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lxveille · 7 years

Text

a lonely thing to do

jeonghan x reader

word count: ~ 6300 a/n: songwriter!reader; lyrics which are used in this story as being the reader-character’s are actually those of joni mitchell, whom i adore always; sex is talked about and led up to but not explicitly described.

Usually you don't realize you're in love until the heartbreak comes. With Jeonghan, it dawns on you sooner than that, while the two of you are still in the throes of a barely-secret fling. Still, neither of you are seeking a commitment, so what is there to do when you’re the only one in love?

You aren’t pretty when you cry, not like girls in movies and music videos. It’s all the worse because you know Jeonghan will still be gorgeous when he inevitably breaks your heart.

This is the concept you’re toying with inside your mind as you sit on your couch at half-past two in the morning with one lamp on and your notepad in your lap. Jeonghan is in the next room over, sleeping and entirely unaware that you’re already imagining how this will all come crumbling apart. In the margins of the page, you slowly write down the words premeditated disaster. With a sigh, you let your gaze settle back on to the verse you were still in the middle of writing.

❥ ❥ ❥

Seventeen has a reputation. There’s enough creative energy and musicality shared between the lot of them that their nickname of self-producing is merited. Nevertheless, you’re aware there are composers and writers brought in on their projects. It’s just that you just had never imagined being on the receiving end of a business inquiry from Pledis.

You’ve been successfully making a living as a songwriter for a few years. A handful of the singles you’ve put together for various artists have done well enough in the charts for you to gain confidence in presenting your work to companies and artists alike. You do your best to carry that confidence into the room when you go to meet with a handful of the members of Seventeen to work on a track with them.

Jihoon had been the one to request management reach out to you for collaboration. Evidently, he’d taken note of your name in the writing credits of several songs he’d been listening to a lot lately. So when he found himself hitting a wall with his own music for their next comeback, your name had come to mind easily.

Working with artists directly can be a mixed bag. With Jihoon, Seungcheol, Soonyoung, and Hansol, you consider yourself lucky as the awkwardness feel of a professionalism easily transitions into an artistic pursuit. You find yourself slipping into a strange role of mediator as their ideas beginning pouring out after you suggest a few changes in the rough draft of a chorus they presented.

The third day you go in for a writing session with them, you meet Jeonghan in passing while he’s on his way out of the Pledis building. He’s a little bit disheveled from practicing choreography for some track you’re entirely uninvolved with. Somehow he still looks breathtaking, and you scold yourself for even having the thought.

“You’re the new writer Woozi brought in, right?” he asks. You nod and exchange proper introductions. “I’ve only heard good things,” Jeonghan mentions before politely adding, “Please continue working hard with our members.”

The next time you meet with him it’s because he’s come in with lyrics himself for one of the tracks in progress. Everything is very cordial. The writing session feeling much the same despite the change in attendance. Frustration raises amongst the group over something in the hook, and Soonyoung is the first to suggest everyone take a break.

While the boys disperse, you stick around in the conference room, determined to get down a few of the lines still lingering in your mind even if they may end up getting scrapped. You don’t realize Jeonghan hasn’t actually left the room until you look up from the crowded page of your notebook.

“If you’re not interested in taking a break,” he asks, “can I get you something from a vending machine?”

“I just wanted to get a few things on paper,” you explain as you stand up. You stretch, limbs and spine stiff from having spent so long in one position.

“Fair enough.” Jeonghan smiles like he’s in on some joke you hadn’t heard.

He walks with you to the closest vending machine. It’s as you’re typing in the code to get a bottle of seltzer that he remarks, “I really like the way you put things. In your lyrics, I mean. You don’t always put things in the most obvious terms, but it’s like… they demand to be felt rather than just heard.”

The compliment takes you by surprise. When you turn to face him after picking up the cold bottle of water, you’re taken back again by the lack of space left between the two of you. You’re certain he hadn’t been standing so close when the two of you first came to a stop. You know he knows that he’s standing closer than a professional capacity would permit.

Twelve different options of how to answer flicker through the front of your mind. Some would diminish and deny his claims. Others would reflect praise back on him. A stray few would invite him closer than he already is. The only one that makes its way to your tongue is the simplest. And Jeonghan’s smile grows as you’re disarmed to only saying thank you in return.

