PRINCESS AND THE PAUPER (pt 1)
SUMMARY: It wasn’t like you and Kevin hated each other. In fact, you quite admired him despite his somewhat indifferent attitude toward you. Well, now that you’re paired up for the last dance of the year, you guess it’s the perfect time to find out why.
GENRE: smut, very little fluff, a lot of angst
PAIRING: Kevin Moon x afab!reader
WC: 4.3k
SERIES MASTERLIST PART 2
PERM TAGLIST: @juyeonszn @winterchimez @flwoie
18+ MDNI AGELESS BLOGS WILL BE BLOCKED
WARNINGS: insults (nonsexual), mentions of injuries, mentions of what is basically sabotage, kevin is actually really kind of a bad person to y/n yall im sorry, kevin is still stupid (keeping with the trends), kevin is emotionally constipated but so is y/n but she's less emotionally constipated, pining, enemies to lovers, making out, marking, hair pulling, scratching, dry humping, poor attempts at humor, guys i'm actually warning you kevin is a total asshole in this
A/N: Idk why i went the angsty route for this but i'm very very excited to be releasing the final installment of this series. this was supposed to be released on christmas but me and fawn did not give ourselves NEARLY enough time to actually prepare this so we had to push it off. Much love, kiss kiss. Anyway thank you to everyone for reading this collab. This is part 1 of the final installment, so please be on the lookout for part 2 on fawn's page!!
You couldn’t have been more excited to be partnered with Kevin Moon for the end-of-year exhibition. He was kind, he was incredibly talented, he was funny, he—
“You have to be fucking joking.”
— hated your goddamn guts.
You weren’t even sure why. One day the two of you had been just a couple of freshmen, excited to become the best versions of yourselves, and the next…it was like Kevin suddenly decided that he just hated everything about you. He did everything from mocking your solo performances to outright screaming at you for the tiniest of mistakes that not even your professors had picked up on. Your foot was a centimeter too far to the left, your back was arched too much, or your arm looked flimsy. Anything that he could possibly berate you for, he found it.
“Language, Moon.” Your professor scolded, hovering beside you and gauging both of your reactions. Your thumbnail is wedged between your teeth, and your free hand is wrapped around your waist. Kevin is fuming across from you, staring at the paper with such intensity you fear that it would catch fire.
“Professor, you can’t possibly expect me to work with her!” Kevin flings his hand out in your direction, and you scoff.
“You make it sound like this is my fault.”
“Isn’t it?” He raises an eyebrow, lips curling up into a nasty sneer. “Most things usually are.”
“Oh really?” You drop your hands to your side, taking a small step toward him.
“Yes!”
“Like what?”
You’re inches away from each other now, a palpable tension between the two of you that had your professor shuffling back uncomfortably. A few lingering students glanced at the two of you, whispering amongst each other.
Do you think they really hate each other?
I think that they’re doing this just for show, just like Sangyeon and his girlfriend.
Maybe they really do hate each other…or, at least, one of them does.
“Like the class performance of Princess and the Pauper last year.” Kevin grins smugly, as if he’d won some sort of competition between the two of you. There’s a flash of anger and hurt in your eyes.
“Let’s not remember that you were the one who dropped me, Kevin.” The smugness dissipates and now your “opponent” is standing uncomfortably before you.
“I— I know that, but—” You cut him off abruptly, and there are a few tears brimming in your eyes.
“You know damn fucking well that the performance would’ve been fine had you not intentionally let me fall. It’s your fault that happened, not mine.”
“Y/N,” your professor warns. “Let’s calm down, shall we?”
Her hand on your shoulder steels you, and your body relaxes.
“The two of you,” she speaks slowly and calmly but there’s cold authority in her tone, “are going to work together on this performance, and you are going to work nicely. I will not be tolerating arguments this time. If you two cannot prove to me that you can work together as a team then I will fail you, and I will recommend you both be removed from the program. Am I understood?”
You bite on your tongue, eyeing Kevin and waiting for him to respond first. His words dug deep into you. It was easy for you to take the blame for mistakes you made, for starting on the wrong beat. But for him to blame you for his mistake? That was going too far. That was crossing a line that no dancer should ever cross (i know nothing about dancing).
