#besides the math homework

[gaygirldoodles]

Highschool is awesome actually

[magiowlio]

my math teacher got mad the class for not doing the worksheet that she never assigned. god I’m so done with this class

[highlifeboat]

Gerda complaint about school once and LRG made that place her personal enemy🤣

Facts

LRG doesn't even really know what school is, all she knows is Gerda leaves for like 7 hours, 5 days out of the week.

God help if Gerda ever complains about a teacher or another student because LRG WILL make them a target.

[joshuamj]

finally got an autism diagnosis hoooray

[yujibooty]

࿐ Nerdjo who’s mom asked why he’s been so cheerful lately (assuming he got a Pokémon card he’s been wanting, or ‘one of those action figures’)

Nerdjo who’s cocky nonchalant attitude falters when you get too close.

Nerdjo who pats your head after study sessions, grabbing his bag and getting ready to leave.

Nerdjo who freezes when you ask him to stay a little longer.

Nerdjo who’s nonchalantless evaporates the second you ask him about his DND characters and Pokémon cards. Completely lost in his ranting, until his eyes land on yours. The fact you were actually listening made smth in his stomach flutter that he can’t explain.

Nerdjo who doesn’t have to turn his head when you walk past him, now exchanging smiles with you every morning.

Nerdjo who bursts in laughter when you do something stupid. Immediately clearing his throat when others look at him annoyed, though his smile never fades away.

Nerdjo who acts like he doesn’t care when you ask to come over, his heard thumping out of his chest, as he shrugs.

Nerdjo who’s never felt such stress or excitement before. He felt like ‘normies’ taking a math test. (“Would she laugh at my wizard bedsheets?”)

Nerdjo whose parents are more excited than he is about this unknown ‘tutor’ girl, his mom drowning him in questions.

Nerdjo who feels anxious letting a girl someone in his personal den. (“Please don’t touch my action figures those are the limited edition 1970-“)

Nerdjo who welcomes you in casually, his mom running to the door like a puppy chasing a ball. (“Mom- she’s fine you can leave the cookies on the counter.”)

Nerdjo who thinks he’s experiencing feeling ‘nervous’ for the first time in his life.

Nerdjo who shows you how to play Pokémon while you both sit on his bed. Your homework and sketches scattered on his floor.

Nerdjo who pulls his sweater over his head mid game, revealing his tank top. (“Kinda hot in here.”)

Nerdjo who feels uneasy under your eyes as you take in his figure. Noticing your distraction to his sleep build.

Nerdjo who starts noticing your figure too.

Nerdjo who tells himself these new emotions are because he’s made a friend. (Besides that shithead Suguru.)

Accepting your hug as you walk out the door, his mom behind him trying to contain herself like a ticking bomb ready to explode.

Yeah, a friend.

Ps; he walks back into his room and your scent hit him like a wave, the bedsheets, his plushies you tampered with, his sweater.

“shit.”

part one || part two

^^ you’re here.

[asahicore]

fast forward - pjs

pairing. jay x fem!reader

synopsis. After yet another romantic disappointment in the form of one Jake Sim, you go to the well you’ve always believed to grant wishes and ask for your one and true love to appear. That night, you go to sleep in your bed but wake up in a strange house. When you head downstairs, you find a man washing the dishes and telling you your favorite meal is waiting on the table for you. You’ve spent hours glaring at the back of that head, you could recognize it anywhere—it belongs to none other than Park Jongseong, your high school sworn enemy... and future husband, or so it seems.

genre+warnings. high school au, the type of e2l where they never really hated each other to begin with, they act like they're academic rivals even though they're not particularly academically gifted, jay has a thing about german the language, sunoo and kazuha besties, heeseung is a loser, jake and sunghoon are assholes sorry, ive liz is german, 02z get into a white-boy locker-room fight, attempts at banter etc, they're a little bit silly

word count. 26.6k

a/n. had the idea for this listening to fast forward by somi LAST SUMMER... and only wrote it this summer and only posting it now <3 i hope u guys enjoy reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it !!!!! jay is an absolute cutie here pls love him as much as i do.... as always let me know what u think and remember to vote for @zreamy president in the upcoming elections, shes the only one i trust to beta-read and hence to run a country <3 no it doesnt matter that shes scottish put this woman in the white house

There is only one thorn on the otherwise immaculate rose that is your life.

Every morning, you wake up feeling refreshed from eight hours of restful sleep. You go downstairs to the kitchen, a boiling cup of milky Earl Grey tea already waiting for you, and eat breakfast with your brother Jinwoo and father. Your mom dashes in, placing a kiss on your and Jinwoo’s foreheads, and on your dad’s lips, saying she’s late for work but will see you in the evening. “Have fun at school,” she bids every morning without fail. Your dad teaches Korean Literature at your school, so the three of you drive there together. He watches amusedly as you and Jinwoo bicker light-heartedly on the way there—even in the pits of his puberty, you and your brother get along like two peas in a pod. He still tells you about everything he learns at school and fills you in on the drama in his class, up-to-date with everything even though he pretends not to be interested.

You’re always one of the first to arrive at school, so you scroll through your feed or finish up some homework as you wait for your classmates to file in. Your friends circle your table and you chat about the last episode of the show you’ve been watching until the bell rings and they leave you for their assigned seat.

Class starts with your teacher handing out the math tests you took last week. “Jay and Y/N, great job, keep it up,” he says as he walks past you and the boy in front of you, and hands you your paper. Relief floods your body as you take in the bright red 82 in the top right-hand corner—not the best of the class, but enough for you to be satisfied. 

Good friends, good grades—nothing extraordinary, but it’s a life you dare say any high school senior would want.

There’s just that one thing. The thorn in your side that won’t stop poking.

You glare at it as it whips around in its seat and takes a peek at the grade on your paper before you get to snatch it away from view. It only gives you three seconds to rejoice over your grade. 

“Aw, Y/N. Good effort! Maybe you’ll do better next time!” Jongseong coos, holding up his test for you to see and glare even harder at. 85. Not that big of a difference, but it makes you want to punch the faux sympathetic pout off of his face. 

You’re about to spit something just as petty back at him, but someone whispers your name, and you turn your head in their direction. Beside you, Jake is smiling at you as he asks what grade you got. Your attention is swiftly taken off of Jongseong, whom you don’t even notice dramatically rolling his eyes, huffing in annoyance, and turning around. 

“82,” you whisper back, holding up your paper for Jake to see. His friendly, absurdly handsome smile makes your ears burn. “You?”

The corners of his lips fall down into a sad pout—the kind that makes your heart melt rather than gets on your nerves like someone else. “68,” he says. Leans in over the gap between your tables. Your heart jumps uncontrollably around your rib cage. “Do you wanna go over it together during the break? I think I need some help.”

One-on-one time with Jake Sim? You don’t need to be asked twice. You nod silently, almost mesmerized by Jake as his grin widens. He leans back in his chair. “Perfect. I’ll see you in the library, then.”

“Library, yeah,” you echo dumbly, but thankfully, your teacher tells you to all quiet down and starts the lesson. 

You’re antsy all throughout the rest of your morning classes and lunch break, so nervous that you barely manage to finish your yogurt. Of course, your friends, Sunoo and Kazuha, have a field day with this, and even you can’t help but laugh along as they jump between reassuring you that it’ll be fine, slapping your shoulders with excitement and making fun of your uncharacteristic quietness.

Jake arrives at the library five minutes after you, looking around the room before he finds you at the big round table in the back of the library. Your brain is too riddled with anxiety for you to make more small talk than “Hey,” “Hey,” “How was your lunch?” “Good, yours?” “Good.” And so you just jump straight into it.

You’ve only had a couple minutes of quiet explanation on your part and heavy nodding on Jake’s when Jay appears at the entrance of the library. He spots you and Jake immediately, and without any hesitation whatsoever heads towards you and sits down at your table, right across from the two of you.

“Hey, Jay,” Jake greets in a friendly manner, but Jay only responds with a nod of his head.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” he says when he notices you glaring. “I won’t bother you.”

As if he could be anything other than a bother, you think, but courteously keep to yourself. The childish rivalry you and Jongseong have got going on has no business spoiling a rare hour of alone time you get with Jake. As you go over the exercises he had the most trouble with on the test with you, your eyes often drift over to Jongseong as if to check on him—you’re cautious like he’s a spider in the corner of the room that might spring on you at any moment.

And indeed, the moment your gaze leaves him for more than a minute as you explain an intricate theorem to Jake, he’s out of sight, and panic shoots through you. Where the hell has he suddenly gone off to? you wonder, but not for long.

“There’s a much easier way to do this, really,” says a voice from behind you, and of course, it’s none other than Jongseong himself, quite literally butting his way into your tutoring session. Right between you and Jake, he bends over and rests his elbows on the table, taking Jake’s pencil from him and describing the theorem in a way that isn’t that much simpler. Your eyes shoot bullets into the side of his face while he, unbothered, explains this and that to Jake, who glances at you a couple of times but otherwise does not seem so perturbed by the sudden change of tutor. Either Jongseong doesn’t notice your glare or doesn’t care, because he doesn’t budge.

Just when they’re done with the exercise and you think you’ll get Jake to yourself again, another voice appears from behind, a much higher, girlier one. You notice the hand on Jake’s shoulder first, until slowly, your eyes drift to the face—you recognize Yunjin, head of the cheerleading squad, and she’s smiling at you, a smile that at once tries to cover and betrays her surprise at seeing you and Jake together. She doesn’t acknowledge you any more than that, gaze going back to “Jakey,” asking him if he wants to head to class together. You check the time—five minutes before the first bell rings. What do they need so much time getting to class for? It’s not like any room in this school is more than a three-minute walk away.

But Jake doesn’t even look back at you, just says “Sure!” with far too much enthusiasm for your taste as he packs his stuff. “Thanks, you two,” he says, looking at Jay first, then at you. You think his eyes linger on you for a second, but just like that, he’s gone, him and Yunjin walking side-by-side.

You watch them leave—they look good together, the cheerleading captain and the soccer team’s star. The white Vans she’s wearing have a bunch of red love hearts on them that look drawn on, and you think, Of course, Jake is the type to date someone cute, someone fun, someone who would draw on their shoes. Not someone like you, whose idea of a good Friday night is lighting up a scented candle and reading your favorite novel for the nth time. When they’ve left the library, you slump in your seat, crumpling the sheet of paper you had drawn a bunch of graphs and formulae on to make things clearer for Jake. Jay awkwardly clears his throat and finally returns to his seat, looking at you with his lips pressed in a tight line.

“Y/N?” he asks tentatively, and the sound is too much to bear, so you pack your things and head to your next class early, too. Your mind is racing with a million thoughts a minute—who is that girl to Jake, how come you’ve never seen them together before, how come he was so eager to leave with her, what was that smile she gave you about? In the fifty-five minutes of your biology class, which you uncharacteristically don’t pay any attention to, you’ve convinced yourself that they are crazy in love and that none of Jake’s actions or words towards you had ever meant anything, that you’d liked him so much you’d dreamt up the possibility of his liking you back, too.

Your next lesson starts—the smile Jake gives you as he walks into History is so bright, it dissipates any clouds hanging over your head. You do believe in male-female friendships, but despite yourself, you can’t help but think that anyone in a relationship wouldn’t give someone else such a perfect, warm smile. It just wouldn’t be right. And so, you reason with yourself that simply walking to a class together didn’t mean two people were a couple.

For an hour, you stare at the back of Jake’s head, and although you do eventually come to the more sensible conclusion that a smile may just be a smile, you also think it's unlikely that he and Yunjin would be a thing. If they were, why would they hide it? Jake is so nice, you wouldn’t be surprised if he’d exaggerated his enthusiasm upon seeing her. You’re sure you still have your chances. He even says see you tomorrow when class is over and slips out of the room to go to soccer practice. 

You feel like you’re walking on cloud 9 as you head from History to your next class—but when you remember that the next class is German, your mood drops significantly. Because the universe has it out for you, you and Jay are two of just ten students in your year taking German as your second foreign language option, everyone else having gone for either French, Japanese or Spanish. Your reasoning for it is that your dad has had an obsession with Germany since his year abroad in Bavaria, and twelve-year-old you had wanted to make him happy. Eighteen-year-old you regrets it slightly, but at least now your dad is ecstatic every time you tell him in German that the dinner he made was really tasty. Why Jongseong decided to take it beats you—he’s probably just insane.

But because you don’t really know anyone else in the class, and because it’s your last period of the day, you have no friends to run off with once the lesson is over, and he gets to bother you all the way from the classroom door to the staff parking lot. 

You’ve barely finished bidding Auf Wiedersehen to your teacher and Jongseong is already harassing you. “So, I didn’t take you as the type to be into guys like Jake Sim.” He says Jake’s name with such disdain, like he thinks he’s so much better than him, or like he hates him. It confuses you just as much as it annoys you; Jongseong didn’t seem to have a problem with Jake earlier at the library.

“And that’s your business, because…?”

You don’t look at Jongseong, who’s quickened his pace to keep up with yours, but you can feel the smirk on his face. It’s insufferable. “Oh, it’s none of my business. I’m just surprised, is all. You guys are so… I don’t know, different.”

You scoff. “If you think I’m not good enough for someone like Jake, I’d rather you tell me straight up, Jongseong. Or actually,” you say, looking up at him with a dry smile. “Keep it to yourself and leave me alone.”

He looks offended by your words, and it only adds to your already immense annoyance—he’s the one who just insulted you, so why is he looking at you with those stupid furrowed eyebrows?

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t need to.”

“No, Y/N.” He grabs your wrist and makes you face him, your stomach flipping in surprise that you quickly cover up. When he releases you, you cross your arms over your chest and wait for him to speak, keeping your eyes trained on a spot behind him. “I don’t think he’s too good for you.” 

This makes you look at him. You have to admit, your curiosity is piqued. Not like Jongseong to say anything even vaguely in your favor. “He’s just…” He sighs, searches for the right word. “Well, he’s just a bit of a dick, isn’t he?”

You freeze for a second. You’re so taken aback, your scoff comes out more as a laugh—Park Jongseong, king supreme of all dicks at this school, just called Jake Sim a dick?

“I’m sorry?”

He sighs again, as though you’re the unreasonable one. “He’s so… smug. A wannabe class clown and thinks he’s the shit because he’s on the soccer team. Have you seen the way he swaggers around school?”

You look at him with fake sympathy. “Jong, are you jealous?”

“Pfft. No way. I just think it’s a shame you keep going after these dudes who are not even worth your time, or whatever, so yeah…” he says, voice trailing off and looking down at his feet as he speaks. Hands in pockets and blank expression on his face, you can tell he’s trying to look cool, but the way he’s avoiding your gaze is a dead give-away. Even his ears have turned red. Jongseong is having one of those shy moments he has when he’s trying to be nice to you. Clearly, a simple act of kindness towards you is so hard for him that it radically changes the way he behaves. 

Like when you were fifteen and you just couldn’t get this stupid art project right, so he stayed behind for three hours after school with you, helping you draw and paint and cut and glue. 

Like when you were sixteen and your grandma just passed away, making you miss a week of school, and without a word, barely looking at you, he gave you a stack of handwritten notes of all the lessons you missed. To this day, you’re not sure how he did it—you weren’t in the same class that year.

Like when you were seventeen and Park Sunghoon rejected you in the middle of a crowded hallway. You’d run off to the girls’ bathroom to cry it out, but Jongseong quickly found you and spent the entire period cursing Sunghoon out instead of being in English, like you were both meant to be. He was uncharacteristically nice to you for a few days after that, never starting an argument for no reason or interrupting you when you spoke. When you snapped at him, telling him it only made you feel worse that he treated you differently, he smiled and told you how stupid you looked when you cried. It made you laugh more than it should’ve.

Like now, when he suddenly decides that Jake Sim is also a wrong choice for you. “Him and Sunghoon are good friends, you know that?” he says. “Birds of a feather, and all…”

So you know that Jongseong is not all bad. He has his redeeming qualities. He can even be nice sometimes, when he so wishes. But those moments are so few and far between that when he returns to his usual insufferable self, you wonder if you’d dreamt it all up. Which is why you can’t quite take him seriously right now. You roll your eyes and resume walking towards the parking lot, but of course, he continues to follow you. “Why do you even care who I go after?”

“I don’t-”

“You clearly do, otherwise you wouldn’t be bothering me like this.”

“Well, if all your attention is taken up by that douche, who am I going to go up against?”

“That’s what you’re worried about? That I stop arguing with you?” you say, disbelief clear in your voice.

“I’m offended, Y/N,” he starts, his sarcastic tone making you roll your eyes again. “That our little rivalry matters so little to you.”

“We’re not even the top students of our class, for God’s sake, we’re not fighting over anything.”

“I’ve actually got the best grades in German, thanks very much.”

“Whatever. I wouldn’t call it a rivalry so much as a mutual dislike of each other, because one of us woke up one day and decided to start going against everything the other said.”

“At least you’re self-aware.”

The exit to the parking lot now appears to you like the gates of heaven. You don’t even bother replying to him, thinking that he’ll just leave you alone now that you’re here. But as you step outside, he places himself in front of you and blocks your path, arms splayed out, eyes wide like he’s just seen a ghost.

“What are you-”

“Have you done the German homework for tomorrow?”

The sudden change of subject gives you whiplash. “What? No, Miss Schumacher assigned it just now-”

“Well, given your tendency for getting the word order all wrong, I can already tell you you’re not gonna have fun with it-”

You pinch the nose of your bridge, trying to calm yourself down before you lose what’s remaining of your mind. “Jongseong, were you actually dropped on the head as a baby? Go away. My dad’s gonna be here any second.” You try to walk around him, but he steps in front of you again. You peer up at him, undisguised annoyance in your eyes. Where are your dad and brother when you need them?

“I’m just saying, you’ll probably need help with it-”

“I won’t. And if I do, I’ll just use Google. Now get out of my way,” you say, and manage to duck under one of his arms.

Then you see it.

Well, actually, it takes you a second to understand what it is you’re seeing. At first, you think it’s one of those horny couples thinking they’re being really discreet by going to the staff parking lot to make out, when in reality they could be caught by any one at any time. They’re just far enough that when you do a double take, you realize that you do know the back of that head; that fluffy mop of brown hair. You sit behind it every History period, next to it every Maths and English period.

The girl is up against the wall, and you can’t really see her, what with her and Jake’s tongues being down each other’s throat and his body blocking her from your view, his hands on her hips, her arms around his shoulders. All the works. She’s wearing a cheerleader uniform, so she could be any of twenty girls—but you’re pretty sure only one of them wears a pair of white Vans with red love hearts on them.

Your heart sinks to your stomach.

You’re frozen in place when a whistle rings in the distance, and Jake and Yunjin separate, giggling to each other as they jog to wherever the sound came from. The sports field, probably. It’s Monday; the cheerleaders and the soccer team share the field for their practice. 

Jake spots you and Jongseong staring at them. He waves quickly, awkwardly at you, still smiling even when surprise coats his features. Yunjin tugs on his hand and just like that, they’re gone. 

“Y/N-” 

Jay’s voice fades in the background. You want to get away from this situation as quickly as possible—it’s embarrassing enough seeing the guy you like and thought you had a chance with kissing a girl that is arguably much more on his level than you are, but having Jongseong of all people not only witness it, but try to protect you from it, God knows why, makes it impossibly mortifying. You speed-walk to your dad’s car, huffing as you plop in your seat and slamming the door behind you. Your brother is already sitting in the passenger seat, and you don’t even argue with him about it. When you only give single-word replies to his questions, he shrugs and returns to playing Clash of Clans on his phone. 

The moment you get home, you fish a five cent coin from your purse, change into mud boots and grab your dog’s leash. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

After half-an-hour of trudging through leaves and soft ground, muddy from many a rainy November night, you and Pablo, your massive, fluffy airhead of a German Shepherd, find yourselves at the well in the middle of the forest. Ever since you were little, you have attributed magic powers to the well—not that anyone told you any sort of myth about it, but you remember reading a story about a magic well and decided that your well would be magical, too. You’ve never wanted to abuse its powers, so you’ve used your wishes conscientiously: things like getting a certain present at Christmas (when you were nine and the most important thing ever was getting the Monster High doll you wanted) or not stuttering during your presentation in class (when you really didn’t want to embarrass yourself in front of Park Sunghoon and his cool friends). Every wish you’ve made has come true. Whenever a faint voice of reason tells you that it’s because you always ask for very realistic things, you squash it and continue to believe in the well.

Because today, you’re not asking for something realistic. 

Today, you’re asking the well to show you the way to love.

You’ve grown up watching The Notebook and Pride & Prejudice. Your parents are high school sweethearts who are still, twenty-five years later, happily married. You devour romance novels and binge-watch Asian dramas, the more unrealistic and romantic, the better. You are convinced that soulmates exist, that love always finds a way, that it is there for anyone to see. That it can take form in a childhood friend, an archnemesis, a total stranger.  

But for some reason, it hasn’t shown itself to you yet, no matter how valiantly you’ve looked. 

You’re absolutely sick and tired of it. It is Jake kissing another girl, it’s Sunghoon leading you on for months and then rejecting you in front of everyone, it’s your ex-boyfriend-who-shall-not-be-named, your first love and first heartbreak, dumping you after a year and getting with the girl he had told you not to worry about a week later. At a party a few months later, he’d said, word for word, “At least I didn’t cheat on you.”

Coin lodged between your hands, you interlace your fingers and press your palms closely together, eyes screwed shut in desperation. “Hey,” you start simply, because you and the well are good friends. “It’s been a while since I’ve asked for anything, so I hope you can indulge me… This is gonna sound so cliché, but I’m really tired of getting fucked over by boys — excuse my French — and I just wanna meet the person who’s right for me, you know? Mom’s always reminding me that I’m only eighteen, and that I’ve got plenty of time to meet someone, but I just feel like if I don’t find someone now, I never will. And if I get fucked over again — sorry — I’ll just lose hope and write off men for the rest of my life. So help a girl out, will you? I’ll leave it to you how you wanna go about it, but… just show me that there’s someone out there. Please.”

When you open your eyes, you need a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. You toss the coin in the well. It doesn’t make a sound as it hits the bottom, as if it has been absorbed within the old brick walls. You know better than to question it—the well works in mysterious ways.

You’re quiet that entire evening, making up an excuse of a tiring day at school when your parents ask. Really, you’re just thinking about your wish, whether it’ll work, what might happen. You half-ass your homework—Jay was right, the German exercises throw you into a bout of despair, so you quickly close your textbook and bury yourself in your sheets, falling asleep hours earlier than you usually would.

--

For some reason, the first thing you notice when you wake up is that it’s still dark outside. It must be the middle of the night, you think. It takes you a few seconds to realize that you’re in a completely strange room.

Instead of your floral-patterned sheets, you find yourself covered by delicate silk sheets that your parents would never agree to buy you, no matter how adamantly you argued for the benefits of silk for your skin. If skincare experts online had convinced you of one thing, it was that silk would do wonders for your obstinate acne. You slide out of bed and find a pair of slippers on the floor, as if waiting for you. Even the pajamas you’re wearing are fancier, more grown up than the ones you have at home, a set composed of a pinstriped button-up and shorts. You look around, for some reason more surprised and curious than panicked. You could’ve been kidnapped, for all you know, but all you care about right now is this room. Rather than the pink and white walls that have surrounded you since childhood, covered with pictures of you and your friends, postcards of artwork bought at museums, and posters of your favorite movies, the walls here are beige and mostly bare, except for a painting of Japanese cherry blossoms above the bed and a family portrait on the opposite wall, above a wooden chest of drawers. 

The family portrait. A woman, a man, and what you can only assume are their children. They look like twins—two girls. Can’t be older than three years old. Out of the four faces, you recognize two of them. You recognize them far too well. One of them is yours, of course. You look slightly older, by a decade, maybe? You’re glad to know that you won’t fall off after twenty-five, like much of social media has led you to believe. 

The other face you recognize immediately, too, but it takes you a few seconds to truly believe it.

It belongs to none other than Park Jongseong.

A dry chuckle falls from your throat, as if someone has just made a very insulting joke at your expense and you have to pretend you find it funny. The well has a very odd sense of humor, you think. It’s probably just a prank, a magic-induced nightmare before the real thing. Except this already feels real, disorientingly so. The fabric on your skin, the picture, the room. It all feels too real, more tangible than any dream you’ve ever had.

You take a step closer towards the picture, as if looking at it harder will make Jongseong’s face fade into that of another man, the real man that will become your husband and father of your children. But alas, his features remain the same, frozen in time by the photographer’s camera. He, too, looks older—and not only does he not fall off after twenty-five, he becomes all the more handsome for it.

Is this how you find out that Jongseong was handsome all along? You stare at it until the familiar face becomes practically unrecognizable, like repeating a word so much it stops feeling like one. The straight nose, the almond-shaped eyes that seem to have softened overtime, whereas his jaw has remained as sharp as ever. Have his eyebrows always framed his face so perfectly? Has that dimple always been there? 

You look around again, and the bright numbers on the bedside alarm clock catches your attention. They read 9:57 p.m., but it’s the date that makes your stomach sink—today is still the 18th of November, but ten years later. You stare at the clock, at the unfamiliar number, a date so far into the future you can’t wrap your head around it. You could barely envision life after high school.

Downstairs, the sudden clang of pots and the sound of a tap running manage to rip your gaze away from the alarm clock. An overwhelming curiosity tells you to follow the noise. This is all a dream, so there are no consequences if you explore a bit more, right? 

You’ve never been in this house before, and you have no idea where your feet are taking you until you find yourself in the kitchen. It’s the only lit room in the house, and you’re creepily standing in the dark under a wide archway that connects the kitchen to what looks like the dining room. A man has his back to you, washing dishes and putting them out to dry on a rack next to the sink. He’s wearing a white cotton sweater, one that you feel you recognise without ever having seen before, and a brown apron is tied around his neck and waist. 

The first thing you think to yourself is Oh, his haircut hasn’t changed. In almost every class you share with him, Jongseong has made it a point to sit either next to you or right in front of you, so you’ve spent a lot of time glaring at the back of his head. You wouldn’t be surprised if he started developing two eye-shaped bald spots there. His hair is still short and spiky at the back and on the sides, longer on the top. When he lets it grow too long, it sometimes covers his eyes, and he obnoxiously keeps having to push it back like a heartthrob in an 80s movie. 

Something like a memory flashes through your mind, blurry like those images you aren’t sure came from a dream or from real life. Your surroundings are unclear, but Jay’s face is nestled against your neck, your hand in his hair. You can feel the softness of the close shave against your palm as clearly as if you were touching it right now. You ask him why he’s always kept it that way, and he replies that it’s simple to maintain. Then in classic Jay fashion, he adds, “And it makes me look awesome.”

Another memory, a clearer one, this time—this definitely happened. It’s halfway through sophomore year, a random Tuesday, and Jay walks in, holding his head high and looking smugly around himself. The bastard got a new haircut. Long gone, his messy, unorganized flop of black hair that looked like it didn’t know what it was doing; hello, sleek undercut. It accentuates all of his best features, which is terrible news for you. You had never even thought of Jongseong as someone having “best” features, but now they’re being thrown in your face. His nose. His jawline. His smile.

It ruins your day, and a few after that. You can’t quite put it into words when your friends ask what’s wrong at lunch—or rather, you don’t wanna face the humiliation of uttering something along the lines of “Park Jongseong looks good with his new haircut, and it’s bothering me.”

Here, it’s a familiar sight in an unfamiliar environment, the back of his head. Without really thinking, you take a step forward. Jongseong starts at the sound of your slippers against the marble floor tiles, but his face relaxes into a smile when he sees you.

“Oh, it’s just you, honey. I thought you were sleeping.”

Just you. As if the two of you being in the same kitchen is normal. You guess it must be, to this version of Jongseong. To him, you’re not the annoying girl he strives to best in every class—you’re honey. 

“I was,” you say, walking around the kitchen island to join him by the sink. Something in you needs to look at him, really look at him, maybe pinch yourself or pinch him to be sure you’re not going crazy. Maybe you caught wafts of some ancient algae that lives in the well and made you hallucinate?

“I left a plate out for you in case you woke up. Made your favorite. The girls weren’t so happy, seeing as it’s the third time this month,” he says with the special kind of smile reserved for parents talking about their children. The girls. A mention so casual, so obvious, your heart hurts. “But I think I got it really right this time,” he continues. “Honestly, it might even be better than the original.”

He goes back to washing the dishes and you watch the sponge in his hands as it scrubs away tomato sauce, the soap as it runs from the plates into the sink. A knot forms in your stomach, something like a deep sadness that overwhelms you all of a sudden, and tears form in your eyes, threatening to fall any second.

When you haven’t budged in almost a minute, Jongseong starts to say, in an intimate, almost worried voice, “Aren’t you going to eat, honey?” but when he sees your wet eyes, the tremble in your lower lip, he shuts the water immediately and dries his hands. With his thumbs, he wipes away the tears that have started falling from your eyes. “What’s wrong?” he whispers.

You can’t reconcile the man in front of you with the image you have of the boy that torments you in every class you share. You can’t reconcile the genuine concern in his voice with the snarky tone you’re met with every day. And yet, they respond to the same name, their features are identical, if not for the years that separate them, the stress of adulthood on one and the carefreeness of youth on the other. 

Your body reacts automatically to the soft touch—never in a million years would you let the Jongseong you know come near you like this, but here, nothing feels more natural than his hands on your face, your shoulders, your hair, as though they’re just as much his as they are yours. You realize the emotion in your stomach is not sadness—tears fall, but you’re not sad. You’ve never felt as home as you do now, and if one thing romantic novels have taught you, is that this must be love.

You look up at the man in front of you, eyebrows furrowed as you search his face for confirmation or some sort of an answer. There’s a tremble in your voice when you speak next. “I just… I think I love you, Jongseong.”

He chuckles. “Well, we established that a while ago, didn’t we? What with getting married and having kids. But I’m glad you still feel that way.”

The mention of marriage and children doesn’t faze you nearly as much as it should. You’ve only got one thing on your mind. “Do you love me too?”

You expect him to laugh—not out of cruelty, but because the answer is so obvious, it almost doesn’t deserve to be answered seriously. Like when your brother asks if he can have one more of your cookies and you tell him you’ll cut his hand off. Sometimes you think it’s easier to be sarcastic than be unabashedly nice to someone. Especially with Jongseong, whom you don’t expect kindness or patience from, you wait for him to stay something like, “No, that’s why I’ve stayed with you these eight years.” 

