leslie

“God it’s that loud ass motorcycle guy again.” You complain. “Why does he always have to come here!”

Your coworker laughs. “We have the best gas prices in town dude, everyone who’s smart comes here.”

“I guess. He’s as worse as the guys with the loud ass Benz.”

“Oh! Nobody’s worse than that guy.”

“True and-.” Your interrupted by the entrance bell chiming. You look to your left and your heart stops, holy shit, it’s the loud ass motorcycle guy. When he comes in fully, he takes off his helmet and your heart stops once again and your jaw goes completely slack. Of course he has to be the hottest guy you’ve ever seen.

You see he has his motorcycle parked near the entrance and you really look at it this time, it’s cool, although, you don’t know much about motorcycles to care. You're in the midst of observing when he comes up to your register, putting down a red bull and a bag of chips.

“You like red bull?” You ask, honestly just wanting to start up a conversation with the now renamed hot guy with a motorcycle.

“Yeah, how about you?”

“Sometimes. I only like the frou frou ones though, like the pink one.” You ramble as you scan his things in.

“Mm. The wild berry one, my friend drinks that.”

“Mhm, if I have to have one I drink that one. The dark pink one tastes like throw up.” You pause. “Not that I know what that tastes like.”

He laughs. “It’s not my personal favorite either. I just like the plain kind.”

“Cool. Your totals eight fifty six.”

He smiles. “Back to business.”

“Always.”

He pulls out his card and it’s a black card. You slyly look back at your screen, pretending you didn’t see it and internally freak out. So he’s hot, and he’s rich, total package. Except for maybe that loud ass motorcycle. He grabs his stuff and heads out the door and starts up said motorcycle, and rides away.

“He was giving you a sexy stare girl.” Your coworker chirps behind you

“What?”

“He was being all sultry and shit.”

“No he wasn’t. You’re being a dumbass.” You quip back.

Your coworker rolls her eyes and walks towards the shelves, leaving you to man the register. You lean forward, resting your chin on the palm of your hand and thinking about hot guy with a motorcycle for the rest of your shift.

-

Over the two months, he comes in a handful of times. Nothing too different about any of the interactions, usually talk about the mundane stuff. You learn his name is Yufan, but that’s the only notable interaction.

“Hey.” He says as he drops his stuff off on the counter.

“Hi. Find everything all right?” You ask as you scan his stuff into the machine.

“Yeah.” He nods. “Hey, um, what time do you get off of work?”

You tilt your head. “Five, why?”

“If you wanted, maybe I could pick you up and we could go on a date?” He asks anxiously.

“Sure! I smell like a gas station though… Is that okay?”

“Don’t mind darling.” He pays and walks out the door, leaving you baffled.

Shit, you have a date at 5! Your hairs all frizzy from the summer heat, you’ve probably reapplied deodorant like 4 times today. Your outfits wrinkled. You have eye bags that could hold ten pound groceries. You’re so screwed.

Your shift goes by slower after that, every 30 minutes you’re checking the clock, getting irritated, checking the clock again, getting irritated again. By the time it is 5, you almost miss it until your coworker comes strolling in at 4:58.

You don’t care for him much, so you give him the rundown on what your boss told you to tell the night shift people and hightail it out of there. And just as your leaving the store an unrecognizable car comes and pulls up next to you. The passenger window rolls down, and it’s hot guy with a motorcycle.

“Hop in. ‘S kinda cold, figured you wouldn’t wanna be on a motorcycle tonight.”

You say a quick yeah and get in the car, in shock at how expensive it looks in there.

“Jesus. I didn’t even know they made cars this fancy.” You gawk.

“Had to pull her out for you. She doesn’t get shown off very much.” He informs you and you roll your eyes. “Uh huh, sure you’ve used that one before.”

He chuckles. “No actually. The only girl that’s ever been in this car is you, first person besides me actually.”

You hum, looking out the window as you listen to his faint music playing on the radio. You turn your head and look at Yufan, really look at him. His side profile is a work of art, something you’ve really never seen before. He’s driving with one hand and you truly do feel like a female bird. And listen, you’re not one to put out on a first date but if he asked so kindly you might just-.

“You okay?” He asks, holding back a laugh.

“Oh yeah, sorry, I stare sometimes.”

“Like something ya see?” He teases.

You snort. “Eh, you’re not too bad on the eyes I guess.”

“Couldn’t say that about you. Prettiest girl in town.”

“Well you’re the only one that thinks that.”

“You don’t think it?” He questions you.

“I mean, look at me. I’m average I guess. Not ugly, I don’t think that, just, average. I never thought someone as cool as you would think I’m pretty. So, points for me?”

“When I entered the gas station I only really went in to go to the restroom, and then I saw you. So, I bought a drink and chips instead just so I could talk to you, and you were so sweet and your smile is so pretty and I thought, damn I’m in trouble.” He admits as he turns onto another street.

“You know what I used to call you before I saw your face?”

“Hm?”

“Loud ass motorcycle guy.”

He bursts out laughing which ends up making you laugh too. “Loud ass motorcycle guy, huh. Take it you don’t like motorcycles?”

“I think they’re cool but I’ve never had an urge to buy one and ride it. I don’t even have a car. And um, where are you taking us?” You pivot suddenly.

“To see the stars.” He answers simply.

You remember telling him you like stars. Thought that one day you’d like to make your own constellation. He laughed at that, said that’d be cool and that was it. You didn’t think he’d remember that.

But here he is, pulling into an open field where stars crowd the sky. You both get out and you look in awe at the sky, absolutely mesmerized.

“Beautiful isn’t it?” You nod your head in agreement and continue looking at the stars, mentally noting all the constellations you see.

“See right there.” You point, tracing the stars with your finger. “That’s the big dipper.”

“Good that you know these, I was never good at identifying this stuff.”

“Where’d you even find this place?” You ask, curiosity peaking.

“My friends and I used to have parties out here. And when it was just us five, we’d lay on the ground and drunkenly look at the stars trying to figure out what was what. I miss them.”

“What happened to them?”

“Everyone moved away, they’re on to bigger and better things. Seems I couldn’t let this place go, never knew why until now.” He says, looking at you.

You smile. “Pfft, I’m only a girl.”

“A really sweet and funny girl. One that knocked me off my feet. That’s notable to me.”

“You’re too sweet. Get like this with the wrong girl and she’ll take advantage of it.” You absentmindedly say, not thinking about it.

“I don’t think there will be another girl, I don’t open my heart much.”

“So you see me, and there’s something that tells you I’m worth opening your heart for?” You question.

He stands still for a second, thinking.

“Something about you feels so easy to me. So familiar. My dad always explained that to me when he first saw my mom, and I wondered if I’d ever feel that. And out of all places, I felt it at a gas station with a girl who called me loud ass motorcycle guy.”

You giggle. “I see what you’re saying though, I feel the same way. I don’t know, guys never really cared for me before you, so I’m new to this, clearly.”

“So let me make you mine then.”

You turn your head towards him and he’s looking at you as if you’re the only thing in the world. “Yufan, you can’t just say things like that.”

“Like what? That I want you to be my girlfriend? Because I would, for the rest of my life, regret it if I let you get away. So I’m asking, will you be my girlfriend?”

“You won’t like me-.”

“I’m not asking that. I’m asking if you’d be my girlfriend.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay.” You laugh. “I’ll be your girlfriend. But if you hate me later, don't say I didn’t tell you so.”

“I’ll take the good and the bad darling.”

-

Two more months have passed since then. Yufan regularly takes you and pick you up from work because he doesn’t like you taking the bus. Never complains and never takes your gas money for him. Just wants a simple kiss in payment to which you happily oblige. You guys haven’t had sex yet, and his birthday is tomorrow and you have a grand plan for that.

He wants his birthday to be lowkey. He doesn’t want a big party or lots of decorations, but you still want to make it special. You bought him gifts and you feel a little crazy for going this all out for a man you started dating two months ago but you really can’t help it. He’s so sweet.

It’s twelve in the morning when you’re knocking on his door of his apartment. You know he’s still awake because you guys were having a casual conversation five minutes ago. He opens the door and you practically attack him with a hug, saying happy birthday over and over again as he shushes you with his lips. You pull him in with your arms around his neck, kissing him deeper. He puts his big hands on your waist and you melt into his touch.

You pull away, panting and he’s chasing your lips and kissing you again as fast as you pulled away. “Hey!” You say muffled. “I want to give you your gifts.”

“You are my gift.” He responds as he squeezes your hips.

“Yeah well this gift comes with surprises.” You shoot back as you grab his gifts out of the hallway, piling them into his entry way.

Your boyfriend's apartment was nothing short of luxurious. He truly went all out and you understood why, and wow would you love to live in a place like this. Not yet though, although, half your stuff is already here…

“You didn’t have to go all out..” He says as he smiles.

“Baby, it’s only two gifts.”

“Well I appreciate it.”

You guys go to his living room and plop down and you watch him as he opens his gifts. One is a new helmet that was truthfully a pretty penny and it’s all worth it seeing his reaction. He kisses you, tells you that he loves it, puts it on the shelf with his other helmets.

When he opens the second one, he awes at it. It’s a snow globe, even though you guys met in the dead of summer, of two people looking up at a glowing star.

“Thought of us.” You say barely above a whisper.

“It’s perfect.”

After a few moments you clasp your hands together. “Okay, one more!”

“You have another one?”

“Yes, I’ll be right back.” You call out as you shut his bedroom door, stripping your clothes off once the doors shut. You stand in the mirror observing your new lingerie, hoping he’s going to like it.

“Okay.” You peek your head out of the door. “You ready.”

“Mhm.”

You come out and shut the door behind you. “Ta da!”

He falls back, putting his hands over his face. He quickly recollects himself and gets up, coming over to you in a few quick steps.

He puts his hand on the small of your back, diving down to your neck. He sucks at the sensitive skin and you moan softly at the sensation.

“Been thinking of this.” He says between kisses. “Didn’t wanna rush you, wanted it to be perfect.”

He rises from your neck, giving you a quick kiss on the lips. “You make it perfect, everything you do and touch.”

“You’re so perfect for me darling.”

His simple words have you worked up so you grab his hand and lead him back to the couch, pushing him down onto it once you get there. He quickly strips off his shirt and discards his pants and you climb on top of him, straddling his waist and grinding yourself on him.

“Fuck, keep doing that.”

So you do, but you quickly want more.

“Can I ride you?”

“Do whatever you want.” He says, looking at you through his lashes.

You get off of him and strip him off his boxers, his cock immediately springing out, hitting his stomach. Now, you knew he was big, but you didn’t think he’d be this big.

You nervously take off your panties and he intently watches you, and once you’re done, he whines.

“Pretty girl, come straddle me.” You do as your told and climb back on top of him. He pulls you so that you’re laying on top of him and teases those pretty long fingers around your sopping wet mess of your cunt that begs for those fingers to stuff you full.

He inserts one digit, slowly pumping it in and out of you, he adds a second one, doing the same thing. His fingers are soaking wet by the time he’s fully up to the knuckle. He curls them a bit, finding the spot in your walls that makes you whimper in his ear. “Feel so perfect on my fingers, gonna feel so good on my cock.” He says as he works his fingers some more.

Once he feels your relaxed enough he pulls his fingers out and kisses you again. “Whenever you’re ready.” You shakily sit up and gently grab his dick with your hand, teasing it between your wet folds. He makes a satisfied sound in response and you take it as the go ahead to bring his tip to your entrance.

You sink down, wincing at the pain and he’s only tip deep inside you. “Hey, take it slow.” He coos. “I’m in no rush darling.”

You nod and continue to slowly sink down and he groans when you take all of him, your ass meeting his thighs. His hands find the sides of your hips, rubbing slow circles, soothing you as you take him all in. You start to fuck yourself on his cock and the man underneath you is in heaven. His darling going up and down on him on his birthday? What more could he want?

You moan and pant as you bounce yourself faster on his cock, near the edge already.

“You wanna cum on me? C'mon pretty girl, give it to me.”

You cry out as you release all over him, your walls pulsating on his member just right. You fall on top of him again, and he rubs your back. “Is it okay if I keep going? You tell me if it’s too much, okay?”

“Mhm, I promise.”

He flips you over softly and kisses your pouty lips. He grabs your hips once again and starts fucking himself into you. Although, this didn’t feel animalish. This felt like making love, felt like something more than just sex.

“Mm, gonna cum so deep. You’d like that?” A soft yeah comes from your lips and he kisses you again, pounding into you. “So pretty beneath me.” He throws your leg over his shoulder, drilling in deeper, making you clench around him harder.

He guides his hand in between your sweaty bodies and begins making slow circles around your clit. You arch off the couch moaning his name, sounding like a prayer off your lips.

“One more, give me one more darling.” You curse loud enough to shake the apartment as your climax rips through you again. Yufan’s pace starts getting desperate, his hips finally stilling as he empties himself inside of you.

He falls over to the side of the couch, being careful not to crush you. “Be right back.” He says as he carefully pulls out and heads towards the bathroom. He comes out with a clean warm towel and wipes you up so gently you almost start crying, so thankful your first time is with him.

He throws the towel somewhere in the room and cuddles up next to you again, kissing your shoulder blade as he settles down. You both drift off at some point and you couldn’t be happier in another’s arms than you are right now.

-

It’s January and you both just celebrated new years together and everything was going perfectly until then.

So as you sit on his couch in his apartment, you wait. He comes through the door, unassuming of your motives tonight.

“You’ve been distant.” You say simply.

He looks at you, confusion etched on his brows. “Hm?”

“Distant, you haven’t been yourself recently.”

“I’m myself, maybe a little tired, but I’d like to think I’m fine, that we’re fine.”

You sigh. “Right, because fine means barely talking to me when you’re home and just going to bed. That seems normal.”

“I’m tired darling, you’re trying to make this more than it is.” He weakly fights back.

“You’re always tired. What the hell are you doing at work that you do differently than two months ago? We were fine then.”

“It’s just the workload has gotten worse-.” He starts but you scoff, cutting him off. “Well you won’t tell me that! You just come home and sleep. You don’t even try to talk to me!” You argue, cutting him off. “You know what, I’m going home tonight.”

“What? Please don’t go, please.” He begs as you walk past him and grab your coat and purse.

“We don’t even cuddle anymore Yufan, you’ll be fine.” You say finally and slam the door behind you.

-

It’s been two days since you last talked to your boyfriend and you’ve been crying non stop. You know you’re the one who left first but you wanted him to chase after you, tell you everything’s all right and that he’d change. Too bad this isn’t a fairy tale.

You still work at the gas station on the weekends and it is currently Saturday, meaning you have another day of this and you can finally sulk in your bed.

You’re checking someone’s stuff out when you hear a loud engine pull into the gas station’s parking lot and you look over and see it’s Yufan. You look back down, proceeding to scan this person's stuff and ignore the familiar figure that enters your peripheral vision. He goes back to the back of the store and you hear the fridge open and close and footsteps walk up to your line. The person you’re waiting on pays and your boyfriend walks up.

“Find everything okay?” You ask on autopilot.

“Mhm. This one’s for you, pretty girl.” And he points at the pink redbull on the counter.

You can’t help but tear up, feeling so emotional after thinking he hated you, and here he is buying you a drink. “Thank you.”

“Anything for you, I’ll be back at 5.” He mentions as he pays and swiftly walks out the door, leaving you shocked as ever.

After your shift ends, you see his car pull up and you get in. He pulls out of the parking lot and onto the road in silence. After a minute though, he speaks up. “I’m sorry.”

You don’t answer right away, you want to hear what he’s going to tell you.

“I’m just going through a lot right now… Mentally. It’s not good for me right now but I’m trying. And I’m sorry I pushed you away during it, I just couldn’t do it.” He admits.

“No baby, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have walked out like that. I just felt so mad-.”

“I understand, I would’ve felt the same way. But I realized over the last two days that we work through everything together, and that I’m not alone anymore during this.”

“You aren’t, I’m always right here, and I always will be.” You say as you hold his hand.

He brings the back of your hand up to his lips and kisses it. “I really love you my darling.”

You laugh, smiling from ear to ear. “I really love you too.”

You guys drive back to his apartment and once you get there he lays you down, kisses you everywhere, and fucks you till you feel dizzy. He will never let you get away from him again, from now on he’s going to love you to the fullest.

He loves you more than his heart can take and he can’t wait to spend the rest of his life with you, always.

The first thing you ever said to James was:

“You’re in my spot.”

Not the most auspicious beginning. Not the kind of story that made for a clean narrative arc -no charged glance across a room, no meaningful collision, no moment with enough cinematic weight to justify everything that came after it.

Just you, age 18, three months into your debut, standing in the doorway of Practice Room 7B at 11pm with your water bottle and your USB drive.

And James, 19, sprawled across the center of the floor with his headphones around his neck and his jacket thrown over the mirror rail. His long legs were taking up an amount of space that felt frankly unreasonable, looking up at you with the unhurried expression of someone who had not been expecting company and was not particularly moved by its arrival.

“There’s no names on the floors,” he said.

“I booked this room,” you said. “7B, eleven pm. Check the system.”

He didn’t check the system. He looked at you for a moment with the assessing quality that you would not recognize as characteristic until much later, and then he said: “I’ve been here since nine.”

“And your booking ended at eleven,” you said, stepping inside because waiting in the doorway felt like conceding something. “So.”

He made a pause in which he conducted some internal deliberation, the outcome of which was apparently a decision to be mildly entertained rather than annoyed.

He sat up, reaching for his jacket with the unhurried ease of someone who moved through the world at his own pace regardless of external pressure.

“You’re from R3SET,” he said. Not a question.

“You’re from Cortis,” you said, equally declarative.

“James,” he said, which was not exactly an introduction so much as information delivered flatly.

“I know who you are,” you said.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah?”

“You were the dude who changed the note… the one in the song at that showcase stage everyone talked about for two weeks.”

“Three weeks,” he said.

“Two,” you said. “I checked.”

He looked at you then -really looked, the first time, the kind of look that was less social and more like assessment, and something in it was so direct that it felt almost rude. Then he stood up, gathered his things without particular hurry, and walked toward the door.

“It was three weeks,” he said, passing you.

“It really wasn’t,” you said to his retreating back.

