ao_aowrites

Usually, Jaejun would not be so lost in his head. Thoughts don't drift when he's thrusting into Yeon-jin - not when she's doing that thing where she tightens and clamps down around him, hot and unbearably slick, tight enough that Jaejun chases that high even on the nights he doesn't have her. But today, rare as it happens, his mind wanders anyway.

He thrusts, having found his rhythm, skin against skin, the soft drag and push of it filling the quiet of the room. He makes sure to hit that spot - the one that drives Yeon-jin out of her careful, composed mind and makes her-

"-Nng. Fuck."

Yes. That one.

He sighs - low, caught at the back of his throat - and leans into her. Their bodies, slick with perspiration, press together until the space between them disappears, until he can feel the fine tremor running through her, can smell her perfume breaking down under the heat of her skin into something warmer and more honest. It's interesting, how connected they become in moments like this. Bewitching, almost. Jaejun moves his hips again - slowly at first, deliberately, watching Yeon-jin's brows pull together, her lips part on a breath she won't give him the satisfaction of hearing - and then at full throttle. The kind of rhythm she chases. The kind she won't ask for but takes anyway, fingers tightening in the sheets. The kind that Jaejun is just a little smug to know only he can give her.

Only him. Jeon Jaejun.

He buries his face in the curve of her bare neck, biting his lip against the sudden, almost embarrassing urge to mark her. The skin there is warm and damp, her pulse jumping faintly against his mouth. She groans beneath him, the sound pulled up from somewhere low in her chest, and the brief parting of her lips sends something possessive clawing through him. He wants to own that mouth. That sickly sweet, poisonous mouth. So he does - he kisses her, swallowing the sound she makes, one hand travelling down the plane of her body, finding the sensitive peak of her chest and working it until she clenches around him, fingernails biting into the back of his neck hard enough to sting.

Yeon-jin comes like that. Kissing him, arms tight around his neck, hips rolling up to meet him, her whole body pulling taut before it gives.

Jaejun follows her over the edge, pushing deeper, hips stuttering, and lets himself go.

---

Yeon-jin takes a shower while Jaejun disposes of the condom. He shrugs on a bathrobe - the fabric soft against his still-warm skin - and moves through the motions quietly, already aware that his time with her is coming to an end. The reminder sours his sated mood before it has the chance to settle.

The bathroom door slides open on a gust of steam. Yeon-jin walks out wet and luminous, dark hair stripped of its elegance, clinging to her throat and collarbones in dark ribbons. The white towel wrapped around her body does things to him - things that should not be legal and by now are only passively humiliating. He picks up his phone from the nightstand and finds it dead. He plugs it in, drops onto the bed, and trains his eyes on the ceiling.

The room smells like her. Like them. That particular mix of her perfume and sweat and something that has no name but that Jaejun has been breathing in since he was a teenager and still hasn't gotten tired of.

He knows the signs. The deceptive quiet after. Yeon-jin lets the calm settle like bait before she springs - this is what she does with enemies, with prey. Jaejun has been both at different points and learned the hard way not to mistake the silence for safety.

He stares at the ceiling and hopes, just this once, she lets it go.

She doesn't.

Yeon-jin appears at the foot of the bed, arms crossed, a stern look already assembled on her face. Jaejun scrubs a hand over his mouth, feels the roughness of his jaw against his palm.

"I told you not to leave marks."

He thinks briefly about what it would cost him to say something sharp back. Thinks about the truce, still fragile, still healing from the last time they screamed at each other until the walls of this room felt too small. He'd meant most of what he said. He still means the part about Ha Do-yeong. He regrets the part about her daughter - regretted it the moment it left his mouth - and so he'd apologised. He had to. This arrangement goes both ways.

"I didn't leave any marks, Yeon-jin."

She rolls her eyes, slides her towel up her thigh, and points.

The mark is faint. Barely there. A bloom of pink against her skin, easy to miss. Jaejun rolls his shoulders and lets go of playing dumb - it won't cut it and they both know it.

"You aren't going home anytime soon. It'll fade before then."