So when instead, he says, “More than anything on this Earth,” voice low and vulnerable, tears flow even harder. 

“Sorry, it’s probably just my period,” you say through sobs, although you have no idea where in her menstrual cycle this version of you is.

Jongseong chuckles again, pressing a kiss to your forehead. “You do get emotional around this time.” And you cry more, because you can’t believe someone other than your mother knows you so well that they know what your period symptoms are.

Rubbing soothing circles against your back and whispering soft words in your ear, he holds you for as long as you need to calm down. When you finally do, he tells you to go sit on the couch, that he’ll finish up the dishes then heat and bring your food for you. You think you’ve got your emotions under control, but the moment you bite the pasta, cooked to perfection with the most succulent tomato sauce you’ve ever had, sweet with a little kick of spice and a generous amount of parmesan cheese, tears start to fall again as if you had an endless stock of water behind your eyes.

“This is so good,” you mumble.

Jongseong smiles, his gaze full of affection miraculously directed at you as he tucks away strands of your hair so they don’t get in your eyes or in your food. “I’m glad, baby.”

You react to the nickname viscerally, words tumbling out of your mouth before you can even understand them. “You haven’t called me that in ages.” You widen your eyes at yourself, wondering how this was something you even knew. But when you look at Jongseong, all he does is smile more.

“You’re right, I haven’t. I guess I was reminded of college. You cried all the time back then. As much as it pained me, I can’t say I wasn’t happy to be the one you always came to for comfort.”

You haven’t been through college yet, so you should be unable to tell whether this truly happened or not—and yet, the memories of the body you’re in all confirm what Jongseong just said. But it feels impossible—going to university with him, letting yourself be vulnerable enough with him to not only cry in front of him but let him comfort you. Whatever could have happened in the years between the present you know and your time at university for things to change so drastically?

But before you can make sense of any of it, Jongseong speaks again. “Why? Do you like it when I call you baby?”

Your stomach flips. Heat rises to your face at his words, the tone with which he said them, the things he was alluding to—you know that having children means you’d popped your cherry at some point, that you’d had sex with Jongseong specifically, but to be confronted with the fact was something else. 

“Maybe,” you mumble, and proceed to stuff your mouth with pasta so that you can’t incriminate yourself further.

He puts on a recent movie, something you should arguably be paying attention to, since you’re literally getting a glimpse into the future of cinema—you could steal the idea, go back to your present and sell it for an outrageous price.

But Jongseong’s presence next to you makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but him. The warmth emanating from him, the scent of his perfume envelop you, give you a sense of just how real this all is—despite how comfortable being with him like this feels, you’re still not convinced you’re not just in an unsettlingly vivid dream. You take one of his hands in yours, examining each finger, turning his hand over, tracing the lines of his palm, smoothing your thumb over his nails—it’s an undeniably human hand. Warm against yours, slightly rough. He’s started using hand cream, you think, all these winters when his dry hands would crack because of the cold coming up to your mind, teenage Jongseong’s hard refusal to wear any sort of cream to protect himself. Memories bob up to the surface: fixing his cracked hands up with a plaster, your tear falling on his hand, the both of you in your school uniforms in what looks like the school infirmary; awkwardly gifting him some hand cream the Christmas of that year, not looking at him as you hand him the small package. Saying, “It’s a waste of plasters for something that could be fixed so easily.” Him treating you to warm, spicy tteokbokki because he felt bad for not having gotten you anything, even though this was the first time either of you had ever given the other one a present.

As your fingers trail up from his hand to his forearm, his shoulder, his jawline, more memories flood your mind. Clumsy first kisses; squabbles of the kind you were already used to; lazy mornings in bed; hours spent in your kitchen or his, before you shared one, cooking dinner together; the way you felt when he proposed, a feeling so intense remembering it is almost unbearable now. Your eyes and fingers examine his face in detail—even though you’ve seen him almost every day since the start of high school, this feels like the first time you really perceive him. The delicate bow of his lips, the strong nose, the softness in his eyes when he looks at you. Your heart beats uncontrollably as you hold each other’s gazes, but you feel inexplicably relaxed at the same time, two nearly opposing realities fighting each other inside of you—one in which you and Jongseong regarding each other with such affection is unthinkable, the other in which it is daily routine.

“Movie not to your taste?” he asks, voice gentle, breaking you out of your stupor.

“Hm?”

He nods towards the TV screen. “I see you’re not paying much attention.”

“No. I have… things on my mind.”

He raises an eyebrow, a smirk slowly growing on his lips. “Yeah?” You think your heart might actually flatline when he brings you in closer to his chest, and, face buried in your hair, says, “You know, I’ve been thinking that the twins might want a younger sibling to play with soon enough…”

You’re not sure whether he actually wants a third child or if this is weird dirty talk that apparently turns parents on—all you know is that this is something future you will deal with, not high school senior you. 

You whip up your head at him, eyes wide in panic that he mirrors immediately. “Or—or not. Later. Later?” You nod fervently, and the worry dissipates from his handsome features. “Okay, later,” he whispers, kissing the top of your head before returning his attention to the movie. 

A couple hours later, you’re laying in bed in the dark together—you can tell Jongseong is falling asleep by the regularity of his breathing and his stillness, but you’re wide awake. You don’t know how you’ve managed to spend all this time with him, acting like the wife he knows and loves, without imploding. But suddenly, the idea of waking up in your childhood bed, surrounded by your pink-and-white walls, going downstairs to be greeted by your brother and parents, sends a wave of panic through you. You haven’t felt this comfortable in a long time—Jongseong’s arm draped over your waist, the fact that you could reach over and feel his skin against your palm if you wanted. You don’t want to go back to a time where you hate him. In fact, you don’t know if you could hate him after this.

“Jongseong?” you say softly, the syllables unfamiliar on your tongue, even though the name rings brusquely through your head for the best part of every day.

It takes a few seconds, but he reacts eventually. “Hm? Did you just call me Jongseong?” he murmurs sleepily, as if you’d just called him Robert or Christopher and not the name his own parents gave him.

“Yeah.”

He chuckles. “Now that’s something you haven’t called me in ages. Makes me feel like you’re mad at me,” he says, turning over and burying his face in the crook of your neck. His hair tickles your skin, and one of your hands comes up reflexively to feel the softness of his close shave.

“...Jong?” you try.

“That’s a step up, but not quite what I want,” he mumbles.

You’re silent for a few moments. “Honey,” you say tentatively, voice a mere whisper.

“That’s better.” You can hear the smile in his voice.

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“Mh-hm. It’s Saturday tomorrow.”

“No,” you say, feeling out of breath. “I mean, will you be here?”

You’re aware you’re not making much sense—and yet, Jongseong needs no further explanation. “Of course, baby,” he starts, voice soothing. “I’ll be here tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day afterwards. ‘Til death do us part, remember?”

You let out a shaky breath. “Okay.”

“I love you, Y/N.”

“I love you, too,” you find yourself saying, and, more importantly, meaning. It’s the last thing either of you says before falling asleep.

--

Tears are streaming down your face when you wake up the next day. When you open your eyes, pink and white obnoxiously stare back at you. The clock reads 7:12, just three minutes before your alarm goes off, and unfortunately for high school you, the night hasn’t given in to Saturday morning—it’s Tuesday, and you have to go to school and act as if you hadn’t just had the weirdest, most realistic dream of your life. You don’t even get a weekend to shake this weird feeling in your stomach off, you’re going to have to face Park Jongseong full force. At least, this will become your friends’ favorite bit for the foreseeable future.

They’re already sitting in the classroom when you get there, animatedly chatting to each other. You plop down in your seat in front of them, and when they see the sullen look on your face, ask you what’s wrong.

“Did you wake up during the night to play Hay Day again?” Kazuha asks, eyebrows knotted with genuine worry.

“I’m not that person anymore,” you reply. “No, I just had a really weird dream. More like a nightmare, really. It feels like I didn’t get any sleep.”

“What was it about?” Sunoo asks.

Your eyes dart back-and-forth between the two of them as you brace yourself for their reactions. Not wanting anyone else to overhear, you lean in conspiratorially. They mirror you. “I was married to Park Jongseong,” you whisper. As expected, they burst into laughter immediately, and you lean back in your seat, crossing your arms in annoyance. “It’s not funny.”

“It’s very funny,” Kazuha retorts. “It’s ironic, even, considering how much you hate the guy.”

“Exactly!”

“But I guess even you know how ridiculous it is that you hate him, if your brain is able to imagine yourself being married to him,” Sunoo adds, shrugging. “It’s a good reminder that you’re literally the only person in this school with a vendetta against him.”

Kazuha nods energetically. “He picked up a pen for me, once. He’s a nice guy.”

You look around the room in panic. “Keep it down, will you?” you hush, despite the fact that no one is paying any attention to the three of you. You sigh, resolving yourself to telling them the entire truth. “But guys, I’m scared. I think this might be a sign.”

Their eyebrows perk up. “A sign that your hatred of him has actually been disguising a crush this entire time?” Sunoo asks, feigning innocence.

“No—what? Where did you get that idea?”

“Nowhere. Go on.”

“Whatever. Come here,” you say, gesturing for them to huddle again. “It’s the well.”

“Oh my God, Y/N, you’ve actually lost it,” Kazuha says, fascinated by your stupidity.

“I’m not going to tolerate any well slander, this is serious. I just wanted it to reassure me that there was someone out there for me. And then I had that stupid dream.”

Kazuha and Sunoo exchange a look like they’re parents trying to announce to their daughter that she’s adopted. “Y/N…” Sunoo starts.

“This is crazy. Like, love philters and writing Park Sunghoon’s name a hundred times are one thing, this is…”

“Crazy,” Sunoo said, nodding along. “This is crazy. There’s no other word for it. Your eighteen years of boyfriendlessness have finally caught up to you.”

“You guys don’t get it. What about that time I asked it to give me a good grade on our Literature exam and I literally came first out of our class? Or when I told it I missed Jung Hae-in and his military discharge announcement came the next day?” you say, aware that the look in your eyes is only confirming their suspicions—but you need someone to believe you, or at the very least understand you.

“One, you’re a good student. Two, that was pure coincidence,” Sunoo explains.

“But girl, if you want to marry Jay, that’s fine. You’ve got our blessing,” Kazuha says, shrugging.

“Yeah. He picked up her pen, once,” Sunoo adds.

“And you know, you guys clearly have some sort of chemistry.”

You scoff. “If you think that him refuting my every word and finding every opportunity to make fun of me, then yeah, I guess you could say we have chemistry.”

“You guys have banter,” Kazuha says as if it’s obvious.

“Oh, please. Banter is cute. I want to kill him every time he opens his mouth.”

Your friends both roll their eyes. “While I understand that most men are better off staying quiet—no offense, Sunoo—”

“None taken.”

“You have to admit Jay is not nearly as insufferable as you make him out to be,” Kazuha says.

“Are you kidding me? He’s always acting like a child. Rubbing it in my face when he gets a better grade, trying to start arguments for no reason, sucking up to teachers, stealing my erasers, for God’s sake, you’d think he’s twelve. I know that I’m not on the majority's side, but I seriously cannot understand how other people tolerate him at all.”

Sunoo sighs. “Because he’s nice to everyone. He never hesitates to help people, he’s even funny, sometimes, and—well, look at him.” He nods his head towards the door, and when you turn around, Jongseong is indeed walking in the classroom. “He’s not a bad-looking boy.”

“Gosh, Sunoo, maybe you should marry him,” Kazuha says, but since you laid your eyes on Jongseong, you’ve stopped listening.

You feel weird. You look at him, and you feel weird. It’s the same feeling you had during your sleep last night, a feeling that paralyzes you from head to toe, that starts in your stomach and spreads to your entire body, weighs you down in your chair. 

“Hey, guys,” he greets simply, and his voice wraps itself around your heart and squeezes. You can’t do anything but watch him as he takes his seat next to you, plopping his bag on the table and taking his notebook out. He looks at you, watches you watching him, then swivels around in his chair.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asks your friends.

“She had a dream that she m—”

“Do not finish that sentence, Zuha, if you want to live to see another day.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she replies, a satisfied little smile on her lips.

Despite yourself, you’re still staring at Jongseong, trying to figure out what the hell these emotions are that are raging up a storm inside of you. Instead of ignoring you, he turns to face you, resting his elbow on the table and his chin in his palm as he stares back at you, smirking. “What’s up, Y/N? Has it finally dawned on you how devastatingly handsome I am?” he asks, and you frown, because he’s not so far off from the truth.

“Please, kids, it’s 9 a.m., don’t flirt right in front of us,” Sunoo says, despair in his voice.

“She’s the one who started it,” Jongseong replies, still looking at you, his smirk growing.

For some reason, this startles you out of your trance, and you look away from him like you’ve been burned, preoccupying yourself instead with your notes for this class. “In your dreams, Jongseong,” you mumble.

“More like in yours,” Kazuha says, her and Sunoo giggling.

“Zuha!” you exclaim. Jongseong looks at you with raised eyebrows, and with his infuriating capacity to put two and two together, you’re scared he’s figured out what she meant, but you’re literally saved by your teacher who walks in at that moment and starts the class. 

The second the bell rings to signify the end of the class, you hurriedly pack your things and mutter an excuse about needing the bathroom, trying to get as far away as possible from the boy whose all-too familiar scent had messed with your thoughts all class, whose every brush of his arm against yours had made your heart race uncontrollably.

--

It hadn’t just been a dream. It couldn’t have been.

Just like there was no doubt the 28-year-old Jongseong from last night had once been the annoying boy you knew, the 18-year-old Jongseong was sure to one day become the husband of your dreams. A devoted partner and father, his presence comforting, his good looks indeed devastating, unwavering.

There was no mistake to be made. The well had worked its magic.

Whether you liked it or not, you would end up marrying Park Jongseong. You, of all people; him, of all people.

Was there already something of your future husband in the boy that snickered when you mixed up your genders in German class, or would he one day spring out of nowhere? Apparently, you’d be around to find out.

But for now, how to act around him? It felt unfair that you were privy to this knowledge of your shared future while he was ignorant of it. Blissfully, perhaps. You couldn’t imagine that he would rejoice much at this news.

Your mind is somewhere else the entire day. At lunch, your other friends try to get the thing that’s obviously bothering you out of you, but Kazuha and Sunoo are there to tell them not to bother. You’d needed to tell someone about it, but you don’t want the entire school to know about your marital premonitions. The two knuckleheads you call your best friends are already doing a good enough job teasing you about it—”There’s your husband, Y/N,” when Jongseong walks past; “So have you thought of baby names? Kayleigh and Mackayleigh, perhaps?” unsolicited, during Physics. You turn around to check on the culprit — because yes, Jongseong is the culprit here, you, a mere a victim — and when he notices you staring, nods at you as if to say, What’s your problem?, trying to look threatening in his white lab coat that’s three sizes too big and protective goggles.

It doesn’t help that Jongseong has a way of hovering around you. Even in classes in which your teachers assigned the seats for you, he’s never far from your seat. The two of you sit next to each other in German, your last class every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. But today, the seat next to you is empty—what would’ve been a cause for celebration just yesterday is now a source of worry. You’d seen him just two hours ago in your previous class together, so where the hell was he now? He’s lucky that your teacher is an old German lady who always spends the first ten minutes of the lesson rambling about something in dialectal German no one understands but nods along to anyway. When he walks into the room, five minutes late, she just says, “Hallo, Jay,” and continues with her story. It’s about her first school trip to Berlin when she was fifteen and the country was still divided. You think.

He winks at you when he takes his seat and you roll your eyes. You pretend to listen to your teacher for thirty seconds, then hit him gently with your elbow. “Where were you?” you ask without looking at him.

He doesn’t answer immediately, probably surprised you initiated a non-hostile conversation with him for once. “I was just hanging out with my friends, something you clearly wouldn’t understand.”

And your friends wondered why you hated him?

“Still having imaginary friends at eighteen is really concerning, Jongseong. You should see someone about it.”

When you glance at him, he’s already looking right at you, smiling. You’ve never felt so conscious of your side profile. 

“Why? Were you worried?” he whispers, kicking your foot with his.

You look at him, horrified—where the hell had he gotten that idea? How was he so spot-on? You scoff, trying to diffuse the tension inside yourself. “No.”

He kicks your foot again. “I was five minutes late and you started to worry?”

“No. Stop.”

“I didn’t know you cared about me so much, Y/N.”

This time, you give him a harsh look, one that lets him know you really mean your words—“Stop it.” Finally, he relents, getting the assigned homework out now that the teacher has actually started the lesson. Your face softens—he looks hurt. Guilt tugs at your heartstrings.

Despite what you might say, you like the way things are with Jongseong. If some people always need to be crushing on someone, you always need to have someone you perceive as an enemy—it was Na Jaemin in elementary school, because he’d once made fun of your incapability to climb the monkey bars; Shin Ryujin, in middle school, for kissing your crush during a game of spin-the-bottle at your own birthday party; Park Jongseong, since freshman year, for simply existing. Your reasons for disliking him are trivial, you’ll admit. You weren’t sure you could even place a finger on what had first triggered your disdain towards him—one too many awful jokes, one too many times raising his hand in class and rattling off a perfect answer, then looking around himself proudly, one too many roars of laughter heard throughout the entire cafeteria. The fact that no one else seemed to be bothered by him only added to your aggravation. He just got on your nerves, and it seemed that you openly showing your dislike of him — him, who was so used to being loved by everyone around him, pampered by his family, praised by his teachers, popular among his peers — was enough to make him dislike you, too. So, after a few failed attempts at trying to be your friend, because Jongseong was unable to not be friends with everyone he met, he didn’t simply give up. 

If he couldn’t be your friend, then fine, he’d be your enemy.

At least, that’s how it appears to you, still now. It’s never gone dangerously far, but if there’s an opening to tease you or get on your nerves, he’ll do it. Not passing you the ball during soccer, or conversely, only aiming for you during dodgeball, not sharing his textbook with you when you forgot it unless you beg, loudly clearing his throat when you speak in class. And, lately, pouring salt on your wounds in the form of reminding you how impossible you and Jake Sim are. His motto must be if there’s a will, there’s a way. And when it comes to making your life hell, his will is infinite.

Everything is upside-down now. The question of how your relationship can possibly go from this to that obsesses you. It feels like you’re more capable of sharing a funeral, dying at each others’ hands, than a wedding. 

“Jong, your textbook.”

He squints at you. “Funny how I’m Jongseong when you hate me, Jong when you need a textbook,” he says, sliding his book closer to himself.

“It’s not my fault your name is a mouthful,” you retort, trying to pull it back to the middle of the table, but he’s quicker than you.

“Then maybe you should call me Jay, like everyone else on Earth.”

“Where’s the fun in that? Now give it here. Please?” you ask, mustering your best smile. Any other teacher would’ve scolded the two of you by now, but Ms. Schumacher is peacefully going on about the importance of word order and punctuation in the German sentence, oblivious to her two students bickering in the back row. Jongseong usually never sits at the back of the classroom—only here.

He gives in, smiling back, but there’s something behind it, something that tells you nothing good is brewing in his brain. “Only because you’re so pretty.”

Normally, this kind of remark would’ve warranted a slap on the arm or an array of insults, but if today is anything, it is not normal. You look at him like you’ve been stung, visions of your not-dream coming to you in flashes like you’re the titular character on That’s So Raven—the affection in your husband’s eyes, the kindness in his words, the sincerity in his smile. Again, you’re left to wonder if this man is already taking root inside of the boy next to you, if Jongseong’s future capacity to love you presently exists in his heart.

Does your future capacity to love him already exist in your heart?

You watch as his smirk softens into a grin, your flusteredness and lack of a response clearly amusing him, then as he circles the exercises Ms. Schumacher is assigning for the lesson. She seems to have forgotten there was homework due—Jongseong will be sure to remind her of it quickly.

He kicks your foot again, tells you to focus. His ears have turned red.

You wonder if those capacities haven’t existed from the start.

--

As much as you love a good friends-to-lovers story, characters hiding their feelings out of fear of ruining the friendship have never failed to frustrate you — just tell her, you dummy, it’s obvious she likes you too — and yet, you’ve never related more than now.

Whatever it is that you and Jongseong have, you don’t want to lose it. It adds entertainment to your otherwise average life. 

“Good thing she didn’t pick on you while we went over the homework, ‘cause you clearly put zero effort in. And I wouldn’t have helped you, even if you’d asked, by the way.”

You hum absent-mindedly as you put your notebook and pencil holder in your bag. Are you sure that these are even your feelings in the first place? Just because the well put a silly idea in your head doesn’t mean you have to believe it like it’s scripture. If what you saw is real, then it will happen in its own time. Things don’t have to start changing right this instant.

“Gosh, Y/N, what’s up with you today? You’re so boring,” Jongseong continues, following you out of the classroom. 

“Just tired,” you reply. Wouldn’t it be unnatural if you were to radically alter the way you behave with Jongseong? Love should come about organically. Sure, his presence has always provoked some kind of reaction within you, but that’s usually been annoyance. Whether he’s stealing the fifth eraser you’ve bought that month or running on the soccer field, beads of sweat running down his temples, hair sticking out everywhere, victoriously smiling when his team scores—you’re annoyed. Whether he’s sticking up his hand higher than yours or going to the school dance with Ahn Yujin—you’re annoyed. When you learned that she’d been his neighbor since infancy and that she had a boyfriend, who went to another school and only trusted Jongseong to take her to the dance, you were still annoyed—this time at yourself for feeling even the tiniest bit relieved that nothing was going on between them.

And this — his quick steps trying to keep up with yours, his dumb story about yogurt coming out of Heeseung’s nose today at lunch when they were laughing too hard — yes, you’re still annoyed. But you realize you’re not annoyed at him.

You’re annoyed at how he makes you feel.

“Y/N?” he says, but you’re too deep in your thoughts, only vaguely registering the sound until he repeats it, louder this time, and grabs your hand, making you abruptly stop walking. “Are you sure everything’s okay?” he asks with genuine concern in his voice. “You’re barely listening to me. I mean, it’s not like you usually really do, but you’d have told me to get lost, like, five minutes ago now…”

He chuckles self-deprecatingly, but despite his words, you’re focusing on something else yet again. His hand on yours, his loose hold on your fingers. Your brain is yelling at you—hold his hand, hug him. It’s like there are still traces of the 28-year-old version of you you visited yesterday, urging you to behave like her and not 18-year-old you. 

So, the well had let you know that you need not look much further to find what you wanted. Here it is, in the form of a boy you have convinced yourself you hated, and hated you, and yet, he’s holding your hand, asking you if you’re okay, worry knotting his eyebrows together. 

Hold his hand. Hug him. Instead, you retract your hand, let it fall limply by your side. Jongseong’s eyebrows shoot up.

He’s so close, the supposed love of your life. You don’t know how to reach out to him.

For now, you smile. “Get lost, Jong.”

--

you guys how the hell do i act around jongseong now that i know our fates are romantically intertwined

kazuha i think not treating him like the number one public enemy would be a good start

you so what… be nice to him? how do i do that

sunoo oh my god y/n when she has to treat another person like a regular human being

you he’s not just another person!

sunoo okayyyyy i see you little miss repressed feelings

you i hate u

kazuha just don’t roll your eyes at everything he says anymore and don’t start arguments for no reason

you he’s the one who starts them… but okay i’ll try

--

“Let’s pair up for the reading analysis today. You can stay with your deskmate or pick a partner, I don’t mind as long as you get the work done. I’m talking about you, Chaewon and Yuri. This is English class, not a gossip session.”

The second your English teacher has finished speaking, Jongseong swivels in his chair. “Let’s partner up, Y/N?”

“What about me?” Jake asks, eyes darting back-and-forth between the two of you.

“You can partner up with Minju,” Jongseong replies, pointing to the girl he’s usually seated next to. “Look. You guys will be great together. Say hi, Minju.” Minju waves shyly at Jake, braces on display as she smiles ecstatically. It’s not everyday that she gets to talk to one of the most popular guys in school.

Jake reluctantly switches seats with him, glancing back at you and Jongseong who just grins at him, fake friendliness plastered on his lips, until he turns around again. Your new partner’s smile softens and reaches his eyes when he looks at you. “Hi.”

You have to look away—you feel your face burn under his gaze. “Hi, Jong.”

He tilts his head. “What? Do you hate me so much that you can’t even look at me now?” he asks, and you can’t tell whether he’s joking or genuine.

You frown. “I don’t hate you.”

“Oh? That’s a recent development.”

“I guess,” you mumble after a few seconds. Is it really? You suddenly can’t remember if you ever really hated him, or if you’d exaggerated your own feelings.

His smile widens. “Well, good. I mean, you were going to have to realize at some point that I really am funny, smart, endearing, handsome-”

“Back to hating.”

“Let’s start the assignment.”

You agree on reading the passage first, but you realize halfway through that not a single word has been absorbed. “Hey. Why did you switch seats with him?” you ask, whispering so as not to be overheard.

Jongseong shrugs. “I thought you wouldn’t want to work with him, considering…”

“Right.” You’re silent again, but only for a bit. “What’s it to you?” you mumble. 

He scoffs. “Sorry for trying to be considerate.”

“That’s not—”

“Let’s just focus on this.”

His sudden coldness vexes you. You know you should let it go — don’t start arguments for no reason, and all that — and you know it’s childish, but you can’t help yourself. You have certain reflexes you’re not particularly proud of when it comes to one Park Jongseong. “Let’s just focus on this,” you repeat, mocking his grumbling tone of voice and shaking your head like a puppet.

He glares at you. “Can you not act like a toddler for once?”

“Can you not be a dick for once?” you bite back.

“Y/N, Jongseong, I’m sure you’re having a fascinating conversation on the use of chiaroscuro in the text?” your teacher asks, a look of warning on his face.

“Yes, sir,” you reply, embarrassed.

“Yes, so much chiaroscuro,” Jongseong mumbles, resting his cheek on his knuckles. When the teacher has turned away, he kicks your foot. “See, you’re getting us in trouble.”

“Do you even know what chiaroscuro is?” 

He hesitates. “That’s not the problem here. You are.”

“Well, maybe if you didn’t-”

“Y/N, Jay, final warning.”

“Sorry,” you both say at the same time. With one last glare at each other, you finally get to work.

So your plan to start getting along with Jongseong isn’t in full-force yet. On the drive back home that afternoon, you reassure yourself that these things take time. When the moment is right, the two of you will grow closer.

--

But increasingly, it feels as though the right moment will never come.

Two months have passed since your visit to the well, and things between you and Jongseong have not changed. Not really, at least.

You still bicker like cat and dog — it goes without saying that you’re the cute puppy and he’s the heartless cat — and he gets as much on your nerves as ever, especially now that you know that the potential to be nice to you, to love you, even, exists somewhere inside him. Somewhere deeply hidden perhaps, but somewhere nonetheless. Of course, after telling yourself that what must come will come of its own accord, you haven’t done much to change the dynamic between the two of you. But if you used to see your retaliations against him as necessary to your survival, you now find some sort of enjoyment in them—some might call it Stockholm Syndrome, you perceive it as a step in the right direction. You’ve followed one of Kazuha’s pieces of advice: you don’t roll your eyes at him anymore, simply because you don’t feel the need to. You argue with him with a smile on your face, his attempts at insulting or annoying you have started to make you laugh.

He doesn’t say anything but seems to gladly welcome this change. If you get a lower grade than him on a test, he doesn’t try to stick the knife in further, but genuinely offers to go over it with you later. If you give in after two hours of tearing your hair out over a German exercise and text him for help, he doesn’t make fun of you. If he says something particularly arrogant or makes a really bad joke, all you need to do is give him a look, and he’ll mumble an apology. 

Could it have been like this the entire time? you wonder, watching him across the schoolyard as he and Heeseung hunt for Pokémon. Just a couple months ago, you would’ve scrunched your nose at the sight, making fun of him for his childish interests. Now, you notice the way he laughs, audible all the way to where you sit with Kazuha and Sunoo, the way he jumps excitedly and points at things only he and his friend see, and all you feel is endearment.

“Look at you, look at that,” Sunoo says as he hits you on the forehead with his metal spoon, startling you. He tuts. “You’ve got love dripping from your eyes, sweetie.”

“Sunoo, that’s disgusting.”

“Love? I know.”

“No, your spoon. Your saliva’s all over that,” you say, and all he does is eat another mouthful of his yogurt while staring wide-eyed right at you. When you look back at Jongseong, he’s high-fiving Heeseung. You wonder which creature he’s caught now. In the library yesterday, he spent thirty minutes showing you every single one he had captured so far instead of revising for the upcoming Physics test.

“Yeah, we know you’d like someone else’s saliva more,” Kazuha chimes in, and the two of them snort.

“It’s not like that,” you say, biting into an apple slice.

“Oh yeah? What’s it like, then?” Kazuha asks.

“We’re… becoming friends,” you say, but you’re not sure who you’re trying to convince more.

“Y/N, I’ve had to watch the two of you giggling to yourselves in the library one too many times to believe you’re friends. I know your homework’s not that funny,” Sunoo argues.

“Friends can giggle with each other!” you exclaim, but your friends are inflexible.

“I would tell you to get yourself together if you giggled at me like that,” he says.

“I saw you twirl your hair the other day,” Kazuha adds.

“I never—When?!”

She shrugs. “The other day.”

You deflate, crushed under your friends’ accusations. “I wouldn’t twirl my hair…” you mumble. You decide to busy yourself with your apple slices, not even bothering to find out what Kazuha and Sunoo start snickering and elbowing each other about.

“Hey,” a familiar voice greets, making you look up. Jongseong smiles at you and steals an apple slice from your tupperware as he sits down next to you, Heeseung across from him.

“Hi, Jong,” you say, sitting up straighter. You offer a piece of fruit to Heeseung but he declines, saying he doesn’t like apples without peanut butter.

In front of you, your friends exchange a look, and you’re immediately terrified of what they’ll do next. Leaning in, they place their elbows on the table, and Kazuha starts them off. “Jay, you and Y/N know each other pretty well, right?”

Jongseong glances at you, eyes wide. “Uh, sure.”

“Have you ever noticed her, say, twirling her hair?” Sunoo asks, tilting his head innocently at the poor boy by your side.

You’ve never seen him look so confused. “Um, yeah, she does that when she’s concentrating on something, sometimes…”

They lean back. “Huh,” Kazuha says, studying Jongseong’s face.

“Interesting. Very interesting,” Sunoo says, slowly nodding.

You glare at your friends. “See, that’s different,” you tell them. “I was concentrating on something, not doing… whatever you guys had in mind.”