“Understood,” Kevin mutters after a moment, and you nod your head slowly.
“Understood.”
“I think we should do Angel by Keshi.”
“And I think that’s the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard.”
Your eyes widen when Kevin says that with his back flat on the ground of the practice room you’d rented. He’s got a stress ball in his hand, throwing it toward the ceiling and waiting for it to fall back down into his hand. For at least an hour, it had been, essentially, a one-sided discussion with you throwing out ideas and Kevin ignoring you as best he could until you threatened to tell the professor he wasn’t being cooperative. He’d proceeded to call you a “stupid snitch” before responding to each suggestion you threw out with something negative.
“If it’s so dumb then how about you give a suggestion for once?” You retort. “Instead of just sitting there moping like a child.”
“Ooh, good one,” Kevin says mockingly, his eyes narrowing at you after. You know he can see you’re getting frustrated with him. You can see it in the smirk he sends your way as he sits up. “Stings real bad, Y/N.”
“Why are you such a prick?” You grab your crossed ankles, rocking back and forth on your butt.
“Why are you such a teacher’s pet?”
“I’m…I’m literally not.” Your head tilts and Kevin shrugs.
“Sure you aren’t.”
“Can you focus please?” Kevin rolls his eyes when you change the subject, leaning back onto the palms of his hands and spreading his legs out in front of him.
“I’ve been focused, you’re the one who keeps getting distracted by me.”
Your jaw falls slack. You kept getting distracted? The whole time the two of you had been in this room, he had done absolutely nothing to contribute. You, arguably, were the only one not distracted!
“What if we did—”
“Partition by Beyoncé.” Kevin interrupts you, and you quirk an eyebrow.
“I’m not doing that song with you.”
A smirk, and he leans forward. “Why? Afraid you’ll be seduced by your enemy?”
It's too late for that. “Nope. I just don’t wanna be that close to you at all. You fucking smell.”
For the first time ever, Kevin falls silent. His jaw hangs open and his eyebrows shoot to his hairline. Internally, you cheer at how you were likely the first person (as far as you know) to make him shut up for a few moments.
“I do not smell!” He snaps, finally jolted from his stupor when you clear your throat.
“You kinda do, Kev,” you pick at something on the ground. “Sorry to be the one that broke it to you.”
“Don’t call me Kev.”
You look at him, and his nose is wrinkled with disgust. He doesn’t look angry, per se, but he isn’t exactly the most pleased you’ve seen him.
“Sorry.”
Kevin goes quiet again, and now both of you are picking at the floor.
“So we’re doing Angel, right?” You ask, trying to clear the awkward air. Your partner kisses his teeth and shakes his head.
“I really think we should do Partition.”
“Why are you so set on doing such a sexual song?” Your cheeks are warm, but you try to ignore it as best you can. Kevin notices, that smug smile returning to his face.
“Why are you so uncomfortable with it? People love these types of performances.” He has a point, but you’ll die before you let him know it. “They love tension between dancers. Gives them a thrill.”
“It’ll be thrilling when they see my fist in your face,” you mumble so he can’t hear you.
“What?” His eyebrows knit together and you smile coyly.
“What?” Your voice is pitched up to mock him, and a muscle feathers in his jaw.
“We’re doing Partition.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
He kisses his teeth again, returning to leaning on the palms of his hands. You lay flat on your back, fingers splayed across your stomach.
“You’re annoying. You know that, right?” You hear him shift on the ground, and then his face appears in your periphery A dry laugh escapes you.
“That’s not what your mom said last night.”
“Don’t— don’t talk about my mom.” You lift your head off the ground, a lazy grin plastered onto your face when you see Kevin’s lips twitching. “That— that wasn’t funny. Like, at all.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t, Kevin.” You agree, lowering your head back to the ground.
“I’m serious, Y/N. You aren’t funny.” He stands up, gathering his belongings and keeping his back turned. Had you not seen him fighting a smile just a moment ago, you would have thought he was truly angry with you. Or, perhaps, he was angry with you, but the joke was enough to get him to crack a smile.
“I believe you,” you sat up again, following his lead and grabbing your own items. “Totally. Why wouldn’t I?”
