“I am tying my laces. I’m tying them and panicking. Multitasking.” Riki yanked the lace tight enough that the eyelets groaned, then immediately loosened it again, frowning down at his own skate like it had personally wronged him. The locker room around them was already half full — upperclassmen moving with the unhurried, proprietary ease of guys who’d done this a hundred times, freshmen moving like they were trying not to be noticed taking up space. Jungwon recognized the difference in himself too. He was sitting very still. Still felt safer than fidgeting.

“You made first line at your old club team,” Jungwon said. “Twice.”

“That’s youth hockey. This is — “ Riki gestured vaguely at the room, at the Blackwood crest stenciled above the doorway, at the rows of stalls with nameplates that weren’t theirs yet. “This is the actual NCAA. This is Park Jongseong’s team. You know what happens to freshmen who embarrass themselves in front of Park Jongseong?”

“What happens?”

“I don’t know, that’s the scary part. Nobody’s ever told me. It’s implied.”

Jungwon almost smiled. He didn’t, because smiling felt like it would let some of the pressure out of his chest that he was using, very deliberately, to keep himself focused. He’d wanted this — wanted it the specific, single-minded way he wanted most things, which was to say completely, with no real plan for what to do with himself if it didn’t happen. Three years of juniors hockey, two recruiting visits, one decision that had felt less like a choice and more like the only door that had ever made sense to walk through. And now here he was, lacing up in a locker room three thousand miles from anywhere that had ever felt like home, next to a guy who’d been his roommate for four days and already felt like the only stable thing in the building. “You’re quiet,” Riki said, which was rich, coming from him.

“I’m always quiet.”

“You’re quiet like you’re thinking too hard about something. There’s a difference.” Riki finally got both skates tied to his satisfaction and straightened up, rolling his shoulders. He’d filled out over the summer — they both had, the strength program had made sure of that — but he still moved like someone who hadn’t quite caught up to his own height yet, all elbows and momentum. “What are you thinking about?”

“Not throwing up.”

“Liar. You’ve never thrown up in your life. You’re, like, constitutionally incapable of it. It’s annoying, actually, now that I say it out loud.”

The door to the locker room swung open before Jungwon could answer, and the easy noise of the room dropped by half — not silence, just a recalibration, the particular hush that happens when the person who matters most walks in. Jungwon knew who it was before he turned his head. He’d watched enough Blackwood game tape over the summer to recognize the walk alone.

Park Jongseong didn’t look like he was trying to be intimidating. That was, Jungwon would come to understand, exactly what made him intimidating. He had a stick bag over one shoulder and a coffee in his other hand and he said “morning” to about six people on his way to his stall, easy, unbothered, like a guy who already knew exactly how good he was and had stopped needing to perform it. “That’s him,” Riki whispered, entirely unnecessarily.

“I know who it is.”

“I’m just saying. That’s him.”

Jay — Jungwon had heard it a dozen times already, never once heard anyone call him Jongseong outside of a coach’s clipboard — dropped his bag at the stall with his name already on it, the one with three years of tape residue on the nameplate, and finally let his eyes drift over the room. Cataloguing. Jungwon recognized the look because it was one he used himself, the assessment of who was solid and who was nervous and who might be a problem. His eyes landed on Jungwon and Riki for a second longer than anyone else. “You two. Yang and Nishimura?”

“Yes, captain,” Riki said, too fast.

Something flickered at the corner of Jay’s mouth — not quite a smile, the suggestion of one filed away for later use. “Heard a lot about you both this summer. Coach won’t stop talking about the center from the Japan program.” A nod at Jungwon. “We’ll see if it’s true on the ice.”

“It’s true,” Riki said, before Jungwon could decide whether to say anything at all. “He’s annoying about it. He’s, like, suspiciously good.”

“Suspiciously good freshmen are my favorite kind.” Jay’s gaze held on Jungwon another beat — not unkind, just thorough, the way you’d look at a piece of equipment you were deciding whether to trust. “Don’t let me down out there.”

“I won’t,” Jungwon said, and meant it more than he’d meant almost anything in his life. Jay moved on, already greeting someone else by name across the room, and Riki exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for the entire exchange. “Okay. Okay, that was — he seems normal. Chill, even. I was told there’d be a speech.”

“There will be,” said a voice from the next row of stalls, and a guy Jungwon recognized from the roster as Jake leaned around the partition, grinning. Sunghoon, beside him, didn’t look up from where he was meticulously taping his stick, but he was clearly listening. “The speech isn’t till tonight. Initiation.”

“What speech?”

“You’ll see.” Jake’s grin widened in a way that should have been more reassuring than it was. “It’s a Blackwood tradition. Captain gives the rookies the rules. Most of it’s normal stuff — don’t skip lifts, don’t talk to the football team unless you’re trying to start something, don’t be the reason we lose the Founders Cup.” He paused, and Jungwon had the distinct sense that the pause was load-bearing. “And then there’s the other rule.”

“What other rule?”

Sunghoon spoke without looking up. “You’ll see.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Because it’s funnier this way,” Jake said, and went back to his own laces, whistling something tuneless, leaving Riki staring after him with the look of a man who’d just been told there was a trapdoor somewhere in the room and no further information.

Tryouts were, in the most literal sense, just hockey. Jungwon had played enough of it in enough rinks across enough countries that the ice itself never scared him — the cold air in his lungs, the particular silence of a puck gliding before the slap of someone’s stick broke it, the geometry of a give-and-go executed clean. That part of him was calm. Had always been calm. It was the only part of him that ever fully was. What he hadn’t expected was how fast Coach Anders moved them through drills clearly designed to see who flinched. Full-ice give-and-gos at speed, odd-man rushes with no warning who was getting the puck, a three-on-two read where half the freshmen visibly hesitated at the blue line and got benched for the rest of the rep without a word of explanation.

Jungwon didn’t hesitate. He’d decided somewhere over the summer — quietly, the way he decided most things — that hesitation was the one thing he could not afford to bring to this ice, because everyone here had a reason to think a freshman center didn’t belong on the top unit, and the only argument he had against that was the one he could make with his stick.

By the third hour, he’d noticed Jay watching him specifically. Not constantly. Just at the moments that mattered — the give-and-go where Jungwon held the puck a half-second longer than the drill called for, reading the lane instead of dumping it the way the play sheet suggested, and put it through a gap that hadn’t technically been there until he made it be there. Jay didn’t say anything. He just watched, and then skated to center ice for the next rep, and Jungwon understood that the watching was its own kind of conversation.

Riki, for his part, was finding his footing the louder way — a highlight-reel one-timer in the third drill that got a few sticks tapping the ice in approval, then immediately undercut by tripping over the blue line in the very next rep and going down hard enough that the whole rink heard it. “I’m fine,” he announced to no one, from the ice, before anyone asked.

“Nobody asked,” Jake called from the bench.

“I could feel the concern radiating off this rink and I wanted to address it.”

By the time Coach blew the final whistle, Jungwon’s legs were a kind of tired that felt less like exhaustion and more like proof of something. He skated to the bench beside Riki, who collapsed onto it like his skeleton had personally given up on him, and only then let himself look toward center ice, where Jay was talking to Coach with the easy, low-voiced confidence of someone who’d be reporting the freshman roster’s worth in about four sentences. “You. Center.” Coach’s voice cut across the rink, and Jungwon’s head came up before he’d even registered being addressed. “Yang. Get over here.”

Riki nudged him so hard he nearly went face-first into the boards. “Go, go, go—” Jungwon skated over, suddenly aware of his own pulse in a way he hadn’t been for three hours of actual hockey. Coach Anders had a clipboard he wasn’t looking at and an expression Jungwon couldn’t read, and Jay stood beside him with his arms crossed, unreadable in a different, more deliberate way.

“First line,” Coach said. “Center. You’ll be playing with Jongseong on your wing.” For a second the words didn’t fully land — not because Jungwon didn’t understand them, but because some part of him had been so braced for a different sentence that this one needed a moment to be believed. First line. As a freshman. He knew, distantly, the way you know a fact rather than feel it, that this didn’t happen. Not at a program like this. Not in week one. “Thank you, Coach,” he managed.

“Don’t thank me. Earn it every single day or I’ll pull you so fast you won’t see it coming.” Anders said it without heat, like a fact of weather, and walked off toward the next conversation he had to have. Which left Jungwon standing on the ice across from Jay, alone, in the particular quiet of a rink emptying out around them. Jay studied him for a second. “You know what this means.”

“That I don’t get to be bad at this.”

“That you don’t get to be bad at this,” Jay agreed, something almost like approval moving across his face. “I don’t care that you’re a freshman. I care that you’re good, and I think you’re about to be the best center this program’s had in four years, and I need to know if I can build a line around you that doesn’t fall apart in November.” He held out a glove. “Can I?” Jungwon looked at it for half a second longer than the gesture probably warranted, and then knocked his own glove against it. “Yeah. You can.”

“Good.” Jay’s mouth did the almost-smile thing again, fuller this time. “Welcome to the Wolves, Yang. Don’t make me regret this.” He skated off toward the tunnel, and Jungwon stood there a moment longer than he needed to, letting it settle — the ice under his skates, the weight of the line Jay had just put on him, the particular feeling of being trusted by someone whose trust clearly didn’t come cheap. He thought, with the small, private satisfaction of a goal he’d set for himself and quietly hit: I want him to keep thinking that about me.

The Den (the ice hockey frat) at seven that evening was unrecognizable from the version Jungwon had toured during his recruiting visit — that one had been clean, staged, every surface wiped down for parents. This one had thirty hockey players packed into a living room that smelled like body spray and old pizza, somebody’s portable speaker playing something with too much bass, and a framed photo on the wall by the staircase that Jungwon’s eyes kept catching on without quite knowing why. Two kids, maybe ten years old, matching gap-toothed grins, one of them holding a hockey stick taller than he was and the other holding nothing, hands on her hips like she was supervising. He recognized Jay immediately even at that age — something about the set of the jaw hadn’t changed at all. He didn’t know who the girl was. Didn’t think about it past a beat of mild curiosity before Riki elbowed him in the ribs and the room’s energy shifted, everyone finding a seat or a wall to lean against, because Jay had walked to the front of the room with the specific posture of a man about to give a speech he’d given many times before.

“Alright. Rookies, eyes up. Everyone else, you’ve heard this, shut up and let me say it anyway.” A ripple of laughter from the upperclassmen, like the joke was older than Jungwon’s time at Blackwood. Jay waited it out, unbothered, then continued. “Rule one. You do not skip lifts. I don’t care what your high school strength coach told you, you skip lifts here and you will feel it in February when you’re getting run over by a sophomore from BC who didn’t.”

“Rule two.” A few guys mouthed it along with him, clearly by memory. “You do not embarrass this program. Not at parties, not on campus, not on Twitter, God help you if it’s Twitter. What you do reflects on all of us, whether you like that or not.”

“Rule three. You do not start anything with the football team. I don’t care who started it actually, I don’t care who’s right, you walk away, because Coach has had that exact conversation with their coach four times already and I am tired of being there for it.”

The room had loosened by now, a low murmur of guys who’d heard this annually finishing his sentences under their breath, Jake outright mouthing along with theatrical solemnity like he was reciting a pledge. Jay let it happen for a second, something almost fond in it, before his expression shifted — not harder, exactly, but more deliberate. He turned, and Jungwon watched him look at the framed photo on the wall, then back at the room. “And the last one.” His voice didn’t get louder. If anything it got quieter, which made the whole room quiet down to match it. “You do not touch my sister.”

A groan went up from at least eight different directions, good-natured, well-worn. “Bro, we know,” Jake called out, not unkindly. “You say this every single year.”

“And I’ll keep saying it every single year,” Jay said, “until one of you proves me wrong by not needing to hear it.”

“It’s literally tattooed into our brains at this point,” Heeseung put in from somewhere near the back. “We could say it for you.”

“Then say it with me.” A few scattered, half-joking voices did, off-rhythm, and Jay let himself almost-smile at the chaos of it before his gaze swept the room one more time and landed, with what felt to Jungwon like unmistakable precision, on the freshmen. On him. On Riki.

“I mean it,” Jay said, and there was no joke left in his voice at all. “I don’t care how funny you think it is. I don’t care if you think it’s a bit. She’s not a joke, and she’s not available, and any of you who think you’re the exception are going to find out real fast that I am not.” Nobody laughed at that part.

Jungwon nodded along with the rest of the rookies, the universal gesture of understood, no problem, why would this ever be an issue — and meant it. He filed it next to the lifts and the football team and the Twitter rule. A reasonable ask from a captain who’d clearly built his entire program on trust, and Jungwon had just shaken that man’s hand on the ice four hours ago and told him he could be trusted with it.

—

The thing nobody told Jungwon about Blackwood — not the recruiters, not the campus tour, not the glossy athletics brochure with its drone shots of the rink at sunset — was how much of actual freshman life happened in the gaps between hockey. He’d pictured it, vaguely, as practice and class and sleep, in that order, on a loop. Nobody mentioned the part where the Den ran on its own gravity, where Tuesday afternoons meant six guys sprawled across two couches watching game tape with the volume too low to actually hear, where Heeseung had apparently appointed himself the unofficial keeper of a coffee machine he guarded like a dragon, and where Jake’s primary personality trait, three days in, appeared to be finding new and increasingly elaborate ways to make Riki regret saying anything out loud, ever. “I’m just saying,” Jake said, sprawled upside down across the arm of the couch in a way that looked actively bad for his spine, “if Coach moves you to second line because you keep tripping over blue lines, that’s not bullying. That’s documentation.”

“It happened once.”

“It’s happened twice. I have a list.”

“You don’t have a list.”

“I have a mental list. Mentally, it’s very organized.” Jungwon sat at the kitchen table with his economics textbook open to a page he’d read four times without absorbing a single word of, partly because the syllabus had assigned something genuinely dense for week one, and partly because he was distracted by the particular ease of the room around him — the way nobody here had to perform anything. He’d grown up around hockey locker rooms his whole life and they were rarely this loose this early. The Den had three years of inside jokes baked into its walls already and he and Riki were still learning the language, but nobody seemed to mind teaching it to them. “You’re doing the econ reading,” Heeseung observed, dropping into the chair across from him with his own mug. “On a Wednesday. Before it’s due.”

“Is that not normal?”

“It’s very not normal. Sunghoon hasn’t opened a textbook since orientation and he has a 3.7.”

“That’s a lie I haven’t fact-checked because it’s funnier to let it stand,” came Sunghoon’s voice from the doorway, where he’d appeared with the specific quiet menace of someone who could apparently materialize without anyone noticing the approach — Jungwon was starting to learn that about him, three days in. He had a bag of equipment over one shoulder, clearly back from a gear fitting, and he dropped it by the door without much ceremony. “Captain back yet?” Heeseung asked him.

“Nope. Said he’d be back for dinner. Something about—” The front door opened before Sunghoon finished the sentence, and for a second Jungwon assumed it was Jay, the way the whole kitchen’s attention shifted toward the sound the way it had in the locker room three days ago — that same recalibration. But the voice that came through wasn’t Jay’s.

“Whoever ate my leftovers from the fridge, I want you to know I saw the container in the recycling and I am not currently choosing violence, but I reserve the right to change my mind.” Jake, upside-down on the couch arm, didn’t even look over. “That was Heeseung.”

“It was not me—”

“It was absolutely you, you had pad thai breath for an hour.” You walked into the kitchen mid-argument with the easy, unbothered air of someone who’d clearly been doing this — walking into rooms full of hockey players bickering — for years, long enough that it had stopped registering as anything except background noise. You had a tote bag over one shoulder that looked like it weighed more than it should, your hair pulled back in a way that suggested you’d come straight from somewhere academic rather than anywhere that required effort, and you dropped the bag onto the counter with the same casual proprietary ease Jay had dropped his stick bag in the locker room three days before. Like this kitchen belonged to you too. Jungwon would learn, eventually, that it basically did.

Jake was off the couch before you’d even finished setting the bag down, crossing the kitchen in three long strides to throw an arm around your shoulders and steer you half a step sideways like you were a piece of furniture he was rearranging. “There she is. The menace. The legend.”

“Get off me, you’re sweaty.”

“I showered.”

“You did not shower, I can smell the rink on you from here.” You ducked out from under his arm without much real effort, swatting at his side, but there was no real heat behind it — just the specific, well-worn ease of two people who’d clearly done this exact bit more times than either of them could count. Jungwon filed the whole exchange away without quite meaning to: the easy physical familiarity, the way Jake could throw an arm around you without either of you thinking twice about it, the way you were so plainly, completely unbothered by him. The kid-sister treatment. He understood it the second he saw it, and understood, with slightly less clarity but no less certainty, that he did not want to be filed under the same category as Jake. “Rude. I carry that smell with pride. It’s eau de championship.”

“It’s eau de you skipped the showers because Sunghoon was hogging the good one.”

“That is also true.” Jake didn’t even pretend to be offended, dropping back onto the couch with the satisfied air of a man who’d gotten exactly the interaction he wanted. “Anyway. Heeseung ate your leftovers.”

“I did not—”

“You’re new,” you said, cutting clean through Heeseung’s protest, not turning around yet, like you’d clocked Jungwon in your peripheral vision the second you walked in and simply hadn’t gotten to him yet on your list of priorities. You opened the fridge, presumably to assess the damage to whatever container had survived the day. “I — yeah.” Smooth, Jungwon thought, distantly, unimpressed with himself. “Jungwon. Yang Jungwon.”

“The freshman center Coach won’t stop talking about.” You shut the fridge, finally turning fully, and Jungwon had approximately one second to decide what to do with his face before you were looking directly at him, and the decision he landed on was: nothing. Stay still. Don’t give anything away that you haven’t earned the right to see yet. “Jongseong mentioned you.”

“He did?”

“Mentioned might be generous. He said, and I’m quoting, ‘there’s a freshman who might actually be good,’ which from him is basically a sonnet.” You said it with the specific dry affection of someone who clearly adored your brother and found him slightly ridiculous in equal measure, and something about the way you talked about him — easy, unguarded, like there was no universe where loyalty to him was even a question — made Jungwon’s read on the whole Den click a little further into place. This wasn’t just the captain’s sister stopping by. This was someone who’d grown up in these rooms the way the rest of them had grown up on the ice. He noted, too, distantly, that you’d called him Jongseong. Nobody else in this house had used that name once in three days. To everyone here he was Jay, or Captain, or — on a bad day — Jongseong said with theatrical dread before someone got benched. You said it like it was just his name. Maybe, Jungwon thought, to you, it just was.

“I’ll try to live up to the sonnet.” That got something out of you — not quite a laugh, but the version of one that exists right before it, a flicker at the corner of your mouth that you seemed to decide not to fully commit to. “You’re better off not trying. He’ll find a new thing to be insufferable about within a week.” You looked past him, toward Riki, who’d gone very quiet on the couch in a way that suggested he was taking detailed mental notes for later interrogation. “You’re the other one. Nishimura.”

“Riki. You can call me Riki. Everyone does. It’s — yeah, Riki’s fine.” Riki, Jungwon noted with some private amusement, had apparently lost several IQ points in real time.

“Riki,” you repeated, like you were filing it. “Heads up — if Jongseong catches you eating my leftovers too, he’ll actually do something about it. I’ve made peace with these guys being lost causes.” A gesture at Jake and Heeseung, who both made identical offended noises. “Freshmen still have a chance at redemption.”

“Noted,” Riki managed. You grabbed something from the cabinet — crackers, Jungwon registered without really meaning to register it, the kind in the blue box, which felt like a stupidly specific detail to be cataloguing about someone he’d known for ninety seconds — and headed for the doorway, pausing there the way people do when they’re about to leave a room but haven’t quite committed to it yet. “Anyway. Welcome to the circus.” You said it to the room generally, but your eyes caught Jungwon’s for one more half-second on the way out, not lingering, not anything, just a normal goodbye glance that any of these guys would have gotten in your place. “Try not to let them ruin you too fast.”

And then you were gone, down the hall, the sound of a door somewhere upstairs — Jay’s room, Jungwon would learn — clicking shut behind you, and the kitchen exhaled back into its normal noise like nothing had happened at all. Nothing had happened. Jungwon was aware of that with total clarity. A girl had walked into a kitchen, made a joke about leftovers, learned his name, and left. This was, by any reasonable measure, the least significant interaction he’d had all week, several orders of magnitude less significant than making first line. He looked back down at his econ textbook. Read the same paragraph a fifth time. Still didn’t absorb a word of it. “Well,” Riki said, from the couch, in a voice pitched for exactly one listener. “That’s unfortunate.”

“What is.”

“Don’t.” Riki sat up properly for the first time in twenty minutes, fixing Jungwon with the specific look of someone who had just watched something happen and intended to make sure Jungwon knew he’d watched it. “I watched your whole face do a thing just now.”

“My face didn’t do anything.”

“Your face did several things. I counted at least three things.” Riki lowered his voice further, glancing toward the doorway like the danger might still be listening. “Jungwon. Buddy. My friend. My roommate, who I have grown to care about in four short days. That’s Jongseong’s sister.”

“I know whose sister she is.”

“You know whose sister she is and your face still did the thing.”

“There was no thing.”

“Heeseung,” Riki called out, not breaking eye contact with Jungwon, “did his face do a thing just now?”

“Absolutely it did,” Heeseung said, without looking up from his coffee, with the weary tone of a man who’d apparently already seen this exact movie play out at the Den before and knew exactly how it ended. “I give it two weeks before he’s carrying her bags.”

“I’m not carrying anyone’s bags.”

“Three days,” Jake corrected, from the couch, finally rolling himself upright. “I give it three days.” Jungwon closed his textbook with more force than the moment strictly required, ignoring all three of them with the particular dignity of a man who knew, somewhere underneath the irritation, that they weren’t wrong about anything, and that the worst part — the part he had absolutely no intention of admitting to a room that would never let him hear the end of it — was that some quiet, certain part of him had already decided three days wasn’t going to be nearly long enough to talk himself out of it.

He’d shaken Jay’s hand on the ice. Told him he could be trusted. He thought about the blue crackers. The flicker at the corner of your mouth. The door clicking shut down the hall. That’s unfortunate, he thought again, and didn’t disagree with himself even once.

—

“—and then he just left. Didn’t say bye, didn’t say see you later, nothing. Just picked up his gear bag like a man fleeing a crime scene and walked out of the gym.”

“Sunoo.”

“I’m not done.”

“You’ve been not-done for four blocks.”

“Because it’s a four-block story, Y/N, I don’t control the geography.” Sunoo hopped over a crack in the sidewalk without breaking stride, somehow managing to keep his energy at a near-constant boil despite the fact that they’d left your dorm twenty minutes ago and he hadn’t paused for breath since. The two of you had shared a floor since orientation week freshman year — adjacent rooms, actually, close enough that you’d learned to recognize each other’s footsteps in the hallway — and in that time you’d discovered that Sunoo processed his entire emotional life out loud, in real time, usually at a volume better suited to indoor voices. “So I’m in the gym. Minding my business. Doing my little cooldown stretches because I’m a responsible adult who stretches—”

“You stretch for ninety seconds and call it a cooldown.”

“It’s quality over quantity. And Sunghoon’s there finishing his lift, and he’s got his shirt half off because he’s toweling down, and I make eye contact with him for one — one — completely normal, completely platonic second, and the man turns the color of a fire alarm and leaves the building.”

“Maybe he had somewhere to be.”

“Y/N. He works out at the same gym at the same time every single day. He had nowhere to be. He had somewhere to flee.”

You laughed — you couldn’t help it, you’d been laughing on and off for four blocks — and adjusted the strap of your bag, the night air doing that early-fall thing where it hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to be warm or cold, which meant you’d both left your jackets at the dorm and were now regretting it in real time, walking faster than necessary partly to get there and partly to generate body heat. The Den was eight minutes from campus if you cut through the quad, less if you didn’t care about getting grass stains on your shoes, which tonight, you decided, you didn’t. “Maybe,” you said, “and I’m just spitballing here, he likes you, and that’s why he ran away.”

“That tracks with literally zero of his behavior.”

“It tracks with all of his behavior. You just don’t want to hear it because then you’d have to do something about it instead of getting to complain to me for four blocks.” Sunoo opened his mouth to argue, visibly reconsidered, and closed it again, which from him was basically a confession. “Okay, fine, hypothetically, if that were true, what would I even — no. Don’t answer that. I don’t want strategy tonight. Tonight I want to dance and forget Sunghoon exists for at least ninety minutes, and you’re going to help me do that.”

“Deal.”

“What’s your goal for tonight?”

“My goal,” you said, with the specific, deliberate casualness of someone who had absolutely thought about this on the walk over, “is to get laid. That’s it. That’s the whole goal. Low bar, very achievable, I’m not trying to overcomplicate my life.”

“A woman with priorities. I respect it.” Sunoo glanced sideways at you, taking in — properly, for what felt like the first time since you’d left your room — what you were actually wearing, like the conversation had only just given him a reason to look. “Okay, and might I say, dressed for the occasion.” You’d put actual thought into it, more than you’d admit to him directly: a dress that hit exactly the right amount of effortless while having taken twenty-five minutes of very much not effortless decision-making in front of your mirror, dark and fitted in the way that did the most work with the least amount of obvious trying, paired with the kind of confidence that came from knowing you looked good and choosing not to make a big deal out of it. You weren’t dressing for anyone specific. You were dressing for the version of tonight where something interesting happened, which felt like a reasonable thing to dress for on a Friday. “I clean up alright.”

“You clean up like a public health hazard, is what I’m saying, someone’s going to need medical attention.” Sunoo bumped his shoulder against yours, grinning. “Jongseong’s gonna take one look at that dress and have an aneurysm.”

“Jongseong is not going to see this dress, because Jongseong is going to be busy being captain and yelling at freshmen about beer pong etiquette, and if he does see it, I will simply lie and say I’ve been wearing a cardigan all night.”

“Bold strategy.”

“It’s worked for four years.”

You could hear the party before you could see it — bass thudding low and steady through the walls of the Den a full block out, the specific texture of a hundred-plus people’s noise blending into one continuous hum, punctuated occasionally by something sharper, a shout, a laugh, the unmistakable crash of something glass that nobody seemed to care about. The porch light was on. Somebody had strung up actual string lights along the railing at some point this week, which felt like a Heeseung touch, the kind of small unnecessary effort he’d deny making if you asked him directly.

The front door was propped open with somebody’s shoe — a genuinely upsetting choice of doorstop that you chose not to think too hard about — and you and Sunoo stepped into the wall of heat and noise that was the Den at full party capacity, the living room packed wall to wall, the kitchen counter doing actual structural duty as a makeshift bar, someone’s questionable music choices blaring from the speaker Jake had clearly hooked his phone up to because nobody else picked songs this aggressively. “Y/N! Sunoo!” Jake’s voice cut through the noise before you’d even gotten three steps in, and he appeared out of the crowd with a red cup in each hand, already holding one out toward you like he’d been anticipating your arrival. “You look — okay, wow, you look like you’re trying to put me in an early grave, what is this.”

“It’s a dress, Jake.”

“It’s a weapon, is what it is. Does Jongseong know you own this?”

“Jongseong does not get a vote on my wardrobe.”

“Jongseong would absolutely like a vote on your wardrobe, that’s the whole — “ Jake gestured vaguely, encompassing, you assumed, the entire premise of his existence as Jay’s friend and teammate. “You know what, never mind, not my fight. Drink.” He pressed the cup into your hand without further ceremony, the same easy, brotherly overfamiliarity you’d gotten from him since you were eighteen, no different than if you were one of his actual sisters. “Sunoo, you too, don’t make this weird by refusing.”

“I wasn’t going to refuse, I was going to say thank you, but go off.”

“Where is he then?” you asked, scanning the crowd out of habit more than real interest — you didn’t actually need to find Jongseong, you knew he’d find you eventually, the way he always did at these things, materializing at your elbow within the first twenty minutes like a smoke detector going off. “Tell me he’s not doing the thing where he stands by the door checking IDs like he personally runs a liquor board.”

“He was doing that an hour ago, yes,” Jake confirmed, entirely too pleased about it. “Sunghoon talked him down. Mostly. He’s somewhere being captain at people. You’ll find him or he’ll find you, you know how it goes.”

“Tragically, I do.” You took a sip of whatever was in the cup — something fruity and far too strong, exactly the kind of drink this house specialized in and refused to ever improve upon — and let Sunoo tug you further into the crowd, already scanning for Sunghoon with the specific, badly-disguised intensity of someone who’d claimed thirty seconds ago that he didn’t want to think about him at all tonight.

That was when you felt it. The look. You’d grown up around enough hockey players to have a very specific radar for being looked at — the difference between the guys who’d known you since you were twelve and treated you like furniture and literally anyone else — and this one didn’t register as either. It wasn’t loud about it. It wasn’t a guy elbowing his friend to point you out. It was just — there, steady, from somewhere across the room, and when you turned your head to actually find it, you already half-knew, with the strange certainty of a feeling you hadn’t quite earned the right to yet, exactly whose eyes you were going to find.

Jungwon was leaning against the wall near the kitchen doorway with a cup he didn’t seem especially interested in drinking, half a conversation happening beside him that he clearly wasn’t fully present for, and when your eyes landed on his, he didn’t look away first. Didn’t do the thing most guys did — caught looking, quick recovery, pretend it never happened. He just held it, calm, unhurried, like he’d already decided there was no version of tonight where pretending made sense. You looked away first. You weren’t entirely sure why. “Okay,” Sunoo said, very close to your ear, having apparently clocked the entire exchange in the two seconds it took, “that’s new.”

“What’s new.”

“You know exactly what’s new. Freshman center, eleven o’clock, doing the eye thing.”

“There’s no eye thing.”

“There is extensive eye thing, I watched it happen, I have a front row seat to eye things, it’s basically my major.” Sunoo’s grin was doing something genuinely unholy now. “Go talk to him.”

“I came here to find a hookup, not start a whole — situation.”

“Maybe the hookup is the situation. Have you considered that the universe is just handing you a gift and you’re standing here arguing with the delivery guy.” You didn’t answer that, mostly because you didn’t have a good one ready, and let yourself get pulled deeper into the party instead — toward the dancing, toward whatever Heeseung and a sophomore defenseman were arguing about near the speaker, toward the specific chaos of a Friday at the Den that you’d witnessed probably two hundred times across four years and never once gotten tired of. You were aware, the entire time, of exactly where in the room he was standing.

“Absolutely not.” Jungwon said.

“Jungwon. Buddy. Best friend. Light of my life.” Riki had a hand wrapped around his wrist and was hauling him bodily toward the makeshift beer pong table set up at the end of the kitchen counter, where a sophomore defenseman Jungwon vaguely recognized from tape was loudly defending his table’s undefeated record to anyone who’d listen. “You cannot stand against this wall for the entire night doing your broody freshman thing. People will start asking questions.”

“I’m not doing a broody freshman thing.”

“You are doing the broodiest possible version of a freshman thing, you’ve had the same face on for forty minutes.” Riki deposited him at the end of the table with the satisfaction of a man completing a difficult task. “Play. Socialize. Be a person.” He played. He was, infuriatingly, good at beer pong too — some part of his brain that processed angles and trajectories for a living refused to turn off just because the stakes had dropped to a plastic cup — which meant by the fourth round he’d had more to drink than he’d planned on, that loose, warm, slightly-too-honest feeling starting to settle in behind his eyes, the kind where his usual careful filter on his own face got a little less reliable.

Which was, in retrospect, bad timing for the exact moment he looked up and found you across the room, talking to some guy he didn’t recognize — not a hockey player, built wrong for it, probably someone’s friend from another house — who’d planted himself directly in your space with the specific posture of a guy who thought he was being charming. You had your arms crossed, half-smiling in a way Jungwon was already learning to read as entertained, not interested, but the guy didn’t seem to be picking up on the distinction, leaning in another inch, saying something that made you roll your eyes.

Something hot and entirely unreasonable moved through Jungwon’s chest. He had no claim to that reaction. He knew that, even loose and warm and three cups in, some clear-eyed part of him filing the feeling under not yours to have even as it refused to go away. “Oh, this is good,” Riki said, following his line of sight, delighted. “Your face is doing the thing again. The thing’s back.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m not even mad, I just want to document it for later—”

“Sink it or pass the ball, Nishimura.”

Across the room, Jay had clocked the same conversation about four seconds before Jungwon had, and unlike Jungwon, Jay had absolutely zero hesitation about what to do with that information. He crossed the room with the unbothered, unhurried walk of a man who knew exactly how much weight his presence carried in this house, and inserted himself into the conversation with a hand clapped flat on the guy’s shoulder. “Hey, man. You go to Whitfield?” Jay’s voice was friendly. Jungwon, even from a distance, did not trust it for a single second.

“Uh — yeah, I’m here with—”

“Cool, cool. Hey, quick question, completely unrelated.” Jay’s hand was still on the guy’s shoulder, steering him a polite half-step back from you, the whole motion smooth enough to look almost accidental. “You know whose house this is?”

“…Yours?”

“Mine. And that’s my sister. So I’m gonna need you to go find your friends now, and I’m gonna need you to do it real fast, and we’re gonna both pretend this was a totally normal interaction. Sound good?” The guy looked between Jay and you for one confused second, visibly recalibrated his entire night, and excused himself with considerably less charm than he’d arrived with. “Jongseong.” You said it with the specific, long-suffering exhaustion of someone who’d watched this exact scene play out roughly forty times. “I was handling it.”

“You were handling it. I helped it get handled faster.”

“I didn’t need help.”

“Noted, for the record, and ignored, also for the record.” Jay dropped a kiss on the top of your head, entirely brotherly, entirely unbothered by your glare, and was gone again within seconds, already absorbed back into some conversation near the door, leaving you standing there with your arms still crossed, visibly debating whether being annoyed was worth the energy.

Jungwon watched the whole thing happen from the beer pong table with what he hoped looked like idle interest and definitely was not. He set his cup down. Told himself, with the particular conviction of a guy three drinks deep, that he was simply going to go say hello. Nothing more than that. A normal, low-stakes hello, the kind any teammate’s family member deserved. He was lying to himself and he knew it the entire walk across the room. “Your brother’s very committed to his bit,” he said, by way of greeting, and you turned, and something in your face shifted — not surprise exactly, more like you’d half-expected this, had maybe been tracking the same distance between you that he had.

“He’s been doing that since I was sixteen. I used to think it’d get old. It has not gotten old.” You studied him for a second, something assessing in it. “You’re not as drunk as Riki, but you’re not sober either.”

“Accurate.”

“Confident, though. Most freshmen don’t walk over here unprompted.” A small, deliberate pause. “Most freshmen don’t walk over here at all, actually. Jongseong’s speech tends to be memorable.”

“I remember the speech.” He held her gaze, steady, the warmth in his chest from earlier rearranging itself into something calmer and more certain now that he was actually standing in front of you. “I’m not doing anything the speech covers. We’re talking.”

“Just talking.”

“Just talking,” he agreed, and let the silence after that sit a beat longer than strictly comfortable, watching you decide what to do with it. You didn’t walk away. That, more than anything he’d noticed all night, told him something.

The conversation that followed wasn’t long — a few minutes, maybe, threaded between the noise of the party, you asking where he was from, him asking how long you’d lived in this exact chaos, the easy rhythm of two people figuring out they liked talking to each other more than either had planned on. But something underneath it had already shifted register, the air between you gone thick and obvious in the way that doesn’t need words to confirm it, and when you finally tipped your head toward the back hallway — toward the stairs, toward somewhere quieter — he didn’t hesitate even half a second before following.

The door to his room had barely clicked shut behind you before his hand found your jaw, tilting your face up to his, and he kissed you like he’d been thinking about it considerably longer than the twenty minutes you’d actually been talking — slow at first, testing, and then deeper when you made a small sound against his mouth that undid something careful in him. His tongue traced yours, unhurried despite the want clearly humming under his skin, like he had every intention of taking his time even though some other part of him was screaming to do anything but. “You sure about this?” he murmured, mouth dragging along your jaw, down the line of your throat.

“Jungwon.” Half a laugh, breathless already. “I dragged you up the stairs.”

“I know. Wanted to hear you say it anyway.”

He walked you back toward the bed with a hand splayed warm against the small of your back, and when the back of your knees hit the mattress he followed you down, settling his weight over you with a kind of deliberate control that made it very clear nothing about tonight was going to be rushed unless you wanted it to be. He kissed down the column of your throat, lingering at the spot where your pulse jumped under his mouth, and you felt the low sound that pulled out of you before you’d consciously decided to make it. “Pretty,” he said, against your skin, low, certain. “You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to do this.”

Clothes came off between kisses, unhurried despite the heat building under both your skins — his shirt first, then yours, his mouth finding your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder, lower, until his lips closed around one nipple and you arched up into him with a gasp that made him hum, pleased, against your chest. “There you go,” he murmured, glancing up at you through dark lashes, taking in the way your breath had gone shallow. “That’s it.” Your hands come up to him without thinking, sliding into his hair, pulling him closer, and that’s all it takes for the control he’s holding onto to slip just slightly. His mouth moves again, up your neck, along your jaw, back to your lips, kissing you deeper this time, less careful, more intent.His hands come up to your tits without hesitation, cupping them fully, thumbs dragging over your nipples, slow at first, like he’s testing, like he’s figuring out what you’ll do. You arch into him immediately. That’s all he needs. “There you go,” he says, softer now, watching your face. His mouth follows his hands, closing around one nipple, his tongue circling before he sucks, harder than you expect, and you gasp, your fingers tightening in his hair. He hums against you pleased. “That’s it,” he murmurs, pulling back just enough to look at you, his eyes darker now, focused in a way that makes your stomach flip. “Yeah— keep doing that—”

His hand slid down the length of your body, slow, deliberate, mapping you like he intended to remember every inch of it, until his fingers found your folds, already slick, and the broken little sound you made at the first slow drag of his fingers through your heat seemed to do something to him — his own breath catching, jaw tight. “Fuck,” he breathed, almost reverent, watching your face. “You’re so wet already.”

He worked you open slow, one finger and then a second, the slick drag of his fingers against your walls drawing soft, breathy moans out of you that he seemed determined to collect one by one, his thumb finding your clit and circling it in slow, deliberate pressure that had your hips rolling up against his hand before you could stop them. “Good girl,” he murmured, watching you fall apart under his hand with open, undisguised satisfaction. “Just like that. Let me hear you.” His fingers moving inside, not fast or rough — just steady, curling slightly inside you, hitting deeper and deeper, his thumb keeping that same pressure on your clit that makes your whole body tighten.

When he finally settled between your thighs, cock thick and aching, he paused at your entrance just long enough to catch your eyes, checking, certain even now. You nodded, breathless, and he sank into you slow, inch by inch, a low groan tearing out of his throat at the way your walls stretched tight and slick around him as he bottoms out. “Christ — “ His forehead dropped to your shoulder for a second, composure visibly fraying. “You feel — fuck, you feel so good.” His hand tightens on your hip. “Okay?”

“Yes,” you say, breathless. “Keep going—” He started slow, deep, grinding his hips into yours with a kind of controlled, deliberate rhythm that had you gasping his name within minutes, his lips finding your neck again, sucking a mark into the skin there like he wanted proof of tonight to last past morning. His hand found yours, lacing your fingers together against the sheets, and the gesture was somehow more intimate than anything else he’d done so far. “Look at me,” he said, voice rough, and when you did, his rhythm picked up, the tip of him dragging against that spot inside you that made your back arch off the mattress, his name falling out of you again, broken this time.

“That’s it,” he breathed, watching your face with a hunger that had nothing detached about it. “You’re doing so good. So good for me.” The praise undid you faster than anything else he’d done, your moans coming quicker, breathier, his own breathing gone ragged above you as he chased the same building heat, until you tipped over the edge with a cry muffled against his shoulder, your walls clenching tight around him. He groans against your neck when he feels it, his rhythm breaking, then turning rougher for a second, chasing it, hips stuttering as he spills into you, slow and shaking through the last of it.

For a long moment afterward, neither of you moved — his weight braced over you, both your chests heaving, his thumb tracing absent, unhurried circles against your hip like he wasn’t quite ready to stop touching you yet. “Okay,” you managed, eventually, into the quiet. “That was — “

“Yeah,” he said, and even breathless, even wrecked, there was something steady in his voice that you didn’t examine too closely. “Yeah. That was.”

You woke up in your own bed the next morning, which felt important somehow — you’d made a point of it, pulling your dress back on at some indecent hour and walking the eight minutes back to your dorm rather than staying the night, because staying the night implied something you weren’t ready to imply, even to yourself, even in the privacy of your own head. Sunoo had texted you four times between 1 AM and 8 AM, the last one just reading wake up I need details with three eyes emojis, and you lay there for a solid ten minutes staring at your ceiling before you worked up the nerve to open the thread.

sunoo: WAKE UP

sunoo: I saw you disappear with him

sunoo: Y/N I need details or I will actually die

You typed nothing happened and deleted it, because Sunoo had literally watched you walk up the stairs together and would know immediately you were lying, which somehow felt worse than just telling him the truth. you: ok don’t be weird about this

sunoo: I’m always weird about things. specify.

you: jungwon and I hooked up

sunoo: I KNEW IT I CALLED IT LAST NIGHT

you: it was a one time thing

sunoo: sure…

you: I’m serious. it doesn’t mean anything. he’s jongseong’s freshman, it literally cannot happen again

sunoo: ok but did he?? was he??

you: I’m not doing this with you over text

sunoo: COFFEE. TEN MINUTES. I NEED TO LOOK AT YOUR FACE WHEN YOU TELL ME

You did, eventually, tell him — over coffee, in the dining hall, with Sunoo leaning so far across the table that he nearly knocked over both your cups twice — and true to form, he listened to the entire thing with his chin in his hands and his eyes getting progressively wider, and at the end of it, instead of the appropriately scandalized reaction you’d been braced for, he just said, “okay, but you’re going to see him again.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re literally going to see him constantly, Y/N, he lives in the house you’re at four times a week. This isn’t a guy you can ghost. This is a guy who’s going to be physically present in your life on a near-daily basis.” You hadn’t fully thought that part through, if you were being honest. “It can just be normal. It happened, it was — fine, it was good, it was really good, actually, but it happened, and now we move on like adults.”

