“Be patient. Let it happen naturally.”

⋆｡‧˚ʚ ✧ 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇 𝓈𝒾𝓍 ✧ ɞ˚‧｡⋆

January arrives like a door swinging open onto cold air — sudden, inevitable, the kind of thing you knew was coming and somehow still aren't ready for. Final semester. Last stretch. The end of something enormous that they've been inside so long it stopped feeling like an ending and started feeling like just the way things are.

The campus wakes up with a different kind of energy — quieter in some ways, louder in others. Seniors move through the quad with that specific expression of people who can see the finish line and aren't sure whether to sprint or stop and look around one more time. She feels it in her chest every morning: the particular anxiety of being almost done, which is somehow more terrifying than being in the middle of it. Almost done means having to figure out what comes next. Almost done means the structure she's been living inside for four years dissolves and something else has to take its place.

She doesn't think too hard about what that something is.

Soobin is already at the kitchen counter when she comes out most mornings — his things, her kitchen, this blurred arrangement that stopped being temporary somewhere around week three and never found its way back. Coffee made before she asks. Her mug on the left because he noticed she always reaches left first. The specific brand of creamer she likes on the second shelf because the first shelf gets too cold near the back and the creamer separates if it gets too cold and she complained about that once, months ago, and he has apparently filed it away alongside every other small detail of her existence.

She stopped noticing the small things. That's the part that matters — not that he does them, but that she stopped noticing, which means she started expecting, which means the absence of them would register as lack rather than normal. He built a floor under her feet so quietly that she forgot there was ever anything beneath her but his hands.

Thesis drafts take up most of January. She works at the dining table most evenings and he works across from her, his own pages spread, and they've developed a rhythm of productive silence broken by murmured questions and the occasional shared snack and the way he reaches over without looking to refill her water glass whenever it gets low. She's told three separate people that she works better with him there than she ever did alone, and she means it the way you mean true things — carelessly, without examining why it's true or when it became that way.

Beomgyu texts her one Thursday: you two are basically married. i'm sending a gift registry.

She sends back a middle finger emoji and doesn't show Soobin.

He already knows what Beomgyu thinks. He's known for a long time. He finds it useful.

The stress peaks in February the way it always does — deadlines compressing, every professor deciding this is the week to assign the difficult thing, her sleep getting thin and her temper getting shorter and the specific hormonal cocktail of finals-adjacent anxiety making her feel like her body is slightly too loud for her skin. She knows this version of herself. She doesn't like her but she recognizes her.

Soobin recognizes her too.

He shows up one evening with a heating pad she didn't ask for — it's not her period, just tension across her lower back — and a packet of the good painkillers and a container of whatever his mother used to make that involves ginger and enough warmth to soften the worst edges of a bad week. He sets everything on the coffee table without ceremony, drops onto the couch beside her, and pulls her sideways into him with one arm while he opens his own laptop with the other like this is just how evenings go now.

"You didn't have to," she says, already reaching for the ginger thing.

"Didn't have to do what?" he says, which is the only answer he ever gives to gratitude, which is the way he makes it feel like breathing — like something that just happens, like oxygen, like of course, why would there be any other option.

She eats the whole container. He doesn't comment. Just keeps working, one hand eventually drifting to her knee where it rests for the rest of the night, thumb making those slow absent circles she's stopped registering as anything except warmth.

Later — much later, the drafts put away, the apartment quiet — she ends up in his lap with her mouth on his jaw and his hands under her shirt and the particular urgency of people who've been sitting very close to each other for too many hours and have reached the natural end of the tension that produces. They've stopped discussing it. It just happens now the same way the coffee happens — naturally, without ceremony, an arrangement that suits them both. She tells herself this because it's comfortable. He lets her tell herself this because it's useful.

"Stay," he says against her throat, the word barely above a breath, which she understands to mean in my bed tonight, because she still sometimes retreats to the pull-out when the evening ends with them tangled on the couch rather than moving to the bedroom, a small preservation of the idea that this is still flexible, still a choice being made, still something she could step back from if she decided to.

She goes to the bedroom.

She always goes to the bedroom.

It starts with the condom conversation.

Which isn't really a conversation so much as a moment, a Tuesday night, the two of them already past the point of slowing down, his mouth on her neck and her hands in his hair and the drawer of the nightstand open where the condoms live, except his hand pauses on the way there and he turns his face against her cheek instead, voice low and careful in the way he gets when he's about to suggest something he's already decided on.

"I want to feel you," he murmurs, and the words land in the specific register he uses when he wants them to bypass her thinking brain and go somewhere warmer and less rational. "Just once. Just us. I'll get the pill tomorrow — the expensive one, the one that actually works. I just—" his mouth drags to her ear "—I want to know what it feels like."

She should think about it longer than she does.

She doesn't.

"Okay," she breathes, which is the word her body has apparently decided is correct, and then his hands are moving again and the drawer stays closed and the particular desperate warmth of skin without barrier is enough to make the thinking brain go offline entirely.

Afterward — the warmth of him still inside her, both of them slow and wrecked and his face pressed to her shoulder — she thinks: tomorrow he'll get the pill, we'll be fine, this was a one-time thing because he asked so well and she was already too far gone to be sensible about it.

She doesn't notice that the drawer stays closed the next night too.

Or the night after.

What she does notice — weeks later, without connecting the dots she doesn't know are there to connect — is that the nightstand has been subtly reorganized. The things she reaches for most are at the front now. The condoms are still technically there, just toward the back, under some things, slightly less immediately available. She assumes she moved them herself.

She didn't.

He goes to the pharmacy on a Wednesday morning while she's in her 9am lecture.

He knows her schedule. He always knows her schedule.

He takes his time in the aisle — this is not a trip he makes carelessly, this is a trip he has thought about since the baby clothes in the mall, since he felt something unlock in his chest standing behind her at that shop window, since he looked at the tiny Eevee paw shoes and thought: I want this, and the wanting arrived so clean and certain that it frightened him briefly before it didn't anymore.

He picks up her period products first — the right ones, the specific brand she likes, the overnight pads she always forgets to buy herself, the liners because she mentioned once being caught without them. Sets them in the basket.

Then he takes his time with the vitamins.

Prenatal vitamins, it turns out, look remarkably like regular women's health supplements. Same aisle. Similar packaging. He picks up two bottles — compares them with the ones she already takes, the ones she keeps on the bathroom shelf — and selects the ones closest in appearance to her regular brand. Same amber bottle. Similar capsule color. Different contents.

He adds them to the basket without hurry.

He adds the after-pill she asked for too — the expensive one, the one he told her works — and pockets it on the way out of the pharmacy without putting it in the bag.

She never asks to see the receipt.

She never asks about the vitamins.

She takes them every morning the way she takes everything he sets in front of her: because he's always been right about what she needs, because she trusts him completely, because four years of being known this precisely has trained her body to accept care from his hands without question.

He watches her take the first one over coffee on a Thursday morning — still in his hoodie, hair unstyled, squinting slightly at the light — and feels something patient and enormous settle in his chest.

He was always going to get here.

He just had to be careful about the route.

The last semester has a specific quality to it that she can only describe as pressure — everything compressed, every deadline tighter, every emotion closer to the surface. She cries twice over thesis footnotes. She laughs too loud at things that aren't that funny. She wakes at 4am with her heart already going and her mind cataloguing every unfinished thing, and the only thing that reliably puts her back to sleep is the weight of his arm across her waist and the slow even rhythm of his breathing against her shoulder.

She's also, she notices with a detachment that feels like someone else's observation, the horniest she has ever been in her adult life.

She doesn't analyze this too deeply. Stress, she tells herself. The body compensating. Senior year hormones. The fact that she's been sleeping next to someone warm and large and genuinely excellent at the specific activity for months now and her body has recalibrated its baseline accordingly.

Whatever the reason, the effect is this: they fuck constantly.

Not carelessly — they're never careless, even when they're frantic, even when it's 11pm and she has a 7am alarm and she's the one climbing into his lap instead of sleeping like a reasonable person. There's always intention in it. His, she will understand later, has always been very specific. Hers is just want — uncomplicated, immediate, the particular hunger of a person who has been given something extraordinary and can't stop reaching for it.

Tuesday morning before her seminar — quick, efficient, him sitting on the edge of the bed with her straddling his lap, face in his neck, his hands gripping her hips to set the pace, both of them quiet because the walls are thin and it's 7am and the world hasn't fully started yet.

Thursday night after she finishes her last draft revision — slow, thorough, him taking his time with her in the particular way he does when they have nowhere to be, no urgency except the kind that builds and builds until she's shaking and he's still moving like he could do this forever.

Sunday afternoon — twice, because the first time ends too fast and he pulls her back before she's even caught her breath, mouth at her ear saying stay and his hands already finding the places that make staying the only possible response.

She stops keeping track of what's protected and what isn't. She trusts him. She has always trusted him. He said he'd handle it — the expensive pill, the good brand, we're covered — and she accepted that the way she accepts everything from him, which is to say: fully, without verification, because he's never been wrong before.

He is not wrong now either, technically.

He's just not doing what she thinks he's doing.

The tension doesn’t break so much as it simply stops pretending to exist.

It starts on a random Tuesday in late February, the kind of gray afternoon where the light never quite decides to commit. She’s been hunched over her laptop for six straight hours, shoulders tight, eyes burning, when Soobin appears behind her chair without a sound. His hands settle on her shoulders first, warm, sure, thumbs pressing into the knots with the exact pressure she likes because he’s mapped every inch of her tension over months.

“You’ve been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes,” he murmurs, voice low and close to her ear.

She exhales shakily. “It’s not working.”

“Then stop.”

He doesn’t wait for permission. He never really does anymore. His fingers slide under the collar of her hoodie (his hoodie) and peel it upward. She lifts her arms automatically, letting him strip it off her like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The cool air hits her bare skin and she shivers once. He notices. Of course he does.

He turns her chair slowly until she’s facing him. Then he drops to his knees between her spread thighs like it’s nothing — like kneeling for her is just another Tuesday evening task.

“Soobin—”

“Shh.” His palms glide up her thighs, pushing the soft fabric of her shorts higher until his thumbs brush the crease where leg meets hip. “Let me take care of you.”

He leans in and presses an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of her thigh, then another, higher. When he reaches the edge of her panties he hooks his fingers in the waistband and tugs them down with one smooth motion. She lifts her hips to help without thinking. The trust is bone-deep now; her body has learned that his hands only ever bring relief.

He doesn’t tease tonight. There’s no slow build, no playful denial. He simply spreads her open with his thumbs and puts his mouth on her like he’s starving.

The first lick is broad and wet and perfect. She jolts, one hand flying to his hair. He hums against her, the vibration shooting straight up her spine, and then he settles in, slow, deliberate drags of his tongue over her clit, two fingers sliding inside her without resistance because she’s already soaked from the sheer relief of his attention.

“Fuck— Soobin,” she gasps, hips twitching.

He doesn’t answer with words. He answers by curling his fingers, finding that spot that makes her see white, and sucking her clit into his mouth with steady, rhythmic pressure. The wet sounds fill the quiet apartment, obscene and intimate at the same time. Her thighs start to tremble around his ears. He doesn’t let up. He never lets up when he decides she needs to come.

She comes the first time with a broken cry, back arching off the chair, fingers tightening painfully in his hair. He rides her through it, gentling his tongue but keeping his fingers moving until the last spasm fades.

Only then does he pull back, lips shiny, eyes dark and focused entirely on her flushed face. He rises to his feet, towering over her, and strips his own shirt off in one fluid motion. His sweatpants follow. His cock is already hard, flushed dark, the tip glistening.

He doesn’t ask. He simply pulls her up from the chair, turns her around, and bends her over the dining table where her thesis pages are still scattered.

The wood is cool against her breasts. She braces her palms flat as he kicks her feet wider apart.

“Stay just like this,” he says quietly, one large hand smoothing down her spine.

Then he’s pushing inside her — bare, hot, thick — in one long, steady stroke.

They both groan. The feeling without the latex is overwhelming: every ridge, every vein, the blunt head pressing right against her cervix when he bottoms out. He stays there for a moment, buried to the hilt, letting her adjust, letting himself feel her clench around him raw.

“So tight,” he breathes, voice rough. “Always so fucking perfect for me.”

He starts moving — slow at first, deep rolls of his hips that drag against every sensitive spot inside her. One hand grips her hip, the other slides up her back to fist gently in her hair, not pulling, just holding. Anchoring.

The pace builds. The table creaks under them. Her moans turn into whimpers, then sharp cries as he angles his hips and hits that spot again and again. The second orgasm crashes into her without warning. She clenches hard around him, vision blurring, and he curses under his breath, pace faltering for the first time.

He doesn’t pull out.

He fucks her through it, harder now, chasing his own release. When he comes it’s with a low, guttural sound, hips snapping forward as he spills deep inside her, hot pulses that seem to last forever. He grinds against her ass, making sure every drop stays where he wants it.

She’s still bent over the dining table, chest heaving, when Soobin’s hands slide up her sides with deliberate slowness. His cock is still buried deep inside her, softening only slightly, and the feeling of him twitching against her walls makes her whimper softly. He doesn’t pull out. Instead, he leans down, pressing his broad chest fully against her back, caging her between the cool wood and the heat of his body.

His lips find the shell of her ear first.

“You feel that?” he murmurs, voice low and rough, breath hot against her skin. “How perfectly you take me?. Nothing between us.”

A shiver runs through her. She nods, unable to form words yet. His hips give one lazy roll, pushing his cum deeper, and she clenches around him instinctively. The wet, filthy sound it makes should embarrass her. It doesn’t. Not with him.

Soobin’s mouth trails down to her neck, pressing open-mouthed kisses along the sensitive column. He sucks lightly at the spot just below her ear, the one that always makes her melt, then soothes it with his tongue. His hands aren’t idle. One large palm smooths up her spine, fingers splaying wide between her shoulder blades, while the other slips around to her front, cupping her breast and thumbing over her nipple until it pebbles under his touch.

“Such a good girl for me,” he whispers between kisses, voice dripping with that quiet intensity he only ever uses when they’re like this. “Letting me have you exactly how I want. Just us.”

He starts moving again — not thrusting hard, but slow, deep grinds that keep him pressed flush against her, his cock stirring back to full hardness inside her slick heat. Every roll of his hips drags against that sensitive spot, making her gasp and push back against him. His free hand leaves her breast to trace down her stomach, fingers brushing lightly over her clit in teasing circles that match the rhythm of his hips.

She turns her head, seeking his mouth. He meets her instantly, kissing her deeply, tongue sliding against hers in the same unhurried way he’s fucking her. The kiss is messy, wet, full of shared breath and quiet moans. His lips are soft but demanding, sucking on her lower lip, nipping gently, then soothing with his tongue again. He tastes like her, and the realization sends another wave of heat through her body.

His hand on her back slides up to tangle in her hair, just holding her head in place so he can kiss her harder. The other hand continues its slow torture between her legs — fingers circling her swollen clit with perfect pressure, occasionally dipping lower to feel where they’re joined, where his cock stretches her and his cum leaks out around him with every shallow thrust.

“You’re getting wetter,” he breathes against her mouth, a hint of satisfaction in his tone. “My cum inside you… you like that, don’t you? Feeling me drip out while I’m still fucking it back in.”

She moans into the kiss, nodding frantically. Her walls flutter around him, and he groans, the sound vibrating through his chest into her back. The kissing grows more heated — tongues tangling, teeth grazing, desperate little sounds escaping both of them. His hips pick up a fraction more speed, still controlled, still deep, each thrust accompanied by another slow circle over her clit.

He breaks the kiss only to trail his lips along her jaw, down her throat, sucking another mark just above her collarbone. His fingers in her hair tighten slightly, tilting her head to give him better access. Every touch is reverent and possessive at once — his palm mapping her ribs, thumb brushing the underside of her breast, then back down to pinch her nipple lightly while his mouth claims her neck.

“So pretty when you’re like this,” he murmurs between kisses and soft bites. “All flushed and needy. Taking everything I give you.”

Her breathing is ragged now, hips rocking back to meet his slow thrusts. The combination of his cock moving inside her, his fingers on her clit, and his mouth worshiping every inch of skin he can reach is overwhelming in the best way. She feels completely surrounded by him, his heat, his scent, his quiet control.

Soobin kisses the corner of her mouth again, softer this time, then whispers against her lips:

“Turn around for me, baby. I want to see your face while I touch you.”

He pulls out slowly, both of them groaning at the loss, a thick trickle of his release sliding down her thigh. He helps her straighten and turn, his hands gentle but firm on her hips. When she’s facing him, he lifts her effortlessly onto the table, spreading her legs wide and stepping between them.

His mouth finds hers again immediately, deep, consuming kisses that make her dizzy. His hands roam freely now: one cupping her face, thumb stroking her cheek, the other sliding between her thighs to push two fingers back inside her cum-filled pussy, curling them slowly while his thumb works her clit.

The kissing never stops. Slow and filthy, then soft and sweet, then hungry again. He drinks every moan from her lips, every gasp, every broken whisper of his name. His fingers move in perfect rhythm, scissoring gently, spreading his cum and her wetness, preparing her for more.

He only pulls back when she’s trembling, lips swollen and shiny, eyes glassy with need.

“Look at me,” he says softly.

She does.

And in that moment, with his fingers buried inside her and his gaze locked on hers, she feels the depth of how completely she belongs to this, to him, even if she still calls it friendship.

Soobin’s fingers are still buried deep inside her, curling slowly, when he pulls back just enough to look at her properly. His eyes are dark, pupils blown wide, but his voice stays soft, almost reverent.

“Look at you,” he murmurs, thumb stroking her clit in lazy circles while his other hand cradles her jaw. “Sitting on the table all spread open for me… so fucking beautiful.”

She bites her lip, cheeks burning under his gaze. “Soobin… you don’t have to say that every time.”

“But I do,” he replies instantly, leaning in to press a slow, deep kiss to her mouth. When he pulls away, his fingers keep moving. “Because it’s true. Every inch of you drives me crazy. I’ve wanted this for so long… wanted you like this.”

Her breath hitches as he curls his fingers again, hitting that spot that makes her thighs tremble. “You already have me,” she whispers, voice shaky. “You know that.”

A small, satisfied smile curves his lips. “Yeah… I do. And I’m never letting go.”

He withdraws his fingers slowly, making her whimper at the loss, then brings them to his mouth and licks them clean without breaking eye contact. She watches, mesmerized and flushed.

“Soobin—”

“Shh. Let me worship you properly tonight.” His hands slide up her thighs, spreading them wider as he leans down. His mouth starts at her collarbone, pressing wet, open-mouthed kisses along the line. “You’ve been so stressed with the thesis… let me take care of every part of you.”

He trails lower, lips brushing the swell of her breasts, then down her stomach. Every kiss is deliberate, slow, like he’s mapping her. “This spot right here,” he murmurs against her ribs, sucking lightly, “makes you shiver every time.” He proves it by doing it again, smiling when she gasps.

“You remember everything,” she breathes, fingers threading through his hair.

“Of course I do.” His voice is low, intimate. “I’ve been paying attention for years. Every sound you make, every place that makes you wetter… all mine to learn.”

He moves back up, mouth finding the sensitive skin just below her ear while his hands roam — one palm smoothing over her hip, the other cupping her ass, squeezing gently. “Tell me how it feels, baby. Tell me what you need.”

“It feels… so good,” she moans softly as his fingers trace circles on her inner thigh. “Your hands are everywhere. I can’t think when you touch me like this.”

“Good,” he whispers, nipping at her jaw. “You don’t need to think. Just feel. Just let me love on you.”

He kisses down her neck again, slower this time, sucking a faint mark into the hollow of her throat. “This neck… always smells like your shampoo and a little like me now.” He inhales deeply, then licks the spot. “Fuck, I love that.”

She arches into him, a soft laugh escaping despite the heat building again. “You’re so obsessed.”

“With you? Yeah.” His eyes meet hers, serious and heated. “Completely. Every curve, every sound, every time you say my name like that.”

His hands slide under her thighs, lifting her slightly as he kisses lower, across her stomach, tongue dipping into her navel. “This little spot right here always makes your hips twitch.” He demonstrates, and she does exactly that, giggling breathlessly before it turns into a moan.

“Soobin, please… I need more.”

He looks up at her, chin resting on her lower stomach, eyes dark with promise. “Patience, baby. I’m not rushing tonight. I want to taste every part of you first. Tell me, does this feel good?” He presses a kiss just above her mound, then another on the inside of her thigh.

“Yes— fuck, yes,” she gasps, legs spreading wider on instinct. “Your mouth is so warm… I love when you kiss me there.”

