alanine

"Sunghoon!"

Headshot, headshot, assist—that's all that's being processed when the front door bursts open hard enough to rattle the empty energy drink cans on Sunghoon's desk. He doesn't blink, even as one of them falls over, rolling around on the floor. He doesn't even stop to think about the remaining drop left in the can that's probably leaking onto the carpet somewhere.

"Sunghoon, get your ass out here!"

He's in game mode, and nobody stops him when he's like that. Not even his roommates, whose approaching footsteps he fails to register. The only thing that matters is the screen in front of him as he lines up his next shot, just waiting for the remaining enemy teammate to peek around the corner. His prey is right there. Right behind that wall. All they have to do is walk into his trap.

Just peek already, you little pussy bitch—

"Sunghoon!"

He yelps when a hand clamps on his shoulder. His arm jerks, aim twitching, and the enemy peeks at that very moment, landing a clean headshot on him. His teammates start cursing at him in the voice chat. A lovely, overlapping chorus of "kill yourself" and "delete the game" as if he hadn't carried them for the past two rounds.

Sunghoon mutes the mic and pulls his headphones down around his neck, glaring behind him at Heeseung, who is practically dragging him up from his seat. He tries to yank his arm away, but then another pair of hands is hauling him out of his seat. He directs his glare back at Jay.

"What the f—"

"Don't act surprised. I literally told you we needed your help an hour ago. It's your fault for queueing a ranked game," Jay states, patting his shoulder. Sunghoon is now on his feet, blinking at him. Annoyed, but... ultimately unable to argue back, given he had ignored all his texts.

"Can't you just get Jake or something?" He mutters.

Jay is already leaving his bedroom, and Heeseung nudges him forward, forcing him to follow. Sunghoon rolls his eyes, a heavy sigh escaping him. He moves with begrudging footsteps out into the hallway.

"It's a four-man job. Turns out my grandma's coffee table is heavy as shit."

"Your grandma's coffee table...?"

He's not exaggerating. The thing is solid oak—masterfully crafted, intricately carved, and so extremely fucking heavy that by the time they've wrestled it through the front door, all four of them go down, collapsing to the couch. Jake, already muttering something about needing a drink, Heeseung describing his physical decline in real time, and Jay, heaving in silence.

Sunghoon sinks into the cushions, and his vision blurs, wondering which is more to blame for it: the summer heat or the fact that he's been skipping the gym to play ranked and living off microwave ramen for the past few weeks. His headset is still around his neck, and he can hear his teammates losing without him. He doesn't care. He can't feel his arms.

"Fuck, I'm gonna feel that in my back for weeks," Heeseung announces to the ceiling, then his head lifts, "but look at that—really ties the place together, right?"

He gestures to the room. Sunghoon's eyes glaze over the sight. Bare white walls, curtainless windows, a TV that sits directly on the floor, and a trash bag in the corner full of takeout containers and red solo cups—and of course, now, the beautiful table, sticking out like a sore thumb amid the room's college-boy barrenness.

"We've lived here a whole year now," Sunghoon starts between breaths, not enough energy in him to glare at his roommates. "Not once has any one of us said, 'Oh no, where will I put my cup of coffee?'"

"Who says we have to use it for coffee?"

He blinks. He doesn't know when Jake left the room, but he's now returning with a six-pack of beer, setting it down on the new table. He cracks one open immediately, settling next to him on the couch.

"My grandma's downsizing." Jay reaches forward, patting the table's surface with genuine affection. "She gave it to us for free. You don't say no to a free coffee table."

"Well, it looks stupid." Sunghoon folds his arms, "Really helps the whole we have nothing aesthetic."

"Come on. We're adults now." Heeseung perks up, "Adults have coffee tables. It's about presentation. Besides, I heard chicks dig it. Something about owning real furniture and bed frames just does it for them."

"None of us are bringing girls home," Sunghoon starts, looking at each of them. He sees Jake's mouth open to protest, "And no, your weird situationship does not count."

"Maybe that's 'cause we didn't have a coffee table before," Jay shrugs.

"Yeah, tell the ladies all about your grandma's furniture. I'm sure they'll start lining up the block."

Sunghoon feels a headache starting behind his left eye, and when he hears the game end through his headset at his shoulders, he rips the device from his neck, shoving it to the cushion at his side.

"Shitty ass game," He mutters.

A sweat had gathered at his brow, and he now moves to wipe it as he's reaching for a beer, cracking it open and taking a large gulp like it's water.

"Rough match?"

"Nah. Would've been an easy match," Sunghoon replies, groaning, "Just stressed. Coach has been pressuring me, plus there's that stupid course I have to retake this semester."

"Tough life being Captain of the E-sports team, huh?" Heeseung jokes, "Or what is it you were called that one time? The school's biggest virgin?"

Captain of the E-sports team. A title Heeseung delivers like a punchline. Most people do. Sunghoon, on the other hand, wears it with pride, and had long since stopped trying to explain himself—both the fact that being the best player in the whole school is a legitimate accomplishment, and the fact that he is not a virgin. Effectively explaining either of those things would require Heeseung to actually care, which he doesn't.

Sunghoon had spent his whole life refining his skills for that sort of recognition. He shoots with precision and wins. He reads his opponents to filth, predicting their every move, and annihilates them with ease. He plays Valorant at a level that makes his teammates worship him like a god, and the enemy team start inventing new slurs to type in the chat. That is to say, he was very, very good at it. And very serious about it.

It's precisely why he doesn't have time for moving coffee tables. Or sitting around like this. Or—

His phone buzzes.

His is summer course. Right. The one he'd failed last semester, that his academic advisor had gently but firmly informed him he needed to retake if he wanted to graduate on time. He'd registered for it in a fog of dismissive irritation back in March, figuring it would be easy enough. And then the syllabus had dropped with the word group project, and he'd been assigned a project partner who had emailed him four times before the first week of classes had even ended, asking about meeting up weeks before the deliverable due dates.

He reaches for his phone, scrolling through the feed of missed notifications from you: One shared document link, more than a couple missed messages, and—he squints—a voice memo. Who the fuck sends voice memos about code?

"Is that the project partner you keep complaining about?" Heeseung leans over his shoulder, snatching the phone away, "She sends voice memos. How adorable. Don't tell me you're ignoring those?"

"Give it back."

He doesn't; instead, he hits play, raising the volume to the max so the whole room can hear it.

"Hey, Sunghoon. How are you? Um... I'm here at the library now. I know we agreed to meet at three o'clock, but I got here a little early," he hears you laugh a bit nervously through the speaker. You have one of those that's just a little too sweet, a little too apologetic for no reason in particular. "I booked a study room, so text me when you're here. And... that's all for now. Bye, Sunghoon."

The boys sit there in silence. Glaring in disbelief at their friend.

"Oh my god," Heeseung groans, "Sweet Jesus, your partner sounds like this, and you've been ignoring her?"

Jay snatched the phone, glaring at it, then glaring at Sunghoon, "She sounds like an angel. What the fuck is wrong with you? Like, medically. What kind of mental illness does a guy have to have to end up like this?"

"That's the long-term psychological damage of being a Valorant player," Jake scoffs, and Sunghoon rolls his eyes.

"Play it again," Heeseung demands, and Jay rewinds it a bit, just to hear the breathing and that nervous little laugh through the speaker, a smile forming on his lips, "Is she cute? She sounds cute. She's got the voice. You know the one that some girls have, that makes you think about what other noises they could—"

"I don't know. I haven't even met her—yet." Sunghoon snatches the device back, "She's annoying. She sends like twenty messages a day."

"Twenty messages a day," Heeseung looks at him, "From a girl who sounds like she whimpers when she's nervous. You know what I'd do with twenty messages a day? I'd be jacking off to the typing indicators."

"That's disgusting. Keep that shit to yourself."

"What's disgusting is you having a girl sending you personalized audio content, saying your name like that, and choosing to ignore it."

"Bet he's got it all in a folder somewhere," Jay snorts, "Keeps it hidden away, playing on loop while he queues ranked. Jacks off between rounds."

"I've never even listened to any of these," Sunghoon says flatly, "She sends so many. Seriously. She's like an organized freak. The kind who start projects early and shit."

"Oh, so she's one of those girls?" Jake grins, "super nervous, apologizes for nothing... You know the type?"

"I don't." Sunghoon deadpans, feeling like his friend is about to start describing a porno category rather than an actual person, given the smirk on his face.

"The type that acts all innocent and sweet on the surface," Heeseung nudges him, "you know what they say about them, right? That they're total freaks in bed. Shit, if a girl like that booked me a study room I'd—"

"Actually finish your degree and graduate?" Jake offers.

"I'd graduate with honours."

"She's probably been waiting in the library for how long, now?" Jay shakes his head, "She got there early. Early. She's probably sitting there with her little notes and highlighters and her 'bye Sunghoon' voice, checking her phone every thirty seconds, and you're here drinking beer and complaining."

Today. The meeting was today. He checks the time—forty minutes ago.

"Shit," Sunghoon's on his feet, sprinting towards his room, "Shit, shit, shit."

He starts digging around for his backpack in his room, under piles of laundry, and nearly trips on the can he forgot to pick up on his floor.

"Guys, the library!" he calls out in a panic, "I'm supposed to be at the library. I need a ride. Now. Jay?" "Not my problem." "Jake?" "Nope."

Sunghoon grabs his bag and stumbles back to the living room, bracing himself against the doorframe. Heeseung is already looking at him with that slow, insufferable smile, sprawled on the couch like he's been waiting for this exact moment.

"I dunno," Heeseung says, stretching his arms over his head with a theatrical groan. "I'm feeling pretty tired. That table was heavy." "I helped." "You complained the whole time." "I did not—" "And you kept voice memos hidden from me. From all of us. That's a betrayal of household trust." "I didn't hide anything. You're just a nosy degenerate." Sunghoon's grip tightens on the doorframe. "Are you driving me or not?" "Hm." Heeseung taps his chin. "Maybe if you ask me nicely..." Sunghoon takes a breath. Swallows his pride. "Heeseung." He says through gritted teeth, "Can you please drive me?" "Ah, I like the sound of that." Heeseung pushes off the couch and brushes past him with infuriating slowness. "Fine. But you owe me. I wanna hear more of cute-girl's voice notes, so be nice to her." "Okay. Whatever, you fucking pervert." Sunghoon scoffs, watching him snag his keys off the hook by the door. "Just drive."

The library's fairly empty. It's expected, given it's the middle of summer on a weekend, but it's still jarring as ever to walk past empty tables where people would go to war to get a spot during finals season. And, for the first time in a while, he's thankful to be in an air-conditioned building.

"Hi Sunghoon!" you greet him as soon as he enters the room, seemingly startled by the suddenness of his arrival. He watches you for a moment, how your back straightens, and your immediate, almost rehearsed smile.

She's got the voice. Heeseung's words ring in his mind as he takes you in, you know the one that some girls have, that makes you think about what other noises they could—

"Hi," he answers, slipping into the seat next to you, "Sorry for making you wait. Roommate stuff. Had to move a coffee table. Very adult."

You laugh a little too quickly, and he notes the way your hands tremble in your lap. He also notes the way you refuse to meet his eyes.

"That's okay," you glance towards your phone, which was still face-up with its messages open. You fumble with it, tucking it away. "I was just worried maybe, like, you got lost or something."

Lost? He has to resist the urge to scoff. He's late, and instead of being upset, you decided to make up lousy excuses for him. He looks you up and down again. You're cute, like you sounded over the phone. A nervous-looking mess. The type of thing his roommates would call endearing. Sunghoon, on the other hand, finds it frustratingly pathetic.

"So." You're already turning your laptop to face him, "I've been working on the backend structure. I commented everything, so it should be pretty straightforward. Here's the API setup, and the database schema..."

You click through files as you talk, your voice picking up speed, and he doesn't listen. He tries to. He swears, he does. But his eyes instead follow your posture, and how you sit uptight, spine straight. Your hands fumble around, twitching like you can't keep them still, and your knees bounce under the desk like a nervous habit.

Good god, you look like you'll crumble to pieces any moment. He can feel a headache creeping up on him already. It's exhausting just looking at you.

"...What do you think?"

"Huh?" He blinks, taking in whatever you're pointing to on your screen. You're looking at him all bright-eyed and earnest, as if his opinion would add any sort of valuable insight here. "I... think it looks good. You did well."

"Really?"

"Yeah, I mean," he shrugs, "Why do you sound so surprised?"

His question catches you off guard. He suspected it would, that's why he asked it. Not that he was trying to prod around in your anxious little head. Just that you seemed predictable. Now he knows you are.

"I just..." You're tapping the desk now. "I wanted it to be up to your standards. I didn't want to disappoint you."

"My standards?" He repeats. Then, unexpectedly, he laughs. Not at you—well, maybe a little at you. But mostly at the absurdity of the most competent person in the room, asking for his approval. "You're something else, you know that?"

You blink. "What does that—?"

"Here," He's still smiling. The headache from earlier has faded. He's not sure when. "Let me show you what you're working with."

He opens his laptop and spins it toward you. His frontend code sits there in all its tragic glory—bare bones, placeholder text, a CSS file with plenty of questionable styling decisions. Your take it all in, and for a split second, you forget to hide the horrified expression on your face.

"See? Trash. Actual garbage. I don't even show up to class. I'm not the guy whose 'standards' you should be worried about. Besides..." He leans back. "You're probably the best student in the whole class."

"I'm sure I'm not," you say, almost bashful, brushing it off as if it were a compliment. It wasn't. He was stating a fact. But you're too self-deprecating to know the difference, he supposes. "And your code isn't trash—"

"It is. We both know it's ass. You don't have to be polite."

"It's... disorganized. And a little rushed..." You hesitate, "Were you busy with something—?"

"Oh my god, you have no idea," he tilts his head back, a sigh of frustration leaving him almost immediately. "Regionals. Scrims every night. Coach breathing down my neck. I'm pretty sure I heard someone call for a flank in my dream last night, and I don't even think I was asleep. Or maybe that was just my roommates fucking with me again..."

You nod along as if you understand, though you definitely don't. You probably don't even know what half those words mean, but you're listening, and for some reason, that's less annoying than it was ten minutes ago.

"Anyway. I know it's rough. But like I said. Don't worry your head over anything else. I'll get to it, I swear."

"I'm not worried. I trust you. We still have another week, so it's not like it's last-minute. We just need to clean up some things here," You nod sweetly, then angle the screen toward him and lean in, your shoulder nearly brushing his. "The class labelling in the HTML is messing with the CSS styling. If you restructure the divs here, it should resolve most of the layout issues. And then here..."

You start explaining—specificity, nesting, the cascade. Your voice is steady now, in your element. You point at the screen with a capped highlighter like a tiny lecturer. He catches maybe sixty percent of it.

What he catches more of is your instinctive forgiveness. He shows up an hour late with half-done work that looks like a middle schooler's first project, and you're already pivoting to reassurance mode. It's okay. It's a good start. We can fix it. It's spineless. A little sad, honestly. It's also nice. You're a nice person. No bite, no sarcasm, no passive-aggressiveness, just pure, unearned kindness.

He sighs, leaning back in his chair, settling in as you continue. He makes himself comfortable as best he can in his plastic library chair, and subconsciously, his legs spread, his knee drifting outward until it presses against yours under the table.

It wasn't intentional, and he's about to mutter a quick apology and draw his leg back, but then you pause completely. Your mouth is still half-open around whatever you were about to say, but nothing comes out. Your eyes drop to the table. Your fingers freeze over the trackpad.

He notices. He absolutely notices all of it. The way you swallow, the way your lip trembles trying to find your next word, the way you glance at him from the side in a panic, checking to see his reaction. She gets flustered when I touch her, he thinks, filing the thought away like data, interesting. He doesn't move his knee. Doesn't say anything or make any sort of face. He just watches you scramble, suddenly feeling a lot less bored than he'd felt a few seconds ago.

"I—" You shake your head, a tiny, almost imperceptible movement. "Sorry, what was I—the bullet points. Right. I'll email you."

You clear your throat. Find your place in your notes again, though your hands are fumbling slightly, your crisp efficiency gone. You're scrambling to recover, to be useful again, to reassert the order you're using as a crutch.

"Anyway," you manage, "That's everything from my end. We're in good shape."

You're already packing up. The laptop closed with a decisive click. Highlighters swept into your bag in a single motion. Notebook stacked on top. The organized girl, reassembling her armour. Trying to pretend the last thirty seconds didn't happen.

"You in a hurry?" He has to hold back a teasing grin as you scramble for your words. "No! I mean—yeah. Just. Gotta go, so... yeah. See you next week. Or something." "Yeah. Or something."

He doesn't move. He's thinking about the bus. The long, slow route across campus. The forty-minute wait. Maybe Jay will pick up if he calls. Maybe Heeseung will text him something unhelpful, like walk it builds character.

You're standing, bag over your shoulder, then you pause, noticing he hasn't gotten up. "You're staying?"

"Hm? Just deciding if I want to beg my roommates for a ride, or suck it up and take the bus."

"Oh..." you adjust the strap of your bag, watching him thoughtfully. Your hand is already at the door, ready to go. But you don't. Your mouth hangs open slightly, hesitating on your next word. "Do you maybe want a ride? I have my car. If you want."

He looks at you. Still shrinking yourself. Still avoiding direct eye contact. And you're offering him a ride he didn't ask for. You're offering favours for him—a stranger you don't know. He files that fact away, too.

"Yeah." He stands, slinging his bag over one shoulder. "A ride would be great, actually."

You smile like he's the one doing you a favour, and he smiles back. Not for the same reason. Just because he's feeling really fucking lucky that his project partner is this nice to him.

What a stupid, stupid idea. Really, what on earth were you thinking? Having him, of all people, in your car? In your passenger seat?

Park Sunghoon. You'd read the name about a hundred times in email threads and shared documents. Now that same man is here, in your car, looking out the window with his jawline catching the late afternoon light like it's trying to blind you. Your blood pressure is rising by the second, trying to keep your focus on the road, while your heart threatens to beat out of your chest.

Admittedly, you were annoyed at first. You'd spend an hour in the library, checking your phone, re-reading the room booking confirmation, composing and deleting increasingly pathetic messages. Hey, just checking in! No rush!

You even practiced in your head the polite-but-firm speech you'd planned to deliver. It's a new thing you've been trying to do where you don't let people walk all over you—where you set boundaries and explain that your time is valuable. Then he'd walked in.

To call him hot would be an understatement. That man right there is not simply hot. Hot is a word for attractive people who still seem human. Sunghoon, on the other hand, looks like someone photoshopped a male model into your web programming course as a prank.

His hair is dark and slightly messy, like he just rolled out of bed and somehow falls perfectly into place. His jawline, so sharp it could kill you, and when he flashed that dimpled smile at you—that lazy, unbothered, gorgeous smile—your brain had performed a full system shutdown.

You don't offer people rides. You don't even like having your friends in your car. You get stressed by the thought of someone else in your space, watching you drive, listening to your playlist. And now he's in the passenger seat of your car, looking so gorgeous that you're wondering if he's even real, and you're freaking the fuck out. His knee bounces idly as he stares out the window, and your eyes snag on the movement—the way his hand, large and sprawled out, rests loose on his knee. You snap your gaze back to the road.

Deep breaths, you tell yourself, sparing him another glance from the corner of your eye. Stop thinking about weird stuff. Stop being weird. Just make conversation or something.

"So," you manage, and the fact that you manage to say it while sounding almost normal is a small victory. "You said you were busy? With, like, a summer internship or something?"

"Nah." He's still looking out the window, nodding his head slowly to the music. You don't even know what song you have playing. The sound of your own thoughts is too loud for you to notice, but a warmth floods your cheeks at the mere idea that he's enjoying your music. "E-sports. I'm on the school team. We've got regionals coming up."

You blink.

E-sports. You suppose it makes sense. He is in computer science, like you. Most guys in your program are into the whole video gaming thing. It's just hard to imagine him as one of them.

You try to picture it in your head: The E-sports team. A group of socially awkward loners who sit in darkened rooms with headsets, shouting at each other. And then there’s Sunghoon who, beneath the old hoodie and messy hair, looks like he's one photoshoot away from a skincare campaign.

"That's—" You search for the right word. "Cool. I didn't realize the school had an E-sports team."

"Most people don't." He shrugs, glancing over at you. "It's not exactly a spectator sport. But we're good. Made regionals last season. Coach says if we podium this year, we might actually get real funding."

He says it less with arrogance, and more in that matter-of-fact tone he seems to always have. There's something about the way he doesn't perform humility or pride, how he states his truth and moves on. It seems easy. You admire that. You also find it deeply unfair that his voice is making you feel all sorts of things while he's just... talking.

"What game?" you ask.

"Valorant. The shooter. With the agents and the abilities?" He glances at you. "You've heard of it?"

"Oh! My younger cousin plays." You think back, laughing a little at the recollection of the time he made you download it to your laptop. "I'm terrible at it. Like, genuinely embarrassingly bad. I panic and shoot at the floor."

He laughs. It's a real laugh, short and surprised, and a heat creeps to your cheeks. "Everyone's bad at first. It's all just practice."

"Right. Practice." You're smiling now, "I'll add it to my schedule. Between the project and avoiding my parents' calls."

"Your parents?"

"Strict. They mean well, but..." You shake your head, letting your words trail off.

You feel the weight of his stare, a soft hum leaving his lips. The intersection ahead goes yellow. You slow to a stop, grateful for the excuse to look away from him.

"So." You pivot, "E-sports. You must be practicing a lot then, right?"

"It's a lot of pressure," he says, and his voice has shifted slightly. Less casual. His brows scrunch together, and he's looking out the window again, passing streetlights catching the angles of his sharp, beautiful profile. "Coach says if we don't podium, our funding might get cut. Again. So I've been practicing nonstop. Scrims every night. VOD reviews."

Scrims. VOD reviews. Words that do not exist in your vocabulary, but you nod your head along like you understand. You think you get the idea, anyway.

"And then there's this course." He gestures vaguely at you, at the car, at everything. "This bullshit that I have to retake it."

"You failed web programming?"

"I was carrying the team through the playoffs. Sacrificed my homework for practice." He rubs the back of his neck, and your eyes track the shift of his shoulder, the way his fingers press into the muscle there, the brief glimpse of his collarbone where his hoodie shifts. You look away before he catches you staring. "Didn't think I'd end up failing, but. Here we are."

You think about his half-finished frontend. The skeleton components. The CSS file, full of god knows what. He'd shown it to you with the sheepish shrug of someone who knew exactly how bad it was and hated it. He hadn't tried to convince you it was better than it looked.

"But it's okay. It's worth it to make it to regionals." He's smiling to himself, "I'll fucking destroy those losers. They won't know what hit them."

You laugh, but he doesn't. You realize it's not a joke very quickly, and so you clear your throat instead.

"And I'll get my work done, of course," he tips his head towards you, his posture shifting. "Can't guarantee my portion will be as good as yours. But you can blame it on me in the group review doc."

"I'm sure you'll do great," you hear yourself say. "Not just the project. The tournament, too."

He turns to look at you. The late afternoon light catches the side of his face, and you have to force your eyes back to the road.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." You clear your throat. "I mean, I don't know anything about E-sports. But you're the captain, right?"

"Yeah."

"So you must be good. Like, actually good."

He doesn't answer right away. When you glance over, he's not looking at the road—he's looking at you, head tilted slightly, like he's trying to figure you out.

"I am. I'm the best player on the team." He says it with that matter-of-fact tone again.

You pull up to his place. It's a student housing unit—one of those rundown ones that nobody cares about enough to fix up. Someone inside is yelling, the way guys yell when they're playing video games. You shift into park.

"Thanks," he says, unbuckling his seatbelt. "For the ride. And for... You know. Not being pissed about the code. Or the being late thing."

"It's fine," you smile. "Really. Don't worry about it."

He pauses with his hand on the door. Looks at you. There's something in his expression you can't read, the hint of a smile that you think might be lazy amusement, though you're not sure what he's amused by. He stops. Shakes his head slightly. "See you soon?"

"Yeah! I'll send the invite. And the notes."

He smiles. That damn smile. And then he's gone, walking up the path to his door, and you're sitting in your parked car with your heart doing something stupid in your chest. You watch him disappear inside. You're warm all over, and there's no good reason for it either. All he did was sit there and talk to you like a normal person, and yet you're here, feeling a deeply humiliating sort of heat forming in your lower stomach the more you think about it.

Through the front window, you can see movement—someone on a couch, the blue glow of a TV. His roommates, probably. You wonder if he'll tell them about you. You wonder if they even know you exist. Then you realize you're still parked outside his apartment, staring at his front door like a creep, and you pull away from the curb.

You have to drive all the way back to campus. It's a route you know by heart, familiar enough that your brain has permission to drift. And drift it does—back to the study room, the way he'd leaned back in his chair, the way his knee had pressed against yours. You'd frozen. Completely, mortifyingly frozen. You'd forgotten your own sentence and stammered through the recovery. And then he'd smiled at you in the car. And now you're smiling. You're smiling at a red light with no one else in the car, like an idiot, and you can't stop.

It's late, past two in the morning, and the place has gone quiet—Heeseung retreated to his room hours ago, Jake's been dead to the world the moment he got home from his summer job, and Jay's probably doomscrolling, given the amount of Instagram reels he keeps sending to the roommates group chat. The only light is the fridge, a dull white glow illuminating Sunghoon’s tired gaze.

Sunghoon stands in front of it, scanning the contents inside, none of it looking particularly enticing, but he just lost a ranked game, and he needs to eat his feelings. Leftover takeout. Someone's half-eaten burrito. A case of energy drinks. He grabs a container that looks decent enough—day-old noodles, probably Jay’s because nobody else in the house bothers to cook. Deciding that dealing with the aftermath of stealing his food is a problem for tomorrow, he shoves it in the microwave.

"Sup."

The floorboards creak behind him, and Sunghoon turns around to glare. Heeseung. Of course. The microwave beeps, and Sunghoon grabs the container, shoving his chopsticks around. It’s still cold in the center.

"Why do you always choose to enter the kitchen when I'm here?"

"Because we run on the same sleepless schedule," Heeseung moves to the sink, waterbottle held under the faucet and turns on the tap. His hair is a disaster, his shirt inside-out, and he watches Sunghoon eat Jay’s leftover noodles straight from the container, too lazy to comment on it. "And 'cause I wanna hear about your little library date. Was she cute?"

"Not a date."

"She drove you home. So it clearly went well." He turns off the tap and fastens the cap back on the plastic bottle. "Were you nice to her?"

"I was nice."

"You better have been. Most women would've called you a loser for being a grown ass man with no driver's license."

"Whatever."

"No, not whatever. I can't believe you." Heeseung points the water bottle at him, frowning, "I can't believe what I'm hearing. She waited an hour for you. Then she gave you a ride home.”

"I know. Real nice of her, right?"

"Too nice of her." Heeseung stares at him, watching him shove noodles into his mouth. "Jay's right. We really should do a scan of your brain. Admit you to a psych ward or some shit."

He doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't want to think about it. But his brain, unhelpfully, is already thinking about it. The project. He should really start working on the project. That's the thought he keeps trying to hold onto. Not because he actually wants to do it, but because of you.

You'd been kind. Genuinely kind. You'd asked about regionals like you gave a single shit. You'd nodded along while he talked about Valorant, even though you don't understand any of it. Then there was his code—his shitty ass code that he knew was trash, that you knew was trash, too. There was no lecture. No guilt trip. Not even a hint of disdain. You just showed him how to fix it. Carefully explained it, even sent him an email after with an organized bullet-point list of all the steps he needed to implement.

An angel. That's what you are. Or a doormat. It’s the same thing, in his mind. A worse person would take advantage of that, wouldn't they?

His phone buzzes on the counter: One new email. An attachment. Then a second notification—a voice memo.

Heeseung's eyes immediately drop to the screen.

"Is that her?"

"Can you not—?"

Heeseung snatches the phone. Again. Sunghoon is too tired to fight him.

"She sent you another voice memo. At 2am." Heeseung's thumb hovers over the play button. "You know what girls send voice memos at 2am for, right?"

He's grinning as he presses play, and Sunghoon digs his chopsticks further into his noodles, ignoring his crude commentary.

"Hi, Sunghoon. Um. Okay, so I was thinking about earlier—about the whole esports thing, and how stressed you seemed about the tournament? And I just... I had some extra time, so I finished up the code. It wasn’t a big deal, really. Only took a few hours.” There’s a nervous laugh, then a pause like you’d forgotten your next words, “Hopefully, this helps? So you can focus on practice and not have to worry about the project on top of everything else… yeah. Just. Let me know if you have questions. I'm always happy to help. Okay. This is getting long. Sorry. Bye, Sunghoon.”

Heeseung sets the phone down on the counter, the movement slow and careful, like he’d just handled a sacred artifact.

"Dude."

"I know."

"This is insane."

"I know."

"You've got a girl doing all your work for you. At two in the morning. Because you mentioned you were stressed about a Valorant tournament. Said she’s always happy to help."

"I said I know. She's nice. Now leave me alone."

"No, I don't think you understand. Do you even realize what this is?" Heeseung is pacing now, the kitchen too small for his indignation. "This is the literal definition of pretty privilege. You literally just sit there, and she’s doing things for you—Holy shit, it's like when Jake was doing some hot chick's homework for an entire semester 'cause he was begging for a crumb of pussy—"

"Jake was manipulated." Sunghoon sets his leftovers down. "I'm not manipulating anyone. I didn't even—I never asked for this."

"Yeah." Heeseung stops pacing and looks at him. "But you could've. That's the fucked up part. You could  ask her to come over right now and do your dirty laundry, and she'd say yes. She'd probably bring her own detergent."

Sunghoon wants to retort that, but... You would, wouldn't you? He drags two hands down his face, sighing as his roommate's mouth continues to run.

"Life's so unfair." Heeseung throws his hands up. "I send a girl one message. One. And she leaves me on read for three days. You ignore a girl for a week, and she's doing your homework, giving you rides home, and sending you audio porn. What is wrong with the world?"

Sunghoon's looking at his phone.

He should type something. Thanks, maybe. Or sorry—sorry you’re doing his work at 2am, sorry he didn't do it himself, sorry he's probably going to keep disappointing you. His thumb hovers over the keyboard.

thanks. you didn't have to do that. Deletes it. seriously thank you. i owe you. Deletes it.

He pockets his phone and walks past Heeseung, leaving the leftovers container behind.

"Where are you going?"

"Bed."

"You're not going to respond? You're just going to leave her on read?" He half-calls out, "You're really gonna act like you're not interested at all?"

He shuts his door. Sits on the edge of his bed, the room dark except for the blue glow of his monitor in sleep mode and with a heavy sigh, he opens the voice recorder. A hand runs through his hair, and he clears his throat, feeling like an idiot. Then he presses record.

"Hey. Got your email. Thanks. You seriously didn't have to do that." A pause. He doesn't know how to end these things. Your voice memos always ended with ‘bye Sunghoon,’ all soft and hesitant-sounding, but he thinks something like that would just sound awkward in his own voice. He then realizes he’s still recording and stammers, "I'll—yeah. I'll make it up to you. Goodnight."

He hits send before he can delete it and stares at it for longer than he should. Girls like that shit, right? The whole voice memo thing. He's not sure. He just felt like you deserve a little more than a thank-you text for doing his work for him.

He tosses his phone onto his nightstand and lies back on his bed, long limbs stretched out from a long day of doing mostly nothing (apart from moving that damn coffee table). His brain, unhelpfully, drifts back to the library. The way you'd frozen when his knee touched yours. The way you'd stammered through the rest of your sentence and then offered him a ride anyway. The way you'd looked at him in the car, wide-eyed and nervous. It's been a while since he'd seen anyone look at him like that.

Not that he's inexperienced with women—unlike what his roommates' constant teasing would imply. It's a lack of interest, something he had discovered about himself in high school with his first whopping three-month-long relationship. He'd gotten bored of her in the first month, and when she asked him to choose “me, or your stupid game,” it really wasn’t a difficult choice to make.

Then there was the odd fling here and there in his first year of college. Again, never lasted long. He didn't have the time or energy to commit. In his defence, he was upfront about his intentions. It's not his fault they never listened.

He stopped bothering after that. Girls are drama. They get clingy and weird. They pout and whine over not getting enough attention, trying to drag him away from his game. That shit is annoying. And he doesn't put up with annoying shit.

A part of him wonders if you'd be the same. You're cute, but insecure. The type to get attached too quickly, he'd assume. But you also listened when he talked about his game. You did his code so he could practice more and asked for nothing in return. That's maybe the most supportive any woman has ever been of his future E-sports career.

You could probably ask her to come over right now and do your dirty laundry, and she'd say yes. He scoffs at Heeseung's voice in his head. Then, a much crueller thought enters his mind: I could probably get her to do the whole project, too.

It's sharp and invasive—so much so that he's rolling over with a groan, burying his face into the pillows. Sunghoon's a lot of things. A shitty project partner being somewhere near the top of that list, but he is not a freeloading whore. He'll be grateful and move on. He'll do his work, he'll win regionals, and when the semester is done, he'll never see your face again.

Sunghoon did not, in fact, do his work.

He tried to—if opening up an empty file and staring at it for five minutes before queuing another ranked Valorant game counts as trying.

Bless your heart, you even sent him reminders. Texts of encouragement with little smiley faces, offers to help, to which he replied with empty promises. Don't worry, I'm working on it tomorrow. I've got it. All good.

All of that, until he woke up the next week with a calendar notification:

deliverable 2 meeting today

It's a weekday, which means Jay took his car to work. Which means he has to take the bus to the library. Which means he won't have time to string something together at the last minute for when he's supposed to meet you.

Sunghoon: can we meet at my place? Sunghoon: got no ride today You: sure :)

He grins at the text. Perfect. That's perfect. All he has to do is sit down, write some bullshit, and hope that you offer to fix it—which he's sure you will. You're nice like that. You're understanding.

But then he's at his computer, and he's looking at the Valorant icon in the corner of his home screen. And then he's queuing another game. Then another. And another... and— The doorbell rings.

Hours. He'd just spent hours playing instead of doing his work like a fucking idiot. And now he's in the middle of a ranked game, clutching up another round.

"Heeseung!" He yells, "Get the door!"

No response. Of course, there's no response.

Luckily, the last remaining enemy peeks, and he finishes the round with another win. With that, he's sprinting to the door. Swings it wide open. A wave of muggy outdoor air hits him, the summer sun beaming down, and you're there smiling slightly, hands gripping the strap of your bag. He doesn't have time to process you.

"Come in," he gestures, sprinting back towards his room. He calls out over his shoulder, "Sorry, I'm in a game. Ranked. Can't leave. Make yourself at home." He's sliding back into his seat, and your footsteps follow tentatively behind him.

“Ranked?”

“Like, if I leave, I’ll be penalized and lose ranked points.”

“Ah.”

You stand behind him, a polite distance away, still gripping your bag. You shift your weight where you stand, squinting at the screen.

"I'll be done soon, don't worry. These guys are easy."

"Okay..." You sound a little confused, leaning over his shoulder, watching him move through the map.

Somehow, the feeling of your eyes on him as he plays feels like a power boost. And something in him feels the urge to show off just a little bit. You watch him easily take out two enemies with precision, and he smiles, cockily.

"Told you. Easy."

A voice perks up in the lobby chat. The enemy team. "Reported for aimbotting. This is fucking bullshit."

Sunghoon presses the button on his mic to talk, "Nah. I'm just better."

The voice on the other end proceeds to start cussing him out, mouth close enough to the mic that it cuts out every few words, calling him every slur and cuss word under the sun and from the corner of his eye, he sees your face drop in horror. He mutes himself for a second.

"It's just trash talk. Don't worry. Happens all the time."

"All the time?"

“Gaming culture. It’s not for the weak.”

He gets another headshot, and another voice joins in, "Yo, asshole, how does it feel being a basement-dwelling, virgin?"

"Wouldn't know.” Sunghoon quickly unmutes again, firing back, “Why don't you tell me about it?"

A third voice, "Don't bother with him. This guy probably jerks off to his own highlight clips. I guarantee he's never felt the touch of a woman."

Sunghoon's about to respond, but then you're leaning forward in one confident stride.

"Oh? You guarantee that?"

The mic picks up your voice loud and clear, and the lobby explodes. Both the enemy team and his own.

"NO WAY."

“WHO IS THAT?"

"Bro has a whole woman in his room, and he's playing Valorant right now."

"She sounds hot as fuck."

"Dude, I'll forfeit if you get her to moan in the mic."

"Can we get a whimper if we win the next round?" His teammate says.

“Fuck off,” He says immediately, glancing over at you. You’re shifting your weight, your arms around yourself, looking incredibly embarrassed, but you’re grinning proudly. He grins right back, unable to resist the urge to rub this moment in on every other loser in the lobby. “She’s a little busy under the desk right now.” Your eyes go wide at the implication, and the voice chat explodes.

“WHAT THE FUCK DOES HE MEAN BY—”

The whole lobby talks over each other, and when he gets his final shot, VICTORY printed across his screen, he leans back in his chair.

"Anyway, she’s waiting for me," He glances over at you, his voice terribly smug, and you visibly embarrassed. "Later incels."

The post-game stats load, and finally, there is silence in his headset. He lets it fall to his neck, still grinning.

"Sorry." You start, "I didn't mean to—"

"Sorry?" He raises a brow, "Sorry for what? That was badass. You just destroyed them. Now those guys have to cope with losing and being bitchless. They're gonna be crying over it for the next year, at least."

"Well... good. They deserve it." You say a little proudly, watching him report the guy who called him slurs for bullying. "I don't understand. How can people get so mad over a game?"

"Sore losers," he says simply, "they're mad because they're bad."

"Or they're mad because you're really good," you offer a smile, "I didn't see you miss a single shot. How is that possible?"

He opens his mouth to answer, but the words don't come. Instead, he’s blinking, really taking you in for a moment, because if his eyes don’t deceive him, you actually seem… impressed. Genuine admiration. The kind he only gets from his teammates and other losers in game.

"Practice," he starts, letting his gaze drop, taking you in. The skirt that rides up your thighs, your hands clasped in your lap, and those wide, attentive eyes of yours. "Years of aim training. Game sense. Good instincts."

Something stirs in him, and suddenly he’s thinking about how good you’d look underneath him, making that same wide-eyed expression for an entirely different reason. How nervous that little voice of yours would sound making other kinds of noises for him, what you’d actually look like if you were under his desk on your knees.

You'd give in so easy.

“Anyone can learn it.” He finally says, the intensity of his gaze half-wiped, replaced with something more polite. “It just takes dedication."

"I'm a lost cause with this stuff. Trust me," you laugh, "Anyway. We should probably get to the project."

Ah. The project. The thing he has nothing to show for on his end because he didn't do anything.

“There's a lot more ground we have to cover this time. There are a lot more features that need to be implemented this time and..."

You ramble on as you seat yourself at the edge of his bed, opening up your bag, and Sunghoon gulps.

He could rip off the band-aid and admit it right now. "Sorry, I'm an idiot, and I played ranked instead of doing my work, but I'll get it done in the next week, I swear."

But you already did his work last week. Already spent a whole week sending him reminders and sending sweet little voice notes—all of which he'd responded to with empty promises. He swears he never meant for those promises to become empty. He planned on doing his work. He just... didn't.

Instinctively, he stands, and mid-sentence, he's placing his headset on your head, adjusting it. You freeze up like last time, and look up at him with the most helpless gaze, all train of thought just gone. His train of thought is rather lost, too, if he's being honest.

"Better idea," he says, "What if I teach you how to play?"

"But—"

"You defended my honour in a Valorant lobby. That kind of bravery deserves a reward.” He pulls out his chair for you, "Sit."

You hesitate. He can see the war happening behind your eyes—the good, responsible side of you trying to fight the flustered one that wishes to give in.

"Just one game. For me?" He reaches out and nudges your shoulder. He lets the touch linger a second longer than it needs to, and he watches your breath hitch.

"Just one.”

The gaming chair swallows your frame, and he pushes it in, hovering just a little too close as he leans over you. He puts you in practice mode to start.

"Alright. Basics first. This is how you move." He guides your hand to the keyboard, his fingers deliberately brushing yours. "WASD. Forward, left, back, right. You know that already?"

You nod weakly, moving around, not quite with ease, but at least you know how to do it. He laughs a little at the jerky movements, and your flustered demeanour from him being this close. He's enjoying this.

"Good. Now shooting." His hand covers yours on the mouse. "Left click. Aim for the head."

The bot appears. You click. Miss entirely. Click again. Hit the shoulder.

"See? You're already better than half my ranked teammates."

"Don't make fun of me."

"I'm not, I swear."

He lets you get comfortable with the practice range. You're clumsy but getting the hang of it, your movements less awkward, your aim less panicked. By the time he queues you into a real match—comms and text chat both disabled, he's not having a repeat of earlier—you're at least facing the right direction.

He drags a chair from the kitchen and sits next to you.

"Real game now. Real players. They're going to be better than the bots."

The first few rounds are rough. You die early in the first. Then the second. By the fourth round, you've done exactly zero damage, and the enemy team is up 3-1. Your teammates are probably flaming you. He's glad he muted them before the round started.

"See? I told you I'm terrible."

"No talking. Just play."

Round five. Your teammates are dropping around you. It's a disaster—your teammates rushed in too soon, leaving you behind. And then it's just you. One versus two.

"Stay behind the corner," Sunghoon says, his voice low near your ear. "Wait for them to come to you."

"But our team is supposed to be attacking, right?"

"Yeah, but these players are stupid. They're playing too aggressively. They'll come to you."

His hand lands on your shoulder, and your hands are trembling slightly on the keyboard.

"Keep your crosshair at head level. Right there."

He adjusts your mouse, and you nod. In your ears, you hear footsteps. Then, the enemy peeks. You click. The headshot sound is unmistakable—a clean, crisp dink that echoes through the headphones. One enemy down. Pings explode from your dead teammates.

"Holy shit!" Sunghoon leans forward, grinning. "Look at that! You got a headshot!"

"I—I did?"

"You did. One tap. Clean as hell," he's beaming, "Now, don't lose focus yet. One more to go."

You're staring at the screen like you can't quite believe it. Your hands are still trembling, but you're smiling now—a real smile, wide and bright and unguarded.

Though you don’t have time to celebrate, because a body shot hits from behind you, not enough to kill you, but enough that you scream. You move behind the wall, frantically moving the mouse around.

"Don't panic. They're coming to you. Just wait—"

The enemy appears, and you click, your bullets spraying clumsily, and by some miracle, you outlive them with barely any health left—but you won. You won the 1v2.

"That's my girl!" He's grinning wide, "You're a natural, you see that?"

You play terribly the rest of the game, but your team locks in, their hope reignited by your clutch up, and carries you to a win. VICTORY. It appears in big letters across your screen.

You take off the headset, your smile unwavering, your cheeks warm. "That was... actually kind of fun."

"See? Told you."

"I still mostly did nothing."

"You won. Stop being humble." He nudges your shoulder, allowing the touch to linger. "Most people don't win their first game. Bet I can help you win your second, too."

"Sunghoon." You laugh, gently moving his arm away as he tries to queue another game. "We have to do the project."

"We can do that another time."

"We can do this another time. We need to work."

"Do we really need to?"

"Yes."

He pauses a moment. A beat of silence passes, and your gaze lingers on him.

"Sunghoon," you say again, gently, carefully. Like you already understand where this is going, "If your work is a little messy like last time, I don't mind. I just want to make sure we're on the same page."

"I just..." He looks at you. Still in his chair, still wearing his headset around your neck now, and the way you're looking at him—half-flustered, half-stubborn, trying so hard to be responsible and even going so far as to push back—makes him realize he'll have to try harder than he thought to distract you. "I just think with you, it's always: Project this. Project that. You work so hard. You know it's okay to relax sometimes, right?"

"I—"

"You know what your problem is? You worry too much. Whenever I see you, you're always worrying. What's up with that?"

He leans back in his chair, arms folded over his chest. Your eyes follow them, how his biceps strain in his shirt, and his knee bumps yours. He stays watchful, analyzing the way your breathing picks up. The way your eyes go wide again.

"I don't know... I've always been..." you manage, shaking your head, "My parents were strict growing up, so..."

"I don't see your parents anywhere."

"Right. I know it's silly, but sometimes it's like I still hear them in my head," you laugh nervously, avoiding his gaze, "it was always study, study, study. No fun, no friends, no boys—"

"No boys?"

All of a sudden, it clicks for him. The shyness. The stuttering. The way you'd frozen in the library when his knee touched yours—not just flustered, but genuinely short-circuited, like your brain had no protocol for what to do. The way you'd offered him a ride, even though you could barely look at him. The way you'd defended him in voice chat, fierce and uncalculated, with no idea of the attention it would bring.

It all makes sense now. Every single thing. You're not just anxious or sheltered. You're completely, profoundly inexperienced. He's likely the first guy who's ever been this close to you—and you’re here, in his room, wearing his headset. Every reaction you've had, every flush and stammer and nervous laugh, it's all because you've never done this before. He smiles, enjoying the thought more than he should. A lot more.

"No boys," he repeats, and his voice comes out slow and deliberate. "What does that mean, exactly?"

"It means no boys. Like." You're flustered already, and he hasn't even moved. "No dating. My parents were really strict about it, and I just—I never really—"

"Never really what?"

He knows exactly what you're trying to say. He just wants to hear you try to say it.

"Never really... dated?" he offers, tilting his head. "Never really had a boyfriend?"

You shake your head, barely a movement.

"Never really..." He lets the pause stretch. Watches you squirm. "...anything?"

You can't manage another word, so you don't speak. You don't have to. The silence speaks for itself.

"You've never done anything?"

The question hangs in the air. He watches you process it—the implication, and how you can’t hide from it.

"Never even been kissed?" "No." There it is. The confession, small and brave. "It's embarrassing. I know. I never really—" "It's cute, actually."

You look at him, wordless. Maybe he should feel bad. He should feel guilty for prying this out of you, for enjoying how uncomfortable you are and filing all of this away as useful information. Some distant, rational part of his brain knows that. Instead, he's thinking about how nobody has ever touched you. How he’s the first one now to have been close enough to see you all flustered and vulnerable and completely unguarded.

His hand finds your knee. It's innocent enough, not drifting any higher than above it, his thumb moving in slow circles, and he watches in real time as your mind goes completely blank.

He's going to kiss you. Honestly, he knew he was going to kiss you the moment he understood what "no boys" meant, and while part of him is still trying to distract you from the project by getting you all hot and bothered like this, another part of him wants to do it just because he can. Just because you're there, in his chair, looking at him like that, reacting to his touch like this. That kind of power is a drug. It only makes him want to see just how far he can push you.

"Sunghoon," Your voice comes out thin, breathless. Your hand flutters up, not pushing him away, just hovering, like you're not sure what to do with it. "The project. We really need to—"

"The project." He says it flat, like the word itself is a chore. "The project will be fine. It'll get done. Right?"

He tilts his head, lets the implication hang there: You did the last one. You'll do this one, too.

Your mouth opens, but whatever argument you'd prepared dissolves the second his hand moves. It slides up from your knee to the edge of your skirt, his fingers tracing the hem where it brushes your thigh, and you go absolutely still beneath his touch.

"You look cute today, by the way." His voice is low, and his eyes look you up and down. "I like this."

He toys with the hem of the fabric, his knuckle grazing bare skin. Your thighs press together involuntarily, and he catches it. The movement. The sharp little inhale. The way your hands grip the armrests, fingers curling into them.

A sound escapes your throat, something small and embarrassing. A whimper you clearly didn't mean to make. His eyes flick up to your face. Your lips are parted, and you're looking at him like you've forgotten how words work.

"That's it," he murmurs, "You'll be good for me, right?"

Your eyes drop to his lips. You nod. It's a tiny, helpless movement, and the last of your resistance crumbles.

His free hand comes up to cup your chin, tilting your face toward his. He's close enough now to feel your breath, shallow and uneven. Close enough to know that no one has ever touched you like this before, and you're terrified, but you're not pulling away.

He leans in, slowly inching forward, closer and closer and—

"Sunghoon!" The door bursts open, "Have you seen my charger? I think..."

Heeseung's voice trails off as he takes in the sight. You. Sunghoon. The proximity between you. His hand on your thigh. Valorant open on his PC.

"Well, well, well..." he grins, leaning against the doorframe, "do my eyes deceive me, or is that a girl? In your bedroom? Sitting on your throne?"

"Leave."

"And you're making the poor thing play your stupid game. That's no way to treat a lady," he gestures around, then looks to you, "You. Don't tell me you're pretending to be impressed by his KDA ratio?"

You shrink under his gaze, looking like you wished to flee any second.

"Listen, I get it.” He raises his hands in surrender, “He's a good-looking guy. But his personality?" He shakes his head, "He’s a walking red flag. And not in the hot bad boy way. In like, a discord-moderating, redditor way."

"Seriously, get out."

Sunghoon is on his feet now, jaw tight. But you're already up, already grabbing your bag, already not looking at anyone.

"Actually, I should go."

"You don't have to—"

"I'll see you soon." The words tumble out. You duck past Heeseung, out of the bedroom, into the hall. Your footsteps go fast—past the living room where the coffee table sits in all its carved, solid-oak glory.

Heeseung follows you as far as the hallway, leaning against the wall with the lazy confidence of someone who knows he ruined something, but has no idea what.

"Wait!" he calls after you. "Before you leave, what do you think of the coffee table? Real craftsmanship, right?"

The front door slams. Hard enough to rattle the empty energy drink cans still scattered on Sunghoon's desk.

Heeseung turns back to the bedroom doorway, where Sunghoon is standing rigid, hands at his sides.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Sunghoon spits.

"Me? What's wrong with you?" He strides on into his room, taking his lost phone charger from the port near his bedside. The one he took yesterday without asking, "You steal my shit, you get cockblocked. Sorry."

"You know that was my project partner, right?"

"I know who it was." Heeseung wraps the cord around his hand, watching Sunghoon with an expression that's sharper than before. "The one with the voice. The one who did your work at two in the morning. I guess now she comes over to stroke your ego too, huh?"

"I was this close to—"

"This close to what?" Heeseung quips, raising a brow. "Finish the sentence."

"This close to... to taking her mind off of worrying. She's a chronic worrier. It's annoying. It's..." his voice trails off.

