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SINCE @lazimooni POSTED MY GIFT THEN IM POSTING THEIRS THAT I UUHH LEGIT DREW TODAY AHAHDHFNC :3
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Happy Valentines, Akira. Happy Valentines, Asshole.
If you can’t read what Akechi’s secondary inner-dialogue says cause I obscured it too much behind his regular dialogue, here’s a transcription in panel order: Hello, you fucking- Ah- Hello, Akira! Fuck off, why should I tell you- Just a soda- there’s a new flavor.
I don’t want your shitty gift. Oh- haha! You’re so sweet.
I hope I choke. They’re lovely, thank you.
Like hell. Likewise. There’s no way it’s just a coincidence. Still though, it’s a funny coincidence.
#p5#akeshu#akechi goro#kurusu akira#wow- me?? posting a valentines comic... actually on?? valentines????? wack. absolutely wack#it's a short one! I purposefully tried to keep it short. it was a challenge and it still ended up being 3 pages. but i blame my canvas size#also in case u can't see what akira is holding out to akechi: theyre chocolate covered strawberries on sticks!#i saw them irl and was like oh god i want those. i am going to project that feeling on my favorite characters so help me god#and now! here we are! but my shitty-ass coloring & line quality make it hard to discern them so. sorry about that lmaooooo#ANYWAY i don't do enough post-maruki stuff so. i made this one a little bittersweet. :)#why did i put akechi's scarf in a bow? honestly i dont know! i think i saw some art a while ago that did that too and i thought it was cute#well. plus i guess there's the symbolism of 'akechi being alive and reciprocating your feelings (however involuntarily) IS a gift' part#hence that hes wrapped up in a bow. like a present. :)#also god. the first panel is supposed to be akechi's reflection in a vending machine window. I could NOT get it to look right#so for reference!!! just so you guys understand!!!!!! thats what that panel is supposed to be!!! he is NOT in fact a ghost. (sigh)#hope you enjoyed and had a lovely valentines!! for my part i have eaten nothing but sweets today and hoo boy will that have been a mistake#ALSO in terms of the audience-participation comic...hopefully coming soon. if i can ever gain the will to draw it.#but at least tumblr has polls now so i can do the audience-choose-y bit without needing to use a separate website! so thats good i guess#anyway anyway anway thanks for listening to me ramble if you made it this far! have a lovely rest of your day and hopefully see u again soon
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rivers if he was absorbed by poisonous gas but didn’t care too much
#weezer#rivers cuomo#poison gas#poison#maybe i’ll get more fans#THE WEEZER ARMY MUST GROW#THE WEEZER LVOERS !#please send me asks guys am so bored!!!#plus also dms are always open for any of u! i love u all n would love to talk to any of u#i took this pic and Wonderfront#i miss it. i wanna see them again :( but im broke!#i have to spend my money on my anniversary gift for my boyfriend which i’m NOT complaining about bc i love him obviously but am seriously SO#broke. i will draw whatever you guys want actually#for either 1) a follow (or if you are already following ; then free) 2) a little kiss#not on the lips though#but ya! please send. asks i always love interacting with you all! you guys r so sweet <3#there’s this tiktok user#maladroitlover579 and i love their videos so much they’re genuinely so silly n funny#i love commenting on their videos you guys should check them out they r huge weezer fan too!!! if you couldn’t tell by the name#omg today someone complimented my hair and i got so happy#MY OUTFITS HAVE BEEN SO FIRE LATELY🤤🤤 today i wore a short denim skirt with an off the shoulder black long sleeve with white leg warmers!#then yesterday i wore a black tube top with a long black skirt which hugged me#before i wore my brown sweater with my black skirt (which has POCKETS.) so it was super cute.#then monday i wore black yoga flares; white tank top with cute buttons; and a red shrug!#i got compliments on my style. 😎 guess i’m just the cutest girl on the block#or should i say… ON GHE BLOG??!#cuz it’s weezer blog… and i’m the only girl posted on here consistently….#always between my words i wanna add ‘da’ in the middle of them because that’s a running joke w my boyfriend#like da obviously! 🙄 da seriously? 😒 da Lol 😂#idk he’s silly and i’m silly
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hey how much is sapnap and matpat in the new tommyinnit video, i want to watch but i don't really want to see them
Matpat isn't in it. Sapnap is but it's just Tommy seeing him coming out of a store, asking if he's fucked up mentally, sapnap says no and Tommy is like "nice seeing you" very dryly and sarcasticly, and leaves. A lot of people say Tommy was being a bitch to him on purpose but he has autism and I ALSO have autism so....idfk
#asks#also the matpat thing is prob just personal preference BUT in case it isn't#he's....fine. I've heard people call him transphobic and i have no idea what the fuck they're talking about?? he's outspokenly an ally and#his cohost on gt live is nonbinary??? he includes nonbinary options in all of his gener surveys????#i think it's literally just because of his videos when he was in college and didn't “get” trans people but he LEARNED. and he learned fast#every accusation I've seen against him was either old#bullshit/made up#or purposely bad faith (like the pope thing??? he literally gave the pope a video game because he wanted to give him something that#represented the video game community while also having a kind message because it's traditional to bring gifts representing your community#and people act like it was a pusposeful intent to be cruel and evil and overshadow real genocide or something??? i read a rant on it and wa#like#...THIS ONLY MAKES SENSE IF YOU ALREADY HATE HIM AND ASSUME HE HAD BAD INTENT.#They hated him FIRST and then tried to justify it.#it's so dumb???!! it's so dumb. what the fuck#people also call him ableist and that's just as stupid and i- i need to stop my point is. free him he's literally just a normal guy#a normal guy who learns stuff over time?? like humans do????? and grows as a person?????#fuck twitter and fuck cancel culture. matpat rocks and i think he's fucking cool as shit. FUCK#matpat...strokes the screen....matpat I'm so sorry for what they did to you oh my godddddd#matty patty.....matty patty I'm so sorryyyyy#pookie I'm so sorry for what they said abt u I'll avenge u i prommy <3 ur so slayyy literally so slay don't let the h8ers get you DOWNNN om#he's a legend and he's genuinely not an asshole he's just kind of a himbo dumbass who has to have ash explain to him what a tumblr sexyman#is. he's just out of touch if you explalin to him he'll go “oh okay!!! i support you!!”#HE'S TRYING HIS BEST!!!!!!!! RAAASGUGUUHHHHH#matpat supporter i am a matpat supporter i am a matpat fan and bestie#he's my little blorbo he's my silly little guy my dumb theory man#you're allowed to hate him idc i just don't think saying he's an irredeemable monster who needs to be beaten up is fair.#you could say#.... he's “annoying at first”#get it? but yeah i think “i find him annoying and hate him personally” is fine but “he's evil and actually morally duplicitous” is unfair.
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Chapter 141. Its just so funny to me Fei Du let's Luo Wenzhou play daddy. Fei Du is like sure I'll stop partying if the wife wants me to, stop drinking and street racing, wear warmer attire etc. And by wife at home he means a man almost a decade older scolding him like a baby but he likes his lovers exactly like that so <3 he's like "it's fine. I can follow his rules, I didn't care that much about the alcohol, as long as he's in my arms" and you know ignoring the whole "I might lock him in a basement and keep as a prize comment I made this winter"
Zhou Huaijin looked in the same direction as him, his eyes dimming. “Will you have tea? Or some sake?”
“Tea is fine. They don’t let me drink alcohol at home.”
#silent reading#lb#im not usually jnto daddy kink but its SUCH a part of their domestic dynamic and i love them for it#i love their casual THAT and casual touch as both are acts of service/gift giving/touch love types#also just. fei du: they dont let me drink at home u-u BITCH YOURE an adult and luo aint ur real dad u can do whatever#ur bitch ass like: they dont let me u-u instantaneously fueling luo wenzhous kink for u obeying him#and ur own little haha its my Home and my Home has rules and hes such a little jerk husband isnt he <3 im gonna have to bite him <3#haha what can you do. lmao fei du LOVES sharing luo wrnzhous protective bullshit to others its fei dus way of bragging he has such a homey#stable domestic relationship. fei dus like I KNOW I WAS A PLAYER but look heres the man i made a ring for <3 hes MY man <3 he cooks for me#and worries if im even COLD. isnt he just DARLING i couldnt find another lover this GOOD arent i lucky? arent y jealous? arent u impressed#my player ass locked down this domestic daddy to spoil me rotten <3 you should be. a man will NEVER love you as much as my man#loves me <3
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[chin on hands] just played [s] seer: descend and. hm. having feelings abt john's and rose's first physical meeting being while she's grimdark and abt to see their parents' dead bodies. and of course john, unaware of the grimness of the situation, has his first irl words basically be 'so an alien thinks we should get married :B what do you think?'
#libra.txt#thirteen year olds am i right.........#< person who also has strong feelings regarding the troll murders on the meteor#like!! again i didn't have flash when i first read homestuck so the fine details and the games are completely new to me!#i have SO many feelings about the meowrails during seek the highb100d#like again blaming cygna for making me think abt equius more (thank u cygna i appreciate it)#they cared about each other so much!!!!!!!! and i care about them!!!!!!!#also gamzee :/ i have never liked him but i am sad about him. lowkey blaming dave for him snapping#(obvs there are extenuating circumstances beyond dave sending him the blasphemous vid. withdrawal for one. highblood rage. cal in general)#on the other hand i've always liked eridan! he sucks so bad but i like him!#and with the gift of growing up a little and theoretically being more mature. i'm just really sad about all these kids dying :-(#fans being like 'ohhh equius and eridan are soooo weird and creepy!!!!!' THEY'RE 13!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#as a (former) weird and creepy 13yo. that doesn't mean they deserved to die!!!!!!!#i know it's a story and it benefits the plot and i'm not mad about it. this is what fanfic is for.#i just. kids :-(((((#not ready at all for the scratch and the 3 year meteor trip and all that#i can't wait to see the alpha kids again and play with the dancestors but also. this comic is so sad :((
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COD P☆RN LINKS | PT. 3
ghost: always so quiet and reserved, seeing you like this is refreshing. so humane having ur guts rearranged after doubting your lieutenants skills! dove, you're so needy. but luckily for you, you have a patient, big bf came back from prices' baby shower now u and si want a baby of ur own, but u can't wait:( doughy ass bouncing on his long cock that no one's sucked in over a year, thankfully now ur here! sharing the captains daughter with soap<3 trusting is hard for him, so once he has you, he doesn't wanna let go warm winter fuck with ur gentle boy price: once you taught olderbf!price how to make hotter videos, he thinks he's so much cooler but that old man lives within him💔i mean look how he's holding the phone! you feel a big, throbbing thing in your tummy, hopefully he doesn't press down on it D: when u took him to meet ur parents, you just looked too good not to fuck afterwards :( as much as he loves his quiet girls, he can't say no to a bubbly one night stand now can he he didn't wanna have to do this but this IS what bad girls get... dadsfriend!price taking you upstairs during the bbq. there's so many people so no one will hopefully notice ur gone... soap: totally something soap would do, fucking you levitating 😭 first time having a crush this intense, taking sneaky photos of you, drawing you in his sketchbook, leaving you little gifts anonymously - now that you gave him a chance, he's too shocked to even do anything! honestly his dream is hot gf x loser guy he's a messy boy who likes his sex quick! so so much cum dripping out, it's like your boys' in heaven filthy gym partner can't keep his hands to himself only one person can eat you this well when you're sick, soap! gaz: your drunk sex was so good, you won't forget it even when you're sober <3 appreciating that pussy with the love and tongue it deserves so wet and tight like ur ex boyfriend did nothing at all smh, must've been tiny deeeeep in ur gfs womb! pretty boy barely ever gets angry, but when price has been on his back the whole week, and now you're giving him attitude - he can't take it anymore! hot belly bulge - who would've thought from the serene, goofy guy? graves: ah, so THAT'S how you passed recruitment i see, interesting... what a baby, never been with a real woman. actually a very soft, sensual man. don't mistake him as rough cuz of how he acts at work lucky shadow of the week gets to record the barracks bunny and graves kept trying to draw milk out of you but he didn't realise not everyone just...lactates :(he can't stop rewatching this video y'all took, how your greedy pussy just swallows his dick whole :o purposely just teasing you so he can see u angry konig: an efficient way to wake up his beautiful baby✨ his cold tongue and your warm socks make an interesting contrast🤔 he caught you masturbating all by yourself and you didn't seem to reach ur full potential :( loser!konig coded, once he finally gets his rough hands on you, it's hard letting a beauty like you go ruined ur cute little panties smh, greedy big boy mean colonel punishing his secret fuck buddy after he found out you've started talking to another person💢 bonus!!: surprise ;)
@xtrrdnrypotato @livingdead-g1rl
#call of duty#cod#cod mw2#cod headcanons#cod modern warfare#cod fanfic#simon ghost riley#cod smut#mdni#minors go away#minors do not interact#minors will be blocked#p links#k6tzielinks#cod links#cod smut links#corn links#cod p links#konig#konig smut#konig cod#konig mw2#ghost smut#ghost cod#ghost call of duty#graves#phillip graves smut#phillip graves#soap mactavish#john soap mactavish
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hey! i really love your fics and i have a special request 4 my 19th birthday ( aug 16 ) . can you do inexperienced yuuta x inexperienced reader or frat boy/play boy yuuta x shy nerdy reader? I really luv u and it would mean alot 2 me if you did this,feel free to say no or ignore this if you want! no pressure!