He hums in approval, the vibration traveling through her skin. “Good girl. Keep talking to me. I love hearing how much you need me.”

His palms stroke up and down her sides, thumbs brushing the undersides of her breasts as his mouth continues its slow worship — kissing, licking, sucking gently on every inch of skin he can reach. He pauses at her hip bone, biting lightly, then soothing with his tongue.

“You’re shaking,” he observes softly, voice full of quiet pride. “Already so sensitive for me. That’s because your body knows who it belongs to now, doesn’t it?”

She nods, breath coming in short pants. “It does… it’s yours, Soobin. All of it.”

His eyes flash with something deep and satisfied. He rises slightly, capturing her mouth in another slow, filthy kiss while his hands continue exploring — squeezing her ass, tracing her waist, thumbs circling her nipples until they’re tight and aching.

“Say it again,” he whispers against her lips, voice husky. “Tell me who you belong to.”

“You,” she breathes, kissing him back desperately. “I belong to you.”

He groans softly into the kiss, one hand sliding between her legs again to tease her entrance with two fingers. “That’s my girl. So perfect. So mine.”

The touching never stops — slow, reverent strokes mixed with firmer grips, every movement designed to make her feel completely adored and completely claimed at the same time. His mouth stays busy on her skin, murmuring praises between kisses.

“You’re so soft here… so warm… I could spend hours just touching you like this.”

She whimpers, hips rocking against his hand. “Soobin… I’m getting close again just from this.”

“Then come for me whenever you want, baby,” he murmurs, kissing her deeply once more. “But I’m nowhere near done worshipping you tonight.”

She’s still trembling from his slow worship, thighs spread wide on the dining table, when Soobin straightens up and cups her face with both hands. His thumbs brush her flushed cheeks, eyes locked on hers with that quiet intensity that always makes her stomach flip.

“Baby,” he murmurs, voice low and rough around the edges, “you’re so good for me. Letting me touch you everywhere… but I need your mouth now. Can you do that for me?”

Her breath catches. She nods quickly, lips parting. “Yes… I want to. I love making you feel good too.”

A slow, satisfied smile spreads across his face. “That’s my girl. Come here.”

He helps her slide off the table, legs still shaky, and guides her gently down until she’s on her knees in front of him. The apartment floor is cool against her skin, but the heat radiating from his body makes her forget everything else. His cock stands hard and flushed in front of her, still slick from being inside her earlier, the tip glistening with a mix of their arousal.

Soobin threads his fingers gently through her hair. “Look at me while you do it,” he says softly. “I want to see your eyes.”

She looks up at him, heart racing, and wraps one hand around the base of his thick length. He’s big, always has been, and the weight of him in her palm feels familiar and intoxicating. She leans in and presses a soft, open-mouthed kiss to the head, tasting the salty tang of him mixed with her own wetness.

“Fuck…” Soobin hisses, his grip tightening slightly in her hair. “Just like that. Start slow, baby. I want to feel every second.”

She obeys, licking a long, slow stripe from base to tip, swirling her tongue around the sensitive head before taking him into her mouth. The groan that escapes him is deep and guttural, his hips twitching forward just a little.

“Oh shit, your mouth feels incredible,” he breathes, watching her with dark, hooded eyes. “So warm… so wet. You always take me so well.”

She hums around him, the vibration making his cock twitch against her tongue. Encouraged, she takes him deeper, bobbing her head slowly while her hand strokes what she can’t fit. Her other hand rests on his thigh, feeling the muscle tense under her palm.

Soobin’s breathing grows heavier. “That’s it… just like that. Use your tongue more on the underside — yes, fuck, right there.” His voice drops lower, almost reverent. “You have no idea how many times I’ve thought about this. You on your knees, looking up at me with those pretty eyes while you suck my cock.”

She pulls back for a moment, lips shiny, breathing hard. “Do you really think about me like that?” she asks, voice husky, giving him a few slow pumps with her hand. “Even when we’re just… hanging out?”

“Every day,” he admits, thumb stroking her cheek. “Sometimes when you’re studying across from me, all focused and biting your lip, I imagine pulling you under the table and letting you worship me while you try to stay quiet.” He guides her mouth back to him gently. “But this is better. This is real. Suck a little harder, baby — yeah, just like that. Good girl.”

She moans around his length, taking him deeper until he hits the back of her throat. She relaxes, swallowing around him, and Soobin curses under his breath, head tipping back for a second before he forces himself to look down again.

“God, you’re perfect,” he groans, hips starting to rock shallowly. “The way your throat squeezes me… fuck, I could stay in your mouth forever. You like tasting us together? My cum and your pussy all over my cock?”

She nods as best she can, eyes watering slightly but never breaking eye contact. The filthy words send heat straight between her legs again. She hollows her cheeks, sucking harder, tongue working the underside while her hand twists gently at the base.

Soobin’s grip in her hair tightens, but he’s still careful, never forcing her. “Slow down a little or I’m gonna come too fast,” he warns, voice strained. “I want to enjoy this. Want to watch you take every inch. You’re so fucking eager for it… my sweet best friend on her knees sucking me like she was made for it.”

She pulls off with a wet pop, stroking him firmly while she catches her breath. “I was made for you,” she whispers, pressing sloppy kisses along his shaft. “I love how you feel in my mouth… how heavy you are on my tongue. Tell me what else you want.”

His eyes darken further. “Lick my balls while you stroke me. Then take me deep again.”

She does exactly that — tongue laving over his sack, sucking one into her mouth gently while her hand works his cock in long, steady strokes. Soobin’s thighs tremble, a low moan escaping him.

“Fuck yes… just like that, baby. You’re so good at this. No one else could ever make me feel this way. Only you.”

She switches to the other side, then licks back up to the head and swallows him down again, taking him as deep as she can. Soobin’s hand guides her rhythm now, gentle but firm.

“Look at me,” he says again, voice rough. “I want to see how much you love having my cock in your throat.”

Their eyes lock. Tears cling to her lashes, but she doesn’t stop, humming and swallowing around him. Soobin’s breathing turns ragged.

“You’re gonna make me come if you keep that up,” he warns, though his hips keep moving in shallow thrusts. “But not yet… I still want to fuck you properly tonight. Want to fill you up again while you’re moaning my name.”

She pulls back just enough to speak, lips brushing the tip. “Then use my mouth however you want first. I can take it.”

Soobin pulls her up from her knees with gentle but firm hands, his mouth immediately claiming hers in a deep, messy kiss. He can still taste himself on her tongue, and the thought makes him groan softly into her mouth. He walks her backward until her hips hit the edge of the dining table again, then lifts her effortlessly so she’s sitting on it once more, legs wrapping around his waist.

“You’re incredible,” he murmurs against her lips, breaking the kiss only to trail his mouth along her jaw. “The way you looked up at me with my cock down your throat… fuck, I almost lost it.”

She smiles breathlessly, hands sliding up his chest. “I love making you feel like that. You always take such good care of me… I want to do the same for you.”

His eyes soften for a moment, something deep and possessive flickering behind the heat. “You do. More than you know.” Then his voice drops lower, hands sliding up her sides. “But right now, I need to taste you again. Spread your legs wider for me, baby.”

She obeys instantly, leaning back on her elbows on the table as he drops to his knees between her thighs once more. His large hands grip her inner thighs, spreading her open, and he stares at her glistening pussy with open hunger.

“Look at this pretty little pussy,” he says, voice rough with want. “All wet and swollen from my cock and your mouth. Still leaking my cum… that’s so fucking hot.”

She whimpers, hips twitching. “Soobin… please.”

“Please what?” he asks, pressing a soft kiss to the inside of her thigh, then another higher up. “Tell me. I want to hear you say it.”

“I want your mouth on me,” she breathes, cheeks burning. “Please lick me… make me come with your tongue.”

A low, satisfied sound rumbles in his chest. “Good girl. So honest for me.”

He doesn’t tease this time. He dives in, licking a broad, slow stripe from her entrance up to her clit, tasting the mix of their arousal. She gasps sharply, one hand flying to his hair.

“Oh god— Soobin!”

He hums against her, the vibration sending sparks through her body. “You taste so good,” he murmurs, pulling back just enough to speak. “Sweet and a little salty from us… I could eat you for hours.”

His tongue circles her clit with precise, firm strokes, then flattens to lap at her entrance, pushing inside her as far as it can go. She moans loudly, back arching off the table.

“Yes— right there,” she pants. “Your tongue feels so good inside me… deeper, please.”

He obliges, fucking her with his tongue while his nose nudges her clit. Two fingers replace his tongue after a moment, curling upward to hit that perfect spot as his mouth latches onto her clit and sucks gently.

“Fuck, Soobin— I’m— I’m close already,” she cries, thighs trembling around his head. “Don’t stop… please don’t stop.”

“I won’t,” he promises, voice muffled against her. He looks up at her, eyes dark and intense. “Come on my tongue, baby. Let me feel you fall apart. You’re so beautiful when you come for me.”

His fingers pump faster, curling perfectly, while his tongue flicks rapidly over her clit. She’s gasping, moaning his name like a chant, hips grinding against his face.

“Soobin— oh fuck, I’m coming—!”

Her orgasm hits hard, walls clenching around his fingers, a gush of wetness coating his tongue. He doesn’t pull away, riding her through it with slow, soothing licks and gentle thrusts of his fingers until she’s shaking and oversensitive.

When she finally slumps back, breathing hard, he rises to his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His cock is rock hard again, flushed and leaking.

He leans over her, kissing her deeply so she can taste herself on his lips. “Did that feel good?” he whispers.

“So good,” she sighs, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You always make me come so hard… I don’t know how you do it.”

“Because I know you,” he says simply, nipping at her lower lip. “Every spot, every sound, every way you like to be touched. You’re mine to please.”

She pulls him closer, kissing him again. “Then please fuck me now. I need you inside me again.”

He smiles against her mouth, voice low and promising. “Not yet, baby. I still want to play with these perfect tits first.”

Soobin’s words hang in the air, low and heated, as he leans over her on the table. His hands slide up her sides slowly, cupping her breasts and lifting them slightly, thumbs brushing over her already sensitive nipples.

“These perfect tits,” he murmurs, eyes dark with hunger. “I’ve been dying to give them the attention they deserve.”

She arches into his touch, a soft moan escaping. “Soobin… they’re not that special.”

He shakes his head, leaning down to press a reverent kiss to the swell of one breast. “Don’t say that. They’re fucking gorgeous. Soft, full, and they fit perfectly in my hands.” He squeezes gently, watching her reaction. “See? Made for me.”

He lowers his mouth to her left nipple, sucking it into his mouth with slow, deliberate pulls while his hand kneads the other breast. She gasps, fingers threading through his hair again.

“Oh— that feels so good,” she breathes. “Your mouth is so warm… suck a little harder.”

He does exactly that, hollowing his cheeks and flicking his tongue over the stiff peak. “Like this?” he asks, pulling back just enough to speak before switching to the other nipple, giving it the same treatment.

“Yes— fuck, yes,” she whimpers, back arching off the table. “I love when you play with my boobs… it goes straight between my legs.”

Soobin hums in approval, the vibration traveling through her nipple. “Good. Because I could do this all night.” He switches back and forth, licking, sucking, and gently biting, leaving faint red marks on the soft skin. “They get so hard for me… look at them. So pretty and sensitive.”

His free hand continues kneading the neglected breast, rolling the nipple between his fingers, pinching lightly until she’s squirming beneath him.

“Tell me how it feels,” he says, voice rough as he looks up at her, lips shiny. “Talk to me while I worship these.”

“It tingles… everywhere,” she pants, hips rocking uselessly against nothing. “Every time you suck, I feel it in my clit. You’re making me so wet again, Soobin.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” he growls softly, sucking harder on one nipple while twisting the other. “I want you dripping for me. Want your pussy aching while I take my time with your tits.”

He presses them together, burying his face between them, licking and kissing the valley. “So soft… so warm. I love how they spill over my hands.” He nips at the underside of one, then soothes it with his tongue. “You have no idea how many times I’ve stared at you in those tight shirts, imagining doing exactly this.”

She laughs breathlessly, tugging his hair. “Pervert.”

“Your pervert,” he corrects, grinning against her skin before sucking a nipple back into his mouth. “Only yours. And you love it. Say it.”

“I love it,” she moans, voice breaking as he bites down gently. “I love when you’re obsessed with my body… love how you touch me like I’m yours.”

“You are mine,” he says firmly, switching breasts again, lavishing the same slow, filthy attention on the other. His hips press forward, letting his hard cock rest against her inner thigh, hot and leaking. “These tits are mine to play with, to suck, to mark. Every time you wear that blue dress, I’m going to remember how they look right now — all flushed and covered in my mouth.”

She whimpers louder, one hand reaching down to stroke his cock slowly. “Then mark them more… please. I want to feel you tomorrow when I’m trying to study.”

Soobin groans, hips bucking into her hand. “Fuck, baby. You’re going to kill me.” He sucks harder, leaving a visible hickey on the inner curve of one breast, then another on the other side. “There. So everyone knows who these belong to, even if they can’t see.”

His tongue swirls around her nipples again, alternating between soft licks and firm sucks while his hands squeeze and mold her breasts. She’s panting now, thighs clenching around his waist.

“Soobin… I need you inside me,” she begs, voice shaky. “I’m so empty… please fuck me.”

He pulls back slightly, lips red and swollen, eyes blazing. “Not yet. Turn over for me first. I want you on your hands and knees.”

Soobin steps back just enough to give her room, his hands steady on her hips as she turns over on the dining table. She braces herself on her forearms, arching her back instinctively, ass presented to him. The position makes her feel exposed and desired at the same time, completely open for whatever he wants.

“Fuck, look at you,” he breathes, voice thick with lust. One large hand smooths down her spine, then cups her ass, squeezing firmly. “So pretty like this. Bent over and waiting for me.”

She glances back at him over her shoulder, cheeks flushed. “Is this how you want me?”

“Exactly like this,” he replies, stepping closer until his cock rests heavy against her ass. He rubs the thick length between her cheeks slowly, teasing. “Ass up, back arched… my perfect girl. You’re dripping down your thighs. All that from me playing with your tits?”

“Yes,” she admits, pushing back against him. “Everything you do makes me wet. Please, Soobin… I need you inside me now. I’ve been waiting.”

He groans, gripping her hips tighter. “You beg so sweetly. How can I say no to that?”

He lines himself up, the blunt head of his cock nudging her entrance, still slick from her earlier orgasm and his precum. With one slow, deliberate push, he sinks into her from behind — bare, deep, stretching her perfectly.

Both of them moan loudly at the feeling.

“Oh my god— Soobin,” she gasps, fingers curling against the table. “You’re so deep like this… I can feel every inch.”

“That’s right,” he says, voice strained as he bottoms out, hips flush against her ass. “Feel how well you take me? Your pussy was made for my cock bunny.”

He stays still for a moment, letting her adjust, one hand rubbing soothing circles on her lower back while the other grips her hip. Then he starts moving, slow, powerful thrusts that drag against every sensitive spot inside her.

“Fuck, you’re tight,” he groans, picking up a steady rhythm. “So warm and wet… gripping me like you never want me to leave.”

She pushes back to meet his thrusts, moaning with each deep stroke. “Harder… please. I can take it. I want to feel you tomorrow.”

Soobin’s grip tightens, and he gives her what she asks for — snapping his hips faster, the sound of skin slapping against skin filling the apartment. “Like this? You want me to fuck you like I own you?”

“Yes— yes, just like that,” she cries out, head dropping forward. “You do own me… fuck, right there— don’t stop!”

He angles his hips, hitting that perfect spot over and over, one hand sliding around to rub her clit in tight circles. “That’s my good girl. Taking my cock so well in this position. Your ass looks incredible bouncing against me.”

He leans over her, chest pressing to her back, and presses open-mouthed kisses along her shoulder. “Tell me how it feels, baby. Tell me you love getting fucked like this.”

“I love it,” she moans, voice breaking with every thrust. “I love when you fuck me from behind… so deep, so rough. Your cock is hitting everything— I’m gonna come again if you keep going.”

“Then come,” he growls against her ear, thrusting harder. “Come on my cock while I’m buried inside you. I want to feel you squeeze me.”

His fingers move faster on her clit, and his pace turns punishing — deep, relentless strokes that make the table creak beneath them. She’s whimpering and moaning, pushing back desperately.

“Soobin— I’m close— fuck, I’m coming—!”

Her second orgasm crashes over her, walls clenching hard around his cock. Soobin curses, slowing his thrusts to ride her through it, but not stopping completely.

“That’s it… good girl. Milk my cock with that tight pussy,” he praises, voice rough. He keeps moving through her spasms, drawing it out until she’s shaking.

When she starts to come down, he straightens up, hands gripping her hips again. “I’m not done with you yet. I want to fill you up one more time… but first, turn over. I need to see your face when I come inside you.”

Soobin doesn’t let her catch her breath for long. He slides his arms under her, one beneath her knees, the other around her back, and lifts her effortlessly off the dining table. Her legs wrap around his waist instinctively, arms looping around his neck as he carries her through the apartment. His cock, still hard and slick with her release, brushes against her ass with every step, making her whimper softly against his shoulder.

“Where are we going?” she murmurs, pressing lazy kisses to his neck.

“To bed,” he answers, voice low and rough. “I want you spread out properly under me. I want to look at you while I fill you up one more time.”

He kicks the bedroom door open with his foot and lays her down gently on the center of her bed,  their bed now, really, the sheets already rumpled from the night before. The room is dim, only the soft glow from the hallway light spilling in, casting warm shadows across her body.

Soobin climbs over her immediately, settling between her spread thighs in missionary. He braces himself on his forearms, caging her in, his broad frame hovering just above hers. His cock nudges her entrance again, hot and insistent.

“Look at me, baby,” he says softly, one hand brushing damp strands of hair from her face. “I want your eyes on me the whole time.”

She meets his gaze, her own eyes glassy with lingering pleasure and fresh need. “I’m looking… I always look at you.”

He smiles, that small, secret smile, and slowly pushes back inside her in one smooth thrust. They both moan at the familiar stretch, the wet heat, the perfect fit.

“Fuck… still so tight,” he groans, bottoming out and grinding his hips in slow circles. “Even after coming… your pussy keeps pulling me back in.”

She wraps her legs higher around his waist, heels digging into his lower back. “Because I need you there. Deeper, Soobin… please. I want to feel you everywhere.”

He starts moving — long, deep strokes that press her into the mattress. Unlike the rough pace, this is slower, more intentional, every thrust deliberate and grinding. His hips roll against hers, pubic bone pressing against her clit with each downward motion.

“So good,” she gasps, hands sliding up his back, nails lightly scratching. “This position… I can feel all of you. Your cock is so deep… hitting everything.”

“That’s the point,” he murmurs, leaning down to kiss her deeply, tongue sliding against hers in time with his thrusts. “I want you to feel every inch. Want you to remember exactly who’s inside you, who’s taking care of you.”

He breaks the kiss to trail his mouth down her neck, sucking lightly at the marks he left earlier. One hand slides between them to cup her breast again, thumb circling the nipple while he continues those deep, steady rolls of his hips.

“Tell me how it feels now,” he whispers against her skin. “Being in your own bed, legs wrapped around me while I fuck you raw.”

“It feels… safe,” she breathes, then moans as he hits a particularly sensitive spot. “And dirty. And perfect. I love having you on top of me like this… love how heavy you are, how you fill me completely.”

Soobin groans, pace faltering for a second before he steadies again. “You have no idea what you do to me when you say things like that.” He thrusts a little harder, making the bed creak. “Your pussy is clenching around me so nicely… you’re going to make me come soon if you keep squeezing like that.”

She tightens her walls deliberately around him, smiling breathlessly when he curses. “Then come inside me. I want it. I want to feel you spill deep… want you to stay there after.”

His eyes darken. “Yeah? You want me to breed you tonight? Fill this pretty cunt until it’s overflowing?”

The word “breed” makes her whimper loudly, hips bucking up to meet him. “Yes… do it. Fill me up, Soobin. I’m yours.”

That seems to snap something in him. He kisses her hard, messy and desperate, while his hips pick up speed, still deep, but faster now, chasing his release while making sure she feels every thrust. His hand stays on her breast, squeezing and playing with her nipple as he drives into her.

“Come with me,” he pants against her mouth. “One more time, baby. Come on my cock while I come inside you.”

She nods frantically, one hand slipping between them to rub her clit in quick circles. The combination — his thick cock pounding deep, his weight pressing her down, his mouth on hers, his hand on her breast — pushes her over the edge again.

“Soobin— I’m coming— fuck!”

