josie

The game started a couple of weddings ago and you could blame it on the couple of drinks you had. The second and third time, you knew that it wasn't just a stupid mistake as much as it was becoming a habit. It never went further than making out, but it still manages to sweep you off your feet.

It has almost become like a mutual agreement. Every wedding you work together became a secret makeout place, and every time Seokmin's hand travelled a bit more, he kissed you a little deeper and he lingered a bit longer.

You have no doubt that today is going to be any different. Arriving at eight in the morning and spending two hours getting the ceremony hall ready before the rest of the party comes in.

Including the person that makes your blood boil and your heart jump.

"Florals for spring?" Seokmin bobs his head, his lip curved upwards. "Groundbreaking."

You shoot him a glance.

He shrugs. "I mean, I have seen more original things."

"If it was for originality, I would've become an artist instead." You wave your hands. "You should do your job. You know, the one I hired you to do. I think the bride and groom will appreciate it if you do."

"The bride has her first look in ten minutes. I have some time."

"Then I advise you to go somewhere else instead of bothering me. I'm busy."

Before you can walk off, Seokmin has already grabbed your wrist. The look in his eyes is intense as they flick to your lips, dark almost. "I have some time," he repeats himself.

"I don't," you manage and pull your hand back. "I'm in the middle of coordinating so grab yourself a coffee before you get to work or whatever you want to do."

"Always so bossy." Seokmin's lips brushed the shell of your ear. "I like that on you."

You push him lightly, even though the heat pools in your stomach. "Save your energy for bridezilla, Seokmin. You can use all of it."

He smiled and brushed past you, his hand sliding to the small of your back. "Excuse me."

Something inside of you is telling you to slap his hand away. Another thing wants that hand in other places.

You don't pay him much attention as he walks off, but his touch lingers. You feel it sparking a flame that you're not waiting for, and the way it makes your heart jump makes you wonder what you hate more: this feeling or Seokmin himself.

The maid of honour walks into the ceremony hall and lets out a long, deep sigh. When she sees you, her cheeks flush. She excuses herself and lingers for a bit before she walks off.

You are moving the bouquets that they left at the entrance when she joins you, grabbing one vase from you.

When you turn to her, she shoots you a small smile.

"Should I ask?"

She shakes her head with a small smile. "Maybe it's best if you don't."

You put the vase down and turn to her. "Maybe I should. What's going on?"

"The bride's pissing me off," she starts and puts her hands on her hips. "I love her to death, but arranging this wedding really brought out the worst in her. And I know it's her big day…"

"I've had this so many times," you respond. "You're far from the first maid of honour to take a breather from a bridezilla."

She chuckles. "She's a horrible bridezilla and I bet she doesn't even realise it."

You shake your head and arrange the last of the bouquets. "I just hope for you that she'll be a little loose on the afterparty. There are brides who are still hammering on every single detail while they're supposed to have fun."

"Putting you out of your job, huh?" She nudges you with a grin.

"It happens every so often, yeah."

She chuckles and looks at the bouquets. "You're doing a good job, though. I don't know if the bride has gotten a chance to express her gratitude, but otherwise I'll make sure she will."

You place a hand on her shoulder and excuse yourself. Through the big sliding doors, you walk outside and take your buzzing phone out of your pocket.

The groomsmen pull up in the street and you wave at them, pointing at the parking lot next to the venue. In the meantime, you confer with the catering about their delay and you shoot the DJ a final text for tonight.

When the groomsmen greet you, you blow your cheeks. One of slaps your back with a laugh before he heads inside, the groom at the end of the line. He shoots you a weak smile before he disappears into the hallway.

You can tell whether a marriage will succeed or fail based on how the day goes. Rewind that, you just need to look at the faces of the loved ones to see what will happen before the day even starts. It's the way the groomsmen are flocked to the groom, or the way the bridemaids trail around so anxiously that you begin to think they might not even want to be there at all. Or when you look at the bride's mother and you see a frown etched into her face when she thinks nobody is looking.

But you see. You see everything and you know exactly which marriages will last and which won't.

When you step inside, the first thing you see is the maid of honour talking to one of the groomsman. By the way her brows are pushed together and the way they're talking in hushed voices, you know nothing good is coming out of that conversation.

She locks eyes with you, but her face remains stale.

You bob your head and make your way to the ceremony hall. You don't quite catch when the seats start filling up, but you greet the guests anyway. As you glance at the front, the groom isn't there. You put a step forward when you feel a hand on your shoulder.

Seokmin pulls you backward and leans in. "You're not going to like what I'm going to tell you," he whispers. The way his lips brush against the shell of your ear makes your heart jump.

You look over your shoulder and arch your eyebrow.

He motions his head toward the kitchen and you decide to follow him, ignoring the curious glances. You lean against the counter as he slides a cup under the machine. "You're going to need this. I promise you, this will be a first for you as well."

You cross your arms. "Just tell me instead of being so secretive, Seokmin."

Seokmin turns to you and the lack of equipment around his neck makes you swallow. He leans against the counter, his rolled up sleeves putting his lower arms on display. "We have another case of cheating," he starts.

"So? The wedding will be blown off." You shrug. "It's not the first time."

"Just wait for what I'm about to tell you next." He gives you the cup of coffee and reaches for his inner pocket. He holds up a small, iron flask. "Want some of this, too?"

"I'm still working."

"Not for long." He puts it back and leans against the counter again. "Turns out that the bride is seeing her — supposed to become — husband on the side. And her actual boyfriend showed up because the maid of honour and best man found out and apparently, the best man called him."

The coffee shoots into your throat. You start coughing and put the cup down. "Excuse me—"

"If I had a coffee when the maid of honour told me, I would've reacted the same."

When the coughing dies down, you stare at Seokmin. You blink a couple of times before shaking your head. "Wait a second. How did nobody know this?"

"According to the maid of honour, the bride told everybody the relationship was over."

You widen your eyes, to which Seokmin bobs his head.

"No wedding for us today. The groom told me to find you and tell you to blow it off."

You wave your hand and grab your cup. "Put some of that stuff in."

"Are you sure?" Seokmin reaches for his pocket again. "It's quite strong—"

"Perfect. Put it in."

He pours a bit of it into your cup, a pungent smell penetrating your nose. You take a spoon and stir it before downing it in one go. The alcohol and heat burn your throat as you make your way back to the ceremony hall.

It's never easy to tell people the wedding has been blown off. If anything, they look at you weird for not knowing more. Or, well, not disclosing more.

The gasps and breaths pulse through the room before it falls silent. Your eyes glide over the crowd, who are looking at each other for solace. As if they're trying to decide who stands up first and leads the way through all of the awkwardness.

You shoot all of them an apologetic smile as they trail down the path that they came towards. Seokmin joins you, but you part ways from him again and grab your phone. You pass the dressing rooms and you hear loud yelling, but you ignore it.

Even though a part of you is nosy. Very nosy.

You walk outside and call the catering first. They're not happy, but you'll make sure to contact them after today to see what you can do for them. The DJ seems more relieved than burdened by the news and your boss is shocked above all else. She tells you that she'll pick it up with them and that you'll only have to worry about turning the venue back into its usual glory.

When you're back inside, the floor is completely empty. You look around at the employees putting the tables back when you spot Seokmin at the front, talking to one of the owners.

His eyes lock onto you and he smiles, the warmth spreading through your chest. He points at you before he walks over with the owner on his trail.

"I thought I'd help you clean up," he says and squeezes your shoulder before he slips away.

You look over your shoulder as he makes his way back to the employee room.

The owner takes the news better than you expected. He claims that he needed one good look at the bride to know that something was off, but you've heard that many times before. You tell him that he can go home and you will take care of the rest. There's no need for him to stay there and you will deliver the key to him on his way home.

He opts to stay instead, but you insist. He can't do anything against your insisting — over the many times you've been at his venue, you've geared up for his attempts — and eventually, he goes home.

As the room is back to its usual community spot, you tell the employees the same.

It's halfway the afternoon, everyone long gone when you finish cleaning up. You sit at a table with your laptop, documenting everything for your boss, when Seokmin joins you.

He shoves a cup forward with a smile and takes a sip of his own.

You take a sip, the alcohol burning the back of your throat so much it makes you wince. "Jesus, how much did you put in this?"

"Enough to compensate for the wild day we've already had when it's barely 3PM," he tells you. When you stare at him, he shrugs. "I can do nice things for you."

"I'm sure you can." You put the cup and down and finish your email. "This is not what I expected to do today. The afterparty they planned was actually quite fun."

Seokmin stretches his arms as he leans back. "I hoped that could be the moment I would have you to myself for a bit. I know I like it the most when it's the afterparty."

You shoot him a look, but your cheeks flush. You turn back to your laptop.

"I mean, I have you to myself now, but there's something about the secrecy…"

"Explains why you get off so easily," you remark and scroll through your spreadsheet. You look back up to see Seokmin deadpanning you and shrug.

He crosses his arms and looks the other way. "I was going to say something nice, but never mind that."

"Hold that thought." You attached the sheet and documents to your email and watch it send before shutting it. You put it back in your bag and take one big swig of your coffee. "Okay, spill thought."

Seokmin shakes head. "Window of opportunity has closed."

"Does that mean 'I reconsidered my kindness?'"

He nods with a sweet smile, making you snort. "I have those moments often."

"I figured. For a very long time I thought there was no good bone in your body." You take your cup in hand and look at him.

His smile fades. "Wait, seriously?"

"No, but I've always found you rather annoying and cocky." You point at him with a grin. "I did notice your reaction there so I think you should spill that thought now, if you're not doing the kind one."

"I don't want you to think I'm an asshole, that's all." He shrugs and takes a sip.

You look at him, a grin playing at your lips.

"No."

"Oh, come on. What's going on?" You ask. When he doesn't reply, you deadpan him. "You've been acting way too normal for your doing anyway today. Usually you would've made it your mission to chase me up the wall."

"Well, maybe I just didn't feel like it today."

"Unlike you, but okay."

Seokmin's gaze makes your heart gallop in your chest. It has an edge, it's clearly visible, but there's something else flickering behind them. Something you haven't seen on him before. He leans back in his seat and downs the rest of his coffee. "I need something stronger for that."

Before he can get up, you grab his wrist. "Seokmin, sit down please."

He does so and pulls his arm back.

"I don't have to know what gets you so worked up all of a sudden, but I don't hate you. You just make my job incredibly difficult sometimes."

"You deserve it for being so uptight." Seokmin nudges you. "You need to loosen up sometimes, sweetheart. All I'm trying to do is putting a smile on that pretty face of yours."

Your cheeks flush with heat. When you look at him, he's fighting everything that's happening underneath the surface.

"I like seeing you smile."