“Sure,” Sunoo said, in the tone of someone who did not believe a single word of that sentence but had decided it would be more fun to watch it fail than to argue with it now.

It took exactly four days for the first text to arrive, and you spent an embarrassing amount of those four days checking your phone more than you’d ever admit out loud, which you told yourself was just curiosity and nothing else.

jungwon: hope the exam went okay

You stared at the message for a solid thirty seconds before you fully placed what he meant — you’d mentioned, in passing, during some entirely unrelated moment that night at the party, something about a stats midterm you’d been stressed about, a single throwaway sentence buried in twenty minutes of conversation that had ended in considerably less conversation. You hadn’t expected him to remember it. You definitely hadn’t expected him to remember the date of it well enough to text four days later asking how it went.

you: it was fine. how did you remember that?

jungwon: you mentioned it

you: I mentioned it once. for like a second.

jungwon: I have a good memory

You looked at that for longer than it deserved, turning it over, trying to decide what it actually meant, before landing — deliberately, with the specific effort of someone building a case — on the explanation that required the least amount of feeling anything. He’s probably like this with everyone. Some guys are just attentive. It doesn’t mean anything specific about you. You’d seen guys remember small details about people they were trying to sleep with before; it was, in your admittedly limited experience, a fairly standard move. You typed back something easy, noncommittal, and didn’t think about it again. You thought about it again almost immediately.

The second time you saw him wasn’t planned, exactly, though you’d go on to realize much later that very little involving Jungwon ever was as unplanned as it looked in the moment. You’d come by the Den on a Tuesday to drop off a textbook Heeseung had borrowed weeks ago and conveniently never returned, and you found Jungwon at the kitchen table again, same spot as your first meeting, a laptop open in front of him and the specific glazed look of someone three hours into a problem set he hated. “Stats?” you asked, dropping into the chair across from him out of habit before you’d consciously decided to stay.

“Econ. Worse.” He didn’t look up right away, but something in his posture shifted, settled, like your presence had registered before he’d even confirmed it with his eyes. “How’d the exam actually go? You gave me a one-word answer over text and I don’t trust one-word answers.”

“It was fine. Genuinely. I got a 91.”

“That’s not fine, that’s good.” He finally looked up, and something about his face doing that — actual interest, actual attention, like your stats midterm was a real piece of information he wanted rather than small talk he was performing — made you feel exposed in a way you weren’t prepared for at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday. “What was the part you were stressed about?”

“The regression stuff. I always mess up the regression stuff.”

“Did you mess it up?”

“No, actually.”

“See.” Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, the same controlled almost-version of one you were starting to recognize as just how he looked when he was pleased about something he didn’t feel like performing loudly. “Told you you’d be fine.”

“You didn’t tell me anything, you texted me a four-word message four days after the fact.”

“I thought about it before that. I just didn’t text you about it before that.” You didn’t have an immediate response to that, which annoyed you more than the comment itself did, and you covered the gap by pulling Heeseung’s textbook out of your bag and setting it on the table with more force than necessary. “Anyway. This is Heeseung’s. Tell him I want it back faster next time, or I’m telling Coach he’s been using my notes to pass his sports psych class.”

“He’s been using your notes?”

“For two years. It’s our arrangement. I write good notes, he owes me eternal favors he never actually does.”

“I could text him for you. Tell him you stopped by.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t have to.” Jungwon said it simply, like the distinction mattered to him — not obligation, just preference — and went back to his laptop like the conversation had cost him nothing at all, which was somehow the part that unsettled you most as you let yourself back out the front door a few minutes later. He’s just like that, you told yourself, walking back across the quad. Considerate. It’s probably just a personality thing. You almost believed it.

It kept happening. That was the part you hadn’t planned for — not one specific moment you could point to and say this is when it became something, but an accumulation of small things that individually meant nothing and collectively meant something you weren’t ready to name. He started showing up. Not obviously, not in a way anyone could call out directly — he was just, increasingly, there, in the places you already were. You mentioned, once, in passing, that you liked the coffee place two blocks off campus better than the one on it, and the next time you walked into the campus one out of habit, you found him already in line, and when you raised an eyebrow he just said, “needed caffeine,” like that fully explained why a freshman hockey player with a packed practice schedule had wandered three blocks out of his way to a coffee shop you’d mentioned exactly once.

You came out of your Thursday lecture one week to find him leaning against the building’s brick exterior, hands in his pockets, looking entirely unbothered, like this was a totally normal place for him to be standing. “What are you doing here?”

“Was in the area.”

“Jungwon. This building is nowhere near the rink, nowhere near the Den, and nowhere near anything you have a reasonable excuse to be near. You don’t even have classes on this side of campus.”

“I have a class two buildings over.”

“At what time?”

“…Later.”

“How much later.”

“An hour and a half.” You’d laughed at that, properly laughed, the kind that surprised you because you hadn’t planned on finding it as funny as you did, and he’d just shrugged, unbothered by being caught, and walked you back toward the Den anyway like the ninety minutes he didn’t need to spend doing it were nothing at all to him.

You built explanations for every single one of these. He was nice. He was thoughtful with everyone — you’d seen him carry Riki’s gear bag without being asked, seen him remember Heeseung’s coffee order, seen him hold doors and notice things and generally exist as the kind of person who paid attention because that was simply who he was, not because of anything specific to you. He’s just like that, you told Sunoo, more than once, with increasing defensiveness each time. He’d do this for anyone. “Would he,” Sunoo said, unconvinced, the third time you tried the line on him. “Yes.”

“Has he stood outside any other girl’s lecture hall for ninety minutes?”

“I don’t know his entire schedule, Sunoo, I’m not his — I don’t track that.”

“You’re tracking it right now. You just told me it was a Thursday lecture and gave me a building name.” You hadn’t had a good answer for that one. You hadn’t really had a good answer for any of it, if you were honest, but being honest about it felt like opening a door you weren’t sure you’d be able to close again, so instead you kept doing the thing you’d apparently decided was easier: cataloguing every kind, attentive, specific thing Jungwon did, filing it carefully under that’s just him, and trying very hard not to notice how thin that file was getting to support the weight of what was actually piling up inside it.

—

The locker room before a game had a different texture than the locker room before practice, and Jungwon had learned the difference inside his first two weeks at Blackwood — practice was loose, chatter, somebody’s bad playlist. Game day was quiet in a way that wasn’t tense exactly, more like everyone in the room had individually decided to go somewhere internal for twenty minutes and would be back shortly. Jay sat at his stall with his eyes closed, headphones in, doing the same pregame ritual Jungwon had already watched him do four times now — three slow breaths, a fist against his own chest twice, then up and moving like a switch had been flipped. “You good?” Riki asked, low, from the next stall over, taping his stick with more focus than the task strictly required.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look good. You look like you’re about to throw up, which is hilarious, because you’ve told me multiple times you’re constitutionally incapable of that.”

“I’m not going to throw up.”

“Your face is doing a concerning thing.” Jungwon didn’t answer that, because Riki wasn’t entirely wrong — there was a specific, low-grade hum under his skin that hadn’t been there during any of the scrimmages or exhibition games, and he understood, finally and completely, the difference between playing well and playing well in front of a packed home arena on opening night with your name on the first line for the first time in program history as a true freshman. Coach had confirmed the lines an hour ago. Jungwon centering Jay and a senior winger named Sunoo’s roommate situation he hadn’t fully sorted out yet — no, that wasn’t right, he corrected himself, shaking the thought loose, focus — centering Jay. First line. Opening night.

He looked up once, scanning the stands through the tunnel as the team filed out for warmups, and found you almost immediately, three rows up behind the glass, exactly where you always sat — he’d clocked that without meaning to, the specific seat you and Sunoo claimed for every home game, close enough to see faces, far enough back to avoid getting hit by anything errant. You weren’t looking at him. You were looking at Jay, the way you always did first, tracking your brother onto the ice with the specific, unconscious attention of someone who’d been doing it your whole life. Then your eyes moved, found Jungwon’s, and something in your face did a small, private thing that he was almost certain nobody else in that stadium would have caught.

He scored his first collegiate goal eleven minutes into the second period — a give-and-go off Jay’s stick that he buried top shelf before the goalie had finished moving — and the arena went up around him in a wall of sound that he barely registered, because the only thing he was actually aware of, skating back toward the bench with his gloves up and his teammates slamming into him in celebration, was the specific spot three rows up where you were on your feet, both hands pressed over your mouth, looking at him like you’d forgotten, for one unguarded second, to look like you weren’t supposed to be looking at him like that at all. Jay slammed into him on the bench a second later, helmet knocking his, grinning wide and unrestrained in a way Jungwon hadn’t seen off him yet. “That’s what I’m talking about. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Lucky bounce.”

“That was not a lucky bounce, that was you reading a play I didn’t even know was there yet.” Jay clapped him hard on the shoulder, something genuinely proud in it that Jungwon felt land somewhere uncomfortable in his chest, given everything else currently happening in his life that Jay had absolutely no idea about. “Coach was right about you. I’m gonna hate saying that out loud as often as I’m clearly about to have to.”

Blackwood won 4–1. The Den that night was its own kind of chaos — a post-win party that started before half the team had even fully showered, Jake commandeering the speaker again, somebody’s questionable decision to bring home a literal cardboard cutout of the team mascot from God knows where. Jungwon found himself in the middle of it, still riding the particular high of a first goal in a packed building, fielding congratulations from upperclassmen who’d barely spoken to him three weeks ago and now seemed entirely willing to consider him a real part of the program.

You found him near midnight, in the kitchen, away from the worst of the noise, where he’d retreated with a water bottle and the specific overstimulated quiet of someone whose adrenaline had finally started to crash. “Hey, scorer.” You leaned against the counter beside him, close enough that he could smell whatever you were wearing, something warm underneath the general party smell of the house. “Good game.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it. I’ve watched Jongseong play with a lot of centers. You two looked like you’d been playing together for years, not weeks.”

“It helped that he kept finding me.”

“He doesn’t do that for just anyone.” You said it simply, like a fact, and something about the specific weight you put on it — he doesn’t do that for just anyone, echoing right back at the same private logic you’d been using to talk yourself out of every single thing Jungwon had done for weeks — made you go quiet for a second too long, like you’d heard yourself say it and immediately regretted the implication. Jungwon didn’t push it. He’d learned, in three weeks of watching you build and rebuild the same careful argument, that pushing only ever made you retreat faster. “You disappeared fast after the game,” you said instead, recovering. “I thought you’d stick around for the chaos longer.”

“Needed air.”

“You’re standing in a kitchen.”

“It’s quieter air than the living room.” A small, almost-smile. “You found me, though.”

“I was looking for water. This is incidental.”

“Sure.” You rolled your eyes, but you didn’t move away, and the space between you had gone thin and obvious in the same way it had three weeks ago at the party — except this time there was no excuse of being drunk, no Sunoo dragging you anywhere, just the two of you standing in a kitchen at midnight with three weeks of careful, deniable, he’s just like that tension sitting heavy in the air between you. You were the one who closed the distance this time. You’d think about that later — the fact that you’d made the decision, hadn’t waited for him to make the first move the way he had at the party — and you’d wonder what that meant about how far gone you already were without having admitted it to yourself yet.

You kissed him first, one hand fisting lightly in the front of his shirt, and he made a low, surprised sound against your mouth before his hands found your waist, steadying, like he needed a second to confirm this was actually happening before he let himself fully lean into it. “Thought this was a one-time thing,” he murmured, lips barely leaving yours.

“Shut up.”

“Just confirming the terms.”

“Jungwon.”

“Right. Shutting up.” He didn’t, not entirely — he kissed you again, slower this time, deliberate, walking you back until you hit the counter’s edge, hands braced either side of you like he had every intention of keeping you exactly there. “Upstairs,” he said, against your jaw, somewhere between a question and a statement. “If you want.” You did.

His room was darker this time, the party noise muffled down to a low thrum through the floor, and there was something different in the way he undressed you now — less the controlled, deliberate unhurriedness of someone proving a point, more the quiet hunger of someone who’d spent three weeks pretending he hadn’t been thinking about exactly this. “You moved first,” he said, mouth at your throat, hands sliding the strap of your top down your shoulder. “Didn’t expect that.”

“Don’t make it weird.”

“Not making it weird. Just noticing.” He pulled back far enough to look at you properly, something steady and a little too searching in his eyes for a hookup either of you was still insisting this was. “I like that you did.” You didn’t have a response for that that wouldn’t have meant admitting something, so you kissed him again instead, and let that be the answer.

He laid you back against the sheets with the same deliberate care as the first time, mouth trailing down your throat, your collarbone, lower, his hands mapping you like he was confirming something he already knew rather than learning it fresh. When his fingers finally find your folds, already slick, he exhales sharply at the feel of you, his head dipping, his forehead briefly pressing to your stomach like he needs a second.“Every time,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You’re like this every time.”

“Don’t get smug about it.”

“Wasn’t being smug. Was being honest.” His thumb found your clit, slow, deliberate circles that pull your breath out of you almost immediately, your hips shifting up into his hand before you can stop them. He notices. Of course he does. His eyes flick back to your face and stay there, watching everything — the way your mouth parts, the way your breathing changes, the way your body responds to him.“You gonna let me hear you tonight, or are you still trying to be quiet for the house.”

You let out a breath that turns into something softer, more broken as his thumb presses a little firmer. “The house is currently hosting forty drunk hockey players, Jungwon, nobody’s listening.”

“Good.” Something low and pleased in his voice. “Then don’t hold back.” His fingers slide through you again, slower this time, spreading the slickness, feeling you properly before he presses one finger into you, easing it in without rushing, letting you feel the stretch. You gasp. Your hands find his shoulders. He doesn’t stop, instead adds a second finger, deeper this time, the drag of them against your walls slow and deliberate, pulling soft sounds out of you that start low, breathy, and only get louder the longer he keeps going.Your breath breaks, your thighs tightening around his arm, your body reacting faster, harder.“Good,” he says softly. “You look so good like this—” His fingers curl slightly inside you, hitting deeper, and the sound you make this time is louder, less controlled.

When he finally settled over you, lining himself up, he paused just long enough to press his forehead to yours. “Look at me,” he said, the same thing he’d said the first time, like it mattered to him every time, and when you did, he sank into you slow, a rough exhale tearing out of his throat at the tight, slick give of your walls around him. “Fuck — there you go.” His hips found a slow, grinding rhythm almost immediately, deep, deliberate, his mouth finding your neck, sucking another mark into skin that hadn’t quite finished healing from the last one.

“You take me so well. Every damn time.” The praise pulled a moan out of you that you didn’t bother muffling this time, and he made a rough, satisfied sound at the back of his throat in response, picking up the pace, the tip of him dragging against that spot that had your hips rolling up to meet his own. “That’s it,” he breathed, voice fraying at the edges. “That’s it, just like that — you sound so good.” Your hand found his, lacing fingers against the sheet the way it had the first time, and something about the repetition of that small gesture — the fact that he’d done it again, unprompted, like it was simply part of how he touched you now — undid you faster than anything else, your moans climbing breathless and unguarded until you tipped over with his name broken on your lips, walls clenching tight around him. He followed seconds later, groaning into your hair, hips stuttering through the last of it.

Neither of you moved for a long minute afterward, his weight braced careful above you, both of you breathing hard. “Okay,” you managed eventually, the exact same word you’d used the first time, like your brain hadn’t come up with anything new in three weeks. “That was — “

“Yeah.” He pressed a kiss to your temple, unhurried, lingering half a second longer than a one-time thing required. “That was.”

You walked back to your dorm alone again that night, the same as before, and lay awake afterward turning over the same tired argument — he’s just like that, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just convenient, you’re both just convenient for each other — except this time, for the first time, the argument didn’t quite hold its shape all the way through to morning. Good note — this is exactly the right instinct, you want the “everyone notices” chapter to land on a foundation that’s actually been built, not implied. A montage of small, accumulating moments before the bigger social-fallout chapter. Building that now.

It became a pattern made entirely of small things, none of which felt significant on their own and all of which, stacked together, were starting to feel like a life you hadn’t quite agreed to but weren’t fighting either. He texted first more often now. Not every day — Jungwon wasn’t a constant-texter, never had been, but the texts that did come were specific in a way that always undid your he’s just like that theory a little further.

jungwon: what time’s your lecture end today

you: 2:15 why

jungwon: no reason

There was always a reason. You walked out of your 2:15 that Thursday and found him sitting on the low wall outside the building, gear bag at his feet like he’d come straight from the gym, scrolling his phone with the studied casualness of someone who’d been there longer than “no reason” implied.

“You weren’t even supposed to have a free period right now.”

“I moved my lift.”

“You moved your lift.”

“Coach lets me have some flexibility.” He stood, falling into step beside you without asking if that was the plan, like it had simply stopped being a question between you. “How was the lecture.”

“Boring. You moved your lift for a boring lecture you weren’t even in.”

“I moved my lift to walk you back. The lecture being boring is just a fact you told me, unrelated.” You didn’t have a comeback for that, mostly because you didn’t want one — you wanted to keep walking next to him in the cold with his shoulder bumping yours every few steps, which was its own small, uncomfortable piece of evidence you kept choosing not to look at directly.

You started going to more practices than you used to. You told yourself it was because the season was getting good, because Jongseong’s line was clicking in a way that made it genuinely fun to watch, and that was even mostly true — but you also couldn’t deny, standing at the glass with your arms crossed against the cold of the rink, that your eyes found a specific number on the ice before they found your own brother’s. After one particular Thursday practice — closed to the public, technically, but the rink doors were never actually locked and you’d been sneaking in to watch since before you could legally drive — you waited until most of the team had filtered toward the locker room tunnel, until it was just a few stragglers and Coach Anders gathering up cones at center ice, and caught Jungwon’s eye across the rink with a small tilt of your head toward the narrow service corridor that ran behind the home bench.

He peeled off from the group without a word, gear bag over one shoulder, and found you in the dim, concrete-smelling hallway two minutes later, still in his practice jersey, hair damp with sweat, breathing a little hard from the skate. “That’s disgusting, by the way,” you said, wrinkling your nose as he got close. “You smell like a locker room.”

“You wanted me back here.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to be close to the smell.” He laughed, low, and backed you gently against the cool concrete wall anyway, one hand braced beside your head, and you let him, because apparently you’d stopped pretending the smell was actually a deterrent somewhere around hookup number one. “Well done today,” you murmured, against his mouth, an echo of the thing you said after every good game, except this was just a Thursday practice nobody else was watching, and you’d said it anyway, like it mattered to you whether he heard it. “It was just a drill.”

“You still looked good doing it.”

“Yeah?” Something pleased and a little smug crept into his voice, and you kissed him before he could lean too hard into it, his hand coming up to cup your jaw, the kiss going slower, deeper, his tongue tracing yours unhurried even though you both knew Coach was thirty feet away and any one of the team could walk down this corridor in the next ninety seconds. “We’re going to get caught one of these days,” you said, when you finally broke apart, breathless, his forehead dropping to rest against yours.

“Not today.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know nobody comes down this hallway. I checked.” He said it so simply, so practically, like he’d actually scouted the corridor in advance for exactly this purpose, that you laughed again, helpless, and he caught the sound with another kiss before you could finish it.

You let him walk you back out a side door a few minutes later, his hoodie — Blackwood Hockey, his last name on the back, YANG in block lettering you definitely hadn’t memorized the shape of — somehow ending up over your shoulders, because you’d complained once about the cold and he’d simply taken it off and handed it to you without making it a whole thing, the same easy, unbothered way he did most things for you now. You meant to give it back. You told yourself that every single time. The pile of his hoodies steadily accumulating at the back of your closet would suggest otherwise, if anyone had thought to look. Sunoo noticed the hoodies before he noticed almost anything else, mostly because he had unrestricted access to your closet and the world’s least subtle eye for detail. “Okay, why do you own four of the same hoodie.”

“I don’t own four of the same hoodie.”

“You own four hoodies that all say YANG on the back, Y/N, I’m not colorblind, I can see the consistent theme.” Sunoo held one up by the shoulders, inspecting it like evidence at a trial. “This is not subtle. This is, in fact, the opposite of subtle. This is a paper trail.”

“They’re comfortable.”

“I’m sure they are. I’m sure that’s the only reason.” He folded it back into the pile with exaggerated care, like he was handling something fragile and emotionally significant, which, you supposed, it currently was. “You know I’m rooting for you. I just think you should know that your closet has officially ratted you out, in case you were under the impression you were being subtle about any of this.”

“I never said I was being subtle.”

“You implied it heavily by insisting nothing’s going on, repeatedly, for over a month.” You didn’t have a defense for that one either. You were running out of defenses generally, you’d noticed — the file you’d been keeping, he’s just like that, it doesn’t mean anything, had gotten so thin and so unconvincing that you’d basically stopped pulling it out except as a reflex, a thing you said because you’d been saying it so long it had become muscle memory rather than something you actually believed.

The one bright spot in all of it, weirdly, was Sunoo’s own slow-motion disaster running in parallel — because somewhere in the same stretch of weeks, Sunghoon had apparently decided that ignoring Sunoo at the gym wasn’t a sustainable long-term strategy, and had started, with the same painful, visible effort it took him to do anything emotionally honest, showing up around him on purpose. “He asked me to get food,” Sunoo reported one night, vibrating with it, sprawled dramatically across your bed while you tried to study. “Just the two of us. No team. No excuse. He said, and I’m going to quote this exactly because I’ve already memorized it, ‘do you want to get food sometime, just us, like, as a thing, if you want it to be a thing, no pressure if not.’”

“That’s so awkward.”

“It’s the most romantic sentence anyone’s ever said to me, don’t ruin this for me.”

“I’m not ruining it, I think it’s sweet that he’s bad at it.”

“He’s so bad at it. He practiced that sentence, Y/N, I could tell, there was a cadence to it like he’d said it in his bathroom mirror forty times.” Sunoo rolled onto his stomach, propping his chin on his hands, grinning at you with the specific delight of someone who’d finally gotten what he wanted and couldn’t quite believe it. “Anyway. We’re getting food Friday. As a thing. I said yes so fast I think I scared him a little.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“I’m happy for you too, even though you keep insisting there’s nothing to be happy about, which, by the way, four identical hoodies.”

“Drop the hoodies.”

“I will never drop the hoodies.” Underneath all of it — the texts, the corridor, the hoodies steadily migrating into your closet, Sunoo’s slow, awkward, delighted thing with Sunghoon humming along beside yours like a quieter mirror of the same feeling — there was a song you’d started playing on repeat without quite noticing you’d started doing it, something low and aching and a little too on the nose, the kind of song that made you feel caught out by your own playlist. You didn’t examine that too closely either. You’d gotten good, lately, at not examining things too closely. It wasn’t sustainable. You knew that, somewhere underneath the part of you still insisting otherwise. You just weren’t ready yet to be the one who said it out loud first.

Riki had a theory, and the problem with Riki’s theories was that he refused to keep them to himself until he’d fully confirmed them, which meant Jungwon spent most of a Tuesday afternoon practice getting side-eyed across the locker room like he was a crime scene Riki hadn’t finished processing yet. “You smell like her perfume,” Riki said, apropos of nothing, while they were both lacing up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I do laundry next to you, Jungwon. I know what your detergent smells like. I also now know what her perfume smells like, because it’s been showing up on your hoodies for three weeks, and those are two very different smells, and you are currently covered in the second one.”

“That’s not — “ Jungwon stopped, recalibrated, decided the better strategy was not engaging at all. “Tie your skates.”

“I’m just saying. For a guy who insists nothing’s going on, you sure do smell like a specific person an awful lot.” He wasn’t wrong, which was the most annoying part. Jungwon had gotten careless — not about the actual secret, he was still careful about that, still made sure nobody saw anything that would actually confirm it — but about the smaller tells. He’d started checking his phone faster than he used to. Started angling his laptop screen away from the kitchen table on instinct whenever someone walked by, even when all he was looking at was a stats reading. Riki, sharing a room with him for six weeks now, had apparently built up a working database of Jungwon’s baseline behavior and was running constant diffs against it. “You also disappear,” Riki added, undeterred by the silence. “At parties. You’re there, then you’re not there, and then forty minutes later you’re back like nothing happened, except your hair’s different and you’ve got this look.”

“What look.”

“The look. The one you’re doing right now, where you’re trying very hard to have no look at all, which is itself a look.” Jungwon gave up entirely on the laces and just stared at him. “What do you actually think is happening, Riki.”

“Honestly?” Riki considered it, head tilted, with the specific seriousness of a man about to deliver a verdict. “I think you’ve got a hookup situation going with someone you really, really don’t want anyone to know about, and I think it’s someone close enough to this house that the secrecy isn’t paranoia, it’s necessary.” That was, Jungwon thought, uncomfortably close to the actual truth for someone who didn’t have the full picture. “And I think,” Riki continued, clearly enjoying himself now, “that if I had to bet money on exactly one specific person, I would bet on—”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not gonna say it. I respect the game too much to just say it out loud. I’m gonna let you have this.” Riki finally bent down to actually tie his skates, infuriatingly satisfied with himself. “I just want it on record that I noticed first. When this eventually comes out — and it will, things like this always come out — I want full credit for calling it in week three.”

“There’s nothing to call.”

“Sure, buddy.”

Jake noticed differently, and later, and by accident — which was, in retrospect, the way most of the house ended up noticing things, because Jake’s primary skill was being in the wrong room at the right time and immediately understanding the significance of whatever he’d walked into. It happened on a Thursday, three weeks after the home opener, when you’d come by the Den to return Heeseung’s textbook for the second time — a running bit at this point, since Heeseung kept “forgetting” to give it back specifically so you’d keep coming by, a fact you had not yet clocked and that the rest of the house found hilarious — and Jungwon had intercepted you in the front hallway before you’d even made it to the kitchen. “He’s not even here,” Jungwon said, leaning against the doorframe like he’d been waiting, which — Jake would think later, replaying it — he absolutely had been. “Practice ran late for the d-men. You can just leave it.”

“I know I can just leave it, I was going to leave it on the kitchen table—”

“I’ll make sure he gets it.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to.” The same line he’d used weeks ago, delivered with the same easy certainty, and something about the rhythm of it — the fact that you both seemed to already know this bit, already had a shorthand for it — was what actually caught Jake’s attention as he came down the stairs, gear bag over one shoulder, mid-text to someone else entirely.

He stopped on the landing. Didn’t say anything yet. Just watched for a second longer than either of you noticed him watching, taking in the specific quality of the space between you — not friendly-easy, not stranger-polite, something with more weight in it, the kind of familiarity that took longer than six weeks to build unless something had sped the process up considerably. You handed Jungwon the textbook. Your fingers brushed his on the handoff, the kind of accidental contact two people lingered on a half-second longer than accidental contact usually got, and neither of you seemed to register that you’d done it at all. “I’ll see you around,” you said, already turning for the door.

“Yeah.” Jungwon’s voice did something on that one syllable that Jake had genuinely never heard out of him before — not at practice, not at games, not in six weeks of living down the hall from the guy. Something soft. Something that had no business being attached to a sentence that short. Jake waited until the front door clicked shut behind you before he came the rest of the way down the stairs, eyebrows already halfway up his forehead. “So,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t even say anything yet.”

“You were about to say something.”

“I was about to say so, and then I was going to let the so do a lot of heavy lifting, and you just confirmed everything the so was going to imply by getting defensive about it before I finished.” Jake dropped his gear bag by the stairs, grinning now, delighted in the specific way he got delighted about things that promised future entertainment value. “Bro.”

“It’s nothing.”

“You said ‘yeah’ to her like it cost you something to say it. I’ve known you six weeks and I’ve genuinely never heard your voice do that.” Jungwon didn’t have a response that wasn’t a lie, and Jake — to his credit, Jungwon would think later — didn’t push for one. Just clapped him once on the shoulder, the universal gesture of a man choosing not to make something someone else’s problem yet, and headed for the kitchen. “I’m not gonna say anything,” Jake said, over his shoulder. “Mostly because I don’t actually know anything, I just watched a vibe happen. But for the record? If I’m right about what that vibe was — and I think I’m right — you’ve picked the single most complicated person on this entire campus to have feelings about.”

“I don’t—”

“Jungwon.” Jake stopped in the kitchen doorway, looking back at him with something almost gentle underneath the usual bit. “I’ve watched Jongseong run off guys at parties for less than what I just saw happen in that hallway. I’m not saying don’t. I’m saying be careful. That’s all. That’s the whole speech.” He disappeared into the kitchen, already calling out to Heeseung about something unrelated, and Jungwon stood alone in the hallway for a long moment, the textbook still in his hands, thinking that be careful was advice he’d needed about six weeks ago, and was currently far too late to actually take.

Heeseung found out the most boring way possible, which fit him — he was the kind of person who noticed things quietly and decided what to do with the information later, rather than announcing his discoveries the way Jake did. He’d simply started noticing that you knew things about Jungwon’s schedule that you had no obvious way of knowing — texting Sunghoon once to ask if practice was running over because Jungwon mentioned it might, a detail that hadn’t come from anyone but Jungwon himself.

He didn’t say anything about it. He just started covering, automatically, the way he’d cover for any of his teammates without needing to be asked — vague answers when Jay asked where Jungwon was, a deliberate slowness in mentioning that you’d stopped by when you clearly hadn’t wanted it mentioned. He never confirmed anything out loud to anyone. He just quietly became part of the machinery keeping the secret intact, the same unbothered, low-key way he did most things, and never once brought it up to Jungwon directly. Jungwon noticed the covering before he ever figured out Heeseung had clocked anything. By the time he put it together — weeks later, in the middle of an entirely unrelated conversation, when Heeseung said something that only made sense if he already knew — it didn’t even feel like a confrontation. Just a quiet, unspoken acknowledgment between two people who’d both decided silence was easier than the alternative.

Sunghoon noticed last, mostly because Sunghoon’s attention was almost entirely occupied that semester by his own slow-motion crisis regarding a specific person on the other side of campus, and he genuinely had very little processing power left over for anyone else’s romantic developments. When he finally did clock it — weeks later, watching Jungwon hover a half-second too long near the door whenever you were expected — his only reaction was a flat, “oh, that’s happening too?” like the house had simply hit its quota for secret entanglements and he was mildly annoyed there’d be two simultaneous storylines to keep track of.

By the time the home stretch of the semester hit, the entire house knew something — not the full shape of it, not how far back it went or how much it had already become, but enough to start quietly rearranging themselves around it. Cover stories appeared without being requested. Jay’s questions about Jungwon’s whereabouts got answered just vaguely enough to be technically true. Nobody said anything to Jay directly, because nobody wanted to be the one to set off whatever they all correctly suspected would be a genuinely bad reaction, and because — if anyone had asked them, which nobody did — most of them had quietly decided, somewhere along the way, that they liked watching Jungwon be like this. Soft. Distracted. Obviously, hopelessly gone for someone, in a way none of them had ever seen out of him before. It was, Jake said once, to Heeseung, the two of them watching Jungwon check his phone for the fourth time in ten minutes during a film session, “honestly kind of nice. Watching the guy be a disaster for once. Makes him feel human.”

“Jay’s gonna lose his mind when he finds out.”

“Yeah.” Jake didn’t sound especially worried about it, in the moment, in the specific way nobody in that house was worried about anything yet, because the bad part hadn’t happened. “But that’s a future problem.”

—

It was Sunghoon who spotted the hickey, and he didn’t even mean to — it was just there, dark and obvious, riding the curve of Jungwon’s neck above his collar when he peeled his shirt off before practice, and Sunghoon, mid-conversation with Heeseung about something entirely unrelated, simply stopped talking and stared. “Okay, what.”

“What?” Jungwon, lacing his skates, didn’t look up.

“Your neck.”

“What about it.”

“It’s got a — “ Sunghoon gestured, vaguely, at the general vicinity of his own throat, like the word itself was too much effort. “There’s a whole situation happening there.” Heeseung leaned over to look, and to his credit, didn’t say anything immediately — just took it in with the resigned, weary calm of a man who already had a working theory about its origins and didn’t need it confirmed out loud. Jake, three stalls down, had no such restraint. “OH my god.” He was up and crossing the room before Jungwon could even reach for his collar to cover it, grabbing his jaw and tilting his head sideways with zero regard for personal space. “That is not subtle. That is genuinely the least subtle hickey I have ever seen on a human neck, who did this to you, I need a name—”

“Get off.” Jungwon shoved him away, yanking his collar up with more force than the gesture required, ears going faintly red in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the locker room. “You’re blushing! He’s blushing, everyone look, Yang Jungwon is blushing—”

“I will end you, Jake.”

“You can’t end me, I’m a senior, I have seniority over your blushing.” Jake was delighted in a way that was going to make the entire practice session unbearable, Jungwon could already tell, and the fact that Riki had gone suspiciously, deliberately quiet in the corner — not even looking up, very pointedly minding his own business in a way that screamed I know exactly whose mouth did that and I am choosing not to say it out loud right now — only made it worse.

“Coach is gonna notice,” Heeseung said, mildly, like he was doing Jungwon a genuine favor by flagging it rather than just enjoying the chaos. “Coach notices everything,” Sunghoon added. “He noticed I changed deodorant brands once. Mid-practice. Pulled me aside specifically to ask if I was sick.”

“It’s a hickey, not a medical emergency, can we move on—”

“We absolutely cannot move on, this is the most interesting thing that’s happened in this locker room all semester.” Jay walked in midway through, gear bag over his shoulder, and the entire room — Jake included, for once — went quiet fast enough that it was almost funnier than the joke itself. Jay glanced around at the sudden silence, mildly suspicious, the universal expression of a captain who’d clearly walked into the middle of something and didn’t yet know what. “What.”

“Nothing,” six people said, at almost exactly the same time, in a unison so synchronized it was its own kind of confession. Jay’s eyes narrowed, scanning the room, landing — inevitably, because Jungwon still had his hand half-cupped over his own neck like that wasn’t going to draw more attention than just leaving it alone — directly on him. “You good, Yang?”

“Yeah. Fine. Just — cold. In here. Cold room.”

“It’s not cold in here.” Jay frowned, looking around at the room generally, like he was trying to locate whatever joke he’d clearly missed, and then seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the time, the way captains learn to triage which mysteries are actually worth solving. “Whatever. Get your skates on, Coach wants us on the ice in five.” The second he turned away, Jake mouthed “cold room” at Jungwon with such exaggerated disbelief that Jungwon had to physically look away to keep from laughing, which, in retrospect, was its own kind of tell, but at least Jay had already left the room.

Jay, for his part, had started noticing something else entirely — not the hickey, he genuinely never clocked that one, too distracted by practice logistics to connect dots that weren’t directly in front of him — but the simple, accumulating fact that you’d been at the Den constantly lately. More than usual, and his version of usual was already pretty high, since you’d basically grown up treating the place like a second home. “You’re here a lot,” he said one evening, finding you on the couch with your laptop, a half-finished essay open and very obviously not being worked on. “I’m always here.”

“You’re here more. I counted. You’ve been here five out of the last seven days.”

“Wow. Tracking my movements. Very normal brother behavior.”

“I’m not tracking your movements, I just notice things, it’s a captain instinct, it doesn’t turn off.” He dropped onto the couch beside you, stealing a chip from the bag balanced on the armrest without asking, the same easy, thoughtless intimacy you’d had your whole lives. “Is everything okay? With you? Is this an avoiding-your-dorm thing, or a missing-your-favorite-brother thing?”

“You’re my only brother.”

“Which makes me the favorite by default. Don’t dodge the question.”

“Everything’s fine, Jongseong. I just like it here.” You said it lightly, easily, and it wasn’t even technically a lie, which made it easier to say without flinching — you did like it here, more than you’d let yourself examine the actual reasons for lately. “Can’t a girl enjoy her brother’s questionable life choices in frat-house form without it being a whole investigation?”

“I guess.” He didn’t look fully convinced, but he let it go, the way he generally let things go when you used that exact tone — easy, unbothered, nothing here worth the energy of pushing — and went back to stealing your chips instead, and you let yourself exhale, slow and quiet, grateful that the version of you he’d known your whole life was apparently still convincing enough to hold up under a few extra questions. You weren’t sure how much longer that was going to keep being true. You didn’t let yourself think about it too hard.

The “team bonding” thing happened on a Friday Jay had scheduled weeks in advance — mandatory, his words, no exceptions, an entire evening at some axe-throwing place across town that he’d decided the team needed for “chemistry,” which had become a running joke all week because nobody fully believed Jay actually thought axe-throwing built chemistry so much as he just wanted an excuse to make everyone do something together that wasn’t hockey. Jungwon went. Obviously. Mandatory was mandatory, and he was still new enough to the program that skipping a captain’s event wasn’t a card he could play yet. He lasted two hours — long enough to throw a genuinely embarrassing number of axes into the wall instead of the target, long enough for Jake to declare him “tragically bad at exactly one physical activity, finally, some humility” — before he found a moment between rounds, phone in hand, thumb already moving before he’d fully decided to send it.

jungwon: team bonding. axe throwing. I’m terrible at it you: send proof jungwon: no you: that bad? jungwon: jake has been narrating my failures for forty minutes. it’s a whole bit now. you: I want to see it jungwon: absolutely not jungwon: what are you doing tonight you: nothing. sunoo’s out with sunghoon. apparently it’s becoming an actual thing thing. jungwon: good for them you: you’re going to be at this for hours, jongseong’s not letting anyone leave early jungwon: probably jungwon: unless I’m not. You’d read that last text three times before you fully understood what he was implying, and by the time you’d typed back don’t you dare get in trouble for this, he’d already left it on read, which — you’d learn, later, watching him recount it with a kind of sheepish pride — meant he’d already made the decision somewhere around the second eyeroll Jake gave him for missing yet another axe throw, and had simply waited for the right moment to slip out the side door while Jay was mid-story about last season’s playoff run.

He didn’t call an Uber to your dorm. He texted you instead, come open your window, which felt like an unnecessarily dramatic instruction until you actually looked outside and found him three stories down, standing in the grass below your window with his hands in his pockets like climbing buildings was a totally normal Friday activity for him. “You cannot be serious.”

“There’s a drainpipe. It’s very stable.”

“It is not — Jungwon, that is not a stable anything, that is a liability, get away from it—” He was already climbing by the time you finished the sentence, infuriatingly competent at it in a way that suggested either an athletic background doing something useful for once or a genuinely concerning lack of risk assessment, and you spent the entire ascent with your heart somewhere in your throat, half ready to call campus security and half ready to laugh, until he finally hauled himself up onto your windowsill and dropped into your room with significantly less grace than the climb itself had suggested, nearly taking out your desk lamp on the way down. “You’re insane.”

“I missed you.” He said it so simply, breathless from the climb, hair messed up, grinning in a way you rarely got to see fully unguarded, that you didn’t even have a comeback ready. “Jongseong’s gonna do the speech about attendance tomorrow. Worth it.”

“You’re going to get in actual trouble.”

“Probably.” He didn’t seem remotely concerned about that, already crossing the small space of your dorm room toward you, hands finding your waist. “Worth that too.” You kissed him before you could think better of it, and it had a different texture than usual — none of the unhurried, deliberate pacing of the first two times, something hungrier in it, both of you a little reckless off the adrenaline of him literally having climbed a building to get here. “You climbed three stories,” you murmured against his mouth, “to do this.”

“Wasn’t going to wait until tomorrow.”

“You could’ve just waited.”

“Didn’t want to.” He walked you back toward your bed, mouth at your jaw, your throat, hands already working at the hem of your shirt with considerably less patience than usual. “Wanted you tonight.” Clothes came off faster this time, less ceremony, more want, and when he finally got you under him, bare skin against bare skin, his mouth found yours again, deep, insistent, tongue sliding against yours with none of the careful restraint from before. “You’re in a hurry,” you breathed, when he finally pulled back enough to look at you.

“I am not in a hurry.” He pressed a kiss to your collarbone, lower, his hand sliding between your thighs to find you already slick, and the rough sound he made at that told you exactly how much restraint he currently had left. “I’m just very motivated.” His fingers worked you open quick, sure, two fingers curling against your walls in a way that had your back arching off the mattress almost immediately, his thumb finding your clit and pressing tight, deliberate circles that pulled a breathy moan out of you before you could think to muffle it against anything. “That’s it,” he murmured, low, watching your face with the same hungry attention he always gave you. “God, you’re so wet for me already.”

“Jungwon—”

“I know. I know, I’ve got you.” He kissed you again, hard, swallowing the next sound you made, and when he finally settled between your thighs and pushed into you, there was nothing slow about it this time — a long, rough slide that had you both groaning at once, his forehead dropping to your shoulder. “Fuck — “ His hips found a rhythm fast, deep, grinding into you with a kind of urgency that had your nails dragging down his back. “You feel so good, every single time, I swear—” The pace built quick, his mouth at your neck sucking another mark into skin that already had a fading one from days before, his hand finding yours and lacing your fingers together against the sheets the same way it always did, like even rushed, even reckless, that small piece of tenderness was non-negotiable to him.

“Look at me,” he said, rough, and when your eyes met his, something in his rhythm shifted, deepened, the tip of him dragging against that spot inside you that had your moans climbing breathless and unguarded. “You’re so good,” he breathed, voice fraying. “So good, taking me like this — gonna make you cum so hard you forget your own name.” The praise tipped you faster than usual, your walls clenching tight around him as you came apart with a cry you pressed into his shoulder to muffle, and he followed almost immediately after, a rough groan torn out of him as he spilled into you, hips stuttering through the last of it before he collapsed half his weight onto you, both of you breathing hard in the quiet of your dorm room.