He turns to look at you again, his expression shockingly dull when he meets your eyes. The tension is back, and you shuffle awkwardly in your spot. In the silence of the practice room, you’re struck with the urge to ask him questions. Why he hates you, why he dropped you during the performance. It had been on your mind for so long, but not once have you had the strength to ask. Now, though, you have an unstoppable urge.
You clear your throat, dipping your head down for a second and then lifting it to keep your eyes on him.
“Why d—”
You’ve barely gotten one word out before Kevin interrupts you again, taking long and heavy steps to the door. It’s as if he’d sensed your questions, your curiosity. His timing certainly made it seem that way.
“I’ll text you when we can start working on the choreography.”
Kevin slams the door of the TBZ house so hard that the walls shake.
“Why the fuck are you slamming my doors?” Sangyeon yells from his bedroom, his voice muffled by the distance between them.
“Sorry!” Kevin yells back, but he’s not. He’s not sorry at all, not now at least. Why the fuck did he have to get paired with you? Of all the people in the class, why did the professor think it was a good idea to stick the two people who hate each other the most on a team?
“You’re lucky that Sangyeon’s too busy getting his dick sucked to care that you slammed the door.” Changmin peers at Kevin from the kitchen counter, hunched over with a frog-shaped cup in his hand. The older of the two wrinkles his nose in disgust, making his way to the counter and sinking into a barstool.
“Didn’t need to know that detail, but thanks anyway.”
“No problem,” Changmin grins sarcastically, lifting his cup as a sort of toast. “What’s got you so ticked off anyway?”
“Some stupid assignment my professor assigned me.”
“Oh, right. The dance one?”
“Yeah.”
Kevin drops his head into his hands, rubbing at his eyes with the base of his palms. Then he raises his head, eyebrows knit together in confusion.
“Wait, how did you know about the assignment?”
“One of my friends is in that class,” Changmin sets his cup down and leans forward to fold his arms on the granite countertop. “He said he saw you being a dick to Y/N after you found out the two of you were partners for the exhibition.”
“Well, she deserved it,” Kevin grumbles, dropping his hands onto the counter.
“She always deserves it, according to you.” Changmin kisses his teeth and purses his lips. “Why do you hate her, anyway? She’s a fantastic dancer, she’s super nice, she’s really pretty. She’s got your humor, too, so shouldn’t the two of you, like, get along?”
“Y/N L/N is the spawn of the devil himself, and I’ll die before I get along with her.”
“Okay, I get that, but why?”
Why. Why do you hate her so much? What could she possibly have done to make you drop her in the middle of one of the most important performances of your college career?
“She…” Kevin trails off, his face heating up with embarrassment. “She spilled coffee on me during freshman year.”
For a few moments, Changmin says nothing and Kevin thinks that the younger man didn’t hear him. Then he speaks, and Kevin wishes he hadn’t said anything at all.
“You…broke a girl’s ankle…and almost ruined her chances at ever dancing again…” Changmin speaks slowly, trying to comprehend the sheer absurdity of what he’d just heard. “Because…because she spilled coffee on you?”
“It wasn’t just that!” Kevin tries to defend. “She got it all over my expensive shirt, the white one you got me for my birthday back in high school. The stain wouldn’t come out, even with bleach, so I had to toss it!”
“You’re the dumbest person I have ever met, Kevin Moon.” Changmin pushes himself up to stand straight, suddenly radiating anger and startling Kevin. “You don’t fucking drop someone and break their ankle because of a goddamn shirt that I bought you from fucking Target.”
“Wait— it was from Target?” Kevin’s jaw drops.
“Yes? Did you think that I bought a wicked expensive plain white button-down shirt?”
“Well, I mean…” Kevin scratches the back of his head, his cheeks heating with embarrassment.
“You know what?” Changmin pinches the bridge of his nose, biting down on his tongue briefly. “That’s— that’s not the point of this conversation. The point is that you’re a horrible person. You’re a horrible person and if you don’t get your shit together and apologize to that poor girl, I’m gonna get Sangyeon involved.”
“Why— I’m not a horrible person!” Kevin snaps, and Changmin scoffs.
