#jungkoode

Team photo day is not, technically, a humanitarian crisis.

You know this. Intellectually. In the same way you know that traffic jams aren’t actually designed to ruin your life and that the universe doesn’t have a personal vendetta against you specifically.

And yet.

Here you are.

Seven forty-three in the morning, standing in front of your wardrobe, staring at nothing, eating pikotas out of the bag because you forgot to eat an actual breakfast and this is fine. This is completely fine. You’re fine.

You are not fine.

Photo day at Valdebebas means the entire Real Madrid roster in one building for six consecutive hours while photographers and club PR staff run around like badly caffeinated border collies trying to herd twenty-two professional athletes who have, collectively, the attention span of a fly. 

It means chaos. It means noise. It means approximately forty-seven different egos ricocheting off the same walls.

And it means him.

You should be in university right now. You would be in university right now if the universe had any sense of justice or basic narrative fairness, but instead you’re standing here in your bedroom at seven forty-three in the morning because your dad got a text last week—last week, you’d been living in blessed ignorance for seven whole days—that said all staff families invited for unity shots.

You remember reading it over his shoulder.

You remember the exact quality of silence that followed.

Your dad’s face did this thing it does sometimes—that small, private kind of hopeful. Like he’d been handed something unexpected and was trying not to show how much he wanted it. 

He didn’t say anything. 

Just set his phone down and went back to his coffee and was very, very carefully not looking at you.

And that was it.

That was the whole argument.

His stupid hopeful face.

You hate that face. You love that face. You would walk into a burning building for that face, which is essentially what you’re doing right now, except the building is Valdebebas and the fire is Kim Taehyung’s continued existence in your general vicinity.

You pull on a jacket. Check your phone. Ignore the three texts from Sofia, one of which is just a photo of her crying because dinosaurs went extinct that she sent at midnight for reasons you can’t fully parse.

Thirty minutes later you’re in the car, your dad driving, and he’s telling you about some new taping technique he learned at a conference in Valencia and you’re nodding in the right places and looking out the window and thinking, with great specificity, about all the things Taehyung could theoretically have come down with in the last seven days that would justify his absence today.

The list is not short.

Food poisoning, obviously. Pulled hamstring. Mysterious rash. Some dignity-adjacent incident at one of those Marbella villas that requires him to stay indoors and reconsider his choices for a minimum of six to eight weeks. A sudden onset of good judgment. A personality transplant. An inconvenient restraining order from a woman with better self-preservation instincts than you.

You’d take any of it.

You’d honestly take all of it.

Your dad turns into the Valdebebas entrance and waves at the security booth, and the gate opens, and the facility swallows you like it always does—this sprawling, impeccable machine of professional football; clean lines and manicured grass and the kind of quiet institutional money that’s visible in every single surface.

You hate how impressive it is.

You’ve spent most of your life in training facilities and you still can’t do it—can’t fully make yourself unimpressed by places like this. 

Barça’s was better. Obviously.

But Valdebebas has its own kind of weight. The kind that comes from decades of titles and the particular arrogance of an institution that has never once doubted its own importance.

Your dad parks. Gets out. Straightens his jacket with that small professional pride he always has walking into work, this guy who spent twenty years at Barça and is somehow still excited to show up.

You follow him inside.

The main building is already busy in that specific controlled-chaos way that happens when a large number of people have been told to be somewhere at the same time. Staff in lanyards. Photographers setting up rigs. A PA with a clipboard and the haunted expression of someone who has already been on shift for two hours longer than the day technically started. Players filtering in by twos and threes, some in full kit, some mid-conversation, some still wearing the slightly glazed look of people who were definitely not in bed at a reasonable hour last night.

You recognize most of them by now.

That’s what happens when your dad works here. You learn faces, positions, which ones are approachable and which ones have a thirty-meter exclusion radius of ego that you should respect for your own wellbeing.

You already know which one falls in the second category.

Your dad spots someone from medical across the lobby and says something about finding you in ten minutes and then he’s gone, absorbed into the professional ecosystem, and you are standing alone in the main corridor with your tote bag and your pikotas and your complete lack of enthusiasm.

Right.

Elevator. Floor three. Find somewhere quiet and get through the next six hours without doing anything you’ll need to explain to HR.

The elevator banks are at the end of the corridor, past the trophy cases—which, fine, are impressive, you’re not dead, you can acknowledge that—and you walk toward them, hands in your jacket pockets, looking at your phone because looking at your phone is a universal signal that you do not want to be talked to and most adults in professional environments respect this.

You press the call button and wait. Check your messages. Sofia’s meme is a photo of a man walking directly into a lake with the caption ’me, going to anything I said I wouldn’t go to.’ You send back a thumbs up. She’ll understand.

The elevator dings.

The doors open.

You step in without looking up, reaching for the button panel, and then you register the presence of another body already inside the elevator and your eyes lift on reflex—

Kim Taehyung.

In full kit, looking like he walked out of a shoot that hasn’t happened yet. Hair done. Chain sitting right. That specific quality of effortless that takes an annoying amount of effort. Holding a Coke Zero like it’s a prop. 

And smirking.

That smirk.

The one that says ’well, well, look at this,’ like your presence here is a delightful twist of fate rather than a logistical inevitability that you’ve been dreading for seven days.

You stare at him.

He stares back.

The elevator doors slide closed behind you.

Right.

So. That’s where you are.

Trapped in an elevator with Kim Taehyung at seven fifty-eight in the morning before you’ve had coffee, and the universe is clearly operating at full capacity today, fully committed to its bit, no notes.

You turn back to the panel. Press three. Face forward.

“Gominola.”

He says it like he’s greeting an old friend. Like this is pleasant. Like you didn’t spend seven days quietly hoping he’d contract something non-life-threatening but career-interruptive.

You face the doors.

“Don’t talk to me.”

He doesn’t respond.

Good. Excellent. Signs of personal growth, possibly.

Three seconds of silence.

“Wonder if they’re doing individual shirtless shots this year,” he says, conversationally, out loud. Into the air. “The club kept that one from two seasons ago for like eighteen months, which—I mean. Can you blame them.”

You stare at the doors.

“I said don’t talk to me.”

“I’m not talking to you.” Completely unbothered. “I’m talking to myself.”

You have no response to that. Not because you don’t have one—you have several—but because giving him one proves he’s talking to you, which he technically isn’t, and he knows that, and he’s enjoying this.

He suddenly leans in, and your hand moves without fully consulting your brain.

It lands flat on his stomach—reflexive, stopping him—and the contact registers immediately. Cotton kit. Solid under your palm. Warm in a way that’s distinctly inconvenient.

He goes still.

“Mhm?”

One syllable. Pointed. Like he’s giving you time to prepare yourself.

“I was just going to press the button. You missed it.”

You turn your head just enough to glance at the panel.

Floor three.

Not lit.

You could’ve sworn you had pressed it?

He reaches past you with his free hand and presses 3.

The button lights up. Small. Red. Humiliating.

“There,” he murmurs. “Proud of us.”

You go to pull your hand back, but his fingers close around your wrist before you can, tight enough to keep your palm where it is, still flattened against his stomach through the thin training top, like this was all your idea and he’s simply honoring the decision.

You look down at his hand on your wrist.

Then up at him.

Then back at his hand, because maybe visual confirmation will make this feel less insane. 

It does not.

“Let go.”

He doesn’t.

Instead he turns just enough to lean his other forearm—the one holding the Coke Zero—against the wall beside your head, easy as anything, trapping space down to something stupidly narrow. 

His chain catches the overhead light. So do his piercings. Of course they do. Every part of this man behaves like it’s in a campaign.

He’s annoyingly close. You can smell the citrusy scent of his, landing somewhere behind your ribs, where it has no business being. 

“What?” he says, glancing down at your hand on his abs and then back up. “Surprised?”

You blink at him.

He tilts his head, smugness in HD.

“Thought you’d already seen them.” His mouth twitches. “In your dad’s office. In the pool.”

“Yeah,” you say. “And they’re not impressive.”

There it is.

That reaction.

Tiny. Immediate. His teeth catch his lower lip and his whole expression shifts in a way that should probably be illegal before eight in the morning. 

Not offended. Worse. Delighted. 

Like you just tossed a match at a man made entirely of lighter fluid and ego.

“They’re not?” His voice drops a fraction. “You’ve spent an awful lot of time looking at them.”

You stare at him.

Do men like this come factory defective or is it environmental?

“Do you wake up and decide ‘yes, today I will be delusional,’” you ask, “or does it come naturally to you?”

His thumb strokes once over the inside of your wrist.

Your pulse, because your body is a traitor with no loyalty to the cause, kicks directly against it.

He notices. Obviously.

“Bit of both,” he says. “Depends how much attention I get before breakfast.”

“Incredible.”

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“Everything you say to me is a compliment.” 

He leans a fraction closer and the citrus hits harder—not cologne, not product, just him, that sharp clean lemon scent that clings to his skin like it was engineered in a lab specifically to piss you off. 

“Even the insults. Especially the insults.”

Your jaw tightens. “You need medication.”

“Probably.” He’s not even pretending to disagree. “But right now I’m in an elevator with the prettiest girl in the building and she’s touching my abs, so. Priorities.”

You ignore the prettiest girl part. You ignore it completely. You file it in the trash folder of your brain where all of his compliments go, the one labeled ‘performative bullshit—do not engage.’

“Maybe if you drank less soda you’d have something worth looking at, Coke.”

His eyebrows go up.

“Oh.” He leans in a touch more, pleased in a deeply irritating way. “I got promoted?”

You frown. “Hm?”

“From Coke-boy to Coke.” His mouth curves. “Wow. We’re stripping me of gender now? I’m just an object now. A concept. A beverage.”

You deadpan at him. "If you want, I can make it simpler."

"Please do."

You hold his gaze when you say it. "Zero."

That really does something. Not visibly, not in any way a normal person would catch, but you're not a normal person when it comes to him. Unfortunately.  

The tiny flare in his eyes. The way his tongue presses once against the inside of his cheek. The little almost-smile he has to bite back because apparently being insulted is his favorite hobby after staring at himself in reflective surfaces.

Seriously. Medical journals should be lining up outside his house.

“Zero,” he repeats.

“Mhm.”

“Because of the drink?” he asks.

“Partly.”

“And the other part?”

You hold his gaze. “Use your imagination.”

“Oh, I do.” His voice goes rough around the edges. “Constantly, actually.”

You ignore that with the dignity of a woman refusing to acknowledge a public indecency.

“It suits you,” you say. “Coke Zero. Zero nutritional value. Zero restraint. Zero redeeming qualities.”

He almost laughs. You can see him trying not to.

Instead he says, quietly amused, “Zero? Seriously, Gomi? That’s mean.”

“You sound insulted.”

“I am.”

He’s not.

He's absolutely not.

That's not what insulted looks like. That's what horny looks like, and you know the difference, and he knows you know the difference, and the whole thing is deeply, profoundly stupid.

His grip on your wrist shifts.

Your hand—still on his stomach, still pressed against that warm cotton—starts to move. Downward. Slow.

"Really, genuinely insulted."

Lower.

Past the hem of his kit. Past the elastic.

"Keep moving that hand," you say, very calm, very level, "and see what happens."

He goes still.

Then his eyes drop.

To your mouth.

"You know that makes me wanna do it more, right?"

He says it like he's sharing a fun fact. Like this is trivia night and he's contributing.

"So being pushy is your whole thing," you say. "Good to know. Something you should probably discuss with a psychologist."

"Psychologists are fake."

"That's not—"

"Made up. Whole field. Scam."

"You can't just—"

"Moving on."

Suddenly his grip on your wrist tightens and he pulls your palm down and presses it flat against his crotch—

And he's hard.

Fully hard. Zero ambiguity about what you're feeling—the thick, obvious shape of his cock straining against fabric, hot under your palm, and your brain processes this information in approximately point-three seconds before your body reacts on pure animal instinct.

You yank your hand back like you've touched a burner.

And shove him.

Both palms, flat against his chest, hard enough that he staggers backward two full steps, his shoulder blades hitting the elevator wall with a thud that makes the Coke Zero slosh in the can.

"Are you insane?"

Your voice comes out sharper than you intended. Pitched higher. Not flustered—you do not get flustered—but something adjacent to it that you refuse to name and will be taking to your grave.

Taehyung doesn't look sorry.

Taehyung looks like Christmas came early and brought him personally wrapped gifts.

He's laughing. This low, rough chuckle that sounds like it's being dragged out of him against his better judgment—if he had better judgment, which he doesn't, which has been firmly established.

"What?" He's still grinning, rubbing the spot on his chest where you shoved him with his free hand, not remotely bothered. "You've felt it against your pussy once already. Figured we were past the formalities."

Your mouth opens.

Closes.

Opens again.

Nothing comes out.

Because what do you say to that?

What is the appropriate verbal response to a man referencing the time he ground his erection against you in your father's treatment room while you're trapped in a moving elevator in a professional football facility at eight in the morning?!

Emily Post didn't write a chapter on this.

The elevator dings.

Floor three.

The doors slide open and reality floods back in—fluorescent lighting, corridor noise, the distant sound of someone yelling about lighting setups—and you stand there, pulse hammering, while the world outside the elevator continues to exist as if the last ninety seconds didn't just happen.

Taehyung straightens up. Adjusts his kit. Takes a sip of his Coke Zero with the calm of a man who did not just place your hand on his dick in a shared vertical transit space.

He steps out.

Pauses.

Turns.

And throws you the V sign.

Two fingers. Lazy. That same gesture from the party, the one that started all of this, and his tongue presses against the inside of his cheek as he does it, and his eyes hold yours for exactly long enough to make his point before he turns and walks down the corridor like nothing happened.

