#lonesomes recs | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hyukascampfire · 3 months ago

Text

TO: SOMEONE FROM A WARM CLIMATE ... ❨ O6 ❩ ⸺ 𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘺 𝘦𝘺𝘦𝘴 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦, 𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘺 𝘴𝘰𝘧𝘵 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴

𝓘N WHICH 𝗁𝗎𝗋𝗍 𝖿𝗂𝗓𝗓𝗅𝖾𝗌 𝗈𝗏𝖾𝗋 𝗁𝗂𝗌 𝖾𝗒𝖾𝗌 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗅𝗂𝗇𝖾𝗌 𝗁𝗂𝗌 𝖿𝖺𝖼𝖾. "𝗂𝗍 𝗌𝖾𝖾𝗆𝗌 𝗒𝗈𝗎'𝗏𝖾 𝖺𝗅𝗋𝖾𝖺𝖽𝗒 𝖽𝖾𝖼𝗂𝖽𝖾𝖽 𝗐𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝗂 𝖺𝗆 𝖿𝗈𝗋 𝗆𝖾, 𝗁𝖺𝗏𝖾𝗇'𝗍 𝗒𝗈𝗎?" 𝗁𝖾 𝗌𝗍𝗎𝗆𝖻𝗅𝖾𝗌 𝗎𝗉 𝖿𝗋𝗈𝗆 𝗁𝗂𝗌 𝗌𝖾𝖺𝗍, 𝗍𝗈𝗐𝖾𝗋𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗈𝗏𝖾𝗋 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝗐𝗂𝗍𝗁 𝖺 𝖼𝗎𝗋𝗅𝖾𝖽 𝗅𝗂𝗉. "𝗌𝖺𝗒 𝗂𝗍," 𝗁𝖾 𝖼𝗁𝖺𝗅𝗅𝖾𝗇𝗀𝖾𝗌. "say what i am."

faerie!𝗍𝖺𝖾𝗁𝗒𝗎𝗇 ╱ faerie!𝗒𝖾𝗈𝗇𝗃𝗎𝗇 · ƒ ! r 15k 𝖿𝖺𝗇𝗍𝖺𝗌𝗒 ⸺ smut, angst, unprotected sex, mentions of past trauma, kissing scars, yandere themes, oral f rec, overstimulation, cumming on belly, power play, jealousy and possessiveness ｡ ( playlist )

← rꫀׁׅܻblogs & asks arꫀׁׅܻ always apprꫀׁׅܻciatꫀׁׅܻd! ♡(ᗒᗣᗕ )՞ →

🪶 ⦂ look what's finally out. i almost shed a tear formatting this post. i've missed this series so much. hehe. did i shed a few real tears over this? yes. i know that this part is shorter, and i did cut some stuff out, but i think that it packs the biggest punch. things HAPPEN. there is no meandering here.

“Tomorrow?” Beomgyu says. He’s laid with his shoulder pressed to yours, watching the ceiling the same lazy way you do.

Tomorrow. Leave it to Taehyun to spring stuff on you. Just when this place started feeling like home, here you go packing. You suppose you could stay here with Beomgyu and stick your head in the sand, but what good would that do you? You can’t pretend that the world will stop moving around you if you do. It won’t. Ancient powers will still be toeing at war, and Taehyun will still be general, and you will still be too near to the center of it all than you ought to be. They are indelible truths, so whatever. You’ll go to that war camp with him, if it’s for the best.

For tonight, though, you’ll enjoy Beomgyu’s presence. You almost want to ask him to come with you, but to the kelpie, being dragged into some meandering court war is worse than being left here by himself. Truly, he’ll probably be here thriving by his lonesome. Kelpie is as kelpie does.

You echo the word with a sigh. “Tomorrow.”

He turns to you, mischief sparkling in his mud eyes. Even without words, you know exactly what that look’s supposed to be saying.

“Don’t even start,” you say, elbowing him. “I was just beginning to think that I might miss you. Of course, you had to remind me of your nagging…” There’s no real bite. You’re never really annoyed, and Beomgyu doesn’t really care to run away.

Well, he might. You like to think that he’d at least look back twice were he to get the chance to make his grand escape for the treeline. But this conversation is more of a strange, unconventional comfort for the both of you than it is a genuine consideration.

“You’ll miss the nagging most.” He turns props himself up on an elbow. “Will you talk with the grass stalks when you’re there? The Lord isn’t much for words, and you love to hear your own.”

Gasping, you glare. “Are you calling me annoying? That’s not fair coming from you. You love the sound of your own voice more than any faerie I’ve known, and you love the sound of your own voices.”

Of course, Beomgyu takes pride in that. “I do tell a story good. You should love my voice, too.”

He’s awful, but you laugh. He’s right enough. There was a time, when you first brought him here from his forest, that you’d talked to him for so long into the night that your voice went raw. You had never talked so much in your life.

“I guess the grass will have to do.” You interlace your fingers on your belly.

“They are quite humorous.”

“Whatever, liar,” you snort.

“Oh, but they are.” Sitting up, Beomgyu’s snarled hair hangs as he looks down, impish amusement bursting at the seams of his face. “Such a human thing; to think that because you don’t know it, then it can’t be how it is. Everything has something to say, you just don’t hear it.”

Blinking, you look at him. “I guess that’s true,” you say. You’d always known that there was a lot about the world that you didn’t know, but you are reminded of that more than ever these days. Even just in little things like this. “I wonder how it’ll be.”

Beomgyu looks a little bit less playful. “You’ll need to watch yourself. Humans don’t go to faerie war camps. They won’t be glad to have you there. The Lord thinks he’s protecting you, but our world is feeling the unbalance. Not even his mind, as sharp as he thinks it is, can predict what’s unpredictable.”

How terribly ominous is that. “Do you know something I don’t?” you ask, releasing a short breath for a laugh and fiddling with the trim of your pillow that you’d made pretty with gold swirls.

Beomgyu shoots you one of his eerie, knowing grins that leaves you unsure whether you should laugh with him or worry about what it means.

“What?” you say, giving him a contemptuous frown instead. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

You’re reminded of when he’d told you similar things when he’d helped with your geas. You will never be whole again, but you ought to savor what you’ve got left. Perhaps he does it just to mess with you, but you’ll never be sure. That’s the thing about a faerie: the moment you think you’ve understood who they are and what they’ll do, they’re different the next. Capricious and ever-changing, at least to your human mind.

You’d thought you’d known a faerie once. That’s a lesson better taught than learnt.

Or maybe what you have here, in those strange eyes and that fickle smile, is just friendship, and the things he says are just because of what he is. Maybe you’re trying to look at Beomgyu through the same cracked lens that Yeonjun had left you with. You’d been a trusting girl once. Breathing out a sigh, you take a long look at his face. Shouldn’t you let yourself be her again? Isn’t it unfair to assume the worst of him because of what another did?

“It means that I worry for you,” he says, flopping back down beside you. “And that you should be safe. I don’t wish to live in this terrible estate with just the Lord, some servants, and I.”

You blink up at the ceiling, your throat tight for whatever reason. “A lie,” you say. It comes out more as a rueful complaint than the shoddy joke you intended for it to be. It’s hard when you’re not sure whether or not you believe it to be the truth. He’s the one that said he could lie if he wanted to.

His gaze falls on you, old in its weight. “And so, if it is?” he says. His voice is gentle, or perhaps comforting, in a way you weren’t sure he could be. “Would you make yourself sick debating it? Hanging onto every word to discern whether it's a real truth or a faerie truth?”

Instead of speaking when you don’t know what to say, you turn to him and let his words wrap around your bones.

You would, just as you always have. Out of all the people that’s not fair to, it might just be the most unfair to yourself. You’ll never know for certain, so why torture yourself trying to?

Well, if only it were that easy. If only you could know what someone intends before you give them a tender spot in your chest to leave achingly empty. To leave it bruised and a shriveled, wary husk of its former self.

“And,” he says, full of humor, “if not you, then who would I bother asking to release me from the bridle’s hold? Not the Lord. He wouldn’t tolerate it. He’d keep me here for an eternity, was it convenient for his own plans.”

No, you don’t think he would. Taehyun hadn’t gotten Beomgyu to serve his menial needs; he hadn’t gotten him for himself. You wonder if you’ve been looking at Taehyun through that same, warped lens you’ve been seeing the rest of the world with. Did you let it bend his image into something untrue?

“Of course,” you say, rolling your eyes. “I was wrong. You are predictable. Maybe I’m with Taehyun on that.”

❆

Cutting through snow up to your calves and with a pack on your back and Taehyun’s silhouette leading the way, it’s impossible to not remember the last time you did this. So much has changed since then, and then so much has stayed unchanged.

It’s been months since you two came north. A lifetime ago. And so much has happened between the both of you, quicksand up to your ears, but you can’t say you know him that much better than you did then. You might even know less now. It’d been cut and clean—he was a dark, impolite man that saw the world down his nose.

Going west, it takes less time for frost and white forest floor to give way to green than it had when you went north. Foliage. Seeing a forest untouched by the cold’s bitter death has you breathing in the air, savoring the way it doesn’t sting your lungs. It’s fresh in a different way.

Once your feet begin to ache, you make a small camp for the night. Camp, meaning a fire made of damp wood off the forest floor that’s reluctant to burn and tree stumps to lean your back against. Good that it’s warmer here.

Taehyun gets some poor small forest animal to roast, and you brought some apples to eat on the way. The gamey tang and the sweetness mesh into something that’s not too awful, considering your circumstances. You sit down by the meek fire, holding your palms out at it. You’re not so far away from home yet that the night doesn’t at least make your bones ache with the chill.

“Did you not know until recently that they’d want you to go to the camp?” you say, trying to warm the air between you in the same way you toast your numb fingers.

With one arm propped up on a bent knee and his apple dangling untouched in his hand, he shakes his head. The fire dances an array of oranges and yellows in his eyes. “I’m their general. It doesn’t matter why I did it; if I don’t play the part, it’ll have been for nothing. If I stayed in my estate, they’d have no use for me.”

So, it was his idea. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

Taehyun purses his lips, watching the fire. Thinking about whether or not to say. “I thought it’d upset you,” he says finally after a long moment.

Unsure of what to say to that, you take a pause. Truthfully, you hadn’t expected that—that he thought it would be fine either way, that he hadn’t thought to, that it wasn’t up to him, you might’ve assumed. He was nervous to tell you that he, and by extension you, were going to have to go? He didn’t say it outright. Taehyun never would. But the thought is sweet, in a way. Your lips turn up at the corners, a soft and unexpected smile.

“I guess that’s true,” you say. You would’ve gone either way, though. The fire sizzles and pops as it eats up the wet logs, the little stack falling. “Don’t you worry about the fact that they might find out that you’re not so enthusiastic about the war? To be general?”

“As long as I do their bidding, I don’t think they’ll care what I believe in.” He shrugs. “I play general, they get to have war. If they aren’t coming to our doorstep because we were spies, that’s all I care about.”

You suppose that’s right. Neither of you are looking out to play hero, anyway. Just to survive. The both of you seem to always be doing that together.

“What are they asking of you?” you say. If they’re moving out into camps, then something must be happening. That was inevitable.

“The camp is near the King’s castle. Just a little north of it, on a big grass plane. They’re not looking to be sneaky anymore,” he says. “So, it could be anything.”

Nodding, you cozy back up against the tree. You hope it’s not anything too terrible. For his sake.

❆

Taehyun’s not awake by the time you stir, his arms crossed over his chest and his head back on the bark. A few early birds sing back and forth to each other from the boughs of the trees above you. It’s a sound as fresh and clear as the blue dawn sky and the dew that sparkles from the grass.

How sweet it all would be, did the bottom of your spine not pinch from the night spent upright on your ass, and were there not the unignorable muckiness that clings to your skin from a day spent walking. Dusting your palms of dirt where you’d planted them to the ground, you decide to make a trip to the gentle stream that had lulled you to sleep with its rushing last night. A bath in that water would definitely wake you up quick.

You follow the sound of it until it appears from between two trees. It just looks cold, rushing over the mud riverbank a crystal clear color. You kick off your boots and test it, gasping as it bites. You can’t help but smile at yourself—it’s exactly what you need to come out fresh enough to suffer another day of dragging your feet over the ground.

Getting in is like pins and needles. You peel your clothes off and step in up to your hips, your hisses meshing with the sounds of the morning air. Damn it, it’s cold. Ice cold, as it runs down your spine from where you cup it and wet your hair. And when you’ve gone numb to it, you feel the water rushing in between your fingers, scrubbing it over your skin, letting the crystalline coolness make you clean.

Hopefully, they’ll have some way for you to bathe there. The folk don’t need to bathe for hygiene the way you do, and they’d have no reason to bring a luxury like a tub along in that case. It’s a war camp. You wonder in what other ways it’ll be inhospitable for a human.

Maybe you’ll have to find a river, there, too—

Taehyun’s voice startles you. “You didn’t think to at least tell me you were going?” There isn’t any real bite, more like annoyance.

You freeze, heart kicking into action so hard that you feel it. You thought he’d be asleep for at least until you got back. Covering your chest with your arms, you spin.

“Sorry,” you say, cheeks burning. Why’s this feel so… Well you don’t even know how to put it into words. He’s had his hands all over you, his lips on you, but him catching you like this just is different. Frankly—you’re flustered, aware of each inch of bare skin, water still rolling down your body and your hair laying in wet tendrils, that he has to pretend he doesn’t see. For your sake.

Or maybe it doesn’t phase him. Your tummy flips. Would that be for the better or worse?

“I thought something happened,” he says. Curt. Short. “You shouldn’t be out alone like this. It leaves you vulnerable.” His eyes stay trained on your face—distinctly, purposefully. It’s almost humorous how stone-faced he is. Almost, if your heart wasn’t pounding in your ears.

“I wanted to clean up.” You shiver, maybe at the soft breeze on your wet skin or maybe at the redness of his ears. “I’ll tell you. Next time.” Please go, so I can put some fucking clothes on, you want to add.

“Yeah. That would be useful.” He thumbs the hilt of his sword. “Finish up and meet me back at camp. We should get going.” Unceremoniously, he turns on his heel and disappears back into the trees, spine straight.

Water falls from you as you step onto land, wringing your hair out. You’re just glad he didn’t insist on closing his eyes and staying as you dress to keep watch.

Add that to the list of reasons the air becomes suffocating the moment you’re in proximity to him. It seems that the things you leave unsaid and unaddressed, like those words he’d said to you when he kissed you for the second time, the ones that make your spine tingle the more you pretend they didn’t happen, are sometimes heavier than what you do say.

❆

Camp is a scattering of a few tents raised on a grassy stretch, just as Taehyun had said. Their flags willow in the wind, pointed swords strewn out beside straw-stuffed dummies.

You’re sharing a tent with Taehyun. It’s simple: two beds on opposing sides, trunks for your belongings, and nearly nothing else. You appreciate your bed at home a little more when you plop down into the cushions, but blankets and pillows are better than tree trunks and bark.

Taehyun slips in some time later. It’s dark out behind him as he does, the stars hanging above.

“It’s certainly functional in here,” you say, running your fingers through nasty tangles in your hair like a comb. “A war camp.”

“We’ve both slept in worse.”

“Yeah, we have,” you snort, but don’t miss the distance in his voice. After a few beats, just watching him lean his sword against the wall, you ask, “Did something happen?”

He breathes out slowly through his nose, eyes caught where he’d just placed his heavy, dutiful sword. “They want to go straight for bloodshed. They thought I’d get here and just march into the fucking palace.”

You open your mouth, bracing your hands on the mattress beside you as if unsure if you want to stand up or gawk at him. “What? Just walk right up? How does that make any sense?” you say. “You said no, right?”

“Yes, I said no.” Taehyun sits on his bed and works on the laces of his boots. “It doesn’t just make no sense. It’s not how war works. Not a faerie war.”