“Worth the drainpipe?” you managed, eventually, into the dark. “Worth the drainpipe.” He pressed a lazy kiss to your temple, still catching his breath. “Worth Jongseong’s speech tomorrow too, honestly.”

“He’s actually going to kill you.”

“He’s gonna yell about attendance. He’s not gonna kill me.” Jungwon settled beside you, pulling you in against his chest with an easy, unthinking familiarity that you both noticed and didn’t comment on — the fact that he hadn’t left yet, hadn’t started the usual post-hookup routine of finding his clothes in the dark. “Can I stay a while?” You should have said no. You’d been saying no to exactly this for weeks, the staying, the parts that made it feel like something with a future instead of something contained. “Yeah,” you said instead, quiet, already half-asleep against him. “Yeah, you can stay.” Neither of you said anything else about what that meant. You didn’t have to. You both already knew.

—

The qualifier had been circled on the team calendar since August — win, and Blackwood was through to the regional bracket that fed straight into the Founders Cup; lose, and the season’s best version of itself ended in a building three hours from campus with nothing to show for it. Coach Anders had been quieter than usual all week, which everyone had learned meant he was more nervous than usual, and Jay had been running pregame meetings with the specific intensity of a captain who’d been to this exact game twice before and lost it. “Eyes up,” he said, in the locker room, voice pitched low and even in the way it got before something mattered. “We’ve done the work. We know this team. We know their power play, we know their breakout, we know their goalie cheats low on his glove side.” A pause, scanning the room, landing — same as always — on the freshmen for half a second longer than anyone else. “Tonight’s not about being perfect. It’s about being the team that wants it more for sixty minutes straight. I need that from everyone. Especially my first line.” His eyes found Jungwon’s. Held there. “You ready?”

“Yeah,” Jungwon said, and meant it the way he meant most things — completely, with no real plan for what came after if it didn’t go his way. It went his way. It went the whole team’s way, in the end, but it was close enough for most of the third period that the entire arena had been on its feet for the last six minutes of regulation, the score knotted at two, both benches screaming themselves hoarse at every faceoff. Jungwon won the draw with ninety seconds left, fed it back to the point, and when the rebound came loose in the slot it was Jay who buried it — top corner, glove side, exactly where Jungwon had told him all week the goalie wouldn’t expect it — and the arena came apart at the seams.

Jay found him first in the pile, both of them screaming something at each other that wasn’t even words anymore, helmets knocking, the whole bench spilling over the boards to bury them both. Riki got there a half-second later, half-sobbing with the specific delirious exhaustion of a freshman who’d just played the biggest sixty minutes of his life, and for a long, loud, glorious minute none of it had anything to do with secrets or rules or anyone’s sister. It was just hockey, the purest version of it, the kind Jungwon had signed up for in the first place. “THAT’S MY CENTER,” Jay was shouting, at no one, at everyone, dragging Jungwon into a headlock that was technically a celebration and technically also just Jay needing somewhere to put the sheer volume of feeling currently moving through him. “That’s my guy! I called it week one, I told Coach, I told him—”

“You told him nothing, you were terrified of me in week one—”

“I was never terrified, I was strategic—”

The bus ride home was loud the whole way, somebody’s phone playing the win highlight on a loop until everyone had watched Jay’s goal from six different angles, and by the time they pulled up outside the Den, the entire street already had cars parked along it that didn’t belong to anyone in the house — word traveled fast on a qualifier night, and half the campus seemed to already know there’d be a party going by the time the team actually walked in the door.

Riki covered for him for the first time that night, and it happened almost by accident, in the sense that Riki didn’t plan the lie in advance so much as produce it instantly, under pressure, with the specific improvisational skill of someone who’d apparently been quietly preparing for this exact moment without telling anyone, including himself. It was maybe forty minutes into the party, the living room already a wall of noise, when Jay turned around mid-conversation and said, to no one in particular, “where’d Jungwon go?” Riki, standing two feet away with a cup in his hand, didn’t even blink. “Bathroom.”

“He’s been gone a while.”

“Stomach thing. Pregame nerves, probably hit him late.” Riki said it with such total, unbothered conviction that even he seemed mildly impressed with himself afterward, recounting it later to Jungwon like he’d just pulled off a heist. “Should probably give him some privacy, honestly. Not a great scene in there right now, I’d imagine.” Jay made a face. “Gross. Okay. Tell him to drink water.”

“Will do, Captain.” The second Jay turned away, Riki allowed himself exactly one slow exhale of relief before pulling his phone out and typing, with the gravity of a man reporting from the field: covered for you. stomach thing. you owe me forever. Jungwon — who was, in fact, not in the bathroom at all, but in the kitchen with you, half-hidden behind the open refrigerator door under the thin cover story of getting a drink — read the text and laughed out loud, which made you ask what was funny, which made him show you, which made you laugh too, the two of you ducking further behind the fridge door like that added any real concealment at all. “He’s never going to let this go,” Jungwon said. “He’s never going to let what go specifically — the lie, or the leverage?”

“Both. Definitely both.”

Near midnight a freshman approached and flirted with Jungwon, a girl from his econ discussion section who’d apparently decided that a qualifier win was the right occasion to finally act on whatever interest she’d been nursing since week one, and she found him by the drinks table with a confidence that suggested she had no idea — none at all — what she was walking into. “You were so good tonight,” she said, hand finding his forearm, easy and familiar in a way that made something in your chest go tight and hot the second you spotted it from across the room. “Like, genuinely incredible. I didn’t know freshmen could even play like that.”

“Thanks.” Jungwon’s voice was polite, a little distant, the specific tone of someone being friendly without encouraging anything, but he wasn’t pulling his arm away either, too caught up in the general adrenaline of the night to fully register what was happening. You watched for exactly eleven seconds before you decided you’d watched enough. “Hey.” You inserted yourself into the conversation with more edge than you meant to, hooking a hand into Jungwon’s other arm like it was the most natural thing in the world, which — to anyone watching, you reminded yourself, it absolutely had to look like, since nobody here knew. “Jongseong’s looking for you. Something about the highlight reel.”

“Oh — yeah, I should—” Jungwon, to his credit, picked up on the temperature shift immediately, even half a beer in, and extracted himself from the girl’s hand with an easy, “good game tonight, good luck on the econ midterm,” before letting you steer him away by the arm without any real resistance. The second you’d put enough distance between yourselves and the drinks table, he was already grinning. “Are you mad?”

“I’m not mad.”

“You’re a little mad.”

“I am not — Jongseong does not actually want you, that was a lie, I made that up.” You let go of his arm like you’d only just realized you were still holding it, crossing your own instead, which did nothing to disguise how transparent you currently were. “I just didn’t feel like watching that.”

“Watching what.”

“You know what.”

“I genuinely don’t, you’re going to have to use words.” He was enjoying this far too much, falling into step beside you toward the stairs, something delighted and a little smug working at the corner of his mouth. “Say it.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“Say it or I go back and ask her what the econ midterm’s actually about, since you brought it up.”

“Fine.” You stopped on the stairs, turning to face him, irritated mostly at yourself now for how easily he’d gotten this out of you. “I didn’t like watching some girl touch your arm and call you incredible. There. Happy?”

“Very happy.” He said it so simply, so plainly delighted, that some of your irritation softened into something else despite your best efforts. “You’re jealous.”

“I’m not jealous, I’m — annoyed. On principle.”

“That’s jealous with extra steps.” He caught your hand, tugging you the rest of the way up the stairs toward his room, the party noise dropping away behind the closing door. “I like it, for the record. Watching your whole face do that.”

“Don’t make this a thing.”

“Too late,” he said, against your mouth, already kissing you. “It’s already a thing.” You shoved him back onto the bed with more force than the moment strictly required, and he went easily, laughing low under his breath, hands finding your waist as you climbed over him, straddling his hips before either of you had bothered with much in the way of preamble. “Still jealous?” he murmured, hands sliding up your sides under your shirt.

“Shut up.”

“That’s not a no.”

“Jungwon.” You pulled his shirt over his head, tossing it somewhere you didn’t bother tracking, and the sight of him underneath you — flushed, win-high, looking at you like you were the only thing that had happened all night that actually mattered — undid the last of your patience. “Less talking.”

“Yes, ma’am.” You worked his belt open with quick, certain hands, and he watched you do it with his jaw tight, breath already gone uneven, hands gripping your hips like he was holding himself back from taking over entirely. When you finally freed him, hard and already aching, he let out a low, rough groan that you felt all the way down. “Tell me you want this,” he breathed, even now, even like this, the same checking he always did. “I’m on top of you right now. What does it look like.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I want this. I want you.” The honesty of it surprised you a little, coming out unguarded, but you didn’t take it back. You sank down onto him slow, both of you groaning at the slick, tight slide of it, and for a second you just stayed there, adjusting, his hands flexing against your hips like he was fighting every instinct to thrust up into you before you were ready. “Fuck — you feel — “ He cut himself off with a sharp exhale as you started to move, slow at first, finding a rhythm, his head tipping back against the pillow, throat working.

“This okay?” you asked, breathless, already rolling your hips again. “More than okay. God, look at you.” His hands slid up to your tits, thumbs brushing your nipples until you gasped, your rhythm faltering for a second before you found it again, faster now, chasing the building heat low in your stomach. “That’s it,” he groaned, hips finally rising to meet yours, the drag of him inside you hitting deeper at this angle, dragging a moan out of you that you didn’t bother muffling. “Ride me just like that — fuck, you’re so good, you have no idea—”

“Jungwon—”

“I know. I’ve got you.” His hand found your clit, thumb pressing tight, deliberate circles in time with your movement, and the combination had your moans climbing fast, breathless, your nails dragging down his chest. “You looked so good tonight,” you breathed, barely coherent, rolling your hips faster. “On the ice. I couldn’t stop watching you.”

“Yeah?” Something in his voice cracked open at that, rougher, more desperate. “Tell me again.”

“You were incredible.” You said it again, deliberately, watching the way it undid him, hips snapping up harder to meet yours. “Best on the ice. Better than anyone.”

“Fuck — “ His grip on your hips tightened, guiding your pace faster, deeper, the tip of him dragging against that spot inside you that had your vision sparking white at the edges. “Say it again—”

“Best player out there,” you gasped, close now, every word coming apart at the edges. “Mine — “ That seemed to do something to him entirely, a rough, broken sound tearing out of his throat as his thrusts turned faster, less controlled, chasing the same edge you were chasing, and when you finally tipped over it was with his name breaking out of you, walls clenching tight around him as he followed seconds later, spilling into you with a groan he pressed into your collarbone, hips stuttering through the last of it.

You collapsed against his chest, both of you breathing hard, his arms coming up around you loose and unhurried, like he had no intention of letting go anytime soon. “Hey,” you said, eventually, into the quiet, your cheek still pressed against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow back down. “I’m proud of you. For tonight. For real, not just — “ you gestured vaguely at the bed, the obvious aftermath of it. “For the game. You were really, genuinely incredible out there.” Jungwon went quiet for a second, his hand stilling where it had been tracing slow, idle patterns against your back, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost all of its earlier teasing. “Nobody’s said that to me tonight. Not like that.” A pause. “Jongseong said it loud, in front of everyone. Riki said it because he’s my best friend and he has to. You’re the first person who said it just to me. Quiet. Like you meant it specifically.”

“I did mean it specifically.”

“I know.” He pressed a kiss to the top of your head, settling you further into his chest, his fingers finding yours and lacing them together against his stomach, slow and easy, the most unhurried, domestic gesture either of you had managed yet. “I like this part. After. Just this.”

“Yeah,” you admitted, quiet, letting yourself mean it without flinching for once. “Me too.” Neither of you said the word that was sitting in the room with you, obvious and unspoken, but you both heard it anyway, in the silence, in the way his heartbeat hadn’t gone all the way back to normal yet, in the way you’d stopped pretending, even to yourself, that this was still just convenient.

The team’s covering operation had, by this point in the season, developed an almost professional structure to it, and Jake — somewhat to his own surprise — had ended up running point on the version of it that covered for you specifically, rather than Jungwon, in a way that felt less like keeping a secret and more like something closer to actual brotherly instinct kicking in where Jay’s couldn’t. It started small. Jay would ask, casually, where you’d gotten to after a party, and Jake would have an answer ready before the question had even fully landed — “she left with Sunoo,” or “she said she was tired, headed back to the dorm early,” delivered with such easy, bored conviction that Jay never once thought to push further. It wasn’t even really lying, most of the time, just a careful management of which true things got said out loud and which got quietly left out, and Jake did it with the same instinctive ease he’d cover for any of his actual teammates, except this time the teammate he was protecting was you. “You don’t have to do that,” you told him once, catching him right after he’d smoothly redirected Jay away from asking why you’d been at the Den three nights running. “I know I don’t have to.” Jake shrugged, like it cost him nothing, which — Jake being Jake — it probably genuinely didn’t. “I’ve watched you get treated like property by every guy who’s ever looked at you twice on this campus, Y/N. Watching Jungwon actually be good to you, and good for you, is the first time I’ve actually wanted to help one of these situations instead of running it off.” He bumped your shoulder, easy, the same brotherly affection he’d had for you since you were sixteen. “Plus he climbed a drainpipe for you. I respect the commitment.”

“You heard about the drainpipe?”

“Everyone heard about the drainpipe. Riki couldn’t keep that one to himself for more than six hours.”

The sloppiness crept in gradually, the way it always does — not one specific reckless decision but a slow accumulation of smaller ones, each individually defensible, collectively a problem. You stopped checking the hallway before leaving Jungwon’s room. He stopped waiting the full ten minutes before following you down to a party. You held his hand under the kitchen table once during a group dinner and didn’t notice you’d done it until Heeseung’s eyes flicked down and back up again, saying nothing, filing it away with the same quiet discretion he applied to everything.

Riki, increasingly, found himself in the position of full-time alibi generator, a role he’d apparently decided to take seriously enough to develop a rotating cast of excuses so he wouldn’t repeat himself in front of Jay. “Stomach thing again?” Jungwon asked once, amused, after overhearing Riki deploy it for the third time that month. “I can’t keep using stomach thing, Jay’s gonna think you have a chronic illness.” Riki looked genuinely affronted at the suggestion. “I’ve diversified. Library. Equipment fitting. One time I said you were ‘processing the loss emotionally’ after a game we won, which in retrospect was a mistake, because Jay actually came to check on you and I had to improvise an entire secondary lie on the spot.”

“You told him I was sad after a win?”

“I panicked! You were not in the building, Jungwon, I needed something fast!”

It was Heeseung, in the end, with his usual quiet bluntness, who said the thing that pushed you both toward an actual conversation about what exactly you were doing. “You two are being sloppy,” he said, apropos of nothing, while you were both in the kitchen at the same time for once without any real cover story prepared, his voice pitched low enough that it wasn’t a public confrontation, just an observation meant for the two of you. “Not in a ‘someone definitely knows’ way yet. In a ‘it’s only a matter of time’ way.”

“We’re being careful,” Jungwon said, automatically, though even he didn’t sound especially convinced. “You held her hand under the table on Tuesday. I watched it happen. Jay was four feet away.” Heeseung took a sip of his coffee, unbothered, delivering the rest like a weather report rather than an accusation. “I’m not telling you to stop. I’m telling you that whatever you’re doing right now isn’t a secret thing anymore, it’s a secret-shaped thing that everyone already knows the shape of. The only person who doesn’t know is Jay, and that’s getting harder to maintain every single week.” Neither of you had a response to that. Heeseung, satisfied he’d made his point, simply finished his coffee and left the room, and the silence he left behind sat heavy enough that you finally looked at each other and both understood, without saying it yet, that something needed to actually be decided.

It happened that same night, quieter than either of you expected — no big declaration, no dramatic setup, just the two of you lying in his bed in the dark, his fingers tracing slow shapes against your bare shoulder, the kind of stillness that made honesty easier than it usually was. “Can I ask you something,” Jungwon said, into the quiet. “Mm.”

“What are we doing.” You didn’t answer right away, not because you didn’t have one, but because you’d been avoiding the question so deliberately for so long that actually hearing it out loud felt strange, like a word you’d practiced saying in private finally being spoken in front of someone else. “I don’t know what we’re calling it.”

“I know what I want to call it.” He said it simply, no hesitation in it at all, the same steady certainty he’d had since the very first night, since before you’d even properly known his name. “I haven’t been seeing anyone else. I haven’t wanted to. I don’t want some random freshman from your econ section thinking she has a shot, and I really don’t want some guy at a party thinking he does either.” A small pause. “I want this to actually be something. Not just — convenient. Not just a secret. I want to be yours, and I want you to be mine, even if nobody else gets to know that yet.” You let that sit for a second, feeling the actual weight of it land somewhere real in your chest, and then you turned to face him fully in the dark. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay. Exclusive. Just us.” You felt something loosen in your chest as you said it, like a held breath finally let go. “I haven’t wanted anyone else either, if that wasn’t obvious from the jealousy thing.”

“It was very obvious.” He was smiling, you could hear it even without seeing it clearly. “I liked the jealousy thing a lot, for the record.”

“I know you did. You’re insufferable about it.”

“I’m allowed to be insufferable. My girlfriend’s jealous over me. That’s a good day.” He tried the word out like he was testing the weight of it, girlfriend, and something about the easy way he landed on it — like he’d been holding it ready for weeks, waiting for permission to use it — made you press closer into him, burying the small, helpless smile against his chest before he could see the full shape of it. “Don’t get used to saying that out loud,” you murmured. “Not yet. Not where anyone can hear.”

“I know.” Some of the lightness faded out of his voice, the reality of the actual logistics settling back in. “Soon, though. Right? We’re not doing this forever.”

“Soon,” you agreed, and didn’t let yourself think too hard about how soon soon actually needed to be, or what it would cost when it finally happened.

Sunghoon came out to the team on an entirely unrelated Tuesday, with none of the ceremony he’d apparently been bracing for, during a postpractice stretch session that had devolved, as most of them did, into nonsense. “I’m gonna say something and I need everyone to not make it weird,” he announced, to the room generally, mid-stretch, with the specific tension of someone who’d clearly rehearsed the moment and chosen the most low-stakes possible setting to finally do it. “Oh god, are you quitting hockey,” Jake said immediately. “Don’t quit hockey, we need you for the power play—”

“I’m not quitting hockey. I’m gay.” The room went quiet for exactly one second. “Okay,” Heeseung said, easily, already going back to his own stretch like Sunghoon had just announced the weather. “Cool.”

“That’s — that’s it? That’s the reaction?”

“What reaction did you want?” Jake looked genuinely confused. “Bro, we know. We’ve known. You’ve been weird about Sunoo for two months, you think we didn’t clock that?”

“I — okay, I knew you guys clocked the Sunoo thing, but I meant, like, generally—”

“We know generally too,” Riki put in, helpfully unhelpful. “I think Heeseung called it back in like September.”

“I called it the first week,” Heeseung corrected, mildly offended at the underselling of his own detective work. “It’s not, like, a thing, man,” Jake said, more gently now, sitting up properly to actually look at Sunghoon instead of just talking past him. “You’re still you. You’re still the guy who’s weirdly competitive about stretching and once cried during a dog food commercial—”

“That was one time and the dog was sick in the commercial, that’s a valid reaction—”

“You’re still our guy. That’s the whole thing. Nothing about that changes because you said the actual words out loud instead of us just all politely knowing.” Jake grinned, the tension fully gone from the room now. “Although I will say, the Sunoo thing makes a lot more sense now in terms of timeline. I thought you were just developing a coffee addiction for a while there.”

“I don’t even like coffee.”

“I KNOW, that’s what tipped me off, you kept buying it and not drinking it, it was clearly a Sunoo-adjacent purchase—” Sunghoon, somewhere in the middle of the room’s easy, immediate, unbothered acceptance, looked like a man who’d spent considerably longer bracing for this moment than the actual moment had required, and Jungwon — watching from across the room, his own secret still folded carefully out of sight — felt something complicated move through his chest. Relief, for Sunghoon, that this house was exactly the kind of place where something like that could land soft. And underneath it, quieter, a feeling he didn’t examine too closely: the knowledge that his own reveal, whenever it finally came, was not going to land anywhere near this gently. He thought about you, across the room and thought, not for the first time, that soon was a word doing a lot of work to put off something that was eventually going to come due no matter how careful you both stayed.

—

The quarterfinal landed on October 12th, which Jay had been complaining about since the schedule first dropped over the summer — “of course it’s on our actual birthday, of course the conference hates me specifically” — though the complaining had always had a performative edge to it, since everyone in the house knew Jay would rather play a quarterfinal on his birthday than not play one at all. You’d been planning the surprise party for two weeks, in increments small enough that nobody outside the inner circle had noticed: a quiet text chain with Heeseung about decorations, a grocery run with Riki that he’d disguised as “team snacks” when Jay asked, a cake order picked up that morning and hidden in the trunk of Sunoo’s car like contraband. The whole house had folded into the conspiracy with an enthusiasm that surprised even you — Sunghoon handling the lights, Jake in charge of the playlist, Heeseung quietly making sure there was enough food to feed forty hockey players without it looking suspicious in the fridge beforehand.

Jungwon’s job was the hardest one, and you’d given it to him on purpose: keep Jay distracted enough after the game that nobody had to rush the setup. “You’re sure he won’t notice anything’s off,” Jungwon asked, the night before, lying beside you with his chin propped on his hand. “He’s terrible at noticing things that aren’t directly related to hockey or me. You’ve watched him miss four separate hints about his own surprise party already. He thinks we’re doing dinner. A small dinner. That’s it.”

“And the call thing?”

“My job. I’ll handle my job. You handle yours — keep him in the locker room long enough, talk hockey at him, whatever it takes.”

“I can talk hockey at him for hours. That part’s not hard.” He pressed a kiss to your temple, easy, settling further into the pillow. “Happy almost-birthday, by the way. Twenty-one’s a big one.”

“Don’t remind me. I feel ancient.”

“You’re the same age as your brother, you’ve always been this age relative to him, nothing’s changing.”

“That’s not the point and you know it.”

Blackwood won the quarterfinal 5–2, Jay scoring twice and assisting on a third, playing like a man who’d decided his birthday came with an obligation to be the best version of himself on the ice, and the locker room afterward was loud with the specific giddy exhaustion of a team that knew it was one step closer to the Cup. Jungwon found Jay by his stall, still half in his gear, and did exactly what he’d promised — kept him there, breaking down the third goal frame by frame, asking deliberately long questions about reads and lane choices that he already understood perfectly well, buying every minute he could.

Across the room, you were on the phone, your voice pitched loud enough to carry. “Mom wants to FaceTime him the second he’s out of the shower, she’s been texting me nonstop, she says happy birthday like four times already and wants to actually see his face—” It worked exactly as planned. By the time Jay finally extracted himself from Jungwon’s increasingly elaborate hockey questions and took the call from your parents in the hallway outside the locker room — your mother’s voice audible even through the phone, your father in the background insisting on singing the first two lines of happy birthday badly, on purpose, the way he had every year since you were both kids — the entire team had already loaded into cars and beaten you both back to the Den, where Heeseung’s lights were up, Jake’s playlist was queued, and Sunoo had the cake set up on the kitchen counter with twenty-one candles that had taken Riki three attempts to actually light because the lighter kept giving out.

You walked Jay through the front door fifteen minutes later, phone call wrapped up, still mid-sentence about something your mom had said, and the entire house erupted at once — lights up, music starting, a chorus of “SURPRISE” loud enough that Jay actually flinched, one hand flying to his chest like his heart had genuinely stopped for a second. “You—” He turned on you immediately, half-laughing, half-betrayed. “The FaceTime was a setup.”

“The FaceTime was real, Mom does want to call you later, I just needed you distracted for twenty minutes.”

“I can’t believe you used our parents as a smokescreen—”

“I can’t believe it worked this well, honestly, you’re shockingly easy to fool.” He pulled you into a hug before you’d finished the sentence, the kind that lifted you half off your feet, laughing into your hair. “Happy birthday to you too, by the way. We’re the same age, idiot, this is also your party.”

“I know. Co-birthday king and queen. I expect a toast.”

“You’ll get several toasts. Jake’s already written something, I can see it on his face, he’s been holding it in all night.” He had, in fact, written something, and it was exactly as unhinged as advertised — a toast that started sincere, devolved into a list of increasingly embarrassing stories about Jay from freshman year, and ended with Jake actually getting a little emotional about “the best captain and the most tolerant sister a team’s ever been lucky enough to share a house with,” which got a genuine cheer from the room and a swat to the back of the head from Jay, who was visibly moved and trying very hard not to show it.

The party ran late, the good kind of late, the kind where nobody’s watching the clock because nobody wants the night to end — cake, then dancing, then somebody’s questionable decision to bring out the karaoke machine that lived in the Den’s basement for occasions exactly like this one, Jay and Jake butchering a duet so badly that Heeseung had to leave the room to compose himself. You danced with your brother for one whole song, the two of you doing the same ridiculous, half-choreographed bit you’d been doing at every birthday since you were fourteen, and across the room you caught Jungwon watching, something soft and unguarded on his face that he didn’t bother hiding for once, since nobody was paying close enough attention to notice. By two in the morning, the house had finally gone quiet — bodies passed out across couches, Jay asleep sitting up in an armchair with cake frosting still on his collar, Riki face-down on the floor for reasons nobody had bothered to investigate, Sunoo and Sunghoon curled into each other on the porch swing outside, low voices and easy laughter drifting in through the screen door. The kind of ending a good party earns. “Come on,” Jungwon said quietly, finding you in the kitchen surveying the wreckage of cake and cups. “I’ll walk you back.”

The campus at two in the morning had a particular hush to it, streetlights doing most of the work, your footsteps the loudest sound for blocks. Jungwon had his hands in his pockets, walking close enough that his shoulder brushed yours every few steps, neither of you in any real hurry to get where you were going. “Good birthday?” he asked. “Best one in years, honestly. Jongseong cried a little during Jake’s toast and he’s going to deny it forever, so that alone made the whole night worth it.”

“I have something for you. For your actual birthday, not the team thing.” He pulled a small, carefully wrapped box out of his jacket pocket — he’d clearly been carrying it all night, waiting for a quiet moment that wasn’t surrounded by forty other people — and held it out, a little sheepish in a way you rarely got to see on him. “It’s not much. I wanted to give it to you without an audience.” You unwrapped it slowly, under the streetlight outside your dorm, and found a thin silver chain inside, a small charm hanging from it shaped like a tiny hockey puck, and on the back, when you turned it over, your birthday engraved in careful, small lettering alongside a single date you recognized immediately — the night of the party, three months ago, when this whole impossible thing had started. “Jungwon.”

“I know it’s a weird thing to commemorate. I just—” He rubbed the back of his neck, the first genuinely nervous gesture you’d seen out of him in weeks. “I wanted something that was just ours. Something nobody else would know the meaning of if they saw it. You could wear it and nobody would ever know what it actually means, except you. Except us.” You didn’t say anything for a second, just looked at it, the weight of how much thought had clearly gone into something this small landing somewhere soft and unguarded in your chest, and when you looked back up at him, he was watching you with the specific, quiet hope of someone who genuinely wasn’t sure how the gift would be received. “I love it,” you said, finally. “I love it so much.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You let him fasten it around your neck right there under the streetlight, his fingers careful at the clasp, and when he was done you turned and kissed him — slow, unhurried, none of the urgency from earlier in the semester, just the easy, settled kind of kiss that came from three months of knowing exactly how this felt and not being in any rush to stop feeling it. “Best birthday gift I’ve gotten in years,” you murmured, against his mouth. “Good. That was the goal.” He kissed you again, lingering, his hand coming up to rest against the curve of your jaw. “Happy birthday.”

“Hey,” you said, pulling back just far enough to look at him properly, an idea you’d been sitting on for a week finally finding its moment. “There’s a festival next weekend. Off campus, like an hour out — Sunoo’s been talking about it for weeks, lights and music and the whole thing. I want you to come with me.”

“An hour off campus.” Something in his face shifted, considering it properly. “That’s far enough that nobody from the team would just stumble into us.”

“That’s the point.”

“You’re asking me on an actual date. A real one. Outside the Den, outside parties, outside all of this.” He said it slowly, like he was turning the idea over, savoring it a little. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me something like that since September.”

“Is that a yes?”

“That’s the easiest yes I’ve ever given anyone.” He pulled you back in, forehead resting against yours, both of you smiling too wide for the hour, for how tired you should have been, for how much you still had left to figure out about the rest of this. “I’d go anywhere with you. An hour’s nothing.” You stood there a while longer under the streetlight, in no hurry at all, the small silver puck resting warm against your collarbone, neither of you saying out loud the thing you were both clearly thinking — that a real date, an hour off campus, away from anyone who might recognize either of you, felt like the first real crack of daylight after months spent entirely in the dark. Like maybe, soon, you wouldn’t have to keep choosing between him and the rest of your life.

The week leading up to the festival passed in a way that felt almost suspiciously easy, and Jungwon noticed it more than once — the specific, unguarded lightness of just being happy, without the usual undercurrent of calculation running underneath it. He caught himself smiling at nothing during an econ lecture. Caught Riki noticing him do it. “You’ve been weird all week,” Riki said, eyeing him over a stats problem set neither of them were actually working on. “Weird good, though. Like, suspiciously content. It’s unsettling, honestly, I’m used to you having at least one low-grade crisis going at all times.”

“I don’t have crises.”

“You have constant crises, you just hide them well. This week you’ve had zero. I noticed.” Riki narrowed his eyes. “Something’s happening this weekend. You’ve got a bag packed already and it’s Tuesday.”

“We’re going to a festival.”

“You’re going somewhere overnight with a bag packed four days early for a day festival. Those numbers don’t add up, my friend.”

Jungwon didn’t dignify that with an answer, mostly because Riki wasn’t wrong, and the not-answering was its own kind of confirmation that Riki accepted with a satisfied, knowing nod and went back to his problem set, humming something annoyingly pleased with himself under his breath.

You’d booked the hotel two weeks in advance, a small, unfussy place near the festival grounds that you’d found mostly because it was far enough out that nobody from Blackwood would plausibly be staying there too, and you’d told Jungwon all of it with the same deliberate, slightly nervous energy of someone planning something that mattered more to her than she wanted to admit out loud.

“Friday to Sunday,” you’d said, showing him the booking on your phone. “Festival’s Friday, but I figured — we never get an actual weekend. Just us. No covering for anyone, no checking the hallway first.”

“Friday to Sunday,” he’d repeated, something settling and pleased moving across his face. “I like that math a lot.”

Sunoo and Sunghoon were going too — officially, publicly, the easiest couple in the entire group now that Sunghoon’s coming out had cleared whatever quiet tension used to sit underneath their dynamic — and the four of you drove out together Friday afternoon, windows down, Sunoo controlling the music with the same merciless authority he applied to most things, Sunghoon driving with one hand permanently finding Sunoo’s knee whenever a song he liked came on. “This is so much better than sneaking around,” Sunoo announced, from the front seat, twisting around to grin at the two of you in the back. “You two get to have, like, a real weekend. With us. As an actual couple thing. Double date energy. I’ve been waiting for this since September.”

“We’re not technically a public couple yet,” you reminded him.

“You’re public to us. That’s basically the same thing, just smaller scale.”

The festival itself was everything Sunoo had promised — string lights strung between food trucks, a stage at the far end of the field playing through a lineup of bands neither of you fully recognized, the whole grounds lit gold as the sun went down. And for the first time since the party back in September, you got to just be a couple in public — Jungwon’s hand finding yours without either of you checking who might be watching first, his arm slung easy around your shoulders while you waited in line for festival food, both of you laughing at something stupid Sunoo said without the automatic, practiced half-second of distance you usually kept in case anyone from the Den happened to be nearby. “This is so weird,” you admitted, leaning into his side as the two of you watched some local band finish their set. “Good weird. I keep waiting for the part where I have to let go of your hand.”

“You don’t have to let go of my hand.” He squeezed it, like he was making the point physically as well as out loud. “Not here. Not this weekend.”

“I know. It’s just — new. Being normal about it.”

“I could get used to normal.” He pressed a kiss to your temple, easy, unhurried, the kind of casual public affection that would’ve sent your heart into your throat back at the Den and here just felt like exhaling. “We should do this more.”

“We will. Eventually. Just — not yet.” He didn’t push on the not yet, the way he’d stopped pushing on it weeks ago, content for now with the version of normal a weekend an hour outside of everyone’s orbit could actually offer. Sunghoon bought Sunoo a ridiculous oversized stuffed animal from one of the carnival games after missing the target six times and finally landing it on the seventh, to a level of triumphant celebration that drew the attention of half the surrounding crowd, and Sunoo carried it around for the rest of the night like a trophy, occasionally hitting Sunghoon with it when he said something he found insufficiently romantic.

You got back to the hotel late, well past midnight, festival dust still on your shoes, and the second the door clicked shut behind you, Jungwon had you pressed gently back against it, his mouth finding yours unhurried but certain. “Good night?” he murmured, against your lips. “Best one in a while.” You let your hands slide up under his shirt, the festival heat and the long day and months of careful waiting all collapsing into one slow, building want. “Come to bed.”

He undressed you slow, the same deliberate care he’d had since the very first night, like the weekend stretching ahead of you had taken away any reason to rush. He laid you back against the hotel sheets, mouth tracing the same patient path down your throat, your chest, lower, and when his fingers finally found your folds, already slick from the whole night of anticipation, he groaned low against your skin. “We’ve got all weekend,” he said, glancing up at you, something dark and unhurried in his eyes. “No reason to rush any of it.”

He took his time proving that, working you open with slow, deliberate fingers until you were gasping his name into the quiet of the room, and when he finally settled over you and pushed in, the rhythm he found was slow and grinding, deep, drawing soft, breathy moans out of you that built steadily rather than rushing toward anything. “Look at you,” he breathed, watching your face with open, unguarded want. “We’ve got two more nights of this. I’m not in a hurry tonight.” He kept that promise. The first time was slow, drawn-out, both of you trading low praise and his name and yours back and forth until you came apart around him with a soft, broken sound, his own release following unhurried moments later. The second time, near dawn, was slower still, lazier, half-asleep limbs and unhurried kisses until neither of you could tell anymore where the festival ended and the rest of the weekend began.

Saturday morning arrived late, neither of you bothering to leave the bed until room service knocked, and you spent a solid hour tangled in the sheets eating pancakes off the same plate, his fingers occasionally stealing bites off your fork just to watch you swat at him. “This is what I want,” you said at one point, syrup-sticky and entirely unguarded, watching him steal another piece of bacon. “Just this. Mornings like this, except not just on a weekend an hour from campus.”

“Soon,” he said, the word that had become something like a promise between you over the last few weeks, and this time it landed differently — closer, more real, like the gap between soon and now had finally started to close.

You spent Saturday afternoon wandering the small downtown near the hotel, ducking into shops mostly for the fun of it, Jungwon buying you a ridiculous pair of sunglasses you’d tried on as a joke and then genuinely loved, you talking him into a soft, oversized sweater he swore he’d never wear outside this trip and absolutely would, in fact, wear constantly once you got back. Sunoo texted updates from his and Sunghoon’s parallel afternoon — we got matching bracelets I’m going to cry — and you sent back a photo of Jungwon in his new sweater with the caption we’re matching in spirit. By Saturday night you were both too sun-tired and festival-worn to do much more than order room service again and fall asleep tangled together by ten, and Sunday morning came too fast, the drive back to campus quieter than the drive out had been, all four of you a little subdued at the idea of stepping back into a world where this version of things — easy, public, unguarded — had to fold itself small again.

“I don’t want to go back to hiding it,” you said quietly, somewhere on the drive, your head against Jungwon’s shoulder, watching the festival grounds disappear behind you through the back window. “I know.” His arm tightened around you, his voice low enough that it was just for you, even with Sunoo and Sunghoon talking quietly up front. “We won’t have to. Not forever.”

The drive back from the festival had the particular quiet of a good weekend ending — not sad, exactly, just settling, everyone a little sun-worn and content, Sunoo’s playlist gone soft and slow for the last hour of the trip in a way that matched the mood better than anything from Friday’s drive out. Sunghoon dropped you and Sunoo off first, your dorm closer to the highway exit than the Den, and the goodbye had its own small chaos — Sunoo hugging you so hard you nearly lost your footing, already texting in the group chat about “the best weekend of my entire life, I’m emotional, don’t talk to me,” Sunghoon leaning out the driver’s window to tell Jungwon something about practice schedules that was really just an excuse to keep the car parked a few extra minutes.

You climbed out last, your bag over one shoulder, and Jungwon got out too, rounding the car to walk you the short distance to the dorm entrance even though it was barely twenty feet, because apparently three days of being an actual couple in public had made him reluctant to let the smallest goodbye go un-marked. “This was the best weekend I’ve had in years,” you told him, under the dorm’s overhead light, voice still a little rough with the particular exhaustion that comes from too much sun and too little sleep and exactly the right amount of everything else. “Best one I’ve ever had.” He said it simply, with no exaggeration in it at all, like he’d actually run the comparison in his head and landed on the truth of it. “I don’t want to go back to checking hallways.”

“I know. We won’t, soon.”

“Soon,” he agreed, and pulled you in for a last kiss right there under the light, slow and unhurried despite Sunghoon’s car idling at the curb, his hand coming up to cup your jaw the same way it had the very first night, except nothing about this kiss carried any of that night’s uncertainty. This one knew exactly what it was. “Go,” you murmured, eventually, laughing against his mouth. “Sunghoon’s going to start honking.”

“Let him.”

“Jungwon.”

“Fine. Going.” He kissed you once more, quick, like he couldn’t quite help himself, then backed away toward the car with obvious reluctance, already calling over his shoulder, “text me when you’re inside.”

“I’m twenty feet from the door.”

“Text me anyway.” You watched the car pull away before you went in, and true to his word, your phone buzzed before you’d even gotten your key in the lock.

jungwon: best weekend of my life. thank you for asking me.

you: thank you for climbing through my window in september. none of this happens without that.

jungwon: worth every inch of that drainpipe

The car ride to the Den was quieter, Sunghoon driving, Jungwon in the passenger seat with his phone still warm in his hand, the particular loose, contented quiet of someone who’d spent three days being exactly who he wanted to be without having to manage it. “You good?” Sunghoon asked, eyes on the road. “You’ve got a face.”

“What face.”

“The face you’ve had all weekend. The one where you look like someone hit you with a happiness truck and you haven’t fully recovered.” Sunghoon said it without judgment, mostly amused. “It’s a good look on you. Different from the usual broody thing.”

“I don’t do a broody thing.”

“You do an extensive broody thing, it’s just been on pause for three days.” Sunghoon pulled up outside the Den, cutting the engine. “You ready for the readjustment? Back to hallway-checking and stomach-thing alibis?”

“Not really.”

“Yeah. Figured.”

Jay was in the kitchen when they walked in, mid-conversation with Heeseung about something on his laptop, and he looked up the second the door opened with the easy, automatic attention of a captain checking who’d come home. “There he is. Where’ve you been all weekend? Riki said something about a festival, but he was being weird and cagey about it, which usually means he’s covering for somebody.” Jungwon felt the question land exactly where he’d known it would eventually land, and answered it the way he’d practiced in his head somewhere around hour two of the drive home, voice easy, unbothered, the specific calm he’d built a habit of deploying for exactly this purpose. “Went with Sunghoon. Sunoo wanted to go to that festival thing out near the lake, dragged us both along, figured it’d be good to get off campus for a weekend before the semester gets worse.” A small shrug, casual, nothing in it worth a second look. “Needed the break, honestly. Been a heavy few weeks.”

“Yeah, you’ve earned a weekend off.” Jay nodded, easy, already moving past it, no reason in his world yet to ask a follow-up question, because nothing about the answer had given him one. “Glad you went. You’ve looked tired lately, this is the first time in weeks you’ve looked like you actually slept.”

“I slept a lot.”

“Good. Need you sharp, we’ve got the semifinal in two weeks, I’m not losing my center to burnout right before that.” Jay clapped him once on the shoulder on his way past, the same easy, trusting gesture he’d been giving Jungwon since week one, completely unaware of how much weight that trust was currently carrying without his knowledge. “Go unpack. We’ll talk lines tomorrow.” Jungwon watched him go, the lie sitting easy and practiced in his chest, and felt — not for the first time, but more sharply than usual, the festival’s three days of honesty still warm in his memory — exactly how much it cost him to do this so smoothly. He was good at it. That had stopped feeling like something to be proud of weeks ago.

Sunghoon, beside him, didn’t say anything, just exhaled slow through his nose, the universal sound of someone watching a friend get better and better at something that was eventually going to catch up to him. “You’re really good at that,” Sunghoon said, finally, quiet, once Jay was out of earshot. “Yeah,” Jungwon said, and didn’t sound proud of it at all. “I know.”

Coach Anders had decided, with the semifinal now exactly two weeks out, that the only acceptable response to that fact was to make practice considerably worse for everyone involved, and Jay had taken to that decision with the specific zeal of a captain who agreed with it completely and intended to make sure the rest of the team did too. “Again,” Jay called, for what had to be the eighth time, as the line reset at the blue line. “We’re not running this drill again because it was bad. We’re running it again because it needs to be automatic. You shouldn’t have to think about this read by week fourteen of the season.”

“My legs are gone,” Jake announced, from somewhere near the bench, draped over the boards like a man who’d given up on dignity entirely.

“Good. That means it’s working.” Jay didn’t even look over, already skating back to center ice. “Yang, Riki, line up. Same read, full speed this time.”

Practice ran nearly forty minutes long that day, and longer the day after that, Coach standing at the bench with his arms crossed and his expression unreadable in the particular way that meant he was satisfied without wanting anyone to know it yet. Jungwon’s legs felt like they belonged to someone else by the time they finally got let off the ice, the good kind of exhausted, the kind that meant the work was actually sinking in.

