Kyun :):

You sigh, pulling away the covers which Riki put on you before leaving and slowly get up only to be greeted by a red stain on the white sheets.

Great. you thought as you groan removing the sheets and taking them to the bathroom.

You never let anyone clean your bloody, period-stained sheets. Even though the workers wouldn't mind, you just didn't feel morally right doing that.

And so, you washed the sheets and took a bath.

Drying your hair, you come out of the shower feeling a bit relaxed. You quickly get dressed in a basic white tee and linen pants.

You didn't have much work today, only a brief meeting which you could attend at home, so you decided to not to go to your office.

As you sat at the dining table, Bisco came running to you and pawing on your calf, so you'd pick him up.

You chuckle at that and settle him on your lap, petting his back while the chef arranged the breakfast infront of you. You quickly text Riki that you are awake and continue eating.

After breakfast, you went straight to the couch and plopped on it unable to bear the pains. You lay like that for a few mins when a text interrupts you.

Riki: Charity meeting at 5p.m. Js reminding you. I'll be home at like 3.

You: alrrr!!

you lay your head again on the couch and close your eyes and then-

Riki: What'd you have for breakfast?

You: Porridgeee

Riki: Healthy. Was it good?

You: Veryyyyyy Riki: Mhm. Good. You: What are you doing?? Riki: In a meeting rn You: ...And ur texting admist it? Riki: Wanted to check in to see if you're doing okay Arent you on your periods

You: ...Howd u knoww

Riki: Tracker. You: You saw my tracker? Riki: On my phone, baby. i have your period tracker on mine. You: Oh. why Riki: Alright, ill talk to you after meeting. ❤️

You smile at that. It's as if everyday, he finds new ways to surprise you.

After attending the meeting, you don't know when, but you fall asleep on the couch with your body curled. You don't notice neither the time passing nor Riki coming home.

Walking in, he was surprised. Cause usually, whenever you're at home during his arrival, you'd come with Bisco in your arms to greet him but today, he just saw one of the workers who wanted to help him with his blazer which he politely declined and asked about you. "Where's Y/n?"

"Mrs.Nishimura is sleeping on the couch, sir" the worker replies and leaves.

He keept his bag and blazer away as he went into the living room. He saw you curled up on the couch, clutching your stomach which pained his heart.

He slowly crossed the distance and kneeled down so he was the same level as you and caressed your cheek slowly.

You wake up at that, "Oh? You're back?"

"Mhm, how'd you feel" he asks, his thumb caressing your cheekbone.

"Oh I'm alright, just a bit of pain." You lie. Both of you know your pains are much more severe than you make them to seem.

He leans to press a kiss on your forehead and moves back, "We can skip the event tonight."

"No, I'm fine besides it's a really important event. Your mother emphasized that alot." you say, taking a hold of his hand.

He intertwines them, "Oh, I'm sure she'll understand when if I tell her the reason"

"No, Riki its alright. Maybe we can come off early?"

He nods immediately at that, "Definitely."

The drive to the gala was quiet.

As you felt that you look bloated even though Riki assured you that you didn't, you chose to wear some simple trousers and a silk button up which look elegant but still comfortable enough for you.

Riki's hand was on your thigh, lightly pressing along your leg to ease some of the soreness.

You both enter the Gala as multiple people already come to greet you.

As the night continues, your cramps become ten times more painful. You could barely manage to stand properly without any support.

Though Riki's warm hand was right on your back all the time, the pain didn't subside. You ball your fists tight, your nails digging into your palm trying to contain the pain.

The cramps only increased and your tears started to form before you could even stop. And before you could even feel like crying, Riki's hand suddenly pressed firm against your waist and he pulled you closer.

He looked down at you, his chest tightening at your glassy eyes.

'Shouldn't have come here in the first place' he thought.

He pulls you a bit closer and rubs circles on your back trying to ease you out of it. "It's alright, do you wanna go home?" he whispers to you looking down.

You shake your head as a no and snuggle closer to him wanting to feel his warmth. He presses his hand flat against your back and presses a kiss on your forehead.

"No, its okay. Is it hurting really bad?"

'dumbfuck, ofc it is' he thought to himself

You just nod at his question as he rubs your back slowly.

"Lets go home, yeah? we can drink chocolate milk and sleep. you want that?"

You hesisitate for a moment but then nod.

"Alright," he says and pecks your lips and continues, "Go to the car, I'll come in a second."

"Okay" was the only thing you could muster up.

"Want me to help you?" he asks as you move away letting go of your back only to hold your hand.

"No, im fine." you say and you leave, unable to handle the pain anymore.

What both of you didnt know was people were watching this all along. He couldnt care less, not really.

He engaged himself in one last group to talk as they pulled him in.

"Oh Mr.Nishimura, what an event to see you with your wife!" an old man says laughing.

A woman in her early twenties nods as if he just said the sun rises in the east. "Oh truly, truly. Haha oh my god, did you see how she left?"

Another one joins, sipping her champagne. She looks at him and goes, "Its cute, really. But gosh, she's such a crybaby,"

Riki pauses at that.

He looks at the woman with his cold stare.

The room quietens and everyone notices.

"What did you say?" he asks, his voice cutting sharp through the cold air.

The woman forced a smile. "I was just joking."

"No."

Riki took a slow step forward.

"What did you say?"

The woman stutters, "C-Calm down Mr.Nishimura, i-it was-"

The confidence drained from her face.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

Riki's voice remained calm.

"So you call everyone whose kind, sensitive and genuine a crybaby?"

Another step.

He takes a breath, "You know what is a joke?"

"I've watched people spend years building a reputation."

His eyes returned to hers.

"And about thirty seconds destroying it."

The woman went pale. Nobody laughed anymore. Nobody even breathed.

Riki checked his watch casually as if he's waiting for his car.

"As long as we're discussing people's weaknesses, I suppose we could continue."

Silence.

"I could tell everyone here exactly what yours are."

The woman looked like she wanted the floor to swallow her. Not because it felt like a threat, no. because it sounded like he actually would do that.

"But my wife would be disappointed in me."

Riki straightened his sleeve.

"Be grateful she has a kinder heart than I do."

Then he walked away. Without raising his voice, without any dramatics, puiting her right to her place.

"What took you so long" you ask as he gets in the car.

"Oh you know, just some business." he says hovering over you to secure your seatbelt.

You nod as the driver drives to your house.

Both of you freshen up and immediately get on bed after some really good hot chocolate that riki asked the chef to make so it'd be ready by the time you both are done with your night routine.

You turn off the lights and charge your phones as he pulls you closer by your arm, you immediately hug him, settling into a comfortable position.

His arm wraps around your waist as his hand slips underneath your pajama top and a bit under your pants so his hand is laid flat on your abdomen.

He gently keeps his hand flat, rubbing circles every once in a while, making you free from the pain and giving you warmth.

"Sleep, you've did enough today" he says as he presses a firm kiss to the side of your head.

You nod and snuggle closer to him, nuzzling your face in his neck unaware of what he went through today at the charity, unaware of him protecting you at all times and unaware of the amount of love he has for you that it physically hurts him when he sees you in pain.

.

for more of this....... check out : cold husband riki series

©mrsjjongstby all writing belong to me. do not copy, modify or repost my works.

liked this? click here for more: (∩^o^)⊃━☆

taglist: @meowza1@seonhoon @iluvagoodashy @yethoughts @fruitymochi @firstdivisiongirl @leonykennedy@seungiesdoll@yejisuu@cinnamonrei @fein4hoon @gabftcupcakes @tboboee @bubblyellieee @aeri101 @jakeyyjakexoxo @micchieai @shawnyle @voucearse @livishere4u @kristynaaah @areikii @bootyneedle @enhypenina @aruhoon @aeri101 @deluluscenarios @firstdivisiongirl @fruitymochi @yethoughts @iluvagoodashy (open!) @your-not-fanny ;)

Having debuted in 2020, it had been almost two years since she became an idol, and well, everything wasn't as good as she had imagined. She had spent many years as a trainee, first at SM then at JYP, before joining her current agency to debut.

However, her agency was one of those that thought artists belonged to them and that they were just slaves to be exploited. In two years, Y/N hadn't had a single day off or a free weekend. Yes, for her only, because that wasn't the case for her four members.

Yes, it seems Y/N was the black sheep of her own group. But she had taken it without a word because the support and love of the fans were what mattered most. The funniest part was that she wasn't loved by her agency or her members, yet she was the most loved member by the fans! It always made her laugh when she thought about it.

Now, they had just won a trophy at the 2022 MAMA Awards, and nothing could have seemed more beautiful to Y/N. Backstage, she looked at the trophy in her hands, never having believed she could hold a MAMA in her hands one day.

The ceremony was over, but the adrenaline was still present in everyone, fans and idols alike. Groups and soloists were coming and going backstage, cameras following them closely.

"Excellent evening tonight," their manager said. "You deserved this trophy, girls."

"Of course we deserve it!"

"We worked hard to get it!" Y/N refrained from rolling her eyes. ‘Worked hard’, right.

"Y/N, thank you for coming tonight, we'll call you back to give you your final check," their manager declared.

She looked away from the trophy to look at the man tapping on his phone and frowned. "Excuse me?"

"It was a good final performance, the fans will remember you for a few weeks before moving on. But it was nice being your manager for a while."

"What…?" Her leader approached her with a smirk and took the trophy from her hands, leaning toward her, belligerent.

"I'll take this since you won't need it. Sorry, Y/N-nie, but with all the comeback changes, the agency let us vote on whether you should stay in the group or not. We decided to let you go before you ruined our image. You never really fit in."

Y/N stood frozen, her mouth wide open, as a heavy silence settled backstage, idols, staff, and cameras fixed on them. She had never felt so humiliated in her life, her cheeks reddening with shame.

"See it as a gift, Y/N-nie," the main dancer approved. "It's better that you leave the group before the fans start hating you. We wouldn't want that to ruin your life."

The main singer shoved her bag into her arms, patting her cheek. "We'll miss you, baby. So sad."

The girls exchanged glances before bursting out laughing, their manager snapped his fingers to bring their attention back, informing them that their van had arrived. They gave her mock farewells before walking away with their manager.

Y/N stood there, frozen, staring at the direction her former group had taken after she had been pitifully banished. Around her, silence still reigned, no one really knew what to do, pitying the young woman.

She wasn't a rookie, far from it, after two years in the industry, this was an announcement that would shake the fans. The girls from Le Sserafim parted the crowd to join her, surrounding her, trying to offer comfort. They knew her from afar, and they were the only ones Y/N could consider her friends.

"I'm so sorry, Y/N."

"They're truly horrible people, I hope nothing bad happens to them."

Y/N hugged Eun-chae, her shoulders shaking as everyone thought she had finally given in to tears. But eyes widened when she pulled back, laughing out loud until tears came to her eyes.

"Oh God, we've lost her," Sakura swore.

"They've completely broken her," Chaewon agreed.

"Y/N, are you sure you're okay?" The idol finally calmed down, wiping her tears with the back of her hand.

"They're the biggest idiots I've ever seen."

"Uh?"

"I'm the group's producer, I own the rights to all of GL1TTERS' songs. If they fire me, I take the rights with me, and the group can't sing anything anymore!"

Y/N started laughing again, her hands on her knees, as her friends also allowed themselves to laugh, cursing those idiots. The young woman straightened up with a sigh, running a hand through her hair.

"I need a drink." She disappeared toward the dressing rooms, the Le Sserafim girls ran after her, begging her not to do anything stupid.

A stupid thing her former agency had done, because the next morning, when the announcement of her departure was published without any context or explanation, the backlash they would suffer would be unprecedented.

It had been almost a month since the announcement of Y/N's departure, and things hadn't died down, far from it. They even seemed to be growing every day. There was radio silence from Y/N, while the members of GL1TTERS and the agency were hit by a well-deserved wave of hatred. Yes, someone had leaked a backstage video…

Anyway, Y/N was enjoying a well-deserved rest, finally taking the vacation she so desired to spend time with her family and do everything she wanted. She was walking her dog along the Han River, sitting on a bench to enjoy the sun's rays. It felt so good.

Passersby came and went without paying attention to her, Y/N hadn't bothered to put on a mask to hide her identity. At this point, she didn't care. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a young girl hesitating to come toward her, and she suspected a shy fan.

The idol waved at her to invite her over, the young girl approached, bowing before her, a small handheld camera in her hand.

"Hello, Y/N! My name is Yoona, and I'm a big fan of yours! I'm an amateur journalist, and I wanted to know if you would spare some of your time to answer a few questions? Of course, I'd understand if you're busy, and I don't want to disturb you."

Y/N remembered that her newly chosen agent had told her to stay away from the media for a while, but the hopeful look in the young girl's eyes made her give in.

"Of course. Sit down, please." The fan thanked her with a big smile, bowing once more before sitting beside her, framing her camera toward her. "Is it rolling?"

"Yes."

"How do I look? Is this my good side? I didn't even put on makeup."

"You're so pretty." Y/N smiled, seeing her cheeks redden, and leaned her elbow on the back of the bench, resting her chin on her fist.

"So, what do you want to know, darling?"

"First of all, the fans are really worried about you and wondering how you're handling this whole situation."

"Honestly, I haven't felt this good in years," the idol admitted. "In two years, I was the only one in the group without any vacation, so I've been able to see my family again and pick up hobbies I'd forgotten, so I'm really happy."

Her dog trotted over to them and jumped onto the bench, sniffing the camera, which made Yoona laugh. "I can also enjoy my big baby, so it's even better," Y/N smiled, scratching her dog behind the ear.

"So you're not sad to have left, I mean, to have been kicked out of GL1TTERS?"

"I know that from the outside, we seemed like a close group, but we never were. At least, not with me. I've always been a bit of the ugly duckling they forget to invite to dinners."

"That's really horrible," Yoona said.

"I certainly won't miss the group or the agency. What I will miss are the fans, because they're the ones who allowed me to continue for so long. I would have left the group myself long ago if it weren't for them."

Yoona nodded, petting the dog with her free hand, which had lain down between them. "What's the next step, then?"

"Good question," Y/N chuckled, bringing the straw of her iced coffee to her lips. "I don't really know for now. I don't know if I want to continue as an idol or do something else. What's certain is that if I continue as an idol, it will be at an agency that doesn't treat me like shit. I've had enough of being the punching bag for others."

"Yes, that's understandable. Anyway, the fans will follow you no matter what you do!"

"That's sweet. And guys, please don't waste your money sending protest trucks in front of the agency," she addressed the camera. "I'm incredibly touched by all the support you're sending me, but no matter what happens, I won't be returning to GL1TTERS, no matter what the agency offers. Well, they'd first need to have something to offer, because they've already lost a lot because of my firing."

"Like?" Yoona laughed.

"Even though my name never appeared in the album credits, I oversaw the entire creation of the songs. I owned all the rights. So by firing me, I took the music with me. But since the agency does things before thinking, they paid dearly for it. They had to buy the rights from me, and oh God, they had to pay a lot."

Y/N winked at the camera, making Yoona laugh. "But really, I thank you for your support, but don't waste your time with them, they're rotten to the core and don't deserve all the attention you're giving them. It's better if things die down gradually. They'll try to keep GL1TTERS going, even though I think it's a lost cause."

"Can fans find you on social media to get updates on you?"

"I've created a new personal Instagram account, so type in my name, and you should find it. I'm not sure I'll post much K-pop stuff on it, but you'll see that I'm still alive."

"Thank you so much for answering my questions and for giving me your time," Yoona smiled. "I was really scared to come see you when I saw you, but you're so kind!"

"Thank you, it was really nice. So you can become a journalist like this?"

"Well, I'm passionate about K-pop, but I have a terrible fear of the spotlight, so I don't see myself becoming an idol, you know? Especially since I sing like a dying cat," she said, drawing a laugh from Y/N. "But I still want to be in the industry, even behind a camera!"

The young woman nodded, understanding that she still wanted to achieve her dream, then reached into her pocket to get her wallet and pulled out an ivory-colored business card.

"Here. It's my professional number. Since I don't know which direction I'm going yet, I'm trying to build my own staff. I have enough to pay for my own team with the compensation from the scandal. I already have my agent, but I'm sorely lacking someone to manage my social and professional media. I'm terrible at creating content."

"You… You're serious?" Yoona breathed, staring at the card as if it were a bomb. Y/N shrugged, throwing her dog's ball, he ran after it, barking.

"It's just a proposition, you don't have to accept it. I know it's far from the same as 'amateur journalist.' But if you're interested, the position is yours. You seem like a talented young girl, you shouldn't let that slip by. Call me when you've made your decision."

"Yes! Thank you so much! I don't know what to say."

"Then don't say anything," Y/N chuckled. She whistled to call her dog back before standing up. "I hope we see each other again soon, Yoona. Bye, guys, love you!"

Y/N waved to the camera before walking away, her dog trotting beside her. Yoona let out a trembling breath, looking at the business card before letting out a little cry of joy.

The video was published within the hour, without editing or effects, and had millions of views in just a few hours. Y/N's first appearance since the scandal, and on a video from an unknown person, no less, while the media were tearing each other apart to get an interview with her.

Fans quickly noticed that she seemed healthier and happier, and supported her even more, subscribing to her Instagram without delay. Comments flooded the video posted on X.

@lovewithy/n: Our queen is the best! @justicefory/n: God, she's so beautiful that I was distracted throughout the entire video @y/n_wifey: Let's give her the fandom she deserves! @y/n-niiiiiie: Girl came for an interview and left with a job everyone dreams of #sojealous

Y/N was on her way home when she received a call from her best friend, also an idol. "Yeah?"

"Can you go get me some bubble tea and ice cream?"

"There's literally a convenience store at the bottom of your street, can't you go yourself?"

"I can't be bothered, and I'm not even dressed. It's our only day off this week!"

She sighed but gave in, telling him she'd be at his place in about ten minutes. Dragging her noisy husky along, Y/N quickly went to buy ice cream and a drink while her dog howled outside.

Her best friend had sent her the building code, so she was able to enter without disturbing anyone, taking the elevator to the second floor. The young woman entered the dorm as if it were her own, arriving in the living room and surprising the dorm's inhabitants.

The boys had finally gotten a day off, so they hadn't planned on having visitors, still in their pajamas and not very presentable.

"Ugh, can someone tell me why this dog embarrasses me every time I go out? I left him outside the convenience store for five minutes, and he barked as if someone was shooting at him."

The husky perked up his ears, looking innocent, and trotted toward the couch to jump between Ni-ki and Jay. Y/N handed the plastic bag to Sunoo, who took it with a smile. "Thanks! You were fast, I thought you'd take longer."

"I didn't want you to start yelling at me if I was a minute late. And luckily you didn't go out, because you would have scared everyone with that face."

She pointed to the greenish face mask he had on, Sunoo slapped her hand, shouting. "Yah! You're so mean!"

"Don't hit the hand that feeds you, boy!"

"Noona, what are you doing here?" Jungwon asked, hesitantly.

"I just came to drop off his ice cream and bubble tea before he disowns me." Y/N groaned when her friend kicked her shin. Removing her dog's leash, she put it on the coffee table before lying down on the floor, crossing her arms under her neck. "Your place is pretty nice, the neighborhood is cool," she said.

"So you're back at your parents' place?" Sunoo asked, digging his spoon into his mint-chocolate chip ice cream.

"Yeah, but it's good. I missed living with them. Can you believe the last time I saw my brothers, they were a meter tall, and now one has a girlfriend and the other has a beard? So disgusting."

Sunoo snorted and noticed his members' still-stunned looks. "Oh, yeah, that's Y/N! We've known each other since high school."

"You're Y/N from GL1TTERS," Jake breathed, in shock.

"Just Y/N, thanks. I like to think I'm on hiatus."

"Go on vacation if you're on hiatus," Sunoo teased.

"Believe me, it's already planned!" she exclaimed, rolling onto her side, leaning on one elbow. "I found an incredible hotel in the Caribbean with an ocean view and a private beach. Two weeks of pure bliss!"

"Take me with you, please!" Y/N wrinkled her nose, shaking her head from left to right.

"I love you, but I don't love you enough to take you on vacation with me, bro."

"Yah!" Sunoo threw the ice cream lid at Sunghoon, who had started laughing.

"So what are you going to do now?" Heeseung asked.

The young woman turned her head toward him, noticing that his tank top left his muscles exposed and his black sweatpants were hanging low on his hips. He was sitting alone in an armchair, his legs slightly apart and his chin resting on his fist.

"Don't know," she finally replied. "We'll see what the future holds for me. Maybe I'll have some nice surprises." Heeseung smiled as she looked at her dog, completely sprawled on his back, belly up, hoping for scratches from Ni-ki and Jay, on whom he was lying.

"Loki, seriously, have some manners! You're not at home here!" As if he understood and didn't want to leave, the husky started howling to death, Y/N buried her face in her hands, sighing, as the boys started laughing.

***

Y/N showed up at the dorm one beautiful Saturday afternoon, wearing a magnificent long lavender dress, hugging her bust perfectly with fine sequins on the bodice before flaring out at the waist.

"Kim Sunoo, move your butt, we're going to be late!"

"Wow, noona, you're very elegant!" Ni-ki smiled.

"Thanks! SUNOO!" Her friend emerged from his room, a blanket around his shoulders like a cape. He looked like a zombie, and Y/N stared at him with wide eyes.

"What the fuck?"

"Sorry, but I've had a migraine since last night, I can't go with you."

"But you promised to be my plus-one at my cousin's wedding! Now they'll all think I made up this 'boyfriend' thing!"

"That's where you're wrong," Sunoo smiled before grimacing. "I've got it all planned! I found myself a replacement."

"Who…?"

The dorm door opened, and Y/N slowly turned around, coming face to face with Heeseung, who was dressed as if he were going to a wedding (which he was). He was wearing a cream-colored suit, open over a shirt whose top buttons were undone, and a lavender handkerchief was tucked into his jacket pocket to match the color of her dress.

She stared at him, her mouth wide open, blushes covering her cheeks. "Here's my replacement! Have a good wedding, I'm going to go die in my bed." Sunoo turned on his heel, disappearing into the hallway and slamming his bedroom door behind him.

"Sorry if I'm not what you expected," Heeseung chuckled weakly. "No, it's… You're fine. You're…"

"Hot," Ni-ki called from the living room.

Y/N shot him a sideways glance, and the maknae hid behind Sunghoon, who was laughing. The young woman sighed, stepping forward to grab Heeseung's arm and pull him along with her. Her car was parked in front of the dorm, and she got behind the wheel, the idol took the passenger seat.

"Why did you agree to come with me?" she asked as they drove out of Seoul.

"Sunoo told me it was important to you, so when he asked me to take his place, I wasn't going to abandon you."

"Thank you," Y/N smiled, glancing at him.

"Can I still ask you why you needed a 'boyfriend' as a plus-one?"

She sighed, leaning her left elbow against the window. "It's stupid," she said. "The myth about your family members accosting you every time they see you to find out if you're still single is true." Heeseung chuckled but nodded. "And besides, I love them all, but they always ask me if I'm okay or how I'm handling this whole situation, and sometimes it gets heavy."

"I understand. Anyway, Sunoo promised free food and drinks, so that's also why I came." Y/N hit him in the chest while he laughed.

They arrived at the reception venue and attended the beautiful ceremony. Y/N was very emotional for her cousin, with whom she was very close, keeping a hand on Heeseung's arm as he had tucked her hand into his.

The fact that she came with an escort distracted her family from asking her how she was, and Heeseung was a big hit with her aunts. Funny. She drove Heeseung back to his dorm, and they got out of the car, enjoying the quiet of the night around them.

"Thank you for coming with me, Heeseung. I really had a good time."

"Me too," he smiled. "Even if your cousins are crazy." Y/N chuckled but nodded, then bit her lip, taking a step toward him to place a kiss on his cheek.

"Good night, Heeseung."

"Night'." She smiled, then stepped back, returning to her car to drive off into the night. Heeseung looked in the direction she had taken before turning on his heel, entering the dorm.

His members were already asleep as he locked himself in his room, tossing his jacket over his desk chair and unbuttoning his shirt. He collapsed onto his bed, crossing his arms under his neck, staring at the ceiling. A smile stretched his lips without his control, thinking back to the wonderful evening he had just spent with Y/N.

One thing Y/N didn't expect from this wedding was the photos that could come out of it. Because if she went to a family wedding with Sunoo, it wouldn't have been surprising, given that their friendship was known to the public, but Y/N going to a wedding with Heeseung on her arm caused a huge stir.

She should have known that some wedding photographers would sell a few photos of them to make some money. Fans were talking and posting, but there wasn't really any hate behind it, so Y/N let it slide, focusing on her future projects, even though someone still lingered in her mind.

***

It had been almost two years since Y/N had been kicked out of her former group, GL1TTERS. The scandal had died down, but the consequences still lingered in people's minds. The group had never really regained its former popularity, given the departure of the favorite member and the one who produced all their songs.

A producer from the agency had taken over but wasn't as talented as Y/N, and his style wasn't what fans liked most. The agency still tried to promote the group, but it no longer had the same enthusiasm as before.

As for Y/N, she was living her best life as an independent artist preparing her big comeback. After two years of absence, she felt that fans were getting impatient. She had surrounded herself with a staff she trusted completely and got along with well, keeping young Yoona with her as a community manager and social media manager.

