#loona fluff

Your eye twitches. “W–What do you mean? Like, with what?”

“With you, honey. Talk to me. What is it?”

You clear your throat a bit loudly, rummaging your mind for a lighthearted out. “With me? Like, what part? My dashing looks? My peak bod—”

“Don’t! Beat around the—honey, please. Do I really need to say it myself?” Her volume control begins to wane, her jaws so tight they might leave stretch marks on her face. 

“Honey, I dont—urgh. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here,” you rasp, suddenly aware of how hoarse your voice is. Jinsoul lets out a huff, pushing away her mostly finished dinner. “Alright. I’ll spell it out for you then. Something is up with you. Has been for the past week.” Her voice quavers just a bit, hinting at a deluge of emotions being dammed. 

Your lips are struggling to motion a reply despite your brain going into overdrive for one. “I don’t—not sure…what?”

Jinsoul takes a big swig of her glass of water and sets it down a bit hard, the noise making you flinch. “See? You even jump from just that alone. What happened to you, honey? Tell me!”

“There’s no—nothing happened. Don’t worry about it,” you retort, your voice dragging on your throat like sandpaper. “Is that so? Look at me, honey. Look at me in the eyes,” she asks firmly. Try as you might, your eyeballs refuse to obey, darting everywhere else around her instead. That’s if they’re not trying to just black out or come up with strange shapes in your peripheral vision.

“You can’t do it, can you?” Jinsoul whispers, pulling her hair back with both hands. She clears her throat, both fists clenching on the table. “You’ve been coming home later and later, you haven’t been eating well, you—”

“I haven’t been eating? Honey, I’ve finished every plate—” “Don’t interrupt me!” She shouts into your face; only the fourth time she’s done so in the three years you’ve been together and the first in five months of marriage. “You wanted me to lay it out for you, so listen to me when I am!” One of her fists rises into the air, seemingly about to slam back down on the table.

“You thought I didn’t notice?” she begins again, gradually sounding less stable. “Every night this past week you eat like…like something’s chasing you. And in the morning—” Her face scrunches and she clenches her raised fist even harder, to the extent of shaking. You want to comment on it, but she bars that off before you can try. “—in the morning you vomit most of it back up! I could hear it, you know.”

 Your lips stammer for defense, cold sweat beading on your palms. “Well, I…maybe my–my stomach just…happened to be upset, all those nights. You never know with the body, right?”

“And what do you think’s causing it to be?” she snarls, her breath becoming laboured. “You haven’t been sleeping well, either! I can see it in your face, I hear it in your voice—I feel it in everything you do!”

The room’s atmosphere tightens into a viscous coil, a searing heat radiating from Jinsoul’s person. The already dim lights appear to darken even further, cutting off the rest of the world and leaving a deafening silent cocoon around the two of you.

“W–Well…that’s—I…uhm, there’s…it—there’s stuff happening at–at work. You know, overtime, and—I haven’t been drinking out or…or hanging around with other women or anything,” is the best you could meekly scrounge together, and even you can hear how pathetic it sounds.

 Jinsoul’s eyes widen to a deathly glare, sucking in through her teeth. “You think…that’s what I care about right now?” Her voice is downright menacing, offended. “About your work buddies, and–and OTHER WOMEN?!” She actually slams her fist on the table now, eliciting a small yelp from you. “You think I give a flying fuck about those things?! More than…more than—”

Her breath catches in her throat, one hand flying to clutch her chest as her face grimaces in pain. Alarm bells are set off in your head, instinctively leaping to your feet and rushing to her side. “Jinsoul, honey. Breathe…slow in, slow out. You taken your meds yet? You haven’t, have you? Let me—”

Jinsoul’s eyes reopen to shoot a glare at you, swatting away your arms with a grunt. “Don’t you dare…you’re not getting out of this like that. It’s not—” She winces and groans again, but recovers before your bumbling steps can find a gap to exploit. “This damn heart hasn’t stopped me for thirty years, it won’t now!”

You cringe and whine at her morbid persistence. “Honey, don’t say that! This is serious! You’ve gotta—”

“So am I! So am I…” Her eyes begin to glisten; whether from the pain, the seething emotions or both, you’re unsure. What you are sure of is that there is absolutely no escaping this now, facing it is your only option. “So please, honey. Talk to me, tell me what it is, hm?” Jinsoul pleads, a few beads rolling down her cheeks. 

Her soft, warm hand reaches out to your cold, stiff one, keeping just enough pressure to hold you in place. “Remember what I told you? About the thing I hate to hear the most?” You peer down at your hands, your eyes starting to heat up and water as well. “I…the—yes. I remember.”

That brings a hint of light back into Jinsoul’s eyes, her lips relaxing just a tiny bit and curving into the smallest of smiles. “Tell me. I wanna hear it.”

“It’s…uhm, you…crap, hold on,” you sniffle, the week’s worth of sleep debt catching up to you. “Ah. It’s when you hear…bad news about me from…from another person.”

“That’s it. You remember.” Jinsoul’s smile grows a nudge. “So, whatever the hell it is…you tell me. Yourself. Because this concerns you. Your well-being. Right?”

Another, louder sniffle. “R–Right,” you nod, your own tears breaking free. Her smile finally grows into something fully tangible, bringing her free hand on top of the other. “Then go on. What is it, my love?” she asks, just audible enough to reach you.   

