Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
SUMMARY . . rafe gets exactly what he asks for when he calls you clingy in front of everyone and discovers that silence is a lot harder to live with than he expected.
AUTHOR’S NOTE . . 2847 words ; PART TWO, rafe admitting he was wrong for that night so theres closure
MAIN MASTERLIST | PART ONE
the conversation should make him feel better. logically, it should, because you answered.
that alone is more than he’d gotten from you for days. you responded to every question he asked, told him where you were, reassured him you weren’t angry, and never once left him sitting there wondering if you’d disappeared again.
he finds himself staring at the messages with a growing sense of irritation he can’t even explain, not because of anything you said. if anything, that’s the problem. you were reasonable, you were patient.
over the next few days, he rereads the conversation more than he’d ever admit to out loud. every time he does, he finds himself stopping at the same messages. i’m literally texting you right now. how is that avoiding you.
before, conversations with you had never felt like work. he never had to think about whether you’d answer or if he’d hear from you that day. you were always somewhere nearby, reaching out first. he tells himself this is temporary. you’re still upset and it’ll pass. but the longer it goes on, the more obvious it becomes that this isn’t punishment. you’re simply matching the energy he’s always given you.
that’s the part that keeps bothering him. if you were screaming at him, he’d at least know what to do. instead, you’re calm, you smile when you see him, you don’t seem upset.
by the time he sees you at the country club, he’s convinced himself that what the two of you need is time together. if things feel weird, then all he has to do is make them feel normal again. it’s the kind of logic that makes perfect sense inside his own head and literally nowhere else.
the afternoon sun hangs low over the golf course as people move in and out of the clubhouse. you’re standing near the outdoor counter waiting for a drink you’d ordered, one hand resting against the strap of your bag while you scroll absentmindedly through your phone. from across the patio, rafe spots you immediately.
without hesitation, he changes direction. you don’t even notice him until he’s really close. when you glance up, surprise flashes across your face for half a second before settling into something softer.
“hey.” it’s just a hey, and for some reason, it already annoys him.
“hey,” he says back. “what’re— what’re you doing?”
you glance toward the counter. “waiting for my drink.”
“then what?”
the question earns a small look from you, but you smile like it’s obvious, “then i’m leaving, babe. i’ve gotta go. i told you i’d be out with friends today.”
his jaw tightens slightly as you suppress your smile. it’s not even because it’s funny. you can just already know where this conversation is heading.
there’s a beat of silence before he exhales through his nose. “you’ve got a lot of friends all of a sudden.”
you raise an eyebrow, “i’ve always had friends.”
he immediately realizes how that sounded, unfortunately, not before the words are already out there, but you don’t argue with him over it. don't get defensive. you choose to let the comment sit there until the awkwardness belongs entirely to him.
“look,” he says, shifting his weight. “we should do something.”
you blink. “what do you mean?”
“later. tonight. whatever.”
your expression remains unchanged. “i already have plans.”
“cancel them.” the response comes so naturally he doesn’t even think about it.
you stare at him for a second. something about your expression makes him realize he’s done it again - in the expectation that you’ll immediately rearrange yourself around whatever he wants.
your drink is placed on the counter beside you before either of you says anything else.
you reach for it. “sorry, i can’t tonight. i already made plans.”
“your friends again?”
“no.” you shake your head lightly. “my family’s doing something, and on friday too.”
for a second, he just stares at you. he doesn’t know why that answer bothers him as much as it does. maybe because it catches him off guard, that somewhere along the way he’d convinced himself the only reason you weren’t around was because you were deliberately staying busy because you were upset or something.
“what, like dinner?” he asks.
you shrug. “yeah, something like that. i just haven’t spent much time with them lately, so.”
it’s vague, but not dismissive. you’re answering him, same as you’ve been doing all week - just giving him enough information that he can’t accuse you of shutting him out, but not volunteering anything extra either.
a month ago, you would’ve told him three days in advance, probably would’ve asked if he wanted to come.
the realization lands heavily in his chest. “okay. so you’re busy all night tonight?”
“probably.”
another silence settles, but you don’t seem uncomfortable inside it. you shift your drink into your other hand and glance toward the parking lot where a familiar SUV has just pulled into one of the spaces.
even from this distance, you immediately recognize it. your expression softens almost instantly. “i asked them to pick me up.”
he follows your gaze as a man steps out from the driver’s side, your father. your mother climbs out from the passenger side a second later while your siblings in the backseat leans forward, waving through the window after spotting you near the clubhouse.
before rafe can stop himself, his eyes flick back toward you. you’re smiling at them. while he’d spent days sitting in his room staring at his phone, waiting for your attention to come back, you’d simply gone back to living your life. but of course, why wouldn’t you?
“i should go,” you say.
he opens his mouth, ready to say something, but he isn’t entirely sure what, like don’t go. come with me instead. what about tomorrow? something, anything, but none of it sounds right.
so all he manages is a stiff nod. “alright, i’ll see you.”
you offer him a small smile. “i’ll see you.”
the entire drive home, he keeps replaying the interaction in his head, picking apart pieces of it. nothing about the conversation was bad. if anything, it was frustratingly normal.
he spends the rest of the evening trying to distract himself from it. he throws himself into whatever’s in front of him, whether it’s helping move something down at the dock, sitting through a conversation he barely listens to, or aimlessly scrolling through his phone while the television drones somewhere in the background.
for days after the argument, he’d assumed the distance came from sadness. then, when the sadness seemed to fade, he’d convinced himself it was just stubbornness. now he isn’t so sure it’s either of those things anymore. sadness still reaches for people and anger still demands something from them.
he wakes up and instinctively checks his phone before remembering there probably won’t be anything waiting for him, again. every little thing seems to lead back to the same uncomfortable conclusion. somewhere along the way, he’d become used to being a priority without ever having to earn it.
the memory of the party comes back more often now. before, whenever he thought about that night, his focus stayed on the argument itself, then on the smaller details instead. he remembers your smile disappeared in the moment, the look on your face after he said it what he said, you knew you genuinely didn’t understood what you’d done wrong.
the more distance he gets from it, the harder it becomes to justify what happened. he’d spent so much time convincing himself that you were too attached and too involved in every part of his life that he’d never stopped to consider why. you weren't demanding things from him. you weren't
one night, he finds himself sitting on the edge of his bed with your message thread open again.
he doesn’t even remember opening it. one second he’s scrolling through something else, and the next he’s staring at months of conversations stretching up the screen.
for the first time, embarrassment starts creeping in alongside everything else. it’s not the embarrassment of being ignored, but the embarrassment of realizing he’s been trying to skip straight to the part where things go back to normal without actually addressing the reason they changed in the first place.
he’s asked where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been up to. he’d focused so heavily on restoring access to you that he’d never once stopped to acknowledge the thing that pushed you away. and once he notices it, he can’t stop noticing it.
the thought follows him long after midnight.
he leans back against his bed’s headboard and stares at the ceiling, one hand resting across his stomach while the events of the past couple weeks continue looping through his head. eventually, a frustrated laugh escapes him, because the answer feels so obvious now that he almost wants to be annoyed with himself.
the next morning, you don’t expect to see him.
the weather’s nice, people move in and out of storefronts, golf carts weave lazily down the street. you’re standing outside a small shop near the marina, waiting for a bag someone inside is still putting together for you, when a truck pulls into a nearby parking spot.
you recognize it immediately. rafe steps out and spots you, but for a second, neither of you moves, and then he starts walking over.
you watch him approach, noticing almost immediately that something feels different. like he’s still rafe, shoving his hands into his pockets halfway through crossing the sidewalk, but there’s something less impatient about him today. he seem less reactive than as of late.
he stops in front of you. “hey.”
“hey.” you glance toward the shop window.
he notices. “you busy?”
the question almost makes you smile. “my parents wanted to go out on the boat today, remember?”
he nods once. for a moment, it seems like he’s about to fall into the same pattern as before to ask how long you’ll be gone for or if the plans are gonna take over the entire day. you can practically see the questions forming behind his eyes.
instead, he exhales slowly, and lets them go, which surprises you. “okay.”
another pause settles between you. as a group of tourists walk past, you realize he’s actually nervous. at least not visibly, but you’ve known him long enough to recognize when he’s uncomfortable.
your expression softens slightly, “what’s up?”
rafe looks away first, and that surprises you too. he drags a hand across the back of his neck. “been thinking about that night, and before you say anything—” he starts, then immediately stops himself with a frustrated shake of his head. “actually, no. never mind.”
you tilt your head slightly, but still don’t say anything. the conversation goes quiet as a worker approaches you, handing you a bag. you thank her, nodding politely and wishing them well before you turn away, fiddling with the handles of the bag while lingering long enough to let rafe know you’re still listening.
“i was already in a bad mood,” he tries again. you stay quiet and watch him carefully. “i was irritated, stressed, whatever. but that wasn’t your problem, i know. you weren’t doing anything wrong. you weren’t bothering me, and you weren’t being clingy.”
frustration flickers across his expression after saying it, just only with himself for needing to say it out loud in the first place.
“i just . . i took everything out on you because you were standing there. i guess. and then i did it in front of everybody.” there’s no excuse attached to it.
you study him for a moment before speaking. “why?”
his eyebrows pull together. “what?”
“why did it bother you so much?”
the question catches him off guard. you can see it happen. it’s easier to apologize for the outcome than it is to examine the reason.
“i don’t know.”
you raise an eyebrow, waiting.
he lets out another quiet laugh. “okay, that’s not true.” his gaze drops briefly toward the pavement before returning to yours. “i think i just got used to it.”
“used to what?”
“you.”
you furrow your brows in confusion.
“you’ve always been there, calling me, checking on me, all that. i started acting like it was annoying when really . .” he shakes his head once. “i don’t know. i just stopped appreciating it.”
people continue moving around the marina while a boat horn sounds somewhere behind you. the tension that’s been sitting between you for weeks finally feels different.
you look at him for another second before your expression softens almost imperceptibly. you ask quietly, “so when i stopped?”
rafe’s eyes meet yours. “hated it.”
you hum with a nod, looking away. he doesn’t try to explain himself again, but he stands there looking at you, waiting.
you don’t realize it, but you’re currently holding all the power in the conversation. he’d finally handed you something honest, and now he has absolutely no idea what you’re going to do with it.
your eyes narrow thoughtfully, and rafe swears he feels his stomach twist. the corners of your mouth don’t even move that suddenly rafe finds himself wondering if he somehow managed to make things worse.
a couple weeks ago he would’ve literally rather had to swallow glass than stand in public talking about his feelings, even if people aren’t even close enough right now to hear you two. but still, you’re standing on a marina sidewalk with people walking past every few seconds.
“i mean it, y/n.” your eyebrows lift slightly at his low voice. “i shouldn’t have said any of that, especially not like that. you didn’t deserve it. and i’m sorry.”
the apology hangs there. for a moment, neither of you says anything. you can see how awful he’s been feeling. you sensed it the moment he kept messaging you. he doesn’t even know sarah overheard rafe topper and kelce about her that one time and told y/n about it.
you smile. it’s small at first, but it’s enough for something in rafe’s expression to immediately soften. all week he’s been bracing for resistance or disappointment. instead, you’re smiling.
you shake your head lightly before glancing past him toward the docks. “c’mon,” like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
you turn before he can ask what you mean, already beginning to walk away from him, and for half a second rafe simply stands there watching you go. then he notices your arm moving behind your back.
your hand’s open, waiting.
the sight nearly makes him smile, because apparently after everything, after a week of driving himself insane and rereading text messages and checking your location like a lunatic, this is how you choose to tell him he’s forgiven. he’s been forgiven, you’ve just been waiting for him to admit how much of a dick he’d been that night.
you don’t even look back so you can keep walking, fully expecting him to be there. rafe reaches for your hand immediately. there isn’t even a second of hesitation.
his fingers close around yours, and the relief that hits him is so sudden it almost catches him off guard. he shortens his stride as he catches up beside you, careful not to tug your arm as he brings your hand toward his mouth and presses a quick kiss against your knuckles.
only then do you finally look at him, and the second he sees your face, he lets out a quiet huff of laughter because you’re grinning. you’ve apparently been waiting for him to catch up.
his thumb brushes across the back of your hand, then gives your hand a gentle pull, reeling you slightly closer until you’re forced to stumble half a step toward him with a laugh. before you can say anything, he’s already leaning down, pressing a brief kiss against your lips, and the second he pulls away he follows it with another against your temple.
you roll your eyes, but he immediately does it again.