Yeon-jin's expression shifts into something that promises hell on earth, slow and deliberate. Her mouth opens.

This is the other thing that pisses him off about her - the way she will drag them both back into it like a reflex, like a teenager who hasn't learned that some battles aren't worth the damage. He knows what they are. He has known for a long time. What they have is nothing. Will be nothing. Will result in nothing.

And still.

The truth of it, the version Jaejun only allows himself in rooms like this one - rooms that still smell like her, where the sheets are still warm - is simpler and more humiliating than any argument they've ever had: no one has ever held his attention the way Park Yeon-jin does. Not for long. He's tried - many times, many women - and they all start to blur after a while, faces and names that couldn't sustain his interest past a season. Yeon-jin has never blurred. She keeps up with him, mentally and physically, matches him in ways that feel almost unfair.

When they'd first started, it was teenage curiosity. Heat and proximity and bad decisions. The smell of her shampoo in a crowded room. The way she looked at him like she already knew what he was going to do before he did it. Now it has calcified into something he should have let go of years ago and somehow never did.

He came to understand, eight years ago, that he was alone in what he'd imagined for them.

Yeon-jin had chosen differently. He'd watched her choose and said nothing, and they had arrived here - to this room, this arrangement, this ongoing refusal to name what they are - and Jaejun had told himself it was enough.

It almost is, on good days.

Her phone rings. The sound cuts cleanly through the quiet.

Yeon-jin, now dressed in her silky nightwear, crosses to get it. The smile that breaks across her face when she answers is the kind Jaejun hasn't seen her wear in his direction in years. Genuine. Unguarded. Soft at the edges in a way she never allows herself around him anymore. It should leave him seething. Most times it does.

Tonight he just watches.

"-Yes, Oppa-"

Jaejun looks away. His phone has powered on. He stares at the screen without reading it, the light too bright against his eyes in the dimness of the room.

He was always going to be someone else's husband. The thought lands with the dull familiarity of an old bruise. Not sharp anymore. Just there, settled into the bone.

Yeon-jin hangs up, already moving toward her unpacked bags with that particular energy she gets - purposeful, lit from within by something that has nothing to do with him. She pulls out a dinner dress. The fabric whispers against her fingers as she lays it across the chair.

"What is it? Where are you off to, Yeon-jin?"

She steps into the dress without answering immediately, and then turns, presenting him with the pale expanse of her back. The faint marks from earlier bloom like watercolour against her skin.

"Zip me up."

He does. His fingers find the zipper at the base of her spine, the metal cool and small between his fingers. If his hands linger a beat longer than the task requires - running along the ridge of her spine where the zipper ends, where the warmth of her skin radiates up through his palms - Yeon-jin says nothing. She lets out a small, mean laugh instead. The sound of it settles somewhere behind his sternum. She slides into her heels, the soft click of them against the floor. Reaches for the Hermès bag on the table - the one he knows she keeps like a relic, her first wedding gift from the only man who might have actually glimpsed whatever lives underneath Park Yeon-jin.

Everything clicks into place.

"Since he's in town, Oppa asked to meet." A small shrug. What can you do.

"Have fun." Jaejun reaches for his phone. Starts scrolling.

He goes through the list with the detached efficiency of a man selecting a restaurant - the bright screen harsh against his thumb, name after name sliding past without catching. He pauses. His eyes snag.

Choi Hye-jeong.

A pale echo of the real thing. A ridiculous imitation, if he's being honest - same dark hair, same careful femininity, none of the teeth. But she's easier, and she'll pick up on the first ring, and tonight Jaejun finds he doesn't have the patience for anything that requires more from him than that.

"Oh, I will." Yeon-jin's voice carries from the door, bright with anticipation, already somewhere else entirely.

The door clicks shut behind her.

The room is quiet. It still smells like her.

----

I know this might feel like it's downplaying their relationship, but it just makes more sense to me this way. we all knew Jaejun and Yeon-jin had something complicated between them — but to me it always felt less like yearning and more like needing. he knows his place in her life. he hates it. and he made peace with it anyway.

at least until Dong-eun came along and Ye-sol's paternity was no longer a secret.