The ceiling light’s warm glow reflects on her eyes, deeper than the full moon in the sky. You stare back into their depth, and are about to unload your story before they squint once more from the persisting pain in her chest. “I—honey, I want to discuss it on the couch, if that’s okay. It–it feels more…right, that way. Please? I’m not just stalling, I swear. Not anymore.”

Jinsoul’s expression drops slightly, but rises back up soon after. “Okay. If that’s what we need, absolutely.”

“And, uh…can you take your meds first, too? Please, I’m really concerned. Truth.”

She sighs—almost scoffing—but concurs, nodding her head. “You’re right. I really should.”

“Alright! I’ll fetch them for you, one sec.” You turn towards the medical cabinet, but she maintains her grip, keeping you in place. “Honey, your hands?” She makes a small ‘oh’ and loosens them, almost begrudgingly. You ensure her with a small smile, tapping them with your other hand. “I’m not running away, I promise. You can let go, honey.”

Jinsoul finally lets go, busying her hands by wiping away her tears. You hum and head towards the cabinet, pouring her prescribed dose of medication into a small cup. Turning back to the table, you pick up her glass and refill it, handing it and the cup to her. Jinsoul whispers a brief thanks and takes her meds, downing it with water slowly and calmly this time.

Satisfied, you offer your hand again. Her eyes widen in soft surprise, but she takes it and stands up. You silently walk to the couch in the living room, her grip getting firmer along the way. Only when you’re both seated does she begin to loosen, but not entirely.

“S–so, it’s…um, well it’s—er…” You struggle to start, to speak past the lump holding down your jaw. Jinsoul doesn’t pressure, continuing to whisper assurances and encouragement. 

At long last, the pandora box is opened. You reveal the root cause for all this mess; a major fuckup you made at work last week. One that set your team’s progress back by a whole month at the very least.

Your colleagues—and especially your supervisor—were understandably vexed, but they didn’t fixate on it too much, instead beckoning you to do better and make up for it. And instead of taking this cue to ride on their support and leap forward, you let your guilt consume you, bit by bit. You began to drown yourself in work, to an extent even some of your colleagues found excessive. It was the only thing that felt “right” to do.

Your break times grew shorter, nigh non-existent. You started skipping lunches; the select times you did eat, you did so as if the food would turn into a bomb if you slowed down even a smidge. And it was from there that your distance with Jinsoul really grew and ate away at you.

“I–I know…I know that…that you really don’t like me skipping lunch, s–so…so—” you struggle to continue as sobs take over your vocalisations. Jinsoul stayed silent the whole time, her expression seeming to freeze at something unreadable. “It–it became…I was—I was scared! Too scared to…to tell you…” 

You’re full on bawling at this point, your voice becoming even hoarser than it already was. You keel over and cry into your free hand, soaking every surface of skin on it with mucus and sweat. Only when your sobs come down to a more manageable state does Jinsoul start speaking again, the first words being, “You goddamn fool.”

Sniffling loudly, you look up at her, slightly bewildered. Her mouth is stretched into a toothy frown, trembling from how tight her jaws are clenched. Her nostrils flare open and closed, mucus running free and joining the rush of tears falling from her blazing eyes. 

“Look at me,” she croaks, pulling on your hand with a near death grip. “Sit up properly and look at me.”

You lethargically comply, cries turning quiet under her gaze. “I–I’m sorry, Jinsoul,” you utter just as her mouth opens. It closes back up, stretching into a thin, pensive smile. Gulping down more tears, you try again. “I’m really so—”

Smack. Jinsoul’s other hand shoots up to deliver a sharp slap to your cheek, the noise pinging in your ears. “You’re sorry? You’re sorry?” she mumbles, her voice shaking. “For what, huh? For what?!” 

“I—it, I thought—”

Smack. Another slap; on the other cheek, with the other hand previously under yours. The pain throbs and buzzes, squeezing out more tears from your ducts. “J–Jinsoul, honey…”

Jinsoul runs her fingers through her hair, shutting her eyes and leaning back. “Who am I? Hm? Who am I to you?” she asks as she comes back down, her voice dangerously sprung.

“You…huh? Why are you suddenly—”

“WHO AM I TO YOU?!”

The guttural roar is deafening in the quiet space, one of if not the loudest sound you’ve ever heard her make. The intensity takes the wind out of your chest, your answer coming out as a frail rasp. “Y–You’re my wife, Jinsoul! My one and…and only love.”

“Exactly! I’m not your boss! Or–or your supervisor, your client—whatever! I am your wife, you silly man!” She cries out, poking at her chest. “Why—why would you be scared to tell me something like that? Huh? Why?!”

Your sobbing and shivering becomes more intense. All you’re able to provide are shakes of your head. “Are you afraid I was going to smite you or something? Or–or skin you alive? All because you skipped lunch?! Because—” Her intensity outruns her own lungs, coughing hard in the middle. “—because you ran into a big obstacle on the rough road to support our life?”

Once again, no verbal response makes it past your throat, only amounting to wavering, sheepish whimpers. Jinsoul grabs your cheek with both hands, forcing you to face her. “Answer me, honey. Why—what are you scared of?”

“I didn’t…I didn’t—” Your shiver intensifies, even rocking the couch slightly. “I didn’t want to make you mad…” you wheeze, continuing to bawl thereafter. “Oh, you—” Jinsoul raises one of her arms again, your body instinctively bracing for another slap—one that doesn’t arrive. Her arms pull you into a deep hug instead.    