"Is that the thought you needed something stronger for?"

"It's part of it." Seokmin shrugs. "It's nothing, really."

You narrowed your eyes and bobbed your head. "Okay…" You get up from the seat and grab your bag. "I'm going home. You're more than free to join me and we can just order some food and have our own afterparty."

Seokmin shows a flicker of uncertainty as he gets up as well. He smiles at you. "Yeah, sure. Why not?"

You load your stuff in the car and drive off with Seokmin's car behind you. You live just out of town, a neighbourhood where nobody would disturb you. For a city as big as this, you're glad you settled in a quieter part.

You pull into the driveway and grab your stuff as his car pulls up in the street. He parks it behind yours and gets out, observing your house with a hum. He follows you inside and you settle in the garden, the view over a meadow and a small stream running through it.

He holds the beer in his hand as his eyes observe it. "You must never get tired of this view."

"Nope." You settle yourself next to him and lean back. "I'm very lucky to be living here."

"The only thing that scares me is how easy it is to look in your neighbours' gardens."

"We have to be secretive, then."

Seokmin nudges you. "Right here in your garden? I didn't expect you to be so bold."

You snicker and hold your glass of wine up. "Cheers."

"To our own afterparty." He clings his bottle against it gently and takes a sip. He puts it down on the table and exhales. "I can't imagine playing one person like that, let alone two."

You turn your head to the side. "Are you thinking about the bride?"

"I was there when her boyfriend stormed in," Seokmin tells you. "I was taking pictures of the preparations per her request and I don't think I will ever forget the look on his face."

"This was a first for me, too," you say and stare off in the distance. "I had instances where one of them cheated, or where something happened on the day of the wedding, but never this." You shrug. "It happens. I can't be too bothered about it, but I feel bad for the men in this scenario."

He inhales sharply. "I need more of your attitude."

You chuckle. "You'll get there when you see everything so upclose."

He smiles and that's where the conversation dies out. You spend a couple of minutes in silence, then the conversations pick up as if nothing happened. Seokmin asks about your parents, about your life outside of your job and in turn, you ask him about his friends. You were amazed to learn that he's in a group of thirteen, in all stages of their life.

Your heart wants to claw out of your chest when his face lights up. All because he's telling you that he's an uncle. You feel your hands reaching out to him, but you pull back. With a smile on your face, you listen to the stories he tells.

Even past dinner, he still finds things to talk about and you start to realise that you don't mind doing this every day. Coming home after work and having Seokmin over, talking about your days and about your lives. Getting to know each other in more ways than just making out at weddings.

"What did you want to tell me earlier?" You ask. "Otherwise I'll go first."

Seokmin freezes in his seat. His eyes dart to you. "Do you mean the thought that needed something stronger?"

You nod.

He swallows and waves his hand. "Yeah, you go first."

You grab his face and pull him into a kiss. You feel him tense up before he returns it, his hands traveling to your waist. You try to deepen it, but he pulls back.

"Are you sure you want to do this in your garden?" He whispered against your lips. "I don't know how far I'll take it."

You chuckle and kiss him again. "You can go as far as you want to."

He groans and pulls you into his lap. "The magic words."

Your lips connect in a kiss like never before. The heat pools in your stomach as he pushes your top up, his hands leaving a trail of heat on your skin as they slide underneath. You slide your hands underneath his open blouse and push it down. His shoulders tense up under your touch, and he releases a soft groan against your lips when you shift in his lap.

"You have no idea what you do to me," he says in a low tone. "How long I've waited to do more, to be more." He kisses your neck and your stomach tightens. "The secrecy is fun, but I want you every day. Not just in a staff room at a wedding venue."

"Please," you breathed out. Your hands entangle in his hair as he nips on your pulse. "I want you, too, Seokmin. I'm sick of waiting until a wedding to see you again."

"You have me until the day I die."

In your garden that night, you both surrendered to the game that you've been playing. And for the first time in your life, you could live with a draw.

🏷️: @livmarauder ; @cherrypickedxo ; @frayaatiny ; @huiimoon ; @mochisdayone

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Peer Evaluation (Final Submission)

Course: ENG2041 — Contemporary Literature

Project: Final Research Paper

Peer Evaluation for Student: Y/N L/N

Attendance — 10/10

Y/N was never once late to our meetings. In fact, she was always annoyingly punctual and raised hell over me being late by a few minutes. Regardless, Y/N showed incredible discipline and never failed to show up to our meetings to discuss the project, even if she was half dead from the sleepless nights.

Contribution — 10/10

Y/N contributed equally to every stage of the project, if not the most towards the project. The success of this project is mostly owed to her, her sleepless nights and early mornings editing as well as revising the document and slides to ensure absolute perfection. Although, she refused to admit how my edits occasionally improved her work.

Communication — 10/10

Y/N responds to messages regarding the project inhumanely fast for someone who always has her head down in stacks of paper in her favourite spot in the library, specifically the seat next to the window that faces east. She had no issues stating her problems with my research, being firm in her opinions and communicating her concerns in a professional manner. As a result, our project quality had improved dramatically after I (begrudgingly) followed her feedback (though I’d never admit it to her face).

Work ethic — 10/10

Y/N has a work ethic like no other. While I admit that I was annoyed by her constant fixation on the minor details at first, I found myself growing to appreciate her attention to the details that many others, myself included, would glance over. I’ve grown to learn and admire Y/N for she doesn’t leave anything half done. She does everything with 100%, and it clearly shows in the project where everything had been carefully vetted, arranged and presented. I used to think rivalry meant proving I was better than her, but somewhere along the project and spending hours with her, I realised I had stopped trying to outdo her and started trying to become someone who could keep up with her instead.

Strengths

- Ridiculously hardworking

- Somehow always right

- Makes coffee taste less terrible

- Pretending not to laugh at my jokes

- Looks cute when focused

Areas for improvement

If I were to be very honest, there’s not much for Y/N to improve in. She’s somehow both an amazing student, friend and person all at once. Not many can say that, myself included. Many of our batch mates are quick to compare us, but I truly don’t believe I’m even remotely close enough to be compared with her. I’m truly grateful and honoured to have had her as my partner and my rival these past semesters. (Though, she wouldn’t die if she stopped assuming I was only trying to annoy her all the time.)

Additional Comments

Y/N,

I never minded being paired with you. Actually, that’s a lie, because I was relieved.

Truthfully, I spent most of first year trying to find reasons to talk to you. At the time, I was nowhere near your circle. I’m sure you don’t remember, but I had painfully tried to talk to you about your day while Professor Min was talking, and you had hushed me almost immediately in annoyance to focus on the lecture. I was taken aback, but had kept my mouth shut for the remainder of the class. From that day, I kept a respectable distance from you thinking that you had hated my guts— only to realise that you hadn’t even remembered me at all.

I was quite hurt, to be honest. However, the distance allowed me to realise how you drifted towards people like Wonwoo, Jihoon and Junhui. The type of students you could study with or rather the type of students you could compete against (though honestly I’m unsure where Soonyoung fits into that group of yours). It was then I realised that perhaps competing with you would’ve been the easiest excuse to talk to you.

Turns out, arguing with you over stupid things like answer schemes and grades was a terrible strategy, because somewhere between getting paired for the project, rewriting your introductions just to spite you, fighting over your unnecessary Oxford commas, and staying in the library until midnight together when everyone else was at frat parties… I forgot we were supposed to be rivals.

The project’s over now. Soon enough, our semester’s going to be over too. Eventually, we never have to see each other in this class again, and I won’t really have an academic excuse to keep texting you anymore, so I guess I’ll need to be honest instead.

I’ve been in love with you for a while now.

Not because you got along with me in the end, or because we ended up working really well together. I’ve been in love with you long before Professor Min decided we’d make good partners (for the project). The project just gave me more time with you than I ever thought I’d get, and it gave me more to fall in love with.

Final grade — 100/100

I would gladly partner with Y/N again, no questions asked. Maybe I’m a little biased, but Y/N is the most reliable person to choose for a partner. Maybe not just for another assignment, though.

So, I’d like to ask her;

Dinner this Friday? A proper meal, not a cup of instant noodles you dig out of your cupboard at 2am when you can’t fall asleep, not a lunch where I’m buying to save your body from collapsing. A proper dinner, a proper date where we don’t talk about anything academic related the entire night— my treat.

Yours Sincerely,

Yoon Jeonghan

— — —

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Request for Reassignment of Final Project Partner

Dear Y/N,

I hope you have been doing well.

Now that the projects have come to a close, I figured I’d finally reply to the email you sent me at the beginning of the project.

As you know, I wasn’t able to accomodate your request for a change in partners. At the time, I believed it was important to keep the assigned groups unchanged in the interest of fairness.

Having now read your final paper and watched your presentation, I have to say I’m rather glad I did.

The two of you complemented each other’s strengths remarkably well, and it was evident throughout the semester that your collaboration became increasingly natural. Your final submission was one of the strongest projects this cohort has produced, and I suspect neither of you would have achieved quite the same result had I approved the reassignment.

Sometimes the people we least expect to work well with end up challenging us in the ways we need most.

Congratulations once again on an excellent project, and I wish you both all the best moving forward.

Kind regards,

Professor Min

— — —

⋆.˚ ★ — bonus screenshots of jeonghan driving joshua insane for the sake of his crush 🙂‍↕️

m. list

YOUR HEAT BURNS THROUGH YOU LIKE A LIVING THING, TURNING YOUR INSIDES INTO LIVING HELL. Your skin feels too tight, pulling at the edges and cleaning to the sheets beneath you, the sticky surface of your body covered in a thin sheen of perpetual sweat. The only source of relief is Junhui's callused hand moving down your side, his light touch grounding. You shiver as his fingers graze your ribs, your stomach, your thighs, each point of contact only ramping up the furnace under your skin.

You whimper, unable to stop the sound from crawling up the back of your throat. You squeeze your thighs together, the ache so intense that you feel like the room is spinning - or maybe it is, you can't be sure, though it doesn't seem entirely likely.

"I know," Junhui coos, squeezing your thigh a little. "I've got you, baby."

Junhui’s face is close to yours - close enough that you can count each one of his dark, silky eye lashes. He’s pretty like this, his blonde hair falling across his forehead, slightly damp from the shower he’d taken with you earlier that morning. Your eyes trace the careful curve of his lips, landing on your favorite mole just above his pink upper lip. 

Junhui's scent wraps around you then, purposeful and warm to steady your pounding heart and elevated anxiety. He smells like cedar and the black tea he likes to drink in the morning, your brain fracturing a little through the haze of your heat at the familiarity of it.