OH MY GOODNESSS i could never ignore this! i can ABSOLUTELY cook this one up for you and i hope i met your expectations!! i wanted to release this right on your birthday, so here is my gift to you! <3 ILY you’re so sweet thank you for sending in a request!
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finally.
{frat boy/playboy yuta okkotsu x nerdy f!reader}
summary: yuta okkotsu is a typical popular frat boy player who’s never been told no, but at one of his regular parties where he spots your pretty little self in the kitchen, and you turn him down? his entire existence resets as he then cannot stop thinking about you and tries his absolute hardest to change the impression you have on him.
warnings: college au, afab!reader, fluufff, mentions of alcohol and drinking, yuta LOVES you, he’s a little weenie at first, character development yuta, no smut in this one!, cursing, party fight, protective yuta, yuta fights someone lol, slight sexual themes but really nothing.
word count: 5k
authors note: OH HOW I LOVE THIS ONEEE!! i hope i’m feeding you guys well this week with these fics hehe!! IM WRITING A FREAKY ONE FOR THIS NEXT SO STAY TUNED!! love you love you <3
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yuta okkotsu was the biggest player and frat boy to ever plague your college campus— having parties literally every other night and trashing the absolute fuck out of his frat house after every single one, living in the privileges of popularity as he was without a doubt the hottest man there.
he absolutely relished in his reputation, loved the attention, loved the stares he got, and had a body count that absolutely shot through the roof in numbers.
and yuta was quite literally a typical frat boy. he was loud and obnoxious, the most stubborn hot headed man to ever exist on the face of the planet, passed the time playing beer pong for fun and drinking, and had girls practically at his feet, him never having to work for anything to get in his bed and fuck.
until he met you.
you had timidly walked into one of his frat parties one night, shy, cutely nerdy, a little scared and absolutely drop dead gorgeous, your energy an entirely different one from his own as he watched you a little too much throughout the night, rehearsing his perfected plan of getting girls into bed with him as he finally spotted you alone in the kitchen after a while, approaching you.
yuta flashed you an attractive polished smile as he leaned up against the kitchen counter, practically cornering you in as you eyed him alarmingly.
“hey,” he sipped at his beer. “what’s your name?”
you awkwardly shifted, wondering where the hell your best friend was as the biggest player you’ve ever heard of was talking to you.
“y-y/n…” you stammered, your gaze barely looking at him but giving a small smile through your nervousness nonetheless.
“pretty name for a pretty girl,” he hummed. “you’ve never come to my parties before, have you?”
you shook your head no, your doe eyes finally peering up at him.
“welcome then!” he chirped smoothly and leaned closer to you, his breath faintly smelling of alcohol. “you here by yourself?”
“no i’m with a friend, actually.” you laughed awkwardly, your cheeks red with embarrassment but smiling politely through your discomfort, not wanting to offend him in any way.
yuta nodded, his eyes scanning the crowd. “did you lose them?”
“i— i guess so—”
“you can stick with me then.” he shrugged, a sly smile on his face as he sweet talked you, it slightly faltering when he noticed how uncomfortable you looked, but carrying on anyways. “you wanna head upstairs? maybe we can—”
“no thank you.”
he paused.
no?
“no?”
he was yuta okkotsu. no girl has ever told him no before.
you shook your head at him and gave him a sugary smile, your tone kind and polite as you started to walk away from him. “i’m sorry, i think i see my friend over there though! thank you for keeping me company, i hope it wasn’t too much trouble!”
he watched you walk away then in your tiny little skirt, and he felt stupidly offended. absolutely stupidly offended as he slightly scoffed and shook his head, taking a swig of his beer, his body and mind literally glitching with the foreign feeling of rejection.
yuta tossed his empty beer bottle lazily in a black garbage bag and stuffed his hands into his pockets, his long legs already pulling him over to the beer pong table in the living room, opting to forgetting the entire encounter he had with you altogether and shaking it off.
except he couldn’t. he couldn’t shake it off.
his brain was buzzing and utterly reeling over the thought of your timid nature and soft spoken words and pretty pretty face from that point forward, thoughts that aggravated him to no end that bubbled up every time he ate, slept, was in class, and did basically anything.
he didn’t know why it was happening. he didn’t know why you took over his every fucking thought as he only interacted with you for like five minutes. but your aura was different. so poised, so shy and gentle, and it was like a red string was physically pulling him towards you everywhere you went.
yuta saw you around campus a lot more after that, you sticking out like a sore thumb and blinding his vision whenever you walked past him, your smile sweet and respectful towards him that lasted only a millisecond as you walked down further, his eyes watching you over his shoulder, soft.
you conversations with him were nothing but polite and casual as he tried to talk to you again and again, your body language guarded and careful, but your voice like silky honey, speaking to him with more kindness than he deserved.
yuta never seemed to be able to get past the invisible wall you built in front of him.
“a girl like her isn’t gonna go for a guy like you, yuta.” one of his frat brothers muttered to him, having been fed up with yuta’s moping and grumbling around the house ever since he saw you.
“and why not.” he gruffed, his arms tightly crossed over his chest as he leaned back on the couch.
“because she’s nothing like us.” he emphasized. “she’s a nerd, respects herself, is way too good for you, and would never let herself waste time with a guy of your reputation.”
his frat brother patted him heavily on the shoulder. “just go back to the ones you usually go for. they’re easy.”
yuta only rolled his eyes and stood, but he really couldn’t deny what he had said. you were too good for him, way too good for him, his life completely mismatched from yours— paths never meant to cross as he solemnly watched you from afar, wanting you to smile at him the way you smiled at others, wanting you to talk about your precious nerdy interests and your studies with him like you do with your friends, and wanting you to just simply look at him longer than the usual casual hello you gave him.
but you never did.
in an attempt to try and talk to you again without seeming like an absolute fucking stupid creep like last time (something he quickly realized), he started throwing parties at his frat literally every single night in hopes of you showing up, scanning the crowd and sulking in a corner when he couldn’t find you, the bags under his eyes growing darker and darker with every time you didnt make an appearance.
he tried to go back to his old ways and hook up with the girls he usually did, tried to bury you in the back of his mind and go back to before, but he just couldn’t, his mind foggy and preoccupied with thoughts of you that invaded his every neuron, making him kiss his hook ups back lazily or straight up just cancel on them— stopping all together in the end.
it had been months, and yuta sat bored out of his mind on the living room couch during another one of his parties, not a single drop of alcohol in his system as music pumped and drummed through the frat that made his headache ten times worse.
these everyday parties were pointless.
he sat up and trudged to the kitchen, pushing past his friends for a beer until he froze.
there you stood, finally, leaning against the kitchen counter all by yourself, just like how you were when he first saw you.
his eyes flew open and he quickly smoothed over his white t-shirt with his hands, heart hammering against his chest so hard that it traveled down to his ribcage as he approached you, internally freaking the fuck out.
“hey y/n,” he greeted quietly and calm, trying his absolute hardest to convey sincerity towards you. “how are you doing?”
your eyes snapped to his and you leaned back a bit, but smiled. “hi yuta! i’m doing okay. how are you?”
he could practically see the wall you had in front of him, your posture timid and cautious, and his eyes only grew more insecure.
“i’m good! do you— do you want a drink? or something? i could—”
“oh it’s okay yuta! i’m fine,” you answered shyly, a grin on your breathtaking face.
yuta gnawed on his thumb, looking around the kitchen for something, anything that could fix the image you had on him.
the fridge.
“do you um—” he walked over to the fridge, almost stumbling over his own shoes as he opened it. “do you want maybe apple juice? or— or i have chocolate milk? or sunny d i drink like an entire dozen a day but—”
you giggled.
his head snapped over to you and watched your pearly smile, shining just for him for a moment, his shoulders slowly relaxing.
yuta sheepishly scratched the back of his neck and laughed along with you.
“sunny d would be great!”
he stared blankly, and then quickly nodded. “o—okay! yes sunny d—”
he ransacked through his fridge, knocking over several cans of energy drinks and beers before he finally found the sunny d’s in the back, tearing one out from the pack and closing the fridge.
“here you go.”
your cheeks glowed pink as you shyly took the small bottle from his hands, a cute wobbly smile on your face that made yuta’s chest clench.
precious.
he wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans.
“i wanted to apologize—” he strained out. “for the way i spoke to you when we first met.”
you stared at him.
“it was never my intention to make you uncomfortable, and i acted like a complete dingbat with the things i said, so i just—” he scuffed his shoe against the kitchen floor. “i’m really sorry.”
you were quiet, big doe eyes blinking up at him in shock— until your frame gently deflated, eyes softening for him.
“you don’t have to apologize yuta honestly.” your soft voice soothed him, a sound he craved to hear everyday since the moment he met you. “i don’t think any less of you if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“you don’t?”
you shook your head cutely, beaming. “i don’t.”
he felt like he could breathe again.
your invisible wall slowly and gradually crumbled away the more you got to know yuta after that. he was still a little flirt, but only a little flirt with you, and he still did his frat boy job duties everyday, but he toned down the parties massively and stopped playing beer pong and drinking just for fun.
it would be a lie if you said you weren’t hesitant about yuta to begin with. you knew of his reputation and the risks you ran with befriending him the way you were— you well aware that he was trying to win you over, but you saw something different in him that he didn’t show to anyone else, and you trusted him, the goodness of your heart always giving people the benefit of the doubt.
he was trying his absolute hardest for you and changing his bad traits, wanting to become a person that deserved to be with you as he listened to you ramble on and on about your classes and your studies all of the time, him smiling adoringly at you because he genuinely loved so much hearing you talk to him and listen to anything you had to say— and yuta was falling practically head over heels over the way you gushed about your little nerdy interests, your eyes shimmering every time.
“and what’s this one called?” he asked softly.
you glanced over. “that’s the corpse flower! they only bloom for two to three days every two to three years.”
“only for two to three days?!” he whispered harshly, the ambiance in the botanical garden quiet and serene as you both observed the different kinds of breeds, flowers being your specialty of knowledge.
and he wanted to know all about it, even though he had a pamphlet in his hand that told him everything.
he wanted to hear it from you.
“and this one?”
he pointed to a vibrant scarlet red flower.
“that’s the cardinal flower. they attract little bees and hummingbirds!”
your words were gentle and polite, your eyes sparkling at all of the different flowers in front of you.
“oo! and this one—” you stopped suddenly, slowly retracting your hand and looking at him bashfully, your cheeks redder than ever.
yuta’s eyebrows furrowed. “what? why’d you stop?” he looked to where you had been staring. “what about this one?”
