𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙞

you’ve been friends with han taesan for months. long enough to know the songs he reaches for when the world becomes too loud for him, long enough to hear simply the opening notes of oasis, nirvana or my chemical romance and think of him before the song itself. long enough to know that he always buys pudding when he’s had a particularly tiring day, that’ll he reach for banana milk on the 3rd shelf without even looking, and that he can never resist stopping at street food truck on the walk home.

you know the stories he tells in passing. the ones that slip out between conversations and disappear as quickly as they came. stories about his childhood, calling his mom ‘auntie’, about his friend, him pranking his friend that they lost his passport, about things he finds funny. sometimes, he doesn’t even remember telling them afterwards, but you do.

the way his face softens whenever he talks about something he genuinely loves. the way he absent-mindedly hums songs under his breath. the expressions he makes when he’s thinking too hard. the habits he’s picked up over the months without ever noticing. 

somewhere along the way, memorizing han taesan became effortless. it wasn’t something you consciously chose to do. it simply happened. every passing comment became something worth keeping. every preference became something worth remembering. every fragment of himself that he handed to you. no matter how small, found a permanent place in your mind. 

sometimes you think you know taesan better than he knows himself. not because you’re special. but because you spent months paying attention. because caring for someone means remembering them. and you have always cared far more than needed.

whenever something reminds you of him remotely, you send it to him immediately. a song playing in a cafe. a black cat sleeping on a windowsill. a photo of a band tee that looked like something he would wear. an edit you see online. a quote you found on pinterest. if it reminds you of taesan, no matter how insignificant it is, your fingers are already sending it to him.

the problem is that taesan never seems to do the same. at first you don’t notice it. or maybe you do, but you convince yourself that it doesn’t matter. then someone mentions one of your interest, your favourite idol, and instead of turning to you, taesan turns to someone else. he send them pictures of the idol specifically to them, mentions the idol to them. 

another time, he excitedly shares a story you’ve never heard before with a group of people you could have sworn he wasn’t at all close to. and then it happens again. and again. and again. they’re such small moment that nobody else would pay attention to them. moments that sound ridiculous when spoken aloud. moments that shouldn’t hurt as much as they do.

but they do.

because every time it happens, a quiet voice in the back of your head asks the same question, why wasn’t it me? you hate that question. you hate the jealousy that follows it. you hate the bitterness curling in your chest whenever you watch him remember someone first. most of all, you hate yourself for caring. because taesan isn’t doing anything wrong. he isn’t choosing to hurt you. he isn’t intentionally leaving you behind.

yet somehow, every time he remembers somebody else before he remembers you, it feels like standing outside a locked door with your hand still wrapped around the key. and eventually, the tiny cuts begin to feel less like cuts and more like proof. proof that maybe you’ve spent months memorizing someone who never thought to memorise you back. 

you tell yourself that you’re being dramatic. jealous. selfish. 

you tell yourself that friendships aren’t measured by who remembers who first, that taesan is allowed to have other people in his life. that the world doesn’t revolve around you. so you swallow it down. every sting. every disappointment. every moment where your heart sinks for reasons you can’t properly explain. you bury the feelings beneath excuses. he’s probably busy. it doesn’t mean anything. you’re overthinking it again. and for a while, those excuses work. until they don’t. 

because no matter how many times you scold yourself for feeling this way, the ache remains. it follows you into the conversations and lingers long after they’ve ended. it settles quietly in your chest whenever you see taesan effortlessly connect with people in ways you’ve spent months wishing he could connect with you.

the guilt is almost worse than the sadness. you know he hasn’t done anything wrong. you know he doesn’t owe you anything. yet every time you realise you’ve remembered another detail about him white struggling to think of a single detail he might have remembered about you, something inside you twists painfully. 

you begin questioning everything. whether you’re trying too hard. whether you’re too much. whether people secretly tolerate you rather than enjoy being around you. whether you’ve mistaken being available for important. and no matter how hard you try to silence those thoughts, they always seem to find their way back. because deep down, beneath all the guilt and self-loathing lies a fear you’ve been too afraid to name. that maybe you’re easy to forget. and maybe that’s why nobody ever seems to remember.

while everyone seems to have people waiting for them, messages flooding their asks, their inboxes, their phones, friends checking up on them, you begin feeling increasingly invisible. it’s a feeling that creeps up on you slowly. you notice it when your phone stays silent for hours unless you’re the one starting the conversation. when group chats ignore you. when nobody asks where you’ve been.

meanwhile, everyone else seems to have someone. someone reading their stories. someone checking up on them. someone bringing them into a conversation. someone remembering. and you begin wondering what it is about you that makes people leave your name at the tip of their tongue before forgetting to say it altogether. that you might be at the front as a trio, but at the end of the day, everyone remembers the other two.

still, you smile.

you become frighteningly good at it. you smile when people ask how you’ve been. smile when they joke around you. smile when they tell you stories about people who seem to matter more. eventually, the smile stops feeling natural. so you start practicing. standing in front of the bathroom mirror late at night, tilting your head slightly to the left because that angle looks more convincing, pulling the corners of your lips higher, softer, happier. again. and again. and again. until you’ve perfected the expression of someone who is doing just fine.

sometimes you stare at your reflection afterwards and wonder why it still looks so wrong. why the smile never quite reaches your eyes. why it feels less like happiness and more like a mask you’ve worn for so long that you’re starting to forget what’s underneath it.

even your text messages become performances. you add extra exclamation marks. you type out laughter. you send cheerful replies even when you’re lying in bed staring at the ceiling, feeling emptier than ever. sometimes you’ll catch yourself smiling at your phone while texting someone, not because you’re happy, but because you’ve somehow convinced yourself it’ll make the words sound happier. 

as if emotions can travel through a screen. as if pretending long enough will eventually make it true. and maybe that’s the cruelest part. the more lonely you become, the harder you work to make sure nobody notices. because if nobody notices that you’re hurting, then at least you can pretend it’s a choice. at least you can tell yourself that you’re hiding. instead of facing the possibility that nobody was looking for you in the first place.

you wonder if anyone would notice if you stopped reaching out first. it’s a though that lingers in your mind for weeks before you finally act on it. not out of spite. not to test anyone. just because you’re tired. tired of always being the one who remembers. so one day, you stop.

you stop sending taesan songs that remind you of him. you stop taking photos of things you know would make him laugh. you stop texting first. stop asking how he’s doing. stop showing up in the places where he expects to find you. you make yourself smaller, quieter, easier to miss. and then you wait. at first, nobody notices. your phone remains silent.

days pass. then a week. the world continues turning exactly as it always has. people continue laughing. continue making plans. continue living. and somehow, that hurts more than if they had outright told you they didn’t care. because at least rejection is an answer. this feels like proof. proof that your absence creates no gap. that nothing changes when you’re gone. 

while taesan continues living his life normally, you find yourself sinking and spiralling deeper and deeper into thoughts you can no longer control. you start seeing yourself through the lens of every insecurity you’ve ever tried to ignore. replaceable. forgettable. temporary. a person who only exists in other people’s lives when it’s convenient.

you begin replaying old conversations in your head, searching for evidence that you mattered more than you think you did. you come up empty every time. sleep becomes difficult. some nights you lie awake staring at the ceiling, wondering how long it would take for people to realize you’ve disappeared completely. a day? a week? a month? or would someone eventually mention your name in passing and be met with a confused silence, as though you were never there at all?

the worst part is that you know these thoughts aren’t fair.

you know loneliness has a way of twisting reality into something uglier. yet the longer the silence stretches on, the harder it becomes to argue against it. because if people miss you, surely they would look for you. surely they would call. surely they would notice. 

but every morning, you wake up to the same empty notifications. and every morning, it becomes a little easier to believe the lie that has been growing inside you all along,

that if you vanished tomorrow, the world would simply be the same. 

just as it always has.

meanwhile, taesan slowly begins noticing the absence of someone who had always been there. at first, it’s the little things. small things. the kind of things he never paid attention to because they were always there. his phone feels quieter. 

there are fewer notifications waiting for him after school. fewer random photos in his chat. fewer messages saying, *plop* or this reminded me of you

he tells himself you’re probably busy. then a song comes on through his headphones. from the idol he knows you like. his thumb hovers overs your contact before he remembers. he hasn’t heard from you in weeks. another day, he sees something stupid that would have made you laugh. another day, he buys a snack and remembers you always trying to steal a bite. another day, he hears a story and thinks, i should tell—

before the thought abruptly stops. because he hasn’t spoken to you. a realization follows him everywhere, for the first time he realizes just how often his thoughts ended with you. through late nights spent staring at old conversations, he scrolls further and further back through your messages, only to discover something he wished he hadn’t noticed. almost every conversation started with you.

every song, every photo, every check-in, every how was your day?

you had been reaching for him for months. and he had never realised. because hed grown so used to your presence that he’s started treating it like something permanent. something that would always be there no matter how little attention he paid to it. 

for the first time in his life, han taesan feels the shape of your absence. and it terrifies him. so he goes looking for you. except when he finally finds you, nothing goes the way he imagined. you don’t look angry, you don’t yell, you don’t accuse him. you just look tired. tired in a way he’s never seen before. and when the words finally start spilling out, months of hurt come pouring out with them

all the loneliness. all the jealousy. all the guilt. all the times you see others be better than you. all the times you have been overlooked. all the times someone was more important than you. all the times you’ve cried to sleep. all the moments you curled into a ball wishing life gave you a fair chance. all the moments you wanted someone to remember you instead of needing you of convenience. all the moments you convinced yourself that if you disappeared, nothing in his life would change. all the moments you wished you were someones choice..

taesan listens. and with every sentence, the guilt settles deeper into his chest. because nne of this is new. these feelings didn’t appear overnight, they’d been brewing for months and months. hidden behind every smile and every cheerful message.

and the worst part is realizing he never noticed. that while he was taking your presence for granted, you genuinely believed nobody would notice if you were gone. and now, standing in front of him, you look at him with the certainty of someone who has already accepted the truth. 

while taesan is only just beginning to understand how wrong it is, by then, the doesn’t know whether he’s too late to make you believe otherwise because the problem is that by then, you've already convinced yourself that nobody would have noticed if you disappeared.

after spending so long feeling overlooked, you’re no longer sure if being remembers now is enough. because that is what you wanted, wasn’t it? for someone to notice. for someone to realise you were gone. for someone to come looking for you. for someone to choose you. and yet, standing here now, with taesan looking at you as though he’s afraid you’ll disappear again, you feel none of the relief you thought you would. 

instead you feel tired, so unbearably tired. the kind of tired that settles deep in your bones after carrying something alone for far too long. because the loneliness didn’t vanish the moment he noticed. the insecurity didn’t disappear the moment he came back. 

months of feeling unwanted cannot be undone by a single conversation. months of silence cannot be erased by finally hearing your own name. you spent so long teaching yourself not the need anyone, spent so long teaching yourself that being forgotten was normal. that expecting people to remember you was asking for too much. that caring less would hurt less.

those beliefs didn’t disappear overnight. they rooted themselves inside you. became a part of you. and now taesan stands before you, finally seeing all the things he failed to see before, finally understanding the hurt you’ve been carrying all this time. but understanding it now doesn’t change the nights you spent staring at a silent phone. 

it doesn’t change the countless times you swallowed your feelings because you were afraid of being difficult. 

it doesn’t change the way you’ve learned to expect disappointment before hope.

for months, you waited for someone to notice you were hurting. eventually, you stopped waiting. and that’s the problem. because somewhere along the way, the question stopped being will anyone notice if i disappear? and it became does it matter if they do?

taesan remembers you now. he sees you now. he’s reaching for you now. but after spending so long feeling forgotten, you’re no longer sure if being remembered now is enough to heal the part of you that learned how to survive with being overlooked. 

perhaps you had been wrong all along. perhaps you were never a constellation. never a shooting star. never even the moon reflected in a puddle. because constellations are noticed. shooting stars are wished upon. even reflections catch someone’s eye eventually.

you were the sky itself. always there. so constant that people forgot to look. for months, you stretched endlessly above the people you loved, carrying their storms, their sunlight, their wishes and their dreams. you made room for all of them. held every memory they handed to you with careful hands. 

and like the sky, you became something expected. something permanent. something people assumed would still be there tomorrow, asking for nothing. the tragedy of permanence is that people rarely think to appreciate it until it disappears. until one day they leave, and everyone finally notices how much of the sky was missing.

only when the stars vanish do people realize how dark the night has become. only when the music stops do people notice the silence. only when someone leaves do people begin measuring the space they occupied. 

perhaps the cruelest thing about being remembered is that it happens only after you stopped waiting for it. for months, you stood at the edge of other people’s lives like a lighthouse overlooking a restless sea. you guided them home through storms. carried their secrets. memorised the shape of their hearts so they would never have to feel alone.

and then one day, exhausted, you let the lights out. only then did people notice the darkness. only then did they stop and wonder where the glow had gone. perhaps that should have been enough. perhaps it should have healed something inside you to know that your absence left a space after all.

but wounds do no disappear simply because someone finally acknowledges they exist.

a flower watered too late still wilts.

a letter delivered months after it was written still arrives stained with time.

some things are not broken by a single moment, but by a thousand tiny moments stacked carefully on top of one another until they become impossible to carry. you spent months searching for evidence that you existed in other people the same way they existed in you. months reaching into conversations and friendships, hoping to find your name stitched somewhere between the seams.

months wondering whether you mattered or whether you had simply become convenient. and eventually, the wondering became its own kind of answer. not because nobody cared. but because you had already learned how to live as though they didn’t. 

perhaps that was the real tragedy. not being forgotten. not being overlooked. but becoming so accustomed to emptiness that even when hands finally reached for you, you no longer knew how to reach back.

after all, a candle can spend its entire life lighting the way for others, only to discover that one the flame dies, people suddenly remember how dark the room is.

but knowing that they missed the light does not undo the months spent burning alone.

bunny gif divider by @kthice | network: @berrybittynetwork

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he fully begged you to sleep over at ‘his’ dorm for a couple days to make up for lost time. yes, begged. on his knees with flowers and everything. and who are you to deny such a request?

your arrival was met with the brightest, most lovesick smile from jaehyun that you’ve ever seen followed by a night where you weren’t allowed out of his embrace for longer than a minute. to say he missed you would be the understatement of the century and you could tell there was just a bit more hiding behind his eyes.

which is why you shouldn’t be shocked when seeing the box of chocolate coated biscuits at the bottom of the convenience store bag sitting on his bed.

