Ria

Minji was already there when you arrived.

Of course she was. This was one of the enduring mysteries of your friendship — that a woman with three children, a husband, a house, and a schedule that should make punctuality structurally impossible was always, without fail, the first one at the table. You had stopped questioning it years ago. Some things you simply accepted.

She stood up when she saw you and hugged you the way she always hugged you — fully, completely, Minji's hugged you long enough to feel when something was off before you said a word.

"You look tired," she said, pulling back to look at your face.

"I'm fine, it's the bakery" you said.

She gave you the look. The seventeen-year look. The one that said: we both know that's not what I asked.

"Let's wait for Sooah," you said.

"Three minutes," She sat down taking the same exact spot she's been taking since the three of you were seventeen year olds, her movements were pure muscle memory at this point. "She texted from the car. Her boss had a morning apparently."

You slid into the booth across from her. The menus were already on the table and you both picked them up out of habit despite knowing exactly what you were going to order, had known since approximately 2009, because some decisions were made a long time ago and did not require revisiting.

"How is Seojun?" you said. "More importantly — how is the situation with Seojun."

Minji put down her menu and looked at the ceiling a long dramatic sigh left her lips. "I love that child so much, I love all three of my children" she said. "I am also so tired."

"He," she said, "has decided he wants to play the cello."

You already knew about the cello thing. You'd seen it yourself two Thursdays ago — Seojun cornering an older girl at the music center you volunteer at.

You'd started going to the center three years ago — Yoongi had mentioned it once, at dinner, and spent most of the evening talking about the director with a warmth that was so unlike him both you and Jin had just let him keep going. You went the following week out of curiosity. You'd been going every couple of weeks ever since, bringing pastries, knowing most of the kids by name and how Minji's kids all ended up attending.

Which was how you knew about the cello thing before Minji said a word. You'd seen it yourself — Seojun cornering Jisoo, one of the older girls, explaining with complete seven-year-old conviction why the cello was objectively the best instrument, while she gave him the patient, faintly bewildered look of someone who hadn't asked for this. He was seven. She was twelve. The cello was nearly as tall as he was. None of it had slowed him down even slightly.

"Three weeks ago it was the drums," Minji started picking at her napkin abstentmindely. "Before that the guitar. Now suddenly it's the cello, and apparently nothing else will do, and I keep asking myself why the cello specifically, and then yesterday I figured it out and I haven't been the same since."

"There's a girl."" you said and couldn't hide your smile.

"There's a girl." Minji dropped her head back against the booth. "He's seven. She's twelve. She plays the cello and according to him she is — direct quote — the coolest person at the entire center. He came home and announced this like it was breaking news."

You bit the inside of your cheek and focused very hard on your menu.

"You know something," Minji said.

"You know I go to the center every couple of weeks," you said. "I bring pastries for the kids."

"And?"

"And Seojun is extremely committed to the cello," you said carefully. "As an instrument. For musical reasons."

Minji turned her head and looked at you.

"She's really talented," you added, which did not help your case at all. "Like, genuinely. For twelve."

"She's twelve," Minji repeated, like saying it again might change something. "That's worse, not better." She put her face in her hands.

"He is exactly like his father, you know that? Exactly. Seojong saw me across a classroom in fifth grade and decided, that was it, no further discussion needed, and then spent the next ten years making sure he was right." She lifted her head just enough to look at you over her fingers. "Men in my husband's family don't get little crushes. They fall completely, immediately, and then they just — wait. Calmly. Until they get what they want." A pause. "He proposed the week after we graduated. We had Seojun older sister before I'd even unpacked from the wedding. I thought I'd have more time before any of this started again, with any of them, and now my seven-year-old is out here with a type."

You laughed, and reached over to pat her arm. "It's probably just a crush, Min. He's seven. Give it a month, it'll be dinosaurs again."

"Don't," she said. "Don't give me hope and then take it away. I'm just saying — does she even know he exists?"

You thought about the Thursday in question. The patient, faintly trapped expression. "She's aware of him," you said. "That's as far as I'd go."

Minji groaned and let her head fall back against the booth again, and you were still laughing at her when the door opened and Sooah walked in.

She arrived with her coat half on and the specific expression of someone who had made a firm decision about the next hour and intended to defend it. She slid into the booth, dropped her bag, and looked at both of you.

"I need food," she said. "And I have news. And I need you both to be normal about it."

"Define normal," Minji said.

"Don't make it a whole thing."

"Now I'm worried," you said.

"It's not bad news," she said. "It's just — it's a lot. I'll explain after we order."

You ordered. The same things you had been ordering here since you were seventeen — Minji her doenjang jjigae, Sooah her bibimbap, you the yukgaejang that had been the best thing on the menu since the beginning of time and would continue to be. The waiter didn't even write it down anymore. That felt like an achievement.

"Okay," Minji said, menus gone. "News. Go."

Sooah wrapped both hands around her water glass.

"My boss," she said, "is getting married."

A pause.

"Okay," you filled the gap her silence created.

"In eleven days."

Another pause.

"Eleven days," Minji repeated.

"Eleven days," Sooah confirmed. "As in, I found out yesterday and have been holding this information inside my body like a —" she stopped. Took a breath. "You know there's a product launch event in ten days. Big one. High-end, a hundred and twenty guests, the whole thing. The one you are catering. And they are announcing the engagement at the event." She looked at both of you. "The wedding is the day after."

Minji stared at her. "The day after the party."

"The day after the party."

"That you are planning."

"That I have been planning for three months, yes."

You looked at Sooah carefully. "Is she — is your boss okay? Is this something she wants?"

Sooah's expression did something complicated. The professional composure dropped at the edges, just slightly, the way it only ever did with you two.

"That's the thing," she said, quieter. "I've worked for her for four years. She is not — she's not a cold person, but she is a very private one. Very controlled. I have never seen her lose composure at work. Not once in four years." She paused. "I walked into her office last week and she was crying at her desk."

The table was quiet.

"Her father is making her take over the company," Sooah said. "It's been coming for a while, the whole succession thing, and the marriage is part of it. Very old-fashioned, very — it's a whole situation. She didn't choose it." She looked down at her glass. "She's not happy about it. I can tell. She tries to be professional about it and she is, she's very good at her job and she handles everything perfectly, but I know her and —" a pause — "she's not happy."

"Does she love him?" Minji asked.

"I don't even know who he is," Sooah said. "She hasn't said a name. Just — there's a fiancé, there's a wedding, there's a company announcement. Everything on the same weekend."

"That's," Minji said carefully, "a lot for one weekend."

"It's a lot for one lifetime," Sooah said.

You thought about the event brief. The hundred and twenty guests. The timeline that had made you and Cameron look at each other across the prep table with matching expressions. You had said yes immediately because the brief was extraordinary and the opportunity was real and you had not asked enough questions about why a high-end product launch needed a full wedding-tier catering setup in under two weeks.

Now you understood.

"Sooah," you said.

She looked at you.

"Is that why you called me first?" you said. "For the catering."

She had the grace to look slightly guilty. "You were the only person I trusted to pull it off in that timeline. A hundred and twenty guests, high-end, custom everything, less than two weeks —" she shook her head. "I wasn't going to give that to someone who didn't deserve it. And you deserved it." A pause. "Also I knew you'd say yes because you never say no to a challenge and I know you. She also wants to know—" Sooah picked up her napkin, which meant she was bracing herself — "if you could cover the wedding catering as well. The day after. Same team, different venue the company will cover any price."

You looked at the ceiling.

Two events. Eleven days. One hundred and twenty guests at the launch, god knows how many at a wedding, a cake that did not yet exist.

One beautiful thing, you thought. She just wants one beautiful thing.

You thought about a woman you had never met, sitting at her desk with her hands flat on the surface and nowhere to put what she was feeling. You thought about what it meant to have your life decided for you — the company, the husband, the timeline, all of it handed down from someone else's plan. You believed in love the way some people believed in weather — not as a concept but as a fact, something that arrived and changed everything and could not be argued with. The idea of a marriage that had nothing of it made something in you go quiet and sad in a way that had no practical application but was completely real.

You couldn't fix the marriage. You couldn't fix the father or the company or the arranged timeline of someone else's life.

But you could make the food extraordinary.

"Tell her yes," you said. "Both events. And I'll need the full brief for the wedding by end of week." You picked up your tea. "I do always say yes," you admitted.

"You absolutely do," Minji said.

"It's a problem," you agreed.

"It's a gift," Sooah said firmly. "And my boss — whatever is happening with her personal life — she deserves a beautiful event. I want to give her that much at least." She straightened slightly. "So yes. I recommended you. And you're going to be incredible. And we can argue about the ethics of it after."

You looked at her for a moment.

"Thank you," you said. And meant it fully, for all of it — the trust, the recommendation, the faith that had been sitting quietly underneath all the professional reasoning.

"Obviously," she said, and picked up her spoon.

You ate. The conversation found its rhythm the way it always did — easy and overlapping, the specific warmth of people who had been finishing each other's sentences for twenty years.

"Okay, so," Minji said, around a mouthful of rice, "the reunion has a group chat now."

"Oh no."

"Fifteen years. Can you believe that? They actually booked a venue this time. Three weeks from Saturday."