Her third orgasm hits her hard, walls fluttering and clenching rhythmically around him. Soobin groans loudly, burying his face in her neck as his own release crashes over him. He thrusts deep one final time and stays there, cock pulsing as he spills hot and thick inside her, filling her completely.

Soobin stays buried deep inside her, his weight a comforting blanket as their breathing slowly evens out. He presses soft, lingering kisses along her collarbone, her jaw, the corner of her mouth, never pulling out. The feeling of him still thick and warm inside her makes her hum contentedly, legs still loosely wrapped around his hips.

He shifts carefully, keeping them connected, and rolls them both until she’s on top, straddling him. But instead of letting her ride him hard, he pulls her down so her chest is flush against his, arms wrapping around her back to hold her close. Their faces are inches apart, breaths mingling.

“Like this,” he murmurs, guiding her hips into a slow, rolling grind. “Nice and deep. I want to feel every little movement.”

She rocks gently against him, the new angle letting him press even deeper. A soft moan escapes her as the head of his cock nudges that sensitive spot inside with every subtle shift.

“Soobin… you feel so good,” she breathes, eyes half-lidded as she looks down at him. “So full…”

His hands slide up and down her back in long, soothing strokes, one eventually cupping the back of her neck while the other rests possessively on her ass, encouraging her slow rhythm. “That’s it, baby. Just like that. No rush tonight. I want to make love to you until you forget everything except how we fit together.”

He lifts his head to kiss her, slow, deep, unhurried kisses that match the lazy roll of their hips. Their tongues slide together gently, savoring, tasting. Every time she sinks down fully onto him, he groans softly into her mouth, the sound vibrating through both of them.

“You’re so warm inside,” she whispers between kisses, forehead resting against his. “I love feeling you throb like this… like your body is telling me how much you need me too.”

“I do need you,” he replies, voice husky but soft. “Every day. Every night. This — being inside you, with nothing between us… it’s everything I’ve wanted.” He thrusts up gently to meet her next roll, grinding deep. “Feel that? That’s me loving you. Slow and deep, just like you deserve.”

She whimpers quietly, clenching around him as the pleasure builds in a warm, steady wave rather than a sharp peak. “Soobin… it’s so intimate like this. I can feel your heartbeat inside me.”

His arms tighten around her, one hand slipping into her hair while the other traces her spine. “Good. I want you to feel all of me.” He kisses her again, slower this time, then trails his lips to her ear. “You’re my safe place. My home. Let me stay right here and love you like this for as long as you need.”

They move together in a gentle rhythm — not frantic fucking, but something softer, deeper. Making love. Her breasts press against his chest with every roll, nipples brushing his skin. His hands never stop touching her: stroking her back, squeezing her ass lightly, cradling her face so he can look into her eyes.

“Kiss me again,” she murmurs.

He does, pouring everything into it — the years of quiet longing, the careful way he’s built this life around her, the overwhelming tenderness he only lets show when they’re like this. Their hips keep that slow, sensual grind, his cock sliding in and out in long, luxurious strokes that make her toes curl.

“You’re clenching so sweetly around me,” he whispers against her lips. “Squeezing me like you never want me to leave your body.”

“I don’t,” she admits breathlessly, nipping at his lower lip. “Stay inside me forever if you could.”

Soobin lets out a low, pleased sound, thrusting up a little deeper on the next roll. “One day I will. But tonight… just feel me loving you. No ending yet.”

He flips them once more with careful strength, settling back on top of her in missionary without ever fully pulling out. Now he’s the one setting the slow pace, hips rocking in deep, unhurried circles while he holds her gaze.

“Tell me you feel it too,” he says softly, brushing his nose against hers. “Tell me how much you love having me inside you like this.”

“I love it,” she gasps, legs tightening around him. “I love you inside me… making love to me. It feels like we’re the only two people in the world.”

“We are right now,” he murmurs, kissing her deeply again as their bodies continue that slow, intimate dance.

He doesn’t chase his orgasm. He simply savors her — every flutter of her walls, every soft moan, every time her fingers dig into his shoulders. The pleasure builds gradually, warm and overwhelming, like sinking into something endless and safe.

In the quiet of her bed, with the last semester pressing in from outside, they make love like time has stopped — slow, deep, and dangerously close to something far more permanent than either of them is admitting.

They stay locked together for a long time, bodies still joined, hips moving in that same slow, lazy rhythm. The pleasure has built into something warm and endless, a gentle wave rather than a crash. Soobin’s forehead rests against hers, their breaths mingling in the quiet dark of the bedroom.

“I’m close,” he finally whispers, voice rough but tender. “Been holding it for you… but I need to come now, baby. Need to fill you one last time.”

She nods, legs tightening around his waist, fingers stroking the back of his neck. “Come inside me. Please. I want to feel it… all of it.”

He kisses her deeply as his pace shifts — still deep and intentional, but with a little more urgency now. One hand slides between them to circle her clit with slow, perfect pressure while he thrusts. Their mouths stay connected, soft and open, sharing every moan and gasp.

When her fourth orgasm finally washes over her — slow, rolling, and devastatingly sweet — she clenches hard around him, whimpering his name into his mouth. That’s all it takes.

Soobin groans low and broken, burying himself as deep as he can go. His cock pulses inside her, spilling hot and thick in long, rhythmic waves. He keeps rocking gently through it, pushing every drop deeper, like he’s sealing something between them.

“Take it all,” he breathes against her lips. “That’s it… good girl. All for you.”

They stay like that, trembling and connected, until the last aftershocks fade. Only then does Soobin carefully pull out, a thick trickle of his release following. He doesn’t let the mess bother either of them. Instead, he rolls onto his back and pulls her on top of him, wrapping both arms around her body like he never plans to let go.

The aftercare begins without words at first.

He strokes her back in long, soothing lines, fingertips tracing her spine, then her shoulders, then down to the curve of her ass. His other hand cups the back of her head, threading gently through her damp hair. Soft kisses land on her forehead, her temple, the tip of her nose, quiet, reverent presses of his lips that say everything he doesn’t voice yet.

“You okay?” he murmurs eventually, voice low and warm in the darkness.

She nods against his chest, ear pressed over his heartbeat. “More than okay. I feel… floaty. Safe. Like nothing bad can touch me when I’m with you like this.”

A small, satisfied sound rumbles in his chest. “Good. That’s exactly how I want you to feel.” He presses another kiss to the top of her head. “You were perfect tonight. Took everything I gave you so beautifully. I’m so proud of you, baby.”

She smiles sleepily, nuzzling closer. “You always take such good care of me. Even when we’re… like that. Especially when we’re like that.”

“Because you’re mine to take care of,” he says simply, one hand continuing its slow strokes down her back while the other reaches for the nightstand. He grabs a soft towel he’d left there earlier (always prepared) and gently cleans between her thighs with careful, tender wipes. “There… better?”

“Mhm.” She sighs contentedly as he finishes and tosses the towel aside, then pulls the blanket up over both of them. “Stay like this? Don’t move away yet.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he promises, shifting them so she’s tucked perfectly against his side, head on his chest, one of her legs thrown over his. His arm curls protectively around her waist, hand splaying wide over her lower back. “I’ve got you. Sleep if you want. I’ll be right here.”

She traces idle patterns on his chest with her fingertip. “You always know what I need before I even ask. The towel… the way you hold me after… everything. How do you do that?”

He chuckles softly, the sound vibrating under her ear. “I pay attention. To every little thing about you.” His fingers keep stroking her hair, slow and rhythmic. “You’ve been carrying so much with the thesis and finals. You deserve to be taken care of like this. Deserve to feel loved and safe every single night.”

The word “loved” lands softly between them. She doesn’t pull away from it — just lets it settle in her chest like something warm and familiar.

“I do feel loved,” she whispers after a moment. “With you. Even if we still call this… whatever it is between best friends.”

Soobin’s arms tighten around her just a fraction. His voice stays calm, but there’s a depth of satisfaction underneath. “Then keep feeling it. Because I’m not stopping anytime soon.”

He reaches over and turns off the small lamp on the nightstand, plunging the room into comfortable darkness. The only sounds are their breathing and the distant hum of the city outside. He keeps holding her close, one hand never stopping its gentle caresses, down her arm, across her back, along her hip, grounding her, soothing every last bit of tension from her body.

“Close your eyes,” he murmurs. “I’ve got the whole night. Tomorrow I’ll make you breakfast, run you a bath if you’re sore, whatever you need. But right now… just let me hold you.”

She yawns softly, already drifting. “Love you, Soobin… thank you for always being here.”

He presses one final, lingering kiss to her forehead, eyes closing as he breathes her in.

“I love you too,” he whispers, so quietly she might not fully register it. “More than you know. Sleep now, baby. I’m right here.”

In the quiet afterglow, with his cum still warm inside her and his arms wrapped securely around her body, she falls asleep feeling completely cherished, completely safe, and completely his — even if she still believes it’s all harmless.

Soobin stays awake a little longer, listening to her breathing even out, one hand resting possessively over her lower stomach.

He smiles into the dark.

Everything was going exactly as planned.

The notebook gets a new entry around week six of the semester, written in the bathroom of her apartment while she's in the shower, his handwriting smaller than usual like he's containing something:

*Ovulation window opens Thursday. She has a seminar until 6. I'll have dinner ready. She always relaxes after eating. Be patient. Let it happen naturally. It always happens naturally with her.*

*She took the vitamins again this morning. Third week. She thinks they're the same ones.*

*She said I don't know what I'd do without you last night when I fixed her laptop. She said it like it was nothing. She doesn't know it's everything.*

He closes the notebook. Listens to the shower running. Thinks about the Eevee onesie and the tiny paw shoes and the annotated map of the city with the good school district circled in blue pen.

He thinks: we're so close.

He thinks: she just needs a little more time to catch up.

He puts the notebook back in the bag where it always lives — deep, under folded clothes, the corner just barely visible if you know to look for it — and goes back to the kitchen to finish dinner.

She comes out of the shower in his hoodie twenty minutes later, hair damp, smelling like her shampoo and a little like him, and the sight of her in his space, in his clothes, building a life in the shape he's been quietly constructing around her for years — it lands in his chest the way it always lands, like coming home.

"Smells good," she says, dropping into her chair at the table.

"Chicken," he says. "You said you were craving it."

She said that Tuesday. Offhand. In the middle of a different conversation.

She doesn't remember saying it.

He does.

It happens on a Thursday afternoon — late sun cutting through the crooked blinds in narrow gold strips, the apartment carrying the stale-coffee smell of a day spent working at home, the ceiling fan doing its slow whining rotation. She's curled on the couch in his hoodie, phone face-down on the armrest, something unresolved sitting between her shoulder blades that she can't quite name.

He's on the floor with his back against the couch, textbook open across his lap, thumb tracing the edge of page 187 the way he does when he's reading but also thinking about something else.

She drops the phone onto the armrest and exhales through her nose.

"So," she starts, and stops. Tries again. "Have you ever — been with a girl and a guy, like, at the same time in your life? Overlapping?"

His thumb stills on the page. He tilts his head two centimeters left — that listening posture she knows — and lifts his eyes slowly.

"Why now?" he asks, voice soft with a tiny hook at the corner of his mouth.

She shrugs inside the oversized sleeves, pulling both cuffs down until her hands vanish. "Just thinking. You talk about hot guys the same way you talk about hot girls. It feels easier for you. More natural."

He closes the book carefully. Sets it beside his thigh, edges aligned.

"Easier with what?" His torso shifts toward her; his knee brushes her calf where she's curled on the cushion above him and stays there, warm.

She doesn't move her leg. "With bodies. Touch. Everything. You don't flinch. Guy or girl — it's the same to you."

He rests his elbow on the cushion by her knee, face tilted up toward hers. "Does that bother you?"

"No." She shakes her head, a loose strand falling across her eye that she pushes back with a sleeved knuckle. "I think it's nice. You just exist like that. No categories."

The fan whines once. A gold bar of light slides across the bridge of his nose.

"So what do you think I am?" he asks, barely above a whisper.

She swallows. "Someone who likes people. In different ways. At once, or one after the other. Doesn't matter."

His thumb traces a slow circle on the book cover. His gaze flicks to her mouth for half a second.

"Would knowing change anything for you?"

Her stomach executes a slow, rolling flip. "No." Fast, then softer: "I mean — it wouldn't change what we're already doing."

He lifts his right hand. The backs of his fingers brush the inside of her wrist where the hoodie sleeve has slipped — dry, warm, almost accidental. Almost. His thumb settles over her pulse — no pressure, just resting, feeling the quick rhythm underneath.

"Good to know," he murmurs.

She feels the last piece click into place in the back of her mind and slide a drawer shut: bi. Of course. That explains the way he talks about bodies, the way he's never had a label that fit, the way he dated that one guy in high school and then no one seriously after. That explains all of it. She's not his girl — she's his safe person, his most trusted body, the one constant in a life that keeps its real desires in a quieter room.

She breathes out slowly.

"You're really good at being human," she says, trying for playful, landing somewhere rougher.

He smiles sideways — small, secret. "And you're really good at letting me be."

His thumb stays exactly where it is over her pulse.

The light shifts from gold to orange and neither of them moves and she settles into the version of him she's just constructed — bi, complicated, hers in the way that doesn't require explanation — and feels the relief of it, the neat click of a label that makes everything make sense.

She doesn't see him watching her settle.

She doesn't see the small satisfied thing that moves across his face when he feels her relax.

He was never bi.

He was never gay.

He is a man who has been in love with one specific woman for four years and has been willing to be anything she needed him to be in order to stay close enough to matter.

He keeps his thumb on her pulse a little longer.

Feels it slow.

Feels her trust him completely.

March.

The period tracker app on his phone — the one synced silently to hers since September, the one she has no idea he has — shows a seven-day window starting the fourteenth.

He doesn't change anything about how he acts during those seven days. That's the discipline of it, the thing he's practiced and refined over months of quiet watching: he doesn't become different during the window, he just becomes more of what he already is. More present. More warm. More inclined to touch her without reason, to pull her into him from behind in the kitchen while she's reading something on her phone, to end evenings by pulling her into the bedroom instead of letting her drift to the pull-out, which she almost never uses anymore but still theoretically could.

The fourteenth falls on a Friday. She has a seminar until six. He has dinner ready at six-thirty. She comes through the door already half-unraveling from the week — bag dropped, shoes kicked, the exhale of someone who has been holding herself together through a long day and can finally let the seams loosen — and walks straight into the kitchen where he's plating food and leans her forehead against his shoulder blade without a word.

He reaches back and puts his hand on her hip without turning around.

"Hard day?" he asks.

"The worst," she says into his shoulder.

"Sit down. It's ready."

She sits. He brings everything over. They eat with the window cracked, the early March air just beginning to smell like something other than winter, and she talks about the seminar and he listens the way he always listens — fully, with his eyes on her face, asking the questions that extend what she's saying rather than redirecting it. This is one of the things she tells Lia about him when Lia asks — he actually listens, like, actually — and she doesn't know that she's describing something he cultivated deliberately over years because the research he did on emotional connection in long-term partnerships said that attentive listening was the highest-rated quality in relationship satisfaction across all studies.

He did the research.

Of course he did the research.

After dinner she ends up on his lap on the couch — not because she made a decision, just because the gravitational pull between them at this point is essentially physics — and his hand finds the back of her neck and she closes her eyes and his mouth finds her ear and it proceeds the way it always proceeds from here: inevitable, warm, without ceremony.

She doesn't think about protection.

She doesn't think about anything except the warmth of him and the weight of the week leaving her body and how this, right here, is the only place in the world where everything quiet down.

He thinks about the window.

He thinks: this is how it was always going to happen — naturally, warmly, in the middle of an ordinary evening, without her knowing what it is.

He thinks: she'll understand later. She'll choose this later. She always chooses me eventually — I just have to be patient enough to let her arrive.

He pulls her closer.

She melts into him without question.

Outside, early spring comes in quietly through the cracked window, carrying the smell of something new beginning.

April arrives and the thesis is submitted and the relief of it is enormous and clean and she screams in the apartment at 11:47pm when the portal confirms receipt and Soobin picks her up from the floor and spins her once, laughing, and she's laughing too and the apartment smells like the celebration dinner he started at ten in case it finished early — because he knew it would finish around now, because he checked her submitted draft schedule three days ago and calculated the revision time she'd need — and everything is warm and good and full of the specific joy of something enormous finally being done.

They're drunk by one. Not sloppy-drunk — happy-drunk, the kind where everything is funny and the music is too loud and she ends up on the kitchen counter while he dances extremely badly in front of her and she's laughing so hard her stomach hurts, and he grabs her hands and makes her dance with him standing on the floor while she's on the counter so they're almost the same height and she cups his face and kisses him — sweet this time, soft, grateful — and feels the whole weight of this year, of this person, of this strange warm life they've built in the space between what she thought he was and what he actually is.

"We're going to graduate," she says against his mouth, the fact of it landing new each time she says it.

"We're going to graduate," he agrees, hands on her waist, steady.

She leans her forehead against his. Thinks about May. Thinks about the families coming and the gowns and the photographs and what comes after and the particular terrifying freedom of after.

"Are you scared?" she asks.

"No," he says, which is true. He has been building after for years. He knows exactly what it looks like. "Are you?"

"A little," she admits.

He pulls her closer. "I'll be there," he says. "Whatever comes after. I'm there."

She believes him completely.

She has no idea how literal he means it.

May arrives in three weeks and leaves a month of chaos in its wake — final presentations, departmental dinners, the strange suspended quality of last things, last lectures, last times walking routes she's walked four years of mornings. She takes photos of things she never photographed before: the library window. The bench near the science building where she ate lunch a hundred times. The coffee place two blocks over where he introduced her to the order that's been hers for two years now.

She texts one to him with the caption: this is because of you.

He texts back: all the good ones are.

She screenshots it and doesn't tell him.

He already knows.

The families arrive the Thursday before graduation.

It's been planned for weeks — both sets of parents, a restaurant in the city, the kind of dinner that requires a reservation and actual shoes and the specific performance of adulthood that comes with presenting your life to people who remember when you were smaller. She spends an hour getting dressed and changes twice and Soobin sits on the edge of her bed watching her with the patience of a man who genuinely does not care which dress she wears as long as she's in the room.

"The blue one," he says, when she holds up two options.

"You always pick the blue one."

"Because you always look best in the blue one." Flat. Obvious. Like this is not a compliment but a fact, which is exactly how he always delivers compliments, which is exactly why they land.

She puts on the blue one.

The restaurant is warm and candlelit and the tables are close enough together that everything feels intimate whether you want it to be or not. Her parents are already there when they arrive — her mother standing up immediately, arms open, the specific warmth of a hug from a woman who has been waiting to see her daughter for months and is not going to underdeliver on the reunion. Her father shakes Soobin's hand — firm, measured, the handshake of a man who is taking stock — and Soobin meets it evenly, which her father notices, which is the first point in Soobin's favor.

His parents arrive five minutes later. His mother is warm and effortlessly elegant in the way of women who have been comfortable for a long time. His father has Soobin's height and Soobin's quality of stillness and the specific observant quiet of a man who built something and would like to see who his son is becoming.

The table settles. Wine is poured. The conversation finds its feet.

She watches it happen without fully understanding what she's watching — the way the two sets of parents orient toward each other with a comfort that feels less like strangers getting acquainted and more like people who already have an opinion and are spending the evening confirming it. Her mother laughs at something Soobin's mother says and touches her arm and the gesture is too warm for first meeting, like they've been in the same orbit before and simply haven't occupied the same room until now.

She goes to the bathroom midway through the main course and comes back to find her father and Soobin in the corner of the conversation, the rest of the table temporarily occupied with something else, her father leaning forward slightly — not hostile but focused — and Soobin meeting every question with the easy confidence of a man who prepared for this meeting long before it was scheduled.

She watches from across the room for a moment before they see her.

Her father nods once. Deliberate.

Soobin catches her eye over the table — quick, barely a flicker — and she can't read it from here, except that it's warm.

She sits back down. Her mother squeezes her hand under the table.

"He's wonderful," her mother says quietly, very close to her ear. "He's always been wonderful."

She thinks: she means as a friend. She means it the way she always means it — Soobin is wonderful, what a good friend, what a lucky thing you found him.

She doesn't think anything more careful than that.

After dinner — families separating, hotel directions exchanged, hugs distributed — she and Soobin walk back to the apartment in the cool May evening with the city noise low around them. He has his jacket over her shoulders because she was cold three blocks ago and he took it off without being asked, which is, she thinks distantly, so completely him that she doesn't even think of it as remarkable anymore.

"My dad asked you about your plans," she says.