You stare at the closed doors.

Blink once.

Twice.

"What the fuck," you say, to no one, in an empty elevator, at eight in the morning.

Your hand smells like his kit.

You wipe it on your jacket.

It doesn't help.

You’ve been here eleven minutes. 

You know this because you’ve been counting, the way you count everything when you’re stuck somewhere you don’t want to be—minutes, ceiling tiles, the number of times the PR coordinator says ‘team’ (four so far).

You’re keeping a tally in the margin of your notebook next to your actual notes, which are sparse and getting sparser because this whole thing is a glorified logistics briefing disguised as a team bonding exercise and you are not on this team.

You’re the physio’s daughter.

You’re here because ‘staff families invited for unity shots’ apparently translates to ‘sit in a room for an hour while someone explains lighting arrangements like it’s a NATO summit.’

There are about fifteen people in here. Players scattered across the sectional couches and chairs, a few WAGs, some PR staff, two photographers who keep checking their light meters like nervous pilots. 

Your dad’s somewhere on the other side of the room talking to the head coach’s assistant about rotator cuff protocols, because he is constitutionally incapable of not working even when he’s technically off-duty.

You’ve got a seat at the end of the long couch, notebook open, pen moving, foot tapping a rhythm against the floor that’s half concentration and half residual irritation from the elevator incident that you are not thinking about.

You are not thinking about it.

You are taking notes.

Professional, organized, here-for-her-dad notes about photo scheduling and where staff families are supposed to stand during the group shots and—

A body drops onto the couch next to you.

Not across the room, where there are at least four empty seats. Not on the chair by the window, which is free and far away and would’ve been the choice of any person with functioning spatial awareness and a basic respect for personal boundaries.

Next to you.

Right next to you.

His thigh settles approximately two millimeters from yours. 

You don’t look up.

Don’t react.

Just keep writing.

The PR coordinator is explaining something about backdrop options for the individual portraits—white versus grey, apparently this is a debate that requires committee input—and you are focused on that. Entirely focused. One hundred percent of your attention on backdrop discourse.

Something crinkles.

You glance sideways—reflex, not choice—and watch Taehyung reach into the pocket of his training jacket and pull out a small bag of pikotas.

Your pikotas.

Not your literal pikotas. But your candy. Your thing. The sour-sweet cherry gummies that you keep in your tote and your nightstand and your jacket pockets because they’re yours, they’ve been yours since you were twelve, and now this man is sitting next to you in a professional meeting eating them like they’re his.

He pops one into his mouth. Chews. Doesn’t look at you.

“Where did you get those.”

It comes out before you can help it. Flat, but with an edge of genuine confusion, because pikotas aren’t exactly standard vending machine fare and you’ve never once seen them in the Valdebebas canteen.

He finally glances at you. Chewing. Taking his time about it. Extracting every possible second of enjoyment from both the candy and your face.

“You’d be surprised,” he says, “the kind of contacts Madrid players have.”

“Contacts.”

“Mm.” Another pikota. He makes a small show of examining the bag, turning it over like he’s reading the nutritional information. “Smuggling around kids’ candy. Whole underground network. Very serious operation.”

“Must be one hell of a job. Your braincells survive the mission?”

“I’m a man of many talents, Gomi.” He sucks the sugar off his thumb. Casual. Not looking at you. “Some of them are even legal.”

“Name one.”

“I just located and acquired your favorite candy within a fifteen-kilometer radius of a high-security football facility using nothing but my charm and a phone call.” He tilts the bag toward you. Offering. “That’s basically espionage.”

“That’s basically sad.”

“And yet.” He pulls the bag back, pops another one, and faces forward again. “You’re still talking to me about it.”

You turn back to your notebook.

Write nothing.

The meeting continues. Backdrop: grey wins. Schedule: roster goes first, staff families after lunch. Individual shots: alphabetical by surname, so Taehyung’s somewhere in the middle, which means he’ll be hanging around the facility for hours with nothing to do, which means he’ll be hanging around you for hours with nothing to do, which means today is going to be the longest day of your life and you haven’t even had coffee yet.

His knee taps yours.

Light. Brief. Could be accidental.

You shift your leg away.

Thirty seconds pass.

Tap.

You clench your jaw. Move your leg again.

Twenty seconds.

Tap.

This time it lingers—his knee pressing against the side of yours, holding contact for a full beat before pulling back.

You stare at your notebook. The words on the page have stopped meaning anything. You’re looking at your own handwriting and seeing hieroglyphics because your entire cognitive capacity has been rerouted to the single point of contact where his knee keeps finding yours like a homing missile with a personal grudge.

Tap.

Is he braindead?

Tap.

Is he actually, clinically, medically braindead? Because that’s the only explanation. Some kind of neurological event has occurred and the part of his brain responsible for reading social cues and understanding the concept of ’stop’ has been permanently deactivated.

Tap.

You could choke him. Right here. In this room. In front of fifteen people and a PR coordinator and two photographers. You could put your hands around his throat and squeeze and you’d feel nothing—no guilt, no remorse, just the deep, abiding satisfaction of a woman who has reached her absolute limit with a man who thinks his proximity is a gift.

Tap.

Who does he think he is? Genuinely. Is this the approach? Touch the girl, annoy the girl, be so relentlessly, suffocatingly present that eventually she breaks from sheer exhaustion? Is this what works on other women? Does he tap their knees in meetings and they just—what? Swoon? Melt? Decide that yes, being subtly harassed during a photo day logistics briefing is the romantic overture they’ve been waiting for?

Tap.

God. God, Kim Taehyung is a test. A full-blown, divinely orchestrated trial of patience. God really said ’men are insufferable and here’s one to prove it. Here’s the thesis statement with abs and a Coke Zero habit and zero—literally zero—understanding of the word no.’

What did you do in your previous life? 

It must’ve been bad. You must’ve burned down a convent or kicked a dog or committed some deeply specific sin that the universe decided could only be atoned for through repeated, sustained exposure to this man’s right kneecap.

Tap.

Karma. That’s what this is. Cosmic, targeted, inescapable karma.

Tap.

Fucking stupid attention-seeking—

“Stop.”

You say it through your teeth. Quiet. Just for him.

He doesn’t stop.

Tap.

His face is pointed at the front of the room. Attentive. Invested. Like he’s absorbing every single word about photo resolution requirements and has never been more intellectually stimulated.

Tap.

Fine.

You swing your knee sideways and crack it into his.

Hard.

Not a tap. Not a nudge. A full, mean, retaliatory strike that connects with the side of his kneecap with enough force that his whole leg jolts.

He snorts.

Tries to cover it—badly—pressing his fist against his mouth, shoulders shaking, this strangled sound escaping through his fingers that’s somewhere between a laugh and a cough.

Heads turn. Half the room glances over.

Taehyung clears his throat, fist still against his mouth, and nods at nobody in particular. 

“Sorry. Cough. Just a—” He thumps his chest once. “—tickle in the throat. Carry on.”

The PR coordinator blinks, adjusts her glasses, and continues talking about file format preferences.

Heads turn back.

You want to dissolve into the couch cushions and cease to exist.

He’s eating another pikota. Chewing with that self-satisfied rhythm of a man who just won a round and knows it.

Silence.

Blessed, temporary silence.

Forty-five seconds of peace in which you try to re-engage with the meeting, try to remember why you’re here, try to reconnect with the version of yourself that walked into this building this morning with functional blood pressure and the will to live.

Then he starts bouncing his knee.

Not the tapping. The bouncing. That full-leg rhythmic jitter that some people do when they’re restless, except he’s doing it at a frequency that vibrates through the couch cushion and directly into your thigh and it’s like sitting next to a human jackhammer.

Your pen stops moving.

You look at his leg.

Look at him.

He’s staring straight ahead. Chewing a pikota. Bouncing. Completely at peace with himself and the chaos he’s introducing into your nervous system.

You don’t think about it.

Your hand drops to his thigh and you dig your nails in.

Four fingers and a thumb, pressing into the muscle hard enough to anchor his leg to the couch and stop the vibration dead.

The effect is immediate.

His breath catches—audible, quick, a sound that has no business existing in a meeting room—and his head tips back. His arms go up, stretching overhead, spine arching slightly, and the groan that comes out of him is disguised as a stretch noise but it’s not a stretch noise and you know it’s not a stretch noise and he knows you know.

Every single head in the room turns again.

“Just—” His voice is rougher than it should be. He rolls his shoulders, committing to the bit. “Tight. From training. Sorry.”

The PR coordinator looks like she’s reconsidering her career choices.

You remove your hand from his thigh like it’s radioactive.

He looks at you.

That grin.

That absolute shit-eating, fully unrepentant, ‘I-just-made-a-noise-in-a-meeting-room-because-you-hurt-me-and-I-liked-it’ grin.

Your face is hot. Your ears are hot. Your entire body has decided to betray you by turning the exact shade of the pikotas he keeps eating, and you grip your pen so hard the plastic creaks.

He pops another pikota into his mouth.

Winks.

You are going to kill him. You are going to kill him and plead temporary insanity and every woman on the jury will acquit you.

The meeting wraps up approximately nine years later.

People start standing, gathering bags, fragmenting into side conversations. The PR coordinator distributes printed schedules. Someone mentions lunch. Normal, functional, human behavior happening all around you while you sit rigid on the couch thinking about the thirty-six different ways you could commit a crime and get away with it.

Taehyung shifts next to you. Doesn’t stand. Tilts his body toward yours, dropping his voice low enough that the words are just for you.

“I’m gonna be honest with you, Gomi.” Barely above a breath. “I didn’t hear a single word of that briefing.”

You stare at him.

“I have zero idea what’s happening for the photos. No clue. None. My entire blood supply was—” He makes a vague gesture downward. “—elsewhere. The whole time.”

“That sounds like a you problem.”

“It is a me problem.” He nods. Solemn. Completely unbothered. “A really pressing me problem.”

“Then go figure it out.”

“I was hoping my favorite physio’s daughter would brief me.”

“Briefly: no.”

“Gomi—”

You stand up. Grab your bag. Your schedule. The remains of your composure, which are admittedly scattered across the floor of this briefing room like debris.

“Your mess. Your cleanup. I’m not your personal assistant.”

“You’re really gonna leave me here?” He tips his head back against the couch, looking up at you with an expression of a kicked puppy. “Confused and alone?”

“Thriving and unbothered, actually.”

You’ve taken exactly two steps toward the door when Namjoon appears.

He’s holding a coffee—actual coffee, from the good machine on the second floor—and he’s got that easy, slightly disheveled energy he always has, glasses slightly askew, turtleneck doing its turtleneck thing. 

He smiles when he sees you.

“Hey. How was—”

“Don’t ask.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

He chuckles, and you’re about to ask him if he wants to grab food after the family shots when—

“Is that your boyfriend?”

You stop walking.

Turn around slowly.

Taehyung’s still on the couch, sprawled, one arm stretched across the backrest, looking at Namjoon with an expression that’s technically neutral and functionally anything but.

You open your mouth to tell him that’s none of his business, that he doesn’t get to ask you that, that the concept of your personal life should be as inaccessible to him as basic human decency apparently is—

“And what if I am?”

Namjoon’s voice. Calm. Even. Standing right beside you with his coffee and his turtleneck and an expression you’ve never seen on him before—steady and unbothered and looking directly at Taehyung like he’s got all day.

Taehyung simply looks at Namjoon from the couch, that sprawled-out posture, and there’s a beat—two, three seconds—where they just hold each other’s gaze. Weighing. Measuring.

Then Taehyung raises both hands. Palms out. That universal gesture of surrender that means nothing when it comes from him.

“My bad, dude.” Easy. Disarming. A smile that shows too many teeth. “Didn’t know.”

Namjoon doesn’t respond. Just holds the look for another second. Then turns to you.

“Ready?”

You pick up your tote strap, adjust it on your shoulder. “Let’s go.”

You make it three steps toward the door.

“Yo, dude!”

Both hands cupped around his mouth. Full volume. The kind of voice projection you use in stadiums, not conference rooms.

You both half turn, looking over shoulders.

“You better watch her.”

The smile that follows is the kind that could mean anything and definitely means something, and you grab Namjoon’s arm and pull him through the door before your face can give him any reaction at all.

The photo shoot is a circus and no one brought a tent.

You’re watching from behind the lighting rigs, tucked into one of those folding chairs they set up for families and staff, doing an excellent impression of someone who belongs here while internally calculating how many minutes until you can leave.

The roster shots are happening on the main pitch backdrop—that massive club crest banner they’ve rolled out like a red carpet for egos—and the photographer, a tiny woman with a headset, is trying to organize twenty-two professional athletes into neat rows.

It’s going about as well as you’d expect.

“Marco. Marco—I need you in the second row.”

“The second row?” Marco says it like she just asked him to stand in the car park. “Bro, my jawline doesn’t hit right from the second row. There’s a shadow thing. It’s an Italian bone structure issue.”

“It’s a height issue,” the photographer says flatly. “You’re five-eleven. Second row.”

“Five-eleven and three quarters—”

“Second row, Mr. Santelli.”

Leo, who’s already been placed in the second row, looks unreasonably pleased about this development. “Welcome to my world.”

“Shut up, Leo.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I said shut up.”

“The second row’s not that bad—”

“Leo, if you finish that sentence, I will tell Sofia what you said about her cooking last Tuesday.”

Leo shuts up.

The photographer repositions. Adjusts angles. Asks the first row to square their shoulders. Asks the third row to stop slouching. Asks Gabriel to please—please—take the AirPods out.

“Sorry, sorry—” Gabriel yanks them out, grinning that impossible grin that makes everyone forgive him immediately. “I was listening to something.”

“During the team photo?”