Silence. Sunghoon notices the look in his roommate’s eyes: disapproving, doubtful.

"You know what I think?" Heeseung says slowly, "I think you're getting a little too comfortable with the amount of kindness she gives you."

"I don't know what you mean."

“The walls are thin, and I’m nosy. I know what I heard,” he scoffs, heading toward the door. "You’re pushing your luck. And trying to tongue your project partner so she can do your work for you is a new low. Even for you."

Sunghoon then gapes at the offensive, downright defamatory implications his roommate is making towards him.

"I didn't—" Heeseung leaves before he can defend himself. And Sunghoon stumbles to the hallway, calling out after him. "I didn't do anything wrong!"

Sunghoon slams the door shut on him, taking a second to breathe. There's a ping on his phone. A new voice note. He clicks it immediately, your voice rushed, the sound of your car running in the background.

"Hey Sunghoon. Sorry for leaving like that. I got kinda nervous when your roommate walked in. But I had a really good time with the game! And with you. And... oh, and about deliverable 2." You pause, then a sigh escapes you—heavy, but hesitant. "I've thought about it, and I know your tournament is coming up really soon, so I don't mind taking it off your hands. Anyway, goodbye for now, Sunghoon."

Sunghoon sinks into his gaming chair. Relief morphs into glee, a short laugh escaping him. He can’t believe it. He can’t believe you. Whatever guilt Heeseung was trying to make him feel fades instantly—easily. Too easily. He queues another game.

The basement is quiet. Still. Peaceful. Just Sunghoon, the ironing board, and his team jersey, steam hissing in the silence. His gamer tag stares up at him from the back of the jersey, crisp and clean. Tomorrow he'll be wearing it on stage. Tomorrow it's game time. Tomorrow, he's locked the fuck in, with his team at his side and everyone there to watch him take that victory.

He's in the zone. Has been all night. Showered, prepped, head clear. No distractions. No thoughts about the final project deliverable due next week that he definitely hasn't started, or thoughts about Heeseung's accusations, or thoughts about you, and your wide eyes, and the way you looked at his lips right before—Nope. He’s not thinking about it.

The basement door groans open, followed by footsteps. Sunghoon doesn't bother turning around. He knows it’s Jay, judging by the heaviness of the tread, and because he’s the only one of them who regularly uses the washer instead of letting clothes pile up until they smell.

"Game's tomorrow?"

"Yep." Steam hisses. Sunghoon runs the iron along a sleeve. "You're still driving me, right?"

There’s a pause. Too long a pause. Sunghoon turns. Jay's standing by the washer, suddenly fascinated by the lint trap.

"Jay."

"Huh?"

"The tournament," Sunghoon says it slower this time, the iron forgotten in his hand. "The thing I gave you the date for a month ago. The thing you swore you'd drive me to. Ringing any bells?"

"Right, right." Jay shuts the washer door. Doesn't meet his eyes. "Well."

"Jay."

"Thing is," Jay scrubs the back of his neck, "my grandma's moving. Already told my mom I'd help tomorrow morning."

“Dude.” Sunghoon blinks, gaping at him, "You promised me first."

"Sorry, man. Grandma over you."

"I gave you a month's notice."

"And my grandma gave me twenty-two years of birthday money." Jay shrugs, already turning toward the stairs. "Can't put a price on that."

Sunghoon sets the iron down with a little more force than necessary. "You could've said something before tonight."

"It's not the end of the world. Just take the bus."

"It's an hour drive. Longer by bus. On a Sunday. That's—"

"Tough luck."

"Jay." Sunghoon's voice sharpens. "This is the biggest day of my—"

But Jay's already halfway up, and the basement door clicks shut behind him. The washing machine hums into the silence. Sunghoon stares at the empty staircase.

The bus is not an option. Absolutely not. He didn't grind all season to show up to regionals late, all sweaty from sprinting across a transit terminal because the Sunday schedule runs once every forty-five minutes if he's lucky. And his teammates? He could squeeze into someone's car, knee to chest, listening to them argue about team comps and whose mom packed snacks. He'd rather walk.

But… there is another option. Someone who's given him a ride before. Someone who is always happy to help. Someone who did his code, who defended him in a Valorant voice chat, who can't resist him, no matter how many times he's proven himself incompetent.

He pulls out his phone. It seems like a shitty thing to do. He knows that. But, it's mutually beneficial, isn't it? He gets a favour, you get to see him. It's a win-win, really. Besides, it's not like he's only calling for the ride. He genuinely does like the idea of you there, front row, cheering his name. Watching him destroy the enemy team live instead of from his bedroom. You'd get all confused, trying to follow the game, and then he'd win, and you'd be proud even though you don't really understand what you're proud of and—hell, maybe he'd finally get to give you that kiss. Maybe more. It's been on his mind too much lately. Your eager, parted lips, your thigh tense beneath his touch, the way you leaned into it like a good little plaything. Always so desperate to please—you'd make him feel like a real champion, wouldn't you? All nervous and untouched and entirely his. His prize, his to guide, his to take. It's a perverse fantasy. It's also not entirely impossible. Though, he shakes his head at himself, not erasing the thought, but putting it back on the shelf. The ride. That's the priority now. Having a pretty girl at his arm is just a bonus.

You press submit. Deliverable two, done. Your portion, pristine, commented, tested, and complete. His portion—the portion you told yourself you wouldn't do—also complete. Also entirely yours. You close the laptop and sit there in the dark of your dorm room.

This is getting out of hand. You know it is. It's been out of hand, actually, ever since the library and the first deliverable that you fixed—the thing you should’ve never done in the first place but did anyway. He didn't do his work again, and this time he didn't even try to pretend otherwise. He just looked at you with those eyes, said ‘It will be fine,’ and you let the subject drop because his hand was on your thigh, your brain had stopped working, and the only thing on your mind was not wanting to let him down.

But what about him letting you down? It’s happened twice now. Not enough times to call it a pattern of behaviour yet, but enough to imply something about his character and where his priorities lie. He's unreliable. Lazy. Probably manipulative, if your best friend's theories are true. That's not the kind of guy you want. That's not the kind of guy anyone should want. You should be furious, actually. You should send him a firm email. You should stand your ground.

He’s hot, though, your brain unhelpfully reminds you. Stupidly, impossibly hot, and he almost kissed you—you think. Sometimes you replay it in your head, and you're certain of it. Other times, you wonder if you imagined the leaning in, the pause, and the way his voice dropped when he said you'll be good for me, right?

You sigh, hand twitching against your thigh. When you close your eyes, it's like you can still feel him touching you there. Every time you think about it, your whole body goes hot, and you think about it a lot—not just about what happened but what could've happened if his roommate hadn't walked in. You can't even keep track of the amount of times you've lied awake, drenched in your own sweat, thighs pressed together, just thinking about his hand slipping further up your skirt and relieving you of the torturous, wound-up feeling that's had you in a chokehold all summer.

Your phone buzzes.

Incoming video call: Sunghoon

You stare at the screen, still recovering from your fantasy. It takes you a minute to actually process that it is, in fact, him calling you and not a figment of your imagination. He's never called you before. Not once. All summer, it's been voice memos and texts and the occasional thumbs-up emoji.

It rings again, and you fumble reaching for it, nearly dropping it on the floor. You pick up, and as soon as you see the FaceTime video loading, you click to turn off your camera.

Your eyes are glued to the screen as you take in the sight of him. He's lying in bed, his hoodie pulled up over his head, shadows cutting across his jaw, and his hair falls over his eyes. You're almost pissed at the fact that someone can look that good so casually.

"Hey." His voice comes through your earbuds low and rough, and it travels down your spine. Your whole body shivers.

"Hi," you manage, small and a little breathless.

"How's my girl doing?"

My girl. That's the second time he's called you that. The first was during the game, when you landed the headshot. You'd assumed it was adrenaline, or a reflex. Something guys said to their duo partners, like "my man" or "my guy". But he's not gaming now. He's in bed. Talking to you.

"I'm good—fine." You swallow. "What about—?"

"Can I see you?"

"See me?" You glance down at yourself. Old t-shirt. Not a trace of makeup. Yeah. That's not happening. "I'm in bed. It's dark. There's nothing to see, so..."

"Hm," he sighs, and you hear the rustling of fabric as he adjusts himself. "Too bad."

"What's up?" You're trying to sound normal, clearing your throat, "Why'd you call?"

"Just wanted to chat."

His free hand finds the drawstring of his hoodie, twisting it idly around one finger. Your eyes follow the movement, staring at the veins, the size of his hand, the length of his fingers and—you drag your eyes back to his face.

"About?"

"You free tomorrow?"

He shifts again, and the camera jostles, this time a light groan escaping him.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow you have—nothing. You have absolutely nothing. And even if you did have something, you'd still say you have nothing because it's him who's asking. Your heart skips a beat, a stupid smile breaking on your face.

"Yes," you say, immediately trying to downplay the eagerness in your voice. "Yeah, I'm free. Why?"

"And you can drive?"

"Sure. Why—?"

"Good." He ignores the question again. "Then I'm taking you out."

Your heart does a full stop. "Where?"

"Surprise.”  He smiles. “Just wear something cute, m'kay?"

Wear something cute. What does that mean exactly? Cute how? Cute like a dress? Or is a dress too much? Maybe a skirt. He said he liked your skirt last week. He toyed with the hem and said I like this and you made a sound you're still embarrassed to remember.

"Sleep well," he then says, breaking the long, silent pause with a slight chuckle, "See ya."

And before you can get another word in, he's gone. The reflection of yourself stares back at you in the darkened screen. Maybe you should call him back and ask what 'cute' means. What kind of 'cute'? Dinner cute? Coffee cute? Hanging out at his house, cute? But after a long time of staring at his contact, debating how to even ask, you decide it's too late.

You shower, scrubbing every inch of yourself. Exfoliate. Shave—you shave everything—carefully, methodically, in places you don't normally bother with because usually you're thinking "who's going to see?" But if his hand travels further than it did last time, you do not want to be stuck in your own head worrying about it, so you do it just in case. Just to be prepared.

Then you stand in front of your closet for forty minutes trying on everything you own, trying to decide what feels like too much, and what feels like not enough. You don't know.

Eventually, you settle. A skirt you usually avoid because it rides up your thighs too much. A top that's nice without trying too hard. You look at yourself in the mirror. You feel pretty. Normally, you feel clean, or presentable, or fine. But today, you feel pretty.

It's a dangerous feeling. You're getting dressed up for a boy who hasn't done a single assignment all summer. You're shaving your legs for him when technically you're still not sure what "taking you out" implies. But your heart is racing, and your cheeks are warm, and you find yourself smiling at your reflection in the mirror like an idiot, anyway.

So what if you dressed up for him? You're allowed to feel pretty. You're allowed to want him. You're allowed to hope.

You're shaking when you pull up to his place. Not visibly, at least, as you’re gripping the steering wheel hard enough to hide it. You’ve been talking to yourself under your breath for the last three blocks. Be normal. Be cool. Which would be a lot easier to do if this weren't the first time a boy had asked to "take you out" and you’ve been alone with your own anxious thoughts for so long now that you're starting to dwell on what that might mean again. Dinner, maybe? The thought simultaneously makes your heart flutter and your stomach churn. You're so nervous, you're not sure you could hold down any food. What if he asks why you're not eating—?

You're getting ahead of yourself. Maybe he's right. You do worry too much. You don't even know where you're going yet, and you're already jumping to conclusions.

Predictably, you're early. Of course you are. You'd left your dorm with an extra twenty minutes because you couldn't stand to pace around your room anymore, and now you're pulling up at the curb feeling like an idiot. But, to your surprise, he's already waiting on the porch.

He spots your car before you even have time to honk, jogging down the steps, and you roll down the window, smiling bright and stupid and probably too eager. Then...

Then your eyes drop to his chest. The jersey. The school's E-sports team jersey, to be precise. You know what it looks like because you've stalked the team's Instagram page about a hundred times just to stare at the photos of him on there until they were permanently burned into your retinas forever.

"Hey," he says, pulling open the passenger door. "Right on time."

"Hi," you swallow, smiling politely. "What are you wearing?"

"Team gear." He slides into the seat, dropping his bag at his feet. "Regionals are today. Didn't I tell you?"

Your blood runs cold.

No. No, he did not. He said I'm taking you out. He said to wear something cute. He said it was a surprise.

"Regionals," you repeat. "Right. The tournament."

"Yeah. It's at the convention centre. About an hour drive." He's buckling his seatbelt, "Coach said we could bring anyone we want. Figured I should bring my number one supporter, right?"

So it's not a date. Not at all what you were thinking when he called you late at night with his voice all low and asking if you were available—asking if you could drive. Still, you smile. You smile because even if your heart has sunk into your stomach, you know it's your own fault for thinking this would be anything more than it was. And, well, this matters to him. This is the thing he's been neglecting the project for. The thing he told you he’d been practicing for, talking about it in the car that first day you met him. He’s choosing to bring you to his thing. That alone must mean something... right?

"That sounds fun," you say, and the words feel like they belong to someone else. "I've never been to an E-sports thing before."

"You'll love it. You'll finally see me play for real. Not just some ranked lobby."

"Yeah." Your smile starts to hurt your cheeks. It strains and fails to reach your eyes. "Can't wait."

The drive is an hour. You spend most of it listening. He talks about the bracket, the teams they're facing, and some enemy team player who's been trash-talking him online. He talks about comps and strats and something called a meta. You nod, you smile. You ask questions. You try to seem engaged.

In a way, you are a little. Not because you care about the game, but because it's hard not to feel warm in the face when you see him like this. He's barely able to sit still in the passenger seat, gesturing with his hands, more animated than you've ever seen him, smirking with the kind of confidence you'd expect a star player to have. This is his thing. This is what he's good at. He invited you.

That has to mean something—you're certain of it now. Even if it's not what you thought. Even if you spent an hour getting ready, shaving everywhere and trying on countless different outfits just to sit in a convention centre folding chair.

You glance down at your skirt and your pretty top. All that effort you put into looking like you hadn't put in effort now feels wasted. Maybe people dress up nice for these things, you tell yourself. You've never been to an E-sports tournament, so you wouldn't know. At least, that's what you tell yourself, refusing to believe that he chose those words on purpose, knowing how they'd come across, knowing how they'd affect you. "You look pretty, by the way." Your head snaps toward him. He's looking out the window, and the words slipped out of him so casually that you almost don't catch it. Your heart furiously pounds in your chest, all doubt in your mind momentarily forgotten. "You too." The words tumble out before your brain can catch up, and immediately you want to grab them and shove them back in your mouth. You too? "I mean—you look good. The jersey. It suits you." There's a hint of a smile on his lips, and yours tug into one too—something small and hopeful.

You keep driving, trying to focus less on the quiet ache in your chest and more on the fact that he is here right now, in your car, bringing you into his world.

The convention center is freezing, the kind of cold that seeps through your thin top and settles into your bones. The air conditioning is blasting, likely to prepare for the body heat of the crowd that'll pack this place in a few hours. But right now, it's just you and a handful of other early arrivals and staff members scattered across folding chairs, listening to the distant sound of someone testing a microphone.

He didn't introduce you to his team. Didn't even glance back. Just pointed at the front row and said, "Sit there," and then he was gone—swallowed by a cluster of matching jerseys and equipment bags. You'd stood there for a moment, awkward, watching him disappear, arms wrapped around yourself against the cold.

That was hours ago. Hours in a hard plastic chair, scrolling through every app on your phone until you'd seen every post, every story, every notification that wasn't there. You got up once to buy an iced coffee from the convention center cafe—watery, gone in ten minutes. It did nothing to quiet the growling in your stomach.

You're cold. You're hungry. You're bored. You're wearing a skirt and a cute top in a convention centre full of strangers who smell like they don't shower, and you feel stupid. So, so stupid. But when he jogs over to you, twenty minutes before the tournament starts, everything brightens. Like you're not freezing to death where you sit. Like it all makes sense now, why, against your better judgment, you decided to stay.

He's got his headset looped around his neck, and his eyes have that focused, sharp kind of intensity you witnessed the first time you saw him play in his bedroom. He carries himself like he’s already won. It’s the kind of easy confidence—or arrogance, rather—that others would call obnoxious. To you, however, it’s captivating.

"Hey!" He squeezes your shoulder, just once. The warmth of his hand cuts through the chill. "Still awake?"

You blink up at him, smiling before you can stop yourself. Your head is foggy from too much fluorescent light and not enough food, but suddenly none of that registers.

"Barely.” You laugh, “But still alive. What about you?"

"I’m ready." He grins, that cocky, unbothered grin. "More than ready, knowing that you're here."

Your breath catches. Stupid. It's such a small thing yet the warmth that blooms in your chest catches you off guard, and for a moment you forget about the miserable afternoon you've just had. You just smile back at him, helplessly.

"Don't get too sleepy. I want to hear you cheer. Loud."

"I will." You say without hesitation.

"Good."

He flashes you one last smile, and then he's gone, slipping back toward the stage. You call after him, "Good luck!" He doesn't turn around. Just raises a hand in acknowledgment.

You sink back into your chair, still smiling, still warm from the brief press of his fingers on your shoulder. It's pathetic, honestly. You know it's pathetic. One touch, one sentence, and suddenly the hours of waiting and the overpriced coffee and the cold that's still seeping through your clothes don't feel like such a big deal anymore.

When the tournament starts, you come to realize you know a lot less about this game than you thought. There's a lot of terminology that flies past your head. Strategies you don’t understand. Names you don’t recognize. But you know enough that you understand when his team is winning, and when he's the last one alive on his team, wiping out the enemy team like they're nothing, and you definitely understand why the crowd cheers loudly when he clutches a 1v5.

They win. Easily. It’s not even close, and when the final round ends and the casters are screaming, and his teammates are out of their chairs—you're on your feet too. Clapping until your hands sting. Cheering, though you're certain you'll lose your voice for it.

He finds you the moment his team filters off the stage. One second you're standing alone, scanning the crowd of jerseys; the next, his hand is at your waist, fingers curling against the fabric of your top, pulling you into his side like it's the most natural thing in the world. Like he's done it a hundred times. His palm is warm through the thin material, his thumb pressed just above your hip, and he's wearing the world's biggest grin.

The hall is chaos—people talking in every direction, the music playing too loudly, a coach yelling something across the room. You can't really hear what he's saying, just the rumble of his voice near your ear, the occasional word breaking through: ...killed it... ...see that clutch?... You nod, smiling, hyperaware of the heat of his hand and the way his fingers tighten whenever someone jostles past. He steers you toward his teammates with that grip on your waist, guiding you through the crowd like you're an extension of his victory. The other boys are clapping him on the back, shouting over each other. Every time someone congratulates him, his hand flexes against your hip—not quite pulling you closer, but not letting you drift either.

"...You good with sushi?"

"Hm?" You furrow your brows, not quite catching his words still.

"Post-game celebration. Coach is treating us," he leans in right next to your ear this time, his words a little clearer. He grabs your arm. "Let's go."

The sushi place is in a strip mall across the parking lot from the convention centre. Laminated menus, lighting that's too bright for a celebration, and employees who look like they're regretting every life choice that led them to this shift. The sheer amount of noise coming from the table doesn't help.

The team has been going around making speeches—thanking the coach, thanking their friends, thanking Sunghoon, their number one captain and player. He soaks it up like a sponge, leaning back in his chair with the ease of a star player who knows he killed it. The table goes a little quieter when it’s finally his turn.

"I'd like to thank my team, of course, for putting their best foot forward. Coach, for keeping us in line. But most importantly..." He turns to you. His arm slides from the back of your chair to your shoulders. "I'd like to thank this one right here. For the support. For cheering me on louder than anyone." He squeezes your shoulder. "You made my life a hell of a lot easier this semester."

Easier. You're not sure why that choice of words doesn't sit right. Maybe because it felt too cold, or detached. He could've said you made his life better, brighter, happier… and maybe you're reading too much into it. You’re probably overthinking it and jumping to conclusions that aren’t there, like you always do. But easier implies convenience, nothing else, and you don’t really like the way that makes you feel.

He's being nice, you tell yourself. He’s thanking you in front of everyone. It's a good thing.

"Oh, and I got you something." He reaches into his bag and pulls out a jersey. Identical to his own. "My spare jersey. Since you know. I couldn't have done it without you."

You take it, the fabric stiff and unfamiliar in your hands. You open your mouth to say something—thank you, maybe, or you didn't have to—but nothing comes out.

"Put it on."

You do, and the shirt swallows your frame, the hem only a few centimetres above where your skirt ends. His gamertag is printed in bold letters on the back, and on you, it feels like a brand—a mark of his claim. You hold your breath, too overwhelmed by the scent of him, and your stomach does that flipping thing it always seems to when he gives you crumbs of affection like this, except this time with a newfound heaviness resting uncomfortably somewhere within you.

"Looks good," He hums, pleased, nodding to the rest of his team, "Right guys?"

The team cheers, someone whistling while the guy sitting next to him claps his back, and he takes it all in with pride, while you look down at your lap.

"Hey. Don't be shy." He leans in, voice dropping just for you. His knee bumps yours under the table. "I meant it. You do look pretty today."

The heaviness lifts. Just a little. Just enough to put on your brave face again, and the wait staff starts serving up whatever platters they ordered earlier. The boys descend like hawks, piling their dishes high, chopsticks clacking. Two of them fight over the remaining spicy salmon rolls, and someone orders another round of sake; meanwhile, Sunghoon is already talking about the next tournament.

You stare at your plate. You were hungry earlier. Starving, actually—your stomach had been growling through the final matches, but now you just poke at a piece of nigiri with your chopsticks, turning it over and over, watching the rice fall apart.

This isn't exactly what you had in mind when he said he was taking you out… but he thanked you in front of the team. Gave you a jersey. Called you pretty. And his knee keeps bumping yours under the table, making an embarrassing flush creep to your cheeks every time.

He wants you here. That should be enough. That should make you happy. So why do you still feel so hollow?

"Excuse me," a voice appears behind you both. You and Sunghoon turn to face him. "I'm with the school paper. Mind if I grab a few quotes?"

A guy with a press badge and a notebook is standing beside the table. You'd seen him earlier, sitting in the same section near the front as you. Reserved seating. It makes sense. Regionals are a big deal for your school; this is probably the most interesting story they've had in years.

"Yeah, sure."

"Just a few questions about the match. The clutch in finals—what was going through your head?"

"Oh. Easy. I locked the fuck in," he breaks into a smug grin.

Sunghoon talks about game sense. Instincts. Reading the enemy. The reporter scribbles notes, asks a few more questions. Asks about his training schedule, the responsibilities of being the team captain, and the pressure. You continue to poke at your food, assuming none of it involves you, until he glances at you.

"And I see your girlfriend is here. How does it feel to have that kind of support showing up for you?"

Your heart skips. Sunghoon glances at you, but his gaze isn't nearly as panicked as your own

"Oh. She's not my girlfriend." He says it casually. Like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Like the idea had never even occurred to him.

Suddenly, the table is a little quieter, like everyone had hushed their conversations just to overhear. Feeling the weight of everyone's eyes, your fingers tremble around your chopsticks.

"Ah." The reporter looks at you—the jersey, the arm around your shoulder—then offers an apologetic smile, "Sorry, I just assumed—"

"She's more like..." He tilts his head, considering. "My lucky charm."

Lucky charm. Not a girlfriend. Not a friend. Not even my project partner, who gave me a ride here and did all my work for me. A lucky charm. Something you carry around for good fortune and toss in a drawer when you no longer need it. "Or maybe," he starts again, "She's like my prize. You know, you win the tournament, you get the trophy. She's kind of both. Good luck and a good reward. You know what I mean?"

You hear a snicker from across the table, and he laughs too. He laughs. His arm is still around your shoulder, heavy and warm, and his thumb is tracing idle circles against your sleeve like nothing is wrong. Like he didn't just reduce you to an object in front of a reporter and his whole team.

"I'm just teasing. But, really, the closer I keep her, the easier my life becomes. So, you asked how it feels, right? I'd say it feels pretty damn good," he pulls you closer for a second, giving your shoulder another squeeze, "I was telling the whole team earlier. It's all thanks to her."

"Wait, so she's single?" One of his teammates leans over, "Dude, you've been gatekeeping her all night—"

"Fuck off." He snaps, turning back to the reporter, "Next question."

The interview fades to background noise.

Lucky charm. You want to laugh. Or maybe cry.

As if luck had anything to do with it. The only reason he's here, celebrating, getting interviewed, is because of the labour, time and energy that you freely offered him like a fool. And now he's calling it luck.

You sit there in your seat, his arm heavy around you like he owns you. You realize only then that it means nothing. Absolutely nothing.

You slide out from under it. "Bathroom," you murmur, already on your feet.

He doesn't look up. His hand drops to the back of the empty chair without pause, and the reporter is already asking the next question. You walk toward the door, and the bell chimes as you leave.

The parking lot is hot. The heat, humid and suffocating, rises off the asphalt, and the air feels thick in your lungs. Your car is at the far end. Too far away, you think, as you make your way. You walk fast, the jersey still hanging off your shoulders, and it feels like the weight of it is slowing you down. You hate that you're still wearing it.

Behind you, the restaurant door opens, and heavy footsteps follow. "Hey! Hey, wait up—"

You don't wait. Obviously. But he catches up very easily, hand on your shoulder to halt your frantic steps.

"What's going on?" He catches up, slightly out of breath. "You just left. What gives?"

You spin around. "I'm a lucky charm? A prize?"

"What?" His expression shifts—not guilty, but confused. Like he genuinely doesn't understand. He takes a moment to gather himself. "Yeah. Like, it's a compliment. Like, I'm lucky to have you here with me. I mean, what did you want me to say? Project partner? Female friend?"

"Listen." Your voice is shaking. "I'm happy for you. You won. Congratulations. But I want to go home now."

"But why? We were having fun, right? And the team loves you—"

"No." You cut him off. "Your team loves you."

"Yeah, and you're with me."

"I'm with you?" The words catch in your throat. "What is that supposed to mean?"

Your heart thuds, watching him carefully. You hold your breath, hoping—desperately, pathetically—to hear something other than a lucky charm this time. Something meaningful. Something more.

"It means..." his voice is careful, processing every word in his head before he decides to say it, "You're wearing a shirt with my name on it, and I'll be the one taking you home after—"

A laugh escapes you. Not because any of this is entertaining, but because you truly cannot fathom how that is the best response he could come up with.

"You're taking me home?"

"You know what I mean."

"Sunghoon." Your voice drops. The frustration is bleeding out, leaving something softer behind. Something that hurts more. Your hands are trembling. "You told me to wear something cute. You said you were taking me out."

"So that's it?" He asks. You don’t know when he moved closer, or how you allowed him to, but suddenly his hand is at your shoulder again. He rubs it as if to comfort you, and his words tumble out, a little more frantic than he usually sounds, "You wanna go out? We can go out. We can go out right now. Just tell me where you want to go. I'll take you—”

"We aren't going anywhere." You say a little firmer this time, brushing his hand away. "I'm leaving."

You walk toward your car, but he doesn't relent. He came here with you, and his ride is standing in front of him, keys in hand, about to disappear. He can't let that happen.

"Wait."

He grabs your arm, his hand warm and familiar. You hate that it still makes your breath catch.

"Please." His voice is different now. Lower. The arrogance is gone—or maybe just hidden. "Don't go. I'm sorry. Okay?"

"Sorry for what?"

"For..." He runs a hand through his hair. "Calling you a lucky charm? And not taking you on a date? Whatever I did. Just… don't leave me here. Please."

"You don't even know what you're apologizing for," You hiss, your hand curling tighter around your car keys.

"Yeah. Because I'm confused." He tries, "I was being nice all night. I gave you the jersey. I don't know what I did wrong, so tell me. I'll do whatever you want. I'll fix it."

"Sunghoon," you frown, taking in a breath. You're going to do it. This is the moment where you stand your ground. "I am not some doll that exists to give you free rides whenever you want. Or do all your work. Or sit through your gaming tournaments and make you look good in front of your teammates."

"You're not—" his brows furrow, "That's not what you are."

"Then what am I?"

You try to step back, but your back meets your car door. Now you're cornered, and he still hasn't answered. Instead, his hand comes up. Hesitant, not quite sure if he's allowed, or if it's the right choice to make currently in the heat of the moment, but he does it regardless. His fingers brush your jaw, featherlight, just tracing it and his thumb settles under your chin. Everything else around you ceases to exist.

"Tell me what you want me to say." His voice is rough, and he tilts your face up, "What do you want from me? I don't understand what you want."

"Sunghoon—"

"I keep thinking about last week," He exhales, something between a laugh and a breath. His other hand finds your hip, fingers curling into the fabric of the jersey. "What we never got to finish. I know you think about it too."

His forehead nearly touches yours. His thumb still rests under your chin, holding you in place, and his eyes drop to your lips. "One last time," he asks, "What do you want?"

You realize he's doing it again. The thing where you try to talk about something serious—the project, the way he's been treating you—and weaponizes his irresistibility against you. You wonder if he even realizes that he's doing it. Regardless, you can’t help how you stare. He's just so... beautiful. So incredibly irresistible. The warm press of his body, caging yours to the car. The intense look in his eyes. His height, and how he towers over you. It's too much.

"You know what I want,” your voice comes out smaller than you intended. There it is. The part where you give in. You always do. How could you not? You’re just a girl, caged between the hottest man you've ever seen and your car door.

Your eyes drop to his lips. "That's all you had to say," he murmurs.

He kisses you. Your first kiss. It's not gentle. It's hungry, desperate, his hand sliding into your hair, his body pressing against yours. Your brain shuts off entirely. Your hands come up to his chest, and instead of pushing him away like you should, you're gripping his jersey, pulling him closer. You have no idea what you're doing, but the feeling of his tongue in your mouth and his hands all over you has you whimpering under his touch, melting into his arms.

"You're with me." He says against your lips, rough and unrelenting. "Stay here with me."

His hand slides from your hip to the car door behind you.

"Let me make it up to you. I'll treat you so well. I promise."

Your whole body is trembling. He's so close and so warm, and you've wanted this for weeks and—fuck, who are you kidding?

The back seat of your car is cramped, but he doesn't seem to mind. He's above you, his body a warm weight, kissing you, worshipping you with his tongue and his mouth, kissing along your neck. He takes his time, letting you get familiar with the shape of him atop you, his hard cock pressed against your thigh through his pants. You're embarrassed with the amount of slick between your legs and how your skirt has ridden up all the way at your hips to reveal it all. If you thought you could ever try to hide what he does to you before, you certainly can’t do it now.

"Look at you," he murmurs against your mouth. His fingers find the hem of the jersey—his jersey. "You look so good in this. So fucking good."

You can't speak. Your voice is gone. His hand slides up your thigh, pushing the jersey higher. Then he pauses. Looks down. A slow grin spreads across his face. His hand traces over your underwear, smooth skin separated by thin fabric.

"You prepped for this?" Your face burns. "All this?" His fingers thumb the lace edge of your panties, "For me?"

"I didn't—I wasn't—"

"You were expecting something." His voice is teasing. "Weren't you? All dressed up. All smooth." He kisses your throat. "Fuck, that's so cute."

A sound escapes you—a whimper you didn't mean to make—and he chuckles, the vibration of it travelling down your neck. His hand is still on your thigh, thumb tracing idle circles against bare skin just above the hem of your skirt. You can feel the heat of his palm, the way his fingers splay wide like he's claiming territory. Your hips shift without permission, angling toward him, chasing the pressure he isn't giving you.

Then his hand retreats. Slides back to your waist. His lips capture yours in another open-mouthed kiss, and you make a frustrated little sound against his mouth—half protest, half plea. Your fingers wrap around his wrist and guide it back down, pressing his palm right where you need it, your thighs parting in invitation.

“Hm?”  He pulls back just enough to look at you, eyebrows raised, lips still slick. There's genuine surprise underneath his evident amusement. "You want—?"

“More.”

The word comes out sounding more certain than you expected. His expression flickers, both taken aback and deeply, thoroughly pleased, then his hand resumes its position, palm pressing flat against the lace of your underwear. He doesn't slip beneath the fabric, rubbing only slow, deliberate circles over it, letting the friction build until your hips are rolling into his touch.

It's a lot. The pressure, the heat, the way he watches your face the whole time like he's studying you. You're so sensitive that even just his hand over fabric has your breath catching in your throat.

"Like that?" he murmurs.

You nod, not trusting your voice. Your fingers curl into the fabric of his sleeve, holding on.

"I've never—"

"I know." There's a teasing lilt to his voice, his lips curving against your throat. He likes this. Likes the way you're coming apart beneath him, all trembling and flushed and brand-new. His fingers don't slow. "You want to stop?" It's a dare. He already knows the answer. His thumb presses down just a little harder, drawing another broken sound from your lips.

"No." The word is torn from your throat too fast. Stopping is actually the opposite of what you want. You've been dreaming of his touch all summer. Even if he's a complete asshole, he's a beautiful asshole, and the ache between your thighs knows where its priorities lie.

"Yeah?" His voice drops, words brushing against your ear, "Then tell me what you want."

"Sunghoon..." you trail off, his thumb still circling your clit over your underwear, "I don't know. Just touch me more, please."

“Begging already?” He smiles against your mouth, and then his hand slides back down, dipping beneath the waistband of your panties. His fingers are warm as they brush through your slick folds, gathering the wetness that's been building since he first kissed you. He doesn't push in yet—he circles your entrance lazily, teasing, letting you feel the pressure without the invasion. "You're too good to me."

It's been a while since he's done any of this, but he's always been good with his hands. It’s like facing an opponent: The technique is muscle memory, and the strategy is played by ear. He just has to watch you, learn your weaknesses, and exploit them until he wins. Though when it comes to you, he's learning that you're weak to pretty much everything he does, watching your lips part and your brows scrunch together without his fingers even inside you yet.

“So wet. So worked up. You really wanted this, didn't you?" he whispers, "Don't worry. I've got you."

He pushes one finger inside you—slow, deliberate, sinking deep until his knuckle presses against your entrance. Your back arches, a sharp gasp escaping your throat, and he watches your face as he curls that finger, searching, finding the spot that makes your eyes flutter shut.

"That's it," he breathes. "That's my girl."

He adds a second finger, stretching you, and the wet, slick sound of your body accepting him fills the foggy car. He pumps them in and out, his thumb pressing circles against your clit, and you feel yourself clenching around him, your hips rolling to meet his rhythm. Your hands grip his shoulders, nails digging into the fabric of his shirt, pulling him closer.

"Feels good?" His voice is in your ear, low and rough. You nod, unable to respond. Breath catching in your throat because you can barely breathe, think or do anything coherent. "Is this all you wanted? Needy girl just wanted my attention?"

In the midst of the fog, it catches your eye again. His cock, hard and untouched in his pants. You want to see him. All of him. And you reach out for the waistband, desperate to feel the weight of him in your hands.

"Wanna touch you, too," you manage, and his fingers slow inside you for a moment.

"Yeah?" He grins, watching you pull the waistband down and palm him through his boxers. He just watches you fumble around, looking up with that awestruck, wide-eyed gaze. "You sure?"

You pull him free anyway. And then you stop, staring for what you're sure is way too long. Because he's—well. He's big. Not that you have any real-life experience to compare him to, but still. It didn't take a genius to figure out that he's impossibly, unfairly big. So much that it makes you wonder if the universe just decided to give him everything: the face, the hands, the voice, and now this. Maybe you should've expected that the literal embodiment of the genetic lottery would have a pornstar cock.

"What's the matter?" He laughs, propping himself up on one elbow to get a better view of your face. "Nervous?"

“No.” You swallow, still staring. "You're just really—"

"Big?" He says it for you, clearly enjoying himself. "Yeah. I know."

The bigger the dick, the bigger the ego, huh?

You watch him grin down at you, and you really do want to pretend like you're not affected by it, but it's actually kind of terrifying and a lot more than you bargained for.

“Don’t think about that right now,” He takes his free hand and encloses it around yours, around him, not showing you how to do it. Just guiding you. “I’m enjoying this.”

Your fingers are gentle and trembling and completely unsure, but he doesn't mind. He takes in the sight, watching you try to please him with your hand while you fall apart on his fingers. You clench around him as he presses inside, finding the right spot that makes your eyes roll back, and you can't help the cry that leaves your parted lips.

"That’s it," he murmurs. "Good girl. Just let go."

You unravel around his fingers, back arching off the leather seat, and he has to press his free hand flat across your hipbones to keep you from bucking against his palm. Your thighs clamp around his wrist, trembling, and his name, broken and breathless, catches in your throat. It’s the most beautiful sound he's ever heard you make. He watches it happen, watches your mouth fall open, and your lashes flutter, watches the tension seize through your body and then release, all at once, around his fingers.

When you come back to yourself, you're still gripping him. Your fingers are wrapped around his cock, loose now, your palm slick with the precome that's gathered at the tip. He's still hard and aching. His breathing is ragged, his chest heaving, and for a long moment, he doesn't move—just stares down at the way your hand looks wrapped around him, your delicate fingers against the flushed, heavy weight of his length. Then his jaw tightens, and his hand closes over yours, repositioning your grip.

"Like this," he guides you, pumping your hand up and down his shaft. He tries to show you the rhythm, the pressure, the speed. And to your credit, you're trying. You are. And if he were in the mood to be a little more patient, he'd let you play with him. But currently, he doesn't have it in himself to torture himself any longer.

He closes his fist around yours, harder. Then he's moving, fucking into your hand with short, desperate thrusts. The sound of it fills the cramped car, skin on skin, his hips snapping forward in a rhythm that's too fast, too ragged to be anything but pure need. You watch him, still dazed from your own release, still sprawled across the back seat with your skirt bunched at your waist and his jersey twisted around your torso. Your chest rises and falls with shallow breaths, and your eyes—wide, glassy, utterly fixed on where his cock slides through your palm—are the only thing he can look at.

"Fuck, look at you," he groans. His head drops forward, hair falling into his eyes, but he forces himself to keep watching his length disappear and reappear through your grip. "All spread out for me. My cute little reward. My prize. All mine."

His rhythm breaks. His hips stutter, and then he's spilling across the jersey with a low, broken groan, something primal and possessive curling in his gut at the sight. You lie there, still catching your breath, wearing his name and his release.

He braces himself above you, breathing hard. His forehead nearly touches yours. The windows are fogged opaque, sealing you both inside this cramped, humid quiet.

Your skirt is bunched at your hips. The jersey is twisted around your torso, damp and clinging to your sweat. You don't move. Don't speak. Just lie there beneath him, wearing the evidence of what just happened, still recovering.

He exhales, long and slow, and his eyes trace over you.

"Shit," he breathes, sounding almost in awe. "You're really something, you know that?"

You don't answer. You're still catching your breath, floating somewhere between the high and the slow, creeping return of reality.

He doesn't notice. He's too busy looking at you and the jersey he's made a mess of—at the way you're sprawled beneath him with something between satisfaction and wonder. All of his doing.

"So," he murmurs, propping himself up on one elbow. His free hand traces a lazy line down your arm. "You forgive me?"

"Hm?" Your eyes finally meet his, blinking up.

"The tournament. The project. The stuff I said. Or did." He presses his lips to your jaw, peppering kisses until he meets the shell of your ear. His thumb draws a slow circle on your hip. "You're not still mad, right?"

Your chest rises and falls, not quite finding the words just yet.

"Because I meant what I said. You're with me. This—" he gestures between you, "—this thing we have. I like this."

His eyes are on you—his unfairly beautiful eyes.

It would be so easy to forget the whole night ever happened. Your hands twitch where you hold onto him, warm and solid, and the part of you that's still deeply infatuated with the sight of him like this wants so badly to pull him back down and discover all the other ways he could take you to heaven and back.

But then you look down at the jersey. His jersey. At the stain already drying on the fabric. He'd marked his territory and tried to present it to you as a gift, and you think the worst part of it all is that he really, truly does believe it's something to be grateful for.

He presses a kiss to your forehead, and you close your eyes. Your throat tightens. For a moment, you almost let it go. You almost fall back in.

"Also, like... you’ll still drive me back, right?"

Your eyes snap open.

You glare up at him. At his perfect, oblivious face. At the faint smile still lingering at the corner of his mouth. He's still braced above you, still warm, still inside the afterglow you were both supposed to be sharing. And for a moment, you wonder who’s more stupid: him or you.

"Get out."

He lifts his head, "Huh?"

"Get out of my car."

"We just—hold on," He pushes himself up, still dazed. "I made you—you literally just—"

"You made me cum. Great job." You shove at his chest until his back hits the door, and he fumbles with his pants. "You’re still an asshole. Now get out of my face."

"You're kicking me out?" He gapes, "You can’t do that to me.”

"There's a bus stop nearby."

Your hand reaches for the door behind him, shoving him out, and he stumbles onto the asphalt. His brows furrow.

"I'm not taking the fucking bus."

"Not my problem." You yank the jersey over your head. Ball it up. Throw it at his chest, and he catches it on reflex—his own name, crumpled, damp, ruined. "Find your own way home."

You slam the door and climb into the driver's seat, ignoring the way he pleads outside the window, knocking on the glass. He's frantic, still recovering from the whiplash, but you don't stop.

You start the engine and back out of the parking spot, speeding away and in the rearview mirror, he's still standing there. Jersey in one hand, watching you disappear.

The ride back to your dorm is quiet. Radio off. Just you and your thoughts, the sun bleeding orange across the horizon.

People always say your first kiss is supposed to be special or that your first time is supposed to mean something. Meanwhile, your first kiss was followed by getting fingered in the backseat of your car in a strip mall parking lot with a boy who treats you like trash, wearing his cum-stained E-sports jersey.

It's a tale as old as time: a girl who doesn't know any better gives everything to a boy who couldn't care less. Maybe you should feel used or ashamed. Maybe it should feel wrong, or cheap, or degrading. Yet, it doesn't really. Because honestly? You'd wanted it all summer. His hands on you, his voice in your ear, touching you in places you've never been touched before. It wasn't special. It wasn't romantic. But it was yours, and you took it.

There is a heaviness in your chest. You can't deny that. But there is something else that shines brighter, that courses through your veins, head to toe. Satisfied. You feel satisfied. A little giddy, even.

Park Sunghoon. Brilliant esports player. Terrible project partner—and terrible person, really. But fuck, if he wasn't good with his hands. And body. And words. And face.

You grin to yourself at the memory of it all, free of the anxiety that used to cripple you every time you thought of him. All those hours you'd spent wondering what he thought of you, if he liked you back. You don't give a shit what he thinks anymore.

He debated for a while who to call. Not Jay, obviously. Jay would take one look at the crumpled fabric in his hand and drive in the opposite direction. He could've called Jake—Jake wouldn't judge him for his sexual failures, given his pathetic history with women, but Jake would certainly judge everything else about the situation. Also, there’s no way he would drive an hour out on a whim just to pick him up. That left Heeseung. The one most likely to actually pick up, only because he’s a nosy little shit and he'll absolutely never let Sunghoon live it down.

Sunghoon finds himself sitting in the passenger seat, jersey crumpled in his lap, staring out the window, and Heeseung takes a loud, dramatic sniff.

"You smell like jizz." He glances at the jersey. "The fuck did you do with that?"

"None of your business."

"None of my business, my ass." Heeseung pulls out of the lot. "I'm doing you a big favour. Think I deserve to know."

Silence.

"Sunghoon. Spill."

Sunghoon exhales. Long. Slow. Staring straight ahead.

"I don't get it. I mean, I don't get her. I was doing everything right. I gave her the jersey. I told the team I couldn't have won without her. I made her feel good. Really good. Like, screaming-my-name kind of good." He pauses. "Not to brag. But I blew her fucking mind. And then suddenly it's 'get out of my car,' and she throws the jersey at my chest and drives off." He turns to Heeseung, genuinely bewildered. "What am I missing?"

"Let me get this straight," Heeseung changes lanes. Checks his blind spot. "She drove you to your game? On top of all the project shit she did for you?"

"She wanted to."

"Did she?"

"...Well, she wanted to see me." He folds his arms, "She had a good time. So I don't get the problem—"

"Sunghoon. Dude." Heeseung sighs, "The whole seduction manipulation thing you're trying to do? It only works if you're hot and smart enough to pull it off. You're just hot."

"I'm not manipulating her."

"Sure you're not."

"I'm not. I'm just trying to keep her happy. Which, judging by how hard she came, I thought I was doing my job right."

Heeseung snorts. "Your job?"

"What?"

"You're treating her like a resource. Like a side quest. Keep her happy, get the rewards. She's a human being, not an NPC, dumbass." "That's not—" The denial dies halfway out of his mouth. Sunghoon stops, brows furrowing at his roommate's words. "That's not what she is. No, she's nice to me. Like, genuinely nice." The corner of his lip tugs, almost involuntary. "She's fun to be around. Laughs at my jokes. She listens when I talk about Valorant. She has this look, like she's all impressed, even though she probably doesn't understand any of it. And man, you should've seen the way she cheered for me. It was like... the best feeling in the world."

He stops a moment, sighing, the memory of you beneath him in the car resurfacing itself. You, falling apart for him. "She's cute," he says, and the words feels a little too innocent for what he actually means, but he probably shouldn't say anything more in front of Heeseung anyways. "She's really cute." He stops. Blinks. His own words catch up to him, and suddenly the inside of the car feels very small.

Suddenly, he feels warm. These days, he always seems to feel that way when he thinks about you. It's annoying. It's distracting. It's—

"Hold the fuck on." The car comes to a screeching halt at a red light, and Heeseung turns. "You like her."

"What?" It comes out too fast. "Yeah, right. You know I don't do dating. Or any of that bullshit. It's a waste of—"

"I didn't ask if you wanted to marry her. I asked if you liked her."

Sunghoon looks out the window, streetlights passing.

He thinks about you. Your laugh, your smile, the voice notes you always leave and how he sometimes finds himself listening to them late at night when he has nothing better to do. He thinks about the way you looked in the crowd, sitting there for him. The way you always show up when he needs you and let him treat you like trash.

For a while, he told himself he was only getting close to you for convenience. Though there’s nothing convenient about the jittery feeling in his stomach right now, is there? He shoves it back down.

"No," he folds his arms. "Obviously no."

Heeseung gives him a long look. A very long look. Then he turns back to the road.

"Then stop bothering the poor girl and do your damn project."

Heeseung turns up the radio. The highway hums beneath them.

Sunghoon stays silent. The jitteriness in his stomach fades into something new. Something that aches. A terrible feeling—an awful one. He wonders how you might feel right now. Worse than him, he's sure.

"I will," he suddenly says. "I'll stop."

He'll do his work. He'll make things right. And next time, when you inevitably come back around, he'll apologize properly.

Sunghoon opens the project folder. Stares at the empty files, the frontend he never built. The CSS that's still mostly placeholder comments.

This should be easy. He'd always told himself I could pass this class in my sleep if I actually tried. But now he's trying, and his brain is a blank wall.

He types a line, deletes it, types again. Wrong syntax. The error at the bottom of the screen glares red and refuses to explain itself. He opens google, checks Stack Overflow, which presents and answer he doesn't understand. He copies the code anyway, slots it in, and five more errors bloom where one used to be.

This is bad. Severely bad. If he fails this course again, his GPA risks dropping below the minimum threshold for athletic eligibility. No GPA, no team. No team, no playing next season. And if Sunghoon can’t play next season, the team loses the tournament, and they lose funding. No funding means the program folds, which means he can kiss his E-sports career goodbye.

His hand twitches toward his phone. It's become a reflex now—reach for you the moment something goes wrong, except now you won’t help him. Because he fucked that up and asked for too much too quickly and made you feel used. And now he’s stuck, watching the errors keep piling up, knowing the deadline is three days away.

Leave the poor girl alone. He grabs his phone anyway.

He can't do it without you. He doesn't know the syntax, doesn't know the structure. You were always there, filling the gaps, smoothing the edges, making it look easy. And he let you. He counted on it. He counted on you, and he didn't even realize it until you were gone.

He needs you. He opens your chat and looks at his messages. Still unanswered. Still unread.

Sunghoon: hey. i'm sorry. Sunghoon: i know you're mad but Sunghoon: idk how to do this without you sent three days ago Sunghoon: hey Sunghoon: i don’t wanna bother you again Sunghoon: but i really am trying Sunghoon: and im stuck Sunghoon: please sent two days ago

"Hey. It's me. I don't know if you're listening to these anymore." He clears his throat, eyes on the timer of the voice recording. He’s sent a lot of these over the past few days, and he’s long since stopped hoping you’ll respond. He treats it almost like a confessional instead. "I'm sorry. For everything. I really am. I tried to do the project. Like, actually tried. And I can't. I don't know how. I never went to class, and I never—I know it's all my fault. And that I've dug my own grave. Just... I hope you know I'm trying. And..." A long silence. The recording meter ticks. "...I miss you—fuck. Sorry. Just. Yeah. Sorry"

He hits send, immediately shoving the device aside and burying his face in his hands. He keeps telling himself he doesn't want to bother you. That he can figure this out on his own. That he should leave you alone. But the cursor's still blinking on an empty file, and his phone's still dark, and the lie is getting harder to hold onto every time he reaches for it. He needs you.

Sunghoon waits outside the lecture hall.

He's never even been to this building before, even had to look up the room number, the time, and the building itself. But now he’s there, leaning against the wall, hood pulled over his head, arms crossed, watching the doors like he's holding an angle. Students trickle out in pairs and clusters. He scans every face.

Then he sees you.

You're near the back of the crowd, and you're not alone. Some guy is walking beside you—boring and forgettable. He's leaning in as you talk, nodding at whatever you're saying, and smiling at you, and Sunghoon wants to call him pathetic, but you're smiling back at the guy. His jaw tightens.

You haven't noticed him yet. You're still talking, gesturing with one hand, your bag slung over your shoulder, looking strangely relaxed. You never looked like that with him. He only knows you as the flustered girl who froze in the library when he knee touched yours. You, who melted into his touch in the backseat of his car. Not... this.

The guy says something, and you laugh, making Sunghoon's fingers dig into his own arm.

Then your eyes sweep the hall, landing on him. You hold for half a second before immediately looking away, starting to walk faster. You brush past him like he doesn’t exist, but Sunghoon’s already pushing himself off the wall, falling into step beside you.

"Hey." His hood falls back over his shoulders. "Can we talk?"

"I have somewhere to be."

"Five minutes. Please."

"Pretty sure she said no," The other guy frowns, then looks at you. "Everything okay? You know him?"