Jongseong looks at you. “What did they have in mind?”

You answer before either of them can dig your grave any deeper. “Nothing. It’s nothing. We were just having a stupid conversation.” You muster your most convincing smile, and the subject is finally dropped.

No one says anything for a few moments, until Heeseung decides to speak up: “You should’ve seen Jay earlier, Y/N. He caught this super rare version of Pikachu earlier, it was awesome.”

“Dude…” Jongseong murmurs.

“What?” Heeseung asks, his enthusiasm quickly dissolving into confusion. Jongseong just shakes his head. Thankfully for all of you, the bell rings then, and you head to class. The three of them walk in front of you while you and Jongseong fall back a step.

“Why were you guys sitting outside? It’s freezing today,” he asks you. Walking side-by-side like this, you can’t help but notice the inches he has over you, the broadness of his shoulders in comparison to yours.

“They turned the heat way too high in the cafeteria, so we came outside for some fresh air,” you explain. He’s right, the air is chilly today—it’s a few days into December, and the temperatures have been accordingly low.

“Aren’t you cold?”

Your heart skips a beat. One of the side effects of not being at each other’s throat anymore was that you got more and more often to be privy to this side of Jongseong—attentive, considerate, kind. What you once thought were his moral attempts at not being so mean to you all the time, you found out was actually his real nature. He wasn’t a prick who was sometimes nice, he was a nice person who turned into a prick with you. Whether the fault lay on him or you was another debate.

“No, I’m alright,” you say, but your body decides to betray you and makes you sneeze three times in a row.

“Bless you,” Jongseong says, laughing. “Here.” You try to stop him, pushing his hands away, but he takes his gloves off and forces them in your palms.

“I’m going to be inside for the next four hours, Jong, I’ll be fine. Keep them.”

“No, it’s okay. Just so you can warm up quicker.”

You eventually give in, putting the gloves over your hands, laughing at the extra fabric that hangs off the tip of your fingers. But when you look at Jongseong’s now-bare hands, something catches your attention. Stopping in the hallway, you grab one of them, examining the cuts on his knuckles. “You need to wear hand cream, Jong, your hands are too chapped.”

He lets you turn his hand over, smooth over his skin, do the same thing with his other hand. “Men don’t wear hand cream,” he says, a grin on his lips.

You burst out laughing. “I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Seriously, though, I don’t like the way it feels. Too sticky.”

“You just need to get a quick-absorption one.” Then, you make the terrible mistake of looking up from his hand and meeting his eyes—you gasp silently, his gaze and soft smile transporting you right back to that night, the images of 28-year-old and 18-year-old Jongseong mixing into each other, becoming indistinct from each other. Your gaze drifts down to his lips — chapped, too, when they’re usually plumper, rosier — and his hand, still in yours, balls into a fist. The second bell rings and you both take a step back, eyes meeting again for a brief moment before looking down at the floor. With uncharacteristically shy, embarrassed words of parting, you make your separate ways to your next classes.

“That was beautiful, Y/N,” Sunoo says, waiting for you by the door, and you walk past him without so much as a glance.

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

--

sunoo jay and y/n almost kissed earlier

kazuha WHAAAAT

you KIM SUNOO.

kazuha WHEN?????

sunoo right before class after the lunch break y/n was sooo embarrassed afterwards lol

you we did NOT almost kiss you’re talking out of your ass

kazuha i can’t believe i missed this fml

you YOU DIDNT MISS ANYTHING NOTHING HAPPENED

sunoo be serious u guys we’re standing inches apart

you were* and no we weren’t

sunoo oh stfu it was autocorrect i saw it w my own eyes y/n… you WERE literally holding his hand and staring into those beautiful eyes of his

kazuha sunoo…?

sunoo what can’t a man acknowledge another man’s objective attractiveness if i was y/n i would’ve folded the moment i saw him

you literally one of the first times he talked to me was to make fun of my handwriting

sunoo yeah he’s on his tsundere shit i fw it

you …

sunoo anyways zuha you shouldve seen it when the bell rang they practically leaped away from each other and u didnt know what to do w yourselves afterwards likeeee it was so obvi what you both were thinking of

kazuha cuuuute

you i resent these accusations.

sunoo istg if u dont kiss him next time i will

kazuha ???

you SUNOO?

sunoo WHAT

--

Something happens a few days before the start of winter break.

Ms. Schumacher is absent, gone off to Germany to visit her family there—she has enough seniority in the school that they let her abandon her responsibilities as a teacher once in a while. A week is too short a period of time for them to bother finding a substitute. It’s usually your last class of the day, but you have to wait around for your dad to be done working, so while most of your classmates have gone home early, you sit with about six other people in the unsupervised study room, absent-mindedly jotting down tid-bits of dialogue for your new story idea, too preoccupied with Jongseong’s absence to really pay attention to anything else. It’s fifteen minutes after the hour, but he’s nowhere to be found, although you know for a fact that he takes those weird Molecular Gastronomy cooking classes your Chemistry teacher offers for extra credit every Thursday after school, so he should be here. And anyways, if he’d gone home, he would’ve texted you something like, Have fun sitting around for an hour, I’m gonna go do awesome stuff with Heeseung, even if awesome stuff meant playing Mario Kart or drinking Sprite and holding a two-person burping contest.

You’re so engrossed in your own thoughts that you pay no mind to the sudden ding of a phone in the room, followed by some gasps and heated whispers. The exchanged words go through one ear and out the other—There was a fight? In the locker rooms? It must be bad if they were sent to the nurse before the principal… Huh? Over who? So he took both of them on? Damn, I didn’t know Jay got like that. He seems so well-behaved.

Your head whips up at the mention of your friend’s name. “Jay? Did something happen to him?” you ask out loud, the whispers dying down immediately as everybody stares at you. 

Gaeul, who was in your class last year, is the only one who answers you. Holding up and waving her phone, she says, “They say he got into a fight.”

Jongseong? A fight? It sounds like a practical joke. He admitted to you he once started crying watching Heeseung playing Call of Duty, it was so violent. You shake your head. “He-he did? With who?”

Gaeul and the girl next to her exchange a concerned, almost guilty look. “Jake and Sunghoon.” The crease between your eyebrows deepened. You don’t need to ask anything else before she adds, “They’re at the nurse’s station. It sounds pretty bad…”

That’s enough for you to leap out of your chair and run to the nurse’s station. It seems the news has spread impossibly quickly among your year group—even Kazuha and Sunoo are already blowing your phone, asking you if you’ve heard, if you know how Jay is. You ignore them, reminding yourself to text them back later, until one message from Sunoo in particular catches your attention: It apparently started because Sunghoon said something about you, Y/N. They’re saying Jay got angry.

The nurse is busy on the phone when you get there, her back to the entrance, so you’re able to slip in unnoticed. You head to the adjoining room where the beds are, all three of them taken—you walk by Sunghoon first, his arms crossed over his chest and pointedly not looking at you, then by Jake, who calls out your name. You glare at him and pull on the white plastic curtain that separates his bed from Jongseong’s. They’re already going to hear you, you don’t need them seeing you on top of that. 

Jongseong sits up with a grunt when you appear at the end of his bed. The sight of him makes your stomach flip, and not in a good way, for once—his left eye is swollen and circled by a deep purple bruise, shiny with ointment, there’s a cut on his cheek, his lower lip is busted, his right hand is wrapped in bandages. “Oh my God,” you whisper as you help him up, voice breaking. He stares at his hands, jaw locking when you gently place one palm on his good hand, the other on the side of his face, moving it this way and that so you can take a better look at his injuries. He winces, and you let go, resting your hand on his shoulder instead. “What the hell got into you?” you whisper vehemently, unable to decide if you’re worried or angry or both as tears form in your eyes.

He tries to shrug, but even that seems to hurt. “Don’t shrug, Jongseong, tell me what happened.”

“I’m Jongseong again now?” he says, attempting a smile, but only one corner of his lips rises.

You sigh. Even in this state, he has to be a smart-ass. “You’re Jong when I need a textbook, Jongseong when you get into stupid fights,” you reply, and he smiles wider but immediately winces, hand coming up to the cut on his lip. You notice that his hand is still riddled with cracks, and whether they’re due to their dryness or to this fight doesn’t matter—”Wait here,” you say, and go rummage through some drawers for plasters. “She forgot some spots.” You feel Jongseong’s eyes on your face as you patch him up to the best of your abilities.

“I don’t want to tell you what happened. I’ll do the job of hating these idiots for the both of us, so don’t concern yourself with them,” he says, apparently not caring that the idiots in question can hear his every word.

He keeps his promise—you never hear another word from him about the cause of the fight. 

Later, you find out through other means, namely Sunoo’s questionably remarkable ability to unearth any and all gossip, that in the locker rooms after Phys Ed, someone had started Jake on the topic of Yunjin, who had been recently revealed as his girlfriend. They’d apparently kept it secret because it was just fooling around at first, and only later had gotten serious enough for them to parade around the school as the couple. 

It had been an unremarkable conversation until Jake said, “You guys know Y/N from our class? She saw us in the staff parking lot once, and I was sure we’d be busted then. But she didn’t tell anyone.” And just like that, the conversation turned to you, someone who was usually never a topic among these boys, jocks, soccer players, “the kind of people who peak in high school and still have a superiority complex at forty,” as Sunoo describes them. 

He has a harder time explaining what happened next, can’t quite look you in the eye as he recounts what was said. “So, this is what they say, apparently someone said that you used to be obsessed with Sunghoon, then with Jake, and Sunghoon said you… Well, he said you were pathetic, that asshole, and that you had been so easy to lead on, then Jake joined in, saying the same things, basically, how funny it was seeing you so obviously in love with him when he would never give you a chance…” He looks at you worriedly, but you tell him to go on. “And so that’s when Jay got up and just straight-up punched Jake in the face. And while Jake was trying to figure out what happened, Jay punched Sunghoon, and then they both got on him, pushing him, but when he wouldn’t stop throwing punches, they started fighting, too. I think they all got some good ones in before the other boys were able to break them apart and the P.E. teacher arrived…”

But that would be later. Now, sitting with Jongseong in the nurse’s station, tears falling onto the plasters you place on his hand, nothing matters but him. You don’t need the details—he’s hurt, he got hurt over you, you feel as though every cut on his body may well have been done by your own hand. You’ve never felt so guilty for something you didn’t do. Your voice trembles when you speak; you’re unable to look at him, at his busted eye. “I just don’t want you to get hurt for me.”

Without missing a beat, he says, “What else would I get hurt for?”

You can only meet his eyes for a split second. Even like this, he manages to look at you with the same softness that has haunted you since the night you met 28-year-old Jongseong, that has rendered all thoughts of anything other than him meaningless since the day your gaze drifted down to his lips just weeks ago. “Jong…” is all you can mutter as you look down at your hands holding each others’, your lips trembling.

He raises his bandaged hand, still not used to his dominant side being ineffective for now, then lowers it when he realizes. Clumsily, he pats your hair with his left hand. “Don’t cry, please…”

Jake’s head pops out from behind the curtain. “Y/N, I’m really sorry—”

“Not right now, man,” Jay quickly interrupts. Jake pathetically disappears behind the curtain again.

“Just promise me you won’t do this again.”

“Y/N…”

“Promise me,” you say, more demanding this time, sticking out your pinky finger. Jay, hesitant, looks between your outstretched finger and your face a few times, but eventually gives in.

The nurse, upon coming to check on the boys, catches you with Jongseong and chases you out immediately. You sulk back to study hall, where everyone’s head perks up the moment you walk in. “They’re okay,” you reassure vaguely, and unenthusiastically answer their many questions. It’s only a few minutes until the bell rings, and you’re free to go then.

--

jong so… guess who got a five-day suspension

you you idiot what did your parents say?

jong they’re not happy i have to do all the household chores for a month

you boo-hoo

jong not sure why i came here thinking i’d get some comfort…

you … are you feeling better?

jong a little bit the nurse gave us some really strong painkillers but i’m okay because there’s a pretty girl that’s going to drop off the homework for me after school every day :)

you oh did you ask chaewon to do that?

jong um no i was talking about you ..if that’s okay

you haha i know i just wanted you to say it straight up

jong ykw maybe i should just ask chaewon

you i’ll see you tomorrow jong!!

jong :) see you tomorrow pretty 

 --

The months that separate your return to school and graduation come and go in the blink of an eye. Jongseong can’t come to school the last day before the holidays or the first four days after, and he’s grounded in-between. Things change bit by bit with every day you visit him—To give him the homework, you tell his parents, although there isn’t much to do when the semester isn’t in full swing, and you could’ve easily sent him pictures. The first time, you spend more time scouring the pictures and trinkets in his room than actually talking to him, and awkwardly give him a half-hug when he tells you he won’t be able to hang out at all during the break before practically running out of his house, your heart beating a thousand miles a minute from the innocent contact. By the fourth time, you lie together on his bed and talk about your plans for college, your hands sitting centimeters apart on the navy sheets. You haven’t dared touch his hand since that day in the nurse’s station.

You’re window-shopping with Kazuha when you spot the hand cream you had seen yourself gifting Jongseong in your well-given vision. Buying it is one thing, actually giving it to him is another, an awkward, stuttery situation in which the wrapping done by the store employee suddenly seems over-the-top and out-of-place. But Jongseong seems to like it—it’s the last day of his suspension, his black eye is now a yellow-ish color, he can smile without risking splitting his lip in two. He applies it immediately, tells you he’ll make sure to wear it every day until the end of winter. You find yourself wishing there was something you could give him for every season so he wouldn’t go a day without thinking of you. When you leave, he bashfully thanks you for making sure he doesn’t fall behind and says he’s excited to see you at school the next day. You hardly know what to do with yourself, so you squeak out a “me too” and slip out the door.

His first day back is a Friday. It starts with Mathematics, a class in which you sit by each other. You remember the first week of classes when Kazuha and Sunoo had ran to sit with each other, expressly because they knew that if he saw you were sitting alone, he’d take the seat next to you, just to better torment you all year. You’d resented it then; it couldn’t make you happier now. Your body is humming with nervous energy, your foot tapping relentlessly against the tiled floor. When he appears in the doorframe, you wave at him as if he’d forgotten his seat in three weeks of absence. His elbow brushes against yours as he sits down.

Between the two of you, friendship blossoms over these months. To the detriment of everyone around you, you continue to bicker as you always have, but it’s now clearly done out of habit, out of affection, even, than out of actual dislike of each other. He and Heeseung slowly integrate your small group of three, and before you know it, it feels as though there have always been five of you. Together, you welcome spring.

In January, to thank you for helping him to pick out his mom’s birthday present, Jongseong treats you to some tteokbokki, which you said you’d been craving all week. He orders the spiciest one, then has to take a sip of water between every bite. You laugh at his teary eyes and red face while you devour the bright red rice cakes easily. 

In February, he makes a show of giving you and Kazuha and Heeseung and Sunoo some homemade chocolates, saying it’s a friend thing. You find out that evening that the others each have five in their box—there are twenty in yours. It’s one of the things that makes you second guess what sort of feelings he has for you. For years, you’ve been convinced he harbored strong feelings of disdain for you; now, he seems to enjoy your friendship. You’re scared to read too much into anything, because if Jongseong is well-liked throughout school, it’s for a reason: he’s nice. To everyone. Even to you, too, nowadays. But if nice is giving five chocolates, what is giving twenty?

A sudden realization hits you in March—Jongseong appears at your door, drenched from the rain, a bag of your favorite snacks in hand. “You weren’t at school today. I had to find out you were sick from Kazuha,” he says as if she was a random classmate of yours and not your best friend, as if he should be the first to know about these kinds of things. Your mom rushes him in, finds him so charming in the five minutes they converse that she decides he should stay over for dinner, and as you watch him laughing with her, you think, I haven’t thought of 28-year-old Jongseong in ages. I’ve only thought of you. And although you can trace the start of your feelings to that dream-like experience you had, you can now say with confidence that it’s not the only reason for them.

College application results come out in April, right on his birthday. The five of you celebrate together at an American-style diner, gorging yourselves on crispy bacon and chocolate chip pancakes. Kazuha is going back to Japan, almost a decade after moving to South Korea—”I’m gonna miss you guys, but I miss takoyaki and my grandma more right now.” Heeseung has been accepted into the Engineering department at the country’s top university. You, Sunoo and Jongseong are all heading to the same place: you for Screenwriting, which you’ve known since you were one of the winners of the scholarship contest last October, Sunoo for Communications, whatever that is, and Jongseong for European History and Literature with a minor in German, that freak. It’s a good university, and it’s not far from home. The way Jongseong tells you about his acceptance sticks with you: he doesn’t say, They accepted me, too, or, I’m going to the same university as you. He says, We’ll be together.

May is filled with afternoons at the park when you should all be studying for exams. Your mom keeps asking when she’s going to see “that wonderful boy” again. Your friendship with Jongseong has given him new ways of teasing you—after four years of near-kleptomaniac tendencies, he’s finally stopped stealing your erasers and has instead started to let his gaze linger on your face, to call you pretty when you least expect it, to tuck your hair behind your ear. You hate it most when he asks you whether there’s something from your romance novels or movies that you want him to recreate. “Is there a field big enough nearby that I can walk through at the break of dawn, Mister Darcy-style?” he’ll say, or “I’ve always wanted to try that upside-down kiss from Spider-Man. It’s a classic, really.” 

Summer comes early in June. You need to bring a two-liter water bottle and a hand fan to your exams, and you’ve never felt such relief as when it was all over. After endless pictures with your parents and siblings, just your parents, just your siblings, then Kazuha and Sunoo, together, then separately, then with Heeseung and Jongseong as well, Kazuha forces you and Jongseong together, watching with a smile as he shyly wraps an arm around your waist and you awkwardly throw up a peace sign. It’s your first picture of just the two of you.

In July, you and Jongseong unlock a new first: saying goodbye. He’s leaving to stay with his American family as he does every summer. You show up at his house the day before at four p.m. “to help him pack,” you say, but it’s Jongseong, and he finished packing two days ago. So instead, you sit on his desk chair, he on his bed, and you fight back tears. “You’re coming back, right?” you ask, like he’s leaving to go to war and not Seattle. Amusement and affection flicker in his eyes. “Of course I am. I wouldn’t throw four more years of being a pain in your ass away, would I?” he says, and you smile, because you know it’s going to be much more than four years.

But he doesn’t just leave you with a few nice words. Avoiding your gaze, he hands you an envelope. Inside is a single ticket, a two-month membership for your city’s arthouse cinema that you can only go to when they have student deals or when your parents have had enough of your begging. You can’t even begin to imagine how much this must’ve cost. “Jong…” you murmur, in awe at the thin slip of paper between your hands. “This is incredible. Thank you so much.”

Jongseong looks down at his feet, fighting a smile as he kicks the invisible rocks that obviously litter the floor of his bedroom. “I thought you’d get bored without me around, so, that way you can entertain yourself, I guess… And if you run into any film bros next year, you’ll have seen as many pretentious movies as them.”

You burst into laughter then, and, without thinking, wrap your arms around his neck, thanking him over and over again. It takes him a second, but he wraps his arms around your waist and says it’s no big deal.

As you walk down the path from your house, he calls out your name. “Don’t be a stranger,” he says.

You smile. “Never.”

So, he’s not here for summer. Kazuha is working in her parents’ ramen restaurant to make some money before leaving, even Heeseung leaves two weeks into July for Seoul to visit some relatives there and get accustomed to life in the big city. You only get to laze around with Sunoo, but even he eventually leaves for his grandparents’ house by the sea, making you promise you’ll come visit him at some point, otherwise he’ll “die of boredom.” 

It’s August now, and your brain and body alike buzz with restlessness. You go to the cinema almost every day, making the best of your subscription. If you’re not going around your house looking for spider webs with your vacuum cleaner, you’re riding random bus lines and discovering parts of your town you’ve never set foot in before. If you’re not making your way through your never-ending pile of unread books, you’re creating your own stories, finally taking the time to properly outline and draft the one-line ideas you’ve had sitting in your Notes app, preparing yourself for the start of your degree. Your mind is taken up with love stories. From Romeo & Juliet to Dirty Dancing to Book Lovers, you can’t get enough of the genre. You become particularly obsessed with stories involving time travel, rewatching After Time and Lovely Runner like they contain some precious knowledge. By the end of the month, you’ve turned your life into an eight-episode TV series—a desperate girl makes a wish on a star only to discover she is fated to marry the one boy she hates most. You know you’d watch that. You send Sunoo and Kazuha the pilot, and after calling you insane numerous times but also heaping on praises, Sunoo says this: lol your going through jay withdrawals.

It shakes you so much you’re not even compelled to message back you’re*.

But he’s not wrong. The more you let yourself admit it, the more you realize how true it is: you miss Jongseong. You text once in a while, you’ve even stayed up late talking on the phone a couple of times, but you miss him, his corporeal form, having his gaze on you, having the possibility but never the courage to touch him. Every day, there’s something you want to tell him about. The cats huddling around a young neighborhood kid as he pours milk into a bowl, the clearance sale at your local library, most books for one buck only, the actor from an 90s Hong Kong film you swear has the exact same smile as him. You don’t want to bother him, so you write letters instead. Some you send, some you don’t—the ones you keep hidden in your drawer usually hint too obviously at your feelings for him. Some of them don’t just hint and contain lines of your declarations: I miss you, everything I see reminds me of you, I want to check that your bruises have healed completely even though the last trace of them faded months ago. You keep these letters a secret, even from Sunoo and Kazuha, who would never let you live down such woebegone, down bad behavior.

You do it because it feels good, getting all of your feelings out on paper. You’re a romantic at heart, so you’re prone to over-exaggeration when it comes to things like these—but everything that you write remains based in truth. You’d started with a postcard of your hometown, jokingly writing, Don’t forget where you came from. How is it over there? and he’d actually replied with a postcard of his own, filling it from top to bottom. You easily went from these small postcards to multiple pages of stream-of-consciousness-like writing. You think it’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done—although you’re not sure he feels the same way, considering he still writes to the German pen pal Ms. Schumacher had assigned him in your first year of high school. No one else’s correspondence had lasted more than four months because she’d immediately forgotten to make sure you kept in touch regularly.

I ran into Jake Sim at the city library, you write one day. You’ve replied to everything in his latest letter, so you’re now catching him up on your recent adventures. He was checking out some books about Linguistics, of all things—he bought me bubble tea afterwards and told me that the injury he got last April was actually a relief. Did you know his father was a big name in soccer here? Apparently, he never wanted to be a soccer player that badly, and he wants to do Linguistics and Social Anthropology, who would’ve guessed it. He’s like Troy Bolton if High School Musical was about Humanities and not singing. Anyways, you probably don’t want me to go on and on about him, so I won’t, but we did talk about that fight you guys had back in December. He apologized for it, to you and me both, although he didn’t go into much detail — Sunoo is still the only one who’s had the balls to tell me exactly what happened, and he wasn’t even there! — and I was reticent at first, but he seemed genuine. He said he didn’t even hang out with Sunghoon or Yunjin or any of those people anymore, that it was only out of convenience really, and that he hopes starting university will be like turning over a new leaf. Well, he could be full of shit, who knows. As I sat there listening to him I wondered what it was I used to see in him. He’s nice enough, but we only spoke about him for the entire hour. He asked me no questions that weren’t “and you?” so it was a bit exhausting. 

But it got me thinking about your fight again. Reflecting on it now, I can say that it was a turning point for me in my perception of you.

You look at your words, smiling to yourself—this is one of the times where you find yourself erring from the topic at hand, instead indulging in sappiness and nostalgia. You write about how your opinion of Jongseong has changed over these months, how it wasn’t seeing him as your husband in all those years that had really shaken things up, but rather that day in the nurse’s station, the frightening colors around his eye, his attitude like it was natural that he would get hurt like this for you. You write, Have I been wrong about you this whole time? I thought you harbored the same negative feelings towards me as I had you since the moment you’d laid eyes on me, but all of a sudden, here you were, bloody, bandaged hand holding mine. Even with your busted eye, you looked like an angel next to all that white in the nurse’s station. I’ll never forget your words that day. Would you really not get hurt for anything else, Jong?

“I’m going to the Post Office for a package soon, Y/N. Are you done with your letter?” your mom calls from the staircase landing.

“Give me five minutes!” you call back.

You forage through your drawer for a new sheet of paper and re-write your letter, making sure to leave any compromising parts out and fold both letters into neat squares—one that will cross the seas and reach Jongseong, one that will live out its days in the darkness of your crowded drawer. You’ve run out of envelopes, so you go look for one in your parents’ office. Your mom calls out your name again, impatient to leave — if she sends her package off before twelve p.m., it will get to the receiver tomorrow, and she’s hell-bent on getting perfect five-star Vinted reviews — so you hurriedly put your letter in the envelope, close it, stamp it, and write Jongseong’s name and address on the back. The other letter you absent-mindedly throw in your drawer with the dozens of other letters in which you’d crossed the line.

--

A few weeks later, like an apparition, Jongseong stands before you again.

He’s tanner from months under the Washington sun, from afternoons spent at his family’s lake house, on their boat. His hair is slightly shorter and suits him even better; you don’t recognize any of the clothes he wears. He grumbles as his mother goes back-and-forth between hugging him, staring at him worriedly and reminding him to call at least twice a week while his father unpacks the trunk. “I’ll only be a thirty-minute train ride away, Mom,” he says. 

He’s still Jong.

You moved in yesterday, and you’re now waiting for your new roommate, who, after five minutes of deliberating whether she should bring a jacket or not and finally decided against it, changed her mind the minute she stepped outside. 

It’s been two months since you last saw him. Shortly after sending your letter, you’d gone to stay with Sunoo’s grandparents for a week, just a day before he was set to come back from Seattle. Amid packing and other preparations, you haven’t had time to see each other. Is it okay if I respond to your letter in person? I think I’ll be too busy these two coming weeks, he texted you. You replied that it wasn’t a problem, you told him which dorm you’d been assigned and found out his was the one next door.

When he notices you staring, he does a double-take. You wave at him, and even from this distance, you see the blush that creeps up his neck and takes over his face as he shyly waves back. You’ve never seen him like this—he’s always been either arrogant or friendly, never… flustered. He makes a motion as if to say, I’ll text you, and heads inside the building with his parents and all of his luggage.  

Indeed, he texts you some hours later while you’re sharing a piece of strawberry and matcha cake with your roommate Liz, whom you find out is half-German—Jongseong and your dad would probably love her for that simple fact. Some of the first things she’d asked you were what your astrological signs were and whether you wanted her to pull tarot cards for you when she was all done setting up her side of the room. Between that and her dyed blonde hair, you’d felt comfortable telling her all about Jongseong, the well and your dream. Unlike your skeptical and sarcastic friends, she’d nodded along to your every word, a serious expression on her face. “A sign from the universe,” she’d called it, and she gasped in excitement when his name appeared on your screen.

He sends you a link to a freshers’ week event, some potted plant sale happening on the main campus square, and asks if you’re free to go with him tomorrow. I need something to liven up that depressing room, he writes.

So that’s how you find yourselves among green plants of all shapes and sizes, searching for one that’s both low-maintenance and appealing to the eye. You’re glad that you have something to actually do—if you were just sitting at a café and having a conversation, you’re not sure you’d be able to stand the awkwardness. You’d chalked up his behavior on the day of his move-in to nerves, or to surprise upon seeing you so unexpectedly. But apparently, it wasn’t a one-time thing. He keeps clearing his throat as if he were sick with some cold, won’t look into your eyes for more than split seconds at a time, and in complete opposition to his usual confident, deliberate speech, talks in a quick and disorderly manner. And he’s either really caught a cold, or his ears have just permanently turned red. You ask him if something’s wrong a couple times, but he violently shakes his head, says, “No, what could be wrong?” then looks at you as if you might tell him what’s wrong.

When you’re alone again, you wonder what on earth could have happened over the summer that could make him change his behavior with you so radically. Did something happen in Seattle? Maybe he met someone there and doesn’t know how to tell you. Maybe you went overboard with your letters, he doesn’t want to be friends anymore, he wants to let you down easy but doesn’t know how to tell you. Or maybe—maybe you got impossibly pretty during those two months, and absence does make the heart grow fonder, as they say, and every thought you have about him, he has about you, but he doesn’t know how to tell you.

In any case, he’s hiding something.

The theory that he might want to stop being friends soon falls flat—the invitations to other freshers’ events keep coming, be it free wine & pizza taster sessions from the Wine Society, karaoke nights with the Taylor Swift Society or a shark movie marathon with the Bad Film Society, and he never turns you down when you tell him there’s something you want to visit in this new city of yours, even when the thing you want to visit in question is a bakery you have to queue in front of at seven a.m. if you want to get a pain au chocolat. In your defense, they turn out to be the best ones you and Jongseong have ever tried—although, to be fair, neither of you has been to France.

Things progressively return to normal. He’s able to make eye contact for more than three seconds again, he listens carefully and laughs along when you tell him about your week by the sea with Sunoo, he fills you in on what Heeseung’s been up to. One thing remains different, however—when you throw quips at him, he usually would’ve delighted in coming up with a better, wittier response, but now, he’ll roll his eyes at best, look at you amusedly and stay silent at worst. “Won’t you even entertain me?” you ask him once, to which he replies that you’re doing a good job entertaining yourself as is. 

Instead, he becomes more earnest. As per usual you badger him with questions like Aren’t I so pretty right now? or Isn’t my outfit so cute today? to get a reaction out of him, and if during your high school days he’d either fake a puking sound or look you up and down and grumble I guess, he now smiles and simply says Yes, you are, Yes, it is. It seems impossible to keep track of his attitude: one day, he’s one thing, the next, he’s another person entirely. 

It annoys you. You take his changing demeanor to mean that now that he’s a college student, he won’t indulge in your childish squabbles anymore, as though he was above all of that now, when just three months ago he was stalking your parents’ Facebooks to find unfavorable photos of you from when you were thirteen and using them as reaction pictures in your friends’ group chat. You think of your graduation day, of the box he’d given you, all done up in wrapper paper and a bow—he had filled it with every eraser he’d stolen from you over the years, he’d even gone so far as to date every single one of them, from the second of October freshman year to the twenty-eighth of November of your senior year. You didn’t count them, but there had to be at least a hundred. At the time, you’d just thought it was funny—but what if the gesture had meant something deeper than you’d realized? What if he was marking the end of something with that box? No more playing around, we’re adults now. But classes have barely started, you don’t know your way to the off-campus library, you aren’t a different person to who you were just weeks or even months earlier. Why is he acting like he is? You look at him, and you see the boy whose fault it was you had to buy a new eraser every week—who knows how many books you could’ve bought with that money. But when he turns to look at you, too, and your eyes meet, you’re suddenly assailed with the memories of that night, the kind eyes, the soft smile. 

