blanketed love — જ⁀➴ Ej Oneshot ˎˊ˗
parings : &team EJ x Reader•fem
mini playlist : always — daniel caesar 𖧧 good looking — suki waterhouse 𖧧 in my room — julia wolf 𖧧 i bet on losing dogs — mitski 𖧧 Mrs magic — Strawberry guy 𖧧 promise — Laufey 𖧧 We hug now — Sydney Rose 𖧧 understand —keshi 𖧧 Waiting Room — Phoebe Bridgers 𖧧 Innocence — Hildir Svensson, deprezz 𖧧
a/n: this has been sitting in my drafts for daysss 💀 it’s my longest work yet. tired and idk but hope you enjoy reading. i didn’t proofread it too much im lazy af 💔💔 i’m so out of it rn.
genre : Grief Narration ⋮⋮ Slight Angsty ⋮⋮ slow burn ⋮⋮ meta fiction ⋮⋮ contemporary urban drama ⋮⋮
. ✦ ⠀ The drifts through unresolved feelings, missed timing, and the kind of connection that never fully happens to be. No clearings, just lingering “almosts” and what-ifs.
The fluorescent light of the basement laundry room hums loud enough to settle into your teeth. It’s 2:14 AM, and you’re standing there with your forehead pressed against the cool tile wall, watching the dryer spin in slow circles. The entire week has hollowed you out — endless meetings, corporate restructuring, conversations that felt less like work and more like being carefully removed from your own life piece by piece.
Then the heavy fire door swings open.
At first, you don’t bother looking up. Ten floors means ten different schedules, strangers moving through the building at impossible hours. But the footsteps stop too abruptly. The squeak of sneakers against linoleum cuts off right behind your plastic laundry cart.
You turn your head slowly.
The universe doesn’t tilt. No dramatic silence falls over the room. There’s only the devastating familiarity of Euijoo standing there in an oversized gray sweatshirt you used to steal from him three winters ago.
Not drastically. Just enough for it to hurt. The softness around his face has sharpened into something leaner, more tired, like life carved exhaustion directly into him. He’s holding a basket of dark clothes against his hip, fingers curled tightly around the handle.
For a second, he freezes.
His eyes widen slightly — the exact same expression he used to wear whenever you interrupted one of his deep thoughts.
“Oh,” Euijoo says quietly.
It barely sounds like a word. More like air leaving his lungs.
Something cold and heavy settles into your ribs.
You straighten instinctively, tugging your hands deeper into the sleeves of your cardigan because they’ve started trembling without permission. “Hey.”
“You live here?” he asks.
His tone evens itself out too quickly, polite and careful in a way that feels strangely cruel. Like the breakup had been sanded down into manners.
“Temporarily,” you answer, gesturing vaguely upward. “Ninth floor. I’m subletting from a coworker while… things clear up.”
He nods once, glancing down at his basket before looking back at you. He doesn’t ask what that means. Doesn’t mention how the two of you once shared a laundry basket because neither of you ever had enough quarters.
“I’m on four,” he says after a moment. “Been here about a year.”
“Right.” Your eyes drift back to the dryer. Seven minutes left. “Good to know.”
The hardest part isn’t the breakup itself.
It’s how gentle strangers you’ve become.
Three days later, you run into him again in the lobby.
Rain slams against the glass doors in sharp April diagonals, cold enough to ruin the hems of your trousers. You’re struggling with a broken umbrella, fingers numb and irritated, when another hand suddenly enters your line of sight.
Euijoo takes the umbrella from you carefully.
Two quick clicks, practiced and precise, and the bent rib snaps back into place. He hands it back without letting his fingers brush yours.
“The spring gets stuck on these,” he says, stepping back immediately, leaving an intentional distance between you. “You have to push it past the notch.”
“Thanks.” Your throat feels strangely dry.
You leave the building together since you’re both heading toward the subway station anyway. Your steps fall into rhythm automatically, bodies remembering three years of shared commutes even while your shoulders keep a painful amount of space apart.
“How’s your mom?” you ask quietly, eyes fixed on the rain-slick pavement.
“She’s good. Retiring in June.” He hesitates. “How’s the work transition?”
You let out a tired laugh. “Loud. Kind of a mess. But manageable.”
“You were always good at handling messy things,” he says softly.
The words land heavier than they should.