"She's my project partner," Sunghoon practically seethes, not looking at him. His eyes are on you. "Now leave us alone."

"Think that's up to her to decide—"

"She's with me." Sunghoon's voice is flat and final. "Right?"

You stop walking. Your shoulders square and you turn to face him, chin lifting, and for a split second, there's something almost amused flickering at the corner of your mouth. Like you'd been expecting this. Still, your eyes are cold, your jaw set. You’re pissed. He’s never seen you truly, completely pissed. You always hid it beneath a smile.

"It's fine," you say to the guy, your voice calm. "I'll catch up with you later."

The guy hesitates. Looks at Sunghoon, then back at you. He's probably weighing his options, and Sunghoon watches him do the math in real time.

"Yeah. Okay." He scoffs, walking off, "Later."

Sunghoon turns back to you immediately, his jaw still tight from watching that guy disappear around the corner.

"Who was that?"

"Classmate." You say it flat. You’re already walking again, your pace hurried.

"Yeah, right." He scoffs, falling into step beside you. "Does he know that? That he's just a classmate?"

"Why does it matter to you?"

"You're ignoring my messages." He avoids the question.

"Okay." You don't slow down. Don't even glance at him. "And?"

"And I'm kind of desperate here," His voice is rising now, frustration bleeding through the cracks. "I've been trying to reach you for days. I need your help."

You stop at the stairwell door, hand on the push bar, and finally, you look at him. Your expression is unreadable, but there's something almost pitying in the tilt of your head.

"You always need things, don't you?"

He blinks, and you're already pushing through the door, your footsteps echoing up the concrete stairwell. He hesitates for half a second, one hand braced against the doorframe, watching you climb, and then he's following, the door slamming shut behind him.

"You're greedy, Sunghoon. I've already given you so much."

"I know." His own footsteps fall heavy behind yours. "I know I don't deserve anything."

"Then stop wasting my time." You snap back.

You shove through the fire door at the top of the stairs, and suddenly you're both outside—the heat hitting him like a wall after the stale cool of the lecture hall, sunlight glaring off the sidewalk. You cut across the quad, weaving between clusters of students without slowing, and he stays on your heels like a shadow. You know he’s there, but you keep walking. Past the fountain. Past the library.

By the time you reach your dorm building, you're both breathing harder from the pace, and when you push through the glass doors into the air-conditioned lobby, he slips through behind you. Slowly, you turn.

"Why are you still following me?" Your frown cuts deep, brows furrowed. "Seriously, this is stalker behaviour."

Sunghoon doesn't flinch. Doesn't even have the decency to look ashamed.

"I won't leave until you help me."

"I dare you to tell that to campus security." You retort, chin tilted up, eyes locked on his.

Then you exhale through your nose, sharp and dismissive, and turn on your heel toward the elevator. You jab the call button with your thumb, harder than necessary.

"I dare you to call campus security." Suddenly, he stands beside you, hands in his pockets, shoulder nearly brushing yours, a ghost of that infuriating smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "You won't."

The elevator dings, soft and cheerful, utterly indifferent to the tension coiled in the tiny space between your bodies. He steps in and stands close enough that you catch the familiar scent of him, and the doors slide shut, sealing you both inside.

"Because you don't scare me," you say, prodding a finger at his chest. He glances down at it, then back up at you, eyebrow raised. "You're like a whiny little toddler. Throwing a tantrum just because I won't give you what you want this time."

He doesn't step back. If anything, he leans into the prod, just slightly, letting your finger press into the fabric of his hoodie.

"Please," he says, and his voice has shifted—lower, stripped of the smirk. "The project is due in three days. None of my code works. I tried. I actually tried. I wanted to do better. But I don't know how to do this. I never learned, because you were always—"

"Always doing it for you." You stare at the elevator doors. "Yeah. I know."

"I'm sorry, okay? I know I fucked up. The tournament. The jersey. The lucky charm thing. All of it." He huffs, a short, humourless laugh at his own expense. "It wasn't very feminist of me. I shouldn't have treated you like an object, or something."

"No." Your voice is flat. "You shouldn't have."

The elevator dings, and you step out fast, keys already in your hand. Still, he's right behind you. His footsteps fall heavy on the carpet, matching your pace, refusing to give you even a stride of distance.

"Stop following me." You say again, firmer this time.

"I told you I won't."

"Well, you can cry in the hallway, then. I'm not dealing with this." You reach your door, and the keys jingle sharply as you slot them into the lock, missing the first time because your hands are not quite steady. You twist the knob and slip inside, already rolling your eyes, already swinging the door shut. "Bye—"

His hand catches it. Palm flat against the wood, fingers curling around the edge, arm braced. The door stops dead, half-open, and you're left gripping the handle on your side.

You stare at his hand. Then at him.

He pushes, though not very hard, and he steps through the gap, his body filling the frame and then clearing it. The door clicks shut behind him, and he leans back against it, his chest rising and falling with breaths that are just a little too fast to hide, like he’s equally as shocked as you are that he just forced himself inside your dorm room.

Your keys are still in your hand. Your knuckles are white around them, and you back up a few steps. Your chest is rising and falling to match his now, and the room feels suddenly very, very small.

“Listen, I just want to—”

"Get the fuck out of my room, or I swear to god I will actually call security."

"What do you want from me?" His voice comes out raw, louder than he meant. He pushes off the door, one step forward, then stops himself. "I apologized. I've tried to do my work. I'm trying to make things right. You want me to get on my knees and beg? 'Cause I will. I'll fucking do it."

"Sunghoon—"

He drops.

The movement is sudden and unceremonious. His knees hit the carpet with a dull thud, and for a second, he just stays there, head bowed, hair falling forward into his eyes, probably in need of a haircut. Then he looks up at you from the floor, hands clasped together.

"Please." His voice cracks. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

You stare down at him, distraught. A little horrified. Kind of cringing to yourself, honestly. And for a moment, you just watch him apologize over and over again. He mutters the same things he texted you about already. Missing you. Wanting to be better. Wanting to fix things. Needing to pass the class.

You drop your keys on your bedside table. The clatter breaks the rhythm of his apologies, and he goes silent. His head lifts, tracking the sound, tracking you as you take a step toward him. Then another. He doesn't move. Doesn't breathe, it seems like.

Stopping just in front of him, his clasped hands loosen, fingers uncurling, and then he's reaching for yours instead—slow, uncertain, like he's not sure he's allowed. His palms are warm, a little clammy. His fingers wrap around your knuckles and squeeze, and you can feel the tremor in his grasp. You think this is the first time you've ever seen this man experience any sort of real fear.

You lift his chin with your free hand, fingers pressing into his jaw, tilting his face up. The movement isn’t gentle or kind, as if the frown on your lips wasn't indicative enough of your displeasure with whatever this display is.

"You're pathetic."

"I know."

"You're an entitled, egotistical, manipulative loser."

"I know."

"Get up."

He does, and now you're the one craning your neck to look at him.

"For the last time." You say it slowly, "Leave me alone."

He doesn't move. His eyes trace your face. Your throat. The line of your collarbone. Your lips, still pulled into a tight frown.

"I can't do that." A silence follows. "You don't want me to do that either."

"I do."

"Maybe you do," he clarifies, hand finally reaching out until his fingers meet your throat, grazing your skin until they meet your chin. You lean into the touch. It’s your weakness. Your fatal flaw. You can say whatever you want, but when he has his hands on you, you crumble in his grasp. "But your body wants something else."

His thumb brushes your lower lip. Your mouth parts without permission.

You hold his gaze. Your breathing is shallow, your pulse hammering at the base of your throat where his fingers just were. You hate the way you can't pull yourself away. “Tell me what you want,” He rests leans in closer, his voice rough. "I can make it up to you. I'll make you forget what you were even upset about. You just have to—" You kiss him. Hard enough to shut him up. Hard enough that he makes a small, surprised sound against your mouth before his hand tightens in your hair and he kisses you back. It's different from the parking lot. Slower, a little hesitant because you're still learning how this all works. Desperate still, but less immediately urgent. His hand cradles the back of your head, and his lips work yours like they have something to prove. Your hands come up to his chest, and this time you don't push him away. When you break apart, you're both breathing hard. His forehead presses to yours, his eyes dark and a little dazed. The look of someone who knows they're about to get exactly what they wanted. You despise it.

"Are you really whoring yourself out for grades?" Your voice comes out breathless, undermining the bite you'd intended.

He laughs, low and warm against your mouth.

"If I'm whoring myself out for anything, it's forgiveness." His hand drops to your waist, his thumb tracing the curve of your hip. "I meant it when I said I missed you."

"Oh, I'm sure you do." You laugh bitterly, but his lips are already trailing down your jaw. "I'm sure you miss the way I did all your work and drove you around and—"

"I miss when you were mine." He says it against your throat, the words vibrating against your skin. His hand tightens on your hip. "And not laughing at some other asshole's jokes."

You can feel the shift in him, his possessiveness bleeding through the charm.

"Seriously, who was that guy?"

"Told you. Nobody." Your head tips back as his mouth finds the hollow beneath your ear. "Just a classmate."

"Did you do anything with—?"

"No. Obviously, no." The sigh that escapes you is half-frustration, half-surrender. "Just you. You know it's just you."

"That's right." He pulls back just enough to look at you, and there's satisfaction in his eyes—warm and smug and entirely undeserved. "Just me."

His hand slides from your hip to the small of your back, pulling you flush against him.

"What we did in the parking lot was just the start." His lips brush your ear, then your cheek, then the corner of your mouth. "I can do so much more for you. You know I can."

Your back suddenly hits the mattress. You didn't feel him walking you there—didn't register the steps, the turn, the careful way he lowered you down. But now he's above you, braced on his forearms, looking at you with a kind of hunger and hope.

"Let me apologize properly." He squeezes your hand, his thumb brushing your knuckles. "Will you?"

You look up at him. At his jaw. His mouth. His dark, beautiful eyes. You nod without questioning it.

His lips find your throat first. Soft. Slow. He traces the line of your pulse with his mouth, feeling it flutter beneath his attention. Then lower—your collarbone, the hollow at the base of your throat, the warm skin just above the neckline of your shirt. He pushes the fabric aside, just enough, and presses a kiss there. Then another. Then lower.

His hands move with the same precision he brings to his game, but slower. Like he's memorizing the landscape of you as he strips you of your clothes. His mouth traces a slow path down your stomach. You’re near-bare when his fingers hook into the waistband of your underwear, and he pauses, looking up at you through his lashes.

"Just lay back."

You nod again, not trusting your voice.

He pulls the fabric down. His breath is warm against the inside of your thigh. Then his mouth is there—gentle at first, testing, learning what makes you gasp and what makes you go still. His hands hold your hips, thumbs tracing circles into your skin, steadying you.

"Too much?" He murmurs against you, the vibration of his voice sending a shiver up your spine.

"No," You swallow. "Don't stop."

With that, he's grinning, lowering himself between your thighs.

He takes you apart slowly. Thoroughly. His tongue works in patterns you can't track, his fingers pressing into the soft flesh of your thighs, his voice a low murmur of praise against your skin. So good for me. So pretty. Just like that.

When he feels you getting close, he doesn't speed up. He holds the rhythm steady, deliberate, drawing it out until your hands are fisted in his hair and your back is arching off the mattress and his name is the only word left in your vocabulary.

"Who's making you feel this good?" His voice is rough, muffled against your skin. "Tell me."

"Sunghoon."

"Say it again."

"Sunghoon—please—!"

You shatter. The wave crashes through you, and he works you through every second of it—his mouth never stopping, his hands grounding you, holding you together even as you fall apart. When the last tremor leaves your body, you're gasping, your fingers still twisted in his hair.

He kisses his way back up. Your hip. Your ribs. The curve of your shoulder.

"All mine," he murmurs against your skin, pressing the words into you like a claim.

Finally, his lips find yours. Still slow, none of that frantic hunger that had him pressed against you before you could think in the back of your car. His hand comes up to cradle the side of your face, thumb brushing your cheekbone, and his mouth moves against yours like an apology he doesn't know how to put into words.

But you're not done with him yet. Not even close.

Your hands drop from his chest to his waistband, fingers finding the drawstring and tugging. You fumble—too eager, too impatient—and the knot catches, your knuckles pressing into the hard plane of his stomach as you work at it. His abs tense under your touch. He pulls back, eyes wide, lips still swollen.

"What are you doing?" His voice is rough, caught between surprise and something else. His hand hovers over yours, but doesn't stop you.

"Want you." You meet his eyes and hold them, your chin tilting up. "Inside me."

He nearly groans at the sound of that, dick twitching in his pants. But, for the first time, he hesitates. Even now—even with you laid out beneath him, even with the taste of you still on his lips—there's a flicker of concern in his expression. "You sure?"

"You want forgiveness." Your voice is steadier than you feel. "Show me how sorry you are."

He stares at you for a beat. Something in his expression shifts—surprise giving way to something darker, more amused, thoroughly impressed. A low chuckle escapes him, warm and rough, and he shakes his head like he can't quite believe you.

"You want it that bad, huh?"

You push his hoodie up over his shoulders, suddenly self-conscious of how much skin you’re showing compared to him. He finishes the job for you, peeling off the hoodie and shirt beneath it in one motion, and then he’s reaching for the waistband.

You barely notice how his sweatpants are gone in a single impatient shove, too focused on him; the broad sweep of his chest, the tight lines of his stomach, the way his arms flex as he braces himself above you. Your hands flatten against his chest without second thought.

"How the hell are you so..." You trail off, too stunned to finish.

"Gym. Sometimes." He shrugs, "What? I'm not a complete loser."

"You're worse than a loser." You retort, but your words betray your actions as you find the waistband of his boxers.

"I am?" He's grinning now, watching your hands fumble, "You don't seem to mind."

He shifts his weight as you pull them down, and then you have him—hard, bare and intimidating, grinding against the inside of your thigh. Your breath catches.

"I'm serious, though." His voice drops. His forehead presses to yours, and his hips still. "You sure you want this? It feels sort of wrong. Like..."

"Like what?"

He doesn't answer right away. His thumb traces a slow line along your hip, grounding himself, grounding you. Like you should save it for someone else, he thinks. Someone more deserving. The thought makes him shudder. He can't stand it—the image of someone else's hands on you. Someone else seeing you like this, all flushed and open and unguarded. He's too obsessed with the way you react to his touch. Too greedy to give it up.

"Sunghoon," you sigh, "I literally don't care. Just put it in."

He sucks in a breath.

"Well, I care." He presses closer, and you feel him at your entrance. He doesn’t push in yet, just rests there, heavy and warm. His eyes find yours. "So tell me if it hurts. Tell me—" He pushes in just barely, just the head of him, and your mouth falls open. "—fuck, you're gorgeous."

He's not fully in yet—just working his way inside, pausing to let you adjust to each inch. His thumb strokes the back of your hand in slow, soothing circles. And yet still—

"So big," you whimper, glancing down between your bodies, almost disbelieving. You already feel so impossibly full of him. Your fingers squeeze around his, your other hand gripping the back of his neck. "So much..."

"I know." He whispers it, and you catch the corner of his mouth twitching—trying not to smile too smugly, trying not to let it get to his head. But he's still just a guy, and the way you're looking at him, all wide-eyed and overwhelmed, is doing things to his ego he can't quite suppress. "Too much for you?"

You shake your head in denial, your nails pressing little crescents into his shoulder blade as he sinks in deeper. The stretch is intense, almost too much, but the thought of him stopping is worse.

"I know it's a lot." There's a trace of that smugness in his voice now, but it's tempered by something softer. Something almost tender. "But it feels good when you get used to it, angel. I swear."

He's fully in now. You feel him everywhere—a deep, satisfying fullness that borders on overwhelming. His palm presses flat against your lower belly, and you watch his jaw go slack as he feels himself there, buried inside you, just beneath his hand.

"Fuck," he breathes, almost to himself. "Feel that? That's me. Right there."

You can't speak. You can only nod, your breath coming in shallow gasps, your body still adjusting to the size of him.

You feel him in your guts, an almost unbearable fullness that borders on pain before it tips into something else. When he starts moving, shallow and careful, it's like your whole body shakes with the sensation. Want. Need. Anticipation. You've wanted him so badly. All summer, every night, every time his knee brushed yours or his voice dropped low. And now here he is inside you, above you, finally, and you're barely able to handle it. The frustration prickles at the edges of your bliss.

A strained sound escapes you with each shallow thrust. Your face is still tight, your body still struggling to accommodate him, but you are so, so determined.

"More," you manage, the word half-demand, half-plea. "You can go harder. Faster. I won't break."

He just laughs, Low and warm.

"Not yet." He purrs. "Not this time. You'll take it like this."

He fucks you slow and deep. His thumb finds your clit and circles it in a lazy rhythm, matching the roll of his hips. The discomfort lingers at the edges from the stretch of him that still borders on too much, but then he shifts, angling your leg slightly higher, and something inside you ignites.

A raw, involuntary noise escapes you, and he catches it immediately.

"Right there, huh?" He does it again, same angle, same depth. You bite back a cry. "Feels good?"

"So good." Your nails rake down his back. "Fuck, it’s so—"

You don't finish the sentence. You cum around him, rather abruptly, a broken cry on your lips, your back arching. He groans, low and strained, and rocks you through every pulse of it, his hips rolling gently, letting you ride out your high.

When your eyes blink open, hazy and unfocused, you stare up at him. At the sharp cut of his jaw. His mouth, still slightly parted. The dark hair falling over his gorgeous eyes. He looks like a fucking pornstar—it's actually unbelievable. Every inch of him is perfect, and it just makes you even more pissed.

And he hasn't finished yet. Still hard. Still inside you. Still watching you with that smug, knowing look, like he's got all the time in the world.

That also makes you pissed.

With a single-minded focus, you’re pushing him to his back, mounting him, your legs still shaking from the aftermath of your orgasm.

“What are you—” His voice is genuinely startled. His hands come up to your hips on instinct, not guiding, just holding, like he's bracing for impact. His eyes are wide, fixed on your face.

You lower yourself onto him, slowly. Sinking down until you’re fully seated there. It’s a lot. A lot more than it was trying to take him from just lying down. You feel all of him, even deeper than before, filling you to the brim, and your eyes squeeze shut, trying to swallow the slight discomfort that still lingers.

“I don’t know if you should—” His voice is strained. He's trying to be decent. Trying to hold still. You can feel the tension in his thighs beneath you, the effort it's taking him not to thrust up into the heat of you.

You start to move. Mostly to shut him up. There’s no rhyme or rhythm. No technique. Only directionless desire. Your hips rock in a shallow, uneven pace because you can't really handle what you're trying to take—the angle is different, and every downward stroke punches a gasp from your lungs. Your thighs burn with the effort. Your balance wavers. But you don't stop.

"Fuck." The word tears out of him, strangled and reverent. He's leaning back against your pillows now, propped on his elbows, watching you with helpless awe. "Just take it. Take what you want. It's yours."

Your nails drag down his chest, leaving angry red lines in their wake. The sting makes him hiss, but he doesn't stop you—doesn't grab your wrists, doesn't flip you over. He just watches, enthralled, as you claw at him like you're trying to leave a mark he'll feel for days.

You're cursing at him under your breath. Asshole. Entitled. Selfish. Using me. Words he can't quite catch but definitely deserves. Your rhythm stutters and breaks, your hips faltering as the pleasure builds too fast, too intense, and you can't keep the pace steady when every nerve in your body is screaming.

Maybe he should feel terrified that you're clawing at him like an animal, cursing his name with the same breath you use to moan it. But he's captivated. He's never been more attracted to anyone in his life. Your lips are parted, your chest bare and heaving, and you're riding him with zero grace and a summer’s worth of pent-up fury and sexual frustration.

"Shit," he breathes, his hands sliding up from your hips to your waist, thumbs pressing into the soft flesh just above your hipbones. "Look at you. So fucking hot when you're mad. Maybe I should—"

You slap him across the face.

As hard as you can.

It shocks you, even.

It’s not very hard—he's basically a wall of muscle—but the sting is real, and the crack of it echoes in the room.

For one suspended second, he doesn't move. Doesn't breathe. His head is still turned from the impact, a faint pink bloom already rising on his cheek. Still trying to wrap his head around the fact that you—the girl who stutters over her words and whimpers from a single touch—just slapped him across the face while riding him.

His eyes find yours.

"Shut the fuck up." You hiss.

He should probably feel pissed, right? Offended, maybe? He's never been slapped in his life—not by a girlfriend, not even by his roommates, though he’s sure sometimes they want to. And yet the sting on his cheek is radiating down his neck, into his chest, settling low in his gut where it twists into something insatiable.

His dick twitches, and a sound he's never made escapes him—which he does not have the time to unpack currently. He'll think about it later, probably, when he's alone and confused and trying to figure out what the hell just happened to him.

A grin tugs at the corner of his mouth.

"Make me."

You slap him again, and his smile only widens.

His cheek is definitely pink now. He can feel the heat of it, the slight throb, and it's doing something to him. His hands tighten on your hips, not to restrain you, just to keep you there, like this. Steadying your hips.

You're breathing hard, staring down at him, the stretch of him wearing you thin. He splits you open in a way that borders on too much, your body still struggling to accommodate the sheer size of him even now, even after everything. Every inch is a presence you can't ignore, and for a dizzying second, you wonder if this is what it feels like to be completely consumed. Still, you take him. You take what you want.

You finish with a broken cry, your rhythm shattering completely. Your hips stutter, lose their pace, and then you're collapsing forward, forehead pressed to his chest, your whole body seizing and releasing around him in waves that don't seem to stop. His hands find your hips and hold you steady through it, thumbs pressing into the soft flesh just above your hipbones, grounding you while you shudder apart on top of him.

For a moment, he lets you rest there. His hand cradles the back of your head. His chest rises and falls beneath your cheek. He's still hard—achingly, painfully hard—and the feeling of you fluttering around him, spent and trembling, is almost enough to finish him right there.

But not quite.

He flips you onto your back.

It's fast. One arm wraps around your waist, and then the world tilts, and suddenly you're beneath him again, your back sinking into the mattress, your legs falling open around his hips. He doesn't give you time to adjust—doesn't give himself time to think. He just drives back into you, burying himself to the hilt in one desperate thrust.

"Hoon—!”

"Take it," he chokes out, hand reaching for your neck, "Don't tap out on me, now. Fucking take it like a good girl."

The pace is different now, a lot less considerate. He's been holding back all night—letting you adjust, letting you set the rhythm, letting you take what you wanted. But now he's wound too tight, every thrust driven by a pure, animalistic need.

His breath goes ragged. His jaw clenches so tight it aches. The hand around your neck tightens, not enough to choke you, but enough to keep you in place, and he fucks into you like he's trying to outrun something—the guilt, the fear, the dawning realization that this isn't just about getting off anymore and that it probably hasn't been for a while.

"I'm—" His rhythm breaks, stutters, and then he's pulling out at the last possible second. His hand wraps around himself. He finishes on your stomach with a low, broken groan that sounds like it's been dragged out of him against his will, and he stares at the image of it all: You, covered in his cum. Finally his again.

He stays there for a moment, braced above you, his arms trembling. His head hangs low, breath coming in ragged gasps. The mess between you is warm and slick, pooling on your skin, and neither of you moves to clean it up. Not yet, anyway.

The room goes quiet, the two of you only breathing.

He blinks down at you. At the mess. The way you're still catching your breath, still flushed, still looking up at him with those wide, unreadable eyes. Something flickers across his face—something almost tender, almost frightened—and then it's gone, replaced by the ghost of that infuriating grin.

"Shit," he breathes, and it comes out half-laugh, half-apology. "Come here."

He kisses you. Soft. Gentle. Nothing like the desperate, driving intensity of a few minutes ago. This kiss says something different—something he can't quite put into words and isn't sure he's ready to. His lips linger on yours for a beat longer than necessary before he pulls back. "You got anything to clean up with?"

You point him to the drawer at your bedside, and he reaches over. A pack of wet wipes. He cleans you up with careful, methodical hands, wiping the mess from your stomach, between your thighs, his touch efficient but gentle. Like it's the most natural thing in the world. Like he's done it a hundred times.

He tosses the wipes toward the garbage bin in the corner. It lands short. He doesn't pick it up. Instead, he climbs back onto the bed and lies down beside you, close enough that his shoulder brushes yours.

"Does it hurt anywhere?" He turns his head on the pillow to look at you. His hair is a disaster, still damp with sweat at the temples. "I was trying to be careful, but you were kind of intense. You were a virgin, like, two hours ago."

"A little sore." Your voice comes out hoarse. "I'll survive."

"You sure? I can get you Advil." He's already half-propped up on one elbow, ready to go searching through your bathroom cabinets. "I don't know where you keep your Advil."

"I'm sure."

He nods, settling back down. His arm finds its way around your waist, pulling you closer until your head rests against his shoulder. His hand traces idle patterns on your hip—slow, absent shapes, like he's not even aware he's doing it.

"You're staying?"

He looks down at you. The question catches him off guard—not the words, but the way they sound to him. Soft and Uncertain, like you're bracing for him to leave. Clingy already, he thinks, but the thought makes him smile, rather than feel annoyed.

"Come on." He presses a kiss to the top of your head. "I'm not a complete asshole."

"You're not?"

"I'm staying." Another kiss, softer this time. "I'm not going anywhere."

You hum, a sigh leaving your body, head settled against his chest. His heart does something inconvenient in his ribcage—a flutter, a stutter, something he refuses to name. He pulls you a little closer anyway.

"I mean it," he says, and the words start coming faster now, tumbling out in a ramble he hadn't planned. The afterglow loosened something in his chest. "I'm gonna make it up to you. For real this time. Not like the parking lot. I know I said that then, but I mean it now. I'm gonna take you out. An actual date. No tournaments. No sushi—unless you want sushi? But a nicer place than that one. Just you and me. A real restaurant. Not some strip mall junk."

You're quiet, your thumb drawing lazy circles against his chest. It's a soothing, steady rhythm that has his eyes growing heavy.

"And I'll stop calling you a lucky charm or prize or whatever. That was stupid. I shouldn't have said that. I don't even know why I said it. I was just—the reporter was there, and I was still hyped from the match, and my teammates were all listening." He presses another kiss to your hair. "You're not any of that. You're good to me. Really good to me."

Still no response. Your thumb keeps tracing those slow circles, but you haven't looked up at him. You must be tired. Poor thing.

"Oh, and I'll teach you," he adds, a chuckle escaping him. "How to ride me. Properly. Not that I'm complaining. It was cute watching you struggle up there."

A yawn cracks his jaw. He tries to smother it, but it's too late. His body reminds him that he got zero sleep trying to work on the project, and that he just made you finish three times. The adrenaline is gone. What's left is heavy, dragging exhaustion. Almost peaceful.

"Anyway," he mumbles, eyes closing. "I'll be better. I swear. Actual date. No name-calling. Riding lessons. Sunghoon 2.0. The redeem—" Another yawn. "The redemption arc."

You turn your head on his chest. Your voice cuts through the haze of his exhaustion.

"Sunghoon."

"Mm?"

"What did I say about shutting up?"

He blinks. The question catches him off guard, and then a laugh bubbles up from somewhere deep in his chest—genuine, surprised, a little bit giddy. A laugh only you seem to be able to pull out of him.

"Yes, ma'am," he says, grinning. "Shutting up now."

You settle back against his chest. Your hand resumes its position over his ribs, but the circles have stopped. He doesn't notice. He's already sinking, the warmth of you pulling him under.

He closes his eyes. The weight of you against his chest is warm and solid and real. His, some quiet, possessive part of him whispers. And the taste of you still lingers on his lips, tasting a lot like victory.

It's been two weeks. Sunghoon has learned a few things about you. He's learned that you're insatiable—and that Heeseung was right when he said something about the innocent ones being the freakiest in bed. He's learned that you like it when he pulls your hair—not hard, just enough. He's learned that you like to pull his hair and dig your nails into him and cuss him out, while begging him to go harder and faster. He's also learned that you still won't let him take you on an actual date. And trust him, he's tried.

"Let me take you out," he'll say, and you're cutting him off with your sweet, irresistible lips. "I'm serious," he'll insist, and your hand is down his pants, teasing him for being hard already. "I'll buy you dinner. Anything you want," he'll try, and you're sinking to your knees, taking his dick down your throat like it’s nothing. Then he forgets whatever he's arguing about.

It bothers him. Not the sex part, obviously—he enjoys that more than he's ever enjoyed anything—but he doesn't want you to think that's all he wants. He's been trying to prove otherwise. Trying to show you that he actually gives a shit. That he's not an asshole. That he's changed. You don't seem to believe him—that's the only reason he can think of why you keep avoiding his advances, anyway. Every time he brings up a real date, you dodge, distract and deflect with your hands and your mouth and the warm press of your body. He's determined to prove you wrong.

Today is no different. You're in his bed, head pressed into the pillows as he fucks you from behind, and he's covered in a layer of sweat. "Shit," he seethes, watching himself disappear inside you, your greedy cunt taking all of him. "So fucking gorgeous." "Faster," you whine, predictably. He almost laughs. "Let me take you out." He slows deliberately, his cock dragging along your walls at an agonizing pace—so slow you can feel every inch of him, the thick ridge of his head catching on just the right spot before he pulls back again. "Tomorrow. Dinner. Real restaurant." "Sunghoon." His name is muffled against the pillow, half-moan, half-protest. Your fingers twist in the sheets. "Somewhere nice." He rolls his hips, just barely, just enough to make you gasp. "No sex. Not before. Not after. Not even a little. Just talking." "You're already talking right now." You push back against him, trying to take him deeper, but his hands tighten on your hips, holding you still. "And it's very annoying." "I'm serious." "So am I. Now faster." "No."

A squeal escapes you as his palm connects with your ass—not hard, just a sharp little crack that makes you jolt forward. The sting blooms warm across your skin. He rubs the spot immediately, his palm soothing over the heat he left behind, and the contrast makes you shudder. "Just say yes." He leans over you, his chest brushing your spine, and you can feel the heat of him, the slick slide of his skin against yours. His lips find the shell of your ear. "Lemme hear it, and I'll fuck you right." His hips rock forward—barely an inch—and you moan at the shallow stretch. Then he pulls back again, leaving you empty and aching. "Fine," you huff, "Maybe." He stops moving entirely. You wait for the next thrust, the next tease, but nothing comes. Then he's pulling out completely, his hands leaving your hips, and the sudden absence of him is so jarring you actually whimper. "What are you—?" "No date, no dick." You crane your neck to glare at him over your shoulder. He's kneeling behind you, cock slick and ready, one hand wrapped lazily around himself. He strokes himself, just watching you squirm. "That's not fair." "It's completely fair." Trying not to grin, seeing the look of frustration on your face, "Seriously, what am I, a piece of meat to you?" "Yes," you don't even hesitate, "So put your dick back inside me and stop talking." "So demanding," he raises a brow, hands leaving his cock to return to your hips. You whine when you feel the tip of him tease along your slick heat, absolutely dripping for him. You huff, dropping your forehead to the pillow. Your body is aching. Empty. You can feel how wet you are, how ready, and he's just kneeling there, smug and gorgeous and utterly infuriating. "Please." Your voice drops, softening. "Please give it to me." He bites his lip, hands gripping your hips tighter as he grinds against you. The begging. You know he can't resist the begging. He sucks in a breath. Don’t give in, don’t give in, don’t— "Want it so bad." You push back onto your elbows, arching your back, presenting yourself to him. "Need you inside me. Need you to fill me up. Please, Sunghoon. Please." "Fuck." He stutters and lines himself up, the head of him pressing against your entrance—just barely, just enough to make you gasp and push back—and then he sheathes himself in one brutal, devastating thrust. "So fucking needy." You cry out, face buried in the pillow, your whole body jerking forward as he sheathes himself to the hilt. He doesn't give you time to adjust, nor does he give himself time to be careful. His hand presses flat between your shoulder blades, pinning you to the mattress, and his other hand grips your hip hard enough to bruise. The headboard slams against the wall in a frantic rhythm, his pace punishing. Your fingers curl into the sheets, twisting the fabric, trying to anchor yourself against the force of him. Every thrust punches a broken sound from your throat—half gasp, half moan, muffled by the pillow. He watches himself disappear into you, the slick glide of his length, the way your body stretches to accommodate him, the way you push back against him even now, even pinned, even helpless. "That's it," he grits out, his voice wrecked. "Take it. Take all of it." You're babbling something into the pillow—his name, maybe, or just incoherent pleading. He can feel you tightening around him, your walls fluttering, the telltale tremble in your thighs. He reaches around, finds your clit, and the sound you make when he touches you there is almost enough to finish him on the spot. "Come for me," he breathes, his rhythm stuttering as his own control starts to fray. "Let go. I've got you."

You shatter. He feels it—the clench, the pulse, the way your whole body seizes and releases. Your cry is muffled by the pillow, but he hears it anyway, feels it in the way you grip him, in the way you shudder beneath him. He fucks you through it, chasing his own release now, and when it hits him, a low, broken groan is torn from his chest as he spills inside you.

He collapses forward, bracing himself on his forearms so he doesn't crush you. His forehead presses to the space between your shoulder blades, his breath coming in ragged gasps against your damp skin. Beneath him, you're still trembling—small aftershocks rippling through you. The room is quiet now, just the sound of breathing and the distant hum of his PC.

He stays there for a long moment, letting his heart rate settle, letting the sweat cool on his back. Then he shifts, pressing a kiss to the center of your spine. Then another, higher. Then another, at the nape of your neck. He works his way up slowly, reverently, like he's memorizing the landscape of you.

"Come here." His voice is wrecked, barely more than a rasp. He eases out of you gently and tugs you down onto the pillows with him, pulling your back against his chest. His arm drapes across your waist, heavy and warm. His nose brushes the curve of your ear. But then he’s watching you slip from the bed, and he can’t help but frown. The sheets pool around his waist as he sits up, reaching for you. His fingers catch your arm before you can stand.

"Where are you going?" "Back to my place?” “Why?” “Because.” You break from his grasp, “I’m busy.” "With?"

"Studying. Work. Social life." You're pulling on your clothes with that efficient, no-nonsense energy he's come to recognize—underwear, shirt, the quick twist of your hair into something presentable. "Some of us care about our lives." He ignores the jab, tugging you back toward him. You stumble, one knee landing on the mattress, and he takes the opening—his mouth finding the curve of your neck, pressing slow, deliberate kisses along your throat.

"Sunghoon..." Your voice wavers, a warning and a surrender all at once. "I want to take you out." He murmurs it against your skin, his hand sliding up your arm. "Wanna do more than just this. Wanna do this right." You pull back just enough to look at him. Your expression is hard to read—something between exasperation and something softer you won't name. "This is fine. I like this." "I know. I like it too." His thumb traces your jaw. "But—" "I have to go." You lean down and kiss him. Brief. Almost dismissive. Then you're pulling away, grabbing your bag, and he's left in the bed, still warm from your body, still tasting you on his lips.

He groans, dragging himself upright. Hastily, he’s tugging his sweatpants on, and throwing a hoodie over his head, and he follows you down the hallway, catching up just as you reach the living room.

The usual suspects are in position—Heeseung on the couch, Jake in the armchair, Jay sprawled on the floor doing something on his phone that's making him smirk. Three heads lift in unison as you pass.

"Leaving so soon?" Heeseung calls, not looking up from his phone. "Not even cuddling? Sunghoon, man, don't tell me you fumbled that bad?" "I have places I need to be," you reply simply, not breaking your stride, "Bye, guys—"

He catches you at the door. His hand finds your waist, spinning you back toward him, and then he's kissing you—not the brief, dismissive peck you tried to give him in the bedroom, but something a lot more intentional.

He ignores the wolf whistle from the couch and the “get a room!” comment, his fingers curling into the fabric of your shirt at the small of your back, pulling you flush against him. His tongue traces the seam of your lips, and when they part on a surprised breath, he deepens the kiss without hesitation. You make a sound against his mouth—half embarrassment, half something else—and he grins into the kiss, pleased with himself.

"Sunghoon—" You pull back, hand pressed to his chest. "Next time." His voice is low, meant only for you, his forehead nearly touching yours. "I'm taking you out. Even if I have to keep my hands to myself the whole night." "Sure," Your smile is unreadable, but you don't pull away. "Next time." Then you're gone. The door clicks shut, and Sunghoon turns to face the room. Three stares bore into him.

"Bro," Jake says, "That was disgusting." "Downright pornographic," Jay agrees from the floor. Heeseung just shakes his head slowly, "You're down bad. Like, down bad, down bad." "Catastrophically down bad." "You guys don't get it." Sunghoon flops onto the couch. "She's perfect. Like, actually perfect. She's smart, and she's funny, and she puts up with my shit. And..." he cracks a smile as he gestures to his bedroom, "You know." "We know," the three of them say in unison, flatly.

His head falls back, and he sighs, the scent of your perfume still lingering on him. The one trace of you that stays behind whenever you leave too soon. "But," He pauses, his brows scrunched, "I don't think she believes me when I say I want more. I think that she thinks that I'm just trying to get in her pants." "To be fair," Jake says, "you have been in her pants. Multiple times." "And you literally spent the first half of the summer ignoring her while she did your coursework," Jay adds. "And you made her take you to your E-sports tournament, then came on her—" Heeseung starts. "I know. I did a lot of shitty things I regret." He stares at the ceiling. "It’s different now. I want to show her I actually care. That I'm not using her for her body or something. But every time I try, she changes the subject. Or distracts me. Or—" "Distracts you with sex?" Heeseung raises an eyebrow. "That must be terrible for you. Imagine that? Trying to take a girl out for dinner, and she just wants one order of your load down her throat instead. How awful." "I’m serious." "Sunghoon." Heeseung puts a hand on his shoulder. "You're complaining that a girl who's hot and smart and good in bed won't let you take her to Olive Garden. Do you hear yourself right now?" "She's got you whipped," Jay says, not looking up from his phone. "Never thought I'd see the day. The guy who once said 'relationships are a debuff' is now begging for a dinner reservation." "I'm not whipped." He retorts. "I just want her to know that I care. That's all." "Simp," Jake coughs. Sunghoon's head snaps toward him. "Oh, you did not just say that—" "Right message, wrong messenger," Heeseung interrupts him, "You are objectively a simp now. You, the guy who famously chose video games over his last relationship, who once said 'dating is a distraction from the grind'—" "The grind is still important." "—is now begging a woman to let him buy her overpriced appetizers."

Sunghoon would normally fire back with some well-aimed jab about Heeseung and Jay's own nonexistent love life or Jake's shit show of a dating history. But he's distracted. Thinking about you. About next time. About how he's finally going to convince you that he means it. "I am," he says simply, a smile on his face, "I'd buy her everything on the menu if she asked me to." A beat of horrified silence passes, the three boys sharing glances with each other. "Seriously, what happened to him?" Jay whispers to Jake, who shrugs in response, matching his look, "This is terrifying." "I'd almost rather hear him screaming at his ranked teammates." "Or cry over a broken Nintendo Switch controller." "Or talking to himself in the mirror before games. 'You got this, Sunghoon. You're him. You're cracked.'" "It's hard to believe," Heeseung says, lowering his head between them and pulling them into an impromptu huddle, their voices dropping to stage whispers, "but maybe love really did change him." "He's not in love," Jake rolls his eyes. "He's in heat or something." "Yeah, well, it's the closest he's gotten to love in like, what, years?" Heeseung replies, "Look at what he's wearing. That's a brand new hoodie. Clean, pristine condition, not a single stain or wrinkle. When's the last time you saw him in something that didn't come out of the laundry pile?" "It’s like when male birds start doing those weird dances to impress the females," Jay shudders, "Puffing up their chests. Spinning in circles. Except it's Sunghoon doing it. Which just feels—" "Gross?" Jake offers. "Unnatural.” "Wrong.” "A crime against nature." "You know I can hear you guys, right?" Sunghoon deadpans. "Literally everything." "We know," Heeseung says without turning around. "We don’t care. Go back to daydreaming."

Sunghoon opens his mouth to fire back, but his phone buzzes on the cushion beside him. A notification. He glances down, expecting your name on the screen—a text, maybe, or one of those voice notes he's learned to listen to the moment they arrive. His lips quirk up. Then he reads it.

Transcript Updated: Summer Semester — Web Programming Final Grade: F

The smile freezes on his face like a video paused on a single frame. "What?" Heeseung leans over, trying to see the screen. "What's that face? You look like you just watched your favourite vandal skin get vaulted."

Sunghoon doesn't answer. He opens the grade portal. Opens the project submission page. There it is: The final project. Submitted. Your name, alone. His? Nowhere to be seen.

"I failed." His voice is small, hollow. "The class. She took my name off the project." Silence.

Then Jay starts laughing. A sharp, incredulous bark. Heeseung joins in, his shoulders shaking. Jake sets down his controller with the slow deliberation of a man who wants to fully savour what's about to happen.

"No way," Heeseung manages between breaths. "She didn't." "She did." "Oh, this is beautiful." Jay wipes his eyes. "This is the most beautiful thing I've ever witnessed." “So dicking her down didn’t get you anywhere after all,” Heeseung is grinning widely, “Tried to use her for grades, then caught feelings.” "That's not—” "You thought you had it all, huh? The A, the tournament win, the girl—" He wheezes, "You thought you were out here playing her, and she played you." "I told you it wasn't like that—" "Bro." Jake sets down his controller. "It was exactly like that." Sunghoon stares at the screen. At the F. At your name, alone on the submission page. His chest feels strange. Hollow. Like someone reached in and scooped something out and left a Sunghoon-shaped shell on the couch. He doesn't even have the energy to fight his roommates anymore.

He stands up from the couch, words dying on his lips. One moment he’s there, staring at his phone, and the next he’s walking—feet carrying him down the hallway toward his room. The laughter of his roommates fades behind him, muffled by the closing door.

His room is dark except for the blue glow of his monitor. The Valorant home screen stares back at him, waiting for a queue that won’t come. He sits at the edge of his bed and stares at the transcript notification again, as if looking at it long enough might change the grade.

His thumb hovers over your contact. The last message from you—a short, simple text from earlier that day. On my way. He'd smiled when he read it then. He presses the call button. "Sunghoon." You pick up after a few rings, "What's up?" "What's up?" His voice comes out strangled. "You failed me. You took my name off the project. I thought—I thought we were—" There’s a laugh on the other line. "You thought what?" You ask, clearly amused. "You really thought that because you fucked me, suddenly I'd decide to let you keep your name on a project you didn't contribute to?" "No, I—" He's stammering. "Not like that. But you made me think—" "I didn't make you do anything." "You let me believe—" He runs his hand through his hair, pacing. "Had me under the impression we were good. With each other. That things were fixed. That I apologized and you forgave me." "Oh? Do you feel misled?" You tease, a content sigh, then leaving you, "I never promised you anything, Sunghoon. It's not my fault you assumed things."

His stomach drops. He sits there, in the middle of his dark room, phone pressed to his ear, and the silence stretches long enough that he's not sure why you haven’t hung up on him yet.

"I like you." The words tumble out before he can stop them, earnest and vulnerable and nothing like how he usually is. "I wasn't just trying to get in your pants. I want to take you out. I've been trying to take you out for weeks. I wanted to show you—"

"Oh, I know. You made that very clear." "Then why—" "But I'm sorry to break it to you," you continue, "I don't date guys who can't fix their own broken code." He swallows, phone trembling in his grasp. "Call me when you want to fuck again, 'kay? That's all you're really good for." You say. It’s not smug or cruel. It’s just honest. "Bye, Sunghoon."

note ✰.ᐟ this work exists in the same au as this fic here

You’ve done your research. Three weeks of it, thorough and methodical, the kind of research you’d do for an actual piece — which this is, you’ve decided, this absolutely counts as journalism, your professor would probably disagree but your professor also gave you a C minus on your piece about the university’s dining hall monopoly which was genuinely your best work so his opinion is noted and filed in the bin.

You have a google doc. It has sections. There’s a tab called subjects and a tab called timeline and a tab called tips (working) and another one called notes which is mostly just screenshots of anonymous submissions that all say some version of the same thing: he’s charming, he’s beautiful, he made me feel like the only person in the room, and then he was gone, and I’m fairly certain he didn’t know my name by the end of it.

Seventeen submissions. Seventeen different girls. One name, consistent, at the centre of all of them.

Park Sunghoon. Figure skating scholarship. Second year Humanities, now final year. Shares a house off campus with Jay Park and Lee Heeseung, both of whom feature in the submissions as background characters — his friends were there, they seemed nice, Jay remembered my name even if Sunghoon didn’t appearing in three separate accounts with the specific poignancy of a detail nobody coordinated.

He has a type, according to the submissions. Which is to say he doesn’t have a type. He’ll talk to anyone, charm anyone, make anyone feel chosen — and then the choosing stops, and he moves on, and the girl is left standing in the aftermath wondering what she did wrong when the answer is nothing, the answer is that’s just what he does, the answer is you were never going to be the exception because Park Sunghoon doesn’t do exceptions.

He does this, you’ve established, approximately once every two to three weeks. He’s been doing it since freshman year. He has never, by any account you can find, caught feelings. He has never once, to anyone’s knowledge, repeated a girl.

He is, in short, a certified campus fuckboy, and he has been getting away with it for three years because he’s beautiful and charming and genuinely good company right up until the moment he isn’t, and by then it’s too late.

Not anymore.

You have a plan. The plan is elegant and slightly unhinged and Minji — your best friend, Kiss & Tell’s only reader who knows the writer — has called it both those things and also added extremely on brand for you which you take as the highest possible compliment.

Thirteen tips. The clingy, overwhelming, emotionally catastrophic playbook of everything a man like Sunghoon runs from. You’re going to deploy every single one, document it in real time, post it to the blog, and by day thirteen he’ll have run screaming and Kiss & Tell will have its most-read piece of the year and you’ll have actually done something with your journalism degree that matters.

The only thing you need is an in.

Which is, currently, the one gap in the plan.

You’ve been thinking about this for three days when Minji texts you at 9PM on a Friday: jisoo’s having people over. sunghoon will be there. i heard jay mention it.

You look at the message.

You look at your google doc.

You close your laptop, get up, and start getting dressed.

Jisoo’s apartment is the kind of place that fits thirty people comfortably and currently has approximately sixty, which means the music is too loud and the drinks are wherever you can find them and the air has that particular quality of a Friday night that’s fully committed to itself.

You arrive with Minji at ten, already knowing the layout — Jisoo’s place is a known quantity, you’ve been here before, the kitchen is to the left and the living room is straight ahead and the back patio is where people go when the inside gets too much.

You find a drink. You find a wall. You survey the room with the practiced efficiency of someone who has been reporting on this campus for three years.

You find him in four seconds.

He’s not hard to find. That’s the first thing — he doesn’t try to be found, he doesn’t need to, he simply exists in a room and the room orients around him without being asked. He’s tall, which you knew, and he’s wearing something simple, which you didn’t expect, dark jeans and a plain shirt and the specific ease of someone who has never once had to try very hard.

He’s laughing at something Jay said — Jay, beside him, is grinning with the energy of someone who said something very funny and knows it — and the laugh is real, you can tell from here, unperformed, and this is information you file away because it matters. The charm is one thing. The realness underneath it is something else.

You’ve been looking at him for approximately thirty seconds before Minji says, very quietly, “you’re staring.”

“I’m researching,” you say.

“You have a look on your face.”

“It’s my research face.”

“It’s not your research face,” Minji says, and takes a sip of her drink with the serenity of someone who is going to be right about this and knows it and is content to wait.

Three hours earlier, Jisoo’s apartment is already filling up when Jay Park has his idea.

This is, historically, how most problems begin.

He’s standing with Sunghoon near the back wall, both of them with drinks, watching the room do what rooms do on Friday nights — fill up, get louder, become the kind of atmosphere where things happen that people talk about on Monday.

Jay is on his second drink. Sunghoon is on his first. This ratio is relevant.

“Can I ask you something,” Jay says.

“No,” Sunghoon says.

“When’s the last time you actually—” Jay makes a vague gesture that encompasses a significant amount of meaning. “You know. Stayed.”

Sunghoon looks at him flatly. “What.”

“With someone. Longer than — you know. The usual.”

“I don’t have a usual.”

“You absolutely have a usual,” Jay says. “8 days maximum. You don’t learn their names by the end. You move on. It’s a whole thing.” He tilts his head. “When’s the last time you actually kept someone around?”

Sunghoon is quiet for a moment. He drinks his drink.

“Why,” he says, which is not an answer.

“I was just thinking,” Jay says, with the careful casualness of a man who has been thinking about this for longer than just now, “that it’s been a while. And I was thinking about whether you actually could. If you tried.”

“Could what?”

“Keep someone.” Jay looks at him. “Like. Actually keep her. Not the thing you do. The real version.”

“I keep people.”

“Sunghoon.”

“I do.”

“You kept Chaewon for seven days in second year and forgot her name on day four,” Jay says. “She was in three of my seminars. It was a whole thing.”

Sunghoon says nothing.

“Thirteen days,” Jay says, and the number arrives in the air between them with the particular weight of a challenge that’s been building to its own conclusion. “That’s what I’m saying. Thirteen days. One girl. You actually try. I don’t think you can do it.”

And there it is.

Sunghoon looks at him.

Jay looks back with the grin of someone who has just deployed the one thing that has never once failed to work on Park Sunghoon, which is I don’t think you can.

It goes all the way back to when they were seventeen and Jay said I don’t think you can land that triple and Sunghoon landed it, and then again at eighteen when Jay said I don’t think you can get into that programme and Sunghoon got into that programme, and now they are twenty-two and standing at a party on a Friday night and Jay has said I don’t think you can and the outcome is, as always, inevitable.

“Thirteen days,” Sunghoon says.

“Thirteen days.”

“Fine.”

Jay blinks. Even knowing it was coming, even having built to it, the speed of it catches him off guard. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Sunghoon finishes his drink. Sets the glass down. “Fine.”

Jay opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again with the expression of a man who has just heard the trap click shut and has only just registered that he was also standing in it.

“Great,” he says, slightly less certainly than he’d like. “That’s — yeah. Great.”

“Who loses,” Sunghoon says.

“What?”

“If I lose. What do I owe you.”

“I—” Jay hadn’t gotten this far. “I don’t know. Bragging rights.”

“Bragging rights,” Sunghoon repeats, unimpressed.

“And you do my laundry for a month.”

