#it just keeps. showing me the posts I have already scrolled past. without refreshing to the top of the dash.

[marypsue]

Is anybody else's dashboard just a fucking loop right now or am I hallucinating

[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!

permanent taglist: @zreamy @sunghoonmybeloved @lalalalawon @sd211 @w3bqrl @raikea10 @wntrnghts @moonlighthoon @4imhry @rikisly @loves0ft @iamliacamila @theboingsuckerasseater9000 @chaechae-23 @baekhyuns-lipchain @hyuckslvr @vernonburger @amorbonbon @fluerz @jakeflvrz @enhastolemyheart (ask to be removed/added!)

[parcoeurs]

Extremely fascinated by your wag AU tag 👀.

thanks bestie so am i.

okay lmao so this isn't an actual fic that'll ever be written but. i was talking to my friend about it who still hasn't finished dts season 3 unfortunately but it means that i've switched around ages and years etc. i promise this has the potential to be a fun and sexy time but there's just s o much background shit that needs to be discussed. tw for mentions of irl deaths etc:

but pierre & charles meeting when they're 5-6 (which is what i think charles actually says irl but someone said it might've been closer to when they were 10-11? regardless.) and charles' dad passes away when they're 9-10, and jules when they're 13-14 and charles quits racing then. (fyi i know that irl jules passed away first)

he thinks about quitting when his dad passes away but keeps going with help from jules. so when the accident etc happens, it's not even like an active decision he ponders. he just knows there's no way he'll race again.

and pierre's been with him throughout everything, his best friend who he can talk to when he can't bear looking at his own family. so he doesn't understand when pierre tells him he's going to keep racing. when charles had told him he was never going to get into a kart ever again, pierre had nodded, grabbed his hand and squeezed it tight. important to note that they're barely teenagers rn so yes charles feels betrayed that pierre isn't feeling the same things he is and isn't choosing the same future for himself etc.

they have a huge fight, lots of crying, lots of dramatic teenage angst. but it ultimately ends with charles shutting pierre out of his life. which is easier said than done when it's your best friend whose family is super close with yours. but it works because pierre is off racing around the world and charles has done all he can to never have to think about that stuff.

so charles goes to school, is doing uni somewhere in europe. studies something generic like business or maybe if i'm feeling suuuuper indulgent i will have him major in environmental studies like moi <3 pointedly does not come to monaco during grand prix weekend or the week before or the week after.

and then anthoine passes away too. (they're 20-21 now)

they see each other again at the funeral but don't talk, they meet up afterwards. pierre breaking down in charles' arms, clutching at his back, telling him he was right. pierre should've quit, he can't do this anymore either. they haven't said a word to each other in 7 years but charles still knows pierre, and knows that this isn't actually what pierre wants. or what he should do. (charles vaguely knows pierre's in f1 but doesn't know he's with redbull, doesn't know redbull's the top team etc)

"you can still do this, you will," charles tells him.

"not without you again."

so then comes the challenge of mending their relationship while still working through the shared trauma, and the Layers of past trauma. and also just the general awkwardness that comes with a friendship breakup/makeup situation you know! they can't just act like nothing happened but would it be easier that way?

they start texting first, then they play fifa or cod together. (sometimes pierre's british friend lewis joins too.)

slowly slowly slowly, they become friends again and then inseparable too. maybe even closer than they were before and charles only now realizes how much he missed pierre. while pierre still can't believe he has charles back now, it's as good as he let himself imagine.

the part i'm unsure about is if i would want pierre's career trajectory to be the same or not. because i think the demotion adds SUCH a painful but interesting aspect to his ~storyline. but ultimately i think maybe he just doesn't get the second seat immediately. spends more years with toro rosso/alpha tauri before getting "called up" (sorry i have no idea what the proper terminology is haha ignore the nba/nhl terms).

he invites charles to his first race in the red bull and charles says no. immediately. pierre's quiet on the other side of the phone, internally thinking he messed this up somehow. he thought things were going well and he takes this as charles doesn't want to see him. but he knows there's a lot more that's stopping charles and he also knows charles will definitely pull back if pierre asks about the other stuff. so he moves right along, asking charles about school, the weather, and tries not to let it show in his voice that he misses his best friend and needs him too.

"i'm going to try to watch," charles says, after pierre's yawned goodnight through the phone and is waiting for him to hang up. because you know pierre's not going to hang up first.

"what?"

"the race. i'm going to try. goodnight!" mentally charles slams the phone shut but really he just smashes at the red button before shoving it under his bed and looking at his hands trying to get answers for what he just did.

his only relief is that he didn't promise pierre he would watch, just that he would try. couldn't even choke out a, "good luck." (insert long paragraph about charles letting pierre down or thinking he has).

he only watches qualifying. pierre p3. already knows on saturday that there's no way he can watch the actual race.

but on sunday when he's supposed to be going over his notes for his climate change science & policy course (yes.... i did it...) he finds himself with his heart in his mouth refreshing formula1 dot com. watches the random names move up and down while keeping his eyes on 10 - gasly. (starts shaking for a second when he sees pierre's name drop until the IN PIT sign comes up across his name. fellas the thing about triggers is-- anyways.)

the scariest part is that by the time he's scrolled through all of red bull's socials to look at pictures of pierre on the podium (he finished p2 sorry i know this truly does not matter), he's forgotten about the race. the anxiety sits small in the back of his throat, his happiness for pierre is bright and loud in front of him. charles sends him a message, asking him to call whenever he can and adds a blue & red heart emoji which feels like a Big Step. but basically pierre calls and acts like nothing has happened since the last time they talked. mentions the breakfast he had in detail as if he didn’t get a podium in his first race with red bull. finally with a big team. but charles embarrassingly realizes that maybe his text didn't exactly imply in literally any way whatsoever that he knows the results of the race and was trying to congratulate pierre with this call. charles probably feels so embarrassed at this point but somehow still can't manage to say anything about the race until the next day maybe.

maybe texts pierre, good job. or, you were great. or something about him and not the race. or maybe reposts a picture from red bull but not one of pierre in his car, pointedly. only one of him on the podium. and pierre probably reposts it with the squid emoji and/or my favourite sentence in the world, merci petit calamaro.

charles cries when he reads it.

not to be lazy now but [insert 10k words of them building their friendship. meeting up in monaco with both of their families. meeting in milan or london or paris idk where pierre would live. but he flies charles out. not on a private jet because charles flat out refused lol. not because he's an environmentally conscious king he's just too, embarrassed? overwhelmed? by pierre doing Things Like That for him. even though he wants it lol. like when he graduates he's soooo annoyed that pierre couldn't come celebrate immediately because it was race week. but when he comes home his apartment is filled with flowers (roses, his favourite) and balloons and a giant teddy bear as tall as charles. and he DOES post 12 instagram stories to go with the other 30 from his other friends congratulating him. so yeah charles goes through a lot of personal growth and therapy. to the point where he's watching pierre race again, and waiting for him to invite him to a race again!!! do not even think about actual dates i'm fucking begging you but the one he goes to is monza :))))]

ultimately charles' path to understand/accepting/moving on from, his trauma, happens once he has pierre back in his life. it's also encouraged by pierre, but it's also not entirely because of him. not sure how to word that but yeah. these things are happening at the same time but charles still has to go through them by himself.

pierre takes him on romantic dates all around the world and charles doesn't realize that's what they are. fully in his bestie vibes only mood while pining for pierre in a way he doesn't even quite understand. almost a self deprecating, jeez whoever gets to date pierre is going to be so lucky :/

fanpage on ig: met pierre's alleged bf he's so pretty and sweet, i complimented his shoes and he was so nice. charles reading that: i didnt know he was dating someone :( why wouldn't he tell me :( well at least someone complimented my shoes today :(

pierre doesn't necessarily think they're dating, but he does know charles doesn't quite realize what they're doing so he's just waiting for him to come to terms with it.

not to give this au 10 different subplots but yeah that miscommunication plot becomes our prize for surviving through the first part of this.

but yeah at the last race of the year, that pierre wins because i said so? charles finds him before he goes on to the podium, kisses his helmet. says i love you, i'm so proud of you.

THEN, finally, charles does become pierre's wag. we made it kids. we did it joe.

[lady-plantagenet]

What hasn’t already been said: The Spanish Princess 2

Episode 3: GOOD Grief! (we finally have a good episode on our hands)

To all those of you keen enough to have come back for another segment of ‘what hasn’t already been said: TSP’, as opposed to have just been scrolling when you see this - welcome back! (Scrollers you too <3)

Drawing of Thomas More’s Son AKA who Margaret Pole at this point wants to be the step baby momma of ;).

To anyone who’s seeing this for the first time: what this is a list of observations, jokes, reactions and criticism which occur to me upon a rewatch. I wait every week until Saturday to do this so that I have had my fill of scrolling through the tag and aggregating what has already been said. I tried doing a whole spoof (here where I gave up 10% in) but tbh a) I don’t know the history well enough b) it’s more time consuming than I thought and c) this series is just not as funny or as crazy as TWQ, so it’s untenable. Having said that: This is not a hatepost. I’m not hatewatching this series and nitpicking on purpose but expressing my honest views and trying to find the good in it as well as the bad.

Without further ado...

First Scenes: 

LMAO the way Wolsey suggests they break their alliance with Spain is freaking hilarious because the actor delivers the lines as if he were a high school girl making a personal attack by suggesting the prom change its theme to 70s disco to the chagrin of the peppy up-and-coming rival.

Also @ Henry VIII looking like the peppy up-and-comer’s bff and shy stan with that pencil bite and small smirk when Catherine loses her cool against Wolsey.

I’m sorry... who is Henry married to again?

Also what is Margaret Pole doing at the council meeting?? I’m not saying I don’t like it.

Margaret Pole warning against certain repetitive thinking creating madness :(((

Attempted Naked Twister:

Oh Catherine, what is with you and all the other STARZ protagonists and that weird politcky bedroom talk? Who actually finds this sexy?

‘Catherine you are unnatural’ ooof that line delivery was somehow haunting.

Was the whole ‘I can’t be rushed you are off-putting with your overpowering’ a callback to Arthur and Catherine? Apparently there’s another writer for this episode so I won’t put all subtly past them. 

Scotland:

‘Shitey men’ asdkjashd

Look I’m tired of all this ‘my children won’t be safe’ line getting repeated. Look mate, murder of royal infants and children was not exactly a common occurence, even in cases of deposition. The Princes in the Tower are an exception to this but a very infamous case for that reason. Child murder was extremely taboo. In situations like this with an infant kid, no one is going to bother murdering the babies and taking their thrones, the lords will just vie for power and make themselves de facto rulers and oust the queen. It’s not a question of safety but a question of holding power. Stop giving all women characters perma mummy brains.

Maggie being all caring:

‘Barnaby’ *scoffs* ‘Such an English name’ - OH MAN 0_0 is Catherine mocking them for trying to adapt ? Like I know it’s meant to show her envy for Lina, but it’s coming out all messed up.

Our girl Maggie’s smile screams I’m beating your ass in chess.

Anyhow this is the least histrionic we’ve seen Catherine so far.

Chaplain vs Catherine:

I’m interested how Catherine will feel at Stafford’s execution given that I have noticed this show build up to a friendship between them.

Why is everyone laughing at the whole ‘will you delight us with new schemes’ line was not that funny?

LMAO at Thomas Boleyn’s attempted brown-nosing. 

You know what? Ruairi is a decent actor. When he says ‘so you admit it? you lost the child because you tried to be a man?” the actor conveys Henry’s troubled mind, lowkey scare towards Catherine and bewilderment all in one. The way his eyes do not move but just widen emotionlessly also gives this sense that he is being manipulated (which I guess they are going for with Wolsey). Then the whole choir music in the background.. I don’t know.. I’m liking this, it’s creating a vibe of a king of haunted and increasingly paranoid Henry. I’m sure they are going for that, so good.

Ursula Pole and Mama:

Maggie Pole say ‘riches don’t keep you safe’ with tears in her eyes :’(. Please tell me how this is not her thinking on her parents and granddad Warwick and what befell them ;’(.

I find Ursula refreshing actually, don’t get those types of heroines often. But they are making her similar to a gold-digger, an exhalted marriage was first and foremost considered a thing of honour. Noblepeople wouldn’t speak in such mercenary terms regarding their marriages. 

Post Mary Defiance:

I love the ‘horse’ nickname from Brandon n’awwww

Also just realised what made TWQ so atmospheric - that wierd ‘oooo’ sound effect in the background when a character was being paranoid or worrying. They are using it during Henry’s ‘How is it that I have no sons?’ and it is just... so effective.

Catherine calling them ordinary children... she just keeps striking me as more and more classist. Like ok, I know every royal was... but still, I thought she was meant to see Lina as a friend and equal despite her race and status. To add the race element, this kind of rubs me the wrong way.

Also it is so clear by the end when Catherine states how the king is upset with her, she expects Maggie to ask her about it.. but she doesn’t lmao.

Back to Scotland until Sexy boy fencing:

I love me this soft boi. Angus <3 <3

I like how they address that some men don’t really like killing and that violence isn’t inherent in a man’s nature.

Oh man, are we supposed to look at Lina’s house and deplore the impoverished conditions? It would go for at least 3,000,000 pounds in today’s property market?

Is Catherine being particularly classist again with ‘Why u not becoming a butcher Wolsey, ey?’. 

Though I will admit the ‘but giving meat to the poor is also good’ was one of her only smart comebacks.

Just realised, Catherine’s pink dress pretty as it is, looks straight out of the 1570s... why?

Montage and After:

You guys are right, there is this weird longing between Henry and Wolsey lmao. It is actually insane.

So basically Catherine is officially depressed

OOOFF we have Stafford as regent instead of Catherine. (edit: I suppose it’s cause they go to France which they didn’t historically? Also if Stafford is at home then what is his son later doing in France, why would he be there without his father. This show didn’t think this through)

Meg Singing:

An impassionate speech is not too anachronistic. But despite the title of this post (what hasn’t been said) I will reiterate that 16th century and Medieval people’s problem wasn’t that they were ashamed of their grief and didn’t cry. In fact, crying was somewhat more socially acceptable then than it even is now! Even manly men like Arthur were written as crying in literature such as Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Obviously you couldn’t go overboard, but in truth crying was indeed often too performative rather than hidden too much behind doors.

Pole and More UWUWU in France and after:

I LIKE THIS INTELLECTUAL FLIRTING

It’s nice to see a depiction of romantic feelings between mature and level-headed subjects.

God Mary Tudor is so beautiful in this scene jesus. and the music when she was being presented was also very beautiful.

Maggie Pole getting given ‘a modest income’ yeah... she was one of the wealthiest peers of her day.

Also Maggie’s lady cousin not lady aunt Frost!

‘shaking of the sheets’ lmaoooo

William Compton cracks the hell out of me. I love this guy. He is just so creepy and twisted yet super keen and friendly. ahaha He looks like a riot, I hope we see him more. lmao tiles.

Also this palace feels very anachronistic almost 18th century-ish.

I like the Louis and Mary sequence, it’s nice seeing him trying to make her feel less scared, but OMFG when he lay on that chair.. for one second I thought they were trying to kill him off already.

Scotland: ‘Love is an open doooooorrrrr’ + Last Scene:

I ship Meg and Douglas ahhhh this soft boi x strong woman match is everything Henry and Catherine could have been.

I wonder... why is Lina speaking in Spanish more than Catherine. hmmm Are they trying to foreshadow Lina’s eventual return home and how Catherine become a true englishwoman?

Conclusion:

7.5/10

I cannot in all fairness believe it. This was actually decent. I’ve given up on historical accuracy long ago so by this point I’m focusing more on how it stands as as drama. I mean, TWQ was also a flop when it came to grasping the complex issues of that era but why do I feel compelled to rewatch it every year? Because it had atmosphere when it came to acting, music, certain aesthetics (though the costumes let me down often). It felt adequately gothic and dark, yet bright and jewel-lish when it had to be, sometimes both at the same time. Some one-liners were also memorable etc...

So far TSP 2 did not have any of this. Everything felt way too off and anachronistic. But not even consistently anachronistic. The music was also often very meh (though I just noted the absence of the spanish stringy theme that kept playing in season 1 - I guess I understand why), the dialogue very clichéd (‘alright lads let’s throw in the words: king, crown, power, fight, battle + other buzzwords and we have ourselves Shakespeare’) and so on... but I saw a change in this episode and I couldn’t initially point out what it was.

Upon rewatch, I identified some of the improvements (noted above) but above all: The producer was different! Boy does it show. Unfortunately, I think she is only for this one episode which really sucks. Come back! There is more chemistry between the couples, less predictable interactions, pervy Compton, cinnamonroll Douglas, better music, more scenic shots (e.g Douglas and Margaret in church) e.t.c. I hope it will match the rest of the STARZ productions in getting better towards the end.

Look it’s no masterpiece. But I’ll give credit where it’s due because at least this time it didn’t leave me feeling wanting and unsatisfied (if that makes sense).

[mittensmorgul]

The Tumblr Beta Version: an objective analysis

I was tempted to just type “it sucks.” And while that is an objective analysis, it’s not exactly helpful. I’ve sent several requests to @staff and @support to restore my account to the old tumblr dashboard format, and received the same automated reply twice now. I’ll copy/paste it here so everyone is on the same page:

(lol, I had to go back and edit this, because apparently the beta version doesn’t display block quotes on the dash. So I’ve also put the block quotes in italics... hopefully it’ll display properly... note after editing: nope, it doesn’t display italics either... how the heck am I supposed to differentiate quoted text? I’ll start each quoted bit with an asterisk, I guess...)

*Thanks for reaching out about the beta dashboard.

*We're currently testing it out, and your account seems to have been selected to take part in the test. Thanks for your patience while we work on it! At this time there is not a way to opt out of testing. You may see your Tumblr experience return to normal as we continue testing.

WE CAN ONLY HOPE.

*In the meantime, check out some of the new features available only in the beta dashboard:

OKAY TUMBLR, IF YOU INSIST, though I would MUCH rather have back all the functionality I personally invested into this website through xkit... you know... making the site ACTUALLY FUNCTIONAL. Let’s see what this beta version has given me instead of functionality:

*Change Palettes: Go to the person icon, then click "Change Palette." You'll find the classic Tumblr blue, dark mode, and a few other color palettes for your dash.

So I tried out all the color palettes. In addition to the ones mentioned here, there’s one that’s trying to look like a green screen terminal that gives me flashbacks to the early 80′s. There’s a reason we stopped using green screen terminals... Another one is “canary yellow.” It’s very yellow. The “classic tumblr” isn’t actually classic tumblr... all the post boxes are dark blue with grey type, not white with black type. And all the other colors are the insanely bright fluorescent of the new Dark Blue standard tumblr scheme. Which means links are practically invisible unless I highlight them. It’s migraine inducing. The one theme with a light colored background is called “Concrete” or “Cement” or something like that and even that only works for about half an hour before the migraine aura really kicks in. I just want my Old Blue via xkit back. You know, what tumblr actually used to look like. I don’t want any of these horrible color palettes. None of them work for me.

*The new "meatballs" menu: This is where you can copy the post link, unfollow the Tumblr who made or reblogged the post, or report a violation to our Community Guidelines.

I could do all of this from the user menus with xkit, too. I don’t regularly report violations or have the urge to block people I have chosen to follow. Why on earth would I want to do any of this? And why would I want these features located directly beside the post link copy feature? 

You know what I do miss? I miss the xkit timestamps feature. I didn’t have to hover dangerously close to the KILL IT WITH FIRE meatballs menu in order to see when a post was made, and in this era of disinformation and misinformation spreading around this site faster than Covid-19, being able to see when a post was ORIGINALLY created is a far more useful feature than an easier way to block people. For reference: I currently have three blogs blocked. Two of them are pornbots. One is a nazi. If I don’t want someone’s content on my dash, I don’t follow them. This “feature” is entirely useless to me.

*A quick note: Pagination is not supported in this beta test, but we're collecting feedback to send to our engineers.

THIS IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST. This beta test might actually be tolerable if I wasn’t trapped into endless scrolling. If I could page through my dash, refreshing it every ten posts or so. You know why? Because once I scroll about 30 posts down my dash, tumblr starts overheating my laptop under the load of ALL THOSE POSTS. Things start malfunctioning-- it takes longer and longer to load new posts the farther I scroll. And the keyboard navigation (both page down and hitting J to advance to the next post, and even just using the down arrow to scroll as I read a long post) freeze and stop functioning. One of my laptop fans has actually begun to malfunction.