You hear everything hidden underneath them — the nights you stayed awake helping him rebuild his portfolio after his gallery placement collapsed, the way you held both of your lives together when things started falling apart.
It feels like an opening. A hand reaching through darkness.
But before you can say anything back, he adjusts his coat and nods toward the intersection ahead.
“This is my crosswalk,” he says. “See you around.”
You watch him disappear through the rain.
The elevator breaks down on a Tuesday night.
You’re standing in the lobby staring at the OUT OF ORDER sign with two heavy grocery bags cutting into your fingers after a twelve-hour shift.
Euijoo stands beside the mailboxes, sleeves pushed up slightly, keys dangling loosely from one hand.
Before your pride can answer for you, he steps forward and takes the heavier bag from your grip — the one filled with canned soup, milk, and things too exhausting to carry nine flights up.
“I can manage,” you insist weakly.
“I know you can,” he says, already pushing open the stairwell door. “But you shouldn’t have to.”
The climb is mostly silent except for the echo of footsteps against concrete.
When you reach the fourth floor, he doesn’t stop.
By the ninth floor, both of you are breathing harder than either of you wants to admit.
You unlock the apartment quietly, and Euijoo sets the groceries just inside the doorway. His gaze drifts across the room — sparse furniture, blank walls, unfamiliar corners. The apartment doesn’t look lived in. It looks temporary. Like someone halfway through leaving.
“You still don’t have a shoe rack,” he says after a moment, eyes flicking toward your boots abandoned near the entrance. “You hate dirt on hardwood floors.”
Your chest aches so suddenly it almost catches you off guard.
“I just haven’t gotten around to buying one yet,” you murmur.
Euijoo finally looks at you properly then.
His eyes linger on the exhaustion beneath yours, the dark circles, the way you’re swaying slightly from being too tired for too long. One of his hands twitches faintly at his side, fingers curling inward like he’s physically stopping himself from reaching toward you.
“Eat something warm tonight,” he says quietly, voice lower now, softer in the way it used to be when nobody else was around. “Don’t survive on coffee again.”
Then he turns before you can answer.
He walks back down the hallway before you can tell him the truth —
that the only reason dinner became coffee is because nobody waits in the kitchen making rice anymore.
The convenience store across the street smells like stale cardboard, burnt coffee, and the artificial saltiness of instant ramen. It’s 1:45 AM, the rain finally reduced to damp streaks across the pavement outside, the roads shining under streetlights like spilled oil.
You sit at the narrow plastic counter facing the window, staring into a paper cup of hot water while the noodles slowly soften beneath the steam.
The bell above the door chimed a few minutes ago.
You would recognize the sound of Euijoo anywhere — the tired shuffle in his footsteps, the slight drag of his left sneaker whenever exhaustion settled into his bones.
A chair scrapes softly against the floor.
Euijoo sits directly across from you.
He doesn’t buy anything. Just rests both hands against the scratched laminate table, fingers pale beneath the harsh fluorescent lights.
“You’re still awake,” he says quietly.
Not judgmental. Just observant.
The way someone speaks when they used to memorize your sleeping habits like scripture.
You peel back the foil lid of your ramen cup slowly, letting steam drift between the two of you in soft white waves. “Couldn’t sleep.”
His eyes lower toward the cup. “Bad night?”
“The radiator in 904 keeps making this clicking sound every four seconds.” You stir the noodles absentmindedly. “Feels like psychological warfare.”
Euijoo huffs the faintest laugh through his nose.
“It’s probably the pressure valve,” he says automatically. “It needs bleeding. If you leave a wrench outside your door, I could—”
The shift is almost invisible, but you feel it happen anyway.
His jaw tightens slightly. His gaze flicks toward the rain-streaked windows instead of you.
“You should tell the building supervisor,” he finishes more carefully. “He usually fixes those on Thursdays.”
The correction hurts more than it should.
I can do it for you becomes ask someone else.
You take a bite of noodles that taste like absolutely nothing.
“How’s the studio?” you ask after a while.
“Quiet.” He leans back slightly in the plastic chair. “I’m working on smaller landscape prints lately. Less ink. More empty space.”
“You always wanted to lean into minimalism more,” you murmur before you can stop yourself. “You used to complain that your older work felt too crowded. Too loud.”