Oh, and Heeseung… Well, they had grown much closer over these two years. Sunoo was even jealous that his hyung was stealing his best friend, but Y/N knew how to appease him with mint-chocolate chip ice cream, so he stopped sulking. And even though Hybe and her agent hadn't placed any restrictions on whatever relationship they had, they still preferred to enjoy their secret.

The 2024 MAMA Awards arrived, signaling Y/N's big comeback. Backstage, she saw herself two years earlier when she had been publicly fired and her dream ripped away. Now, she was there to take her revenge and wouldn't let anyone stop her.

Y/N gave a wonderful performance on stage with three tracks from her new album that enchanted the fans. They were happy to finally see her on stage again. In the idols' stands, she looked around, accidentally catching the eye of one of her former members sitting a little further away.

She ignored them, feeling their stares on her as they whispered. And yes, GL1TTERS had never really returned to the forefront after the scandal, and it showed in sales.

She turned her head when a hand touched her shoulder, Sunoo was leaning toward her, his face distorted by a smile. Y/N returned his smile, her gaze falling on Heeseung, who winked at her.

The Rookie of the Year award was about to be presented, and Y/N was among the nominees. She had only made her comeback a few weeks earlier, so she didn't expect to win the trophy. "And the MAMA Award for Rookie of the Year goes to… Y/N!!"

The young woman's eyes widened, not expecting it, as the shouts of fans and applause of idols echoed in the background. She stood up, hugging Sunoo, who was jumping up and down.

"Congratulations, bestie!" She smiled, hardly believing it was real, and walked toward the center of the stage, where the MC handed her the trophy. Y/N positioned herself in front of the microphone, wetting her lips.

"Wow, uh, I don't really know what to say," she chuckled. "I wasn't expecting this at all. I didn't think I could win this award when I only debuted a few weeks ago, but apparently it's possible! I am very grateful to everyone who has supported me throughout this journey." She paused to catch her breath. "I don't have enough time to thank all the fans, but getting this award is thanks to you. I'm also thinking of my parents and my brothers. And Loki. He's my dog," Y/N clarified, drawing laughter. "I also thank my amazing staff, who have always been by my side, as well as my friends and boyfriend… I MEAN FRIENDS!"

She slapped a hand over her mouth, having made a blunder, as the crowd exploded in hysterical screams. Sunoo was doubled over laughing against Sunghoon, Jake and Ni-ki bumped into Heeseung, giggling. The young man had a small smile, though a blush covered his cheeks.

"Let's forget about this," Y/N laughed nervously. "Oh my God, someone shut me up… Alright! I promise to do my best to continue making you proud and to create music that brings us all together. Thank you so much!"

Y/N bowed and quickly left the stage, heading backstage. Yoona and her agent were already waiting for her, laughing, as she collapsed onto a chair. "I thought I coached you well for facing the cameras, but I guess not," her agent mocked.

"Unnie, it was so funny," Yoona giggled. "But fans are already asking lots of questions on Twitter and Weverse. I think you'll have to make a statement sooner or later."

"Or, I could bury myself alive and hope no one finds me!" she suggested. They both shook their heads negatively, making her whine.

The young woman returned to her apartment, ignoring the journalists' questions as she got into her van. She really needed to think before she spoke, or she'd make more and more mistakes.

Ready to sleep, Y/N was filling Loki's water bowl when the doorbell rang. She gave him a pet before going to open the door, raising an eyebrow when she saw Heeseung on the doorstep.

"Heeseung?"

He didn't answer, closing the distance between them to grab her face in his hands and take possession of her lips. She recoiled in surprise, Heeseung took the opportunity to close the door with the tip of his shoe.

"Heeseung, what are you…" she gasped, pulling back.

"I'm not allowed to greet my girlfriend?" he smiled.

"I, uh… Shut up!"

He laughed, his hand settling in the hollow of her neck to tilt her head slightly back, allowing him to deepen their kiss. Her fingers gripped the front of his sweatshirt, her body pressed against his, seeking more contact. Heeseung broke the kiss only to go back on the attack, swallowing the moan that escaped her.

Loki barked from the kitchen, bursting their bubble of pleasure. Y/N rolled her eyes and pulled back, grabbing the ties of his sweater to pull him after her.

"Let's go to my room, yeah?" Heeseung smiled, moving closer to her as she backed up, then lifted her into his arms, smiling.

Masterlist

you popped a piece of popcorn into your mouth, glancing down at him. "what's the big deal? just tell her you're too busy being a legendary figure skater to date."

he rubbed his forehead and admitted truthfully, "i tried that last year." he then shifted his arm just enough to look up at you with a pout. "now she thinks i'm lonely. hajoon hyung's bringing his fiancée, and hyejin's bringing her new boyfriend. i'm literaly going to be interrogated by the halmeonis."

you let out a soft laugh, shaking your head at how dramatic he was being. without thinking, you nudged his shoulder with your foot.

"well, you could always take me. i look pretty great in formal wear, don't you think?"

in your head, it was a joke — a completely random banter between two people who had known each other since middle school.

but sunghoon didn't laugh.

the room fell quiet, and you felt his attention shift entirely onto you. he slowly sat up, resting his elbows on his knees as he studied your face. the playful annoyance was completely gone from his expression, now replaced by an intensity that made your heart do a flip.

"wait," he mumbled softly, dark eyes locking onto yours. "that's actually a perfect idea."

you blinked, your hand freezing halfway to the popcorn bowl. for a second, you thought you had misheard him. but the entirely dead serious look on sunghoon's face proved otherwise. "wait, what?" you let out a breathy, nervous laugh. "hoon, i was kidding. i'm not actually going to crash your family banquet."

"it's not crashing if you're my official guest," he countered, sitting up a bit straighter. the initial surprise on his face had completely morphed into genuine excitement. "think about it. we've known each other forever. you already know miyeong imo is hard to deal with, you know how my parents are, and you're basically part of the family anyway. it's foolproof."

"foolproof?" you stared at him, your heart doing a strange flutter against your ribs. you tried to ground yourself with your usual sarcasm, but the way his eyes were holding yours made it difficult. "we'd have to pretend to be dating, sunghoon. do you really think we can pull that off? we just fought over the last slice of pizza."

"we won't be fighting. we'll be acting," he reasoned, his smirk growing. he leaned in a fraction closer, tilting his head. "what, are you worried you won't be able to handle being my girlfriend for a few hours?"

you rolled your eyes, tossing a single piece of popcorn at his chest to hide the warmth creeping up your neck. "in your dreams, park."

"then do it," he said, voice dropping into a softer, more sincere tone. he reached out, his fingers lightly brushing against your wrist to catch your attention. "seriously. just for one evening. you get a free fancy dinner, and i get to survive without being asked a thousand questions. please?"

you looked at the slight pout he always used when he wanted to get his way, and the earnest look in his eyes that you had never been able to say no to since middle school. you let out a long, defeated sigh, though a small smile slipped onto your face.

fine," you muttered, shaking your head at your own helplessness. "i'll do it. but you owe me big time."

sunghoon's face instantly lit up, his signature bright smile breaking through as he knocked his shoulder against yours. "deal. get ready, girlfriend. we have a love story to fake."

you replied with a playful roll of your eyes in response, but beneath the surface, a familiar knot of nerves was tight in your stomach.

honestly, the idea of faking a relationship with sunghoon shouldn't have felt this daunting. you were best friends.

but if you were being completely honest with yourself, the boundary between "just friends" and something more had been blurring for months. it was in the way he casually draped an arm over your shoulders while walking, how his gaze lingered on you when you weren't looking, and how your heartbeat always picked up whenever he got just a little too close.

you had always brushed it off as comfort, the outgrowth of years of shared history. but now, staring at his triumphant grin, a wave of genuine nervousness hit you.

the next few days passed in a blur of frantic text messages and late-night calls as the two of you tried to establish a believable "backstory", but nothing truly prepared you for the actual day of the banquet.

by the time saturday evening rolled around, the casual, easygoing confidence you had maintained all week completely vanished. standing in front of your bedroom mirror, you smoothed down your navy blue silk dress, hands trembling slightly. you were used to sunghoon seeing you at your absolute worst—sweatpants, messy hair, and dark circles—so the sudden transformation felt foreign.

the sharp buzz of your phone cut through the quiet of your room.

[hoon the ice prince] : i'm outside.

taking a deep breath, you grabbed your small clutch, took one last look in the mirror, and headed downstairs.

when you opened your front door, the cool evening air hit your face, but it was the sight of sunghoon that made you freeze.

he was leaning against his car, but he wasn't the casual best friend you saw every day. he was wearing a perfectly tailored dark suit that accentuated his broad shoulders, his dark hair styled flawlessly off his forehead. he looked... handsome, like someone pulled straight from a magazine.

as the door clicked open, sunghoon looked up from his phone.

the casual greeting he usually threw your way died in his throat. his entire posture stiffened, his eyes widening slightly as his gaze swept over you. for a long moment, he just stood there motionless.

"sunghoon?" you ventured softly, shifting your weight nervously. "do i look okay? is it too much?"

the sound of your voice seemed to snap him out of his trance. he blinked rapidly, a deep crimson blooming at the tips of his ears and rushing up his neck. he cleared his throat roughly, his hand flying to the back of his neck. it was a nervous habit you knew all too well, though you had never seen him do it because of you.

"no," he said, voice coming out a little rougher than usual. he cleared his throat again, stepping forward as his eyes locked onto yours with a sudden intensity.

"no, it's... you look incredible, really."

your heart hammered violently against your chest at the sincerity while the banter you had practiced in your head flew away.

"ready to go, boyfriend?" you teased weakly, trying to break the heavy tension. he let out a low chuckle, though his eyes remained on yours, warmer than they had ever been before. "ready. let's go fool my family."

the drive to the venue was filled with a charged silence that neither of you knew how to break.

every time you glanced over, his knuckles were white against the steering wheel, eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead.

when the car was finally taken by the valet service outside the grand hotel, the reality of the situation settled in. through the glass doors of the lobby, you could already see clusters of well-dressed people laughing and mingling.

sunghoon turned his head to look at you, taking a breath to steady himself. "okay. once we walk through those doors, we're officially on."

"right," you replied, voice small from the nervousness.

slowly and deliberately, sunghoon offered his hand to you. you looked down at his open palm, then back up at his face. his dark eyes were steady, watching your reaction closely. with a racing pulse, you slid your hand into his. his fingers immediately closed around yours, his grip firm and hand warm.

"your hands are cold," he noted quietly, his thumb brushing across the back of your knuckles. "blame the nerves," you muttered, leaning into his side just a little as you both began walking toward the entrance.

"don't worry," he squeezed your hand gently as the automatic doors slid open. "just stay close to me. i won't leave your side."

before you could reply, a loud, sharp voice rang out. "sunghoon-ah! over here!"

you both turned to see miyeong imo hurrying toward you, her eyes instantly dropping to your linked hands with an expression of sheer shock.

sunghoon didn't miss a beat. he smoothly drew you a little closer to his side, his arm brushing against yours as he plastered on a bright, effortless smile. "imo," he called, voice smooth and entirely convincing. "there's someone i'd like you to meet."

she stopped right in front of you. "oh my goodness," she breathed, hands clapping together. "sunghoon-ah, you actually brought someone? and you didn't warn me?"

"i wanted it to be a surprise," he reasoned quickly.

before you could even think about how to introduce tourself, sunghoon's hand left yours only to grab your waist. the sudden warmth of his hand made your breath hitch. he pulled you closer to his side, touch grounding.

"imo, this is my girlfriend, yn," he introduced. his voice carried a proud tone that sounded incredibly real it made your head spin. he looked down at you with a smile playing on his lips. "i'm sure you remember me talking about her before."

"of course, of course!" she beamed, her shock melting into excitement. she stepped forward, warmly taking your hand. "the famous best friend that is now his sweetheart. sunghoon's mother has told me so much about you over the years, but seeing you two like this... oh, you look beautiful together!"

"thank you, mrs. park," you managed to say, offering the most polite smile. "it's wonderful to finally meet you."

"call me imo, dear! everyone does," she insisted, waving her hand dismissively before turning her sharp gaze back to her nephew.

"well, park sunghoon, i have to admit, i'm impressed. you hid this quite well. how long has it been?"

"a little over three months now," sunghoon answered without a single hint of hesitation. he squeezed your side gently, "we wanted to keep it to ourselves for a bit, just to make sure we were ready for the family interrogation."

miyeong imo let out a loud laugh. "smart boy. well, come inside! your parents are near the main stage, and your cousins are definitely going to want to see this."

as she fluttered away to greet other guests, the elegant doors of the main hall loomed just ahead.

you let out a shaky breath, looking up at sunghoon. "three months, huh? you said that pretty fast."

sunghoon looked down at you, hand still resting comfortably on your waist. up close, you could see the faint pink tint still lingering on his cheeks, but his eyes were bright with amusement. "i told you, we're acting. come on, let's go make my cousins jealous."

the heavy doors of the hall opened to a room filled with the clinking of crystal glasses and the hum of a live string quartet. the grandeur of the space was intimidating, but the weight of sunghoon's hand at you waist kept you grounded as he guided you through the crowd.

it didn't take long for his cousins to spot him.

"look who finally decided to show up," a voice said. hajoon, sunghoon's older cousin, stepped away from a high-top table, holding a glass of champagne. walking closely behind him was hyejin, holding the arm of her new boyfriend.

but as they closed the distance, their teasing expressions faltered. hajoon stopped mid-stride, gaze dropping straight to sunghoon's arm draped possessively around your waist.

"no way," hyejin murmured, her eyes wide. "sunghoon-ah? is this...?"

"hey, hyung. hyejin-ah," sunghoon greeted them, voice entirely relaxed. his thumb traced a slow, absentminded circle as he shifted his posture. "this is my girlfriend. i told you guys i was bringing a plus-one."

"we thought you were just making up a lie," hajoon admitted, shaking his head in disbelief before offering you a warm smile. "i'm hajoon. it's great to meet you. honestly, we all thought sunghoon was going to marry his ice skate, so you're a miracle worker."

you laughed, the genuine humor easing some of the tension in your shoulders. "it's nice to meet you, hajoon-ssi. he's not that bad."

"oh, don't defend him yet, you don't know what he's like at family dinners," hyejin teased, leaning in. "but seriously, how did this happen? sunghoon never talks about his private life."

"we've been best friends for years," sunghoon answered for you. he looked down at you, and for a second, the bustling room seemed to fade away. the look in his dark eyes were intense and entirely focused. "eventually, i just realized that the person i wanted to spend all my time with was already right next to me. i got tired of waiting."

your heart did a violent, dangerous stutter. the way he said it sounded less like a rehearsed backstory and more like a confession.

because the table was crowded and family members kept leaning in closer to whisper and gossip, sunghoon kept you close. every time someone passed by with a tray of food, his hand would gently guide you closer to his chest, chin practically resting against the top of your head.

when hajoon launched into an embarrassing story about sunghoon's childhood, sunghoon hid his flustered face by leaning down, his breath warm against your ear as he whispered, "don't listen to him, he's exaggerating."

as the banquet transitioned from dinner to mingling, the hall grew even more crowded. waiters carrying heavy trays of champagne and appetizers skillfully darted through groups of talking guests, and the noise level in the room rose significantly.

at one point, a slightly tipsy business associate of his father stumbled slightly backward into your path, before you could even register the movement, sunghoon stepped into your space, his broad shoulders completely blocking you from the impact, he took the brunt of the bump, his hands coming up to rest gently on your upper arm.

"you okay?" he asked immediately, forehead creasing with genuine concern as he looked down at you.

"yeah, i'm fine. just a bit crowded," you said, your voice a little breathy from how quickly he had moved.

"come here," he murmured. he then guided you toward a quieter alcove near the edge of the hall. he stood strategically between you and the crowd, creating a small, private pocket of space just for the two of you.

he reached onto a passing waiter's tray and grabbed a glass of cold water, handing it to you. "here. you look a little flushed. you okay? we can leave early if it's too much."

you took a sip of the water, locking eyes with him. the watchful look in his eyes had nothing to do with acting for his family anymore. no one was watching you in this corner. "i'm okay, hoon," you said softly, offering him a reassuring smile. "you don't have to shield me from everything."

sunghoon let out a breath, hands sliding into his suit pockets as he leaned a bit closer to you. a tiny smile touched his lips. "force of habit, i guess. i just... i want to make sure you're safe. especially since you're here for me."

you placed your empty glass down on a small marble table nearby. "well, your family definitely bought it. hajoon told me i deserve a medal for putting up with you."

sunghoon chuckled, shaking his head. "yeah, well, hajoon hyung doesn't know anything."

as the strings of the quartet shifted into a slower rhythm, sunghoon's gaze drifted past your shoulder toward the center of the hall, where couples were beginning to move onto the dance floor. he watched them from a moment before his eyes flicked back to you, a sudden nervousness crossing his features.

"speaking of putting up with me," he started, clearing his throat as he took one hand out of his pocket. he extended it toward you, a shy but hopeful smile tugging at his lips. "dance with me?"

you stared at his hand, your pulse spiking all over again. there were no nosy imo's hovering right next to you, no cousins to impress.

"sunghooon," you whispered. "no one's looking at us right now. we don't have to fake it here."

he took a half-step closer, closing the distance between you until you could feel the warmth radiating from his chest. his expression softened, lacking the playful defense mechanisms he usually relied on.

"come on, yn. just this once?" he asked.

the words hung in the air between you, heavy and electric, as sunghoon waited for your response. before you could even find your voice, he took a gentle step forward, hand sliding smoothly into yours to pull you toward the dimly lit dance floor.

slowly, sunghoon brought his hand up, his palm resting flat against the small of your back. his touch was firm, drawing you in until there was barely any space between you. you placed your free hand on his shoulder, the fabric of his suit soft under your fingertips.

as the strings swelled into a slow, sweeping melody, you both began to move. sunghoon guided you effortlessly, his rhythm flawless from years of training on the ice. but this didn't feel like a performance for an audience for his focus was entirely locked onto you.

up close, the ambient lights of the hall caught the sharp angles of his face, softening the usual cold face he wore. he eyes searched yours with an intensity that mde it hard to breathe.

"you're quiet," he noted softly, voice a low murmur that easily cut through the music.

"i'm just..." you swallowed hard, looking up at him. "trying to figure out when you became such a great actor."

a small, genuine smile broke across his face, his eyes crinkling at the corners. he shook his head slightly, his grip on your waist tightening just a fraction as he spun you slowly away from another passing.

he tilted his head, voice dropping into a whisper. "who said i was acting?"

a sudden rush of heat hit your face. you froze in your spot, your hand on his shoulder tensing as you tried to process what he had just said.

as the last note of the string quartet faded into the applause of the crowd, the reality of what he had just muttered seemed to finally catch up with his brain.

he froze. his eyes widened slightly, the confident, intense gaze he had been holding completely fracturing.

"i—" he started, his voice cracking just a bit.

he abruptly let go of your waist as if he had accidentally touched a hot stove, pulling his hands back and fisting his hands by his sides. the effortless figure skater from two seconds ago had vanished, replaced by the flustered boy you had known since middle school.

a deep red instantly bloomed at his cheeks, clashing drastically with the cool lighting of the ballroom. he cleared his throat roughly, eyes darting to a pillar somewhere behind you that was no very fascinating.

"sorry, i... don't know what i'm saying," he stammered, words tripping over each other as he gestured vaguely at the ceiling. "the glare in here is crazy. it makes everyone look all serious and weird. i didn't mean anything by it. i think the lack of oxygen in this room is messing with my brain."

an awkward, heavy silence settled between you, the chatter of the ballroom suddenly feeling very loud. you stood there, your hand still slightly raised where it had been resting on his shoulder, completely unsure of what to say.

"right," you managed to say, dropping your hand to your side and gave a stiff nod. "of course."

"mhm," sunghoon hummed quickly, finally braving a glance at you, though his cheeks were still bright pink. he rubbed the back of his neck, letting out a forced laugh. "anyway, it's getting pretty warm in here. do you... wanna go grab some air outside? or some punch? or... literally anything else?"

"actually," you said quietly, pulling the fabric of your dress a little tighter around yourself, "i'm getting kind of tired, do you think we could just go home?"

he blinked then nodded quickly. "yeah. yeah, definitely. let's get out of here."

the departure was a blur of quick goodbyes to miyeong imo, his parents, and his cousins, with sunghoon keeping a polite but careful distance from you the entire time. by the time the valet brought his car around and you both stepped inside, the silence that followed was suffocatingly heavy.

sunghoon gripped the steering wheel tightly, his eyes glued to the dark road ahead. the confident banter that usually flowed so easily between you was completely gone. every tiny sound, like the low hum of the engine or even the click of the turn signal, felt magnified a hundred times.

you stared out the window. your mind was racing, replaying the moment on the dance floor over and over again.

when the car stopped at a red light, sunghoon shifted uncomfortably in his seat and loosened his tie slightly with one hand. he looked like he wanted to say something, his mouth parting slightly as he glanced toward you, but as soon as you began to turn your head, he snapped his gaze right back to the traffic light, swallowing hard.

the air in the car remained thick with an unspoken tension, the distance between two seats feeling wider than it ever had.

the car finally pulled up to the curb outside your house, the engine idling quietly in the dark driveway. without a word, sunghoon unbuckled his seatbelt and stepped out, walking around to your side to open the door before you could reach for the handle.

you stepped onto the porch and turned around, holding your clutch tightly in front of you.

"thanks for driving me," you said softly. "and the dinner."

sunghoon stood on the top step, hands buried deep in his pockets. the yellow porch light cast long shadows across his face, highlighting the tense line of his jaw. "yeah. thanks for coming with me. my family really liked you."

"they're great," you replied with a small, polite smile that didn't quite reach your eyes.

the awkwardness hung heavy between you. unable to stand the suffocating tension for another second, you gave a small nod, turned around, and unlocked your front door. you stepped inside into the dark entryway and began to swing the door shut, ready to let the exhausting night finally end.

thud.

the door suddenly stopped, caught firmly by the palm of sunghoon's hand pressing against the wood.

you blinked in surprise, looking through the gap. sunghoon was standing there, his head tilted down, chest rising and falling with a heavy breath. slowly, he pushed the door back open just wide enough to look at you clearly, eyes burning with a sudden and raw determination.

"i can't just leave it like this," he said, voice dropping into a low tone that made your breath hitch. "i'm sorry i freaked out. but i wasn't lying."

you stared at him, your hand frozen on the doorknob. the cool night air slipped through the open doorway, but you could barely feel it over the sudden racing of your pulse.

sunghoon stepped fully onto the threshold, his usual cool composure completely stripped away. he rubbed the back of his neck, looking down at his shoes for a split second before forcing his gaze back up to lock onto yours.

"i panicked because i realized how obvious i was being," he admitted, voice rough. "when i said i was nervous, i meant it. i might've looked cold or something but i was about to explode. tonight wasn't just a bit for me. watching you talk to my family, holding your hand, dancing with you... it just made me realize how long i've been hiding how i actually feel."

he took a small, cautious step closer, hands coming out of his pockets. he reached out, his fingers gently brushing yours where they held the edge of the door, waiting to see if you would pull away. when you didn't, his grip tightened.

"i don't wanna go back to pretending we're just friends," he whispered, eyes filled with vulnerability you had never seen before. "i want it to be real. if you'll let me."

the silence stretched between you. you just stared at him, your brain short-circuiting as his words looped in your head. your lack of an immediate answer seemed to send a wave of pure panic straight to sunghoon's brain.

his eyes widened, and he immediately started backtracking, his words tumbling out in a rush.

"i mean— you don't have to say anything right now. i know it's a lot, and we've been best friends since we were wearing matching tracksuits in middle school, so if i ruined the vibe, i'm sorry. i just really needed to get it off my chest because i thought if i didn't say it now, i'd never—"

stepping forward, you caught the lapels of his suit jacket, tugging him down just enough to cut off his frantic rambling. you leaned in and pressed your lips against his.

he went utterly rigid. his eyes popped open wide, mouth snapping shut mid-sentence as he froze like a statue. but after a split second, his eyes fluttered shut and a soft sound escaped him as he kissed you back.

you pulled back just a few inches, your own face burning hot, but you refused to let go of his jacket. "park sunghoon, shut up for a second and let me speak."

he nodded dumbly, breath hitching.

"i was shocked because i thought i was the only one," you confessed, voice softening as you looked into his pupils that were now filled with shock and sudden hope. "i've liked you for months now, hoon. when i joked about being your date, i was terrified you'd see right through me. tonight didn't feel like acting to me either. i don't want to pretend anymore."

a wide smile appeared on sunghoon's face, the tension melting out of his shoulders. his deep dimples appeared as he let out a low laugh, his hands coming up to gently wrap around your waist.

he glanced down at you, eyes bright under the soft porch light. the nervous, rambling boy from a moment ago was gone, replaced by a version of sunghoon you were unfamiliar with—one that looked content, with a breathtaking smile that made the edge of his eyes crinkle.

"you have no idea how long i've wanted to hear you say that," he murmured, hands smoothing over the fabric of your waist, holding you flush against him. the crisp night air brushed past, but wrapped in his arms, you couldn't feel the chill at all.

"so," a playful smile tugged at your lips as you circled your arms around his neck. "does this mean i don't have to call you 'boyfriend' just for show anymore?"

he let out a melodic laugh, leaning down until his forehead rested against yours. "nope. no more acting required now."

he pulled back just enough to look into your eyes, his expression turning incredibly sweet. "i will call you tomorrow morning. and this time, it's a real date. just the two of us. no family around."