The door swung shut and you stood alone in Practice Room 7B and felt, despite having successfully reclaimed your space, that the exchange had ended in something closer to a draw.

You didn’t think about it again for two weeks, which was its own kind of foreshadowing.

• • •

The thing about HYBE was that it was enormous and also, paradoxically, very small.

Enormous in the way of any machine with global reach -the floors and corridors and practice rooms and studios multiplying upward and outward, the constant movement of staff and talent and camera crews and visiting collaborators.

The kind of place where you could theoretically spend a month without seeing the same person twice.

And yet the industry within the industry -the specific ecosystem of the acts themselves, the people who lived in the same buildings and ate from the same canteen and used the same practice rooms and breathed the same air recycled through the same HVAC system -was genuinely, inescapably small.

You saw the same faces, you learned people’s schedules by accident, by proximity, by the way your paths intersected in corridors and elevators and waiting rooms without either party having arranged it.

You started seeing James everywhere approximately two weeks after the practice room, which you attributed to coincidence, and then to probability, and then eventually just accepted as a feature of your shared geography.

He was in the elevator one morning when you got on with your members, both groups maintaining the polite, comfortable distance of people who were not unfriendly but were also not yet anything in particular.

He nodded. You nodded. Simple.

Hye-ri, who had not yet heard the Practice Room 7B story and would later respond to it with conspiratorial energy, smiled brightly at everyone.

The elevator arrived at its floor and one group filed out. He held the door for Soeun, who was the last one off, moving as slowly as was her nature at 9am.

“Thanks,” Soeun said sleepily.

He said nothing, just released the door once she was through. You glanced back as the doors closed and he was looking at something on his phone.

Not at you, so you looked forward again.

• • •

The first real conversation -not the territorial exchange about Practice Room 7B, but the first one with actual content, actual duration, actual evidence of two people engaging with each other rather than simply occupying the same space- happened at the canteen at an off-hour on a Tuesday.

You’d come down at 2pm, between schedules, when the lunch rush was over and the space was quiet. You wanted something warm and uncomplicated and to sit somewhere that wasn’t a practice room or a meeting room or a corridor for approximately twenty minutes.

James was at a corner table with what appeared to be a cup of coffee and nothing else, looking at his phone with a focused scowl.

The canteen was otherwise empty.

You got your food -the plain rice and the soup, because your stomach was in that specific state of demanding something simple- and made the social calculation that sitting at the opposite end of the canteen from the only other person there was ruder than sitting nearby, so you chose a table two away from his.

He glanced up when you sat down, registered you, and looked back at his phone.

You ate your soup.

“You’re always here at weird hours,” he said, without looking up.

“So are you,” you said.

“I’m avoiding a meeting.”

“I’m between schedules.”

“What kind of schedule runs until 2am?” he asked, and now he did look up, and there was something in the question that was less pointed than curious -the genuine kind of curiosity that didn’t dress itself up.

“Rehearsal ran late,” you said. “Then a vocal session. We have a comeback in six weeks.”

“R3SET’s second?” He said it like he’d already known and was confirming.

“Yeah.” You looked at him. “You’re not avoiding a meeting. Your schedule’s on the third floor board, you don’t have anything until four.”

There was a pause.

“You read the third floor schedule board?” he asked.

“I pass it every day.”

“And you memorized my schedule.”

“I memorized the general layout,” you said, with perfect composure. “You happen to be on it.”

He looked at you for a moment with that specific expression -the almost-smile that wasn’t quite, that lived in the small muscles around his eyes rather than his mouth. “Right,” he said.

You ate your soup and he went back to his phone.

Twenty minutes passed in a quiet that was, you noticed, not uncomfortable. The two of you existing in the same space without requiring anything from each other, and neither apparently needing to fill the space with noise.

When you stood up to leave he said, without looking up: “Seven weeks.”

“What?”

“Your comeback. It’s seven weeks out, not six. The release dates got pushed on Monday.”

You stood there for a moment. “How do you know R3SET’s release schedule?”

“I read the boards,” he said. “You happen to be on them.”

He looked up then, and the almost-smile was doing the thing where it almost became an actual smile and then pulled back at the last moment like it had decided against it.

You held his gaze for exactly the amount of time required to not look away first, which was becoming a recurring theme, and then you picked up your tray.

“Thanks,” you said.

“Sure,” he said.

You walked out and made it to the elevator before you let the small, involuntary smile happen, where nobody could file it as evidence of anything.

• • •

It built the way these things built -not in dramatic installments but in the accumulation of small moments that didn’t individually amount to anything and collectively amounted to everything.

He started saving you a spot in the one practice room with the good sound system when he finished early, without mentioning it -you’d just arrive to find a piece of tape with your initials on the booking board in his handwriting.

You never acknowledged it out loud and neither did he. It simply happened, and then continued to happen, and you both treated it as unremarkable.

You gave him your extra energy bar once, in a corridor, because you had two and he looked like he hadn’t eaten since morning. He took it without excessive gratitude, just ate it while you talked about something unrelated, and the next week a different brand of bar appeared in your bag that you hadn’t put there.

There was an award show in November -your first major one as a group, the kind of night charged with the particular glamour and underlying anxiety of a milestone.

You were waiting in the corridor behind the stage in your outfit, which was a structural confection of embellished fabric that looked extraordinary and made sitting down a political decision, when he appeared from a different direction in his own stage clothes, and you both stopped.

He looked at you -the full honest look, the kind he sometimes gave when he’d apparently decided not to moderate it.

“You look-” he started, and seemed to reroute something. “Good luck tonight.”

“You too,” you said.

He nodded once before walking past, and your stylist appeared from around the corner and started fussing with your hair.

The moment folded itself away into the noise of the evening, and later, on stage, in the middle of your third song, you looked out into the audience and found him in the seats assigned to Cortis, with the navigational certainty of someone who hadn’t been looking for him and had found him anyway.

He was watching. Not performing-watching, not the ambient attention of someone in an audience.

Actually watching, with the focused quality you’d come to recognize as characteristic. He didn’t look away when you made eye contact.

You looked away first, because you had choreography to execute and couldn’t afford the distraction, but the heat of it stayed on the side of your face for the rest of the song like a second spotlight.

• • •

James was the first person (other than your members) in the building who ever made you genuinely laugh.

Not the performance laugh -the one you’d refined to a bright, camera-ready sound that communicated joy without revealing anything.

The actual one, the one that caught you off guard and came out bigger than you intended, the one that made your eyes crease at the corners in a way your makeup artist always had to correct before filming.

It was something stupid. You couldn’t even remember what, later, when you tried -some observation he’d made in that flat, deadpan delivery of his, something about Martin’s posture.

And you’d laughed, the real one, before you’d had time to present the curated version instead.

He’d looked surprised. Then the almost-smile finally completed itself -actually became a smile, rare and brief and somehow private, like something he hadn’t intended to share and had anyway.

And then both of you had looked away simultaneously like two people who had accidentally seen something they weren’t supposed to.

That was 7 months in. By then you already knew you were in trouble, the specific kind that didn’t announce itself but showed up one day fully installed and looked back at you like it had always been there.

• • •

The first fight was in January.

Not a small one. The real inaugural event -the one that established the template for everything that followed, that revealed the specific architecture of how you two functioned, when the politeness dissolved and the actual material underneath was exposed.

It was about something professional, technically.

A collab arrangement that had fallen through due to scheduling and a comment he’d made in a group setting, that you’d taken as pointed and that he’d claimed was general. But the claim itself feeling like a provocation rather than a clarification.

It had escalated with a speed that surprised you both, the way flash fires did -the specific combustibility of two people who had spent seven months building up a charge without discharge.

Every careful canteen silence, every piece of tape on a booking board, every unremarked energy bar, every held glance and looked-away-from moment: all of it apparently convertible into fuel.

You said things. He said things. The things were sharp and specific, which was worse than general and vague. That meant you both knew exactly where to aim.

He told you that your drive was so relentless it was alienating. You told him that his emotional unavailability was a character flaw he’d dressed up as depth.

And other particularly childish things.

Both of you hit something real. Both of you knew it.

It ended not with resolution but with you walking out of the conversation, and him letting you. The two of you spending eleven days not speaking in a building you shared, navigating around each other with effortful precision.

On the twelfth day he was in the elevator when you got on, alone, the doors closed, and in the four floors between you and your destination neither of you spoke. When the doors opened he held them and let you out first with the same gesture he’d used for Soeun seven months ago.

“The tape’s back on 7B,” he said, as the doors were closing. “If you want it.”

You walked to the practice room.

The tape was there, your initials in his handwriting, unremarkable and consistent and saying more than either of you had managed in eleven days of silence. So you pulled out your USB drive and started the music and didn’t think about what it meant, because thinking about what it meant required a vocabulary you hadn’t yet developed for whatever this was.

• • •

The second fight happened in March, and it was the one that changed the coordinates of everything.

In retrospect -and you would spend a considerable amount of time in retrospect, dissecting this particular evening with forensic attention. Like someone trying to locate the exact moment a thing became a different thing -it wasn’t even a significant fight. Not by the standards.

It was a Tuesday, late, and you were both in the building past reasonable hours.

You’d crossed paths in the corridor outside the vocal booths in the specific way that felt, by now, less like coincidence and more like the building itself was engineering your proximity through some architectural conspiracy.

You’d said something. He’d responded. The response had landed wrong. The details were almost beside the point -they always were with James, the specifics of the argument always slightly less important than the current running underneath it.

What mattered was the escalation, which was quick and hot, the two of you falling into the rhythm of it with the terrible fluency of people who’d already mapped each other’s pressure points and couldn’t help pressing them.

You were in his face in the way you got when you were angry -close, refusing to let height function as advantage, chin tilted up, voice controlled and precise in the way that was somehow more aggressive than shouting.

He was doing the jaw thing, the one where the muscle flickered at the corner, and his eyes were dark, direct and giving nothing.

“You don’t actually know me,” you said, which was what you said when he’d gotten too close to something accurate and you needed to push him back. “You think you do-”

“I know you better than you’re comfortable with,” he said, flat and certain. “That’s the problem.”

“That’s not a problem, that’s a delusion-”

“You went still,” he said. “Just now. When I said that. You went still.”

“I didn’t-”

“You always go still when something’s true.”

You stared at him, he stared back.

And something in the architecture of the moment shifted without announcement -the way pressure shifted before weather, that subtle change in atmospheric quality that meant something was about to happen whether or not anyone had decided on it.

You didn’t decide. That was the thing you’d return to later, examining it from different angles.

It didn’t feel like a decision.

It felt like the inevitable conclusion of seven months of accumulated charge finally finding its outlet, physics rather than choice, the thing that happened when you built up enough of something and ran out of room to keep containing it.

You kissed him.

Or he kissed you.

The honest answer was that it was simultaneous in the way that made attribution impossible, the two of you crossing the remaining distance at the same moment as if you’d both received the same signal from the same source.

His hand came up to the side of your face with a roughness that wasn’t quite gentle and wasn’t quite not, and you had a fistful of his jacket.

The anger didn’t disappear -that was the thing that surprised you most in the moment, that the anger didn’t disappear but instead converted, transformed into something that ran in the same channel at the same intensity in a completely different direction.

It lasted approximately ten seconds.

You both pulled back. Looked at each other. The corridor was still empty, the distant practice track was still running. Nothing had changed about the physical reality of the space, but everything had changed about what existed in it.

His hand was still near your face. Neither of you moved for a moment.

Then you let go of his jacket

“That,” you said, with all the composure you could assemble on short notice, which was not as much as you would have liked, “didn’t happen.”

Something moved through his expression. Not agreement. Not disagreement. Something harder to read. “Okay,” he said.

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“James.”

“I said okay, jeez,” he scoffed.

You straightened. Fixed your top, met his eyes one final time with the look you used when you needed to communicate that you were in complete control of a situation.

You walked back down the corridor and took the stairs, because the elevator required waiting and waiting required standing still and standing still was not something you were capable of in that particular moment.

In the stairwell you sat on the third step from the bottom, pressing your fingertips to your mouth and stared at the concrete floor.

You said, quietly and with feeling, a word that started with ‘F’ and covered approximately forty percent of what you were actually feeling, the other sixty percent being substantially too complicated for a single word to manage.

Fuck, it didn’t happen, you told yourself.

Your heartbeat said otherwise, loud and inconveniently informative.

• • •

It happened again three weeks later... ironically.

This time there was less plausible deniability about what it was -it wasn’t the end of an argument, wasn’t the discharge of accumulated charge.

It was a different kind of moment entirely, which made it both better and worse simultaneously.

You’d been in the practice room late, alone, running the bridge section of the new choreography for what felt like the fortieth time because something in the transition wasn’t landing cleanly.

You couldn’t locate the problem from inside the movement, which was the particular frustration of dance -sometimes you needed external eyes, someone to stand outside the thing and see what you couldn’t feel.

James had appeared in the doorway with the look of someone who’d been passing and had stopped, and for a moment he’d just watched you run the section.

“The weight transfer,” he said, from the doorway. “You’re anticipating the next count. You lose the accent.”

You ran it again, adjusting.

“Better,” he said.

Then he came in and stood beside you in the mirror, and ran the count with you -not the full choreography, just the four bars in question, his reflection beside yours in the practice room mirror.

His timing was good in the simple baseline way that people who lived in music tended to have regardless of their primary discipline.

When you ran it clean he caught your eye in the mirror and said: “There. You’re insanely good when you focus.”

And you responded with blurry eyes : “Yeah.”

The room was very quiet because then, neither of you was looking at the mirror anymore.

The second time was slower than the first. That was the difference - the first time had been the speed of reaction, of something that had been held too long finally releasing.

You felt the shift in the air before his hand moved -his palm sliding slowly up your arm, over the thin strap of your practice top, until his fingers curled around the back of your neck.

His grip was warm, firm, not quite gentle. When you finally looked up at him, his eyes had gone dark, pupils wide.

He didn’t ask. He simply leaned in and kissed you like he’d already made the decision minutes ago.

It started slow, almost careful -his lips pressing against yours with deliberate pressure, warm and slightly damp from the heat of the room. Then the restraint slipped.

His mouth opened, and the kiss deepened with a low, quiet hunger. His tongue brushed yours, not teasing but claiming, stroking in a slow, heated rhythm that made your stomach tighten. You tasted salt on his lips from the earlier dancing, felt the faint scrape of stubble against your skin as he tilted his head and took more.

His other hand found your waist, fingers digging in just enough to pull you flush against him. The kiss grew hotter, wetter.

A soft, involuntary sound escaped you, and he answered it with a low exhale through his nose, almost a growl, as he backed you half a step until your lower back met the barre.

He pressed forward, chest to chest, one thigh sliding between yours as the kiss turned unmistakably heated -messy, urgent, tongues sliding and lips sucking, breathing growing ragged between the brief moments you broke apart only to crash back together.

When he finally pulled back just enough to look at you, his lips were flushed and shiny, breath coming hard. His forehead rested against yours, eyes half-lidded, and for a second the only sound in the mirrored room was the two of you trying to remember how to breathe.

Your makeup from earlier had faded to its bones. Your hair had come partly undone. You looked, you thought, like someone in the middle of something they hadn’t planned.

Which was accurate.

James was watching your reflection rather than your face, which felt like a concession of some kind -the mirror was easier, the distance of the reflection, the ability to look at something without quite looking directly at it.

“We should probably…” you started.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Talk about-”

“Probably,” he agreed.

You both didn’t talk about it.

Not that night, not in the days following.

By unspoken mutual agreement you treated the practice room the way you’d treated the corridor -as something that had happened in a pocket outside normal time.

You saw each other in the building and were normal, which is to say you were exactly what you’d always been -two people with an unclassifiable dynamic and an ongoing low-grade tension.

It was, you would think later, an approach with significant structural flaws.

• • •

The first time you slept with James was inevitable in the way that cellular reproduction is inevitable

-something that had been pulling since the moment the charge between you became too dense to ignore, building through every charged silence, every almost-smile, every fight that left you both raw and buzzing.

It happened six weeks after the second kiss, in the quiet, exhausted aftermath of one of those late nights where the building felt like it belonged only to the two of you.

You’d both been avoiding each other again after a stupid argument about nothing that had somehow spiraled into everything -something about schedules and priorities, and how neither of you ever actually said what you meant.

Three days of careful, professional distance in the corridors. Three days of pretending the other person didn’t exist in a space where existence was impossible to avoid.

You were in 7B again, alone, running through vocals until your throat felt like sandpaper because stillness was worse than exhaustion.

James appeared in the doorway like he always did, unannounced, carrying two bottles of water he couldn’t explain.

He set one down near your bag without a word and leaned against the mirror rail, watching you with that clinical, cataloguing stare.

You didn’t tell him to leave. He didn’t ask if he should stay.

The conversation that followed was sparse, edged, full of the things you weren’t saying.

Accusations dressed as observations.

Defenses that sounded like attacks.

Until the space between you simply ran out, and the kiss that started it was less explosion this time and more surrender -slow at first, almost reluctant, like both of you were still trying to talk yourselves out of it even as your hands moved.

He knew exactly how to touch you.

That was the terrifying part.

From the first slide of his palm up your waist under your shirt, he read your body like he’d been studying it for months in secret (because he had). The way his thumb pressed just under your ribs made your breath catch. The way he bit down on your shoulder when you tugged at his hair drew a sound from you that felt humiliatingly honest.

You knew him too -knew the tension at the base of his spine when he was trying to hold back, knew how his breath stuttered when you dragged your nails down his back, knew the exact rhythm that made his control fracture.

There was no discussion. No “what are we doing.” No neat categorization. You ended up on the floor with the lights still on, door locked and the faint smell of rubber mats and sweat in the air, clothes shoved aside rather than removed entirely because stopping felt impossible.

It was slow at first -agonizingly so- James pushing into you with a controlled patience that felt like punishment, forehead pressed to yours, eyes open the whole time. Every inch deliberate. Every roll of his hips measured to draw out the kind of sound you refused to let anyone else hear.

But it was the loudest you’ve ever felt him, deep in your bone marrow, all-consuming. Not loud, not frantic at first, but devastatingly precise.