Euijoo looks at you then.
For a few suspended seconds, the distance between you disappears. The politeness cracks open just enough for something unbearably familiar to shine through. Suddenly you’re remembering old studio nights in college — charcoal dust staining your fingertips, Euijoo slumped against your shoulder at 3 AM muttering about deadlines while you cleaned brushes beside him.
“I think I can breathe better now,” he says softly.
He never explains whether he means the artwork or himself.
The steam curls upward between you both.
And somehow Euijoo still sits across from you like he remembers everything — how you take your tea, how you rub your eyes when you’re tired, how silence means something different depending on the shape of your shoulders.
Friday night, the power goes out.
No dramatic thunderstorm. No warning.
Just a sudden click at exactly 10 PM, followed by absolute darkness swallowing the entire apartment building whole.
The silence afterward feels strange. Heavy.
You use your phone flashlight to stumble toward the hallway, intending to knock on a neighbor’s door and ask if anyone owns candles.
But when you open your apartment, Euijoo is already there.
The pale glow of his phone lights half his face, sharpening the tired slope of his features against the dark corridor.
“The main power box blew,” he says. “Whole block lost power.”
“Oh.” You glance down at your dying battery. 12%. “Great.”
You watch him glance toward the stairwell leading down to his apartment, then back toward you standing alone inside a place that still doesn’t feel like home.
“I have a portable charger,” he says eventually. “And candles.” A pause. “You can come downstairs if you want. It’s warmer on four.”
The stairwell is quiet except for your footsteps echoing off concrete walls.
He walks ahead of you, phone flashlight angled carefully toward each step so you won’t trip.
When he opens the door to his apartment, it feels less like entering someone else’s space and more like walking straight into a preserved version of your old life.
The familiar scent of sandalwood and printing oil lingers in the air. On the kitchen counter sits the chipped ceramic mug you bought him years ago at a flea market in Kyoto — pale blue glaze cracked near the handle.
Your chest tightens painfully.
Euijoo lights a thick beeswax candle and places it on the coffee table. Golden light spills softly across the room, filling corners with moving shadows.
You sit on the floor with your back resting against the sofa.
He sits a few feet away, knees pulled loosely toward his chest.
“Here,” he says quietly, handing you a charging cord.
The tiny charging sound feels absurdly loud in the dark apartment.
Outside, rain begins again — softer this time, tapping rhythmically against the windows.
The silence between you fills with everything neither of you says aloud.
The career you couldn’t abandon.
The months spent trying to stretch love across impossible distance until both of you were exhausted from holding the weight of it up.
His knee brushes your arm.
The contact is accidental, but he doesn’t move away immediately.
For a few unbearable seconds, the warmth of him stays there, pressed lightly against your side, enough for your pulse to start hammering against your ribs.
Why did we let this happen?
But Euijoo only swallows quietly before pulling his leg back.
“You should try to sleep,” he says into the dim room, eyes fixed on the candle flame instead of you. “I’ll stay awake a little longer.”
By mid-May, you’ve figured out Euijoo’s Tuesdays by heart.
He doesn’t get back from his printmaking workshop until close to midnight, sometimes later if a project runs over. You start adjusting your own nights around it without meaning to—laundry, late errands, anything that might justify being in the same orbit at the same time.
It’s 2:15 AM on a Wednesday when you end up in the basement again.
The laundry room is cold in that way basements always are, all exposed pipes and humming machines that feel half-alive. You’re sitting on the linoleum floor with your back against a row of idle washers, a plastic basket between you and Euijoo like it’s the only thing keeping the world properly divided.
Neither of you talks at first.
You just reach into his basket, pull out one of his oversized white shirts, and snap it once, then twice, the fabric sighing as it settles. Your hands move automatically after that—folding sleeves inward, then folding the body into clean thirds the way he likes, precise enough that it doesn’t crease across the chest.
Not the shirt. Not the laundry.
The flickering light above makes his face look tired in a way that feels almost structural, like exhaustion has been built into him over time. He reaches into your basket in return, pulling out one of your knit cardigans. His folding is less certain—he always rolls the sleeves too tightly—but he still does it carefully, like the attempt itself matters more than correctness.
“You’re losing weight,” he says eventually.
It isn’t harsh. That’s the problem. It lands too gently to defend against.
