♱ everything, ̠i̠̠n̠ 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆 ˖°.

  An empty history, filled to its extent with ache and joy and all-consuming longing. An overflowing history, devoid of the coalescence bearing two souls; two vessels on opposite edges of a battle wound.

  Had you accepted another university invite, or perhaps been born to another name, or chosen to smile another day, or been a sole tea drinker, or maybe worn shoes one size up, or hated the sag of damp clothes smelling of petrichor, or—

  Maybe you would have never known.

  And at the time, you thought ignorance would have been better than bracing the weight of a hollow history, a blank canvas you had painted with another being, someone who had managed to find their way to you amongst billions, those few years ago.

  The sound of your name.

  It hadn’t been spoken aloud. It reverberated against the walls in your head when you saw it printed in clean serif and faded ink at the bottom of the sleek gallery program, beneath a line of contributors and sponsors. And there, just beside it, his. 

  You stare at them both for a couple seconds, wondering whether the universe was laughing at you at this very moment. Shit, you would’ve scoffed yourself if, for a singular constricted breath, the atoms around you hadn’t stilled and departed your bubble of consciousness until there was nothing there. If there were no longer any unidentified voices musing the other, no bubbling of champagne or barely-registered clicks of a camera shutter. For just one breath, everything snaps out and back in.

  Another breath more and you were sliding the stiff paper into your purse. Dismissed.

  If you’d known before, maybe you wouldn’t have come. Though, it wouldn’t have mattered in the end, for his ghost remains right there with you. It always is.

  Faded now from the years filled with new experiences and souls and laughter since you last saw its mortal vessel. The ghost had gradually eroded, but it was still there, now as a scar bearing the embroidery of pain once tolerated, the embellishment of a scab picked off without second thought of its origination.

  The air inside the exhibit hall is still and unkind, how polished places often are. A place masking you to appear composed even when your hands were sure to twitch in anticipation of inevitable conversation.

  You had come out of obligation. An assignment graced by Sana, your editor-in-chief, like it was any other piece, but you knew the moment you read the email this would feel different. It was an exhibition showcasing a century of local London artwork, and it was bigger than the usual exhibitions you attended, with more sponsors and features and refined guests as a passive audience. Simply put, it was dense.

  It was exactly what the company needed.

  So, you showed up, modest in flowing silk, your leather journalists notebook in hand, a vessel of black ink rolling between your fingers.

  And, of most importance, your faultless ignorance to the tangible home of your ghost. Him.

  You move throughout the gallery, your presence feeling as dim as the lighting above. There were pieces here a younger version of you might have lingered at longer. Your eyes flit past a pale clay vase unearthed from the Thames bed and oil portraits flaking behind glass. Photographs litter across one of the walls, their edges yellowing from the way the sun has kissed them through the passage of time. And time, it feels like such a funny thing in this place. It seems to stretch when you stroll past stone statues caught mid-motion, and you almost can’t fathom the absurdity of precision it takes to sculpt a life form with your bare hands. 

  You scribble a few notes into your notebook, about the art and the people and everything in between, and watch the guests blinking at beauty and with expressions curious enough to gape further into each of the pieces, but detached enough to avoid what would be illegal indulgence. Though, the longer you stand in this place, this corridor of expression and reminiscence, the more you begin to feel it. 

  The ghost is here. 

  And it wasn’t hovering behind you the way it usually does, bound to old songs or spring weather or the grace with which certain hands held cameras.

  No. 

  This time, he is somewhere in this space. Somewhere just beyond your existence, his breath is folding into the silence and his steps are softening beneath the music and his shadow is curving behind a sculpture or pillar or frame.

  You swallow, moving to another section where glass frames breathe faint reflections back at you. A marble piece catches your eye, abstract and jagged, and you halt, thinking, for the briefest moment: Hyunjin would’ve loved this. 

  The edges, the flair. His obsession with the drama of sculpture. You wonder, fleetingly, if he was still in Florence uncovering the heart of Michelangelo, or perhaps he’d found solace in Rome and the brushstrokes of the Bellinis. He was still sending you handmade postcards, always arriving weeks late, filled with sketches of carved limbs and soft-spoken critiques of Italian espresso.

  Is he thinking about Hyunjin, too? 

  Is he also here, serenading a century of pieces born through creative heart with the shutter of his camera, thinking about how your shared friend would consider this a second home? It was a witless thought, one you were sure had only conspired given the circumstances at hand. Still, you couldn’t help but imagine how you were both in the same space, pondering upon the thread of a singular vibration, wrapping around the exact same thought for your friend at this very point in time.

  The three of you used to stay up until sunrise arguing about art and time and whether every piece of artwork that had ever existed held the love its creator poured into it. The two of them had always thought they did. You weren’t so sure, but neither of you knew any better at the time.

  The sound around you feels impenetrable through the medium. There was something about this exhibit, with its weathered frames and the careful way people walked through it, that made time feel thicker. This place gave time a viscosity that posed a challenge for minds attempting to rush through it. 

  You pause beside a frame of a fog-drenched bridge. You tilt your head.

  And catch the most stark flicker of light.

  The softest click of a shutter. 

  Your breath catches.

  And yet,

  There he is.

  Living and breathing beyond islands of glass cases and motionless life. Moving, down the corridor, half-shadowed beneath the exposed concrete of an arch, his camera raised, gaze steady, posture sharp, and photographing the pale marble limbs of a woman reaching for nothing.

  His hair is black now, ink-dark, parted softly down the center, and it frames a face more defined than you had left. Broader shoulders roll beneath a loose black shirt, tucked into slouched slacks that whisper when he shifts weight from one foot to the other. A silver ring glints on his index finger, and his earrings catch the light; they’re subtle, the crazy age of nineteen drowned with the dangling silver he must’ve laid to rest in the time you spent apart.

  It’s him, his look, the demeanor you had grown so accustomed to all those years ago. But it looks different on him now, and you’re not sure why.

  Perhaps that was the way Tokyo had painted him and sent him back.

  You aren't sure if he’d seen you, until he turns, slowly, flicking through the shots he’d just taken with the same look he would wear those few years ago, one that told you the picture had been honourably resurrected from the vision in his mind. He was always so sure of himself, and you could still see it in him. Even when he looks up.

  And your eyes meet.

  And the recognition, gosh. 

  It’s immediate, and it submerges you with no warning.

  He holds your gaze without blinking. You don’t look away. The soundless medium stretches between you, full of a mass the both of you knew better not to touch.

  For just a second, you feel the beat of blood drum behind your left ear, feel your pharynx refusing the cool air that had crammed into your nose. For just a second, you burn from the core of your being, out to your flanks and into your limbs.

  For just a second, you think maybe he feels it, too.

  Until he pulls his foot over and starts walking towards you.

  He moves closer, each click of his shoes against the ground louder than necessary in a room too soft, but no more than the beat in your ears. His camera rests secure in his palms, cold pupils boring into your own and begging you not to look away. 

  But you do.

  How could you not? It was easier staring at his linen-bearing chest than a looking glass which coaxed you close enough to suck you back into the middle of a history full of nothing and everything all at once.

  You don’t dare to move.

  You can’t. You can’t, because you’re ambushed with how it had ended. Three days after your graduation ceremony. Two souls on opposite ends of the train station, minutes away from bracing their new futures, eyes wet with all the things the both of you hadn’t said, probably because you both knew it had already ended the night before. One shared glance. It hadn’t even been a real goodbye.

  You had both silently convinced yourselves it was easier that way. Ambition made separation seem less like heartbreak and more like inevitability.

  It wasn’t.

  Four years apart had taught you that.

  He stops a breath away, close, not enough to touch but enough to feel his presence, to feel how real he was in front of you. 

  His eyes sift along your face, slow and unsure, pausing over the faint wrinkles rooting from the corner of your eyes, ones he had usually only ever seen when you would smile way back then. There’s a more prominent shadow beneath your cheekbones now, too. Are those grown out bangs? And your lips.

  Did they feel the same?

  He sucks in air through a slightly gape mouth, words threading together across his tongue before falling apart, unable to find their way into the world. He presses his lips back together. 

  Your eyes find his again, and when you peer through the ice of his irises, none of it matters anymore.

  The distance, the night before, him—it all drains back into the empty pit of history, discarded once before.

  His voice wisps out of him, lower than you remembered, but still gentle and masked in the same Australian accent that had caught you off guard upon initially meeting him in your first year of university.

  “I wanted to call.”

  Your fingers tighten around the leather spine of your notebook. You nod once slowly.

  His own curl further along his camera lens, and his eyes, they were so… potent. Your reflection fills his pupils, wide and shifting over the atoms sculpting your visage, still too new for him, but still bearing the short time of youth you’d shared together.

  “I wasn’t sure– I didn’t know if your number was still the same.” His voice wavers in the boyish manner it used to when he would overthink his wording, with the same hint of hesitation that stemmed not from fear, but from respect. You remember hearing it in how he would pause before delivering a compliment, or offering to walk you home, or saying anything that threatened to give his deepest thoughts away. Even now, the weight of what wasn’t being said thumbs beneath each of his phonemes.

  He looks down for a second, a soft pinch between his eyebrows making him wonder whether he regrets coming over to you and saying anything at all. His fingers flex once more around his camera.

  You let the silence linger and bargain with it to say what neither of you could.

  But you know it won’t. So, you push out a stubborn breath and reply, “It is. Still the same.”

  His eyes flick up again.

  “Right,” he breathes, faintly choppy as the air pushes past the carefully lifting restraint in his throat. 

  The soft whirring of an overhead vent in the distance fills the short silence that clouds around the two of you. Your eyes had eventually fallen to the slopes of his cheeks when his gaze became too much for you to look at. Now, they travel across his frame with reluctance as you try to force the beat of your heart back to a suitable pace. Although, you give up when you become too aware of the quietness surrounding the both of you.

  You look back into his eyes to find that his hadn’t left your face. Pushing at the way it makes your throat tighten, you ease the door—the very heavy door—open.

  “How was Tokyo?”

  His face softens in an instant, relaxing into the smallest pull of a smile. Soon after, a faraway thought colonizes his gaze, a glint in his eyes coming only from distance and time and late nights spent under fluorescent gallery lights in foreign cities.

  “It was…” he begins, then stops himself. The answer was too much for casual small talk. He exhales softly through his nose. “Fast. A little too fast,” he chuckles feebly, “But good… it was good.” He pauses. “I was with a small collective. Shot mostly underground work, but I learned a lot, and got to see a lot more of Japan than I thought I ever would.”

  You watch the way his eyebrows furrow as he says it, how they relax when he looks back at you.

  “I did pretty well my first year there,” he glances down at his camera for a second, his voice more mellow when it comes back to say, “My director had me sign with the head office.”

  The tug at the corner of your mouth feels like an instinct. You hug your notebook to your chest and find the will to utter a small, “That’s amazing.”

  He peeks at you, feeling a small smile hoping to find refuge on his own lips, but it withers when he fails at stitching together the eight letters most people pronounce in times of gratitude like this.

  It falls quiet again, two pairs of eyes capturing the sights of everything beyond them except each other. Your finger still finds itself padding along the leather spine of your notebook, tucked close to your chest, your own lifejacket amidst the ripples of uncertainty flowing around you. 

  Surely, this means he wasn’t here to stay. You can’t help the way your heartbeat deflates a little at the thought.

  “Are you here on vacation then?” you question, biting through your own restraints. The words come softer than intended, the curiosity you attempted to smush down shamelessly dragging behind them.

  Naturally. This was the first time you were seeing him in four years, of course.

  He chuckles weakly, then gives a gentle shrug, gazing into your eyes. “Not really. I didn’t sign a permanent contract.”

  “Oh.”

  He pokes his tongue against his cheek before softly rolling his bottom lip between his teeth. He pushes out a breath.

  “I’m back… for a while, actually.”

  The words don’t hit you with the full force they had carried. The absence of a lilt at the end of his sentence tells you there was something else behind them, a gap he didn’t fill, and it leaves your breath hanging along the edge of a cliff. But, his voice dips, nearly crouching under the weight of what he was about to say. 

  “I signed with Quixote. Just a few pieces to start. It’s a trial period.”

  The name hangs in the air between you. You feel it settle between your lungs before you could stop it.

  Of course he did. Quixote had been a growing name in the journalism industry of London. If he was coming back, especially with the credentials he had accumulated during his training and internship in Tok– Japan, allegedly, there is nowhere else he’d be better suited for. 

  You look past him for a moment, at the frame a short distance behind his shoulder—a portrait of two children running along a seaside cliff. It was similar to the photos he used to print in black and white just so he could develop it himself and feel the chemicals etch it into permanence.

  You firmly nod.

  “That’s a good fit,” you answer, continuing to rub a wanton thumb along the spine of your notebook. “You’ll do well there.”

  He watches you with a simmering anticipation, giving the slightest tilt of a nod with gratitude left unspoken, washed under the quirk that catches in the corner of his lips.

  You clear your throat lightly. “I do some writing for them. Features, mostly, and some editorial work.”

  His chest halts and eyebrows lift. “Really?”

  You nod again. “Yeah.”

  There’s a beat, faint and quick and full of all the unknown possibilities that had opened up in the last few sentences the two of you had shared. You flay off the swarm of them with a cold palm.

  “Maybe we’ll be working together,” he muses, paired with a small smile.

  You hum, but don’t smile in return. You feel a flicker of nostalgia at his voice, because it sounded the exact way it would during your university days—well, midnights, more accurately—when he would jester you with a rundown pun to take your minds off the exams you would both battle in the morning, coffee hot on his breath and a pencil tucked between strands of blond behind his ear.

  Your fingers tap once against your notebook’s edge when it all comes rushing back to you again, a tumbling, gargantuan wave of the past that grapples you into it and shuts out any and all indication of present living.

  It’s him. Him.

  And you can’t help but wonder, somewhere in London, he has an apartment filled with what remains of his mannerisms. The collection of his photographs hung along a wall that has definitely grown in size, and place. The invisible and heavily maintained boundary between his coffee beans and tea bags because “they’ll give each other cooties”. The blue ceramic mug you had made for him at a pottery class that sat untouched in the top shelf of his least used kitchen cabinet, promises of using it swept under a rug because he thought it was too perfect to mar, even though you had already chipped the rim.

  The hoodie that still smells like you, tucked deep in his closet, waiting to hug your body again. Does he still have it? Does he still have the graduation flowers you shared, dried to preserve your last night of freedom? Did he even keep that stupid blue mug? It was crooked anyway.

  Does it even matter? It doesn’t, it most certainly shouldn’t, it’s been years. It doesn’t matter. He’s probably a completely different person now. It doesn’t matter. 

  It doesn’t matter, just like how the last night you had shared with him doesn’t matter.

  You had felt his lips brush and nip at the skin across your body, but it doesn’t matter.

  You had felt the rumble of his groan in your mouth when you squeezed him further into you, but it doesn’t matter.

  You had felt the heat of his body bind to your own in the most intimate of ways for just one night four years ago, but it doesn’t matter.

  It doesn’t matter.

  At least, that’s what you tell yourself.

  “Yeah, I guess we will.”

  You peer at him, and he looks down at his camera. His mouth opens, still quirked with amusement and  twitching like he might respond, but no words come apart from a breath.

  You take a small step back, your eyes languidly passing over him, the hollows of his cheeks, the light catching along the slope of his nose, and the glint of the silver ring against the black of his camera.

  The hands that once held you.

  The lips that had once graced your own.

  “Felix.”

  His gaze snaps back up.

  You hold it.

  “It’s okay.” It leaves you more timid than you had wanted it to, but you meant it, even if it stung a little. You manage a gentle smile. 

  You hadn’t realized the way Felix’s shoulders had been tensed until they steadily draw down. He’s not completely sure if you’re referring to what he thinks, but he chooses to believe so. 

  His eyes press into a squint, and he nods.

  “I’ll see you around.”

  Without granting him time to answer, you turn and walk away. Although, it feels light.

  Almost like you’d left a piece of you standing there with him.

  Almost like the ghost who’d been following you around since that night four years ago had finally found its way back home.

  As did another, because as Felix watches you walk further away from him, he sees his ghost of you whisper back into your body with a wink.

   A week had passed before you saw him again.

  It was just another string of routine mornings and lukewarm tea, ink blue deadlines stitched into the muted gloss of calendar squares, polite emails with sign-offs that weren’t always sincere, and the occasional meeting blending into the margins of the last. But beneath the normal, there was a tautness in your stomach which hadn’t eased since the exhibit.

  Each time the elevator opened at the office, you found yourself peeking up with half-held breath, searching for a familiar silhouette in dark clothing and loosely hung camera straps walking somewhere upon the floor.

  Sometimes you passed the windows with the sun plastering its light along the floors, and you wondered if he was somewhere outside under the sheet of warmth, lens in hand, pausing the world in frames only he could see. You recalled the manner in which he used to explain it.

  To Felix, photography wasn’t simply about capturing a subject, but rather waiting for the moment the subject offered itself. He would see it in the way people softened when they thought no one was looking; the soft shush between the blinks; the calm right before laughter, right after heartbreak; the lull blanketing the world after it rains; the way he once gazed at you through a viewfinder and had witnessed art worth preserving over lifetimes and beyond.

  You told yourself it didn’t matter anymore—your place of work should not give you the same feeling as a haunted house—but then came Friday.

  You had barely stepped through the elevator doors when Sana flagged you down, a clipboard in hand and a glimmer of urgency in her eyes.

  A new gallery was opening, a private viewing being held the night before its official launch. It would house traditional British art that traced the translucent evolution of a city through the eyes of its artists. She wanted a feature by Monday morning. You would write it.

  And Felix would shoot it.

  You didn’t ask for someone else. You had just given one firm nod, professional and collected and on the verge of succumbing to your pestering nervous system.

  It wasn’t until you’d packed away your notebook and briefing folder that he stopped beside your desk.

  “So… the gallery’s a few blocks from mine,” he had quietly stated after greeting you with a curt smile. “If you want, you can meet me at my apartment and, uh, we can take the subway– together.”

  You had turned to him steadily, your breath a flame weak from lack of oxygen. Your eyes had reluctantly crept up to peer into his, skittering back into your half-packed bag when his presence started to radiate a memory you weren’t sure you had reaped the right to feel again.

  He didn’t elaborate, didn’t offer pleasantries or humor or even a residual curl at the corners of his lips. He stood peculiarly tall with only those words and a look not asking anything of you, but hoping.

  You agreed.

  Now, it was the Saturday afternoon that came a mere twenty-four hours after your last encounter, and you were stood facing the oak of his apartment door.

  It was tucked off a narrow street lined with aged brick and ivy clinging to the buildings. The street smelled faintly of fresh bread from the corner bakery and the musk of rain that had passed sometime earlier. The sky was slowly overcoming the grey wake of precipitation.

  You had looked up at the window you imagined was his. Of course, there was no visible indication from your place on the ground, no Felix-esque antiques or silhouette, but you felt the weight of knowing he was on the other side of a wall now, and how strangely surreal it was.

  Would it be like his apartment before? Would it be dimly lit with mismatched chairs and a photography book half-indulged, basked atop a coffee table of cedar. Would it have the cluttered bookshelf, or the lens caps scattered on his desk, or even the single orange light bulb naked upon the pinnacle of a lamp stand he’d insisted was “a muse for inspiration”?

  A part of you hoped it did, even if it was just that stupid light bulb, but you thought that was merely your human need for finding comfort through things that were familiar. 

  The space you were about to enter belonged to someone else. Someone older. Someone changed. Someone who still wore silver rings and carried the sun and moon on his back with the grace of an angel. 

  Someone you didn’t really know anymore.

  You hesitate at the buzzer, hand hung in the thick air of the corridor, attemplting to ignore the way it vibrates with anticipation for the night before you. You press a determined finger forward into the rubber once the chill of unknown wisps out of you in a breath.

  The muffled thump of footsteps fills the few seconds that stretch before the door opens, the soft creak from the hinges revealing a slightly disheveled Felix on the other side.

  His hair is loosely combed back in a small, low bun with leisure stemming from fast fingers. A few dark strands fall in gentle waves, lolling just above his eyes, and some pieces curl softly at his temple, still damp from either a recent shower or what may have been a quick excursion through the rain. He wore a loose charcoal button-up, sleeves cuffed to his elbows, collar slightly aslant from adjusting it once and never bothering again. His slacks are dark, low-slung, the fabric gathering softly at his ankles where it met bare feet—always bare indoors, even in the dead of winter when the floorboards felt too arctic to brace the pads of your whole foot. Good to know he was still weird.

  There is something disarming in the way he looks at you. 

  His eyes flit over you once, a silken sheen washing over them with a sort of hindered indulgence. You notice the gleam in his gaze and a swelling behind it.

  He offers a warm smile, however, small and fleeting.

  “Hey,” it comes out scratchy, sounding like the words in the back of his throat had run dry waiting for a presence to consume them. He quickly clears his throat, smiling again. “Sorry, I was just fixing up my camera bag.” His eyes hastily scan down your frame and back up. “You look beautiful.”

  He gives another smile, tight-lipped, seemingly caging in a thought he wrestled with, refusing it to see the light of the world and tucking it back down where it had been forced to huddle.

  You manage a small “Thank you,” stepping in when he makes space for you, his hand brushing against the doorframe as you pass. His touch barely misses your shoulder.

  “I’m all ready,” he begins, closing the door and walking past you with hurried steps, looking back, “I got caught up with an errand earlier, so I got pushed back a bit. I just need to finish up with my bag, and we’ll be good to go.”

  Ah. So it was the rain.

  You nod, “Yeah, no worries. I’ll wait by the door.” He acknowledges you with another smile, still too tight, and disappears down the hallway, leaving you alone to take in the space he now called his home.

  This apartment was different, but with no doubt, it breathed Felix. Just… older. 

  Greys and rusts and dark wood, inanimate objects given life instead of decorated, the embrace of both warmth and cold. A single mosaic lamp glows above a low wooden table, scattered with art books and coasters that had been used with care. A chenille couch angled toward a wall of tall windows looked to have been appreciatively sat in. A sleek black record player sat upon the grain of a dark walnut cabinet, a definite upgrade from the second-hand one he owned in university.

  There were also pieces of him here that hadn’t aged with him.

  The photographs, dozens of them. Some framed and hung with a surgeon’s hand along the wall, others leaned against it in stacks, half-sorted, some new and some older. You spotted a few from Japan, you assumed—foreign cityscapes and cherry blossoms and the tranquility of the architecture—and others that stung your chest with a somber, nostalgic bite. Cambridge streets in the early morning haze. A diner sign Hyunjin once posed under for a joke. The foggy edge of a rooftop you used to sit on with him when the world felt motionless.

  There was one near the end, adorned in the same black frame since the last time you’d seen it.

  A photo of you.

  Caught from behind, you, in your old corduroy coat you didn’t have anymore, standing before a canvas at the Tate. He hadn’t told you he was taking the picture. Felix had just pulled his camera up to a dark chocolate eye trained to notice beauty in the mundane and clicked before you could turn around. When you did, upon hearing the shutter, to scold him, he’d only shrugged with a crooked grin and squinty eyes and laughed, “Look– just look, it came out so cute!”

  You stepped forward without meaning to.

  And caught the ocean-like glimmer of glazed and amateurly sculpted clay.

  When you turn to face it in the depths of his kitchen, you feel a thud in your chest. Your breath retreats from its post.

  The blue mug.

  Your blue mug. 

  Your blue mug he had promised to use, then never did. Your blue mug that should be tucked away in the top-most shelf of his least opened cabinet.

  Yet, here it is.

  Sitting in the sink, a dark ring of espresso stained along the rim, just shy of where you had chipped it.

  You stand there a second too long, your heart caught in your throat and chest heavy with a feeling you couldn’t put a name to. Perhaps it was grief? Or hope? Or maybe, it was just… time. The weight—no, burden—of it, the persistence, and how particular things stayed, even when you had never asked them to.

  You observe it through a deep breath.

  Was this meant to give you a small pang in your chest? It should, right? It’s only natural, you suppose.

  But it’s been too long. Who cares if he’s using your mug? It’s just a mug.

  It’s just a mug.

  A mug.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Softer footsteps echo from the hallway, and you find yourself peeling gaze away from his sink when Felix emerges, now sporting socks and his camera bag strapped over his shoulder.

  It was the same.

  Well. Isn’t that lovely.

  The same chocolate leather camera bag slung over his shoulder, showing the age of having been carried all through university. It had worn edges now, the leather faded around the zipper from years of handling, but it still held shape, and it embraced the part of him refusing to replace things that worked.

  For a moment, you're focused on it and how it hung familiarly against his side. Another dull, warm pang settles in a crevice beneath your ribs.

  Not because you missed the bag, but because of what it meant.

  Because of the blue mug, still chipped and now housing remnants of cold espresso.

  Because of the photo—your photo—still framing your old corduroy jacket you didn’t have anymore.

  Because somewhere between now and then, he had stopped hiding the things reminding him of you.

  You don’t say anything. It feels easier to offer him a stifled smile, one he gifts back with more warmth.

  “Okay, all good to go.” He walks to the door, slipping into his shoes and making you forget how heavy this moment feels. His fingers brush over the latch, and he turns back to glance at you, only briefly. There’s a mist in the way his eyes settle over your being, but you’re too preoccupied with pushing away all of the juvenile reminders of your past to acknowledge it.

  When he opens the door, his hand grazes your back in a gesture of courtesy.

  For a moment, his palm lingers, bringing with it a gentle buzz that floats across the root of your spine. The warmth of it sinks through the satin fabric of your dress. You feel his breath catch behind you, a subtle, low sound you probably weren’t meant to hear.

  He pulls his hand away.

  You step into the corridor, your body still thrumming, the skin low on your back prickling under the faint residual heat murmuring from the pseudo print of his hand.

  Behind you, the door closes with a click too faint for you to grasp through the death of second’s longing. He follows.

  The ghost of a blue mug follows, too.

  “You fucked four years ago and you’re still creaming your pants in your sleep over it?”

  Felix runs a sluggish hand over his eyes. “Hyunjin–”

  “If it was that good, maybe I’ll have to see for myself–”

  “Hyunjin.”

  Hyunjin’s static giggle wisps through Felix’s phone and tickles his eardrums. “Relax, relax, I’m just kidding. Perchance.”

  Felix stares at his ceiling, chest bare, the duvet of his bed ruffled around his hips. “Why do I even bother with you?”

  Hyunjin’s chuckle bleeds through the speaker, along with the faint Italian call of a man passing by, seemingly advertising his goods. Something about bread, Felix assumes.

  Hyunjin typically calls Felix at this early hour of six o’clock. Being in Naples, he was just an hour ahead. Ever since Hyunjin learned of Felix’s homecoming in London, he adopted a pestering habit of calling him five minutes before his alarm rang. It made his early morning walks that much more amusing.

  Felix, on the other hand, was not amused by it in the slightest. Though, getting to talk to his closest friend in the remnants of dawn was abundant enough to compensate. 

  Usually, unlike this morning.

  “Okay, so, you’ve seen her a couple times now,” Hyunjin prompts.

  Felix exhales through his nose. “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Lix. Did you rub one out each time you got home?”

  Felix pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “It’s too early for this–”

  “Did you?”

  “…Maybe.”