"Who's even going." Sooah didn't look up from her bowl. "Half that chat is people I haven't thought about since graduation."

"Everyone says they're going. Nobody's actually going." Minji waved her chopsticks. "Except apparently Junho. He responded within ten minutes."

"Of course he did." You kept eating.

"And then," Minji continued, with the relish of someone who'd been waiting all lunch for this part, "he asked — in the group chat, very casually, very just wondering — whether everyone was planning to come."

"By everyone, he meant Y/N." Sooah said.

You took a slow sip of water.

"I'm so done with that man. I swear to God. He's never let it go. It's been fifteen years since you guys broke up. You've been with Jin for ten. For god's sake." She paused, then returned to the original point with the air of someone closing a loop. "Honestly, he's not the annoying evil ex, Junho is a whole different category."

"He's not a different category," you said. "He's just—"

"He tried to ruin to your wedding."

The table went quiet for a second.

"He didn't try to ruin it," you said. "He showed up."

"He showed up," Sooah repeated, "to a private venue, with security, at an event maybe forty people knew the location of, total — and somehow he was there. At the gate. Telling the guards he was a close friend of the bride and needed to speak to you."

"He probably paid someone for the information," Minji put in. "I refuse to believe someone just let it slip where it was. Even if not what it actually was."

"And when they wouldn't let him through, he didn't leave. He waited." Sooah's voice had gone flat in the way it did when she was trying to stay calm about something that still made her angry. "And then when you came outside for two minutes to take a call—"

"He grabbed my arm," you said, quietly. "He wasn't going to hurt me. He just — wouldn't let go. He kept saying he needed five minutes, just five minutes, and I kept saying no, and he wouldn't—"

"And then security removed him." Minji recited it like the rest of the story — worn smooth from being told so many times, and still somehow enraging every time. "Forcibly. Because he wouldn't let go of you and you were asking him to and he wasn't listening."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"That's not a messy ex." Sooah, quiet now, no bite in it, just true. "A messy ex shows up drunk and cries and you feel bad for them and it's a story you tell at parties. That's a man who couldn't accept that you said no — four times — and had to be physically made to let go of you." She looked at you. "I love you, and I love that you're someone who doesn't hold grudges. But I will hold this one for you forever, because somebody has to."

You didn't say anything.

"And he's in the group chat asking if you're coming to the reunion. Like none of that happened. Like it's normal. Like he's owed something."

"I know."

"Anyway." Minji's voice softened. "Are you gonna go?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"You should bring Jin. That will shut him up forever."

You almost laughed. "You know Seokjin can't come to our high school reunion."

And there it was — the thing that lived underneath every version of this conversation, the thing the three of you had circled for years in different forms. Nobody from high school had ever met your husband. Not once. Not at the wedding — your wedding had been small, careful, the kind that never ended up anywhere it could be photographed — and not since. As far as your graduating class knew, you were married to someone, and that someone had no face, no name anyone could confirm, no existence in any form they could point to. You still used your maiden name in public. Kim Y/N existed only on legal paperwork, the kind that stayed very, very private.

Which, over the years, had become its own kind of problem.

"You know what Hana said at the last reunion." It wasn't really a question from Sooah.

"That maybe there wasn't actually a husband," Minji said flatly. "That maybe you made him up. Or—" she stopped.

"Or," Sooah picked up, "that you were seeing someone who was already married to someone else. And that he was the one who paid for the bakery, and that's why nobody ever sees him — because he has a whole other family somewhere, and you're the—" she made a face. "I'm not even finishing that sentence. I got so mad I had to leave the room."

"I remember," Minji said darkly. "You texted me from the bathroom."

"I was shaking. I was one second away from slapping her plastic surgery out of her face"

"It's fine," you said. "It doesn't bother me."

"It bothers me."

"It bothers both of us. On your behalf. Constantly."

You looked at your bowl. The thing was — it didn't bother you, not really, not in any way that kept you up at night. You had made peace with this a long time ago, the calculation you'd made before you ever said yes to him: that loving him meant some things stayed in the dark, that his world required walls yours didn't, and you had accepted that fully, with open eyes, and you had never once regretted it.

But there were moments. Small ones. A wedding, a reunion, some ordinary event where everyone else got to bring the person they loved and introduce them and say this is mine, look at this, isn't he wonderful — and you got to bring nothing. Got to let people imagine whatever they wanted, because the truth was bigger than a group chat could hold and you weren't the one who got to decide when it came out.

You were proud of him. That was the part nobody saw. You were so proud of him it sometimes felt like something physical, something you carried around and had nowhere to put down, and the not being able to show it — not the hiding itself, you'd long since stopped minding the hiding — but the not being able to just once stand next to him at something small and ordinary and say this is my husband the way anyone else would. That was the part that occasionally caught you off guard.

You didn't say any of this.

"It's really fine," you said again, and reached for the banchan.

Minji watched you for a second longer than was strictly necessary, then let it go, because that was also part of twenty years.

"I just—" Minji exhaled, frustrated, and then, almost before she could stop herself: "God, I wish Jin could go. I would pay actual money to watch that girl's face. I'd pay money to watch her see who you're actually married to and just—" she made a small explosive gesture with her hand. "Combust. On the spot. In front of everyone."

"Min."

"I'm just saying it would be very satisfying."

"Jin can't go," you said. "You know he can't go."

"I know," Minji said, and she did know, and the energy dropped out of it immediately, the way it always did once the actual fact of the thing reasserted itself. "I know. I just — sometimes I wish you got to have that. Just once. The easy version. Where everyone just knows and nobody gets to make up stories and Junho doesn't get to pretend he's owed an apology."

"It's okay," you said. "I know our relationship is private. I've always known what that means."

It was true, what you'd said. You had known — from the very beginning, from before there had even been anything to know, you had understood what loving him would cost in the specific currency of other people's information about your life. You had said yes to him with your eyes open. You had never once, not for a single day in ten years, regretted it.

But there was a small voice. It didn't come out often — it hadn't come out at all in months, actually, until just now, sitting in this booth, hearing Minji say I wish you got to have that — but it was there, and it said something you didn't usually let it finish saying.

Private and secret aren't the same thing.

Private was something you chose, together, on purpose, for reasons you both understood and agreed with. Secret was something that happened to you — something other people decided, that you lived inside of, that required you to disappear a little so someone else didn't have to.

You had always called it private.

You weren't entirely sure, sitting there, that it had only ever been that.

You picked up your spoon.

"Anyway," you said, "I don't think I'm going to the reunion. I have an event in ten days and a wedding the day after that and frankly Junho can keep wondering."

"Good," Sooah said, visibly relieved to be moving on. "Honestly, good. Let him sit in that group chat forever."

"Forever," Minji agreed.

And the conversation moved on, the way it always did — to Sooah's boss, to the cake, to whether Minji's husband was capable of surviving a weekend alone with all three kids while she came to help with the wedding setup (the consensus was: questionable) — and you let it move, and ate your soup, and put the small voice back where it usually lived.

It didn't go away, exactly.

It just got quieter.

The food was mostly gone. Minji had checked her phone twice and Sooah had a call at two and you had a tasting at one forty-five and the afternoon was beginning to close around the lunch the way it always did, too fast.

You put down your spoon.

"I need to tell you both something," you said.

They looked at you.

"We're trying again," you said. "Seokjin and me. We've decided. We're trying for a baby, again."

The table went quiet in a way that was not surprised exactly but was careful. Careful in the way that only made sense between people who knew what again carried. Who had been there for the before. Who had sat with you through the month you didn't talk about it and brought food and didn't make you explain.

Minji's hand covered yours across the table before you'd finished the sentence.

"Are you sure?" Sooah said, gently. Not doubting. Checking.

"Yes," you said. "I know how much I want this. I've always known." You looked at your hands. "I'm scared. And I want it. Both things are true."

"Both things are allowed to be true," Minji said quietly.

"I know." You exhaled. "It's just — Jin is acting weird. Not bad weird. Something-is-off weird. I can see the seam and he doesn't know I can see it and he keeps choosing funny when I need him to choose honest and I —" you stopped. "I don't know what's underneath it yet. And I'm scared of what it is. And I'm scared of trying again and I want it so much and I —"

You stopped.

The table held it.

"Talk to him tonight," Sooah said. "Not the version of the conversation that's easier. The real one."

"I'm going to," you said.

"Promise," Minji said.

"I promise," you said.

And you meant it. You meant it the way you had meant things since you were seventeen and the three of you had started telling each other the truth — completely, with full knowledge of the cost of it, and no intention of taking it back.

Outside the restaurant you hugged goodbye on the pavement, the afternoon sun doing its best, Seoul moving around you the way it always did.

Minji held on a second longer than usual. "Call me tonight," she said. "After."

"I will," you said.

You stood there for a moment after they were both gone. The restaurant behind you. The bakery ahead. The evening somewhere in the future, waiting.

Tell him what's true, Sooah had said.

You put your hands in your pockets and walked back toward the bakery and thought about caramel, and patience, and the thirty seconds where everything looks fine.

You were paying attention.

You were going to keep paying attention.

The isomalt wouldn't set.