“if you want a kiss, you can just ask, jae..” the exasperation in your voice does nothing to kill his vibe, he’s on a mission.

“but the others don’t wanna play with me!” his voice grows whinier as he opens the box, “taesan and leehan ran away to their rooms before i could even show them and sungho and woonhak just straight up told me no..” his lips are fully downturned as he blinks at you.

“ask riwoo then! he’s like your second girlfriend anyway,” you mumble the last part mostly to yourself, but your point still stands.

“well, he was the one to suggest i do it with you instead.”

“so he rejected you too?”

…

“yeah…”

something about how his shoulders deflate ever so slightly at his persistent rejections has you thinking it over. it has nothing to do with how close you’d be to him, it’s actually the opposite.

it’s knowing you’d be just a little too out of reach to fully pull him in. some chocolate was going to set you apart and the pride of ‘winning’ was no match to how having his lips on yours felt.

months of being on separate sides of the country and this was his first idea of fun?? fine. you’d show him fun.

“okay. let’s play.” even with your chin turned upwards in confidence, your voice wavers.

“really?!” you swear a pair of puppy ears perk up on his head and his tail is wagging behind him..

it’s fine. he’s your boyfriend, not a middle school crush, being close to each other shouldn’t make you too nervous to play a game.

except when the chocolate begins melting on your lower lip, you realize how warm it is in his room. and the scent of his cologne you’ve missed for ages lingers on his sweater enough to make your head spin. he’s so close it’s intoxicating.

“ready?” his eyes flit down to where your mouths meet the biscuit before locking back onto yours.

“mhm,” you nod.

he takes the first bite, you the second.

his next is bigger and enough to bring your noses to bump against each other. you can feel his breath fanning against your skin and it almost makes you forget to take the next bite. but you can be bold, you can be soo bold.

your bite is almost double what his was and you can tell he’s amused by your eagerness. your competitive side has always stood out to jaehyun, it’s like he enjoys seeing you riled up and ready to win. however he has a few tricks of his own.

your boyfriends hand settles on your shoulder with the tips of his fingers brushing the skin of your collarbone, inching up your neck. what a cheater, this is unfair and he knows it. you think he’s about to lean in for his next bite until his hand slides up your neck and cradles your jaw. the corners of his lips twitch upwards at the sight of your eyes widening, almost smug.

the faint crunch wasn’t even processed before his lips ghosted against yours. his fingers tangle in the roots of your hair, lightly tugging you closer and bringing you to your next turn. but how could you possibly go any further? you’re practically kissing now with how thin it is! but you won’t back down.

you scrape crumbs off and into your mouth with your tongue peeking out which almost distracts him entirely. but not enough. the warmth of his palms seep into your skin and his lips press against yours, teeth clinking as he bites off the remainder of the biscuit.

it’s dizzyingly intimate and causes you to pull away with nothing but a crumb falling in between you.

“cheater! you did that all on purpose, that was so not fair!” your argument would sound plausible if you weren’t bright red.

he giggles at your accusation and pulls you back towards him mid rant. and this time, his mouth is on yours in the right way. tongue swiping against your lower lip and noses bumping together.

“is this why you’re so mad?” he mumbles in between kisses, smiling down at you. “cause i was playing instead of just kissing you?” he doesn’t let you pull away, keeping a steady hand on your hip and one gently holding your jaw in place. he still tastes of chocolate, sweet and addicting.

“or are you just mad you lost?…” he whispers that last part into your mouth but it’s not really a question meant for you to answer. he just immediately cuts you off again because he’s been so deprived of your touch he needs all he can get right now.

the game and the pepero’s are long forgotten on the side of his bed to which he’ll definitely find after your little moment and brag about later. but now all he needs to prove is how much he’s missed you.

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Taesan doesn’t remember when you began this “game”, all he knows is that he’s submitting to your touch day by day.

He’s not sure if he’s fully onboard with you unraveling how truly sensitive he is, but when you grab him by his jaw and kiss the side of his neck, he starts to think it isn’t too bad.

The problem is you manage to catch him off guard each time.

Taesan sits in an empty studio, one leg propped up on his spinny chair as he stares uselessly into the laptop screen. Something is missing, that usual BoyNextDoor spark. No matter how much he replayed the track, moved sound effects around, it wasn’t hitting the same.

He would’ve heard the door open if he weren’t blasting the music in his headphones, securing his future buying hearing aids.

He misses your steps, how you linger behind him wondering if when his eye will catch you in the reflection. Taesan is engrossed in his laptop, you roll your eyes.

“Love?”

You even gave him a verbal warning, yet he’s still squinting at the screen like he’s trying to find treasure; you’re annoyed.

Your hands snake onto his shoulders, ever so slightly putting pressure. Taesan immediately shivers under your touch, almost like his brain already knows it’s you even if he hasn’t turned around yet.

“Y/n—“

He doesn’t have the chance to interrupt, your lips make contact with the side of his neck.

Lips quirk up into a smile, blush creeps across his face, and his shoulders would’ve perked up if you weren’t holding him down so easily (where did you get this sudden strength??).

He lets his head hang low, letting you continue despite the swarm of butterflies in his stomach. You kiss down, eyelashes fluttering when his lips part, his breathing elevating.

“So what’s got you frowning?” You inquire, lips still traveling, almost trying to dissect more of his secrets.

You’ve got him all nervous, he isn’t sure how to respond. Your hands leave his shoulders, your fingers moving up to the back of his head. A sound nearly escapes his mouth as they curl into his dark roots, pulling ever so slightly.

He sucks in a breath, trying to speak—protest against this “attack”.

“The track— I— it doesn’t matter.”

Taesan, who is usually a competitive guy, admits defeat. He pulls you onto his lap, craning his neck for you to pick up where you left off.

You stare at him in surprise, studying him as his eyes wander to the floor, his hair falling over his shy expression perfectly.

“Ask for it, handsome.”

You take advantage of the moment, giggling at him sinking into his seat further. Taesan swears you’ll be the death of him, your cute face, your words that seem to hit him right where you want them to, he’s an absolute goner.

He bites his lip, thinking about his ego, maybe his dignity. Though, what else has he to lose? His girlfriend’s lips on his neck, her hands pawing at the back of his hair, he’s in heaven each time no matter if he wants to admit it or not.

“Please, continue.” He practically mumbles, hoping that’s good of a response for you.

He didn’t know his meek behavior would make you even more hungry. His chest shakily rises and falls as you stare at him like prey, your eyes piercing through his soul. He wants to know what you’re thinking—but you’re a tough cookie to crack.

You squish his jaw between your fingers, nails ever so slightly digging into his pale skin. He presses his feet into the ground, trying to connect with the earth again.

Then you do something unexpected, you kitten lick his collar bone before sinking your teeth into his skin. Taesan jerks underneath you, a broken sound finally escaping his lips.

“When will you admit you like this?” You whisper into his skin, teeth grazing the spots you would’ve usually peppered with kisses.

His grip on your hips tightens, not able to speak when you’re sucking marks into his skin. You’re currently pulling out the deepest parts of him, discovering how vulnerable you truly make him, he can tell you’re eager for more.

He doesn’t know what gets him to crack, if it was your thumb caressing his face, or maybe your hand binding one of his wrists to your waist, it doesn’t matter anymore. His brain has completely fogged up, your touch taking advantage of the free capacity.

“You’re right.” He replies breathlessly, fighting back another noise as your teeth sink greedily into his skin once more.

The small beat of the track from his headphones is quickly drowned out, the moment fully encapsulating you both.

Taesan hopes he’s stuck here forever.

a / n : should this be on the nsfw? I dunno it isn’t that bad 😭🤞 enjoy ts he’s been on my mind lately 😰😰

bonedo : @beomtomie @leehanisleehaning @ajjaehyun @leeknowramona @wensurr @vanillakirstein @lovehakie @wishieyu

perm : @leehanisleehaning @ajjaehyun @ivehan @chayuni400 @tsanho

* . 𖡼 ᰍᩚ he knows how to use his hands

woonhak knows he has nice hands. faint veins, large palms, and long fingers. there’s a sense of pride that rushes to his head when he notices you staring, knowing your attraction to them.

it’s like he does it on purpose. getting you all hot and bothered by not so subtly tensing just enough for his forearm to flex. or toying with his hands, curling his fingers around whatever he’s holding with a light squeeze. and to anyone else it’d just look like he’s fidgeting out of boredom but you know those fingers better than anyone else.

the way they twitch around the rim of a water bottle is identical to how the tips of his fingers tease your cunt. he’ll collect your slick and sloppily spread it all over your pussy, smearing your arousal around as the tips of his fingers brush against your hole. then, he’ll slowly work one, then two digits inside as his tongue darts out to lick your clit. they reach so deep inside of you and turn your brain into mush every time he moves. he’s already trained to know exactly where to press up against that gummy spot that has you seeing stars, always so eager to draw those pretty moans from out of you.

his hands in general are always put to good use on you, whether it be his palm pressed flat against your clit while his fingers do all the work, or tweaking your perked up nipple as he mouths at the other. it’s like they’ve already pinpointed all of your weak spots to go after and make you dizzy. but he’s never too harsh, always pressing a gentle kiss to wherever he thinks he was a little rough and makes it up to you by dragging out another orgasm as you whine into his neck with his fingered buried deep.

and he’s filthy, licking each digit clean and practically moaning at the taste before leaning in to make you taste yourself on his tongue. he drags the muscle down your neck, looking up at you with needy eyes, waiting for permission to mark you up. he gets drunk off of your body, in love with how pliable you are in his hold and how you react when his lips brush over a particularly sensitive spot. he eventually ends up back at face level with your lower tummy, begging to let him go for another round because he’s obsessed with making you finish on his fingers and licking you clean.

you think he’s started craving you ever since the first time he’s had a taste. there’s a heat behind his eyes that’s begging you to let him have you on his tongue. whether you’re out in public in a dress he likes, or if you’re just lounging at home in a loose pair of sleep shorts, his mouth waters at just a glimpse of your thighs. he’ll rest a hand on your knee and inch his way up with the most eager and needy look in his eyes that tells you he’s been thinking of it for a while. and when you finally let him, his fingers take no time to peel your underwear off of you and slide in right where they belong.

* . 𖡼 ᰍᩚ such a tease!!

your boyfriend has grown a bit of an obsession with going down on you. some days he’ll take it slow and make you beg him to touch you more, loving how needy you get for his mouth. he’ll build up your arousal with lingering touches and take his sweet time pressing kisses between your thighs and grinning at how impatient you are. and other days, he’ll get straight to the point by pushing you against the nearest surface and nudging his cheek against your upper thigh and thumbing at the hem of your panties in an attempt to coax you into letting him bury himself in you.

he used to be so nervous, always glancing up for reassurance that he’s making you feel good. but his hesitation soon cleared when seeing the way your hips bucked up to chase his mouth with every kitten lick he gave to your cunt. the first time you came on his tongue and he saw that glazed over look in your eyes, woonhak almost came on the spot. since then he’s sought out to give you everything his mouth can offer.

overstimulating also is also another habit of his. it’s an addiction; his mouth latched onto your swollen clit, swirling his tongue around the bundle of nerves while his fingers bully your insides. he can’t pull away now, not when you’re moaning so pretty and your pussy is even sweeter, he’d be a fool to leave such a beautiful sight unattended. there’s no use trying to squirm out of his grip because you’ll only be dragged back and finger fucked into another orgasm, cunt pulsing cum into his mouth for the nth time. the louder your cries get only fuel him to press his face deeper and rut your sensitivity against his nose.

and woonhak knows it’s greedy and selfish to keep pulling orgasms out of you nonstop, but he just can’t help it when you look so pretty while you cum. he’s obsessed with watching it, seeing your pussy twitch out of oversensitivity and feeling you squeeze so hard around his tongue is something he will never get tired of. sometimes, he’ll even purposely groan against your skin to watch you shiver at the vibrations. and of course he’s always so eager to lap up the mess he’s made which only brings your already sensitive cunt closer to cumming again and starts the process all over.

he loves the burst his ego gets when the tears welled up in your eyes are running down your cheeks and the grip you had on his hair begins to tighten. his palms spread you open even further, highlighting how embarrassingly messy you are despite all of the times you claimed you couldn’t cum anymore. he doesn’t let you hide in the tear soaked pillow or he’ll threaten to stop if you’re not looking at him. in fact, he’ll get whiny if you try to avoid him and beg you to keep your eyes on him as if the only thing in your head isn’t how full of him you are. it’s the validation of knowing you’re losing your mind because of him and he won’t stop until every last thought is about him.

For what, he can’t surmise. Though he might have an inkling. 

He shuts the door behind him very slowly, takes his shoes off very slowly, then rounds the corner from the hall into the living room very, very slowly. 

And there you are, standing against the island with your arms crossed. You don’t look angry, and that’s the worst part. You just stare at him, expecting, like he’s the one who called this impromptu intervention. 

He doesn’t dare speak first because he knows whatever he says will be the wrong thing anyway. 

But when you keep staring at him, eyes growing narrower by the micron as the steely seconds pass, he’s left with no choice. 

“I missed you—“

“What the hell is this?” Your voice makes him step back, startled at the sudden way you step forward and shove your phone into his space. 

He blinks rapidly, the screen coming into focus. 

It’s a looped, blurry video of him on Twitter, lifting his shirt and exposing himself—butterflies and all—in the middle of a performance, on stage and in front of thousands of people... thousands of women. Well, that’s what it seems like but all he remembers is trying to detach the sticky fabric off his skin. 

But watching it now, it looks… suspicious… and when he lifts his gaze back to you, the glare explains it all.

“Wait, no, that’s not what it—“

“Not what it looks like?” You huff, shoving the phone in your pocket. He stammers silently, unsure how he’s somehow said the wrong thing again. 

“The shirt was wet! I was—“

“So you had to flash everyone?”

Well, truly he can’t remember what he was doing. His brain goes on autopilot sometimes during the shows and the questionable things he does aren't really in his control. That’s stage Jiung, not normal Jiung. Stage Jiung is the promiscuous harlot, not him!

He means to say all of this. But all his brain can make him do is gape like a fish. 

You click your tongue, and in his 24 years of life Jiung has never felt so chastised—not even when his dad found him after he ran away from home that second time. 

You turn to leave and Jiung lurches forward, grabbing you by the arm. 