  “You silly, silly man,” she spits, her cries becoming less explosive and more drawn out, matching yours. “I’d be annoyed, of course…but only for a bit! I can’t stay mad at you for such a thing.” With a chunk of tension molten free, so are both of your tears, gushing out as you spend the next several minutes crying and sobbing into each other’s shoulders.

By the time Jinsoul pulls away, you’re both a sweaty, coughing, sniffling mess. Your eyes are puffed up and red, your tears having left sizable channels on your cheeks. “Hey,” she says quietly, her fingers smudging away your tears and tracing random, lazy circles after. 

“Hey,” you reply, doing the same with your fingers. “Don’t you ever...be afraid to tell me anything. About everything—especially if you need help. Got it?”

You nod firmly, clearing your throat. “Got it.”

“You promise?”

“I promise…to t–tell you anything and everything, whatever it is.”

Jinsoul breathes a slow sigh, far more relaxed than her previous ones. “Thank you, honey. Thank you.” She leans forward and plants a gentle kiss on your forehead. “Like I said…” she sniffles, clearing away some damp strands of your hair. “I would be annoyed that you weren’t eating, but that’d be it. I’d do anything, everything I can to help and support you—so long as you tell me. Help me understand what’s making you skip lunch, and ask for my help. Okay, dear?”

“Okay,” you exhale another brief sob, nodding even more furiously. “I’ll pack your lunches, bombard you with calls during lunchtime—heck, I’ll burst into your office and feed you myself if it means you’ll eat properly,” she suddenly rattles, eliciting some breathy laughs that make you cough.

Jinsoul laughs along, tickled by your unbridled glee. “Now there’s my handsome man. I like you a lot better like this, you know? Missed it the past several days.” You squint at her and scoff. “Wow, you’re admitting you only married me for happiness? Hmph!”

“I said better—” “Ow!” “—not exclusively like this, you oaf,” she jests, flicking your ear.

“Like what?” you chuckle, nursing your ear.

“Hm?”

“You said better like this…so, like what?”

Jinsoul pouts and ponders, her fingers drumming softly on your thigh. “Smiling,” she replies, her own smile growing to the largest it’s been all evening. “You’re a lot prettier with a smile.”

“Tsch,” is all you voice on the surface, but your heart’s jumping up and down, some colour beginning to flood your pale cheeks. “Not as pretty as you though. Like, ever.”

Jinsoul doesn’t hide her reaction quite as well, a small, excited hum making it past her stretched lips. Colour also returns to her face, reddening all the way to her ears. She retaliates with a quick peck on your lips, which is thrown back and forth until you’re both giggling and squealing so hard you can’t keep going.

“But, uh…really. I need to apologize,” you state after calming down. Jinsoul scrunches her nose and pouts, an expression you can’t help but find ever so adorable. “Hmph. What for?”

“I’m…sorry, for making you worried sick.” You lightly tuck some hair behind her ear. “I really should’ve known better than to hide these kinda things from you, my sweetheart.”

Jinsoul tries to continue the ‘sulking’ front, but her little squirm and blazing heat on her cheeks sing a different song. “Tsch. At least you know now. Don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t. Especially not with your heart condition—gosh, I really fucked up big time there, didn’t I?” you laugh. Jinsoul chuckles along, but maintains a judging gaze. “Hey now, don’t put yourself down too much. What did I say?”

“Right, right.”

“And…I’m sorry too.”

You raise a brow and tilt your head. “Huh? For what?”

“For taking this long to address it,” she replies solemnly. “I could tell from like, Wednesday, but…I thought—” She sighs. “I thought you’d go up to me first. I’m sorry I ruined our Saturday night with…this.”

 You hum, bringing her into a hug. “It’s alright, honey. You didn’t ruin anything,” you coo, stroking the small of her back. “It would’ve gotten far worse if not for you. In fact…” You pull back and cup her cheek, staring deeply into her face full of concern, woven in with threads of love. “ …I’m thankful you thought that highly of me. And I’m gonna meet—heck, surpass that expectation. Sound good?”

Jinsoul nods with a warm smile. “I’ll look forward to it.” 

============

With that settled, you both turn your gaze towards the surroundings, spending the next several minutes with a comfortable silence, along with the occasional finger pokes or lazy circles on each other’s hands.

“You know…” Jinsoul blurts, turning her attention back to you. “ …if I saw someone else treat you the way you treat yourself sometimes, I would beat them to within an inch of their life.”

You let out an upbeat hum at her statement, raising your brows. “Gee, thank God I’m not that someone else,” you reply, then mock a gasp. “Or should I prepare tougher defenses because I’m not someone else?”

A beat of foreboding silence ensues. “You prepared for this?” Jinsoul suddenly leaps onto you, going on an onslaught of tickles on your person. You’re caught wide open, cackling and squirming immensely under her relentless attacks. “Ahahaha! What the—gahh! Stop! Stop! Honey—eheeheehee!”

 Jinsoul keeps going of course, the only thing that eventually stops her is you nearly falling off the couch. She guffaws in satisfaction, letting you go to slap the couch in glee. You immediately seize the opening and go on the counter offensive, switching positions and pinning her down as you deploy your own tickling fingers.