“The new project at work,” you reply, eyes fixed on a gray sock you’re turning over in your hands. “It’s heavy. Late nights.”
“You need more than convenience store broth.” He folds another shirt, slower now. “I made too much braised radish tonight. It’s in the fridge on four. Take it before you go up.”
It’s never just excess with him. It’s always something standing in for what he can’t say directly.
“Thank you,” you whisper.
The dryer behind you clicks off with a heavy metallic thud.
The silence that follows feels denser than before, like the room has quietly filled up with everything neither of you are touching.
You both reach for the basket at the same time.
Your fingers brush his knuckles.
It’s brief. Barely anything.
But both of you stop instantly, as if the contact has a weight neither of you agreed to carry.
Warm laundry heat rises between you, smelling faintly of lavender detergent and something familiar enough to hurt. Euijoo doesn’t pull away right away. Neither do you.
For a moment, it feels like the air itself is holding its breath, waiting for one of you to cross the invisible line that’s been sitting between you for years now.
His mouth parts slightly.
Not quite words. Not yet.
Then something shifts—small, almost imperceptible. A decision made without speaking it aloud.
He withdraws his hand first.
“The clothes will get cold,” he says quietly, standing up and lifting the basket as if it belongs to neither of you and both of you at once. “Let’s go.”
The storm arrives on a Thursday.
Not cinematic. Just relentless.
Rain hits the windows hard enough to make the glass tremble, turning the entire building into a damp, echoing shell. By 11:30 PM, the radiator in 904 gives up with a wet hiss, and whatever warmth was left in the apartment drains out almost immediately.
You’re on the floor with your laptop, trying to finish a layout edit, fingers stiff from the cold and fatigue making every line blur slightly.
Three beats. A pause. Two beats.
You already know who it is before you open the door.
Euijoo is standing in the hallway with a thick grey wool blanket tucked under one arm and his laptop under the other. He’s wearing thick socks and the clear-framed glasses he only uses when his eyes are too tired for contacts.
“My heater’s out too,” he says, not looking directly at you. “The supervisor said the boiler line’s down for the whole building until tomorrow afternoon.”
“It’s warmer inside on four.”
He doesn’t ask. He never really does anymore.
Inside, he moves with quiet efficiency—dropping the blanket over your shoulders without letting his fingers linger, tucking it in just enough that it stays without needing adjustment. Then he sits beside you on the floor, careful, deliberate, leaving exactly enough space that nothing should happen by accident.
The rain keeps hitting the windows in steady rhythm.
For a while, it’s just typing. Two laptops. Two quiet lives pretending they’re not sharing the same room.
Your shoulder brushes his arm under the blanket.
It’s accidental, or it should be.
He doesn’t move away immediately.
The contact lingers long enough that it stops feeling like an accident and starts feeling like a question neither of you is allowed to ask.
His breath catches—small, almost betrayed.
You turn your head slightly.
He’s already looking at you.
Close enough now that the space between you feels charged, unstable, like something one wrong word could collapse entirely.
His fingers tighten faintly against the edge of your blanket.
He looks like he’s about to say everything. Like it’s all right there, pressing against his teeth.
His laptop screen flashes white as a render completes. The light breaks the moment cleanly in half.
The expression vanishes before it can become anything irreversible.
He leans back just slightly, reclaiming the distance like it was always his to take.
“The wind should die down by three,” he says quietly, eyes back on his screen. “Try to sleep after that.”
On Monday, you wake up late.
The alarm went off—you just didn’t stay awake long enough to care.
You have forty-five minutes.
You rush out of the apartment half-dressed, hair still damp, footsteps uneven as you cross the lobby. The sliding doors come into view too fast—
And Euijoo is already there.
One vanilla, extra sleeve so it doesn’t burn your hands.
He steps into your path without urgency.
“The Line 2 train is delayed,” he says evenly, like he’s repeating something he’s already checked three times. “Take the express bus. Corner stop. Three minutes.”
You stare at him for half a second too long.
“You look like this when you miss your first alarm,” he says softly.
Then his hand lifts without thinking.
His thumb brushes a damp strand of hair from your cheek and tucks it behind your ear.
It’s so automatic it almost doesn’t register as real until it’s already done.
He freezes immediately after.
His hand hovers in the air for a fraction of a second too long.
“Go,” he says, eyes lowered. “You’ll miss it.”