“It was a good song.” He says it like that’s a perfectly valid excuse. 

To be fair, for Gabriel, it probably is.

Sergio, standing front and center because he’s the captain and that’s his spot and nobody has ever once questioned this, pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Can we just—” He gestures at the group with the resigned authority of a man who’s done this forty times and it never gets easier. “Can we just take the photo. Please. One photo. Without anyone talking.”

“Bold of you to assume we know how to be quiet,” Marco says.

“I’m not assuming. I’m begging.”

“That’s sad, captain.”

“Your existence is sad, Marco. Smile.”

The photographer counts down. Three, two—

Taehyung bumps Marco’s shoulder. Hard enough to knock him sideways half a step.

Marco bumps him back.

Taehyung catches himself on Leo, who wasn’t involved but is now stumbling into Matías, who turns around with the expression of a man contemplating violence.

“¡Eh!” Matías shoves Leo back upright. “¿Qué coño hacéis?” (What the fuck are you doing?)

“It wasn’t me—”

“It’s never you—”

“Can we PLEASE—” The photographer’s voice has reached a frequency that could shatter crystal. “—take ONE photo where EVERYONE is looking at the camera and NOBODY is assaulting each other?”

Silence.

Twenty-two players stare forward.

Click.

“Thank god,” the photographer mutters.

“That’s gonna be a good one,” Marco announces to nobody. “I felt it in my bones.”

“You felt my elbow in your bones,” Taehyung says.

“Same thing.”

The photographer waves them off for a break while she checks the shots, and the formation dissolves immediately into chaos—players scattering, grabbing water, checking phones.

Leo drifts toward Marco and Taehyung like a satellite pulled by gravity, and within thirty seconds they’re clustered near the lighting rig to your left, close enough that you can hear every word whether you want to or not.

You do not want to.

You hear them anyway.

“—I’m just saying, the grey backdrop washes me out,” Marco’s saying, scrolling through his phone. “They should’ve gone with black. Black makes everyone look ten percent hotter. That’s science.”

“That’s not science,” Leo says.

“It is. I read it somewhere.”

“You don’t read.”

“I read captions, Leo. Captions count.”

Taehyung’s leaning against the rig, arms crossed, looking bored in the way he always looks bored when he’s actually paying attention to everything. His eyes drift across the room—casual, unhurried—and you know the exact moment they land on you because you feel it the way you feel a change in air pressure.

You don’t look up.

Keep reading your schedule.

“Alright, individual portraits next!” The photographer’s assistant—the PA with the clipboard and the thousand-yard stare—starts calling names. “Alphabetical by surname. We’re starting with—”

“Excuse me.” Xavi’s voice cuts through the noise. Not loud. Never loud. Just that specific frequency that makes every player in a thirty-meter radius instinctively straighten up. “Before individuals—can we address the team photo situation?”

He’s looking at the Chaos Coalition.

All three of them.

That look. You’ve seen your dad give it—the one that doesn’t need words because the disappointment is doing all the heavy lifting.

“The team photo,” Xavi repeats, “is the image the club uses for the entire season. It goes on the website. On posters. On merchandise. And you three—” He gestures with a water bottle. “—turned it into a playground fight.”

“It was a nudge,” Marco says.

“It was unprofessional.”

“Xavi—”

“This represents the club.” Xavi’s voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t need to. He’s got that Andalusian calm that makes everything sound both reasonable and devastating. “The club that pays your salaries. That gave you a platform. The least you can do is stand still for eight seconds.”

Silence.

Marco blinks.

Leo stares at his shoes.

Taehyung tongues the inside of his cheek, jaw shifting, not saying a word.

Xavi holds the look for another two seconds—just to make sure it lands—then nods once and walks back toward the photographer, water bottle in hand, posture perfect, the absolute picture of professionalism.

The moment his back is turned, all three of them huddle closer.

“Look at him,” Marco mutters, barely moving his lips. “Being all… Xavi-like.”

“I mean,” Leo whispers back, “he is Xavi.”

“Yes but when I say Xavi-like I mean it as an insult, Leo. Focus.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Taehyung glances over his shoulder—checks Xavi’s position—then turns back. “Did you hear him? ‘The club that pays your salaries.’ Like I don’t know who pays my salary. I’m very aware of who pays my salary. My salary is excellent.”

“I’m so done with the salary lecture.” Marco shakes his head, solemn. “Top three worst moves. Right behind the ‘you represent something bigger than yourselves’ speech.”

“Oh god,” Leo groans. “That one’s the worst.”

“It’s so bad.”

“‘Something bigger than yourselves,’” Taehyung mimics, dropping his voice into Xavi’s measured cadence, chin lifted, an invisible water bottle in hand. “‘Every action you take reflects on this institution.’”

Marco snorts. Covers his mouth.

“‘The crest on your chest isn’t decoration,’” Marco adds, doing his own Xavi impression—slower, one hand pressed to his heart. “‘It’s a responsibility. A privilege. A—’”

“’—a legacy,’” Leo finishes, and all three of them mouth the word at the same time, like they’ve heard it four hundred times, which they probably have.

“At least the salary one’s short,” Taehyung concedes. “In, out, done. The ‘bigger than yourselves’ thing? That one’s got layers. He builds to it. There’s a crescendo.”

“There’s eye contact,” Marco adds, haunted. “He makes eye contact with every single person in the room.”

“Individually.”

“Individually.”

“Seriously, he’s all like—” Marco straightens up slightly, adjusts an imaginary collar. “‘Look at me. I’m Xavi. I’m morally superior because I’ve been in a relationship with someone who actually loves me for eight years and we just got engaged and I’ve never once thought about another woman because I’m built different’—”

“That one feels personal,” Leo says.

“It is personal.” Marco frowns. “Imagine being in love with the same person. Forever. Voluntarily.”

He shudders. Full body. Like the concept of monogamy is a physical affliction.

“Some people like that,” Leo says, carefully.

“Some people like eating plain rice, Leo. Doesn’t make it a personality.”

Taehyung snorts.

“Like, bro, the wedding?” Marco continues, eyes widening. “Have you seen the Pinterest board? Elena showed Isabella. There are mood boards. Plural. One for table settings. One for flowers. One for—get this—napkin folds.”

“Napkin folds,” Taehyung repeats.

“Specific napkin folds. There are apparently seven kinds and Elena has opinions about all of them.”

“And the water bottle thing too,” Leo mutters. “Like even his hydration is morally superior.”

“For real,” Taehyung says. “It’s like watching a documentary about discipline.”

“He’d make a great priest,” Leo offers.

“He’d make a great principal.”

“He’d make a great my-dad-when-I-got-bad-grades—”

Xavi looks over from across the room. Just a glance. Just a flicker of those dark eyes in their direction, chin lifting slightly, the way a lion turns its head when it hears rustling in the grass.

All three of them snap forward simultaneously.

Marco grabs his water bottle and drinks with aggressive innocence. Leo suddenly finds the ceiling fascinating. Taehyung pulls out his phone and stares at a blank screen with the focus of a man reading breaking news.

Nobody speaks.

Nobody breathes.

Xavi holds the look for three full seconds.

Then turns back to his conversation with Rafael.

Marco exhales through his teeth. “Close one.”

“He’s got eyes everywhere,” Leo whispers. “It’s like he can hear us thinking.”

“It’s the goalkeeper training,” Taehyung says, still fake-scrolling. “Peripheral vision. They see everything.”

“We should spread out,” Leo suggests. “Look natural.”

“We are natural—”

“We look like we’re planning a heist—”

“Okay, next please!” The photographer’s voice cuts across the room. 

Alexandre peels himself off the wall with the enthusiasm of a man walking to his own execution, and the room reshuffles again.

You’ve been watching all of this.

You didn’t mean to, but it’s impossible—genuinely, physically impossible—not to watch three grown men who earn more in a week than most people earn in a year act like twelve-year-olds who got told off by a substitute teacher.

The Xavi impression was good, though.

You’re not going to admit that to anyone.

The next hour passes in a blur of flash photography and fragile egos. Players cycle through individual shots—some take thirty seconds, some take fifteen minutes because they keep asking to see the screen and requesting different angles. Marco insists on a reshoot because his ‘jawline wasn’t catching the light.’ Taehyung, predictably, nails his in one take and walks away like he couldn’t care less. 

You saw him check the preview screen twice, though. 

He cared.

Your dad appears around noon, coffee in hand, looking pleased in that quiet way he gets when work is going well.

“Fotos de familia ahora, cariño.” (Family photos now, sweetheart.) He squeezes your shoulder. “Solo un par. Rápido.” (Just a couple. Quick.)

You close your notebook. Stand. Smooth down your jacket.

This is the part you’ve been dreading. Not the photos themselves—you can survive standing next to your dad and smiling for a camera. You’ve done it a thousand times, at a thousand Barça events, in a thousand corridors that smelled like medical tape and belonging.

It’s the context.

Staff families means you’re part of the Madrid machine now. Officially. Documented. Filed away in some PR folder as evidence of team unity and institutional warmth.

The photographer’s set up a new backdrop—warmer lighting, softer focus, the kind of setup designed to make everyone look approachable and human. Staff members are filing in with partners, kids, the occasional bemused-looking teenager who clearly got dragged here against their will.

You know the feeling.

Your dad steers you toward the cluster forming near the backdrop, his hand on your shoulder, already talking to one of the assistant coaches about someone’s hamstring.

The photographer’s assistant is arranging people into loose groupings. Staff on the left. Families on the right. Players who are part of the ‘unity shots’ scattered in between for that curated we’re-all-one-big-family aesthetic that clubs love and nobody believes.

You end up near the edge of the group. Reasonable. Safe. Far enough from the center that you’re visible but not prominent. Your dad’s beside you, already in position, radiating that calm professional warmth that makes everyone around him stand a little straighter.

This is fine.

You adjust your jacket. Fix your hair. Prepare the face—neutral, pleasant, the expression of a person who is here by choice and not because her father’s career depends on institutional goodwill.

And then—someone stepping into the space to your left where nobody was standing three seconds ago.

You feel it before you register it. 

That faint edge of citrus that your nose has started recognizing against your will.

His hand touches your lower back.

Light. Brief. Fingertips pressing through the fabric of your jacket, just below your shoulder blade, the kind of contact that could be dismissed as guidance. Positioning. Moving you into frame the way anyone might move anyone during a group photo.

Except his fingers linger.

One beat too long.

Two.

His palm flattens. Settles against the curve of your spine.

And stays.

“Chin up, Gomi,” he murmurs, voice low enough that only you hear it. “You look like you’re at a funeral.”

You don’t turn your head. Don’t look at him. Just face the camera with your expression locked in place and your back burning where his hand sits.

The photographer raises her camera.

“Everyone—smile!”

You do.

It’s late when the whole nightmare is finally over. 

The light through the hallway is going amber, that low-angle afternoon thing that happens when a day’s been going on too long and the building itself seems tired of hosting people. 

Most of the photo shoot chaos has been packed up. The photographer left an hour ago. Staff families filtered out after that, then the WAGs, then the players in staggered groups—some to the gym, some to their cars, some to whatever shiny nightlife commitment makes them feel alive after eight hours of being professionally agreeable.

You’re still here because your dad’s still here. Because your dad is always still here, because Jesús does not leave a facility until every piece of equipment is accounted for and every clipboard is initialed and every surface has been wiped down to his personal standard of medical-grade cleanliness.

Which means you’re in the closet.

Not metaphorically. Literally in the storage room off the main physio corridor, reaching for the electrode cables your dad asked you to grab from the top shelf because they migrated during the chaos of today and now they’re wedged behind a box of resistance bands that someone shoved up there with the spatial awareness of a drunk giraffe.

Your fingers graze the edge of the box. Miss the cables by about four centimeters.

You stretch higher. Your jacket rides up. Your shoulder protests.

Seriously. This shelf is just unreasonably placed, designed by someone who assumed that everyone who uses this room is three meters tall and plays professional football.

You stretch again. Fingertips brush plastic. Almost—

A hand reaches past you.

Long arm. Over your shoulder. Fingers closing around the cable bundle and pulling it down with zero effort, like the shelf is at eye level and not somewhere near the ceiling.

The smell hits you before the identity does.

Lemons.

That specific scent that isn’t cologne, isn’t soap, isn’t anything you can pin to a product—it’s just Kim Taehyung. The way his skin smells after a full day. Bright and tangy and warm in a way that makes your throat do something inconvenient.

He always smells like lemons, doesn’t he?

You’re not a citrus girl. Never have been. You don’t squeeze lemon into your water or order limoncello or buy those yellow cleaning products that smell like summer kitchens.

But right now, standing in a storage closet with his arm still extended past your head and his chest approximately four inches from your back, the lemon thing is—

Present.

Very present.

He drops the cables into your hand.

“Here.”

You take them. Step sideways, putting distance between you and whatever just happened in your olfactory system.

“Thanks.”

He shrugs. Moves back. Leans against the opposite shelf with that particular brand of engineered casualness that he does—arms folded, one ankle crossed over the other, like he ended up here by accident and not because he walked into a storage closet that he has absolutely no reason to be in.

You look at him.

He looks at you.

The silence sits there for a second, the same way that happens at the end of a very long day when everyone’s used up all their performance energy and there’s nothing left but the actual person underneath.

“You look tired,” he says.

“Wow.” You don’t miss a beat. “Charming.”

“I mean—” He pauses. His jaw works slightly, like he’s chewing on the next word before releasing it. “This kind of day is exhausting. The performing.”

You don’t respond immediately.

Because that’s—

That’s not a line. 

That’s not a setup for something. 

There’s no smirk chasing the sentence, no innuendo tucked into the pause, no gleam in his eye that says gotcha. 