The bed dips slightly and you glance toward the new weight, suddenly aware of Joshua. He sits with his legs folded beneath him, his dark eyes wide as saucers, bottom lip tucked between his teeth as his gaze darts between you and Junhui. He’s pretty even when he’s nervous, the softness of his face easing you with the sharpness of Junhui. His fingers twist in the sheets like he's unsure what to do with his hands, dark hair a little disheveled from running his hands through it too many times.

Junhui notices it too. Of course he does - he's an alpha. Though he's not the head alpha of this pack, there is very little that Junhui doesn't notice, and right now he's reaching for Joshua gently, an encouraging smile on his face.

"Shua," he murmurs. "Come here."

The beta only hesitates for a moment. You watch him with heavy eyes as he slides closer, the mattress shifting. It jostles you a little and you whine, but Junhui tuts at you gently, his other hand reaching to help Joshua settle near you. You immediately lean toward him, sliding your head across the bed to press it near his knee.

"She needs you," Junhui tells him. His hand restarts tracing patterns on your thigh and you nod, agreeing with him. You do need Joshua - desperately. "I'll show you, yeah?"

"I don't want to hurt her."

"You won't," Junhui assures him. "Like this."

Junhui slides his hand from your leg back up your body until he's cupping the back of your neck, his thumb brushing the sensitive skin of your scent gland. You shudder, feeling your heart flutter as your eyes go unfocused for a second. For a moment, all you can sense is Junhui's thumb against you, not quite scenting you but enough contact to make you press your forehead to Joshua's knee, panting.

"Touch her like this on the other side," Junhui murmurs. "She likes a thumb on her scent gland. You don't have to press. Just put some light pressure."

Joshua follows Junhui's lead, reading a hand to cup the back of your neck and tilt your head up. You look up at him, the light coming in from the window blinding you for a second until his face swims into focus. Joshua is pretty, the slope of his nose perfect and his full lips curling into a smile as his thumb swipes back and forth against your scent gland, making you trill.

It feels good, cedar and juniper twisting together as they settle on either side of you, the weight of them on the mattress making you sink further, their knees brushing your sides. You turn toward Joshua, seeking the calm balance of his cool palm and juniper scent while Junhui's warm cedar presses in.

"You're so warm," Joshua whispers.

"Heat," you croak. "Very hot."

Junhui chuckles. "Everything will be more intense for her right now." His fingers leave your neck to card through your hair, his nails scratching bluntly against your scalp. You melt into it with a soft sound and Joshua smiles down at you. "See? She reacts well. She'll tell you what she needs."

"Touch me," you beg, looking at Joshua through your lashes. "Please."

Joshua complies, his hand sliding down your arm slowly. The slow drag of his fingers over your skin feels like heaven, your eyes rolling back as you lose yourself to the touch. You feel yourself melt into the bed, his touch growing more confident until he's lacing his fingers with yours. You immediately give them a squeeze and he squeezes back, and when you glance at him again, you see the way he's softened a little, happy to be close to you.

"Kiss her," Junhui hums. "She likes that."

Joshua glances down at you and you nod eagerly, sliding up the bed a little to give him room. Hand still wrapped in yours, he leans down to brush his lips against yours. They're soft and questioning at first, barely more than a brush of lips until you make a desperate sound against him and surge forward, kissing him properly.

He complies, deepening the kiss as he lets go of your hand to cradle your head, angling your face toward him. His tongue presses the seam of your lips and you open up for him immediately, the warmth of his mouth and tongue inviting. He tastes like honey and something else sweet and addicting, your own hands coming up to pull him closer.

Kissing Joshua is different from kissing Junhui. Despite Junhui's steady and calm nature, he can be demanding, his kisses severe and consuming. This isn't that. This a languid press of mouths, the soft sweeping of Joshua's tongue along the ridge of your teeth, the bumping of his nose into yours until he's pulling away to catch his breath.

"Perfect," Junhui says quietly. "See how much she needs you?"

Joshua nods, resting his forehead against yours. His pupils are blown wide, nearly swallowing the warm brown of his irises. His lips are pretty and pink, a little swollen from kissing you and you smile, leaning forward to steal another kiss, nipping his bottom lip gently. He laughs into your mouth, letting you steal as much of him as you want, your hunger insatiable.

When you pull back again, his eyes are still closed, his breathing heavier. "Tell me what to do, baby. What do you want?"

The words get stuck in your throat. Cedar and juniper clash in your thoughts, your body locked in the heat so fully that Joshua's words turn to a tangled mess when you try to process them, a frustrated sound working its way up your throat.

"Touch her," Junhui answers for you, sensing the frustration. "Sometimes she struggles to communicate. Just go with the flow and don't worry about being wrong. Your instincts know what to do."

Nodding, Joshua slides his hand from your face down your neck, his fingers lingering over the rapid flutter of your pulse before he drags them to your collarbone, lightly tracing the indents of Soonyoung's teeth from the night before. You arch into his touch, chasing it - craving it - and he makes a small sound of surprise, like he can't believe you need him this much.

"Good." Junhui's hand settles on your waist, keeping you anchored to the bed. "See how she responds? Keep doing."

Joshua listens to the alpha, his touch growing bolder. He leans down and kisses you again, deeper and hungrier and you let it consume you. His hand traces the curves of your body, his fingers curling slightly to drag the blunt edge of his nails down your hips. You moan into his mouth and he moans back, the sound of his despair echoed so acutely that it makes your thoughts turn cottony and thick, sticking together as you shiver.

"Please," you beg, your voice wrecked. "Please."

"Easy, baby," Junhui soothes, bending down to kiss your temple. His own hand slides down to your thigh where he grips you and opens you up, cool air hitting your soaked cunt. "Shua's going to take care of you. Aren't you Shua?"

"Yes," Joshua says, and his voice has dropped, gone rough around the edges in a way you've never heard before.

He kisses down your jaw and your throat, his lips soft, tongue darting out to taste you. You squirm but Junhui keeps you pinned, his hand on your hip and tight as Joshua's mouth finds the sensitive spot where your neck meets your shoulder. He runs the flat of his tongue across the delicate skin there and you cry out as Junhui chuckles. You feel Joshua grin against your skin as he lingers there, sucking at your neck gently, the sensation shooting right through you and turning the pit of your stomach molten.

"Perfect," Junhui murmurs. He lifts the hand off your hip to press Joshua's shoulder. "Lower."

Joshua works his way down your body with his lips, tongue and teeth, each press of his mouth both a burn and balm. His mouth is hot against your sternum, your ribs, the soft skin of your stomach, each kiss like a brand. He's careful as he shifts down the bed and you feel your stomach flip when Junhui pries your legs wider while Joshua slides to his knees at the edge of the bed.

Junhui follows him down, moving to kneel behind Joshua. He wraps himself around Joshua's back, chest pressed close enough that he can hook his chin over Joshua's shoulder so he can murmur directly into the beta's ear. You can see the way Joshua relaxes slightly into Junhui's presence, leaning back into the alpha, turning to press his forehead against Junhui's neck briefly as he breathes him in.

"Start slow," Junhui murmurs, lips dragging against the shell of Joshua's ear. You stare at them between your legs, watching as Junhui's eyes drag up to yours, pupils blown and hungry. He reaches around Joshua, caging him in as he places his hands on your knees, spreading you wider. "She's sensitive, so anything you do will feel overwhelming. I recommend soft licks."

Nodding, Joshua leans forward, his breath ghosting across your inner thigh as he settles close. Your thighs twitch but his grip is firm, keeping you open for Joshua's hungry gaze.

You forget how to breathe, watching as your heart flutters like a humming bird trapped in a cage. Joshua follows Junhui's instructions exactly, dragging his tongue slowly and deliberately through your sticky folds. The sensation punches right through you, your back arching off the bed as a broken sound escapes you, voice cracking. Junhui's hands tighten on our knees, keeping you in place as Joshua's tongue circles your swollen clit.

"Take your time." Junhui nips Joshua's ear playfully and the beta moans, the sound vibrating through you. You twist your hips, the sensation overwhelming. "Hmm. She liked that."

Joshua nods, humming again. Your lashes flutter, heading pushing back into the mattress as his tongue works in long, slow strokes, occasionally using the tip of his tongue to circle your clit with just enough pressure to make you gasp before he dips back down to tease your aching hole. It makes the heat in your blood sing, his mouth soft and warm and wet and fuck.

"Suck gently," Junhui recommends. "That makes her lose it."

"Yeah?" Joshua asks, panting as he pulls away and looks up at you. His eyes are completely blown, lips glossy with your slick. He looks debauched, so different from the polished beta who likes to make you scones on Sundays. "Let me try."

Joshua's lips close around your clit and he sucks gently. The sensation is so intense you nearly sob, your hands coming up to hide your face as your entire body goes tight. He smiles against you, laughing a little as he fastens his mouth to your pussy, sucking in gentle tugs that make your entire bed spin on its axis while Junhui's thumbs stroke small circles on the inside of your knees.

"You're doing so good," Junhui whispers. "I bet she feels so good."

Joshua pulls back just enough to look up at you, his eyes dark and hazy, his lips and chin glistening. The sight of him on his knees with Junhui wrapped around him makes something in your chest crack open, your heart stopping and starting all over again as Joshua smirks and dives back in, confident and hungry.

"Tastes so fucking good," he mumbles, nose bumping your clit. "Could do this all the time."

"Let me taste," Junhui says and leans over Joshua's shoulder.

Joshua turns to face Junhui, letting the alpha steal a wet kiss that's all tongue. You stare, watching as Joshua submits easily to Junhui as the alpha sucks the taste of you right off Joshua's tongue. When they pull apart, Joshua is a little breathless as Junhui grins and glances at you, tongue swiping across the bottom of his lip.

"Delicious."

Junhui pushes Joshua's head forward then and the beta follows right back to your pussy, his tongue finding a rhythm that is slow and devastating, swapping back and forth between broad strokes and focused attention on your clit as he traces patterns that make you writhe.

You feel Joshua's hand slide up your thigh, guided by Junhui's grip on his wrist as he tentatively presses a finger into your wet heat. You gasp, feeling the stretch combined with the flutter of his tongue stealing the breath from your lungs. He curls his finger exactly as Junhui instructs, pressing against your front wall so that you see stars, cursing up at the ceiling as he drags you toward an orgasm.

His tongue works your clit in steady, rhythmic circles while his finger moves inside you, and the dual sensation builds and builds until you're lost in it, suspended in the feeling of an orgasm that waits and waits and waits until it finally breaks and rushes in.

You come hard, your pleasure suddenly having no start or end but a looping, endless twitching of thighs and clenching walls. You grit your teeth, unable to breathe for a few seconds until you finally gasp for air, body loosening slightly. Joshua's mouth is still on you but it's soft now, his tongue soothing and avoiding your clit, finger pressed deep as he sucks at you messily, making little sounds of enjoyment as he does.