You leave with the coffee in your hand, heat bleeding into your fingers.
At the stop, you take a sip.
By the third week of May, nothing is accidental anymore.
At 1:30 AM, if either of your apartment lights are on, you both end up at the convenience store across the street like it’s an unspoken agreement neither of you signed.
Just the clerk asleep behind the counter and a fluorescent light that won’t stop buzzing like it’s trying to fill the silence for you.
Euijoo is untangling wired earphones.
It takes him longer than it should. His hands are tired from framing prints all day, fingers still faintly stained with ink that never fully leaves skin.
He finally frees the knot.
Then he looks at the wires.
He just holds one earbud out.
The music starts immediately.
Second-year songs. Late-night studying. Cheap convenience store dinners. A basement venue so small you had to stand pressed shoulder-to-shoulder just to see the stage.
The memory hits too fast.
It sits between you at the table like something alive.
Euijoo leans back slightly, watching the street through the window. His face looks calm in a way that doesn’t match his eyes.
You know he’s hearing it too.
Everything attached to it.
The nights you stayed too late in his apartment because leaving felt unnecessary.
The way he used to hum along without realizing.
The way you used to think there would be more time.
You turn your head toward him.
He’s already looking at you.
And for a second, it feels like neither of you is sitting in a convenience store anymore.
It feels like you’re back in all the versions of that same room where nothing ever ended properly.
His mouth opens slightly.
Something real enough to change everything.
“The tea’s getting cold,” he says.
His voice cracks just a little on the last word.
He reaches over and gently removes the earbud from your ear, winding the wire slowly around his fingers like if he moves carefully enough, he can keep the moment from breaking.
“We should head back,” he adds, softer now.
And this time, neither of you argues.
By the end of May, the silence between you has changed shape.
It isn’t awkward anymore. It doesn’t have edges you can name or fix. It has become something softer, heavier—something that fills the empty spaces in your apartment like water slowly rising in a sealed room.
You’re sitting on his floor, helping him sort through a stack of thick cotton paper prints for his upcoming exhibition. The room smells of black ink drying too slowly and lavender fabric softener that never quite masks the chemical bite of work that’s been going on too long.
You reach for a print at the exact moment he does.
Your fingers slide against his palm.
It’s brief, but it lands like a shock anyway—warm skin, sudden contact, too real in a room where everything else has become careful.
Euijoo doesn’t pull away.
His hand stays there, flat against the paper, his fingers subtly curling until they hover just along the edge of your wrist. His gaze drops immediately to the point of contact, like he’s trying to understand what it means without moving too fast and breaking it.
His breathing shifts. Slower. Rougher.
“You’re still using that editing software,” he says quietly, voice lower than usual, worn at the edges. he’s feeling your skin lightly but so subtly. The way your hands were overworked with everything these past few years.
“They updated it,” you murmur. “It’s better now.”
His thumb moves slightly—barely anything—brushing the pulse point at your wrist without fully committing to it. Like he’s counting something he doesn’t want to admit he’s counting.
Don’t leave. Don’t move. Don’t become distance again.
The thought sits between you both, unspoken but fully formed.
Then his phone vibrates on the desk behind him.
The sound is sharp. Final.
His hand slides away from your wrist with a slowness that feels almost unbearable. He clears his throat, already rebuilding the wall in real time.
“That’s probably the gallery coordinator,” he says, picking up a pencil and turning back to the prints. “We should finish numbering these.”
You find the note on a Friday morning.
It’s tucked under your door with a small plastic container of hot ginger tea.
His handwriting is unmistakable—neat, slightly angled, controlled in the way everything about him has started to become again.
The wind’s going to drop the temperature to six degrees tonight. The supervisor said the boiler line on nine is acting up again. If it gets too cold, the key is under the mat on four. Just go in. You don’t have to wait for me.
You stare at it for a long time.
There are two more lines underneath.
They’ve been aggressively blacked out.
But if you tilt the page toward the light, you can still see the pressure of the pen underneath the ink.
I don’t think I can keep pretending that you’re just a neighbor
Every time I hear the elevator stop on your floor, I—
The rest is gone. Erased too thoroughly to recover, except for the fact that he spent time making sure you wouldn’t read it.
And somehow that hurts more than the words would have.
You see him in the lobby that afternoon.