Jay gathered them at center ice before letting anyone head for the showers, voice pitched in the low, even register he used when he meant something seriously. “Two weeks,” he said. “I know everyone’s tired. I’m tired. I don’t care. We’ve worked too hard this season to lose in the semis because we got comfortable in October.” His eyes moved across the group, the same way they always did, landing for half a second longer on his first line. “I need everyone locked in. No distractions. No slipping. We’ve got one shot at this and I’m not watching it fall apart over something stupid.” Jungwon felt that land somewhere uncomfortable in his chest, the word slipping hitting closer than Jay could possibly know he meant it.

You came by the Den that evening with a folder of notes Jay had texted you about twenty times asking for — something he’d left at your apartment after a study session weeks ago that he apparently needed for a presentation he’d been putting off — and you found the house in its usual post-practice wind-down, the smell of someone’s attempt at dinner drifting from the kitchen, the low murmur of a TV nobody was actually watching. “Finally,” Jay said, intercepting you in the front hallway before you’d even made it past the framed photo on the wall, snatching the folder out of your hands with the particular gracelessness of an exhausted older brother. “You’re a lifesaver. I would’ve actually failed this presentation.”

“You’re welcome. Next time, don’t leave your stuff at my place for three weeks before remembering you need it.”

“Noted. Ignored, probably, but noted.” He flipped through the folder to confirm everything was there, and in the process of doing so, his eyes caught on something at your collarbone, the small silver chain that had become such a constant fixture you’d genuinely forgotten, in this exact moment, that it was something worth noticing. “That’s new,” Jay said, tilting his head, studying the little charm hanging from it. “The necklace. I haven’t seen that before.” Your stomach did a slow, cold drop, the kind that came from being caught flat-footed by a question you should have seen coming and hadn’t prepared an answer for. “Oh — yeah. Just something I picked up.”

“Where? It’s cute. Looks expensive for a ‘picked up’ kind of thing.” He leaned in slightly, squinting at the small engraved charm without actually reaching for it, which was the only mercy currently available to you. “Is that a date on the back?”

“It’s — just a birthday thing. From myself. Treated myself.” The lie came out faster than you’d planned it, stacking itself on top of the truth so quickly you almost believed it yourself for a second. “You know. Twenty-one. Felt like an occasion.”

“Huh.” Jay studied it a beat longer, and for one suspended second you were certain he was going to ask the obvious next question — why would you buy yourself a hockey puck charm, you don’t even like hockey jewelry, you’ve made fun of mine for years — but exhaustion and a folder full of overdue coursework apparently won out over curiosity, and he just shrugged, already turning back toward the stairs. “Cute, though. Looks good on you.”

“Thanks.”

“Tell Sunoo I said hi. And tell Sunghoon he owes me ten bucks from the bet last week.”

“What bet?”

“Doesn’t matter, just tell him.” Jay was already halfway up the stairs, folder under his arm, the conversation closed in his mind as completely as it had opened.

You stood there for a long moment after he disappeared, your hand coming up unconsciously to touch the small charm at your collarbone, feeling the particular vertigo of having walked right up to the edge of something and stepped back from it by pure luck rather than any actual skill. Across the room, in the kitchen doorway, Jungwon had gone very still, having caught the entire exchange from a few feet away, and when your eyes finally met his, you both understood, without saying anything, exactly how close that had just been. “That was too close,” you said quietly, once you’d both retreated to the relative privacy of the back porch. “I know.” Jungwon’s jaw was tight, his eyes still on the doorway like Jay might reappear any second. “He was right there. One more second of looking at it and he would’ve asked the question that actually matters.”

“He didn’t, though.”

“This time.” Jungwon ran a hand through his hair, something frayed at the edges of his usual calm. “We’ve been doing this for four months. We just got lucky in there. That’s not the same as being careful.” You didn’t have a good response to that, mostly because he was right, and the two of you stood there in the cold evening air, the necklace warm and suddenly heavy against your skin, both quietly aware that the margin you’d been operating in had just gotten visibly thinner, and that luck, eventually, the way it always does, was going to run out.

—

You went to Jungwons to study and the studying had been real, at first — that was the part that would seem darkly funny to Jungwon later, in the version of this night he’d replay for weeks afterward, the fact that the thing that finally got them caught had started as something genuinely, boringly innocent. You’d come over with your laptop and a stack of flashcards for a psych exam, and Jungwon had his own econ readings spread across the bed because his desk was buried under hockey equipment he kept forgetting to put away, and the two of you had actually studied, properly, for almost an hour — quizzing each other, him stealing glances at your flashcards and making fun of your handwriting, you threatening to revoke his snack privileges if he kept distracting you.

The studying had stopped being the point somewhere around the time he’d leaned over to correct an answer on your flashcard and you’d turned your head at exactly the wrong — or right — moment, and what started as a normal, domestic kind of closeness had tipped, slow and easy and entirely without either of you deciding it on purpose, into something else. Flashcards forgotten on the floor. His laptop pushed aside. The particular unhurried quiet of two people who’d done this enough times now that there was no nervousness left in it at all, just familiarity, comfort, the specific ease of being completely known by someone.

Neither of you heard the door.

Jay had knocked — he’d insist on that later, loudly, repeatedly, as if it mattered — but the knock had landed in a gap between two things that weren’t paying attention to anything outside the room, and when nobody answered, he’d done what he always did at the Den, what he’d done a hundred times before without a second thought, because it was his team’s house and these were his guys and there had never, not once in three years, been a reason to think twice about opening a door that wasn’t locked.

“Hey, Jungwon, I need to ask you something about the line rush tomorrow—” The sentence didn’t finish. It just stopped, mid-air, the way a record stops when someone lifts the needle, and the silence that replaced it was the loudest sound Jungwon had ever heard in his life.

For one full second nobody moved. Jay stood frozen in the doorway, hand still on the handle, his expression doing something complicated and fast — confusion first, the brain’s split-second refusal to process what it was looking at, and then, almost instantly, the confusion burning off into something else entirely, something that didn’t have a soft landing anywhere underneath it.

Jungwon didn’t scramble. That would come a second later, the reflexive grab for a shirt, the half-formed motion of putting himself between you and the door, but in that very first second he just froze too, eye to eye with Jay across the room, and some old, certain part of him understood with total clarity that there was no version of the next ten seconds that ended anywhere good. “Get out,” Jay said. Flat. Quiet. Worse than yelling. He wasn’t talking to you. He couldn’t look at you.

His eyes were locked on Jungwon, and his voice, when it came again, had dropped even lower, which somehow made it land harder than volume would have. “Get dressed. Get downstairs. Now.” He turned and left before either of you could say a single word, the door left hanging open behind him, and the sound of his footsteps on the stairs was the sound of something detonating in slow motion, the blast wave still traveling, the real damage still about thirty seconds out.

By the time Jungwon made it down to the common room — shirt yanked on inside out, hands not quite steady, you two steps behind him with your own clothes hastily fixed, both of you moving on the kind of adrenaline that doesn’t leave room for thinking — the house had already started gathering, drawn by the sound of Jay’s voice carrying from the kitchen where he stood with his hands braced flat on the counter, head down, breathing like a man trying very hard not to put his fist through something.

Riki was already there, having apparently come downstairs to investigate the noise, and the look on his face when he caught sight of Jungwon was somewhere between sympathy and pure dread. Jake appeared from the den a second later, take-out container still in hand, taking in the scene with rapidly dawning horror. “Jongseong,” you started, “let me explain—”

“Explain what.” Jay’s head came up, and his voice cracked across the room loud enough that it didn’t matter anymore who heard it. “Explain how long this has been going on? Explain how many times I’ve asked where you were and gotten a lie back? Explain how every single person in this house apparently knew except me?” Nobody answered that. Jake’s eyes dropped to the floor. Riki’s jaw tightened. The silence itself was an answer, and Jay heard it land, his face going through something raw and furious all at once.

“You all knew.” He looked around the room, voice climbing now, no longer flat, no longer quiet. “You knew, and none of you said a word to me. I trusted every single one of you—”

“It wasn’t our secret to tell,” Heeseung said, low, the only person brave enough to say anything at all. “Don’t.” Jay’s voice cracked on the word. “Don’t you dare stand there and tell me about whose secret it was. She’s my sister.” He turned back to Jungwon, and whatever had been simmering under the flat, quiet anger from upstairs finally broke loose entirely. “I had one rule. One. I told you on day one, I told you to your face, and you shook my hand on the ice an hour later and let me believe you actually meant it.”

“Jongseong, I—”

“How long.” Jay was closing the distance now, chest heaving, and Jungwon — to his credit, to the credit of the discipline that made him good at everything he did — didn’t back away from it. “How long has this been happening. Don’t lie to me again, you’ve done enough of that already.”

“Since September.” Something in Jay’s face actually broke at that, the math of it landing visibly — four months, nearly the entire season, every single practice, every single game, every locker room conversation happening underneath something he’d had no idea about — and the breaking turned immediately back into rage because rage was easier to hold than the alternative. “Four months.” He shoved Jungwon, hard, both hands flat against his chest, hard enough that Jungwon actually stumbled back a step. “Four months of you standing next to me on the ice, four months of me trusting you with line calls, with the C someday, with everything, while you—”

“Jongseong, stop—” you tried to get between them, hand on your brother’s arm, but he shook you off, not violently, just completely focused on Jungwon now, advancing again. “You don’t get to touch her.” His voice had gone rough, half-wrecked. “You don’t get to look at me every single day at practice like nothing’s wrong while you’re—”

He shoved again, and this time Jungwon’s back hit the counter, and for a second it looked like it might actually become something neither of them could walk back from — Jay’s fist closing, his whole body coiled toward throwing the punch that had clearly been building since the second he opened that door — and that was when Jake and Heeseung both moved at once, Jake’s arms locking around Jay’s middle and hauling him back bodily, Heeseung grabbing his arm, both of them talking over each other, fast, low, hey, hey, not like this, not here—

Jungwon didn’t fight back. Didn’t even raise his hands to defend himself, just stood there and took the shove, which seemed to make something in Jay even angrier — like some part of him had wanted Jungwon to fight back, needed somewhere to put all of this that wasn’t just him screaming into a room that wouldn’t push back. “GET OFF ME—” Jay wrenched against Jake’s grip, and that’s when you stepped fully between them, voice cutting through everything else in the room, loud enough and furious enough that it actually stopped him.

“Stop it. STOP. Look at me.” Your voice broke on the last word, but you didn’t back down, standing your ground directly in the space between your brother and the boy he was trying to put a fist into. “You want to be mad? Be mad at me too, then, because I made every single one of these choices right alongside him. He doesn’t get to decide who I love.” Your voice cracked again, and you let it. “And neither do you.” The room went dead silent. Even Jay, still half-restrained by Jake’s grip, stopped pulling.

“He doesn’t get to decide who I love,” you said again, quieter now, but no less furious, “and you don’t either, Jongseong. I am not a rule on your team. I’m not something you get to protect by deciding for me. I’m twenty-one years old and I fell in love with someone, and I don’t care whose name was on a list you made up three years ago.”

Jay stared at you, chest still heaving, something in his face caving in around the edges in a way the anger hadn’t managed to do yet. “You’re in love with him.” It wasn’t really a question. It came out flat, hollowed out, like he was hearing the actual shape of what he’d walked in on for the first time, underneath all the rage. You didn’t answer. You didn’t have to. The answer was already all over your face, and Jay saw it, and something about seeing it confirmed broke whatever had still been holding the anger together.

He went quiet. Genuinely quiet, the fight draining out of him all at once, Jake’s grip loosening because there was nothing left to restrain. He looked at Jungwon one more time — not with rage now, something worse, something flatter and more wounded. “I trusted you, Jungwon.” His voice had gone rough, almost gentle, which somehow landed harder than anything he’d shouted. “Out of everyone on this team. You.” He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and walked out, past all of them, out the front door into the night, and nobody followed him, because nobody in that room had any idea what they’d even say if they did.

The house didn’t go back to normal noise after that. It just sort of held its breath, everyone scattering into smaller, quieter clusters, nobody quite looking at you or Jungwon directly, the weight of the last five minutes still hanging thick in every room.

You found Jungwon upstairs, sitting on the edge of his bed exactly where the two of you had been studying an hour before, flashcards still scattered across the floor like nothing had happened, like the whole world hadn’t just come apart downstairs. He had his elbows on his knees, head down, and when you sat beside him he didn’t look up right away. “Hey.” You put a hand on his back, careful. “Look at me.”

When he finally did, his eyes were wet, and the sight of it — Jungwon, who never cried, who’d taken a shove to the chest downstairs without flinching — undid something in you faster than the whole fight had. “I ruined it,” he said, voice cracking. “The one thing he ever actually trusted me with. I told him I wouldn’t touch you and I — I broke it anyway, and I’d do it again, and I hate that about myself, I hate that I’m not even sorry—”

“Hey.” You pulled him into you, his head dropping against your shoulder, his arms finally coming around you like he needed something solid to hold onto. “I’m not sorry either. I can’t be sorry about you.” He cried quietly into your shoulder for a long time after that, and you just held him, neither of you saying anything else, because there wasn’t anything left to say that would fix what had just happened downstairs.

Blackwood played the semifinal four days later, and somehow, despite everything, despite a locker room that had gone quiet and brittle in a way Coach Anders clocked within the first five minutes of the first practice after, they won — 3–2, in overtime, a deflection off Jake’s stick that barely crossed the line before the horn sounded. It should have felt like the best night of the season. Instead it felt like survival. Jay hadn’t passed to Jungwon all night. Not once, not even when the lane was wide open, not even in overtime when every read on the ice screamed for it. Jungwon had noticed. The whole bench had noticed. Coach noticed most of all, and in the chaos of the locker room afterward, amid the relief and the exhaustion and the muted, uncertain celebration, he pulled both of them aside before anyone could even get their gear half off. “Park. Yang. My office. Now.”

The door clicked shut behind the three of them, and Coach Anders didn’t sit down, just stood there with his arms crossed, looking at both of them like a man who’d run out of patience an entire period ago and had only just now gotten the chance to say so. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, and frankly, I don’t want the details.” His voice was level, but there was steel under it. “What I do know is that I watched my captain refuse to pass to his center for sixty minutes of playoff hockey tonight, and I watched us nearly lose a game we should have won by two goals because of it.” Neither of them said anything.

“We have the regional final in nine days. Whatever this is — and don’t tell me it’s nothing, I’ve coached long enough to know what a broken line looks like — you two figure it out. I don’t care how. I don’t care if you hate each other off the ice.” Coach’s jaw tightened. “But if you skate like that again next week, I will bench one of you myself, captain or not, and I will not lose sleep over it. Are we clear?”

“Yes, Coach,” Jungwon said, quiet. Jay didn’t answer at all. He just nodded once, jaw tight, and walked out without looking at either of them, and Jungwon stood there in the sudden quiet of the office, understanding with total clarity that the hardest part of all of this hadn’t even started yet.

The thing nobody had warned either of them about — because nobody had ever needed to before, in twenty-one years of being twins who occasionally fought and always, always talked it back out within a day — was how loud silence could actually be. Jay didn’t yell anymore after the night in the kitchen. That part, somehow, made it worse. He simply stopped. Stopped texting back. Stopped answering calls, then stopped letting them ring through at all, your name going straight to voicemail within the first week. Stopped looking at you when you were in the same room, which happened less and less because you’d quietly, painfully started avoiding the Den altogether, the one place that had felt like a second home for twenty-one years suddenly feeling like somewhere you weren’t welcome.

You tried, the first few days. Texts that got delivered but never answered. A voicemail you left, voice cracking halfway through, asking him to just call you back, just to talk, you didn’t even care if he yelled at you again as long as he said something. Nothing came back. Not a word. Not even the dismissive, irritated kind of nothing that meant he was still paying attention. Just an absence, total and deliberate, the kind that told you he’d made a decision and intended to hold it. “He’s never done this before,” you told Sunoo, one night, curled up on your dorm room floor with your phone face-down beside you because you couldn’t stand looking at the unanswered thread anymore. “Not once. Not ever. We’ve fought — God, we’ve fought about stupid stuff our whole lives, but it’s never lasted more than a day. We don’t know how to not talk to each other. I don’t know how to be a person without him answering when I call.”

“He’s hurting,” Sunoo said, careful, sitting beside you with a hand rubbing slow circles on your back. “That doesn’t make it okay that he’s doing this to you. But I don’t think this is really about punishing you. I think he genuinely doesn’t know what he’d say if he opened his mouth, so he’s choosing not to open it at all.”

“That doesn’t make it hurt less.”

“I know. I’m not saying it does.”

You didn’t tell Sunoo the rest of it — how you’d started reaching for your phone out of pure instinct a dozen times a day to send Jay something stupid, a meme, a complaint about a professor, the small constant traffic of two people who’d shared a womb and then a childhood and then this whole strange, public college life, and how every single time you caught yourself doing it, the realization that you couldn’t landed like a physical thing, a small fresh cut reopening in the same spot.

Jay wasn’t unaffected. He’d never have admitted that to anyone, least of all himself, but the proof of it sat in small, private moments nobody saw — him staring at your contact in his phone some nights, thumb hovering over the call button for whole minutes before he locked the screen and set it face-down on his desk. Once, badly, at three in the morning, he’d actually started typing something — I don’t know what to say to you right now but — before deleting it letter by letter and throwing the phone across his bed instead. He told himself it wasn’t about punishing you. He told himself a lot of things that week that he didn’t fully believe.

What he couldn’t tell himself a way out of was practice. He and Jungwon were still first line. Still had to be, with the regional final nine days out and Coach having made it unmistakably clear there was no alternative on the table. So they skated together, every single day, in a silence that had nothing companionable in it at all — Jay calling line changes and breakout patterns in the flattest voice anyone had ever heard out of him, never once including Jungwon’s name in anything that wasn’t strictly necessary.

He passed to everyone else. That was the part the whole team had clocked within the first practice back, and nobody said anything about it out loud because nobody knew how to say it without making things worse. Three-on-twos where Jungwon was the better read, and Jay sent it wide instead. Breakouts where the play sheet called for a direct feed up the middle, and Jay dumped it to the boards instead, conceding possession rather than putting the puck on his center’s stick. “Jongseong, why didn’t you pass?” Coach called out, the third time it happened in one practice, his patience visibly fraying.

“Saw a better option,” Jay said, flat, already skating back to the faceoff dot. “The better option was standing in open ice on the opposite side of the rink from where you actually shot it.” Jay didn’t answer that at all. He just lined up for the next drill, jaw locked, and ran it exactly the same way again.

The only time he spoke to Jungwon directly anymore was to yell — sharp, clipped corrections mid-drill, none of the easy back-and-forth they’d built over a season of trust, just you’re late on that read or cover the weak side, that’s basic positioning delivered in a voice that had nothing left in it of the guy who’d fist-bumped Jungwon at center ice in September and said welcome to the Wolves. Jungwon took every single one of them without arguing back, jaw tight, because arguing felt like it would only confirm to Jay that he’d never deserved the trust in the first place. “He’s doing this on purpose,” Riki said quietly to Heeseung, watching from the bench as Jay sent another pass wide of an open Jungwon. “He knows exactly what he’s costing us. He doesn’t care right now. That’s how mad he still is.”

“He cares,” Heeseung said. “That’s actually the whole problem. He cares so much it’s easier to be furious than to feel any of the rest of it.”

The locker room had gone strange too, the easy noise of September curdled into something careful and over-managed, everyone monitoring their own jokes for anything that might land near the wound. Jake had tried, once, to lighten things with a comment that would’ve killed in October and instead landed in dead silence, Jay’s face shutting down entirely, and Jake hadn’t tried again since. Jungwon noticed the way the team had started, almost unconsciously, dividing its attention between the two of them — careful not to seem too friendly with him in front of Jay, careful not to seem like they were taking sides, the whole house caught in a kind of low, exhausting diplomatic tension that hadn’t existed a month ago. He hated that he’d done that to them. He hated, more than anything, the particular shape of Jay’s silence — not the screaming from that first night, which had at least been something he could push back against, but this. The total absence. The refusal to even grant him the dignity of being yelled at like he mattered enough to yell at.

He found you most nights now at your dorm rather than the Den, both of you retreating to the one space that didn’t have Jay’s silence sitting in every room of it. “He looked right through me today,” Jungwon told you, one night, staring at the ceiling instead of you, like saying it out loud while looking at something else made it easier. “Not even with anger anymore. Just — through me. Like I’m not even worth being mad at.”

“He’s mad at me too. He won’t even do me that.”

“At least he’s saying things to me. Even if it’s just to yell about a read.” Jungwon’s voice cracked slightly. “I keep thinking if I just play perfectly enough, eventually he’ll have to say something else to me. Something that isn’t a correction. And then I realize how stupid that is, because this was never actually about hockey.” You reached over and laced your fingers through his, the same gesture he always did to you, except this time it was you reaching for him, and he held on like it was the only steady thing left in his whole week. “We’re going to fix this,” you said, with more certainty than you actually felt. “I don’t know how yet. But we are.”

Neither of you believed it fully, not that week, with the regional final closing in and Jay’s silence showing no signs of cracking and the whole team holding its breath around a fracture none of them knew how to heal. But you said it anyway, because saying it out loud felt like the only thing keeping either of you from drowning in how bad it had actually gotten.

Jake snapped on a Tuesday, in the most unlikely place for it to happen — not at the Den, not somewhere private, but right there in the locker room twenty minutes before practice, with half the team already in their gear and the rest filtering in around them.

It started small. Jay said something clipped to Jungwon about positioning on the upcoming power play, the same flat, correction-only tone he’d been using for a week and a half, and Jungwon nodded along the way he always did now, jaw tight, taking it without pushing back — and something about that exact exchange, the smallness and the sadness of it, the way two guys who used to actually talk to each other had been reduced to this, finally broke whatever restraint Jake had been holding onto. “Okay, I’m done.” He said it loud enough that the whole room turned, his gear bag dropping to the floor with a thud. “I am actually done watching this.”

“Jake—” Heeseung started, already sensing where this was going. “No, shut up, I’ve been quiet for a week and a half and I’m not doing it anymore.” Jake rounded on Jay first, finger pointed, and the sight of it — Jake, who was never the serious one, never the one who got genuinely heated about anything, standing there with real fire in his face — stopped the whole room cold. “You’re acting like Jungwon committed an actual crime. He didn’t murder anyone, man, he fell in love with your sister, and I’m sorry, but that’s not the same thing, and you have been treating him like it for two weeks.”

“Jake, this isn’t—”

“It is my business, actually, because I’m watching our first line fall apart nine days before the most important game of the season, and I’m watching my captain — who I respect more than almost anyone on this team — turn into someone I genuinely don’t recognize.” Jake’s voice cracked slightly, more emotional than anyone had ever heard him. “You taught me what it means to be a captain on this team. You taught all of us. And right now you’re teaching us that the second something actually hurts, the move is to go cold and silent and pretend the person doesn’t exist. Is that the lesson? Because if it is, I don’t want it.”

He turned on Jungwon next, and his voice didn’t soften much. “And you. You’re walking around like you’re being sentenced to life in prison. Take the hit, man. You broke the rule, fine, you knew what you were doing, but you don’t get to just curl up and accept being treated like nothing either. You love her. Act like it actually means something instead of apologizing with your whole body language every single day.”

Nobody said anything for a second. Riki had gone very still by his stall. Heeseung’s eyes were on the floor. Even Sunghoon, usually unreadable, looked like he didn’t know where to put his face. Jay was the one who finally broke the silence, and his voice, when it came, didn’t have any of the cold flatness from the last week and a half in it anymore. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing? You think I like feeling like this?”

“I think you’re so far up in your own anger that you forgot we’re all still here,” Jake said, quieter now, the heat draining out into something more tired. “I think you forgot Jungwon’s not just the guy who broke your rule. He’s also the guy who’s centered your line for an entire season and made you look like the best captain this program’s ever had. Both things are true. You’re acting like only one of them is.”

Jay’s jaw worked, something complicated moving across his face, and for a long moment the whole room just watched, waiting, nobody quite breathing. “Everyone out,” Jay said finally, low. “Except him.” A nod toward Jungwon. “Give us the room.” The team filed out slowly, Jake last, clapping Jay once on the shoulder on his way past — not quite forgiveness, not quite anything, just contact, the kind two people who actually cared about each other still managed even mid-argument — and the door shut, leaving Jay and Jungwon alone in the locker room for the first time since the night everything broke.

Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Jay sat down heavily on the bench, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor, and Jungwon stayed standing, not sure if sitting down uninvited was a privilege he still had. “Jake’s right,” Jay said finally, quiet, not looking up. “About all of it. I hate that he’s right.”

“I’m not going to pretend I didn’t break the rule,” Jungwon said. “I did. On purpose, eventually, even if it didn’t start that way. I’m not going to stand here and tell you I’m sorry about loving her, because I’m not, and I think you’d see right through it if I tried.”

“I know you’re not sorry about that part.” Jay’s voice was rough. “I think that’s actually what made it worse. If you’d looked guilty about loving her, I think I could’ve hated you clean. But you didn’t. You looked like a guy who’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I didn’t know what to do with that.”

“I would do it again. I’m sorry it cost you what it did. I’m not sorry I did it.” Jay finally looked up at that, and something raw and exhausted passed over his face. “I trusted you more than anyone on this team. That’s still true, even now. That’s what made this hurt the way it did — it wasn’t just the rule, Jungwon, it’s that I actually thought I knew you. I was already talking to Coach about making you assistant captain next year. I thought you were the one guy who’d never make me regret trusting him.”

“I know. I heard about that, after. It made everything worse, knowing that.”

“Good. It should.” But there wasn’t much heat left in it. They sat in silence for a while, the kind that had a little more give in it than the silence of the last two weeks, and finally Jay let out a long breath, something in his shoulders loosening for the first time since the night he’d opened that door. “I’m still mad,” he said. “I know.”

“I’m not gonna be okay with this overnight. I don’t know how to just turn that off.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Jungwon’s voice cracked slightly. “I just — I miss you, man. Not just as my captain. You were the first person here who actually made me feel like I belonged on this team, not just on the ice but in the house, in everything. I miss that. I know I don’t get to just ask for it back right now. I just wanted you to know I miss it.” Jay stood up slowly, and for a second neither of them moved, and then he closed the distance and pulled Jungwon into a hug — quick, a little stiff, the kind two guys give each other when they’re not sure the moment’s fully earned yet but need the contact anyway — a hard clap on the back, the kind of bro-hug that said more than either of them were ready to say out loud. “We’re not good,” Jay said, pulling back, voice rough. “I want to be really clear about that. We are not good yet.”

“I know.”

“But I can’t keep doing this on the ice. Jake’s right, I’m costing us the season out of spite, and that’s not who I want to be as a captain.” He exhaled, something almost like a laugh escaping despite everything. “God, I hate that Jake was the one who had to say all that to my face. He’s never serious about anything.”

“He was pretty serious about that.”

“Yeah. Scared the hell out of me, honestly.” Jay actually laughed then, short and surprised, like the sound had snuck out before he’d given it permission, and Jungwon found himself laughing too, the first time in two weeks either of them had laughed about anything, the sound strange and rusty but real. It faded into quiet again, but a different kind this time, something a little more bearable.

“I love your sister, man,” Jungwon said, finally, simply, no longer something he was confessing so much as just stating, plain and certain. “I know that’s the whole problem. But it’s true, and it’s not going away, and I needed you to hear it from me like that, not in the middle of a fight.” Jay was quiet for a second, looking at him steady. “Yeah,” he said, eventually, something tired and a little wrecked in his voice. “Yeah, I know.” He paused at the door on his way out, looking back at Jungwon for a long moment. “Would’ve been good,” he said, quiet, almost too quiet to catch, “having you as an actual brother. If this had all gone differently.” He left before Jungwon could answer, but the words sat warm in the room behind him, the first real crack of something other than anger in two weeks.

Jay showed up at your dorm that night after, no text first, just a knock you almost didn’t answer because you’d stopped expecting anyone good to be on the other side of your door lately. When you opened it and saw him standing there, hands in his pockets, looking exhausted in a way that went deeper than just practice, you didn’t say anything at all — just stepped back to let him in, the way you always had, the way you hoped you always would. “I’m not okay,” he said, sitting on the edge of your bed, not looking at you yet. “I want to be clear about that before we do this. I’m still hurt. I’m still figuring out how to be around either of you without it costing me something.”

“Okay.”

“But I can’t keep not talking to you. I tried. I’m not built for it, apparently. I kept reaching for my phone to tell you something stupid and then remembering I wasn’t allowed to, and it felt like missing a limb.” He finally looked up, and his eyes were wet, and yours were too, the two of you mirroring each other the way you always had, even now. “We’ve never gone this long without talking. I hated every single day of it.”

“Me too.” Your voice broke. “I know I hurt you. I know hiding it for four months made it so much worse than if I’d just told you. I’m sorry for that part, even if I’m not sorry for him.”

“I know.” Jay’s voice was rough. “I heard basically that same sentence from him a few hours ago. Word for word, almost.” A short, tired laugh. “You two are annoyingly aligned on this.”

“Are you going to be okay? With him? Eventually?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m working on it. He’s — “ Jay stopped, considering. “He’s a good guy. I always thought that. That’s actually most of why this hurt so much, if I’m honest. It would’ve been so much easier if he was someone I didn’t already respect.” You moved to sit beside him, and after a second, he let his head drop onto your shoulder, the same way he had a hundred times before across twenty-one years, every fight, every bad day, every moment either of you needed the only other person who’d been there from the very beginning. “We’re not okay yet,” he said quietly. “I need you to know that. This is going to take a while.”

“I know.”

“But we’re better than we were yesterday.”

“Yeah.” You let yourself lean into him, the two of you sitting there in the quiet of your dorm room, bruised and tired and still not fully mended, but closer to it than you’d been in two weeks. “We’re better.” It wasn’t fixed. Not all the way, not yet. But for the first time since that night in the kitchen, it felt like something that could actually be fixed, eventually, by two people who’d never once, in their whole lives, managed to stay broken with each other for very long.

The weeks following something in the Den shifted back toward warmth so gradually that nobody quite noticed the exact moment it happened — only that by Wednesday, Jay was sitting across from Jungwon at the kitchen table going over breakout patterns like nothing had ever broken between them, and by Friday, the two of them had fallen into an easy rhythm on the ice that made Coach Anders actually smile during a drill for the first time in three weeks. It wasn’t instant. Jay was still careful in ways he hadn’t been before — a half-second pause before he passed to Jungwon that hadn’t existed in September, a watchfulness in his eyes when you and Jungwon were in the same room that read less like suspicion now and more like a brother recalibrating, slowly, what he was allowed to feel okay about. But the silence was gone. That was the part that mattered most. He talked to Jungwon again — really talked, not just corrections barked mid-drill — and the first time Jungwon made a joke and Jay actually laughed at it, properly, the whole bench seemed to exhale at once, like the entire team had been holding its breath for weeks without realizing it.

You started coming to the Den again too, openly, without the old careful choreography of checking who was in which room first. The first time Jungwon kissed you goodbye in front of everyone — quick, easy, right there in the kitchen doorway, his hand finding your jaw the way it always did — Jay made a sound like he’d swallowed something unpleasant. “I’m gonna need a warning before you do that,” he said, not looking up from his cereal. “Some kind of system. A bell.”

“You walked in on considerably worse than a kitchen kiss, Jongseong, I think you can survive this.”

“That’s exactly my point. I have a very low tolerance left for surprises involving you two.” But there was no real heat in it anymore, just the particular, well-worn grumbling of an older brother performing discomfort he didn’t fully feel, and when Jungwon came back through twenty minutes later to grab his gear bag and kissed you again on his way out the door — bye, love you, back after lift — Jay just groaned into his cereal bowl. “Gross,” he announced, to the room generally. “Both of you. Disgusting. I’m eating.”

“You’ll live.”

“Barely.” But he was almost smiling when he said it, and that almost-smile told you more about how far you’d actually come than any amount of words could have.

The necklace sat against your collarbone every single day now, no longer something you had to explain away with a half-true lie about treating yourself — Jay knew exactly what it was and who’d given it to you, had asked about it directly one evening with none of the old danger in the question, just genuine, easy curiosity. He give you that? And when you’d said yes, he’d just nodded, looked at it a second longer, and said, it’s nice. He’s got good taste, in a tone that wasn’t quite forgiveness yet but was something moving steadily toward it.

The regional final was scheduled for a Saturday night, home ice, the biggest game Blackwood had hosted in four years, and the week leading into it had the specific, charged intensity that comes when an entire program understands exactly what’s at stake. Coach Anders ran practices longer and harder than he had all season, the kind of two-a-days that left everyone’s legs feeling like wet sand by Thursday, and Jay led every single one of them with a focus that had fully returned to its old, easy command, no longer fractured by anything sitting underneath it.

“This is it,” he told the team, the night before, gathered in the Den’s living room in a rare moment of total quiet, no music, no chaos, just thirty guys who’d spent a whole season building toward exactly this. “Four years I’ve waited for a shot at this. I’m not gonna stand up here and give you some big speech, because you already know what this means to all of us.” His eyes moved across the room, the way they always did, landing on Jungwon for a beat — not the wary, careful look from a few weeks ago, but something warmer, something closer to trust fully restored. “We’ve been through a lot this season. On the ice and off it. I think that actually makes us better for tomorrow, not worse. We know how to fight for each other now. Let’s go show everyone else what that looks like.”

The room broke into noise after that, the easy, electric kind, and later that night, after most of the house had gone quiet, you found Jungwon out on the back porch alone, staring out at nothing in particular, the cold air doing nothing to cut the obvious nervous energy radiating off him. “Hey.” You wrapped your arms around him from behind, chin resting between his shoulder blades. “You’re thinking too loud. I can hear it from inside.”

“Biggest game of my life tomorrow.” He turned to face you, pulling you properly into him, his forehead dropping to rest against yours. “I keep running through every possible way it could go wrong.”

“It’s not going to go wrong.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, actually. I’ve watched you all season. I’ve watched you and Jongseong figure out how to be brothers again in like two weeks after the worst fight either of you have ever had. You two can do anything when you’re actually trying together.” You kissed him, slow, certain. “I love you. I need you to actually hear that tonight, not just as a thing I say after games. I love you, and I’m so proud of everything you’ve become this season, on the ice and off it, and tomorrow doesn’t change any of that no matter how it goes.” Something in his face went soft and open at that, all the nervous energy settling for a moment into something quieter. “I love you too,” he said, and it landed the same way it always did between you now — easy, certain, no longer something either of you had to hide in a kitchen at midnight or whisper behind a closed door. “I love you so much it scares me sometimes, how much this season’s actually been worth it because of you, even with everything that happened.”

“Tomorrow’s going to be good.”

“Yeah.” He kissed you again, lingering, the cold night air around you both finally feeling less like a threat and more like just weather. “Yeah, I think it actually will be.”

The arena on Saturday night was packed beyond anything Jungwon had played in front of all season — every seat filled, students standing in the aisles, the kind of noise that hit you physically the second you stepped out for warmups, a wall of sound that hadn’t fully let up by the time the puck dropped for the first period. You sat in your usual seat, three rows up behind the glass, except tonight you weren’t in your normal clothes — you were in his jersey, YANG stitched across the back in block lettering, his number stretched over your shoulders, and you hadn’t hidden it from a single person walking in, hadn’t thought twice about who might see. Sunoo sat beside you in a Blackwood shirt of his own, practically vibrating with nervous energy, occasionally grabbing your arm hard enough to bruise every time the play got close to either net.

The first period was tight, both teams playing tense, controlled hockey, neither side willing to make the first real mistake. Jay’s line — Jungwon centering, Jay and a senior winger flanking him — controlled most of the offensive zone time but couldn’t find the back of the net, hitting a post once that sent the whole arena into a held-breath gasp before the horn sounded for intermission still scoreless.

The second period broke the dam. Blackwood’s opponent struck first on a power play seven minutes in, a wrist shot through a screen that the goalie never saw, and the home crowd’s noise dropped into a tense, anxious murmur. You watched Jay’s face on the bench during the next shift — jaw locked, eyes scanning the ice with total focus — and when his line went back out, something in the way he and Jungwon moved together looked different than it had all season, sharper, more locked in, like the deficit had snapped something into perfect alignment between them instead of rattling it apart.

Jungwon tied it up with four minutes left in the second — a give-and-go off Jay’s stick that mirrored almost exactly the play from his very first collegiate goal back in October, except this time when he buried it, Jay was the first one to slam into him in celebration, both of them screaming something wordless into each other’s face masks, the whole bench spilling over in noise. “THAT’S MY GUY,” Jay was shouting, dragging Jungwon into a headlock that had nothing restrained about it. “THAT’S MY CENTER!” You were on your feet with the rest of the arena, Sunoo screaming directly into your ear in a way that was going to leave you half-deaf, both your hands pressed against your chest like you could physically hold your own heart in place.

The third period was the longest twenty minutes of your entire life. Both teams traded chances, the goaltending on both ends going from good to borderline miraculous, the clock ticking down with a kind of cruelty that made every single shift feel like it might be the one that decided everything. With six minutes left, Blackwood’s opponent hit the post on a breakaway that made the entire arena gasp in unison and then exhale just as loud when it rang off harmlessly. With ninety seconds left, Jay blocked a shot with his own body that had the whole bench up on its feet, limping briefly before shaking it off and getting back into position like it had cost him nothing at all.

And then, with thirty-one seconds left on the clock, it happened. Jungwon won the offensive zone faceoff clean, the puck sliding back to the point, worked low, and when it came back out to the slot it found Jay’s stick exactly where Jungwon had read it would be all night — the same instinct, the same trust, rebuilt and somehow stronger than it had been before everything broke. Jay’s shot beat the goalie clean, top corner, far side, and the horn that followed wasn’t even fully necessary because the entire arena had already exploded before the puck had finished crossing the line. 3–1. Twenty-nine seconds left. The building came apart.

The final horn sounded like the loudest thing you’d ever heard in your life, and the ice turned into total chaos within seconds — gloves and sticks flying, the entire bench pouring over the boards, players piling on top of each other near center ice in a scrum of padding and screaming and pure, uncut joy. You were over the glass and through the gate before you’d even consciously decided to move, Sunoo right behind you, security barely bothering to stop the wave of people flooding toward the ice because there was no stopping it tonight, not for this.

You found Jungwon in the chaos near the blue line, and the second he saw you coming he dropped his stick and gloves and just opened his arms, and you ran straight into them, the momentum spinning both of you in a full circle, his arms locking tight around you, lifting you half off the ice entirely. “You did it,” you were saying, half-laughing, half-crying, his face buried in your neck. “You actually did it—”

“We did it.” He pulled back just far enough to kiss you, right there in the middle of the ice, in front of the entire arena, in front of every single camera and every single person who might have once whispered about whose sister you were — none of that mattered anymore, none of it had ever mattered less. “I love you. I love you so much, you have no idea—”

“I love you too.” You kissed him again, laughing into it, both of you spinning slightly on unsteady skates and unsteady legs, the whole world around you a blur of noise and lights and bodies celebrating. Jay found you both seconds later, breathless, helmet already off, and for one suspended moment you weren’t sure what he was going to do — and then he just pulled both of you into him at once, one arm around each of your necks, dragging you both into a hug that nearly took all three of you down onto the ice. “WE WON,” he was screaming, not really to either of you specifically, just into the air, just because the feeling needed somewhere to go. “We actually won—”

He pulled back enough to look between the two of you, something in his face gone fully soft for the first time in months, no wariness left in it at all. “I’m happy for you two,” he said, breathless, genuine, loud enough that you both heard it clearly even over the noise of the whole arena. “I mean that. I’m actually happy.”

“Jongseong—”

“Don’t make this weird, I already feel weird saying it.” But he was grinning, fully, easily, pulling Jungwon into a separate hug, a real one this time, no stiffness left in it at all, clapping him hard on the back. “You’re a hell of a center, Yang. Best one this program’s had in years. Maybe ever.”

“Means a lot, coming from you.”

“It should.” Jay pulled back, studying him for a second, something decided and certain settling into his face. “I talked to Coach last week. Before tonight, actually — wanted to wait and see how things played out between us first, didn’t want it to feel like I was just handing it to you out of guilt.” He took a breath. “You’re gonna be assistant captain next year. I already told him that’s what I want. You earned it. On the ice, and — yeah. Off it too, eventually. I see that now.” Jungwon stared at him for a second, something overwhelmed moving across his face, and then he just laughed, short and disbelieving and entirely happy. “Good,” he said, simply, because there wasn’t really a bigger word that could hold everything underneath it. “Good,” Jay agreed, grinning, and pulled him into one more hug, and over his shoulder his eyes found yours, warm, settled, twenty-one years of being twins finally feeling whole again underneath all of it.

The ice stayed full of celebration for a long time after that — Jake hoisting the game puck over his head like a trophy, Riki crying openly and loudly and without a single ounce of shame about it, Sunghoon finding Sunoo at the glass and kissing him in front of the entire arena with none of his old hesitation left, Heeseung quietly recording all of it on his phone because someone, he kept saying, needed to actually remember this properly. You stood at the center of it all in Jungwon’s jersey, his arm around your shoulders, your brother laughing somewhere beside you, and let yourself feel, fully and without reservation, exactly how far all of you had come to get here — through secrets and silence and the worst fight any of you had ever had, into something that finally, finally, felt whole.

“Soon,” Jungwon murmured, against your temple, echoing the word you’d both used all season as a promise for later. “Remember when we kept saying soon?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not soon anymore.” He kissed your temple, easy, certain, home. “It’s just now. It’s just us. For real, finally, out loud, in front of everyone.”

“Yeah,” you said again, smiling so wide it ached, watching the chaos of the best night of the entire season swirl around you both. “Yeah. It really is.”

