#YOU JUST HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL YOURE OUT OF WORK AND FINISH THE EPISODE

[dfroggofarson]

Helloo Dear Reader! Since exam period is crushing me I decided to post Chapter 2. today. Thank you for the likes and the reblog! I am looking forward to feeding on your support. - that's gonna be how I measure my worth, obviously.

Btw You can also find this on my Ao3 under the same username.

Have fun and a good day (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)

Cry, Baby

Chapter 2. - Some I-scream, sir?

"No, I’m telling you, Pompompurin is extremely cute!"

"Exatly! That’s why I’ve been telling you to get Pompompurin socks, like me!"

You wiggled your toes in the pink merch socks while the rest of your legs were still under the too-clean and too-white hospital sheets. It has been almost a week since you’ve had the luck of being hospitalized, and today was the day you finally got released. Yamaguchi came here every day just to be with you for these past six days, and even though you got him to go home early yesterday, he insisted on being with you today to help you with packing, and to treat you to ice cream as a reward for enduring hospitalozation and not dying. You told him you were perfectly fine now, but he was adamant.

"I’m not leaving you alone! What it another episode comes and you’re by yourself?" He asked, despite knowing you have nurses available 24/7 and your mom also came to check on you every day after work.

You were thankful you had a friend like him.

Now there you were, standing up slowly – as per your friend commanded you – while he held your right arm to help you balance yourself. "I can stand all right by myself, thank you," you remarked, to which Yamaguchi just snorted.

"I don't think so."

"I really can, but... alright." Your face warmed into a smile.

Your friend made sure you could actually stand on your two legs, and then went over to the other side of the bed to pick up your backpack your mom brought you a few days ago.

”So I packed your bag but look around, I might have forgotten something," Yamaguchi offered. You glanced around and shook your head. "I got your books, snacks, clothes, socks, and um… that sort of things…" Suddenly his face became all read and you had to take a moment to realize why.

"You didn’t pack my underwear, did you…?" You asked, mortified, now your face read also. He gulped. "I told you to leave my underwear alone! Were you secretly a pervert all this time or what?!"

"No, no, I’m sorry! I was just trying to help, and happened to grab them, too… It was an accident, I swear!"

"How can this be an accident?!" You exclaimed, both of your heads as red as an overripe tomato. "How can touching my underwear be an accident?!"

"Are you finished, kids? We have to get going."

Both of you turned to the door to see your slightly annoyed mom leaning into the door frame. If red had an even more intensive color than you two were wearing, now your faces would resemble that. You wanted to dig yourself a grave and lie in it without hesitation. Yamaguchi’s face told the same tale.

"Come on, Yamaguchi-kun, get Yori’s bag," she ordered, and the poor boy flinched. He grabbed your bag and scurried out of the room as quick as possible. "Let’s go, Yori."

"Yes, mom," you replied.

"And teach that boy some manners while you’re at it! I don’t want grandkids until you’ve both finished college."

"Mom!" you cried, burying your face into your shirt.

"I’m so sorry, Ms. Shidou, I really didn’t mean it…" you heard Yamaguchi whine while waiting for you in the corridor. You caught up to him while letting your mom take the lead.

She got you checked out of the hospital, and took you to the gray Toyota that was parked outside the hospital. All three of you got in the car and remained silent. It was your mother who broke it first.

"How are you feeling, Yori?"

"Better, thanks. I am as healthy as an ox!" You said smiling, and you didn’t lie.

It was just that you had a weird feeling in your stomach you did not know the reason of. But hopefully it was not another warning for a second seizure to come.

"The doctor told me about this new experimental medicine," she continued. "I could have you enter a program, he already made a spot for you. Most of it would be covered by the hospital. He also said it’s much better than the last one, it’s showing great progress with little side effects. I think we should to it."

Your smile weakened. Another experimental program? The last and only one you were willing to participate in ended with night vomiting, serious headaches and early signs of depression. Although it made the number of your seizures deplete, it was not worth it. You would have stopped after the second dose, had your mom not pushed you through all the way to the sixth.

You had no choice but to go with her decision, but maybe you could get her to drop these trial drugs.

"I don’t think that’s a good idea… The last one I took only made it worse," you mentioned carefully.

"Yes, but it’s different now. I looked at the numbers, almost seems to be too good to be true, but apparently it is."

You highly doubted that.

"What do you think, Yamaguchi-kun? Don’t you think it would be good to end these hospital visits and get these seizures out of Yori?"

Yamaguchi looked to the other side. You absolutely hated when she did that. Trying to get a manipulated opinion out of your best friend to support her cause.

"Well, it’s not really my place to say, but… I think Yoriko-chan should be the one to decide. As far as I have heard the last time it didn’t go that well…"

"Is that so? Hmm, I suppose you’re right…" she gave the impression of thinking about it, but you knew very well she had already made up her mind.

You just despised these situations.

The car turned to the left, and you were now in the city center of Shibuya.

"Mom, you remember I told you how we wanted to grab some ice cream with Yama-kun? To celebrate my release?" you said quickly. Anything to get out of this. "Would you please drop us off somewhere near? I’ll meet you at home in a few hours, I promise I won’t be late!"

"Oh, right. Let me take a right, I can pull aside there."

She turned to the right and stopped the car. "All right, you two be careful. If anything happens, call me and I’ll get you," she said, but you knew you would never do that unless it really was an emergency. "Yamaguchi-kun, keep an eye on my daughter – but not a too close one."

Yamaguchi nodded his head up and down frantically, and promised to do so. You bid your farewells to your mother, and got out of the car. You watched as she drove away, and when the Toyota was out of sight, you let out a sigh so large Yamaguchi almost jumped.

"I just hate it when she picks on you, I’m sorry," you said, but he just waved it off.

"I know what she’s like, I sensed something was coming our way," he admitted, to which you grimaced. "But really, I don’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe they’ll go away, like three years ago, and then they won’t come back."

"Even if that were to happen, I doubt she’ll let go easily. Maybe if nothing happens for a few months. I’ll just need her to drop this topic."

You two walked silently towards the ice cream shop you knew well. That strange sensation in your stomach did not seem to go away, no matter how hard you tried to ignore it. The grimace on your face only shifted also. And Yamaguchi was quick to notice it.

"Are you okay? Does something hurt?" he asked worriedly. You shook your head.

"No, it’s just… this seizure was somehow… different."

"Different?"

"I can’t really put it into words, but there is a strange sensation in my stomach telling me something’s wrong," you admitted. Strangers passed by while you were walking slowly. "And… I had this weird dream while I was sleeping… there was this... thing that had four arms and four eyes."

"Wow, okay, your dreams are mostly horrific or undecodable, but this sounds different," Yamaguchi said, looking on the pavement.

"Yeah. And also there was some kind of word I heard while looking at it. It was Ryoumen, it means double-faced, I think."

You heard someone tripping over their feet behind you, and you quickly turned to see a white haired man collect himself casually. He wore rounded sunglasses. You quickly turned to him.

"Are you okay, sir?" You asked as Yamaguchi approached him as well.

"Of course, of course!" He replied, probably with the most unworried tone you have ever heard in your life. You had no idea what he was on but you would gladly accept some of that. "Sorry to bother you, I just accidentally overheard you talk about a dream you had, and I happen to be a big fan of strange dreams! Would you care to talk about it more?" He smiled friendly, and you started to have a fishy feeling about him, you just couldn’t put your finger on it. But you were so taken aback by his question that you automatically replied to him.

"Sure, uhh… So there was a four-armed thing, maybe a guy… and I heard this Ryomen…"

"He had four eyes, right? What colour were they?" He asked, face still lit up for whatever was so interesting in your random dream.

"Uhh, blue, why?"

"Oh, blue, I see! You know, there is actually a study that showed that less japanese people see blue-eyes in their dreams, so I guess that makes that dream extra special!"

"I… see?" You were seriously weirded out right now, and you could sense Yamaguchi had the same feeling.

"Also, did he by chance have black marks across his body?"

Something was wrong.

"Yes."

You could not see the stranger’s eyes, but you swore to God something changed in his expression. The next moment it was gone, like nothing happened.

"Are you in a hurry now? If it’s not inconvenient for you, would you care to join me for a coffee to talk about this dream more?" He asked, and all alarms went off in your head. Something’s wrong, something’s wrong!, your gut told you.

"Please excuse us, but actually we are in a hurry," said Yamaguchi, grabbing your arm and starting to pull you in the opposite direction he was originally going in.

"Yes, but it was very interesting, thank you for the talk," you said, hoping to God he wouldn’t follow you. Maybe it would be a good idea to call your mother, she couldn’t have gone that far…

"Ah, forgive me for taking your time, then. But please take my contact info, if anything pops into your mind or have another dream like that, please contact me!"

You quickly took the card uttering one last "goodbye" – heaven knows why – and let Yamaguchi practically drag you away from the scene. You glanced at the stranger’s direction – but he was gone! It was like he wanshed into thin air. The hairs on your neck stood up. Run, your brain told you, and you made haste right away. You and Yamaguchi only stopped when you were several blocks and streets away.

"Oh my god, I thought he was going to kill me or something," you panted, heart still in your throat, and Yamaguchi nodded heavily.

"He’s totally a serial killer. Oh my god, he must be a serial killer, I am so glad we’re alive."

"Me too. Shit that was weird," you muttered, still terrified of the aura that man was carrying. What was his business?! You just couldn’t figure it out.

"Maybe he wanted to kidnap you, you’re a pretty schoolgirl after all.”

"Let’s just… not think about that againand forget it, okay? Shit. Thanks for dragging me away, I thought I was gonna throw up and get killed on the spot," you said, eyes wide, while both of you leaned onto a wall. "I do not want to die by the hands of a random stranger."

"What if we didn’t talk about death at all?" He interjected. "I don’t want to die, I’m too young to die. No death for me, please."

"And no ice cream too, I really think I’m gonna throw up…" You barfed, trying to hold it in. Your stomach was stirred to the point where you really thought you were going to vomit. Thank you, stress.

In the end, you managed to hold back, but you didn’t have the nerve to get going just yet. Both of you just leaned to the wall and stared out of your head.

What was that man’s business? Was he really some sort of dream-scientist or whatever? He didn’t seem to be bad at first glance, he was maybe even handsome and friendly. But the questions he posed and the way he did… Every single nerve in your body told you to run, that something is wrong and just go.

You looked at your hand, his card still in your palm, although a bit crumpled. You waned to throw it away immediately, but… something told you to keep it. You were still a bit trembling, so without thinking, you put it in the back pocket of your trousers and forgot about it as quickly as you could. You would throw it out later.

The two of you remained here for what seemed to be half an hour, until you could calm your heart and breathing. Only ten minutes passed by the time you got going, and none of you spoke about getting ice cream that day again.

* * *

Later that afternoon, you said goodbye to Yamaguchi. You could still see how his hands were shaking, and you could relate to him quite much on this matter. He made sure to get you home safely, walked you to your front door and watched you go inside before he turned to go home as well. Thankfully, he only lived a few streets away from you, and just three minutes after he dropped you off you got a message from him telling you that he’s home, too. You let out a sigh of relief and went straight to your room after saying hi to your mom. She did try to ask why were you so early, but you just said that you remembered you have a test on Monday and you and Yamamguchi had to study for that.

Once you got upstairs, you changed to your pajamas and plopped on your bed to watch anime, or anything, to get your mind off of that strange encounter. You started the first anime that came to your screen and watched mindlessly. It seemed to work, and because Yamaguchi didn’t text you you assumed he was doing the same.

A few hours later you had dinner with your mom, and although she was not a bad cook, you just couldn’t get yourself to eat with joy. You dodn’t have an appetite, but if you had let her know that, she would have tried to ask questions that you really didn’t want to answer.

When you were winished with washing the dishes, your mind was somewhat at ease. You went to the bathroom to get ready to sleep. You said goodnight to your mom, walked to your room, and tucked yourself in. Sleep didn’t come that easily – but when it did, you wished you never closed your eyes in the first place.

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

WHSIKEY IM NOT ANSWERING YOUR ASK IM SO SORRY

[asahicore]

fast forward - pjs

pairing. jay x fem!reader

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

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

word count. 26.6k

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And that’s your business, because…?”

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

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

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

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t need to.”

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

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

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

“I’m sorry?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At least you’re self-aware.”

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

“What are you-”

“Have you done the German homework for tomorrow?”

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

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

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

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

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

Then you see it.

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

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

Your heart sinks to your stomach.

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

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

“Y/N-” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

It belongs to none other than Park Jongseong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is so good,” you mumble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hm?”

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

“No. I have… things on my mind.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

“...Jong?” you try.

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

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

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

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“Mh-hm. It’s Saturday tomorrow.”

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

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

You let out a shaky breath. “Okay.”

“I love you, Y/N.”

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

--

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

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

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

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

“What was it about?” Sunoo asks.

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

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

“Exactly!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Nowhere. Go on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“None taken.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She had a dream that she m—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And your friends wondered why you hated him?

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Stop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jong, your textbook.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re annoyed at how he makes you feel.

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

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

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

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

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

For now, you smile. “Get lost, Jong.”

--

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

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

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

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

you he’s not just another person!

sunoo okayyyyy i see you little miss repressed feelings

you i hate u

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You frown. “I don’t hate you.”

“Oh? That’s a recent development.”

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

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

“Back to hating.”

“Let’s start the assignment.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s not—”

“Let’s just focus on this.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir,” you reply, embarrassed.

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

“Do you even know what chiaroscuro is?” 

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

“Well, maybe if you didn’t-”

“Y/N, Jay, final warning.”

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sunoo, that’s disgusting.”

“Love? I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never—When?!”

She shrugs. “The other day.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dude…” Jongseong murmurs.

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

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

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

“Aren’t you cold?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

--

sunoo jay and y/n almost kissed earlier

kazuha WHAAAAT

you KIM SUNOO.

kazuha WHEN?????

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

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

kazuha i can’t believe i missed this fml

you YOU DIDNT MISS ANYTHING NOTHING HAPPENED

sunoo be serious u guys we’re standing inches apart

you were* and no we weren’t

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

kazuha sunoo…?

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

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

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

you …

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

kazuha cuuuute

you i resent these accusations.

sunoo istg if u dont kiss him next time i will

kazuha ???

you SUNOO?

sunoo WHAT

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Y/N…”

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

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

--

jong so… guess who got a five-day suspension

you you idiot what did your parents say?

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

you boo-hoo

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

you … are you feeling better?

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

you oh did you ask chaewon to do that?

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

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

jong ykw maybe i should just ask chaewon

you i’ll see you tomorrow jong!!

jong :) see you tomorrow pretty 

 --

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “Never.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Give me five minutes!” you call back.

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

--

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

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

He’s still Jong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In any case, he’s hiding something.

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

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

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

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

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

Your heartbeat speeds up and you have to look away.

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until you didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You said so yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you guys sit next to each other?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, I thought I’d do it now.”

“Now?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” you repeat, and he chuckles.

“Really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think I did, too.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that in your letter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fifty years, huh?”

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

“I wasn’t planning to.”

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “I am.”

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

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[tbaluver]

S/O With Depression- The Love And DeepSpace Men

parings in order: Xavier x Reader, Zayne x Reader, Rafayel x Reader, Sylus x Reader, Caleb x Reader requested by: anonnie ⋆˚꩜｡ genre: comfort a/n: hihi lovelies! ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡ i would like to mention that everyone has different types of depression and goes through different things! i wrote the ones i’m familar with and what the anonnie requested! what might be common for me or from the anonnie that requested can be completely different to someone else! if you want to see more then i’ll write a part 2! hopefully this brings some comfort to those that need it enjoy reading! <3 any likes and reblogs are always appreciated! enjoy!

⋆｡‧˚ʚ♡ɞ˚‧｡⋆

Xavier:

Will do his best to be a light and source of comfort for you

Xavier would stay close when getting out of bed feels impossible. But if you needed space, he’d respect that, keeping you company from a small distance in bed to remind you that you’re not completely alone. He wouldn’t let you stay curled up in bed for too long. He’d gently carry you to the kitchen to make sure you’re fed.