“sorry!” you sputtered. “i felt like i was getting carried away and talking way too much…”
you laughed it off, but yuta only shook his head.
“no you weren’t. you weren’t at all.”
you peered up at him shyly.
“you can talk about anything you want with me wherever we are, y/n. i like it when you explain to me these things, or anything you know really.” he ruffled your hair. “i like listening to you.”
your cheeks adorned a pinky shade as you took in what he said, and you smiled so so big then, nodding.
“so what’s this one?” he pressed again, lightly.
the bed contained a mix of white and purple flowers, small and dainty as they swayed to and fro a bit with every breeze.
“those are pansies,” you leaned over the railing. “i like these especially because it looks like they have another pair attached to them on the other side.”
“like a little buddy,” yuta commented.
you laughed softly, “yeah! like a little buddy.”
he pointed to a specific pansy that had one white flower and one purple flower on the opposite side.
“that’s you and me.”
“is it?” you grinned. “who’s who?”
“you’re the white one and i’m the purple one,” yuta absentmindedly turned and grabbed your hands gently, playing with your fingertips— and you let him. “because you’re pretty and really fucking smart and way too nice to me, and i’m a douchebag and sometimes i’m a mean and scary old fart.”
you giggled loudly at his joke, shaking your head. “nuh uh. i don’t agree.”
“you don’t?” he quirked an eyebrow, a silly smile on his face.
you shook your head again. “you’re genuine yuta. really genuine. and you’re funny, you never make me feel embarrassed for the things that i love, and you make others happy!… sometimes.”
yuta laughed, “sometimes?” he softly placed your hands back at your sides. “yeah, you’re not wrong.”
“but you make me happy, always.” you finished off.
his eyes lit up like a firework. “really? so does this mean you’ll finally say yes to going out with me and give me a little kiss?”
you snickered and covered your mouth, your cheeks flushed. “nuh uh.”
“aww mannn,” yuta groaned and leaned against the railing, but turned his head to the side after a few seconds and looked at you, giving a tender smile.
your eyes continued to sparkle over the flower beds in front of you, but yuta’s eyes only sparkled at the one flower in front of him.
that’s where he started calling you flower.
“that’s okay!” he leaned back up. “i’ll keep trying.”
and boy did he try. each and every single day yuta tried as he brought you little treats from the campus cafe, or helped carry your textbooks to wherever you went, brought you neatly packaged flowers or sometimes would even pull his car over when he saw pretty ones on the side of the road, getting off and running to pluck them, handing them to you through the window with a goofy grin.
everything was bliss between you two, and your world only got brighter as you hung out with him.
but for yuta, his world got a little complicated.
his former hookups only grew sour once they found out about you, the girl yuta seemed to spend every waking hour with, completely blind sighted to the fact as they thought he would’ve dumped you months ago already.
and his frat brothers were just bothered. yuta wasn’t managing the frat like he used to before, like he was supposed to as their leader, neglecting the collective reputation they all had with him not sweet talking the entire female student body, or their parties not running every single night anymore— and even when they did run, yuta wasn’t ever even there to begin with, he was with you, something they quickly realized.
“you have to cut it out man,” one of them said. “this frat is turning into a shit hole because you keep spending your time with that girl—“ he stopped. “who the fuck even is she? i mean if it was layla fine everybody knows layla but—”
“who she is is none of your fucking business?” yuta snapped. “and just because i’m not sending girls for you to jerk your dick with doesn’t mean this frat is turning into a ‘shit hole.’”
some of the boys snickered.
“you wanna run the maintenance on the house? you wanna call up the fucking board and ask for the ten thousand fucking permits we have to have for our parties every year? you think you can run that?”
“no—”
“then be my fucking guest.”
“okay fine, i’m sorry man.” he sighed. “we haven’t had a party in a week though, we have to throw one tomorrow and you have to be there. then ill call it even.”
yuta snorted. call it even? whatever.
he begrudgingly agreed, not wanting to be there whatsoever but softening up to the fact that maybe he was neglecting his frat a little too much.
so when he called you up that day for your nightly phone calls, yuta asked for your attendance.
“i know— i know parties aren’t really your thing…” he pursed his lips, staring up at the ceiling as he had you on speaker. “but i’d feel a lot better if you were there… and you won’t be alone! you’ll be with me the whole time so—”
yuta sighed. “…i have been neglecting the frat a little bit, and they’re pissed at me.”
you gasped softly, “they are?”
“yeah but i don’t give a fuck.”
you both giggled.
“but i do want to make them somewhat happy so that’s why i gotta throw this party… can you come? it’s okay if not flower don’t worry—”
“of course i can go yuta!” you spoke cutely over the speaker. “as long as you give me a sunny d i’ll be okay.”
he laughed.
“i feel like…” you struggled. “them being mad and what’s happening with your frat is partially my fault yuta… i’m sorry.”
your voice was so worrisome, you feeling tremendous guilt on the other line as you bit your lip.
“what?” his eyes narrowed. “no flower, absolutely not. why would you think that?”
“because i keep asking you to hang out with me,” you spoke softly. “and i feel like im hogging you from your frat boy duties.”
yuta chuckled and shook his head. “i would ten times rather spend time with you than hang out with these fucking dummies.” he sat up on his bed. “i love it when you ask for me flower. keep doing it please. whatever that’s happening with my frat strictly has to do with me okay? not you.”
you grinned on the other end, your heart giddy. “okay.”
so the night of the party, you showed up to his frat looking absolutely gorgeous in your tight little dress, his hands instantly clamming up and his throat closing at the scent of your strawberry perfume and lovely face alone.
yuta tried so hard to keep his eyes respectful and not drift down to your ass or the way your perfect tits squeezed out from the top, almost physically slapping himself when he accidentally touched you way lower than he should have when guiding you through the crowd.
everywhere he went people were greeting him or passing him shots, him quickly acknowledging everybody and downing whatever they gave him as you shyly and timidly stuck to his body (which he loved).
yuta taught you how to play beer pong that night and cheered like an absolute fucking idiot whenever you would make it in, drinking the cups for you instead as he knew you weren’t the biggest fan of alcohol, which made you a little weak in the knees that he catered to you so much.
the party was actually way more fun than the both of you expected, especially for yuta, because he proudly had you on his arm as you walked throughout the house, you trying your absolute hardest to ignore the stares you got from different girls and not uttering a single word about it to yuta, not wanting to burden him and take his focus away from rejuvenating the frat and his brothers.
all was bliss, until it wasn’t.
“is this her? the girl you’re always talking to?” one of his frat brothers stumbled through the crowd, the one that argued with him the day before, drunk off of his freaking mind as his eyes raked over your body like nothing.
yuta instantly picked up on that and stiffened, “yeah.”
he tried his best to swallow his annoyance and be civil as he gently placed a hand on your back and softly ushered you forward, you shy and clinging onto his shirt. “this is y/n.”
“h—hi.”
“i see why you abandoned us for a nerd man!” he slurred. “she’s fucking hot. never seen tits look so good—”
your breath hitched.
“the fuck you just say?” yuta tugged you behind him. “the hell is wrong with you man? don’t talk about her like that.”
you noticed several eyes looking over.
“what!” he hiccuped dumbly. “they do! why are you getting pissed—”
“i don’t give a shit!” yuta snapped. “don’t talk about her like that!”
he scoffed, swaying a little. “what, like you actually care about her anyways—”
“are you fucking serious?” yuta stepped forward and you tugged him back, your eyes frantic as they scanned over the crowd forming and back to him.
“no yuta, he’s drunk it’s okay—”
“she’s just another one for your body count, once you fuck her you’re gonna leave—”
yuta slipped from your grasp and lunged at him, tackling him and towering over him on the ground as he fisted his shirt and jerked him up, yuta landing punch after punch to his face as the crowd yelled, cheered and recorded around you.
“yuta please!” you tried to get his attention, your chest heaving in a panic as you watched the other guy land a hit on yuta, not wanting him to get hurt over you at all whatsoever.
yuta dodged another coming hit and beat the shit out of him, grueling him down to a mere pulp as everything around him went completely white and fuzzy, his body stinging with absolute rage.
he was furious.
finally, several other frat brothers broke through the crowd and pulled yuta off of him.
“that’s enough that’s enough!”
“guys stop!”
quickly, you grabbed yuta’s hand once they put him aside and tugged him away from the crowd, speed walking to the front door.
“you’re out of the fucking frat you piece of shit!” yuta practically roared behind him as you pulled him. “you’re out!”
your trembling fingers hurriedly turned the knob and opened the door, dragging him out down the steps to the porch and across the grass, not saying a single word to him yet as he kept breathing out desperate apologies to you with every step.
once you both were a safe distance away from the house and just a tiny bit down the street, you let go of his hand and turned to him.
“—fuck im sorry i’m sorry im so sorry—” yuta shoved the base of his palms into his eyes as he threw his head back, “i just fucked everything up between us i—”
yuta knew you would never want to be with a guy like him, especially one that couldn’t keep his shit together and resorted to violence the way he did minutes ago, right in front of you. a guy like that didn’t deserve you. you deserved way way fucking more. and as he tore his palms away from his face, eyes looking up at the night sky, he knew he completely messed up his chances with you for good.
his head snapped down to look at you, his eyebrows pinched and eyes contorted in absolute guilt and agony as he placed his bloody knuckled hands on your little cheeks.
“i’m so fucking sorry he said those things to you like that that was not okay flower,” he emphasized. “and i’m so sorry i beat him when you told me not to i— i just couldn’t stand there when he was talking to you like that man—”
he dropped his hands and cursed, his arms going up as he covered his eyes again.
“yuta it’s okay—”
“no,” he shook his head and looked at you. “no it’s not okay. you deserve way more than this and no matter how fucking hard i try to do better, the life i built before you just doesn’t let me.”
his eyes got so sad, saying words he didn’t want to say, but knew he had to. “you shouldn’t be around a guy like me flower, you really shouldn’t. fuck— i don’t want you around a guy like me. you’re too precious for that. i’m gonna end up screwing you over like i always do—”
“yuta stop.” you raised your voice a little, your tone one he’d never ever heard come out of your mouth, firm and serious in contrast to the sweetness you always gave him.
he shut right up.
“come sit down with me on the curb,” you pulled his arm. “please.”
he followed you and sat down next to you on the side walk with his head down, you taking in how yuta only had one little cut next to his eyebrow, pride funnily bubbling up in your chest as you realized how good he actually fought.
he did that. for you. he made a scene out of himself and protected your name.. for you. although you hated that he got into a fight, you knew he was trying so so hard for you, going above and beyond for a year now trying to fix himself to be a better man deserving of you, and you were immensely touched, no one having put even close to that amount of effort like he was in your life.
“you don’t get to decide what i deserve yuta.”
his eyes shot in your direction “but as a friend i’m telling you—”
you huffed as you grabbed his cheeks and kissed him.
you kissed him.
yuta’s eyes were blown astronomically wide as you did, his heart no longer beating as he could’ve sworn he was dead right now, not believing that you were actually kissing him.
him.
you pulled apart from his lips with a smack, your hands still on his red cheeks. “a guy who’s willing to literally change himself without me having to ask, trying to be better for me everyday without fault for literally a year, doing everything he can to make me happy? definitely deserves me yuta. you deserve me.”
you pecked his forehead softly and pulled back again, his body going numb when you did. “so what if you beat the shit out of him? i would do it too if someone was talking to you like that i don’t care. i’d lose but i’d do it,” you giggled. “i didn’t like the fight because i don’t want you getting hurt, ever, period. but you literally scrapped him up like it was nothing, so i don’t have anything to worry about.”
he shook his head and playfully rolled his eyes. “no flower that’s the thing you’re too sweet to me, i don’t want you justifying—”
“yuta be quiet!” you whispered harshly, giving him a silly grin. “you talk too much.”
you reached up and very very gently pecked the little cut on the side of his eyebrow, feeling a cool calming waterfall wash over his body at the feeling of your soft lips finally on him, something he’s wished upon every star for.