⋆。˚ lacey speaks!! that’s a wrap! thank you so much for giving this fic your time. i hope you loved these characters as much as i loved writing them. don’t forget to leave a comment if you enjoyed it—it always makes me so happy to read them. 🤍

“I am tying my laces. I’m tying them and panicking. Multitasking.” Riki yanked the lace tight enough that the eyelets groaned, then immediately loosened it again, frowning down at his own skate like it had personally wronged him. The locker room around them was already half full — upperclassmen moving with the unhurried, proprietary ease of guys who’d done this a hundred times, freshmen moving like they were trying not to be noticed taking up space. Jungwon recognized the difference in himself too. He was sitting very still. Still felt safer than fidgeting.

“You made first line at your old club team,” Jungwon said. “Twice.”

“That’s youth hockey. This is — “ Riki gestured vaguely at the room, at the Blackwood crest stenciled above the doorway, at the rows of stalls with nameplates that weren’t theirs yet. “This is the actual NCAA. This is Park Jongseong’s team. You know what happens to freshmen who embarrass themselves in front of Park Jongseong?”

“What happens?”

“I don’t know, that’s the scary part. Nobody’s ever told me. It’s implied.”

Jungwon almost smiled. He didn’t, because smiling felt like it would let some of the pressure out of his chest that he was using, very deliberately, to keep himself focused. He’d wanted this — wanted it the specific, single-minded way he wanted most things, which was to say completely, with no real plan for what to do with himself if it didn’t happen. Three years of juniors hockey, two recruiting visits, one decision that had felt less like a choice and more like the only door that had ever made sense to walk through. And now here he was, lacing up in a locker room three thousand miles from anywhere that had ever felt like home, next to a guy who’d been his roommate for four days and already felt like the only stable thing in the building. “You’re quiet,” Riki said, which was rich, coming from him.

“I’m always quiet.”

“You’re quiet like you’re thinking too hard about something. There’s a difference.” Riki finally got both skates tied to his satisfaction and straightened up, rolling his shoulders. He’d filled out over the summer — they both had, the strength program had made sure of that — but he still moved like someone who hadn’t quite caught up to his own height yet, all elbows and momentum. “What are you thinking about?”

“Not throwing up.”

“Liar. You’ve never thrown up in your life. You’re, like, constitutionally incapable of it. It’s annoying, actually, now that I say it out loud.”

The door to the locker room swung open before Jungwon could answer, and the easy noise of the room dropped by half — not silence, just a recalibration, the particular hush that happens when the person who matters most walks in. Jungwon knew who it was before he turned his head. He’d watched enough Blackwood game tape over the summer to recognize the walk alone.

Park Jongseong didn’t look like he was trying to be intimidating. That was, Jungwon would come to understand, exactly what made him intimidating. He had a stick bag over one shoulder and a coffee in his other hand and he said “morning” to about six people on his way to his stall, easy, unbothered, like a guy who already knew exactly how good he was and had stopped needing to perform it. “That’s him,” Riki whispered, entirely unnecessarily.

“I know who it is.”

“I’m just saying. That’s him.”

Jay — Jungwon had heard it a dozen times already, never once heard anyone call him Jongseong outside of a coach’s clipboard — dropped his bag at the stall with his name already on it, the one with three years of tape residue on the nameplate, and finally let his eyes drift over the room. Cataloguing. Jungwon recognized the look because it was one he used himself, the assessment of who was solid and who was nervous and who might be a problem. His eyes landed on Jungwon and Riki for a second longer than anyone else. “You two. Yang and Nishimura?”

“Yes, captain,” Riki said, too fast.

Something flickered at the corner of Jay’s mouth — not quite a smile, the suggestion of one filed away for later use. “Heard a lot about you both this summer. Coach won’t stop talking about the center from the Japan program.” A nod at Jungwon. “We’ll see if it’s true on the ice.”

“It’s true,” Riki said, before Jungwon could decide whether to say anything at all. “He’s annoying about it. He’s, like, suspiciously good.”

“Suspiciously good freshmen are my favorite kind.” Jay’s gaze held on Jungwon another beat — not unkind, just thorough, the way you’d look at a piece of equipment you were deciding whether to trust. “Don’t let me down out there.”

“I won’t,” Jungwon said, and meant it more than he’d meant almost anything in his life. Jay moved on, already greeting someone else by name across the room, and Riki exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for the entire exchange. “Okay. Okay, that was — he seems normal. Chill, even. I was told there’d be a speech.”

“There will be,” said a voice from the next row of stalls, and a guy Jungwon recognized from the roster as Jake leaned around the partition, grinning. Sunghoon, beside him, didn’t look up from where he was meticulously taping his stick, but he was clearly listening. “The speech isn’t till tonight. Initiation.”

“What speech?”

“You’ll see.” Jake’s grin widened in a way that should have been more reassuring than it was. “It’s a Blackwood tradition. Captain gives the rookies the rules. Most of it’s normal stuff — don’t skip lifts, don’t talk to the football team unless you’re trying to start something, don’t be the reason we lose the Founders Cup.” He paused, and Jungwon had the distinct sense that the pause was load-bearing. “And then there’s the other rule.”

“What other rule?”

Sunghoon spoke without looking up. “You’ll see.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Because it’s funnier this way,” Jake said, and went back to his own laces, whistling something tuneless, leaving Riki staring after him with the look of a man who’d just been told there was a trapdoor somewhere in the room and no further information.

Tryouts were, in the most literal sense, just hockey. Jungwon had played enough of it in enough rinks across enough countries that the ice itself never scared him — the cold air in his lungs, the particular silence of a puck gliding before the slap of someone’s stick broke it, the geometry of a give-and-go executed clean. That part of him was calm. Had always been calm. It was the only part of him that ever fully was. What he hadn’t expected was how fast Coach Anders moved them through drills clearly designed to see who flinched. Full-ice give-and-gos at speed, odd-man rushes with no warning who was getting the puck, a three-on-two read where half the freshmen visibly hesitated at the blue line and got benched for the rest of the rep without a word of explanation.

Jungwon didn’t hesitate. He’d decided somewhere over the summer — quietly, the way he decided most things — that hesitation was the one thing he could not afford to bring to this ice, because everyone here had a reason to think a freshman center didn’t belong on the top unit, and the only argument he had against that was the one he could make with his stick.

By the third hour, he’d noticed Jay watching him specifically. Not constantly. Just at the moments that mattered — the give-and-go where Jungwon held the puck a half-second longer than the drill called for, reading the lane instead of dumping it the way the play sheet suggested, and put it through a gap that hadn’t technically been there until he made it be there. Jay didn’t say anything. He just watched, and then skated to center ice for the next rep, and Jungwon understood that the watching was its own kind of conversation.

Riki, for his part, was finding his footing the louder way — a highlight-reel one-timer in the third drill that got a few sticks tapping the ice in approval, then immediately undercut by tripping over the blue line in the very next rep and going down hard enough that the whole rink heard it. “I’m fine,” he announced to no one, from the ice, before anyone asked.

“Nobody asked,” Jake called from the bench.

“I could feel the concern radiating off this rink and I wanted to address it.”

By the time Coach blew the final whistle, Jungwon’s legs were a kind of tired that felt less like exhaustion and more like proof of something. He skated to the bench beside Riki, who collapsed onto it like his skeleton had personally given up on him, and only then let himself look toward center ice, where Jay was talking to Coach with the easy, low-voiced confidence of someone who’d be reporting the freshman roster’s worth in about four sentences. “You. Center.” Coach’s voice cut across the rink, and Jungwon’s head came up before he’d even registered being addressed. “Yang. Get over here.”

Riki nudged him so hard he nearly went face-first into the boards. “Go, go, go—” Jungwon skated over, suddenly aware of his own pulse in a way he hadn’t been for three hours of actual hockey. Coach Anders had a clipboard he wasn’t looking at and an expression Jungwon couldn’t read, and Jay stood beside him with his arms crossed, unreadable in a different, more deliberate way.

“First line,” Coach said. “Center. You’ll be playing with Jongseong on your wing.” For a second the words didn’t fully land — not because Jungwon didn’t understand them, but because some part of him had been so braced for a different sentence that this one needed a moment to be believed. First line. As a freshman. He knew, distantly, the way you know a fact rather than feel it, that this didn’t happen. Not at a program like this. Not in week one. “Thank you, Coach,” he managed.

“Don’t thank me. Earn it every single day or I’ll pull you so fast you won’t see it coming.” Anders said it without heat, like a fact of weather, and walked off toward the next conversation he had to have. Which left Jungwon standing on the ice across from Jay, alone, in the particular quiet of a rink emptying out around them. Jay studied him for a second. “You know what this means.”

“That I don’t get to be bad at this.”

“That you don’t get to be bad at this,” Jay agreed, something almost like approval moving across his face. “I don’t care that you’re a freshman. I care that you’re good, and I think you’re about to be the best center this program’s had in four years, and I need to know if I can build a line around you that doesn’t fall apart in November.” He held out a glove. “Can I?” Jungwon looked at it for half a second longer than the gesture probably warranted, and then knocked his own glove against it. “Yeah. You can.”

“Good.” Jay’s mouth did the almost-smile thing again, fuller this time. “Welcome to the Wolves, Yang. Don’t make me regret this.” He skated off toward the tunnel, and Jungwon stood there a moment longer than he needed to, letting it settle — the ice under his skates, the weight of the line Jay had just put on him, the particular feeling of being trusted by someone whose trust clearly didn’t come cheap. He thought, with the small, private satisfaction of a goal he’d set for himself and quietly hit: I want him to keep thinking that about me.

The Den (the ice hockey frat) at seven that evening was unrecognizable from the version Jungwon had toured during his recruiting visit — that one had been clean, staged, every surface wiped down for parents. This one had thirty hockey players packed into a living room that smelled like body spray and old pizza, somebody’s portable speaker playing something with too much bass, and a framed photo on the wall by the staircase that Jungwon’s eyes kept catching on without quite knowing why. Two kids, maybe ten years old, matching gap-toothed grins, one of them holding a hockey stick taller than he was and the other holding nothing, hands on her hips like she was supervising. He recognized Jay immediately even at that age — something about the set of the jaw hadn’t changed at all. He didn’t know who the girl was. Didn’t think about it past a beat of mild curiosity before Riki elbowed him in the ribs and the room’s energy shifted, everyone finding a seat or a wall to lean against, because Jay had walked to the front of the room with the specific posture of a man about to give a speech he’d given many times before.

“Alright. Rookies, eyes up. Everyone else, you’ve heard this, shut up and let me say it anyway.” A ripple of laughter from the upperclassmen, like the joke was older than Jungwon’s time at Blackwood. Jay waited it out, unbothered, then continued. “Rule one. You do not skip lifts. I don’t care what your high school strength coach told you, you skip lifts here and you will feel it in February when you’re getting run over by a sophomore from BC who didn’t.”

“Rule two.” A few guys mouthed it along with him, clearly by memory. “You do not embarrass this program. Not at parties, not on campus, not on Twitter, God help you if it’s Twitter. What you do reflects on all of us, whether you like that or not.”

“Rule three. You do not start anything with the football team. I don’t care who started it actually, I don’t care who’s right, you walk away, because Coach has had that exact conversation with their coach four times already and I am tired of being there for it.”

The room had loosened by now, a low murmur of guys who’d heard this annually finishing his sentences under their breath, Jake outright mouthing along with theatrical solemnity like he was reciting a pledge. Jay let it happen for a second, something almost fond in it, before his expression shifted — not harder, exactly, but more deliberate. He turned, and Jungwon watched him look at the framed photo on the wall, then back at the room. “And the last one.” His voice didn’t get louder. If anything it got quieter, which made the whole room quiet down to match it. “You do not touch my sister.”

A groan went up from at least eight different directions, good-natured, well-worn. “Bro, we know,” Jake called out, not unkindly. “You say this every single year.”

“And I’ll keep saying it every single year,” Jay said, “until one of you proves me wrong by not needing to hear it.”

“It’s literally tattooed into our brains at this point,” Heeseung put in from somewhere near the back. “We could say it for you.”

“Then say it with me.” A few scattered, half-joking voices did, off-rhythm, and Jay let himself almost-smile at the chaos of it before his gaze swept the room one more time and landed, with what felt to Jungwon like unmistakable precision, on the freshmen. On him. On Riki.

“I mean it,” Jay said, and there was no joke left in his voice at all. “I don’t care how funny you think it is. I don’t care if you think it’s a bit. She’s not a joke, and she’s not available, and any of you who think you’re the exception are going to find out real fast that I am not.” Nobody laughed at that part.

Jungwon nodded along with the rest of the rookies, the universal gesture of understood, no problem, why would this ever be an issue — and meant it. He filed it next to the lifts and the football team and the Twitter rule. A reasonable ask from a captain who’d clearly built his entire program on trust, and Jungwon had just shaken that man’s hand on the ice four hours ago and told him he could be trusted with it.

—

The thing nobody told Jungwon about Blackwood — not the recruiters, not the campus tour, not the glossy athletics brochure with its drone shots of the rink at sunset — was how much of actual freshman life happened in the gaps between hockey. He’d pictured it, vaguely, as practice and class and sleep, in that order, on a loop. Nobody mentioned the part where the Den ran on its own gravity, where Tuesday afternoons meant six guys sprawled across two couches watching game tape with the volume too low to actually hear, where Heeseung had apparently appointed himself the unofficial keeper of a coffee machine he guarded like a dragon, and where Jake’s primary personality trait, three days in, appeared to be finding new and increasingly elaborate ways to make Riki regret saying anything out loud, ever. “I’m just saying,” Jake said, sprawled upside down across the arm of the couch in a way that looked actively bad for his spine, “if Coach moves you to second line because you keep tripping over blue lines, that’s not bullying. That’s documentation.”

“It happened once.”

“It’s happened twice. I have a list.”

“You don’t have a list.”

“I have a mental list. Mentally, it’s very organized.” Jungwon sat at the kitchen table with his economics textbook open to a page he’d read four times without absorbing a single word of, partly because the syllabus had assigned something genuinely dense for week one, and partly because he was distracted by the particular ease of the room around him — the way nobody here had to perform anything. He’d grown up around hockey locker rooms his whole life and they were rarely this loose this early. The Den had three years of inside jokes baked into its walls already and he and Riki were still learning the language, but nobody seemed to mind teaching it to them. “You’re doing the econ reading,” Heeseung observed, dropping into the chair across from him with his own mug. “On a Wednesday. Before it’s due.”

“Is that not normal?”

“It’s very not normal. Sunghoon hasn’t opened a textbook since orientation and he has a 3.7.”

“That’s a lie I haven’t fact-checked because it’s funnier to let it stand,” came Sunghoon’s voice from the doorway, where he’d appeared with the specific quiet menace of someone who could apparently materialize without anyone noticing the approach — Jungwon was starting to learn that about him, three days in. He had a bag of equipment over one shoulder, clearly back from a gear fitting, and he dropped it by the door without much ceremony. “Captain back yet?” Heeseung asked him.

“Nope. Said he’d be back for dinner. Something about—” The front door opened before Sunghoon finished the sentence, and for a second Jungwon assumed it was Jay, the way the whole kitchen’s attention shifted toward the sound the way it had in the locker room three days ago — that same recalibration. But the voice that came through wasn’t Jay’s.

“Whoever ate my leftovers from the fridge, I want you to know I saw the container in the recycling and I am not currently choosing violence, but I reserve the right to change my mind.” Jake, upside-down on the couch arm, didn’t even look over. “That was Heeseung.”

“It was not me—”

“It was absolutely you, you had pad thai breath for an hour.” You walked into the kitchen mid-argument with the easy, unbothered air of someone who’d clearly been doing this — walking into rooms full of hockey players bickering — for years, long enough that it had stopped registering as anything except background noise. You had a tote bag over one shoulder that looked like it weighed more than it should, your hair pulled back in a way that suggested you’d come straight from somewhere academic rather than anywhere that required effort, and you dropped the bag onto the counter with the same casual proprietary ease Jay had dropped his stick bag in the locker room three days before. Like this kitchen belonged to you too. Jungwon would learn, eventually, that it basically did.

Jake was off the couch before you’d even finished setting the bag down, crossing the kitchen in three long strides to throw an arm around your shoulders and steer you half a step sideways like you were a piece of furniture he was rearranging. “There she is. The menace. The legend.”

“Get off me, you’re sweaty.”

“I showered.”

“You did not shower, I can smell the rink on you from here.” You ducked out from under his arm without much real effort, swatting at his side, but there was no real heat behind it — just the specific, well-worn ease of two people who’d clearly done this exact bit more times than either of them could count. Jungwon filed the whole exchange away without quite meaning to: the easy physical familiarity, the way Jake could throw an arm around you without either of you thinking twice about it, the way you were so plainly, completely unbothered by him. The kid-sister treatment. He understood it the second he saw it, and understood, with slightly less clarity but no less certainty, that he did not want to be filed under the same category as Jake. “Rude. I carry that smell with pride. It’s eau de championship.”

“It’s eau de you skipped the showers because Sunghoon was hogging the good one.”

“That is also true.” Jake didn’t even pretend to be offended, dropping back onto the couch with the satisfied air of a man who’d gotten exactly the interaction he wanted. “Anyway. Heeseung ate your leftovers.”

“I did not—”

“You’re new,” you said, cutting clean through Heeseung’s protest, not turning around yet, like you’d clocked Jungwon in your peripheral vision the second you walked in and simply hadn’t gotten to him yet on your list of priorities. You opened the fridge, presumably to assess the damage to whatever container had survived the day. “I — yeah.” Smooth, Jungwon thought, distantly, unimpressed with himself. “Jungwon. Yang Jungwon.”

“The freshman center Coach won’t stop talking about.” You shut the fridge, finally turning fully, and Jungwon had approximately one second to decide what to do with his face before you were looking directly at him, and the decision he landed on was: nothing. Stay still. Don’t give anything away that you haven’t earned the right to see yet. “Jongseong mentioned you.”

“He did?”

“Mentioned might be generous. He said, and I’m quoting, ‘there’s a freshman who might actually be good,’ which from him is basically a sonnet.” You said it with the specific dry affection of someone who clearly adored your brother and found him slightly ridiculous in equal measure, and something about the way you talked about him — easy, unguarded, like there was no universe where loyalty to him was even a question — made Jungwon’s read on the whole Den click a little further into place. This wasn’t just the captain’s sister stopping by. This was someone who’d grown up in these rooms the way the rest of them had grown up on the ice. He noted, too, distantly, that you’d called him Jongseong. Nobody else in this house had used that name once in three days. To everyone here he was Jay, or Captain, or — on a bad day — Jongseong said with theatrical dread before someone got benched. You said it like it was just his name. Maybe, Jungwon thought, to you, it just was.

“I’ll try to live up to the sonnet.” That got something out of you — not quite a laugh, but the version of one that exists right before it, a flicker at the corner of your mouth that you seemed to decide not to fully commit to. “You’re better off not trying. He’ll find a new thing to be insufferable about within a week.” You looked past him, toward Riki, who’d gone very quiet on the couch in a way that suggested he was taking detailed mental notes for later interrogation. “You’re the other one. Nishimura.”

“Riki. You can call me Riki. Everyone does. It’s — yeah, Riki’s fine.” Riki, Jungwon noted with some private amusement, had apparently lost several IQ points in real time.

“Riki,” you repeated, like you were filing it. “Heads up — if Jongseong catches you eating my leftovers too, he’ll actually do something about it. I’ve made peace with these guys being lost causes.” A gesture at Jake and Heeseung, who both made identical offended noises. “Freshmen still have a chance at redemption.”

“Noted,” Riki managed. You grabbed something from the cabinet — crackers, Jungwon registered without really meaning to register it, the kind in the blue box, which felt like a stupidly specific detail to be cataloguing about someone he’d known for ninety seconds — and headed for the doorway, pausing there the way people do when they’re about to leave a room but haven’t quite committed to it yet. “Anyway. Welcome to the circus.” You said it to the room generally, but your eyes caught Jungwon’s for one more half-second on the way out, not lingering, not anything, just a normal goodbye glance that any of these guys would have gotten in your place. “Try not to let them ruin you too fast.”

And then you were gone, down the hall, the sound of a door somewhere upstairs — Jay’s room, Jungwon would learn — clicking shut behind you, and the kitchen exhaled back into its normal noise like nothing had happened at all. Nothing had happened. Jungwon was aware of that with total clarity. A girl had walked into a kitchen, made a joke about leftovers, learned his name, and left. This was, by any reasonable measure, the least significant interaction he’d had all week, several orders of magnitude less significant than making first line. He looked back down at his econ textbook. Read the same paragraph a fifth time. Still didn’t absorb a word of it. “Well,” Riki said, from the couch, in a voice pitched for exactly one listener. “That’s unfortunate.”

“What is.”

“Don’t.” Riki sat up properly for the first time in twenty minutes, fixing Jungwon with the specific look of someone who had just watched something happen and intended to make sure Jungwon knew he’d watched it. “I watched your whole face do a thing just now.”

“My face didn’t do anything.”

“Your face did several things. I counted at least three things.” Riki lowered his voice further, glancing toward the doorway like the danger might still be listening. “Jungwon. Buddy. My friend. My roommate, who I have grown to care about in four short days. That’s Jongseong’s sister.”

“I know whose sister she is.”

“You know whose sister she is and your face still did the thing.”

“There was no thing.”

“Heeseung,” Riki called out, not breaking eye contact with Jungwon, “did his face do a thing just now?”

“Absolutely it did,” Heeseung said, without looking up from his coffee, with the weary tone of a man who’d apparently already seen this exact movie play out at the Den before and knew exactly how it ended. “I give it two weeks before he’s carrying her bags.”

“I’m not carrying anyone’s bags.”

“Three days,” Jake corrected, from the couch, finally rolling himself upright. “I give it three days.” Jungwon closed his textbook with more force than the moment strictly required, ignoring all three of them with the particular dignity of a man who knew, somewhere underneath the irritation, that they weren’t wrong about anything, and that the worst part — the part he had absolutely no intention of admitting to a room that would never let him hear the end of it — was that some quiet, certain part of him had already decided three days wasn’t going to be nearly long enough to talk himself out of it.

He’d shaken Jay’s hand on the ice. Told him he could be trusted. He thought about the blue crackers. The flicker at the corner of your mouth. The door clicking shut down the hall. That’s unfortunate, he thought again, and didn’t disagree with himself even once.

—

“—and then he just left. Didn’t say bye, didn’t say see you later, nothing. Just picked up his gear bag like a man fleeing a crime scene and walked out of the gym.”

“Sunoo.”

“I’m not done.”

“You’ve been not-done for four blocks.”

“Because it’s a four-block story, Y/N, I don’t control the geography.” Sunoo hopped over a crack in the sidewalk without breaking stride, somehow managing to keep his energy at a near-constant boil despite the fact that they’d left your dorm twenty minutes ago and he hadn’t paused for breath since. The two of you had shared a floor since orientation week freshman year — adjacent rooms, actually, close enough that you’d learned to recognize each other’s footsteps in the hallway — and in that time you’d discovered that Sunoo processed his entire emotional life out loud, in real time, usually at a volume better suited to indoor voices. “So I’m in the gym. Minding my business. Doing my little cooldown stretches because I’m a responsible adult who stretches—”

“You stretch for ninety seconds and call it a cooldown.”

“It’s quality over quantity. And Sunghoon’s there finishing his lift, and he’s got his shirt half off because he’s toweling down, and I make eye contact with him for one — one — completely normal, completely platonic second, and the man turns the color of a fire alarm and leaves the building.”

“Maybe he had somewhere to be.”

“Y/N. He works out at the same gym at the same time every single day. He had nowhere to be. He had somewhere to flee.”

You laughed — you couldn’t help it, you’d been laughing on and off for four blocks — and adjusted the strap of your bag, the night air doing that early-fall thing where it hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to be warm or cold, which meant you’d both left your jackets at the dorm and were now regretting it in real time, walking faster than necessary partly to get there and partly to generate body heat. The Den was eight minutes from campus if you cut through the quad, less if you didn’t care about getting grass stains on your shoes, which tonight, you decided, you didn’t. “Maybe,” you said, “and I’m just spitballing here, he likes you, and that’s why he ran away.”

“That tracks with literally zero of his behavior.”

“It tracks with all of his behavior. You just don’t want to hear it because then you’d have to do something about it instead of getting to complain to me for four blocks.” Sunoo opened his mouth to argue, visibly reconsidered, and closed it again, which from him was basically a confession. “Okay, fine, hypothetically, if that were true, what would I even — no. Don’t answer that. I don’t want strategy tonight. Tonight I want to dance and forget Sunghoon exists for at least ninety minutes, and you’re going to help me do that.”

“Deal.”

“What’s your goal for tonight?”

“My goal,” you said, with the specific, deliberate casualness of someone who had absolutely thought about this on the walk over, “is to get laid. That’s it. That’s the whole goal. Low bar, very achievable, I’m not trying to overcomplicate my life.”

“A woman with priorities. I respect it.” Sunoo glanced sideways at you, taking in — properly, for what felt like the first time since you’d left your room — what you were actually wearing, like the conversation had only just given him a reason to look. “Okay, and might I say, dressed for the occasion.” You’d put actual thought into it, more than you’d admit to him directly: a dress that hit exactly the right amount of effortless while having taken twenty-five minutes of very much not effortless decision-making in front of your mirror, dark and fitted in the way that did the most work with the least amount of obvious trying, paired with the kind of confidence that came from knowing you looked good and choosing not to make a big deal out of it. You weren’t dressing for anyone specific. You were dressing for the version of tonight where something interesting happened, which felt like a reasonable thing to dress for on a Friday. “I clean up alright.”

“You clean up like a public health hazard, is what I’m saying, someone’s going to need medical attention.” Sunoo bumped his shoulder against yours, grinning. “Jongseong’s gonna take one look at that dress and have an aneurysm.”

“Jongseong is not going to see this dress, because Jongseong is going to be busy being captain and yelling at freshmen about beer pong etiquette, and if he does see it, I will simply lie and say I’ve been wearing a cardigan all night.”

“Bold strategy.”

“It’s worked for four years.”

You could hear the party before you could see it — bass thudding low and steady through the walls of the Den a full block out, the specific texture of a hundred-plus people’s noise blending into one continuous hum, punctuated occasionally by something sharper, a shout, a laugh, the unmistakable crash of something glass that nobody seemed to care about. The porch light was on. Somebody had strung up actual string lights along the railing at some point this week, which felt like a Heeseung touch, the kind of small unnecessary effort he’d deny making if you asked him directly.

The front door was propped open with somebody’s shoe — a genuinely upsetting choice of doorstop that you chose not to think too hard about — and you and Sunoo stepped into the wall of heat and noise that was the Den at full party capacity, the living room packed wall to wall, the kitchen counter doing actual structural duty as a makeshift bar, someone’s questionable music choices blaring from the speaker Jake had clearly hooked his phone up to because nobody else picked songs this aggressively. “Y/N! Sunoo!” Jake’s voice cut through the noise before you’d even gotten three steps in, and he appeared out of the crowd with a red cup in each hand, already holding one out toward you like he’d been anticipating your arrival. “You look — okay, wow, you look like you’re trying to put me in an early grave, what is this.”

“It’s a dress, Jake.”

“It’s a weapon, is what it is. Does Jongseong know you own this?”

“Jongseong does not get a vote on my wardrobe.”

“Jongseong would absolutely like a vote on your wardrobe, that’s the whole — “ Jake gestured vaguely, encompassing, you assumed, the entire premise of his existence as Jay’s friend and teammate. “You know what, never mind, not my fight. Drink.” He pressed the cup into your hand without further ceremony, the same easy, brotherly overfamiliarity you’d gotten from him since you were eighteen, no different than if you were one of his actual sisters. “Sunoo, you too, don’t make this weird by refusing.”

“I wasn’t going to refuse, I was going to say thank you, but go off.”

“Where is he then?” you asked, scanning the crowd out of habit more than real interest — you didn’t actually need to find Jongseong, you knew he’d find you eventually, the way he always did at these things, materializing at your elbow within the first twenty minutes like a smoke detector going off. “Tell me he’s not doing the thing where he stands by the door checking IDs like he personally runs a liquor board.”

“He was doing that an hour ago, yes,” Jake confirmed, entirely too pleased about it. “Sunghoon talked him down. Mostly. He’s somewhere being captain at people. You’ll find him or he’ll find you, you know how it goes.”

“Tragically, I do.” You took a sip of whatever was in the cup — something fruity and far too strong, exactly the kind of drink this house specialized in and refused to ever improve upon — and let Sunoo tug you further into the crowd, already scanning for Sunghoon with the specific, badly-disguised intensity of someone who’d claimed thirty seconds ago that he didn’t want to think about him at all tonight.

That was when you felt it. The look. You’d grown up around enough hockey players to have a very specific radar for being looked at — the difference between the guys who’d known you since you were twelve and treated you like furniture and literally anyone else — and this one didn’t register as either. It wasn’t loud about it. It wasn’t a guy elbowing his friend to point you out. It was just — there, steady, from somewhere across the room, and when you turned your head to actually find it, you already half-knew, with the strange certainty of a feeling you hadn’t quite earned the right to yet, exactly whose eyes you were going to find.

Jungwon was leaning against the wall near the kitchen doorway with a cup he didn’t seem especially interested in drinking, half a conversation happening beside him that he clearly wasn’t fully present for, and when your eyes landed on his, he didn’t look away first. Didn’t do the thing most guys did — caught looking, quick recovery, pretend it never happened. He just held it, calm, unhurried, like he’d already decided there was no version of tonight where pretending made sense. You looked away first. You weren’t entirely sure why. “Okay,” Sunoo said, very close to your ear, having apparently clocked the entire exchange in the two seconds it took, “that’s new.”

“What’s new.”

“You know exactly what’s new. Freshman center, eleven o’clock, doing the eye thing.”

“There’s no eye thing.”

“There is extensive eye thing, I watched it happen, I have a front row seat to eye things, it’s basically my major.” Sunoo’s grin was doing something genuinely unholy now. “Go talk to him.”

“I came here to find a hookup, not start a whole — situation.”

“Maybe the hookup is the situation. Have you considered that the universe is just handing you a gift and you’re standing here arguing with the delivery guy.” You didn’t answer that, mostly because you didn’t have a good one ready, and let yourself get pulled deeper into the party instead — toward the dancing, toward whatever Heeseung and a sophomore defenseman were arguing about near the speaker, toward the specific chaos of a Friday at the Den that you’d witnessed probably two hundred times across four years and never once gotten tired of. You were aware, the entire time, of exactly where in the room he was standing.

“Absolutely not.” Jungwon said.

“Jungwon. Buddy. Best friend. Light of my life.” Riki had a hand wrapped around his wrist and was hauling him bodily toward the makeshift beer pong table set up at the end of the kitchen counter, where a sophomore defenseman Jungwon vaguely recognized from tape was loudly defending his table’s undefeated record to anyone who’d listen. “You cannot stand against this wall for the entire night doing your broody freshman thing. People will start asking questions.”

“I’m not doing a broody freshman thing.”

“You are doing the broodiest possible version of a freshman thing, you’ve had the same face on for forty minutes.” Riki deposited him at the end of the table with the satisfaction of a man completing a difficult task. “Play. Socialize. Be a person.” He played. He was, infuriatingly, good at beer pong too — some part of his brain that processed angles and trajectories for a living refused to turn off just because the stakes had dropped to a plastic cup — which meant by the fourth round he’d had more to drink than he’d planned on, that loose, warm, slightly-too-honest feeling starting to settle in behind his eyes, the kind where his usual careful filter on his own face got a little less reliable.

Which was, in retrospect, bad timing for the exact moment he looked up and found you across the room, talking to some guy he didn’t recognize — not a hockey player, built wrong for it, probably someone’s friend from another house — who’d planted himself directly in your space with the specific posture of a guy who thought he was being charming. You had your arms crossed, half-smiling in a way Jungwon was already learning to read as entertained, not interested, but the guy didn’t seem to be picking up on the distinction, leaning in another inch, saying something that made you roll your eyes.

Something hot and entirely unreasonable moved through Jungwon’s chest. He had no claim to that reaction. He knew that, even loose and warm and three cups in, some clear-eyed part of him filing the feeling under not yours to have even as it refused to go away. “Oh, this is good,” Riki said, following his line of sight, delighted. “Your face is doing the thing again. The thing’s back.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m not even mad, I just want to document it for later—”

“Sink it or pass the ball, Nishimura.”

Across the room, Jay had clocked the same conversation about four seconds before Jungwon had, and unlike Jungwon, Jay had absolutely zero hesitation about what to do with that information. He crossed the room with the unbothered, unhurried walk of a man who knew exactly how much weight his presence carried in this house, and inserted himself into the conversation with a hand clapped flat on the guy’s shoulder. “Hey, man. You go to Whitfield?” Jay’s voice was friendly. Jungwon, even from a distance, did not trust it for a single second.

“Uh — yeah, I’m here with—”

“Cool, cool. Hey, quick question, completely unrelated.” Jay’s hand was still on the guy’s shoulder, steering him a polite half-step back from you, the whole motion smooth enough to look almost accidental. “You know whose house this is?”

“…Yours?”

“Mine. And that’s my sister. So I’m gonna need you to go find your friends now, and I’m gonna need you to do it real fast, and we’re gonna both pretend this was a totally normal interaction. Sound good?” The guy looked between Jay and you for one confused second, visibly recalibrated his entire night, and excused himself with considerably less charm than he’d arrived with. “Jongseong.” You said it with the specific, long-suffering exhaustion of someone who’d watched this exact scene play out roughly forty times. “I was handling it.”

“You were handling it. I helped it get handled faster.”

“I didn’t need help.”

“Noted, for the record, and ignored, also for the record.” Jay dropped a kiss on the top of your head, entirely brotherly, entirely unbothered by your glare, and was gone again within seconds, already absorbed back into some conversation near the door, leaving you standing there with your arms still crossed, visibly debating whether being annoyed was worth the energy.

Jungwon watched the whole thing happen from the beer pong table with what he hoped looked like idle interest and definitely was not. He set his cup down. Told himself, with the particular conviction of a guy three drinks deep, that he was simply going to go say hello. Nothing more than that. A normal, low-stakes hello, the kind any teammate’s family member deserved. He was lying to himself and he knew it the entire walk across the room. “Your brother’s very committed to his bit,” he said, by way of greeting, and you turned, and something in your face shifted — not surprise exactly, more like you’d half-expected this, had maybe been tracking the same distance between you that he had.

“He’s been doing that since I was sixteen. I used to think it’d get old. It has not gotten old.” You studied him for a second, something assessing in it. “You’re not as drunk as Riki, but you’re not sober either.”

“Accurate.”

“Confident, though. Most freshmen don’t walk over here unprompted.” A small, deliberate pause. “Most freshmen don’t walk over here at all, actually. Jongseong’s speech tends to be memorable.”

“I remember the speech.” He held her gaze, steady, the warmth in his chest from earlier rearranging itself into something calmer and more certain now that he was actually standing in front of you. “I’m not doing anything the speech covers. We’re talking.”

“Just talking.”

“Just talking,” he agreed, and let the silence after that sit a beat longer than strictly comfortable, watching you decide what to do with it. You didn’t walk away. That, more than anything he’d noticed all night, told him something.

The conversation that followed wasn’t long — a few minutes, maybe, threaded between the noise of the party, you asking where he was from, him asking how long you’d lived in this exact chaos, the easy rhythm of two people figuring out they liked talking to each other more than either had planned on. But something underneath it had already shifted register, the air between you gone thick and obvious in the way that doesn’t need words to confirm it, and when you finally tipped your head toward the back hallway — toward the stairs, toward somewhere quieter — he didn’t hesitate even half a second before following.

The door to his room had barely clicked shut behind you before his hand found your jaw, tilting your face up to his, and he kissed you like he’d been thinking about it considerably longer than the twenty minutes you’d actually been talking — slow at first, testing, and then deeper when you made a small sound against his mouth that undid something careful in him. His tongue traced yours, unhurried despite the want clearly humming under his skin, like he had every intention of taking his time even though some other part of him was screaming to do anything but. “You sure about this?” he murmured, mouth dragging along your jaw, down the line of your throat.

“Jungwon.” Half a laugh, breathless already. “I dragged you up the stairs.”

“I know. Wanted to hear you say it anyway.”

He walked you back toward the bed with a hand splayed warm against the small of your back, and when the back of your knees hit the mattress he followed you down, settling his weight over you with a kind of deliberate control that made it very clear nothing about tonight was going to be rushed unless you wanted it to be. He kissed down the column of your throat, lingering at the spot where your pulse jumped under his mouth, and you felt the low sound that pulled out of you before you’d consciously decided to make it. “Pretty,” he said, against your skin, low, certain. “You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to do this.”

Clothes came off between kisses, unhurried despite the heat building under both your skins — his shirt first, then yours, his mouth finding your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder, lower, until his lips closed around one nipple and you arched up into him with a gasp that made him hum, pleased, against your chest. “There you go,” he murmured, glancing up at you through dark lashes, taking in the way your breath had gone shallow. “That’s it.” Your hands come up to him without thinking, sliding into his hair, pulling him closer, and that’s all it takes for the control he’s holding onto to slip just slightly. His mouth moves again, up your neck, along your jaw, back to your lips, kissing you deeper this time, less careful, more intent.His hands come up to your tits without hesitation, cupping them fully, thumbs dragging over your nipples, slow at first, like he’s testing, like he’s figuring out what you’ll do. You arch into him immediately. That’s all he needs. “There you go,” he says, softer now, watching your face. His mouth follows his hands, closing around one nipple, his tongue circling before he sucks, harder than you expect, and you gasp, your fingers tightening in his hair. He hums against you pleased. “That’s it,” he murmurs, pulling back just enough to look at you, his eyes darker now, focused in a way that makes your stomach flip. “Yeah— keep doing that—”

His hand slid down the length of your body, slow, deliberate, mapping you like he intended to remember every inch of it, until his fingers found your folds, already slick, and the broken little sound you made at the first slow drag of his fingers through your heat seemed to do something to him — his own breath catching, jaw tight. “Fuck,” he breathed, almost reverent, watching your face. “You’re so wet already.”

He worked you open slow, one finger and then a second, the slick drag of his fingers against your walls drawing soft, breathy moans out of you that he seemed determined to collect one by one, his thumb finding your clit and circling it in slow, deliberate pressure that had your hips rolling up against his hand before you could stop them. “Good girl,” he murmured, watching you fall apart under his hand with open, undisguised satisfaction. “Just like that. Let me hear you.” His fingers moving inside, not fast or rough — just steady, curling slightly inside you, hitting deeper and deeper, his thumb keeping that same pressure on your clit that makes your whole body tighten.

When he finally settled between your thighs, cock thick and aching, he paused at your entrance just long enough to catch your eyes, checking, certain even now. You nodded, breathless, and he sank into you slow, inch by inch, a low groan tearing out of his throat at the way your walls stretched tight and slick around him as he bottoms out. “Christ — “ His forehead dropped to your shoulder for a second, composure visibly fraying. “You feel — fuck, you feel so good.” His hand tightens on your hip. “Okay?”

“Yes,” you say, breathless. “Keep going—” He started slow, deep, grinding his hips into yours with a kind of controlled, deliberate rhythm that had you gasping his name within minutes, his lips finding your neck again, sucking a mark into the skin there like he wanted proof of tonight to last past morning. His hand found yours, lacing your fingers together against the sheets, and the gesture was somehow more intimate than anything else he’d done so far. “Look at me,” he said, voice rough, and when you did, his rhythm picked up, the tip of him dragging against that spot inside you that made your back arch off the mattress, his name falling out of you again, broken this time.

“That’s it,” he breathed, watching your face with a hunger that had nothing detached about it. “You’re doing so good. So good for me.” The praise undid you faster than anything else he’d done, your moans coming quicker, breathier, his own breathing gone ragged above you as he chased the same building heat, until you tipped over the edge with a cry muffled against his shoulder, your walls clenching tight around him. He groans against your neck when he feels it, his rhythm breaking, then turning rougher for a second, chasing it, hips stuttering as he spills into you, slow and shaking through the last of it.

For a long moment afterward, neither of you moved — his weight braced over you, both your chests heaving, his thumb tracing absent, unhurried circles against your hip like he wasn’t quite ready to stop touching you yet. “Okay,” you managed, eventually, into the quiet. “That was — “

“Yeah,” he said, and even breathless, even wrecked, there was something steady in his voice that you didn’t examine too closely. “Yeah. That was.”

You woke up in your own bed the next morning, which felt important somehow — you’d made a point of it, pulling your dress back on at some indecent hour and walking the eight minutes back to your dorm rather than staying the night, because staying the night implied something you weren’t ready to imply, even to yourself, even in the privacy of your own head. Sunoo had texted you four times between 1 AM and 8 AM, the last one just reading wake up I need details with three eyes emojis, and you lay there for a solid ten minutes staring at your ceiling before you worked up the nerve to open the thread.

sunoo: WAKE UP

sunoo: I saw you disappear with him

sunoo: Y/N I need details or I will actually die

You typed nothing happened and deleted it, because Sunoo had literally watched you walk up the stairs together and would know immediately you were lying, which somehow felt worse than just telling him the truth. you: ok don’t be weird about this

sunoo: I’m always weird about things. specify.

you: jungwon and I hooked up

sunoo: I KNEW IT I CALLED IT LAST NIGHT

you: it was a one time thing

sunoo: sure…

you: I’m serious. it doesn’t mean anything. he’s jongseong’s freshman, it literally cannot happen again

sunoo: ok but did he?? was he??

you: I’m not doing this with you over text

sunoo: COFFEE. TEN MINUTES. I NEED TO LOOK AT YOUR FACE WHEN YOU TELL ME

You did, eventually, tell him — over coffee, in the dining hall, with Sunoo leaning so far across the table that he nearly knocked over both your cups twice — and true to form, he listened to the entire thing with his chin in his hands and his eyes getting progressively wider, and at the end of it, instead of the appropriately scandalized reaction you’d been braced for, he just said, “okay, but you’re going to see him again.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re literally going to see him constantly, Y/N, he lives in the house you’re at four times a week. This isn’t a guy you can ghost. This is a guy who’s going to be physically present in your life on a near-daily basis.” You hadn’t fully thought that part through, if you were being honest. “It can just be normal. It happened, it was — fine, it was good, it was really good, actually, but it happened, and now we move on like adults.”