“rafe.”
“what?” he sounds entirely too pleased with himself, you can hear it, which is exactly why your smile refuses to leave.
by the time you reach the docks, he’s hovering close behind you, both hands settled comfortably at your waist while the two of you walk. every so often he leans down to press another absent-minded kiss somewhere he can reach, to your temple, the side of your head, the back of your hair.
your family’s boat comes into view a few moments later where your parents are already waiting. the second they spot you, your mother lifts a hand in greeting. you wave back.
“can rafe come?” you call out to them.
your father looks from you to him, then immediately smiles, nodding big, just once, maybe twice if you didn’t catch the first one. “of course.” the answer comes so quickly it makes you smile.
beside you, rafe’s grip tightens slightly against your waist. he’s walking beside you, and this time, when you reach for him, he has no intention of letting go.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
SUMMARY a feminist podcast roasts a boyband live on air, and Keonho makes the mistake of getting intrigued by the one girl who refuses to be impressed.
PAIRING idol Keonho x podcaster Yn / female reader
FEATURING CORTIS, ILLIT Wonhee, NewJeans Hyein, H2H Ian, mentions of other idols
GENRE social media au with written parts, romance, crack, fluff (tba)
WARNINGS wony fc, umm lots of jokes? swearing, complete roasting of the male kind (= hopecore), kys/kym, underage drinking, tba
In which : you have been seeing niki for 5 months now , you know his fg like your jeans pocket. He has always been a cheater and a toxic boy , but what can you do?? It's not like you're dating.
mae notes :: new smau guysss , this title was inspired from a lyric of "pride" by Kendrick Lamar , I think you can tell I love kendrick. Btw may god keep me away from this type of rls cuz wtf😭😭
💬: i was in a mood and just couldn't stop thinking about rafe having a wet dream while sleeping in the bed with bsf!reader
swearing, light smut, i don't know if this is like somnophilia or dub-con but heed those warnings as well ig
Sharing a bed with Rafe wasn't anything new. It was a routine born out of late-night drives, shared secrets, and a close friendship. One that did have its blurred lines but you never wanted to talk about it.
It was entirely platonic. Or, at least, you had both spent months convincing yourselves it was.
Until tonight.
You woke up in the dead of night to a strange heat against your back. Rafe's bedroom is typically cool, the premium air conditioning humming softly in the background, but the space between your bodies is scorching.
Beside the warmth against the small of your back, you feel this repetitive pressure. Rafe is flush against you, his large frame bracketing yours from behind, hand clamped firmly over your hip, fingers digging into your waist.
Then, he moves.
It’s a slow roll of his hips, straight against your backside. You freeze, your breath catching in your throat. He’s asleep, you can tell by the pattern of his breathing, but a sudden, low whimper breaks from the back of his throat. It's an uncharacteristically vulnerable sound that sends a shiver straight down your spine.
And a pool forming shamefully between your legs.
He grinds against you again, harder this time, a ragged gasp slipping past his lips. He's dry humping you in his sleep, completely lost in whatever vivid, intense dream is playing out behind his closed eyelids.
That's when you feel it.
A wet, seeping warmth bleeds through the fabric of your clothes where you're sure the tip of his dick is making friction.
Your heart hammers and you silently panic as you carefully but quickly twist out from under his heavy grip, pulling away to the opposite side of the mattress.
You turn around in the blueish dark of his room, your eyes wide. Rafe has shifted onto his back now, chest heaving slightly. In the shadows, you can clearly see the dark, widening wet patch right at the crotch of his gray sweatpants. It’s soaking right through the cotton, spreading onto the sheets beneath him.
Your face burns, not knowing what to do. You’re completely frozen, mind racing, entirely unsure of whether to wake him up, slip out of the room entirely, or just pretend you never saw it and press yourself back against him and try to go back to sleep.
But before you can make a choice, the lack of friction stirs him awake. Rafe lets out another rough sigh, eyelashes fluttering before his eyes crack open. They’re heavy-lidded, dark, and completely clouded with desire.
He doesn't look startled to see you staring, blue eyes glue to you as he struggles to keep them open. There isn't a single shred of embarrassment on his face as he examines himself either, the haze of arousal wiring him entirely unbothered by, or oblivious to, the mess he's made.
"Where'd you go?" he mumbles, his voice incredibly deep and raspy from sleep, reaching out to rub a hand up your thigh.
"Rafe... you," you stammer, your voice rising and shaking slightly as you look down at his lap and then back up to his face.
He follows your gaze down, eyeing the damp, ruined fabric of his sweatpants with a tired pout that only makes you press your legs together tighter. But instead of pulling away or apologizing, he reaches out, his hand wrapping around both of your wrists with a firm tug. He pulls you right back into his space, effortlessly erasing the distance you just created.
Your faces are inches apart now, and he's holding one of your hands up, looking you in the eye tiredly as he guides the other directly down, pressing your palm flat against his print. You could feel the rigid line of his lingering erection beneath the wetness, so hard, you swore you could feel the blood being carried to his dick, veins pumping between the pads of your fingers.
"Help me out," he whispers, his gaze fixing onto yours with an intoxicating heat.
And before you can even fully process his words, Rafe leans in, his hand releasing your wrist that's in the air, sliding up to cup the back of your neck. He pulls you down into a bruising kiss, shattering whatever boundaries you thought you had left.
You guessed the lines weren't so blurred after all.
feedback is appreciated! thanks for reading. follow & turn on post notifs for @theharlowpost for writing exclusive updates!
in which: sunghoon is your best friend who usually never lets you down—until you ask him to introduce you to his friend. what you don’t know is that this bothered him more than he can admit, as because he’s had feelings for you for a while.
in which: sunghoon is your best friend who usually never lets you down—until you ask him to introduce you to his friend. what you don’t know is that this bothered him more than he can admit, as because he’s had feelings for you for a while.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
🎶 - Is That True by boynextdooooruhh (do you get my reference ok no Bye)
𝖯𝖠𝖨𝖱𝖨𝖭𝖦𝖲: classmate!riki x fem reader
𝖨𝖭 𝖶𝖧𝖨𝖢𝖧 - riki, the popular boy in the university, gets paired up with you, the quiet and smart girl for a school project. you try to push yourself and riki to work, but he keeps trying to distract you. long story short, he’s in love with you.
𝖦𝖤𝖭𝖱𝖤: smau, classmates to lovers, college au, there is a written part in this chapter
𝖶𝖠𝖱𝖭𝖨𝖭𝖦𝖲: suggestive jokes, suggestive pictures, smut, phone sex (WE ARE FINALLY GETTING SOMEWHERE🥳), masturbation (both, also this is extremely obvious), orgasm denial/control, sub!riki (omg), soft dom!reader, noona kink, dirty talk, light degradation/praise, tit fetish
| MDNI |
prev | next | masterlist
𝖶𝖮𝖱𝖣 𝖢𝖮𝖴𝖭𝖳: ~𝟩𝟢𝟢
when you answer the phone, he repeats your name over and over again like a prayer.
“riki? you wanted my help?” you ask, your voice soft.
“please, noona…i can’t finish! please…please talk to me…your sweet voice. it…it drives me crazy..!”
his voice immediately made you wetter than you already were. “i can help you. yunjin is out, so don’t worry about being quiet. i’m gonna touch myself too, okay?” you say, sliding your shorts off. “show me your pretty dick, hm? show noona what she does to you.”
he immediately whimpers in response, flipping his camera to show him stroking his fully-hard dick. you immediately start rubbing your clit. “you got this horny from just two images?” you say.
“holy shit…you l-looked so hot. i-i can’t!”
“i like how pretty you sound, ki. it’s making me so wet…look, baby.” you say in a teasing manner, while moving your camera down to show you fingering yourself, your arousal coating your fingers.
“all of that…for me?” he asks, stroking himself harder.
“yes, baby. be a good boy stroke your dick more f’me…show me how much you want noona to be there. s-show me how much you want to be inside noona, stretching her out and cumming inside her.” that instantly made him jerk his hips up.
“it…it turns me on when you talk to me like that.” he whimpers, pre-cum beading by his tip.
“mmm, does it? it makes me so horny when you fall apart for me. making me finger myself just for you, hm?”
“if you k-keep talking like that i’m gonna come already.”
“not yet. you don’t finish until i say so.” you say, the sloshy sounds of your wet pussy getting louder, making you whimper. “you just started touching yourself a minute ago, you can’t be close already, can you?”
“n-not yet…i need you to…to take off your shirt. i need to see your big tits again.” you moan to his words, taking your shirt and bra off.
you take one your tits and squeeze it, while also leaning your phone against a pillow, letting him see you fully bare, pleasuring yourself. your left hand is working with your tits while your right hand is pumping in and out of your pussy.
“baby, fuck…i think i’m getting close…” he says, while letting out a moan.
“n-no…hold it in like a good boy.”
“okay, noona…i-i’ll try. baby…you’re so fucking hot…especially when you play with your tits.”
“you like that? pretend that you’re here with me, sucking on my boobs while rubbing my clit.” your words yet again made him jerk his hips up.
“oh my g-god i can’t…i keep imagining being inside of you, and the face you would make when you would came. i wanna fill you up…i wanna fuck you so bad, make you a mother.”
“all that just for me?”
“y-yeah…all for you…you’re my good girl, noona…”
“you’re so cute, ki. you love me so much, don’t you?”
“i do…i love you so…so much…” his voice made you feel your climax coming up.
“ki…i-i’m close. are you?”
“yeah, i am,” he moans.
“let’s come together then. can you do that for me?”
“o-okay…i’m ready.” his release immediately flooded out, making a mess everywhere. yours leaked out of you, making him groan.
after you were done, you licked your fingers clean, tasting yourself. “you did so good, ki.” you praised, still catching your breath.
“t-thank you…i can’t believe we just did that…are you okay?”
“yeah. i’m okay. are you glad i helped you?” you ask.
“i’m so glad…your tattoo looked really good when you touched your tits.”
“that’s all thanks to the tattoo artist,” you tease, giggling.
“i think he did a great job. he also has to clean the sticky mess he made all over his sheets just now.”
“hmm…okay then. see you tomorrow, mm?”
“of course, pretty.”
“goodnight, pretty boy.”
“goodnight, princess.”
wow, you thought to yourself. you were extremely shocked by what you just did. sure, you’ve had phone sex before, but never that intense. you were never in charge like that. it was definitely surprising. but hey! you didn’t regret it!
❀'s note: plss ignore all timestamps on the ss >< i had to sneak in that heeseung ref lolz. also ik this chapter was a lot so i hope everything made sense ! "ig we're friends haha" ouuu she is ticked off lowkey. it all points back to their mysterious past... but all shall be revealed in due time... lmk your predictions / any other thoughts !
heeseung x fem! reader ⊹ ࣪ ˖⠀⠀⠀you met heeseung when you were just a kid. somehow, he was always there, until he wasn't. years later, you reunite. what starts as a long distance thing turns into and a relationship neither of you ever stopped trying to make work. the whole time, even in the good years, there's this quiet awareness underneath everything: that the distance was always there, that it never really went away, and that loving each other meant carrying that the entire time, right up until it was the thing that ended it.
→ genre: heeseung as your ex, slice of life, angst, childhood friends to lovers, long distance relationship, non-linear | → playlist: coming up roses - harry styles | wish you were here - pink floyd | less - olivia rodrigo | purple rain - prince | who knows - daniel caesar | i know the end - phoebe bridgers | pluto projector - rex orange county | → word count: 16k | !! warnings: smut scene, grief, heartbreak, oral sex (m and f receiving), protected sex, mutual breakup, bittersweet ending
HEESEUNG SPENT WAY TOO MUCH TIME THINKING ABOUT HOW LONG YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO GET OVER A BREAKUP. All of his friends had a different answer — Jay, for example, said it takes exactly half of the amount of time you spent with that person. Jungwon claimed it took one hundred beers, no matter how long that takes. Sunoo insisted you're cured the moment you survive a date without crying after. Meanwhile, Jake's method was to hit the party as soon as possible and lock eyes with whoever doesn't look away first. And well, Heeseung didn't do any of those things. He just kept wondering if grief had an expiration date or if he'd just have to distract himself from how he felt about you for the rest of his life.