He fucked you like he’d already memorized every map point of your pleasure and was now tracing them with ruthless focus -slow, deep strokes that made your back arch off the floor. His hand clamped gently but firmly over your mouth when your voice started to climb, because even then, even in that moment, the building and the world outside still existed. You came so hard your vision whited out at the edges, thighs shaking around his waist, and he followed shortly after with a low, broken sound against your neck, hips stuttering as he buried himself deep.

Afterward you lay there tangled on the floor, breathing hard, neither of you speaking for a long time. The weight of what had just happened settled over both of you like a second skin -intimate, terrifying, and already laced with the knowledge that this would complicate everything without solving anything.

You didn’t label it. Not that night, not ever. It simply became another layer of the thing between you: a new way to argue with your bodies instead of your words.

Sometimes it followed a fight -angry, rough, biting kisses and hands that gripped too hard, the kind of sex that felt like punishment and absolution at once.

Sometimes it happened in the quiet lulls, slower and almost tender in its exhaustion, where he would press his face into your neck and you would let yourself hold him like he was yours without ever saying it.

The toxic rhythm continued, unchanged at its core. He would disappear for days after particularly raw nights -ghosting texts, avoiding your usual corridors, throwing himself into work like distance could reset the scale. You would do the same, blocking his number for forty-eight hours only to unblock it when the silence felt worse than the fighting.

You’d show up at each other’s dorms at odd hours under flimsy excuses (a forgotten charger, a question about a stage cue, clothes left behind on purpose), and end up in his bed or against his door or in the shower with the water running loud enough to cover the sounds you couldn’t quite muffle.

He knew your body with devastating accuracy-the exact pressure on your clit that made your legs give out, the angle that had you clenching around him with a broken whimper, the way sucking on the spot just below your ear made you forget every defensive retort.

You knew his -the way his hips stuttered when you whispered filthy observations against his mouth, the way gripping the back of his neck grounded him when he got lost in his own head, the way he groaned your name like a curse and a prayer when you rode him slow and deliberate, refusing to let him rush.

It was never just sex.

It was the continuation of every conversation you refused to finish out loud. Every thrust carried the weight of ‘I see you.’ Every bite carried ‘I hate how much I need this.’

Every time he came with your name muffled against your skin, it felt like another thread tightening around the thing neither of you would name.

You kept orbiting. Fights, silence, explosive nights that left you both wrecked and temporarily softer, then more fights. The push and pull became the architecture of whatever this was -intimate, codependent, and fundamentally unresolved. Because naming it would require choosing, and choosing felt more dangerous than the endless cycle of coming together and pulling apart.

• • •

Three years had gone by.

Three years, and James was still the same.

Still the same flat delivery and assessing gaze and emotional availability of a particularly well-defended fortress. Still the same almost-smile that completed itself approximately four times a year and each time felt like being handed something rare and slightly dangerous. Still the same fluency in your pressure points, still the same precision with words when he wanted them to land somewhere specific, still the same capacity to fill a room with his particular brand of charged, difficult presence in a way that you’d never been able to adequately explain to anyone who asked.

You’d tried, once, when Hye-ri had asked you to describe what it was about him -what the actual thing was, underneath the toxicity narrative, underneath the drama, the real answer.

You’d sat with the question for a long moment and then said: he’s the most specific person I’ve ever met.

In conclusion, you were both still the same, only maybe worse.

You rolled your eyes so hard it actually hurt, tossing your phone onto the silk duvet of your bed.

Lock my doors? Who the fuck does this fucking little bitch think he is?

As if he hadn't already broken through every single one of your defenses months ago, making sure you were now opened raw and spread on a fucking platter for him - aphrodisiac foods and all.

You knew exactly what he was doing playing that toxic game where he'd insult your existence one minute and then pull you against him so tight you could feel his heartbeat the next.

Grabbing your oversized hoodie, you didn't even bother changing out of your stage makeup, the glitter still clinging to your eyelids like shimmering armor. You knew you were playing with fire, but the adrenaline of a fight was the only thing that made you feel alive lately.

Maybe that was the whole problem.

Every argument with James sent something electric through your veins, sharp and addictive, the way his jaw clenched when he was angry, the way your pulse quickened when neither of you backed down, the way every cruel word felt like a challenge thrown across a battlefield.

It was exhausting. It was toxic.

It was also the closest thing to feeling alive you had found in months.

Silence bored you. Peace made your skin itch. But a fight with James? A fight with James could have your heart hammering against your ribs so hard it felt like it was trying to escape.

It made you feel seen. Seen in the worst possible way, maybe, but seen nonetheless.

Because no one got under your skin the way he did and you hated him for it.

You hated how he could turn a harmless conversation into a screaming match. Hated how he knew exactly which buttons to push. Hated how anger always burned hotter when it was directed at him.

And maybe the sickest part was that, somewhere between the insults and slammed doors, you found yourself craving it.

Craving him.

Not because fighting felt good, but because it was the only time neither of you pretended not to care.

Ten minutes later, you were standing in the hallway of the Cortis dorms, your knuckles rapping sharply against the wood, and your keys in your hand ( which you’d hoped you could stab through his stupid face ).

The door swung open almost immediately, and there he was, hair a mess, eyes bloodshot, looking absolutely wrecked but still somehow infuriatingly handsome.

"The hell you doin' here?" James muttered, leaning heavily against the doorframe. His voice was raspy, thick with the remnants of alcohol and irritation. He looked you up and down, his gaze lingering a second too long on your legs before he scowled. "Thought you'd be tucked in at 9pm, acting all high and mighty like always.”

"You're a dick, James," you snapped, stepping past him into his space without waiting for an invitation. "Juhoon told me you were out here throwing a tantrum like a child."

"A tantrum?" He let out a dry, bitter laugh, closing the door with a heavy thud behind you. He stepped into your personal bubble, looming over you so you had to tilt your head back just to meet his eyes. The tension was thick enough to choke on that familiar, jagged energy that always preceded a blowout or a breakdown. “You’re the one who came here. I was just drunk, it wasn’t that deep.”

"Not that deep?" You scoffed, a sharp, melodic sound that felt jagged in the quiet of the dorms. You stepped closer, your chest nearly brushing his, refusing to let his height intimidate you. "You're literally texting people like a fucking psycho, James. You're embarrassing yourself."

James let out a huff, the scent of expensive whiskey and something uniquely him that warm, musky scent that always made your stomach do a traitorous flip hitting you full force.

He didn't back away. Instead, he leaned down, his face inches from yours, his eyes dark and swirling with a mix of intoxication and pure, unadulterated irritation.

"Embarrassing? Please," he sneered, his gaze dropping to your lips for a split second before snapping back to your eyes. "You love it. You love comin' over here in the middle of the night just to tell me how much of a prick I am. You're addicted to the drama, y/n. Don't even lie to yourself, that’s embarrassing."

He reached out, his fingers catching a strand of your hair, tugging it just slightly not enough to hurt, but enough to make the contact feel intentional, aggressive.

"You're so damn extra," he muttered, his voice dropping an octave, turning low and dangerous. "Walkin' in here lookin' like that...full of attitude. You think you're so untouchable, huh? Like you're too big for this shit?"

He stepped even closer, forcing you to take a half step back until the edge of his kitchen counter pressed into your lower back. He loomed over you, his presence heavy and suffocating in the best possible way.

"You're a menace," he whispered, his thumb grazing your jawline, his touch surprisingly soft compared to the venom in his words. "A tiny, loud mouthed, beautiful menace. And you're drivin' me fucking crazy."

His eyes searched yours, searching for the spark of a fight, for the retaliation he knew was coming. He was baiting you, pushing you to the edge because he knew that once you tipped over, there was no going back to being 'just friends' or 'just a situationship.'

"So, what's it gonna be tonight?" he challenged, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth, though it didn't reach his eyes. "You gonna scream at me 'til your throat hurts, or are you gonna shut the fuck up and actually do something about it?"

You let out a sharp, mocking laugh, refusing to let his proximity intimidate you even as your heart thudded a frantic rhythm against your ribs.

God, he was so predictable, using his hands to distract you when he knew he was losing the verbal war.

You reached up, grabbing the front of his shirt with a white knuckled grip, pulling him down until your foreheads collided.

"You're so full of yourself, thinking i’m the only one addicted to this," you hissed, your eyes flashing with a mix of fury and hunger. "Maybe I didn't come here to scream, James. Maybe I just came to remind you exactly who it is that actually puts up with your bullshit."

Without waiting for his smug comeback, you stood on your tiptoes and crashed your lips against his, the kiss less of a romantic gesture and more of a collision hard, desperate, and tasting faintly of whiskey.

The moment your lips crashed into his, a low, guttural sound escaped the back of James's throat halfway between a groan and a growl.

He didn't do gentle. He didn't do "sweet."

The second you initiated the contact, his hands moved from your hair to your waist, his fingers digging into the fabric of your oversized hoodie with a bruising intensity, as if he were trying to pull you inside his very skin.

He kissed you back with a frantic, starving energy, his tongue sweeping against yours in a way that felt like a battle for dominance. It was messy, teeth clashing, the taste of whiskey and salt and pure, unbridled tension coating your mouth. He tasted like the chaos you both thrived in.

"Fuck," he breathed against your lips, breaking the kiss for just a fraction of a second to catch his breath, his forehead still pressed hard against yours. His eyes were blown wide, the pupils swallowing the iris, looking dark and predatory in the dim light of the apartment. "You're such a brat. Always gotta have the last word, even when you're using your mouth for somethin' else."

He didn't give you time to retort. His hands slid down from your waist, gripping your thighs and hoisting you up so you had to wrap your legs around his waist just to stay upright. He backed you up against the counter, the granite cold against your skin, but he was pure heat.

"You think you're so smart, huh?" he muttered, his lips grazing the sensitive skin just below your ear, sending a violent shiver down your spine. He nipped at your lobe, his voice dropping into that rough, drawl that always made your knees weak. "Thinkin' you can just walk in here, look all pretty and smug, and make me forget how much you pissed me off hours ago?"

He pulled back just enough to look you in the eyes, his gaze heavy and hooded, his thumb dragging roughly over your bottom lip, smearing the remnants of your lip gloss.

“I still hate you.” He declared, as if you could care less.

He leaned back in, his kiss deeper this time, more possessive, his hands roaming your body as if he were trying to memorize every inch of the girl who knew exactly how to ruin him.

A wicked, dangerous thought flickered in the back of your mind. You weren't just going to let him have his way not tonight. He thought he was the one in control, the one who could just summon you with a few drunken, messy texts and expect you to fall into his lap.

Not a chance, fucktard.

You leaned into the chaos, matching his intensity with a fervor that was almost manic, let your hands slide under his shirt, your nails grazing the skin of his back, tracing the muscles there just enough to make him hiss through his teeth. You kissed him like you were trying to consume him, your movements calculated and devastatingly effective. You knew exactly where to press, how to tilt your head, how to let your breath hitch in a way that he could feel against his skin.

You felt him react the way his breathing hitched, the way his grip on your thighs tightened until it was almost painful, and the unmistakable shift in his body as he grew hard against you. He was losing it. The smug, cocky James was being dismantled by the very person he'd spent the last hour insulting.

Just as his hands began to slide lower, just as he let out a sound that was finally pure and honest, you pulled back.

It wasn't a gradual retreat, it was a sharp, sudden break. You slid off him, your feet hitting the kitchen floor with a soft thud that felt deafening in the sudden silence.

James stumbled slightly, his hands grasping at empty air where your waist had been seconds ago. He blinked, his eyes glazed and dark, looking completely dazed and desperately needy. "Yo... where the fuck are you going'?" he rasped, his voice cracking. He reached for you, his movements uncoordinated, his face a mask of confusion and sudden, intense frustration. "Y/n, don't be a bitch. We just-"

"We just what, James?" you interrupted, your voice cool, smooth, and entirely too calm for someone who had just been devouring him. You reached up, smoothing down your oversized hoodie, your expression unreadable despite the glitter still shimmering on your eyelids. "You were 'just drunk,' remember? You said it wasn't that deep.“

You turned toward the door, a small, triumphant smirk playing on your lips that you made sure he couldn't see.

Gotcha bastard.

"Wait, hold up," he growled, stepping toward you, his chest heaving. He looked wrecked hair a disaster, lips swollen, and a look of pure, desperate irritation on his face. "You're really gonna do this? You're gonna leave me like this? That's low, even for you."

"Get used to it you manchild," you tossed over your shoulder, grabbing your keys. "You wanted a tantrum? You got one. Goodnight, James."

As you walked out the door, you could practically feel his gaze burning a hole in your back, his frustration radiating off him in waves. You knew he was standing there, probably cursing your name under his breath.

And that was exactly the point.

• • •

The next day hit like a hangover, except for the part you weren’t the one who’d been drinking.

You pushed through the revolving doors of the HYBE building with your signature Prada sunglasses perched on your nose even though the lobby lighting was soft and flattering. Your manager scurried behind you like an overworked shadow, clipboard in hand, already rattling off the day’s agenda in rapid-fire mode.

“R3SET styling at 10:30 sharp. You’re filming joint content today with Enhypen for their new single promo - dance challenge, variety games, and that ‘chemistry talk’ segment the fans love. Their company specifically requested some cross-group pairings.”

You offered her a small, tired nod instead of words, flipping your hair so the ends brushed your shoulders in a smooth motion. The echo of your shoes against the marble floors cut through the quiet hum of staff and distant practice room bass as you kept walking.

‘No need to snap at her just because you’re exhausted’ you thought to yourself. She was just doing her job in this machine that never stopped spinning. You saved your venom for people who actually deserved it.

Enhypen. Cute.

At least it wasn’t him.

Today you could breathe without the weight of last night’s wreckage pressing on your ribs.

Inside the fifth-floor styling suite reserved exclusively for R3SET, the familiar controlled chaos of the music industry machine wrapped around you like expensive perfume and hairspray. The air smelled of warm curling irons, fresh coffee from the craft table, and that signature Jo malone diffuser scent they pumped in to “set the mood.”

Clothing racks dominated one wall -today’s concept was cool, street style: oversized Adidas zip-up jackets in sleek black and washed-out grey, layered over fitted crop tops, paired with relaxed cargo pants and sneakers..

Your members were already deep in transformation mode. Mina sat regal while a senior stylist perfected her long extensions, Hye-ri was getting her nails done in a glossy blood-red, and maknae Soeun was dozing in her chair as the makeup artist contoured her cheeks into something angelic.

You dropped into the center makeup chair like you owned the entire floor, crossing your legs with a dramatic sigh.

Ji-eun, your long-time makeup artist who had survived two years of your moods, gave you a quick once-over in the mirror. “Rough night?” she asked under her breath, already squeezing primer onto her palette.

“Define rough,” you muttered, scrolling through your phone even though the notifications were painfully empty. No drunk apologies. No blocked-number workarounds. Just silence. “Just make me look… alive please.’”

Ji-eun smiled faintly. “Got it.”

Mina glanced over, lips already glossed to perfection. “You disappeared after practice yesterday. Again. You good?”

“Spectacular,” you replied, voice laced with sarcasm. “Just dealing with manchildren who think 2 am. drunk texts are romantic.”

Hye-ri’s head snapped up like a meerkat. “James again? Seriously, unnie, how many times are you two gonna do that toxic shit before one of you actually taps out?”

Never, your mind whispered traitorously.

“It’s complicated, what can i say?” You shrugged.

The memory of last night flooded in uninvited; his wrecked hair, whiskey breath, the way he’d pinned you against the counter like he wanted to disappear inside you. The triumphant click of his dorm door behind you still echoed in your chest like a victory that tasted strangely like ash.

It all felt like a blade you kept pressing into both your palms just to feel something real.

Ji-eun worked in focused silence, blending cool concealer under your eyes to erase the faint shadows of sleeplessness. She layered on a smoked-out lid with razor-sharp black wings, turning your gaze into something predatory and elegant. Your lips got a deep, venomous berry stain -kiss-proof, because your line of work demanded perfection even when your insides felt like chaos.

The K-pop content machine never stopped turning. Joint promotions like this with Enhypen were calculated gold: their sleek, powerful boy-group energy paired beautifully with R3SET’s fierce, unapologetic girl-crush concept. Dance challenges, playful variety games, forced “get-to-know-you” segments -all designed to spark fan edits and trending hashtags. Companies loved this shit. Fans ate it up.

Your phone buzzed. A staff message confirming the pairings. You didn’t bother opening it fully.

Hye-ri spun in her chair, now fully styled in a cropped metallic top that flashed under the ring lights. “Jake and Sunghoon are stupid fine. Think we’ll get paired for the couple dance segment?“

You scoffed, examining your reflection as Ji-eun finished with setting spray. The girl in the mirror looked lethal -flawless skin glowing, hair in sleek waves with strategic face-framing pieces.

But inside, something softer twisted. Last night you’d ghosted James properly after months of toxic push-and-pull. Deleted everywhere. Left him standing there wrecked. And now, even on a day that had nothing to do with Cortis, his stupid ghost lingered like expensive cologne you couldn’t wash off.

‘Let him suffer’, you thought, but the thought carried a quiet ache -like pressing on a bruise just to watch the colors bloom. Of fucking course he wouldn’t suffer, how naive could you be?

“Yeah, well,” you said aloud, voice dripping venom, “hot doesn’t fix emotional constipation. Most of these idols are better at choreography than conversation anyway.”

You had… weird ways to cope.

Soeun giggled. “Unnie, you’re so fucking scary.”

“Realistic,” you corrected, standing up as the stylists adjusted your jacket to hang off one shoulder just right.

Your manager popped her head back in. “Fifteen minutes until we head to Studio 4 with Enhypen. Smile. Be friendly. The director wants natural vibes.”

You smirked at your reflection one final time, tilting your chin.

Natural vibes.

Sure.

As R3SET filed out toward the elevators - sneakers tapping in unison, ther familiar tension coiled low in your stomach. Not because of Enhypen, but because somewhere in this same building, James was probably nursing the same bruised ego and headache you’d gifted him last night.

You wondered if he’d heard about today’s schedule.

You wondered if he’d care, which was obvious, he probably wouldn’t care.

The distant bass from practice rooms thrummed through the walls like a heartbeat. Your own heart did that stupid, traitorous flip it always did when your thoughts drifted to him -equal parts hate and hunger, wrapped in the prettiest shade of toxicity.