  Hyunjin barks out a laugh so loud, Felix has to hold his phone away from his ear. “God, you’re hopeless. Four years, and you’re still behaving like a pervy little teenage dirtbag whenever it comes to her.”

  Felix groans. “You’re insufferable. Why don’t we talk about your lack of game.”

  “Don’t change the subject. Did she look the same?”

  Felix pauses. He tries to ignore the manner with which his throat tightens at his friend’s question. “She looked… no, she didn’t– I don’t know, I guess. I mean– fuck, I don’t know.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “No, Jinnie. That’s the problem.” He rolls onto his side and gazes at the wall, his groggy voice dimming in strength. “She looked older, but she looked the same. And it made me feel like I missed too much and had no right stepping back into her life again.”

  For once, Hyunjin doesn’t quip back right away. The muted sound of his footsteps on cobblestone make it through the receiver, followed by a soft sigh. “Shit, Lix.”

  Felix swallows and breathes deeply into the silence.

  “So… still creaming your pants then?”

  Felix slams his palm over his eyes, but he can’t stop the corner of his mouth from twitching. “I hate you.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m your only friend who’ll tell you to either get over her or finally grow the balls to do something about it.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “And you’re still a pervert in love. What a pair we make.”

  Felix’s thumb drags over the corner of his phone case. He swallows again and pokes his tongue into his cheek, before, quietly, he admits, “What if I messed it all up already?”

  Hyunjin hums, persuading him to carry on.

  “I left, Jinnie. I didn’t even give her a proper goodbye. I thought– shit, I don't know, I thought if I stayed gone long enough, maybe I’d stop feeling like this. But seeing her…” His breath shakes. “It’s like nothing has changed. But everything has changed.”

  Hyunjin’s footsteps slow. Felix can almost picture him stopping dead in the middle of a Neapolitan street, head tilted and eyes squinting across the menu of a cafe through the window, considering whether his nervous system can handle a seven A.M. espresso shot. “So, you’re scared.”

  Felix lets out a brittle laugh. “Yeah. I’m scared she doesn’t care anymore. And I’m scared that every time I open my mouth, she’ll just… look at me like I’m a stranger.”

  Silence.

Before Hyunjin’s voice cuts in, softer than Felix anticipated. “You’re not a stranger to her. You couldn’t be, even if you tried.”

  Felix blinks at the wall. His chest tightens. “How would you know?”

  “Because I know you, and I know her,” Hyunjin simply states, “And if you still carry the thought of her along with you after all this time, don’t you think she carries you, too?”

  Felix blinks again. He doesn’t register how the muscles along his torso relax and body sinks more comfortably into the mattress.

  Hyunjin lets him sit in that for a moment, then adds with a firm but kind voice, “Listen, you don’t need a speech or some deliberate plan to make things feel better with her than they currently are. Just show up. Be honest. If there’s one thing you owe her, and, frankly, yourself, it’s the truth. Even if it hurts.”

  Felix exhales slowly, the sound catching in his throat. “You’re annoyingly good at this sometimes.”

  Hyunjin snorts. “Don’t spread it around. I’ve got a reputation to maintain.”

  That drags a laugh out of Felix. He wipes a hand down his face, eyes stinging but feeling lighter somehow. “Thanks, Jin.”

  “Always,” Hyunjin says, then adds with a grin Felix can hear clearly through the phone, “Now go take a cold shower before you start writing sonnets about her eyebrows or something.”

  Felix scoffs, but the pang in his chest feels a little less there.

  It had been two months since the feature was published.

  “You Cambridge kids have phenomenal chemistry,” Sana had gushed, eyes gleaming with approval, faultlessly unaware of how she had summoned your past into the room. “His photos compliment your writing so well.”

  Since then, she had paired the two of you more often, though mercifully not often enough. 

  There had been three features in total: one on a charity benefit, another on a small-town fashion archive, and the last on a historic shipyard now doubling as an artist collective. There had been three chances to orbit again, each of them lacking a collision between both your gravities. Though, none of them required stepping back into his apartment, with its whitewashed walls filled with frames and a chenille couch.

  His apartment with the blue mug.

  The interactions were small, but small had never meant harmless. A passing of editorial notes, fingers brushing for a second longer than required, his camera grazing your shoulder as he adjusted his lens near your desk, the focused yet palpable silence falling over the two of you when you reviewed drafts together. He would compliment your metaphors, his voice cautious, afraid of it poking at a bruise he couldn’t see. You would nod at the sharpness of his pictures, refraining from asking too much about his unique method, just to see if it was still the same as before.

  You didn’t see him in the office often—he tended to do his revisions elsewhere—but you always felt a jolt of suspense when you rounded a corner, wondering if today would be the day he was hunched over the layout table, headphones on and scribbling amongst cards of life seized motionless by his hands.

  Now, there’s the marathon.

  The University of Cambridge’s annual Boundary Marathon: twenty-six miles tracing the outer streets of the city, followed the next day by a black-tie banquet funded by sponsors and alumni. 

  When the email landed in your inbox, Sana’s usual glossed cheer all over it, it was obvious her mind had already been made. “Who better than two of Cambridge’s very own to cover it?” she’d written, punctuated with a winking emoji.

  You hadn’t even had time to protest before the arrangements arrived: round-trip train tickets, a hotel stay of three nights, booked and confirmed, and a schedule you had not yet agreed to but couldn’t decline unless you wanted to smother under the wrath of Sana’s perfectionism.

  And you definitely couldn’t decline now, for you were stepping off the train at the Cambridge station.

  The light outside the station is brighter than you remember. The platform buzzes with the rumple of arrivals, the metallic clatter of luggage wheels against stone, and footsteps echoing under the vaulted ceiling. Though, beneath it all, an old, hushed taunt digs into your skin, an aged fog swarming your nerves with an unrelenting persistence.

  Four years ago, you stood here. 

  Four years ago, this was the place you last saw him with—jeez, what had it even been? Pain? Or is that what you hoped it was?—in his eyes as he turned toward his train, and you toward yours. 

  Four years later, you were back.

  During the ride, neither of you had spoken much. You had read half of a novel without registering a word of it. Your eyes had followed the text, but your mind was tracing back through time, your thoughts running a marathon of its own. 

  He sat diagonally across from you, leg crossed over the other, a journal open on his knee, writing with an intensity that would shy out of hiding during exams all those years ago. 

  At one point, the sleeve of his sweater slipped back, revealing the same watch he used to wear in university with the same worn brown leather straps and the same hairline crack in the glass face. You peered away before he could catch you watching, or before you recalled more than you felt ready for.

  Both of you wore headphones, a seemingly unavowed pact not to fill the air with words that dared to shake the train floor under your feet more than the tracks it ran upon. An awareness lingered between you, and it slithered through the hissing in the seams of the train car. 

  You counted the stops. You know he did, too.

  The sign at the station still swings on its rusted chain, and even after all the time, the platform smells vaguely of wet stone and distant coffee from the same cart vendor, now wearing more rust on its wheels. Although the ivy is thicker on the brick wall, everything else feels unchanged, and it feels so cruel.

  Felix stands beside you, nudging at an unprovoking stone with the toe of his shoe. His gaze peers up and turns someplace past the buses pulling away in the distance, lips sealed with the glue of the words you both wanted to mutter.

  Neither of you do.

  You stand side by side in the wind, weak with early spring chill, waiting for the car to take you to the hotel.

  The first night ends in a wordless smudge, with two souls swatting away reminders in ignorance on opposite sides of a wall. Two souls in a place too foreign and all familiar.

  Two souls, still one, and on the verge of facing their empty history.

  “Bloody blessing it didn’t rain. Could you imagine?”

  The remark drifts from somewhere behind you, tossed off by a runner still catching his breath and carried in the breeze.

  The marathon has long ended, but the field is full with runners winding down, shoulders slouched and carrying breathy voices, faces flushed and turned to smile at loved ones. Some linger with their families, clasping hands and bottled water, others with friends or teammates, limbs sprawled over the grass, reuniting with laughter and exhaustion. 

  You sit just off to the side on a bench, the pages of your notebook naked on your lap, a pen rolling loosely in between your fingers. The last of your interviews is scrawled in half-formed thoughts still warm in memory, waiting to be stitched into coherence.

  “Thank God the banquet’s indoors tomorrow.”

  You swivel to face him.

  Felix stands nearby, camera in hand and scrolling through the day's captures. He peeks at you, moving to sit by your side.

  “It’s raining tomorrow?”

  He nods slowly. Your lips purse. “Hmph… I didn’t pack for that.”

  A soft laugh escapes him, his eyes crinkling at his hands tucking the camera back into his bag. “It never rained too bad here, you have nothing to worry about.” 

  A beat passes. 

  “If it makes you feel better, I didn’t know either. Only found out about, oh, a minute ago.”

  His voice trails off in time with the grin curling across his face. He glances at you through squinted eyes, and you can’t help but smile back at him.

  His cheeks were slightly flushed from having been chatting with many of the runners throughout the day. About what, you weren’t sure, but the topic of conversation never mattered when it came to Felix. 

  Felix, who always welcomes the musings of others, drowning in stories that didn’t belong to him. The epitome of open arms.

  The two of you sit there, shoulders brushing once in a while, letting the atmosphere of the field fill in the silent cracks of the evening with shoes crunching in grass, the distant hiss of water bottles refilling, the rise and fall of cheery laughter. 

  The content sigh Felix lets out.

  “Isn’t that where Hyunjin fell off that girl’s skateboard?”

  He gestures to a shaded corridor beyond the stretch of lawn, framed by the long arms of an aged willow tree, grown heavier since you last saw it.

  You follow his gaze and grin, your memories flickering like slides in an old projector. “Oh my god, yeah.”

  He chuckles fondly. “He never did get her number, did he?”

  “After falling like that, he was hopeless,” you murmur, eyes still focused on the distant path, half-expecting to see the scene play out all over again. Felix chortles and stares with you.

  You know you’re picturing the same thing: Hyunjin laughing through his scraped knees, brushing off the embarrassment with a shrug that hadn’t reached his ears, grinning too wide to admit he was trying too hard. His campus crush had offered a weak chuckle before dusting off her skateboard and rolling away, leaving a wincing Hyunjin splayed atop cold stone and reaching for his scraped knees.

  “I wonder what he’s doing now.” The words come easily, more willing than they had been in a long time.

  Felix inhales. “Yeah… I never really got his postcards on time.” Although his calls never seem to fail at beating my alarm.

  You chuckle. “I never did either.”

  His smile tugs upward and rests on his face some seconds before dissolving, pairing with his unwavering kind eyes but replaced by a view that was more reminiscent.

  “He visited Japan once,” he mumbles.

  You peek at him, brows faintly raised. “Oh? What was he doing there?”

  “He was just passing through for a few days. Wanted to see what I could do with this baby,” he murmurs, lifting his camera in one hand, thumb grazing the lens. “I was in Kyoto at the time.”

  “Hmm,” you nod, “I never got a postcard for that.”

  His lips sport the shadow of a smile, threaded with reluctance his eyebrows don’t do well to hide. His fingers twitch over the camera body, and for a moment, the silence lounges in the small space between you.

  He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. He huffs.

  “Would you… would you wanna look at the pictures?”

  His eyes find yours, rid of search, but asking all the same. “I can pull them up on my laptop. There’s some I’ve wanted–” he hesitates, revises, “–some I think you’ll really like.”

  His voice trails along the cliff of vulnerability. When it returns, it’s lighter on its toes. “We can order room service. My treat.”

  You snort gently, eyes narrowing. “It’s already paid for.”

  He giggles with crinkling eyes as he bumps his shoulder against yours with insistence. “Just say yes. I know you’re curious.”

  And he’s right. 

  So it comes as no surprise when you find yourself upon the comforter in his hotel room, watching Japan unfold in the manner it had through his chocolate eyes, and someplace amongst the temples blurred by evening fog and street lanterns glowing over narrow alleys and the leftover fries cooling on the night table, you find a comfort akin to one you had felt on the same university grounds with the same boy by your side.

  Although, he isn’t much of a boy now, is he?

  “This is from when Hyunjin came to visit,” Felix beams, halting on a photo of himself in Kyoto, partly shadowed by the cherry blossom tree he leaned into. His faded jeans pooled in drapes around his ankles, blond hair sweeping messily around his head as he stood with arms crossed adorning a grin that illuminated his face. “Hyunjin took this one himself. He was really proud of it.”

  You lean forward, a warm smile feeling natural when it pulls at the corners of your lips, the glow of the screen brushing over your cheeks. “Gosh, it’s so beautiful there,” you mumble.

  You’d rather not consider the compliment being a reverberation of seeing a version him who was a few steps closer to the collegiate Felix you had grown so accustomed to, instead of praise for the century old architecture of the temple behind him.

  Felix, already smiling, feels a more compelling drag at the edge of his lips upon hearing you.

  Click.

  The next photo.

  You gasp. 

  “HIS HAIR!”

  Felix’s laughter spills into the hotel room, unfiltered with crinkles sprouting from the corners of his eyes. The creases at the bridge of his nose deepen, and his eyelashes lay closer to his cheeks when he twinkles at the expression on your face.

  You push upright against the headboard, abandoning the lax sprawl you had adopted from an hour of clicking through pictures in favour of a more animated lean.

  The image on the screen is of the same place, the same flowing cherry blossom and temple just a short distance behind. Except, Felix was no longer the subject.

  “When did Hyunjin buzz off his hair?!”

  You gesture, half-horrified with furrowed eyebrows tight in confusion and lips curled, wholly amused all the same, to the pixelated baldy who stood with a sheepish grin and posture proud.

  Felix snorts. “Right before he got on the plane. He didn’t even tell me. I spent twenty minutes trying to find him in arrivals.”

  You giggle, “He looks like a kiwi.”

  The photos roll on, each one carrying the scent of a past you were never part of but now feel strangely welcomed into. You cherish glimpses of the alleys of Kanazawa and temple courtyards kissed golden beneath ethereal sunsets, candid shots of a kiwi-headed Hyunjin mid-bite into skewered yakitori, Felix from behind as he steadies his camera on a rickety tripod with his trusted camera bag slung around his torso, occasional cafe tables with delicately painted teacups half-drunk, and reflections of towering city buildings in puddles on Tokyo concrete.

  Your laughter returns again and again, stemming more from the chest than mouth each time, cozy and twinging in secondary acquaintanceship to places you’d never been.

  “You’re in love with symmetry,” you tease, pointing to yet another photo composed so neatly it seems cruel to be so effortless. “And it all makes sense– I mean, it doesn’t even look forced. It’s like the world yields to your camera.”

  He shrugs with a smugness he doesn’t hide. “I can’t help it if the world cooperates.”

  You push his arm and grumble, “Just show me the next one.” 

  Between the pictures and anecdotes Felix passionately offers for each, you find yourself slumping against his arm, your legs curled to your chest and head floating heavily above the heat radiating from his shoulder.

  Time begins to stretch beyond its physical limits, bending around your bodies and encasing you in this state until the laughter ebbs and thins into the comfort washing over you. You don’t quite register when it happens, apart from the sudden awareness it conjures in your spine and knees and the way your breath fluctuates at the top of your chest. 

  You lean over just enough to peer at another image and feel him turn his head toward you, his arm brushing close against yours, mending your body heat together.

  The screen glows with a dusk-lit seaside. You peek back at him.

  He’s close.

  Watching you, his eyes languid in swirls of melted chocolate. His hand rests between you both, open, relaxed, waiting to be met with the warmth of another mortal. The proximity is not new, yet a stirring in it tonight makes it feel less inevitable. 

  And reminds you of the last time your bodies had been together atop a bed.

  His eyelashes lower, eyes flicking from your mouth to your cheek and then back again. Both your postures have frozen, and the rise of your chests have synchronized until you were both breathing at the same, slow rate.

  The air swells with a silence begging to be crushed by a defiant touch.

  Your hand stills.

  Your eyes droop.

  Your mouth parts.

  And he starts to lean in.

  Slowly.

  Closer.

  Until hot air fuses between you.

  You feel it on your nose.

  Cheeks.

  Lips.

  And in your head where your thoughts violently fracture apart.

  “I should– um–” you stammer, blinking. The words stumble over the cliff of your throat, inelegant and raspy shards flying out of the tornado raging through your mind. Your neck twists away from his face, a hatchet that swats back at the barrier of body heat shared between you. “It’s late. I should– uh, I need to get back to my room.”

  You don’t wait to see Felix’s face when he rapidly reels back from where your lips had almost met and plasters flat against the headboard of the bed. 

  Instead, you slip off the bed and gather your belongings, clutching them to your chest, hoping they will guard you from the residuals of what almost occurred. You offer a tight smile and rush out of the room before you can change your mind.

  Because you’re afraid you might.

  The door shuts with a thud behind you.

  Your own room is only a few steps beside his, but your pulse has quickened as though you’ve run the very marathon you witnessed today.

  Inside, the lights remain off. You press your back against the cold door and rasp an exhale.

  What does this mean?

  It’s been four years. Four years. Surely that is enough time for two souls to drift apart, at least far enough for them to reject the idea of joining together as intimately as they once had. Right?

  Right?

  The glow of his screen still loiters someplace on the canvas in the backs of your eyes.

  Even when they fill with tears that spill into cotton pillowcases not belonging to you.

  Felix feels like the biggest idiot in the world.

  He feels it the moment the door clicks shut behind you, the sound carrying more finality than it should. You hadn’t slammed it, but the muffled retreat feels somehow worse to him because it leaves too much room for imagining, for questioning and hoping and all the foolish things he should have kept tucked safely out of his reach.

  He remains where you left him, with his spine smothered into the headboard, legs stretched out before him and utterly numb. The hotel room is dim, apart from a standing lamp and the laptop still half-glowing with the image of a Kyushu seaside he no longer sees. The warmth of your body, of your laugh, of your voice when it had been dressed in his name—they plague him. 

  They linger in the room with your perfume, and he fears the cold of your ghost creeping onto the comforter and weaving back into the folds of his clothes.

  He sits like that for what feels like a long time, although time had never been honest with him when it came to you.

  Eventually, he slumps forward, his elbows digging into his knees and throat pulled tight with a tension birthed from the restraint that had clamped onto him when the heat of your lips had kissed his own. A tension clenching the chest as tears do before they fall, when they cling to the illusion of control.

  It had been such a minor shift, but the world, his world, had spun wildly out of its alignment. One near kiss had opened a fault line beneath everything you’d rebuilt until now.

  He doesn’t know when the tears begin, only that they come fast, hot, and more pitiful than he’s ever permitted them to be in the comfort of a foreign bed. They crash into him with the collective mass of all your shared memories and the thought of the world you had begun to repair tonight teetering off its axis again.

  The world you had built years ago in the hazy golden window of youth you had shared together. The world you both had walked away from with bloodied engines lodged in your throat, and, without warning, had stepped back into a couple months ago as though you had never left.

  His throat burns. His chest stutters. His body curls into the duvet like he’s trying to fold in on himself and disappear into a night that is no longer beautiful.

  It was beautiful.

  Was.

  And he hates it.

  He feels like an idiot when he wakes the next morning in the same slacks from yesterday, the waistband twisted uncomfortably against his hip and the pillow beneath him dried and crinkled where his tear-stained cheek had indented it. There’s a dull throb in his skull, and when he sits up, the room bevels with whiplash he recalls only from hangovers and heartbreaks.

  He showers. Dresses. Twists the rings on his finger he hadn’t taken off last night. 

  Then he finds himself in the hallway outside your door.

  He knows he should knock, as any sane person would, but he doesn’t.

  Instead, he paces over the hallway carpet, a muted navy patterned with golden diamonds. His steps trace the same three footprints again and again, his fingers stiff but clenching and unclenching in a disoriented pattern.

  When his breaths no longer crumble mid-inhale, he halts in front of the door and raises his fist.

  His knuckles rest against the grain, but he still doesn’t knock. He stands there with his head hung and eyes shut, trying to summon an eloquence he’s never had the honour of knowing. 

  But suddenly, Felix remembers your voice from yesterday evening, lilting with an excitement you kept pushing back into hiding as you mentioned your afternoon appointments.

  “I like to feel my best at big gigs,” you had bubbled while walking back to the hotel.

  He lets his fist fall.

  You wouldn’t be here. 

  You wouldn’t be here because you were smart. You would know to stay out longer so you could avoid the boy who still didn’t know what to do with the gap between almost and too late. You knew he would be there, waiting for you to get back, because it was Felix, and Felix had always communicated when the time called for it. He was always ready, heart wide open and prepared to bear any emotional tornado of words that were flung his way, because he’d rather bear that than the possibility of losing you to it.

  He feels like an idiot when he realizes he hasn’t texted you about last night, and he was not looking forward to spending another four years apart. So, he leans against the doorframe and hastily pulls his phone from his pocket and does so. 

  Or, at least, typed and deleted and typed once more a variation of sentences that attempted to manage justice for his swarming thoughts until he finally stuck to one.

  [ Felix ]  Hey, I just wanted to check back in with you after last night.

  And another.

  [ Felix ]  I wanted to say sorry. It was never my intention to make you feel uncomfortable.

  And another.

  [ Felix ]  Lmk when you’re back at the hotel. If it's alright with you, we can talk it over.

  And when it had been over an hour with no reply and constant pacing until the carpet of his hotel room had soaked in his pattern, Felix sent his final ones.

  [ Felix ]  Please

[ Felix ]  I'm afraid of losing you again

  He feels like an idiot later that evening, when he stands outside the university’s formal hall in a dark suit he had slid into absentmindedly, camera in hand, hair down and unstyled in a manner that had once been your favourite in blond. His hands fumble when he adjusts his camera strap, though he tries to mask it with idle fidgets along his lapels. His job tonight is to shoot event coverage, but his eyes flicker more often to the door than to the stage.

  He feels like an idiot when he scans every new figure that enters.

  He feels like an idiot when he adjusts his lens more than necessary.

  He feels like an idiot when he shoots pictures he knows are useless and barely composed, with disorganized subjects and poorly balanced lighting, each shot missing the one thing he’s searching for through the viewfinder.

  The banquet sprawls on. He snaps a few half-hearted shots, captures laughter he doesn't feel part of, and drowns in clinks of glassware and swells of string instruments that blend into a blurry window he can’t see past.

  He feels that same tautness return to his throat, the tautness that had visited him when you pulled away last night, when he tasted your breath but not your mouth and felt your fingers twitch like you had once known his body and were just musing upon the mental souvenirs from that night.

  That night.

  The memory finds him in this instance.

  It claws at the flesh within him. He shoves at it, pleads for it to leave him alone for once.

  But, it’s merciless.

  The memory rages him to pulp. It digs through all his layers of skin and scratches along his muscles. It pulls at each of his tendons and suffocates his heart and lungs and every one of his vessels in an unyielding squeeze. 

  Then, it sits back and basks with hauteur upon a cold, stone throne with a smirk and smug eyes.

  The night before you had parted four years ago.

  Your voice, dressed in a soft and breathy pitch, whimpering murmurs meant only for his shoulder.

  Your legs, warm and rubbing along his torso, before they had wrapped him closer into you.

  Your mouth, desperate and gasping his name in syllables crafted for no one else but him.

  The soft drag of your hand through his hair, the weight of your hips under his palms, the lull between your whimpers and words that had been incoherent but meant the universe to him.

  Felix swallows hard. The camera in his hands grows heavier. He closes his eyes and draws in a slow, deep breath that fills his lungs to the brim.

  It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

  At least, that’s what he tells himself.

  Over some time, the crowd thins, and the music moves into its final interlude.

  Felix grudgedly peers up from pretending to tamper with the settings on his camera when his eyelids peel back, and he hastily steps on the tips of his toes to once again catch the blur that had been your being.

  You’re outside, your notebook balanced against the side of the brick wall running the perimeter of the courtyard as you write something in it with leisure. Your hair is down, and your dress sways with the breeze, catching at your knees. The pen between your fingers pauses. You read back what you have written.

  Then, you close the notebook.

  You slip it into your purse.

  And Felix’s breath dissipates against the raging heart in his chest.

  You’re here. 

  You’re here and real and within his reach and just here.

  For the first time tonight, Felix feels the thud of his heart beat along the confines of his throat and into his ears. He raises his camera, his finger quavering over the button, but he does not click. It was habit, a gift from the universe, who’d conditioned him to react to all the beautiful things the world had to show him.

  Felix watches you.

  He watches, because after all this time and everything in between, Felix remains trying to find the moment serenading him with the notion that you are still his to cherish, because, through his viewfinder, you had been his to cherish.

  Only his.

  Felix feels his heart lurch upward and settle someplace behind the uvula in the back of his throat, the beat of it tangling with his breath as though his body cannot keep up with the command he gives it. His lowers his camera and feels feet move before his mind catches up, his steps echoing faintly against the hardwood floors of the formal hall, the soles of his boots skimming worn grain as he crosses the threshold to the glass doors and pushes them open with force that dares to startle the medium.

  You are already moving, but the movement ceases at the first sound of the door opening behind you. However, you don’t turn.

  The evening hangs heavy between your bodies, humid with the promise of oncoming rain. The sky above is a dull, undisturbed grey, the clouds thick and swollen with water unspent. The air smells of soil and stone and what Felix thinks it would smell like if the colour green kissed blue. 

  It smelled the way it always had before a storm poured over these grounds. 

  Felix approaches slowly. There is no urgency in his pace now, though his pulse is thundering. His camera rests low in his hands with an unnatural lightness. His grip cannot entirely accept he is no longer photographing inanimate objects and strangers.

  His features are drawn, eyes wide but weary, mouth marginally parted with a curve failing to settle into anything useful. Strands of dark hair have begun to fall across his forehead. 

  He bares himself to you wearing hope as a bruise on his body. It is tender and visible, and it makes him seem younger than he thought he had any right to be tonight.

  He breathes your name, an underlying soreness mending the letters together.

  You hesitate before you turn.

  The smile you wear is small and polite; it wavers only just. Perhaps, you, too, are not as composed as you would like to be. Just as your eyes, because after one look, they fail to meet his own.

  Felix cannot speak. The words gather behind his teeth, defiant against his efforts of getting them into a single file line because they want too much and too little at once, to explain last night, or plead you not to disappear for four years he can no longer afford.

  You tilt your head ever so slightly.

  “You’re headed back to the hotel, too?”

  The ease of your voice nearly sends him reeling. He stares at you for a second longer than he should, unable to reconcile the calm in your tone with the mayhem inside him. Your eyes flit over him, from the mess of his hair to the collar of his shirt to the blazer he hadn’t shrugged into properly. You glance once more and begin to turn back around.

  “Wait–!” he blurts, the word falling into the ditch between instinct and regret.

  You stop again.

  Your gaze meets his.

  And, you give him a gentle smile.

  “Walk with me.”

  You turn back around before Felix has a chance to fully comprehend what you have just said. 

  The camera hangs useless between his fingers, its weight insignificant next to the pang swelling in his chest. His eyes glaze over you—the slope of your bare shoulders, the loose fall of your hair dampened by the breeze, the corners of your eyes narrowing with each of your steps—before he steps forward and fumbles to keep up.

  He follows a step behind you, boots brushing against the uneven cobblestone of the old path lined with stooped trees whose roots have long begun to claim the walk for themselves. He rubs a thumb along the lens again, then again, until the action begins to betray his nerves, so he forces the camera into the nest of his bag, too restless to carry it any longer.

  His thoughts churn.

