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.

---

It was a rare moment for Sara. One where the world wasn't lighter, wasn't more bearable to be in. Sara much preferred it that way — it was easier to channel that part of her, the one where she simply let go and poured everything out onto the canvas. Quiet brain, full hands.

It's something she doesn't like doing much. She's been told it stifles not only her technique but her creativity too.

She doesn't really get it, but the critic who told her had said it to her face, unlike the rest. Made sure they locked eyes when she added that she could tell Sara was lost. Far too out of reach.

Sara doesn't remember much about that day. It was one of the few exhibitions she'd tried her hardest to stay sober for, but the crowd, the people — everything had been mind-numbingly boring. She got bored. When Myeong-o finally crawled in from whatever hole he'd been hiding in, Sara hunted him down, and then she—

She's not sure what happened next. But the world was much better to be in right after.

The exhibit ended. She remembers the critic though, all daring and in her face, the woman unbothered by her parents or the guests as she stared Sara down and told her to get her head in the game.

It was sexy.

And if there's anything other than art or that sweet, sweet high that Sara gives a fuck about, it's people. Well — not people, per se. More like beauty in all its different forms. That's still putting it simply, because there's a specific kind of beauty Lee Sara appreciates and it is almost never the kind the world makes obvious.

---

Sara tugs at her hair as Jaejun and Yeon-jin arrive at the rooftop terrace. She sniffs when she spots the minute grimace on Park Yeon-jin's nasty, beautiful face.

Bitch.

Sara slides her shades on and leans back into the soft, newly cleaned couch. She's not sure when that happened. She does remember sometime this week — her mother calling to say she'd be bringing her usual people over.

Sara told her to fuck off, then hung up. Honestly, the woman has known her all her life and still has no sense of boundary.

Jaejun drops into the couch beside her and shrugs off his coat. The heat must be getting to him. Sara shivers as the painful warmth prickles her skin. Jeon Jaejun, the asshole, dumps his dark coat onto Sara and she barely reins her annoyance in.

It's soft though. Like the newly cleaned couch, except it smells like Jaejun — his overpowering brand of musk and cologne. Strong enough that Sara thinks twice before shrugging it on.

"Yah, don't tell me you're high right now. I told you to stay clean today, I need you to use that stupid brain of yours for once."

Sara frowns mutely as Yeon-jin screams her head off. Not for the first time since the beginning of this cursed friendship, Sara imagines a world where she never took Yeon-jin's hand as a child. Never followed her around as a teenager.

She huffs and slides Jaejun's coat on properly, the shivers wracking through her making it more difficult than it should be. She considers giving up. Continues anyway — fuelled by spite, pure stubbornness, and nothing else.

The reward is worth it. The heat seizes gradually and Sara stops to consider the fact that she might have been cold the entire time.

Huh.

She waves the thought away, taking in the antsy Yeon-jin in front of her, watching her frown at the sight of Jaejun's coat on Sara. If Sara were a pettier person — someone like Hye-jeong — she would gloat. Smirk. Make it known.

Instead, Sara lets the manic giggles come, helpless at the thought of Park Yeon-jin being jealous over this.

"Hey, cut it out."

Of course. Jaejun the asshole, right on time to ruin her fun. Sara rolls her eyes behind her glasses. She notices how Yeon-jin calms down though — pacified by whatever the freaky eye contact she makes with him means.

"So what's wrong?"

Sara doesn't care. She really doesn't. But if she has to sit here any longer, without comfort or even her usual ability to tune them out, she'll go crazy. Her thoughts are frantic enough on their own — the way she tugs at her hair, the way she scratches at her skin without thinking. She'll take what she can get.

Park Yeon-jin sighs through her nose before smoothing the wrinkles from her black leather tube skirt. A tick, then — Sara can't think of any other reason why Yeon-jin would bother straightening leather.

Although Yeon-jin does have a preference for leather these days. From Sara's distant recollection, it might be the husband. God knows the number of ridiculous schemes Yeon-jin has run to keep that man's attention.

It's very likely Yeon-jin's husband. Ha — Do — something. It's Ha. Jaejun curses the man out too many times for the name to vanish completely. Whatever it is, Sara understands. Yeon-jin does make a vision in leather, bat-crazy as she is. The woman drives people mad, and not in the sexy way.

"Can you believe that worm. That good-for-nothing whore. That bitch we all took pity on."

Yeon-jin starts and Sara shuffles on her seat, searching. Beside her, on the couch, the table, everywhere.

She should have something. Something to make this easier. To make Yeon-jin bearable.

"What did Choi do now?" Sara asks flatly. Jaejun beside her is too busy to care, or to pretend he gives a fuck about whatever Yeon-jin is saying.