You know why this wasn’t a problem on the old version? If the data load got to heavy, I could open a post in a new tab, click view on dash with xkit, and voila! Brand new tab! I could close the malfunctioning tab and everything would be refreshed to normal! But without pagination, THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Also, after reblogging a few posts, the beta version of this site breaks, and doesn’t open a post tab to add commentary or even tags. It just... reblogs the untagged post with no warning whatsoever. You know... that’s really really not cool. I tag EVERYTHING. Well, almost everything. The tags are the only way to keep track of the 40k+ posts on my blog. And warn people that I am posting potential spoilers, or other specific content. It’s REALLY inconvenient to have to either immediately go to my blog to edit the post and add tags, or even comments. The alternative is to scroll up to open individual posts I want to reblog in a new tab, and then reblog directly there. Ironically enough, THOSE pages actually open with xkit installed, and everything (surprise!) functions perfectly there.

It’s perfectly reasonable to understand why this specific issue has limited the number of posts I reblog. Reblogging content should not be this much of a hassle. Creators have been complaining for a while that reblogs have drastically slowed down, and I think making it even more annoying and difficult to reblog posts will not help this problem.

Also, with xkit enabled, there’s a function that auto-loads images as you scroll, so the images are always visible BEFORE they appear on screen. I don’t have to look at the colored boxes and wonder if this is a post I’ve already seen or something I should sit and wait for. Don’t even think about watching tumblr videos. Loading priority is given to the ads that you cannot pause or dismiss, so that video loads and plays in choppy two second bursts instead of being given priority. Since that’s the content I am actually here to consume, it kinda makes me want to do the opposite of patronizing anyone who advertises here with graphically intense ads. And then when you scroll away, with xkit, gifs and videos you’ve scrolled past STOP loading and playing, which I think might be contributing to the intensity of the resource hogging that’s literally melting down my laptop.

And for reference, I have a pretty decent little gaming laptop. A blogging platform shouldn’t be driving it to the brink of frying itself. I didn’t realize just how much xkit worked to streamline this and provide basic functionality to this site.

*And lastly, if you're an XKit user, know that the XKit team is working hard to update things on their end to make it compatible with the beta dashboard.

And this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what I’ve lost without xkit. And this is a really REALLY garbage response to user complaints. “Oh, yeah, sorry we made our site suck even worse, but those nice people who do our jobs for free will surely fix our garbage soon!”

Dear wonderful people at @new-xkit-extension, I love you, and I miss you, and while I wish xkit worked with this beta version I’ve been forced into living with, I truly feel for y’all who are trying to deal with this nonsense on behalf of all of us.

And to the folks at Tumblr... maybe try to just... make your site actually more like xkit. You know, actually functional. None of these special new features are useful or functional to me. I respectfully request for a fourth time to be removed from this inane beta test.

Give us OPTIONS. Let us display ALL THE TAGS without having to click a button. Let me have back my Activity+ that actually allowed me to interact with people from my dash! That showed me real-time inline notifications in a way that I could reply to with a single click! Bring me back to my column of open messaging conversation icons so I have easy access to the people I talk with throughout the day instead of closing them all every time I refresh the page. I already feel socially isolated in freaking quarantine, please stop shutting off all my avenues of communication!

Let us have pagination! I mean, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to force heavy users of this site into a beta version that doesn’t allow us to opt out until your engineers had actually figured out how to make it work in a very basic way.

*Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with!

YES. PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS BETA TEST NOW. I have let you know exactly what I want from this site. I just want it to ACTUALLY WORK. For someone who spends 12+ hours a day on this site, this beta test version is NONFUNCTIONAL. PLEASE ALLOW ME TO OPT OUT. I AM LITERALLY BEGGING YOU. I WILL ACTUALLY PAY YOU CASH MONEY TO ALLOW ME TO OPT OUT OF THIS AND GO BACK TO HAVING A FUNCTIONAL BLOG AGAIN. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!

PLEASE! 

I AM OFFICIALLY AT THE END OF MY PATIENCE FOR ENDURING THIS NIGHTMARE.

(one final quick note... I’ve only been back on my dash long enough to make the parenthetical edits-- i.e. adding italics that don’t display and then adding the asterisks at the beginning of each section of quoted text, and already my laptop is overheating again. For reference, I originally typed this entire post from within my tumblr inbox page-- which still functions normally with xkit-- and spent over an hour on it. My laptop was fine the entire time. Clearly the issue is this beta version of the website. I will never forgive tumblr if y’all fry my literal only portal to the outside world at this time. PUT ME BACK TO NORMAL NOW. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INFURIATING AND ENTIRELY UNACCEPTABLE. Thanks)

(oops apparently i lied... when the asterisks and the previous final note failed to display, I thought that seemed suspicious, and realized that I literally needed to refresh my entire dash in order to see edited changes. Funny how xkit enabled me to do that in real time, which is just another bit of functionality I’ve lost with this beta program. Please guys, this is really, really not working for me at all, just put it back.)

[wilhelmfink]

09.01.21. - 12:36am

Hi.

I don’t even know if anyone I used to know still uses this website or sees my violently infrequent posts, but tumblr has always been my safe space - especially in my lowest points.

Last time I was here, I was bedridden, sobbing nonstop for days on end, dragging my feet to the T to get to classes that I ended up dropping out of, and drowning my thoughts out with Crybaby. I let myself feel everything because I knew that was how I would get through it. 

Now. I am stuck in a state of disbelief, betrayal, confusion, loss. Once again, a boy promised me forever. Except this time, he gave me a Tiffany ring to prove it, not even two years into our relationship. He moved states to be with me. Uprooted his life, left his family and friends, to be with me, because he said we were forever. Opposites attract, but we could make anything work. We were alike in all the ways that mattered.

Secretly, I was always afraid that one day he’d remember his midwestern, suburban roots - the ones I buried - and he’d want to leave. Which is something I swore I’d never do for a man. 

Four years later. This summer was tough, after I got the job and started making money. At some point I got the ick. It seemed as my life was falling into place, his came to a standstill. He was working insane hours at the gym, to no avail, because his company pays their employees like shit. Knowing that it would never really get better, he made no concrete moves to move on. He went through the same lackluster phases of applying for jobs as I did, which looking back on, of course I understand. It’s extremely overwhelming, especially to someone with ADHD, and it’s easier to say “I’m fine where I am, I’m getting by, I’ll just do this later when I really need to.” When your job is mentally and physically draining to the point where you can’t properly take care of yourself outside of it, where on earth are you supposed to muster the energy to write cover letters and apply to jobs?

However, I’ve been through it before, and I broke out of it. I took steps to better myself and dive back into my passions, and that’s when everything started coming together. I assumed that with my experience, I could help him. But he wasn’t listening, wasn’t letting me, and all the while without my knowledge, he was spiraling.

I had the ick because he wasn’t doing anything to help himself despite my best efforts to help him. I guess I wasn’t as attracted to him because he lacked overall drive, which he eventually picked up on. It was disappointing seeing everyone else in our lives get their shit together, to watch his life continue on as it had for the past three years - like he was fresh out of college, always broke, and barely getting by. After my career began, it just wasn’t the same. My patience started to wear thin, and I was being rude. I have a problem in general with being mean to people I’m extremely comfortable with, which is bad. I lack a filter, always have. It got progressively worse with him, though, which I knew, and would try to work on, but then he would piss me off or disappoint me again. All of his interests annoyed me. I loved him, but I rarely liked him.

Then I went away for a week and was able to clear my head. I had the chance to miss him for the first time in years. I came back ready to start again, eager to look for apartments together and finally move on to the next step of our relationship.

If it wasn’t obvious, the day I came back he aired out all of his concerns about our compatibility, his distaste for New York, and his worsening depression, and it honestly caught me by surprise. I thought I was the only one experiencing and burying doubts. However, after our first honest conversation in months, I jumped to creating an action plan - what can we actively change going forward to support each other and ourselves more? I am not one to give up. The only reason I never brought anything up earlier is because I assumed it was all because of a bad PMS cycle and I wasn’t in my right mind, which was partially true.

But the bottom line is, I never would have given up. Because that’s not what you do when you promise someone forever.

However, he did.

Sunday was a perfect day in virtually every way. I felt clean, excited, refreshed, in love. When Monday came, he arrived home from work sick to his stomach with the guilt of having such a wonderful day previously, and basically ended it. I wasn’t aware that’s when we “broke up”, but that’s what he told our roommate that night - after I requested that nothing be final until we had a night apart to think.

One night turned into two. A night he was supposed to spend with his friends he ended up sleeping at his female coworker’s apartment without telling me. Without even thinking about telling me. If I hadn’t had his location, I probably still wouldn’t know. I was nauseous for a week straight. Honestly, I’m still nauseous. Especially because I don’t know if I can trust him about what’s happened, when no one else in my life seems to.

Above all, I didn’t think we were officially broken up until we were moved out of the apartment we live in together. Dating a libra is fun because they never want to have the hard conversation or give it to you straight. They live a double life, feeding you little lies to keep you happy and worry-free, while they do god knows what behind your back.

This was always a problem when it came to smoking. But now that it applies to potentially cheating (would he even consider it cheating? I certainly would, considering the words “it’s over” were never said and we were happily together less than 12 hours earlier), I have been a wreck.

I just never thought this would happen to us. I escaped back to Virginia to get away from all the traces of him, which is difficult when your entire lives are intertwined. His name is always on the tip of my tongue. When I’m alone, he’s the first person I want to call. When I’m scrolling through twitter, he’s the first person I want to show all the funny tweets to. And that’s the worst part of it, is losing your best friend. That one person who is always there for you no matter what.

I’m numb and nauseous over the fact that the thing we built for over four years could change so quickly overnight. That it could be so mindlessly disrespected in a matter of hours, minutes even. I genuinely don’t know what to think or what to do with myself, because the person I’ve been so in love with has completely disappeared. The body he used to be in is still walking around somewhere in New York, but everything is different and it’s killing me.

I might not be a sobbing pile of bones this time around, but it feels so much worse. The stakes are higher. The years were longer. Our love was so strong and felt so everlasting, up until a week ago. I can’t approach this time as open-armed as the last, because I have a job and bigger responsibilities now. If I think about it as heavily as I did last time, I would be permanently sick - or, worse than I already am.

I am just so sad and empty right now. I am grateful for my friends and family that have surrounded me, but boy... everything hurts all the time. I can’t even put this whole situation into words. But this was a start, and you know I’ll be back.

[phantom-le6]

Film Review - Justice League vs The Fatal Five

Hello all, and welcome to my first review on Tumblr in the wake of Facebook scrapping its Notes functionality, thereby forcing me to shift platforms (a practice I hope I won’t have to keep repeating).  To kick off my use of this new posting platform, I’m reviewing one of the two new films I got for Christmas, or rather the two films that are totally new to my collection; the other films I got were better copies of films I already own.  Anyway, we’re taking another dip into the world of DC Comics direct-to-home release animation with a look at Justice League vs The Fatal Five.

Before we get in the review itself, however, quick bit of house-keeping for anyone who hasn’t read one of my reviews before. The structure of my reviews is intro paragraph or two, a plot summary for anyone who has seen the film before and wants to refresh their memory, then the review itself.  The plot and the review are both clearly labelled, so to avoid spoilers just scroll past the section headed as ‘plot’ to the one labelled ‘review’.  Got all that? Ok, then here we go… 

Plot (adapted from Wikipedia):

In the 31st century, Mano, Tharok and Persuader of the Fatal Five attack the Legion of Super-Heroes' headquarters for their time sphere. Star Boy, Saturn Girl and Brainiac 5 try to keep them back but fail. Just as the villains activate the sphere, Star Boy leaps at them and is taken along. Arriving in the 21st century above Earth, Star Boy triggers a boobytrap Brainiac 5 programmed, trapping the villains inside the sphere in a stasis field. Star Boy comes down in Gotham City while the sphere ends up in Metropolis. Star Boy discovers his supply of medicine, needed to stabilize his mind, was destroyed in his rough landing. As his medicine doesn't exist yet, Star Boy's increasingly erratic behaviour gets him apprehended by Batman and taken to Arkham Asylum. The stasis-locked time machine is picked up by Superman and brought to the Justice League's headquarters for analysis. 

Ten months later, Jessica Cruz is struggling with the trauma of her near-death by a murderer who killed her friends, making her afraid to leave her apartment. To add to her anxiety, she has been chosen by a Green Lantern power ring and Wonder Woman keeps trying to recruit her into the Justice League. In Gotham, Miss Martian is trying to prove herself to Batman for membership in the League, but her inexperience works against her good intentions. While trying to unlock the secret of the strange sphere, Mister Terrific accidentally brings down the stasis field, freeing its occupants. Superman and Mister Terrific fight them, but Superman is wounded by Persuader's axe and the villains escape.

 Star Boy's memory is jogged by a news report of the fight, and he breaks out of Arkham. The Justice League members compare notes about these mysterious assailants and discover they are time travellers; and from Star Boy's words, Batman deduces that they are after Jessica. When the three villains attack Jessica, Star Boy comes to her rescue, followed by Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Mister Terrific, and Miss Martian, who force them into flight after a hard struggle. In the aftermath, Star Boy and Jessica form a close friendship based on the fact that both of them are struggling with their mental health.

To find out more about their guests from the future, Batman instructs Miss Martian to telepathically link them (Batman, Miss Martian and Jessica) with Star Boy's memories, thus learning about the Legion. They witness a battle between the Legion and the Fatal Five, which ended with the capture of Mano's lover Emerald Empress and Validus; as there was no prison that could hold them in the 31st century, the Legion took them to Oa in the 21st century. They also learn that if Star Boy misses more than two doses of his medication, it will cease to work and prevent him being in the Legion. 

Upon their awakening, the League receives an ultimatum from Mano: Surrender Jessica or all American cities will be destroyed by bombs created by Tharok. The first bombings start in Metropolis, forcing the Justice League to move out. Left behind with Star Boy in the Watchtower, Jessica is contacted by Tharok through her ring, forcing her to surrender herself to the Five and enable them entry to Oa's prison cells. Despite interference by Kilowog and Salaak, Emerald Empress and Validus are freed, and when Jessica fights back, Persuader cleaves her ring in two. Afterwards, Emerald Empress has her Emerald Eye of Ekron steal the energy of the Central Power Battery, and the Five return to Earth to recover the time sphere. 

In the meantime, Star Boy discovers Jessica's absence and informs the League. The heroes proceed to the time machine's location, a secret US military base, where the Fatal Five force them into battle. Emerald Empress subdues the Justice League and then initiates her master plan to use the Lantern's power to destroy Earth's sun, wipe out humanity, and thus prevent the formation of the Legion in their time. On Oa, Jessica recovers her faith and determination, and by reciting the Green Lantern oath, she reassembles her power ring. Brought back to her apartment by the ring, Jessica flies to the base and prevents the Fatal Five from escaping back to their own era by bringing the whole base down upon them, killing the supervillains. 

Superman, Jessica and Star Boy race after the Eye, but are too late to prevent it from plunging into the sun. As the star cracks apart, Star Boy sacrifices himself by lowering himself into the sun's core and using his powers to reverse the fracturing. In the final scene as the Justice League members commemorate Star Boy's heroism, they are joined by the Legion who have come from the future to honour their fallen comrade. Batman also grants Miss Martian admission into the League for her bravery.

Review:

This film is basically an original story not adapted from anything in particular, and although it is done in the style of the DC Animated Universe that originally revolved around the Batman, Superman and Justice League animated shows of the 1990’s and 2000’s, it is apparently meant to be a stand-alone narrative.  Cast-wise, we get back the like of Kevin Conroy, George Newbern and Susan Eisenberg to reprise their roles as the DC Trinity (Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman) from the Justice League animated series, and well-known voice actors like Kevin Michael Richardson and Tara Strong also feature in this production. 

In terms of character, we’re certainly getting a bit of a different Justice League line-up while also getting DC’s future team the Legion of Superheroes worked into the mix, primarily through the character of Star Boy and the film’s antagonists the Fatal Five.  In terms of the League itself, the customary League core that is the DC Trinity is in place, but then we have no Flash, Miss Martian in place of the better-known Martian Manhunter, and Mr Terrific to add to the team’s diversity in place of using Cyborg.  Finally, we have Jessica Cruz as the team’s Green Lantern, and it’s the use of her and Star Boy in this film that makes this film stand out from any other DC films, because both of these heroes are neurodiverse. 

As fans of more modern DC comics stories, or anyone who has looked into this film’s behind-the-scenes extras, will know, Star Boy is a schizophrenic, but by the 31st century there is medication to manage the behaviours that this form of neurodiversity can cause, so it’s not an uncommon idea among DC’s writers to show Star Boy getting trapped in our time without this medication.  During the Justice League era between Infinity Crisis and Final Crisis (not long before DC did its new 52 reboot and decided to stick to buying pre-2000 Marvel lore), the comics did in fact do this as part of the Legion coming back in time to bring back Wally West, the then-Flash who had become stuck in the Speed Force with his wife and children during the Infinity Crisis. 

By the same token, Jessica Cruz is a Green Lantern who has crippling anxiety following a traumatic event, so she’s having to use a lot of willpower to overcome that anxiety and function like anyone else.  Given that Green Lanterns are chosen based on their ability to overcome great fear, not only does it make a lot of sense for someone battling anxiety to be chosen as a Green Lantern, but it also very effectively demonstrates a much more positive and healthier take on mental illness in the world of superheroes. Granted, DC isn’t being particularly original in this regard; Iron Man’s alcoholism in the comics and his PTSD in the MCU show that Marvel has at least one heroic character that they’ve been willing to showcase as a positive example of what people can do despite being mentally different to others.  Sadly, neither company has yet done a good, positive, accurate take on autism yet, but then if they did, I’d have less fodder for my novel writing. 

Putting two neurodiverse heroes at the core of this film really makes it a great one to watch just because for once it means the neurodiverse characters aren’t the stereotypical crazed villain types and the idiotic stereotypes that stem from such misuse of the mentally divergent in fiction get combatted a little.  Granted, it would have been nicer if DC and WB could have demonstrated this kind of pro-mental health attitude in its live-action film wing by not making the Joker solo film and doing something more akin to this film in its place. There is no doubt in my mind that DC and WB need to put more of the staff behind their animated films on DCEU projects if it ever hopes to seriously compete with the MCU. 

Otherwise, the film is largely just a good diversion; well-animated, well-performed, but not a huge level of plot depth despite putting two neurodiverse characters front and centre on the side of the heroes. Hopefully going forward DC and WB can address that on some future film, either animated or live-action.  For now, I’m going to content myself by handing down a score of 9 out of 10.

[evefletchr]

coffee

Groaning softly as her email screen refreshed, showing four new additions to the already full inbox, Fallon resisted the urge to slam her laptop shut and pressed her shaking hands to the edge of the desk in an attempt to keep her temper in check.

The entire week was beginning to feel like a write-off. As grateful as she still was for Femperial, it had its moments of feeling like it was more stress than it was really worth. The work itself was fine but the consistent disrespect often outweighed the feelings of empowerment or forward momentum. The constant belittlement from her male competitors had caused her more than her fair-share of Kanye-level office meltdowns. More than one piece of tasteful decor had been destroyed as penance for being within her arms reach after losing a potential client that she was courting or listening to a particularly backhanded voicemail.  

Her new publicist - a gentle suggestion from Kirby after the fiasco with Blake’s assault accusations - was incredibly effective, if not a little overbearing. Her morning check-ins were nice, but the having to remember to text her every time Fallon wanted to post on Instagram was already getting old. She appreciated knowing that she was safe from another public scandal for the time being, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being babysat, which she had never been particularly good at.

Her phone buzzing on her desk snapped her attention away from the frustrating emails, and she felt a familiar but entirely unwelcome flutter in her chest when she read the name flashing on the screen.

Kirby.

Letting it ring twice before picking it up, Fallon leaned back in her seat and took a calming breath before speaking.

"Kirby. What is it?"

The other woman sounded a little breathless - she had insisted on walking instead of hiring a car when she went out to run a few above-intern-paygrade errands - but ultimately upbeat. Her morning was obviously going better than Fallon's was.

"Hi! I'm just finishing up here and getting ready to come back - did you eat anything, yet?"

"No," Fallon started, then quickly corrected her mistake. "I mean - no, I don't want you to bring me anything, if that was what you were leading in to."

A car horn honked in the background of the call. Kirby sighed.

"You didn't answer my question - well, you did. Sort of. I'll be back in less than ten."