You picture the moment over again in your head later that night, when you’re home and writing lines about a boy with silk words and a smile that sets off alarm bells between your ribs.

The danger of Jeonghan seems to pass over the time that follows. The rest of your sessions with the various members go without any further instances.

At least until you’re packing up your belongs after your last planned meeting with them for the tracks you’ve been collaborating on together. Numerous gratitudes and goodbyes have been given several times over. Chan drops by to wish you well following a text from Soonyoung despite the fact that he hadn’t been in the writing session that had just wrapped up.

Somehow in the chaos of closing this chapter, you find yourself alone in the room with Jeonghan again. He’s perched on the table you’re still sitting at, watching you organize everything in your bag with a curious gaze.

“How do you do it?” he asks. You suspect he isn’t referring to the way you manage to cramp all your things into a relatively small backpack.

“You’ve been in these meetings,” you say, looking up at him while you’re still bent forwards to slip pens and pencils back in place, “You’ve seen me writing.”

“I think what you say is different from how it goes inside your head,” he puts forth this theory with a faint chuckle. If you were any further away, you might have missed it.

“Do you say everything exactly as it comes to you?” you question him, tilting your head as though it was a challenge. As if you had him cornered on this.

“Ah,” he sighs with a shake of his head, though his expression suggests anything but frustration or disappointment. “But I guess I mean more of how these things come to you the way they do to begin with.” His sights settle back onto you as you lean back in your chair, your attention exclusively on him at this point. “The way you frame certain feelings, you’d think you’ve lived much longer than you have. But we’re not so far apart in age, are we?”

“You think I’m more inspired than you?”

His laughter is more obvious this time. It almost strikes you as self-deprecating, but there’s a constant gleam in his gaze that assures you otherwise. “Would that be the word to use?” he thinks aloud before shrugging. “Geez, maybe you’re right. Maybe you are.”

“To be fair, I think your company keeps you too busy most of the time for you to live the kinds of things that inspire me.”

These words make his smile skew to one side while his eyebrows quirk in curiosity. “I don’t want to presume anything about you, miss,” he speaks with a combination of formality and tone that comes together to form a playfulness that sends an easy smile to your lips.

“I’m a helpless and nervous romantic who’s never asked for fidelity,” you tell him, intentionally falling back on words that would be better suited for your notebook than a casual conversation.

He smiles and looks down at his lap, at where one of his hands is settled with something you can’t quite make out between his fingers. “It’s kind of you to keep your love life so complicated for the sake of making other artists sound profound.”

“That’s not my motivation,” you clarify as you stand up, deciding the conversation is drifting to a point where you’ll be best off leaving sooner rather than later. “It just might be an added benefit of liking company more than commitment.”

Jeonghan watches you rise from your seat, gaze steady and unhurried as it traces your form. If you’d heard alarm bells before, you should’ve sensed a siren when he locked eyes with you in that small room. He pushes his weight off the table and is back on his own two feet as he presses a slip of paper into the palm of your hand.

“Well, the next time you need inspiration...” He finishes the proposition with a kiss rather than with words. You can taste the flippancy on his lips.

You put the number from the paper he’d handed you into your phone all the same.

❥ ❥ ❥

You don’t call Jeonghan. You don’t send him a single message. The lack of contact doesn’t prevent your mind from drifting to him from time to time. On these occasions, you remind yourself that your work with Seventeen is done. Then you reach out to someone else in your contacts instead.

This logic satisfies until you receive a frustrated, desperately worded text from Jihoon late one Wednesday night. They have recording time for one of your songs tomorrow, and the final adjustments he’s trying to make before officially laying the track down are driving him to madness.

The words please and thanks occur no less than fourteen times in the text thread that unfolds between you two in the time it takes you to get from your apartment to their dorm. You work with Jihoon until the demo and lyrics and sheet music are all in accordance and all come as close to perfect as either of you can find a way to.

By the time all this is done, you’re exhausted and Jihoon feels indebted to you. Which is how you end up sleeping on their couch for a couple hours. When you come to around dawn, a nervous feeling creeps up your spine as if you’ve done something inappropriate. So it feels like a walk of shame even without having done more than your job as you slip out of the dorm without saying any goodbyes.