“Were they… okay with that? You telling them no?” He’s not a general that has commanded an army at war—not his father. They know nothing but the fact that Taehyun is the General’s son and that he’s come here pretending that he’s somebody to tell them what they should or shouldn’t be doing. The faerie ego is not sympathetic to that.

He grits his teeth, jaw flickering.

No. Most definitely not. “Why go in with swords? They know that, by hospitality, they’d have to entertain us if we asked to be. A feast, a celebration of nothing, literally anything. And then we could make a quiet move while we’re in there. Battling it out in some field is ridiculous.”

Taehyun blinks. Thoughts turn in his head, visible through his eyes. “That would break the rules of hospitality, though.”

“So, they won’t see it coming. It seems better than just throwing armor on and hoping we can outnumber them. You said that the North couldn’t win this, but isn’t that only if we play by their rules? Of course they’ll do better when it’s the stakes they put up.”

“You’re good at that.”

“Well,” you say, unsure and flustered. “It just makes the most sense. I thought it’d be what you were thinking too.”

He lets his head drop into a laugh. A laugh. You don’t think you’ve ever held on to the sound of someone’s laugh the way you do the soft, mellow sound.

You linger on the last remnants of his smile, letting its stark contrast with his usual disposition ring through your bones, as he snuffs out the candle and lets a new, uncharted kind of silence fall over the space.

You linger on it as you fall asleep, too.

❆

The camp becomes more hollow as Taehyun takes up his role. The only time you get to see him now is when he steps into the tent too late in the night. He’s always up earlier than you.

It’s not like you have anything else to do. Other than Taehyun, this place is just an encampment of strange, hard faces and unnerving eyes that watch you as you toil through the days. Eyes that are curious as to why you’re even here. You start to wonder the same, under their scrutiny. It certainly feels like you shouldn’t be.

You know better than to stick your nose in their business or to try and make friends. Instead, you whittle time down with practicing on the fine, veneered bows and taking your needle to any tattered old fabric you see.

Today, you snatched one of Taehyun’s simple black tunics to work away at. All you’d brought in your pack when you had stuffed your essentials in there was some black thread. So you stitch blackthorn branches around the cuffs even though nobody would notice unless they cared to look.

You thread and you thread, letting the world blend into nothing as it always does when you work with your hands like this. The sun sinks from its peak, casting golden afternoon warmth onto your skin from in between tents. You focus on that. When you were a girl, you did the same thing with the goldspun threads you had then. It’s one thing you had for yourself.

Only the sound of something different draws your attention enough to drag you away from decorating the cuffs. A familiar sound; melodic and off-kilter in the same way. Something so singular that you’d know it anywhere, no matter if it made sense or not. Faerie music, and not just any faerie music.

Your feet follow the sound until you find him: a flop of golden hair, freckles spackled over his nose, and music floating away from his lute like magic. Because it is magic.

But, why would he be here?

“How come I knew you’d show up right when I was looking for you?” Kai says. He has clover in his hair, of course he does, and wears a faerie smile. “You have such a strange way of finding yourself in the middle of things. Come for a dance?” He plucks a few notes like an invitation.

You can’t disagree with that. Staying put where you are, you say, “What’s a bard got to do in a place like this?”

“A faerie needs music wherever they will go,” he answers, “and none else more than us antsy for a show.” Crisscrossed in the grass, he puts his instrument down for the first time since you’ve known the strange faerie. “It would not be remiss to say that you and I are both here on equally unlikely terms. Who is to say that you are to be here and I am not, or that I am to be, and you are not?”

Beomgyu’s vernacular has made you at least a bit more accustomed to faerie turns of speech, but Kai speaks the wordiest of them all. A taleteller. That was either fully the truth, or a lie disguised somewhere in those long and gossamer words. It has to be at least partly the truth, though, because Kai is sympathetic to the North.

Or maybe he isn’t. You can’t tell exactly what Kai is, or what he believes in, or if he likes or dislikes you, or if he’s here or there. The only certain thing about him is that you might never know.

“Okay, well,” you say, “I’ll be off then, if we’re playing riddles.”

Kai looks up at you, his brows raised presumptuously. “Why leave when you’ve only just arrived?” he says. “We are two of a kind here. I don’t see why we two can’t be friends. And, oh, do I have something that you ought to see.”

Your interest must show in your face, because he smiles and pats the ground beside him. That could mean a hundred different things, coming from him. You don’t move, eyes narrowed.

“Don’t be wary,” he laughs. It sounds something like bells twinkling in the distance. “What good would it bring me to play tricks on you? You’ll hate to miss what I’ve brought for you.”

Still not entirely convinced, but definitely intrigued, you take a seat on the ground with him, criss-crossing your legs. A gentle breeze tugs your hair one way. It’s a beautiful day. Maybe you should’ve let yourself enjoy it a little.

“Not a trick,” you say, playing with the grass beneath your fingertips. “Then what? I thought you to be the tricksy type.”

The sun gilds his silhouette, making his hair into true gold around the edges. He laughs, nose wrinkling with such joy that you wonder if it really was that funny. “You suffer trust,” he says.

It’s nothing but a flippant, passing remark. Nonetheless, it strikes you deep, because deep down you know it’s the truth. You just hate that it’s so obvious to them and their kind. You hate that everything about you is obvious to them. It’s as though they reach in and flip through your pages, while you’re stuck out here trying to figure it out yourself. Beomgyu had done the same.

The long moment in which you look at him makes him laugh again, shaking his head. “Here. Let me show you.” He reaches into a pocket.

A letter. He produces a letter. You aren’t stupid enough to pretend that it might be from Beomgyu or anybody else. Belly dropping, you know exactly who’s written to you.

“I don’t want it,” you rush out. “Keep it. Send it back to him and tell him I won’t be taking any of his letters.”

You keep telling yourself that you’re past it. Past him. No healed person has to remind themselves that they are, or has to choke down the lump in their throat at a slight reminder as this. It is achingly pathetic.

Kai seems to think so, as well. He furrows his brows. “You don’t want them? Are you not lovers?”

“No, we are not,” you lie. Or, well, it’s the truth, but it’s as venomous as a lie on your tongue. “It doesn’t matter. I wonder why he would send you all the way here just for this.” Now, it’s clear why Kai is here at this camp.

He grins, because your reaction makes it obvious to anybody looking close enough. “Take it. Read it at least once, and then burn it if you must. I can’t leave this place until you have it.”

That doesn’t sound so awful. Tentatively, you accept it into your hands.

Kai, in a different tone of voice than before, points at the little patch of clover that you wouldn’t be wrong to assume he stole the ones in his hair from. A four leaf clover stands proud in the center of them. “Luck, it seems,” he says, “has its own say.”

What that means, you don’t know. You take his letter and burn it in a candle flame, watching the words float up in curls of wispy smoke. Not for anger, but because you know better than to do this again. You know yourself and how much you love his sweet words too much to even allow yourself to read them first.

And over the weeks the next came and then the next. You burnt those ones too. Seeing Kai becomes your routine, stepping out into fresh air to go sit with him wherever it is. A damp patch of grass, on a fallen log out in the edge of the forest, in between two tents. He’s somebody to talk to, and goodness are you hungry for that. He’ll play old songs for you, telling you stories in which you are even less sure whether or not they’re bolstered with dramatics than Beomgyu’s.

Goodness, you miss that horse. You ask Kai to take something to him for you, since he’s coming in and out anyway. The letter you get back makes you laugh out loud. In jagged, unsightly lines, he scrawled back, sending letters now, are we? You’re just surprised he knows how to write, honestly. Would it be a cruel joke to write back and say, you’re free? Would that even work over ink? It seems that you’ll be here forever, with the way things are going now. The long haul. Taehyun wouldn’t even know Beomgyu was gone until you got back.

Nonetheless, you are certain he’s content there by himself, though it isn’t the loch he wishes it would be.

There’s always something happening here, and you live just on the outskirts of it. You’re not sure what. Taehyun doesn’t come to tell you about it, but from what you’ve pried at Kai over, you know that things aren’t going well. You figured as much, what with the quietness that Taehyun returns with every night, the weight of responsibility heavy on his shoulders, and the way his face has become sharper.

The weight of a leader that he will shoulder, because he believes it to be his duty.

❆

For the first time in a while, Taehyun comes back at an hour that you’re not opening one heavy eye to watch him through. Kicking the blankets off your legs, you sit up and watch him peel his doublet over his head, the one with the Blackthorn crest in silver.

And then he takes his tunic off, and there is his back, bared to your eyes. Your stomach erupts with violent butterflies. His muscles move under his skin, precise and powerful, the movement of him throwing the fabric elsewhere showing them off beneath each jagged old wound. At the top, in his shoulder blade, is one that you recognize.

“That looks better than when I last saw it,” you say, voice gentle with sleepiness.

Taehyun pauses, looking over his shoulder. “I thought you were asleep. I’m sorry.”

Tension; tension as thick as smoke in the air between you. It’s been that way for a while now. Suffocating.

“No, it’s okay.” You purse your lips. “I haven’t gotten to talk with you much. I stayed up a bit later.” The fact that it insinuates that you’ve been waiting to speak with him, you don’t address. You sleep in the same little space every night. It’s hard not to want that.

Sitting on his bed, elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped, he looks at you for a long moment. “Is that so?” he says. “I didn’t know.”

How could he know? It’s not like the two of you have ever been the way you and Beomgyu had. The way you and Yeonjun had. There’s always been this exact indescribable tension underlying it all between you. Something you are desperate to understand, but in the same way, deeply frightened to.

Crossing the room, you sit beside him. “I know you’re busy,” you say, filling the candle-lit air with words. “The stitches. They helped? It doesn’t look so bad.” You lie. It’s a gnarly scar, still red and tender, but no longer an open wound. For some reason, though you don’t think another scar would bother him too much, you don’t want him to know that it’s unsightly. It’s not what he deserves to hear. He got that one carrying your poisoned self when he didn’t need to.

There are a lot of things he did for you that he didn’t need to, and you struggle to grapple with why he did. Why he left behind a spy’s golden trove of information as if those years of his life meant nothing. Why he did a number of the things he did, when it made no sense for him to. Taehyun isn’t one who will do the kinder thing over the rational thing. So, then, why?

“They did,” he hums, his voice low. “It healed up fine. Thank you.”

There’s a few long beats of silence. You’re looking at his back, curved forward into a bend, and you blurt it. You curse yourself even as it's coming out, because it’s a ridiculous thing to ask, really.

“Can I…?” you say, a soft thing that trails off toward the end. Bringing your palm up, you hover it just over his back.

Taehyun tenses up, but he doesn’t object.

His skin is everything that a living thing’s should not be, under your palm. Cold; bitterly so, and each long, marred line is a groove under the pads of your fingertips. His back is torn up, and then smooth muscle where it isn’t. It makes your stomach sick.

“Are these… all from him?”

The timbred rumble of his voice reverberates through your palm. “No. Not all of them.” You run your fingers over a vicious, sideways scar. Something once festering and visceral, but his skin mended into something whole once more. That jagged mark will never leave, though. “But some are.”

His voice is distant and tight. You know it’s that he thinks speaking of it is pitying himself, when he survived it already. He doesn’t see it how you do—how much it’s clear that those still bother him. Your heart clenches in your chest, but you hold back all the things brimming on your tongue. You don’t want him to think you pity him.

“How did you get that one?”

He surprises you by answering. “The day I learned I was strong enough to fight him.”

Your hand freezes on his back. You knew each had a story, but hearing them is different. “What happened?” you ask, gentle but prodding. You wonder which parts of him were built by that man, and which still remind him of it.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Taehyun says. His voice is terse; walls beginning to draw back up.

“No, it doesn’t.” You thumb the scar he got with you, and then so very slowly, you press a soft kiss to just beside it . Your breath puffs out from your nose, warmth over the frigidity of him.

Taehyun shudders. His heart thumps in his chest—you can hear it, up this close. An unsteady rhythm, frantic against his ribcage. When he sits up and turns to look at you, his eyes are something different. Somewhere between intense, frightened, or unsure.

Your heart mimics his. With your voice soft, you say, “I’m sorry for that one.”

Where he had walked in here a war general with hard eyes and his jaw tight, the man you see now is one who hasn’t ever known a gentle touch, who hardened himself so that he couldn’t. And yet—like a frightened, unsure animal, he lets you in just enough to know that you won’t balk at his unsightliness. Beyond just his torn-up body. That doesn’t bother you, beyond the heaviness knowing what he was made to survive leaves you. Rather, down to what he is at his very core.

❆

Most of what you know about what’s happening comes from Kai. Not that Kai has ever shown animosity toward you—with time, you’ve come to at least enjoy listening to him playing for hours. You wish Taehyun would come to you to talk about it. Wish that he felt like he could.

What is this, between you? Is it trust, or not? You don’t know. You don’t even know how you feel, let alone even beginning to know how he does. But with this, shouldering it all himself, it looks like maybe he doesn’t. And, then again, his favorite tunic to wear for weeks has been the one that you made pretty. The threading that only he and you would know was there. Small gestures, and whatever they mean from him.

The sentiment toward Taehyun, with the faeries here, and you’re sure back home in the North, is starting to sour toward him. His moves have all fallen apart, ended up with us worse than we started off with. You keep a distance between yourself and all of that—but even you know what’ll happen if that trend keeps up. What use is a general that will lead you into loss? They’ll rid themselves of him.

Worse. You choose not to think about that, or the dark pit it leaves in your stomach.

It makes no sense at all. Taehyun is capable and intelligent—he doesn’t do anything without considering it. If anybody in this world was to succeed in something like this, it’s him. But suddenly he is not, and you watch it weigh on him.

And then, there’s Yeonjun. His sending letters tells you he’s at least okay. You might make peace with receiving and burning them forever, did you still not wonder about him, or ache for somebody to hold some nights. There had been a time in your life when you had never known what it was to hold or to be held, and still you lived. A bitter part of you wishes you never did. It’s like what Beomgyu had said: You’ve only got so much of yourself. Each time you fill yourself up with our magic, you lose that space. You will never be whole again

You will never be whole again. Yeonjun’s love was magic in its own right, even if it wasn’t really. It sometimes seems like it’s a hollow, empty spot inside of you where he sat. But that’s not right. It’s that he is still there, and always will be, and you feel as much when you try and pretend otherwise. So now you are to live forever as if you didn’t know him, didn’t love him, and it aches. You cannot pretend it doesn’t.

So, sometimes, you consider whether or not it’s better to live without him forever or to forget yourself and indulge. It’s not like he ever was a pure evil. Hardly that. But when you get to thinking about how sweet he’d been, how much you enjoyed it, you remind yourself of what he did, who he’s left you as. For the better. For the better.

You worry that he really will make good on what he wrote in those letters. Regardless of what he sends you now, you choose not to look. Losing you was fresh, then. Yeonjun is not nonsensical, just hurt. You tell yourself that, anyway.

Taehyun’s in your tent before you even are tonight, slipping in after a long evening of Kai trying to teach you the lute. As handy as you are, music seems to be out of the question. You don’t just spend time with him on days where he comes with letters—it’s most of your days, now. It’s easier that way.

His shoulders are rigid. He sits, so still and lost in thought. Sword still on his hip and still dressed down to his boots, he probably hasn’t moved since he sat there. It’s not hard to imagine what it is.

“What’s wrong?” you ask, ruffling through your trunk for something to make a snack out of. “Do they still not trust you?”

Taehyun scoffs. “They don’t just not trust me. They want me out. Not all of them, but the loud ones. They think that I’m doing it on purpose.” Laughing with a caustic edge, he shakes his head and looks at you. “I wish I was.” After a moment, he adds, “How did you know?”

“Kai said as much,” you say. Forget eating.

A look of something akin to realization flashes over his eyes, and then he nods. “Of course. Of course.”