Hanging up without another word, Fallon turned back to the screen and exited out of her email inbox and pulled up a new browser tab instead. Fingers still shaking from leftover adrenaline, she typed her own name into the search bar, clicked the 'news' tab, and began to scroll.

A result that hadn't been there when she'd fallen asleep well past midnight the night before caught her attention, and she glanced at the office door to ensure it was still closed before guiltily clicking on the link.

Fallon Carrington: Failing Upwards

Wincing at the title but preparing to keep reading, Fallon lurched forward to guard the screen when a knock at her office door announced that she was no longer alone.

"Come in!"

Straightening up and quickly minimizing the tab, Fallon rearranged her features into what she hoped was something neutral and unbothered just as Allison pushed the door open a crack and peeked her head inside.

"I've got a couple of manuscripts for you to sign for." She twisted more of her torso around the door like she were taking up as little room as possible, then held up a few heavy-looking envelopes. 

Beckoning her into the office with two fingers as she reached for one of her pens with her free hand, Fallon sighed tiredly and let the earlier momentary panic at getting caught melt away. It was replaced with sleepiness, though. Urgent sleepiness, in fact, her late night catching up with her all at once as Allison took the signed sheets back out into the reception area and left Fallon alone with the stack of fresh work.

She tried to focus, but the tab in the corner of her eye - shrunken down to a simple icon on her task bar - was taunting her. She knew whatever it said wouldn’t be accurate - the downside to the survival tactic of lacking public vulnerability also meant everyone else seemed to lack the cognitive dissonance to have any proper grasp on who she was as a person - but she had to know. Pushing aside the envelope she’d just unsealed, she glanced at the door - still cracked open from when Allison had come in - and then reopened the article. 

Carrington is a name that has bloomed out from the greater Atlanta area into a success story as impactful of pop culture as Kardashian or Trump over the last few generations, though just like it’s fellow categorants, has also had its fair share of painfully public failures. 

“I come bearing coffee, please hold your applause,” Kirby’s voice startled Fallon out of her silent reading as she slipped almost silently into the office. 

Scrambling to close the laptop as Kirby approached the desk, Fallon reached for one of the manuscript envelopes and held it out for the other woman to take, offering it as a distraction. Unloading the coffees and a paper bag onto the corner of the desk, the other woman knitted her brows together in thought.

"What's this?"

She reached out as if she was going to take it, but circled the desk and grabbed the top of the laptop instead, swiveling it around to look at the screen.

"Wait -" Reaching out for it in protest, Fallon groaned under her breath when Kirby harmlessly flicked her hands away and dipped down further to peer at the words on the screen, then read aloud: "Fallon Carrington - Failing Upwards."

Snorting in disbelief, Kirby shook her head and then reached for the trackpad, scrolling further down the article. Fallon's eyes flicked down to her hand and she realized she was holding her breath; the other woman's arm was nearly draped over her shoulder, close enough that they were nearly cheek to cheek.

"This is stupid," Kirby concluded, standing upright again. "Just another example of your enigma."

Feeling the corners of her mouth tug upwards involuntarily at the compliment, Fallon rolled her eyes to suppress it.

"I'm a little tired of being told who I am by other people - people who don't know me."

"As you should be," Kirby affirmed, rounding the desk again to pull the coffees from their tray one by one. "You know yourself - no one else needs to. One sugar, two ice cubes, and a half-shot of creamer."

She placed one of the paper cups in front of Fallon, pulling her attention from the screen to it, instead.

"I figured... midday lull, you'd want your chugging-temperature order instead." Smiling easily, she reached for the bag, next, and then reached inside of it to produce a mouth-wateringly fresh looking muffin. "And a muffin."

She placed it next to Fallon's coffee, then took the remaining cup for herself and nodded to the stack of manuscripts again.

"Do you want me to start on those?"

Blindly handing her the first envelope from the stack, Fallon dropped her gaze back to the muffin and cleared her throat.

“Thank you.”

Kirby shrugged, still smiling.

“I put bananas in the mini-fridge this morning, too.” 

Heading to her usual spot by the coffee table, the redhead settled in on one of the couches and got to work, leaving Fallon alone to her thoughts.

The coffee was admittedly perfect. Perhaps she wasn't as unknown to everyone as she had originally thought.

[a-night-at-the-0pera]

Stress Relief, Part 4

PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, Chapter Playlists

Pairing: College!Joe Mazzello x Reader

Summary: The start of senior year of college is usually full of bittersweet moments, but returning to campus without your best friend by your side is as bitter as the burnt dining hall coffee. With Joe busy with orientation activities and you unsure about what you want, it is hard to tell whether this last year of college will get off to the right foot, and if the two of you can repair your relationship. 

Warnings: BIG EMO ANGST (sorry, but it had to happen), alcohol consumption, some smut (18+ please!), fluff fluff fluff