It’s not until much later that morning that you realize your lyric book is missing. A few quick texts confirm your suspicions that you must have left it behind by accident. Jihoon is already at the studio when you’re itching to get the notebook back in your own hands. You head over to the dorm anyway with his reassurance that someone will be there to let you in.

When someone turns out to be Jeonghan, you almost freeze on the doorstep.

“Hey, you… left your book right?” he greets, clearly having been looped in by Jihoon. You nod and accept when he invites you inside. You follow several steps behind him as he leads you back to the couch you’d slept on and picks up your notebook from the coffee table where you’d left it. “Don’t worry, no one looked or anything,” Jeonghan says as he hands it back to you.

“It’s not a diary,” you remind, even though the contents were certainly personal enough in places to be considered as much. “It’s my job to share them.”

“Then don’t worry, no one’s out here stealing your work,” he revises his assurance. A familiar expression is tugging at his features, reminding you exactly of why you hadn’t ever followed up with him after the last time you parted.

“Thanks.” It comes out stiffer than you intended. Stilted in the way that repressed anger adds blades to polite words.

“You can go if you want, but could I say something first?” That dangerous smile of his falls away as quickly as it’d come. He looks earnest, and he takes a step back to suggest that he’s not interested in encroaching on you as he’d done before.

You tell him he can say whatever he’d like without looking at him, busying yourself instead with unzipping your bag and slipping your notebook back to where it belongs.

“I’m sorry for the way I behaved the last time I saw you.” Jeonghan shifts his weight where he stands. From the corner of your eye, you swear you can see him churning further words over in his head. He hadn’t anticipated this chance; he hadn’t planned out how he would actually get from feeling regret to forgiveness.

“I had no right kiss you,” he acknowledges it quietly, like the fact he’d even done it embarrassed him now. You didn’t know if any other the other members were home, but you would guess he hadn’t told any other them about his small transgression. “Or to presume my number was something you’d ever want.”

It surprises you when Jeonghan averts his eyes from yours when you lift your head to look at him directly. “I think I got caught up in… I don’t know, something silly just because of the kinds of songs we were working on together.” You recall the first time he’d set you on edge, when he spoke of your lyrics provoking feeling. It makes you wonder if somehow he’s blaming you in part for his rash actions.

“You’re difficult not to admire,” he states after a pause that nearly tricked you into thinking he was done speaking. A faraway sort of smile appears and evaporates as soon as he’s finished with that confession. “But that doesn’t excuse my actions. I hope you won’t let my indiscretion tarnish your relationship with our group.”

In the end, it’s always business, you think to yourself.

“You’re better with words than you give yourself credit for, Yoon Jeonghan,” you tell him honestly.

❥ ❥ ❥

The invitation to the private release party for seventeen’s album goes unanswered for several days. You tell yourself you’re putting off deciding whether or not to go simply because you’ve been busy lately. A different label had reached out to you and hired you to help some new artist of theirs put together a cohesive debut album. The executives want the music to be radio-friendly with appeal to young adults rather than the teens they’ve garnered attention from with their other artists thus far. The singer, a soft and serious young man named Daecheol, feels things immensely but is absolutely terrible at putting them in words.

When you finally accept the invitation, you convince yourself it’s mostly because you miss the world of difference that exists between working with Jihoon and the others compared to your current project.

You show up late. It’s an unfortunate side effect of you debating between two outfit options for the occasion. In the end, you go with the dress that makes you stand up a fraction straighter. It has a track record of being zipped by you and unzipped by someone else.

Soonyoung and Chan greet you like you’ve just come back from a war. Jihoon isn’t quite as obvious in his bee-line to welcome you to the event. The album is playing over the speakers and you still get the same thrill as you had the first time when you hear the polished, professional sound of your own compositions buzzing through the air.

“I’m glad you came,” Jeonghan tells you when he approaches nearly an hour and a half after your arrival.

“Are you happy with the final album?”

“Of course,” he grins with genuine pride. “Are you?”

“It isn’t my album,” you remind.

