bambi

It’s always the same with him. Said slowly and intentionally. 사 slips from his teeth, lower pitched than its following counterpart. 랑 finds itself in a higher register, flicked off the tip of his tongue as it presses against the roof of his mouth. 사랑 is a familiar, practiced word when verbalized, but not so much when it’s written.

Something that Jaehyun is endlessly grateful for, considering the fact that he finds himself tracing it on your body any time he has the chance.

It never started off intentionally, this pseudo-confession of his. It was an accident, like most bad habits are, after one too many three dollar shots at some shitty hole in the wall Taeyong recommended. You don’t understand Korean. Sure, a few words here and there, but nothing that makes you remotely coherent to anything he’s half-heartedly slurring in your general direction. This in and of itself doesn’t normally pose a problem.

But after his fifth shot? English words seem impossibly out of reach and his vocabulary reverts to what he’s most accustomed to.

“나는 이 노래를 사랑해요,”

His lips are pressed to the side of your head as he speaks. Voice barely audible over the pulse of the music and the quietness of his tone. Words reserved only for you, as if you had any chance of understanding them in full. The weight of his palm presses into your shoulder, fingers curling around the curve of it and slipping down to your bicep as he stumbles where he stands.

Jaehyun is glued to your side. Pressing every bit of himself against you in both a concentrated effort to keep standing and a selfish desire to be all over you without the consequence of his feelings being all too obvious. “난 그냥 취했을 뿐이야,” he’d slur to Taeyong after one too many knowing looks, brushing him off with a roll of his eyes and beginnings of a pout, “아무것도 아니야. 그냥 술을 너무 많이 마셨을 뿐이야.”

Your incapacitated counterpart’s blonde hair is sticking uncomfortably to the curves of his cheek and the back of his neck—roots grown in and dyed ends fraying—slick with sweat from the simmering heat of the dive. His tank top is in a similar state, now slightly sheer as it clings to his torso, the short-sleeved button up he was wearing as a jacket now long gone. It would be cooler if he weren’t hanging off of you, a point that Taeyong has brought up three times too many, but Jaehyun thinks he’d rather overheat than part from your side for more than half a second.

“You what?”

You can only catch the angle of his jaw from your peripheral, unable to move your head with the weight of his own pressing into it. You wish you could—see him, that is—so that perhaps you could read his lips. Sounding out the syllables slowly before he corrects you with a huffed out laugh. You’d probably catch more than one word that way, if you weren’t too distracted by the flush of his cheeks and droop of his eyes.

“나는 이 노래를 사랑해요,” he repeats, bridge of his nose brushing against the curve of your ear as he angles his head towards his shoulder. Words enunciated slowly, clearly, and a bit louder this time. An unconscious reaction from your inability to understand and one you’d appreciate more if it weren’t partially drowned out by the obnoxiously loud drunken chatter surrounding you.

“What about the song?”

You can hear him exhale, fingers squeezing your bicep in a gentle motion that you know is attributed more to frustration than affection (though perhaps Jaehyun would say it’s a little of both). But it’s not that your confusion over such a simple sentence is completely unfounded. The use of the formal 사랑해요 (saranghaeyo) isn’t necessarily wrong but…it’s an unusual word choice. 좋아한다 (joh-ahanda), to like, would be more fitting. To like a lot rather than to feel love for.

But Jaehyun has always been a romantic, never using 사랑 flippantly and attributing it to the things he truly does love rather than simply like. Like this song.

And you.

“사랑,” the hand unoccupied with being wrapped around you is quick to get ahold of your own, “사랑해요. 나는 이 노래를 사랑해요. 사랑해,”

Jaehyun’s fingers clumsily trace the hangul onto the back of your palm. Over and over again with each repetition. As if you had any sense of what the shaky, uncoordinated strokes of his finger meant. It’s an earnest effort, one that probably wouldn’t have helped even if you were able to gather what he was spelling out with the way he keeps sloppily combining the characters together.

“Love,” he slurs, accent unusually heavy in a way that makes the ‘L’ sound more like an ‘R’, “사랑해,”

The second time he found himself writing the word, it was more purposeful with little intent of teaching. And the third. The fourth. The tenth. So on and so forth. It’s hard, honestly, to encapsulate every bit of what he feels for you in either variation of the phrase; I love you.

Three measly words that he wears out in his head, stretching them thin with overuse. He loves everything you do, everything about you. How can that be explained in such a simple phrase? 새상에 너밖에 없어 seems more fitting, though even that falls short (and is perhaps more embarrassing to say aloud).

Jaehyun finds himself drawing 사랑해 on your arm whenever you sit next to him on the couch. Your back whenever he makes the mistake of sharing your “queen” (it’s barely a full) sized bed for a sleepover. On your pulse point at dinner. Your thigh when he’s driving. He murmurs it into every hug, every shove of his shoulder when you can’t help but burst into laughter, every squeeze of your hand, every touch. It’s second nature. To trace the characters in long, languid strokes of his finger. Effortless and unconscious. Something that now comes to him as naturally as breathing.

사랑해. I love you.

When you do ask, what he’s drawing, he only hums. Red hot embarrassment prickling at his ear lobes, flushing down his neck and resting in his cheeks like he had been caught red handed (which for all intents and purposes he had been). Face a color that could rival a stop sign as he raises the back of his hand in a poor attempt to hide his flustered reaction. Eyes looking everywhere but your own as he clears his throat. “Nothing,” he says with a nervous laugh, “Just drawing.”

Jaehyun’s always been a terrible liar; his tells are much too obvious for his own good. But you don’t push him for an honest answer. Whatever it really is, it doesn’t bother you. So you drop the subject. It’s nice—his hands on you. Even if he does act like he’s never touched another person before in such an affectionate way (he has, but none of those people were you).

It becomes something you expect, something you look for in the pauses of your conversations. Something you find yourself trying to recreate—tracing the same shapes into the palm of your hand, trying to recall the lazy rhythm of Jaehyun’s own fingers. Not knowing what it means, but writing it nonetheless.

사랑해. I love you.

🦌: every time i write for jaehyun i think of the worst aura loss of my entire life where i fumbled him so horrifically during our fancall and i have to shut my laptop and go take a walk