This is going to be a long day, you thought, a small, but at least today, the battlefield didn’t have his name on it.

You stepped into Studio 4 with a soft smile, the bright lights warming your face as you adjusted the oversized zip-up jacket hanging casually off one shoulder. The polished floors reflected the group’s energy, professional. and you gave a little wave to everyone already there, your glittery eyelids catching the light in a subtle shimmer.

Your members moved around you comfortably- Mina offering polite hellos, Hye-ri stretching with a laugh, and Soeun rubbing her eyes sleepily. You felt that familiar pre-filming flutter in your stomach, not quite nerves but a quiet excitement mixed with the weight of last night still lingering like a faint bruise.

The Enhypen boys were clustered near the craft table, looking sharp in their coordinated streetwear. Jake noticed you first and flashed that warm, dimpled smile. “Hey! So glad you guys made it.”

You returned the smile easily, tilting your head with a small laugh. “Hi, yeah, we’re excited to be here. Thanks for having us, the new song is amazing, by the way.”

Okay, just breathe and be normal. No need to overthink this, you thought, suspicious they’d read through your mind and find out just how much of a crazy bitch you were.

Your manager gave you an approving nod as you kept things light and friendly, your members chatting politely with them.

Sunghoon offered you a curt nod, while Heeseung bowed politely. Jungwon, the leader, stepped forward with easy warmth. “I watched some of your latest stages y/n! The dance machine herself- it’s really cool to finally collab like this.”

Dance machine. The nickname always made you duck your head a little, cheeks warming with humble pride. You’d earned it through endless hours in practice rooms, pushing your body until the music felt like it lived in your bones, but you never let it go to your head.

“Ah, stop, you’re too sweet,” you said with a shy grin, waving it off. “I’m just happy to dance with all of you. And Riki and i gotta live up to the title of best dancers of this generation.”

You caught Riki’s eye across the group and gave him a friendly fist bump when he approached, his tall frame and sharp grin matching your energy in the best way. There was an easy respect between you two, no awkwardness, just shared love for the craft.

“Yeah i’m sure we could never disappoint” Riki said, voice low and teasing but kind.

“Pretty sure we won’t,” you replied softly, smiling wide. “I’ve been practicing that footwork you posted last month - it’s killer.”

The director clapped his hands, calling everyone into position before the conversation could continue.

“Alright! Starting with the dance challenge for the ‘Bite me’ remix. Let’s keep it natural, lots of energy and good vibes.”

The cameras started rolling, and you moved with effortless grace, your body syncing to the heavy bass like it was second nature. Every sharp isolation, every smooth body roll, every powerful pop flowed out of you warmly, drawing quiet cheers from the staff. Riki matched you perfectly, the two of you creating that unspoken chemistry that made the dance feel alive. During the partner section, his hand guided your waist for a small lift- professional, precise, and supportive.

Between takes, you found yourself chatting with Riki near the water station. He leaned against the wall, wiping sweat from his brow with a towel. “Your timing on that pre-chorus footwork is insane. How do you even make the transitions feel so natural?”

You smiled, twisting open your water bottle and taking a sip. “Lots of late nights pushing it until it clicked, honestly. But you’re incredible too - you know that ankle detail you added? I tried stealing it for our teaser, but it looked mid.” A soft, genuine laugh escaped you.

It felt refreshing, this easy conversation without any sharp edges. God, when was the last time talking to someone didn’t feel like walking through a minefield?

Your mind drifted traitorously back to James, as it always seemed to do. He would’ve noticed already -the single rebellious lash at the outer corner of your right eye that curled upward like a tiny black wing, refusing to cooperate no matter how carefully Ji-eun applied the mascara. It looked like deliberate eyeliner flair, but it wasn’t. James knew that.

He noticed everything about you: the way you favored your left hip when it tightened from over-practice, the specific tilt of your head when you were holding back a real smile, the faint scar on your knuckle from that mic stand incident two years ago.

Even in the midst of chaos, he saw the small things that made you feel truly seen… and that was part of what made everything so complicated.

You shook the thought away gently (aggressively) as the director called for the variety games segment. The group split into mixed teams for the silly relays -balloon passing with no hands, quick karaoke bits, and freestyle dance prompts. You ended up with Jake and Riki, fumbling through the challenges with plenty of laughter and when it was your turn to freestyle, Riki kicked it off with intricate footwork that had everyone clapping. You followed with fluid waves and isolations, keeping it playful and encouraging the others, the cameras rolled capturing the brotherly energy that Enhypen had towards your members and you.

This was fun, better than sulking all day because of some self centered prick-

Jungwon laughed from the sidelines. “You really are the dance machine. That was so smooth!”

You blushed a little, smiling shyly. “Thanks, but you guys killed it too, no really.”

The chemistry talk segment wrapped things up, everyone sitting in a loose circle on the studio floor with mics clipped on. The questions started light -favorite collabs, funny stage fails, dream variety show ideas. Hye-ri’s dramatic reactions had the whole group giggling. Then it shifted to partnerships.

“So, y/n and Riki,” the MC staff prompted with a friendly smile. “You two are always trending for your dance collabs. What’s it like working together?”

Riki glanced at you thoughtfully. “She pushes everyone to be better. It’s easy to sync up cause i feel like we both catch the little details that make a performance special.”

You nodded, smiling softly as you tucked a strand of hair behind your ear. “He’s right. It’s nice when someone just… gets the feeling behind the moves. And Riki’s always so encouraging, like a brother,- i learn a lot from him.” You gave his shoulder a light, friendly nudge and the laughter that followed felt natural, the cameras capturing the easy, likeable vibe the director wanted.

Filming wrapped with group photos, warm goodbyes, and promises of future collabs and some Enhypen members filed out first, waving cheerfully.

You were gathering your things, slinging your bag over your shoulder with a content sigh, when the studio door opened briefly.

James walked past in the hallway, probably heading somewhere else in the building, his messy hair and sharp jawline unmistakable even from a distance. His eyes flicked inside the studio and landed on you- specifically on you chatting animatedly with Riki near the exit, the two of you still exchanging quick notes about the choreography with easy smiles.

You didn’t see him at first, but the familiar pull in your chest hit anyway.

His expression tightened for a split second -something unreadable- before he kept walking. You caught the movement out of the corner of your eye too late, your smile faltering just a touch as that toxic mix of ache and hunger twisted quietly inside you again.

You adjusted the strap of your bag on your shoulder, the oversized hoodie slipping a little further down your arm, and waved goodbye to the other members as they headed off to their next schedule. Jake shot you a thumbs-up, and you waved back with both hands, cheeks still carrying that post-filming flush.

Being kind came naturally most days -it was easier to smile and lift others up than to sharpen your words like weapons- but moments like this reminded you how fragile that calm could be when James was involved.

Not that you actually gave a fuck.

Your members gathered around you near the mirrors as staff began packing up equipment. Mina tilted her head, noticing the tiny shift in your expression. “You okay, unnie? You looked like you were having fun with Riki earlier.”

You let out a soft breath and smiled again, this one a little smaller but still real. “Yeah, I’m good. It was really fun. Riki’s so talented -it’s nice when you can just… dance without thinking and all that corny stuff.”

“You two are literally the dance machine duo everyone talks about. I swear, the way you synced up? Chef’s kiss. But seriously, you’ve been a little spacey today.” Hye-ri slung an arm around your shoulders, her blood-red nails flashing under the lights. “Is it because of… looser king?”

Looser king was the -ridiculous and childish- nickname you’d given James, it was some sort of code name to make it easier to speak about him under full confidentiality. But you were pretty sure James was aware that he was in fact the looser king.

Soeun perked up from where she was sipping her water, eyes wide and curious. “Wait, James again? Unnie, you gotta tell us the full story one day. You always come back from seeing him looking like you got into a fight with 10 elephants or something.”

You ducked your head with a shy laugh, tucking that stubborn strand of hair behind your ear again. The rebellious lash at the outer corner of your right eye caught in the mirror’s reflection -curling upward just enough to look like intentional liner flair. You knew James would have zeroed in on it instantly if he’d been closer.

It was scary, really -how someone who drove you so crazy could still make you feel more seen than the thousands of fans screaming your name.

Why does he have to notice the small things? It would be easier if he just… didn’t, you thought.

Screw that, it would be easier if he just fucking died.

“I don’t know,” you admitted quietly to your members, voice kind and a little vulnerable as you all started walking toward the elevators. “It’s complicated. He texts something messy at 2 a.m., i show up like an idiot, and then… well, you know. But today was nice. No drama, just dancing and laughing with good people. I’m tryna keep it that way.”

Hye-ri squeezed your shoulder supportively. “You deserve easy days, unnie. You work harder than anyone I know. Him on the other hand? He deserves to get properly beaten up.”

The compliment warmed you, but the last comment made you even happier, and you bumped her lightly with your hip, grinning. “Stop, you’re gonna make me blush in front of the staff, i’m gonna start thinking it’s okay to beat men up sometimes.”

Inside your head, though, the gremlin of misconduct whispered: “Beat him up until he can’t even curse at you anymore. Violence IS the answer.”

•••

As you rode the elevator down, the distant bass from other practice rooms vibrated through the walls like a comforting heartbeat.

Your phone buzzed in your pocket -a staff message about the next schedule and a few fan edits already popping up from previous projects. You looked through the myriad of comments, some outstandingly mean for no reason, but some comforting.

And every few seconds your mind circled back to James standing in that hallway, jaw tight, eyes locked on you like he couldn’t look away.

He’d seen the easy smile you gave Riki, the open body language, the way you were genuinely enjoying yourself without the usual push-and-pull.

You wondered if he’d text again tonight. If you’d answer. If you’d end up right back where you started -face down in his bed or storming out his door.

For now, though, you zipped up your hoodie a little higher and followed your members out into the lobby, offering small smiles and waves to passing staff. Self control was a beautiful invention. Because you were about 99% sure that without it, you’d be yelling at everyone by now.

Mina walked on your left, her long extensions swaying elegantly with each step like a living curtain of silk, one hand absently twirling a strand around her finger in that regal quirk of hers that always made her look like she belonged in a drama scene even during casual walks. At 24, she carried herself with this quiet, big-sister poise that somehow made everyone around her feel steadier.

Hye-ri, on your right, bounced along with her usual energetic flair, her freshly done blood-red nails flashing like warning signs every time she gestured wildly, cracking her knuckles with a satisfying pop that made Soeun cringe beside her. At 20, Hye-ri was the spark plug of R3SET -bold, dramatic, but with a heart so big it could probably power the entire building’s sound system.

“I swear, y/n-unnie, you and Riki looked like you were born to share a stage, it’s so sad fans would make rumors if you guys collabed… Meanwhile, I was over here trying not to drop that balloon on Jake’s head during the relay. Did you see his face? Poor guy went full puppy eyes.” She let out a bright, infectious laugh that turned a few heads in the lobby, slinging her arm around your shoulders again in that casual, protective way she had.

Inside your head, a funny little voice chimed in: Hye-ri’s nails could probably slice through tension like butter. If only they could cut through my James-induced brain fog too.

Maknae Soeun trailed just behind, rubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand in her signature sleepy way, her angelic contoured cheeks still flushed from the variety games. At 19, she was all wide-eyed curiosity mixed with this adorable habit of dozing off mid-conversation if things got too calm, only to pop back awake with the most random questions.

“Can we get snacks on the way back? My stomach’s doing that rumble thing again.” She patted her belly dramatically.

As your manager’s van pulled up to the curb, Hye-ri hopped in first, dramatically claiming the back seat with a flourish of her red nails.

“Shotgun for snacks! Soeun, no falling asleep on my shoulder this time -you drool.”

Soeun climbed in after her with a sleepy protest and a giggle, “I don’t. Only time i did that was cause i was exhausted.”

Mina slid in gracefully beside you in the middle row, her extensions pooling neatly as she offered you a piece of gum from her bag -another one of her quiet caring quirks, always prepared with little comforts, her eyes flicking to you with that perceptive big-sister intuition.

You accepted it with a grateful smile, popping the minty gum into your mouth as the van merged into traffic. “Thanks, Mina. Seriously, you all made today feel easy, no pressure, just… dancing and laughing. It’s been a while since it felt that light, you guys are the best.”

The girls smiled at you, Hye-ri pulling you into a side hug as the van settled.

The city lights started blurring past the windows as evening crept in, and Soeun’s head was already starting to tilt toward Hye-ri’s shoulder despite her earlier denial. Hye-ri just rolled her eyes fondly, adjusting so the maknae could rest comfortably -her tough exterior hiding the softest spot for the youngest.

“You know,” Hye-ri said after a beat, voice dropping into something more sincere as she looked at you, “whatever’s going on with James… you don’t have to figure it out alone, you know that right?”

You leaned your head against the cool window, watching the streets pass in a gentle rhythm, and let out a small self-deprecating laugh.

“I know. And I appreciate it more than you guys realize. He’s just… he’s so weird. And so i get weird too, it’s a never ending cycle. And it’s kinda…complicated. ”

The van filled with understanding hums and a few teasing but kind jabs from Hye-ri about “toxic hot boys,” but you just refused to categorize him as that. He was mean, and rude, and moody, but toxic?

Was it really toxic if you wanted it that much?

• • •

You stepped into the dorm after what felt like an eternity, the heavy door clicking shut behind you with a sigh of relief.

The familiar scent of vanilla candles and the faint trace of Hye-ri’s strawberry body spray wrapped around you like a hug you didn’t know you needed. She always had this way of spraying the sweetest scents that reminded you of your childhood, back when you weren’t this tormented by fat CEOs (bang pd yes) and executives.

The living room was dimly lit by the string lights Soeun had insisted on hanging last month -soft golden glows that made the space feel less like a high-end prison and more like an actual home. You kicked off your sneakers, letting them thud against the shoe rack, and padded toward your room in socked feet, the cool hardwood a small mercy against your aching soles.

“Unnie, don’t stay up too late doing black magic on James, we’ve got early meetings tomorrow.” Hye-ri called from the kitchen.

She was already raiding the fridge for late-night snacks (cucumbers since the company had made her go on an -unnecessary- diet) Her voice carried that signature playful lilt, the one that always made you snort even when you were drained.

She was teasing you about the last fan rumors: people claiming they’d seen you do black magic on other idols at an award show; when you’d thought black magic meant the kind of princess-and-pony magic that people of color did.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll try not to summon any demons or illuminati…” you shot back, voice tired but teasing.

In your room, you peeled off the oversized hoodie and cargo pants, tossing them into the laundry hamper with more force than necessary. The glitter on your eyelids had survived the day surprisingly well, but it was time to let the armor come off.

You headed straight for the bathroom, twisting the faucet until steam rose in lazy curls. The tub filled slowly as you added a generous scoop of Epsom salts and a few drops of lavender oil -the good stuff your manager had gifted after that brutal comeback week. Sinking into the hot water felt like sinking into oblivion, the heat seeped into your muscles, loosening the knots from hours of dancing and the invisible tension James always left coiled in your chest.

Somehow it all came back to him. Even when it wasn’t inherently about him. God, just one night without thinking about that walking glob of spit and dust, you thought, tilting your head back against the cool porcelain edge while bubbles popped softly around you.

You scrolled through your phone with damp fingers -harmless stuff: fan edits, a few memes Soeun had sent in the group chat, a skincare tutorial that promised to fix “tired eyes.”

For once, James didn’t dominate every corner of your brain. You let yourself float there, eyes half-closed, humming the melody of Enhypen’s new track under your breath.

After the bath, skin flushed and smelling like an Ulta store, you wrapped yourself in a fluffy robe and tackled your mini skincare ritual. Double cleanse, toner, serums layered like a protective spell - your makeup artist Ji-Eun would be proud. You even did the gua sha thing Mina swore by, rolling the cool stone along your jawline while staring at your reflection.

Energized by the warm water and the rare quiet, you settled at your desk in soft lounge shorts and a cropped tank, laptop open.

You had a half-finished lyrics draft for a potential solo track- something about wanting what you shouldn’t. Your fingers hovered over the keys, then dove in, you tweaked melodies on your keyboard setup, layering soft synths over a moody bassline. Time slipped away pleasantly, during which for a solid hour, James was just background noise, a faint echo rather than the main track.

You even laughed at yourself when a particularly cheesy line came out - “heart like a battlefield, but damn if I don’t love the war” -and deleted it immediately. Cringe. But accurate.

Your phone buzzed on the desk beside you, the screen lighting up with a new message. You glanced over, expecting a text from the members’ group chat or a staff alert.

Instead, it was from him. James.

The preview showed an image attachment. Your stomach did that annoying little flip despite everything, what could he possibly have to say that fit into a singular photo?

You opened it. There, in crystal clear detail, was his hand -long fingers, veins prominent, the same hand that had gripped your thighs last night- holding up a pair of familiar red lace panties.

Your red lace panties. The delicate ones with the tiny bow at the front.

Forgot these at my place last week, brat. Figured you might want them back.

Your face heated instantly. That smug fucking asshole.

You could practically hear his raspy voice saying it, that low drawl laced with mockery. You stared at the photo, thumb hovering over the screen.

The panties looked small in his grip, almost fragile against the rough masculinity of his hand. Heat pooled low in your belly uninvited before you locked the phone and set it face down, refusing to give him the satisfaction of an immediate reply.

Ignore. Let him stew.

You tried going back to your lyrics, but the words blurred, then came another buzz, and against your better judgment, you checked.

The same red lace panties, now wrapped tightly around his very hard cock. The fabric stretched obscenely over the thick length, the lace pattern visible where it strained. His hand was gripping the base, thumb pressing just below the head. The lighting in his room was low, shadows accentuating every ridge and vein.

“Fuck,” you whispered aloud, thighs pressing together instinctively, not without a bit of annoyance. Your pulse kicked up, a traitorous warmth spreading between your legs. The image was burned into your retinas now -raw, deliberate and meant to ruin your peace. You typed back quickly, fingers flying:

You: You’re actually deranged. Delete those.

Then, because you couldn’t help poking the bear:

And stop stealing my shit, you klepto

You waited. The typing bubbles appeared… then disappeared with no response. Minutes ticked by. Nothing. You refreshed the chat like an idiot, heart hammering.