He concedes with a tilted nod. “But I think it’d be a very different night if not for you,” he tells you after a moment. He looks you over and you find yourself filtering through different meanings that could be buried in this statement.

“I’m grateful I was able to contribute to it.” You sense this isn’t as direct of an answer as Jeonghan would have liked from the way he leans back from you just a bit, lips settled into a pondering line.

You look over the crowd, smiling at the antics happening in various corners of the room. “A while back, you apologized for something that was never held against you,” you admit recklessly.

“Oh.” Jeonghan stands beside you, eyes searching out his fellow members one by one to check on what was keeping them entertained. “I wish you’d told me as much then.”

“I wasn’t ready to want you yet.”

With that, Jeonghan’s the first to break the nonchalant charade. He turns his head to stare at you in profile. His tongue presses against his front teeth in anticipation. He wants to say something as effortless as you; he wants to make you snap your attention onto him alone for the rest of the night. All he can summon is a simple, “And now?”

Your eyes dart to his, and you smile unabashedly. “I am.”

He leads you to an upstairs you hadn’t known the venue had before he kisses you.

The adrenaline of something new and ill-advised makes you both close in upon each other too eagerly. Two hands alone are not enough for him to touch every inch of you that he desires. In a flurry of swollen lips and grasping hands, you realize that once won’t satisfy you when it comes to Jeonghan.

❥ ❥ ❥

Once doesn’t cut it for Jeonghan either.

In the beginning, it’s a simple arrangement of having sex and parting ways within a matter of minutes afterwards. Repeated days of this turn into weeks, and Jeonghan begins to linger. Sometimes for only an hour or two after. Other times he lets himself give in to tiredness and finds himself scrambling in the morning to make it back to the dorm before he’s missed too badly.

He comes up with excuses and repetitive cover stories for where he slips off to from time to time. You suspect at least a majority of the members know the truth. They let the two of you carry on as though your affair is a secret nonetheless. Maybe out of some kind of respect. Or, you theorize, they find Jeonghan’s scrambling for excuses to be amusing enough to let him think they’re actually convincing.

There’s no lack of passion. The carnal sort of passion that drives tragic lovers into each other's’ arms in theaters. Easily mistaken for a matter of the heart, but showing its true nature when you hardly think of each other when you’re apart. Still, Jeonghan fucks you like orgasming might be the key the solving all the world’s problems, persistent and heated and damn near inspiring. Or else he holds you almost too close and makes the whole universe slip into slow motion.

It’s after a long night of the latter when you find yourself curled up in a soft blanket watching Jeonghan get dressed. The sky outside is only now beginning to lighten. Outside your window, you can just make out hues of pomegranate and strawberry ice cream creeping over the horizon.

You want to invite him back under the covers. Convince him it’s too early to go, tempt him with the promise of more sleep and of sleep by your side. You press your lips into each other instead and watch as he runs a hand groggily through his hair.

“Jeonghan,” you call out for him, and he hums as he looks back at you from over one shoulder. You want to say any number of things to him, but none of them feel appropriate for the moment once they reach the tip of your tongue. So you leave the silence up to his interpretation.

He takes the three strides he needs to be back at your bedside. One knee comes to rest on the mattress as he leans in to kiss you, hand resting on one side of your neck as he does. “Can I come back tomorrow night?” he asks, mind already on when he can get back inside you before he’s even left.

“Okay,” you accept the idea readily. “Good luck with your schedules,” you think to say as he’s heading towards your bedroom door, knowing the performances and appearances are what makes him so certain he won’t be able to be here again tonight.

You trust him to lock your front door when he goes. He says he doesn’t mind showing himself out if it means you get to stay comfy.

That afternoon, as you’re walking home from a trip to your favorite coffee shop, Jeonghan pops into your mind. You want to know if he’d like the pastries at that cafe as much as you do; if he’d think that one painting hanging in the corner of a vase of flowers atop a messily packed suitcase is as strangely moving as you do.

The crosslight turns, but you stay frozen on the curb.

These are the wonderings that usually strike you too late. The ones you have sadly after men have told you that can’t keep on with ‘the way things are’. However things are -- it seems they always reach a breaking point before you even know it’ll hurt to say goodbye.