Jinsoul’s boisterous belly laughs go up two octaves as she wriggles underneath you, flailing her arms and legs helplessly in an attempt at defense. Inevitably though, she deploys her ace card. “Eeek! Ahaha! Honey—ventricle! Mmm! Ventricle!” she chants the agreed upon safe word. 

You’re already trained to comply, so you grind to a halt. Several seconds of panting and coughing ensue, reeling back from the immense mirth you just shared. “Really? You’re using the CHD card for this?” you scoff, shooting a teasing scowl. “Hmph! Unfair.”

 “Hah! Having a heart defect does have its ups sometimes,” Jinsoul mocks in a singsong voice, sticking out her tongue. The protruding organ gives you another idea, dashing your head down to capture it with your lips. She lets out a long squeal at the sudden dash, but then reciprocates, kissing you back. 

The arms on her sides wrap around your neck, pulling you deeper. You slide your hand up and lays it on her nape, adding to the depth and intensity. It’s only now you remember how long you’ve gone without her lips, how starved you’ve been of her taste, how much you’ve missed the softness of her hair.

The outside world seems to disappear altogether; the only space that matters is what you two currently occupy and the only time that matters are the moments that pass with your lips on hers. Said world isn’t in a hurry to return as you reopen your eyes, her marbles showing a cosmic reflection of yours. Her soft, warm breaths are like pneumatic sonar, painting an image of the proximity you haven’t shared in what feels like ages.

“My gosh, Jinsoul,” you excuse the gentlest of whispers, hardly ruffling the little hairs on her face. “I forgot just how drop-dead gorgeous you are.”

   Jinsoul’s facial muscles move ever so slightly. One of her hands slides from your neck to your cheek, her thumb doing soft strokes above your top lip. “Now this is unfair. You’re a meanie,” she huffs, a flicker of surprise darting across you as a confused hum. “Last night you hardly felt like a shadow. Tonight…” Her hand pulls back a few centimetres and pokes at your nose lazily. “ …you just made me fall for you again.”

You’re pretty sure she just did exactly the same, a quiet chuckle escaping you before you kiss her again, even slower and softer this time. Jinsoul makes a small sound into your mouth, melting away more tension from your sore muscles. Her lowered hand rejoins the one behind your neck, then slides down to your back.

Suddenly, those same arms start to squeeze you tightly, pressing your body against hers. Her mouth reflects the upturned ferocity, lapping at your lips with thirst and probing into you with her tongue. You’re caught rather off-guard, but are hesitant to pull away. Instead you try your best to keep up with her. 

Jinsoul’s little noises become louder and louder, growing into lustful, needy moans that stir up something within you; something that hasn’t been in motion for a while. In fact, they only stop once she’s gone at it so long that she runs out of breath and absolutely has to pull off. Your lips unlatch with a tangible, moist smack, having swollen a bit from the intense suction. 

“Honey, what was—” you wheeze, breathing heavily. “What was that?”

Jinsoul lubricates her lips and gulps before answering, “Something else…I’ve been missing this week. Your body—” She pulls you into her while she grinds her core upwards against your groin. “—on me, in me…anywhere that isn’t just—mmmhh…” She does it again with a quiet moan, making you gasp and flutter your eyes. “ …around me.”  

Jinsoul latches back onto your lips while you’re flustered, somehow hungrier than she was last time. Even as you try and pull back from her, she chases you; raising herself to keep kissing you for as long as possible. 

“Holy crap, honey!” is the first thing you utter when you finally manage to separate. Jinsoul’s eyes glow in a different colour, full of need and want. “Please, honey. I wanna do it. Let’s do it,” she says breathlessly.

“Is it…that time of the month? I can’t remember,” you pant in front of her. Jinsoul slides her hands to your butt, giving it a firm squeeze that makes you groan. “Come and find out,” she giggles, biting her lip.

“Alright. Bedroom. Now.” You leap off the couch and scoop her up, eliciting an excited squeal from her as she wraps her legs around you. Your mouths don’t leave each other on the way to the bedroom, navigating mostly by peripheral vision. You bump into the wall and doorframe a few times due to this, but it only adds to the anticipation, pushing your loins against each other’s.

Laying Jinsoul on the bed is easier said than done, your muscles still sore from the chronic overworking and undersleeping. However, you push through the ache, anything to give your wife the pleasure she needs. Not one second after her back touches the mattress, she begins shedding her clothes, leaving you staring blankly at her haste and the sight that greets you once she’s done.

Her bare body is nothing short of breathtaking; the entrancing expanses of smooth, beautiful skin, her supple breasts, and the throbbing, rapidly glistening surfaces of her womanhood. It’s a sight you’ve seen more than you can count, and yet it still sweeps you off your feet like a broom with vengeance.

You don’t know when you started staring, but Jinsoul’s giggle snaps you out of it like it’s been half a lifetime. “You’re staring! What are you looking at?” 

“I—I…you, honey. Everything…it—you’re so beautiful. So…hot.”

Jinsoul snickers and rubs her thighs together, making herself moan and bat her eyelids. “So fuck me then.”

You swallow the saliva gathered in your mouth and nod furiously. You take your shirt off in such a hurry that it catches, making you curse loudly. Jinsoul cackles at your adorable frustration, sitting up. “You need a little help?”