This was, technically, a simple problem with a simple solution — temperature, timing, the specific humidity of a kitchen that had been running hot all day. You knew this. You had been making pulled sugar work since culinary school, had done it a hundred times, had explained the process to Cameron so many times you could do it in your sleep.

You had now failed it four times in a row.

The fifth attempt was cooling on the marble slab and you were watching it with the kind of attention that had stopped being about the sugar a while ago. It cracked along the same line as the last one. You set down the scraper. Looked at it. Picked it back up.

The isomalt was for the centerpiece — the one that was supposed to be extraordinary, the thing you'd promised yourself would make Sooah's boss's terrible week at least surrounded by something beautiful. A woman being handed a marriage she never chose, a wedding the day after an announcement she didn't want to make, and you were going to give her one good thing in the middle of it. One thing that was right.

You started the sixth attempt.

She doesn't get to choose any of it, you thought, watching the sugar heat. Not the man, not the date, not the company. None of it is hers.

And you thought about your wedding. Small, careful, the kind that never appeared anywhere. You thought about how you'd chosen every single part of it — chosen him, chosen that day, chosen the dress and the vows and the quiet venue with the tight security, all of it yours, all of it real. You had never once regretted a second of it. You loved him so much it sometimes still surprised you, ten years in, the specific shock of being this lucky.

The sixth attempt cracked before it even finished cooling.

You stared at it.

I'm not even upset about my own thing, you thought. I have the thing. I have him. I'm the lucky one. And you believed that, you did, it wasn't performance — but underneath it, quiet, persistent, the thought kept arriving anyway: she gets a wedding everyone will see and hate, and I got a wedding nobody will ever see, and somehow I'm the one standing here wishing.

You started the seventh attempt.

You thought about the reunion. About walking in with his hand in yours, no calculation, no security plan, no story prepared in case someone asked. About Lee Hana — whoever Hana was to you now, just a name from a group chat — watching you cross a room with your husband and having absolutely nothing left to wonder about. You thought about what it would feel like to not have to manage that. To just — be seen. Once. In the light, not behind anything.

You thought about your mother, who had a photo album from your wedding that she had shown exactly four people in four years, all of them sworn, in advance, to secrecy, before she'd even open it. You thought about your father, who kept photos of all three of your brothers and their families on the wall of the restaurant — birthdays, graduations, a whole gallery of a normal, visible family — and how there wasn't a single photo of you and Seokjin anywhere on that wall, not one, because a photo on a wall in a restaurant two streets from a building like that was a photo someone could take a picture of.

The seventh attempt didn't even make it to the slab. You felt it go wrong in your hands and set it down before it could finish failing.

You thought about football matches. About a niece's ballet recital, a nephew's preschool showcase — the ordinary, boring, wonderful things families did, the things Jin's brother's kids did every month and that Jin had never once been to, not because he didn't want to, but because Uncle Seokjin showing up to a five-year-old's dance recital was not a thing that could happen quietly. You thought about how your brothers had, at some point, without ever discussing it directly, taught their own children not to mention him. Not in a cruel way. Just — we don't talk about Aunt's husband, okay? It's a secret, it's special, we keep it safe. Five-year-olds keeping a secret for an adult because the adult couldn't carry it alone.

You started the eighth attempt.

Your hands were shaking slightly. You told yourself it was the heat.

I don't regret it, you thought, and that part was still true, would always be true. I would choose him again every single time, in every version of this, forever.

But you were so tired.

You thought about the appointment folder on the counter at home. About we're trying again — the word again and everything it was quietly, carefully not saying, the thing that had happened the first time that you still, even now, even alone in your own kitchen, could not look at directly. You thought about how trying again meant hoping again, and hoping again meant the possibility of losing again, and you were standing here failing at sugar for the eighth time wondering if you had enough left in you for any of it — the hoping, the hiding, the holding, all of it, at the same time, with him a little bit far away and getting farther.

The eighth attempt cracked.

You realized you were crying when a tear landed on the marble and you watched it sit there, small and round, next to the ruined sugar, and thought, distantly: oh.

You hadn't noticed it start.

You wiped your face with the back of your wrist, which did nothing, because your hands were covered in sugar and now so was your face, and you laughed — one short, broken sound, not really a laugh — and then you were properly crying, the kind you hadn't let yourself do in weeks, standing alone in your kitchen at six in the evening with eight failed centerpieces and a marriage with a space growing in the middle of it that you didn't know how to close, and a baby you wanted so badly you could barely look at the word again, and a husband you loved more than anything who you couldn't hold hands with at a high school reunion, and a mother with an album nobody got to see, and a father with a wall that didn't have your picture on it, and nieces and nephews who had been taught, gently, kindly, devastatingly, not to say your name or your husband's.

It has to be true, you thought, looking at the eighth crack, the words arriving the way they always did, except this time they didn't feel like they were about sugar at all. You can't make it pretend to be something it isn't. It either holds or it doesn't.

You stood there and let it not hold for a minute.

Just a minute.

Then you wiped your face again, smeared sugar across your cheek, and reached for a ninth attempt — because the centerpiece needed to be right, and because crying in your kitchen wasn't going to fix the thing that actually needed fixing, and because you had always, always kept going.

You just wished, for once, that you didn't have to.

Cameron appeared in the kitchen doorway at half past six.

He looked at you. He looked at the marble slab. He looked at the five failed attempts lined up in a row like evidence.

He said nothing for a moment.

"The floor is sold out," he said finally. "Like, completely. There's nothing left. We had a line at four o'clock." He leaned against the doorframe. "It was a great day."

"Good," you said.

"I'm going to stay and close up," he said. "Clean down the stations, do the inventory, sort the morning prep list." He paused. "You should go home."

You looked at the marble slab.

"I need to get this right," you said.

"You're going to get it right," he said, with complete certainty. "Tomorrow. When you've slept and eaten something that isn't a testing spoon and your hands know what they're doing again." He crossed the kitchen and gently, without drama, moved the marble slab to the side. "Tonight it's not going to work and you know it's not going to work and standing here being frustrated at it is not the same thing as fixing it."

You looked at him.

"Go home," he said, kindly. "Whatever is going on — and I'm not asking, that's your business — go home and deal with it. The isomalt will be here tomorrow."

You stood there for a moment.

"The centerpiece is going to be extraordinary," he said. "You have ten days. You have time." A pause. "You don't have infinite time to fix whatever's going on at home. That has a shorter timeline."

You picked up your apron strings and untied them.

"Thank you," you said.

"Obviously," he said, and picked up the inventory clipboard.

Your phone buzzed on your pocket when you were inside your office to pick up your things and leave, screen lighting up.

My Handsome Husband 💍 6:44PM : practice ended early. the guys want to come over and drink and cook like old times, is that okay?

And attached a gif of himself blowing a kiss that made you smile.

My Handsome Husband 💍 6:44PM : jungkook says and i quote "tell noona i will literally cry if we don't go to the house tonight, i miss her cooking and also her in general" My Handsome Husband 💍 6:45PM d: he is being very dramatic but also he's not wrong, we all miss you. it's been too long since the house was full

You stood there for a moment, sugar drying on your face, nine failed attempts behind you, and felt something in your chest loosen — just slightly, just enough.

It had been too long. You hadn't noticed how long until just now, reading it in his texts — the house had been quiet for weeks, the kind of quiet that wasn't peace, just absence. You and Jin had built that house with exactly this in mind, a place big enough and warm enough that it could hold all of them whenever they needed it to, and somewhere in the last month it had stopped doing that. Stopped being full. Become just the two of you, carefully not saying things to each other in rooms that had been designed for noise.

You missed them. All of them — Jungkook's bottomless appetite and his terrible jokes, Hoseok's laugh that filled a room before he even finished what he was saying, Yoongi pretending to be asleep on the couch while listening to everything, Jimin narrating his own life with his hands, Taehyung taking photos of things nobody else would think to photograph, Namjoon two drinks in and suddenly very philosophical about something nobody asked about. You missed the chaos of it. The mess. The specific, particular comfort of a kitchen full of people who had known you since before any of this — before BTS, before the world knew their faces, when it was just seven boys and a girl behind a counter and a restaurant that fed them more than they paid for.

You needed that tonight, you realized. Before the conversation you and Jin still had to have — the real one, the one that had been sitting between you since four this morning — you needed an evening of normal first. An evening of being just Jin and his wife and their found family, loud and warm and exactly as it had always been, before the two of you sat down and looked at the quiet parts.

You wiped your face properly this time, leaving the ninth attempt where it was, and texted back:

You: of course. tell jungkook I'll make the thing he likes You: tell him i miss him too. miss all of you. come home

You drove home in the early evening, Seoul doing its particular thing at this hour — the lights coming up, the city shifting from day to something warmer, the specific quality of a Tuesday that was almost over. Your hands smelled like sugar. Your kitchen was in Cameron's capable hands. The isomalt would be there tomorrow.

You pulled up to the house and sat in the car for a moment.

Are we okay.

The question was still there. Quiet. Patient. It had been there since seven fifteen this morning in your office and it had been there through the lunch and through nine failed attempts at sugar work and it was not going anywhere.

But tonight there would be noise first. There would be Jungkook eating everything in the kitchen and Hoseok's laugh filling the house and all the ordinary, ridiculous warmth that the two of you had built this place to hold.