Word Count: 10.4k

Author’s Note: Thank you all for waiting so patiently for this final chapter in the series! The past few weeks have taken a lot out of me, but I’m excited to share this last piece of the story with you. I’m honestly sad it’s over! I’ve sort of fallen in love with Joe and Y/N myself, and I’ll miss writing their dumbass adventures. I hope you all like this last chapter. Thank you for coming on this ride with me! I’ve been floored at every turn by how much people like this story, and I am so grateful for you all. As always, special shoutouts to @sweet-ladyy, @denimmay, and @o-holynight for being talented people and amazing friends...without you guys and your love, I honestly don’t know if I would have had the energy to finish this story. And, of course, thank you to @o-holynight, my graphic design queen, for the beautiful moodboard! Comments and reblogs are always appreciated! I love to hear what you all think! <3

~~~~~~~~~

To say you are restless is an understatement. It is 2am and you are wide awake, trying to not think about the alarm set on your phone for a bright and early 8am wake-up call. The car downstairs is packed, crammed full of boxes and bags, ready for the drive back to college. You even have an outfit for tomorrow all laid out, the comfy pair of shorts and soft t-shirt folded nicely on the chair in the corner. It’s not like this is your first rodeo. After all, tomorrow is the start of senior year. Shouldn’t you feel like a professional at this by now?

You roll over onto your stomach, grabbing your phone from the bedside table and unlocking it. Instinctively opening Snapchat, you scroll to the Discover page and click on the first little Story circle at the top, the screen flashing snapshots of the past 24 hours in your friends’ lives. Mara is watching Dirty Dancing with her sisters. Dylan is at his band’s last concert of the summer. Wren is already back on campus and unpacking their stuff, rocking out to their latest Spotify playlist. Sage’s story is punctuated with giggles, showing her mom attempting to roll a joint, captioned “last night in Colorado.” You smile to yourself, feeling your pre-move-in anxiety beginning to fade a little, replaced with excitement to see your friends again.

Until you reach his story. 

Joe’s face fills your screen, surrounded by a swarm of eager, smiling freshmen, all cheering and laughing. “I met these kiddos today but I would already die for all of them,” the caption says, cutting off a few millimeters of the cute orientation Geotag in the corner. Your heart pangs seeing him smile, even in his goofy orientation leader uniform. Especially in his goofy orientation leader uniform. And, on second inspection of the snap, you notice that Joe has a mustache, too. That’s new. A not-so-subtle reminder of the fact that you have barely seen his face in over a month. Your finger hovers over the screen, debating whether or not you should reply to the video clip. It is really cute, and you could send some innocuous message about the new kids or something. Or you could roast Joe on his new facial hair.  

Honestly, all you want is a response. Ever since your visit to New York, you and Joe have barely talked. No more dumb comments on each other’s summer Instagram posts. No more midnight FaceTime calls. Just a handful of Snapchats and texts, most opened and never answered. The lack of communication, quite honestly, is killing you, but you know that it’s all your fault. You’re the one who built the walls.

Fuck it, it can’t hurt to send him the message. The worst that can happen is that he opens it and doesn’t respond, and at this point, you’re used to that. You swipe up, typing in the little grey chat bar.

omg look at the babies!!! can’t wait to meet them!

It’s wishful thinking to expect a reply, especially at this hour, so you double-check your alarm and place your phone on the nightstand again, fidgeting to find a comfortable position on your mattress. Your eyes are just starting to drift shut when your phone dings, causing your eyes to fly open again. It can’t be. You snatch up your phone, nearly knocking over the water bottle on the table.

Snapchat from Joseph Francis.

It’s almost embarrassing how fast your heart is beating as you swipe open the notification, refreshing the page to load the message. The little blue speech bubble pops up, indicating a typed response instead of a picture. Okay, cool.

Haha yeah, they’re great

Definitely a lackluster response, but still something. You quickly type out another message, hoping that maybe you can start an actual conversation.

Why are you up so late?

You keep the app open, eager to see if Joe will respond again. After a minute, the little dots appear.

Orientation activities

I could ask you the same thing

Again, weirdly succinct for how Joe usually texts, but at least he is texting. Your fingers fly across the keyboard once again.

Guess I’m a little anxious about move-in tomorrow…I mean, it’s senior year, just one year left with everyone. But I’m also excited because I get to see you tomorrow! You’re living in Kennedy again, right?

The little dots immediately spring up, but disappear again after a few moments. You can see that he’s thinking about how to respond, and the waiting is excruciating.

“Come on, Joe, say something,” you whisper aloud to yourself, chewing anxiously on your lip.

Yep, Kennedy again…they renovated the bathrooms this summer, it’s really nice

That’s awesome! Well, I’ll be in Stafford, so we’ll be just across the green from each other. I’m getting to campus around noon tomorrow…after I move my shit in, maybe I could swing by your room to say hi?

Ordinarily, you’d cringe at your paragraph texting, but you are so desperate to talk to Joe that you don’t even care. The little dots pop up again, just for a second or two.

I’m busy, but I’m sure we’ll see each other around

Your heart twinges a little at that message. It is just so…dismissive? Flippant? You know he isn’t lying, since being an OL means he’s busy all the time until classes start, but it feels like he doesn’t want to make time for you.

“Well, even if you aren’t gonna make an effort,” you mutter, “I will.”

For sure! I’ll find you tomorrow somehow…probably by following a pack of lost freshies lmao

Joe’s response is a singular thumbs-up emoji. How can you even respond to that? With that one little picture, he’s basically told you he’s done talking. You sigh, closing the app and placing the phone on your nightstand again. For the first time that evening, a wave of exhaustion washes over you, although whether that’s from genuine tiredness or from trying to interact with Joe is hard to say. You yawn, snuggling into your pillow. Senior year may already be off to a rocky start, but that is definitely a tomorrow problem.

* * *

“I think that’s the last of them,” you pant, wiping a few beads of sweat from your forehead as you straighten up. The friendly sophomore who volunteered to help you puts the box she’s carrying on your bare mattress with a little grunt, turning to you with a smile.

“Well, if you need any more help, let me know! I live just down the hall.”

You smile back at her, “You really are an angel for helping me move in. You’re the RA for this floor, right?”

“Yep,” she nods, pointing at the plastic nametag dangling from the lanyard around her neck, “Kiera, Room 321, at your service!”

“How do you feel about being a sophomore in a building full of seniors?” you ask, beginning to unpack your clothes.

“A little nervous, if I’m honest,” she says softly, “you guys are all cool and smart and I’m just some dorky sophomore who’s job it is to make sure that you all don’t die.”

“Well, I promise that I won’t die on you,” you giggle, “and everyone I know who is living on this floor is pretty chill. I think the worst thing you’ll have to keep an eye out for is a repeat incident of the Walden Shitter.”

“The uh…the what?” Kiera asks, her eyes widening in confusion.

“My freshman year, there was a student who kept…relieving themselves in buckets and leaving said buckets all over Walden Hall. It was disgusting.”

“Did they ever catch them?” the RA squeaks out.

“Nah,” you giggle, “but they did send a hilarious email to the entire campus, and the Shitter was dormant after that. They’ve probably graduated by now. Unless, of course, the Shitter is in my class. Then they could even be living here in Stafford!”

Kiera stares at you, unsure if you’re joking or not. You smile at her, unfolding your tapestry.

“I think the best part of being a senior so far is passing on the lore to the young’uns like you,” you tease.

“Well, if the Shitter makes a reappearance, I’m blaming you,” she laughs back, “thanks for the heads-up, I guess? Anyways, I’ll get out of your hair, but I’ll see you around (Y/N)!”

You give her a little wave as she trots out of your room. It feels weird to have a student two years younger than you in charge of your floor, but you don’t envy her. In your previous three years of college, you’ve seen some really heinous situations that RAs have had to deal with. You smile to yourself thinking about the time someone set a notice board on fire in the student center during sophomore year. College really is a fucking zoo sometimes.

A familiar voice drifting in through your open window snaps you out of your reminiscing.

“…and on the left we have Stafford, one of the most popular dorms on campus. It’s mostly full of seniors though, so I’d call it more of a retirement home than a dorm! Haha...that was a bad joke, okay, yikes…moving on….”

You dart to the window, leaning out and craning your neck to see a mop of auburn hair passing by.

“JOSEPH FRANCIS MAZZELLO, YOU BETTER STOP RIGHT THERE!” you shriek, waving like a madwoman.

Joe turns around and looks up at the dorm with confusion, scanning the windows to see who is yelling at him. The moment he catches your eye, you spin on your heels and run out of your room and down the stairs, throwing open the heavy front door and sprinting down the path. You leap at Joe, enveloping him in a huge hug.

“I fucking missed you!” you breathe out, squeezing him tightly.

“It’s good to see you too,” Joe smiles at you, patting you on the shoulder.

“And I see you’ve decided to grow a new little friend, huh?” you tease, reaching up to poke at his mustache. However, before your finger can stroke the thin strip of reddish hair, Joe jerks his head away from you, clearing his throat. You’re suddenly very aware of the group of freshman staring at you, your arms wrapped around their orientation leader.  You laugh awkwardly, stepping back from your friend.

“Hi everyone, um…welcome to campus!” you offer, smiling at them, “uh…I’m (Y/N), I’m a senior here. Sorry, I just got so excited to see Joe! You know, these are the kinds of friendships you’ll make here at…”

“Why don’t you save the cheesy Dean of Students-style speeches to me, huh?” Joe mercifully cuts you off with a chuckle, squeezing your arm lightly, “don’t wanna ruin your cool-kid senior façade now, do you?”

“As if I ever had that,” you snort, rolling your eyes at Joe before turning back to the freshman, “you all are seriously lucky to have this dork as your OL, he’s the best guy on campus.”

Joe blushes a little at that, digging his toe into the dirt.

“Thanks, (Y/N). Uh, we gotta keep moving though, there’s a barbeque in twenty minutes that we can’t be late for.”

“Oh, can I meet you there?” you ask, “I’m starving, and I can’t wait to catch up with you!”

“I’ll be working,” Joe states plainly, “and it’s just for new students.”

“And what, you won’t sneak me in?” you tease, poking his shoulder.

“No, I won’t,” he says through gritted teeth, looking at his orientation group, “I can’t, (Y/N).”

Your smile falls from your lips and you take a step away from Joe, shocked by his change in tone. Last year, Joe would have offered to sneak you into the barbeque before you could even ask. Maybe it’s just the fact that he’s supposed to be a good example to the new kids. Or maybe it’s because…

You shake your head, plastering another smile across your face, before responding “Of course, I was just joking, Joe! Well, I’ll let you guys get on with your tour, I guess. Um, text me later, okay?”

Joe nods and waves as you walk back to the front door of Stafford. As he walks off with his gaggle of excited freshman, you feel a pang in your heart. A naïve part of you had hoped that perhaps Joe’s lack of communication this summer was just because he was busy with his internship, but it’s pretty obvious now that something is very wrong between the two of you. The idea of Joe hating you is too much to bear. Who is going to call you for 2am pizza parties? Who is going to go to Senior Ball with you? Who is going to be your rock for this final tumultuous and all-important year of college?

There’s only one other person on campus you want to talk to right now. You pull up your video chat app, clicking on Sage’s icon. A few rings later, her beautiful chocolate-brown curls fill the screen, and you smile.

“Hey, gorgeous, how are you?”

She sighs, angling the camera so you can see the stacks of boxes behind her, “Sweaty as hell…unpacking is the worst thing about moving back to college.”

“I thought the worst thing about moving back to college was having homework again.”

“Actually, I take it back, the worst thing about moving back to college is hearing my next-door neighbor fucking her boyfriend.”

You nearly choke from laughter, “Already? Are you kidding? We’ve been back for two hours!”

“Love finds a way,” Sage drawls, rolling her eyes, “anyways, what are you up to?”

You shrug, pausing on the dorm stairs, “I was just going to go back to my room and unpack, I guess.”

“Well, why don’t you come to my room and help me unpack?” she suggests, “we haven’t seen each other in forever, and I can always use an extra set of hands for untangling my necklaces.”

“What an offer,” you reply sarcastically, “unpacking your boxes to avoid doing my own.”

“Hey man, you don’t have to,” she responds, “but I can pay you in summer gossip and chocolate.”

You giggle, “fine, you’ve convinced me. You’re living in Howser this year, right?”

“Yep, second floor. I’ll see you soon, babe,” Sage confirms, smiling as she hangs up.

* * *

Your hand has barely grazed the door of Sage’s room before she calls out, “It’s open!”

“Sage!” you squeal, swinging open the door and holding out your hands, pulling your friend into a tight hug. The two of you bounce around, clinging to each other and laughing, before collapsing on Sage’s overcrowded single bed.

“I missed you, (Y/N)! Looks like you had a good summer, though,” Sage sighs, turning to look at you.

“Yeah, it was okay,” you demur, “mostly working, interning, avoiding my parents…typical stuff. How was working at that summer camp?”

“Kids love me,” she laughs, “can’t say I love the little monsters back, but hey, I made serious bank. Guess that makes getting poison ivy on my ass worth it!”

The two of you spend a few more moments lying on the bed before Sage hands you a fabric bag full of jewelry. You reach in and grab hold of an earring, but when you try to yank it out of the bag, a giant tangled ball of necklaces, bracelets, and other shiny things emerges. As Sage puts on a playlist and gets to work unpacking her suitcases, you diligently start to untangle.

“You went to go see Joe in New York sometime in July, right?”

You nod silently, digging the corner of your nail into a particularly difficult knot in the jewelry ball.

“So…how was it?” Sage presses.

“Fine,” you say simply, “we got ice cream and went roller skating and watched movies…it was fine.”

“Just fine?” she teases, “come on, that must’ve been, like, the most exciting weekend of your summer.”

You shrug, avoiding her eyes. Sage stares at you for a few moments before starting her line of questioning again.

“So are you guys gonna hang out tonight?”

“Why would we hang out tonight?” you splutter out.

“Gee, (Y/N), why would you hang out with your best friend after months of not seeing him?” she drawls sarcastically, “it’s almost like, I don’t know, people can miss each other?”

Again, you shrug, desperately struggling with a particularly knotted necklace to try and divert attention away from the fact that you are avoiding answering. You can feel your friend’s eyes boring into the top of your head.

“Did something…happen? Are you avoiding Joe for some reason?” she asks, dropping the sarcasm in her voice.

You flop backwards on the bed with a sigh, giving in to the pressure to share. If someone has to know, it might as well be Sage.

“I’m not the one doing the avoiding…things got weird over the summer.”

“Ah! The truth comes out!” she grins, turning to face you with her hands on her hips, “alright, spill. Weird how?”

You grimace, hiding your face in your hands. Guilt wracks your body as you realize just how much you’ve hidden from your friends, especially Sage, who has really been there for you ever since the fall of sophomore year, when you suffered through a hellish macroeconomics lecture together. To stay awake during the brutally boring 9am course, the two of you would pass notes back and forth. They initially started as questions about the lecture, but eventually blossomed into little doodles of your horrid professor, hungover confessions about what had happened the night before, and scribbled admittances of classroom crushes. Sage was there for you when you were on the brink of failing Ancient Greek, and you were there for her when her girlfriend broke up with her out of the blue over Snapchat. And she could be there for you now, if you just let her in.

You shakily exhale, sitting up on the bed and pulling your legs under you.

“It’s a long story.”

And it practically spills out of you. The finals week stress in the library. The party with his stupid unbuttoned shirt. Him wiping off your make-up so sweetly. Him making you moan his name, your first orgasm washing over you courtesy of your best friend. The trip to New York, with its movie nights and reciprocal blowjobs and strawberries and roller skating. Its disastrous ending on that moonlit golf course, your best friend’s cum dripping out of you as you biked back to his house in tears. The fact that you barely spoke for the rest of the summer. And throughout the whole re-telling, you keep coming back to how it’s all your fault. You, with your stupid guarded heart and fear of intimacy, are the one who destroyed your friendship before the sex even had the chance to. If it even would have.

When you finish with the story, you let out a deep breath, turning to face Sage again. The sun has begun to set, the golden rays filtering through the leaves outside the window to dapple the walls and linoleum floor. It feels like you just ran a marathon, but it feels good to finally let everything out, to confide in someone. Even if you can’t see this problem being fixed.

“But it would be safer to just be friends, you know? And I’m sure he’s thinking the same thing,” you murmur quietly, grabbing the ball of tangled jewelry again to give your hands something to do.

“But ‘just friends’ don’t look at each other like that, (Y/N), and you know it,” Sage says, flashing you a knowing look.

“Like what?”

“You really are clueless, huh?” she teases, “I swear, I thought you and Joe have been endgame since sophomore year! When you were talking about having crushes on guys, you’d always compare them to Joe.”

You stare at her, “I would fucking not.”

“Yes, you would!” she nods furiously, “Always saying things like ‘Peter and I laughed all class today, which reminded me of the time Joe and I…blah blah blah’. Or ‘Taylor asked me out, but I said no, because I had plans with Joe that night’. Sister, are you serious? Best friends cancel plans with each other to let their friends go on hot dates.”

“Well, I never told him about Taylor asking me out!” you say, throwing your arms up in exasperation, “I’m sure if I did, Joe would have been fine with me bailing.”

“But you didn’t tell him,” Sage says pointedly.

“No, I didn’t, but that doesn’t mean….it doesn’t mean I have a crush on Joe. It’s just my personal business! He doesn’t have to know everything about me,” you huff indignantly.

“Best friends know that shit, (Y/N). The fact that you care so much about Joe but chose not to tell him about Peter or Taylor or anyone else who you’ve hooked up with is kind of telling, isn’t it?”

“I…I…,” you stammer, unable to come up with a reply.

Sage sighs, smiling sweetly at you and squeezing your knee before standing, busying herself with unpacking again.

“I mean, I get why you’d have a crush on him,” she shrugs, “Joe’s really cute. And a good kisser, too.”

You stop dead, the charms of the necklace you’re untangling clinking together. Sage’s words are processing in your mind, the gears turning embarrassingly slow.

“How do you know that?” you venture tentatively, setting down the tangled mass of delicate gold chains.

“What, that Joe’s talented with his tongue? We hooked up a few times freshman year, like super messy, floor-of-the-frat-house make out sessions. He’s a sweet guy, but he definitely wanted something more serious, so we had fun and went our separate ways,” Sage answers nonchalantly, continuing to fold t-shirts into her dresser.

You take a shaky breath in, the world spinning a little around you. The image of your two best friends as stupid, drunk freshman rolling around together on some sticky floor would ordinarily be an equally embarrassing and hilarious thought, but it makes you sick to your stomach.

“You never told me,” you mumble, fidgeting with the hem of your shorts.

“I didn’t?” Sage asks, looking at you over her shoulder, “I thought I did.”

“Why didn’t you guys tell me?” you hiss, gritting your teeth to try and keep tears from falling.

Sage crosses her arms and cocks out her hip, clearly a little frustrated by your reaction.

“Babe, in all fairness, I didn’t know you then. And I didn’t know until five minutes ago that you had feelings for Joe, on top of already having fucked him! I love you, but it’s my business who I hook up with, and to be perfectly honest, I thought Joe would have told you by now, considering he knows how often we hang out.”

You just shake your head, the first few hot tears beginning to slip out. You know she’s right, that it’s unfair of you to be so angry when all this happened years ago, but you can’t help feeling betrayed somehow.

“Still, Sage, you should have…”

“(Y/N), you are getting angry at the wrong person,” she begins, sitting next to you on the bed, “Of course, if we had known each other then and I knew you had feelings for Joe, I never would have made out with him. You know that. But you can’t retroactively call dibs. Plus, you weren’t even friends with him freshman year. But clearly the boy is in love with you, (Y/N), and it’s pretty obvious that you lo…”

“Everyone needs to stop telling me how to feel!” you yell, jumping to your feet, angrily wiping at the tear tracks on your cheeks.

“I’m not trying to…”

“Yes, you are! And Joe tried to get me to admit it that night by the fucking golf course pond, too! Why can’t…why can’t I just…,” you stammer angrily, unable to pin down your emotions.

“Why can’t you just be honest with yourself?” Sage snaps back, “what the hell are you afraid of, (Y/N)?”

Silent, open-mouthed sobs are wracking your body, the swirling cloud of emotions too much for you to handle. You sink down onto the ground, pulling your knees to your chest.

“What are you afraid of, (Y/N)?” Sage repeats, softer this time.

“I…I d-don’t know.”

“Well, sweets, I think you need to talk to Joe,” she suggests, kneeling next to you and pulling you in for a tight hug, “I know it’s scary, but the only way to fix this is to be honest with him.”

“B-but what if…”

“No,” Sage cuts you off with a kind but stern look, “you’ve had enough ‘what if’s’. Why can’t you finally have a ‘why not’?”

You just cry, clutching onto the front of Sage’s sweatshirt as you stain it with tears. She just hums softly, rubbing your back.

“I’m s-sorry that I d-didn’t t-tell you sooner,” you stammer out, the apology punctuated by hiccups.

“It’s okay, (Y/N),” she says, “I mean, am I a little pissed that I missed out on all this tea over the summer? Yes. But I’m happy you’ve told me know, and honestly honored that you confided in me like this.”

You nod, wiping away the tear tracks on your cheeks, “Thank you for listening.”

“Anytime, lovely. And now, the best part about telling me begins.”

“What do you mean?” you ask warily, a little afraid of the plan Sage is undoubtedly cooking up.

“Because now I can help you get him alone,” she says, flashing a wicked grin, “And I just so happen to know where he’s going to be tonight.”

* * *

How you always end up on the porch of Beta Theta Pi is beyond you, but there you are again, nearly four months after that last fateful visit, ready to finally talk to Joe about how you feel. Well, as ready as you can be, six vodka shots deep.

The pre-game at Ollie’s apartment off-campus definitely got a little out of hand, the alcohol flowing freely during some wild games of King’s Cup as ABBA blasted in the background. By the time Sage suggested Strip Go-Fish, it was time to get going to Frat Row, so your small group staggered out the door, cheering incoherently about the first big bash of senior year. Sage kept whispering in your ear about how important it is that you find Joe at the party, and you nodded, the alcohol in your system carrying away your fear of confrontation.

But now, standing on the porch in the rapidly cooling early fall air, seeing the party raging inside through the open front door, your confidence falters. Even through your alcohol-induced haze, you can feel the anxiety bubbling up, burning your throat. Or maybe that’s just the vodka. At least you can get rid of that easily.

Sage and Ollie seem to sense your hesitation and each take a side, grasping you firmly and pulling you into the house.

“I think maybe…,” you begin, looking around at the familiar surroundings of the frat house. Did they clean this place over the summer? Wild.

“Maybe what? We should dance?” Sage offers, grinning at Ollie, who eagerly nods.

“Come on, Y/N, they’re playing Ke$ha,” he adds, pulling you in the direction of roaring music. The darkened living room that’s serving as the dance floor smells of stale beer and weed, the two strobe lights perched on the table in the corner illuminating the room with flashes of rainbow-colored light. The bass line begins to flow through your veins like the alcohol, and you are transported, immediately giving into the music. There’s plenty of time to find Joe, right? You might as well enjoy the party first.

As you, Sage, and Ollie swing your hips and sing along to “Your Love is My Drug”, a smile spreads across your face. This is how the beginning of the school year is supposed to feel; carefree and wild, blasted off your ass and listening to mid-2000s hits with your friends at a smelly frat party. The three of you go absolutely bezerk during the last chorus, jumping up and down and grinning madly at each other, sharing a moment of complete euphoria.

The next song starts, the bass boosted to 100. Your ears prick up, the telltale intro to Beyoncé’s “Drunk In Love” blasting through the frat house’s speakers. Sage taps you on the shoulder and gestures to the kitchen, signaling that she is going to get a drink, and Ollie follows suit, miming that he’ll be back in a minute. Ordinarily, you’d be a little anxious to be on the dancefloor on your own, but for some reason, tonight you feel totally fine. The floor of the house is vibrating from the bass, and you dance to the beat, your eyes closing as you get into the music.

Suddenly, a cheer goes up from the other side of the dark living room, where a huge gang of freshman has gathered. They have formed a circle, dancing up on each other as they yell at the figure bobbing wildly in the middle. Your eyes feel a little fuzzy and you can’t see too far, so you inch your way over to see what the fuss is about.

Lo and behold, the boy you came here to find is breaking it down in the center of the ring of freshmen, still in his orientation leader uniform. His orientation group is shrieking with laughter, clapping and grinning at their OL’s goofy antics. Several of them have whipped out their phones, and Joe hams it up for the cameras, pulling ridiculous faces and winking as he drops to the ground and begins to do The Worm. You can’t help but laugh.

Joe’s eyes immediately snap to you, the laughter sparkling in them quickly fading to apprehension. He scrambles up from the floor, plastering on a fake smile and clapping one of the boys near him on the back.

“Tyler, you take over!” he laughs, his eyes still locked on yours.

Tyler immediately jumps in and the group cheers as Joe slips away. He comes towards you, but swerves left, giving you a weak smile as he tries to skirt around you.

“Hey, (Y/N),” he mutters, heading towards the kitchen.

“They finally played Beyoncé for you, huh?” you say quickly, grabbing his wrist, “that’s why you were dancing, right?”

Joe nods, another tight-lipped smile playing across his face as he tries to pull his wrist gently from your grasp.

“Th’ kids seem to really like you,” you slur, “shouldn’t be surprised.”

“How much have you had tonight?” Joe questions, worry flashing briefly in his eyes.

“A lot, Sage and Ollie and I played King’s Cup, ‘n I had to drink the cup, so” you explain, gesturing vaguely, still holding his wrist.

“Do you wanna dance with me?” you ask, tugging lightly on him.

“I’m working,” Joe answers flatly.

“Come on,” you whine, “you were dancing jus’ a second ago, why won’t you dance with me now?”

“Because I’m busy,” he states impatiently, “gotta make sure no one overdoes it. And I have to make my rounds, so please let me go.”

“No,” you pout, your grip tightening, “dance with me!”

“Let me go right now!” Joe hisses, twisting out of your grip, “What is your problem, (Y/N)?”

“What is my problem?” you repeat back to him, eyes widening, “my problem? No, it’s our problem, Joe. Our problem. The two of us, together.”

He groans, stepping away from you, “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“So when?” you spit out, “when can you pencil me in, Joe? When can you make time for me?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he hisses back.

“You’ve been ignoring me all summer, ever since New York, and I fucking missed you,” you say, feeling a few tears starting to prick in your eyes.

“Oh, so now we care about feelings, I see,” Joe bites back, rolling his eyes and turning away from you towards the kitchen.

“You don’t care about my feelings at all Joe, so stop pretending like you do,” you yell, a few heads whipping in your direction, equally excited and repulsed by the unfolding drama.

“When were you gonna tell me about you and Sage, huh? Or did you keep that from me because you care about my feelings?”

Joe stops dead in his tracks, his back to you. Over his shoulder, you can see Sage and Ollie, gaping at the scene in front of them. The music is still blasting, but all chatter has stopped, every eye in the room trained on the meltdown in the middle of the dance floor.

“That really isn’t any of your business, (Y/N),” he spits out, his tone ice cold, “And besides, you fucking hated me freshman year, so what does it matter?”

“Yeah, I fucking hated your mustache freshman year too, but that doesn’t stop you from growing another set of pubes on your face now, does it?” you shriek back, “it looks like a caterpillar crawled up your neck and died, Joe! It’s fucking disgusting!”

“You know, I really don’t have to stand here and listen to this right now,” Joe retorts, still not looking at you. He walks towards the hallway, clapping another OL on the shoulder, muttering about how he has to go.

“Next time you make out with my friend, you fucking tell me!” you shout at his retreating figure, tears beginning to stream down your face, “you talk to me, Joe!”

The front door of the house slams shut, the sound making nearly everyone in the room wince. Your chest is heaving, tears flowing freely from your eyes as you stand frozen in the living room. It feels like you blacked out. Everything moved too fast. What just happened?

Sage snaps you out of your thoughts by grabbing your arm and pulling you out into the hallway.

“What the fuck was that?” she growls, “that was not what we talked about.”

“Yeah, well, I’m drunk, Sage, and your plan was shit to begin with,” you grumble, eyes lolling shut to avoid the harsh overhead light.

“No, that went to shit because it wasn’t the plan,” she hisses, shaking you a little, “and you really didn’t need to bring mine and Joe’s history into it.”

“Oh, fuck off,” you moan.

“Fine. I will. I’m washing my hands of this whole fucking situation, (Y/N). Good luck. Text me when you’ve fixed it, or when you’re ready to apologize to me,” Sage says coldly, dropping her hands to her side and stalking back to the kitchen.

You stumble down the hallway, flinging open the front door and clambering down the porch steps. All you can think now is that you want to be as far away from this frat house as possible. You wander down the street and turn left onto the main campus, which is softly illuminated by the yellow glow of the streetlamps. The leaves rustle overhead as you walk, kicking stones with the toes of your shoes. A bench appears on your right, and you immediately collapse onto it, pulling your jacket tighter around your body. It’s wet, and you register that you’ve been crying this whole time, tears soaking through the light material.

Tossing your head back, you stare at the moon, rising full and round overhead. It was under this same moon that you and Joe walked home from the frat party in May, giggly and softly wrapped up in each other. It was under this same moon that he filled you so completely for the first time, down in the soft grass on the Hyde Park golf course.

And it’s under this moon now that you realize, fully and honestly, how badly you fucked up. You let your fear of rejection completely take over your life, torpedoing your friendship before any romantic feelings even had the opportunity to consider doing so. Self-sabotage is one hell of a drug, and you’re feeling the effects now. You need to talk to him. You need to set things right if you have any chance of salvaging this friendship.

Heaving yourself up from the bench, you begin to tread in the direction of Joe’s dorm. Kennedy House is an old, imposing grey stone building in the center of campus, famous for its palatial single rooms and horrendously small showers. The façade of the dorm looms like a castle wall, cold and imposing in front of you as you fumble in your pockets for your keycard to swipe into the building, finding nothing but an old gum wrapper and your earbuds.

“Fuck,” you sigh out, “must’ve dropped it at Beta.”

If you knew which window was Joe’s, you might have resorted to throwing pebbles, but just as you were dangerously eyeing the gravel in the flowerbed, another student walks up the front steps of Kennedy, brandishing her keycard. You smile at her.

“Hey, I dropped my card at Beta, could you swipe me in?”

“Uh, sure,” she says, looking you up and down once before swiping her plastic ID through the slot next to the door, the lock releasing with a loud clunk. You thank her and begin to roam the first floor, checking the little nameplates on the bedroom doors. The RA on this floor apparently chose a Disney theme, with each student getting a different character from the most popular films. Tragically, amongst all the princes and animal sidekicks, there is no Joe to be found. You decide to try your luck on the second floor, the doors filled with images of famous cereal brands. The third floor is equally adorable with zoo animals, but equally frustrating with its lack of Joe. You’re starting to believe that you misread his message about where he lived. Finally, while roaming the fourth floor, you find his door. A little paper peach is taped to the painted wood, his name spelled out in thick, inky block letters. Farmer’s market theme? How wholesome.

Your fist hesitates in front of the door, your mind racing as you pray that he is in his room. It’s now or never.

“Joe, it’s me,” you say softly, knocking gently on the wood.

No response.

“Are you asleep?” you ask, knocking again, “Joe, I really wanna talk.”

A few faint voices float in from the open hallway window. The students smoking on the front stoop are loud enough that, if you hadn’t been listening to the door so intently, you would have missed it. The tiniest of sniffles from the other side of the peeling paint.

“Joe, I know you’re in there!” you bark, voice cracking in desperation as you begin hammering on the door, “please open the door.”

The creaking of bed springs and the shuffle of feet alert you to the fact that Joe has gotten out of bed. You step back from the door, ready to see him, but the door does not open.

“Go away, (Y/N).”

“Did you seriously get out of bed to tell me that?” you scoff, banging on the door again, “I am not gonna go away until we talk, Joe!”

“So now you want to talk?” Joe bites back. You can almost hear the angry curl of his lip.

“Yes, Joe, I do,” you say firmly, “please.”

There is a long pause, punctuated with shaky breaths from both sides of the hard wood. Finally, the lock clicks and Joe opens the door just a crack, his eyes peering out from the darkened room.

“So talk.”

“I’m not doing this out in the hallway, Joe.”

“Fine,” he mumbles, opening the door further and turning quickly around, flicking on the string lights by his bed before sitting heavily in the wooden desk chair, “close the door behind you.”

You shut the door as you step into the dimly lit room, the orangey glow of the lights flickering across Joe’s stone-cold and clean-shaven face. You blink your eyes rapidly, staring at the newly-bare patch of skin on his upper lip. He must have just shaved it when he got home from the party.

“Your mustache…” you murmur, absentmindedly reaching out to cup his cheek, your thumb grazing lightly against a bead of blood weeping from a razor nick. Joe’s eyes flutter closed at your touch, a tiny sigh escaping his lips as he lets himself be held by you. But the moment does not last long, his eyes flying open wildly as he swats your hand away.

“I shaved it off, “he spits out, shrinking away from you, “because it was just so ugly, right? Are you happy now?”

“I…I didn’t mean…”

“To fucking roast me in front of my orientation group? In front of every goddamn person in Beta? There’s an awful lot you do that you don’t seem to mean, (Y/N), and I’m really tired of you making a fool out of me,” he says, eyes full of fire.

“What have I done to embarrass you, Joe?” you return, heat rising in your cheeks, “you’re the one that started all of this last May! You’re the one that permanently fucked up this friendship, you and that mouth of yours. So why am I the one to blame now?”

“Oh, please, (Y/N), you’re the one that said yes!”

“And you’re the one that said it wouldn’t change anything between us.”

Joe swivels in his chair, his hands fisting frustratedly in his auburn hair, squeezing his eyes shut and tugging at the roots as he responds.

“We both chose to believe that, though, didn’t we?”

He’s right. If you had truly thought it was a bad idea, you wouldn’t have accepted Joe’s offer, right? But you did. And you enjoyed it. A lot. You exhale a shaky breath, leaning against the wall near his bed.

“But why would you offer to do that, then, if you…if you maybe thought things would be different after?” you ask, your eyes searching for Joe’s.

There’s a softness to his brown eyes when he finally meets your gaze, a softness that betrays more feeling than he probably would want to, if he could see himself.

“Maybe…maybe I wanted things to change.”

His words squeeze the breath right out of your lungs.

“(Y/N), I’ve been crazy about you ever since Spring Weekend during Freshman year. Why do you think I was standing outside your room before vomiting all over it? I wanted to ask you out even then. I just…just used too much liquid courage to hype myself up for doing it, and well…” he pauses, scratching the back of his neck.

Your back starts sliding down the wall, your legs folding under you as you sink slowly to the floor. What is happening right now? Did Joe really just confess that he has feelings for you? Everything needs to stop. You need time to catch up. But Joe just keeps talking, a freight train of emotions barreling out of his mouth.

“And then when I saw you in that English lecture the next fall, I swear I truly believed there was a God. I was so pumped when the professor sat us next to each other, so I could apologize for being a dick in the spring and maybe get to know you. The more I learned about you, the more I wanted to spend every minute of every day around you. And finally you wanted to hang out. And finally we got closer. But the closer we got, the more you started to see me as a friend.”

You nod your head slowly, eyes glazed over. It feels like you are a million miles away from campus right now, with Joe’s voice seeping hazily into your brain. You wish he would stop talking.

“And I love being your friend, (Y/N)! I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty or anything, or to make you feel like you owe me anything…god, I really sound like an incel piece of shit. I just…that night last May, after the party, it broke my heart to see how stressed out you were, and my idiot brain just blurted out whatever it was thinking. And when you agreed, all I could think was ‘finally, I get to worship this beautiful girl like I’ve always wanted, like she’s always deserved.’”

“Joe, please…” you moan weakly, head resting in your hands.

“But then, you didn’t want anything between us to change. And when you visited me in New York, you kept saying that, too. So I tried my best to just enjoy what we were doing, and believe me, it was great,” he chuckles, running his hands through his hair again, “but I had to try and squash down all these years of feelings, and they all came spilling out on that golf course. Seeing you on top of me, your eyes shining in the moonlight…God, (Y/N), you really don’t know how amazing you are. And I tried again to be vulnerable, to let you know how I feel, but you clearly didn’t feel the same way. That hurt. And it still hurts. But if you really want us to go back to just being friends, I’m willing to try. Because I can’t lose you...because…because I...”

“Joe, please stop,” you croak out again, tears flowing freely, “I can’t do this.”

Joe snaps out of his monologue, finally realizing that you’re slumped on the floor at the side of his bed. He slips out of the desk chair, kneeling in front of you and gently placing a hand on your knee.

“What are you afraid of? Please, (Y/N), just tell me…”

“We are running out of time,” you choke out, digging the heels of your hands roughly into your tear-soaked eyes. You can feel the fine, dark grit of running mascara on your skin, but there isn’t really a point now of trying to not make it worse. Joe tries to pull your hands away from your face but you jerk away from him, curling in on yourself. A few tears start to prick in the corners of his eyes.

“What do you…”

“There’s an expiration date on all this, Joe!” you explode, whipping your face to look at him, “We get one year together, just nine more months! And then what? We find jobs, go to grad school, get scattered everywhere across the globe? How can I feel good about starting a relationship that I know will end in heartbreak?”

Joe recoils from your outburst, sitting back on his heels as you seethe in front of him.

“So you’re saying that no matter what, we would have to break up in May?” he begins slowly, clearly trying to keep his temper, “What if we ended up in jobs in the same city? We could do long distance. Are you really saying that this wouldn’t be worth it? That we wouldn’t be worth it?”

You groan, throwing your head against the wall, “It’s fucking hard, Joe! At graduation, you say bye to your friends knowing that when you see them again, it’ll be just like old times! You’ll pick up where you left off. And I don’t want us to change. I don’t want to leave you in May and drift apart because of distance or whatever.”

“I wouldn’t let that happen,” Joe grits out, firmly grabbing your leg.

“Well, you let it happen this summer.”

That makes Joe freeze. Anger is dancing in his eyes, and you can tell you hit a nerve.

“I was fucking hurt, (Y/N). You crushed my heart that night on the golf course.”

“Oh, boo-fucking-hoo, Joe! You ambushed me with wanting to talk about your feelings, apparently feelings you’ve had for forever. You can’t just do that!”

“Well, what was I supposed to do then, huh?” Joe fumes, his voice full of acid, “just keep fucking you, pretending there wasn’t any emotion in it? Keep biting back all the things I wanted to whisper in your ear while I was deep inside you? Where would nine more months of that get us, huh? Because just a few months of that has gotten us here, and I fucking hate being here.”

“So then go!” you shriek, scrambling to your feet, “you got what you wanted! You got to fuck the girl you’ve had a crush on for years, and you even got some free fashion advice and a trip to the roller rink out of it! You basically just admitted that that was the moment you’ve been waiting for for all these years, so just check me off the conquest list and fucking go! But I’m not going to spend my last year of college playing ‘will-they-won’t-they’ with someone who doesn’t respect my need for time and space and…and…”

“You aren’t making any sense, (Y/N), just listen to yourself!” Joe yells, jumping up and gesturing wildly at you.

“Well if I’m so fucking insane, Joe, just tell me to shut up and kick me out of your room, then!” you shriek back, stepping towards him. Joe growls at you, low and deep from the back of his throat, his eyes dangerously dark.

“I’ll make you shut up.”

And suddenly, his lips are on yours, feverishly angry and hot, pressing you up against the wall. One of his hands immediately finds your hip while the other tangles in your hair, tugging harshly. You moan into his mouth, your teeth grazing his bottom lip. This should not be happening, but both your bodies are saying quite the opposite. Joe grinds against your thigh and you whimper, reaching down to palm him over his jeans, but as your fingertips graze over his hardening length, he breaks the kiss and pushes you away, blinking rapidly.

“No. No. This…this can’t happen again,” he stammers out, shaking his head with wide eyes, “I can’t.”

You just stare at him, your lips swollen and still hanging open.

“I can’t do this anymore, (Y/N).”

“Well you’re the one who kissed me just now, Joe,” you reply, matter-of-factly.

“I know, and I’m sorry,” he says, sinking down onto his bed, “I just want to know what this is. What we are. If this is going to go anywhere. Because if it isn’t, we need to stop this. Quit cold turkey.”

You nod silently, praying that your mind could stop spinning for long enough to make a decision. It is now or never.

“Can you say something, please?” Joe whispers, picking anxiously at his nails, “I just want to know what you’re thinking.”

On shaky legs, you slowly walk over to the bed, sitting gingerly down on the soft comforter. Joe’s eyes are glued to you, desperate for any indication about where your mind is at. You pick a spot on the wall to stare at, stabilizing yourself.

“I’ve known…ever since I visited you, I’ve known that I really like you, Joe. And ever since we fought at your house, I’ve known that I don’t like my life when you’re not in it. I just…”

Joe visibly deflates, sighing, “There it is. The whole ‘I like you, but’ speech.”

“Joey, let me finish,” you plead, gripping his thigh, “please.”

He nods, delicately placing his hand over yours, squeezing lightly.

“I like you. I want this. I don’t know how long I’ve wanted this, but I know it’s what I want. But I don’t think you want me.”

“What? (Y/N), that’s ridiculous!” Joe scoffs, “haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”

You just shake your head, feeling your throat close up as the tears return, streaming in torrents down your face. It is just like the night in Hyde Park all over again. Joe being his sweet, earnest self, and your brain trying to take you down from the inside. But you can’t stop it.

“I’m not enough for you. I’m not good enough. And I don’t deserve someone like you, Joe! You are the kindest, sweetest, funniest person I’ve met. Everyone you meet likes you, and I’m just…me.”

“Don’t say that, please don’t…” Joe begins, but you cut him off with a shake of your head, self-hatred spewing like venom from your lips.

“And if we start dating, sure, it’ll be fun, but one day you’ll wake up and realize just how fucking mediocre I am and you’ll leave! I can’t handle that, Joey, because I wouldn’t just be losing my boyfriend…I’d be losing my best friend.”

“(Y/N)…”

“No, Joe, I can already see it happening!” you choke out, gesturing at him, “it already happened. This summer. I was a piece of shit who couldn’t commit and you just left. And I don’t blame you, I really don’t. Why would you want to be with someone who can’t make up her mind? But when I left New York, we stopped talking. And I can’t lose you like that again. The hole you would leave would be too big to fix, so why even open up the space in my heart in the first place?”

This last sentence hangs in the air like a crystal chandelier, costly and deadly heavy. So there it finally is. The real reason why. Free from the swirling currents of anxiety in your mind, released into the stillness of Joe’s dorm room.

“So, dating would…not be…worth it?” Joe asks, slowly and without malice. He genuinely seems to want to figure out why you feel the way you feel.

“No, no!” you moan, squeezing your eyes shut, “I want to be with you, Joe, really. But I don’t want to burden you with me. With all this.”

“What if I told you,” Joe smiles softly, gingerly taking your hand in his, “that you would never be a burden to me, (Y/N). Never. In fact, you’re the opposite of a burden! A, uh…balloon? Free ice cream? A day with no homework?”

For what feels like the first time in forever, the two of you giggle together, genuine smiles spreading across both of your faces.

“You’re really dumb,” you sniffle, playing with his fingers.

“Yeah, I really am,” he grins, “but dating you would be the smartest decision I would ever make.”

“Oh, stop.”

“I won’t! Not until you know how much I love you.”

At those words, your eyes snap up to his, round as saucers.

“Joe, you don’t mean…”

“Yes, I do mean that. I love you, (Y/N). I have for a long time, and I never stopped,” he insists, “not even when you were roasting me at the party about my shitty pube mustache.”

Still dumbfounded, you giggle again, “you looked like Michael Cera.”

“Hey, I’m a firm believer in a relationship having a solid flirt-to-roast ratio,” Joe jokes, “so I’ll take that with grace. As long as you’re okay with me saying that you look like a raccoon right now. Just like you did in May.”

You pull away to try and scrub at your face, but Joe gently grabs your wrists and pulls them into your lap, smiling sweetly at you.

“Stop it, (Y/N), you look beautiful.”

“No I don’t!” you gasp, playfully wriggling away from him.

“Most beautiful raccoon this side of the Atlantic!”

“Ew, don’t say that ever again, Joe,” you tease, “people will think you’re a furry, and then I’d have to break up with you. My reputation is on the line.”

“Oh yeah?” he scoffs, tackling you on the bed, “and what reputation is that, exactly?”

“Okay, you got me there,” you laugh, looking up at him, “I’m a woman of ill-repute.”

“Perfect,” he hums, “just how I like ‘em.”

Joe leans down, kissing you for the second time that night. While the kiss before was undoubtedly hot, the sincerity of this one sends heat rushing through your entire body. Of all the kisses the two of you have shared over the past few months, this one feels the most perfect. The most complete. It makes all the heartbreak and anxiety worth it, in a way. You feel like finally, you’ve found each other.

Joe’s thigh is perfectly situated between your legs, and you scoot down the bed, beginning to rut your core needily against his khaki shorts. He moans into your mouth, squeezing your hips.

“We don’t need to do anything tonight if you don’t want to, (Y/N), I know it’s been a lot.”

“Clearly,” you pant, circling your hips again, “I want to fuck you right now, Joe.”

“Well, if you insist,” he chuckles, helping you sit up and remove your shirt before ripping his own off.

“I’ve missed this,” you sigh, running your hands across his smooth chest.

“You could’ve had it for years, you know” he teases, his usual Joe humor returning at full force.

You groan from both frustration and the friction between your thighs, “Don’t remind me. Next time I’m being such a dumbass, please tell me.”

“With pleasure.”

In between heated kisses and soft moans, both pairs of shorts are haphazardly tossed to the floor, wandering hands making up for months and years of lost time. It feels as if you two have never touched each other before, each stroke and squeeze sending sparks shooting through your bodies. Joe’s fingers find their way to your core, rubbing your clit firmly through your panties.

“Fuck, (Y/N), you’ve soaked these all the way through,” he murmurs, tugging the material to the side to swipe a finger through your folds.

“So take them off then,” you moan, back arching off the bed, “I need you, Joe.”

“Ordinarily, I’d tease you for being so needy,” Joe pants, “but I’m pretty fuckin’ needy too.”

The bulge in his boxers is too prominent to ignore. You reach out to touch him, but he pulls away, fishing through the bins under his bed.

“Joe,” you pout, “come back, I can…”

“No need, babe, I swear if you put your lips on me I’ll come right then and there. And, as lovely as those lips are, I would much prefer to be inside you.”

You swallow thickly as you shimmy out of your panties, a sticky thread of your wetness pulling away with them. Joe has been busy unwrapping the condom, but when he sees you, lying ready, eager, and soaked in front of him, he stops mid-roll, cock twitching.

“You’re so fucking hot, (Y/N). God, I’m lucky,” he groans, hastily rolling the condom fully on.

“Stop flattering me and fuck me instead, Joe.”

“Why not both?”

“Touché,” you grin, reaching out and grabbing his biceps, pulling him in for a rough kiss. The feeling of skin on skin sends another thrill through you and you grip him tighter, looping a leg around his hip and nudging him towards your core. Joe lays you back on the bed, softly, pressing kisses down your chest as you squirm underneath him, gasping.

“Are you ready?” he asks between kisses, murmuring gently against your skin.

“God, yes,” you keen, running your fingers down his back, “I want you inside me, Joe.”

“Whatever you want, gorgeous,” he smirks, running his cock through your slick folds a few times before pushing inside you in one fluid motion.

The sensation of being so completely filled by Joe makes you cry out, your nails digging sharply into his shoulder blades.

“You okay?” Joe asks, concern overtaking the pleasure on his face.

“Yes, yes,” you sigh out, “it feels so good, Joe. So perfect.”

“I was gonna say the same thing,” he smiles, a bead of sweat trickling down his temple, “I’m gonna start moving now, is that good?”

You nod, eyes squeezing shut in pleasure as Joe sets a steady, deep rhythm. With each stroke, his cock brushes against your sweet spot, causing your pussy to clench tightly around him.

“Fuck, (Y/N), I’m not gonna last long if you keep doing that,” he growls out, reaching a hand down to rub furious circles on your throbbing clit.

“I’m not either,” you whine, “I’m so close, Joey.”

“Are you gonna cum for me, princess? All over my cock?”

You nod silently, feeling your orgasm build with shocking speed in your core. Joe keeps thrusting into you, hips stuttering as you come undone around him. As you arch off the bed with a scream, he grabs your waist, pulling your body flush to his as he releases into the condom inside you, a deep, satisfied groan coming from the back of his throat.

The two of you come down from your highs together, sticky and sweaty and tangled in each other’s arms. Joe’s breathing is ragged in your ear, his nose rubbing against your temple softly.

“That was…”

“Really fucking…wow,” you finish, smiling lazily at him.

“No regrets yet?” he playfully asks, pulling at your waist gently to get you to roll onto your side and face him.

“No regrets yet. And I have a feeling that I won’t have regrets ever.”

Joe rubs small circles against the soft skin at your waist, humming softly, “You’ve really changed your tune, huh?”

“It was a little off-key before,” you mumble, pressing a soft kiss to his lips.

“Well, good thing I have perfect pitch,” Joe smirks.

“Oh, as fucking if, Joe!” you gasp, smacking him lightly on the chest, “I’ve heard you sing in the shower.”

He feigns hurt, collapsing backwards on the bed, “you wound me, woman! I shall never recover from your barbarous implication.”

“How tragic,” you mock, a sweet smile dancing on your lips, “just as I was starting to fall for you.”

“Really?” Joe sits up, staring down at you with wonder. Years’ worth of hope is beaming from his beautiful brown eyes.

“Yeah, really, Joey,” you murmur, reaching up to run your fingers through his hair, “I love you.”

No words are needed from Joe for you to know he feels the same way. He peppers kisses all over your face, brushing your sweaty hair away from your forehead. He curls up next to you, pulling you into his side as you rest your head on his chest. The two of you stay there together, bathed in the warm glow from the string lights overhead, breathing in each other’s scents as you drift off to sleep.

“Joe?”

“Mmm?”

“I think senior year is gonna be really, really good.”

“Yeah,” he chuckles sleepily, “I think so, too.”