"She's so fucking pretty when she comes," Junhui groans. "Fuck."

Joshua pulls back slowly, his lips and chin glistening, eyes dark and hazy as he looks up at you. His lips curl upward, pupils dilated as he presses slick-wet kisses to the sides of your thighs, leaving shiny marks as he goes. Junhui's hands leave your knees, your legs trembling a little as you let them fall open, your muscles turning to jelly.

Junhui reaches for Joshua. "Come here."

Joshua rises on shaky knees and Junhu catches him before he loses his balance, cupping the back of his neck to pull him to his feet and into a kiss. It's slow and deep, and you watch with your heart beating and fingers twisting into the sheets as Junhui gets a taste of you from Joshua's lips before pulling back. He wipes his thumb across Joshua's bottom lip and pops it into his mouth, humming.

"Tastes good." Junhui looks at you and his gaze darkens. "She needs more of you, Shua."

Joshua nods. "I want to give more."

"Slow," Junhui says, dropping his hands to the hem of Joshua's shirt to pull it over his head. The beta shivers and nods, a little dazed as Junhui's nibble fingers pull at the strings on Joshua's sweatpants next. "Slow and deep. She likes hard and fast the first day of heat - that's what Soonyoung took care of last night. Today we just need her to feel it."

Joshua nods, kicking off his sweatpants to crawl onto the bed, shuffling on his knees. You mouth waters at the sight of him, all tan and smooth from summer days spent at the pool, broad at the shoulder and perfectly tapered in the waist. His cock is heavy, the tip swollen with need as he makes a sound in the back of his throat when you reach for him.

He lets you grab his hands, pulling him down for a kiss that tastes like you. You don't mind, sliding your hands through his sweaty hair, nails dragging down the nape of his neck as he hums, pleased. The smell of him calms you down, pheromones soothing and making you sigh into the kiss, melting back into a state of calm as he settles between your legs.

Junhui shifts on the bed then, momentarily distracting you as you break away from Joshua's kiss. Junhui is kneeling on the bed, blonde hair disheveled in the low light. He's stripped down to his sweats, the hard planes of his stomach twitching as he crawls over, his dark eyes fixated on you. His shoulders are just as broad as the beta between your legs, but there's a predatory grace to the way that Junhui moves that makes him sharper.

Joshua makes room for him, sitting up on his knees as he pries you open further at the knees, your thighs stretching in protest. Cool air hits your cunt and you whine, but Joshua shuts you up as he rubs the fat head of his cock against your slick entrance, pressing just enough to stretch you but not enough to slide past. You let out a pathetic noise and he grins until Junhui growls.

"Don't tease her," the alpha warns.

Joshua goes pink in the cheeks, nodding. "Sorry."

Junhui huffs, bending down to cup your face and turn you toward him for a soft kiss. You preen under his affection, leaning toward him to kiss him back eagerly. He laughs, the sound buzzing through your lips and making your head spin as his tongue slides against yours just as Joshua grips your hips and presses his cock into your heat.

It's slow, but it steals your breath away anyway. You gasp against Junhui's mouth, breaking the kiss to glance at where Joshua is focused on sliding home, head ducked down to watch his cock disappear inside of you, his shoulders slick with sweat.

"Fuck," you hiss and Junhui smiles, placing wet kisses against your temple, teeth scraping lightly. "Feels so fucking good."

"Mhmm," Junhui agrees. His lips move to your jaw, sucking the skin there lightly before he licks down to your throat, tongue dancing around your scent gland. You go blank for a minute, vision whiting out until Joshua is pressed in to the hilt. "You're doing so good, baby. So perfect for Shua."

Joshua trembles slightly, tension thrumming through him as he fights to control himself. Where an alpha might start slamming into you, Joshua waits, the stretch and pressure of him pressing against your walls so good that you clench around him on instinct, making him let out a broken laugh.

"So tight, baby," he gasps. "So good."

Junhui hums in agreement, his kisses trailing to your collarbones. "Move now. Long, deep strokes."

Joshua listens, withdrawing slowly so that the drag of him against your walls makes you cry out. He pushes in just as deliberately, snapping his hips so the stroke is deep. It punches the breath from your lungs and you grab onto Junhui, who doesn't mind, letting you dig your nails into his arms and hands as he lavishes attention to the swells of your chest.

The rhythm Joshua sets is torturous, each stroke deep and measured that forces you to feel every inch of him, hitting that spot inside of you that has you mumbling his name, head falling to the side while your legs lock around his hip, keeping him going.

Junhui's hands on your body makes the pleasure spike, his palms sliding up your ribs, thumbs brushing the underside of your breasts before cupping them gently, thumbs flicking over your nipples. You arch into his touch, moaning brokenly, overwhelmed by the feeling of both of them, their skin warm and scents tangled.

Long gone is the ache in your stomach, replaced only by swelling heat and pressure. Long gone is the too-tight skin and the feverish need to be touched, replaced by Junhui's hands and his warm mouth closing around a nipple, sucking and flicking with his tongue until you're nearly sobbing, hands tangling in his damp hair.

"So pretty," he mumbles against your chest. "Look at you taking Joshua so well. Does it feel good, baby? Does he fill you up the way you need/"

"Yes," you whine. "Yes, yes, yes, yes."

Joshua's pace stays steady and unhurried, each thrust making you tighten around him. You can feel how wet you are, slick dripping down the curve of your ass as he picks up his pace a little, feeling the way your orgasm is building, knowing you need to reach it. He grinds into you at the end of each stroke, hitting it just right that your vision starts to blur.

Junhui kisses up your chest, along your throat, finding your mouth again. He kisses you like he has all the time in the world, tongue sliding against yours in a lazy rhythm that mirrors Joshua's strokes. Being between them is overwhelming - Junhui's mouth on yours, his hands on your skin, Joshua buried deep inside you, his hands gripping your waist.

"Shua." Joshua looks up, his hair sticking to his forehead as Junhui leans toward him. "Come here."

Joshua leans forward, still moving inside you, and Junhui catches him in a kiss. You watch through hazy eyes as they kiss above you, Junhui's hand cupping Joshua's jaw, guiding him. The sight of it makes you clench around Joshua and he moans into Junhui's mouth, making the alpha grin.

"She likes to watch," Junhui pants against Joshua's mouth. "Likes knowing how everyone belongs to one another." Junhui's hand slides down Joshua's chest to his hips where he squeezes. "Angle up. She needs it right here."

Joshua adjusts, his hands sliding under your thighs to lift them higher, and when he pushes in again the angle is devastating. He hits that spot inside you dead-on and you nearly scream, your whole body arching up off the bed.

"Dead on," Junhui says with a grin. He leans down again, his mouth finding your ear. "Feel that, baby? Feel how deep he is? He's going to take such good care of you. Going to fuck you slow and perfect until you come so hard."

"You're so wet," Joshua groans, his voice strained. "Fuck I don't know how to last."

"That's the heat," Junhui murmurs against your throat. "You can pick up pace. She's close. She's so good for you, yeah? Pretty little omega."

"Fuck yeah."

The praise makes you whimper, makes fresh slickness coat Joshua's cock in response, their approval making your body sing. Junhui kisses you again, deep and consuming, and you lose yourself in it until you feel Junhui's hands slide down between where Joshua fucks you, his fingers finding your clit. His touch is light, but combined with Joshua's relentless pace, it's enough to tilt you over.

Your orgasm hits you hard and you come with a strangled noise, body jerking upward as Junhui holds you down. Your hand clutch at Junhui's shoulders, nails digging into his skin and sliding down his arms. He doesn't mind, letting out a pleased sound as he and Joshua work you through your orgasm in tandem.

"That's it," Junhui murmurs. "Let go, we've got you."

Joshua groans above you, his rhythm faltering as you clench around him. "Oh fuck- I can't-"

"Come for her," Junhui says softly, and it's permission and command all at once.

Joshua's hips stutter forward one more time, burying himself as deep as he can go, and then he's coming with a broken moan. You feel the pulse of him inside you, the warmth flooding your core, and it draws another aftershock from your own orgasm. His whole body trembles, his hands gripping your hips hard enough to bruise, and the sounds he makes send you soaring, your omega preening at the way your beta loses control for you.

The three of you collapse together in a tangle of limbs and sweat-slick skin, Joshua slumping forward and catching himself on his forearms to avoid crushing you, his face buried in the crook of your neck. His breath comes in hot, ragged pants against your throat as Junhui shifts beside you, one arm sliding you to the side so Joshua can pull out and collapse next to you.

Joshua stays glued to your side, his legs tangled with yours as your joint fluids drip down your thigh. You ignore it, knowing Junhui will deal with it later like he's supposed to. For now, Junhui flops down next to you so you're pinned between them, and reaches over to run his hand down the back of Joshua's neck.

You turn your head to nuzzle into Junhui's chest, breathing him in, while Joshua presses soft kisses to your shoulder. Your heat has quieted to a low simmer, temporarily sated, and in its absence you feel the bone-deep exhaustion and the overwhelming desire to sleep right here between the two of them.

"You did good," Junhui tells Joshua, voice rough.

You feel Joshua's smile against your shoulder. "She's incredible. Both of you."

Turning to face him, you reach up to thread your fingers through his hair, tugging him down for a slow, sweet kiss. When you pull back, Junhui is watching you both with dark, intent eyes. Something shifts in the air - a change in the sharpness to his scent and face that makes your pulse quicken.

Junhui leans in, his hand sliding into your hair to angle your face toward him, and when he kisses you, it's deep and possessive, his tongue claiming as he pulls away with a sharp bite to your lower lip that makes you whimper.

“You've been staring at the door since 7:40. It's currently 8:05. Taehyun's mom's going to walk through it any minute now and you're going to jump like she caught you doing something illegal.”

“I wasn't staring at the door.” You absolutely were staring at the door. 

“Okay.“ Jiwon holds up an oval that's more of a rhombus. “Do these look like chicken eggs to you?”

“They look like abstract art.”

She sticks her tongue out at you. “Okay, well, they're chicken eggs.”

Across the room, Soyeon — who technically works the front desk and has no real business in the classroom during the day, but wanders in anyway whenever she's got a free ten minutes — is refereeing a dispute over a single yellow crayon that has somehow become the most coveted object in the building. Two kids stand on either side of her, red-faced and furious, both absolutely certain of their claim.

“I had it first.”

“I had it first first.”

“There's no such thing as first first,” Soyeon says, with the weary patience of someone who's negotiated with cranky four year olds before breakfast and will again after lunch. “There are, however, eleven other yellow crayons in that bin. I checked.”