You needed that.

You got out of the car.

You went inside.

You were going to find out — just not yet.

You heard them before you opened the door.

This was normal. Seven men who had known each other since they were teenagers did not arrive anywhere quietly — there was always someone saying something, always someone laughing at what that someone said, always the overlapping warmth of a group that had been through enough together that silence between them was a choice rather than a default.

You stood in the entryway for a second and just listened.

The kitchen was the heart of the house — Jin had insisted on it from the first sketch of the floor plan, had stood in front of the architect and said, with complete seriousness, I don't care what the living room looks like, the kitchen needs to be the biggest room. It was. Open, high-ceilinged, the island long enough that six people could work around it at once without anyone's elbows colliding, and the dining table beyond it — the one he'd had custom-made, dark wood, long enough to seat sixteen comfortably, which still sometimes wasn't enough, because when his family and yours and all seven members and Minji's kids and Sooah were all here at once it was an army, and the table grew extra leaves and people sat on counters and the whole thing spilled into the open patio doors that led out to where the grill sat.

Food had always been the language between you. Not just yours — both of yours, separately and together, going back to a restaurant counter and a boy who kept coming back for bread. Feeding someone was how you said things that were too big for words. The kitchen reflected that — open shelving with mismatched bowls collected over a decade, a wall of cookbooks that were actually used, the specific worn patina on the cutting boards from years of being the boards everyone reached for first. Strings of small warm lights along the exposed beams that Jin had insisted on and that you had thought was excessive and now could not imagine the room without. Photos on the side of the refrigerator, held up with magnets — not posed ones, just moments, Jungkook asleep at this table with his face in a bowl, Hoseok mid-laugh, your parents at last Chuseok.

This was the room you had built to hold exactly this.

You changed out of your work clothes and came down to find the kitchen already in motion — and it took you a second, just a second, standing in the doorway, to take in all of it.

Jin and Jungkook were at the stove together, Jin directing with the easy authority of someone who had appointed himself head chef the moment he saw Jungkook reach for the wrong pan. "Y/N is not cooking tonight," he was saying, not even looking over his shoulder, like he'd anticipated the question before either of you could ask it. "She's been on her feet since six. We're handling it."

"We're handling it," Jungkook confirmed, with the seriousness of a man who had been assigned a critical mission.

Jimin and Taehyung were at the island, technically cutting vegetables, though the ratio of cutting to talking was not in the vegetables' favor. Jimin was mid-story, knife moving in slow, unhurried strokes while he gestured with his other hand, and Taehyung was laughing at something before Jimin had even finished the sentence.

Through the open patio doors you could see Yoongi at the grill, sleeves pushed up, doing something to a tray of skewers with the focused, unbothered competence that he had clearly done this many times. Hoseok stood beside him, handing him things before he asked for them, the two of them talking in the easy rhythm of people who didn't need to fill every silence.

And at the long table, Namjoon was setting it. Carefully. One placemat at a time, lining up the chopsticks with visible concentration, because table-setting was the one kitchen task that had been declared, years ago, by unanimous vote, to be Namjoon-safe. You remembered why. The two of you had once left him alone with a tray of cookies for eleven minutes and come back to find the kitchen full of smoke and Namjoon standing in the middle of it looking genuinely betrayed by the oven, as though it had acted against him personally. He had not been allowed near your kitchen since.

You stood there for a moment, just looking at all of it.

Seven boys who had once shared a two-bedroom apartment so small that Jin used to chop vegetables sitting on the floor because there wasn't enough counter space for more than one person to stand at a time — you remembered that apartment, remembered visiting it, remembered the specific chaos of seven people and one bathroom and a kitchen the size of a closet. And now: this. A house with a kitchen built for an army, a grill on the patio, a table that needed extra leaves, all of them moving around each other with the comfort of people who had built something enormous out of almost nothing and never stopped being grateful for it.

You felt something rise in your chest — warm, full, almost too much.

"Noona!" Jungkook saw you first, predictably, abandoning his post at the stove entirely. Jin didn't even protest, just shook his head fondly and kept stirring.

Jungkook reached you first and hugged you the way he always did — completely, lifting you slightly off your feet, the specific enthusiasm of someone who had genuinely missed you and had no interest in being subtle about it. "You smell like sugar," he said, into your hair.

"I've been fighting sugar all day."

"Did you win?"

"No."

"Tomorrow," he said, with total confidence, and let you go.

Jimin was next, knife abandoned, wrapping you in a hug and saying something about how the house had been too quiet, and then Taehyung, who hugged you and held on a beat longer than necessary and said nothing, which from Taehyung meant a great deal. Hoseok came in from the patio smelling like smoke and grill and hugged you with the specific warmth that had never once changed in fifteen years. Namjoon abandoned the table setting halfway through and hugged you with the careful, slightly formal energy of someone who took hugging as seriously as he took everything else.

Yoongi came in last, wiping his hands on a towel, and you braced slightly out of habit — Yoongi was not a hugger, had never really been a hugger, a nod and a hey was usually the full extent of it.

He hugged you anyway.

Brief. A little stiff. But real.

"Hey, Yoongi-yah," you said, surprised.

"Hey," he said, already pulling back, already reaching for the towel again like nothing had happened.

You looked at Jin over Yoongi's shoulder. Jin was watching, something curious in his expression.

You filed it away.

Whatever that was about, it was going to be a story.

The food Jin made was, as always, absurdly good. He had no business being this talented in a kitchen given that he also had every other quality he had, and you had told him this multiple times, and he received it every time with exactly the amount of smugness you would expect.

You were sitting next to him at the table, his arm slung loosely over the back of your chair and then, a few minutes in, around your shoulders properly, and you shifted your weight without thinking about it — leaned into him, tucked against his side, a small adjustment so practiced between you that it happened the way breathing happened, no decision involved at all.

At the far end of the table, a pair of eyes was watching.

You caught it for just a second mid-bite, looking at the two of you with something so warm and so unguarded that it didn't read as anything complicated at all. Just fond. Just glad. The specific expression of someone looking at two people and thinking, simply, good. that's good. that's exactly how it should be.

It was the same look, you realized — the same eyes, the same face, just fifteen years and a great deal of everything else layered over the top of a boy who had once stood by the door of your parents' restaurant a second too long and gotten flustered when your mother caught him looking.

He smiled at you when he noticed you'd noticed. You smiled back.

Neither of you said anything. There was nothing that needed saying.

You ate. They talked. The comeback, the concert preparations, the Netflix documentary that had everyone both excited and slightly terrified, the exhausted energy of a group in the final stretch before something enormous.

"It's going to be the best one," Jimin said, with complete conviction. "I know we say that every time. But this time I actually mean it."

"You actually mean it every time," Taehyung said.

"This time I mean it more."

"The set list alone," Namjoon said, from somewhere near the end of his second drink, with the reverence of someone who had been part of building it. "We got it right. I think we actually got it right this time."

They talked about the songs. Who had written what, how the process had gone, the pieces that had come together easily and the ones that had taken months. Namjoon talked about his contribution with the careful excitement of someone who still, after all this time, found it slightly miraculous that the thing in his head had become a real thing. Yoongi said about four words total and somehow communicated an entire process. Jimin described his with his hands, which was the only way Jimin had ever been able to describe anything.

You listened.

And you felt Jin, beside you, do the thing.

It was small. It would have been invisible to anyone who hadn't spent ten years learning every register of his voice — but his laugh, when Taehyung asked him something about his own contribution, came out a half-step higher than it should have. Brighter. A fraction too quick, landing before the joke had even fully arrived. That's the version for the room, you thought. That's not the real one.

"And Jin hyung's he came right after he finished his own tour, one week before we—" Taehyung started.

"I did what needed to be done," Jin said, easily, already moving on, already refilling Jimin's glass, already asking Hoseok something about the choreography that pulled the attention sideways before anyone could circle back.

It worked. Of course it worked. It always worked.

You ate your food and smiled at the right moments and watched him hold the room together with the same effortless warmth he always had, and underneath it, quiet, you thought: I see you doing that. I see exactly what you just did.

You didn't say anything.

Not yet.

By the time the second round of drinks had become the third, the conversation had drifted the way it always drifted late in the evening — looser, warmer, the careful architecture of funny stories for the group slowly giving way to whatever was actually sitting underneath.

Namjoon was lying on his back on the floor near the table, which was, everyone agreed without saying so, a sign that he had reached a certain point.

"How do you do it," he said, to the ceiling.

"Do what," Jin said.

"This." Namjoon gestured vaguely, encompassing you, Jin, the table, the general concept. "Love someone for this long. Like — actually. The whole time. Not just — saying it. Actually doing it. Every day."

Jin glanced at you. Something in his face shifted — not the bright version, not the room version. The real one.

"You choose it," he said. Simply. "Every day. That's it. That's the whole thing. Some days it's easy and you don't even notice you're doing it, and some days it's hard and you do it anyway, and you just — keep choosing. Over and over. That's all marriage is, really. Choosing the same person, on purpose, for the rest of your life, every single day, even on the days it would be easier not to."

The table went quiet for a second.

"That's so—" Namjoon's voice did something. "That's so devastating. Why is that devastating."