Pablo Neruda once wrote: I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. He doesn't explain what spring does exactly, he assumes you already know. Everyone has felt that combination of arrival and disruption and beauty once. Spring doesn't ease you into anything, it just shows up one day and suddenly everything that was dormant is out in the open, exposed and vivid, and you start wondering how you went from bare branches to this, without noticing the exact moment it changed.
What people miss about that line is that spring always leaves, and that's not a tragedy in the poem and Neruda doesn't treat it like one. Spring was never going to stay, that's not what spring is for. The cherry trees don't mourn the end of spring, they just stand there changed in whatever season comes next, carrying the proof of what happened to them in the way they've grown. The poem is not about the love that lasts, but about the love that makes you into something you couldn't have become alone.
You thought about that poem more than you should have. You used to turn this over in your head on the bad nights, on the nights when you'd done the math too many times and kept arriving at the exact same answer — that you'd been right about each other and wrong about the circumstances, and that maybe that was its own kind of love story, just not the kind that gets a second act. It helped, sometimes. Other times it felt like something you were saying to yourself in place of something you didn't have the words for yet. But you kept trying to believe that what you two had was complete even if it wasn't permanent, that it counted, that it had changed you in ways you were still discovering. That's what you told yourself when you thought too much about the end.
While you thought too much about the end, Heeseung thought too much about the beginning. You were eleven and he was twelve, his family used to visit the city sometimes, cousins on his mom's side who lived three streets from your childhood home, and one summer he showed up at the end of your block and didn't know the rules of the game everyone was playing and argued about it for twenty minutes. You remember thinking he was annoying. He remembers thinking you were the kind of kid who knew everyone's name already and made him feel like he'd arrived late to something.
You played outside until it got dark, something kids don't do anymore and you both did back then without thinking about it, just stayed out because no one had called you in yet and there was no reason to leave. What he remembers is that at some point, you ended up sitting on the curb away from the others, and he was probably talking about some stupid boyish thing, and you had this way of listening even then, chin in your hand, actually paying attention, like what he was saying mattered. Heeseung wasn't used to that, even though Heeseung was only twelve.
His family came back the next three summers. You'd spot him from your window sometimes before he spotted you, this familiar-unfamiliar face showing up at the end of your street, and you'd go downstairs like you just happened to be going outside. You'd pick up wherever you'd left off, easy in the way things are easy when you're young and don't know yet to be guarded. He brought a portable speaker one summer and you'd sit on the building steps and argue about music, mostly you telling him his taste was bad and him defending himself without much conviction.
Heeseung eventually stopped coming. His family just stopped making the trip, and you'd notice his absence the first summer and then less the second and then it was just how things were. You'd see his name on your phone sometimes, a like here, a story view there. Once, when you were sixteen, he'd commented a single emoji on a photo you posted. By the time you were almost adults you were basically strangers who knew each other's faces.
But then, one day, you were running late when you ran into him. You'd taken the wrong exit and had to double back and you were annoyed and distracted and got on the train and almost didn't look up from your phone at all. He was standing by the opposite doors with his hands in his jacket pockets and you almost didn't place him and then you did, all at once. He looked up at the same moment and that felt like something, even then.
You both figured out within about a minute into the conversation that you were going to the same concert. He showed you his ticket on his phone like proof and you laughed and said that's insane and he said I know and you looked at each other in that way you look at someone when coincidence feels a little too neat to be only coincidence. The Strokes played Someday third song in. You grabbed his arm without thinking about it and you let go of his arm and you both faced the stage and you could feel him smiling even without looking at him.
The show ended at eleven. He said so and you said so and then you both laughed because that was all there was to say. You ended up at a place nearby that was still open and you stayed there until they started stacking chairs around you and the guy behind the counter looked at you twice before you got the hint. You talked the way you talk to someone you don't really know but somehow aren't nervous around. He told you about his hometown and you told him about the last five years and it was easy in a way you couldn't fully explain, the way it sometimes is with people you knew before you knew anything, before you'd decided who you were going to be. At some point you were talking about something completely unrelated and he laughed at something you said and you thought, this is a memory I would like to keep.
Heeseung texted you when he got back to where he was staying that night. That was really fun, he wrote. You read it in bed with your phone on your chest after and thought yeah, it really was.
The next day you walked around for a long time without going anywhere specific. You showed him the street where you grew up and you stood outside your old childhood home for a minute, and Sunday came too fast. You drove him to the airport because you offered and he said yes maybe a little too quickly. The drive took almost fifty minutes and you talked the whole way, then you were there and you weren't talking anymore and you pulled up to departures, and Heeseung looked at you and you looked back, and there was something there that you didn't have a name for yet, something that felt old and new at the same time. He picked up his bag and said he'd text when he landed. You watched him walk through the sliding doors and then you sat there for a moment longer than you needed to before pulling away.
He texted when he landed. You were still awake, not because you'd been waiting, except you had been. landed safe, he sent. Then a minute later: hey. for what it's worth, running into you was the best thing that happened to me this year.
After that, talking to Heeseung just became part of your day. He'd send you something he saw on the way to work, you'd reply hours later with something completely unrelated, and somehow that would turn into an hour of back and forth that neither of you had scheduled. You'd fall asleep mid conversation and wake up to three messages he'd sent after, the last one always something like okay you're asleep. talk tomorrow. You always talked tomorrow.
He called one night because he said he was too tired to type and you ended up on the phone for two and a half hours, both of you lying in your respective beds in your respective cities, talking about nothing that mattered and somehow not running out of things to say. When you finally hung up it was past two in the morning and you had work the next day and you lay there in the dark staring at the ceiling feeling something you didn't want to look at too directly yet.
He made you a playlist once and the title was just a date — the date of the concert, the day you ran into each other on the train. You listened to it on your commute and texted him you put Someday first and he said obviously and you smiled at your phone like an idiot on a crowded bus. So you made him one back and you spent longer on it than you'd admit. You watched movies together sometimes, texting reactions in real time because neither of you could figure out the sync on any of the watch together apps and at some point it stopped mattering.
Nobody called it anything and you didn't talk about what it was. There was no conversation where you defined it, no moment where either of you said so what is this. It just kept being what it was, consistent and entirely without a label, and most of the time that felt okay.
Then he texted you a screenshot of a festival lineup with no caption. You looked at it for three seconds and then called him. "When is it," you said instead of hello.
"June," he said. "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" You were seeing what he was seeing. Heeseung bought his ticket that night and you already had yours by the time he texted to ask if you were going to get one.
You were at the arrivals gate twenty minutes early. You watched the doors and then he was coming through them with his backpack on one shoulder, looking slightly jet lagged and exactly like himself, and he saw you and his whole face changed in this quiet way, not a big reaction, just relief, maybe. You hugged and he lifted you off the ground, picked you up like it was nothing, and you laughed into his shoulder and he held on for a second longer than necessary and when he put you down you thought, very clearly, this is not how you hug a friend. You picked up his bag and said you look terrible and he said I was on a plane for several hours and and you both laughed and he followed you to the car.
You were at every show together, front to back, and Heeseung had this thing where he'd lean down to say something in your ear when it was loud, not always anything important, sometimes just this part right before a song got good, like he wanted to make sure you were paying attention to the same thing he was. You always were.
Heeseung always had a hand on your back when you were moving through a crowd, his chin on top of your head when you were both standing still watching something, finding your hand in the dark without looking. One night you were waiting for a set to start and he was standing behind you and he said something in your ear and you turned around to respond and your faces were closer than you'd calculated for and neither of you moved back. You said whatever you were going to say. He listened. You turned back to face the stage and your heart was doing something unreasonable and the music started and you let it.
On the last night you sat on the grass after the final set, not ready to leave yet. The field was emptying out around you and you were both just sitting there, not saying much, and he was pulling at the grass next to him, and you looked at him and thought you were going to miss him when he leaves. And then, underneath that, you thought that you were already missing him even though he was right there.
You sat on the curb outside your building for a long time after the festival ended. At some point Heeseung started humming something and you recognized it before he got to the words. "Wish You Were Here? Pink Floyd," you said.
"Yeah."
"I love this song." You were quiet for a second. Then you said, "do you know what it's actually about?"
He looked at you. "Tell me."
You told him about Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s founding member. Barrett suffered a mental breakdown and was ousted from the band in 1968, so you told him about how Roger Waters wrote it for someone who was physically there but already gone in every way that mattered. How the band would play it for him sometimes and he'd show up to the studio unrecognizable and they wouldn't even know it was him at first. How it's a song about watching someone disappear while standing right next to them. Heeseung listened with forearms on his knees, looking at the street.
"There's another interpretation though," you said. "About becoming so successful and so numb that you stop being present in your own life. Like, don't get so lost that you forget to actually be there."
"So it's about two different kinds of absence," he said.
"Yeah," you said. "Exactly."
He nodded slowly and didn't say anything for a moment. A car passed. Somewhere above you a window was open and you could hear the low sound of someone's television. "I think regardless of all that," he said, and his voice was quieter now, "every time I hear that song from now on I'm going to think about you."
You didn't see it coming. You don't know why — you should have, probably, but you didn't, and it landed somewhere unguarded, and before you could do anything about it your eyes filled up and you looked away.
"Hey," he said immediately. "Hey, c'mere." Heeseung put his arm around you and pulled you in and you let him, your face against his shoulder, and he just held you there on the curb outside your building at whatever time it was, not saying anything else, just his hand on the back of your head, careful.
When you pulled back you looked at him and he was already looking at you, close, and you thought about how easy it would be and how hard it would be and how those were the same thing right now. "I really want to kiss you," you said. "And I think that's going to make tomorrow really hard."
He looked at you for a moment. "I know," he said. And then, softer: "I know."
He kissed you anyway, or maybe you kissed him, you can't tell afterward who moved first. It was gentle and it lasted and when it ended you stayed close, foreheads touching, neither of you saying anything. It was the best moment of your life and one of the saddest and you understood, right then, that those two things were going to live together for a long time. Heeseung loved to remember that one specific moment.
Heeseung, unfortunately, also remembered the last night he spent with you with an unfairly amount of clarity, because it was so ordinary in every way it shouldn't have been. You were sitting on your couch with your legs across his lap, both of you watching something neither of you cared about. The apartment was too quiet and he'd thought he wanted to remember this moment, which probably meant he already knew you weren't going to cross his path again. The conversation, when it finally came, wasn't a fight; it was two people being honest with each other at the exact wrong time, or maybe the exactly right time, which sometimes does look the same. The most painful thing about loving someone the way you'd loved him was learning to recognize his truth, even when it costs you something. Even when it costed you him.
But what really stayed with Heeseung wasn't exactly the ending, but everything before it. You had given him something he didn't have a word for yet, like the version of himself he'd been while loving you, that was less guarded and more willing. He didn't know what to do with that now that you were gone, it felt like inheriting something beautiful with no place to put it. Some nights he'd catch himself thinking, at least it happened. Other nights that thought felt like the cruelest one of all.
Meanwhile, you made a list of all the things that were supposed to help, assembled from every friend who meant well and every corner of the internet that promised a way through. You tried most of them, trying to act organized about your grief, which felt inappropriate somehow given how disorganized the grief itself was.
You rearranged your bedroom, moved the bed to the other wall, switched which side the lamp was on and bought new pillowcases in a different color. It worked for exactly one night, the unfamiliarity of it, waking up disoriented and not immediately knowing where you were. By the third morning your body had already memorized the new geometry and you were back to reaching for your phone before you were even fully awake, which is how you'd been starting every day since, looking for something you couldn't name and definitely weren't going to find on TikTok.
Then there was the phase you got very into routines. You read somewhere that structure was healing, that the body finds comfort in repetition, so you set alarms and kept them and made yourself eat breakfast at the same time every day and immediately going to the gym next. It helped, keeping yourself busy always helps, which is to say it helped until it didn't, until a random morning the coffee finished brewing and your apartment was very quiet and you stood at the counter of your kitchen and felt it anyway — the whole weight of it, right on schedule, completely unbothered by your new routine.
The crying wasn't even the hardest part, because crying at least felt like something. The hard part was the in between, the perfectly normal moments that somehow hurt even more. You'd be on your way to work, reading, entirely unbothered, and then you'd remember something he said once, something small and stupid and specific to him, and your chest would forget how to work for a second. You'd watch a funny reel and immediately think of his reaction and then remember you wouldn’t know his reaction. You wondered if that was pathetic, then you wondered why you were so concerned with whether your grief was pathetic, and who you were performing sanity for, and why. Then you'd turn the page. Someone across the aisle would shift in their seat. Life would keep moving, as advertised.