Neither kid finds this persuasive. You've learned, over three years, that most classroom diplomacy comes down to waiting people out rather than winning any actual argument, and sure enough, within ninety seconds both of them have abandoned the crayon entirely in favor of a much more interesting pile of dolls in the corner. Soyeon catches your eye over their heads and mouths good luck, and you give her a thumbs up you don't entirely feel yet as she disappears back to the office.

The door opens. It's Taehyun's mother, harried and talking rapidly about a meeting she's clearly already late for, depositing her son and his bag and a granola bar all in one motion before disappearing again in a cloud of strong perfume. Taehyun toddles toward the block corner without acknowledging either of you, which is, frankly, the daycare equivalent of a warm greeting.

You've got four kids in by 8:15, seven by 8:30, and by nine the whole room has that low hum of chaos that means the day's properly begun — someone building a tower, someone destroying a tower, someone crying about the tower's destruction with a passion. Chaewon, three going on forty, sits very seriously at the reading corner turning the pages of a picture book upside down and narrating it with complete confidence.

“That's not what it says,” you tell her, crouching down.

“I know,“ Chaewon says. “I made it better.”

You don't have a response to that, so you let her keep going.

By ten you've got the whole room moving through the usual currents — circle time, then centres, then the slow inevitable descent into midday crankiness over minor grievances that means it's almost snack time. You hand out orange slices and listen to a passionate, incoherent argument between two five-year-olds about whether dogs could, in principle, become doctors, a debate that resolves itself only when someone knocks over the entire bin of blocks and both parties get called away to help clean it up, already having forgotten what they were arguing about in the first place. 

This is the shape of your days, mostly. Small disasters, smaller triumphs, a lot of glitter you'll find in your hair for a week afterward. You do like it — the specific way you like something you didn't expect to love. You'd taken the job out of necessity two summers after a psychology degree that hadn't led anywhere near where you'd planned it would; you'd pictured a clinic, or a research post, or at the very least something with your name on a door, not a room full of glue sticks and orange peels. But somewhere in the middle of your first year you'd looked up from tying somebody's shoe and realised you weren't counting down to anything anymore. You like the kids, you like listening to their absolutely nonsensical debates, and okay, maybe the tantrums aren’t exactly a plus, but when they hand you a badly coloured apple or give the sweetest compliments about your outfit on any given day, your whole heart melts. You think about it sometimes — grad school, or moving away, but never with any real intensity. It could happen, someday, but for now, you’re happy exactly where you are.

Sunday dinner at your mom's is a fixed institution, always at the same table, same mismatched chairs, same argument, most weeks, about whether the good tablecloth is really necessary for a meal that will inevitably involve your younger sister spilling something on it. Agreeing to dinner once a week was one of your mother’s few stipulations when you decided to move out. And now Yuna's twenty-two and home for the summer between the end of her graphic design degree in another city and the beginning of whatever comes next, and she's currently interrogating you about your love life with the particular shamelessness only a younger sibling can manage.

“So nothing's happening with anyone,” she says, not a question.

You roll your eyes. “Correct.”

“Nothing at all. Zero activity.”

“I have a very rich inner life, Yuna, it doesn't all have to be romantic. Hobbies. Friends.”

“I didn't ask about your inner life, I asked if you're seeing anyone.“ Yuna reaches across the table for the rice without asking, which your mother allows only from her, a fact that has been a point of argument for roughly twenty years. “You have like, two friends anyway.”

Unfortunately, your younger sister is entirely correct. 

“I saw that lovely Choi boy last week, actually,” your mom says, entirely too casual about it, spooning more food onto your plate — which is her way of forcing you to stay in your seat. “He asked how you were doing. Very polite about it. He's always been polite, hasn’t he?”

You scoff. “He's flirting with the whole town, Mom, that's just what he does.”

“Mm,“ your mother says, which is not agreement, and also not disagreement, and is in fact the single most infuriating sound a mother can make. “He's been doing it a long time, though, hasn't he? Since you two were teenagers.”

“He asked her to proooom,” Yuna chips in, sing-song, and you promptly kick her under the table. “Ow! Mom!”

“That doesn't mean anything,” you say, over Yuna’s complaint.

“I didn't say it meant anything.” Your mother says it lightly, the way she says most things she actually means incredibly pointedly, a skill you're fairly sure you inherited directly from her and have spent years turning against her at this exact table. “I just think it's interesting that a man can ask about a woman for ten years and it doesn't mean anything, and a woman can turn him down for ten years and that doesn't mean anything either. Sounds like a lot of nothing happening for a very long time.”

“Can we talk about literally anything else,” you groan, rubbing a hand over your eyes. “In fact! We can talk about how Yuna still hasn't found a job,” you offer, and Yuna kicks you back under the table hard enough that you yelp, and your mother laughs, and the conversation moves on, mercifully, to safer ground — Yuna's job search, the neighbour's renovation, whether it's finally time to replace the good tablecloth — but you catch your mom looking at you once more over the course of the meal with an expression you don't examine too closely.

Here's the truth of it, if you're being honest, which you try not to be too often on this particular subject: Seungcheol's been flirting with you since roughly the ninth grade, in the low-grade, no-stakes way he’s never grown out of. But he also flirts with the guy at the post office. He flirts with Ms. Oh, who's sixty-one and unmarried and thinks he's a delight. He flirts with the bartender at the one good bar in town, who's engaged and finds it hilarious. It's not a thing you take personally, mostly, because it so clearly isn't personal — it's just the way it is with him, constant.

Except it's always felt a little more personal directed at you, and you've spent a lot of energy over the years making sure it never gets anywhere near landing. 

You remember the prom thing specifically, with a clarity that time hasn't done much to soften — him leaning against your locker two weeks before, hands in his pockets, asking with a shrug that was trying so hard to look like it didn't matter, and you turning him down before he'd even finished the sentence, because Kim Daeun had told you the week before that he'd asked three other girls the exact same way, and you weren't about to be a fourth. You'd found out later that wasn't true, that you'd actually been the only one he'd asked, but by then the pattern was already set, the reflex already built, and reflexes, you've learned, are a lot harder to unlearn than they are to learn in the first place. He hadn't argued, hadn't sulked, had just said “your loss” and grinned and gone off to ask someone else's opinion on which tie to wear instead, and you remember watching him walk away and feeling, underneath the relief, something that took you another decade to correctly identify as disappointment.

There was something else, too, that came later, and you think about it more than you'd like to admit, because by then you weren't the same girl who'd turned him down at a locker. You were two years into a psychology degree, home for a fortnight over the winter break, feeling like a slightly different person in your own hometown, the way you always did those first few days back, still half in seminar-mode, still analysing everything, including, apparently, yourself. You'd been walking back from your mum's when the sky opened properly, no warning, the kind of rain that soaks through in under a minute, and a car had pulled up alongside you with its window already rolling down before you'd even registered whose it was. Seungcheol in his brother's beat-up sedan, hair already damp from getting out to jog around and open the passenger door for you before you could say anything.

“Get in,” he'd said, entirely reasonable, entirely obvious, and you'd stood there on the curb, drenched, freezing, genuinely unable to think of a single sensible reason to say no, and said no anyway. You'd told him you didn't mind the walk, which was a lie so transparent you'd half expected him to call it, and he hadn't, had just looked at you for a second too long, rain running down from his long fringe onto his cheeks, before he'd said, “Alright,”  and driven off slowly. 

You'd spent the rest of that walk soaked through and furious with yourself in a way you didn't have language for yet, turning it over with the same detached, clinical curiosity you were being trained to turn on everything else that year — why did you say no, what did you think accepting would cost you — and never quite landing on an answer you liked. You remember thinking, absurdly, that you'd learned more about avoidant attachment that semester than you'd ever wanted to know, and that none of it had stopped you doing exactly what the textbook said you would.

You remember the coffee, more recently, and the movie, and the wedding — Soonyoung's cousin's wedding, the one he'd asked you to as a plus-one with an actual paper invitation he'd apparently gone to the trouble of getting an extra copy of, which you'd found both sweet and alarming in equal measure and you had turned down within about four seconds of seeing it, before you could think too hard about why your hands had gone a little unsteady holding it.

You expect it now. Seungcheol borderline flirts every time he sees you; occasionally he pushes his luck and asks you out, with enough time in between that you can’t call him insistent. 

Each time, you refuse it with the specific lightness of someone slamming a door gently enough that it doesn't look like she's slamming it. And each time he's taken it exactly the way he takes everything — with a grin, a shrug, a “your loss” tossed over his shoulder as he walks away completely unbothered, already on to the next joke, the next call, the next whatever. 

So you do the same — you don't examine it. You put it in the same drawer where you keep most things you don't want to look at directly, close it, and go back to your life.

The same week you have that pointed dinner with your mom, you see him at the grocery store — or rather, he sees you. It's a Wednesday, nothing special about it, and you're standing in the cereal aisle trying to decide whether you actually need a box of the good granola or whether that's just a symptom of grocery shopping hungry, when a voice behind you says, “You're gonna want the other kind.”

You close your eyes and take a deep breath, not even bothering to turn around. “I didn’t ask you, Seungcheol.”

“You didn't have to. You've been standing there for a full minute looking at that box.” Seungcheol's got a basket hooked over one arm, and the basket, when you glance at it, contains a box of protein bars, a carton of orange juice (with pulp, which, ew), and a single lime, which tells you absolutely nothing about what he's planning to cook tonight. “The one with the honey clusters. Trust me.”

“I don't take grocery advice from a man whose entire cart is a lime and protein bars.”

“It's a basket, not a cart, and I resent the implication that I don’t know how to grocery shop.” He leans against the shelf, unbothered, like he's got nowhere else to be — which, this being a Wednesday evening and him apparently off shift, he probably doesn't. “You still owe me an answer on Seokmin’s barbecue thing, by the way.”

“That was two years ago, Seungcheol.”

“I have a long memory.”

“You have a selective memory. You don't remember owing Soonyoung forty dollars, but you remember a barbecue invitation from two summers ago.”

“Different category of memory. One's debt. The other's an open wound.” He says it with a hand pressed dramatically to his chest, grinning, and you roll your eyes and put the honey clusters in your cart anyway, which he looks entirely too pleased about.

“Don't,” you say.

“Didn't say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“I was going to say I'm always right about cereal, but sure, put words in my mouth.“ He falls into step beside you as you push toward the dairy section, not because he needs anything there, you're fairly sure, but because this is also just how it goes, has gone, for as long as you can remember: running into each other in the produce aisle or outside the post office or at the one gas station, falling into the same easy rhythm you've had since you were teenagers — like the conversation never really stops, just pauses between sightings. “How's the daycare? Still winning?”

“Every day's a battle, but yes.”

“You could come to Seokmin’s barbecue this year. Renewing my invitation.”