“Love, I promise that wasn’t me—“

Okay, that came out wrong. 

You whip around again, your glare somehow even sharper, and Jiung nearly curls into himself. 

“Oh? Who was it then, prancing around the stage like a show whore?”

His face burns, his body burns. He knows you’re upset with him, but his dick doesn’t seem to get that hint. 

He swallows down his pride, wringing his hands together, eyes flitting away. “…Stage Jiung?”

The silence is somehow worse. 

Then a sigh, and you’re turning away again. 

“You’re sleeping on the couch tonight.”

And you leave him there, kind of scared that he’d actually pushed it too far this time, and kind of turned on that it just makes him want to push more.

𓆩⟡𓆪

You should’ve known that banishing Jiung to the living room would be a fruitless attempt. He’s clingier than you are possessive, and keeping him away from you for more than a workday is like depriving him of oxygen. 

So, soon enough, when it hasn’t even been an hour since you’d tucked into bed, you hear his soft footsteps pad eagerly up to your door. 

You take a breath, mentally preparing yourself for a war of attrition, completely determined to not let him win this time.

Even his quiet, endearing little “jagi?” as he pokes his head into the room doesn’t sway you. You shut your eyes quickly in hopes that he’ll just change his mind and go away. 

He doesn’t. 

“I know you’re not asleep,” he says, and his tone is so stringy and drawn out and warm in the way that makes you want to coddle him that you nearly hurl a pillow at his head. 

It makes you violent sometimes just how cute he can be with his voice alone. 

You let out an irritated huff, sharply turning to face away from him. 

Like the nuisance that he is, he crawls into the space behind you anyway. You curse yourself for not keeping it all occupied to steer him away. 

He’s quiet for a while, and you’re fine to just let it go and go to sleep without saying anything to make your point, but then he’s talking to you again in that tiny voice of his. 

“Are you really ignoring me?”

You grit your teeth. Yes, you yell telepathically. 

It’s a strategy, you remind yourself. He knows how to weaponize his cuteness. You’re not falling prey to it again. 

You feel a gentle tug at your hair—he must be twirling it around his finger like he always does when he wants to just be connected to you somehow. 

You’re about to turn around and bat him away—but then he’s plastering himself to your back. 

“Please don’t ignore me,” he whines into the back of your head. Then, he grinds his hips against your ass, and your eyes snap open at the prominent hardness you feel prodding against you. He buries his face into your shoulder, his hot breath hitting your neck. “‘M so hard… help me?”

You squeeze your eyes shut, pursing your lips as you turn your face into the pillow. 

Fuck, what the hell are you supposed to do now?

Nothing, your brain supplies. 

But Jiung gets restless without attention, and very persistent. He’s bound to wear you down. 

Whatever, he hasn’t earned the grace of your attention. If he wants to get off, he can get off himself. 

“Tried on my own. Didn’t work,” he grumbles like he’s got a gateway into your inner thoughts. 

You hold in a gasp as he adjusts himself to slot his bulge against you, giving just enough pressure against you that has you nearly pushing back for more. You hold yourself strong.

And he hates it, clicking his tongue as he ruts helplessly against you again like that’ll get you to cave. 

“Jagi,” he whines again, drawing out the word as he shoves his face into the back of your head. 

You swallow down your hammering heart, squeezing your thighs shut to quell the growing burn. 

The thin fabric of your sleep shorts is a feeble barrier to hide the way his cock pulses against you with heavy need. 

He lets out a short grunt, frustrated when you still don’t respond. 

“Fine,” he huffs and you can almost hear the pout. 

You think it’s a cue to him leaving and you nearly protest the idea—until you hear the shuffle of clothes and then feel the blunt head of his cock nudging against the back of your clothed cunt. 

“Just—” He cuts off with a guttural groan as he traces your slit, the heated line of pressure of his cock carving through you as he pushes into the warm crevice created between your thighs. 

His arms wrap around your waist, clinging desperately as he messily bucks into you, slathering your silk shorts with his precum and quickly making you make a mess of it too with your own growing arousal. 

“Please,” he mumbles, words slurred against your ear. “Jus’ let me have this… just this, ‘ma make you feel—hah—feel good too…”

You fight to hold in every little noise that threatens to escape you whenever he nudges against your clit, but the pressure is so quick and short lived that you kind of want to throw a tantrum and demand he fuck you properly. But that would mean him winning. And you’re very egotistical in that sense, maybe even worse than him. 

Your fist clutches into the sheets as he drives himself against you, very uncoordinated and clumsy, but the careless noises that spill out of him that he would normally contain point to that fact that he couldn’t give more of a fuck about anything if it doesn’t mean him getting to cum. 

And it’s becoming almost unbearable for you to hold it all in, with the thick pressure of his cock sliding against your heat just a barrier away, so hot and so enticing. 

Your cunt weeps with the emptiness. And you nearly sob when he stops moving, just for a second. 

“‘M sorry I’ve been misbehaving,” he mumbles into your ear, gasping when he starts to rut into you again, even quicker and even clumsier. “Promise it was a mistake… fuck—” he breaks when his cock slips into the leg of your shorts, pushing into the wet mess of your folds. 

You can’t hold your gasp back then, your body seizing at the sudden friction of his bare cock against you. 

“Sorry,” he gasps, but just starts to fuck into that space anyway, apparently not very sorry. 

He holds your hip with one hand to keep you still, whimpering when his tip catches against your hole. 

And instead of heeding his own word to get himself off and pulling away, he pushes in.

“Sorry!” He gasps again, grunting at the tight heat of you clamping down at the sudden intrusion. 

“J-Jiung,” you heave, starting to squirm, but your train of thought gets completely derailed when he starts chanting ‘sorry, sorry, sorry,’ as he just pushes in and in and in until he’s seated deep inside you. 

You both settle with deep, shuddering breaths, bodies seized tight to get used to the feeling after days of nothing. 

And then you push your hips back, just a little, and the dam breaks. 

He clamps both his hands on your hips, pulls you back into an arch, and starts pounding into you, whispering and begging and sobbing into your hair about how he needs you, wants you, has to cum in you or he won’t be able to sleep.

And it drives you mad, how even after thoroughly pissing you off, he somehow manages to piss you off even more with how good he can fuck that anger out of you. 

Your body melts into the mattress as he flips you down and pistons you into it, muttering his apologies and singing his gratitude. 

“Won’t be bad ever again,” he vows into the back of your shoulder as he fucks right into that gummy spot inside you. “‘M just yours—fuck, thankyouthankyouthankyou—fuck!”

His cock pulses inside you, but just before he can spill, he rips himself off of you and flips you over. 

Because Jiung has an obsession with filling you with his cum that it doesn’t matter what position you’re in, he’ll fold you in half and drive in as deep as he can to make sure he’s giving it to you properly. 

And you lay there, eyes rolled to the back of your head as the warmth of his cum pools deep in your womb, his head buried in your chest, that you thank whatever power that’s out there that makes him act like a whore on stage, because none of them know just what Jiung reduces himself to for you and only you.

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1 reblog/comment = 1 virtual kiss <3

Knowing Anton's love language is physical touch, you make sure to spoil him a lot. He loves to lie down in your lap, while you massage and scratch his scalp. Naturally, you'd also play with his hair, braiding it, or adding clips, and sometimes you get a little carried away, yanking at it a little harder than you intended to do...

That's how he discovered this kink, the tingle of your nails scraping him, the sharp pain if you pull too hard, feeling oddly dominated while you (innocently) do to him as you please.

Since he struggles to express himself verbally, he tries to make you tug at his hair during sex. Every time he eats you out, he puts one of your hands on top of his head, but instead of gripping it tightly, you just push it down a little bit further into your pussy, bumping into is nose, just to let go off him immediately, digging your fingers into whatever item was closest instead. When fucking you in missionary, he would try the same, this time you'd pull him down into a kiss (he's not necessarily complaining about this, though...).

The first time you actually pulled at his hair, you were just being playful. Anton was in an especially sassy mood that night and couldn't stop making petty remarks about everything you would say, while you two were binge-watching a random dating show.

"Why won't he just answer truthfully? He had no issue telling the other boys!", you exclaim, annoyed at the male single, who just bashfully lied to his date. "Y/N, why are you so uncompassionate? He wants to impress her." Anton sighs, rolling his eyes and dramatically crossing his arms in front of his chest, actually taking them off your shoulders. He can't contain his giggle, though, especially after looking at your annoyed face. You choose not to answer, being done with his antics. You also don't stop him as he's embracing you again, not even sparing him a glance, as he starts to press little pecks on your cheeks. Anton's kisses move further down your face, but before he could place one on your lips, you finally decide to tease him back: you lightly tug at his hair, the longer strands at the back of his head, pulling him away from you. Nothing could have prepared you for the moan that leaves his lips. You can see his dick swelling in his shorts, even in this dim lighting you can see how his ears turn a pretty shade of red. A relieved grin forms on his face, biting his lower lip, closed eyes, his glasses slipping down his nose a little bit -- you would never forget this expression.

From then on, you start using his little weakness, as you call it, to your advantage. If you want him to do something for you, like getting a water bottle as you are both already lying in bed, you'd start playing with his hair, wrapping it around your finger, massaging his scalp. After just a minute of this, he'll get up.

If he's getting on your nerves, teasing you or being sassy, you would play with the hair at the back of his neck as a warning, scratching the sensitive skin that's becoming riddled in goosebumps. Most of the time he'd only get worse, though, provoking you until you finally, and cautiously, yank his head back, asking him in your sweet voice to stop while keeping the pressure on his scalp.

Making out with Anton was always fun, sexy and passionate, but this definitely alleviated it for the two of you. Previously, you'd rather awkwardly place your hands on his shoulders or chest, but now you have them buried deeply into his light brown hair, pulling him occasionally closer by his cheeks.

You both can't stop kissing each other, surprising everyone at how shamelessly the shy Anton would french kiss you in public, just like he does tonight. One of your friends asked you to join her to this random house party at the house of some guy she is currently seeing, and since you knew she'd probably be gone the moment you step through the door, you decided to drag your boyfriend along to keep you company. Quickly, you two got bored, and decided to just make out in the kitchen. You're sitting on the counter, Anton standing between your legs, kneading your hips and ass. So immersed and turned on by the heated session, none of you noticed your friend stumbling in, until she's standing right next to you, jokingly complaining how rude you two are for hiding from everyone else. In actuality, none of you feel like returning to the group, instead you'd rather drive home and fuck his brains out. Much to your demise, your polite boyfriend actually starts to talk to her, but before he could promise her that you'd return to the crowd, you pull Anton's hair by the side of his head, until he's facing away from her, feeling overwhelmed by the heat pooling between your legs, just wanting to get her out. You yank at it with so much force he didn't even moan like usual, he just hisses at the pain. You quickly relieve your grip and tell your friend honestly that you two will leave soon, urging her to walk away, and immediately and panicky starting to kiss your boyfriends neck, worrying you hurt him. The moment she closes the door behind her, you wanted to apologize for being too rough, especially in front of another person, but Anton surprises you yet again by not only putting your hands back on his head, but also picking you up and carrying you out the backdoor to your car.

He moans so loudly when you pull at his hair, especially when he's inside you. His beautiful, light and airy voice sounds almost angelic as he's begging you in a whiny tone to pull harder. He cums so hard, his legs start to shake.

He's so desperate too, popping a boner as soon as your nails scrape his scalp, any rational thought leaving his mind. He'll actually giggle or laugh at every yank, feeling so much pleasure his heart pounds against his chest.

He doesn't really care if others are around when you pull his hair, in fact, it's usually the hottest since he least expects it, the humiliation only adding another layer to it. Since you usually do it rather spontaneously too, the tugs tend to be a lot rougher as well.

He cums just from getting his hair pulled while eating you out, your legs wrapped around his head, wet, swollen pussy rubbing against his tongue and nose, being engulfed by your sweet smell. Adding the friction from the mattress below his cock is more than enough to make him burst, loudly and whiny.

You drop back against your pillow and exhale slowly. The ceiling stares back at you, indifferent and unhelpful. Somewhere outside your window the neighbourhood has gone quiet—it's late, later than you should still be awake, and yet here you are. Thermometer on the nightstand. Fever climbing. The elaborate skincare routine you had promised yourself—the one specifically designed to ensure you looked like a functioning human being tomorrow—sitting completely forgotten on your bathroom shelf.

Tomorrow morning, which is the morning of your first date with Kim Woonhak.

Even just thinking his name sends an embarrassing flutter to your chest. That small, involuntary lurch behind your ribs, the one you've grown so used to that you almost forget it hasn't always been there. 

Almost. 

The truth is you remember exactly when it started. It wasn't dramatic. No grand revelation or cinematic eye contact across a crowded room. Just the smallest detail—stupid and completely ordinary, and then it settled somewhere deep and refused to leave, through months of friendship and late nights that ran longer than they should have, through every conversation where you chose your words a little more carefully than necessary and every time you looked at him and had to remind yourself to look away.

And now, after all of that, tomorrow is finally arriving. 

Your first date. With him. Your first date with anyone, if you're being fully transparent with yourself, which you are actively avoiding because that particular truth makes everything feel even more enormous than it already does. The outfit is already hanging on your wardrobe door. You'd spent an almost unreasonable number of evenings narrowing it down, texting Woonhak about completely unrelated things while your floor was covered in rejected options, and the memory of it makes a quiet warmth bloom in your chest even now, even through the fever haze.

You reach for your phone. His contact is already open because of course it is, your thumbs have developed their own opinions about where they want to be apparently. The rational thing is right there—one text, simple and reasonable. “I'm not feeling well, can we move this?” He would understand. He would insist on it, even. He is, frustratingly, that kind of person.

You stare at the empty message box.

Then you lock your phone and set it face-down beside the thermometer.

No. Absolutely not.

You have waited too long for this. You've sat with this feeling for too long, through too many months of wanting a relationship you weren't sure you'd ever get to have. You are not surrendering tomorrow to a fever. You will sleep this off. You'll feel better in the morning—people recover from fevers overnight all the time, surely, and you will simply be one of them through sheer force of will if nothing else.

The glass of water on your nightstand, the one you poured an hour ago with genuine intentions of drinking it, sits completely untouched. The medicine in your bathroom cabinet stays in the bathroom cabinet. The half-eaten snack you'd abandoned on your desk earlier in favour of rereading your last conversation with him remains exactly where you left it, slowly going stale.

You turn off the lamp.