He looks normal. Composed. Carefully assembled.
Long coat. Bag over one shoulder. Hair still slightly damp from earlier rain.
“Thanks for the tea,” you say.
“Did it help?” he asks, eyes searching your face in a way that feels too precise to be casual.
“Yeah,” you answer, and your hand tightens around the folded note in your pocket. “Euijoo, about the note—”
“I have to catch the 4:15 express,” he interrupts gently.
Just timed perfectly to avoid the conversation.
“The gallery needs the final layout by five. I’ll see you later.”
And then he leaves before you can hold anything in place.
The rain returns at midnight.
Heavy, relentless, turning the courtyard into a shifting sheet of gray light.
Your apartment on nine is freezing again—the radiator completely dead this time—and the key under the mat on four has started to feel less like permission and more like inevitability.
Downstairs, his apartment is warm in a way yours isn’t.
Euijoo comes home at 1:00 AM soaked through, hair stuck to his forehead despite the umbrella, shoulders sagging like he’s been carrying the entire day alone.
He sees you sitting on the couch wrapped in his grey wool blanket.
Not surprise. Not confusion.
He drops his bag, walks to the kitchen, and starts the kettle.
A few minutes later, he brings two mugs over and sits on the floor in front of you, leaning back against the coffee table. The lamp casts soft amber light across his face, softening the sharpness of his tired expression.
“The exhibition got pushed,” he says quietly. “Next month now. The curator wants more pieces. They’re asking me to do a residency in New York City for three weeks.”
Three weeks somewhere else. A different rhythm. A widening gap that won’t wait for either of you to be ready.
“That’s… good,” you say carefully. “It’s what you wanted.”
His hand rests on the edge of the couch beside your knee. Close enough that you notice it immediately. Far enough that he can pretend it doesn’t mean anything.
Outside, rain hits the window in slow, steady pulses.
“I don’t know if I should go,” he admits quietly.
It’s not a confession exactly.
But it’s the closest thing he’s given you in a long time.
“You should,” you say anyway.
The words feel wrong the moment they leave your mouth.
“It’s your career, Euijoo.”
Like he already knew that answer before he asked.
“Right,” he says softly. “Of course.”
His hand stays there for a moment longer.
That night, you can’t sleep.
Every time you close your eyes, you see the erased lines on the note. The way his thumb hovered over your wrist. The silence that always arrives right before something important gets unsaid.
You wrap your cardigan around yourself and step into the corridor, intending to go downstairs just to breathe something colder than your thoughts.
But when your door clicks shut—
Someone is sitting on the stairwell landing just above the ninth floor.
He’s been there long enough for the emergency exit light to carve shadows under his eyes. His fingers slowly rotate his keychain in a steady, absent loop.
He looks up when he hears you.
Just exhaustion so deep it feels like it’s hollowed him out.
“What are you doing here?” you whisper.
He stands slowly, joints clicking in the quiet.
He stops just outside your space, like there’s an invisible rule neither of you agreed on but both of you keep obeying.
“I came up to check your heater,” he says.
The boiler was fixed hours ago.
His hand lifts halfway—hesitates—open, like he doesn’t know whether he’s allowed to touch you or if that would finally ruin whatever fragile structure is still holding this between you.
His eyes flick to your mouth.
Something in his expression breaks—just slightly. Not loudly. Not visibly to anyone else. The yearning is so loud it feels like a physical noise in the hallway.
But enough that you feel it.
“Euijoo,” you say quietly.
He looks at your mouth again, then at your eyes, his face twisting into an expression of sheer, quiet agony. Then, he drops his hand back to his side and takes a step backward, toward the stairs.
And he walks away before either of you can turn that moment into anything that would change what comes next.
Every remaining interaction carries the weight of a door that’s already closing.
By the final week of May, the ninth-floor apartment stops feeling temporary—not because you’ve settled into it, but because you’ve started undoing it. Boxes begin to replace furniture. Drawers stay half-open. Everything becomes a staged version of absence.
At 1:15 AM, the elevator dings on the fourth floor.
The doors slide open and Jake steps out instead, carrying a brown paper bag that smells sharply of fried chicken and cheap beer. He looks far too alive for the building, like he’s walking through a place that forgot how to host people properly.