“I truly wonder what she sees in you.”
For a brief moment, Kevin stops breathing. In that moment, a series of thoughts run through his mind, thoughts that he can’t even begin to process.
Horrible person.
I wonder what she sees in you.
Who is ‘she?’ Why does Changmin know what she thinks of him?
He couldn’t possibly mean you. You hate him, and he hates you. There was no possible way that you cared about him at all, especially after how cruel he’d been to you.
Right?
One week.
A whole damn week goes by before Kevin texts you to meet him at practice room 304. To be honest, you would have forgotten about the project had your professor not sent out an email the day prior requesting progress videos to be submitted by Monday morning.
“That leaves us, what, four days to draft at least half of the choreography?” You’re sipping at an iced latte, your back against the mirror as Kevin ties the laces of his sneakers.
“Something like that.”
He’s on edge. You can hear it in his voice. Something has him tense and you aren’t entirely sure what to do about it, especially since you aren’t the cause (for once). Part of you wants to ask him what’s wrong, but a much larger part of you is screaming to just leave it alone. For a while, you listen to that larger part. You begin working with Kevin to choreograph the song and while it was a bit awkward for you, you find it much easier to work with him than with previous partners you’d had. You ignore the way your skin burns every time he touches you— correcting your posture, helping you with a movement. You ignore how much you enjoy his hands on your body, however faint his touch is.
You’d admit that Kevin was right about the tension. The air felt stuffy, the walls closing in on you. It was erotic, the choreography Kevin had created. It was fast, and most of the moves you’d gone through required you to have your body close to his. The audience, however, would love this, just like Kevin said. So, no, you weren’t against admitting when Kevin was right, and you would have told him that at the end of practice.
Really, you would have!
But then Kevin starts pissing you off.
Small, quiet comments about how ridiculous you look. Insulting how you do a specific move. Nitpicking every step, every breath, every water break. Sweat is dripping down your neck by the time Kevin officially lets you stop for a while. You can see how tired he is, can see his shoulders slumping and his legs wobbling every time he steps.
“I think we should call it a day.” You call over to him, and he scoffs.
“Of course you would say that.”
Your eyebrows furrow, and you set your water bottle down.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Kevin spins to face you as you say this, his jaw ticking and his hands clenched into fists.
“You know exactly what it means, Y/N.” He sneers, standing tall when you take long strides over to him.
“No, actually,” you fold your arms over your chest, “I don’t know what it means.”
“Then I’ll tell you.” His face is now inches from yours, and you back up a bit. Just enough for your face to not be so close to his. “I think you’re losing your touch. I think that you’re sloppy, that you’re arrogant, you can’t admit when you’re wrong.”
Kevin goes on listing these qualities, these faults, and all the while you can only scoff knowing that those are exactly the same things you would use to describe him.
“I think that—” he continues, but then you’re interrupting him.
“Shut the fuck up, dude.” You can’t stop your eyes from rolling, but it’s not as if you’d planned to hold back anyway. “You think you’re any better than me?”
“Yes, I do.” Kevin tilts his head with a mocking smile. “I think I’m a thousand times better than you.”
“You aren’t,” you tell him, and he bites his tongue when you pretend to pout. “Sorry to burst your egotistical, self-absorbed bubble, but you aren’t better than me. You aren’t a better dancer, a better student, or a better person.”
Kevin’s gaze hardens, and you don’t notice the step he takes toward you. Or, maybe, you do and choose to ignore it. Maybe it’s exactly what you wanted.
“You’re full of shit.” He breathes out, and you can feel a few strands of his hair brush against your forehead. The corner of your lips lifts into a lopsided smirk.
“And so aren’t you. We aren’t so different now, are we Moon?”
A few silent moments. Bated breaths of air. The tension between the two of you is something unlike anything you’d felt before. You take a deep breath, ready to step away from him, and then his lips are crushed against yours in a furious kiss. There’s no love or care for one another behind it, just a fatal mixture of hate and lust for one another. A build-up of tension that could only be dispelled by the two of you.
Kevin’s hands are all over your body— squeezing at your hips, running up and down your waist, brushing over the curve of your ass. Your own hands tear at his clothes, stretching the fabric beyond repair, and your nails sink into his skin, breaking it and making him hiss in pain. Your lips mesh together, your teeth clacking together and your tongues pushing together in more of a fight than a dance of dominance.