“...What?” you say, knitting your brows.

“Somebody’s been telling my people that I’m a traitor. Somebody’s been making sure that each and every one of my moves goes down in flames. Somebody was sent here to do a prince’s bidding and give you his letters.”

Pausing, you frown. You didn’t think that Taehyun knew about those, but you also think that he’s just pieced that together himself. “But I’ve been with him most days,” you say. You were today, and then just the day before. “He wouldn’t have been able to.”

Jaw working, Taehyun trains his eyes on you. “Does that mean you were with him always? And that doesn’t mean that he dirtied his own hands.” He pauses, softening his tone the littlest bit. “You don’t know him as well as you think you do.”

You know that. Goodness, do you know that. You might say that he’s just avoiding considering the fact that it could be that his moves have failed, but that’s not Taehyun. If it were that, it wouldn’t bother him like this. He’d try a new approach, find a way, because he is utterly capable. That’s the problem, and why he’s come to this conclusion. Because he already knows that it’s the truth.

“Then, should we do something that couldn’t be sabotaged?”

He waits for you to elaborate with interest shining in his dark eyes.

Flushing, you’re reminded of the last time he trusted you enough to follow your lead, and how it ended for you. Still, he looks ready to do it again. You take a gnaw at your lip before saying, “We could do something. Us, if they’re just gonna mess it up when you send others. That way we know that it gets done, and they’ll see that it’s not your fault. They’ll trust you again, even if someone’s running their mouth.”

Taehyun thinks about that for a few moments. The silence as he does reminds you again of what you stand to lose if it went sideways. “They’re not as easy to convince as that. Not if somebody’s still in their ears, and if they’ve already decided that I’m not who they want leading their army.” A beat. “But, better that than letting it happen.”

You let out a long sigh, settling down opposite of him on his bed. Letting the silence stir between you with only your eyes speaking for a few moments, you say, “You think it’s him?” Not Kai—Yeonjun. At least, the one who would want this.

“I know it is.” His face goes hard, a sharpness you’re familiar with. “And you cozied right up with his messenger. It’s ironic.”

Gritting your teeth, you shoot back, “That’s not fair.”

Taehyun doesn’t answer you. His eyes burn with something beyond anger—an expression that you can just barely name hurt. You hold back the reflexive scoff that begs to come tumbling out like an old habit. Back to this. Searching his face, you try to find what, exactly, has him looking at you like that.

“Don’t do that,” you say. The emotion that comes out with it, straining the words, surprises you. “You’re just… shutting me out again. I thought you…” You don’t finish your sentence, but the air carries the meaning along for you. I thought you would let me in.

He doesn’t answer, but there’s a flash of something over his face. A wince. Like he wants to say something, but he can’t let himself.

“Why do you do that?” you say. Your blood roars to life in your veins, and you find your mouth straining under the weight of words you’ve wanted to say, just like it has for so long. And then it buckles. “To be honest with you, Taehyun, nothing you do makes any sense. One minute, you’re looking at me so cold that it looks like I mean nothing to you, and then another you’re… You’re saying stuff that I don’t understand. One second you won’t even speak to me, and then you’re leaving behind your life because I wanted to stay with Yeonjun. Why? Why would you do that? Why didn’t you go back and tell them I was a traitor kissing their prince? Why didn’t you get me killed? You make me think…” Your voice cracks despite you, but you don’t care if it makes him see you weak. “ It’s not fair.”

The tent falls silent, the air a thousand pounds, each beat sounding like you’ve said it now. Chills erupt over your arms, and you can take none of them back, so no matter what, you will at least finally know. Finally. Your stomach is done so tight up in knots.

“Because I never cared about being a spy,” he says, face dropped. “Or about being general, or being Lord of an estate, or about what people thought of me either way, or about any King or Queen or wars.”

Reeling, you breathe. The slow sound of it fills the room, but the pounding of your heart in your ears roars over it. That makes no sense at all. Your mind buzzes.

“Why did you do any of it, then, Taehyun? What do you care about?”

His throat works. Those cold eyes have something tender in them, but not a gentle tender. Tender like an old wound that he’s long since licked clean himself, that he hates to poke and examine out loud. Despite it, he tells you. Just for you, because you tend to always need him to do so.

“Nothing. I cared for nothing.” He’s rigid, so out of place, sat in front of you. “So I gave myself purposes.”

That word, cared, puts in context so much that you have to blink and make your head stop spinning just so that you can catch a solid thought. He cared for nothing. You have had Taehyun wrong in your head down to a ridiculous, fundamental level. Taehyun didn’t become who he is because that’s what he wanted. He was a ghost, a shell left hollowed out, floating between duties that he assigned himself just to survive, like becoming a spy, or whatever else he did. He had no goal, no place he cared to call home. Never want or let himself want anything—froze himself from the inside out to ensure it.

Cared, as if he found something to care for. Your mouth dries up, belly doing flips. Because, of course he didn’t care about leaving behind his life to follow you wherever you went, when he has been cold for so long, and he felt something. Of course he went to any lengths, no matter how unsure his motivation seemed to you then, to keep you safe. Of course he tried to mold himself into Yeonjun’s shape, as unbending and unmoldable as he is, because he felt that whatever hollowness he saw inside himself, you would not want. He knew that he was pushing you away because he doesn’t know how to nurture something like that, so he tried to veneer himself with bits of the man you were so enraptured with. Filled that hollowness up with something he thought would make you look his way—but of course he’d never say it. He couldn’t make himself, no matter how much he wanted it. Because that is who Taehyun is: a contradiction of himself.

All those time’s he’d frozen up and lashed out at you, because it was fucking killing him. Seeing you with Yeonjun. You had thought moments ago that it was Yeonjun who was the one with a bottomless sea of wants. Well, where Yeonjun wants, Taehyun needs. He will have you, because somebody who has only ever let themselves want something once is not going to just let it go.

What could you even say to that? How could you digest the bigness of it? Instead of trying, you go utterly still and wide-eyed in front of him.

He wanted something to trust. Searching his eyes, the ones that have gotten even more wildly tender in your silence, you determine that. Taehyun had nothing and nobody, not his father, not his killed mother, not a single one of his own kind in this world, to trust.

You, hands curled into the fabric of your clothes, breath fully for the first time in a while. You think you know the feeling. You think that you have become intimately familiar with the severe lack of it. That much, you can offer him.

The words fall from your mouth floaty and ethereal. Something unreal in the orange, all-too-real glow of the space. “I understand.”

About all the things that just came crashing over your head like ice water, or about the yearning for trust, you’re not sure. Either way, you do.

❆

Crouched behind some bushes, your knees dig into the mud. In front of you, the High King’s palace stands proud, briars crawling up its walls and strange, unpredictable windows here and there. It looks more like a festival hall than a palace.

Taehyun decided that doing something, just the two of you, like you had said, was best. It’s reminiscent of where you began. The two of you, spies again. In a way.

It’s nostalgic, but then it’s also so… new. The air between you, charged with new energy, but energy that grips you all the same. So many questions were answered, but so many cropped up to fill their absence.

But this feels lighter. You can’t discern why, when it fully should leave your spine tingling. The gravity of what he feels for you should tug you straight down to the earth with the force of it. It doesn’t. Turning to where he crouches beside you, you eye the lines of his profile. Your heart does a little jump.

“Now?” you say.

“A minute. We have to wait for the watch to change.” He tilts his head up in a point gesture toward the massive door at the main entrance.

“Or, we could go in another way. I’m sure they have other doors. How can we just walk right in?”

“There could be a door in through the servant’s quarters, but…” he says, eyes flicking over to you.

“That sounds like it would be better, though. Easier.” The hall is massive—you don’t doubt they use servants to make it run.

Running a thumb over the bottom of his sword at his hip, a little thing you noticed he does, Taehyun falters. “They keep human servants,” he says.

Like Soobin. Glamoured to be brainless hands, floating like spirits around the halls to fulfill their assigned purpose. You eye its walls and think of how easily you could’ve found yourself there. Some fates are fairer than others. You wish you knew why.

“We’ll wait until we see those watchmen leave. Then we can slip in.” He says it as fact. “We’ll search rooms. It’s not much, but we could use leverage. Anything.”

You nod slowly, and then turn to watch through the gaps in the leaves.

The watch does change, as Taehyun has said. You slip in silently, and nobody stops you. If it’s so easy to make your way into here, maybe war with them wouldn’t be so unimaginable. Your eyes dart everywhere as you do. It couldn’t really be that easy.

But it is. You split off from Taehyun. At the center, there’s an opening hall where feasts must be held. You imagine how many of those have happened there, and how many of the kinds of stories Kai tells you might’ve started right beneath that high ceiling. You don’t linger long enough for anybody to find you, but you do take in the look of the walls and imagine how Yeonjun would’ve done the same years ago. His home.

You peek your head into a number of rooms. None look like anything important, but you dip in to scan them just in case. Not counting the guards, you haven’t seen a soul. Empty; each room, empty. With how alive Court had been in the north, this is starkly not that. A dead palace. How strange, considering that the North is known for its bitterness and unwelcoming nature, and this place the opposite. It doesn’t feel that way.

You come to a room that gives you pause. It’s decorated not too differently from the rest, a bedroom as opposed to studies and other sorts of rooms, bathed in crushed velvet greens. The floor is littered with a strange array of things, surfaces dusted. It’s even more vacant than the rest of the hall, left untouched by whoever called it theirs once.

And, it’s familiar. You just get this achy, tingling feeling in your core. Bending down, you blow dust off some paint. It’s bright and colorful in ways only something from the human world is. Reds, blue, yellow, a rainbow in a little palette of dried up colors. A few unfinished, amateurish canvases lean against a wooden dresser. Decks of cards, none like any from here, scatter over the wood panelling.

Yeonjun always did like keeping human things. Dragging in a long, deep breath, you try and see if you can catch the woody, warm scent of him, left lingering here where he no doubt spent so much time. Nothing but the musk of an empty, dusty room meets you.

Picking up a leatherbound book from the blanket, you sit and pull it open. It creaks like old leather. The pages are moth-bitten and most are blank.

In an elegant hand, you find a written page. That handwriting. You loose a steadying breath.

It reads, They say I’d only make some stupid order that all humans would be free from our people, were I King. Would that really be so terrible?

You wet your lips. It’s some letter that never ended up with whoever he intended it for. Seeing that he did, in fact, live a wholly different life is strange. He left it behind for reasons that you know—he hated this place. Still, seeing it all confirmed. In front of your face. The rebellion must mean a lot to him. It seems, reading these little bits left behind, that he had his reasons. And obviously, he did. Nobody leaves behind their life for no reason. The time he spent in the human world changed him. Or, it magnified what had always been there: a soft spot.

Footsteps come for the door. You snap the book shut, but the door’s already opening.

“Hey,” Taehyun says.

Clinging to the leather, you let yourself breathe. “Hey,” you echo.

“You’re not great at being quiet,” he says, lips tilting up to one side in something that you could call almost playful. “You’re lucky that there’s nobody here. Anybody with my ears would’ve known you were in here.”

You figured as much. “Why, though? Where are they?”

“I don’t know where.” His gaze flickers around the room before landing back on you. “They have never left this hall. I thought that they would’ve just sat in here and let us right in before ever leaving.”

“Eerie…” you hum, hopping off the bed.

“Yeah.” Thoughts swirl behind those eyes. “They were smart enough not to leave anything, either. I found nothing.”

Looking down at the book you clutch to your chest, you purse your lips. Neither had you, but no part of you wants to leave this to be gnawed on some more. So, you don’t.

❆

Pulling back the bowstring comes easier now. It creaks, your arms aching. But you release your breath in a slow, measured puff, eyes finding the center of a straw bullseye a hundred yards down.

You let it fly. It cuts the air straight and makes its mark a little left of dead center. Always a little left… You huff, arms aching. Kai plays a song that faded into background noise thirty minutes ago.

“You shoot well,” Kai says. You can hear the smile in his voice. “You taught yourself?”

Shooting him a glance, you shake your head.

“Then, the General taught you himself,” he deducts. “An interesting thing.”

“I guess. A lot of things are interesting. Like how you play music the way you do.” A deflection, more than anything.

Kai pats the face of his lute. “You’ve learned how to speak like us, though you can lie. That, of all things, is interesting. You’ve spent more time around our kind than most. Tell me, what have you learned?”

He’s no doubt collecting a story he thinks he can make into a song. A storyteller like him is always listening and watching for another. That’s one way to be immortalized in this world. “I have no reason to lie,” you say, tinted with a laugh.

“Don’t you?” he says, playful eyes watching you.

“Don’t I?” Forget your bow—you toss it elsewhere. “Am I the one with a reason to lie?”

Cocking his head to the side, his mouth splits into a grin. Many of the folk are glad for animosity; Kai seems to be the type. He knows exactly what you mean. “You have a lot to say. I’d like to hear it.”

You do. But where do you start? Instead of asking him something that beats around the bush, something he could find a loophole in, you’ll ask him plainly. That’s a start. “Why are you trying to sabotage us? Is it because of Yeonjun? Did he ask you to?”

“He did,” Kai answers, without any flounce or fakery. Straight up. It shocks you. It shouldn’t be that easy. He could’ve just as well not answered. That might’ve been as much an answer as saying it outright, though. “Does that make you hate him?”

Freezing in place, your mouth doesn’t move to say yes. You don’t know how to answer that. You wish you did. Instead, you say, “What does he think he’s achieving? What if they find out that he’s sneaking around? It’s stupid.”

“It is,” Kai hums. The day is overcast, but his colors aren’t dulled by the grey sky. “When the prince feels, he feels it true. He makes his mind, and then he lives for it.” The way his eyes meet yours strikes you. Full of meaning. “What, then, would he change his mind on something like a purpose he believed as he did that one for?”

“I’m asking you,” you say. Yeonjun feels deeply and unapologetically, you are already intimately aware of that. From the moment he told you that his initial purpose was to identify and have you as spies killed, you have wondered how deeply he stood for the cause. That’s another thing that’s troubled you for the fact that you can’t make peace with it.

Well, since he’s here in front of you, it’s best to just ask.

“Did Yeonjun love me? Really love me?”

“He did, but I believe you know that already. That’s not what you really wonder.”

You hate that he knows. Gritting your teeth, you nod.

“You interest me, so I’ll give you this. The prince has never cared to become a king. A soft-hearted, joke of an heir. So, then, why would he have rebelled against his father if not to have his spot? Because he had one purpose, after living among your kind. The prince could never stand the way we treat you. That was enough for him to leave his home and try to change it.”

Yeonjun’s book still sits somewhere in your trunk. That lines up with what you had read.

“The prince cares for you,” he says. “More than even that. Enough to forget what else he did. Enough to forget anything else.”

There that is again. Why does it even matter to Kai? “I’m sure he said the same plenty of times before,” you say. Bitterness, as a habit. “I don’t understand why you do what he says. What’s in it for you, if he has me back? I don’t see what you gain.” Kai, who lived always between here and there.

“He’s an old friend,” he answers. “And I know what it is to love a human. That’s all.”

You purse your lips. He was a part of the rebellion as well. As mysterious as he is, of course Kai has his own reasons.

“Tell him that, if he does love me, then he’d stop. It’s past the point where we can go back to what it was.”

“I know that what happened hurt you, but I don’t think you really believe that.”

He says it so matter-of-factly, so airily, that it doesn’t even annoy you. Your ears go hot with defensiveness. “You don’t know me. How would you know that?”

Shrugging, he says, “It doesn’t matter what I say. But you have a few decisions you need to make for yourself. Not for what you should do, but whatever it is that you want.”

“And, what? I should decide to run back to him? Because that’s what you want, and he wants, so that’s what I should want too?” Your knuckles bleach white. “I don’t trust him. I can’t trust a word you or him say.”

“Why? Because he was scared to tell you, but still, he did because you deserved to know?”