On days when your words don’t come easily and your thoughts feel jumbled, he never interrupts or rushes you. He stays quiet, a hand on top of yours, nodding along while letting you speak at your own pace even if your sentences come out jumbled. Occasionally, he might ask a question to understand the context. When you do finish what you’ve needed to say, he’ll work through it together with you

If you were taking any medications, he’ll go through the entire packet and read through any information about it online. He’ll remember all the side effects that come with it and checks up on you whenever you take them

When every little sound starts to feel like it was too much, he draws the curtains and does everything he can to make it more peaceful. He moves carefully, no sudden sounds will be made in this household. Even the way he eats or shifts in his seat would become more gentler. If you were comfortable with it, Xavier would gather you into his arms, holding you close against his chest. His hand rest gently over your ear, blocking out whatever noise is left.

Xavier would offer to listen and be the place where you can let it out. But if it’s an unexplainable feeling that you just can’t put into words then he’ll find a different way to cheer you up. He’ll settle beside you, pulling up your favorite comfort shows and have your snacks ready

Zayne:

Whenever getting out of bed feels like too much, he’ll leave a warm cup of tea and a few slices of fruit or your favorite snacks by the bedside table. He never rushes you so he waits. Sometimes he’ll sit nearby so you don’t feel alone. Other times, he gives you the space you want, trusting that you’ll reach out when you’re ready. But when it starts to feel like too much and the silence grows too heavy, he will step in. Never forcefully. He’ll encourage you to start off slow, a hand on yours. Maybe something as simple as sitting up or maybe just brushing your teeth.

Anytime you went through a depressive episode, Zayne has no problem doing the extra housework or helping you with your physical health. He’ll help you shower, brush through your hair gently, and help brush your teeth. He’ll praise you for each small step you take

The type to send you reminders to take your meds at the right time and that you should eat something before you take them so you don’t get nauseous.

Zayne would understand and has never taken it personally when you don’t want to be touched. He doesn’t try to hug or reach for your hand. Instead, he makes space for you until you you’re comfortable once again

He can tell when you get sad randomly. Zayne would never force you to explain but he will always remind you if you want to talk, he’s there. Sometimes when it’s just a quiet ache sitting in you for no reason, he’ll also understand that. He’ll suggest a walk out for fresh air or just for a different scenery if you’ve been inside for too long.

When the smallest sounds can feel too much, he’ll make sure to move extra quietly. He’ll offer noise cancelling headphones to drown out any sounds. Any open windows will be closed and he’ll draw the curtains to keep the noise out. He’ll make sure to close any of the doors inside softly, silence his phone and pager and he’ll make sure to give you the space you need.

Sometimes the words just don’t come out right but Zayne would never rush you. He would always be patient, even when your voice shakes or when you pause for too long. And when you do finally get them out, no matter how jumbled or messy it sounds, he listens. Every single word and every detail. Once you said all you needed to say, that’s when he speaks and helps

Reminds you that he is always there for you. Even if he was busy at work and you know he can’t reach you right now, you can still message him. He reminds you to never hesitate to reach out, spam him, leave him voice messages. He’ll read through every word and detail and he’ll find time to immediately reach out to you

Rafayel:

You would never feel alone if Rafayel was by your side. Even if he was away from an art exhibition, he would text you throughout the day. If you need him by your side, then he’s finding an excuse to get out of work and find his way to you.

When you’re having a hard time getting out of bed, Rafayel would be by your side under the covers so you don’t feel alone. However if you continue to have a hard time, he doesn’t hesitate to step in. He’ll scoop you up in his arms, carrying you to the bathroom. He’ll start with something simple, like a warm bath since it can maybe cheer you up.

When every noise seems to bother you, he’ll make sure to move around quietly in the studio. He’ll close up the windows and doors so his seagull friends won’t bother you. He’ll even breathe more quietly so he doesn’t bother you. Rafayel would still stay nearby but gives you your space to make sure you’re not alone. He’ll wait until you’re ready to talk with him

Rafayel would never take it personally when you did not want to be touched but he definitely does get a little pouty about it behind your back. He just misses holding onto you but he understands and gives you the space you need.

Feeling sad randomly? Rafayel would never push you to explain what’s wrong but he encourages you that it’s good to let it out and that he’s always there for you. However, if it was unexplainable, he doesn’t make you feel weird about it. He’ll find ways to cheer you up as best as he can. He’ll pull up videos on his phone and you silly videos he found that might make you smile. He’ll even suggest a quiet walk by the beach just for a change of scenery and for some fresh air

Sometimes the right words just won’t come. They get lost somewhere between your thoughts but Rafayel has never once looked at you confused or has never been impatient. He watches you carefully, trying to understand your expression. Sometimes he finishes the sentences for you, not to interrupt but because he’s piecing it together with you. And if you grow frustrated, he offers to sketch it out with you.

Sylus:

On days when getting out of bed feels impossible, he stays beside you but he doesn’t let you stay there for too long. He understands the weight of it all but he will step in. First he’ll start with encouragement, asking you to sit up just for a bit. But if your limbs feel too heavy and your body refuses to move, he never gets frustrated. He’ll carry you in his arms. He’ll run you a warm bath and help bathe you. Later he’ll encourage you to do some small activities with him to get you a little motivated

He would never take it personally if you were not in the mood to be touched. There’s no wounded ego or disappointment. He gives you the space that you need until you are ready to curl up next to him again. He’ll make sure you were absolutely comfortable with it before he reaches back

Sylus would always give you the choice to talk or cry or let it out to him in whatever way you need. But if it’s those days where it’s just unexplainable, he doesn’t press on. Instead, he’ll offer distractions. He’ll pull out a new vinyl that he’s been saving for or maybe stepping out to a new scenery to get rid of whatever ache you have in your chest

When the world feels too loud and your thoughts won’t slow down, no matter how hard you try to explain to Sylus through hiccupped sobs, he doesn’t ask you to make sense of it. Instead, he pulls you into his arms. He doesn’t say much at first, his hand moves slowly up and down your back. He doesn’t need you to have the right words. He’ll listen, hiccupped sobs or not, to every detail you have to say. When your sobs begin to slow, when you start to breathe a little easier, he’s still there, helping you sort through the weight you've been carrying. It doesn’t matter if the problem is big or small. He’ll work them out with you together.

Luckily your shared bedroom is at the top floor to avoid any noises from the city. However if any noise continues to bother you, Sylus wouldn’t ask what’s wrong, he’ll just move around quietly as best as he can. He’ll stop playing any music on his record player unless you don’t want him too. He’ll make sure Luke and Kieran are not in the same building and he’ll make sure to mute Mephisto

Caleb:

Having a hard time getting out of bed? Caleb would give you the space you need, leaving you your favorite snacks and water by the bedside table with a cute little note and a doodle for you. He’ll check in on you often to see if you’ve eaten or just by ‘passing’ by the room. However if it does stretch on, he’ll kneel beside the bed and offer his hand, suggesting a few easy stretches. He’ll encourage just a small stretch for your arms and then legs next and then a small little walk to the kitchen where he has a little meal waiting in the kitchen just for you

As much as Caleb loves to hold you and have you in his arms, he would never be offended if you did not want to be touched. He would never hover and never pressure you. He gives you all the space and time you need when you’re comfortable again

Feeling sad out of nowhere? He would be SO worried, it would be written all over his face. His first instinct is to check in, offering to let you vent out if you need to. He’s always been a good listener. If it just feels unexplainable and you can’t quite name the reason, then he’ll find ways to cheer you up. Caleb would curl up with you and pull up your favorite comfort shows or movies. Or he’ll bring you your favorite snack or make your favorite dish that you love. And of course, he offers his signature big bear hug.

If any sounds were bothering you, he’d make sure to not make a single sound in the house. No loud footsteps in the halls, no clinking dishes, you name it. He’d even go as far as making sure no plane flies in the direction over your home to make sure you get the peace you need.

Sometimes you can’t get the right words to come out and Caleb would be patient with you the entire time. He lets you speak and lets you take all the time you need to get it out. His hand rests on yours, his thumb traces slow, soothing circles over your knuckles as he reads your expressions carefully. If any tears come out from frustration, he cups your face with so much care and wipes away any stray tears.

ʚɞ cr. for the divider @/ cafekitsune

ʚɞ 𝘕𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯:

ʚɞ my other works if you want to check it out! The Love And DeepSpace Masterlist, Pg. 2

ʚɞ Others:

Wattpad ( still updating it rn )

twitter @/ tbaluverr but idk how to use twitter </3

[hhoneylemon]

‘cause i lo-lo-love the chase

summary: you finally kiss your best friend after burgers and slushies. he’s ecstatic. 2k words.

inspired by this song and post

mark is sick to his stomach.

he feels like a pervert. every time you hang out, he’s watching you. he watches the way your face lights up as you laugh, how you apply lip balm every now and then, the face you make when you focus on the show playing on the tv.

his crush on you is embarrassing. could he even call it a crush at this point? he’d throw himself in front of a car for you. you probably wouldn’t even feel special if he said that, he’d do that for any civilian to make sure they were safe. feelings suck.

is it enough that he waits when each seance dog episode comes out so he can watch it with you when you’re free? he stays off of social media until then, opting for going flying, studying extra, watching random shows he’s never heard of. the gritting feeling of want and anticipation are almost unbearable. note the word almost; the way you ask him to explain something to you, listening to his dorky ramble, the way you sit side-to-side with him on the couch while watching, the way you give truthful opinions about the episode you’d just watched with him. you make it all worth it.

he loves you. he realized he did a long time ago, then decided to hold that in him and ‘wait for the right time.’ he regrets that sentiment when he watches you go out with other guys, a harsh grip squeezing his heart just to throw it to the ground and stepping on it repeatedly.

at least the relationships never lasted. at least he was always there to pick you back up with a hug and the offer to watch a terrible movie to get over it. it’s never failed to work.

now, mark sits on your bedroom floor as he scribbles down the answers to your current homework assignment. you sit on your bed, hands thrown up as you complain about one of your teachers. he’s only half listening, trying to focus on the work to complete it.

“and she lost the paper, but somehow it’s my fault? now i’m knocked down a whole letter grade because she isn’t good at her job. i literally have a witness who saw me turn it in.”

mark nods in response, finishing his paper. he leans his head back onto your mattress, looking up at you. he offers a dopey grin. you offer a small smile in exchange before sliding off the bed and sitting beside him on the floor.

“sounds shitty. i hope you can do make up work to bring it up.”

“yeah.”

you murmur in response, grunting in annoyance. mark takes a moment to soak your image into his memory. the setting sun is casting a golden glow onto your skin, illuminating and shadowing the right parts of your face. he finds his mouth has gone dry.

“it’s almost dinnertime. you might wanna get home to your mom, mark.”

you twist to face him better, a kind warmth appearing on your face. he nods, almost disappointed. he grabs his school bag, standing with a little grunt of effort. you stand and follow him to your window, unlocking it for him as he slips into the straps of his bag. he smiles at you with a sickening sweetness.

“i’ll see you tomorrow, alright?”

you nod as he climbs out, watching him with quiet fondness. the way the soft breeze ruffles his hair has you in a chokehold, the puppy-like look on his face as he debates leaving or staying longer in his mind. he hovers off of your room, feet kicked behind his thighs as he looks at you.

“yeah. burger mart, right?”

he grins, nodding. the way his eyes crinkle at the corners has your heart beating a little faster. 

“yep, sounds good. bye!”

mark takes off into the sky. you watch him until you’ve lost sight of him. that’s when you close and lock your window, sitting on your bed and pulling out your phone while waiting until you hear your mom calling you to come eat dinner.

( ´ ▽ ` ).｡ｏ♡

mark hates his life.

he kept you waiting! he got sidetracked stopping a bank shooting as invincible. he was twenty minutes late as he jogged into burger mart, scanning the tables to try and find you.

you sat alone in a booth in the far corner, sipping on a slushy. he slides into the seat across from you, offering an apologetic look.

“sorry, i was superhero-ing.”

“all good.”

you grin, biting at your bottom lip. a few chuckles escape you as you point at him.

“your, uh, shirt is backwards.”

mark looks down. the pattern of his tee was missing, not to mention the tag sticking out of his collar. he sighs, ears turning red in embarrassment. he then struggles with sliding his arms into his sleeves and turning the shirt around, fixing it. you smile in amusement the whole time, holding back a laugh. he was cute. and a loser.

“ugh. whatever. what do you want to eat, i’ll pay for it.”

your eyes widen at his words, shaking your head.

“you don’t have to, it’s okay.”

you begin standing, only for him to hold up a hand. he rises to his feet and shimmies out of the booth, already pulling his wallet from his back pocket.

“no, it’s okay. i don’t mind, really.”

you nibble on your bottom lip, but give in anyways. you tell mark your usual order and he walks to the counter to order. he comes back in a few minutes, an exasperated look on his face.

“i’m so glad i don’t work here anymore. the cashier looked like her life was sucked outta her. i know the feeling.”

you laugh in response, relaxing into the booth. you forgot what it was like to hang out with mark.  it was like a warm hug; comforting and safe, you could tell him anything and he would only mildly judge you, then he would offer terrible advice after.

one of the employees beings over a paper bag that contained your food. the two of you spend a long time chatting in the booth, long after you finish eating. mark only ushers you out after he noticed his old manager had clocked in.

“i wasn’t done my slushy.”

you complain, walking beside him down the street. he offers an apologetic smile.

“we can get one from somewhere else. there’s a 7/11 a few blocks down?”

“sounds good.”

he nods, the two of you falling back into a comfortable silence. you travel downtown, finding the 24 hour store that hides with a few unused buildings. a nail salon sits beside it, currently closed after a villain was thrown through one of the walls. across the street is a parking garage, presumably for the places people work at down the block.

mark grabs your wrist, pulling you into the 7/11 with a laugh.

“what’s so interesting about the parking garage? you scared tether tyrant is hiding in there?”

you playfully roll your eyes, following him to the slushy machine. the blue raspberry is out of order, as always. the revelation makes mark groan and clutch his forehead, as if his two other favorite flavors aren’t in stock.

you grab a medium cup and reach for your favorite flavor, causing his nose to shrivel.

“be adventurous. get the root beer, it’s so good. trust.”

“i will not trust, mark.”

you laugh at him, filling the cup halfway. just to make him smile, you fill the other half with root beer. you get the desired outcome, mark’s face housing a gentle smile as he reaches for his own cup to fill.

when you got to the cashier, he cheated. he murmured something about tether tyrant in the parking garage—of course you looked outside, nervous, as though a superhero wasn’t standing right beside you. you looked back to berate him for tricking you, just to see he’s already paid.

he walks you outside with a grin, sipping from his slushy. you reach over and nudge his shoulder with your own, rolling your eyes. 

“you’re insufferably a gentleman.”

he raises an eyebrow, a his grin turning teasing.

“such big words coming from you.”

you groan and massage your temples with your free hand. he’s such a dork.

the two of you lean against the wall of the 7/11, making small talk as you sip from your slushies. he had gotten mountain dew and cherry, his other two favorites. they stained his tongue a weird shade when he sticks it out at you after you poke fun of him. you smile weakly in turn.

maybe this would be your end. the sunset illuminating his features, him animatedly talking about who knows what, smelling like citrus and mint and something so incredibly mark.

you nervously fiddle with the pockets of your pants as you walk to the nearby trashcan. you throw your cup away before mark’s right at your side, throwing his away as well. his mouth is still moving, though you’ve long lost what he’s been saying. the two of you walk into the parking lot while he continues talking, and them he smiles.

oh, it’s devastating. your heart stutters in your chest. your brain stops working. you do something stupid.

your hands find his cheeks. his eyes widen and his mouth finally stops moving, his cheeks turning pink. you pull him close and your lips meet.

it’s slow, soft. his lips are cold from the slushy. he tastes like mountain dew and cherries. you feel him move, so you open your eyes and part your guys’ lips. mark’s eyes open in confusion, only to widen when you begin laughing.