Heeseung went home after you broke up. Jay picked him up from the airport and looked at him before saying anything, exactly like people do when they already know but are giving you the chance to bring it up first. By dinner that night somehow everyone already knew, someone just said so, you good? and Heeseung said yeah in a tone that meant the opposite.
Jungwon tried to get him to do the hundred beers thing, obviously. Heeseung made it through maybe four before he just stopped and nobody pushed it, which he was grateful for. Jake and Riki dragged him out one night to a bar and Heeseung stood there holding a drink he wasn't really drinking, and at some point Jake just put a hand on his shoulder and said we don't have to stay and they left twenty minutes later and got Taco Bell instead, and that ended up being the better night by a lot.
What actually helped — if anything did — wasn't any of the specific things but just being around people who'd known him before, who could sit with him in a room without needing him to be okay. Sunghoon made fun of him for something stupid he did in middle school and Heeseung laughed for real for the first time in weeks, and it wasn't because the joke fixed anything. It just reminded him that he existed outside of heartbreak, that there was a version of him that had nothing to do with you, that had been around a long time before you and apparently was still in there somewhere.
Still, he kept catching himself doing the thing where a place would remind him of something and he'd just stand there for a second, recalculating.
His cousin's wedding was the first thing you two ever went to together as an actual couple; the first time either of you had to explain to other people what you were to each other, something neither of you had really practiced. His aunt asked, very directly, in front of everyone, and who is this? and Heeseung had said this is— and then paused for just slightly too long, and you'd jumped in and said your name and then, after a beat, his girlfriend, like you were trying it out loud for the first time too. His aunt had said oh, finally, like this had been a long time coming, making you laugh, and Heeseung remembered standing there thinking that you'd just said it so easily, and that had made it feel like a bigger deal.
The trip to the mountains was the first real trip you went on together, just the two of you for a few days on a cabin he'd found. It was, by any measure, romantic. The cabin had a fireplace that he spent way too long trying to figure out and a window that looked out at actual mountains and you'd cooked together in a kitchen too small for two people, bumping into each other constantly, and at night you'd sat wrapped in the same blanket watching something on his laptop because the cabin didn't have a TV.
But what he actually thought about, more often than the fireplace or the view, was the heater breaking on the second night and the two of you lying there in every layer of clothing you'd packed, laughing about it instead of being annoyed. He thought about the hike that was supposed to take two hours and took four because you'd insisted on a "shortcut" you found on your phone that turned out to not exist, and you'd both ended up arguing about whose idea it was while also laughing too hard to actually be mad, and by the time you got back it was dark and you were both starving and the only thing open was a gas station and you'd eaten gas station food like it was the best meal of your life because you were so hungry, sitting on the hood of the rental car in the cold.
Those were the things he remembered, the parts that would only ever mean anything to the two of you, the kind of thing you'd bring up years later and both immediately start laughing.
The first time you flew out to see him after you'd both quietly decided this was a thing now, without either of you using the word relationship out loud yet — he remembered standing at arrivals and seeing you before you saw him, and you looked pale, lightly green. You hadn't told him until after that you hated flying and that you hadn't been on a plane in years, that you'd spent the whole flight gripping the armrest and doing breathing exercises and that you'd nearly cried during turbulence. You told him all of this like it wasn't a big deal, like you hadn't just done something that scared you specifically so you could stand in this airport.
Heeseung hadn't known what to say to that, then. He still didn't, fully, even now. He just remembered taking your bag and putting his hand on your back and you leaning into him slightly, still a little unsteady, and him thinking — not in those words but the feeling of it — you did something hard to get here. He hadn't asked you to, you'd just done it.
After that it was the normal stuff. Time zones you both did math around. Flights that got more frequent and then somehow never frequent enough. His friends started including you in plans before you'd even arrived — is she coming this time? — and your friends started doing the same with him, asking about him like he was just part of the group now, which he was. You'd shown up to enough things that people stopped explaining who you were to each other. You were just Heeseung and you, one unit. So that's why it hurt even more when his heart broke.
Heeseung never actually had his heart broken before. He'd had things end before but nothing serious, nothing that lasted more than a month. He'd never had a person and never built a life around someone and then had to figure out what to do with the life once the person was gone.
So when it actually happened, he didn't recognize it. He thought he just had a cold. That's not a joke, for the first few days he genuinely thought something was physically wrong with him, because nothing had ever made his body feel like that before. His chest hurt not metaphorically, he felt like there was something tight wrapped around his ribs that didn't loosen no matter how he sat or stood or breathed. He didn't know that heartbreak was a physical thing. He'd heard people say things like my chest hurts about breakups his whole life and always thought it was just an expression. He found out that it was true the hard way, lying awake with an actual, physical, located ache in his chest.
He wasn't hungry, which had literally never happened to him in his life because Heeseung was always hungry, and then when he did eat, food tasted like nothing, like he was chewing for the sake of chewing. He'd lie down to sleep and his brain would just start running through everything on a loop he couldn't turn off, and he'd look at the clock and it would be 4 a.m. and he'd have work in four hours.
He kept reaching for his phone to tell you things, like send you a video, a thought, this happened today, you'd find this funny. His thumb would be most of the way to your contact before his brain caught up and he'd just sit there holding his phone feeling like an idiot. It happened more times than he wanted to admit but it still happened, actually, even weeks later like some reflex in him that kept assuming you were still the person he told things to.
And there were the plans and that was maybe the worst part. A trip you'd been saying you wanted to take, an apartment thing, eventually, someday, a conversation you have when you're imagining a future together without officially deciding you're imagining a future together. None of it had been a promise exactly, but it had been real in the sense that he'd started picturing it, started letting himself assume it.
And now all of that was just sitting there unused. He didn't know what to do with a future he'd been picturing that didn't exist anymore. It wasn't like returning something you bought, where there's a process, a receipt or somewhere to send it back. It was more like the plans were still technically his, still in his head, except they didn't connect to anything real anymore, and he didn't know if he was supposed to throw them away or just let them sit there until they stopped meaning anything on their own. Neither option felt possible. He just had this whole imagined life with no home for it.
And you'd been through heartbreak before, or you'd thought you had. You'd had a breakup at seventeen that wrecked you for months, your friends had to physically remove you from your room sometimes, and you'd thought, at the time, that this was what heartbreak was. And you'd survived it, you'd come out the other side eventually, and some part of you had filed that experience away as the worst it gets, a kind of benchmark — you'd been through the worst, so whatever came after, you'd know how to handle it.
You did not know how to handle it.
It wasn't that this hurt the same and you were just better at managing it now. It was that this hurt more, because by every external measure the relationship at seventeen had been messier and more obviously bad for you. This one hadn't been bad and that was the whole problem. There was no version of this where you got to be angry at Heeseung, no version where you could point to something and say that's why it ended, that's the villain of the story, and that was so much harder to carry than betrayal had ever been.
You thought, I already did this. I already know what this feels like. And then you'd be hit by something like a song or a memory, and you'd realize you didn't know what this felt like at all. This heartbreak was something else entirely when the first one had been just bad, because you'd never actually lost something you thought might have lasted. At seventeen, some part of you had always known it wasn't going to work out. This time you hadn't known that, this time you'd been wrong about that, and being wrong about that was its own kind of grief, separate from the grief of losing him.
But there were moments that felt like progress. You went to the movies by yourself one day because you had nothing else to do and the alternative was sitting in your apartment alone again. You bought a ticket for a movie nobody else wanted to see, got popcorn, sat in the middle of an almost empty theater and watched the whole thing. Walking out afterward, you felt — and you remember being almost embarrassed by how big this felt for something so small — capable. Like you'd done something that proved you could still be a person who did things alone. It was such a small thing but it felt enormous.
You went out with your friends one night and a guy at the bar started talking to you, and you flirted back, leaned into it a little, enjoyed it even. He was funny and he asked for your number near the end of the night and you almost gave it to him, you really almost did, and then you didn't, and you told your friends in the bathroom I don't think I'm ready, I think I just wanted to know I still could, and you went home that night feeling fine about it.
You downloaded one of the dating apps eventually, because everyone kept telling you it would help, and you matched with someone within the first day, and you looked at the match notification for a long time and then deleted the app. You just didn't feel like doing it and you'd promised yourself a while ago that you weren't going to do things anymore just because you were supposed to.
And yes, you bleached your hair. At home, by yourself, with a box kit and gloves, because you'd decided that going into your late twenties, it made sense to have pink ends again, something you hadn't done since you were a teenager. It took three tries to get the bleach even and you fried your hair more than the box promised you would, and it looked a little uneven for the first week, but you loved it anyway.
For a while you thought all of this was the healing, and it was, partly. But at some point you noticed that you were doing all of it a little too quickly, a little too eagerly, like you were decorating around a hole instead of dealing with the hole. You were busy, and you were fine, and underneath both of those things was everything you hadn't actually let yourself feel yet.
So one night you decided, very deliberately, that you were going to feel it and not avoid it, just feel it, all the way for the first time since it happened. You got in the shower and you sat down on the floor of it, water running over you, and you just let it happen. And it wasn't pretty crying, it was loud and ugly and it didn't stop when you wanted it to. You'd always called it emotional constipation, where you go too long without crying and it all just sits there waiting, and when it finally comes out it comes out all at once, everything you'd been holding for weeks, and you have no control over how long it takes or even what it looks like.
You don't know how long you sat there but probably for long enough that your legs went a little numb from the position. And while you cried you let yourself go back through it on purpose this time. You let yourself have all of it again, fully, one more time, specifically so you could put it down. You thought about the way Heeseung used to talk about love, back when none of this had happened yet, back when love was still a theory to him and not something that had already happened to him and broken his heart.
He'd never been in love before you. He told you that early on like a disclaimer, like he wanted you to know what you were getting into, that he was the kind of person who needed things to make sense. He'd grown up obsessed with space, he had learned that the universe is infinite and if everything he'd ever do or feel amounted to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the universe's lifetime, then none of it had to be a big deal. Nothing was permanent because nothing was supposed to be permanent.
He told you all of this the night he told you he loved you, which you found out later was not a coincidence because he'd been rehearsing it in his head for weeks. You were in his backyard and it was getting cold and neither of you had bothered to go inside, and you'd asked him half jokingly, if he still thought love was just chemistry, like dopamine, oxytocin, all the stuff he used to bring up whenever the topic came up. He thought about it for a while, and then he said, "I think about the math."
"What do you mean by math?" you asked.
"You know. The odds of us both existing right now, at the same time, on the same planet." You didn't say anything, just waited, because you could tell he was going somewhere with it. "Okay, so — the universe is 13.8 billion years old, right," he said, looking up at the sky. "Earth is about 4.5 billion. Life on this planet has been around for something like 3.7 billion years. And humans have only existed for about 300,000 years." He paused. "If you do the math on that, all of human history put together like every war or civilization — comes out to something like 0.000002% of the universe's lifetime. It's basically nothing, a rounding error, actually."
"That's scary," you said, but you were smiling, because you could tell it wasn't where he was going.
"It's not, though," he said. "That's the thing. I used to find that comforting. Like, if everything I am and everything I do amounts to almost nothing on that scale, then none of it has to be a big deal." He shrugged. "I liked that."
"What changed then?"
"You." He said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. "And for someone who's spent his whole life thinking everything has an answer, there are questions I have about you that I can't solve. Like, I know how stars form and I know how galaxies move, and I still don't know how, or when, or why I fell for you."
You felt something in your chest shift, your eyes wet, but you didn't say anything yet because you wanted him to keep going, and he did. "And I get it," he continued, and you could tell his heart was going faster now, that this part was harder. "I get being scared. I'm terrified most of the time — of saying the wrong thing, of not knowing how to do this—" he gestured between the two of you, "—but I'd rather be terrified and honest than safe and nowhere."
You stared at him, while a stubborn tear ran down your cheek, "And I'm — god, I'm jealous of you," he said, the words coming faster now. "Of the way you feel things so easily. The way you just let yourself experience stuff without trying to explain it first. I've spent my whole life trying to make everything make sense, and you don't do that, you just — exist in it. And it's beautiful. You're beautiful." he stopped, flustered, started again.