“you’re so good to me yuta, truly you are. and i’m sorry it’s taken me so long to say this because i’m always nervous but—” you smiled endearingly. “i do want to go out with you, and i do want to give you little kisses. all of the time.”
yuta slowly let his forehead fall against yours, feeling like he was in a dream as the only emotion he felt at the moment was bliss. pure honeyed bliss as he wrapped his arms around you and pulled you to his chest, his face burying in your silky hair.
his hard work had finally paid off, and he had every fucking intention of keeping up that work until the day he dies, wanting you, his shy and timid precious little flower forever in his life— you changing him for the better so much that he finally feels like he’s properly healthy, in more ways than one.
“we’re going out tomorrow,” he mumbled into your hair. “bright and early. i’m gonna take you to get breakfast, and then we’re gonna go to that aquarium you’ve been wanting to go to for weeks now, and then i’m gonna buy you a souvenir, and then i’m gonna take you to get your nails done—”
“yu!” you pulled back and giggled happily. “you don’t have to buy me anything my goodness. just you is enough.”
he bit his lip, smiling like a fucking idiot.
“really?”
“really.”
“well too fucking bad i’m gonna do it anyways.”
he pulled you back in as you laughed and buried his face back into your hair, not wanting to break away at all, feeling like the richest douchebag in the world as he finally had you as his.
you scooted your face up then and nudged him, him pulling a part in response as you proceeded to plant another sugary kiss to his lips, yours lingering as they melted into a perfect mold against his mouth, yuta’s heart absolutely soaring, your red invisible strings close together at last.
he finally had you.
finally.
and he was never letting you go.
#jjk#jujutsu kaisen#yuta okkotsu x reader#jjk yuta#yuta okkotsu#yuta x reader#jujutsu yuta#gojo satoru#jjk fanfic#jjk x you#geto suguru#geto suguru x reader#gojo satoru x reader#jjk fluff#nanami kento#choso kamo#jjk yuuta#nanami kento x reader#choso x reader#okkotsu yuuta#toji fushiguro#jjk gojo#jjk x reader#gojo#gojo x you#gojo fluff#gojo x reader#jjk nanami#jjk geto#jjk suguru
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FIRST masterlist! This masterlist has all my writing from 06/02/24 up until 01/10/24 — for my recent works click on my KINKTOBER <3
Men In Uniform Do It Best!
Dirty Lil' Secrets
A Picture Lasts Long (But Not As Long As That D*ck)
I'm Addicted, I Admit It!
Give Me Tough Love
Never Ever Seen This Before!
We Don't Have No Babies!
Like A Fever
Bad Things (To You)
Prettier When Messy!
Care For You!
Green-eyed Monster
So Lonely In My Mansion!
Kiss Me More!
Girl, I Do This Often
Cause, I Love Freaks!
Sl*t Me Out!
Match My Freak!
WAP!
R U Mine?
Hot To Go!
Girl, You Earned It!
I'm A BIG Stepper!
BODY-ODY!
SOOO ANXIOUS
Long Overdue!
THIS P*SSY DEPRESSED!
The Family Matter?!
I-T G-I-R-L!
I Lasted Ten Rounds!
BRAT!
She's My Vitals!
ONE-SHOTS
Three's a Crowd (But Four...) — “So, are they like holograms? Or can you really touch them?” “Why? Trynna cop a feel, sweetheart?” In which you and your boyfriend find very unconventional uses for his powers.
Why Can't I Keep My Fingers Off You? [Part 1] [Part 2] — There were two things missing in the scene in front of you: 1. The aphrodisiac chocolate your friends had given as a gag gift last Christmas that had been hidden away in the back of your refrigerator. 2. Your dear fiancé.
Dream A Little Dream — For the strongest, it was a privilege to dream. Especially when his dream is you.
Initiation! — “Just a small initiation, nothing too serious.” Couldn’t be too hard, right? So why are you - the all-new frat sweetheart - being pinned to the bed and stuffed full from all ends by your frat brothers?
One More? Please? — A kiss always solves everything! But when a kiss turns into something more…well, it’s only a desperate attempt to unseal yourselves from this damned prison realm, right? Right?
Everybody Knows That I'm a Good Girl, Officers... — You don’t know what’s faster - how fast you were speeding down the highway, or how fast you’re on your knees for the hot officers that just so happen to pull you over.
Hope They Catch Us — When you’re on-screen, it’s always a rivalry to see who’s best - you just never thought that it would be the same struggle in bed.
Unmistakably Yours — In which the strongest bends space and time - literally - after coming back from deatḣ, to do what he’s always wanted to do - you.
Madam Gojo — Gojo Satoru, the strongest clan leader in all of Japan - and the most dangerous, too. You, rejected by the elders, and totally not his future bride, right? Right?
Can't Touch Me (Like Gojo) — In which intentionally making your fríend-with-benefíts jealous ends up with more benefits than you’d think.
The Heir — No, your clan leader husband won’t stop until he gives you an heir. No, you don’t think you’ll make it out alive.
LONGFICS
The Call — After an explosive fight with your boyfriend, you really should feel sorry about being swept up by the blue-eyed stranger at the club - but it’s so hard when he kisses you like that.
Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy — He knows that you would be one of his favorite stories from his travels. And you know that you want nothing more than to stay by his side. After meeting an alluring cowboy at Ol’ Rustcliffe Saloon, both of you are sure of one thing - this must be fate.
Go For It, Gojo! [Part 1] [Part 2] — You wouldn’t fuck Gojo Satoru even if you were paid…is what you thought exactly five minutes before you were shoved against the wall of this cramped closet, his face stuffed in your soaked panties.
Unhoneymooners!? — The universe was surely playing a joke on you. Here you were, trapped on a luxury getaway with your - dangerously handsome, extremely obnoxious - ex. Either you were going to kill each other or end up pinned beneath him, split apart on his cóck. You just didn’t know what would come first.
AITA For F*cking My Sugar Daddy's Son?! — When your sugar daddy just isn’t paying attention to you, can you really be blamed for fúcking his son? Especially when his son is absolutely obsessed with you.
Bad Boys Bring Roses — You’ve never dealt with the yakuza - not once. So why is the future head of the Gojo clan suddenly coming up to you, demanding that you marry him for 30 days?
The Way You Kiss Me — The four times Satoru tries really hard not to kiss you - his best friend’s pretty younger sister. And the one time he doesn’t.
Isn't That Sweet? (I Guess So) — Oh no! Why do your pantíes keep disappearing? Well, maybe your hot roommate knows the answer…
Haunting You — A bIoody trail of vampire attácks, a political marriage, and four suitors you’re forced to choose from - all haunting you. But none as much as the mysterious stranger that makes everything in you scream that you might just be fated for the very thing your kingdom is trying to escape from.
You'll Taste Me Too! — How do you last three days on a work trip with the man you hate the most in the office? You don’t - you end up pinned underneath him, instead.
We Neva Play! — Turns out, the “r” in rivals stands for “really good séx” when a mission becomes a little too hot to handle.
Something Stupid — Five times the strongest would rather díe than tell you he loves you, and the one time he almost does. Almost.
ONE-SHOTS
Initiation! — “Just a small initiation, nothing too serious.” Couldn’t be too hard, right? So why are you - the all-new frat sweetheart - being pinned to the bed and stuffed full from all ends by your frat brothers?
Like An Animal — Of course Toji doesn’t want any more kids. Of course he’s lying as he stuffs your pretty cúnt full of his cúm for the third time tonight.
Whiskey, Neat, With a Side of You — When your date stands you up, you’re lucky that the hot bartender is more than happy to keep you company!
Everybody Knows That I'm a Good Girl, Officers... — You don’t know what’s faster - how fast you were speeding down the highway, or how fast you’re on your knees for the hot officers that just so happen to pull you over.
F*ck You! (Literally) — Of course, you hated your ex-husband. Of course, you found yourself in bed with him on your wedding anniversary.
LONGFICS
Government Hooker — With the fame and glory of being an international popstar comes the inevitable threat of an overzealous stalker. You just didn’t think that it would also come with a very sexy, buff bodyguard behind your every move.
Madam Zenin — There’s nothing that rouses Toji, the infamous head of the Zenin clan, nothing that will make him lose control - until they take what’s most important to him. You.
ONE-SHOTS
Brooklyn Baby — Everybody wanted to fuck Suguru Geto, lead bassist of Tokyo Special Grades. Said Suguru doesn’t want to fuck anyone else but you. He couldn’t give less of a fuck if anyone walked in right now. In fact, a small part of him wishes someone would.
Initiation! — “Just a small initiation, nothing too serious.” Couldn’t be too hard, right? So why are you - the all-new frat sweetheart - being pinned to the bed and stuffed full from all ends by your frat brothers?
Golden Boy — Falling right back in love with the cult leader you’re supposed to kíll? Happens more often than you’d think.
LONGFICS
ONE-SHOTS
Initiation! — “Just a small initiation, nothing too serious.” Couldn’t be too hard, right? So why are you - the all-new frat sweetheart - being pinned to the bed and stuffed full from all ends by your frat brothers?
A Million Dollar Baby! — Turns out, rent can be paid in much more than one way.
LONGFICS
ONE-SHOTS
Welcome To The Itadori's! — Three times Choso really, really wanted to hold you without his family barging in, and the one time he actually does.
FIVE! — Five hours - it’s all it takes for Choso’s baby fever to take over. After all, you’d look so pretty with his kid - five of them, in fact.
LONGFICS
Great With Kids? (You Can Have Mine) — When your younger brother gets a new babysitter, only two questions linger on your mind: 1. How come your parents didn’t trust you in charge? 2. How dare the sexy babysitter be so perfect - it made you want some attention too.
Freak On The Cam! — Choso always loved watching you - his pretty lil’ camgírl - from behind the screen. Who knew he’d love being on-screen with you even more?
ONE-SHOTS
Can't Touch Me (Like Gojo) — In which intentionally making your fríend-with-benefíts jealous ends up with more benefits than you’d think.
LONGFICS
Exes who...
Love Is Blind
“She My Best Friend, Yeah We Not a Couple.”
Wanna Do Bad Things To You
I Wanna Get Freaky On Camera
Lemme Ride, Baby!
Can I Fill You Up, Baby?
"Pull On It. Harder."
Little Heaven
© 2024 tonycries
Do NOT repost, modify, translate or plagiarize in any way on ANY platforms. This includes any text and graphics included.