"She had the guts to meet with Do-yeong Oppa."

Jaejun straightens beside Sara. Even she doesn't pretend to be uninterested anymore.

Yeon-jin scoffs as she reminisces. Sara locks eyes with the asshole beside her — he notes the question on her face and shrugs. Sara holds back a groan as Park Yeon-jin takes her sweet, maddening time.

"Do-yeong Oppa has been getting suspicious these days. I don't like it. He said he spoke to Hye-jeong and she said something. He wouldn't tell me what it was."

Jaejun pulls out a cigarette and lights it while Yeon-jin talks. The scent of nicotine leaves Sara in a brief daze and she sniffs. It won't cut it — Sara never really got into smoking. To her it was scratching an itch with the softest possible thing. Unlikely to relieve it, but the motion felt good regardless.

Jaejun gives her a look as Yeon-jin snatches the cigarette from him and he pulls out another, offering Sara a stick as he does.

Sara stares at it for a moment. Yeon-jin's spiralling rant becomes static.

She takes a stick and Jaejun lights it. She takes a drag, savours it, and tunes back into the crash-out already in progress.

"—I know that but he had something to do with it, I just can't prove it."

Sara takes another long drag, thoughts settling into something almost clear. Everyone in their group knows how Yeon-jin gets when anyone touches her family. Husband and daughter — especially husband. Yeon-jin is a terrible human being. They all are. But Yeon-jin more than most, and she turns into something else entirely when her family gets involved.

It's because of how she sees them, Sara thinks. Unlike everything else in her life, those two are clean. Untouched. Perfect by Yeon-jin's particular definition of the word.

It's something Sara doesn't care much for. Her family was once like that — Pastor Lee and his devotedly religious household. Look where that landed them.

She finds the whole thing boring, honestly. It truly must be, or why would Yeon-jin need breaks from her perfect life to come sit on Sara's rooftop and make it worse? Yeon-jin doesn't like hearing that though.

"—I have had enough with that bitch. It's bad enough that she copies us, and even online she acts like we're all besties, and now she has the guts to mess with Oppa."

Yeon-jin's clicking heels are muffled by the rug on Sara's terrace — the one that had to be installed after Sara passed out and hit her head too many times. That was the official story, anyway.

"Alright, calm down. I'll talk to Hye-jeong and she'll take back whatever she said."

Jaejun flicks away his spent cigarette.

"That's not going to cut it. Besides, Do-yeong Oppa is too smart. If Hye-jeong turns around and takes back everything she said, do you know how suspicious that's going to look?"

Sara sighs, flicking away her own cig as Yeon-jin scrambles for another one.

"Well what do you want me to do then?"

"How about you keep her in check. God, Jaejun, must I tell you everything. I don't care what you do, but make sure she doesn't mess with my family. Or else—"

Park Yeon-jin trails off. She kicks at an empty flower pot, groans, then whips a harsh glare at Sara.

"I get it already. Calm the fuck down."

Jaejun half-rises as though to comfort her, then thinks better of it and stays still.

"Fine — and you."

Sara stumbles, movements jerky. Yeon-jin crosses her arms, prideful, and Sara briefly considers bolting from her own home before she dismisses the thought.

The last person who should be able to make her do that is this bitch. The thought almost makes Sara laugh. She settles for a snort instead.

"The shower — is it clean? I need to shower. The last thing I need is Oppa knowing I smoked again after promising to quit."

Yeon-jin groans, not so mighty now. Sara waves a hand toward the door leading down into her apartment.

"Knock yourself out."

Yeon-jin knows her way around well enough by now. The bitch still narrows her eyes, glaring down at Sara.

"It's clean, right?"

Sara nods. She's not offended. They've all seen her at her worst. At her filthiest. There are no pretenses left between them, and Sara has long since stopped deciding whether that's a comfort or just the inevitable result of knowing people too long and too closely.

A beat. Then:

"You know Hye-jeong is stubborn too."

Sara says it out of boredom, while Jaejun scrolls through his phone.

"She's not stupid. She'll give in once she knows Yeon-jin is pissed." His tone is flat, settled. "After all, if there's one thing everyone knows about Hye-jeong—"

"—it's that she's a coward who's weak to Jeon Jaejun." Sara finishes it for him.

"I guess so."

Sara shrugs.

The silence that follows is different from the one before — less loaded, more comfortable. The kind that comes after the storm has moved on to ruin someone else's afternoon.

Sara leans her head back against the couch and stares up at the sky. Somewhere behind her, the shower turns on. Jaejun exhales beside her, long and slow.

She should paint something when they leave, she thinks. Something ugly.

She always does her best work in ugly moods.

----

More glory fics on my Ao3 🖤