone spill punch on you? Lemme guess, was it Jake?"

At his name, the knife in your stomach twists even deeper, and you look away, hoping they don't notice the way your face falls.

But Heeseung notices. Of course. His gaze sharpens, the playful teasing in his expression replaced with a softened concern, "Y/N...what's going on?"

"I'm fine," you reply a little too quickly, your voice a little too high. You plaster a smile on your face, turning back towards the two boys, concern written all over their faces. "Just tired. Long day."

Neither of them look convinced, but before Heeseung can say anything else, Ni-ki nudges him and gestures towards something across the room.

"Hey...isn't that—"

You follow Ni-ki's gaze, and you immediately wish you didn't.

Because just like that, your world crumbles.

There she is—Jenn.

You're not even wondering when she got here, how she got here, or even why she's here in the first place. No, not even.

Because all that's occupying your mind right now is the way she's there, perched comfortably on Jake's lap on one of the couches in the distance, her arm draped casually over his shoulder.

The way she's laughing freely at something he says, her hand lightly brushing against his as if it's second nature, her fingers briefly pushing a strand of hair away from his face.

The way Jake doesn't even flinch, the way he doesn't pull away.

The way he smiles at her.

That same smile—the one you've spent weeks convincing yourself was yours—now feels like a cruel joke.

And that does it. For the first time that night, despite all you endured, you shatter.

You force yourself to look away, but it's too late. Your chest hollows out deeper and deeper with every passing second, until all you're left with is a final realization:

Maybe you never really had him at all. He was never yours in the first place.

Ni-ki and Heeseung exchange glances before looking at the expression on your face—all the color drained, as if you were merely just a body, paralyzed. Both of them open their mouths, but nothing comes out, clearly unsure of what to say, but you don't give them the chance. You're already standing, grabbing your bag at your side with trembling hands.

"Y/N, wait—" Heeseung starts as both him and Ni-ki stand up with you, but you shake your head, his voice distant and muffled as if he's speaking to you underwater.

"I need some air," you mumble, but you're sure neither of them hear you, your voice barely above a whisper.

Before they can stop you, you're already weaving through the crowd, your vision blurring as you fight the overwhelming urge to break down. You stop at the door, your eyes quickly scanning the cluttered floor for your shoes. For a moment, you think you've made it—escaped the suffocating air and heartbreak clawing at your throat—but a mistake you didn't mean to make stills you.

You glance over your shoulder, and there he is.

Jake's eyes meet yours, and the world comes to a stop. His easy smile slips from his face and is immediately replaced by a flicker of panic, his brows drawing together as if he's just realized something, but you don't stick around to analyze it.

Not when your heart is already in pieces on the floor.

You quickly look the opposite way, fighting the sting of burning tears threatening to spill over as your fingers fumble desperately with the zipper of your coat when you hear a concerned voice from behind you.

"Y/N?" Jungwon's familiar voice cuts through your haze, his hand resting lightly on your shoulder. "What—where are you going?"

"Home," you whisper, avoiding his gaze as you finally manage to get your coat on, turning towards the door.

Suddenly, Jungwon steps in front of you, a firm frown on his face, "Hey, hey, what's wrong? Talk to me—"

"Jungwon, I need to go," you look up at him as your voice cracks for the nth time that night, feeling Jake's set of eyes on you still, "Please, Won."

He hesitates, clearly confused but more worried over anything else, "Okay, but I'm driving you."

You sigh, shaking your head, "No, it's fine—"

"I'm driving you," Jungwon repeats, leaving no room for argument as he's already grabbing his coat and walking out the door.

Not bothering to look behind you to see if Jake's still watching, you follow Jungwon out to the hallway, the chill of the air feeling like a fresh wave of emotions crashing over you all at once: embarrassment, anger, heartbreak.

You're too caught up in your spinning thoughts to even notice the sound of frantic footsteps behind you until a voice cuts through the silence.

"Y/N."

His voice is quiet, almost drowned out by the muffled hum of music and laughter seeping from the party you should've escaped from a long time ago.

But still, you hear it anyway—because of course you do. Because it's him. And no matter how much you wish you didn't, you'd silence the entire world just to hear that voice.

And you hate it.

You hate how your entire body freezes mid-step, you hate how every nerve within you comes alive at the sound of his voice, you hate how your heart stumbles, as if trying to root itself in the pain you've been trying so hard to outrun.

You turn around slowly, against every ounce of logic telling you to keep walking. And when your eyes land on him—on the raw, desperate, almost broken look on his face—you hate yourself even more.

Because even now, even after everything, your heart still sinks at the sight. And you hate how you give him the power to break you with just one look.

“Can we talk?” Jake asks, his voice low and unsteady as he takes a small step towards you.

From beside you, Jungwon hesitates, his gaze flickering between you and Jake. After a beat, he nods, "I'll get the car. Wait here."

He spares Jake a final look of warning before nudging you for comfort and stepping into the elevator.

The elevator doors close, leaving you and Jake alone in the hallway, the air thick with unspoken words and emotions.

You swallow hard, your throat tight, but you steel yourself, "What do you want, Jake?"

You shift your weight and instinctively cross your arms, a defensive barrier between you and the boy you spent too long letting into your heart. His eyes meet yours, and for a moment, the vulnerability in them makes your resolve falter.

He takes a hesitant step towards you before exhaling shakily, running a hand through his hair.

“I—I messed up tonight. I didn’t mean to...," he trails off, his words fumbling, his eyes searching yours in desperation, his heart breaking at the way your tears are a second away from falling over.

"...to completely ignore me all night? Make me feel like nothing?" You finish for him, your quiet voice breaking despite your attempt to stay composed.

"No. God, no. You're not nothing," he says quickly, his voice faltering on the last word. "Y/N, you matter so much to me."

“Well it definitely didn't feel that way,” your voice is barely audible, but you finally look up at him, the hurt finally bubbling to the surface. “After everything you said—promised, everything we talked about…”

"I know, I just—" he hesitates, his voice barely above a whisper. He takes a tentative step closer, his movements slow and careful, like he's afraid you'll break if he gets too close. "I was nervous."

"It’s been so long, and I didn’t know what to say, how to act. I wanted to get it right—to make it perfect—but instead, I just—" he stops, dragging another frustrated hand through his hair. His eyebrows knit together in that familiar way that once made your heart flutter, but now only adds to the ache in your chest.

You let out a hollow laugh, the bitter sound foreign even to your own ears, “Well, congratulations, Jake. You managed to mess it up anyway.”

“Please,” he looks devastated, his hands trembling at his sides. “Y/N, please don’t think I don’t care about you. I do. More than you know. I just—I don't know how to do this. I panicked and I didn't mean to hurt you, I swear."

"Then why was...," you look at him, your eyes still stinging from all the unshed tears as you take a shaky breath, “...why was she all over you tonight? Why didn’t you stop her?”

He falters, his shoulders slumping under the weight of your question, “It wasn’t what it looked like. I didn’t—I couldn’t—”

“You couldn’t,” you echo, the words spilling out in a rush now, each one cutting him deeper. “I should've known. Let me guess, she wants to get back together, right?"

Jake's silence is deafening, and it immediately answers your question. He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. The way he looks at you—eyes wide and filled with regret, lips trembling as if searching for the right words—confirms everything you were afraid of.

You squeeze your eyes shut, a shaky breath escaping your lips—a sound caught somewhere between a scoff and a choked sob. No matter how hard you try, the wall holding back your emotions cracks under the weight of it all. The doubts you’ve tried so hard to bury suddenly resurface, crashing over you like waves, each one carrying the sting of every insecurity, every fear you’ve ever had about this moment. Your chest feels tight, your heart splintering under the realization that everything you were afraid of might be true.

"Jake, I can't do this," you whisper, shaking your head. "I can't be the person you lean on while you try to figure out what you want."

"No, no—Y/N, I do know what I want," he pleads, his voice cracking as he tries to step closer. "And it’s you. Always been you, Y/N. Everything I said—I meant it."

His words hang heavy in the air, the faint echo of the party music filtering through the cracks in the door and into the quiet hallway. You look away, refusing to let him see the way your tears finally spill over.

"You promised," you let out softly and slowly, through your sniffles. “You promised you wouldn't hurt me. You said you'd prove that I could trust you, that I didn't have to be scared. You knew I was worried, Jake. And you...you hurt me anyways."

"And I swear I meant every word I said. I still do," Jake says, his voice desperate as he shakes his head. He steps even closer, his hand reaching out and brushing against yours, but you pull back before he can close the distance. "You have to believe me. Please, Y/N. You're the only one."

You shake your head again, the tears now freely rushing down your cheeks despite your best efforts, "I—I don't know if I can believe that anymore, Jake. I want to, I really, really do. But tonight..."

Jake’s face falls, the weight of your pain crashing into him all at once. His lips tremble as he struggles to hold himself together, his eyes turning glassy themselves. The sight of you—broken, because of him—cuts deeper than he thought was humanly ever possible. His voice is barely above a whisper, raw and pleading, “Y/N, I’m so sorry. I—God, please. Please give me a chance.”

You look at him—at the boy who became your safe space these past few months—and all you feel is the ache in your heart.

"I can't do this right now, Jake," you finally let out through your broken voice as you take a step back. "I think I just need space."

The words hang in the air like a death sentence. His breath hitches as if your words physically hit him in the face, "Y/N..."

Your phone suddenly buzzes, a text from Jungwon letting you know he's outside. You glance down at it, then back at Jake. For a moment, you hesitate, your heart screaming at you to stay—to give him the chance he's yearning for. But your brain knows better.

"I have to go," you murmur softly, as you take a final step back, turning away before more tears threaten to spill all over again. You force yourself to keep walking, fighting the overwhelming urge to look back—to let him pull you into his arms, where you wished so desperately you belonged.

Frozen, Jake watches helplessly as you walk away, his chest tightening with every step you take. Everything feels like it's caving in, regret clawing at him the more he lets you walk further away. He opens his mouth to say something—anything—but the words fail him, silenced by the weight of his own mistakes.

To Jake, the sounds of the party are now far in the distance, drowned out by the pounding in this ears. Instead, the hallway falls into a haunting silence, broken only by the faint echo of your retreating steps—a cruel reminder of what he's just let slip away.

The car ride starts in complete silence, the only sound between you and Jungwon the soft hum of his engine and the faint sound of whatever playlist he was playing in the background. You stare out the window, watching the city lights blur together, your coat clutched tightly under your grasp as if it's the only thing keeping you sane.

Jungwon glances at you out the corner of his eye, his hands steady on the steering wheel. He doesn't say anything at first, but you know him well enough to sense the storm brewing in his head.

"Okay," he finally says, as if on cue, breaking the silence. "Spill."

You don't respond, your eyes still fixed on the surrounding city breezing by you, as if the passing view could somehow erase the memory of him. Your fingers dig further into the fabric of your coat, your knuckles going numb.

Jungwon gives you a few more moments of silence, but when you don't make any sign of responding, he speaks up again.

"Y/N," his voice softens, but the edge of his concern cuts through. "Don't do that thing where you shut people out. Especially me, you know I hate that."

"I'm not—" you start, but your voice wavers, and the lie dies on the tip of your tongue.

“You are," he exhales sharply from beside you, his grip on the steering wheel tightening. "Look, you don't have to tell me everything, but don't pretend you're fine when you're clearly not."

The words sit heavy in the air as you swallow hard, your throat burning as you finally whisper, "It's stupid, Jungwon."

He doesn't take his eyes off the road, but his tone is firm, "I'm sure if it's got you looking like this, it's not stupid."

You want to argue, to tell him to just let it go, but the hurt pressing down on your chest is too much. The ache in your body threatens to take over again, and you hate it. You hate how the tears form again, how you can still see Jake looking at you like that, like you were breaking right in front of him and he didn't know how to stop it.

Jungwon waits. He doesn't push, because he knows you. He knows you're just hurting, struggling to grasp your overwhelming emotions, so he gives you the time you need. But his quiet patience is unbearable, like he's peeling back every layer of your resolve just by being there, and eventually, you give in.

"It's Jake," you finally choke out, the name tumbling from your lips like a curse.

Jungwon doesn't respond immediately, but you can feel the shift in his demeanor. His jaw tightens, and his fingers flex against the wheel, "I figured as much honestly, after what I saw in the hallway, but what exactly happened, Y/N?"

You shake your head, your voice shaky, "It doesn't matter. I—I just feel so stupid, Won. Like, how could I think..."

You trail off, biting the inside of your cheek hard enough to draw blood. Jungwon gives you a softened glance, signaling you to continue whenever you're ready to.

You take a deep breath before you speak up again, "How could I ever think I was good enough for him, you know?"

There's a silence that follows after your words and you hear Jungwon take in a deep inhale.

"This isn't on you, Y/N. This has nothing to do with whether you're enough or not," Jungwon's voice is steady, but there's a firm edge to it now. "Look, I don't want to overstep or anything...and I definitely don't want to vouch for him—especially right now but...are you sure he's not just freaking out?"

You tilt your head over at the boy next to you, "Freaking out about what?"

"You," Jungwon says simply like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

"That doesn't make any sense," you start shaking your head. "Why would he—"

"Because you're you," Jungwon interrupts, his tone matter-of-fact as he keeps his eyes trained on the road in front of him. "And Jake's a complete idiot, but even idiots get scared when they care about someone as much as he clearly cares about you."

You blink, Jungwon's words sinking into all the cracks formed within you, "You really think he cares about me that much?"

“Are you kidding?” Jungwon scoffs, his expression a mix of disbelief and exasperation. “Y/N, the guy looks at you like you hung his moon and stars. Trust me, I’ve seen it.”

And you don't know what comes over you, but Jungwon's words hit you like a punch to the gut, and suddenly, the tears you've been holding back come rushing forward, hot and relentless. You cover your face with your hands, your body shaking as the sobs you've been swallowing all night finally make their way out.

Jungwon quickly looks over at you and, without hesitation, glances over his shoulder to pull over to the side of the road, the soft clicking of the hazard lights mixing in with your cries. When he finally puts the car in park, he doesn't say anything and just leans back in his seat, his hand resting lightly on your shoulder—close enough to remind you he's there, but not too much to smother you.

"I'm sorry," you manage to gasp out between sobs, your hands going up to wipe your face as all the overwhelming emotions finally take over you.

"Don't," Jungwon says firmly, "Don't apologize for feeling like this."

You take a shaky breath, trying to pull yourself together as your sobs eventually start to slow down, "I just don't understand. If he cares so much, why does this hurt so bad?"

"I don't think it's about how much he cares," Jungwon sighs, as if carrying your pain alongside you. "Sometimes...sometimes people care so much that they don't know what to do with it. They panic. They overthink. And they mess up in the worst ways because they don't know how to handle what they're feeling."

You look up at him, your face still wet with tears, "So you're saying it's an excuse."

"No," Jungwon replies, quickly shaking his head fervently. "Definitely not an excuse. Jake screwed up, Y/N. Big time. And it's 100% on him to fix that, not you. But—"

He pauses and thinks for a second, his words deliberate, "—it doesn't mean his feelings aren't real. Or that he doesn't care about you."

You look away, glancing down at your hands in your lap, fiddling with the hem of your coat as you take in Jungwon's words.

"It's just feels like...like I'm the only one who got hurt here, Won. Like I'm the only one who..," you trail off, unable to form your thoughts into a coherent sentence, but leave it up to Jungwon to always fully understand you.

"You're not the only one," he says softly. "He's hurting too, Y/N. Maybe not in the same way, and maybe he doesn't deserve any sympathy, but I can see it. I've seen it. Jake...Jake isn't Jake without you. And honestly? That idiot is probably tearing himself apart right now."

Your lips part, but the words don't find you. Instead, you let the weight of Jungwon's words sink in, unsure what to do with how true they may be.

"You don't have to forgive him right now," Jungwon adds after a moment. "Hell, you don't even have to forgive him at all. Honestly, that might satisfy me just a bit. But maybe...maybe you owe it to yourself to hear him out. Not for him, but for you."

You turn to Jungwon, your lips forming into the smallest pout, "But what if it just makes everything worse?"

He gives you a faint, grounding smile, equal parts reassuring and honest.

"Then you walk away knowing you did everything you could—for yourself. And if it does come to that," he shrugs lightly, "we'll figure it out together."

You're quiet for a long moment, the thought of walking away from Jake and everything he means to you terrifying you…but you know Jungwon's right. You owe yourself the chance to try—even if the unknown outcome fails you.

With a shaky breath, you nod, brushing away the last of your tears, "Thanks, Jungwon."

"You're welcome," Jungwon hums in acknowledgement before his lips curve into a small grin, the atmosphere lightening slightly, "but, uh, could you at least use the tissues in the glove compartment before my seats turn into a snot rag?"