He’s just standing there, looking at you, and his voice sounds different. Flatter. Stripped of the usual coating.

Tired, actually.

He looks tired too. Not the kind of tired that makes people ugly—because the universe wouldn’t grant you that mercy—but the kind that shows in the looseness of his posture. 

The way his shoulders sit lower than usual. 

The faint shadow under his eyes that his bone structure almost hides but not quite.

“You’d know,” you say. Quieter than you intended.

“Yeah.” He holds your gaze. “I would.”

Something passes between you. Brief. Unnamed. The kind of thing that happens when two people who spend all their time performing accidentally stop at the same time and realize they’re both just standing there without a script.

Then—

“So you perform too.”

His mouth shifts. Not a grin. Something smaller. More knowing.

“Thought you were above that.”

The sincerity evaporates like a puddle in July.

“Meaning?” Your defenses snap back online. Immediate. Automatic.

“Meaning—” He tilts his head, that half-interested expression settling over his features. “—I put my hand on your back during the photos. Right there. Full palm.” He makes a vague gesture. “And you just… stood there.”

“Because we were being photographed.”

“Because you were performing.” He says it like he’s delighted by the discovery. “After the meeting—after the—” 

He mimes clawing fingers.

Nails digging into a thigh. 

Your nails. His thigh. 

“—that whole thing, I was expecting you to turn around and stomp on my foot. Elbow to the ribs. Something.”

“I didn’t want to cause a scene.”

“You always want to cause a scene. You charged fifteen grand to my card at a party.”

“That was different.”

“How?”

“That was revenge. The photo was just logistics.”

“Logistics.” He repeats the word like it’s amusing. Like it’s a candy he’s rolling around his mouth. “Right. My hand on your back was logistics.”

“It was.”

“And you letting it stay there?”

“Tolerance.”

“Tolerance,” he echoes. His eyes narrow. “See, Gomi, I don’t buy that.”

“I don’t care what you buy.”

“Because I think—” He pushes off the shelf. Doesn’t step closer. Just shifts his weight forward in a way that makes the room feel smaller. “—you liked it.”

“I tolerated it.”

“You tolerated my hand on your back but tried to puncture my femoral artery with your fingernails forty-five minutes earlier?”

“Yes.”

“Those are mixed signals.”

“Those are boundaries. One was a briefing room where you were being insufferable. The other was a photo where pulling away would’ve looked weird.”

“Mm.” He’s almost smiling now. Containing it. Barely. “So you didn’t pull away because of optics.”

“Correct.”

“Not because my hand felt good.”

“Your hand felt like a hand. Congratulations on having one.”

He bites back whatever’s threatening to break across his face. 

You can see it—the way his jaw locks, the way his cheek hollows slightly with the effort of not grinning.

“Okay,” he says. “Fair. But the nails thing.”

“What about it.”

“I liked that.”

You stare at him. “You liked that you almost got caught making sex noises in a briefing.”

“I liked the nails thing, Gomgom.”

No lead-up. No cushioning. 

He just drops it into the air between you like it’s a reasonable contribution to a conversation between two people standing in a storage closet.

“Good for you.”

“I mean—I’m used to scratches.” He tilts his head, rolling one shoulder back like he’s remembering something specific, something physical. “My back’s basically a canvas at this point. Comes with the territory.”

“Disgusting.”

“So like, not news.” He doesn’t even register the insult. Just keeps going, the way a train keeps going when someone throws a pebble at it. “Girls scratch. It happens. Standard operating procedure. But you—” 

He points at you. One finger. 

"—you scratched me like you were actually trying to get to the bone.”

“Because I was trying to get to the bone.”

“—and that was so hot, Gomi.” His voice drops, rough, as if the memory’s doing something to him in real time. “Like, fuck. That’s all I could think about for the rest of that meeting.”

“Explains why you got nothing out of it.”

“Exactly! See?” He spreads his hands. Beaming. “We get each other.”

“We absolutely do not get each other.”

“You’re right.” He nods, solemn, like he’s reconsidering his position and arriving at a new conclusion. “I think we should get to know each other. In my room. My bed, specifically. So you can add those scratches to my back. For real this time.”

There it is.

The proposition. Delivered with all the subtlety of a billboard on the M-30 and twice the confidence.

In a normal setting—on a normal day—with a normal amount of patience left in your reserves, you’d say ’I don’t want to know’ or ‘what the fuck is wrong with you’ or even a mere ‘boy, whatever’ and walk out and that would be the end of it. Clean exit. Dignity intact. The mature response of a woman who does not engage with men who proposition her in storage closets after photo days.

But it’s not a normal day.

And Taehyung is not a normal person. 

And it’s been a twelve-hour day of performing and tolerating and sitting next to his stupid bouncing knee and feeling his stupid hand on your stupid back and smelling his stupid lemon smell and you are fed up. 

Past fed up. Beyond it. 

Somewhere in the territory where irritation curdles into recklessness and your mouth stops consulting your brain before opening.

“You wouldn’t last long enough,” you say, “to get me to scratch you.”

The room goes very still.

Taehyung’s face does something you’ve never seen it do.

It goes blank.

Completely, totally blank—every expression wiped clean for a full second, like his operating system just crashed and is rebooting. 

His mouth is slightly open. 

His eyes are fixed on you with the intensity of a man who just heard something in a language he didn’t know he spoke.

Then the reboot completes.

And the grin that spreads across his face is predatory.

Not his usual smirk. Not the cocky, performative thing he wears like a uniform. 

This one’s slower. Meaner. All teeth and something behind the teeth that makes the air in the closet feel like it dropped ten degrees and heated up simultaneously.

“Wanna bet?”

Two words, low enough that you feel them more than hear them. 

His tongue presses against the inside of his cheek, and his whole posture shifts—pushing off the shelf, not moving toward you but orienting toward you, his body language suddenly very awake for a man who looked exhausted thirty seconds ago.

Something about the way he says it sounds like a door opening onto a room you shouldn’t walk into.

You step back.

“I’m leaving.”

“Gomi—”

“Goodbye.” 

You tuck the cables under your arm, grip the shelf with your free hand for balance as you step around him—giving him the widest possible berth in a closet that doesn’t offer much berth to give—and head for the door, flipping him off. 

“Oi!”

His voice bounces off the corridor walls, too loud, too pleased.

“That’s the first time you’ve flipped me off!”

You keep walking.

“That’s a milestone, Gomi! We should mark the date!”

You round the corner.

His voice follows, fading but warm.

“I’m putting it in my calendar!”

The lemon smell stays on the cables the whole walk back.

You don’t notice.

You absolutely, categorically don’t notice.

if you liked this chapter, please consider buying me a coffee!! ♥'ﻌ'♥

next | index

—taglist

@Mina4556 @latinxbipride @miheavnly @gaebestie @tan-veee @chocoltae-17 @kalmisaidso @thvsgirll @calmyourtitts7 @silverozy @svnk1ssd @anithv @yeahimacapricorn @6rnde @akirawhore @bonzoirparis @megatroncam07 @Asstaeticcc @melizzzie @kookie96 @coletaehyung @unbibiased @sexyevilkitten @maralodiaal @my0hmary @butterymin @quhrtz @lachlaniah @jhopeloverrr @medicinemybish @jjkszn @makulimlim @onyxthornseer @amajikisupremacy @omgstahpp-blog @drwonderbread @angelhyuka @mikrokookiex @ot7girl4l @mar-lo-pap @rossy1080 @fancypeacepersona @ggukjugoo @jadestonedaeho7 @a-kookie-with-my-tae @ironyatitsfinest @impossiblecopoaffire @cannotalwaysbenight @taevescence @itstoastsworld @somehowukook @stutixmaru @chloepiccoliniii @annyeongbitch7 @minniejim @curse-of-art @mellyyyyyyx

© jungkoode 2025

But this takes the crown.

He'd showered. That's the thing. He'd done the whole responsible-athlete night routine—shower, skin care, the eye cream he pretends is just water, teeth, the works. Pulled on boxers. Got into bed. Opened his laptop to the match footage he's supposed to review for Saturday because he is a professional and professionals review footage and he was going to do that.

He was going to sit here, in his bed, in his clean boxers, and analyze his defensive positioning for ninety minutes like a man with discipline and priorities and a brain that lives inside his skull.

Then there was an ad.

Some skincare thing. Thirty-second pre-roll he couldn't skip. A girl—blonde, irrelevant, forgettable—licking a lollipop in slow motion while some voiceover talked about hydration or collagen or whatever the fuck.

And his brain, his traitorous, disloyal, sex-poisoned brain, looked at that mouth and thought:

‘You know who has lips like that?’

You.

Your lips.

Your fucking lips.

Man.

And then it wasn't the ad anymore. It was you, in that storage closet, looking at him with those flat, unimpressed eyes, and your mouth—that mouth—shaping the words ’you wouldn't last long enough to get me to scratch you’.

His dick twitched.

He ignored it.

He is a professional. He was reviewing footage. He clicked past the ad, opened the match file, watched approximately forty-five seconds of his own defensive clearance before his cock twitched again—harder this time, insistent, the little bitch—and the footage started looking less like tactical analysis and more like meaningless pixels arranged in patterns that his brain refused to process because all of his blood was migrating south at an alarming and frankly inconvenient rate.

He'd adjusted himself.

That was the first mistake.

Because an adjustment turned into a palm pressing down through his boxers, and pressing turned into a slow drag of his hand along the shape of himself—half-hard already, thickening under his own fingers—and the drag turned into a grip. Loose. Barely there. Just his hand over the fabric, feeling himself fill out, and the footage was still playing on the laptop screen, some midfielder making a run he should be tracking, and he wasn't tracking shit.

He was thinking about your nails.

Four fingers and a thumb digging into his thigh hard enough that he'd groaned in a briefing room full of people. The bright, sudden pressure of it. The way it felt like you meant it—not playful, not teasing, but aggressive. Like you wanted to hurt him. Like hurting him was the point.

His hand had moved on its own. Over his boxers. Slow strokes that he told himself were nothing—just adjusting, just resettling, just dealing with a normal physical response that would pass if he ignored it—

And then he had groaned.

Out loud. Into his empty apartment. A sound that came from somewhere deeper than his throat, pulled out of him by the memory of your hand on his leg and the way your nails bit through polyester like it was paper.

He threw the phone aside. Tossed the laptop toward the foot of the bed. Pressed both hands over his face, palms digging into his eye sockets, and lay there.

He shouldn't have started doing this.

He should not be doing this.

He is a professional athlete who earns more money in a week than—he is not jacking off to the physio's daughter. That's a line. That's a hard, definitive, nonnegotiable line that he is not going to cross because he has standards and boundaries and a roster of women on his phone who would be here in ten minutes if he—

He turned onto his side.

And the pillow was there.

Look. If you've never had a dick, you can't understand what he's about to explain, so judgment needs to go on hold for a second.

The pillow was right there. Soft. Cool against his overheated skin. Positioned exactly where his hips ended up when he rolled over, and the contact—the accidental, completely unplanned friction of cotton against the front of his boxers—made his dick punch up so hard his thighs clenched.

He pressed into it. He’s only human.

A lazy, half-conscious roll of his hips, his cock grinding against the pillow through his boxers and the pressure had hit so fucking good that his breath had caught and his hand fisted in the sheets and he had thought ’okay, maybe just—‘

No.

Absolutely not.

But yes.

Pillow fucking. He was about to start pillow fucking.

When did he become a fucking loser, seriously.

He has options. That's the fucking thing. He has excellent options. He has an entire contact list full of options with names and faces and bodies that would put this pillow to shame.

But something about this—about the specific quality of need coiling behind his navel—didn't feel like a phone call. Didn't feel like company.

It felt private.

Hungry in a way that required his own hand and his own imagination and absolutely nothing else in the room.

He rolled flat on his back.

Stared at the ceiling.

The thing is—and this is the part he's annoyed about—Kim Taehyung does not jack off.

Kim Taehyung does not need to.

Kim Taehyung opens a contacts app. Kim Taehyung has, on rotation, a system designed by a younger and slightly stupider version of himself but functional in every measurable way. Hots for when he wants the lights off and his brain off and the whole thing handled in under an hour. Pretties for when he wants to be photographed walking into a restaurant first. Cutes for when his ego needs a sponge bath. And the Sexys—the rare ones, the ones who make him work—for when he wants to feel something with teeth in it.

Five minutes. Ten, tops. He could be balls deep in someone qualified.

He could call Agne.

He could text. She wouldn't text back, of course. She doesn't text first, she doesn't text second, she doesn't text. But if he sent a ‘hey’ she'd let him know what errand he had to run before she'd unlock her front door.

His dick does not respond.

His dick, which has been ten thousand percent online for the last forty-five minutes, just sits there. Hard and uninterested and insulted that he's even bringing other women up.

Huh.

Okay.

He could call Marina, then. Pretty 412, give or take. The one who lives off Castellana, the one with the laugh, the one who never asks where things are going because she already knows and that's the appeal—low-effort, low-stakes, low-aftermath, in and out, polite text in the morning, no follow-up.

Nothing.

His cock does not even flinch.

What the fuck.

Okay, fine. Kioba. Cute 209. Soft, pliant, openly impressed by absolutely everything he does. The one who looks at him like he invented sex. The one he could break down in twenty minutes flat just by murmuring ’good girl’ in the right register because she goes molten the second a man with abs maintains eye contact.

His brain recoils.

Recoils. Like he just suggested filing taxes.

He stares at the ceiling.

What is happening.

This is—seriously, what is this.

He's lying in his own bed with the kind of erection that could legally be classified as a public menace and his brain is rejecting every single woman on his roster like a fucked-up vending machine spitting bills back.