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jjk men and their red flags
a/n: i'm feeling problematic :> tell me what u think (agree/disagree/add more?) this is all for shits n giggles !! non sorcerer au kinda
kento nanami — (over)protective
but like... to the point where it feels like he's treating you like a child! he doesnt like to see you sweat or even work at all for that matter. he loves it when you cook but has bought covers for all the knifes. if he sees a burn on your hand get ready for a 10 minute long lecture. if you accidentally fall he wont let you get up for atleast 3 days to help you ""heal."" it's almost like he doesnt trust you to take care of yourself :') he probably has like 3 separate first-aid kits everywhere.
suguru geto — emotionally unavailable
i feel like this is explainable to his character (sort of.) i dont think that he'd make you feel isolated at all, he's be an amazing listener and probably memorizes every word you say. he listens to you rant and even trauma dump with insane patience. but at some point it feels as though you hardly know him. he's talk to you a lot but very little of it is personal and you hardly know what he's thinking because his ass is not tell you. he also unintentionally distances himself from people from time to time. this applies to you too and you can feel him getting emotionally distant sometimes. it isnt something he does knowingly but it sure ass hell bothers you.
satoru gojo — very clingy and needy
this nigga. he is so utterly clingy. and at first it's perfectly fine, even appreciated by you. you still love him like crazy of course but it is just overwhelming. he is like a child most of the time, he need you around him and is always accompanying you wherever you go, and he expects you to do the same. he also doesn't believe in "me time" because why would you feel better when you're away from him: (? want to hang out with your friends? what do you need them for: (? he's right there. he is also physically incapable of listening but boy is he good at making up.
toji fushiguro — controlling
he is so controlling omfg. it's usually subtle but sometimes he will outright just say no to things he doesnt like, not caring if you like them. it gets to the point where he actually starts to change your personality. he is very caring and that's his justification for this typa stuff. it is usually harmless stuff but he gets paranoid often. he doesnt let you wear miniskirts out if you're not with him. he doesn't let you befriend people he thinks are into you. he barely lets you buy stuff on your own, he usually gifts you whatever it is youre into at that moment. borderline turned on by fear and you being dependent on him.
choso kamo — has no social life outside you
pretty self explanatory. he doesnt have many friends outside you and isn't interesting in making them either. total loser. so taking him out to events, he probably doesnt interact much and chooses to look at you the entire time, which annoys your friends. he answers their questions pretty bluntly. he's never down to have people over and lowkey hates when you are.
hiromi higuruma — workaholic
also self explanatory. he leaves early, comes home late. you barely see him on the weekdays. sometimes he goes as far as ignoring your calls when in between cases. he calls you periodically but has to have an alarm set to remind him. he loves you very very deeply but is just used to working non stop T_T
#jjk#jjk smut#jjk x reader#jjk ^ ~#multi :>#jujutsu kaisen smut#choso kamo smut#choso x reader#choso smut#geto suguru smut#geto x reader smut#gojo satoru#gojo satoru smut#gojo x reader smut#gojo x reader#jjk x reader smut#gojo smut#jujutsu kaisen x reader#geto smut#choso kamo#gojo#geto#choso#toji smut#nanami smut#toji x reader#nanami x reader#geto x reader#gojo satoru x reader#jujutsu kaisen x you
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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.”
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something more
pairing: aaron hotchner x fem!bau!reader
summary: you and aaron are friends with feelings more obvious than you think. or: 5 times the team suspects you and hotch are dating +1 time they know it.
word count: 6.6k
warnings: friends to lovers, the team being a little nosy, pining idiots!!!, probably inaccurate descriptions of bau jobs (for the plot!), a very small injury, a birthday, a first kiss, and fluff!
a/n: hiii this one has been a long time coming so thank you guys for being so patient with me!!! and special thanks to the anon who requested this one! i hope u guys enjoy it and please please let me know what you think <3 ily
༄
Aaron Hotchner was never someone you thought you could be this close to.
Coming to the BAU, you’d been intimidated more than anything. As Unit Chief, he’s got a reputation that’s hard to ignore. Professional, brave, cold when he has to be. His success and talent were undeniable, and all you wanted to do was prove that you belonged there, too.
Then, you really met him, and he surprised you in a way you hadn’t expected. Hotch was kind right off the bat, welcoming you to the team with a smile that felt like some sort of prize.
He was an excellent boss. Understanding and protective, quick to defend anyone on the team like they were his own family. Except, he was so much more than just your boss.
Now, you’d call him your closest friend, someone who’s number you’d call if you were in trouble. He’s your closest friend and yet you feel so much more for him.
It started slow, a friendship blooming the way a plant does with just enough sunlight. It was a shared smile here, a nudge of the shoulder there. It grew to be a seat next to him reserved for you on every plane ride.
Today, it’s eating lunch with him in his office.
Aaron usually works through lunch, more eager to get things done than he is to worry about skipping a meal. Somehow, with two tupperware containers in your hand and a sweet smile, you’d managed to get him to take a break.
“Whatcha doing?” You’d asked.
Hotch looked up from his paperwork then, dropping his pen because you were in his doorway. “You know, Unit Chief business. Reports.”
“Sounds like you have time for lunch, then.” You set the containers down on his desk, making sure to avoid the papers he’d just been working on.
“I should really get this done-”
“Hotch,” you stopped him, “you and I both know that you’re always ahead on this stuff because you stay here so late. Lunch won’t set you back.”
With a shake of his head and the biting back of a smile, a simple twitch at the corners of his mouth, Aaron agreed and stacked his paperwork off to the side.
That’s how you’ve ended up in the chair that’s usually on the opposite side of his desk, only now it’s tugged to be next to his. Your knees touch every so often when one of you shifts, and the warmth stays with you even when the contact is gone.
“Sorry it’s nothing fancy,” you say as he opens the container you brought for him.
“Don’t apologize. It’s great.” Hotch has a way of saying things that make them sound true, no matter how few words he uses, so you accept it.
“Okay, good!” There’s a small silence, a lull as you both take your first bites. “Can I help with anything?”
Aaron looks from the paperwork to your face, your eyes already on his. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to,” you reassure him. “I think sometimes you forget that you aren’t the only one who can do this stuff.”
He knocks his knee against yours. Purposeful this time. A silent ‘thank you.’
“Like you said, I’m ahead anyways. I’ve got it.”
“Come on, Hotch. I’m already done with my report from our last case. I’ve got time. Let me help.”
He’s always been reluctant to accept help, to ask for it, but when you’re asking so sweetly, when it’ll give him an excuse to spend more time with you, it’s hard for Aaron to say no.
“Alright. You help for an hour, that’s it.”
You grin at him, like his acceptance of your offer was some kind of gift he’d given you. Your nose crinkles a little with it, and his hand flexes in his lap, like he’s fighting not to reach out to you.
“Okay, put me to work, boss.”
“We just started lunch,” he says, a little chuckle puffing out.
“Have you ever heard of multitasking, Agent Hotchner?”
Aaron laughs, shaking his head as he reaches for one of the files in the stack he’d made and hands it to you. He’d call everyone at the BAU a friend, but there’s something different, something more about how he’d describe you.
He’s grown closer to you than he usually lets himself get to people, like you’re the only one with the right tools to break through walls he’s put up. You see each other outside of work (on the rare days you aren’t working), and still, he feels like it’s never long enough.
Hotch briefly wonders if he could just move your desk into his office. He shakes off the thought and what it might mean.
Head bent, you’re now focused on the work he gave you, and Aaron takes the chance to admire you. His eyes flick over your profile, the light hitting your cheeks, the flutter of your eyelashes every time you blink.
As if you could feel his gaze on you, you turn towards him and smile—a small, closed-mouth smile, but a smile all the same—before turning your attention back to the page.
When you take a pause and take another bite of your lunch, a small drop of sauce lands on your thigh. “Oh, shit.”
Aaron grabs a tissue from the box on his desk, wrapping it over his fingertip before wiping the small spot from your leg, his finger a spark against you even through your pants.
“Good thing you wore black,” he says, tossing the tissue in the garbage. His hand, however, stays on your leg, and though the touch is light the weight of it feels the opposite. Heavy, huge.
“Good thing you’re here to clean up after me, more like.”
Your eyes meet, and you share a smile with Hotch the way you often do. Mid-conversation, across a room, it’s a smile you sort of reserve for each other.
In the main office below, Derek, Spencer, and JJ stand together, watching the interaction through the window into Hotch’s office. You and Aaron seem to be in your own bubble, completely unaware of your small audience.
“They’ve gotta be together,” Derek is the first to speak, waving a hand towards the office where you and Hotch are talking. “I mean, come on.”
“I don’t know,” JJ shrugs, “they both seem kinda clueless.”
“We probably shouldn’t speculate about them,” Spencer, always the sweetheart, says. “But, statistically, Hotch never eats lunch. Just saying.”
JJ pats Reid on the shoulder, huffing out a laugh before she heads back to her desk.
You stay in Aaron’s office much longer than an hour that day.
-
Punctuality is important in the BAU. Really, if you’re not early, you’re late. You’ve always got to be ready, wheels up in ten, or five.
You suppose that doesn’t really apply to outside-of-the-office parties at Garcia’s.
It’s rare that you’re all available at the same time, from late nights at the bureau to families, it’s tough to make your schedules line up when you aren’t working, which is why whenever she can, Penelope likes to host drinks for the team.
You’re on your way there now, or, you should be. Instead, you’re getting ready in your bedroom while Aaron waits in your living room.
Hotch has offered to drive you to these things every time, and with every offer, comes your easy answer of ‘yes.’ He’d been outside in his car for five minutes before he decided to call, because you’re usually in his passenger seat within seconds of him pulling over by your building.
The ringing of your phone had your eyes blinking open, squinted against the sudden brightness of your TV. You’d accidentally fallen asleep, and, still disoriented, picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Hey, everything okay?” It’s Aaron’s voice on the other line, and you pull your phone away for a second to check the time before sitting up quickly.
“Shit, Hotch, I must’ve fallen asleep. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s alright, I can wait for you.” He’d wait as long as you need, he thinks. The thought passes through like a leaf blown in the wind, freely, randomly.
“Have you been waiting long?” You ask, fingers tugging at a loose thread in your pants.
“No, don’t worry. Barely five minutes.”
And he still wanted to check on you.
“Why don’t you come in? My couch is probably more comfortable than your car, right?”
“You sure?” He checks, like he hasn’t been to your place before, like you’d ever not want him there.
“Get in here, Hotchner.”
You hung up before he could reply, and he laughed to himself in his car before shutting it off and doing exactly what you’d told him.
So, now, you’re rushing to find an outfit while Aaron sits on your couch by himself.
Even though he’s in the next room, you can feel his presence around you, the steady security he gives you, the warmth that seeps out of him even when he tries to hide it.
You settle on a knitted sweater, a skirt, and some tights, which you realize as you tug them on aren't the speediest of options, but it’s too late to change your mind now. With your hair figured out and the mascara that had smudged during your nap fixed, you step back out into the living room.
Aaron made himself at home while you were gone (he often feels that way with you, at home), sitting on your couch with his arms spread across the back. He looks better than he should there, suit stretched across his shoulders, and you have to clear your throat to snap yourself out of it.
“Okay, sorry again for the delay. I’m ready to go.”
He looks up as soon as you walk in, eyes skimming over your legs and the tights wrapped around them, your waist, up your neck. His gaze lands on your eyes the way it often does, like magnets.
He shakes his head, “don’t be sorry. We’ll be what they call ‘fashionably late.’”
You laugh, because who would’ve thought that the words ‘fashionably late’ would ever come out of Aaron Hotchner’s mouth.
“Who taught you that one, huh?”
“I like to keep my sources anonymous.”
“Well okay, then. Let’s go be fashionably late, Hotch.”
He lets you lead the way to the car, only jogging up ahead to open your door before you can reach it yourself.
During the drive to Penelope’s, you take control of the music with little objection from Aaron, and when it gets to a song you know he likes, you sing along, encouraging him to do the same.
“Let’s hear it, Agent Hotchner.” You hold your fist out like there’s a microphone in it, looking at him with a grin on your face.
“I can't sing.” Aaron’s fighting off a smile, because you’re sitting beside him, not too shy to sing along, being all cute and, briefly, he thinks about reaching out and grabbing your hand and holding on.
“Sure you can! Everyone can sing, come on.” You unfurl your faux microphone-holding fist and tug on the knot of his tie, “loosen up a little.”
And, because you have some way of convincing him of things—first lunch, now this—he humors you by joining in for one chorus of the song. When your eyes light up a little, and your grin only widens, he can’t bring himself to be too concerned of how bad he probably sounds.
By the time you’re at Garcia’s door you’re a solid hour late, yet you and Aaron walk up to the door with matching smiles all the same.
“I’m getting you to do that every time I hear that song now, I hope you know.”
“That was a one time special,” he says. He reaches over your shoulder to knock on the door. His hand brushes against you, featherlight and quick, a crackle over your skin.
On the other side, Morgan says, “must be the lovebirds” when he hears the sound.
You and Aaron don’t hear him, only broken out of your little shared bubble when Penelope opens the door. “There you guys are! I made your drinks but the ice might be melted by now. You know, ‘cause you’re late.”
You know this is directed towards you more than it is Hotch, because Garcia’s a little intimidated by him still. You also know she’s only joking, and greet her with a hug before stepping in.