"So when you ask if I still think it's just chemistry," he said, quieter now, "I think about the probability of us both existing right now, in this exact moment. Humans have been around for 300,000 years and you and I get maybe eighty years each, if we're lucky. Do the math on that and it comes out to something like 0.00000058% of the universe's entire lifetime. And somehow, in that fraction of a fraction, we're both here on the same planet at the exact same time."
His voice cracked, just slightly, on the last part.
"And when I think about that — about how unlikely it is that I get to exist on Earth at the same time as you. And I'm scared of it, because if the universe only gave us this much time, then you deserve to spend it happy. And I want to make you happy."
The tears that had been building finally spilled over, and you didn't wipe them away. "No one's ever said anything like that to me before," you whispered.
"It's just math," Heeseung said, almost apologetic, like he was embarrassed by how much of himself he'd just handed over.
"No," you said, laughing through the tears. "You make it sound beautiful."
He looked at you for a second, like he was deciding whether to say the next thing. Then he said it anyway. "You make everything beautiful."
Sometimes he'd imagine a future and it felt precarious and unstable. Would you be there with him? Would you want to be? But who was he to say? He wasn't a computer. He couldn't run the simulation a thousand times and find the outcome with the highest probability of success. Was it a crime to not have the answers? In physics, uncertainty was a principle, but in life, people seemed to expect certainty and confidence. And Heeseung had neither.
Maybe one day things would make sense. Maybe he'd understand what you saw in him, if you saw anything at all. Maybe you'd get married, build a life, exist in the same space for longer than this brief cosmic moment. He'd probably take these thoughts to the grave, but somewhere, in the parts of himself he didn't like to examine, he knew something else too: he'd love you always. Or at least, he thought he would.
So when you'd said it back, that you loved him too, that you wanted this, whatever this was going to turn out to be, distance and uncertainty and all of it — Heeseung didn't think he'd ever been that happy in his life. He just remembers standing there in the cold with you and feeling like something had clicked into place.
Neither of you had any idea what you were actually signing up for. You said it like it was simple and it felt simple that night, because you were both standing in the same place and the distance was just an idea. You didn't know yet what it would feel like to want to tell someone something at eleven at night and have to wait until morning because of the time difference. You didn't know what it would feel like to watch someone's flight status app for two hours because their plane was delayed and you couldn't do anything about it from where you were. You didn't know that missing someone could become a baseline, something you got used to without it ever actually going away.
But you made it work, in an unglamorous way that long distance actually works. You learned each other's schedules down to the hour like when he was done with practice, when you were free for lunch, the three hour window every day where your awake times actually overlapped and you protected that window like it was sacred. He'd call you on his walk home so the time wasn't wasted on nothing. You'd eat dinner with your laptop propped up so he could "be there," even though being there meant a slightly pixelated version of him eating ramyeon at his kitchen counter while you ate whatever you'd thrown together, and somehow that still counted as a date, and somehow it actually felt like one.
Heeseung got good at little things. He'd send you a photo of the sky at golden hour with no caption because he knew you'd be waking up to it, he was handing you the start of your day before he went to sleep. He'd leave voice messages instead of texts, just rambling about his day, and you'd listen to them on your commute and it would feel like he was right there talking to you, which he kind of was, just delayed.
He said things to you over those months that he never thought he'd say to anyone. He told you once, half asleep on a call at like 2 a.m. his time, "I like falling asleep on the phone with you more than I like falling asleep in silence, and that used to be my favorite part of the day." You'd laughed and told him that was the saddest compliment you'd ever gotten and he'd said, "no, I mean it, I used to look forward to the quiet. Now I look forward to you."
He told you, after a video call where you'd been having a bad day and cried a little and he couldn't do anything except be on the other side of a screen, "I hate that I can't just be there. But I'm glad you let me see it anyway. I don't want the version of you that's only okay."
He'd say things like "I keep thinking about what you'd think of this" about completely mundane stuff like a building, a song, a weird thing someone said on the subway, and you started doing the same thing, narrating your day to him in your head even when he wasn't there, because somewhere along the way he'd become the person you processed your life through, even from across miles and miles away.
Funny enough, Heeseung felt exactly like that now too. He'd be walking somewhere and see something like a dog wearing a stupid little jacket, a sign with a typo, some guy arguing with a vending machine and the first thought was, automatic, before he could stop it, she'd think this was so funny. And then there'd be that second where he remembered he had nowhere to send it.
He wondered, sometimes, if he'd ever feel that again. He didn't know if that was a one time thing or if it could just happen again with someone else, eventually. He hoped it could, but he also kind of hoped it couldn't, which he knew didn't make sense.
And then he'd spiral a little, sometimes late at night — was any of it even worth it? But not in a bitter way. He didn't regret it, not even on the worst nights. But he'd lie there doing the math again, except this time the math wasn't comforting. He'd think about all those years and all that effort and flights and time zones, and where it had landed him: here, alone, missing someone he used to talk to every single day, and he'd think, what was the point of all of it, if this is where it ends up?
The distance had always hurt, that part wasn't new. But the distance used to have an end date like in two weekends or three weeks, whatever it was, there was always a number attached to it like a flight already booked and something to count down to. But this was different, this distance wasn't going to end in a reunion. It was just going to be the new permanent shape of things, and that took some getting used to, the idea that the ache wasn't temporary anymore, it was just what this was now.
For a long time, he'd actually felt kind of arrogant about it, looking back. He'd believed, fully, that the two of you could outlast the distance, like that it was a problem like any other problem, something you could just be diligent enough about and eventually it would stop being a problem at all. He used to think love was the kind of thing that just automatically solved logistics. And for years, it kind of had. You'd both shown up for it, over and over, and then, after everything, after years of doing exactly that, the distance won anyway.
The visits had been getting less frequent for a while, it was just life. He'd gotten busier with work, you'd gotten busier with yours. Your friend group needed you for things. His family needed him for things. The visits that used to happen every month started happening every couple months, and then less than that, and you both kept saying next time will be easier without either of you really believing it.
Then the first real conversation happened, you were on a call and you'd made some offhand comment like I miss when we used to see each other more, and he'd said, yeah, me too, and then there was a pause that went on a beat too long. "So what do we actually do about that," you said, eventually, but you weren't accusatory, you were just tired.
And neither of you had an answer, that was the thing. You both had real lives and not placeholder ones you were waiting to leave behind. He had his job, his friends, his family, a whole structure he'd built around himself in his city and you had the same, in yours. Moving wasn't simple for either of you and you both knew it, and neither of you wanted to be the one to ask the other to give theirs up because you both knew what that would actually cost, and you loved each other too much to want the other person to pay it.
People don't really talk about how love doesn't always mean being willing to give up everything for someone. Sometimes the healthiest version of loving someone is not doing that, even if it would feel more romantic in the moment. You'd both built lives that mattered, separately, before you'd built something together, and asking either of you to dismantle one for the other wasn't love.
After that, it wasn't one conversation, but it was a lot of small ones, spread out over months. There was a stupid fight about a missed call that wasn't really about the missed call. There was a conversation where you asked, carefully, if he'd ever consider relocating eventually, and he said maybe, someday, and you both heard how far away someday sounded. There was a night where he asked you the same question, in reverse, and got the same kind of answer.
You both just kept circling it, and there'd be a good week, where it felt normal again, where you'd talk like always and it would feel like maybe you'd just been in a rough patch. And then there'd be another conversation that didn't go anywhere, another what are we going to do that ended in the exact same place.
He took a few weeks off work over the holidays to visit you, since your birthday was a week before Christmas, and he'd booked the trip around it months in advance so he could be there for it and for Christmas with your family and ring in the new year together too. You both just kind of needed it, even if you both already knew, somewhere underneath, that it might not turn out the way either of you had pictured when he'd booked the flight.
It started fine, better than fine, actually, for the first couple of days. You picked him up from the airport like you always did, and he hugged you the way he always did, and for a few hours it felt like nothing had changed and nothing would change. Your birthday came first, and he'd remembered everything, and for that whole day it really did feel like nothing was wrong. Then there was Christmas, and you took him to see your family, and your mom made too much food like she always did, and your dad asked him about work and Heeseung answered like he always did. Your nephew still asked him to play video games and he still let him win even though you both knew he wasn't actually trying, like he always did.
You did all the things you always did. The same coffee place. The same walk along the river you always ended up on. You went to the bookstore he liked, the one with the cat that ignored everyone but him, and he bought a book he probably wouldn't read and you both knew that too.
But underneath the whole week, there was something different, nothing either of you could point to. Just a silence that hadn't used to be there in between the normal stuff. A few times you caught him looking at you in a way that felt like he was trying to memorize something. A few times you did the same thing.
New Year's came and went quietly as you watched the countdown from your living room, and he kissed you at midnight the way he always did, and neither of you said anything about how it felt different this time, like you were both carrying something into the new year that you hadn't carried into the last one. The second night of the new year — his last night before he flew back — you were on the couch at your place, some movie on that neither of you had picked for any real reason, just something to have on, and neither of you was watching it. You were sitting close, his arm around you, and at some point you just started crying quietly. You didn't make any noise about it, didn't want to, but he noticed it the way you do when you know someone's body that well.
He sat up a little straighter and turned toward you, careful, and put his hand on the side of your face, his thumb just resting there. "Hey," he said, quiet. "Hey. What's wrong?"
You looked at him and you didn't say anything for a moment. Then you said, "I don't know if this is going to be the last time we do this."
He didn't say anything right away. He let out a long breath like he was trying to hold something back, and he couldn't, his eyes filled up too and he didn't wipe them. "I don't know either," he said. "And that scares me."
You looked at him. "I know I've asked this so many times already," you said, "but what do we do?"
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know what to do."
"I don't either," you said.
And that was the thing that broke it open. You both just started crying properly, and you didn't care about being quiet anymore, and he pulled you in and held onto you like he was trying to keep something from slipping through his hands. "I love you so much," he said into your hair, his voice not really working right. "I don't want to let you go."
You pulled back enough to look at him, and you reached up and wiped the tears off his face with your thumb. "You need to love me less now, baby," you said.
"I don't think I can," he said.
"But you have to," you said. And you weren't saying it to hurt him, you said it like it was the only kind thing left to say.
It went quiet for a while after that. Just the movie still playing, both of you sitting there with your faces wet and your hands still holding onto each other. "Is there a way we can make this work?" he asked eventually. Not like he believed there was an answer, just like he had to ask it one more time, for both of you.
"We already did," you said. "We made it work. For years, we made it work." You looked at him. "And I don't want to be here to see when it stops working."
He closed his eyes. He leaned his head down onto your shoulder, his whole body curving toward you, and he said, barely above a whisper, "I've never felt this much pain before."
You rested your head against the top of his, and you said, "Me neither."
And you both just sat there like that, holding on, for a long time, not because either of you thought it would change anything. Just because you both needed a little more time before it stopped being something you got to do.
Growing up, you thought grief was a word that belonged to death. That's how it was always used in books and movies, at least. You'd see characters in black and slow piano music, someone staring out a window, and you understood that this was what grief looked like and that it only happened when someone died. You later found out that grief is actually just the word for what happens when you lose something that mattered to you. You can grieve a person who's still alive, still texting other people, still posting pictures, still existing in the world, but just not in your world anymore. You can grieve a version of your life that didn't happen. You can even grieve a job you lost. You can grieve a future you'd already started building in your head, and none of that requires a death. It just requires losing something.
Movies get some of it right. You personally enjoyed Past Lives because gets a lot of it right, actually, like that scene at the end, when the two of them are standing on the curb waiting for the car. Nora says something about how if she'd stayed, if things had gone differently, she wonders who she would have been, and that line stuck with you because it's not really about him. It's about grieving a version of yourself that only existed in a timeline that didn't happen. The you that would've existed if things had gone differently. You'll never meet her.
But movies also get a lot of it wrong, or at least incomplete as if they compress it. Grief in a movie happens in maybe a montage with sad song and rain, a few weeks pass in a cut, just like that one Bella scene in her bedroom in New Moon. Real grief doesn't have edits, though. It just keeps going in real time and there's no soundtrack.
Joan Didion wrote about grief after her husband died, about how she kept his shoes because some part of her brain hadn't accepted that he wasn't going to need them again. She talks about how grief isn't a thing you process and finish, it's a thing that ambushes you, again and again. You read that book a long time ago and thought it was about death specifically, but you understand it differently now, especially the ambush part. It doesn't ask permission, it just arrives, when you're listening to a song, or an specific smell, and you're back at the beginning again.