“I'll think about it,” you say, which is what you always say, and he laughs like he already knows what that means, because he does, because you've been having some version of this exact exchange for the better part of a decade — him asking, lightly, for something, you deflecting, lightly, in return. Neither of you ever quite landing anywhere, both of you apparently fine with that. You part ways at the register, him with his lime and his orange juice and his protein bars, you with a cart full of things that will mostly go uneaten, and you don't think about it again until you're halfway through unpacking your groceries at home and realise you're smiling for no reason you can name.

It isn't all banter, though, and it would be doing the whole thing a disservice to pretend it is. There's a version of you two that has nothing to do with the game at all, that surfaces every so often, and you think about one particular evening more than you'd probably admit to anyone, including yourself.

You'd run into him at the diner on the edge of town, the one that's open too late and serves coffee that's either too strong or too watery. He'd been alone in a booth looking like a man who'd had a longer day than usual, sleeves shoved up, staring at a mug he wasn't drinking from. You'd almost kept walking.

“You look like you got hit by that truck of yours,”you'd said, sliding into the booth across from him without being invited, and his look of surprise when he saw you mirrored exactly how you’d felt at your own actions.

“Feels about right.” He hadn't tried to make a joke of it, which was how you knew it was serious. Seungcheol without a joke ready was rare. “There was a house fire. We got everyone out,” he adds quickly, “It’s just — the house. It’s fucked up. Like, it was a couple and their kids, and their dog, and they were — you know. Gutted. Crying and shit. The kids, especially.”

You hadn't said anything clever, because there wasn't anything clever to say, and you'd known enough not to try, from years of watching adults fumble around children in crisis and from a psychology degree that had, in fact, occasionally been useful. 

“You did everything you could,” you'd said eventually, quiet, as he rubbed his hands over his eyes. “I know that's going to sound like nothing to you right now, but it’s true.”

He'd looked up at you properly then, something unguarded in his face that had nothing to do with flirting, nothing to do with the bit — just a kind of tired gratitude that made you want to reach across the table and grab his hand. “They teach you that in your psych degree or what?” he'd asked, attempting for a smile.

You mirror the smile, with a small shrug of your own. “Turns out it's good for something besides making me insufferable at dinner parties.”

That had got a real laugh out of him, short and surprised, and the two of you had sat there for another hour talking about nothing that mattered and everything that did — his brother, your sister,the particular dread of watching a four-year-old take a deep breath right before they’re about to scream the place down. He'd asked you, at one point, about college and your degree — he’d never been to college, of course, and he’d listened to the whole thing like it was the most interesting thing anyone had said to him all week.

You remember thinking, driving home that night, that you liked him best like this, unshowy, unarmoured, asking real questions and actually waiting for the answers — and you remember being immediately furious with yourself for thinking it, and filing the whole evening away in the same drawer as everything else.

Minji's been your friend since third grade, and she's the one person you still talk to who's known you both — you and Seungcheol — long enough to have a real opinion on the whole situation, which she airs freely and often. Today it's as she’s doing her nails, a shade of red she's had you hold the bottle for while she does the other hand, sitting cross-legged on her grandmother's back porch with two iced coffees sweating rings onto the railing between you.

“I saw Seungcheol at the gas station Tuesday,” Minji says without preamble, not looking up from her hand. “He asked if I'd talked to you lately. Very smooth about it. Very casual.“

“He's like that with—”

“If you say 'he's like that with everyone' I'm going to put this nail polish in your hair.“ She caps the bottle, finally looks at you, and there's none of your mother's careful lightness in it, just Minji's usual bluntness, worn soft by nearly twenty years of friendship. “I've watched this specific bit for ten years. I watched it in high school, I watched it through your entire early twenties,and at some point, as your best friend, I have to ask: what exactly are you so afraid of?”

You don’t answer straight away, dropping your gaze to the coffee. You take a sip, fiddle with the straw between your teeth before you sigh, tilt your head back towards the clouds. “He’s not serious. It’s like a game to him.”

“Did someone tell you that or are you just making up your own conclusions?” She arches a perfectly shaped brow. “It’s been years, ___.”

“Yeah, years of playful flirting. There’s literally nothing serious behind it — I turn him down and he laughs, Minji. It’s a joke. We both know it’s a joke.”

“Do you? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like he’s been stuck on you since high school, and you’re too scared of yourself to even give him a chance.”

She always knows how to hit where it hurts, exactly when you need to be hit. Your mouth opens for a second, and then closes as you flounder for something to say. “He’s not stuck on me,” you say finally. “Seriously. We’ve both dated other people, in high school and after.”

“Don’t be purposefully obtuse, you know what I mean. He likes you.”

“Well, he’s never actually said that!”

“Purposefully. Obtuse.” She pokes your forehead after each word. “What are you protecting yourself from here?”

You close your mouth, silenced and sulking about it.

“Because it's not him,” she continues. “He'd catch you. He's been standing there with his arms out for a decade.”

“It's not that simple.”

“It's exactly that simple, you've just made it complicated on purpose because complicated is easier to dismiss than simple.“ She blows on her nails. “He likes you. You like him. It’s the simplest fucking thing ever.”

You don’t say anything, just scowl and sip your coffee. Your best friend is harsh on the best of days, and usually you like it — today, she’s said everything you don’t want to hear.

“Anyway. How's Chaewon? Is she still doing her pirate princess story?”

“She's added a supervillain.”

“Of course she has.” Minji grins, and the conversation slides, mercifully, sideways — into Minji's own things, a promotion she's up for, a guy she's seeing who she's not sure about — and you're grateful for it, for the reminder that your life has edges that don't touch Seungcheol at all, whole rooms of it that are just yours, just Minji's, just the ordinary unremarkable texture of having a friend since you were eight years old. But underneath the rest of the afternoon, everything Minji said keeps surfacing, quiet and insistently plaguing your thoughts.

It's a Tuesday, unremarkable in every way, when Ms. Oh — who owns and runs Little Pines — gathers the staff in the break room after the kids have gone home to go over the calendar for the next month.

“Also,“ she says, near the end, flipping a laminated sheet, “Fire Safety Day's the fourteenth. The station's sending a few of the firemen out to do the usual — stop, drop, roll, let the kids sit in the truck, the whole bit.”

“Cute,“ Soyeon says, refilling her coffee. “The kids’ll love it.”

“Who's coming?” Jiwon asks, because Jiwon asks things you'd rather she didn't, and you’re pretty sure she has a crush on one of Seungcheol’s coworkers, Wonwoo.

“Didn't say. Whoever's on rotation, I'd assume.” Ms. Oh moves on to the field trip permission slips, and you let out a breath you hadn't noticed you were holding, and tell yourself, very firmly, that it doesn't matter who's coming. It's a fire station. There are, by your count, eleven firefighters in this town. The odds are fine. The odds are completely fine. 

You avoid thinking about Choi Seungcheol for the rest of the day. Which is to say, you think about him constantly for the rest of the day.

The morning of the fourteenth arrives, and the kids are beyond excited. They’ve talking about it for a week — Chaewon's drawn what she insists is a fire truck and what everyone else agrees looks more like a very angry snail, and Taehyun's informed you three separate times, with the grave authority of a man delivering breaking news, that firemen have “actual axes.” You've got the kids lined up in the yard by ten, sunscreen reapplied, hats on, when the truck rolls up the gravel drive with the low satisfying rumble that makes every single child under the age of six lose their entire mind at once.

You see him before the truck's even fully stopped. Of course you do. He's hanging half out of the passenger side before it brakes, waving at the kids (who are adorably excited), and something in your chest does the thing it always does — a small, private, entirely inconvenient drop, like missing a stair in the dark.

Choi Seungcheol climbs down in his full gear, helmet under one arm, and crouches immediately to be at eye level with a cluster of four- and five-year-olds who are looking at him like he's personally invented fire trucks. “Who wants to sit in the driver's seat?” he sings, and the resulting scream from twelve small children could probably be heard three towns over.

He's good at this. You'll give him that, freely, the way you give him most things freely except the one thing he actually asks for. He crouches and jokes and lets Chaewon try on his helmet, which swallows her entire head, and gets down on the ground to show a rapt little semicircle of children how the hose attaches, and doesn't once break character even when Taehyun asks him, with total sincerity, whether he's ever fought a dragon. (“Couple times,” Seungcheol says. “Rough guys, dragons. Mostly it's the smoke.”)

The other two firefighters who've come with him, an older woman named Yerin and Soonyoung, who you’d also gone to high school with, do their parts fine, competent and pleasant and funny, but the kids gravitate to Seungcheol easily and instinctively.

You've managed, for a solid twenty minutes, to stay on the opposite side of the gaggle of kids, ostensibly ensuring Beomgyu keeps his hat on. It doesn't last. Around the time the kids are being herded toward the truck to take turns sitting behind the wheel, he peels off from the group and ambles over, helmet tucked under his arm, looking entirely too good for someone who's just spent twenty minutes being climbed on by preschoolers.

“You've got glitter on your face,” he says, by way of hello.

“I always have glitter on my face. It's basically work uniform at this point.”

“It's a good look on you.” He says it easily, the same way he says everything, but his eyes do a quick pass over you before landing back on your face with that brief dimpled smile, and you hate — hate — the small flicker of warmth that swells in your stomach.

“You didn't have to come,” you say, which isn't true, since he clearly did have to come, it's his job, but it's the fastest thing you can think to say that isn't I hoped you wouldn't and also knew you would.

“Somebody's gotta protect this town's youth from the dangers of unattended candles,“ he says solemnly. “It's a calling.“

“Right. Noble.” You pause. “They’re four, by the way.”

“Extremely noble. You should be nicer to me. I'm basically a public servant.”

“I'm always nice to you.”

“You're the meanest person I know,“ he says, delighted, “and I mean that as a compliment to your commitment.”

“Anyway,” he says, looking over to the truck. “The kids are gonna want to come to the station. We usually do that — let them see where the trucks live and everything. I can set it up with your boss if that's alright with you.”

“Sure,” you say, half-listening, half-watching the kids. You’re pretty sure Beomgyu and Yeonjun are going to trip, chasing each other like that. “Whatever's easiest.”

“You'll come too, right? Chaperone duty?”

“That's generally how field trips work, yes.” 

“Good.” He says it satisfied, like it matters, and for just a second something honest surfaces under the joking — you catch it before he tucks it away again, the way you sometimes do, a flash of something steadier than the bit usually allows.

And then, before you can examine that, Chaewon comes sprinting over demanding to know if the truck can go faster than a police car, and he's gone again, crouched down explaining horsepower to a three-year-old with the same total sincerity he used on the dragon question, and you stand there for a second longer than you mean to, watching him, before you make yourself go help Yerin with the hose demonstration instead.