“Sure,” Sunoo said, in the tone of someone who did not believe a single word of that sentence but had decided it would be more fun to watch it fail than to argue with it now.

It took exactly four days for the first text to arrive, and you spent an embarrassing amount of those four days checking your phone more than you’d ever admit out loud, which you told yourself was just curiosity and nothing else.

jungwon: hope the exam went okay

You stared at the message for a solid thirty seconds before you fully placed what he meant — you’d mentioned, in passing, during some entirely unrelated moment that night at the party, something about a stats midterm you’d been stressed about, a single throwaway sentence buried in twenty minutes of conversation that had ended in considerably less conversation. You hadn’t expected him to remember it. You definitely hadn’t expected him to remember the date of it well enough to text four days later asking how it went.

you: it was fine. how did you remember that?

jungwon: you mentioned it

you: I mentioned it once. for like a second.

jungwon: I have a good memory

You looked at that for longer than it deserved, turning it over, trying to decide what it actually meant, before landing — deliberately, with the specific effort of someone building a case — on the explanation that required the least amount of feeling anything. He’s probably like this with everyone. Some guys are just attentive. It doesn’t mean anything specific about you. You’d seen guys remember small details about people they were trying to sleep with before; it was, in your admittedly limited experience, a fairly standard move. You typed back something easy, noncommittal, and didn’t think about it again. You thought about it again almost immediately.

The second time you saw him wasn’t planned, exactly, though you’d go on to realize much later that very little involving Jungwon ever was as unplanned as it looked in the moment. You’d come by the Den on a Tuesday to drop off a textbook Heeseung had borrowed weeks ago and conveniently never returned, and you found Jungwon at the kitchen table again, same spot as your first meeting, a laptop open in front of him and the specific glazed look of someone three hours into a problem set he hated. “Stats?” you asked, dropping into the chair across from him out of habit before you’d consciously decided to stay.

“Econ. Worse.” He didn’t look up right away, but something in his posture shifted, settled, like your presence had registered before he’d even confirmed it with his eyes. “How’d the exam actually go? You gave me a one-word answer over text and I don’t trust one-word answers.”

“It was fine. Genuinely. I got a 91.”

“That’s not fine, that’s good.” He finally looked up, and something about his face doing that — actual interest, actual attention, like your stats midterm was a real piece of information he wanted rather than small talk he was performing — made you feel exposed in a way you weren’t prepared for at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday. “What was the part you were stressed about?”

“The regression stuff. I always mess up the regression stuff.”

“Did you mess it up?”

“No, actually.”

“See.” Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, the same controlled almost-version of one you were starting to recognize as just how he looked when he was pleased about something he didn’t feel like performing loudly. “Told you you’d be fine.”

“You didn’t tell me anything, you texted me a four-word message four days after the fact.”

“I thought about it before that. I just didn’t text you about it before that.” You didn’t have an immediate response to that, which annoyed you more than the comment itself did, and you covered the gap by pulling Heeseung’s textbook out of your bag and setting it on the table with more force than necessary. “Anyway. This is Heeseung’s. Tell him I want it back faster next time, or I’m telling Coach he’s been using my notes to pass his sports psych class.”

“He’s been using your notes?”

“For two years. It’s our arrangement. I write good notes, he owes me eternal favors he never actually does.”

“I could text him for you. Tell him you stopped by.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t have to.” Jungwon said it simply, like the distinction mattered to him — not obligation, just preference — and went back to his laptop like the conversation had cost him nothing at all, which was somehow the part that unsettled you most as you let yourself back out the front door a few minutes later. He’s just like that, you told yourself, walking back across the quad. Considerate. It’s probably just a personality thing. You almost believed it.

It kept happening. That was the part you hadn’t planned for — not one specific moment you could point to and say this is when it became something, but an accumulation of small things that individually meant nothing and collectively meant something you weren’t ready to name. He started showing up. Not obviously, not in a way anyone could call out directly — he was just, increasingly, there, in the places you already were. You mentioned, once, in passing, that you liked the coffee place two blocks off campus better than the one on it, and the next time you walked into the campus one out of habit, you found him already in line, and when you raised an eyebrow he just said, “needed caffeine,” like that fully explained why a freshman hockey player with a packed practice schedule had wandered three blocks out of his way to a coffee shop you’d mentioned exactly once.

You came out of your Thursday lecture one week to find him leaning against the building’s brick exterior, hands in his pockets, looking entirely unbothered, like this was a totally normal place for him to be standing. “What are you doing here?”

“Was in the area.”

“Jungwon. This building is nowhere near the rink, nowhere near the Den, and nowhere near anything you have a reasonable excuse to be near. You don’t even have classes on this side of campus.”

“I have a class two buildings over.”

“At what time?”

“…Later.”

“How much later.”

“An hour and a half.” You’d laughed at that, properly laughed, the kind that surprised you because you hadn’t planned on finding it as funny as you did, and he’d just shrugged, unbothered by being caught, and walked you back toward the Den anyway like the ninety minutes he didn’t need to spend doing it were nothing at all to him.

You built explanations for every single one of these. He was nice. He was thoughtful with everyone — you’d seen him carry Riki’s gear bag without being asked, seen him remember Heeseung’s coffee order, seen him hold doors and notice things and generally exist as the kind of person who paid attention because that was simply who he was, not because of anything specific to you. He’s just like that, you told Sunoo, more than once, with increasing defensiveness each time. He’d do this for anyone. “Would he,” Sunoo said, unconvinced, the third time you tried the line on him. “Yes.”

“Has he stood outside any other girl’s lecture hall for ninety minutes?”

“I don’t know his entire schedule, Sunoo, I’m not his — I don’t track that.”

“You’re tracking it right now. You just told me it was a Thursday lecture and gave me a building name.” You hadn’t had a good answer for that one. You hadn’t really had a good answer for any of it, if you were honest, but being honest about it felt like opening a door you weren’t sure you’d be able to close again, so instead you kept doing the thing you’d apparently decided was easier: cataloguing every kind, attentive, specific thing Jungwon did, filing it carefully under that’s just him, and trying very hard not to notice how thin that file was getting to support the weight of what was actually piling up inside it.

—

The locker room before a game had a different texture than the locker room before practice, and Jungwon had learned the difference inside his first two weeks at Blackwood — practice was loose, chatter, somebody’s bad playlist. Game day was quiet in a way that wasn’t tense exactly, more like everyone in the room had individually decided to go somewhere internal for twenty minutes and would be back shortly. Jay sat at his stall with his eyes closed, headphones in, doing the same pregame ritual Jungwon had already watched him do four times now — three slow breaths, a fist against his own chest twice, then up and moving like a switch had been flipped. “You good?” Riki asked, low, from the next stall over, taping his stick with more focus than the task strictly required.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look good. You look like you’re about to throw up, which is hilarious, because you’ve told me multiple times you’re constitutionally incapable of that.”

“I’m not going to throw up.”

“Your face is doing a concerning thing.” Jungwon didn’t answer that, because Riki wasn’t entirely wrong — there was a specific, low-grade hum under his skin that hadn’t been there during any of the scrimmages or exhibition games, and he understood, finally and completely, the difference between playing well and playing well in front of a packed home arena on opening night with your name on the first line for the first time in program history as a true freshman. Coach had confirmed the lines an hour ago. Jungwon centering Jay and a senior winger named Sunoo’s roommate situation he hadn’t fully sorted out yet — no, that wasn’t right, he corrected himself, shaking the thought loose, focus — centering Jay. First line. Opening night.

He looked up once, scanning the stands through the tunnel as the team filed out for warmups, and found you almost immediately, three rows up behind the glass, exactly where you always sat — he’d clocked that without meaning to, the specific seat you and Sunoo claimed for every home game, close enough to see faces, far enough back to avoid getting hit by anything errant. You weren’t looking at him. You were looking at Jay, the way you always did first, tracking your brother onto the ice with the specific, unconscious attention of someone who’d been doing it your whole life. Then your eyes moved, found Jungwon’s, and something in your face did a small, private thing that he was almost certain nobody else in that stadium would have caught.

He scored his first collegiate goal eleven minutes into the second period — a give-and-go off Jay’s stick that he buried top shelf before the goalie had finished moving — and the arena went up around him in a wall of sound that he barely registered, because the only thing he was actually aware of, skating back toward the bench with his gloves up and his teammates slamming into him in celebration, was the specific spot three rows up where you were on your feet, both hands pressed over your mouth, looking at him like you’d forgotten, for one unguarded second, to look like you weren’t supposed to be looking at him like that at all. Jay slammed into him on the bench a second later, helmet knocking his, grinning wide and unrestrained in a way Jungwon hadn’t seen off him yet. “That’s what I’m talking about. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Lucky bounce.”

“That was not a lucky bounce, that was you reading a play I didn’t even know was there yet.” Jay clapped him hard on the shoulder, something genuinely proud in it that Jungwon felt land somewhere uncomfortable in his chest, given everything else currently happening in his life that Jay had absolutely no idea about. “Coach was right about you. I’m gonna hate saying that out loud as often as I’m clearly about to have to.”

Blackwood won 4–1. The Den that night was its own kind of chaos — a post-win party that started before half the team had even fully showered, Jake commandeering the speaker again, somebody’s questionable decision to bring home a literal cardboard cutout of the team mascot from God knows where. Jungwon found himself in the middle of it, still riding the particular high of a first goal in a packed building, fielding congratulations from upperclassmen who’d barely spoken to him three weeks ago and now seemed entirely willing to consider him a real part of the program.

You found him near midnight, in the kitchen, away from the worst of the noise, where he’d retreated with a water bottle and the specific overstimulated quiet of someone whose adrenaline had finally started to crash. “Hey, scorer.” You leaned against the counter beside him, close enough that he could smell whatever you were wearing, something warm underneath the general party smell of the house. “Good game.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it. I’ve watched Jongseong play with a lot of centers. You two looked like you’d been playing together for years, not weeks.”

“It helped that he kept finding me.”

“He doesn’t do that for just anyone.” You said it simply, like a fact, and something about the specific weight you put on it — he doesn’t do that for just anyone, echoing right back at the same private logic you’d been using to talk yourself out of every single thing Jungwon had done for weeks — made you go quiet for a second too long, like you’d heard yourself say it and immediately regretted the implication. Jungwon didn’t push it. He’d learned, in three weeks of watching you build and rebuild the same careful argument, that pushing only ever made you retreat faster. “You disappeared fast after the game,” you said instead, recovering. “I thought you’d stick around for the chaos longer.”

“Needed air.”

“You’re standing in a kitchen.”

“It’s quieter air than the living room.” A small, almost-smile. “You found me, though.”

“I was looking for water. This is incidental.”

“Sure.” You rolled your eyes, but you didn’t move away, and the space between you had gone thin and obvious in the same way it had three weeks ago at the party — except this time there was no excuse of being drunk, no Sunoo dragging you anywhere, just the two of you standing in a kitchen at midnight with three weeks of careful, deniable, he’s just like that tension sitting heavy in the air between you. You were the one who closed the distance this time. You’d think about that later — the fact that you’d made the decision, hadn’t waited for him to make the first move the way he had at the party — and you’d wonder what that meant about how far gone you already were without having admitted it to yourself yet.

You kissed him first, one hand fisting lightly in the front of his shirt, and he made a low, surprised sound against your mouth before his hands found your waist, steadying, like he needed a second to confirm this was actually happening before he let himself fully lean into it. “Thought this was a one-time thing,” he murmured, lips barely leaving yours.

“Shut up.”

“Just confirming the terms.”

“Jungwon.”

“Right. Shutting up.” He didn’t, not entirely — he kissed you again, slower this time, deliberate, walking you back until you hit the counter’s edge, hands braced either side of you like he had every intention of keeping you exactly there. “Upstairs,” he said, against your jaw, somewhere between a question and a statement. “If you want.” You did.

His room was darker this time, the party noise muffled down to a low thrum through the floor, and there was something different in the way he undressed you now — less the controlled, deliberate unhurriedness of someone proving a point, more the quiet hunger of someone who’d spent three weeks pretending he hadn’t been thinking about exactly this. “You moved first,” he said, mouth at your throat, hands sliding the strap of your top down your shoulder. “Didn’t expect that.”

“Don’t make it weird.”

“Not making it weird. Just noticing.” He pulled back far enough to look at you properly, something steady and a little too searching in his eyes for a hookup either of you was still insisting this was. “I like that you did.” You didn’t have a response for that that wouldn’t have meant admitting something, so you kissed him again instead, and let that be the answer.

He laid you back against the sheets with the same deliberate care as the first time, mouth trailing down your throat, your collarbone, lower, his hands mapping you like he was confirming something he already knew rather than learning it fresh. When his fingers finally find your folds, already slick, he exhales sharply at the feel of you, his head dipping, his forehead briefly pressing to your stomach like he needs a second.“Every time,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You’re like this every time.”

“Don’t get smug about it.”

“Wasn’t being smug. Was being honest.” His thumb found your clit, slow, deliberate circles that pull your breath out of you almost immediately, your hips shifting up into his hand before you can stop them. He notices. Of course he does. His eyes flick back to your face and stay there, watching everything — the way your mouth parts, the way your breathing changes, the way your body responds to him.“You gonna let me hear you tonight, or are you still trying to be quiet for the house.”

You let out a breath that turns into something softer, more broken as his thumb presses a little firmer. “The house is currently hosting forty drunk hockey players, Jungwon, nobody’s listening.”

“Good.” Something low and pleased in his voice. “Then don’t hold back.” His fingers slide through you again, slower this time, spreading the slickness, feeling you properly before he presses one finger into you, easing it in without rushing, letting you feel the stretch. You gasp. Your hands find his shoulders. He doesn’t stop, instead adds a second finger, deeper this time, the drag of them against your walls slow and deliberate, pulling soft sounds out of you that start low, breathy, and only get louder the longer he keeps going.Your breath breaks, your thighs tightening around his arm, your body reacting faster, harder.“Good,” he says softly. “You look so good like this—” His fingers curl slightly inside you, hitting deeper, and the sound you make this time is louder, less controlled.

When he finally settled over you, lining himself up, he paused just long enough to press his forehead to yours. “Look at me,” he said, the same thing he’d said the first time, like it mattered to him every time, and when you did, he sank into you slow, a rough exhale tearing out of his throat at the tight, slick give of your walls around him. “Fuck — there you go.” His hips found a slow, grinding rhythm almost immediately, deep, deliberate, his mouth finding your neck, sucking another mark into skin that hadn’t quite finished healing from the last one.

“You take me so well. Every damn time.” The praise pulled a moan out of you that you didn’t bother muffling this time, and he made a rough, satisfied sound at the back of his throat in response, picking up the pace, the tip of him dragging against that spot that had your hips rolling up to meet his own. “That’s it,” he breathed, voice fraying at the edges. “That’s it, just like that — you sound so good.” Your hand found his, lacing fingers against the sheet the way it had the first time, and something about the repetition of that small gesture — the fact that he’d done it again, unprompted, like it was simply part of how he touched you now — undid you faster than anything else, your moans climbing breathless and unguarded until you tipped over with his name broken on your lips, walls clenching tight around him. He followed seconds later, groaning into your hair, hips stuttering through the last of it.

Neither of you moved for a long minute afterward, his weight braced careful above you, both of you breathing hard. “Okay,” you managed eventually, the exact same word you’d used the first time, like your brain hadn’t come up with anything new in three weeks. “That was — “

“Yeah.” He pressed a kiss to your temple, unhurried, lingering half a second longer than a one-time thing required. “That was.”

You walked back to your dorm alone again that night, the same as before, and lay awake afterward turning over the same tired argument — he’s just like that, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just convenient, you’re both just convenient for each other — except this time, for the first time, the argument didn’t quite hold its shape all the way through to morning. Good note — this is exactly the right instinct, you want the “everyone notices” chapter to land on a foundation that’s actually been built, not implied. A montage of small, accumulating moments before the bigger social-fallout chapter. Building that now.

It became a pattern made entirely of small things, none of which felt significant on their own and all of which, stacked together, were starting to feel like a life you hadn’t quite agreed to but weren’t fighting either. He texted first more often now. Not every day — Jungwon wasn’t a constant-texter, never had been, but the texts that did come were specific in a way that always undid your he’s just like that theory a little further.

jungwon: what time’s your lecture end today

you: 2:15 why

jungwon: no reason

There was always a reason. You walked out of your 2:15 that Thursday and found him sitting on the low wall outside the building, gear bag at his feet like he’d come straight from the gym, scrolling his phone with the studied casualness of someone who’d been there longer than “no reason” implied.

“You weren’t even supposed to have a free period right now.”

“I moved my lift.”

“You moved your lift.”

“Coach lets me have some flexibility.” He stood, falling into step beside you without asking if that was the plan, like it had simply stopped being a question between you. “How was the lecture.”

“Boring. You moved your lift for a boring lecture you weren’t even in.”

“I moved my lift to walk you back. The lecture being boring is just a fact you told me, unrelated.” You didn’t have a comeback for that, mostly because you didn’t want one — you wanted to keep walking next to him in the cold with his shoulder bumping yours every few steps, which was its own small, uncomfortable piece of evidence you kept choosing not to look at directly.

You started going to more practices than you used to. You told yourself it was because the season was getting good, because Jongseong’s line was clicking in a way that made it genuinely fun to watch, and that was even mostly true — but you also couldn’t deny, standing at the glass with your arms crossed against the cold of the rink, that your eyes found a specific number on the ice before they found your own brother’s. After one particular Thursday practice — closed to the public, technically, but the rink doors were never actually locked and you’d been sneaking in to watch since before you could legally drive — you waited until most of the team had filtered toward the locker room tunnel, until it was just a few stragglers and Coach Anders gathering up cones at center ice, and caught Jungwon’s eye across the rink with a small tilt of your head toward the narrow service corridor that ran behind the home bench.

He peeled off from the group without a word, gear bag over one shoulder, and found you in the dim, concrete-smelling hallway two minutes later, still in his practice jersey, hair damp with sweat, breathing a little hard from the skate. “That’s disgusting, by the way,” you said, wrinkling your nose as he got close. “You smell like a locker room.”

“You wanted me back here.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to be close to the smell.” He laughed, low, and backed you gently against the cool concrete wall anyway, one hand braced beside your head, and you let him, because apparently you’d stopped pretending the smell was actually a deterrent somewhere around hookup number one. “Well done today,” you murmured, against his mouth, an echo of the thing you said after every good game, except this was just a Thursday practice nobody else was watching, and you’d said it anyway, like it mattered to you whether he heard it. “It was just a drill.”

“You still looked good doing it.”

“Yeah?” Something pleased and a little smug crept into his voice, and you kissed him before he could lean too hard into it, his hand coming up to cup your jaw, the kiss going slower, deeper, his tongue tracing yours unhurried even though you both knew Coach was thirty feet away and any one of the team could walk down this corridor in the next ninety seconds. “We’re going to get caught one of these days,” you said, when you finally broke apart, breathless, his forehead dropping to rest against yours.

“Not today.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know nobody comes down this hallway. I checked.” He said it so simply, so practically, like he’d actually scouted the corridor in advance for exactly this purpose, that you laughed again, helpless, and he caught the sound with another kiss before you could finish it.

You let him walk you back out a side door a few minutes later, his hoodie — Blackwood Hockey, his last name on the back, YANG in block lettering you definitely hadn’t memorized the shape of — somehow ending up over your shoulders, because you’d complained once about the cold and he’d simply taken it off and handed it to you without making it a whole thing, the same easy, unbothered way he did most things for you now. You meant to give it back. You told yourself that every single time. The pile of his hoodies steadily accumulating at the back of your closet would suggest otherwise, if anyone had thought to look. Sunoo noticed the hoodies before he noticed almost anything else, mostly because he had unrestricted access to your closet and the world’s least subtle eye for detail. “Okay, why do you own four of the same hoodie.”

“I don’t own four of the same hoodie.”

“You own four hoodies that all say YANG on the back, Y/N, I’m not colorblind, I can see the consistent theme.” Sunoo held one up by the shoulders, inspecting it like evidence at a trial. “This is not subtle. This is, in fact, the opposite of subtle. This is a paper trail.”

“They’re comfortable.”

“I’m sure they are. I’m sure that’s the only reason.” He folded it back into the pile with exaggerated care, like he was handling something fragile and emotionally significant, which, you supposed, it currently was. “You know I’m rooting for you. I just think you should know that your closet has officially ratted you out, in case you were under the impression you were being subtle about any of this.”

“I never said I was being subtle.”

“You implied it heavily by insisting nothing’s going on, repeatedly, for over a month.” You didn’t have a defense for that one either. You were running out of defenses generally, you’d noticed — the file you’d been keeping, he’s just like that, it doesn’t mean anything, had gotten so thin and so unconvincing that you’d basically stopped pulling it out except as a reflex, a thing you said because you’d been saying it so long it had become muscle memory rather than something you actually believed.

The one bright spot in all of it, weirdly, was Sunoo’s own slow-motion disaster running in parallel — because somewhere in the same stretch of weeks, Sunghoon had apparently decided that ignoring Sunoo at the gym wasn’t a sustainable long-term strategy, and had started, with the same painful, visible effort it took him to do anything emotionally honest, showing up around him on purpose. “He asked me to get food,” Sunoo reported one night, vibrating with it, sprawled dramatically across your bed while you tried to study. “Just the two of us. No team. No excuse. He said, and I’m going to quote this exactly because I’ve already memorized it, ‘do you want to get food sometime, just us, like, as a thing, if you want it to be a thing, no pressure if not.’”

“That’s so awkward.”

“It’s the most romantic sentence anyone’s ever said to me, don’t ruin this for me.”

“I’m not ruining it, I think it’s sweet that he’s bad at it.”

“He’s so bad at it. He practiced that sentence, Y/N, I could tell, there was a cadence to it like he’d said it in his bathroom mirror forty times.” Sunoo rolled onto his stomach, propping his chin on his hands, grinning at you with the specific delight of someone who’d finally gotten what he wanted and couldn’t quite believe it. “Anyway. We’re getting food Friday. As a thing. I said yes so fast I think I scared him a little.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“I’m happy for you too, even though you keep insisting there’s nothing to be happy about, which, by the way, four identical hoodies.”

“Drop the hoodies.”

“I will never drop the hoodies.” Underneath all of it — the texts, the corridor, the hoodies steadily migrating into your closet, Sunoo’s slow, awkward, delighted thing with Sunghoon humming along beside yours like a quieter mirror of the same feeling — there was a song you’d started playing on repeat without quite noticing you’d started doing it, something low and aching and a little too on the nose, the kind of song that made you feel caught out by your own playlist. You didn’t examine that too closely either. You’d gotten good, lately, at not examining things too closely. It wasn’t sustainable. You knew that, somewhere underneath the part of you still insisting otherwise. You just weren’t ready yet to be the one who said it out loud first.

Riki had a theory, and the problem with Riki’s theories was that he refused to keep them to himself until he’d fully confirmed them, which meant Jungwon spent most of a Tuesday afternoon practice getting side-eyed across the locker room like he was a crime scene Riki hadn’t finished processing yet. “You smell like her perfume,” Riki said, apropos of nothing, while they were both lacing up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I do laundry next to you, Jungwon. I know what your detergent smells like. I also now know what her perfume smells like, because it’s been showing up on your hoodies for three weeks, and those are two very different smells, and you are currently covered in the second one.”

“That’s not — “ Jungwon stopped, recalibrated, decided the better strategy was not engaging at all. “Tie your skates.”

“I’m just saying. For a guy who insists nothing’s going on, you sure do smell like a specific person an awful lot.” He wasn’t wrong, which was the most annoying part. Jungwon had gotten careless — not about the actual secret, he was still careful about that, still made sure nobody saw anything that would actually confirm it — but about the smaller tells. He’d started checking his phone faster than he used to. Started angling his laptop screen away from the kitchen table on instinct whenever someone walked by, even when all he was looking at was a stats reading. Riki, sharing a room with him for six weeks now, had apparently built up a working database of Jungwon’s baseline behavior and was running constant diffs against it. “You also disappear,” Riki added, undeterred by the silence. “At parties. You’re there, then you’re not there, and then forty minutes later you’re back like nothing happened, except your hair’s different and you’ve got this look.”

“What look.”

“The look. The one you’re doing right now, where you’re trying very hard to have no look at all, which is itself a look.” Jungwon gave up entirely on the laces and just stared at him. “What do you actually think is happening, Riki.”

“Honestly?” Riki considered it, head tilted, with the specific seriousness of a man about to deliver a verdict. “I think you’ve got a hookup situation going with someone you really, really don’t want anyone to know about, and I think it’s someone close enough to this house that the secrecy isn’t paranoia, it’s necessary.” That was, Jungwon thought, uncomfortably close to the actual truth for someone who didn’t have the full picture. “And I think,” Riki continued, clearly enjoying himself now, “that if I had to bet money on exactly one specific person, I would bet on—”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not gonna say it. I respect the game too much to just say it out loud. I’m gonna let you have this.” Riki finally bent down to actually tie his skates, infuriatingly satisfied with himself. “I just want it on record that I noticed first. When this eventually comes out — and it will, things like this always come out — I want full credit for calling it in week three.”

“There’s nothing to call.”

“Sure, buddy.”

Jake noticed differently, and later, and by accident — which was, in retrospect, the way most of the house ended up noticing things, because Jake’s primary skill was being in the wrong room at the right time and immediately understanding the significance of whatever he’d walked into. It happened on a Thursday, three weeks after the home opener, when you’d come by the Den to return Heeseung’s textbook for the second time — a running bit at this point, since Heeseung kept “forgetting” to give it back specifically so you’d keep coming by, a fact you had not yet clocked and that the rest of the house found hilarious — and Jungwon had intercepted you in the front hallway before you’d even made it to the kitchen. “He’s not even here,” Jungwon said, leaning against the doorframe like he’d been waiting, which — Jake would think later, replaying it — he absolutely had been. “Practice ran late for the d-men. You can just leave it.”

“I know I can just leave it, I was going to leave it on the kitchen table—”

“I’ll make sure he gets it.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to.” The same line he’d used weeks ago, delivered with the same easy certainty, and something about the rhythm of it — the fact that you both seemed to already know this bit, already had a shorthand for it — was what actually caught Jake’s attention as he came down the stairs, gear bag over one shoulder, mid-text to someone else entirely.

He stopped on the landing. Didn’t say anything yet. Just watched for a second longer than either of you noticed him watching, taking in the specific quality of the space between you — not friendly-easy, not stranger-polite, something with more weight in it, the kind of familiarity that took longer than six weeks to build unless something had sped the process up considerably. You handed Jungwon the textbook. Your fingers brushed his on the handoff, the kind of accidental contact two people lingered on a half-second longer than accidental contact usually got, and neither of you seemed to register that you’d done it at all. “I’ll see you around,” you said, already turning for the door.

“Yeah.” Jungwon’s voice did something on that one syllable that Jake had genuinely never heard out of him before — not at practice, not at games, not in six weeks of living down the hall from the guy. Something soft. Something that had no business being attached to a sentence that short. Jake waited until the front door clicked shut behind you before he came the rest of the way down the stairs, eyebrows already halfway up his forehead. “So,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t even say anything yet.”

“You were about to say something.”

“I was about to say so, and then I was going to let the so do a lot of heavy lifting, and you just confirmed everything the so was going to imply by getting defensive about it before I finished.” Jake dropped his gear bag by the stairs, grinning now, delighted in the specific way he got delighted about things that promised future entertainment value. “Bro.”

“It’s nothing.”

“You said ‘yeah’ to her like it cost you something to say it. I’ve known you six weeks and I’ve genuinely never heard your voice do that.” Jungwon didn’t have a response that wasn’t a lie, and Jake — to his credit, Jungwon would think later — didn’t push for one. Just clapped him once on the shoulder, the universal gesture of a man choosing not to make something someone else’s problem yet, and headed for the kitchen. “I’m not gonna say anything,” Jake said, over his shoulder. “Mostly because I don’t actually know anything, I just watched a vibe happen. But for the record? If I’m right about what that vibe was — and I think I’m right — you’ve picked the single most complicated person on this entire campus to have feelings about.”

“I don’t—”

“Jungwon.” Jake stopped in the kitchen doorway, looking back at him with something almost gentle underneath the usual bit. “I’ve watched Jongseong run off guys at parties for less than what I just saw happen in that hallway. I’m not saying don’t. I’m saying be careful. That’s all. That’s the whole speech.” He disappeared into the kitchen, already calling out to Heeseung about something unrelated, and Jungwon stood alone in the hallway for a long moment, the textbook still in his hands, thinking that be careful was advice he’d needed about six weeks ago, and was currently far too late to actually take.

Heeseung found out the most boring way possible, which fit him — he was the kind of person who noticed things quietly and decided what to do with the information later, rather than announcing his discoveries the way Jake did. He’d simply started noticing that you knew things about Jungwon’s schedule that you had no obvious way of knowing — texting Sunghoon once to ask if practice was running over because Jungwon mentioned it might, a detail that hadn’t come from anyone but Jungwon himself.

He didn’t say anything about it. He just started covering, automatically, the way he’d cover for any of his teammates without needing to be asked — vague answers when Jay asked where Jungwon was, a deliberate slowness in mentioning that you’d stopped by when you clearly hadn’t wanted it mentioned. He never confirmed anything out loud to anyone. He just quietly became part of the machinery keeping the secret intact, the same unbothered, low-key way he did most things, and never once brought it up to Jungwon directly. Jungwon noticed the covering before he ever figured out Heeseung had clocked anything. By the time he put it together — weeks later, in the middle of an entirely unrelated conversation, when Heeseung said something that only made sense if he already knew — it didn’t even feel like a confrontation. Just a quiet, unspoken acknowledgment between two people who’d both decided silence was easier than the alternative.

Sunghoon noticed last, mostly because Sunghoon’s attention was almost entirely occupied that semester by his own slow-motion crisis regarding a specific person on the other side of campus, and he genuinely had very little processing power left over for anyone else’s romantic developments. When he finally did clock it — weeks later, watching Jungwon hover a half-second too long near the door whenever you were expected — his only reaction was a flat, “oh, that’s happening too?” like the house had simply hit its quota for secret entanglements and he was mildly annoyed there’d be two simultaneous storylines to keep track of.

By the time the home stretch of the semester hit, the entire house knew something — not the full shape of it, not how far back it went or how much it had already become, but enough to start quietly rearranging themselves around it. Cover stories appeared without being requested. Jay’s questions about Jungwon’s whereabouts got answered just vaguely enough to be technically true. Nobody said anything to Jay directly, because nobody wanted to be the one to set off whatever they all correctly suspected would be a genuinely bad reaction, and because — if anyone had asked them, which nobody did — most of them had quietly decided, somewhere along the way, that they liked watching Jungwon be like this. Soft. Distracted. Obviously, hopelessly gone for someone, in a way none of them had ever seen out of him before. It was, Jake said once, to Heeseung, the two of them watching Jungwon check his phone for the fourth time in ten minutes during a film session, “honestly kind of nice. Watching the guy be a disaster for once. Makes him feel human.”

“Jay’s gonna lose his mind when he finds out.”

“Yeah.” Jake didn’t sound especially worried about it, in the moment, in the specific way nobody in that house was worried about anything yet, because the bad part hadn’t happened. “But that’s a future problem.”

—

It was Sunghoon who spotted the hickey, and he didn’t even mean to — it was just there, dark and obvious, riding the curve of Jungwon’s neck above his collar when he peeled his shirt off before practice, and Sunghoon, mid-conversation with Heeseung about something entirely unrelated, simply stopped talking and stared. “Okay, what.”

“What?” Jungwon, lacing his skates, didn’t look up.

“Your neck.”

“What about it.”

“It’s got a — “ Sunghoon gestured, vaguely, at the general vicinity of his own throat, like the word itself was too much effort. “There’s a whole situation happening there.” Heeseung leaned over to look, and to his credit, didn’t say anything immediately — just took it in with the resigned, weary calm of a man who already had a working theory about its origins and didn’t need it confirmed out loud. Jake, three stalls down, had no such restraint. “OH my god.” He was up and crossing the room before Jungwon could even reach for his collar to cover it, grabbing his jaw and tilting his head sideways with zero regard for personal space. “That is not subtle. That is genuinely the least subtle hickey I have ever seen on a human neck, who did this to you, I need a name—”

“Get off.” Jungwon shoved him away, yanking his collar up with more force than the gesture required, ears going faintly red in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the locker room. “You’re blushing! He’s blushing, everyone look, Yang Jungwon is blushing—”

“I will end you, Jake.”

“You can’t end me, I’m a senior, I have seniority over your blushing.” Jake was delighted in a way that was going to make the entire practice session unbearable, Jungwon could already tell, and the fact that Riki had gone suspiciously, deliberately quiet in the corner — not even looking up, very pointedly minding his own business in a way that screamed I know exactly whose mouth did that and I am choosing not to say it out loud right now — only made it worse.

“Coach is gonna notice,” Heeseung said, mildly, like he was doing Jungwon a genuine favor by flagging it rather than just enjoying the chaos. “Coach notices everything,” Sunghoon added. “He noticed I changed deodorant brands once. Mid-practice. Pulled me aside specifically to ask if I was sick.”

“It’s a hickey, not a medical emergency, can we move on—”

“We absolutely cannot move on, this is the most interesting thing that’s happened in this locker room all semester.” Jay walked in midway through, gear bag over his shoulder, and the entire room — Jake included, for once — went quiet fast enough that it was almost funnier than the joke itself. Jay glanced around at the sudden silence, mildly suspicious, the universal expression of a captain who’d clearly walked into the middle of something and didn’t yet know what. “What.”

“Nothing,” six people said, at almost exactly the same time, in a unison so synchronized it was its own kind of confession. Jay’s eyes narrowed, scanning the room, landing — inevitably, because Jungwon still had his hand half-cupped over his own neck like that wasn’t going to draw more attention than just leaving it alone — directly on him. “You good, Yang?”

“Yeah. Fine. Just — cold. In here. Cold room.”

“It’s not cold in here.” Jay frowned, looking around at the room generally, like he was trying to locate whatever joke he’d clearly missed, and then seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the time, the way captains learn to triage which mysteries are actually worth solving. “Whatever. Get your skates on, Coach wants us on the ice in five.” The second he turned away, Jake mouthed “cold room” at Jungwon with such exaggerated disbelief that Jungwon had to physically look away to keep from laughing, which, in retrospect, was its own kind of tell, but at least Jay had already left the room.

Jay, for his part, had started noticing something else entirely — not the hickey, he genuinely never clocked that one, too distracted by practice logistics to connect dots that weren’t directly in front of him — but the simple, accumulating fact that you’d been at the Den constantly lately. More than usual, and his version of usual was already pretty high, since you’d basically grown up treating the place like a second home. “You’re here a lot,” he said one evening, finding you on the couch with your laptop, a half-finished essay open and very obviously not being worked on. “I’m always here.”

“You’re here more. I counted. You’ve been here five out of the last seven days.”

“Wow. Tracking my movements. Very normal brother behavior.”

“I’m not tracking your movements, I just notice things, it’s a captain instinct, it doesn’t turn off.” He dropped onto the couch beside you, stealing a chip from the bag balanced on the armrest without asking, the same easy, thoughtless intimacy you’d had your whole lives. “Is everything okay? With you? Is this an avoiding-your-dorm thing, or a missing-your-favorite-brother thing?”

“You’re my only brother.”

“Which makes me the favorite by default. Don’t dodge the question.”

“Everything’s fine, Jongseong. I just like it here.” You said it lightly, easily, and it wasn’t even technically a lie, which made it easier to say without flinching — you did like it here, more than you’d let yourself examine the actual reasons for lately. “Can’t a girl enjoy her brother’s questionable life choices in frat-house form without it being a whole investigation?”

“I guess.” He didn’t look fully convinced, but he let it go, the way he generally let things go when you used that exact tone — easy, unbothered, nothing here worth the energy of pushing — and went back to stealing your chips instead, and you let yourself exhale, slow and quiet, grateful that the version of you he’d known your whole life was apparently still convincing enough to hold up under a few extra questions. You weren’t sure how much longer that was going to keep being true. You didn’t let yourself think about it too hard.

The “team bonding” thing happened on a Friday Jay had scheduled weeks in advance — mandatory, his words, no exceptions, an entire evening at some axe-throwing place across town that he’d decided the team needed for “chemistry,” which had become a running joke all week because nobody fully believed Jay actually thought axe-throwing built chemistry so much as he just wanted an excuse to make everyone do something together that wasn’t hockey. Jungwon went. Obviously. Mandatory was mandatory, and he was still new enough to the program that skipping a captain’s event wasn’t a card he could play yet. He lasted two hours — long enough to throw a genuinely embarrassing number of axes into the wall instead of the target, long enough for Jake to declare him “tragically bad at exactly one physical activity, finally, some humility” — before he found a moment between rounds, phone in hand, thumb already moving before he’d fully decided to send it.

jungwon: team bonding. axe throwing. I’m terrible at it you: send proof jungwon: no you: that bad? jungwon: jake has been narrating my failures for forty minutes. it’s a whole bit now. you: I want to see it jungwon: absolutely not jungwon: what are you doing tonight you: nothing. sunoo’s out with sunghoon. apparently it’s becoming an actual thing thing. jungwon: good for them you: you’re going to be at this for hours, jongseong’s not letting anyone leave early jungwon: probably jungwon: unless I’m not. You’d read that last text three times before you fully understood what he was implying, and by the time you’d typed back don’t you dare get in trouble for this, he’d already left it on read, which — you’d learn, later, watching him recount it with a kind of sheepish pride — meant he’d already made the decision somewhere around the second eyeroll Jake gave him for missing yet another axe throw, and had simply waited for the right moment to slip out the side door while Jay was mid-story about last season’s playoff run.

He didn’t call an Uber to your dorm. He texted you instead, come open your window, which felt like an unnecessarily dramatic instruction until you actually looked outside and found him three stories down, standing in the grass below your window with his hands in his pockets like climbing buildings was a totally normal Friday activity for him. “You cannot be serious.”

“There’s a drainpipe. It’s very stable.”

“It is not — Jungwon, that is not a stable anything, that is a liability, get away from it—” He was already climbing by the time you finished the sentence, infuriatingly competent at it in a way that suggested either an athletic background doing something useful for once or a genuinely concerning lack of risk assessment, and you spent the entire ascent with your heart somewhere in your throat, half ready to call campus security and half ready to laugh, until he finally hauled himself up onto your windowsill and dropped into your room with significantly less grace than the climb itself had suggested, nearly taking out your desk lamp on the way down. “You’re insane.”

“I missed you.” He said it so simply, breathless from the climb, hair messed up, grinning in a way you rarely got to see fully unguarded, that you didn’t even have a comeback ready. “Jongseong’s gonna do the speech about attendance tomorrow. Worth it.”

“You’re going to get in actual trouble.”

“Probably.” He didn’t seem remotely concerned about that, already crossing the small space of your dorm room toward you, hands finding your waist. “Worth that too.” You kissed him before you could think better of it, and it had a different texture than usual — none of the unhurried, deliberate pacing of the first two times, something hungrier in it, both of you a little reckless off the adrenaline of him literally having climbed a building to get here. “You climbed three stories,” you murmured against his mouth, “to do this.”

“Wasn’t going to wait until tomorrow.”

“You could’ve just waited.”

“Didn’t want to.” He walked you back toward your bed, mouth at your jaw, your throat, hands already working at the hem of your shirt with considerably less patience than usual. “Wanted you tonight.” Clothes came off faster this time, less ceremony, more want, and when he finally got you under him, bare skin against bare skin, his mouth found yours again, deep, insistent, tongue sliding against yours with none of the careful restraint from before. “You’re in a hurry,” you breathed, when he finally pulled back enough to look at you.

“I am not in a hurry.” He pressed a kiss to your collarbone, lower, his hand sliding between your thighs to find you already slick, and the rough sound he made at that told you exactly how much restraint he currently had left. “I’m just very motivated.” His fingers worked you open quick, sure, two fingers curling against your walls in a way that had your back arching off the mattress almost immediately, his thumb finding your clit and pressing tight, deliberate circles that pulled a breathy moan out of you before you could think to muffle it against anything. “That’s it,” he murmured, low, watching your face with the same hungry attention he always gave you. “God, you’re so wet for me already.”

“Jungwon—”

“I know. I know, I’ve got you.” He kissed you again, hard, swallowing the next sound you made, and when he finally settled between your thighs and pushed into you, there was nothing slow about it this time — a long, rough slide that had you both groaning at once, his forehead dropping to your shoulder. “Fuck — “ His hips found a rhythm fast, deep, grinding into you with a kind of urgency that had your nails dragging down his back. “You feel so good, every single time, I swear—” The pace built quick, his mouth at your neck sucking another mark into skin that already had a fading one from days before, his hand finding yours and lacing your fingers together against the sheets the same way it always did, like even rushed, even reckless, that small piece of tenderness was non-negotiable to him.

“Look at me,” he said, rough, and when your eyes met his, something in his rhythm shifted, deepened, the tip of him dragging against that spot inside you that had your moans climbing breathless and unguarded. “You’re so good,” he breathed, voice fraying. “So good, taking me like this — gonna make you cum so hard you forget your own name.” The praise tipped you faster than usual, your walls clenching tight around him as you came apart with a cry you pressed into his shoulder to muffle, and he followed almost immediately after, a rough groan torn out of him as he spilled into you, hips stuttering through the last of it before he collapsed half his weight onto you, both of you breathing hard in the quiet of your dorm room.