  How can you walk with such serenity? How can your voice sound like home when your eyes don’t even meet mine, pretending as though nothing happened last night? Hadn’t you seen the way I looked at you? Hadn’t you read the messages? Didn’t that mean something?

  Don’t I mean something?

  It brews inside him as grief and disbelief and frustration, all boiling underneath the surface until the pressure finds a seam to rip through.

  “I haven’t seen you all day.”

  His voice is quiet and sounds child-like, spoken into the veil of approaching rain. He hopes you’ll stop or turn or at least give him a glance. 

  But you don’t.

  “We need to talk about last night,” he echoes, watching the back of your head, begging for it to turn.

  You don’t stop walking. Rather, your steps quicken, trying to outrun the clouds. “We can talk at the hotel. It’s going to rain.”

  “No.”

  The word slips out sharp, and in the next instant, his hand reaches for yours.

  He touches you gently, his fingers silking around your wrist with enough hesitation to leave room for refusal. 

  Refusal you don’t grant.

  The moment you stop, he feels your pulse under his thumb, stable but quicker than he thought it should be. You turn to him carefully.

  The tightly locked jaw, the guarded eyes, the sparse valley of creases between your eyebrows. You wear a look that signals for upcoming impact, and it twists a knot deep in him that he can’t reach but so desperately wishes to.

  He can’t take it anymore.

  “This isn’t nothing.”

  You blink at him.

  “I meant what almost happened last night,” he continues, his voice straining against it wavering. “You felt it. I know you did.”

  You shake your head lightly, as if trying to dismiss both him and yourself. “Felix, please–”

  “No. I’m not doing this again. You can’t look at me like that, or kiss like we almost did, then pretend like nothing happened.”

  That gets your eyebrows to unknit themselves. He steps in front of you now and lets your wrist slowly drop from his hold.

  A gash of stark light erupts in the clouds. Thunder rumbles overhead as rain begins to brush through the leaves above, excusing itself into the bubble that had formed around the two of you. You peek upwards, then back at him.

  He watches your lips press together. Your chest rises with a deep inhale, and for a moment, he thinks you might shout. 

  Instead—and very much to his dismay—your face twists.

  Your eyes gloss over.

  Your mouth twitches.

  Your brows draw inward, and your whole expression crumples in the most devastating manner, and before he can prepare his heart for it, the first tear falls.

  Then another, and another, until the rainwater and your grief are indistinguishable on your cheeks.

  Felix feels a crack inside him.

  He steps forward instinctively.

  You take a step back.

  Your eyes glisten beneath the soft sheen of rain, your eyelashes soaked and lips quivering in a frown. You glance off to the side, staring into the distance for a moment before you peer back at him with a fresh wash of pain that beckons your next words out of you.

  “Why are you using my mug?”

  He blinks. “What?”

  “The mug I made you, you never used to use it.” Your voice cracks. It’s scratchy in your throat, and from the careful, restrained manner with which you speak, Felix can tell the tears he sees do not showcase the true extent of your anguish. “Why are you using it now, Felix?”

  Realization creeps upon him, before it strikes him all at once and flings him down a spiraling staircase.

  You had seen it, hadn’t you?

  Your mug had been resting in the sink in his apartment the day of your first shared feature. The same blue ceramic mug you had gifted into his hands during second year, chipped along the rim because you had been so enlivened to give it to him.

  He opens his mouth, but the words seize before they even get a chance to patch into being. Every explanation flashing his mind feels superficial.

  So, he says nothing.

  The rain thickens, threads dripping from his hair and sliding down his neck into the open collar of his shirt. They patter against the branches above and slip from the leaves to the ground.

  His jaw clenches, his throat suffocates him, and his eyes never leave yours—both your eyes, two kindred spirits submerged in agony of four years time.

  A tear slips down his rain-dampened cheek when he stifles a sob. 

  And Felix finally decides he was done running.

  “I missed you.”

  He lets the words fall from him sans constraint, even if he wished he could keep them caged behind a thousand locks in the darkest depths of his mind.

  Your eyebrows scrunch together. You shake your head and whisper a meek, “Stop.”

  “I missed you every goddamn day,” he whines, persisting against your feeble plea with his eyes squinting and rimmed with unapologetic tears. “I took that mug with me to Japan. I carried it in my bag wrapped in my sweater, even when I didn’t use it for months, maybe a year. I couldn’t. It made me sick.”

  You gape at him, your hands slack by your sides. Felix breathes in deep, tightly shutting his eyes at the ground. Rainwater drips from the tips of his clumped strands of hair to the leather of his boots and rough stone of the pathway. He lifts his head, and his eyes, now clad in red jackets, strike back at you.

  “I didn’t use it, until one day I realized I hadn’t smiled in weeks. And I thought– what the hell, maybe drinking out of it will make me feel closer to the last thing that ever made me happy. And it did. Fuck–”

  His voice trembles from everything he’d shoved into hiding, finally pouring loose.

  “I spent every night in Kyoto and Tokyo and– shit, I don’t even know, just everywhere, flicking through pictures of you. I missed seeing you everywhere and taking pictures of you everywhere. You were the only face I ever wanted to see through my camera again.”

  The rain streams down his cheeks, now akin with his tears. He doesn’t bother wiping them.

  Neither do you. You’re standing just beyond him, but you feel 5939 miles away all over again. The rain drills through the leaves above you and drips down your skin, leaving the parts of you that hadn’t met the faint heat radiating from Felix doused in a cold coat.

  Felix grapples with the words pleading to escape being spoken aloud, his eyebrows pinching together painfully.

  “I think about that night all the time… the one before we left. I think about your laugh and your–” Felix stalls, his lips tremoring, before they twist into a terrible grimace, and he has to muffle a sob. “Your moans in my ear,” he weeps, “And how the space between us disappeared for one fucking night and I didn’t even know how to hold you because I knew I was going to lose you in the morning.”

  He gasps for air, resurfaced from drowning. His tongue pokes at his cheek before he begs himself to continue, even if his voice cracks, even if the words stain his cheeks with more tears than the rain.

  “I love you. I always did. You were in every photo I took, even when you weren’t there. I couldn’t delete a single one.”

  There is a heartbeat of silence masked underneath the rainfall.

  A heartbeat of silence through which Felix isn’t quite sure when your static body had plastered to his.

  You’re stepping towards him in haste, and your hands are on his face and your mouth molds against the warmth of his own and the cold rain doesn’t matter, the history doesn’t matter.

  It doesn’t fucking matter.

  Felix stumbles back from the impact of your body colliding against his. The repel of his eyelids succumb to a close when his hands finally grasp your hips, clad in cold, dampened silk that clings to your skin.

  Your kiss denies caution. It harbours four years of yearning condensed into the embrace of lips and the slide of fingers into wet hair and the hopeless way your hands grip onto the lapels of his blazer. His arms wrap tightly around you, clutching you to him with a groan birthed from what could only be worn-out longing. 

  The world narrows, and thunder rumbles overhead; an applause.

  You break only to breathe, to cry, foreheads pressed together, droplets striking your beings.

  Somewhere in the downpour, an aged spark reignites.

  The rain has soothed itself by the time you reach the hotel, but its remnants trail behind, woven into your damp clothes, laced in your hair, glazing the floor of the elevator as its doors close you inside a rapidly heating capsule. 

  You mold back into each other without a second to spare. Your hands frame his jaw, your mouth open hot against his, and his body pins tight to yours, surrendering to the greed of your touch. Your lips taste of rain and smudged lipgloss, and he drinks you in, refusing to leave even a drop through the drought that has been engulfing him since the last night he spent with you. His hand finds the base of your spine, and he pulls you flush to his front, feet shuffling amongst yours to back you to the wall so he can prop his knee between your thighs and slot his tongue against yours.

  After the elevator sighs open, neither of you speak while trailing down the hallway. The corridor flickers with dim light, enough for Felix to see your dress clinging with dampened drapes along the curves he knows too well in memory and not well enough in touch. 

  He hurriedly unlocks the door to his room. When it opens, he lets you brush past him and follows close behind.

  Inside, he sets your purse on the table, placing his camera bag beside it. He turns to you, eyes still tender with tears.

  His hands reach for your shoes, kneeling to unfasten them with gentle hands. When he peeks up, your eyes meet his, now red around the edges and glossed at the rims.

  “You don’t have to…” you whisper, your hands resting over his shoulders.

  “I want to,” he affirms, fingers skimming up your legs as he rises, his breath quivering at the shiver you give beneath his touch. “I need to.”

  You stand still as he reaches for the back of your dress. His fingers clasp around the zipper before they pause. He gazes at your eyes with the squint you knew all too well, glimmering red with salted tears.

  “Okay?” It’s all he can manage, but it seems to be enough because you smile and give a small nod.

  “Yes.”

  He nods back. His hands are stable, though his chest threatens to split with the pressure brewed from all the years leading up until now. The zipper slides down slowly, the sound intimate and echoing in the quiet room, and the fabric slips from your shoulders.

  Underneath, you wear only the most trivial fabric of modesty, and even that feels excessive.

  Felix can’t look away.

  After how long it’s been, he can’t even blame himself.

  He savours you with longing eyes, warm, even through the cool of the rain and tears. He savours you for everything you are.

  You are art, his absolution, and he knows there will never be anything else he wants to see more than you, like this, in his arms and in his light. It had been so long, too fucking long. 

  Felix had been submerged in icy water when he stepped onto his train the day you parted. His being froze from the core out the second the wheels screeched against the tracks and hammered him further away from the one soul his own couldn’t bear to part from. 

  Finally, finally the ice within him cracks along the surface from the heat of your body under his palms, wisping into him to find his soul once more.

  He’s not sure how long he stays gazing at you—time had drained into oblivion the moment your lips had honored his—but he knows he has to make a move when he feels another salted streak graze down his cheek.

  So, he whispers a kiss to your shoulder, then your collarbone, then the hollow of your throat, slowly backing you toward the bed. When your knees find the edge, he lays you down with wetting eyes, your head sinking into the pillows and damp hair fanning about in a celestial crown that confiscates the last breath out of him.

  He removes his boots, the sound of wet leather dropping to the floor followed by the soft clicks of his belt. He unbuttons his shirt slowly, his eyes capitulating to the angel bestowed to him. They wash down your body, basked with utmost grace atop the white duvet, and grow heavy with a craving that burns through his limbs and tortures his core.

  The rain outside traces the window in lazy streaks. The sky—the world—has surrendered.

  When he returns to you, his bare chest is blushed with warmth and residual rainwater. He kisses you again, sucking the plush of your bottom lip into his mouth. Your hands curl into his dripping hair, and he melts into the way you breathe his name.

  His lips trace a languid path down your sternum, warm breath skimming along your rain-cooled skin. When his hot mouth closes around your nipple, his tongue grants a thick lick, coaxing out your soft, little sounds, the ones he hasn’t heard in forever but have nestled a home in him he’d return to whenever he craved your warmth in his hands.

  His lips seal tighter, pulling you in and sucking hard. A low gasp slips from your throat, and he groans against your skin in answer, the vibration doing more for you than you could handle. His tongue circles again, flicks, presses flat, and your nipple hardens further beneath it. 

  He sucks harder. He doesn’t stop because he wants to hear more, wants to feel the way your back lifts into him and your thighs writhe underneath him, wants to drag every sound out of you until you are breathless before he even really touches you where you need it most.

  His hand slides beneath your other breast, cupping it, the heat of his palm stark against your skin. His thumb brushes over the nipple, slow before it firms, while his mouth works the other. You whimper, your hips tilting, already needing more.

  His mouth stays latched to your nipple, tongue flicking and swirling, but it’s the weight of his body that draws a wearing gasp from you.

  His hips rut against your center in helpless grinds. The fabric of his slacks is soft, but there’s nothing soft about the thick press of his bulge, hard and hot against your slick-sheened panties, dragging along your swollen folds in time with the suck of his mouth.

  Felix can't help it. His body has never been so desperate for someone, and he thinks he's lost the ability to pull back now that he finally has you under him after all this time. He tries to move with restraint, but his hips roll down into you again and again, chasing after the friction without even meaning to. 

  And the friction, it's maddening. It's more than worth it when you feel the pressure of your clit catching on the ridge of him through the pitiful layers separating you.

  You feel how hard he is, and just how much he’s holding back.

  His groan rumbles into your breast again, tongue flattening before he closes his lips and sucks harder, the tension in his hips bleeding into his mouth. Every grind coaxes a little noise from your throat, and it only makes him rut harder.

  With a last suck, he pulls off with a wet pop, breathing deep with a blushed face. His heavy eyes watch you as his mouth drops back to your sternum, sucking lazy kisses down your torso. The tips of his hair brush your skin, damp and soft, his breath warm as he paints a trail across your stomach. The muscles there twitch involuntarily. You feel bare, exposed in a way that has nothing to do with nudity, and from the way his hands softly feather across your skin, you think Felix can tell.

  His fingers find the perimeter of your underwear and whisper across the lace. His gaze lifts, a heavy-lidded stare that warps the world underneath you. You nod at him.

  The fabric slides down slowly, his knuckles brushing along your thighs as he unveils you inch by inch. Your slick clings to the crotch of your panties as he peels it off, and he groans when he eyes it, nostrils flaring and jaw tightening like he’s about to cum from the sight alone. He lets the fabric drop to the ground.

  His eyes dust over you, chasmic, jaw slack and kiss-bruised lips parted, the tips of his fingers ghosting their way back to your skin and leaving a trail of heat rooting itself into your blood.

  “You don’t know what you do to me,” he mumbles, voice hoarse and clawing its way out of his core. “You’re the most beautiful..." The words had been so quiet, you don’t catch him trailing off. His thoughts are too far gone to conjure a suitable comparison.

  The bed dips near your feet where Felix sinks his knees into the mattress, his mind still lost in the sight of you. The pads of his fingers rub along your thighs before he spreads them, his grip firm with one hand around each leg, thumbs digging into the soft flesh near your hip crease, pushing you open with enough force to leave room for your own hesitation. 

  When his eyes sail down to your core, glistening and unconditionally bared to him, he exhales shakily, his jaw clenching as if it pains to see, and he grapples with the whimper threatening to spill out of him.

  The pads of his thumbs press into the plush of your thighs as he settles between your legs and breathes you in.

  You can feel the heat of his mouth hovering just beyond. Felix nudges the tip of his nose just under your clit and muffles a small, low moan in his mouth when you quietly whine along with the curt grind of your hips. His chocolate eyes flit up to you.

   “Can I?”

  You nod hastily, your eyebrows knotting together. “Please, Lix.”

  It was your use of his nickname that has Felix tipping his tongue into your gushing core and flattening it in one, long drag through the slick middle of your folds. Your delinquent hips roll into him, rid of constraint after feeling the first dip of his tongue run through your arousal, moaning in time with the whimper Felix lets deep into you. 

  A salted stream runs down the side of your temple and into your hair, because of how pleasurable it feels, and how deprived your body has felt for years, and how, in all the time apart, you’re overcome with the lie that was the taste of all your grief having been washed away with indifference drying in its place. A lie and nothing but, because now, from having Felix’s lips drawn to the part of you that aches most, you’re realizing just how much you’ve grieved and wanted him since his soul had lost its grip on yours.

  His lips wrap along your clit before he sucks as much of it as he can into his mouth. The tip of his tongue laves against the surface of it, stimulating it deliciously with hard sucks and gentle flicks.

  “Lix– mmm.”

  He groans into you again in response, the vibrations drifting through your clit and straight to your core. When he feels your fingers comb through his hair, he can’t help but suck harder onto you and muffle a needy moan into your heat.

  He’s lost it. Felix has utterly lost it.

  And the things he wants to say to you right now—fuck. They had started brewing in him the second he first got his mouth wet with your sheen. But he can’t say them now. He knows better than to pull apart from where you were currently connected, knows better than to retrieve his slick-coated tongue from your nub for purposes other than making you cum all over his face.

  But, gosh does he itch to tell you just how bad he’s wanted this.

  How your smile had haunted him through lonely nights in Japan, almost as much as the pretty face you made when he made you cum along the length of his cock.

  How he’d gotten one taste of his best friend and couldn’t stop bending her over every surface in his mind, or muffling his whimpers between her legs while she used his mouth in all his fantasies.

  How his body wailed for your own, to fuck into you so deep until you were a wet mess beneath him and full with his seed for days.

  Although, he didn’t plan to tell you he’d stolen a pair of your panties once, and how they were the only thing of yours he had with him when he left, apart from that bitchass blue mug that made his chest crumple in on itself whenever he saw it. 

  And he definitely, definitely didn’t plan to tell you of the tears that had slipped down his reddened cheeks whenever he’d cum all over himself and those panties, fisting them around his cock to the echo of your phantom moans in his ear until his tip swelled and veins pulsed against his cum-coated fingers.

  Yeah, Felix thinks he’ll keep those anecdotes to himself. He’ll just let his tears wet the insides of your thighs for now.

  With one last kitten lick across the surface of your clit, Felix lets off with a small pop, and before you’re given the chance to mewl at his retreat, his tongue slides back into your folds and curls towards your pooling centre, the hole from which his chin had been doused with your arousal, now running down his chin to the adams apple bobbing in his neck.

  He digs his tongue into you, flattens it against your gummy walls, and coats it in as much of your wetness he can drown his mouth in before he slides it back up to your clit and drags your slick along the surface.

  Felix is sucking your clit back into the wet warmth of his mouth when you feel the tip of his middle finger flit around the perimeters of your entrance. You buck your hips, hoping it’ll slip in so you no longer have to clench around nothing.

  Your thighs quiver against his head when his finger dips into your hole and drags it along your clenching walls. His tongue flattens and circles and flicks, teasing the part of you that pulses just for him, growing firmer, faster, tracing patterns he still remembers from years ago and still longs to perfect.

  You catch glimpses of Felix’s blacked-out eyes through strands of dark hair that tickle the skin above your clit. He pumps his finger in and out, over and over, licking and sucking and your bud before he decides to add in another.

  He relishes the gasp you let out when you feel the stretch of his second finger within your walls, curling them farther into your sweetest of spots until your own fingers are curling into his hair. He builds you up closer and closer and yearns for nothing but the feel of every beat of your heart in his mouth. You serenade him with your little whimpers and gasps and writhe your hips against his mouth with no restraint, granting him all he covets for.

  You sob his name as he continues to pump and curl his fingers into you, tears streaking sideways over your temples, hips bucking against the mouth sucking on your nub, and he holds you down, pressing his palm into your lower stomach. The groan that clambers out of him reverberates through your spine and adds to the pressure that pushes you to your peak.

  Your voice shudders, weak and breathy, “Felix, m’close–”

  He knows. You’re clenching so hard onto his fingers, he can barely manage to pull them out. He stuck to curling them further into you and pushing them into the spot that made you gush many moons ago. He moans against you, pleading for you to lose control and let go against him.

  Pressure rips through you, exploding from the pit of your core and out to your flanks. It’s white hot, and it has you pushing at Felix’s head with the hand curled in his hair, your thighs clenching around him when your back lifts off the duvet. You don’t even try to control the spams rippling through your limbs, let alone the string of whimpers that make it past your lips.

  Felix watches it all unfold, watches you unfold for what would only be the first time tonight. He’d been rutting his dick into the mattress this entire time trying to gauge a sense of relief, but he almost can’t take it when he feels the way you rhythmically clench around his fingers again and again.

  He stays between your thighs, mouth wet with your arousal, dripping down his chin and neck, his tongue giving gentle licks as your body jolts with aftershocks.

  “Did so good, baby,” he whispers, “You’re so good, hmm… so good for me.”

  When he feels your body relaxing against his touch and sees your eyes fluttering to a close, Felix tries to slowly drag his slick-coated fingers out of you.

  Keyword: tries.

  A defiant whine leaves you, and you peek at him with scrunched eyebrows, clamping onto his fingers so hard, Felix has to rub his dick further into the mattress.

  The corner of his mouth quirks, and he pretends he’s not about to cream his pants just from seeing the way you look after you cum. “I’m not done with you yet.”

  You stare at him with your fucked-out eyes and bruised lips, your breasts heaving with deep, slow breaths. You unclench.

  The soft moan you let out when Felix takes back his fingers has arousal reeling through his body, and it’s almost completely over for him when he catches how a string of your slick connects the tips of his fingers to your core.

  Felix is so hard, he thinks his dick might burst if he keeps it confined in not just his slacks, but the suffocating black boxers he had on. He reels back from his place between your legs, standing up at the edge of the bed and pushing the fabrics down his legs, all while keeping the fingers covered with your wetness angled away from anything that might rub against them.

  He’s imagined this view so many times. He’s thought of you, sprawled atop a bed like this with slick drooling from between your legs and parted lips heaving out breaths in time with the rise and fall of your breasts, all throughout his university years, and the fantasies only continued after he got a taste of you and moved an eight-hour time difference away.

  Your eyes are chasmic, gazing along the slopes of his body before they dance across the curve of his cock, the head flushed red and gleaming with the precum that had rubbed across it when he was rutting into the duvet. He doesn’t spare you a second to gaze any further because he dips back down to you, his biceps flexing as his body leans down to rest atop yours, caging you down with his weight. He wants to chuckle when you roll your hips up into him upon feeling the weight of him against your heat, but he can’t because he has to choke back a whimper; it had been too long since he felt you in this way along that part of his body.

  Your hands graze up his arms and onto his shoulders and neck, your thumb swiping at the slick glistening on his lips. Felix smiles before catching the tip of it in his mouth and sucking gently, popping off and giving it a small kiss. You stare at this exchange.

  “Look at me,” he murmurs lowly.

  It takes a second before you do. Your vision is still glassy, lips still puffy and parted. You stare into his heavy-lidded gaze.

  “You wanna taste yourself?”

  You nod hastily, whining quietly along.

  “Words, baby.”

  Your thigh rubs along the side of his abdomen before a tender, “Yes,” makes it past your lips.

  Felix brings his fingers to your lips and gazes at the way you suck them in. His dick jumps against your gleaming core when he feels your tongue swirling along the length of them until he finally drags them out.

  For his own will.

  The kiss that follows drowns out the sounds you both make into each other. It's deep and slow, the taste of your wetness mixing together from the surface of your mouths. He can taste you when he sucks at your bottom lip.

  “You’re mine,” he mumbles against you, lips softly brushing over your own. His thumb strokes over your cheekbone, catching a tear that falls down, and his lips part before he speaks in a voice so hushed, it almost doesn’t make it out whole.

  “I dreamt about this,” he breathes, forehead pressing to yours, “for four years. I thought I’d go mad.”

  You close your eyes, trying not to sob again, though the knot within your ribs tells you it’s coming.

  “I thought about you every night,” he groans, “The way you sound, the way you came for me. I– fuck, I couldn’t touch anyone else. I didn’t want anyone else. Only you.”

  He watches the rims of your eyes well with fresh tears, a painful cinch lacing your eyebrows together before you weakly whisper, “Lix.”

  Felix couldn’t take it anymore. The weight of him hangs heavy between your legs, and he rolls the curve of him against your slick heat, craving to feel more of you along his length.

  “Tell me you want me,” he whispers, not caring for how his voice breaks mid-sentence.

  “I want you,” you choke out, voice raw from the way your moans chipped at it, your nails curling into his back. “I never stopped.”

  That’s all it takes for Felix to reach between your bodies, line himself against where you needed him most, and slip the tip within you, his eyes never once leaving your face.

  They can’t, not when your brows scrunch together and eyes narrow in pleasure, not when he sees your lips part into a soft oh and gasp against his own.

  Your head dips further back into the pillow, and you wrap your legs tighter around his waist, one of your hands leaving his back to grip at the ends of his dampened hair. Felix lets his forehead fall into the curve of your neck, one of his hands cradling your head, the other flattened on your back and pushing you against the warmth of his chest. He breathes over your collarbones when he feels your breasts graze along his skin, his dick dragging halfway into you.

  You mewl and grip harder onto his hair when he pulls out, almost louder than the moan you give when he ruts deep into you and bites down on your rain-stained neck.

  You feel the warmth of him everywhere, from the hand in your hair, the hot breath on your skin, the palm splayed over your back, the chest pressing into your own.

  The dick fucking deep into you. 

  He whimpers into your skin when he pulls out against the harsh drag of your walls refusing to let him go. The hand along your back grazes across your skin to your waist with the rough thrust that has his tip brushing over your sweet spot.

  “I’m here,” he murmurs, over and over, voice cracking like lightning each time he fucks  into you, “I’m right here. You don’t have to miss me anymore. I’m here.”

  It’s almost too much, feeling how hard and deep he is inside you, those words in his hoarse voice, his touch and body heat lingering across your skin, his scent colonizing your senses and making you grip onto him as hard as you can. Too much, too much, too much.

  Felix lifts his head from the base of your neck to watch the way your face scrunches with each of his thrusts, and—fuck, you’re crying?

  Your gaze is wet with a new set of tears streaking down your temples, and from the way you stare up at him with the most fucked-out eyes, Felix knows these ones are definitely not as wholesome as their predecessors. 

  It takes everything in him not to spill his seed into you right then and there.

  “Crying already, hmm?” His pace slows before giving you a rough thrust.

  A meek mmph barely makes it past your lips.

  “Crying on my dick,” he mumbles, breath hot on your ear and cheek, “Missed it that much?”

  A scoff breaks apart your string of pants, and you push at his chest before feebly muttering, “No.”

  Felix almost smirks, and his hand swiftly comes up to grasp your wrists in his hands, pushing them onto the pillows above your head.

  “No?” He mocks, rutting into your hilt with a squelch.

  You shake your head, moaning, defiant little eyes peering into his smug ones.

  “Okay.”

  Felix rolls his hips back until his tip slips out, sliding it against your clit.

  The sudden emptiness has you rolling your hips and arching into him, whimpering until your eyes fill with more tears that spill out the corners and down the edges of your face.

  “Don’t be– mean,” you squirm underneath him, wriggling your wrists in his grasp, but Felix just chuckles.

  “Why not?” he muses, sliding his length along your dripping slit and letting the tip of his wet head catch onto your clit, “I missed having you on it. I have no problem admitting to it.”

  If you weren’t so fucked out already, you’d scowl at him.

  “Tell me what you want,” he drawled, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you. Gonna give it to you so good.”

  You stare up at him, panting. He leans down until his lips rub against yours. “Tell me, baby.”

  You whine, “Wanna cum on your dick.”

  Felix smirks. “Yeah?”

  You moan in response.

  “Say please.”

  Your eyebrows knot tightly together, the fear of oncoming defeat lolling around deep in your gaze. “Lix–”

  “Say it.”

  You sob. “Fuck, please, Lix. Please–”

  His hands unclasp from your wrists, hastily reaching back down to grab the base of his cock so he can slam back into you, gripping onto your hips and splaying it across your lower stomach.

  That has you feeling how deep each of his thrusts go, making you moan and whimper and cry, your hands gripping along his body, curling into his shoulders and back and hair with each rut into you.

  He fucks you through the tears—his, yours, the ones that had shed in all those years apart. The room is filled with the sounds of your cries and pants and the wet squelch of his thrusts and soft, broken pleas and praises. He kisses your tears mid-thrust, whispers your name against your neck, and lets every sob be cradled between your bodies, locked in the place where words no longer mattered.