~~~~~~~~~

Permanent Taglist (message me if you want to be added!):

@queenbbarnes @denimmay @bensrhapsody @queen-frodo @blisshemmings @istill-loveyou39 @rogers-sweatbands @sunflower-borhap-boys @goodoldfashionedloverboyy @joefucksdonuts @panicatttckiss @a-kind-of-magik @hotspacedefender @itsme690 @catch-a-deak @sweetgcreature @rogerloveshiscar @rogahhtaylahh @fatbottomedstyles @caffeine-girl @drowseoftaylor @manuosorioh @sherlollydramoine @posh-hersh

[cinema-tv-etc]

Meet the woman who made Netflix get rid of its most annoying feature

A writer from Muncie, Indiana, recently complained about Netflix’s autoplay feature. The company responded in a major way. By Adam Clark - Feb 6, 2020

Lovers of high-quality feature films and The Witcher rejoiced on Thursday afternoon when Netflix made a huge, unexpected announcement.

Finally, viewers can turn off that annoying feature that autoplayed previews when you scrolled through the video streaming platform’s content. Netflix will also let you turn off the autoplay feature that starts the next episode of a show after you finish the one you’re watching. This happened after a woman from Muncie, Indiana, complained about the feature on Twitter and offered to give away her “entire kingdom” to make it stop. Other Netflix watchers have complained about this feature, but her tweet seems to have gotten the company’s attention.

Sarah Hollowell is a young adult fantasy writer who now owes Netflix her kingdom. After she tweeted for a way to turn off the autoplay feature, Netflix responded a week later on Twitter by linking to a new help page that offers a way to stop both the preview autoplay and the next-episode autoplay. The latter is what you probably blame for your last seven-hour binge, since that next episode comes on before you can peel yourself off the couch.

Recode recently spoke to Hollowell, who explained the backstory to the tweet that rocked the Netflix universe. Hollowell explained that she’s been a Netflix customer since before the company offered streaming videos and simply sent DVDs through the mail. More recently, the self-described “expert binge-watcher” says she couldn’t browse without being inundated by autoplay previews. Her tweet that Netflix seems to have noticed happened after a particularly frustrating session.

“I was clicking through all the categories on the homepage and I was so distracted by knowing that I had to move fast to avoid the autoplay that I could barely register the titles,” Hollowell told Recode. “I ended up muting the TV, and it was the kind of mild annoyance that’s perfect for whining about on Twitter.”

A week after her volley of tweets, Netflix retweeted Hollowell and announced the updated settings. This is a big deal, if you follow Netflix Twitter much. People reviled these autoplay previews so much that there’s a dedicated Twitter account collecting the complaints, including one widely circulated smirk from Knives Out director Rian Johnson. Outrage like this has spilled over to seemingly every corner of the internet. If you click through any of those links, you’ll also realize that people have been yelling at Netflix about this for years. There’s even a Change.org petition started by a Melissa Bryant, a passionate Netflix user from Maine, that racked up nearly 125,000 signatures in the past two months.

It’s unclear why Netflix finally decided to listen to its customers. Back in 2018, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation told BuzzFeed News that one of the reasons the platform autoplayed preview clips was because “video is just a much more efficient way to communicate these things per unit of time than reading text.” But still, the previews don’t count as views on the platform, so it’s not like Netflix was using the feature to juice its numbers. Recode reached out to Netflix with these questions and will update this post if we hear back.

In the meantime, Hollowell would be happy for folks to think that it was her tweet that did it.

“Don’t get me wrong, I will absolutely take the credit if they want to hand it over to me,” she told Recode. “I will happily be seen as the savior of the people.”

She went on to point out that she’s since tweeted at Hulu about its user design, which she thinks is confusing. Hollowell would also like Amazon Prime Video to know that browsing by genre is a horrible experience on the platform: “Why do they make you answer their riddles three just to find where they’re keeping the horror movies?” It’s hard to say.

If you’ve made it this far and still haven’t turned off the autoplay features in Netflix, we’ll make it easy for you. Just sign in to Netflix and click the “manage profile” button. (If you’re already logged in, you can find this option under the dropdown menu with your profile picture.) From there, you should see two new entries.

To stop the awful autoplay action, just uncheck the box and enjoy the show.

How do I turn autoplay on or off?

Netflix provides two autoplay settings that you can turn on or off. Changes to these settings are specific to a profile and will take effect across all devices. You can adjust these settings from the Netflix site. Autoplay next episode in a series on all devices

When you watch TV shows with multiple episodes, you can automatically play the next episode using autoplay without needing to manually select it.

To turn autoplay on or off:

   Sign In to Netflix from a web browser.

   Select Manage Profiles from the menu.

   Select the profile you’d like to update.

Check or uncheck the option to Autoplay next episode in a series on all devices. Note: Your device may require a refresh to pick up the updated setting. You can force an update by switching to another profile, then switching back in order to reload your profile with the updated setting. If profile switching does not resolve this, try signing out and signing back in to the device. Autoplay previews while browsing on all devices

When you browse Netflix, you can automatically play trailers using autoplay to get a preview of a TV show or movie.

To turn autoplay on or off:

   Sign In to Netflix from a web browser.

   Select Manage Profiles from the menu.

   Select the profile you’d like to update.

Check or uncheck the option to Autoplay previews while browsing on all devices. Note: Your device may require a refresh to pick up the updated setting. You can force an update by switching to another profile, then switching back in order to reload your profile with the updated setting. If profile switching does not resolve this, try signing out and signing back in to the device.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/6/21127121/how-to-turn-off-netflix-autoplay-trailers-feature-annoying

[its-ashleyreads]

FInished: 05/05/2020

Love at First Like by Hannah Orenstein

Rating:  ★★★★★

Okay, so to preface this review I feel like I need to say that I don’t typically rate romance novels highly. Not because I believe that they aren’t deserving of high ratings but more often than not there is some problematic element that I just don’t jive with. That being said, this book definitely had a problematic element to it but it was dealt with in such a way that enhanced the characters and their development instead of being problematic for the sake of shock value.

Also, just a warning that I had a LOT of thoughts on this book so the review is quite lengthy. I’ll put little headers on each paragraph so if you’re only interested in thoughts on certain aspects you can scroll down and find them easily.