He scrolls through them mentally. Hots, Pretties, Cutes, Sexys—the whole color-coded apparatus he built precisely so this would never be a problem—and every face that appears gets immediately voted down by some part of him he doesn't have the energy to interrogate.

Inconvenient.

Deeply, profoundly, embarrassingly inconvenient.

He shoves his boxers down.

His cock springs free, slaps up against his stomach with enough force that it actually stings—that wet, heavy thwack of a man who's been hard for too long without doing something about it—and he makes a sound that's half a laugh and half a wince.

"Dude." He lifts his head, looks down at it, deeply unimpressed. "You're embarrassing both of us."

It twitches.

"Yeah," he mutters. "Same."

He drops his head back.

Stares at the ceiling some more.

He needs to have a serious sit-down with Taehyung Jr. at some point. Discuss boundaries. Maybe a HR-style intervention.

There's a roster. There's a system. The system was designed for exactly this kind of moment—hard at midnight, alone in bed, nothing to do—and the system has just gone on strike.

Solo work, then.

Fine.

Fine.

He reaches blindly for the nightstand drawer, fumbles past the watch box and the airpods case and the little pouch where he keeps the coke he's not touching tonight because he is, allegedly, a professional, and his fingers close around the thing he forgot he owned.

Marco's gift.

Marco gave it to him at the beginning of last season as a joke. Hamstring strain, two weeks off the pitch, two weeks off everything else by his physio's order, and Marco had walked into his apartment with a gift bag and that fucking smile and pulled out a top-shelf fleshlight like he was handing over a championship medal.

«For your suffering, brother.»

Taehyung had laughed. Thrown it in the drawer. Forgotten about it.

Until now.

He looks at it.

It looks back.

He sighs.

He sighs the sigh of a man whose ancestors are watching, whose contract is worth eight figures, whose face is on the side of three buildings in Madrid, and who is about to fuck a silicone tube because his brain has unilaterally decided that the only acceptable woman for tonight is the one woman he absolutely, categorically, professionally cannot have.

He spits in his palm. Coats his cock once, slow, top to base, and the slick drag of his own hand makes his hips jerk before he's even started.

Christ. He's leaking. Pre-cum already beading at the tip, smearing under his thumb, and he uses it—rubs it down the shaft, gets himself wet enough that when he positions the fleshlight and presses the head against the opening it's already stupidly easy, already too good before he's even in.

He sinks in.

The sound that comes out of him is somewhere between a hiss and a moan and he doesn't have the dignity to be embarrassed about it because fuck, this thing is tight, it's hot, it's slick, and his brain has already replaced what's happening to his cock with what he wants to be happening to his cock, which is you.

You.

Bent over for him. Underneath him. On top of him.

He doesn't care, he doesn't have the focus, but you.

Your mouth. Your hands. Your nails on his back the way they were on his thigh, but worse. Meaner.

Because he's the one who's earning them this time.

Because he's the one between your legs giving you a reason.

He starts moving.

Slow at first—long, deep strokes, hand at the base of the toy, working it down over himself like he's the one doing the fucking, like you're the one taking it—and his other hand goes up over his head, gripping the headboard, because he needs something to anchor against or he's going to lose the rhythm.

Fuck.

When did jacking off feel like this?

He doesn't remember it being this good. He's pretty sure it wasn't. He's pretty sure this is what people who jack off regularly are getting and nobody told him because if he'd known he wouldn't have spent the last six years booking room service for women he didn't want to share breakfast with.

He pumps faster.

His hips are starting to move on their own now, fucking up into it, and his brain is already deep into it, already past the part where he's pretending this is recreational and into the part where he's narrating, where he's running a track, where every thrust comes with a line he'd say if you were actually here.

‘Yeah?’

That's the first one. That's always the first one. Low, smug, just a syllable to make sure you're listening, his mouth at your jaw, his cock buried so deep you'd feel it in your stomach—

‘Yeah? That's it. There you go, Gomi.’

Christ. He's saying it in his head and his hand speeds up like his hand can hear him.

’What's that, hm?’

He's pushing into you. Splitting you open. Taking his time on the first stroke because you'd be tight, you'd be so fucking tight, of course you would, of course a girl who looks at him like he's a stain on her schedule would clamp down on his cock like she's trying to squeeze him to death. Even your pussy would be unimpressed. Even your pussy would be giving him the cold shoulder right up until the moment it wasn't.

’So unimpressed all the time, Gomi. Always so fucking bored. Always such a smart mouth. And then I stuff you full of dick and suddenly you can't talk, hm?’

He bites his lower lip. His eyes have closed without his permission. He can almost see it—your face, that face, the one you put on when you've decided he isn't worth processing, except now your eyes are wet and your mouth is open and there's nothing flat about the way you're looking at him because his cock has reorganized your priorities.

’Yeah. Suddenly real fucking impressed, aren't you, Gomi. Suddenly very fucking interested in my cock.’

Fuck. Fuck.

The toy is making sounds. Wet, obscene, slick noises that should be disgusting and aren't, that are making his thighs shake, and he's fucking up into it harder now, the headboard creaking under his grip, and somewhere in the back of his head a mastermind voice is going ’easy, slow it down, you'll come too fast’, and he is ignoring that voice as hard (ha) as he can.

He wants to come too fast.

He wants to come embarrassingly fast.

He wants you to laugh at him for it and then keep your nails dug into his back anyway.

His mouth is moving without sound, the fantasy running across the inside of his skull like a broadcast, and your lips are right there, your fucking lips, and in his head he's leaning down and biting the bottom one because he's wanted to bite it since the first day when you didn't bother to look up from your textbook, and you taste like cherry, you taste like the picotas you live off, you taste like that artificial sour-sweet sting that he's been craving horridly lately.

God. Your fucking lips.

He kisses you in his head. He kisses you so much in his head that his actual mouth opens into nothing, breath dragging, and his free hand has come down off the headboard and is gripping the meat of his own thigh hard enough to bruise.

He's chasing the feeling. The one your nails left. The one he's been thinking about every twelve minutes since the briefing room. He digs his own fingernails into his quad and rolls his hips up at the same time and his cock hits the back of the toy and it's so good he sees a flash of white.

‘That's it. That's it, Gomi. Take it. Look at me. Look at me when you take it.’

In his head you're shoving at his chest the way you shoved him in the elevator that morning, palms flat, two-handed, but it's a token because he's already balls deep, because your legs are already wrapped around his hips, because your nails are already pricking down his shoulder blades and starting to break skin.

You'd tell him to pull out, you absolutely would.

And in his head he just—

Doesn’t.

In his head he grins down at you, wrecked, sweating, and grabs your hip hard enough to bruise and grinds deeper and says ‘nope’ and fucking fills you up. Stuffs you. Floods you. Cums inside, even though you told him not to, because you told him not to, holding eye contact while it happens, watching your face do something new.

The orgasm hits him like a tackle.

His arm flies up and he clamps it over his mouth, biceps to lips, biting down into his own arm so hard he tastes copper because the sound that wants to come out of him is too big for the room, too big for the building, too big for the version of himself he’s allowed to be in public—and his cock pulses, and pulses, and he is dimly, distantly aware that he is cumming into the fleshlight in a quantity that has no precedent, that his hips are still jerking, that his thighs are quaking, that his whole body is convulsing through it in waves that seem to keep coming for an obscene amount of time.

His vision goes white.

White, then black, then static.

When he comes back down he’s panting against his own bicep, teeth still pressed to skin, his cock still buried in the toy, his free hand fisted so hard in the sheet that he’s gonna have to ice it tomorrow.

“Holy fuck.”

He says it into his arm.

His chest is heaving. His hairline is wet. The sheets under him are soaked through where his back hit them. He smells like sweat and sex and the salt-bright tang of his own cum, and his mouth is dry, and his lips are a little swollen from biting them, and his cock is still twitching weakly in the fleshlight like please can we go again.

He feels sick for exactly five seconds.

Sick like what the fuck. Sick like did that just happen. Sick like in what world did Kim Taehyung just have the biggest orgasm of his life from a fleshlight and a fantasy of the physio’s daughter telling him to pull out and him not pulling out.

In what world.

In which world.

Then the sick passes.

And underneath it, under the immediate horror of it, there is—

Oh.

Oh, that’s bad.

There is purring satisfaction.

His whole body feels soft, and sluggish, the usual sensation that comes after a good meal, a good match, a good fight, that says that was the right thing, that says do that again, that says we found it. His chest is loose. His shoulders, which have been knotted up around his ears for weeks, are flat against the mattress for the first time in he doesn’t know how long.

He blinks at the ceiling.

The ceiling, again, has nothing to say.

“Okay,” he mutters, to nobody. “Okay. We’re not unpacking that. We’re not unpacking any of that.”

He pulls the fleshlight off.

“Jesus.”

The amount of cum inside it is, frankly, unreasonable.

Like, medically. Like, he should be hydrating. Like, where did all of that come from, when did his body manufacture all of that, what is happening to him.

He sets the toy aside on the nightstand to deal with later, falls back against the pillows, drags an arm over his face.

His heartbeat is slowing. His breathing is evening out. There’s a low, content rumble behind his sternum that feels suspicious but feels too good to interrogate.

He just had the biggest fucking orgasm of his life imagining a girl who has never once, in the recorded history of his interactions with her, told him she wants him.

He should be losing his mind right now.

He’s not losing his mind.

He’s smiling. Tiny. Stupid. Into the crook of his own elbow.

“Okay,” he mumbles, mostly to the ceiling, partially to his cock, partially to himself. “Okay. We’re not gonna make this a thing.”

His cock, soft and spent and thoroughly drained, doesn’t even twitch.

“Cool. Glad we agree.”

His eyes are heavy. The kind of heavy that means his body has decided the day is over now whether he likes it or not.

He turns his head. The pillow is right there—the same pillow he was about to disrespect twenty minutes ago. He pulls it under his cheek.

His last thought, before the dark takes him, is that the cotton smells faintly like his own skin, faintly like lemon detergent, and—weirdly, stupidly, traitorously—he wonders, just for a half-second, what your pillow smells like.

Picotas, probably.

His mouth twitches.

He’s out before he can finish the thought.

𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚚𝚞𝚒𝚎𝚛𝚘 𝚋𝚊𝚛𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚘𝚊 (i want bbq)

You stare at the WhatsApp notification blinking from the corner of your laptop screen and let out a breath through your nose that’s maybe 40% sigh and 60% resignation.

You minimize it.

Miss Díaz is at the front of the lecture hall drawing a diagram on the whiteboard that looks like she’s planning a murder—angles and dotted lines converging on a kneecap. The Q-angle. Quadriceps line of pull relative to the patellar tendon’s insertion at the tibial tuberosity.

You write: 𝒬－𝒶𝓃𝑔𝓁ℯ > 15° 𝒾𝓃 𝓂𝒶𝓁ℯ𝓈 ／ > 20° 𝒾𝓃 𝒻ℯ𝓂𝒶𝓁ℯ𝓈 = 𝓇𝒾𝓈𝓀 𝒻𝒶𝒸𝓉ℴ𝓇 𝒻ℴ𝓇 𝓅𝒶𝓉ℯ𝓁𝓁𝒶𝓇 𝓂𝒶𝓁𝓉𝓇𝒶𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔．

Underline it twice.

Good. Fine. Paying attention. Being a student. Absorbing knowledge like a functional adult who came to university to learn and not to babysit a—

A soft snore ripples from your left.

Your pen stops.

The sound has a signature: wet, nasal, slightly whistling on the inhale, like a golden retriever sleeping in a patch of sun. You’ve sat next to this sound for exactly eleven days of shared lectures and you could pick it out of a police lineup.

You drive your elbow sideways into his ribs.

Namjoon jolts upright so fast his pen launches off the desk, clatters across the floor, rolls under the chair of the girl in front of you who doesn’t even flinch because this is the third time it’s happened this week. His hand slaps the notebook. His eyes snap wide open like someone who has definitely been awake this entire time and was simply resting his eyelids in a meditative state.

“Patellar maltracking,” he says instantly. Loud enough that two heads turn.

You blink at him.

He blinks back.

“…Right?” he adds, quieter.

“You were snoring.”

“I was breathing heavily.”

“Through your mouth. With sound effects.”

He groans—low, theatrical, a groan that belongs in a hospital ward honestly and not a biomechanics lecture—and folds forward onto the desk, forearms flat, face buried. The collar of his hoodie bunches up around his ears.

“I can’t do this today,” he mumbles into the laminate.

“It’s eleven AM.”

“Time is a construct and I’m in crisis.” He turns his face sideways so one eye is visible, blinking up at you like a fish on a dock. “She hasn’t texted me back.”

You tap your pen against your notebook twice. “Marta?”

He lifts his head. Looks at you. The betrayal in his expression could be framed.

“Huh? What? No—Marta left me on read three days ago and I decided that meant she hates me. I’m talking about Leia. Keep up, Y/N. Come on.” He props his chin on his forearms, wounded. “I’m sharing my trauma with you.”

“How many girls are you texting.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It feels like the point.”

“The point,” he says, pressing a palm flat against his chest like he’s about to recite the Constitution, “is that I sent Leia a meme—a great meme, by the way, A-tier, certified—and she opened it and just. Nothing. Twelve hours. Not a ha-ha. Not a reaction. Not even a pity-tap on the like button. Just seen.”

“Maybe she didn’t find it funny.”

“It was objectively funny.”

“Maybe her standards are higher than yours.”

“Maybe you’re dead inside.”

You write another line in your notebook.

Miss Díaz has moved on. The diagram now has arrows pointing in four directions like a weather map of knee dysfunction.

“Namjoon.”

“Mm.”

“Why are you even in this class.”

He goes very still.