Will it hurt to say goodbye to Jeonghan?

You’re jostled by an impatient pedestrian pushing past you to cross the street.

The answer, you realize as the ‘don’t walk’ sign begins to flash, is yes. Of course it will.

❥ ❥ ❥

You’ve known for a week that you’re in love with Jeonghan when he shows up at your place near eleven at night with a bottle of wine. For a moment, you think of telling him he can’t come in. Selfishly, you head wants to get ahead of this whole thing, to uproot the whole thing before any more feeling can blossom.

But your heart wins, as it always has. You let him in and don’t speak a word of your true fondness for him. You sit with him in your living room with the windows open. The night air complements the oaky undertones of the wine. You chat, drink and laugh your way through a good few hours with him.

When it’s empty, he pulls you closer, intertwines your fingers with his carefully and murmurs how he had to come. How he couldn’t help himself but make time for you tonight. He’s spent all day longing to hear his name come tumbling off your tongue.

People say wine makes you sleepy. They say the same of sex. But after sharing a bottle and an orgasm with Jeonghan, you can do nothing but lie awake on your bed with melody lines churning over in your mind. You turn onto your side, pushing yourself up on one hand to get a good look over the man beside you. His eyes are closed, lips parted slightly and hands limp upon his bare chest.

You close the bedroom door behind you when you slip out into your living room. Instead of sitting on your sofa, you collapse onto your floor with your lyrics open on one page beside you and your composing book open to a blank score on the other side of you. You try to keep your humming out of the imagined vocal lines hushed for Jeonghan’s sake. Fast asleep as you imagine him to be, the walls of your apartment are only so thick. Even if he weren’t there at all, you’d be singing softly so as to avoid disturbing any neighbors.

You sprawl out on your back as you run over a few variations for the bridge in your head. Your fingertips run through the air, tracing the intervals of notes as you narrow yourself gradually down to two.

As you try the tunes out with the words you’d written, you let your eyes close. “Didn’t it feel good when we were sitting there talking?” you sing softly into the dark space of your living room, “And lying there not talking, didn’t it feel good?”

You pause and repeat the same words with slight differences in the flow and notes; this time your voice goes up a pitch on the negation in the second phrase. It feels right like that. Like it puts in a coy emphasis on exactly what you’re suggesting is being done outside of conversations. You wet your lips with your tongue before you try that second version out once again.

The last note hangs above your hand as you fall silent once again.

“Do you always write your melodies laying half-naked on your floor?” A soft, teasing question washes over you and summons you back to the moment. You sit up and look towards your bedroom doorway. He’s leaning against the frame so comfortably that you can’t be certain how long he’s been there.

Jeonghan has pulled on a plain gray t-shirt, but still has nothing but boxers on from the waist down.

“Sorry I woke you,” you presume, refusing to humor his jest with any kind of direct reply. He moves over to where you’re sitting while shaking his head.

“I’m glad I got to hear you,” he speaks quieter this time as he invites himself to sit down in your lap, his knees falling on either side of your hips. “You have a nice voice. Why don’t you ever record more than just demos?”

“I don’t want to be known as a singer,” you recite a reason you’ve given plenty of times before. As his fingers brush over your shoulders and pull carefully at the elastic barely keeping your hair back in the mess of what was once a bun, you feel yourself compelled to elaborate. “I used to play in cafes, sometimes, or in my village’s train station… I hated most the things people would tell me. I didn’t ever care when they said I looked cool, or sounded pretty, or could be the next whoever…” Jeonghan pauses his ministrations with your hair to meet your eyes. The attentiveness in his gaze makes you hesitate momentarily. When you continue on, you’re speaking in more of a whisper. “I just wanted people to say they liked the way the words fell together, or how a melody made them feel anything at all.”

“A real poet,” he muses with a gentle lilt. His hands are back in motion, gathering your hair into a neat ponytail, head tilted to one side so he can look at what he’s doing. “Wasn’t that one of the first things I praised you for?” His lips graze against your temple and at the soft skin behind your ear.