"I know. I told him."

She glances at him. "What did you tell him?"

"The truth." His hands are in his pockets, step unhurried. "That I have a position with my father's company starting in July. That I'm looking at apartments in this city. That I plan to be around."

She absorbs this. The position she knew about. The apartments — she hasn't heard about apartments. "Looking at apartments?"

"Casually," he says, which is not true at all, but he says it so evenly that it lands as true. "Just thinking about the next step. It makes sense to stay near campus for a while. We both have reasons to stay near campus."

She nods slowly. She doesn't ask why he's framing it as we — it just sounds right, it slots in beside all the other things that have started sounding right without her consciously deciding they should.

"He seemed to approve," she says.

"He asked good questions. I respect him." A pause. "He loves you. Wants to know you're taken care of."

The phrase lands softly and she doesn't examine it. Just walks beside him with his jacket over her shoulders and the city lights turning everything amber and thinks: this is what after looks like, maybe. This warm ordinary thing. This person walking beside her who knows her schedule and her coffee order and her worst fears and her best jokes and who has made himself so completely necessary that she stopped being able to locate the seam between where she ends and where he begins.

She hooks her pinky through his — the old habit, the childhood reflex, the one that means crowds and closeness and I don't want to lose you in this.

He hooks back.

They walk the last three blocks in comfortable silence.

The night before graduation she can't sleep.

This is not unusual — she's been a bad sleeper before big things her whole life — but the particular shape of this restlessness is different. It's not the thesis anxiety or the seminar-deadline 4am alarm-heart. It's something lower and stranger, something in her body rather than her mind, a low-grade wrongness she can't locate precisely. She's been a little off for the past week. Not sick exactly — nothing she could point to and name — just slightly not herself, a degree or two off her usual temperature, a faint nausea some mornings that she blames on stress and then forgets by afternoon.

She chalks it up to the enormity of tomorrow.

Soobin is asleep behind her — arm over her waist, face close to her shoulder, breathing slow and even. He fell asleep fast the way he always does after she stops moving, like her stillness is the signal his body was waiting for.

She stares at the ceiling.

She thinks about four years. She thinks about the girl who arrived at this school with a perfectly organized planner and a very clear idea of what the next four years would look like, and looks for the seam between that girl and this one — lying in a bed that has become shared so gradually she couldn't tell you which night the pronoun changed from his bed to our bed — and finds the seam is very thin. Almost invisible. The kind that a good tailor makes deliberately so you can't see the work.

She thinks: I'm really happy.

The thought arrives simply, without the guilty hedging she might have expected. She's really happy. This is her life and she likes it and tomorrow she's going to wear a gown and her parents will cry and Soobin will be right there the way he always is and after after comes and she'll figure it out — they'll figure it out, the we that has become natural — and everything is going to be fine.

She doesn't think about the slight wrongness in her body. She's tired and stressed and tomorrow is enormous and everything strange is explainable.

She turns over. Faces him.

In the dark his face is soft the way it gets in sleep — the careful composure he carries through waking hours gentled down to something younger, the boy inside the man, the person who has apparently been in love with her since they were nineteen and showed it in every way except the most obvious one.

She thinks: I love you.

The thought arrives without fanfare. Not a revelation — just a recognition, quiet and deep, like something that has been true for a long time finally being acknowledged in the right language.

She doesn't say it out loud.

But she tucks it close.

Closes her eyes.

And finally, finally, sleeps.

The next morning she wakes up to the smell of coffee and the sound of him moving quietly in the kitchen and the pale particular light of a May morning that is going to be a beautiful day. She lies there for a moment — ceiling, light, the distant sound of campus beginning to wake — and notices, without urgency, that her stomach feels faintly wrong again.

She ignores it.

Gets up. Gets dressed. Puts on the earrings he picked out last week when she held up options — simple silver ones he said would catch the light under the ceremony tent, because of course he thought about that.

He appears in the doorway with two mugs. "How do you feel?"

"Good," she says, and mostly means it. "Nervous. Ready."

He hands her the coffee. His thumb brushes her wrist when she takes it — just a second, just contact — and she feels it move through her the way it always moves through her, warm and sure and impossible to locate properly because it's everywhere now, woven into the whole fabric of her days.

"You're going to be great," he says.

"We're going to be great," she corrects.

He smiles — small, real, the one with the dimples — and it's a smile she doesn't quite have the context for, layered with a satisfaction she can't fully see.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "We are."

She drinks her coffee.

Outside, the May morning opens up clear and warm and full of beginnings.

And in her body, very quietly, something has already begun.

౨ৎ prev ✧ next — ⋆｡‧˚ʚ ✧ 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇 𝓈𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓃: 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓎𝑒𝓈 𝓈𝒽𝑒 𝒹𝒾𝒹𝓃’𝓉 𝓈𝒶𝓎 ✧ ɞ˚‧｡⋆

౨ৎ tag open: @black-startxt @buttersoob @idkguyslma @toru-saki @amelie-sama-blog @binniesbabe @ravenslocked @usuallyunlikelyfox @whoreforjongho

🩷 𝓊𝓅𝒹𝒶𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓃 𝒾𝓃𝓈𝓅𝒾𝓇𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝓈𝓉𝓇𝒾𝓀𝑒𝓈

𝓊𝓅𝒸𝑜𝓂𝒾𝓃𝓰 ꒰ა𝐿𝑜𝓋𝑒 𝒲𝒾𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓊𝓉 𝒶 𝒞𝑜𝓊𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇-𝒞𝒽𝒶𝓇𝓂໒꒱ 𝒸𝒽𝑜𝒾 𝓈𝑜𝑜𝒷𝒾𝓃 × 𝒻𝑒𝓂!𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹𝑒𝓇 ໒꒱ Hogwarts AU

⋆｡‧˚ʚ ✧ 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇 𝑒𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉: 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓁𝒾𝒻𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒷𝓊𝒾𝓁𝒹 ✧ ɞ˚‧｡⋆

The first thing she notices, sitting in the waiting room of the OB clinic on a Tuesday morning with a decaf coffee in her hands that she did not order herself, is that she is not panicking.

She thought she would be panicking.

She has spent two weeks thinking she would be panicking at this exact moment, plastic chairs, soft ambient light, a reception desk with a small potted succulent and a sign about parking validation, all of it adding up to a reality she has been building toward from the inside of her own body without anyone asking her permission.

She thought sitting here would feel the way the pregnancy tests felt, that cold floor certainty, the world contracting down to a single fact.

Instead what she feels is this:

Soobin's shoulder against hers.

He was outside the clinic when she arrived.

Not texting from the lobby, not circling the block in the car.

Outside, leaning against the wall in the pale morning light with two cups in a cardboard carrier, wearing the dark green jacket — the one she told him once, a year ago, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, that she liked best on him.

He straightened when he saw her coming down the block.

Said nothing.

Handed her the decaf.

She took it.

Looked at the cup.

Looked at him.

"How did you know I switched to decaf," she said, even though she knew the answer.

She has always known the answer.

She just needed to say it out loud for once instead of filing it under Soobin is like that and moving on.

He just tilted his head toward the door.

Come on.

Let's go.

So they went.

And now she is sitting in a plastic chair with his arm pressed warm against hers and the decaf getting cold in her hands and she is thinking about all the versions of this morning she imagined during the two weeks since she found the notebook.

The versions where she was angry, where she walked in here alone, where she had figured out the correct emotional posture to take toward a man who loved her devotedly and badly and completely.

She imagined all of those versions.

She did not imagine this one, where she handed him her coffee so she could fill out the intake form and he held both cups without being asked and she looked at his hands, those hands, those careful familiar hands and felt the panic just.... not come.

There is a word for that feeling and she is not ready to say it yet but she knows what it is.

The nurse calls her name.

They both stand at the same time, which neither of them planned.

He looks at her.

She looks at him.

A small negotiation happens in the space of one breath.

She reaches down and takes his hand.

His fingers close around hers immediately, like they were already reaching back.

They walk through the door.

The ultrasound room is cold and clinical and smaller than she expected, the paper on the exam table crinkling every time she shifts, the overhead light bright in the particular way of rooms that have no patience for softness.

The technician is kind and speaks in a warm unhurried voice, explaining everything before she does it, gel cold on her stomach, the wand moving.

Then the sound.

She was prepared for many things.

She studied what to expect, because she is someone who studies what to expect, who triple-checks calendars and reads ahead and tries to keep the world from surprising her at full force.

She was prepared for the visual.

She was prepared for her own complicated emotions.

She was prepared for Soobin standing beside the table being calm and present and exactly as steady as he always is.

She was not prepared for the sound.

It is small.

It is insistent.

It is so completely, undeniably real that it moves through her like something seismic, something that rearranges furniture in rooms she did not know she had.

A heartbeat.

One heartbeat underneath hers.

Not a theory anymore, not a test result, not a word on a page.

A sound in a room.

A small insistent proof of something.

She does not cry.

She is not going to cry in this room in front of a stranger.

She swallows hard and keeps her eyes on the screen and concentrates on breathing evenly and does not look at Soobin because if she looks at Soobin right now she will cry and she has decided not to.

She does not look at him.

She feels him.

He has been very still since the sound started — the specific stillness of someone who is feeling something enormous and has decided this is not the moment, not yet. but his hand found her shoulder at some point and his thumb is moving, slow and steady, the way it does when he wants to say something without saying it, when the words aren't enough or aren't the right ones.

Slow circles.

Over and over.

I'm here.

I know.

I'm here.

The technician points at the screen.

There.

That flutter.

That is the heart.

Soobin says nothing for a long, suspended moment.

Then, very softly, in a voice she has never heard from him before — lower than his usual quiet, rough at the edges in a way he never allows himself to be —

he says:

"Hi."

Just that.

One word to the screen.

To the flutter.

She turns to look at him.

She should not have turned to look at him.

His jaw is tight with the effort of keeping his face manageable, his eyes bright in the clinical light, and he is looking at the screen with an expression so completely unguarded that she has to look away again immediately because it is too much, it is the most honest thing she has ever seen on a human face and it belongs to him and it is directed at something that is half hers and half his and it is too much.

She squeezes his hand.

He squeezes back hard enough that her knuckles ache.

Neither of them speaks for the rest of the appointment.

They don't need to.

She brings it up on the drive home because she cannot hold it any longer.

It is not what she planned to do.

She planned to wait.

She planned to pick the right moment, find the right framing, approach it the way you approach anything difficult: organized, considered, from a position of having thought it through.

But they are in the car and the city is moving past the windows and the decaf is cold in the cupholder and the heartbeat sound is still living somewhere in her chest and she cannot hold it anymore.

"Why," she says.

He keeps his eyes on the road. His hands are steady on the wheel.

"What part."

"The real part."

She looks at his profile.

"I've read the notebook enough times. I understand the plan. What I want to understand is the reason underneath the plan. The one you didn't write down."

He is quiet.

She waits, because she has learned that his silence is not avoidance, it is the sound of a person choosing their words with the same care he brings to everything, the same care that used to look like patience and she is only now learning to call by its right name: love.

"Every time I tried to just say it," he begins, voice low and even, "you would laugh at something I said and call me your person and I would think — she already has this. She has me in this shape. The safe shape, the always-there shape, the one that gets to hold her hand in crowds and braid her hair and hear everything. If I say something real, she has to make a decision."

He pauses.

A long one.

"And she might decide no. And then I lose all of it. I lose you."

She breathes.

Outside a stoplight turns green.

"So you decided to never risk it," she says.

"I decided," he says carefully, "to make the risk impossible. To make myself so present, so woven into the fabric of your actual life, that by the time you had to decide anything I wasn't a risk anymore. I was just. A fact. The person who was always there."

She absorbs this.

It is not comfortable to absorb.

It is also, and she has been sitting with this for two weeks, not entirely unlike things she has done.

But in her own quieter, more passive way, choosing the label that kept him close without forcing her to name what she actually wanted.

Leaning on him endlessly and calling it friendship so she didn't have to call it need.

"Were you scared," she asks.

"The whole time."

He glances at her, quick, then back to the road.

"Of what specifically."

"Of you seeing it and stepping back."

His voice stays level but there is something underneath it that costs him to say.

"You had me in this perfect category. Safe. The one you could tell everything to. The one who didn't want anything you weren't offering. I knew that if I pushed, if I let you see it properly, you might think — oh. This changes things. And then you'd manage it. You'd be kind about it and careful about it and you'd gently put distance between us to make it less complicated for me, because that's the kind of person you are, you protect the people you care about from their own feelings."

She stares at him.

"And I could not survive that distance," he finishes, quiet. "So I didn't give you the chance to create it."

She sits with that for a long time.

Long enough that they pass through two more neighborhoods, long enough that the city starts becoming something she recognizes as the one they are currently leaving.

"You should have told me," she says, finally.

The same thing she said two weeks ago and means differently now.

"I know."

"Because here is what I have been thinking about for two weeks."

She turns fully in her seat to look at him, even though he can't look back properly.

"I think I knew. Not the planning. But the feeling underneath all of it. I think I knew and I put the label there specifically because it was easier than knowing, and I let you carry that for years."

She breathes.

"I'm angry at you for the ways that were actually wrong. The vitamins, the condoms, the things you decided for both of us. Those were mine too and you took them from me and I'm still working through that."

She pauses.

"But I'm also angry at myself. Because I was doing my own version of it the whole time. Just quieter. Just easier to miss."

He is very still behind the wheel.

"I kept you," she says. "In the shape I needed you to be in. And every time something blurred the edges of that shape I just... looked away."

He exhales through his nose, slow and deliberate.

"You needed something to feel safe," he says.

"So did you," she says. "That's my point. We were both doing the same thing in different directions and calling it something else."

The car stops at her old apartment block.

He has driven them here without discussing it.

She looks up at the building, the windows she knows by room, the entrance they have walked through hundreds of times.

There is a metaphor in this, she thinks, but she is too tired for metaphors today.

She looks back at him.

"I always wanted a family," he says to the windshield, very quietly. "Not in an abstract way. Not someday maybe, if things work out. I wanted it concretely and specifically and from the moment I knew what wanting meant I already knew I wanted it with you."

He swallows.

"I know that's a lot. I know it probably sounds like I decided something for you that wasn't mine to decide. I know that's true."

He finally looks at her.

"I'm not asking you to forgive the how. I'm asking you to understand the why. The why is just that I have loved you since before either of us had the language for it and I have been building toward this because without it I was just. A man standing next to the life he wanted, trying to figure out how to deserve a door in."

The morning light comes through the windshield and sits on his face and she looks at him — really looks, the way she stopped letting herself look years ago because it was too much information — and sees all of it.

The love.

The fear underneath the love.

The years of choosing her every single day in every way available to him except the direct one.

The boy from the photo at seventeen who told his mother there was a girl and she didn't know yet.

She reaches over.

Puts her hand on his jaw and makes him look at her properly.

"I know," she says. "I know all of it. I've read the whole notebook."

His breath shakes slightly.

Just once.

"The yellow dress," she says.

His jaw tightens under her hand.

"You wrote about the yellow dress," she says. "You wrote that my eyes look gold sometimes. You wrote that you had to leave the room."

She keeps her voice steady.

"That was three years ago. I have been wearing your clothes and sleeping in your bed and calling you my person for years without saying the thing I was also not saying, which is that I have never felt about anyone the way I feel about you and I covered it in a label because I was scared too. Just of different things."

He looks at her.

His eyes are doing the thing she cannot look at for too long, too bright, too much.

"What were you scared of," he asks, barely a whisper.

"Losing the best thing I had," she says simply. "Asking for more and having you realize that more was too much. Having you look at me as a problem to be managed instead of the person you —"

She stops.

"I had you exactly as much as I could have you without risking anything. I wasn't going to ask for more. So I made the label true in my own head and I stayed inside it."

He turns his face into her palm.

Neither of them says anything for a long moment.

"We wasted so much time," she says.

"No," he says, against her hand. "Nothing was wasted. We just took the long road."

She almost laughs.

"You took the scenic route through the part where you tracked my cycle and swapped my vitamins."

His mouth curves against her palm.

"To be fair."

"You don't get to be fair about that."

"I know."

He turns her hand over, presses his mouth to the inside of her wrist where her pulse is, warm and deliberate.

"I know I don't."

She lets him.

She tilts her head against the seat and watches him and thinks about heartbeats.

The small one they heard this morning.

The one under her palm right now.

Hers, which has been trying to tell her something for years in a language she kept refusing to learn.

"Okay," she says softly. "Let's go pick a house."

He lifts his head.

Something in his expression opens, the particular brightness of a man receiving something he prepared for but didn't let himself fully believe was coming.

"Yeah?" he says.

"Don't make it a thing," she says. "Let's just go."

He starts the car.

She doesn't move her hand from his wrist.

The spreadsheet is color-coded.

She finds it on his laptop the morning after the appointment, open on the dining table beside his half-drunk coffee.

Six neighborhoods.

Columns for school district rating, park proximity, commute time, build year of the housing stock, walkability score.

A column labeled feel with notes like good energy, busy street and quiet but isolated? worth viewing in his small deliberate handwriting.

Everything organized, everything considered.

He has even included a column that cross-references distance to both their parents' cities.

She stares at the spreadsheet for a long time.

Then she picks up her own phone.

She has been looking at houses too, for ten days, late at night with her phone screen brightness turned down.

Not in the city on his spreadsheet.

In the city her parents live in, eight hours away, the small town with the clapboard houses and the pine trees and the road that smells like woodsmoke in winter.

She has been looking at houses there the way you test the temperature of water before you step in — not committing, just touching, seeing what the surface feels like.

She found one four days ago.

She has been sitting with it since.

She opens the listing and crosses the kitchen to where he is standing at the counter refilling his coffee, still in the gray sweatpants he slept in, hair unstyled, reading something on his own phone, and she holds her screen up without saying anything.

He looks at it.

He is quiet.

He takes the phone with one hand, still holding his coffee with the other, and scrolls through the photos slowly.

The kitchen with the wide counters.

The garden running long and green.

The sunroom with three walls of windows.

The room the listing calls a library-or-study, with built-in shelves and a window seat and afternoon light that turns everything gold.

Five bedrooms.

Six bathrooms.

A different city.

Twenty minutes from her mother's house.

He keeps scrolling.

He goes back to the sunroom photo.

He looks at it for a long moment.

Then he laughs.

She was prepared for arguments.

She was prepared for the spreadsheet defense, for a careful measured conversation about practicality and timing and the life they have already built here.

She was even, in some small testing part of herself, prepared for the first real sign that there is a limit to how far he will follow, that the adaptability has an edge, that at some point even Choi Soobin reaches the end of what he will reshape himself around.

The laugh is not any of those things.

It is the real laugh, the quiet warm one that starts in his chest, the one she has been cataloguing since they were nineteen years old without knowing she was cataloguing it.

"You thought about this," he says, and his voice is full of something she can only describe as fond.

Not surprised but openly, entirely fond.

"You absolutely thought about this, didn't you."

She crosses her arms.

"I was exploring options."

"Six bathrooms," he says, still looking at the listing.

"We might need them."

"Five bedrooms."

"Future planning."

"And it's in a completely different city from the one I spent three weeks researching, exactly twenty minutes from your parents."

He looks up at her over the phone screen and the fondness in his expression does something to her chest that she is still not ready to name properly.

"You picked the most expensive option in the most inconvenient location specifically to see what I would do."

She holds his gaze.

"And?"

He sets his coffee down.

He looks at the listing one more time.

He hands her phone back to her.

"We need to check the school districts near that neighborhood," he says, in the tone of someone making a practical decision, as if she has not just handed him a test and he has not just passed it without flinching.

"And whether there's a park within walking distance. Ideally a playground too, for when they're a bit older."

He picks his coffee back up.

"Can you pull up a map?"

She stares at him.

She stares at him for long enough that he glances back at her, eyebrow raised slightly, patiently waiting for her to catch up.

"You're serious," she says.

"When am I not serious."

"You made a spreadsheet for six neighborhoods in this city. You researched those neighborhoods for weeks. You had a whole plan."

"And you found a better option."

He says it simply, as though this is obvious, as though watching a month of careful work become irrelevant in the space of thirty seconds is not a loss at all, just an adjustment.

"A bigger house, better long-term as the family grows, close to your parents who will help enormously in the first year, and honestly —"

He looks back at the listing on her phone.

"— that kitchen is better than anything in my spreadsheet."

She is quiet for a long moment.

She thinks about every time she has tested him without realizing that's what she was doing.

Every time she changed plans last minute and he recalibrated.

Every time she pushed back on something he'd decided and he opened his hands and said okay, what do you want instead.