“Aren’t you in the year above me.”

Stiller.

“I’m sharing my trauma with you,” he says, lifting his head fully now, betrayed. “I’m peeling back the layers. I’m being vulnerable. And you decide this is the moment to dig into the gaping wound of my academic record.”

“I’m just curious.”

“You’re cruel. You’re so cruel. You walk around looking like a normal person and inside you’re a Bond villain.” He bemoans it with his whole torso, shoulders rounding, but keeps going anyway. “I failed the unit in Seoul, ’kay? The system was different. The grading was different. The professor had vendettas.”

“Mhm.”

“And I’m here on a transfer credit situation that requires me to retake biomech in the host country’s curriculum, which, by the way, is taught in English, which is also not my first language, even though I’m fluent, but there’s a difference between fluent and pelvis-girdle-dynamic-stabilization-during-gait fluent—”

“Sure.”

“—and you’re sitting there like, ‘aren’t you in the year above’, like you didn’t catch me on the kindest possible day to mention that to me.”

“I’m catching you on the day you drooled on yourself and got dumped by Leia.”

“I didn’t get dumped. We weren’t—”

“On read for twelve hours. From a meme.”

He lowers his head back down to the desk. Soft thud. Same spot.

“Mean woman,” he says into his arm. “Mean, mean woman.”

Your laptop pings.

𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚝𝚎𝚝𝚊 (sis) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚝𝚎𝚝𝚊 (sis) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚝𝚎 𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚢 𝚑𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚘 (i’m talking to you) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚖𝚎 𝚒𝚐𝚗𝚘𝚛𝚊 𝚕𝚊 𝚝𝚒𝚊 (she’s just ignoring me) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚛𝚎𝚒𝚋𝚕𝚎 (unbelievable)

You open the Whatsapp screen fully this time.

𝐘𝐨𝐮: 𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚢 𝚎𝚗 𝚌𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚎 (i’m in class) 𝐘𝐨𝐮: 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚊 (stop)

𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚟𝚊𝚕𝚎 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚘 𝚚𝚞𝚒𝚎𝚛𝚘 𝚋𝚊𝚛𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚘𝚊 (ok but i want barbecue) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚋𝚊𝚛𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚘𝚊 𝚍𝚎 𝚙𝚒𝚣𝚣𝚊 (barbecue as in pizza) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚕𝚊 𝚍𝚎 𝚜𝚒𝚎𝚖𝚙𝚛𝚎 (the usual)

You feel the corner of your mouth twitch. You kill it before it becomes anything.

𝐘𝐨𝐮: 𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚗𝚎𝚜 𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚊 𝚗𝚘𝚌𝚑𝚎? (you’re coming over tonight?)

𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚙𝚘𝚜 𝚌𝚕𝚊𝚛𝚘 (of course) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚟𝚘𝚢 (coming)

𝐘𝐨𝐮: 𝚗𝚊𝚍𝚒𝚎 𝚝𝚎 𝚑𝚊 𝚒𝚗𝚟𝚒𝚝𝚊𝚍𝚘 𝚎𝚕𝚒 (nobody invited you eli)

𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚊𝚢 𝚝𝚎𝚝𝚊 𝚗𝚘 𝚜𝚎𝚊𝚜 𝚊𝚜𝚒 (ugh sis don’t be like that) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚑𝚊𝚌𝚎 𝚖𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚜 𝚚𝚞𝚎 𝚗𝚘 𝚖𝚎 𝚟𝚎𝚜 (it’s been months since you last saw me) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚗𝚘 𝚖 𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚍𝚎 𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚘𝚜? (don’t you miss me?)

Technically true.

He’s been in Madrid longer than you have—came up for uni a year and a half ago, got a girlfriend, got a flat in Malasaña, got himself a whole little life with Marta and exposed brick and a vintage poster you’re sure he thinks makes him interesting.

Before dad’s contract, the only way you saw each other was Eli taking the train down to Barcelona for a weekend, eating everything in the fridge, sleeping on the couch, and leaving behind three mismatched socks like some kind of textile poltergeist.

Now you and dad live twenty minutes away and he still hasn’t come by. Busy man. Cohabiting life. Girlfriend. Supposedly school, though you’re sceptical about the ratio of FIFA to actual coursework happening in that flat.

𝐘𝐨𝐮: 𝚗𝚘

𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚃𝙴𝚃𝙰???? (SIS????) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚛𝚎𝚒𝚋𝚕𝚎 (unbelievable) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚖𝚎 𝚍𝚊 𝚒𝚐𝚞𝚊𝚕 𝚟𝚘𝚢 𝚒𝚐𝚞𝚊𝚕𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚎 (i don’t care i’m coming anyway) 𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚍𝚒𝚕𝚎 𝚊 𝚙𝚊𝚙𝚒 𝚚 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚎𝚕 𝚑𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚘 𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚊 𝚗𝚘𝚌𝚑𝚎 (tell dad to prep the oven for tonight)

You close the app.

Namjoon hasn’t moved. Still face-down on the desk. Miss Díaz has progressed to rehabilitation protocols for patellofemoral pain syndrome, which means there’s maybe ten minutes left, and you’ve lost the thread of your notes somewhere between Q-angles and your brother’s inability to take no for an answer, which is genetic, probably. Inherited trait.

The entire family runs on stubbornness and selective hearing.

“Who’s texting you?” Namjoon mumbles, one eye cracked open.

“My brother.”

“Didn’t know you had a brother.”

“Consider yourself still in the dark.”

“Mean,” he says again, but softer this time, almost fond, and closes his eye.

Suddenly Miss Díaz caps her marker. “Chapters nine through eleven for Monday’s seminar. I want case study analysis, not summaries. If you hand me a summary, I will hand it back.”

Chairs scrape. Laptops close. Zippers, coughs, the collective exhale of people freed from academic torture.

Namjoon peels himself off the desk like a sticker that’s been left in the sun too long. There’s a faint red mark on his forehead from the wood grain. His pen is still on the ground.

“Got plans tonight?” He yawns into his fist, patting his pockets for his phone. “It’s Friday.”

“My brother’s coming over.”

“The brother you won’t tell me about?”

“That one.”

“Cool. Love the transparency. Very healthy friendship dynamic we’re building.”

You tuck your laptop into your bag, zip it shut. “He wants barbecue pizza and attention. In that order.”

“See, that’s a detail. That’s characterization. I’m learning things about you against your will and I want you to know I appreciate that.”

You shoulder your bag and head for the door. He follows, because he always follows—not in a weird way, just in a Namjoon way, like a current that doesn’t know it’s moving.

You take the corridor toward the south exit, the one that spits you out near the quad where Sofia usually waits after her sports psych lecture.

Your phone’s been buzzing intermittently. You pull it out while walking, expecting Eli, but your thumb catches on a push notification from a sports gossip account you forgot to mute.

MadridGossip 🔴 Real Madrid’s Kim Taehyung spotted leaving Tatel with Brazilian model Daiane Souza for third time this month, are they official? Sources say the pair have been ‘inseparable’ since…

You click your tongue. Lock the screen.

Namjoon glances over. His peripheral vision is annoyingly functional for someone who was comatose four minutes ago.

“Oh, right.” He adjusts his bag strap. “By the way. What’s up with you and him?”

“Huh?”

“Taehyung.”

You keep walking. Same pace. “Nothing. Literally.”

“I mean—” He scratches the back of his neck, choosing his words with seeming care. “The way he was all… ‘Is that your boyfriend?’ And the whole ‘you better watch her’ thing across a room full of people. That was—”

“That was him being a footballer.”

“That was him being something.”

“You know how they are.” You push through the glass doors into the quad. The October sun hits your face, still warm enough to feel like a lie. “They see something shiny and they want it. That’s the whole personality. Training, winning, acquiring.” You squint against the light. “I’m probably his first real interaction with a woman who doesn’t worship him and he’s just—malfunctioning. Like a cat with a laser pointer. The second it stops moving, he’ll get bored.”

Namjoon hums. Not convinced, not pushing. Just filing it.

“A cat,” he repeats.

“A very expensive, very stupid cat.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” you echo, and that’s the end of that.

Sofia’s already on the bench near the fountain, cross-legged, sunglasses pushed up into her blue hair like a headband, typing furiously on her phone with both thumbs.

She looks up when you approach and her face does that thing—the one where she’s holding a secret so big it’s physically distorting her features.

“Hi,” she says. Too bright. Way too bright.

“What did you do,” you say.

“Nothing! God. Can’t a girl just be happy on a Friday?”

Namjoon drops onto the bench beside her, groaning. “Nobody’s happy on a Friday after class.”

“I am. Because—” She locks her phone, holds it against her chest like a prayer book. “Jackson’s coming to pick me up.”

Namjoon hovers above the bench at an angle that can’t be good for his lower back, one hand still on his bag strap, mouth open.

“Jackson,” he says.

“Mhm.”

“Jackson as in Jackson Wang.”

Sofia’s grin could power a small municipality. “Mhm.”

“Jackson Wang. The Jackson Wang. Rapper. Producer. He is coming to pick you up. From university. In his car.”

“I mean, it’s easy to assume he has a car—” you start, and Namjoon’s head swivels to you so fast you hear his neck crack.

“You knew?”

You shift your bag to the other shoulder. “Knew is a strong word.”

“She knew?!” He points at you, looking at Sofia. Then points at Sofia, looking at you. His finger swings between you like a broken compass. “How long has—when did—what?”

“Oh my god.” Sofia clasps her hands together, vibrating. “She hasn’t told you.”

“Told me what?”

“Namjoon.” Sofia grabs his forearm with both hands. Her nails are painted a deep teal that matches absolutely nothing she’s wearing. “I have to tell you everything. From the beginning. From Café Luna.”

“What happened at Café Luna.”

“So Jackson and his brother Hoseok—you know Nomad, right? Obviously you know Nomad, everyone knows Nomad—they were at Café Luna, just sitting there, and Jackson literally stood up in the middle of the café and announced a party to the entire room—”

“He did not.”

“He did. Ask her. She was there.” Sofia jabs a thumb at you. “Tell him.”

“He stood up.”

“He was standing. On the floor. Being iconic.” Sofia waves you off and refocuses on Namjoon, who looks like he’s processing the existence of a new primary colour. “So there was a party. Villa Cereza. And we went. And he was there. And we talked. And then we talked more. And then—”

“Define ‘more.’”

“Namjoon, I’m getting to that part, let me build the narrative—”

You lean against the back of the bench and let them go. Sofia’s hands are moving at the speed of her mouth, which is considerable, and Namjoon keeps making sounds—small, strangled, vowel-heavy sounds—at every new piece of information, like a man watching a nature documentary about something that shouldn’t biologically exist.

Your phone buzzes.

𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚝𝚎𝚝𝚊 𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚟𝚘 𝚊 𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚝𝚊 𝚝𝚊𝚖𝚋𝚒𝚎𝚗 𝚗𝚘? (sis i’m bringing marta too right?)

𝐄𝐥𝐢 🫠: 𝚍𝚒𝚖𝚎 𝚚 𝚜𝚒 𝚙𝚘𝚛𝚏𝚊 (say yes pls)

𝐘𝐨𝐮: 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚎𝚕𝚊 (bring her)

Sofia’s saying something about Jackson’s playlist in the car and how he played her a track he hadn’t released yet, and Namjoon is gripping the bench slats like he’s on a rollercoaster, and the sun is doing that thing where it sits low and gold and makes everything look warmer than it is.

You pocket your phone and let out a sigh.

At least you’re free from Kim Taehyung’s existence today.

Eli entered the house an hour ago like a human battering ram.

Front door slamming open, keys jangling—he still has his copy, the one dad gave him when you moved, the one he swore he’d only use ‘in emergencies’ which apparently now includes ‘I want pizza’ and ‘I haven’t seen you in two months and I missed you but I’ll die before I say that out loud’—and then seventy-eight kilos of younger brother crashing into you in the hallway with the force of someone who has not learned, in his entire life, that affection doesn’t require a running start.

“¡TETA!” (SIS!)

He’d picked you up. Actually picked you up. Spun you half a rotation before you got an elbow into his ribs and he dropped you, cackling, and you’d hit him with the dish towel and he’d hit you back and then you were swatting at each other in the hallway like feral children while Marta stepped through the door behind him, bag on her shoulder, watching the two of you.

“Hola, guapa,” (Hey, gorgeous) she’d said to you, over his shoulder, while he had you in a loose headlock.

“Hola, Marta,” you’d managed, muffled, one hand flat on his face trying to push him off. “Dile a tu novio que me suelte.” (Tell your boyfriend to let me go.)

“Eli, suéltala.” (Eli, let her go.)

“No quiero.” (Don’t want to.)

“Eli.”

“Vale, vale.” (Fine, fine.)

He let go. You fixed your hair. He grinned—that wide, unregulated, full-face grin that makes him look exactly like your mother and makes your chest do a thing you will never, under any circumstances, acknowledge—and pulled the Barça beanie off his head and dropped it on yours.

“Te queda mejor a ti.” (Looks better on you.)

“Todo me queda mejor que a ti.” (Everything looks better on me than on you.)

“Eso es verdad,” (That’s true) Marta said from the kitchen, already finding the stools.

That was an hour ago.

He hasn’t separated from you since, been orbiting you like a satellite with separation anxiety—leaning on the counter while you pulled ingredients out, stealing mozzarella straight from the bag, getting his hand slapped, stealing more, narrating every single thing you’re doing like a sports commentator, saying stuff like “y la teta abre el horno, señoras y señores, con una técnica impecable—” (and sis opens the oven, ladies and gentlemen, with impeccable technique—) , getting hip-checked into the fridge, bouncing back, continuing.