You allow yourself to be backed into the mirror, too caught up in how good his lips feel against yours, and you almost forget how much you supposedly hate him. When his lips fall to your neck and your hands scrape their way up his back, you want to let yourself forget about all the horrible things he’s said to you. His teeth sink into the skin of your neck, listening to the way you groan at the sting, and then his tongue is laving over the spot, his lips sucking at the skin at the same time. He does that over and over again, practically covering every inch of your throat with these marks until it looks like a wild animal got to you.
“I hate you,” Kevin lifts his face from your neck, grabbing your face in one hand and squeezing your cheeks together. His eyes are dark with so many emotions that it has your stomach churning. “I hate you so fucking much.”
You try to respond, but he just squeezes your face tighter and grins maliciously at your desperate whine. He kisses you again, uncaring of the fact that your lips are smushed together and your can’t exactly kiss him back. In fact, it’s almost like that’s exactly what he wants. He wants you to struggle against him, wants you desperate and whining.
“Isn’t this nice?” He teases, his mouth a hairsbreadth from your own. “Finally quiet for me. You’re so much prettier when you aren’t talking back to me. If I let you go, are you gonna stay quiet?”
He releases you, and you surge forward to connect your lips in another kiss. Your arms are around his neck and his slide down to your legs, haul you up, and press you against the mirror. You wrap your legs around him, clinging tightly and forcing him impossibly closer to you. Something shifts in the way you move against each other, no longer just your lips and hands, but now your hips are grinding together and you’re moaning, and Kevin is breathless against you, throwing his head back and groaning into the open air. You use this as an opportunity to return the favor, marking his neck up in the same way he’d marked yours (if not a bit harsher).
“Fuck,” Kevin hisses, hands squeezing so hard at your thighs you know they’ll be bruised in the morning. “Always gotta be so harsh, don’t you?”
“You just did the same thing to me,” you snap back, your body shuddering as he continues to rut against you. Your voice is shaking, containing not nearly the amount of malice you’d hoped it would. You sound desperate, you sound like you want him. Which, of course, you do. But you would prefer it if Kevin didn’t know that.
Too late.
His eyes are gleaming as if in a trance and his hands slide to your ass to drag your hips harder against yours. The pleasure continues to build, your eyes rolling back, and your head falling against the mirror.
“Thought you hated me,” Kevin coos and laughs when you moan out his name. “Poor baby, so desperate for me you can’t even speak.”
“H-Hate you,” you whine. “Hate you s-so much.”
“I’m sure you do, baby.” He hums, watching as your body begins to convulse. He can feel himself getting closer as well, his dick twitching in his sweatpants. “Go ahead, cum all over the man you hate.”
And you do. Your body shudders, back arching off the mirror as you moan and sob against him. Your hips continue to rut into his, and eventually, he drops his head into your chest, laving with his tongue at the skin exposed by your t-shirt. Your hands are in his hair, holding tightly to the strands.
After a moment, you tap at Kevin’s head to get his attention.
And boy, do you get it.
As if he was hit with a wave of post-nut clarity, he practically drops you to the ground with a crazed look of horror in his eyes. You frown at him, stumbling back to your feet with legs made of jelly.
“You okay?”
He backs away from you, nearly tripping over his feet. You follow him, but he’s too fast.
“Don’t— don’t fucking come near me.” He snarls, and you flinch. It’s not fear. It’s hurt. You’re not sure why the statement hurt you, but it did and the feeling stabbed into your heart like a golden dagger. “Stay the fuck away from me. This— this was a mistake. You were a mistake.”
It’s become a sort of habit for him, you think, watching as he slams the door to the practice room. You still aren’t quite sure why it hurts, why your throat feels like it’s closing up and your stomach churns with displeasure. You turn to face the mirror, tracing a hand up your neck to touch the marks on your neck and there’s a sad smile plastered on your face.
It can’t be helped when he’s hated you for so long.
There’s a crack in your heart, and you wonder if it’ll be fixed just like the crack in your bone from the last time he hurt you.