"its a deal, park sunghoon," you whispered.

© 2026 wonarchy. all rights deserved.

“excuse me?” he gasps dramatically, pressing a hand to his chest like you wounded him. “i was incredible. the crowd loved me.” he wobbles a little as he tries to take off his jacket, nearly tripping over his own feet.

you burst into another fit of giggles and reach out to steady him. the second your hands touch his chest, the mood shifts just a little — still playful, but warmer. sunghoon looks down at you with that dazed, lovestruck smile he only ever gives when he’s drunk and completely in love.

“come here, wife,” he murmurs, voice low but cracking with laughter as he pulls you against him. his hands settle on your waist, thumbs rubbing circles over the fabric of your dress.

you tilt your head up and kiss him, both of you smiling too wide for it to be smooth. your teeth clack together awkwardly and that only makes you laugh harder into each other’s mouths.

“we’re terrible at this right now,” you snort, hiding your face in his neck.

“nooo, we’re perfect,” sunghoon insists, swaying with you in the hallway like you’re slow dancing. “best married couple in the world. very sexy. very coordinated.”

he tries to kiss you again but misses your lips and lands on your cheek instead. the two of you dissolve into another round of giggles, clinging to each other so you don’t fall over.

somehow you make it to the bedroom, shedding clothes along the way. sunghoon’s shirt is half unbuttoned, your dress is unzipped but still hanging onto your shoulders. he backs you up until your knees hit the bed and you both tumble onto the mattress in a messy heap.

“ow— your elbow,” you complain through laughter.

“sorry, baby,” he chuckles, rolling slightly so he’s hovering over you. his hair falls into his eyes as he looks down at you, cheeks flushed pink from the alcohol and arousal. “you’re so pretty. how did i get so lucky?”

you reach up and cup his face, pulling him down into another giggly kiss. this one is deeper, sloppier, tongues brushing lazily as your hands roam over his bare chest. sunghoon groans softly into your mouth when your fingers trace down his abs.

“i want you,” he mumbles against your lips, smiling like an idiot. “so bad. been thinking about you in this dress all night.”

“then take it off,” you whisper, biting your lip to stop another giggle.

he struggles adorably with the zipper, cursing under his breath when it gets stuck. “why is this so hard? i’m usually good at this.”

“because you’re drunk, hoonie,” you tease, helping him tug the dress down your body.

the second it’s off, sunghoon’s eyes light up like he’s seeing you for the first time.

“wow,” he breathes, hands sliding over your waist and up to your breasts. “my wife is so hot. how is she real?”

you laugh and pull him back down, kissing him while your legs wrap around his hips. he grinds against you slowly, still wearing his pants, and the friction makes you both moan softly between giggles.

“off,” you demand, tugging at his belt. “pants off. now.”

sunghoon tries to look serious but fails miserably as he sits up and fumbles with his belt. “yes ma’am. anything for my beautiful, drunk wife.”

once he’s finally naked, he crawls back over you, skin warm and flushed. you’re both giggling again as he tries to kiss your neck but keeps missing because he’s swaying.

“stop laughing at me,” he whines playfully, nipping at your collarbone. “i’m trying to be romantic.”

“you’re doing great,” you reassure him, threading your fingers through his hair. “so sexy. very smooth.”

he grins and finally settles between your legs properly. his hand slides down to touch you, fingers gliding through how wet you already are. his eyes widen comically.

“baby… you’re soaked,” he whispers, awed. then he giggles. “did i do that?”

“yes, you idiot,” you laugh, pulling him closer. “now fuck me before we both pass out.”

sunghoon’s cheeks flush even darker at your bold words. he lines himself up and pushes in slowly, both of you moaning at the feeling. he drops his forehead to your shoulder, breathing hard.

“fuck… you feel so good,” he groans, hips starting to move in shallow thrusts. “always so perfect for me.”

the sex is messy, uncoordinated, and full of laughter. every time he thrusts too deep and you both wobble, you crack up. when he tries to change positions and nearly falls off the bed, you have to pull him back by his shoulders, giggling the whole time.

“i love you so much,” he keeps murmuring between thrusts, kissing your face all over — your lips, your nose, your eyelids. “my wife. my best friend. i love fucking you.”

“i love you too,” you moan, legs tightening around him. your hands roam his back, nails lightly scratching as pleasure builds despite all the giggles. “harder, hoon— please.”

he tries, really tries, but ends up laughing again when he loses his rhythm. “i’m sorry— i’m so drunk but i still want you so bad.”

you cup his face and kiss him deeply, hips rolling up to meet his. the mood shifts gradually — still giggly and loving, but the pleasure starts taking over. sunghoon’s thrusts become deeper, more purposeful, even as soft chuckles escape between moans.

“right there,” you whimper, eyes fluttering. “feels so good…”

“yeah?” he pants, pressing his forehead to yours so he can look at you. “gonna make my pretty wife cum?”

you nod frantically, and he reaches between you to rub your clit, a little sloppy, but perfect.

your orgasm hits you first — sudden and sweet, making you moan his name as your body tightens around him.

sunghoon follows right after, burying himself deep with a broken groan, hips stuttering as he fills you up. he collapses on top of you, both of you breathing hard and still laughing breathlessly.

“we’re a mess,” you whisper, running your fingers through his sweaty hair.

“the best kind of mess,” he replies, kissing your jaw lazily. he rolls off you but immediately pulls you into his arms, spooning you from behind. his hand rests possessively on your stomach as he nuzzles into your neck.

“best night ever,” he mumbles, already sounding half-asleep. “i love being drunk with you. i love having giggly sex with you. i love being your husband.”

you smile and intertwine your fingers with his. “and i love you more.”

even as sleep starts pulling you under, soft giggles bubble up again when sunghoon sleepily tries to kiss your shoulder and misses. he eventually succeeds, pressing a warm, lazy kiss to your skin.

“round two in the morning?” he whispers.

“only if you’re not hungover,” you tease.

“deal.”

you fall asleep tangled together, bodies warm, hearts full, and the quiet sound of shared laughter still lingering in the air long after the party ended.

© jongst4r, 2026

Jake Sim had ripped my heart right out of my chest and shattered it. Almost a month later and I’m still picking up the pieces. 

“It’s silly,” I say as I pin a garland of fake ivy above my bed.

“No, it’s not,” replies Shani. 

The two of us were carrying out our yearly tradition of me pleading with Shani to let me decorate the dorm, her playing the tsundere and refusing, then eventually giving in after I bust out the puppy-dog eyes. This year I had purchased a plethora of fake plants and string lights to give our room a cosy fairyland theme.

“I just feel so stupid,” I continue. “We would still be talking right now if I had just kept it to myself.”

“I guarantee you, you’d still be miserable.” She pauses her work with the fairy lights to shoot me a look over her shoulder. “You’re an emotional person. When you feel, you feel hard. And I like that about you, lots of people do, but that’s not great when you have unrequited feelings. You’d be tearing yourself up from the inside out. Why are you looking at me like that?”

Wiping fake tears from my eyes, I put on my best proud-parent face and exclaim, “Oh, Shani, you do understand emotions!”

Shani rolls her kohl-lined eyes. “Just because I refuse to show my emotions, doesn’t mean I don’t understand them.”

‘Refuse to show’ is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s true that Shani isn’t the most cuddly and friendly person on campus. It was one of the many reasons we made such great roommates. We balanced each other out: her, the stoic and calm, and me, the excitable and emotional.  

Giggling, I drop the facade and hop off my bed to throw the excess leafage in the decor box. “I’m just joking. But for real, am I really that easy to read?”

“Yes, but we’ve also been roommates and friends for almost three years now.” 

I flop down on my bed and roll to face her as she sits on her own. “Did Scarlett tell you she has a new roommate?”

“Of course she did. That girl can’t keep a secret to save her life.”

I laugh. 

Scarlett is a sucker for gossip and drama.

 “Do you think we’ll see her at the welcome party?”

“Who? Scarlett? Obviously. The new girl? Unlikely. Scar said she doesn’t seem like the type.”

“What does that mean?”

“Who knows,” Shani says with a shrug. “Either way, the party’s in an hour. We should get dressed.”

“Guys, I don’t know about this,” I whimper, tugging at the hem of my dress as the three of us make our way across the courtyard to the gym. In preparation for tonight’s events, Scarlett and Shani had squeezed me into one of the former’s skimpiest dresses: a tiny strapless number, black in colour with baby-pink lace decorating the hem and neckline, barely long enough to cover my butt. Scarlett had swept my hair up into a loose updo whilst Shani dug through her monstrous collection of black boots to find a heeled knee-high pair she claimed would match the dress perfectly.

“What if it doesn’t work?” I ask, a sheen of sweat forming at the back of my neck despite the lack of material on my body.

“I guarantee you it will,” Scarlett replies, flashing her signature mischievous smile. “He’d be crazy not to come crawling back, begging for forgiveness.”

Shani nods in agreement. “And even if he doesn’t, you still look absolutely stunning, and we’re going to have a great time dancing.”

They’re talking about Jake, of course. Aside from giving myself a massive confidence boost, he is the reason for me wearing this little black “revenge dress” as my friends have dubbed it. I want him back. Whether as a friend or something more, I need his presence back in my life. The reasonable portion of my mind tells me it would be best to forgive and forget—accept that Jake doesn't want me and move on. But the foolishly hopeful (and unfortunately stronger) portion wants me to fight for one of my dearest friends. At the very least, I believe I deserve an explanation from Jake, and if wearing a skimpy mini-dress is the only way to get one, then so be it.

The party is already in full swing when the three of us enter the gym. The lights are low and constantly shifting between hues of blue and pink. There is a banner hanging from one of the balconies reading “Welcome Back!” in bedazzled block letters, and streamers and balloons floating above the student body. Both the day and night classes are here tonight.

“Let’s get a drink,” says Shani. She leads the way to the snack and beverage table. 

It’s guarded by a pair of teachers attempting to prevent the punch and juices from being spiked. I’m sure at least a third of the students here tonight are carrying flasks of alcohol with them tonight as a result. I’m even more sure that Scarlett knows every single one of them and will be able to con someone into sharing with us.

As soon as our cups are full of fruity punch and we’re out of earshot of the teachers, Scarlett confirms my suspicions with a cheeky grin. “I know who we can get alcohol from. Jay Park promised to sneak me in some after losing a bet.”

Shani recoils. “Of all the people in this school, it had to be Jay. You know I hate him.”

Scarlett waves her hand dismissively. “Hate, love, same thing.”

Shani blanches then recovers, fixing a deadly stare on Scarlett. “You little—” She calms herself with a deep breath and turns to me, planting her cup in my free hand. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

Scarlett giggles mischievously as Shani stomps away.

“She's going to actually get mad at you one of these days,” I warn.

“Eh, doubt it. She’s a softy at heart.”

I laugh in agreement. No matter how much of a tough act she put on, Shani has a lot of love to give to those who earned her trust.

“What was that about anyway? Did something happen between her and Jay? I didn’t know they knew each other.”

“Oh, they know each other very well,” Scarlett says with a suggestive wiggle of her eyebrows.

“Oh... Oh.”

“Yep. Now come on, I want to get drunk.” She tugs me through the crowd to her source. “Hey, Jay!”

“Hello, Scarlett,” says a boy that I can only describe as looking like trouble. This must be Jay. He’s standing with two other boys. One with a gentle expression and kind, doe-like eyes, the other with a puppy face and boy-next-door smile, kind of like—

Jake. My eyes meet his and the world stops spinning. It’s him. It’s really him. To anyone else, he looks just as he did the day he broke my heart. But there are small changes that only I can pick up on. His smile and eyes are just as joyfully boyish and kind as always, but his hair is longer and darker, and his skin is paler, clearer and almost glowing.

My heart reaches for his, and my body aches for his comforting presence. But before I can even begin to think about what to say, someone presses play and the world starts spinning fast enough to give me whiplash. 

Jake’s expression drops, his hands fly up to his mouth in an ‘I’m-going-to-be-sick’ kind of way and he’s shoving his way through the crowd, rushing to get away.

My stomach twists. Does he hate me that much? So much that the mere sight of me has him hacking up his lunch? My heart stings in a way that I had only recently become familiar with. It was similar to the stinging behind my eyes when I held back tears, only worse.

“What’s his deal?” Scarlett scoffs, pushing her cup towards Jay. “Allergic to the consequences of his actions?”

Scarlett's joke brings a small smile to my face. It warms my soul to have her backing me up. 

Jay rolls his eyes but obliges her, discreetly unveiling a chrome flask from his jacket. He pours a shot into her cup then mine and then Shani’s. “To be fair, you just served up his greatest desire on a silver platter in a place where partaking of said desire is heavily frowned upon.”

A tingle runs down my spine. Greatest desire? Does he mean me? But what does that even mean? How could I be Jake’s greatest desire? It was no more than one month ago that Jake wilfully ripped my heart from my chest, hurled it to the ground, stomped and spit on it. Metaphorically, of course.

Scarlett grimaces. “First of all, Jay, you need to stop talking about humans that way—it’s gross. Second of all, what are you talking about?”

“You know what I'm talking about.” Tucking his flask away again, Jay turns to the boy with the doe-eyes. “I’m going to go check on him.”

The boy nods and Jay disappears into the crowd. The boy then turns to me and Scarlet.

“I’m Heeseung, by the way,” he says with a friendly smile.

Scarlett introduces us.

“I’m sorry about them,” Heeseung says, frowning slightly. “Please don’t take anything they say or do personally. Jake’s still learning and Jay, well, he’s just an idiot.”

My brow furrows. “Learning?”

Heeseung nods. “That’s what the transitional period is: learning. His body is still changing, so intense cravings are a given. He’ll learn how to control them soon, though, and he’ll eventually be able to survive off the pills alone.”

“The pills?” I gape at Heeseung. He has such a kind face, I would have never guessed drugs were one of his hobbies. Is that why Jake cut me off? Because he’s been hanging out with drug dealers? Is he a drug dealer too now?

“The blood pills, I mean.”

“The blood pills?” I exclaim. It just gets worse.

Heeseung’s doe eyes widened in mild surprise. “Jake didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Jake was bitten by a pureblood. He’s a vampire now.”

The afternoon air is warm, a gentle breeze carrying the fresh scent of spring across the courtyards where students can be found chatting the afternoon away as they spread out on the soft green grass, or nap under a tall shady tree, the background jibber combining with the gentle babble of the fountain to create the perfect lullaby.

I, however, am on a mission. Despite Heeseung filling me in on all that is Jake this past month, I need to hear it from the man himself. A small glimmer of hope had sparked as Heeseung spoke to me. Maybe Jake didn’t mean what he had said that day. Maybe the transformation was getting to him. As cliche as it is, maybe he thought that cutting me off would ‘protect me’. I really hope it isn’t that because that is just plain stupid. Vampires and humans can coexist perfectly well. The school we attend is proof of that. Surely Jake knows that. Although, I’d prefer Jake was being misguidedly heroic rather than honest when he said that he no longer wanted my friendship.

It’s an odd sensation to let my eyes skim past all the students in black day-class uniforms and instead honing in on the white night-class uniforms in the search for Jake. Despite this, I find him with little effort. He’s heading in the direction of the exotic flower greenhouse where Heeseung told him to meet-up after class. 

There’s a sharp pang in my chest at the sight of him, feelings of longing and misery storming in my heart. I miss him. Oh, God, I miss him. But he broke my heart, and whatever his reasons were, the pain was undeniable. Still, recovering my friendship with Jake would mean the world to me, and that can’t happen until he starts being honest with me. It’s time to get some answers.

I step out from behind my hiding place and follow Jake into the garden, maintaining a respectable distance. If he realises I’m following him then I’m sure he’ll flee. I can’t let that happen.

The hedged pathway twists and turns, breaking into forks at multiple points. I start to worry at a few intersections that I might turn the wrong way, but the subtle scent of orchids and lilies guides me to the centre where the glass flower house lies. I’d be remiss to simply call the place a greenhouse when the entire structure could house half the human body of students of Cross Academy. Rather, the term ‘glass palace’ seems more appropriate. Despite its crystal clear walls, the incredible volume of tropical and exotic plants and flowers housed inside block the view from outside. As I twist the golden branch-shaped handle, I can only hope Jake managed to follow the flower scent as well.

Inside, a serenade of butterfly wings flapping and crickets chirping surrounds me as I search for Jake. I find him sitting on the edge of a flower bed, twirling a hibiscus between his fingers.

Before I can even think of calling his name, he shoots up and his gaze lands on me, frantic and disbelieving.

“Jake,” I say softly, as though not to spook a small animal. 

He stumbles back. “Where's Heeseung?”

“He's not coming. It's just you and me, Jake.” There's an ache in my chest that grows deeper at the sight of Jake. I want to scream and cry and tear my hair out—better yet, tear his hair out—anything to make him understand how he needlessly hurt me. But I can't bring myself to do it. Hurting him won't do either of us any good. 

And the longer I observe him, the more concern starts to creep up on me. He’s changed again since the party. Then, his skin glowed and his eyes twinkled. Now, his skin is sallow and covered in a sheen of sweat, his eyes sunken beneath dark circles, and his posture weakened. Is this part of the change from human to vampire? But he looked fine at the party. What has changed since then?

“No, no,” Jake says, shaking his head, dark locks falling over his eyes. “I-I have to go. I can't do this.”

“Yes, you can,” I urge, moving closer.

He steps back. “No, I can't.” 

I step forward. “Yes, you can. There's no reason you can't.”

“There's so many reasons I can't,” Jake replies, gaze meeting mine again.

The intensity of his stare sends a shiver down my spine. I try to swallow my nerves.

His eyes catch the bob in my throat. They flash red.

A gasp sweeps out of my mouth before I can stop it. 

“Jake, wait,” I say, reaching for him, but it's too late, he's gone, disappearing between shades of emerald and honeydew.

A wave of panic surges through me and my legs start moving of their own accord, chasing after Jake through the greenhouse. I can’t lose him, not when I haven’t even gotten him back. 

I pause in the centre of a ring of towering palm trees as desperation claws up my throat. “I know you’re a vampire!” I shout, turning in a circle. “Heeseung told me.”

Only flittering beetle wings reply. But the familiar tingle at the back of my neck, tells me he’s still here, watching me. “Jake, please. I’m not scared of you.”

A beat of silence follows. It’s broken by palm fronds brushing against each other.

I turn to the sound, but Jake’s voice echoes out behind me.

“Don't lie to me, Y/N. I saw the look on your face before.”

“It wasn’t fear,” I say, turning again, scanning the surrounding plants for a glimpse of him. “I was just a bit shocked, is all.”

More silence. 

So I continue, “You’ve never had bright red eyes before, so I was surprised. That’s all. I’ll get used to it, though. I’ll get used to everything. I don’t care that you’re a vampire.”  

Leaves rustle behind me again. When I turn, I find myself face-to-face with Jake. My heart skips a beat, almost jumping into my throat. His eyes are slowly returning to normal—mocha brown pushing back against the crimson red. And yet, the cold glare in them pins me in place. He's never been more intimidating, power and strength and heat radiating from his body as he towers over me.

Briefly, I wonder if the change from human to vampire is like a second puberty, because I could have sworn he only had a couple inches on me. 

His low voice interrupts my thoughts. “You don’t care?” He asks. “Y/N, I’m a vampire. I need blood to survive. I crave it. And I could easily kill you to satisfy the craving. You should be terrified. I’m a monster.”

I suck in a deep breath, steeling myself. He’s trying to scare me—push me away—but it’s not going to work. Not this time.  

“You’re not a monster,” I say, returning his glare, though I fear the half-heartedness of it is abundantly obvious. Despite my best efforts, I can never be truly mad at him. Frustrated maybe, but angry? Never. “You’re my best friend. You have been for the past eighteen years, and you will be for another eighteen, at the very least.”

Tears pool in my eyes and I jab a finger into his chest. He flinches, stepping back.

”You think you can scare me, Jake Sim? Think again. I’ve seen you in diapers. I’ve seen you ball your eyes out on the first day of school. I’ve seen you in heels and a dress. I’ve seen you so drunk you sang karaoke for three hours straight. I’ve stripped and bathed you after you fell in your vomit, for God’s sake!”

A rosey blush blooms across his cheeks as he takes in my words, stupefied embarrassment taking over from the faux-aggression. He parts his lips to speak but no words come out, so he closes them and hangs his head. 

Jake has always been the type of person who needs a little time to process his thoughts and feelings, so I step back and give him some space while he considers my words. The cogs of his brain turn steadily, pulling his brows closer together. My fingers twitch, itching to reach out and smooth over the crease between them like I used to do when Jake got lost in his thoughts. I force myself to hold back, though.

Finally, he looks up and opens his mouth again to speak. Anticipation turns my heartbeat skittish. 

“Y/N, I—“ are the only words Jake manages before his body suddenly stiffens and his eyes widen, that sickly crimson flooding the irises. His expression becomes pained, one of his hands pressing against his temple.

”Jake?” I say. “Are you okay?”

A groan and a grunt is his reply as his knees buckle and he falls to his hands and knees.

“Jake!” I reach for him instinctively, dropping to the ground next to him.

A shudder racks his lean body, the hand on his head flies down to cover his mouth and nose, and I think he might be about to throw up. A single bead of sweat forms at his hairline and trickles down.

“Jake, what's wrong?” I ask, panic shaking my voice. “Are you sick?”

I reach for his forehead, trying to gauge his temperature, but he shoves my hand away. 

“No,” he groans. “Leave me alone. You need to get out of here.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“Blood,” he says through gritted teeth. “Your blood. I can smell it.”

It’s only then that I become aware of the gravel slicing into the skin on my knees, drawing thin lines of blood to the surface. It’s not enough to warrant a band-aid, but apparently enough to trigger this visceral reaction from Jake. My heart clenches as his breathing turns laboured.

A conversation I had with Heeseung whilst arranging this meeting with Jake springs back into memory.

“Jake is still in the transitional period,” he had said. “As a human turned vampire, his body doesn’t know how to survive off the small amount of blood the rest of us are born knowing to. He needs fresh blood every day to complete his transformation.”

“What if he doesn’t get fresh blood?” I asked. 

Heeseung sighed. “If a new vampire doesn’t get enough blood while the change is still happening, they’ll become a Level E.”

I hesitated then, fearing his next answer. “Level E?”

“Level E is the lowest rank of vampires. They lose almost all cognitive function as their hunger for blood takes over, driving them to endless acts of violence in the pursuit of it. There’s nothing that can be done for a person if they reach that point. The only thing you can do is put them out of their misery.” 

Back in the present, my mind is made up instantly.

“Jake, get up,” I say, rising and pulling his arm. “Let me help you.”

With a heavy, pained groan Jake lets me pull him off the ground and guide him to a nearby bench. He near-collapses onto it, leaning his weight onto one hand as the other shakily rakes through his hair. He throws his head back, chest heaving with each breath. I try my best to ignore the heat spreading around my body as I loosen my tie. Jake is in pain and I need to help him.

“What are you doing?” Jake asks, his usually smooth and full voice now strained and gravelly. His eyes widen as I slip off my blazer. “Y-Y/N.”

“You need blood,” I answer, undoing the top buttons of my shirt to expose my neck.

“Y/N, no, I can’t,” he says, but his eyes betray him, the warm natural brown fading to an eerily bright red.

“Yes, Jake,” I reply, imbuing my voice with a confidence I don’t have. “I refuse to let you turn into a Level E. I refuse to lose you.” Undoing a fourth button that allows my shirt to fall off my shoulder, I sit next to Jake and turn my back to him so he has full access to my neck.

Jake’s eyes fall to the exposed skin. He swallows hard. “I don’t know if I can control myself,” he confesses. “What if I can’t stop?”

“You can and you will,” I tell him. I look at him over my bare shoulder. “I know you can.”

His eyes snap up to mine. “Aren’t you scared?”

“Only of losing you.” Gently, I take one of his hands in mine and bring it up to the side of my neck where the rhythmic pulse of blood is strongest. “Please, Jake. Just take it.”

The red in his eyes intensifies at the feeling of my pulse under his hand. His breath hitches. “Okay.”  

I can see how hard he’s concentrating on maintaining his composure as he straddles the bench and shuffles closer. My heart swells at the knowledge that he’s insistent on controlling himself and not letting his hunger consume him. He cares about me still, despite the harsh words he spoke before. I matter to him. I can only hope it’s as much as he matters to me. 

He places a tentative hand on my other shoulder and lowers his face into the crook of my neck. I hear a low rumbling in his throat as he breathes in my scent. “I’m sorry,” he whispers before sinking his teeth into my skin.