You don’t reply, jettisoning the fabric and diving to your knees, pulling her in by the calves. She yelps and lays back on the bed, continuing to laugh until you start kissing her inner thighs, which shuts her up. “H–Honey…you don’t have to—mmhh. Do that!” she moans, though her body betrays her, shivering from arousal.

You kiss and lap at every square inch of skin on her thighs, slowly making your way to her core which is leaking profusely at an increasing rate. “I want this, honey. I wanna make you feel good, make up for myself,” you utter, briefly pausing before delving into her pussy proper.

“B–But…aren’t you tired? We could just…get into the actio—ahh!” Jinsoul tries to protest before you plant your nose just under her opening, dragging it along her slit to inhale her intoxicating musk. “Mmm, you smell good, honey. Did I mention I’ve been fucking starving?” you growl. She tries to murmur something else but never gets to as you do the same thing you did with your nose, now with the tongue, just outside of her folds. “And you…are a damn feast and a half. So relax for me, honey. Let’s enjoy this.”

Jinsoul can only whimper in response, but she does relax, nodding shakily. With the lights all green, you take off. You kiss, suckle, and twirl your tongue at every bit of skin near her sex, sending little electric jolts through her body. Her moans and gasps wax and wane in volume, then skyrockets as you finally stop teasing and eat her out properly.

You’d tease for a lot longer, but as you both mentioned; you’re starving and tired, so you don’t go easy. You devour her with loud, thirsty slurps as if you’re trying to extract every drop of moisture from her flesh. Jinsoul provides plenty though, securing you onto her with her legs. Her groans are rickety and jagged, her eyes struggling to stay open as your mouth defiles her.

“Honey…you’re so—ahh! Good! I haven’t felt—” Jinsoul lets out a choked sound as your hands manage to squeeze between her thighs and join your mouth. One set of fingers rolls and pinches her clit, your tongue covering the rest. The other set slips inside her, blowing fuses and tripping breakers within her as your fingers probe her walls in search of that magical spot.

The moment they find it, her entire system overcharges, belting out a strained howl and bucking her hips. “Honey—baby—darling—ack! Right there! Right there right there right there…fuck! Don’t stop!” she rattles off, grabbing your hair with one hand and kneading her breasts with the other. 

Jinsoul’s tremors start going into erratic directions, her walls pulse around you, and her noises get so high they go silent. She’s close, the heat in her stomach is on a short fuse.

“Fuck! I’m gonna cum! I’m gonna cu—honey, I’m gonna cum! I’m so close…” 

“You taste so good, honey. Cum for me, let me drink you up,” you mumble into her, burning off the rest of her fuse. Jinsoul explodes with a shrill wail, crying out your name like she’ll forget it otherwise. Her grip on your hair is downright painful, second only to the grip pulling the sheets off the mattress. 

A torrent of her juices drenches your face, practically waterboarding you as her thighs clamp your head down and her feet dig into your back. You greedily lap up as much as you can, even choking on some as you inhale it through your nose. Jinsoul’s flavour is well worth the nasal exercise though, her tangy, sweet essence blessing your tastebuds as you gulp it down.

Jinsoul takes over a minute to finally loosen her grip enough for you to pull away. By then you near black out from the vice she had around you, but you wouldn’t have it any other way. You cough and take big gulps of much needed oxygen, smiling proudly at your handiwork. “Damn, honey,” you pant, wiping your mouth. “We’re gonna have to wash the sheets tomorrow.”

“W–Whose…uhhh…fault is that?” she murmurs, still coming down from her high. “Your heart okay?” you ask, caressing her calves and massaging it softly. 

“It’s fine.” Jinsoul sits up and feels her chest, eyeing you with hunger. “Be even better if I have that dick in me,” she giggles dazedly.

“You bet.” You take off your pants and underwear with a bit more composure than your shirt, freeing your hardness aching against the fabric. Jinsoul lets out an excited yelp upon seeing it, moving up the bed and opening her legs wider. Giving a few pumps and lathering her release all over your length, you climb on and position yourself above her.

“You’re so gorgeous,” you comment as you line up for entry. “It’s still hard to believe I got you all to myself.” Jinsoul whimpers quietly and reaches out for your cock, pumping it herself and making you gasp. “So make it believable. Fuck me like you won’t believe otherwise.”

You shudder at her words, and are about to push in when one of your arms suddenly gives way, collapsing onto her. “Whoa! You alright, hon? Was that on purpose?” Jinsoul exclaims. “I, er…no, that wasn’t. I think it’s that sleep debt biting my ass,” you chuckle, using the proximity to pepper her cheek with kisses.

Jinsoul whines and pushes you off, rolling you onto your back beside her. She then flips over and straddles you, rubbing her folds on your stomach and leaving a trail of her slick. “J–Jinsoul! You…wow!” is all you can utter, mesmerised by the sight of her on top.

“Then this time, let me…take care of you, honey,” she sighs, grinding and pumping your shaft behind her at the same time. “Gosh…you’re so hard!” She gives your balls a cheeky squeeze that makes you wince. 

Your hands go to her waist as she lines up, but she takes them off and interlaces hers instead. “Let me, honey. I’ll do the—” Jinsoul breathes out a long groan as she sinks down. “—work for you! Oh my God!”

You let out a shaky hiss at the sensation, then cry out with her when she bottoms out. “J–Jinsoul! Honey! So tight…fuck!”