Does his future capacity to love me already exist in his heart?

Your heartbeat speeds up and you have to look away.

--

From your letters, it seems to be much hotter back home than in Seattle—you talk of sunburns, of afternoons spent inside with the fan on maximum speed, of ice melting instantly and watering down your Coke Zeros, whereas Jay can walk around the city pleasantly and needs to bring a jacket if he’ll be out until late after sundown. And yet, as he reads your latest letter, his skin prickles feverishly, from the top of his head to the tip of his toes. He’d excitedly torn the envelope open the second it arrived in the mail, heart thumping as he counted the pages, at least three more than usual — he was always happy that you wanted to talk to him at all, so the fact that you had this much to tell him sent him over the moon — but he would have never expected what was awaiting him inside.

With a smile on his face, he read your replies to the questions he’d asked you last time, your reactions to everything he told you about, the live Mariners game, the lake house, the rides on the boat. He imagined you as you sat at your desk in your room he’d only seen once, when you’d held a small party for your birthday and he, having arrived first, was honored with a tour of your house. He imagined your smile, the way you played with your hair when you focused on something, wondered whether you pondered every word before you wrote it down as he did or whether you poured your thoughts out onto the page without hesitation. His smile faltered when Jake Sim’s name appeared in your neat handwriting, but he was relieved to find out your description of him now was miles away from the one at the start of the school year. 

Then you start writing about him. Him, Park Jongseong, and your words startle him so much, it’s like he’d forgotten he was the recipient of this letter in the first place.

But it got me thinking about your fight again. Reflecting on it now, I can say that it was a turning point for me in my perception of you. 

He’s been lying comfortably in his bed, but he sits up the moment his eyes take in these words. If there is one topic the two of you have practically never broached, it’s this exactly: your relationship, the changes it’s gone through this past year. Except for a few mentions made in jest here and there, you’ve always conveniently ignored the fact that not so long ago, you were at each other’s throats. At least, you were at his throat, and Jay let you be, let you think the hatred went both ways, when in reality all he wanted was to keep you close one way or another. To him, anything was better than indifference.

But here you are, writing about how you feel about him, not in hints, not in jokes, but actually telling him black and white what goes through your head when you think of him—in other words, everything he’s been dying to know ever since he met you and especially ever since you started warming up to him a few months ago.

I have never told you about that night because I know it’ll just be more fodder for you to endlessly tease me, and I haven’t even mentioned it in these letters that I write and don’t send. Sometimes I debate the ethics of it—if I know something about our futures, isn’t it right that you know, too? But then again, I still hesitate whether what happened was real or not. As with anything, the more time passes, the more I forget about it. What kind of cheese you’d put on the pasta, the movie that played in the background, whether the stairs were carpeted or wooded—these details have evaded me by now. All I clearly remember is your face and how I felt, seeing it then, seeing it the next day at school, ten years younger, the same exact person in what felt like a different universe. As much as I tried to deny it, I know now that it was no coincidence—I was talking about it with Sunoo and he said that sometimes, we want something so badly, we conjure it up for ourselves. He’s not always a dimwit. And he’s right, the kind of love I felt from you in that dream — or not-dream — I’ve yearned for it ever since I first watched Pride & Prejudice, the 2005 film to be precise, when I was ten. But with you? That was what I couldn’t believe at first. I don’t think I need to explain why—you were there, I think you knew how I felt about you for over three years, it’s not like I tried to hide it.

Then you turned up and the sight of you was enough to bring back all the feelings from that dream. You must’ve wondered why my behavior with you switched so suddenly—well, a glimpse into marital bliss is sometimes enough for a girl to make some changes in her life. Yet I valiantly tried to convince myself that any flutter of my heart around you was due to this stupid dream, to a version of you my brain had conjured up because it was starved for affection, and you happened to be at the forefront of my mind, even if not for the right reasons. But it was no use. I had entertained the possibility that this future was really mine, and I couldn’t go back to seeing you as the boy who annoyed the living daylights out of me.

But Jong, if you weren’t you, I would’ve been confused for a week and then I would’ve gotten over it. I stayed confused for a while, and everything you did only served to confuse me further. I started to notice you more, to see you for who you were and not for the idea I had constructed of you in my head, I stopped taking note of only the things that reinforced this idea. And that changed everything.

Let’s get it out of the way: as much as I hate to admit it because it proves you right, I saw that you are indeed devastatingly handsome. It devastates me every time I have to look at that stupid, wonderful face of yours. And if aging is something you’re worried about, don’t be. I’ve seen you at 28, and let’s just say that your jaw somehow only gets more chiseled. I’ve realized that you don’t just participate in class to be a prick — except for when you contradict me in Literature, I know you only do that to piss me off, and yes, it works — but that you actually care about what we learn and that you don’t want the teacher to feel like they’re talking to a classroom full of students made out of bricks. I’ve also realized that you didn’t specifically pick German to be the one subject where you must beat me at all costs, you just actually really like German, even if I’m still undetermined as to why. And I can finally admit to myself—you are funny. Sometimes. There were so many times I had to stop myself from laughing at one of your idiotic puns because I could not bear to give you the satisfaction. That feeling when the worst person you know makes a funny joke, and all that. And as much as I’ve mocked you for it, I do actually like your laugh. I like that you’re only loud when you laugh, or sneeze, or get excited over something. You don’t scream, you don’t get angry, and I think that’s a lot for a boy fresh out of puberty. Or for any boy, really. 

But above all, you’re kind, Jong. I think it’s the best thing about you. I think it’s the best thing anyone can be. I see it in your patience with Heeseung when he starts one of his rants better reserved for Reddit than real life, I see it in the way you took Sunoo and Kazuha in stride, even though they’re a bit rough around the edges sometimes, I see it in the way you guide the freshmen at the start of every year, when all anyone does is complain about them, I see it in the gentleness with which you let down the girls who confess to you, even the more persistent ones. I used to think they were crazy, but I understand them more than ever now. I also used to think that all those kindnesses meant that the ones you occasionally showed me meant nothing more than that—occasional kindnesses. You were just a nice guy, occasionally so to me. But you sort of ratted yourself out when you gave me those twenty chocolates for Valentine’s.

Or, really, what made things clearer was that fight in December. I guess I was wrong—you do get angry. I remember a thought I had at the time: just when I think I know you, you do something to shake it all up. You punched two of the star soccer players of our school in the face because they said some mean, unimportant things about me. Thinking about it now, I still don’t understand it. Was it another one of your acts of kindness? 

And then I thought of those other times you helped me out. Do you remember them—the art project, the handwritten notes after my grandma passed away, you tearing Park Sunghoon a new one in the girls’ bathroom. I’m sure there are many more that I’ve dismissed simply because I did not want to see you in any other light than the one I’d decided to shine on you. 

Maybe I’m rewriting the past here, but I’ve been thinking about something lately. The theme today seems to be honesty, so I’ll lay myself bare and tell you something I haven’t told anyone yet, not even myself. The more I write, the more I become aware of its truth. I like you, Jong. I think I have for a long time, longer than either of us thinks. Maybe that’s why I kept buying erasers.

I don’t have the best memory — I suspect iron deficiency, it runs in my mom’s side of the family — but I do remember this. The first time I saw you. I haven’t noticed your face changing in real time, but I’m sure I’d laugh at how much of a baby you looked back then. Although I didn’t fare much better, I’m sure. Well, you’re the one that has all these embarrassing pictures of me, you freak, so I’m sure you could tell me. Moving on… 

I found you really cute. You were chatting to the person next to you, maybe it was Heeseung, I didn’t look properly—I only looked at you. Don’t laugh at me. It was the first day of high school, there was a nervous energy in the air, but you seemed happy to be there. You know I don’t have hordes of friends like you do, I don’t walk through life with people naturally gravitating towards me. I’m okay with it now, but it was something I struggled with back then. Kazuha, Sunoo and I have had each other since our elementary days, and I never needed more than that—but fifteen is the prime age for comparison, and as the weeks passed and we got used to being high schoolers, I listened to everyone sing your praises, I watched as you talked with all of our classmates, even our teachers, like you were old friends. But we sat next to each other in a couple of classes, and you wouldn't talk to me outside of partnered work. I, who wanted to be easily charmed by you like everyone else was, who thought maybe you’d help me come out of my shell. But it felt like sitting next to me was torture to you, like the boy whom I watched speak with ease to everyone else disappeared when I was around. And so — and I’m not proud of this — every smart remark in class, every joke that had the entire class roaring, every high five you gave out in the hallway, I started to despise them. And by association, I started to despise you. After that, it was easy to find fault in everything you did, my contempt was only enhanced by everyone’s admiration. But I’m not alone here. It went both ways, didn’t it? I don’t think you liked that I didn’t like you and openly showed it, so used to being everyone’s favorite person you were. I remember how you showily tried to be nice to me after that, maybe you just wanted another friend, but I didn’t let you. I don’t blame us for how we acted, only for taking so long to get our heads out of our asses.

(I have to say, I also have a thing for hating people. Remind me to tell you about Na Jaemin and Shin Ryujin one of these days.)

Anyways, I think it’s because I had liked you so much at first that I could then seemingly hate you so much. But I never hated you, Jong, not really. I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. Can I take it all back now? 

Now that we’re entering university soon, I can’t help but look back on high school. This is what I want to know, but I’m not sure I’ll ever have the courage to ask you, because if your answer is the one I suspect, I don’t know how I’ll handle all the regret in my heart.

Have I been wrong about you this whole time? I thought you harbored the same negative feelings towards me as I had you since the moment you’d laid eyes on me, but all of a sudden, here you were, bloody, bandaged hand holding mine. Even with your busted eye, you looked like an angel next to all that white in the nurse’s station. I’ll never forget your words that day. Would you really not get hurt for anything else, Jong?

Your letter abruptly ends here, no concluding remarks, no wishing him a fun time in Seattle and looking forward to his next letter, no sign-off. It was as if someone cut you off before you could say everything you wanted, but then why send him this seemingly unfinished letter? It is all the more bizarre since your letters are usually meticulous: you write on every other line, it looks like you take your time with every single letter, the only disturbance in your otherwise perfect handwriting is your going back-and-forth between cursive and script s’s. But this particular letter looks rushed, your lines are sloppy, some words need to be read a few times over to be understood. What kind of state had you been in, writing these words? Jay’s heart swells, thinking that you were as moved writing as he was reading. He even looks through your letter again, wishing to find a tear stain somewhere, but there are none. Maybe he’s been watching too many of these romantic period dramas you always go on about.

He has to pace his room when he’s done reading your letter, but he feels trapped inside these four walls, so he dashes outside, saying that he’s getting some air when his relatives ask him where he’s off to in such a rush, and walks around the block five times. When he’s back in his room, he rereads your letter, eyes taking in each and every word slowly and carefully, making sure he doesn’t misread anything.

You like him. You, Y/N, like him, Jongseong, it’s a fact, it’s real, you said so yourself, you went into quite some detail about it, he can’t believe it, but it’s real, it’s written right there on the page, if anyone dares tell him he’s fooling himself, he can prove them wrong, you’re the one who said it.

The smile doesn’t leave his lips for the rest of the day, he can barely eat, he’s already full of happiness. He reads your words over and over before falling asleep, committing them to memory, dreaming about them, about you.

You. How should he respond to this? Are you even expecting a response? You seem to know he’s not impartial to you, either, although that’s an understatement. 

In the following days, the thought that you hadn’t meant to send him this letter nags at him. The abrupt ending, the absence of your usual Love, Y/N. The fact that this had come out of left field—none of your previous letters had even a romantic undertone, no matter how he tried in his own to hint at his missing you, the most reference to seeing each other again you would give him was It’ll be better to show you this in real life. The act of sending letters itself didn’t feel very platonic, but you never went there, so he didn’t, either. He had secretly yearned to have you this close all these years, he would never forgive himself if he ended up chasing you away now with his over-eagerness.

You had landed on something very real in your letter: I don’t think you liked that I didn’t like you and openly showed it, so used to being everyone’s favorite person you were. I remember how you showily tried to be nice to me after that, maybe you just wanted another friend, but I didn’t let you. He cursed his fifteen-year-old self, that idiot who couldn’t even speak to a girl no matter how much he wanted to, just because she was so pretty, he was afraid of saying something stupid and messing it up before it even had a chance to start.

On days when you’d had particularly nasty or petty arguments — it could get pretty bad, at the start, before you both started maturing and realized how ridiculous you were, especially with your classmates telling you to keep it classy — he’d stay up all night, wondering why you hated him so much in the first place, what on Earth he could’ve done to warrant such vitriol. Now, finally, he knew, and he could only resent the fact that no one had invented time machines yet, so he could nip his useless ego in the bud; so he could tell younger Jay not to take it personally, that you had your reasons for disliking him, that even if you hadn’t, the world won’t end if someone doesn’t like him like everyone usually does. 

Because, he hates to admit, that was what had done it for Jay. He couldn’t stand that someone — not just someone, but one of the prettiest girls he’d ever seen, a girl he’d been hyping himself up to talk to every day, but never found the courage to — didn’t immediately fall for his charms. And not just that, but even showed just how much she disliked him. You looked him up-and-down with disdain, made disgusted faces at his jokes, rolled your eyes when he spoke up in class. It made him burn with anger, but he also weirdly enjoyed it—at least, you were paying attention to him. So, he amped it up. Talked louder, laughed louder, hovered around you. He even stole your erasers, wrote the date on which he’d taken them, kept them in a box on his desk that he looked at every time he studied at home. He aimed to beat you in every class you shared, even though neither of you cared that much about grades—the annoyed look on your face when he boasted about the two points he’d gotten over you was enough satisfaction.

All in all, he behaved like a child, and you reciprocated in like.

Until you didn’t.

It was a random Tuesday when something in your attitude towards him shifted. It wasn’t a complete 180, but he noticed everything about you, so even a slight change of your tone was obvious to him. You started using your nickname for him more often than his full name—he never told you, but of course he loved that you didn’t call him Jay like everyone else, that you had your own way of addressing him. It was a sign to him that the two of you had something special, even if it was on the opposite end of the spectrum of what he wanted with you.

He again spent sleepless nights wondering what had caused this change: was it something he had done, or something within you? It was a welcome change, that much was sure, but he was initially too confused to take it in stride. He’d long made peace with the fact that he’d never have you the way he really wanted, so he was fine with whatever this was—but now, you were changing, your interactions were tinged with something like shyness, the distance between you felt greater than ever. He tried to keep up his smart-ass appearances around you, but you only indulged in your old habits once in a while, as though you had grown tired of arguing with him, even of giving him the time of day.

So he resolved himself to adapting his behavior to yours. If you stared at him intently like his face was a puzzle you were trying to solve, he let you, rested his head on his palm and smiled as he stared back at you. Finally, he had an excuse to look at you without you threatening to punch him or saying a picture would last longer. He knew they did, he’d had to resort to scrolling through Sunoo’s and Kazuha’s Instagrams to find any photos of you. Yours was private and at the time, you would’ve probably cursed him out if he’d sent a follow request. If you seemed too annoyed or upset over something, he’d leave you alone, he’d do something nice to let you know you didn’t need to have your guards up at all times around him. If you seemed to silently call for a truce of hostilities, he easily complied.

Then, after a few weeks, your petty arguments resumed, but those too were different—if before they felt filled with real disdain and irritation, they now seemed to be a comfortable habit to fall back on, almost like a fun hobby. Those, too, Jay readily welcomed.

And so things changed in a direction Jay had never thought would one day be possible. You gave him no explanations, nor did he ask for any, and soon he stopped losing sleep over the why’s and the how’s and simply let himself enjoy the fact that you now had the semblance of a friendship, that he could compliment you and pass it off as amical teasing, that he could learn things about you like what you spent your weekends doing, what your relationship with your family was like, whether you were a dog or cat person, whether you wanted to visit his farm in Stardew Valley. 

Unsurprisingly, this only enhanced his already pathetically strong feelings for you. He worried over how to make sure this wasn’t some sort of 30-day friendship trial you had wanted to test out. He reveled in the fact that his top university of choice was the one you had already been accepted to. He now knew what it felt like to have you smile at him, smile because of him, and he never wanted again to live in a world where this was not a daily occurrence. 

He now sort of has an answer—your letter doesn’t make it very clear, it makes him think again that you really had not meant to send it, but you seem to have had a dream. A dream of him, 28-year-old him, to be precise, of your life together—he’s not sure. At this point in time, he doesn’t care much, either. Whether it was a dream or a real vision of the future that you had, all that matters is that it allowed you to see him in a new light, a light which he had hoped for years would one day appear to you, and it had changed things. And now, you liked him.

You said so yourself.

He’s at a loss for words. He can’t concentrate for long enough to put all his thoughts in order, he can’t make himself calm down and write his feelings down. He has to pack to go home, once he’s home, he’ll have to pack for university. But it’s only two weeks from now to the day you meet again, and it’ll be better to say what he wants to say in person, anyway.

Is it okay if I respond to your letter in person? I think I’ll be too busy these two coming weeks, he texts you.

And then those two weeks pass like two seconds and you’re there, a few meters away from him. All the speeches he’d prepared in his head, from grand declarations of love to laid-back admittances of Yeah, I like you too, you’re cool, I guess, they all vanish from his head. For fourteen days he’s been going through scenarios upon scenarios of your reunion, what you’d look like, what he’d say, how you’d react. But now that he can actually see you, now that he would just have to walk a few steps if he wanted to touch you, hug you, kiss you — hoping that was something you wanted to do — he freezes. He forgets how his body works, the part in his brain that’s meant to manage language ability fails him. HIs mom calls him over, urging him into his new dorm building, and all he can do is wave back at you like an idiot.

When finally he musters the courage to text you, what he hopes will be the day that starts your romantic relationship turns into the day Park Jongseong realizes how much of a loser he is. For the first hour, he can’t look at you, he can’t get through a sentence without stuttering out half of his words, he runs out of things to say in record time. All he can think of is how easy it’d be to grab one of your hands, hold it in his and walk around this stupid potted plant sale as if the two of you were two halves of a whole. He doesn’t even want a potted plant, his roommate already has five, he just wanted an excuse to see you. He steals glances at you when you’re looking elsewhere, and he notices everything about you tenfold now that he can, now that caring about you doesn’t need to be in vain any longer. He tells himself that he just needs to calm down a bit, even when you have the confirmation that the person you’re about to confess to already likes you, revealing your feelings to someone is always nerve-wracking, the two of you haven’t seen in each other in a while, he’ll talk to you once his heart gets out of his throat.

But you’re acting normal. Suspiciously so. You’re acting like you never told him you liked him, like nothing has changed between you. He rereads your letter the second he gets back to his dorm. He’s not crazy, it’s written right there, I like you, Jong. I think I have for a long time, longer than either of us thinks. He knows the words by heart now, but he checks them anyway. So why are you acting like you never said anything? Had you really not meant to send that letter? Did Jay actually intrude on your private thoughts by reading words that had never meant to be seen by another soul?

You continue to behave as you usually would around him, but if he couldn’t go back to vicious bickering when things changed the first time, he can’t go back to friendly bickering now that things — for him — have changed a second time. He doesn’t even want friendly to be in your shared vocabulary anymore. 

So he stops giving in. If you make fun of him, he just stands there with an unimpressed if amused look on his face. If you pedantically correct him on something, he just nods his head and accepts it. He can tell you’re bothered by it, but he needs to show you that he doesn’t want to go on being just friends with you—he wants to compliment you without having to pass it off as teasing, he wants to stare at you with hearts in his eyes without having to look away when you catch him, he wants to spend every waking second of every day with you, he wants to hold your hand, hold you. 

He could wait for things to change slowly again, but why wait when he could help things along?

--

It’s nine p.m. on a Saturday and you’re sneaking Jongseong into your dorm. Liz is away for the weekend, gone back home to celebrate her aunt’s birthday, so you have the room to yourselves. It took some convincing to get him to come — What if we get caught coming in, What if your T.A. sees us, What if I get reported to campus police — and so when your verbal reassurances failed to work, you resorted to blinking up at him through your lashes and that did the trick.

Jongseong was in many ways unlike any other man you’d ever met; in some other ways, he was the exact same.

Plastic bag of the tteokbokki you’d asked for in hand, he looks around the deserted hallways like someone might jump out of nowhere and beat him to a pulp at any given moment. At this time of the week, everyone’s out partying or holed up in their dorms, presumably either to rest or because of a lack of friends so early on in the semester. You grab his free hand and hurry him along to the elevator—once inside, it takes you a few seconds before you realize you’re still holding it, and you retract your hand quickly while he just smiles. 

You settle yourselves on the floor—comfort is not worth getting gochujang sauce on your white sheets. You sit criss-cross in front of each other, the food between the two of you, and catch up on your first week of class in-between bites of spicy, gooey rice cakes and fish cakes. You wonder, if one day you and Jongseong are no longer friends, how long you will keep associating tteokbokki with him.

When you tell him that you and Jake share a class, Introduction to Film Studies, he gives you a look. “What’s that face for?” you ask.

“Did you guys sit next to each other?”

You chuckle. “Of course. We only knew each other in that room, it would’ve been weird not to.”

He continues to stare at you. After a while, he muses, “You’re not…?”

You halt in your tracks, rice cake at the end of your plastic fork hanging in the air, halfway between the container and your mouth. “Whatever you’re thinking, the answer is no.” Still in love with him, interested in him again, you don’t know the exact details of Jongseong’s thought process, all you know is he has nothing to worry about—if it’s something he worries about.

When a smile slowly grows on his lips and he nods, saying, “Okay, good,” you let yourself think it might be.

Later, you’re ten minutes into a senseless blockbuster movie when he suddenly pauses it. It snaps you out of a trance—his hand was awfully close to yours, so is his shoulder, his thigh, his knee, everything, really, and you haven’t been able to concentrate on anything but the warmth radiating off his skin and the intensity with which you crave to feel it intentionally rather than accidentally. When he speaks, there’s something serious in his tone that makes you nervous. “Y/N,” he says as he turns to you, and now his face is awfully close, too. There’s still many centimeters separating you, but in this tiny, barely lit-up room, he feels closer than ever before. “Do you remember when I said I’d reply to your letter in real life?”

You tilt your head. “Yeah, that was ages ago.”

“Well, I thought I’d do it now.”

“Now?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Now.”

And then those safe centimeters suddenly disappear, and Jongseong’s lips are on yours. It’s a brief, chaste kiss, so quick you wonder if it even happened when he leans back again.

“I like you, too,” he says, and your heart stops.

“W-what?” is all you can say back, eyes wide like he’s just admitted to killing someone rather than reciprocating your feelings.

His confident facade quickly crumbles. “God, this was so much cooler in my head, I-I’m sorry.” He pulls something out of his sweatpants pocket, pages folded over and over into a tiny square. As he unfolds them, you recognize your paper, your handwriting—but what do your letters have anything to do with him kissing you, of all things? “I don’t think you meant to send this. But I’m glad you did.”

He hands you the pages and your eyes skim over the words, not detecting anything out of the ordinary, until—But it got me thinking about your fight again. Reflecting on it now, I can say that it was a turning point for me in my perception of you. You remember this line, because you had made sure to strike it and everything that came afterward out when you rewrote the letter that you would actually send Jongseong. So how was he giving you this? 

“I-How do you have this?” you ask, voice trembling. You feel as though your heart overflows with all kinds of emotions, and so your eyes follow, tears staining your lower lashes. 

But Jongseong is not one to let you hide things from him. “Hey, no, it’s okay,” he says, warm hands coming to cup your face. “Look at me.” You have no choice but to oblige—his gaze is somehow both soft and stern, a mix of concern and determination. “Did you mean what you wrote in here?” You nod. “Then everything’s okay. You don’t know how happy I was reading this.”

The tension in your body slowly starts to fade. “Really?”

“Really. I cherish every single word in there.”

“Really?” you repeat, and he chuckles.

“Really.”

Your heartbeat speeds up as you gaze into his eyes, as you let yourself bask in the affection and endearment you find there. You can’t quite comprehend what’s happening. The letter, the kiss, his confession, your inadvertent confession, it’s all a mess in your head; so sudden, but such a long time coming at the same time. You never imagined that things would change so quickly—less than a year ago, you thought Jongseong was the most irritating person on this planet. After meeting his 28-year-old self, you thought it’d take ages for the two of you to be on such good terms. But now, just a week into your first semester of university, belly full of tteokbokki and Sprite, you like each other enough not only to be in the same room without hurling insults at each other but to actually be smiling at each other, willingly at that.

Your eyes drift down to his lips, just like in the hallway all those months ago, and the words slip out before you can stop them. They’re a mere whisper—”Kiss me again.”

Jongseong doesn’t need to be told twice. Still cupping your face, he bridges the gap between the two of you again, and this time, when your lips meet, they don’t come apart so quickly. It’s your first kiss, and it’s nothing short of magical, better than any romance novel could’ve prepared you for. His lips are warm and soft against yours, moving slowly, gingerly; as if he’s scared to take any wrong step, he lets you control the pace, follows every tilt of your head this way and that. It’s a relief that he seems to know as little about this as you do—his hands haven’t moved from your face, yours are on his knees, all you can do is focus on the movement of your lips, to think of anything else at the same time would be overwhelming. 

“I’ve liked you from the start,” he suddenly says, face still so close you can feel his breath on your lips as he speaks. 

“Hm?” you hum, body reeling from the kiss.

“I’ve liked you from the start,” he repeats, grinning—he looks relieved, like he’s been waiting to say these words for a long time. “I can’t believe this is happening after all these years. Or at all, really.”

“I think I did, too.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that in your letter.”

Your eyes widen and you bury your face in your hands as Jongseong laughs. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” you mumble.

He smooths over your hair with one hand, brings your face back up with the other. “Don’t worry. I won’t ever make you regret this.”

Your brain and heart are too all over the place for you to come up with a coherent answer, so you lean in and reconnect your lips to his. It’s already becoming your favorite sensation, feeling him smile into the kiss, threading your fingers in his soft hair.

Time passes delicately like this, the two of you on your single bed, in the sheets that you bought three weeks ago. A lot of it is spent kissing and learning how to fall into each other’s rhythm, but you also spend hours talking, comparing situations and how you’d experienced them. You thought his occasional acts of kindness were done out of guilt, evidence that he did have some morals; he was trying to show he cared about you. He thought you’d despised him from the moment you saw him; you reiterate in more detail than your letter what really happened, you say you wish you knew then what you know now. 

“But I never hated you, Jong. I think I wanted to believe that I did, but I never actually did.”

“You glared at me everytime I walked past like I killed a member of your family.”

You groan, ashamed of yourself. “I did, didn’t I?”

“You did,” he says, chuckling, placing a kiss on your forehead. His arms are around you, your head rests atop his heart—you’ve never felt more comfortable in your life. “But it’s okay. We’re here now, and I don’t want us to have any regrets about high school. We had a good time, didn’t we?”

You tilt your head up to look at him. “I’m sure you did, stealing all my erasers.”

He lets out a hearty laugh. Clearly, he’s very proud of his feat. “Hey, I gave all of them back.”

“And what am I going to do with a hundred erasers, Jong?” you ask, laughing too, pecking his cheek aggressively—your way of punishing him for a grave deed.

“Keep them as a token of my love for you,” he says, and your breath falters at the mention of that word. “In fifty years, it’ll be a sign that I’ve liked you since the beginning, I just had a funny way of showing it.”

“Fifty years, huh?”

He grins. “Fifty, a hundred, whatever. You’re not getting rid of me.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

You’re both smiling so wide, you can barely manage a kiss. He trails kisses from your lips to your ear. Holding you close, he whispers, “It’s always been you, Y/N. Always and only you.”

There may be thorns on the otherwise immaculate rose that is your life, but Park Jongseong was never one of them—all along, he was a bud waiting to bloom.

--

The more time passes, the more you wonder whether that night you had seen in your vision will ever come. There’s been evenings similar to it—crashing the minute you came home from a long day on set, telling yourself you’d take a fifteen-minute power nap only to wake up three hours later and coming downstairs to find your husband cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen, taking care of your son or simply watching TV, but waiting for you, always waiting for you. He seems as happy now watching you come down the stairs as he was then finding your face among all the students flocking out of lecture halls. 

The details are blurry now, but many small things seem to be different from what you’d seen. He still tries to recreate your favorite meal, but it’s not pasta all'arrabbiata, it’s laksa, because your first date as an official couple was to a Malaysian restaurant, not an Italian one. He’s still the best father you know, but you have one son, not twin girls—although that offer to “give him a younger sibling to play with” is always on the table. Even the house you live in is different from the one in your dream, which has now become nothing more than a funny anecdote you share with people when they ask you the story of how you and Jongseong met.

You think of Sunoo’s words from all those years ago: Sometimes, we want something so badly, we conjure it up for ourselves. Had 18-year-old you been in such denial over her feelings for Jongseong that she’d had to convince herself a magical well had bestowed a crazy dream upon her to admit that, yes, there was something there, something other than childish hatred?

It doesn’t matter anymore. Months pass without you thinking about that well, anyway. 

Tonight, you come home late from work after having had to do last-minute changes to the script for your current project, a movie that starts shooting in a few days. Jongseong texted you that he was going to bed an hour or so again, so you’re greeted by a plate of japchae covered in film paper. The post-it note stuck to it reads, I’m afraid of the repercussions of too much curry consumption on our son, so no laksa tonight my love. Hope you like it. Come to bed quick. You were starving a second ago, but you decide food can wait—other things can’t.

You tiptoe up the stairs and into your son’s room, breathing in the scent of his hair and placing a kiss there. His hair is still worryingly sparse, but if he’s anything like his dad, it’ll come in a bit later than the other kids. You always thought babies with a full head of hair were freaky, anyway. He doesn’t budge a bit, sleeping like a log—his dad is another story, shuffling in bed the moment you step into your shared bedroom. He opens his arms wide, a silent invitation.

“You’re home,” he says as you attach yourself to his body, your leg hiked up over his, your face buried in the crook of his neck, your thumb caressing the start of stubble on his cheeks.

You smile. “I am.”

© asahicore on Tumblr, 2024. please do not repost, translate, or plagiarize my works. support your creators by reblogging and leaving feedback!