I gasp at the sharp sting of pain, hands balling up in the hem of my skirt. It hurts more than I expected and I almost want to tell Jake to stop, but then a soft moan vibrates along my skin and his arms wrap around me, and the pain eases. He pulls my body flush against his own and the familiarity of him melts the tension from my bones so well that I find myself sighing and relaxing into him. 

it was almost comical how different you were. riki was full punk, bassist for an indie band that often played at the university, ENHYPEN. there wasn’t a single day where he wasn’t absolutely decked out in silver, chains and long, dangly earrings hanging from his figure whenever you saw him. maybe, if you caught him on an extra good day, you’d catch him in makeup, his eyes fierce with the subtle smudge of eyeliner he’d do sometimes. or, if you got really lucky, you’d be able to catch his bold lower body tattoos in the baby tees he decided to wear every once in a while.

it was his whole thing, his brand. someone saw a person with obnoxiously large jeans on? riki totally put them on to that. someone saw a person with obnoxiously tight jeans on? riki had to have been on the moodboard. he was predictable– in the sense that he had a very clear reputation preceding him around the decelis campus.

so when you hear that he has a girlfriend just as popular as he is, you could probably assume what she’d look like. when the rumors started going around that riki nishimura was found smiling at his phone during lectures and carrying roses around campus, every slightly alternatively-styled girl at decelis had been taken hostage for questioning. they took everyone in, but none of them were his. they’d never get it right, because there was one thing about riki that nobody could ever see coming.

riki was definitely a powerful presence in all regards, but in specific, his romantic type was the one thing that turned more heads than ever.

the university nearly caught fire the day you went public. it was the day of your three month anniversary, and ENHYPEN had a gig nearby that afternoon, so your boyfriend invited you to go watch. the bar was no more than a twenty minute walk from campus, so the set was filled with students when the band stepped up to play.

the crowd roared when the spotlight hit the members– park jongseong on vocals and guitar, kim sunoo on the keyboard, yang jungwon on drums, and nishimura riki in all his glory, standing just to the side with his iconic, hot red bass slung over his shoulder. they glistened under the stage lights, presence undeniable. jongseong stepped up to the mic, a smirk making its way to his face as he took in the crowd. he held the mic in his hand, guitar pick in between his fingers as he spoke. “y’all ready to rock with us, decelis?” he wasn’t loud, he didn’t have to be– his voice, as deep and smooth as it was, had enough impact in it to get everyone pumped up.

riki looked up from his bass for a second, eyes quickly scanning the bar for the one face he’d been waiting to see. you weren’t hard to spot, anyway. his gaze finally fell on you, looking you up and down shamelessly in front of the audience. you could practically feel his hands on your body as he eyed you, obviously savoring the sight of you at his set. your cheeks flared red despite yourself, and he caught the flustered reaction on your face before you looked away, chuckling and shaking his head before focusing again.

when the opening melody of karma came through jay’s guitar, it was almost on primal instinct that the screams blared through the bar, hands up and waving to the beat as the set began. the band shone under the stage lights, their confidence almost dangerous up close. you could see it in the way they smiled as they played, getting through crazy riffs and high notes with ease, closing their eyes after as if to bask in the way the crowd would get louder whenever they’d do tricks.

you couldn’t keep your eyes off your boyfriend the entire time. he was pretty quiet by nature, but on stage? he was explosive. he smiled the biggest on stage, bobbing his head along to the music as he carried the performance on bass. you saw the way adrenaline filled his body under the energy of the moment, seemingly restless as he gave all of his energy on performing. this was what he loved to do, performing is what he lived for, and he was even happier with you there to watch him.

after about half an hour of performing, ENHYPEN’s set came to a close, the four bowing before the crowd before stepping off. as you’re headed over to the bar for a drink, the bartender looks you up and down quizzically, an amused brow perked up at your presence.

“y/n l/n?” she gasped dramatically, “to what do we owe the pleasure?” minjeong leaned slightly over the bar, her head tilted as she got another look at you. you giggled, you knew people never would have expected you at a bar, let alone at a rock set. “you can thank ENHYPEN for my presence tonight,” you smiled, “i was invited to watch them tonight.”

“really?” minjeong looked suspicious, but it only interested her all the more. she smirked, clicking her teeth. “i could’ve sworn you were alone during that entire set. could it be that you’re secretly a fan of rock, miss l/n?”

“i mean–”

“hey baby,” a pair of familiar lips suddenly stuck to the lower part of your neck, cutting it dangerously close to your collarbone as you giggled at the ticklish feeling it gave you. “riki!” he chuckled against your neck before pulling away and wrapping his arms around you. “‘you like the set?” his voice was low and husky, slightly hoarse from screaming on stage. you nodded, grinning from ear to ear as he mirrored your expression. “happy three months, babe.”

minjeong’s legs nearly gave out on her. she could only stare, jaw practically on the ground as she observed the interaction. “i’m sorry– you two? like, you? and him?” 

riki wiped the smirk from her face, taking its place with a smug grin of his own. “yes, winter, we’re dating.” he turned to you, his expression softening ever so slightly under your gaze, the way you just looked happy to be around him. “a piña colada for the lady, please.”

it was laughable, the juxtaposition of your personalities.

you were popular around decelis, probably just as popular as he was, but that was the only thing you had in common. while he rocked baggy jeans and fucked-up smokey eyes, you wore short, flowy skirts with that signature eyeliner wing that everyone tried copying on campus. you had new and cute hairstyles every single day, and you had a different shade of pink for every occasion– it was simply your color. 

while riki was known for his fierce presence in ENHYPEN, you were known for the effortless attraction you carried with every step you took. you were the campus golden girl, sociable and amiable, grades that some would try to kill for, and you were beautiful. you were gorgeous beyond what words could describe. guys could fold at the sound of your laugh, girls would sell their souls to live a day in your shoes. you were essentially the regina george of campus, minus the villainy, of course. 

riki met you through a mutual friend at a party, from which you bonded over all the surprising things you shared in common. despite the opposite lives you lived, the two of you just fit together. like yin and yang, hot and cold, sweet and sour, you balanced one another out perfectly. It’s what made your relationship so special and all the more powerful. 

“power couple” was an understatement for the impact of your relationship around decelis. it was so impossible and unbelievable, yet made so much sense at the same time. seeing the two of you walking side by side on campus was enough to inspire enough double takes to give a person whiplash, your visual chemistry in pictures was nearly blinding from the overwhelming amount of straight looks. but what got people the most was the way you two would melt in each other’s presence.

it was in the way you completely break composure near riki, throwing your arms around him messily as he reciprocated with hearty laughs you’d never hear from him otherwise. it was in the way riki’s neck would burn a bright pink the second he managed to get his hand on your waist, and the way you’d panic whenever riki whispered in your ear, his words never fully appropriate for a public setting. 

The vampires had tried to find remedies in the old grimoires they possessed, or even to contact acquaintances in the hidden supernatural world, but no solution seemed to present itself to them.

Jay made her eat different kinds of broth, Y/N couldn't swallow anything more without throwing it up within the hour. It worried them to see their lover in this state and frustrated them that they could do nothing.

They took turns watching over her when she finally slept, staying by her bedside to ensure she didn't have a fit in her sleep. Heeseung had not been able to return to her mind, a kind of fog clouded his mind whenever he tried to read her.

Jungwon gently dabbed the young girl's forehead with a damp cloth, her pale complexion glistened in the candlelight. They had been forced to handcuff her to the bed because she became uncontrollable during her fits, even scratching herself or digging her nails into her palms, making blood flow.

"Do you think I'm going to die?" she said weakly, her arms by her sides.

"Of course not, we're going to find a solution to make you better."

"Why are you doing this for me? You freed me from the abbey, and you're watching over me."

"Because we care about you," Jungwon smiled, stroking her hair. "You don't understand everything now, but everything will be clearer in the future."

Y/N nodded, not having the strength to ask all the questions that had been running through her mind since her arrival. The vampire leaned down to place a kiss on her forehead before leaving the room to empty the small basin of water that had become warm.

Silence fell over the room, and Y/N closed her eyes, trying to fall asleep. Through the window, the moon rose in the sky, its rays entered the room. The light gradually spread toward the bed, gently licking the young girl's body.

Y/N opened her eyes again, the red light of the moon completely enveloped her and cut off her breath so strongly that she thought she was dying. She brought her hand to her chest, where the medallion was burning her skin. She wanted to call for help, but her voice died in her throat.

Jungwon returned to the room humming, a new bowl of fresh water in his hands. He entered the room, stopping dead when he saw the empty bed. The handcuffs had been abandoned on the mattress, and the sheets were in disarray. The bowl shattered into pieces on the floor, the vampire rushed to the wide-open window, the curtains flapping in the wind.

"Shit…" He rushed out of the room to raise the alarm. "Hyungs! Y/N is gone!" As he burst into the hall, the vampires appeared from all corners of the house at vampire speed.

"What do you mean, Y/N is gone?" Jake panicked.

"I left the room for five minutes, and when I came back, the bed was empty and the window was wide open!"

"We have to find her!"

They left the house, heading into the woods in search of the young girl. They could follow her scent in the air, but there was a strange atmosphere in the forest. It was as if they felt watched from all sides, eyes coming from the trees, the leaves, and the moon.

Its red rays cast an ominous light in the woods, and it didn't bode well. They hadn't seen a red moon for millennia, and for one to appear in the sky today, when Y/N was at death's door, could not be a coincidence.

"Her scent is getting stronger," Sunghoon said. "But there's also…"

"Blood," Ni-ki said.

The vampires emerged from the bushes to enter a circular clearing in the middle of the woods. But their blood ran cold. Because in the center stood Y/N, kneeling before two altars. And they would recognize them among a thousand. These were the altars where they had buried the bodies of Selen and Sooha. So how the hell did they end up here when they should be in Transylvania and Riverfield?!

Y/N raised her arms above her head, as if in a trance, the blade of the knife she held glinting in the night. "NO!"

"Y/N!"

Heeseung was the first to reach her, grabbing her wrist to try to make her drop the weapon, but she was unreachable, endowed with a strength that prevented the vampire from stopping her. "Y/N, baby, drop the knife!"

"We can help you!"

"Let me do it…" she murmured, her eyes empty and translucent.

This was not their lover here, but another version of her, possessed by the curse that was about to befall their soulmate once again. "Y/N, listen to my voice and stop this," Heeseung begged. "You don't have to do this."

"Let. Me. Do. IT!" She screamed, chopping the words as a force emanated from her and sent the vampires flying around the clearing.

Their screams echoed in the woods as Y/N lowered her arms, plunging the knife in one swift motion into her chest. Blood flowed, dripping over her fingers as she began to speak words in an ancient language that even they knew little of, her voice carried through the clearing as gusts of wind shook the trees.

"Y/N, stop this, I beg you!" Sunoo shouted over the wind's assaults.

"Y/N, please!"

However, it was not her blood that stained her hands and soaked her clothes. The tip of the knife had broken the medallion around her neck, and the blood it contained had escaped. She had never intended to take her own life, only to save theirs.

A lightning bolt streaked across the sky, the two altars of Selen and Sooha slowly sank into the ground as if it were opening beneath their feet. Y/N's voice echoed through the air, more powerful than ever as blood flowed from her nose, ears, and eyes. Was she giving her own life to save them?

Thunder rumbled in the sky as cries that were not her own rose. Lightning struck where Y/N was, a bright light blinded them before disappearing.

Calm had returned, the wind had died down, and the moon had regained its silvery color as if nothing had ever happened. Two statues were erected where the altars had stood, in memory of Selen and Sooha.

The vampires rushed to Y/N, who was lying in the grass, motionless. Jay cradled her in his arms, running a trembling hand over her face to wipe away as much blood as possible. "Love, please, wake up."

Jungwon pushed the knife away from her hand, Ni-ki swept away the shards of glass that covered her chest amid the dried blood. Heeseung slid his hand into her hair, tears brimming in his eyes as he pressed his thumb to her temple, trying to read her mind.

"I can't feel her anymore," he murmured. "She's gone."

Jake stifled a sob behind his hand, Sunghoon placed a hand on his shoulder. They had just lost the one they loved once again, and they had been powerless to stop it. They had lost again. The hunters had once again been victorious.

Y/N suddenly sat up with a cry, clutching her chest as they all jumped in surprise. She breathed heavily, as if she had been holding her breath for long minutes. "I got struck by lightning! They didn't tell me it would do that!" She grunted, rubbing her chest, which smeared more blood.

"You're… You're alive," Sunoo stammered.

"Of course I'm alive!" She stood up, looking at the two statues, hands on her hips. "Aish, the liars, they said it would be painless."

"They?" Ni-ki repeated.

"Yeah, Selen and Sooha."

"You talked to them?!"

The young girl nodded, turning to them. "The voices I was hearing were Selen and Sooha. Except I didn't know what they meant, which is why it was painful. But they explained how to break the curse."

"You broke it?" Jay gasped.

"Obviously, but we had to take advantage of the red moon, which only comes once every thousand years, to break it. Those fucking hunters were clever. But I had no idea how to do it, so Selen took possession of my body. She was the one closest to breaking the curse. Sooha died before she could even try."

"We thought you were going to kill yourself," Heeseung sighed, grabbing her hands.

Y/N smiled tenderly, caressing his cheek, and the vampire closed his eyes, seeking her warmth. "Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. The medallion was what contained the curse with your blood, destroying it was impossible except on this day. You are free. And by extension, so am I."

"Do you… Do you remember?" Sunghoon hesitated, scratching the back of his neck.

She pulled away from Heeseung to approach him, wrapping her arms around his neck as the vampire's hands immediately went to her hips, like an automatism. "I know that the first time we kissed was on the lake dock," she smiled. Y/N stroked his hairline, a smirk stretching her lips. "I mean, we did much worse on that dock, right, Hoon?"

He growled, leaning his head down to kiss her, but Y/N had already pulled away, turning her back to them to head toward the house. "All right, I need a bath!"

She let out a cry when she was lifted into muscular arms, clinging to Ni-ki's neck, who had suddenly appeared. "Ni-ki!"

"You're barefoot, I'm carrying you."

"I got here barefoot. I can go back barefoot."

"No, not as long as I'm here, darling." Y/N muttered under her breath but let herself be carried, the rest of the vampires quickly joined them as they headed home. Their home.

The curse was broken, and there was no longer any risk of their lover being killed. They would finally be able to live a life of abundance, joy, and love.

Jake had run her a nice hot bath, and Y/N had been able to wash away all the dirt and blood that had accumulated during her short walk in the woods.

Her body hidden by the bubbles floating on the surface of the tub, Y/N rested against the edge, her eyes closed, finally enjoying a little peace. The voices that had filled her mind for months were finally gone, and it felt strange. She had almost gotten used to them.

The bathroom door opened, and she opened her eyes to see Heeseung enter, crouching down in front of the tub. He smiled, gently taking her hand, which was resting on the rim, and intertwining their fingers.

At her touch, he was able to enter her mind as he had in the past, without restriction or unpleasant crackling. "I can read your mind," he murmured, pressing his forehead against the back of her hand.

"What can you read?" she smiles. Heeseung lifts his head to look at her, a smile stretching across his lips.

"All the dirtiest things we did."

Y/N bursts into laughter, sitting up in the bath and leaning against the edge, her head tilted towards Heeseung. She runs her fingers through his dark hair, gazing at his face, then his lips. She places a tender kiss there and pulls back just enough for Heeseung to search her lips for another kiss.

The vampire nibbles at her lower lip until a small drop of blood pierces it, which he catches with his tongue, Y/N moaning through the kiss. His hands roam over her damp skin, water soaking his sleeves.

"I missed this so much," he murmurs against her mouth. "I missed you." She smiles, placing a kiss on his lips, then on his jaw, his cheeks, his forehead, Heeseung keeping his eyes closed.

"Yah, hyung!" Their little bubble burst as Ni-ki stood in the doorway, arms crossed and looking annoyed. He grabbed Heeseung by the back of his shirt collar, pulling him to his feet. "We said we don't touch Y/N-nie before we speak! You traitor!"

Heeseung winked at Y/N, who giggled as the maknae dragged the vampire away with him. The girl got out of her bath, dried herself, and put on a dry, blood-free nightgown.

Barefoot, she went downstairs to the living room where the vampires were. "We heard you and Heeseung hyung had some fun?" Sunghoon teased.

"It was just a kiss," she said, rolling her eyes. "Don't be dramatic."

"Dramatic?" Sunoo gaps. "Honey!"

Y/N smiled and sat down between Jake and Jungwon on the sofa. Jay appeared behind her and draped a blanket over her shoulders so she wouldn't get cold. Jake had lit a fire in the fireplace, but it was still a little chilly.

"Why was Ni-ki talking about a discussion we were supposed to have?" she asked.

"Well, a lot has happened in a short amount of time," Jungwon said. "You regained your memory, and the curse was lifted. We just wanted to make sure you were okay with all of this."

"I am. I mean, I know that without Selen and Sooha's memories, being the soulmate of seven vampires would be very disturbing, but it isn't for me. I'm just happy that it's all over and we can live together."

“Good, that’s exactly what we want too,” Jay smiled.

“So we can kiss her now that we’ve talked?” Heeseung asked. Ni-ki and Jake threw pillows at his face, the older vampire grumbling and chasing after them. Y/N giggled, resting her head against Jungwon’s shoulder as he kissed her forehead.

Now, a long and beautiful life lay before them.

Masterlist

The party is Mina’s idea. It always is. You’ve stopped pretending otherwise — stopped doing the thing where you spend twenty minutes debating whether you’re really feeling it before Mina gives you the look and you both know you’re going regardless.

It’s a Friday in late September, the air outside finally tipping from warm to something with a bite in it, and you’ve been in your dorm room since two in the afternoon staring at the same paragraph of Middlemarch without absorbing a single word.

“You need to get out of this room,” Mina says from your bed, where she’s been watching you not read for the past hour. She’s already dressed — black top, dark jeans, the gold hoops she only wears when she’s decided the night is going to be worth the effort. She decided before she came over. The last hour has been a courtesy. “You’ve been staring at that book like it cheated on you.”

The word lands between you, briefly. Mina’s face doesn’t change “George Eliot is a menace,” you say.

“You love George Eliot.”

“I love George Eliot when I’m not trying to produce fifteen hundred words on her narrative voice by Monday morning.” You close the book. It’s not like you’re reading it anyway.

The thing about Delta Kappa parties is that they are, by any objective measure, too much. Too loud, too hot, the bass sitting somewhere in your sternum, red cups and bodies everywhere you look. Mina thrives. You tolerate it with the specific resignation of someone who knows they’re going to have a good time despite themselves and finds this faintly irritating.

You’re on your second drink when you see Sunghoon. He’s across the room near the kitchen doorway, mid-conversation with someone you don’t recognise, laughing at something. Head tipped back the way he always did — that particular way, unhurried and a little private, like whatever amused him was his alone. You used to love that about him. You watch it for maybe three seconds before you look away, which feels like a victory of some kind.

Four months. Four months since you’d found out, since you’d sat on your dorm room floor and read a conversation thread you were never supposed to see, since everything you thought you’d built with him had turned out to be built on something rotten underneath.

Two years of your life. Your first real relationship. You’d thought it would last.

You look away. You drain the rest of your cup.

“He’s here,” Mina says, appearing at your elbow with the precision of someone who has been watching.

“I know.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No.” You mean it. “I’m not leaving a party because of Sunghoon Park.”

She studies you for a moment with that particular look — the one that measures the difference between actually fine and performing fine with uncomfortable accuracy. Whatever she finds seems to satisfy her, because she clinks her cup against yours and says, “Then let’s get another drink.”

You’re at the makeshift bar — someone’s kitchen counter pressed into service — when you become aware of someone standing beside you. Not waiting for the bottle. Something else. A specific quality of attention that you register before you’ve consciously clocked it. You look up. Jake Sim looks back.

You know who he is the way you know most things about the people who exist in Caldwell’s uppermost stratum — passively, through cultural osmosis, without ever having chosen to learn. Captain of the Wolves. Dean’s son. The name that comes up in a specific tone of voice, like a warning dressed as gossip.

Up close he is, unfortunately, exactly as good-looking as that reputation implies. Tall, built through the shoulders and chest in the way that years of hockey builds — not showy, just solid, like his body was designed to take up space and does so without apology. Dark eyes. A jaw that should probably be illegal. A mouth curved at the corner like he’s already three steps ahead of the conversation and finds this mildly entertaining.

“You’re doing maths,” he says.

You blink. “What?”

“Your face.” He nods at you, vaguely. “Very intense for someone just standing at a bar.”

“I’m making a drink.”

“You’ve been staring at that vodka for forty-five seconds.”

“I didn’t realise I was being timed.”

“You weren’t.” He reaches past you for the bottle — close enough that you catch something clean and faintly expensive — pours his own cup, sets it back.

“I’m Jake.”

“I know who you are.” Something moves through his expression. Amusement, maybe, or the specific satisfaction of a fact confirmed.

“Most people do,” he says, and there’s no arrogance in it, just a statement of observable reality, which is somehow worse. “And you’re—”

“Also a person,” you say.

That gets a real smile. Brief, but actual. “Fair enough.”

You should find Mina. You’re aware of this the way you’re aware of the coursework due Monday and the fact that it’s past midnight — true, noted, irrelevant. Instead you stay where you are and let the conversation go where it goes, and it goes somewhere you didn’t expect.

He’s good at this. That’s the thing you clock first and keep clocking — the way he makes conversation feel like it has momentum, like you’re building toward something together, the timing of his humour landing slightly off-beat in a way that catches you. He asks questions and actually listens to the answers. You know it’s a formula. You know it has worked on an uncountable number of girls at an uncountable number of parties exactly like this one, and knowing that should make you immune to it, and it doesn’t.

Mina finds you at some point, clocks the situation in under a second, raises her eyebrows precisely two millimetres — a full paragraph in two millimetres — and disappears back into the crowd.

At some point his hand finds the small of your back. Light. Questioning. You don’t move away from it. At some point, close enough that you feel the words more than hear them, he says: “We could get out of here.”

You think about Middlemarch, which you’re not going to read tonight regardless. You think about the two years you spent being someone’s person and the four months since that have felt like learning to walk in a body that’s been subtly rearranged. You think about Sunghoon somewhere in this house with his head tipped back, laughing.

“Okay,” you say.

His room is in the east block upperclassmen housing — a single, because of course, because Jake Sim has probably never had to negotiate space with anyone in his life. It’s tidier than you’d have guessed. You file this away without meaning to, the way you’re still filing things even now, even when you’ve told yourself you’re not doing that anymore.

He closes the door and you’re already turning toward him and then his mouth is on yours and it’s nothing like how he acted downstairs — no charm, no ease, just heat and intent, his hands gripping your face and kissing you like he’s already decided exactly how this goes.

You grab his shirt and walk him backwards and he turns you instead, smooth and immediate, your back hitting the wall beside the door hard enough to knock the breath out of you and you don’t care, you’re already pulling at his shirt and he’s already got your top halfway up your body.

He strips it off you and his mouth drops straight to your throat, open and hot, and then your bra is unclasped and gone before you’ve fully registered his hands at the back of it.

Then his mouth is on your tits and he makes a sound low in his chest like the sight of them was specifically designed to ruin him. His hands cup them, squeezing, thumbs dragging slow over your nipples and watching your face while he does it. You feel your cheeks go hot because his expression is entirely too focused, too attentive, like he’s cataloguing your reactions and filing it away for later use.

He bends his head and takes one nipple into his mouth, tongue working in slow wet circles. Your head drops back against the wall on a moan you didn’t mean to let out that loud.

“Yeah,” he says against your skin, rough and pleased, “get loud,” and bites down lightly you gasp and your nails find his shoulders through his shirt.

He marks you up like he has all the time in the world — mouth dragging from your tits to your throat to your collarbone and back again, teeth and tongue, leaving his work on your skin with a thoroughness that should feel like too much and instead just makes you want more.

His hips grind into yours against the wall, the hard line of his cock pressed against your core through clothing, slow and deliberate, the friction makes you roll up into it and he does it again to which you make a sound that’s honestly embarrassing.

“Bed,” you manage, and he pulls back just enough to look at you — mouth-bitten, dark-eyed, satisfied with himself in a way you don’t have the capacity to be annoyed about right now — and walks you to it.

You land on the mattress and he’s over you immediately, his mouth back on your tits before you’ve stopped bouncing on the mattress, you’re pulling at his shirt until he lets you get it off him and then his jeans are gone and yours are gone and he’s settled between your thighs in just his boxers and the weight of him is — a lot, in the best way, solid and warm and pressing you into the mattress, his hips grind down slow as his cock drags against your pussy through the thin fabric of your panties, you grab his shoulders to hold onto something.

He does it again. Slower.

His mouth is still at your nipple, tongue working it stiff while his hips keep that maddening rhythm, grinding into you with enough friction to make your thighs clench around him but not enough to give you anything real, you can hear how wet you are, can feel it and judging by the way his jaw tightens he can too.

“Jake,” you say, and it comes out more desperate than you intend.

“I know,” he says, like that’s an answer, and then he’s moving down your body.

He hooks your underwear off, throws it somewhere and finally puts his mouth on your pussy. Your back comes off the mattress.

He licks into your folds slowly, taking his time, his tongue dragging from your entrance up to your clit in one long stroke and then doing it again, his hands are spread flat on your inner thighs holding you open and still and there is nothing to do but take it.

He’s good — infuriatingly good — like he’s genuinely interested in making you cum, like this is something he wants to do rather than something he’s doing to get to the next thing. You’ve got one fist in the sheets and one pressed to your own mouth to which he pulls your hand away from your face without looking up. “Don’t,” he says against your cunt, and goes back to work.

His tongue finds your clit and stays there, tight focused circles, two fingers then press at your entrance and push in slow, curling immediately, finding the spot that makes your hips jolt and working it with patience that feels almost cruel.

The sounds coming out of you are loud and continuous and undignified and he hums against you like he approves, the vibration travelling straight up your spine, and you can feel yourself getting close embarrassingly fast, your walls clenching tight around his fingers, your whole body chasing it.