Shaking your head, you say, “Does he pity himself? If he was as selfless as you want me to believe, he would’ve left it at that. But he didn’t. You’re here, aren’t you? That’s proof enough.”

“I’m hardly trying to say that he’s selfless. He is selfish. But it’s distorted to pretend that he’d hurt you.”

“What do you know?” you say, scoffing with pure acid. His eyes watch you as you go, but he doesn’t call after you.

Your nails make crescents in your palms, but you dig them in harder so that you feel that, rather than the aching like a poked bruise you thought had healed. His words ring disturbingly true regardless.

❆

Even though it seems that Taehyun is under more stress now than he ever was before, something has changed between you. Something unspoken.

It’s not as if he’s become talkative. But in some quiet moments, you catch him for long enough to have quiet, meaningless conversations with him into the night. And the nights where you get those dreams, he doesn’t mind you taking a spot in his bed to talk yourself out of it. He surely misses out on sleep for it, and as busy as he is, he surely needs it, but he never complains. Just listens to you ramble until you’re too tired to worry that you’ll close your eyes and find something frightening behind them.

He’s awkward. Terribly awkward about it. Sometimes he doesn’t know what to say, so he just stares at you. You imagine that he’s piecing together his speech in his head. It’s endearing in a way that has your heart clenching in your chest. He understands so much of the world so deeply, the darkest corners of it, but letting someone close? Speaking just to speak? It’s as though he’s trying to teach himself when he’s around you.

Orange flickers over the planes of his face. He watches you, his arms crossed over his chest, like he usually does.

“Taehyun?” you say, hair unkempt and your eyes sleepy. He doesn’t seem to care. “Can I ask you something?”

He hums.

Ever since he whispered it into your ear, that unintelligible word, you’ve been viciously curious. Chills erupt over your skin at the memory. Him behind you, the pads of his fingers on your skin, the heat of his breath. And, whatever it had meant, it crackled like magic in the air. Something different.

“That one day, you said a word that I couldn’t understand. What did it mean?”

Tongue darting out to wet his lips, he shifts. “My real name.”

You freeze, mouth dropping open as though to scoff and laugh it off. But his face is bare of humor. That can’t be right. Having a faerie’s real name is as good as them handing their life over to you. They don’t just hand them over like that. Most will spend their entire life holding it viciously to their chest, and for good reason. Anything you said or commanded, he would have to do. The way Beomgyu’s face had morphed when Taehyun commanded him to do anything—something like that. Anyone with a faeries name could tell them to crawl in the dirt and then take a dagger to cut their tongues out, and they would. They would.

And, Taehyun, of all of them? It doesn’t seem logical for him to give that to you. For a man so adept at surviving, it’s out of order. “What?” you say, voice peaking. “Why?”

As if it were the most obvious thing in the world, he says flatly, “Because I trust you with it.”

Your chest tightens. What a heavy, unbelievable thing to hold: somebody’s life in your hands, and to know that without a doubt that you will nurture it. His life, with which he did not care for so long about. You understand the gravity of that.

“I could hurt you with it,” you say. You can’t breathe, the air sucked from the room. “Aren’t you worried about that?”

“Then do it.” His jaw flickers. “Hurt me with it.”

How can he just say that? “No—why would I? I won’t ever. I won’t ever even use it. I promise you.”

“It’s yours.” He shrugs. “Use it how you want.”

The words slither up your spine, tickling the back of your skull. Oh. “I don’t even remember how to say it.” Could you? The vivid memory plays out, and it’s as incoherent to you as it had been then.

In a low, breathy voice, he repeats it. The hair on your arms stands up.

It takes you a few tries before you finally manage to get something close to it to come from your mouth. The dimple in his cheek peeks out with each attempt. But when you do get it, his eyes darken.

“There,” he says, nodding once. “Say it again.”

You do. The air crackles and comes alive.

“Do you feel it?”

“Yeah,” you say. “It feels like when I ate Lachrymose.” Tastes like it, too.

He frowns. “When did you?”

The knee-jerk reaction is to lie and say that it was something that happened when you were little. But you’re trying to tell less of those. “There was this time that he took me to a market. I had to have some to even see it.”

Taehyun’s jaw ticks, shadows flickering, but he doesn’t comment on it. “I had a feeling you were off doing dumb stuff.” It’s terse, but not mean. You might even call it an attempt at humor.

Snorting, you cross your arms. “You can’t pretend I’m the mysterious one.”

“Mysterious?” he says, arching his brows.

“Yes, mysterious. What do I know about you? I guess I know that you were a spy, but that doesn’t count.”

“That’s because there isn’t much to know.” His voice goes distant like it always does when he’s thinking.

Even if he had lived a phantom life, everybody has a history. “That’s not true. I’ve never been more curious about anybody’s past than I am yours.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Sorry? For what?”

“That I don’t have anything to tell you.”

A life like that must’ve been awful. Your heart aches for him. Going from one place to another, unsure why you are or what you want or what your purpose is. “Was it lonely?” you ask.

Hair brushes his eyes as he moves. They look softer under this light—not soft, but softer. “It was all I knew. It couldn’t have been lonely.”

But, he felt the lack. Whether he calls it loneliness or not, he knew he was carved out by something. Isn’t that loneliness?

“Did you like being a spy?” Did it hurt you to leave it behind, you want to add.

“No more than for the fact it was something I was good at. I’m good with swords and metal, and not much else. It was a start.”

You nod, smiling gently, “I’m not good for much else than sewing.”

The air sits still between you, a calming presence that wraps you up in its arms. At ease, safe, like you usually feel with him.

You talk until your throat’s sore. Youdon’t even realize dawn has come until he pushes himself up off the bed and the soft blue light peeks in as he leaves.

Laying under your blankets to fight the morning chill, you say his true name one more time. Just to taste it.

❆

The drooping pearl of the necklace Yeonjun gave you swings delicately side to side. No matter what, you couldn’t leave it. You hold it out, watching it. Just watching it.

Kai had gotten up under your skin. His words peeled the dressing you had so carefully laid down for yourself. He’d done it so easily that you’re almost angry.

It doesn’t feel good to paint Yeonjun out to be all terrible, because he isn’t and never was. The truth of the situation is that he didn’t expect to end up loving you, or maybe he didn’t expect for his job to involve hurting a human life in any way. In any case, he never meant to break your trust.

But he did. Aren’t you a hypocrite, then? You weren’t telling him everything, either. Even if he already knew what you were, that was a decision you made. Because you were afraid. He was afraid he’d lose you, too. At least he told you regardless. That’s what gets you; he did tell you. Is what you’re doing punishment for that? Is it mean? And yet, if you go to him again, what of the fact that he thinks he can make you come back by pulling strings? That leaves a nasty taste on your tongue.

You don’t know. Dropping your head, you sigh. For a long time, everything has been bubbling up in your chest. Now, it rises into your throat and restricts your breathing. You don’t know, you don’t know.

The thudding of booted footsteps has you popping your head back up to find Taehyun in the doorway. His mouth moves in a half-smile to say something until he zeroes in on what you hold in your fist. Eyes going sharp, his face twists.

“Oh,” you say. “You’re back.”

His feet remain planted. He’s so still that it doesn’t even seem like he’s breathing. It sends a genuine chill over you, hair prickling. That look; you recognize what it is, now. You’ve seen it once or twice. So intense that it eats up the oxygen in the room and leaves none left for you.

“What’s that?” he says, crossing the room to snatch it from your hand. He watches it spin and glimmer in the lowlight. Last time he had seen it, he couldn’t help but snap it off your neck. His throat bobs around a hard swallow.

“A necklace.”

“Always him,” Taehyun growls, eyes smoldering. “No matter what I do. What will it take for you to stop fucking wanting him?”

You’d breathe, but it all gets caught in the back of your throat. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You don’t?” he scoffs, taking your face in his hands. So gentle in contrast with the razors he sneers with. “Bullshit.”

You do. Of course you know what he means. You try to muster up words, but his thumb down the line of your jaw stops them short.

“Look me in the eyes,” he says. Mush-brained, like you always seem to be around him, you do. His jaw ticks and he breathes out a weakened, “Fuck.”

The mattress meeting your back doesn’t even register through the thick, fire-smoke haze of his mouth on yours. You gasp into his mouth, fingers curling into the front of his tunic. That same one you had embroidered. Him, walking around in your touch all day. It makes your belly turn over.

He licks the seam of your mouth, his hands in your hair and then running up your torso and then squeezing the plush fat of your hips, as if he can’t decide where he wants to feel you, so he devours it all at once. As if he could make up for all the times he wanted so badly to do this, but could not.

You gasp for breath when your mouths part, kiss so impatient and frantic that it dazes you and leaves your lips smeared. “Taehyun,” you shudder out. He always leaves you stupid and with nothing to say but that.

He takes your chemise where it lands on your thighs and brings it up. Each inch is scalding and exhilarating at once. When it’s bunched up above your breasts, those intense eyes eat the sight up. All sharp edges and want, but you see how his ears go red.

“I haven’t wanted anything this bad in my whole fucking life,” he says, palm splayed over your ribcage. “I have gone so long like this. Never had anything to want. But I want all of you. That, I need.”

You shake like a leaf in his hands with it; want. “Take it,” you say. It’s good that it’s nothing more than two words, because you don’t trust your voice right now.

But, really, is it? You think they’re much more than just words. Your head spins so much that the world blurs into lines around you—everything but him and the beating of your heart.

Instead of devouring you like you thought he would, he thumbs the hinge of your jaw. Yeonjun, as sure of himself as he is, would’ve. But everything about Taehyun is contrary to what you’ve known. Yeonjun was a slow, tantalizing burn because he knew exactly what he wanted to do with you. Taehyun’s all over you like he cannot get enough, a dazzling white-hot fire. And he cannot get enough.

“Are you sure?” he says, the words tumbling out past his lips with trembling urgency. “Because I’m… Don’t play with me. Please, don’t fucking play with me. You want this?”

You’re just as bad as he is. Worse, even. It’s like he takes whatever is inside of you and makes it tenfold. Your skull pounds to the same terrible rhythm as your center. It goes through you in waves. “Taehyun, please, just do something. I do. I do.”

His fingers are biting as he tugs you down to the edge of the bed, his hair hanging in his eyes. Dark, swirling pools. You drown in them. They’re even better in between your thighs, down on his knees.

“Tell me where he touched you,” he says, breaths puffing over your inner thighs.

So he can replace it all with himself. Your blood boils under your skin.

“Did he do this?” he asks. It doesn’t come out vindictive. No—he’s really asking. He wants to know exactly what you like, to make himself exactly that. Why does that set you on fire the way it does?

“Yes.” You run your palm down the length of your belly, slowly, just to feel it and the tingles. His eyes track it the whole way, darting back up to yours when you take his hair in your hands. “Yes, he did. And he was so good at it, Taehyun.” It’s purposefully antagonistic, but your belly tightens as his face falls to shadows.

The first swipe of his tongue is a test. He watches you jump with analytical precision and then applies that like he does everything else—watching. Observing. Another, trying a flick, and his intelligent eyes note how your thighs shake. Then his fingers go tight under your thighs, the cold of him like frostbite, and he dives in. No long drags, no fanfare.

You squeak, but it devolves into a litany of feral sounds. No, Taehyun is not Yeonjun. He reminds you of that in the way he pins you, his arms stronger, in the different way his mouth moves on your cunt. Not at all. It’s like you’re learning how your body reacts anew.

He does not let you clamp your thighs around his head, does not let you buck your hips, and does not let you breathe.

“Oh—” you start, but your vision tunnels as he takes your clit into his lips. A graze of teeth here, his tall, strong nose against it there. Wholly overwhelming you so that he knows, beyond a doubt, that there’s nothing in this world that you could be thinking about but this. Him. Because he so desperately needs it that way.

“Taehyun,” you plead with him. Your fingers tug at his scalp, and you’re positive that his jaw must ache, but there’s nothing but an endless hunger that meets your gaze when you find it in you to pry your eyes open and look. “Taehyun, please,” you say, voice cracking toward the end as your belly tightens.

His nose. It sends your body rigid each time he digs in deeper and bumps it up against you. It pushes you closer, closer, and then closer, until you burn all over, nails digging into his muscle-corded forearms to have something to hold as it licks down your spine. The last words you can manage are intelligible—your tongue betrays you.

Taehyun presses a rough hand right below your navel and holds you down through it. He’s the only thing that’s real beyond your hoarse cries and shaking body. Him.

He doesn’t stop flicking your clit with his tongue until you’re jumpy and choking on your breaths, belly going taut.

The vision of him as he pulls back has stars speckling your vision. His mouth is covered in you, his pupils blown wide. On him, on his perfect, clean-cut face, it’s the lewdest thing you’ve ever seen. Though you’re still floating in a smoky haze, sedated, it sends glowing sparks through you.

His breaths fan over your face as he climbs back up, maneuvering you however he pleases. With his forehead pressed to yours, he half growls, half shudders, “Damn it.”

The words are scalding. You know exactly what he means, because you’re feeling it too. Something as powerful as the sea swallowing you clean, sucking you down to where you know you won’t ever reach the surface again.

You take a hand and run it up the plane of his stomach, feeling and savoring each scar, until you feel his heart. It thuds under his skin frantically. It echoes through your bones, so loud that you might hear it if you strained your ear enough. It tugs at the strings of your heart.

“You’re nervous?” you say, eyeing the mess of his hair, the flush on his cheeks. All so endearingly human. Sweet, even.

“No,” he says. His voice is vibrantly husky and thick. “I’m not scared. I’m just…” His eyes sweep over the sight of you, the spread of your soft thighs and the splay of your hair and the same glazing of the eyes in yours as there is in his no doubt, longingly. There’s a flicker of unsureness, and then he presses his forehead to your shoulder and rolls his hips into you. He lets that speak, the hardness of him. “Good?”

Running a finger over the curve of his ear, you feel the scar tissue left there. “Good,” you say, still partly lost for breath. More than that; you want him all over you. You want him like liquid silver in your bloodstream, heavy but utterly potent.

He fumbles with his pants for a moment, the sword calloused pads of his free hand brushing over your pulse. It stutters under his thumb as he holds it there—checking if you’re feeling it how he is.

“I have been tortured,” he says, wetting his lips and scoffing as if he can’t believe what he’s about to say. “I have been tortured, driven up the fucking walls, by the sound you make when you cum. Since you let him have it in my home, since you let me hear it.” His eyes flash, and then he’s bent you straight in half.

With your thighs flush to your front, your mind goes blank white all but for the very human, very fundamental kick that comes with being so utterly held down. All his brawn is suddenly more apparent now than ever. You press at his hard chest, nothing but his breaths to breathe. “Tyun,” you say, calves on his shoulders.

“Good?” he repeats, his jaw working. The tip of him presses to your entrance.

Taking your lip into your teeth, you cut through the haze and nod for him. “Yes,” you say. “I’m good.”

That’s everything he needed to hear. The thick tip of him presses in first, and then you’re hanging on to each new inch, taking to his shape and size slowly but surely. A sound catches in his chest as his body meets yours, a gravelly curse following.

For a moment, he hangs on and lets you wiggle your hips in circles to learn the feeling. He’s different from Yeonjun like this, too. And then he takes your waist into his hands and begins to fuck you, because hardly could the both of you wait a moment longer. You need, need, need.

He drops his head and works his hips into you so eagerly that it’d be impossible for him not to brush up against that sweet, saccharine spot inside you. You press a palm over your mouth. Not to quiet yourself—when the world has gone to nothing else but him on top of you, you don’t care. But because you haven’t got a clue what else to do with your hands. You’re clawing, both grabbing him closer and pushing at him.

“Taehyun,” you whimper. “There—right there.”

Angling his hips, he searches your face. “Yeah? You…” His voice chokes off before he can gather himself again. “Like it there?”