“Worth the drainpipe?” you managed, eventually, into the dark. “Worth the drainpipe.” He pressed a lazy kiss to your temple, still catching his breath. “Worth Jongseong’s speech tomorrow too, honestly.”

“He’s actually going to kill you.”

“He’s gonna yell about attendance. He’s not gonna kill me.” Jungwon settled beside you, pulling you in against his chest with an easy, unthinking familiarity that you both noticed and didn’t comment on — the fact that he hadn’t left yet, hadn’t started the usual post-hookup routine of finding his clothes in the dark. “Can I stay a while?” You should have said no. You’d been saying no to exactly this for weeks, the staying, the parts that made it feel like something with a future instead of something contained. “Yeah,” you said instead, quiet, already half-asleep against him. “Yeah, you can stay.” Neither of you said anything else about what that meant. You didn’t have to. You both already knew.

—

The qualifier had been circled on the team calendar since August — win, and Blackwood was through to the regional bracket that fed straight into the Founders Cup; lose, and the season’s best version of itself ended in a building three hours from campus with nothing to show for it. Coach Anders had been quieter than usual all week, which everyone had learned meant he was more nervous than usual, and Jay had been running pregame meetings with the specific intensity of a captain who’d been to this exact game twice before and lost it. “Eyes up,” he said, in the locker room, voice pitched low and even in the way it got before something mattered. “We’ve done the work. We know this team. We know their power play, we know their breakout, we know their goalie cheats low on his glove side.” A pause, scanning the room, landing — same as always — on the freshmen for half a second longer than anyone else. “Tonight’s not about being perfect. It’s about being the team that wants it more for sixty minutes straight. I need that from everyone. Especially my first line.” His eyes found Jungwon’s. Held there. “You ready?”

“Yeah,” Jungwon said, and meant it the way he meant most things — completely, with no real plan for what came after if it didn’t go his way. It went his way. It went the whole team’s way, in the end, but it was close enough for most of the third period that the entire arena had been on its feet for the last six minutes of regulation, the score knotted at two, both benches screaming themselves hoarse at every faceoff. Jungwon won the draw with ninety seconds left, fed it back to the point, and when the rebound came loose in the slot it was Jay who buried it — top corner, glove side, exactly where Jungwon had told him all week the goalie wouldn’t expect it — and the arena came apart at the seams.

Jay found him first in the pile, both of them screaming something at each other that wasn’t even words anymore, helmets knocking, the whole bench spilling over the boards to bury them both. Riki got there a half-second later, half-sobbing with the specific delirious exhaustion of a freshman who’d just played the biggest sixty minutes of his life, and for a long, loud, glorious minute none of it had anything to do with secrets or rules or anyone’s sister. It was just hockey, the purest version of it, the kind Jungwon had signed up for in the first place. “THAT’S MY CENTER,” Jay was shouting, at no one, at everyone, dragging Jungwon into a headlock that was technically a celebration and technically also just Jay needing somewhere to put the sheer volume of feeling currently moving through him. “That’s my guy! I called it week one, I told Coach, I told him—”

“You told him nothing, you were terrified of me in week one—”

“I was never terrified, I was strategic—”

The bus ride home was loud the whole way, somebody’s phone playing the win highlight on a loop until everyone had watched Jay’s goal from six different angles, and by the time they pulled up outside the Den, the entire street already had cars parked along it that didn’t belong to anyone in the house — word traveled fast on a qualifier night, and half the campus seemed to already know there’d be a party going by the time the team actually walked in the door.

Riki covered for him for the first time that night, and it happened almost by accident, in the sense that Riki didn’t plan the lie in advance so much as produce it instantly, under pressure, with the specific improvisational skill of someone who’d apparently been quietly preparing for this exact moment without telling anyone, including himself. It was maybe forty minutes into the party, the living room already a wall of noise, when Jay turned around mid-conversation and said, to no one in particular, “where’d Jungwon go?” Riki, standing two feet away with a cup in his hand, didn’t even blink. “Bathroom.”

“He’s been gone a while.”

“Stomach thing. Pregame nerves, probably hit him late.” Riki said it with such total, unbothered conviction that even he seemed mildly impressed with himself afterward, recounting it later to Jungwon like he’d just pulled off a heist. “Should probably give him some privacy, honestly. Not a great scene in there right now, I’d imagine.” Jay made a face. “Gross. Okay. Tell him to drink water.”

“Will do, Captain.” The second Jay turned away, Riki allowed himself exactly one slow exhale of relief before pulling his phone out and typing, with the gravity of a man reporting from the field: covered for you. stomach thing. you owe me forever. Jungwon — who was, in fact, not in the bathroom at all, but in the kitchen with you, half-hidden behind the open refrigerator door under the thin cover story of getting a drink — read the text and laughed out loud, which made you ask what was funny, which made him show you, which made you laugh too, the two of you ducking further behind the fridge door like that added any real concealment at all. “He’s never going to let this go,” Jungwon said. “He’s never going to let what go specifically — the lie, or the leverage?”

“Both. Definitely both.”

Near midnight a freshman approached and flirted with Jungwon, a girl from his econ discussion section who’d apparently decided that a qualifier win was the right occasion to finally act on whatever interest she’d been nursing since week one, and she found him by the drinks table with a confidence that suggested she had no idea — none at all — what she was walking into. “You were so good tonight,” she said, hand finding his forearm, easy and familiar in a way that made something in your chest go tight and hot the second you spotted it from across the room. “Like, genuinely incredible. I didn’t know freshmen could even play like that.”

“Thanks.” Jungwon’s voice was polite, a little distant, the specific tone of someone being friendly without encouraging anything, but he wasn’t pulling his arm away either, too caught up in the general adrenaline of the night to fully register what was happening. You watched for exactly eleven seconds before you decided you’d watched enough. “Hey.” You inserted yourself into the conversation with more edge than you meant to, hooking a hand into Jungwon’s other arm like it was the most natural thing in the world, which — to anyone watching, you reminded yourself, it absolutely had to look like, since nobody here knew. “Jongseong’s looking for you. Something about the highlight reel.”

“Oh — yeah, I should—” Jungwon, to his credit, picked up on the temperature shift immediately, even half a beer in, and extracted himself from the girl’s hand with an easy, “good game tonight, good luck on the econ midterm,” before letting you steer him away by the arm without any real resistance. The second you’d put enough distance between yourselves and the drinks table, he was already grinning. “Are you mad?”

“I’m not mad.”

“You’re a little mad.”

“I am not — Jongseong does not actually want you, that was a lie, I made that up.” You let go of his arm like you’d only just realized you were still holding it, crossing your own instead, which did nothing to disguise how transparent you currently were. “I just didn’t feel like watching that.”

“Watching what.”

“You know what.”

“I genuinely don’t, you’re going to have to use words.” He was enjoying this far too much, falling into step beside you toward the stairs, something delighted and a little smug working at the corner of his mouth. “Say it.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“Say it or I go back and ask her what the econ midterm’s actually about, since you brought it up.”

“Fine.” You stopped on the stairs, turning to face him, irritated mostly at yourself now for how easily he’d gotten this out of you. “I didn’t like watching some girl touch your arm and call you incredible. There. Happy?”

“Very happy.” He said it so simply, so plainly delighted, that some of your irritation softened into something else despite your best efforts. “You’re jealous.”

“I’m not jealous, I’m — annoyed. On principle.”

“That’s jealous with extra steps.” He caught your hand, tugging you the rest of the way up the stairs toward his room, the party noise dropping away behind the closing door. “I like it, for the record. Watching your whole face do that.”

“Don’t make this a thing.”

“Too late,” he said, against your mouth, already kissing you. “It’s already a thing.” You shoved him back onto the bed with more force than the moment strictly required, and he went easily, laughing low under his breath, hands finding your waist as you climbed over him, straddling his hips before either of you had bothered with much in the way of preamble. “Still jealous?” he murmured, hands sliding up your sides under your shirt.

“Shut up.”

“That’s not a no.”

“Jungwon.” You pulled his shirt over his head, tossing it somewhere you didn’t bother tracking, and the sight of him underneath you — flushed, win-high, looking at you like you were the only thing that had happened all night that actually mattered — undid the last of your patience. “Less talking.”

“Yes, ma’am.” You worked his belt open with quick, certain hands, and he watched you do it with his jaw tight, breath already gone uneven, hands gripping your hips like he was holding himself back from taking over entirely. When you finally freed him, hard and already aching, he let out a low, rough groan that you felt all the way down. “Tell me you want this,” he breathed, even now, even like this, the same checking he always did. “I’m on top of you right now. What does it look like.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I want this. I want you.” The honesty of it surprised you a little, coming out unguarded, but you didn’t take it back. You sank down onto him slow, both of you groaning at the slick, tight slide of it, and for a second you just stayed there, adjusting, his hands flexing against your hips like he was fighting every instinct to thrust up into you before you were ready. “Fuck — you feel — “ He cut himself off with a sharp exhale as you started to move, slow at first, finding a rhythm, his head tipping back against the pillow, throat working.

“This okay?” you asked, breathless, already rolling your hips again. “More than okay. God, look at you.” His hands slid up to your tits, thumbs brushing your nipples until you gasped, your rhythm faltering for a second before you found it again, faster now, chasing the building heat low in your stomach. “That’s it,” he groaned, hips finally rising to meet yours, the drag of him inside you hitting deeper at this angle, dragging a moan out of you that you didn’t bother muffling. “Ride me just like that — fuck, you’re so good, you have no idea—”

“Jungwon—”

“I know. I’ve got you.” His hand found your clit, thumb pressing tight, deliberate circles in time with your movement, and the combination had your moans climbing fast, breathless, your nails dragging down his chest. “You looked so good tonight,” you breathed, barely coherent, rolling your hips faster. “On the ice. I couldn’t stop watching you.”

“Yeah?” Something in his voice cracked open at that, rougher, more desperate. “Tell me again.”

“You were incredible.” You said it again, deliberately, watching the way it undid him, hips snapping up harder to meet yours. “Best on the ice. Better than anyone.”

“Fuck — “ His grip on your hips tightened, guiding your pace faster, deeper, the tip of him dragging against that spot inside you that had your vision sparking white at the edges. “Say it again—”

“Best player out there,” you gasped, close now, every word coming apart at the edges. “Mine — “ That seemed to do something to him entirely, a rough, broken sound tearing out of his throat as his thrusts turned faster, less controlled, chasing the same edge you were chasing, and when you finally tipped over it was with his name breaking out of you, walls clenching tight around him as he followed seconds later, spilling into you with a groan he pressed into your collarbone, hips stuttering through the last of it.

You collapsed against his chest, both of you breathing hard, his arms coming up around you loose and unhurried, like he had no intention of letting go anytime soon. “Hey,” you said, eventually, into the quiet, your cheek still pressed against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow back down. “I’m proud of you. For tonight. For real, not just — “ you gestured vaguely at the bed, the obvious aftermath of it. “For the game. You were really, genuinely incredible out there.” Jungwon went quiet for a second, his hand stilling where it had been tracing slow, idle patterns against your back, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost all of its earlier teasing. “Nobody’s said that to me tonight. Not like that.” A pause. “Jongseong said it loud, in front of everyone. Riki said it because he’s my best friend and he has to. You’re the first person who said it just to me. Quiet. Like you meant it specifically.”

“I did mean it specifically.”

“I know.” He pressed a kiss to the top of your head, settling you further into his chest, his fingers finding yours and lacing them together against his stomach, slow and easy, the most unhurried, domestic gesture either of you had managed yet. “I like this part. After. Just this.”

“Yeah,” you admitted, quiet, letting yourself mean it without flinching for once. “Me too.” Neither of you said the word that was sitting in the room with you, obvious and unspoken, but you both heard it anyway, in the silence, in the way his heartbeat hadn’t gone all the way back to normal yet, in the way you’d stopped pretending, even to yourself, that this was still just convenient.

The team’s covering operation had, by this point in the season, developed an almost professional structure to it, and Jake — somewhat to his own surprise — had ended up running point on the version of it that covered for you specifically, rather than Jungwon, in a way that felt less like keeping a secret and more like something closer to actual brotherly instinct kicking in where Jay’s couldn’t. It started small. Jay would ask, casually, where you’d gotten to after a party, and Jake would have an answer ready before the question had even fully landed — “she left with Sunoo,” or “she said she was tired, headed back to the dorm early,” delivered with such easy, bored conviction that Jay never once thought to push further. It wasn’t even really lying, most of the time, just a careful management of which true things got said out loud and which got quietly left out, and Jake did it with the same instinctive ease he’d cover for any of his actual teammates, except this time the teammate he was protecting was you. “You don’t have to do that,” you told him once, catching him right after he’d smoothly redirected Jay away from asking why you’d been at the Den three nights running. “I know I don’t have to.” Jake shrugged, like it cost him nothing, which — Jake being Jake — it probably genuinely didn’t. “I’ve watched you get treated like property by every guy who’s ever looked at you twice on this campus, Y/N. Watching Jungwon actually be good to you, and good for you, is the first time I’ve actually wanted to help one of these situations instead of running it off.” He bumped your shoulder, easy, the same brotherly affection he’d had for you since you were sixteen. “Plus he climbed a drainpipe for you. I respect the commitment.”

“You heard about the drainpipe?”

“Everyone heard about the drainpipe. Riki couldn’t keep that one to himself for more than six hours.”

The sloppiness crept in gradually, the way it always does — not one specific reckless decision but a slow accumulation of smaller ones, each individually defensible, collectively a problem. You stopped checking the hallway before leaving Jungwon’s room. He stopped waiting the full ten minutes before following you down to a party. You held his hand under the kitchen table once during a group dinner and didn’t notice you’d done it until Heeseung’s eyes flicked down and back up again, saying nothing, filing it away with the same quiet discretion he applied to everything.

Riki, increasingly, found himself in the position of full-time alibi generator, a role he’d apparently decided to take seriously enough to develop a rotating cast of excuses so he wouldn’t repeat himself in front of Jay. “Stomach thing again?” Jungwon asked once, amused, after overhearing Riki deploy it for the third time that month. “I can’t keep using stomach thing, Jay’s gonna think you have a chronic illness.” Riki looked genuinely affronted at the suggestion. “I’ve diversified. Library. Equipment fitting. One time I said you were ‘processing the loss emotionally’ after a game we won, which in retrospect was a mistake, because Jay actually came to check on you and I had to improvise an entire secondary lie on the spot.”

“You told him I was sad after a win?”

“I panicked! You were not in the building, Jungwon, I needed something fast!”

It was Heeseung, in the end, with his usual quiet bluntness, who said the thing that pushed you both toward an actual conversation about what exactly you were doing. “You two are being sloppy,” he said, apropos of nothing, while you were both in the kitchen at the same time for once without any real cover story prepared, his voice pitched low enough that it wasn’t a public confrontation, just an observation meant for the two of you. “Not in a ‘someone definitely knows’ way yet. In a ‘it’s only a matter of time’ way.”

“We’re being careful,” Jungwon said, automatically, though even he didn’t sound especially convinced. “You held her hand under the table on Tuesday. I watched it happen. Jay was four feet away.” Heeseung took a sip of his coffee, unbothered, delivering the rest like a weather report rather than an accusation. “I’m not telling you to stop. I’m telling you that whatever you’re doing right now isn’t a secret thing anymore, it’s a secret-shaped thing that everyone already knows the shape of. The only person who doesn’t know is Jay, and that’s getting harder to maintain every single week.” Neither of you had a response to that. Heeseung, satisfied he’d made his point, simply finished his coffee and left the room, and the silence he left behind sat heavy enough that you finally looked at each other and both understood, without saying it yet, that something needed to actually be decided.

It happened that same night, quieter than either of you expected — no big declaration, no dramatic setup, just the two of you lying in his bed in the dark, his fingers tracing slow shapes against your bare shoulder, the kind of stillness that made honesty easier than it usually was. “Can I ask you something,” Jungwon said, into the quiet. “Mm.”

“What are we doing.” You didn’t answer right away, not because you didn’t have one, but because you’d been avoiding the question so deliberately for so long that actually hearing it out loud felt strange, like a word you’d practiced saying in private finally being spoken in front of someone else. “I don’t know what we’re calling it.”

“I know what I want to call it.” He said it simply, no hesitation in it at all, the same steady certainty he’d had since the very first night, since before you’d even properly known his name. “I haven’t been seeing anyone else. I haven’t wanted to. I don’t want some random freshman from your econ section thinking she has a shot, and I really don’t want some guy at a party thinking he does either.” A small pause. “I want this to actually be something. Not just — convenient. Not just a secret. I want to be yours, and I want you to be mine, even if nobody else gets to know that yet.” You let that sit for a second, feeling the actual weight of it land somewhere real in your chest, and then you turned to face him fully in the dark. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay. Exclusive. Just us.” You felt something loosen in your chest as you said it, like a held breath finally let go. “I haven’t wanted anyone else either, if that wasn’t obvious from the jealousy thing.”

“It was very obvious.” He was smiling, you could hear it even without seeing it clearly. “I liked the jealousy thing a lot, for the record.”

“I know you did. You’re insufferable about it.”

“I’m allowed to be insufferable. My girlfriend’s jealous over me. That’s a good day.” He tried the word out like he was testing the weight of it, girlfriend, and something about the easy way he landed on it — like he’d been holding it ready for weeks, waiting for permission to use it — made you press closer into him, burying the small, helpless smile against his chest before he could see the full shape of it. “Don’t get used to saying that out loud,” you murmured. “Not yet. Not where anyone can hear.”

“I know.” Some of the lightness faded out of his voice, the reality of the actual logistics settling back in. “Soon, though. Right? We’re not doing this forever.”

“Soon,” you agreed, and didn’t let yourself think too hard about how soon soon actually needed to be, or what it would cost when it finally happened.

Sunghoon came out to the team on an entirely unrelated Tuesday, with none of the ceremony he’d apparently been bracing for, during a postpractice stretch session that had devolved, as most of them did, into nonsense. “I’m gonna say something and I need everyone to not make it weird,” he announced, to the room generally, mid-stretch, with the specific tension of someone who’d clearly rehearsed the moment and chosen the most low-stakes possible setting to finally do it. “Oh god, are you quitting hockey,” Jake said immediately. “Don’t quit hockey, we need you for the power play—”

“I’m not quitting hockey. I’m gay.” The room went quiet for exactly one second. “Okay,” Heeseung said, easily, already going back to his own stretch like Sunghoon had just announced the weather. “Cool.”

“That’s — that’s it? That’s the reaction?”

“What reaction did you want?” Jake looked genuinely confused. “Bro, we know. We’ve known. You’ve been weird about Sunoo for two months, you think we didn’t clock that?”

“I — okay, I knew you guys clocked the Sunoo thing, but I meant, like, generally—”

“We know generally too,” Riki put in, helpfully unhelpful. “I think Heeseung called it back in like September.”

“I called it the first week,” Heeseung corrected, mildly offended at the underselling of his own detective work. “It’s not, like, a thing, man,” Jake said, more gently now, sitting up properly to actually look at Sunghoon instead of just talking past him. “You’re still you. You’re still the guy who’s weirdly competitive about stretching and once cried during a dog food commercial—”

“That was one time and the dog was sick in the commercial, that’s a valid reaction—”

“You’re still our guy. That’s the whole thing. Nothing about that changes because you said the actual words out loud instead of us just all politely knowing.” Jake grinned, the tension fully gone from the room now. “Although I will say, the Sunoo thing makes a lot more sense now in terms of timeline. I thought you were just developing a coffee addiction for a while there.”

“I don’t even like coffee.”

“I KNOW, that’s what tipped me off, you kept buying it and not drinking it, it was clearly a Sunoo-adjacent purchase—” Sunghoon, somewhere in the middle of the room’s easy, immediate, unbothered acceptance, looked like a man who’d spent considerably longer bracing for this moment than the actual moment had required, and Jungwon — watching from across the room, his own secret still folded carefully out of sight — felt something complicated move through his chest. Relief, for Sunghoon, that this house was exactly the kind of place where something like that could land soft. And underneath it, quieter, a feeling he didn’t examine too closely: the knowledge that his own reveal, whenever it finally came, was not going to land anywhere near this gently. He thought about you, across the room and thought, not for the first time, that soon was a word doing a lot of work to put off something that was eventually going to come due no matter how careful you both stayed.

—

The quarterfinal landed on October 12th, which Jay had been complaining about since the schedule first dropped over the summer — “of course it’s on our actual birthday, of course the conference hates me specifically” — though the complaining had always had a performative edge to it, since everyone in the house knew Jay would rather play a quarterfinal on his birthday than not play one at all. You’d been planning the surprise party for two weeks, in increments small enough that nobody outside the inner circle had noticed: a quiet text chain with Heeseung about decorations, a grocery run with Riki that he’d disguised as “team snacks” when Jay asked, a cake order picked up that morning and hidden in the trunk of Sunoo’s car like contraband. The whole house had folded into the conspiracy with an enthusiasm that surprised even you — Sunghoon handling the lights, Jake in charge of the playlist, Heeseung quietly making sure there was enough food to feed forty hockey players without it looking suspicious in the fridge beforehand.

Jungwon’s job was the hardest one, and you’d given it to him on purpose: keep Jay distracted enough after the game that nobody had to rush the setup. “You’re sure he won’t notice anything’s off,” Jungwon asked, the night before, lying beside you with his chin propped on his hand. “He’s terrible at noticing things that aren’t directly related to hockey or me. You’ve watched him miss four separate hints about his own surprise party already. He thinks we’re doing dinner. A small dinner. That’s it.”

“And the call thing?”

“My job. I’ll handle my job. You handle yours — keep him in the locker room long enough, talk hockey at him, whatever it takes.”

“I can talk hockey at him for hours. That part’s not hard.” He pressed a kiss to your temple, easy, settling further into the pillow. “Happy almost-birthday, by the way. Twenty-one’s a big one.”

“Don’t remind me. I feel ancient.”

“You’re the same age as your brother, you’ve always been this age relative to him, nothing’s changing.”

“That’s not the point and you know it.”

Blackwood won the quarterfinal 5–2, Jay scoring twice and assisting on a third, playing like a man who’d decided his birthday came with an obligation to be the best version of himself on the ice, and the locker room afterward was loud with the specific giddy exhaustion of a team that knew it was one step closer to the Cup. Jungwon found Jay by his stall, still half in his gear, and did exactly what he’d promised — kept him there, breaking down the third goal frame by frame, asking deliberately long questions about reads and lane choices that he already understood perfectly well, buying every minute he could.

Across the room, you were on the phone, your voice pitched loud enough to carry. “Mom wants to FaceTime him the second he’s out of the shower, she’s been texting me nonstop, she says happy birthday like four times already and wants to actually see his face—” It worked exactly as planned. By the time Jay finally extracted himself from Jungwon’s increasingly elaborate hockey questions and took the call from your parents in the hallway outside the locker room — your mother’s voice audible even through the phone, your father in the background insisting on singing the first two lines of happy birthday badly, on purpose, the way he had every year since you were both kids — the entire team had already loaded into cars and beaten you both back to the Den, where Heeseung’s lights were up, Jake’s playlist was queued, and Sunoo had the cake set up on the kitchen counter with twenty-one candles that had taken Riki three attempts to actually light because the lighter kept giving out.

You walked Jay through the front door fifteen minutes later, phone call wrapped up, still mid-sentence about something your mom had said, and the entire house erupted at once — lights up, music starting, a chorus of “SURPRISE” loud enough that Jay actually flinched, one hand flying to his chest like his heart had genuinely stopped for a second. “You—” He turned on you immediately, half-laughing, half-betrayed. “The FaceTime was a setup.”

“The FaceTime was real, Mom does want to call you later, I just needed you distracted for twenty minutes.”

“I can’t believe you used our parents as a smokescreen—”

“I can’t believe it worked this well, honestly, you’re shockingly easy to fool.” He pulled you into a hug before you’d finished the sentence, the kind that lifted you half off your feet, laughing into your hair. “Happy birthday to you too, by the way. We’re the same age, idiot, this is also your party.”

“I know. Co-birthday king and queen. I expect a toast.”

“You’ll get several toasts. Jake’s already written something, I can see it on his face, he’s been holding it in all night.” He had, in fact, written something, and it was exactly as unhinged as advertised — a toast that started sincere, devolved into a list of increasingly embarrassing stories about Jay from freshman year, and ended with Jake actually getting a little emotional about “the best captain and the most tolerant sister a team’s ever been lucky enough to share a house with,” which got a genuine cheer from the room and a swat to the back of the head from Jay, who was visibly moved and trying very hard not to show it.

The party ran late, the good kind of late, the kind where nobody’s watching the clock because nobody wants the night to end — cake, then dancing, then somebody’s questionable decision to bring out the karaoke machine that lived in the Den’s basement for occasions exactly like this one, Jay and Jake butchering a duet so badly that Heeseung had to leave the room to compose himself. You danced with your brother for one whole song, the two of you doing the same ridiculous, half-choreographed bit you’d been doing at every birthday since you were fourteen, and across the room you caught Jungwon watching, something soft and unguarded on his face that he didn’t bother hiding for once, since nobody was paying close enough attention to notice. By two in the morning, the house had finally gone quiet — bodies passed out across couches, Jay asleep sitting up in an armchair with cake frosting still on his collar, Riki face-down on the floor for reasons nobody had bothered to investigate, Sunoo and Sunghoon curled into each other on the porch swing outside, low voices and easy laughter drifting in through the screen door. The kind of ending a good party earns. “Come on,” Jungwon said quietly, finding you in the kitchen surveying the wreckage of cake and cups. “I’ll walk you back.”

The campus at two in the morning had a particular hush to it, streetlights doing most of the work, your footsteps the loudest sound for blocks. Jungwon had his hands in his pockets, walking close enough that his shoulder brushed yours every few steps, neither of you in any real hurry to get where you were going. “Good birthday?” he asked. “Best one in years, honestly. Jongseong cried a little during Jake’s toast and he’s going to deny it forever, so that alone made the whole night worth it.”

“I have something for you. For your actual birthday, not the team thing.” He pulled a small, carefully wrapped box out of his jacket pocket — he’d clearly been carrying it all night, waiting for a quiet moment that wasn’t surrounded by forty other people — and held it out, a little sheepish in a way you rarely got to see on him. “It’s not much. I wanted to give it to you without an audience.” You unwrapped it slowly, under the streetlight outside your dorm, and found a thin silver chain inside, a small charm hanging from it shaped like a tiny hockey puck, and on the back, when you turned it over, your birthday engraved in careful, small lettering alongside a single date you recognized immediately — the night of the party, three months ago, when this whole impossible thing had started. “Jungwon.”

“I know it’s a weird thing to commemorate. I just—” He rubbed the back of his neck, the first genuinely nervous gesture you’d seen out of him in weeks. “I wanted something that was just ours. Something nobody else would know the meaning of if they saw it. You could wear it and nobody would ever know what it actually means, except you. Except us.” You didn’t say anything for a second, just looked at it, the weight of how much thought had clearly gone into something this small landing somewhere soft and unguarded in your chest, and when you looked back up at him, he was watching you with the specific, quiet hope of someone who genuinely wasn’t sure how the gift would be received. “I love it,” you said, finally. “I love it so much.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You let him fasten it around your neck right there under the streetlight, his fingers careful at the clasp, and when he was done you turned and kissed him — slow, unhurried, none of the urgency from earlier in the semester, just the easy, settled kind of kiss that came from three months of knowing exactly how this felt and not being in any rush to stop feeling it. “Best birthday gift I’ve gotten in years,” you murmured, against his mouth. “Good. That was the goal.” He kissed you again, lingering, his hand coming up to rest against the curve of your jaw. “Happy birthday.”

“Hey,” you said, pulling back just far enough to look at him properly, an idea you’d been sitting on for a week finally finding its moment. “There’s a festival next weekend. Off campus, like an hour out — Sunoo’s been talking about it for weeks, lights and music and the whole thing. I want you to come with me.”

“An hour off campus.” Something in his face shifted, considering it properly. “That’s far enough that nobody from the team would just stumble into us.”

“That’s the point.”

“You’re asking me on an actual date. A real one. Outside the Den, outside parties, outside all of this.” He said it slowly, like he was turning the idea over, savoring it a little. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me something like that since September.”

“Is that a yes?”

“That’s the easiest yes I’ve ever given anyone.” He pulled you back in, forehead resting against yours, both of you smiling too wide for the hour, for how tired you should have been, for how much you still had left to figure out about the rest of this. “I’d go anywhere with you. An hour’s nothing.” You stood there a while longer under the streetlight, in no hurry at all, the small silver puck resting warm against your collarbone, neither of you saying out loud the thing you were both clearly thinking — that a real date, an hour off campus, away from anyone who might recognize either of you, felt like the first real crack of daylight after months spent entirely in the dark. Like maybe, soon, you wouldn’t have to keep choosing between him and the rest of your life.

The week leading up to the festival passed in a way that felt almost suspiciously easy, and Jungwon noticed it more than once — the specific, unguarded lightness of just being happy, without the usual undercurrent of calculation running underneath it. He caught himself smiling at nothing during an econ lecture. Caught Riki noticing him do it. “You’ve been weird all week,” Riki said, eyeing him over a stats problem set neither of them were actually working on. “Weird good, though. Like, suspiciously content. It’s unsettling, honestly, I’m used to you having at least one low-grade crisis going at all times.”

“I don’t have crises.”

“You have constant crises, you just hide them well. This week you’ve had zero. I noticed.” Riki narrowed his eyes. “Something’s happening this weekend. You’ve got a bag packed already and it’s Tuesday.”

“We’re going to a festival.”

“You’re going somewhere overnight with a bag packed four days early for a day festival. Those numbers don’t add up, my friend.”

Jungwon didn’t dignify that with an answer, mostly because Riki wasn’t wrong, and the not-answering was its own kind of confirmation that Riki accepted with a satisfied, knowing nod and went back to his problem set, humming something annoyingly pleased with himself under his breath.

You’d booked the hotel two weeks in advance, a small, unfussy place near the festival grounds that you’d found mostly because it was far enough out that nobody from Blackwood would plausibly be staying there too, and you’d told Jungwon all of it with the same deliberate, slightly nervous energy of someone planning something that mattered more to her than she wanted to admit out loud.

“Friday to Sunday,” you’d said, showing him the booking on your phone. “Festival’s Friday, but I figured — we never get an actual weekend. Just us. No covering for anyone, no checking the hallway first.”

“Friday to Sunday,” he’d repeated, something settling and pleased moving across his face. “I like that math a lot.”

Sunoo and Sunghoon were going too — officially, publicly, the easiest couple in the entire group now that Sunghoon’s coming out had cleared whatever quiet tension used to sit underneath their dynamic — and the four of you drove out together Friday afternoon, windows down, Sunoo controlling the music with the same merciless authority he applied to most things, Sunghoon driving with one hand permanently finding Sunoo’s knee whenever a song he liked came on. “This is so much better than sneaking around,” Sunoo announced, from the front seat, twisting around to grin at the two of you in the back. “You two get to have, like, a real weekend. With us. As an actual couple thing. Double date energy. I’ve been waiting for this since September.”

“We’re not technically a public couple yet,” you reminded him.

“You’re public to us. That’s basically the same thing, just smaller scale.”

The festival itself was everything Sunoo had promised — string lights strung between food trucks, a stage at the far end of the field playing through a lineup of bands neither of you fully recognized, the whole grounds lit gold as the sun went down. And for the first time since the party back in September, you got to just be a couple in public — Jungwon’s hand finding yours without either of you checking who might be watching first, his arm slung easy around your shoulders while you waited in line for festival food, both of you laughing at something stupid Sunoo said without the automatic, practiced half-second of distance you usually kept in case anyone from the Den happened to be nearby. “This is so weird,” you admitted, leaning into his side as the two of you watched some local band finish their set. “Good weird. I keep waiting for the part where I have to let go of your hand.”

“You don’t have to let go of my hand.” He squeezed it, like he was making the point physically as well as out loud. “Not here. Not this weekend.”

“I know. It’s just — new. Being normal about it.”

“I could get used to normal.” He pressed a kiss to your temple, easy, unhurried, the kind of casual public affection that would’ve sent your heart into your throat back at the Den and here just felt like exhaling. “We should do this more.”

“We will. Eventually. Just — not yet.” He didn’t push on the not yet, the way he’d stopped pushing on it weeks ago, content for now with the version of normal a weekend an hour outside of everyone’s orbit could actually offer. Sunghoon bought Sunoo a ridiculous oversized stuffed animal from one of the carnival games after missing the target six times and finally landing it on the seventh, to a level of triumphant celebration that drew the attention of half the surrounding crowd, and Sunoo carried it around for the rest of the night like a trophy, occasionally hitting Sunghoon with it when he said something he found insufficiently romantic.

You got back to the hotel late, well past midnight, festival dust still on your shoes, and the second the door clicked shut behind you, Jungwon had you pressed gently back against it, his mouth finding yours unhurried but certain. “Good night?” he murmured, against your lips. “Best one in a while.” You let your hands slide up under his shirt, the festival heat and the long day and months of careful waiting all collapsing into one slow, building want. “Come to bed.”

He undressed you slow, the same deliberate care he’d had since the very first night, like the weekend stretching ahead of you had taken away any reason to rush. He laid you back against the hotel sheets, mouth tracing the same patient path down your throat, your chest, lower, and when his fingers finally found your folds, already slick from the whole night of anticipation, he groaned low against your skin. “We’ve got all weekend,” he said, glancing up at you, something dark and unhurried in his eyes. “No reason to rush any of it.”

He took his time proving that, working you open with slow, deliberate fingers until you were gasping his name into the quiet of the room, and when he finally settled over you and pushed in, the rhythm he found was slow and grinding, deep, drawing soft, breathy moans out of you that built steadily rather than rushing toward anything. “Look at you,” he breathed, watching your face with open, unguarded want. “We’ve got two more nights of this. I’m not in a hurry tonight.” He kept that promise. The first time was slow, drawn-out, both of you trading low praise and his name and yours back and forth until you came apart around him with a soft, broken sound, his own release following unhurried moments later. The second time, near dawn, was slower still, lazier, half-asleep limbs and unhurried kisses until neither of you could tell anymore where the festival ended and the rest of the weekend began.

Saturday morning arrived late, neither of you bothering to leave the bed until room service knocked, and you spent a solid hour tangled in the sheets eating pancakes off the same plate, his fingers occasionally stealing bites off your fork just to watch you swat at him. “This is what I want,” you said at one point, syrup-sticky and entirely unguarded, watching him steal another piece of bacon. “Just this. Mornings like this, except not just on a weekend an hour from campus.”

“Soon,” he said, the word that had become something like a promise between you over the last few weeks, and this time it landed differently — closer, more real, like the gap between soon and now had finally started to close.

You spent Saturday afternoon wandering the small downtown near the hotel, ducking into shops mostly for the fun of it, Jungwon buying you a ridiculous pair of sunglasses you’d tried on as a joke and then genuinely loved, you talking him into a soft, oversized sweater he swore he’d never wear outside this trip and absolutely would, in fact, wear constantly once you got back. Sunoo texted updates from his and Sunghoon’s parallel afternoon — we got matching bracelets I’m going to cry — and you sent back a photo of Jungwon in his new sweater with the caption we’re matching in spirit. By Saturday night you were both too sun-tired and festival-worn to do much more than order room service again and fall asleep tangled together by ten, and Sunday morning came too fast, the drive back to campus quieter than the drive out had been, all four of you a little subdued at the idea of stepping back into a world where this version of things — easy, public, unguarded — had to fold itself small again.

“I don’t want to go back to hiding it,” you said quietly, somewhere on the drive, your head against Jungwon’s shoulder, watching the festival grounds disappear behind you through the back window. “I know.” His arm tightened around you, his voice low enough that it was just for you, even with Sunoo and Sunghoon talking quietly up front. “We won’t have to. Not forever.”

The drive back from the festival had the particular quiet of a good weekend ending — not sad, exactly, just settling, everyone a little sun-worn and content, Sunoo’s playlist gone soft and slow for the last hour of the trip in a way that matched the mood better than anything from Friday’s drive out. Sunghoon dropped you and Sunoo off first, your dorm closer to the highway exit than the Den, and the goodbye had its own small chaos — Sunoo hugging you so hard you nearly lost your footing, already texting in the group chat about “the best weekend of my entire life, I’m emotional, don’t talk to me,” Sunghoon leaning out the driver’s window to tell Jungwon something about practice schedules that was really just an excuse to keep the car parked a few extra minutes.

You climbed out last, your bag over one shoulder, and Jungwon got out too, rounding the car to walk you the short distance to the dorm entrance even though it was barely twenty feet, because apparently three days of being an actual couple in public had made him reluctant to let the smallest goodbye go un-marked. “This was the best weekend I’ve had in years,” you told him, under the dorm’s overhead light, voice still a little rough with the particular exhaustion that comes from too much sun and too little sleep and exactly the right amount of everything else. “Best one I’ve ever had.” He said it simply, with no exaggeration in it at all, like he’d actually run the comparison in his head and landed on the truth of it. “I don’t want to go back to checking hallways.”

“I know. We won’t, soon.”

“Soon,” he agreed, and pulled you in for a last kiss right there under the light, slow and unhurried despite Sunghoon’s car idling at the curb, his hand coming up to cup your jaw the same way it had the very first night, except nothing about this kiss carried any of that night’s uncertainty. This one knew exactly what it was. “Go,” you murmured, eventually, laughing against his mouth. “Sunghoon’s going to start honking.”

“Let him.”

“Jungwon.”

“Fine. Going.” He kissed you once more, quick, like he couldn’t quite help himself, then backed away toward the car with obvious reluctance, already calling over his shoulder, “text me when you’re inside.”

“I’m twenty feet from the door.”

“Text me anyway.” You watched the car pull away before you went in, and true to his word, your phone buzzed before you’d even gotten your key in the lock.

jungwon: best weekend of my life. thank you for asking me.

you: thank you for climbing through my window in september. none of this happens without that.

jungwon: worth every inch of that drainpipe

The car ride to the Den was quieter, Sunghoon driving, Jungwon in the passenger seat with his phone still warm in his hand, the particular loose, contented quiet of someone who’d spent three days being exactly who he wanted to be without having to manage it. “You good?” Sunghoon asked, eyes on the road. “You’ve got a face.”

“What face.”

“The face you’ve had all weekend. The one where you look like someone hit you with a happiness truck and you haven’t fully recovered.” Sunghoon said it without judgment, mostly amused. “It’s a good look on you. Different from the usual broody thing.”

“I don’t do a broody thing.”

“You do an extensive broody thing, it’s just been on pause for three days.” Sunghoon pulled up outside the Den, cutting the engine. “You ready for the readjustment? Back to hallway-checking and stomach-thing alibis?”

“Not really.”

“Yeah. Figured.”

Jay was in the kitchen when they walked in, mid-conversation with Heeseung about something on his laptop, and he looked up the second the door opened with the easy, automatic attention of a captain checking who’d come home. “There he is. Where’ve you been all weekend? Riki said something about a festival, but he was being weird and cagey about it, which usually means he’s covering for somebody.” Jungwon felt the question land exactly where he’d known it would eventually land, and answered it the way he’d practiced in his head somewhere around hour two of the drive home, voice easy, unbothered, the specific calm he’d built a habit of deploying for exactly this purpose. “Went with Sunghoon. Sunoo wanted to go to that festival thing out near the lake, dragged us both along, figured it’d be good to get off campus for a weekend before the semester gets worse.” A small shrug, casual, nothing in it worth a second look. “Needed the break, honestly. Been a heavy few weeks.”

“Yeah, you’ve earned a weekend off.” Jay nodded, easy, already moving past it, no reason in his world yet to ask a follow-up question, because nothing about the answer had given him one. “Glad you went. You’ve looked tired lately, this is the first time in weeks you’ve looked like you actually slept.”

“I slept a lot.”

“Good. Need you sharp, we’ve got the semifinal in two weeks, I’m not losing my center to burnout right before that.” Jay clapped him once on the shoulder on his way past, the same easy, trusting gesture he’d been giving Jungwon since week one, completely unaware of how much weight that trust was currently carrying without his knowledge. “Go unpack. We’ll talk lines tomorrow.” Jungwon watched him go, the lie sitting easy and practiced in his chest, and felt — not for the first time, but more sharply than usual, the festival’s three days of honesty still warm in his memory — exactly how much it cost him to do this so smoothly. He was good at it. That had stopped feeling like something to be proud of weeks ago.

Sunghoon, beside him, didn’t say anything, just exhaled slow through his nose, the universal sound of someone watching a friend get better and better at something that was eventually going to catch up to him. “You’re really good at that,” Sunghoon said, finally, quiet, once Jay was out of earshot. “Yeah,” Jungwon said, and didn’t sound proud of it at all. “I know.”

Coach Anders had decided, with the semifinal now exactly two weeks out, that the only acceptable response to that fact was to make practice considerably worse for everyone involved, and Jay had taken to that decision with the specific zeal of a captain who agreed with it completely and intended to make sure the rest of the team did too. “Again,” Jay called, for what had to be the eighth time, as the line reset at the blue line. “We’re not running this drill again because it was bad. We’re running it again because it needs to be automatic. You shouldn’t have to think about this read by week fourteen of the season.”

“My legs are gone,” Jake announced, from somewhere near the bench, draped over the boards like a man who’d given up on dignity entirely.

“Good. That means it’s working.” Jay didn’t even look over, already skating back to center ice. “Yang, Riki, line up. Same read, full speed this time.”

Practice ran nearly forty minutes long that day, and longer the day after that, Coach standing at the bench with his arms crossed and his expression unreadable in the particular way that meant he was satisfied without wanting anyone to know it yet. Jungwon’s legs felt like they belonged to someone else by the time they finally got let off the ice, the good kind of exhausted, the kind that meant the work was actually sinking in.