Every time she shifted the shape of what she needed and he reshaped himself around it without keeping score.

He is not doing this because he has no spine.

She knows that now, knows it fully, has spent two weeks reading the evidence of exactly how much spine and strategy and intention are packed into this person.

He is doing it because this is the language he speaks.

Because when he says I want this with you he means all the this — not just the version he planned, but whatever version she actually wants, whatever life she would actually choose if she felt safe enough to choose honestly.

He has always been building around her.

She just spent years thinking that meant he was simple.

"Okay," she says quietly.

He looks at her.

"Okay," she says again. "Let's see the house."

Something in him goes very still for a beat, the way he goes still when he is receiving something unexpected, and then he just nods, easy, already reaching for his own phone to message the agent, like it's settled, like it was always going to be settled this way.

But she saw it.

That one beat.

She files it away.

Holds it close.

The house is better in person.

The listing photos did it no justice.

The kitchen has a window above the sink that looks onto the garden and late-afternoon light comes through it in a warm amber wash that makes the whole room feel like somewhere a family has already been happy.

The garden is longer than she expected, all the way to an old stone wall at the back with something green and climbing growing over the top of it.

The sunroom is enormous and quiet and smells faintly of the previous owners' garden, something floral and old.

The library-or-study has a window seat.

The cushions are sun-faded from years of use.

The bookshelves go floor to ceiling on two walls.

The afternoon light comes in and turns everything gold.

She stands in the center of the room and does not move for a long time.

Soobin comes to stand behind her, just within the perimeter of her space the way he always is, close enough to be felt.

She hears him looking at the room.

"Nursery," she says softly, before he can.

He makes a quiet sound of agreement.

"With the window seat kept in," she continues. "Good light all afternoon. I could sit here while they sleep."

"Or read," he says. "There are worse ways to spend a nap time."

She turns around.

He is close, closer than she registered, and she has to look up to meet his eyes and what she finds there when she does is the thing she has been finding more and more lately — open, unguarded, no performance, just him looking at her the way he must have been looking at her for years in all the moments she wasn't paying attention.

"This is the room," she says.

He nods.

"This is the room."

"We're getting this house."

"Yes," he says, soft and certain.

She looks back at the window seat.

Outside the garden is bright and green and the stone wall is covered in that old growing thing and she thinks about painting these walls, thinks about what color, thinks about a small person sleeping in afternoon light while she sits in the cushioned window and reads something that has nothing to do with thesis footnotes and the air smells like something different than stress.

"Sage," she says.

"Sorry?"

"For the walls. Sage green."

He steps up beside her and looks at the room, and from her peripheral vision she watches him nod once, decisive, like it was always going to be sage.

"Sage," he agrees.

They stand there for a moment in the room that is going to be theirs, in the house that is going to be theirs, twenty minutes from her mother's kitchen and the cinnamon smell and the pine trees, and outside the sun comes through the windows and makes everything warm.

She turns to look at him.

"When you were planning all of it," she says. "Did you imagine this? Specifically?"

He considers it honestly.

"The house was more abstract. The part I imagined specifically was you. Being somewhere with you that was ours. Having something that was both of ours."

He pauses.

"The rest was just logistics."

She absorbs this.

"You're lucky I love this house," she says.

His expression does that thing where the corners shift and the warmth gathers and the dimples don't quite appear but the intention of them does.

"I know."

She shakes her head.

Smiles despite herself.

Turns back to the window.

"Let's tell the agent yes," she says.

The agent’s car disappears down the quiet street, and the front door clicks shut behind her. The house falls into a hush broken only by the faint creak of floorboards under their feet. Golden light pours through the kitchen windows, catching on dust motes and turning the empty counters soft amber. The space still carries the faint scent of the previous owners’ lives, but it already feels like the beginning of theirs.

She stands at the wide sink, looking out at the garden, when Soobin steps in close behind her. His arms slide around her waist without hesitation, palms spreading over her stomach as he pulls her back against his chest. His nose tucks into the curve of her neck, breathing her in like he always does. She feels the warmth of his exhale, then the gentle press of his lips.

“You really said yes,” he murmurs against her skin, voice low and wondering. His hands knead slowly at her waist, thumbs stroking in small circles.

She leans into him, covering one of his hands with hers. “We said yes.”

He kisses the side of her neck again, open-mouthed and lingering, then nips lightly at the skin there. The small bite sends a shiver through her. His mouth never stays still for long; it travels, tasting, as if he cannot help himself. Another soft bite follows on her shoulder through the thin fabric of her shirt before he nudges the collar aside to reach bare skin.

She turns in his arms. His eyes are dark and open in the golden light, that unguarded look she has grown used to seeing more of lately. He leans down and kisses her properly, slow and deep, one hand cupping the back of her head while the other stays anchored at her lower back, pressing her closer. When they break apart, his forehead rests against hers.

“I have waited so long to have you here like this,” he says quietly. “In our house.”

His hands move with familiar reverence, sliding under her shirt to trace her ribs, then higher. He cups her breasts, thumbs brushing over her nipples until they tighten under his touch. He watches her face the whole time, learning every small reaction. When she arches into his palms, he makes a low sound and dips his head to kiss along her collarbone, then lower, pushing her shirt up so he can mouth at the soft skin of her chest. His tongue traces, then his teeth graze gently, never hard enough to hurt, just enough to make her gasp.

“Soobin,” she breathes.

He drops to his knees right there on the kitchen floor, hands sliding down her sides to her hips. He presses his face against her stomach first, kissing through her clothes, then looks up at her with quiet hunger. “Let me taste you.”

She nods, and he helps her out of her bottoms, setting them aside carefully. His hands spread her thighs, and he leans in, mouth warm and eager. He starts slow, kissing along her inner thighs, nipping softly, then licks a broad stripe up her center. When his tongue finds her clit, he hums in satisfaction, the vibration traveling through her. His hands knead her ass, holding her steady as he explores, sucking gently, then firmer, learning exactly how she likes it. One finger slides inside her, then two, curling patiently while his mouth works.

She threads her fingers through his hair, hips rocking softly. The pleasure builds in waves, warm and inevitable. He stays there until she comes with a quiet cry, thighs trembling around his shoulders. He keeps licking her through it, gentler now, savoring.

When she catches her breath, he stands, lifting her easily onto the counter. The stone is cool beneath her, but his body is warm as he steps between her legs. He kisses her again, letting her taste herself on his tongue. His hands never leave her, stroking her thighs, her waist, her breasts, as if he needs constant contact to believe this is real.

She reaches for his waistband, pushing his pants down. He is hard and flushed, and she strokes him slowly, watching his eyes flutter. He groans softly against her mouth.

“No rushing,” he whispers. “We have time. All the time now.”

He lines himself up and pushes in slowly, inch by inch, until he is buried deep. They both exhale at the feeling. No barriers, just heat and closeness. He stays there for a long moment, forehead pressed to hers, breathing with her. Then he begins to move, deep and unhurried rolls of his hips.

His mouth stays busy, kissing her neck, biting gently at her shoulder, sucking marks that will fade by morning but feel permanent in the moment. One hand fondles her breast, pinching lightly at the nipple, while the other grips her hip, guiding her to meet his thrusts. The golden light paints their skin as they move together.

“You feel so good,” he murmurs, voice rough. “So perfect for me. My mama.”

The word sends heat spiraling through her. He says it again, softer, reverent, each time he sinks deep. “Gonna fill you up. Keep you full. Build everything with you.”

She wraps her legs around him, pulling him closer. The pleasure climbs again, slower this time, deeper. His pace remains steady, worshipful, hands and mouth everywhere. When she clenches around him, coming a second time, he follows soon after, burying himself deep and spilling inside her with a low groan, hips twitching as he gives her everything.

They stay joined for a long while, his arms wrapped around her, face tucked into her neck. He presses soft kisses there, small bites, hands still stroking her back and sides. The kitchen is quiet except for their breathing and the distant sound of birds outside.

“This is ours,” he says eventually, voice muffled against her skin. “All of it.”

She runs her fingers through his hair and nods, feeling the weight and warmth of the life they are choosing settle around them like the golden light.

Moving happens the way most enormous life changes happen: in pieces, without ceremony, with far too many boxes and the persistent feeling that the version of yourself that packed this particular box no longer quite exists by the time you're unpacking it.

She packs her side of the apartment over three evenings.

This is generous phrasing.

What she actually does is open boxes, put three things in them, get distracted by an object that requires explanation, and show the object to Soobin, who is packing his side with the terrifying efficiency of a man who has apparently been emotionally ready to leave for a while.

"This mug," she says, holding up a mug that says but first, coffee in a font that belongs in 2014. "Lia gave me this for my birthday in freshman year. Do I keep it."

"Keep it," he says, without looking up from the box he's filling.

"It's kind of ugly."

"It's from Lia. Keep it."

She puts it in the box.

Shows him a book next.

He tells her to keep it.

A candle with three hours of burn time left.

Keep it.

A single decorative gourd she bought at a campus market and has never used for anything.

He looks at the gourd for a long moment.

"Keep it," he says.

"You didn't even think about it."

"You've kept it for two years. You're going to keep it. Put it in the box."

She puts the gourd in the box with the mug and the candle and the book and feels something she cannot name sitting just beneath her sternum.

She has been feeling it for weeks, this low-grade quiet something.

It is not sadness.

It is not quite happiness.

It is something more like: witnessing.

The sense of watching your own life from a slight remove and understanding, maybe for the first time, what it is.

She looks at his side of the room.

His boxes are labeled.

Not just kitchen and books — specifically labeled.

Mugs: everyday. Books: fiction. Spare linens: hall closet.

The objects from his surfaces are packed with care, nothing broken, nothing missing.

The walls where his things were are bare and clean.

He has been ready for a long time.

She crosses the room and stands beside him, close, looking at the boxes he has built.

"How long have you had this packed," she says softly.

He is quiet for a beat.

"Some of it I packed when I moved in here. Kept it ready."

She turns her head to look at him.

He keeps his eyes on the box he is sealing.

"Soobin."

He finally looks at her.

His expression is open, not defensive.

"I hoped," he says simply. "That one day we'd be doing this. Moving somewhere together. That it wouldn't be — me staying at yours because of a flimsy excuse, or a suitcase in a trunk. That it would just be ours. So yes. Some of it I kept ready."

He pauses.

"That probably sounds —"

"It sounds like you," she says.

He looks at her for a moment.

Something in his face does the shift, the softening.

She reaches up and takes his face in her hands, both palms, and holds him there and makes him look at her properly.

He lets her.

He is always, she realizes now, letting her set the pace, letting her reach for him, stepping into whatever she offers and offering nothing she hasn't asked for first.

"You have been so patient," she says.

Not an accusation.

Just true.

"I didn't always feel patient," he admits.

"I know. I saw the notebook."

The corner of his mouth moves.

"I'm sorry it took me so long to look at you properly," she says.

He brings his hands up over hers, both of them, holding her hands against his face.

His eyes are bright in the apartment light and she holds his gaze and neither of them looks away.

"It doesn't matter," he says.

"It matters. I'm saying it anyway."

He turns his face slightly, presses his mouth to her palm, warm and deliberate, his eyes staying on hers the whole time.

She lets out a breath she has apparently been holding for years.

"Okay," she says softly. "Let's finish packing."

He nods.

Keeps hold of one of her hands as they go back to their separate boxes.

Neither of them acknowledges it.

Neither of them lets go.

The nursery gets painted first.

This is not a plan so much as a gravitational fact.

Something keeps pulling them back to that room — her because of the window seat and the afternoon light and the way she already knows the shape of the life she wants to build in it, him because of something she can't fully see but can feel the weight of, a particular quality of stillness that comes over him in that room that she has started to understand means he is full of something he hasn't found the words for yet.

It is a Sunday when they paint.

All the furniture from the previous owners has been cleared.

The floors are bare wood, slightly scuffed, old and warm.

She has borrowed clothes from the back of the closet — an old shirt of his, worn soft, that she officially stole three apartments ago.

He is in something similar, paint-stained already from a test stripe he did on the sample board yesterday.

Sage green.

Exactly right.

She is not a methodical painter.

She is aware of this.

She paints in enthusiastic overlapping strokes that cover most of the wall and some of the adjacent trim and she has a theory that this adds character and Soobin has a different theory which he expresses by taking the roller from her without a word, correcting the trim, and handing it back.

"You're going in circles," he says.

"I'm interpreting the space."

"You missed three sections."

"They're accent sections."

He takes the roller.

Corrects the accent sections.

Returns it.

She misses a new section immediately, not entirely by accident, just to watch what he does.

He takes the roller again, a small sound escaping him that is caught between exasperation and a laugh.

She starts laughing first.

And then he gives up on exasperation and laughs too, the real laugh, the chest-first one, and they are standing in the middle of the half-painted nursery with sage green on their hands and on their clothes and probably on her face, the radio playing something neither of them knows, afternoon light flooding through the window seat, and she looks at him and he looks at her and the laughter just keeps going until she has to lean against the wall and he has to brace a hand on his knee and they are, both of them, completely undone.

"This is your fault," she manages.

"You deliberately missed sections," he says, still laughing.

"Character," she insists. "This house needs character."

He shakes his head and looks at the wall and she looks at it too and it is, genuinely, exactly right.

The color is perfect.

The room is going to be perfect.

The sun is coming through the window seat and making everything warm and she can see it, suddenly and completely, the version of the future this room contains — she can see it so clearly it almost knocks the breath out of her.

She looks at him.

He is looking at the room with that expression she has been learning to read.

The full one.

The one he spent years keeping out of his face when she was watching.

The one that says:

this is what I wanted.

This exact thing.

Not more, not different.

This.

"Hey," she says softly.

He looks at her.

"I'm glad," she says. "That it's you. I want you to know that."

She pauses.

"Not despite everything, not with caveats. I mean — I have caveats, I'm still working through some of the caveats, the vitamins are going to be a topic for a while —"

He winces slightly.

"— but underneath all of that. I'm glad it's you. I've always been glad it was you."

He looks at her for a long moment without speaking.

Then he crosses the room in two strides and he kisses her.

Something slower and more deliberate, his hands cupping her face, her paint-covered hands gripping the front of his shirt, the radio playing something in the background that neither of them can hear anymore.

He kisses her like someone who has been waiting a very specific amount of time and is finally, finally not waiting.

She kisses him back like someone who understands now what she was doing when she thought she wasn't doing anything.

When they pull apart her forehead drops to his shoulder and his arms come around her and they stand in the sage green room in the afternoon light and neither of them says anything for a long while because nothing they could say would be more than what is already in the room.

"We still have two more walls," she says eventually, muffled against his shoulder.

"I know," he says, chin on her head.

"You're going to have to take the roller from me at least six more times."

"I know that too."

She laughs, quiet, against his shoulder.

He holds her slightly tighter for one moment before he lets go and hands her the roller and they go back to the walls.

They paint until it's done.

They sit on the floor in the finished room with their backs against the wall, shoulders touching, looking at what they made together.

It is exactly right.

He asks her on a Wednesday morning in the kitchen.

She is eating cereal.

She has been eating cereal at all hours because the baby has started having opinions about food and cereal is always on the approved list, so she is at the counter at eight in the morning in his hoodie with a bowl of cereal and her hair still in yesterday's braid and she is not, by any measure, prepared for what is about to happen.

He dries his hands on the dish towel and turns around.

He leans against the counter opposite her with his arms crossed and the particular expression she has learned means he has decided to say something now, something he has been sitting with and turning over and has finally arrived at being ready to say.

She lowers the spoon.

He reaches into the pocket of his sweatpants and sets a small box on the counter between them.

Matte black.

Simple.

From somewhere that does not need to advertise itself.

He does not open it.

He just rests his hand beside it and looks at her.

"I'm not going to make this long," he says. "You already know everything. I've already said most of it."

He pauses.

"I want to ask you to marry me. Not because of your father, though he is, as we both know, the kind of man who will rest easier with this than without it. Not because of the baby, though I am aware that I am deeply non-objective about this baby."

He looks at her.

"Because I have been in love with you for years and I am done being something less than honest about it. And because I would like to stop being your best friend in addition to everything else and just be yours. In the clearest way available."

She looks at the box.

She looks at him.

"You asked me in sweats," she says.

"You were eating cereal," he says. "The moment presented itself."

"Soobin."

"You can say no," he says, steady. "Or not yet. Or I need time. I meant it when I said that. There's no version of your answer where I go anywhere."

She looks at the box for a long moment.

She thinks about the notebook entry she keeps coming back to.

She trusts me completely. I don't know if I deserve it. I know I'm not going to stop trying to.

She thinks about the driving in the snow.

The ginger tea every morning.

The decaf in the car park outside the clinic.

The hi he said to the flutter on a screen.

She thinks about a seventeen year old boy telling his mother there was a girl and she didn't know yet, and then spending years making himself so necessary and so present and so completely woven into the fabric of her life that she could not imagine its shape without him in it.

She thinks about her own notebook.

The pale green one in the nightstand drawer.

I let him. Because it felt like being loved. Because what more can someone want than to be that known, that seen, that cared for? And the answer, the real answer, the one I have been avoiding for years, is: I wanted to be loved by him specifically. Not a man who loved me like he did. Him.

She reaches across the counter and opens the box herself.

The ring is nothing like what she would have expected and everything she would have chosen.

Simple and thoughtful and designed to be worn every day without thinking about it, designed to become part of the hand, part of the person.

The kind of thing you choose when you are not thinking about the gesture but about the actual human who will wear it for the rest of their life.

Of course he thought about the actual human.

He always thinks about her.

"You knew my size," she says.

"I have known your size for two years."

He says it plainly, without apology, because they are past the point where he needs to apologize for paying attention.

"You can throw the ring at me if you want. I'll still be here tomorrow."

She looks at the ring in the box.

Then at him.

"You're so annoying," she says.

The corner of his mouth moves.

"Yes," she says.

The movement stops.

He goes completely still.

"Yes," she says again, softer. "Obviously yes. It was always going to be yes, you absolute disaster."

He lets out a breath that sounds like something releasing, something he has been holding longer than this conversation, longer than this morning, something he has been holding for years.

He crosses the kitchen and takes the ring from the box and she holds out her hand and his hands are not entirely steady when he slides it on, she notices that, files it away as the truest thing in the room — all his composure and patience and careful planning, and his hands are shaking slightly when he puts the ring on her finger.

She wraps her hand around his.

He covers their joined hands with his other one and bows his head for a moment, just a moment, just long enough for her to feel the weight of what this is for him, what it has always been, how much of himself he has been holding in careful reserve waiting for this exact point.

She brings her free hand up to the back of his neck and pulls him down and kisses him properly in the kitchen at eight in the morning with cereal going soggy in the bowl behind her and morning light coming through the window above the sink and the ring new on her hand and everything about it exactly, specifically, right.

The announcement dinner is in the new house on a Saturday, both sets of parents at the same long table for the first time, the kitchen full of the smell of what Soobin has been cooking since noon, all the good things, all the things her mother specifically loves and his mother has mentioned once.

She watches him work the kitchen and receives the specific revelation, watching him, that this is who he has always been.

Not just with her.

With everyone.

He noticed what her mother loves.

He noticed what his mother mentioned.

He tracks it all, everything, every small preference of everyone who matters to him, and then he provides, quietly, without announcement, without waiting to be asked.

She used to think this was because he was careful.

She understands now that it is because he is devoted.

Those are completely different things.

Her father pulls Soobin aside after the first course.

She watches from across the room — her father leaning in with that focused careful quality, Soobin meeting it without glancing toward her for reassurance, answering in that low even voice, one hand in his pocket, the other holding his wine glass with complete relaxed ease.

Her father nods.

Once.

The deliberate kind.

Her mother appears beside her.

"Well," her mother says, sipping her wine.

"Don't," she says.

"I have said absolutely nothing."

"I can hear what you haven't said."

Her mother smiles into her glass.

"I told you at Christmas dinner. When you were eighteen. I said to your aunt, I said, watch that boy. He's going to outlast them all."

She shrugs elegantly.

"Nobody listens to mothers."

She looks at Soobin across the room.

He is laughing at something her father said, dimples appearing, and her father is visibly trying not to look pleased about the laugh and failing.

"He tracked my period app," she tells her mother.

Her mother is briefly silent.

"For how long."

"Over a year."

Another silence.

"Well," her mother says. "He does have very good instincts about when you need the heated blanket."

She chokes on a laugh and her mother pats her hand once, warm, and moves away toward the kitchen with the serenity of a woman who has decided that love is complicated and the important things are warmth and provision and someone who will still be there at eight in the morning.

She is beginning to think her mother is not wrong about the important things.