"It's not devastating," Jimin said. "It's romantic."

"It's devastating and romantic," Namjoon said. "Both things." He covered his face with his hands. "I'm going to die alone."

"You're not going to die alone," you said.

"I am," Namjoon said, from behind his hands. "I had something. I thought I had something. And then she just—" he made a gesture that seemed to indicate someone vanishing into thin air. "Gone. No explanation. Nothing." He lowered his hands and looked at the ceiling again, more seriously this time. "I think about it constantly. I think I really— " he stopped. Started again, quieter. "I think I'm in love with her. I never told anyone that. I don't even know why I'm saying it now."

Nobody said anything for a second.

Then, from around the table, in various tones of fondness and exasperation, more or less simultaneously:

"We know."

"Yeah, we know."

"Namjoon-ah, we've known for two years."

Namjoon sat up so fast he nearly knocked over his glass. "What? How—"

"You always talk about her," Yoongi said, without looking up from his food. "We just don't say anything."

"You started writing about her," Jimin added. "You think nobody notices. We all notice."

"I told you," Hoseok said, gently, "that you should just tell her how you feel. Months ago. I told you exactly this."

Namjoon stared around the table, betrayed. "Nobody told me that everyone knew."

"We were being polite," Taehyung said.

"This is the least polite thing that has ever happened to me," Namjoon said, and put his face back in his hands, and the whole table laughed — warm, easy, the specific laughter of people who loved someone and were laughing both at him and entirely on his side at the same time.

You laughed too.

And beside you, Jin laughed — the real one this time, the one that started low and built, the one you knew.

You leaned into him a little more.

He pulled you closer without seeming to think about it at all.

The company drivers arrived in stages, which was its own kind of chaos.

Taehyung went first, mostly upright, taking one last photo of the kitchen for reasons nobody questioned anymore. Hoseok and Yoongi went together, Hoseok still laughing about something from twenty minutes ago that nobody else remembered the start of — easy, unbothered, nothing left over from earlier in his face. Nobody brought it up again. He hugged you a little longer than usual on his way out, and you held on for that extra second too, and neither of you said anything about it, and he looked, for the rest of the goodbye, like a man who was simply glad to have had a good night and intended to leave it at that. Jimin lingered by the door, hugging you twice, telling you the food was perfect, telling Jin the food was perfect, telling the doorframe the food was perfect on his way out.

Namjoon was a problem.

He had reached the specific state of drunk where his body had decided the conversation was over several minutes before his mouth had, and by the time the second car arrived he was draped sideways across two dining chairs with his eyes closed, occasionally mumbling something that might have been profound if anyone could have understood it.

"Up," Jimin said, hauling on his arm. "Namjoon-ah. Up. Car's here."

Namjoon did not get up.

Yoongi grabbed the other arm. Between the two of them they got him roughly vertical, at which point his full height and weight became everyone's problem at once, and he swayed, and both of them swayed with him, and for a moment it looked like all three of them were going to end up on the floor together.

"Taehyung," Jimin said, with great calm, to a man who had already left.

Taehyung, it turned out, had not actually left — he'd been waiting by the door for exactly this, and came back in with the bodyguard, and between the four of them they got Namjoon out the door and down the steps in the manner of people moving a very large piece of furniture that occasionally said I love you guys unprompted.

"We love you too, hyung," Jimin said, patiently, for what was apparently not the first time tonight.

The door closed. The cars pulled away. The house, which had been so full an hour ago, settled into something quieter.

Jungkook was still at the table, finishing the last of everything within reach.

"I'm staying," he announced, to nobody, around a mouthful of rice.

"We know," Jin said.

"I'm your firstborn child."

"We've covered this."

"I'm also your favorite," Jungkook said, with total confidence.

"You are not too big and manly," Jin said, "to be talking like this."

"I'm extremely big and manly," Jungkook agreed, "and also your favorite."

You came around the table and kissed the top of his head. "You'll always be my favorite," you said.

"Thank you, noona."

"Absolutely not helpful," Jin said, to the ceiling. "He does not need more spoiling. Look at him. He's basically a small house now."

"He's a good size," you said.

"That's not the point—"

"You're going to be such good parents," Jungkook said, suddenly, looking between the two of you with an expression that had gone soft and sincere in the way it sometimes did, late, when the food was gone and the volume came down. "I mean it. I'm so happy for you guys. Genuinely."

"Thank you, Jungkook-ah," you said.

"Okay, that's enough sincerity for one night," Jin said, standing and starting to clear plates, partly because he meant it and partly, you suspected, because he didn't entirely know what to do with sincerity that wasn't wrapped in a joke.

Jungkook got up to help, and within about thirty seconds the two of them were bickering — about the right way to stack plates, about whether the pan needed to soak or could be washed immediately, about absolutely nothing, the specific bickering of two people who loved each other and expressed roughly forty percent of that love through low-stakes argument.

You started to get up.

"Sit," Jin said, without even looking at you.

"I can help—"

"Tea, Noona." Jungkook said, pointing at your cup. "Finish your tea. We've got this."

You sat back down. You finished your tea. You watched the two of them clean the kitchen while arguing about a pan, and felt, again, that warm full feeling that had been sitting in your chest all evening.

Jungkook left for the guest room not long after — significantly more horizontal than vertical by that point, waving vaguely over his shoulder, already half asleep before he reached the stairs.

The house went quiet.

Jin came back to the table once the kitchen was done — properly done, the way he did it, nothing left half-finished — and instead of sitting in his own chair he pulled yours slightly, and then pulled you, settling you into his lap with the easy confidence of someone who had been doing this for ten years and saw no reason to stop now.

He put his chin on your shoulder. Breathed in, slow, like he was taking in the whole evening at once.

"I love you," he said. Quiet. Not performing it.

"I love you too," you said.

"Thank you," he said, "for loving them. All of them. The way you do." His arms tightened slightly. "They love you so much. You know that, right? Like — really. You're not just my wife to them. You're—" he searched for the word. "Their person too. In a way."

"I love them too," you said. "All of them."

He was quiet for a moment, just holding you, and then his hand moved — slow, almost absent at first, just resting against your side, and then less absent, his thumb tracing along your hip, and you felt the shift in him the way you always felt it, the warmth turning into something else.

"You're so beautiful," he said, against your neck. "Do you know that? I don't think I tell you enough."

"You tell me constantly."

"Not enough," he said, and kissed your neck, slow, and his hand slid up under the hem of your shirt, warm against your skin, moving with no particular hurry, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it.

You felt the day — all of it, the lunch, the isomalt, the texts, the whole long complicated stretch of it — start to recede.

"Seokjin," you said, and it came out less like an objection than he probably deserved.

"Mm," he said, which meant he wasn't listening, and his hand moved higher tracing the curve of your bra so delicately, and you felt his mouth smile against your skin when you made a small sound you hadn't entirely meant to make.

"We're at the dining table," you said.

"Our dining table, yes." he agreed, not stopping.

"Jungkook is upstairs."

"He's asleep." A pause. His hand moved again, deliberate now, and you felt his breath catch slightly against your neck — the specific give-and-take that had never once gone away in ten years, him undoing you and being undone by it at the same time. "But," he said, "if you'd feel better somewhere with a door—"

"Upstairs," you said. "Now. Before he wakes up and walks in on something he'll never recover from... again"

Jin laughed — low, warm, against your throat — and stood, taking you with him like it cost him nothing, and you were laughing too, and the whole enormous day was somewhere behind you now, and there was just this: him, the stairs, the door, and everything that had been sitting quietly underneath the evening finally allowed to come up to the surface.

The bedroom door closed behind you and his hands were already moving, already certain, the warmth from downstairs tipping into something faster, something that had been building since his mouth first found your neck at the table and had nowhere left to go but here.

"Hi," he said, against your mouth.

"Hi," you said.

"I've been thinking about this since the eggs this morning," he said. "I swear to god, I almost got hard during practice thinking about you. Do you know how disastrous that would've been? Mid-choreo? In front of the cameras?" He said it with such gravity — solemn, slightly absurd, completely sincere, like he was reporting a genuine workplace hazard — that you burst out laughing, and he caught the laugh with his mouth and turned it into something else.

Your shirt went. His followed. His hands found you with the ease of ten years of practice — he knew exactly what worked and had never once stopped being delighted by it. His fingers traced slow circles and then pinching your sensitive nipples, light and then not light at all, and he watched your face the whole time with a slow, wicked smile, like he was committing your expression to memory.

Then his mouth followed his hands taking as much as he could possible fit, and his tongue traced a slow circle, and your back arched into him before you'd decided to move at all, his name leaving your mouth in a way that made his smile widen against your skin.

His other hand started moving lower, on a clear mission, and you felt the soju in your blood do exactly what soju did — made you bold, made you fast — and you caught his wrist and flipped him onto his back before he'd registered what was happening.

"Excuse me, Mrs. Kim," he said, looking up at you with mock offense, gesturing at himself. "This is a national treasure. I require gentle handling."

You rolled your eyes and kissed him, hard, and he laughed into it.

Your mouth knew exactly where it wanted to go. There would be time later for the things that needed saying — the space, the growing quiet, all of it — but that was later, and this was now, and right now what you wanted was him, unraveling, completely.