“And if I win?”

“You won’t.”

“Jay.”

“Fine. If you win I’ll do your laundry for a month and I’ll admit in front of Heeseung that you were right about the Ateez album.”

A pause.

“Deal,” Sunghoon says immediately.

They shake on it. Jay watches him scan the room with the quiet, unhurried focus of someone who has just been given a task and is already approaching it systematically, and feels, somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach, the specific sensation of having made a decision he doesn’t fully understand yet.

He takes a long drink.

He tells himself it’ll be fine.

—

“He’s at the drinks table,” Minji says. “Corner of the kitchen. Jay’s with him but Jay just got pulled into something in the living room so Sunghoon’s alone.”

You look at her.

“You’ve been tracking him,” you say.

“I’ve been observing,” she says. “Go. And look like you’re going for a drink, not like you’re going for him.”

“I know how to walk into a kitchen, Minji.”

“You know how to walk into a kitchen like a journalist on an assignment,” she says. “Which is different. Relax your face.”

You relax your face.

“More,” she says.

You relax it more.

“Good. Go.”

You go.

The kitchen is quieter than the living room, the particular relief of a party room that isn’t the main event — a handful of people, the counter lined with bottles, the window cracked open letting in the cold October air.

He’s exactly where Minji said he’d be.

You clock him in your peripheral vision and do not look directly at him, which is a skill you have developed specifically for this kind of thing — the journalistic sidelong awareness, present without being obvious. You move toward the drinks table with the energy of someone who wants a drink and only a drink and has no awareness whatsoever of the person three feet to her left.

You reach for a bottle.

He reaches for the same one.

Your hands arrive at the neck of it at the same moment.

You look up.

He looks down.

Up close he is — and you’re going to note this for the record and then never think about it again — significantly more than his submissions prepared you for. Which is saying something, because the submissions were not understating it. But there is a difference between objectively good looking as a reported fact and objectively good looking as a thing happening to you personally at close range on a Friday night, and the difference is considerable and you are a journalist and this is a story and you absolutely clock it and file it away and move on.

“Sorry,” you both say, at the same time.

A beat.

He takes his hand off the bottle. “Go ahead.”

“No, it’s—” You gesture. “You were here first.”

“I wasn’t, actually.” Something in his expression is doing a thing — a quiet recalibration, the kind of look that assesses and concludes and moves forward. “I just got here.”

“Same time, then,” you say.

“Same time,” he agrees. He picks up the bottle. Pours two glasses without asking. Hands one to you.

You look at it.

“Bold,” you say.

“You were reaching for it,” he says simply. “Seemed like you wanted it.”

You take the glass. You drink. It’s good — he poured the right thing, which means he clocked what you were reaching for in the half second before you both arrived at it simultaneously, which means he notices things, which is information you file immediately in the subject tab of your mental google doc.

“Sunghoon,” he says.

“I know,” you say, and then catch it. “I think Jisoo mentioned you. She mentioned a few people.”

He looks at you with an expression that suggests he’s heard this kind of recovery before and found it charming rather than annoying, which is somehow worse than if he’d called you out directly.

“Y/N,” you say.

He says your name back, once, quietly. Just to himself. Like he’s storing it.

Something in your chest does something completely unauthorised and you attribute it to the drink.

“Final year?” he asks.

“Journalism,” you say. “You?”

“Literature.” He leans against the counter — not performing it, just settling, the ease of someone completely comfortable in any room he’s in. “And the rink. Early mornings.”

“Figure skating,” you say, as if you’re learning this for the first time, as if it isn’t highlighted in yellow in tab one of the google doc.

“Don’t,” he says.

“Don’t what?”

“Whatever you were about to say.”

“I was going to say it sounds peaceful,” you say. “Early mornings. Quiet rink.”

He looks at you for a moment. Like he was braced for something and got something else instead. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice is slightly different. “It is.”

The kitchen moves around you — people coming in, going out, the ambient noise of a party in full swing — and neither of you moves.

“Can I ask you something,” he says.

“You just did,” you say.

The corner of his mouth does something. Not a smile exactly — the precursor to one, the thing that happens before the decision is made. “Fair,” he says. “Can I ask you something else.”

“Depends what it is.”

“What are you doing tomorrow.”

You look at him. He’s looking back with the steady patience of someone who is used to waiting for things he’s decided he wants, and underneath it something that wasn’t in any of the seventeen submissions — a directness that isn’t performance. He’s not deploying the charm right now. He’s just asking.

You are a journalist. This is a story. Day one begins tomorrow and tip one requires a pet name and you need his number to deploy it.

“I might be free,” you say.

“Might be.”

“Probably am.”

“Can I have your number,” he says, no preamble, just the question, and you think about seventeen girls who probably said yes to this exact question in this exact tone of voice and you think about the google doc and the thirteen tips and the fact that you are not going to be number eighteen.

You are going to be something else entirely.

“Sure,” you say, and take his phone when he hands it over.

You type your number. You type your name. You hand it back.

He looks at the screen. “Just Y/N?”

“You don’t need my last name yet,” you say.

“Yet,” he repeats, and the corner of his mouth commits this time, the full thing, and it gets out before he decides to let it and you think that this specific smile — the unguarded one, the one that isn’t the charm — is going to be the most dangerous part of this entire assignment.

You file it. You move on.

“Goodnight, Sunghoon,” you say, and you take your drink and you leave the kitchen and you do not look back.

In the living room, Minji is waiting with the expression of someone who has been watching through the kitchen doorway for the last four minutes and has formed approximately forty seven opinions.

“Well,” she says.

“I’m in,” you say.

“And?”

You look at your drink.

“He’s worse than the submissions,” you say.

Minji opens her mouth.

“Don’t,” you say.

She closes it. She has the expression of someone who is going to be right about something and has infinite patience.

You drink your drink.

Across the room, through the kitchen doorway, Sunghoon is looking at his phone. You watch him save your contact. Watch him type something. Delete it. Type something else.

Your phone buzzes.

unknown number: it was good to meet you tonight

You save the contact immediately. You stare at what you’ve typed for a moment, then change it.

hoonie 🤍

—

that night, 1:47AM:

hoonie 🤍: it was good to meet you tonight

you: who’s this

hoonie 🤍: you know who this is

you: I might need a reminder

hoonie 🤍: I owe you a drink

you: the one you poured me was actually really good so I think we’re even

A pause. Three dots. Gone. Back again.

hoonie 🤍: what are you doing tomorrow

you: why

hoonie 🤍: no reason. just asking.

you: I’m probably free

hoonie 🤍: I’ll pick you up at 12

you: bold of you to assume you have my address

hoonie 🤍: do I not?

you: …I’ll send it to you

hoonie 🤍: good

you: goodnight

hoonie 🤍: goodnight Y/N

—

🤍 kiss & tell

tip 01: give him a pet name. immediately.

Here’s what nobody tells you about a man who runs on charm — he’s built his whole personality around the way his name sounds in other people’s mouths. He knows how it lands. He’s been watching it land for years.

So take it away.

Give him something else. Something soft and slightly ridiculous, something completely at odds with everything he’s spent three years carefully constructing. Don’t ask permission. Don’t explain it. Just deploy it, directly, and watch what happens to his face.

The goal isn’t to annoy him. The goal is to see who he is when the thing he relies on gets gently, cheerfully removed.

Results to follow

You didn’t hear it from me. x

[1,847 readers overnight. 63 comments.]

she’s actually doing it.

KISS AND TELL THE WAY I SCREAMED.

I know exactly who this is about and I have never felt more seen in my life.

—

He picks you up at twelve.

This is the first thing that surprises you, which you don’t let show — that he said twelve and it’s twelve, exactly, his car pulling up outside your building at eleven fifty-eight and him not texting to say here or outside or any of the things people say when they arrive, just waiting, engine running, until you come out.

You clock this on the way down the stairs. Filed under: he’s punctual. he waited. he didn’t announce himself.

The car is clean. This is the second thing. Not aggressively clean, not the sterile cleanliness of someone performing tidiness — just maintained, looked after, the cleanliness of someone who takes quiet care of things they own. There’s a jacket on the back seat and a reusable coffee cup in the holder and a small air freshener hanging from the mirror that smells like cedar and you are absolutely not going to find this endearing.

“Hey,” he says, when you get in.

“Hi, hoonie,” you say.

A pause.

He looks at you.

You look back.

“Hoonie,” he repeats.

“Mm.”

“That’s—” He stops. Starts again. “Where did that come from.”

“I don’t know,” you say cheerfully. “It just suits you.”

“It doesn’t suit me.”

“I think it really does.”

He looks at you for another moment with an expression that is trying to be flat and not fully succeeding — there’s something underneath it, something that might be the effort of not reacting, which means he is reacting and choosing not to show it, which is more interesting than if he’d just been annoyed.

He puts the car in drive.

“Where are we going?” you ask.

“There’s a place,” he says. “Near the rink. Good food. You’ll like it.”

“How do you know what I’ll like.”

“I don’t,” he says simply. “But if you don’t, we’ll go somewhere else.”

You look at the side of his face.

Filed under: he has a contingency. he’s already thought about what happens if the first plan doesn’t work.

You face forward.

“Hoonie,” you say again, conversationally, and watch his jaw do something in your peripheral vision.

“Please,” he says.

“Please what?”

“Stop.”

“Stop what?”

He glances at you. You are the picture of innocence. He looks back at the road.

“You’re going to keep doing it,” he says. It’s not a question.

“Probably,” you say.

A pause.

“Fine,” he says, and there’s something in it — resigned, but underneath the resignation something else, something that sounds almost like he finds this funny and is refusing to admit it.

You face forward and smile at the windscreen where he can’t see it.

Tip one: deployed.

The place near the rink is small and warm and the food is exactly what he said it would be, which you note because it means he knows what good food is and he knew enough about you after one conversation to make an accurate prediction.

You eat across from each other at a small table by the window and it’s — easy. That’s the thing that keeps catching you off guard, the thing that wasn’t in the submissions. The submissions covered charm, the warmth, the way he makes you feel like the only person in the room. What they didn’t cover was this — the version of him that exists when he’s not performing anything. The version that eats his food without making it an event and asks questions that are short and real and actually listens to the answers.

He asks about journalism. Not oh cool what’s that like but specific things — what you want to do with it, what kind of writing you actually care about, whether you think print is dead or just resting.

“Resting,” you say, firmly.

“Resting,” he repeats, like he’s testing whether he agrees. “Why.”

“Because people still want stories. They just want them differently. The format changed, not the hunger.”

He looks at you across the table. “What do you write?”

“Pieces,” you say. “Long form, mostly. Campus stuff. Culture, people, the way things work underneath the way they look.”

“Anything published?”

“The university paper. Some external stuff.” You take a sip of water. “Nothing that’s set the world on fire yet.”

“Yet,” he says, giving you your own word back, and the corner of his mouth does the thing.

You look at your plate.

Filed under: he pays attention to the exact words you use. he remembers them. he deploys them back.

This is, you think, how he does it. Not the obvious charm — the specific attention. The making-you-feel-like-your-words-matter thing. You’ve been watching for the playbook and this is it, this is the whole thing, and knowing what it is should make it easier to withstand.

It does not make it easier to withstand.

“What about the skating,” you say, because you need to redirect. “How long?”

“Since I was seven,” he says.

“Competitions?”

“Through high school. Regionals, a few nationals.” He says it the way people say things they’re proud of but have learned not to lead with. “Scholarship for university. Now it’s just — mornings. Keeping it.”

“Do you miss competing?”

He’s quiet for a moment. Longer than the other answers.

“Sometimes,” he says. “Not the competing. The clarity of it. When you’re on the ice and there’s a programme to execute, everything else goes quiet.” He looks at his water glass. “I miss the quiet.”

You look at him.

He seems to realise he’s said something more than he meant to, because he looks up and recalibrates slightly — not retreating, just adjusting. “Sorry. That was—”

“Don’t apologise,” you say.

He looks at you.

“It was a real answer,” you say. “Those are better than the other kind.”

Something in his expression shifts. The recalibration stops. He holds your gaze for a moment with the look of someone encountering something unexpected in a place they thought they knew the map of.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I guess they are.” You are a journalist. This is a story. You eat your food.

He drives you back at two-thirty.

Outside your building he doesn’t turn the engine off, just parks, and you sit there for a moment in the particular quality of the end of a first — not a date, this is not a date, this is day one of thirteen and you have twelve tips left to deploy.

“I had a good time,” he says.

“Me too,” you say, which is true, which is fine, which is completely consistent with the plan.

“Tomorrow?” he says.

“What about it.”

“Are you free.”

You look at him. “Why, hoonie?”

The jaw thing again. “Because I’d like to see you again. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” you repeat.

“Is that a yes?”

“That’s a probably,” you say, and get out of the car, and don’t look back, and get into the lift, and press your floor, and the second the doors close you take out your phone and open the google doc.

Day 1 — complete. Tip 1 deployed. He hates the nickname.

You pause.

He also doesn’t hate the nickname.

You close the google doc. You open the blog dashboard. You start writing.

In the car outside your building, Sunghoon sits for a moment after you go in.

He looks at the building entrance.

He thinks about real answers are better than the other kind said with the particular directness of someone who means exactly what they say and has no interest in softening it.

He thinks about hoonie delivered with complete sincerity and zero apology and the way he couldn’t find a single thing to do with it.

He picks up his phone. He opens the text thread.

tomorrow works. I’ll come to you this time.

He looks at what he’s typed. He sends it. He puts the car in drive.

Across town, your phone buzzes.

hoonie 🤍: tomorrow works. I’ll come to you this time.

You stare at the contact name.

You type back: okay. noon again.

You put the phone down.

You pick up your notebook.

You write: tip two. the move-in. start small. a candle.

—

He comes at noon the next day.

You’ve been up since nine preparing, which is not something you will ever admit to Minji, who would make a face that would live in your memory for years. You’ve done your reading and drafted a column and had two coffees and told yourself that the preparation is logistical, it’s for the piece, it has nothing to do with the fact that someone is coming over at noon and you’d like the flat to look — not different exactly. Considered. Like you live here intentionally.

He arrives at noon exactly. Same as yesterday. You are starting to understand that this is just who he is — the punctuality, the quiet reliability of it — and you are filing it accordingly and not finding it anything other than useful data.

He’s in a different hoodie today. Still simple, still worn-in, still somehow doing more than it should.

You let him in.

He looks around your flat with the attention he gives everything — quiet, unhurried, taking it in properly rather than performing interest. He looks at your books, your desk, the organised chaos of a final year journalism student who lives primarily in her own head.

“Nice,” he says, which from him means something because he doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.

“Thanks,” you say. “Make yourself at home.”

He sits on your sofa.

You go to the kitchen.

You come back with two coffees — his black, which you know from Minji’s intelligence and are absolutely not going to reveal that you know — and a candle, which you set on the coffee table with the ease of someone simply adding to their space, nothing deliberate about it, just a girl putting a candle in her own flat.

He looks at the candle.

“Cedarwood,” he says.

“Mm.”

“That’s—” He pauses. “That’s what my car smells like.”

You meet his eyes with complete innocence. “Is it? I’ve had this one for ages.”

He looks at you.

You hand him his coffee.

He takes it, still looking at you, with the expression of someone who is doing a calculation and arriving at a result he finds interesting.

“Hoonie,” you say, sitting beside him. “What do you want to do today?”

The jaw thing. “Stop calling me that.”

“I genuinely don’t know what you mean,” you say.

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“Sunghoon is a lot of syllables,” you say. “Hoonie is efficient.”

“It’s two syllables.”

“Exactly. Same as Sunghoon. But softer.” You look at him with perfect sincerity. “It suits you.”

“It doesn’t—” He stops. Closes his mouth. Opens it again. “You’re doing this on purpose.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know yet,” he says, and his voice is different — not suspicious, more like genuinely curious, the specific tone of someone encountering a puzzle they actually want to solve. “But you’re doing something.”

“I’m drinking my coffee,” you say. “In my flat. That I’ve lived in for two years.”

He looks at the candle. Then at you.

Then, slowly, he smiles. Not the charm one. The real one, the unguarded one, the one that got out before he decided whether to let it. “Okay,” he says.

“Okay,” you agree. You drink your coffees.

He stays for four hours.

This is not planned. The plan was two hours maximum — enough to establish presence, enough to deploy the beginning of tip two’s territorial creep, enough to leave him wanting more rather than enough. Four hours is not strategic.

Four hours happens because he mentions a book on your shelf — something you’ve had since first year, annotated to within an inch of its life — and you end up in an argument about whether the narrator is unreliable or just mistaken, which are different things, which he agrees they’re different things but disagrees on which one applies, and the argument is so genuinely enjoyable that you don’t notice the time until the light through your window has gone from afternoon to early evening and you’ve both moved from the sofa to the floor at some point without registering the transition.

“Unreliable implies intention,” you say, for the fourth time. “He’s not lying. He just doesn’t know.”

“Not knowing is a form of unreliability,” he says, also for the fourth time, from the other side of the coffee table. “Your perception shapes what you report. An unreliable perception makes an unreliable narrator regardless of intent.”

“That’s a really broad definition of unreliable.”

“It’s the correct definition.”

“According to who?”

“According to the text,” he says, and picks up the book and reads you a passage with the ease of someone who has it half-memorised, which means he’s read this book before, which means he recognised it on your shelf, which means—

You stop that thought.

“That passage supports my reading,” you say.

“It supports mine.”

“It doesn’t—”

“It—”

“Hoonie.”

He stops. Looks at you. Something in his expression does the thing — the almost, the precursor — and then he looks back at the book and says, very calmly, “I will concede the passage is ambiguous.”

“That’s not the same as conceding the argument.”

“No,” he agrees. “It’s not.”

You look at him across the coffee table, the cedarwood candle burning between you, your annotated book in his hands, and you think about seventeen submissions and thirteen tips and the google doc with its four tabs and the fifth one you opened and immediately closed.

“It’s nearly six,” he says, checking his phone.

“Is it?”

“I should go.” But he doesn’t move. “Jay’s making dinner. He does this thing on Sundays where he decides he can cook and Heeseung and I have to either eat whatever it is or pretend we had plans.”

“Do you ever just tell him he can’t cook?”

“Every time.” He stands, finally, handing you back the book. “He does it anyway.”

You walk him to the door.

He picks up his jacket from the hook — he hung it up when he came in, you noticed, without being asked — and pauses.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

“What about it.”

“I have the rink in the morning. But after.” He looks at you. “Come to ours. Jay will make too much food regardless.”

“You’re inviting me to dinner at your house,” you say.

“Jay’s inviting you to dinner at our house,” he says. “Jay just doesn’t know it yet.”

You look at him.

“So that’s a yes?” he says.

You think about tip two. Move your stuff in. Start small. Establish presence in his space.

“Sure,” you say. “What time?”

“Seven.” He opens the door. Pauses. “Bring the candle.”

He says it completely straight-faced and leaves before you can respond, and you stand in your doorway watching him go down the hall and thinking that Park Sunghoon just made a joke about the candle, which means he knows about the candle, which means he’s paying attention to everything, which means this is going to be significantly more complicated than the google doc accounted for.

You close the door.

You pick up your notebook.

tip two update: he invited me to the house. didn’t even have to engineer it. he did it himself.

You pause. Read it back.

this is either going really well or really badly and I can’t tell which.

That night, after Jay’s food — which was aggressively fine, not bad, not good, aggressively fine — and two hours on their sofa watching something none of you were really watching, you leave the candle on their kitchen counter.

You do it on the way out, smooth and casual, setting it down like you’re just putting something down while you put your jacket on.

Heeseung sees you do it.

He says nothing.

You say goodnight and leave.

In the kitchen, Jay looks at the candle.

“Is that—”

“Don’t,” Sunghoon says.

“I’m just asking—”

“I know what you’re asking.”

“It smells nice,” Jay says. “That’s all I was going to say. It smells nice.”

Heeseung, from the sofa, turns a page of whatever he’s reading.

“She left it on purpose,” he says, to the page.

“Obviously,” Sunghoon says.

Jay looks between them. “And that’s—”

“Fine,” Sunghoon says. “It’s fine.”

He goes to his room.

Jay looks at the candle. Looks at Heeseung. Looks at the candle again.

“He likes her,” Jay says.

“I know,” Heeseung says.

“It’s day two.”

“I know,” Heeseung says again.

Jay pulls out his phone. Looks at the bet, the text thread, the terms. Puts the phone back in his pocket.

“We’re fine,” he says, to nobody in particular. Heeseung turns another page.

hoonie 🤍: you left your candle

you: did I? I didn’t notice

hoonie 🤍: you noticed

you: I’ll pick it up next time

hoonie 🤍: or I could bring it when I see you tomorrow

you: you’re seeing me tomorrow?

hoonie 🤍: apparently

you: bold assumption

hoonie 🤍: is it wrong

A pause. You look at the ceiling of your room. You look at your notebook, open on the bed beside you, tip two update written in your handwriting.

you: no

hoonie 🤍: goodnight Y/N

you: goodnight hoonie

Three dots. Gone.

Then:

hoonie 🤍: I’m not calling you anything back

you: I know. goodnight.

hoonie 🤍: …goodnight.

—

🤍 kiss & tell

tip 02: start moving your stuff in. casually. let him notice slowly.

Don’t announce it. Don’t make it an event. Just — leave things. Small things first. A candle. A jacket over a chair. Let the object do the work while you do nothing at all.

The goal isn’t possession. The goal is presence. The goal is to become a feature of his space so gradually that by the time he notices, you’re already there.

Did it work? He texted me about the candle.

Draw your own conclusions.

You didn’t hear it from me. x

[2,341 readers. 81 comments.]

the CANDLE.

she’s an evil genius and I mean that with full respect.

anonymous: I recognise this man’s entire behavioural pattern and Kiss & Tell you are doing the lord’s work.

—

🤍 kiss & tell

tip 03: cry. in front of him about something small.

Not a breakdown. Not a scene. Something small and genuine and completely disproportionate to the situation — a sad video, a dog, a song that comes on at the wrong moment.

The objective is simple. Men like this have spent years perfecting the art of emotional unavailability. They’ve built entire personalities around not being the one who feels things in public. So you introduce feelings — small, manageable, completely non-threatening feelings — and you watch what they do with them.

Do they run? Do they freeze? Do they do the stiff-shoulder-pat of a man who has never once been asked to sit with someone else’s emotions?

Results to follow.

You didn’t hear it from me. x

—

Day three arrives with the particular energy of something that has already decided what it’s going to be.

You know this before you’re fully awake — the specific quality of the morning, October light coming through your curtains in the thin gold way it does when the weather can’t commit to itself, and your phone already buzzing on the nightstand with a text that came in at seven forty-two AM from a contact saved as hoonie 🤍 which is, you think, perhaps a sign that day three has opinions.

hoonie 🤍: rink was good this morning. you’re up?

You stare at this message for a moment.

He texted you at seven forty-two in the morning, voluntarily, to tell you the rink was good.

You file this.

you: I am now

hoonie 🤍: sorry

you: don’t be. what made it good

A pause. Longer than his usual response time, which you’ve already clocked is short — he’s not a leave-it-on-read person, he responds when he sees it, which means he has his phone nearby most of the time, which means the deliberate pauses are deliberate.

hoonie 🤍: landed something I’ve been working on for two weeks

you: the triple?

hoonie 🤍: you know about the triple

You freeze.

you: you mentioned it. yesterday. when you were talking about the programme.

This is a lie. He did not mention it yesterday. It is in tab one of the google doc, sourced from a submission sent in by a girl who went to one of his morning sessions three months ago and described watching him attempt a triple axel for forty minutes with the specific admiration of someone who has been thoroughly won over against their will.

Three dots. Then:

hoonie 🤍: I don’t think I mentioned it

you: you definitely did

hoonie 🤍: …okay

He doesn’t push it. You exhale.

you: so you landed it?

hoonie 🤍: yeah

you: how does it feel

hoonie 🤍: like the ice gave me permission

You read this three times. You put your phone face down on the pillow. You pick it up again.

you: that’s a really good way to put it

hoonie 🤍: I’m a literature student

you: is that your excuse for everything

hoonie 🤍: it’s not an excuse it’s a qualification

You laugh, alone in your room at seven fifty AM, at a joke made by a boy you are assigned to lose over thirteen days, and you file this too — he’s funny. not performed funny. actually funny. — and you do not examine the filing too closely.

you: come over later?

You send it before you can think about whether it’s too eager, too fast, inconsistent with the planned arc of tip deployment. It doesn’t matter. It’s day three. The scrapbook is day four. Today is the crying, which requires proximity, which requires him to be here.

That’s why you sent it.

hoonie 🤍: what time

you: whenever. I’ll be in all day.

hoonie 🤍: two?

you: two works

hoonie 🤍: see you at two Y/N

You put the phone down. You open the google doc. You open a new document — not a tab, a separate one, private, not part of the Kiss & Tell infrastructure — and you write:

he said the ice gave me permission. I don’t know what to do with that.

You close it without saving.

He arrives at two with food.

Not a lot — just things, from the place near the rink, the good one, without being asked, without announcing it. He comes through the door and sets a paper bag on your counter and shrugs off his jacket and hangs it on the hook, which he does automatically now, second time and already automatic, and you think about establish presence from your own tip and feel the specific irony of him doing it back to you without knowing.

“You didn’t have to,” you say, nodding at the bag.

“You had food here last time,” he says. “Fair’s fair.”

“I had coffee.”

“And a candle.”

“The candle was already here.”

He gives you a look that says he absolutely knows the candle was not already there and is choosing not to press it, which is its own kind of move — letting you have the small fictions, not calling them out, keeping the game friendly.

You are a journalist. This is a story. You find this extremely interesting and nothing else.

You eat the food he brought at your kitchen counter, standing, which turns into sitting on the floor with your backs against the sofa because your flat is small and the counter doesn’t have stools and somehow the floor is just where you both end up, plates balanced, talking about — nothing. The specific nothing of two people who are finding out that they can fill time with each other without effort, which is either the most ordinary thing in the world or the most significant, depending on who you are.

He’s telling you about Jay’s latest cooking disaster — something involving rice and a confidence level that was not supported by the actual skill — when your phone, face up on the coffee table, plays a video.

Autoplay. Something from your feed. You’d been scrolling before he arrived and left it open.

You both look at the screen.

It’s a dog. A golden retriever, elderly, being reunited with a soldier coming home. The dog sees the soldier and its whole back half starts wagging and it makes a sound — a specific, desperate, you’re back you’re back you’re back sound — and the soldier gets down on his knees on the tarmac and the dog practically climbs into him.

You watch it for four seconds.

Your eyes fill up.

This is not entirely the plan. The plan was to deploy the crying strategically, with a video you’d pre-selected, at a moment you’d engineered. What is happening instead is that the video arrived without warning and you are apparently the kind of person who cries at dog videos at two forty-five in the afternoon in front of someone you are professionally obligated to remain detached from.

You blink. Hard. Once.

Too late.

Sunghoon looks at you.

He looks at the phone. Looks back at you. Looks at the tear that has made it approximately halfway down your cheek before you get a hand up to intercept it.

“Are you,” he starts.

“I’m fine,” you say. “It’s a dog.”

“I can see it’s a dog.”

“He was so happy,” you say, which is not a sentence you planned to say, which arrives from somewhere entirely outside the tip deployment framework. “He didn’t even — the sound he made—”

“Okay,” Sunghoon says.

“I’m not crying,” you say.

“You’re definitely crying.”

“It’s a dog,” you say again, as if this is a complete explanation, which to you it is.

He is quiet for a moment.

Then he does something you did not put in the google doc, which is that he reaches over and hands you a napkin from the food bag — not with ceremony, not with the performance of someone doing a kind thing, just hands it over, plain and practical, the way you’d hand someone a napkin — and goes back to his food.

He doesn’t say anything else about it.

He doesn’t make it weird.

He doesn’t do the stiff-shoulder-pat. He doesn’t freeze. He doesn’t make a joke or look uncomfortable or redirect the conversation with the energy of someone escaping a situation they don’t know how to be in.

He hands you a napkin and goes back to his food and lets the moment be exactly what it is — small, genuine, completely disproportionate — without making it anything more.

You wipe your face.

You go back to your food.

“He was really happy,” Sunghoon says, after a moment, to his plate.

You look at him.

He is very focused on his food. The tips of his ears are faintly pink.

“Yeah,” you say. “He was.”

You do not put this in the blog post.

You write the tip. You write the strategic version, the one about emotional unavailability and the shoulder-pat and watching what he does with feelings he didn’t expect to encounter. You write it with the detachment of a journalist who has the story under control.

You do not write about the napkin.

You do not write about his ears.

You open the private document — the separate one, the one that isn’t part of the Kiss & Tell infrastructure — and you write:

he handed me a napkin and didn’t make it weird. that’s it. that’s the whole thing. I don’t know why I’m writing this down.

You stare at it.

You close it without saving. Again.

—

Day four arrives and you have a scrapbook to make.

You’ve been thinking about the scrapbook since you planned the tips. It’s the most unhinged one — the most deliberately, strategically overwhelming — and it requires actual effort. You need photos, which means you need photos from the last three days, which means you’ve been taking them.

You have, it turns out, taken more photos than you planned.

The food from the place near the rink, the brown paper bag with its logo. A screenshot of a text exchange that made you laugh. The view from his car window on day one, which you took while he wasn’t looking because the light was doing something through the glass that you wanted to keep. His jacket on your hook — just the jacket, the empty shape of it against the door, which you took on day two after he left and have not examined why.

You print them at the campus print shop on Wednesday morning. You buy a scrapbook from the art supplies place next door — not a nice one, not a proper one, the kind with a flimsy cover and pages that are slightly too thick, which is exactly right. You buy stickers, because of course you do, and some tape, and a marker, and you sit at your kitchen table for an hour and make something that is objectively both ridiculous and, somewhere underneath the ridiculousness, completely genuine.

Because the photos are real. You actually took them. The light through his car window is actually beautiful. The jacket on the hook is actually — it looks like it belongs there, which is the thing you noticed when you took the photo, the way it looked like it had always been there, and that’s why you took it, and you are a journalist and this is a story.

You close the scrapbook.

You put it in your bag.

He comes over at noon. He’s in the hoodie again — different one this time, grey, slightly older, and you’ve started to understand that the hoodies are his version of comfortable, that he dresses for other people sometimes and for himself other times and the hoodie version is the himself version.

“Hoonie,” you say, letting him in.

“Y/N,” he says, with the patience of someone who has accepted this is simply going to happen.

You make coffee. You bring it to the sofa. You sit beside him with your bag and he’s looking at his phone, something about the rink schedule, and you pull the scrapbook out and set it on the coffee table.

He looks at it.

Then at you.

“What’s that,” he says.

“A scrapbook,” you say.

“Of.”

“Us,” you say. “Mostly. The last few days.”

He is very still.

“We’ve known each other for four days,” he says.

“Three and a half,” you correct. “But a lot happened.”

He looks at the scrapbook. At the cover, which has a sticker on it — a small gold star, because you had the stickers and it felt right — and his name written in marker in your handwriting, hoonie, which you did partly for the tip and partly because by the time you were making it you’d stopped thinking about the tip.

“Can I—” he starts.

“Go ahead,” you say.

He picks it up.

He opens it.

You watch him.

He goes through it slowly, which you didn’t expect — you expected a quick flip, the polite skim of someone who doesn’t know how to receive something like this and is looking for the exit. Instead he takes his time. Each page. The food bag photo. The text screenshot. The light through the car window.

He stops on that one.

“When did you take this,” he says.

“Day one. On the way to lunch.”

“I didn’t see you take it.”

“You were driving.”

He looks at the photo. At the light through the glass, the way it caught and scattered, the particular quality of it that made you reach for your phone without thinking.

“It’s good,” he says, quietly. Not performing it.

“I know,” you say. “That’s why I took it.”

He turns the page.

He finds the jacket photo.

He’s quiet for a long moment. Long enough that you stop watching him and look at the coffee table instead, the cedarwood candle — his candle now, in their kitchen, you brought a new one for yours — and the two coffees going slowly cold.

“You took a photo of my jacket,” he says.

“It looked nice on the hook,” you say.

“On your hook.”

“On my hook. Yes.”

He closes the scrapbook. Sets it on the table. Picks up his coffee.

You wait.

“You’ve known me for four days,” he says again.

“Three and a half.”

“Y/N.”

“Sunghoon.”

He looks at you. And here is the thing — here is the thing you didn’t put in the google doc and couldn’t have — he doesn’t look unsettled. He doesn’t look like a man encountering an overwhelming situation and calculating his exit. He looks like a man encountering something he doesn’t have a category for and finding, to his own apparent surprise, that he’s not looking for one.

“You’re something,” he says.

“I’ve been told,” you say.

“I don’t mean it like that.”

“How do you mean it.”

He looks at the scrapbook on the table. At the gold star sticker on the cover. At hoonie in your handwriting.

“I don’t know yet,” he says honestly. “I’ll tell you when I do.”

You look at him for a long moment.

Filed under —

You don’t file it.

For the first time since the google doc, since the seventeen submissions, since the plan that is elegant and slightly unhinged, you look at Park Sunghoon sitting on your sofa holding his coffee with the scrapbook of three and a half days on the table between you and you don’t file it.

You just look at him.

“Okay,” you say.

“Okay,” he says.

You drink your coffees.

He leaves at four. He picks up the scrapbook on the way out, without asking, and you watch him tuck it under his arm like it’s something he’s taking home, which it is, which means it worked, which means tip four is complete.

You should feel like you won something. You mostly feel like you did something real.

“Tomorrow,” he says, at the door.

“Tomorrow,” you agree.

He goes.

You close the door.

You go to your desk. You open your laptop. You open the blog dashboard and you write the tip post — the strategic version, the scrapbook-as-weapon version, the this-is-how-you-overwhelm-a-man-who-runs-from-feelings version.

Then you open the private document.

You stare at the blank page.

You type: he took it home.

Four words. You look at them.

he took it home and I don’t know if that’s the tip working or something else and I think the problem is I’m not sure it matters anymore which one it is.

You close it.

This time you save it.

In the house off campus, Jay finds the scrapbook.

Not snooping — it’s on the kitchen counter, which is where Sunghoon put it when he came in, and Jay sees it because he goes to the kitchen for water and it’s just there, and he picks it up because it has a gold star sticker on it and he’s curious.

He opens it.

He looks at the photos. The food bag. The text screenshot. The light through the car window. The jacket on the hook.

He closes it.

He goes to the living room where Heeseung is reading.

“Heeseung,” he says.

“Mm.”

“We have a problem.”

Heeseung turns a page. “I know.”

“She made him a scrapbook.”

“I know.”

“It’s day four.”

“I know, Jay.”

Jay sits down heavily on the sofa. He looks at the ceiling. He thinks about the bet — the text thread, the terms, thirteen days, one girl, you actually try — and he thinks about Sunghoon’s face when he came home, which was not the face of a man who is running a bet.

It was the face of a man who took a scrapbook home and is not entirely sure why and is not entirely bothered by not being sure.

“We should say something,” Jay says.

“Should we,” Heeseung says, not looking up.

“One of us should—”

“Which one of us,” Heeseung says, “is going to walk into Sunghoon’s room and tell him that the girl who made him a scrapbook on day four is doing it on purpose, and also that you made a bet, and also that we’ve both been watching this happen and said nothing?”

Jay opens his mouth.

“Which one of us,” Heeseung continues, turning another page, “is going to do that.”

Jay closes his mouth.

He looks at the ceiling.

“We’ll give it a few more days,” he says.

Heeseung says nothing.

Which is, Jay is beginning to understand, Heeseung’s way of saying you have made a catastrophic error and I am going to let you arrive at that conclusion yourself.

Jay goes back to the kitchen.

He looks at the scrapbook on the counter.

He gets his water.

He goes to bed.

—

🤍 kiss & tell

tip 04: make a scrapbook. day four. show him.

Physical evidence of a relationship that is three and a half days old.

Print the photos. Buy the stickers. Write his name on the cover in your own handwriting. Make it real enough that he can’t dismiss it and ridiculous enough that he should want to.

The goal is overwhelm. The goal is to be too much, too fast, too sincere — to deploy the kind of gesture that sends men like this running for the nearest exit.

Here’s what happened instead… he took it home.

I don’t have a tip for that. I’ll get back to you.

You didn’t hear it from me. x

[3,102 readers. 114 comments.]

SHE DOESN’T HAVE A TIP FOR THAT I’M LOSING MY MIND.

kiss & tell are you okay.

anonymous: I know who this is and I need everyone to understand that this man has never once taken anything home in three years.

⤷ from Kiss & Tell: …noted.

—

🤍 kiss & tell

tip 05: name it. (as in his penis ;))

Give it a full name. Something formal. Something that requires introduction. Deploy it with complete sincerity and maintain eye contact with him while you do it.

The objective here is simple — men who have built entire personalities around being untouchable tend to have one specific vulnerability, which is being caught completely off guard in a situation where charm is not a useful tool.

This is that situation.

Results to follow.

You didn’t hear it from me. x

—

Day five starts with a text at seven AM.

hoonie 🤍: rink. triple again. landed it cleaner.

You read this lying on your back in the dark of your room, phone screen bright in the early morning, and you think about like the ice gave me permission and the private document you’ve been saving things to and the fact that he texts you about the rink now, voluntarily, without prompting, like you’re the person he tells things to.

You’ve been the person he tells things to for five days.

you: cleaner how

hoonie 🤍: the landing. rotation was right last time but the landing was off. today it was right.

you: what does a right landing feel like

The pause is longer this time. The deliberate kind.

hoonie 🤍: like the ground caught you on purpose

You stare at this message.

You type: that’s a really good sentence

hoonie 🤍: I told you. literature student.

you: qualification not excuse

hoonie 🤍: exactly

you: come over tonight?

You send it before you think about it, which is becoming a pattern you haven’t fully addressed. The plan accounts for frequency of contact — it’s in the timeline tab, maintain consistent but not overwhelming presence, let him initiate where possible. You have been initiating more than the timeline accounts for.

You file this under logistical adjustment and move on.

hoonie 🤍: yeah. eight?

you: eight works

hoonie 🤍: I’ll bring food

you: you don’t have to keep doing that

hoonie 🤍: I know

You put your phone down.

You open the google doc.

You open the private document instead.

he said like the ground caught you on purpose. I’ve been thinking about it for twenty minutes. I should probably stop thinking about it. I’m not going to stop thinking about it.

You close it.

He arrives at eight with food from a different place this time — further from campus, somewhere you don’t recognise the bag from, which means he went out of his way, which you note and do not remark on.

He’s in the grey hoodie again. The himself one.

You’re in your flat in your own version of the himself thing — an old university shirt, jeans, hair that’s been up since this morning and is making its own decisions at this point — and when you open the door he looks at you with the expression he gets sometimes, the brief unguarded one, before he recalibrates into easy and casual.

“Hi, hoonie,” you say.

“Hi,” he says, with the patient resignation of a man who has stopped arguing about the nickname and is choosing to interpret this as winning.

You eat on the floor again. This is simply where you eat now, apparently — sofa abandoned in favour of the rug, backs against the coffee table, food between you. You’ve stopped thinking about whether this is strategic. It’s just comfortable.

He tells you about the rink. About the programme he’s been working on for three months, the one the triple is part of, the way the whole thing builds toward a specific feeling he’s been chasing.

“What feeling,” you ask.

“Like it’s inevitable,” he says. “Like every element was always going to be in that order. Like the programme is just — uncovering something that was already there.”

You look at him.

“That’s what good writing feels like,” you say. “When it works. Like you’re not inventing it, just finding it.”

He looks back at you.

“Yeah,” he says. “Exactly like that.”

The room is quiet for a moment. The good kind, the kind that doesn’t require filling.

You are a journalist. This is a story.

“So,” you say, and something in your voice shifts, and he hears it — you see him hear it, the slight attention change, the orientation. “I’ve been thinking.”

“About.”

“About the fact that it’s day five,” you say, “and we’ve been spending a significant amount of time together.”

“We have,” he agrees, carefully.

“And I think—” You look at him with complete sincerity. “I think it’s time we took the next step.”

He goes very still.

“The next—”

“I want to,” you say, and you hold his gaze, “if you want to.”

A pause.

He looks at you. You look at him. The space between you on the rug is not very large and the lamp is doing something warm with the light and he’s in his grey hoodie and his hair is doing the unstyled thing and his expression is—

“Yeah,” he says, quietly. “Okay.”

The thing about Park Sunghoon, which was in the submissions but which the submissions did not adequately convey, is that he is extremely good at this.

Not in the way you expected.

You expected the practiced version — efficient, warm in a generalised way, the kind of good that comes from having done something enough times that it stops requiring thought. You expected charm applied to a physical situation. You expected to feel, somewhere underneath everything, the low hum of being processed. Another girl. Another night. Another name he wouldn’t remember by the end.

What you get is the opposite of all of that.

He notices things.

He gets your shirt off and looks at you with that expression — the brief unguarded one, the one you’ve been cataloguing — and it doesn’t recalibrate this time. He just looks. Openly, unhurriedly, like you’re something he hasn’t finished figuring out and is in no rush to.

His eyes move over you slowly. Your face. Your throat. Lower.

“Hi,” he says quietly, and it sounds like something else entirely.

“Hi, hoonie,” you say, because you can’t help it, and he makes a sound that is almost a laugh and presses his mouth to your collarbone.

And then he takes you apart.

He gets your bra off and looks at your tits with the focused attention of someone making a decision, and then his hands are on them — cupping, thumbs brushing your nipples — and you inhale sharply and he does it again, watching your face while he does it, filing away the reaction.

“Sensitive,” he says. Not a question.

“Shut up,” you say.

The corner of his mouth does the thing. He lowers his head and closes his mouth over your nipple and your hand goes into his hair immediately, gripping, and the sound you make is embarrassingly immediate. He works them with his mouth and hands — unhurried, thorough, learning what makes you twitch versus what makes you actually make noise — and by the time he starts moving down your body you are already significantly less composed than you planned to be.

He gets your jeans off and looks at you and says “fuck” quietly, to himself, like it got out before he decided to let it, and that single unguarded profanity is what tips you from oriented into something else. Because it’s real. Because he means it. Because Park Sunghoon, looking at you in the lamplight of his room, forgot for one second to manage his expression.

You were not prepared for him to mean it.

He gets your underwear off and puts his mouth on your pussy and you stop being a journalist completely.

He eats you out the way he does everything — with complete attention, unhurried, like there’s a right answer here and he’s going to find it. His tongue works through your folds slowly and then finds your clit and stays there and you grip his hair and he takes that as information and presses closer. Two fingers push into your pussy and curl and you arch off the bed.

“Sunghoon —”

“Mm,” he says against you, which is not words, which is just sound, and somehow that’s worse.

He learns you methodically — finding the specific pressure on your clit that makes your thighs shake, the angle of his fingers against your walls that makes you lose language, and then staying there, patient and relentless, not moving on until he’s got exactly the response he was looking for. You have both hands in his hair and you’re not being careful about how hard you’re pulling and he seems to actively prefer this, his fingers curling deeper when you do.

The first orgasm hits harder than you expected. You cry out properly — loud enough to echo off the walls of his quiet house — and he works you through every second of it and then keeps going and you try to pull him up by the hair.

He ignores you.

“More,” he says against your pussy, simply, like it’s obvious.

“Sunghoon —”

“More.” He looks up at you over your body and his eyes are completely dark and the composed literary student is entirely gone and something about the specific way he’s looking at you — focused, certain, like you are a problem he is enjoying solving — makes heat bloom all the way up your chest. “I want to hear it again.”

You give it to him. The second one builds slower and hits differently — deeper, rolling through you in long waves — and you’re shaking by the end of it, thighs clamped around his head, and he pulls back and looks at you and his mouth is slick and his expression is thoroughly satisfied.

He moves up your body. Looks at you. Checks — actually checks, the same care underneath everything.

“Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah,” you say. “Obviously yeah —”

He kisses you and you taste yourself on his mouth and pull him closer and he makes a low sound and reaches over to the nightstand and then he’s back and lining up and pushing into your pussy slow and —

You understand immediately why seventeen girls kept coming back.

It’s not just the size, though that’s — relevant information, significant information, information you are filing carefully. It’s the way he’s completely there. No part of him is somewhere else. His forehead drops to yours and he gives you a moment, feeling your walls adjust around his cock, and when he starts to move the sound he makes against your neck is low and genuine and nothing like performance.

“Fuck,” he breathes. His hips drive forward and you arch up and he groans. “You feel so good.” He pulls back and pushes in deeper and you make a sound that has no consonants in it. “Yeah.” His mouth finds your ear. “Just like that.”

“Sunghoon —”

“I’ve got you,” he says. “Relax.”

He sets a pace that is deep and thorough and completely unhurried — long strokes that drag against your walls perfectly, his cock filling you on every thrust in a way that keeps short-circuiting coherent thought. His hands move over you while he moves — your waist, your hips, sliding up to your tits and gripping before moving back down — like he wants to touch all of you and is working through the logistics of it.

You are loud. You were not planning to be loud. You are very loud.

“There,” he says, when you make a specific sound, and adjusts his angle and does it again. “Right there?”

“Yes —” Your hands grab his shoulders. “Yes, right —”

“Good girl.” He stays at that angle. His thumb finds your clit and you cry out. “So good for me.”

The words land somewhere that surprises you with how directly they land. Your whole body responds to them — clenching around his cock — and he groans at the feeling and his composure slips a fraction.

“Tight,” he says against your throat. “Tight fucking pussy —” His hips snap forward and you cry out again. “You feel that?”

“Yes —”

“Yeah.” His thumb keeps working your clit, small and precise, and his cock is deep and his mouth is at your jaw and your ear and your throat. “Take it.” He drives in harder. “Just like that. Take it.”

You come on his cock with your nails in his shoulders and your head thrown back and a sound that you will think about with some embarrassment tomorrow and he works you through every second of it — hips maintaining that deep steady rhythm, thumb relentless on your clit — until you’re grabbing his wrist and making incoherent noises.

“Too much —” you manage. “Too —”

“One more,” he says. Not unkind. Just certain, the way he’s certain about everything. “Give me one more.”

“Sunghoon I literally —”

“One more,” he says, and shifts his angle, and you sob, and give him one more.

He comes shortly after, buried deep, his forehead to your shoulder, groaning low against your skin with his hips pressed flush against yours and his cock pulsing and staying buried while he rides it out. His hand at your hip is tight enough to leave something tomorrow and neither of you are thinking about tomorrow.

He stays there after. Breathing. Not rushing the aftermath.

You are not going to put all this in your blog. What you are going to put in the blog is what happens approximately forty minutes in, when you are in his bed — you ended up at his, Heeseung and Jay both absent, the house quiet and warm — and things have arrived at a natural pause, and you look at him and the tip, the one you’ve been planning since the google doc, arrives.

“Hi,” you say.

He looks at you. “Hi.”

You look down. Then back up. Very seriously.

“Hi, Gerald,” you say.

The silence is immediate and total.

Sunghoon stares at you.

You maintain eye contact.

“What,” he says.

“Gerald,” you say. “I think it suits him.”

“You—” He stops. “You just—”

“Formally,” you say. “I wanted to do it formally.”

He stares at you for a long moment. Something is happening in his face — a sequence of things, moving through quickly, surprise and bafflement and something else underneath both of them, something that is fighting very hard not to become what it wants to become.

It loses the fight.

He laughs.

Not a small laugh, not the quiet almost-laugh you’ve catalogued — a real one, full, the kind that takes him by surprise, that gets out before he can decide whether to let it, that turns into another one before the first one’s finished, and he puts a hand over his face and laughs into his palm and you watch this happen and feel something in your chest that is completely outside the scope of the assignment.

“Gerald,” he says, from behind his hand.

“Strong name,” you say. “Classic.”

“You planned that,” he says.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You one hundred percent planned that.”

“I acted on instinct.”

He looks at you from behind his hand, eyes visible above his fingers, still doing the aftermath of the laugh — the residual warmth of it, the particular quality of someone who has just laughed properly and the room is different because of it. “Instinct,” he repeats.

“It felt right,” you say.

He drops his hand. Looks at you properly.

And here is the thing that doesn’t go in the blog, that goes in the private document, that you will think about at seven AM tomorrow when he texts you about the rink: he looks at you like you are the most interesting thing that has happened to him in years. Not in the charming way, not the way he probably looks at everyone. In a specific way. The way you look at something that keeps being different from what you expected and you’ve stopped expecting it to stop.

“Gerald,” he says again, quieter.

“Do you hate it?” you ask.

“Yes,” he says.

“Good,” you say.

He laughs again, smaller this time, and pulls you back in, and the rest of the night is — the rest of the night goes in the private document, not the blog.

What goes in the blog is the tip. The strategic version. The maintained-eye-contact version.

What goes in the private document, at one forty-seven AM, lying in his bed while he’s asleep, phone screen dim so it doesn’t wake him:

he laughed. the real one, the full one, not the almost. I’ve been cataloguing the almost-laughs for five days and tonight I got the real one and it happened because of Gerald and I think I need to be honest with myself about something.

I think I need to be honest with myself about something and then a long blank space where you couldn’t find the words, and then:

the ground caught you on purpose. that’s what he said this morning. and I keep thinking about it and I think I’m starting to understand what he means and I don’t know what to do with that.

You save it.

You put the phone down.

Beside you, Sunghoon sleeps with the specific quality of someone who is completely comfortable, one hand near yours on the pillow, not touching but close, and the lamp is still on because neither of you got up to turn it off and the room is warm and the scrapbook is on his desk, the gold star sticker catching the light, and outside the window the campus goes about its late night and inside this room everything is—

You don’t finish the sentence.

You close your eyes.

In the morning you wake up before him.

This surprises you — you expected him to be the early one, the rink-at-five-AM one, and he will be tomorrow and the day after, but today is not a rink morning and so he’s asleep when the light comes through the curtains and you lie there for a moment in the particular disorientation of waking somewhere that isn’t your room.

Then it lands.

Right. Yes.

You turn your head.

He’s asleep on his back, one arm at his side, hair doing something completely unmanaged, and he looks — he looks like himself. The version underneath everything else. Without the careful ease, without the recalibration, just him, and you lie there and look at him and think about seventeen submissions and the google doc and the private document and Gerald and the laugh and the ground caught you on purpose.

He opens his eyes.