Beomgyu finds her on the way back from the kitchen.

He has been unusually quiet all evening, which for Beomgyu means occasionally speaking at normal volume, and his eyes have been suspiciously bright since he arrived.

He stops in front of her and looks at her ring and looks at her face and then he pulls her into a hug so sudden and complete that she almost drops her glass.

"I'm so happy," he says into her shoulder. "You have no idea. I have watched this man —"

His voice cracks slightly.

"— for years. For years. Do you know what it has been like. Do you have any idea."

"Beomgyu."

"I used to listen to him in the next room. On the phone with you. Every night. I used to think — when is she going to figure it out —"

"Beomgyu."

"He has a notebook," Beomgyu says, pulling back, eyes genuinely wet. "Did you know about the notebook —"

"I found the notebook."

"And you're still here."

He looks at her with an expression of profound relief.

"You're still here."

"I'm still here," she says.

Beomgyu looks over at Soobin across the room, who has clocked the hug from a distance and is watching with the expression of a man who suspects Beomgyu is either saying something wonderful or something deeply incriminating and cannot tell which from this distance.

"He would have waited forever," Beomgyu says quietly, genuinely. "I want you to know that. Whatever else is complicated — he would have just. Waited. For as long as it took."

She follows his gaze across the room.

Soobin meets her eyes from across the table, across the parents and the wine glasses and the dinner and the life they have built, and he gives her the small private smile, the real one, the one she knows belongs to her.

She smiles back.

"I know," she says.

"That's why."

She finds him in the nursery.

She knew she would.

She followed the quiet, the particular kind of quiet that means he has found the room and is sitting with it.

He is on the window seat.

One knee drawn up, back against the wall, looking out at the garden in the dark.

The nightlight they tested last week throws a low amber circle on the sage-green floor.

She stands in the doorway for a moment just looking at him, this person who has been her whole life for years without her naming it as such, sitting in the room they painted together, in the house she chose and he followed her to without hesitation.

She goes in.

Sits beside him on the window seat.

Their shoulders touch.

Outside the garden is dark and still.

The old stone wall is just visible, the climbing thing a shadow along the top.

"I want to tell you something," she says.

He turns to look at her.

"I've been keeping my own notebook," she says. "Since the week I found yours."

His expression shifts slightly.

Carefully.

"Not the same as yours," she continues. "Not planning. Just honest. Things I had been doing without naming them. Ways I had been taking without giving."

She pauses.

"I wrote down that I think I was in love with you first," she says. "I wrote down that I invented the label because wanting you was too frightening and having you at a safe distance was the best version of something I was too scared to ask for directly."

She looks at him.

"And I wrote down that we are both, in our own ways, exactly as morally gray as the other. You with the planning and the notebook. Me with the willful blindness and the leaning and the taking without accounting for what it cost you to give."

She pauses.

"We're even."

"We're not even," he says quietly. "What I did was —"

"We're even," she says, firmly. "Not in the sense that everything was the same. In the sense that neither of us gets to stand in the position of wronged party. We did this together. We arrived here together. And I am choosing it, Soobin. Not because I've decided to forgive something. Because I looked at all of it honestly and I still want this. I want you. I want this house and this room and this baby and the whole complicated truth of how we got here."

He holds her gaze for a long moment.

Then he reaches over and hooks his pinky through hers.

The old gesture.

The childhood one.

The one that means crowds and closeness and I don't want to lose you in this.

She hooks back.

Outside the garden is dark and still and the climbing thing is invisible along the stone wall and somewhere a small heartbeat is keeping its private insistent rhythm.

The house breathes around them, warm and new and theirs.

"I love you," he says.

She has been waiting, without knowing she was waiting, for him to say it like this.

Not in the middle of something.

Not as a preamble to something else.

Just the sentence, offered directly, with no hedge and no performance, in the amber light of the room they painted together.

She turns to look at him.

He is watching her with that expression — clear, warm, the one she spent years filing under friendly because she needed it to be something manageable.

It is not manageable.

It never was.

It is enormous and patient and completely, specifically hers.

"I know," she says. "I know you do. I've known for a while."

She squeezes his pinky.

"I love you too. I probably loved you first and I definitely made it harder than it needed to be and I am very, very glad you are annoyingly persistent."

He laughs.

The real one.

In the nursery.

In the dark.

She puts her head on his shoulder and he rests his chin on the top of her head and they look at the garden together.

"We should paint the trim tomorrow," she says.

"Yes," he says.

"I'm going to be worse at it than the walls."

"Obviously."

"You're going to have to correct me at least eight times."

"I have estimated twelve," he says, "but I was trying to be optimistic."

She laughs against his shoulder.

His arm comes around her waist, hand settling over her stomach the way it has been settling there lately — not possessive, not strategic, just present, just covering the place where the small insistent heartbeat lives, the way you put your hand over something you love and want to protect.

She puts her hand over his.

The house holds them.

The garden waits outside.

And in the window seat of the sage green nursery, in the city her parents live in, twenty minutes from the kitchen that smells like cinnamon, with the old climbing thing growing along the stone wall, she finally, finally lets herself have the thing she has been having all along.

Later — weeks later, quiet Tuesday morning, the house beginning to feel like theirs in all the ways a house becomes yours slowly and then all at once — she opens the pale green notebook to a new page.

She writes:

things I know to be true.

She writes:

the window seat is the best seat in the house.

She writes:

he takes the roller from me and I miss sections on purpose now.

She writes:

I don't know what I'd do without you. I know exactly what that sentence means and I'm saying it anyway.

She sits with the words for a moment.

Reads them once.

Then once more.

Not because she doubts them.

Because there was a time when she would have.

A time when she would have crossed them out, softened them, translated them into something smaller and safer and easier to live beside.

A time when she would have called it friendship because friendship felt manageable.

A time when she would have mistaken certainty for danger.

She does none of those things.

She closes the notebook.

Slides it back into the nightstand drawer beside his.

The pale green cover settles against the dark one.

Two notebooks.

No secrets.

No plans waiting to be discovered.

Just records.

Evidence.

Proof that two people spent years circling the same truth from opposite directions before finally arriving at it together.

She stands.

The house is quiet around her.

Quiet in the way living things are quiet.

The kind of quiet that contains movement in other rooms.

The kind that contains another person.

She opens the bedroom door.

Somewhere downstairs she can hear cabinets opening.

The soft clink of ceramic.

Water running briefly from the sink.

The familiar rhythm of someone making coffee.

His rhythm.

The sound reaches her before she reaches the stairs.

She pauses for a moment, one hand resting unconsciously over the curve of her stomach.

Listens.

Coffee already made.

The morning already started.

His presence moving through the kitchen below with the same easy certainty it always has.

Once, she thinks, she would have called that ordinary.

She would have said it was habit.

Convenience.

Routine.

Now she knows better.

Love does not always arrive as thunder.

Sometimes it arrives as consistency.

As someone remembering how you take your coffee.

As a heated blanket appearing before you ask.

As a hand finding yours in a crowd.

As a person who keeps showing up until showing up stops feeling remarkable and starts feeling inevitable.

Home is strange that way.

It happens gradually.

Then suddenly.

One day you realize you are no longer visiting your life.

You are living inside it.

She starts down the stairs.

The kitchen comes into view.

And there he is.

Standing at the counter.

Coffee waiting.

Morning light through the window.

Looking up when he hears her.

Smiling immediately.

Automatically.

Like she is the first thing he was hoping to see today.

Maybe she always was.

Maybe he always knew.

Maybe she did too.

"Hey," he says.

The simplest word.

The one that has carried a thousand different meanings over the years.

She smiles back.

And walks toward him.

Toward the coffee.

Toward the kitchen.

Toward the life that had been hers all along.

Toward home.

There are stories about first love.

There are stories about destiny.

There are stories about timing.

This was never really any of those.

This was a story about two people who spent years standing inside the same feeling and calling it different names.

"Later — weeks later, quiet Tuesday morning..." And somewhere in a sage green nursery, a window seat catches the afternoon sun, a notebook closes, coffee is already waiting downstairs, and two people finally stop waiting.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐄𝐍𝐃

𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓃𝓀 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹𝒾𝓃𝑔 ♡

Until the next one.

— V

౨ৎ prev ✧

౨ৎ tag open: @black-startxt @buttersoob @idkguyslma @toru-saki @amelie-sama-blog @binniesbabe @ravenslocked @usuallyunlikelyfox @whoreforjongho @kpoploserr @fairfootedflekk @emotionalmoa

𝓌𝑒𝓁𝒸𝑜𝓂𝑒 𝓉𝑜 𝓂𝓎 𝓁𝒾𝓉𝓉𝓁𝑒 𝒸𝑜𝓇𝓃𝑒𝓇 ♡

✧ 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓂𝒶𝓃 𝓌𝒽𝑜 𝒻𝑜𝓇𝑔𝑒𝓉𝓈 𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓎 𝓂𝑜𝓇𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔 → [𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒]

✧𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 → [𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒]

✧ 𝓊𝓅𝒸𝑜𝓂𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓅𝓇𝑜𝒿𝑒𝒸𝓉𝓈 → [𝓈𝑜𝑜𝓃]

୨ৎ ݁ ˖ 𝒻𝒾𝓃𝒹 𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓂𝓎 𝓈𝓉𝑜𝓇𝒾𝑒𝓈 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 ˖ ݁ ୨ৎ → [𝒸𝑜𝓂𝓅𝓁𝑒𝓉𝑒 𝓂𝒶𝓈𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉]

𝓊𝓅𝒸𝑜𝓂𝒾𝓃𝓰 ꒰ა𝐿𝑜𝓋𝑒 𝒲𝒾𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓊𝓉 𝒶 𝒞𝑜𝓊𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇-𝒞𝒽𝒶𝓇𝓂໒꒱ 𝒸𝒽𝑜𝒾 𝓈𝑜𝑜𝒷𝒾𝓃 × 𝒻𝑒𝓂!𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹𝑒𝓇 ໒꒱ Hogwarts AU

⋆｡‧˚ʚ ✧ 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇 𝓈𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓃: 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓎𝑒𝓈 𝓈𝒽𝑒 𝒹𝒾𝒹𝓃’𝓉 𝓈𝒶𝓎 ✧ ɞ˚‧｡⋆

It starts with coffee.

Just coffee, the same order from the same place two blocks over, the one Soobin introduced her to and that has been hers for two years now, the one she brings to her lips on a Tuesday morning three weeks after graduation and her stomach turns so hard and so fast she has to set the cup down and press both palms flat to the counter and breathe through her nose for a full ten seconds.

She blames the milk. The milk is probably off.

Wednesday it happens again, this time with eggs — Soobin at the stove, the kitchen bright and warm and smelling like something good — and she has to leave the room fast, murmuring something about her phone charger, and stands in the hallway of the apartment she shares with Lia, the apartment that has been just hers since January when Lia's mother got sick and Lia packed a bag and said I don't know how long and kissed her cheek and left. She stands with her back against the wall outside her own bathroom and waits for her stomach to remember where it lives.

She blames stress. Post-graduation decompression. Her body finally releasing four years of held tension all at once.

Thursday she throws up.

Quietly, efficiently, tap running, hand pressed to her mouth. She sits on the bathroom tile after — the same tile Lia picked out freshman year because it was the cheapest option that didn't look cheap — and stares at the ceiling and counts backward and then counts again because the first answer cannot be right and the second answer is the same as the first.

She is late.

She is never late.

She knows this because he tracks it — the thought arrives and she lets it pass without examining it, the way she lets most thoughts about how much he knows pass without examining them, because examining them leads somewhere she isn't ready to go. She just knows she is late and her stomach has been wrong for a week and the coffee she has drunk every morning for two years suddenly smells like a threat.

She comes out of the bathroom looking completely fine. She is excellent at looking fine. He is at the kitchen counter reading something on his phone, and he hands her a glass of water without looking up — just reaches for it and holds it out, already poured, already room temperature because he knows she can't stand cold water first thing in the morning — and she takes it without comment and drinks it all and tells herself: probably nothing. definitely nothing. she'll wait one more day and then it will be nothing.

She waits two more days.

It is not nothing.

Lia answers on the second ring, voice warm and slightly rough the way it always is in the morning, and the relief of hearing her is so immediate and physical that she has to sit down on the edge of the bed.

"Hey," Lia says. "You sound weird. What happened."

"Nothing yet," she says. "I need you to stay on the phone with me while I go to the pharmacy."

A pause. Then, very carefully: "Okay. I'm here. Go."

She goes.

The pharmacy near campus is small and bright and mercifully quiet at nine in the morning. Lia talks her through the aisle — this one, yes the three-pack, and grab the gummy bears from the front because you're going to need them, trust me — and she puts everything in the basket without looking at the prices and pays with her card and walks back to the apartment with her bag and her phone and the specific feeling of a person who already knows the answer and is just completing the formality of being told.

Soobin is out. She checked before she left — morning run, he goes at eight-thirty every day, back by ten, she knows this the way she knows everything about his schedule now, which is to say completely and without having to think about it.

She takes all three tests.

She sits on the bathroom floor between each one with her phone pressed to her ear and Lia on the other end not talking, just breathing, which is exactly the right thing and exactly why Lia is her person even from eight hours away.

All three say the same thing.

She looks at them lined up on the sink edge and feels everything simultaneously, which means she feels nothing for about thirty seconds, and then she puts her face in her hands.

"Lia," she says.

"I know," Lia says, voice soft and steady across the distance. "I know. Breathe."

"How did this—" she stops. She knows how. She's been telling herself for weeks that he handled it, the expensive pill, the good brand, we're covered, and she accepted that the way she accepts everything from him — fully, without verification, because he has never been wrong and she trusts him completely. "I was careful," she says, and even as the words leave her mouth they feel slightly wrong, slightly imprecise, like she's describing something she only has half the information for.

Lia is quiet for a moment. "Were you?"

She thinks about the drawer. The condoms she stopped tracking. The vitamins she takes every morning without checking the label because he sets them out and she takes them because he's always right about what she needs.

She thinks: were you.

She doesn't have an answer yet.

"He's going to be calm about this," she says instead, into her palms, the words muffled. "He's going to be so unbearably calm and I'm going to want to scream."

"Is that the worst thing?" Lia asks. "Him being calm?"

She thinks about it honestly — sitting on the bathroom floor of the apartment they share, the apartment he has been living in for months, his shampoo on the second shelf, his running shoes by the door, his handwriting on the grocery list on the fridge.

"No," she admits. "Right now it might be the only thing that doesn't make me fall apart completely."

She hears the front door open at ten-oh-four.

He reads the room from the hallway.

She knows he does this — she's watched him do it a hundred times, the small pause before he enters any space where she is, the half second of assessment that tells him everything before a word is spoken. She used to think it was just attentiveness, the natural result of knowing someone this well. She is beginning to think it is something more precise than that.

He appears in the living room doorway, jacket unzipped, hair wind-messed from the run, cheeks pink, and takes in the scene in one sweep: her on the armchair with her knees pulled up, the bathroom door open behind her, the specific quality of her stillness that is not calm but the performance of calm. His eyes find hers and stay.

He understands. She watches him understand — the fractional widening of his eyes, the long exhale through his nose, the way his shoulders drop in a motion so small anyone else would miss it. Not surprise exactly. More like confirmation.

Not surprised, she thinks. He's not surprised.

She puts that away for later.

"I've got her," he says quietly toward her phone, which she's still holding, and she realizes he could hear Lia's breathing from across the room — that's how quiet the apartment is, that's how attuned he is. She tells Lia she'll call back, and Lia says I love you and she says I love you and the call ends and then it's just them in the apartment and the three tests on the bathroom sink and the grocery list in his handwriting on the fridge.

He crosses to the armchair. Crouches in front of her so his face is level with hers, lower than hers, actually, which changes the geometry of them in a way she isn't used to, him looking up at her for once — and waits.

"I'm pregnant," she says.

"I know," he says, soft as an exhale.

She stares at him. "Say it. Say you already knew."

"I suspected," he says. "A few days. The nausea. Wednesday when you left the kitchen. I didn't want to say anything until you knew for yourself."

She nods slowly. "Of course you knew."

"I—"

"Of course," she says again, not unkindly, just tired and true and still processing the thing she's been not-quite-letting-herself-think for four days. "You know everything about my body before I do. You track my cycle. You noticed before I put it together." She pauses. "Were you surprised?"

He holds her gaze. The pause that follows is the most honest thing he's done in months — not because it contains an admission, but because it doesn't contain a denial.

"No," he says finally. Quietly.

The word lands like a stone in deep water. She watches the circles move out and doesn't try to stop them.

"How did this happen," she says, and even as she asks it she's not sure what answer she's looking for — the biological one she already knows or the other one, the one underneath, the one she can almost see the shape of but can't quite bring herself to name yet.

He doesn't answer the biological version. He says: "I wasn't careful. And I knew what that could mean."

"That's not the same as an accident."

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

She puts her face in her hands again. Stays there. He doesn't reach for her — just waits, crouched in front of her chair, giving her the space she needs to process without trying to fill it, which is exactly what she needs and exactly what she can't figure out whether to be grateful for.

"What do you want?" she asks into her palms. The only question that matters right now.

"Whatever you decide," he says, immediately, steady. "Fully, completely, no conditions. If you can't do this right now I will take care of everything and hold your hand through it and we will not speak of it until you want to. If you want to keep it—" a pause, and in it she hears something she can't quite name, something enormous and patient finally permitted to be itself "—I will spend every day making sure neither of you needs a single thing I can give you."

She lifts her face. Studies his. "You already know what you want."

"This isn't about what I want."

"Soobin."

He holds her gaze — and there, just underneath the careful and the steady, she sees it. The yes. The already. The quiet certainty of a man who has been imagining this from inside a plan he hasn't shown her yet.

"Yes," he says softly. "I know what I want."

She wipes her face with her wrist. Breathes. "I need time. A few days."

"Take all the time you need."

"Stop being so reasonable," she says, and her voice wobbles between tears and a laugh. "It's making it harder."

He reaches out — slow, careful — and takes her hand. Doesn't grip. Just holds it in both of his, warm and steady, thumb resting over her pulse the way it always does, the way it has done since the very beginning, since long before she understood what that meant.

She lets him.

She gives herself three days.

The first she spends mostly on the couch in Lia's side of the apartment — the side that still smells a little like Lia's perfume even though she's been gone for months, the side with the dying succulent Lia asked her to water and she keeps forgetting and then watering too much to compensate, curled around a blanket that is technically Lia's and calling her mother without telling her why and just listening to her talk about the garden and the neighbor's dog and the normalcy of a world that hasn't changed yet.

She doesn't call her father.

The second day she goes to the shelter alone, without telling Soobin where she's going. She sits in run 14 with Max's enormous golden head in her lap for forty minutes and scratches behind his ears and thinks about things she doesn't have words for yet. Max asks nothing of her. This is currently his greatest quality. She thinks about the baby clothes in the mall window — the Eevee onesie, the tiny paw shoes, the way her chest had gone warm and aching looking at them, and thinks about Soobin's arms coming around her from behind, his chin on her shoulder, his voice saying just to look. She thinks about how sure he was. How already he felt, even then. She thinks: he has been several steps ahead of me for a very long time and I have been so comfortable in that I never looked up to see how far.

On the third night she turns over in the dark and faces him.

He's awake. Of course he's awake. Watching her with those dark steady eyes that have been watching her for years and waiting for her to be ready to look back.

"I'm keeping it," she says.

He closes his eyes. Just for a second. Just long enough for something enormous to move through him. When he opens them again they're bright in the dark in a way she's never quite seen before — not tears, just light, like something that has been under pressure for a long time finally being given room to breathe.

"Okay," he says, and his voice comes out rough at the edges. "Okay."

"Say something real," she says. "Not just okay."

He reaches for her — slow — cups the back of her head and pulls her forward until her forehead rests against his. His thumb moves through her hair, back and forth, the rhythm of it like breathing.

"We're having a baby," he whispers, and stops. Starts again. "I'm—" his breath shakes, just slightly. "I'm so—"

He doesn't finish.

She understands everything he doesn't finish.

"I know," she whispers back.

She falls asleep with his hand in her hair and doesn't dream of anything.

She wakes to ginger tea on her nightstand.

Ginger tea, which she has not asked for, which she didn't know was in the apartment, which is apparently what you're supposed to drink for first trimester nausea and which Soobin has clearly researched in the seventy-two hours since she told him, because of course he has, because there is no version of a thing she needs that he doesn't immediately move to provide. There is also a sleeve of crackers. A banana. A small folded note in his handwriting: eat before you stand up. body needs it first. trust me.