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[invincibledc]

BATUNCLE!reader who just always gets called instead of his brother. It’s sickening how greedy his nephews and nieces are.

note: all batfam are kids in this expect for Bruce ofc lol!

“Uncle y/n!!!!!” Dick when he was just a Robin, screams as he rushes into the study room to see his uncle wearing his signature glasses. Y/n holds back a deep sigh, looking at the acrobat who just smiles at him.

“Yes, sweetheart?” “Watch, what I can do.” Dick says before doing a new trick he just learnt.

Y/n couldn’t help but chuckle, clapping to encourage the little bird. “Amazing! Show uncle what else you can do.” Dick’s eyes light up as he started to do some more tricks.

“UNC! UNC!!!!!!” Jason dragged as he was in the kitchen working on homework.

Y/n looked at his twin brother who looks back at him. “That’s your son.” Y/n says, getting ready to head out, but instead Bruce chuckles.

“But that’s your nephew, and he’s calling for you.”

Y/n was suddenly in the kitchen, seeing jason’s lit up face. “Yo, unc! Help me with this math question?” He asked, showing him the equation.

“What the..” y/n grabbed the paper and gave it back. “Uhm. How about we head out for ice cream?” Y/n says, clearly not understanding this generation’s math solving problems.

Jason hopped off the chair and rushed to hold his uncles’s hand.

“Ice cream. Ice cream! Ice cream!”

“Uncle?” Tim says softly, walking into his uncle’s room.

“Yes Timmy boy?”

“Is Santa real?” He asked towards his lovely uncle.

“Of course he’s real, you just gotta be asleep to earn any gifts.” Y/n says, taking his glasses off and lay down.

It’s quiet before Tim gets on the bed with his uncle. “Is that why you have a Santa costume in your closet?”

Y/n’s eyes flew right open as Tim just stare at him. “Okay bed time champ!”

“Ammu.” (uncle)Damian says, alerting of his presence. Y/n turned around, having to get ready to go get groceries. “Yes dames?” Y/n says, putting his jacket on as the small brown skinned boy walks towards him.

“I wanna come too.” He says, he already looked ready—maybe a little too ready as he had his Velcro shoes on and a jacket that seems a little too big.

Y/n chuckled, “you sure? It’s gonna be a long trip with me to the grocery store.”

“I’m sure!” He says a little too excitedly, he grabs onto his uncle’s hand. Y/n couldn’t help but chuckle before heading out with the small boy.

“Of course..”

“UNCLEEEE!!!!” Steph yells, running towards the man that ran away as the blonde girl tackled him.

“Where have you been dude?! I’ve been waiting for you to watch this movie I just saw!”

“Been busy with work, kiddo… get off me please..” Stephane gets off the poor man, chuckling before dragging him to the living room.

Cass stood beside her uncle, watching him do a puzzle by himself, “uncle.” She signs after tugging on the male’s sleeve. “Yes honey?” He replies, pausing himself from completing his puzzle.

“I wanna color with you. Please.” She tugs harder, getting him at least out his chair. Y/n sighs, but walks with her to her room. “Why not your father? I’m sure he can make time to—” he was interrupted with a pout from the girl.

“Okay never mind, drawing it is!”

BATUNCLE!reader who can’t deny his nephews and nieces at all…

[kermdoeswriting]

The worst jobs ever lead to 0 Student debt

Have you ever been so broke that you've resorted to gigs that normally would make you seem like a minor villains goon?

Danny has.

Being practically broke, drowning in constant student debt, college student has led to some of the weirdest side gigs Danny has ever done. He can at the very least confirm that as he continues his degree in Astrophysics at MIT.

But in all honesty, he's not very picky or upset about how weird they are. Danny would rather do something strange once, then continue drowning in debt the way he was currently.

Student debt was not a joke.

And even if it were, it wasn't a very funny one, considering he himself was just scraping by on his two front teeth due to them.

Either way, the point was Danny's done practically everything in Gotham possible just to make some small bits of cash here and there. Danny only ever goes to Gotham for the sake of an extra ectoplasm boost on top of the fact it has the most jobs out of any city possible due to the crime rate.

He's been a temporary goon and a guard to several different warehouses throughout Gotham & New York City (most times there isn't even anyone or anything in them but a jobs a job). He's been in charge of covering a front temporarily for what looks like fake companies (nothing to do with drug dealing or the mob for some reason, he usually tries to stay clear of those offers).

He also was a tester for some of Mr. Nygma's traps being hired for the sheer fact that he couldn't really die and therefore could test several of Mr.Nygma's traps at once.

He took a temp job to help feed Dr.Quinzel's pet hyenas when she was in Arkham for awhile as well as pet sit. That one was his favorite honestly, Lou and Bud were sweethearts despite the carnage thing.

He recently had even been a personal insta-cart driver for a certain Penguin mob-boss strangely enough (until the guy got sent back to Arkham that is).

Danny really isn't picky when it comes to jobs unless it was just something mostly immoral and just insane, like drug dealing and/or murder & world or several life ending situations or just involved with someone like the Joker.

It's gotten to a point that the average Gotham goon usually recognizes him when he passes by during a job visit. They tended to recommend him a new job when they saw him, knowing he was just as eager as they were in this economy.

Which is how he ended up here, sitting in an empty warehouse yet again for possibly another hour before he could leave and get paid. Danny was sat on the floor doing his advanced calc homework and trying not to scream about it as he sat there.

It was something he did when the nights were slower honestly. The night was ruined quickly after that though when the glass shattered above him and scattered all over his homework and the rest of the ground.

Danny only sighed and mourned the possible money he'd be losing to that mess before shaking the glass off of him and his papers. He didn't bother looking up at his possible attacker.

"You have got to be fuckin kidding me. Not again, Kid."

Only then does Danny look up to see who broke the window. Red Hood sounds exasperated despite the mask covering all of his real voice with a mechanical voice changer. Besides him was Nightwing who seemed just as disappointed as his partner was while putting his escrima sticks behind his back.

"Can I help you Red Pill, Blue Pill?"

That made Red Hood snort while Nightwing just sighed into his hands and dragged them down his face before responding.

"Kid, what are you doing in he- Is that homework???"

Nightwing walked closer almost sounding offended as he looked down at the mess of Danny's math that he was going to have to redo before turning in tomorrow. The thought of recopying everything made him feel angry all over again.

"The one you guys wrecked by getting glass all over it? Yes," Danny leaned back into his plastic chair provided by the Goonion. "Thanks for that by the way, I'm going to have to recopy everything before class tomorrow."

"That wouldn't be a problem if you just got a normal part-time job like a normal young adult." Red Hood snorted as Nightwings slight lecture and it made Danny roll his eyes at the both of them as he sat up.

As if he hadn't tried that route already. In between his space museum internship during the day and his thousands of classes every week, he didn't exactly fit a lot of younger adult jobs schedule.

"Do you know any nearby normal adult jobs that are hiring a current university student with millions in debt and a internship schedule that only allows them to work at night?" Danny snapped back which made Red Hood start to snort and laugh again at Nightwings expression.

"Well..." Nightwing at the very least had the decency to look sheepish as if he had thought about it genuinely and couldn't think of a thing.

"Thought so." Danny slumped against the chair again, before shutting his eyes. He waved them away as he sat back, already mentally preparing himself for another all nighter for the sake of recopying his papers.

"If thats all, I'll see you next time I get a fake listing or bad job that you guys have a tendency to break into. Go away."

Nightwing only sighed again before Danny heard his grappling hook sound off back through the broken window into the night. Red Hood only chuckled one last time before ruffling his hair.

"See you, Kid. Make sure you try to sleep before class"

Danny just huffed at him and waved him off again as Red Hood shot his grappling hook off into the night and joined Nightwing. With a sigh, Danny sat up again and grabbed his nearby backpack filled with scrap paper.

Time to restart the equation all over again.

______________________________________________________________

Basically Danny needs money to keep going to MIT so he continuously decides to take up jobs for hire in Gotham (and other places but mostly Gotham), which lead to him breaking a lot of laws for another cash grab.

Meanwhile, the Batfam is very concerned that they keep meeting this meta young adult (who doesn't even live in Gotham!!) who seems to continuously be running through villain placed ad offers like water to get cash.

How desperate for cash is this guy????

[aleese1111]

homework and heart | yeon sieun x neighbour!reader

summary: yeon sieun is just trying to get through a study session without losing his sanity, but his lifelong neighbor makes that impossible—armed with sarcasm, zero personal space boundaries, and a habit of falling asleep on his arm mid-math problem. they argue like enemies, act like friends, and care like something they won’t admit.

warnings: [fluff fluff fluff] , mutual but unspoken romantic feelings .

author's note: i just know sieun would treat his girl like a delicate flower. everything about him (apart from his psycho tendencies) screams gentleman. the reader is sort of a tsundere or something. wrote this while listening to [ My Love Mine All mine - Mitski] . requests

“your handwriting looks like a drunk spider fell in love with a pen,” she said, peering over si-eun’s shoulder.

si-eun didn’t glance up. “you’ve said that before.”

“yeah, and it hasn’t improved.”

“you’re here for math help, not calligraphy critique.”

“i’m here for the free heating,” she declared, collapsing onto his bed like it owed her rent. “your floor heating is elite. i feel like a warm croissant.”

si-eun exhaled through his nose. “you’re supposed to finish the worksheet i gave you.”

“you’re supposed to stop being a fun vacuum,” she shot back, flipping onto her stomach and burying her face in his pillow. “why do you smell like laundry detergent and sad?”

he ignored that. “that’s page two. the functions review.”

she groaned into the pillow, her voice muffled. “why are you like this?”

“efficient?”

“emotionally unbothered.”

“that’s not a flaw.”

“it is when your only reaction to my suffering is to hand me a pencil.”

she sat up and tossed said pencil at him. he caught it midair without even turning his head.

“show-off,” she muttered.

“you threw it with the force of a butterfly.”

“rude. accurate, but rude.”

they sat in silence for a moment—her pretending to work, him actually working—until she groaned again and fell dramatically across the table, narrowly missing his open notebook.

“i give up. i’m becoming a flower shop cashier. i’ll name the succulents and everything.”

“you hate plants.”

“they hate me first. it’s mutual.”

“finish number five.”

“no.”

sieun said her name.

“make me.”

he leaned back in his chair, expression flat. “do your homework.”

she leaned forward, matching his energy. “make me.”

their faces were inches apart now, eyes locked in a silent, petty standoff.

“childish,” he murmured.

“lifeless.”

“stubborn.”

“robotic.”

“you still haven’t moved.”

“you blinked first.”

“that’s not how this works.”

“says who?”

“says logic.”

she rolled her eyes and dramatically scribbled on the worksheet. “there. number five. happy?”

he checked it. “that’s number six.”

“i hate you.”

“good. now do five.”

she cursed under her breath, then muttered, “you better carry my backpack at my funeral.”

“you won’t need a backpack if you fail this class.”

“then you better carry my coffin. same energy.”

si-eun glanced at her, the faintest trace of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

she caught it and pointed. “there. you smiled. admit you like me.”

“i smiled because you said something dumb.”

“same thing.”

they didn’t look at each other after that. not directly, anyway. but she was quietly doing question five, and si-eun casually slid a bag of her favorite snacks across the table like it didn’t mean anything.

like always.

she got up without warning and dropped beside his chair, her chin resting on his arm, body invading his space like it was natural law.

“you need a break,” she muttered.

“you’re distracting.”

“good.”

he didn’t pull away. just let her stay there, still scribbling notes while her cheek pressed against the sleeve of his hoodie.

“you’re going to smudge the ink,” he murmured.

she shrugged. “you’ll rewrite it for me anyway.”

“that’s not how this works.”

she smirked. “isn’t it?”

they stayed like that, the sound of pen on paper and her breathing settling into rhythm.

she, of course, fell asleep fifteen minutes later. head still leaning against his arm, mouth slightly open, clumsy as ever.

si-eun didn’t move.

he just kept writing with one hand, while the other lightly tugged the blanket from the bed to drape over her shoulders.

outside, the sky finally decided to rain.

inside, there was peace—chaotic, uneven, stubborn peace. the kind only the two of them could create. the kind that made sense even when nothing else did.

✶ ᶻz .ᐟ ,

[cressidagrey]

Lessons in Math (and Humility)

Welcome to Mysterious Mrs Piastri's Mondays. Apparently this is a thing now. (Ever since I hear that interview where Kimi was asked which subjects he's scared off an the answer was Math, I knew I was gonna write this.)

Pairing: Oscar Piastri x Felicity Leong-Piastri (Original Character)

Summary: Kimi Antonelli thought he could handle anything — race cars, pressure, a wet track…but his math homework may destroy him. Enter Bee Piastri. 

(divider thanks to @saradika-graphics )

Kimi Antonelli didn’t ask for help lightly.

Especially not with math.

He was a racing driver, not an idiot. He could handle telemetry, fuel loads, braking calculations, tyre degradation graphs — all of it — without blinking. He’d memorized braking points at Spa, figured out fuel maps on the fly, and survived radio calls with engineers who thought “you’re fine” covered every possible scenario.

He was good at numbers. At racing numbers.

But this assignment?

This nightmare of partial derivatives and matrix transformations?

It stared at him from his tablet like a personal attack, every line of notation a new insult to his intelligence.

After twenty minutes of glaring at it — tapping his pen, checking his notes, checking them again as if they might have magically rewritten themselves — Kimi finally let out a groan of pure, unfiltered despair.

He flopped face-first onto the hospitality couch, tablet slipping from his hands onto the seat beside him.

Without lifting his head, he announced, voice muffled against the cushions: “I’m going to fail math and bring shame to the entire grid.”

The nearest breathing human — unfortunately — was Ollie Bearman, who looked up from where he was very happily slurping a suspiciously neon smoothie.

Ollie raised an eyebrow. “What’s the problem?”

Kimi lifted one arm limply and waved the tablet in the air like a white flag of surrender.

“This. Derivatives. Partial equations. I don’t know. Numbers are evil.”

Ollie blinked once. Then grinned — the kind of grin that meant he was enjoying Kimi’s suffering way too much.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “Arthur Leclerc almost failed stats back in F3.”

Kimi turned his head enough to squint at him. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. Like, barely passed.”

Kimi perked up slightly, seizing onto the news like a lifeline. If Arthur — who had a literal racing dynasty backing him — struggled, maybe there was hope for the rest of them.

“How’d he survive?” Kimi asked, sitting up slightly.

Ollie’s grin widened.

“Oscar.”

Kimi stared at him. “Piastri?”

“Yep. Quiet nerd back at Prema. Absolute lifesaver. Helped Arthur cram for finals and everything.”

Kimi narrowed his eyes. He thought about Oscar: quiet, steady, terrifyingly good at everything he touched, like someone had programmed him in a lab.

Of course Oscar would have hidden superpowers. Of course.

Kimi hesitated, pride warring with desperation.

And then sighed dramatically, letting his head thunk back against the couch.

“Fine,” he said. “Find me Piastri. I have no pride left.”

Which was how, ten minutes later, they ended up with Oscar Piastri sitting cross-legged in the McLaren motorhome, frowning deeply at Kimi’s tablet like it had personally offended him.

“Okay,” Oscar muttered, squinting, “it’s not impossible. It’s just badly worded.”

Kimi leaned forward, full of hope — desperate, grasping hope.

Maybe this would be fine. Maybe Oscar Piastri — quiet, unflappable, secret nerd of Prema lore — could fix this disaster.

Five minutes later, that hope was dead.

Oscar exhaled slowly, dragging a hand through his hair. “I’m going to be honest with you, mate: I have no idea what they’re asking for.”

Kimi flailed, waving his hands like he could physically summon better news. “But you saved Arthur! You’re the math guy!”

Oscar held up a hand, grimacing. “That was basic stats, Kimi. You know, averages. Standard deviations. This—” he pointed at the tablet like it might bite him, “—this is multivariable calculus meets actual sadism.”

Ollie Bearman, who had been perched nearby pretending not to watch the trainwreck unfold, snorted into his water bottle.

Oscar sighed again, this time reaching for his phone.

“No—” Kimi said, panicked, feeling his dignity slipping further into the abyss. “Don’t call someone. Don’t bother anyone. I’ll just fail and move to a cabin in the woods, it’s fine—”

Oscar was already dialing.

“Relax,” he said, calm as anything. “Felicity’s here. She likes this stuff.”

Five minutes later, Felicity Piastri wandered into the motorhome.

Kimi had seen her around the paddock plenty of times over the last year.

The first two things he’d learned about Oscar’s wife were simple:

1. She was tiny and startlingly pretty — the kind of pretty that could probably kill a man if she wanted to.

2. If Felicity Piastri was somewhere, Bee Piastri, Oscar’s terrifyingly adorable four-year-old daughter, was never far behind.

Today was no exception.

Bee marched in beside her mother, two neat pigtails bouncing with every step, each tied with papaya-colored bobbles (a detail that felt almost aggressively on-brand). A stuffed frog plushie dangled from one hand, like a trusted battle companion.

Both of them — Felicity and Bee — looked unfairly bright and well-rested for how emotionally wounded Kimi felt.

Oscar, completely unbothered by the incoming reinforcements, handed Felicity the tablet without preamble.

She glanced at it. Paused. Then blinked slowly.

“You’re all stumped by this?” she asked, her voice dripping with mild disbelief.

Kimi wanted the floor to open up and swallow him whole.

“It’s the notation!” he blurted defensively. “And the question’s vague! And the examples were misleading!”

Felicity tilted her head, looking at him with the kind of fond pity reserved for particularly slow puppies. “It’s literally just a chain rule application with a matrix shortcut.”

“That’s not helping!” Ollie said, muffled into the crook of his elbow where he was laughing himself into an early grave.

Meanwhile, Bee had clambered neatly onto Oscar’s lap without hesitation, perching herself like a queen surveying her court. Kimi noticed absently how Oscar automatically shifted to make room for her — steadying her with one hand, pressing a soft kiss to her temple like it was muscle memory.

“Mama, is it hard?” Bee asked, peering at the tablet with great seriousness.

Felicity smiled. “Not really. But it’s annoying.”

Bee thought about that for a second. Then squared her tiny shoulders like she was preparing for battle.

“Can I try?” she asked.

Oscar sighed deeply. “Bee, it’s complicated—”

But Bee was already moving, plucking the tablet from his hand like it was no big deal, mumbling to herself under her breath.

“Okay, so you take this one first because it’s inside the brackets... and then you swap the middle bits because that’s the rule from the blue notebook... and then you put it all together and it looks like a frog but it’s actually a plus sign.”

Kimi blinked.

Ollie blinked.

Oscar just shook his head like a man who had accepted the chaos a long time ago.

Three minutes later, Bee beamed, handed the tablet back to her mother, and swung her legs happily.

“There,” she said proudly. “Now it’s not grumpy anymore.”

Felicity leaned over, checked the solution... And grinned.

“She’s right,” she said brightly. “Great job, sweetheart!”

Oscar gave a low, half-proud, half-resigned chuckle. “Welcome to my life.”

Kimi stared at the screen.

A four-year-old. A four-year-old had solved the math problem correctly in under three minutes.

Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised. He had heard rumors last year — something about Bee spotting an issue with a McLaren suspension load calculation before any of the engineers did.

But seeing it in real time?

Devastating.

Absolutely devastating.

“I— how did you—?” Kimi stuttered, still struggling to comprehend reality.

Bee shrugged like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Mama says numbers are friends. You just have to make them sit next to each other nicely.”

Kimi blinked down at the tablet, then at Bee, then back again.

Maybe... maybe racing cars was safer. Maybe he should stick to corners and apexes where the worst that could happen was a spin, not having his soul annihilated by a toddler.

Felicity kissed the top of Bee’s head and said entirely too casually, “There you go. Courtesy of a four-year-old.”

Oscar smiled and held out a hand. “Great job, Bumblebee.”

Bee high-fived her father so hard the smack echoed around the motorhome.

Kimi slumped back into his seat, utterly defeated.

Maybe he had brought shame to the grid after all.

Later, Kimi found himself slumped in the corner of the McLaren motorhome, a half-crushed juice box in his hand — courtesy of Bee, who had handed it over solemnly “for bravery.”

The worst part?

He genuinely needed it.

He sipped the apple juice in silence, staring into the middle distance, quietly reconsidering his entire academic career.

Maybe he could just... never open a math textbook again. Maybe he could live the rest of his life solely calculating apex speeds and brake bias. Maybe if he was fast enough, no one would ever ask him to solve another derivative.

Maybe.

Across the room, Felicity leaned against the table, arms folded, smiling sweetly — the kind of sweet that definitely had shark teeth hiding underneath.

“Bee’s better at recognizing patterns than most adults,” she said casually, like she wasn’t casually shattering the egos of Formula One drivers before lunchtime. “She’s been beating Oscar at card games since she was two.”

Oscar, sitting beside Kimi and munching on a cookie he definitely hadn’t earned, patted Kimi’s shoulder with exaggerated sympathy.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said, trying — and failing — not to laugh. “She inherited her mother’s brain.”

Kimi just groaned into his hands.

It didn’t help that Bee chose that exact moment to skip past them, Button the Frog tucked securely under one arm and a packet of glittery frog-shaped stickers in the other.

She looked so pleased with herself. Completely oblivious to the devastation she had left behind. Or maybe — horrifying thought — not oblivious at all.

Kimi made a note to himself:

Never challenge Bee to anything involving numbers.

Never doubt Felicity’s terrifying brain ever again.

Maybe just stick to driving cars really fast. It was safer for his dignity.

Probably.

Maybe.

[ari-ana-bel-la]

Could you write a Charles Leclerc x child daughter reader (10 years old), where he's at the racetrack, and Charles brings her to the Ferrari garage after school? While in the garage, Charles helps her with her homework and maybe reactions of others on father-daughter moment. I love your fanfics!

Homework in the Paddock

The hum of engines roared through the paddock, a familiar melody to Charles as he walked hand-in-hand with his daughter, Yn. The warmth of the Monaco sun bathed the racetrack in a golden glow, and despite the bustle of team members rushing around, mechanics fine-tuning the cars, and media personnel lingering for interviews, Charles was focused on one thing—Yn.

She was ten years old now, and every bit the light of his life. From the moment she was born, Charles knew his world had changed. It had grown brighter, more meaningful. Every race, every win, every setback—it all mattered more because of her. And he had made sure she could be with him as often as possible, even working out an agreement with her school so she could attend her classes online while traveling with him.

Yn adjusted the straps of her small backpack, shifting it over her shoulders as they walked toward the Ferrari garage. “Papa, what’s on the schedule today?” she asked, glancing up at him with her bright, inquisitive eyes.

Charles squeezed her hand. “I have meetings, media, and then practice, but we have some time before that. I thought we could do your homework together in the garage.”

Yn groaned dramatically, making Charles chuckle. “Papa, I thought I was getting a break from school,” she pouted.

“You promised, ma chérie,” Charles reminded her with a knowing smile. “And I promised your maman I would make sure you did your lessons.”

They stepped into the garage, the smell of fuel and rubber filling the air. The Ferrari team was already busy preparing the car for the next session, but the moment Charles and Yn walked in, heads turned. The entire team had come to adore Yn over the years. She was like a little Ferrari mascot, always there with her father, always bringing an infectious energy that even the most stressful race weekends couldn’t dampen.

“Yn!” Lewis greeted her first, crouching down and holding out his fist for a bump. She grinned and knocked her tiny fist against his. “You keeping your dad in check?”

“I try,” she said dramatically. “But you know how he is.”

Lewis laughed as Charles shook his head. “I’m standing right here, you know.”

Bruno, one of the engineers, came over with a smile. “Doing schoolwork in the garage today, Yn?”

Yn nodded, already pulling out her tablet and notebook. “Papa said we have to,” she said with a sigh, shooting her father a playful look.

Charles pulled up a chair next to the workbench and patted the seat beside him. “Alright, let’s see what we have today.”

Yn sat down, flipping open her notebook. “Math,” she groaned. “Fractions.”

Charles leaned over, scanning the page. “Ah, fractions. The bane of every child’s existence.”

“Did you like math when you were little, Papa?” she asked, pencil poised over the paper.

Charles chuckled. “Not really, but I had to be good at it.”

Yn sighed dramatically, picking up her pencil and staring at the problems. “Okay, if I have three-fourths of a pizza and I eat one-fourth, how much do I have left?” she read aloud.

“Hmm,” Charles said, pretending to think hard. “I don’t know, that’s a tough one.”

Yn rolled her eyes. “Papa.”

He grinned. “Alright, alright. You tell me.”

She tapped her chin before scribbling the answer down. “Two-fourths!”

“Or,” Charles prompted.

“One-half?” she said hesitantly.

He ruffled her hair. “Exactement.”

As they worked through the homework, the Ferrari team continued their preparations, but many couldn’t help but glance over at the duo. It was rare to see such a tender moment in the midst of the high-pressure world of Formula 1, and yet, it felt natural in Charles’ case. He had always been a family man, and everyone knew that Yn was the most important person in his life.

At one point, Lando walked into the garage, talking animatedly to one of his mechanics, but stopped in his tracks when he saw the scene unfolding. He smirked, walking over and leaning against the workbench. “Charles, mate, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look this serious before.”

Charles looked up, raising a brow. “I am always serious.”

Lando shook his head. “Not like this. This is next-level focus.”

Yn giggled, looking up at Lando. “He’s just helping me with math.”

“Fractions?” Lando asked, peeking at her notebook. “Oh man, I was terrible at those.”

Yn gasped dramatically. “Even race car drivers are bad at fractions?”

Lando nodded solemnly. “Absolutely. That’s why we have engineers to do all the hard stuff for us.”

Yn turned to Charles. “Papa, can I just get an engineer to do my homework too?”

Lewis, who had been listening, burst into laughter. “Brilliant idea.”

Charles groaned, shaking his head. “Non, non, you do your own work.”

Just then, Fred walked by, taking in the sight of Charles hunched over a notebook with his daughter. He paused, then shook his head with a chuckle. “Maybe we should put you on the strategy team, Charles.”

Yn perked up. “Can I be on the strategy team too?”

Fred smirked. “If you’re better at fractions than your Papa, I’ll consider it.”

Everyone laughed as Charles sighed dramatically. “Why does everyone bully me?”

Yn leaned her head against his arm. “Because we love you, Papa.”

Charles softened immediately, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “And I love you, ma chérie.”

As the day went on, Charles balanced being both a driver and a father seamlessly. He would answer engineering questions, discuss race strategy, then turn back to Yn’s homework to explain another problem. It was a side of him that many in the paddock admired—a father who made sure his daughter always knew she was his priority.

By the time the schoolwork was done, Yn stretched her arms above her head. “That was exhausting,” she declared.

Charles smirked. “Now you know how I feel after a race.”

“But you love racing,” she pointed out.

“And you love learning,” he countered.

She gave him a look. “Let’s not go that far.”

Lewis walked over, tossing Yn a Ferrari cap. “Since you worked so hard, I think you deserve a reward.”

Yn grinned, putting it on her head. “Merci, Lewlew!”

Charles smiled as he watched her interact with the team, knowing that no matter how many trophies or podiums he earned, nothing would ever mean more to him than the little girl who made his world brighter every single day.

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♥︎♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

Authors Note: Hey loves. I hope you enjoyed reading this story. My requests are always open for you.

-🩷🎀

[cherrysinner]

─── YOU'VE GOT MAIL .ᐟ

...or the end.

★ pairing.ᐟ frat!rafe x nerd!reader

★ summary.ᐟ rafe cameron is the golden boy of kildare university; certified frat boy, captain of the football team, relentless party animal with lines of girls to sleep with.

reader couldn't be more different; while she has the best grades in the whole school, she suffers from social anxiety disorder, and her social life is limited to her three best friends and the cat she secretly snuck into her dorm room.

both of them decide to join the anonymous chatroom for their campus, and start talking to one another, a friendship starting to form between the two; but neither of them know how different the other is.

★ author's note.ᐟ i can’t believe that this is the last chapter… this series has been going on for over three months now and i’m so grateful for all of you <3 i’ll be posting an epilogue that takes place some time after this, but if you guys are interested, i am open to writing requests about ygm!reader and frat!rafe in the future!

YOU'VE GOT MAIL!

"oh, yeah." rafe chuckled softly, "we have a game tomorrow, and i was wondering if you were coming." "vivian mentioned it earlier," you nodded, "i dunno, i mean, i don't really know anything about football." you chuckled breathily, "and... i have a lot of homework..."

"yeah, yeah. i get that..." rafe mumbled, before clearing his throat, "i... i really want you to come." your eyes widened, "you do?" "yeah. i do." he smiled softly, holding the shoe box out to you, "you could even wear this. if you want to. if you're not too busy."

you took the shoe box he was offering to you and opened it, seeing a folded piece of fabric. "what's this?" you chuckled softly, placing the shoe box down on your bed as you unfolded it.

"it's my jersey. i've seen some of the guys loan them to... uh, girls." "how many girls have you loaned it out to?" you chuckled playfully as you admired it, "none. just you." rafe shrugged. you placed the jersey down, turning to rafe and taking a deep breath, a small smile on your lips, "well, maybe you'll see me there. and maybe i'll wear that."

as rafe was about to turn to leave, you took hold of his wrist and he turned back to you, "but if i come to the game, you better win it." you got on your tiptoes, pressing a kiss on his cheek.

"he wants you to wear his jerseyyy? how cuuute." vivian cooed teasingly, taking a bite out of a piece of cake, the four of you sitting a cafe after your lectures were over, "don't tease her for being excited." zainab nudged vivian's shoulder.

"isn't it super public, though? for me to go to the game wearing his shirt." you purse your lips. "he said he's never let a girl wear it to one of their games."

"mmm, that's true. everyone except rafe has given their jersey to some girl to wear. it's a big deal, babes." "don't intimidate her, viv." "i'm not trying to intimidate her! she should know what she's getting into. everyone's gonna be watching you."

"what… what does that mean?"

"as soon as one person at that stupid game notices you're wearing cameron's shirt, they're telling their friends and then sending it over to KildareUBlindItems. in fifteen to thirty minutes, even the people who aren't at that game will know."

"funny how fast you can calculate yet you failed math." emilia rolled her eyes, "that's because math class is irrelevant. this is the important kind of math."