Tomorrow, you decide, with the serene and entirely unfounded confidence of someone who has comprehensively outsourced her common sense to her heart—you will be absolutely fine.

You close your eyes.

You are so utterly, devastatingly, hopelessly cooked.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

Morning arrives, and it is not kind.

You become aware of consciousness slowly. Everything feels heavy. Your head, your limbs, the very air pressing down against your skin—all of it conspires to keep you horizontal, and for a long, bleary moment you comply. The sunlight filtering through your curtains feels aggressive. Your throat has graduated overnight from sandpaper to what feels like gravel, and the low throb behind your temples from last night has settled in with the comfortable permanence of an unwelcome houseguest.

You lie there, blinking at the ceiling.

Something was supposed to happen today.

You can't quite—

Your phone lights up on the nightstand.

You reach for it with the slow, waterlogged movements of someone operating at approximately forty percent capacity, fingers closing around it weakly. The screen swims into focus. One notification. A text, timestamp seven minutes ago, from the contact name you may or may not have spent an embarrassing amount of time choosing.

“Good morning :) still up for today? or did you finally come to your senses and realise you can't handle me?”

The effect is instantaneous and completely involuntary.

You sit up.

The headache detonates behind your eyes like a personal vendetta, white, sharp and immediate, and you actually have to press the heel of your palm against your forehead for a moment, teeth gritted, vision briefly unreliable. A noise escapes you that is not remotely dignified. You stay very still until the worst of it passes, phone clutched to your chest, the room tilting gently at its edges.

Then you look back down at his message.

The smile happens before you can stop it.

“I’ve been ready since yesterday,” you type back, which is true in every sense except the one where you are currently sitting upright through sheer determination alone, fever still very much present, head still very much attempting to detach itself from your body. “don't keep me waiting :)”

You hit send.

Then you push the covers back, plant your feet on the floor, and decide with absolute finality that you are fine.

You are so fine.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

Getting ready takes longer than it should.

It’s not because you are indecisive—you already know what you're wearing, have known for days, the outfit still hanging exactly where you left it on your wardrobe door like a small monument to your own optimism. It takes longer because somewhere between washing your face and attempting eyeliner, your body keeps requesting breaks you haven't scheduled. A moment gripping the bathroom sink while the floor shifts unreliably beneath you. Another moment sitting on the edge of your bed, mascara wand in hand, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass with the patience of someone who has decided that dizziness is simply not on today's agenda.

You look at yourself in the mirror.

You look terrible.

You look, specifically, like someone who ran a fever through the night and then got up anyway and tried to cover it with skincare and wishful thinking (which… is exactly what you did). Your eyes are glassy enough that no amount of concealer has managed to fully disguise it, and there's a specific quality to your complexion that sits somewhere between delicate and concerning.

You lean closer to the mirror.

Fine, you decide. Totally fine. Practically glowing, even.

Breakfast does not happen. You think about it briefly, open the fridge, register that the idea of eating anything feels genuinely implausible, and close it again. You'll eat later, during the date. That counts. That's basically the same thing.

By the time his text arrives—"on my way :)”—you are dressed, presentable by the loosest definition of the word, and running on a potent mix of adrenaline and delusion. You do one final check in the mirror, smooth down your outfit, and decide firmly that you look fine.

You look fine.

When the knock comes you cross the apartment in record time, pull open the door, and there he is.

And for a moment, you forget entirely that you feel like you're dying.

He looks like how he always does, which is to say unfairly good in an entirely casual way that he seems completely unaware of, and he's smiling at you with that radiant smile that has absolutely no business making you feel the way it does. His eyes do a quick, almost imperceptible sweep of your face—a brief, unreadable emotion passing through them—before settling back on yours like it never happened.

"You actually showed up," he says, delighted, like he genuinely wasn't sure you would. You lean against the doorframe with what you hope reads as effortless and not please give me something to hold onto.

"Told you," you reply. "Don't keep me waiting."

He laughs—bright and easy—and steps back to let you through, and you decide with complete certainty that you would drag yourself off your deathbed every single morning for the rest of your life for that sound without a second thought.

You grab your bag. You step outside. 

Yes, you are completely, totally fine.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

The night market is everything you imagined it would be.

Warm light strung low between stalls, the smell of frying oil and sugar competing in the air, noise layered over noise until it stops being individual sounds and becomes atmosphere. Woonhak grabs your wrist the second you step inside, already pulling you through the crowd before you've fully arrived, pointing excitedly at a stall halfway across the market.

"Okay, okay—do you see that? We're going there first. No arguments."

"We just got here—"

"No arguments," he repeats, already moving, and you laugh and follow him, and for a blissful, golden little while, you forget entirely that you are running a fever of nearly thirty nine degrees.

He's so bright tonight. That's the thing about Woonhak that you can never quite explain to anyone who hasn't stood next to him—he fills whatever space he walks into, this warm and restless energy that makes everything feel like it's moving slightly faster and more vividly than it did before he arrived. You've liked him for so long that you've genuinely forgotten what it felt like not to, and standing beside him now, it feels like a reality you keep having to convince yourself is real.

You feel strange tonight. Everything seems just a little out of focus, like your body can't quite keep up with the rest of the world. But his hand is warm around your wrist, grounding you, and the dizziness eases enough for you to catch your breath. 

You're here. You made it. Everything else can wa—

A sudden chill moves through you from your shoulders down, your whole body shuddering once, visibly, before you can catch it.

Woonhak turns immediately.

"Are you cold?"

"No," you say. "Just the breeze."

He looks at you. Then he looks very deliberately at the banners hanging from the stall directly beside you—completely, utterly motionless, not a single thread shifting—and then he looks back at you with his eyebrows raised.

"There's no breeze."

"There was one. It passed."

"It passed." 

"It was… very fast!”

He stares at you with his mouth slightly open, caught between disbelief and amusement, and then he laughs—short and bewildered—and shakes his head and turns back to the stall. You exhale quietly.

Fine. You're fine.

But when he falls into step beside you again he's closer than before that your arms brush with almost every step, and his hands have come out of his pockets, and you notice all of this and choose, very deliberately, not to think about what it means.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

He talks without restraint, like every thought that crosses his mind is worth sharing. He keeps up a running commentary on every stall you pass, tells a story about Jaehyun that has him laughing before he even reaches the punchline, and bumps his shoulder against yours every so often to make sure you're looking at whatever has caught his attention.

You are. You laugh when he laughs, follow wherever he points, match his energy as best you can. It's just that every few minutes, the world blurs around the edges, and you have to blink until everything settles back into place before he notices.

"—and then he actually tried to convince the guy that it wasn't even his—" Woonhak glances over mid-sentence and catches you a half-beat behind, your gaze slightly unfocused, and stops. "Hey."

You blink back into the moment. "Sorry — those caught my eye." You gesture at a nearby stall. "What were you saying?"

He doesn't look at the stall. He looks at you, and underneath his expression a different frequency of attention has switched on—the laughter still warm in his face but behind it, watchful now. 

"You sure you're okay?" he asks.

"I'm great," you tell him, and you smile, and you put your whole self into it. "Tell me what happened."

The moment passes. He finishes the story and you laugh in the right place. But when you start walking he's closer again— closer than he was even a minute ago— and his shoulder stays pressed against yours, steady and deliberate, and you think he's started noticing more than he's letting on.

Inside, the throb behind your temples has quietly escalated. You breathe through it and keep walking and tell yourself it's fine, it's fine.

You're absolutely fine.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

He buys you tteokbokki without asking, appearing at your side with it like it's the most natural thing in the world. He holds it out to you, his expression easy, but there's a quiet insistence beneath it.

"You haven't eaten anything this whole time," he says, and the teasing lilt that's coloured his voice all evening gives way to quiet concern.

"I've been pacing myself."

"For an hour."

"I'm very disciplined."

He looks at you, and for just a second, the easygoing expression slips away. What's left is intent—focused, a little worried.

"Eat," he says. "Please."

The word startles you more than it should. You don't think you've ever heard him sound quite so earnest. 

Before you can talk yourself out of it, you're reaching for the skewer. 

You smile, take it, and try. You genuinely do.

Two bites in, your stomach clenches in immediate protest. You stop chewing.

For a few long seconds, all you can do is stand there, swallowing carefully, willing the nausea back down. The skewer hangs forgotten in your hand as you fix your gaze on the lantern above the nearest stall, counting each breath and praying your face doesn't give you away.

It passes. Barely.

The third bite never comes.

You find a bin a minute later. When you return to his side his eyes go straight to your empty hands, and the silence stretches three full seconds longer than it should.

"You couldn't finish it?" he asks quietly.

"I wasn't as hungry as I thought," you offer.

He looks at you for a long moment, jaw shifting once. He has the expression of someone assembling a picture from pieces he doesn't want to believe, choosing very carefully not to say what he's thinking yet.

"Okay," he says, quiet and measured.

It's only one word, spoken in a tone you've never heard from him before. But it tells you more than anything else he's said all evening.

You take his hand without thinking about it, lacing your fingers through his, and he squeezes back—warm and immediate—and you feel him exhale through it.

"Come on," you say softly. "What's next?"

He lets you redirect him. But his thumb traces a slow, absentminded pattern against the back of your hand as you walk, and you don't think he realises he's doing it, and it keeps you tethered to the present unlike anything else tonight has managed. For a little while the fever recedes back to a murmur and you almost forget again.

Almost.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

The adrenaline leaves gradually, and then all at once.

There's no single moment where you register it happening. It's just a slow and incremental dimming. The idea of him has been powering you through this all evening—the wanting, the waiting, the electric reality of finally having what you'd spent so long hoping for—and ideas, it turns out, have limits when your body is running a fever on no food, no water and sheer stubborn devotion.

You're still beside him, matching his pace, answering when he speaks. But your reactions come a fraction too late now, every smile feeling just a little heavier than the last. He tells a joke that would usually have you laughing without thinking. It still reaches you. Somewhere beneath the fever, it's just as funny as it always would be. Your body simply can't keep up.

Woonhak has gone quiet.

The commentary has stilled entirely. He's just walking beside you now, close enough that your shoulders stay in constant contact, and you can feel the weight of his attention on the side of your face like a hand pressed gently against glass.

"Hey," he says, low.

"Hey."

"You having fun?"

"So much fun." You mean it. You mean it with everything you have left, which isn't much, but every last bit of it is his. "I really am."

He nods slowly. "You'd tell me if something was wrong, right?"

Your chest tightens. "Nothing's wrong," you say. "I promise."

He doesn't push. But his free hand finds the small of your back, warm and steady, and it keeps you upright in more ways than one.

Almost there. 

Just the rooftop. 

You just have to get to the rooftop.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

The street leading away from the market is quieter, lined with low amber light and the particular stillness that follows when a crowd falls away behind you. Woonhak mentions the rooftop ahead with practiced casualness—definitely looked it up, definitely pretending he didn't—and even now, even like this, the quiet effort behind it makes your heart soften.

You make it halfway down the street.

The dizziness arrives without warning and without mercy—a full and consuming wave that drains the colour from the edges of your vision and turns the pavement unreliable beneath your feet in a single, devastating second. Your steps falter. Your free hand reaches for something solid to grab onto and finds only air.

"Hey—" Woonhak feels it through your joined hands before you've even fully registered it yourself, turning towards you instantly. "Hey, what's—"

"I'm—" But the word dissolves. The world tips. Your knees buckle before you can catch yourself, and the pavement rushes up to meet you—

Arms catch you before you reach the ground, immediately pulling you in against him, and the impact you braced for never comes, just the solid warmth of him and his voice saying your name with an urgency that cuts through the fog like the first clear word you've heard all evening.

"Hey — hey. I've got you. Can you hear me?"

"Mm." It's all you can manage. Your hands have found the front of his jacket and are holding on with what little grip you have left.

For a moment he just holds you, one hand braced at your back, and then his palm comes up to press against your forehead, and the sharp breath he draws in tells you everything about what he's been expecting.

"You're burning up." His voice is low and even and very, very careful. "How long have you been feeling like this?"

You close your eyes. "Since yesterday."

Silence settles between you.

"Since yesterday," he repeats. His grip doesn't loosen, but it changes somehow, tightening just enough for you to notice. His gaze searches your face as if he's trying to reconcile the answer with the version of the evening he'd convinced himself was real.

"I didn't want to cancel," you say, into his jacket, very small. "I've been waiting for today for so long. I just—I really didn't want to cancel."

He doesn't say anything for a moment. You feel him exhale, slow and deliberate, feel the way his arms adjust around you with a care so methodical and certain that your throat tightens with it. Before you can ask what he's doing, your feet leave the ground. The movement is so smooth you're already tucked against his chest by the time it registers that he's carrying you.

"Woonhak—"

"Don't," he says softly. His jaw is set and his eyes are forward and his hold on you does not waver for a single second. "Just stay with me, okay?"

You try.

You really, genuinely try—you focus on the amber light above you, on the steady rhythm of his footsteps, on the warmth of his chest against your side and the sound of his voice and every small anchor that might keep you tethered here, present, with him. You want to stay. You want to see where this street leads, what the rooftop looks like and every version of tonight that has yet to come.

But the fever has been patient all evening, and it is done being patient.

The amber light blurs and stretches. His voice reaches you from somewhere far away, your name in his mouth sounding like the last clear sound in a room going slowly, gently dark—and your hands, still curled into the front of his jacket, go slack.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

You wake slowly, and the first thing you register is cold.

A damp cloth sits folded over your forehead, cool water tracing a thin line down towards your temple, and beneath it your skin feels tender and overheated in a way that makes the cold almost unbearable and welcoming at the same time, like your body can't decide which sensation to trust. You lie there for a long moment without opening your eyes, just breathing, just existing inside the strange heavy quiet of a body that has been running on empty for far too long.

The air smells different from your own room—cleaner, somehow, with an undertone of a warm, familiar scent that you can't immediately place, not until your mind catches up and supplies the answer : him. It smells like him.

You open your eyes.

The ceiling above you is not your ceiling. The light fixture is wrong, the crack in the corner that you've memorized from your own bedroom missing entirely, replaced by smooth unbroken white. You blink, slow and uncertain, and let your gaze drift sideways instead—soft grey walls, a desk cluttered with things that are clearly not yours, textbooks stacked at an angle that suggests they were shoved aside in a hurry, a hoodie thrown carelessly over the back of a chair like someone changed out of it in a rush and didn't bother folding it.