  He fucks in and out of you, over and over, faster, his hot, needy whimpers washing over your skin. Felix feels you rolling your hips harder against him, feels your thighs starting to squeeze the sides of his hips, feels you tugging harder at the ends of his hair, and he knows he’s drawing you closer to a release. So, he lets the hand on your stomach slide lower down your body, until the tips of his fingers catch onto your swollen nub, and begins to draw circles over it.

  You let out a little gasp that Felix captures in his mouth, kissing you and rubbing you and fucking you until the pressure starts to build. 

  “Cum for me,” he groans in your ear, “Cum, baby.”

  He ruts up into the spot that has you gushing, whimpering his name again and again, until finally, you twitch, your cunt clenches, fluttering open and shut around his hard length, and you're a whimpering mess beneath him.

  Felix’s hot, heavy eyes are pouring into yours when you come undone for him again. He basks in the moans trailing out of your parted mouth, and when he hears you repeating his name, masked in lewd whines, he feels a coiling of his own brewing deep within him.

  His abs tighten, biceps bulge, hands gripping into your still damp hair. His mouth falls open with groans, and he whimpers your name against your cheek when the tense string finally tightens and snaps. His hips are worn, bucking into you hopelessly, wretchedly, and his deviled cock is draining your spent walls with his hot seed.

  He’s spurting into you, and you're clenching onto him, wrapping your tight walls around him and sucking up each drop he has to offer you.

  “I’m yours, I’m– fuck, yours, only yours.”

  He mumbles against your skin, groaning and fucking his cum deep into you with one more thrust before his hips slow to a stop inside you. He’s still lazily rubbing over your clit, halting with a chuckle when he feels you squirm from overstimulation.

  You're both panting, noses rubbing softly, and Felix wants to stay like this forever, with his cock stuffing you and your cunt full of his searing cum. But he knows he can’t, and he can feel himself softening, so he delicately starts to pull himself out of you. 

  You let out a low mewl in protest, and Felix answers you with a mellow whine of his own.

  He twists himself to lay on his side next to you. His eyes wash over you, over your hair still damp in some places and sprawled in a sea around your head on the pillows, your plush, still swelling lips, your eyes, now soft and kind, squinting at him when you smile up at him.

  Felix melts, and knows he’s never seen anything more beautiful. That’s high praise coming from someone who takes pictures of beautiful things for a living.

  Speaking of taking pictures…

  “Where are you going, Lix?”

  Felix is already slipping off the bed, walking towards the table on the other side of the room. “Just one second. I just…”

  He reaches into his camera bag and hears you gasp behind him. He chuckles when turning around to face you.

  “If you let me,” Felix starts, voice rough from your prior activities, “they’ll only be for me. No one else, you have my word.”

  You smile softly, biting your lip in consideration for his words.

  “If you say no, the camera goes back in the bag,” he continues, “and I will never speak of it again. Unless, of course, you know– you bring it up or something, the choice is ultimately yours! I just want you to be comfortable, I only suggest it because you look so pretty full with my–”

  “Okay.”

  “Cu– okay?”

  You giggle, hiding behind your shoulder, and it melts Felix’s heart beyond repair. “Yeah.”

  He blinks at you a couple times before his lips curl into a grin.

  “Come get your pictures, camera boy.”

  You did not have to tell him twice.

  There is a cool, briny air that merges with the rays of warm sun upon the leaves of the tangerine tree.

  The salted air, freshly wisped away from the ocean beyond the shore, wraps through the pointed leaves, their glossed, evergreen surfaces faded from daily sunbathe. Their abundance strays from humble, only to feather about the bright orange fruits littered throughout the botanic canopy.

  The anatomy of this tree dances in a dark translucence across a cream wall adorning different flavours of wooden frames, each bearing captures of light from moments turned memories of the past.

  The firsts of the many frames held the sights of places familiar to its captor. The cityscapes of Tokyo and temples of Kyoto and Kanazawa rest beside a large Cambridge willow tree, each adorned in frames of their own. A London bakery lays just underneath, housing a cozy sight that hadn’t been rid of the warm scent mingling with petrichor.

  There was one near the top, adorned in the same black frame since the last time you’d seen it. A photo of you. Caught from behind, you, in your old corduroy coat you didn’t have anymore, standing before a canvas at the Tate.

  Some frames along this wall held moments that weren’t necessarily pictures. One, for instance, held a copy of a front-page feature published in Quixote some moons ago about a new gallery opening. Your name had graced the bottom of the headline, with Felix’s in a smaller print beneath the corresponding picture.

  Another frame held flowers from a graduation, remains of what had been considered a last night of freedom. They had been preserved and pressed in an arrangement similar to the one it had adopted in its lively bouquet. Even dried, these flowers still held life.

  Other frames held memories that were fresher in time. Specifically, one taken in Milan during a surprise visit honoured by you and Felix, the sheepish grin of a long-haired Hyunjin sparkling through the glass. Sunrays danced over his head as he slung an arm across his chest. His other arm had been pushing you out of the frame.

  A picture of the very house these frames are living in basks beneath the shade of the tangerine tree. It’s modest in size, big enough for a newly engaged couple with hopes of nurturing their own family, and it has the most tranquil array of botany littered amongst its perimeters, beautifully captured through the lens. Almost as beautiful as you, who sits upon the front steps with a pair of keys hanging from your fingers and the most brightest of smiles stretching across your visage.

  There is a picture of you inside this house, dressed in tattered sleep shorts and a hoodie you hadn’t seen in years. A hoodie that smelt of your scent. You had found it while unpacking moving boxes, out of a box that belonged to Felix. You had gasped upon seeing it again, pulling it over your head, and wrapping it around you when the camera had pointed your way.

  The blue mug. It rests in Felix’s palms, coffee steaming into strands of his now blond hair, illuminated by the flash of his camera, along with the half-opened moving boxes scattered behind him in the distance. A glint upon the rim reflects a small speckle of the light back towards you, who had been holding the camera with the exact method Felix had instilled.

  There were two new editions to this wall, both dressed in matching ebony frames.

  The first ornaments the plushness of new skin, of your hair and Felix's eyes on one being. Your nose and his lips blend together to sculpt a face that would grace the world with a new smile, a new laugh and new ideas and new ways to maneuver through this life.

  The second is different from all of the frames on this wall in that it had lacked a being behind the camera. Preset with a ten-second countdown, Felix had scurried to your side, stretching out his arm and snapping his fingers in front of the lens. The other had found solace around your waist, your own arms preoccupied with the weight of your baby.

  Your baby, with plush new skin, your hair and his eyes, your nose and his lips.

  Though, there was a set of pictures that hadn’t made it to this wall. In fact, they never saw the light of day at all. These pictures were housed in a book buried in the nightstand on Felix’s side of the bed. Felix had promised you no one would see them, that they were only for him (and you, whenever you wished for them to honour your sight). He kept that promise, adhering to it whenever the veins in his cock would pulse for his wife, and only but.

  These pictures never saw the light of day, and they were his, and he was yours.

  Tell me now:

What does it mean when two people endure a history that doesn’t exist?

৬ৎ  𝑙𝑒𝑒'𝑠 𝑝𝘰𝑠𝘵𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑒  ࿐ tell me exactly what you're thinking. how did this make you feel? did certain sentences stick with you? what did this fic leave you with? comment, comment, comment! it helps me grow as a writer, and i wish to grow not only for me, but for you—reader, beautiful in all your glory. ᡣ𐭩

── thank you for reading ❝ we're beautiful, i hate it ❞ ᝰ.ᐟ

“Shut up.” You wiped a circle clear with your sleeve, even though the outside world wasn’t much to look at—just a January sky the color of dirty dishwater and a parking lot lined with snowbanks. Cars slid in and out. People ducked their heads against the wind. Everything kept moving, while in here, time slowed to the crawl of IV drips and the squeak of nurses’ shoes in the hallway.  

“You’re quiet today,” Seungmin said.  

“I’m always quiet.”  

“No, you’re loud.” His mouth tilted into the ghost of his old grin, the one he used to wear when you biked down hills too fast or lit sparklers on New Years even though you weren’t supposed to. “You talk too much, and now you don’t. What’s wrong with you?”  

You didn’t answer. Instead you asked, “What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get out?”  

He tilted his head back against the pillow, eyes shifting up as if the ceiling had answers. “Go to the corner store. Buy those stupid gummy worms we used to steal when we were kids.” He paused, then softer: “And run. Just run until my lungs hurt.”

You swallowed, hard. “Then I’ll be a doctor. And I’ll fix you, so you can do all that.”    

Seungmin snorted, the sound weak but sharp, cutting through the quiet. “Didn’t you want to be a writer? You were always scribbling in those ugly pink notebooks. Said you were gonna publish a whole series and make me the main character.”    

Heat crept up your face, but you didn’t look away from the glass. “That was stupid.”    

“No,” he said, his tone softening. “That was you. You wanted the whole world in your hands.” He shifted against the pillows, a little wince betraying the effort. “Now you just want… me fixed.”    

Your throat closed. “What’s wrong with that?”    

“Nothing.” His lips tugged into something small, crooked, but real. “Except I don’t think you can write endings for real life. Not the way you want to.”    

You turned to glare at him, desperate to keep the sting in your eyes from spilling over. “Shut up. I can. I will.”    

He laughed—quiet, breathy, the kind of laugh that used to rattle out of him when you pushed each other on the swings too high. Now it broke halfway, cut short by the cough that pulled his shoulders tight against the pillow. You hated that sound. Hated how it reminded you of clocks ticking down.          

“You always think you can boss the universe around,” he wheezed once it passed, his eyes finding yours again, sharp even in that hollowed face. “Like when we used to play superheroes at the park. You made me be the sidekick, remember? Said you’d save the world and I’d hold the snacks for the afterparty.”          

Your lips twitched, despite yourself. “You liked being the sidekick.”          

“I liked the snacks,” he said, and for a moment you could almost pretend you were back there, sticky fingers from cheap popsicles, grass stains on your knees.

But the hospital smell ruined the illusion. It always did.          

Seungmin shifted again, curling toward you like a puppy comforting it's human. His hand crept across the stiff blanket until it found yours, bony fingers still managing to squeeze. “Don’t cry,” he muttered. “You cry too easy.”

“I’m not crying.” You sniffed, staring stubbornly at the window where frost traced spider-web veins across the glass. “I’m just...thinking.”

“Then think without snot dripping down your nose,” Seungmin said, but his grin faltered, replaced by something gentler. His thumb brushed over your knuckles, a whisper of warmth. “Tell me the story instead. The one you were scribbling in that ugly notebook that last time I was in school. What did you call it again?”

Your mouth twitched. “The Chronicles of Kim Seungmin.”

He grinned at the name, a flash of his old self. “Right. Lemme hear it.”

You rolled your eyes but launched into it anyway, voice hushed. “Once upon a time, there was a boy named Kim Seungmin. He wasn’t just any boy—he was the bravest kid in the whole kingdom. He fought dragons with a slingshot, and he never missed. He could outrun horses, and he could talk to wolves.”

Seungmin giggled, breath catching but eyes bright. “Naturally.”

“And because he was so brave,” you went on, leaning closer so your shoulders touched, “the gods gave him a gift: immortality. Kim Seungmin, the boy who could never die. He lived forever and ever, protecting the kingdom and eating gummy worms every night for dinner.” 

For a moment, he was quiet, his smile dimming. His fingers tightened around yours. “Even when everyone else is gone?”

You nod enthusatically “Even then.”

He turned his face toward the ceiling, eyes blinking slow. “That sounds lonely.”

The room fell silent but for the beep of the monitor, the hum of the vent. The kind of silence that pressed heavy on your chest, as if the whole world had stopped breathing with him.

Then the door creaked open. A nurse peeked in, her voice soft but firm. “Visiting hours are over. Time to go, sweetheart.”

You wanted to argue, to tell her five more minutes, ten, forever—but Seungmin’s hand slipped from yours before you could open your mouth. He closed his eyes, the ghost of a smile still clinging to his lips. He was tired, you can tell.

You slid off the radiator, feet cold against the tile, and glanced back once as you left. His small frame looked even smaller under all that white. The window beside him glowed faintly with the last scraps of daylight, holding the promise of a world still waiting outside.

And you thought, with the fierce stubbornness only twelve-year-olds could muster:

if the gods wouldn’t give him forever, then you’d find a way to do it yourself.

warnings 𖢥⊹ ࣪ ˖ mentions of violence, blood, wounds // mild cursing // multiple kiss scenes bc jake is just so kissable whoops // slowslowburn // jakehoon bromance keeps me alive // jake pines & yearns & longs & yearns.. // concept of 'casual' dating // superhero & mcu elements & easter eggs :3 // jake is a loser but spider-man is a smooth-talker heh

°˖➴ .ᐟ 𖢥 addie ── FINALLY !!! i have finally, finally finished a full fic for the first time in literal forever and i'm actually so excited for this one bc i freaking love mcu & spiderman & jake so freaking much you guys dont understand...spidey was my first ever childhood crush i think i literally made a post abt it somewhere here on my blog ages ago...so my reaction when i got this anon request for this fic?? i cheered. ꉂ(˵˃ ᗜ ˂˵) ty for being patient with me and for all the words of support & encouragement & love throughout the process <333 if you've been here some time and read my other works you know i literally get myself way too indulged into the whole process,,,but i really did have so much freaking fun writing this so i really hope you guys like all 25k words of spidey!jake :3

sim jaeyun has a lot of secrets.

like the fact that he’s secretly (but not so secretly) a giant nerd and, frankly, a genius with the probable IQ of someone who can calculate pi to the 500th decimal in his head just for fun. or maybe the fact that he’s definitely smart enough to hack into the school’s database and find copies of the finals’ answer keys under ten minutes flat.

but he doesn’t. because again. sim jaeyun is a genius (and because he’s scared of getting caught. but mostly the genius thing).

sim jaeyun pours his milk before cereal. he sleeps on his stomach. he doesn’t separate his white socks from his colored ones. he’s terrified of cats. he loves rom-coms. he’s spider-man. he can’t fall asleep without his favorite build-a-bear. and he doesn’t know how to ride a bike.

but his most important secret? he has the biggest crush on you.

so big that he’d say it’s more top-secret than the fact that he uses 5-in-1 men’s soap and being the city’s web-slinging, crime-fighting, red-and-blue spandex-wearing superhero.

and in all honestly— it’s not like the latter is even that secret anymore.

because another thing about jake? he sucks at keeping secrets.

he figured this out about two weeks into accepting his new life post-radioactive-spider-bite—right around the same time he decided yeah, sure, i can totally handle having powers and a double life. and not freaking out every time he accidentally shot a web out in his sleep.

he figured this out when park sunghoon, his longtime best friend, accidentally found jake’s suit in his room. and by accidentally, we mean jake just…left it lying out. on his bed. in plain sight. because he forgot to put it away the day sunghoon came over to share his history notes.

that was the day sunghoon declared himself jake’s “guy in the chair.”

so yeah. jake sucks at keeping his spidey secret…a secret.

but his crush on you? oh yeah.

that one’s highly classified (except from sunghoon. because again—guy in the chair).

“you should probably stop staring before it gets creepy.”

jake blinks.

he stops staring at you—across the cafeteria, laughing with your friends, completely unaware of how he’s most definitely about five seconds away from writing your name in bubble letters with a pink glitter pen on his notebook cover.

he turns his head toward the voice. sunghoon, of course.

“actually, too late. it’s creepy,” sunghoon adds before casually chewing on the cafeteria pizza that’s always a little too suspiciously rubbery but no one ever questions it for their own sake.

jake sighs, his eyes going back to your figure across the busy room. “you think she’ll talk to me in chemistry today?”

sunghoon doesn’t even blink. “she has to talk to you. you guys are literally lab partners.”

“that’s different,” jake mutters, chin in his hand, eyes never leaving you once. “i mean, i could ask what her favorite color is or something…”

sunghoon stares. jaw slack. full deadpan.

“that’s a joke, right? please tell me that’s a joke. because i don’t know what funnier—the fact that you have the pick up lines of a first grader, or the fact that even i know that you know you don’t have the guts to say anything to her that’s not directly related to ionic bonding.”

jake whips his head to his best friend, the look in his eyes being nothing less than betrayed, “i so totally can!”

“jake,” sunghoon says slowly, voice lowering, “you broke the test tube in your hand last week when she asked what your weekend plans were.” a pause. “then you ran out of the room. without saying anything.”

jake groans. drops his head into his arms on the table. “okay, i specifically remember saying we would never bring that up ever again.”

sunghoon chuckles, hands raised, “just saying.”

a brief silence falls over the table as jake lifts his head up in despair. he goes back to probably-definitely-not-so-subtly watching you from across the cafeteria.

“you should just…y’know—” sunghoon nudges jake’s side. “—get your lil buddy to help you out.”

jake freezes. turns to his best friend in horror, “my…lil what now?”

sunghoon’s palm smacks the side of jake’s head before his voice drops to a whisper, “your alter ego, idiot.”

jake rubs the side of his head, staring at the way sunghoon is casually sitting there like this is a perfectly reasonable suggestion.

“you heard me,” sunghoon continues when jake makes no sign of responding, the look on his face enough to tell sunghoon he thinks he’s probably borderline psychotic. “go up to her as spider-man. be mysterious. say something cool. i bet she’ll be super impressed and instantly fall in love with you.”

“that is literally the worst idea you probably could’ve ever thought of.”

“is it?” sunghoon shrugs, smug as he leans back in his chair. “because seeing as your track record so far is either a) breaking glass around her, or b)…actually, no. yeah, that’s it. that’s all i got. your track record sucks, bro.”

jake groans for the nth time and lets his head thunk onto the table this time with a soft clunk. “i hate it here.”

“you’re not even going to consider it?”

jake lifts his head just enough to glare his eyes at sunghoon, “do you hear yourself? you want me to flirt with her…while wearing spandex. in full mask. while i talk like this—” his voice drops to the deeper, definitely-not-as-disguising-as-he-thinks-it-is tone he uses while saving the city at night. “‘hey. i know i’m wanted by, like, a hundred bad people out there, but also, what’s your favorite color?’”

sunghoon grins. “add a little web trick and shoulder touch and boom—she’s yours.”

jake deadpans at him, his voice returning to normal, “do you even like me? are we even friends?”

sunghoon shrugs. pops a fry in his mouth. thinks for a second. “you’re entertaining.”

jake groans again. slumps dramatically into his seat, staring at the too-bright fluorescent lights in the ceiling above him. “i can’t flirt as spider-man me,” he mutters. “that sounds like a nightmare. i can’t even talk to her as me me.”

“duh. that’s kinda the entire point.”

“and then what, huh?” jake dramatically throws his hands up. “i take her on a date while web-swinging through the city? and if i drop her?”

“i dunno,” sunghoon takes another unbothered bite of his rubber pizza. “use two webs? you’re the one with the sticky powers, i don’t know it works!”

jake lets out an exasperated sound.

sunghoon pats his back, attempting to be the supportive friend he is. “face it. it’s the only way she’s ever gonna know you’re slightly even remotely cool and do anything more than read books on like…i don’t know—how physics makes the earth spin or something.”

jake pouts. “i am cool!” “you own a build-a-bear named woofy.” “he’s a comfort object!” “exactly. that’s why spider-man has to take the wheel from now on.”

jake stares at sunghoon, shakes his head, and starts packing up his completely untouched lunch.

“whatever. i’m going to chemistry,” he mutters, swinging his backpack around his shoulder with a huff, despite the fact that class doesn’t start for another twenty minutes.

and it’s not like he needs to get to class early to ask the teacher questions or get extra help on the homework or anything normal and productive like that—don’t be ridiculous.

because here’s the thing. jake getting to class early means one very important thing: he gets to his seat—the one next to yours—before you do.

which means you have to acknowledge him first. which is crucial.

because if the roles were reversed—jake does not trust himself to be able to acknowledge you first and say hi without choking on his own air or probably knocking over a glass beaker that wasn’t there before but would somehow magically appear because that’s just jake’s luck in the process.

regardless, it works. the system works. he’s perfected it by now. because it’s about half way through the school year and without fail, every time you walk into class and jake’s already sitting there—busy pretending like he’s reading some article on his laptop when in reality his senses are going haywire over being overwhelmed by your entire presence that he already felt from down the hallway—you always greet him first with the same airy, cheery tone in your voice, bright smile, hair flowing, perfume floating in the air—

"hi jake!"

jake's soul ascends.

he looks up (too fast), catches himself (too obvious), and tries to play it cool with a little nod and smile that definitely looks a little more like a grimace (too tragic).

"hey." nailed it.

you smile casually as you plop your backpack down on the lab table you share with him and start pulling out your notebooks for the day. and jake just stares ahead like a soldier at war. his hands are sweating. his feet are bouncing. his entire nervous system is screaming at him to say something, anything.

and as if the universe decided to play a casually cruel trick on him—

"...so what's your favorite color?" "so, any fun weekend plans?"

both your voices overlap. you both freeze. turn to each other at the same time. blink.

"oh—" "—sorry, you go—" "no, you first—" "okay—wait—i, i forgot—"

silence. you hold back a smile. jake wishes to melt into the earth and hopes he never reincarnates.

"i was just gonna ask," you say, a small smile still playing on your lips that it makes jake's brain actively start doing 360s, "if you're doing anything this weekend."

jake short-circuits.

say something. be mysterious. be cool. be normal. channel spider-man. but maybe...not spider-man when you talk to him. spider-man when he talks to everyone else. "i'm...uh." he clears his throat. tries again. "probably just, y'know. working."

you tilt your head, eyes sparkling with curiosity, "working?"

"yeah," jake nods, too quickly for his own liking, then stops himself. "like—side gig."

if a side gig came with at least two new bruised ribs some nights and meant saving a city from criminals, but yeah, okay. sure. side gig.

your brows raise. "that's cool! what do you do?"

jake freezes. panics. what does he do.

he can't say spider-man.

he also can't say he has the molecular build of an eight-limbed arthropod and can stick onto walls with only his bare fingers.

and he definitely can't say i spend 70% of my free time thinking about you and the other 30% swinging off buildings.

"...delivery." he says it like he's mysterious. cool. totally normal.

you blink. as if waiting, as if expecting him to elaborate.

he blinks back at you.

"delivering...what?"

"...pizza."

(and he did once deliver a stolen pizza order back to its rightful owner after webbing the thief to a lamppost. that totally counts.)

"oh," you nod slowly, giving him a genuine smile. "that sounds fun!"

jake gives a thumbs up. mentally smacks himself in the face repeatedly. but then, his brain suddenly catches up to the situation at hand and before he can stop himself, he blurts—

"wait—uh, why do you ask?"

and then you break eye contact, glancing down at your notebook, and jake pretends not to notice your fingers suddenly fidgeting with one of your many too-colorful pens.

"well," you start, and jake is trying his very, very best to ignore the fact that his senses can pick up on your heart beat. "we've got the final coming up next week, and i don't know—you always seem like you know what you're doing in class, so—"

she thinks im smart? oh my god. she notices me? even when i’m not breaking glass? oh my god oh my god oh my—

"—i was hoping maybe we could study together?" you look up at him again, your eyes wide. "or go over the study guide one last time or something. but it's totally fine if you're busy working! and that makes sense, you probably don't even need to study, you're, like, uber smart and stuff, so—"

"no."

your words come to a halt and your mouth is left slack.

jake smacks himself. mentally. again. and again.

"...oh, um—"

jake coughs suddenly, a little too loud, a little too forced. "sorry! i mean—no...no, i'm not busy. yes, i'm down. down. to study. together. yeah."

he takes note in the way your shoulders slightly relax and the way you release a breath of what sounds like relief and amusement at the same time.

then, a soft smile makes its way to your face again, "okay! okay, cool!"

jake doesn't know if he should scream, sob, or launch himself into the sun.

he smiles back. "cool."

there's a pause.

"wait—but what about work?" your head tilts slightly, a soft crease forming between your brows.

shit.

"oh. right," jake mutters, clearing his throat as his hand casually brushes through his hair as if he thought this one through (he, in fact, did not).

quick, lie—wait, no. casual lie. lying is not cool. don't lie to the girl you like. you're simply protecting her. be mysterious. be cool. be normal.

"i'm...sure the pizzas will be okay for a night! yeah. they have flexibility. my job, i mean. not the pizzas. my manager's chill."

your smile brightens at his answer and jake decides launching himself into the sun is dramatic. in fact, he thinks the sun came out today just for him.

"okay, yay!" you're beaming. "sounds like a plan."

jake also thinks his heart just tripped over itself.

"here, let me—" you rip off a corner of your notebook and start scribbling something down with one of your pens before sliding the slip of paper over to his side of the table, "—give you my number and you let me know when and where works best, yeah?"

and jake is simply a guy. a guy entirely entranced.

it's the way you lean a little closer to the desk, tongue peeking out at the corner of your mouth in concentration. the way your hair shifts when you tilt your head, the gentle swish of it brushing over your shoulder. the way your bracelets softly clink together when your hands move. the way you smoothly push the small slip of paper with your number and name signed with a small smiley face towards him like it's no big deal.

jake stares at the paper like all those nights of manifesting finally paid off and this small slip of notebook paper is first proof that a manifestation journal really does work.

your name. your number. a tiny smile doodled next to it.

it's the cutest thing he's ever seen.

he looks at the note. then at you. then back at the note.

how did this happen. what did he say? was it the pizza lie? no, it couldn't have been the pizza lie.

"cool," jake eventually says, but he realizes he's said cool one too many times and it comes out so high-pitched, he's genuinely unsure if he said it out loud or just squeaked like a mouse.

and you just simply smile back at him, soft and sweet and light, and jake decides to revisit the potential idea of self launching into orbit.

and when the teacher enters the classroom, immediately starting the lecture, jake turns back to the front of the class, trying his very best to focus—

"pink."

it comes out as a low and soft whisper. jake's head jerks slightly towards you, and you're leaning in, just slightly enough for your shoulder to brush against his.

"...i—what?"

you smile, your eyes crinkled at their corners as you look at him, "my favorite color. it's pink."

then, you turn back to the whiteboard, already scribbling down your notes like you didn't just change the entire trajectory of jake's future.

jake doesn't move. jake, in fact, doesn't hear a single word of whatever the teacher is saying about the synthesis and characterization of something-something-carbene-molecular-something.

all he knows is:

he's seeing you this weekend.

your favorite color is pink.

and tucked into the back of his phone is now a piece of corner notebook paper with your number on it.

and, of course, it's written in pink.

jake doesn’t know what he’s going to tell sunghoon about first—the fact that the favorite color pick-up line potentially worked, or that he has an actual study date with y–

wait.

“do you think it’s a study date?” jake’s voice is muffled by a peanut butter protein bar, his legs dangling off the edge of some random apartment building he deemed clean from bird poop to sit on.

there’s a long beat of silence from the other end of his phone that’s perched beside him on speaker, before sunghoon finally answers.

“i think it’s your chemistry lab partner…who needs to study for an exam…with her super genius bench partner,” sunghoon pauses. “but yeah. it’s definitely also a study date.

jake fist-pumps the air. “right?! that’s what i’m saying!” he leans back on one of his palms, staring down at the blur of streetlights and car headlights below, watching the tiny dots of normal people go about their normal people lives after their normal people days.