“oh, mark.”

he’s confused. but, oh, are you shorter than usual? he looks closer and—he’s not even on the ground. his entire face flushes as he touches back down, hands gently resting on your hips.

“god, that’s embarrassing.”

“do i kiss that good? you gonna fly away if i do it again, fly boy?”

he averts his gaze for a moment, shutting his eyes. he can’t believe you’re bullying him over this—

“do it again?”

his eyes fly open and he turns to look at you. your own eyes widen in response, a tad of uncertainty appearing in your eyes and creeping around in your brain.

“shit, sorry. i won’t do it again, sorry, i just—“

mark leans in, lips pressing softly to yours. he gently sighs against you, savoring the flavor of you. he loves root beer.

he pulls away when he needs air, eyes fluttering open to take in the sight of you. you’re beautiful. he smiles big, happiness radiating off of him in waves.

“i can walk you home now.”

“alright.”

you walk beside him, walking the few blocks to get back to your house. he walks you all the way up to tour door before stopping you, grabbing you by the wrist. he offers a gentle smile.

“hey. i hope this means something. like—i can take you out soon?”

a smile hints at your lips. you nod, arms wrapping around his neck.

“sounds good.”

mark leans in and kisses you for a third time that night. this time, his lips can’t help but form a smile. he can’t help if he lifts off the ground again, either. he also can’t help that he brought you up with him, slowly spinning the two of you together.

he drops back down, thumbs gently rubbing against the flesh of your hips. his forehead finds yours as he bites his bottom lip.

“same time on friday?”

you snort, fingers playing with the hairs at the nape of his neck.

“sure thing, fly boy.”

masterlist

[clarkeyszn]

# A BOY WHO’S JACKED & KIND ! george clarke

summary: you convince george to film a tiktok video with you. warnings: none although it is mentioned that george is able to lift reader onto his shoulder?? pairing: george clarke x fem! reader, established relationship. word count: 1.3k author’s note: inspired by the tiktok the useless hotline boys made bc i wish it was me! this wasn't proofread very well as i, yet again, prioritised my writing over my life commitments and i am now running late for work 👍

slim pickins — sabrina carpenter

it starts on a quiet friday afternoon. you and george both had a day off work and so you had taken the opportunity to have a cozy day in, just the two of you. you're sprawled on the sofa, scrolling aimlessly through your phone. george was spread out next to you, half asleep, when you nudge him with your phone. 

when he doesn’t respond, you nudge him again. “george.”

“hm?” he mumbles, peeking one eye open. 

“can we do this tiktok?” you showed him your phone. it was from one of your friend’s account to sabrina carpenter’s ‘slim pickins’ where her boyfriend lifts her up onto his shoulder. 

“you want me to lift you up for a tiktok video?” he blinked. 

“yeah,” you nodded, enthusiastically. 

“absolutley not,” he laughed, rubbing the tiredness from his eyes.

you sat up straighter, “what? why?”

"i'm not doing a trend called 'slim pickins'. what even is that?"

"don't act like i didn't catch you saving sabrina carpenter edits into a folder." you glared at him, "all you have to do is pick me up. what's even the point of all that muscle if you don't wanna use them?" you pinched his arm.

"first of all, ouch." he glared at you, "secondly, it's cringe."

you huff and flop back against the cushions of the sofa,, dramitically wounded. "you're so boring."

"i'm saving us from tiktok humiliation." he says, "the lads'll never let it go if i start doing coupley tiktoks." he complains, already closing his eyes again like the conversations over.

"please." you scoff, "you're mpre affectionate with chris and arthur than you are with me."

george just snorted, eyes still closed.

you sulk for exactly ten minutes, then you let it go. for now.

the next day

you woke up the next morning alone. george had left early, before the sun even rose, to film the next episode of the useless hotline. this meant you got to enjoy yet another blissfully quiet day.

that is, until you open your tiktok for you page.

there he was, your boyfriend, with his podcast co-host on his shoulder to the sound of the exact sabrina carpenter song you had shown him not even twelve hours prior, grinning like it was the most fun he had in weeks.

it was funny, of course, the running joke that you and andrew were merely side pieces in max and george's borderline romantic dynamic. but, still, you weren't letting this go easily.

later that night, you're sitting cross-legged on the bed, phone in hand. waiting for george to finish streaming. he's been live for hours now. talking, laughing, completely unbothered as he plays games for the people watching. eventually, you get bored of waiting, so you get up with your phone in hand and walk down the hall.

george is mid-sentence, laughing at something on his screen, when the door creaks open behind him. at first, he doesn't notice you, not until his chat explodes.

'Y/N!!!' 'she looks so done 😭' 'uh oh george is in trouble'

george grinned at the chat before turning in his chair to face you, "hey, baby. what's up?"

"not much." you shrugged, walking over to him and standing behind his chair, leaning down so you were visible on stream, "whatcha doin'?"

"watching random tiktoks." he said, showing you his screen.

you gasped, "oh! i saw a really good one earlier, can i show you?"

"yeah, go for it." he nodded, getting up from the chair so you could use the pc.

you took a seat and began typing into the search bar.

@/theuselesshotlinepod

you clicked onto the profile and went to the most recent video.

"oh no," george sighed and started nervously laughing behind you, hiding behind his gaming chair.

"no, no!" you said sweetly, tapping his arm like you weren't plotting his downfall, "watch it."

you pull up the video in full screen and hit play. sabrina carpenter's voice began echoing through the room.

"a boy who's jacked and kind—"

"it was max and calum's idea, i swear." he laughed.

"was it?" you asked, "chat, i literally asked him to do this exact video yesterday. and he said no!" you laughed.

'LMAOOO' 'the other woman😭' 'i wonder if andrew feels the same' 'she bought RECEIPTS.'

george hides behind the chair again. "i'm being cyberbullied."

"you deserve it." you grinned.

you let the video play one more time, just to drag it out a little while longer. then, satisfied, you grabbed your phone, said goodbye to the chat and left the room.

a while later, you were curled up on the sofa, still scrolling through tiktok when george emerged from his streaming room with a sheepish smile on his face.

"are you actually upset?" he asked, standing in front of you.

"not upset, upset." you shrugged, "but it would be nice if my boyfriend would make tiktoks with me."

he grabbed your hands and pulled you up from your place on the sofa, wrapping his arms around you in a hug. "you're so petty." he chuckled, kissing your forehead.

you hummed, burying you head into his chest. "you love it."

he pulled away, picking your phone up from where you left it on the coffee table. "i do. that's why i'm gonna do it once. and if i throw my back out, you owe me physio."

you looked up at him, "you're not doing this out of guilt, are you?"

"absolutley not," he said, already walking over to the window sill. "i'm doing it because i'm jacked and kind."

his poor joke made you burst into laughter, "you're so annoying."

"come on, let me hoist you."

you clapped your hands, jumping up and down on the spot. "thank you! thank you! thank you!"

the two of you prop your phone up on a stack of cookbooks that have never been touched and an empty coffee mug like this tiktok was some high-level production.

you queue up the audio, bounce on your feet a little as the countdown begins, you turn to george. "ready?"

"not really." he huffed, rolling up the sleeves of his jumper as the music starts playing.

you stood in front of him, his hands found their place securely around your waist.

"a boy who's jacked and kind..."

george lifts you up, effortlessly, onto his shoulder. for a second, everything's going perfectly. you're sitting on his shoulder, balanced like a princess, while he beams at the camera.

"can't find his ass to save my life."

then, because he cannot be serious for one minute, he pretends to wobble.

"george!" you shriek, grabbing a fistful of his hair for stability.

"you're fine!"

you're both laughing so hard, he actually nearly drops you the next time. but he manages to power through to the end of the audio and gently, and safely, lowers you to the floor.

you stuble your way over to your phone, still laughing, george comes up behind you, the pair of you watching the video back before you posted it.

it looks like it was filmed by a couple of sleep-deprived toddlers, which honestly checks out.

within minutes, the comments start rolling in.

'THIS is couple goals.' 'she won 😭' 'petty always wins, ladies.' 'max_balegde: jealousy wasn't a good look on you, babe x'

george scrolls through them from where he’s flopped next to you on the sofa, grinning. “okay, i’ll admit,” he says, nudging your knee, “that was kind of fun.”

you smile, nudging him back. “told you.”

he tilts his head, watching you for a second. “still not doing another one, though.”

“sure,” you say, already opening your tiktok app and queuing up the next audio.

he groans, dragging a pillow over his face. “i’ve created a monster.”

but when you peek over the pillow and raise an eyebrow, he’s already laughing, and you know damn well he’ll do it again.

[silens-oro]

Senior Citizen Behavior

Not all fics have adult content, but this blog is 18+. Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch x f!Reader Domestic fluff/Established Relationship

The Pitt Playlist located here

Synopsis: For the first time in a very long time, it isn't Robby who's coming home late after his shift. Word Count: 1,421 Content Warning: Age gap; No age specified, but I typically write readers with Robby or Abbot as 30+ in my mind. Tooth-rotting fluff. A/N: lmao this was supposed to be a drabble and ended up being a one-shot because I can't help myself when presented with an old man on a silver platter, so there's that.

please comment & reblog :)

It was just before 10pm when you quietly let yourself into the apartment you shared with Robby -a whole two and a half hours later than you were supposed to leave the office, but the end of the quarter was quickly approaching and extra hours were required to be put in by your entire team. 

Gotta think of the shareholders, you thought bitterly to yourself as you shook the snow off of your head and toed your boots off at the door. Your bag and coat found their homes on the wall hooks in the entryway next to Robby’s jacket and bag, and you tiptoed down the hall to the soft glow coming from the living room.  

Robby was an absolute sight when you caught a glimpse of him on the sofa. Mindful to step around the known creaky floorboards, you rounded the sofa to see what the damage was. He texted you earlier in the day that the first couple of hours of his shift were an absolute doozy, and when he called you on his way home he yapped about a fist fight that broke out between two patients who were there because of a fight that landed them in the ED to begin with. 

"Round Two in the Emergency Department," he had said, still beside himself when the department turned into the set of Jerry Springer. 

“Sounds like an episode title of It’s Always Sunny,” you joked into your desk phone as you typed into the blurring Smartsheet on your monitor that you had been working away on for the last three hours straight. You let him know that it was going to be a late night for you and to not wait up. He needed his beauty sleep.

It was a nightmare Robby was all too happy to leave in the hands of Dr. Jack Abbot and his (loving) freakshow of a night shift -they were more than equipped to handle it and Robby couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

All Robby wanted to do by the time he stepped out of those automatic doors and into the fresh air was get home, take a hot shower, eat a good meal, and wrap himself around you like a boa constrictor -and maybe put a movie on so he could fall asleep before the opening credits finished. It wasn’t too much to ask for, and yet Robby found he had the apartment all to himself because you (in an absolute rarity) ended up as the one who had to work late this time around, so he made due with what he had. 

He took his shower and made a quick meal for the both of you before getting comfortable on the sofa with a book he started on his last day off. He got maybe three pages in, blinked once, and the next thing Robby knew, he was out. If you were there, he would’ve told you that he was just resting his eyes for a moment and he was definitely not asleep. No, he wasn’t snoring. All allegations were denied in this situation (that happened many times before), but you'd always give him a knowing smile with a sarcastic ‘sure' thrown his way. 

Senior citizen behavior, you had joked once and he nearly smothered you with the weight of his body as he draped himself on top of you until you apologized through a fit of laughter.  

Robby was sitting mostly upright on the sofa, leaning on a few throw pillows that propped his elbow up on the arm rest. He was in his comfy cardigan (the one he only wore at home after he had taken a shower) with his round readers hanging precariously on the tip of his nose and his latest book smashed flat against his chest. His feet, wearing coziest winter socks because the man was never barefoot in the house, were crossed ankle over ankle on the coffee table making his impossibly long legs appear to be even longer than they already were. 

Robby’s head was tilted back just enough to make his mouth open the tiniest bit, allowing soft snores (that he would deny til he was blue in the face) to escape while he rested -blissfully unaware of his audience, and you couldn’t stop the breathy laugh that escaped you even if you tried. 

“Oh, you are never beating the senior citizen allegations now, Robby.” You teased in a whisper as you carefully removed the readers that were dangerously close to falling off the tip of his nose. You folded the arms carefully and set them on the side table next to the base of the lone lamp that illuminated the room, before gently prying the book from his (more than likely cramped) hand. The book itself was flat on his chest, pages splayed open on the last page he read -or attempted to, anyway. Not seeing a bookmark anywhere, you dog-eared the page and set it next to his glasses with care. 

Robby grumbled incoherently when your palm came to rest on his bearded cheek. The dark circles that were starting to reappear under his eyes made your lips tilt down for a fraction of a second, knowing he was exhausted. Not just physically, but mentally as well. Between what happened with Pittfest just four months ago, and Frank’s situation that Robby blamed himself for (not for Frank using, but for Robby not seeing it until a first day intern pointed it out to him), and the goddamn Patient Satisfaction Scores he was constantly drilled about like the ED was a Primanti Bros. franchise -on top of whatever other bullshit Gloria threw at him, he needed to take some time to himself so he could disconnect -if only for a few days. The problem was that Robby wasn’t the type to disconnect. He felt an obligation because if not him, then who?

It hurt your heart to think of the weight Robby carried day in and day out, like he was Atlas carrying the sky on his shoulders, not because he needed to be punished, but because he needed to be useful and this was the only way he knew how to be. Robby was a great man with an enormous heart who constantly gave himself away at the expense of never getting those pieces back. And while you tried to replace what you could, for every piece you returned, two more were taken away in its place. The toll it took on him was getting more and more noticeable by the day, but still he trudged on. It’s who Robby was, and would always be. 

Waking him up when you knew he needed the rest was the last thing you wanted to do, but you knew if you left him on that couch he was liable to wake up with something out of alignment and that was the absolute last thing he needed. 

You leaned down and kissed his forehead tenderly, then down to his nose, and finally landed on his ever so slightly parted lips (that he was 100% not snoring through). Robby’s eyes started to flutter and a sleepy grin tilted his lips up when he cracked them open and saw you standing over him. 

“Hi, sleepyhead.” You whispered, “I told you that you didn’t have to wait up for me. Your back is going to be screamin' at you.”

“Clearly I didn’t wait up,” He joked, groaning at how stiff he felt from sleeping in the position he was in. He yawned as he stretched his arms up, pulling his t-shirt up to reveal just the slightest sliver of his happy trail low on his stomach, and gently grabbed your hand to pull you down to the sofa so you could snuggle into his side.

Robby drowsily kissed the side of your head as you wrapped your arms around his middle, letting one of your hands slip underneath his soft cotton t-shirt to rub at his ribs affectionately. It didn’t take you very long into your relationship with Robby to figure out that skin to skin contact, specifically in a non-sexual setting, was something he craved. It was comforting and intimate in a way that grounded him and so it became a ritual whenever the two of you had brief moments together that you were more than happy to oblige in. It was never explicitly stated between you, he never asked for it, but you just knew and he loved you for it. “There’s a plate in the microwave for you. Figured you’d be starving when you got home.” His words were muffled because he still hadn't moved. You gently tilted your head up to look at him.

“Have I ever told you how much I love you?” He chuckled, rolling his eyes. The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes were pronounced and you couldn’t help but admire how handsome he was -especially when he was smiling. “Because I do. You’re the best.” You smiled up at him, giving him a loving peck. Robby let the kids linger, cupping your jaw to keep you close to him. 

“I try.” He breathed against you, dodging the attention by pressing his forehead to yours. He found comfort in the lingering smell of your shampoo and the warmth that radiated off of you. 

“You do more than try, Robby, and I will always appreciate that.” Again, you kissed him tenderly, your hand coming up to gently scratch at his beard. He gave you the stink eye when you laughed at the tiny groan he let out when you did it.