Finds you immediately, without looking — just turns his head and you’re there and he looks at you with the specific expression of someone waking up and finding exactly what they were hoping to find and not trying to manage that expression at all.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi, hoonie,” you say.

He closes his eyes again, briefly. “You’re doing that in the morning now.”

“I do it all the time.”

“It’s worse in the morning.”

“Because you’re less defended.”

He opens his eyes. Looks at you. “Yeah,” he says, quietly. “Maybe.”

The room is morning-quiet. The lamp is still on, pale now against the daylight. His desk has the scrapbook on it, gold star, hoonie in your handwriting.

“Rink tomorrow,” he says.

“I know.”

“Early.”

“I know.”

“You could—” He stops.

“Could what,” you say.

“Come,” he says. “If you wanted. It’s early. You probably don’t want to.”

You look at him.

“What time,” you say.

Something in his face does the thing. “Five-thirty.”

“I’ll be there at five-twenty,” you say. “To be annoying.”

He looks at the ceiling. But his mouth is doing the thing and he doesn’t try to stop it, not this morning, not in this room.

“Obviously,” he says.

Jay is in the kitchen when Sunghoon comes downstairs at nine.

He’s making coffee with the focused energy of someone who has been awake for a while and has been thinking about things and has decided to make coffee because it’s better than the alternative. He looks up when Sunghoon comes in. Clocks his expression. Looks at the scrapbook, which has migrated from the counter to the kitchen table at some point. Looks back at Sunghoon.

“Good night?” Jay says, with the careful neutrality of a man defusing a situation.

“Yeah,” Sunghoon says. He opens the fridge. Gets juice. “You?”

“Fine.” Jay pours two coffees without being asked and sets one on the counter. “She go home?”

“Earlier.”

“Right.” A pause. “She’s—” Jay stops.

“What.”

“Nothing,” Jay says. “She seems good. She’s good.”

Sunghoon looks at him.

Jay picks up his coffee.

“What,” Sunghoon says again.

“Nothing,” Jay says. “I just—” He stops again. He has the expression of a man standing at the entrance to a conversation he should have two days ago and is finding the door very heavy. “I just think she’s good. That’s all. I like her.”

“Okay,” Sunghoon says slowly.

“Okay,” Jay says.

Sunghoon picks up his coffee. Looks at Jay for a moment with the particular look of someone who knows a conversation is being avoided and is choosing, for now, not to push it.

He takes his coffee upstairs.

Jay stands in the kitchen alone.

He looks at the scrapbook on the table. At hoonie in someone else’s handwriting. At the gold star sticker.

He takes out his phone. He opens the bet thread. He stares at it. He puts his phone back in his pocket. He drinks his coffee.

—

🤍 kiss & tell

tip 05: name it.

Full name. Formal introduction. Complete sincerity. Maintained eye contact.

Here’s what I can tell you: it worked. The overwhelm landed. He was, briefly, completely caught off guard in a situation where charm was not a useful tool.

Here’s what I can’t tell you: what happened after.

Not because it isn’t relevant. Because some things are happening in this story that I didn’t plan for and I’m a journalist and I know when a story is going somewhere I didn’t map out and I need a minute to figure out what that means before I report on it.

Tip six is boys night. I’ll be there Thursday.

You didn’t hear it from me. x

[4,891 readers. 203 comments.]

KISS AND TELL WHAT DO YOU MEAN SOME THINGS ARE HAPPENING THAT YOU DIDN’T PLAN FOR.

she’s in trouble.

⤷ we’re all in trouble.

the name reveal is going to be in the comments for the rest of time.

anonymous: I go to this campus. I know who this is about. I need everyone to understand that this man smiled at someone in the humanities building yesterday and it was not his normal smile.

⤷ from Kiss & Tell: …I’m going to need you to expand on that.

laceys note // if you guys made it to the end thank u! and yes before yall ask i do have part 2 in the making 😉

You’re staring at your own reflection in the bathroom mirror, and the girl staring back looks like she’s about to either throw up or ascend to another dimension. Maybe both. In that order.

The letter is clutched so tightly in your hand that the pale lavender envelope is starting to crease, and you force yourself to loosen your grip before you ruin the one thing you’ve spent three weeks perfecting. Three weeks. That’s twenty-one days of drafting, crossing out, rewriting, Googling “how to write a love letter without sounding like a desperate loser,” and then rewriting again. You’ve used up an entire pack of stationery. You’ve watched so many calligraphy tutorials that the YouTube algorithm thinks you’re training to become a medieval scribe. All for this one moment. This one letter. This one massive, terrifying, possibly life-ruining leap of faith.

You are a hopeless romantic. Hopeless being the operative word.

It’s not that you don’t believe in love. You do. Desperately, overwhelmingly, with every fiber of your first-year STEM student soul. You believe in meet-cutes and slow burns and the exact moment when two people look at each other and the entire world goes soft around the edges. You’ve read about it a hundred times. You’ve watched it play out on every screen you own. You’ve composed entire daydreams about it during particularly boring chemistry lectures. Love is your favorite subject, the one you’ve studied with more dedication than calculus or physics combined. There’s just one tiny, inconvenient, absolutely infuriating problem.

You’re terrified of it.

Not the idea of it. The idea is lovely. The idea is safe. The idea lives in your head where everything unfolds exactly the way you want it to, where you always say the right thing, where you never trip over your own feet or laugh too loud at the wrong moment or stand frozen in a doorway like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. But real love? The kind that requires vulnerability and eye contact and actually speaking words out loud with your mouth? That kind of love makes your palms sweat and your heart race in a decidedly unromantic, fight-or-flight kind of way. You are, and this is the most embarrassing part, a coward. A romantic coward. You dream of grand gestures but can barely manage a coherent sentence when an attractive person so much as glances in your direction.

Which brings you back to the letter.

The letter is your loophole. Your workaround. Your way of confessing your feelings without actually having to say them, because writing them down felt manageable in a way that speaking never has. You can be eloquent on paper. On paper, you can say things like “the first time I saw your smile, it felt like someone had turned on all the lights in a room I didn’t even realize was dark” without immediately wanting to crawl into the nearest hole and live out the rest of your days an hermit. On paper, you’re brave. On paper, you’re the kind of person who goes after what she wants.

In reality, you’ve been hiding in this bathroom for fifteen minutes, and your hands are shaking so badly that a passing person would think you are having an epileptic seizure.

“Okay,” you whisper to your reflection. “Okay. You can do this. You are a woman on a mission. You are a warrior. You are-”

A toilet flushes in one of the stalls behind you, and you nearly launch yourself through the ceiling.

A girl you vaguely recognize from your introductory programming class emerges, gives you an odd look as she washes her hands, and leaves without saying anything. You wait until the door swings shut, then press your forehead against the cool glass of the mirror and contemplate every life choice that has led you to this moment.

His name is Jungwon.

Yang Jungwon. Second year. Undeclared major but leaning toward something in the humanities, which you know because you may have done a bit of light, respectful, completely non-creepy research. He has a smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes and a laugh that sounds like sunshine if sunshine could make noise, and he holds doors open for people even when they’re still like ten feet away, which creates that awkward situation where the person has to speed-walk to not seem rude, but he never seems to mind. You first noticed him at the campus library during midterms when he quietly slid a pack of gummy bears across the table toward you at 2 AM, muttering something about glucose being good for brain function, and then went back to his book like he hadn’t just fundamentally altered the trajectory of your entire emotional existence.

That was four months ago. You’ve been pining ever since. Pining, yearning, longing, you’ve run through the entire lexicon of unrequited affection, and you’re exhausted. Today, you’ve decided, is the day it ends. One way or another.

You push yourself off the mirror, square your shoulders, and march out of the bathroom with the determination of someone going to war. The envelope is slightly damp from your grip, but it’s still intact, and the words inside are still true, and somewhere on this campus, Yang Jungwon is about to receive the most heartfelt confession letter ever written by a first-year student who has consumed an unhealthy amount of romance media.

Now you just have to find him.

—————

The hallway is bustling with students, the usual midday chaos of people rushing to classes or huddling in groups to complain about assignments. You scan the crowd, looking for a familiar face that might point you in the right direction, and your eyes land on a guy leaning against the wall, scrolling through his phone with the dead-eyed expression of someone who has just finished a three-hour lab.

“Excuse me,” you say, and your voice comes out about an octave higher than normal. You clear your throat. “Sorry, um, do you know where I can find Yang Jungwon? Second year?”

The guy looks up, blinks slowly, deciding whether or not to acknowledge your presence, and then shrugs. “PC room, I think. Saw him heading there like twenty minutes ago.”

The PC room. Of course. It’s in the engineering and informatics building, a place you’ve rarely ever been to. But you know where it is, roughly, and you thank the guy with what you hope is a normal smile and not the rictus grin of someone rushing toward emotional catastrophe.

The walk across campus takes approximately seven minutes, and you spend every single one of them rehearsing what you’re going to say. You’ve already written the letter, so technically you don’t have to say anything, you can just hand it over and flee but you want to say something. Something cool. Something memorable.

“Hey, Jungwon, this is for you.” Simple. Direct. Good.

“I wrote you something. No pressure, just read it when you have time.” Casual. Low-stakes. Excellent.

“Hi, I’ve been emotionally compromised by your existence for several months, please accept this paper rectangle of feelings.” Okay, maybe not that one.

The engineering building looms in front of you before you’re ready. You push through the main doors and immediately feel out of place. The students here move with a different energy, less frantic, more focused, the kind of people who probably know what a server is and have opinions about programming languages you’ve never heard of.

You follow the signs toward the PC room, your footsteps echoing in the corridor, and with every step, your heart climbs higher up your throat. This is it. This is the moment. You’re going to walk in there, find Jungwon, hand him the letter, and then whatever happens happens. At least you’ll have tried. At least you’ll have been brave, even if it’s only for thirty seconds.

The door to the PC room is slightly ajar, and you can hear voices inside, multiple voices, which gives you pause. You assumed he’d be alone. Or with maybe one other person.

You hesitate. Your hand hovers over the door handle. Every instinct is screaming at you to turn around, go back to your dorm, and spend the rest of your life wondering what could have been. And maybe you would, if not for the small, stubborn voice in the back of your mind that says: You’ve already come this far. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to be the kind of person who actually does the thing instead of just dreaming about it?

Yes. Yes, you do.

You squeeze your eyes shut, take a breath so deep it makes you lightheaded, and push the door open with more force than strictly necessary. It slams against the wall with a bang that makes approximately twelve heads swivel in your direction, and for one horrifying moment, you are the center of attention in a room full of strangers.

But you don’t see any of them. You only see the figure sitting at the computer closest to the door, his back half-turned to you, hair falling over his forehead, the exact silhouette you’ve been looking for. Or at least, the exact silhouette you think you’ve been looking for.

You don’t stop to confirm. You don’t let yourself think. You just march forward, thrust the letter out in front of you like a shield, and launch into the speech you’ve been rehearsing for three weeks.

“This is for you. I’m sorry if this is weird or sudden but I’ve liked you for a really long time and I couldn’t keep it to myself anymore. You don’t have to respond right away. You don’t have to respond ever, actually. I just wanted you to know that someone out there thinks you’re wonderful and I wrote it all down because I’m better at writing than talking and honestly I might pass out if I keep standing here so please just take this and I’ll go-”

You finally look up.

And the face staring back at you is absolutely, categorically, one hundred percent not Jungwon.

The boy in front of you is taller than Jungwon. Broader shoulders. Sharper jawline. Different eyes, darker, deeper, currently widened in a mixture of surprise and something you can’t quite read. His lips are parted slightly, as if he was about to say something before you launched into your emotional word-vomit, and he’s holding a half-eaten protein bar that’s now frozen halfway to his mouth.

The room has gone completely, utterly silent.

You can feel the stares of every single person boring into the back of your head. Someone coughs. Someone else whispers something that sounds suspiciously like “did she just-” before being shushed by their neighbor.

And then the boy, the very handsome, very wrong boy, sets down his protein bar, takes the letter gently from your trembling hand, and says in a voice that’s low and smooth and completely unfamiliar: “Wow. Okay. What’s your name?”

This is the worst moment of your entire life. You are going to die right here, in this PC room, surrounded by computer monitors and half-empty energy drink cans and a dozen witnesses who will spread this story to every corner of the university within the next three hours. Your obituary will read: here lies Y/N, the loser who can’t even recognize her ultimate crush.

“Y/N,” you croak, because your mouth is apparently still functioning even though every other part of you has shut down. “L/N Y/N. First year. STEM.”

You don’t know why you said STEM. He didn’t ask for your department. You’re offering information nobody requested. This is a disaster.

But the boy, he’s looking at you with an expression you can’t decipher, his head tilted slightly to the side like you’re a puzzle he’s trying to figure out. He’s wearing a dark hoodie with the informatics department logo on it, and there’s a pair of expensive-looking headphones draped around his neck, and his hair is slightly mussed in a way that suggests he’s been running his fingers through it while concentrating. He’s absurdly good-looking, the kind of good-looking that makes you simultaneously want to stare and look away, and you’re only now noticing the way several girls in the room have been watching him since you entered, not just because of your blunder, but because they’ve been watching him.

“I’m Heeseung,” he says, and there’s a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Lee Heeseung. Third year. Informatics engineering.”

Lee Heeseung. The name registers somewhere in the back of your panic-addled brain. It’s familiar in the way that campus gossip is familiar, attached to words like hot and player and don’t get your hopes up because he’ll charm you and then move on. You’ve heard girls in your dorm talking about him in hushed, giggling tones, trading stories about brief encounters and misinterpreted invitations. And you, in your infinite wisdom, have just handed a love letter meant for someone else directly into his notorious hands.

You have to fix this. You have to tell him it was a mistake. You have to-

“I’m flattered,” Heeseung says, and his smile widens slightly, not quite a smirk but definitely approaching smirk territory. “Really. This is... I mean, no one’s ever confessed to me with an actual letter before. It’s kind of old school.” He turns the envelope over in his hands, examining it with what seems like genuine curiosity. “The handwriting is really pretty. Did you do the calligraphy yourself?”

“Yes,” you say, because you are physically incapable of lying when put on the spot, and also because your brain has apparently decided that the best course of action is to just answer whatever questions he asks like this is a normal conversation and not the emotional equivalent of a tornado.

“Impressive.” He looks at you, really looks at you, and something shifts in his expression. The teasing edge softens just a fraction. “A confession is a lot, though. I mean, I’m honored, but we don’t even know each other.”

This is your opening. This is the moment where you say “actually, that’s because this letter wasn’t meant for you, there’s been a terrible misunderstanding, I’m so sorry, please forget this ever happened.” The words are right there, lined up on your tongue, ready to go.

But the room is still watching. A dozen pairs of eyes. The whispers have stopped, but the staring hasn’t, and you can feel every single gaze like a physical weight pressing down on you. If you correct him now, in front of everyone, you’ll have to explain. You’ll have to admit that you walked into a crowded room and confessed to the wrong person like an absolute buffoon. You’ll become a campus legend for all the wrong reasons: the girl who was too stupid to even identify her own crush. The story will follow you for the rest of your university career. You’ll never live it down.

But if you just... let him believe it... if you just nod and agree and leave as quickly as possible... you can fix this later. Privately. Without an audience. You can find him tomorrow, or send him a message, or do literally anything other than humiliate yourself further in front of all these people.

Your mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.

“I know,” you hear yourself say. “It’s a lot. I know.”

Heeseung nods thoughtfully, like you’ve said something profound. “But I’m not against it. Starting slow, I mean. If you want.”

What.

“What,” you say, but it comes out more like a statement than a question.

“I’m okay with starting slow,” he repeats, and now the smile is definitely back, a little crooked, a little curious. “You’re cute. And clearly brave. I like that. So if you want to, I don’t know, get coffee sometime and see where this goes... I’m open to it.”

Someone in the room lets out a low whistle. Someone else says “Heeseung, are you serious right now?” in a tone of utter disbelief. But Heeseung doesn’t look away from you. He’s waiting for your answer, his gaze steady and warm, and you are standing in the epicenter of a complete and total catastrophe with absolutely no idea how to get out.

Say no. Say it was a mistake. Say the truth.

“Okay,” you whisper.

Okay?! Okay?!

“Okay,” he echoes, and the smile breaks fully across his face, transforming him from handsome to devastating. “Good. I’ll find you. Y/N, first year, STEM, right?”

You nod mutely.

“Cool.” He tucks your letter carefully into the pocket of his hoodie, like it’s something precious, like he’s planning to read it later, and the gesture makes your stomach twist with guilt so intense you think you might actually be sick. “I’ll see you around, Y/N.”

You don’t remember leaving the room. You don’t remember the walk back across campus or the elevator ride to your floor or the moment you collapsed face-first onto your dorm bed. All you know is that one moment you were standing in the PC room, and the next you are here, staring at the ceiling, replaying every single agonizing second on an endless loop.

You confessed to the wrong person.

You confessed to the wrong person.

And for some reason that you absolutely cannot comprehend, he said yes.

Across campus, in a PC room that has finally returned to its normal hum of activity, Lee Heeseung pulls a slightly crumpled lavender envelope out of his hoodie pocket and stares at it for a long moment.

“Dude,” says his friend Jay from the next computer over, not bothering to hide his grin. “What just happened?”

“I don’t know,” Heeseung says honestly. And he doesn’t. He’s used to attention, he knows how to handle it, how to smile and nod and gently redirect without hurting anyone’s feelings. It’s a skill he’s developed over the years, the only way he knows to deal with the unfortunate side effect of his people-pleasing tendencies. He’s nice to someone, he helps them with an assignment, he holds a door open or offers a pen, and suddenly they’re looking at him with stars in their eyes, and he doesn’t know how to tell them that he was just trying to be polite without sounding like an arrogant jerk. So he lets them down easy, or he avoids the situation entirely, and his reputation grows in ways that don’t reflect the truth at all.

But this, this is new. A letter. An actual, physical, handwritten letter, with swooping calligraphy and a lavender envelope and a girl who looked so terrified that he thought she might actually pass out right there on the linoleum floor.

She looked at him like he was a natural disaster. Like she was watching a building collapse in slow motion and couldn’t do anything to stop it.

And then she said okay anyway.

“She’s interesting,” Heeseung murmurs, more to himself than to Jay, and carefully opens the envelope.

“Interesting how?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s too busy reading, his eyes moving slowly across the carefully penned words, the ink slightly smudged in places where the writer’s hand might have trembled. It’s beautiful. It’s earnest. It’s the kind of letter that someone writes when they mean every single word, when they’ve poured their entire heart onto the page without holding anything back.

He’s never received anything like it before.

And he wants to know more about the girl who wrote it, the girl who burst into his afternoon like a hurricane of nerves and feelings.

“Jay,” he says, still staring at the letter, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. “I think something interesting just walked into my life.”

He doesn’t notice the way his friend shakes his head and mutters something about “here we go again.”

He’s too busy wondering when he’ll see Y/N next.

—————

The following forty-eight hours of your life can be accurately described as a masterclass in strategic avoidance and tactical regret.

You skip two classes. Not on purpose, exactly, you just can’t bring yourself to leave your dorm room when every shadow in the hallway might be Lee Heeseung coming to collect on that coffee date you apparently agreed to in a moment of temporary insanity. You survive on instant noodles and the protein bars your friend left on her desk with a sticky note that said “FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY,” which this absolutely qualifies as. You watch three entire seasons of Bridgerton without retaining a single moment because your brain is too busy replaying the PC room incident on a continuous, merciless loop.

“I’m Lee Heeseung. Third year. Informatics engineering.”

“I’m okay with starting slow.”

“You’re cute.”

You bury your face in your pillow and scream, but it comes out muffled and pathetic, like a small animal giving up on life.

By day three, you’ve developed a system. You only leave your room during off-peak hours, skittering through campus, your head on a constant swivel. You’ve memorized the locations of every vending machine in buildings Heeseung is unlikely to frequent. You’ve started taking the long way to your remaining classes, cutting through the art department and the greenhouse and once, memorably, a service corridor that smelled strongly of bleach and soap. You’ve become a ghost. A phantom. A creature of the shadows who survives on granola bars and instant noddles.

But the problem with running away from your problems is that your problems don’t actually go anywhere. They just wait. And think about you. And eventually, when you least expect it, they catch up.

It happens on a Thursday.

You’re crouched behind a potted plant near the science building, scanning the courtyard for any sign of tall, attractive informatics students, when your phone buzzes with a text from your best friend, Yunjin.

Yunjin: heard you’ve been living like a sewer rat. want me to bring you real food?

You: can’t. i’m in the middle of a crisis

Yunjin: You’re executing what we talked about yet?

You: it’s in process

Yunjin: at the end of the day, you will have to tell him

You stare at the message for a long moment. It’s such a simple solution. So elegant. So reasonable. And yet, every time you imagine yourself walking up to Heeseung and saying “actually, I meant to give that letter to someone else,” your entire body physically recoils like you’ve touched a hot stove. The humiliation would be astronomical. The look on his face, surprise, then confusion, then that horrible moment of realization that he was never supposed to be the recipient would haunt you for the rest of your natural life. And you’d still have to explain the Jungwon part. And Jungwon would find out. And then you’d be the weird girl who couldn’t even confess to the right person, and Heeseung would be the guy who got accidentally confessed to, and everyone would laugh about it for weeks, and-

Your phone buzzes again.

Yunjin: i can hear you overthinking from across campus. just rip off the bandaid. what’s the worst that could happen

You type back a single message: he could tell everyone and i’d have to transfer schools and change my name and become a farmer in New Zeland

Yunjin: dramatic. but valid. good luck with your plant hiding

You shove your phone back into your pocket and peek around the potted plant again. The courtyard is clear. This is your window. You take a deep breath, steel your nerves, and scuttle out from behind the foliage.

The plan for today is simple: find Heeseung, explain the misunderstanding, and disappear forever. You’ve spent the entire morning psyching yourself up for this. You’ve practiced the speech in the mirror seventeen times. You’ve even written a script on your phone that you can refer to in case of emergency. It’s thorough, it’s clear, it leaves absolutely no room for misinterpretation, and it ends with a sincere apology and a polite request that you both pretend this never happened. It’s perfect. It’s foolproof. All you have to do is locate the target.

Easier said than done. You’ve been looking for him since yesterday, not to talk to, but to observe from a safe distance so you could plan your approach and the universe, in its infinite comedic wisdom, has made him completely unfindable. It’s like he vanished off the face of the earth the moment you actually wanted to see him. Three days ago, you couldn’t walk three feet without catching a glimpse of him, but now? Now he’s a ghost. A myth. A concept rather than a physical entity.

You’re going to have to ask for help.

This is, objectively, a terrible idea. Asking for help means talking to people, and talking to people about Heeseung means potentially revealing that you’re looking for him, which means potentially revealing why you’re looking for him, which means the whole campus could know about the letter situation by lunchtime. But you’re running out of options, and you’re running out of granola bars, and you can’t live behind potted plants forever.

You find your informant near the engineering building, a girl with neon green headphones and a laptop covered in stickers, sitting on a bench and typing furiously at something that looks like code. She seems approachable. She seems like she won’t ask too many questions. You approach with what you hope is casual confidence and not the desperate energy of someone who has been living on protein bars.

“Excuse me,” you say, and your voice comes out surprisingly normal. Points for you. “Do you know where I can find Lee Heeseung? Third year, informatics?”

The girl looks up, her eyes flicking over you with mild curiosity. She doesn’t ask why you’re looking for him, which makes you want to hug her. “Heeseung? Yeah, I think I saw him heading to the quad about ten minutes ago. Something about meeting up with some people before his next class.”

The quad. Of course. The most open, public, exposed location on the entire campus. The place where literally everyone congregates. The absolute last place you want to have a conversation about accidental love confessions.

“Great,” you say, and your voice is definitely an octave higher now. “Great. Thank you. Thanks. So much.”

The girl gives you a weird look, shrugs, and goes back to her coding.

You’re already moving, your feet carrying you toward the quad before your brain can catch up and talk you out of it. This is fine. This is progress. You’ll find him, you’ll pull him aside, you’ll give him the speech, and then you’ll be free. You’ll be a normal person again. You’ll be able to walk through campus without checking every corner for a tall informatics student who thinks you’re cute and brave and worthy of a coffee date.

The quad is bustling when you arrive, clusters of students sprawled across the grass and gathered around the stone benches near the fountain. The afternoon sun is bright and warm, the kind of weather that makes everyone want to be outside, which is lovely and picturesque and deeply inconvenient for your purposes. You squint against the glare, scanning the crowd for a familiar dark-haired figure.

No Heeseung.

You circle the perimeter, weaving between groups of friends and dodging a frisbee that comes sailing dangerously close to your head. You check near the fountain, near the big oak tree, near the cluster of food trucks that’s set up along the east edge. Still no Heeseung. Your informant said ten minutes ago, he should be here. Unless he already left. Unless you missed him. Unless this is a sign from the universe that you should give up and commit to the farmer life plan after all.

You’re so focused on your search that you don’t notice someone approaching until a shadow falls across your path, and a voice, warm, familiar, the exact voice you’ve been daydreaming about for four months, says:

“Y/N? Hey, it is you!”

You look up.

Yang Jungwon is standing right in front of you, smiling like the sun just came out from behind a cloud, and every single coherent thought in your brain immediately evaporates.

He’s wearing a soft-looking cream sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and his dark hair is slightly windswept, and there’s a tiny mole near his chin that you’ve never noticed before but is now seared into your memory forever. He’s holding a book, something with a cracked spine and a title in a language you don’t recognize and he’s looking at you with genuine, undiluted pleasure, like running into you is the best thing that’s happened to him all day.

“It’s me,” you say, because you are a conversational genius. “I mean. Yes. Hi. Hello.”

Smooth. Flawless execution. Ten out of ten.

Jungwon doesn’t seem to notice your complete lack of verbal grace. His smile widens, crinkling the corners of his eyes in exactly the way you’ve catalogued in your mental Jungwon database. “I thought I recognized you. You’re in my philosophy elective, right? Front row, near the window?”

He knows where you sit. He knows where you sit. This is both the best and worst information you’ve ever received, because on one hand, Yang Jungwon has noticed your existence, but on the other hand, Yang Jungwon has noticed your existence, and now you have to be a normal human being and not the disaster you currently are.

“Front row near the window,” you confirm, nodding a little too vigorously. “That’s me. I like the natural light. For... note-taking purposes.”

“Makes sense.” He shifts his weight, tucking the book under his arm. “You take really detailed notes, by the way. I sat behind you once, and I was honestly impressed. Your color-coding system is no joke.”

Jungwon has looked at your notes. Jungwon has been impressed by your notes. Your brain is short-circuiting at approximately the speed of light, and you have to physically resist the urge to fist-pump in the middle of the quad.

“Thank you,” you manage. “I have a lot of highlighters. Maybe too many. Is there such a thing as too many highlighters? I don’t think so, but I’ve been told my stationery collection is concerning.”

Oh no. Why are you talking about stationery? You need to say something charming. Something witty. Something that will make him see you as more than the girl with the aggressive color-coding system.

“I don’t think it’s concerning,” Jungwon says, and there’s a teasing lilt to his voice that makes your knees go weak. “Passionate, maybe. Dedicated. I respect it.”

“Passionate and dedicated,” you repeat faintly. “That’s... yeah. That’s my brand.”

He laughs, and it’s exactly like you remember, bright and warm, the kind of laugh that makes you want to do whatever you just did again and again just to hear it on repeat. “I like it. Passion is underrated.” He tilts his head, studying you with an expression you can’t quite read. “So what brings you to the quad? You usually eat lunch in the science building courtyard, don’t you?”

Your heart stutters. He knows where you eat lunch. He’s observed your habits. This is either a sign of mutual interest or you’ve accidentally become the subject of a sociological case study, and at this point you’re willing to accept either outcome.

“I’m, um, looking for someone,” you say, and the confession letter debacle comes crashing back into your consciousness like a wrecking ball through a glass window. Right. You’re supposed to be finding Heeseung. You’re supposed to be fixing the misunderstanding. That’s why you’re here. Not to bask in the radiant warmth of Jungwon’s attention like a lizard on a sunny rock.

“Anyone I know?” Jungwon asks, and there’s something in his tone, curiosity, maybe.

“Probably not,” you say quickly. “Just a... just a person. A random person. Not important.”

Jungwon raises an eyebrow, clearly unconvinced, but before he can press further, a new voice cuts through the afternoon air like a knife through butter.

“There you are.”

You freeze. Your blood turns to ice. Every cell in your body screams in unison: run.

Lee Heeseung is walking toward you across the quad, his headphones hanging around his neck and his hands tucked casually into the pockets of his jacket. He looks exactly as devastatingly attractive as he did three days ago, which is deeply unfair. His expression is a mixture of curiosity and amusement, and when his eyes meet yours, that slight smile, the one that’s not quite a smirk but definitely is a smirk’s second cousin, curves across his lips.

“I heard you’ve been looking for me,” he says, coming to a stop beside Jungwon like this is the most natural gathering in the world. “You know, if you wanted to see me, you could have just messaged. I would have given you my number at the PC room.”

Jungwon looks between you and Heeseung with visible confusion, his earlier smile fading into something more guarded. “Wait. You two know each other?”

This is it. This is the moment the universe has been building toward. Every terrible decision, every act of cowardice, every misguided attempt to avoid embarrassment, it’s all led here, to this exact spot on the quad, with the wrong guy standing next to the right guy and your entire romantic future hanging in the balance.

“I wouldn’t say know,” you begin, but Heeseung is already talking over you, apparently immune to the desperate telepathic signals you’re trying to beam directly into his brain.

“She confessed to me two days ago,” Heeseung says, and his tone is so casual, so conversational, like he’s discussing the weather or what he had for lunch. “Walked right into the PC room, handed me a letter, told me she’d liked me for a long time. It was very romantic. Very old-school. I was impressed.”

Silence. Jungwon stares at Heeseung. Then at you. Then back at Heeseung.

“She... confessed to you,” Jungwon repeats slowly, and his voice has gone flat in a way that makes your heart splinter into approximately seven thousand pieces.

“Full confession,” Heeseung confirms, still smiling. “I’m thinking we’ll start with coffee. Keep it simple, you know? She’s shy. I don’t want to overwhelm her.”

This is a nightmare. This is a waking, breathing, actively-unfolding nightmare, and you are trapped in it like a fly in amber, unable to move or speak or do anything except watch as every possible future with Jungwon crumbles to dust before your eyes.

Because here’s the thing you realize in that horrible, crystal-clear moment: you can’t correct Heeseung now. Not in front of Jungwon. Not when Jungwon has just been told, in no uncertain terms, that you confessed to someone else. If you explain the truth, that the letter was actually meant for Jungwon, that the whole thing was a catastrophic mistake, then what? Jungwon would know you’d been planning to confess to him, but he’d also know that you somehow managed to mess it up so spectacularly that you confessed to his friend instead. You’d look incompetent at best and completely unhinged at worst. And Heeseung would be humiliated, and Jungwon would be awkward, and you’d be the epicenter of a social catastrophe so immense that all three of you would have to avoid each other for the rest of your academic careers.

You are trapped. Completely, utterly, irreversibly trapped.

“Interesting,” Jungwon says, and the word is so neutral that it cuts deeper than any insult ever could. “I didn’t realize you two ran in the same circles.”

“We don’t,” you croak. “We really, really don’t.”

“We’re just getting started,” Heeseung says cheerfully, and he has the audacity to wink at you. Like this is some kind of adorable inside joke instead of the emotional apocalypse it actually is.

You have to get out of here. You have to escape before the sob building in your chest forces its way out and makes everything infinitely worse. You can feel it pressing against your ribs, hot and insistent, and if you don’t leave right now, you’re going to burst into tears in the middle of the quad in front of both of them, and then the disaster will be complete.

“I have to go,” you blurt out, and you’re already backing away, your feet moving before your brain can issue any kind of warning. “I have… a thing. A class. A lab. A lab class. It’s very important. I can’t miss it. I have to go.”

Heeseung’s brow furrows slightly. “Wait, I thought you wanted to talk to-”

“Nope! No talking! We’re good! Everything’s fine! Bye!”

You spin around and power-walk toward the nearest exit, which happens to be in the direction of the fountain, which you only realize when your foot catches on the low stone ledge and you go sprawling forward with all the grace of a newborn giraffe.

Your knee hits the ground. Your dignity hits the ground approximately three feet to the left. Several people turn to look.

“Y/N!” That’s Jungwon’s voice, concerned and moving closer, and you absolutely cannot handle that right now.

“I’m fine!” you shriek, scrambling to your feet with adrenaline-fueled desperation. “Totally fine! Happens all the time! I’m very clumsy! It’s part of my charm!”

You don’t look back. You can’t look back. If you look back, you’ll see Jungwon’s worried expression and Heeseung’s confused one, and you’ll have to confront the full magnitude of what just happened, and your fragile emotional state simply cannot withstand that kind of pressure. So you run. Not jog, not power-walk…run. Across the quad, past the food trucks, through a gap between two buildings, and out onto the main campus pathway like the hounds of hell are snapping at your heels.

You don’t stop until you reach the arts building, and you don’t start breathing normally until you’ve locked yourself in a practice room on the third floor, surrounded by soundproof walls and a piano that’s seen better days. You slide down against the door, pull your knees up to your chest, and let out a sound that’s halfway between a groan and a wail.

Everything is ruined. Everything. You had one chance, one single, solitary chance to fix the misunderstanding and salvage your dignity and maybe, just maybe, preserve the possibility of something with Jungwon somewhere down the line. And instead, you let your hopeless romantic heart get distracted by a five-minute conversation about philosophy notes and highlighters, and now you’re the girl who confessed to Lee Heeseung, and Jungwon thinks you’re interested in someone else, and there is no conceivable way to untangle this mess without making everything exponentially worse.

You’re going to have to transfer schools. You’re going to have to move to another country. You’re going to have to fake your own death and start a new identity as a goat farmer in New Zeland.

The door handle jiggles behind you. “Occupied!” you yell, your voice cracking.

“Y/N? Is that you?”

Your best friend Yunjin’s voice filters through the door, muffled but unmistakable, and the sound of it is enough to crack the dam you’ve been desperately trying to hold together. You scramble to your feet, fumble with the lock, and yank the door open to reveal Yunjin standing in the hallway with a cup of bubble tea in each hand and an expression of profound concern on her face.

“I saw you running,” she says, her eyes scanning your disheveled appearance. “Like, truly running. I’ve never seen you run before. You once told me running was for people who don’t appreciate the journey.”

“Yunjin,” you crumble, and your voice is so pitiful that she immediately sets down both drinks and pulls you into a hug.

“Okay,” she says, steering you back into the practice room and closing the door behind her. “Okay. Sit down. Tell me everything. What happened? Did you talk to Heeseung? Did you fix it?”

You laugh, but it comes out wrong, high and wobbly, on the edge of hysteria. “Fix it? Fix it? Yunjin, I made it so much worse. I made it so much worse that I think I actually created new dimensions of worse. Scientists are going to have to invent new words to describe how badly I messed this up.”

“That’s... improbable,” Yunjin says carefully. “But I’m listening.”

She settles onto the piano bench, and you collapse onto the floor in front of her, crossing your legs and burying your face in your hands. The story spills out of you in a torrent, the quad, the search for Heeseung, the unexpected appearance of Jungwon, the conversation that made your heart soar, and then the moment Heeseung appeared like a harbinger of doom and casually announced your confession to the one person you never wanted to know about it.

“And then I fell,” you finish miserably. “In front of both of them. And I ran away. And now Jungwon thinks I like Heeseung, and Heeseung thinks I like Heeseung, and I can’t correct either of them without making everything even weirder, and my life is a romantic comedy written by a petty incel.”

Yunjin is quiet for a moment. Then she lets out a long, slow breath. “Okay. That’s... that’s a lot.”

“I know.”

“And you’re telling me you couldn’t just say, hey Heeseung, sorry for the mix-up, the letter wasn’t for you, my bad?”

You look up at her, your eyes rimmed with red. “In front of Jungwon? After Heeseung already told him I confessed? What would Jungwon think of me?”

Yunjin considers this. “That you’re a disaster, probably.”

“Exactly!”

“But a lovable disaster,” she adds. “Disasters can be endearing.”

“Yunjin, please focus.”

She holds up her hands in surrender, but there’s a glint in her eye that you recognize, the one that means she’s about to drop some wisdom on you whether you’re ready for it or not. Yunjin has been your best friend since orientation week, when you both accidentally joined the wrong club meeting and ended up spending two hours in a competitive gardening seminar before realizing your mistake. She’s practical where you’re dreamy, decisive where you’re hesitant, and she’s talked you down from approximately four hundred anxiety spirals since the semester started. If anyone can find a way out of this mess, it’s her.

“Okay,” she says, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. “Let me present you with an alternative perspective.”

“I’m listening.”

“Lee Heeseung,” she says, ticking off points on her fingers, “has a reputation. A big one. Everyone knows it. He’s the guy who’s super nice to everyone, especially girls, and then they fall for him and he gets all surprised when they expect something more, and then things fizzle out because he wasn’t looking for anything serious.” She makes air quotes with her fingers. “Sound familiar?”

You blink. “I mean... I’ve heard things. But he didn’t seem like-”

“That’s his whole thing,” Yunjin interrupts. “He doesn’t seem like it. That’s why it works. He likes when everyone is after him. But nice doesn’t equal interested, so girls get the wrong idea and then they get hurt. It’s a cycle.” She pops a tapioca pearl into her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “My point is, you don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to fix this. You just need to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For him to get bored.” She says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Think about it. You’re not actually interested in him, right? You’re not going to fall all over yourself trying to get his attention. You’re not going to be waiting outside his classes or accidentally showing up wherever he hangs out. You’re not going to be like every other girl who’s chased after him.”

You frown. “So... what, I just... do nothing?”

“No, you do the opposite of chasing.” Yunjin grins, and it’s slightly wicked. “You make yourself as uninteresting to him as possible. You’re awkward, you’re weird, you’re clearly not trying to impress him. You don’t dress up when you know you might see him. You talk about boring things. You mention, I don’t know, your extensive collection of vintage stamps or whatever nerdy hobby you can think of. You make yourself boring.”

“I don’t have a stamp collection.”

“Then make one up! The point is, Heeseung is used to girls who want him. If you clearly don’t want him, his interest is going to fizzle out faster than a cheap sparkler. He’ll move on to the next girl who bats her eyelashes at him, and you’ll be free. No confrontation necessary.”

You turn this over in your mind. It’s... not the worst idea you’ve ever heard. In fact, compared to your current strategy of blind panic and tactical fleeing, it’s practically genius. If you can’t correct the misunderstanding without making everything worse, maybe you can just... let it die on its own. Let Heeseung’s fabled short attention span work in your favor. Become so aggressively unappealing that he loses interest within a week and never thinks about you again.

And once he’s out of the picture, once enough time has passed, maybe you can try again with Jungwon. Properly. With better aim.

“You’re a genius,” you tell Yunjin, the hope creeping back into your voice. “An absolute genius. I could kiss you.”

“Please don’t, you’re covered in grass stains.” She nudges one of the bubble teas toward you with her foot. “Drink your tea. Hydrate. And then we’re going to brainstorm all the ways you can make yourself seem as unappealing as possible to a hot third-year informatics student.”

You grab the drink and take a long sip, the sweetness settling something in your chest. For the first time in three days, you feel something other than panic. You feel strategic. You feel determined. Lee Heeseung might think you’re cute and brave and worthy of a coffee date, but he hasn’t met the version of you that’s about to emerge, a version so bland, so uninteresting, so aggressively mediocre that he’ll run in the opposite direction before the week is out.

“Okay,” you say, wiping your mouth with the back of your hand. “Okay. Let’s do this. Operation Make Heeseung Uninterested starts now.”

Yunjin raises her bubble tea in a toast. “To being boring.”

You clink your cup against hers. “To being boring.”

Somewhere across campus Heeseung is still standing in the quad with a confused expression on his face and a lavender envelope in his pocket, wondering why the girl who supposedly has a crush on him just sprinted away like she was being chased by bears.

He’s not used to this. He’s not used to any of this.

And that, he realizes with a small, bemused shake of his head, is exactly what makes it so interesting.

—————

Operation Make Heeseung Uninterested lasted exactly four days before it encountered its first major obstacle.

That obstacle is approximately six feet tall, has flowing hair that falls perfectly across his forehead, and is currently walking directly toward your table in the cafeteria with a tray in his hands and a smile on his face that suggests he has absolutely no idea he's supposed to be losing interest in you.

You spot him approximately 2.3 seconds too late. By the time your brain registers the approaching danger, you are already mid-bite into a sad cafeteria sandwich, your mouth full of bread and lettuce and the dawning realization that you are trapped. There is no escape route. Your table is in the corner, surrounded on three sides by walls and on the fourth side by Heeseung's rapidly approaching form. You are a cornered animal. A very stupid, very panicked cornered animal with mayonnaise on her chin.

"Y/N!" Heeseung says your name like it's his favorite word, bright and warm and entirely too enthusiastic for someone who's supposed to be a notorious womanizer with a short attention span. "I was hoping I'd run into you. Mind if I sit?"

Mind if he sits? Of course you mind. You mind immensely. You mind with every fiber of your being. Sitting with Heeseung is the exact opposite of what Operation Make Heeseung Uninterested is supposed to accomplish. Sitting with Heeseung means talking to Heeseung, and talking to Heeseung means opportunities to accidentally charm him, and charming him is categorically Not The Goal.

But Heeseung is already pulling out the chair across from you, and his smile is so genuine, and there's a tiny bit of what looks like grease on his cheekbone that suggests he's just come from some kind of engineering lab, and you are weak. You are so, so weak.

"Go ahead," you hear yourself say, and then immediately want to punch yourself in the face.

Operation Make Heeseung Uninterested, Day Four, 12:34 PM: catastrophic failure already in progress.

Heeseung settles into the chair with an easy grace, setting his tray down and immediately stealing one of your fries like you're old friends who share food on a regular basis. You watch the fry disappear into his mouth and feel a small part of your soul leave your body.

"So," he says, leaning back and studying you with those dark, unreadable eyes. "You ran away from me pretty fast the other day. Should I be worried? Do I have something on my face?"

He doesn't. He absolutely doesn't. He has the kind of face that belongs on a billboard, all sharp angles and soft edges and that one little mole on his forehead that you are definitely not noticing because noticing things about Heeseung's face is counterproductive to the mission.

"No," you say quickly. "No, you're fine. Your face is fine. I mean, you don't have anything on your face. I just remembered I had somewhere to be. Very suddenly. It was urgent."

"An urgent… lab class?" Heeseung's lips twitch. "That's what you said, right? An urgent lab class on a Thursday afternoon?"

Your face heats. "Yes. Exactly. Lab class. Very urgent. Science doesn't wait."

"Mmm." He pops another one of your fries into his mouth. "Well, the good news is, you don't look like you're in a hurry right now. So we can actually talk. You know, like normal people who are supposedly getting to know each other?"

Right. Getting to know each other. Because you confessed to him. Because he thinks you like him. Because you're living in an elaborate lie of your own making.

This is your chance, though. This is the perfect opportunity to implement Phase One of the Make Him Uninterested plan: Be Weird and Off-Putting. You just have to be the most boring, strange, unappealing version of yourself that you can possibly imagine. How hard can it be?

Pretty hard, as it turns out, because your brain chooses this exact moment to go completely blank.

"So," Heeseung says, apparently unbothered by your silence, "tell me about yourself. What do you like to do for fun? Besides writing beautiful love letters and then running away from the recipient?"

You choke on your own saliva. Just… straight up choke on nothing, like a cartoon character. "I don't…that wasn't…I do normal things. Normal fun things. Like… watching paint dry. And counting ceiling tiles. Very relaxing. You should try it."

Heeseung's expression flickers, confusion, amusement, something in between. "Counting ceiling tiles?"

"There are forty-seven in this cafeteria," you say, doubling down with the desperate energy of someone who has already committed to the bit. "Forty-eight if you count the one that's partially covered by that vent over there. But some people don't count partial tiles. It's a philosophical debate, really."

"Fascinating," Heeseung says, and the worst part is that he sounds like he actually means it. "What else?"

What else? What else can you say that will make you sound completely unappealing? You cast around for inspiration, your eyes landing on your sandwich. Okay. Fine. If words can't do the job, maybe actions can.

You pick up your sandwich with both hands and take the weirdest bite you can physically manage, mouth open slightly too wide, chewing with exaggerated jaw movements, making an unfortunate amount of noise in the process. You feel like a cow. You look like a cow. You are embodying the spirit of a cow, and surely, surely, this is enough to make any self-respecting hot informatics student run for the hills.

Heeseung watches you chew. His expression doesn't change.

"Good sandwich?" he asks mildly.

"Mmf," you say, still chewing, still being a cow. "Very good. I love-"

And then the lettuce hits the back of your throat.

You don't know how it happens. One moment you're chewing normally, well, abnormally, but in a controlled way and the next moment a piece of lettuce stages a rebellion and lodges itself directly in your windpipe. Your eyes go wide. Your hand flies to your throat. You make a sound that is somewhere between a wheeze and a honk.

"Y/N?" Heeseung's amused expression shifts to concern. "Are you okay?"

You are not okay. You are choking. You are choking on lettuce in front of Lee Heeseung in the middle of the cafeteria, and this is how you're going to die.

Heeseung is on his feet now, moving around the table with surprising speed. "Hey, hey, can you breathe? Do you need me to-"

You shake your head frantically, still making dying cow noises, and grab your water bottle with shaking hands. The first gulp does nothing. The second gulp, by some miracle, dislodges the lettuce just enough for you to cough it up into a napkin with all the grace and dignity of a cat hacking up a hairball.

Silence.

The entire cafeteria, you're convinced, is staring at you. In reality, probably only a few nearby tables have noticed, but it feels apocalyptic. You sit there, red-faced and teary-eyed, clutching a napkin full of your own near-death experience, and want the floor to open up and swallow you whole.

Heeseung kneels beside your chair, one hand hovering near your shoulder like he isn't sure if touching you would be welcome. "Hey. You're okay. You're okay, right? Do you need me to get you anything? More water? A doctor? A new sandwich without lettuce?"

His voice is gentle. Genuinely gentle. Not the smooth, charming tone you expect from someone with his reputation, but something softer, something that sounds almost like real concern.

"I'm fine," you croak, your voice ravaged. "I'm fine. That happens. All the time. I'm very bad at eating. It's one of my traits."

"One of your traits," Heeseung repeats, and the corner of his mouth twitches despite his obvious worry. "Being bad at eating?"

"It's a lifestyle choice."

He laughs. Not a polite chuckle or a mocking snicker, but a real laugh, surprised and bright and completely unguarded. He sits back down in his chair, shaking his head, and looks at you with something that is definitely not boredom or disinterest.

"You're really something else, you know that?"

You don't know how to respond to that, so you don't. You just sit there, still clutching your napkin of shame, and wonder how Operation Make Heeseung Uninterested has somehow resulted in him laughing at your jokes and looking at you like you're the most entertaining thing he's encountered all week.

"So," Heeseung says, propping his chin on his hand, "I've been wondering. What made you decide to confess to me? Was there a specific moment? Something I did?"

Oh no.

Oh no, oh no, oh no.

This is the worst possible question he could ask. You can't tell him the truth…I didn't mean to confess to you, I meant to confess to your friend, you just happened to be sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time, please don't hate me…but you also can't just… not answer. He's looking at you expectantly, his dark eyes curious and open, and you have approximately three seconds to come up with a convincing lie before the silence becomes too awkward to recover from.

"Your… kindness," you say, grasping at straws. "You're very… kind. To everyone. I noticed."

Heeseung tilts his head. "My kindness?"

"Very kind," you repeat, nodding vigorously. "So kind. The kindest. I saw you… hold a door open for someone once. It was… inspiring."

"I held a door open."

"A door. Yes. It was a very heavy door. And you held it. For a long time. Multiple people went through. It was very impressive."

Heeseung stares at you for a moment, and you stare back, your face burning, your soul evacuating your body. This is it. This is the moment he realizes you are completely unhinged and decides to never speak to you again. This is the victory of Operation Make Heeseung Uninterested.

"That's…" Heeseung starts, and then pauses. "That's the first time anyone's ever confessed to me because I held a door open. Usually I get compliments about my face. Or my voice. One girl told me I had a nose made to be sat on, which I still don't fully understand."

"Your node is… fine," you say weakly. "I didn't notice your nose. Or your face at all. Just the door. The door was the important part."

"A door," Heeseung says, and that smile is spreading across his face again, the one that makes him look less like a notorious player and more like someone who has just found a particularly entertaining puzzle. "You wrote me a three-page love letter because I held a door open."

"The calligraphy alone took a week," you say, and immediately regret it.

Heeseung laughs again, and this time it's softer, almost wondering. "You're not what I expected," he says. "At all."

"Is that… good or bad?"

"I haven't decided yet." But he's still smiling, and his eyes are still fixed on you with that curious intensity, and you're starting to get the sinking feeling that everything you do, no matter how strange or off-putting you try to be, is having the exact opposite effect of what you intend.

You need a new strategy. Something foolproof. Something so aggressively unappealing that even the most determined people-pleaser can't pretend to be interested.

And then, like a gift from the gods of social awkwardness, the topic of video games comes up.

Heeseung mentions something about blowing off steam after a tough assignment by playing a few rounds of something, and the question slips out before you can stop it: "Wait, do you play League of Legends?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Sometimes. You?"

And that's it. That's the moment the dam breaks.

You don't mean to start geeking out. It just happens. One moment you're thinking be boring, be uninteresting, be bland, and the next moment you're fifteen minutes deep into an impassioned monologue about the current meta, the problems with the jungle role, and why Riot Games needs to nerf a specific champion into the ground before she single-handedly destroys the competitive scene.

"-and don't even get me started on the new items, because the balance team clearly doesn't play their own game, which is fine, whatever, it's not like I have strong opinions about it except I absolutely do, and I wrote an entire essay about it on the subreddit that got like two thousand upvotes, so clearly I'm not the only one who thinks the armor penetration scaling is completely broken-"

You stop.

You stop because you have just realized, with dawning horror, that you have been talking for an incredibly long time without letting Heeseung get a single word in. You have been gesticulating. You have been making sound effects. At one point, you're pretty sure you drew a diagram on a napkin to illustrate the optimal jungle pathing route.