“god, i’m gonna say something dumb. i always say something dumb. i’m gonna probably tell her my favorite element is, like, carbon, or something. that’s not even a fun one,” jake sighs as he watches the sun slowly set along the skyline in front of him.

there’s a long, suffering sigh from the phone. “please, for the love of God and everything He created, do not tell her what your favorite element is.”

jake frowns, even though he knows sunghoon can’t see it. “you don’t think it’s charming?”

“remember what happened in the sixth grade when that girl asked for a pencil and you gave her an entire lecture on valence electrons and then she never spoke to you ever again?”

jake makes a face. “okay, but she didn’t specify what kind of lead she needed—”

“just…be normal,” sunghoon cuts in. “be jake.”

jake goes quiet. because that’s just the problem, isn’t it? because jake isn’t normal.

“normal” and “jake” haven’t belonged in the same sentence since he woke up one random morning with super strength, freakish reflexes, and abs (not that he’s complaining about the abs. but still. he knows his two-day-a-week gym habit and occasional protein bar didn’t cause them).

normal isn’t waking up in the middle of the night because your fingers literally fused to your bed frame. normal isn’t learning how to navigate puberty while also learning how different wrist angles shoot out different types of webs. normal isn’t lying to your mom about why your laundry always smells like burnt rubber and concrete dust and weirdly enough, hot dogs.

and normal definitely isn’t sitting a hundred feet above the city at 10PM on a friday night with your best friend on speaker and your spandex suit hidden under a hoodie, trying to decide if your biggest life crisis is:

a — the rise of petty city crime or b — the way your ridiculously pretty chemistry partner smiled at you and made you question your entire being in 0.2 seconds

but when he thinks about you?

when jake’s with you—he’s just jake. no suit, no webs, no…fear of potential death. 

he feels like a regular teenage boy. the kind who worries about history finals and likes stupid memes and builds lego sets with his best friend on saturdays and has a crush on the cute girl in his chemistry class.

with you, he doesn’t feel like a science experiment. or a secret. or an accident waiting to happen.

he just feels like…jake.

“i just—dude. i didn’t even have to pull the spider-man card!” jake sits up a little, legs now swinging. “like. at all. she said i was smart! jake-smart. i didn’t need to save a cat or catch a bus or—”

“—instead,” sunghoon’s monotone voice cuts in, “you told her you deliver pizzas for fun and somehow it worked.”

“you’re the worst guy in the chair.”

“and yet, here we are. you’re still call—”

“wait” jake freezes. sits upright. his head tilts slightly. “hold on.”

something in the air hits him. his senses prick. muscles tense. tingling. sounds slow, scents sharpen. the world zooms in all at once.

“i gotta go,” jake stands up, his voice muffled by shoving the rest of his protein bar into his mouth, already slipping his mask over his head.

“duty calls,” sunghoon replies casually, like this is the third time this week (it is). “be safe!”

“love you, bye!” jake says before the hanging up and shoving his phone into his backpack and thwipping it to the rooftop wall in one motion. it’ll probably still be there later. hopefully.

on most nights, it is still right where he left it, waiting patiently after the hours of his city-saving. but right now, jake couldn’t care any less about his belongings. he’s already airborne, swinging building to building with smooth, practiced ease. he follows the tug in his chest, the sense of something being slightly off. a scuffle. somewhere just a block or two away.

and on most nights, you’re careful. you’re observant, aware. you know how to check left, right, then left again before crossing the street. you stick to the well-lit sidewalks, don’t take shortcuts, avoid the sketchy alleyways your parents used to warn you about growing up.

and you also know, deep down, that you probably shouldn’t have stayed at this library this late. but here we are.

you’re barely a block from the bus stop you just got off at when it happens. a shadow moves—quick, low, but intentional. he’s stumbling. smirking. slurring.

your stomach drops immediately.

“hey, pretty thing,” he calls out, “where you off to this late?”

“not interested,” you mumble, clutching your bag closer to your body, steps picking up faster.

“oh, come onnn,” he draws. you hear his footsteps behind you. too close now. “just a little chat—”

you turn over your shoulder just in time to see his hand land slightly on your shoulder, just where your bag strap sits.

but before you can even react—

THWIP.

it happens before you can even blink.

the guy disappears. yanked off his feet. with a yelp, he’s slammed against the nearest parked car on the street with a heavy thud, followed by a line of white, sticky substance trapping his sides.

and suddenly, another one hits his hands. then his ankles. then his chest.

until it’s all around him and he’s stuck to the car like a decal himself.

you freeze, not knowing what just happened or what the hell you’re supposed to do now. your heart is racing, your brain playing catch-up, your breathing paused.

and as you’re staring at the man-shaped cocoon, wondering if this is what finally wills you into full-blown psychosis—

a figure drops from above. with absolutely zero subtlety. and lands directly in between you and said webbed-up guy in a crouch.

dressed in red and blue. head to toe. and so much spandex.

spider-man.

“wow,” he says deadpan, turning to point at the man-turned-car-decal. “okay. that was, like, a solid ten out of ten on the creep scale. would’ve been a nine, but then you touched her. so. automatic point deduction.”

the guy groans beneath the webbing. “what the—who the hell are you?”

spider-man throws his arms up in exasperation, gesturing to himself like it’s obvious.  “spider-man, dude. the webs? the spider logo on my chest? keep up.”

he then turns to you, brushing off the imaginary dust from his hands. “you know, if i had a nickel for every time some scuffy guy tried the whole grabby in an alley thing this week, i’d have like…four nickels.”

a beat. you’re still frozen. eyes wide. jaw slack.

“which isn’t a lot. but it’s weird that it happened that many times. should probably do something about that. or i guess that’s my job.”

the man groans from behind him, squirming, “get this shit off me man—”

“shhh,” spider-man shushes him, raising a hand. “don’t speak. we’re in a delicate moment of justice here.”

then, he turns back to you, head tilting. the eyes of his mask dilate as they squint at you.

his voice softens. “hey. everything okay?”

and you’re still frozen.

because there are many things you don’t believe in. you don’t believe in narwhals. you don’t believe that tarot cards can predict your love life. you don’t believe in flushing ice down the toilet to make it snow the next day, and you probably, maybe, sometimes don’t believe in birds being government spies.

but spider-man? you didn’t know if you believed in him or not. sure, you’ve seen the headlines. heard the rumors, watched the blurry phone footage. but never with your own eyes. until now.

“uh…” you nod quickly, eyes still wide, mouth still slightly ajar. “i...yeah. thank you. for that.”

and jake tries his best to keep his cool. exhales behind the mask, trying to not completely lose it.

to not completely combust when the literal crush of his life is standing in front of him, somehow glowing even under a dim, flickering street light. to not think about the very real fact that he just saved you from whatever-he-refuses-to-think-about that he just saved you from.

so he gives a casual shrug.

“that’s what they pay me for.”

you blink. “you get paid?”

jake stills. “uh, well. no. not technically. emotionally, yes. and sometimes sweet old ladies buy me churros.”

you blink again, but this time, your lips twitch slightly. “…okay. right.”

jake clears his throat, straightening up, placing his hands on his hips all awkward again and then putting them down when he realizes he probably looks like a cheap superhero mascot like that.

this part—this part—he’s usually good at. web the creep. leave a note for the cops. call them in. that’s how it usually goes. what doesn’t usually happen is…this. saving the girl he likes. the girl who doesn’t know she’s the girl he likes. the girl who definitely doesn’t know he sits next to her in chemistry and pretends to read when she walks in.

the creep behind him groans again. jake spins around on his heels and double thwips a neat string of webs over the guy’s mouth.

“aaaaand silence,” jake mutters, nodding to himself. “look at that. instant peace. should’ve probably done that twenty seconds ago.”

he turns back around. and you’re smiling now. it’s small and slightly shaky, but it’s there. jake notices. of course jake notices.

“are you sure you’re okay?” his voice dips again, gentler now.

you nod. “yeah, i think so. seriously…thank you so much.”

and jake hesitates—heart thumping, nerves sweating, because you are literally standing in front of him and he has the mask of spider-man on right now but the confidence of jake from chemistry. but still, he manages, "get home safe, yeah? you shouldn’t be walking alone this late. city’s full of creeps and…men in spandex.”

you let out a quiet laugh. “noted.”

“cool,” jake lets out, throwing up an awkward thumbs up and he makes a mental note to stop using the word ‘cool’ and to stop using thumbs ups as a defense mechanism.

he clears his throat and takes a casual step back as you watch him, still unmoving, as if you’re still trying to convince yourself he’s real.

“alright,” jake says, pointing his hand up to the building behind you before saluting you goodbye with the other. “spider-man…away?”

he fires. latches perfectly. but the fact that he actually, out-loud, said ‘spider-man away’ gets to his head and so he doesn’t time the swing quite right and his foot hits the top of a recycling bin on the way up. and he really hopes you didn’t see it happen (you did).

he lands on the rooftop above you, immediately crouching down out of view, chest heaving as his brain catches up to his body, still processing what just happened. heart still hammering, fingers still tingling.

then, after waiting a few seconds, he peers his head carefully over the line of buildings down the street and watches your figure walk away. head down, bag hugged close, pace quicker now.

and of course, because he’s jake—and spider-man (but mostly because he’s jake)—he follows you from above. quiet, careful, out of sight. just to make sure you make it back okay.

and when you finally reach your apartment building and unlock the front door, he still waits.

waits until he sees a light flicker on in your bedroom window. waits until he sees your figure draw your curtains closed. waits until he knows you’re safe. only then does he finally exhale.

he drops onto the roof of a nearby pizza place—the one that claims they sell dollar pizza but it’s really $1.49—pulls off his mask with one hand and runs the other through his completely wrecked hair.

“jesus christ, jake,” he mutters to himself, a hand dragging down his face. “spider-man away? really?”

he shakes his head at himself, partly in shame, partly in disbelief, but mostly in shame, then stretches out his legs, groans at the ache in his biceps, and swings back towards the first rooftop where he left his backpack.

and thank god it’s still there. because once he unwebs his bag and fishes through his textbooks, unknown food wrappers, and decathlon club fliers to take out his phone with just merely 12% battery left, he clicks on your contact. stares at the blank message field. then he types.

JAKE (10:42PM) : hey! it’s jake (from chem lol) hope your night’s going okay :) also still good to meet at the cafe near school tomorrow? maybe around noon?

he stares at it. rereads it six times. changes lol to haha. then back to lol. deletes the smiley face. then the whole message. then retypes it word for word.

eventually, he hits send.

and jake, bless his heart, keeps staring at the screen. forgets it’s nearly 11PM. forgets that his mom, who thinks he’s in bed, is probably gonna check in on him any second now (and yes, jake is nearly a legal adult. but he also grew up with chronic nightmares, so. check ins are necessary at times).

but then his screen lights up. your name. a single message.

Y/N (10:43PM) : yes :)

he feels his entire body exhale. or light up on fire. he’s not sure of the difference, honestly. and jake’s also not sure how long he sits there smiling at his phone like an idiot.

he doesn’t remember swinging back home. he doesn’t remember sneaking back into his room through his fire escape. he doesn’t even remember showering and wincing at the sting of soap against his fresh cuts and scratches.

because all he’s thinking about is your text. which is probably why he also forgets to set an alarm.

so when he wakes up the next day at 11:45AM, twenty minutes away from the café he promised to meet you at in fifteen minutes, and absolutely zero minutes ready to leave his place—he’s in full blown panic.

“oh crap, crap—ow, damn it—crap,” he’s mutters, runs into a chair, accidentally smears toothpaste on his hoodie sleeve, and grabs the first protein bar he sees—cookies & creme this time—before sprinting out the door. but not before kissing his mom on the cheek goodbye.

his hair is still damp. his backpack is half-zipped. he’s 85% sure he applied deodorant twice and toothpaste once. or maybe the other way around.

and by the time he barges into the corner café that sells overpriced matcha lattes with the grainy oat milk but has good lighting and free wifi and outlets to use so it’s deemed a good study spot anyways, he immediately zeroes in on you at the small corner table—pen in hand, sipping from a cup casually and not at all aware that your mere existence and the way the little beam of sunlight shining through the café windows reflecting on you is already sending his sleep deprived state into overdrive.

he makes—or more like stumbles—his way over, just in time for you to glance up and catch his eye.

“hey!” you smile, so warm and relaxed that it almost makes jake forget he sprinted over in mismatched socks. “you made it.”

“yeah—sorry,” jake exhales, pulling out the seat across from you and placing his stuff down. “i stayed up late, forgot to set an alarm, then couldn’t find matching socks, i had this blue one on and then a red—“

jake stops himself. looks at you. gives you a sheepish smile. “sorry. you don’t need to hear about the whole sock saga.”

you giggle as you look up at him, “what a shame, i was kinda invested to see where that was going.”

jake tries not to float.

“and it’s fine, jake. really. if it makes you feel any better, you’re only like twelve minutes late.”

jake lets out a nervous chuckle as he slides into the seat across from you, “thanks. i’m usually only, like, ten minutes late, so this is all new to me. including the study date part.”

jake freezes. your eyebrow quirks. why did he say that. why. did. he. say. that.

a small smile tugs at your lips, “study date?”

jake’s eyes are frozen and blown wide as he stares at you in horror from across the table, stumbling over his own words, “i mean. i—no, not a date! unless…unless you wanted it to be a date, which is fine! not just fine! i mean, it’s fine if you wanted—i just assumed that—well sorry, i shouldn’t have assumed—that would be non-consensual and i’m really big on, like, mutual respect and consent and—”

he stops.

jake needs to stop. he should stop talking about consent before he even got to ask you how your morning’s been like a regular human being does.

your stare lingers for a beat longer before you break into laughter, hand flying to your mouth, the other holding onto the table in front of you to support yourself as you snort. “jake.”

jake sinks slightly in his seat. wishes he was sinking into the earth. “yeah?”

your laughter softens into something gentler, and you look up at him, sure and simple and steady. “it’s okay. let’s call it that. a study date.”

you know how your laptop sometimes freezes because it’s firing a million tasks at once and then the fan starts whirring violently before the entire thing decides to just shut off and it has to take a few minutes to recover before rebooting itself back up to be able to fully function again?

yeah. that’s what’s happening to jake. right now.

“oh. okay. cool. cool, cool, cool,” he tugs at the collar of his hoodie. stop it with the cool, jake, we talked about this. and whatever you do, do not throw up a— he throws a thumbs up at you. puts it away. tries to recover. “i’m very…pro…studying.”

you grin at him. “clearly.” the dating part? not so much.

and after that, thing settles. in that warm, weirdly comforting way things do when you’ve either known someone your entire life or just long enough to know you want to.

textbooks open, laptops propped, flashcards highlighted, questions exchanged, your iced matcha is slowly disappearing while jake’s iced americano just sits there untouched—slowly watering down because jake forgets coffee makes him jittery but he was in a state of panic when he got to the counter so…here we are.

“wait, can i ask you something kinda random?"

you glance up from your notes, giving jake a small nod. “yeah?”

jake’s eyes land on the back of your laptop and he gestures vaguely to it. “why is your laptop covered in like…fourteen different beluga stickers?”

your head tilts as you follow his gaze and—yup. it’s true. it’s covered with not only fourteen little cartoon belugas, but also otters, starfish, and a little whale in the corner that isn’t so little and cost you a whole whopping five dollars at the book fair.

you blink at it. “oh, right.” a small smile then tugs at your lips. “i’m kinda obsessed with ocean life. it’s, like…one of my things.”

and jake is silent. not because he’s judging. no, he recites the periodic table in alphabetical order to help him fall asleep at night, so he can’t judge. but because—god. you say that like it’s the most casual thing in the world and not the most adorable sentence he’s ever heard.

“like, belugas are my favorite sea animals,” you continue, your own voice picking up from your own excitement now. “they’re just so cute and squishy looking. and they always look like they’re smiling? and granted i’ve never met one, but if i did meet one, i just know it’d be kind.”

jake is still not saying anything. he’s watching the way your hands move animatedly, the way your eyes light up, the way your voice lifts when you say the words “if i did meet one” like it’s the most natural thing in the world to meet a literal beluga.

“they do look pretty nice,” jake adds eventually, absolutely trying his best to fight the grin off his face. “for a whale, i mean.”

your eyes widen as you suddenly gasp and lean in over the table towards jake, catching him off guard. “okay, i’m gonna pretend you didn’t just say that.”

jake freezes. and he doesn’t know how and he doesn’t know when, but he’s pretty sure he messed up somehow just by trying to impress his crush by complimenting a beluga.

“belugas aren’t whales,” you say, matter of fact, “they’re actually a type of dolphin, despite the name. common mistake.”

“oh,” jake just blinks and nods like this is a totally normal conversation. like he isn’t currently being lectured by the cute girl from his chemistry class about beluga whales. beluga…dolphins? not whales.

his eyes flick briefly to your hands, still hovering mid-air, animated from your explanation. then to your face, your eyes sparkling just a little bit too much for him to blame it on the café lighting. and everything—every little detail jake seems to notice and learn about you—makes jake feel like his heart is about to beat out of his chest.

“sorry,” you pause, noticing his stare. “i just…i really love this kind of stuff. it’s all just so fascinating to me. it’s kinda like whenever you start freaking out over, i don’t know…cis-trans isomerism in alkenes?”

jake chokes on his spit. smooth.

“wait,” he’s coughing, sitting up straighter, “how do you know that i—wait, how do you even know about cis-trans isomerism?”

“what can i say? i’m observant,” you look at him over the rim of your cup as you take a sip, casually shrugging, a small smirk on your lips.

and jake just casually tries not to freak out.

because, sure, jake has had his fair share of realizations through out his lifetime. like the day he woke up and found out he could suddenly stop a bus with his bare hands. or the time he discovered he’s mildly allergic to cauliflower. but this? this might top the list.

because you notice things. about him. him. and it short-circuits his brain. just a little. maybe a lot.

jake tries not to smile too hard. tries not to read too much into it. tries not to wonder if you notice the way he leans closer during chemistry labs or the way his voice raises half a pitch when you talk to him or the way he purposely gets to class early just so he could talk to you before.

they’re the kind of thoughts that keep him up that night. the kind that plague his entire mind until the only thing he’s thinking about when he falls asleep that night and the only thing he’s thinking about when he wakes up the next morning is…you.

and for the next few days, that’s just about the most exciting thing that happens to jake. the next few days for him go pretty normal.

and by normal, jake means boring. and by boring, i mean on monday, spider-man stops a bodega robbery and gets a pat on the back from the police officer and a sprained ankle. on tuesday, he wakes up late and almost misses his history final (which honestly would’ve been preferable). and on wednesday, you text jake for help on a chemistry review question. which is actually very exciting and not at all boring nor normal, despite how hard jake tries his best to act normal.

on thursday, however, jake stays late in the school computer lab to tinker with his web shooter tech. and that’s when sunghoon pulls up in front of him, dropping two small pieces of paper on jake’s mess of wires and tools and notebook doodles.

“bada-bing, bada-boom,” sunghoon announces as he plops into the chair next to jake.

jake looks up. sunghoon’s spinning awkwardly slowly in the swivel chair, arms out like a king clearly waiting for applause.

jake squints at the slips of paper. then back up.

“sunghoon.” “yes?” “why are we binging and booming and why are there clown fish on my web shooters?”

sunghoon beams. the kind of beam that makes jake’s spider tingle feel immediately and instinctively nervous. "because, my friend,” he begins proudly, “i am your guy-in-the-chair and thanks to me, you are now officially going on an aquarium date this weekend.”

jake blinks down at the two tickets. then looks up at sunghoon. blinks again. “wait. i’m going on a what with who now?”

sunghoon’s face falls flat. “with y/n, you idiot. who else would i be sending you to the aquarium with? me?”

jake’s jaw slackens. eyes widen. heartbeat pounding, “what—why, why, why, would you do that?”

sunghoon’s brows furrow as if the answer is the most obvious one in the world (and it is), “because you like her? and now you can take her to see those things she has fourteen of on her laptop that she likes so much. beluga whales or whatever they were.”

jake opens his mouth to argue—then shuts it. looks at sunghoon very, very, seriously. “beluga dolphins. they’re beluga dolphins. common mistake.”

and sunghoon could give two flying farts about beluga whales versus beluga dolphins versus beluga birds for all he knows, but because jake’s his best friend, he tries not to judge.

“…okayyyy, beluga dolphins.” he claps jake on the back and jake flinches. “anyways! you. y/n. aquarium date. this weekend. bada-bing. bada-boom.”

friday is the most un-normal and the most un-boring day of them all.

because on friday, right when jake slams his locker shut at the end of the day—ready to go home and debating if he should build his brand new imperial star destroyer lego set or practice different swinging techniques off the library roof—

“JAKE!”

and jake’s spidey sense could not have predicted what happens next. because before he can even register his own name, jake’s slammed into. stumbling. arms flailing. back hitting the lockers behind him.

and it’s you. you, clinging to him in a hug. smiling. glowing. and jake is dying. screaming. ascending.

“I GOT A 99,” you smile as you look up at him, eyes sparkling and wide.

jake swallows hard. his hards are still awkwardly hanging at his side, unsure whether to hug you back or just spontaneously combust into dust right then and there.

“wait. the chemistry exam?” he manages, voice higher than usual.

you nod so fast it’s a blur. “yes!—i think it’s a little stupid she docked me a single point just because i rounded wrong on that molarity question—which, yeah, i know you warned me about. but it’s fine. i’m literally a chemistry genius.”

jake lets out a breathy laugh, looking down at you—still warm, still wrapped around him, still lighting up like the literal sun in the middle of the school’s halls.

“you are,” he says, and it comes out softer than he expected.

and then you’re looking up at him again—close, glowing, happy—and jake swears the whole world pauses. like the only thing that has ever mattered to him is this exact moment. like someone hit pause on everything except you. the shouts, the lockers slamming, the overhead announcements—he doesn’t hear any of it.

all he knows is you. the way your smile curves just slightly more on one side. the scent of your shampoo. the feel of your arms around him and the way his pulse has never been louder in his entire life.

jake doesn’t think he’s ever felt this way about someone before.

and like you suddenly realize how long you’ve been holding onto him, or maybe just how close the two of you are—you slowly pull back. not all the way, just a half-step, your arms slipping from around his middle. you clear your throat, eyes flickering to a locker, then to a ceiling.

“um—thanks to you, though. seriously,” you say, voice softer now, “for all your help. and studying with me.”

and jake is still staring. still dazed. “oh! no, yeah. yeah yeah. totally. i had fun. it was fun.” he swallows again. please stop saying fun. “so fun.” yeah. he’s absolutely a lost cause.

but you laugh. and god, jake loves your laugh. he wants to bottle it up, carry it around in his pocket, and use it like a power-up when he’s out fighting criminals at night.

and it’s in that moment, somewhere between your grin and the sound of your giggle still ringing in his ears, that it hits him.

this is it. this is the moment.

jake clears his throat. wipes his palms on the sides of his jeans like it’ll help. glances off to the side before looking back at you.

“listen, so um—” he’s already fumbling. “i was wondering—like if you’re free this weekend, and only if you really, really want to, seriously no pressure at all because i know you’re probably busy, but—”

he pauses. breathes. tries again. “—but if you’d be down, i, uh—i have two tickets to the aquarium. and since you’re really into the ocean and stuff i thought—”

“oh my god,” you interrupt, eyes lit up. “you got tickets to the aquarium?”

jake nods so fast he swears he looks like a bobblehead.

“yeah! well—no. technically sunghoon got the tickets but—”

“ohhh, like you and sunghoon were going to go together?” you tease, grinning now. “that actually sounds kind of fun—”

“wait. wait—no.” and jake nearly panics, his hands waving. “no, no, no, i mean—i’m trying to—”

jake inhales sharply. gets a grip. “do you want to go with me? this weekend? to the aquarium?”

“oh!” you blink up at him, clearly surprised—but not in a bad way. your voice goes a little softer. “like…just us?”

“yeah,” jake nods, trying to sound chill and not at all like he’s internally combusting. which is definitely, 100%, happening right now. “i mean—if you want. if you don’t, it’s totally cool. i’ll just…give the ticket to my mom or something. she likes fish. i think. probably. i’ve never actually asked—”

“jake.”

jake stops. looks at you again. “yeah?”

you smile. all fond and amused and sweet. “i’d love to go to the aquarium with you.”

and jake completely loses the grip he thought he had a strong hold of.

“wait, really?” “really.” “oh,” jake breathes. “cool. cool, cool, cool.” you tilt your head, “you’re doing the repeating thing again.”

“i know,” jake groans, dragging a hand down his face. “i literally had a whole mental intervention about this, it’s not working—

you laugh. again. and jake ascends. again.

“okay,” you say, stepping back just enough. “aquarium this weekend. it’s a date.”

jake ascends a third time.

“right,” he says, barely recovering. “totally. i’ll—uh, i’ll text you the details?”

you nod, already backing away towards the main doors, “can’t wait!”

and forget the imperial star destroyer set or brand new swinging techniques. jake 100% knows what he’s doing tonight—and it’s sounding a lot like googling beluga dolphin facts. 

later that night, jake’s perched on the edge of a random rooftop—one leg dangling off the ledge, a protein bar in one hand, his phone in the other, glowing with an article titled: top twelve facts about belugas that will shock you.

but then—his spidey senses prick.

because at exactly 10:32PM, like clockwork, your usual bus pulls up to the stop below the building he’s seated at.

okay. so maybe it’s not exactly a coincidence he’s here. and maybe this roof isn’t that random after all.

and maybe, just maybe, he’s made it a habit to make sure you get home safe every night. it started with just one night—making sure you got home safe after last week’s incident. then it turned into two. then three. then…every night. at exactly 10:32PM. now it’s a full-blown instinct he hasn’t admitted to anyone (especially not sunghoon) because, well…he likes making sure you get home safe. sue him.

when he sees your figure step off the bus, jake immediately straightens. the hairs on his arms prick up. his pulse quickens. his palm slightly sticks against the protein bar wrapper. and this is just a regular friday.

except—it really isn’t. because today, you—you, the very smart and very funny and very pretty ocean-loving girl who sits next to him in chemistry—hugged him today and agreed to go on a date with him and oh god.

so actually, nothing about today was regular. not even close. and nothing about what jake is about to do is regular.

instead of just watching from above like he has the past week… he swings.

with a few quick, practiced motions, he webs himself building to building, bouncing off a wall to land neatly right in front of you on the sidewalk.

and you scream. “what the—oh my god—” you jolt back mid-step, instinctively clutching your bag closer to you.

“ah—sorry! sorry!” jake holds his hands up, immediately regretting his dramatic entrance. he straightens up from his crouch, brushing dust off his suit. “that probably looked a lot cooler in my head.”

you narrow your eyes, still trying to catch your breath, looking not totally convinced, “right.”

jake rubs the back of his neck awkwardly.

then, like it’s the most normal thing in the world to be nearly ambushed by a red-and-blue-suited vigilante, you simply adjust the bag on your shoulder, sidestep him, and continue walking down the sidewalk.

jake blinks behind the mask, stunned for a second, before quickly scrambling to catch up.

“you know,” he says, effortlessly falling into step beside you, “if i didn’t know any better, i thought we agreed you wouldn’t be walking home alone this late.”

you glance over, the corners of your mouth slightly tugging upwards, “and if i didn’t know any better, i’d say you’re starting to follow me, spidey.”