"so if i wear his shirt… everyone's gonna know that there's something going on between us? i didn't even think about that. i can't have that many people look at me." your brows knitted together. eyes, everywhere. looking at you, judging you, thinking you weren't good enough…

"don't you dare even start that." vivian grabbed your hand, squeezing it. you turned to her, your lower lip stuck between your teeth, a coppery taste in your mouth, "rafe wants you to go. you want to go, correct?" you nodded, "then the rest is irrelevant. besides, you're gonna watch the game with us. if someone stares at you i’ll just throw my slushie at them."

your lips quirked up slightly; you knew vivian wasn't kidding. "speaking of the game," emilia cleared her throat "i… i kinda asked my crush to sit with us during the game."

"what?" your eyes widened, a teasing tone lacing your tone "you finally talked to the girl you've liked since freshman year? the one you've never told a thing about to us?" "yes, that one." emilia rolled her eyes, "but it's no big deal. just be nice? it's just a friend thing, for now."

YOU: should we switch over to normal texting?

MalachiConstant: nah. this is more fun.

YOU: if you insist :p

MalachiConstant: so, have you made up your mind?

YOU: about…?

MalachiConstant: that's not funny

YOU: :p YOU: I might be coming. guess you'll see.

MalachiConstant: well, if you are, we usually have a party after we go home.

MalachiConstant: you should be my date

YOU: you're that sure you're gonna win?

MalachiConstant: if you come watch us, we're definitely winning MalachiConstant: but if you don't, we're definitely losing, i'll be too sad to focus on the game

YOU: you're so dramatic.

MalachiConstant: it's a fact

you laughed softly, putting your phone down onto the bed. angel looked at you, her different-colored eyes fixed on the smile on your face as if it disturbed her.

"i've got a date tonight. with a football captain." you cooed, giving her head a scratch, the cat closing her eyes and leaning into the touch, "who would've thought."

"so, who do you guys think em's gonna bring?" vivian took a sip from her slushie, wiggling her brows. by now, the stands were nearly packed, the game scheduled to start in less than ten minutes.

you, zainab and vivian had only just gotten to the stands five minutes ago, but based on the whispers and occasional glances you kept receiving, people had noticed the number nine on the front of your shirt, along with the number and the name ‘cameron’ on the back of it. without a word, you took vivian's slushie, grimacing when you tasted the vodka through the cherry-flavored icy drink, having counted on the girl's words that she couldn't take having to watch a college football game sober.

"you feel better now?" vivian raised her brows teasingly once you finally handed the cup back to her. you stuck your thumb up, feigning a smile through your burning throat.

"hi, guys."

you looked up to see emilia standing there with a sheepish smile, her cheeks slightly red. next to her, stood a blonde, brown-eyed girl, a small smile on her lips. vivian let out a gasp, looking between emilia and the girl.

"this is sarah cameron." before you could even get a word in, your pink-haired best friend had already jumped to her feet, "you're rafe's sister, aren't you?" "guilty. you guys know him?" the girl chuckled softly. "she does." vivian said with a shit-eating grin and gestured to the shirt you were wearing, and as soon as she saw the number nine on the team's jersey, sarah smiled, "you're her. huh."

"sorry?"

"nothing. it's nice to meet you." the girl held out her hand for you to shake, and you did, telling her your own name, trying not to overthink her words.

shortly after emilia and sarah had sat down, cheers erupted all around you, KildareU’s football team running onto the field led by rafe, the boy looking around until he finally spotted you, a wide grin taking over his lips when he saw what you were wearing.

you smiled and waved at him, rafe lifting his hand and waving right back at you, both of you blissfully unaware of the eyes fixed on you; like always, it was like it was just the two of you.

cheers erupted around the stands as soon as the buzzer rang out signifying the end of the game. to be honest, you didn't know much about football, and you really hadn't paid attention to the game even if you did; the entire time your eyes were on rafe, and whenever he'd so much as glance your way, you could feel your heart doing a backflip in your chest.

you and your friends were leaving the stands when you felt someone's large hand wrap around your wrist, tugging you back, spinning you around so you were facing them.

you let out a hiccup as soon as you were faced with rafe, your eyes wide, the reaction making rafe let out a chuckle. he was breathing heavily, his face covered with a sheen of sweat, but a pleased grin still lingered on his lips, "what, you were just gonna leave without congratulating me?"

"shut up." you gently smack his chest, "i was gonna congratulate you at the party. your team's waiting for you." "this is more important. you wore my shirt." there was genuine fondness in his tone as he spoke, and you could feel your cheeks warming up. "i wore it. and you won."

"thanks to you." rafe tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear, "you're gonna have to come to all of my games from now on if you want us to keep winning."

"maybe i do." you pursed your lips. "come on, lover girl!" you heard vivian call out behind you, reminding you that your friends were still waiting for you. "i'll see you at the party tonight." you stated, pressing a kiss on rafe's cheek before turning around and running to your friends, rafe watching you with a wide smile on his face.

despite being surrounded by his friends, rafe kept looking over their shoulders, trying to see if he could spot you, his eyes occasionally flickering to his rolex as if it would somehow make you magically appear in front of him. the conversation going on around him went in through one ear and out the other.

"c'mon, man." topper slapped rafe's shoulder, pulling him out of his thoughts "why aren't you celebrating?" even though the party had been going on for a few hours now, rafe had spent the better part of the past hour nursing his second beer, "i'm waiting for someone." he mumbled, nudging topper off of him.

"who are you waiting for?" a familiar voice rang out from behind him.

rafe turned around to where the question had come from, and he was faced with you standing there with your head cocked to the side, a coy smile playing on your lips. you'd switched from the jersey into a dress that was the same shade of maroon as their team color.

"you. obviously."

"whoa, rafe, who's this? she your girlfriend?" jonathan, one of his teammates asked, his friends turning to face you. you chuckled softly, "no, we're not—"

"yeah, she's my girlfriend." rafe interrupted you, unable to help the grin that took over his face when he saw the way your eyes widened. his hand slipped to your waist, and the boy pulled you into his side, not letting go of you through the entire night, no matter who came up to him; and whenever someone asked him who you were, he didn't stutter.

"she's my girlfriend."

BONUS:

after the party, rafe was walking you back to your dorm, his fingers intertwined with yours while his coat was wrapped around you, a pleasant buzz still making your tongue a bit loose as cicadas chirped around you.

"you know, i don't mind if you didn't mean what you said."

"what did i say?" rafe furrowed his brows.

"you know," you kicked some of the gravel, "the stuff about me being your girlfriend and everything." when those words left your mouth, rafe stopped in his tracks, your eyes widening as you turned to face him, "what?" you chuckled softly.

rafe's warm hands cupped your cheeks, the boy bringing his face down closer to yours, your heart feeling like it was going to beat right out of your chest, his lips only inches away from yours.

"i meant it. i wanna be with you." rafe whispered, before closing the small remaining distance between you. his lips were warm and soft, your hands snaking onto his torso, pulling him into you.

the yellow streetlight over you flickered as you pulled away from the kiss with a smile so wide it was starting to hurt your cheeks. "say yes." he whispered softly, his calloused thumb stroking your cheek.

"yes."

THE END…?

TAGLIST: @yktayy9669 @tinythebunni @dywho @melalsworld @akobx @samwinchesterisawhore @st8rkey @jjasmiineee @ltristessedureratoujours @a-lovers-card @uselessnewt @lunaleah @letstryagaintomorrow @cinnamqnnlatte @papapoy @kay133sposts @wtfisastiles @butterfly1c @emmiesummers @melodyyybubbles @toomanywhitelies @littl3loveydovey @scne-vampire @alwaysmaybank @mysticbby2009 @luna443 @drewstarkeyswife-7 @flowerluvr @kisselxoll - cont. in com.

[1d1195]

Two Negatives

~9.8 k words

From me: I promise it’s not going to be about math that much. This is an academic rivals sort of thing. It’s going to have at least two follow ups but this is the whole story overall. I think there are parts of it that are kind of hand-wavy and whatnot. Not completely connected or explained.

Warnings: Maybe if you read this the right way you may notice that Harry's a little bit of a sugar-daddy. Low self-esteem, cheating, mentions of sex stuff.

Summary: Harry loves annoying the girl in his classes. She's an easy target. And more often than not, she teases him right back.

Which Harry is an absolute sucker for.

“Hey,” he hissed.

She ignored him. Instead, her gaze bounced back between the board where Professor Charles was writing on the whiteboard and the paper in front of her alongside her notebook, dated and titled ready to jot down any issues she had as they worked through the new material.

Something hit the back of her head. Nothing that hurt. But she felt it in her hair. Probably a gum wrapper. Or maybe the actual piece of gum. She wouldn’t have been surprised. She reached behind her head without looking, grateful it wasn’t a piece of gum, and she dropped the wrapper in her bag beside her to dispose of later.

He dropped his calculator off his desk (flung it was more accurate) so it landed right by her foot. She didn’t flinch as it clattered and ignored the curious peeks of others looking at her like she was the one causing the noise.

“Give me a pencil,” he was right next to her, grabbing his calculator.

“Go fuck yourself,” she whispered so quietly she wondered if Harry could even hear her.

“Please! I forgot!”

“You always forget,” she hissed back.

Professor Charles cleared his throat. She glared at her paper as her cheeks burned with embarrassment. How dare Harry embarrass her in front of her professor because he was too stupid to bring his own pencil again. She placed dots on her graph as her professor did, stabbing at her paper a little too hard. Pretending it was Harry’s Voo Doo doll. Just so it would stop. So he would stop. But no. He was still knelt beside her.

“Mr. Styles, is everything alright?” Professor Charles asked.

“Yup, just tying m’shoe,” he said and stood up with a grin. That grin probably got Harry out of a speeding ticket, especially if he was pulled over by a female officer. Probably got him out of homework when he was in school because he knew how to make anyone feel flattered and good about themselves.

That stupid, pretty smile of his with the most adorable dimples probably melted any woman that looked his way.

Professor Charles rolled his eyes as he turned back to the whiteboard. At the same time Harry plucked her pencil from her grip mid stroke of the number eight she was writing. Before she could protest or even fully grasp that her writing utensil was stolen, Harry was back in his seat... right behind her. She took a deep breath and tilted her head to the ceiling trying to keep herself calm so she wouldn’t scream at him in front of everyone. So, she wouldn’t look like a lunatic. Why did he have to sit behind her? She reached into her bag and pulled out her pencil case and continued writing as if Harry hadn’t interrupted her at all.

*

She didn’t have a class following her lecture so she would have a second to breathe and eat, which wasn’t the case most days. Fortunately, she was head tutor at the academic center in the library which wasn’t far from the dining hall. It was also pretty easy going at the center, so she could eat while working. But it was always nice to pretend and be a regular student and eat in the hall. She listened to music and read her book. The only hour she got to read much these days. After tutoring, she would be headed to one more class before she was back to work at the college bar in the center of town.

Her schedule was mapped out to the minute. Her days filled to the brim with school and work. Because she didn’t have a choice. It was the same way every penny of her budget was scheduled and allotted for other things as well. It didn’t leave time for friends.

“Hey gorgeous.”

Well, one friend.

He pecked her cheek before sitting across from her. “Class good?” He asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, how was yours?”

He reached over the table, held her hand, and skimmed his thumb along her knuckles. It was sweet. If it wasn’t so forced. “Good,” he smiled.

Isaac was an extremely handsome guy. He was popular, smart, and funny. His family had big plans for him and that was why he was on this prestigious college campus.

“Hi Isaac,” a flirtatious call sounded from across the room. He turned to find the culprit but came up short.

“By the door,” she said. Isaac turned releasing her hand as he did and waved at the girl who dissolved into giggles. After greeting the masses, he turned his attention back to her. “Can I suggest something?”

“Of course you can, girlfriend.”

She rolled her eyes. “Do you really want to be with the kind of girl who will openly flirt with someone in a relationship?”

“I think everyone knows it’s a fake relationship.”

“Regardless,” she shrugged.

“Jealousy doesn’t become you, my love,” he winked. He grunted when she tossed one leg over the other beneath the table and perhaps overshot just a hair.

She met Isaac on the first day of college. She was bringing her own stuff into her dorm room alone. His parents caught sight of her. Recognized her as she looked like her mom’s twin from way back when they all roamed this campus themselves. But unlike them, she was there under very different circumstances. She greeted them politely, smiled, and chatted as she knew best.

But Isaac approached her later that evening. She was sweaty from unpacking all alone. Her saving grace was a dorm room to herself. Perhaps the only lucky thing about her freshman year. This place screamed money. Money that she didn’t have anymore.

Isaac screamed money. “I need your help.” So, Isaac made sure she didn’t die of hunger and didn’t become a complete social pariah. Made sure she was taken seriously because of course this campus was littered with people who didn’t believe smarts could come without money.

In return, she was to be a doting girlfriend. When his parents were around, she was to be a fixture on his arm. Would it last forever? Probably not. But at least she would be okay for four years. She was kind, lovely, the exact kind of girl they expected their son to find and help keep him stable to take over his father’s company.

The kind of girl that would let Isaac be with whoever. Of course they had their moments. Like the lunch breaks such as the current one. Making appearances so that if anyone asked it wouldn’t be unheard of that they were together.

But she was no stranger to the whispers. That poor girl has no idea her boyfriend is cheating on her.

Fortunately, she didn’t have time for a boyfriend. Especially not one like Isaac. So, if her fake boyfriend was cheating on her, then at least she didn’t have to deal with it. Each time his parents came to town it wrecked her schedule. Wreaked havoc on her study time. Her work time. After three years, it was starting to feel like more of a give and less of a take in comparison to him.

But Isaac was nice enough. He still thanked her profusely—especially when his parents were in town. He didn’t use a lot of tongue when he kissed her in effort to keep up appearances. Knowing where his tongue had been, she was grateful.

“I’m not jealous,” she told him. “I care about you enough that I don’t want your heart to get broken.”

“You know I don’t have one of those.” She rolled her eyes. “You know, I’d be happy to throw you a bone, my love,” he leaned toward her, his eyes flirty and his smile lascivious.

She snorted. “Not even if you boiled it in disinfectant.”

“Orgasms help with stress.”

“I’m not lacking in orgasms. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Kinky, baby,” he winked. “You actually got me hard,” he told her. He wasn’t trying to sleep with her so much as he was willing to sleep with her. When they first arrived at college there were several firsts that both needed to accomplish and well, the fake dating wasn’t the only thing they were able to help each other out with. But after three years of rumors and knowing what Isaac was like outside their fake relationship, she was glad she got to him before all of the rumors swarmed around her.

“I have to go to work,” she told him getting up from the table.

Isaac really was a nice friend. Lovely even. But only if they were really alone. As time wore on, he got cocky and annoying—especially in public. It seemed like he was doing more of a favor for her than she was for him (even though she stopped asking him for things almost a month into their arrangement—shortly after she heard a rumor of a threesome).

But his parents loved her. They didn’t ask questions about his schooling or dating life because of her sweet nature. Originally, she felt guilty over their lie. But now, she was resenting that part of him more and more. He was a pretty good friend. But he was a dick of a boyfriend. “Are y’hungry, baby?” He asked.

She shook her head, cheeks blushing, and anger tingling in her blood. She hated the way he spoke to her in public; he sounded so condescending. Not at all like the kind and caring boyfriend he was supposed to pretend to be or even the kind and sweet friend he was behind closed doors. “Shut up, Isaac,” she sighed. His ego played a massive part in their friendship. He was rich and popular. She was not. “You sound like a douchebag.”

He pressed his lips to her ear, wrapped his arm around her waist. If she was looking in from the outside, she was sure it looked cute and romantic. “Mm,” he hummed ignoring her insult. “Can feed you something later,” he winked.

She knew people were watching so she smiled, leaned toward his ear. “If you’re going to feed me, I need a full meal.”

He chuckled, rolled his eyes and pecked her lips. “See you later, baby,” he kissed her softly again as he said it. “Gonna make sure you’re nice and full,” he promised loudly as he walked away. Not so loudly, that everyone would hear. But certainly loud enough for Harry Styles, who walked into the dining hall at that precise moment, to hear.

“Wow, bit extra for the dining hall,” Harry smirked. She glared at him, her cheeks warming.

“Don’t suppose you have my pencil?”

“Hmm,” he tapped his hands over his pockets. “Sorry Your Majesty,” he bowed in his over-the-top kind of way. “Clean out.” She rolled her eyes, grabbed her stuff, and made her way for the exit. Harry grabbed her hand at the last second pulling her back to look at him. “Y’okay?” He asked. “Y’look tired.”

She snatched her hand away. She was tired. But it didn’t feel good for it to be pointed out that she looked tired. “Thanks, I guess,” she rolled her eyes again. “I’m going to go now before you have a chance to insult me again.”

“Hey,” he frowned and called after her again as she continued walking away. “M’serious. Y’look like you’re getting sick.”

It was extremely unfair that Harry noticed that. “Are you concerned about me, Styles?” She glanced over her shoulder.

“Someone has t’remember t’bring me a pencil.”

“You could very much bring your own pencil.”

“Well, then I wouldn’t get t’have these lovely conversations every day, would I, Your Majesty?” She shook her head and ignored him as he continued speaking to her. “Hope he fucks y’good and full or whatever,” he called. She glared but refused to look back at him.

*

Harry appeared in one of her classes on the first day of her second year. A transfer from another school. His smile was panty-melting. Truly. Even she could recognize that. But regardless of how pretty he was, it was obvious how annoying he was going to be. He slid into the seat right behind her. “Hi,” he smiled. She ignored him, focusing on her professor starting class syllabus stuff. Besides, it seemed unlikely that someone like Harry was talking to her. “M’Harry,” he whispered.

She started scribbling on her notebook.

“He hasn’t even started yet,” he mumbled.

“Can I help you?” She turned around to look at him.

His smile was breathtaking. It really felt like he stole the breath from her lungs. “Sorry, Your Majesty. Didn’t mean t’interrupt y’doodle. Do y’have an extra pencil?” He asked.

She stared at the twenty-year-old man in his second year of college unprepared for his first day of classes. Perhaps if she rolled her eyes and ignored him, the trajectory of her life might have been something else entirely.

Instead, she handed her pencil to him.

“Thanks, Your Majesty.”

She rolled her eyes, anyway, facing forward.

*

In her Abstract Algebra class Harry was right behind her once more. “Psst.”

She ignored him. But his body was closer, his voice was closer. “Your Majesty,” he practically sang.

“What is your deal?” She hissed.

“I need a pencil.”

“Bring your own.”

“I like the one y’gave me. It wrote so smooth.”

She doesn’t know why she gave him a pencil.

But she really did know.

Harry was obviously handsome and from the way he chuckled under his breath over the lame jokes their professors made, he was quick and probably funny in his own way. But moreover, he had to be intelligent. Really intelligent to understand a pun about probability theory. The way others in the class fawned over him (guys and girls alike) it was apparent he was popular. Maybe popular like Isaac which made her dislike him just a bit.

It went that way every class. Harry was in four out of five of her classes both the fall and spring semester. Every class he needed a pencil. Each day he thanked her in his ridiculously attractive accent. Your Majesty.

What a dick.

But Harry talked to her. Even if it was just asking for a pencil. Or a picture of the notes he missed from when he went to the bathroom. He didn’t care that her family was broke. That she was broke. That she worked three jobs and hardly slept. He didn’t make her feel like she didn’t deserve to be on that campus.

“Did y’get the answer t’number nine?” It wasn’t a trick; he wanted her answer. Her opinion. “I got two different answers three different ways. There was no judgment that she couldn’t afford the extravagant lifestyle that her peers did. She had one winter coat. Not six to match her outfits. She didn’t have a car. She didn’t go out to eat and she made her own coffee except for on Saturdays when she splurged and treated herself to her favorite bagel and her favorite coffee.

Maybe it was because she saw him at a party. A girl at his side, smiling at him. Twirling her hair and touching his pretty chest. It was effortless. She didn’t have to try to flirt with Harry. It was a given. Rich, popular, perfectly pretty. The same as Harry.

Everything she wasn’t. Everything Harry would never want.

So she tended to Isaac. Kept to herself.

Gave Harry an absurd number of pencils.

Which continued into their third year. Where things got busier, harder, and more overwhelming.

But Harry was always right behind her. Asking for a pencil. Making her cranky.

But always making her feel normal when no one else did.

*

It was obvious Harry had money. The key on his ring had a symbol for a car that would never be in her price range. His clothes were pretty, the latest trends. Even his sweatpants looked like they were designer.

Maybe it could have been that way for her. Maybe if her dad hadn’t embezzled all their money. Hadn’t gone to jail and left her and her mother with anything more than a penny. Growing up she didn’t feel rich, but she never wanted. But right as she was applying to colleges, with only one college campus that made her heart happy, it was the first time in her life she thought about and hated money.

She imagined no one on campus ever felt that way.

But even if Harry had the nicest clothes and the nicest car, he never flaunted what he had. Not even to his friends. He didn’t show off or act like he had a ton of money. He was just there.

Which is why perhaps, when he annoyed her to pieces, she didn’t mind giving him a pencil in the end.

*

It was a bad day. She missed her mom. She was exhausted. Didn’t have time to make herself a coffee which just felt criminal. The test on her mind nearly brought her to tears as she sat down in her seat, seconds before her professor walked in.

Her pencil case was empty.

Part of her felt sad she wouldn’t have a pencil for Harry. Would he ask someone else? Would he stop asking her because of it? God, why did she even care? It was a blessing. He would stop asking her. She wouldn’t have to keep wasting money she didn’t have on pencils.

Plus, he wasn’t even there.

The test landed on her table. Her brain felt weary. Was she getting sick? Probably. Stress did a number on her immune system. It was a miracle she wasn’t sick all the time.

Taking a deep breath and closing her eyes she tried to calm her mind. It wasn’t the time to think about the reading she needed to complete, the shift she was covering at the academic center, or the dinner she was really looking forward to splurging on. It had been ages since she had chicken in her pasta dish.

“Hey,” how long were her eyes closed? How did she miss him coming to his seat.

“I don’t have a pencil, Harry,” she hissed back.

“Of course, y’do,” she could hear his eye roll.

“I don’t, I forgot my pencil case.”

He snorted. Her eyes flicked to Professor Charles who didn’t look up from his own paper at the front of the room. “C’mon, quit being a brat.”

“A brat?” She whispered.

“Quiet,” Professor Charles still didn’t look up.

“Sorry Your Majesty, jus’ give me a pencil and—”

“I don’t have one!” Her voice was quiet and maybe if she wasn’t only two rows from the front of the room, it wouldn’t have been a big deal when he pulled it out of her grip.

But she was towards the front.

Professor Charles stood beside their desks. “You’re both excused.”

Her face felt hot and pale at the same time. She felt like she was going to throw up. The feeling of eyes on her made her more embarrassed than the time she tripped and fell at her third-grade band concert. “Professor Charles,” she started.

“Enough,” he snagged her paper from her desk. Her throat felt tight, her eyes prickled, and she thought that maybe in a different life she could have been friends with Harry. Liked him, even.

But not then.

She bit on her lip to keep from crying as she packed her stuff into her bag and marched out of the room, head held high, and ignoring everyone’s stare. Especially the guy following her out of the classroom.

*

She slapped the door to the building as Harry continued following her. She was fuming. Practically steaming from his perspective. Yet he couldn’t help but think she looked absolutely adorable. “Quit fucking following me!” She snapped.

“My God, you’re so uptight,” he rolled his eyes.

“Harry Styles, you’re an absolute dick. Just leave me the fuck alone, for God’s sake.”

It garnered the attention of a few onlookers. But their path to the dining hall was quiet given it was the middle of class time. "Jesus Christ, do y’ever jus’ take a break? S’one fuckingtest, Your Majesty. For fuck’s sake. He’ll probably drop it. Quit being a baby."

A sniffle. One small, tiny noise.

"You don't get it do you?" She snapped. She didn’t want to. But she couldn’t hold it in anymore. It was too much. The final straw.

In the entire time Harry had known her he had never seen her this upset. Not like this. Not to the point where she was crying.

Because of him.

He made her cry.

"I have a squeaky-clean record. I have to be perfect all the time. I can't let one hair be out of place. I can't get one bad grade. If I do, then everyone around me makes comments and they assume it’s because I have no money. The poor girl can’t hack it here. It's this massive pressure on me all the time. I can't get caught doing normal party things. I can't get caught cheating on a test, Harry. I can’t. I lose my scholarship if I don't maintain my GPA. I can hardly afford to be here, Harry. I have to work three jobs. I have to budget every minute of my time as much as every dollar of my bank account. Do you know I haven't been home in three years? I miss my mom so much and I can’t even afford to go see her and I just pretend because—” she covered her mouth and Harry swallowed hard, willing himself to not cry as well. This wasn’t about him. This was all about her right now. “And now,” she croaked. “I’m going to have to skip dinner because I need to buy new pencils because I have been giving them to someone who’s too fucking inconsiderate to even fucking return them after annoying me for no better reason that for kicks.”

Her sniffles turned into sobs and Harry had never felt like more of an ass. He thought she was annoying at worst, but he never wanted her to cry.

Her crying, all her tears, they were all his fault.

"I study so hard. I have to. But I want to. I want to make enough money to support my mom, and I can’t do one thing wrong because if I do then I’ll lose everything. I have to study. I’m not like you, Harry. You just know everything and that's amazing, Harry, it really is,” and for the first time since he started interacting with her, Harry felt horrible for the way he had treated her. The compliment she gave was so thoughtful. The kindness in her voice was unmissable. He was practically shocked it even came from her mouth. “But not all of us are gifted with insane intelligence like you. Not all of us are God's gift to women and can go out and party and not be judged for kissing someone I like. Not all of us can afford to be here without help."

Harry kept his lip between his teeth to keep from speaking.

“I’ll get over it,” she sniffed. “Sorry for being so uptight.” She wiped her face and stalked off toward her dorm.

Harry had never felt worse about himself.

*

She wore her best interview dress. Her hair was pinned precisely so that the pieces that constantly flew away were at bay. She swallowed the rock that formed in her throat as she knocked on her professor's office door.

"Come in."

"Professor Charles," she was grateful he didn't look up because she was worried, she was going to curtsey or something equally ridiculous. "I wanted to apologize—"

"Your boyfriend already came to tell me he's at fault for the fiasco in class. He took full responsibility and said it was extremely unfair of me to refuse you the exam."

Her heart skipped a beat. "M-my boyfriend?" She whispered.

"Mr. Styles is very bold and I suppose I was a bit harsh. You are a brilliant young woman and role model to your peers," he praised. "Would you like to take the test now or schedule another time?" He asked looking up from his work.

She swallowed. "Um..."

"I would appreciate it, if you took it now. I need an answer key to grade the rest of them," his voice was steady, but she felt the compliment down to her bones. "I have a class in two hours, and I was hoping to check grading off my to-do list before it started," he explained.

She felt uneasy, overwhelmed, but not like she did when she sat down the first time to take the same exam. "I can do it now," she whispered and dropped her bag at her feet and situated herself at the table on the side of his office below the window. She got to work and completed the test as if all it asked was for her to write the alphabet down. She was checking over her work when she glanced out the window and saw the sprawling campus. There were people walking by at fast clips. Eager to get to the dining halls and rushing to make it to their classes on time.

But in the midst of all the people running by, there was Harry, sitting on a bench. His arm stretched across the back of it, while the other held his phone. He crossed his feet at his ankles and looked like a model for relaxation.

He took the complete blame for the test. She felt her heart aching and she stood from the table and went over to her professor's desk. "Is... Mr. Styles able to retake the exam as well?"

"I wasn't planning on it," he looked up at her. "Why?"

She bit her lip, looked at her feet. "I could have just given him a pencil."

"Mr. Styles should be prepared for his own education," he said knowingly. There was no way she was going to explain her relationship with Harry to her professor. Plus, she wasn't sure she'd be able to. She dropped her gaze and handed off her exam. "You can tell Mr. Styles he can come up and take the test," he said simply. "I have the answer key now."

She blinked.

"He'll probably ace it as well, but your handwriting is neater," he shrugged, tipped his glasses further down his nose and silently read her answers. She stood still, like she was waiting for the danger to pass. "Is there anything else you'd like to discuss?" He asked glancing back up. She shook her head, pinned to her spot. The strangeness of it all was overwhelming. "Men like Mr. Styles are going to have it a lot easier than you. The field you’ve selected is male-dominated and many will sell you short because of your gender," he said. "That doesn't mean you need to worry about your worth," he assured her. "You are a brilliant, hardworking, and talented individual. Mr. Styles should be bringing you pencils to class."

Her cheeks felt warm.

"Also, to be fair, it's nice to know you're not cheating off of each other because it was getting a little suspicious," he turned her exam back across his desk and wrote her score at the top of her page, upside down—98%. "Missed a negative."

"If Harry misses it, can you knock off more points?" She asked before she could stop herself then felt herself blush at how ready she was to throw him under the bus. She looked down shyly and covered her mouth before she looked up at him again.

Her strict professor made a face that resembled somewhat of a smile. "Of course."

“Thank you,” she hoped she sounded as gracious as she felt.

“Great work,” he nodded in response.

She headed out of the office and walked toward the bench. She sat beside him and faced forward. Harry put his phone back in his pocket and turned only his head toward her. "How'd y’do?" He asked.

"Ninety-eight."

He tutted. "Too bad," he smirked.

A smile twitched at her lips. She looked up at the sky briefly. "He said you can go on up and take it now," she told him.

He blinked. Surprise coloring his pretty features. Harry rarely seemed stunned, especially because of her. It was cute and also exciting that he was surprised by her. "What?"

She looked at her lap, trying to focus on her nails but not for too long because she was worried that she would gnaw on them if she let the nerves overtake her. "That was... the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me," she whispered. "Especially for Professor Charles' class," she continued. Taking a deep breath, she looked at him. "I was obnoxious. Bad day or whatever... it wasn't your fault and I’m sorry I made a big deal of it."

"I just wanted you to stop crying. You look ridiculous when you cry."

She smiled. A genuine one. Not a forced one that Harry had seen her give everyone under the sun. Not the one that she plastered on her face during presentations. It was beautiful. She was beautiful. “Y’had every right t’be mad at me. I was a complete dick.”

She shrugged. “I... I should have just given you a pencil... it turned out there was one at the bottom of my bag and... I kind of... like giving you a pencil. You just caught me at a really bad moment.”

“I know. M’sorry. I knew y’looked off.”

She tilted her head at him. “You knew I looked off?”

“M’pretty good at memorizing all your different looks,” he had a smile that made her melt. “Like right now, s’one of m’favorites. Y’look relaxed. It happens once, roughly, every three weeks, I think. Lasts maybe four minutes if m’lucky,” he winked. She rolled her eyes and shook her head at him. But Harry noticed how her cheeks turned red. It made him want to continue flirting with her. She was fun to flirt with. Her sarcastic comments were funny, even when directed at him, and it only amplified how smart he knew she was.