“Don’t stop,” you manage, “don’t — please —“ and he doesn’t, his tongue relentless on your clit and his fingers curling deep, and you cum on his mouth with your thighs shaking, his name coming out broken and too loud for the room.

He works you through every second of it, tongue gentling, fingers slowing until you’re twitching and oversensitive and pulling at his hair to get him off you, he comes back up your body looking composed in a way that feels like a personal attack. There’s something dark and satisfied in his expression as he looks down at you and kisses you before you can say anything, slow, and you taste yourself on his tongue.

His cock is hard against your hip, straining against his boxers, you reach between you and wrap your hand around him and feel him shudder. He’s thick and heavy in your palm, already slick at the tip and when you stroke him his composure cracks — hips pushing into your grip, jaw tightening and a low rough sound forming against your mouth.

You work him slow and watch his face and feel something warm and powerful settle in your chest. “Condom,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says and reaches for the nightstand.

He pushes in slow and you feel every single inch. The stretch of him opening you up, thick and relentless, your walls giving way around his cock, you dig your nails into his back and breathe through it until he’s fully seated. You’re so full it sits somewhere between pleasure and pain and then he rolls his hips and it tips firmly into the first one.

He starts slow — deep, grinding strokes, his cock dragging against every nerve of you, the weight of his hips pinning yours into the mattress and his mouth finds your tits again immediately, like he can’t help it, tongue working your nipple while his hips keep their deep rhythm and you stop being capable of thoughts that go anywhere.

“You’re so fucking tight,” he says against your breast, low and rough, and bites down on the swell of it and soothes it with his tongue and does it again somewhere else.

“Jake—”

“I know,” he says, his thumb finds your clit. The added pressure makes you gasp and your hips jolt up to meet his and he makes a sound that isn’t quite a groan and picks up the pace.

The slow grind gives way to something sharper. His hips snap against yours and the headboard knocks the wall and the wet sounds of it fill the room. You have completely stopped caring about anything except the way his cock fills you on every stroke, deep and thick, the drag of him pulling back and driving in again setting off a chain reaction of sensation that climbs fast.

He shifts your leg up higher over his hip and the angle changes, deeper, and the sound you make at that is genuinely obscene. “Yeah?” he says, doing it again, deliberate. “There?”

“Yes,” you manage, “there, don’t stop, please—”

“Dirty when you want something,” he says, low and pleased, and fucks you harder.

His thumb circles your clit without stopping, his cock drives into your cunt again and again and his mouth marks your throat. The build crests too fast to catch — you cum for the second time harder, walls clenching rhythmically around him, his name coming out wrecked and he follows you over with his hips buried deep and his face pressed to your throat, low broken sounds against your skin as he cums.

The room goes quiet. You stare at the ceiling. Your body has been taken apart and put back together slightly differently and everything feels warm and loose and heavy.

That, you think distantly, was either the best or worst decision you’ve made in months.

Possibly both.

Jake disposes of the condom, comes back, drops onto the bed beside you. The quiet settles. It’s almost comfortable — the dark, the warmth, both of you just breathing. And then…

“You can go whenever,” he says. Flat. Casual. Already looking at the ceiling like you’re no longer the most interesting thing in the room. Like you’ve been downgraded, in the last thirty seconds, from a person to an inconvenience that’s resolved itself.

You blink. You can go whenever. Not you don’t have to rush, not do you want some water, not even basic human decency. Just — you can go. Door’s there. Thanks for coming.

Something cold moves cleanly through the warmth in your chest and extinguishes it. You sit up. “Right,” you say. Your voice comes out level. You’re proud of that.

He says nothing. He is staring at the ceiling with his arms folded behind his head like a man with absolutely no awareness that he’s just been profoundly rude, or perhaps perfect awareness and total indifference, which is worse.

You find your clothes in the dark with quiet methodical efficiency — jeans, top, shoes, bra shoved into your bag because life is short. You do not look at him while you dress and he does not look at you. At the door you pause, and you genuinely don’t know why, some reflex kicking in from a life spent being polite to people who haven’t earned it.

“Bye, then,” you say.

“Mm,” says Jake Sim, at the ceiling not even at you. You want to scoff in his stupidly hot face.

You close the door behind you.

The walk back across campus takes twelve minutes and you spend all twelve of them with the cold night air doing its best against the heat in your face. Not embarrassment — or not only that. Something sharper. The specific anger of someone who knew exactly what they were walking into and walked into it anyway and is now annoyed at themselves for being annoyed.

I knew, you think, with each step. I knew what he was. Everyone knows what he is. I just—

You’d let the hour at the bar do its work. You’d let the conversation and the hand at the small of your back and the dark eyes and the unfair jaw do their work, and you’d told yourself it was fine because you were going in clear-eyed, and the sex had been — god, the sex had been amazing — but then he’d opened his mouth and reminded you exactly who he was and now here you are, at one forty in the morning, crossing the quad with your bra in your bag.

You text Mina. still up?

The reply is immediate. obviously. how was it?

You stare at your phone for a moment. come to mine, you type back.

Mina is sitting up in your bed when you get back, laptop open, a bowl of cereal balanced on her knee that she definitely made while waiting. She takes one look at your face as you come through the door and sets it on the nightstand. “Tell me.”

You drop your bag, toe off your shoes, and sit on the end of the bed. You press your fingers to your eyes for a moment. “The sex,” you say carefully, “was genuinely incredible. Like — top three of my life, Mina. Easily. Potentially top two.”

“Okay—”

“And then, the moment it was over, he looked at the ceiling and told me I could go whenever.” You drop your hands. “In the tone of someone dismissing a tradesman. Like I’d come to fix his boiler.”

Mina’s expression moves through several stages. “He did not.”

“He absolutely did.”

“What did you say?”

“I said bye then and closed the door.”

“Bye then?”

“I panicked and defaulted to manners.” You flop backwards onto the duvet. “I knew. That’s the thing. I knew exactly what he was before I ever spoke to him and I did it anyway because—” You gesture at the ceiling. “I don’t know. Because I’m tired of being careful. Because Sunghoon was across the room being beautiful and I wanted to feel something that wasn’t about him.”

Mina is quiet for a moment. Then: “Was it, at least something that wasn’t about Sunghoon.”

You consider this with the ceiling. “Yes,” you admit. “Annoyingly, yes. Right up until he opened his mouth.”

“He really is the worst,” Mina says, with the conviction of someone delivering a verdict.

“He really, genuinely is.” You stare upward. “He’s got such a good cock though, Mina. Like. I’m annoyed about it. I’m actively annoyed.”

Mina puts her face in her hands. You watch her shoulders shake. “It’s not funny,” you tell her, and then you’re laughing too, and the tight mean thing in your chest loosens by a fraction, and outside the window Caldwell goes on being loud and indifferent and fully lit up, and you are fine.

You’re fine. You’re completely fine.

The week after the party you are, by any reasonable measure, completely fine.

You turn in the Middlemarch essay on Monday morning — fifteen hundred words on narrative voice, mostly written Sunday afternoon in a single focused stretch that you attribute to having gotten something out of your system.

You go to your Tuesday seminar and your Wednesday lecture and you have coffee with Mina on Thursday at the place near the English building where they do the good almond croissants, and you do not think about Jake Sim.

Or you think about him the normal amount. The amount that is appropriate for a person you slept with once at a party and will probably never speak to again, which is to say occasionally and without weight, the way you might think about a film you watched on a plane — enjoyable in the moment, not something you’d seek out again, largely irrelevant to your actual life.

This is what you tell yourself. Mina does not challenge it, which means she’s either convinced or she’s decided to let you have it, and knowing Mina it’s the second one.

Sunghoon texts you on Wednesday. Just — hey, saw you at Delta Kappa Friday. you looked good. You stare at it for a long time. You don’t reply.

You see Jake on Monday. You’re crossing the main quad, coffee in hand, bag over one shoulder, running approximately four minutes late for your seminar, and he’s coming the other direction with Jay Park and someone you don’t recognise, all three of them in Wolves gear, clearly post-practice.

He’s laughing at something Jay said, head tilted back, and he looks — easy, and loose, and completely unbothered by anything in the known universe, which you knew, which is exactly what you expected, and yet something about seeing it in person at ten forty-three on a Monday morning makes your jaw tighten anyway.

He doesn’t see you. Or he does and gives no indication of it, which amounts to the same thing. You look straight ahead and keep walking and do not think about it for the rest of the morning.

You think about it a little bit in the afternoon. By evening you’ve filed it away under irrelevant and moved on, which is the correct and mature response and you’re proud of yourself.

The sickness starts on Wednesday morning. You wake up with your stomach doing something wrong — not dramatic, not the sharp unmistakable rebellion of food poisoning, just a low persistent nausea that sits behind your sternum like it’s made itself at home. You lie still for a moment, waiting for it to pass.

It doesn’t.

You get up, make it to the bathroom, sit on the edge of the tub for ten minutes breathing carefully, and then it eases enough that you can brush your teeth and get dressed and tell yourself you’re fine.

You’re not fine by Thursday morning.

The nausea is worse — still not acute, still this low insidious wrongness, but it’s there when you wake up and it doesn’t fully lift, and your coffee tastes like something burnt and metallic and you push it away after two sips which Mina clocks immediately from across the table at the place near the English building.

“You’re not drinking your coffee.”

“I’m not feeling it today.”

Mina looks at the cup. Looks at you. “You have never in three years of knowing you not felt like coffee.”

“There’s a first time for everything.” She watches you for a moment with that look. You look back at your laptop and don’t say anything else.

By Saturday you feel actively, genuinely terrible.

Not sick-sick — no fever, no aches, nothing you can point to as a specific illness — just this relentless creeping nausea that is worst in the morning and fades by afternoon and makes the idea of eating before eleven o’clock an abstract and unpleasant concept.

You cancel your Saturday morning coffee with Mina, which you have never done, and she’s at your door by noon with a container of crackers and a forensic expression. “Talk,” she says.

“I think I’m coming down with something.”

“What kind of something.”

“I don’t know, Mina, a virus. A bug. Something that’s going around.”

She sits down on your bed and opens the crackers and holds them out to you and you take one because the sight of them is, somehow, the most appealing thing you’ve encountered all week. You eat it slowly. Your stomach does not immediately rebel. You take another one. “How long?” Mina asks.

“Since Wednesday morning.”

“And it’s worst in the morning.”

“Yes.”

“And you can’t drink coffee.”

“It tastes wrong.” Mina is quiet for a moment. You eat another cracker and look at the wall. “I’m sure it’s just a bug,” you say.

“Yeah,” Mina says, in a tone that means something else entirely. “Probably.”

The conspiracy theories start that evening, though. It’s the two of you on your bed with Mina’s laptop open and a bag of pretzels between you, and it begins reasonably enough — you googling nausea worse in morning possible causes and working through the list with the detached efficiency of someone who is definitely not spiralling. Stress. Acid reflux. Inner ear issues. Viral gastroenteritis. Dietary changes.

“Have you eaten anything different lately?” Mina asks.

“No.”

“Stressed about something?”

“When am I not stressed about something.”

“Fair.” She scrolls. “It says here inner ear problems can cause—”

“I don’t have inner ear problems, Mina.”

Mina scrolls further. You eat a pretzel and watch her face and wait for it. You know it’s coming. You’ve known since Saturday morning, if you’re being honest, since she’d sat on your bed with that specific expression and said probably in that specific tone, and you’ve been not-thinking about it with considerable effort for the past several hours.

“Okay,” Mina says, carefully, still looking at the screen. “What if.”

“No.”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“You don’t have to.” You pull the laptop toward you and close the tab. “It’s been less than two weeks. It’s too early for that. It’s a bug.”

“You used a condom?”

“Obviously.”

“They’re not a hundred percent.”

“It’s a bug,” you say. “It’s a completely normal bug that normal people get and it has nothing to do with — it’s a bug.”

Mina looks at you with the expression of someone who has several more things to say and has made a strategic decision to not say them yet. “Okay,” she says. “Bug.”

By Sunday you can’t keep breakfast down. You sit on your bathroom floor at eight in the morning with your back against the tub and your forehead against your knees and you think about the party, and Jake’s room, and the nightstand, and the condom, and you think no very firmly and repeatedly and it doesn’t help at all.

You text Mina. can you come over

She’s there in seven minutes. She doesn’t say anything when you open the door, just looks at your face, and you nod back at her.

The Caldwell campus drugstore is a five minute walk from your building and has, blessedly, a single-occupancy bathroom at the back that Mina sweet-talks the Saturday cashier into letting you use on the grounds that you’re not feeling well, which is at least entirely true. It’s a very small bathroom.

The two of you fill it completely — you on the closed toilet lid, Mina with her back against the sink, the test sitting on the edge of it between you with three minutes on Mina’s phone timer counting down. Nobody says anything.

The tile is white. There’s a motivational poster on the back of the door — you’ve got this! in yellow letters — that you stare at with a feeling you can’t fully name.

Two minutes.

“It’s probably negative,” you say.

“Probably,” Mina says.

“The condom—”

“Yeah.” “And it’s been less than two weeks. Like. The timing—”

“The timing is actually about right,” Mina says, gently, “for symptoms to—”

“Stop,” you say.

One minute.

You watch the timer. The timer watches back. Your hands are completely still in your lap which surprises you — you’d have expected them to shake, but instead you feel very calm in the specific way that you get sometimes when something is about to happen and your body has decided that panic is a resource to be conserved.

The timer goes off.

Neither of you moves for a second. Then Mina picks up the test and looks at it. Her face does something — a flicker, fast and controlled, there and gone — and she hands it to you without speaking.

Two lines.

You look at it for a long time.

“Okay,” you say, finally.

“Yeah,” Mina says.

The motivational poster on the wall says you’ve got this! in yellow letters and you stare at it and think about Jake Sim telling the ceiling you can go whenever and feel something move through you that is too big and too complicated to have a name yet.

“Okay,” you say again. Like if you keep saying it, it’ll start meaning something useful.

—

You don’t go to him straight away. That feels important somehow — that you don’t just spiral out of that drugstore bathroom and make a beeline for the Hargrove Center in a panic, that you go back to your dorm first and sit with it for a while like a person with some degree of self-possession.

You and Mina order food you mostly don’t eat and sit on your bed with the test face-down on the nightstand like if you can’t see it it’s less real, and you talk around it for a while before you talk about it directly, which is its own kind of processing.

“You don’t have to decide anything today,” Mina says.

“I know.”

“You don’t have to tell him today either.”

“I know.” You pull your sleeves over your hands. “But I feel like — I don’t know. He should know. Like in or not he’s — it’s his. He should know.”

Mina is quiet for a moment. “Okay,” she says. “But eat something first.”

You eat half a portion of noodles. It’s the most you’ve managed in days and your stomach accepts it cautiously, like it’s making no promises. Then you change your top, put your shoes on, and look at Mina.

“Don’t come with me,” you say.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were absolutely going to.”

She opens her mouth. Closes it. “Text me the second you’re out.”

The Hargrove Center is a twenty minute walk across campus and you use all twenty minutes to rehearse what you’re going to say, which turns out to be a complete waste of time because the moment you push through the side door and the cold air of the rink hits you — that particular sharp smell of ice and equipment — your prepared sentences evaporate entirely.

Practice is just wrapping up. You can see them from the entrance, the Wolves coming off the ice in clusters, helmets off, sticks in hand. Jay Park says something that makes Riki Nishimura laugh. Jungwon Yang is already halfway to the boards.

And Jake is — there, centre ice, still, talking to one of the assistant coaches with his helmet under his arm and his hair pushed back from his face, and even from here he looks like someone who has never had an uncontrollable variable in his life.

You wait.

You’re good at waiting. You’ve spent the last two weeks being good at things you didn’t choose to be good at.

He sees you when he comes off the ice — clocks you in the way that people clock something unexpected in a familiar space, a brief recalibration. Something moves across his face, too fast to read. Then it’s gone and he’s walking toward you with the easy unhurried stride of someone who has decided to be unbothered and you stand your ground and wait for him to reach you.

“Hey,” he says. Like you’re an acquaintance. Like he’s mildly surprised to see you and finds it mildly unremarkable.

“I need to talk to you,” you say. Something shifts.

The easy expression doesn’t disappear exactly but it adjusts, becomes more guarded. He glances around — Jay is watching from the boards with open curiosity, Riki less subtly — and then jerks his head toward the corridor off the main rink.

You follow him into it. It’s quieter here, the noise of the rink muffled, the overhead lights slightly too bright. He turns and faces you with his arms crossed and his weight back, and waits. You had sentences. You had very good sentences, all the way across campus.

“I’m pregnant,” you say.

The corridor goes very quiet. Jake looks at you. His expression does several things in quick succession that he doesn’t quite manage to keep off his face — shock, and something that might be fear, and then a shuttering, a closing, something careful dropping down over all of it.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay,” you repeat.

“That’s — okay. How far—”

“I just found out today. So.” You fold your arms across your chest. “Not far.”

He nods slowly. His jaw is working. He looks at the floor for a moment and then back at you and the careful expression is fully in place now, composed and unreadable, and you don’t know whether to be relieved or furious about it.

“Are you sure it’s mine,” he says.

The corridor goes even quieter somehow.

You look at him. “What did you just say.”

“I’m just—” He shifts his weight. “We don’t know each other. I don’t know who else you’ve been—”

“Are you calling me a slut.” It comes out flat. Not a question.

“I’m not calling you anything, I’m just saying I don’t know—”

“You’re the only person I’ve slept with in four months.” Your voice is very level. “I was in a relationship. It ended. I haven’t — there’s been no one else. There’s only been you.” You look at him. “And I can’t believe I’m standing here explaining that to you.”

“I’m not trying to—”

“You literally just implied I could have slept with someone else.” The level voice is beginning to fray at the edges. “You literally said that. To my face.”

“Look, I just—”

You slap him.

You don’t plan it. Your hand moves before the decision has fully formed, the sharp crack of it landing across his cheek, and then there’s a ringing silence and your palm is stinging and Jake’s head has turned with the force of it and he’s looking at you now with an expression you haven’t seen on him before. Not angry. Something more complicated than angry.

“Don’t ever,” you say, quietly, “imply something like that to me again.”

He says nothing. His hand has come up to his cheek, not pressing, just — there. His jaw is tight.

“I thought you should know,” you say. “That’s all. I thought you deserved to know because it’s yours and you deserved to know. I haven’t decided anything yet and I’m not asking you for anything.” You pull your bag higher on your shoulder. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he says. Low. You walk back out into the cold. You text Mina out and she sends back seventeen question marks which is fair.

You tell her you’ll explain when you get back and spend the walk home feeling the particular hollow exhaustion of someone who has done the thing they needed to do and now has no idea what comes next.

You’re back in your building, one flight up, when you hear him behind you. “Hey—”

You turn. Jake is in the stairwell, still in his practice gear, slightly out of breath like he walked fast to get here, and you have absolutely no idea how he found out which dorm you’re in and you’re going to have questions about that later.

“How did you—“

“Jay knew,” he says, which explains nothing and everything.

He comes up the last few steps and stops on your landing and runs a hand through his hair and looks like someone who has been having a very difficult internal conversation at speed. “Can I—”

“No,” you say.

“Two minutes.” You look at him. He looks back. The mark from your hand has faded from his cheek but his expression is still doing that thing — complicated, unreadable, something working behind it.

“Two minutes,” you say, and unlock your door. Your room is small and suddenly smaller with him in it. He stands just inside the door like he’s not sure he’s allowed further in, which is the most uncertain you’ve seen him, and you sit on the end of your bed and look at him and wait.

He reaches into his jacket. He puts a stack of bills on your desk. You look at the money. You look at him. “Jake.”

“It’s enough to cover — whatever you decide.” He’s not quite meeting your eyes. “I’m not — look. I don’t want a kid. I’m not in a place for that. We don’t know each other. But I’m not going to just—” He stops. Starts again. “Take it. Whatever you need it for.”

You stare at the money for a long moment. “Are you going to want to be involved,” you ask. “If I decide to keep it.”

Something crosses his face. “I don’t — I haven’t—” He exhales. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” you say. “That’s honest at least.”

“Are you going to keep it,” he asks. Quietly. Like he’s not sure he has the right to ask.

You look at the money on your desk. You look at him — standing in your doorway in his practice gear, jaw tight, trying very hard to look like someone who has this handled and not quite managing it — and you think that this is the first time he’s looked like a person to you. Not the reputation, not the corridor composure, not the ceiling of his bedroom. Just a person who is as blindsided as you are and coping with it badly.

“I don’t know yet,” you say. “I’ll let you know when I do.”

He nods. He looks at you for a moment longer than necessary. Then he picks up the money from your desk and puts it on your nightstand instead, like the desk was somehow wrong, like the four feet of distance makes a difference, and you don’t say anything about it.

“I’m sorry,” he says, at the door. “For what I said. At the rink.”

You look at him. “Which part.”

“All of it.”

He closes the door behind him and you sit on your bed in the quiet of your room for a long time, the money on your nightstand and the weight of everything pressing down, and then you pick up your phone and call your sister.

She picks up on the third ring. “Hey, you.” Hannah’s voice is warm and slightly distracted in the way it always is — you can hear one of the kids in the background, the particular high-pitched negotiation of a five year old who wants something and has decided now is the time. “Give me two seconds.”

Then, away from the phone: “Lily, baby, I said after dinner. After. Yes. Because I said so, that’s why.” A door closing.

Then: “Okay. Hi. Sorry. What’s up?”

You open your mouth. You’ve been sitting on your bed for forty minutes since Jake left, the money on your nightstand and your phone in your hand, and you’ve composed this conversation approximately thirty times in your head and all thirty versions started more coherently than what actually comes out, which is: “I did something kind of stupid.”

“How stupid.”

“Significantly.”

A beat. Hannah has always been good at letting silence do its work, at not rushing in to fill it with the wrong thing. It’s one of the things you’ve always loved about her. “Okay,” she says. “Tell me.”

So you tell her. All of it — the party and Jake and the test and the corridor and the slap and him in your room with the money — and Hannah listens through all of it without interrupting, which is its own kind of gift, and when you’re done there’s a moment of quiet that feels like her sorting through it.

“Okay,” she says again. “First question. Are you physically okay?”

“Yes.”

“Second question. Do you have someone with you?”

“Mina’s coming over in an hour.”

“Good.” You can hear her moving around, the soft sounds of her kitchen. “Third question, and I want you to actually think about it before you answer — not what you think you should say, not what’s practical, not what he wants or what anyone else wants. Just you.”

She pauses. “Do you want to keep it?”

You look at the money on your nightstand.

You think about the question the way she asked it — stripped of everything else, just you, just the truth of it underneath all the noise.

The thing is, you already know. You’ve known since the bathroom floor this morning, since you sat with your back against the tub and your forehead on your knees. It’s why the knowing has been so terrifying — not because you’re uncertain but because you’re not, and being not uncertain makes it real in a way that uncertainty would have postponed.

“Yeah,” you say. Quietly. “I do. I just — I don’t want it to be his. I don’t want to be tied to someone who—” You stop. “I don’t want the situation. I just want—”

“The baby,” Hannah says. “Yeah.” She’s quiet for a moment. “Those are two separate things,” she says. “The situation and the baby. They feel like the same thing right now but they’re not.”

You hear her sit down somewhere. “Marcus and I — when I had Lily, things with us were not good. You remember. We were not in a good place. And I thought about it the same way — I want her, I just don’t want this. And it was hard. It was genuinely really hard. But she’s five now and she’s the most annoying, amazing person I’ve ever met and I can’t — I can’t imagine.”

You press the back of your hand to your mouth.

“I’m not telling you what to do,” Hannah says quickly. “I promise I’m not. Whatever you decide I’m with you. I just — you asked.”

“I know,” you manage. “I know you’re not.”

“Is he terrible?” she asks. “This Jake person.”

You think about the corridor. The money. I’m sorry. For what I said. All of it. “I don’t know yet,” you say. “He’s — I don’t know what he is.”

“Okay.” Hannah’s voice is careful and warm. “You don’t have to know yet. You don’t have to know anything yet except what you want. Everything else gets figured out.”

You sit with that for a moment. “I’m keeping it,” you say. Out loud, to another person, for the first time. It lands differently than it did in your head — more solid, more real, like something that has been decided rather than something being considered.

“Okay,” Hannah says, and she says it the way Mina says it — not okay as in fine but okay as in I’ve got you. “Then we figure out the rest.”

You tell Mina when she comes over and she holds your hand and doesn’t say anything for a long moment and then says “okay, what do we need to do” in the tone of someone rolling up their sleeves, which is exactly right, which is why she’s your person.

You tell Jake two days later.

You find him after morning practice on a Wednesday, same side entrance to the Hargrove Center, and this time he sees you coming and something in his posture adjusts — not quite bracing, just becoming more careful, more deliberate, the way he gets when he’s paying attention. “Hey,” he says.

“I’m keeping it,” you say.

He goes very still. You watch him process it — the stillness and then the almost imperceptible movement of his jaw, the way his eyes go somewhere internal for a second before coming back to you. He looks like someone doing rapid and complicated mathematics. “Okay,” he says finally.

“You don’t have to be involved. I meant that when I said it. I’m not — I’m not asking you for anything except to know. You deserved to know and now you know and whatever you decide to do with that is up to you.”

“I said I’d provide,” he says. “I meant that.”

“Money isn’t the same as involved.”