Aaron isn’t far behind you, though at these things, he never is.
You’re met with warm greetings from the team when you walk in, and you chat for a bit, but it isn’t long before things split off into smaller conversations. They all know that Aaron drives you to these things, and, as profilers, they’re also all able to see the way you look at each other, the way the knot of his tie sits lower than usual.
In the corner, Emily leans over to Derek, saying, “usually it takes at least two drinks for Hotch’s tie to look like that.”
“I told you, they’re together,” Derek shrugs.
“I don’t think they know that,” Emily replies.
This time, Aaron hears them, and he can’t help but look towards you in the room the rest of the night, thinking and thinking and thinking.
He ends up deciding that they might have a point. That maybe, that shift in his heartbeat when you’re around isn’t nothing, isn’t just friends.
-
The flight home from a case always feels the longest.
On the way there, you’re packing every hour with information about what’s going on, talking to Garcia, reading police reports. You’re all on edge, eager to get out there and help and do your jobs,
Then, on the way home, with another case solved, all you’re thinking about is going home, sleeping in your own bed, and time seems to go slower.
If your name happens to be Aaron Hotchner, you’d spend the plane ride home doing paperwork that actually can wait.
You and Aaron sit next to each other on pretty much every flight, though the seats have never been assigned. It’s an unspoken thing, like your names are written on the fabric of the same two seats on the jet and that’s just the way it is.
The first time was early on in your time on the team. It was a tough case for you, and Hotch seemed to know it without you having to say anything, so, when you got on the jet to come home, he smiled that small, twitch of his lips smile at you and nodded at the seat next to him. You’ve been sitting there ever since.
Today, your flight is on the shorter side, but feels long the way it always does. Trying to keep yourself occupied, you pull out your earbuds and shuffle your playlist, hoping that the songs will speed things up.
“Sick of me already?” Hotch speaks up when he notices your headphones.
You tilt your head to look at him. He looks tired, the way you’re sure you do, too, but never any less handsome. His eyes are soft where they meet yours, paired with a hint of a smile that you’re always able to catch.
“Sick of you, Hotch? Never.” You nod at the file he has open on the small table, “just didn’t want to distract you.”
“I thought you enjoyed distracting me. Always telling me I work too much.”
“‘Cause it’s true,” you say. “That doesn’t mean you listen.”
“I listen to you more than I listen to most people.” Aaron’s voice is gentle when he says it, the words sinking in and melting you just a little, sugary sweet. It could mean absolutely nothing, but with the way he keeps his eyes steady on yours, you don’t think it does.
“Listen to this, then,” you hand him one of your earbuds, and his fingers brush yours when he takes it from you. “But you can’t make fun of me if a musical soundtrack comes on, okay?”
“Okay,” he huffs a small laugh, and you feel a little brighter. “I promise.”
You’re aware of the team having their own conversations in the rows in front of you and Hotch, but you can’t bring yourself to join in, because you and Aaron are sharing your earbuds and his head is bent just a little closer to yours. It’s delicate, and you’ll do your best not to break it.
You talk a little longer, until it naturally fizzles out and Hotch is back to working on his files and you’re bobbing your head along to your songs. Only now, Aaron sits closer to you, his arm against yours.
He’s not sure what to do with his newfound realization that his feelings for you run far deeper than friendship. All Aaron knows is that he likes the feeling of you beside him, and that he’s planning on keeping you there as long as you’ll let him.
It’s quiet between the two of you aside from your occasional ‘this is a good one,’ and his hum of acknowledgement.
Eventually, you’re relaxed enough that your eyes grow heavy, the sleep you’ve been lacking suddenly catching up to you, and when you hit a patch of slower songs you’re fighting to stay awake.
When your head lulls onto Hotch’s shoulder, you jerk your head up, “sorry, Aaron.”
His chest does something funny. A jump. It’s not often you call him Aaron, and he’d listen to the sound of his name on your lips on a loop if he could. Because he can’t help himself, he scooches himself even closer to you.
He decides to call you something different, too, saying, “it’s alright, honey.”
You’re too sleepy to really read into that one, all you feel is the flutter in your stomach and Aaron’s hand on your head, gently guiding it to his shoulder.
When he’s sure you’re asleep, Hotch looks away from his files and over to you. Your cheek is squished against his shoulder, your lashes fanned shut. He thinks you’re the prettiest girl he’s ever seen.
Aaron doesn’t even feel the smile that spreads over his face as he reaches up and pushes your hair away from your face. He’s completely unaware of the eyes that catch him, far too focused on you.
Emily turned around when she realized she hadn’t heard your voice in a bit, and she did it just in time to catch Hotch’s movement. Instead of saying something, she turns back around and shakes her head to herself.
Hopeless, she thinks.
Sleep doesn’t come so easily with this job, with the things you see, so Aaron can’t help but try and stay steady for you, and if that leads to him letting his eyes close and resting his head on yours, then so be it.
It’s not until the end of the flight that the team checks on the two of you. As everyone stands and grabs their go bags, they notice the two of you, asleep next to each other, earbud wires hanging between you.
“Should we wake them up?” JJ asks.
“Hotch doesn’t get enough sleep as it is,” Spencer chimes in. “Neither does she, actually.”
Of course, Derek finishes with, “let’s leave the lovebirds to it,” before the team gets off the plane.
It’s only about twenty minutes later that Aaron does wake up, but he feels more well-rested than he has in a while, even with the kink in his neck.
Blinking his eyes open, he’s met with an empty jet and the comforting weight of your head on his shoulder. “Shit,” he sighs.
He debates waking you, ultimately deciding that you’d probably rather sleep in your bed rather than the seat of the BAU’s jet. Reaching up, he pulls your earbuds away, setting them on the table. With a brush of his fingertips to your cheek, he coaxed you awake.
“Hey, honey,” Aaron’s nearly whispering, like he’s afraid to scare you. Or, maybe, he’s convinced that if he moves too quickly, too loudly, this whole thing will fade away as if he’d been dreaming. “Wake up, we’re home.”
“Hm?” You grumble, scrunching your nose when he brushes your cheek again.
“We fell asleep, but we landed.”
“Oh, god.” You sit up properly, lifting your head. “I’m sorry, Aaron. Hotch.”
“Aaron is good,” he eases you. “Come on, I’ll drive you.”
Sleep-hazed, or maybe just happy that he can be Aaron to you, you agree easily and take his hand when he offers it, letting him lead you to his car.
-
You’ve been spending more time at Aaron’s ever since that flight. In the car, he’d convinced you to stay over at his place in the guest room, since it was closer. With your go bag already in his car and heavy, sleepy eyes, it was hard for you to do anything but agree.
It’s another slice of his life that he’s let you see, and you can’t help but feel like it means something, like you’re stepping further and further away from being coworkers who are friends and towards something different. Something more.
That flight feels like the catalyst, the thing that caused things to shift into what they are now.
Aaron’s couch is much more comfortable than yours, and though you’ve yet to spend the night again, you’re sitting there with him at almost every chance. The time off you get is rare, and Aaron wanting to spend it with you sends flutters to your stomach whenever you think about it.
You feel like you know him better, getting to see his space, how he chose to decorate, what colors he likes, which ones he doesn’t. You also know what temperature he likes to set his thermostat.
“Do you enjoy living in a refrigerator?” You ask, hands tucked into your sleeves. “Just wondering.”
Aaron laughs, a small huff, “I think you just run cold, honey.”
He’s been calling you that a lot, too. Honey.
“No way, Hotchner. Your house is what runs cold. Or maybe you’re cold-blooded.”
Not with you, he thinks. Years and years of doing what he does, Hotch might even call himself cold when he’s thinking a little too hard. But never cold with you. He thinks that might be impossible for him.
“Shhh, don’t tell anyone my secret,” he says, his arm brushing against yours from where he sits next to you on his couch. “Where are you cold?”
“Can’t feel my toes, Aaron. I might be out of commission for the next case.”
“Well we can’t lose our best girl, can we?” Best girl, he says. Like he means it, like it’s simple. “I’ve got some thick socks you can grab. Bottom drawer.”
Just like that, he’s cracked another wall of his down even further, giving you permission to go into his bedroom as if you’ve been in there a thousand times.
“Really?”
“Unless you’d rather not feel your toes-“
“Okay, okay,” you stop him, unable to fight your smile. “Thanks, Aaron.”
When you stand and head towards his room, Aaron can’t stop himself from thinking that you belong there, in his home, his room, his life. You fit in so seamlessly he wishes you’d never leave.
He stands up too, because the couch suddenly feels sort of empty without you beside him, without your warmth. He walks over to his thermostat on the wall and turns it up for you.
You’ve always thought that you can tell a lot about a person from where they live, and seeing Aaron’s bedroom now solidifies it. His place does too, but there’s something about his bedroom that feels much more personal.
Here, there’s more of him, little bits of his life scattered around. A picture of him as a kid with his parents on the dresser, the newspaper’s crossword sitting completely finished on his nightstand, his bed neatly made.
You smile at the framed photo before slipping the top drawer open and finding the pair of socks he’d been talking about. As much as you’d love to snoop, you don’t want to invade his privacy in any way. Besides, from Aaron, even a glimpse of his space feels special.
You slip on the socks before you leave his room, letting them bunch at your ankles.
As soon as you walk back into the living room, Aaron’s phone rings. Glancing at you softly, almost apologetically though he’s got nothing to be sorry about—you work with him, you know how important a call can be—he picks it up.
“Hotchner,” he says, holding it to his ear. His voice is different this way, more professional, controlled. Never any less pleasing to hear.
He’d wanted to say something about how good you look in his clothes when his phone rang, Garcia’s name flashing on the screen. Aaron wishes it was someone else, only to spend more time with you this way.
“Sorry to call late, sir,” Penelope says. “We’ve got a case. Missing kid; it’s urgent.”
“Don’t be sorry, Garcia. We’re on our way.”
“Wait, we?” She asks, curious as always.
“What’s going on?” You ask Aaron.
“Got a case. I’ll drive, honey.” He lets the pet name slip, like it’s a habit.
On the other line, Garcia’s grinning to herself in her office. She’d had a suspicion of who on the team Hotch would be with outside of work, and hearing your voice, and his use of the word ‘honey’ all sticky sweet, she knows she’s onto something.
“Oh, that’s ‘we,’” Penelope’s voice teases. “Tell her I’ll see you guys soon!”
Aaron shakes his head, fighting his smile. “Bye, Garcia.”
He hangs up and looks from his phone to you, your eyes already on him, corners of your mouth tugged up just a little like you’d heard what Garcia said, heard the lilt in her voice. Like you liked the idea of you and Aaron being a unit. We.
He likes that idea, too.
Back at the BAU, Garcia calls Derek next, who picks up with his classic, “hey, babygirl.”
First, she tells him that he needs to come into the office, that they’ve got a case, then, “you’re never going to believe this.”
Penelope loves to talk, and Derek’s happy to listen, so she tells him about how you’d been with Aaron when she called, and that you were on your way together.
“I give them another week, max, before they’re holding hands when they come in.” Derek laughs, because he can see yours and Hotch’s feelings so easily, plain as day, and he loves to be right about things.
“How mad will Hotch be when he finds out that we talk about his relationship?” Penelope’s mostly joking, only a fraction concerned.
“If the boss didn’t want us talking about it, he shouldn’t be so obvious, sweetheart.”
Once you arrive at the office, you don’t catch Penelope and Derek’s shared looks behind yours and Aaron’s—who happens to be carrying both his and your go bag—backs.
And if anyone notices the loose socks around your ankles, they don’t say anything about it.
-
You’re not supposed to go off on your own unless it’s absolutely necessary. You know that, the team knows that. Aaron, who is always trying to keep you as safe as possible, enforces it.
You guess that this time might be up for debate.
When it comes to what you do, you have to trust your instincts most of the time. And today, your gut told you to make a decision that might not have been safe, but to you, it felt like what you had to do.