“woah,” jake fake-gasps. fake-clutches his chest as if offended. “spidey? oh wow. we’re already on nickname basis and i don’t even know yours.”

you snort. “y/n,” you say, finally looking at him fully. “it’s y/n.”

jake’s heart does a triple flip. he thinks he’s heard your name a thousand times already—slipped through conversations with sunghoon, when your teacher calls out your name during attendance, in his dreams—but somehow, this feels new.

he flashes a smile you can’t see behind his mask, “y/n.” he repeats it like it’s the most important thing he’s ever learned. he then points to himself. “spidey.”

you laugh again, this time loud and real and soft and sweet. and suddenly, jake’s night feels warmer.

“yeah, i got that,” you say, shaking your head. “thanks for the clarification, spidey.”

there’s a short silence after that—comfortably quiet, but not empty. both your footsteps crunch against a thin blanket of scattered leaves, the echoes of your steps bouncing off the dimly lit sidewalk. somewhere in the distance a dog barks faintly. a bus drives by.

“shouldn’t you be out—” you finally speak again, glancing up at him, “—stopping carjackings or getting churros from old ladies?”

jake hums, the sound low in his throat. be mysterious. be cool. be normal. "well yes,” he clears his throat and adjusts his web shooter just to do something with his hands, “but it’s also part of my duty as your friendly neighborhood spider-man to make sure the citizens of this city get home safe.”

you raise a brow, smirking, “is it also part of your duty to walk every single citizen home after saving them?”

“…well. not exactly,” he tries not to sound nervous. tries. “just the ones i think are…pretty.”

you freeze mid-step. your breath catches, feet stopping entirely.

jake does the same. his heart might actually fall out of his chest. “that’s—” he coughs, scratching the back of his neck. “that’s just you, by the way. if that wasn’t…super clear.”

your mouth parts. but no words come out. only your eyes react—wide, soft, blinking.

“oh—" you eventually say, softly and unsure, as if you’re trying to figure out if the literal spider-man is trying to flirt with you. “thanks? i think.”

and jake is 98% pretty sure he’s redder than his own suit right now. “yeah, yup. of course,” he says, voice cracking ever so slightly as his mind searches for anything, something else to talk about. “uh…so any fun plans this weekend?”

smooth. so smooth.

you blink, still looking at him a little weird, but your smile comes back almost instantly as you two start walking again, “actually yeah! i’m going to the aquarium tomorrow.”

jake’s heart does another little flip. yes. yes, yes. she still wants to go. she’s still going with me—

“with this guy,” you add casually, kicking a pebble in your way.

jake feels his heart do a little pause. “a guy?” he says, wincing when it comes out just a little too quickly, a little too high-pitched. “oh. a guy guy. wow. a guy.”

you nod along, completely oblivious, mind clearly elsewhere, “yeah, he’s pretty great. got us the tickets and everything.”

jake nods stiffly, staring straight ahead like the lamp post across the street is the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen in his entire life, “nice. that’s…really nice. sounds like a pretty solid dude.”

“totally,” you grin up at him, and it’s the kind of grin that makes jake’s lungs forget why they exist in the first place. the crinkle of your eyes, the curve of your mouth, the gentle ease in your voice—it all hits him at once. the most perfect storm.

“a little awkward,” you continue. “says ‘cool’ way too much. but he’s really sweet. and funny. and a genius.”

and jake combusts on the spot. jake thought he knew what happiness was. he thought getting accepted into the school’s robotics team felt good. he thought shaking hands with the mayor after saving him from a limo crash was peak fulfillment. he even thought finishing the millennium falcon lego set with sunghoon in a single night was the height of his serotonin levels. but this? hearing you talk about him—about jake—with that softness in your voice, that tilt in your smile, that warmth in your eyes?

oh yeah. this is what true happiness is.

and by the time jake returns back to earth, the two of you are approaching your apartment now—he recognizes the street by heart at this point.

you come to a stop in front of your building, turning to face him beneath the glow of the overhead lighting, “thanks for walking me, by the way.”

jake shrugs, hands shoved into the sides of his suit awkwardly, “it’s part of the job description. gotta make sure my favorite citizen gets home safe.”

you give him a look. one of those lingering ones that makes jake wonder. the kind that lasts a beat too long.

“…favorite, huh?” you raise a brow, lips quirking into a soft smile. jake’s heart stutters. “top three, at least.” you giggle again, shaking your head slightly, “night, spidey.”

“night, y/n,” he murmurs quietly before you go in, watching as you head inside. the door clicks shut behind you, and jake’s world immediately feels a little dimmer.

jake stands there in the quiet for a second. and then— he fist pumps the air in celebration, kicking his leg up like an animated character, “yes, yes, yes!”

with the goofiest grin under his mask, jake flings a web up toward the apartment building across the street and launches himself in one fluid motion. he lands with practiced ease, sitting in his usual spot just as the light flickers on in your bedroom window.

he’s still grinning. still breathless. still absolutely unable to believe what just happened.

with a newfound confidence, jake pulls out his phone from one of his suit pockets and unlocks it.

JAKE (10:54PM) : hey! just wanted to say im excited for tomorrow :) hope you have a good night y/n

he doesn’t hesitate before hitting send this time.

and when he wakes up the next morning, jake is still smiling.

no nightmares. no forgotten alarms. no dreading history finals. just the lingering memory of yesterday—from the hug to the walk last night, from the way you smiled at him to the way you said ‘night, spidey’, from the way he swears your laugh is not permanently stored in his brain’s top five sounds of all time.

now, he’s staring up at the massive curved glass in front of him, a large ‘beluga whales here!’ sign above him. you’re already right up against the glass, peering inside like you’re looking at the most fascinating thing in the world.

and to you—it is. to jake? his answer would be very different. his answer would look a lot like you.

because you’re right there, next to him. shoulder brushing him. looking effortlessly beautiful in the soft dim blue light of the tank.

and jake is trying very, very hard to look calm, cool, and collected. despite the fact that he’s sweating through his button-up because he’s nervous, giddy, and definitely sprayed way too much cologne (two spritzes max, sunghoon said. jake did six. he panicked).

but you—you look completely at peace. you’re smiling, your eyes lighting up with wonder, one palm pressed gently against the glass as you watch one of the belugas swim past.

“they’re literally smiling,” you whisper, completely in awe. “look at them. they’re so pretty.”

jake glances at you. then the belugas. then back at you.

he’s not entirely sure who you’re talking about anymore.

“yeah,” he says, a little breathlessly. “they’re…really pretty.”

at that, you turn to look at him and jake has to force himself to not look away. he smiles at you when your eyes meet his. and your smile is soft. soft and amused. like you knew what he was saying. like you’re choosing not to call him out on it.

“so,” you eventually say, tilting your head to look up at him. “on a scale of one to ten, how ridiculous does this shirt make me look?”

jake glances down at your outfit—you’re wearing an oversized t-shirt now layered over the outfit you picked out for today. it’s bright blue, has a cartoon fish giving a thumbs up, and across the front in bubbly letters sits, ‘fish makes life betta’.

your eyes landed on it the second you two walked past the gift shop. and you had to have it. immediately, of course.

jake had laughed at first when you turned to him, holding up the shirt against you, eyes wide. “should i buy this?” you asked, not a hint of sarcasm in your tone.

and that’s when jake realized, you meant it.

and that was also the exact moment jake realized he’s absolutely, undeniably, hopelessly gone for you.

“negative twelve,” jake says now, very seriously, despite the smirk on his face. “you look unironically very cool.” you scoff, “you’re such a liar.” jake shrugs, still grinning. “did that get me a couple more points at least?”

one of your eyebrows quirk, like you’re surprised by the sudden confidence. and honestly? so is jake.

there’s a beat—one of those soft, lingering ones carrying a silence that feels full with something unspoken. the kind that hums quietly below the surface. the kind jake could live inside forever.

then, your lips twitch into a smile. “mmm…maybe half a point. you’re up to, like, an 89.5%.”

jake lets out a soft, breathless laugh, eyes still on you, “i’ll take it. that’s like…a B plus.”

“better than what you got on the history final,” you say, already smirking.

jake’s eyes widen as he gasps, “hey—what!? that was so uncalled for.” you laugh again, clearly enjoying this. “you got a 73, jake.”

“a 74!” he corrects you, his voice now a pitch higher. “it was curved! and i woke up late! blame it on sleep deprivation.”

“that…still sounds like barely passing to me.”

jake narrows his eyes at you playfully, “okay, you know what? i’m deducting your points for emotional damage. 99.5%.”

you gasp dramatically. “you can’t deduct points!”

“better than what you got on the chemistry final,” jake says, eyebrows quirked, feeling ridiculously proud of himself for that one.

your eyes widen—equal parts shocked and impressed, “touché, jake. touché.”

and jake just grins, heart pounding so fast he swears it’s about to break out of his ribcage and up and run.

your smile lingers for a little longer before you glance away for a moment, returning your gaze back to the tank in front of you, watching as the belugas swim past lazily, weightless and floating like clouds. and you think there’s something oddly calming about them. it makes the whole world slow down.

jake watches you instead.

the lights from the tank dance against your skin, your features glowing blue and soft and perfect. your hands are simply at your side, head tilted slightly as you follow their movements with your wide eyes. you’re not even saying anything—but you don’t need to.

jake swallows hard. takes half a step closer to you.

“hey,” he says quietly. you look over. “yeah?” “i’m really glad you came today.”

your expression shifts—just a little. surprised, maybe. but then, it softens. into something gentle and honest. “i’m glad you asked,” you say, just as quiet.

and jake is so close. so close, that he can feel the slight brush of your pinky against his own. and suddenly, the air feels heavier. tighter. packed with nerves and possibilities and hope and everything that makes jake’s senses want to scream into a pillow.

and jake, because he’s still jake, blurts out the first thing his brain lands on— “let’s take a picture with a beluga!”

you blink. but then, your laugh bubbles up again as you nod, stepping close behind him as he’s already fumbling to pull out his phone.

the photo is slightly blurry. your shirt is bright and front and center. jake’s smile is too wide, and yours is somewhere between a laugh and a look—

one that’s angled towards him instead of the camera.

the walk back later that night is quiet. not the awkward quiet. not the quiet filled with weird tension. but soft quiet. warm quiet. the kind of quiet that settles over jake like his favorite blanket—thick and safe and familiar, the kind that jake feels whenever he’s tucked into bed after a night out around the city.

and when you two walk side by side, you’re close enough that jake can feel your sleeve brush against his every few steps. and the sidewalk is wide. but neither of you move away. not even once.

street lamps shine above you, the city hums quietly around, and jake—who literally has the ability to swing between skyscrapers and soar through the air—feels like he’s floating for the first time in his life.

because he’s definitely not thinking about how he can catch the small traces of your perfume or how your hand keeps brushing his. and he’s definitely not spiraling over whether or not you’re thinking about how his hands keep brushing yours back.

and right when he’s mentally trying to calculate just how fast his heart is currently beating (and if his calculations were correct, he thinks he’s at 142 beats per minute)—

you stop walking.

jake halts a half step ahead, blinking in surprise as he turns back to face you, “everything okay?”

you bite your bottom lip. squeeze your eyes shut for a second. “yeah. yeah—i just…” a breath. “i have to tell you something.”

and that knocks the air straight out of jake’s lungs. he steps towards you instinctively, his steps quiet against the pavement until he’s standing right in front of you—frozen under the soft glow of the streetlight overhead.

“okay,” he says, trying to sound normal. which is hard. because jake is currently experiencing what can only be described as sensory overload. 

he tries to not notice the way you’re fiddling with the hem of your incredibly bright blue shirt. or the way you’re blinking too many times. or the way he can literally hear your heartbeat from where he’s standing. and he calculates 143 beats per minute. maybe 144.

“i—um…i actually didn’t really need help with chemistry,” you blurt, eyes still focused somewhere near his shoelaces in front of you. “i know exactly what cis-trans isomerism in alkenes is. not only because i thought it was really cute when you explained it in class that one time, but because i genuinely think it’s super cool so i did my research project on it last—”

you pause. “…which is super irrelevant. oh my god—wait, let me backtrack.”

then your words start tumbling. “i just—i thought you were really cute. and smart. and witty. and honestly, probably a little awkward too but, like, in a cute way. and i didn’t know how else to talk to you outside of class. i figured you were too busy or not really into random girls asking to hang out. so i panicked. even though i have a 98 in chem right now.”

you stop. take a breath—finally.

jake, however, does not. jake’s entire being has stopped functioning. his brain is blank—no thoughts, just the steady, continuous static of oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. every nerve in his body is on high alert. his spidey senses are firing—heart pounding, breath caught, fingertips tingling. it’s like his body’s trying to prepare him for a fight, when really? he’s just trying his hardest not to melt into the ground.

and jake can feel everything. the warmth of the streetlight on his back. the shift in the breeze between you and him. the exact distance between your body and his. it’s all too much and not enough and jake is losing his mind.

and when you notice his frozen stare, you wince—your eyes squeezing shut again as you start mumbling, “oh my god. i’m so sorry. okay, let’s just forget i said—”

and jake, because he’s still jake, doesn’t think.

jake kisses you.

it happens before he can overthink it. which is entirely a lie, because jake always overthinks.

but this time, it happens before he could spiral through every worst case scenario. before he could remind himself of all the ways he could possibly screw this up.

all he knows is that you were standing there—rambling, flushed, perfect—and he just had to.

his hand finds your cheek instinctively, warm and unsure and trembling ever so slightly. and when his lips meet yours—it’s gentle. so gentle, like a question asked without words. like an answer given all at once.

and jake is still spiraling. his senses are everywhere—you smell like faint citrus and something a little like vanilla, your grip on his shirt is tight, and your lips are soft, so soft, moving with his like you two have known this rhythm forever.

everything is heightened for him. blurred and focused at the same time. and the kiss isn’t perfect—his nose bumps yours and you step too close and accidentally hit his shoe—but none of that matters.

because this is real. because it’s you.

and when jake finally, slowly, pulls back—just barely—both of you are breathless.

both heartbeats loud enough for jake to hear. quite literally.

“you think i’m smart?” you let out a small scoff as your eyes meet his, his shirt still under your grip, “out of everything that just happened, that’s what you’re focusing on?” “i mean,” jake shrugs, helplessly smiling, “i’m just making sure i heard that part correctly.”

you laugh louder now—relieved and warm and everything jake wants to hold onto forever.

the rest of the night moves slower for jake. literally slower. like neither of you want the moment to end—your steps gradually slowing the closer you get to your apartment building. jake keeps his hands in his pockets, fingers still tingling, goosebumps still on his skin. every now and then, he steals a glance your way, just to make sure this is real. that you’re real.

and when you reach the front of your apartment building, jake’s chest tightens the tiniest bit. you stop at the base of the stairs. so does he.

“well,” your voice is quiet as your eyes flick up to his. “i’ll see you at school on monday?”

jake nods, trying to look cool, calm, and collected even though he’s pretty sure he’s still at 142 beats. “yeah. for sure. monday.”

you smile, soft and a little shy. “night, jake.” “night, y/n,” he echoes, offering a tiny, awkward wave that makes you smile as you slip through the door.

jake lingers for a second longer, watching until the door clicks shut. then he spins on his heel, a giddy smile on his face, stumbles three steps down the sidewalk and—

“holy shi—” he physically clamps a hand over his mouth to keep himself from screaming.

jake fist-pumps the air. once. twice. spins in a circle. nearly trips and eats it on the curb. but he doesn’t care.

he kissed you. he kissed you. and you kissed him back.

and jake is back to nearly launching into orbit.

his fingers are still trembling as he pulls his phone out from his pocket, text message already full of typos from typing too fast when the screen lights up—

incoming call : GUY IN CHAIR 🧠

“DUDE,” jake answers instantly, breathless and borderline yelling. “i was just about to text you—I KISSED HER!”

a beat.

“WHAT?!” sunghoon’s voice explodes over the phone. “you KISSED her? you KISSED HER? oh my god.”

jake is pacing now, still walking down the street but barely aware of it. “i know. it just happened. i don’t even know—like, we were walking, then she stopped and told me she didn’t even need chemistry help and that she just needed an excuse to talk to me and i literally blacked out so i don’t remember the rest—”

“oh my god. oh my god.” “i KNOW.” “like, wait—you kissed her-kissed her?” “i KISSED her-kissed her, dude.” “bro.” “i know.”

they’re both beaming. celebrating. somewhere above him, a very confused old lady stares at jake from her window as he dances in the middle of the sidewalk like he just won the lottery.

“wait. wait, crap—” sunghoon cuts in, tone suddenly serious. “hang on, i called you for a reason.” jake freezes mid-spin, “huh?”

“guy in chair duties,” sunghoon’s voice shifts. “there’s a call coming through the police scanner. armed robbery. bank on 23rd and main. it just came in, like, thirty seconds ago.”

jake stops. groans. “you’re kidding me,” he mutters under his breath.

“sorry, man.”

without missing a beat, jake glances around for any people—then ducks into the nearest alleyway.

“can’t a guy catch a break?” he mumbles, already yanking off his button up, his suit already underneath (because—obviously, you can never be too prepared), then bunches up the shirt and webs it to the brick wall in one fluid motion.

sunghoon’s voice buzzes through his phone, “good luck, spidey.” jake pulls the mask over his face. “i’ll just tell you the rest on monday.”

“copy that.”

“thanks, hoon. spidey’s on it.”

turns out—spidey, in fact, was not on it.

he doesn’t know if he should blame it on the fact that he was mildly (extremely) mentally distracted by the memory of kissing you under the warm streetlight, or the fact that those robbers had insanely good aim, but either way:

jake comes home with a black eye, a rapidly darkening bruise on his cheekbone, a bullet graze burning across his left side, and what he’s 97% sure is a dislocated ankle.

“crap, crap, crap,” he mutters under his breath, wincing as he carefully locks the window behind him. he drops down from the ceiling with a thud, trying not to yelp out in pain when he lands on the ankle that he’s now 99% sure is dislocated. the apartment is quiet. his mom’s probably asleep. hopefully.

jake rips off his mask and immediately grimaces at his reflection in the mirror, “jesus.”

his right eye is already swelling. there’s dried blood going down the side of his face. his suit is slightly torn and singed and still sticky over the wound at his ribs. he presses a palm there, breathing through his teeth.

it’s fine. he’s fine. totally fine.

the shower was probably the most painful part of the night. every drop stings, and there’s something really, really humbling about trying to wash off dirt and dried blood while also replaying the moment you kissed him in perfect clarity over and over again in his head.

and jake’s been at this for a while now. out patrolling, out fighting crime, out throwing dad jokes to creeps at night. but he’s never had a night like this. not with this much chaos, not with this much feeling.

an unexpected bullet. a slam against concrete. some dumb goon with a perfect punch. but right before it? you. you in an obnoxiously bright blue t-shirt saying ‘fish make life betta’. looking at him like that. kissing him like that.

by the time jake stumbles out of the bathroom, patched up with some teenage mutant ninja turtles bandages and wrapped in an oversized hoodie, he’s exhausted.

every limb aches. every muscle screams. every brain cell thinking of you.

and by the time monday rolls around and he wakes up to his alarm at 6:32AM—because he snoozed it for 32 extra minutes—jake frowns at what he sees.

his black eye looks worse, his face is, at least, five different shades of blue, purple, pink, and his ankle is still swollen. every step sends a jolt of pain up his body that even breathing feels like a core workout.

so jake does what any emotionally and physically fatigued teenage superhero would do.

he fakes food poisoning.

when his mom knocks on his door to get him up for school, jake meekly groans out a quick, “mooom. i’ve been projectile vomiting since, like, 3AM. i think it was the fish tacos.”

jake did not eat fish tacos.

but she buys it anyways, says something about him getting rest, and how she’s going to the store for medicine.

and jake sighs. mentally blesses his mom’s heart. attempts to fist pump weakly. fails. winces in pain. then, he turns his phone completely off, buries himself under his blanket, and with nothing but the hazy image of beluga whales, a reminder that he needs to wash his bloodied suit, and you—jake finally falls asleep.

the next thing jake can comprehend is more than twelve hours later. a lot more than twelve hours later. when he blinks awake—it’s pitch black, his body is still aching, his phone is dead, and—

there’s knocking. soft, but persistent.

he stumbles out of bed with a groan and a wince, croaking out a low, “coming..” while he limps over with one arm holding his side before he whips his door open and—

it’s you. jake blinks. you blink. your jaw drops.

“y/n,” jake blurts out, eyes wide. he rubs them once. twice. hopes, prays, this is just one of those weird fever dreams that feel way too real that he gets whenever he sleeps for too long.

but then you rush forward, brows furrowed and eyes flicking from his black eye, to the bruise on his cheek, to the way he’s leaning heavily on one leg with the other slightly elevated—

yeah. this is not a fever dream.

“what are you—what—how—what are you doing here?” jake stammers, instantly turning around, nerves spiking as he quickly scans his room for any incriminating spidey-like props.

suit? mask? web shooters? where did he put that damn mask—

“i texted you, like, fourteen times,” you say following him in, concerned painted all over your face. “you didn’t show up to school. you weren’t answering. i panicked and your mom let me in—jake.”

you stop. jake stops. your voice drops.

“what in the world happened to you?”

jake did not plan for this part. well, he didn’t plan for any of this. “i—uh,” he turns to you, eyes wide. “i…fell.”

your eyes flick down to his knuckles—bruised, battered, and definitely the aftermath of punching something hard. you raise a brow.

jake follows your gaze. panics.

“jake—did you…get in a fight?” “what?!” his voice goes an octave too high. he clears his throat. tries again. “no. no, no. i don’t—fights? me? no. i don’t—i don’t get into fights. that would be very…un-cool.”

you give him a look that says you clearly don’t buy it, but to his relief, you don’t push.

but because jake is still jake, he continues anyways. “i…i was biking—” jake doesn’t know how to ride a bike. “—without a helmet. bad idea, don’t do that. and then i hit this…massive pothole. huge. basically fell off and hit the curb and…and yeah.”

you blink at him. and jake’s panicking, so he’s still going.

“—and then a pigeon flew into me…?” you blink again. “a pigeon.”

jake nods quickly, as if that could convince you anymore (it doesn’t). “a pigeon! you know how they are. dumb pigeons.”

there’s a pause. you stare at him from halfway across the room. jake stands there awkwardly with his hands by his side.

you sigh. cross your arms. “you’re a really bad liar.”

jake looks at the ground. his ears turn red. then he looks back at you with a small, sheepish smile on his face. “yeah,” he admits softly. “kinda am.”

jake moves to sit on the edge of the bed, and you take that as an invitation to sit next to him. there’s a silence between you two again as jake fiddles with the ends of his hoodie, his face warm from either the bruising, the fact that you just called him out, or the fact that somehow, someway, you’re here. in his room. on his bed.

you glance sideways to look at him. then at the floor. then back at him again. you nudge his knee with yours. “…well,” your voice comes out quiet. “are you okay? at least?”

jake looks up. meets your eyes.

and they're wide and worried and so completely focused on him. and for the second time in twenty-four hours, jake thinks his heart might literally give out.

he nods once. swallows. “yeah. yeah, i am. thanks, y/n.”

the moment lingers as the same warm hush settles again between you, like some kind of quiet, mutual agreement—like hey, i’m here, and yeah. i care. and no, i’m not going anywhere. and jake doesn’t know what to spiral about first.

the fact that:

you haven’t left.

you haven’t pried about why he looks like a literal punching bag.

you care.

you shift a little, reaching into the backpack that jake hadn’t even noticed you brought, and pull out a packet of neatly clipped papers.

“i brought the chem notes from today,” you say, holding them out in between you. “there was a pop quiz, and i figured you might want the stuff we reviewed after.”

jake blinks down at the packet, then up at you. then back at the packet. he tries to act normal when he brushes against your fingers when it takes he from your hand. fails spectacularly.

“and,” you continue, eyes flicking to his for a second before focusing somewhere behind him. notably, the crooked bill nye ‘science rules!’ poster taped to the wall. “i just…wanted to see you.”

and jake, quite literally, forgets how to form words for half a second, but you don’t notice. your knee is still against his and he thinks he’s memorized the smell of your shampoo at this point.

“anyways—” you clear your throat and the shyness in your tone makes jake forget how to breathe. “—there’s this documentary they’re playing at the theater tomorrow.” you pause, as if gauging his reaction but jake’s pretty sure he’s blacked out right now. “it’s about—um—deep sea ecosystems? something about bioluminescence and predator-prey adaptations and this super weird jellyfish migration they just discovered.”

jake blinks hard. shakes himself back to reality. realizes this definitely, 100%, isn’t a fever dream. but surely, he’s dreamt of something like this before.

“that…sounds amazingly weird,” is all he can manage to say, nodding slowly.

“i figured,” you give a little half-shrug, “maybe you’d wanna go with me?” then you nudge his shoulder this time. “if you’re not still crippled by then, that is.”

there is a full three seconds of stunned, stunned silence. then, jake scrambles to sit up straighter, eyes wide, “yes. yeah—yes, i’d love to. with you. to see the jellyfish. yeah.”

you smile at him, “cool.” and jake can’t stop smiling back. he’s 98% pretty sure he looks like an idiot, but 100% knows he doesn’t care in the slightest.

you push up from the bed before grabbing your backpack and slinging it over your shoulder. “alright then,” you say, clapping your hands together. “i should go. rest up, okay?”

“i will. i will,” jake nods quickly, still a little dazed. “can’t be too crippled for tomorrow.”

you let out a soft laugh as he follows you to the front door. and when you step outside, you pause in the doorway—hovering like there’s still something on the tip of your tongue.

jake’s hand lingers on the doorknob. you glance up at him. open your mouth, then close it again.

then finally, quietly—you try again. “i, um…” you tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear. “about the other night…”

jake’s heart rate spikes. your eyes flicker up to meet his, and they’re a little unsure. as if searching.

“i wasn’t sure,” you admit. “when you didn’t show up to school and didn’t answer my texts…i didn’t know if maybe—”

you trail off for a second, then finish in one quick breath: “if maybe you regretted it.”

and jake—bruised and aching and completely out of his mind for you—feels the air knocked out of him all over again.

his entire body goes still before he reboots all within 0.5 seconds. “no,” he says. fast. too fast, jake. “god, no.”

your eyes lift again.

“i didn’t regret it. not even a little bit,” his voice stumbles, his nerves are on fire, and his chest tightens with something dangerously close to hope. “i think…i think i relived it a million times in my head, honestly.

jake lets out a small chuckle—partly pathetic, but entirely sincere. “i meant it,” he murmurs. “every second of it.”

you shift your weight from foot to foot, “okay.” a reassured smile rests on your face. “just checking.”

jake exhales, rubs the back of his neck, and looks at you with something boyish and sorry. “i don’t regret it, but i do regret not checking my phone. that was stupid.”

you smirk at him, “a little bit.” jake grins, releasing a short breath of relief as he leans a little against the doorframe, “i’ll do better.”

you hum, giving him a certain, knowing look. “i’ll hold you to it,” your voice drops a little, and before jake can fully process the shift, you lean in—just barely, but yet just enough—and place the lightest kiss to his cheek.

and jake goes completely still. because it’s not dramatic, and it’s definitely not cinematic by any means.

not when you’re both standing in the middle of his apartment hallway, under a flickering light his super refuses to fix no matter how many maintenance requests his mom files. not when there’s a suspicious cloud of weed-scented air coming from the new college neighbors, who obviously do not care about the no smoking indoors sign. and especially not when jake’s ankle is still swollen, his ribs still sore, and he’s wearing star wars pajama pants with a hole in them that he’s praying you didn’t notice.

but it’s warm. and real. and so vulnerable it makes jake’s heart yearn in the most inconvenient way. like breathless honesty wrapped in nothing but silence and the glow of someone who cares.

you pull back slowly, your cheeks a shade pinker than before, your eyes still on his. and jake—well, he’s pretty sure his entire body is red head to toe. his cheek tingles from where your lips just were and his senses are so hyper-focused on you, he doesn’t even notice the pain of his wounds anymore.