His hoodie. His desk. His room.

Oh.

The realization comes quietly as the memories begin to return, uneven and out of sequence, as though your mind is still catching up to everything your body has already lived through. The market, warm, loud and golden. Lanterns strung low overhead. Tteokbokki you couldn't finish, the way his eyes had gone straight to your empty hands when you came back from the bin. His hand at the small of your back, steady even as the ground had started to feel unreliable beneath you. The street after, quieter, amber-lit, his voice mentioning a rooftop with poorly disguised excitement.

And then the ground tipping. His voice, sharp and urgent, cutting through a fog that had already started swallowing everything else. Your name, said like it mattered more than anything else in the world.

And then nothing. A long, formless nothing, dark and total.

You lift a hand—slowly, testing, like you're not entirely convinced it will cooperate—and press your fingers lightly against your own forehead, beneath the cloth, as though you might be able to feel the fever from the outside if you just try hard enough. It's still there, quieter now, banked down to a more manageable ache than whatever had been raging through you last night, but present all the same. A dull, insistent hum beneath your skin.

You have never in your life felt more like a zombie than you do in this exact moment, and the humiliating part is that you know, somewhere in the honest core of yourself, that it isn't only the fever's doing. You'd spent the entire week rotting quietly from the inside—skipping meals because his texts felt more urgent than hunger, staying up because talking to him felt more important than sleep, letting every small warning sign slide because nothing, nothing, felt more pressing than the fact that you were finally, finally going to get to have this. Him. A date. A version of tomorrow you'd been aching for since the moment you realized you were in this deep.

Lovesick, in the most literal, humiliating, medically inconvenient sense of the word.

You almost laugh, except your throat is too dry and your head throbs in mild protest at the idea, so instead you just lie there, staring at his ceiling, marinating in the specific mortification of having quite literally fallen ill over a boy.

Maggots for brains, you think, a little deliriously. If he ever found out that phrase existed, you would never, ever hear the end of it.

The door opens.

"OH MY GOD—okay, okay, you're up, you're actually—" Woonhak comes in fast, too fast, a bowl balanced with visible concentration in one hand like he'd been hovering just outside the door waiting for exactly this. The moment his eyes land on you properly, something in his whole body seems to loosen, relief washing so plainly across his face that it's almost startling to witness, like he'd genuinely been bracing for the alternative.

"Do you know how long you've been out?" He crosses the room in a handful of long strides, setting the bowl down on the nightstand with more care than the rest of his movements would suggest he's capable of right now. "A full day. Twenty four hours, I've been checking your temperature every hour like some kind of lunatic, Jaehyun's been texting me asking if I've lost my mind, I genuinely think I might have—okay, here, sit up, slowly, don't just—wait, let me—"

His hands hover, uncertain, torn between the cloth on your forehead and the pillow behind you and you in general, like he can't quite decide what needs fixing first and is mildly panicking about the sheer number of options.

"Okay, cloth first, probably, or—no, wait, are you thirsty, should I get water, I have water right here actually—" He reaches for a glass on the nightstand you hadn't even noticed, thrusts it slightly in your direction, then seems to reconsider whether you're upright enough to drink anything and pulls it back halfway. "Or not. Not yet. Cloth. I'll do the cloth.”

 It would be funny, you think distantly—the way concern turns him chaotic instead of calm, all that easy confidence from last night nowhere to be found—except you don't have it in you to laugh, not yet, because somewhere between the door opening and him crossing the room, the full shape of everything has finally caught up to you.

The date. The one you'd wanted for months, quietly, achingly, through every late-night conversation and every carefully chosen word. 

"—and I texted my mom, actually, don't ask me why, I panicked and she was just the first person in my contacts who wasn't you—" He resettles the cloth against your forehead with a gentleness that doesn't match the speed of his voice at all, two entirely different registers running at once. "She said to give you soup. I'm already doing that. I feel very ahead of the curve here, honestly—”

The one you'd promised yourself you'd be present for, fully, unmistakably yourself, not this. Not fainting in the middle of a street. Not losing an entire day. Not waking up small and fever-warm in his bed while he hovers over you like you're a fragile object he's afraid of breaking further.

"—I mean it, I nearly had a heart attack, you just went completely limp, I've never carried anyone that fast in my life, I think I set a personal record actually, not that this is a competition, but if it were—" He stops, and notices, maybe, that you've gone very quiet beneath him, that your eyes have taken on a glassy, distant quality that has nothing to do with the fever.

There was no rooftop. There was no ending. There was just—an entire day gone, swallowed whole, and the quiet devastating certainty that you'd taken the one thing you'd wanted most and broken it before it had even properly begun.

Your eyes sting before you can stop them.

Woonhak's rambling cuts off mid-sentence.

"Hey—hey, what's wrong?" His hands finally land, one bracing gently at your shoulder, the other hovering near your face like he's afraid to touch without permission. "Is it your head? Are you dizzy, do you need me to—"

"I…" You swallow hard. "I r-ruined it." Your voice catches on the second word, and you squeeze your eyes shut, willing yourself to stop.

It doesn't work.

The tears come anyway—hot, fast, and completely outside your control, spilling over before you can do anything to stop them. 

"I ruined the whole thing." Your breath hitches. "I wanted it to be p-perfect. I wanted to be—I don't know." You shake your head, another sob breaking through. "I just wanted to be normal."

Your next words come out in a rush, tripping over each other.

"I wanted you to have a good first date, and instead I passed out in the middle of the street, and you had to carry me, and there was no rooftop, and I missed an entire day, and I'm s-sorry." The apology fractures around another shaky breath. "I'm so sorry. I just wanted it to be good, and I—"

"Hey. Hey, no—" Whatever he was about to do gets abandoned entirely. He sinks down onto the edge of the bed, closer now, and his hands come up slow and careful, as though you're a frightened animal that might startle at sudden movement. One thumb brushes beneath your eye, catching a tear before it can fall further, and then his palm settles against your cheek, warm and steady, like it belongs there.

"You didn't ruin anything," he says, and there's no trace of teasing left in his voice now. Only a quiet certainty, delivered as though it isn't even a point worth arguing. "You showed up to see me with a fever of thirty nine degrees because you didn't want to disappoint me. Do you understand how insane that is? You ate tteokbokki you could barely keep down because I asked you to. You held my hand through an entire night market while you were actively about to pass out, and you still laughed at my stupid Jaehyun story, and you still smiled at me like—" He stops himself, exhales, shakes his head slightly, like even he can't quite find the right shape for it. "Like I was the only good thing in the whole market. That's not ruining a date. That might be the most anyone's ever tried for me in my entire life."

You blink up at him, throat too tight to answer, more tears slipping free despite his thumb's best efforts to catch them.

"There's going to be a rooftop," he says softly, still wiping at your cheeks with a patience that leaves your chest painfully tight. "There's going to be a hundred rooftops, I promise you, I already looked up five more just in case. I'm not going anywhere. This isn't the only chance we get." His voice grows gentler with every word. "You could've just told me you were sick, you know. I would've shown up at your door with soup and my bad taste in movies instead. I wouldn't have cared about some rooftop."

"I wanted the date," you mumble, small, pressing your face slightly into his palm without quite meaning to. "I've wanted it for so long. I didn't want a fever to be the reason I didn't get it."

"I know." His thumb sweeps once more beneath your eye, gentle. "I know, you absolute menace. You've got maggots for brains, you know that? Fever like that and you still texted me 'don't keep me waiting.'"

A wet, surprised laugh escapes you despite everything, undignified and hiccupping. "That's so mean."

"It's affectionate," he says, entirely unbothered, leaning forward to press his lips briefly to your forehead, right where the cloth had been. "Extremely affectionate. I've been thinking about it all day, actually—maggots for brains, over me. I don't think I've ever felt so honored to be someone's rot."

"Please stop talking."

"Never," he says, grinning now, some of the earlier panic finally bleeding out of him now that you're laughing instead of crying. He reaches for the bowl on the nightstand, angling it towards you with exaggerated ceremony. "Soup. Made by my own two hands, so lower your expectations accordingly. And then you're sleeping, and I'm staying right here, and tomorrow—when you've got actual functioning brain cells again—we're renegotiating this whole rooftop situation. Non-negotiable."

You take the bowl from him, your fingers brushing his, and the tightness in your chest eases for the first time since you woke.

"Okay," you say quietly.

"Okay?"

"Okay." You manage a small, worn-out smile. "Take care of me, then."

The look that crosses his face at that—soft, a little stunned, like you've handed him permission to hope—stays with you long after he's tucked the blanket back around your shoulders and settled into the chair beside the bed, close enough that his hand finds yours without either of you really deciding it should. The fever hasn't broken yet. There's no rooftop tonight, no ending you'd planned for.

But his hand is warm around yours, and his eyes stay on you even after you've closed your own, and for the first time all week, the ache in your chest doesn't feel anything like sickness at all.

Maybe this was just the thing that happens when your baby stays. 

@coriihanniee ᯓᡣ𐭩

˖➴ reblogs are appreciated! ty for reading! <3

your package was waiting on the foot of your bed when you got home. the cardboard box was slightly crushed, the corners pushed in and the tape frayed like it had been dragged down a street by a rope. you'd been tracking it closely all week, since the contents cost about half of your paycheck and then some, having paid extra for a warranty. your anticipation had been growing all week not only because of the simple, modern-age dopamine rush of receiving a package but because, maybe, you'd finally get some sleep this weekend. and every day after.

that was if the item inside the box was less damaged than the outside.

"did you fucking sit on it?" you asked as you stomped into the kitchen you shared with your roommate, who was standing at the sink as if he were going to wash the dishes piling up but was, instead, scrolling aimlessly on his phone.

euijoo glanced up at you once, rolling his eyes as he flicked his loose, messy hair out of his eyes. he said, simply, "no, i didn't."

"well, somebody did," you sighed, navigating around him to get the scissors from a drawer, "i'm gonna be pissed if they're broken."

"you're already pissed," he half-laughed, shifting over to put distance between the two of you, like you were contagious with some incurable disease. he watched you, though, intently, as you swiped open what was left of the tape holding the box closed. or, rather, attempted to with the world's dullest scissors and apparently the toughest tape ever made. he cleared his throat, crossing his arms over his chest, "what's in the box, anyway?"

"if you'd have some patience," you grunted, shifting the box on it's side to get a better grip. but the grip wasn't better. in fact, it was worse, and the scissors clattered out of your hand, skidding across the floor and right by his feet. euijoo bent down to pick them up, and you sighed, defeated. he definitely thought you were incompetent. you had given him no reason to believe otherwise in your three months of living together.

"hand it over," he motioned for the box still caged in your arms, "before you cut your fingers off."

and when you handed him the package, he, too, struggled with wedging the blade between the concrete fibers. euijoo attempted an expert move, pinning the box in place between his knees and driving the scissors down the length of it with both hands.

"you're gonna cut your leg off," you winced at the maneuver, a bit prideful that you weren't struggling by any fault of your own. it was painful to watch, and the sight almost made you second-guess any invasive sentiments you had toward him. almost. he was undeniably attractive, tall and slender but broad and so boyish. euijoo carried a certain charm about him, like he was the teacher's favorite in school, like he had sold lemonade on the street corner and made no money because he drank it all before getting his first customer. he also seemed closed off in a way that reversed his charm in many situations; euijoo seemed to be actively fighting his personality off, like a mosquito buzzing in his face. he swatted and swatted. even now, he wanted to laugh at your critique of his technique when yours was far less successful, but he didn't. instead, he doubled down on making it work. you chewed at the inside of your cheek, "don't, like, stab it."

"do you want it open or not?"

"i'd prefer my noise cancelling headphones in one piece," you said, mumbling the next sentence under your breath at a volume you thought only you could hear, "i might finally get some sleep at night."

having a roommate had it’s perks– shared chores, shared rent, shared meals when one of you would make too large of a portion by accident– but it also had its drawbacks. having your particular roommate had one, very significant downside: the shared wall.

you thought living with euijoo would be convenient for the both of you, cheaper than living alone and in a cuter apartment, too, but it had grown to just be convenient for him. you knew him through a mutual friend, nicholas, who had personally recommended euijoo when you mentioned that you were looking for a roommate. according to nico, euijoo was helpful with chores and always paid his half of the rent on time, which was more than your previous roommates did. but you still didn't know him that well, having only been around him a few times in nico's large friend group.

"is there anything i should know about?" you had asked nicholas, just as a precaution before reaching out to euijoo about the apartment, "like, is he a sleepwalker?"

"uh, no, he doesn't sleepwalk," nico had laughed, then, a knowing, low chuckle, "but he's… kind of loud."

you could handle a bit of noise; you'd lived with gamers who shouted well into quiet hours, and your last set of housemates were sorority girls who sounded like they were competing in squealing matches every weekend. there was no possible way euijoo was louder than them— you told nicholas this, and he didn't discourage your decision to reach out to him the next day, offering him the spare room in your prospective flat.

the first night, you thought you had imagined it, the muffled grunts and curses that phased right through the wall separating your room from his. earlier that day, you could hear him on the phone, the way his voice carried right into the open space of the apartment despite the normal volume. you could hear every sharp slide of the plastic hangers on the rack as he organized his wardrobe. every slam of a drawer, every click of the light switch, every whir of the ceiling fan— it was like you were in there with him. but euijoo himself hadn't been loud in the way nicholas described, like a nuisance. he moved confidently, unafraid to bump corners or shuffle things around. for the first ten hours, you were inspired; you could have stood to be less apologetic, live a bit recklessly. but nicholas lived that way, too— confident.

maybe he snored, you had thought as you slipped into your bed. it was the only option left. unless nicholas had been pulling your leg, making you worry over nothing because he knew you would. your eyes fluttered closed, heavy after lifting boxes and unpacking all day. but just as you began to drift off, you heard it. you heard the unmistakable drawl of pleasure, the satisfied sighs and moans and strings of jumbled curses flowing from lips undoubtedly slack, and you knew only one thing for certain:

nicholas was fucking dead.

would it have been so difficult to mention that euijoo was some kind of sex addict? there was no other way to make sense of the sheer number of times a week your new roommate was moaning, alone in his room but talking himself through it like he wasn't. you were no prude, but you started taking a tally of the sleepless nights from how frequent his self-care sessions were. by night five, you'd barely slept a wink in your new apartment.

so, you really did hope that the headphones would be truly noise-cancelling. you craved a night's rest that didn't have a pre-show. but you didn't want to embarrass euijoo at all with your predicament. somehow, his comfortability outweighed your own. surely, it had nothing to do with his sweet, round eyes, dark like turned soil. or his patient smile, which dropped as soon as you let your grievances slip. i might finally get some sleep at night.

because euijoo heard it. he definitely heard it, telling by the way the scissors slipped in his hand and nicked the soft, golden skin of his finger like a thorn. he winced and brought the cut to his lips instinctively, dropping the scissors in the sink behind him. "shit," he muttered into his hand as you stuttered toward him and grabbed the half-opened box from his arms, dropping it to the floor.