“I know.” He shifts his weight. His hands are in his pockets and he’s looking at you with that careful expression, the one you can’t fully read. “I don’t — I’m not going to be the guy who just throws money at it and disappears. That’s not—” He stops. “I don’t know what I am yet. But I’m not that.”

You look at him for a long moment. There is, underneath the practice gear and the careful composure and the history of the last two weeks, something that might be decency in there. It’s buried. It’s inconsistent. You’ve seen it appear and disappear enough times already to know better than to trust it yet. But it’s there. “Okay,” you say. “Then figure out what you are and let me know.”

You turn to go. “Can I—” He stops. You look back. “Can I have your number,” he says. “Properly. So we can — so it’s easier to—”

“To what.”

He looks, briefly, like someone who hasn’t thought this far ahead. “Talk,” he says. “If we need to.”

You look at him for a moment. Then you take out your phone and hold it out. He puts his number in and hands it back and you save it under Jake Sim (do not text unless necessary) which you do not show him. “I’ll be in touch,” you say.

Jake doesn’t mean to tell his friend— or he does, but not like this, not in the locker room with his gear half off and Riki eating a protein bar on the bench across from him and Jay taping his wrist in the corner and Jungwon doing something on his phone. It comes out the way things come out when you’ve been holding them too long and the effort of holding them finally exceeds the effort of saying them.

“I got someone pregnant,” he says.

The locker room goes quiet. Riki stops chewing. Jay puts down the tape. Jungwon looks up from his phone. “I’m sorry,” Jay says, with the careful enunciation of someone who wants to make sure they’ve heard correctly. “You what?”

“You heard me.”

“I heard you, I just want to make sure I—” Jay sets down the tape fully and turns to face him. “Who.”

“Girl from Delta Kappa. Three weeks ago.” Another silence. Jay is looking at him with an expression that Jake doesn’t particularly enjoy — something between concern and the specific look of someone doing the maths on how this could have happened and arriving at several uncomfortable conclusions about Jake’s general life choices.

“Are you—” Jungwon starts.

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I was going to ask.”

“Then what.”

Jungwon looks at him steadily. “Is she okay.”

Jake opens his mouth. Closes it. Thinks about you in the corridor at the rink and your voice going flat and your hand cracking across his face, and then you in your dorm room — calm and certain and telling him you weren’t asking him for anything, which was somehow the part that landed hardest. “I think so,” he says. “She’s — yeah.”

“Do you like her?” Riki asks, with the bluntness of someone who has not yet learned that some questions require more runway.

“I don’t know her,” Jake says.

“That’s not what I asked.” Jay shoots Riki a look. Riki shrugs and takes another bite of his protein bar.

“What are you going to do?” Jay asks, turning back to Jake.

Jake leans his elbows on his knees and looks at the floor. The locker room smells like it always does — ice and rubber and effort — and it’s familiar in a way that is almost destabilising right now, how normal everything around him is when nothing feels particularly normal. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “Be there, I think. As much as she’ll let me.”

“As much as she’ll let you,” Jay repeats. Something in his tone.

“She’s not — she’s not soft.” Jake looks up. “She’s not going to make it easy.”

“Should she?”

Jake looks at him. Jay looks back, steady and unhurried. “No,” Jake says, after a moment. “Probably not.”

Jay nods once. Picks the tape back up. “Then figure it out,” he says, like it’s simple, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Jake sits with that in the familiar smell of the locker room and thinks that he probably needs to.

—

The truce, when it forms, is not announced. It happens gradually over the following week — a text from him checking if you need anything, which you respond to with I’m fine thanks and nothing else. A text from you three days later telling him your first appointment is booked for the following week, which he responds to with do you want me there and you respond with not yet and he responds with okay and that’s it, that’s the whole exchange, and somehow it’s the most civil conversation you’ve had.

He doesn’t push. You note this without letting it mean too much. You’re not friends. You’re not anything with a name. You’re two people who made a mistake that turned into something neither of you planned for, and you’re figuring out how to exist in the same orbit without either of you combusting, and most days it feels manageable and some days it feels impossible and on the days it feels impossible you call Hannah, who answers on the third ring and lets the silence do its work.

It’s something, you think. It’s not much but it’s something. For now, that has to be enough.

The thing about Caldwell though, is that it’s a big campus until it isn’t.

Thirty thousand students, four faculties, two libraries, a quad the size of a small park — and yet somehow the people you most want to avoid have an unerring instinct for occupying the same coffee shop, the same corridor, the same stretch of pavement at the same time.

You’ve been navigating this for four months with Sunghoon and you’ve gotten good at it. You know his schedule well enough to avoid it without meaning to, the way you learn the shape of someone after two years and can’t quite unlearn it.

Which is why it catches you off guard when he’s just — there. The library café, a Tuesday afternoon, three weeks after the test. You’re at a corner table with your laptop and a cup of tea you’ve been nursing for an hour because coffee is still wrong and probably will be for the foreseeable future, and you’re halfway through a close reading of Middlemarch chapter forty-two when someone pulls out the chair across from you and sits down and you look up and it’s Sunghoon.

He looks, as he always looks, like something assembled with unreasonable care. Dark hair, clean jawline, the particular quality of stillness he has that used to make you feel calm and now just makes you feel tired.

“Hey,” he says.

You look at him. Then at the chair he’s sitting in. Then back at him. “I didn’t say you could sit.”

“I know.” He doesn’t move. “I just wanted to talk.”

“Sunghoon.”

“Five minutes.”

You close your laptop. Not because you’re agreeing, but because whatever he’s about to say you want to be looking at him when he says it. “Five minutes,” you say. “And then you’re going to go away.”

Something moves through his expression — not quite hurt, but adjacent. He folds his hands on the table. He has nice hands. You spent two years noticing his hands. “I saw you at Delta Kappa,” he says.

“I know. You texted me.”

“You didn’t reply.” He looks at you steadily. “You were talking to Jake Sim.”

There it is.

You keep your face very neutral. “I was at a party. I talked to a lot of people.”

“Jake Sim isn’t a lot of people.” Something in his voice shifts — not quite possessive, not quite jealous, threading that needle with the precision of someone who knows he doesn’t have the right to either and is trying to disguise it as concern. “He’s not a good person to get involved with.”

“Thank you for that,” you say. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” You look at him. “Sunghoon. You don’t get to come sit at my table and tell me who I should and shouldn’t talk to. You gave that up.”

His jaw tightens. “I know I did.”

“Then why are you here?”

He’s quiet for a moment. Outside the café windows the quad is grey and overcast, students moving across it with their heads down against the wind, and Sunghoon is looking at you with an expression you know — you’ve catalogued it, the way you’ve catalogued everything about him, two years of accumulated knowledge you can’t seem to put down. It’s the expression he gets when he wants to say something and is choosing his words with care.

“I miss you,” he says.

You look at him for a long time. The honest answer is that you miss him too — or you miss the version of things you thought you had, which isn’t exactly the same as missing him but lives close enough to it that the distinction is hard to maintain on a grey Tuesday afternoon with him sitting across from you looking like that.

You miss having a person. You miss the shape of your life before it got complicated in every possible direction.

But you also know what he did.

You know it with the specific clarity of something you’ve gone over enough times that it’s stopped being sharp and started being just — true. A fact about him. A fact about what he chose. “I know,” you say. Carefully. “But that’s not my problem to fix.”

He nods. Slow. Like he expected it and it still costs him something. He stands up, pushes the chair back in, and then pauses with his hands on the back of it. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Actually? You look—” He stops.

“I look what.”

“Tired,” he says. “You look tired.”

“I’m fine,” you say.

He looks at you for a moment longer. Then he goes, and you open your laptop, and you stare at Middlemarch chapter forty-two for a while without reading any of it.

You don’t tell Jake about Sunghoon.

There’s no reason to.

You and Jake are not — whatever you are, it doesn’t include telling each other things. It includes occasional texts, one appointment you went to alone where a doctor confirmed what you already knew and gave you a due date that made it real in a new and specific way, and a strange careful politeness that exists between you like a temporary structure neither of you fully trusts.

He texts you on a Friday evening. how are you feeling

You look at it for a while. Fine. Less sick this week.

that’s good

A pause. Then: do you need anything?

You think about your sister’s voice. You don’t have to know anything yet except what you want. You think about Jake in your dorm room, the money on your nightstand, I’m not going to be the guy who just throws money at it. You think about how many times in the past three weeks he’s almost been decent and then done something to complicate it.

I’m okay, you send back. Thanks.

He sends a thumbs up and you put your phone face down and tell yourself this is fine, this arrangement is fine, and mostly you believe it.

You find out about the girl on a Saturday night.

You’re not looking for it — you’re not the kind of person who goes searching for things they don’t want to find, you learned that lesson with Sunghoon — but Caldwell is a big campus until it isn’t, and Mina’s friend group overlaps with the hockey crowd in the specific way that happens at schools where athletes are their own ecosystem but not a fully separate one.

It’s Mina who tells you, with the careful expression of someone who has been sitting on information and decided you’d rather hear it from her. “I heard Jake hooked up with someone last weekend,” she says. Not leading with it, not burying it either. Just: here is a thing that is true.

You look at your coffee. You’ve graduated back to coffee this week, weak and milky, which feels like a victory. “Okay,” you say.

“You’re allowed to have feelings about that.”

“We’re not together, Mina.”

“I know.”

“He can do whatever he wants. We’re not — there’s nothing between us. We’re just—” You move your hand in a vague gesture that encompasses the entire situation. “This.”

“I know,” Mina says again, in the tone that means she has more to say and is choosing not to. You continue to drink your coffee.

The thing is — and this is the part you don’t say out loud, the part you turn over privately in the quiet of your own head — the thing is that you know she’s right.

You are allowed to have feelings about it.

You do have feelings about it, somewhere underneath the very reasonable and correct observation that Jake Sim owes you nothing beyond basic decency and whatever co-parenting arrangement you eventually figure out.

You have feelings about it the way you have feelings about a lot of things lately — in the muffled, at-a-distance way, like they’re happening to someone slightly removed from you and you’re watching through glass.

You’re pregnant with his baby and he’s sleeping with someone else and you’re not together and you have no claim on him and all of that is true simultaneously and you’re not sure what to do with the fact that it still sits in your chest like something uncomfortable.

“I don’t care,” you tell Mina. She looks at you with the expression that means I know you and I know that’s not entirely true but I love you so I’ll let you have it.

“Okay,” she says.

—

Jake texts you on Sunday.

heard you’ve been doing better. that’s good

You stare at the message for a long time. Yeah, you type back. Thanks.

A pause. Then: can I take you to your next appointment?

You put the phone down. Pick it up. Put it down again.

The question sits there, simple and direct, and the thing about it is that it isn’t nothing. It’s not the gesture of someone who is just throwing money at a situation. It’s — something. Small and tentative and probably not enough and something nonetheless.

It’s in two weeks, you send back. I’ll let you know.

okay, he says. no pressure.

You put the phone down and look at the ceiling and think about a girl you don’t know and a Saturday night you weren’t part of and the specific stupidity of having feelings about either, and then you think about your next appointment and the due date the doctor gave you and the small impossible reality of all of it, and you decide that you are going to take a nap and deal with every single one of these things later.

Later, you think. All of it later.

He comes to the appointment, in the end you let him. You texted him the details the night before — time, building, room number — and he’s there when you arrive, standing outside the health centre with his hands in his jacket pockets and his breath fogging in the cold, and he looks up when he sees you coming and something in his expression does that thing, that complicated unreadable thing, and he falls into step beside you without saying anything.

Inside, in the waiting room, you sit next to each other in plastic chairs with a magazine between you that neither of you reads. A couple across the room are holding hands. You and Jake sit with six inches of space between you like a demilitarised zone.

“You okay?” he asks, quietly.

“Fine,” you say. “You?”

“Fine,” he says.

The nurse calls your name and you both stand up and Jake follows you in and stands slightly to the side while the doctor talks and asks questions and pulls up the scan on the screen, and you look at it — the small impossible blur of it, the heartbeat a flickering certainty on the monitor — and you feel the thing in your chest that you’ve been keeping at distance move closer without permission.

Beside you Jake goes very still.

You don’t look at him. You look at the screen.

“Everything looks perfect,” the doctor says.

You nod. You don’t trust your voice.

In the corridor after, walking back out into the cold, Jake is quiet for a long time. Longer than usual even for him.

You’re almost at the path that splits — his way, your way — when he says, without looking at you: “That was—”

“Yeah,” you say.

He nods. Puts his hands back in his pockets. “I’ll walk you back,” he says.

You think about the girl he slept with. You think about Sunghoon in the library café. You think about the scan on the monitor and the heartbeat that is real and certain and not theoretical anymore.

“Okay,” you say.

He walks you back. You don’t talk much. It’s not uncomfortable exactly — it’s something more complicated than that, something neither of you has a name for yet, and when you reach your building he stops at the bottom of the steps and looks at you and opens his mouth and then closes it again.

“What,” you say.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just — take care of yourself.” You look at him for a moment.

“You too,” you say, and go inside.

—

Sunghoon doesn’t give up. You’d half expected him to — one conversation in the library café, you’d said your piece, he’d said his, and you’d thought that would be the end of it. Sunghoon has always been precise about things, economical, not the type to repeat himself unnecessarily. You’d thought he’d take the answer and file it and move on.

Instead he texts you on a Wednesday. Just — how are you doing. No punctuation, which for Sunghoon is practically shouting.

You don’t reply.

He texts again on Friday. can we get coffee sometime? just to talk?

You stare at it for a long time.

You show it to Mina, who makes a face. “Don’t,” she says.

“I’m not going to,” you say.

He finds you on campus on Monday — the English building, your own territory, which feels deliberate. He’s waiting near the entrance when you come out of your seminar and you see him before he sees you and for one uncharitable second you think about turning around and going back inside.

You don’t. You keep walking. “Hey,” he says, falling into step beside you.

“Sunghoon.”

“I just want to walk with you.”

“I didn’t say you could.”

“I know.” He walks with you anyway, hands in his coat pockets, quiet for a moment in the way that used to feel comfortable and now just feels like pressure. “How are you feeling?”

You glance at him. “Fine.”

“You look better than last time I saw you. Less tired.”

“Thanks,” you say, flatly.

He’s quiet again. The path curves toward the quad and you keep walking and he keeps pace and you’re aware — acutely, uncomfortably aware — that you’re starting to show. Not dramatically, not in a way that’s obvious under your coat, but enough that you know. Enough that it’s a matter of time.

“I meant what I said,” Sunghoon says. “In the library.”

“I know you did.”

“I’m not trying to pressure you.”

“You’re walking next to me uninvited,” you say. “What would you call that?”

He stops. You stop too, half a beat later, and turn to look at him. He’s standing in the middle of the path with that precise, careful expression and something underneath it that isn’t quite what he’s performing, and you know him well enough to know the difference and wish you didn’t.

“I made a mistake,” he says. “I know I did. I know what I did and I know it was—” He stops. Starts again. “I just want a chance to—”

“Sunghoon.” You keep your voice even. “I can’t do this right now. I genuinely cannot — there is too much happening in my life right now for me to also be doing this. Okay? Please.”

He looks at you. Something in his expression shifts — a question forming, something he’s noticed that he can’t quite place. “What’s happening?” he asks. Carefully.

“Nothing that’s your business,” you say. “Please just — let me go.”

And he lets you go.

But the problem is that Caldwell is a big campus until it isn’t.

The problem is that two weeks later you’re at a party you didn’t particularly want to attend — a smaller thing, a friend of Mina’s, an apartment off campus — and both of them are there. Jake and Sunghoon.

You don’t notice Jake first. You notice Sunghoon, across the room with his circle, and you note it and move on, you’re good at that now. You get a drink — water, the specific reality of being the only sober person at a party hitting — and find Mina and settle into the corner and decide you’ll stay an hour and then leave.

You notice Jake about twenty minutes in.

He’s near the kitchen with Jay, and there’s a girl — tall, dark-haired, laughing at something he’s said with her hand on his arm and her body angled toward him in the specific way that means something. You see him lean in to say something close to her ear. You see her laugh again. You look away.

You look back to Mina, who is mid-conversation with someone and hasn’t clocked it, and you drink your water and you are fine, you are completely fine, this is exactly what you knew was happening and seeing it in person doesn’t change anything and you are fine.

You last another twenty minutes before you decide you’re going to get some air.

The problem is that getting air requires passing the kitchen. Jake sees you at the same moment you see him and something in his expression shifts — that recalibration, that adjustment — and the girl’s hand is still on his arm and you keep walking, eyes forward, almost past— “Hey.”

His voice.

You stop. You turn. He’s stepped slightly away from the girl, who is watching with a politely curious expression. “Hey,” you say.

“You’re here,” he says, which is not his most articulate moment.

“Briefly,” you say. “Don’t mind me.” Something moves across his face.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” You smile at him — pleasant, neutral, the smile of someone who is absolutely fine. “Enjoy your night.” You keep walking.

The air outside is cold and you stand on the small concrete step outside the apartment and breathe it and tell yourself the tightness in your chest is just the stuffiness of the party and not anything else.

You hear the door behind you. “Hey—”

You turn, expecting Jake, and it’s Sunghoon. Of course it’s Sunghoon.

He’s in his coat, hands in his pockets, and he looks at you with that careful expression and says “I saw you come out” like that explains what he’s doing here, which it does, which doesn’t make it better.

“I needed air,” you say.

“I know.” He comes to stand beside you. Close, but not touching. “You looked upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“You have a face,” he says, gently, and you hate that he’s right, hate that after four months and everything that happened he can still read you like that. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it Sim?” Something in his voice changes — not quite hard, not quite angry, threading the needle. “Are you involved with him?”

“That’s not your business.”

“I’m asking because I’m worried about you, not because—”

“Sunghoon.” You turn to face him. “Please stop. Please just—”

The door opens behind you. Jake comes out. He takes in the scene — you and Sunghoon, close, Sunghoon’s expression, yours — in about half a second and his jaw tightens in a way you’ve learned to read as something being suppressed.

“Everything okay?” he asks. Looking at you, not at Sunghoon.

“Fine,” you say, for what feels like the hundredth time tonight.

“She said she’s fine,” Sunghoon says. His voice is even. “So you can go back inside.” Jake looks at him. Something passes between them that has nothing to do with you — some older, unnamed thing.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Jake says.

“Then walk away.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Jake.” Your voice is sharper than you intend. “It’s fine. Go inside.”

He doesn’t go inside.

He stays where he is with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on Sunghoon, and Sunghoon stays where he is with that precise stillness, and the cold air between all three of you is doing a lot of work.

“You’re the one she’s been seeing,” Sunghoon says, to Jake. Not a question.

“That’s not your business,” Jake says.

“It is when you’re—” Sunghoon stops. Something has crossed his face — he’s looking at you, at your coat, and the realisation moves through his expression slowly and then all at once.

His eyes find yours. “Are you—”

“Don’t,” you say.

“Are you pregnant?”

The step goes very quiet.

Jake goes very still.

You look at Sunghoon and there is a specific kind of exhaustion that moves through you — the exhaustion of someone who has been managing too many things for too long and has just watched one of them slip out of their hands.

“That,” you say, carefully, “is none of your business.”

“It’s his, isn’t it.” Not looking at Jake. Looking at you. Something in his voice that you don’t have a name for — not anger, not hurt, something more complicated and less clean than either. “You hooked up with Jake Sim at a party and now you’re—”

“Sunghoon—”

“What were you thinking?” And there it is — the composure cracking, the precision slipping, something rawer underneath. “What were you actually — with him, of all people—”

“Hey.” Jake’s voice is hard. “Watch yourself.”

“You stay out of it—”

“She told you it’s none of your business—”

“I’m talking to her—”

“Then talk to her with some respect—”

“Oh that’s rich, coming from you.” Sunghoon turns to Jake fully now and the precise stillness has sharpened into something else. “Everyone knows what you are. Everyone knows how you treat—”

“And everyone knows what you did,” Jake says, low and flat. “So don’t stand here and act like you’ve got the moral—”

“Stop.” Your voice cuts through both of them. They both look at you. “Both of you. Stop.”

A beat. “I’m going home,” you say. “This is—” You gesture at the three of you, at the step, at all of it. “I’m not doing this.”

“I’ll walk you—” Both of them, simultaneously.

“Neither of you will walk me anywhere.” You pull your coat around you. “I want to go by myself and I want both of you to leave me alone tonight. Okay?”

Sunghoon opens his mouth.

And then — later, when you try to reconstruct the exact sequence, it’s hard to isolate the moment it tips — he reaches for your arm, a gesture, just trying to stop you leaving, and Jake moves at the same time, stepping forward, his hand coming out to push Sunghoon back, and Sunghoon turns, and the angles are all wrong, and Jake’s elbow catches you across the side of your face.

It’s not hard. It’s not a real blow — it’s the edge of the motion, glancing, the kind of thing that in any other circumstance would be an accidental knock in a crowded corridor that you’d shake off and keep walking.

But you make a sound and stumble back.

Jake turns and sees your face and goes completely white. “Fuck—” He reaches for you.

“Don’t touch me.”

Your hand comes up. Your voice has gone very quiet. The side of your face is throbbing, low and dull, and underneath it everything else — the tiredness, the party, Sunghoon’s face when he realised, the girl’s hand on Jake’s arm — all of it presses in at once and you are so, so tired.

“I didn’t — it was an accident, I didn’t mean to—”

“I know it was an accident,” you say. Still quiet. Still very controlled. “I know that.”

“Are you okay? The baby—”

“I’m fine. It was my face, not—” You stop. Press your fingers briefly to your temple. “I’m fine.”

Jake is looking at you with an expression you haven’t seen on him before — something undone about it, all the composure gone, something almost desperate. “Let me take you home—”

“No.”

You look at him. Then at Sunghoon, who has gone very still and very pale. “I’m going to get Mina. I’m going to go home. And I don’t want either of you to contact me tonight.”

You take out your phone. You text Mina. You wait on the step with your back to both of them until she comes out, takes one look at your face, takes your arm, and walks you away without saying a word.

Behind you, you don’t look back.

Jake texts at midnight. I’m so sorry. please tell me you’re okay

You look at it for a long time. I’m fine, you send back. Goodnight Jake.

He sends: I’m sorry again

Those two words, and you put your phone face down and stare at the ceiling of your dorm room and Mina is asleep in your desk chair with a blanket over her because she refused to go home and you love her for it, and the small dull ache in your temple has faded to almost nothing, and the baby is fine, you’re fine, everything is fine.

You don’t text him back.

He tries on Sunday.

A text at nine in the morning — can we talk please? — that you look at and put face down without replying.

Then at eleven: I know you’re angry. you have every right to be. I just want to talk.

Then at two in the afternoon, which shows either impressive persistence or a complete inability to read a room: I’m going to keep texting until you tell me to stop.

You text back: stop.

He texts back: okay. I’m sorry.

You put the phone in your drawer.

He doesn’t stop.

Well, he stops texting — he respects that, or he tries to, mostly — but he finds other ways. There’s a bag outside your dorm room door on Monday morning: crackers, the specific brand you’d been eating in the early weeks, ginger tea, a punnet of the green grapes that you’d mentioned once in passing to him that you’d been craving. No note. Just the bag.

You stand in your doorway looking at it for a long time.

You bring it inside. You eat the grapes. You do not text him to say thank you and you do not text him to say stop and the not-texting feels like its own kind of answer that you’re not ready to examine yet.

On Tuesday he’s outside your building.

Not lurking — he’s sitting on the low wall by the entrance with his hands between his knees and his jacket on against the cold, and he stands up when he sees you come out and he doesn’t move toward you, just — stands there, and waits, and lets you decide.

You stop on the steps. “Jake.”

“Five minutes,” he says. “I know I don’t deserve them. Five minutes and then I’ll go and I won’t — I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want.”

You look at him. He looks back. He has, you note, the specific appearance of someone who hasn’t been sleeping well — not dramatic, just a tightness around his eyes, a quality of having been somewhere difficult in his own head for the past two days.

Good, says a part of you.

The other part steps down off the steps and stands in front of him and crosses her arms and says: “Five minutes.”

He exhales. “I’m sorry,” he says. “For Friday night. For — all of it, the whole night, but specifically for—” He stops. His jaw works. “I should never have let it get to that point. I should have walked away from him the second it started and I didn’t and you got hurt and you’re — the baby could have—” He stops again. Something in his face that isn’t composure. “I will never forgive myself for that. I need you to know that. It keeps me up.”

You look at him. “It was an accident.”

“It was an accident that happened because I couldn’t keep my head.” His voice is flat with self-assessment. “Same difference.”

“It’s not the same difference.”

“It’s close enough.” He looks at you steadily. “I’m also sorry for the girl at the party. I know you saw. I know we’re not — I know you don’t have any claim on me and I don’t have any claim on you and technically I didn’t do anything wrong but I’m still sorry because I saw your face and I knew and I did it anyway and that’s—” He stops. “That’s not who I want to be. With this. With you.”

The wall by the entrance is cold and grey and a girl from your floor passes you both with her earphones in and doesn’t look up and the world keeps moving indifferently around this conversation.

“You hurt me,” you say. Not the elbow. The other thing. The girl at the party and the ceiling of his bedroom and the weeks of almost-decency that kept getting complicated. “Not — not physically. You just keep—” You stop. “Every time I think maybe you’re a person you do something that reminds me why I shouldn’t think that.”

He takes that. Doesn’t deflect, doesn’t explain, just takes it. “I know,” he says.