Cupping the back of his head, you pepper kisses and nip wherever you can reach. It’s all your overwhelmed mind can do to thank him.

That deep, trembling feeling starts at the base of your spine. It’s inescapable between him and the bed beneath you, your toes curling in the air and your back going rigid. Everywhere you go, he’s there. Every square inch of you.

Taehyun’s no better off. “Fuck,” he whimpers. It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard come from his mouth. His head drops into your neck, a procession of something between whiny breaths and growls spilling into your skin.

“I’m…” you say, insides burning up far too much for you to finish that thought. You teeter on the edge just enough to drive you mad, mad enough that falling off feels both like punishment and prize.

He knows, though. “Me too,” he says, voice so tight you think it might snap. Hips faltering, he takes the hair at the back of your skull and tugs your head back just to press a smoldering kiss to your mouth. You know why he’s done it—the sound of his coming undone is muffled into your mouth as he eases up just enough to let your twitching legs down, slipping out. He takes himself into his fist, the slick sounds so obscene they break through your delirium. Belly going taught, the little bit of soft, healthy fat there, he throws his head back and spills over your stomach with a bone-deep sound.

Both made lazy, you don’t have it in you to move for some long moments. You just listen to the sound of his ragged breaths coming and going off pattern with yours. It’s all you need to hear. All you need to know.

Dazed, you watch him stand to find something to clean you up with. The air is empty, but not bad. Not stifling. He dabs at your belly with a gentle hand, tossing it away. You half expect him to slip out or go lay in his own bed, but he doesn’t. You always did seem to get him wrong, anyway.

You draw shapes into his skin, talking nonsense with a raspy voice until you’re droopy-eyed and don’t even realize you’re drifting.

❆

Poking through the fabric, you tug the string taut. Another one of Taehyun’s shirts dangles down from your hold.

Something’s happening. You’re not exactly sure what. But he’s hardly here, so something must be. You gnaw at your bitten lip. It doesn’t seem so much like there’s any buzz or mistrust around here anymore, so then what?

You know that you came here for real war, but the notion of it finally becoming actualized makes your stomach go nauseous. Not to mention the fact that you don’t even know where they’ve gone. That leaves a door of possibilities cracked that you don’t even want to peek into.

Taehyun can handle it. You know he can. Despite it, you hang on to every moment that he’s not here. What’s that? You decide not to name it, for your sake.

You thread and you thread, circling the cuffs and then around the neck, letting your mind wander. But not too far.

A rustle at the tent opening catches your attention, and then Kai’s stepping inside. Your belly doubles over itself. Never once has he come to you. “Is everything okay?” you say, throat tight like you already know. Because you do.

Wasting no time, Kai says, “The prince has been apprehended. But I’d tell you that he’s been given away.”

Silence washes over you as you pause. “What?” you say. Your voice is distant as it comes out. That was not what you were expecting, but it’s not any better. Taehyun’s shirt goes forgotten.

“For leverage,” he elaborates, “the King has been told about his son's rebellion. He’s been betrayed by one of our own.” There’s a deep sadness in his eyes. Old friends, he had said. “Our general is a cruel, sharp man.”

“What do you mean by that?” you say. The walls spin around you. That’s not right. That’s not right.

Kai doesn’t answer you, but his long, telling look speaks truer than words. Producing a letter, he offers it to you. Yeonjun’s insignia is stamped into wax on the face of it. “I suggest that you read this one.”

Your hand trembles as you take it from him. Yeah. You’d better read it. The cruelty of burning letters hits you like a real blow to the chest. The King has his traitorous son, probably sitting somewhere you haven’t got a clue of, plotting on having his head. So many words—oh, you feel sick just thinking of them going up in smoke now. Yeonjun will die.

The letter tears with a sickening sound. You don’t have the steadiness in you to open it delicately like you did once.

𝐾𝑎𝑖 𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑠 𝑚𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑚 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒, 𝑚𝑦 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒. 𝐴 𝑏𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑏𝑒 𝑔𝑙𝑎𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑖𝑡, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝐼 𝑎𝑚 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑎 𝑏𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑚𝑎𝑛.

𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝐼 𝑑𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝐼 ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝑜𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝑢, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑢𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑦 𝐼 𝑎𝑚 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑦𝑜𝑢. 𝐼 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑠𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑐𝑟𝑢𝑒𝑙𝑡𝑦, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝐼 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑚𝑦 𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑓𝑎𝑢𝑙𝑡. 𝐼 𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑑𝑖𝑑 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑖𝑓 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑚𝑦 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑥𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠, 𝐼 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑑𝑜 𝑖𝑡. 𝐼’𝑙𝑙 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑦.

𝐸𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑝𝑎𝑝𝑒𝑟 𝑢𝑝 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑡. 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑦, 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑙𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑜𝑛𝑒 ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑡. 𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑚𝑒, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐼 ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢.

𝐼 𝑤𝑖𝑠ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑠𝑎𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑦, 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝐼 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑏𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑦 𝑡𝑜𝑜. 𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝐼 𝑎𝑚 𝑛𝑜𝑡. 𝐼 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑏𝑒. 𝐸𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑖𝑓 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑝𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑓𝑢𝑙, 𝐼 𝑎𝑠𝑘 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑜 𝑎𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑜𝑓 𝑚𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠. 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑜𝑓 𝑚𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑐, 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑜𝑓 𝑚𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙 𝑔𝑙𝑎𝑑𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑡. 𝐼’𝑑 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑚𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡. 𝑀𝑎𝑦 𝐼 ℎ𝑎𝑢𝑛𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑠 𝑦𝑜𝑢 ℎ𝑎𝑢𝑛𝑡 𝑚𝑒.

𝑌𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑗𝑢𝑛

It’s all so sickly sweet, so dramatically him. Hot tears burn down your cheeks, jaw trembling as you make attempts to keep it all in place. Even just to see his handwriting…

You want to close your eyes and pretend that Taehyun would not, but your gut doesn’t allow it. You know the truth. You know that it was Taehyun who deducted it was Yeonjun sabotaging you. You know that it’s Taehyun that so perfectly, so seamlessly hid behind an ice wall for months that you hadn’t a clue how deeply and voraciously he needed to have you. It was him, with his sharp mind—that part of him that is capable of shutting down emotion and acting on brutal, detached strategy.

A strategist through and through. It was Taehyun who will have Yeonjun’s head.

🪶 ⦂ this is the happiest day of my life (＞＜) i missed them so much. i know how this development is probably making yall feel... so yes i will be needing to hear everything.

← rꫀׁׅܻblogs & asks arꫀׁׅܻ always apprꫀׁׅܻciatꫀׁׅܻd! ♡(ᗒᗣᗕ )՞ →

▸ tׁׅagᥣׁׅ֪ꪱׁׅstׁׅ @lvrs-street2mmorrow , @soohashits , @f4iryfever , @arcturus444 , @linqed , @serenityism00 , @immelissaaa , @luv4cheol , @lickingan0rchid , @20-cms , @hhoneylix , @beestvng , @hyucktapes , @bewitchless , @prince-jjae , @blankliving , @yaoizee , @stormy1408 , @missychief1404 , @izzyy-stuff , @miukuui , @lunesdesire , @sunoolver , @cherricola-star , @xylatox , @filmnings , @hearteyes4hobi , @hyunj00 , @kangtaehyunfan029 , @caratcakemoa , @biteyoubiteme , @dawngyu , @hyunruhi , @jeonghaniyoo13 if your tag isn't working, check the mentions part of your settings!

260 notes · View notes

becausebuckley · 2 months ago

Text

michelle's buddie fic recs: week 19!

slightly shorter list than usual, sorry about that - i had a major thesis deadline last week, so i've both been reading less and haven't been keeping track as diligently as i normally do, whoops. still, i hope you enjoy these!

this is a mix of fics with all ratings, so some include NSFW content. please take a look at both the ratings and the fic tags before reading! some contain spoilers for season 8.

if you come across something you like in this list, remember to show some love to the author by leaving kudos and a comment!

a man in finance | carpediaz/@sofa-king-lame | 13.9k | M

The one where Chimney finds Eddie a man in finance. Trust Fund. 6'2". Blue eyes. And he's an asshole, but only for like...five seconds (until he finds out about Chris). Eddie falls hard and fast, but it's ok because Buck does too. this is such a wonderful one!! i love how this author incorporates side characters into these alternate universes (loved lucy's appearances here, and chimney is always so fun) and the buddie dynamic is just lovely <3

cool and chill things to say to your best friend who you've accidentally been having phone sex with when you pick him up at the airport | hwaelweg/@the-hwaelweg | 6k | M

in which we explore the intimacy of having someone's voice in your ear, accidentally falling into phone sex, and edging Eddie Diaz until he can admit he's a good person. i love the distinction between facetimes and phone calls here and the intimacy of it all is just <3 also very hot!!

good things come to those who wait | ithilien22/@ithilien-writes | 2.6k | E

Turns out, Buck likes when Eddie makes him wait for it. (And they're embarrassingly in love about it.) this has such lovely buddie characterisation!! the best combination of domestic fluff and smut <3

i looked at your face & i knew that i'd found it | fleetinghearts/@shitouttabuck | 3.3k | GA

it might be just slightly obvious that buck really, really likes to talk about eddie. such great firefam feels!! buck constantly yapping about eddie is one of my favourite things ever and i love how this fic captures it <3

if i have your heart forever | ipretendtobesane/@usercowboy | 9.2k | M

The day Eddie returns to Los Angeles for good and the day he realizes he’s in love with Evan Buckley happen to be the same twenty-four hours, which makes sense, really, if you think about it. He was coming home. To Los Angeles, to the 118. To Buck. this is the loveliest gentlest fic <3 i love both buck and eddie here, but eddie's realisation felt especially natural and in character!!

sobriquet | rainbowninja167/@rainbowtitania | 18.4k | T

5 Times Buck Called Eddie by a Nickname + 1 Time He Didn’t. this is just so, so, SO much fun!! such a fantastic writing style, and i love how it incorporates humour specifically <3 so good!!

something so lonesome about you | serenelystrange/@serenelystrange | 7.9k | E

Buck signs up for a Christian Dating site, and accidentally stumbles into the man of his dreams. i loved watching buddie's relationship grow in this one! and what a hilariously wonderful fic premise <3 brilliant!!

the way that you hold me tight (there's no other place in the world where i rather would be | The_Lonely_Wolf_Needs_A_Star | 4.2k | M

10 hugs throughout Buck and Eddie's relationship. this was a reread! i'm such a sucker for buddie fics focused on physical intimacy and this hits the spot every time <3

u/minutetomidnightenthusiast's reddit post history. | dylaesthetics | 6.7k | M

the emotional rollercoaster of Eddie's Reddit posts throughout the history of knowing Buck. this author's reddit fics are the gift that keeps on giving <3 i love how this one and the previous one compliment each other, i highly recommend reading them both!!

#friendly reminder that i also occasionally put together lists for certain requested tropes/themes #which you can also find under my rec list tag!#in case you're looking for more to read :)#buddie #buddie fic #buddie fic rec #911 abc #911 fic #911 fic rec #michelle's recs #fic rec list

262 notes · View notes

lonesome--hunter · 1 year ago

Text

You guys this book I'm reading is just fuuuuuck. Here's a page TW noncon/dubcon

It's called Distorted by Nyla K. It's free on Kindle unlimited.

#lonesome's book recs

12 notes · View notes

catsushinyakajima · 1 month ago

Text

Asterika's Spring Sem fic recs!

The Promise by drschnz | 67.6k | College AU | Summer Vacation

Gets into Keith's anxiety and paranoia soooo well. You see how his problems cause problems and how his fears and actions are percieved by others and atdghdhdd. Beach house fic on top. Sooo much build up with such a satisfying confrontation. Loved it.

Bang by vanitashaze | 18.9k | Smut | Autism/ADHD

Holy shit you guys. First off, the author has the funniest language ever, they write totally the way Lance would think. Second off, this fic addresses ideas like consent, body image, capabilities of enforcing boundaries, and self-respect so well! This is fully a smut, but it's a very autistic smut (smut between autistic people, focuses more of the autism). So fucking realistic and good.

Part Time Soulmate, Full Time Problem by StillKicking/@still--kicking | 54.8k+ | Soulmate AU | Canon-Compliant

THIS FIC IS SO ARGHH! Soulmate au with both POVs?? Sign me tf up. Love seeing how they affect each other and how they think the other perceives them (only to be dead wrong). There is sooo much teamwork in this (CUZ THEY MAKE A GOOD TEAM AND THE AUTHOR KNOWS IT). This fic is beyond beautiful and I'm so excited to see where it goes.

Walk With Me by bluemantics/@bluemantics | 15.7k+ (2/3) | Post-Canon | Mutual Pining

Post canon Klance...dumbasses Klance...WHAT MORE CAN I SAY? These folks got their baggage they refuse to talk about and a bunch of unsaid romance and background adashi im dead. im dead. Im on the floor.THEY JUST GET EACH OTHER!!

love me to my bones (all this time) by ShatterinSeconds/@shatterinseconds | 8k | Post-Canon | Ace!Keith

So any ace fic at all deserves to be put in the hall of fame, but an ace fic from the allosexual POV? AUGH! It's so indulgent to see Lance talk about Keith so respectfully and love him and try his best. And he's never giving up anything to stay with Keith. Also they're dumbasses.

Grin and Bear It by loadingboy/@loadingboy | 192k+ | Brainwashing | Heavy Angst with an eventual comfort

So no list of mine is complete without a fic that induces psychological warfare on the mind. you guys. I read 10 chaps of this fic in four hours. That's how into it I got. I got sooo much tension reading this. Zack is the king of pacing a story. You always recieve snippets of information, but never the full picture, and I ALWAYS WANT MOREEEE. The parts that hurt hurt soo much and the parts that are normal somehow hurt too! I'm not a very emotional reader, but if you are, you will cry reading this EL O EL

vicodin on sunday nights by lykak | 118k | High school AU | Homophobia

You guys. This is the real enemies to lovers. Like! ARGH, Lance has sooo many issues it's not even funny and Keith's existence hurts him it's not even a rival thing. And somehow something beautiful blossoms out of it. Lots of fights, realizations, bonds being made, so much! Truly shows the ups and downs of a closeted high school jock.

been living in a lonesome galaxy by Katranga | 25.1k+ (4/5) | College AU | Friends with Benefits

If someone tells you I have over twenty rereads of this fic no I fucking don't definitely not! Ha! Haha...but fr. This is one of my FAV college aus. First off: Love autistic keith. LOVE HIM. Love Keith and Lance being good for each other. Every interaction with them is so cute. Indescribably so. And Keith, this guy is navigating through so many life issues! People do him dirty smh. I LOVE THIS FIC!!

kick at the darkness by ilgaksu | 61.2k | Dirty Dancing AU | 1960s US issues

I fucking love learning things from a fic. Actual educational fic. Love an author who knows things, so much things, to the point that the fic is deadly accurate. Also, the prose is insane. Beautiful. This fic deals with real life issues during the 1960s in US. We see issues with money, power, race, gender, sexuality, etc. It's all explored. Also...dirty dancing au!

I'd Love to See Me From Your Point of View (For All of My Pretty and All of My Ugly, Too) by mothmanavenue/@mothmanavenue | 5.9k | Fluff | Pining

So much fucking pining. Lance is so down bad. Almost as down bad as I am for this fic. God, they're so cute. They're so couple-y. We really see how Keith makes Lance feel cared for. Ykw, I'm actually about to go reread this NOW. PEACE YALL.