This is it. This is definitely, absolutely it. There is no way a hot third-year informatics student wants to listen to a first-year STEM girl rant about video game balance for fifteen straight minutes. Operation Make Heeseung Uninterested has just achieved its first genuine success.

You brace yourself for the polite excuse, the awkward glance at his phone, the slow backing away.

Instead, Heeseung leans forward, resting his elbows on the table, and says: "Okay, but hear me out, what if the armor penetration scaling isn't the problem, and it's actually the base damage values that need to be adjusted? Because if you look at the win rate data across different elos, the issue isn't consistent at all levels of play."

You blink.

"I main ADC," he adds, as if this is a perfectly normal confession. "So trust me, I feel your pain about the jungle situation. Do you know how many times I've been left to solo dragon because my jungler was AFK farming? Too many. Too many times."

"You… main ADC?"

"Vayne and Kai'Sa mostly. Sometimes Jhin if I'm feeling dramatic."

You have no response to this. Your brain has short-circuited somewhere around the phrase "win rate data across different elos," and it's still rebooting.

"Your essay on the subreddit," Heeseung continues, pulling out his phone. "What was the title? I want to read it. I love seeing well-reasoned arguments about game balance, and honestly, most of what gets posted is just people complaining without any actual data to back it up."

"It was… it was called The Current State of Armor Penetration: A Statistical Analysis and Why I'm Losing My Mind," you say faintly.

Heeseung types something into his phone, scrolls for a moment, and then his face lights up. "Found it. Two thousand three hundred upvotes and fourteen awards? That's impressive. Wait, you made graphs? You made graphs?"

"I was very passionate about the subject."

"Passionate," Heeseung repeats, looking up from his phone with an expression you can't quite read. "Yeah. I'm starting to get that about you."

He tucks his phone away and smiles at you, and it isn't the smooth, practiced smile you expect from the campus womanizer. It's something smaller. Something realer. Something that makes your stomach do a weird, traitorous flip that you immediately try to suppress.

"You know," he says, tilting his head as he studies you, "you remind me of a mouse."

Your brain screeches to a halt. "A… mouse?"

"Yeah. A little field mouse. The way your nose scrunches up when you're thinking, and how you get all twitchy and skittish when you're nervous. It's cute. It's really cute."

Cute. He calls you cute. He compares you to a rodent and somehow makes it sound like a compliment, and worst of all, worst of all, you can feel a traitorous blush spreading across your cheeks like wildfire.

"I'm not…I don't…mice are not cute. Mice are pests. They carry diseases. I'm basically a health hazard."

Heeseung laughs, and it's the same genuine laugh from before, and he's looking at you like you're the most entertaining thing he's seen in years. "A health hazard. Right. Well, consider me warned."

He stands up, gathering his tray, and for one beautiful, hopeful moment, you think the ordeal is over. But then he pauses, looking down at you with that unreadable expression, and says the words that haunt you for the rest of the day:

"I was interested before, but now?" He shakes his head, still smiling. "Now I'm really interested. See you around, little mouse."

And then he walks away, leaving you alone at your corner table with a half-eaten sandwich, a napkin full of regurgitated lettuce, and the sinking realization that Operation Make Heeseung Uninterested is not only failing, it's backfiring spectacularly.

You try to be weird, and he calls you cute.

You try to be boring, and he engages with your niche gaming opinions.

You try to choke to death in front of him, and he kneels beside your chair with genuine concern in his eyes.

You bang your forehead against the cafeteria table once, twice, three times, not caring who sees. This is a disaster. This is an unmitigated, unprecedented, absolutely catastrophic disaster. Hana's plan was supposed to work. Heeseung was supposed to get bored. He was supposed to move on. He was not supposed to look at you like you're a puzzle he wants to solve, or call you a mouse in a tone of voice that makes your heart do gymnastics, or read your League of Legends essay and compliment your graphs.

You need to regroup. You need to call an emergency meeting with Yunjin. You need to figure out a new strategy before this situation spirals even further out of control.

But first, you need to go to the library and return the books that are due today before you accrue another fine, because no matter how catastrophic your love life becomes, the university library shows no mercy.

—————

The library is your sanctuary. It always has been, a quiet, climate-controlled haven where the smell of old paper and the soft hum of fluorescent lights can soothe even the most tensed of nerves. After the cafeteria incident, you need sanctuary more than ever. You slip through the main doors with your stack of books clutched to your chest, inhaling the familiar scent of knowledge and dust, and feel some of the tension begin to ease from your shoulders.

Everything is fine. Everything is going to be fine. You return your books, you find Yunjin, you regroup, and you figure out a way to-

"Y/N?"

The voice comes from somewhere to your left, and you know that voice. You know it the way a flower knows the sun, the way a compass knows north, the way a hopeless romantic knows the exact cadence of her crush's greeting.

Jungwon is sitting at a table near the history section, surrounded by a fortress of textbooks and loose papers. He's wearing glasses…glasses…and his hair is slightly mussed from what you assume is hours of intense studying, and he's looking at you with that smile, the one that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes your entire nervous system short-circuit.

"Hey," he says, waving you over. "What are you doing here?"

Existing in the same space as you, you think. Breathing the same air. Trying not to spontaneously combust.

"Returning books," you say, holding up your stack as evidence. "I have some overdue ones. The library fines are no joke."

"Tell me about it. I had to pay fifteen thousand won last semester because I forgot about a book I'd checked out for a research paper." Jungwon winces at the memory. "My wallet still hasn't recovered."

"That's brutal."

"The library giveth, and the library taketh away."

You laugh, and it comes out surprisingly normal, not too loud, not too high-pitched, just a regular human laugh from a regular human person who is definitely not having an internal meltdown about how good Jungwon looks in glasses.

"Hey," Jungwon says, glancing at the empty chair across from him, "if you're not in a hurry, do you want to study together? I've been here for three hours and my brain is starting to melt. It would be nice to have some company."

Your heart stops.

Yang Jungwon, the Yang Jungwon, the owner of the smile and the laugh and the gummy bears at 2 AM is asking you to study with him. This is the kind of moment you've daydreamed about for months. This is a meet-cute in progress. This is the universe throwing you a lifeline after the cafeteria disaster, a chance to actually spend time with the boy you've been pining over since midterms.

"Yes," you say, before your brain can remind you of all the reasons this is a terrible idea. "Yes, I'd…I'd love to. Let me just return these first."

You practically skip to the returns desk, your heart doing a full backflip in your chest. By the time you make it back to Jungwon's table, your philosophy textbook and notebook spread out in front of you, you've convinced yourself that this is exactly what you need. Some time with Jungwon. Some time to remember why you wrote that letter in the first place. Some time to reconnect with the feelings that got buried under the chaos of the Heeseung situation.

The only problem is that you can't focus on studying at all.

You try. You really, genuinely try. You open your textbook to the assigned chapter. You uncap your highlighter. You fix your eyes on the page and attempt to absorb information about ethical frameworks and moral philosophy. But your eyes keep drifting up, against your will, over the top of your book, to the boy sitting across from you.

Jungwon is studying. Actually studying, not fake studying, not pretending to study while secretly watching you the way you're watching him. His brow is furrowed in concentration, his pen moving steadily across his notebook as he takes notes. Every so often, he pauses, taps the end of his pen against his chin, and then resumes writing with renewed focus. The late afternoon light slants through the window behind him, catching the highlights in his dark hair and making him look like he's stepped out of a painting.

He is beautiful. He's so beautiful that it makes your chest ache, a soft, sweet ache that you've been carrying around since the moment you first saw him in this very library. You watch the way his fingers curl around his pen, the way he bites his lower lip when he's thinking, the way his glasses slide down his nose and he pushes them back up with an absent gesture.

"I can feel you looking at me," Jungwon says, not glancing up from his notebook.

Your entire body jolts like you've been electrocuted. "I wasn't…I was just…there's a clock behind you. I was checking the time."

Jungwon looks up then, and there's a knowing glint in his eyes that makes your stomach do a slow, somersaulting flip. "The clock is to your right, Y/N. Not behind me."

You look to your right. Sure enough, there's the clock, hanging on the wall in plain view, which you would have noticed if you'd spent even one second actually looking for it instead of gazing at Jungwon's face like a Renaissance painter studying their muse.

"I'm… directionally challenged," you say weakly.

"Uh-huh." Jungwon sets down his pen, and the smile playing at the corners of his mouth is soft and teasing and absolutely devastating. "Come here for a second."

"What?"

"Just come here. Lean forward a little."

Your body obeys before your brain can intervene. You lean across the table, your heart hammering so loudly you're certain the entire library can hear it. Jungwon leans forward too, closing the distance between you, and you catch a faint whiff of something clean and subtle, laundry detergent, maybe, or the kind of fragrance that just smells like him.

His hand reaches out, and before you can process what's happening, his index finger gently pokes your cheek.

"Boop," he says.

You make a sound. You don't know what the sound is supposed to be. Maybe a laugh, maybe a question, maybe a plea for mercy. What comes out is something closer to a squeak, a small, strangled, completely undignified squeak that would be embarrassing if you had any brain cells left to feel embarrassment.

Jungwon's smile widens, and his finger lingers on your cheek for just a moment longer than necessary. "You had an eyelash," he says. "Right there. But also, you just looked really cute staring at me like that. I couldn't resist."

Cute. He calls you cute. That's twice in one day that a devastatingly attractive boy has called you cute, and your hopeless romantic heart doesn't know whether to celebrate or go into cardiac arrest.

"I wasn't staring," you whisper, but it comes out completely unconvincing.

"You were absolutely staring." Jungwon withdraws his hand, but his smile stays, warm and fond and knowing. "It's okay. I don't mind. It's kind of nice, actually. Being looked at like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm something worth looking at."

The words settle into your chest like a stone dropping into still water, sending ripples through your entire body. He thinks it's nice. He thinks you're nice or at least your staring is nice and he pokes your cheek and calls you cute and now he's going back to his studying like he hasn't just fundamentally altered your brain chemistry.

You try to return to your textbook. The words swim in front of your eyes, meaningless and blurry. You highlight a sentence at random, realize you have no idea what it says, and highlight it again for good measure. The page is now approximately forty percent highlighter ink.

"You're going to run out of highlighter at that rate," Jungwon observes, not looking up.

"I have backups," you say. "I always have backups."

"Of course you do."

The studying session continues for another hour, and you absorb approximately zero information about ethical frameworks. What you do absorb is a comprehensive catalogue of Jungwon's study habits: the way he organizes his notes with color-coded tabs, the way he mutters to himself when he's working through a difficult concept, the way he absentmindedly drums his fingers against the table when he's thinking. Every detail is another entry in your mental Jungwon database, another thread in the tapestry of your affection.

By the time you pack up your things and say goodbye, "See you in philosophy," Jungwon says, and you respond with something that might be words or might be a series of enthusiastic nods, you are floating. You are literally, physically floating, your feet barely touching the ground as you drift out of the library and across campus toward your dorm.

Jungwon pokes your cheek. Jungwon calls you cute. Jungwon says he likes being looked at by you.

You are winning. Despite the Heeseung disaster, despite the cafeteria catastrophe, despite everything, you are winning.

By the time you reach your dorm room, you are a mess of giddy energy with nowhere to go. You close the door behind you, throw your backpack onto your desk chair, and then proceed to wriggle across your bed like an ecstatic worm, kicking your feet and muffling your squeals into your pillow.

"He called me cute," you whisper to your empty room, your voice muffled by fabric. "He poked my cheek. He did the boop thing. The boop thing, you guys. Who does the boop thing? Adorable people, that's who. Perfect people. People with beautiful smiles and kind eyes and-"

You roll onto your back, staring at the ceiling with a dreamy expression. The ceiling has forty-three tiles in your room. You counted them on your first night in the dorm. But right now, all you can see is Jungwon's face, the way he looked at you across the library table, the way his finger felt against your cheek, the way his voice went soft when he said like I'm something worth looking at.

You are going to marry him. You are going to marry Yang Jungwon and have a beautiful wedding with string lights and wildflowers and a three-tier cake, and you will tell the story of how you stared at him in the library and he poked your cheek and-

You stop wriggling.

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait.

You can't marry Jungwon. You can't even confess to Jungwon, because Jungwon thinks you confessed to Heeseung. Jungwon thinks you're interested in someone else. Jungwon was sweet and friendly and maybe a little bit flirty, but that's just his personality. He's nice to everyone. He gives you gummy bears at 2 AM; he probably gives gummy bears to everyone who looks tired. You aren't special. You are just… there.

The giddiness begins to drain out of you, replaced by the familiar weight of reality. You are still trapped in the Heeseung situation. You are still the girl who confessed to the wrong person. And no matter how many times Jungwon pokes your cheek, that fundamental fact isn't going to change.

With a heavy sigh, you drag yourself through your evening routine: shower, skincare, the episode of the baking show you're halfway through and finally crawl into bed around midnight, your emotions a tangled knot of hope and despair.

Sleep comes slowly, a gradual descent into darkness, and then-

—————

You are in the PC room again.

But this time it's different. The lights are dimmer, the computers all dark, the chairs empty. It's just you, and the door is swinging shut behind you, and there's someone waiting at the computer closest to the door.

Heeseung.

He's sitting in the chair, facing away from you, his headphones around his neck and his shoulders relaxed. When he hears your footsteps, he turns, and his expression isn't surprised or amused or curious. It's something else entirely. Something darker. Something that makes your breath catch in your throat.

"You're here," he says, and his voice is lower than you've ever heard it, a rumble that vibrates through your bones. "I've been waiting for you, little mouse."

"I'm not-" you start, but he's already standing, already moving toward you, and you can't seem to make your feet work. You're rooted to the spot, watching him approach with a mixture of fear and something else, something you don't want to name.

He stops inches away from you, close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from his body, close enough that you can see the individual strands of his hair and the curve of his lips and the way his eyes, God, his eyes are fixed on your mouth.

"You know what I've been thinking about?" he murmurs, and one of his hands comes up to brush a strand of hair away from your face, his fingers lingering against your temple. "I've been thinking about that letter. The way you said you only had eyes for me. The way you said you couldn't stop thinking about me."

"That wasn't-" you try, but your voice comes out as barely a whisper, and Heeseung's thumb is tracing along your jawline now, feather-light and devastating.

"I can't stop thinking about you either," he says, and his face is getting closer, closer, and you can feel his breath against your lips. "Do you want to know what I think about?"

Your heart is hammering. Your skin is on fire. You can't move, can't speak, can't do anything except stare up at him with wide eyes as his other hand settles on your waist, warm and solid and pulling you closer.

"I think about this," he whispers, and then his mouth is on yours.

The kiss is…it's…

It's intense. It's consuming. It's the kind of kiss that erases every rational thought from your brain and replaces it with pure, unfiltered sensation. His lips are soft but insistent, moving against yours with a confidence that makes your knees weak. His hand tightens on your waist, pulling you flush against him, and you make a sound against his mouth, something small and breathless and completely involuntary.

When he finally pulls back, his forehead resting against yours, his voice is rough. "You’re what I’ve been looking for my whole life, Y/N. You’re my miracle."

And then his lips are on your neck, trailing fire down to your collarbone, and your head falls back, and his name escapes your mouth in a way you've never said it before-

He kneels before you, his movements fluid and deliberate. His eyes never leave yours as he unzips his jeans, freeing his already hard cock. It stands proud and thick, the tip glistening with pre-cum. He takes your foot in his warm hand, bringing it to his shaft.

"Look what you do to me," he murmurs, his voice husky with desire. He wraps your foot around his length, his thumb pressing against your arch as he begins to move your foot up and down his cock. His eyes flutter closed for a moment, a low groan escaping his lips.

The sensation of his hot skin against your sole sends shivers through your body. You watch, mesmerized, as he uses your foot to pleasure himself, his hips thrusting in rhythm with the movements of your foot. His other hand moves to your ankle, his grip firm but gentle, his fingers stroking your sensitive skin.

His eyes open, locking with yours again, and the intensity in his gaze makes your breath catch. "You're so beautiful," he breathes, his movements becoming faster, more urgent. "You’re perfect the way you are."

His breathing grows ragged, his muscles tensing. With a guttural moan, he comes, his hot release spilling over your foot and his hand. He leans forward, his tongue darting out to taste his own cum from your skin, his movements slow and sensual. He licks your foot clean, his tongue tracing patterns on your arch, between your toes, sending waves of pleasure through your body.

Then he shifts, positioning himself between your legs. He looks up at you, his eyes dark with desire. "I need to taste you," he says, his voice rough with need.

He hooks his fingers into the waistband of your panties, pulling them down slowly, his eyes never leaving yours. He tosses them aside, then leans in, his breath hot against your most sensitive flesh.

His tongue flicks out, teasing your clit, and you gasp, your hands flying to his hair. He chuckles, the vibration sending another jolt of pleasure through you. "Patience, little mouse," he murmurs against your skin.

His tongue moves in slow, deliberate circles, building your pleasure gradually. He alternates between broad, flat strokes and quick, precise flicks of his tongue against your clit. His fingers join in, one, then two, sliding inside you, curling to hit that spot that makes you cry.

Your hips buck against his face, your breath coming in ragged gasps. "Heeseung," you moan, your fingers tightening in his hair.

He responds with increased enthusiasm, his tongue working faster, his fingers pumping in and out of you. The pressure builds inside you, a coil of pleasure winding tighter and tighter until it snaps.

You come with a cry, your body convulsing as waves of pleasure wash over you. But Heeseung doesn't stop. He continues his assault on your senses, his tongue and fingers working in perfect harmony to bring you to the edge again.

And then you are squirting, your release flooding his mouth and chin as he drinks you in, his movements never faltering. He looks up at you, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction as he laps up every drop.

When he finally pulls away, his face glistening with your juices, he crawls up your body, capturing your lips in a searing kiss. You can taste yourself on his tongue, and the intimacy of it sends another wave of desire through you.

"Tell me you’re only thinking of me," he whispers against your lips, his hands roaming your body. "and not Jungwon."

You wake up.

You wake up in your dorm room, in your bed, at 7:43 AM on a Tuesday morning, with your heart pounding and your skin flushed, your panties soaked and your sheets twisted around your legs like they've been through a battle.

For a long moment, you just lie there, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember how to breathe.

Did you just… did you just dream about… did Lee Heeseung, the guy you're supposed to be making uninterested in you, the guy you've been trying to avoid and ignore and repel, just star in what can only be described as an extremely obscene dream? The virgin you are just cringed at the memory.

You press your hands to your burning cheeks and let out a sound that is somewhere between a groan and a scream.

"No," you whisper to the empty room. "No, no, no. This isn't, this can't…I don't even like him. I like Jungwon. Jungwon! I've liked Jungwon for four months. I wrote a letter to Jungwon. I have a color-coded mental database of Jungwon's habits. I want to marry Jungwon and have a three-tier wedding cake with wildflowers!"

But your brain, traitorous and unhelpful, keeps replaying fragments of the dream, the way Heeseung's eyes go dark, the way his voice rumbles against your ear, the way his hand feels on your waist, the way his tongue is warm and-

You grab your pillow and press it over your face, screaming into it with all the force your lungs can muster.

This is wrong. This is so, so wrong. You are a Jungwon girl. You've always been a Jungwon girl. You don't think about Heeseung like that. You don't think about Heeseung like anything. Heeseung is an obstacle. Heeseung is a problem to be solved. Heeseung is the guy you're actively trying to repel, not the guy who shows up in your subconscious and does things that make you blush in the privacy of your own bed.

"I'm a psychopath," you say to your pillow. "I'm a complete and utter psychopath. Who dreams about this with a guy they're supposed to be making uninterested? A psychopath, that's who. A deranged lunatic. A person with a broken brain."

Your pillow, predictably, does not respond.

You drag yourself out of bed and into the bathroom, splashing cold water on your face and avoiding your own reflection in the mirror. You don't want to look at yourself. You don't want to see the evidence of the dream still lingering in your flushed cheeks…and between your legs.

This is a problem. This is a Major Problem with capital letters and possibly a warning siren. You can't afford to be having dreams about Lee Heeseung. You can't afford to be thinking about Lee Heeseung at all. Your entire strategy, Operation Make Heeseung Uninterested depends on you being able to keep a clear head and a steady heart, and neither of those things is going to be possible if your subconscious keeps ambushing you with extremely vivid, extremely inappropriate content.

You need to talk to Yunjin. Immediately. Before your brain can conjure up any more unauthorized imagery.

But as you grab your phone and type out a frantic message, EMERGENCY MEETING REQUIRED IMMEDIATELY CODE RED REPEAT CODE RED, you can't quite shake the lingering sensation from the dream.

The way Heeseung's thumb traces along your jawline.

The way he calls you little mouse in that low, rumbling voice.

The way he says you were perfect the way you were like he means it, like it's true, like he's been into you his whole life and hasn't even known it.

You shake your head violently, flinging droplets of water across the bathroom mirror.

"Nope," you say out loud. "Nope, nope, nope. We're not doing this. We're not thinking about this. We're going to go to class and eat lunch and avoid all tall informatics students, and we're going to get our brain back on the Jungwon track where it belongs."

But even as you say it, even as you try to mean it, a small, treacherous part of you wonders if maybe, just maybe, the Jungwon track isn't the only track worth following anymore.

You shove that thought into a mental box, lock it, and throw away the key.

You have a plan. You have a strategy. You are going to make Heeseung uninterested, and you are going to figure out a way to untangle the misunderstanding, and you are going to end up with Jungwon like you were always supposed to.

The dream is just a dream. It doesn't mean anything. It can't mean anything.

You refuse to let it mean anything.

(But when you catch yourself glancing toward the informatics building on your way to class, you walk a little faster, and you definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent do not wonder what Lee Heeseung is doing right now.)

—————

The dream haunts you for three days.

Not in a supernatural, ghost-in-the-corner kind of way. More in an I-can't-make-eye-contact-with-my-own-reflection kind of way. Every time you close your eyes, fragments of it flicker behind your eyelids like a movie you hadn't asked to watch. The dark PC room. The way Heeseung's voice drops to a rumble. The phantom sensation of his tongue on your clit, his hand on your ankle, his look-

You physically convulse every time the memory resurfaces, which is approximately every forty-five minutes. Your philosophy notes become a graveyard of distracted doodles, half of which look suspiciously like the curve of someone's jaw. You have to throw away an entire page because you accidentally write "little mouse" in the margin instead of "moral relativism."

Yunjin is no help whatsoever.

"So you had a wet dream about the hot guy who you’re supposedly getting bored of," she says over bubble tea the day after the incident, her expression thoroughly unimpressed. "This is a problem because…?"

"Because I don't like him, Yunjin! I like Jungwon! I've liked Jungwon since midterms! Jungwon is the goal! Jungwon is the three-tier wedding cake!"

"And Heeseung is…?"

"A temporary obstacle! A misunderstanding with legs! A very tall, very inconvenient plot twist!"

Yunjin sucks on her tapioca pearls with the air of a therapist who has heard it all before and is no longer surprised by anything. "You know what they say about protesting too much."

"I am not protesting too much. I am protesting exactly the right amount. I am protesting a perfectly calibrated quantity."

"Sure." She pats your hand with condescending sympathy. "Whatever helps you sleep at night. Oh wait-"

You throw a tapioca pearl at her face. It sticks to her cheek for a solid three seconds before falling off, and the look of absolute betrayal on her face is the only bright spot in your otherwise nightmare-plagued week.

But now it's Thursday. Thursday, 2:15 PM. You're stationed in the science building's main hallway, crouched behind a bulletin board that is absolutely not wide enough to hide your entire body, waiting for the coast to clear so you can sprint to your next class without encountering any tall informatics students.

Your system has evolved since the early days of the crisis. You now have a color-coded schedule of Heeseung's known movements, courtesy of some light reconnaissance work that Yunjin calls "stalking" and you call "strategic intelligence gathering." You know his class schedule. You know his preferred study spots. You know that he tends to grab coffee from the campus café at exactly 3 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which means the science building hallway should, theoretically, be a Heeseung-free zone at 2:15.

Theoretically.

You're just about to make your move, a quick dash to the stairwell, then up two flights, then a straight shot to classroom 307, when you hear it.

"Hey, is Y/N L/N in there?"

Your blood freezes. Your muscles lock. Your soul briefly departs your body and then slams back into it with force.

That's Heeseung's voice. That's unmistakably, undeniably, catastrophically Lee Heeseung's voice, and it's coming from approximately ten feet to your left, where the door to your department's main office stands open.

You press yourself harder against the bulletin board, praying for invisibility, praying for a sudden power outage, praying for the ground to open up and swallow you into its merciful embrace. None of these things happen. Instead, you hear the department secretary respond with cheerful obliviousness.

"Y/N L/N? First year, STEM? I think I saw her in the hallway just a minute ago. Let me check, oh, there she is! Y/N! You have a visitor!"

The secretary is pointing directly at your bulletin board. Your bulletin board that is not hiding you at all. Your bulletin board that is, in fact, leaving approximately seventy percent of your body completely visible to anyone who happens to look in that direction.

Heeseung turns.

Your eyes meet.

Time stops.

There are moments in life that feel like they stretch into eternity, moments so profoundly awkward, so cosmically embarrassing, that the universe itself seems to pause and take notice. This is one of those moments. You are frozen in a half-crouch behind a bulletin board, your backpack dangling from one shoulder, your hair escaping from the ponytail you threw it into this morning, your expression one of pure, unfiltered terror. Heeseung is standing in the doorway of the department office, looking unfairly attractive in a simple black hoodie and jeans, his eyebrows rising slowly toward his hairline.

A small crowd of students has paused in the hallway to watch. You can feel their eyes on you like a physical weight. Someone whispers something to their friend. Someone else pulls out their phone.

You are going to die. You are going to perish right here in the science building hallway, and your ghost will be doomed to haunt this bulletin board for all eternity.

"Y/N?" Heeseung's voice is a mixture of confusion and amusement. He takes a step toward you, and you instinctively take a step back, which results in you bumping directly into the bulletin board and causing several flyers to flutter dramatically to the ground. "Were you… hiding behind that?"

"No," you say, too quickly. "No, I was…I dropped something. A contact lens. I was looking for my contact lens."

"You don't wear contacts."

"I might! You don't know my life!"

"Your glasses are literally on your face right now."

You reach up and touch your glasses, which are indeed sitting on your nose, clearly visible, doing their job of correcting your vision. You have no response to this. There is no response to this. You have been caught in a lie so transparent it's essentially a window.

Heeseung's lips twitch. "You know, most people who have a crush on me don't run away and hide behind furniture. This is very confusing for my ego."

The crowd is still watching. Why is the crowd still watching? Don't they have classes to go to? Midterms to study for? Lives to live that don't involve spectating your public humiliation?

"I wasn't hiding from you specifically," you say, because apparently your mouth has decided to operate independently from your brain. "I was hiding from… the sun. It's very bright in here. I'm photosensitive."

"You're a STEM student hiding from the sun in a basement hallway with no windows," Heeseung says slowly. "That's… a new one."

"It's a medical condition. It's very serious. My doctor says I need to avoid direct fluorescent lighting."

"The fluorescent lighting is what's getting you."

"Absolutely. It's my greatest enemy. Well, second greatest. After-" You stop yourself before you can say after incredibly hot informatics students who keep appearing in my life like a recurring nightmare.

Heeseung waits. When you don't finish the sentence, that smile, the one that's definitely a smirk's second cousin, maybe even its first cousin at this point, spreads across his face.

"Well," he says, "now that I've found you and dragged you out of the shadows, literally, I was wondering if you wanted to grab coffee. With me. Right now."

Every single person in the hallway is looking at you. The secretary is looking at you from the office doorway, her expression one of grandmotherly delight at what she clearly perceives as a romantic overture. The students who stopped to watch are exchanging glances and whispers. One girl gives you an encouraging thumbs up.

You are trapped. You are cornered. You are a mouse being offered coffee by a very tall, very persistent cat.

And just like every other time Heeseung has put you on the spot, you open your mouth and the wrong words come out.

"I love coffee," you say. "Coffee is my favorite liquid. After water. And possibly juice. But it's definitely in the top three."

"Is that a yes?"

"…Yes."

The campus café is a small, cozy establishment nestled between the student union and the art building. You have been here exactly twice before, both times with Yunjin, and both times you have spent more money on a single drink than you usually spend on an entire meal.

Today, the café is moderately busy. A few students hunch over laptops, a couple in the corner have what looks like a very intense conversation about something, and a barista with an impressive mustache wipes down the counter. The smell of espresso hangs in the air.

"Why don't you grab us a table?" Heeseung suggests, pulling out his wallet. "I'll order. What do you want?"

You blink at him. "You don't have to pay for me."

"I'm the one who invited you. It's the least I can do." He tilts his head, that curious expression settling over his features. "Consider it part of the starting slow thing. Coffee first, then maybe a meal, then eventually I'll work up to buying you a gift."

You don't know how to respond to that, so you just tell him your order: a vanilla latte, the most basic thing on the menu, and flee to a small table near the window before your face can betray you any further.

Okay, okay, okay. This is fine. This is manageable. You are just having coffee with Heeseung, the guy who thinks you confessed to him, the guy you have been actively trying to repel, the guy who starred in your extremely inappropriate dream three nights ago. This is fine. Everything is fine.

You watch him at the counter, chatting easily with the mustachioed barista like they are old friends. He laughs at something the barista says, and the sound carries across the café, warm and genuine. A group of girls at a nearby table glance over at him, then put their heads together and whisper. Heeseung doesn't seem to notice. Or if he does, he doesn't react, doesn't do any of the things you would expect from someone with his reputation.

It's infuriating.

A few minutes later, he walks toward your table with two cups in his hands. "One vanilla latte for the lady," he says, setting yours down with a flourish, "and one Americano for me. I got you an extra shot of vanilla. You seem like you could use it."

"I could use a lot of things," you mutter, wrapping your hands around the warm cup. "Vanilla is a start."

Heeseung settles into the chair across from you, his long legs stretching out under the table. "So," he says, "do you want to tell me why you were hiding behind a bulletin board earlier? Or should I just keep guessing? My current theory is that you're secretly a spy for a rival university and you're gathering intel on our science department."

"Your theory is wrong."

"Then what's the real reason?"

I was hiding from you, you don't say. I was hiding from you because I dreamed about you eating me out and now I can't look at your face without spontaneously combusting.

"I'm just… very committed to checking bulletin boards," you say instead. "There's a lot of important information on them. Club announcements. Study group postings. Lost and found notices. Someone lost a cat last week. Did you see that poster? Very sad. I hope they found the cat."

"You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Rambling. You ramble when you're nervous." He takes a sip of his Americano, his eyes never leaving your face. "It's cute. But you don't have to be nervous around me, you know. I'm not going to bite."

The word "bite" should not make your stomach flip. It is a normal word. A mundane word. A word that people use in completely innocent contexts all the time. But your brain, still apparently haunted by the ghost of that dream, chooses to remind you of the part where Heeseung's lips trailed down to your collarbone, and suddenly you can't look at his mouth anymore.

"I'm not nervous," you lie. "I'm just… naturally like this. I'm a naturally weird person. This is my baseline."

"Your baseline is being weird?"

"Extremely weird. The weirdest. I once alphabetized my entire book collection by color instead of author name because I wanted to see what it would look like. It looked terrible. I kept it that way for three months."

Heeseung considers this. "That's not really weird. That's just… creative organizational choices."

"I also talk to my plants. All of them. Individually. I have a succulent named Jason and I tell him about my day."

"That's just being a good plant parent."

"I cannot snap my fingers. I've tried for nineteen years and I simply cannot do it. My fingers make no sound. It's like they're broken but specifically only for snapping purposes."

Heeseung smiles now, that same genuine smile that appeared in the cafeteria when you talked about League of Legends. "Okay, that one's a little weird. But in an endearing way."

Endearing. He called you endearing. This is not going according to plan.

"I should go get napkins," you say abruptly, pushing back your chair. "We need napkins. For the coffee. In case of spills. You can never be too prepared."

Heeseung glances at the napkin dispenser that is already sitting on the table between you. "We have napkins."

"These aren't… good napkins. I need the good ones. The thick ones. From the counter. I'll be right back."

You escape before he can protest, weaving through the tables toward the counter where the barista is busy steaming milk. You don't actually need napkins. You need a moment to breathe, to collect yourself, to remind your heart that it is supposed to be beating for Jungwon, not doing gymnastics every time Heeseung smiles at you.

The barista hands you a stack of napkins without you even having to ask. You clutch them to your chest like a shield and turn back toward your table.

Heeseung is watching you, his chin propped on his hand, his expression soft and curious and completely unguarded. The afternoon light from the window catches the angles of his face, the sweep of his hair, the slight quirk of his lips. He looks like a painting. He looks like something you would pin to a Pinterest board titled "dream boyfriend" and then immediately feel bad about because no real person should look that good while just sitting in a café.

You start walking back toward the table, your mind a whirlwind of panic and confusion and the desperate need to get through this interaction without making a bigger fool of yourself.

And then your foot catches on the leg of a chair.

It happens in slow motion. One moment you are walking, your napkins clutched to your chest, your eyes fixed on Heeseung. The next moment your toe hooks around a wrought-iron chair leg that is sticking out slightly from a nearby table, and your body pitches forward, and the napkins fly out of your hands, and the coffee, dear God, the coffee who's sitting on the table gets knocked off and sloshes out of your cup in a great wave.

Time speeds up again. You hit the floor with a thud that rattles your teeth, and the coffee hits you approximately 0.3 seconds later, soaking through your sweater and your jeans and possibly your very soul. The liquid is still warm, not scalding but definitely not pleasant, and it is everywhere, on your clothes, on your hands, dripping from the ends of your hair, pooling on the floor around you in a sad, beige puddle.

The café goes silent.

You sit there, on the floor, covered in your own vanilla latte, and stare at the puddle spreading beneath you. The napkins have scattered across the tiles like confetti, completely useless now. A drip of coffee rolls down your forehead and off the tip of your nose.

This is it. This is the moment you finally break. All the stress of the past week, the letter, the misunderstanding, the dream, the bulletin board incident has been building toward this, and now, sitting in a puddle of expensive café coffee with every eye in the establishment fixed on you, you feel the tears prick at the corners of your eyes.

You are going to cry. You are going to cry in front of Heeseung and the mustachioed barista and the couple in the corner and those girls who have been whispering about Heeseung earlier. You are going to cry, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

But then you look down at your hands, and you realize something.

His coffee. The Americano. The cup who's been next to yours, you have managed, in the chaos of your fall, to keep it upright by holding it. Your arm lifted it above your head at the last second, some primal survival instinct kicking in to protect the beverage that isn't even yours, and the Americano is still sitting perfectly intact in its cup, not a single drop spilled.

You are covered in latte. Your sweater is ruined. Your dignity is in shambles. But his coffee is safe.

"I saved yours," you say, your voice coming out as a croak. You hold up the Americano like a trophy, your arm trembling slightly. "Look. I saved yours."

Heeseung is already out of his chair, already crouching beside you, his expression shifting from shock to concern to something else entirely, something soft and wondering and absolutely devastating.

"You saved my coffee," he repeats.

"It was a reflex. I don't know why. I don't even like you that much. I mean, I like you a normal amount. A regular amount. The amount you're supposed to like someone you accidentally-" You stop yourself before you can say more. "I saved your coffee."

Heeseung stares at you for a long moment. Then, very deliberately, he reaches out and takes the Americano from your hand. He looks at you, covered in vanilla latte, sitting in a puddle on the café floor, your glasses askew and your hair dripping.

And then he pours his own coffee over his head.

Just… tips the cup over and lets the dark liquid cascade down his hair, over his forehead, along the sharp bridge of his nose, soaking into the collar of his black hoodie and leaving trails of coffee across his skin.

You gape at him. The entire café gapes at him.

"What-" you start, but your voice has stopped working.

Heeseung sets the empty cup down with a quiet click and smiles at you, a warm, genuine, completely unhinged smile that makes your heart do a full backflip inside your chest.

"Now we match," he says.

You can't speak. You can't think. You can only stare at him, this absurd, beautiful, incomprehensible boy who has just poured coffee on himself in the middle of a crowded café for no other reason than to make you feel less alone in your humiliation.

"But… your hoodie," you manage. "Your hair. The floor. The-"

"I have other hoodies. My hair will dry. And the floor can be mopped." He reaches out and gently straightens your glasses, which have gone crooked during your fall. His fingers brush against your temple, feather-light. "You looked like you were about to cry. I couldn't let you cry alone."

"Alone?" Your voice cracks. "You couldn't let me cry alone?"

"I mean, ideally you wouldn't cry at all. But if you are going to cry, I figure I should give you company. Solidarity in humiliation, you know?" He's still smiling, still crouching in front of you, still covered in Americano like it is the most normal thing in the world. "We make a pretty good pair of disasters, don't you think?"

Your heart flips. It doesn't flutter. It doesn't skip a beat. It does a full, acrobatic, Olympic-level flip inside your chest, and you feel the sensation reverberate through your entire body.

Why is he like this?

Why is Lee Heeseung, reputed womanizer, notorious player, the guy everyone warns you about, sitting on the floor of a café covered in his own coffee just to make you feel better about spilling yours? Why is he looking at you like that, with those dark, gentle eyes, like you are something precious instead of the absolute disaster you clearly are?

You don't know. You don't understand. And the not understanding is starting to become a problem, because every time you think you have Heeseung figured out, he goes and does something like this, and your careful mental categories crumble a little more.

"We should probably…" You gesture vaguely at your coffee-soaked selves. "Clean up. Or something."

"Probably," Heeseung agrees. He stands up and offers you his hand, his coffee-stained, still-damp hand and you have no choice but to take it. His grip is warm and solid, and he pulls you to your feet with an ease that suggests you weigh nothing at all. "There's a student services office around the corner. They keep spare t-shirts for emergencies. We could both use a change of clothes."

You look down at your sweater, which is now more latte-colored than its original blue. "That's… probably a good idea."

Heeseung pulls out his wallet and drops several bills on the nearest table, far more than the cost of two coffees with a nod to the mustachioed barista. "For the mess," he says. "Sorry about the floor."

The barista nods slowly, his expression suggesting he has seen many things in his years at the café but has never quite witnessed anything like this.

And then Heeseung guides you out of the café, his hand hovering at the small of your back but not quite touching, and you walk through the student union in matching coffee-stained clothes like the world's most unfortunate pair of twins.

The student services office is a small, cluttered room tucked into a corner of the union building. It is staffed by a perpetually exhausted-looking graduate student who has clearly seen too much in his years of dealing with student emergencies. When you and Heeseung walk in, dripping coffee and smelling like a coffee explosion, he doesn't even blink.

"Coffee incident?" he asks flatly.

"Yes," Heeseung says.

"Both of you?"

"I'm told we match now."

The student stares at him for a long moment, then sighs with the weariness of someone who long ago stopped questioning the absurdities of university life. "We have spare t-shirts in the back. They're not fashionable. They have the university logo on them. You don't get to complain about the design."

"We wouldn't dream of it," Heeseung says.

The student disappears into a back room and emerges a moment later with two folded shirts. They are, as promised, aggressively unfashionable, a mustard yellow color with the university mascot printed on the front in peeling letters. Beneath the mascot are the words "Embrace the process!"

"These are incredible," Heeseung says, holding up his shirt with genuine delight. "I'm keeping this forever."

"The bathrooms are down the hall," the student says, already turning back to his computer. "Please don't track coffee into them. I just had the floors cleaned."

You and Heeseung change in separate bathrooms, and when you emerge, you are confronted with the sight of Heeseung wearing a mustard-yellow shirt that is slightly too small for him, the fabric stretching across his shoulders in a way that is definitely not doing things to your heart. The coffee has been wiped off his face, but his hair is still damp, curling slightly at the ends, and the combination of the terrible shirt and the wet hair and the ridiculously attractive face is so absurd that you actually laugh out loud.

"What?" Heeseung asks, grinning. "Do I look as good as I think I do?"

"You look like you traded shirts with a child."

"A very fashionable child. This slogan will hype me up for my next exam." He looks you over, his eyes crinkling. "You don't look half bad yourself. Yellow's a good color on you."

You are wearing the exact same shirt. You look like a banana. But Heeseung says it like he means it, and you feel that traitorous flutter in your chest again.

"We should go," you say, because standing in a hallway with Heeseung while wearing ridiculous matching shirts is doing something strange to your brain chemistry. "I have… I need to… there's a thing…"

"The mysterious thing," Heeseung says. "Your nemesis. Your arch-enemy. The eternal obstacle to us spending more time together."

"It's a very busy thing. It takes up a lot of my schedule."

"Right." He is still smiling, still looking at you with that soft, curious expression. "Well, before you run off to your very important thing, let me walk you to-"

"There you are, Heeseung! I've been looking everywhere for-"

The voice comes from the end of the hallway, and you know that voice. You know it the way you know your own heartbeat, the way you know the lyrics to every Ariana Grande song, the way you know that vanilla lattes are now your mortal enemy.

Jungwon walks toward you, his phone in his hand and a slight frown on his face, like he has been searching for Heeseung for a while. He looks so unfairly beautiful that your heart does the thing it always does when you see him, that painful, hopeful, aching thing that feels like a bruise that won't heal.

But then his eyes land on you, and he stops walking.

"Y/N?" His gaze travels from your face to your shirt to Heeseung's matching shirt to the general air of disaster that still clings to both of you. "What… happened to you guys?"

"Coffee incident," Heeseung says, with the casual air of someone explaining something completely normal. "She spilled hers, so I spilled mine too. Now we're twins."

Jungwon blinks. "You poured coffee on yourself?"

"Matching disasters. It's a new concept. We're pioneering it."

You want to say something, anything, to salvage this situation. Jungwon is looking between you and Heeseung with an expression you can't quite read, and your brain screams at you to explain, to clarify, to make sure he doesn't get the wrong idea about what he is seeing.

"It's not… we're not-" you start, but your voice comes out squeaky and strange. "The coffee was an accident. Well, my coffee was an accident. His coffee was on purpose. But not in a romantic way. In a… solidarity way. Against the humiliation. We are fighting humiliation together."

"Fighting humiliation," Jungwon repeats slowly.

"Enemies," you say, nodding too hard. "We're humiliation enemies. Humi-nemies. It's a whole thing."

Heeseung watches you with that amused expression again, and you can tell he is biting back a smile. "Humi-nemies," he echoes. "Right. That's what we are."

Jungwon is quiet for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he smiles, but it isn't his usual warm smile. It is something smaller, something more careful, something that makes your stomach drop even as you can't identify why.

"You guys make a cute couple," he says.

The words hit you like a physical blow. Your mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. No sound comes out.

"We're not—" you try, but Jungwon is already stepping back, already half-turning away.

"I've got to get to class," he says. "Heeseung, I'll catch up with you later. Y/N… nice shirt."

And then he walks away, and you stand in the hallway with your heart in your stomach and Heeseung's matching shirt still warm against your skin.

"We're not a couple," you say, but it comes out as barely a whisper.

"Not yet," Heeseung says cheerfully, apparently completely oblivious to the emotional devastation that just occurred. "But we're off to a good start, don't you think? Coffee disasters, matching outfits, running into my friends, this is basically a textbook meet-cute progression."

You turn to stare at him. He is grinning, still radiating that unshakeable, inexplicable joy that seems to follow him everywhere. He has no idea. He has absolutely no idea that the boy you actually like just saw you in matching shirts with someone else and assumed you were a couple.

"Are you okay?" Heeseung asks, his smile fading slightly. "You look a little pale. Was the coffee too hot? Do you need to sit down?"

"I'm fine," you manage. "I just… I need to go. The thing. The very important thing. It's calling me."

You don't wait for him to respond. You turn and walk away, not running, because running would be too obvious, but walking very quickly, your mind a tornado of panic and regret and the image of Jungwon's smile fading as he says the words that just shattered your entire world.

You guys make a cute couple.

He thinks you are a couple. Yang Jungwon, the boy you have been pining over for four months, the boy you wrote a three-page love letter to, the boy who poked your cheek in the library and called you cute, he thinks you are dating Lee Heeseung.

You are trapped. You are so, so trapped.

By the time you reach your dorm room, you are practically vibrating with suppressed emotion. You close the door, lean your back against it, and press your hands to your face.

You guys make a cute couple.

"We're not a couple," you whisper to your empty room. "We're not a couple. We're humi-nemies. That's a real thing that I definitely didn't just make up because I can't communicate like a normal human being."

Your room does not respond.

You slide down the door until you are sitting on the floor, your legs stretched out in front of you. You look ridiculous. You feel ridiculous. Your entire life has become a comedy of errors, and you are the punchline.

But even as you sit there, drowning in self-pity and the lingering scent of vanilla latte, you can't quite forget the look on Heeseung's face when he poured his coffee over his head. The way he smiled at you, open and unguarded. The way he said I couldn't let you cry alone like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Why is he like that? Why is he so… him?

You don't have an answer. And that, more than anything else, is starting to scare you.

The library has become your second home.

Not by choice, exactly. More by necessity. The library is neutral territory, a place where you can exist without fear of coffee-related disasters, unexpected bulletin board ambushes, or tall informatics students appearing out of thin air to pour beverages on themselves in acts of solidarity. The library has rules. The library has silence. The library has mercifully dim lighting that hides the dark circles under your eyes from three consecutive nights of restless sleep.

It has been four days since the coffee incident. Four days since Jungwon looked at you in your matching shirt and said those fateful words: You guys make a cute couple. Four days of replaying that moment over and over in your head, analyzing every micro-expression on his face, every nuance in his voice, trying to determine if there was something else there, something like disappointment, or regret, or maybe even jealousy.

You have come to no conclusions. Your analytical skills, apparently, are useless when applied to matters of the heart.

So you do what any reasonable, emotionally overwhelmed STEM student would do: you throw yourself into your studies with the intensity of someone trying to forget their entire life. You have read the same paragraph about cellular respiration seventeen times. You have highlighted so many sentences that your textbook looks like a rainbow has thrown up on it. You have consumed approximately four hundred milligrams of caffeine in the past three hours alone, and your hands shake slightly as you turn another page.

It is fine. Everything is fine. You are fine.

"You're going to burn a hole through that book if you keep staring at it like that."

The voice comes from directly above you, and you jolt so hard that your highlighter goes skidding across the table and rolls onto the floor. You look up, your heart already doing that familiar, traitorous leap, and there he is.

Jungwon.

He stands beside your table with a gentle smile on his face, his backpack slung over one shoulder, his hair slightly messy like he has been running his fingers through it.

"Sorry," he says, stooping to pick up your fallen highlighter. "I didn't mean to startle you. You just looked so intense. Like you were trying to intimidate the biology into making sense."

"The biology is winning," you admit, accepting the highlighter with a hand that trembles slightly. From the caffeine. Definitely from the caffeine. "I've been reading the same page for twenty minutes and I still have no idea what oxidative phosphorylation is."

"It sounds like a spell from Harry Potter."

"That's what I've been thinking! But apparently it's something about electrons and I just-" You gesture vaguely at the chaos of papers spread across your table. "I'm losing the war."

Jungwon laughs, that bright, sunny sound that never fails to make your heart flutter. "Mind if I join you? I've been looking for a quiet spot to study, and honestly, sitting next to someone who's fighting for their life against biology sounds way more entertaining than sitting alone."

Your heart, the same heart that belongs to this boy, that has belonged to him since the moment he slid gummy bears across a library table at 2 AM, screams YES with the force of a thousand suns. Your brain, the traitorous organ that got you into this mess in the first place, reminds you of all the reasons this is a terrible idea.

"You probably don't want to sit with me," you say, the words tumbling out before you can stop them. "I'm not very good company right now. I've been mainlining caffeine and I think I can hear colors."

"That sounds like excellent company." Jungwon pulls out the chair across from you and sits down without waiting for permission. "What colors can you hear?"

"Biology textbook beige, mostly. It sounds like despair."

He laughs again, and the sound settles into your chest like a warm blanket. This is fine. This is okay. You can study with Jungwon without making it weird. You have done it before, you have spent a whole hour in this very library, watching him take notes and push his glasses up his nose and poke your cheek with that devastating smile. You can do it again. You are a professional. You are a master of emotional compartmentalization.

For a while, you actually do study. Or at least, you both pretend to. Jungwon opens his philosophy book and starts reading, his brow furrowed in concentration, his pen tapping absently against his notebook. You stare at your biology textbook with renewed determination, willing the words to make sense.

But your eyes keep drifting up, against your will, over the top of your book, to the boy sitting across from you. The way the library light catches the highlights in his hair. The way he bites his lower lip when he is thinking. The way his fingers curl around his pen, elegant and deliberate.

"You're doing it again," Jungwon says, not looking up from his book.

Heat floods your cheeks. "I'm not doing anything. I'm reading about oxidative phosphorylation. It's very interesting. Lots of electrons."

"Y/N." He looks up then, and his expression is softer than you expected. Gentler. "It's okay. I told you before, right? I don't mind being looked at like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm something worth looking at." He sets down his pen and folds his hands on the table, giving you his full attention. "You have a very particular way of looking at people. Did you know that? It's like you're trying to memorize them. Every detail. Like you're cataloguing things that most people wouldn't notice."

Your heart pounds so hard you are certain he can hear it. You want to say I'm only looking at you like this because it's you. But the words won't come. "That's… that's my STEM brain. I'm very analytical. I notice things. It's a curse."

"I don't think it's a curse." Jungwon's voice is quiet, thoughtful. "I think it's actually really special. Most people don't pay attention like that. Most people look at you and see what they want to see, not what's actually there." He pauses, his eyes searching your face. "You're different, Y/N. You actually see people."

The words hang in the air between you, heavy with meaning. This is it. This is the moment. The conversation has shifted into something deeper, something more intimate, and you can feel the confession building in your chest like a wave about to break.

You can tell him. Right now. You can tell him everything, the letter, the misunderstanding, the way your heart has been his since the very beginning. You can clear the air and finally, finally be free of the tangled web you have accidentally woven around yourself.

"Jungwon," you say, and your voice comes out steadier than you expect. "There's something I need to tell you. About Heeseung. About the confession. About everything. It's not what you think. It's never been what you think."

Jungwon's expression flickers, surprise, confusion, something else you can't quite name. "What do you mean?"

"I mean-" You take a deep breath, gathering your courage. "The letter. The one I gave to Heeseung. It wasn't-"

"Wait." Jungwon holds up a hand, stopping you mid-sentence. "Before you say anything else, can I say something first?"