He’s wearing a Ronaldinho ‘03 retro jersey. Obviously. The faded one with the cracked badge and the slightly wrong shade of blue that means it’s real, not reproduction, because Eli would rather eat glass than wear a fake kit. He’s still wearing the thin gold chain that your uncle gave him, the one he never takes off, the one that matches the E on his wrist, the one that matches yours on your ankle.

You’re both pretending you haven’t noticed how the kitchen smells like the old flat when you cook.

“Que le pongas más queso, teta.” (Put more cheese on it, sis.)

“Tiene suficiente queso.” (It has enough cheese.)

“No tiene suficiente queso. Nunca tiene suficiente queso. ¿Verdad, Marta?” (It doesn’t have enough cheese. It never has enough cheese. Right, Marta?)

Marta’s perched on the kitchen stool with her chin in her hand, dark hair tucked behind one ear, watching the two of you with a smile.

“A mí no me metáis en esto,” (Don’t drag me into this) she says, but her eyes are warm, and you like her so much it’s almost annoying.

You like that she doesn’t try to be part of the sibling thing.

She just sits in the warmth of it and lets it exist.

“¿A qué hora viene papá?” (What time is dad coming?) Eli asks, peering into the oven through the glass like the pizza is going to stand up and dance.

“Dijo que a las ocho.” (He said eight.)

“Son las ocho y cuarto.” (It’s eight fifteen.)

“Pues llegará a las ocho y cuarto, ¿no?” (Then he’ll get here at eight fifteen, won’t he?)

“Qué borde eres, teta.” (You’re so rude, sis.)

You bump him with your hip. He bumps you back.

Then the front door opens.

“¡Papi!” Eli is already moving, abandoning you mid-sentence, crossing the kitchen in three strides toward the hallway.

You hear it—the familiar shuffle of your dad’s shoes on the tile, the soft “hombre, Eli, qué alegría” (hey, Eli, what a joy) and the sound of a hug happening.

“¿Y Marta? ¿Ha venido?” (And Marta? Did she come?)

“Aquí estoy, Jesús.” (I’m here, Jesús.) Marta raises a hand from the stool.

Your dad crosses to kiss both her cheeks.

“Qué guapa estás, hija.” (How pretty you look, sweetheart.)

“Gracias, Jesús.” (Thank you, Jesús.)

“¡A ella le dice guapa y a mí ni me mira!” (He calls her pretty and doesn’t even look at me!) Eli protests, spreading his arms.

“A ti te veo todos los días por videollamada, payaso.” (I see you every day on video call, clown.)

Warm. It’s warm.

The kitchen is full and the oven is on and your brother is here and your dad is here and Marta is here and this is the closest the house has felt to home since the moving boxes were unpacked—

“Also,” your dad says, switching to a tone you recognize, the one he uses when he’s about to deliver information he knows won’t land well, “me he encontrado a alguien en el camino.” (I ran into someone on the way.)

Your hands stop on the oven mitt.

Someone steps out from behind your dad in the hallway.

Leans a shoulder against the kitchen doorframe. Raises one hand in a wave—lazy, loose-wristed, the kind of wave that says sup without any of the social awareness required to recognize that ‘sup’ is not the appropriate energy for walking into someone else’s home on a Friday night uninvited.

“Hey, Gomi.”

So much for Kim Taehyung’s existence not bothering you today.

There he fucking is.

In your kitchen. In your house.

God, why is he everywhere?

He’s in sweats and a black tee that’s doing nothing to disguise the chain at his neck or the width of his shoulders or the fact that he looks like he drove near here on purpose and is now pretending he didn’t. His hair is damp at the temples. Post-practice. That lemon-and-soap thing clinging to the air around him, already seeping into the kitchen, already colonizing the rosemary.

Your death glare could strip paint.

“Tiene partido mañana,” your dad says quickly, reading your face as expected of the man who has survived twenty-plus years of parenting you. “Necesita que le revise la espalda. Me lo encontré de camino.” (He has a match tomorrow. Needs me to check his back. I ran into him on the way.)

You are absolutely certain Kim Taehyung did not ‘run into’ your father.

You are certain of this the way you are about gravity, photosynthesis, and the fact that Marco probably helped coordinate whatever GPS-timed interception manoeuvre got him into your dad’s car.

He rant into Taehyung on his way.

Sure. And pigs fly.

Your eyes haven’t left Taehyung.

The fucker is reeling, clearly pleased with himself—the jaw is doing a slight clench-unclench of suppressed satisfaction, and his eyes are touring your kitchen, landing on the oven, the island, you. As if knowingly proud of having just gained access to a restricted area and thus cataloguing everything before security notices.

Eli, who had been mid-sentence to your dad, has gone quiet.

He tracks from Taehyung’s face to his chest to the black Nike swoosh on his tee to the general aura of Real Madrid that clings to him like cologne, and his expression undergoes a transformation that you can only describe as allergic reaction.

“Qué tal.” (What’s up.)

Taehyung nods. “Hey. Good to meet you.”

English. Predictably.

Eli turns to you. His eyebrows say everything his mouth doesn’t, but his mouth says it anyway.

“Un crack.” He gestures vaguely at Taehyung with his whole hand. “Una década en el país y no habla español.” (A whole prodigy. A decade in the country and he doesn’t speak Spanish.)

“Elías,” your dad says, in the ‘please behave’ voice.

Eli raises both palms. Surrendering. Not surrendering. Performing surrender while his jaw stays tight and his eyes stay on Taehyung with the warmth of a border patrol checkpoint.

Marta, for her part, takes a quiet sip of her water. Says nothing.

Taehyung lets his eyes do a slow scan of his on the whole length of you. Then settles on your face, and whatever he finds there makes the corner of his mouth twitch.

Fucker.

“Nice place,” he says.

“Like you haven’t been here before,” you mutter between gritted teeth.

Taehyung tilts his head. “Have I?”

“¿Ha estado aquí?” (He’s been here?) Eli whips around so fast his chain swings. His eyes snap between you and Taehyung. “¿Qué dices, teta? ¿Cuándo ha estado aquí?” (What are you saying, sis? When was he here?)

“Eli, para.” (Eli, stop.)

“No, no, no—¿cómo que para? ¿El número dos del Real Madrid ha estado en esta casa y nadie me lo ha—” (No no no—what do you mean stop? Real Madrid’s number two has been in this house and nobody told me—)

“En inglés, Eli.” (In English, Eli.) Your dad places a hand on Eli’s shoulder and squeezes once. “Si hay alguien que no habla español, hablamos en inglés. Queremos que nuestros invitados se sientan cómodos.” (If there’s someone who doesn’t speak Spanish, we speak English. We want our guests to feel comfortable.)

Eli’s jaw works sideways. He looks at your dad. Looks at Taehyung. Looks at you. Back to Taehyung.

“Guests,” he repeats, in English, like the word has a flavor and he’s not enjoying it.

“Oh, I’ve always felt very welcome here,” Taehyung says. Casual. Warm, almost.

You want to murder him.

“Have you,” you say.

“Yeah.” He funally takes a step into the kitchen. “We got real acquainted last time. Didn’t we, Gomi.”

Fucker, fucker, fucker.

Something in your peripheral vision moves. Eli. Leaning forward. Radar fully online.

“Why does he call you Gomi?” Eli asks, tone as if he was a detective who’s just found a second set of fingerprints at the crime scene. “Teta. Why does he call you that.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, it’s a nickname. People don’t just—”

“It’s short for Gominola,” Taehyung offers, helpfully, because he has never in his life read a room and chosen silence. “She’s always eating those cherry things. Picotas?”

“I know what picotas are,” Eli says. “I’m from Barcelona.”

The temperature in the kitchen shifts about four degrees. Your dad clears his throat.

“Well.” Your dad claps his hands once, the universal father signal for ‘we are moving past this.’ “I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since two. So let’s have dinner first, and then later we’ll do the treatment, right, Taehyung? Can’t work on an empty stomach.”

Taehyung nods with a scornful smirk.

Dad gestures at the oven. “Are the pizzas ready?”

They are. You grab the oven mitt. Eli materializes at your elbow to help because he hasn’t stopped orbiting you since he arrived and he’s clearly decided that the orbit now includes surveillance duties.

Taehyung settles into the dining area like it’s a press lounge. Pulls out a chair—the one closest to the kitchen pass-through, the one with the best sightline to you—and sits. Doesn’t ask.

“You’re not eating?” your dad asks him, already cutting into his slice.

“Already ate. Pre-match protocol—can’t mess with the macros.”

“Right. The regime.” Your dad nods, professional. Respects it. Doesn’t push.

So Taehyung sits there. At your family dinner table.

Watching you.

You sit, placing the pizzas in the center of the table. Eli drops into the chair to your left—the one he always takes, the one that was his at every table in the Barcelona flat too. Marta’s across from him. Your dad’s at the head. And Taehyung is in front of you, not eating, one arm draped over the back of his own chair, legs spread under the table the way men who’ve never been told to take up less space sit.

His knee is six inches from yours.

Fine. This is fine. You’re eating pizza in your own home with your family and there is a professional footballer watching you chew and it is fine.

You bite into the barbecue chicken pizza. It’s good. Eli’s recipe was right—barbecue base, chicken, red onion, extra mozzarella. Got the crust perfect, the way he always does, thin and just charred enough at the edges, the way mom liked it.

Something nudges your foot, slow press of a socked foot against the inside of your ankle, sliding up half an inch, settling there.

You choke.

The pizza—specifically a piece of chicken the size of a euro coin—lodges sideways in your throat, and you cough, hard, eyes watering, hand to your mouth, and the entire table turns to look at you.

Taehyung reaches across. Picks up the water glass in front of you—your glass, the one with the lemon slice you dropped in twenty minutes ago—and holds it out.

“Careful, Gomi.” His voice is low. Almost gentle. Almost concerned. “Don’t choke on big things.” He tilts the glass toward you. “Need to start with smaller ones.”

You take the water. Drink. Set it down. Wipe your mouth with the back of your hand.

“I’m fine,” you say. Hoarse.

“You sure?” The mock concern is still there, sitting on his face like a mask someone ironed on too perfectly.

He knows what he’s doing. He knows what ‘choke’ sounds like when he says it. He knows what it all sounds like. The innuendo of it.

And he knows you know.

And he is having the time of his life.

“Positive.”

Eli’s hand is suspended between his plate and his mouth at a forty-five-degree angle that suggests he stopped mid-chew and hasn’t resumed.

His eyes move from Taehyung’s face to yours. Back. Forth.

Taehyung’s foot finds yours again before you’ve even swallowed the last bite.

Bold. Stupidly bold, considering there’s a table full of people three feet away who’d lose their minds if they knew what was happening under it.

You don’t look up. You will not give him the satisfaction of a flinch.

But yeah, that’s definitely his socked foot—which means the fucker took his shoe off. Under your family’s dinner table, mid-pizza, with your father one seat over discussing his back like a normal human professional athlete, Kim Taehyung removed a shoe.

You want to break every toe on that foot. Individually. With ceremony.

The foot creeps higher. Calf. Back of your knee. Settles there like it’s allowed, like it pays rent.

Okay. No. Absolutely not.

You reach down, just adjusting your flip flop like a woman who definitely isn’t plotting violence—and then you go for it. Quick jab, aimed at his knee, the kind of move that should make him yelp and retreat and reconsider every choice that led him to this table.

He doesn’t yelp. He catches it.

Hand closing around your ankle before your foot even lands, fast enough that you don’t have time to process it as a threat before it’s already happening—and then he’s pulling, dragging your foot forward, and pressing it flat against—

Oh.

Oh, this absolute piece of shit—

His dick is hard. Unmistakably, inconveniently, table-cloth-be-damned hard, and your foot is currently resting against the proof of it because he just put it there, like that’s a normal thing to do at a family dinner.

He looks at you through his lashes. Doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed of himself—just settles deeper into the chair, spreads his knees a little wider under the table like he’s getting comfortable, and the motion drags your foot with it, presses it in harder.

His smirk pulls wider.

He rolls his hips. Barely—an inch, maybe less, just enough that you feel it, just enough that it could pass as a man shifting his weight in a chair that’s slightly too small for him, if you didn’t know exactly what you were currently in contact with.

The absolute audacity. The sheer, unhinged audacity of doing this.

“Comfortable?” you say, so flat it should end this.

“Very.” He says it like he’s talking about the chair, like his voice isn’t doing that low, rough thing underneath the word. “Good seat.”

“Mm.”

You hold his gaze. He holds yours.

Somewhere in your chest something is doing aerobics it has no business doing, and you shut it down, lock it in the same drawer where you keep every other inconvenient thing you refuse to look at directly.

Under the table, your foot stays exactly where it is because he’s trapped it.

He bucks again. Slight. A man enjoying himself entirely too much for someone currently risking his kneecaps in enemy territory.

Cool. Fine.

Fine.

If he wants a game, you’ll play the game. You’ll play it so well he’ll regret inventing it.

You plant your heel on the edge of the chair between his thighs, brace, and roll the arch of your foot firmly along the length of his cock through the sweats.

He chokes.

Actually chokes.

His body jerks forward, spine bowing off the back of the chair, one hand flying up to the edge of the table to catch himself. The wood gives a tiny thud under his palm. His lips part around a sound that doesn’t quite make it out.

Eyebrows shoot up. Pleasure, not surprise.

Well. Both.

It hits him before he can fake it, and you see it in real time—muscles going tight under his shirt, jaw going slack, that first raw flinch when a man goes from ‘I’m in control of this’ to ‘oh, fuck.’

Good.

You feel his cock kick hard in response, thick and hot and so fucking there that for a second it’s all you can feel—the ridge of his shaft, the blunt weight of the head catching under the ball of your foot when you drag back.