"I know you do, even if you are a pain in my ass. I love you all the more for it."

please comment & reblog :)

[januaryembrs]

oblivious!reader x downbad!spencer who’s not even nervous to flirt with reader anymore cuz she just doesn’t get it (probs older episodes spence)

CLUELESS | Spencer Reid x reader

description: Spencer's got a crush, too bad you're entirely clueless to his dilemma. (S3!Spencer in mind)

length 1.2k

At first he’d thought it was the world’s gentlest form of rejection, how you would dodge his questions, barely bat an eye at him laying himself bare for you, thought that maybe you were pretending not to see the way his hands shook and voice quivered to save him some face. 

“I-I was wondering if you wanted to go see Zodiac at the movie theatre?” He stammered, obsessively tucking his hair behind his ear because it felt like it was ticking his cheeks, or perhaps that was just some residual sweat gathering on his temple because you were just so pretty when you looked at him like that, your eyes wide and excited, waiting for him to finish speaking because you always loved to listen to him, “I was thinking we could try comparing it to the actual case and figure out how accurate their hollywood version of it is,” 

Your face lit up like the fourth of July, and your smile was blinding, “Oh, I love the movies! It’s going to be so fun, Spence!” You chirped, whirling around in your desk chair to meet Emily’s bored stiff expression as she scrolled through her computer, “Em, Spencer wants us to go see Zodiac, you in?” 

Spencer paled, because that was not what he’d meant by we whatsoever. It wasn’t that he held anything against Emily, nor JJ or Penelope as they were quickly roped into the plans as well, he just hadn't had them in mind when he thought to ask you out on a date. From what he could tell you hadn’t escaped spending time with him alone on purpose. He just hadn’t quite been specific in his question, it was an easy mistake to make. 

But you looked so excited as you organised who was getting what snacks, quickly dibsing the seat slap bang in the middle of everyone so you wouldn’t feel like anyone got left out. He thought his chest stuttered when you grabbed his hand and asked if you could sit with him since he’d remember the most about the original case, and you’d need his big brain for the little game he had planned. 

Spencer agreed, instead of trying to make it clear what he’d meant by his original question, because he hated disappointing people and the other girls seemed just as thrilled to go see the movie as you were. It wasn’t until Morgan slapped him on the back with a chuckle, having watched the whole thing from his own desk that Spencer felt truly dumb. 

“You’re going to have to try better than that, pretty boy,” He exclaimed, and Spencer bit his lip in thought, “Try asking her to do something in a way that leaves no room for confusion, girls like it when you’re direct,” 

And he nodded vehemently, because dating advice from Morgan was usually sound and bulletproof, how else would would he have garnered the ladies man reputation?

Direct, he could be direct. Sure, Spencer could be direct. 

He swallowed heavily just thinking about it. 

–

“These are for you,” Spencer jumped in before you could get sidetracked by chatting his ear off about the squirrel you’d nearly ran over on your way to work, and your expression flitted into surprise. 

He handed you the big bunch of pink roses and baby’s breath, and your mouth cracked into a smile immediately. “Oh, Spencer, these are beautiful, you shouldn’t have. My birthday’s not for another week,” 

“And I booked us a table at that Thai place on your block that you always get- wait birthday?” Spencer stumbled over his script, the words he’d been practising all morning coming to an effective halt as he realised once again his intentions had flown right over your head. And yet before he could set his record straight, just like you had last time, you’d jumped at the chance of spending time with him without understand just what you were agreeing to. 

“I love Thai food, that’s so thoughtful of you, Spence,” You said, hopping up out of your chair to give him a bear hug around his lithe waist, the flowers still tightly in the palm of your hand. He reciprocated, even if his expression was a terrible mix of frustration and confusion. 

It was like someone had cast some sort of spell over his words so that he’d never be able to ask you out on a date, like he was trying to speak in a dream, the words never really coming out. You weren’t dumb, not by any means, you could be a little naive sometimes, but never cruel. Spencer had no idea what the answer was. He guessed he was right back at square one.

–

“I don’t know man, I tried asking her to the movies, she thought it was a group thing. I tried taking her out for dinner, she thought it was for her birthday, I even asked if she wanted to come over to mine and she thought I meant a sleepover. What’s romantic about pillow forts?” Spencer sighed, leaning his head into his palm as he watched you swan around the office without a single inkling of his affections, “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I had fun at every one of them, but I just want there to be more. Maybe she just doesn’t feel the same,” 

“Don’t lose hope, pretty boy,” Derek comforted, the seemingly appointed love Guru that had had to witness two weeks of Spencer’s advances get sidelined. He followed Reid’s gaze to where you hummed a song to yourself as you collected files from Emily’s desk to take them over to your own. He bit his lip in thought, “I don’t think it’s personal, honest, I don’t think she means anything by it. You just need to be clearer,” 

“Clearer?” Spencer said with raised brows, using a single prod of his converse to swivel himself around to face you, and your expression perked into a smile just from seeing him. Derek watched the two of you closely, his theory all but game set and match as you seemed genuinely excited to see their resident genius who was convinced there was nothing there, “That shirt is really cute on you. It makes your eyes look really pretty,” Spencer said, in his most direct tone possible, because the nervousness seemed to dissipate when he knew you wouldn’t pick up on his intentions. The only sign you’d heard him at all was the way your fingers ruffled his hair affectionately. 

“Aw, thank you, Spencer,” You said, a little bounce in your step as you passed his desk to your own, running a gentle hand over his arm, where his blue striped shirt bunched around his biceps, “I like your purple one the best, but this one’s quite handsome too,” You replied, grabbing the other wad of papers from your drawer without much of a reaction and heading up the stairs to Hotch’s office, and he turned back to Morgan, throwing his hands up in exasperation. 

Morgan laughed, shaking his head and yanking his cup of coffee towards him, “She’ll figure it out some day, lover boy. I give it a month, tops,” 

And Spencer huffed, wheeling himself back to his desk, his eyes naturally trailing up to the large window that divided them from Hotch’s personal space, the two of you discussing something jovially as if you were none the wiser to his internal predicament. 

He made a note to wear his purple shirt more often.

[checkeredflagggs]

The Story of Us: Chapter 2

pairing: logan sargeant x famous!fem!singer

summary: logan and you have been keeping a secret from everyone but it might be time for it to come out

a/n: while I do my best on most of my works to be race neutral, this one is very very very self indulgent 🤷🏻‍♀️

a/n2: this is part 2 of 4/5, which will be released when they’re finished and I’m using pretty much everything from Taylor Swift

a/n3: I still don’t understand instagram so - no one but those that follow you can see a private accounts comments (even on a public post). Also I still hate twitter so I’ve replaced it with Bluesky.

a/n4: Also timelines? Never heard of them. This is set in 2024 but I’ve moved Miami to before Australia

a/n5: happy birthday Logan! The charles post is next but I wanted to get this out for Logan’s birthday!

a/n6: justice for debut and speak now

Part 1

y/n_gossip

liked by user, user, user, and 12,383,483 others

y/n_gossip: breaking! Coming from unknown sources are apparently leaked photos from y/n’s private phone.

My questions are how was she hacked and who is the guy!

view all comments

user1: what a gross invasion of privacy!

↳user2: seriously! Celebrities are just people too and they don’t need people nosing into their business

↳user1: well said!

user3: mother? has? a? boyfriend?????

↳user4: what! who! when! how! WHAT???

↳user5: this is not what i expected to see when i woke up…

↳user3: right??? Its like looking both ways crossing the streets and getting shit on by a bird…

↳user4: …what???

user6: please do NOT tell me that crazy person is right?? I don’t think I could take it if they were right and it’s Logan Sargeant

↳user53: I think you might have to get used to idea that they were right

↳user19: ok that’s like really rude but I’m gonna ignore it because you’re agreeing with me

↳user7: ok but NO WHERE does it imply that this guy is Logan

↳user8: also where is it said that these photos are of y/n?? She’s been spending a lot of time with yoursister and yourbff

↳user7: more of a long shot but still possible!

↳user19: I’m gonna hold it over your heads for the rest of forever

↳user53: alright let’s roll it back now. Maybe wait to gloat until you’ve actually been proven correct?

↳user19:…fine

Private Messages, Logan and Y/N

f1gossip

liked by not_logan, not_oscar, user, user and 583,902 others

tagged: charles_leclerc, maxverstappen1, pierregasly, alex_albon, landonorris, georgerussell63

f1gossip: within minutes of the leak of y/n’s photos, several drivers had posted a collection of photos to their stories. Looking closely at them, the range of photos could be taken to mean that they were the guy in the photos with y/n (who people are speculating is her unrevealed boyfriend)

view all comments

user9: ummmm…this is not it guys 😂

user10: I didn’t think silly season was going to include drivers strongly implying they’re cheating on their girlfriends

↳user11: oh my god I didn’t even think of that

↳user12: just wait — give it a few days and the wags will be posting similar photos 😂😂

user13: the desperation radiating from these pics is incredible

↳user14: so is the second hand embarrassment

↳user15: so true. I’m cringing for them jesus

not_oscar: what??

↳not_logan: no

↳not_oscar: what the fuck is this

↳not_oscar: ew

↳not_lilyz: 🤣🤣

↳not_lilyz: ok but i need answers

↳not_oscar: oh ill get some answers alright

user16: ok but tagging them???

↳user17: so bold. I don’t think I could live after it

↳user18: it’s not even about me and I want to crawl under a rock and die

↳user17: big mood

Private Messages, The Grid (Unserious)

Private Messages, Logan and Y/N

williamsracing

liked by user, not_y/n, oscarpiastri, georgerussell63 and 2,234,123 others

tagged: alex_albon, logansargeant

williamsracing: watch as our drivers take on the Duracell RC Challenge and answer fan questions! Full episode out now

view all comments

user20: this is so cute!

↳user21: I know! It’s always so fun to see Logan and Alex clearly enjoy themselves

↳user22: it’s so good to see them smiling!

user23: ok but those questions???

↳user24: forget all the questions — I want to tattoo Logan’s look of mischief when he said cardio was his favorite form of workout

↳user23: oh my god I thought was just me who saw that!

↳user19: well if my girlfriend was y/n, cardio would also be my favorite workout

↳user53: I’m judging you

↳user19: but are you disagreeing with me?

↳user53:…no

↳user19: ha!

↳user23: …are you…flirting…on my comment thread????

↳user19: WHAT? NO. ABSOLUTELY NKT

↳user53: hahaha I don’t now what yours talking about

logansargeant: best media day so far!

↳alex_albon: I don’t know how you did it but I’m sure you were cheating

↳logansargeant: haha 😆 you can’t prove anything!

not_oscar: so we’re being freaks on main now?

↳not_logan: and what of it?

↳not_y/n: yeah don’t kink shame us oscie

↳not_oscar: oh i'm definitely doing more than that

↳not_lilyz: oh like you haven’t done anything freaky too

↳not_logan: ha!

↳not_y/n: thank you lily

↳not_oscar: really love?

↳not_lilyz: 🤭🤭

f1

liked by maxverstappen1, alexandrasaintmleux, oscarpiastri, pierregasly, and 15,273,273 others

tagged: y/n, y/n_nation

f1: …Ready For It? Y/N has arrived ahead of the Miami GP where she will be singing the national anthem to kickstart the day!

view all comments

user25: classy!

↳user26: she always is!

y/n: it’s an honor to have been asked! And the warm welcome from everyone and their teams have really made the day something special! 🩵

↳logansargeant: oh everyone has been very excited to have you in the paddock!

↳oscarpiastri: very excited indeed

↳charles_leclerc: Bienvenue au Grand Prix ! Vous êtes en effet un spectacle très apprécié à voir! “Welcome to the Grand Prix! You are indeed a very very welcome sight to see!”

↳pierregasly: C'est toujours un honneur d'avoir une jolie jolie fille qui vous attend! “It’s always an honor to have a pretty pretty girl waiting for you!”

↳user27:…I thought the desperation was over…

user28: god what a whore…useless too. Made it too hard to get tickets. Too many silly stupid little girls who don’t know anything about the sport got all the tickets just to see her

↳alex_albon: wow I didn’t know mouths could spew such shit

↳maxverstappen1: I wouldn’t worry about not being able to get a ticket 👍🏻 you’ve been banned!

↳landonorris: not only by the individual teams but by the sport as a whole

↳f1: well said drivers! user28 that is not the attitude that we support here in f1! We welcome (nearly) everyone to the Grand Prix’s whether they’re here to watch the race or to watch y/n!

↳user29:…shut down!

user30: my favorite part of today so far has been how stupid the drivers turned when y/n got close to them!

↳user31: there was absolutely no thoughts in the heads of the Ferrari men

↳user32: (or their girlfriends let’s be real)

user33: I wish someone had gotten close enough to the alpine garage…

↳user34: god I know! The Kelsey brothers were there and based on their faces whatever Pierre was saying was probably outrageous af

↳user35: well he’s publicly called himself a tripod so we know he has no shame

user36: Oscar’s look of disgust whenever Lando and Alex opened their mouths tho…

↳user37: oh he was going through it today

↳user19: Love how logan was just laughing in the background though

↳user53: well if you’re right, they’ve been together for years so he’s probably pretty secure in their relationship…

↳user19: if?!??

↳user53: THERES STILL NO PROOF

williamsracing

liked by not_y/n, georgerussell63, alex_albon, oscarpiastri, and 1,334,274 others

tagged: logansargeant

williamsracing: Logan podium! I repeat!!! LOGAN PODIUM

view all comments

user38: I never thought I’d see the day

↳user39: well damn that’s kinda really rude

↳user38: be so for real right now did you ever think Williams would podium? Let alone Logan??

not_y/n: yeah you’re gonna get the best head of your life tonight babe

↳not_logan: 🥵🥵🥵🤩🤩🤩

↳not_oscar: please for the love of everything keep that shit to yourselves

↳not_y/n: just say you’re jealous and move on Aussie boy

↳not_oscar: why am I friends with you again

↳not_logan: we really didn’t give you a choice

↳not_y/n: we grew on you eventually!

↳not_oscar: like mold

↳not_logan: boo!!

↳not_y/n: boo!!!

oscarpiastri: congrats Logan!

↳logansargeant: thanks man!

alex_albon: congratulations! Show them how it’s done!

↳logansargeant: you know it! But it’s your turn next!

↳alex_albon: 🙌🏼🙌🏼

jv.f1: congratulations

↳user40: what in the world is with this dry ass congrats???

↳logansargeant: thank you!

georgerussell63: Many congratulations Logan! It was great to finally share a podium with you

↳logansargeant: thank you George! Hopefully the first of many!

logansargeant

liked by not_y/n, oscarpiastri, alex_albon, and 778,445 others

tagged: williamsracing

logansargeant: P3 BABY! WE DID IT! THANK YOU EVERYONEEEEEEEE 🩵🩵🩵

view all comments

user41: CONGRATS LOGAN

↳user42: THATS OUR AMERICAN BOY

y/n: Congratulations Logan! You do Florida and Miami proud

↳logansargeant: thanks y/n! You must be my lucky charm though

↳y/n: Oh no that was all you!

↳user19: 🫵☝🏻🫵🫵🫵🫵☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻

↳user19: THIS IS WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT!!

nicolepiastri: congrats Logan!

↳logansargeant: thanks Mom Piastri

↳oscarpiastri: and what of your actual son?

↳nicolepiastri: you’d like a congratulations for 6th?

↳oscarpiastri: well yes?!

↳nicolepiastri: hmmmm whatever you want sweetie. Congratulations on 6th

↳user43: I live for Nicole dragging Oscar

user44: such a great drive today Logan! Show ‘em what Americans can do!

not_y/n: possibility of you sneaking away before media to meet me?

↳not_logan: not likely

↳not_y/n: damn. Well just now I’ve made it back to our place and I’ve found a way to keep myself busy 😉🥵

↳not_logan: you can’t do this to me. Not right before I have to talk to Jensen and Nico

↳not_y/n: 🤭🤭🤭

↳not_oscar: or never. You can do this never

jensonbutton: congrats kid!

↳logansargeant: thanks jenson!

Private Messages

y/n_nation

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y/n_nation: Our bags are packed and the flights are here! Welcome to the Eras Tour!

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zendaya: what a wonderful night 🖤

↳tomholland2013: thanks for dragging me!

↳zendaya: you begged me to go?

alexandrasaintmleux: what a stunning show! Best night of my life!