You nod, your heart hammering.

Jungwon leans back in his chair, his eyes never leaving your face. "I've been watching you and Heeseung," he says slowly. "The past few weeks. Ever since he told me about the confession. And I've never seen him like this before."

Your stomach drops. "Like what?"

"Like… happy. Genuinely happy. Not the surface-level people-pleasing happiness he shows everyone else, but something real. Something that goes all the way down." Jungwon's voice is earnest, almost protective. "Heeseung is my friend. One of my best friends. And I know what people say about him, that he's a player, a womanizer, that he'll charm you and then move on. But that's not who he really is."

You don't know what to say. You don't know where this is going. But you can't seem to interrupt, can't seem to find the words to stop him.

"Heeseung is…" Jungwon pauses, searching for the right words. "He's the guy who will stay up all night helping you debug code even when he has his own assignments due. He's the guy who remembers everyone's birthday and always gets them a gift that shows he actually paid attention to what they like. He's the guy who can't say no to anyone, ever, because he's so terrified of disappointing people that he'd rather burn himself out than let someone down."

He smiles, but there is something sad in it. "Girls think he's flirting with them because he's nice to everyone. And he won't correct them because he doesn't want to hurt their feelings. So he just… lets them believe what they want to believe, and then he feels guilty when they get attached, and the whole thing becomes this cycle he can't break out of. It's not malice. It's the exact opposite of malice, it's too much kindness, too much caring, and not enough ability to set boundaries."

Your throat is dry. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I think you're different." Jungwon meets your eyes, and his gaze is steady and sincere. "I think you actually see him. Not the reputation, not the rumors, but the real him. And I think he's starting to see the real you too." He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer. Almost fragile. "So I need you to promise me something."

"What?"

"Take care of him. Please." Jungwon's smile is gentle, but there is something behind it, something that looks a lot like pain, carefully hidden, expertly concealed. "He's been alone for a long time, even when he's surrounded by people. I don't think he even realizes how lonely he is. But you… you could change that. I can see it."

The wave of emotion that crashes over you is so overwhelming that you can't speak. This isn't how this conversation is supposed to go. You are supposed to confess to Jungwon. You are supposed to clear up the misunderstanding. You are supposed to finally tell him the truth.

Who knows - Daniel Caesar playing now

But Jungwon isn't finished.

"There's something else I should tell you," he says, and his voice drops even lower, barely above a whisper. "Something I probably shouldn't say. But I think I need to, or I'll regret it forever."

"What is it?"

Jungwon looks down at his hands, folded on the table. When he speaks, his voice is steady, but you can hear the effort it takes to keep it that way.

"I like you."

The words don't make sense. They can't make sense. You hear them, understand them individually, but your brain refuses to assemble them into a coherent meaning.

"What?" you breathe.

"I like you," Jungwon repeats, and now he looks up at you, and his eyes are so full of something, regret, maybe, or longing, or both, that it makes your chest ache. "From the first day of philosophy class. You sat in the front row, near the window, and you had like eight different colored highlighters lined up on your desk, and you took notes so furiously that your pen ran out of ink halfway through the lecture. I remember you made this little frustrated noise and searched your bag for a spare, and you looked so genuinely distraught that I almost offered you mine."

The library. The philosophy lecture. The day you ran out of ink. You remember it, vaguely, distantly, a moment so mundane you never thought about it again. But Jungwon remembers. Jungwon has been watching you, just like you have been watching him.

"I noticed you after that," he continues, and his voice is achingly soft. "The way you always sat in the same spot. The way you organized your notes. The way you bit your lip when you were concentrating. I kept telling myself I'd talk to you, but I could never find the right moment. And then midterms happened, and we were both in the library at 2 AM, and I saw you looking exhausted and stressed, and I just…" He laughs, but it is a sad sound. "I gave you gummy bears because I couldn't think of anything else to do. It felt so stupid at the time. Who gives gummy bears to a stranger at 2 AM?"

"A stranger who hadn't slept in thirty-six hours and was about to cry over organic chemistry," you whisper. "It wasn't stupid. It was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me."

Jungwon's smile flickers. "I was working up the courage to actually talk to you. To ask you out properly. But then…" He trails off, and his expression shifts, something closing off behind his eyes. "Then Heeseung told me about the confession. And I saw the way he looked when he talked about you. And I knew… I knew I'd missed my chance."

No. No, no, no. This is wrong. This is all wrong. He hasn't missed his chance. The chance is right here, right now, sitting in front of him with a heart full of feelings that have always been meant for him.

"Jungwon," you say, and your voice cracks. "The letter… it wasn't-"

"I'm not telling you this to make things awkward," Jungwon interrupts gently. "I'm telling you because I want you to know. I like you. I really, really like you. And sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I'd been braver, if I'd said something sooner, if I hadn't waited until it was too late." He pauses, and his eyes meet yours, and the weight of what he says presses down on your chest like a physical force. "But I'm glad it's Heeseung. He deserves someone like you. And you deserve someone who sees you the way he does."

"You don't understand," you try, desperation creeping into your voice. "It wasn't supposed to be Heeseung. The letter was meant for-"

"Take care of him," Jungwon says again, and this time his voice is final. Resolute. Like he has already made his peace with something you haven't even realized he was struggling with. "That's all I ask."

He stands up, gathering his book and his notebook, and you watch him with a growing sense of panic. This can't be how it ends. You can't let him walk away without knowing the truth.

But then he pauses, looking down at you with that devastating smile, the one that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes your heart do somersaults, and he reaches out and gently pokes your cheek.

"Boop," he says softly.

The gesture that once made you giddy with joy now feels like a knife twisting in your chest.

"Liking you was never a waste of my time, Y/N," he says, and his voice is tender in a way that breaks your heart into a thousand pieces. "I don't regret it. Not even for a second."

And then he walks away, and you are left alone at your table with a biology textbook you haven't read and a heart that is shattering into so many fragments you don't know if you will ever be able to put it back together.

I like you.

I gave you gummy bears because I couldn't think of anything else to do.

Liking you was never a waste of my time.

He liked you. He liked you this whole time. All those months of pining, of yearning, of writing and rewriting that letter and he has been feeling the same thing. You have been two ships passing in the night, each carrying the same cargo of unspoken feelings, and you have missed each other by a margin so narrow it is almost laughable.

But it isn't laughable. It is devastating. It is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to you, and you are sitting in the middle of a silent library trying not to fall apart.

You don't remember packing up your things. You don't remember leaving the library. One moment you are staring at the spot where Jungwon was sitting, and the next you are walking across campus in the fading evening light, your backpack hanging heavy from your shoulders, your feet carrying you automatically toward your dorm.

And then the tears come.

They start slow, a burning sensation behind your eyes, a tightness in your throat. You try to swallow them down, try to hold them back, but they won't be contained. By the time you reach the pathway between the science building and the student union, you are crying openly, tears streaming down your cheeks in hot, relentless rivers.

This isn't a romantic cry. This isn't the kind of crying that happens in movies, where the heroine looks beautiful and tragic and a single perfect tear rolls down her cheek. This is an ugly cry. A messy, hiccuping, snotty cry that makes your nose run and your shoulders shake and your breath come in ragged gasps. You are crying because the boy you liked liked you back, and instead of ending up together like you were supposed to, everything has gone terribly, irreversibly wrong.

You stop walking. You can't keep going. Your legs won't carry you any further. You lean against the rough bark of a tree and press your hands to your face, trying to muffle the sounds that escape from your throat.

You cry for the letter you sent to the wrong person. You cry for the courage it took to write it, and the cowardice that has kept you from correcting your mistake. You cry for Jungwon, who liked you and gave up on you because he thought you wanted someone else. You cry for yourself, for the hopeless romantic who dreamed of grand gestures and perfect moments and has ended up with nothing but misunderstandings and a heavy heart that breaks into smaller and smaller pieces.

You cry until your throat is raw and your eyes are swollen and you don't think you have any tears left to shed.

And then a voice, gentle, concerned, painfully familiar, cuts through the fog of your grief.

"Y/N?"

You look up.

Lee Heeseung stands on the pathway a few feet away, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his expression shifting from casual curiosity to alarm as he takes in your tear-streaked face and trembling shoulders.

"Hey," he says, and his voice is softer than you have ever heard it. "Hey, what's wrong? What happened?"

You should make an excuse. You should say you are fine, that it's allergies, that you just got something in your eye. You should tell him to leave you alone, to give you space, to let you fall apart in private.

But the words won't come. All that comes out is another sob, and your knees buckle slightly, and then Heeseung is there, his hands on your shoulders, steadying you.

"It's okay," he says, even though he doesn't know what is wrong, even though you haven't explained anything. "It's okay. I've got you."

"No, you don't understand," you choke out. "Everything is messed up. Everything is so messed up and it's all my fault."

"Then we'll fix it." He says it with such simple certainty, like it is the most obvious thing in the world. "Whatever it is, we'll fix it."

"You can't fix this. No one can fix this."

"Maybe not." Heeseung's hands move from your shoulders to your upper arms, his grip gentle but grounding. "But I can be here. I can listen. And I can promise you that whatever it is, you don't have to deal with it alone."

Something in his voice, the steadiness, the sincerity, the complete lack of judgment, cracks through the last of your defenses. You stop trying to hold yourself together. You let the tears fall, let your shoulders shake, let yourself be exactly as broken as you feel.

And Heeseung doesn't flinch. He doesn't look uncomfortable or try to escape or offer meaningless platitudes. He just stands there, his hands warm on your arms, his presence solid and unwavering, letting you cry without asking for explanations or justifications.

After a while, you don't know how long, the tears begin to subside. Your breathing steadies. The storm inside you quiets to a dull, aching calm. You wipe your eyes with the back of your hand, suddenly aware of how awful you must look, how puffy and red and wrecked.

"I'm sorry," you whisper. "Your jacket is probably wet."

"My jacket has survived worse." Heeseung's voice is gentle. "Come on. Let's sit down somewhere."

He guides you to a bench nearby, a small wooden bench tucked under a cluster of trees, partially hidden from the main pathway. You sit down heavily, your legs still shaky, and Heeseung sits beside you, close enough that you can feel the warmth of his body but not so close that it feels invasive.

Dream - Keshi playing now

For a long moment, neither of you speaks. The evening settles around you, the sky shifting from pale blue to soft pink to deeper purple. A few stars start to appear, faint pinpricks of light against the darkening canvas overhead. The campus is quiet, most students already back in their dorms or the library, and the only sounds are the distant hum of traffic and the occasional rustle of leaves in the breeze.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Heeseung asks eventually.

"Not really."

"Okay." He doesn't push. He doesn't pry. He just sits there, his shoulder almost touching yours, his presence a quiet comfort in the gathering dark.

"You're not going to ask questions?"

"You'll tell me when you're ready. Or you won't. Either way, I'm not going anywhere."

The simplicity of it, the uncomplicated, undemanding kindness of it, makes your eyes sting with fresh tears. You blink them back, determined not to start crying again.

"Why are you being so nice to me?" you ask, your voice hoarse.

Heeseung turns his head to look at you, and his expression is unreadable. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Because… because I'm a disaster. Because I've been weird and awkward and I ran away from you and hid behind bulletin boards and spilled coffee on myself and I can't seem to do anything right. Because you barely know me, and what you do know is mostly just me making a fool of myself."

Heeseung is quiet for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he smiles. Not the smirk or the teasing grin, but something softer. Something realer.

"Can you guess the movie I've watched recently?"

The question is so random that you blink. "What?"

"A movie I've watched recently. Can you guess?"

"Am I supposed to?"

"No, because I've never told you." He leans back on the bench, tilting his face up toward the emerging stars. "I don't usually tell people. It's kind of embarrassing."

You sniffle, curiosity temporarily overriding your grief. "What is it?"

"To All the Boys I've Loved Before."

You stare at him. "The Netflix movie? The one with Lara Jean?"

"The very same." He doesn't look embarrassed at all. If anything, he looks almost proud. "I've watched it like eight times. Maybe nine. I lost count somewhere around the sixth viewing."

"But… that's a teen romance. That's a movie about fake dating and love letters and-" You stop. "Oh."

"Yeah." Heeseung's smile turns wry. "The parallels weren't lost on me. Girl writes love letters she never meant to send. Letters end up reaching the boys. Chaos ensues." He glances at you sideways. "Sound familiar?"

Your heart does something strange, something fluttery and uncertain. "Why did you watch it?"

"Because Lara Jean is a hopeless romantic who's terrified of actually living the romance she dreams about." Heeseung's voice is thoughtful, almost contemplative. "She's brave on paper but scared in real life. She has all these feelings and no idea what to do with them. And she's convinced that if she actually tries to be vulnerable, everything will fall apart."

He turns to look at you fully, his dark eyes catching the faint glow of the distant streetlamps. "Does any of that sound familiar to you?"

Your breath catches in your throat.

"You write beautiful letters," Heeseung continues, his voice dropping lower. "You pour your heart onto paper because it's safer than saying things out loud. You make graphs about video game balance because you're passionate and detail-oriented and you can't help but go all-in on the things you care about. You talk to your plants and name your succulents and hide behind bulletin boards because real life is scary and rejection is terrifying and it's easier to dream about love than to actually risk your heart for it."

You can't speak. You can barely breathe. He is describing you, not the surface-level you, not the "weird first-year STEM student" you, but the real you. The you that lives in daydreams and love letters and the safety of your own imagination.

"The letter you wrote wasn't just a confession," Heeseung says quietly. "It was a work of art. The calligraphy, the words, the way you talked about noticing small things and finding beauty in ordinary moments, that's not something you write to just anyone. That's something you write when you've been paying attention. When you really see someone."

He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is almost a whisper.

"You remind me of her. Lara Jean. The girl who was so busy dreaming about love that she almost missed it when it showed up in front of her. You are Lara Jean. My Lara Jean."

Your heart races. Your palms are sweaty. The evening has grown dark around you, the stars fully emerged now, and Heeseung's face is half in shadow, half illuminated by the distant campus lights.

"Why are you telling me this?" you whisper.

"Because I think you're scared," Heeseung says simply. "I think you've been scared since the moment you handed me that letter. I think you're scared of what it means, scared of being vulnerable, scared of letting someone actually see you. And I want you to know that I see you anyway. Even when you're trying to hide."

He reaches out, and his hand finds yours in the darkness. His fingers are warm, his grip gentle.

"You don't have to be scared with me," he says. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going to hurt you. And I'm not going to stop being interested just because you're awkward or clumsy or you spill coffee on yourself or you ramble about League of Legends until you run out of breath." He squeezes your hand. "That's the stuff I like about you. That's the stuff that makes you real."

You stare at him, your eyes still swollen from crying, your nose still red, your heart still aching from the conversation with Jungwon. And yet, sitting here on this bench with Heeseung's hand in yours and his words echoing in your ears, something shifts. Something changes.

"I don't know what I'm doing," you admit, your voice barely audible. "I don't know what I want. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel."

"Then don't figure it out tonight." Heeseung stands up, still holding your hand, and gently pulls you to your feet. "Come on. Let's get you back to your dorm. You need rest and probably some water. Crying is dehydrating."

Despite everything, the heartbreak, the confusion, the complete emotional chaos of the past hour, you almost smile. "That's a very practical observation."

"I'm an engineering student. We're practical by nature." He falls into step beside you, your hands still joined, and begins walking you toward your dorm building. "Also, I may have done some research on crying. You know, for science."

"You researched crying for science?"

"It was for a psych elective. But also for life skills. You'd be surprised how many people don't know that emotional tears contain stress hormones that need to be flushed out of your system. Crying is literally good for you."

"You're very weird," you say, but there's no bite to it.

"Coming from the girl who named her succulent Jason, I'll take that as a compliment."

You walk in silence for a while, the campus quiet and peaceful around you. The stars are bright overhead, and the air is cool against your tear-stained cheeks, and Heeseung's hand is warm in yours, steady and reassuring.

When you reach your dorm building, he stops at the entrance, turning to face you. The light from the lobby spills through the glass doors, illuminating his features, the sharp line of his jaw, the gentle curve of his lips, the way his dark eyes fix on your face like you are something worth looking at.

"Y/N," he says.

"Yeah?"

"I meant what I said earlier. You don't have to figure everything out tonight. You don't have to have all the answers. But whatever you're going through, whatever made you cry like that… I hope you know you can talk to me. About anything. Even if it's hard. Even if it's confusing. Even if it's not what you think I want to hear."

Your throat tightens. He has no idea how relevant those words are. He has no idea that the thing that made you cry is, in part, him or at least, the situation he is unknowingly caught up in.

"Thank you," you whisper.

Heeseung smiles, that same soft smile that appeared when he poured coffee over his head, when he called you a little mouse, when he listened to you talk about video games for fifteen minutes straight. And then, before you can react, he leans forward and presses a gentle kiss to your cheek.

It isn't romantic or it isn't supposed to be. It is brief and soft and chaste, the kind of kiss you might give a friend who is hurting. But his lips are warm against your skin, and when he pulls back, your cheek is tingling, and your heart does that traitorous flutter again.

"Goodnight, little mouse," he says. "Get some sleep."

And then he walks away, his hands in his pockets, his silhouette disappearing into the darkness of the campus night.

You stand there for a long moment, your hand pressed to your cheek where his lips have been, your heart a tangled mess of grief and confusion and something else, something warm and growing, something you don't want to name.

This is supposed to be simple. You are supposed to like Jungwon. You have liked Jungwon for four months. You wrote him a letter and dreamt about him and catalogued his habits and built an entire future around the idea of him.

But Jungwon walked away. Jungwon made his choice. Jungwon told you to take care of Heeseung and then poked your cheek one last time, a goodbye disguised as a signature gesture.

And Heeseung… Heeseung poured coffee on himself to make you feel less alone. Heeseung held your hand and told you that you were his Lara Jean. Heeseung kissed your cheek and called you little mouse and looked at you like you were something precious.

You don't know what to do anymore. You don't know what to feel. The map you have been following, the one that leads straight to Jungwon has crumbled in your hands, and now you stand in unfamiliar territory with no compass and no guide.

You push open the door to your dorm building and walk to your room in a daze, your mind still spinning. When you finally collapse onto your bed, still in your clothes, still wearing the tear tracks on your cheeks, you stare up at the ceiling and try to make sense of the chaos in your heart.

Jungwon liked you.

Jungwon gave up on you.

Heeseung said he wouldn't go anywhere.

Heeseung kissed your cheek.

You press your fingers to the spot where his lips have been and close your eyes.

"I don't know what I'm doing," you whisper to your empty room. "I really, really don't know what I'm doing."

Your room, as always, offers no answers. But somewhere in the distance, you can almost hear Heeseung's voice: You don't have to figure everything out tonight.

So you don't. You let the exhaustion pull you under, let sleep claim you, and try very hard not to think about the fact that the boy who just comforted you through your heartbreak is the same boy who might be slowly, quietly, unexpectedly stealing your heart.

The university, in its infinite and questionable wisdom, has decided that what the student body really needs is a three-day trip to a skiing station.

You received the email three weeks ago, skimmed it with the vague interest of someone who has never skied in her life and has no intention of starting now, and promptly archived it into the dark abyss of your inbox alongside seventeen other emails you will never open again. The trip is optional, after all. Attendance is not mandatory. You can simply stay on campus, enjoy the quiet emptiness of the dorms, and continue your ongoing mission of avoiding all tall informatics students while trying to piece together the shattered remnants of your romantic life.

It is a perfect plan. Flawless. Foolproof.

Until Yunjin gets involved.

"You're going," Yunjin says, standing in the doorway of your dorm room with her arms crossed and her expression one of immovable determination. She has just finished reading the email over your shoulder, and the glint in her eye is the same one she gets when she is about to bulldoze through every objection you can possibly raise.

"I'm not going," you reply, not looking up from your biology textbook. "I don't ski. I don't snowboard. I don't even own a proper winter coat. The heaviest thing I own is a cardigan, and I'm pretty sure it's made of acrylic."

"Then we'll get you a coat."

"Yunjin."

"Y/N."

"I can't go to a skiing station. I have studying to do. I have lab reports to write. I have approximately eight hundred flashcards to review before the next exam. My social life is already a disaster zone, I don't need to add frostbite and potential avalanche-related injuries to my list of problems."

Yunjin steps fully into the room, closes the door behind her, and fixes you with a look that you recognize as her "I'm about to say something brutally honest and you're not going to like it" expression. "You've been moping for two weeks."

"I haven't been moping. I've been processing."

"You've been moping. You've been staring at walls, listening to sad music, and eating instant ramen for every meal. I saw you crying over a nature documentary the other day because the baby penguin got separated from its family."

"That was emotionally manipulative editing! They set it to sad piano music! Anyone would have cried!"

"Y/N." Yunjin sits down on the edge of your bed, her voice softening. "I know about Jungwon. I know he told you he liked you and then walked away. I know you've been carrying that around like a weight on your chest. But hiding in your room isn't going to make it better. You need to get out. You need fresh air. You need to do something that isn't just staring at the same four walls and replaying the same conversation over and over in your head."

You set down your highlighter. "What if I run into Jungwon on the trip?"

"Then you'll be a normal human being about it. Or you'll be weird and awkward, which is your default state anyway, so nothing will have changed."

"Comforting."

"What if you run into Heeseung?"

The question catches you off guard. Your hand stills on your textbook, and you feel that familiar, complicated flutter in your chest, the one that has been appearing more and more frequently whenever someone mentions his name. "I don't know. I haven't really talked to him since…" Since the night he kissed your cheek. Since the night you realized that maybe, just maybe, your heart is no longer as firmly in Jungwon's camp as you always assumed.

"Exactly," Yunjin says, as if your silence has proven her point. "You need to figure things out. And you can't do that if you're hiding in your dorm room subsisting on sodium and self-pity. The ski trip is three days. Three days of fresh mountain air, hot chocolate, and the chance to actually talk to people face-to-face instead of through a fog of depression ramen."

"The ramen isn't that bad."

"The ramen is a cry for help."

You are quiet for a moment, staring at the pages of your textbook without really seeing them. Yunjin is right. You know she is right. You have been hiding from Jungwon, from Heeseung, from the tangled mess of feelings that you still haven't sorted out. The past two weeks have been a blur of avoidance and overthinking, and you are no closer to clarity than you were on that bench under the stars.

"Fine," you say finally, the word escaping before you can stop it. "I'll go."

Yunjin's face lights up. "Really?"

"But I'm not skiing. I refuse to ski. I'll sit in the lodge and drink hot chocolate and judge people from the window like a ghost."

"That's the spirit."

The morning of the trip arrives with a gray sky and a biting chill in the air. You stand outside the student union with your hastily packed duffel bag, which contains exactly zero items suitable for winter sports because your wardrobe is approximately eighty percent oversized sweaters and twenty percent academic stress, and watch your breath fog in the cold morning air.

The bus is already parked at the curb, a massive coach with the university logo emblazoned on the side. Students mill around, dragging suitcases and carrying thermoses of coffee, their chatter filling the air with a buzz of excitement. You spot a few familiar faces from your classes, a group of engineering students comparing snowboards, and your heart lurches, a flash of dark hair that might be Jungwon disappearing into the bus.

Yunjin has already boarded, abandoning you for a seat near the front because she wants to "network with the economics majors" or some other nonsense that you can't relate to. You are alone, clutching your bag and wondering if it is too late to fake a sudden illness, when a voice speaks directly behind you.

"Need help with your bag?"

You spin around so fast that your duffel bag swings in a wide arc and nearly takes out an innocent bystander. The innocent bystander, thankfully, has very good reflexes. He ducks, straightens up, and smiles at you with that familiar, devastating smile that has been haunting your dreams for weeks.

Heeseung.

He wears a black puffer jacket that makes his shoulders look even broader, a gray beanie pulled low over his hair, and a pair of snow boots that actually look like they belong on a ski trip. His cheeks are slightly pink from the cold, and his eyes are bright with that unshakeable, inexplicable cheerfulness that seems to follow him everywhere.

"Hi," you say, because your brain has apparently decided that monosyllables are all you can manage.

"Hi," he replies, his smile widening. "Fancy meeting you here. I thought you said you were photosensitive and couldn't be exposed to direct light. Is snow-light different from regular light?"

"That was a lie and you know it."

"I know." He reaches out and gently takes your duffel bag from your white-knuckled grip. "Come on. Let's find seats together. The bus is filling up."

"I… what… together?"

"Unless you already have a seatmate?"

Yunjin has abandoned you. You have no allies, no escape routes, and no valid excuses. "No," you admit. "I don't."

"Great." Heeseung starts walking toward the bus, your bag slung easily over his shoulder like it weighs nothing. "Fair warning, I'm a chronic window-seat person. I need to be able to stare dramatically at the scenery while contemplating the meaning of life."

"That's very specific."

"It's a lifestyle choice."

You follow him onto the bus, your heart doing that complicated gymnastics routine that it has perfected over the past few weeks. Heeseung navigates through the aisle with practiced ease, nodding at people who call out to him, exchanging quick greetings, but never stopping until he reaches an empty row near the middle of the bus.

"Window seat's yours," he says, gesturing for you to go first.

"I thought you said you were a chronic window-seat person."

"I am. But I'm making an exception." He stows your bag in the overhead compartment, then steps back to let you pass. "Consider it part of the whole starting slow thing. Sacrifices must be made."

You slide into the window seat, your heart hammering, and Heeseung settles in beside you. The seats are closer together than you expected. His shoulder brushes against yours, and even through the layers of your coats, you can feel the warmth of his body. You press yourself slightly closer to the window, trying to create more space, but the universe, in its infinite comedic wisdom, has clearly designed this bus to maximize accidental physical contact.

"Comfortable?" Heeseung asks, his voice tinged with amusement.

"Extremely. Never been more comfortable in my life. This is peak comfort."

"You're pressed against the window like you're trying to phase through it."

"The window is cold. The glass is… nice. I like glass."

Heeseung laughs, that genuine, surprised laugh that you heard in the cafeteria and the café and on the bench under the stars. "You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"The rambling thing. The nervous rambling thing." He turns in his seat slightly, facing you. "You know you don't have to be nervous around me, right? I thought we established this. Coffee disaster solidarity. Matching shirts. The whole thing."

"I'm not nervous," you lie. "I'm just… the bus is very… bus-like. It's making me feel things."

"Bus-like feelings."

"Exactly."

Heeseung shakes his head, still smiling, and pulls a pair of earbuds from his jacket pocket. "Here. Music helps me relax on long trips. We can share if you want."

He offers you one of his earbuds, holding it out between his fingers like it is something precious. The gesture is so simple, so unexpectedly intimate, that your breath catches in your throat. Sharing earbuds means sitting close enough for the cord to reach. Sharing earbuds means listening to his music, hearing the songs he likes, experiencing something together in the quiet space between words.

"Okay," you whisper, taking the earbud.

Your fingers brush against his, just for a second, and the contact sends a spark of electricity up your arm. You quickly insert the earbud, focusing very hard on not thinking about how close he is, how warm his shoulder feels against yours, how the faint scent of his cologne fills the space between you.

"What are we listening to?" you ask.

"A playlist I made," Heeseung says, scrolling through his phone. "It's kind of all over the place. Some indie, some R&B, some stuff I found on TikTok that got stuck in my head. I'm not very organized with my music."

"That's shocking. I assumed an informatics engineering student would have their music meticulously categorized by genre, mood, and decade of release."

"You assumed wrong. My playlists are chaos. This one is literally called vibes idk."

"That's the worst playlist name I've ever heard."

"It's an accurate playlist name. You'll see."

Lovers - Anna of the North playing now

He presses play, and music fills your ear.

"We should play a game," Heeseung says after a few songs have played. "To pass the time."

"What kind of game?"

"Twenty questions. But the version where you can skip questions if you don't want to answer. No pressure, no judgment, no awkwardness."

You consider this. Twenty questions with Heeseung is a dangerous proposition. There are so many things you don't want to answer, so many topics you have been carefully avoiding, so many truths that are still tangled up in misunderstandings and misplaced letters. But there is also something disarming about the way he offers the terms, no pressure, no judgment, no awkwardness, like he genuinely cares about making you feel safe.

"Fine," you say. "But you go first."

"Okay." Heeseung leans back in his seat, his shoulder still pressed against yours, his expression thoughtful. "What's your favorite movie of all time?"

"Pride and Prejudice. The 2005 version with Keira Knightley."

"The hand flex scene?"

You turn to stare at him. "You know about the hand flex scene?"

"Every person with a functioning heart knows about the hand flex scene. It's cinema history. Mr. Darcy flexing his hand after helping Elizabeth into the carriage because he's so overwhelmed by touching her? Iconic. Revolutionary. I think about it at least once a week."

You don't know what to do with this information. Lee Heeseung, reputed womanizer, hot informatics engineering student, the guy who is currently wearing a beanie and looking unfairly attractive in bus lighting, knows about the hand flex scene from Pride and Prejudice. He thinks about it weekly.

"You're very strange," you say.

"I prefer culturally literate."

"You said you've watched To All the Boys I've Loved Before at least six times."

"That's one of my favorite modern movies. Pride and Prejudice is my favorite classic. I contain multitudes." He nudges your shoulder with his. "Ask me something else."

The questions flow back and forth as the bus winds its way out of the city and into the mountains. You learn that Heeseung has an older brother who he FaceTimes every Sunday, that he chose informatics engineering because he loves the logic of coding but secretly dreams of being a music producer, that he loves Shin ramyeon and has created his own way of eating his instant noodles. He learns that you started collecting highlighters in middle school and now own over forty different colors, that you have named every plant in your dorm room after characters from classic literature, that you once won a poetry contest in high school but never told anyone because you were embarrassed.

The landscape outside the window shifts as the bus climbs higher into the mountains. Snow begins to appear, first in patches, then in sweeping blankets that cover the trees and the slopes and the distant peaks. The sky is a pale winter blue, and the sun glints off the snow.

"Next question," Heeseung says. "What's something you're scared of?"

The question hangs in the air between you, weightier than the ones that have come before. You could give a surface-level answer, spiders, heights, the dark, but something about the quiet intimacy of the bus, the warmth of his shoulder against yours, the gentle music in your ear, makes you want to be honest.

"Being seen," you say quietly. "Really seen. By someone who matters."

Heeseung doesn't respond right away. When he does, his voice is soft. "Why?"

"Because if someone really sees you, they might not like what they find. It's easier to stay on the surface. To be the version of yourself that you can control." You pause, watching the snow-covered trees blur past the window. "I'm good at dreaming about things. Imagining them. Writing them down. But actually doing them… actually putting myself out there… that's the scary part."

"That's why you write letters," Heeseung says. It isn't a question.

"Yeah. It's safer on paper. You can edit a letter. You can cross things out and start over. You can't do that with real life."

Heeseung is quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks, his words are careful and measured.

"For what it's worth," he says, "I've been seeing you for a few weeks now. The real you, I mean. The one who rambles and spills coffee and hides behind bulletin boards. And I haven't found anything I don't like yet."

Your heart stutters. You don't know what to say, so you say nothing, just let the music fill the space between you and try to memorize the exact timbre of his voice saying those words.

The skiing station is everything the brochure promised and more. A sprawling complex of wooden lodges and snow-covered slopes, nestled in a valley surrounded by towering peaks. The air is crisp and clean, carrying the scent of pine and woodsmoke, and the snow glitteres under the afternoon sun like a carpet of crushed diamonds.

You step off the bus and immediately sink three inches into a snowdrift.

"Excellent start," Yunjin says, appearing at your elbow and grinning. "Really graceful. Ten out of ten."

"I didn't see it."

"It's snow. It's everywhere. How did you not see it?"

You extract your foot from the drift and shake the snow off your boot with as much dignity as you can muster. "I was distracted by the scenery."

"Uh-huh." Yunjin's grin widens. "And by the scenery, you mean the six-foot-tall informatics student you spent the entire bus ride cuddled up with?"

"We weren't cuddling. We were sharing earbuds. There's a difference."

"There's really not."

You grab your duffel bag from the luggage compartment and follow the crowd toward the main lodge, your cheeks burning despite the cold. The lodge is a massive timber-frame building with a soaring ceiling, a massive stone fireplace, and windows that look out over the slopes. Students are already scattered across the lobby, checking in, collecting room keys, and making plans for the afternoon.

Your room is small but cozy, with a window that faces the mountains and a bed that looks impossibly inviting. You dump your bag on the floor, plug in your phone to charge, and then immediately find yourself staring out the window at the snow-covered landscape.

Yunjin finds you an hour later, dragging you out of your room and into the lodge's main café for hot chocolate. The café is warm and bustling, filled with students comparing ski passes and swapping stories about near-misses on the slopes. You find a table near the window, and Yunjin wastes no time in grilling you about the bus ride.

"So," she says, stirring her hot chocolate with a cinnamon stick, "Heeseung."

"What about him?"

"You spent three hours cuddled up with him on a bus."

"Sharing earbuds is not cuddling."

"You let him listen to music with you. You played twenty questions. You told him about your highlighter collection and the poetry contest you never told anyone about." Yunjin fixes you with a knowing look. "Those are not casual bus acquaintance topics. Those are I'm emotionally vulnerable with this person topics."

You stare into your hot chocolate. "I don't know what I'm doing, Yunjin. Everything is so tangled up. I started this whole mess because I was too scared to confess to the right person, and now the wrong person has been nothing but kind and thoughtful and unexpectedly perfect, and the right person told me he liked me and then walked away, and I don't know what I'm supposed to feel anymore."

Yunjin is quiet for a moment. Then she reaches across the table and places her hand on yours. "Maybe there isn't a supposed to. Maybe there's just what you actually feel, when you strip away all the expectations and the plans and the ideas about how things were meant to go."

You look up at her. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, you've been so focused on the idea of Jungwon, the letter, the confession, the grand romantic gesture, that you might have missed what's been happening right in front of you." She squeezes your hand. "Heeseung poured coffee on himself so you wouldn't feel alone. He held your hand while you cried. He looked at you on that bus like you were the most interesting person he'd ever met."

"That doesn't mean-"

"Y/N." Yunjin's voice is gentle but firm. "When are you going to stop being scared and start being honest?"

The question hits you like a punch to the chest. Because she is right. Yunjin is always right, that is the infuriating thing about her. You have been scared since the moment you walked into that PC room, scared of rejection, scared of humiliation, scared of what would happen if you actually let someone see you. And that fear has led you into a labyrinth of misunderstandings and half-truths, and somewhere along the way, you have gotten so lost that you can't even see the exit anymore.

"I need to tell him," you say quietly. "Heeseung. I need to tell him the truth about the letter."

Yunjin nods. "I think that's a good idea."

"He might hate me."

"He might. But he also might not. And either way, you'll finally be able to stop carrying this around." She leans back in her chair, blowing on her hot chocolate. "Besides, from everything you've told me about him, I don't think hating you is high on his list of priorities."

"What if it ruins everything?"

"What if it fixes everything?"

You don't have an answer to that. You just sit there, watching the snow fall outside the window, and feel the weight of your decision settling onto your shoulders. Tonight. You will tell him tonight. Before dinner, maybe, or after. You will find a quiet moment, away from the crowds and the noise and the chaos of the ski trip, and you will finally, finally tell him the truth.

Finding Heeseung turns out to be easier said than done.

The ski station is massive, a maze of slopes and trails and lodges that all look exactly the same. You wander through the main lodge, check the café, peek into the game room, and even brave the equipment rental shop where a terrifyingly efficient employee tries to convince you to try snowboarding. You escape with your dignity barely intact and a pamphlet about beginner lessons that you immediately stuff into the nearest trash can.

It isn't until you step outside, squinting against the glare of the sun on the snow, that you spot him.

He is on the intermediate slope, a dark figure against the white expanse of snow, cutting down the mountain with the kind of effortless grace that makes your heart lurch into your throat. He is snowboarding, of course he is snowboarding, because apparently there is nothing Lee Heeseung can't do and he moves like he was born on a board.

You have two options. Option one: wait at the bottom of the slope like a normal person and flag him down when he finishes his run. Option two: try to reach him now, which will involve navigating the snowy terrain between you and the slope, a task for which you are woefully underprepared both in terms of footwear and basic motor coordination.

You choose option two, because you are an idiot.

The path to the slope is a gentle incline of packed snow that looks deceptively easy to traverse. You take three steps and immediately realize your mistake. The snow is slippery, not the powdery kind of snow that crunches satisfyingly underfoot, but the packed, icy kind that has been trampled by hundreds of skiers and snowboarders and now has the texture of a skating rink.

You take a fourth step. Your foot slides. You windmill your arms frantically. Your other foot slides in the opposite direction. For one glorious, suspended moment, you do something that might generously be called a split, and then gravity takes over and you go down in a tangle of limbs and snow and absolute humiliation.

"Y/N?"

The voice comes from above you. You look up, snow clinging to your hair and your eyelashes and probably places you don't want to think about, and there is Heeseung, standing over you with his snowboard tucked under his arm and an expression somewhere between concern and barely suppressed laughter.

"Hi," you say weakly. "I was looking for you."

"You found me." He kneels down beside you, brushing snow off your shoulder. "Are you okay? That looked like a pretty spectacular fall."

"I've had better. I've also had worse. This is somewhere in the middle."

"Your standards for falls must be very high."

"I'm an overachiever."

Heeseung laughs and offers you his hand. You take it, and he pulls you to your feet with the same easy strength he showed in the café, steadying you when you wobble on the slippery snow.

"Come on," he says, still holding your hand. "Let's get you somewhere less treacherous. The beginner slope is over there, it's flatter and a lot less likely to attack you."

"I don't snowboard."

"I'll teach you."

"Heeseung-"

"It'll be fun. I promise." He already guides you toward the beginner slope, his hand warm and solid around yours. "Besides, you came all this way to find me. The least I can do is give you a snowboarding lesson."

The beginner slope is, as promised, much less intimidating than the intermediate one. It is a gentle hill with a slow incline, populated by other beginners who fall over with the same frequency and enthusiasm that you anticipate for yourself. Heeseung finds a quiet spot near the edge, props his snowboard in the snow, and turns to you with an expression of exaggerated seriousness.

"Okay, lesson one: standing on the board without falling."

"That sounds fake."

"It's very real. I've done it many times."

"Show-off."

He grins and proceeds to walk you through the basics of snowboarding with the patience of a saint and the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely loves sharing his hobbies. He holds your hands when you wobble, catches you when you fall, and laughs with you instead of at you when you face-plant into a snowbank for the third time in ten minutes.

"You're getting better," he says, pulling you upright after your fourth fall. Snow dusts his beanie and clings to his eyelashes, and his cheeks are flushed pink from the cold. "That time you almost made it five feet."

"Almost being the key word."

"Almost is progress. Almost is the first step toward eventually."

You look at him, really look at him and feel something shift in your chest. This is it. This is the moment. You can't put it off any longer.

"I need to tell you something," you say, your voice coming out steadier than you feel. "Can we sit down for a minute?"

Heeseung's expression flickers, curiosity, concern, something else you can't name but he nods. "Of course."

You find a bench near the edge of the slope, tucked under a pine tree whose branches are heavy with snow. The afternoon sun starts to sink lower in the sky, painting the mountains in shades of gold and pink, and the air is cold enough to make your breath fog. You sit down, and Heeseung sits beside you, close but not too close, his snowboard propped against the bench.

For a long moment, you don't say anything. You are gathering your courage, trying to find the right words, trying to figure out how to start a conversation that might change everything.

"The letter," you say finally. "The one I gave you in the PC room. There's something I need to tell you about it."

Heeseung doesn't react. He just waits, his dark eyes steady on your face.

"It wasn't meant for you," you say, and the words come out in a rush, tumbling over each other in their hurry to escape. "I wrote it for someone else. For Jungwon. I'd been planning to confess to him for weeks, and I'd written this whole letter, and I asked someone where he was and they said he was in the PC room, and I walked in and I saw someone sitting at the computer and I just assumed it was him, and I didn't look, I didn't check, I just handed over the letter and started talking, and then you looked up and it wasn't him at all, it was you and I was so embarrassed and everyone was watching and I couldn't correct you in front of all those people, and then everything spiraled and I kept trying to tell you but I couldn't find the right moment and then Jungwon found out and I couldn't correct it in front of him either and now everything is a mess and I'm so, so sorry, and I understand if you're angry, I understand if you hate me, I just… I couldn't keep lying to you anymore. You deserved to know the truth."

You stop talking. Your heart pounds so hard you can feel it in your temples. Your hands shake, and you press them together in your lap to keep them still. You don't look at Heeseung, you can't look at him, can't bear to see the expression on his face.

The silence stretches for what feels like an eternity.

And then Heeseung says, in the most casual voice imaginable: "I know."

Your head snaps up. "What?"

"I know the letter wasn't meant for me." He smiles, not a smirk, not a grin, but something gentle and warm and completely without judgment. "I've known since the beginning."

"But… how… since when-"

"Since I read it." Heeseung leans back on the bench, looking out at the snow-covered slope with a thoughtful expression. "The letter was beautiful. Every word of it. But it wasn't about me. It was about someone who smiles a certain way, someone who gave you gummy bears at 2 AM, someone who studies hard during free time at the library." He glances at you sideways. "I've never given anyone gummy bears. And I'm an informatics student, I don't take philosophy."

Your brain short-circuits. "You knew. This whole time. You knew."

"I knew."

"And you didn't say anything?"

"What was I supposed to say?" Heeseung's voice is gentle. "You were so flustered and embarrassed, and I could see you panicking in front of everyone. If I called you out right there, you would have been humiliated. And then I kept waiting for you to tell me yourself, but you never did, and eventually I just…" He shrugs. "I got curious. You wrote this incredible letter, and you were so weird and skittish and interesting, and I wanted to understand you. So I kept showing up."

"You kept showing up because I was interesting?"

"At first. Then it became something else." He turns to face you fully, his expression open and earnest. "You're not like the other people who confess to me. They want the idea of me, the reputation, the image. You didn't even want the real me. You wanted someone else entirely. And that was… refreshing. You weren't trying to impress me. You were trying to get rid of me. It was the first time anyone ever hid behind a bulletin board to avoid me."

"I wasn't… I didn't…" You bury your face in your hands. "This is so humiliating."

"It's not humiliating. It's human. You made a mistake. A very entertaining, very elaborate mistake." He gently pulls your hands away from your face, forcing you to look at him. "And somewhere along the way, while you were busy trying to make me lose interest, I got to know the real you. The one who names her plants after literary characters. The one who writes passionate essays about video game balance. The one who cried over a baby penguin last week."

"Yunjin told you about that?"

"Yunjin and I have been texting. But don't worry she didn't spilled all your dirty secrets."

You gape at him. "You and Yunjin have been texting?"

"She reached out after the coffee incident. Said she wanted to make sure my intentions were good." He smiles, a little sheepishly. "I think I passed the test. She said I was less of a disaster than expected."

"I'm going to kill her. I'm going to kill both of you."

"Before you do, let me finish." Heeseung's voice softens, and he takes your hand in his, the same way he did on the bench under the stars, steady and warm and reassuring. "I knew the letter wasn't for me. But I also know that somewhere along the way, something changed. Maybe it changed for you too. Maybe it didn't. Either way, I wanted to give you the space to figure it out on your own terms."

You stare at him, your mind reeling. He knew. He has known this entire time, and instead of being angry or hurt or humiliated, he just… waited. Gave you space. Let you come to him when you were ready.

"You're not upset?" you whisper.

"I'm not upset."

"You don't feel… I don't know, betrayed? Lied to?"

"Y/N." He squeezes your hand. "You were scared. I get it. I've spent my whole life being scared of disappointing people, scared of saying no, scared of letting anyone down. I know what it's like to be trapped in a situation you didn't mean to create. I'm not going to hold that against you."

The tears threaten again, not the ugly, heartbroken tears from that night on the pathway, but something softer. Something that feels almost like relief.

"I'm sorry," you say, your voice cracking. "I'm so sorry for not telling you sooner."

"You're telling me now. That's what matters."

"I don't know what I feel," you admit. "About anything. About anyone. Everything is so confusing."

"Then don't figure it out right now." Heeseung stands up, pulling you gently to your feet. "We have three days at a ski station. There's a jacuzzi. There's hot chocolate. There's an entire mountain to explore. Let's just… enjoy it. See what happens. No pressure, no expectations, no misunderstandings."

Just like that, the weight you have been carrying for weeks, the guilt, the anxiety, the tangled knot of secrets, begins to loosen. Not disappear entirely, but loosen enough that you can breathe again.

"There's really a jacuzzi?" you ask.

Heeseung grins. "There's really a jacuzzi. I saw it on the map. Outdoor, heated, with a view of the mountains. Very romantic. Very much the kind of thing you'd put in a letter about someone."

"You're making fun of me."

"A little bit. But also, I'm serious." He picks up his snowboard and tucks it under his arm. "What do you say? After dinner? We can go check it out."

You think about it. The jacuzzi. With Heeseung. In a swimsuit. In warm water under the stars, surrounded by snow-covered mountains. It is terrifying. It is ridiculous. It is exactly the kind of thing the hopeless romantic inside you has always dreamed about.

"Okay," you say. "After dinner."

By the time dinner rolls around, you are a nervous wreck.

You have spent the rest of the afternoon in your room, alternating between staring at the ceiling and frantically texting Yunjin for advice. Yunjin has responded with a series of increasingly unhelpful messages:

Yunjin: wear the cute swimsuit

You: i don't OWN a cute swimsuit

Yunjin: wear the one you borrowed from me for the pool party last semester

You: the black one???

Yunjin: YES the black one. he won't know what hit him

You: i don't want him to be HIT i want this to be NORMAL

Yunjin: nothing about your life has been normal since the moment you walked into that PC room. embrace it. wear the swimsuit.

You wear the swimsuit.

Underneath your clothes, of course. Underneath a thick sweater, a pair of jeans, and the oversized winter coat you borrowed from Yunjin specifically for this trip. You feel like you are wearing armor, except the armor is actually a swimsuit, and the battle is against your own nervous system.

Dinner is a blur. The lodge's restaurant is packed with students, the noise level somewhere between "lively" and "chaotic," and you barely taste the food on your plate. You keep glancing toward the table where Heeseung sits with a group of his friends, and every time he catches your eye, he smiles at you, that same soft, knowing smile that makes your stomach do complicated acrobatics.

At one point, you accidentally make eye contact with Jungwon across the dining hall. He sits with a group of philosophy students, and when your gazes meet, he raises his hand in a small wave. His expression is unreadable, not sad, not angry, just… neutral. You wave back, and then you both look away, and that is it. A quiet acknowledgment of everything that has happened and everything that hasn't.

After dinner, you return to your room and proceed to have a minor meltdown.

The text from Heeseung arrives at exactly 8:47 PM.

Heeseung: jacuzzi? meet in the lobby in 10? bring a towel

You stare at the message for approximately three full minutes. Then you type out seventeen different responses, delete all of them, and finally settle on:

You: okay

Just "okay." No punctuation. No enthusiasm. Just the monosyllabic response of someone who is either incredibly chill or seconds away from spontaneous combustion.

You grab your towel and make your way to the lobby. The lodge is quieter now, most students either in the game room or in their own rooms recovering from the day's activities. The fireplace in the main lobby still crackles, and a few people gather around it with mugs of hot chocolate.

Heeseung is already there, leaning against the reception desk with a towel slung over his shoulder and that same gray beanie pulled over his hair. He has changed out of his snowboarding gear into something simpler and when he sees you approaching, his face lights up with that genuine smile that never fails to make your heart flutter.

"Ready?" he asks.

"No," you admit.

"Good. Let's go anyway."

The jacuzzi is on the outdoor deck of the spa building, a steaming oasis surrounded by snow-covered rocks and pine trees draped in lights. The mountains rise in the distance, dark silhouettes against a sky so full of stars it looks like a painting. The air is freezing, the kind of cold that makes your lungs ache, but the water is perfectly, blissfully warm, and when you finally shed your coat and your sweater and your jeans and slip into the bubbling water in your borrowed black swimsuit, you let out a breath you didn't realize you have been holding.

"This is nice," you admit, sinking down until the water reaches your chin. "This is really, really nice."

"Told you." Heeseung slides into the water across from you, his towel discarded on a nearby bench. The lights catch the angles of his face, the curve of his shoulders, the way his hair curls slightly at the ends from the steam. "Sometimes I'm right about things."

"Sometimes."

"Rarely. Occasionally. Once in a blue moon."

You laugh, and it feels good, lighter than it has in weeks. The warm water, the cold air, the stars overhead, the boy across from you who has known the truth all along and hasn't run away, it all feels like something out of a dream.

"I'm glad you told me," Heeseung says quietly. "About the letter."

"Me too."

"And I'm glad you're here. At the ski station. In the jacuzzi. With me."

Your heart flutters. "Me too."

"So what happens now?" Heeseung asks, but there is no pressure in his voice. Just curiosity. Just openness.

"I don't know," you say honestly. "But I think… I think I'd like to find out."

Heeseung smiles, soft and real and full of something you are only just beginning to recognize.

"Then let's find out," he says. "Together."

The jacuzzi is bathed in purple light.

You don't know if it is intentional or if someone just installed colored LEDs and called it a day, but the effect is undeniably, unfairly romantic. The water glows with a deep violet hue, shifting to indigo where the bubbles break the surface, and the steam rising into the cold mountain air catches the light and turns it into something almost magical. It looks like a movie.

A romance movie, specifically. The kind you have watched a hundred times in your dorm room, wrapped in a blanket, dreaming about the day something like this would happen to you.

And now it is happening. And you are absolutely, catastrophically unprepared.

Heeseung sits across from you in the bubbling water, his arms stretched out along the edge of the jacuzzi, his head tilted back slightly to look at the stars. The purple light paints shadows across the planes of his face, the sharp line of his jaw, the curve of his lips, the column of his throat disappearing into the steam. Droplets of water cling to his skin, and when he tilts his head forward to look at you, his dark eyes reflect the violet glow in a way that makes your stomach drop straight through the floor.

"You're doing it again," he says, his voice low and amused.

"Doing what?"

"Staring at me like you're trying to figure me out."

"I'm not staring. I'm… observing. It's different."

"Is it?"

"It's scientific. I'm conducting research."

Heeseung's lips curve into that familiar smile, the one that is definitely a smirk's first cousin by now, maybe even its sibling. "And what has your research concluded so far?"