You manage to let out a small scoff of disbelief as you roll your watery eyes, "You're the worst."

"Nah," Jungwon replies with a cheeky grin as he shifts the car back into drive, but not before he reaches over to ruffle your hair playfully. "C'mon. Let's get you home."

The knocking at Jungwon’s door comes at the worst possible moment.

He’s halfway through organizing his desk—something he only attempts when he’s too frustrated to sit still—and the last thing he expects to see when he swings the door open is Jake, standing there looking like he hasn’t slept a millisecond all night.

Jungwon makes no sign of saying anything or making a move, just staring at the older boy in question. Jakes shifts uncomfortably, running a hand through his messy hair, not used to seeing Jungwon in this sour, expressionless mood.

"Hey," Jake finally says, his voice hesitant.

“What do you want?” Jungwon deadpans, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed tightly over his chest. He knows he sounds harsh, but, frankly, he doesn’t care.

Jake falters for a moment, his gaze dropping to the ground, "I...I need your help."

Jungwon's eyes narrow, "With what, exactly?"

He knows what, but he's not letting Jake off that easily. Not after last night.

"With Y/N," your name hangs in the air between them as Jake's voice cracks, and Jungwon clenches his jaw before he lets out a frustrated sigh.

"I don't think you're in any position to be asking me for help right now."

"I know," Jake says quickly, his hands raising in surrender. "I know, okay? I screwed up big time. I—God, I don't even know where to start, Jungwon. I just...I don't want to make things worse."

Jungwon lets out a bitter, humorless laugh, stepping back and motioning his head to let Jake enter his room, "You've already got a good head start on that, I see."

Jake steps inside, awkwardly hovering near the door as Jungwon moves to sit on the edge of his own bed. He doesn't offer Jake a seat, and Jake doesn't ask for one.

"She cried, you know," Jungwon says after a few moments of silence, his voice stone cold. "I had to pull over because she couldn't even hold it together long enough for me to get her home. I've known her my entire life, and I don't think I've ever seen her cry that hard, Jake."

Jake flinches, the words physically hurting him, "I didn't mean to—"

"Yeah, I know," the younger boy cuts him off, his voice sharp, his anger rising on behalf of you. "You didn't mean to hurt her. But you did. And now you're asking me to help you fix it like it's that easy."

"It's not easy," Jake mutters quietly, his hands fumbling with the edge of his hoodie. "Nothing about this...none of it is easy. But I know I messed up, and I—I can't just leave things like this, I can't lose her, Jungwon. I care about her too much."

Jungwon deadpans at his friend, fighting back the urge to scoff in his face, "If you cared about her, you wouldn't have let her walk out of that party looking like her entire world was falling apart."

Jake looks up, his eyes red-rimmed and filled with something Jungwon can't quite name...desperation, maybe. Or guilt. Or both.

"I didn't know what to do," Jake finally admits, his voice still barely above a whisper, as if admitting to himself for the first time, too. "I saw her, and she looked so...broken. And I—I panicked, I didn't know what to do, and by the time I realized, she was gone."

Jungwon leans back, groaning as he runs a hand over his face. The anger bubbling within him hasn't fully faded, but he knows there's something else now—something softer, something that makes it harder to keep his protective guard for you up.

Because he knows Jake isn't lying.

"You don't get to half-ass this, Jake," Jungwon finally says after he thinks to himself. "She's not some random girl you're trying to impress, she isn't Jenn. This is Y/N. If you want to fix things, you have to be ready to own up to everything. No excuses, no backing out. She deserves that much."

Jake nods quickly, his eyes wide and hopeful at Jungwon's slight change in demeanor, “I will. I swear, I will.”

"And don't think she's going to forgive you right away," Jungwon adds. "She's hurt. You have to give her time. This isn't about what you want—it's about what she needs."

Jake swallows hard, nodding again, “I just want to talk to her. To explain. To tell her I’m sorry and—”

His voice cracks, and he looks down, his hands trembling slightly. Jungwon lets out a sigh, his mixed feelings turning more into something closer to pity. Because as much as he wants to stay mad for your sake, he's known Jake long enough to know that he's a good guy—and that his heart is in the right place.

But even more than that, he knows you. And he knows how much Jake means to you, even if you won't admit it, especially not now more than ever.

"You're actually an idiot," Jungwon says after a few beats, his voice carrying a lighter tone now. "But for some godforsaken reason, knowing her, I think she might actually miss you."

Jake looks up from his hands, his eyes searching Jungwon's face for any flicker of doubt, "You really think so?"

Jungwon shrugs, standing up and moving towards his door, "I think you've got a lot of work to do if you want to earn her trust back. But...I think you still have a chance."

Jake doesn't say anything as he follows Jungwon to the door, but the look on his face says enough—there's a new slight look of hope. It's small, but he's clutching onto it like it’s his lifeline.

“You know," Jungwon says when he reaches the doorway. "Y/N’s not the type to let people in easily. She puts up walls—but with you…she let them down. You’re special to her, Jake, even if she doesn’t say it. Don’t throw that away. For her sake, and yours.”

“I won’t,” Jake promises, his voice steady now. “Thank you, Jungwon.”

Jungwon nods at the older boy before giving him a faint smile, "And just so you know, I defended you yesterday. So don't prove me wrong or I'm actually going to deck you."

Jake lets out a weak laugh as he hangs outside Jungwon's door, "Noted. I promise I won't let her down again."

Jungwon doesn’t respond, just closes the door with a soft click, and hopes—for all their sakes—that Jake means it.

Jake [5:12PM]: hi Y/N Jake [5:12PM]: i know I'm the last person you want to hear from right now. and i don’t blame you at all Jake [5:13PM]: but i cant just stay silent and let this sit between us, and i value you too much to not respect you needing space and just show up at your door Jake [5:14PM]: even though it’s killing me to stay away Jake [5:14PM]: after you left the party last night, i went back inside. i told jenn that whatever we had in the past is exactly that, the past. and i swear to you, Y/N, there’s nothing between us. there hasn’t been for a long time. and it’s my fault for making it seem otherwise. Jake [5:15PM]: and as for how i acted…i don’t even know where to start. i fucked up extremely. nothing will excuse my actions and i don’t expect you to forgive me. but i need to apologize properly, you deserve that much. Jake [5:17PM]: please let me see you, Y/N. i don’t deserve it, and i don’t deserve you. but you mean everything to me, and i hate that i hurt you. and i promise, if you let me, i’ll do everything to make it up to you.

You stare at the phone in your hand, the messages feeling like salt to an open wound. The words on the screen begin to blur together as tears prick your eyes, spilling over before you even realize it. You don't bother wiping them away—the sting in your chest too raw, too heavy. Each word feels like Jake is standing right there in front of you, his voice soft and broken, tangled with regret.

You tell yourself to stop reading. You've already gone through the same messages at least a hundred times in the past ten minutes, overanalyzing each syllable as if they hold the answers to all of your questions.

And yet, you can't stop.

You want to be angry. You are angry. Or, at least, you think. Because beneath the flame of your anger that's already threatening to die out? There's an ache you can't ignore—a small, stubborn part of you that refuses to let go to the sincerity in his words, clinging onto the hope that he's telling you the truth.

You mean everything to me, and I hate that I hurt you. I promise, if you let me, I'll do everything to make it up to you.

The ache twists harder, curling into doubt. What if he means it? What if he's telling the truth?

But of course, the fear rises just as quickly. Because what if he's not? What if you let him back in, and it all falls apart again? What if you let yourself believe in him, giving him the second chance he's asking for, only to have your heart shattered worse than before?

And then, there's Jungwon's voice, soft but steady, cutting through the chaos brewing in your mind: "Even idiots get scared when they care about someone as much as he clearly cares about you."

Your breath catches.

Because that's the worst part. Knowing that maybe—just maybe—Jake really does care. Knowing that maybe he's telling the truth—and you're the one too afraid to take the risk, ready to build up the walls Jake's managed to get through.

Your phone screen suddenly dims, pulling you out of your thoughts and back into the moment. You blink rapidly, wiping at your face, your mind a mess of emotions you can't untangle or describe.

Fear. Hope. Doubt.

And something else—something you're afraid to admit, but you know is unmistakably real.

And it's stronger than the fear churning in your chest—it's something that's pulling you forward.

Your heart pounds almost out of your rib cage as you let out a shaky breath, the weight on your shoulders pressing harder and harder with every second you hesitate. The ache doesn't let up, but neither does your hope.

So you stop thinking altogether, letting your heart take control instead.

You shut your eyes, as if bracing yourself for a crash, take a deep breath, unlock your phone, and let your fingers fly across the screen, each word feeling like a leap off a cliff.

You hit send.

Y/N [5:30PM]: hi jake Y/N [5:30PM]: you can come over

The soft knock at your door startles you, even though you know it’s coming.

“Y/N?”

His voice. Jake’s voice.

Your heart clenches painfully, a conflicting mix of longing and hurt washing over you all at once. It hasn't even been a full day since the party, but the weight of his absence has already hollowed you out, leaving a hole you can't ignore. You know he's the one who caused it—that the cracks in your heart are his doing—but at the same time, the stubborn part of you whispers that he's also the only one who can mend them.

You make your way to the door, your movements hesitant as you crack it open, peek out, and...there he is.

"Hi," Jake says softly.

He's a mess. A beautiful, saddened mess—his hair messy, like he's been running his hands through it all day, his eyes rimmed with the kind of exhaustion that isn't just physical. One hand is buried deep in his jacket, and in the other—

"Flowers?" You ask, raising a brow in surprise.

Jake's ears turn red. "Yeah. Uh, I didn't know if you had a favorite, so I got—"

You open the door wider, revealing the full bouquet—daisies, tulips, roses, all wrapped together in crinkled tissue paper.

"—a little bit of everything," he finishes awkwardly, his voice trailing off, pausing for a second before holding them out to you with a sheepish smile.

Your lips twitch subconsciously, despite everything.

"Jake, you're literally allergic."

His mouth opens, then closes, the redness from his ears now spreading to his cheeks.

"Well, yeah, but—," Jake mumbles, shifting on his feet. "—not, like, deadly or anything dramatic like that."

He pauses, his voice dropping into something softer, more vulnerable, "I just wanted you to have them. That's all."

You feel your insides tighten, the sincerity in his voice getting to you. For a moment, all you can manage to do is stare at him—at the way his eyes are silently pleading, wide and unsure.

You hesitate for a second, then step back and open the door wider.

"Thank you," you say quietly, your fingers brushing against his as you take the bouquet, sending a flicker of warmth through you. "Come in."

Jake hesitates, his eyes searching yours like he's not sure if he's actually allowed to. When you turn away and walk towards your kitchen, he finally steps inside, kicking off his shoes quickly and hovering by the door like he doesn't know what to expect next.

You set the flowers down on the counter, adjusting them carefully before turning back to him. He's still standing there, stiff and uncertain, the distance between you feeling larger than ever before.

"So..." You say, crossing your arms tightly across yourself, shifting your weight as a way to ground yourself—though the lump in your throat makes it feel impossible.

Jake exhales shakily, his hands fidgeting by his sides and gaze darting to the floor before finally landing on you, "I came to apologize. Properly."

You blink at him, expression unreadable, "You already said sorry."

Your voice comes out sharper than intended, surprising even yourself, but the words leave before you can stop them. Jake flinches, just slightly, but he nods, knowing he deserved that.

"Not like I should have," he says, stepping closer, his voice low and careful, like he's afraid you'll run out of your own apartment. "I know I messed up. I hurt you, and I hate that I did. I hate that I made you feel like you weren't enough or that someone else could ever compare to you, Y/N."

Your arms tighten around yourself as if the words might knock the breath out of you as look away, unsure if you can meet the rawness in his eyes.

"Last night," Jake continues, his eyes filling with guilt, "I didn't handle last night right. And not just how I handled Jenn, but I let my own insecurities and stupid fears of being perfect for you get in the way. I let it happen and mess everything up. I let you think that you didn't matter to me, and I will never forgive myself, Y/N."

His words hang in the air, heavy yet sincere, and for a moment, all you can do is stare at him as you process his words slowly.

"And I don't expect you to forgive me either, Y/N," Jake's voice wavers before he continues, "but I need you to know that I'm so, so sorry. No excuses. For all of it—for making you feel like anything less than everything, for making you feel like you weren't my first choice. Because you are. You're my only, Y/N."

His words hit you with a force that crashes over the walls you tried so desperately to build. They're overwhelming yet tender, like rediscovering a piece of yourself you hadn't even realized you lost. And you want to let them comfort you, you do. But the pain from last night lingers deep down, reminding you of why you built those walls in the first place.

For a moment, the silence stretches on longer than you intend, the weight of his words settling in the air between you. Jake doesn't look away though—his gaze unwavering, vulnerable, and raw.

As though he's laid himself bare before you, giving you the power to either accept or shatter him completely.

When you finally find your voice, it trembles despite your best efforts, "Jake...I don't know if I can just forget what happened."

"I'm not asking you to forget," he says quickly, taking another step closer until there's only a few feet left between you. "I just want the chance to fix us. I can't lose you like this, Y/N."

Your breath catches at the proximity, his presence pulling you in like gravity. The pain from last night tries to claw its way back into your heart—sharp and bitter—but his warmth reminds you of something else that refuses to be ignored.

That flicker of hope that's demanding your attention, screaming at you to just let him in—not just for his sake, but for you.

You take a deep breath, finally meeting his gaze. "Jake, I don't need you to...to be this perfect person. I don't need you to prove anything to me."

You pause, pushing past the lump in your throat, "Because since the beginning, I always believed you. And...I think I still do. Even after last night, I still believe you, Jake. No matter how hard I try to."

Jake lets out a breath he thinks he's been holding in for hours, "Really?"

"Yeah," you nod slowly, as if reassuring yourself as much as him. "But I don't need any of your promises or proof or any of that. I just...I just need you as you."

His eyes soften at you as he nods so quickly it's almost desperate.

"And I need you to be honest with me, Jake," you continue before he can speak. "If we do this, I need to know I can trust you. Because I don't know if I can do this...this waiting game anymore."

"You can," he says immediately, closing the distance between you two, making your breath hitch. You can see the way his hands are trembling, the slight quiver in his lips. "You can trust me. No more hesitation. I'm all in, Y/N. This is it for me, you're it."

You search his face for any sign of doubt, any speck of hesitation. But all you find is his sincerity—so hopeful and so real—the kind that makes you want to let him in fully and let your walls crumble all over again.

So you do.

"Okay," you say softly, almost as if you're testing the word.

Jake's eyes widen, the relief and hope flooding his features. Slowly, as if asking for permission, he reaches out, his fingers brushing against yours tentatively.

"Okay?" He whispers, his voice barely audible to you as his eyes flicker between your hands and your face.

You nod, your own hand turning over so your fingers curl around his in an instinctive gesture that feels so natural it makes you want to scream. The warmth of his touch feels like the first real comfort you've felt in forever, and it's enough to make your resolve slip.

"But," you add softly, your eyes not leaving the way his hand wraps around yours so perfectly, "this doesn't mean everything's fine. We need to talk. We need to figure out where we stand, and where we go from there."

Jake nods again, his grip on your hand tightening slightly, "We will. Whatever it takes, Y/N, I'll do it. I need you to know how much you mean to me and I'll never stop trying to show you that."

You let out a shaky breath as you take in his words, finally looking up from your intertwined hands to meet his eyes, your own slowly filling with the tears you've been holding back.

"You really hurt me, Jake," you say quietly, your voice breaking from the sheer weight of your vulnerability being laid bare.

Jake's face crumbles instantly, guilt etched into every line of his expression. Without hesitation, his free hand comes up to gently cup your cheek, his thumb light brushing away the tears that fall, as if he's afraid you might pull away.

Your eyes flutter closed at the warmth of his hand, and despite the emotions raging inside you, you let yourself lean into him. It feels both reckless, yet inevitable, like free-falling and trusting—knowing—he'll catch you.

"I know," he whispers, his voice thick with emotion he can't swallow down. "And I'll spend as long as it takes to deserve you, Y/N. I'll never make you feel like that again."

You nod weakly, and before you can think too much, he wraps his arms around you, pulling you into the safety of his chest, his chin moving to rest on top of your head as his warmth envelops you completely.

And for the first time in a long time, you let yourself break, burying your face into his chest as the tears flow freely, the weight of everything finally breaking free as you let yourself melt into his tight embrace.

It's not perfect. It's not a fix-all.

But as Jake holds you close, whispering quiet reassurances into your hair, you know it's a start.

And a start is all you need.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。..・。.・゜✭・.・

epilogue:

“Hi, pretty.”

“Hi, Jake.”

On the other end of the call, Jake lets out a playful scoff. Even with the slight lag, you can see his lips twitch into that familiar pout—the one that still gives you butterflies, no matter how many times you've see it now, even a year later.