In a moment like this, you’re tempted to believe he could love you in full. That you could spend years with him fixing your hair and kissing your skin. That he’d be happy with that. That you could be satisfied without anyone else rocking their hips into yours but him. Your fingers bunch into the fabric of his shirt. Grasping at the cotton, remember the feel of wool and lycra that you’ve peeled off other men, even within the past few weeks while you’ve been busy falling for Jeonghan.

“Does it bother you that most people who know your songs won’t ever know your name?” he asks as his hands slip under your nightshirt.

“I just want them to listen.” Your answer comes out with a slight hitch as your heart rate accelerates with Jeonghan’s fingers running up the skin of your back.

“I’d make them,” he murmurs nonsensically. His chest presses lightly into yours, arms helping guide you back down so you’re lying with him above you. He catches your lips with his own. His hands migrate from your back to front, following your curves carefully as they come to settle on your hips, bare save for the clean underwear you’d slipped on after the last round with him. “I’d sing anything you told me to.”

It’s impossible for this promise to be sincere, but it feels nice being breathed against your skin as his kisses move down your neck.

❥ ❥ ❥

Jeonghan doesn’t expect to see you at the afterparty of an awards show. He doesn’t even spot you until halfway through the event.

You’re in the same dress you wore to Seventeen’s last release party and gratefully accepting a glass of sparkling wine when he catches your eye from across the room. He’s in the middle of a conversation with another woman, who looks like she’s been having a rather nice time. She has the kind of beautiful smile you never managed to find the perfect words to describe when you were writing lyrics about picturesque women.

He doesn’t abandon her side or excuse himself from the conversation. In a bustling room, there’s no rush for him to find a way to you. No number of mental reminders that the two of you have no obligations to each other fully placates you.

Just as you’re getting ready to leave, he appears in front of you with the same smile he’s been giving every pretty person all night. “You didn’t tell me you’d be here,” he starts with what you already know, and sounds glad to have you right in front of him

“Daecheol invited me sort of last minute,” you inform him. You are unsurprised when the name doesn’t summon any kind of recognition. “He wanted to thank me for helping with his album,” you continue, fidgeting with the strap of your purse on your shoulder. He hadn’t been nominated. The company had only sent him to the event and the after party for the publicity of being there.

“I’m leaving with him,” you add before Jeonghan can feign that he’d only forgotten for a moment about the project you’d told him about more than once.

“Oh.” His smile falters. You feel cruel for feeling anything resembling comfort in that. “Have a nice night, then.”

“You too, Jeonghan.”

The awkwardness of this farewell doesn’t stop him from reaching out to you two nights later. It changes nothing in the bigger pattern the two of you have established. It doesn’t stop you from letting him in your door and it doesn’t keep him from making soft, empty promises against your skin.

❥ ❥ ❥

You stir from discomfort rather than from any alarm. You lift your head carefully from the cushion of your couch and splay fingers that have cramped from sleeping with a pen still firmly in grasp. You hadn’t meant to fall asleep in your living room. You hadn’t meant to be writing lyrics until exhaustion made a momentary pause turn into full slumber.

You’d meant to crawl back into bed with Jeonghan before any of this could happen.

Instead, your back in complaining from the half-upright position you’d slept in. And Jeonghan is still in your apartment, though far from asleep.

You stay silent as you blink sleep from your eyes and take in the sight of Jeonghan standing near your window with a familiar notebook in hand. It’s open to the same page you’d been working on only a few hours ago. You can make out the places in the margins where you’d made note of stray phrases you thought you may use at some point in the future.

As your mind stirs a bit more, you recall the last verse you’d completed before you must have passed out. The thought that Jeonghan was reading those words over at this very moment filled you with a kind of dread you hadn’t felt in years. You’d long gotten over the embarrassment of showing others things that you’d written from the heart. But in this case, it stung to think the words were being read by the very same person who had provoked them.

I think I'm falling in love with you Are you going to let me go there by myself? That’s such a lonely thing to do Both of us flirting around, hurting too

“Jeonghan,” you begin with his name, and hope that your voice carries no traces of anger or fear. He turns abruptly to face you again. “What are you doing?”

“I wanted to see what you were working on,” he says nonchalantly. He seems to float across the ground as he comes back in your direction to hand the notebook back to you. “It’s sad, but… kind of confusing,” he gives you feedback that resonates too well with the ache that spreads in your chest as you look into his eyes.