133 notes · View notes

spencerreidsrightsock · 4 months ago

Note

masturbating while spencer’s on a case and he walks in on you

TW MDNI masturbation(fem) oral(fem!rec)

Spencer had been away on a case for close to a week. It had been nearly a week since you had hugged him, held his hand, smelt his intoxicating scent; it had been a week since his hands had touched you. That’s how you wound up with one of his lounge shirts in your arm with your other arm between your legs, your fingers running over your sensitive clit then dipping down between your folds. You had your head buried in Spencer’s shirt, the sounds of your slick coming from between your legs, and your lonesome moans and whimpers echoing through the room. You throw your head back and bring Spencer’s shirt over your face, taking in the scent of it; trying to convince yourself he was there, that your fingers were his. You let out a particularly loud moan and you hear the bedroom door open and you jump and sit straight up. Spencer stands there with his messenger bag on his hip, his mouth dropped open. When you meet his gaze a subtle smile appears on his lips. “Hello to you too” he says, his voice gravely. “Missed you” you whisper as you catch your breath and try to brush off the embarrassment. He slides his shoes off and his clothes off quicky and climbs into bed, his body hovering over yours. He pressed his palm to your cheek, “I can tell, but I missed you too” he growls out as he gently pushes you back onto the pillows. He leans in, his face inches from yours, “I love you,” he whispers. “I love you too Spence.” You say back softly. He smashes his lips onto yours in a desperate kiss. He makes his way from your mouth to your neck, sucking your skin gently. He kisses from your neck to your collar bone. He kisses every inch of your body until his face is between your thighs and his hands are wrapped around your waist. He pressed gentle, teasing kisses onto either of your thighs until his breath hovers over your aching clit. He licks a stripe up your slit which elicits a moan from your lips. It’s safe to say, that night you got everything you both missed while he was away.

#spencer reid #spencer reid masterlist #criminal minds #spencer reid smut #spencerreidblurbs #criminal minds masterlist #spencer reid x you #spencer reid x reader #spencerreidsrightsock #spencerreidnsfw

217 notes · View notes

aveaveria · 2 months ago

Note

Hi!! I looove your take on Dick, your writing is amazing. I was wondering if you have any fanfic recs for him 👉👈. I'm open to anything. Thanks a bunch 🥰

Thank you so much for the kind words, dear anon, 🥰 and sorry for the wait! I recommend checking out multiple fanfictions by these authors but I limited my recs to one per author. 😊 I hope the recs are to your taste—if not all, then some of them!

🪴Gen Dick Grayson Fic Recs

Little Suns by ScarlettSwordMoon

While Bruce was presumed dead, Dick adopted Damian. Now that Bruce has returned, the three of them struggle to adjust to the new status quo. AKA Five times Dick struggled with being a father and a son, and one time he got the balance right.

Little Suns is a wonderful exploration of Dick's time as Batman and relationship with Damian shortly before Bruce's return and after. Dick is immensely grateful for the added time he can spend with Bruce after all, but the patriarch being back means old and new problems return too.

The Dark Embrace by TheOakTreeGhost

It was four hours until the break of dawn, and while full moon was high in the sky, it’s silver gleam barely penetrated the inside of the edifice. Most of its windows were purposefully designed to keep the light out, after all. Careful not to let his footsteps echo, Batman walked past the entrance hall and the visitor center, then turned left to go to the west wing. A long, dust-encrusted corridor with tiled floors that had never lined-up properly extended before him, its cracks resembling veins from which dried up sprouts grew, and then, deprived of any nourishment, withered. Though now hollow of its utilitarian grandeur, the walls were still too tall yet too claustrophobic, their deteriorating blankness forging grotesque monsters out of peeling paint and grime. They watched him. Judged him. And they found him wanting. OR When the Batcomputer picks up on strange readings coming from the abandoned Gotham City Youth Center, Batman must go investigate.

I wish the Dark Embrace were a canon comic because it has everything that makes mystery stories great. It's a great detective story showing how Dick operates on his lonesome and then with an alternate universe Bruce at his side while they fight scary monsters!

Behind Every Mask (There Is a Path to a Heart) by NyxKvistad

Gordon promised himself he wouldn't accept the kid as part of the team. It's a promise he didn't think he would have to break. Robin, Richard, Dick, that kid changed his mind, just like he changed Bruce's life.

Fics about Dick's early crime fighting career have their very own charm. Behind Every Mask explores very sweetly and humorously the way not only Bruce and Dick but also Jim and Dick grow together during nightly rooftop meetings.

Obfuscated by A Mess (ErebosBlue)

Cass, still being new to the family, is confused by Dick Grayson. He does not make it better when he talks with her, but he does pique her interest in ways that not many are able to. Because Dick is hard to read and yet so easy to trust. To get behind. - Dick Grayson Week: Dick’s Undervalued Competency

A wonderful character study of Dick as the seasoned crime fighter and big brother of the Bat Clan by Cass Cain herself.

Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot by J.T.

Damian has a bit too much to drink at the New Year’s party, and he decides it’s an opportune time to discuss important matters with Grayson and Father.

Gala fics and this trio just give me nostalgia. It's a wonderful feeling to read fics like these. They are my favorite non-nuclear family trio.

The Rule Stands by Engineered

“I know what you’re going to say, Batman,” Damian said, shrugging the hand off his shoulder. “You’re going to tell me that Nightwing is dead, and that people don’t come back from the dead. Well, clearly you are wrong, seeing that you were dead and I was dead and Red Hood was dead and even Superman was once dead-” “My parents are dead,” Father interrupted. “Nightwing’s parents are dead. There have been a few notable exceptions in extenuating circumstances, Robin, but the rule stands. Everyone can die.” OR Damian meets a 10-year-old Dick Grayson, and they become best friends.

The Rule Stands shows why Dick Grayson will always have a special place in Damian's heart. Their relationship in this is very rooted in canon while also introducing a time travel twist, which gives Damian an opportunity to bond with little Grayson and shows the contrast to how much he loves adult Grayson as a big brother, friend and parent.

🛳️ Ship and Ship-Gen Dick Grayson Recs

Hanging Work by Lucy Gillam (cereta)

Bruce/Dick Two tickets to a circus never used, a little boy forgotten, and a chance meeting. Of such things are legends made.

One of the classics. Any Bruce/Dick reader must at least know of its existance. If you enjoy Different Mentor AUs, definitely read Lucy's series. This is Selina raising Dick.

Stars and Cinders by victoriousscarf

Dick-centric with a side of Slade/Dick and Jason/Dick Bruce Wayne makes a really awful Jedi. His padawans are not much better. That Batman Star Wars AU no one asked for.

Maybe no one asked for this but it remains THE Star Wars/Batman fic. It's a very satisfying crossover world that victoriousscarf built.

An Arm Full of Feelings by Sophie

Dick gets shot and has to be brought to Superman's Fortress to heal. He meets a tentacle alien that he befriends, and also possibly sort of starts dating. No one really approves much.

I approve, though. A lot. This is the sweetest tentacle sex Dick has ever gotten and will ever get. Just be mindful that it is underage.

Territory by TooFazed

Thomas Sr./Dick with a side of Bruce/Dick Thomas blames it on Bruce. A little at least. Because Bruce said son, not sons.

Flashpoint Thomas Wayne comes in contact with the mainline, most importantly Dick, meaning he therefore doesn't mess everything up. A BDSM exploration of Dick's mental state.

Naked As We Came by klose

Bruce/Dick "As it happens," he says, letting humour crinkle his eyes as his gaze flickers towards the other end of the table -- "I believe Dick would make a fantastic trophy wife." Fix-it for for this headcanon: "Bruce secretly longs to marry Dick, but after joking with him about it for so long he’s afraid Dick will say no. He can’t take the thought of that rejection and so he keeps the ring in his back pocket. It’s his father’s."

I devoure Klose's fics when I first came here, and she had banger opinions on Timblr too. She captures the romantic Bruce is, especially when it's about Dick, really well. And they are pining, your honor. Pining. Bruce and Dick are a married couple and chickens about it anyway.

He Shouldn't Have Interfered by WorldsUnreal

How Clark found out about Bruce and Dick. Or rather, how Clark mistook their completely appropriate feelings for something else and then it turns out he had been right all along.

One of the first DC fics I ever read and the first multi-chapter I followed on AO3. Clark being wrong but totally right is hilarious. I think other characters recognizing Bruce and Dick's mind boggling fated love is always delicious to read.

Klarion’s Curse by ilyena_sylph, Merfilly

Slade hunted the wrong witch, and gets an interesting curse.

Klarion's curse made me ship Slade & Dick, and it is a blast full with pre-N52 canon. Additionally, the fic has a unique Slade and Dick dynamic I haven't seen in fandom much to this date. Dinah is a fun and refreshing support character.

When I read these first fics the DCU was like a strange new world I stumbled into. These fics and many others are the reasons I learned to love the DCU. Don't forget to check out the referenced comics too. You will enjoy them. Trust. 💚

#dick grayson #bruce wayne #damian wayne #slade wilson #dick grayson fanfiction #brudick #sladick #fanfiction #ao3fic #tumblr fic #fanfic rec #batfamily #dc comics #nightwing #robin #batman

62 notes · View notes

muntitled · 2 years ago

Text

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐃: 𝐖𝐨𝐨𝐳𝐢 𝐚𝐭 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐲!?

Didn't anybody tell him being back in the booth will leave him singing solo?

Pairings: Lee Jihoon x Fem!reader | Slight!Kim Mingyu x Fem!Reader

Synopsis: A kink confession in couple's therapy might just save your relationship

Warnings: Established Relationship, Insecurities, Gender Roles, Slight!Toxic Relationship, Fluff, Slight Angst, Smut (+18 Minors DNI), Masturbation, Dom/Sub undertones, MeanDom!Jihoon, Sub!Reader, Innocence Kink, Slight DDLG, Ownership Kink, Hair Pulling, Spitting kink, Massive Degradation Kink, Praise Kink, Slight Humiliation, Submission Kink, Dirty Talk, Grinding, Oral Sex (Male rec), Breeding Kink, Slight!Hate sex

Word Count: 3.9k

Song: Mine | Beyonce

Woops

"I'm aware that I'm on this mission to get my boyfriend to actually want to fuck me again but why does it feel like I've already failed on the very first step?" A whine so childish, and so petulant rips itself from the depths of your throat but Jihoon's running shower silences the pathetic noise.

While he showers, you're left sitting on the floor surrounded by a graveyard of designer lingerie. A too small Victoria's Secret set is immediately abandoned in its box, leaving you howling into the phone as you wriggle yourself into the complicated underwear.

Your confidence wanes as you adjust to the intricate bows and string of the set, wincing as you pull up the pink garter belt until it's clasped around your thighs. Soon enough, you're padding across the floor of your walk-in closet, hesitantly approaching a mirror.

"I mean, this says 'slut' but what if 'slut' isn't what he's attracted to?" Your hand curls tightly around the width of your phone, "Jihoon is an anomaly! What if I end up making a complete and utter fool of myself?" The mirror is nestled between Jihoon's clothing rack harbouring all his neatly pressed designer pieces. You let the sight of his intimidating fashion waver your already fragile confidence.

"Are you hearing yourself?" Scoffs Mingyu through your phone's speakers, "What man has ever in the history of the universe not been attracted to 'slutty'? I feel like that might be a prerequisite in terms of the origins of the word." He says in a lax, calm manner, "Woozi'll just be happy to see boobs and ass becuase that's usually how a guy's brain goes. Or how mine goes at least."

Despite Mingyu's assurances, your arms are still folded over your scantily covered breasts while you cradle your phone in the air. "I don't know," your bottom lip finds its way between your teeth. "You didn't hear him today at counseling, Mingyu. I feel like our therapist might actually hate us." You continue to cradle your torso, forcing yourself not to flinch at the memory of your earlier session of couples therapy.

How far away Jihoon had felt despite being seated right beside you, like a gleaming, stoic-faced monolith. You feel as though you have been living in nothing but a perpetual winter, forever trying to please Jihoon, your boyfriend, but always falling short in front of Woozi, the entertainer. Work, work, work, on his mind meant that you were left to entertain your own wants by your lonesome. Even more harrowig, is the excuse he had given your therapist.

"She's always in boss mode," Jihoon's tone was as cold as ice, refusing to spare you even a single glance as he faced the therapist ahead, "And that's one of things I love about her, yes. Her drive and determination makes us compatible because I know I'm the same-"

A scoff slips past your lips at that point, making Jihoon's fist clench on the arm rest as you snootily interjected, "Don't misconstrue." You said, "He works more than me," and it was the truth as far as you believed it. Yes, you would gladly admit to neglecting a few key elements of your relationship in the face of your career, but never had you ever made Jihoon feel microscopic in your pursuits. Not like how he made you feel.

"It's important to listen to each other without interjecting." The therapist calmly scolded, leaving you grumbling in your seat, "You'd be surprised at how much could truly be accomplished by simply listening to each other,"

You were truly ready to tell that old lady to go to hell but something strange happened, and Jihoon finally opened his mouth, unburdening himself with what has truly been bothering him in his relationships as of late.

"It's just," He swears lightly under his breath, which does a terrific job in garnering yout attention. You peek up from underneath your lashes and you're stunned to hear him say, "I just wish she'd understand that it wouldn't burn down the foundations of feminism if she'd just," Jihoon's jaw ticked as he displayed the very first signs of emotion, "-Just let me take that load off for a bit…"

"In what way?" The therapist asked, sensing the nearness of a eureka moment. She treaded carefully, in fear of scaring Jihoon back into his shell. Thankfully, he made himself clearer because by now, you needed to know as well.

"She's the boss in her day to day and I respect that," he says, "But all I'm saying is that it wouldn't hurt to leave all that shit at work..."

The therapist nodded with grave understanding, although even you could see the trepidation easing onto her face. There is no hiding the conflicting emotions displayed on your face.

"You're asking her to become more…" The therapist cleared their throat, "Submissive?" Jihoon had not responded after that, letting the pregnant silence act as his megaphone.

"I'm submissive," you had whispered, nodding as if trying to convince yourself of your words. "I'm like… so submissive," before you could decorate your lie with even more lies, Jihoon finally turned towards you.

"Really?" He asked, "Where?"

You let an incredulous chuckle escape from your throat as you shot back, "Where what?"

Jihoon did a show of looking around the therapist's clinical office, delving deep into his petty theatrics as he calmly, "Where are you being submissive, because it hasn't been with me?"

The session had ended with you wracking your brain at Jihoon's admittance of what you suspect to be a kink. His words haunted you on the silent drive home. They had piqued your interest considerably, filling the atmosphere with a tense warmth, as if a tempest was brewing. One that neither of you was quite aware of how to deal with yet.

It was a feeling that led you into the deepest confines of your closet, until you pulled out the Savage x Fenty lingerie box, immediately calling Mingyu in a fit of panic while Woozi was in the shower. He was, after all, your best friend way before you even knew of Lee Jihoon.

Ripping your arms away from your torso is a mission on its own, one you succeed with immense reluctance as you finally gaze at your reflection in all her half naked glory.

You commence a hesitant twirl in front of the floor to ceiling mirror.

Very hesitant.

The lace bralette is digging into your ribs, and the matching pink garters are cutting into the skin of your ample thighs. It is all so painfully uncomfortable that you're threatening to take it off, no matter how much of a wet dream you may look like.

But there is excitement there too, bubbling beneath the surface, awakened by Jihoon's confession. You are almost excited to try this with him. Submission, sexually, was never on your cards previously but maybe this is something you should have noticed long ago. You pride yourself on being observant so why didn't you notice it before?

The soft affirmations of "Say my name," while he was steadily bringing you to orgasm with his fingers alone. The unmistakable need to have his hand locked around your throat whenever he was on the verge of cumming.

Even the non sexual stuff.

Ordering for you. Making sure your hand was always locked inside his when you found yourselves wandering the city. Forcing you to pay with his card despite knowing you made more than enough to sustain your lifestyle.

How didn't you know?

Keeping a hesitant grip on your satin nightgown, you tilt your head at your reflection skeptically.

"Imagine how embarrassed I'll be if he just ignores me," The insides of your mouth is bleeding non stop from the way you've been gnawing at it, "Maybe I should just accept that work is the only love in Jihoon's life."