Summary

“Love at First Like” by Hannah Orenstein, is about Eliza, a 20-something jewellery store owner in New York who sells happily ever afters but can’t seem to find her own. One night after a train wreck of a first date she scrolls through Instagram and finds out that her ex-boyfriend, who said he wasn’t the type to settle down, has gotten engaged. Eliza does what everyone does after finding out their ex has moved on, she gets drunk. After drinking through the better part of a bottle of whiskey Eliza thinks it’s a good idea to go into the jewellery store, she co-owns with her sister and take pictures of engagement rings on her finger.

The next morning, she realises that in her drunkenness she accidentally posted one of the photos on Instagram and her 100K followers now believe that she’s engaged. Her first instinct is to take the photo down but after seeing the influx of sales, at a time when the business sorely needs them, she decides to milk it a little longer. With so many questions surrounding who she’s engaged to and no man in sight, Eliza and her best friend Carmen, decide to hold an audition of sorts for someone to play the groom-to-be. The audition turns out to be a complete bust but shortly after Eliza meets Blake. Blake is everything a girl like Eliza wants, he’s attractive, charming, and he owns a men’s luxury watch company; they’re a match made in heaven. They start dating because this is someone who Eliza can really see herself settling down with, but she hasn’t told him that she’s fake engaged, or that she’s planning to stage a fake wedding to drum up even more sales for her business. Throughout the book Eliza struggles with whether to tell Blake the truth, or risk losing him for good.

 Review *Contains Spoilers*

Eliza

When I first picked up this book it was in one of those 3 for £10 sales and I needed a third. The premise sounded ridiculous and unrealistic and I thought it would just be an easy read that I rolled my eyes at, like most chick-lit. I was so pleasantly surprised by this book. I thought this was going to be a 1/5 but somehow, I’m giving it a gold star and a 5 out of fucking 5.

The main character, Eliza, is not someone I totally relate to, in fact her impulsivity is one of the qualities I hate most in anyone. As a dedicated planner and organiser, it’s one of my biggest pet peeves, but despite that I actually really liked Eliza’s character. Her bad/irresponsible choices in the beginning mostly just seem like a way to get the plot moving but I can still see how her character got to the place to make those choices. We’re given just enough backstory to understand how much her jewellery store, Brooklyn Jewels, means to her and how she would do anything to keep it from going under. Which is why when sales go up after the accidental engagement photo, I totally understand why she didn’t delete it, even if I don’t agree with it.

Secondary Characters/Friendships

I also absolutely loved that side characters like Carmen, Sophie and Raj all got to be real, fleshed out characters. Often, I find that secondary characters, in romance especially, don’t really get to have arcs or personalities other than whatever stereotype or trope they’re based on. Carmen in particular I thought was really well done. When we’re first introduced to her I thought she was just going to be a fun BFF that serves up one-liners to get laughs. Yes, Carmen can be a funny character at times, but that’s not who she is. Despite us only having small glimpses into this character, as we only see her through Eliza, Orenstein uses Eliza’s history with Carmen to show us how she’s evolved over the years in her career goals particularly. The second encounter we have with Carmen is almost entirely centred on her and her idea of an app that she wants to launch, where Eliza intones that previously “[Carmen] said she’d rather do excellent work for a company and collect a steady paycheck. [Eliza] never thought she'd strike out on her own.” (60) The rest of this encounter is spent with Eliza offering to provide business advice and support to Carmen as she knows how hard starting a business can be.

I absolutely adore Eliza and Carmen’s friendship because it doesn’t revolve around Eliza and her boy trouble. Their friendship is a two-way street where they lift each other up when they doubt themselves, like when Carmen was nervous about making a presentation to investors and Eliza went through it with her until she’d perfected it. And they ground each other when they’re becoming too idealistic, like when Eliza keeps stringing Blake along and Carmen reminds Eliza that he’s a person with real feelings who doesn’t deserve to be played with. Their friendship is so authentic and true to real life experience that I honestly want another book about just the two of them living it up in NYC.

Eliza as a friend in general, I found was quite refreshing. In a lot of romance the heroine tends to be quite selfish and shitty towards their friends, if they have any at all, but Eliza hit the perfect balance of caring for her friends and caring for herself; not being a martyr, but also not being greedy. I loved how excited she got about her friends lives and achievements, and how when she saw that Raj, a web engineer, was bar-tending between gigs she hooked him up with Carmen who was in need of exactly what he had to offer. I also like how it was mentioned that Carmen paid Raj because I think sometimes things like that get reduced to a friend doing another friend a favour, instead of the fact that Raj is a trained professional and deserves to be paid for his time and expertise.

Sophie

However, someone who did not deserve to get paid, was fucking Sophie. Let me clarify, Sophie deserved to be paid for the work she did at Brooklyn Jewels, but she did NOT deserve a $15K bonus right as their business was going through a tough time financially. This made me unreasonably angry, I had a full freaking meltdown because it was so ridiculous to me that she would even ask and even more so that Eliza said YES. Sophie needed the money to go through IVF treatments because she and her wife wanted to have a baby, fair enough. I personally don’t believe in going through that kind of treatment when there are so many kids in the world without families but whatever, to each their own. But what really irked me was the fact that Sophie, who is in her early thirties, had already attempted this method of conception and it didn’t work. So, she was willing to take a gamble with money that was greatly needed to help keep their business afloat because she couldn’t just wait a fucking year or two. Not to mention the fact that if she did get pregnant and has this baby only for her business to fail, then she wouldn’t have a steady income, health insurance, maternity pay and she would have also screwed her sister out of her dream. Luckily everything works out for the best, Sophie gets pregnant and Eliza saves Brooklyn Jewels, but it so very easily could have destroyed multiple lives. The fact that Sophie is meant to be perceived as the ‘responsible’ sister astounds me. When Eliza was trying to save their business by offering solutions Sophie kept shooting every idea down and her only contribution to that conversation was that she wanted to fire their only employee who got paid shit-all anyway. Honestly, I could write a fucking essay on why I hated Sophie but I guess I’ll settle for a really long paragraph.

Love Interests

The problematic element in this book was definitely the ridiculously elaborate plot for Eliza to lure Blake into marriage to cover her fuck-up. As I was reading I marked three places where Eliza could have told Blake the truth in an organic way so that it wasn’t just like she was dropping a bomb on him. Despite my frustration with Eliza, her internal monologue again, made me understand why she wasn’t doing things how I wanted her to. Although, even though I understand her reasoning, it still doesn’t make what she did to Blake right, and I absolutely love how he couldn’t trust her again and that they didn’t get back together. I hate the ‘love concurs all’ trope and I’m glad that the author showed how Blake, who was clearly way more in love with Eliza than vice versa, couldn’t get past the fact that she used and lied to him. Part of me wishes that was how the romance in this book ended, with no happily ever after, maybe Raj pretending to be her fiancé to save Brooklyn Jewels, but no happy couple at the end.

The other part of me feels all warm and fuzzy because Raj and Eliza are unbelievably cute together. Orenstein could have fucked this romance up so hard, especially because it comes in so late in the story and Eliza was (kind of) on the rebound. But she takes the readers thoughts of, ‘Did Eliza really not notice her feelings for Raj until now?’ and ‘Is Raj just second place because Blake dumped her?’ and turns them into questions Raj uses to stand up for himself. Raj has clearly liked Eliza since they first met and I loved that he was willing to fight for what he believed he deserved. Raj and Eliza have such great chemistry as characters, but they were ultimately their own people who made their own choices, even after getting together. The way Orenstein wrote both Blake and Raj was a breath of fresh air. To see two male characters not being aggressive, but still standing up for themselves and not blindly bowing down to what the female love interest wanted, was something I don’t think I’ve ever read before. I think that comes from the fact that yes, Eliza is the heroine of this story but it’s not just about her. Like, I could tell while reading from Eliza’s point of view that there were other things going on in this world that just didn’t include her. So, while she was our main character, she wasn’t the main character of the world she was living in.

Representation

One of the things I loved most about this book was the casual representation. This was the truest to life representation I’ve seen in a romance novel thus far. Orenstein doesn’t make a big deal about her minority characters because they’re not minority characters, they’re characters who happen to be minorities. This book isn’t about race or LGBTQ+ rights so there’s no real need to dwell on those things, but she does acknowledge those parts of her characters in small ways throughout. This is how more fiction should be, because the more we normalize diversity in the media we consume, the less we’ll think of minority groups as ‘other’ (or so I hope).

Rating

Ultimately this book was not perfect. I definitely had problems with it (mostly named Sophie) but it was a fun read from beginning to end with some thought provoking themes which will stick with me for a while yet. Honestly, this book could have been complete garbage, but Orenstein’s writing and character development made me connect to almost every character (except for Sophie of course). I can’t wait to read her other works. 5/5. Brava!

[milap-sd]

Update Announcement Bar in Shopify :)

Hi welcome to update announcement bar tutorial where we will have a look at the advanced implementation so that the value for someone to qualify for free shipping it's updated whenever someone adds an item to the card without the page having to refresh and the same thing should work on the cart page. 

If someone adjusts the quantity you can see the message gets updated and it should be fun to implement this so let's go alright so starting this post I assume that you have already seen part 1 of this tutorial and just to quickly recap that by now you should have this modified announcement bar and you can display the amount that someone needs to add in order to unlock free shipping. 

When you add an item to the cart this value won't get updated automatically and you need to refresh the page so that it gets updated and if you haven't seen part one yet I highly recommend you go back and watch that first so you can get a really good understanding of what is going on but otherwise if you're using the theme you could also go ahead and copy and paste the content of our modified header that liquid fire.

Okay so that being said I can already tell you that in this post we are going to write some JavaScript code to implement our update functionality and therefore I want to give you a quick overview on how the JavaScript is structured within the W theme and you will find the same pattern and many other themes as well and I can simply right click with my Chrome browser and then go to inspect and switch to the console and in here we can test and debug JavaScript code but what I want to show you right now is that our theme fires attached an object that is called theme to the window and in that theme object we will find all the theme elements that have to be managed in some way by JavaScript and just to name a few examples here we have the mobile navigation or maybe the search drawer or some post if we have posts on our page and all these elements contain methods that help to control them. 

So for example we could use the MDOT search drawer and in here we will find a method that is called open and this would simply bring up the search bar and in the same way we have a method that is called closed and this would dismiss the search bar and in the same way we are going to create a helper function to update our shipping bar and then we will simply call that every time an input changes.

Okay so now we can have a look into the actual theme code and in your theme files you will find a folder called assets and this should contain the theme j/s which should contain most of the JavaScript for your theme and you can already see the window dot theme object which I just showed you on the front-end and here it is set to a blank object and then over time you will see that all the other elements are added to this object. 

So we have the theme of currency the draw the header the mobile navigation the video and so on and so forth and within these elements we have all the helper functions that we can use to control the elements but for example here we have a method called pause video and here we have one that is called load videos and now we are going to scroll to the bottom and down there we will implement our own shipping bar element with all the necessary update functions. 

So let me zoom in that it's easier for you to read and down here we drop to a new line and first of all we create our new shipping bar element so let's type theme dot shipping bar and then we set it to an empty JavaScript object and now we will drop in between these curly brackets and down here I can define the so-called object properties and all the properties will be public on the front end so maybe we could simply type test and then some text hello world and maybe another property or test - which will be some random number maybe one two three four five but we can also add functions to these properties. 

So we will have an update function and then we would simply type function a pair of parenthesis and a pair of curly brackets and in here we can define what happens when someone executes the function let's do user lock and for now we would simply type updated shipping bar and for now safe this and after a quick refresh on the front end. 

We should now have access to our new themed shipping bar object and you can already see that we have our defined values so ended shipping bar the test equals had a word and test two as one two three four five and we can even call our update method therefore we just use parentheses and you can see now it says updated shipping bar and this is exactly where we will implement our real update functionality later but for now I just want to tell you that I have a small problem with these two values being public because later we will have some variables and I don't want them to be public but with the syntax that I used we don't have a way to create private or hidden properties.

So we will fix that and then we will go ahead and implement the update method so back in the theme file we will now define this object in a slightly different way so let's type a theme but shipping bar and now we won't set it to an object immediately or instead to a function this function should be executed immediately so we type parentheses at the end and in between the curly brackets we can define that function and in here we can now define all the variables that we need and our update method and then all the variables will be private and we will only return or make the update method public and now I feel like this may sound a little bit confusing especially if you're new to JavaScript. 

So let's define some variables and then I will show you this in action so we will have one variable for the shipping bar HTML and then we will have one let's say for the promote message we can do promote ext and then we will have another one for the message that shows up when you unlock free shipping so unlocked txt and down below we can then define our update function. 

Let's do function that is called update we can also define that function right here but for now we will simply type console dot lock updated shipping bomb and now we can go ahead and delete all the above declaration and in this function we will simply return our new update function to the public let's type update we'll link to the update function and then save this so as we check the front-end one more time. 

We should now see that within the theme that shipping bar element we only have access to the update method and all the other variables are no longer public and so this syntax helps to keep things structured and it's also used throughout the theme so I thought it would be a good idea to share this alright. 

So in order to build out our update function we now need to assign some values to our variables and the shipping bar itself is relatively easy to get so we can simply use document query selector and then selected by its CSS class so I think it was announcement far nons min - bah but in order to get the other two values so the promote message and the unlock message and the threshold as well we will need that too. 

Now we will use a small trick to get these because we can't simply access the customizer settings from the JavaScript file so therefore we will go back to the header dot liquid where we implemented our free shipping bar and then we will simply add these values to the data set of the announcement bar so we will define three data attributes the first one will be data #NAME? then we will have data there's unlocked and we will have data - threshold and now we can simply copy these variables that we defined above and place them into the data attributes are we wanted me to add curly brackets so the liquid gets rendered and unlocked txt threshold and in the JavaScript we can now get these data attributes and assign them to our variable so back in the JavaScript fire.

We can now take the announcement bar and get all the values we need from its data set so bar dot data set but promote and bar dot dataset dot unlocked and bar but dataset best hug we can save this and now the time has come that we can implement our update function and therefore we will use an ajax request so a request in the background if you want to say and therefore we type dollar sign get json and then the request domain which will be slash cart js. 

So we want to request the cart and once we get that data so then we want to perform a certain action with their data so we can simply type the function and then cart and then curly brackets and in here we will define what happens with the card data but now let me show you really quick what we get when we call this request domain and therefore I will copy this to my clipboard and then I can use my Shopify domain and append slash card j/s and you can see that I get the card data in the JSON format and the JSON format is a way to display structured data we can see it here in a more structured way and you can see that I get information on the card like the item count the items in the card the subtotal total price and this is the key attribute. 

I'm interested in to compare if the threshold has been reached or not yet and now back in the update function I can simply calculate the value that is left by subtracting the card dot total price from the threshold - card dot total price and in the same way as we did it in the header fire we now need to apply a money filter to this value left because right now it's incense and doesn't match the theme mana formatting. 

So let's do VAR value left money and then we can use a function that lies within theme dot currency dot format money and this function will take the value and sense and the theme dot money format and then we can save it and now the last thing we have to do in order to finish our update method is simply check if the value that is left is less or equal to zero then we want to display the unlock message and otherwise so if it is still above the zero then we want to display the promote message and therefore we will simply access the announcement bar.

So we will type bar in our HTML in both cases and now we can simply copy the message from the head of fire so let's do this right away and right here we have the announcement bar message so we can simply copy it stood right here now we have to use single quotes we will get a conflict with these double quotes and we also remove the curly brackets from the liquid rendering because now we can use the JavaScript variable that we defined above and then we will use plus here we use single quotes again success message and down below we can copy the same statement or the same markup and now we will replace the unlock message with the promote message but if you remember. 

We still have this dynamic placeholder from the customizer settings where we output the value that is left and we will replace that as well so let's type dot replace and then value oh it's in brackets where you and we will replace it with the value left money and then we can save it and I hope you can already see that this is very similar to what we have done in the first tutorial so in the head of fire we did basically the same we took some of the messages from the customizer and when we update or put out the announcement by message we simply check if the value that is left is less or equal to zero and then we set the  announcement message to either the success message or to the promote message all right. 

So now we should give our new implemented method a test on the front end and therefore I went to the cart page and now I will adjust the quantity and when I call our new method so theme the shipping part our update we should see this value jump to 10 euro and it does so this is great and now I would qualify for free shipping and I will call the same method again and then we should see the unlock message and we do so this works great and we didn't make any mistakes otherwise we would see them right here and we could fix them in the theme file but now that this is working.

We simply have to call this method whenever the card input or the card quality changes and I think right now you already have enough input so the last thing is very simple to do and then we can finish the project all right so back at the theme files we now have to find all the places where let's say in items edit with the card or the input quantity is changed or an item is removed entirely and in the W theme you can search for exactly these keywords. 

So let's search for update item and right here you will find a function that is called whenever the input quantity changes and you can see that they also do an AJAX request to perform this on the background and once this is done they also do some other stuff and right before they end here we can call our new theme shipping bar update method let's copy it right here and this is the first place we will add this and then we will go ahead and search for at item 2 card or add item and you will see the second function that gets called whenever an item is added to the card and even here they do an ajax request to perform this on the background and again once this is done the executors function and right before they end this function. 

We can again insert our new m dot shipping bar update method and save it again and the last place we recall our new function is when an item is removed so on remove and let's see here we have the function for it and there's the Ajax request to perform it on the background and once this is done they execute all this and at the end we will call our new shipping bar update method let's copy it here as well: and save and I think now we have all the important places. 

So let's check this on the on the front-end so back at the front-end I can now try to add an item to the cart and you would see that this gets updated immediately and even on the cart page if I adjust the quantity let's say to six and is updates to the unlock message perfect and even if I remove the item entirely this jumps back to 50 so everything's working perfect. 

Okay so before we finish the post I want to add one more little thing so that this gets a little bit safer to use because right now we don't have any validation if the shipping bar is enabled and if it isn't enabled this might throw an arrow and break a lot of theme code so what I simply want to do is after we get the shipping bar or after we try to get the shipping bar I want to test if the shipping bar has any useful value.

So we can simply type if bar and then wrap this into curly brackets and the same thing will be done in the update method so if we have a shipping bar then we want to do everything that we just implemented and otherwise we will simply do nothing so we'll save this and this is the minimum validation that we can make and then we can finally finish the post and this was a lot to explain and probably a lot of input for you as well so if you have questions you can always leave them down in the comment section and as always I hope you found some value in this post and then I hope to see you on the next post bye.

[365daysofsasuhina]

[ 365 Days of SasuHina || Day Two Hundred Sixty: Later in the Year ] [ Uchiha Sasuke, Hyūga Hinata ] [ SasuHina ] [ Verse: Best Years of Your Life ] [ AO3 Link ]

Though Hinata would probably call Spring or Summer her favorite season - given the pleasant weather and the bountiful flowers she loves so much - she will admit that Autumn has a certain kind of...charm to it. The slow descent in temperatures from the scorch of Summer is refreshing in its own way. Of course, it also means kids returning to school, so not everyone is happy about the arrival of Fall. But overall...she finds plenty to like about it.

The shifting colors of the foliage are always beautiful. Though Hinata might prefer cooler colors when it comes to things like her wardrobe, or her workspace, there’s something so...cozy about the palette later in the year. It’s a sign the months are dipping back toward the sleep of Winter: harvest is over, the reaped rewards of a long Summer of work gathered up and stored away for the snowy months. It’s a time to celebrate a successful waxing of the seasons to their peak, and to prepare for the waning back into the cold.

Even the air seems to carry a certain...tinge to it. The smell of damp, fallen leaves...the plethora of baked goods and their spices as people look for warmer treats to ward away the chill. The breeze might have a slight nip to it, but that just means shifting to the thicker parts of her closet. Sweaters (and sweater dresses), leggings, boots, hats, scarves...all sorts of cute things to wear!

Yes, Autumn has its charm. Which is why - as Hinata lurks in her favorite haunt, a little coffee shop and bakery hybrid - she holds her cup of coffee in hands grateful for the heat, watching the season sweep through her little city with a soft smile. She’s spent the entire day up until this little break taking photographs of the shifting atmosphere. While she has a day job at a craft store chain, her real passion is photography...which she indulges in on her blog. She always sees a swell of traffic this time of year as others enjoy the season.

One would think her easily tired of it, given that her place of employment has been swamped with Fall decorations and themed wares for weeks before Summer was anywhere close to over. In fact, Autumn has scarcely begun, and she’s already seeing their Winter wares being put up on display. It’s a little disappointing how...overlooked it is between the hype that is Summer, and the end of the year. Beyond pumpkin spiced...everything, there isn’t much regard given to the season before it slips into Winter.