“goodnight, jake,” you say finally before turning and going down the hall. and jake stands there, watching you—entirely, irrevocably, shamelessly, gone.

when you’re finally out of sight, jake finally stands up straight, snapping himself out of it and shuts the door behind him, limping his way back to his room when—

his eye catches the clock. 10:43PM. crap. you really need to stop walking home this late.

and suddenly, jake’s adrenaline kicks back in. not from the kiss. okay, maybe a little from the kiss. but mostly because it’s you, and you’re walking home alone, and, yeah, you live a five minute walk away from his but what if something happened, and then— yeah.

with no hesitation, jake locks his room door, goes into his closet, and grabs his suit—still battered and bloodied and roughened up, but it’ll do. two minutes and one-struggle-to-put-on-a-suit-when-half-crippled-later, jake is quietly hobbling out of his window, praying his mom is asleep.

he swings himself easily onto the rooftop of his own building, easily spotting you already a block down. he keeps to the rooftops, stealthily going from building to building until—

his damn ankle. his ankle—which he clearly forgot about for a hot business second—catches on a loose gutter and the next thing jake knows is pain, the taste of concrete in his face, and a loud-and-not-so-subtle crash, bang, clang.

“crap, crap, shit—” jake stands up, dusting his suit off, one leg propped up as he balances on his good one. “ouch, god—” “spidey?” oh god. jake freezes. peeks over the edge.

and there you are—fifty-something feet below, staring up at him, brows furrowed, arms crossed. “oh—” jake gives an awkward wave from where he is. “—y/n! hey! hi. what’s—uh—what’s up?”

jake steps back to duck out of sight, muttering a stream of whispered curses to himself before inhaling sharply and flinging himself down from the rooftop, landing right in front of you with the composure of someone with a screaming ankle and bullet-shaped wound in their abdomen.

you arch a brow. “…is this the part where you admit you are following me, after all?” jake straightens up slowly. and painfully. “i—what? no. i was, uh…” he gestures vaguely down the block. he has no idea what he’s pointing to. “getting pizza. dollar slice. late night craving.”

“uh huh,” you squint, clearly not believing him. “if i promise to stop walking home this late, will you stop stalking me from rooftops?” jake pauses. tilts his head. “define stalking.” you let out a small laugh, half-exasperated, half-fond.

“fine then,” you say, shrugging, “c’mon then. you’re already out. i’m coming with you.” jake blinks. “…coming with me to…where?”  “to get pizza,” you’re walking now, already turning without second thought. “duh.”

ten minutes and two lukewarm pizza slices later, you’re sitting shoulder to shoulder on your fire escape. the air is thick with humidity and smells faintly of marinara, melting cheese, and rusted metal. there’s a low buzz of cars below in the distance, and the stars up above are mostly hidden.

you’re chewing in silence. jake, on the other hand, is holding his slice in his hand in fear—too nervous to even lift his mask up to eat it. thankfully, you don’t notice. or if you do, you don’t mention it. either way, he’s relieved.

you knee bumps his. “so why do you do it?” jake startles slightly, his eyes dragging over to you beneath his mask, “why do i…do what?” you take another bite, still staring out across the street. “spider-man. why do you do what you do?”

he follows your gaze to the building you’re looking at. gives a weak shrug.

“i…didn’t really have a choice, i guess,” he offers quietly. that makes you turn. “you’re being forced to do this?” “no—no, not like that,” he’s quick to shake his head. then he pauses. thinks for a second. “it’s more like…one day, i woke up with these powers. and i realized i could do something with it, you know? like something good. and if i have the chance to…shouldn’t i?”

you’re silent for a second. then you glance over, studying the smooth fabric of his mask like you’re trying to see the face beneath it.

“so you fight crime and get beat up on the daily…willingly?” you shake your head, a small scoff escaping your nose. “you’re better than me, spidey.”

jake lets out a short breath—half of a laugh, half of a sigh. “someone has to. i mean, if i just sit back and watch bad things happen…then it’s like the bad things happen because of me.”

you nod slowly, your lips pressing together in thought. “yeah. that makes sense.”

there’s another pause. quiet, mutual. a pocket of space in the noise of the city where nothing exists but your knees pressed side by side and the pizza box going cold between you. you shift beside him, letting your legs dangle freely off the fire escape. “you’re a good guy,” you say eventually, turning to shoot him a soft smile.

jake swallows hard. his heart’s somewhere in his throat, and he doesn’t quite trust his own voice not to crack, so he simply nods—just once—and turns his gaze back out to the horizon.

“welp,” jake finally says, voice low, a little reserved, “i should probably get back to…you know. my thing.” you tilt your head, eyes narrowing playfully. “like walking your favorite citizens back home?”

“that part—” jake scoffs under his breath, then smirks behind the mask, “—is already done.” then, because spider-man is still jake, he throws up a finger-gun for good measure. he hates himself.

you roll your eyes, but the same smile stays on your face, “you’re unbelievable, spider-man.”

“i try.”

jake slowly rises to stand on the narrow ledge, glancing down at you one more time. the moonlight hits your cheek just right. you’re still holding the crust of your pizza slice, legs swinging, your eyes slightly narrowed like you’re trying to figure something out. and for the third time in twenty-four hours, jake still feels like his heart might give out.

he gives you a little salute, meant to be casual, but he feels anything but. and then, without thinking—he says it.

“see you tomorrow.” a beat of silence. jake’s face blanks. his body completely stills. you blink up at him. “…tomorrow?”

crap. crap, crap, CRAP.

jake’s silence goes for a second too long. then he scrambles for cover. “i mean—uh—hypothetically,” jake stammers, waving a gloved hand vaguely. “like, if you’re…out again. tomorrow. late at night. which you shouldn’t be. because, you know. laws.”

you give him a look. “laws?” “yup,” he taps his chest with two fingers. “spidey laws.” you let out a small giggle and lean back against the railing, arms loosely wrapped over your knees. “right. goodnight, spidey.”

jake clears his throat and bids a small, “night, y/n,” before shooting his web to the corner of the next building and swinging himself out of sight.

and jake doesn’t stop smiling the whole way home. not even when he peels the suit off with a small wince. not even when he collapses into bed, muscles aching and bruises throbbing and heart racing.

but the panic eventually sets in. and it’s early evening the next day by the time it does for jake.

jake stands in front of his closet, yanking hangers out as he quickly skims and tosses another outfit into the rejected pile.

sunghoon lies on the bed behind him, sprawled out horizontally, lazily twisting a rubik’s cube with one hand and scrolling on his phone with the other.

“you know,” sunghoon says without looking up, “it’s literally just a movie. actually, it’s barely even that. it’s a documentary.”

jake whips around, ignoring sunghoon’s comments, holding up a navy button-up in one hand and a graphic tee in the other. “which one says i-tried-but-didn’t-try-too-hard-because-i’m-not-100%-sure-what-we-are-quite-yet-but-just-enough-try?”

“…okay,” sunghoon says, twisting the cube into a perfect, one-colored side. “i’m just…gonna ignore everything you said. but go with the navy.”

“perfect,” jake grins at first, before his eyebrows furrow slightly. “wait, wait, wait. do you think she suspects anything?”

sunghoon lowers the cube. looks at jake. “about you liking her? bro, you kissed her—dude, it’s so obvi—she knows, trust me.”

“no,” jake hisses, yanking off his shirt and then buttoning the navy one on. “about me. like me me. like, spider-man me.”

sunghoon pauses. eyes jake. “what? why? what did you do?”

jake tries to fight back the dumb grin growing on his face as he runs his hand through his hair. “i walked her home.”

“okay…” sunghoon gives him a look that says he’s not impressed. “and i walked my grandma home last week, what’s your point—”

jake rolls his eyes and glances at him through the mirror. “as spider-man.”

“wait—” sunghoon gasps. “so you did end up using your lil guy!”

jake turns to sunghoon, face horrified, “can we please stop calling it my lil guy—”

but before sunghoon can respond, a sudden crackle of static cuts through the air from where jake’s police scanner sits on his cluttered desk.

“—reports of an assault in progress near 37th and bay. suspect is armed. five victims. officers en route. any nearby units respond.”

the air stills. sunghoon immediately sits up. jake’s head jerks towards the tracker. sunghoon’s already reading the look in his best friend’s eyes, “don’t.” jake doesn’t answer.

his eyes are locked on the scanner. his jaw tightens. his mind already racing.

assault in progress. you. suspect is armed. documentary. weird jelly fish. 37th and bay. you. five victims. y/n. y/n. y/n. y/n.

sunghoon watches him carefully, like someone trying to talk a bomb out of detonating. “jake. don’t even think about it.” “i’m not!” jake blurts, too fast, too high, and the crack at the end gives him away.

sunghoon groans. “dude. you have another date. with y/n. you’ve been waiting for this for so long.” “i—i know,” jake’s voice rises in panic. and he’s trying so hard not to panic. “but what if no one gets there in time? w—what if…it’s close. i can handle it. i’ll be quick.”

“jake.” sunghoon gapes at him. “quick? you literally limped up the stairs today. you barely beat that guy from the other day!”

jake doesn’t hear him. in fact— jake’s navy button-up is already off.

“i’ll be fine!” “you still have a bullet scar in your stomach!” “exactly, sunghoon. scar. practically healed. no biggie!” sunghoon throws his hands up. “you can’t be serious—”

“i’ll be done and early to the theater. i swear, hoon.” jake is already tugging the suit halfway over his upper half, wincing at the movement but powering through. “i’ll swing in, swing out. three minutes, tops.”

sunghoon groans louder. and jake is already yanking the window open. “jake.” his friend’s voice softens slightly. “don’t blow this. you like her. she likes you.”

jake pauses, foot on the ledge, mask in hand. he turns back towards sunghoon, lips tight, shoulders tense. “i do like her,” he murmurs.

he pulls the mask down over his head anyways.

“but you know me, sunghoon. you know i can’t be the guy who looks the other way.” and sunghoon does know. of course he knows. this was always a losing battle from the start. because he knows his best friend, he knows jake. knows his heart wasn’t just made of gold, but forged in it. soft and stubborn, foolish yet fearless. the kind of heart that doesn’t back down, even when it knows it should. the kind that tries anyways.

so sunghoon doesn’t push any further. he presses a hand to jake’s shoulder and gives it a firm pat.

“you better not be late.”

jake offers a crooked salute with two fingers—part promise, part apology— and falls backwards out the window.

a flick of his wrist, a few shots of web, a sharp whoosh of air as jake swings into the wind—and the night cleans the rest of his loud thoughts out of his head.

because as much as he wants to see you—as much as he’s worrying about being late—he can’t think about that right now.

and so one fight, a couple hard punches to the gut, a potentially dislocated shoulder, and a webbed-up criminal later—

jake is limping his way back across a rooftop ledge, blood in his mouth and the taste of guilt already rising up like bile behind it.

he lands with a grunt just outside his window on the fire escape, cracking it open and tip-toeing in. he stumbles into his room—still half-messy from earlier—navy button-up on the floor, rubik’s cube on the bed.

jake groans softly, one hand pressed into his side, the other slowly dragging his mask off. his jaw aches. his ribs throb. his other ankle is definitely going to bruise. but his heart? sinks when he finally turns on his phone.

6 missed messages. 3 missed calls. all from you.

Y/N (7:41PM) : hey! just got here early :)) but no rush!!

Y/N (7:57PM) : are u on ur way?

Y/N (8:03PM) : jake? is everything okay?

Y/N (8:16PM) : im going in now…meet me inside when u get here?

Y/N (9:45PM) : jake if u forgot u can just tell me

Y/N (10:12PM) : i hope ur okay

jake stares at the screen. sits on the edge of his bed, defeated. like he might fall apart.

because jake has seen a lot in his short lifetime. he’s seen back alleyways soaked in red. he’s seen broken glass way too many times a teenager ever should. he’s seen someone take a swing at him with a crowbar. he’s seen bruises bloom on his ribs and vanish before anyone could ask questions. he’s seen criminals twice his size fall, and he’s seen friends—good people—get hurt anyways.

but this? this wrecks him. this has jake in shambles.

because he missed it. he missed you. and before he could talk himself out of it—before he even knows what he’s going to say—he’s tapping on your name and pressing the call button.

it rings once. twice. three times.

“jake?” your voice is soft. cautious. like you didn’t know if you should answer, but did anyways.

jake swallows hard, voice caught in his throat.

“i’m sorry.” a pause. it hangs in the air and jake already wants to scream. “i’m so sorry,” he says again, voice low, words falling out fast, as if trying to outrun his own guilt gnawing at him. “i—i didn’t mean to—i was gonna be there, i swear i was gonna be there, but then something happened and—”

“hey,” your voice cuts through. not loud, not pressing, not angry. “it’s okay.” but it’s far from it. not in jake’s head. not when the image of you sitting alone in the dark theater has already carved itself into his brain. not when he can hear the disappointment in your voice.

jake licks his lips. he can hear the shift of your weight rustling against your bed. maybe you’re curled up somewhere in the dark. maybe you’re still in the outfit you wore to the movies. maybe you cried, and maybe you didn’t. and maybe jake will never know.

“no, no it’s not,” jake manages. he winces—at the pain growing at his ribs, at the mess he’s made, at himself. “i—i didn’t even text, i—god, i’m such an idiot—”

“you’re not an idiot, jake,” you say. and your voice is tired, but never cold. “i was just…worried.”

“i’m okay. i promise. and i promise i didn’t forget,” he whispers. “not even a little.” and there’s so much more jake wants to say.

“…did something happen?” you ask gently. jake’s fingers tighten around the phone. “yeah,” jake says, the sound barely coming out. “kind of.”

another beat passes. a small exhale from you. “do you want to talk about it?” and jake’s throat closes up.

because he wants to. god, he wants to. he wants to tell you everything—about the fight, the chase, the guy with the knife, the way his side still burns, the way he pictured you waiting outside the theater for him with every swing and every hit he took and every punch. he wants to tell you he didn’t forget. that you were the only thing on his mind the whole time.

but he can’t. he knows he can’t.

“…i—i can’t.”

you’re quiet again. but this time, jake can feel the shift even over the phone. and it’s not annoyance, it’s not cold. jake doesn’t think a single bone in your body could ever hold an ounce of bitterness. just disappointment. sadness.

“…okay.” your voice barely goes through. jake squeezes his eyes shut. his fist balls up the sheet under him. “i’m sorry,” he whispers again.

you inhale through your nose, “it’s okay. i just—i didn’t know if something happened. i didn’t know if you were hurt...or if i said something wrong.”

jake’s stomach twists—sharp and awfully close to throwing up. and this time, it’s not from the amount of times he took it to the gut today.

“no,” he blurts, too quickly but he doesn’t care. “no, it wasn’t you. you didn’t do anything wrong.”

another long, still silence.

“alright…well,” you murmur eventually, voice light in that way people use when they’re trying not to sound disappointed. “i’ll see you at school then, i guess?” 

“yeah,” jake nods, even though you can’t see him. “yes. yeah, tomorrow.”

you don’t say anything else. and neither does he. you end the call first.

and jake stays frozen, still on the edge of his bed, phone still pressed to his ear even after the line goes dead with a soft click.

he shuts his eyes, letting the dark swallow him whole. and as he groans, rubbing a tired hand over his face—wincing at the physical pain, but mentally cursing at the emotional one—jake can’t stop hearing your voice in his head.

everything is too much.

halls buzzing, lockers slamming, sneakers squeaking. the overhead lights are way too bright, and the air smells like gym socks and cafeteria mystery meat.

and it’s all overwhelming. well, it should be, at least. especially for someone who has heightened senses that feels everything a hundred times more than the regular human being. sharper, louder, closer.

but jake barely notices any of it. he’s already halfway down the corridor, eyes immediately locking in on you the second he walked through those doors. and as far as he’s concerned, nothing else matters. 

you’re at your locker, spinning the combination without looking, when jake finds himself next to you before he knows it.

he clears his throat, “hey.” you glance over. “oh,” you say, blinking. “hi.”

jake steps a little closer, a little hesitant, nerves jumbled in his gut. “look, y/n. i’m really sorry. i still am.”

you shake your head almost immediately, pulling out a book and shutting your locker gently. there’s a polite smile on your face as you look over at him, “jake. it’s okay. really.”

"it’s not—” he says, frowning, his voice coming out rougher than he intends. his ribs still hurt. his ankle’s still swollen. his face still bruised. but none of that stings half as much as the way you’re not meeting his eyes right now. “you had every right to be pissed—”

“i wasn’t pissed, jake,” you cut in gently. “i told you. you just worried me…that’s all.”

that makes jake shut up. his throat closes up. because worried might be worse. worried means you care. and he let you down anyway.

and that’s it for a moment. the silence that follows stretches a little too long—lockers clang in the background, someone yells about running late to class. the world keeps moving—but jake doesn’t.

“i’m glad you’re okay,” you finally say, voice quiet as your gaze skims across his face, lingering just a moment too long on the faint bruise along his jaw.

jake exhales slowly. tries not to flinch under the weight of your concern. because how? how can you still look at him like that—with care, with softness—when he doesn’t know what he even did to deserve it?

and the worst part is, he’s terrified he already lost you before he ever even earned you.

“…so,” he says, the word catching in his throat awkwardly yet hopeful all at once, “how about we try again?” your head tilts, an unreadable curiosity replacing the worry in your eyes.

jake lets out an uneven breath of nervous laughter as he searches your eyes. “tomorrow night? you, me. that corner diner with the insane milkshakes and greasy burgers. then we can regret it together afterwards.”

you only look at him for a beat. then, just slightly, your shoulders relax. and jake watches it happen in real time—the way the tension lifts just slightly, the curve of a small smile tugging at your lips.

like sunlight cutting through a cloud. like a sign from the universe that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t completely ruin everything.

“okay,” you breathe, a small laugh escaping with it. “that…actually does sound kinda fun. maybe not the grease part, but…yeah. at least we can suffer together.”

you then step closer, nudging him lightly with your shoulder, a playful glint in your eye, “you’re paying, by the way.”

jake grips the straps of his backpack with both his hands, smiling at you like a child offered candy. “done and done.”

“alright, well,” you step back with a glance down the hall, “i should probably head to class.”

jake nods back, eyes still watching you, “yeah, yeah, right. me too.” but he doesn’t move. just keeps watching you, unsure if he should try pinching himself.

you look back at him one last time, “jake?”

jake’s half-way on his heels when he stops at the sound of your voice again. “yeah?”

“it really is okay,” you reassure. and it’s real. honest. grounded. and everything jake needs to hear.

he smiles, a little too lopsided and voice a little too fragile when he speaks again, “i’ll see you?”

“counting on it,” you grin before turning back and making your way to class.

the rest of the day blurs for jake. he aces the pop vocabulary quiz in english, he steals some of sunghoon’s fries from his tray, he accidentally dents his locker door when closing it because he forgets he has literal super strength.

but it all passes in a haze. muted and unimportant. because the only thing that cuts through the noise is the thought of you.

every hour stalls. every minute another reminder that the best way to distract himself from the chaos of his head is the same thing that causes it in the first place—

seeing you. obviously.

“you know,” his voice comes from above, playful and easy, “i probably sacrifice at least two churros a night just making sure you get home safe instead of saving the world out there.”

“jesus christ—” you jolt back, nearly tripping over your own feet as jake—spider-man—drops down beside you later that night on your walk back home. you instinctively swat at the air as if that threatens him. at all.

“wrong guy,” he quips, sticking the landing in a crouch and straightening up. “but i do appreciate the enthusiasm.”

your face drops and give him a deadpan stare. “you really gotta stop doing that.”

“me?” jake clutches his chest dramatically through the suit before jutting a thumb behind him towards absolutely nothing. “i could totally leave right now and earn myself some churros.”

you huff out a breath, rolling your eyes even as your lips twitch towards a smile, “then why are you still here, spidey?”

“because,” jake answers simply, falling into step beside you, “it’s part of my friendly-neighborhood-spider-man-civic-duties to make sure my favorite citizen gets home safe.”

you snort, shaking your head lightly as you tilt your head at him, “fine. let’s get going then.”

jake smiles beneath the mask—too wide, too hopeful, too much. and you don’t see it, but he feels it—feels you—in every corner of himself. and jake hates how badly he wishes this could just be him. no mask, no lies, no secret. just jake. just you.

once you two make it a block or two (jake lost count), jake coughs a little too awkwardly, breaking through the quiet, “sooo…what ended up happening with that aquarium guy?”

you falter for half a second. it’s quick, but jake notices. not because his jake-tingle makes him notice everything, but because he’s watching. especially you.

you start walking again just as fast, trying to pretend the question didn’t rattle you at all before you clear your throat, “what guy?”

“y’know,” jake gestures vaguely, hands flailing, “the guy-guy. the one who took you to see the belugas—”

oh no. jake stops. shuts his mouth. he did it again. you stop too. turn to look at him slowly.

“…how do you know about the belugas?” jake looks at you. the lenses of his mask widen. then narrow. blink. squint.

“i—uh—” jake rubs the back of his neck, the suit suddenly feeling a little too tight, a little too warm. “i saw a billboard. yeah. i was swinging around the other day and—and there was this massive ad. big and blue and very…beluga-like.”

there’s a beat. reason #1115 why jake’s going to launch himself into orbit. but you buy it anyways, settling with a small side-eye before walking again, “okay…right.”

“yeah,” jake exhales under his mask, recovering with a casual shrug, “anyways. belugas…the aquarium guy?”

you hum, the sound barely audible as if you’re thinking, “he’s…cool. he’s alright.”

and jake’s heart caves in a little. okay, maybe a lot. he pretends to nod, to be chill, to not feel like maybe he’s witnessing his entire world fall apart in front of him right now and he can’t do anything about it.

“damn,” he manages to squeak out, voice lighter than how he feels. “just alright?”

you glance at him briefly before looking back at the sidewalk, “no, no—he’s…he’s really nice,” you say and jake swears he can feel the syllables in your voice individually bruise his ribs. “he’s just…confusing. i don’t know.”

and jake, because he’s jake, watches you. watches the way your voice dips quieter. watches the way your shoulders curl in just a little, watches the way your mind trails off.

“confusing…” he says slowly, carefully, testing the ice. “like you…don’t like him?” and jake doesn’t know why he asked that. he doesn’t know if he wants to hear the answer.

“yes. no. i—i don’t know. i think i do.” a small pause. you kick a pebble. “but sometimes it’s hard to tell if he…if he actually cares? or if i made the whole thing up in my head.”

jake blinks hard. looks away. swallows. bites the inside of his cheek to keep everything in. because you didn’t make it up. not even a little. and god, if only you knew how desperately he cares—how much of his life he’s unintentionally rewritten around you.

his heart screams to tell you everything. that this is his chance, that he can fix everything right here, right now. but his brain knows better.

“i think…you should give him a chance.”

you look up, surprised. and jake doesn’t know why—but that hurts too.

“seriously,” his eyes flick forward again. “he’d be lucky. you’re smart. and thoughtful. and…even though you have the survival instincts and awareness of a sea turtle, you’re…fun. and honestly kind of unbelievable.”

and for a spilt second, jake forgets. forgets that he’s not just jake. forgets he’s not just a teenage boy talking to his crush. forgets that to you, right now, he’s not the awkward guy that stammers next to you in chemistry and accidentally breaks glass beakers in his hand. forgets that he’s spider-man—the one you seem to trust a little more freely than the boy who let you down.

and that’s what hurts the most. because when you glance up at him now—there’s that feeling again. the pocket of air that only ever exists between you and him. a space that feels warmer than the rest of the world, like the universe took a breath and exhaled only around the two of you.

and it’s always there, somehow—whether he’s wearing the mask or not. whether it’s spider-man and you eating cold pizza on your fire escape. whether it’s you and jake laughing over a lame pun your teacher used in class. and jake knows that air. craves it. has memorized the shape of silence it holds.

but right now, it feels more like spider-man gets to live in it. not jake. and that realization twists something sharp and quiet inside his chest.

because jake’s the one who likes you. jake’s the one who knows you like your matcha lattes even with the grainy oat milk that makes the texture weird. the one who knows you only ever take chemistry quizzes with your favorite pink pen because you think it gives you good luck. the one who gets to share sour patch kids with you under the lab table when you both think no one is looking. but jake’s the one who messed up.

and spider-man’s the one who gets to be here now.

he looks at you—you standing there, eyes soft, smile just a little sad—and he’s willing himself not to say anything stupid. not to ruin the moment. not to cross that line he drew. not to let it get to his head every time he realizes the only way he can be close to you right now…is by being someone else.

and so jake locks in.

the next morning, he wakes up early—which, in jake terms, really means waking up at his regular time and only hitting snooze twice instead of his usual six. he throws on a hoodie that he sniffed to make sure it smells like detergent and not like it’s overdue for a wash, looks in the mirror, and brushes his hair. like actually brushes it, and not just run his hands through it and hopes for the best. he walks the full twenty minutes to the café where he studied with you, orders your usual—the matcha latte with the grainy oat milk—adds a smiley face and heart on the side of the cup next to your name, and books it to school. he arrives early to school, for once, and goes straight to your locker—not before dodging a frisbee mid-air, a frantic girl running with an art project in hand, and a couple making out aggressively by the vending machine.

when you close your locker door shut, you look up surprised—jake in your view, holding the matcha out like an olive branch. if olive branches wore oversized hoodies and had a mild existential crisis fifteen minutes ago.

you blink. then you smile and take the cup. jake gives himself a mental high five. nailed it. and when you softly ask him to walk to you to your first class? jake nearly does a backflip. (he doesn’t. he plays it cool. barely.)

when chemistry rolls around later in the day, jake’s the first one to say hi this time. when the teacher is busy not looking, jake leans in and says a really, really stupid joke about ionic bonds and valence electrons and regrets it immediately but you laugh. you laugh and jake’s day is immediately better than any other day he’s had this week. at some point, you nudge his knee and when jake looks down—your hand is there, holding out a pack of sour patch kids. jake takes it as a good sign. or maybe a sign of impending life-long romance. either way, he takes one and tries not to make it weird. (and he still does. he accidentally eats two at once and chokes a little. but it’s fine.)

when the bell rings and class is over, you’re both packing up when you glance over and smile at him, “I’m excited to see you later tonight.” and jake thinks he misheard. thinks he’s hearing things because just three weeks ago, the most he’s ever said to you was either something about the periodic table or…running out of the classroom after breaking a glass beaker with his bare hands. but then your hand lands on the sleeve of his hoodie and gives him the slightest squeeze, and jake malfunctions.

jake gives you a thumbs up. because he panicked. he panicked and thumbs-upped (he will never learn). but you smile anyways and say your cute little goodbye before leaving class.

and the rest of the school day is irrelevant to jake because the rest of the school day doesn’t involve you. well, except in his head. sure, jake goes to lunch. sunghoon won’t stop talking about the new valorant expansion pack and how his computer lags everytime he tries to peek a corner—but jake’s just thinking about how your hair looked in the sunlight this morning when you asked him to walk you to class. sure, jake gets his pop quiz back in history with a big, fat, b minus written on top in red marker. normally, he’d spiral, because he really should be getting his history grade up. and normally, he’d wince at the mental image of his mom scolding him later over it—but he’s too busy replaying your laugh in his head. sure, jake goes to robotics club after school. he’s supposed to help calibrate the parts for their new battle bot but he accidentally installs a cord backwards, and now the bot is stuck running in circles—because jake sim is currently preoccupied.

preoccupied mentally drafting a speech that goes something like, “hey, i like you. a lot. possibly way more than i should but i don’t really care because you always smell good and your smile makes me want to rip my hair out and the memory of kissing you is in my dreams everynight. can i be your boyfriend? please? maybe? i’ll buy you weird oat milk drinks forever and buy you more beluga stickers even though, respectfully, you probably shouldn’t own any more.”

it’s still a work in progress.

and later that evening, jake is pacing back and forth in his bedroom, mentally preparing himself for tonight. his spider-man suit lies crumpled somewhere in the back of his closet half-covered by a flannel, a calculus textbook, and one sock he still can’t find the missing half to. he makes a mental note to wash the suit. eventually. later. not tonight. tomorrow. whatever. not important.

because tonight, he’s just jake. just jake, a regular teenage boy. just jake, a regular teenage boy with no responsibilities except to make his crush and hopefully soon-to-be-girlfriend happy.

just jake, nervously fixing the collar of his nicest hoodie, debating whether or not to wear the cologne his mom got him two birthdays ago. just jake, combing his fingers through his hair and wondering if you like it better pushed back, down, up, messy, styled, or, hell, shaved off entirely because he will do it if it gets him one (1) smile from you. just jake, practically grinning to himself because he’s going to see you.

jake checks the time again. 7:24PM. he’s early, which is good. which is the plan. because early gives him time to get to the diner first. early gives him time to find the best booth, which is the one near the corner window so you two can watch the sunset together and sit far from the kitchen door to avoid the smell of peanut oil. early gives him time to breathe and mentally run through everything he wants to say.

hi y/n. you look really pretty. i missed you—wait no, you saw her literally three hours ago, don’t say that—i was thinking we could split the strawberry milkshake together—wait is she lactose intolerant?

jake grabs his phone, wallet, the flowers he picked up at the corner deli on the way home. it’s wrapped in too much plastic, a little crooked, one of the carnations is sticking out, but it’s pink and soft and entirely you coded.

and jake makes his way to the diner, sneakers scuffing against the sidewalk, heart doing backflips in his ribcage as he turns the corner and sees the neon lights of the diner come into view just a few more blocks down. one of the lights of the sign is flickering in and out, going back and forth from diner to din_r. it’s perfect. you’re perfect. he just needs to get there.

buzz. buzz. jake looks down at his phone in hand.

incoming call : GUY IN CHAIR 🧠

“yo, i’m gonna call you in, like, a few hours,” jake answers without thinking, barely breaking his pace, “i’m on my way to the—” “jake.” and sunghoon’s voice is tense. urgent. the kind of urgent that tightens something in jake’s chest. jake stops.