Kevin slams the door of his car so harshly he almost fears he broke it. The engine rumbles to life, and tires screech against the ground as he speeds out of the parking lot and gets far, far away from you.
His hands are shaking, so unsteady that he’s almost afraid he’ll get into an accident. His heart is pounding. Adrenaline, maybe. Fear is more likely. Fear of what he’d just done, what he could have done. It terrifies him, the rush of emotions he’d felt when you looked at him.
It didn’t make sense to him. You were supposed to hate him, to want him dead. Why did you look at him like that? Like he hung the stars in the sky and painted the moon just for you. Why. Why. You ruined everything.
A choked sob forces its way up his throat, and he covers his mouth with the back of his hand.
He doesn’t understand it. Why is he feeling so many emotions from this? He shouldn’t. He shouldn’t be feeling this…this…
Kevin doesn’t even understand the emotion he’s feeling, so he decides he won’t bother.
He’ll ignore you, avoiding you as best he possibly could. You’ll practice alone, that way he won’t have to speak with you.
Avoid, ignore, hate. Avoid, ignore, hate.
That was the perfect solution.
Avoid you and the inevitable questions you’ll have.
Ignore you and the looks you’ll send him. The confusion, the anger.
Hate you. Hate the way you make him feel, the way you make him want you.
Hate you.
Hate you
Love you.
© itsbeeble. do not steal, claim, or repost.
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my door is always open
kevin x gn!reader
part of my soulmate series
tags: soulmate au (sharing bruises), hurt/comfort, angst, neighbor/friend!kevin, yn has a cheating boyfriend (who is not kevin)
wc: 1.5k
a/n: i listened to younghoon's say something fancon performance on loop while writing this and maybe it shows lol
series masterlist | tbz masterlist
The cold from the pavement crept through the fabric of your pants making you freeze. You knew you couldn’t stay out here forever, but going inside meant facing him and you weren’t ready, not yet. You’d had your suspicions for a while. But now the proof was on your neck in the shape of hickeys that someone else had left on his skin. It felt so calculated, making sure you knew without having to tell you, breaking your heart without having to be the one to bring it up. No, he was waiting it out, leaving the ball in your court. Perhaps he could even rid himself of feeling guilty if he just riled you up enough, staying calm and composed and winning himself the right to call you hysterical for lashing out. Sure, he was the one to hurt you first, but no need to verbally attack him, right? You could talk it out calmly—not that he’d feel like there was anything to talk about in the first place. Maybe he hurt your feelings, but that was something for you to come to terms with. He couldn’t always be the perfect boyfriend and act in the way you wanted him to; after all he was just a person and you wouldn’t make him apologize for being human now, would you?
It was always like this. And the saddest part was, you’d accepted it time and time again, apologized for every time he hurt your feelings just to keep him by your side. Because you loved him. Because he was your soulmate. And even now you were feeling the same way. You would have followed him anywhere, if only he hadn’t crossed this one line that was so visibly inexcusable that even you couldn’t bring yourself to bow your head. If it’d just been the growing suspicion it would have been one thing. You could have played it off as your mind playing tricks on you. But he’d decided to take away any room for interpretation, letting you carry the traces of his cheating on your skin for you and the whole world to see.
And even with all that, you felt like you wanted to forgive him; even now you didn’t want to give up on him. So, you sat on the pavement with the cold creeping into your bones, trying to drag out the confrontation for as long as you could, because as long as you didn’t go inside you wouldn’t have to make a decision between him and yourself. As long as you didn’t go inside you hadn’t lost either of the two.
“What are you doing out here? Forgot your keys?” Kevin’s voice pulled you out of your thoughts.
You wiped away your tears, hoping he hadn’t seen them through the flimsy light the streetlamp was casting over you. “No, nothing much. Just sitting here.”
Kevin looked at you for a moment longer before sitting down next to you on the pavement. His shoulder brushed against yours, just briefly, but the touch felt comforting. It made you feel less alone. Kevin had always had this effect on you from the moment you’d met him a few years ago. There was something genuine and kind about him that never failed to put you at ease. He didn’t make you feel anxious or second guess yourself all the time the way your soulmate did.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he eventually asked, looking straight ahead instead of burdening you with the weight of his gaze.