But, now is hardly the time to mull that over. She’s going to warm up, and then make the trek back to her apartment to get started on this week’s blog post. Already her mind slips into a daydream-like state, picturing the layout and how best to arrange her favorite shots.

Her thoughts are interrupted, however, as the door chimes nearby, her seat only a few feet from it along the large window that overlooks the sidewalk. Blinking, she turns to give the newcomer a glance, shy but curious.

She has to do a double take.

Is...is that…?

Her staring thankfully goes unnoticed, the figure too focused on reaching the counter and perusing the menu. Pale eyes try to see his face from this angle, not quite sure he is who she thinks he is. The woman behind the register greets him pleasantly, putting together his order with a hint of smalltalk she can’t hear from this distance. His body language is rather lax, a hip cocked with hands in his jacket pockets. Dark hair brushes the tops of his shoulders, the top half drawn up in a tail behind his head.

Once he gets his drink and snack, he turns to look for a place to sit, and she all but confirms it. That’s Sasuke! Sasuke Uchiha! She hasn’t seen him in...gosh, years. They went to school together nearly all twelve years, except for a stint while he moved away. But he’d returned before graduation, and then just...disappeared. No one had really heard from him after that, not even Naruto. He fell off the map, moved out of the city, and ghosted everyone.

What is he doing here?

Averting her gaze just enough to be subtle, Hinata watches him out of the corner of her eyes. It’s so...strange. He looks quite a bit different. He’d always been a rather lean, almost skinny kid in school, but...he’s bulked up ever so slightly. Still far from someone like Naruto’s build, but no longer a beanpole, either. His hair was never that long in school, always shorter in the back and untamed. His style had been rather...alternative back then, but now he’s just dressed in dark-wash jeans, a t-shirt, and a jacket. Seems he’s mellowed out quite a bit.

Curiosity is eating at her. She wants to know where he’s been, and why! But perhaps more importantly, the reason behind his return. No one’s said anything about hearing from him or seeing him, so...clearly he hasn’t contacted anyone. At least not according to anything she’s seen on Facebook. Surely by now, Naruto would have thrown a huge fit all over the site if he knew.

But...she very rarely spoke to Sasuke back then. He’d been so...withdrawn. And while he appears far more laid back now, she’s not sure it would be wise to just...go say hello. He might not want to be seen. But...well...he is in a public place.

...maybe she can get a photo of him.

Digging out her camera, she makes a show of perusing through her memory card, turning to sit sideways in her chair. He’s technically facing the same direction as her table, further back from the window, eyes glued to a phone he scrolls through while sipping his drink. Then carefully, ever so carefully, she starts angling her lens, trying to find him through the screen view. Almost...there…

Like magnets, his dark eyes whip to her lens, startling her so badly as he stares right at her that she jumps. Fumbling not to drop her (rather expensive) hobby device, she feels heat bloom quickly through her face.

He perks a brow at her, stopped mid-chew through a bite of his snack. But after a moment to consider her, recognition bleeds through his confusion.

“...Hinata?”

“I, uh...y-yes?” Caught red-handed and not having the gall to try to fib, she shrinks in her chair, clinging to her camera. “Er...Sasuke, right?”

“Yeah.”

Well, she’s already embarrassed herself this much...might as well go all-out. “What - w-what are you...doing here?”

“Getting some coffee. Same as you, looks like.”

“I - no, I mean...here. In town. No one has seen you in...in ages! You just sort of...disappeared.”

Clearing his teeth behind his lips, Sasuke adjusts his posture a bit. “Took some time to travel. Wanted to get away from it all for a while. Hopped around a few cities, took odd jobs...but thought I’d come back now that it all sort of lost its spark. Didn’t think I’d run into someone I knew so quickly, though.”

Someone he...knew? But...they hadn’t exactly been friends… “I see! Well, it - it’s nice to see you. So...you’re here to...stay?”

“I think so. Still planning things out. Been mostly winging it for the past few years, so...I have to get used to it again. Working on finding a place and a job. Thought I’d lie low and get that figured out before letting anyone know I was back…”

“Oh, I-I won’t tell anyone!”

“Thanks. But...weren’t you trying to take my picture?”

Jolting, her blush returns full force. “I was just, um...I-I wasn’t sure if it was really...you! You look...different.”

“Yeah? You too. No more baggy clothes and curtain hair, huh?”

Hinata blinks. He...remembers that? “N...no. Not so much, at least. I...well, I guess change is h-hard to avoid. Even if you don’t notice it over time. Must be, um...easier for you to notice, since...since you’ve been gone.” Clearly still nervous, she smiles sheepishly, gesturing to the window. “You...you picked a great time to come back! The weather’s been very...very nice. And the Autumn colors are at their peak. That’s what I have the c-camera for. Was out...taking pictures.” And not just looking like a creep sneaking photos of people… she thinks to herself, wilting.

“Photography, huh? Neat hobby. Get any good shots?”

This seems so...strange. To just be...talking to him. They’d been in completely different circles in high school. Now that sort of cliquey nonsense seems so...childish. But still...they’re practically strangers beyond a few overlapping acquaintances. “I...I think so. I need to go...through them. And get them posted. I...I run a little blog, it - it’s nothing fancy. Just...well, just a hobby.”

Sasuke nods. “Hobbies are good. Keep you sane through the other life crap you gotta put up with. I’d like to see it.”

“You -? It...it’s not that -”

“You were always one of those quiet ones in school. That means you know how to observe. Bet you take great photos.”

The compliment catches her off-guard. “...I…? Well, I...I try.”

“What’s the site?”

Pink in embarrassment, Hinata just...writes it on a napkin, handing it over. “Don’t, um...don’t have too high of expectations. I’m still...I’m still learning. A-about a lot of how it all, um...works.”

He waves a hand. “Maybe I oughta make one. Took a lot of photos while I traveled.”

Hinata can’t help a small perk. “Oh, you...you should! I’d love to see them!”

“...I’ll look into it. Maybe yours’ll give me some inspiration.”

She blinks, still rosy.

“Well...I gotta get going. Lot to do tomorrow,” he then announces, rising from his seat. “Nice seeing you, Hinata. Maybe I’ll bump into you again.”

“I-I bet you will. I’m here a lot, so…” She trails off, unsure what else to say. As he offers a farewell, she waves, still not quite...grasping their entire exchange. It felt so alien. Now that he’s gone, she’s not even sure it really happened.

But, either way, she remains true to her word, deciding not to mention the sighting to anyone. Sounds like he’ll be busy enough as it is without anyone pestering him. Looking into her empty coffee cup, Hinata thinks for a moment longer before packing up her things.

...she’s got a blog post to work on.

                                                             .oOo.

     Tired @~@ But I like this one pretty well. I'm a HUGE fan of Autumn myself, so getting to add it to the background of a drabble is nice~ Otherwise...not too much to say about this one. Just a chance encounter between two prior acquaintances. Might continue it at some point. Honestly there's so many of these that could use part twos or full fics...I can't keep track anymore xD But we'll see~      Anywho, I need to get some sleep - I'm still a day behind here, and tomorrow's gonna be another very busy day. The next two weeks or so (at least) are still gonna be very...eventful, so I can't make any promises about catching up. But I'll try, at least, not to fall any further behind lol - anyway, thanks for reading!

[disloopy]

remedy for a broken heart pt.2

nafla

genre: angst

word count: 3k

a/n. i’m sorry this look on nafla is superior don’t try to convince me otherwise. this part is soooo long im sorry but i hope its a good finish since you guys have been waiting forever for it.

                                 with a little bit of this, with a little bit of that we gon be alright

Nicholas sighed in exhaustion, plopping down on the couch next to you. The current state of the small studio he shared with the rest of the boys reflected upon the amount of time he spent there, working on songs but never finding one that seemed to qualify his ideals.

“What are the stakes?”

“Hm?”

“I mean if I quite music... can I live?”

You turned to him, setting your phone aside. “Ask yourself... you’re the one who said music is your life.”

“I know... but I’m afraid people here won’t accept me cause I’m not one of their own.”

You laughed. “Babe, it’s always hard at first, I’m sure they’ll eventually learn how amazing you are and will look past the differences.”

“You know,” Nicholas murmured. “Jinyoung hyung suggested we go to Korea for a a while.” He knew he had peaked your interest with those words. “He knows some people there. If we can start a stable career, then it won’t be too hard when we come back here.”

You smiled with a bright “that sounds great!” but there was a hint of worry in your eyes. Nicholas liked that. “Jinyoung is always reliable, isn’t he?” you said, looking away for a second. Nicholas nodded in agreement; trusting Jinyoung would be the only right thing to do in any situation.

“So are you all going?”

“Me and hyung are gonna fly out first, then we’ll get the others to come.” You didn’t say anything for a while so Nicholas reached over to clutch your hand. “When I get back, you’ll be dating a real rapper.” He hoped these words could at least be somewhat comforting to you.

“I already see you as a real artist,” you told him with a smile.

“Dude, what’s the deal?” asked Daniel, walking into Nicholas’s room as he was getting dressed for the day. “Mina just asked me if she can stay in the guest bedroom for the rest of the trip... did y’all fight?”

“We broke up,” Nicholas told him plainly.

“What?” Daniel couldn’t hide his shock. “We literally here to relax and you guys went ahead and made your own drama.”

Nicholas sighed in irritation. “Daniel, I really don’t want to talk about this right now.” The younger boy fell silent, and put his hands in his pockets, staring at the floor. 

“Well damn... so did y’all break up break up or...” Nicholas knew he was referring to the ‘incident’ with you . It wasn’t something he was proud of, the fact that all his friends, who were avid supporters of you, were conscious of the whole thing. 

“Fuck... I don’t know. Girls are so complicated.”

Daniel pressed his lips together. “Really, I think you’re complicated.” The two boys chuckled quietly, unsure of what was funny. “So you still up for tonight?”

“I don’t think it’ll be good if I came.. since Mina...”

“Bro, she’s coming too.”

“Alright, I’ll think about it.”

As Daniel was leaving the room, Nicholas asked him to keep quiet about the whole situation to which he respectfully obliged. Daniel was known to have a big mouth but he was also trustworthy and always had his friends best interests at heart. And with that thought, Nicholas found it might be easier to forget about everything and have a fun night out with the boys instead of moping around like this. His friends would be by his side anyway and maybe that’s what he needed at the moment.

Nicholas left the solace of his bedroom to join the rest outside. “Yo, Mina, I got smth for you,” said Jinyoung, walking over to where she sat next to Daniel. She looked up from her phone, trying to peer around Jinyoung to see what he had hidden behind his back. Nicholas also watched, trying not to look too unhappy.

“You know how you love Post Malone? Well, he’s in the city, performing tonight and we got you tickets.”

Nicholas saw Mina’s expression brighten  as she took the tickets from Jinyoung and jumped up, shaking her hips in delight.

“Oh my gosh, you’re the best!” She threw her arms around his neck, hugging him tightly. Daniel pulled her back onto the couch.

“Don’t get too excited, you’re going with Owen.”

Mina’s lips parted and she rolled her eyes. “Ugh, are you serious?”

“I heard that!” Owen called from the kitchen to which Mina gave Daniel a sheepish look and he grinned, ruffling her hair. 

Rather than being envious of the way his friends treated her, Nicholas found himself feeling sympathetic. Mina had a way of hiding her emotions ― much like you ― and she was too obviously pretending she didn’t care about what had happened earlier that morning. Her pretense had worked for her in the past but Nicholas knew her too well. 

That night, Jinyoung and Daniel came into Nicholas’s room, informing him that they were leaving and if he’d like to join. “Can I come a bit later? I’m just not feeling it right now,” Nicholas told them, hiding away under his covers where he had been napping in all afternoon after a tiring shopping session with daniel. 

“Bro, you’ve been sleeping all day, what’s wrong with you,” said Daniel, trying to pull his blankets off but Nicholas held on to them tightly in fear his friends might see his phone open to your instagram page which he had been scrolling through for the past hour.

Jinyoung just sighed. “Daniel, leave it. Don’t force him to come.” Nicholas looked at him with grateful eyes and Jinyoung nodded. “I actually gave Mina those tickets so she’d leave you alone tonight,” he chuckled and Nicholas threw a pillow at him. “But you can join us whenever you’d like.”

“Thank you, hyung.”

When everyone left, the house was quiet and Nicholas hated how lonely he felt right now, but he brought it upon himself . He reached for his phone again, refreshing your instagram page to see that you had updated your story. 

Hesitantly, he brought his thumb on top of your profile picture, swallowing hard as your story opened up to reveal a picture of you with your arm draped around an unfamiliar girl, a bottle in your hand, your trademark million dollar smile plastered across your pretty face. You had tagged “Avalon Club” and Nicholas realized it was the same club his friends were going to. That’s why Daniel wanted me to come so bad.

Nicholas closed the story and went through your instagram posts once again. You had changed a lot and the posts showed it clearly. There was a gap in dates wherein you hadn’t posted at all and the posts from before the gap were of him and you, years of memories locked in a couple photos that had been buried under the more recent ones of you looking happier.

“Call when you land, alright?” you said, pulling away from the hug with Jinyoung. You asked him since you knew Nicholas would pass out and forget by the time they go to Korea.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Jinyoung replied, fixing his beanie that had almost fallen off from the contact. You finally moved to Nicholas who was waiting for you with open arms. He pulled you against him, burying his face in your hair ― little did he know, it would be the last time he’d get to do so.

“I’m gonna miss you so much,” you told him with a little pout. Nicholas saw that you were trying hard to hold in your tears and he pulled you closer again so the others wouldn’t see. “Don’t you forget about me while you’re there, okay?”

He moved back, cupping your cheeks. “How could I ever forget about you?”

But the truth is he could, and he did. After going to Korea, Nicholas found himself busier than he would have expected. He made sure to keep you updated for the first couple weeks but after one or two hectic months, he couldn’t find motivation to pick up his phone and call you. His busy schedule kept him occupied but even when he was free, it seemed there was no time for you.

Besides that, Nicholas’s new life presented him with extravagances he could never have imagined of in a thousand lifetimes, nor could he refuse them. Although he had done a very selfish deed and couldn’t muster up the courage to face you after that. 

But the girls that went back and forth from Nicholas’s room didn’t pass without the knowledge of his friends who thought he was being sus and questioned him about it. “Did you break up with Y/N?” asked Jinyoung.

“Uhhh...”

Jinyoung shook his head. “I did not expect this from you... seeing how attached you were to her, I thought you’d be begging to go back to America everyday.”

“Calm down, she’s prolly in another guy’s pants right now too.”

But both men knew you weren’t like that. Nicholas didn’t bother sending a breakup text because you had probably forgotten about him as well. However, you didn’t feel that way at all.

When the crew returned to America after gaining some popularity, you were still there, hitting nicholas up with instagram messages which he didn’t find it in himself to even open because at this point, ignorance was bliss. 

And it seemed like the eye contact he made with you on his first American stage spoke a thousand words, none that either of you could ever speak to each other. To this day, that look still haunted him. It wasn’t any normal “breakup” if you can even call it that. Because sometimes, he found a part of himself was still with you.

Nicholas must have watched your story about a million times, staring at the picture of you for so long his eyes began to hurt. He couldn’t stay here any more. He was pathetic.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Daniel smirked when Nicholas finally arrived at the club. He had already drowned his self-pity in a few drinks when Daniel and Jinyoung found him seated at the bar.

“Having fun?”

“We should be asking you that,” said Jinyoung, propping his elbow on top of the counter. “You look down... was it Mina?” At this, Nicholas’s head snapped toward Daniel who shook his head quickly.

“I didn’t say anything, I swear.”

“Mina told us you guys were having a fight in the car while we were dropping her off,” Jinyoung explained. “What’s gotten into you?”

Nicholas sighed. “Yeah... it was my fault not hers. Did she tell you we broke up?” His relationship with her was on a thin line.

“Uh no, she said you guys were ‘on a break’ or sum like that.”

Though slightly disappointed, Nicholas was relieved that she didn’t want to leave him altogether. His heart already felt weak at the thought of losing yet someone important in his life again.

“By the way... Y/N’s here,” Daniel said quietly. “We wanted to tell you so it doesn’t turn out like last time.” Nicholas faked surprise but in reality, he knew all too well your whereabouts. 

“That’s nice... I don’t really feel like talking to her right now, though.”

“I guess you gotta tell her that yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

Jinyoung cleared his throat, getting up from his seat. “Don’t look now but she’s walking right towards us.” Nicholas froze. That means you were probably right behind him. Nicholas and Daniel smiled and waved at you over Nicholas’s head and then gave him a look before walking away.

“Hey stranger.” Your voice was soft, almost like a melodic tune. He hadn’t heard it in what felt like ages.

Nicholas turned around. “Y/N! I haven’t seen you in forever! Wow, I can’t believe you’re here!” Was that too much? Who cared, he’d already messed up whatever image of himself you had in your mind. You hugged him but it felt like the distance between you two increased and it was like he couldn’t even feel you.

“I came to your concert but I guess your friends didn’t tell you I was there,” you said, sitting down in the seat next to him. “I figured if you did see me, you would have talked to me but you didn’t so...” 

Nicholas laughed in embarrassment but inside a piece of him died. It seemed he had been too obvious with his hesitation. Or maybe he was just an asshole. The latter seemed quite accurate. 

“Anyway, you are you?”

A mess, Nicholas could reply. But instead he said, “I’m good... I mean, I’m better than better.” 

“How’s life as a celebrity?” you asked, laughing. Nicholas couldn’t bring himself to look at you but your laugh felt like medicine all it’s own.

“Wellll, I don’t really feel like one.”

“Really? You sure do act like one.” You murmured the last part. Was this your way of saying ‘fuck you’ to Nicholas? Perhaps Nicholas was thinking about it too much. He needed to drink a little more.

“Can I get you a drink?” he asked and you shook your head. 

“Nah, I was leaving with my friends right now actually... then I saw you.” You started to get up, taking your bag with you. “I’ll see you around then.” 

You can’t seriously let her leave like this, Nicholas thought to himself as his chest tightened. This may or may not be the last time he’d get to see you. A part of him wanted to remain that selfish and stupid self and let you go your way, as if just seeing you was closure enough.

But it wasn’t. The conversation was riddled with tension and if he hadn’t known any better, you were surely throwing shade at him for what he had done. If this was the only way to get rid of the guilt, Nicholas had to at least try.

He gulped down whatever was left in his glass and then stopped you. “Wait, Y/N! You got a minute?” You shrugged, sitting back down, clutching your purse tightly. Nicholas took a deep breath. 

“Listen... I don’t want to do this all over again,” he said quietly. “I just want to say I’m so sorry for being the worst boyfriend ever... and for being a dick and-”

“Nick,” you said, cutting him off. “I forgive you.” Nicholas fell silent. Those three words didn’t give him the relief he thought he’d get. A lot of him thought that you’d tell him you missed him and that you waited for him all this time and that you still love him. 

But none of that came. 

“Seriously...? Just... like that?”

You pressed your lips together. “I mean, what do you want me to say? That I still have feelings for you and I want to get back together?”

It sounded weird out loud the more Nicholas thought about it. “I just wanted closure... I mean, I’ve been kinda thinking about it and it was unfair to you.”

“Just forget it, Nicholas. You said you were ‘better than better’, what now?”

“Maybe I was lying,” he murmured and like that the stony expression on your face crumbled, softened to your glowing features as you stared at the glass surface of the counter.

“Maybe I’m lying too,” you said. “I mean, I know I said I forgave you but sometimes, I sit down thinking of you and I hate you.” Nicholas chewed on the bottom of his lip as you spoke. All this time he’d been worrying about his feeling and his guilt that he never thought about you.

“I hate you for not coming back for me when you promised me you would. But you know what, you have new friends, a new girl, a new life... who am I to tell you you can’t enjoy that?” You sat back and then looked at Nicholas and Nicholas looked back at you. It was the first time you two made direct eye contact and it didn’t feel like a knife piercing through him. 

“The last time we were together, I couldn’t help thinking of the future and...” you swallowed hard, taking Nicholas’s hands in yours. Your hands were just as soft as Nicholas remembered. “I knew that this would happen because I know you, Nick. I still let you go and maybe it was stupid but I was right.”

Nicholas held your hands tightly. “I wish that I could go back and change things... I swear I’m not like that any more.”

“Maybe you’re not,” you said, reaching up to touch the side of his face. “I hated you for what you did but I admire you for being able to sit here right now and at least tell me how you feel, even if it’s two years later. You’re not who you used to be, I know that.”

“That’s all I want,” Nicholas whispered. “To know that you don’t hate me.” You smiled and exhaled softly.