As much as Harry wanted to stay on that bench for as long as she did, he finally stood. Then rubbed the back of his head squinting at her, one eye closed. "Do you have a pencil?" He asked shyly.

She snorted, plucked hers from her pocket, and held it out to him. "I'd like it back," she reminded him. Even if he didn't, it was their thing now.

He rolled his eyes. "Wait here. It'll only take me half the time it took you." She rolled her eyes but pulled out a book from her bag and opened it to the page she was previously reading. "Hey kitten?" He asked. She didn't look up and Harry realized he never called her anything other than Your Majesty. He nudged her foot to make her look up. "Who did y’think I was talking to?" He chuckled.

"Who me?" She asked, but Harry noted the way her cheeks turned red. He rolled his eyes. "Sorry," she shook her head. "Did you need something else?"

His expression softened and he shook his head. "I'm sorry."

"Thank you," her voice was so gentle. "I'm sorry too."

"There's nothing y'need t'apologize for,” he shook his head quickly. “I was a complete ass," he admitted. She shrugged.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” he said seriously. “Please don’t let anyone treat you that way.” She nodded silently. Knowing that she couldn’t promise that. Nor did she expect Harry to make her keep such a promise, but it made her heart squeeze with disappointment in herself. “Be right back,” he nudged her foot again as he headed back to the math building. She returned to her book and tried not to think about how Harry was probably right. This was the most relaxed she felt in months.

About forty minutes later Harry exited the building, walking at a leisurely pace. He sat on the bench once more. She didn't look up as he did but the butterflies in her stomach reminded her that he was there. Harry draped an arm across the back of the bench and then presented her pencil to her as if it were a bouquet of flowers. "How'd you do?" She asked gently.

He sighed, clucked his tongue. "Ninety-five,” she smiled but tried and failed to hide it from him. "I missed two negatives."

She giggled. "How embarrassing."

"How embarrassing," he mocked in a voice that was meant to sound like her. "You're so annoying. Do y’know he uses your work as the answer key?"

It had to be a record. The longest time they had been together without bickering. The number of times she smiled because of him.

The fastest someone had ever fallen for someone she was supposed to hate.

*

When Harry saw her boyfriend, he started looking for her. He was clearly busy with his friends and the women they were entertaining. But she wasn’t amongst them. He did a loop around the party. Looking for her even if he shouldn’t have. He stopped and chatted during his search so it wouldn’t be obvious. But even when he did stop and leaned against the wall, or grabbed another drink, he kept scanning for her.

When his loop came up empty of the pretty girl he liked to annoy, he wondered where she was and how he could ask without it being weird.

“Hey stranger,” Eleanor smiled and kissed his cheek. “Where’ve you been?”

Louis gave a polite wave to his best friend from across the way, a knowing smile on his lips, grateful that someone he trusted could keep an extra eye on his lady.

“Jus’ wandering around,” he mumbled.

Did he sound disappointed? He felt disappointed.

She stared at him and stood on her toes to reach his ear so she could speak to him directly over the loud music. “She’s not here.”

“What?” Harry pulled back like she slapped him. Was it that obvious? It couldn’t have been. He was just… wandering. Like a lost, lovesick puppy wondering where she was and hoping he would find her to make the weird feeling in his chest go away. Eleanor cocked an eyebrow at him. Silently telling him that hewas not fooling her. “Fuck,” he mumbled sipping his drink. It was pathetic and obvious.

“She doesn’t come to these things,” Eleanor shrugged.

“Why?”

She sighed, rolled her eyes. “He doesn’t want her here.”

Harry felt like the words Eleanor said were spoken in a language he didn’t know. “Who doesn’t want her here?”

“Her boyfriend.”

The grip on the bottle Harry was holding tightened. “Oh.”

“Go ahead. Ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Harry.” He closed his eyes and looked around to find him. It was like he already knew it was going to break him. He didn’t want El to continue even though he knew he needed to hear it. “What he told her to keep her away? She dotes on him too much. Worries too much about her reputation and everyone else’s. She doesn’t have fun. So, he doesn’t want her here. At these kinds of things.”

Honestly, a party didn’t seem like her vibe. She was more of a game night kind of girl. Someone you could take to a family cookout or a pool party with kids. But calling her not fun? Because frankly, Harry realized he hadn’t liked a single party he’d been to in months and it’s because her banter wasn’t there to keep him company.

“Oh,” he murmured. Trying to feign indifference.

“Don’t you want to ask what I think?” Harry didn’t look at his friend. His eyes finally landing on the man that didn’t deserve the sweet, intelligent, and beautiful girl he didn’t invite. He followed his path up the stairs to the second floor. Right as Eleanor told him the worst thing he had ever heard. “He hooks up with other girls and he has the common decency to do it behind her back,” she shrugged.

“What?!” He spit his eyes dropping to Eleanor again. How could she be so casual about this?

“She knows…or I would imagine she suspects,” she shrugged. “But she’s good for his family. They adore her. And he helps her reputation. She’s trying so hard to dig her family—”

It was like he knew. Everything. All of it made sense. Every tiny fiber of her being was made for someone else—whether it was her family who she adored and helped as much as possible, Isaac who didn’t deserve her at all, or even Harry, who honestly wasn’t sure he was much better than Isaac. “Does she know he sleeps with them?”

Eleanor looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t know if they sleep with him. I’m assuming. But I think it’s a pretty good assumption. He’s probably—”

Harry slammed his bottle on the ground shattering it and drawing the attention of those around him. He took the stairs two at a time and opened every door to every room—an unspoken party rule: never open a closed door.

He was breaking it.

A girl shrieked and he just knew he had found the right room. He didn’t pay any attention to her scrambling to cover up her naked chest and instead yanked him clean off the bed. “What the fuck!?” Harry shoved him back into the hall. He was only in his boxers. Piece of shit. Someone whistled and Harry shoved him harder as he tried to push him back and make his way for the bedroom again. “What the fuck, Styles?!”

“Call her,” he snarled. Shoving him against the wall again when he tried to continue escaping. “End it. Now.”

“What are you—”

“You’re going t’cheat on her?” Harry’s voice was venomous. “Her?” He repeated. Like that was really all he needed to say. Everyone was staring now. Harry kept going. “Call her and end it. Or I’m going over and telling her you’re done.”

The stupid prick tilted his head at Harry almost condescendingly. “Do you want her? She’s not like us.”

Harry didn’t like the way he said us. There wasn’t a single connection he wanted to be associated with in context of the vile piece of trash in front of him. Other than he managed to pick the sweetest girl he had ever met. But simultaneously, the very wrong girl to fuck with, because Harry also picked her. Unlike the moron in front of him, he was going to do everything he could to protect her and her heart.

“She’s doesn’t have money. She won’t understand—”

Harry punched him across the cheek before he could stop it and someone else watching groaned at the impact and Harry continued talking. “Tell her now.”

“Christ, Styles! What the fuck!” He rubbed his jaw.

“Tell her.”

“I’m not telling her shit. She knows she needs me more.” Harry jerked back like he had punched him back. “What? You don’t think she’d give up the reputation I have, do you?”

Harry watched him silently for only a moment longer. Without a word, he headed back into the bedroom grabbing the stray clothes. Before anyone could rationalize exactly what he was doing, he was sprinting down the steps and outside.

He threw them in the pool without thinking, ignoring the laughter and shouts from him as he hurried around the side of the house. He continued running and didn’t look back.

*

Harry was in her dorm. On her floor. Stopped in front of her door.

He knocked.

Repeatedly.

There was no answer, but he knew she was there.

So, he knocked again.

And again.

Eventually there was a click of her lock despite the fact it couldn’t be opened without her key card. Of course she was all about safety. Finally, he heard her voice starting to speak as she opened the door. “I’m off duty if you have an emergency, you’re supposed to see the RA on duty and—” The door was open and out of the way before she finished talking. Harry pressed himself inside. “Harry! What are you—”

“Tell me s’not true.”

“What’s not true?”

“Y’know he hooks up with other women?” He glared at her.

The color drained from her face.

Harry rubbed his hand across his face. “What is the matter with you?! Are you so desperate for a scrap of affection you’ll open yourself up t’diseases and shit because you—”

“Shut the fuck up,” she hissed tears stinging her eyes instantly.

“—need him? You don’t need him. You’re a thousand times better than him. A million! Y’could have any guy y’want, and they would still want t’grovel at your feet. Why would y’pick the one Goddamn asshole who—”

“You don’t know shit. Harry Styles. Stop pretending like you know me because —”

“Then explain it t’me because I can’t think of one fucking reason someone as intelligent, kind, beautiful, and hilarious as you would—”

A weird noise left her throat. Almost a squeak. It was adorable. If Harry wasn’t so mad. He would have told her such. Would have reveled in it because she was so fucking sweet and cute. But instead, she asked the most heartbreaking question known to man.

“You think I’m beautiful?”

Her question was so soft. So unbelievably shocked. Innocent. All the words left his head. It was too quiet. His shoulders were rising and falling too hard and too fast. “What?” He shook his head.

She looked at her feet. Harry scanned her. Her shirt was too big. It didn’t look like she was wearing pants. Maybe she wasn’t. Harry hoped she wasn’t. She only wore one sock. Like she lost the other in her sheets or maybe she only purposefully put one on because only that foot was cold. Those pretty eyes looked at him, anxiety, frustration, sadness, all staring back at him from the depth of her soul. “No one has ever said I’m beautiful before.”

Harry felt something die in his chest. He really thought he would start groveling on his knees for her because he was one of millions of guys who wanted to grovel at her feet. He wanted to be better. As soon as he made her cry over missing a test, he wanted nothing more than to be better for her. “No one?”

“Just... my family...” She shrugged.

“Kitten,” he rolled his eyes. “You’re… you’re really beautiful,” he rubbed a hand over his mouth, pinching his lower lip, as he scanned her. “In a way that probably makes a lot of girls jealous,” she snorted. He sighed. “Seriously. Your hair, kitten. It’s... so silky and shiny and your eyes,” he shook his head. “And your brain, my God,” he smiled softly. “M’not even going t’mention your body. Because you’re more than your appearance, but m’really...” he nearly sighed like a lovesick teenager. Maybe part of him still was. “You’re stunning, kitten.”

She blushed. Really blushed. So hard that Harry could see it in the dim light of her room cast from the twinkly lights she had strung around the window. Her cheeks were so red and utterly beautiful. For a second Harry thought it would be easy. All of it. Getting her to like him. Trust him.

Her face morphed into one of utter distrust. “That’s mean,” she whispered. “You’re... that’s mean to...” she shook her head.

“Kitten,” he frowned. Unable to believe she could think like that. He didn’t even know where to begin. Everyone had to like her. She was lovely, beautiful, so intelligent it took his breath away.

But she mistook his hesitation for the worst. She shook her head. “Forget it. You’re just... being nice to me because... because you feel bad or something,” she sniffled. The poor thing couldn’t even take his compliment. Harry wanted to cry. “Just the way everyone else does,” she laughed bitterly. “Thank you for being nice. Or whatever. For wanting to protect me. I don’t need it,” her voice cracked. “You can go back to your party or... whatever it is that—”

“Love,” his heart felt achy.

“No seriously. I get it. I’m too nice. I’m stupid to let him walk all over me but you don’t know the kind of reputation my family has in comparison to everyone here. So yeah. I let him use me as a prop—”

“Stop it,” he snapped and shook his head.

“—because I’m good for his image, too. Even if it makes me miserable and—”

“Kitten, I’m serious. Stop it,” his voice was almost raw. Like he had been screaming for hours. Maybe it was the combination of anxiety and frustration rushing through him. Like adrenaline but worse. He wanted to cry.

“—it’s pathetic that when people see me with him, they see this innocent—”

“Shut. Up.”

“—intelligent girl who doesn’t know anything because her family is poor and broken—”

“Stop it!” His voice took on a new octave. It made her words fall away.

They were both seething with anger and frustration. The tears in her eyes made him sick. Like when he made her cry because she couldn’t take her test. It was only the second time, but he quickly realized he hated it when she cried. “Stop what, Harry?”

“Stop minimizing who you are,” he practically growled.

“Everyone else does it.”

“Oh yeah? Name one time I’ve done that. If everyone has done it; tell me, kitten. When have I. Ever. Made you feel like less?”

She was silent. Finally.

Harry never made her feel like less. He annoyed the shit out of her. Pissed her off and made her sad. But he never made her feel like she didn’t deserve to be on that campus. Never made her feel inferior.

“M’going t’kiss you,” he warned stepping closer to her now that he made his point.

Her brain restarted. Her cheeks flushed again. “Harry, we can’t I’m... in a relation—”

He glared at her as her back pressed to her bed frame. Cornering her in her open room that was suddenly infinitesimally smaller than it was seconds before. “S’not a fucking relationship,” he snarled. “M’not sure what y’were doing. But you’re not doing it anymore. Not with him. Never again.”

“But we were—”

“Y’don’t need him,” he assured her. “Trust me.”

“But—”

“Y’have me, kitten. M’gonna do whatever y’need,” he cupped the back of her neck, making the words stop on the tip of her tongue and put one hand on the small of her back, pulling her to him swiftly and devouring her lips. She moaned instantly, seconds into the kiss. His lips felt like warm little pillows. Cushioning her own. It was intoxicating. Unfairly, he pulled away almost as quickly as it started. “Oh s’nice, kitten,” he praised. “Moaning already,” he pulled back and peppered kisses along her jaw. She whimpered softly, making him groan. “Y’make pretty little noises like that, kitten. M’not gonna be responsible for what comes next,” he warned pressing his lips back to hers.

Her fingers tangled in his hair at the back of her head. Harry leaned forward arching her backward and wrapping his arms around her tightly. He didn’t want to be aggressive, but there was something in the way her mouth tasted, the way her body felt, that he couldn’t stop kissing her. Hardly breathing, or maybe he was trying to breathe all of her in, he continued pulling her lips into his mouth. Hoping that somewhere along the way, they would get stuck like that. Destined to spend eternity attached by their kiss like a Greek punishment. Except the endless touch of her mouth wouldn’t be punishment. Because he wanted it to be endless. Wanted to spend forever showering her with affection because she deserved that and so much more.

“Can I stay the night, kitten? I’ll sleep on the floor if y’want,” his voice was practically ragged. His forehead pressed to hers. “I jus’ don’t want t’leave you. Please don’t make me leave.”

“You can stay,” she whispered, her voice breathless and airy. “Not on the floor, though.”

“M’not a bat, kitten. Can’t hang from your ceiling,” he joked.

She snorted. “C’mon,” she tugged him to her bed and pulled her in right behind her beneath her covers.

There weren’t many times Harry felt peace. “Harry?” She asked, as she settled into his embrace. His lips skimmed along her face, pressing every so often to whatever he could reach. Like he couldn’t stop himself.

“Hmm?”

“Thank you.”

He squeezed her. “You’re welcome, beautiful.”

She sighed. “Your mouth is pretty nice when you’re not talking,” she said quietly.

He chuckled. “Just you wait and see, kitten.”

*

As lovely as the night before was, she tried to maintain a semblance of her routine between replaying the kiss(es) and the angry confession over and over in her head. At the moment, she was grabbing lunch for herself. It was probably going to set her back a bit since she’d need to buy more pencils since Harry stole them all, but she was a little too tired to go without supplying herself with more energy. She pulled her wallet out as the cashier rang her up. “It’s all set, love,” she said sweetly. Tilting her head, she gazed at the woman as if it were a joke.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s all set,” she repeated. “Your food’s been paid for already.”

She blinked, glanced around, looking for someone that fit the description of Good Samaritan. “Who...?”

“I’m not sure. I was just told that if you came through the line to tell you it’s been taken care of. You can get whatever you want,” she shrugged.

Blinking again she glanced around again. A line formed rapidly behind her. She gathered her items and headed for a seat. The one where Isaac usually joined her. But there was no Isaac. She read her book and listened to her music in silence. It was peaceful. When the hour was up, she headed back to the kitchen area to grab another snack, lining up behind the others waiting to check out as well. “Your food’s paid for.”

She felt like she was being pranked. “Again?”

“No, always.”

She felt like her mind was short circuiting. “What?”

“Your meals. All have been paid for. For the year.”

The snack she got was going to be uneaten because she felt like it was a prank. “I don’t understand.”

“I really don’t have more details than that. We were just told your food was paid for.”

“We?”

“My boss left, but I can have him reach out and explain it.”

“Please. Thank you.”

Stunned, she left with her snack. She headed to the library academic center. The tutors on her shift all waved to her. “That gift is for you,” Gabby said. At the front table was a fairly large giftbag. The kind you get for a kid’s birthday and put a board game in it. She looked at it curiously and pulled the tissue paper out of the way. She swallowed the lump in her throat realizing she didn’t need the dining hall manager to reach out to her after all.

She plucked the card from the slot on the side of the bag.

Half are probably for me anyway.

The bag was filled with packages of her favorite pencils. More than she would need for the rest of her undergraduate degree. Maybe even graduate. Or even the rest of her life.

She took a deep breath and pulled out her laptop and opened her email. She typed in Harry’s address, because she still didn’t have Harry’s phone number. Even after making out with him for hours. After waking up in his arms later than she was supposed to and letting his lips linger on her skin.

She wrote her message and pressed send before she could overthink it.

You didn’t have to do that. It’s way too much, actually. I’m a little uncomfortable imagining you spending THAT much money on food and pencils.

Well. If you died of starvation, I wouldn’t have anyone to bother. Kind of a boring way to suffer through the last two years of college—we have Real Analysis I and II next year. I can’t do that alone.

Thank you. That was... very nice of you.

You’re welcome, kitten. Coffee is free too; I went to every shop within walking distance and left your picture. An old ugly one from your mom’s Facebook page, don’t worry. Didn’t want you to get a big head about all of this. It’s not a big deal.

Help yourself to whatever you need and if you need something else let me know.

And this is my phone number so you can stop emailing me like it’s 2003.

She smiled fondly at the message. Closed her laptop and felt happier to be at work than she had in weeks.

*

Harry didn’t force anything. She was lying against his chest in her small room, on her small bed. “I’m sorry it’s so cramped,” she whispered.

“S’better for snuggling,” he shrugged and kissed the top of her head. “Go t’sleep, please, kitten.”

“Don’t you want to... I don’t know, fuck or something?”

“Well, when y’propose it so romantically like that,” he murmured.

She pouted. “I don’t know... I just assumed that...”

“That m’like Isaac? Please don’t make that assumption anymore.”

“So, you don’t want to fuck me?”

“Oh, more than anything,” he tilted her head up and brushed his finger on her warm cheek. “But not until you’re ready.”

“I literally just—”

“No. Y’think s’because we’re supposed to. Not because y’want to,” he shrugged one shoulder. “I’ll wait,” he promised and kissed the tip of her nose, and it was the lamest kind of kiss imaginable. Being twenty-one and melting over a kiss on the nose.

Yet it made her want a thousand more of them. Made her want to cry with how adored she felt. Harry didn’t care that she worked a thousand hours. He didn’t expect her to make out with him. Or blow him. Or anything sexual. No, he practically begged her to sleep in his arms.

It was unfair how sweet he was wrapped up in the body of someone that made her infuriated for the last year and a half. Right as she was about to pass out, she jerked herself awake involuntarily. “Y’okay, love?” He hummed as if she so much as coughed and not nearly punched Harry in the face with her movement.

“Tired.”

“I know, baby. M’trying t’make y’sleep,” he combed her hair down. Traced her spine in the same movement. “Surprise, surprise, you’re a bit stubborn.”

“Who me?”

“Want me t’sing?”

“Don’t want my ears to bleed, no.” Harry chuckled softly. Ignored her.

Then hummed.

It was so warm, so soft, it felt like magic. Harry could sing. That wasn’t on any Bingo cards when she thought about Harry. She didn’t even know what song he was singing. But it lulled her right to sleep.

*

Harry was wrapped around her in the small bed, his head tucked below her chin, his face smushed into the front of her shirt. If she wore a lower cut shirt, Harry would have been drooling on her boobs. “You’re able to breathe in there?” She whispered, threading her fingers through his hair.

“S’the only way I want t’go,” he promised, his voice muffled with sleep and the fabric on her body. “Or with y’legs wrapped around m’head,” he shrugged one shoulder. If Isaac said that to her, she would have punched him. When Harry said it, it made her want to wrap her legs around his head. Made her squeeze her legs together. “Felt that,” he mumbled. Her legs were wrapped around his waist, so he had no choice but to feel it. “Did y’sleep okay?”

She nodded. “Did you?”

“Extremely. Wrapped up in m’favorite girl.”

Her heart fluttered and she kissed the top of his head. Never would she have imagined Harry being so sweet and lovely like this. “Are you... going to be mean in public to me?”

“I hope not,” he pulled away and rubbed his eye. He looked sleepy and boyish. A devilish combination for her skeptical heart. “Have I been mean t’you?” He asked. “I know I tease, but mean?” She supposed he wasn’t mean. Maybe the teasing tricked her.

“I guess the teasing—”

“M’so sorry love,” he frowned and cupped her cheeks, kissed her softly on the lips. “No more teasing,” he promised.

“Well,” she laughed softly. “I kind of like teasing you.”

He smirked. “I don’t want you to think m’mean,” his eyebrows pinched together.

“Can I ask you a question without making fun of me?”

“I think that depends on the question, kitten. If y’ask me some basic math problem like what’s the indefinite integral of x-squared times cosine x or what’s a negative times a negative—”

“Are we dating?”

He stopped his joke and cupped her face. Dropped his forehead to hers and brushed his thumb along her cheek. “I would fucking hope so, kitten.”

She swallowed. “You don’t care that I’m broke? Or that I work a lot and I’m crazy and—”

“No, I don’t care ‘bout any of that. You’re m’favorite person to annoy. The person I look forward t’seeing most in class. You’re the entire reason ‘ve never skipped class.”

Her heart fluttered. “You can’t pay for everything, Harry. It was a sweet sentiment but—”

“M’not letting m’girlfriend starve,” he rolled his eyes.

Her heart definitely fluttered. He was sweet. Harry was sweet. What a revelation. Or maybe she always knew that.

She looked into those beautiful green eyes that made her feel overwhelmed in the best way. “Why do you call me Your Majesty?” She whispered quietly. Almost scared to hear the answer.

He rolled his eyes again. A favorite past time of his. “Because kitten,” he pressed his lips over hers briefly, then kissed her forehead, and finally the tip of her nose. He met her gaze and made sure she was focusing when he spoke again. In a few minutes she would be busy, overwhelmed, and stressed. For the moment, Harry wanted to make sure she knew just how important she was to him. “I think you’re a queen.”

--

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[nayiana0]

"Focus"

pairings yunho x reader

wc : 3.3k genre : smut, slowburn (mild)

tags: established rls, oral sex (m receiving), handjob, romance, intimate acts during study, fingering

a/n : trying to concentrate with a hot distraction sitting too close. dont. no. focus.

After your last class, you find Yunho waiting for you outside, leaning against a tree, his arms crossed over his chest. He looks up when he sees you, his eyes lighting up.

“Hey, beautiful,” he says, pushing off the tree and walking over to you.

You can’t help but blush at the compliment. You know you’re not perfect, that you have your own flaws and insecurities, but when he looks at you like that, it’s easy to believe that maybe you are.

“What are you up to?” he asks, his voice casual but his gaze intense.

You shrug, playing it cool. “Not much. Just heading home to study.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Study, huh? That’s all?”

You laugh, feeling the tension between you build. “Well, unless you have something better in mind?”

He steps closer, his hand brushing against yours. “I might. But you’ll have to come back to my place to find out.”

You bite your lip, your heart racing. You know what he’s suggesting, and a thrill runs through you. 

But you also know that you need to keep things in check, to not let the physical aspect of your relationship overshadow the emotional growth you’ve both been working so hard on.

“What did you have in mind?” you ask, playing along.

He smiles, a wicked glint in his eye. “Oh, I have a few things in mind. But let’s just say it involves a lot of cuddling...and maybe a little bit of...math?”

You roll your eyes, but the heat in your cheeks gives you away. “Math? Really? That’s your idea of a good time?”

He shrugs, his grin growing. “Well, I do love a good challenge. And you, my love, are the most challenging and rewarding equation I’ve ever encountered.”

You can’t help but laugh, the tension breaking. “Okay, okay. You win. Let’s go back to your place and … study some .. math.”

He takes your hand, laughing with you. “Deal. But no funny business until we get through at least one page of calculus, okay?”

You nod, your pulse racing. “I promise. No funny business until then,” you say, your voice teasing. But as you walk, his hand in yours, you can’t help but feel the tension build between you.

———

When you finally reach his apartment, the door swings open and you’re greeted by the familiar scent that is Yunho’s ‘domain’. 

Textbooks and papers scattered everywhere, a half-eaten sandwich on the counter, and a faint smell of cologne that seems to cling to everything.

He leads you to the couch, where he’s cleared a space just for the two of you. You sit down, your heart hammering in your chest. 

You know what’s going to happen, what you both want to happen. But the anticipation is almost too much to bear.

He sits beside you, his leg brushing against yours. You can feel the heat of his body, the way his proximity seems to charge the air.

You open your mouth to ask about the math homework, but the words get caught in your throat when he leans in, his eyes locked on yours. 

And before you can even process what’s happening, he’s kissing you, deep and slow.

It’s like the world outside of this apartment doesn’t exist anymore. All that matters is the taste of him, the feel of his hands in your hair, the way his body presses against yours.

When he pulls away, you’re left breathless, your mind a whirlwind of desire. “What was that for?” you manage to ask, your voice husky.

He smirks, that devilish glint in his eye. “I think you know why,” he says, his voice low and seductive. “You’re so smart and so fucking sexy. I’m obsessed with you”

You laugh, pushing him away playfully. “Shut up” you say, trying to keep your cool. But inside, you’re melting. Because maybe, just maybe, he’s right.

He tugs you closer, his hands on your hips. “I’m serious, Y/N. I know it. And I’m going to prove it to you, over and over again.”

The promise in his words sends a shiver down your spine, and you know that there’s no turning back now. 

This isn’t just about math, It’s about reconnecting, about reaffirming the love that you both know is there.

And as you kiss him again, letting go of your reservations, you feel that love blossom inside you.

It’s a powerful, overwhelming force that makes you realize just how much you need him.

You let your hands wander, exploring the contours of his body as the kiss deepens.

His grip on you tightens, his thumbs brushing against the fabric of your shirt, sending waves of pleasure through your body. You break the kiss, panting, your eyes locked with his.

“We should really focus on that math,” you murmur, trying to lighten the mood. But the smolder in his eyes tells you he’s not ready to let go just yet.

He chuckles, his hands still resting on your hips. “Alright, if you insist,” he says, his voice thick with desire. 

He leans over to grab a notebook and a pen from the coffee table. “But I think we might need some...extra motivation.”

Before you know it, he’s scribbled down a simple algebra problem. It’s something you two learned years ago, something you both know by heart, but the way he looks at you, the way his eyes seem to say,  "I dare you," makes it feel like the most complex equation you’ve ever seen.

You roll your eyes, but you can’t help the smile that tugs at your lips. You take the pen from him, the tip of it hovering over the paper. “Fine, I’ll play your little game,” you say, trying to sound more annoyed than excited.

But as you start to write out the solution, his hand slides up your thigh, under your skirt. His touch sends a jolt of electricity through you, making it hard to focus. 

You bite your lip, trying to keep your hand steady.

“Having trouble concentrating?” he asks, his voice a low murmur. His hand moves higher, his fingertips grazing the lace of your panties.

You gasp, your hand slipping. The pen marks a jagged line across the paper. “Yunho!”

He grins, his eyes never leaving yours. “I thought so,” he says, his voice a low rumble.

“Let’s make this interesting. If I can solve a calculus problem without looking, you have to...take off your shirt. If you can solve an algebra problem without getting distracted, I’ll stop touching you.”

You narrow your eyes, the challenge accepted. You scribble down a calculus problem, one that’s definitely beyond his skill level—or so you hope. You hand him the notebook, your heart racing.

He looks at it, his brow furrowed in concentration. His hand stills on your thigh, and you feel yourself relax a little.

But only a little. Because even though you know he won’t solve it, you can’t ignore the feeling of his fingers, now tracing slow circles on your skin.

You watch him, his tongue peeking out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes flicking back and forth across the page. 

And even though you know he’s trying to distract you, you find yourself getting lost in his focus, in the way he bites his lip when he’s thinking hard.

“Alright, I’ve got it,” he says, scribbling something down. He holds the notebook out to you with a smile on his face. 

But when he hands you the notebook, it’s just a bunch of random symbols and numbers that mean nothing. You can’t help but laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asks, his voice mock-offended. “I think it’s a perfectly valid equation.”

You shake your head, smiling. “No, it’s just...you. Trying to be all smart and clever, and you can’t even write a basic calculus problem.”

He grins, leaning back into the couch. “Maybe not, but I can definitely make you forget about math.”

And with that, his hand moves again, slipping under the band of your panties. You suck in a breath, the coolness of the air hitting your wet skin. 

He starts to stroke you, his movements slow and deliberate, his thumb finding that spot that makes you see stars.

You drop the notebook, your hands grasping at his arms, trying to hold onto something as the world starts to spin. 

His other hand comes up to cup your breast, his thumb flicking over your nipple.

You’re lost in the sensation, your mind a haze of pleasure. But then he stops, his eyes on you, watching you.

“What?” you ask, your voice breathless.

His lips curl into a slow, knowing smile. ‘I just like watching you like this,’ he murmurs. ‘‘Completely undone. Just for me.’’

You swallow hard, your body still buzzing, aching for more. ‘That’s not fair,’ you whisper.

'‘Neither is how fucking sexy you are when you’re trying to stay focused.’' His fingers drag lightly over your thigh, not enough to satisfy—just enough to tease. ‘You were solving equations like your life depended on it. And still dripping for me.’

Your breath catches again, heat surging low in your belly. ‘‘You said you’d stop touching me if I finished the problem.’’

‘‘I lied,’’ he says simply, leaning in, his mouth brushing against your ear. ‘You’ve been too good not to reward.’

He smirks, his hand moving again. But this time, he’s not touching you. He’s unbuttoning your shirt, his eyes never leaving yours.

You watch him, your breath hitching as he reveals more and more of your skin.

And when the fabric falls away, and you’re sitting there in just your bra, you feel a strange mix of vulnerability and power.