You grieved all of your firsts. The first kiss on the curb outside your building after the festival, you crying before it even happened because some part of you already knew how hard it would be to let him go the next morning, but you'd jumped in anyway. You remembered thinking, right before, this is going to complicate everything but I'm doing it anyway, because by that point not doing it felt like the bigger risk. The first time he said he loved you at his backyard and the conversation after, the one where you both actually decided that this was going to be a real thing now. You remembered how light you'd felt afterward, like something had been settled.
You remember the first proper date, where he'd called ahead of a visit and said, let me take you out on a date, like he wanted to do it right. You went to a café in the afternoon, then a movie — Joker, which he'd picked, and which you ended up loving way more than you expected. "You're being weirdly into this," he said. "This is giving me incel girlfriend energy." You'd hit his arm and said "shut up, it was good," and he just kept laughing the whole walk out of the theater, occasionally muttering "Arthur Fleck did nothing wrong" under his breath in a voice clearly imitating you, even though you'd said no such thing.
Then you ended up at a bar afterward, way later than either of you meant to, drinking beer and laughing about nothing, and at some point it turned into one of those nights where you just kept going back and forth, building on each other's jokes the way you always did. "Honestly," he said, leaning back, "now that you're my incel girlfriend, I gotta be careful. Don't want to accidentally get red pilled by association."
"You're the red pilled one, Heeseung, what the hell are you on," you said, laughing. "You like Neon Genesis Evangelion. That's literally the most incel anime ever."
"That's a masterpiece of animation and you know it."
"That's what they all say." He waved the waiter down and asked, completely seriously, if he could borrow a pen. You raised an eyebrow at him. "What are you doing?"
"We need to write all of this down," he said, already scribbling on a napkin. "Every inside joke we have. We're gonna lose track otherwise."
So you did, you spent probably an hour just going back through everything, all the bits you'd built up, laughing harder at some of them out loud than you had the first time, because hearing them said back to you made them funnier somehow. The incel girlfriend thing. The thing about his cousin's wedding band. A whole bit about a typo he'd made once that had become a permanent part of your vocabulary. By the end the napkin was full on both sides and completely illegible, and neither of you could read half of what he'd written, which somehow made it even funnier.
For your one year anniversary, you actually made a real little book with every inside joke you could remember, written out properly with little doodles next to some of them. You gave it to him and he read through the whole thing slowly, laughing at some pages, going quiet at others, and at the end he just looked at you for a second like he didn't totally know what to say, and then said, "this is the best thing anyone's ever given me," and he wasn't joking.
There was a version of this where you tried to explain it to people and it never quite landed right, because what you had with him didn't fit the categories people usually used. Boyfriend was true, technically, but it always felt like it was missing something. The truer thing you'd have said if you weren't worried about how it sounded, was that he was your best friend. The person you'd call first, the person whose opinion you actually wanted before you made a decision, the person you trusted completely with everything, including the parts of yourself you usually kept tucked away.
People talk about friendships turning into relationships like it's this dramatic slow burn shift, some kind of line you cross, but it never felt like that with you two. It felt more like nothing changed and everything changed at the same time. You still talked the same way, you still made fun of each other the same way, you still told each other things you wouldn't tell anyone else, except now you also got to kiss him, which honestly felt like a bonus.
That's why it was so light. Not in the sense of unimportant but in the sense of having no extra weight on it and no performance or anxiety about whether you were doing it right. A lot of relationships you'd seen, and even some you'd been in, had this undercurrent of tension running through them but you never had that with Heeseung. Even with the distance, you almost never felt jealous and neither did he, and it wasn't because either of you was trying hard not to be, it just genuinely didn't come up. You trusted him completely in this almost boring way, and he trusted you the same way. There was nothing to manage, because there was nothing either of you was worried about. The only thing that was ever actually hard was the physical distance itself but never the relationship.
You used to think that was rare, even back then, even before you had any sense of how it would end. You'd hear friends talk about their relationships with all the games, and you'd feel almost guilty that you didn't have any of that to contribute. What you had instead was just ease — he was your best friend who you also happened to be in love with, and being in love with your best friend turned out to be the most uncomplicated thing in the world, right up until it wasn't anymore. Except even then, even at the very end, that part of it never broke because you never stopped being each other's best friend. That might have been the hardest part of all of it, actually. You didn't just lose a boyfriend. You lost your best friend too, and there was no version of moving on that got you that part back.
Even though every time you told him he was your best friend, he'd fire back, completely straight faced but jokingly, "no, Jake's my best friend. Know your place," and you'd laugh every single time, no matter how many times he'd done the bit — and you grieved that too, the fact that you'd never hear it again in that specific voice over that specific dumb thing.
And then, you also grieved the moment you were intimate for the first time.
It was on the weekend when he first came to visit because of that festival. One of those afternoons you'd taken an everything shower, scrub, shave, lotion, the nice perfume you almost never wore and you felt ridiculous doing it. He was your best friend. You'd talked everyday, shared everything, there was no reason to be nervous around him. But the old stuff was still there, the quiet insecurities left over from people who hadn't been careful with you like he was. Your hands shook a little when you dried your hair. You told yourself it was stupid but it didn't stop the feeling.
That night, after you cried on the curb outside your building before he even kissed you, you went upstairs with him. The second the apartment door closed, the air changed. He looked at you like he already knew the next visit was months away. You barely made it to the couch. He kissed you carefully at first, almost reverent, his hands cupping your face, then the kisses grew deeper and slower, like he couldn’t help himself. He leaned over you and you softened under him, and it felt different from anything you'd known. This wasn't just want, it was like every cell in you pulled toward him. He hadn't said the words out loud yet, but you could feel it in the way he touched you. He already loved you. You already loved him.
You let out a small sound against his mouth, almost a whimper. He pulled back just enough to breathe, forehead against yours, and you felt him hard then, pressing against your thigh through his jeans, embarrassingly obvious. The realization made heat rush through you and another soft moan slipped out before you could stop it. He exhaled sharply. "Don't do that," he murmured, voice rough, "or I'm not gonna be able to control myself."
You looked up at him, heart hammering, and said the only thing that felt true. "Please don't control yourself."
He kissed you again harder, then stood and lifted you, and your legs wrapped around him. He carried you to your bed and laid you down carefully,and he sat on the edge of the bed for a second, just looking at you. His eyes moved over your face, your neck, the rise of your chest under your shirt. "You're so fucking beautiful," he said quietly, almost to himself. Then he leaned down and kissed you again, slow and deep, before his hands found the hem of your blouse. He pulled it up gently, pausing when he reached your ribs so you could lift your arms. The fabric slipped over your head and he dropped it somewhere on the floor.
His gaze stayed on you, just taking you in. "God," he breathed, fingers tracing the line of your collarbone. "I've thought about this so many times. You have no idea." He said it like a confession, like he still couldn't quite believe he was allowed to touch you.
He kissed your neck, open mouthed, and you felt yourself arch while he moved lower, his lips brushing over the tops of your breasts, and your fingers threading through his hair. He unhooked your bra with both hands, sliding the straps down your shoulders, and the cool air hit your skin and then his mouth was there, soft and warm. He kissed one breast, then the other, like he had all the time in the world even though you both knew he didn't.
He kept going lower, lips brushing over your ribs, then your stomach and he stayed there for a moment, forehead resting just below your belly button, breathing you in. "Can I take these off?" he asked, fingers already at the waistband of your pants. His voice was low, but you could see the nerves in the way his hands trembled just slightly. He was being more direct than you'd imagined he would be, saying exactly what he wanted, and it made something hot twist low in your belly.
"Yeah," you whispered.
He pulled your pants down your legs carefully, eyes following the movement. Once they were off, he sat back for a second and tugged his own shirt over his head. The sight of his bare chest, the way his skin looked made your mouth go dry. He leaned down again, pressing his whole upper body against yours, skin on skin, and the warmth of him was overwhelming. He kissed you deep and you felt like you could drown in it.
Then he moved lower again, kissing the inside of one thigh, then the other, slowly. When he reached the center, he pressed a kiss right over your panties. He inhaled, slow and deep, and let out a quiet sound that made your cheeks burn. "You okay?" he asked, looking up at you. His eyes were dark, but the concern was still there reassuring.
You nodded quickly, hips shifting toward him without meaning to. "Yeah. Please."
He hooked a finger under the edge of your panties and pulled them to the side. "Fuck… you're so wet," he murmured, almost reverent. "Is this all for me?"
You let out a shaky smirk, trying to keep some control. "Obviously."
"Yeah?" His voice dropped even lower, then his mouth was on you. The first slow lick pulled a broken sound from your throat. He took his time at first, learning you, but the more you reacted, the more sure he got. He licked and sucked with a focused hunger that made your head spin. Your hands fisted the sheets and his hair, trying to stay grounded.
"Heeseung… oh my god," you moaned. He groaned against you, the vibration shooting straight through your body. One of his hands moved down to palm himself through his jeans, like tasting you was driving him crazy too.
You tried to hold back, but it was impossible. The tension built fast and sharp. He felt the way your thighs started to shake around his head, and he went faster and more insistent, mouth working you like he needed you to come for him. When it hit, it crashed over you hard. Your back arched, a loud moan tearing from your chest as you came, pulsing against his tongue. He kept going through it gentler now until you were panting and trembling.
He kissed his way back up your body, kissing your stomach, ribs, the valley between your breasts until he reached your mouth. His lips were slick, and the taste of yourself on him made your head spin. "Are you okay, baby?" he asked while brushing hair out of your face.
"More than okay," you breathed. You pulled him down into another kiss, deep and messy, while your hand slid down between you to palm him through his pants. He was rock hard, straining against the fabric. The groan he let out against your mouth went straight to your core.
"We don't have to keep going if you don't want to," he said, voice strained, "or if you're tired."
You smirked, suddenly feeling bolder, dirtier. "I would never be tired. I want you, Hee."
You pushed at his shoulders gently and he let you flip him onto his back. You straddled him, and started kissing down his chest, his stomach, taking your time the same way he had. But you let a hungrier side of yourself show, the one that felt safe enough with him to be a little shameless. You mouthed at him through his pants, looked up at him while you did it and watched his eyes flutter. He looked wrecked already, breathing hard, one hand reaching down to touch your hair like he couldn't believe this was real.
You kept teasing him like that, pressing open mouthed kisses along the hard line of him, breathing warm against the fabric until his hips twitched up toward your mouth. His hand tightened in your hair, and you finally hooked your fingers into his waistband and looked up at him. He lifted his hips to help you drag his pants and underwear down together. When he sprang free, you took a second just to look at him hard and flushed, leaking a little at the tip. The sight made your mouth water.
He let out a low chuckle, half breathless. "Holy shit… you're actually a little dangerous, aren't you?"
You smirked up at him. "You'll see."
You leaned down and took him into your mouth slowly, tasting him and learning the weight of him on your tongue. He groaned deep in his chest, the sound raw while his hand stayed in your hair. "Yes… right there," he breathed, voice wrecked. "Fuck, you're doing such a good job. Just like that."
You took him deeper, hollowing your cheeks, and he cursed under his breath, hips jerking a little before he caught himself. He looked completely lost with his eyes half closed and his lips parted, chest rising fast. Before long his grip tightened and he gently tugged you back by the hair. "Wait," he panted, "I don't wanna bust too soon."
You laughed softly and kissed the inside of his thigh. "I don't mind. I want to make you feel good."
He pulled you up and kissed you hard, hands sliding down your back like he needed to hold all of you at once. While you sat on the edge of the bed catching your breath, he reached for his jeans on the floor, dug through the pocket for his wallet, and found the condom. You watched him the whole time, the ordinary little movements somehow making everything feel even more real. He came back to you and rolled it on quickly, then looked at you with something almost reverent in his eyes. "You're so, so perfect," he said quietly, and kissed you again.
You guided him to sit up against the headboard and straddled him again. While he finished with the condom, you reached down and slipped your panties all the way off, tossing them aside. His hands moved over you immediately cupping your breasts and then sliding down your waist, gripping your hips. "Look at you," he murmured. "So fucking beautiful. I can't believe you're mine right now."
You braced your hands on his shoulders and slowly sank down onto him. The stretch was intense, perfect. Both of you gasped at the same time. When he bottomed out you stayed there for a second with your foreheads pressed together. You started moving, rolling your hips, and he met every movement with small thrusts up into you. The sounds in the room were just skin, breath, and moans. "Fuck, that's it," he whispered, one hand on your hip guiding you, the other tangled in your hair. "Ride me just like that. You're so wet… shit."