“It’s not finished.” Though that’s not the issue at hand. “I wish you hadn’t just looked without asking first,” you allow yourself to reveal. It’s too much to say. Already your voice has an added warble to it. You hope he hears it as frustration rather than distress.

“I thought you were fine with people looking at your work?” He looks genuinely perplexed by the way your attitude has changed.

That was before it was about you, you think to yourself as you shut the notebook and press it close to your chest. “I am,” you lie.

His eyes bore into yours, seeking out the evidence for he already suspects. “I wouldn’t have done it if I knew you were going to mind.” He can’t retract the action, but he still wants his intentions excused. “You know that, right?”

As far as you’re concerned, he’s calling upon a kind of trust reserved for those who care deeply for one another. Not a single syllable of it feels fair. “I think you should go, Jeonghan.”

This catches him off guard. He falls into the spot beside you on the couch like his legs have given out on him. “Because I looked in your notebook?” he tries to understand. He’s perplexed. He’s disappointed, maybe, but see no trace of regret or sorrow in his eyes.

“It’s different now, you know,” you want to defend your reason. The thought that he might leave feeling you’d changed outlooks without any logic or warning. “Different than when you were just an artist I was selling lyrics to.”

“I know I’m not the first artist you’ve slept with,” he states plainly, and the edge of his tone makes you assume he’s only just refraining from adding ‘or the only one you’re sleeping with now’. “You still share this stuff with them, don’t you?”

“Never anything I’ve actually written about them,” you retort before you’ve processed exactly how much those words reveal to him.

The heat of the moment had you anticipating venom back from Jeonghan. But he’s faster to notice the indirect confession than you. His features soften, lips only just parting as his mind begins to race.

“That’s about me?” he seeks verification. He looks down at the closed notebook in your arms as if he had x-ray vision. You have a sinking feeling he might as well, that everything in the quick shift of his demeanor tells you that he remembers what was written on that page perfectly.

Denial doesn’t occur to your heart as an option. And your mind doesn’t stand a chance of being heard over how loud the other is beating in your worried chest. All you can manage is nodding.

With that confirmation, the air shifts again and he leans in closer to you.

“You never asked if I love you,” Jeonghan speaks softly, fingers brushing your cheeks as he cradles your face. Your heart skips and beat, and you fumble inside your head for a panic cord that might eject you from this whole situation.

“It won’t change much if you do.” Your voice shakes. You want to look away from him but some unspeakable tension makes it impossible to do.

“Why not?” he implores you in a whisper. You try to imagine other men’s hands where his are. It isn’t hard to do, but it makes your heart ache in protest.

You picture yourself as any other woman in his hold. It’s easy to think he’d say these exact same things no matter who you were.

It takes a deep, steadying breath to brace yourself before you can bring yourself to say, “Because I don’t want it to.”

Confusion takes over Jeonghan’s face. He scans yours like the meaning behind your statement could be found somewhere in the details of your skin.

“I told you from the start, when you asked how I write.” It comes out in a whisper because a part of you already wishes you could take it back. Love alone does not make for a good commitment, you tell yourself over and over, hoping with each repetition that it might convince your heart.

“Maybe I should go,” Jeonghan concurs at last, hands falling away from you as an old conversation drifts to the front of his mind.

He hadn’t known when you said you never asked for fidelity that it meant you’d turn it down even if it was offered with open hands.

❥ ❥ ❥

Several months later, he hears a familiar verse in some female singer’s song. He hears a familiar story. There’s some melancholy in the tune, but it’s too upbeat to think anyone would cry over it. He doesn’t have to look up the credits to know who wrote this.

Jeonghan doesn’t cry. But he tenses, and his heart skips a beat for the first time as he pictures you bathed in sunlight and tangled in bedsheets.

As the final line of the song comes crashing into his ears, he thinks you might have gotten at least one thing wrong. But the recording is done. It’s too late to tell you how he much wishes you’d made a different choice when it came to the options you laid out in that last open wound of a lyric.

We love our loving, but not like we love our freedom.

#seventeen scenarios #jeonghan scenarios #seventeen imagines #yoon jeonghan scenarios

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