Of fucking course. He starts the fire and walks away. This was his sick revenge for yesterday.

The ache between your thighs grew insistent, slick and frustrating. You shifted in your chair, trying to focus on anything else- your laptop, the half-written chorus... But all you could picture was him, lounging in his bed, smirking at his phone while you sat here wet and bothered.

Eventually, you gave up, you brushed your teeth aggressively, changed into an oversized sleep shirt, and crawled into bed.

The sheets felt too warm, too smooth against your sensitized skin, you felt like you were about to blow up any minute, taunt nipples brushing against the mattress. You tossed and turned, the image replaying behind your closed eyelids, his hand, the lace. The way he’d looked at you last night -desperate and furious and hungry all at once.

Your hand slipped under the covers once, hovering, but you stopped yourself with a groan, ‘Not giving him that power tonight.’

• • •

Morning light filtered through your curtains, soft and golden. Your alarm hadn’t even gone off yet when your phone vibrated on the nightstand. Groggy, you reached for it, rubbing sleep from your eyes. And who better than an entitled motherfucker to wake you up when things are already going downhill.

James : Two can play that game, you brat.

You stared at the screen, a slow smile tugging at your lips despite the fresh wave of heat low in your stomach. The dynamic between you two was a live wire -dangerous, addictive, impossible to quit cold turkey.

He pushed, you pushed back harder; he teased, you left him wrecked; he ignored, and you burned.

You : Keep dreaming. Those panties are yours now. Consider it a parting gift.

You set the phone down, stretching languidly under the covers, body still humming from last night’s unresolved tension.

You wondered how long it would take before one of you cracked again.

James : They were already mine, finders keeper.

• • •

The HYBE lobby was already in full morning swing when you pushed through the revolving doors, the familiar sensory assault of cold air conditioning, distant bass lines, and the sharp scent of coffee hitting you all at once. You had your phone pressed against your ear, pretending to be on a call so no one would stop you for small talk, which was a technique you’d perfected to a fine art over the years. Your manager walked three steps behind you, mercifully quiet for once, scrolling through her own device.

You hadn’t replied to James’s last text yet.

That was a choice. A very deliberate, very painful choice, like holding your hand over a candle flame just to prove you could. You were fully aware that the longer you waited, the more it would eat at him, and the thought of James checking his phone every ten minutes with that jaw-tight, eye-twitching irritation he got when he was being ignored made something deeply petty bloom in your chest like a very satisfied flower.

You were not above petty. You had built an entire personality around it.

The elevator dinged open on the third floor and you stepped out into the corridor that ran between the mid-size practice rooms, the ones with the slightly better sound systems that the senior acts got priority access to.

You were scanning your schedule on your phone, half reading, half still replaying his text in your head - two can play that game, you brat- when you nearly walked directly into Park Sunghoon’s elbow.

“Whoa, sorry-” he started, stepping back.

“No, my fault,” you said automatically, phone disappearing into your pocket like you weren’t supposedly on a call, as you offered him a polite smile. He looked mildly alarmed in the way that extremely handsome people sometimes did when they accidentally inconvenienced someone, like they were genuinely surprised their existence had physical consequences. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“Neither was I,” he said easily, readjusting the water bottle under his arm. “Good collab yesterday. You and Riki make everyone else look like they’re moving through concrete.”

“You’re being modest, your lines yesterday were clean,” you said, and meant it.

You headed in opposite directions with nothing more than a nod, which you appreciated. Sunghoon had always struck you as someone who understood the value of not overstaying a conversation. You could respect that.

You were halfway down the hall when you felt it before you saw it -that specific shift in the air quality that your nervous system had apparently been trained, like a very stupid Pavlovian dog, to recognize.

James was coming from the other direction. He had his hood up, headphones around his neck, a coffee in one hand, and the particular walk he had when he’d slept badly -slightly slower than usual, shoulders carrying extra tension, jaw working like he was grinding through something mentally. He looked like a weather system. Specifically, the kind with a rotating center and a name assigned by meteorologists.

You didn’t slow down. Neither did he. You passed each other with approximately forty centimeters of clearance and zero words exchanged.

His eyes slid to yours for exactly one second -dark, unreadable, and annoyingly direct -before you both looked away simultaneously, with the practiced indifference of two people who had touched each other’s skin less than thirty-six hours ago and were now pretending to be strangers in a hallway.

You turned the corner and stood still for two full seconds. “Cool, you thought. “Great. Fantastic. Incredible start to the day.”

Your phone buzzed, and you stared at the screen with the expression of someone watching a car roll slowly into a ditch.

You pocketed your phone with more force than necessary and pushed open the door to Practice Room 3B, where Mina was already stretching in the center of the floor with the serene, unhurried energy of someone who had slept eight full hours and woken up without a single unresolved situationship weighing on their conscience.

It must be nice, you thought, not for the first time, to be Mina.

“You good?” she asked, not looking up from where she was bent over one extended leg, her long extensions fanned across the floor.

“Perfect,” you said, tossing your bag toward the mirror wall. “Completely, entirely, one hundred percent fine.”

She looked up at that, because after 3 years Mina could identify the specific frequency of your lies with the accuracy of military-grade sonar. One perfectly shaped eyebrow climbed toward her hairline.

“Looser king?” she asked.

“Passed him in the hallway.”

“And?”

“Nothing. We didn’t talk.”

Mina made a small, diplomatic humming sound that somehow communicated, I have opinions about this but I love you so I won’t say them right now, which was honestly one of her most advanced social skills. She uncurled from her stretch and stood up with effortless grace. “Hye-ri’s getting coffee downstairs, Soeun already called in that she’s running fifteen minutes behind because she fell back asleep.”

“So out of character,” you said, and meant it with great affection but with extreme sarcasm.

You pulled up the playlist for your current practice track and dropped into a stretch of your own, letting the familiar burn in your hamstrings pull your focus back into your body and away from the seven-layer cake of annoyance currently occupying the front of your mind. Music drifted from the Bluetooth speaker -a pre-release track you’d been given early for choreography study, something with a heavy trap undercurrent and a melody that kept catching on a particular interval you found compelling. You hummed along absently, working through your warm-up sequence.

The thing about dancing -the real thing, the thing you couldn’t explain to people who didn’t do it-was that it required your entire brain. Not just the motor cortex doing its job, but everything: musicality, spatial awareness, emotional translation, split-second physical decision-making.

When you were actually in it, properly in it, there was no room for anything else. No James, no red lace photographs, no hallway eye contact that lasted exactly one second too long to be purely coincidental.

The problem was warm-up. Warm-up was not properly in it yet. Warm-up left your mind running parallel tracks, which meant James had real estate in your head and was currently doing absolutely nothing productive with it.

The door banged open.

“I got oat milk lattes and one matcha because Mina will make that face at me if I don’t.” Hye-ri swept in with a drink carrier, her red nails vivid against the cardboard, wearing a cropped sweatshirt that said PROBLEMS across the chest in block letters that you privately thought was too on the nose for a Tuesday morning.

She set the carrier down and looked between you and Mina with the swift social intelligence of someone who’d grown up reading rooms as a survival skill. “What’d I miss?”

“She passed ‘looser king’ in the hallway,” Mina said, accepting her matcha.

Hye-ri turned to you with the expression of a scientist observing a very predictable chemical reaction. “And?”

“Why does everyone keep asking ‘and’ like something interesting happened?” you said, taking your latte. “Nothing happened. We walked past each other. That’s it.”

“Did you make eye contact?”

“Err… briefly.”

“Did it kill you?”

“A little bit.”

“Okay yeah that tracks.” She dropped onto the floor beside you, tucking her legs into a butterfly stretch. “You know what your problem is? You’re too proud to be the first one to crack and he knows it”

You took a long sip of your latte and stared at the middle distance. “I really need you to not be right about this.”

“Unfortunately,” she said brightly, “I am almost always right. It’s actually a burden how smart and on the point i am.”

“Tragic,” Mina said, very quietly, into her matcha.

The door opened again and Soeun stumbled in looking like she’d been reassembled from several different directions, her hair in a lopsided bun and her bag hanging off one shoulder at an angle that suggested gravity was also conspiring against her this morning. “I’m here, I’m here -the alarm got delayed.. AND I fell asleep, it wasn’t just the falling asleep part-”

“We know,” the three of you said simultaneously.

She dropped her bag and looked at you with sudden alertness, the way she sometimes snapped into clarity completely at random, like a phone screen turning on when you weren’t expecting it. “Did something happen with looser king?”

You looked at the ceiling. “Everyone mind your business,” you said, with all the conviction of someone who was absolutely going to tell them everything eventually and knew it.

Practice went well, which it usually did when you threw yourself into it with the emotional displacement energy you’d developed over years. By the time your choreographer ran you through the new bridge section for the fourth time, you’d stopped thinking in words entirely and were operating purely on music and muscle memory, which was exactly where you liked to be.

Soeun caught the hip accent on the pre-chorus after several attempts and let out a delighted noise that made everyone in the room smile, because Soeun happy about a breakthrough was one of those genuinely contagious joys that didn’t require any context.

Your phone stayed in your bag during practice. That was the rule -the one rule you actually kept consistently. Whatever chaos was happening in the outside world, the practice room was the one place that remained clean.

When you finally surfaced two and a half hours later, sweaty and pleasantly wrung out, you had three messages from James waiting. You sat on the floor against the mirror wall to cool down, water bottle in hand, and read them in order.

James: you know what’s funny

James: you walking out the other day like that

James: pretty sure that’s the most attention you’ve ever paid me

You looked at the screen for a long moment. That was more honest than anything he usually sent.

He wouldn’t have said that if he’d thought it through. He was more careful than that when he was composed. Which meant he’d sent it before he was fully composed, which meant he’d been thinking about it for a while.

You: that’s the saddest thing you’ve ever said to me. and you once told me my stage presence was “mid” so that’s saying something

His reply came in thirty seconds, which told you everything.

James: i was drunk when i said that

You: you’re always drunk when you say the things that actually matter

James: don’t psychoanalyze me before noon

You: it’s 11:47

James: close enough

You: James.

A pause. Longer than the previous ones.

Your chest did the thing it did sometimes -the complicated clench that wasn’t quite longing and wasn’t quite anger but lived in the narrow territory between them where nothing was comfortable and everything was too warm.

James: come get your panties back

You let out a sound that was caught precisely between a laugh and a frustrated groan.

Hye-ri looked up from where she was re-taping her fingers and you held up a hand: don’t ask.

She held both hands up: wasn’t going to. You both knew that was a lie.

You: burn them. keep them. donate them to a museum. I don’t fucking care.

James: you care, you love these panties.

You: I really don’t anymore now that i know you had your filthy hands on it.

James: same hands that had you bent over just last week.

You put your phone face down on the floor and pressed your palms to your eyes.

The maddening, infuriating, genuinely impressive thing about James was that he was a cruel asshole but also so particularly interesting.

You knew the way his mood shifted when he was actually upset versus performing irritation, the minute tension around his eyes that appeared before a real argument. You knew he held his coffee cup with two hands in the morning even though it wasn’t heavy enough to need two hands. You knew he got quieter, not louder, when something actually got to him, and that the loud version -the insults and the jaw clenching and the aggressive proximity- was almost always armor.

You knew his armor better than most people knew his face.

That was the problem, distilled to its ugliest and most honest form. You knew each other too well for any of the distance to actually work. Every exit you staged, every blocked number, every time you walked out his door with something that felt like triumph and tasted like loss- he could see through it. And you could see through his.

It was like trying to hide from someone who had your exact same prescription lenses.

You picked up your phone.

You: fine. I’ll come get them. but if you say anything stupid I’m leaving immediately.

James: define stupid

You: anything that comes out of your mouth

James: so you’re definitely leaving immediately

You: yeah probably

James: tonight?

You: yeah. tonight.

You locked your phone and stood up, rolling your neck until it cracked satisfyingly, and gathered your bag from the corner. Soeun was demonstrating something to Hye-ri near the mirror, both of them half-watching you with the transparent subtlety of people who had not been watching you at all and definitely hadn’t seen any of that.

Mina was on the phone across the room, not looking at you, which was actually the most suspicious thing she could have done.

“Practice is over,” you announced to no one in particular. “Everyone go be beautiful normal people somewhere else.”

“We live with you,” Soeun pointed out helpfully.

“Then go be beautiful normal people in our home.”

“You’re going to see him tonight, aren’t you,” Hye-ri said. It wasn’t a question.

Her blood-red nails caught the overhead lighting as she crossed her arms, expression somewhere between fond and long-suffering, like a person watching their favourite disaster film for the eleventh time. They already knew the ending and were choosing to watch anyway.

You slung your bag over your shoulder, in an exaggerated professional tone “I’m going to retrieve personal property that was stolen from me.”

“In the middle of the night.”

“Theft doesn’t have business hours, Hye-ri.”

She pointed at you with one finger. “You’re going to come home and either look like you got thoroughly fucked or like someone ran you over, and either way I want a full debrief.”

“Absolutely not,” you said, heading for the door.

“I’m setting an alarm!” she called after you.

You waved your hand without turning around, and the door swung shut behind you, and you stood in the corridor for a moment in the particular specific quiet of having made a decision you knew was probably not wise and were going to make anyway, because some gravitational fields were simply too strong to resist with willpower alone.

• • •

The Cortis dorms were exactly as chaotic as they always were at nine in the evening.

You could hear them before you even reached the floor -the specific layered noise of young men ( more like boys) existing loudly and simultaneously, someone’s music bleeding through a closed door, the distant sound of what was either a heated gaming session or a genuine argument, and the unmistakable smell of instant ramen drifting into the corridor like an olfactory welcome mat.

You’d changed before coming. Not dramatically -you weren’t about to give James the satisfaction of thinking you’d dressed for him- but you’d swapped the practice sweats for a pair of black sweatpants and a top that your members’ stylist had described as “effortless,” which felt appropriate. Hair down, lip tint, the same pair of sneakers you’d been wearing all day because you genuinely could not be bothered to perform any harder than this.

You were here on an errand. A retrieval mission.

A very normal, very emotionally uncomplicated visit to collect an item of personal property from a person you definitely did not have complicated feelings about.

This was a lie and you were aware of it.

You raised your knuckles to knock on the main dorm entrance when the door swung open from the inside, and you came face to face with Seonghyeon, who was clearly on his way out with his gym bag and had not been expecting you.

“Oh,” he said. “Hey.”

“Hey,” you said.

A beat of the specific silence that existed between people who knew each other primarily through someone else’s drama.

“He’s in his room,” Seonghyeon offered.

“Cool,” you said. “Thanks.”

He held the door open for you and left, which you appreciated enormously. You stepped inside, where the living room was occupied by Martin on the couch with a controller and Keonho eating ramen at the kitchen counter with the focused energy of someone treating their meal as a professional obligation. Martin glanced up, did a small double take, and then looked back at his screen, Keonho lifted his chopsticks in a gesture that you interpreted as a greeting and possibly also a salute.

“He knows you’re coming?” Keonho asked, not unkindly.

“Allegedly,” you said.

“Cool.” He went back to his ramen. No further questions. You appreciated the Cortis members’ collective commitment to minding their own affairs, which was either a very mature group dynamic or a survival mechanism developed from living with James the tyrant.

You knocked on his door with three sharp raps- not soft, never soft, softness at James’s door felt like conceding something- and waited.

“It’s open,” he called, and his voice was that particular texture it had in the evenings, slightly lower, the performance of the day worn off the edges of it.

You opened the door.

His room was dim, lit by the lamp on his desk and the ambient glow of his monitor, which had a paused game on the screen. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, wearing a black hoodie and sweats, hair doing the specific unstyled thing it did when he’d showered and not thought about it afterward. He looked up when you walked in and said nothing for a moment, just looked at you with that dark, assessing gaze that always felt like being weighed against something.

“You actually came,” he said.

“I said I would.”

“You say a lot of things.”

“So do you,” you said, stepping inside and letting the door fall mostly shut behind you. You crossed your arms, staying near the door, because proximity to James in a dimly lit room after nine pm was a variable that required careful management. “Where are they?”

One corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something more infuriating than a smile. He reached to the nightstand beside his bed without breaking eye contact and held up the red lace, dangling from one finger with a casual ease that made your jaw tighten.

“You came all the way here for these,” he said.

“You made a whole deal out of having them,” you said. “Don’t act so surprised.”

“I’m not surprised.” He set them down on the bed beside him, which meant you’d have to get closer to take them, obviously intentional.

You stared at him for a moment with the knowledge that you saw exactly what was happening and was choosing to walk into it anyway, because what was the alternative - admitting you couldn’t get within arm’s reach of him without losing structural integrity?

Absolutely the fuck not.

You sprint-crossed the room and picked them up.

He caught your wrist. Not hard -barely any pressure at all, really- just the curl of his fingers around your wrist bone in that specific way that your nervous system had apparently mapped and catalogued for immediate betrayal, because your pulse spiked before your brain had even fully processed the contact.

“You’re just gonna leave,” he said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“That was the plan,” you said.

“You’re not going to say anything.”

“I said plenty today. Over text. Which you started, by the way, with your little stupid photos.”

“You could have ignored them.”

“How does one possibly ignore a dick pic?”

“Fair,” His thumb moved slightly against the inside of your wrist, slow and thoughtless in the way that was somehow worse than deliberate.

He was looking up at you from where he sat, which was a strange reversal of the usual geometry between you, and something about it stripped away one of the standard layers of defense.

“You wanna fight?” he asked.

“I always wanna fight with you,” you said honestly.

“Yeah.” A pause. “Me too.”

You looked at him. He looked at you. The lamp threw warm shadows across the angles of his face, and the ramen smell from the kitchen was faintly detectable even here; somewhere down the hall someone scored a goal based on the brief eruption from the living room, and none of it touched the specific atmosphere of this room, which had its own weather system entirely.

“Come here,” he said, quietly. Not commanding, not performing - just that, two words with the pretense stripped out, and that was the version of James that was the most genuinely dangerous because it was the one you couldn’t construct a defense against.

You let the red lace fall from your fingers like it had burned you, the fabric whispering against the nightstand as it landed. James didn’t move at first. He just watched you with that half-lidded stare, the one that always made the air feel thicker, heavier, like the room itself was leaning in.