Jay gathered them at center ice before letting anyone head for the showers, voice pitched in the low, even register he used when he meant something seriously. “Two weeks,” he said. “I know everyone’s tired. I’m tired. I don’t care. We’ve worked too hard this season to lose in the semis because we got comfortable in October.” His eyes moved across the group, the same way they always did, landing for half a second longer on his first line. “I need everyone locked in. No distractions. No slipping. We’ve got one shot at this and I’m not watching it fall apart over something stupid.” Jungwon felt that land somewhere uncomfortable in his chest, the word slipping hitting closer than Jay could possibly know he meant it.

You came by the Den that evening with a folder of notes Jay had texted you about twenty times asking for — something he’d left at your apartment after a study session weeks ago that he apparently needed for a presentation he’d been putting off — and you found the house in its usual post-practice wind-down, the smell of someone’s attempt at dinner drifting from the kitchen, the low murmur of a TV nobody was actually watching. “Finally,” Jay said, intercepting you in the front hallway before you’d even made it past the framed photo on the wall, snatching the folder out of your hands with the particular gracelessness of an exhausted older brother. “You’re a lifesaver. I would’ve actually failed this presentation.”

“You’re welcome. Next time, don’t leave your stuff at my place for three weeks before remembering you need it.”

“Noted. Ignored, probably, but noted.” He flipped through the folder to confirm everything was there, and in the process of doing so, his eyes caught on something at your collarbone, the small silver chain that had become such a constant fixture you’d genuinely forgotten, in this exact moment, that it was something worth noticing. “That’s new,” Jay said, tilting his head, studying the little charm hanging from it. “The necklace. I haven’t seen that before.” Your stomach did a slow, cold drop, the kind that came from being caught flat-footed by a question you should have seen coming and hadn’t prepared an answer for. “Oh — yeah. Just something I picked up.”

“Where? It’s cute. Looks expensive for a ‘picked up’ kind of thing.” He leaned in slightly, squinting at the small engraved charm without actually reaching for it, which was the only mercy currently available to you. “Is that a date on the back?”

“It’s — just a birthday thing. From myself. Treated myself.” The lie came out faster than you’d planned it, stacking itself on top of the truth so quickly you almost believed it yourself for a second. “You know. Twenty-one. Felt like an occasion.”

“Huh.” Jay studied it a beat longer, and for one suspended second you were certain he was going to ask the obvious next question — why would you buy yourself a hockey puck charm, you don’t even like hockey jewelry, you’ve made fun of mine for years — but exhaustion and a folder full of overdue coursework apparently won out over curiosity, and he just shrugged, already turning back toward the stairs. “Cute, though. Looks good on you.”

“Thanks.”

“Tell Sunoo I said hi. And tell Sunghoon he owes me ten bucks from the bet last week.”

“What bet?”

“Doesn’t matter, just tell him.” Jay was already halfway up the stairs, folder under his arm, the conversation closed in his mind as completely as it had opened.

You stood there for a long moment after he disappeared, your hand coming up unconsciously to touch the small charm at your collarbone, feeling the particular vertigo of having walked right up to the edge of something and stepped back from it by pure luck rather than any actual skill. Across the room, in the kitchen doorway, Jungwon had gone very still, having caught the entire exchange from a few feet away, and when your eyes finally met his, you both understood, without saying anything, exactly how close that had just been. “That was too close,” you said quietly, once you’d both retreated to the relative privacy of the back porch. “I know.” Jungwon’s jaw was tight, his eyes still on the doorway like Jay might reappear any second. “He was right there. One more second of looking at it and he would’ve asked the question that actually matters.”

“He didn’t, though.”

“This time.” Jungwon ran a hand through his hair, something frayed at the edges of his usual calm. “We’ve been doing this for four months. We just got lucky in there. That’s not the same as being careful.” You didn’t have a good response to that, mostly because he was right, and the two of you stood there in the cold evening air, the necklace warm and suddenly heavy against your skin, both quietly aware that the margin you’d been operating in had just gotten visibly thinner, and that luck, eventually, the way it always does, was going to run out.

—

You went to Jungwons to study and the studying had been real, at first — that was the part that would seem darkly funny to Jungwon later, in the version of this night he’d replay for weeks afterward, the fact that the thing that finally got them caught had started as something genuinely, boringly innocent. You’d come over with your laptop and a stack of flashcards for a psych exam, and Jungwon had his own econ readings spread across the bed because his desk was buried under hockey equipment he kept forgetting to put away, and the two of you had actually studied, properly, for almost an hour — quizzing each other, him stealing glances at your flashcards and making fun of your handwriting, you threatening to revoke his snack privileges if he kept distracting you.

The studying had stopped being the point somewhere around the time he’d leaned over to correct an answer on your flashcard and you’d turned your head at exactly the wrong — or right — moment, and what started as a normal, domestic kind of closeness had tipped, slow and easy and entirely without either of you deciding it on purpose, into something else. Flashcards forgotten on the floor. His laptop pushed aside. The particular unhurried quiet of two people who’d done this enough times now that there was no nervousness left in it at all, just familiarity, comfort, the specific ease of being completely known by someone.

Neither of you heard the door.

Jay had knocked — he’d insist on that later, loudly, repeatedly, as if it mattered — but the knock had landed in a gap between two things that weren’t paying attention to anything outside the room, and when nobody answered, he’d done what he always did at the Den, what he’d done a hundred times before without a second thought, because it was his team’s house and these were his guys and there had never, not once in three years, been a reason to think twice about opening a door that wasn’t locked.

“Hey, Jungwon, I need to ask you something about the line rush tomorrow—” The sentence didn’t finish. It just stopped, mid-air, the way a record stops when someone lifts the needle, and the silence that replaced it was the loudest sound Jungwon had ever heard in his life.

For one full second nobody moved. Jay stood frozen in the doorway, hand still on the handle, his expression doing something complicated and fast — confusion first, the brain’s split-second refusal to process what it was looking at, and then, almost instantly, the confusion burning off into something else entirely, something that didn’t have a soft landing anywhere underneath it.

Jungwon didn’t scramble. That would come a second later, the reflexive grab for a shirt, the half-formed motion of putting himself between you and the door, but in that very first second he just froze too, eye to eye with Jay across the room, and some old, certain part of him understood with total clarity that there was no version of the next ten seconds that ended anywhere good. “Get out,” Jay said. Flat. Quiet. Worse than yelling. He wasn’t talking to you. He couldn’t look at you.

His eyes were locked on Jungwon, and his voice, when it came again, had dropped even lower, which somehow made it land harder than volume would have. “Get dressed. Get downstairs. Now.” He turned and left before either of you could say a single word, the door left hanging open behind him, and the sound of his footsteps on the stairs was the sound of something detonating in slow motion, the blast wave still traveling, the real damage still about thirty seconds out.

By the time Jungwon made it down to the common room — shirt yanked on inside out, hands not quite steady, you two steps behind him with your own clothes hastily fixed, both of you moving on the kind of adrenaline that doesn’t leave room for thinking — the house had already started gathering, drawn by the sound of Jay’s voice carrying from the kitchen where he stood with his hands braced flat on the counter, head down, breathing like a man trying very hard not to put his fist through something.

Riki was already there, having apparently come downstairs to investigate the noise, and the look on his face when he caught sight of Jungwon was somewhere between sympathy and pure dread. Jake appeared from the den a second later, take-out container still in hand, taking in the scene with rapidly dawning horror. “Jongseong,” you started, “let me explain—”

“Explain what.” Jay’s head came up, and his voice cracked across the room loud enough that it didn’t matter anymore who heard it. “Explain how long this has been going on? Explain how many times I’ve asked where you were and gotten a lie back? Explain how every single person in this house apparently knew except me?” Nobody answered that. Jake’s eyes dropped to the floor. Riki’s jaw tightened. The silence itself was an answer, and Jay heard it land, his face going through something raw and furious all at once.

“You all knew.” He looked around the room, voice climbing now, no longer flat, no longer quiet. “You knew, and none of you said a word to me. I trusted every single one of you—”

“It wasn’t our secret to tell,” Heeseung said, low, the only person brave enough to say anything at all. “Don’t.” Jay’s voice cracked on the word. “Don’t you dare stand there and tell me about whose secret it was. She’s my sister.” He turned back to Jungwon, and whatever had been simmering under the flat, quiet anger from upstairs finally broke loose entirely. “I had one rule. One. I told you on day one, I told you to your face, and you shook my hand on the ice an hour later and let me believe you actually meant it.”

“Jongseong, I—”

“How long.” Jay was closing the distance now, chest heaving, and Jungwon — to his credit, to the credit of the discipline that made him good at everything he did — didn’t back away from it. “How long has this been happening. Don’t lie to me again, you’ve done enough of that already.”

“Since September.” Something in Jay’s face actually broke at that, the math of it landing visibly — four months, nearly the entire season, every single practice, every single game, every locker room conversation happening underneath something he’d had no idea about — and the breaking turned immediately back into rage because rage was easier to hold than the alternative. “Four months.” He shoved Jungwon, hard, both hands flat against his chest, hard enough that Jungwon actually stumbled back a step. “Four months of you standing next to me on the ice, four months of me trusting you with line calls, with the C someday, with everything, while you—”

“Jongseong, stop—” you tried to get between them, hand on your brother’s arm, but he shook you off, not violently, just completely focused on Jungwon now, advancing again. “You don’t get to touch her.” His voice had gone rough, half-wrecked. “You don’t get to look at me every single day at practice like nothing’s wrong while you’re—”

He shoved again, and this time Jungwon’s back hit the counter, and for a second it looked like it might actually become something neither of them could walk back from — Jay’s fist closing, his whole body coiled toward throwing the punch that had clearly been building since the second he opened that door — and that was when Jake and Heeseung both moved at once, Jake’s arms locking around Jay’s middle and hauling him back bodily, Heeseung grabbing his arm, both of them talking over each other, fast, low, hey, hey, not like this, not here—

Jungwon didn’t fight back. Didn’t even raise his hands to defend himself, just stood there and took the shove, which seemed to make something in Jay even angrier — like some part of him had wanted Jungwon to fight back, needed somewhere to put all of this that wasn’t just him screaming into a room that wouldn’t push back. “GET OFF ME—” Jay wrenched against Jake’s grip, and that’s when you stepped fully between them, voice cutting through everything else in the room, loud enough and furious enough that it actually stopped him.

“Stop it. STOP. Look at me.” Your voice broke on the last word, but you didn’t back down, standing your ground directly in the space between your brother and the boy he was trying to put a fist into. “You want to be mad? Be mad at me too, then, because I made every single one of these choices right alongside him. He doesn’t get to decide who I love.” Your voice cracked again, and you let it. “And neither do you.” The room went dead silent. Even Jay, still half-restrained by Jake’s grip, stopped pulling.

“He doesn’t get to decide who I love,” you said again, quieter now, but no less furious, “and you don’t either, Jongseong. I am not a rule on your team. I’m not something you get to protect by deciding for me. I’m twenty-one years old and I fell in love with someone, and I don’t care whose name was on a list you made up three years ago.”

Jay stared at you, chest still heaving, something in his face caving in around the edges in a way the anger hadn’t managed to do yet. “You’re in love with him.” It wasn’t really a question. It came out flat, hollowed out, like he was hearing the actual shape of what he’d walked in on for the first time, underneath all the rage. You didn’t answer. You didn’t have to. The answer was already all over your face, and Jay saw it, and something about seeing it confirmed broke whatever had still been holding the anger together.

He went quiet. Genuinely quiet, the fight draining out of him all at once, Jake’s grip loosening because there was nothing left to restrain. He looked at Jungwon one more time — not with rage now, something worse, something flatter and more wounded. “I trusted you, Jungwon.” His voice had gone rough, almost gentle, which somehow landed harder than anything he’d shouted. “Out of everyone on this team. You.” He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and walked out, past all of them, out the front door into the night, and nobody followed him, because nobody in that room had any idea what they’d even say if they did.

The house didn’t go back to normal noise after that. It just sort of held its breath, everyone scattering into smaller, quieter clusters, nobody quite looking at you or Jungwon directly, the weight of the last five minutes still hanging thick in every room.

You found Jungwon upstairs, sitting on the edge of his bed exactly where the two of you had been studying an hour before, flashcards still scattered across the floor like nothing had happened, like the whole world hadn’t just come apart downstairs. He had his elbows on his knees, head down, and when you sat beside him he didn’t look up right away. “Hey.” You put a hand on his back, careful. “Look at me.”

When he finally did, his eyes were wet, and the sight of it — Jungwon, who never cried, who’d taken a shove to the chest downstairs without flinching — undid something in you faster than the whole fight had. “I ruined it,” he said, voice cracking. “The one thing he ever actually trusted me with. I told him I wouldn’t touch you and I — I broke it anyway, and I’d do it again, and I hate that about myself, I hate that I’m not even sorry—”

“Hey.” You pulled him into you, his head dropping against your shoulder, his arms finally coming around you like he needed something solid to hold onto. “I’m not sorry either. I can’t be sorry about you.” He cried quietly into your shoulder for a long time after that, and you just held him, neither of you saying anything else, because there wasn’t anything left to say that would fix what had just happened downstairs.

Blackwood played the semifinal four days later, and somehow, despite everything, despite a locker room that had gone quiet and brittle in a way Coach Anders clocked within the first five minutes of the first practice after, they won — 3–2, in overtime, a deflection off Jake’s stick that barely crossed the line before the horn sounded. It should have felt like the best night of the season. Instead it felt like survival. Jay hadn’t passed to Jungwon all night. Not once, not even when the lane was wide open, not even in overtime when every read on the ice screamed for it. Jungwon had noticed. The whole bench had noticed. Coach noticed most of all, and in the chaos of the locker room afterward, amid the relief and the exhaustion and the muted, uncertain celebration, he pulled both of them aside before anyone could even get their gear half off. “Park. Yang. My office. Now.”

The door clicked shut behind the three of them, and Coach Anders didn’t sit down, just stood there with his arms crossed, looking at both of them like a man who’d run out of patience an entire period ago and had only just now gotten the chance to say so. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, and frankly, I don’t want the details.” His voice was level, but there was steel under it. “What I do know is that I watched my captain refuse to pass to his center for sixty minutes of playoff hockey tonight, and I watched us nearly lose a game we should have won by two goals because of it.” Neither of them said anything.

“We have the regional final in nine days. Whatever this is — and don’t tell me it’s nothing, I’ve coached long enough to know what a broken line looks like — you two figure it out. I don’t care how. I don’t care if you hate each other off the ice.” Coach’s jaw tightened. “But if you skate like that again next week, I will bench one of you myself, captain or not, and I will not lose sleep over it. Are we clear?”

“Yes, Coach,” Jungwon said, quiet. Jay didn’t answer at all. He just nodded once, jaw tight, and walked out without looking at either of them, and Jungwon stood there in the sudden quiet of the office, understanding with total clarity that the hardest part of all of this hadn’t even started yet.

The thing nobody had warned either of them about — because nobody had ever needed to before, in twenty-one years of being twins who occasionally fought and always, always talked it back out within a day — was how loud silence could actually be. Jay didn’t yell anymore after the night in the kitchen. That part, somehow, made it worse. He simply stopped. Stopped texting back. Stopped answering calls, then stopped letting them ring through at all, your name going straight to voicemail within the first week. Stopped looking at you when you were in the same room, which happened less and less because you’d quietly, painfully started avoiding the Den altogether, the one place that had felt like a second home for twenty-one years suddenly feeling like somewhere you weren’t welcome.

You tried, the first few days. Texts that got delivered but never answered. A voicemail you left, voice cracking halfway through, asking him to just call you back, just to talk, you didn’t even care if he yelled at you again as long as he said something. Nothing came back. Not a word. Not even the dismissive, irritated kind of nothing that meant he was still paying attention. Just an absence, total and deliberate, the kind that told you he’d made a decision and intended to hold it. “He’s never done this before,” you told Sunoo, one night, curled up on your dorm room floor with your phone face-down beside you because you couldn’t stand looking at the unanswered thread anymore. “Not once. Not ever. We’ve fought — God, we’ve fought about stupid stuff our whole lives, but it’s never lasted more than a day. We don’t know how to not talk to each other. I don’t know how to be a person without him answering when I call.”

“He’s hurting,” Sunoo said, careful, sitting beside you with a hand rubbing slow circles on your back. “That doesn’t make it okay that he’s doing this to you. But I don’t think this is really about punishing you. I think he genuinely doesn’t know what he’d say if he opened his mouth, so he’s choosing not to open it at all.”

“That doesn’t make it hurt less.”

“I know. I’m not saying it does.”

You didn’t tell Sunoo the rest of it — how you’d started reaching for your phone out of pure instinct a dozen times a day to send Jay something stupid, a meme, a complaint about a professor, the small constant traffic of two people who’d shared a womb and then a childhood and then this whole strange, public college life, and how every single time you caught yourself doing it, the realization that you couldn’t landed like a physical thing, a small fresh cut reopening in the same spot.

Jay wasn’t unaffected. He’d never have admitted that to anyone, least of all himself, but the proof of it sat in small, private moments nobody saw — him staring at your contact in his phone some nights, thumb hovering over the call button for whole minutes before he locked the screen and set it face-down on his desk. Once, badly, at three in the morning, he’d actually started typing something — I don’t know what to say to you right now but — before deleting it letter by letter and throwing the phone across his bed instead. He told himself it wasn’t about punishing you. He told himself a lot of things that week that he didn’t fully believe.

What he couldn’t tell himself a way out of was practice. He and Jungwon were still first line. Still had to be, with the regional final nine days out and Coach having made it unmistakably clear there was no alternative on the table. So they skated together, every single day, in a silence that had nothing companionable in it at all — Jay calling line changes and breakout patterns in the flattest voice anyone had ever heard out of him, never once including Jungwon’s name in anything that wasn’t strictly necessary.

He passed to everyone else. That was the part the whole team had clocked within the first practice back, and nobody said anything about it out loud because nobody knew how to say it without making things worse. Three-on-twos where Jungwon was the better read, and Jay sent it wide instead. Breakouts where the play sheet called for a direct feed up the middle, and Jay dumped it to the boards instead, conceding possession rather than putting the puck on his center’s stick. “Jongseong, why didn’t you pass?” Coach called out, the third time it happened in one practice, his patience visibly fraying.

“Saw a better option,” Jay said, flat, already skating back to the faceoff dot. “The better option was standing in open ice on the opposite side of the rink from where you actually shot it.” Jay didn’t answer that at all. He just lined up for the next drill, jaw locked, and ran it exactly the same way again.

The only time he spoke to Jungwon directly anymore was to yell — sharp, clipped corrections mid-drill, none of the easy back-and-forth they’d built over a season of trust, just you’re late on that read or cover the weak side, that’s basic positioning delivered in a voice that had nothing left in it of the guy who’d fist-bumped Jungwon at center ice in September and said welcome to the Wolves. Jungwon took every single one of them without arguing back, jaw tight, because arguing felt like it would only confirm to Jay that he’d never deserved the trust in the first place. “He’s doing this on purpose,” Riki said quietly to Heeseung, watching from the bench as Jay sent another pass wide of an open Jungwon. “He knows exactly what he’s costing us. He doesn’t care right now. That’s how mad he still is.”

“He cares,” Heeseung said. “That’s actually the whole problem. He cares so much it’s easier to be furious than to feel any of the rest of it.”

The locker room had gone strange too, the easy noise of September curdled into something careful and over-managed, everyone monitoring their own jokes for anything that might land near the wound. Jake had tried, once, to lighten things with a comment that would’ve killed in October and instead landed in dead silence, Jay’s face shutting down entirely, and Jake hadn’t tried again since. Jungwon noticed the way the team had started, almost unconsciously, dividing its attention between the two of them — careful not to seem too friendly with him in front of Jay, careful not to seem like they were taking sides, the whole house caught in a kind of low, exhausting diplomatic tension that hadn’t existed a month ago. He hated that he’d done that to them. He hated, more than anything, the particular shape of Jay’s silence — not the screaming from that first night, which had at least been something he could push back against, but this. The total absence. The refusal to even grant him the dignity of being yelled at like he mattered enough to yell at.

He found you most nights now at your dorm rather than the Den, both of you retreating to the one space that didn’t have Jay’s silence sitting in every room of it. “He looked right through me today,” Jungwon told you, one night, staring at the ceiling instead of you, like saying it out loud while looking at something else made it easier. “Not even with anger anymore. Just — through me. Like I’m not even worth being mad at.”

“He’s mad at me too. He won’t even do me that.”

“At least he’s saying things to me. Even if it’s just to yell about a read.” Jungwon’s voice cracked slightly. “I keep thinking if I just play perfectly enough, eventually he’ll have to say something else to me. Something that isn’t a correction. And then I realize how stupid that is, because this was never actually about hockey.” You reached over and laced your fingers through his, the same gesture he always did to you, except this time it was you reaching for him, and he held on like it was the only steady thing left in his whole week. “We’re going to fix this,” you said, with more certainty than you actually felt. “I don’t know how yet. But we are.”

Neither of you believed it fully, not that week, with the regional final closing in and Jay’s silence showing no signs of cracking and the whole team holding its breath around a fracture none of them knew how to heal. But you said it anyway, because saying it out loud felt like the only thing keeping either of you from drowning in how bad it had actually gotten.

Jake snapped on a Tuesday, in the most unlikely place for it to happen — not at the Den, not somewhere private, but right there in the locker room twenty minutes before practice, with half the team already in their gear and the rest filtering in around them.

It started small. Jay said something clipped to Jungwon about positioning on the upcoming power play, the same flat, correction-only tone he’d been using for a week and a half, and Jungwon nodded along the way he always did now, jaw tight, taking it without pushing back — and something about that exact exchange, the smallness and the sadness of it, the way two guys who used to actually talk to each other had been reduced to this, finally broke whatever restraint Jake had been holding onto. “Okay, I’m done.” He said it loud enough that the whole room turned, his gear bag dropping to the floor with a thud. “I am actually done watching this.”

“Jake—” Heeseung started, already sensing where this was going. “No, shut up, I’ve been quiet for a week and a half and I’m not doing it anymore.” Jake rounded on Jay first, finger pointed, and the sight of it — Jake, who was never the serious one, never the one who got genuinely heated about anything, standing there with real fire in his face — stopped the whole room cold. “You’re acting like Jungwon committed an actual crime. He didn’t murder anyone, man, he fell in love with your sister, and I’m sorry, but that’s not the same thing, and you have been treating him like it for two weeks.”

“Jake, this isn’t—”

“It is my business, actually, because I’m watching our first line fall apart nine days before the most important game of the season, and I’m watching my captain — who I respect more than almost anyone on this team — turn into someone I genuinely don’t recognize.” Jake’s voice cracked slightly, more emotional than anyone had ever heard him. “You taught me what it means to be a captain on this team. You taught all of us. And right now you’re teaching us that the second something actually hurts, the move is to go cold and silent and pretend the person doesn’t exist. Is that the lesson? Because if it is, I don’t want it.”

He turned on Jungwon next, and his voice didn’t soften much. “And you. You’re walking around like you’re being sentenced to life in prison. Take the hit, man. You broke the rule, fine, you knew what you were doing, but you don’t get to just curl up and accept being treated like nothing either. You love her. Act like it actually means something instead of apologizing with your whole body language every single day.”

Nobody said anything for a second. Riki had gone very still by his stall. Heeseung’s eyes were on the floor. Even Sunghoon, usually unreadable, looked like he didn’t know where to put his face. Jay was the one who finally broke the silence, and his voice, when it came, didn’t have any of the cold flatness from the last week and a half in it anymore. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing? You think I like feeling like this?”

“I think you’re so far up in your own anger that you forgot we’re all still here,” Jake said, quieter now, the heat draining out into something more tired. “I think you forgot Jungwon’s not just the guy who broke your rule. He’s also the guy who’s centered your line for an entire season and made you look like the best captain this program’s ever had. Both things are true. You’re acting like only one of them is.”

Jay’s jaw worked, something complicated moving across his face, and for a long moment the whole room just watched, waiting, nobody quite breathing. “Everyone out,” Jay said finally, low. “Except him.” A nod toward Jungwon. “Give us the room.” The team filed out slowly, Jake last, clapping Jay once on the shoulder on his way past — not quite forgiveness, not quite anything, just contact, the kind two people who actually cared about each other still managed even mid-argument — and the door shut, leaving Jay and Jungwon alone in the locker room for the first time since the night everything broke.

Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Jay sat down heavily on the bench, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor, and Jungwon stayed standing, not sure if sitting down uninvited was a privilege he still had. “Jake’s right,” Jay said finally, quiet, not looking up. “About all of it. I hate that he’s right.”

“I’m not going to pretend I didn’t break the rule,” Jungwon said. “I did. On purpose, eventually, even if it didn’t start that way. I’m not going to stand here and tell you I’m sorry about loving her, because I’m not, and I think you’d see right through it if I tried.”

“I know you’re not sorry about that part.” Jay’s voice was rough. “I think that’s actually what made it worse. If you’d looked guilty about loving her, I think I could’ve hated you clean. But you didn’t. You looked like a guy who’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I didn’t know what to do with that.”

“I would do it again. I’m sorry it cost you what it did. I’m not sorry I did it.” Jay finally looked up at that, and something raw and exhausted passed over his face. “I trusted you more than anyone on this team. That’s still true, even now. That’s what made this hurt the way it did — it wasn’t just the rule, Jungwon, it’s that I actually thought I knew you. I was already talking to Coach about making you assistant captain next year. I thought you were the one guy who’d never make me regret trusting him.”

“I know. I heard about that, after. It made everything worse, knowing that.”

“Good. It should.” But there wasn’t much heat left in it. They sat in silence for a while, the kind that had a little more give in it than the silence of the last two weeks, and finally Jay let out a long breath, something in his shoulders loosening for the first time since the night he’d opened that door. “I’m still mad,” he said. “I know.”

“I’m not gonna be okay with this overnight. I don’t know how to just turn that off.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Jungwon’s voice cracked slightly. “I just — I miss you, man. Not just as my captain. You were the first person here who actually made me feel like I belonged on this team, not just on the ice but in the house, in everything. I miss that. I know I don’t get to just ask for it back right now. I just wanted you to know I miss it.” Jay stood up slowly, and for a second neither of them moved, and then he closed the distance and pulled Jungwon into a hug — quick, a little stiff, the kind two guys give each other when they’re not sure the moment’s fully earned yet but need the contact anyway — a hard clap on the back, the kind of bro-hug that said more than either of them were ready to say out loud. “We’re not good,” Jay said, pulling back, voice rough. “I want to be really clear about that. We are not good yet.”

“I know.”

“But I can’t keep doing this on the ice. Jake’s right, I’m costing us the season out of spite, and that’s not who I want to be as a captain.” He exhaled, something almost like a laugh escaping despite everything. “God, I hate that Jake was the one who had to say all that to my face. He’s never serious about anything.”

“He was pretty serious about that.”

“Yeah. Scared the hell out of me, honestly.” Jay actually laughed then, short and surprised, like the sound had snuck out before he’d given it permission, and Jungwon found himself laughing too, the first time in two weeks either of them had laughed about anything, the sound strange and rusty but real. It faded into quiet again, but a different kind this time, something a little more bearable.

“I love your sister, man,” Jungwon said, finally, simply, no longer something he was confessing so much as just stating, plain and certain. “I know that’s the whole problem. But it’s true, and it’s not going away, and I needed you to hear it from me like that, not in the middle of a fight.” Jay was quiet for a second, looking at him steady. “Yeah,” he said, eventually, something tired and a little wrecked in his voice. “Yeah, I know.” He paused at the door on his way out, looking back at Jungwon for a long moment. “Would’ve been good,” he said, quiet, almost too quiet to catch, “having you as an actual brother. If this had all gone differently.” He left before Jungwon could answer, but the words sat warm in the room behind him, the first real crack of something other than anger in two weeks.

Jay showed up at your dorm that night after, no text first, just a knock you almost didn’t answer because you’d stopped expecting anyone good to be on the other side of your door lately. When you opened it and saw him standing there, hands in his pockets, looking exhausted in a way that went deeper than just practice, you didn’t say anything at all — just stepped back to let him in, the way you always had, the way you hoped you always would. “I’m not okay,” he said, sitting on the edge of your bed, not looking at you yet. “I want to be clear about that before we do this. I’m still hurt. I’m still figuring out how to be around either of you without it costing me something.”

“Okay.”

“But I can’t keep not talking to you. I tried. I’m not built for it, apparently. I kept reaching for my phone to tell you something stupid and then remembering I wasn’t allowed to, and it felt like missing a limb.” He finally looked up, and his eyes were wet, and yours were too, the two of you mirroring each other the way you always had, even now. “We’ve never gone this long without talking. I hated every single day of it.”

“Me too.” Your voice broke. “I know I hurt you. I know hiding it for four months made it so much worse than if I’d just told you. I’m sorry for that part, even if I’m not sorry for him.”

“I know.” Jay’s voice was rough. “I heard basically that same sentence from him a few hours ago. Word for word, almost.” A short, tired laugh. “You two are annoyingly aligned on this.”

“Are you going to be okay? With him? Eventually?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m working on it. He’s — “ Jay stopped, considering. “He’s a good guy. I always thought that. That’s actually most of why this hurt so much, if I’m honest. It would’ve been so much easier if he was someone I didn’t already respect.” You moved to sit beside him, and after a second, he let his head drop onto your shoulder, the same way he had a hundred times before across twenty-one years, every fight, every bad day, every moment either of you needed the only other person who’d been there from the very beginning. “We’re not okay yet,” he said quietly. “I need you to know that. This is going to take a while.”

“I know.”

“But we’re better than we were yesterday.”

“Yeah.” You let yourself lean into him, the two of you sitting there in the quiet of your dorm room, bruised and tired and still not fully mended, but closer to it than you’d been in two weeks. “We’re better.” It wasn’t fixed. Not all the way, not yet. But for the first time since that night in the kitchen, it felt like something that could actually be fixed, eventually, by two people who’d never once, in their whole lives, managed to stay broken with each other for very long.

The weeks following something in the Den shifted back toward warmth so gradually that nobody quite noticed the exact moment it happened — only that by Wednesday, Jay was sitting across from Jungwon at the kitchen table going over breakout patterns like nothing had ever broken between them, and by Friday, the two of them had fallen into an easy rhythm on the ice that made Coach Anders actually smile during a drill for the first time in three weeks. It wasn’t instant. Jay was still careful in ways he hadn’t been before — a half-second pause before he passed to Jungwon that hadn’t existed in September, a watchfulness in his eyes when you and Jungwon were in the same room that read less like suspicion now and more like a brother recalibrating, slowly, what he was allowed to feel okay about. But the silence was gone. That was the part that mattered most. He talked to Jungwon again — really talked, not just corrections barked mid-drill — and the first time Jungwon made a joke and Jay actually laughed at it, properly, the whole bench seemed to exhale at once, like the entire team had been holding its breath for weeks without realizing it.

You started coming to the Den again too, openly, without the old careful choreography of checking who was in which room first. The first time Jungwon kissed you goodbye in front of everyone — quick, easy, right there in the kitchen doorway, his hand finding your jaw the way it always did — Jay made a sound like he’d swallowed something unpleasant. “I’m gonna need a warning before you do that,” he said, not looking up from his cereal. “Some kind of system. A bell.”

“You walked in on considerably worse than a kitchen kiss, Jongseong, I think you can survive this.”

“That’s exactly my point. I have a very low tolerance left for surprises involving you two.” But there was no real heat in it anymore, just the particular, well-worn grumbling of an older brother performing discomfort he didn’t fully feel, and when Jungwon came back through twenty minutes later to grab his gear bag and kissed you again on his way out the door — bye, love you, back after lift — Jay just groaned into his cereal bowl. “Gross,” he announced, to the room generally. “Both of you. Disgusting. I’m eating.”

“You’ll live.”

“Barely.” But he was almost smiling when he said it, and that almost-smile told you more about how far you’d actually come than any amount of words could have.

The necklace sat against your collarbone every single day now, no longer something you had to explain away with a half-true lie about treating yourself — Jay knew exactly what it was and who’d given it to you, had asked about it directly one evening with none of the old danger in the question, just genuine, easy curiosity. He give you that? And when you’d said yes, he’d just nodded, looked at it a second longer, and said, it’s nice. He’s got good taste, in a tone that wasn’t quite forgiveness yet but was something moving steadily toward it.

The regional final was scheduled for a Saturday night, home ice, the biggest game Blackwood had hosted in four years, and the week leading into it had the specific, charged intensity that comes when an entire program understands exactly what’s at stake. Coach Anders ran practices longer and harder than he had all season, the kind of two-a-days that left everyone’s legs feeling like wet sand by Thursday, and Jay led every single one of them with a focus that had fully returned to its old, easy command, no longer fractured by anything sitting underneath it.

“This is it,” he told the team, the night before, gathered in the Den’s living room in a rare moment of total quiet, no music, no chaos, just thirty guys who’d spent a whole season building toward exactly this. “Four years I’ve waited for a shot at this. I’m not gonna stand up here and give you some big speech, because you already know what this means to all of us.” His eyes moved across the room, the way they always did, landing on Jungwon for a beat — not the wary, careful look from a few weeks ago, but something warmer, something closer to trust fully restored. “We’ve been through a lot this season. On the ice and off it. I think that actually makes us better for tomorrow, not worse. We know how to fight for each other now. Let’s go show everyone else what that looks like.”

The room broke into noise after that, the easy, electric kind, and later that night, after most of the house had gone quiet, you found Jungwon out on the back porch alone, staring out at nothing in particular, the cold air doing nothing to cut the obvious nervous energy radiating off him. “Hey.” You wrapped your arms around him from behind, chin resting between his shoulder blades. “You’re thinking too loud. I can hear it from inside.”

“Biggest game of my life tomorrow.” He turned to face you, pulling you properly into him, his forehead dropping to rest against yours. “I keep running through every possible way it could go wrong.”

“It’s not going to go wrong.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, actually. I’ve watched you all season. I’ve watched you and Jongseong figure out how to be brothers again in like two weeks after the worst fight either of you have ever had. You two can do anything when you’re actually trying together.” You kissed him, slow, certain. “I love you. I need you to actually hear that tonight, not just as a thing I say after games. I love you, and I’m so proud of everything you’ve become this season, on the ice and off it, and tomorrow doesn’t change any of that no matter how it goes.” Something in his face went soft and open at that, all the nervous energy settling for a moment into something quieter. “I love you too,” he said, and it landed the same way it always did between you now — easy, certain, no longer something either of you had to hide in a kitchen at midnight or whisper behind a closed door. “I love you so much it scares me sometimes, how much this season’s actually been worth it because of you, even with everything that happened.”

“Tomorrow’s going to be good.”

“Yeah.” He kissed you again, lingering, the cold night air around you both finally feeling less like a threat and more like just weather. “Yeah, I think it actually will be.”

The arena on Saturday night was packed beyond anything Jungwon had played in front of all season — every seat filled, students standing in the aisles, the kind of noise that hit you physically the second you stepped out for warmups, a wall of sound that hadn’t fully let up by the time the puck dropped for the first period. You sat in your usual seat, three rows up behind the glass, except tonight you weren’t in your normal clothes — you were in his jersey, YANG stitched across the back in block lettering, his number stretched over your shoulders, and you hadn’t hidden it from a single person walking in, hadn’t thought twice about who might see. Sunoo sat beside you in a Blackwood shirt of his own, practically vibrating with nervous energy, occasionally grabbing your arm hard enough to bruise every time the play got close to either net.

The first period was tight, both teams playing tense, controlled hockey, neither side willing to make the first real mistake. Jay’s line — Jungwon centering, Jay and a senior winger flanking him — controlled most of the offensive zone time but couldn’t find the back of the net, hitting a post once that sent the whole arena into a held-breath gasp before the horn sounded for intermission still scoreless.

The second period broke the dam. Blackwood’s opponent struck first on a power play seven minutes in, a wrist shot through a screen that the goalie never saw, and the home crowd’s noise dropped into a tense, anxious murmur. You watched Jay’s face on the bench during the next shift — jaw locked, eyes scanning the ice with total focus — and when his line went back out, something in the way he and Jungwon moved together looked different than it had all season, sharper, more locked in, like the deficit had snapped something into perfect alignment between them instead of rattling it apart.

Jungwon tied it up with four minutes left in the second — a give-and-go off Jay’s stick that mirrored almost exactly the play from his very first collegiate goal back in October, except this time when he buried it, Jay was the first one to slam into him in celebration, both of them screaming something wordless into each other’s face masks, the whole bench spilling over in noise. “THAT’S MY GUY,” Jay was shouting, dragging Jungwon into a headlock that had nothing restrained about it. “THAT’S MY CENTER!” You were on your feet with the rest of the arena, Sunoo screaming directly into your ear in a way that was going to leave you half-deaf, both your hands pressed against your chest like you could physically hold your own heart in place.

The third period was the longest twenty minutes of your entire life. Both teams traded chances, the goaltending on both ends going from good to borderline miraculous, the clock ticking down with a kind of cruelty that made every single shift feel like it might be the one that decided everything. With six minutes left, Blackwood’s opponent hit the post on a breakaway that made the entire arena gasp in unison and then exhale just as loud when it rang off harmlessly. With ninety seconds left, Jay blocked a shot with his own body that had the whole bench up on its feet, limping briefly before shaking it off and getting back into position like it had cost him nothing at all.

And then, with thirty-one seconds left on the clock, it happened. Jungwon won the offensive zone faceoff clean, the puck sliding back to the point, worked low, and when it came back out to the slot it found Jay’s stick exactly where Jungwon had read it would be all night — the same instinct, the same trust, rebuilt and somehow stronger than it had been before everything broke. Jay’s shot beat the goalie clean, top corner, far side, and the horn that followed wasn’t even fully necessary because the entire arena had already exploded before the puck had finished crossing the line. 3–1. Twenty-nine seconds left. The building came apart.

The final horn sounded like the loudest thing you’d ever heard in your life, and the ice turned into total chaos within seconds — gloves and sticks flying, the entire bench pouring over the boards, players piling on top of each other near center ice in a scrum of padding and screaming and pure, uncut joy. You were over the glass and through the gate before you’d even consciously decided to move, Sunoo right behind you, security barely bothering to stop the wave of people flooding toward the ice because there was no stopping it tonight, not for this.

You found Jungwon in the chaos near the blue line, and the second he saw you coming he dropped his stick and gloves and just opened his arms, and you ran straight into them, the momentum spinning both of you in a full circle, his arms locking tight around you, lifting you half off the ice entirely. “You did it,” you were saying, half-laughing, half-crying, his face buried in your neck. “You actually did it—”

“We did it.” He pulled back just far enough to kiss you, right there in the middle of the ice, in front of the entire arena, in front of every single camera and every single person who might have once whispered about whose sister you were — none of that mattered anymore, none of it had ever mattered less. “I love you. I love you so much, you have no idea—”

“I love you too.” You kissed him again, laughing into it, both of you spinning slightly on unsteady skates and unsteady legs, the whole world around you a blur of noise and lights and bodies celebrating. Jay found you both seconds later, breathless, helmet already off, and for one suspended moment you weren’t sure what he was going to do — and then he just pulled both of you into him at once, one arm around each of your necks, dragging you both into a hug that nearly took all three of you down onto the ice. “WE WON,” he was screaming, not really to either of you specifically, just into the air, just because the feeling needed somewhere to go. “We actually won—”

He pulled back enough to look between the two of you, something in his face gone fully soft for the first time in months, no wariness left in it at all. “I’m happy for you two,” he said, breathless, genuine, loud enough that you both heard it clearly even over the noise of the whole arena. “I mean that. I’m actually happy.”

“Jongseong—”

“Don’t make this weird, I already feel weird saying it.” But he was grinning, fully, easily, pulling Jungwon into a separate hug, a real one this time, no stiffness left in it at all, clapping him hard on the back. “You’re a hell of a center, Yang. Best one this program’s had in years. Maybe ever.”

“Means a lot, coming from you.”

“It should.” Jay pulled back, studying him for a second, something decided and certain settling into his face. “I talked to Coach last week. Before tonight, actually — wanted to wait and see how things played out between us first, didn’t want it to feel like I was just handing it to you out of guilt.” He took a breath. “You’re gonna be assistant captain next year. I already told him that’s what I want. You earned it. On the ice, and — yeah. Off it too, eventually. I see that now.” Jungwon stared at him for a second, something overwhelmed moving across his face, and then he just laughed, short and disbelieving and entirely happy. “Good,” he said, simply, because there wasn’t really a bigger word that could hold everything underneath it. “Good,” Jay agreed, grinning, and pulled him into one more hug, and over his shoulder his eyes found yours, warm, settled, twenty-one years of being twins finally feeling whole again underneath all of it.

The ice stayed full of celebration for a long time after that — Jake hoisting the game puck over his head like a trophy, Riki crying openly and loudly and without a single ounce of shame about it, Sunghoon finding Sunoo at the glass and kissing him in front of the entire arena with none of his old hesitation left, Heeseung quietly recording all of it on his phone because someone, he kept saying, needed to actually remember this properly. You stood at the center of it all in Jungwon’s jersey, his arm around your shoulders, your brother laughing somewhere beside you, and let yourself feel, fully and without reservation, exactly how far all of you had come to get here — through secrets and silence and the worst fight any of you had ever had, into something that finally, finally, felt whole.

“Soon,” Jungwon murmured, against your temple, echoing the word you’d both used all season as a promise for later. “Remember when we kept saying soon?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not soon anymore.” He kissed your temple, easy, certain, home. “It’s just now. It’s just us. For real, finally, out loud, in front of everyone.”

“Yeah,” you said again, smiling so wide it ached, watching the chaos of the best night of the entire season swirl around you both. “Yeah. It really is.”

⋆。˚ lacey speaks!! that’s a wrap! thank you so much for giving this fic your time. i hope you loved these characters as much as i loved writing them. don’t forget to leave a comment if you enjoyed it—it always makes me so happy to read them. 🤍