Mingyu's voice is diabolically soothing as it bleeds through your speakers, "No, no," he says, and you can imagine him swatting away at the air in the process "Jihoon acts like a prude but he's one of the biggest sluts- if not - the biggest slut I know."

"Besides yourself of course," you murmur,

"Besides myself of course" Eventually, Mingyu comes up with what he suspects is his big master plan.

"Perhaps you should send me a pic of you in it, that way when the little guy gets out of the shower and sees you, then you'll be far more relaxed in the knowledge that someone else has already seen you in it."

It truly was Neanderthal mathematics.

However, there is an underlying veneer in Mingyu's tone bleeding in through the phone's speakers that makes you believe your best friend is far from joking. Despite it infuriating Woozi to no end, Mingyu might never stop flirting with you ever. In respect of your dynamic.

"Surely, I shouldn't have to tell you that I'm not sending you a pic of me in my lingerie for you but I guess I have to put that into words you would understand maybe?" You hold up your fingers and clear your throat as you monotonously say, "how dare you," 'have you no shame, Mingyu," You ask, "Need I go on?"

In the midst of Mingyu's petulant whines urging you to just 'leave your man' Jihoon's shower silences, and you right your bad posture immediately. You suddenly have no idea what to do with the drawstring of the nightgown. Somehow, this seemed like the make it or break it moment. The moment where you would decide to dive headfirst into your plans of winning back your relationship despite the possibility of being met with Jihoon's hostility and coldness that you had grown so accustomed to.

The pool of dread and anxiety is deep, and your hands are nearly shaking as your fingers gloss over the lacy pink garment. "I have to go," you whisper into the receiver, vaguely aware that you've already clicked the button to sever the line before your sentence even ends. All while you awaited the footsteps from Jihoon. But they never came.

Courageously abandoning your fear for the sake of actually getting laid, you walk up to the door of your shared bathroom and knock hesitantly.

"Jihoon? Honey, are you okay?" But he is not okay, in fact, Jihoon might venture to believe he may never be okay because your voice is just so pretty, even when muffled by a closed door. His eyes are squeezed shut, and his forearm is leaning against the shower glass, and you just called him honey and fuck, if he didn't start tugging at his dick faster. He feels pathetic, having to get himself off when you were right there but the nuances and complexities of fighting with your partner introduced the need for such things.

Jihoon's jaw is locked tight as he succinctly and suspiciously responds with a rumbling and groaning "Fine." His brows are furrowed, and his teeth locked tightly together as he fights to get off easily and succinctly.

He hopes that you would take the hostility in his voice as a sign to make yourself scarce. Jihoon already fucked up when he let the 'submissive' thing slip but he cannot bear to imagine the utter humiliation he would be subjected to if you swung that door open right now, catching masturbating in the shower, as if he did not have a girlfriend able to meet those needs… It bruises him like nothing else could. He did not want you to see him like this. He did not want you to know that even in the midst of your fights, you were the only woman he ever really thought of.

His palm skates over his soaked cock as his mind is filled images of you on your knees in front of him, head tilted back and tongue sticking out like a-

"Good little slut," It was intended as a whisper to fuel the violent pool of heat bubbling in his abdomen and make him cum quicker. A whisper that you weren't supposed to hear but your ear is on the door now and you shout back,

"Did you say anything?"

He cannot reply because his cock is aching and heavy with the weight of his fantasy. A fantasy in which you were his to hold, his to fuck, his to cum inside of until you were completely and utterly full of his load-

"Fuck-"

He rushes to squeeze the base of his dick, edging himself even though he's not quite sure why. This had been his moment to just cum all over his hands, wash off his spilt seed and be done with it, but you're knocking much more fluidly on the door, and you're becoming impatient.

"Honey, you're scaring m-," You venture to say, despite already pushing the bathroom door open. You're both left momentarily stunned by what the other is seeing in front of them. He is left paralyzed by seeing you in so little clothing… and wearing pink.

While you did not anticipate seeing Jihoon naked in the shower. Why had you not anticipated that? That’s so silly. Your mouth hangs open with the shock of his beauty perhaps.

Has it truly been that long?

In the same breath, Jihoon's lungs are wiped clean as he stares at you through the glass. His breathing is heavy, ghosting over the glass while his broad chest rises and falls. He is nothing but darkened hooded eyes. Eyes that ravage the sight of you in your lacy pink underwear, underwear that he had not seen anywhere. Where did you get that? When did you get that? Myriad thoughts swirl in Jihoon's mind, each more sinister and lustful than the last because you look so completely innocent and so soft standing by the door, arms at your side while the dressing gown hangs lazily off of your shoulders.

After a moment of silence, Jihoon decides to stop this nonsense by leaning back slightly. His long black hair still dripping down the sides of his face and his tongue skates over his bottom lip as he says,

“We should not be this surprised to see each other naked,” He says, a deep voice ringing out through the acoustics of the bathroom, “We are a couple, last I checked.”

When you do not respond, he tilts his head downward, letting an even deeper shadow cast over his eyes as he scans you from head to toe. For an innumerable amount of minutes all is quiet. It feels as though the world had been rid of noise, like you had teleported back in time, to a Charlie Chaplin motion picture. A world of absolute silence.

You begin to wonder how you might respond because surely, you cannot stand here, gawking at him for the rest of your merry life.

Before you could even think of adding to the silence with anything, anything at all, Woozi keeps his ice cold gaze on you, as he leans his head against his forearm, the one still positioned against the shower glass and he resumes his movements of languidly stroking his thick cock buried in his tight fist.

Your mouth runs dry as your eyes betray you, finally venturing down to watch him. You seem to have forgotten just how beautiful your boyfriend truly was, taking in his damp locks kissing his shoulders. He is all solid lines with a sculpted torso and you feel as if you never even knew him at all.

"Jihoon," Your voice quivers with immense passion but he silences you immediately.

"Don't ruin this. Please don't-"

"I wanna help." His mouth snaps shut but he can feel himself twitch in his palm. Jihoon's breath grows hot as you step closer and closer and he squeezes his cock, as the overall scent of you forces its way through his nose and into his brain. You're so utterly addicting, Jihoon's hand strokes almost instinctively, his hips even venturing to push his cock into his palm as he follows your every movement.

"I want you to tell me what to do," You finally say, letting the silk gown fall to the floor as you step into the shower, lingerie and all. Jihoon's mind has completely descended into lechery while his hooded eyes watch you with nothing but adoration.

"Your knees." Is all he is able to force out, "I need you on your knees," He whispers an incredibly hoarse, "Please," that has you falling to his feet automatically. The movement immediately had Jihoon's reeling.

"Fuck," He whispers, the sound of complete awe rushing straight to your core as he finally let's all his inhibitions wilt away with the rest of his manners. Jihoon is quick to bury his fingers into your hair with a roughness you're surprised to see. Surprised but far from disappointed.

"Open your mouth," He instructs, despite already prying your mouth open with his thick fingers, forcing your teeth open as if you were his plaything all while craning your head backwards.

Once he gets your mouth open, Jihoon is insatiable. He immediately bends down and crashes his lips into yours, letting his tongue invade the inside of your mouth like his life depended on it. It's a manic, passionate and domineering kiss, neck that had you moaning into his open mouth as your tongue wrestled with his.

"I'm gonna fuck your mouth now, okay?" His tone however, lets you know that he is not asking, not really, but you nod anyway, unsure of who or what has come over you. All you're really sure of is that you want to make him feel good. The goal, the satisfaction of it is building so fantastically inside of you, pushing through your arteries, steadily soaking your panties with arousal and eliciting a slightly wayward kind of dizzying emotion inside of you all at once.

"Tell me," he says, and you're forced to crane your head back as he straightens his form. "Tell me to fuck your stupid little mouth. Tell me it's what you want." His jaw is locked tight as his hand once again encloses around his sensitive dick. He refuses to give you anything, however, unless he hears you submit to him fully and completely. He feels like he needs to hear the words. Some part deep in his monkey brain needs the confirmation from the source, as if hearing you say such nasty, horrible things would increase his already heightened arousal.

"Please, Fuck my mouth, Jihoon!" In any other instance you might have been shocked at the words flowing out of your mouth, but your cunt is absolutely dripping through the fabric and your hand immediately dives down to cup your pussy through your panties as you look up at him and say, "Please fuck my slutty little mouth, Jihoon! I fucking want you to, pleasepleaseplease-"

"Such a slut- such a pretty little slut-" you'd never heard Jihoon's voice crack the way it just did and you really wish to hear that beautiful sound again. His hand is once again in your hair while his other hand is on your jaw. He pushes a finger inside until he's flattening your tongue and craning your neck even further back. You're momentarily confused, trapped in a haze of stupid lust before Jihoon hovers above you and spits directly into your mouth.

You're moaning, and keening and Jihoon is already forcing his cock all the way inside your mouth.

"Your mouth-" His voice is hoarse as he eases his cock inside the warmth of your mouth. He cannot take his eyes off of you, his beautiful, brilliant girl taking his cock so far into your mouth while you had taken to humping your own hand like an insatiable little slut.

"Fuck baby," He murmurs, letting the tip of cock meet the very back of your throat before inching out again, "is my little girl really getting turned on from sucking cock?" His humiliation is punctuated by a sharp and powerful thrust, one that has you seeing stars and your vision blurring as you fight to keep him inside your mouth. "You don't even have to do anything," He says through gritted teeth, "I'm doing all the work fucking this tiny little mouth of yours, aren't I?" You can feel how turned on he is. He's fucking huge inside your mouth as he slides himself to and fro like his life depended on it.

"God you're so beautiful like this," He whispers, "You're so fucking beautiful taking my cock like a good little whore."

Jihoon's gaze lowers down to where your hand has taken to pushing aside your panties and rubbing swift wet circles on your clit.

"You're not gonna cum like that," He says, almost immediately stilling his frantic hips, "when you cum, it's gonna be because of me, understand?" His grip on your forearm is solid as he pulls you up from off the shower floor. You're absolutely limp in his hands, breath heavy as he brings you close to him. There is a silent, almost tender exchange, with him breathing heavily in your face while you stare wide eyed up at him.

Soon, he's spinning you around with his hands digging into your sides as he presses your front against the fogged up glass. Letting your tits push against the cool, wet surfaces, he draws your hips to his.

Before he sinks his cock into you, a very strange thing happens. Soft pillowy lips brush against your shoulder blade, eliciting a sharp gasp from you.

"Thank you," He whispers before sinking his cock into you with determination. He bottoms out faster than you anticipate, all while you've taken to moaning and whimpering like a mad woman. Your sounds egg him on, until he's rutting his twitching cock inside of you, desperately searching for the alleviation of a budding and aching need inside him.

"You feel so fucking good, you know that?" You hear him behind you. Feel him behind you. Your walls stretch and contract around his cock who continues to bully your insides.

"F-Fuck, Jihoona-"

"Fuck, you're squeezing me, Princess," Your orgasm sneaks up on you pile the devil himself, stripping you of your dignity as you push your hips backwards, almost instinctively forcing his cock deeper as you fucked yourself back onto him. Jihoon's mind is absolutely deranged with lust. He sinks his nails into the softness of your sides and he pulls your hips impossibly closer. He fucks you like a madman, his cock is fluid and quick, pushing against that particular cushion of nerves that has your orgasm feeling like an absolute lifetime. Your panties that had been carelessly pushed aside creates a second later of friction that has him so dangerously close to the edge.

"I'm going to cum inside you." He states while never letting himself stop fucking you, "Fuck- I'm going to cum inside you-" It's the hardest you've ever seen him cum before. His hair is messy and a darker shade under the wetness of the shower, his eyes are hooded and glossy and his body is shuddering against you, overcome by a wave of vicious shocks as he stutters and empties his balls deep inside of you. His cock is forced deeper than it's ever been and you're made completely full of his load. Jihoon is utterly spent as he lowers his weight onto your back. Letting a sea of kisses reign down on your back as your heavy breathing fills the warm and damp air.

"You look so fucking beautiful," He says, never letting his pecks against your back stop, "so fucking gorgeous." That seems like apology enough, on both parts.

813 notes · View notes

bitchlessdino · 2 years ago

Note

okok i'm here for a request

wonwoo as your coworker who you've been having an office romance with - which you have been taking as a joke. everyone thinks you'll get together, and you play along with that. but wonwoo is very serious.

so late night booty call from coworker!wonwoo? or maybe drunk dial to wonwoo and the aftermath the next day (fucking in the office)

Pairing: wonwoo x afab!reader

Genre: smut

Word count: 3.9k

tags: office au, feturin bartender!chan and coworker!mingyu, mentions of alcohol, exhibitionism, manhandling, unprotected sex, creampie, pet name

author note: hi bee ily bee, you're messed up for this bee. but im worse for producing it gdjgwkjg. anyways enjoy wonu rot

Tag: @shiningstar-byulxx @misssugarlips @tommolex @hoeforhao @homerunhansol @dkakapizzaboy @junhui-recs @svtup @buffhoshi @meowmeowminnie @caratochan @lovebot4han @6969lilithcat @wonuhour @camisun93 @emmmui @toruro

Wonwoo is a handsome guy and it was clear as day to everyone in the office. You like having a bit of his attention. He’s funny and quite friendly with you, but that is perhaps because the first time you met you had the courage to fight with him over the last jam-filled donut in the break room. Since then, there’s never not been a reason to talk as if you’ve known each other forever.

You admit some of the socializing you’ve been having with Wonwoo is more than what you do with any other coworker, let alone friend, but you were just playing along and it was too late to go back. Besides, both of you know what this is. All this talk was simply harmless flirting, playful jokes, and lively banter. You make it clear at the end of it all that there is nothing between you and Wonwoo, that things are as platonic as two subordinates can get.

You can’t say the rest of the office believes that though, seeing as so many of them with jealous glares in your direction or the nudges from the suspecting coworkers that ‘lowkey ship’ you two together as if you were some characters in television.

“Ugh, you two make me sick. Just get together and have beautiful children already.”

You and Wonwoo shared a harmonious chuckle together, one louder in humor and it wasn’t the man dashing in a silk silver necktie.

“I wish I could, but they like to sleep on the left side even though I also sleep on the left side and I don't know how that would work,” Wonwoo knocks against your shoulder

“Not to mention he likes cats way more than dogs and the fact that we could never really be together because we’re just good coworkers.”

“Right,” he lightly punches, indicating agreement. “It’d be a really bad idea if we were actually together.”

You raise your brows, almost offended. “Woah, woah. I never said it was really bad.”

“But you were thinking about it.”

“Lover quarrel I hear?” Mingyu butts in after getting his morning joe. “They’re always at it at this time of day.”

You roll your eyes at the giant. “All I’m saying is. I and Wonwoo are good together at work. Just work. Dare I say he’s a good work husband, even if he steals the last of the pastries—“

“Will you ever let that go—“

“No—and that’s all there is everyone. Sorry to disappoint.”

The crowd gives their share of snide smirks before dispersing. Mingyu is the last to stay behind, a Cheshire smile on his face. “Sure, you two. Just keep your hands to yourself around here…if you can help it.”

You were about to throw a light kick at the man before he started scurrying off, leaving you and Wonwoo in your lonesome as always.

“They mean no harm by the way,” Wonwoo points out, “but if it bothers you that much, I can tell them to lay off.”

“Nu-uh,” you reply, shaking your head, “and make me look like a buzzkill? I don’t mind the back and forth. Just don’t anyone get the wrong idea that our jokes are actually serious?”

“Yeah, because it’d be just awful to be caught dating someone like me.”

You groan at his choice of words. “That is not what I said. Stop putting words in my mouth. This is why we wouldn’t work together.”

Wonwoo shrugs, a smile on his face that truly does brighten up a whole room. God, no wonder people think you’re dating him. What single man smiles like that? “Alright, sweet face. Fine. Who cares what they think? We know left from right, okay?” There’s a hint in his tone that says otherwise but you decide to ignore it.