“I need you to be consistent,” you say. “I can’t — I’m going to have your baby, Jake. We’re going to be in each other’s lives for a very long time. I need you to be someone I can rely on or I need you to be completely absent because the in-between is—” Your voice doesn’t shake. You’re proud of that. “It’s too hard. I can’t do the in-between.”

He’s quiet for a moment. The wind moves across the quad and he looks at you with that expression — the undone one, the one without composure — and says: “I don’t want to be absent.”

“Then be consistent.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

“What else do you want me to say?” He’s not defensive — it’s a real question, earnest in a way that sits oddly on him, like a piece of vocabulary he hasn’t used much. “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it. Specifically. I’m not good at—” He moves his hand. “Guessing. Feelings. Whatever this is. But if you tell me what it looks like I’ll do it.”

You look at him for a long moment.

“No more girls,” you say. “Not while we’re — not while this is what it is. I know I have no right to ask that but I’m asking.”

Something shifts in his expression. “Done,” he says. No hesitation.

“And show up. When you say you’re going to show up, show up.”

“Done.”

“And don’t fight people on my behalf. I can handle my own situations.”

His jaw tightens slightly. “That one’s harder.”

“Jake.”

“Done,” he says. “Okay. Done.”

You look at him. He looks back. The five minutes has long since passed and neither of you has moved and the cold is starting to get into your fingers.

“The grapes were good,” you say finally.

Something in his expression — brief, warm, gone almost immediately. “I’ll get more,” he says.

“You don’t have to—”

“I want to.” He says it simply. No performance in it.

You nod. You pull your coat tighter. “I have a seminar,” you say.

“I know. Go.” He steps back, hands in his pockets. “Thank you. For the five minutes.”

You go.

He tells his father that evening.

He doesn’t plan to. He goes to his dad’s office on the east side of the admin building for what is ostensibly a standing weekly dinner that they do on Tuesday evenings — a thing they’ve done since Jake’s freshman year, his dad’s attempt at maintaining something normal in the specific abnormality of being the dean’s son at your own father’s university. They go to the Italian place two blocks off campus. They talk about the team, the season, coursework, the usual rotation.

Except tonight Jake sits down across from his father and picks up the menu and puts it down again and his dad looks at him over his own menu with the steady, unhurried attention that has always been the most disarming thing about him — the way he looks at you like he has all the time in the world and means it — and says:

“What’s going on.” Not a question. His dad has never really needed to make them questions.

Jake puts his menu down. He looks at the table. He thinks about you on the steps this morning saying every time I think maybe you’re a person and the specific accuracy of it, the way it had landed not like an attack but like a diagnosis.

“I got someone pregnant,” he says.

The restaurant is quiet around them — mid-evening, not full yet, the soft noise of other people’s conversations providing cover. His dad sets his menu down with the deliberate care of someone who is choosing his response carefully.

“How far along,” he says.

“About eight weeks.”

His dad nods slowly. He’s a big man — Jake has his build, the same broad shoulders, though his dad carries more grey now at his temples and something steadier in his face, something earned. He looks at Jake with the expression that Jake has never been able to fully decode — not anger, not disappointment exactly, something more complicated and more patient than either.

“Tell me about her,” he says.

Jake blinks. Of all the things he’d expected — “What?”

“The woman. Tell me about her.”

Jake opens his mouth. Closes it. He thinks about you — the flat voice in the corridor at the rink, your hand cracking across his face, I can’t do the in-between. The grapes. The way you’d said the grapes were good like it cost you something to admit it.

“She’s—” He stops. Tries again. “She’s a third year. English lit. She’s sharp. Like — she doesn’t let me get away with anything, she just looks at me and calls it and moves on. She’s not—” He shifts. “She didn’t want this to be mine. She told me that. She wants the baby, she just didn’t want it to be complicated, and I’ve made it complicated.”

“How.”

Jake looks at the table. Lists it. The slap he deserved, the money that was clumsy, the girl at the party, Friday night and the elbow and her face and the specific look she’d had, controlled and exhausted and done.

His dad listens to all of it without interrupting. When Jake finishes there’s a pause — his dad picks up his water glass, drinks, sets it back down.

“Do you like her?” he asks.

Jake looks up.

“It’s a simple question,” his dad says.

“We don’t — I don’t know her. Not really.”

“That’s not what I asked, son.”

Jake is quiet for a moment. He thinks about you outside your building this morning, arms crossed, giving him five minutes you didn’t have to give. The way you’d said I need you to be someone I can rely on like it was the most reasonable thing in the world, like you weren’t asking for anything extraordinary, just — consistency. Basic human consistency. The thing he has never had to be for anyone.

“Yeah,” he says. Quiet. “I think so.”

His dad nods. Like that’s the piece he needed. Like everything else was context and that was the information.

“Then be someone worth liking,” he says. Simply. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s the only thing that matters and everything else is just logistics.

Jake looks at him.

“You’ve never had to work for anything,” his dad says, and it’s not unkind — it’s just true, delivered with the directness of someone who has been watching this coming for a long time. “Not really. Not the things that count. You’re talented and you’re smart and things have always — moved for you. And that’s partly my fault.” He meets Jake’s eyes. “But she’s right. You can’t be the in-between. You’re going to be someone’s father. That’s not a thing you can be inconsistent about.”

Jake absorbs this.

“I know,” he says.

“Do you?”

“I’m trying to.”

His dad looks at him for a long moment. Then he picks his menu back up. “Good,” he says. “That’s the right answer.” He glances over the top of it. “Order something. You look like you haven’t eaten good in a while.”

Jake looks at the menu.

“Dad,” he says.

“Mm.”

“I really—” He stops. “I’ve really made a mess of this.”

His dad lowers the menu slightly. Looks at him with that steady, unhurried attention. “Yes,” he says. “But messes can be cleaned up.” He raises the menu again. “The carbonara is good tonight.”

Jake picks up his menu.

He end up ordering the carbonara.

—

The thing about consistency is that it’s quiet.

It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with a gesture or a speech or a moment you can point to and say — there, that’s when things changed. It just accumulates, slowly, in the background of your ordinary life, until one day you look up and realise the weight you’ve been carrying has shifted without you noticing.

Jake shows up.

That’s the only way to describe it. He shows up in the small ways, the unglamorous ways, the ways that don’t make for a good story but add up to something anyway. He texts when he says he will. He’s outside your building on Wednesday mornings because you have a seminar and the walk takes you past the science quad where the wind is brutal and he started walking with you three weeks ago without asking and has not stopped. He brings food — not always the crackers and ginger tea, sometimes just the grapes, sometimes something from the good Thai place near the rink that you’d mentioned once you were craving and didn’t expect him to remember.

He remembers things.

This is, you find, the most disarming thing about him. More than the jaw and the shoulders and the specific quality of his attention when he’s fully in a conversation.

He remembers that you take your tea with one sugar and that you’re writing your dissertation on George Eliot and that your sister’s youngest is called Lily and that you cannot watch medical dramas right now because they make you anxious in a way you can’t fully explain. He files things away and uses them with a quietness that suggests he’s not doing it to impress you — he’s just paying attention.

And god, it’s harder to be angry at someone who pays attention. You’re still trying.

Your bump begins appearing at eleven weeks.

Not dramatically — not one morning you wake up transformed, just a gradual undeniable softening of the line of your stomach that means your jeans sit differently and your favourite hoodie, the oversized one you’ve worn for three years, suddenly doesn’t hang quite right. You stand in front of your mirror on a Thursday morning and put your hand flat against it and stay there for a moment with the strange doubled feeling that has been following you for weeks now — the unreality of it and the complete reality of it, existing simultaneously, refusing to resolve.

Mina notices before you say anything. She’s been noticing for two weeks, you suspect, and has been waiting for you to bring it up, which is one of the reasons she’s your person.

“You’re showing,” she says, on Friday afternoon, without preamble.

“A little,” you say.

“How do you feel about that?”

You think about it genuinely. “Weird,” you say. “Good weird. Mostly good weird.”

Mina nods. “Have you told Jake?”

“He’ll notice,” you say. “We’re — we’ve been spending time together. He’ll see.”

Mina looks at you with the expression that means she has registered the significance of we’ve been spending time together and is choosing, for now, not to make anything of it. “Okay,” she says.

“Don’t,” you say.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“I really wasn’t,” she says, in the tone that means she absolutely was.

He notices on Saturday.

You’re at this Thai place — his suggestion, your agreement, the two of you in a corner booth with menus neither of you needs because you’ve been here enough times now that you already know — and you’ve taken your coat off because the restaurant is warm and you’re wearing a fitted top and when you reach across the table for the soy sauce you catch him looking.

Not rudely. Not in a way that makes you want to cover yourself. Just — looking, with that attentive expression, taking in information.

“Don’t,” you say.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You have a face.”

“I have a face,” he says, which is almost a smile. “You’re showing.”

“I know.”

“You look—” He stops. Considers his word choice with unusual care. “Good,” he says finally. “You look good.”

You look at him across the table. “That was very diplomatic.”

“I meant it.”

“Jake.”

“I genuinely meant it.” He meets your eyes. “You look good. You’ve looked good for a while. I just—” He stops again. “Didn’t say it. You looks beautiful actually.”

The restaurant is warm and smells like lemongrass and the couple at the next table are arguing quietly about something and the ordinary world is going on all around you and Jake Sim is sitting across from you saying you look good with an expression that has nothing performative in it, no angle, no formula.

You pick up your menu that you don’t need and look at it. “Thank you,” you say, at the laminated page.

He goes back to his menu too. Neither of you says anything else about it. But the air between you has shifted by some small degree and you both know it and neither of you is ready to name it yet and that, you think, is okay.

For now that’s okay.

The not-naming becomes its own kind of language eventually.

He walks you to your seminar on Wednesday and waits fifteen minutes in the wrong direction from the rink to do it, which you know because you’ve looked at the campus map, which you will not be telling him. You bring him coffee one morning — just once, without explanation, the specific order you’ve heard him give three times now — and he takes it without making anything of it which is exactly right. You text him a photo of a onesie Mina finds online that says future hockey player as a joke and he sends back a voice note that is mostly him laughing, genuine and unguarded, and you listen to it twice.

You do not examine why you listen to it twice.

Sunghoon texts once more — I hope you’re okay. I mean that.

You look at it for a long time. You think about the library café and the step outside the party and the way his face had looked when he realised. You think about two years and what they were and what they turned out to be underneath.

I’m okay, you send back. Take care of yourself.

He sends a single: you too.

And that, you think, is the end of that chapter. It doesn’t feel like closure exactly — closure implies a clean line, and there is no clean line, just a gradual and mutual putting down of something that had gotten too heavy to carry. But it feels like something finished. Something that needed to be done.

You feel lighter, after.

Jake finds out about the dissertation.

Not in a dramatic way — you’re in the library one afternoon, the two of you at adjacent tables because you’d both ended up there independently and moving would have been more pointed than staying, and he leans over at some point and looks at your screen and reads two sentences and says: “You write like this normally?”

“Like what.”

“Like—” He gestures at the screen. “Like that. Like it means something.”

You look at him. “It’s an academic paper.”

“I know what it is.” He looks faintly annoyed, the way he gets when he’s trying to say something and the words aren’t cooperating. “I’m saying it’s good. It sounds like you.”

You turn back to your screen. You are not going to make anything of this. You are a reasonable and self-possessed adult and you are not going to sit in the library and catch feelings because Jake Sim said your writing sounds like you.

“Thanks,” you say, at your laptop.

“I’m serious. It’s—” He picks up his pen. “Good.”

“You said that.”

“Because I mean it.”

You look at him. He looks back, pen between his fingers, entirely unaware that he’s just done something dangerous, and you look back at your dissertation and breathe carefully and remind yourself of all the reasons this is complicated.

There are many reasons. They are good reasons. You know them all.

The night it almost becomes something, it’s late November and it’s cold enough that your breath fogs and Jake has walked you back from the library and you’re standing at the bottom of your building’s steps in the dark and neither of you is moving.

“I should go in,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says.

Neither of you moves.

You’ve been doing this — the standing, the not-moving, the conversations that go slightly longer than they need to — for three weeks now. It has a shape, this thing between you, even if it doesn’t have a name. It has weight. You’re both aware of it and both moving around it with the particular carefulness of people who have been burned recently and are not in a hurry to be burned again.

“Jake,” you say.

“I know,” he says. Like he already knows what you’re going to say. Like he’s been having the same conversation in his own head.

“I just need it to stay—” You gesture between you. “Like this. For now. Okay? I need it to stay manageable.”

He looks at you. “Is it not?”

You look back. “Less and less,” you admit.

Something moves through his expression. Warm and complicated and controlled. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll keep it manageable.”

“Okay.”

“I just need you to know—” He stops. Starts again. “I’m not going anywhere. Whatever this is, whatever speed it goes. I’m not going anywhere.”

The cold is sharp and the steps are lit by the yellow glow of the entrance light and you are eleven weeks pregnant and standing in the dark with the father of your baby who is looking at you like you’re something worth staying for, and you think about all the reasons this is complicated and you think about your sister’s voice — those are two separate things — and you think that maybe, maybe, the situation and the feeling don’t have to be the same thing.

“Goodnight, Jake,” you say.

“Goodnight,” he says. You go inside.

At the top of the first flight of stairs you take out your phone.

You open his name — Jake Sim (do not text unless necessary) — and you look at it for a long moment.

You change it to Jake.

Just Jake. Nothing else.

You put your phone in your pocket and go to bed.

—

He asks you out on a Tuesday.

Not dramatically — not with any of the ceremony you might have expected from someone who has spent the better part of four months being alternately infuriating and disarming. He just falls into step beside you on the Wednesday morning walk to your seminar and says, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes forward: “Let me take you to dinner. A real one. Not Thai because we’ve done that.”

You look at him. “Are you asking me on a date?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that.”

“Did you want me to make it complicated?”

You look back at the path ahead. The quad is grey and cold and a girl on a bike nearly takes out a first year near the fountain and life goes on all around you, indifferent and ordinary. “No,” you say. “I didn’t want it complicated.”

“Friday,” he says. “Seven. I’ll pick you up.”

“I know where the restaurants are, Jake. I go here too.”

“I know you do.” He glances at you sideways. “Let me pick you up though.”

You look at him. That expression — patient, certain, not performing anything. Just asking.

“Friday,” you say. “Seven.”

He nods. Looks back at the path. The corner of his mouth does something that isn’t quite a smile and is better than one.

The restaurant he takes you to is small and Italian and not the kind of place you’d have expected from him, which you’re finding is a theme — Jake Sim consistently failing to be what you expect in the specific ways that make him hardest to keep at distance. It’s candlelit without being try-hard about it, the kind of place where the pasta is made that morning and the wine list is handwritten and the tables are close enough that you’re aware of his knee near yours under the table for the entirety of dinner.

You talk. That’s the thing — you just talk, the way you have been talking for weeks now on walks and in the library and over Thai food, except tonight there’s no pretence of it being anything other than what it is. He asks about your dissertation and actually listens to the answer. You ask about the season and he tells you about the conference standings with genuine animation, hands moving, and you watch him and think about the ceiling of his bedroom in September and the corridor at the rink and the bag outside your dorm door and all the distance between those things.

“What,” he says, catching you looking.

“Nothing,” you say. “You’re different.”

“From what?” He laughs.

“From who you were in September.”

He’s quiet for a moment. He turns his wine glass slowly on the table. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I am.”

“Is that — do you mind that? Being different?”

He looks at you. “No,” he says. Simply. “I don’t mind it at all.”

You look back at your pasta.

Under the table his knee settles against yours and stays there and you don’t move away from it and neither does he and you eat your dinner in the warm candlelit ordinary of it and let yourself be there, fully, without managing it from a distance.

Outside afterward the cold hits and you’re pulling your coat around you when his hand finds yours. Not reaching, not making a thing of it — just his hand finding yours in the dark like it already knows the way, fingers threading through, warm and certain.

You let him.

You walk back across campus like that, not talking much, and when you reach your building you stop at the bottom of the steps and he turns to face you and you look at him in the yellow entrance light and you think about goodnight, about all the goodnights, about the careful distance you’ve been keeping.

“Come up,” you say.

His expression does that thing — complicated and warm and something that isn’t quite controlled anymore. “You sure?”

“I just asked, didn’t I?”

He follows you up.

Your room is warm and small and familiar and he’s been in it before but not like this — not with the door closed and the lights low and both of you knowing exactly what this is. He stands just inside the door and looks at you and you cross the room and kiss him.

It’s different from September.

September was heat and momentum and two people who didn’t know each other doing something that felt like a decision.

This is — slower. His hands come up to your face the way they did at the party but gentler, more deliberate, like he’s paying attention to something he nearly missed before. He kisses you like he has something to say and this is the only language that fits, and you feel it move through you differently than anything has moved through you in a long time.

“Hey,” he says, against your mouth.

“Hi,” you say back.

He pulls back just enough to look at you — really look, the way he does now, the full attentive weight of it — and his thumb traces your cheekbone and he says, quietly: “You’re so beautiful. Do you know that?”

“Jake—”

“I mean it.” You can tell he means it. It’s in his face, unguarded and certain. “I’ve been — I should have said it a long time ago.”

You look at him for a moment. Then you pull him back down.

He undresses you slowly, which is new — September was efficient, purposeful, barely stopping. Now he takes his time like he’s making up for it, his mouth following the line of your throat, your collarbone, his hands sliding your top off with a care that makes your breath catch. When he gets to the soft curve of your stomach he stops.

He goes to his knees.

You look down at him, breath held, and he puts both hands flat and warm against your bump and just — holds them there. His forehead drops forward to rest against you. The room is quiet. You put your hand in his hair without thinking about it.

“Hey,” he says softly. Not to you.

Your throat tightens.

He turns his head and presses his lips to the curve of your stomach, gentle, then again, then moves his hands slowly like he’s learning the shape of it, and you feel something in your chest come undone quietly and without ceremony.

“Jake,” you say, and your voice is not entirely steady.

He looks up at you. His eyes are dark and very serious. “Okay?” he asks.

“More than okay,” you manage.

He stands back up and kisses you again and walks you back to the bed.

He lays you down and settles over you and his mouth goes back to your tits immediately — you’d forgotten, or you’d tried to forget, the specific focused obsession of it — his hands cupping them, heavier now, thumbs dragging slow over your nipples until you’re arching up into his mouth.

“Perfect,” he murmurs against your skin, “you’re so perfect,” and the praise lands warm and low in your stomach and you pull at his shirt until he lets you get it off.

He’s as good-looking as you remembered, which is annoying.

His mouth works down your body and his hands slide your underwear off and then he looks up at you from between your thighs with an expression that makes your brain go briefly offline. “Okay?” he says again.

“If you don’t—” you start.

He puts his mouth on your pussy and the rest of that sentence evaporates.

He goes slower than September. That’s the difference — the same precision, the same devastating accuracy with his tongue on your clit and his fingers curling deep into your walls, but slower, like he wants to take you apart carefully this time, like he’s paying attention to every sound you make and adjusting accordingly.

Your hands find his hair. Your hips roll up. He holds them down with one forearm across your hips and doesn’t stop, doesn’t change pace, just keeps that steady merciless rhythm until you’re shaking and pleading and your walls are clenching around his fingers and you cum on his tongue with his name coming out wrecked and too loud for the room.

He comes back up your body looking — different than September. Still composed, still that infuriating ease, but underneath it something open. Something that wasn’t there before.

He reaches for his jacket on the floor. Finds his wallet to grab a condom.

You start laughing.

He looks at you confused. “What.”

“Jake.” You press your lips together. “We don’t — I’m already pregnant.

He looks at the condom in his hand. Looks at you. Something crosses his face and then he laughs too — real and unguarded, the laugh from the voice note, the one you listened to twice — drops it back on the floor and comes back to you.

“Fair point,” he says, against your mouth.

“Incredible,” you tell him. “You’re incredible.”

“Shut up,” he says, warmly, and kisses you.

He flips you over.

Not roughly — carefully, one hand at your hip and one at your shoulder, mindful, and you end up straddling him and looking down at him and his hands settle on your hips and he looks up at you like you’re the best thing he’s seen.

“You good?” he asks.

“Very,” you say, and sink down onto him.

The sound he makes is low and immediate and deeply satisfying. You feel every inch of him filling you, your walls stretching around his cock, and you go slow — partly because of the bump, partly because you want to, partly because watching his face as you take him is something you want to draw out. His jaw is tight. His hands on your hips are firm but not directing, just — there, holding on.

“Fuck,” he breathes. “You feel—”

“I know,” you say, and roll your hips.

His head drops back.

You find your rhythm — slow, deep, the grind of your hips meeting his, and his hands tighten and his hips push up to meet you and his mouth falls open and he is, you think, the best-looking thing you’ve ever seen like this, undone and flushed and completely present, all the composure stripped away.

“Perfect,” he says, rough and low, watching you move. “You’re so perfect, look at you—”

The praise moves through you like heat and you move faster, his thumb finds your clit and you gasp and his other hand spreads warm and careful over your bump and the gesture — the gentleness of it, the instinct of it — tips something over in your chest that you’re not going to examine right now because you’re busy, but you feel it, you feel it clearly.

You cum the second time with his cock buried inside you and his thumb on your clit, his hand on your stomach and his eyes on your face. He follows you not long after with his hips driving up and your name in his mouth, said like it means something, said like he’s been saving it.

Afterward you lie tangled together in your narrow dorm bed, which is not really built for two people but is managing. His hand is resting on your stomach with a naturalness that would have been impossible three months ago and you’re staring at the ceiling and feeling the particular peace of someone who has been braced for a long time and has just, finally, put it down.

“Come to my game next week,” he says.

You turn your head to look at him. “What?”

“Home game. Friday.” He’s looking at the ceiling too. Casual. Except you know him well enough now to know when the casual is covering something. “Come watch.”

You look back at the ceiling. “Okay,” you say.

He turns his head. “Actually?”

“Don’t make it weird,” you say. “Yes. I’ll come to your game.”

The corner of his mouth. That almost-smile that’s better than a real one. “Okay,” he says, and looks back at the ceiling, and his hand stays where it is, warm and certain.

—

The following week is small moments.

Tuesday he brings you the grapes and stays to help you outline your next dissertation chapter, sitting on your floor with his back against your bed and your notes spread between you, and he asks better questions than you expect and you don’t tell him that.

Wednesday the walk to your seminar, his shoulder bumping yours, the coffee he brings without asking — your order, exact, without you saying anything.

Thursday a voice note at eleven at night: just wanted to check you were okay. don’t reply if you’re asleep.

You reply and end up talking for forty minutes.

Friday morning he’s at your door.

In one hand, coffee. In the other, folded fabric — dark blue, the Caldwell Wolves crest on the chest, white lettering across the back. SIM. 9.

He holds it out. “You don’t have to,” he says, before you can say anything. “It’s not — I’m not trying to make it a thing. I just thought—”

You take it from him.

You pull it over your head immediately. It’s enormous on you — falls to mid-thigh, swamps your shoulders, the fabric soft from washing. You look down at it and then up at him. His expression is something you don’t have a word for.

You reach up and pull him down by his jacket lapel and kiss him, there in your doorway, in the yellow morning light, slow and certain.

When you pull back he looks — stunned, almost. Like he didn’t expect it even after everything.

“What was that for,” he says with a big grin.

“The jersey,” you say. “Come on. We’ll be late.”

The Hargrove Center is loud in a way that is different when you’re in the stands rather than the corridor — a living, moving noise, four thousand people and the echo of the ice and the announcer’s voice bouncing off the rafters. Mina is beside you, which you’d insisted on, and she’s wearing a Wolves scarf she definitely did not own before today and is eating a pretzel with the focus of someone who has decided to enjoy this.

Someone sits down on your other side.

You look over. He’s older — Jake’s build, the same broad shoulders, grey at his temples, a Wolves cap and a measured, unhurried expression.

“You must be—” he starts while smiling at you with the same grin Jake gave you not long ago.

“Dean Sim,” you say. “Hi.”

He looks at you for a moment with that steady attention that is so recognisably Jake’s that it almost makes you laugh. He’s smileing — warm, real. “He talks about you,” he says. “Quite a lot.”

“Good things, I hope.”

“Mostly.” He settles back in his seat. “He told me about the grapes.”

You look at him. He looks back with an expression of someone who finds this mildly amusing and is being polite about it.

“He remembered I was craving them,” you say.

“I know,” Dean Sim says. “That’s why he told me.” He looks out at the ice where the Wolves are warming up, Jake moving with that particular ease that is the same on ice as off it, unhurried and certain.

“He’s better than he knows how to show yet,” his dad says, quietly. Not performing it. Just — true. “But he’s getting there.”

You watch Jake on the ice.

“Yeah,” you say. “I know.”

The Wolves win.

Not narrowly — convincingly, the way they do when Jake is in the kind of form he’s been in lately, sharp and present, the kind of player who makes everyone around him better just by being fully there. You find yourself on your feet twice without meaning to be and Mina is absolutely losing her mind beside you in a way that suggests she has been quietly wanting to attend a hockey game for some time and has simply been waiting for the invitation.

After the final buzzer the arena stays loud, the celebration on the ice spilling into the stands, and Dean Sim shakes your hand and says it was lovely to meet you with a warmth that is entirely genuine, and you watch him go and think that Jake got the best of him, underneath everything.

And then the jumbo screen above the ice lights up.