You took your time with his whole length leaving a wet trace with your tongue, from base to his tip. You could feel how badly he wanted it — every twitch, every breath he failed to keep even — and you enjoyed every second of making him wait for it. You were soaked, had been for a while, the fabric of your underwear clinging uncomfortably, but that could wait too.

What you wanted, more than anything, was to feel him come apart under your mouth.

So you gave him exactly that — slow, deliberate, taking your time the way you knew drove him out of his mind, and when you finally took him fully, the rumors about him hadn't been wrong, though it had taken you months early on to learn how to take all of him without your jaw protesting. Now you could, easily, your nose brushing against him, his hands fisting in your hair, his hips moving on their own, helpless against it. You loved this — loved watching him lose the thread completely, loved that after ten years he still came apart for you exactly like this.

"Baby — God — please, please don't stop—"

But you didn't want him finishing like this. You wanted all of him, wanted to feel everything, when he did.

So you pulled back — his pout immediate and dramatic, then gone the second he saw you peeling off the rest of your clothes — and sank down onto him, and he said your name low against your skin, broken, and you said his back, and for a while there was nothing else. Just him. Just the warm low light of the room. Just the two of you, finally, completely alone, after a house full of people and a day that had held everything.

"Hey," he said, against your jaw. "Hey. Look at me."

You looked at him.

His face was close, the room dim, his eyes dark and certain and entirely on you — and even now, even after ten years, it still did that thing in your chest, the rearranging thing, the one you'd given up trying to explain.

"I've got you, baby use me. I'm yours." he said bitting his lip so hard when you rolled your hips felling him hit every single part of you that needed it.

"I know, and I'm yours. Seokjin, yours" you breathed pulling your head back now chasing your own release grabbing your breasts with the same devastating intensity he had done minutes before. One of his hands reached your hip holding you in place, guiding you down towards him and the other knew exactly what you needed. His thumb started lazy circles on your clit. The scream that left your lips was so loud so shameless that for a second you forgot the sleeping man in the other room. You tried to cover your mouth.

"It's ok baby he won't hear you, let go" he said. "Right now. Just this. Just us."

"Yes, Yes, Yes." you repeated. "Stop talking."

He laughed — breathless, real — and then he stopped talking.

He wasn't gentle. You didn't even registered when he flipped you again until you felt your bedsheets on your back.

Drunk Seokjin was rough — never anything you didn't want, never anything that wasn't completely mutual — but not gentle either. Not the slow version, not the patient one. This was the other Jin, the one that came out when something needed saying and this was the only language left for it, when ten years of knowing each other made words redundant and touch said it faster, truer, deeper.

His hands were everywhere. Yours were too. You knew him completely — every part, every reaction, the exact combination that undid him fastest — and tonight you used all of it, with the singular focus of someone who had decided there was nothing else worth thinking about. Just him. Just the two of you. Just choosing this, again, the way you always did.

He said your name the way he said it when he meant it — not for show, just the sound of it pulled up from somewhere low in his chest, like it escaped before he decided to let it. It landed somewhere specific in you and you pulled him closer.

The wine had loosened something in him — the part he usually kept just slightly in check — and tonight it made him talk more, not less. A low, constant stream of you're so beautiful and I love you and god, I fucking love you so much, punctuated by his mouth and his thrusts at every opportunity, like he couldn't choose between saying it and showing it and had settled on doing both, endlessly, between kisses.

"Tell me again," you said, breathless, your hands in his hair.

"I love you," he said immediately, like he'd been waiting for permission. "I love you so much. I love you—" and then his mouth moved and the sentence dissolved completely, and what came out instead was just sound — raw, unguarded, the noise he only made when he stopped trying to use words at all and just felt something.

You pulled him back up to you. Kissed him properly. Felt him smile against your mouth even mid-kiss — warm, certain, a man exactly where he wanted to be and entirely aware of it.

"Come here," you said.

He came.

You weren't far behind.

Afterward he pulled you close without negotiating it — just moved you where he wanted you, which was against him, which had always been against him, your back to his chest, his arm around your waist. You were both still catching your breath. The ceiling was dark. The house was quiet.

"Hi," he said, into your hair.

"Hi," you said.

His thumb moved slowly against your waist. You felt his heartbeat against your back, steadying.

"Okay?" he said.

"Very okay," you said.

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Pressed his mouth briefly to the back of your head.

You lay there.

Both of you quiet. Both of you, you could feel it, still carrying the things you hadn't said. They were still there — patient, waiting, not going anywhere. But they were quieter now. The urgency of them had gone down to something manageable, something that could wait until morning, something that did not need to be tonight's problem.

You would get there.

You were going to get there.

For now there was just this — his arm around you, the dark, the slow return of breathing, the specific warmth of two people who had chosen each other on purpose and kept choosing and were going to keep choosing even when the choosing was hard.

"Sleep," he said.

"Working on it," you said.

His arm tightened slightly.

You closed your eyes.

You woke at four in the morning and the bed was wrong.

Not the slow surfacing of an ordinary wake — something sharper, your body registering an absence before your mind had caught up to what it meant. You lay there for a second, eyes open in the dark, and reached out before you'd even fully decided to.

The sheets beside you were cold.

Not cool. Cold. The kind of cold that meant he'd been gone for a while — long enough for the warmth of him to have left the fabric completely, long enough that whatever had pulled him out of bed had happened hours ago and you hadn't felt it, hadn't woken, had been asleep and warm and happy three hours after the best night you'd had together in weeks while he had been somewhere in the house, alone, with something.

You sat up.

Your heart was already doing something it shouldn't be doing yet — too fast, too early, before you had any reason for it. You sat there in the dark with your hand flat on his side of the bed and you thought, stupidly, maybe he just couldn't sleep. Maybe he's getting water. Maybe it's nothing.

You got up anyway.

You checked the guest room first, because it was closest, because some part of you was hoping — hoping for something so small and so ordinary that it embarrassed you even as you hoped it. Jungkook was face-down across the bed, one arm hanging off the side, snoring with the complete dedication of someone who had no idea the night had changed shape around him. You stood in the doorway for a second longer than you needed to. He looked so peaceful. So unaware. You felt something in your chest twist at the sight of him — grateful, and also, underneath the gratitude, something that already knew this was the last easy thing you were going to feel for a while.

Jin wasn't there.

You went down the hall to the office — the gaming room, the place he disappeared to when something was sitting too heavy in him to take to bed. You knew this room. You knew the specific quiet of it, the glow of the monitors when he was up late working something out without words, the way he'd look up when you brought him tea and smile like he hadn't been anywhere at all.

The door was open.

The room was dark.

The chair was empty. The monitors were off — not on standby, not asleep, off, the kind of off that meant nobody had been in here tonight at all.

You stood in the doorway and the cold from the bedroom seemed to follow you, settling somewhere under your ribs.

He wasn't here.

You thought about the kitchen. The downstairs bathroom. The garage, even — some absurd version of him standing in the garage at four in the morning for no reason you could name, except that you needed him to be somewhere, needed there to be an explanation that didn't require you to feel the way you were starting to feel.

You went downstairs.

Your feet were bare on the cold floor and you didn't turn on a single light, and the house — the big, warm, full house that had held seven men and so much laughter only hours ago — was so quiet now that you could hear your own pulse.

You knew this house. Every step, every creak, the exact geography of it built into your body over years. You moved through it without thinking, the way you always did.

And then you heard him.

A sound.

Small. Barely anything. The kind of sound someone makes when they are trying with everything they have not to make a sound at all — the kind of crying that has gone past the point of choice, that the body does whether you've decided to allow it or not, while some other part of you keeps trying, uselessly, to hold the door shut.

You had heard that sound from him exactly twice in fifteen years.

You stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

Your whole body went still.

He was on the living room floor.

Back against the couch. Knees pulled up to his chest. His hands were over his face and his shoulders were moving — small, rhythmic, the specific motion of someone whose body had taken over completely, the part of him that decided things having stepped aside for the part of him that simply could not anymore.

You stood there.

For one terrible second you thought about going back upstairs.

It wasn't cowardice — or it was, a little, but it wasn't only that. It was fifteen years of knowing exactly how he was built. He had left your bed. He had walked past the office, past every space that was yours together, and come down here, alone, in the dark, to a room nobody used at this hour or ever, really — and every part of you that knew him understood what that meant. He hadn't wanted to be found. He had wanted, more than anything, for this to happen somewhere you wouldn't see it.

You could give him that. You had given him that, in small ways, for years — the privacy he didn't know how to ask for, the unspoken agreement that some things he carried alone and you let him, because that was what he needed and because not pushing was its own kind of love.

You stood at the bottom of the stairs in the dark and for one full second you almost turned around.

And then you looked at him again — really looked, at the way his shoulders were shaking, at how small he looked folded up against the couch, this man who filled every room he ever walked into, who held the door for everyone, who you had never once in fifteen years seen this undone — and you understood, with a clarity that hurt, that this wasn't a moment to respect his privacy.

This was a moment he needed someone to not let him have it.

You crossed the room.

You knelt down in front of him. Put both your hands on his knees. You didn't say anything — you didn't trust your voice yet, and you weren't sure there were words for this anyway.

He went rigid.