↳charles_leclerc: what an amazing show y/n! Love your piano work!

↳user48: flirting with another woman right underneath your girlfriends comment??

oscarpiastri: fantastic time!

↳hattiepiastri: THANK YOH OSCSR!

↳not_y/n: glad you enjoyed yourself!

↳hattiepiastri: thank you for the tickets and the sweaters and the records!!

↳not_y/n: anything for my favorite Piastri!

↳oscarpiastri: you’re welcome 😑

alex_albon: by far the best concert I’ve been to!

↳lilymhe: thanks for taking me baby!

↳alex_albon: of course!

↳lilymhe: and thanks y/n for such a magical night 😘

↳user49: what’s with the weird flirting? What’s happening right now???

carmenmmundt: ¡Qué noche tan magnífica! ¡Gracias y/n! What a magnificent night! Thank you y/n!

↳georgerussell63: I loved every moment of it y/n!

↳user50: I see the desperation has found this post as well 😂😂

↳user51: so has the second hand embarrassment 🫣🫣

user52: I can’t feel my face or my feet but oh my god what a magical night

↳user54: absolutely worth it!

↳user52: definitely gonna be the concert of the year!!

Bluesky

Part 3

[charmedimsure]

WAKE UP CALL || thanos

pairing: Thanos/Choi Su-bong x f!reader

summary: Thanos is you're least favorite regular at the club you bartend for. But when you find him passed out against the building one night, you can't just leave him there. No debt/no games AU.

word count: 2.4k

warnings: drinking, drugs, addiction, depression

A/N: i'm really proud of this fic. expect a second part sometime soonish (gonna work on requests first tho). if you find any mistakes no you didn't <3

Part 2: The Next Episode

The music in Club Pentagon is so loud it feels like it's inside of you. You're placing the olives in a dry martini a patron is waiting for, handing it to them with a smile. You're one of the most popular bartenders at Club Pentagon. Men order from you because they're drunk and want to fuck you, and women order from you because they're more comfortable drinking cocktails that have been made by another woman.

"Señorita, over here!" A voice yells out to you and you sigh at the familiar voice.

You turn and put a hand on your hip, spotting the telltale purple hair of your least favorite regular. "What do you want?"

He puts a hand over his heart. "Ouch, you hurt me, baby. I just wanted to see my favorite girl."

You roll your eyes, grabbing a nearby towel and quickly wiping drops of different liquors off the bar. "Well, you saw me, so you can leave now."

He takes a glance at his little posse around him, consisting of guys hoping to get famous, girls wanting to say they slept with a rapper, and your least favorite coworker Nam-gyu. You have no idea how the runner still has a job here, considering he spends more time licking the failed rapper's boots than actually running anything.

"You know, I have an extra space at my table," he says. "I'd love if you came over after your shift. Thanos will treat you well."

You groan. The boy has been relentless in asking you out ever since you started working at the club. "I would rather sit with the movie villain than you." You look over his shoulder at your coworker. "Nam-gyu, take him away or I'm gonna volunteer you to clean the floors."

With a hiss, Nam-gyu puts his hands on Thanos' shoulders and steers him away from you. Thanos smiles over his shoulder, waving at you. "I'll see you tomorrow night, Señorita!"

You cringe, knowing that you most definitely will see him again tomorrow.

<>

The next night goes by much too slow for your liking. You spend your shift mixing the same drinks over and over, putting up with the men who flirt with you, and calling security on some men who won't leave girls alone. You had of course seen Thanos, but the club was so busy that you didn't even have the time to reject him, instead just huffing at him and turning to another person waiting at the bar.

Once your shift is over and you've finished everything you need to do, you step out through the back door, taking a deep breath of air that doesn't smell like smoke or alcohol.

As you walk toward the street to hail a cab, you spot a flash of purple against the wall. Getting a bit closer, you recognize the passed out body of Thanos.

While a small part of your mind is telling you to just leave him there, you know you can't do that. You crouch down next to him, putting your fingers on his pulse point and letting out a sigh of relief when you feel his heartbeat. You look down at him, furrowing your brows when you notice that the cross that always hangs around his neck is slightly open.

Carefully picking it up, you take a peek inside and see an assortment of multi-colored pills. Shit, he's lucky he's just passed out. Had you known he'd been on... whatever this shit is... you would've banned all bartenders from serving him drinks. He may be the bane of your existence, but you're not going to let him die.

You close the cross and remove it from around his neck, shoving it in your pocket. You lightly slap his cheek a few times until he blinks his eyes open, looking around him. He looks at you, eyes adjusting to the light.

"Hey, Señorita," he slurs. "Where is everybody? Where's Nam-su? He was supposed to take me home."

You let out a small chuckle at the name he called your coworker. "They aren't here."

He frowns, trying to stand up. "I need another drink."

You grab onto his shoulders, supporting his weight as he nearly topples to the ground. "I think you've had enough, Thanos. It's time to get you home."

He makes a sound of protest, but doesn't have the strength to stop you from dragging him to the curb as you wave down a taxi. The car pulls up and you help Thanos into the back seat before sliding in next to him.

"Where to, Miss?"

The plan was to take Thanos to his place, but you don't know where he lives and the odds of him telling you or the cab driver right now are slim. He also can't be left alone in the state he's in. One more pill could send him over the edge.

With a sigh, you tell the driver the address of your apartment building, holding Thanos upright as he pulls away from the club.

<>

Thanos wakes up, his head pounding worse than ever. He reaches for his cross to pop a pill to get rid of the headache, but instead of finding the necklace, his hands just grab his shirt.

He opens his eyes, hissing when the light makes a pang of pain go through his head. Looking down, Thanos' cross is nowhere to be found. That's when he realizes that he's not in his bed, or any bed, for that matter. He's laying on the couch in an unknown place, a small garbage can on the floor next to him. On the coffee table in front of him is a glass of water. He reaches for it, downing the whole glass in one go. Spotting a small note next to the glass, he picks it up and reads it.

'If you barf I'll make you clean it up. Use the garbage.'

He hears a noise coming from the other room and stands up, wanting to figure out what is happening and where he is. When he steps into the kitchen, he nearly gasps when he sees you with your messy hair and oversized t-shirt on.

You turn to look at him. "Oh good, you're not dead. I really didn't want to deal with that." You walk over to the fridge. "Blue or red?"

He gives you a confused look. "What?"

"Gatorade," you clarify. "Blue or red?"

"Oh, uhh, blue."

You grab the blue bottle and place it on the table. "Drink that. The electrolytes are good for hangovers."

Thanos walks slowly to the table, picking up the bottle and taking a sip. "Do you have a bathroom?"

"No, I just pee out the window," you deadpan without thinking. You see him look down, a look of embarrassment and shame taking over his face. You sigh. "Down the hall to the left."

The boy nods and disappears down the hallway. He walks into the bathroom, locking the door behind him. He feels in his pockets, taking out his phone and huffing when he sees the battery is dead. Looking inside your medicine cabinet, he frowns when he can't find what he's looking for. How can you have no painkillers? Instead he takes the mouthwash, taking two big gulps. Mouthwash has alcohol, and he needs it. When he doesn't feel the familiar sting, he looks down at the label.

'Alcohol free'.

Just his fucking luck.

He puts the bottle back in the cabinet and closes it, coming face-to-face with himself in the mirror. The bags under his eyes have never been darker, at least not that he can remember. His skin looks pale, and his hair is disgusting. He turns the knob for the sink, splashing his face with cold water.

When he walks back into the kitchen, you're no longer there. He moves to the table, seeing a plate with scrambled eggs and toast sitting next to his drink. Thanos hesitates, not really knowing what to do.

"That's for you, you know."

He jumps a bit when he hears your voice behind him. You come out of your room dressed in your casual clothes.

You smile slightly at his expression. "Do you not like eggs?"

He shakes his head. "No, eggs are good."

Your smile grows. "Good because that's all I know how to make. Do you want any hot sauce with it or something?" You put the rest of the eggs from the pan onto your own plate and leave the pan to cool off.

"Do you have pepper?" Thanos asks.

You nod, walking to the table and putting your plate down on the opposite side of his. "It's on the table."

Thanos cautiously sits down in his seat, reaching for the pepper and putting it on his eggs. He takes a bite, pleased to find that they are cooked just right. He watches you as you eat your breakfast in silence, scrolling through your phone mindlessly. A shot of pain going through his head and he winces. "Do you have any painkillers?"

You shake your head, not taking your eyes away from the screen. "I do, but I think you've mixed enough substances with whatever's in that cross you carry."

Thanos feels his entire body tense at the mention of his cross. He opens his mouth to say something, but nothing ends up coming out.

You lock your phone and put it face-down on the table. "Don't worry, I didn't throw it out. It's in a safe place, along with the painkillers and anything else that could potentially be abused."

The boy lets out a breath and nods, continuing to eat slowly. He looks you over silently. Your face is bare of makeup and your hair is still messy. Thanos has liked you since the moment he first saw you at the club, but you've never looked more beautiful than you do right now. "What happened? How did I get here?"

"I found you passed out outside the club last night when I was leaving," you explain. "You said Nam-gyu was supposed to bring you home but I couldn't find him, so I took you back here."

Thanos huffs. "Fucking idiot," he says under his breath.

You snort out a laugh, and Thanos thinks it might just be the most beautiful noise he's ever heard. He wants to know what he can do to hear that noise again.

You both finish your food in a comfortable silence, you looking at your phone and Thanos looking at you. At one point you catch him looking at you and raise an eyebrow. "Everything okay?"

He takes a deep breath. "Why are you helping me? Why are you being nice to me? I've been nothing but an asshole to you."

You sigh. "Honestly, I've been asking myself the same question. I think I just saw you there, alone and in need, and I thought that I would've wanted someone to help me had they found me like that. You have been an ass, but I think that's more the pills than you."

Thanos nods slowly, taking in your words. "Well, thank you."

You nod. "Just please don't make me regret showing you where my apartment is. I don't wanna move."

The boy chuckles, and you feel the corners of your mouth twitch up at the sound. "I won't. I promise."

"Good." You stand, taking your plate and his and bringing them to the sink. "I have off today. You're welcome to stay here for a bit until you're feeling better. I'll call a cab for you when you're ready."

Thanos goes back to the couch he woke up on, sitting down. He finds a charger for his phone and plugs it in. You come into the room, putting a new bottle of gatorade on the coffee table in front of him. He thanks you and cracks the seal.

The two of you end up talking for hours. He tells you about how he got into music, and you tell him that you always wanted to try learning to play the guitar, though you've never had enough money to buy one or the other equipment. Thanos feels his heart grow fuller with every laugh he is able to get out of you. He gets more satisfaction from these few hours spent with you than he has every night drinking his life away at Club Pentagon.

At one point, you look at him, a lazy smile on your face. "What's your name?"

He gives you a look of confusion.

"Your real name. I doubt your real name is Thanos."

He lets out a nervous laugh. He hasn't gone by his real name in at least a year. "It's Su-bong," he says shyly. "Choi Su-bong."

"Su-bong," you repeat, as if trying out how it feels. You smile at him. "I like Su-bong. You should be him more often."

Later, as you stand outside your building calling for a taxi, you turn to look at the boy next to you. "You know, you could be so much more than this."

He looks at you with wide eyes. "What do you mean?"

"You have talent and heart, more than you've ever shown while out of your mind drunk and stoned," you say. "So many people's lives are ruined because they keep chasing that high. Don't be one of those people. Please. You're meant for better."

A cab pulls to the curb in front of you. As Su-bong opens the door, you put an arm on his shoulder, stopping him. Digging into your pocket, you pull out his cross and hand it to him. "The choice is yours. And if you decide you want to give your life another chance, I'll be here to support you." You hand him a slip of paper with your phone number. "This is for support. If you text me the way that you talk to me at the club, I'm going to block you. Do not make me regret this."

He smiles as he takes the cross and the paper from you. Once he sits in the car, he rolls the window down. "Thank you again, for everything."

You give him a small smile and wave before walking back into your apartment building.

Once inside his own apartment, Thanos walks to his bathroom. He takes the cross out of his pocket, opening it to find his pills. He picks one up, examining it. With a sigh, he drops the pill into the toilet, turning the cross over so the others follow. He watches as the bright pills swirl around bowl before disappearing down the drain. He doesn't want to be this person anymore. He wants to be someone that you can be proud of. Someone that he can be proud of.

[writersdrug]

Training for Two

Chapter 6: Pup Cup

Masterlist

Summary: Simon unexpectedly runs into you... and your friends... and Tyler.

Warnings: dissociation, jealousy

It was finally Saturday - a Saturday where you had cleared your schedule, and so had Leslie and Nina. AND Tyler. Which was maybe once every two months. So, you had made plans to get brunch with the girls, the three of you deciding to dress up a bit and get mimosas. Tyler had promised to swing by around one to take you around the city, then to spend a cozy day at his apartment.

Right now, it was girl time. The three of you had your mimosa pitcher and a shared basket of fries, delving into each other's personal drama.

"And then Marcie asked me to pick up this Saturday - today, mind you - because she forgot the two interns were finished this Thursday. Of course, I told her no, in the most professional way I could - and she had the audacity to say I needed to pick up more slack. Me!!"

Nina scoffed. Your jaw dropped open. "You've been there the longest!"

Leslie nodded. "Longer than her, too! God, I could've let her have it, right then and there-" she sighed, leaning back in her seat. "Of course, I didn't. But I made sure she knew I would not be coming in on my day off, that I had planned for weeks."

You snapped your fingers in applause, making Leslie chuckle. "Bravo to you - we love seeing women fighting women in the workplace."

"Oh, stuff it." She laughed, swatting your hands away. "Feels like an episode of 'The Office,' if you ask me. Just too bloody insane to be real."

You hummed thoughtfully, taking a sip of your mimosa. Your eyes wandered down to your purse, hanging from the side of your chair, your phone tucked away within. I wonder what Simon's up to... what does he do on his days off?

"Speaking of women in the workplace..." Leslie turns to Nina, who was scowling at her phone. "Who's got you so irate on a Saturday?"

"Idiots, that's who." She grumbled, furiously punching away at the keyboard on her screen. "It's as if the minute I take a personal vacation, everyone and their grandmother suddenly need a wedding planner." She sighed and tucked her phone back into her purse. "I'm sorry..."

You and Leslie shook your head, reassuring her that it was alright. God forbid she starts falling into the "I work so hard and get nothing in return" schpeel - which would be believable and understandable, if it wasn't for the fact that she played that card every time the three of you were together.

"Did you hear she started dog-sitting?" Leslie said, nodding in your direction.

That snapped Nina out of her own head. "You did? What does that have to do with your design work?"

You huffed. "Well, it doesn't - but, and I told you this, Leslie" - she laughed at your glare - "that I was just looking for a house-sitting gig, like what I did before I left that stupid company. Just until I got a few clients to myself, and could start my own business."

"Busy bee..." Leslie commented, and Nina nodded in agreement.

"Not nearly as you two - remember how hard it was for me and Tyler to have a weekend together? Now I'm the one waiting for him. He's even started coming with me when I take Riley for walks - just to spend more time together."

"How sweet..." Leslie cooed.

"Riley?" Nina asked.

"The dog." You answered. "She's a wonderful dog, really. Used to be military, before her... injury..."

You trailed off, staring at something between Leslie's and Nina's heads. They stared at you in confusion for a moment, until you beamed widely and started waving your hand. They turned to stare at whomever had caught your attention.

Simon wasn't one for "get-togethers," as he heard them called. He was perfectly fine spending his leave at home, only leaving to walk Riley or get his groceries and smokes. He'd occasionally text the team and see what they were up to, but other than that - he had no problem living like a hermit.

Soap was the one to suggest the idea of the team getting lunch together, since they were all nearby for work. Of course, Gaz was never one to turn down a group outing; once he was in, Price had decided they all might as well go. ("Should be a team off the field too, right?")

So that's how Simon had been forced to come out of his cave. And no, it might not seem like he was forced... but it would be rude of him not to go, so therefore, societal standards were forcing him. That, and Soap would bitch about him being a "bawbag" for weeks if he didn't tag along.