“After all we’ve been through, you still won’t give me a cute pet name?”

You roll your eyes, biting back a grin, “What do you want me to say? Hi, my handsome, perfect, kindest, funniest, boyfriend in the whole wide world?”

Jake leans closer to the camera, his expression completely serious as if you should already know his answer, "...Yes."

Giggles burst out of you, shaking your head at his antics. “You’re too cute to be doing all that, Jake. Pick a struggle.”

He clutches his chest dramatically, “You know, what? You’re my struggle—I fly across time zones, run on three hours of sleep, and you still won’t give me a crumb of your affection?”

“You’re exhausting.”

“And yet…,” Jake trails off with a teasing smirk, his voice dropping into that playful, yet low lilt that still makes your stomach flip to this day. "Here you are, calling me at 1AM in the morning.”

Your cheeks flush as you glance away from the screen, trying to ignore the way his teasing gaze makes you feel, "Don’t' get confused, it's not like I wanted to or anything. I just figured someone should remind you to go to bed or else you'll look like a zombie tomorrow at the fanmeet."

Jake laughs softly, the sound grounding you in a certain way only he ever can. "You're so thoughtful, babe. My number-one hater and number-one fan, all at once. I'm so lucky."

You send him an air kiss, the teasing grin on your face mirrored by the fond one tugging at his lips. He looks at you like he did in that first-ever call way back then—like you're his whole world, and he can't believe you're real.

"How's the jet lag this time?" You ask, steering the conversation to safer ground.

"It's not so bad," he shrugs, despite the clear exhaustion in his voice. "At least this trip is only for a few days. Then I can come back to the comfort of our bed."

You raise an eyebrow, "My bed."

Jake's eyes narrow, "Our bed. Just admit it—you miss me."

You pause. "Maybe. Just a little."

His grin widens, and for a moment, neither of you say anything, the conversation lulling into an easy silence—the kind of warmth that only comes with knowing someone so well.

Finally, you shift under your blanket, getting comfortable as Jake watches you through this screen, his gaze tender, as though memorizing the curve of your smile, the way you tuck your hair behind your ear.

"You should sleep," you murmur, holding your phone closer to your face. The glow of your phone reflecting off your soft features sends palpations to Jake's chest so loud he almost doesn't hear your words.

"Mm, I really should," Jake sighs, though he doesn't move an inch. "I'll talk to you soon, yeah?"

"Mmhm," you hum, your eyes closing at the softness of his voice.

“Sleep tight. I love you,” his says, voice soft and deliberate, making sure you feel every word.

“Goodnight, Jakey,” you tease, letting the smirk creep into your voice, peeking an eye open just to catch his reaction.

Jake groans dramatically, running a hand down his face, “Y/N…not this again.”

You giggle, the fondness within you growing tenfold as you take in his face—the slight pout of his lips, his messy hair, his eyes shining with unwavering adoration for you.

“I said I love youuu,” he whines, dragging out the last word, his lips tugging into the tiniest of smiles, his entire universe reflecting from his eyes.

Finally, you give in, smiling sweetly.

“I love you, too, Jake. You already know.”

And you’ve never meant anything more.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。..・。.・゜✭・.・

Songs that Remind me of Y/N:

From the first call to forever—you've always been my favorite melody. Yours, Jake <3

"As I Am" – Justin Bieber (ft. Khalid)

"Daylight" – Taylor Swift

"DIE 4 YOU" - Dean

"Psycho, Pt. 2" – Russ

"Heaven" – Bazzi

"Every Kind of Way" – H.E.R.

"Off My Face" – Justin Bieber

"Before You" – Benson Boone

"Sunflower" – Post Malone & Swae Lee

"Pink + White" – Frank Ocean

"No Doubt" – Enhypen <3

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。..・。.・゜✭・.・

update! if you enjoyed this and want more of no doubt!jake & y/n, check out my sequel series linked here for drabbles of their relationship <3

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。..・。.・゜✭・.・

the end! if you made it all the way, this is for you:

⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡♡♡♡♡♡

p.s. i wanted to leave the ending kinda up to interpretation—hence the time skip to a year later..but lowkey what if i wrote short drabbles/scenes of things jake does to gain Y/N's trust again, from small to big gestures etc etc..lmk if that's something anyone would wanna see !! (update — linked above now!)

<3, addie

m.list here!

tag list (love you all <3):

(i hope it let me tag everyone!)

@thesassy-mia @ikeulove @renaishun @xylatox @puma-riki @blackberryrains @dreamiestay @junislqve @lamin143 @dreamy-carat @etherealhan @vvenusoncasual @belovedsthings @somuchdard @sumzysworld @mirouie @almondtofu006 @fancypeacepersona @vivimura @hollxe1 @missthang600 @sugarikiz @sanasour @enhamonsterghoul @etherealriki

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upallnightallday · 1 month ago

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"I did it for realism."

Bitch, realism would be giving Evan "Buck" Buckley chronic leg pain.

Because I didn't even have ladder truck fall on my leg, I actually don't have any kind of trauma on my leg. I just have slightly wrong leg position and my whole left leg is screaming since I had to get off from my medication that increases my pain levels cause they gave heart palpations.

YOU DON'T NEED REALISM.

I'm in pain and mad. Give mee buddie ficrecs on Buck having chronic pain.

#911 spoilers #911 abc #911 #buddie #eddie diaz #evan buckley #911 show #911 on abc #anti tommy kinard #anti bucktommy #chronic pain #evan buck buckely #911 ficrecs

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cloudeulogy · 2 months ago

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ballerina cappuccina mentioned !!

'dress like an angel, act like crazy' an ot8 skz x adhd!reader smau by @cosmicalily

"everyday's a trial, baby." - 'crazy' by le sserafim

author's note: i thought the title was really funny and silly guys >< also this is lowkey my adhd hard launch?? i've mentioned it before but never made a dedicated fic about it . . . #firsttimekindanervous warnings: medication, mentions of mental overload/anxiety, DO NOT TRY JISUNG'S AT HOME, italian brainrot

taglist: @hyunjiiza @velvetmoonlght @s3ungm1nxxl0ve @btch8008s @heartsbyani @ellemir2404 @bellarellasstuff @starsinagreenskyxx @ashtxrie @pigeonseatmayo @modesttiger @woozarts @zelinkcrossing @urlocalmultigroupfan @shuuporanglinos @lezleeferguson-120 @r1nstaaa @bibibahngg @jessxxxfwd @koiiqqqq @lenfilms @yaniblvsh @dearmini @ilovedallywinston @0sunshinecryptid0 @peskybirdysya @channieschocco - dm, comment or send an ask to be added :)

୨ৎ fic library ୨ৎ about me ୨ৎ req rules ୨ৎ taglist ୨ৎ

#*ficrecs

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daisyfieldrecs · 4 months ago

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Bradley Bradshaw Fics

Old Habits Die Hard| Series| Warning in Each Chapter| @roosterforme

Right Girl, Wrong Time| Series|Warnings in Each Chapter| @roosterforme

Yours Truly, Bradley Bradshaw| Series| Warnings in Each Chapter|@roosterforme

Singing in the Sanctuary| Series| Warnings in Each Chapter| @arcane-vagabond

Strangers Like Me| Mini Series| Warnings in Each Chapter| @arcane-vagabond

Amhrán na Farraige| One-Shot| Angst, Smut| @arcane-vagabond

Welcome Home, Rooster Bradshaw.| One-Shot| Smut| @bradshawssugarbaby

Heartbreaks & Happy Birthdays| Angst, Allusions to Smut| @sorchathered

Wrong Number| One-Shot| Fluff, Lil Smut| @roosterforme

Never There| Pt.2| One-Shot| Fluff, Angst, Alllusions to Smut| @bobby-r2d2-floyd

Meet The Teacher| One-Shot| Fluff, Allusions to Smut| @bradshawssugarbaby

Personal Space| One-Shot| Fluff, Allusions to Smut| @warnersister

Mad About the Boy| One-Shot| Smut but not?| @bussyslayer333

There was something ‘bout you| One-Shot| Smut| @bussyslayer333

Off to the races| One-Shot| Smut| @bussyslayer333

Looking for somebody (to love)| One-Shot| Smut| @bussyslayer333

Fell in Luv| One-Shot| Fluff, Allusions to Smut| @bussyslayer333

Untitled| One-Shot| Allusions to Smut| @bussyslayer333

little wallflower| One-Shot| Fluff| @bradshawsbitch

Hotter Than Texas| Pt.2| Two-Shot (?)| Fluff| @tongue-like-a-razor

stranger.| One-Shot| Smut| @promisingyounglady

#ficrecs #daisyfieldrecs #top gun fanfiction #tog gun maverick #bradley rooster bradshaw #bradley bradshaw fanfic #bradley bradshaw fic #bradley bradshaw smut #bradley bradshaw fluff #bradley bradshaw angst

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yourbuckies · 6 months ago

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and even more of my favorite fics:

In The Dark • Marooned_Poet Lone Wolf and Cub • hachinana87 Tried to drift but don't know how • dharmashark the tender things we're working on • Lake (beyond_belief) Here and Where You Are • crinklefries I'll Get By • orphan_account turn me up when you feel low • fairyfable No Glory in the West • maggneto, profoundalpacakitten, Talli Cut Him Out In Little Stars • Gloromeien lane lines • sparkagrace

#stucky #stevebucky #stevebuckyedit #steve rogers #bucky barnes #steverogersedit #buckybarnesedit #marveledit #mcuedit #sebastian stan #chris evans #mine #ficrecs #hope the final days of this year are peaceful and safe and happy everyone #happy holidays <3

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biasbuck · 7 days ago

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BiAsBuck’s June ficrec Jamboree.

Hi everyone, happy Summer hiatus! Wow have you all been busy, there's so many incredible stories and art out there right now. I'm back with another round of fic that I've read and loved over the last month. It's a big one!!

As always you can find previous rec lists here.

21 June 2025

a one time thing (every time) by @fcntasmas back with a bang, this is a 40k 'what if Buck and Eddie were 'platonically' hooking up all along ever since 2x01, but didn't mean to catch feelings along the way' fic, with Eddie having feelings realisation first and spiralling accordingly. Completely gripping and an emotional rollercoaster, these two dummies can be soooo stupid (in love.) - I also adored the season 9 spec fic with Buck and Sophia Diaz roommates.

the taking of station 118 by pinkdoughnut was JUST what I needed to read post season 8 - with the firefam still grieving, Chim steps into the role of Captain, and right into our spec season 9 opening disaster AND a firehouse hostage situation. Brilliantly characterised team dynamics and some lovely buddie along the way.

hope is a well with no bottom (but you make me feel full) by @facewithoutheart super horny slightly voyeuristic Eddie keeps accidentally coming home early during roommate era whilst Buck is hooking up with people in his private time, and conspires to manifest this for himself. Hot and silly and fun.

let every man be master of his time by @illgetmerope a timeloop fic! Buck wakes up on his day off...and a frantic Eddie arrives on his doorstep. You see Eddie's been stuck in a loop and Buck keeps dying of a suspected aneurism, no matter how early he flies back from El Paso to warn him. When Buck inadvertently gets dragged into the loop with him, he assumes he's having another coma dream! How many loops will it take to figure it out? I loved the claustrophobia and sense of ever increasing desperation but also the way that feelings clicked into place through time (it's giving me Window of Opportunity, iykyk.)

on nights when i'm hollow by @sonofatoasterwaffle angry hurt/comfort with not too much comfort at first grief hook up fic, following the kitchen fight scene. This one is visceral and has claws and I loved it a lot. When you love someone so much you know exactly the right way to hit them where it hurts.

you need to cry, baby by @roosterseresin 'The first time it happens it scared the shit out of Eddie.' Buck keeps crying during sex (but in an affirming way). Cathartic and sweet, and overflowing with feeling (just like Buck.)

Getting Better All the Time by @glorious-spoon 'Buck walks in on Eddie watching porn. It escalates from there.' oh weewookinkmeme how you have blessed us so! We're gonna have to stain guard the couch. Such a lovely build of tension and embarrassment and succumbing to horniness.

four thousand miles to you by @spaceshipkat okay but Kat has been keeping us FED this month!! I literally couldn't pick which fic to rec at first so go read them all, but oh this one really stuck with me. 'It’s been over two months of chasing Buck across the country, from state to state to state, following a trail he suspects Buck doesn’t realize he’s dropping breadcrumbs on. If he did, Eddie worries he’d stop sending the postcards, and they’re his only clues.' I love postcard fic, and the chase and almosts and bubbling undercurrents of hurt and love and hope runs throughout. Gorgeous!

if food be the language of love (eat up!) by @chronicowboy Buck's learned love language is food, via Bobby. So with him gone, he...stops cooking. But soon he realises that maybe he needs this language to communicate with Eddie in the way he knows best. Grief and love and care. Such a beautiful healing journey.

i kinda wanna kiss your boyfriend if you don’t mind by @buckme 'Buck and Eddie get together. The people of LA are blinded by how attractive the two of them are once they're happy, and lots of flirting ensues.' Such an excellent set up, and so much fun to read. Loved the firefam being like, oh no, it's the new couple glow! Brilliant.

After the first time by @starlingbite 'Post season 8 - In which Buck and Eddie rush into sex before talking things through, resulting in Buck panicking ever so slightly in the middle of the night.' This is a short but sweet fic, beautifully sparsely written to show that late night time passing ticking clock, with some deeply relatable oh shit now what insomnia!

tux and flipper by @bisexualbellamyblake look something you have to know about me is I love me a gay penguin metaphor...can name you at least two gay penguin published stories to read right now, and am very delighted that buddie now have their own! 'Eddie comes out to Buck; Buck thinks he wants to go to the zoo.' So funny and delightfully endearing.

crawling back to you by @islandoforder 'post season 8, Buck confesses his feelings, Eddie lets him down as gently as he can, and they both try to figure out how to be just friends.' In which Eddie bluescreens, Buck and Eddie both go through seven depths of hell and introspection and panic, and eventually everything works out. Oh this one gave me so many emotions, gorgeously built up, and such a well crafted grasp on the quiet devastation of trying to stop things from changing when they already have.

pink like the inside of your by @themisally and finally I am dropping to my knees like an oasis in a desert and bowing down to this weewookinkmeme henren fic, in which Hen has made a deck of colour-coded flashcards to revise for her anatomy final, before Karen convinces her to try a more practical revision approach. So so sensual and erotic, dear god, I am so so so happy this gorgeous f/f fic exists. How many times is it possible to reread it in a week, asking for a friend?

Let's call it there for this month or I'll take up half your dash, but if you can't wait until July, don't forget to check out my daily ficrec tag, where there's even more goodness from this talented fandom!

#biasbuck recs #buddie #911 abc #buddie fic #buddie ficrec #buddie fanfic #buddie fic rec #henren #henren ficrec #911 fic #911 ficrec #911 fic rec

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eddiediaaz · 1 year ago

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You answered an anon about 911 fics and you finished saying that could recommend more! I’m new in the fandom and taking all the recommendations so if you want to give more, my ao3 and I are ready ☺️☺️☺️☺️

omg alright!! let me go through more of my bookmarks then hehe

Your Fingerprints Smeared on My Heart (Lead Me Back to You) by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels

what a heart can do by bvckandeddie

dead reckoning by euadnes

takin my time verse by archerincombat

would you lie with me and just forget the world by colonoscopys

a spell on you (because you’re mine) by starkvandyne, tawaifeddiediaz

a bleeding sun on a silver screen by rarakiplin

how you lean on my shoulder (how i see myself with you) by withoutthetiger

Traded by Princessfbi

i just wanna tell you how i'm feeling by calvingseason

i like you so much (it's kinda gross) by Aficatyourfingertips, brewrosemilk

the persistence of memory by withmeornotatall

stupid people. by brewrosemilk

dirty symphony by tawaifeddiediaz

Being Eddie by Daisies_and_Briars

Smoke and Ashes Brushed Off with Ink by Princessfbi

take me to the lakes by archerincombat

let's hear it for the boy by hattalove

Wait for me there by kitkatpancakestack

Ever After by ElvenSorceress

Frequent Flyer by whileyouresleeping

burn the straw house down by rarakiplin

maybe i’ll be brave enough by then by trippedandfell

Love Leaves A Memory by LeandraLocke

never felt this way before (yes i swear) by withoutthetiger

listen to you breathing (is where I wanna be) by Yavilee

at the right time by elisela

wishing to be the friction by ipretendtobesane

Lifelines by hetrez

Your Love is an Oil Slick (It Glows like Rainbows, It Stains My Soul) by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels

Leveling Up by lamardeuse

Evan Buckley & The Coma-Verse of Madness by Daisies_and_Briars

Agua Dulce and Other Sweet Things by TazzySnow

Gravity by rowan_wood

I'm cold but you light the fire within me by Beulaugh

if i need to rearrange my particles — i will for you. by dylaesthetics

you fill my head with you by Underhung_Aura

okay i think this is quite enough lmao, but if you do need more after all of these and the previous ones, let me know (because yes i do have more and more bookmarks lol)!! you can also check my #fanfic tag 😁 it's mostly buddie in there!