Then his hand was on your wrist again, firmer this time, tugging you down until your knees hit the edge of the bed between his spread thighs.

You went willingly. That was the worst part -you always went.

His other hand came up to your jaw, thumb pressing just under your chin to tilt your face toward his. “You’re pissed,” he murmured, voice low enough that it vibrated against your skin.

“So are you.”

“Yeah.” His grip tightened, not enough to hurt but enough to remind you he could. “Come here and be pissed with me, then.”

You kissed him first, skill issue. It was immediate, messy, all teeth and frustration, the kind of kiss that felt like an argument with no words. His mouth was hot, demanding, tasting faintly of the mint he’d probably chewed to cover the taste of whatever he’d been stress-eating earlier.

You climbed into his lap without breaking it, knees bracketing his hips, hands fisting in the front of his hoodie like you wanted to rip it off and strangle him with it at the same time.

His hands settled on your hips, fingers flexing against the soft fabric of your sweatpants. Not pulling, not yet. Just holding. Testing.

“You really came all this way just to pretend you don’t want this,” he said, voice low, rough around the edges from the long day.

“I came for my panties,” you answered, even as your hands slid up his chest, feeling the steady thump of his heart under the hoodie. Too fast for someone pretending to be casual.

“Liar.” He tugged you closer with a firm grip, guiding you until you were straddling one of his thighs. The solid pressure of muscle against your core was immediate, warm, and maddening. You had to bite the inside of your cheek to swallow the sound that tried to escape. His thumb slipped beneath the waistband of your sweats, stroking bare skin in slow, lazy circles that sent heat pooling low in your belly. “You always lie when you’re already wet for me.”

“Fuck you,” you whispered, but there was no heat in it. Or maybe there was too much.

He huffed a quiet laugh against your collarbone, then pressed an open-mouthed kiss there, slow and deliberate, teeth grazing just enough to make you shiver. “That’s the plan.”

He took his time, savoring the slow unraveling. Your top came off first, dragged upward by his hands, his calloused palms skimming up your ribs, thumbs brushing the sensitive underside of your breasts before cupping them fully. He watched your face the entire time- cataloguing the way your breath hitched, the flutter of your lashes, the flush creeping across your chest. When he leaned in, mouth closing over one nipple, tongue slow and teasing in wet circles, you let out a shaky exhale and threaded your fingers through his hair, tugging harder than necessary.

James groaned softly against your skin, the vibration traveling straight through you. “Still so fucking sensitive here.”

He switched sides, sucking harder this time, one hand sliding down your stomach until his fingers dipped beneath your waistband. He stroked you through the thin fabric of your underwear first- firm, deliberate circles that made your hips twitch forward involuntarily, chasing the friction.

“James-” you started, voice already fraying. When he finally pushed your sweats and underwear down your thighs, you stood just long enough to kick them away. Naked now, while he was still mostly dressed.

The power imbalance felt deliberate and infuriating.

He pulled you back into his lap fully, both of you facing each other. His hands mapped every inch of your bare back, then lower, squeezing your ass as he rocked you against the hard, insistent line of his cock still trapped in his sweats. The friction was torturous- too much fabric, not enough skin, the heat of him radiating through the material.

You reached between you, palming him firmly, feeling the thick length twitch under your touch. He was hot, already leaking against the fabric. “You’re just as bad,” you muttered against his mouth, stroking him slowly. “Acting like you don’t think about this every single night.”

“I do.” Honest and raw. His voice dropped. “Every fucking night.”

The confession cracked something open in your chest. You shoved his hoodie and shirt up and off in one impatient motion, running your hands over the familiar planes of his chest, the faint ridges of muscle, the tension coiled tight in his shoulders. His breathing had grown heavier, forehead pressed to yours, eyes half-closed as you freed him from his sweats and stroked him skin-to-skin-slow, deliberate pulls that made his hips jerk.

He caught your wrist again -the same one from earlier- and pulled your hand away. “No time.”

And he was right, there was no time indeed. This was a quickie, one of the many you’d had with him, nothing more nothing less.

Then he flipped you onto your back with controlled strength, the narrow dorm bed creaking under the shift in weight. He settled between your thighs, broad shoulders blocking out most of the lamplight. His cock nudged against your entrance, sliding through your slickness in slow, teasing drags against your clit, but never pushing inside. Just rocking, building the ache until your nails dug into his biceps.

You squirmed, nails digging into his biceps. “Stop fucking teasing.”

“Make me.” His smirk was infuriating, but his eyes were dark with the same need clawing at you.

You wrapped your legs around his waist and tried to pull him in, but he resisted, holding your hips down with one hand while the other braced beside your head. He leaned down, kissing you deeply again, then trailed his mouth along your jaw, your neck, sucking a mark just below your ear that would be hell to hide tomorrow.

Only when you were trembling, hips chasing him desperately, did he finally push inside -inch by slow, thick inch. The stretch burned in the best way, filling you completely. Your mouth fell open on a silent cry.

James’s hand clamped over your mouth instantly, palm firm, fingers pressing into your cheek.

“Quiet,” he growled against your ear, voice strained as he bottomed out and stilled, letting you feel every inch of him. “Whole dorm’s still awake. You want them to hear how badly you need my cock?”

You glared at him, but your walls clenched hard around him in response. He hissed through his teeth, eyes fluttering shut for a second before locking back on yours.

He started moving -slow, deep rolls of his hips that dragged against every sensitive spot inside you. Not frantic, not yet. Every thrust was deliberate, angry in its restraint, like he was punishing you both for how much you needed this. The bed creaked softly with each movement. Skin against skin, the faint wet sounds of him sliding in and out, your ragged breathing against his palm.

You moaned into his hand, the sound muffled and desperate. He leaned closer, forehead to forehead again, sweat starting to bead on his skin.

“Feel that?” he whispered, grinding deep on a particularly slow thrust. “So fucking tight. Like you were made for me.”

You bit the side of his palm in retaliation. He chuckled darkly, then snapped his hips harder once, twice, making your eyes roll back before he slowed again, dragging it out.

“Say it,” he demanded, voice barely above a breath. “Tell me you missed this.”

You shook your head stubbornly, even as tears of overwhelming sensation pricked at the corners of your eyes. He pulled almost all the way out -leaving you devastatingly empty-then slid back in so torturously slow you nearly sobbed against his hand.

“Say it.”

“…Missed it,” you mumbled against his palm, the words barely intelligible. “Missed you, asshole.”

His eyes darkened further. The pace picked up gradually - still controlled, but deeper, rougher, hips slapping against yours with more force. Every thrust carried weeks of unsaid fights, missed calls and slammed doors. Anger and longing twisted together until you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

His free hand gripped your thigh, spreading you wider, angling so he hit that spot inside you with every stroke. Your nails raked down his back, leaving red lines you knew he’d feel tomorrow. He groaned low in his throat, pressing his face into your neck, teeth grazing your shoulder as he fucked you harder.

You were close -embarrassingly close both to orgasming and dying apparently- body tightening around him, thighs shaking. James could feel it. He always could.

“Not yet,” he rasped, slowing again, keeping you right on the edge. “Not until I say.”

You whined against his hand, frustrated tears pricking at the corners of your eyes from the intensity of it all. He kissed the corner of your eye, almost gentle, then started moving again -long, dragging strokes that made your toes curl.

When he finally let you tip over, it crashed through you like a wave. Your whole body seized, back arching hard as you came with a broken cry muffled completely by his palm. He fucked you through every wave, hips stuttering only slightly as your orgasm milked him, drawing it out until you were trembling and oversensitive beneath him.

James’s rhythm grew erratic, thrusts turning rough and desperate. His breathing was ragged against your neck, hot and uneven.

“Fuck-fuck, I’m-” The words were barely coherent, growled into your skin. His hand finally slipped from your mouth so he could brace himself better, fingers digging into the sheets beside your head.

He drove into you one last time, burying himself to the hilt so deep you felt it in your stomach. His entire body went rigid above you -muscles locked, back bowing, thighs trembling against yours. A low, guttural groan tore from his throat, raw and broken, vibrating against your collarbone as his hips jerked forward in sharp, involuntary pulses.

You felt every pulse of his release-hot, thick spurts flooding deep inside you, each one accompanied by a helpless grind of his hips, like he was trying to push even deeper, trying to fuse the two of you together. His cock throbbed hard with every wave, the warmth of him spilling and spilling until it started to leak out around where you were joined.

His breath came in harsh, stuttering gasps, his forehead pressed tight to yours, sweat dripping from his hair onto your cheek. For several long seconds he stayed buried inside you, hips making tiny, reflexive movements as the last aftershocks rolled through him, his body shuddering with the intensity of it.

When it finally ebbed, he collapsed half on top of you, heavy and boneless, face buried in the crook of your neck. His heart hammered against your chest, matching the frantic rhythm of your own.

Afterward, the room was very quiet. The lamp was still on. It was always still on, after, because neither of you ever thought to turn it off in the chaos of everything preceding the quiet, and neither of you got up to do it once the quiet arrived.

You lay on your back staring at the ceiling, one arm folded behind your head, and James lay on his stomach beside you with his face turned toward the wall, breathing slowly. The distance between you was maybe four inches of mattress and approximately several miles of everything else.

You stared at the ceiling’s small imperfections. There was a hairline crack in the plaster near the light fixture that described a gentle arc, like a parenthesis opened and never closed. You’d noticed it before. The thought arrived uninvited and you told it to leave.

“You’re thinking too loud,” James said into the pillow.

“You can’t hear thoughts.”

“I can hear yours.” A pause. “You get this specific kind of still when you’re overthinking. Like you stop existing in your body a little bit.”

You said nothing for a moment.

“That’s very observant of you,” you finally said, and your voice came out quieter than you intended but still filled with sarcasm.

“Yeah well.” He shifted, turning his face toward you now, cheek pressed to the pillow, eyes half-closed but watching you in that steady way. “I pay attention.”

“I know you do,” you said. “That’s the problem.”

“Why’s it a problem?”

“Because it makes it hard to pretend this is nothing.”

The words sat in the air between you, neither retracted nor addressed immediately, just existing with the particular weight of something that had been thought many times and said aloud for the first time.

James was quiet for long enough that you started constructing your exit- the mental logistics of gathering your things, the specific tone you’d use to say something deflecting and semi-sharp on your way out, the way you’d walk down the corridor past Keonho and Martin with your expression completely neutral.

“It’s not nothing,” James said.

Two words. Same economy as before.

You turned your head to look at him. He was still watching you, and up close in the lamp light his eyes were less unreadable than usual -or maybe you’d just learned to read them, which was its own problem, its own intimacy you’d never consented to and couldn’t revoke.

“I know,” you said.

“But you’re still gonna leave.”

“Yes.”

“And tomorrow-”

“Tomorrow is tomorrow,” you said.

He held your gaze for another moment, then something settled across his face -not resignation exactly, more like acceptance of a pattern neither of you had figured out how to break yet.

His fingers moved those four inches of mattress and found yours, not interlacing, just his hand covering yours, warm and still.

“Your lash was doing the thing today,” he said, after a moment, gesturing to his own. “The outer corner one.”

You closed your eyes briefly. “I know.”

“Ji-eun never gets it to lay flat.”

The lamp hummed. Somewhere down the hall, the gaming sounds had quieted. The building itself seemed to have settled into its nighttime frequency, that low ambient hum of a structure full of sleeping people, and for a few minutes neither of you moved or spoke.

The four inches of mattress stayed exactly as they were, and his hand stayed on yours, and the ceiling crack remained a parenthesis with no closing bracket.

Eventually you sat up. Found your things in the dimness with the quiet efficiency of someone who’d had to gather herself in worse conditions than this. James watched you without speaking.

You paused at the door.

“The lash always does that,” you said. “Every time. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.”

A beat.

“Some things you don’t get used to, y/n,” he said. “You just keep noticing them.”

You stood in the doorway for one more second, the lamp throwing your shadow long and soft across his floor, and then you walked out and pulled the door behind you with a quiet click that felt like punctuation on a sentence neither of you had finished writing.

Martin had fallen asleep on the couch. Keonho’s bowl was in the drying rack. The corridor was empty and the building was quiet and you walked through it with your sneakers making soft sounds against the floor, the red lace in your jacket pocket, and the careful, fragile weight of it’s not nothing sitting somewhere behind your sternum like a splinter you hadn’t decided what to do with yet.

Your phone buzzed as the elevator doors closed.

James: get home safe

You stared at it for the entire descent.

You: yeah

You pocketed the phone and put on a face mask. The lobby doors opened to the night air, cool and immediate, and you stepped out into it and kept walking, and you didn’t look back at the building, because some things were better approached from a forward direction, even when everything in you wanted to turn around.

Tomorrow was tomorrow.

• • •

One moment you were in the grey half-sleep where everything was soft and unformed, the next your alarm was going off, and the full inventory of last night was loading in your chest like a program with too many files, slow and slightly painful.

It’s not nothing.

You lay there for ninety seconds staring at the ceiling of your own room, which had no interesting cracks, just smooth white plaster and the faint shadow of the curtain moving in the air conditioning.

Then you got up, because lying still with your own thoughts first thing in the morning was a form of self-harm you weren’t willing to engage in today.

This was as damaging as blasting Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain and hoping for the best.

The dorm was quiet. Hye-ri’s alarm hadn’t gone off yet, which meant you had maybe twenty minutes before the building became a person with feelings, specifically loud ones.

You moved through the kitchen on autopilot -kettle, mug, the good green tea Mina kept in the cabinet above the stove that she’d never explicitly said you could have but had also never said you couldn’t. You wrapped both hands around the mug and stood at the kitchen window watching the city do its early morning thing.

James was silent, so were you. But this time maybe you’d been waiting for a different outcome, in that little naive headspace of yours.

You drank your tea and tried not to think about the weight of him inside of you, his hands on your neck.

You thought about it constantly.

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ Who knows - daniel caesar ♫♬♪

The company building had a rooftop that technically wasn’t for general use but that enough people accessed informally that it had developed a small ecosystem of folding chairs, a forgotten umbrella that had been there since at least February.

You’d discovered it eighteen months ago during a particularly brutal comeback period when the practice rooms felt like they were closing in, and you’d been going up there sporadically ever since -not often enough to make it a habit exactly, but enough that it felt like yours in some half-acknowledged way.

You went up there on your lunch break.

Not for any specific reason. The afternoon had a strange texture to it -your schedule had been lighter than usual, a few meetings, a vocal session that had ended early, and you’d found yourself with ninety minutes of unstructured time that felt like a gift you didn’t know how to receive.

Hye-ri had gone to get food with Soeun. Mina was on a call with her family. The practice rooms were occupied by other groups, and the styling suite smelled aggressively of hairspray.

You sat in one of the folding chairs with your knees drawn up and your jacket zipped to your chin, and you looked at the city spread out below in its usual state of organized chaos, and you let yourself be quiet.

It lasted approximately four minutes.

Your phone buzzed.

Not James -a staff notification about next week’s schedule, which you read and immediately forgot.

But the buzz had disrupted the quiet, which made you pick up your phone, which made you open your messages, which meant you were now - magically- looking at the thread with James the way you sometimes prodded a bruise to check if it still hurt.

It did. It reliably did.

You scrolled up. Not far -just enough to see the shape of what the last week looked like in text.

You read it like reading someone else’s story. A very compelling, very dysfunctional someone else’s story.

And that was when the door to the rooftop opened.

You expected staff. Maybe Hye-ri, who had an uncanny ability to locate you regardless of where you went, like a heat-seeking missile with gel nails.

You did not expect Juhoon, who was one of the Cortis members you actually liked -quiet, thoughtful, someone who’d always existed pleasantly on the periphery of the James situation without ever inserting himself into it. He looked mildly surprised to find you there.

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t know you came up here.”

“I didn’t know you did either,” you said. “You can stay. There’s another chair.”

He unfolded it and sat down, stretching his legs out, tilting his face up toward the pale afternoon sky.

“You were at the dorms last night,” he said eventually, not accusatory, just noting.

“Briefly,” you said.

He nodded. Another silence.

“Can I ask you something?” you said.

“Sure.”

“What’s he like,” you said carefully, “when I’m not there?”

Juhoon considered this with the seriousness it deserved, which you appreciated. He wasn’t someone who gave careless answers.

“Quiet,” he said finally. “He’s quieter than people think. The loud thing is-” he paused, choosing words, “-it’s real, but it’s not the whole thing. When he’s actually upset about something he goes very still.”

“I know,” you said, because the question was dumb. You knew James.

“Yeah.” He glanced at you sideways. “I figured you would.”

“Is he-” you stopped.

“What?”

You looked at your phone in your hands. The thread with James still open. “Is he okay?” you asked, and hated that you were asking, and asked it anyway because apparently that particular self-protective instinct was not functioning correctly today.

Juhoon was quiet for a moment. “I think he will be,” he said, which was not the same as yes, and you both knew it, and he said it anyway with the careful honesty of a good friend protecting two people simultaneously.

You nodded slowly.

“You know I like you,” Juhoon said. “And I like him. So I’m not going to say anything about-” he gestured vaguely at the air between you, which was a gesture that somehow communicated the entire last several months with impressive economy. “But I’ll say this. He talks about you without meaning to. Like you come up in the middle of sentences about completely different things. He doesn’t notice he’s doing it.” He paused. “And that’s either really good or it’s-”

“The problem,” you finished.

“Yeah.”

You sat with that, as heavy and as real as it was.

The city hummed below you, indifferent and continuous, and a pigeon landed on the railing six feet away and looked at you with the blank assessment of a creature utterly unbothered by human emotional complexity, which you found enviable.

“Thanks,” you said to Juhoon.

“Didn’t really say anything.”

He nodded once, and you both sat there a while longer in the pale afternoon light, and you didn’t look at your phone again.

• • •

The thing happened at 4:17pm.

You were in the corridor outside the third floor vocal booths, waiting while your vocal coach finished a session with someone else, scrolling through nothing in particular with the half-attention of someone killing time.

The corridor was quiet -just the muffled sound of whoever was in the booth, and the distant hum of the building, and your own low-grade awareness of the afternoon pressing toward evening.

You heard James before you saw him.