"hold on," you urged him, like he had any choice, and began your violent rummaging through a drawer. somewhere, you had bandages. somewhere, you had your shit together, eight full hours of sleep, and a perfectly organized, ready-to-go first aid kit for situations like this, just in case two grown adults fail to open a cardboard box. your fingers combed through miscellaneous papers, pens, and rolls of tape until they landed on the box you were looking for. you sucked your teeth at the sight before you, "you might not like these, but they're all we have."

cartoon hotdogs scrawled in vivid hues of red and yellow, complete with giant eyes and cheeky smiles, decorated each of the bandages. some of them, with stick-figure arms and legs, were playing with various sport objects, kicking balls back and forth or hitting airborne items with rackets. others were surfing or sunbathing or rollerskating. euijoo pulled his finger from his lips, breathing a soft laugh as you struggled to unwrap the bandage. "nice," he noted, softly, a smile unfurling. you held his right wrist with a shaky hand as you stuck the adhesive of the bandage to his finger, curling the hotdog-printed material around until it sat snug right above the bend. his palms were unexpectedly soft, and you wanted to kick yourself for letting your mind wander. you imagined the way they might have felt sliding up the skin of your thigh, long and svelte. you didn't even notice you were holding your breath until you were finished, until you had concealed the small cut in the most obnoxious bandage ever created and finally freed the air from your lungs.

euijoo was holding his breath, too, watching your fingertips dance around his, steady and intentional and completely opposite to the version of you that worked helplessly at the tape securing your package. you released his wrist like it burned to touch, like you'd been caught, and wiped your palms down the front of your pants, "how's that? can you bend it?" he flipped his hand in front of his face, looking at the bandage with amusement, studying every inch of the design. euijoo bent his finger, slowly, wincing in one grand, exaggerated flinch before dissolving into a chuckle, your fist meeting his shoulder in an uncharacteristic shove.

"it's good," he laughed, lightly punching your shoulder, too, "thanks."

the headphones were in perfect condition despite the trauma the cardboard endured in its delivery. euijoo had cut away enough of the tape that all you had to do was pull the lids apart. you ran a few tests, alone and in the temporary silence; the headphones enveloped your entire ears as you tapped on furniture, clapped your hands, and clicked different surfaces together. nothing. there were traces of sound, sharp notes that twinkled above the muted pulse of your heartbeat in your ears like wind chimes. but, for the most part, you couldn't hear anything.

for the most part. you should not have settled for most.

it always started slowly, in a way that, to the untrained ear, sounded like euijoo was suffering from a tummy ache and had been struck by a wave of cramps. he groaned, sighed. you tried not to imagine what he was doing, tried not to stare through the wall like you had x-ray vision. the part of you that respected his privacy squeezed your eyes shut, just in case; the part of you that was human, that couldn't resist your body's natural and completely normal reactions, slipped one cup of the headphones off your ear.

"shit," you could hear him, muffled, "just like that."

it had to be some psychological torture experiment. having a roommate who was inconsiderately loud was bad enough; the fact that he was hot made it all the more unbearable, and you wondered if he was aware of how thin the walls were or if he was arrogant enough to not care. did he know he could get away with it? you predicted the answer was yes.

the truth was that all of nicholas's friends were hot, but most of them were less pompous about it than nicholas, who was visibly conscious of his outward appeal. his wardrobe, his hair— it all screamed i know i'm hot. but you'd never tell him that. euijoo's beauty snuck up on you. when you'd first met, his tall frame seemed to have shrunk behind the cluster of boys, lingering behind the onslaught of personalities that was their friend group. you'd noticed him later, when everything grew quiet at the end of the party nico invited you to following a slightly world-altering breakup. you had only agreed to go because your ex was, unfortunately, your only friend. meeting people seemed like a great idea.

nicholas wanted you to do more than just meet people, though.

"if you ever get lonely," nicholas had started his award-winning pitch over lunch one afternoon, "euijoo's always down for a good time."

you had nearly choked on your water. euijoo seemed like the least likely out of the group to be down for a good time. especially with you, to whom he had said a total of three words. he seemed more reserved than the others; when they jumped to ask you questions, bring you drinks, and drag you to dance, euijoo had sank deeper into the couch or slumped absentmindedly against the wall. he just looked disinterested, but looks could be deceiving.

"i'm good, thanks," you had wiped the water from your mouth on the back of your hand, choking down your embarrassment.

hook-ups weren't really your thing, hence the aforementioned world-altering breakup that stemmed entirely from your inability to let someone go. you craved emotional connection, long-term stability. you couldn't get that from a one night stand. you wanted to know someone, inside and out. you realized a bit too late that the closest you had ever come to real love was your own hand brushing through your hair, massaging lotion into your damp skin every evening and gently swiping lip balm over your lips every morning. and at night, it had been your own hand stuffed down the front of your shorts bringing yourself to orgasm.

you tried to fight your body every night. the guilt started to weigh on you, like you'd been keeping a secret, like you'd totaled his car in a parking lot and left a half-assed note on his windshield. all the while, your frustration bled into something hotter. you could feel it now, the burning between your thighs, so sharp it almost hurt. and so began your nightly routine: hear him, hate him, and then join him. from the comfort of your own bed, of course, with your laptop open next to you like you'd be paying any attention at all to whatever you decided to put on.

"fuck, baby," euijoo's hoarse voice seeped sinfully through the wall, and your legs involuntarily squeezed, desperate for any friction at all. you would have never admitted it, but you kind of liked the way the guilt amplified your arousal, even if you struggled to look him in the eyes every morning. the thrill of being caught almost outweighed the fear of it.

you quickly pulled up your preferred site. preferred was a bit of a stretch as you didn't really visit many others, but this one got the job done. the interface was a bit clunky, so you were immediately met with an onslaught of streams, both pre-recorded and live, catering to any and every fetish and interest; girls in latex or draped in lace, men in costume, or masked bodies roleplaying vigilantes in the shadows— it was all there in one flashing, oversaturated place. if you weren't half-drunk on your roommate's moans, you would have been severely overwhelmed. but instead, you scrolled and scrolled with your brows furrowed, not quite sure what you were looking for. were you even looking for anything? the thrill of watching usually did it for you before any dirty talk could, mixed with the mental image of your roommate across the hall with his cock in his fist.

god, you were fucked.

you clicked one at random. it didn't matter; the throbbing in your panties promised an orgasm before the site's sponsored ads were even finished running. but, quicker than you anticipated, you were met with the live feed of the stream, of the streamer's dimly lit room. you'd never seen this camboy before, even in passing, but you were not disappointed with your impulsive choice.

user byunny's webcam was angled low, tilted meticulously to reveal only what he wanted you, vaguely speaking, to see; in pixelated, dull light, the exposed skin of his chest and stomach glowed subtly, like headlights muted in sheets of rain, and the angle accentuated the toned slopes of his stomach. he was built delicately, sculpted with a gentle hand from his ribs to his hips which jutted, helplessly, into his hand. you felt your cheeks burn as his fingers wrapped tighter around his leaking, angry cock. the tip had been long flushed red, the length of it coated sleek and throbbing. his hips stuttered with every pained stroke from base to tip, his hips lifting to meet his movements in weak, pleasure-driven thrusts. sweat rolled down the soft expanse of his stomach, rolling down the curve of his waist and disappearing into the shadows of the background. of course, you were meant to be watching his dick, perfectly centered and begging for attention, but you found yourself lost in the details; the t-shirt bunched at the top of the screen, held up by his free hand to keep the flexing muscles of his abdomen visible, the swell of his chest as he panted, as his orgasm inched closer, and his hands. they were pretty, knuckles flushed with vigor, and his fingers were long. you followed the precise bend of his wrist to the golden flat of the back of his palm, all the way to his perfectly kept nail beds, all pristine— except for one.

secured neatly around one of his fingers was a bandage. the hotdogs were roller-skating, and they were skating directly up the length of camboy byunny's twitching cock. your breath caught in your throat as the thought did more than cross your mind. no, the thought pummeled through every other idea you could have had, knocking them against the sides of your skull and shattering them into thousands of pieces. deny, deny, deny, you thought, there are reasonable explanations for this. coincidences were real; you'd been in several of them. at the store, sometimes your total was your birthday. last week, a stranger on the sidewalk had been wearing the same shoes as you. certainly, these hotdog bandages were a hot commodity among wound-havers.

but, then, there was no denying it, as you heard, through the ear that was not covered by the headphones, the ear that could hear every sound euijoo made in his room next to yours, "im coming- fuck, im coming."

approximately four seconds later, traveling the bottomless pit of latency that plummeted for miles and still didn't hold a candle to the trench in the bottom of your stomach, the man on your screen arched up into his hand, his hotdog-clad finger wrapped definitively around the base of his cock. he groaned, in a distorted, disorientingly familiar voice, "im coming- fuck, im-"

you slammed your laptop closed.

"so, you really thought he was beating it every night for fun?"

nicholas found humor in everything, somehow. even this, which you delivered in a hushed and frantic tone in the center of your favorite cafe, made him snort so loud that every head turned and looked at you. you wondered if they knew, if just by looking at you they could tell that you watched your roommate jack off online. you wondered even more if they could tell that you liked it. that was the part that scared you— you had imagined that very situation for months, privately theorizing what he might have been doing, whether he was using a toy or rutting his hips into his mattress. but, back then, you had just heard him, and the visual in your brain was blurred, as if to protect his identity from your perverted brain. seeing him felt like a major violation, even if you were one of hundreds of people watching. did they feel like this, too?

"you didn't think to mention that euijoo was…" you lowered your head to the table, catching a clear whiff of your coffee swirling in your cup as you kept your voice hushed but frantic, "a camboy? that didn't seem like vital information when i asked if there was anything i should know?"

"it's not really my place to tell you, hm?" nicholas raised an eyebrow, swirling his cup in his hand. the liquid sloshed faintly in the plastic confines as he relaxed back in the padded seating of the cafe chair, "but i personally put two and two together after four days of sleeping like shit and losing my earplugs in my pillows."

"well, what did you do?" you asked, "like, how did you get him to stop?"

"stop?" nicholas laughed again, like he was wise beyond his years, "he can't just stop, dude, that's his job. you either pretend you don't know, play dumb, or you can ask him to keep it down… every night for the rest of your lease."

you realized then why euijoo needed a new place to stay and none of his previous roommates did. nicholas was chill, of course, and didn't seem too bothered by your current situation, but the other boys had shorter tempers, less patience. the idea of euijoo being kicked out of his previous apartment made you wonder why nicholas was so insistent that he would make an excellent roommate for you. everything he had said was true; euijoo was timely with rent, and he never complained about the chores you divided equally between the two of you. it was only the constant dirty talk after sundown and the wall-shaking moaning that knocked him down a peg. and now the fact that you saw his dick and can't stop thinking about it.

"i'm so screwed," you covered your face with your hands, experiencing, for what honestly felt like the first time, darkness and peace at the same time. until your phone chimed on the table below you. with your hands still pressed firmly over your eyes, you sensed nico's hand reaching across the table to flip your phone toward him. you asked, voice muffled by your palms, "who is it?"

"the devil himself," nicholas said with a smirk, flipping the phone back toward you as you slid your hands away from your face to read the text on your lockscreen. from euijoo, a simple question: can i move your clothes out of the dryer? nicholas sipped at his coffee as he studied the way your brows furrowed, as if the question required more than a yes or no. "he's like a housewife," he sighed, almost reminiscing, "does he cook for you?"

"if i say yes, will you take him back? sounds like you really miss him," you teased, half-joking as you typed back a hurried response of 'yes,' when you actually wanted to just tell him to burn everything and forget you ever lived there, that you were moving across the country, maybe even booking a spot on the next moon landing. and then you wondered if 'yes' seemed too enthusiastic. like, yes, please look through all my clothes! so you tacked on a quick apology for a final response of 'yes, sorry.' perfect. not too excited and equally regretful.

next to your other texts, the current conversation stood out because that's what it was— a conversation. your previous messages were brief and dry, ritualistic at best, letting each other know in as few words as possible that rent was on the counter or that there were leftovers in the fridge. it was strange to receive a text asking for permission to do something as mundane as moving laundry from the dryer, which you were positive you'd done before and just left his clean clothes in a heap on the couch. it was even stranger to see your phone light up again, this time with a third text in the chain. 'don't be sorry,' it read. you visibly gulped, stomach tied in an uneasy knot. had euijoo been cloned and replaced?

nicholas downed the last of his coffee as you stared into the blinding light of your screen. he stood up, clapped one sympathetic hand on your shoulder, and said, "no, thanks," he tossed his empty cup in the trash bin by the cafe exit, "i really like my beauty sleep."

when you returned to your apartment, euijoo had made himself lunch. he stood in front of the sink, hovering over the basin where the dirty dishes once sat in stacks to catch the crumbs of his sandwich, of which there were plenty. he probably wouldn't have noticed your presence if you didn't drop your keys on the counter, the sound of the metal clanging drawing his chin over his shoulder, drawing his eyes to yours. instead of greeting you, he nodded his head toward the stove.

another sandwich, untouched and resting neatly on a napkin.

you eyed it, suspiciously.

"do you not like turkey?" euijoo asked, cheeks stuffed full of bread.

he watched as you crossed the kitchen, closing the distance between you and the sandwich and, thus, you and euijoo. you lifted the top slice of bread, examining the layers of toppings. it actually looked delicious, which surprised you less than you anticipated. "turkey's good," you gave him a small, hesitant smile, "thanks."

euijoo hummed in reponse, gaze transfixed on the shrinking space between your mouth and your lunch. he watched your lips part, watched the bread rest on the plush flesh of them as you bit into the corner of the crust. as you swallowed the first bite, he asked, "so how'd you, uh, sleep? with your new toy?"

you would have dropped the sandwich if you weren't so hyper aware of his eyes on you, of his presence so close but so far, just within arms reach. the short answer was that you didn't; the long answer was that, every time you closed your eyes, you replayed the subtle tensing and flexing of his stomach as he drove himself to orgasm, the clenching of damp honeyed skin in the dim light of his room. you slammed your laptop shut before you actually saw him tip fully over the edge, but your brain filled in the gaps until sunrise. in fact, your brain was still filling in the gaps, even standing right next to him.