“I don’t know.” Your hand self-consciously wandered to your neck, where you knew your soulmate's hickeys were hiding in plain sight. Some of them, at least. “Maybe.”
“Okay.”
He stayed quiet, not pressuring you to go on immediately. Only when he noticed the way you shivered from the cold did he speak up again.
“You can come back to my place for a while, if you want. I could make you a tea?"
You considered for a moment, the thought of being curled up on his couch with a cup of hot tea very enticing. But you couldn’t bring yourself to move, your body frozen in place as if an invisible chain tied you there. “I think I need to sit here a little longer.”
“That’s okay. Just wanted you to know that the option is there. My door is always open for you.” He lightly nudged you with his shoulder. “I mean not literally, because I do not trust the granny living across the street and I’m sure given the opportunity she would steal Morty. But metaphorically it’s—”
You interrupted him with your giggling, the mental image of the old lady trying to steal his pet snake too ridiculous to stay serious. “Thank you,” you said, once you’d stopped laughing, wiping at the corners of your eyes “it really means a lot, Kev.”
“Mhm-mh,” he gave you a soft smile “Not for that.”
You let your head drop against his shoulder, watching as a cat disappeared into the neighbor’s garden. You’d seen it around a few times, thinking it was a stray, but now the older lady that Kevin had deemed suspicious let it in through her terrace door. You felt an odd sense of jealousy. It seemed everyone had a place to go home to, and so did you, except you couldn’t remember the last time it had felt like home.
“He cheated on me,” you eventually whispered into the night. “He didn’t even try to hide it. There’s traces all over me, my neck, my chest, my thighs—I think he wanted me to see.”
“That’s fucked.”
“Yeah.” You paused and for a while it just stayed silent, Kevin patiently waiting for you to go on rather than filling the silence himself.
“Do you think people can change?” you finally asked.
Kevin took a moment to think before he replied and when he did his voice was calm and genuine. “I do. But that doesn’t mean you have to stick around to find out.”
You huffed a small laugh. “You know, that’s a pretty good response.”
“I think so, too.”
“But the sad thing is, I want to. I want to stick around so badly, but I—” your voice quivered and broke and you felt tears welling up in your eyes all over again. “It’s him who doesn’t want me to stick around. He shows it in everything he does, in the way he doesn’t speak to me anymore, in the way he blames me for every little thing, in the way he doesn’t even try to be kind to me—it’s so clear that he doesn’t want me anymore. I know that already, but if he doesn’t say it clearly, if he doesn’t kick me out, I don’t know how to leave.” You sniffed before wiping your runny nose with the back of your hand. “He’s my soulmate. He was supposed to be my forever. How could I leave?” You sniffed again. “But I can’t stay either. If I go inside now, if I let him trample all over my feelings again, I think I’ll lose even the last bits of respect I have for myself.”
“Then don’t go inside,” Kevin said and he made it sound so easy. “You don’t have to. There is no rule that says you have to face him now, after the cruel way he treated you.”
“Wouldn’t that just mean I’m running away from my problems?”
“I’m not saying you should run forever and never confront him. But at times you have to make a strategic withdrawal, or you’ll lose. Just because you don’t feel like you can stand your ground at this moment doesn’t mean you have to go back to him until you can. If you’re not confident to face him right now, then don’t. If going back makes you hate yourself, then don’t.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Maybe not.”
“He’s my soulmate. You can’t just leave your soulmate.”
“I wouldn’t know, I don’t have one.” He turned his head to look at you and his eyes were so earnest, so unapologetically honest that it made your heart ache. “But what use is there in staying with a soulmate that makes you miserable? Shouldn’t your soulmate ease your pain rather than be the one to cause it?”
In your heart, you knew that Kevin was right. You were just letting yourself get hurt over and over again by staying with him. But leaving seemed so scary. It felt like admitting that you’d failed at something that was supposed to be easy.
“But where would I even go?” you whispered.
His hand reached for yours, giving it a comforting squeeze. “I told you, my door is always open.”
His fingers were warm intertwined with your own when you squeezed back. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
You felt like you were ready to get up now.
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