He decided to bring Riley with him, since it had been a few weeks since she had seen everyone. She looked around as she panted, walking besides Simon through the mildly-crowded sidewalk. It was a decent Saturday afternoon, with a mix of cloud and sun hanging in the sky. Simon wore his usual jeans and a sweatshirt, along with a black surgical mask.

He needed a head start for the day. Not that he didn't enjoy spending time with his team outside of work... but people were exhausting, especially when he was forced into proximity with them. He needed a few hours to himself, in public, just to wake up his social battery. The best way to achieve that? Tea, Riley, and people-watching.

So that's how he found himself, next in line at the coffee counter of a restaraunt he’d been to a few times before. He had his hands shoved in his pockets as he held Riley's leash; her head was on a swivel, sniffing the aromas that wafted through the air, and the occasional hand of each person who passed her. Simon was thankful people were wary of his presence - it kept everyone from trying to lean down and pet Riley without his permission.

The customer in front of him moved away from the counter, and Simon stepped forward. The girl behind the cash register smiled at him, wiping her hands on her apron.

"What can I get for you, sir?"

"Jus' a tea. Medium, no sugar, no cream."

"Would you like the passionfruit tea or the mint berry mixer? Or our jasmine goddess?"

"... d'you have black tea?"

She chuckled. "Yeah, I'll get your black tea."

Simon huffed as he put his cash on the counter. Don' get why tha's funny...

He watched as she moved - rather sluggishly, he thought. Despite that her makeup did a fantastic job of hiding how tired she must have been, he could see it in her eyes and actions. The way she stood there, shoulders slightly slumped as she watched the hot water pour into Simon's cup, her arms resting heavily against the counter. He looked behind him briefly, noticing how long the line was for the cafe. Not to mention she had dine-in orders to fulfill, too... and she's alone at the coffee bar. He turned back, watching as she fought to make sure the lid was properly secured on his cup. It made him a bit nervous, how she supported nearly all of her weight onto the top. What if it crumples? What if she gets burnt? Is there a burn kit behind the shelf? Probably not-

Riley whined, snapping Simon’s attention away from the barista and down towards her. She licked her lips and stared up at him curiously.

She always knows.

He sighed, patting her flank. "Thanks, girl."

The barista returned with his tea, as well as a small cup of whipped cream with a dog biscuit poking out of it. “For your friend.” She said with a too-tight smile.

Simon stared blankly at the whipped cream cup. "I didn't order tha’.” He said bluntly.

“It’s on the house! Pup cups are free.” She said, nudging the two items towards Simon. “Don’t worry, there’s no added sugars in the whipped cream, and the treat is allergen-free.”

Why does everyone assume dogs have allergies? Simon thought to himself. He glanced at Riley for a brief moment – she looked back at him, certainly not expecting a treat, not yet. She’d hounded him enough for those goddamn biscuits all morning, the ones you’d been spoiling her with, and he had no choice but to follow the routine and gave her one. This created a cycle that sent him to the doggie-daycare once a week to pick up more, since the old woman who made them only sold them there. Without even intending to, most likely, you were taking more from his wallet than he had hired you for. Not that he minded… it was all for Riley, however, he was almost certain he’d buy a fucking parrot if you were the one convincing him.

Riley let out a garbled sound, making Simon realize he was still staring at her. And holding up the line. Shit, socializing was more taxing than he thought…

“Thanks…” he mumbled, grabbing his drink and the cup of whipped cream. He carefully directed himself and Riley through the crowd and over to the condiment shelf, setting both items down and adjusting his grip on Riley’s leash. He still had a few hours to kill; it’s a bit cramped in here, he thought as he grabbed a handful of napkins, eyeing the throng of coffee addicts and beatniks in the cafe, there’s always the bench by the fountain on Muller and 4th street, that might-

The sight of your familiar, perfect, sparkling eyes sucked the air and the thoughts from his body in a matter of a single second. That bright personality speared him like a harpoon as you waved from across the café, beckoning him over with a waggle of your fingers. His mind was trying to catch up after being knocked off of its feet, and he finally inhaled.

You looked equally surprised to see him - but he wasn't paying attention to that. He noticed your eyeliner and lipstick, how it made your features even brighter than they typically were. You'd worn your hair down, which was the first time he'd seen it like this since he hired you. Your nails were painted a soft pink, which accentuated the mimosa glass like an orange sunset across a blush sky... and your dress. Of course, it was bright and floral, just like your personality. But it was soft, too. The way it fitted so nicely around you - not too tight, perfectly settled around your shoulders and hips, making you look delicate. Simon was sure if he was to reach out and touch your arm, it would feel like he'd touched the skin of an angel.

He was too stunned to wave back, still frozen in the one spot by the counter as people flowed around him like river water around a stone. It wasn't until Riley had noticed you too and began whining that Simon finally gathered his bearings and nodded his head at you, stuffing the napkins in his pocket.

Two other heads swiveled around from your table and eyed him curiously, and for a moment, he groaned internally; you were with friends. Not horrible, but... not ideal. He didn't care to talk to anyone other than you at the moment – really, ever. Still, you were here, and that trumped all other factors. His anxieties moved to the sidelines when you were on the other end of the path. He clicked his tongue at Riley and grabbed his tea, carefully weaving through patrons and tables to get to you.

"Simon!" You chirped when he approached; you stood up and on your toes, reaching your arms to give him a side hug. He awkwardly stood there, attempting to hug you back by letting his arm curve around your upper back, careful not to spill his tea. Before he could stop himself, he took a deep, quiet breath in, nearly sighing at the smell of your perfume.

So floral and... sweet. Like the bookstore/plant nursery hybrid that he passes when he walks through town on his way for groceries.

You pulled away, and he straightened up. He was suddenly aware of the other two women staring at him.

"So sorry!" You said, turning to your friends. "Simon- this is Leslie, and Nina."

"’Ello." He said quietly, uninterested, and they each responded with their own "hi's". Leslie looked at him with a scrutinous stare, and he could feel her trying to peel him apart layer by layer. She looked like a corporate junkie, with her tight bun and high heels. Nina... she was... odd. She looked at him with her bottom lip between her teeth, eyes half-lidded... it made him uncomfortable. Both with the way she shamelessly ogled, and with how her eyes seemed to be a few unfortunate centimeters too far apart.

"And this is Riley!" You said, bending down and ruffling the dog’s fur. "How ya been, girl?"

She blinked at you as you pet her, sniffing the air between your face and hers. Her tongue hung out of her mouth as she panted, nearly smiling up at you if she could have.

"Ya gone and spoiled her." Simon commented, feeling something warm at the sight of you and Riley. "She wants me to tuck 'er in every day, now. And she's got me runnin' to the dog daycare every week for those bloody biscuits."

Leslie pursed her lips, thinking Simon was being rather rude. You laughed, sitting back down in your seat. "She wasn't spoiled enough, in my opinion. Did she drag you to Poeheko Park yet?"

"She did. Thought I's about to be mugged."

You laughed again. Simon wished he could bottle the sound and keep it in his pocket, so he could pull it out and listen to it over and over whenever he wanted.

"I don't think anyone could mug you, Simon." You said, absentmindedly stroking Riley's fur as she sat next to you.

So you thought he was strong? Invincible? Oh, that did something to him.

"What do you do, Simon?" Leslie asked, sipping her mimosa. "For work?"

Definitely corporate... he thought, from the way her question sounded slightly interrogatory.

"Military." He said bluntly.

Nina's lips curled into a smile; he chose to ignore it.

"Her too?" Leslie pointed at Riley, who sniffed her extended hand.

"She was..." Simon looked down at her, a bit pleased that Riley huffed in distaste at the 'stranger'. "Retired. And a rotten princess now, thanks to you." He turned back to you, his expression lighting up the tiniest bit.

You could sense something - what it was exactly, you couldn't put your finger on it. Simon seemed... tense. Uncomfortable. Maybe he didn't like being thrown into social settings with people he didn't know. You understood it.

"Well-" you said, trying to ignore the way Nina stared at him. "I don't want to interrupt your morning."

"You weren't." He said, still looking at you.

You sent him a glance, and laughed nervously. He continued watching you - God bless anyone who was ever in a staring contest with this man - as Riley sat next to him obediently. Fuck, she was staring at you too...

Leslie looked back and forth between the two of you for a moment, with you blushing furiously, and Simon watching you like you were prey - fortunately, she found an opportunity to come for your rescue.

"Oh, Tyler's here, luv." She said, tilting her head towards the space behind you.

You turned in your seat and smiled, just as a man came up and whisked you out of your chair. You threw your arms around his shoulders and kissed his cheek, and he smiled as his arms wrapped around your waist.

"Thought you were coming by around one?" You said, pulling back to look at his face.

"I was able to pick up the kit from work earlier than I expected, so I thought I'd come by now." He briefly waved at Leslie and Nina, tucking you into his side. "Sorry girls - lookin' lovely, by the way - but I'm stealin' her a bit early today."

Nina waved her hand dismissively. "We had something planned for tomorrow too; go right ahead." Leslie nodded in agreement.

Tyler smiled. "Perfect. Glad it's not too much of a- woah..."

He turned to look – to really take in the sight of the hulking, brooding man beside you, and he was very visibly taken aback. Simon's soft stare had turned into a cold, unforgiving glare. His eyes were hardened with - something. Maybe anger, maybe authority. He stood rigid and tall, with his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt, as he bore holes into Tyler's frame.

Simon took him in: soft, brown hair, a slight tan, rough hands, yet soft features. Slight wrinkles around the eyes from smiling too much. A white shirt and jeans, with a plaid – it made sense, now where your stash had come from.

He liked the way that Tyler was a bit intimidated, as evident by the look in his eyes. What he didn't like, was... Tyler. How he held you close. How you let him hold you. And how he himself felt the urge to snatch you from Tyler's grasp and march you out of the cafe.

"Oh, sorry-" your voice brought them both out of their trance. "Tyler, this is Simon. My client."

"Ah!" Tyler smiled, relaxing a bit as he held his hand out. "Nice to meet you!"

Simon grabbed it firmly, making Tyler wince the tiniest bit as he shook his hand. "Likewise." Not in the slightest.

When he released his hand, Tyler bent down to Riley and offered his hand for a sniff. "I know we've met before, girl."

Simon felt something stir in his gut as Riley sniffed Tyler's hand. "Y' have?" He asked, his voice a bit harsh.

"He's never been in your house." You said quickly, trying to diffuse the tension in the air. "He just tags along for the walks sometimes. Keeps us company.”

Riley IS the company. Y’ don’t need an extra, luv.

"Mm." Simon said gruffly, looking down at Riley. She was sniffing Tyler's closed fist, then leaning back to stare up at Simon. She huffed in distaste.

He fought the urge to smirk. Good girl.

"What do you do, Simon?" Tyler asked, trying to be friendly.

Nina cleared her throat. He's milita-"

"Special Armed Services." Simon interrupted. "Ten years."

Tyler looked impressed. "Shit- that's tough, mate. Makes sense with how you- y'know..." he gestured to Simon's frame, then dropped his hands and cleared his throat. "Eh, nevermind."

"I's fine." Simon replied, standing a bit taller. "What d'you do?"

"Ah- heh, nothin' that impressive. Electrician."

Simon nodded, though it wasn't the answer he was hoping for. It was hard to completely emasculate a man when he did blue-collar work. And even harder when Tyler seemed to respect Simon. It was one thing to be an asshole to an asshole, but it was another to be an asshole to a decent man.

He had to reign himself in. Tyler was your boyfriend. Why was he trying to show the poor lad up after knowing him all for a minute and a half?

"Well, erm..." Leslie cut in. "Looks like you two need to get going, and we're nearly finished here." She smiled at Simon. "It was lovely meeting you!"

"Yeah mate!" Tyler said. "Nice to finally meet you!"

Simon paused for a moment. Normally, he would love to be ripped out of a conversation like this - but now, he'd suffer through the company of a few, annoying strangers if it meant he got to talk to you. But, he obliged, sensing that Leslie wanted him gone for a reason.

"Yeah, likewise." He said, giving Riley a pat, then he looked at you. "Might need you t' watch 'er soon, but I'll email you."

"I'll keep an eye out for it." You said with a flashy smile. "See you later, Simon!"

He grunted and nodded his head, then left them all at the table. Riley stayed dutifully by his side as they made their way through the crowd of cafe patrons.

Simon tried to smell your perfume for as long as it would cling to his shirt. Soon, the scents of coffee, sugar, and teas washed it out, and the lingering warmth your scent brought him had also vanished. The bitterness came right back into his throat, coating his tongue and making him grimace under his mask and his fists clench in his pockets.

Tyler seemed like a good man, and you were happy. He had no business feeling so possessive over something that wasn't his - something that belonged to someone else. He felt like he was missing a screw - his emotions were completely out of control, and he acted compulsively when it came to you. He told himself, as he walked out of the cafe and into the busy sidewalk, that the disappointment of discovering that you were Tyler's would be a good opportunity to work on himself.

He sighed, continuing down the path to the pub. Riley huffed as she trotted next to him, and he suddenly remembered the cup of whipped cream and the dog treat – most likely still abandoned on the condiment counter of the restaurant. “Don’ worry, girl, you can have some’f Johnny’s chips.”

Next ->

[deanwinchestersbabygirll]

Sam Winchester, Hero

-warnings// angst, fluff, SMUT, MENTION OF SA!!

-lil summery// kind of my spin on the pilot episode, based when Sam’s in college, best friends to lovers trope

Sam x reader

Part 2

word count// 3330

(Gif from Pinterest)

Your eyes burned as you continued to read the same line over and over, exhaustion threatening to take over your body any minute "hey you okay?" You looked towards the soft voice to see your best friend Sam, you nodded "yeah I'm just trying to finish this chapter I can't hand in another late assignment" you said stretching your limbs trying to wake yourself up 

Sam chuckled "it's after midnight, you’re gonna end up face down on your desk if you don't get to bed soon" you rolled your tired eyes playfully "I’ll be fine I'll just be another half hour then I'm done, you head on home, I'll be right behind you" Sam shook his head "not a chance this place isn't safe at night I'll wait for you" he said going to sit next to you "Sam sweetie, I'll be fine, our apartment is a ten minute walk at most, plus you know I can handle myself, I've kicked your ass plenty of times" you joked making him smile 

"Alright but I want you to knock on my door when your back home so I know your home safe, I'm giving you forty five minutes and if ur not home by then I'll be back here to haul your  ass home" he said firmly, he was always the worrier, that's what you loved about him the most

"I promise, scouts honour" you promised him with the scouts symbol he chuckled as he moved toward the door "see you at home Y/N" he called as the doors closed leaving you alone in the library, You rubbed your tired red eyes and got back to work, your blinking getting slower until all you could see was darkness and a warm fuzzy feeling take over your body.

Almost an hour later you awoke with a start "oh son of a bitch!" You exclaimed quietly looking at your watch, in a panic you shoved your stuff in your bag quickly before running out the big mahogany doors and taking off in a speed walk down the dark campus towards you and Sam's apartment, hoping he hadn't left yet

You were moments away from sanctuary before you heard the sound of loud foot steps behind you, your heart plummeting to your stomach as you picked up your own pace, you were less than a minute away, the footsteps got closer and your heart was beating a hundred beats per minute

The person behind you grabbed your arm roughly turning you around to face a tall brute of a man, glaring at you his lips twisted in a dirty smile "where you heading beautiful?" He asked his grip on your arm tightening making you wince "none of your business now get your damn hand off me you jackass!" You exclaimed trying to pull your arm away 

"Watch yourself now... the nicer you are to me the better I'll make you feel" the man said licking his greasy lips, your stomach turned and you regretted not leaving with Sam earlier. 