By the time the truck pulls away an hour later, every single kid in the yard is talking about the fire station visit like it's the moon landing. You've got a feeling you won't hear the end of it for a while.

You don't hear the end of it for a while.

For the better part of two weeks, the fire station visit's the single principle of every conversation the four-year-olds have. Taehyun draws the truck again, several times, with increasing and alarming detail about the axes. Chaewon stages an elaborate reenactment during free play in which she plays “the fireman” and assigns you the role of “the person who has to be saved,” which you accept with as much dignity as you can muster while lying on the carpet pretending to be unconscious as a group of kids tug at your legs. Jiwon, of course, finds the whole thing extremely funny.

The days have a way of absorbing whatever's going on with you and continuing regardless, which is, most of the time, a mercy. Circle time happens. Snack time happens. A minor crisis occurs when it's discovered that the class hamster, Mr. Biscuit, has gotten loose sometime overnight, and he's eventually located, after forty tense minutes and one very dramatic search party. Chaewon had refused to take part in said search party, and had instead spent the entire time in the reading corner, insisting Mr. Biscuit would “come back when he was ready,” which, infuriatingly, turns out to be correct.

You also go back to your evenings, which have nothing to do with any of it — a phone call with Yuna where she vents about her job search, an afternoon spent helping Minji repaint her spare room, a Sunday at your mom's where the subject of Seungcheol does not come up even once, a small mercy you're grateful for and slightly suspicious of. Life, in other words, keeps being a whole life, most of which has nothing to do with him at all, which is the thing you keep having to remind yourself of whenever it starts to feel otherwise.

Friday nights, when you're not too wrecked from the week, you go to the bar with Minji and Jimin and a few other friends, because it's the only bar in town worth it. It's not a big fancy place, with its low light,  jukebox, and pool table with a wobble in one of the left legs, but it’s the only place to go, really, unless you want to make the drive into the city.

Minji drags you along after a week of promotion nerves and you go willingly enough. The place is familiar enough to be comfortable even after the tiring week you’ve had, but you’re not really looking to drink too much tonight. 

You've had a few sips of a cocktail by the time the door opens and a loud group of off-duty firefighters spills in, mid-laugh, and naturally, Seungcheol's in the middle of it. He’s saying something that's got Soonyoung doubled over, and you feel the familiar lurch of oh, here we go before you've even fully processed that he's clocked you across the room.

“Oh, this'll be good,” Minji murmurs into her drink, and you kick her under the table, which only makes her grin wider. 

You run into him often, at this bar, so seeing him isn’t really a surprise in itself. He grins at you as he and his friends make their way first to the pool table, and you return the gesture with an awkward nod, and somehow almost drop your drink in the process. 

It’s maybe forty five minutes later that he actually comes over to you. He always does, at least once when you run into each other like this, always comes to say hi, which usually leads into some kind of line.

He waves Dohyun, the bartender, over and orders a whiskey on the rocks, and for a while you just talk, as the ice in his drink melts. Easy, unimportant things, the kind of conversation that happens naturally between two people who've known each other long enough that silence isn't awkward, just comfortable. He tells you about a call they had that week, a cat stuck in a drainpipe that took forty-five minutes and drew a crowd. You tell him about Chaewon's ongoing crusade against the concept of naptime, which makes him laugh so hard he has to put his drink down, not that he’s drank much of it. Somewhere in there Minji peels off to go play pool with Jiwon and Soonyoung, throwing you one loaded look over her shoulder on the way that you very deliberately ignore.

Somehow, the two of you have drifted from the bar itself to a booth in the back corner, and Jiwon's gone home with a wave you barely registered, and Minji's deep in a game of pool she's losing badly and loudly to Soonyoung, and you're sitting closer to him than you were an hour ago without being able to say exactly when that happened. He's telling you something about his brother’s wedding, some story about a groomsman and a dropped ring you're only half following because you've gotten distracted by the way he laughs at his own joke before he even finishes it, the way his hand's landed, at some point, loosely on the back of the booth behind your shoulders, close enough that you can feel the warmth of it without him actually touching you.

“You're not listening,” he says, not offended, just observing.

“I'm listening.”

“What'd I just say?”

“Something about a ring.“

“Close enough.“ He's looking at you in a way that feels different from the usual — like he's forgotten, for a second, to be charming about it. “You've got that look.“

“What look?”

“You’re totally zoning out. That look.”

You snort, aiming for humour. “I'm always zoning out around you.“

“I know,” he says, and there's something in his voice, something almost fond and almost sad at once, so much that it makes your levity fall flat and for a moment neither of you says anything at all. Then he smiles, “You always zone out anyway, though. I remember from school.”

“Please.”

“It’s true! I remember it happening in history class and Miss Lee had to snap her fingers in front of your face!”

Heat crawls up your face. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you remember that! That was in my first week, too, I nearly cried.”

“I remember,” he smiles. “Everyone was talking about the new girl who just moved to town and that was the first time I saw you.”

It's strange, the way ten years can gather themselves into a single quiet second like that — all of it sitting there in the space between his face and yours, close enough now that you can count his eyelashes if you wanted to, which you don't let yourself do, except you do anyway. You think, distantly, of Minji on the porch — he's been standing there with his arms out for a decade — and your mother at the dinner table — sounds like a lot of nothing happening for a very long time — and something in you that's held itself very carefully closed for a very long time simply, without your permission, stops holding.

He leans in, slow enough that you have every opportunity to move. You don't take it.

The kiss, when it happens, isn't clumsy at all, not at first — it's slow, almost unbearably so, like he's been waiting so long for it he's decided to actually take his time now that he's got it, one hand coming up to your jaw so lightly it's almost a question, and you answer it by leaning further in, by letting your hand find the front of his shirt and hold on, and you kiss him back like you mean it, because you do. Then his other hand finds your waist and yours finds the back of his neck and the two of you shift closer in the booth and it turns into something hungrier, less careful.

Somewhere in the bar, distantly, you hear Minji whoop, and you don't even have it in you to be embarrassed.

Then your brain catches up with the rest of you, the way it always eventually does, and you pull back, breathing hard like you've run somewhere. Seungcheol looks a little wrecked, the same way you feel, his hair mussed and his lips a little swollen, and you guess you must look something similar.

“I—” you start, and don't finish, because you don't actually know what comes next. 

“Hey,” he says, low, steady, not moving away, his thumb still resting at your jaw like he’s catching up to the fact that you're pulling out of it. “It's okay, just — ”

“I shouldn't have — ” You're already reaching for your bag, your keys, anything to hold onto that isn't him. “I think I had too much to drink.“

“You didn’t even finish your cocktail,” he says, and he's not smiling now, which is somehow worse than if he had been. “Can we just — talk for a second? I've been wanting to say something for a while, and I know the timing's not— ”

“Cheol, I’m sorry — I — I really think I should go,” you’re fumbling with your bag and your words at the same time.

“I'm not trying to freak you out.” He says it gently, both hands visible now, like he's talking someone down off a ledge, which, you suppose, isn't entirely inaccurate. And his voice speeds up a little, because you’re still gathering your things and avoiding his gaze and it’s his turn to trip over his words: “I just — I like you. Like, actually. I know it's always been the bit, with us, and that's fine, that's — I get why. But I'm not messing around right now. I want you to know that. Can we just talk for a se—?” And he cuts himself off, because you’re standing up.

It's the most honest he's ever been with you, stripped clean of the performance, and it terrifies you in a way you don't have language for at eleven-thirty on a Friday with your pulse still loud in your ears. “Please,” he says, softly, so softly, and his hand brushes against yours, feather-soft. You make the mistake of looking, and he’s gazing up at you from the booth, his eyes pleading and brown and warm and serious.

“I have work in the morning,“ you say, which is a lie, and you both know it's a lie, it’s a fuckin Saturday, but he lets you have it anyway, some tired resignation moving through his face.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “Okay. Get home safe.”

Minji catches you by the door, pool cue still in hand, all the teasing gone out of her face the second she sees yours. “Hey,” she says, softer than you've heard her all night. “You good?”

“I don't know,” you say honestly, and she doesn't push, just squeezes your arm once and tells you she'll call a cab for both of you, and you let her, grateful, not for the first time, that she's known you long enough to know exactly when not to push.

You don't remember much of the ride home. Your hands are shaking slightly as you find your keys at your own front door, and you don't look back toward the bar even once, and you lie awake for a long time afterward turning the whole thing over and over in your head like a stone you can't put down, unable to decide which part scares you more — that he said it, or that some traitorous, long-buried part of you wanted to say something back.

You don't see him again for eleven days, which you know because you count, which you're furious with yourself for doing.

Life continues in the meantime, because it does that, indifferent to the small personal catastrophes you're nursing. There are snacks to portion out and scraped knees to bandage and an entire day on the letter Q that takes far longer than it has any right to. Chaewon's fireman reenactments continue unabated, blessedly innocent of the fact that you now flinch slightly every time she mentions the word. Jiwon notices you're off but, for once, has the mercy not to push, which you appreciate more than you tell her.

Sunday dinner happens in the middle of the eleven days, and you spend most of it pushing rice around your plate while your mother and Yuna talk around you, until your mother, halfway through clearing the table, pauses behind your chair and rests a hand briefly on your shoulder. Not asking anything, just letting you know she's noticed, which somehow makes it harder to hold together than if she'd asked directly. Minji calls twice and you let both calls go to voicemail, not because you don't want to talk to her but because you know exactly what she'll say, and you're not ready yet to hear it out loud, even though some louder part of you already knows she'd be right.

The field trip to the fire station is scheduled for the Thursday of that second week, and you've spent a genuinely humiliating amount of effort trying to get out of it. You ask Jiwon, with what you hope is believable casualness, if there’s any possible way Ms Oh would let you skip it and take a parent chaperone instead. She looks at you like you've suggested trading a kidney.

“Absolutely not. Do you know Ms Oh? No. You're going.”

You haven't been able to think of a version of the truth small enough to hand her, so you let it drop, and here you are on Thursday morning, herding twelve overexcited kids onto a rented minibus with the specific dread of someone walking toward a conversation she's been dodging for a week and a half.

The station's a squat brick building on the edge of downtown, garage doors up, two trucks gleaming in the shade, and the kids lose their minds the second the bus door opens. You busy yourself with headcounts and hand-holding, buying yourself as much time as you reasonably can before you have to actually look at him.

When you do, it isn't what you expect, and somehow that's worse.

Seungcheol is polite. That's the word for it, the only word, and it lands like a slap precisely because it's so foreign coming from him. He greets the kids with the same warmth as before — you'll give him that, he never once lets it touch them — crouching down, letting them climb the truck, patiently explaining the same things he explained a month ago in the daycare yard. 