This is the part where a sane person backs off. Pulls away. Reconsiders his life choices, maybe apologizes with his eyes, lets the foot go and pretends none of it happened.

Taehyung, as expected, is no sane person.

Instead, his eyes come up to you.

Bright, way too fucking bright. There’s a flush high on his cheekbones now, pink climbing out from under his skin like someone turned the saturation up.

The look in his eyes is worse, though. You’d expect guilty, or caught—but instead it’s feral. A perverted little gleam like you’ve just handed him front-row tickets to his own favourite show.

“You good?” your dad asks, mid-bite, not even looking up.

“Yeah.” Taehyung’s voice comes out rougher than the word should require. He clears his throat. Tries again. “Yeah, just—cramp. Leg cramp.”

“Drink more water,” your dad says, sage, unaware, savage in his obliviousness. “Dehydration. You boys never hydrate properly.”

“Right.” Taehyung’s eyes haven’t left you. “Dehydrated. That’s it.”

You arch a brow at him. Blank. Unbothered. The exact face you’d give a vending machine that ate your euro.

He bites his bottom lip—actually bites it, teeth catching the curve of it like he’s holding something back by force—and under the table his hips shift, just slightly, just enough that you feel the slow roll of it against the sole of your foot, full of intention now, not hiding it anymore.

Oh, he likes this.

He likes this entirely too much. The bastard’s two seconds from grinding himself into a footjob in your father’s dining room and somehow still looking like he’s the one in control of the situation, like this was always where the night was headed, like he planned every single second of it from the moment he pulled his shoe off.

Eli’s saying something to Marta about the crust. You catch maybe a third of it. The rest of your attention is locked on the way Taehyung’s eyes darken.

“Eat your pizza,” you tell him.

“Not really hungry for pizza right now.” His voice has dropped, low enough that it’s only for you, threaded with something rough at the edges.

The implication sits there. Heavy. Obvious.

You refuse to acknowledge it with anything beyond a slow, unimpressed blink.

Instead, your toes curl and his lip goes white under his teeth.

You can’t deny the satisfaction that curls in your low abdomen. Because if Kim Taehyung embarrasses himself in his own sweatpants over a foot, that's not your problem. That's a him problem. A very public, very avoidable him problem.

His knuckles have gone bloodless on the table edge.

You almost feel bad.

You don't.

"¿Alguien quiere más?" (Anyone want more?) Eli holds up the last slice, oblivious, gesturing with it like a tiny greasy trophy.

"No, gracias." (No, thanks.)

Taehyung doesn't answer. Taehyung is currently incapable of language, a muscle working overtime somewhere near his ear, and you watch the slow, helpless roll of his hips stutter—once—like his body forgot it was supposed to be subtle.

Your dad pushes his chair back.

"Bueno." He stretches, the particular groan of a man who's eaten too fast after a long day. "Eli, cariño, ¿recoges con tu hermana? Yo voy a revisar a Taehyung." (Alright. Eli, love, can you clean up with your sister? I'm going to check on Taehyung.)

The world resumes.

You cough. Loud. Theatrical. Retract your foot so fast you nearly take his shoe with you.

Taehyung makes a sound like he's been unplugged.

"Taehyung." Your dad's already up, rolling his shoulders, all business. "Coming through for the session?"

"Yeah." He clears his throat, tries again, lands somewhere closer to human. "Yeah. Just—one sec."

He doesn't move. Doesn't stand. Sits very still, like a man calculating the structural integrity of his own sweatpants.

"Need to check something. Carlos sent a few messages." He pulls his phone out of his pocket way too quickly to be casual, never wanted a prop more in his life. Doesn't look at it. "You can start prepping. I'll be there in a minute."

Your dad nods, unbothered, already halfway to the hallway. "Vale. No tardes." (Okay. Don't take long.)

He doesn't.

Taehyung waits exactly until your dad's back is turned to look at you.

That look.

The one with absolutely zero apology in it. Brows up, mouth doing something that wants to be a smirk and is currently too busy being strangled by his own self-control.

"Carlos," you say, flat. "Right."

"Carlos," he agrees. Voice still not fully recovered. "Big update. Urgent."

"Mhm."

He shifts again. Longer this time. You watch him breathe out slow through his nose like he's doing math, like he's reciting the back four, like he's doing literally anything except sitting at a dinner table half-hard because the physio's daughter ground her foot into him over barbecue chicken pizza.

Eli's gathering plates two feet away, blessedly absorbed in his own monologue about crust ratios.

You stand. Stack your own plate on top of Marta's, who gives you a look over the rim of her water glass—small, knowing, entirely too perceptive for someone who said nothing the whole meal.

You ignore it.

Taehyung's still got the phone up, thumb not moving, screen probably black, the world's least convincing performance of a man checking urgent texts.

"Take your time," you tell him, sweet as arsenic. "Wouldn't want you walking into a treatment room compromised."

His lips do something—wiggle, fight a smile, lose. Hold it back the way you'd hold back a sneeze. Badly.

"Gonna take a longer time if you keep looking at me like that."

"Like what."

"Like that. With disdain."

"You're sick in the head."

"And you're hot as fuck when you wanna murder me."

You blink. Once. Slow. The blink that's killed lesser men.

"Congratulations." You shift the plates higher on your forearm. "Should I get you a sticker."

"I'd rather have your foot back."

"Seek help."

"You're making it worse."

"For you?"

"For Taehyung Junior." He points down, helpfully, in case you'd forgotten where the problem lives.

"Ew."

"Yeah, that." He points at you next. Same finger. "Hot as fuck."

He stands. One hand slides into the pocket of his sweats, casual as breathing, and he adjusts himself through the fabric with the unbothered ease of a man fixing his collar. No shame.

It's somehow the most obscene thing he's done all night, and he didn't even try.

"You good?" you ask, flat, nodding at his hand like you're inquiring about the weather.

"Getting there."

"Devastating update for everyone."

"You're welcome to check." He glances down at his crotch, then back up at you through his lashes, slow. "Professional opinion. Physio's daughter and all."

"I'd rather eat glass."

"Kinky."

"Go."

Your dad's voice carries down the hall. "Tae?"

He straightens. Snaps into something resembling business posture, which on him just means his shoulders square and his face does a thing that's supposed to read as composed.

"Coming."

Two fingers point at you. Lazy V. Not a salute. Not a peace sign. Something dumber than both.

"Try not to miss me too hard."

You look at him with the flattest expression available to the human face.

"Dream big, Zero."

That grin again. Quick. Insufferably pleased, for a man who has several things to be ashamed of tonight.

He turns. Heads down the hallway. One more discreet adjustment before he disappears through the treatment room door.

Fucker.

Taehyung looks absentminded after the treatment, which shouldn’t be weird because you were already questioning his lack of braincells before this.

You don’t linger on it too much, just watching your dad strip off the latex gloves at the sink in the treatment room and give Taehyung's back one last practiced glance like he's running through the checklist in his head.

"Should be fine for tomorrow," he says. "Bit of tightness, nothing dramatic. Ice tonight. Mobility work in the morning. And no stupid heroics if something pulls."

Taehyung nods from the edge of the table, shirt already back on, chain catching the light when he lowers his chin.

"Got it."

No joke. No ‘yes, sir.’

Your dad notices. Of course he notices. He notices everything except sexual tension in his own dining room, apparently, but muscles and mood shifts? Elite-level radar.

"You good?" he asks.

"Yeah." Taehyung rubs a hand over the back of his neck. "Just tired."

"Then go sleep." Your dad points toward the hall with the same authority he uses on multimillion-euro men and stubborn hamstrings. "And you—"

He turns to you.

"Can you see him out, cariño? Eli's massacring the kitchen and I don't trust him alone with the leftovers."

From the kitchen, right on cue: "¡Te he oído!" (I heard that!)

Your dad doesn't even raise his voice. "Perfecto." (Perfect.)

You push off the doorframe.

"Yeah. Fine."

Taehyung slides off the table. Slower than usual, but not because of pain. More like he's remembering where his limbs are one at a time. His phone's in his hand. He checks it without seeing it. Pockets it. Then immediately takes it back out again like the gesture needs somewhere to live.

Yeah. Almost like he’s not here.

Unsettling, honestly.

You lead him down the hallway, past the framed print your mum chose years ago, past the console table with Eli's keys dumped on it in a shining little pile of disrespect, past the warm atmosphere of your brother and his girlfriend cuddling on the couch.

Normally, this is where he'd start.

A comment. A jab. Something specifically calibrated to be annoying enough that you'd spend the next hour composing murder charges in your head. He usually cannot shut up around you. It's one of his worst qualities. Competitive field, but still.

Tonight he's quiet.

His thumb taps once against his thigh.

Stops.

Starts again.

You reach the front door and turn, hand on the latch. He nearly walks into you.

"Careful," you say.

"Right." He steps back half a pace. Blinks. "Sorry."

You stare at him.

Sorry.

Interesting. Disturbing. Maybe contagious. You should disinfect the hallway later.

"You concussed?" you ask.

That gets the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, but even that looks distracted. Incomplete. Like the thought had to travel farther than usual to reach his face.

"No."

"Then what's with the haunted-house energy."

He looks at you then. Properly. Not at your mouth, not at your hands, not down the line of your body like he's choosing where to be obnoxious next. Your face.

It's weird enough that you immediately dislike it.

"What?" you inquire.

He leans one shoulder against the wall by the door. Drops his gaze to the floorboards. His thumb starts that tapping thing again, steady and quiet against his thigh. Some internal metronome. You clock it because of course you do. You clock stupid details like it's a job.

Then, out of nowhere—

"What's it like, having a little brother?"

You actually laugh. Not because it's funny. Because what the fuck kind of question is that.

You look at him for the first time since leaving the treatment room. Really look.

He's not doing a bit.

There’s no grin tucked behind it, not a hint of smugness, not even a smudge of bait set neatly in the middle of the sentence.

There’s simply… That tapping thumb and that slightly pinched line between his brows that shows up when he's thinking something he doesn't want to be caught thinking.

"He's my brother," you say, like that should explain it.

"Yeah." His thumb stops. Starts again. "Must be nice."

You squint at him.

"You don't have one?"

"Nah."

He finally crouches for his shoes by the door. Doesn't look up while he says it. Just reaches for the laces, fingers quick and methodical now that they have a job to do.

"Only kid."

You fold your arms.

"Lonely only-child energy. Explains the ego."

It's supposed to land clean. Same as always. Reflex. Efficient. In, out, done. A neat little flick to the forehead of his personality.

He doesn't throw one back.

Just laces one shoe. Then the other.

Pulls the knot tight.

And the silence after it is so unhelpfully unguarded that it sits there between you like you said something wrong, which is irritating because you're fairly sure you didn't.

Eli laughs too loudly at something Marta says. The sound travels down the hall warm and easy and stupidly familiar.

Taehyung hears it too.

It looks like he smiles.

"Eli's annoying," you say, because apparently you're doing community outreach now. "Shows up uninvited. Eats my food. Asks questions like he's deposing me."

"Sounds great."

The answer comes quick enough that you glance at him again.

Still crouched. Still tying the other shoe like his life depends on symmetrical lacing. Still not looking at you.

You almost laugh.

Don't.

"It is," you say Quieter than intended. Enough truth in it to be embarrassing. "Most of the time."

He nods once.

You shift your weight.

This is why you don't do these little detours. This is why the man should stay in his natural habitat—shirtless in corridors, being unbearable, saying things that deserve prosecution. Much easier to deal with when he's acting like himself.

Or the version of himself he prefers to hand out.

He clears his throat. Shoulders come back up. Jaw settles.

"Anyway." He straightens, nods at the door. "I should let you get back to your exhausting brother."

"Mm."

"Tell him I said he's got good taste in jerseys. Ronaldinho's a legend."

You snort before you can stop yourself.

"He'll hate that you noticed."

"I know."

The grin comes back—not full wattage, but enough to be him again. Eighty percent restored. Still under maintenance.

"That's why I said it."

Of course.

You open the door. Cold air slides in at ankle level, October-thin and clean, carrying the smell of someone's grill running too late and wet pavement from a sprinkler two houses over.

He steps through it. Doesn't linger. Doesn't throw a parting line over his shoulder the way he usually does, the kind designed to live in your head for the next six hours whether you want it there or not.

You shut the door. Lock it. Stand there for a second longer than you mean to, hand still on the latch, replaying a sentence that had no business landing the way it did.

Must be nice.

What the fuck was that.

if you liked this chapter, please consider buying me a coffee!! subs get early access to chapters 1-4 weeks before they go public, depending on my work life and editing process!: ♥'ﻌ'♥

next | index | general masterlist | taglist

taglist

@liliummz @ikeepfallinginlovewithbands @Mina4556 @latinxbipride @miheavnly @gaebestie @tan-veee @chocoltae-17 @kalmisaidso @thvsgirll @calmyourtitts7 @silverozy @svnk1ssd @anithv @yeahimacapricorn @6rnde @akirawhore @bonzoirparis @safira9497 @celliez @megatroncam07 @Asstaeticcc @melizzzie @kookie96 @coletaehyung @unbibiased @sexyevilkitten @maralodiaal @my0hmary @butterymin @quhrtz @lachlaniah @jhopeloverrr @medicinemybish @jjkszn @makulimlim @onyxthornseer @amajikisupremacy @omgstahpp-blog @drwonderbread @angelhyuka @mikrokookiex @ot7girl4l @mar-lo-pap @rossy1080 @fancypeacepersona @ggukjugoo @jadestonedaeho7 @a-kookie-with-my-tae @ironyatitsfinest @impossiblecopoaffire @cannotalwaysbenight @taevescence @itstoastsworld @somehowukook @stutixmaru @chloepiccoliniii @annyeongbitch7