“I told you I’d find you,” he says, stepping into the hallway like he owns the silence. “You can’t just disappear into a sublet and expect me not to check if you’re still eating.”
Because the apartment has started to feel worse when it’s quiet.
He drops the bag on your counter and looks around at the bare walls, the half-packed boxes, the stripped-down version of your life.
“Euijoo lives here, doesn’t he?” Jake asks suddenly, cracking open a beer. “I saw his name on the mailboxes downstairs.”
Your hands pause mid-movement. “He lives on four,” you say carefully. “It’s just… coincidence.”
Jake snorts under his breath. “Right. Coincidence.”
He takes a sip, then watches you properly now—less joking, more serious. “You know he’s leaving for New York City next week, right?”
Your stomach tightens before your expression can catch up.
“Nicholas said he already signed everything with the gallery. He’s not coming back for spring.”
The name Nicholas lands differently in the room. Heavier than it should.
“I know,” you say quietly. “He told me. It’s a good opportunity.”
Jake lets out a disbelieving laugh. “Are you actually just going to let him leave? After everything? You two are living in the same building and acting like strangers on a commute.”
Before you can answer, there’s a knock at the door.
Three beats. Pause. Two beats.
Your breath catches before you even move.
When you open it, Euijoo is standing there with a roll of packing tape and a small screwdriver tucked into his hand. He stops the moment he sees Jake inside your apartment.
Something in his face shuts down instantly.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just cleanly.
“Oh,” Euijoo says softly. “I didn’t realize you had company.”
“I just came to drop this off,” he adds, lifting the tape slightly. His voice flattens into something careful, rehearsed. “Nicholas said you might need it for the wardrobe doors before inspection.”
Jake raises his beer in greeting. “Hey, Euijoo.”
His eyes don’t fully leave you.
But they also don’t fully stay. The grip on the tape tightens just slightly, plastic creasing under his fingers.
“Euijoo, wait,” you say, stepping into the corridor as he turns.
The hallway feels colder than your apartment. Sterile. Final in a way that makes your chest tighten.
He stops near the fire door.
Doesn’t turn immediately.
When he does, his expression looks exhausted in a way that doesn’t belong to sleep. It belongs to repetition. To restraint.
“You have guests,” he says quietly.
“I don’t care about that,” you reply.
“I have to finish packing the studio prints,” he continues, voice steady but thin at the edges. “Nicholas is coming over early tomorrow to help move the crates.”
The name sits there longer than it should. “Is he staying with you?” you ask before you can stop yourself.
Euijoo hesitates. Just long enough to matter. “Yeah,” he says finally. “He is. We’ve got a lot to sort out before the move.”
The word doesn’t land like explanation.
It lands like something already established.
Like a life that didn’t pause when you arrived here. He turns before you can respond and pushes through the fire door. The metal clicks shut behind him like punctuation.
Like a period you didn’t agree to.
Saturday afternoon, the rain settles into a steady, dull gray that makes the whole city look unfinished.
You’re standing near the mailboxes with a folded tenancy notice in your hand when Nicholas walks through the sliding doors.
He’s carrying a cardboard box filled with art catalogues. Damp hair. Tired eyes. The kind of quiet that doesn’t ask to be noticed but somehow still takes up space.
He spots you immediately.
“You look tired,” he says simply.
“He’s really going,” Nicholas adds, leaning against the wall. “You know that, right? He’s not leaving anything behind this time.”
“I know,” you say. “It’s for his work.”
Nicholas gives a short, humorless exhale.
“You really don’t get it,” he says, studying you now. “You think this is just a gallery opportunity?”
Your grip tightens slightly on the paper. “What do you mean?”
He glances toward the elevators, then back at you.
“Euijoo has spent the last two years trying to build a life that didn’t feel like it was waiting for someone who wasn’t there,” Nicholas says quietly. “And then you moved into this building. And everything he rebuilt just… cracked open again.”
“He’s leaving for New York City because he has to,” Nicholas continues. “Because I’m not just his friend.”
“I’m his partner. We’ve been together eight months.”
The lobby doesn’t change.
Nothing dramatic happens.
But something in you does.
A slow, sinking recognition that rearranges every memory you thought you understood. The care wasn’t a return.
It was a relapse into something he was trying not to feel.
It comes out small. Familiar.
Almost identical to the one he said in the laundry room.