Not his voice -you heard his laugh. That specific one, the real one, low and slightly reluctant, the one that sounded like it surprised him every time it came out.

He came around the corner with two of the Cortis members, Martin and Keonho in the animated mid-conversation energy of people who’d just come from something good.

He was gesturing with his coffee cup, and his hood was down, he looked easy in a way he almost never looked when you were in the same space as him.

You registered all of this in approximately two seconds.

He saw you on the third second.

The laugh didn’t stop immediately, but it changed. His body adjusted the way it always did in your presence, that slight shift toward readiness, toward the particular loaded awareness that existed between you like a standing current.

The members with him, noticed. They absorbed the shift with the smooth discretion of people who’d seen it before and kept walking, a natural drift that created a few feet of separation, still present but no longer part of the conversation.

“Hey,” James said. His voice was normal. Easy. The same register as the laugh.

“Hey,” you said.

He stopped near you, coffee cup in hand, and looked at you with that familiar specific attention, and you looked back, and the hallway was quiet between you.

And then Martin said something- not to you, to James, a quick murmured comment accompanied by a grin that you didn’t quite catch -and James’s mouth curved, brief and private, the smile aimed at the floor before he looked back up at you.

“What?” you said.

“Nothing,” he said. “You just look-” he paused, assessing, and the look was warm in a way that your body recognized before your brain did, that specific quality of attention that he reserved for you in your quieter moments. “You look tired.”

“Thanks,” you said flatly.

“I didn’t mean it badly.” A pause. “You were up late.”

“We were both up late.”

“Yeah.” The edge of his mouth moved again. “Worth it though.”

And that was it -that was the specific, small, ordinary thing that should not have been the thing. He said it quietly, almost to himself, genuine and unguarded, the way he sometimes spoke when he forgot to armor himself first.

Worth it though.

Like it was simple. Like the previous months of sharp words and slammed objects and photographs sent to deliberately unravel you and the come-heres were all components of something with a simple arithmetic, something that could be summed up and found to be worth it.

And something in you looked at that -at his face, open and tired and fond in the dim corridor light, at the easy way he’d laughed seconds before you appeared, at the life he had that you orbited and disrupted and were disrupted by in return -and something went very, very quiet.

Worth it though.

Were you? Were you worth it? Was any of this worth it? The way he handed you matches and then acted surprised by the fire?

The way you walked out his door feeling victorious and arrived home feeling like something had been excavated from you?

The way you couldn’t go through a normal workday without your thoughts circling back to him with the tireless repetition of water finding its lowest point?

You thought about Juhoon on the rooftop.

“He talks about you without meaning to. Like you come up in the middle of sentences about completely different things.”

You thought about the way you’d pressed your hand over the candle flame on the rooftop and called the burn worth it, and standing here now you couldn’t find the logic anymore.

Not because James wasn’t -something.

He was something. He was specific and perceptive and genuinely capable of moments that got through every defense you’d ever constructed. He saw the lash.

He was sweet, at times, weaponizing his soft edges just to wreck you even more.

But he also sent those photographs at midnight like a lit match through a letterbox. He called you names and meant it to wound.

He pulled you against him and then held you at arm’s length and then pulled you back again and called the cycle by your name like you were the one maintaining it.

He used your own hunger against you with the practiced ease of someone who’d mapped your weaknesses and filed them for deployment.

And you did the same to him. You knew you did, you matched his cruelty word for word, you showed up when you should have stayed away and stayed away when he was genuinely reaching for something real.

You were doing it to each other.

Equally. Fluently. In a language you’d developed together that was entirely composed of damage dressed up as desire.

Worth it though.

Looking at him now in the corridor, warm and unguarded, the laugh still faintly present in the lines of his face -you felt the pull of it. The specific gravitational field. Of course you did.

You thought you probably always would, in some residual way, the way you could always find north even in an unfamiliar city.

But underneath the pull was something else. Quieter than everything preceding it. An exhaustion so thorough it had become structural, like a building that had been load-bearing something too heavy for too long and had finally taken stock of its own foundation.

You were so tired.

Not of him, exactly. Of this.

Of the version of yourself that existed in this particular orbit -sharp and defended and constantly braced for impact, simultaneously craving the collision and flinching from it.

Winning small battles and losing something larger and more important in increments too gradual to track, until you stood in a corridor at 4:17pm and looked at a boy who could recite the inventory of your small imperfections from memory and felt, for the first time clearly: this is not sustainable.

Not he is terrible. Not the clean narrative of a villain and a victim, which would have been easier.

Just: this specific thing, as it is, is taking more than it’s giving, and has been for long enough that you’ve normalized the deficit.

You’d lied. You’d lied when you said you enjoyed it. You were such a skilled liar.

“I’ll see you around,” you said.

James’s expression shifted slightly, reading the specific quality of your tone in that perceptive way he had. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” you said, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. You felt, in fact, unusually clear. “I’ll see you around, James.”

You walked away before he could respond. Down the corridor, around the corner, past the elevators to the stairwell because you needed the physical rhythm of stairs under your feet, needed something mechanical and grounding while your mind ran its quiet revolution.

You pushed through the stairwell door and sat on the third step from the bottom and held your phone in both hands.

You opened instagram first.

His profile -which you’d visited with the compulsive frequency of someone returning to a bruise- looked back at you.

You pressed block and the account disappeared. Clean and immediate, like a light switched off.

Something moved through your chest -not triumphant, not devastated. Something quieter. Like exhaling after holding your breath for a very long time without realizing.

Twitter. Same motion. Block.

The gesture was so small. The tap of a thumb. And yet each one felt like setting something down that you’d been carrying so long you’d stopped noticing the weight, only registering its absence now as a kind of lightness that was almost disorienting.

You opened your contacts and found his name- no special designation, just ‘bitch ass piece of shit’ because you’d never let yourself do something as revealing as save him with a nickname or a symbol, had maintained that small performative distance even in your own phone as if it proved something.

You looked at it for a moment.

You thought about the hand covering yours in the dark.

You thought about the way he’d said : “it’s not nothing.”

You thought: no. it isn’t. and that’s exactly why.

Because if it were nothing, you could manage it. You’d managed nothing before -the industry was full of nothing, of pleasant meaninglessness and easy transience, and you navigated it fine.

Nothing didn’t keep you up at night. Nothing didn’t send photographs calibrated to your specific vulnerabilities at midnight. Nothing didn’t notice the lash, or the scar, or the way you went still when you were overthinking.

Nothing wasn’t this.

And this, as it existed, was quietly making you less.

In small steady increments, the way weather eroded things: a little more defended, a little less open, a little quicker to reach for the sharp response because you’d trained yourself in this particular sparring match until the reflexes were automatic.

You were funnier about it than you used to be, more armored, more fluent in the language of mutual damage.

None of those were things you wanted to become more of.

You blocked his number.

Then you sat with that for a moment, in the concrete quiet of the stairwell with its faint smell of cleaning product and the distant sound of bass from a practice room somewhere above you, and you breathed. In and out, slow and deliberate, the way your therapist had taught you two years ago during the first bad comeback, the way you sometimes forgot to do when things felt manageable and remembered only in the moments they suddenly didn’t.

You weren’t crying. You noticed this with some surprise. You’d expected to feel something more violent -the hot-eyed, tight-throated thing that sometimes arrived when you made a decision that cost you something.

Instead there was just this: the quiet. The lightness of something set down. The slightly raw feeling of a wound that had been cleaned rather than just covered.

The stairwell door above you opened, and Hye-ri appeared on the landing, looking down at you with an expression that said she had found you by some combination of instinct and dedicated search effort.

“The vocal coach is asking for you,” she said. And then, without being told anything, reading you with the comprehensive accuracy she’d developed over two years of shared space: “What happened?”

You looked up at her. “Nothing bad,” you said, which was true. “I just-” you paused, searching for the right word, and settled on the honest one: “I just put something down.”

She came down the stairs and sat beside you without a word, her red nails bright against the grey concrete, and leaned her shoulder into yours. “Okay,” she said simply, she knew you. Deeply.

You leaned back. Somewhere in the building, in a corridor you’d just walked away from, James was probably still standing with his coffee cup, and he would check his phone at some point tonight and find the specific silence of someone who was no longer there.

You thought about that.

You let yourself think about it fully, without flinching -the version of him that would notice, that would go quiet in that particular way Juhoon had described, that would understand immediately what the silence meant because he understood you with the thorough, inconvenient accuracy of someone who’d been paying attention for too long to pretend otherwise.

It hurt. Of course it hurt. You weren’t going to pretend it didn’t, not even to yourself in the privacy of a stairwell with no audience. He was real and specific and the pull was real and losing access to something real always cost something real, regardless of whether it was the right thing.

“Come on,” Hye-ri said softly, standing up and extending her red-nailed hand. “Vocal coach. Then we’re getting actual food tonight, not cucumbers, I don’t care what the company says.”

You looked at her hand for a moment. Then you took it, and stood up, and pushed through the stairwell door back into the brightness of the corridor.

Your phone stayed in your pocket. Dark and silent and, for the first time in months, entirely your own.

Everything was going to be just fine.

• • •

The first time things started to be the opposite of fine, you genuinely thought it was the bibimbap.

The rehearsal had run a long forty minutes over schedule, which in the industry was practically punctual, but which your body had apparently decided to register as a personal grievance.

You’d been working a new formation for the comeback stage, a complex one with tight partner transitions and a center section that required the kind of sustained core engagement that left you aware of muscles you’d forgotten you had.

By the time your choreographer finally called it, the practice room smelled aggressively of exertion and someone’s sports drink, and all four of you were in various states of pleasant physical destruction.

You’d eaten quickly -bibimbap from the canteen, slightly lukewarm because the timing never quite worked -and then gone straight to the bathroom to change before the evening schedule.

And then you were on your knees on the tile floor, and the bibimbap was no longer a factor in your immediate future.

It wasn’t dramatic. That was the first thing. You’d half-expected, from the limited experience you’d had with this particular activity, something more cinematic -the kind of thing that announced itself with ceremony.

Instead it arrived with very little warning and was over quickly, leaving you kneeling on the cool tile with your hand braced against the wall over the toilet and your eyes watering from the effort, feeling hollowed out and mildly indignant.

You sat back on your heels and assessed.

Okay, you thought. The bibimbap. Obviously.

It had been slightly warm. The canteen had been crowded. These things happened, especially during high-intensity periods when your immune system was presumably stretched thin doing other jobs.

You cleaned yourself up with the efficiency of someone who had no time for lingering, rinsed your mouth, checked your reflection with the critical neutrality of a technician assessing equipment, and concluded that you looked fine. Slightly pale, maybe. Nothing concealer couldn’t manage. Or maybe blush.

You walked out of the bathroom and rejoined your members in the corridor.

“You good?” Soeun asked, with her particular brand of innocent perception.

“Canteen bibimbap,” you said, with the decisive tone of someone closing a subject.

“Oh god,” Hye-ri said, with feeling. “The one with the egg?”

“Yeah i think.”

“I told Mina last week that the egg situation in there was suspicious.”

“You told me the rice situation was suspicious,” Mina said.

“Both can be true.”

And that was it. Subject closed, explanation accepted, the conversation moving on with the easy momentum of people who had too many things on their schedules to linger. You filed it away under resolved and didn’t think about it again.

That was a Tuesday.

The following Monday, it happened again.

This time there was no bibimbap to blame. You’d eaten carefully that morning -plain rice, some steamed vegetables, the kind of breakfast your nutritionist described as clean fuel in a tone that made it sound more appealing than it tasted. You’d felt fine through the morning meeting, fine through the first hour of vocal practice, fine right up until the point where you weren’t.

You made it to the bathroom with enough time to be grateful for small mercies, and then you were back on the tile, and afterward you sat against the wall of the stall for a moment longer than last time, frowning at the middle distance.

A bug, you decided. A stomach bug, obviously. The kind that moved through groups of people living in close proximity with the inevitability of weather. You made a mental note to increase your vitamin intake and drink more water and went back to vocal practice eight minutes later, telling your coach you’d needed a moment.

She’d looked at you with the particular assessment of someone who had worked with idols long enough to recognize the specific vocabulary of I am not telling you the full story and said nothing beyond: “Drink some water.”

You drank some water.

That was Monday.

By the following week, there was a pattern, which you were actively declining to acknowledge as such.

It wasn’t every day. That was part of why the denial was structurally sound -you couldn’t maintain something as dramatic as every day without it becoming impossible to ignore, but the intermittent nature of it allowed you to keep generating individual explanations with the industrious creativity of someone who had decided on the conclusion and was working backward.

The spicy ramen Hye-ri had made on Wednesday. The supplements you’d started for the comeback period, which were new and therefore plausibly adjusting. The general physical demand of rehearsals, which were intensifying as the release date approached. A mild intolerance to something in the canteen, possibly dairy-related, possibly egg-related, possibly the entire canteen in general.

The explanations were plentiful and convenient and you deployed them as needed.

What you were not doing -what you had specifically and deliberately decided not to do- was connect any of it to the three weeks of silence on your phone where a particular contact used to be.

Because that would be absurd. That would be the kind of thing that happened in stupid rom coms, the psychosomatic manifestation of unresolved emotional distress playing out through the digestive system like some kind of humiliating physiological metaphor and bla bla bla.

You were not a drama. You were a professional with a comeback in six weeks and a body that was experiencing a minor and entirely explicable gastrointestinal inconvenience, and the two facts existed in completely separate categories with no relationship to each other whatsoever.

This was your position and you were maintaining it.

The members noticed on a Thursday.

You’d made it through the full rehearsal that day -a good day, actually, one of those sessions where everything clicked in the way that felt like payment for all the sessions that didn’t.

The new formation had finally settled into your bodies collectively, Soeun had nailed the bridge section that had been giving her trouble for two weeks, and your choreographer had used the word clean three times in a row, which in his personal vocabulary was roughly equivalent to a standing ovation.

You’d all come out of it flushed and genuinely pleased, the specific good tired that felt earned rather than depleting.

And then you’d gone quiet in a way that apparently registered.

You were sitting on the practice room floor with your knees pulled up, water bottle in hand, and you’d realized with the distant, clinical awareness of someone observing themselves from a slight remove that you were doing the breathing exercise -the one from your therapist, the slow in and out- and that you were doing it because something in your midsection was making a case for your attention that you were trying to negotiate with.

Not now, you thought, with the weary authority of someone who had been having this exact internal argument for two weeks. Absolutely not, we are at work, this is not the time.

Your body, as it had been doing with increasing frequency, did not find this persuasive.

“Unnie.” Soeun’s voice was careful in the way it got when she was paying close attention, the sleepiness entirely absent. “You’ve gone the color of the practice room wall.”

“I’m fine,” you said. Automatic, immediate.

“You’ve said that every day this week,” Mina said, from across the room. She was watching you with that steady big-sister attention that was nearly impossible to deflect because it didn’t push- it simply waited, patient and completely immovable.

“Because I’ve been fine every day this week,” you said.

“You didn’t eat lunch,” Hye-ri said, sitting down beside you. Her red nails wrapped around her own water bottle. “You said you weren’t hungry. Yesterday you also said you weren’t hungry. The day before-”

“I appreciate the erm… documentation,” you said, “but I’ve just been off my appetite a little. It’s a stomach thing. It’ll pass.”

“How long have you had a stomach thing?” Mina asked.

A pause that lasted approximately one second too long.

“Not long,” you said.

Hye-ri and Mina exchanged a look over your head that you clocked in your peripheral vision and chose not to address, because addressing it would require engaging with the implication of it, and the implication was something you were not prepared to engage with on a Thursday evening in a practice room that smelled of sports drink and effort.

“You should see the company doctor,” Mina said.

“It’s a stomach bug,” you said. “Seeing the company doctor for a stomach bug is-”

“If it’s been more than a week it’s not a stomach bug, it’s something to get checked out,” Mina said, with the gentle inflexibility she deployed when she’d made up her mind about something. “Will you just go? For me?”

You looked at her.

She looked back, and her expression was the one she used when she wasn’t going to negotiate.

“Fine,” you said. “I’ll go.”

Hye-ri patted your knee with one red-nailed hand. “Good. Also eat something tonight. Real food. I’m making the soup.”

“You put too much garlic in the soup.”

“The garlic is medicinal and you’re welcome in advance.”

• • •

Dr. Yeon was in her forties, brisk and perceptive, and she’d been the company’s primary physician long enough to have developed a comprehensive understanding of the specific way this industry affected the people working in it.

You sat on the examination table in your practice clothes and answered her questions with the cooperative honesty of someone who had already decided this was a stomach bug and was simply here to have that confirmed so you could report back to Mina.

She asked when it had started.

You thought about it. “Three weeks ago, maybe. Give or take.”

“Frequency?”

“A few times a week. Not every day. It’s inconsistent.”

“Nausea before, during, or after eating?”

“Both. Sometimes neither, sometimes just-” you paused. “Out of nowhere.”

“Appetite changes?”

“Some.”

“Sleep?”

You thought about your sleep over the last three weeks.

The way you’d been waking at 3am with the disorienting certainty of having been in the middle of something important, finding nothing but the dark ceiling and the ambient city noise.

The way you’d been logging the hours but not quite getting the rest, lying in the accumulated silence of a blocked contact like a room where the furniture had been removed -technically empty, technically fine, somehow echoing.

“Some,” you said.

Dr. Yeon made notes. She asked a few more questions, took your blood pressure, reviewed the standard basics. Then she set her clipboard on the desk and looked at you with the direct, non-judgmental attention of someone who had decided to say something she suspected you might not welcome.

“Everything looks physically normal,” she said. “Nothing alarming in what you’re describing medically. But I want to ask you something and I’d like an honest answer.”

“Okay,” you said, with the composure of someone who already felt the shape of what was coming.

“What’s your stress level been like? The last month or so.”

“Normal,” you said. “Comeback prep. The usual.”

“Anything outside of work?”

He’d taped your hand three times in bed that night.

“Not particularly,” you said.

Dr. Yeon held your gaze for a moment with the particular expression of a medical professional who was not required to believe everything their patient said and who knew it and who was extending the professional courtesy of not saying so directly.