#alie replies #Anonymous #fanfic #buddie #911 #911 abc #911 fic #i tried to diversify the authors like last time too!!#*ficrecs

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iraot · 12 days ago

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SUMMARY A coastal town where the sea never forgets, and the tide sings for what was once sacrificed. WORD COUNT 16,814 PAIRING Rafayel x F!Reader | 18 + Only AO3 trigger warnings; there is depiction of body horror, descriptive fear, and a gothic horror feel.

For weeks before her departure, the sea begins bleeding into everything she dreams. Sometimes it laps gently at her ankles while she walks alone through foggy marshes; other times it claws skyward in enormous, hungry waves that never crest. She finds herself speaking languages she doesn’t know, mouthing syllables that taste like blood and pearl dust.

Through it all, one voice persists—low, lilting, and threaded with a coaxing amusement that unsettles more than comforts.

Even in dreams unmoored from water—dust-choked highways, elevators plummeting through mirrored shafts, hotel rooms painted with endless doors—he remains. A breath at her ear, a murmur from behind glass, never rising above a whisper but impossible to ignore.

‘Little driftwood,’ he says, like it’s her name, his affection buried in something older than sentiment. Each time she jolts awake, her throat aches as though she’s been speaking in her sleep.

Nights lose their shape. She either sinks into hours of black, dreamless weight or floats just beneath waking, caught in a suspended kind of awareness where every creak in the floor sounds like a wave breaking. Her bed begins to smell faintly of algae, her pillowcases tinted gray near the seams. Sometimes she finds crusts of salt at the corners of her eyes, tongue sharp with brine, though she hasn’t left her apartment in days.

The final dream comes heavy, too vivid to ignore. She’s underwater without drowning, suspended before a figure who shouldn’t be able to exist—long dark hair moving like strands of ink, tangled with coral-colored chains that pulse faintly with light. His body remains indistinct, almost too bright to look at directly, but his eyes hold a clarity that breaks something inside her.

They are not human, not even close, and they’re looking only at her.

She wakes before dawn, mouth dry, heart beating to a pattern she doesn’t understand. She watches it pulse at the hollow of her throat, checks her watch, and then pulls out her travel packet to confirm what she already knows. The rhythm matches the local tide table precisely. Outside, traffic moves like nothing’s changed, but she senses it—something has already reached out. Something wants her close.

Bayrun reveals itself in pieces, hunched low beneath a constant shroud of fog, the kind that hangs like soaked linen between rooftops. Nothing about the place moves quickly; window shutters sway loose on hinges, paint peels in slow curls from doorframes, and salt-warped signs hang crooked on rusted brackets. Streets narrow into alleys without warning, paved in uneven stones that glisten perpetually damp. A single diner squats beside a weather-beaten chapel, both places looking closed no matter the hour.

Locals are seen more often than heard. Faces pass behind smeared windows or vanish around corners just before she can make eye contact. No one waves. Even children, when glimpsed, speak in hushed voices and glance over their shoulders as if someone, or something, is always listening. It’s a town built for secrecy, or maybe one long practiced in it.

Her driver, Evan, doesn’t talk much once they pass the town’s faded welcome sign—just nods at landmarks she wouldn’t otherwise recognize. He smells faintly of kelp and engine grease, his nails stained from working the docks. When he speaks, it’s without looking at her, as though saying the words aloud too clearly might give them power.

“That house you’re staying in?” he mutters. “Wind always sounds like whispering in there…”

Later, after an uneasy stretch of road where the forest presses close on both sides, he adds, “Tide’s been off lately. Pulls wrong. Be careful near the shore after dusk.” The way he says “pulls” makes her stomach tighten, like it’s a living thing and not a part of nature’s design.

As they crest the ridge that overlooks the coastline, technology begins to fail in quiet stages. Bars of cell signals vanish, one by one. The truck’s radio dissolves into a whine of static, persistent even after he turns the volume down. Her phone vibrates once in her pocket, not from a message but a glitch—its compass spinning in tight circles before freezing north toward the sea.

Down below, the house slumps against the curve of a dying bluff. It stands alone, closer to the waterline than reason allows, separated from town by a thread of cracked asphalt and a mangled stretch of dune grass. The pier beside it stretches half-collapsed into the waves, ribs of it jutting from the water like something skeletal and dead. Weathered timbers lean sideways, windows clouded over by salt and time.

Evan stops the car and says nothing. After a long pause, he lifts her bags from the trunk, sets them down without meeting her eyes, and drives off.

Gravel crunches under her boots as she steps away from where Evan left her. His taillights vanish into the fog without a word of farewell. Salt air thickens with each step she takes toward the slouching house. Its outline sharpens the closer she gets—tilted walls, swollen shingles, the suggestion of once-white trim now blistered to gray.

A cracked walkway leads to a porch that groans beneath her weight. Boards shift underfoot, warped with moisture and age, nails sunken deep into soft wood. No sound comes from within, but the front door yields with a reluctant creak when she touches it. Hinges drag, and for a moment it feels like something resists from the other side.

Inside smells of mold first, then something sharper beneath—sweet and metallic, like copper steeped in seawater. The air clings, heavy, already settling in her hair and in her clothes. Dust motes drift in the watery light filtering through salt-blurred windows. Furniture sits where it was likely abandoned, shaped by years of quiet neglect.

She moves through the first room slowly. Floorboards cry out under her weight, but once she pauses, they keep creaking on their own, like the house is stretching after a long sleep. A fireplace stands bricked over, cold and forgotten, its mantle thick with grit. Shadows gather in the corners too quickly and retreat too slowly.

Upstairs, her bedroom faces the sea. The window doesn’t latch properly. She tests it twice and finds it opens without effort even when the night outside is still. Damp has sunk into the walls here, every surface feeling just shy of wet. Her skin prickles when she steps near the window frame, as though crossing into a threshold she hadn’t known was marked.

In the hallway, a narrow mirror hangs crooked beside the bannister. At first glance it seems unremarkable, but something’s wrong with the glass—her reflection shivers slightly at the edges. At dusk, it shifts more dramatically. Her neck elongates, her pupils darken. Her hair seems to sway even though the air stands dead still.

Over each window, tucked into the woodwork, rests a carved symbol. Circular and crude, gouged deep into the frames, just above where the sun could reach if it tried. She touches one absentmindedly. Her breath catches before she can stop it, a pressure blooming in her chest that fades only when she steps away.

Water doesn’t behave right in the house. Faucets release a hiss before any stream appears, and the liquid runs brown for the first few seconds, then clears to something clear but not clean. She leans close to the bathroom sink, ear near the basin. From somewhere deep in the plumbing comes a sound—low and melodic, almost human, almost sung.

Boxes sit half-emptied along the walls, their contents scattered across dusty furniture in attempts to make the house feel less hollow. Curtains are drawn open to let in the gray light, though it does little to chase away the damp that clings to everything. Her suitcase lies open near the foot of the bed, clothes unpacked into warped drawers that close unevenly. The place feels quieter now, as if it’s watching.

She steps out onto the porch with her phone, searching for signal where the air feels thinner, cooler. Two bars flicker into existence, wavering, then steady. Fog drapes low across the bluff, swallowing the pier in segments. Seagulls circle without calling.

When the call connects, there’s a pause, a delay—then Tara’s voice filters through, too bright, slightly distorted.

“Holy shit, you made it! What’s it like?”

She leans against the railing, watching the horizon. “Wet. Foggy. You’d hate it.”

Tara laughs. “Sounds like your kind of place.” A pause follows. “How’s the house?”

There’s no easy answer for that. She glances back through the doorway, where shadows nest along the crown molding. “Old. Noisy. The window in my room opens by itself.”

“That’s... comforting.”

She doesn’t mention the symbols yet. Or the mirror. Or the way the pipes hum as if listening. “It’s fine. I’ll settle in.” Her voice doesn't sound convincing, even to herself.

“You okay?” Tara’s voice shifts, softens. “You sound weird. Not like… bad weird. Just…”

“Just tired,” she says quickly. “Jet lag. New place. You know.”

Static rustles at the edge of the call. For a moment it sounds like someone else is breathing into the line, just beyond the signal. Tara doesn’t seem to hear it.

“Text me tomorrow,” her friend says. “Don’t go full recluse on me. Promise?”

“I promise.” She doesn’t hang up right away. Keeps the phone against her ear long after the line goes dead, waiting to hear if anything else wants to speak.

–

The fog lifts slightly the next morning, enough to see the town more clearly from the bluff. Paths of salt-scarred pavement wind through grasses flattened by constant sea wind. She pulls her coat tighter before stepping off the porch, the house behind her creaking once, almost like a groan of protest. Gravel shifts beneath her boots as she makes her way down the hill.

Bayrun doesn’t look bigger up close. If anything, it seems to shrink around itself—narrow alleys squeezed between leaning buildings, signage faded to near-invisibility. No traffic passes her on the road, just the slow wheeze of wind through power lines. A handful of locals linger near storefronts that don’t appear open but aren’t closed either. Faces lift to glance at her, then quickly look away.

She stops at a small general store near the church. A bell overhead rings flatly when she steps inside. Shelves sag with canned goods and brittle plastic packaging, everything covered in a fine, sticky dust. Behind the counter, a woman with sharp eyes and a sallow expression watches without speaking.

“Morning,” she offers.

The woman nods but says nothing in return.

“I’m staying up near the old pier. Came in for a few things—tea, maybe batteries?” Her voice sounds too loud in the cramped space.

“Tea’s down that aisle,” the woman says finally. “Batteries too, if any’re left.” Her accent is coastal but drawn out, as though words drag through water before reaching her lips.

Aisles are tight and uneven. Some items look untouched for years, others recently shifted, like someone had just passed through. She finds tea, not her brand, but something floral in a tin with rust at the seams. Batteries lie loose in a cardboard box, none matching. She takes what looks usable and returns to the counter.

The woman doesn’t ask for ID or introduce herself. As she rings up the purchase, her gaze lingers. “Storm season’s early this year. You should be careful out there near the cliffs.”

“I heard the tides are strange.”

“Strange doesn’t cover it,” the woman mutters. “Things go missing when they shouldn’t. Found a whole fishing skiff washed up with the engine still running. No one aboard.”

She hesitates, the tin of tea cold in her hand. “Does that happen often?”

“Not before. Now…” The woman presses her lips together, the rest left unsaid.

She takes her things and leaves. Outside, fog curls tighter again, choking out sunlight. Someone stands across the street for a moment, barely more than a shadow, then slips out of sight behind a building. She doesn’t follow.

Instead, she walks slowly back toward the bluff. Bayrun’s quiet is not the silence of abandonment—it’s the silence of breath held, something waiting beneath the rhythm of waves.

She returns to town twice more in the days that follow, always under a fog that never burns off entirely, no matter how high the sun climbs. It takes her only a few hours to learn the shape of Bayrun—four intersecting streets, each one narrowing as it nears the water. Most buildings are wood-faced and drooping, their paint cracked like old skin, their signs hung at odd angles as if the town itself is trying to shrug them off. No traffic lights, no chain stores, just shuttered windowpanes and the persistent sound of gulls circling without ever landing.

People here do not act afraid of her, but neither do they meet her fully. They offer smiles that reach the corners of their mouths but never touch their eyes. Every conversation is brief, every gesture efficient. When she speaks, they listen; when she asks, their gazes slide away like oil on water. It’s not rude. It’s caution.

She starts asking gentle questions—small ones at first. About tide shifts, sonar disruptions, strange sonar echoes in her equipment logs. A lobsterman named Clay nods once, then shrugs, cleaning his knife with the hem of his shirt. “Equipment don’t work here long,” he says. “Shorts out. Freezes. Gets… confused.”

At a bait shop, another man leans against a freezer of chum and squints at her printouts. “Things live under the shelf that shouldn’t,” he mutters. “Don’t go trawling deeper than you need to.”

She presses further, asks if they’ve noticed a pattern to the tides—something to explain the anomalies in her data. An older man standing nearby scoffs without turning around. “It’s best not to ask the sea to explain herself,” he says. “She doesn’t like it.”

No one laughs, not even as a courtesy. No one seems to think any of it is a metaphor.

At the grocer, the air inside feels colder than outside, despite the lack of refrigeration. She picks up lemons, their skin thin and spotted, and reaches for tea she doesn’t intend to buy. The woman at the register watches her too long, hands resting still on the countertop. Pale skin, wrists threaded with old burn scars or salt rashes—it’s hard to tell.

As she approaches to pay, the woman tilts her head slightly, looking through her more than at her.

“One of his,” the woman mutters, voice just above breath. “Poor thing.”

She blinks. “I’m sorry?”

The woman doesn’t repeat herself. Eyes lower to the register. Mouth tightens. Change is counted precisely, handed over with averted gaze. Nothing further said.

She leaves without pushing. On her way out, a boy playing with a length of kelp near the curb pauses to watch her. His lips are blue though it isn’t cold, his fingernails dark around the cuticles. He says nothing, only taps once on the side of his head, like listening underwater. Then he turns away.

The tide recedes further than usual on the third morning, drawing a jagged line of foam-slick rocks down the shoreline. She walks the beach with a notebook tucked under her arm, but doesn't open it. Her eyes are caught by the clusters of children gathering at the water's edge—quiet, barefoot, faces smudged with sand and sea spray. They speak in low tones, not laughter, not play.

They squat near the tidepools, dragging sticks and broken shells across the damp sand. What they draw stops her cold. Human figures, or close to it—hair flowing in long tendrils down their backs, arms ending in wide-spread fingers webbed like amphibians. The eyes are always oversized, black, round like voids. Shackles encircle the wrists and ankles in each drawing, always. No adult calls them back or stops them.

She watches a girl sketch an elongated figure whose mouth opens in a jagged spiral. The child steps back to admire it, then begins another beside it, as though the process isn’t a game but a duty. When she approaches, the children scatter—not in fear, more like instinct. One girl looks back once, her expression unreadable. The stick falls from her hand and remains behind.

Back at the house, wind pushes against the siding in slow, rhythmic pulses. The pier groans, its ruined slats clattering against one another as the tide begins to climb again. She steps onto the porch, arms full of supplies from town, and pauses. Something glistens darkly at her feet.

A fish, gutted neatly down the belly, lies on the threshold. Not just left there—it’s been pierced clean through with a length of pale driftwood. The stick has been sharpened crudely on one end, driven through the fish’s body and into the porch itself, pinning it like an offering. Scales shimmer dully in the low light. Blood has soaked into the grain of the boards.

No note, no sign of who left it. The air feels colder here, though the wind has died. She looks up sharply, but no one is in sight. Not on the beach. Not among the dunes. Only gulls turning slowly overhead, silent. A line of seaweed has been arranged across the far edge of the porch in a twisting spiral—too deliberate to be accidental.

The equipment begins to fail in slow, inexplicable stages. First, her hydrophone records nothing but long stretches of silence punctuated by sharp bursts of static—irregular, almost pulsed. Then her temperature sensors report readings that fluctuate wildly within the same minute. She reruns the diagnostics, replaces cables, double-checks power sources. Everything appears normal until it isn't.

One night, while reviewing her audio logs, she hears it layered beneath the static: not distortion, not feedback, but a voice. Male. Familiar in a way that makes her hands shake before she even understands why. It doesn’t say her name—never does—but it speaks with a tone that feels intimate, woven through with a knowing that burns at the edge of her memory.

You found me. You forgot why.

The voice comes again in different recordings, never where she expects it. Sometimes it’s hidden behind crashing surf in a file she doesn’t remember making. Other times it rides the background hiss of her malfunctioning monitor, quiet until she leans in, then rising as though responding to her proximity. Her name is absent, yet she feels called.

The sea never forgets her offerings.

Words coil through her mind when she tries to sleep, slithering between thoughts like ribbons of kelp in dark water. She doesn’t dream anymore—not the way she used to. Now she lies awake in half-sleep, listening to whispers echo off the corners of her skull. They don’t speak with urgency, only certainty.

He never says who he is, but it's like she knows anyway, yet the details escape her. The voice doesn’t beg. It doesn’t lure. It waits. Certain she’ll come. Certain she already has.

–

Time begins to shift, subtly at first. She notices it while reviewing her logs—files mislabeled, audio timecodes she doesn’t remember recording, entire segments clipped as though someone had already edited them. Her watch runs a few minutes fast, then slow, then fast again. She blames fatigue. The salt air. The isolation. Excuses come easy until they stop making sense.