"That you're very annoying," you say. "And that the purple light is doing unfair things to your bone structure."

"Unfair things to my bone structure," he repeats, laughing. "That's a new one. I'll add it to the list of compliments I've received."

"You keep a list?"

"Mentally. It's not written down anywhere. I'm not that egotistical."

"Debatable."

He laughs again, and the sound echoes across the water, mixing with the gentle hum of the jacuzzi jets. You try very hard to be normal, to act like you aren't sitting in a bubbling hot tub with a boy who has known your secret all along and has still chosen to be here, in the purple light, looking at you like he wants to kiss you.

And then he reaches for your foot.

His hand closes around your ankle beneath the water, warm and gentle, and before you can process what is happening, he lifts your leg, guiding your foot toward him. Your heel presses against his chest, against the firm warmth of his skin, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, and your breath catches in your throat so abruptly that you make a small, strangled sound that is definitely not dignified. The memory of your wet dream surges instantly, and you mentally thank the purple lights for hiding the sudden flush on your face.

"What are you doing?" you manage, your voice coming out several octaves higher than normal.

"You were floating awkwardly," Heeseung says, like this is a perfectly reasonable explanation. His thumb traces a slow circle against your ankle bone, feather-light and devastating. "I thought you might want something to anchor you."

"My ankle. You're anchoring my ankle."

"Ankles are very anchorable."

"That's not a word."

"It is now. I'm an engineering student. I can invent words."

Your heart pounds so hard you are certain he can feel it through the sole of your foot. His hand still wraps around your ankle, warm and steady, and the position is so unexpectedly intimate, your leg stretched across the space between you, your foot pressed against his chest, his thumb drawing lazy patterns on your skin, that you don't know where to look or what to say or how to breathe.

"You know what's funny?" Heeseung says, his voice conversational, like he isn't currently holding your foot against his heart. "The jacuzzi scene in To All the Boys I've Loved Before."

Your brain, which is already operating at approximately ten percent capacity, struggles to process the shift in topic. "The… jacuzzi scene?"

"Lara Jean and Peter. The ski trip. The hot tub." He gestures vaguely at the purple water around you. "They're in a jacuzzi together for the first time, and Lara Jean is all nervous, and Peter is trying to be cool about it, and there's all this tension because they're fake dating but they're both starting to feel real things."

"I know the scene," you say, your voice faint.

"It's kind of the turning point in the movie. The moment where the fake relationship starts becoming real." Heeseung tilts his head, and his eyes meet yours, and there is something in them, something dark and warm and knowing—that makes your skin tingle. "Funny how we ended up in a jacuzzi too. At a ski station. Just like them."

"Are you saying we're in a romance movie?"

"I'm saying the parallels are getting a little uncanny." His thumb traces another circle on your ankle, slow and deliberate. "The letter. The ski trip. The hot tub."

"Well, technically the parallels are there but it's still different…"

"You're right. At the end of the day we're not in a movie… This is real life."

"Which means…"

"Which means we're in uncharted territory now." Heeseung's voice drops, becoming something lower, something that vibrates through the water and into your bones. "No movie to reference. No script to follow. Just… whatever happens next."

Your mouth is dry. When did your mouth become so dry? You are surrounded by water, and yet every drop of moisture has apparently evaporated from your body.

"That's terrifying," you whisper.

"Is it?" His hand tightens slightly on your ankle, grounding you. "I think it's kind of exciting. Don't you?"

You don't know how to answer that. You don't know how to articulate the complicated knot of fear and anticipation and something else, something warm and fluttering that has taken up residence in your chest. So you do what you always do when you don't know what to say: you deflect.

"You're very smooth, you know that?" you say, aiming for teasing and landing somewhere closer to breathless. "Has anyone ever told you that? The ankle thing, the movie reference, the uncharted territory line, it's a lot."

Heeseung's lips twitch. "Is it working?"

"I'm not answering that."

"That's an answer in itself."

"You're insufferable."

"And yet you're still here." His eyes flicker down for just a moment, barely a second, but enough to make your skin flush. "Letting me hold your ankle."

You pull your foot back, but he doesn't let go. His grip remains gentle, steady, his palm warm against your skin. "I'm not letting you do anything. You just… did it."

"And you didn't stop me."

"I was being polite."

"Polite." Heeseung's smile widens. "Right. That's what this is. Politeness."

The purple light flickers slightly, casting new shadows across his face. The bubbles swirl around you, warm and enveloping, and the cold mountain air nips at your exposed shoulders, creating a contrast that makes every sensation feel heightened. You are acutely aware of everything, the heat of the water, the chill of the breeze, the rough texture of the jacuzzi edge beneath your fingers, the steady pressure of Heeseung's hand on your ankle.

"Can I ask you something?" Heeseung says.

"You're going to anyway."

"True." He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer. More curious. "Have you ever done this before?"

"Done what? Sat in a jacuzzi?"

"Been physical with someone. Intimate." He says the words without embarrassment, without leering, just genuine curiosity. "You get so flustered every time I touch you. Earlier, when I kissed your cheek, I thought you were going to combust. And I'm not trying to make fun of you, I'm genuinely asking. Is this… new for you?"

Your cheeks, already flushed from the heat of the water, burn even hotter. "That's a very personal question."

"You don't have to answer. Remember? Twenty questions rules. No pressure."

You are quiet for a moment. The bubbles churn around you. The stars glitter overhead. Heeseung's thumb continues its slow, hypnotic circles on your ankle.

"I've kissed people before," you say finally. "A few times. But it was always… quick. Awkward. Spin the bottle at parties, that kind of thing." You pause, gathering your courage. "I've never had a real relationship. I've never… you know."

"Made out with someone?"

The bluntness of the question makes you choke on air. "I… that's… yes. That. I've never done that."

"Okay," Heeseung says simply.

"Okay? That's all you have to say?"

"What else would I say?"

"I don't know. Something. Most people would say something."

Heeseung is quiet for a moment, his expression thoughtful. Then he says, "I haven't either. Much, I mean. I've had my few moments but the amount you can count on your fingers. People assume I have, because of the reputation, but the truth is I've never really… connected with someone like that. I've had opportunities, I guess, but I didn't want to do it just for the sake of doing it. I wanted it to mean something."

The confession catches you off guard. You assumed, everyone assumed, that Lee Heeseung was experienced, that his womanizer reputation was built on a foundation of romantic conquests. But here he is, in the purple light of the jacuzzi, telling you that the reputation is just that: a reputation. Smoke and mirrors. Assumptions built on his inability to say no.

"We're both disasters," you say.

"Absolutely. But at least we're disasters together."

"Disaster twins."

"Matching shirts and everything."

You laugh, and it comes out lighter than you expected. The tension that has been coiling in your chest begins to ease, replaced by something warmer. Something that feels almost like comfort.

Wus Good/Curious - PARTYNEXTDOOR playing now

Somewhere in the lodge, someone has connected their phone to the outdoor speakers. The song that starts playing is slow and sensual, the timing so absurd, so perfectly, comedically timed, that you can't help but laugh. "Did you plan this?"

Heeseung laughs too, shaking his head in disbelief. "I swear I didn't. The universe is just showing off at this point."

"This is the least romantic song that could have possibly played."

"I don't know. It's got a certain vibe." His eyes meet yours, and there is a glint of mischief in them. "Very sensual. Very on-the-nose for a jacuzzi scene."

"It's about-" You stop, your face heating.

"It's about what?"

"You know what it's about."

"I want to hear you say it."

"You're the worst."

Heeseung grins, and the purple light catches the curve of his lips, the sparkle in his eyes, the way the water droplets trace paths down his neck and across his collarbone. The song continues playing, and you are suddenly very aware of how close he is, how the space between you has somehow shrunk without you noticing.

"Come here," he says softly.

"What?"

"Come here. I want to show you something."

Your heart hammers so hard you can feel it in your throat. "Show me what?"

"Trust me."

And you do. That is the terrifying thing. Despite everything, the misunderstandings, the secrets, the weeks of chaos and confusion, you trust him. You trust the boy who poured coffee on his head to make you feel less alone. You trust the boy who held your hand while you cried. You trust the boy who has known your secret all along and has never once made you feel foolish for it.

You move through the water, closer to him, and the purple light swirls around you like something out of a dream. When you are within reach, Heeseung's hands find your waist beneath the water, gentle but sure, and he guides you until you are straddling his lap, your knees on either side of his hips, your faces inches apart.

"Is this okay?" he asks, his voice barely above a whisper.

Your breath comes in short, shallow gasps. His hands are warm on your waist, his thumbs tracing slow circles against the curve of your hips. His face is so close you can see the individual droplets of water on his eyelashes, can count the shades of brown in his eyes, can feel the warmth of his breath against your lips.

"Yes," you whisper. "This is… okay."

"You're shaking."

"I'm nervous."

"I know." His hands slide up from your waist, over your ribs, coming to rest on either side of your face. His palms are warm against your cheeks, his fingers threading gently into the wet strands of your hair. "We don't have to do anything you're not ready for. We can just sit here. We can talk. We can get out and go back inside. Whatever you want."

The gentleness of his voice, the patience in his eyes, the way he holds your face like you are something precious, it makes your chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the realization that you are in very, very deep trouble.

Because this boy, this absurd, beautiful, incomprehensible boy who stumbled into your life through a misplaced letter and a catastrophic misunderstanding, has somehow become someone you can't imagine letting go of.

"What I want," you say, your voice barely steady, "is for you to kiss me."

Heeseung's eyes darken. The purple light flickers across his features, and his thumbs trace the line of your cheekbones, and his lips part slightly, and for one suspended moment, the entire world holds its breath.

"Okay," he murmurs. "But we're going to do this right."

And then he kisses you.

His lips meet yours softly at first, gentle, exploratory, the barest brush of contact. He tastes like the mint tea he had after dinner, and his mouth is warm, and the kiss is so sweet and so tender that you feel your entire body melt into him. Your hands, hovering awkwardly at your sides, come up to rest on his shoulders, and you feel the muscles beneath his skin shift as he pulls you closer.

But then you try to deepen the kiss, and it goes wrong.

Your nose bumps against his. Your teeth clack together with an audible click. You pull back, mortified, your face burning. "I'm sorry… I didn't… I don't know what I'm doing-"

"Hey." Heeseung's voice is gentle, his hands still cupping your face. "Hey. It's okay. Look at me."

You force yourself to meet his eyes, expecting to see amusement or frustration or something worse. But all you see is patience. Warmth. Something that looks a lot like affection.

"Everyone's first real kiss is awkward," he says. "That's normal. That's how it's supposed to be."

"It wasn't supposed to be with someone who actually knows what they're doing."

"Then let me teach you." His thumb traces your lower lip, feather-light. "We'll go slow. You follow my lead. And if at any point you want to stop, just say the word. Okay?"

Your heart pounds so hard you can feel it in your temples. "Okay."

He leans in again, slower this time, giving you every opportunity to pull away. When his lips meet yours, the pressure is deliberate, gentle but firm, guiding you. His mouth moves against yours in a slow, languid rhythm, and you follow, mimicking his movements, learning the dance as you go.

"Tilt your head a little," he murmurs against your lips. "There. Like that."

You adjust, and suddenly the angle is better, the kiss deepening naturally. His hands slide from your face down to your waist, pulling you closer, and you feel the length of his body against yours, warm and solid and very, very real.

"Now try parting your lips," he whispers. "Just a little."

You do, and the kiss changes. Becomes something deeper, more intense. His tongue brushes against your lower lip, a question rather than a demand, and when you open for him, the sensation is so overwhelming that a soft sound escapes your throat, something between a sigh and a gasp.

"Good," Heeseung breathes. "You're doing so good."

The praise sends a shiver down your spine. Your fingers curl into his shoulders, gripping him like he is the only solid thing in a world. The kiss deepens further, his mouth moving against yours with a confidence that makes your head spin, and you follow his lead, letting him guide you, letting yourself get lost in the warmth of his body and the taste of his lips and the steady, grounding pressure of his hands on your waist.

"Now," he murmurs, pulling back just enough to press a kiss to the corner of your mouth, "there's variation. You don't have to do the same thing the whole time."

"Variation," you repeat, your voice dazed.

"You can kiss here-" His lips brush the edge of your jaw. "-and here-" A kiss to the sensitive spot just below your ear. "-and here." A kiss to the hollow of your throat that makes your breath catch and your fingers tighten on his shoulders.

"That's… a lot of places."

"There's more." He pulls back, and his eyes meet yours, dark and warm and full of something that makes your stomach flip. "But we can save those for later. If you want."

"If I want," you echo, still dazed.

"Only if you want." His hand comes up to cup your face again, his thumb tracing your cheekbone.

"This is insane," you whisper.

"Completely insane."

"I can't believe this is happening."

"Neither can I." He presses his forehead against yours, his breath warm against your lips. "But I'm really, really glad it is."

"Can we try again?" you ask, your voice small but steady. "The kissing thing. I think I need more practice."

Heeseung laughs, and the sound vibrates through his chest and into yours. "Practice makes perfect."

"I'm a STEM student. I believe in empirical evidence."

"Then let's gather some data."

He kisses you again, and this time, you are ready. Your lips meet his with more confidence, your hands sliding from his shoulders into his hair, it is soft, damp from the steam, and the way he sighs against your mouth when your fingers thread through it makes you feel powerful in a way you have never experienced before.

This time, when you deepen the kiss, it's less clumsy. It's more natural, instinctive, the kind of kiss that feels like it has been waiting to happen for weeks and is finally making up for lost time. Heeseung's hands tighten on your waist, pulling you impossibly closer, and the water swirls around you.

Your hands roam over his chest, feeling the firm muscles beneath your fingertips. Heeseung's tongue teases your lower lip, seeking entrance which you grant without hesitation. The kiss becomes hungrier, more desperate as your bodies press together in the warm water. He has been patient with you, letting you set the pace, never pushing for more than you are ready to give.

You feel something hard pressing against your thigh through the thin fabric of your swimsuit. You pull back slightly, breathless, your cheeks flushed with both desire and embarrassment.

"Don't mind it," Heeseung murmurs, his voice husky with arousal. "It's just a natural reaction to kissing someone I find incredibly attractive."

But instead of shying away, something bold awakens inside you. You've been waiting for this moment, wanting to take your relationship to the next level. Taking a deep breath, you meet his gaze directly, though your words come out in a clumsy rush.

"I want to... I mean, if you want to... I think I'm ready to... do it," you stammer, feeling your face heat up even more. "With you."

Heeseung's eyes widen slightly before softening with affection. "Are you sure? Here? Your first time should be special."

"It is special because it's with you," you insist, trying to sound more confident than you feel. "I want this. I want you. I want to be honest with myself."

A slow smile spreads across his face. "Okay," he murmurs, his hands moving to cup your face. "But we need to prepare you properly. I don't want to hurt you."

His thumb brushes against your cheek as he continues, "Have you ever... touched yourself before?"

You shake your head, feeling a mix of embarrassment and excitement.

"That's okay," he assures you. "I'll teach you. I'll make sure you feel good."

WGFT - Gunna playing now

Heeseung shifts slightly, adjusting your position on his lap. One hand trails down your back, over your hip, and between your legs. Even through the fabric of your swimsuit, his touch sends sparks through your body.

"First, I need to make sure you're ready," he explains softly. His fingers find the edge of your swimsuit bottom, toying with the fabric. "May I?"

You nod, your breath catching in anticipation.

Slowly, his fingers slip beneath the fabric, finding your folds. You gasp at the contact, your body tensing for a moment before relaxing into his touch.

"It's twitching," he murmurs against your ear. "That's good. It means your body wants this too."

His fingers explore gently, learning your anatomy as you bite your lip to hold back moans. He finds your clit and circles it slowly, watching your face for reactions.

"When I touch you here, it should build pleasure." he explains.

He demonstrates, applying a bit more pressure. You can't help but arch your back, a soft cry escaping your lips.

"Like that?" he asks with a knowing smile.

You can only nod, lost in the sensations he's creating.

After a few minutes of this delicious torture, he slides one finger lower, testing your entrance. "I'm going to prepare you," he warns softly. "It might feel a little strange at first, but I promise it will get better."

His finger enters you slowly, carefully. There's a slight discomfort, but as he begins to move in and out, the sensation transforms into pleasure. He watches your face intently, adjusting his movements based on your reactions.

"Does that feel good?" he asks.

You nod, your hips beginning to move in rhythm with his hand.

He adds a second finger, stretching you further. "You're so tight," he groans. "I can't wait to be inside you."

His words send another wave of desire through you. His thumb returns to your clit, rubbing in circles as his fingers continue their work inside you. The dual stimulation is overwhelming in the best way possible.

"Heeseung," you gasp, your hands clutching at his shoulders.

"I know, little mouse," he murmurs, kissing you deeply. "Let it build. Don't fight it."

The pleasure intensifies, coiling in your stomach like a spring. Your movements become more erratic as you chase the feeling building within you.

"That's it," he encourages. "Good girl"

With a cry, you shatter, waves of pleasure washing over you. Heeseung continues his movements, drawing out your orgasm until you collapse against his chest, trembling and breathless.

"You're so beautiful when you come," he whispers, kissing your forehead. "Can you do more?"

You can only nod, still recovering from the intensity of your first orgasm with someone else.

He slides down his shorts slightly just to reveal his already hard cock and slides your swimsuit to the side. His hands move to your hips, and you begin to grind against him instinctively. The water sloshes around you as you move, his lenght sliding between your folds, creating a delicious friction under the water. Lost in the moment, you shift your hips, trying to get closer, to feel more of him.

Suddenly, you both freeze as you feel him slip inside you. There's a sharp pain, followed by a sense of fullness that takes your breath away. Your eyes widen in shock as you look at Heeseung, whose expression mirrors your surprise.

"Oh my god," he gasps, his hands tightening on your hips. "I... I didn't mean for that to happen. Are you okay?"

You nod, still processing what just happened. The initial pain is already fading, replaced by a strange mix of discomfort and pleasure.

"I'm so sorry," Heeseung continues, his cheeks flushing with embarrassment. "I should have been more careful. I didn't..."

As he stammers through an apology, you can't help but let out a small laugh. The absurdity of the situation , your first time happening so accidentally, so clumsily, suddenly strikes you as hilarious.

Heeseung looks at you in confusion before a smile breaks across his face. "You're laughing?"

"We're so clumsy," you giggle, the tension breaking between you. "All that careful preparation and then..."

He joins in your laughter, the moment transforming from awkward to intimate. "Well," he says once the laughter subsides, "since we're already here... are you okay to continue? We can stop if you want."

You shake your head, a new determination filling you. "No, I want to continue. Show me what to do."

Heeseung's expression softens with affection. "Okay," he murmurs, his hands guiding your hips. "Just relax and let me do the work. Move with me, but let me lead."

He begins to move slowly, guiding you in a gentle rhythm. The water sloshes around you as you find a pace together. With each thrust, pleasure builds, different from before but just as intense.

"You feel so good," Heeseung groans, his control beginning to slip. "So tight around me."

His praise only heightens your arousal. You try to meet his movements with your own, but your motions are awkward and uncoordinated. You feel clumsy, unsure of exactly how to move to maximize pleasure for both of you.

"Don't worry about doing it perfectly," Heeseung reassures you, noticing your frustration. "Just feel. Let your body respond naturally."

He adjusts your position slightly, changing the angle of his thrusts. A gasp escapes your lips as he hits a particularly sensitive spot.

"There," he murmurs, repeating the movement. "How does that feel?"

"Amazing," you breathe, your hands clutching at his shoulders.

Heeseung's hands roam your body, caressing your breasts, your back, your hips. His mouth finds your neck, sucking gently at your pulse point. Marking you as his.

"I've wanted this since the moment we got in the jacuzzi," he admits between kisses. "But I was too scared you would run away if I decided to act up."

"I want it," you assure him, your voice breathy with pleasure. "I want all of you. I'm not scared anymore."

Your words seem to unleash something in him. His movements become more deliberate, more purposeful as he chases his own release. One hand moves between your legs again, finding your clit and rubbing in time with his thrusts.

The dual stimulation quickly pushes you toward another orgasm. "Heeseung," you cry out, your nails digging into his shoulders.

"I know," he groans. "Come with me this time."

His words are all it takes to push you over the edge. As you clench around him, Heeseung finds his own release, burying his face in your neck with a guttural moan.

For a moment, you stay connected, catching your breath as the water continues to bubble around you. Heeseung presses soft kisses to your shoulders, your neck, your cheeks.

"Are you okay?" he asks softly, pulling back to look at you.

You nod, a contented smile spreading across your face. "Better than okay. That was..."

"Incredible," he finishes for you, returning your smile. "You're incredible."

As you slowly separate, Heeseung adjusts your swimsuit back into place before

As you both recover in the warm bubbling water, you notice something pressing against your thigh again. You glance down and see that Heeseung is already getting hard once more. A blush spreads across your cheeks as you meet his eyes.

"Already?" you ask with a small laugh.

Heeseung grins, a hint of embarrassment in his expression. "I can't help it," he admits. "You feel so good, and I've wanted this for so long. My body seems to have a mind of its own around you."

A boldness takes hold of you, spurred by the confidence your first time gave you. "If you want to do it again... your way this time... I don't mind," you say, trying to sound casual despite the flutter in your stomach.

Heeseung's eyes darken with desire at your words. Without warning, he pounces, lifting you effortlessly from his lap. He carries you to the edge of the jacuzzi and gently sets you down on the edge. The contrast between the warm water and the cool air sends a shiver through your body.

"My way?" he asks, his voice husky with arousal. "I like the sound of that."

He kneels in the water between your legs, his hands spreading your thighs apart. His eyes never leave yours as he leans forward, pressing soft kisses to your inner thigh. You watch, mesmerized, as he works his way upward, leaving a trail of fire on your skin.

When he reaches your core, he pauses, his breath warm against your most sensitive flesh. "I've wanted to taste you since the first time I saw you in that swimsuit," he confesses, his voice low and intimate.

Then he dives in, his tongue exploring your folds. You gasp, your hands flying to his hair as waves of pleasure wash over you. Heeseung maintains eye contact as he eats you out, his dark eyes watching your every reaction, learning what makes you moan, what makes you arch your back.

"You taste so sweet," he murmurs against you before returning to his task, his tongue circling your clit before dipping inside you.

The sensations are overwhelming, building quickly toward another orgasm. Heeseung seems to sense your approaching release and redoubles his efforts, adding his fingers to the mix, curling them inside you as he continues to lavish attention on your clit.

"Heeseung," you cry out, your hips bucking against his face. "Please don't stop."

He doesn't. Instead, he increases his pace, his tongue and fingers working in perfect harmony until you shatter, crying out his name as waves of pleasure crash over you. He continues his ministrations, drawing out your orgasm until you're trembling and breathless.

Only then does he pull back, a triumphant grin on his face as he licks his lips. "Delicious," he declares, rising from the water.

He kisses his way up your body, over your stomach, between your breasts, along your collarbone, up your neck, until finally his lips claim yours. You can taste yourself on his tongue as the kiss deepens, passionate and hungry.

Without breaking the kiss, Heeseung positions himself at your entrance. This time, there's no accidental slip, he enters you deliberately, slowly, filling you completely. You moan into his mouth at the exquisite stretch and fullness.

He begins to move, his hips thrusting in a deep, slow rhythm that drives you wild. Each stroke is measured and controlled, hitting all the right spots. His movements are faster and harder than before, but still gentle, still considerate of your inexperience.

"You feel incredible," he groans, his voice thick with pleasure. "You're taking it well."

His hands roam your body as he moves, caressing your breasts, your hips, your thighs. His mouth finds your ear, his warm breath sending shivers down your spine as he whispers praises and encouragements.

"You're doing so well," he murmurs. "Taking me so deep. You feel amazing wrapped around me."

His words only heighten your arousal, pushing you closer to another peak. You wrap your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, matching his rhythm as best you can despite your inexperience.

After a few minutes, Heeseung pulls out gently. "Turn around," he commands softly.

You obey, positioning hands at the edge of the jacuzzi. He enters you from behind, this new angle allowing him to reach even deeper inside you. You cry out at the intensity of the sensation.

"Is this okay?" he asks, his voice strained with restraint.

"More than okay," you manage to gasp. "Don't stop."

He resumes his movements, his hands gripping your hips as he thrusts into you. The water sloshes with each movement, adding to the sensory experience. Heeseung's pace increases, his thrusts becoming more urgent as he chases his release.

His moans fill the night air, raw and uninhibited. "I'm getting close," he warns. "Where do you want me?"

"Inside me," you answer without hesitation.

Heeseung hesitates for a moment. "Are you sure? We didn't use anything."

Your mind races for a second before you respond, "I'm on the pill. It's okay."

With a groan of relief, Heeseung continues his movements, his pace becoming erratic as he approaches his climax. With one final deep thrust, he buries himself inside you, his body trembling as he finds his release.

For a moment, he stays inside you. Then he pulls out gently and helps you turn back over. He leans to slowly kiss you while stroking himself a few times before releasing again onto your stomach, warm and sticky.

You look at him in surprise.

"I couldn't," he explains, noticing your confusion. "I couldn't resist, I wanted to see you covered of me."

He reaches for a nearby towel, gently cleaning your stomach before pressing a soft kiss to your lips. "Next time," he promises, "I'll be more gentle. We'll take our time, explore everything properly."

"There's going to be a next time?" you ask with a smile.

Heeseung grins, pulling you into his arms. "Oh, there's definitely going to be a next time. And a time after that, and after that... I'm never getting enough of you."

The walk back to your room feels like floating.

Not literally, of course, your feet are very much on the ground, leaving wet footprints on the wooden floorboards of the lodge hallway, but your mind is somewhere else entirely. Somewhere purple-lit and steaming, somewhere filled with the taste of mint tea and the feeling of warm hands on your waist and the sound of Heeseung's voice murmuring instructions against your lips.

You have had sex. In a jacuzzi. Under the stars. With Lee Heeseung.

The hopeless romantic inside you does cartwheels. The realistic part of your brain is still buffering, stuck on a loading screen that says "please wait while we process what just happened." Your body is somewhere in between, pleasantly warm despite the cold air, tingling in places you hadn't known could tingle, wrapped in your borrowed coat and your towel and the lingering sensation of his skin against yours.

Heeseung walks beside you, his hand intertwined with yours. He hums softly, and when he catches you looking at him, he smiles that devastating smile and squeezes your hand.

"What?" he asks.

"Nothing. Just… processing."

"Processing what?"

"Everything." You gesture vaguely with your free hand. "The conversation. The jacuzzi. The… everything after the conversation."

"The everything after the conversation," he repeats, his smile widening. "Very descriptive."

"I'm a STEM student, not a poet."

"You wrote a three-page love letter with calligraphy. You're absolutely a poet."

"That was a one-time thing. A fluke. I've since retired from poetry."

"Tragic. The literary world has lost a great talent."

You reach your door, and Heeseung stops, turning to face you.

"Are you okay?" he asks, and his voice is gentle. "Really okay? That was… a lot. I know it was a lot. And I want to make sure you're not freaking out."

"I am absolutely freaking out," you admit. "But in a good way. I think. It's hard to tell. My brain is still catching up."

"Good freak-out or bad freak-out?"

"Good. Definitely good. Just… overwhelming." You pause, searching for the right words. "It wasn't how I imagined my first time would be. It was awkward and clumsy and it accidentally went in, and I'm pretty sure I made some very weird sounds, and-"

"It was perfect," Heeseung interrupts softly. "It was real. It was you. That's all I want."

Your heart, which has already been through approximately seventeen different emotional states in the past hour, does another complicated flip. "You're very good at saying the right thing."

"I'm not trying to say the right thing. I'm just telling you the truth." He reaches up and tucks a damp strand of hair behind your ear, his fingers lingering against your temple. "You're amazing, Y/N. And I'm not saying that because of what just happened. I'm saying it because it's been true since the moment you walked into that PC room and handed me a letter that wasn't meant for me."

"You're going to make me cry again."

"Please don't. I've seen you cry twice now, and both times it made me want to fight whoever made you sad. I can't fight myself. That's a conflict of interest."

You laugh, and it comes out a little watery. "You're ridiculous."

"I'm aware." He leans down and presses a kiss to your forehead, soft, gentle, lingering. "Goodnight, little mouse. Get some sleep."

"Goodnight, Heeseung."

He pulls back, his hand slipping from yours, and walks backward down the hallway for a few steps, still smiling at you. "Dream about me."

"I make no promises."

"I'll take that as confirmation."

He turns the corner and disappears, and you are left standing in front of your door with the lingering warmth of the best night of your life.

The moment you step into your room, Yunjin is on you like a hawk on a field mouse.

"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?"

You close the door behind you, leaning against it with a dazed expression. Yunjin sits cross-legged on her bed, her phone in her hand, a half-eaten bag of chips on the nightstand. Her eyes are wide, her expression a mixture of curiosity and accusation.

"The jacuzzi," you say faintly.

"For three hours?"

"Was it three hours? It doesn't feel like three hours."

"Y/N." Yunjin shuts her laptop with a decisive click. "You're wearing a towel. Your hair is wet. You have that look on your face, the one that says I just did something and I don't know how to process it. Spill. Now. Every detail."

You push yourself off the door and collapse onto your bed, staring up at the ceiling.

"We had sex," you say.

"What?!"

"We had sex, don't make me repeat it please or I'm gonna die…"

Yunjin is silent for exactly two seconds. Then: "YOU GUYS FUCKED?"

"Yeah…"

"IN THE JACUZZI?"

"There aren't exactly a lot of alternative locations. The water is warm. There's purple lighting. It's very atmospheric."

Yunjin scrambles off her bed and crosses the room in three steps, grabbing your shoulders and pulling you upright. "I need details. I need all the details. How did it happen? Who initiated it? Was it good? Was he good? Did he-"

"Yunjin!" You press your hands to your burning cheeks. "I can't just… I don't know how to-"

"Start from the beginning. The jacuzzi. What happened?"

You take a deep breath, gathering your scattered thoughts, and then the words start tumbling out of you as you tell her everything.

Yunjin is quiet for a moment, processing. Then she lets out a long breath. "So your first time was in a jacuzzi, under the stars, with a hot informatics engineering student who knew you'd accidentally confessed to the wrong person and liked you anyway."

"That's… yeah. That's basically the summary."

"And you're telling me you're still worried this is some kind of disaster?"

"I'm not worried," you say slowly. "I'm just… confused. About what we are. We don't exactly have the what are we conversation. We just kind of… had sex. And now I don't know if we're dating, or if it was a one-time thing, or if he's going to wake up tomorrow and realize he made a huge mistake and-"

"Stop." Yunjin holds up a hand. "Just stop. I'm going to tell you something, and I need you to actually hear it."

"I'm listening."

"Lee Heeseung has known your secret for weeks. He's seen you at your absolute worst, hiding behind bulletin boards, choking on lettuce, spilling coffee all over yourself, crying on a bench in the middle of the night. He's seen you ramble about video games until you run out of breath, and he's seen you face-plant in the snow eight times in one afternoon. And after all of that, he still chooses to spend three hours in a jacuzzi with you and make sure your first time is special and safe and good."

Yunjin leans forward, her expression intense. "That's not the behavior of a guy who's going to wake up tomorrow and change his mind. That's the behavior of a guy who is completely, thoroughly, absolutely gone for you."

The words settle into your chest. "You really think so?"

"I know so. And I think you know so too. You're just scared to admit it because admitting it means this is real, and real is scary."

"When did you get so wise about relationships?"

"I've been watching you be a disaster for months. I've picked up a few things."

You laugh, and it comes out lighter than you expected. "So what do I do?"

"Tomorrow, you go find him. You see how he acts. And if he acts like nothing's changed except that he's even happier to see you than usual, then you'll have your answer."

"And if he acts weird?"

"Then I'll key his snowboard."

"Yunjin!"

"Kidding. Mostly." She grins and flops back onto her bed. "Now go to sleep. You've had a big night. You need rest. And honestly, I need time to process the fact that my best friend had a romantic jacuzzi rendezvous while I was sitting here eating chips and doomscrolling on TikTok."

"You could have come to the jacuzzi."

"And interrupt whatever is happening between you two? I'm a good friend, not a saint. I'd be third-wheeling so hard I'd need a snowplow to get out."

You laugh again, and for the first time in weeks, you feel light. Unburdened. Like the weight you've been carrying since the moment you walked into that PC room has finally been lifted.

"Goodnight, Yunjin."

"Goodnight, you absolute disaster of a human being. Dream about your hot engineer boy."

"He's not my-"

"Yet. He's not your boy yet. But I give it twenty-four hours."

You throw a pillow at her. She catches it and tucks it under her head with a satisfied grin.

The next morning, you wake up with a start, your heart racing. Dreams of purple light and warm water and hands on your waist and a voice murmuring good girl, you're doing so good against your lips haunt your memory.

You press your face into your pillow and scream.

It is a happy scream, mostly. A disbelieving, giddy scream. But it is also a nervous scream, because in approximately one hour, you are going to have to go downstairs and face Heeseung in the cold light of day, and you have absolutely no idea how that is going to go.

Would he be awkward? Would he be distant? Would he pretend nothing happened? Would he-

Your phone buzzes on the nightstand.

Heeseung: good morning little mouse. breakfast in 30?

You stare at the message for a solid ten seconds. Then you type back:

You: okay

Heeseung: you're very eloquent in the morning

You: i haven't had caffeine yet

Heeseung: i'll have a vanilla latte waiting for you. extra shot of vanilla. just like last time

Heeseung: hopefully with less spilling this time

You: no promises

You get dressed in a daze, pulling on approximately four layers of clothing because you still don't own proper winter gear and the borrowed coat can only do so much. Yunjin is already gone, she has left a note on the nightstand that says went to find the economics majors. don't do anything I wouldn't do. (do everything I wouldn't do), so you are alone with your thoughts as you make your way down to the lodge's dining hall.

You spot Heeseung immediately. He sits at a table near the window, two cups of coffee in front of him, his hair still slightly messy from sleep. When he sees you approaching, his entire face lights up.

"There you are," he says, standing up and pulling out a chair for you. "I was starting to think you'd bailed."

"On breakfast?"

"On me. On this. On everything." He says it lightly, but there is a flicker of vulnerability in his eyes, a tiny crack in his usual confident demeanor. "I wasn't sure if you'd want to see me this morning, or if you'd need space, or-"

"Hey." You reach out and touch his hand, just briefly. "I'm here. I want to see you."

The relief that washes over his face is so genuine, so unguarded, that your heart clenches. "Okay. Good. That's… good."

You sit down, and he slides the vanilla latte toward you. Your fingers brush as you take the cup, and the contact sends a spark of electricity up your arm. You both pretend not to notice, but the way Heeseung's ears turn slightly pink suggests he feels it too.

"So," you say, taking a sip of your latte to give yourself something to do with your hands. "Breakfast."

"Breakfast," he agrees. "Eggs. Bacon. Possibly a pastry if we're feeling adventurous."

"Very adventurous."

"I'm a risk-taker."

You try to eat normally. You really do. But every time you look up from your plate, Heeseung looks at you with that soft, wondering expression, and you forget how to chew, and you end up staring at him with a piece of toast halfway to your mouth like you've been frozen in time.

"You're doing it again," he says.

"Doing what?"

"The staring thing. The I'm trying to figure you out thing."

"I'm not trying to figure you out. I already figured you out. You're a people-pleaser who can't say no and you have a secret soft spot for romantic comedies."

"Then what are you thinking about?"

You set down your toast. "I'm thinking about last night. And what it means. And what we are now."

Heeseung's expression shifts, becoming more serious. "Do you want to have that conversation? The what are we conversation?"

"I don't know. Do you?"

"I asked you first."

"That's very mature."

"I have my moments." He leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. "Look, I know we did things kind of backwards. Most people start with coffee and work their way up to jacuzzis. We started with a misplaced love letter and somehow ended up in a hot tub under the stars. It's not exactly a conventional timeline."

"When has anything about us been conventional?"

"Fair point." He reaches across the table and takes your hand, his thumb tracing circles on your palm. "I don't know what we are. Labels feel… complicated. But I know what I want us to be."

"What's that?"

"Something real. Something that isn't built on misunderstandings or accidents or letters that weren't meant for me. Something that's just… us. Figuring it out together."

Your heart does that fluttering thing again. "That sounds terrifying."

"I know. But you've been scared this whole time, and you've still kept showing up. That's the bravest thing I've ever seen."

"I haven't felt brave. I've felt like a disaster."

"Disasters can be brave. The two aren't mutually exclusive." He squeezes your hand. "So what do you say? Want to be brave together?"

You look at him, really look at him, and see the boy who poured coffee on his head, the boy who held you while you cried, the boy who knew your secret and waited for you to tell him in your own time. And you feel the fear, familiar and insistent, coiling in your stomach.

But beneath the fear, there is something else. Something warmer. Something that feels a lot like hope.

"Okay," you say. "Let's be brave together."

Heeseung smiles, real and open and devastating. "Okay."

The afternoon finds you back on the beginner slope, strapped into a snowboard and wondering how you let Heeseung talk you into this again.

"You said you wanted to practice," he reminds you, tightening the bindings on your boots. "Snowboarding, I mean. Not… other things."

"My entire body is sore from yesterday. Both from the snowboarding and from the… other things."

"Then we'll take it slow. No jumps, no tricks, just a gentle run down the beginner hill." He stands up and offers you his hand. "I'll be right there the whole time."

"You said that yesterday, and I still fell eight times."

"And you got up eight times. That's the important part."

You take his hand and let him pull you to your feet. The beginner slope stretches out before you, populated by other beginners who fall over with roughly the same frequency as you.

"Okay," you say, taking a deep breath. "Okay. I can do this. I'm a capable human being. I understand physics. Snowboarding is just physics with extra steps."

"That's the spirit."

"I'm going to fall."

"Probably."

"And you're going to catch me?"

"Always."

The word hangs in the air between you, heavier than it should be. Always. Not just on the ski slope, but everywhere. Always.

"Okay," you whisper. "Let's go."

You push off.

The first few seconds are wobbly, your balance shifts, your arms flail slightly, your heart pounds in your ears. But then something clicks. Your body remembers the lessons from yesterday, the way Heeseung taught you to lean into the turns, to keep your weight centered, to trust the board beneath your feet.

You pick up speed, and instead of panicking, you lean into it. The wind rushes past your face, cold and exhilarating.

And then, miraculously, impossibly, you reach the bottom of the slope without falling.

"I DID IT!" you scream, your voice echoing across the mountain. "I DID IT! I SNOWBOARDED!"

You are laughing, giddy with adrenaline and triumph, and you turn around to find Heeseung, to share this moment with him, to see the proud expression on his face.

But Heeseung isn't at the bottom of the slope.

He is still at the top.

And he is shouting something.

"Y/N! Y/N L/N!"

The entire slope seems to go quiet. Other skiers and snowboarders slow down, turning to look at the boy standing at the top of the beginner hill, his hands cupped around his mouth, his voice carrying across the snow with startling clarity.

"I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY!"

Your heart stops. Then starts again, twice as fast.

"I'VE BEEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SAY THIS FOR WEEKS!" Heeseung shouts. "AND I REALIZED THAT THE BEST WAY TO TELL YOU IS THE SAME WAY YOU TOLD ME, WITH WORDS THAT I CAN'T TAKE BACK!"

People are staring. Everyone is staring.

"LEE HEESEUNG, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" you shout back, your voice cracking.

"I'M CONFESSING!" he yells. "PROPERLY! IN FRONT OF EVERYONE! BECAUSE YOU DESERVE A CONFESSION THAT'S JUST FOR YOU! YOU DESERVE THE LOVE YOU'VE DREAMED ABOUT!"

"THE FIRST LETTER WASN'T FOR ME!" Heeseung continues, his voice ringing across the snow. "BUT I WANT TO WRITE YOU ONE! I WANT TO WRITE YOU A HUNDRED LETTERS! I WANT TO LEARN YOUR FAVORITE HIGHLIGHTER COLORS AND THE NAMES OF ALL YOUR PLANTS AND THE EXACT WAY YOU LIKE YOUR VANILLA LATTES!"

Someone in the crowd lets out a wolf whistle. Someone else starts recording on their phone. You can't move, can't speak, can't do anything except stand at the bottom of the slope and stare up at the boy who shouts his heart out for everyone to hear.

"YOU'RE A DISASTER!" Heeseung yells, and his voice is full of joy, full of affection, full of something that looks a lot like love. "YOU'RE A HOPELESS ROMANTIC WHO'S TOO SCARED TO LIVE THE ROMANCE YOU DREAM ABOUT! YOU HIDE BEHIND BULLETIN BOARDS AND YOU CHOKE ON LETTUCE AND YOU SPILL COFFEE ON YOURSELF AND YOU MAKE GRAPHS ABOUT VIDEO GAME BALANCE AND YOU CRIED OVER A BABY PENGUIN IN A NATURE DOCUMENTARY!"

"This is the worst confession I've ever heard!" you shout back, but you are laughing, tears streaming down your face, your heart so full it feels like it might burst.

"I'M NOT FINISHED!" Heeseung takes a deep breath, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer, still loud enough to carry, but more intimate, more vulnerable. "YOU'RE A DISASTER, Y/N L/N! AND I'M A DISASTER TOO! I'M A PEOPLE-PLEASER WHO CAN'T SAY NO, I HAVE A REPUTATION THAT DOESN'T REFLECT WHO I ACTUALLY AM, AND I POURED COFFEE ON MY HEAD BECAUSE I COULDN'T STAND TO SEE YOU CRY ALONE!"

He starts walking down the slope toward you, his snowboard forgotten at the top, his boots crunching through the snow.

"AND I THINK, NO, I KNOW THAT I'VE BEEN FALLING FOR YOU SINCE THE MOMENT YOU WALKED INTO THAT PC ROOM AND LOOKED AT ME LIKE I WAS THE WORST THING THAT HAD EVER HAPPENED TO YOU!"

He gets closer now, close enough that you can see the nervousness in his eyes, the vulnerability beneath the bravado, the way his hands shake slightly despite his confident posture.

"SO I'M ASKING YOU, IN FRONT OF ALL THESE PEOPLE, ON THIS VERY EMBARRASSING SKI SLOPE, IF YOU'LL BE MY DISASTER. OFFICIALLY. NO MORE MISUNDERSTANDINGS. NO MORE LETTERS MEANT FOR OTHER PEOPLE. JUST US."

He stops a few feet away from you, his breath fogging in the cold air, his dark eyes fixed on your face.

"WHAT DO YOU SAY, LITTLE MOUSE?"

The silence that follows is deafening. Every person on the slope watches you, waiting for your answer.

And you, you, the hopeless romantic who has always been too scared to live the romance you dream about, you take a deep breath, throw your arms out wide, and shout at the top of your lungs:

"I LIKE YOU TOO, YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT! I'VE LIKED YOU FOR WEEKS AND I DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO SAY IT AND YOU JUST SHOUTED IT FROM A MOUNTAINTOP LIKE A CHARACTER IN A KDRAMA!"

Heeseung's face breaks into the biggest smile you have ever seen. "IS THAT A YES?"

"THAT'S A YES! THAT'S A THOUSAND TIMES YES! NOW COME HERE AND KISS ME BEFORE I PASS OUT FROM THE EMBARRASSMENT OF HAVING THIS CONVERSATION IN FRONT OF LITERALLY EVERYONE!"

He doesn't need to be told twice. He crosses the distance between you in three long strides, catches your face in his hands, and kisses you, deep and thorough and joyful, right there at the bottom of the beginner slope, with the snow sparkling around you and the crowd erupting into cheers and someone's phone recording what will undoubtedly become the most-watched video on the university's social media for the next month.

When he pulls back, his forehead pressed against yours, his breath warm against your lips, he grins like he has just won the lottery.

"You shouted your feelings from a mountaintop," he murmurs. "You, the girl who was too scared to even correct a misunderstanding, just shouted your feelings from a mountaintop."

"You started it."

"I did. And you finished it." He kisses the tip of your nose. "I'm so proud of you."

You have never been more embarrassed in your entire life, and you have never been happier.

"We're still disasters," you say.

"Absolutely. But now we're disasters who are dating."

"Are we dating? Is that what this is?"

"This is me, shouting from a mountaintop that I want to be with you. I'm pretty sure that counts as dating." He pauses, his expression shifting to something more serious. "Unless you don't want-"

"I want." You grab the front of his jacket and pull him closer. "I want everything. The letters and the coffee disasters and the matching shirts and the snowboarding lessons and the jacuzzi conversations and the ridiculous mountaintop confessions. I want all of it."

Heeseung kisses you again, and this time it is softer, sweeter, full of promise.

"You know what this means," he says against your lips.

"What?"

"We're going to have to tell Jungwon."

You groan. "Can we wait until after the trip? I need at least twenty-four hours to recover from this before I have another emotionally complicated conversation."

"Deal." He pulls back, taking your hand in his. "Come on. Let's get out of here before someone asks us for an interview."

And hand in hand, laughing like fools, you run away from the crowd and the chaos.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

Or in your case, because you had a dream.

If that does not sound ominous and odd enough, then factor in your madness fueled research spiral of Reddit theorists flying much too close to the sun with supernatural theories that ought to make their little mortal brains burst if they knew any of it was real and precisely what you were desperately hoping would work.

Because so far in all your existence, not a single man in this loathsome world had ever been immune to your charm, or your song.

And you were biblically determined to find one.

♱⃓ ♱⃓ ♱⃓

You walk along the nave in Saint Evan’s, your pointy red Louboutins clicking on the stone. As you glance around, you note that the pews are fairly full, but what seems to stand out is how there is a very specific demographic of women. Blowouts. Shiny lip gloss. Standout outfits and midi skirts in the name of plausible deniability. 

How peculiar! Out of sheer nosiness, you peek into a few of their minds. 

God, is this top too much? It’s definitely too much, worries one woman in a bold red lip. (it is too much.) I need to get it together. He could be my son’s age, Anyway, can this church afford air conditioning… thinks another. I can’t believe he used to box… I would let him beat my p— Wait, isn’t that Y/N? Jesus Christ, the shape of that ass! Oh, Lord forgive me…

The more minds you intrude upon, the more you realize there is a common denominator among them.

Father Sunghoon, this. Father Sunghoon, that. Who the hell is this Father Sunghoon?

You stare at the congregation with faint disdain. Is this mass hysteria? Haha. Mass Hysteria. But, seriously, have these women truly come to Holy Grounds just to ogle the priest? How blasphemous! you think. That someone’s faith would be so shallow as to indulge in such repulsive behavior here.

As if any man is worth such theatrics.

Then again, who are you to scrutinize anyone’s faith when your own is so dismal? But at least unlike the divorcee three pews over with the scandalous neckline, you possess shame—

“I was wondering when you’d find your way over here.”

The silvery voice comes from just behind you and interrupts your train of thought, and when you turn, a priest stands there.

God.

He might be the most beautiful man you have ever seen.

The young priest is illuminatingly pale, which only made the dark sweep of his black hair and his thick brows stand out all the more in contrast. There is something almost glacial in the sheer excess of this mortal's beauty. Tall, sharp jawline, broad shoulders, and overall athletic. 

Many thoughts run through your head abruptly. Is he new in town? You have never seen him before, which is odd because you know just about everyone. He looks rather young for a priest. Oh, how infuriating it is not to be able to read his mind due to his vows! 

This, you assume and quickly receive confirmation from nearby women pretending not to stare, must be the Father Sunghoon.

Oh. Wait. You've been staring at him for far too long. 

You clear your throat, pretending you have not just been gawking at a priest in the middle of a church. “Interesting choice of words there. What, are you like a psychic or something?”

The handsome priest laughs lightly, the rosary at his neck glinting. “Psychic? Not at all. I simply try to greet every newcomer as though they were always meant to find their way here. I’m Father Sunghoon, by the way.”

So he’s just charming and beautiful and utterly welcoming? No wonder everybody is feeling rather sacrilegious. 

Eh. You are not moved.

Beauty is hardly everything. You of all people would know that, considering you’re you and had eaten a man not very long before arriving. So for all you know, he could be a latent weirdo and slash or homicidal… Besides, you are not in the habit of warming easily to men anyway. Or ever.

♱⃓ ♱⃓ ♱⃓

OUTSIDE, THE EVENING SUMMER air burns nearly as fiercely as the hunger still pulsing through you to bleed that boy dry.

Gluttony. One of your more recurring sins. 

So now you stand in the shadow behind Saint Evan’s, trying to calm down by lighting a fickle thing mortals use for comfort, that has absolutely no effect on you save for making you look sultrier than you already are.

Unfortunately, your stupid goddamn lighter refuses to cooperate. 

On top of that, all of a sudden you hear footsteps and this agitating, grating voice…

“Are you alright?”

It might just be the overstimulation talking (it is), but right now you loathe this priest and you want him to die.

You turn with the cigarette tucked between your lips and find Father Sunghoon standing a few respectful feet away with a look of concern etched into his face, light kissing his pale skin as if the sun itself exists to serve him. “Why are you here?”

The priest raises an eyebrow. “It’s not everyday a woman runs out of church… like that. I’m confused. Have I done something to offend you?”

You sigh. You could probably take it easy on him, you know? “No. No, you know what actually? I’m not alright,” you mumble through your cigarette. “My fucking lighter isn’t working, and I’m starting to feel that God has fucking abandoned me.”

The young priest clicks his tongue, faintly reproving at your taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Bad girl. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” he laughs boyishly. “Let me help.”

Did he just…? 

Before you can react, he steps close enough that the air between you alters as you catch a whiff of him. Oh, he smells… maddening. 

Control yourself. 

You hold your breath as he reaches into the pocket of his cassock and pulls out a lighter. Sunghoon’s cups the flame from the light breeze, and you inhale once it is lit, thanking him before you exhale a tad bit of smoke. 

This feels far too intimate a moment to share with a goddamn priest you have only just met.

“Aren’t you supposed to be discouraging me from death, Father?”

Sunghoon’s mouth curves upwards. He reaches into the same pocket again, draws out a cigarette of his own, and lights it. “Maybe,” he shrugs coolly, smoke curling from his lips. “But I have a feeling I’m in no position to be lecturing you.”

You eye the cigarette between his fingers and let out a small laugh out of disbelief. “Wow. Is following a woman you just met out of church and smoking with her also part of your priest training or something?”

The priest handsomely smirks. “Think of this as a special service.”