“it’s bad. really, really bad,” sunghoon’s voice is strained and jake doesn’t like it. doesn’t like that feeling in his gut. the pull, the weight, the way his skin pricks, the way every muscle in his body tenses.

jake shuts his eyes closed. exhales sharply. runs a hand through his hair. “how bad?”

“like…warehouse near the port is up in flames and there’s a hostage situation and no one’s close enough to get there in time.”

and just like that, jake feels it. the way the air changes, that familiar shift in gravity. that tug in his chest like a string being pulled into two opposite directions.

jake doesn’t say anything. he looks back down the street, stares at the diner. he’s so close. so close to getting there. so close to getting to you. “i can’t, sunghoon. not tonight,” he swallows hard, his voice cracking on the words. “i—i don’t even have my suit.”

there’s a beat. “jake,” sunghoon says, softer yet not any less urgent. “they’ve got kids.”

jake’s eyes flutter closed again. presses the heel of his hand to his forehead like he can press the guilt away. he doesn’t move. and for a second—just one—he thinks maybe, maybe, he could keep walking. just this once. just tonight.

but he knows better.

the responsibility. the pull. the price of the mask. it’s never not there.

his grip tightens around the bouquet. the plastic crinkles. he sighs, slips out a curse word or two under his breath, and—

“jesus christ,” jake mumbles, already turning on his heel. “tell the fire department i’m on my way. and tell them to hurry.”

and jake’s already running—sprinting back in the opposite direction back to his apartment. sunghoon hangs up and jake?

jake doesn’t stop. he doesn’t even look back.

jake doesn’t know what time it is. doesn’t care. smoke still clings to his skin, the faint sting of ash burned into the fabric of his suit. his lungs ache, and his hands are scraped raw from tearing open too many metal doors and carrying too many people to safety.

but he’s alive. they’re alive. 

and yet. all jake can think about—is you.

you, maybe waiting in that booth. you, maybe sipping a milkshake through a striped straw, twirling it slowly and glancing at the door every couple minutes. you, maybe checking your phone. frowning. getting up. leaving.

god.

he doesn’t even stop to change. just swings home, crawls through his fire escape, throws a hoodie over his soot-covered suit, runs a wet hand through his hair, and jumps back out the fire escape again. he swings and swings until he lands in an alleyway near the diner, tripping over a trash can and throwing a curse word at it as he stumbles into the street and—

runs into you.

your arms are crossed tight against your chest, your head’s down. you’re walking the other way, unaware of the chaos behind you.

jake’s voice cracks before it can even form your name. “—y/n. y/n, i—”

you stop mid-step, your head turning at the sound. and when you turn and see him, you pause—the expression on your face unreadable.

“jake?” your brows furrow. “what the hell—where did you even come from? and why do you smell like—” you stop yourself. exhale shortly. shake your head. “you know what? never mind. i—i’m going home.”

you turn again. and jake panics. he starts after you, picking up his pace to match yours “wait—look, y/n, i’m so, so, so sorry. i swear i can explain—”

that’s when you stop in your tracks. you turn, finally facing him. and the emotions written on your face are everywhere—confused, hurt, tired, and somewhere beneath all of that—still soft.

“okay,” you say, looking him in the eye. “then explain.”

jake opens his mouth. closes it. he swallows. his lips open again.

"i—" his throat burns. and it’s not from inhaling a building’s worth of smoke from earlier. "i can’t. it's...complicated."

silence.

you stare at him. eyes wide. quiet. sad. disappointed. the kind that hurts jake more than if you were angry.

when you speak up again, your voice is quiet, barely above a whisper, “look, jake. i don’t know what’s going on with you. and i’m not mad. but…you’re just really confusing. and clearly, you’ve got something going on.”

you take a breath and fold your arms tighter around yourself, “—and while this was fun and all…i just—i don’t know if this is going to work out anyways.”

jake blinks. his stomach drops. he takes a step closer. “wait—no, y/n, i—”

and you keep going. “plus,” you let out a small laugh but it’s the worst kind of laugh—the kind that’s awkward and forced, like it’s there only to preemptively make up for the words coming after. “i’m just gonna be honest with you.”

jake doesn’t breathe. you look him in the eyes.

“i think i like someone else anyways.”

and that does it. jake’s world tilts sideways. the words hit him like a punch—no, worse, because he’s felt bad punches before. this feels like that moment in freefall right before the web catches you, except this time there’s no web. just the fall.

“you…like someone else?” is all jake manages to let out before the words get caught in his throat. he thinks he might throw up.

you nod. slowly. hesitantly. and jake feels like he’s unraveling.

he doesn’t know what to say. he wants to scream, he wants to cry, he wants to tear his stupid hoodie off and tell you everything. that he missed the date because he was saving lives. that he wanted to tell you he’s falling for you. that he bought the damn bouquet and practiced a stupid speech and picked the booth with the best view and no peanut oil smell. that he only missed it because he was trying to be good. good enough. worthy.

but all that comes out is air. because he can’t tell you. because he shouldn’t tell you. because spider-man doesn’t get to be selfish. because jake doesn’t get to be just jake.

your fingers fidget as you glance back down at the ground. you rock slightly on your heels before your voice breaks the silence again, “but hey. no hard feelings, yeah? friends?”

and that might be the final blow. and jake doesn’t even know how to respond. his brain stutters. because what is he supposed to say—”friends? no? actually, i wanted to ask you to be mine tonight, and now i can’t even tell you why i missed it?”

so instead, jake does what jake always does. he pretends. he nods, forces a smile—too quick, too wide, the kind that pulls at his cheeks but doesn’t reach his eyes.

“yeah,” he says. his voice cracks, but he clears his throat like that’ll fix anything. “yeah. of course. friends.”

you nod back and offer a tight smile, “i’ll see you at school, then. goodnight.”

then you turn. and you walk away. jake doesn’t move. the weight of your footsteps fade, but the words still echo in his ears.

friends. someone else. no hard feelings.

his chest feels hollow. like someone scraped everything out and forgot to fill it back in. like he just lost something he never even got the chance to have in the first place.

and spider-man’s the one who saved the day. and it should feel like a win, but it doesn’t. because although spider-man saved the day, jake’s the one who let you down. 

jake was too late. too late, too secretive. too much of everything and still not enough of what you needed.

“maybe it’s not as bad as we think.” sunghoon’s voice is cautious, but not exactly convincing from his slouched position in jake’s desk chair, spinning slowly like he’s debating whether now’s a good time to leave (it’s not. he’s been trying for the past hour. jake made him stay.)

jake lets out a guttural groan in response, already face down on his bed, limbs sprawled out in distress. a pillow is smushed over his head, in attempt to block out the agonizing, soul-crushing reality that is his life.

“it’s over, sunghoon,” jake muffles into his mattress. “over with a capital O. capital V. all the damn letters—over before it even started.”

jake flips over, sending the pillow to the other side of the room, “she likes someone else,” he says hollowly, staring blankly at the ceiling. “i was so preoccupied with everything else that i didn’t even notice she—who else could she even—”

jake cuts himself off mid-rant. because it doesn’t matter. doesn’t matter who you like. doesn’t matter how it happened.

it just matters that it’s not him. that you like someone. and it’s not jake.

jake presses a hand to his head, “god. i’m such an idiot.”

sunghoon lets out a low whistle and starts fiddling with one of jake’s pens, “okay. you’re not an idiot. you did what you had to do, and you did the right thing.”

jake lets out a small sigh, quiet and defeated, finally looking at his friend, “but when do i get to stop sacrificing to do the right thing?”

silence stretches out between them. the ceiling fan above them whirs. the clang of metal pots and pans echo from down the hall—which means jake’s mom is attempting to make meatloaf again. which means the fire alarm will probably go off in ten minutes, maybe eight. the room smells faintly of jake’s two-birthdays-ago cologne, and the burnt tinge of unwashed spandex crumpled somewhere in the room.

sunghoon taps the pen against the desk, eventually breaking the silence, “so talk to her. as spidey.”

jake sits up in his bed and gives sunghoon a look.

“talk to her as spider-man, tell her to give ‘jake’ another chance,” sunghoon repeats, throwing air quotes around his friend’s name.

jake gestures to the ceiling. the wall. the existential void of absolute nothingness around him. “sunghoon. that’s…messed up. morally. ethically. logistically. probably emotionally.”

“i mean,” sunghoon shrugs casually as if this is the answer to all of jake’s problems, “spidey’s already friends with her, anyways. and you told me yourself—it feels like she’s closer to him than she is to you.”

jake throws both hands in the air. “WE’RE THE SAME PERSON.”

he then lets out an inhuman noise and flops backwards onto his bed again, “whatever, man. this is probably for the best anyway,” he mutters. “spider-man should’ve never gotten involved in the first place. it’s safer this way. especially for her.”

a beat passes. jake stares up at the glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to his ceiling from the sixth grade. he blinks once.

“plus, let’s be honest. i’d probably screw it up more somehow. say something dumb and let it slip that it’s been me all along.” jake pauses. “—or honestly, she probably already knows i’m spider-man. which is even worse, because now she probably hates both versions of me.”

sunghoon’s quiet for a moment. just keeps spinning slowly in jake’s chair, the wheels creaking faintly. “…so what? you’re just gonna stop walking her back home now?” he finally says, lifting a brow. “isn’t that for her safety too?”

and yeah. yeah, he has a point. so jake doesn’t stop.

he just stops being seen. and that’s what jake does for the next few days.

so jake falls into this routine without really meaning to. he goes home from school, puts on his suit (it’s clean now, don’t worry), and spends the next few hours either returning stolen bikes or webbing carjackers to brick walls or showing tourists the right direction.

and somehow, someway, jake still finds himself in the same spot at the end of the day—sitting crouched on the ledge of the rooftop across from your bus stop, a hoodie pulled over his mask, hands stuffed in his sleeves.

at 10:32PM, your bus rolls up right on the dot.

at 10:33PM, you step off. same oversized totebag on your shoulder. same way you pull your phone out and unlock it in the same three motions. same streetlight that flickers just before you pass it.

and jake watches you go home. makes sure you’re okay. makes sure you’re safe. all without making himself seen.

and only when your apartment window lights up does he finally feel okay, finally swings away, the wind cold and sharp in his lungs—but not as cold as the air around him whenever you’re not there.

he does this again the next night. and the next. and the next.

and at school, jake falls into rhythm here, too—if you can call it that.

you still sit next to him in chemistry. still copy formulas off the board. still hand in the same worksheets, laugh politely when the teacher makes a pun about avogadro’s number.

but you don’t share your sour patch kids anymore. and jake doesn’t make any stupid chemistry jokes to make you laugh either, because…he can’t think of any. because all the funny ones were ones he saved for you, and they don’t feel worth saying out loud anymore.

you talk to him, sure. when you need the answer to question six, or to ask if he got the quiz grade back. but there’s space between you now. quiet, aching space. and jake doesn’t know how to fill it.

but by the end of the week— all routines fly out the window.

because it’s friday night. and jake swings to the usual rooftop across from your bus stop, a half-eaten churro in one hand—courtesy of the sweet old lady who bought it for him after he showed her where her train station is. because it’s 10:30PM when jake lands on the roof, tossing his backpack to the side when he looks up and—

he freezes.

because sitting there, cross-legged on the ledge—on his ledge—backlit by the moonlight and the yellow glow of the streetlamps below—is you.

jake chokes. he stumbles back, the eyes of his mask blown wide immediately, “what the—y/n?! what are you—how did you—wh—”

and you’re sitting there, blinking and staring at him, unfazed. like you’ve been waiting. you don’t move. you just raise a brow.

“okay, so first you start walking me home every night, then you stop showing up, but still choose to stalk me from a distance? i don’t get you, spider-man.”

and jake is so confused right now. “i—what’s going on?” jake sputters, arms half-raised in shock and disbelief. “how are you even here right now, how did you even get up here?”

“you’re not exactly subtle, y’know,” you deadpan, ignoring his question as you tilt your head up at him. “every night you walk me home? i know this is where you drop your bag off and wait for me to get off that bus. i know you sit on that rooftop across from my place to make sure i’m okay every night. your silhouette is literally not that subtle.” then you gesture vaguely around the rooftop. “also, the webs everywhere? kinda a dead giveaway, don’t you think?”

jake’s mouth opens. nothing comes out. and if it weren’t for the mask, he’d be catching flies.

you stand now, arms crossed tight as you take a step closer to him. you take a deep breath before you ramble, “i don’t know. i’m just—i’m so confused, spider-man. i told the guy i like that i liked someone else. and i don’t even know if that was true or if i just panicked. but the truth is, i don’t even know if the guy i actually like likes me back, or even knows how to talk to me, or if i’m just completely losing it—”

“—wait.” jake tilts his head, still frozen in his spot. “wait, which guy? like the guy-guy? aquarium guy?”

you groan and start pacing, squeezing your eyes shut like you’re trying to make sense of the situation as well.

“yes. yes, of course the guy-guy, aquarium guy—who else would i be talking about? there’s no other guy—”

“you just said you told the guy-guy you liked someone else.”

“i did! i think! i—look, i don’t know! maybe i said it just to protect myself from the fact that the guy-guy doesn’t like me back. but now i might actually like this other guy—”

“okay, okay—hold on, back up,” jake steps back to process. holds up both his hands. “so there’s guy-guy you maybe like…and now a new guy…?”

jake’s mind is reeling. his insides might come out. who is the new guy? is jake even guy-guy? no. yes. maybe? jake has to be guy-guy. or else he’s gonna scold sunghoon for being very unoriginal for the aquarium date idea.

you stop pacing. you turn to him with wide eyes, like you’re mentally begging yourself to shut up, don’t do it, but your mouth moves anyways.

“…you,” your voice is quiet. barely audible. but yet, so loud and clear and more than anything else jake has ever sensed before. “i like you.”

and for a second there, jake thinks maybe he misheard, because it sounded a lot like you just said you liked him. spider-man. and there’s absolutely no way. there’s no way you said that. there’s no way you meant that.

there’s no way this is happening.

there’s no way the girl he’s been hopelessly staring at from across the cafeteria for god knows how long now, the girl he’s been walking home at night to make sure she’s safe even she didn’t know, the girl that witnessed him choke on two sour patch kids at once in the middle of chemistry—is standing here. on this rooftop. telling him that this entire time he’s been tangled up in a love triangle…with himself?

and jake? jake is actively malfunctioning. he says nothing. he does nothing. he thinks nothing.

and you seem to take jake’s stunned silence as pure horror— because you panic.

“oh my god. oh my god—i’m insane,” you whisper, moreso to yourself than him. “i knew it. i knew that guy-guy shattered my brain and messed me up so bad i’m actually losing it.”

you start pacing again. and jake’s legs don’t work, so he just watches.

“like—i don’t even know what you look like under that mask. what if you’re, like…thirty? what if you don’t even have a nose?” your voice rises in disbelief at your own choices. “what if i’m just projecting everything onto this idea of you, because you’re sweet and funny and walk me home and call me your favorite citizen and—god, i’m actually going delusional—”

jake takes a few more steps back, shaking his head once, then twice, like he’s trying to physically undo the entire past five minutes of his life. or reset his entire nervous system.

his hands fly to his hair as he turns away from you, staring up at the sky, muttering incoherent words to himself before he lets out a groan, “i—what the hell—i can’t believe i’m doing this, i’m gonna hurl. oh god—”

then, he turns around. takes one unsteady step towards you. his heart is racing. but without another word—

he yanks the mask off. and his hair is a mess (from the mask). his cheeks flushed like he’s been sweating (he has). his eyes wide like he’s terrified (he is).

“y/n.” your jaw drops. you blink once. twice. you stare at his face. at his hair. at jake.

“…JAKE?!”

your voice echos—loud. probably throughout the entire city, if jake’s being honest. your arms flail so wildly it looks like your brain is about to evacuate your body. you blink hard, like if you do it enough times, this fever dream might just break.

“are you kidding me right now?!”

jake flinches. his eye twitches.

you immediately start pacing again—back and forth, borderline hyperventilating, “YOU? you’re spider-man?! YOU??” you shout again, turning to point at him like he committed fraud. “how—hell—you literally broke a glass beaker last month—this can’t be real—”

jake raises his hands defensively, “okay, to be fair, you caught me off guard by asking me—”

“OH MY GOD,” you groan, throwing a hand into your hair, fisting a small bunch. “i told you i liked you while you were you pretending not to be you. that’s…that’s messed up, jake!”

“okay—yes, i see how that was a little—”

“you…you called me pretty but ignored my texts but still walked me home that night and…i’m so confused right now.”

jake scratches the back of his neck with one hand, the other dropping uselessly to his side, mask still in hand, “well…yeah. but also, like, i thought you picked up on it.”

“WHY WOULD I THINK YOU’RE SPIDER-MAN?” you practically screech, your steps halting as you spin to face him, full disbelief painted all over your face.

jake blinks. “i don’t know! i figured the voice, the walk…literally anything—”

“i don’t listen to people’s walks, jake!” you pace faster now. like if you don’t move, you might actually implode.

jake makes a desperate, helpless noise before he tries again, “look, y/n—can..can you just stop for a second and—”

“no, jake! i’m spiraling!” your voice hits a new level of pitch that makes jake wince. again. “i told two different guys i liked them this week and it turns out they’re the same guy and somehow that makes it worse?! do you know how emotionally unstable this makes me? i ranted to you about YOU—and you let me! oh, you’re so done for jake si—”

and that’s when he does it.

jake shoots a web. it catches your waist. and your rant cuts off mid-sentence as you’re suddenly pulled into him.

with a small yelp, you crash into his chest, hands reflexively splayed across his alarmingly solid chest. your nose is inches from his collarbone, and jake’s hands settle on your waist, immediately grounding you in place.

and you don’t have time to orient yourself—and jake doesn’t give himself time to pause or doubt it before he does it.

jake kisses you.

no hesitation, no overthinking, just all of jake—crashing his lips onto yours, immediately silencing you.

and you don’t stop him. you can’t stop him.

because your lips are already moving against his, messy and fast and a little too much. your fingers fist into the fabric of his suit like you’re trying to anchor yourself and you swear—you swear—you can feel his heartbeat under your fingertips. and all of the sudden, you’re hyperaware of everything. how his mouth is warm and desperate and tastes a little like cinnamon churros and familiarity. how the air between you is sharp, your noses brushing, breath mingling in short gasps—all too much and not enough all at once.

and when you pull away briefly to take a breath—realization hits you. your palm smacks against his chest once. then again. then rapid fire.

“wait, wait. wait. did you just web me?” the words tumble out of you in a half-laugh, half-accusation. and to be frank, you don’t know if you should be angry or attracted right now.

and jake’s still breathless, forehead practically resting against yours, as you feel his chest rise and fall with each shaky exhale. his voice is low, steady. a little hoarse.

“y/n—” jake whispers, so close you can feel the shape of the words against your mouth, “—shut up.”

and then he kisses you again. slower, this time. deeper. like an apology, like a confession, like something that feels way too big to name.

jake’s hand curls tighter around your waist, the other sliding up gently, carefully, until his fingers find the back of your neck, holding you there like he’s afraid you’ll disappear in his hold.

and all you can do is lean in. closer and closer, like if you press hard enough, you’ll disappear into him. disappear into that small pocket of space that only exists between you and him and never come back out.

it’s uncoordinated, a little too frantic. but it’s everything. the shock, the nerves, the confusion all blur into static. and this time, when jake pulls back, just barely, you cant help the tiny, unintentional whine that escapes your lips as you chase his without thinking.

jake exhales a breathless, shaky chuckle against you before he kisses you again. a quicker one this time. and then another. then one to the corner of your mouth. and then your jaw. and then he’s pulling back again, this time slower, eyes fluttering open just as yours do too, his hands still around you, the web still holding you against him.

“hi,” jake whispers. it’s soft and raw and boyish. and so, so real. “it’s me.”

his thumb brushes along your jaw as he swallows hard. your heart stumbles, your eyes searching his face—his stupidly soft brown eyes, the little scar on his chin, the mole near his cheek you’ve always noticed. it’s all him.

the boy who walked you home. the boy who doesn’t know how to talk to you in class. the boy you fell for. all this time.

you’re still pressed to his chest, body still tangled up in his arms, lips still tingling, mind still fuzzy. your voice comes out in a whisper, “i can’t believe it’s been you this entire time.”

he nods, a shy, crooked smile on his face, “it’s always been me.” and then his expression falters, just slightly. “i didn’t mean to lie to you. or miss our dates. i just…i didn’t know how to be this,” he gestures to his suit, “and how to be just jake, either.”

and you just blink, unmoving in his arms, still a little breathless. because there’s something in his voice. something fragile.

“so…so that day you missed school? and you were all beat up?”

jake presses his lips together, guilt painted all over his face, “yeah, i actually did get into a fight. i lied about that part.”

your eyes narrow, “with who, jake?”

jake shrugs like it’s no big deal. “some guy with six arms. real tentacle problem. you should’ve seen the damage i did on him though.”

your mouth gapes.

“i’m kidding—” jake laughs, eyes sparkling now as his nose slightly bumps against yours. “it was a bank robber. kind of. honestly, it’s all a blur now. all i remember was thinking about kissing you that same night after the aquarium.”

you let out a scoff, part processing, part amused. “and the diner night? when you suddenly showed up out of no where?”

jake nods, pulling you in just a little tighter. “suit was under my hoodie the entire time. not fun, by the way. spandex gets sweaty…fast.”

“gross,” you mutter, scrunching your nose as you instinctively tug your hands away from his chest—only to stop halfway, leaving them right where they are anyways. then, after a beat, you slap his chest again. “i can’t believe you told me to give yourself another chance. i don’t know if i should be mad at you or kiss you again.”

jake makes a face and gives a tiny shrug, “well, if you’re asking for my opinion…” he tilts his head. “i definitely have an answer. but i might be biased.”

you roll your eyes, letting out a small laugh as your hands find the back of his neck now. “this is insane, jake. you’re genuinely insane,” you whisper quietly, eyes flickering from the spider emblem on his chest then back to his face.

jake grins down at you, eyes bright, one hand brushing a stray strand of hair away from your cheek.

“yeah? well you like both jake and spider-man,” he tilts his head. “so i think that makes you just as insane.”

you gasp dramatically, smacking his arm like you’re offended. jake laughs, that easy, familiar sound filling the room between you—and the air goes warm again.

there it is. that space. the one he’s always had with you—except now, it’s his. fully his. not just spider-man’s, not a half-version hidden behind a mask.

just jake, who also happens to wear spandex and save the city. just jake, who sucks at high school history and has feelings for the pretty girl in his chemistry class. and just jake—who finally doesn’t have to choose between you and the suit.

you breathe in, watching him carefully. “so…” you begin. “now what?”

jake pauses. and then he smirks. that boyish, reckless, completely jake smirk.

”how about i take you on a proper date?”

your brows lift, your head tilts. “yeah.” you beam up at him. “i’d like that. tomorrow?”

jake shakes his head slowly, leaning in briefly with a mischievous smile on his face.

“now.” you blink. “…now?”

“JAKE—” your scream cuts through the sky as you’re being flung between skyscrapers, clinging yourself around jake’s neck, legs around his torso like your life depends on it.

which, to be fair, is quite literally the case right now.

“—WE’RE NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN—”

jake just laughs, a breathless, exhilarating sound—his mask back on, one arm tight around you as the other shoots another web out, latching onto the building you two swing past.

“are you sure?” he yells over the fast wind. “because you look like you’re having so much fun—“

“JAKE—“

another swing. another scream. another terrified, stupid, perfect laugh.

the city blurs below. the stars blur above. and somewhere in between it all, you feel his heartbeat against yours.

jake’s grip tightens—instinctively, protectively—as you fly past neon signs and glowing windows and the tiny people beneath and the hum of a city that never sleeps.

and in that moment, your panic settles into something else. something warmer.

so don’t try to stop him.

you just hold on tighter.

𖢥⁺₊°˖ tenk u again for all the love & support, always <3 (& special ty for my love ronnie @heejamas for the beluga dolphins fun fact & being my support throughout this entire proces <333 hehehe)

m.list here!