Ten minutes disappear one morning between boiling water for tea and pouring it. The kettle screams on the stove, half-empty, though she doesn’t recall lifting it. Her notebook sits open to a page she hadn’t written yet, scrawled with half-legible symbols in a hand that could be hers, but rushed, crooked, salt-stained.

Thirty minutes are lost another day while walking the shoreline. She steps from one dune to the next, and the light shifts too far for the time she thinks has passed. Her legs ache as though she’s walked farther. Seaweed clings to her ankles. Her recorder blinks red when she pulls it from her bag, already capturing something low and wet and rhythmic she doesn’t remember hearing.

The worst is the night she wakes on the floor. Cold wood against her cheek. Her head throbs like she’s fallen, though there’s no bruise. Around her, silence hums too loud. She lifts herself slowly, only to find damp patches on the floorboards trailing away from the foot of her bed—footprints, bare, too long between steps to be hers. Water seeps into the edges of the rug like it had been dripping from a body.

She follows the prints to the hallway, but they vanish at the top of the stairs. No open windows. No puddles in the entry. Just the house, breathing. Watching. Waiting.

She finds the journal by accident, hunting for matches in a rust-flecked drawer behind the stove. Her fingers brush paper, not cardboard—a soft crackle, the unmistakable weight of old binding wrapped in damp linen. Mold blooms along the spine, and the first few pages have fused together from time and moisture. Her hands hesitate only briefly before opening it.

Ink has faded in places, smudged by salt or touch, but the handwriting is tight and looped, unmistakably feminine. The dates span nearly eighty years ago. The entries begin plainly: garden notes, complaints about damp rot in the walls, descriptions of morning fog. No name is given, just pronouns, references to family long dead. The voice is patient at first, observant, solitary. Then it changes.

Midway through, the entries sharpen. Language grows clipped, phrasing more intimate and agitated. Margins fill with sketches—spirals, waves, what might be eyes. She flips ahead, breath catching as she sees whole pages of repeated lines, written hastily, obsessively:

He dreams through me.

I saw him in the pool, bound and waiting.

I heard my mother call to him before she drowned.

The ink darkens here, pressed harder into the paper, as though written in a frenzy. Some words appear over and over, buried between sentences—below, mouth, teeth, song. One page is heavily creased and nearly torn in the middle, a scrawl barely legible through the overlap:

He is the tide when it’s wrong.

His hunger made it beautiful.

Toward the back, her thumb pauses on a page that feels different—half the sheet nearly torn from the binding, the ink slanted with urgency. The words The Bound One appear near the top, followed by a frantic attempt to cross them out with diagonal slashes. Underneath is a map, hand-drawn in rough pencil. She recognizes the coastline—Bayrun’s crooked harbor, the pier, the bluffs. One area near the cliffs has been circled twice, hard enough to tear through.

Beneath the map, a word is repeated over and over, sometimes alone, sometimes embedded in half-formed sentences: Bride.

Bride. Bride. Bride of the deep. Bride to the voice. Bride, again, again.

She stares at it until the words start to waver. Something shuffles in the walls behind her. Not rats. Not wind. A sound like someone exhaling slowly against the back of her neck. When she turns, the kitchen is still. The drawer hangs open like a mouth.

She didn't sleep that night. The journal lies open across her lap, its damp pages breathing in the candlelight. Wind presses gently against the windowpanes, steady and rhythmic like someone whispering just outside. Her eyes return to the map again and again, tracing the coastline, following the etched lines toward the circled inlet beyond the cliffs—an area not shown on any modern chart she’d studied for her research.

At dawn, the light turns white and watery. Mist crowds the bluff as if reluctant to lift. She dresses with mechanical slowness, wraps the journal in an oilcloth, and tucks it beneath her coat. Boots sink into the soft soil as she makes her way inland, then north toward the cliffs. The usual sound of gulls is absent. Even the sea seems to hush in anticipation.

No trails lead to where the map directs her. Grass gives way to stone, jagged and uneven, slick from the ocean’s breath. Her compass turns once, then stops. She puts it away. Past a bend in the cliffs, she sees the narrow path—hardly more than a fracture in the earth, descending toward a hidden pool carved into the coastline. Water rests inside, unnaturally still, as though waiting for permission to move.

The shape of it matches the drawing exactly. Ringed by black rock, barnacle-crusted and sharp, the pool pulses with a current she can’t see but feels. Her breath shortens. This place isn't on any map she’s ever studied. No townsperson has mentioned it. She kneels at the edge, touching one gloved finger to the surface. The water is warm.

Something moves beneath. Not a fish, not a current—something larger, coiled, deeper. The pressure that rises in her skull is immediate. Not pain. Not yet. A presence. Wordless at first, then forming slowly into shape.

You’re close now.

She stands abruptly, retreating several steps, heart hammering in time with a distant rhythm she doesn’t understand. The pool ripples. No wind touches it. Seafoam gathers around the rocks in symmetrical curves, spiraling inward.

On the cliff above, a shape watches—tall, too tall for any person, unmoving. She blinks, and it’s gone.

Back at the house, the journal feels heavier in her hands. Her fingertips sting where they touched the water. She peels off her glove and finds the faint outline of a spiral curling in her palm, raised slightly as if burned into the skin.

Later, when she tries to call Tara again, the line rings once before dying. Her phone won’t restart. In the silence that follows, her equipment begins recording on its own. Not static this time. Not white noise.

A low voice, just above a whisper:

You are already becoming.

Bride.

Sleep no longer feels like sleep. She lays down sometime after midnight, closes her eyes, and the next thing she knows, sea air is filling her lungs again. Damp grit clings to her soles, her nightclothes stained with salt and black sand. She always wakes just before sunrise, standing motionless at the edge of the tidepools, toes nearly brushing the water. The pool’s surface lies glass-still, unnaturally reflective, its depths dark even in morning light.

Her body bears the evidence—hair tangled with seaweed, skin cool and damp, calves streaked with streaks of bruising that match the shape of sea rock. There are scrapes she doesn’t remember earning. Once she finds barnacles caught beneath her fingernails. Her sheets are never in place when she wakes, her pillows on the floor, sand in the corners of the room where none should reach.

The path she takes varies, though her final destination does not. Sometimes she wakes facing the pool, sometimes with her back to it, as if she’s just finished whispering to the water. She tries locking her bedroom door, even moving furniture against it, but each time she wakes outside again, further down the slope, closer to the tide. Whatever takes her down there moves her without force. Her legs obey. Her will floats somewhere far behind.

She asks a fisherman about the pools once, a man who’s spoken to her before. He tightens his mouth and pretends not to hear. When she presses, he mutters, “People don’t go down there anymore. It’s not ours.” His eyes fix on her palm where the spiral still lingers, now faintly bruised with deepening color. He turns away quickly.

She questions others, with less subtlety. Two women outside the chapel ignore her completely, even as she speaks directly to them. A man sweeping outside the post office pauses, leans on his broom, and says, “You don’t belong in that part of the shore.” When she asks why, his answer is simple: “We remember.”

No one mentions what they remember. No one meets her eyes when she returns to town.

That night, she binds her ankles with a scarf and sets her phone to record. The footage cuts off at 3:17 a.m.—just before dawn. When she reviews it later, the final frame shows her standing beside the bed, eyes open, mouth moving silently. Her hands hang at her sides, fingers slightly curled, as though holding something invisible. Her expression is serene.

The next morning, she wakes as usual on the rocks. Her scarf lies knotted neatly beside her, bone-dry. A small fish skeleton rests near her feet, its bones arranged in a spiral. She knows without a doubt that she placed it.

The dream returns with a weight that feels heavier than sleep should allow. She is underwater, but not drowning—never drowning. Rafayel is there, his body luminous beneath the surface, hair spreading around him like dark smoke. He reaches for her gently, his fingers cool but steady as they cradle her face. Their foreheads touch, and though the water distorts all sound, she hears his voice clearly, not in her ears but inside her skull.

You remember now, he breathes, even though her lips haven’t moved.

You always come back to me.

Chains cross his chest, slick with algae and barnacle scabs, pulsing slightly where they meet the hollows of his collarbones. They don’t restrain so much as mark him, ceremonial, sacred, a reminder. His eyes are wide and black, not empty but full—of pressure, of old want, of the weight of the deep. His breath does not stir the water, yet she feels it ghost across her cheek.

She wakes with her hands clenched in the sheets, mouth dry with the taste of brine. Dampness presses into her skin—not sweat, not entirely. Seaweed lies tangled around her thighs, half-twisted into the sheets, slick with saltwater. It smells fresh, as if pulled moments ago from the low tide rocks, still alive enough to curl faintly at the edges.

Heart thudding, she stumbles to the bathroom, flips on the mirror light, and stares hard into her reflection.

It holds for a moment. Just long enough for her to feel foolish.

A split-second—her body remains still, but not alone. Rafayel stands behind her, towering, his presence undeniable even in the narrow glass. Hands rest on her shoulders, long fingers splayed, thumbs just below her collarbones. His expression is not cruel, not mocking. He smiles, soft and possessive, like someone who has waited a very long time and can finally see the shoreline again.

She spins around. Nothing. The mirror steadies, showing only her. She reaches up, slowly, touches the place where his hands had rested. It burns faintly beneath her skin, not pain—more like memory.

Night falls in heavy layers, the house thick with shadows that feel neither still nor benign. Every window reflects too much darkness, the glass catching shapes she can’t quite see—tall, pale lines at the edge of her vision, vanishing when she turns her head. She moves through the house slowly, barefoot, the floorboards cool and restless beneath her steps. Wind presses against the frame in soft pulses, not gusts but breathing, measured and coaxing.

Her name drifts into the hallway, spoken low and drawn out—once, then again. No question in it, just the sound of it tasting itself in the air. She pauses near the stairs, her hand braced on the warped banister, listening. The voice is hers. Every syllable mimics her exact pitch, her inflection, yet she knows it isn’t truly her speaking.

When she responds—just a whisper, no louder than a thought—the voice deepens. It pours through her bones like warmed saltwater, slippery and thick.

Say it, it murmurs, now fully him, no longer pretending.

Say my name.

Her throat constricts. The air feels charged, breathless. No resistance rises. The name has lived beneath her tongue for days, curling, blooming, pressing upward.

“Rafayel,” she breathes.

The house reacts.

Glass rattles in every windowpane. Walls groan. The tide outside crashes with impossible force, sending spray high enough to slap the porch. Pipes below the floor thrum low, like a throat clearing. Somewhere upstairs, the warped mirror shivers in its frame.

She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t question. A smile rises slowly across her lips, unbidden. It doesn’t feel like hers entirely, but it fits her mouth perfectly.

Rafayel’s voice wraps around her from within, a purr of satisfaction curled in the back of her skull:

Good girl.

Something in her, something that was always waiting, exhales in answer.

The research begins like ritual. She wakes early, hours before the fog thins, moving through the warped hallway with quiet precision—boots laced, coat zipped, notebook tucked under her arm, recorder blinking red as it rides in her pocket. The air in the house never warms, never dries, but her breath is steady now, practiced. She sets out toward the shore with a kind of reverence, as though the cliffside path is hallowed ground.

Beneath her, the trench waits.

The data refuses to behave.

Depth sensors throw inconsistent returns—one cast reads two hundred meters, the next almost double, then less than half. It's as if the seabed reshapes itself when unobserved. She begins tracking it manually, making careful notations in waterproof ink. Sometimes she sits on the rocks for hours, just watching the pool, waiting for that moment the surface changes—when light bends too sharply, or the reflection disappears entirely for a breath. The equipment fails most when the pool is still.

The hydrophone pulses irregular static again. When she replays it later, there's a low harmonic in the background, a resonance too structured to be noise. It sounds less like distortion and more like something sung slowly into a cave, half-mouthed syllables on the cusp of meaning. She plays it backward, filters it, slows it down. The tone sharpens at 3:13 a.m. every night without fail.

The deep-sea thermometer probe dips past what she thought was the bed—then drops farther. A vertical column of heat pulses up through the trench like a breath. She plots it on a graph, sees the peak form a slow rhythm. Heartbeat, maybe. But of what? The ocean doesn’t breathe like this. The readings suggest something alive. Something huge. And moving.

Vials stack beside her bed, samples drawn meticulously, labeled by hand:

Bayrun Coastal Shelf – 04:02 – Dense fog, no wind – 17.6°C – Salinity Normal (Odor: Algae/Blood)Trench Rim, Low Tide – 03:47 – High humidity – 19.4°C – Salinity Elevated – Microbio. activity: ExtremeTidal Pool Center – 02:59 – No wind, mirror surface – 21.8°C – Heavy mineral content – Fluorescence under UV

The last one glows faintly at night. Not just under the lamp, but in the dark—soft blue like bioluminescence, though nothing in the water should emit it. She stores it wrapped in black cloth in the bottom drawer, but it stains the lining of the container with the shape of the tidepool spiral. No matter how tightly she seals the vial, a faint brine smell leaks out.

Her laptop syncs sporadically. Files duplicate without prompt. Timecodes revert to symbols she doesn’t type—looped curves, rough crescents, crude glyphs scratched over her own text. At first she thought it was a system glitch. Now she’s not sure the machine is hers anymore.

She uses analog instruments more often now—barometers, pH strips, a weathered compass that she doesn’t trust but carries anyway. Digital depth readers spike and go blank. The sonar device once returned a full page of blank screen… then a burst of frames so fast they burned out the LED.

She flipped through the printed screenshots later, one by one. In them, something rises. Shadowed, long, sinuous. Not a whale. Not a trench shelf. Something swimming—not past, but up. Her own coordinates are visible in the corner.

Rafayel speaks through the white noise again that night.

You’re measuring the shape of my reach.

She closes her eyes, not in denial—she believes him now, wholly—but because it’s easier to hear when she stops looking. Her ears ring with pressure. Her skin itches beneath her clothes. In the mirror, her pupils widen again. Her blood doesn’t feel cold anymore. The house creaks once—long and low—and the spiral in her palm burns like a whisper trying to get out.

When she logs the next morning’s entry, the pen moves slightly faster than she does. She thinks she wrote “Tide pull 04:31 – stronger than expected,” but the paper reads: Bride tide, 04:31 – responding. Her handwriting, but not her words.

The samples from the trench develop slick film across their surface, though no bacteria cultures explain it. When she leaves one uncapped on the desk for an hour, a ring of black residue stains the wood, spreading outward in delicate whorls like veins. She wipes it clean with bleach. It reappears two days later. Only this time it’s wider. And spiraled.

One night, just before sleep takes her, she places a contact mic against the vial itself and listens.

Thump.

She leaves the recorder running and pulls her knees to her chest on the bed, staring at the shadows creeping up the windowframe. Something low rattles in the pipes again—lower than human, not words, just want.

Another sample from the shelf gives her mild chemical burns along her wrist, like salt rubbed raw into the skin. Yet she doesn’t feel pain. The mark darkens to the same bluish bruise-tone as the spiral on her palm. Her flesh accepts it. Welcomes it. When she wraps it in gauze, she thinks she hears it sigh.

By the end of the second week, she no longer checks tide tables. She feels the shifts—tension winding through her ribs, a throb in the soles of her feet. Her dreams swim closer to the waking world. The data doesn’t frighten her anymore. The anomaly isn’t in the ocean.

It’s in her.

And it’s growing.

—

She only meant to shift the supplies—tea tins, spare batteries, backup reels of wire—but the shelf is unstable, and the warped wood beneath her boots gives at the wrong angle. The whole thing tilts with a shudder, toppling forward in a clatter of metal and broken glass. One jar rolls to a halt against the floorboard with a soft clink, then disappears.

It doesn’t bounce.

She kneels, fingers sweeping through dust and splinters, and finds the edge—slight but deliberate. A section of the floor depressed just enough to flex when weight shifted. Not warped. No damage. A hatch.

Her nails catch the groove, and with a slow tug, the board lifts. It comes up easier than it should. Someone carved this, not by accident but with purpose.

Beneath: a cavity in the joists, dark and dry. She expects mold, dead insects, maybe a nest. Instead, there’s cloth—old linen, sea-stained and brittle with time, bundled tight around a set of objects resting close together.

Three books.

She draws them out one by one, hands trembling not with fear but anticipation. The air around the hidden space is cooler, heavy with the scent of brine and something older—faint iron, damp leather, the brittle perfume of ink and secrets long sealed.

The first is the most mundane. A local almanac, bound in navy-blue cloth now warped and sun-faded. The title is barely legible in flaking gold: Bayrun Weather and Maritime Almanac – 1863. Its pages are thin and delicate, handwritten in looping script, filled with tide charts, eclipse diagrams, lunar phases, but annotated heavily in the margins with notes not found in any scientific ledger. She flips to a marked section and finds:

Fog rolled in too thick to see the shorelight. Birds are absent. Children woke crying—said they saw a man under the waves. Spoke no word, only watched. Sounded the bell twice, but it rang soft as if underwater. Marked the tide as unnatural. Moon still full.