You picked up the pace as you were rolling faster and taking him deeper each time. You leaned closer, lips brushing his ear. "You feel so good inside of me," you breathed, the words slipping out raw. "So fucking good, Heeseung."
He groaned and his hands slid down to grip your ass, squeezing hard. He bit his lip, eyes screwed shut for a second. "Fuck… I don't think I'm gonna last," he managed to say.
You could feel him trying to hold back, his thrusts getting a little more careful. You kissed along his jawline softly and then murmured against his skin, "It's okay, Hee. You can cum for me."
That was all it took. He let out a low groan that turned into a moan of your name as he came hard inside you. His hips stuttered up into yours and his arms wrapped tight around your waist, holding you down against him while he rode it out. For a moment everything was just his shaky breath and the way his body trembled under yours.
He stayed like that for a few seconds, panting against your neck, then pulled you into a full hug, bare chest to bare chest. He kissed your forehead, then your temple. "I'm so sorry, baby," he whispered, sounding genuinely embarrassed. "I couldn't hold it. Just… give me a minute to recover and we can keep going. I promise."
You let out a soft laugh and pulled back just enough to look at him. His face was flushed and his hair was messy, his eyes still a little dazed. You brushed a strand away from his forehead. "It's okay," you said gently. "We have all the time in the world."
The words made something shift in his expression. His heart squeezed tight because he knew it wasn’t really true since he was leaving the next morning. But he didn’t say any of that, instead, he kissed you again. When you pulled back, you stayed there straddling him, just looking at him. Your hands rested on his chest, feeling his heartbeat slowly settle. He looked up at you with an open expression he only ever had with you, thumb gently stroking your lower back.
"God, I love the way you look at me," he said quietly, almost like he was talking to himself. He reached up and cupped your face with both hands, pulling you down for another kiss but this one was sweeter. When he broke it, he kept his forehead against yours.
You woke up early the morning after, both of you, neither of you having really slept much. Heeseung had a flight to catch back to his actual life that existed outside of this weekend, and you got up and got dressed and drove him to the airport in a comfortable kind of quiet, the radio on low, his hand resting on your knee the whole way. At the airport you stayed with him through check in, standing next to him at the counter, double checking if he had his passport, making sure his bag wasn't over the weight limit. He kept looking over at you while he did it, like he was checking you were still there.
You had time before his gate, so you got ice cream from one of the little kiosks. You ordered something and ate maybe a third of it because you weren't really hungry. He noticed and didn't say anything about it, just finished his own and then quietly ate some of yours too. You sat near his gate for a while. He had your hand the whole time. When his boarding group got called, he stood up and you stood up with him, and he looked at you for a second before either of you said anything.
"Hey," he said. "You know you're not getting rid of me that easily, right?"
You laughed a little wet, wiping under your eyes. "I know."
"I mean it," he said.
"I know, Heeseung," you said. "It just sucks saying bye to you anyway."
"Yeah, it does," he said, and pulled you into a hug, his arms wrapping all the way around you, and you put your head against his chest and he ran his hand over your hair, and pressed a kiss to the top of your head. Then he pulled back just enough to make you look up at him. "I'll be back," he said. "And we'll figure it out, okay?" You nodded. "Smile for me. I don't want to see you sad before I go."
You smiled, even though your eyes were still full, and he smiled back like that was exactly what he needed. He kissed you once more, and then picked up his bag and walked toward the gate. He looked back once right before he went through, and you saw the way his jaw tightened, the way he was clearly holding something back too. For one second he looked like he was actually considering turning around and walking back, leaving the flight behind entirely. Then he gave you a small wave, and went through.
That day had been bittersweet, the kind of sad that still had something good to look forward to. You drove home that day still feeling sad but lighter than you'd expected, because there was a next time attached to it. There always had been, every time, for years.
The last time was different.
The drive to the airport was the same as it always was with you behind the wheel and him in the passenger seat, the same roads you'd driven a dozen times. The airport was busy since it was the first week of January, and you walked with him to check in like you always did, stood next to him while he handled his bag like you always did, made sure everything was in order, the same as every other time, like you always did. Except this was the last time you'd ever do this.
Your face was swollen from crying the night before, you both were actually, neither of you had slept and neither of you had bothered trying to hide it from each other that morning. But he still held your hand the whole walk to security, the same way he always did like nothing had changed, even though everything had.
You got close to the gate and neither of you said much. There wasn't really anything left to say that hadn't already been said the night before. You just stood there, and at some point he pulled you in, and you both just held onto each other and cried properly for a long time, not caring who saw.
"I'm always going to love you," he said into your hair, his voice breaking on it.
"I'm always going to love you too," you said.
He held onto you a little longer after that like he was trying to make it last, and then he pulled back and wiped his face, and you wiped yours, and there wasn't anything left to do except let him go through the gate.
For him, walking through that door was the worst pain he'd ever felt, worse than anything, worse than he'd known a person could feel, walking away from someone while every part of him wanted to turn around and not get on the plane at all, and knowing he was going to do it anyway because there wasn't another option left. For you, watching him walk through it was the worst pain you'd ever felt — watching his back disappear, knowing this was the last time, with no next time attached to it, nothing waiting on the other side of this except the rest of your life without him in it.
You both stood on opposite sides of that door for a moment, in the worst pain of your lives, at exactly the same time, in exactly the same place, the way you'd always somehow ended up.
You'd think, looking back, that the day at the airport was the worst of it, but the actual worst day was the one after. You'd told yourself you could do this on your own because you were an adult. You had your own apartment and your own life and your own ways of dealing with things, except none of that turned out to be true, not that day. What you actually did was drive to your parents' house and you walked in and your mom took one look at you and didn't even ask, just opened her arms, and you fell into them and cried in a way you hadn't cried since you were small.
Your mom held you and kept saying "okay, okay, it's okay," but you could tell she was a little alarmed by how much was coming out of you, like she hadn't known a person could cry that much for that long and that loudly. You weren't embarrassed, though. You'd spent your whole adult life being a little embarrassed by big emotions in front of people, even your mom, but that day you just let it all out, the way a kid does with no filter, just pure unfiltered grief taking up all the space.
At some point, you became aware of where you were. This was the house you grew up in. The same house on the same street, where you'd met Heeseung for the first time, more than a decade ago now. You tried not to think about it, you really did but it came anyway.
You were eleven and you'd been playing some version of hide and seek with the other kids on the street, and Beomgyu, one of the neighborhood kids, showed up with this kid you'd never seen before and introduced him as his cousin. You were wearing an Eevee shirt and you remember that specifically, because the first thing Heeseung said to you after Beomgyu introduced him, was, "do you like Pokémon?"
"Yeah," you'd said.
"Every girl likes Eevee," he said, like it was just a fact.
You remember being instantly annoyed. "Yeah, I love Eevee. You have a problem with that?" you'd said, hands on your hips, eleven years old and ready to fight about it.
"No, no," he said quickly, holding his hands up. "I'm just saying." And even then, even as a dumb kid who'd clearly just said something dumb, there was this flicker of him being careful like he didn't want you to take it the wrong way.
He told you his favorite was Gengar. You shot back, "every boy likes Gengar," and that felt like a very satisfying thing to say.
"My friends mostly like Charizard," he said.
"Everyone likes Charizard," you said.
"I pulled a shiny Charizard once," he said, like that changed everything.
"No you didn't," you said.
"Yes I did."
"Then where is it?"
"It's at my house."
"Let's go get it then."
"I don't — I don't live here," he said. "I'm just visiting. Beomgyu's mom is my mom's cousin."
"Oh," you'd said. And even then something in you had felt a kind of disappointment, this quiet little fact landing somewhere: he's not going to be here whenever I want him to be. You didn't know what to do with that feeling, so you didn't do anything with it, you just kept playing.
You remembered that feeling now, lying there on your mom's couch, feeling like that same eleven-year-old, except this time you knew exactly what it meant. Heeseung wasn't going to be here whenever you wanted him to be. Not this summer. Not any summer. Not ever again.
And even though, in those first weeks, you'd been completely sure you'd never get past it and that this pain was just going to be the new permanent shape of your life — one day, months later, you woke up and didn't think about Heeseung first thing.
You were running late for work, actually, which was probably part of it because there wasn't time to lie in bed and feel anything before you had to move. You got dressed fast, caught the train, put your headphones in, read a few pages of your book. Work was normal, you laughed at something a coworker said. You went to lunch with one of your friends from the office and had something genuinely good. You went home, watched an episode of the show you were into at the time, had a glass of wine, and went to bed. And that whole day, for the first time, you hadn't thought about Heeseung not even once. And the strange part was that you hadn't noticed not noticing.
The next day went the same way mostly, until someone at work mentioned they'd seen Joker 2, the one with Lady Gaga, and that it had been terrible. And just like that, you thought of him. And it hurt the way it had hurt the day it happened, like no time had passed at all.
You sat there for a second, kind of stunned by it, and then you realized something else: it had been a while since you'd felt that specific ache of missing him. You'd gone — what, a day? Two days? — without it, and you hadn't even clocked it as an absence until it came back. The thing that struck you was that some part of you had actually missed it. Not only him, but you'd missed the missing. You'd gotten so used to carrying that weight that his absence had felt like its own kind of absence, and its return felt almost like coming home to something, even though it hurt.
C.S. Lewis wrote about grief in A Grief Observed, something about how sorrow turns out not to be a state but a process but more like a long valley with bends in it, and every time you turn a corner you think the road has changed completely, but then you look back and realize the shape of the landscape is still the same, you've just gotten used to walking through it. That felt true now in a way it hadn't before because the pain hadn't gone anywhere. You'd just stopped noticing it was there, and then, when it changes, even for a second, you remember — oh, yeah. That happened.
You weren't sure if that meant you were healing or if it just meant you'd made peace with the ache itself, or maybe learned how to live alongside it instead of waiting for it to leave. Maybe those weren't the same thing, you didn't know yet. But you sat there with your coffee going cold, missing him in that old familiar way.
Heeseung had never had to move on from anything before. So every piece of advice he got, every thing his friends said, all of it assumed he knew the shape of this, that he just needed reminders of a process he'd been through before and would get through it again. But he hadn't, he had no reference point. He was just kind of stumbling through it and figuring out the rules as he went, the way you do anything you're experiencing for the first time as an adult.
For a long time every day felt like the same day but just repeated. Bad but in slightly different ways, but always bad and always present the second he woke up. And then, one day, it just wasn't. He didn't notice it happening, just like you. He woke up and went for a run, because Sunghoon convinced him running was supposed to help with everything, and he actually felt good after, and not "fine, considering," just normal good. He showered and made breakfast, had a video call with Jay about something stupid and they ended up talking for an hour about nothing important and Heeseung laughed. He worked, went out with Jake and Sunoo that night and had a genuinely good time with no asterisk on it.
He went to bed that night and felt good. It felt weird feeling good. Then he realized that he hadn't thought about you all day, not once. He lay there almost waiting for that to upset him, like maybe realizing it would bring it all back, but it didn't, really. He just felt this strange quiet thing on his chest, it wasn't happiness, definitely wasn't happiness, but something close to relief.
The next few days were okay too. Not perfect but the baseline had shifted somehow. He started to think, cautiously, that maybe this was it. Maybe this was what people meant on what moving on feels like. Maybe he was actually getting somewhere. And then there'd be a bad day again out of nowhere, just a monday that felt exactly like the worst weeks all over again, like none of the good days had happened at all. He'd lie there wondering if he'd imagined the progress, if it had been a fluke, if he was back at square one.
He'd pictured it, before, as a kind of slope. Bad, then less bad, then less bad than that, steadily, like a graph trending in one direction. That's not what it was, it was more like weather. Good days and bad days just like rainy days and sunny days, no pattern and no schedule, and the good days didn't cancel out the bad ones and the bad ones didn't erase the good ones either. They just both existed taking turns.
Heeseung found that he could hold both at the same time, eventually — that he could think about you, about the years and the calls and the airport goodbyes and feel something warm about it and something sad about it in the exact same thought. He wasn't sure if that was what moving on actually meant. Maybe moving on wasn't about the bad days disappearing. Maybe it was just about being able to hold the good and the bad without it knocking him over anymore. He didn't know if he was there yet. But some days, increasingly, he thought he might be getting close.