She eats the crackers before her feet touch the floor. The nausea, when she stands, is slightly less devastating than yesterday. She credits the crackers. She would like to not credit him for this but she does.

She pulls his hoodie over her head — it's hers now in every practical sense, has been hers for so long she can't remember which specific act of theft initiated it — and pads out to the apartment.

He is at the dining table.

This is not unusual. He is often at the table in the mornings, coffee to his left, something open on his laptop. The domestic geometry of him in Lia's apartment — the apartment she's been living in alone since January, the one he gradually filled with his presence the way weather fills a room — stopped being remarkable to her months ago. She walks past him toward the kitchen without really registering him.

Then she registers what's on the table.

She stops.

Laptop open — property listings, multiple tabs, each one a different apartment in the city, prices and square footages visible from here. A notepad covered in his handwriting — addresses, travel times, proximity notes. A printed city map with circles drawn in blue pen around specific neighborhoods, each one annotated in his small precise script.

She crosses to the table slowly. Picks up the map without sitting down.

good school district, one circle reads, in his handwriting, in blue pen, drawn around a neighborhood she knows is twenty minutes from both their family homes.

park nearby. the circle next to it.

close to hospital, the third one.

She sets the map down.

Looks at him.

He looks back — unhurried, prepared, a man who has known this moment was coming and has had time to decide how he wants to inhabit it.

"We've been living together for months," he says, before she can speak. "You said yes when I needed somewhere to stay and then I just... stayed. Which isn't the same as deciding. We're going to have a baby. We graduated. It makes sense to find something that's actually ours." He turns the laptop toward her so she can see the listings more clearly. "I was looking at two-bedrooms mostly. But there's a three-bedroom—" he pulls up the tab "—good light. Room for a nursery and an office. Building is quiet. Near that park."

She stares at the screen. She stares at the map. She stares at the note on the page that says good school district in his handwriting, which means he was thinking about school districts, which means this goes further than apartment hunting, which means—

She looks down.

The notebook is under the edge of the laptop. Just the corner of it — slim black cover, edges worn soft, peeking out like it slipped during all the papers and maps and lists. She wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't been looking at the table in this specific way, standing at this specific angle.

She wouldn't have seen it.

But she does.

And he reaches for it — one small reflexive motion, hand moving toward it before he stops himself, before he makes himself go still.

She looks at his hand.

Looks at the notebook.

Looks at his face.

"What is that," she says.

He is perfectly still.

"Soobin." Her voice is quiet. Careful. The voice she uses when she already knows the answer and is giving him the chance to be the one to say it. "What is that."

He doesn't try to hide it.

That is the thing she keeps coming back to — when she reaches across the table and slides it out from under the laptop, he doesn't stop her. Doesn't move at all. Just sits with his hands flat on the table and watches her face with the complete, careful attention of a man who has catalogued every expression she makes and has prepared for most of them and is not sure, for the first time in a long time, whether he has prepared for this one.

She opens it.

His handwriting. Obviously. She'd know it anywhere — small, slanted, precise, every letter formed like it means something. She starts at the beginning because she always starts at the beginning. She needs the full shape of a thing.

The first entries are old. Months old. Some from before the party, before the snow trip, before any of it.

She hates olives. coffee iced even in winter. don't play that song — it makes her sad.

rubs her left temple when the coffee's too strong. prefers the left side of the couch — better view of the window.

She keeps reading.

ovulation window opens thursday. she has seminar until 6. dinner ready. let it happen naturally. it always happens naturally.

She stops.

Reads it again.

Her hands are very still on the pages. She can feel her own heartbeat in her fingertips. She turns the page.

don't rush. she needs to choose me.

speed up the plan. today.

she stopped at the baby clothes for four minutes. she didn't notice me counting. something shifted in her — I felt it. time to move faster.

talk to her mother about the storm forecast longer than necessary. she can't ask him to leave in that weather. she won't.

vitamins swapped week three. she hasn't noticed.

She looks up from the page.

He meets her eyes. Doesn't look away.

She looks back down.

beomgyu doesn't have girls over. he goes to them. she doesn't know that.

she said I don't know what I'd do without you when I fixed her laptop. she said it like it was nothing. it's everything. it's the whole point.

She keeps reading. She reads every page. She reads it the way you read something you know is going to change things — slowly, because speed won't help, because the point is not to finish but to understand.

The entries are not cruel.

That is the thing she keeps being caught on — they are not cruel. They are calculating and deliberate and yes, laid out in his handwriting like a blueprint she was never supposed to see — but they are not cruel. Because running alongside the strategy, threaded through every entry the same way his pinky finds hers in crowds, are the other things:

she laughs more when she eats strawberries. buy them thursday.

she was nervous before the seminar. she didn't say so. she braided and unbraided the same piece of hair four times. she's okay. she just needs someone to not make it a big deal.

she trusts me. completely. I don't know if I deserve it. I know I'm not going to stop.

she looked at me last night like she was about to say something. she didn't. I'm going to give her more time.

She closes the notebook.

Sets it on the table.

Looks at him for a long time.

His expression is the thing she keeps trying to read — waiting for the calculation, the composed certainty she'd expect from someone who kept a record like this. Instead she finds what she's been seeing more of lately and still isn't fully prepared for: fear. The real kind. The kind that doesn't have a plan behind it.

"How long," she says.

"The notebook — before the party. The period app — September. The vitamins—" he pauses "—January."

January. She takes the vitamins he sets out every morning in January. She has not once checked the label.

"And the baby," she says. The sentence she has been building toward. "Was it an accident."

The apartment is very quiet. Lia's dying succulent on the windowsill. His handwriting on the grocery list on the fridge. His running shoes by the door beside hers.

"I wasn't careful," he says. "And I knew what that could mean. And I didn't stop."

"That's not an accident."

"No," he says quietly. "It isn't."

She nods. Very slow. Her hands are folded in her lap and she is very calm in the way that comes after something enormous, when the body has no panic left and only clarity remains.

"You planned all of it," she says. Not a question.

"Yes."

"The snow trip. The storm. Beomgyu's girls. The vitamins. The condoms." She says each word clean and separate. "All of it."

"Yes."

"You were never gay."

"No."

"You let me believe it for years."

"Yes."

She looks at the notebook on the table between them. Looks at the map with its blue circles. Looks at the laptop with the three-bedroom listing — good light, room for a nursery — and the park nearby and the good school district and the proximity to the hospital.

She thinks: he has been building this for years. She thinks: I have been living inside the house he built without seeing the walls. She thinks: I am pregnant and the father planned it and I am sitting here and I cannot locate the thing inside me that is supposed to be furious and only can find things that are warmer and more complicated and much harder to act on.

"Why are you not apologizing," she says.

"Because I'm not sorry for loving you," he says. "I'm sorry I was too afraid to just say it. Too afraid you'd pull away if you knew I wanted more than you'd decided I was allowed to want. I should have told you years ago. I'm sorry for that." He holds her gaze — steady, open, stripped of everything careful for once. "I'm not sorry for being here. I'm not sorry for the baby. I'm not sorry for any of the things I did to take care of you — those were real. Every one of them was real."

"The notebook is real too," she says.

"Yes," he says. "That's real too."

She stands up. Crosses to the window. Looks at the campus below — students passing, ordinary morning, the world continuing without awareness of the conversation happening in this apartment. She stands there long enough that she hears him stand behind her, hears him cross the room, feels him stop a careful distance back — not reaching, not closing the gap, just present, the way he is always present, the patient orbit of a planet that has been circling the same sun for years.

"My father," she says to the window. "He's going to—" she stops. Her father's voice in her head, the formal disappointed register. "He's going to have a lot to say."

"I know," Soobin says behind her. "I'll be there when you tell him."

She almost laughs. "Of course you will."

She turns around. He's right there — close but not crowding, giving her exactly the amount of space she needs, because he always gives her exactly the amount of space she needs, because he has studied her preferences with the precision of someone who has been in love for four years and has no intention of making a mistake at the finish line.

She looks at his face.

She looks at the notebook on the table.

She looks at the laptop with the three-bedroom and the good light.

"Show me the apartment," she says.

He goes absolutely still.

"The three-bedroom," she says. "The one with the park nearby."

He crosses to the laptop — and his hands, she notices, are not entirely steady when he pulls up the listing. She files that away. Holds it close. The unsteady hands are the most honest thing in this room.

She sits beside him at the table and looks at the apartment on the screen — high ceilings, good light, a room that could be anything — and feels the anger and the love and the complicated truth of two people who have been building something together without both of them knowing it.

"We need to talk about all of it," she says quietly. "The real talk. Not just the apartment. Everything in that notebook. What trust looks like going forward. What you owe me and what I'm willing to accept." She looks at him. "And I need you to understand that finding this—" she touches the notebook cover "—when I'm already terrified and pregnant and haven't called my father yet — it's a lot."

"I know," he says. "I know it is."

"But I'm still here," she says.

He looks at her. Really looks.

"I know," he says, softer this time. Like a man receiving something he wasn't sure he'd earned.

She turns back to the screen. Looks at the apartment. The park. The school district circled in blue pen.

"Tell me about the park," she says.

And he does.

She calls her mother first.

From the bedroom, door closed, Soobin in the kitchen making the ginger tea he's been making every morning for three days now, the sounds of him moving through the apartment she shares with Lia — Lia who is eight hours away in a hospital waiting room texting her updates about her mother's recovery, Lia who said when she called last week you sound different, you sound like someone who's figured something out, which she denied and which was not entirely a lie and not entirely the truth either.

Her mother answers on the third ring, warm and slightly breathless.

"Hey, baby. I was just thinking about you—"

"Mom." She stops. "I have something to tell you."

The particular silence of a mother calibrating. Then, soft: "Okay."

"I'm pregnant."

A pause — not shock, not panic — a long exhale that sounds like the releasing of something held tightly for a long time. "Oh, sweetheart."

"I know."

"How far?"

"Early. Just weeks."

"And Soobin."

She closes her eyes. "How did you know it was Soobin."

Her mother makes a sound — gentle, wry, the sound of a woman who has known something for years and has been waiting with extraordinary patience for the rest of the world to catch up. "I've known since you were both eighteen and you fell asleep on his shoulder at Christmas dinner and he didn't move for four hours because he didn't want to wake you." A pause. "I've been waiting a long time for you two to figure it out."

She laughs — short, wet. "Mom."

"Is he there?"

"In the kitchen."

"Of course he is." Unmistakable warmth. Then: "And you're keeping it."

Not a question. Her mother has always known her better than she knows herself, which is a quality she is beginning to recognize in more people in her life than she previously accounted for.

"Yes," she says. "We're keeping it."

Her mother is quiet for a moment. Then: "Your father will be difficult. He'll make it about propriety and expectations and what the family looks like from the outside. And then he'll hold his grandchild for the first time and forget every word of it." She pauses. "Soobin's a good man. I saw how he looked at you at that Christmas dinner. Knew then."

She wipes her face with the back of her wrist. "You never said anything."

"You weren't ready to hear it," her mother says simply. "Now you are."

She calls her father from the couch. Soobin sits beside her — not close enough to crowd, just there, the solid warm fact of him, his hand resting near hers on the cushion without touching.

Her father answers on the second ring.

The conversation is exactly what she expected — his voice going formal and careful, the specific silence of a man reorganizing something enormous inside himself, the pointed questions about plans and stability and what this means for her career trajectory and whether she has thought about — yes, she has thought about it, she's thought about little else for three days, yes he's staying, yes he has a position, yes they're looking at apartments, yes she's finishing what she needs to finish.

There is a long silence near the end.

"He was at the graduation dinner," her father says finally.

"Yes."

"He answered my questions well."

She glances at Soobin. Soobin does not react, which is its own kind of reaction. "Yes."

"I want a proper conversation with him," her father says. "Not at a restaurant. In person. At home."

"Okay."

Another pause. Then, rough at the edges — her father's version of undone: "I love you. We'll figure the rest out."

She hangs up. Sits for a moment. Lets out the breath she's been holding since she dialed.

Soobin's hand finds hers on the cushion.

"Well?" he says quietly.

"He wants to meet with you. Properly. He said you answered his questions well at the dinner." She looks at him. "You knew he was going to ask you things at that dinner."

"Yes," he says.

"You prepared."

"Yes."

She nods slowly. "Of course you did."

His thumb moves — one slow circle on the back of her hand. She doesn't pull away.

"I know this is a lot," he says. "I know it's—"

"It's a lot," she agrees. "And we're going to have a very long conversation about all of it. About the notebook and the vitamins and what honesty looks like going forward. I'm not — I'm not pretending none of that happened." She looks at him. "But I'm also not leaving. And I'm keeping the baby. And I want to see the three-bedroom." She squeezes his hand once, brief. "That's all I know tonight."

He looks at her for a long moment. Something settles in him — she can see it, the slow exhale of a man who has been bracing for an impact that landed differently than expected.

"Okay," he says. Quiet and real. "That's enough."

That night she wakes at 2am and can't go back to sleep.

Soobin is behind her — arm over her waist, breathing slow and even, the particular weight of him that she has gotten so used to that the nights he isn't there have started feeling like something missing rather than something normal. She lies still and stares at the wall of her room — the room she shares with Lia, who is getting better at her mother's bedside eight hours away, who texted today: mom had a good day. also you're going to tell me everything when I'm back and I mean everything.

She thinks about everything.

The notebook. The blue pen circles on the map. The vitamins she took every morning without checking. The condoms she stopped tracking because he said he'd handle it and she trusted him the way she trusts weather — not because it's infallible but because fighting it has never been a useful response.

She thinks about four years of him. Every braided hair. Every 2am ramyeon delivery. Every time he fixed a problem before she'd finished naming it, every careful touch that she filed under safe because the label she'd given him made safe the only category available. She thinks about a man who has been in love with her since they were nineteen and expressed it in the only language he trusted — action, proximity, permanence — because words without a plan behind them felt too risky to say.

She thinks about herself too. The times she called him when she wasn't really in crisis, just lonely. The times she let him carry things she could have carried herself because it was easier and she liked being held. The times she wore his hoodies not because she was cold but because she liked how it felt to smell like him all day and she let herself believe that was a thing without consequences. She thinks about Lia saying he's doing a lot for you and her saying he doesn't mind, he likes it, and Lia saying that's not what I asked and her changing the subject.

She has not been a passive participant in what they've built.

She has just been less aware of what she was building.

She turns over. Faces him.

He's asleep — face soft the way it gets in sleep, the careful composure of his waking hours gentled down to something younger. She looks at him for a long time in the dark. The man who tracked her cycle and planned a snowstorm and swapped her vitamins and built a floor under her feet so quietly she forgot there was ever anything else.

The man who didn't move for four hours at Christmas so he wouldn't wake her up.

The man who, somewhere in that notebook, wrote: she trusts me completely. I don't know if I deserve it.

She reaches out and puts her hand over his where it rests on the pillow between them. His fingers curl instinctively around hers even in sleep — automatic, reflexive, the body knowing what it wants before the mind catches up.

She thinks: this is real. All of it — the plan and the love and the manipulation and the four years — all of it is real, and real things are complicated, and complicated things are not the same as wrong, and she is going to have to spend a long time figuring out where exactly the line is between what she forgives and what she holds onto as important.

She also thinks: he is going to be an extraordinary father. She knows this the way she knows the left side of the couch is hers — not because anyone decided it, just because it became true.

She closes her eyes.

In the morning there will be ginger tea and an apartment listing and a call to schedule with her father and a very long conversation she owes both of them. There will be decisions and complications and the ongoing project of figuring out who she is in a life she didn't entirely choose and didn't entirely not choose.

But right now it is 2am and his hand is around hers and the room smells like cedar and something faintly warm and familiar and she is tired and pregnant and has found out more truth in one day than she can fully process and she is going to sleep.

She is going to sleep and in the morning things will still be complicated and she will still be here.

That's enough for tonight.

That is, she thinks, as her breathing slows and the dark closes in warm around her — enough.

౨ৎ prev ✧ next — 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇 𝑒𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉

౨ৎ tag open: @black-startxt @buttersoob @idkguyslma @toru-saki @amelie-sama-blog @binniesbabe @ravenslocked @usuallyunlikelyfox @whoreforjongho

🩷 𝓊𝓅𝒹𝒶𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓃 𝒾𝓃𝓈𝓅𝒾𝓇𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝓈𝓉𝓇𝒾𝓀𝑒𝓈

𝓌𝑒𝓁𝒸𝑜𝓂𝑒 𝓉𝑜 𝓂𝓎 𝓁𝒾𝓉𝓉𝓁𝑒 𝒸𝑜𝓇𝓃𝑒𝓇 ♡

✧ 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓂𝒶𝓃 𝓌𝒽𝑜 𝒻𝑜𝓇𝑔𝑒𝓉𝓈 𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓎 𝓂𝑜𝓇𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔 → [𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒]

✧𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 → [𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒]

✧ 𝓊𝓅𝒸𝑜𝓂𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓅𝓇𝑜𝒿𝑒𝒸𝓉𝓈 → [𝓈𝑜𝑜𝓃]

୨ৎ ݁ ˖ 𝒻𝒾𝓃𝒹 𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓂𝓎 𝓈𝓉𝑜𝓇𝒾𝑒𝓈 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 ˖ ݁ ୨ৎ → [𝒸𝑜𝓂𝓅𝓁𝑒𝓉𝑒 𝓂𝒶𝓈𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉]

𝓊𝓅𝒸𝑜𝓂𝒾𝓃𝓰 ꒰ა𝐿𝑜𝓋𝑒 𝒲𝒾𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓊𝓉 𝒶 𝒞𝑜𝓊𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇-𝒞𝒽𝒶𝓇𝓂໒꒱ 𝒸𝒽𝑜𝒾 𝓈𝑜𝑜𝒷𝒾𝓃 × 𝒻𝑒𝓂!𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹𝑒𝓇 ໒꒱ Hogwarts AU

He remembers the exact moment.

Not the first time he saw her — that was orientation week, crowded hallway, she was arguing with someone about the room assignments with the particular focused energy of a person who is always right and knows it, and he registered her the way you register weather: sudden, significant, impossible to ignore. That wasn't the moment. That was just the beginning of noticing.

The moment was a Tuesday in October of their first year. Study room on the third floor of the library, both of them there by coincidence, sitting at opposite ends of a long table with their separate materials and their separate silences until she knocked her coffee off the edge reaching for something and it went everywhere — across her notes, her laptop, her jeans — and she said a word so creative and so foul that it made him laugh out loud before he could stop himself, and she looked up at him with her jeans soaked in coffee and the look on her face shifting from mortified to surprised to something that wanted to laugh too.

He gave her his spare notes. He always had spare notes. He'd learned early that being useful was the fastest way to become necessary.

She fixed her coffee disaster. He helped without making it a thing. And then she sat back down at the same end of the table instead of the other end and said: I'm terrible with names, you're going to have to tell me yours again, and he told her and she repeated it once like she was checking the weight of it and then went back to her reading.

He walked back to his room that evening and sat on the edge of his bed and thought: that's the one. With the clarity of a person who has never been uncertain about anything important. Just: that's the one.

He didn't know what to do with that. He was nineteen and careful and his family had raised him to understand that wanting something very much was not sufficient reason to pursue it without a plan. His father built a company from nothing through patience and precision and the understanding that timing is not luck, it's preparation meeting opportunity. Soobin had absorbed that lesson at a cellular level.

So he waited. He built something first.

He was the one who refilled her water glass during long study sessions. The one who noticed she left her umbrella behind and ran it out to her. The one who remembered, without being told, that she liked her nails almond-shaped and that certain songs made her sad and that she needed twenty minutes of quiet after a hard lecture before she was ready to talk. He built himself into the infrastructure of her days piece by piece, carefully, without drawing attention to the construction.

And then one day — three months in, early December, the library closing and both of them gathering their things in the cold fluorescent quiet, she reached over and hugged him.

It wasn't a normal welcoming hug, much less a polite one. She moved closer to him as if she'd always planned to be there, her face against his collarbone, her arms around his waist, and exhaled, long and slowly and comfortably, as if something she'd been holding onto all day finally had somewhere to go.

He stood very still.

He was afraid to move, afraid to breathe wrong, afraid that any wrong motion would end it and she would step back and he would have to exist in the space where this had been.

She stayed for a long time. Long enough that his arms came up around her without him deciding to. Long enough that he felt the specific quality of her trust — total, uncomplicated, the trust of someone who has decided you are safe and means it completely.

He held her until she stepped back.

She said sorry, I'm just — it was a long day.

He said it's okay, which was the most catastrophic understatement of his life to that point because it was not okay, it was the opposite of okay, it was the thing that split his life into before and after with the clean precision of a key turning in a lock.