“Okay, good. Anyways, what are your plans tonight? Up for another night of Valo queue?”

“I actually have plans tonight.”

“Oh?” You say wiggling your eyebrows. “Hot date?”

“Maybe? Haven’t met them yet.”

You’re playful expression fades. “Oh, actually? Wow. You must be…excited.”

He shrugs, freshening up his mug. “It’s nice to have plans outside of binge-watching TV at home, so a little bit.”

Your smile can’t seem to reach your ears until you’ve found a way to find the humor out of it. “That sounds nice. I wanna be set up—Wonwoo don’t you have any hot friends?”

Wonwoo feigns thought, clicking his tongue, now noticing the watch on his wrist. “Well, would you look at the time? Back to work.”

You sneer at him leaving you unanswered, following after him to continue the rest of your day. This is how most days went. Outside of work, you shared your personal interests with him, such as video games—perhaps adding to the assumption that you both seem very couple forward—but otherwise, that was all. There was nothing else that made you more than people who work in close proximity together, and not by your own fault either.

Despite this dynamic, Wonwoo is a private person and you only know what he lets you know. Perhaps, that’s why you are so dead set on keeping the formality the way it is. Who knows the type of person he is behind doors?

You try not to be curious about him for the sake of your circumstance, but the thought of Wonwoo and his date stays in the back of your mind, pestering you like an insect well into the afternoon until after work. That’s when you decide to hit up the local bar, grab a drink—or 5–and catch up with your favorite bartender, Chan, to see what he’s up to. He’s normally a good distraction, seeing as he can talk circles around any subject while jumping from one to the other, and you think it starts to make you forget why ever you came in the first place.

However, ‘drunk you’ does whatever the fuck they want, even if ‘sober you’ says otherwise. You seem to forget that every time you go out, perhaps because you think you’ve overcome that part of you after a while of not drinking. Truth was you haven’t.

“Hellooo…”

The dial tone plays on the other end and you continue your incessant greeting until you’re met with a familiar and confused sound. You automatically grin, clutching the device close to your ear in hopes of hearing his voice again.

“Wonwoo…are you and you having fun…”

You hear shuffling in the background, unaware it was Wonwoo checking caller ID to make sure it was you. “Are you doing okay?”

“Me? I’m great…how are you bud? Buddy? Companion? Bestie?”

“Okay. Where are you right now?”

You chortle, glancing back at Chan who is preoccupied with other customers but watching you from the corner of his eye concerned. “Hehe, I’m with a friend. A very handsome friend…”

Chan lets out a light chuckle before finishing up the drink and handing it to the person waiting. He strolls out to you, listening in on the rest of your call as he pretends to clean up glasses.

“Handsome friend?” Wonwoo repeats.

“Very handsome.”

You aren’t sure what’s going on with you, but you feel the urge to simply narrate everything around you, making sure the man on the other line hears every word.

“Is there a reason you’re calling me, Y/n?”

You hum against the phone in pondering. “Just…because. It’s you.”

“Me?”

“You.”

Chan lightly scoffs at the scene, almost seeing the pink in your eyes as you speak to whoever is on the other end and politely asks for your phone. You pout at him, denying him the device, but with a stern look, you melt into mush and soon obliged.

“Hi, you must be Y/n’s friend right? They’re at the Carat Club right now and it looks like they’ve had enough to drink.”

Wonwoo hums into the phone before responding back cautiously. “Are you the handsome friend?”

Chan grins hearing the hint of jealousy. “Why yes, I am.”

“You don’t sound that handsome.”

“Well, you can judge for yourself because I’m also the bartender here. If you aren’t too busy, I’d really appreciate you getting them home. I’ll keep an eye on them but I can only do that for so long with the rush we’re having.”

There’s a moment of silence on the phone that makes the young bartender think the calls have dropped until the gravelly voice on the other end begrudgingly agrees, quickly hanging up right after.

Chan sets the phone back to your side, doing what he’s promised to do. After some time, he recognizes Wonwoo right away by his frantic arrival and the bartender waves him over. Wonwoo scans your current state with a frown creasing his eyes. He tries shaking your sides, and see how little effect it makes.

“How much have they had to drink?”

“A couple of cocktails but by how early they’ve gotten here I assume they haven’t eaten. Best to take them home before it goes right through them.”

“Thanks,” Wonwoo, picks you up by your limp arms and supports your side in the direction of the door. When he’s out of sight, he quietly curses to himself about the accuracy of the bartender’s appearance before settling you in his passenger seat.

His goal is to get you rested and safe. Seeing as your driver's license is doctored from the city several hours from where they are, he assumes it is in need of an update, and tries to pry your address out of you. To no avail, nothing useful comes out from your drunk slurred lips and he ends up taking you to his home, dumping you on his bed, and tucking you in.

You don’t remember anything after the third drink: making that call to Wonwoo, or the debacle of trying to get you home, or his persistence in climbing up the flight of stairs in his own home with the extra body weight. You can only assume the worst when you wake up the following day in a foreign bedroom; your internal alarm was clock accurate as always. You jump from the sheets in pure fear, scanning your surroundings for an owner, when you realize you still have the clothes you wore to work the day before.

Promptly, Wonwoo walks towards the bedroom you occupy from the wide open door and greet you, a smile on his face. “Good, you’re up. Work is in an hour, I’ll get you there.” “Wonwoo, where am I?”

“My place. I would’ve taken you home if you had been more cooperative.”

It takes your eyes some adjusting but you soon realize the lack of clothing on his body, warranting the smooth, broad, and muscular appearance of a Jeon Wonwoo you wouldn’t dare dream of. You gulp at the sight taking it in before hearing him chuckle as he crosses his arms to obscure the view, forcing your eyes on his face that was bare of the thick pair of metal frames you are used to. Instead, you see his eyes, overflowing with warmth you worry you’d stumble upon seeing them. “Extra bathroom at the other end of the hall. I can lend you a shirt.”

“T-thanks.” You say before he disappears in order to get ready for another day.

You quickly finish what needed to be done, taking advantage of the oversized shirt Wonwoo left you behind and somehow making it work. Soon enough you’re off to the office, in his passenger, only time sober and a lot more self-conscious.

“Did I do or say anything weird?”

He lets out a deep, familiar chuckle. “Depends. What’s your definition of weird?”

You try thinking of an answer but none would come up, having you change your mind about getting his prompt response.

“If it’s any consolation, you didn’t get sick like I thought you would, and you were mostly asleep.”

“That just means I was a mess,” You whine.

“Perhaps, but nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“Wait, what about your date? Don’t tell me you—“

“She canceled and I had nothing going on. You called at a good time.”

“I called you?” You question him in bemusement.

“Like I said, nothing I couldn’t handle.”

His repeating that phrase does something the chemical in your brain, retracing the dents of his torso as if they’re right in front you, glistening against the sun rays peaking out of the windows. The smile on his face makes your heart pound a little harder than you’re used to, and now you’re noticing the veins on his hands as he grips the wheel.

You feel yourself swallow. Hand to heart, you pat down as if trying to manually regulate it, but ultimately fail as Wonwoo continues to speak. This must be the embarrassment talking.

“For a second, I thought you called me to confess your undying love for me or something.”

“What?” You ask laughing a little too hard, for once grasping the humor in the situation with difficulty. “Why would you think that?”

“For one, you were drunk. It seemed likely.” He clears his throat, trying to focus on the road. “And maybe that’s what I wanted to hear.”

Those words settle into you like hot cement, frustratingly slow, and before you finally answer, you’re already back at work, following Wonwoo as you leave the car. When both obviously arrive together, the usual attention has multiplied by tenfold, and the treatment feels different than normal. More flustering a suffocating after the night you’ve had. Wonwoo is the only one to notice as he calmly escorts you to your cubicles, leaving the questions of your coworkers unanswered.

You aren't sure why they’re comments are getting you like this now, making you feel hot, hands clasped against your cheeks like a bashful child, but it bothers you throughout the day, forcing you to keep mostly to yourself. Its then Wonwoo, sends you a note, meeting him for lunch alone knowingly while everyone else planned a meal out. You hesitantly oblige to his request and when the time came around, it’s unexpectantly timid, awkward, and nerve-wracking. That’s not how monets with Wonwoo are supposed to go.

“You’ve been quiet.”

You bow you head. “Sorry.”

“Why are you being sorry?”

“I didn’t think I was bothering anyone.”

You don’t see it, but he rolls his eyes.“Well, you were bothering me. Talk to me, joke around with me, be mean to me I don’t know. The silence is annoying me.”

“...I’m sorry.”

“Apologizing again? Look at me.”

It was difficult given the predicament you’re in, but he forces you to anyways by lifting up your chin between his fingers. You watch a dark storm brew in his eyes and now you can’t bare to tear away.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong now?”

You don’t get it. For the past year, you’ve known him, there's only ever been amicable looks or gregarious smiles at a maximum, but in the deep pit of your stomach bubbles a new sensation that has finally festered enough to rise to the surface. You clench your legs in instinct, eyes fluttering back at him as you let each breath take a slow turn.

Intuitive as always, Wonwoo sees that shift in your eyes. It’s disturbing, daunting, and tempting all at once and he decides he can’t take it anymore.

With the break room wall behind you, he pushes you against it, claiming your lips and body until there is no way of escaping. His lips are soft against yours, but moves languidly and impatient, and the grip of his hands on your hips drains the energy out of your lower body. You attempt to chase his vigor, hands against your neck as you suppress your moans at how he kneads your flesh through your slacks only to press your thigh to his side.

“So I’m what’s wrong?” He asks in a low rasp against your lips.

You naturally hold him by the back of his neck, his nose nuzzling against yours. Wonwoo feels your lips part to speak, but he is in a daze by how soft they felt only seconds ago. “You are far from what’s wrong,” you finally answer.

Ridding of inhibitions and doubt, Wonwoo opens the storage closet behind you and shoves you in to lock you both inside. His hands run up your body needily, desperate to taste the skin underneath the shirt you’ve borrowed. You help him undress the same way he does to you, and your pristine pressed Van Hausens fall near your feet like rubble.

His lips then fall underneath your chin, trailing your neck, he refrains from leaving too much pressure but is almost swayed by your natural scent mixed in with his shampoo. He roughly plants you against a mostly empty shelf, the ice cold metal somehow burning your skin. He helps you tug off your slacks finding that sopping cunt that’s been dying to have him discover them since this morning.

“For me? Just for me?” He wastes no time shoving his hand down the frail fabric of your underwear and gliding his thick digits over your wet slit. “I don’t know if I can keep my hands to myself this time.”

Your voice reveals itself, saying his name in a way you wouldn’t dare let another person hear as long as you lived. He repeats the action, watching you crumble in front of him like award-winning cinema.

“I never heard you speak like that to me. I could get used to it.” He find your ear, his cat-like smile forming before his lips closes around your skin and his whispers cause the ripples of chills down your spine. “Say my name like that again for me, darling.”

You tremble under his touch, feeling his fingers dip into your heat enticingly. “Won…wooo…”

He lets out a soft and gentle moan, and the heat of his breath fans your pebbled skin. “Such a pretty little thing. I’ve dreamt how you’d be like this for me so often.”

“You…have?”

He presses a lingering kiss on your neck. “More than I can be proud of.” He curls his digits before taking light jerks, his thumb rubbing your arousal around the circumference of your clit. He drinks in your pretty pants, teeth grazing back at your skin. “You like me touching you? Aren’t I being such a good work husband?”

Your eyes screw shit, mouth etching open to give him a well-deserved praise, “So goo—“

“Where are my keys,” a voice breaks outside the door.

Wonwoo seizes his fingers from you and clamps them over your mouth, your arousal basically coating your lips and his eyes staring back at you intently.

“Where did they go anyway?”

Wonwoo shushes you with pursed lips. “Better be quiet.” His tone is stern but his actions say otherwise as his zipper comes down in a fraction of a second. “It’s in our best interest not to get caught, right?”

His name muffles under his palm, squeezing the life out of your cheeks as he exposes the bulging cock that’s been fighting away at him since he kissed you. Your eyes dart in their direction, beading perspiration across your forehead, and you feel yourself clench around nothing as his cock draws closer to your fluttering heat.

Your eyes double their size and then shrink to half the size once he’s inside you. His raw, long heat pushes into your core inch by inch, and you feel the necessary evil to bite down his palm. If Wonwoo was bothered by it, he doesn’t show it as he claims you with deep strokes, having your hands rest against his firm pectorals in reluctant trust. His low grunts can only be heard by you and the slight fog in his glasses is apparent the closer he thrust into you, even in the dim closet lighting,

Outside these walls still is a confused Mingyu, not foreseeing the event occurring behind a door mere feet away. “Maybe, they went somewhere else for lunch.”

You audibly squeak within the tight space and Wonwoo shushes you again, knocking back into with a curt but harsh slam before forcing your walls to hold his cock inside you like a natural plug. “You’re gonna get us in trouble, darling. I’m not done with you yet.” An accumulated thrill runs through your veins at the thought of being caught, taking every thrust with pressure and liquifying at the devious smile on your rumored boyfriend’s face.

“No they’re not here,” the intruder says to a voice unheard from their distance. “…Coming!”

His footsteps noticeably scan the perimeter once last time before they retreated further and further away.

“Finally,” Wonwoo breathes out, “now I have you all to myself.” Although he states that, he doesn’t let go of your mouth, in fact, you swear his hand is getting tighter and now his face closer, finally processing the spearmint on his breath “We should still be careful. Can you be quiet for me?”

You quietly nodded, grasping at his body desperately, gesturing for him to keep going.

He scoffs. “My darling being impatient?” He pulls out almost his entire length before shoving back into you, earning a feeble tremble. “My. Cock. Making. You. Needy. Hm?”

You nod back at him, holding back your tears, nails digging into his shoulder blades.

“Eyes on me, darling. Your work husband is need of your attention while I fuck you senseless.”

Shallow breaths escape your nostrils, finally meeting his eyes, which seemed to have lost the thick barrier of his glasses somehow already set on the shelf behind him. “Would you like for me to cum in you?”

You gingerly nod.

“Will you listen to everything I say when I let go of your mouth?”

Like a glitch, you nod the same exact way.

“Such a good little darling.”

His cock fills you up as naturally as breathing does. While his lips are home against yours, tongue entangling to the point it becomes sex itself. Your hushed moans are music to his ears and bear motive as his cock plunges deeper and harder inside you. He doesn’t mind how you bit his lips, nor how your nails drag against his back, rather he revels in it, doubling over you to push his cock inside you deeper until you're unable to contain your screams and he’s forced to silence you again.

You whisper how you’re close and it’s a natural drug, encouraging him to only ram inside you and claim the sweet sound of your orgasm coating decadently around his cock. He handles it rather gentlemanly, fairly as his cock is next to ripple in climax, shooting his thick over churned honey until it fills your heat until the point of fully occupancy. His arms come around you in a firm grasp, bruising your lips until you’re imprinted with the memory of him.

You let out light pants, awkwardly thanking his promptly done tasks before you’re whisked away again by his perfect, salvia-sheened lips. “That was very…superb.”

Strange adjective but it’s done the job, you think.

“I’m glad you think so,” he chuckles in a way that tells you things are far from over and you’re proven correct when he brings up your legs, thighs crushing his cheeks that splays the most impish smile. “But we still have 15 minutes of our lunch and a man’s gotta eat.”

Part of my 3K Follower StayCation!!!

#svthub #seventeen smut #wonwoo smut #jeon wonwoo smut #wonwoo #seventeen wonwoo #seventeen #seventeen fanfic #seventeen x reader #seventeen x you #jeon wonwoo #wonwoo fanfic #wonwoo x reader #wonwoo x you #wonwoo x y/n

2K notes · View notes