Three sheep were lost. One was found gutted at the waterline. No prints. Clocks off by thirty-eight minutes across the harbor. Marked page again in case he returns. If so, note the shift in salt level and proximity of bride-dreams.

She reads it twice. The phrase bride-dreams sets her jaw tense. The rest sounds like… well. Her life, lately.

The second book is leather-bound, the cover engraved with a faded emblem she can’t identify—something between a sun and a spiral, ringed with toothlike flares. Inside, the handwriting varies. The first entry dates to 1714; the last ends abruptly in 1849. It's a compendium, not a journal—a passed ledger. The voices change from one woman to another, but the experiences rhyme like inherited nightmares.

I felt him before I saw him. My belly went cold. The sea didn't move but my skirt clung wet to my thighs. He walked the beach with no prints left behind. I stayed indoors three nights and still heard the song—inside the stove, in my sister's voice, even in the silence between waves.

When my child drowned, I dreamt of him cradling her in his lap. His arms are not flesh. They are current and hold. She smiled with her mouth closed. I woke up bleeding from the nose and the sea still in my throat.

My mother taught me not to speak his name. My grandmother did the same. It is not a name. It is a net. It binds both ways.

Each woman signs only with initials or not at all. Some pages are blank except for charcoal sketches—spirals carved into tideflats, a woman with gills beneath her breasts, children walking backward into the surf with their mouths sewn shut. Several entries mention the bound one, and once, a phrase repeated five times along the inner margin: He loves his brides, but he does not keep them.

The third book doesn’t have a title. No printing press touched it. It’s thick, hand-bound with thread pulled so tight through the spine that the leather buckles at the edges. Pages of vellum, some dyed with seawater or ink made from things she can't identify. Every line written in the same hand, the same strange, curving script—ornate, fluid, like runes softened by waves.

It’s not any known language. She knows this with the clarity of obsession. No alphabet matches it. No online translator gets close. But her eyes linger too long on one page and something happens. A shiver runs behind her teeth. Her fingers twitch, like she almost moved them to mimic the shape of the letters without deciding to.

She turns the page.

Her lips move.

No sound comes out, but her throat strains, and her tongue folds around syllables that have weight.

Memory or instinct? She doesn't know.

Some pages have diagrams—concentric shapes that make her skull ache when she stares too long. Not maps, not quite. Some show anatomical renderings, but not of human beings. One set of sketches details a long-limbed figure with gill slits beneath its jaw, eye sockets flooded with black, and barbs trailing from the back of the skull like fin-spines. The image disturbs her less than it should. Her first thought is: he’s older in this one.

On the final page, someone—perhaps the writer, perhaps not—pressed a crude print of a hand. Webbing between the fingers. Faint bruising at the wrist. Below it, three symbols: the spiral, a crescent-shaped hook, and the unfamiliar glyph that now sometimes appears on her laptop.

She sets the books aside and opens her recorder. Her voice shakes:

“Recovered three texts from the subfloor cavity beneath the north wall storage shelf. All materials water-damaged, pre-1900 origin, significant non-English script. Note repetition of spiral motif, reference to entity matching behavioral profile observed in trench recordings. Will attempt transcription of unknown script in controlled setting.”

The recorder flickers, static whispering between her breaths.

Then: a low, pleased sound, almost a sigh.

You’re reading me again.

She doesn’t flinch. Not anymore. She closes the third book gently and presses her fingers against its cover.

The leather is warm.

–

The dreams return like a tide slipping back in—unrelenting, certain, and no longer solitary. Rafayel still waits at their center, luminous and still as a pillar sunk into the sea’s blackest trench, his voice curling around her mind in the now-familiar cadence of ownership, of promise, of endless, tidal need.

But now there are others.

The voices of women begin to coil through her sleep like threads of song—high, strange, keening harmonies that feel older than the words they almost form. They move around her in the water, sometimes glimpsed only in flashes: a hand brushing her ankle, hair long as seaweed winding around her waist, eyes too dark, too deep to reflect anything but hunger. They speak in layered voices that echo without air, each syllable pricking along the edges of her ribs.

We were meant to be. But not enough. Not whole. Not her.

He called and we came. But the seals held. He needs one.

We are not bitter. We are not cast off. We serve now. We sing.

In dreams, they circle her, caressing—not possessive, not jealous, but reverent, even tender. They do not touch her like sisters or strangers. They touch her like offerings, parting her hair, brushing salt from her brow, laying bare her chest like a priestess being prepared for sacrifice—not to harm. To reveal. Their hands are cool, and never stray where they’re not allowed. It is not for them to claim.

Because he is always there.

Even when she cannot see him, she knows the difference in pressure. Her dreams deepen when he arrives, the water thickening like silk against her skin, every nerve lighting with his proximity. Rafayel does not announce himself with thunder or command. He enters her dream the way the sea enters a wound—slow, complete, inevitable and when he speaks, the other voices hush.

My bride. My blood-anchor. Mine.

Sometimes she sees him, rising from the deep—a shape of radiant shadow, chains across his chest humming faintly with light, strands of hair drifting like ink in a still tide. His eyes catch her like hooks, no cruelty in them—only a hunger so profound it bends reality around it.

He never asks.

He never forces.

But when he touches her—his hand against the small of her back, the pads of his fingers trailing along her thighs, his breath ghosting across her lips though no air moves—her body opens for him like water cleaved by oars.

His mouth never needs to meet hers, not in the dream, not yet. But she wakes each time gasping, tasting salt, her breath ragged and her inner thighs slick with need. Sometimes it’s sweat. Sometimes it isn’t. The sheets are damp in ways that defy comfort. Her tongue is coated in brine, her breath shallow, and always—always—she aches between her legs like she’s just been touched for hours by hands that knew her too well.

In one dream, she feels him behind her. Not pinning—holding. His fingers wrap around her hips like they were made for it, anchoring her in the water while his mouth moves along the nape of her neck. She can’t speak. Her voice doesn’t matter. Her body does. Her skin hums against him, her spine arches without thought, and his voice whispers through her skull, viscous and slow:

Let them sing. You’re mine. Only mine.

The others do not interfere. They chant now, low and ritualistic, floating in circles around the moment of her pleasure. Not jealous—joyous. Like midwives. Like attendants.

The seals break as she softens. As she opens. As she drowns in him.

They say this like scripture, over and over, as she feels his body grind into hers—not with violence, never—but inevitability. Pressure and heat and depth and the sense that she’s being filled not with cock but with presence. His need crashes into her like waves over reef, slow at first, then relentless, rolling until she shakes with it. No pain. Just stretch. Just belonging.

Her breath escapes in the dream—not moans but choked cries, hot and wet and helpless.

“Ahn—haa, Rafayel, fuck—” she gasps, even as seawater slips down her throat, and she comes in her sleep so hard her fingers curl into her pillow, her body bowing under phantom weight, thighs trembling violently.

She wakes soaked.

Every night now. She wakes tangled in damp sheets, her inner thighs sticky with arousal so potent it leaks down the insides of her knees. She doesn’t touch herself during the day anymore. She doesn’t need to. Every time she closes her eyes, he takes her again, fills her again, presses her against the ocean floor or cradles her in the trench’s arms and moves inside her like gravity itself.

He gives her pleasure so slow it shatters. So intense it rewrites.

The other women—if they can still be called that—appear during daylight, too now. At the corners of her eyes. In reflections. Their shapes never hold for long, only hints: long hair swaying in glass, a gleam of scales not on skin but woven into clothing, necklaces of tooth and driftwood. Their smiles are knowing, not cruel.

She reads more of the bound journal. The script comes easier now. She doesn’t translate. She understands.

The failed brides—they were not punished. They were repurposed.

They are the chorus. The keepers. The ones who cradle the seals between their teeth and keep them until the true one arrives.

And when they see her in the mirror, they nod—not with envy.

With relief.

She’s the one. The mouth of the deep. The ache in the tide.

He wants the ache of flesh and warmth, the pulse of blood he can taste in her wrist, the tremble of her thighs when he breathes against the back of her neck and her hips lift without asking. He wants her voice when she cries out and claws the sheets, drenched and delirious with how badly she needs to feel him again.

She starts sleeping naked, because clothes always end up soaked and just like every night, the song begins again.

One seal breaks. Two. Three. You call to him when you moan. We hear. He hears. So close. So close. Bride.

And in the deepest part of sleep, Rafayel whispers against her throat, words like fingers threading her open:

No more seals. Soon. I will rise for you.

And in her dream, she shudders, gasping—

“Please.”

–

The wind tore through Bayrun that afternoon with a ferocity not seen in weeks, but it wasn’t the kind of storm that made people batten hatches or rush home. It was the quieter kind, the mean kind, the kind that seeped into bones and whispered along windowpanes, insinuating itself into every frame, every gap in the wood. She pulled her coat tighter as she stepped through the iron-framed door of the town archives, the bell overhead ringing with a dull, waterlogged clunk as if weighed down by the salt air. The building itself was hunched like everything else in Bayrun—short, squat, dark as wet stone. The wood floors groaned as she walked, swollen from decades of damp. It smelled of old sea charts and mildew, of drying glue and rotting thread, of things forgotten on purpose and stacked too neatly to be casual.

The clerk—Reese, a man who looked like he’d once had a thicker neck and a thinner gut—rose behind the desk in the front alcove, his shirt yellowed where it had been white and his fingers callused around the spine of a naval log. He looked up the way people do when they know who’s coming before the door opens, eyes glassy with something between recognition and dread.

“Looking for something specific?” he asked, not quite hostile, not quite polite.

She offered a nonchalant smile, the kind she’d practiced for years. “Old maps. Tidal records. Anything that hasn’t been digitized.”

He hesitated for just long enough to matter, then nodded toward the back shelves with a twitch of his chin. “Past the shelving cabinet, left side. We’ve got boxes of unsorted material. Be careful. Some of it’s falling apart.”

She thanked him and moved down the aisle, her boots making soft sounds against the warped floorboards. She could feel his gaze stay on her longer than necessary—watching the way she moved, not with curiosity, but suspicion. As though she might reach into the shelves and pull out something she wasn’t supposed to know existed. And he’d be right.

The back alcove was colder, though the storm hadn’t crept in. It was the cold of things left untouched too long. The walls were lined with metal drawers whose handles had rusted, and thick folders stacked like sediment—nautical charts, faded ship logs, fragile ledgers wrapped in twine. She began slowly, leafing through the labeled folders, running her fingers down titles etched in ink long faded to a gray ghost of their former selves. But as the quiet thickened around her, her movements grew more deliberate. One folder yielded an old port registry, its cover cracked open along the spine. A map tucked between its pages caught her eye—dated 1836, Bayrun’s coastline sketched in heavy charcoal. The outline looked familiar, but a note in the margin sent a jolt through her chest.

“Spiral seen again. Low tide. Screaming from below.”

She folded it neatly and slid it into her satchel, fingers twitching slightly. No hesitation.

Another folder, mislabeled as export tax records, held a slim ledger with pages so thin she could see her fingers beneath them. Half the entries had been crossed out or sliced away entirely. Some had survived—one, dated in curling ink and no year she could make out, read plainly:

“Third seal intact. No signs of strain. Her dreams remain shallow. Replace charm at the bluff marker before the next moon cycle.”

Beneath that, scrawled messily in a smaller hand, as if by someone in a rush or on the edge of breaking:

“We don’t remember placing it. But it’s always there.”

Her hand trembled as she closed the book and slipped it into the deepest fold of her coat. The air behind her felt warmer suddenly, too close. She turned and found Reese standing no more than a pace away, his eyes narrowed as if he were seeing something beyond her shoulders.

“Find what you needed?” he asked, voice low, but too even to be casual.

She smiled again, slow and professional. “Still browsing.”

His gaze dropped to the bulge of her satchel, lingered, then slid away without comment. “Try not to remove anything,” he said flatly. “A lot of those haven’t been copied yet.”

“I’ll be careful.”

He didn’t follow her as she walked toward the front, but she felt his eyes on her back all the way out the door. The bell above didn’t ring when she pushed it open, as though something had placed a hand against it, muffling the sound.

The storm had thickened. Rain came not in drops but in fine mist so dense it hovered like breath. The town looked drained of color—gray stones, pale fog, the distant shimmer of water pressed against the horizon like a bruise. She kept her hood up and walked quickly, boots sinking slightly into the sodden gravel as she made her way toward the market row. The wind had fallen away into that heavy, electric quiet that came before something much worse. Her thoughts swam, heavy with maps, ledgers, notes that confirmed far more than she was ready to admit.

She almost didn’t see the woman until they collided at the edge of the street.

Anwyn stood there as though she’d been waiting. Her gray dress was soaked to the knees and clung to her thin frame, hair wild and loose, strands plastered against her cheeks. Her eyes, however, were dry—bright, yellow-ringed irises in a face lined by salt and time. Up close, she smelled of nettles and cold stones and something darker, something old.

For a moment, they simply stared at each other, both wet, both silent, both knowing.

“You’re still walking upright,” Anwyn said at last, her voice soft but edged, like a knife wrapped in lace. “That won’t last much longer.”

The girl blinked, breath catching in her throat, the weight of the ledger pressing against her ribs. “Excuse me?”

Anwyn didn’t smile, didn’t laugh. She looked at her wrist—the one where the spiral still faintly bruised the skin—and then raised her gaze, locking onto her eyes with terrible gentleness.

“They’ve started, haven’t they?” she said. “The dreams.”

The words struck like a stone dropped in a well. The world around them faded. The rain kept falling, but it fell without sound. No people walked the street. The air pressed inward.

“You feel him even when you’re awake. That pressure. The heat in your chest. The tremble in your knees.” Her eyes narrowed, not cruelly. “You feel the ache. The way your thighs twitch when you hear his name. You wake soaked. Shaking. That’s not coincidence.”

She swallowed, mouth dry despite the rain. “What do you know about him?”

“Everything. Not enough.” Anwyn stepped closer. “You can’t unring that bell, child. Once it’s been sounded, it sings on its own.”

“I didn’t ring it,” she said, words coming too fast. “I didn’t mean to. I came here for research, that’s all—”

“No.” The word cut her off, quiet but absolute. “You came. That was the bell.”

She felt dizzy then, as if the earth had tilted slightly beneath her. The wind turned and curled around her shoulders. The sea, she thought, had turned to look.

“Is he real?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

Anwyn’s expression didn’t change. “He’s older than real. The sea made him because she needed something that would never leave her. And now he needs something that will never leave him.”

The storm gathered again around the corners of buildings. The grocer’s sign rocked once, twice. Something unseen knocked against the eaves above them—soft and slow, as if knocking to be let in.

“I remember your voice,” Anwyn murmured, lowering her hand to brush her pendant—carved bone, ancient and smoothed by decades of touch. “I heard it in the water. Before you ever came. Before you were born. You don’t think you belong to him. You do.”

The girl shook her head, backing a step, heart hammering. “What is he?”

Anwyn smiled then, a tragic thing.

“I stopped asking,” she said. “My mother asked. She came home one night with no tongue. The sea gave her back, but not all of her.”

The wind shrieked once across the open square, a long, high whine that didn’t sound like wind at all.

“He’s not coming,” Anwyn whispered, eyes unfocused now. “He’s rising.”

Anwyn didn’t speak right away. After that last sentence—He’s not coming. He’s rising—she seemed to retreat into memory, her gaze gone unfocused, her hand still resting lightly against the carved bone at her neck. Rain traced slow lines down her face and clung to her lashes, but she didn’t blink. The girl stood rooted before her, the ledger still tight beneath her coat, its weight a heartbeat against her ribs, and though she opened her mouth to ask something—anything—Anwyn spoke first.

“My great great aunt walked into the sea naked,” she said at last, voice thin now, spun from the same gray threads as the storm around them. “Smiling.”

The girl blinked, momentarily stunned. “What?”

“She was nineteen. Never married. Said she heard music in the fog—songs that tasted like salt and gold. Said she saw people dancing on the tide, with long hair and mouths that opened too wide.” Anwyn’s gaze came back to her then, steady and calm.

“She told her mother she wasn’t afraid. Said she wanted to meet the one who sang so sweetly. And then she walked straight down to the water without a stitch on her.”

“Did they stop her?”

“Found her footprints in the sand. Nothing else.” Anwyn looked past her now, toward the sea hidden behind the shops and homes, behind the fog and the pitch-black water beyond. “The tide came in wrong for a week after. Horses wouldn’t go near the bluff. Lanterns wouldn’t stay lit.”