He walked home.

He sat in the parking garage for twenty minutes before he could make his hands stop shaking.

He thought: I cannot say anything yet. If I say anything now, she'll be careful with me. She'll create distance. She'll protect the friendship with that same total focus she brings to everything and I will be filed away under complicated and handled and the door will be not quite closed but almost.

He thought: I need to become indispensable first. I need to be so woven into her life that losing me isn't just uncomfortable, it's unimaginable.

He opened his notes app.

He typed: she likes her nails almond. coffee iced in winter. don't mention the song — it makes her sad.

The first entry.

The gay thing was her idea. He needs to be precise about this even inside his own head — he never said it, never implied it, never constructed the illusion deliberately. She arrived at it herself and he recognized immediately that it was useful and said nothing.

The specific day was a Wednesday in their second year. They were getting coffee and she was telling him about a guy from her communications seminar and he was listening with the careful attention he always brought to conversations about her life, not because he wanted to hear about other men but because she wanted to tell him and her wanting to tell him was the whole point, the trust being built one conversation at a time, and somewhere in the middle of it he made a comment about the guy's jawline being objectively strong and she stopped talking and looked at him with something clicking behind her eyes.

Oh, she said. Oh, are you— she made a gesture. Gay? Or like, bi?

He looked at her.

He thought about the hug in the library. He thought about the nineteen-year-old version of himself sitting on a bed making his hands stop shaking. He thought about what it would mean if he said no, the careful distance that would appear, the reclassification, the way she would become guarded around him in the specific way she became guarded around men she thought were interested, which was to say: polite, warm from a measured distance, nothing like the total unguarded trust of her face against his collarbone.

He shrugged. Said something noncommittal. Changed the subject.

She filled in the rest herself.

He understood immediately what it gave him: access. The particular access of a person who has been deemed safe, all the touching, all the closeness, all the late nights and the shared beds and the hoodies she stopped giving back and the way she talked to him about her body and her fear and her worst moments without filtering. He got all of it. Every piece of her that she kept in the category of too intimate for men who might want something.

He was a man who wanted everything. She just didn't know that yet.

He told himself it was harmless. He told himself he was just waiting for the right moment, that the moment would come naturally, that he wasn't deceiving her so much as allowing her to believe something comfortable while he built toward something true. He told himself a lot of things in those first years. Some of them were almost convincing.

The part he couldn't talk himself out of, late at night with the notebook open: she trusts me completely because she thinks I'm something I'm not. And I let her think it because I need her close and I am afraid of what she'll do if she finds out I've been here all along, wanting, planning, counting down.

He wrote it down. He wrote everything down. That was the discipline of it — not lying to himself about what he was doing, even if he couldn't stop doing it.

He loved her. Completely. Desperately. The real kind, the kind that builds a floor under someone's feet and calls it care. And underneath the love was the fear — the specific fear of a person whose family expressed love through provision rather than vulnerability, who grew up understanding that being needed was safer than being wanted, who had watched relationships fail for his entire childhood because someone needed and someone left and the someone who left always left because they had the option to.

He was making sure she didn't have the option.

Not through cruelty. Through the slow patient work of becoming the most necessary person in her life — the one who knew her schedule and her coffee and her cycle and her fears, the one who was always already there, the one whose absence would register as something wrong with the air itself.

He was not a good person, the way people mean it casually. He knew that.

But he loved her, the way people mean it when they mean it completely. He knew that too.

Both things were true. He had never been able to make them cancel each other out.

He knew she was ovulating.

He had known since September when he synced the app — quietly, while she was in the shower, her phone unlocked on the bathroom counter the way she always left it because she trusted him completely, and he had been tracking it since, adjusting his behavior during her windows in the subtle ways he had practiced: more touch, more warmth, more of everything that made her feel held and wanted and safe, which was the specific cocktail that had always made her lean into him rather than away.

The party was on a Friday. He checked the app Thursday night. Saw the window.

He told Beomgyu to throw the party weeks ago. Beomgyu had been talking about wanting to have people over anyway — Beomgyu rarely needed encouragement in this direction, and Soobin simply provided the timing. A large party was better than a small gathering. Enough people that the noise would be excuse enough for them to sit together, slightly apart from it all, the way they always sat slightly apart from it all, which was the dynamic he had spent years carefully cultivating because proximity in isolation had always moved things forward faster than proximity in crowds.

He didn't plan the dirty talk. That part was genuinely theirs — the escalating joke, the way they always pushed each other's limits in conversations that other people would have called outrageous but that for them was just normal, the particular latitude that came from years of being each other's most trusted person. When it started he followed it, which was not the same as initiating it, and when he leaned close to her ear and said the thing that finally made her breath hitch he did it because he felt her body shift against him and understood that she was further along than she was admitting.

The thing he said was true, by the way. Every word of it. He had been imagining it for years.

When she looked at him after — flushed, laughing it off, trying to play it casual, and said wow Soobin if I didn't know you, and trailed off, he felt the whole night change. Felt the air between them stop being hypothetical. Felt she wanted him, not only the safe version, not the label she'd given him, but him, specifically, the person who'd been sitting three feet away from her for four years waiting for exactly this.

He didn't perform calmly. He just was calm, the particular calm of a person who has been moving toward a thing for so long that arriving doesn't feel like surprise, it feels like recognition.

When she kissed him he kissed her back with everything he had.

He wasn't thinking six steps ahead in that moment. He was just there, with her, finally, his hands on her face and her breath on his mouth and four years of patient waiting dissolving into something that felt like the most natural thing he had ever done.

He was not performing when he held her after. He was not calculating when she laughed against his neck. He was just a man who loved a woman and had finally been allowed to show it, and the joy of that was clean and enormous and entirely real.

Even the good things in him were complicated. He had made peace with that.

When her phone rang — the specific emergency ringtone — he felt the shift before she did. Watched her pull away. Watched her face change from soft to alert in the space of a breath. Watched her become the person who had somewhere to be that wasn't here.

He let her go.

He walked back inside.

He stood in the wrecked apartment with Beomgyu snoring on the kitchen island and looked at the couch and felt the enormity of what had just happened settle into him like something taking root.

Then he crossed to his bedroom. Opened the closet. Looked at the suitcase — black, rolling, already packed, had been packed for days, clothes for a week and the charger and the notebook synced to her calendar — and thought: now.

He zipped it closed.

Sat on the edge of his bed.

Smiled in the darkness, and it wasn't a triumphant smile, just one of certainty. The smile of a man who has been building something for years and has finally seen that the foundation holds firm.

This is the opening, he thought. Finally.

𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘣𝘺 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴

The mall was not in the plan.

That is the part he hasn't written in the notebook because it doesn't fit neatly into the language of strategy — the mall was a Tuesday afternoon errand, her shampoo and the matching conditioner, nothing significant, and then she stopped.

He was half a step behind her when she slowed in front of the new baby boutique — the grand opening banners, the Pokémon theme in the window, and right in the center of the display the Eevee onesie with the tiny ears and the paw shoes and the shorts with the little tail — and he nearly walked into her, caught himself, looked at her face instead.

She was looking at the onesie the way she looked at very few things in the world: completely, without performance, her face entirely open, the particular expression she got when something reached past whatever careful surface she kept in public and touched something underneath it. He had a whole entry in the notebook about this expression. He saw it rarely. He catalogued every instance.

She stood there for four minutes. He counted.

He had his arms around her before he fully decided to — chin on her shoulder, looking at the same window, her body leaning back into him slightly the way it always did now, automatic and warm and trusting — and he looked at the tiny paw shoes and felt something unlock in his chest that he didn't have a word for.

He had always planned the baby. It was in the notebook — planned for the future, the distant hypothetical future, the thing that would come after the relationship was established and she was his in every way that mattered. It was not supposed to happen yet. He was being patient.

But standing behind her at that shop window, her weight leaning back into him, looking at Eevee paw shoes in a size that fit no one he knew yet — he felt the future arrive in the present with such force that the distinction between them stopped making sense.

He thought: I want this now. Not someday. Now.

He thought: she's ready. She just doesn't know it yet.

He thought: I might need to help her know it.

He pressed a kiss to her temple. Suggested going inside just to look.

She said yes because she always said yes to him, and he held her hand through the baby boutique and watched her touch tiny soft things with the expression that made his chest ache and thought: this is what I'm building toward. This exact thing. This is the ending.

He went home and opened the notebook.

He wrote: speed up the plan. today.

And then, underneath, in smaller letters: she'd be an incredible mother. I've known this for years. she just needs someone to show her she's ready.

He believes this. He believes it completely.

That is the most complicated true thing about him.

He goes on a Wednesday morning while she has her nine o'clock.

He knows her schedule. He has known her schedule since October of their second year when she started sharing her calendar with him so he could help her prepare for exams, and he has kept it synced ever since, updated automatically, so that at any given moment he knows exactly where she is and how long she will be there and what state she will likely be in when she comes home.

She will be in her seminar until ten-thirty. He has ninety minutes.

The pharmacy near campus is small and well-lit and he moves through it with the efficiency of someone who has visited before, which he has, not for this specifically, but for her period products, her pain relievers, the specific brand of vitamins she mentioned once being low on. He knows this aisle. He knows what she reaches for.

He picks up her period products first. The right ones — the overnight pads she always forgets, the liners, the specific brand. He knows these the way he knows her coffee order: completely, without having to think about it, the knowledge built into him over years the way language is built, structural rather than conscious.

Then he takes his time with the vitamins.

He has done his research. This is not an impulse, nothing he does is an impulse, it is a decision made over several weeks, researched carefully, crosschecked. Prenatal vitamins in the correct dosage to support fertility without announcing their purpose. Same aisle as her usual supplements. Close enough in appearance — amber bottle, similar capsule — that substituting them is a matter of placement rather than concealment. She takes what he sets out. She has always taken what he sets out. This is the trust he has built, the floor beneath her feet, and he is now standing on it.

He adds them to the basket.

He picks up the after-pill too — the expensive one, the one he told her actually works — and holds it for a moment, then pockets it on the way to the register.

He is not a monster. He knows this not because he tells himself but because he checks regularly, holds his actions up against the light and looks at them clearly. He is a man who loves a woman and has decided that the natural pace of her arriving at what he already knows — that they are each other's, that this was always where they were going — is too slow, too vulnerable to interference, too dependent on her having the freedom to choose something else. He has removed some of that freedom. Quietly. Carefully. With the conviction of a person who believes he is making a choice she would ultimately make herself, given enough time and enough safety.

He knows this reasoning is not airtight.

He knows it anyway. Holds it alongside the love, which is enormous and genuine and the truest thing in him.

He pays for the basket. Walks back to the apartment. Sets the vitamins on her bathroom shelf in the place where her old ones were, same position, same angle, and puts the old bottle in his bag to dispose of elsewhere.

He makes coffee.

She comes home at ten-forty, bag over her shoulder, hair slightly windswept, and drops into her chair at the kitchen table and says something about her seminar professor that makes him laugh, and he puts the coffee in front of her and the specific brand of biscuit she likes and sits across from her and listens to her talk.

She is so easy to love.

That is the thing he could never explain to anyone who asked, not that he would ever explain any of this to anyone who asked — but the thing underneath all the planning, the thing that makes the planning feel like devotion rather than possession: she is so extraordinarily easy to love. Every small preference, every habit, every morning routine and late-night spiral and the specific way she laughs when something surprises her. He would have loved her without the notebook. He loved her before the notebook. The notebook is just what love looks like when you're terrified of losing it.

He watches her drink her coffee.

He thinks: she'll take the vitamins tomorrow. She already trusts me with everything. This is just one more thing.

He thinks: we're almost there.

He thinks: she's going to be an extraordinary mother. She doesn't know this yet. He has known it for years.

Her father was going to be the hardest part. He knew this going in.

He had been building toward the graduation dinner for months, not just the dinner itself, the whole sequence: the thesis help, the schedule management, the way he made himself so entirely reliable that by the time the families sat down together at that restaurant, her father would already have a picture of him built from her unconscious testimony. She talked about him constantly. He knew this because Beomgyu had told him — she mentions you in every context, Bin, it's actually kind of insane — and because he had read the texts she sent to Lia in January, which he shouldn't have read but did, because he had access to her phone and used it carefully and only when he needed to know something important.

She told Lia: he knows me better than I know myself sometimes and I don't know if that's beautiful or terrifying.

He read that text three times.

He thought: she's almost there.

The dinner itself went exactly as he'd anticipated. Her father was formal and probing and smart — he respected that, genuinely, it was not performance, and Soobin answered every question with the truthful version of the answer that also happened to be the most reassuring. His plans, his income, his intentions. The position with his father's company, the apartments he was already researching, the fact that he planned to be around — phrased carefully, not possessively, as a practical reality rather than an announcement.

Her father nodded once near the end. Deliberate. The nod of a man who has made a decision and is closing a file.

Soobin didn't smile. Just held the eye contact for the appropriate beat and then looked away.

He walked back to the apartment with her afterward and she was wearing his jacket and asking about what he'd said to her father and he told her the truth — he told her the truth about most things, which was not the same as telling her everything — and she nodded and seemed satisfied and hooked her pinky through his in that old instinctive way she had, the one that had started as a crowd habit and become something else entirely, and he hooked back and they walked the last three blocks without needing to say anything.

He thought: she doesn't know she's already chosen. She thinks she's still deciding.

He thought: that's fine. She can decide at her own pace. I've built the only house available.

He is not proud of all of it. He wants to be clear about this even inside his own head —is not performative clarity, real clarity, the kind that looks at what you've done and names it without flinching. He has manipulated her. He has removed choices from her without her knowledge. He has made her dependent on him carefully and deliberately and called it love, which it is, but love is not an excuse for the method — he knows this, he has always known this, it is the thing he writes in the notebook late at night when the careful composure slips.

He writes it and keeps going anyway.

Because the fear is bigger than the conscience. The specific fear of a man who has never trusted that being wanted is the same as being stayed for — that has always been his mother tongue, the original wound, the thing his expensive family and his formal upbringing never quite healed. The fear that says: if she has the option to leave, she will. Not because she doesn't love him. Because loving someone and staying with them are different skills and people get them confused.

He is making sure they don't get confused.

That is what he tells himself.

He is not entirely wrong. He is also not entirely right. Both things are true in the specific way that the most important truths are always complicated and resist the clean version.

She comes out of the bedroom holding the positive test and his first thought is: there it is.

Not I'm surprised or I didn't expect this — there it is, the clean arrival of something he's been moving toward, the confirmation that what he built was strong enough to reach the place he was building toward. He feels it in his chest like a key turning, like a door opening, like coming home.

His second thought is: she's terrified.

He sees it in the specific quality of her stillness — the way she holds herself when something enormous has arrived and she hasn't had time to construct a response yet, the controlled surface over a current running hard underneath. He has a whole section of the notebook about her fear responses, the difference between the fear that makes her go quiet and the fear that makes her go loud and which one means she needs space and which one means she needs contact.

This is the quiet kind.

He crosses the room. Sits in front of her, lower than her, the geometry shifted so she's above him for once because he knows — he has always known — that being looked up to rather than looked up at changes the dynamic of a hard moment, gives the person you're looking up to something they need without asking.

He waits for her to speak.

She says: I'm pregnant. Her voice is steadier than she feels. He knows this because he knows every register of her voice and the steady one costs her effort right now.

He says: I know. Soft. Without apology.

She asks the question: was it an accident?, and he answers honestly, which is the first time in a long time he answers something about the plan without the careful shaping he normally applies. He says: I wasn't careful, and I knew what that could mean, and I didn't stop. And she says: that's not an accident. And he says: no. It isn't.

He watches her absorb it.

He watches her decide not to run.

He watches her ask for time and he says: take all the time you need, and means it, because he has been patient for four years and three more days is nothing, is the blink between holding breath and finally letting it out.

He holds her hand. Feels her pulse — quick, frightened, working through something enormous — and keeps his thumb over it the way he has kept his thumb over it in a hundred difficult moments, the specific pressure that says: I'm here, I'm not leaving, you can do this.

She keeps her hand in his.

That is all he needs tonight.

The three days she gives herself he fills quietly — ginger tea researched at midnight and procured by morning, crackers on the nightstand, the note because he knows she reads better than she hears when she's processing something heavy, the apartment listings pulled up and the map annotated and the notebook moved to where it could be found.

He moves the notebook deliberately. Not to expose himself, not fully, not in a way he controls, but because he understands something she doesn't yet: the discovery needs to happen on her terms to mean anything. If he tells her, it's a confession. If she finds it, it's a choice she makes. He needs her to choose knowing, not be given it.

He moves the notebook to where it can be seen if she looks closely.

And then he does the most difficult thing he has done in four years of careful planning: he waits.

౨ৎ

She finds it on a Thursday morning.

He sees her see it — watches her eyes catch the corner peeking out from under the laptop, watches the still half-second of recognition, watches her look at his hand as he moves toward it and stops himself, too slow, she's already clocked the motion.

She picks it up.

He goes completely still.

He has imagined this moment many times. He has imagined her anger — the specific kind, cold and precise, the kind she deploys rarely and devastatingly. He has imagined her walking out. He has imagined her asking him to leave Lia's apartment, the apartment he has been living in for months, and he has thought about what he would do if that happened and the answer he arrived at was: I would go. And I would come back. Because I always come back, and eventually she always lets me, and that has been the rhythm of us since the beginning and I know it the way I know her coffee order, the way I know her cycle — completely, without doubt.

What he has not imagined is what he sees.

She reads every page. He watches her face as she reads — every flicker, every tightening, every moment where she stops and he watches her absorb something specific and then keeps reading. He watches her find the ovulation entries. He watches her find the storm forecast note. He watches her find the vitamins.

He watches her find: she trusts me completely. I don't know if I deserve it.

She closes the notebook.

Sets it on the table.

Looks at him.

And her face is not what he prepared for. It is not cold or precise or devastating. It is tired and complicated and something else underneath — something that looks, if he is reading her correctly, and he is always reading her correctly — like the expression of a person who has found something that confirms what they already knew and is deciding what to do with the confirmation rather than with the surprise.

She already knew.

Not specifically, not the notebook, or the vitamins — but the shape of it. She knew and she chose not to look closely because looking closely would have required her to act on what she found and she wasn't ready to act on it and she wanted to stay in the warmth of what they had more than she wanted to examine how it was built.

He understands her so completely in this moment that it steals his breath.

She is morally gray too. That is the truth he loves about her most — she is not innocent, she has never been innocent, she has been a willing participant in something she let herself not-quite-see because it suited her, and when he finally says yes to every question she asks him, gives her every confirmation, makes himself knowable in the full complicated real sense — she still looks at the apartment listing.

Still asks about the park.

Still stays.

He crouches in front of her chair. Puts his hands around hers. Feels her pulse — still fast, still working through something enormous — and keeps his thumb there, the same pressure, the same message: I'm here. I'm not leaving. You can do this.

She doesn't pull away.

She says: I'm still here.

And he thinks: I know. You have always been here. I built toward here and you walked the whole way and neither of us fully admits that you walked it willingly.

He says: I know. Soft. Like a man receiving something he wasn't sure he'd earned.

She says: tell me about the park.

And he does.

He tells her about the park — the one with the good light in the mornings, the one near the apartment building with the quiet hallways and the room that could be a nursery or an office or both, the one he drove past twice in February to confirm it was the right choice, the one twenty minutes from both their families and close enough to the hospital and far enough from campus to feel like after instead of still. He tells her all of it, and she listens, and gradually the tension in her hands eases, and the apartment that smells like cedar and ginger tea and the particular warmth of two people who have been building a life together without naming it holds them both without asking for anything more.

Later — much later, 2am, her asleep against his side, her hand curled under his in sleep the way it always finds him — he opens the notebook app on his phone in the dark.

He types the last entry he will write for a long time:

she found it. she stayed.

she asked about the park.

that's everything. that's always been everything.

He locks the phone.

Closes his eyes.

Listens to her breathe.

౨ৎ prev ✧ next — 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇 𝑒𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉: 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓉𝑒𝓈𝓉

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🩷 𝓊𝓅𝒹𝒶𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓃 𝒾𝓃𝓈𝓅𝒾𝓇𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝓈𝓉𝓇𝒾𝓀𝑒𝓈

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✧𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 → [𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒]

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୨ৎ ݁ ˖ 𝒻𝒾𝓃𝒹 𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓂𝓎 𝓈𝓉𝑜𝓇𝒾𝑒𝓈 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 ˖ ݁ ୨ৎ → [𝒸𝑜𝓂𝓅𝓁𝑒𝓉𝑒 𝓂𝒶𝓈𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉]

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