Then, slowly, he lowered his hands from his face.

He looked at you.

And whatever was left of the wall — whatever thin, careful thing he had been holding up even alone, even at four in the morning, even with no one watching — it didn't just come down.

It gave out.

His face crumpled in a way you had never seen, not once, not in fifteen years, not through military service or comebacks or anything — and the sound that came out of him this time wasn't small anymore. It was low, and broken, and it didn't sound like him at all, didn't sound like the man whose laugh you could pick out of a crowd, and you felt your own throat close before you'd even registered moving.

You were beside him before you'd decided to be. Arms around him. His face dropping into your shoulder, his whole body curling toward you like something that had been holding itself upright through sheer will and had finally, finally been given permission to stop.

"I don't want you to see me like this," he said. The words came out wrecked, barely shaped, muffled against your shoulder.

"I'm your wife," you said. Your voice wasn't steady either. "I want to see you. Every way there is. I mean it, Seokjin. Every way."

He made a sound — not a word, not agreement, not anything you could name — and it broke something open in your chest, because you understood it. You understood it completely. It was the sound of someone who had spent so long believing he had to be the strong one, the steady one, the one who held everyone else together, that being held back felt almost unbearable. Like grief. Like relief and grief at the exact same time, indistinguishable from each other.

You held on.

You didn't say it's okay. You couldn't, because you didn't know yet if it was, and he would have known you were lying, and right now — right now, more than almost anything else — he needed you not to lie to him.

So you just held him. On the floor. In the dark. While the house that had been so loud, so warm, so completely full only hours ago sat silent around the two of you, and your husband — the funny one, the warm one, the one who held the door for everyone else — finally, finally let himself fall apart in your arms.

And you held on.

You weren't going anywhere.

You just wished, more than you had ever wished for anything, that you could take some of it from him. That love was something you could physically hand over, piece by piece, until the weight was something he didn't have to carry by himself anymore.

You couldn't.

All you could do was stay.

So you stayed.

It took a while.

You didn't track the time. You sat on the floor with your back against the couch, his weight against you, and gradually — the way these things go — the shaking slowed. The sound quieted. He was left sitting in the wreckage of it, hollowed out, his breathing uneven in a way that hurt to listen to.

He stared at the floor.

"They all wrote something for this album," he said. His voice didn't sound like his. "Namjoon. Yoongi. All of them. They found the time. Made the time. And I—" he stopped. "I was doing the concert. I thought it mattered. I thought — they were finishing service, the fans were waiting, someone should be doing something—" he exhaled, and it shook on the way out. "I don't regret it. I know it mattered. I know they're grateful. But I sat down to write something for this album and there was nothing. I sat there for hours and there was nothing, and I thought — maybe there's nothing left. Maybe I used it all up somewhere I didn't notice."

You didn't say anything. You couldn't yet.

"Jimin makes people stop breathing when he dances. Hoseok too. Namjoon writes things that make people feel less alone. Yoongi's going to be remembered for fifty years. Taehyung just — exists, in a way nobody else does. And Jungkook—" he laughed, but it wasn't a laugh, it was just air with a shape. "Jungkook keeps getting better. Every single year. All of them. And then there's me."

"Seokjin—"

"I'm the funny one." Flat. No performance in it at all, which was somehow worse than if he'd been crying. "That's it. That's what I am. The oldest. The one who holds the door. I've been holding it open for fifteen years and I don't know what's on my side of it. I don't know if there is a side. I think I might just be the door."

You felt that land somewhere underneath your ribs.

"I joined to be an actor," he said, and something in his voice changed — quieter now, older, like he was finally setting down something he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten its weight. "I never told you that. I never told anyone that. I thought the group wouldn't last, I thought I'd use it, I thought when it fell apart I'd already have a foot somewhere else." He looked at his hands. "And then I met them. And they were so — Namjoon was so serious, Yoongi was so angry and so talented, Jimin worked himself half to death every single day, Hoseok was just — so much, all of it, all of them — and I looked at them and thought, these kids are going to be something, if someone helps them get there." His jaw tightened. "And I just — stopped thinking about what I wanted. I started thinking about getting them there instead. And I never once decided that. It just — happened. Slowly. Until it was just what I was."

You thought about a boy with a loud laugh, holding a door open so naturally he'd forgotten it had ever been a choice.

"I don't regret them," he said, fast now, like he needed you to hear this part before anything else. "I would do it again. Every single time. I love them so much—" his voice cracked clean in half on the word love, and he pressed his hands against his eyes like he could push the feeling back inside. "But I lost something. And I never said that. Fifteen years and I never said it, because how do you say I love this and it also took something from me without it sounding like you're saying the love wasn't worth it?"

"It doesn't sound like that," you said, quiet. "It sounds like the truth."

He looked at you. His eyes were red, his face open in a way you had never seen — not once, not in fifteen years — completely without armor, completely undone, and it terrified you a little, how much it cost him just to let you see it.

"I didn't even give you a honeymoon," he said. "We got married and two months later I was gone and we never—"

"You gave me a bakery."

"That's not the same thing."

"I know," you said. "But it's what you had, and you gave it completely, and that's—"

"It's not enough." His voice broke again. "I think about everything you've given up. Being a secret. Being alone when I was gone. Never having a normal life — a reunion, a wedding photo, a nephew's birthday party — and I just let you. I let you give all of that up and I never even—" he stopped. Looked at you, raw. "Is it enough? Being with me? Is it actually—"

"Don't," you said. "Don't ask me that."

"I need to know—"

"The answer is yes," you said, and it came out fierce, because it was true, because it had always been true. "It has always been yes. You don't get to doubt that."

He looked at you for a long moment.

You took a breath. "But maybe—" you said, carefully, because you loved him, because you thought this was the kind thing, the right thing — "maybe we should wait. On the baby. Just until the tour's done, until things are—"

His face changed.

It happened so fast.

The grief didn't disappear — it just turned, sharp, into something else, something that looked almost like panic.

"What?" he said.

"I just meant—"

"No." Quiet. Too quiet. "No, I — " He looked at the floor, jaw working, and when he looked back up his eyes were wet and furious and scared all at once. "Can I be selfish? Just once — can I just want something without it getting taken off the table the second I admit I'm struggling?" His voice cracked. "You said you wanted this. Do you want this? I know I'm a mess right now but if this is what we want, if you are ready. I am not giving this up too. Not this one."

"Seokjin, I wasn't trying to take it away—"

"We sacrifice," he said, over you, and it came out like something that had been sitting in him for years, finally given a way out. "That's what we do. We sacrifice for them, for the group, for everyone who needs something — and somewhere in all of that we forgot to fight for us. We forgot to even ask what we wanted." His hands were shaking. "I want this. I want you to be the mother of my kids. I want this house even louder than it already is. Don't take that away from me. Please."

You sat with that. With all of it.

"And we're doing it again," he said, quieter now, something in his expression shifting toward something worse than anger — recognition. "Right now. This exact second. I'm carrying everything alone, you're trying to fix it for me, and neither of us is just — talking. Actually talking. We spend our whole lives being the safe place for everyone else and then we come home and we—" he stopped. "When did we stop being each other's safe place?"

The question sat in the room like something physical.

"Is there—" you started. Made yourself finish it. "Is there something to fix? With us?"

He looked at you for a long time.

"There's everything to fix," he said. Not angry. Just certain. Just devastatingly sad. "And we both already knew that. We've just been so good at performing fine that neither of us said it out loud."

You felt the floor tilt slightly.

"Are you happy?" you asked.

It came out small. Smaller than you meant it to.

He looked at you.

"I love you," he said.

"That's not what I asked."

He didn't answer.

"Seokjin. Are you happy?"

He looked away. Stood up. His hands were shaking and he pressed them flat against his thighs like he could force them still.

"I need to go get ready," he said. "Practice is at seven."

He went upstairs.

You heard him moving through the house above you — the bathroom, the closet, the small efficient sounds of a man putting his armor back on piece by piece, and you sat on the floor where he'd left you and you didn't move.

Fifteen minutes later he came back down. Dressed. Bag over his shoulder. The Jin face back in place, and if you hadn't just spent the last hour watching it come apart on this exact floor, you might have believed it.

He came to you. Cupped your face in both hands.

"I love you," he said, and pressed his mouth to your cheek. Not your lips. Your cheek.

"I love you," he said again, against your skin.

"I know," you said. Automatic. Ten years of reflex.

He pulled back. Looked at you like he was trying to memorize something.

"I love you too," you said, too fast, the correction tumbling out of you. "I love you. I know. I love you too."

He held your gaze for one more second.

Then he went.

The front door closed.

You sat on the floor for a long time after that.

The house was so quiet. The same house that eight hours ago had been so full — seven men and a table for sixteen and laughter loud enough to fill every corner of it — and now there was just you, on the floor, in the dark, with the cold coming up through the wood.

There's everything to fix.

You thought about the isomalt. How many times it had cracked yesterday — five, seven, twenty, you'd lost count — and how each time you'd thought you'd caught it, thought you'd gotten the temperature right, thought this time, and each time it had broken anyway, because you'd been somewhere else the whole time, because sugar has no patience for somewhere else.

And the both of you have been somewhere else for months.