Years went by, the way years do. You still followed each other on social media, but muted. Neither of you unfollowed each other but neither of you really engaged either, beyond the one thing neither of you ever stopped doing: a birthday message. You knew that for the rest of your life, probably, on October 15th, some part of your brain would just know — it's Heeseung's birthday — whether you wanted it to or not. You weren't sure if he'd remember yours the same way since yours was buried in the Christmas week, easy to lose in everything else going on, and you figured if anyone had a reason to forget, it'd be understandable. But Heeseung never forgot. Every year, a message would show up, sometimes with something small attached, maybe a joke or a reference only the two of you would get. You always answered. He always did too, on his.
He changed jobs. His brother had a kid. You moved apartments. You changed your car. You broke your thumb and it hurt like hell. You changed your hair more than once — the pink eventually grew out, and then came back, and then grew out again. You went to Paris for a week with friends and posted way too many photos of the Eiffel Tower. He went to China for something work related and you saw, through someone, that he'd looked happy in the pictures.
You dated someone eventually, a couple of years in. It ended badly actually, messier than you'd have liked, an ending with real anger and real hurt feelings on both sides. But it didn't break you the way you might have once expected something like that to. It hurt, and then it stopped hurting on a fairly normal timeline, and somewhere in the middle of it you realized something almost funny: this wasn't the worst thing that had ever happened to you, not even close. You'd already had the worst thing. You'd survived the worst thing. Whatever this was, you already knew you could get through it, because you'd gotten through something so much bigger already. Heeseung had been the big one. Everything after that, you could handle.
He found someone too, eventually. You've heard he's still with her, years later, and that they seem happy. You didn't feel anything bad about that. You'd thought, at some point, that you might — that hearing it would hurt, but it didn't. If anything, it felt right. That was what he deserved. You meant that, plainly.
Then one day, there was an announcement that Oasis, the band you'd been sure would never get back together, somehow getting back together. You got tickets and you went with a friend, a friend you'd gotten closer to over the past year, someone you still weren't entirely sure how to define, if you were being honest with yourself. You weren't sure what this thing between you two was yet, but you were still figuring it out.
At the show, you stood next to her, and at some point during one of the songs, she reached over and took your hand and you let her, and you stood there like that for the rest of the set. And you felt something settle, this unexpected relief. The thought arrived almost gently: maybe I can do this again. Maybe you weren't someone who'd only get to feel this once. There had been a long stretch where you'd genuinely wondered if you'd ever feel love again — not necessarily romantic, but that unguarded affection — and standing there, holding someone's hand listening to a song you'd loved, not even sure yet what it meant, you realized you were feeling it. Whatever this was, it was real and it was love in some form, and you loved her, regardless of what it eventually turned into. And it reminded you, distantly, of him.
And in the middle of that thought, you looked over. And there he was. A few rows over, watching the show, singing along with his arm around someone, her head resting against his shoulder, both of them completely in it, completely happy.
He'd found it too. He'd let himself love again. And it didn't hurt seeing him love someone else.
Heeseung had spent way too much time, once, thinking about how long it's supposed to take to get over a breakup. To get over you. He'd never gotten a real answer, maybe that was because it was the wrong question all along. Some loves aren't ones you get over. They're ones you get through, and what's left, on the other side, is not an absence — it's room. Room to love again, because you finally know you can.
ronnie notes ⊹ ࣪ ˖⠀⠀hi everyone!! i’ve actually been writing this one over the past three months and it’s not as long as the stories i usually post but it means a lot to me. i’m pretty sure some of you are going to yell at me after reading it because well !! it’s sad very sad..... this story is also a lot more personal than most things i’ve written before. there are a lot of emotions and experiences in here that came from things i was dealing with in real life. i started writing it during a period where i felt like i needed somewhere to put all of those feelings, so every time i was sad, overwhelmed, confused, or just trying to make sense of something, i ended up pouring a little bit of it into this fic. in a weird way, writing it helped me get through a lot of the things that were happening while i was away. so i hope you enjoy it.!! and as always, feedback is more than welcome. thank you for reading and for sticking around ♡
⠀ ❤︎ ' jake, your boyfriend didn't care enough for you. but his best friend heeseung did.
𝗖𝗛𝗥𝗢𝗠𝗘 𝗛𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗧𝗦 ─── ✿ written . heavily inspired by otl ! 𝗐𝖺𝗋𝗇𝗂𝗇𝗀 ' angst kissing crying jake being a ho heeyearner ' ( 𝖽𝖺𝗂𝗅𝗒 𝖼𝗅𝗂𝖼𝗄 ) ♱ like and reblog ! 𝗉𝗋𝗈𝖽 . 𝗆𝖺𝗀𝖺𝗓𝗂𝗇𝖾
you had read his text about seven times now. and each time you read it, a different emotion evoked from you.
your thumb hovered over the keyboard many times, yet the words never flew out. you didn't know what to say or what to do.
so you threw your phone into your pocket and ran. ran for fresh air and an escape.
and you found yourself in a familiar place, one that you would always come with jake after school to play around while he called you the 'only one' for him.
you almost laugh at how ironic it was, finding yourself in the same playground now alone and in pain from the same boy who promised you would stay in his life forever two years ago.
sitting down at the end of the slide with your knees to your chest, you begin to breathe. the cold air being the only source of comfort for you. you needed to think, to figure out what you wanted to do and what you needed to do.
your thoughts contained everything and nothing all at once. it was simply chaos in your mind and you were trying to find some sort of solace.
“i thought i almost lost you,” you froze, your thoughts being ripped away from you as you heard a familiar voice emerge from the back of the playground.
“baby,” another voice you knew very well rose. “you have me now. you’re not going to lose me, ri.”
kaori and jake were on the other side of the playground, oblivious to the fact that you could hear every single word that pierced your heart with ease.
“i haven’t kissed y/n in two months.” kaori looks over at jake with wide eyes as he admits his feelings truthfully. “i still don’t know what i feel for her, but i just can’t seem to be attracted to her.”
your skin had already gone numb despite the cold biting you. you sat there frozen at the end of the slide, the tears already pouring out of your eyes before you knew it.
“but you’re still with her,” kaori says softly, but worry seeps through her voice.
“i know. i’m going to sound like a fucking jerk for this, but she’s always been there,” jake sighs. “she’s just… always been there. it’s easier than breaking up. she’s always been easy.”
easy.
you were easy.
that felt like a slap to the face.
that’s all you were to him. while you adored him with your whole heart, he didn’t even let you into his. you were easy for him, easy to settle and lean back on, easy to ignore, easy to hurt.
“she really loved you, you know?”
“i know.” jake looks away and to the back of the slide. “that’s the problem.”
and then you realised.
that was the problem.
your love was the problem, your love was what made your heart shatter into pieces.
you just stayed there, replaying each and every one of his words like they were the ultimate truth. the tone in his voice echoed endlessly in your mind. and you stayed there, rewinding the moment that hurt you the most on that slide long after kaori and jake left, probably hand in hand, unaware of the complete heartbreak they caused.
minutes had passed. ten or twenty. you weren’t sure, losing track of time.
your eyes were puffy enough for anyone to notice you had been crying for a while. still having your knees to your chest, you haven’t moved a bit; your limbs now numb to the pain and everything.
that’s when you heard footsteps.
it was gentle enough for you to slowly look up, “y/n?”
your heart stopped.
it wasn’t jake.
nor was it kaori.
it was heeseung.
there he was, worry splashed all over his face. you realise he probably found your location when you shared it with him once and never bothered to turn it off. he crouches down to meet your level as he lets out a sigh of relief.
“why weren’t you picking up your phone?” he asked softly, tilting his head.
his hands quickly took off the scarf wrapped around his neck as it found its new place around you. the fabric was still warm from his body heat as it faintly smelled of his cologne, the one you'd grown used to.
“i’m sorry,” you apologise, looking down. “it was too much.”
heeseung didn’t wonder why. he never pushed. with him, he never would. instead he reached out, his hands cupping your face softly. “you’ve been crying, pretty.”
“he said something?” and he swears he hears his heart crack when you nod slowly.
“he said… he said i was easy. and that he wasn’t attracted to me.” you shakily let out. “he hasn’t kissed me in months, hee. gosh, i’m so—so fucking stupid.”
your words only tumbled out like broken shards that had been stuck inside your throat and you tried your hardest not to cry in front of him again.
heeseung’s jaw tightened; he wondered how jake could let such a pretty girl like this slip away from his fingers.
“y/n…”
“he doesn’t want me anymore. he never will.” you sniff, your eyes red and teary again. “i was just convenient for him. i’m just convenient to anyone.”
you pulled your knees further into your chest, your chin hiding under his scarf. he let you speak every word without interrupting even though he wished he could pull you into his arms and tell you again and again that nothing you said was true. not to him, at least.
heeseung only tucked in a loose strand behind your ear and admired the beauty he had in front of him. his heart was only pushing him to kiss away your tears and tell you that he would never crush your heart like jake did.
“i’m… i’m hard to love, aren’t i?” you whispered, finally meeting his eyes, and heeseung wanted to immediately shake his head. “that’s the truth. i don’t deserve the effort.”
he was quiet.
before he finally spoke his mind.
“what on earth are you saying?”
you bit your lip, your tears sliding down your cheeks anyway. “i’m not lying, hee. it’s true.”
“then why am i here?”
your eyes slightly widened as you finally read his eyes. he was so close to you, you could feel his cold breath on you.
“i’ve been here the whole time.” his voice cracked too. “i’ve seen you cry over him countless times. the first time i saw you, you were sad because of him. and every time i see that look in your eyes… i just want to shake you and hold you at the same time.”
“heeseung—”
“i’m not him, y/n. i’ll never be him. it’s terrible timing. i know. but i can’t keep pretending that my heart doesn’t stop every time you smile at me.”
your lips parted yet no sound came out.
and he did what he always wanted to do.
he did what you were hoping for him to do.
heeseung kissed you. he held you like you were precious to him, he held a broken, fragile piece that he wouldn’t dare dream of breaking. you held him close, your lips moulding into his perfectly as your hands fisted into his jacket.
your tears stained his cheeks but he didn’t care. all he wanted to do was to hold you close to him.
it was soft, impossibly soft.
it felt slow, gentle, and patient.
nothing like how impatiently jake used to kiss you. if you could even remember how he did.
you didn’t know what you were doing, if you were being honest. the pain subsided into the kiss and your heart was at a crossroads, not knowing where to go.
but you let yourself feel wanted.
and when he finally pulled back, you both breathed into each other.
his eyes were still closed, embracing the moment, and without thinking twice he pulled you into his arms, keeping you closer than jake ever would.
⠀ join the taglist 💌 perm taglist ( send and ask or comment )
⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ love me back taglist closed !
⠀⠀𝖺 𝗒𝖾𝗈𝗄𝗂𝗂 𝗉𝗋𝗈𝖽. do not copy, repost or translate my works
🎶 - Is That True by boynextdooooruhh (do you get my reference ok no Bye)
𝖯𝖠𝖨𝖱𝖨𝖭𝖦𝖲: classmate!riki x fem reader
𝖨𝖭 𝖶𝖧𝖨𝖢𝖧 - riki, the popular boy in the university, gets paired up with you, the quiet and smart girl for a school project. you try to push yourself and riki to work, but he keeps trying to distract you. long story short, he’s in love with you.
𝖦𝖤𝖭𝖱𝖤: smau, classmates to lovers, college au
𝖶𝖠𝖱𝖭𝖨𝖭𝖦𝖲: suggestive jokes, riki lowk got a noona kink, sexting towards the end of the chapter (mdni), jake is lowk a menace, riki gets needy asf
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
pairing: brothers best friend!heeseung x jake’s little sister!reader
synopsis: y/n is jake’s little sister, who seems to be interested in her brothers best friend, heeseung.
cw: cursing, suggestive !!!!
001 | 002 | 003 | 004 | 005 (here) | 006
•a/n: watched obsession yesterday… i literally screamed one time IN THE TEATHRE END ME NOW😭😭😭😭 i literally want to sit down and analyze the movie instead of studying for my LAST final (i probably will do that…) ALSO 🚨🚨‼️‼️ should i end this here or continue???? lmk!!!
synopsis —⋆ What happens when the youngest member of KATSEYE starts to feel drawn to the visual from HYBE’s newest boy group? Only to realise that she isn’t the only idol who’s interested…⋆୨୧˚