She turned her head slowly, the rain dripping from her chin.

“They said it was the devil, back then. When I was small. Said girls like her were troubled, full of sin, and that the ocean knew how to spot weakness.” She gave a bitter half-smile. “Then they started calling it hysteria. Said it was fever. Or madness. Or women wanting escape.”

She leaned closer, lowering her voice to something more private.

“But it was never that. It was always him. Down there. Bound. Hungry. Loved.”

That word—loved—landed heavier than the others. The girl flinched without knowing why. Something in her belly tightened, not from fear, but recognition.

Anwyn’s gaze dropped to her again, sharp with meaning.

“He’s not cruel, you know,” she said. “Not unless he’s kept waiting too long.”

A gust of wind twisted down the alley beside them, flinging rain into the gaps of her coat, turning her hair wild around her face. The grocer’s sign creaked above them, a lonely, bone-dry squeal like a mouth trying to speak.

“They tried to erase him,” Anwyn continued, voice rising above the wind now, no longer whispering. “The men who came from across the sea with their new crosses and their clean churches. They built pews where tide-altars used to stand. Dug up stones etched with the spiral. Burned the ones who remembered.”

A pause. She took a long breath, closed her eyes.

“But memory doesn’t live in books. It clings to brine and lichen. It gets under fingernails and in marrow. And the stories… the stories waited.”

She opened her eyes again, and the girl could see something flickering behind them. Not madness—certainty.

“There were always mothers who whispered to their children, ‘Don’t go barefoot near the pools after dark. Don’t follow the singing. Don’t answer voices in the fog.’ Not because it was myth. But because the last time he rose—” Her mouth twitched. “It cost us. Cost her.”

The girl’s lips parted, but she didn’t speak. She didn’t want to stop this. She needed more, but not all at once. Anwyn’s words had the shape of a story not ready to be told in full. It was unraveling in slow, wet threads, and she knew better than to yank them.

“He hasn’t stirred in a long time,” Anwyn murmured, quieter now, as if talking to herself. “The water’s been calm. The pools shallow. But we’ve all felt it lately, haven’t we? That hush in the waves. That tilt in the tide charts. The sea holding its breath.”

The girl nodded slowly, almost involuntarily.

“I’ve been listening,” Anwyn said. “The birds fall silent in the morning now. The gulls don’t cry when the tide turns. And the wind keeps pushing people toward the shore.”

The words hung there between them.

Rain pattered harder against the rooftops. Somewhere, deep in the direction of the cliffs, a foghorn moaned once—distant and low, too low for anything still docked in the harbor.

Anwyn stepped closer once more, her presence overwhelming in its certainty. Not aggressive. Not threatening. Just… inevitable.

“The bride before you,” she said, and something in her tone cracked slightly. “She died protecting the village. Gave herself to stop him. Broke her own bond.”

That landed like a lead weight in her chest. Not fully understood, but undeniably true. The words slid through her like a key into a rusted lock.

“He hasn’t risen since,” Anwyn said, and looked her full in the face. “He’s waited.”

She could barely breathe.

“And now,” Anwyn whispered, “he wants her back.”

For a long time, neither of them moved. The storm pressed against them like a living thing, not roaring, not wild—just watching. Waiting. A soundless breath held by the sea. Anwyn stepped back first, her gaze lingering like the last warmth of a fire. Her fingers brushed the edge of her bone pendant once more. Then she turned.

She didn’t walk toward any destination. She moved into the narrow slit between the market wall and the butcher’s old shack, a place that should’ve held only shadows and runoff. But she slipped into it like it was a corridor, and vanished into the mist.

The girl stood alone.

Water streamed from the gutters and soaked the cuffs of her jeans. Her satchel pulled heavy against her shoulder, and in her pocket, the spiral-marked hand tingled faintly with warmth, as if something underneath the skin were beginning to turn.

In the back of her throat, the salt tasted sweeter than it should. Though she told herself she wouldn’t, her eyes lifted toward the fog, toward the shape of the shoreline beyond the rooftops because somewhere out there, just beneath the waves, something was remembering her, and it would rise.

—

The morning she chooses to go out on the water, the world is unnaturally still. The kind of stillness that feels deliberate, not passive. Fog has burned away in long silver skeins, the sky pale and dry as bone, the sea smooth as oil beneath her boat. The harbor is silent. No gulls circle. No engines hum. Even the wind holds off as if giving her space.

She doesn’t ask anyone for help.

By now, the town watches her movements the way one watches a sealed jar—half expecting something to hatch inside. She loads the rowboat herself in the gray light before sunrise, testing the balance of her instruments, checking the seals on the equipment case three times though she already knows it won’t matter. Her fingers tremble only once, when she presses the lid shut. Then she pushes off from the weather-beaten dock, the oars slicing through water that doesn’t resist.

No one sees her go.

Bayrun recedes behind her with all the slow majesty of a place surrendering to forgetfulness. The coastline flattens into a low smear of fog-washed cliffs, the trees along the bluff bending always inland, always away from the sea. She rows steadily, legs braced, eyes on the open mouth of the trench far ahead. Her breath stays even. Her pulse, not quite.

The surface of the water grows stranger the further she moves from shore. It no longer ripples in proper patterns. It glistens with too much clarity, reflecting the sky like glass that doesn't break when touched. Her oars leave no wake. The air grows warmer, though the sun hides behind high cloud.

She powers on the sonar.

It glitches immediately—just a quick chirp, then a whine that turns to silence. The hydrophone follows suit. No sound comes back from the water below. Not even ambient hum. Not fish. Not current. Just a vast and total absence, like the sea had swallowed its own voice.

She checks the wires, the settings. Nothing responds.

She drops a probe to take depth. The line spools for far too long. Then it jerks.

Not with tension. With breath.

She freezes. The boat sways once, gently. Not a wave. A ripple, as if something beneath her had exhaled.

Reaching the edge of the trench, she slows her breathing, leans forward slightly, and peers over the rim of the boat. The surface is black now, a perfect mirror of the hull, of her face, of the sky above—but deeper than shadow, deeper than water.

That’s when she hears it.

At first, it’s not sound so much as sensation. A vibration in the enamel of her teeth, a low thrumming that coils up the base of her spine and radiates outward. She presses one hand to her sternum, instinctively, and feels the resonance there—steady, ancient, calling. It isn’t music. Not exactly. It’s too slow for melody. Too long between tones. But it curls like singing, moves like breath, widens like a spiral.

The sound bends through pitch in ways that shouldn't be possible—shifting not from note to note, but from pressure to presence. It isn’t human. Not quite female. It has the rise and fall of something breathing through stormclouds. The syllables are felt rather than heard, rubbing against her bones with aching intimacy.

She closes her eyes and the world tilts.

The last thing she sees is the reflection of her own face on the water—except it isn’t moving with her. The eyes are open too wide. The mouth is slightly parted, like waiting to sing.

Then nothing.

No splash. No scream. Just absence.

She doesn’t know how long she’s gone. In the dream, the world is dim and silver, light diffused as though seen through miles of seawater. She floats without effort, body suspended in liquid too warm to be real. Around her, they come.

The sirens.

They don’t look like stories say they should. They aren’t fish from the waist down, and they don’t smile with needle teeth. They’re beautiful in the way tidal rifts are beautiful—long, soft-limbed things with hair like ribbons of kelp and eyes that glow too gently to be safe. Their bodies glide with a grace that doesn’t belong to vertebrates, and their fingers are too long, too knowing.

They circle her.

One drifts close, trails a hand along her jaw, then her collarbone, humming low and intimate against her shoulder. Another brushes past her thigh, hair tangling around her hips. Their skin is cold silk, smooth and endless. They don’t speak. They don’t need to.

Their humming fills her.

Each vibration burrows deeper, from skin to tendon to womb. She moans softly, breathless in the dark water. Her nipples harden from the chill of them, her thighs clench and then loosen, parted slightly without resistance. It isn’t erotic the way human touch is—it bypasses thought and goes straight to need. Her body accepts them like salt accepts blood.

And still, they do not take. They prepare.

Because he is there. Watching.

Rafayel.

He stands—or floats?—far beyond the others, past their circling limbs, past their caressing hands. The water around him glows faintly with pulsing gold. His eyes are black and full of it, rimmed in molten metal, fixed entirely on her.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. Doesn’t blink.

He just waits.

The other sirens part around him like currents, always in motion, but never touching. They hum his silence into her skin. Their hands guide her closer. Every pulse of their song drives her toward him like a tide pulling inward.

He is the deep pressure waiting behind the whisper. He is the stillness in the eye of the storm.

Her heart pounds.

She reaches for him.

And wakes.

Her body slams back into itself all at once—gasping, lungs heaving. The sky overhead has shifted. Late afternoon, dimmed by cloud. She lies curled in the bottom of the rowboat, limbs splayed as if flung there, her throat raw and her lips cracked dry. The equipment is still dead. The sea around her is still slick, too quiet.

Her boat drifts slowly, aimless. Her hair is wet with more than sweat. Her clothes cling cold to her body, and her thighs ache. Not from exertion. From absence. Inside her skull, the echo of the song still hums faintly, too slow to be music, too deep to be silenced.She doesn’t remember rowing back. She isn’t sure she will.

That night, the song doesn’t recede with the tide. It lingers, expanding—an infection made of sound. It swells within the walls of the old house like moisture, seeping into the grain of the floorboards, the cracks in the foundation, the humming bones of the plumbing. The pipes vibrate faintly beneath her fingertips when she presses her hand to the bathroom sink, not with water pressure but with rhythm, soft and deliberate, the beat of something ancient just below hearing. The melody echoes faintly in every corner—low and layered, the same shifting harmonics that filled her chest on the water, now rising from the dark throat of the drain, coiling in the window glass, vibrating against her skin like a lover’s breath.

It doesn't leave when she leaves a room. It follows. She inhales and it’s in her lungs. She exhales and it thickens behind her teeth. She opens her mouth to speak and realizes her tongue already knows the next note.

When she looks into the mirror above the sink, her reflection doesn’t blink in time with her. Her own face is mouthing something—slow, rhythmic syllables shaped with quiet ecstasy. Her lips part gently, eyes half-lidded, lost in trance, and for a moment she watches herself, heart frozen. She isn't humming. She isn't making a sound. But the mirror-self sings without breath, lips forming each note of the sirens’ call with aching grace.

She backs away slowly. The mirror doesn’t.

She runs her palms down her face and finds sweat. Not from fear. From heat. Her body radiates it in waves, a pulse in her groin, a prickling dampness along the backs of her knees, the line of her throat. Every time she tries to think about anything else—about science, about sleep, about escape—the melody rises behind her eyes again like blood rushing up her spine.

She opens the journal, hoping for context, for relief, for instruction. The pages resist at first, damp and swelling at the seams, but she finds the entry scrawled between drawings of spirals and tide marks, the ink blotched with haste or desperation.

The sirens come when it’s time. They pull the chosen to the gate. He cannot unbind until the bride walks into the blood pool.

The words hit her like cold water poured over the crown of her head, running down her spine in jagged lines. He cannot unbind. The gate. The blood pool. She doesn’t know what it means entirely, but the word bride sets her jaw tight. She’s seen it too many times now. Heard it. Felt it whispered across her skin as Rafayel watched her from beyond the sirens, silent and burning.

Sleep offers no shelter.

She tries. She truly does. She lays down with cotton stuffed in her ears, a pillow pressed hard against each side of her head. She hums other songs under her breath—childhood lullabies, sharp dissonant noise, anything to drown it. She plays static through her phone’s speaker at full volume. But the melody slips around it all, threading through the fabric of her bones like something grown rather than heard.

When sleep takes her, it doesn’t hold her down—it lets her go. She doesn’t dream. She wanders.

She wakes kneeling in the tideflats beneath the full moon, her hands sunk into wet sand, the shoreline ghost-white in the mist. Her nightgown clings to her like a second skin, soaked through, transparent over her breasts and thighs. Sand is embedded deep in her knees, her hair tangled with kelp and sea-foam. Her throat burns with salt, her fingernails are cracked and full of grit, and her mouth is half open, still forming the melody like a prayer too old for language.

She stumbles upright, breath catching, and turns to look back at the house.

It’s too far. She doesn’t remember walking. She doesn't remember waking.

The tide laps gently at her ankles—warm, deliberate, like a hand stroking upward. The pools around her flicker with movement beneath their mirrored surface, flashes of long limbs and gleaming eyes beneath inches of still water. She steps back and the song surges louder, not in her ears but in her chest, blooming from her diaphragm outward like a second heartbeat.

She tries to scream. Nothing comes out but a note. One long, shuddering hum.

She plugs her ears. She clamps her hands over them hard enough to hurt, tears leaking down her cheeks, sobs pressed into the hollow of her throat. But the sound doesn’t fade. Her bones hum with it. Her teeth ache. Her spine thrums like a tuning fork struck by a divine hand.

She stumbles back to the house at dawn, barefoot, cuts on her soles from hidden rocks, feet torn and bleeding. Her sheets are drenched when she lies down, her skin still hot and salty, her thighs trembling faintly from exertion she doesn’t remember. When she presses a hand to her pelvis, she feels warmth still lingering, a low throb that has nothing to do with cold or fear.

She closes her eyes and tries to think of silence.

But all she hears is the song.

Calling her home.

The mood in Bayrun begins to shift in ways that no one names aloud. Doors close earlier. Window shutters that once creaked in the night are now reinforced with strips of rusted metal, nailed shut in hasty fear. The market stalls, usually left half-covered and open to the morning mist, are broken down entirely by dusk, their tarps folded so tightly they look shrink-wrapped, suffocated. A child stands in front of the chapel one evening, pointing silently toward the cliffs until his mother grabs him by the wrist and drags him backward without a word. The air holds its breath, and the townspeople follow suit.

She notices the salt first when she comes home—a fine white line, carefully poured across the threshold of her porch. It isn’t crude. Someone took their time, shaping it clean, evenly spaced, as if laying a charm rather than a warning. It crunches under her boot before she realizes what it is. No note. No signature. Just an act of trembling superstition, of protection offered too late to mean anything.

That night, the wind didn't howl. It moans. The sirens’ song crests just after midnight, rolling over the bluffs and through the cracks of her bedroom window like a tide drawn from the chest of the world itself. It isn’t gentle anymore—not the humming promise of dreams, not the sweet lure she once mistook for seduction. This sound is want, raw and visceral. Urgent, like fingers dragging silk off skin. It dances up her thighs, winds around her belly, slips behind her ribs.

The music aches. It caresses her name with notes too fluid for human tongues, rippling through the wood of the house, pressing against her heartbeat until her breath comes fast and shallow. Every part of her tingles—skin flushed, lips parted, nipples stiff beneath the cotton of her sleep shirt. The salt line on the porch should’ve stopped something. It didn’t. Her feet are bare before she realizes she’s standing, moving through the doorway like she’s being poured downhill.

The air outside is thick, humming with static. The moon hangs full and waxy above the tide pools, bleeding silver into the mist. Her soles find every sharp rock, every slick ridge of moss, and none of it hurts. She descends the bluff like someone following the path of a prayer half-remembered, her steps slow but sure, her eyes glazed and shining in the moonlight. No one calls after her. No doors open. The town has gone still, watching from behind curtains as she walks the path they all feared would open again.

Down at the pools, they wait.

The sirens.

They aren’t monsters. They’re nothing like the stories carved into old church pews or whispered through hymnals. Their beauty is overwhelming, not in its perfection, but in its wrongness—a kind of grace not built for land. Their bodies stretch long and soft, the curvature of limbs flowing like ink dropped in water. Hair sways around them in ribbons, dark as oil and lit from within, kelp-slick and moving even when the air is still. Their eyes glow a subtle green, not eerie but intimate. Safe the way a riptide is safe—if you stop fighting.

Their mouths part around the song, sharp white teeth glinting in flashes between syllables that taste like salt and sorrow. They do not speak to her, but the melody becomes her name, sung low and reverent, echoing off rock and wave. They part around her, arms outstretched in welcome, a procession of long-bodied sea-daughters carving a path to the tidal gate. Her feet splash into the shallows and the water doesn’t resist her. It embraces.

One siren brushes cool fingers along her jaw, tilting her face gently toward the sea. Another leans in and presses her lips to the girl’s wrist, tongue darting out in a slow, reverent lick. Their touch isn’t sexual—it’s sacramental. They hum into her skin as if reading her, mapping every inch of flesh like it belongs to them and always has. They don’t claim her. They honor her.

She is not afraid. She is home.

The moonlight strikes the pools at just the right angle, and the color shifts. What was silver becomes crimson. A stain blooms across the water’s surface—dark and thick and blooming outward in symmetrical spirals. Not blood from a body. Blood meant. The pool itself turns red beneath her feet, and the sirens cry out in unison, their final chorus cresting like the wave before the plunge.