Your shaft throbs within her as it gets accustomed to her luscious hot depths. “S–So big! Hard…mmhhh! Fuck…” Jinsoul whines, grasping your hands tightly for support. She begins moving with slow, stimulating rolls of her hips that set your nerves on fire. You feel every stroke dredging her walls, groaning and whimpering at every movement.

“A–Am I doing a good…job, honey?” she moans, biting her lip. You smile and nod at her in response, arching your back at a particular shove. “Tell me. I wanna…ahhh! Hear it, honey. Uhhh…”

“Y–You’re—” It takes all of your processing power to formulate words. “—doing…really nicely, honey! You’re taking me—so—well! Mmhh! You feel so good!”

Jinsoul yelps in joy, loosening her fingers. “Touch me,” she sobs, bringing your hands to her body. “Feel me, caress me, I wanna—feel…all of you. Please!”

You obey with deep grunts, mapping her body with your hands; the curves of her hips, the fullness of her ass, the smoothness of her belly—which bulges slightly every time you penetrate her. Jinsoul increases her speed in response, whimpering at every touch in between the sharper yelps and grunts. 

“M–More,” she pants, her eyes half-liddened. Her hands guide yours to slide up to her plump breasts, kneading them firmly. Her eyes fully close at that, revelling in how you make her feel. You even have the wherewithal to twiddle and pinch her nipples on occasion, jolting her eyes open accompanied with a loud, trembling groan.

Jinsoul pulls your hand away after some time, leaning forward to kiss you and press her body against yours. You bend your knees to adjust, piercing her at a more intense angle, at least for you. “I missed this,” she sobs, holding you by the temple. “I miss you. I miss us.”

You start to sob again as well, running your fingers through her hair. “I’ve missed you too. I didn’t realize just how much—I needed—mmhh! You!”

“It was…torture. You were—ahh—right here…next to me, but you felt so—far away! Fuck!” Jinsoul cries out into your forehead. “It was—painful! More than…mmhh! Than this—damn heart of mine could ever make me feel.”

You pull her back down to face you, panting at each other. “I will never—ughhh! Be away from you…ever again! Never! I’ll always—fuck! Be—right—here!”

“You promise?” Jinsoul whispers, her tears falling on your cheeks. “I promise! With everything…I have. I—promise! Fuck, honey!” You let out a quivering moan, your eyes fluttering. “I think—I’m close! I can’t—gahh! I don’t think I can pull out…”

“Then don’t!” Jinsoul huffs, her breath getting ragged. “Do it inside me! Fill me up! Give me your baby…” She sits back up and speeds up even more. Her hips slam onto you with desperation, her tits bouncing at every impact.

“H–Hold my hand again, honey,” you plead, and she obliges, interlacing your fingers like before, but with a tighter grip. Several moments pass with only your combined moans and grunts, the crisp plaps of skin against skin, and the creaks of the mattress underneath. 

“I love you so much, Jinsoul. I love—” You burst with a howl, arching your back and snapping your hips into her, driving your seed deep into her womb. Jinsoul shatters more quietly, only teetering whimpers and whines escaping her lips. Her orgasm is no less intense however; her eyes rolling back into her head as her cunt hungrily spasms and milks you dry, drawing out as much of your pent-up release into her depths as possible. Your pelvis gets its turn to be drenched in her juices, squirting so violently they almost push you out.

Your bodies continue their small quakes, the last of your cum spurting into her throughout. Your senses are so intensely stimulated that they go numb, taking you to a different plane of existence for a few moments. 

============

When you do return to the real world, you find Jinsoul slumped onto you again, breathing into your shoulder with her lips pressed lazily against it. You close your eyes to let her come down from her high properly, revelling in the comfortable, yet exhilarating quiet.

“Hey.” Jinsoul’s soft voice wakes you up, her glistening beads staring back at you. “Hey.” You crane your neck up to kiss her forehead. “How you feeling?” 

“Like heaven.” Jinsoul plants little kisses on your collarbone. “I loved it! And I love you too, hehe.”

“Heh. Thought you didn’t catch that.”

“Of course I did,” she mewls, resting her temple on your sternum. “I haven’t heard your loving voice for so long, how could I miss it?”

“Right,” you chuckle, stroking her hair. “But like, how’s your heart? Feels okay?”

Jinsoul scoffs. “It’s good. It can take it. We’ve gone crazier before, you know.”

“Aha. Yeah.” The mention makes your cock twitch inside her, making her giggle. “Ooh, little man wants another go?”

“I, er…maybe not yet. That doesn’t sound too advisable.”

She laughs a bit louder at that, raising herself off of you slowly. Your genitals separate with a burbling squelch, your combined release leaking all over. The mess gives Jinsoul an idea, scooching backwards to clean you up with her tongue. You hiss and wince at the sensation, your hips jerking a few times.

She keeps some of the liquid in her mouth, then crawls next to you and kisses you, transferring some of it over. “Mmm, we taste good,” you rasp, coughing from your hoarse throat.

“Tsch. You want some water, honey?”

“Oh, desperately. I’ll fetch it, stay here.”

“No!” Jinsoul protests, holding you down. “You’re totally wrecked, let me get it.”

“Well, you took over for the last bit, so it’s my turn,” you argue.

“That’s not how this works.”

“That is absolutely how this works.”

“But this is different.”