You see it before you process it — your name, in big white letters, and then: JAKE SIM WANTS TO KNOW — WILL YOU BE HIS GIRLFRIEND?

The arena does not go quiet because four thousand people do not go quiet, but there is a definite shift — a ripple, a collective awareness, people turning and pointing and the noise changing character. Mina grabs your arm. You stare at the screen.

“Oh my god,” Mina says.

“Oh my god,” you say.

“Are you — are you going to—”

And then he’s there.

Full hockey gear, skates and all, somehow having gotten from the ice to the stands in the time it took you to register what the screen said, and he’s standing at the end of your row with his helmet under his arm and his hair damp and his face doing that thing — the unguarded thing, the thing without composure — and four thousand people are watching and Mina has both hands over her mouth.

“Well?” he says. Over the noise. Just to you.

You look at him. You look at the screen. You look back at him.

“You’re insane,” you say.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Is that a yes?”

You laugh — real and helpless, the kind that comes from somewhere you haven’t accessed in a while — and you step over Mina’s knees and go to him and he meets you halfway and you kiss him in the Hargrove Center in front of four thousand people and full hockey gear and the crowd does what crowds do when they witness something and the noise is enormous but you don’t hear any of it.

When you pull back his forehead drops to yours.

“Yes,” you tell him. “Obviously yes.”

He exhales — slow, like something released. His hand comes up to your face. His thumb at your cheekbone, the way it always is. “Good,” he says.

“Good,” you say back.

Behind you Mina is making a noise that suggests she is going to be telling this story for the rest of her natural life.

—

Three weeks later you are officially four months pregnant and the bump is undeniable now, round and real, and you’re sitting on Jake’s bed in his room — tidier than September, same room, different everything — with your legs across his lap while he reads something for class and his hand rests on your stomach with the absent certainty of someone who has stopped thinking about it and started just doing it.

The Wolves won again last night. His jersey, what you wore last night and have been to every game, is on the back of his chair.

Outside the window Caldwell goes on being large and indifferent and fully lit up, and in here it is warm and quiet and ordinary in a way that is — everything, actually. The whole thing. The specific ordinary of someone else’s presence that you’ve been missing without knowing how to name it.

“Hey,” Jake says, without looking up from his page.

“Hey,” you say.

“You good?”

You look at him — at the line of his jaw and the hand on your stomach and the room that used to be just a room and is now something else, something yours — and you think about September, about the corridor and the money and the slap you don’t regret. You think about Mina in the drugstore bathroom and Hannah on the third ring and the heartbeat on the monitor that made everything real.

You think about how none of this was the plan and how a plan was never the point.

“Yeah,” you say. “I’m good.”

He turns a page. His hand stays where it is. Outside, Caldwell. Inside, this.

Good, you think. I’m more than good.

Remembering the wound on her thigh, Y/N accepted his outstretched hand and got out of bed, pushing the covers aside with the back of her hand. The rest of the group left the room while Jungwon led her through the door at the back of the room, which led to an adjoining bathroom.

"Jay is going to prepare you something to eat, you'll see, everything he makes is delicious."

"Thank you."

Jungwon's hand slipped from hers, and he closed the door behind him. Y/N took a moment to look at her reflection in the mirror. It had been a while since she had been able to look at herself, and she looked frightening.

Her hair was disheveled and messy, her skin was marked by fatigue, dark circles underlining her eyes, and some of the wounds she had inflicted on herself had not yet healed.

She took off the old hospital shirt, which fell at her feet, and stepped into the shower. The jet of hot water created a cloud of steam in the bathroom as Y/N slipped under the water. At her feet, the water quickly turned brown from the grime and dust accumulated at the abbey, where she had not received the best treatment.

The water turned pinkish before becoming translucent again, Y/N washed the dirt from her body with soap, rubbing her skin. The wound on her thigh stung, but the pain reminded her that she was alive and no longer trapped.

She turned off the water and got out of the shower, wrapping herself in a thick, soft towel. Clean clothes were waiting for her on the bed when she returned to the room, and Y/N put on the expensive silk nightgown and the long robe, which she tied at her waist.

The young girl braided her hair to let it air dry, long and falling past her shoulders. She emerged from the room, walking down a long hallway to a staircase. The house she was in was an old Korean residence, certainly located on a private estate, judging by the many trees she could see through the window.

Y/N descended the stairs, entering a spacious living room furnished with antique furniture. She was so busy examining the old paintings and tapestries that she didn't notice the vampires scattered around the room watching her.

She turned around, startled when she saw Ni-ki right in front of her, not having heard him arrive. He was taller than her, towering over her and forcing her to look up to see him properly. "Are you hungry? Jay hyung prepared something for you."

She nodded, and Ni-ki gently took her hand. As soon as they touched, Y/N was seized by a vision, her mind invaded by memories that did not belong to her. The problem was that she saw herself with Ni-ki, laughing together in a cherry blossom field.

The young girl pulled her hand away from his to stop the vision, blinking to regain her senses. Ni-ki looked at her curiously, already missing her warmth as he pointed to the low table, where a tray of food was already waiting for her.

Y/N sat on the small floor cushion, crossing her legs under her. Jay straightened up from the armchair where he was sitting across from her, giving her a smile. "I hope you like it, Y/N-nie."

She thanked him with a smile and picked up the chopsticks to start eating. Everything was delicious, much better than the porridge the nuns had served her. The hunger subsided in her stomach, her cheeks already regaining color with this delicious meal.

The robe slipped slightly off her delicate shoulder, and Heeseung and Sunghoon, who were sitting on the couch behind her, could see scars and other marks disappearing under the fabric.

The telepath stiffened, unable to read Y/N's mind, while Sunghoon gritted his teeth, reaching out to her to place his hand on her bare shoulder, his thumb tracing one of her scars.

Another memory entered the young girl's mind: Sunghoon and her sitting on a dock overlooking a sparkling lake, her head resting on his shoulder. Y/N violently pulled away when she felt his hand on her, her knees hitting the table, which knocked over a bowl.

She pulled the robe back into place, staring at Sunghoon over her shoulder. The vampire raised his hands to signal that he hadn't meant to scare her and opened his mouth to ask her about her injuries, but Y/N was already on her feet, heading back to her room.

Y/N leaned against her bedroom door, clutching the lapels of the robe between her fingers. Her scars disgusted her, and she wanted no one to see them. Everything those "priests" said they were doing to her was for her "own good," but she was in even more pain than before after their pseudo-exorcisms.

She crossed the room, going to look out the window. She opened it, letting the fresh air into the room, and took the opportunity to observe the landscape before her. A vast forest stretched as far as the eye could see, and they seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.

However, this landscape seemed familiar to her. In the distance, through a gap in the trees, she could see a lake, the last rays of the sun reflecting off its surface. Y/N brought a hand to her head as pain invaded her, reaching behind her eyes, and she stumbled forward.

Arms wrapped around her waist, and she collided with a firm chest, Sunoo didn't wait to lift her in his arms, turning away to lay her on the sofa in the room. He had come to bring her some herbal tea, only to find her in this state of discomfort.

"Are you okay? Are you in pain anywhere?"

"I'm fine…"

She rubbed her eyes as if it would help the pain pass, but it only made it worse. Sunoo handed her the cup, and Y/N took a long sip of the tea, the fresh taste of mint with a hint of sugar brought her some comfort and relaxed her muscles.

"Do you often have pain like that?" Sunoo asked.

"Yes. But it hasn't always been like this."

"So you haven't always been at the abbey?"

"No. I was taken there because people thought I had gone crazy." Y/N took another sip of tea, frowning as the pain was still present at the back of her skull. "They said I would start screaming and muttering in a strange language, drawing symbols. They said I had ventured too far into the forest and the devil had taken advantage to inhabit me."

"You are not possessed, nor are you sick," Sunoo assured. He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "And you have visions?"

"Not visions. Just voices. Ever since I found this necklace."

"What necklace?"

She reached into her neckline and pulled on the chain around her neck, lifting a medallion from which hung a small vial, skillfully forged in dark metal and containing a very dark red liquid.

Sunoo's gaze darkened as he grabbed the pendant. "Where did you find this?"

"Back home. In Transylvania."

"Can I take this from you? To show the others. Maybe it will help us understand why you have visions." But Y/N didn't seem to want to part with it, closing her fingers around it and shaking her head negatively. Sunoo assured her it was okay and that he would let her rest.

Leaving Y/N alone, he went back downstairs to the living room, where the vampires had been able to follow the entire conversation thanks to their supernatural hearing. Sunoo sat in an armchair, clasping his hands.

"She found Selen's medallion."

"How? That's impossible," Jake refuted.

"She had it around her neck, hyung!"

"That medallion was buried with Selen when she was buried," Jungwon reminded them.

"And then with Sooha when she died," Ni-ki added. "It seems this necklace reappears with each new incarnation of our soulmate."

Jay downed his whiskey glass, setting it on the coffee table with a dull thud. "And maybe it's that damn necklace that keeps taking her from us!"

"Speak more quietly, hyung! Y/N might hear."

"She'll find out sooner or later. And she'll end up like all the ones before her. Dead." A window slammed shut due to a gust of wind, a heavy silence settled in the living room. Throughout the entire house, in fact. Because it was broken by a scream coming from Y/N's room.

They were on their feet before a human could even think of it, running upstairs to burst into the young girl's room. Y/N was thrashing on the bed, as if attacked by an invisible force inflicting pain on her.

Blood was flowing from her nose and ears, which made them panic even more. Heeseung grabbed her wrist, only to be directly thrown into her mind, causing him to collapse against the bed in surprise.

"Y/N!" Jungwon shouted, shaking her. "Y/N, wake up!" But she let out another scream, clutching her chest, her hand firmly closed around her necklace.

"The necklace! We have to take it off her!" Jay ordered.

Sunghoon grabbed Y/N's hand hard enough for her to release the pendant, and he grabbed it, pulling the chain with a sharp tug to break it and throw the jewelry as far away as possible. He stifled a groan as he looked down at his raw palm, as if the medallion had burned him.

Y/N finally calmed down, collapsing against Sunoo, who stroked her hair, whispering words of comfort. Heeseung came to, releasing her wrist as he staggered to his feet. "What did you see, hyung?" Jake asked as Ni-ki cleaned the young girl's face with a damp cloth.

"I may have the answer to our questions." Once sure Y/N had fallen back asleep, they positioned themselves further away in the room, speaking softly so as not to wake her.

"Do you remember the very first hunters we met?" Heeseung asked. "Those in Transylvania."

"Yeah, they swore to massacre us even in death," Ni-ki mocked.

"Exactly, but it wasn't just a promise, it was also a curse."

"A curse? We haven't seen any oh those for ages," Sunoo remarked, glancing at Y/N's sleeping form.

"Our soulmates have always died under strange circumstances. First Selen in Transylvania, the first to die. Then Sooha in Riverfield. And now Y/N appears."

"But she isn't dead."

"Not yet. I think the necklace has a link to their deaths," Heeseung declared, crossing his arms over his chest. "It belonged to Selen, who was our first soulmate, then Sooha possessed it, and even Y/N. That's what must be killing them."

Their gazes fell on the spot where Sunghoon had thrown the jewelry, only to find it empty. They turned toward the bed, discovering with horror that the necklace was now around Y/N's neck. "How…?"

"You see, the necklace must have belonged to the hunters who cursed it. It will serve to kill our soulmates no matter the era."

"Okay, but what does that have to do with destroying us?" Jake asked.

"Because only our soulmate could make us live or die," Jay understood. "The hunters knew they would die sooner or later, but not us. So they cursed us to a life of loneliness without our lover, who will die again and again."

"The bastards," Sunghoon growled.

"How do we break the curse, hyung?" Jungwon worried. "Did you see it?" Heeseung's gaze fell on Y/N, who was sleeping peacefully, her features relaxed.

"Even though Y/N has her own new mind and spirit, the presence of Selen and Sooha is inside her. The voices she must be hearing are just echoes of the curse that also affects her. And it all started when she found the necklace, remember. She alone holds the answer to deliver us all."

Masterlist

But that had only triggered their wrath, the vampires spreading blood and desolation wherever they went in search of vengeance for their lost love. When the hatred subsided and the longing set in, only then did they set out to find their soulmate again.

They knew that sooner or later, she would return to life in the form of a new woman on this Earth, and they would be ready to find her and do everything to protect her and make her theirs. They didn't stay in the same place for more than a few years to avoid arousing suspicion, and they killed most of those who were too curious about them.

That's why they found themselves in the heart of Transylvania, where several centuries earlier, their love had died. They felt her presence every time they got closer to her, and the time had come, they had finally found her.

"Is this a joke?"

The vampires stood before an old abbey, a place of God. This was quite ironic given what they had become, abandoning life for chaos. Heeseung, the oldest among them, stepped forward to knock on the wooden door. A few moments later, the door opened to a suspicious old abbess.

"Yes? Who are you?"

"Sorry to bother you, sister, we are looking for someone." The abbess's gaze seemed to light up.

"Are you the doctors?"

"The doctors?" Jake repeated.

"We have been expecting doctors for several days for the case they are supposed to handle. We have tried everything, but this young girl seems possessed. No priest has managed to cure her, so we turned to medicine. Her screams disturb all the nuns, you see." The vampires exchanged knowing glances. Whatever was happening in this abbey, they would find out.

"Yes, we are the doctors you are waiting for, sister," Jungwon assured, stepping forward. "We feared we might have taken the wrong road coming here."

"I am relieved! Come in! Come in!"

The abbess opened the door wide to invite them inside the sacred place. Ni-ki looked up to contemplate the abbey, a smirk stretching his lips before ascending the monument's steps. "This was going to be fun."

The vampires followed the youngest inside, hesitating for a moment as they passed through the doors but able to enter without constraint. It seemed that the creatures of the night who sinned and spread terror were welcome in the house of God.

The abbess led them through the abbey, the nuns they passed gave them curious looks, and some even blushed at the sight of them. It was certain that they were very attractive, an angelic beauty hiding a diabolical heart.

Soon, the abbey became darker and more austere. There were only candles illuminating the dark corridors, and it seemed that no one came to these places. There were spiderwebs in the corners of the walls, and a layer of dust covered the floor like an opaque blanket.

"The girl was brought to us several months ago," the abbess explained, lighting the way with a lamp. "She suffered from visions and violent fits that make her dangerous."

"You say that neither priests nor doctors knew what illness she was afflicted with?" Sunoo asked.

"That's correct. We thought she was possessed by evil, but all the exorcisms performed on her had no effect, they even seemed to worsen her symptoms. She would have fits where she would scream strange things for hours, so the previous doctors gave us something to sedate her when it happened."

They arrived before a long corridor, the stone walls were covered with crosses nailed to the wall, as if the devil were behind the door at the end of the hallway. The abbess handed the key to Sunghoon to stay behind.

The vampire went to unlock the door, glancing at his friends over his shoulder before opening it. As soon as they set foot in the room, they immediately smelled blood. A metallic smell but with sweet notes, like a fruit full of juice in summer.

The room was poorly lit, the light barely passing through the wooden planks nailed across the window, and the candles did nothing to add more brightness. A glance at the walls could frighten anyone. Strange symbols were drawn on them, some in what appeared to be charcoal, but others red, red like blood. Even they, who had lived thousands of years, did not know what they meant.

Their gazes fell on the figure in a corner of the room. Dressed in an oversized shirt, dirty and covered in suspicious stains, a young girl was sitting against the wall scribbling and muttering under her breath. The tips of her fingers were covered in black, old charcoal, and blood that covered a wound on her thigh.

The abbess stood on the threshold of the door, expecting another fit from the young girl. Jay stepped forward slowly so as not to frighten her, crouching in front of her. She seemed to be speaking in Latin, or perhaps Greek. "Hey…"

"Y/N," the abbess informed him.

"Y/N. I'm Jay, how are you? I'm a friend." She ignored him, pressing her forehead against the cold stone while drawing a new symbol.

He gently grabbed her thin wrist, his fingers pressing on the location of her pulse. Her skin was warm but not hot, and she shivered under his touch. Jay's fingers slid from her wrist to her hand, intertwining their fingers, and he breathed in slowly.

God, she was there.

Jay looked at the vampires behind him, nodding, and their gazes darkened, understanding that they had finally found her. They would finally be able to bring their love home.

But Jay's touch on her did not reassure Y/N. She pulled away from his grasp, holding her head in her hands, muttering. The abbess entered the room, pulling a syringe from her robe pocket.

"What are you doing?" Jake growled, grabbing her arm.

"She's going to have a fit! I don't want her to disturb the nuns in their prayers! I know the devil possesses this child! It's for her protection, gentlemen!"

"The devil does not possess her, and she is not sick," Sunghoon refuted.

Y/N was rocking back and forth, her knees pulled up to her chest, murmuring between sobs, her fingers tangling in her hair and pulling as if that could stop what was bothering her.

Heeseung could read her mind, her thoughts were distracted and blurry but open enough for him to take control of her mind and put her to sleep. Y/N collapsed against Jay, who took her in his arms, lifting her up.

"Where are you taking her?" the abbess worried.

"To a safe place where she will no longer cause you trouble and where we can heal her," Sunoo assured.

"Don't worry, sister," Ni-ki smiled, letting Jay pass by him carrying the young girl. "God is good, he will heal Y/N's soul."

He smiled at her, making the sign of the cross across his chest before following his friends, hands in his pockets. The nuns they passed murmured prayers as they walked toward the exit, the abbey doors closed behind them with a dull rumble. "Let's go home," Jungwon declared.

They disappeared into the air, leaving Transylvania to return to Korea, where they had been settled for several years. They owned a large traditional Korean house in the mountains, far from overly curious civilization.

Jay went to lay the young girl in a room, covering her with a blanket once she was stretched out on the bed. Her sleep was peaceful, controlled by Heeseung, who was giving her the best rest possible.

They took turns watching over her during the night, Heeseung gradually withdrew from her mind so that she would come back to herself at her own pace once the sun rose. Y/N opened her eyes, seeing a wooden ceiling instead of the dark, damp one of her room in the abbey.

She sat up on her elbows, finding herself in a cozy bed and a spacious room. The voices in her head had quieted. She could still feel their presence, but they were, as if, silenced. After months of living like this, she didn't know how it was possible.

"You're awake."

Y/N turned her head to see a young man sitting in the armchair facing the bed. She sat up, running a hand through her tousled hair. How had she gotten here? As if they had heard her voice, the door opened to six other boys.

"Where am I?" she said in a raspy voice from not having spoken for a long time and instead having screamed. "Where is the abbess?"

"You are no longer at the abbey," one of them replied. "You are in a safe place."

"How? I am possessed by the devil, I shouldn't be free. I hear… I still hear them."

A grimace crossed her face as she held her head. A blink of the eye was enough for her to see a boy appear before her, sitting on the edge of the bed. She frowned, not having seen him move, as he pressed a hand to her forehead. "The voices?"

"Yes. They are still there, and they hurt me sometimes. Who are you?"

"You knew us a long time ago, but you forgot. With us, you will be safe, and you will have nothing to fear, okay?"

Y/N nodded, then let her eyes rest on them. Although she was certain she had never seen them before, their faces remained familiar. Like a vague memory. And one thing came back in a loop. A list of names.

Heeseung, Jay, Jake, Sunghoon, Sunoo, Jungwon, and Ni-ki. It was them.

Masterlist

-------------♥︎-----------

The sliding glass door didn’t click open like before; it practically rattled in its frame as Garrett shoved past Logan to head back inside. But the moment Garrett took three steps into the kitchen, he froze completely in his tracks. Everyone had cleared out of the kitchen, and the stove was off.

"Oh, shit..." Garrett muttered, his voice dropping into a harsh, stunned whisper.

Logan stood outside, still reeling from the emotional beating Garrett had just handed him, and he quickly turned - feeling like the conversation wasn't done - he went after Garrett, back inside to try to talk to him - to explain himself. He wanted to tell Garrett all of it. He felt trapped in his feelings for you that he had put away two school years ago - he wanted to tell Garrett what had happened between the both of you two years ago. He needed him to know the full story of you and him.

He denied the thought that there could be the possibility of you in any of his lifetimes.

He stepped up to sliding door frame, "Fuck. Okay, Garret, wait. It isn't-" Through the pane, the entire kitchen came into focus.

Standing just past the kitchen counter, adjacent to the the glass sliding door, Grace was standing without words.

She was wearing Logan's tan Carhartt coat that was three times too oversized, half unzipped and had her keys with a pink and silver gemmed land yard dangling loosely from her soft, paralyzed hands. Grace's steel blue-grey eyes were welling up with tears as she stood there in shock. She placed her hand to the side of counter to steady her. Almost like she needed to catch her breath.

No one else was left on the main floor. The front door of the hockey house was never locked and Grace had let herself in like usual, thinking that everyone would be here for Briar family dinner - instead she heard Garrett and Logan yelling at each other in the backyard.

“Every three m-months?” Grace’s voice trembled. She spoke in a terrifyingly quiet whisper as she stepped back, ignoring Garrett's presence entirely. Grace’s eyes were wide, glossy, and fixed on Logan for a just a second.

“You still...you still keep her dates in your calendar?”

He looked up at her. She distanced herself almost instinctively, looking everywhere else on the ground, in a timid, anxious panic - anywhere except in Logan's eyes. There was just silence in the house now. Garrett stood there, feeling guilt in his tightened chest for how this all unfolded and having any part of it at all. He shouldn't have said anything.

The blood completely drained from Logan’s face. He looked at Grace, with sorry eyes, "No, Grace. It wasn't-it's not like that-" He pressed his hands in an exasperated tension against his temples. "I can explain-" Logan stammered, his voice thin and panicked. He stepped forward, his hands reaching forwards, palms out, pleading. Garrett tried to soften the blow of the situation, "Grace." He looked at them both. "I was just bullshitting - it's not Logan's fault. I shouldn't have brought it up," he tried to ease the pain he felt for Grace as they stood in the kitchen.

"It d-doesn't mean anything," Logan whispered so quietly he could barely hear himself.

The words felt heavy, toxic, and dangerously familiar the second they left his mouth. It doesn't mean anything. She had heard him say that before about you - and she tried to ignore it in the past. Her friends had said that guys and girls couldn't be just friends - but not her John Logan, she thought. She believed him every time when he said he said you were like his family - she knew he had care for you - but she tried to convince herself that he didn't have feelings for you like that - even though her gut cautioned her otherwise.

Grace shut her eyes painfully. She barely had the strength to choke out the words but she had to know. "Do you still...love her, Logan?"

The question was so gentle, so entirely devoid of malice, a soft, earnest plea for an answer she had overthought countlessly in her mind the last few months. She already knew his answer and that it paralyzed him.

Logan stood entirely frozen, his mouth opening and closing. He was speechless. He wanted to deny it. He wanted to fight for his relationship with Grace. She was so kind to him. Even when he was a being some kind of evil in this moment. He didn't mean for this happen - he never meant to hurt her. But with Garrett staring at him, watching this all unfold from the side, and the absolute raw betrayal written across Grace’s face, he let out a silent breath, without any words left to say. He couldn't lie to himself anymore.

He looked to the ground, guilt in his eyes - knowing how much Grace didn't deserve this, without being able to look her in the eyes at all. His silence was the loudest sound in the room.

"It's okay, I'm-it's fine-" she barely let out, her voice strained. She turned and gently unzipped his coat, slipping out of the oversized structured fabric and silently place it on the counter avoiding his eyes entirely.

Grace closed her eyes shut for a brief second, feeling lightheaded suddenly.

Logan took a desperate step forward like muscle memory, his hand reaching out to touch her arm. "I'm sorry, I...I never meant to hurt you."

The moment his fingers brushed the air near her, Grace flinched.

It wasn't just a slight pull-back. It was a physical, instinctive reflex. She took two, frantic steps backward, her sneakers shuffling loudly against the kitchen floor as she put distance between them. Her arms crossed tightly over her chest, not in anger, but as a shield, wrapping around herself as if she were freezing.

She looked at him with glassy eyes, her breath coming in shallow. "Please don't," trembling with pain in her voice. The sight of her backing away from him like he was something dangerous scared Logan himself. He froze in his tracks, his hand hovering uselessly in the empty space between them.

Logan choked out painfully, his voice cracking, "I swear to God, I never wanted to hurt you."

"It's okay. I-I know," with an agonizingly quiet finality, Grace heightened her pace to be as far away from Logan as quick as her small frame could bring her and exited through the front door of the hockey house, with the door shutting. The noise of the car starting in the driveway and tires retreating on the gravel.

Logan stood silently staring into nothing at all, disassociating - almost out of body. Garrett watched him from the edge of room. Just a half hour ago, they had been screaming in each other's faces, fueled by a bitter, territorial rage. But seeing Logan like this—shattered, small, and completely dissociated—the anger drained out of Garrett entirely the moment he saw Grace standing in the kitchen at all.

Months ago, when Garrett had lost his absolute mind and had his own violent, breaking-point outburst on the ice, Logan had been the one to grab him, hold him down, and pull him back. So he would do the same for his brother in this moment.

Garrett didn't hesitate. He reached out and wrapped his arms around Logan in a firm, heavy, grounding embrace - with a profound, sorrowful regret for the part he had played in this unraveling.

Logan didn't move. He was completely frozen, his arms hanging limp by his side, his face buried stiffly against Garrett’s shoulder. But Garrett didn't let go. He just held Logan, locking his arms around his friend, anchoring Logan.

-------♥︎--------