He takes your hand, placing it over his own heart. “Feel that?” he whispers. “That’s all for you, Y/N. Every beat, every breath. It’s all yours.”

You lean in to kiss him again, this time slower, more intentional. Your hands explore his chest, feeling the steady rhythm of his heart beneath your fingertips. 

And as the kiss deepens, you know that this is just the beginning of a long, beautiful journey filled with love, growth, and maybe a little bit of calculus.

But for now, you have to focus on the algebra problem he made up. You try to remember the steps, mumbling them out loud as his hand moves in tantalizing circles. 

"Okay," you murmur, your voice a mix of desire and determination. "Let's do this."

You force yourself to focus on the equations, trying to ignore the heat pooling in your lower belly. His touch is a siren's call, but you're stronger than that.

You're a warrior of mathematics, and you will not be swayed by the distraction of his skilled hands.

You bite your lip, the numbers swimming before your eyes.

"Let x be the number of times I love you," you murmur, trying to keep your voice steady.

"And y the number of moments we've shared. If x plus y equals forever, then what is the value of—"

But before you can even finish the sentence, his thumb brushes against your clit, and your train of thought derails. 

You gasp, your hand flying to his wrist, not to stop him but to guide him closer. "Yunho," you breathe, your eyes fluttering closed.

He chuckles, his voice low and husky. "‘That’s it,’ he praises, his voice thick with lust. ‘‘So desperate, and still trying to focus. I’m so proud of you.’’

You force your eyes open, staring at the problem in front of you. You can do this. You've faced harder challenges than a simple algebra equation. 

You can conquer this, even with his fingers playing a symphony on your body.

You take a deep breath, and with a great amount of effort, you manage to focus on the numbers again. "Okay," you whisper, "Let's just solve this thing."

You scribble down the actual solution, your hand shaking slightly with every stroke of the pen. But you do it. 

You get through the problem without letting his touch distract you too much.

And when you finally look up, his eyes are full of pride and lust, his hand still resting on your thigh.

"Alright," he says, "Your turn to write me a problem."

You nod, his gaze never leaving yours as you take the notebook and scribble down a calculus problem. 

If you can get through this, if you can keep your cool with him touching you like that, then maybe you really are the perfect match.

Maybe the real challenge is keeping your heart from bursting with love for this man who's seen you at your worst and still wants to be with you.

But you're not going to let that thought distract you either. You're going to win this little game, and then you're going to show him just how sexy you think he is. With or without the math.

He nods, his eyes still on the notebook. "Okay, okay," he says, his voice tight with anticipation. "Let's see what you've got for me."

And as he starts to work, his eyes flicking to you every few seconds, you realize that maybe the problem isn't the math. 

You lean in, your breath hot against his ear. "Let’s see how long you can keep your brain working with my mouth on you," you murmur, your voice a sultry whisper. 

You start to kiss him, gentle pecks at first, moving from his neck to his cheek. His breath hitches, his hand faltering on the paper. But he keeps going, trying to ignore the distraction.

"You have to focus," you say, your lips brushing against his ear. "This is serious stuff."

He chuckles, but you can hear the strain in his voice. "I'm trying," he says, his eyes flicking to yours. "But you're making it very hard."

You grin, taking it as a challenge. You start to kiss him more insistently, your hand sliding down to his crotch. You can feel his hardness through his jeans, and you rub it gently, teasing him.

"F-focus," he stammers, his voice betraying his arousal. He clears his throat, trying to regain his composure. "Okay, so we have...we have..."

You can feel his body tense as you unbutton his jeans, your hand slipping inside. 

His breathing speeds up, and you know you're winning. You start to move your hand in time with his words, every stroke punctuating his speech.

"The derivative of a function," he says, his voice a little shakier now. "Is the slope of the tangent line at any given point."

You laugh, the sound low and throaty. "Keep going," you encourage, your hand moving faster.

He swallows hard, his eyes glazed over with lust. "The slope is given by the limit," he says, his voice breaking. "As h approaches zero, of..."

You kiss him again, his words trailing off as he succumbs to the pleasure. But you don't stop. You keep going, pushing him, challenging him to keep his mind on the math.

And then, with a final gasp, he slams the notebook shut. "I can't," he says, his voice ragged. "I can't do it."

You pull back, your eyes gleaming with victory. "I think you've had enough math for one night," you say, your hand still moving on him.

He nods, his eyes never leaving yours. "I think you're right," he says, his voice a low growl. "But now it's time to solve a different kind of problem."

With that, he grabs you, pulling you onto his lap. You straddle him, your legs wrapped around his waist. His hands are on your hips, holding you in place as he kisses you, hard and deep.

You can feel his need, his desire for you, and it sends a thrill through your body. You're in control now, and you're going to make him feel every inch of it.

You start to unbutton his shirt, your hands moving with purpose. You want to see him, touch him, taste him. 

And as you expose his chest, his skin warm and smooth under your fingertips, you know that the night is just beginning.

You lean in, kissing him again, but this time with more urgency. You can feel his heart racing against yours, the heat of his skin. 

And as you rock your hips against him, you know that there's no turning back.

The math is forgotten, the problems of the day left behind. All that matters is the two of you, in this moment, lost in the chaos of love and passion.

You kiss him harder, your hand still working in his pants. You can feel him getting even harder, his breathing more ragged.

And when you finally free his cock from his boxers, he groans into your mouth.

You break the kiss, smiling down at him. "Now who's the one who can't focus?" you ask, your voice teasing.

He laughs, his eyes dark with want. "I've always had a thing for pretty distractions," he says, his voice low. "And you, my love, are the prettiest of them all."

And with that, you lean in to kiss him again, his taste lingering on your lips, a mix of sweetness and saltiness. 

But instead of letting him catch his breath, you whisper,

"I love making you feel good. Let me," as you slowly slide off his lap and onto your knees.

You reach for his waistband, and with a playful smile, you start to peel his pants down, revealing his straining erection. 

He watches you with wide eyes, his voice already thick with need. "Fuck, baby," he murmurs, his hands coming up to the couch to steady himself.

You don't waste any time, taking the head of his cock into your mouth, teasing it with your tongue. 

He gasps, his hips jerking upwards. You can feel his desperation, his need for more, but you take your time, enjoying every second of his reaction.

You start to suck him intensely, his cries of pleasure music to your ears. 

"You're so good, Y/N," he groans, his hands moving to your hair, gripping tightly. "Just like that, baby. Oh, fuck, just like that."

His praise spurs you on, and you start to pick up the pace, stroking him faster, your mouth moving in sync with your hand. 

You watch his face, the way his eyes roll back, the way he bites his bottom lip. You know he’s getting closer, his legs trembling beneath you.

"I can’t—shit, you’re gonna make me cum so fast," he warns, his voice high and desperate. "I'm there, baby. Let go..."

But you don't let go, you keep going, pushing him over the edge. He tries to pull away, but you hold on, taking his entire length into your mouth, swallowing his release.

His whimpers become more frantic, and he grabs your hair, guiding you faster, his eyes never leaving yours.

As he starts to come down from the first peak, you keep going, stroking him, your hand moving in a steady rhythm. 

His eyes widen as he feels himself getting hard again. "Fuck, baby," he pants. "You're gonna make me do it again.. shit—taking me so deep, fuck.”

And you do. You take him back to the edge, watching his face contort with pleasure. You can feel the power in your grip, the control you have over his body.

And when he cums for the second time, it's with a groan that turns into a growl, his eyes squeezed shut, his body tight with release.

You sit back on your heels, looking up at him. His chest is heaving, his skin glistening with sweat. 

You lick your lips, tasting him, and then you lean in to kiss him again, sharing the flavor of his desire.

He looks down at you, his eyes dark with passion. ‘‘You swallowed all of it? Holy shit, baby I—fuck. I can’t even feel my legs right now,” he says, his voice hoarse. "I don't know what I did to deserve you."

You smile, feeling a warmth spread through you. "You just have to keep solving those calculus problems," you joke, wiping your mouth with the back of your hand.

He laughs, the tension of the moment disappearing. "Deal," he says, his eyes sparkling.

And in that moment, you know you're exactly where you're supposed to be. In the arms of the man who loves you, sharing a moment of pure passion.

[suksatoru]

kiss it better — ft: katsuki bakugo

you forgot to give katsuki his good morning kiss—and he is not happy about it.

Your boyfriend is fuming—steam coming out of his head, red in the face type of fuming. You can see him in the corner of your eye, burning a hole into the side of your head. The pencil he was holding as he did his homework snapped in half within an instant.

You furrow your brows in concern, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with him this time. He looked like a ticking time bomb—as if he would implode any moment. You send your boyfriend a small frown, and mouth 'what?' but he merely grits his teeth, grabbing a new pencil from his backpack as he turns his back to you and scribbles away at his work—ignoring you completely.

You pout when he turns away from you, and Mina pokes you with the end of her pen as she laughs.

"What's he whining about this time?" She questions, and you can see the muscles in Katsuki's back tense up—you know he wants to turn around and snap back, but he remains still, peering down at the math worksheet in front of him with a clenched jaw.

"I don't know. But—he might be hungry!" You say, digging into your backpack to find one of his snacks as Mina's eyes light with amusement.

"Hangry." She jokes, and you suppress your laughter for your boyfriend's sake as you approach his desk with apple slices in hand—freshly cut by your loving hands this morning and packed into a little orange zippy bag.

"Kats," You singsong, sitting in the empty seat beside him as you hold out his apple slices with a smile. He turns around with a scowl, but his eyes soften just the slightest bit when he sees you brought him something to eat. Unfortunately, they harden once again as he turns away from you.

"I'm not hungry, you idiot. Do you need help with the homework, or something? I know how much your dumbass struggles with linear equations." He mumbles—and your eyes light up at his words

"Nope! I did it all by myself today, Kats! And I think I did good..." You say, lost in thought as he grumbles something under his breath

"What was that?" You say, opening the ziplock bag and taking out an apple slice—you feed it to him, and he chomps down fast—nearly taking your finger off in the process.

"Ah!" You shriek, leaning backwards in your seat as you laugh—oh, he was very cranky about something this morning.

"Seems to me like you don't need me anymore." He states, voice gruff as he continues doing out the math problem in front of him. You blink in surprise, putting his snack down onto the table before you place a comforting hand on his shoulder.

"What makes you think that?" You ask, gently rubbing the spot between his shoulder blades and neck as he subconsciously leans into your touch. You always knew where his body ached the most —and your gentle hands always soothed the pain behind his skin that no one else couldn't reach.

"You know why," He sighs, and you shake your head no as he lets out an even louder sigh

"You didn't give me my good morning kiss." He mutters quietly, staring at the ground with furrowed brows as you let out a thoughtful "ah."

"Well, if that's the case..." You start, quickly checking your surroundings to ensure no one was looking—before you pecked his lips as quickly as you possibly could. Katsuki doesn't even have time to blink before you pull away with a laugh, walking back to your seat beside Mina as you send him a playful glance over your shoulder

Unfortunately, you made the mistake of believing your stubborn boyfriend would be satisfied by just that.

He's stomping over to you—and Mina can barely even get out a warning for you to duck from the crazy blonde marching your way before he grabs hold of both of your cheeks and pulls you into a kiss—pressing his mouth hard against yours as you let out a squeal of protest, trying to push him off as his friends laughter echoes through the room.

He pulls away after a few seconds—his lips tilting into a slanted smirk at the flustered look on your face before it disappears as he turns towards his cackling friends. Without another word—Katsuki stomps back to his desk and sits down, continuing his work as if nothing happened while you sit still in your seat, quite literally stunned into silence.

"Hey! That's the first time I've seen him kiss you, Y/n! I didn't know he knew how to love a woman right, but I'm glad to see it!" Kirishima exclaims with a sharp grin and you cover your face with a groan. Bakugo barks out a laugh from across the classroom at his words—at the nerve.

"Of fucking course I know how to love her right, you moron! No one does it better than me, and that's a fact!"

No one disagrees with him. And it's only a few minutes later when he's walking back to you with much calmer steps—muttering a quiet thank you for the apples slices.

Yeah, he was a handful, but there was no doubt that he was all yours.

[slaytheusurper]

⭑ One more kiss ⭑

Masterlist

Request: Yes , @slainmori

Pairing: Eddie Munson x Gf!Reader

Warnings: NSFW, includes sadism but nothing too heavy, eddie being a munch, rough sex, spanking, degrading, daddy kink, dom!eddie, sub!reader, making out, dry humping/grinding, 'fake' fucking, fingering, blowjob, teasing and creampie + lovely aftercare.

Summary: Spending a casual Saturday hanging out with Eddie never not turns into him fucking you until you can't walk.

Word count: 4k

Divider by: @strangergraphics-archive

It was another quiet Saturday night tucked away in the soft disarray of Eddie Munson’s trailer, your usual weekend ritual. 

The glow of the desk lamp made for a cozy, warm vibe, and the faint hum of distant traffic from the nearby highway was just background noise to the stillness inside.

You were curled up at the foot of his bed, textbook in your lap, brows furrowed as you tried to wrap your head around a particularly unforgiving math formula. Your pen tapped absently against the paper, ink smudging from your fingers as you worked through yet another problem. 

Beside you, Eddie was splayed out on the bed like a restless cat, flipping through pages in his infamous Hellfire campaign notebook, the one you still weren’t allowed to peek at- no matter how much you begged.

Wayne had taken an extra night shift at the plant, so the place was yours and Eddie’s for the evening. No dinner plans. No parties. Just the two of you existing together, breathing the same air, feeling that quiet comfort of each other's presence. Or at least, that had been the idea.

Eddie shifted again, his leg jostling the mattress. Then again. And again. You bit your lip, trying not to react, but finally, you snapped your head up with a frustrated sigh.

“Eds, can you please stop moving? I’m trying to concentrate.” He froze mid-fidget, blinking at you like a guilty raccoon caught digging through trash. 

“Sorry,” he muttered, not sounding particularly sorry at all. He set his notebook aside with exaggerated care, the corner of his mouth twitching in a way that told you he was up to something. 

“But seriously, why are you doing that now? It’s Saturday. That’s like...a crime against fun.”

“Because,” you said through gritted teeth, pointing your pen at him like a sword, “I don’t do homework on Sundays, you know that. And someone insisted on taking me out for that dinner date last night, so I didn’t get this done.”

Eddie let out a dramatic groan, flopping back onto the mattress like he was physically wounded by your logic. “Ugh, how dare I spend quality time with my beautiful girlfriend? I’m the worst.”

You rolled your eyes, trying to refocus, but you barely got through another line of the problem before Eddie started crawling toward you across the bed like a slow, determined jungle cat.

“Eddie,” you warned, inching your notebook further away.

“I’m just saying,” he said, his voice now suspiciously innocent, “this could be a lot more fun if you’d just take a little break…”

You dodged his grabby hands as he lunged for your book. “Don’t you dare!”

Too late. With one swift, smug motion, he swiped your textbook and notebook, sending them sliding off the bed with a dull thud. You stared at the floor in disbelief for a beat before turning back to him, hands in the air.

“Seriously?”

Eddie, now triumphant, wriggled into your lap like a child claiming a throne, arms coiling around your waist and legs tangling with yours until you were thoroughly pinned. 

He rested his chin against your chest and gazed up at you with those impossibly big, soft brown eyes- eyes that knew exactly how to get their way.

A crooked, bashful grin tugged at his lips. “Hi.”

You narrowed your eyes, but the corners of your mouth betrayed you as they lifted just slightly. He was impossible. Infuriating. And totally irresistible.

You sighed, letting your fingers find their way into his curls. “You’re lucky you’re cute.”

Eddie nuzzled into you with a satisfied hum. “You’re lucky I’m persistent.” 

And you knew exactly what he was up to the moment that playful glint sparked in his eyes, his cute smile twisting into that familiar mischievous grin, the one that always meant trouble, the kind you didn’t really mind.

Slowly, deliberately, he inched his way up your body, his weight pressing comfortably into you, grounding you in the moment. 

His hands moved with feather-light teasing, fingertips grazing your sides as he crawled closer, until his face hovered just inches from yours. You could feel the warmth of his breath fan against your cheek, the scent of his cologne and a hint of cigarettes clinging to him.

Then came the first kiss- soft, almost comically innocent. A mere brush of lips, fleeting and barely there.

You raised an eyebrow, but he only grinned wider.

Another kiss. A little firmer this time, but still far too sweet to be taken seriously.

“Eddie…” you warned playfully, a smirk tugging at your mouth.

A third kiss. A fourth. Each one drawn out just enough to make you squirm, until he pulled back, eyes scanning your face like he was memorizing every twitch, every falter in your resolve.

And then it came, that laugh. The one you tried to fight off, bubbling up anyway, light and breathy and completely helpless against his antics.

He loved that sound.

The second it escaped you, he dipped back down, and this time your lips met his eagerly. Gone was the teasing restraint, replaced by something deeper, more consuming. 

You kissed him with slow-burning passion, hands threading through his hair as he sighed into your mouth like he’d been waiting for you to give in all along. 

The world melted away, replaced by the softness of his skin, the heat between you, the steady thrum of shared affection that made everything else feel secondary.

Eddie’s hands slowly caressed your body, feeling you up before settling on your hips. With enough force he was able to roll you both over, him laying on his back with you in his lap. 

Due to the movement your lips had unfortunately separated, even though it was only seconds- it felt like minutes.

Everything about Eddie drove you crazy, his jokes, his charm, his dramatics and his insanely handsome face. And right now, all you needed was to kiss that pretty face. But Eddie was faster than you and quickly pulled you back in by your neck.

His lips smashed against yours again, not wasting much time before slipping his tongue in your mouth. Exploring and teasing you until you started to ground your hips against his more firmly.

Eddie bucked his hips up to meet yours and let out a groan upon the stimulation. Sometimes this gets you more worked up than the actual sex. Just dry humping each other until you got off.  

You moaned in Eddie’s mouth when he grabbed your ass cheeks and grinded you against him hard, pausing the kiss. Your clothed sexes hitting each other just right, making you roll your eyes back. 

Eddie fucked his hips up harder, the friction against his cock driving him insane. He couldn’t stop. It felt too good. You were both starting to get close, but you needed more, needed his hands, tongue or cock- it didn’t matter.

“Ed’s wait, fuck- need you please.”

Eddie stilled his hips with what little restraint he had, and flipped you over. Your back now landing on the mattress, as Eddie’s already heaving form crawled on top of you. He was so horny, he’d do anything you’ll tell him.

“What do you want baby? Hm? Daddy’s cock, or maybe my mouth first?” Eddie’s eyes were filled with lust as he peered down at you, hair dishevelled and messy.

“Your mouth- Please-” You whined, trying to kiss him again but he backed away.

“No no, please…what?” Eddie tutted, his hands keading your thighs. Since you were wearing your shortests, comfiest shorts, he had a perfect view of the wet patch forming already. Knowing how wet he made you never got old. 

“Please daddy, need your mouth first.” 

He grinned at your words, and lowered his head to kiss and suck at your neck. His lips grazed your skin, letting his tongue roam before he softly blew- as if you weren’t worked up enough.

When you bucked up your hips, he decided to give you mercy. Eddie let his hands slide up from your thighs to one of his metallica t-shirts you were wearing and helped you pull it off. He bit his lower lip before diving in to suck on one of your nipples. Oh how Eddie loved the days you discarded your bra. 

The feeling between your thighs started to become unbearable, your clit throbbing at this point. Luckily Eddie noticed your squirming and kissed down your now bare stomach to the edge of your shorts. 

“Let’s take these off too baby, wanna see you.” Eddie cooed before pulling off your shorts when you nodded. He ripped off your panties too, and gave himself a show as he parted your legs.

Even with all his cozy lights on, he still got a perfect view of your glistening pussy. All wet and puffy for him. He licked his lips before finally planting a teasing kiss on your cunt, making you whine in response. 

“Please daddy-” You whimpered, one of your hands moving down to grasp his curls.

Eddie decided to be nice, for now, and licked a long stipe up your folds. A high pitched moan left your lips, with how sensitive you were from Eddie’s teasing, everything felt terribly good. 

Squelching noises filled Eddie’s room as his tongue lapped faster and faster against your clit, pulling loud cries from you. You desperately hold on to Eddie’s hair as he ruins you with his tongue. 

To prepare you for his cock later, he slides one finger inside your wet cunt, it going in with ease due to how turned on you were. He slowly fingered you open while still pleasuring you with his mouth. Eddie hummed against your pussy, if he died now, he would die a happy man. 

Once he felt like you could take more, he added a second finger, making you moan out his name as he thrusted his fingers inside you. He could feel how your wetness was dripping onto the sheets below, it only made his cock twitch more. Knowing he was doing that to you. 

“I’m so close daddy!” You cried out, his fingers curling right against where you needed him. He positioned the tip of his tongue to move more precisely against your clit, making you fall apart on his fingers moments later.

He relished in the way you screamed his name, dragging out your orgasm as long as possible before finally letting you go. He was only just getting started, right now, he was still being nice to you. 

You knew however things were going to get much more rough now. Eddie’s eyes seemed to have grown darker, his pupils widely dilated as he crawled back up to you like a predator. 

Even though the way you had sex varied- loving, passionate, heated, slow, drunk, high or rough, Eddie always made sure you were pleasured first. Tonight he definitely was in a dominant mood, and you wanted nothing more than for him to use you.

Eddie planted his lips on yours again, forcing his tongue inside as he kissed you. The air was thick with arousal, Eddie having already leaked though the black ripped jeans he was wearing. 

He pulled back, leaving a string of spit between you. It only drove him crazier when he took in your sweaty, blissed out state. He wanted to ruin you tonight. 

“Are you gonna be good for me baby? Gonna let daddy make you feel good?” 

You nodded frantically as Eddie started to pull off his shirt, revealing the tattoo’s littered on his pale chest. His happy trail was on full display, making you almost foam at the mouth. No matter how many times you fucked, you could never get enough of Eddie.

“Like what you see sweetheart?” Eddie grinned, falling back slightly into his usual teasing and playful demeanor before unbuttoning his jeans. He quickly lifted from the bed to fully take them off, leaving him in his boxers.

He gestured for you to come to him when he kneeled on the bed. You obediently did as you were told, sitting on your heels in front of him, waiting for his command. 

“Wanna suck daddy’s dick before daddy splits you open?” Your heart jumped in excitement and you nodded once more. 

“Words baby.” 

“Wanna suck your dick daddy.” You repeated to him with blushed cheeks. 

“Good girl, go on.” 

You could feel your sensitive clit throb again at his words. Doing as you were told, you inched closer to him, lowering your head until you were face to face with his leaking bulge. Looking up at him expectantly, he gave you a nod.

Eddie was used to you going straight in, but with all the teasing he did to you tonight, you were getting payback, no matter the consequences. He gave you a questionable look when you simply pecked his clothed hard on. 

“I’m warning you sweetheart.”

He tried not to show how it affected him, but you heard how he inhaled upon the touch. So you continued, leaving kisses on his bulge and even starting to lick at the wetted fabric, tasting the precum that had leaked through.

“Be good.”

Taking that as a sign to not push him further you pulled back. Hooking two fingers on each side at the waistband, you lowered Eddie’s boxers until his hard length sprung free, he was so hard at this point, it fully touched his belly button, beads of pre-cum still dribbling from his tip.

You smiled up at him innocently before taking him in your hand, tugging the skin over his tip before finally taking him in your mouth. Eddie couldn’t help but moan as he felt your warm, wet tongue grazing the skin. 

He let his head fall back when you started to bob your head up and down his cock, gagging every so often when you had gone too deep. Eddie chuckled as you gagged once more, spit drooling from your chin onto the sheets.

“Cute, thinking you can take all of me. Is it too big for you baby?” Eddie cooed, trying not to gasp when your hand started to massage his balls. 

You couldn’t answer when your mouth was stuffed full of his cock, so you continued to suck Eddie off. It was only seconds later that Eddie pulled you back by your hair. 

“That’s enough, turn around and get on all fours. I think you deserve a little punishment for that shit you pulled just now, don’t you think baby?” His voice sounded hoarse and low, it made your walls clench in excitement.

You did as he ordered and even fully lowered your chest into the mattress, pushing out your ass for him teasingly. Eddie had to hold back and not immediately plunge his cock into your perfect hole that was on display for him.

Instead his hands spread open your cheeks, confusing you, was he going to punish you, or fuck you already? Eddie then tutted, letting one hand fall to his side as the other still caressed your right ass cheek. 

“You know not to disobey me baby. Were you upset daddy teased you? Thought you should tease daddy back? You know that’s not how it works sweetheart.” Eddie reprimanded, his hand now massaging the fat of your ass. 

You whined at his touch, anticipating what was coming. 

“Such a fucking slut, arching your back like that. What? Thought you could distract me? Almost did baby, that’s how fucking hot you are.” 

Just when you thought he was expecting an answer, his hand let go of you for a moment. Until it collided hard with your skin, making your body jerk and a surprised gasp leaving your lips. 

You were sure your ass was already red from that one slap, but Eddie was not done. 

“What do you think baby? I think ten more will do, don’t you?” Eddie groaned, playing with your ass again. He was already very worked up himself, but he knew it would be worth it. 

“Mhmm.” 

You shuddered. 

His hand then slapped your cheek again, hard. Rings colliding with the skin, the sound cut through the room. He repeated it, each time smacking you harder. Until you whined and a tear rolled down your cheek.

“Aw I’m sorry baby, but you knew what would happen.” Eddie tutted, his hand now soothingly stroking the red and irritated skin. 

“Don’t worry, daddy will give you his cock now, make you feel so much better huh?” 

You could barely think, all you wanted was for him to stretch you out with his dick. Arching your back a little bit more down, you urged him to finally fuck you already.

Eddie chuckled behind you at how desperate you had become, and jerked himself a bit before letting his head slide through your soaked folds. 

“Fucckk baby, so warm and wet. Even better than your mouth.”

Eddie drank in your cry when he nudged his tip inside, before sinking into you fully. Your tight walls enveloped him and he couldn’t hold back his own moan. He relished the feeling for a moment before fully pulling out again.

He already earned a protesting whine from you and smiled to himself. When you wiggled your ass back, he took hold of your hips and gave you what you wanted.

He thrusted his cock back inside you and immediately started a steady rhythm. Your pussy squelched around him, the dirty noise filling the room, as well as the sounds of Eddie’s heavy balls smacking against your skin. 

You could not stop moaning his name, begging him to fuck you harder. You needed it rough tonight. 

“What was that baby?” Eddie groaned, his tip hitting your cervix just right.

“Please daddy- harder!” 

That was all Eddie needed. He propped up his right leg and held himself stable with his foot on the bed. Then he really let go. Pounding into you hard, holding onto your hips for dear life so you wouldn’t fall over.

He couldn't blame you, he knew that you were so cock drunk you couldn’t even hold onto anything, you just let him take you. Eddie drove into you over and over, his entire body now covered in sweat. 

He could feel himself getting close, his balls drawing tight and tip twitching. You were no better, your cunt clenching around him tightly as you drooled onto the mattress below. Eddie really needed to change his sheets after tonight. 

“You gonna come for me sweetheart? Fuck, want you to cream on my cock!” Eddie’s dominant demeanour was faltering the closer he got. You loved the way you could make him a whimpering, moaning mess too, even when he was rough with you.

“Mm- gonna cum daddy, please- please my c-clit!” You moaned, barely getting out what you needed.

Eddie still heard you and moved one of his hands from your hip to between your thighs. Rubbing your clit along with his hard and fast thrusts. He was really hoping to make you squirt tonight, already groaning at the thought. 

It was getting hard to reach your clit well while also driving into you, so Eddie hunched more over your body, moving his left hand off your hip as well, so he could use his arm to press you against his stomach. 

His hips now rutted into you perfectly and you could only mewl as Eddie used his skilled fingers to finally make you cum. Eddie got his wish when you couldn’t hold back, and squirted on his dick, his legs and the sheets- which he might as well throw away at this point.

You cried out Eddie’s name, yet he did not stop- rutting into like a rabid dog chasing his own relief. Eddie let out a string of curses as he rolled his hips harder against yours. He was so fucking close, his balls aching for relief.

Pounding into a few more times, his brain turned to mush. Eddie let out the loudest strangled moan you had ever heard as his cum filled you up. His thrusts now slowed but he did not stop until Eddie was sure he fully emptied himself. 

He stayed pressed against you, kissing your shoulder as you both caught your breath. But Eddie had gone soft and had to pull out. With a hiss, he left your warm cunt and pulled out of you. 

He fell back on the mattress and you let yourself fall onto your side, feeling how Eddie’s cum trickled out of you. But Eddie couldn’t leave you for long, he forced himself up and got a wet towel for the both of you.

Climbing back onto the bed with a loving smile, he kissed your forehead before using the towel to clean you up. Using the other side to clean his own dick. When he felt like it was good enough, he threw it on the floor.

The mattress shifted beneath you with a familiar creak as Eddie slid in beside you, the worn springs groaning softly under his weight. Without a word, he wrapped an arm around your waist and tugged your boneless, thoroughly spent body against his chest. 

His skin was still warm, slick in places, and his heartbeat thudded steady and soothing where your back met his chest.

You let out a contented sigh, every muscle in your body pleasantly sore, Eddie had really worn you out tonight. But as your fingers idly traced circles along the curve of his forearm draped around you, your eyes flicked up to his face.

God, he was beautiful like this- hair tousled and damp with sweat, falling in wild curls over his forehead. His lips were parted in a lazy, satisfied grin, eyes half-lidded with that soft, blissed-out glow that made your heart flutter. It was impossible to be annoyed for long when he looked at you like that.

But then… reality came crashing back in.

“Shit,” you muttered, eyes snapping shut as frustration surged up like a wave.

Eddie, barely conscious and still floating in the afterglow, groaned sleepily into your shoulder. 

“What now?”

“My homework,” you groaned, flopping back against the pillow with an exasperated huff. “You made me forget it- again. It’s literally due Monday, Eddie.”

He let out a laugh that was equal parts smug and sleepy, his hand smoothing up and down your side as he pulled you even closer, as if to physically keep you from escaping. 

“Sorry, baby.” He murmured, pressing a kiss just below your ear. “Maybe next time don’t be so damn irresistible.”

You twisted in his arms just enough to give him a mock glare, but it quickly melted under his soft grin and the warmth of his touch. With a sigh, you let your head fall back against his chest, letting the sound of his heartbeat lull you into stillness.

“Next time.” You mumbled, eyes fluttering shut.

But you both knew there’d be no resisting him next time either.