There's one second, early on, when he glances up and catches your eye across the garage and something almost warm flickers there on instinct, old habit, ten years of muscle memory — before he seems to remember, visibly, and shuts it down, his face resetting into something careful before he looks away again. You watch it happen and wish, immediately, that you hadn't seen it. But mostly, for the rest of the hour, there's none of the usual spark in his eyes when they pass over you, none of the teasing, none of the warmth that's always, always been there even when you were actively trying to shut it down. He nods at you once, says “morning,“ in a tone you've never heard him use on you before and then turns his attention fully to the kids and doesn't look at you again for the better part of an hour.

It should be a relief. Instead, it fucking stings.

Yerin gives the group tour of the trucks. Soonyoung lets three kids at a time try on a real helmet. Seungcheol does his part competently, kindly, and entirely at arm's length from you, and when the visit wraps up and the kids are being herded back toward the bus in a loose, sunscreen-smelling parade, you find yourself hanging back at the garage door while Jiwon does the headcount, because you can't make yourself walk away without saying something, even though you have no idea what the something is.

“Hey,” you say, inadequately.

He's coiling a length of hose that doesn't especially need coiling. “Hey,” he says, not looking up. “Kids have a good time?”

“They loved it. You're good with them.” 

“Yeah, well.” He sets the hose down, finally looks at you, and his face is doing the thing it's been doing all morning — pleasant and closed-off.

“Seungcheol—”

“You should get back to the bus,” he says, not unkindly, which somehow makes it land harder than if he'd been sharp about it. “Don't want to lose a kid on my watch.”

It's a joke, technically, the shape of one, but it comes out flat, missing the thing that always makes his jokes land — that easy, unbothered warmth. You realise, standing there in the wide mouth of the garage with the smell of diesel and rubber hose around you, that you've finally managed it. 

“Okay,” you say, because you can't think of anything else, and you turn and walk back to the bus, and don't let yourself look back at the garage until you're sure the kids can't see your face. You spend the entire drive back with a thick lump in your throat and something burning behind your eyes.

You don't sleep well that night, or the two after it. Your brain keeps circling back to the same three minutes in a garage no matter what you try to distract it with. You go through the motions of your days competently enough — nobody at Little Pines seems to notice anything beyond your slightly quieter mood, which you blame on being tired — but underneath the surface you're doing the thing you've always been careful never to do where he's concerned: you're actually thinking about it. 

You skip Friday at the bar that week, and the one after, telling Jiwon and Soyeon you're just tired, which is half true. Minji shows up at your apartment uninvited the same night with a bag of takeout and an expression that says she's done waiting for you to call her back, and you let her in because you don't have it in you to pretend anymore, not to her.

“Okay,” Minji says, setting the containers out on your coffee table like she's settling in for a long negotiation, which, you suspect, she is. “Talk. All of it. I already know something happened at the bar, I was there for the whoop-worthy part, I just don't know the rest.”

So you tell her. All of it — the kiss, what he said after, the eleven days, the garage, the way his face had gone so carefully closed you almost hadn't recognised him. Minji listens without interrupting, which for Minji is its own kind of remarkable, and when you finally run out of words she doesn't say I told you so, which you'd braced for, and which you almost wish she had, because instead she just looks at you, steady and a little sad on your behalf, and says, “You know what you have to do.”

“I know what I have to do.”

“So why haven't you done it yet.”

“Because I've never actually done this before,” you admit, and it's the truest thing you've said out loud in two weeks. “Turning him down, that I know how to do. That's years of practice. I don't know how to do the other thing.“

“Nobody knows how to do the other thing,” Minji says, not unkindly. “You just do it anyway.”

You think about the ten years of it, after she leaves, sitting alone with the takeout containers cooling on your table — the prom, the rain, the coffee you never got, the wedding you didn't go to as anyone's plus-one, every single time you took the easy warm shape of his affection and handed it back to him like something you couldn't use. 

You think about how none of it ever once made him flinch, how you told yourself that meant it didn't matter to him, when really (you can see it now, uncomfortably clearly) it probably meant the opposite. It meant he’d turned the flirting into a joke on purpose, so a no from you never actually cost him anything. But then — keeping it up, over and over, for years, because some idiotic, hopeful part of him had apparently decided you were worth that particular patience.

And you'd spent that same decade telling yourself it was nothing more than a bit, because the alternative — that it wasn't nothing, that it never had been, and that you might actually want it back — was a door you weren't ready to open.

By Sunday you’ve waded into your thoughts deep enough that you can't ignore it anymore. You sit on your kitchen counter with a cup of tea you're not drinking and you make yourself actually look at the thing you've kept in the drawer for ten years, and what you find, when you finally look, isn't complicated at all. It never was. You'd just been very good at making it look that way.

It occurs to you, sitting there with your tea going cold, that obviously, you’ve dated other people since the ninth grade, even been serious with one or two, and none of them ever tied you up in knots the way this has. 

It’s not that they mattered less. It’s that none of them were Choi Seungcheol, who’d been the easiest person in your entire year to like, who’d had half the school a little bit in love with him since he was fifteen, and you’d been so sure back then that a boy like that leaning against your locker was a joke because the alternative — that he meant it, about you, specifically — just didn’t make sense.

It had been simpler, safer, to decide it was just Seungcheol being Seungcheol, the same warmth he handed out to the woman at the post office and the bartender at and anyone else unlucky enough to be standing in front of him, and to file yourself in with all of them instead of letting yourself be the one exception. 

You call Jiwon, because you've run out of ways to have the conversation only with yourself, and because Minji's already said her piece and you want, this once, a second voice saying the same thing back to you before you trust it.

“Okay,” Jiwon says, once you've gotten through the whole thing, sitting cross-legged on your kitchen floor with your phone on speaker and a second cup of tea gone cold beside you. “So let me get this straight. You've liked him since — what, ninth grade?”

“I didn't say I liked him since ninth grade.”

“You basically said that.”

“I said I'd been turning him down since ninth grade, that's a different thing. I think it started as something silly. I haven’t been, you know, pining around for him for a decade straight, and neither has he.” 

You can hear her moving around her own kitchen, a cupboard opening and closing. “Yeah, well. It seems like he’s been waiting for a chance for a decade, though.”

You don’t have anything to say to that. Jiwon continues anyway, so you don’t have a chance. “I genuinely thought you two just had a bit going.  A little routine. I didn't realise that it was unresolved feelings the entire time, and I consider myself a fairly perceptive person, so, congratulations, you've out-repressed even me.”

“That's not a compliment.”

“It's not not a compliment.” A pause. “You're going to go find him, right? Not just think about it for another week.”

Your nose scrunches. “I might.”

“Don't. Go tonight. Or tomorrow. Just — don't let this be a thing you circle for another decade, you've circled it long enough.” 

You laugh, the first real laugh you've managed in days, and it loosens something in your chest that's been sitting there, tight and small, since the fire station garage. “Tomorrow,” you say. “I'll go tomorrow.”

“Good. And tell me everything after. I mean everything.”

“I'm not going to tell you everything.“

“You're going to tell me everything,” Jiwon says, with total confidence, and hangs up before you can argue, which, you have to admit, is probably the correct read of the situation.

You find him on Tuesday evening, off shift, at the little park two streets from the station where you know — because everyone in a town this size knows everyone's habits eventually, whether they mean to or not — he sometimes goes to shoot free throws alone on the cracked half-court when he's got something on his mind. 

Your hands are unsteady the whole drive over, and twice you nearly turn around, and both times you think of Minji on your couch, of your mother's hand on your shoulder, of Jiwon's voice on the phone, and you keep driving.

He sees you before you reach the fence, ball tucked under one arm, and for a second his face does something complicated — surprise, then that same careful, contained politeness from the fire station, sliding down over it like a shade.

“Hey,“ he says. “Everything okay? Kids alright?”

“The kids are fine. I'm not here about the kids.” Your voice sounds horribly strained. If he notices, he doesn’t comment, just waits, bouncing the ball once against the cracked asphalt like he needs something to do with his hands.

“I've been an idiot,“ you say, which isn't how you'd planned to start, but it's true, at least. “For, honestly, a really long time. I don't know how to say the rest of it in a way that doesn't sound like I practised it in my car on the way here, so I'm just going to tell you I practised it in my car on the way here and say it anyway.“

That gets the smallest flicker of something across his face — not quite a smile, but the ghost of one.

“I think I started off thinking you were teasing me, back in school. I thought it was a joke when you asked me to prom. And then after that I just needed you to be joking, because to me it didn’t make sense for you to be serious. And because the alternative meant I had to admit I wanted it too, and I didn't know what to do with that, so I kept handing it back to you instead.”

He sets the ball down against his hip, quiet, still watching you with an expression you can't fully read.

“And at the bar,” you say, “I panicked because I think I realised you meant it, and I realised I did too, and then, I don’t know, I just totally freaked. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t take you seriously and I kept brushing you off and I was mean when you didn’t deserve it, and I’m really, really sorry.”

He's quiet for a moment, turning the ball slowly in his hands, and when he speaks again some of the careful politeness has gone out of his voice, replaced by something rawer, more tired. “I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t mean it. It was just — in high school, yeah, I had a crush on you. And then after, there would be whole stretches where I wouldn’t even think about it. I mean, you went to college and I went to the academy, and — then you’d show up again and, I don’t know. Especially when you moved back.” He pauses — the ball slips out of his hands, and you both watch it bounce to a stop. “You were always worth asking,” he says, finally. “I wanted the chance again, every time, even if you wouldn’t take me seriously.”

“I'm really sorry,” you say, and you mean it. 

“Okay,” he says, soft, and something in his shoulders loosens. “Practised in your car,” he repeats, and there — there it is, the corner of his lips turning up, small and a little disbelieving, like he isn't sure yet whether to trust it.

“Don't gloat.”

“I'm not gloating. I'm saving this for later. I'm going to bring it up constantly.”

“There he is,” you say, and your own eyes are stinging in a way you choose to blame on the wind, and he crosses the distance between you, slower than at the bar, giving you every chance to step back, and you don't, and this time when he kisses you, there's nothing careless in it at all.

an: i did not intend for this to be so complicated i rewrote this three times with different plots and editing took way way longer than intended. idk. it’s nearly 4am and i need to sleep.

perm taglist: @n4mj00nvq @eoieopda @som1ig @wondering-out-loud @tokitosun @hannyoontify @sahazzy @icyminghao @lvlystars @immabecreepin @hanniehaee @kokoiinuts

@yepimthatonequirkyteenager @weird-bookworm @phenomenalgirl9 @lightnjng

@iamawkwardandshy @twilghtkoo @yuuyeonie @lllucere @pearlesscentt