Tears pricked at your eyes as you tried to fight him off "if you touch me I swear I'll-" you started to say before a loud laugh cut you off "you'll what baby? Look at me then look at you, who's got the upper hand here?" he mocked before a third voice interrupted him 

"I do!" The voice said and a fist was slamming against your attackers face knocking the brute out, screaming you turned to see your saviour as the tears streamed down you face, you saw Sam looking back at you concern written all over his face "c'mon let's go" he said quickly taking your bag from you and pulling you tightly to his side making your worries instantly vanish as you cuddled into him 

Sam unlocked the door with his free hand, never letting go of you, he locked the door instantly as soon as you stepped inside "are you okay? I knew I shouldn't have fucking left" Sam told you his voice cracking slightly as his hands cradled your face in them as his green eyes scanned for any visible injuries.

"I'm okay Sammy" you assured him but he shook his head, his shaggy hair bouncing as he did "I'm so sorry I didn't get there sooner, I shouldn't have left you by yourself it's not safe i-" "SAM!" You yelled cutting his rambling off, his eyes snapping down to meet yours "I'm okay, I promise, you got me before he could do anything" you promised him, brushing a stray strand of shaggy brown hair behind his ear

He closed his eyes tightly and sighed loudly, his shoulders remaining as tense as ever, he wrapped his strong arms tightly around you, holding you tightly to him

You rest your head against his hard chest, listening to his heart beating like crazy as he breathed in your scent "are you okay sweetie?" You questioned looking up at him

Sam nodded slowly "I'm doing everything I can right now to stop myself from killing that perverted bastard" Sam confessed, his voice low and serious, you chuckled quietly "Sammy your the sweetest guy I've ever met, you don't have killer instincts in you" 

Sam swallowed thickly... little did you know who he really was, how many monsters he'd killed since he learned to walk "...yeah your probably right, come on let's get some sleep" Sam said changing the subject quickly

You stepped away from the his warm comforting embrace nodding your head, a quiet quiver threatening to leave your lips  "night Sammy" you leaned up to kiss his cheek before retreating to your bedroom.

You shivered as you walked into your dark bedroom, you pulled on an oversized shirt kicked off your jeans before getting into you bed, your whole body shook as you lay, the events of the night finally setting in your head

You let the hot tears fall slowly down your face as you fell asleep. 

You awoke a while later, you heart beating like crazy, your face stung as tears, new and fresh stuck to your cheeks, you tried catching your breath before making your way quickly to your bedroom door and down the hall to your best friends room

You knocked lightly on the door but there was no response other than the small snores on the other side, you questioned if you should just suck it up and go back to your own room but you knew you couldn't, not alone 

Taking a deep shaky breath you opened the door tip toeing towards the sleeping giant, "Sammy?" You whispered in a strained voice, "...Y/N... w-what's going on? Everything okay?" Sam quickly shot up suddenly as though he was wide awake. You tried to control your breathing before replying "y-yeah I uh, I-" you struggled to get out before you broke completely, your whole body shaking as more tears streamed down your swollen face

Sam was instantly pulling you down to sit next to him on his bed, pulling your shaking body tightly into his warm embrace, his muscular arms wrapping around you waist as you lay your head in the crook of his neck, "hey it's okay just breath" he said gently trolling your hair from your face "what happened?" He asked quietly stroking your wet hair behind your ear 

You took a deep shaky breath leaning into his touch "I- I just had a bad dream and I didn't want to be alone, can I stay with you, please?" You begged Sam, your heart racing like crazy, Sam's cheeks flushed a deep red as he nodded his head almost immediately "of course you can, you know you can always come to me no matter what" You smiled squeezing his hand tightly as a silent thank you.

Sam stayed in that position for another while longer, just holding you tightly to him as you slowly regained your breathing and the tears stopped rolling, "you ready to lay down?" Sam asked rubbing his hand up and down your cold arms nodding you move to his side, slowly lowering your self to rest against the cold unused pillow in Sam's bed, Sam turned to face you in the bed,

His hand once again reaching out for your own "I promise your safe here, I would never in a million years let anyone or anything hurt you" Sam assured you making your heart swell, "I know sweetie,  your like my very own superhero" you told him making his lips pull into his familiar grin "night gorgeous" Sam said giving your small hand another light squeeze "night Sammy" you whispered back.

You lay there another few minutes just staring into the dark room, this was different than how you felt earlier in your own bed, you felt safe... you just couldn't trust your mind enough to sleep

You turned to your side to face Sam, his eyes already on you "I can't sleep" you whispered lowly to him your faces inches apart as Sam moved closer his arm moving to wrap around your waist as his green eyes stared into yours "it'll be okay, I'm right here next to you" Sam promised making you smile up at him 

Your hand cupped the side of Sam's face gently as you moved closer, just testing the waters, letting him have time to pull away if he wanted to, but he didn't.

Sam closed the small gap between your lips quickly capturing you lips with his, you let out a small gasp as your hand flew to grip the back of his neck lightly, his own gripping your waist pulling you as close as possible to him, you let out a quiet moan as Sam moved you to lay on your back, his body rolling to hover above you 

You wrapped you legs tightly around Sam's hips pulling him down so that his covered cock was pressing against your clothed clit, "oh god Sammy" you breathed out pulling his hair slightly 

Sam moved his kisses down your neck causing your eyes to roll "Sam please" you begged tightening your legs around his hips, sam obeyed as he pulled back slightly to pull his grey shirt and off revealing his muscular chest, you ran your hand down from his toned chest down to his pyjama pants, you swallowed the thick lump of nerves in your throat "Y/N, we don't have to do this" Sam told you sensing your nerves 

You shook your head and smiled up at him "I want to do this, with you" you told him as you gently pulled him back down for a kiss, he smirked into the kiss, his hands moving to the hem of your oversized shirt you'd stolen from Sam many moons ago, he pulled the shirt off your body, revealing your bare breasts to him, he instantly grasped them in his warm hands

You let out a small moan of his name, arching your back from the bed "please touch me" you begged, sam chuckled and kissed his was down your chest taking each breast in his hot mouth before continuing his way down your stomach, he dragged your panties down off your legs, gasping at the cold air hitting your core you move to clench your thighs together

Sam's hands caught your thighs quickly, spreading them wider exposing you completely to him "you look so beautiful like this" Sam said his eyes a darker green, bordering a light brown, Sam blew cold air against your soaking pussy before diving in, you screamed in pleasure your hand rushing to gripe Sam's longer hair, "oh god Sammy! Please don't stop that feels so fucking good" you cried out as Sam sucked hour clit into his mouth and inserting his two long fingers inside your dripping hole "you taste fucking delicious Y/N I could stay between these legs all damn day if you let me" Sam said against your pussy, the vibrations of his deep voice and combination of his thrusting fingers causing your eyes to roll to the back of your head "I'm so close Sammy please!" You screamed in pleasure slamming your head back against the pillow behind you as Sam sped up his movements, all that could be heard in the room was heavy breaths and the sounds of Sam's mouth and fingers working you toward your orgasm

You cried out in ecstasy, Sam's long fingers curled inside of you hitting your g-spot repeatedly his lips wrapping around your clit stimulating you completely, you screamed Sam's name as the coil snapped, your orgasm came crashing towards you causing your body to shake slightly, sam carried you through it, not stopping until you gently pushed him away from you, you legs around his shoulders shaking "that was the hottest fucking thing in the world, I've never had a guy do that to me before" you breathed out, still trying to catch your breath

Sam chuckled giving you lips a small kiss "well you have only dated jackasses who clearly have no idea how to please their girls, if I had it my way I'd have you tied to the bed with me down there all damn night" Sam confessed making your heart pound, you looked at him threw half lidded eyes a smirk playing on your lips "I'm not opposed to getting tied up sometime" you said making sam groan loudly as you pulled him into another deep kiss, your hand snuck it's way into his pants and wrapped around his hard cock, you started to move your hand in an up and down motion before Sam quickly grabbed your wrist stopping you

Your eyes snapped to his in a panic and your heart raced in panic, "What's wrong?" You questioned quickly and Sam smiled "nothing it's just… I'd rather be inside you gorgeous" Sam told you and he kicked the rest of his pants off leaving his big hard cock on full display making your mouth water "do you have a condom?" You struggled to ask as your mouth was suddenly dry

Sam nodded, hovering over your bare body to reach into his nightstand, he quickly pulled out a familiar foil package, he ripped it open quickly with his teeth and rolled it onto his erect member "are you sure your okay with this?" Sam, ever the gentleman asked you, his hands ran up and down your waist in a comforting way making you smile  "of course I am Sammy" you confessed wrapping your legs tightly around his hips and pulling him down to you so he was chest to chest to you

Sam leaned down to capture your lips in a sensual kiss, not rushed or hard like the other kisses, you felt him place his covered tip at your entrance, your pussy clenching in desperation to feel him inside you,

Your moan caught in your throat as Sam pushed his way inside you, filling you up, inch by inch

Sam sucked in a harsh breath, his lips moving to attach to your neck "god Y/N your so fucking tight, can already feel you squeezing me" he groaned out hotly against your neck, you giggled softly as your hands ran up Sam's muscled back, he began to move his hips slowly to rest the waters, there was a slight pain but nothing could take away from the pleasure of having Sam so close to you like this "faster Sammy please" you told him arching against him to allow him to push inside you deeper, Sam obeyed and grabbed your thighs, he pushed them up so you knees were against your chest, your calves hanging over his broad shoulders

Sam pulled his hips almost all the way back before slamming back inside you making you scream in pleasure

He continued to slam his cock deep inside you at a fast pace, hitting your G-spot with every thrust his pelvic bone pressing against you swollen clit adding just the right amount of pleasure "yes!" You screamed dragging your nails down Sam's back as white hot pleasure clouded your vision, you knew your orgasm was fast approaching as the coil in your stomach tightened "cum with me baby" you moaned out, Sam quickened his movements feeling his own orgasm crash against him, he moved his hand down to rub your clit quickly causing the band in your stomach to snap, you screamed Sam's name as your juices came flowing out of you, down Sam's thighs as Sam groaned feeling the condom fill with his hot seed 

Sam continued to thrust a few more times slowly to calm you both downs, whimpering when he pulled out you gave him a gentle kiss on his now swollen lips "that was amazing" you said once you pulled away causing Sam to chuckle, he threw the used condom in his trash can "yeah that was the best sex I've ever had" Sam confessed making your heart race and your cheeks turn pink when you giggled “yeah me too”

Sam pushed a stray hair behind your ear, his eyes staring into your own with intensity “I really like you Y/N, your my best friend.. I mean I know we just crossed the line of just friends but I want you, I mean, I want this, not just sex.. I mean I want you.. all of you” Sam confessed before kissing you quickly to solidify his words 

Your heart pounded against your chest as you listened to Sam’s confession, “I want that to Sammy” you said placing your hands on either side of his face, leaning in to peck his kiss swollen lips a couple of times until the smiles on both your lips made it impossible to keep going “so how about tomorrow after your last class we head down the Chinese place for dinner and we can rent a movie to take back home?” Sam asked you nervously “I’d love that” you told him before going to the bathroom to get ready for bed again, this time in the safe protective arms of your boyfriend.

A couple of hours later you awoke to voices in the kitchen, panic rose in your chest before you turned to wake Sam, surprised when all that was in his spot was cold sheets, you furrowed you brows before getting up, you quickly pulled on your over side shirt and panties before stalking towards the kitchen where your boyfriend and another man were talking  “sam?” You called for him making his head snap towards you “Y/N hey what you doing out of bed?” Sam questioned placing his hand on your arm 

You opened your mouth to answer before the other man moved towards you a big flirty smile graced his lips “wow you are so far out of my brothers league” the man said making sam roll his eyes “oh your Dean! Sam’s told me a lot about you” you said making him chuckle “all good I hope” he said before turning his attention back to your boyfriend before staring at you again “listen sweetheart, I gotta talk to your boyfriend here about some family business would you mind giving us a minute?” He asked trying to be as nice as possible “of course I’ll just-” you were cut off by Sam’s big arm wrapping tightly around yours waist pulling you tightly to his side “no, anything you can say to me, you can say in front of Y/N” Sam told him his chest puffed out in anger 

Dean clapped his hands together in frustration “fine, dad hasn’t been home in a couple days” Sam scoffed and rolled his eyes dramatically once again “yeah, he’ll come stumbling back on in soon enough, just like he always does!” Sam said annoyed, his muscled arm around your waist tightening as Dean sighed lowly 

 “alright, dads on a hunting trip, and he hasn’t been home in a few days”. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ALL MY OWN WORK I DO NOT GIVE CONSENT TO COPY OR PUBLISH ON OTHER SITES , I.E WATTPAD, ETC, WITHOUT MESSAGING TO ASK FIRST

For my Sam girlies!

[isakvaltersnake]

things from the 2001 television programme band of brothers that haunt me to this day:

- we’re paratroopers lieutenant, we’re supposed to be surrounded. not to be your 60 year old military obsessed uncle about it but that line goes hard

- nix’s little giggle he does sometimes

- I’ll never forgive them for leaving gene’s medic training out of their training montage. in fact you know what? go back in time, film a parallel sequel of the other 9 eps from gene’s pov

- popeye’s “they called you guys too?” and the way his accent specifically scratches my brain

- they gave me moose heyliger and his massachusetts accent for like 20 minutes then the narrative snatched him away from me and i still miss him

- the way meehan looks at winters after he tells him to close the flap, in fact let’s talk about how every single one of winters’ commanders are obsessed with him in one way or another he truly is the it girl

- the chaos and fear that precedes gene and the calm and comfort that follows him

- I know everyone thinks “we’ll go to chicago, I’ll take you there” is the insane line but the one that actually makes me lose sleep is “what, and give up all this?” THAT MAN SAID I WOULD RATHER LIVE THROUGH THE HORRORS OF WAR THAN HAVE LIVED MY LIFE WITHOUT YOU

- alley is So Beautiful and I don’t think we collectively talk about it enough

- babe being some rando replacement in episode three and whilst his other replacement friends are being absolutely roasted he is immediately adopted by bill and then gets gene fucking roe of all people to connect to him?? he’s too powerful I need to study him

- speirs being this ghoulish terrifying boogeyman until lip is anywhere near him then he’s suddenly dimples and kicking his feet and giggling

- speaking of lip and speirs their little sarcastic in jokes, lip finishing speirs’ sentences fml it’s giving married

- you been working out? IN FRONT OF EVERYONE?? LIEB YOU SLUT?? THEN YOURE GONNA LAY IN HIS BED WAITING FOR HIM??? insane behaviour

- the unexplored but high potential friendships and the way I wanted like 16 more episodes for shifty and lip, nix and luz, nix and web, sisk and perconte, winters and gene, grant and tab, lieb and alley, speirs and harry, etc

- the more haggard and bitchy nix gets the hotter he gets. he also must be studied.

- “you should pack up those ears and go home” ok sobel kinda ate with that one ngl

- speaking of sobel the little confused/bewildered/piss-pants faces he makes david schwimmer the actor you are

- the silly little wide stance pennywise ass run hall does before he gets murked RIP king

- klepto speirs ilysm

- joe toye and his brass knuckles are v sexy

- sink letting nix give winters his oak leaves was very shipper girl of him

- lip harry nix speirs winters in the eagle’s nest dream blunt rotation

- the unsustainable amount of cunt served by nix, frank, babe, and luz at all times is truly a marvel

- tab really checked lip’s dick and balls mid battle and honestly that’s friendship

- bit parts for simon pegg, tom hardy, andrew scott, james mcavoy, michael fassbender, jimmy fallon ?? bob casting director you will always be famous

- peacock is so fine if he was even a little good at his job I’d be obsessed with him (special shout out to the scene of him getting sent home on furlough)

- I could list out every one of their meaningful little moments together but really it’s babe and gene just tethering and grounding each other and how they seem to gravitate to each other out of blind instinct? that’s some Brontë whatever our souls are made of bullshit I’m afraid

- ok I know I said I wasn’t talking about little meaningful moments but gene staring across the convent at where babe is sitting, lost in the peace

-bull in replacements getting imprinted on by a bunch of baby ducks and being SO PLEASED ABOUT IT he’s not the stepfather, he’s the father that stepped up

- speaking of, the underutilization of bull in the back half is such an out of character bad call

- you are officers, you are grown ups, you oughta know. HE’S RIGHT AND HE SHOULD SAY IT AND THAT’S ON GENE BEING THE ONLY ONE ALLOWED TO TELL OFF WINTERS

- I know nix and winters are married and whatever but the real married couple behaviour is luz constantly pissing off joe and joe immediately letting it go

- lip and speirs and their mutual competency kink

- I’M REAL SORRY FRANK skinny ilysm

[mrsnishimuraaa]

you write 8th member docs so well please can u do

riki x fem!reader / reader is 8th member of enha

idea : filming enoclock episode 101 when they do that strength thing and when the reader does it it’s lower than Riki’s and turns him on and yeah.

leads to smut please

so delicate

thank u omg u the best

m.list

filming en o clocks are always fun, today a strength game infront of you. the 160cm your supposed to lift a band beyond is almost taller than you, internally you’ve already accepted your fate that your loosing this game, maybe even plotting a sabotage. the boys insist you go first, just so they can tease you when they get a lot higher than you, after some laughter you sigh and step up toward the game.

you grab the elastic band and can barley pull it past one meter at first, bursting out in laughter as you beg the staff for a second try and your pleading works. you manage to pull it too just about a metre and you can’t help but laugh with them at yourself.