“You wanna discuss the semantics now?”

“What? No!”

“Then let me.”

“Why are you so persistent?”

“Why are you so cute?”

Your last counter leaves Jinsoul gobsmacked, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. “You…that—mmhh!” she whines and punches your chest softly, making you cackle. “Rock paper scissors then?” you offer.

Her head snaps towards you, squinting a determined gaze. “Deal.”

“Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!”

You emerge victorious; scissors against paper. Jinsoul sighs and rolls her eyes while you clap your hands and rise from the bed. “Wait!” She pushes you back down with heft, catching you off guard. “Best of three!”

“Really? You’re that determined?” you tease, tilting your head. She gives a single curt nod, preparing her hand for the next round. “Alright then. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!”

Once more, you win; this time paper against rock. Jinsoul whines and throws her head into the pillow, with you chuckling beside her. “See? You were destined to be my queen, so let me serve you,” you gloat, stretching your arms. 

She shoots you a glare, which softens into a pout. “Tsch. Don’t…take too long.” You hum and lean towards her to plant a slow, long kiss of assurance. “I won’t. I’m not going anywhere.”

You make your way to the kitchen, your steps somewhat wobbly. Refilling a pitcher of water, you spot Jinsoul’s plate, a small chunk of food left untouched. You sigh and finish it yourself, smiling at the thought of her and from the much-needed protein charge. With it now empty, you stash it and her utensils in the sink to be washed tomorrow.

“Thank you, honey,” Jinsoul chirps as you hand her a glass. She gulps it down with gusto, in contrast to your slower, steadier gulps. “Man, I needed that,” she pants after, making you chuckle into your glass.

“Hey, sweetheart?” Jinsoul asks as you set the pitcher and glasses on a table. “Hm?”

“You wanna…take a shower together?”

Your forehead wrinkles in confusion. “Uh, of course? That’s not even a…question. Ah.” You realise you haven’t showered together for the past week either. “I’m sorry.”   

Jinsoul lets out a frustrated groan, leaping to her feet and crashing onto you with a hug. “Stop—apologizing—for things—you don’t—need to,” she states, kissing your cheek in between and making you giggle. “Gosh, you’re so adorable.”

Your shower doesn’t suggest urgency in the slightest, making out slowly under the warm running water. Jinsoul’s lips gradually lower and lower until they’re level with your groin, wrapping them around your shaft. “Finishing my dinner,” is what she cites when you quiz her on the decision. 

Your sighs and moans reverberate off the walls for the next few minutes. Her mouth takes you deep, slow, and methodical, hitting all the right spots with her tongue. As it turns out, your balls have a surprising amount left to offer, blowing a sizable load into her mouth which she swallows heartily. 

============

“Honey, now I remember…I’ve got something else to tell you,” you say when you’re both under the covers. “Hm?”

“It’s… got to do with your heart. I found something.” You grab your phone to show her; a hospital abroad is running a program to treat the heart defect she’s got with surgery—at a discount. “What do you think?”

Jinsoul eyes the screen with some judgement, darting between it and you. “Honey…” she sighs, rubbing her forehead. “Where did you find this? Is it legit?”

“Yeah! One of our clients works at the insurance company that’s sponsoring this, and they let me know about it. I checked it multiple times from different parties that are supposedly involved, and it’s real. Legit.”

She continues to leer at the screen, biting her lower lip and smacking it. “Well…even if it’s discounted, it can’t be cheap, can it?”

“It isn’t, and that’s why I’ve been saving up.”

Your response makes her roll her eyes and groan, sitting up straighter on the backboard. “Honey, we’ve talked about this. That amount of money is far better put towards—”

“—a vacation. Yes, I remember. And I’ve calculated. With what I’ve saved up, we could have that surgery and go on a simple vacation right after!”

“I—” Jinsoul’s voice is stuck under tension. “How would the—wait. I don’t know how much you saved up, but I’m pretty sure even with our savings combined, it won’t be enough. Or at least we won’t have anything to fall back onto.”

“Umm…yeah.” You scratch the back of your head, your tone inviting more scrutiny from her. “Umm…yeah…what? Something else you wanna tell me?”

You back out of the website and open your banking app, holding it up to her face so she can see the savings balance clearly. Jinsoul’s eyes flick open, leaning into the screen further, even taking it from your hand to inspect it herself.

“W–What…that’s…how many…” She counts the decimal places with her finger, doing it several times to be absolutely sure. “This—where did you get all of this?”

“I sold my shares. Cashed them out.” You shrug. “Well…some of them. I’m holding onto Quercus Co. Good potential, that one,” you chuckle, then shut up upon seeing Jinsoul’s expectant stare. “But uh…yeah. I sold Bunnsworth, and…StarCee, was it? Yeah, those ones. Their prices are wild right now, so…I sold them.”

 Jinsoul looks no less baffled, if anything even more so. “But, like…isn’t that…kind of, not the smartest thing to do?”

You suck a breath through your teeth. “No, it admittedly isn’t. But…” You reach for her hand, clasping over it softly. “ …when it comes to our health, our happiness, they come first. Right?”

Jinsoul slowly turns away from you. Her expression is less flummoxed now, more pondering, considering, weighing. Her jaws move side to side, as if in tune to the cogs turning in her head.