And he rises.

From the deepest hollow of the trench, through the heart of the tidal gate, Rafayel emerges.

Naked.

Unbound.

His body breaks the surface like a god cast upward by a sea that could no longer hold him. Water streams down his shoulders, slicking over muscle and shimmer-slick skin that catches the moonlight in shades of opal and oil. His chest is broad, tapering to a torso carved in impossible beauty, marked faintly with the iridescent patterns of coral scars and luminous spiral sigils. Where legs should be, his lower body flares into a glorious tail—plum and cobalt, rippling with transparent fin-fronds, each edge lined in silver. It unfurls behind him in lazy, tidal sways, breathtaking in its grace.

His face is sharper than dreams. Jaw strong, cheekbones high, lips full and parted slightly as if breathing her name into the air. Eyes—those impossible, drowning eyes—glow with a light that isn’t reflected, but generated, blue fire threaded with gold, focused only on her. He does not speak. He doesn’t need to.

Rafayel watches her the way a storm watches the coast. Waiting for her to understand what she already is. When the pool thickens around her ankles, when her body shivers with need and belonging so deep it feels ancestral, her lips part too. The song is still in her, but now it’s not echoing. It’s calling back.

The moment her foot breaks the surface, the pool reacts. Not with ripples, but with light—subtle at first, a soft pulse like a heartbeat beneath the surface, then brighter, stronger, until the water glows with that same impossible radiance that lives in Rafayel’s eyes. She steps forward without hesitation, water climbing her calves, her knees, her thighs. Every inch of skin the sea touches comes alive, not with chill, but with sensation—like breath held too long and finally released. Gooseflesh blooms across her arms, not from cold, but from recognition.

Her heartbeat synchronizes with the melody echoing up from below, not separate from it anymore. It’s a measure within the song. She feels the rhythm in her chest, in her spine, in the curl of her toes against the silt. Her body -s to hum—not in sound, but in resonance. The water welcomes her like a lover's mouth, curling along her thighs, licking the curve of her belly, rising up to kiss the underside of her breasts with reverent slowness. The pulse of the sea is inside her now, each beat pulling her deeper, inviting, enveloping, inevitable.

The sirens, once circling, once watching, drop silently into the glowing pool around her, their long bodies sliding beneath the surface without splash or struggle. One by one, they vanish into the depths with elegant flicks of hair and tail, their eyes never leaving her until the last moment. Their song doesn’t fade—it submerges, a chorus continuing below, a hymn vibrating through the bones of the water, winding tighter and tighter around her soul.

Rafayel stands at the center of it all. Still and radiant.

He watches her the way hunger watches softness.

And then he moves.

He doesn’t swim—he glides, his tail propelling him forward in smooth, fluid arcs. His arms are strong and bare, marked faintly with bands of iridescent skin that catch the light as he reaches for her. Fingertips trail along the water’s surface until they meet hers.

When he touches her, the world changes.

“My beloved bride,” he says, and the words hit her like thunder breaking inside her lungs.

There is no question in his voice, no plea. It is not a title he grants her. It is a truth he names aloud.

Her fingers tangle with his. Her breath hitches. Her thighs press together instinctively, not to resist—but to hold in the tremble.

The water climbs higher. Her skin responds. It ripples where the ocean kisses her, as if remembering something it was never told but always knew. Her vision blurs slightly as warmth courses through her veins, not heat from within, but from beneath, the pulse of the deep seeping upward, finding her blood, her marrow, her womb. Her body arches slightly, her nipples tightening, her mouth parting in a gasp that becomes a moan.

Not pain. Not fear.

Release.

She doesn’t scream. She sings.

Her voice isn’t hers alone anymore. It carries the echo of every bride before her, of every offering the ocean accepted and claimed. The melody rises from her throat in unbroken pitch, long and clear, the language wordless but full. Rafayel’s eyes flare brighter, gold threading blue, his mouth slack with awe, lust and longing so old it makes her bones ache to match it.

As her voice rises, so does the light beneath the water.

The pool glows red-gold now, not blood but something more sacred—transition, consummation, awakening. Her thighs shudder as the water caresses her inner seams, flickering up the line of her back, fingers of current stroking the crease where her ribs give way to soft belly. She throws her head back and opens her mouth wider, voice breaking into layered harmonics. Her body begins to shift—not changing, not deforming, but yielding. No webbing. No gills. Just the ocean remaking its claim.

Her spine arches. Her skin gleams and the sea sings through her.

Rafayel groans low, a sound that vibrates the air, the water, her teeth. His chains—those thick bands of coral and metal coiled across his shoulders and chest—glow for one final moment, then begin to unravel. They don’t shatter. They dissolve, like salt kissed by rain. Thread by thread, link by link, they fall away from him, slipping into the water like offerings returned.

His body glistens, finally unbound. Every inch of him is glorious, terrible, divine. His tail lashes once in the water, powerful and beautiful, spreading arcs of color that ripple outward like wings unfurling. He floats toward her, weightless and full of purpose, and the tide accepts them both, closing above their heads as the surface shivers and stills.

The gate is open.

The bride is home.

It is not death. It is undoing—a peeling away of everything that tethered her to air and silence, a shedding of false anatomy, a molting of mistaken humanity. The moment the water closes over her head, the change begins. It isn't slow. It isn't kind. But it is necessary.

Something splits along her ribs—first one side, then the other—thin lines cracking open like mouths learning to speak. Gills, four per side, bloom like wet petals from her skin, dark and red and raw. She convulses, instinct screaming against it, and water floods her lungs. She thrashes once, arms clawing at the space around her as panic takes her—but the breath doesn't kill her.

It feeds her.

The salt slides deep, and the craving rises with it. Her body settles into the intake, ribs expanding in rhythm with the tide. The water is thick in her throat, but it moves clean, welcome. The panic fades like it was never real, only an echo from a world she no longer belongs to.

She opens her mouth, and the scream that bubbles forth is not of terror. It is of transcendence.

Her legs convulse violently, spine arching, muscles tightening to the point of tearing. She feels her bones shifting beneath the skin, warping, bending inward—not breaking, but folding, redrawing their purpose. Her thighs fuse at the seam, calves curling in, feet retracting as the skin along them splits open with a wet, slick sound. She chokes again, not on water, but on the rush of sensation as her flesh tears and heals in the same breath, smooth scales bursting forth like blossoms under heat.

It hurts. But the pain is holy.

Fins erupt from the center of her back, thin ridges of translucent membrane edged in violet light. More follow at her wrists, flexing instinctively like second hands, then from the backs of her thighs, flaring outward in slow, sensual arcs. Her pelvis breaks with a sharp internal crack, the sound drowned in water but felt—a moment of rupture, her hips narrowing, realigning. Nerve endings scream, then settle into place. Her stomach shivers, muscles clenching uncontrollably as something below opens.

A new slit forms where her thighs once met, the flesh parting slick and seamless, throbbing faintly with new need, as though awakened into a body designed to crave touch through current, not skin.

Her arms float outward. Her back arches. Her hair spills around her in coils of shadow and ink, dancing in slow loops through the glowing water. Her mouth parts, lips plush, eyes wide—and they are no longer eyes made for land.

They have gone silver.

Not gray. Not white. Mirror.

She sees him through them. And more—she sees herself. Reflected in his gaze.

Rafayel drifts closer, the light from the tidal gate shining off his skin, casting patterns across his chest, his tail, the long curve of his shoulders. His wings—those beautiful, finned extensions of tail and thigh—fan outward around him in weightless majesty. His eyes, glowing blue rimmed in gold, take her in fully. Not with hunger.

With reverence.

He reaches for her slowly, as if daring not to disturb the moment. His hand hovers just shy of her cheek.

“You were always going to return to me,” he breathes.

His voice ripples through her, vibrating through gill and bone and belly. It strokes the slit between her legs, teases the skin behind her knees, makes her scalp tingle with recognition.

“I made this body for you.”

The words land like gravity. Like the truth. Like destiny clicking into place after lifetimes of waiting.

She floats before him, panting, raw, made of light and blood and sea. Her reflection shimmers in the red-gold water around them. She does not reach for him.

She offers herself.

She drifts in the warm dark, suspended in the cradle of the sea, no longer tethered by gravity or breath. Her gills flex gently with the rhythm of the current, each pulse a song of survival made effortless. Her tail moves in slow, exploratory arcs, muscle alive with power she hasn’t yet tested but already knows. The water holds her like she was born in it, like she never belonged anywhere else. There is no fear, no question, just the hum of salt and blood and memory settling into place.

Rafayel floats just beyond reach, body gleaming where light touches his skin, his tail flicking once, lazily. He watches her—not with hunger alone, though it lives there in the depth of his eyes—but with something deeper. A kind of awe, as if even now, unchained, whole, he still does not believe she has returned.

His expression softens, something old in him unraveling. "I'm sorry," he murmurs, the words barely disturbing the water. No grand explanation. No lingering guilt. Just truth, offered quiet and unguarded.

She doesn't need to remember the whole story. It sits inside her like silt at the bottom of a still pool—something buried, but not gone. There had been fire in him once. Anger. Hunger. After they turned from him, when they scraped the altars clean and offered their prayers to another sky, he had risen with a fury that drowned the coastline in weeks of storms. She had stopped him—not with chains, but with her body. Her life. She had gone willingly into the depths and let the sea take her before he could take them.

But that was another life. And she is not that girl.

She is this.

She is the salt and the slit and the silver-eyed thing that now curls softly through the waves like a ribbon unspooling. She is not bound by sacrifice. She is made for him.

He drifts closer, his chest brushing hers, the heat of his skin shimmering through the cold tide. He looks at her as if he’s seeing his own reflection.

Voice low, reverent. “You are my very soul.”

She moves without hesitation.

Her arms wind around his waist first, then her tail follows, coiling around him in a slow, sure embrace. Their bodies fit together like current into hollow, each press of skin familiar, inevitable. He leans into her touch, baring his throat slightly, allowing her to lead—not in surrender, but in understanding.

He opens to her—not just arms, not just mouth, but every inch of him. His fins relax. His breath deepens. His body yields and she takes him.

The shift between reverence and instinct is seamless, like breath slipping into moan. As her coils tighten around him, Rafayel’s chest heaves once, muscles flexing beneath the shimmer of his skin. From the split at his groin, something begins to emerge—first one cock, thick and slick, unfurling like a flower beneath moonlight, then another, just as long, both veined with pulsing lines of blue and violet, glowing faintly at their base. The flesh is wet with ocean heat, ridged slightly, textured to drive her mad. Just beneath the head of each, knots swell gently, throbbing with restrained need—waiting, ready to claim.

She gasps, and the sound is broken music. Her newly formed slit answers before thought can intervene—flesh parting, pulsing, wet with readiness. The ache is unbearable in its precision, a demand her body was sculpted to meet. Instinct blooms. She knows what he is. What she is. What this is for.

Her tail winds around his like a noose of silk and muscle, pulling him flush to her, bodies tight as coral in tide. She grinds her hips forward, her slit guiding the first cock to her entrance, and the head slips past her folds in a single breathless moment—hot, hard, perfect. She moans aloud, voice catching as he fills her inch by inch, her inner walls twitching around him, slick suction drawing him deeper. Her arms tighten around his shoulders as the second cock presses low against the lower edge of her slit, insistent.

Her body shudders.

A pause—then her cunt opens again, wider this time, stretching impossibly. The second shaft pushes inward, a slow, impossible claim. Her slit seals tight around them both, muscles flexing in wet, rhythmic pulses as he sinks into the base. She feels full—not just stretched, but claimed, locked. The sensation is indescribable, a divine overwhelm. Her back arches, gills flaring wide, breasts heaving against his chest.

Inside her, the shafts shift—not independently, but together, rubbing, grinding, stimulating her from within. Her walls flutter around them, each throb pulling a cry from her throat. Rafayel moans low, mouth brushing her neck, hips rocking gently—not thrusting, but grinding, pushing deep in slow, tidal pulses. There’s no rush. No chaos. Only need. Only union.

“You take me like a god should be taken,” he breathes into her, voice breaking.

Her head falls back, mouth open in a wordless gasp as pleasure coils hot and hard in her belly. She clutches tighter around him, her tail moving in slow waves to keep their bodies pressed, sealed. The ridges of his cocks stroke every nerve, every ache, and the pressure builds inside her, exquisite and unbearable. Her moans rise higher, sharper, until they break into pure sound—a song, high and layered, ultrasonic, carried through the water like an aria of lust and divinity.

The sea responds.

Coral pulses open. Anemones flare. Shoals of fish scatter and whirl, moved to frenzy by the echo of her pleasure. She is more than a woman now. She is song.

His knots swell thick, stretching her even more. She groans into his shoulder, eyes rolling back, and Rafayel bites down gently—just above her collarbone. Not to wound. To mark. His teeth press into her skin with careful reverence, and that final pressure breaks her wide open.

He cums inside her—hot, thick, endless.

Each pulse is a shock wave, twin shafts throbbing deep, filling her with divine heat that floods every hollow in her. Her belly swells slightly, not grotesquely, but visibly, her skin tight and glowing where his seed fills her. She milks him with long, rolling contractions, her slit sucking around the base of his knots, locking tight, sealed. His moans mix with hers now, a duet of ruin and ecstasy.

Her orgasm hits like riptide, gills flaring wide, chest convulsing with each fluttering wave of bliss. Her cunt clamps down again and again, spasming around him, drawing him deeper still. Her hands clutch his shoulders, nails dragging over the iridescent skin, and she breathes him in—not air, not water—him.

All around them, the sirens begin to sing.

It is no longer mourning.

It is exultation. They float in concentric circles, arms raised, hair trailing in luminous coils, their voices joining hers in harmony. The sea vibrates with celebration, not worship, but witness. Their goddess has returned—not as myth, not as sacrifice.

As sovereign.

Rafayel holds her through it all, trembling, moaning into her mouth, still pulsing inside her as their bodies remain locked in holy aftermath. The tide has taken its bride and she has taken everything.

They remain joined for what feels like eternity.

No thrusting. No urgency. Just the slow, coiling aftermath—Rafayel’s knots sealed deep inside her, each slight movement a reminder of how completely she holds him. Her arms stay wrapped around his shoulders, her tail looped tight around his lower half, the fin of his spine fluttering faintly as his body pulses out the last waves of seed. Her belly is warm, stretched taut and glowing with fullness, her breathing shallow, more sigh than need. She doesn’t speak. She can’t. Words are for the land. Here, where breath is song and blood is memory, silence says more.

Rafayel rests his forehead against hers, glowing eyes half-closed, his expression open in a way it has never been—stripped bare of rage, of hunger, of pain. He looks at her as if trying to memorize her shape anew, though it’s clear he never forgot. His hands move slowly over her back, over the new slits of her gills, reverent fingers exploring her form with the patience of the

There’s nothing to forgive. The past has settled, the weight of her sacrifice diffused into this union, transformed from sorrow into something holy. His apology lingers in the space between them—not groveling, not weak, but true. And enough.

The sirens begin to fade back into the sea, their bodies streaming past in luminous lines, no longer needed as heralds or guards. They move with joy now, no longer haunted. The song they sang has reached its end, and the silence that replaces it is soft, sated. She watches them go, hair trailing behind like banners of ink, arms wide as they spin into the depths.

Only she remains, held in Rafayel’s arms, marked and filled, reborn.

Eventually, his knots shrink. Her body relaxes around him, the ache giving way to afterglow. He slips free with a soft moan, warmth seeping from her slit in slow ribbons, floating like oil in the red-lit water. Her body trembles slightly at the loss of him, but he holds her steady, mouth brushing her cheek, her jaw, her gills. Not as a god claiming a prize—but as a man reminding her: you are mine, and I am yours.

They rise together through the warm, humming water, their tails brushing, bodies entwined. Above them, the surface waits, silver and soft. The moon still glows, but it looks different now, smaller. Less important. The world up there is a faded thing.

She breaks the surface first, hair slicked back, face upturned. The sea kisses her lips with gentleness. Rafayel surfaces beside her, his hand sliding into hers without ceremony, fingers curling around the web of hers like he’d always been meant to anchor her here.

They float in silence for a time, looking not at the shore, but at each other. Below them, the water still glows faintly, the last traces of the union echoing outward. The wind brushes over the sea like a lover's breath, calm now, satisfied. The cliffs remain untouched. The houses above are dark. No one watches. No one dares.

She no longer wants to be seen.

She knows who she is.

They dive together, smooth as a bladefish, disappearing into the dark beneath. Her laughter carries once, light and strange, followed by his, lower, rougher. The sea swallows the sound and keeps it.

Beneath the surface, life begins once again.

#rafayel x reader #rafayel lads #rafayel ficrec

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