The One You Stayed For ~Chapter 3~ — When it Started, When it Faded
Giriboy (Siyoung) x Reader
Coogie (Jeonghun) x Reader
The track ends, leaving silence behind. You don’t move — just watch the progress bar blink to a stop.
“You good?” Jeonghun asks, half-lounging beside you.
But that’s not the whole truth.
Because sometimes silence doesn’t soothe — it pulls things up from where you buried them.
Back when it all began, you were just “the girl who hears things.” Someone the label brought in as a maybe — a wildcard.
You were polite. Quiet. Too observant.
Siyoung didn’t take you seriously at first. Not out of malice — he just didn’t think someone like you would last in a space like this. Everyone came and went. Passion burned out fast when it wasn’t backed by something harder.
The first few sessions, he barely looked at you. Let you sit in the background and “do your thing,” but never asked what your thing was.
Until one night, when a track refused to click. The rhythm was fine, the chords were fine, but it felt… hollow.
“Your bass line’s stepping on the kick. If you EQ around 80 Hz and soften the attack, it’ll breathe better.”
The room went still for half a beat.
You weren’t even looking at him when you said it. Just adjusting your own headphones.
But he tried it. Quietly. No big reaction.
And it worked.
Perfectly.
After that, things changed.
He started listening.
Started watching.
And somewhere along the line, you fell for him.
Not loudly. Not all at once.
It happened in tiny, accidental ways:
The way he furrowed his brow when a take was almost right.
The way his voice dropped when he got tired.
The way he never made fun of your weird habit of drumming on your own collarbones when thinking.
You kept it to yourself, of course. The crush. The ache.
You weren’t foolish — just hopeful.
It was enough to be near him. To be useful. To be seen.
But what you didn’t know was this:
He had noticed.
Almost right away.
He told himself it was harmless.
Kind of sweet, really.
And when one of the guys nudged him about it one night, he brushed it off with a dry laugh.
“Please. She’s nice, but… come on. Like that’s ever gonna happen.”
He said it with a smirk — but he didn’t mean to be cruel.
Just real.
Or at least that’s what he thought.
It was only later — months later — that he realized something had shifted. That you’d stopped looking at him with even a hint of that softness in your gaze. You still worked just as hard, still showed up, still offered perfect, precise notes…
But something in you had gone quiet.
And he couldn’t explain why that made him feel —
Wrong.
Empty.
Like he’d missed something before it could even become real.
You remember the exact moment the crush died.
You were passing the hallway, hands full of iced coffee, earbuds in but not loud enough to block the voices.
“She got a crush on you, huh?”
Then that laugh — easy, amused, thoughtless.
“Please. She’s nice, but… come on. Like that’s ever gonna happen.”
You didn’t freeze. Didn’t cry.
And the part of you that had been hoping — the softest, most foolish part — folded in on itself and never came back.
You didn’t hate him. You couldn’t. But you started protecting yourself.
You learned how to be made of rhythm and reverb — useful, steady, untouchable.
And he?
He started watching you more after that. Started noticing things.
But by then, you’d already stopped offering them.
“Hey.” Jeonghun’s voice pulls you back.
You nod. “Just... thinking too much.”
He tilts his head, unconvinced but gentle.
From across the room, Siyoung stands suddenly. Grabs his phone. Doesn’t meet your eyes.
“Let’s take five,” he says flatly. “I need air.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
But you wonder, just for a moment, if that laugh from long ago still echoes in his head the way it does in yours.
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