Nicholas watches you for a second longer.
“He still loves you,” he says quietly. “That’s the problem. He loves you in a way he can’t act on anymore. So he chose the life that actually stayed with him.”
The words don’t soften. But they settle.
The last convenience store meeting happens without planning.
The store is empty except for the buzz of fluorescent light and the faint hum of a refrigerator that never fully stops vibrating.
You’re sitting at the counter with a black coffee cooling between your hands when Euijoo slides into the seat across from you.
Just exhaustion and quiet clarity.
Doesn’t pretend this is casual anymore.
His hands rest flat on the scratched table, fingers slightly spread, like he’s grounding himself.
Neither of you mentions Nicholas.
Neither of you mentions New York City.
Or the version of him that exists somewhere outside this store.
“The van comes at seven,” he says.
Silence follows. Not empty.
“I left the tape on your counter,” he adds after a moment. “And the screwdriver. The landlord on nine will want the door hinges tightened before inspection.”
Your voice comes out thinner than you expect. You look at his hands.
You want to reach across the table.
Not for a conversation. Not for closure.
Just for proof that he’s still real in the way you remember.
His gaze lifts to yours, sharp for a second before softening again. He doesn’t move closer. Doesn’t move away.
The distance between you is perfectly measured now. Not accidental. Not cruel.
"You should get some sleep," Euijoo says softly, standing up from the table.
And for a moment, it looks like he might say something else.
Something that would undo everything that came before it.
Instead, he gives you a small, careful nod.
He looks down at you, his expression perfectly composed, a polite, stranger’s smile touching the corners of his mouth. "Goodbye."
And this time, neither of you stops him from leaving.
The streaky glowing lights of the basement laundry room don’t hum anymore.
If you listen closely, the entire building has already been silent for a long time—silence so complete it stops being something you notice and becomes the default shape of everything.
You look down at your hands.
They are perfectly still.
No trembling. No cold. No late-night exhaustion sitting in your bones.
The kind that doesn’t belong to someone waiting for a dryer cycle.
The boxes on the ninth floor were never part of a move. There was no gradual packing, no slow migration of a life into cardboard. There was only the aftermath—what remains when a space is returned too late for it to matter.
The sublet ended weeks ago.
The radiator was never broken in the way you remember it.
And the rain—April, May, all of it—never touched your skin in the way your memory insists it did.
Because there was no ninth-floor routine.
No fourth-floor apartment.
No staircase that connected the two like a fragile secret.
The building itself was just the last structure your mind kept walking through while everything else stopped.
A loop. A gentle, persistent reconstruction of something unfinished.
Euijoo was never standing in those hallways. Not in the laundry room at 2:15 AM.
Not in the convenience store under flickering radiant light.
Not behind a door holding tape or coffee or hesitation shaped like politeness.
The version of him that stayed with you—gray sweatshirt, long fingers, eyes that looked like they were always about to say something they never reached—was not a person continuing his life somewhere else.
He was the shape your memory gave grief so it could stay close without breaking completely.
There was no Nicholas in a hallway conversation. No partner waiting in New York City.
No competing life you were quietly being replaced in.
Only your mind, trying to explain absence in the only language it had left: narrative.
So it built one. Carefully.
Intimately. Painfully convincingly.
Until even you believed there was someone still choosing between leaving and staying.
The convenience store dissolves first.
Not with drama—just subtraction. Paper cup. Earbud wire. Steam. All of it thinning into something like static.
Then the basement follows.
Then the apartment lighting.
Then the echo of footsteps that were never real to begin with.
You see him one last time—not as a person standing in a doorway, but as a thought taking its final shape.
Gray sweatshirt. Slight hesitation in his shoulders. A face your mind learned to draw so often it stopped needing reference. He looks at you like he always did when something almost mattered enough to become real.
But even that soft fiction cannot hold its form anymore. It loosens.
Not violently. Not suddenly. Just inevitably.
There is no final conversation.
Only the quiet realization that there was never anyone across from you to answer.
The last image doesn’t fade so much as lose definition.
A mug exists somewhere without meaning. A blanket lies folded without purpose. A room stops being a room and becomes nothing more than unused space.
The story finishes rendering itself out of existence. And when it ends, there is no silence left to fall into.
Tag list 𝝑𝝔 @hoonguin @pbandjay7