Aaron had been on the phone with you, trying to figure out a way to make the car drive any faster to get to you. He’d heard it in your voice, in the tone of it, that he couldn’t convince you to wait for someone else to show up.
“I have to do this, Aaron,” you’d said. While the team would normally probably tease him about you calling him Aaron, as if it isn’t his name, they’d known not to interrupt this time. “You know I do.”
“You don’t have to.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel as he spoke. “We’ll be there soon, alright? Just-”
“I’m sorry.” And then, you hung up.
In the end, going in when you did had been the right move. A life had been saved, and you’d slowed the guy down enough that the police were able to arrest him when they arrived. All it cost you was a cut and a bruise on your cheek.
So, your instincts weren’t so bad.
Aaron, however, disagrees. Logically, he knows that he would’ve done the exact same thing you did, knows the rest of the team would’ve, too. But when it comes to you, he has a hard time thinking logically.
After you hung up on him, all he could do was breathe and breathe and breathe over the heavy thumping of his heartbeat and the worry spinning in his head. He drove the quickest he could manage, the car silent inside. A static.
It’s not that he doubts your abilities—he’s always thought you were incredible, even before the friendship, even before now—only that the idea of you being alone with such a bad man makes him feel sick.
He’d take your place in a heartbeat, if he could, just to make sure you’d be safe.
By the time he and the rest of the team get to the scene, you’re walking out of the building with a hand pressed to your cheek and a paramedic leading you to a nearby ambulance.
Aaron spots you right away, his eyes scanning the small crowd through red and blue lights and conversations surrounding him. When he spots you, everything goes quiet.
His first thought is, thank god she’s alive, then, it’s fuck, she’s hurt.
Without a word to anyone, he heads over in your direction right away. He meets you at the ambulance, where you sit on the small bench inside while the paramedic presses your cheek with gauze.
“Honey.” It comes out in a breath. Relief and pain all at once.
You look over to him, his hair a little messy, his eyes wide and roaming all over you like he’s checking for any other injuries. He cares about you, and it’s written all over him.
“Aaron. I’m okay.” You hold a hand out, and he grabs it, sitting beside you on the bench in the ambulance. “Promise.”
For now, he nods, letting the paramedic do their job bandaging up your cheek. When they’re finished, they hand you a spare bandage saying, “it’s gonna bruise, and it might feel sore for a bit, but you’re all patched up.”
The paramedic leaves after that, probably going to check on other people. The lights inside the ambulance seem to cocoon you, a bright difference to the darkness outside.
The first thing Aaron says is, “let me see.”
His hands reach for your face, rough fingertips gently holding your jaw, tilting you so that he can look at your cheek. It’s a little swollen, discolored where you must’ve been hit. There’s a furrow in his brow, something that looks like a pout on none other than Aaron Hotchner.
“Hey,” you grab his wrists, but his hands stay on your face. “I’m fine.”
Aaron’s always worried, he’s always cared about you and about everyone on the team, but this is different. He was usually able to hide things much better than this. Much better than with you.
Now, all he sees is the tiny bloodstain on your shirt and the bandage on your cheek. All he feels is your hands squeezing his wrists and your eyes locked on his.
“You should have waited,” he says. “I could have been there.”
“Hotchner,” your deadpan tone is intact, which he’ll take as a win, even if it’s directed towards him. “You and I both know you would have done the same. I had to.”
One of his hands shifts to cup your non-injured cheek. Normally, he’d be much more composed while working, but he can’t bring himself to care about how he must look right now.
“I know you did,” he tells you, because he does. “I just wish that you didn’t. I don’t like seeing you hurt.”
Your stomach is tumbling, rolling, your heart doing silly things in your chest. You can hardly feel the pain of your cheek anymore when his hand is on the other, his palm warm against your skin, his gaze even warmer.
“I’m hardly hurt, Aaron. Just a scratch.”
“Right. One that required medical attention. That’s more than just a scratch, honey.”
“If you say so, Hotchner.”
He shifts his hands so that they fall into your lap, palms up and fingers instantly finding yours, tangling together perfectly. Like puzzle pieces.
“Good job, by the way.” Hotch rubs his thumb over your skin once, back and forth. “You did the right thing.”
“Learned from the best,” you say.
You’re both oblivious to the fact that the team is watching from a distance, and that the two of you look so lovesick it’s ridiculous that you haven’t spilled your feelings yet. You’re both absolutely fucked.
Where she stands with the team, Emily shakes her head, “I haven’t seen Hotch like this since… ever.”
Beside her, JJ merely shrugs, like it’s obvious, “yeah, they’re in love.”
Spencer looks at you and Aaron in that ambulance with a smile. “The odds of you guys being right are very, very high.”
-
+1
Aaron Hotchner was never the biggest fan of birthdays. Was never big into the cakes and making wishes, the song and the presents and the fuss of it all.
When he started at the bureau, it stayed that way. Days off were rare enough as it was, so he’d always work on his birthday. And while he kept the signed cards from the team, he treated it as any other day. Nothing special.
This year, you’re on a mission to change that.
While it isn’t the first of Aaron’s birthdays you’ve spent with him, it’s the first one since the two of you have grown as close as you have, since you’ve felt the way you do. You’re just hoping to make it a good birthday for him.
You’ve roped the whole team into it. Decorating the conference room with streamers and balloons and a sign that hangs crooked on the wall, bringing in a cake that reads ‘Happy Birthday Hotch’ in frosting, and keeping it all a secret.
Of course, you’ve all already said happy birthday to him, and you’ve got a present stashed under your desk for later, but you’ve been doing your best to act natural even when the anticipation of your surprise for him eats at your stomach a little.
Surprises are a tricky thing, and there’s no way of knowing whether he’ll like it or not. You’ll just have to wait and see.
While in his office, the team had made it seem like they’d all left for the day, saying their goodbyes to Hotch. Instead of leaving, though, they’ve been hidden in the conference room waiting for you to bring him in.
“Aaron,” you say, knocking on his office door. “I think I lost an earring. Do you think you could help me look for it?”
Because you’re the one asking, Aaron says, “‘course, honey. Where do you think it is?”
You smile, because he’s fallen into your trap easily, because you know that he probably would search for an earring with you if you’d actually lost one.
“I remember having it on in the conference room, so maybe there.”
He stands from his desk, gesturing for you to lead the way with his hand held out. You grab onto it before he can drop it, tangling your fingers and leading him behind you.
Aaron lets you guide him, and when you open the door to the conference room and flick on the lights, he’s met with the team’s grinning faces and a chorus of, “surprise!”
For a moment, he’s speechless, frozen in his spot in the doorway with your hand in his.
No, Aaron’s never been the biggest fan of birthdays, but maybe that’s because nobody’s ever done something like this for him. You came into his life all sweet smiles and now you’re throwing him a surprise party? He’s never ever liked someone the way he likes you.
So much that like is spilling into a four letter word and he’s happy to let it.
You know him well enough to know that he doesn’t like being the center of attention too much, so the only people in the room are those of the BAU. His closest friends. And you, his favorite person.
Before he can say anything he’s being spoken to by the team, getting a ‘happy birthday, boss,’ from Derek, a spill about how hard it was to keep this a secret from Penelope, a grin from Spencer, a tip about how you’d organized all of this from Emily, a squeeze to the shoulder from JJ.
When he finally gets the chance, the others split into their own conversations, Aaron tugs you aside to the corner of the room.
“You did all of this for me?” He asks, head bent to catch your eye.
Although you’d caught the signature Hotchner smile—closed-mouthed and quick—when he saw the surprise, you’re nervous about what he might say. You worry that you’ve done too much, that he’d been pretending to like it for your sake.
“I’m sorry if it’s a bit much,” you start, anxiously tugging at your sleeves. “I wasn’t sure if you liked surprises, I know not everyone does, but I wanted to do something for you because I care about you. A lot. And birthdays are meant to be celebrated, you know?”
Aaron can’t help but let a smile spread over his face as you speak; a real smile. His heart is light, his feelings for you melting through him like the soft pink of cotton candy. He doesn’t think you could ever do anything that he wouldn’t like.
“I’ll clean it all up, too, I prom-”
Your rambling is cut off with his lips on yours. He’s kissing you.
It’s soft, the press of his mouth against yours, and it takes you a second to push back. It stays delicate, a dance between the two of you like you’d practiced a million times before.
His hands skate down your arms to hold your hands, weaving his fingers with yours, squeezing like he’s making sure you know this is real.
You feel it all over, your stomach tumbling, your heart beating in a rhythm that thumps his name. Aaron, Aaron, Aaron, over and over.
It’s a kiss worth a thousand words that you haven’t said yet, a kiss full of feelings and meaning and you know it, just by the way he does it, because you know him and he knows you. It’s you and Aaron, and it feels like the beginning of something huge. Of the rest of your life, maybe.
When he pulls back, Hotch rests his forehead against yours, giving your head a gentle nudge, locking his brown eyes on yours.
“It’s perfect,” he says.
The next thing you hear is Derek Morgan cheering, “I knew it!”
Similar words come from the rest of the team.
“Finally,” from Emily.
“About time,” from JJ.
“This isn’t surprising,” from Spencer, who smiles while saying it.
A sweet, “yay,” from Penelope.
Distracted by Aaron kissing you, you’d sort of forgotten they were there. Bashful, you tuck your head beneath Aaron’s chin, forehead against his collar. He simply tightens his hands around yours.
And when it’s time for cake, this year, Aaron Hotchner makes a wish on his birthday candles. He wishes to spend every other birthday just like this. With you.
༄
thank you so so much for reading!!! if you liked it, please please please consider reblogging/commenting and letting me know what you thought! love you <3
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Could I get Adam, Lute and Lucifer and how they 'court' the reader? Like how birds with court each other, little gifts, wing 'dances', nesting, etc...
Also, could I be your 🐌 anon? <3<3<3
Birds of a Feather
Adam, Lute and Lucifer courting you
ʕ•̫͡��ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ
˚✧₊⁎ Adam ⁎⁺˳✧༚
• Peacocking has nothing on The First Man
• His personality is amped up to the highest level when he sees you walk in a room
• (Overcompensation for how fucking nervous you make him)
• Adam gets cocky when he knows he has your attention
• Tossing grapes high in the air and catching them in his mouth, bragging louder than usual about something or the other
• Heaven forbid you laugh at any of his antics, (His smirk is dangerous, “Oh you like that?”) he’ll start singling you out in front of everyone, calling your name before he acts up
• Performances include inviting you to watch his band play and miraculously getting more energy
• Casually tosses guitar picks in your direction— and when he finds out you kept one!? He’s over the moon
• He won’t go out of his way to get you food but he’ll order you something if he goes somewhere
• Adam hates nesting. He doesn’t like being stressed in general and nesting is really fucking stressful!
• The very fact seeing you pricks the urge in him to nest drives him insane
• (AKA, he likes you a lot more than he thought he did!)
• Seeing you in his space does something he doesn’t particularly hate though
• “It’s whatever if you don’t like it.” Adam shrugs
• “No, I think it looks nice! Very you. Tell me about these pictures?”
• He’s fucking done for
˚✧₊⁎ Lute ⁎⁺˳✧༚
• Like they have a mind of their own, her wings stretch out and audibly fluff up when she makes eye contact with you
• Mortifying is an understatement
• She picks out trinkets to give to you at first, something small that could be waved off as insignificant
• Later, when Lute realizes her affections are returned, she brings useful offerings or something you offhandedly mentioned needing
• She wishes she could tell you about the exterminations solely to brag
• See how fierce she is, how skilled she is, how good of a protector she could be for you
• Lute will ask you to arm wrestle as a compromise. She gets to hold you hand and show off her strength!
• Nesting was fine, it was the judgment part that drove her up a wall
• Watching your eyes roam over her apartment, deciding whether or not it was good enough for you? Gah!
• “What, uh—“ Lute clears her throat, she’ll hate herself for even asking later, “What do you think?”
• You smile knowingly, something else that makes her absolutely mad, “It’s perfect.”