“your so weak y/n” riki jokes and you hit him in the shoulder jokingly, standing beside him as he looks down at you, barley even his shoulder height. he can’t help but get turned on at the diffrence in strength and size between the two of you, seeing you as if your made of glass and extremely fragile. he shakes his head trying to surpass the thought as it’s his turn to try.

easily getting it up above the 160cm without too much trouble, he can’t help but think about your height and how he’s lifting the band most likely above your head. he steps back from the game and comes back to stand behind you, observing as the others play. you keep crossing his mind, he knows it’s not right to feel that way about his own group member, but he can’t hide that you being so small compared to him turns him on straight away. the thought of you being so delicate and innocent, the way he would have power over you and be able to do whatever he liked with no struggle. he shakes these thoughts away and waits until the episode is filmed.

everything comes to a finish and you all get back to the dorms, you make your way to your rooms, but notice riki followed you “what’s up ki?” you ask, sliding your shoes off and watching him close your door behind him. “y/n i need you right now, please” he sounds so desperate, you tilt your head and step toward him “what’s wrong ki?” you question “i’ve been thinking about you all day y/n ever since that strength game i- i sound weird im sorry” he stops mid sentence in embarrassment “no riki, just tell me i wont judge you” your oblivious to what he’s hinting at. “just how small and weak you are, i don’t know why but it turned me on” you blink your eyes at him, a bit taken back “please, i need you so bad” the pure desperation in his voice makes something inside of you snap.

you step towards him again, closing the gap between you two as you stand onto your tippy toes wrapping your arms around his neck and pulling him down into a kiss, he immediately kisses back, melting into you as his hands find your waist. spinning you and pressing you back against the wall, deepening the kiss as you let his tounge slip into your mouth, a small gasp as his lower half presses into your stomach. he taps your hip, pulling away slightly “wrap your legs around me baby” he speaks against your lips, pulling you back into a kiss as he lifts you, pressing you up against the wall, now even with his height as you continue to make out.

the kiss gets even messier, the two of you getting even needier. he walks the both of you to your bed before dropping you onto it, and hovering above you, your hoodie and pants are gone in seconds, he takes a minute to soak in the view of your body, thinking about just how small and helpless you are. his sweats and shirt are off next, thrown to god knows where before he’s back on you again, kissing up your body to your jaw, until your lips meet again as he teases you through your panties. you whine and squirm a little before the fully discards them. plunging two fingers into you, in attempt to stretch you out a bit.

before you know it his boxers are down and you can feel his tip teasing you, gathering your slick before entering you slowly, your hands immediately fly to grip the sheets, gasping as he bottoms out. he grabs your wrists and pins them above your head with only one hand, a teasing smirk on his face as he realises just how much control he has over you. he starts to thrust into you, noticing how you jolt forward with every rough movement of his hips, and the way you try to free your wrists to grip onto something but your too weak. the way you squirm under him as you moan, and when he sees himself in your belly is his final straw. pressing down on the budge he’s forming inside you, the pressure causing you to whine and let out a loud moan.

“yeah? you feel that? you feel me hm?” he chuckles at the way you nod eagerly and whimper, moans growing louder and more desperate as he keeps you restrained, wrapping your legs around his waist as your toes curl from the pleasure. “please riki, m’ so close” you whimper, batting your eyelashes at him as he abuses your g spot. a familiar feeling growing in your abdomen as you come close. and his pace only speeds up, he leans down to kiss you as you squirm and tense underneath him, kissing you through to shut you up as your orgasm washes over you, a moan is muddled into his mouth and he takes the chance to slip his tounge in, thrusts never slowing as he reaches his own high, a slow sensual kiss as he spills himself deep inside you.

he pulls away from you, releasing your wrists as he kisses your forehead before pulling out, grabbing a towel and cleaning you gently with care. after he lies down next to you, wrapping the two of you in a blanket as he soothes you to sleep playing with your hair.

jake was pretty confused seeing your clothes on the floor that next morning

[somehowukook]

(On going) Jungkook fics that totally worth the wait. PT. 2. *:･ﾟ✧

I decided to share some ongoing FFs that I’m completely obsessed with. This is the second part.

Minors under no circumstances can interact with my posts.

Hey guys, 💞

Now I’m back with fic recommendations that are absolutely worth following in real-time.

Also, I’m planning to release a teaser of my own fanfic next week, and this is a way for us to get to know each other better until then!

Without further ado…

Let’s go!

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Dextrocardia by @jeonstudios

cop!jk x f detective!reader, undercover cops, fake marriage, e2l au, [a] [f] [s]

“She’s been moved to another operation to help out. This pairing is necessary because you’ll be undercover as spouses. I know you two can be professional about this.”

“What?!” It’s Jeongguk’s upset voice that sounds, and for once, you share his displeased opinion.

One of the best plots, one of the best themes, and one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had. Smart, essential, and full of layers—that’s the tone of this story. There was one chapter where I just couldn’t stop pacing back and forth around the house while reading. Dextrocardia is nearing its end, and I’m going to miss it so much! @jeonstudios is one of my favorite authors and has already written stories that rank in my all-time top favorites. It’s worth reading EVERYTHING! Her Patreon is worth every cent!

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Bad Decisions by @alphabetboyluver

Smut, fluff, a lil angst, bartender!jk, student!jk, strangers-to-friends-to-lovers (?), fwb, deal arrangement, undefined relationship (they’re just friends! just besties!!), miscommunication, idiots in love, emotional slow burn, bucket list (a.k.a. the birds)

It’s simple: write your deepest, darkest fears on origami birds and string them up on Jungkook’s ceiling. When they fall—which they inevitably will, thanks to his cheap Daiso washi tape—you have to face the fear. Set it free.

The issue? You have a fear of intimacy.

Jungkook, a fear of rejection.

And you both have the capacity to make some incredibly bad decisions.

I LOVE BD. I LOVE HOW THIS JK THINKS HE’LL DIE IF HIS CARNAL DESIRES AREN’T MET. He is the personification of my perfect man—everything he does is incredible, and I swear, I can’t even explain how BD is worth it. I LOVE HOW THE OC IS SO HEADSTRONG AND HOW I LEARNED SO MUCH ABOUT SELF-LOVE FROM HER. Look, I discovered Holly’s writing through Throttle (complete and incredible), and I was instantly enchanted by her work. Honestly, if I had money, I’d open a publishing house just to sponsor and publish her books. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing out!

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死 KKANGPAE by @jungkoode

enemies to lovers, slow burn, gang au, angst with smut, fuck buddies, forbidden love, secret relationship

When you join Kkangpae’s Seduction Division, you know the rules: no attachments, no relationships, no exceptions. The consequences are fatal—you’ve seen them firsthand. But rules become complicated when the Chief of Tactical Assassinations keeps looking at you like you’re his next target, and not the kind he takes out with a sniper rifle.

Alright, I’ve already made it clear in my first fic recommendation list that Kiki is brilliant, and you probably know it by now… Besides writing and creating incredible universes and deeply layered characters with impeccable psycho-behavioral construction, she’s also an amazing and kind person—and her fanarts, help!But enough about her, or I’ll never finish… Now let’s talk about this MASTERPIECE that is KKangpae! I am completely WEAK for Jeon, and this OC? Oh God, this woman can break me, and I’d still say thank you! This slow burn (Kiki’s specialty) is so sensual, so good, and so nerve-wracking that it makes you roll on the floor in a fetal position after every episode. Just read it.

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Stuck with you by @focusonkayjay

Computer sci major/shy/nerdy!Jungkook, econ major/popular/influencer!reader, college au, roommates au, roommates to lovers, friends to lovers, idiots to lovers, angst, smut, fluff

Jungkook’s a hopeless romantic—emphasis on hopeless more than romantic. From the moment he first laid eyes on you, he swore he heard bells chiming, like the angels from above were giving him a cosmic nudge. But he’s always been the awkward, nerdy guy—the one who blends into the background—while you? You felt like a dream way out of his league. Fate, however, had other plans and now, you’re his roommate and living with you—in all your effortless glory—is equal parts chaos and heaven. The only challenge? Keeping his ever-growing feelings in check. That is—until a cocky fuckboy with not-so-pure intentions sets his sights on you, and suddenly, just loving you from the sidelines might not be enough.

I found Chers page through one of my favorite fics, Between the Ride and the Roses(which I think you should read). Since then, I’ve been following her work, and this latest release—seriously, I was so happy I read the first episode before making this recommendation list because it’s TOTALLY worth it! This socially awkward JK, with the purest heart in the world (and some self-esteem issues), will win you over in the very first description, and I just hope this precious soul doesn’t get hurt because, honestly, I’d destroy the whole world if anything bad happens to him. Seriously, he is so precious. MY SHAYLA

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Server Room by @mister0ctopus

Smut (X), Office au, Mini Series

Your new IT guy is quiet and shy. But when you accidentally caught him doing something in the server room while moaning your name, you just had to pretend you didn’t see that, right?

How do I say this without sounding crude? Well, I hope you don’t think I’m crazy, but the server room scene is 🔥🔥🔥🔥, and it left me wondering for wayyy too long —what if it were me???? Well, I probably wouldn’t survive this JK doing THAT while moaning my name.

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Not Ideal by @koojks

Grumpy jk, slight angst and eventual smut. SMAU + Written

Jeon Jungkook has made one thing clear: he has no interest in working with you. He barely tolerates you in the friend group as it is. But with a project on the line, avoiding each other is no longer an option.

Through a Tumblr interest recommendation, I discovered Via and got completely hooked on Not Ideal. I’m OBSESSED—I need to know why this JK is so closed off, why he keeps picking on our OC, what he does when he goes out, what he eats, why he acts so nonchalant about everything??? Baby, I need to know!!!!!

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Hope you like it! And please, let’s keep in touch—I LOVE chatting with you!

[syntheticsymp]

Ok, hear me out,

Nikto with erectile dysfunction

Living with Acute Disassociative Disorder and severe PTSD makes him feel completely disconnected from his body, making it hard for him to control. And the amount of medication he has to take just to stay somewhat sane has to have some negative side effects.

It doesn’t matter what porn Krueger sneaks in or the pretty girl Nikto imagines while palming his cock because it always ends the same. With no relief. Softening before he can finish.

It’s a huge blow to his pride. Nikto’s violent, practically a killing machine, yet can’t get his own cock to work properly.

But it was fine. At least he wasn’t hypersexual like Krueger or desperate like Konig.Besides, he couldn’t care less about sex. Relationships like that were hard when he felt like a ghost haunting his own body.

However, he could only tell himself it was fine until you started dating you. Well, less ‘dating’ and more ‘deciding you were his,’ but it was the same in his cold, dead eyes.

Looking at you like this, after teasing you for the better part of the hour, he could be more ready to take what was his. You were laid out infront of him, hands bound and whimpering. His cock was painfully hard as he fished it out of his loose boxers.

With a cruel precision, he lined himself up. One thrust was all he needed, and god, he couldn’t wait. He pressed a harsh kiss to your stomach, his scarred lips bruising your stomach.

You cried out as he pressed in, then pulled out almost immediately.

“дерьмо, дерьмо, дерьмо!” He muttered, stuffing himself back in his pants.

Your teary eyes opened. He had stopped. That… that wasn’t like him. He never cared about your feelings, he just did what he wanted. You managed to prop yourself up by your elbows, wrists still tied.

“Nikto?” You called to him, fearing that he was having another episode. You squeezed your thighs shut to stop the dull buzzing, and this time, he didn’t stop you.

He hissed, pulling back, anger plastered across his face. You couldn’t yet see what was wrong.

He ignored you, opting to sit on the edge of the bed facing away from you. You didn’t speak after that. It would make him upset if you did. His temper was as delicate as the mine fields he has run across.

Instead, you sat up. You pressed your chest against his back. The cloth of his shirt was rough, a dark blue, standard KorTac shirt. Even if he stripped you bare, he refused to allow himself the same vulnerability. You leaned forward, letting your cheek rest against the back of his neck and hugging your arms around his torso as best you could with the handcuffs intact. Your fingertips couldn’t touch with how wide he was.

The two of you stayed like that for a long moment. He didn’t say anything, so you assumed you were doing something right. It takes him a long time to snap back to reality, and your arms were growing tired.

“…We wanted to fuck you tonight.” The vulgar words sounded so strange coming from a rough, sad voice. He was genuinely upset.

That’s when it clicked. If he wanted to fuck you, he would have. There must have physically been something stopping him.

“I know,” you replied simply. It was such a dumb thing to comfort your kidnapper turned Stockholm Syndrome partner over. Perhaps being with him for so long truly did drive you mad. “We can try again, some other time, if you’d like.”

The offer sounded so innocent for what it truly was.

It wasn’t enough to completely melt away his insecurities, but he took one of your hands in his. He played with your fingers, until he squeezed too hard and you attempted to pull back, only for him to catch the chains around your wrists he had tied on.

“Yes. We will,” he said firmly, his eyes finally flitting to yours. “You are ours. It is only a matter of time until we will be official.”

“Yeah,” you agreed, voice soft. “Official.” The word stung the back of your throat. To him, dumping his seed inside you was practically a marriage proposal. You were hardly his girlfriend, just a toy, you weren’t prepared for whatever being his wife entailed.

“Then, we will fuck you until you cannot move. That way, you cannot leave.” He spoke like a serial killer planning their next kill. “We can do it, we are very young.”

Pure fear compelled you to speak. “But, I need to be able to walk.” Maybe he’s think it was a joke. You hoped he did.

“We are strong. We can carry you.”

You grimaced. He must have picked up on your expression. Just like when he first brought you here, he wasn’t convinced of your words. He had tortured enough people at work to know when someone was upset, though quite frankly, he couldn’t care less about someone’s feelings.

With a sharp tug to the handcuffs leaving bruises on your skin, he pulled you closer.

“Are you thinking bad thoughts again, Роза?” He flicked your forehead. “We’d be happy to remove them for you.”

A threat. He was far more direct with his feelings than you were.

You shook your head, not interested in whatever make-shift lobotomy he had in store. “No, no bad thoughts.” You steeled your nerves as you continued, “I’m just thinking about you.”

That seemed to please him, at least. He twisted his fingers around your binds, leaving little space between the two of you.

“Я не уйду,” he said the phrase he told you over and over, eyes narrowed. “Say it.”

The very words that slowly melted you from the inside out. That he made you repeat so many times that you didn’t know anything other than the Russian he was teaching you. The final straw that sealed your fate long ago.

He told you the words meant ‘I love you.’ You weren’t so sure he was telling you the truth.

“Я не уйду.”

He laughed, the noise devoid of joy, gave you a rough pat on the head as a show of appreciation, then laid down in bed, bringing you down with him, not caring enough to undo your binds. The feeling of his flaccid cock pressed against your ass was a sharp reminder of what was yet to come. You doubted you could hold him off forever.