“Physical symptoms without a clear physical cause often have a stress component,” she said carefully. “That’s not to say it’s not real -it is real, your body is experiencing something real. But the body and the mind are less separate than we like to think. Especially in high-demand environments like yours.” A pause. “Is there anything going on that you might be minimizing?”

Minimizing. What an elegant, clinical word for what you were doing.

“I’m managing everything fine,” you said. “Really. I think it’s just the comeback schedule catching up to me.”

She looked at you for one more moment, then nodded once -the small professional nod of someone accepting an answer they did not entirely believe while respecting the patient’s right to give it.

“I’ll have some bloodwork done just to rule things out. In the meantime -eat regularly, even if the appetite isn’t there. Small amounts. Stay hydrated. Prioritize sleep where you can.” She paused. “And if things don’t improve in the next week or two, or if they get worse, I want you back in here.”

“Of course,” you said.

She gave you a mild antinausea prescription and a vitamin supplement recommendation and you thanked her and left, and the door clicked shut behind you with a neat finality, and you stood in the hallway outside her office and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

It’s the comeback schedule, you thought firmly. Obviously.

• • •

The weeks accumulated like sediment, each one depositing its own layer of evidence that you were filtering carefully before it could reach the part of your brain responsible for inconvenient conclusions.

Week three: you lost four pounds without trying, which your stylists noticed before you did when a fitting for the comeback stage outfits required unexpected adjustments.

The head stylist had said nothing beyond a mild professional observation, but she’d looked at you with the same expression Dr. Yeon had used, and you’d looked brightly back and said you’d been working hard and moved on.

Week four: the nausea had developed a schedule of its own, arriving most reliably in the mornings and then subsiding into a low-grade background hum that you’d learned to work around the way you worked around a minor injury - accommodating it, building your day around its rhythms, never quite acknowledging it as something that required real attention.

You were getting very good at working around it.

Your performances didn’t suffer- you made sure of that with a fierce, quiet determination that was, if you were being honest, the closest you came to acknowledging that something was wrong.

You wouldn’t have had to fight that hard to maintain your standard if there hadn’t been something trying to pull it down. The fighting itself was the evidence. But you fought, and your performances stayed clean, and from the outside everything looked like a professional managing a demanding schedule.

Inside, you were having the ongoing conversation with your own body, the one where you kept saying ‘not now’ and it kept saying ‘soon’ with the patient persistence of something that knew it would win eventually.

• • •

You didn’t connect it. You were still not connecting it.

Your mind maintained its position with the stubborn structural integrity of something that knew that connecting it would require feeling it fully, and feeling it fully was- not yet.

Not on a bathroom floor at 2am with a comeback in three weeks and an early call time in five hours.

But your body was keeping its own record, patient and thorough, logging every entry in its own language. The nausea. The weight. The sleep that restored nothing. The 3am fucking ceilings.

It was writing the story you wouldn’t let yourself tell, one quiet symptom at a time.

And eventually, you knew -in the way you knew things you weren’t ready to acknowledge, the knowing that lived below language- eventually, you were going to have to read it.

But you were hiding it from yourself. James’ absence was undeniably taking a toll on your body.

Not in the ways you’d expected grief to present - you’d experienced loss before, in smaller forms, and it had always been recognizable, had always announced itself with the appropriate emotional vocabulary. This was different.

This was quieter and more physical and more insidious, arriving not in waves of feeling but in the baseline functioning of your body simply becoming less efficient at its own operation, like a system running a background process that was consuming more memory than anyone had accounted for.

You weren’t sad, exactly. That was what made it so difficult to identify, so easy to mislabel for so long. You weren’t walking around with the specific weight of sadness on your chest.

You were just -diminished. Running at a capacity slightly below what was normal, in the way that was subtle enough to attribute to other things indefinitely, which you had done, which had worked right up until the moment it hadn’t.

The body didn’t distinguish between kinds of absence.

That was what Dr. Yeon had been trying to tell you in the soft-lit office with the clipboard and the clean bloodwork and the careful professional language.

The body simply registered: something that was here is no longer here. And proceeded to respond to that information with the thoroughness of something that had no access to the reasoning that made the absence make sense -the stairwell logic, the right-decision logic, the this-was-the-healthy-choice logic. All of that lived in the mind.

The body just kept the raw account.

Something was gone. Something that had been present for three years.

And your body, uninterested in the reasoning, had simply begun to reflect that.

• • •

part 2 available soon !

ⓘ ptolemaea

DAY (1)

It was love at first sight when he saw you step into the meeting room, reminding your boss of his schedule later. He admired the way your hair framed your face, tied in a messy bun. You looked ethereal, he couldn't have imagined a girl as beautiful as you in his dreams. He was star struck. He was quickly pulled back to reality at the sound of his boss’s voice.

“Everyone, this is my new secretary. Go on, introduce yourself.”

“Hello everyone, I'm y/n. Nice to meet you all.” 

Your voice was soft, if he could, he'd tape it and play it on loop like it's his favourite song in the entire world. He was so infatuated by you. Unfortunately for him, he has very limited experience in the dating field. How should he approach you?

DAY (290) 

“Oh my god, Sangwon! You're here! He's been throwing dishes and moping since forever.” said Martin.

Sangwon spots him in the corner of the kitchen, a dish in his hand before he smashes it on the floor. He rushed towards him, snatching it from his hand.

“Dude! What the fuck? Why are you smashing plates? Are you alright? Come, sit down.”

He guides him to the couch, cracks open a beer, passing it to him. James takes the beer from his hand, gulping it down in one go. 

“She… She left me, hyung. It's over…”

“Woah, woah… slow down, who? y/n?” 

“She broke up with me… Everything was going so well. Why did she leave me like this?” 

DAY (4)

James steps into the elevator, the faint sound of “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths leaks out of his headphones. Suddenly, you step into the elevator, standing beside him as you wait for it to reach your floor. 

“The Smiths?”

He looks in your direction, mouthing a small “hi”. 

“I love The Smiths”

He takes off his headphones, slipping them around his neck.

“What?” 

“I said I love The Smiths.” 

“Wh- What- You like The Smiths?”

“I love ‘em.” 

The song from his headphones is still faintly playing in the background. 

“To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.” 

You step out of the elevator as the doors open, leaving him flustered and astonished.

“Holy sh-”

DAY (8) 

There's a party in the office today. Everyone's scattered around the room, drinking cheap soda and cocktails. James sees you alone in a corner, drink in your hand. He sees the opportunity and strikes right at it. He walks over to you, almost bumping into a few people but he makes it through the crowd.

“Hey.”

“Hey. You're The Smiths guy.”

“Yeah… I'm James. James Chao.”

“I'm y/n.” 

“Sooo…. y/n. How's it going? Do you like the job?” 

“It's alright. I've always wanted something of my own. I moved here a few months ago, rented an apartment and got my first job. It’s so exciting to be on your own!” 

“Right. I think this is your dream job then?”

“No… I just want to make enough money to travel and support myself. What about you?” 

“Well… I wanted to be a choreographer. Unfortunately, that stuff didn't work out.”

“Well… if that was your dream, I think you should reconsider this job. I think you’d make a pretty solid dancer.” 

“You think so?”

“Yeah.” 

After talking to you at the party, inspiration struck him, he went straight home, looking for songs to choreograph. But, unfortunately for him, that spark was short-lived. He went back to his monotonous routine the next day.

“Guys, I'm officially in love with y/n.”  announced James.

“Dude… what?” said Martin, popping a fry into his mouth.

“You're joking.” said Juhoon.

“You don't understand… I love her! I love the way her hair frames her face,I love her knees,I love the way she says my name, her lips look so plump and glossy, she always has that cherry chapstick on, she smells like vanilla and coffee…” James goes on and on, listing all the things he loves about you. 

“Bro, just because some cute girl likes the same geek shit as you doesn't make her your soulmate.” replied Martin.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” asks James

DAY (27)

“Hey, James, are you going to the karaoke party tonight? the whole office is going.” asked Riki.

“Nah, karaoke and parties aren't really my thing. I'm staying in today.”

“Dude… the whole office is going.” 

“So?”

“The whole office is going.”

“Ohhhhh…..”

The karaoke bar was buzzing with people. People laughing together over trivial things, drinking till they're out of their mind and singing like they've gone through 5 divorces. 5 drunk divorces. 

James takes a sip of his beer before approaching you, he walks in your direction, a smirk on his face.

“Enjoying the show?” 

“Oh. Yeah. I'm singing next.”

“What are you gonna sing?”

“You'll know soon enough. Anyways, you singing anything?”

“Nah, you'd have to get at least 6 beers in me to make me sing.” 

Long story short, James ended up singing the most, he had to physically be removed from stage. It seemed like he had drunk his own body weight. While you, James and Riki walk towards a cab, well, try to walk towards a cab because Riki got so wasted that he couldn't even walk properly as he held onto James’s coat. The cab arrives and he helps Riki inside. 

“Y’know…. y/n… he likes you? He’s likeeeeee madly in loveeee!! All he does it talk about you-”

“Shut up! Shut up! You’re just drunk.” James said as he shoved Riki. 

“But-”

“Goodnight, Riki!” he said, slamming the car door on his face before the cab drove off. 

“So… whatever Riki said… is that true?”

“What? Y’know he always gets wasted and says stupid shit like that. Don’t mind him.”

“Is it true?”

“What… What do you mean by that-”

“James, do you like me?”

“Well… yeah. I do.” 

“I do too.”

“Then that’s settled- WAIT YOU LIKE ME?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Suddenly, out of nowhere., you grab James’s collar, pull him down to your level and kiss him. His eyes widen in shock, barely having any time to process before you let go. You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand. He’s left dumbfounded before you turn around to walk away. 

“Wait! y/n! l-let me walk you home at least!”

DAY (45)

James and you have been going steady for awhile now. You guys often hang around the record store, go to the movies, and walk around LA. Things have been going well. You both act like a couple, you talk on your cellphones, share stolen kisses in the copier room, all silly things new couples do. Your favourite moments with him were the ones where it felt like it was just you two in the entire world, as if everyone else just disappeared. This was one of those moments.

“James, can I open my eyes now?”  

“Yeah.” 

When you open your eyes, you see the familiar decor of his apartment. Confusion etches across your face. 

“Why are we at your place? Weren’t you going to show me something special?”

“I’m showing you a part of me.”

James grabs a boombox from the corner, brings it over and sets it on the floor. He turns the switch on, the sound of the music flowing throughout his apartment. The way he dances to the rhythm is hypnotising, he’s so precise and graceful with his moves as if his body was made to move to the groove of the song. Suddenly, he grabs your hand and pulls you to dance with him.  

“James! I can't dance!”

“Don’t worry, enjoy yourself, I’ll guide you.”

You both dance together- well you at least try. You’re trying to keep up with him but he’s just so good. He tries his best to go at your pace and guide you through it. You almost end up slipping but fortunately, he catches you just in time, your combined laughter filling the room.

As you both lie on the floor, staring up at his ceiling, you turn your head to look at him. 

“James?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t wanna lead you on. I think you’re a great guy but… I’m not looking for anything serious right now. Can we keep it casual?”

Your words fly over James’s head. All he wants is to be with you so he agrees. 

“Yeah… uhm yeah, that’s cool with me.”

DAY (290)

After a couple of weeks go by, James thinks you guys are doing fantastic. He’s hopelessly in love with you and believes you both are a couple. While you, on the other hand, are getting bored of this relationship. It’s so mundane. Go to record stores, talk on the phone, see each other at work, walk around LA, have sex… it’s getting boring. You think it's time to move on now.  

You’re currently sitting at a diner, the smell of pancakes and maple syrup wafting in the air, servers walk around with precision, carrying almost a mountain of plates, the bell rings whenever a customer walks through the door. You think about when you and James went to a bar a few weeks ago and he got into a fight with one of the guys there. It was awful, he got sucker punched in the face and after that night, you were pissed. When you left the bar, he started asking you questions like, “What are we?” “We’re a couple right?” and all you said was “We’re friends, James.” . It was just too much work for you, you couldn’t commit to him if things were going to be like this, you did promise to keep it casual, right?

While you’re lost in your own thoughts, all James can think about is the next morning after the bar fight, where you both lay in your bed, it was the first time where you showed him your humble abode after… well doing what you guys were doing after a few weeks. He remembers how you both made up after that, you attended to him after the fight. The room smelt a bit like antiseptic mixed with the scent of vanilla candles, the sunlight filtered out by the curtains, you both tangled in the same blanket. You tell him about your dreams and how your parents got divorced and how it affected your life. He recalls what you said word by word at that exact moment.

“These are stories one has to earn… I’ve never told this to anyone before.”  

“I guess I'm not just anyone, huh?”

How amusing is that you’re both thinking about the same thing but extremely different parts of it? When you’re with James, it doesn't feel… easy. He’s constantly stressed about your label. While James thought you were his soulmate after that bar fight. He genuinely thought you’re the one for him. Unfortunately, his dreams were about to be shattered in… a good minute. Your voice cuts through his daydreams and he straightens up. 

“Hey, James, let’s not do this anymore.”

“What? Do what? Do you not wanna eat here?” 

“No, I mean us. Whatever we’re doing right now, let’s end it.”

“y/n, are you breaking up with me?!”

“I’m not breaking up with you. We were never a couple, we can't break up.”

“Hey! I get a say in this too! We are a couple!”

“I told you I didn't want anything serious!” You grab your purse from the table and sling it around your shoulder before standing up to leave. 

“Goodbye, James.” You say, before walking towards the door and disappearing in the street outside. 

Fast forward to now, Sangwon is still trying to comfort a drunk James. 

“Dude, she wanted to keep it casual… aside from that, did she ever cheat on you? Did she take advantage of you?”

“No…” 

“James…” 

“Don’t even.” 

DAY (322) 

James hates you. He hates the way you say his name, he hates your outdated haircut, he hates your knobby knees, he hates your chapped lips, he hates how you smell like a hippy candle shop, he hates everything about you. He can’t stand the thought of you. He’s been depressed ever since that. He hates his job even more now. He’s always moping around the office. His boss noticed his unusual behaviour and called him in.

“James… What’s going on with you? You seem sad and all you do is sulk.”

“It’s just that… My girlfriend broke up with me.”

“Oh. Oh… That must be tough, man. Here, I’ll assign you to the funeral  cards so you can put your emotions to good use. Good idea, huh? People mourn their loved ones through your cards while you mourn your dead love by writing them, haha.”

James sighs at his boss’s joke. It does not land. It crashes straight into his chest.

“Very. Funny. Haha.”

DAY (402) 

James is on his way to a coworker’s wedding. After your “break up”, all he got was an awkward email from you, nothing else. He’s boarding the train, bags in his hand until he sees a glimpse of you on the other side. He could recognise your presence in a sea of people easily. He quickly pushes past people, scrambling to his seat before he sets his bags down and makes his way to you. He enters the other carriage and spots you sitting near a window, he runs his hands through his hair before walking up to you. 

“y/n…?”

“James? Oh my god, how have you been? Come sit, sit!”

He settles down before you, his hands on the table.

“Ive been good. Alright, even. What about you, what’s up with you?”

“Ah, nothing much. Got a new apartment elsewhere, new job… way better than my last one. So, where are you headed?”

“Ah, to a coworker’s wedding.”

“You still work there?”

“Yeah.”

Conversation flows easily. You both recall the good times you had together, laughing over something stupid. James thinks, this time the timing is right. It doesn’t take long for him to return to his school-boy mentality. I mean, your chemistry is much more friendly and easy-going than before, right? You even invite him to a party at your new apartment. He’s over the moon! He has time to make things right with you again. He can't miss out on this golden opportunity! Nothing is in his way now.

DAY (408)

James put together one of his best outfits today. He even spritzed some cologne. He was so confident about getting you back! He walks towards your apartment door, flowers in hand and rings your doorbell. You open the door, a glass in hand and you welcome him inside. 

“Oh, James! You didn't have to.”

“Well… I had to get you something, would be rude not to.” 

James looks around the room, it's filled with faces he doesn’t know. He sees a guy approach you both, he comes and stands next to you, wrapping an arm around your waist to pull you closer. James’s jaw tightens.

“Ah, right! I wanted it to be a surprise for you… James, meet Youngjae, my boyfriend- well now, fiance! We got engaged a couple of days back!”

Horror washes over him. All the confidence he had walking here is gone. Just like your relationship. 

“Oh…. That’s great. I’m so happy for you y/n.” 

DAY (442) 

James quit his job at the greeting card company and followed his true passion— dance. He did quite have an episode when he heard about your engagement, there were times he couldn't get out of bed and brushed his teeth with a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Now, he’s doing much better. He’s started choreographing more songs, applied to a couple of jobs to hold him by and even auditioned for a few companies. 

Even then, he’s not completely over you. I mean, how could he be? Not even after like 3 months after your breakup, you’re suddenly engaged to this guy who you probably didn't even know more than him! He’s still mad at you. He never got the closure he wanted.

DAY (488)

James is coming back from one of his auditions today. He decided to take a walk through the park before going home. The park where you both used to frequent. He looks around him, families on picnics, kids chasing each other, couples sharing stolen kisses behind trees, among all this chaos, he finds the park bench you both used to sit on and just…  take up each other's space, he recalls how comfortable that felt. Amidst the crowd, he spots you once again, sitting on that same bench. He approaches you, taking a seat next to you.

“So… how’s life been treating you?”

“Good. Good. What about you?”

“Fine… hey y/n… do you still think about us?” 

“No. I don’t.”

“I… Well… I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause you never wanted to be anyone’s girlfriend and suddenly now you’re someone’s wife.”  

“Surprised me too, yeah.”

“How did it happen?”

“It  just... It happened.”

“Okay, but how? I mean, I don’t get it.” 

“I just woke up one day and I knew.”

“Knew what?” 

“Something that I wasn’t sure about when I was with you.” 

DAY (500) 

James stirs awake, fist fighting with his alarm cock first thing in the morning. After he finally shuts the damn thing off, he pours himself some coffee, he moves towards the front door, picks up his mail and sorts through it. While sorting through a mountain of bills and postcards from his relatives, he spots one labelled from an agency. He quickly rips open the envelope, before reading: 

“Dear James Chao, 

We are delighted to inform you that you have been selected as choreographer for our upcoming trainee group…"