"great," you lied, rotating the sandwich in your hand, looking for the next best bite. lunch and small talk. euijoo had definitely been cloned and replaced. "yeah, they were totally worth the money."

"good," he nodded, watching as you took another bite. crumbs fell like fresh snow, dusting the front of your shirt, coating the fabric pulled taut by the swell of your chest. he inhaled deeply, releasing the breath as an airy laugh, "just curious since, you know, i have a personal investment," he wiggled his bandaged finger in the space between you, just in case you might have successfully repressed the image of his hand wrapped tightly around his cock, the bandage stark against the flushed underside.

you laughed, too. it felt like that was all you could do. "right," you said, pushing through the heaviness in your chest, at the creeping feeling that he knew that you knew.

the two of you ate the rest of your sandwiches in silence.

that night, your clothes were folded neatly on the foot of your bed, sorted by color. this, of course, incited a new wave of daydreams, this time of the domestic variety; you pictured euijoo, laundry piled high in his arms, making the trek from the dryer to your bedroom— thinking about him in your bedroom— tucking your shirts under his chin, pairing your socks, and lining up the seams of your jeans. when he asked to move your clothes, you expected to find them in a messy pile on your bed. instead, you returned to find pristine stacks and a turkey sandwich. nicholas's voice spun in your head: he's like a housewife; does he cook for you?

whatever guilt you carried that first night dwindled over the following weeks into a hollow pang in the back of your throat, the echo of a faucet dripping in a silent and empty house. you felt fully consumed by him; euijoo was a dark cloud, rumbling thunder in the middle of the night. you had accidentally trained yourself to get turned on by your frustration, so every time you slipped into bed and placed your headphones over your ears, your core fluttered. your stomach twisted into one singular knot that only grew more complicated the longer you fended off the invasive mental images of euijoo relaxing into his pillows, almost parallel to you physically. each of you lay propped up, laptop angled toward you, your own hands unraveling that knot in synchronized rhythm.

it was nearly every night for you, too, now. you even made an account on the site to skip the ads, just so you didn't miss a single second of his stream. it amused you to see other viewers in his live chat thirsting over him, and it made you proud in a fucked up way that you knew the truth, that you knew what color his toothbrush was, that he jumped every time the toaster went ding! and that he checked over both shoulders after to make sure that no one saw. for two weeks, you tuned into his streams. for two weeks, you had let yourself succumb to the building desire you'd pushed down until you were full, spilling over. and tonight, you would do it again.

you slipped your headphones over your ears, using them now to keep your laptop's noise in rather than to keep euijoo's noise out. the shame stirred in your chest, barely noticeable but still there, as you pulled up his page and waited. you could hear him in the kitchen, filling a glass with water and slamming the cabinet a bit too harshly for the hour. but you didn't expect any less from him. the floor creaked with every step he took to his room, the hinge squeaking as he opened and closed the door behind him. you could hear him opening drawers and pushing them closed. he flipped his light switch off, and you kicked yourself at the way your heart began to thrum in your chest, how quickly your finger clicked to refresh the page.

and when user byunny finally went live, you felt every part of your body that had once been aflame run cold, the wet of your veins shattering like icicles tossed upon packed snow. you were sure you gasped out loud, mouth hanging open, at the sight before you. euijoo's streams were usually slow, starting with a teasing, casual segment that showcased the growing bulge in whatever pants he had decided to wear. sometimes, they were sweatpants; sometimes, they were printed pajamas; always, they looked damn good on him. tonight, however, there was no teasing, no slow-paced stroking or conversation. tonight, there was no clothing at all except the brightly colored panties crumpled in his fist.

"what the fuck," you mumbled to yourself, leaning in closer to the screen to examine the baby blue fabric, stark against the angry red tip of his cock. the friction was audible, layered beneath his desperate panting. it seemed like all you could do was mutter the phrase over and over to yourself as your poor, confused body decided whether to be pissed. you couldn't deny the warmth that pooled between your legs, just as you couldn't deny the burn in your cheeks as you realized he was broadcasting your underwear to all of his viewers. the heat everywhere amplified as you thought about him rummaging through your drawers, picking through pair after pair in search of those specifically. or did he get them from your laundry, which he so graciously offered to move and then fold, unprompted?

surely, it was all coincidence. it had to be a gimmick, an easy way to satisfy another viewer's request. you'd seen him try all kinds of weird things in just the short time you'd been watching. one viewer asked him to hold a spoon while he jacked off and scoop up his cum with it after. another asked him to narrate every action and voice every thought he had, and the next night wanted him silent. every wish was fulfilled without any argument, any question; his obedience was one of his favored traits among his viewers. so, it made sense to think that someone asked him to get off with a pair of underwear, and it made sense that he had snuck a pair of yours to do so. it didn't have to mean anything.

"wish this was your pussy instead of your panties- fuck," euijoo groaned, twisting the material tighter between his palm and his skin. your mouth was somehow drier than sand, throat closing despite the drool that threatened to spill from the corners of your mouth at the way the thick vein on the underside of his cock gleamed in the harsh light from his screen. the angle was the same every time, highlighting the curve of his waist around the contracting muscles of his stomach. he choked out a desperate sound, "wish it was you- wish i was, fuck, grinding my cock against your ass until i couldn't take it anymore."

was he talking about you? few other explanations held up when you looked at the facts. he was fucking your panties— who else would he be talking about? an idea flickered, arrived in a flash and left even quicker: you would knock, once, on the wall. you would knock, once, on the same wall that drove you to insanity because of just how thin it really was. realistically, he probably could have heard the blankets rustling as you lifted your arm. he could have heard the grinding of your bones in your hand as you balled your fingers into a fist. he most definitely heard the solid, singular knock that reverberated, first, through your room. it was absolute, like the final placement of an empty mug on a coaster. in your headphones, you heard the knock again, about four seconds later. if nothing else, he would take it as a noise complaint, but the way his hand slowed, the way he inhaled like it hurt, told you that euijoo took the knock exactly as you intended— an answer.

euijoo released his breath as a dry, low chuckle. "are you watching, princess?" he asked, "i kind of thought you might be, but i wasn't sure." his voice was deeper than usual, rough like pavement, and it went straight through you. the pet name, the suspicion, the way he knew what you were up to the whole time and didn't change a thing about his routine. it was shameless, confident. euijoo adjusted the panties around him, flattening the soft cotton against the length of him and letting the lace trim decorate the top of his hand. "i hope you dont mind that i borrowed these. they peek out of the top of your jeans sometimes and drive me fucking crazy." he slid his hand up and down, slowly, bunching the material with every stroke, "do you do that on purpose? knock once for yes."

to everyone else, it had to have appeared scripted. perverted roommate gets caught by other, equally perverted roommate. it was all so real, all so shocking to you; were you that oblivious? had you been too distracted by how loud and hot he was to notice that he was distracted by you, too? how many times had euijoo watched you scurry from the shower to your room, peering through the crack in his door as you held your towel up with one hand? you'd done several things to try for his attention, of course, like wearing low-cut tops when your friends went out together, sitting next to him in the backseat and asking him so, so sweetly to buckle your seatbelt for you. but none of that seemed to affect him as much as the cheap, blue panties that sat just a bit too high for your jeans. you squeezed your thighs closer together, picturing his eyes lingering on your hips every time you bent over, rummaging through the fridge for a drink or untying your shoes.

you knocked once.

"fuck, i knew it," euijoo stifled a groan, "knew you weren't as innocent as you seemed. you wouldn't be watching me if that were the case, would you?" you could hear the smirk in his voice, "wouldn't be touching yourself to me, either— timing your orgasms with mine. too fucking sweet." your chest would surely be bruised from how hard your heart was beating, leaping forward and bouncing back off your ribs in erratic jolts. euijoo whispered, like it was a secret, only meant for you, "i can hear you, too. did you know that, doll? knock."

this time, you knocked twice for no. you were nowhere near as loud as he was, even going so far as to stuff your mouth with your shirt to ensure that you were more than silent. when he heard your knocks, he squeezed his long, slender fingers around the base of his cock, jerking his hips up involuntarily.

euijoo grunted, then hummed, "mhm, i can hear every pretty little sigh, every delicious moan. like music, baby. better than fucking music. to know im helping you feel good, so good you cant even look at me the next day— fuck." he gulped down any restraint he might have had, preparing to take a leap that would either result in you in his bed or him looking for a new place to live. "i wish you were here right now, fisting my cock for me," he said, "want you to make me come, baby. would you like that, too? i'm sure my friends here wouldn't mind."

the next knock wasn't on his wall but on his door, just as you pushed it open with a shaking hand. you weren't sure what came over you, what posessed your body and carried you from your bed to his room. the version of you that texted euijoo four months ago, offering him the spare room, would have never imagined that you'd have ended up here. as the door swung open, you took your first look at his bedroom. the door was always closed, even when he was out of the apartment, taunting you like a locked chest packed full of antique treasures and baubles. even in the dim lighting, his walls were charming, decorated with posters and photos. his shelves were lined with collectibles and keepsakes. every inch of space was uniquely him, aside from the corner of the room captured by the webcam on his laptop, which was undistinguishable from any other white wall and bed with plain sheets in the world. the only thing that stood out was euijoo himself, propped up on pillows to achieve that perfect angle you'd grown so fond of.

this angle was better.

this angle, peering down at him from your place in the doorway, revealed everything you'd been deprived of through the screen. his hair was disheveled, beads of sweat bunching the ends of his bangs into jagged points that stuck out every which way against the flushed skin of his forehead. his shirt had been discarded and left in a crumpled heap on the floor next to his bed, leaving his shoulders and neck to be carved by the harsh shadows from the computer's artificial lighting. the sheen on his chest traveled all the way to the top of his hips, where he was still stroking himself in slow, languid motions, as though he were trying really hard to drag this whole situation out.

"hi, pretty," euijoo smiled, and you could see it now, so sweet, so different from the lewd scene before you, "come here. dont be shy."

you crossed the room, timidly, and closed the distance between you, swallowing your nerves like two tough, chalky pills. he tracked your every move with heavy-lidded, dark eyes. the air was thick, hot; it felt like swimming, like being boiled alive. euijoo's skin was hot, too, as you approached him on the bed and his left hand reached out to brush your arm, to coax you closer. your knees hit the side of the mattress, slightly shaking the camera, which your eyes refused to leave. you could see your shadow cast over him, suddenly aware that there was still an audience, that just because you closed your laptop to come finish the job, the hundreds of other people didn't. in fact, they tuned in, closer, more intently. you were part of the show, now, and it made your throat feel impossibly drier.

"don't worry about them," euijoo reassured you, drawing soft circles on the skin of your upper arm, "pretend they're not there. just you and me, yeah?" you wished it could have been. so badly, you wanted to be alone with him, to have this moment all to yourself. this was as good as it was going to get, at least for now.

you nodded and repeated, "just you and me," as you crawled up into his bed, your knees sinking into the plush material of the mattress. your heart sank, too, all the way to the bottom of your stomach where it pumped all the blood directly to your core.

"there you go," euijoo praised, and you visibly relaxed, "i'm all yours, baby. touch me however you want, but you know how i like it."

and then you were touching him, your hand replacing his around the base of his throbbing cock, discarding the panties altogether. you'd done nothing but touch your underwear for weeks. you wanted to feel him. euijoo hissed as the cool skin of your fingers settled on him, setting him ablaze with a scorching sensitivity. the first real contact of skin on skin, of your palm dragging aching swipes down his twitching cock. his hips lifted as your thumb smeared the pearly beads of his arousal with every stroke. your touch was gentle, but your pace was not.

"fuck, just like that," he sighed, leaning back, hands threading into the loose sheets, "feels so good."

slowly, his persona began to crumble, chipping away more and more with every jerk of your wrist, until he was putty beneath you. until he was a perfect puddle, bucking up helplessly into your hand. it felt, for a second, like it really was just the two of you. until you caught a glimpse of your reflection in the screen, and your attention flickered from watching the blissful crease in his brow deepen and smooth to the frantic, desperate motion of your hand, blurred by the stream's lag. it melted the two of you into one, a muddled and pixelated form identified as human only by the sounds euijoo was unable to hold back the closer you brought him to the edge. whines, whimpers— all softer, more raw, than the exaggerated moans and grunts he put on for the sake of his audience.

with your hand wrapped around him, he sounded like he was yours.

"i'm close," euijoo blindly pawed at the fabric of your shorts, the inner seam undoubtedly soaked, "i was close before you even started, close just thinking about you."

there was something still a little unnerving about speaking, if not because of the hundreds of viewers then because you didn't want to slip up and say something wrong, something stupid. you were distracted by the possibility of saying his name, of giving away his identity by accident and ruining everything. so, you settled for eye contact, for dragging your nails down his side and watching as the subtle red welts followed in their wake. you settled for a quiet intimacy as his plush lips fell open and you shared the same breath.

all euijoo could manage was a rushed warning, a choked, "coming-" before his hips rolled one final time into your hand, his release spurting out and over in hot streams. a constant pulse of pleasure racked through his body as you worked him, slowly, milking every last drop until he was whining, doing everything he could to not chant your name like a prayer.

you'd have taken this over a turkey sandwich any day.

your hand, covered in his cum, stilled at the base of his still twitching, sensitive cock. euijoo, with his chest still heaving, reached over and gently wiped the back of your palm with familiar soft, blue fabric. that same gentleness you'd used in the kitchen weeks ago, when he had cut his finger helping you open your package and you'd smoothed the bandage over his skin, was staring right back at you, cheeks flushed and forehead sticky with sweat.

you were panting, too, like you'd done anything but ruin the underwear you were currently wearing. everything happened so fast, so suddenly that it felt like a dream, like you were sleepwalking. it was the same dream you'd drank herbal teas and massaged pressure points to avoid having every night, the one where you and euijoo ended up in a puddle of sweat. only you were awake, now, fully drunk on the scent of him, the sound of him.

and the look of him, just like the audience, which you were now acutely aware of as euijoo carefully wiped away the last of his release from your skin.

euijoo motioned vaguely toward the laptop with a nod, a confident and aimless tip of his head, "end it," he said and, with an arrogant, knowing smirk tugging at the corner of his bitten lips, added "unless you want them to watch me fuck you senseless."

𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭:

@wenomakiluvr @guliexe @cheolscherries1812 @jungwonsgff @heesoulnotes

@kjjupilled @xionvlog @ikigaijo @0wisewisdoom @minhosimthings

@luperque @ikeuholica @nichozzystuffs @s3ungh4nsgf @zzniya

@livelaughloveseventeen @purrplegyuu @yuuniversezx @yukisroom97 @ateez-atiny380

@sunoosun00 @tayl82 @bubbletsworld @iluvujo @euijoo1sidechick

“i said i don’t care. you’re a man, you can do what you want.”

so you did care.

“so.. so— ok.”

“because, why would i be mad?”

“well, she was all over me, but whatever?” nicholas leant his body up against the larger counter of the sink.

you glared at him. “what, so, you want me to be mad?”

“no.” nicholas shrugged.

“fine.” you replied matter-of-factly, “i care then!”

“don’t be like that.”

“look, i care. i’m mad now.”

“y/n.” nico sighed, crossing his arms. “don’t be like that. if you don’t care, that’s fine. now i don’t either.”

you scoffed at him. “god, you’re a brat.”

“how am i a fucking brat, i’m just doing what you’re doing. do you think you’re a brat?”

“no.”

“then neither am i.”

“you’re just acting bratty, nicholas. and now you’re mad.”

nicholas let out an exasperated sigh. “no, i’m not mad.”

“you are.”

“you want me to be?”

your mouth dropped open slightly. “shut up.”

“what?”

“no, shut up, seriously. you’re annoying me.”

nicholas huffed out a breath of air. “i didn’t even do anything.”

“you’re being annoying, just shut up. get out of my bathroom and go play your game or some shit.”

⋆

“do you care now? hm, you care now?”

nicholas’ left hand was splayed out at the centre of your back while he used his right hand to bring your ass back into his hips.

“nicky..” you cried out as his dick slid in and out of you again and again.

“yeah, you care when i’m balls deep inside you. ‘cause i’m the only thing that’s on your mind when you’re like this. your heads empty when you’re full of me.”

“f-fuck off…” you whined out. he couldn’t have picked a worse time to revive your little argument from earlier. you thought fucking would relieve the tension, not make you relive it.

“you care that a girl was touching my arm and.. talking to me like that.” nicholas’ grip on your hip tightened, pulling you closer to him. “you don’t wanna tell me but you’re possessive, i know you are.”

“i’m really not.” you sighed. “you think too highly of yourself.”

“y/n…”

“god, what do you want, nicholas.”

nicholas’ voice seemed a slightly higher octave than it was just a second ago. “just tell me okay?”

“tell you what?”

“j-just tell me— fuck, tell me something… tell me you’re mad at me, tell me you hated seeing it.” nicholas let out a pathetic moan, watching your ass bounce back on him. “tell me you’re jealous…”

“get over yourself.” you barely managed to get the statement out before your walls started to twitch around him.

“i- hmh. i know, i know how you feel. just need to hear it. you care who touches your man, don’t you?“

“fuck, yes, ok? i fucking care!” you fisted the bedsheets around you for stability as your orgasm washed over you. nicholas began to whimper above you, thrusting into you shallow as his followed suit.

“mmh, fuck. i fucking knew it.”

nicholas leant over and pressed a kiss to your shoulder blade before slowly pulling out of you.

“you’re such a freak.” you reached around in the dimly lit room to find his discarded hoodie on the floor and pulled it over your head. looking over at nicholas’ heaving chest next to you on the bed, you rolled your eyes and he just smiled lazily.

“you like that about me. you told me.”

“whatever.” you pulled the blanket over the two of you and dropped your head onto his naked chest.

“so you did care? when that girl was touching my arm and stuff.”

“i mean i— yeah, why wouldn’t i. but why’d you have to fight with me like that? if you knew?”

“my love language is words of affirmation.” he shrugged from beneath you, “i like to be sure.”

“you like to get on my fuckin nerves.”

“ah, that too.”

Sohee he gives you a curt bow and introduces himself. You repeat his name back, as if you're testing its weight for the very first time, and he has to bite the inside of his cheek. Pretending that he hasn't heard that name fall from your lips thousands of times before is a task that almost gives him away. The way you say it—a glimmer to your tone that only Sohee could pick up on. It makes it impossible to keep away from you.

Thankfully, you're forced to walk away from him before Sohee makes any rash decisions that could give you both away to the entire room. You amble over to greet the next guest from a neighbouring kingdom, which marks the rest of the night to turn dreary and boring. You sneak glances back at Sohee every chance you get. You've mastered the art of discretion, so it isn't hard to convince others that you were merely admiring the chandeliers and bouquets of flowers decorating the dance hall.

The night drags on endlessly, it seems. By the time you're finally making your way back to your bedchambers, your feet ache from your heels and the hem of your dress is trampled by several uncoordinated men trying to lead you through dances. You had hoped to dance with Sohee tonight, but he never got the chance to ask you, always confined to some corner of the room. Although he had finally made it to roam the same space as you freely, it seemed you were still separated.

You're mumbling curses under your breath as you finally push your door open, quickly shoving your tight shoes off and limping over to your bed. You only notice him on your bed a second before he's already pulling you down on top of him. You squeal in surprise, but he swallows the sound with his lips like its the most natural thing. You melt into it, into him, the satin of your gown pooling over your sheets.

"It's rude to kiss a princess hours after you just met," you mumble against him, nothing but elation in your voice. You thought tonight would end on the disappointing note of only half a conversation with Sohee. You're overjoyed to find him waiting for you.

"My apologies, princess… you looked too pretty in your dress. What was I supposed to do?" he smiles at you from underneath. You're still haphazardly laying on top of him, layers of your dress swallowing you both. His head rests on your pillow and his hair—which he can never seem to tame—sticks out messily in every direction.

"You looked good too," you start to say, but he pulls you back down to his lips before you can give him any more compliments. You usually see Sohee in regular attire: tunics and plain trousers, sometimes a coat. The sight of him dressed up in a proper suit at tonight's banquet had your heart stirring in your chest.

Sohee sits up, still kissing you like it's his life mission. You're holding him close, hands trailing his back across the expensive fabric. It takes a while for him to fully pull away from you, as if he's addicted to your taste. You peck his lips a few times after, tempting him to fall back into the kiss, but he has other plans. He stands up and grabs your hands. You glance up, wondering what he's scheming behind the glint in his eyes.

"Since you were too preoccupied dancing with other men tonight," he begins, mocking hurt as you giggle at his comment. "I never got the chance to ask you. May I have this dance?" He kisses your hand as you laugh and agree. Even he can't contain the laugh that bubbles up once he pulls you off the bed.

There's plenty of empty space in your bedchamber for you and Sohee to use as a dance floor. It's uncoordinated and messy, but in the best way. Your makeup is slightly smudged from the way he was kissing you before, and you're barefoot under your dress. His hair is unruly, and his suit jacket had already been discarded ages ago. A few buttons on his shirt are unbuttoned, revealing some of his collarbone to your eyes, but you're much too focused on his face to care about how messy his garments have become.

His eyes twinkle under the light as he sways and twirls you around, hands firm on your waist as if to mark his claim. You're only his, and although he wasn't able to dance with you hours ago, he makes up for it now in private. It feels more notable this way, dancing together without the crowd. You know you'll remember everything about this moment years to come. The look of love in his eyes, the sound of his laughter, the slope of his jaw as he dips you in his arms. The plush of his lips that you indulge in one more time because you can never truly get enough. Sohee is everything you hold dear—an elixir that you will never grow tired of. And together, you make the perfect pair.

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@kstrucknet

euijoo sat beside you casually, baseball cap low over his eyes like he hadn’t just crossed three waiting rooms and dodged at least four managers to get here.

“you came all the way here just to call me out?” you whispered, exhausted amusement slipping into your voice.

euijoo smiled lazily. “i came all the way here because you stopped replying to me.”

“i was literally on stage.”

“you’ve texted me during live broadcasts before. i know your capabilities.”

you snorted quietly despite yourself.

“also,” he added, gently bumping your shoulder with his, “you do this thing when you’re stressed where you vanish for an hour… and then come back pretending you don’t need anybody.”

“you say that like you haven’t known me for fifteen years.”

“i have,” he replied easily. “which is why i’m right.”

you rolled your eyes, but your shoulder leaned into his before you could stop yourself.

it had always been like this with him.

easy.

like muscle memory.

long before debut stages and schedules and media training, there had been tiny matching backpacks at child modeling shoots, badly memorized mc scripts at kids’ variety shows, and adults constantly telling the two of you to stand closer together because you both “looked cute on camera.”

the internet still loved bringing up old clips.

tiny you and tiny euijoo sitting side-by-side on a brightly colored set while he shyly handed you strawberry milk because you’d started crying after losing a game.

tiny you fixing his crooked name tag before filming started because he always put them on unevenly.

matching commercials. matching interviews. matching smiles.

people thought the two of you were nostalgic childhood friends who happened to debut in the same industry years later.

which technically wasn’t wrong.

it just wasn’t the whole truth.

“you know what happened earlier?” you muttered quietly after a moment.

euijoo hummed, leaning back against the couch. “hm?”

“one of the mcs asked me if we still talk.”

a laugh escaped him instantly. “no way.”

“and i told them we’re both busy these days and barely see each other anymore.”

euijoo went completely still.

then he slowly lowered the drink in his hand and stared at you like you’d personally betrayed him.

“barely see each other?” he repeated softly.

you shrugged, fighting a smile. “well—”

“you were in my kitchen this morning stealing food out of my fridge.”

“it always tastes better at your place.”

“and last night,” he continued, pointing at you accusingly now, “you called me at two in the morning because you ‘couldn’t sleep unless someone talked to you.’”

“i was having a hard time.”

“and i stayed awake until four.”

there was absolutely no annoyance in his voice—if anything, he sounded embarrassingly fond.

you nudged his foot with yours. “so dramatic.”

“i’m just saying,” he murmured, thumb brushing lightly over your skin, “if this is ‘barely talking,’ i think i’ve been yours without even realizing when it started.”

your heart betrayed you instantly at how natural that sounded coming from him.

not performative.

not dramatic.

just familiar.

the kind of care built quietly over years and years together.

across the hall, staff voices echoed closer.

instinctively, both of you shifted apart slightly.

years of hiding made the movement automatic now.

euijoo noticed your expression immediately.

his smile faded just enough to soften around the edges.

“you okay?” he asked quietly, voice gentler now. “you’ve had that look on your face all day.”

you stared down at your hands for a second before answering.

“yeah,” you murmured, a small, easy exhale leaving you. “i’m okay. i just think i’ve gotten used to you being important to me all the time, not just when it’s quiet.”

for a moment, he didn’t say anything.

then he glanced toward the closed door before carefully reaching over behind the couch armrest and linking his pinky with yours.

tiny.

hidden.

familiar enough to make your chest ache.

“you’re right. we’ve been doing this forever,” he murmured. “remember when that reporter asked if we were dating when we were twelve?”

you laughed under your breath immediately. “and you got so nervous you spilled juice everywhere.”

“i was fighting for my life.”

“you said—and i quote—‘we’re only friends because girls are scary.’”

“they were putting microphones in my face!”

you were trying so hard not to laugh loudly now that your shoulders shook against him.

euijoo watched you with the softest expression imaginable, completely distracted from the noise outside.

then, after a small pause—

“you still kept the bracelet, right?”

your breath caught instantly.

the bracelet.

a cheap little braided bracelet he won for you at a summer festival when you were fourteen after wasting nearly all his game tickets trying to get your favorite color.

blue string. slightly uneven because he insisted on fixing part of it himself.

you still had it tucked safely in your apartment drawer.

“…you remember that thing?”

euijoo looked genuinely offended.

“of course i remember it,” he said quietly. “you wore it until it started falling apart. you cried when it snapped.”

“i was fourteen.”

“you cried.”

“you made me another one!”

“and you still have that one too.”

you looked away immediately because he was right.

again.

euijoo smiled softly, thumb brushing once against your pinky.

“i remember everything about you,” he said, so casually it almost hurt. “i remember your old phone number. i remember the first thing you ever said to me on set. i remember you used to get nervous before filming and pretend you weren’t by talking too much.”

“…i hate when you’re observant.”

“you love when i’m observant.”

unfortunately, that was also true.

outside, someone called euijoo’s name down the hallway.

he sighed dramatically, head tipping back against the couch.

“if i ignore them long enough, do you think they’ll assume i disappeared?”

“your manager already thinks i steal you from your schedule.”

“she’s right.”

“euijoo.”

“i’m serious,” he said, smiling lazily now. “you’ve been distracting me since we were eight.”

“pretty sure you followed me around first.”

“because it was always you. even back then.”

your jaw dropped instantly.

“you cannot say things like that without warning.”

“i’ve been dating you for years. i think i’ve earned it.”

your face felt unbearably warm now.

euijoo grinned at the reaction before standing reluctantly, fixing his cap and hoodie sleeves.

then, very casually, he reached over and untangled the chain of your stage necklace where it had twisted during rehearsals.

such a tiny gesture.

but so practiced.

like he’d done it a hundred times before.

“you’ll come watch our stage later?” he asked softly, his fingers brushing briefly against your collarbone before pulling away.

“of course,” you said right away, a small smile forming. “I like watching you perform.”

euijoo’s gaze lingered on you for a second, warm and a little too knowing.

“you always say that,” he murmured.

“because it’s true.”

he hummed, like that satisfied him more than he wanted to admit.

“and you’ll be there after encore too,” he added casually, like it wasn’t a question.

“obviously,” you said, rolling your eyes a little—but you were smiling.

his expression shifted into something teasing again.

“good,” he said lightly, like it wasn’t a big deal at all. “just don’t look at me like that the whole time.”

“like what?” you asked.

“like you’re trying not to smile,” he replied, eyes flicking to yours. “you get this face when you’re proud of me.”

you went quiet for a second.

then, softer, “that’s because I am proud of you.”

his teasing softened at that, something warmer slipping in underneath it.

“yeah?” he murmured, like he already knew the answer.

He didn’t wait for you to respond—just leaned in, brushing a quick kiss to your forehead, soft and effortless like it had always belonged there.