You thought about the reunion. About deciding not to go, the way you always decided — quietly, quickly, before anyone could even ask, because going meant explaining and explaining meant the careful architecture of private that you'd built your whole life around, and you had told yourself for years that you didn't mind.

You thought about Hana. About the rumor — maybe there isn't a husband at all — and how many times you'd laughed it off, actually laughed, like it was funny, like it didn't land somewhere quiet every single time.

You thought about your mother's photo album. The one she'd shown four people, ever, all of them sworn to secrecy first. You thought about your father's wall, all your brothers up there, their kids, their whole visible lives — and the empty space where yours should be.

You thought about your nieces and nephews. Eight of them, between his family and yours, and every single one of them had learned, at some point, without anyone explicitly deciding to teach them — we don't talk about that. That's a secret. We keep it safe. Eight kids who had absorbed, before they were old enough to understand why, that some people you loved had to be hidden.

You thought about Sooah's boss. A woman being handed a marriage she never chose, a wedding the day after an announcement, none of it hers — and you, sitting here, who had chosen everything, who loved your husband with your whole heart, who would choose him again in every life — and somehow, somehow, you were both sitting in the wreckage of something that had gone quietly, terribly wrong without either of you noticing.

You thought about tonight. The table, his arm around you, Hoseok's fond eyes from the end of it. You guys are the standard, Namjoon had said. How do you do it.

We choose each other every day, Jin had said. And he'd meant it. You knew he'd meant it.

So when had the choosing stopped being enough?

When had this happened?

When had you broken?

You sat in the dark and you thought about again — the word that had been sitting in your chest for days, the word that carried so much, that meant hope and also meant the thing you couldn't look at directly — and you understood, finally, sitting alone on the floor of a house that had never once felt this empty, that again could not happen like this. Not with this much unsaid. Not with two people so practiced at disappearing for each other that they'd disappeared from each other instead.

You couldn't try again until you found each other again first.

The thought sat in you, enormous and quiet.

You got up, eventually, because the floor was cold and because the bakery opened at seven regardless of anything else.

The line that showed were the sugar had separated.

You looked at it now.

It had cracked in your heart too.

You hadn't even noticed.

You stood there for a long moment, looking at your empty house the way you looked at the broken sugar — clear and sharp and broken straight down the middle, exactly the way it wasn't supposed to be, exactly the way it had been all night — and for the first time, you didn't think about temperature, or timing, or technique.

You looked at it.

For the first time all night, you didn't reach for the scraper. You didn't think about temperature, or timing, or what you'd do differently tomorrow. You didn't try to fix it.

You just looked.

The crack ran straight down the middle — clean, sharp, the exact place where the sugar had given up holding itself together and split into two pieces that used to be one. It was supposed to be beautiful. It was supposed to be the thing people remembered. And instead it sat there on the marble in the grey almost-light, broken, discarded, just another failed attempt among all the others.

And you looked at the space where it had cracked — that thin clear line, the gap where there used to be nothing, where two halves of the same thing now sat slightly apart, not touching, both of them still whole on their own and neither of them whole together anymore —

and you understood, finally, completely, what you were actually looking at.

It wasn't the isomalt.

It was the two of you.

The space where it broke. The space that opened so slowly you didn't feel it happening — not a single moment, not a single fight, just months and months of two people so busy holding everyone else together that they stopped noticing they were coming apart from each other, quietly, one crack at a time, until there was a whole gap where there used to be nothing at all.

The space between you.

You stood there in your kitchen, alone, in the house that had been so full last night and was so empty now, and you didn't reach for the scraper. You didn't try to push the pieces back together. You didn't tell yourself it would be fine tomorrow, that you'd get the temperature right next time, that this was just one bad batch among many.

You let it stay broken.

Because some things — you understood this now, standing here, your husband somewhere in the city getting ready to perform for thousands of people who loved him and didn't know any of this — some things couldn't be forced back together. Not yet. Not like this. Not by trying harder, or staying later, or being stronger, or any of the things you had both been doing for months instead of the one thing that might have actually helped.

The crack was real.

The space was real.

And before either of you could close it — really close it, not just paper over it with another good night, another warm dinner, another version of fine — you were both going to have to sit with it first.

Exactly like this.

Broken, and visible, and not yet ready to be anything else.

You turned off the kitchen light.

You left it there on the counter — cracked, beautiful, useless — and you went to get ready for a day that was going to require you to function anyway, because that was what you did, that was what you had always done.

But for the first time in longer than you could remember, you didn't pretend the crack wasn't there.

You just knew it was.

And that, you thought — standing in the doorway, looking back at the kitchen one more time before you turned away —

was the only honest thing that had happened all night.

hi hello yes okay so

i need to start by saying i have been STUCK on this chapter for an entire week. like genuinely could not edit a single sentence. i opened the doc every day and just stared at it like it owed me money. and then today it just. came out. all of it. in one sitting. i don't know what happened, i don't make the rules, the muse does what it wants and apparently what it wanted was to make ME cry at my own laptop.

so. update: writer's block officially defeated 🍞⚔️

a few things:

— yes minji's son IS The Real thing's Seojun AND he has a crush on a 12 year old cellist that we all know and love (If you have read the other stories of this universe, if you haven't it's ok I love you too) and yes i think about this constantly, he's literally his father's son, send help

— the isomalt. i'm sorry. i know. i was also stressed about the isomalt and i don't even bake — there is something in this chapter that connects to TWO other stories in this series and i am SO excited about it i can't even tell you, but you won't know it's there until you know. that's all i'm saying 👀

— jungkook calling himself the firstborn AND the favorite in the same conversation is exactly the kind of confidence i wish i had

— and then. and THEN. the floor scene happened and i had to stop writing for like twenty minutes because i made myself sad. this is my house. these are my problems now

i hope you guys enjoyed this one — and ngl i hope a few of you cried a little too, because i absolutely did, multiple times, while writing a man i made up have a breakdown on his own living room floor. couples therapy when?

anyway. thank you for being patient with me this week 🤍 back to writing now that the block is gone (RIP to it, we will not be mourning)

— ria 🍞

Tag list: @whoisbts @sexytholland @btsevxn @kacythecarat @granataepfelchen @goawaysha @unknownbeknowst @joonmonjagi @cherryblossom1234567890 @blamgyuuuu @swagtimemachinecherryblossom @leftmensh @mikrokookiex @busanbby-jjk @jungkook97l @singularitypromise @angelarin @cherrycheolie @proudnoona @leeknowsbigtoe @lackingdopaminesince2007 @gaslysainz

curious about a character or a story? want to know more before it drops? → ask me anything

first the AGAIN part — I want to tread carefully because I know how sensitive this topic (miscarriage) can be for people, so I'm going to be thoughtful with how I answer.

but yes, this is something I really want to explore for this fic. these are two people in their mid thirties navigating a very real, very human conflict that so many marriages go through, and one of the things I love most about this series is how human I get to make these characters. we will see more in the next chapter — I'll put a warning before it, because we are going to learn why "again" keeps coming up, and it's going to be a hard one. buckle up.

but you know me — I don't write sad endings, so there is a real comeback coming for them.

NOW! the thing about their conflict that I think matters most is this: it's not that they stopped loving each other. it's not infidelity, it's not some big betrayal. they love each other completely.

they love everyone around them so much that they have spent years making themselves smaller — taking care of everyone else — and somewhere in that, they forgot to take care of themselves and each other.

one of the things I wanted to explore here is what happens to a relationship that's already established and ten years deep (specially to a BTS member), when both people are constantly on tour, constantly traveling, constantly out in the world performing a version of themselves. and on top of that — she has to be hidden.

they have nieces and nephews who are children and who had to learn early that you don't mention auntie or uncle outside the house, because that's a secret you keep close. and that is such a quietly devastating thing. not being able to bring your husband to a high school reunion. not getting normal dates. it doesn't mean it stops hurting just because you've accepted it.

now about beanie guy 😂 every single time I think I'm being subtle and someone figures it out I want to throw my laptop in a river.

Ok so in all honesty, originally it was always going to be Namjoon. funny enough — when I started writing WHWYF I had zero plans to write a story for every member let alone build a whole universe. it was just going to be a short main story, Namjoon's POV, a short epilogue chapter, and that was it. but while writing his part I mentioned them (jin and wife!reader)— their relationship, Namjoon's fear of never finding something like that for himself — and that one mention is one of the things that spiraled into this entire universe.

but the truth is, the only members who were legal adults when reader and Jin met are Yoongi, Hobi, and Namjoon, so realistically it has to be one of those three. it might change. yesterday it could have been Yoongi. tomorrow it might be Hobi. whoever it ends up being, it's going to matter later.

and the bride 👀 yes, she is important and we will find out who she is. if you've been reading the summaries and asks about the other stories closely, you might already have a guess — there are a few options.

in this story specifically she matters because she's the thing that pushed reader into spiraling. she's already struggling in her marriage, already avoiding facing it, already trying to get pregnant again while ignoring everything else, and then on top of all of it she has to create a beautiful cake for a beautiful wedding that is, underneath, a loveless marriage. that's what broke her. she'll have weight in the story but she's not a main plotline. there's also another thread I'm not ready to talk about yet because I'll give away too much.