• Lute beams with pride like she’s won a great victory
˚✧₊⁎ Lucifer ⁎⁺˳✧༚
• Never before has he felt the need to actually flaunt.. anything?
• With you it hits him like a fucking train and it’s even harder to supress it
• He’s Lucifer! That’s supposed to be self explanatory, that’s supposed to be enough
• Suddenly he’s checking every mirror on his way to you, making sure he looks better than he feels
• He tries to find other ways to steal your attention or show that he would be a worthy partner
• …But showing off his wings couldn’t hurt, right? He has six after all. If you needed to get to the other side of town he’d be more than happy to fly you over!
• Nothings too good for you! If Lucifer thinks you’ll want or like something, he’s buying it!
• Did you notice he can make things too? He’ll make you something— or fix something for you!
• Quick, break that so he can show you he can fix it!
• Lucifer pulls all the stops trying to prove himself, nesting is no exception… he’s just not great at it
• He starts! However a little after beginning he realizes just how big his mansion is and gets overwhelmed so he closes all the doors and focuses his energy on the only room that matters; his
• “I mainly stay in here,” Lucifer explains while squishing a duck in his fist, watching you explore his room, “I cleaned it up for you! N-Not for you, not for that— I mean not that I’m opposed! I just meant so that you could, uh, see?”
• “I see why you like it, I’d never wanna leave.”
• You’re gonna kill him saying shit like that
~
╰(*´︶`*)╯♡ 🐌 CAN I GIVE YOU A KITH BECAUSE THIS WAS SO FUN!!!!!
#hazbin hotel x reader#hazbin hotel imagine#hazbin hotel headcanons#lucifer morningstar x reader#lucifer morningstar headcanon#lucifer morningstar imagine#hazbin hotel adam headcanon#hazbin hotel adam imagine#hazbin hotel adam x reader#lute headcanon#lute imagine#lute x reader
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♬ now playing: "falling for you"
-> don't you see me? i think i'm falling for you (fallingforyou - the 1975)
summary. various hsr men realizing they're in love with you
chars. dan heng , sunday , aventurine , jing yuan
notes. THIS ONE IS FOR U MIZU-ANON (still gonna call u that despite the username change) had sm fun writing this. i am a biiiiig loser for these types of tropes i need to admit it. I HOPE WHEN U READ THIS U ENJOY MIZU-ANON!!!!!! LOVE U <3
contains. fluff, pre-established relationship, spoiler-free, reader is a trailblazer but not the trailblazer, march & trailblazer mentioned (dan heng), 'pretty' used as a compliment for reader (jing yuan)
inspired by -> this post!
track one: dan heng
staying up late talking to you. dan heng tends to pull all-nighters, but he never expected you to join in one time. it was actually a bonding moment—he felt as if you grew closer since that day. it wasn't exactly a deep talk, it was more like an icebreaker. compared to march and the trailblazer, dan heng was much more reserved, so you saw a different side to him that night. one that you ended up seeing more and growing quite fond of.
always turning their head if your name is mentioned. every morning when the express crew gets up and eat breakfast together, dan heng finds himself always looking over whenever someone calls you. "[name], let's share!" march 7th would exclaim, then the black-haired man's attention immediately turned to your direction.
... and when you notice that a certain someone is staring at you, you make eye contact and smile, which seemed to have flustered him a little. ah, he's growing smitten, slowly.
track two: sunday
realizing certain traits about you that he finds endearing, your curiosity being the most prominent one. with sunday being a halovian, you couldn't help but admire his features, namely his wings. yet you were far too shy to ask if you could touch them—after all, what if he were to feel uncomfortable? but, to your surprise, sunday was the one that offered, finally acknowledging your silent wish. his wings were undeniably soft, but also quite sensitive, fluttering away from your touch. at first, you thought you did something wrong, but judging from the light blush on the oak family head's face, you could tell he actually enjoyed it.
realizing he's in a better mood when you're in a good mood. being head of the oak family, sunday has a tough job. and yet, when he sees you smiling to yourself, sometimes even attempting to help him in any way you can, sunday finds an odd warmth in his chest. one he doesn't experience quite often.
track three: aventurine
the first smile you share. sometimes you wonder whether or not aventurine is serious in certain situations. sometimes you wonder if he's even your friend or if he's using you in a gamble you aren't even aware of. but that one fateful day when he met your gaze and smiled, you could feel your heart skip a beat. aventurine constantly wears a confident smirk, one that makes him seem like someone to be weary of. and that smile of his... perhaps you were the lucky one this time.
flirting with you. actually, your friendship as a whole had some... weirdly romantic undertones, but after a while, the both of you sort of started to truly think about the entire thing. was he serious when he said that you were the only person he wanted? were you serious when you said you wouldn't mind it if he kissed you? only one way to find out, no?
track four: jing yuan
getting things that remind him of you. whether it'd be a shiny trinket he figured you'd like, or even an expensive piece of jewelry, jing yuan slowly started gifting you different things quite frequently. and whenever you'd ask, his response would always be, "it looks pretty, just like you."
finding time for you and spending his free time around you. it's no secret that jing yuan is a busy man, being the general of the luofu. and yet, after those hours are finished, or he managed to catch a break in the middle of the day, he always looks for you somewhere in exalting sanctum and ask if you'd like to take a short stroll with him. you answer yes every time.
#★ — you are my literature#hsr#honkai star rail#hsr x reader#honkai star rail x reader#dan heng#dan heng x reader#sunday#sunday hsr#sunday x reader#sunday hsr x reader#aventurine#aventurine x reader#jing yuan#jing yuan x reader
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Capitano has me grrrr so ill—
So the heat has been bad and you’re capitanos arranged marriage darling so naturally you fall ill. When u go to a doctor they confirm that you’re expecting a baby and you’re terrified to tell your husband lmao. You have no idea how he’d react so you tell and/or bribe the doctor to just tell capitano for you while you do your best to avoid him as best you can the rest of the day :3
Love this!! The flustered and shy you and the affectionate Capitano… now besides Tsaritsa he has someone to pledge his undying loyalty…🥺💕
cw: yandere, arranged marriage, creampie, pregnancy, fem reader
The marriage to Capitano was arranged - a mission. Your relatives have already been looking for a lifelong spouse for you when you reach adulthood. In the eyes of these traditional people, nothing is more important than marriage and childbirth. What you didn't expect was. An armored warrior slowly walked into your village with gifts, solemnly knelt down on one knee and proposed to you, asking them to marry you to him. Your relatives are shuddering.
Of course, they accepted his gift.
Capitano sent enough supplies for the entire village and set up a heating system to help them survive the winter. In exchange, he got his bride.
You've never met him before, but he seems to know every strand of your hair, every smile and worry.
Fatui? That's too far away for you. You have no deep understanding of his power. Full of confusion, you married him. Your husband is upright, aboveboard, and strong… He is not out of control or impulsive. Sex also seemed like a routine. Always advance in a careful and firm rhythm, and stretch your thighs for several hours until your vagina is swollen and dripping. This is how every battle ends. His balls ravaged your quivering petals, his thick glans pushing into the tight depths. He kissed your lips and the back of your hands intently, his warm breath blowing behind your earlobes.
Maybe he just needed an heir. You wonder in despair. Marriage may be romantic, but it's not yours.
You have recently lost your appetite, vomited, and your breasts are swollen. You start to wonder if this could be…?
Capitano tells you that you need his permission to go out. He is not stuffy and conservative. This is a measure to ensure your safety. You are sick and you just want to see a doctor. That's okay, but you still can't go out. The doctor treats you at the manor.
The doctor's diagnosis and treatment results confirm your concerns - you are pregnant, and a little life is growing inside you.
"P-please tell my husband for me," you plead quietly, sniffing. You don't know how Capitano will react.
The doctor readily agreed. For the next half day, you tried your best to avoid your husband, including hiding in the greenhouse, watering the flowers and plants, searching for a magazine "you are interested in but can't remember the name" in the reading room, practicing cooking, and exploring new ways to play TCG. Just as you were hiding in a corner of the library reading pregnancy books, a rush of footsteps approached. It's his leather shoes.
"Are you pregnant?"
Looking at him as if you were caught in the headlights, you covered your cheek with your book and answered vaguely. "Uh…maybe…"
"Are you pregnant?"
Question again. Even your vision was shaken, your waist was lifted, and Capitano lifted you with one hand. The deep scar on his face has now been replaced by affection, and his chest is roaring with joy, bathing in it. You lowered your head and lifted your legs off the ground, panicking. "You, please calm down…"
"…Sorry, I got carried away." He carefully placed you back on the ground, as if you were fragile porcelain, and then he took the back of your hand and kissed it as usual. Those deep blue eyes exuded energy, like twinkling stars in the dark night.
#yandere capitano x reader#capitano x reader#genshin x reader#genshin impact x reader#yandere genshin impact x reader#yandere genshin#yandere genshin x reader
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. . . ( part 2 )
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"nah, what the fuck is this— big bad wolf bullshit?" you can hear matt's voice falter for a second, your bare knees digging into the wood floor of his room. he decided to stream for a few hours tonight, both chris and nick away doing their own things.
for the first hour and a half matt just played some games until you got bored and snuck under his desk, his hand cupping your cheek to give it a light warning smack to whatever cheeky ideas that were brewing in your head.
deft hands slowly started tugging his sweatpants down, to which he just hummed and swiveled around gently in his chair for a second. settling back down, matt was leaning forwards a little to put some music on for the stream, shouting out names he was able to catch that were gifting.
he's fixing his headset and turning the music up a little, it's mainly just to hide any groans and sighs he lets out however. for a second, he steals a glance down at you to find you slowly lowering the hem of his boxers, and he responds by subtly lifting his hips.
matt didn't totally like this idea. one little mistake and the whole stream of.. fifteen thousand people would know what was going on, but he couldn't deny how painfully hard he was just by seeing you on your knees—a little cramped under the small space of his desk.
when you free his length to find pre already dribbling from his slit, your thumb reaches up to thumb at his tip and spread the bead of pre made lube down his shaft. you don't miss the way his thighs tense, hips twitching up a little as you listen to the way he scolds the chat for telling him to react to edits and read fanfiction.
one hand rests on his thigh while the other jerks up and down slowly, twisting your wrist up at the top as you lean forward. parting your lips, you let some saliva drip down the length of his dick and don't miss the heavy sigh he lets out.
soon you're hollowing your cheeks out and bobbing your head gently up and down matt's cock—one hand threading through your hair and digging blunt nails into the back of your head. you can't see his face—but you can hear the way his voice trembles once in awhile and how heavy he's breathing.
your nose presses into his skin, dick shoved all the way down your throat and you gag—only forcing matt to ball one of his hands up into a fist to pretened to cough because he was about this close to letting out a groan.
the noisy slurping and gagging noises of your mouth have him panicking for a second before he's quickly turning the volume of the music up, per chat's request and totally not because it put him just a little more at ease.
he keeps a hand casual over his mouth or on his face, pretending to cough or whatever. his other hand is leaving your head—fingers twitching to pull you off just so he can fuck your throat to his heart's content.
so far so good, right? the stream went pretty smoothly until you'd done something with your tongue and he felt his tip hit the back of your throat, and matt's head is tilting back against his gaming chair and a tortured groan is ripped from his lips.
oops?
notes. sorry if this has spelling mistakes / mistakes in general or anything doesn't make sense i am TIREDD... feel kinda insane w how good matt n chris looked on stream tho. anyways where the fuck did 75 followers come from? like? what??? thank u all i love u guys <3 know its not a lot but argghhb + i reached 100+ notes on a post like ugh <33
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#ᶻz eph3merall#matt sturniolo#matt sturniolo prompt#matt sturniolo blurb#matt sturniolo smut#matthew sturniolo#matt sturniolo x you#matt sturniolo x reader#sturniolo triplets#the sturniolo triplets#sturniolo smut#fr tho what tf do i tag in my posts#still one of my questions tbh
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