“I don’t. And I’m not holding this above you, Nick. We were so good together but we ended and that’s fine too. The best way to move on, though, is to let go of what you can’t control, let go of the past, Nicholas. The universe will align itself.” 

There were some days when Nicholas felt suffocated just thinking about you.You two didn’t end on good terms, if you had ended properly at all. But if this was the last goodbye, then Nicholas felt himself healing a little bit. 

You slid off your seat and kissed Nicholas’s lips. He couldn’t give in and kiss you back, but neither did he have the strength to pull away.

“There. Now we officially broke up,” you giggled, slinging your purse over your shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you later, or maybe I won’t. Don’t beat yourself up over me.” You began to leave with your friends and turned around one last time to wave goodbye. 

It felt like a certain weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Nicholas didn’t feel guilty anymore, the chains around his ankles were finally free. 

He took out his phone and texted Mina. “I’m sorry for everything.” Nicholas got a reply almost immediately, giving him the impression that Mina might have been thinking of him too.

She texted. “I know, love.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

[alittletournesol]

Sing Your Soul {JongKey} part 2/?

Part 2

Eight in the morning had rang on Kibum’s phone, stirring him from sleep as a ball of fur buried its muzzle in his sweatshirt sleeve. The young man blindly grabbed the device and turned the alarm off before he stretched his back, a low grunt escaping his throat. It took him a few seconds to open his eyes and notice the poodle lying on him and seeking for some strokes. With a smile, he welcomed the curly head with a gentle hand, caressing here and scratching there, until a bark startled him.

Standing near the couch, a second puppy was staring at him, black hair half hiding its eyes. It only made Kibum smile more despite his tired eyes, and he slowly sat up straight while tapping the couch he had slept on. Within a second, both his hands were busy stroking his dogs for a sweet morning moment. He had come home early the previous evening, all thanks to Jinki, but somehow he had found himself working on his laptop until very late. 

Sleeping on his couch was something common since he lived alone, it depended on his mood when bed time would come. Sometimes it was out of pure laziness because he was too tired to stand up and walk to his bed, some others he just wanted to sleep with his kids. At that moment, these two were still peaceful and he made the most of it because he knew it wouldn’t last long. Once he could free his hands, he caught his glasses resting on the couch’s backrest and put them on, sighing with comfort when he could finally see something.

Yawning, he let his thoughts gather in his brain and stood up, stretching and walking towards the kitchen. The puppies followed him and got under his feet, ignoring his whines and complaints about it until he filled their bowls. As soon as he was sure they wouldn’t come to him to play, he smiled and petted them a little before he turned his vintage coffee maker on and headed to his bathroom. Only a few minutes were enough for him to take a warm shower and really wake himself up, following his routine in front of his mirror.

Once his skin was decent looking and he had put his lenses and clothes on, he nodded to himself and went back to take a cup of coffee, accompanied with a bowl of cereals mixed with dried red berries. He had a weakness for western-like meals, to the extent he didn’t even remember how to properly cook dishes from his own country. His life had become full of pasta and sweet breakfasts, and he wouldn’t go back in time for anything in the world.

As he sat at the dining table and chewed, he sighed and took his phone to scroll through his social medias, as was his morning habit. He still wondered why he kept working on Saturdays, especially when trains’ hours were different and quite bothering ; he had often thought of investing in a car but although he had money to, he had realised it would take longer to endure the rush hours’ traffic. The subway was faster at least, when there weren’t some technical issues forcing him to wait in a crowded wagon…

This simple thought reminded him of the stop at Sindang station the day before, and he almost knocked his bowl over. Quickly, he opened the app he had saved a few posts on, the evening before at Minho’s bar, and found himself relieved that he hadn’t had only dreamed of doing it. The eight videos were there, patiently waiting for him to watch them, and he didn’t wait a second more. Playing the first one, he easily recognised the sharp features of the subway singer despite the blurred quality during the first seconds. 

The sound wasn’t the clearest but it was enough for Kibum to be mesmerised once again, the crystalline voice reaching his ears and even deeper inside. The stranger was still playing his guitar, but considering he was only wearing a tank top and jeans, the video was dating back to summer time. The event planner could make out the singer’s tanned skin, emphasised by his white hair not hidden under a hood this time. The song’s melody was quite punchy and refreshing although it remained sweet, and gave a pleasant summer vibe.

On another video, he wore a cap and the same kind of hoodie from the day before, but his guitar was against the wall. Instead, he was ringing a small instrument with bells, following the rhythm of a different song. Even if the style was different, his voice suited it so well it felt like he could sing anything, as if every note came so easily from his throat. He didn’t even seem to make a great effort from outside, but Kibum had heard Jinki talk a lot about how hard it could actually be to sing in tune. 

The brown haired man watched all the videos he had under his eyes, frowning at this strange small instrument which made a buzzing noise. It looked like a toy for a child but strangely, the stranger was making it his own accompanist, it was pretty unique and original. A quick glance at the comments and a web research let Kibum know it was called a kazoo and that the singer didn’t blow in it but actually hummed to make it vibrate with different tunes. 

Another video that held his attention showed the guy singing a capella. No instrument, no other sound than his voice singing a song sounding rather sad but not less beautiful. Even if he was just watching a screen and listening to a bad quality audio, the event planner found himself deeply moved by the lyrics and melody of a very slow song asking for forgiveness.

“This guy is amazing.” He eventually whispered before lowering his head to find his two dogs staring at him. “Kids, we can’t let him waste his talent like that, can we ?”

The pups naturally didn’t reply but the way they tilted their heads to the side was enough for Kibum. He hadn’t any plan at the moment but it would come sooner or later, he had the whole day ahead of him before taking the subway and willingly stopping earlier than he should.

A day had never flown by slower than that day, even with the certain amount of work that had awaited the event planner as soon as he had stepped in his office. He had spent hours planning this business meeting, calling hotels in Jeju without any break before he had eventually found an agreement with an owner. After all, it couldn’t be easy to privatise a hotel and a beach for the next month, so the customer would have to content himself with the whole first floor including a huge meeting room.

Even when he had thought of taking a break, he had received a call he couldn’t have refused, and more planning to do. It was almost seven in the evening by now and Kibum was getting ready to leave his office, his heart suddenly beating faster at the thought of stopping at Sindang. He usually was the kind to approach people easily, yet this time he could feel a sort of stress holding his stomach with a strong grip.

After all, he was a stranger among others to this guy, and the latter wasn’t expecting more than a few coins thrown in his guitar’s case. The event planner put his coat on and made sure to close every door, thinking about the plan he had thought of from time to time. It wasn’t much but even though he wanted to do more, his position didn’t really allow him to take such a risk. He hadn’t asked any form of permission yet, but he was sure he could count on the person he was thinking about.

The lump in his throat kept growing as the subway was rolling, stops going by and Kibum counting them. After thinking about it a lot, he eventually decided to send a message to his contact but remained evasive, only telling them they must meet soon to talk business. He was so lost in his thoughts that he almost missed his stop, standing up quite fast and nearly stumbling on someone’s foot before he finally found himself on the platform. The place was crowded since countless persons were getting off, and the event planner managed to stand against the wall, waiting for the stampede to reduce. 

Once he felt like breathing freely again, he adjusted his coat and styled his now messy hair before turning his head towards the corner he should find the singer. And the latter was here,  but he wasn’t singing. Kibum frowned and checked his watch to realize it was already a couple of minutes past eight, and the blonde man was packing his things to leave. Without wasting more time, the brunette crossed the platform until he was close enough to make out the stranger’s face.

He was all in black that day, from his sweater to his holed jeans, if it wasn’t for the silver chain hanging at his belt and his rings. No hood this time, but an as dark cap with another ring on its peak. What the event planner hadn’t expected was for this man to be a bit shorter than him ; when the latter was sitting on his high stool, it wasn’t as noticeable as when he was standing. It was rather cute but it made the young man remember the a capella video… and wonder how such a powerful voice could come from this tiny body.

He was so lost in his observation that he didn’t react when the singer turned towards him and seemed to ask something. He snapped out of it when two fingers clicked in front of his face.

“There, welcome aboard.” The blonde guy, and his speaking voice was surprisingly lower than his singing one, startling the other man. “Is everything alright ?”

“Huh ? Oh, yes, yes I’m fine.” Kibum eventually got a grip on himself and cleared his throat. “You… You’re leaving already ?”

“Yeah, got some places to attend. Can I help you with something ? You’re the guy from yesterday, right ?”

“You can recognise me ?”

“Not everyone leaves fifty thousands of wons to a subway singer. Are you here to take them back ? I haven’t spent them yet.”

“What ? No, not at all, just keep them.”

The smile that enlightened the stranger’s face was so soft and grateful that the event planner got lost for words. He was standing there, certainly gaping and looking like a really strange dude, however the singer was patiently waiting for him and whatever he had to say.

“Hum, I’m usually here until eight.” The blonde eventually said to lighten the mood. “If you want to hear me again, just come a bit earlier than today and we’ll be good.”

“Oh, yeah, sure I was a bit late today.” Kibum nodded, what made the other slightly laugh. “Actually I wanted to propose you something. Would you like to sing somewhere else ? Bigger place, a real audience and—”

“Here we go again.”

The way he got interrupted by the blonde sighing and whispering these quite exasperated words made the brunette raise his eyebrows.

“Listen, you should just go home and mind your own business.” The singer said, his voice soft but his tune firm. “I’ve had my fill of scammers pretending to make a great artist of me, with promises of some company noticing me and all that bullshit. I lost money in those swizzles and disappointed not only myself but my closest relatives as well.”

“Wait, no, I’m not a scammer—” Kibum started, only to be cut off again.

“That’s how they all start. And then they ask for money to cover audition fees, contract fees, fees and more fees. In the end ? Nothing for me, it’s just hot air. I’m not falling for that again so if you don’t mind.”

The event planner didn’t have time to protest because the blonde just left, his guitar’s case on his back and stool under his arm. He stood there, dumbfounded but unable to reproach him for being suspicious, after all he was right : swindlers could be pretty merciless and destroy one’s dream with fake promises. Now he understood why this man hasn’t been noticed : perhaps he had, yet perhaps the fear of being scammed again had made him ignore and refuse everything blindly.

As he boarded the next train, Kibum sighed and found himself regretting to have been so bold. He couldn’t have expected the singer to take him wrong, but he had that terrible habit to never beat around the bush that sometimes put him in awkward situations. Tact, you have to work on your tact, he said to himself while looking at his phone on his lap. For the rest of his journey, he absent-mindedly played some famous game, his thumb sliding on the screen to create combinations of coloured forms.

After a while he reached his home, but his mood was so low he didn’t tolerate the silence of his apartment despite his dogs welcoming him warmly. He spent a bit of time with them and made sure to fill their bowls before he headed to his dressing room, grabbing a few clothes that fitted a night at the bar. Putting them on, he checked his hair and face in the bathroom’s mirror and caught a bag and his keys, leaving in the already dark night.

A few bus stops later, he was in front of the Blue Night, quite crowded but it wasn’t a surprise : it was Saturday night. When he entered the place, the singular ambiance filled him with a familiar feeling, and he got even more relaxed when he noticed Jinki sitting in front of the counter. Next to him, their young friend Taemin was here too, relishing a drink that seemed alcoholic. They were both chatting with Minho while the latter was refilling some glasses, running here and there to satisfy every customer.

When Kibum sat on the free tool next to the youngest man, his three friends stared at him for a second and immediately noticed something was off.

“I guess we’re in for a Martini ?” The bartender said, cocking an eyebrow when his best friend raised two fingers. “Vodka Martini then, you’re getting off to a good start.”

“Shitty day, hyung ?” Taemin asked, patting his elder’s back.

“Not that much, but it took a turn I didn’t expect.” The brunette shrugged. “You know the feeling when you get dumped ?”

“No, I’m the one who dump.”

“Shut up, I remember how you came whining at my door just a few weeks ago, when the last one broke up with you through a phone call.”

“Don’t rub it in, I’m still sensitive.”

“You asked for it.”

“Come on guys, as if it was necessary.” Minho rolled his eyes, handing his glass to Kibum. “I thought you would come with good news since your message said you got some business for me.”

The event planner let a huge sigh out and took a sip of his cocktail, the combination of liquors hitting him right away. 

“Well my dear friend, I thought so myself.” He replied. “But I got dumped by the aforesaid business.”

“You’ll have to be a bit more specific if you want us to understand.” Jinki smiled. “A simple business wouldn’t put you in that state.”

“Maybe I have a crush on the business. Tiny one. I saw him twice only, and you know how it finished.”

“Tell us more.” The bartender encouraged the other man. “It’s been a while since your last fantasy about some guy.”

Kibum took another sip before he gave in to his friendly audience and started telling how he had discovered the subway singer by chance, the day before. He wasn’t the kind to be shy about his feelings and emotions, he had no problem sharing with his friends how mesmerised the stranger’s voice had left him and how handsome the guy was. He confessed his last minute plan and how it got quite shattered not long ago.

“Wait, you were about to propose a performance night in my bar to a random guy ?” His best friend frowned as the shaker stopped moving in his hands. “You got to be kidding me.”

“I wasn’t going to propose him, only ask if it was something that could interest him.” The brunette retorted. “I would have talked about it with you afterwards.”

“You know I can’t welcome any artist like that here, there’s paperwork and all that stuff… and I already have Jinki and Taemin planned for the next two Wednesdays.”

“Trust me, if you hear that guy, you’ll pay him twice your price to sing on your stage. But he didn’t let me finish anyway so you’re safe.”

“That’s too bad…” Taemin commented. “Maybe a new face would have given the Blue Night some new lease of life. I mean, I love singing here and I’m sure Jinki hyung does too, but if Kibum hyung himself sees potential in someone else… would have been interesting to give it a try.”

“I’m not having doubts on it, it’s just something that can’t be planned in the blink of an eye.”

“Can’t you do something ?” Jinki asked his boyfriend, looking at him. “I’ve rarely seen Bum like this, the guy must be interesting.”

“Hey, I’m his best friend but that doesn’t mean I have to give free access to my business to some guy, just because he fancies him !”

“Come on, Minho. He barely asks you things.”

The tall man was alone against the world, even Taemin was staring at him and trying to convince him with his eyes. Sometimes he hated when these two were taking Kibum’s side, because he could hardly resist them when they made a stand. He was still pondering the issue when his best friend handed him his empty glass, clearly asking for more.

“Oh Lord.” Minho sighed and rolled his eyes. “Fine, just send me some video of that guy and I’ll see what I can do. Now stop dramatising, that was your first and last mix of the night.”

“You’re the best best friend one can dream of.” Kibum smiled. “Now shut up and fill that glass.”

to be continued.

[smallerthanzer0]

MCU: version control

(read on Ao3)

(warning: Endgame spoilers!)

Summary: Tony's known three people with that voice - a father, a friend, a son. He's outlived all of them.

or, Tony Stark does some time travel and catches feelings about a certain lost Avenger on the way.

It’s just gravity, in the end: he’s in space, floating hazily in dim-lit conversation and deoxygenated dreams, and then he’s back on Earth and everything is heavy again and he’s falling, falling, falling -

“I lost the kid,” he rasps. An admission of guilt, only marginally lighter for the possessive he barely manages to avoid. The ground is soft under his feet after a month of metal decks; he has to dig his feet in just to stay standing.

Steve, always the indulgent priest and never the confessor, takes his shoulder and leads him away and says nothing else about Tony’s family even as they scroll through lists of the casualties and a familiar scarlet-and-gold visage flickers into view. It's like seeing the fragments of JARVIS' core all over again.

It makes sense. Of course it makes sense. Vision was born from the Stones, the keeper of the Mind Gem, and to Thanos he was nothing but another receptacle to pry open. And yet, like all the other losses the universe has suffered in the past month, it is senseless.

Luckily, Tony’s not conscious for too much longer to care about it.

---

Five years later, one last mission, and Tony is very much over having his family history thrown in his face while he's trying to save the world.

And yeah, this one's kind of on him. He’ll be damned if he somehow lets the Tesseract get away from him again; he can handle Hurricane Howard Stark for a few minutes if it gets him out of the compound. Compared to their last stop, this is a piece of cake.

Then Jarvis climbs out from the driver’s side of his dad’s car and it blindsides Tony almost as bad as getting transitively bodyslammed by the Hulk.

Here’s the thing - meeting a past version of his father isn’t all that bad. The guy standing next to him juggling sauerkraut and flowers is practically a stranger. Maybe he’s seen him in a newsreel somewhere, that same wide-eyed wonder reserved for particularly wild tangents about the future, but he’s a far cry from the Howard Stark who needed Tony out of his line of sight at all times so he could concentrate. It’s easy to say the things he needed to hear back in the future before Morgan was born, knowing that none of it will ever matter.

But oh, Jarvis. Edwin Jarvis, who patched Tony's knees when he fell and drove him to move-in day at MIT and had a hand on his shoulder all the way through his parents' funeral. A man worth recreating.

Tony's already rocking forward on the balls of his feet, idly wishing he'd foregone the pseudonym so he could hear his name in that voice again, when he catches Jarvis' eye.

There's… nothing.

Jarvis is a professional butler. He would never show himself to be nonplussed by the presence of an unexpected guest. But there's no recognition, none of the affection that's been on his face in every single memory he has of the man.

He's abruptly reminded of a late and probably drunken night in college, training JARVIS to call him by name and being hurt every single time at how different it sounded. Remembers the night Vision was born, hearing that voice and not knowing if it would ever sound familiar again. Thinks of another, later evening when Vision had phased into his lab at the Avengers Compound and asked dryly if he'd somehow fused himself to his chair and needed help getting up - he's pretty sure that his near hysterical response set Vision's sarcasm development back by months.

Tony's known three people with that voice - a father, a friend, a son. He's outlived all of them.

He rocks back, waves the two of them off, and wanders casually in Steve's direction without a backwards glance.

---

Bruce is a much better listener than he was post-Mandarin.

It's almost like old times, ignoring that Bruce is permanently bigger and greener now, the two of them in the lab as Tony finalizes schematics for the gauntlet. Bruce takes his glasses off and plays with them, a familiar habit echoed in larger hands.

"We could really bring them back tomorrow," he says quietly. "One snap, and they all come back."

Tony had to analyze the Mind Stone's composition and radiation this morning to see if the gauntlet material was compatible. With that and Natasha's sacrifice, he's keenly aware of who's coming back and who's not. "Not all of them."

Bruce fixes him with solid eye contact he wouldn't have managed five years ago. "Nat?"

"Among others." He sighs. "I saw Jarvis, back in the 1970s."

"Ah," Bruce says. "Vision?" Neither of them mention the possibility of bringing either Jarvis or JARVIS back. It's strange, the lines they've drawn between graves that should be dug up and those to remain untouched. Stranger still to find sources of unimaginable power and not figure out how to use them to the fullest. Maybe it's better to keep things simple.

"I didn't get to know him very well." Bruce sounds fairly apologetic considering that his reason for not being around is his alter ego rocketing him into space. "He seemed like a good person, though. Completely willing to sacrifice himself if it meant stopping Thanos."

Tony grits his teeth. "Yeah, that's not - he was a person, Bruce. He was terrible at cooking and he asked Pep to dance with him the first time he met her and he had a thing for a women who's said maybe two sentences to me that weren't death threats. I - we made him, and he was kind and smart and in love, and Thanos killed him."

Bruce looks at him with a terrible sympathy. "He was like family to you, wasn't he. Just as much as JARVIS."

"Didn't really recognize it until Morgan, but… yeah. Yeah, he was."

"It's harder to tell, when they come out fully grown," Bruce jokes. He's still playing with his glasses. "If there's anyone who was dragged into the whole Thanos situation, it's him. We could… if we're trying to get Nat back too, we could..."

The next day, Bruce tugs on the gauntlet. Tony can only hope that he's thinking of a certain someone when he snaps his fingers..

---

It’s the end of the world (again), but this time there’s a new and refreshing twist where the Avengers get their own army to match whatever disposable soldiers Thanos has elected to hurl at them this time. Portals are opening all over the battlefield, friendly faces pouring out, and in the sparking orange of the one to Wakanda there’s a flash of scarlet-and-gold and -

Vision is there, hand in hand with Wanda, scarlet magic flickering around the conspicuously bare plane of his forehead. Lacking the powers the Mind Gem afforded him, Tony guesses, and probably dealing with a temporary patch job from Wanda, but still more than ready to fight with a physical form offering far more strength and resilience than a normal human.

Tony smiles. Morgan’s going to love her new big brother.