 “Come on, honey. They’re covering 70% of the surgery! With the amount we have left to pay, plus the travel fees, accommodation, all that and the vacation after, we’ll still have some left to spare! That’s excluding our separate emergency funds, too.”

Jinsoul rubs circles on where her heart is, feeling it drum against her ribs. She turns back to you with some trepidation, her chest falling and rising. “I…I don’t know, honey. It’s still a…really big risk.”

“Bigger than the prolonged risks?”

Jinsoul doesn’t answer, pursing her lips. “Jinsoul, honey…” You sigh and begin to tap on her hand rhythmically. “I know you’ve never let this…Congenital Heart Disease thing bother you all that much, but—”

“Heh. The full government name, wow.”

“—that factor, that…looming worry does bother me. A lot.”

“What do you mean? Worry about what?”

“Worry that someday, any day, we might miss a single step and your heart might…might—” Your words clog up in your throat. “—might just give out, and I’m not with you when it happens.”

Jinsoul’s lips twitch, her eyes blinking at an increased rate. “Don’t…don’t put it that way! It sounds horrible! Besides, we’ve been managing just fine with the meds, and…and the check ups.”

“Well, the meds can only do so much, dear! We have to keep buying them, and get you checked up every—heck, I bet the costs up to this point nearly match or even surpass all the costs of this surgery!”    

Jinsoul pushes your hand away and looks away from you. You sigh and smile, leaning in closer to her. “Look, you can’t stand me skipping meals and not taking care of myself, right?” Another verbal silence, only a louder exhale from her nose. “Honey?” you coax, sweetening your tone.

 “Right,” she murmurs. 

“Well, it’s the same for me with your heart. I can’t stand the thought of you always being at risk because of it. You—”

“But I’ve been living just fine!” she exclaims, snapping back to you. “I’ve been…it’s never gotten in the way!”

“I know, and I admire you for it. But…think of it, honey. You’ve been on medications for as long as you’ve been alive! Isn’t that—”

“Is that the problem? You can’t keep up with the meds?”

“No! It…” You crunch your face and inhale, trying not to derail the conversation. “I’ll keep up with the meds, of course. I’ll do anything for you! But…wouldn’t it be better for both of us if we never had to deal with them again?”

After a long beat of silence, Jinsoul sighs and relaxes a little. “I guess you’re right,”

“Right? We’d probably have to do some maintenance for a little after the surgery, but then we’ll be free! You will be free, even more than you already are!” You put your hand over hers again. “Plus, you won’t be able to nag me straight for the next twenty, thirty, fifty years with that current heart,” you tease.

Jinsoul scoffs and pinches your arm lightly. “You could fix that by not doing things worth nagging at.”

“A doomed proposition from the start, I’m afraid,” you hum, making her flash a grin. “So what do you think? This is our chance to get the procedure done for cheap—way cheaper than anywhere in this damn country.”

Jinsoul looks down, her thumb drawing lazy strokes on the back of your hand. “I think…I wanna try it.”

“Yay!”

“But I’m still scared.”

“Oh. Scared how, honey? Tell me.”

Jinsoul looks up at you, showing puppy dog eyes that make your heart run laps around itself. “Will—are you gonna be there with me? All the way—like the whole thing?” she asks meekly. 

“Of course, honey!” You rub her hand. “I'm gonna be there through the whole thing, I proposed it! Heck, unless we absolutely can't be together, I'll be stuck to you like toast on glue.”

Jinsoul's eyes widen and light up as she bursts out laughing. “What?”

“Huh? Wha—oh. Pffft!” You break out into a belly laugh as well, piling onto hers and vice versa, creating a feedback loop of mirth that rings off of the walls and rocks the bed, especially as you slap it—and each other. It gets to the point you devolve into a snickering, snorting mess, barely being able to catch a breath.

“I meant to say—I tried saying ‘like jam on toast’ and ‘like glue’ and mixed it up! Gosh, I need to sleep.”

“Fucking toast on glue—wasn't even that funny!” Jinsoul shoves you in the arm.

“You laughed at it first!”

“But you…you added to it!”

“Oh, I’m not allowed to laugh at my wife laughing?”

“Eek! That’s not what I mean! Why do you twist my words so much!” Jinsoul whines and nuzzles her head in your shoulder. “So I can do this,” you snicker and kiss her scalp, caressing her shoulder. Jinsoul scoffs, but snuggles up to you further.

“Tsch. Of course you can laugh! Laugh all you want, I’ll never be tired of that sound,” she grins, placing her chin on your shoulder. “Even if you do sound like a broken vacuum sometimes.”

You break out laughs in the exact manner she describes, almost starting another snowball. “Stop! We’ll never sleep at this rate.” Thankfully, they do calm down into quieter chuckles soon, feeling each other’s warmths.

“How did you plan all of that last week? During…all that?” Jinsoul asks, lips pursed in concern. “I didn’t. I actually wanted to tell you before…well, that happened.”

Jinsoul hums, dragging her chin. “Oh, my poor baby. You must’ve been so tired, hm?” she coos, massaging your arm. “Uh–huh,” you let out a long yawn, making her yawn also. “So let’s go to bed, hm? We can talk about it more tomorrow.”

“Mmm-mmm. Later. I wanna do other things tomorrow,” Jinsoul murmurs, sliding under the blanket. “Alright then. Later. How about a date? We haven’t gone on one in a while.” You slide under as well, turning your body at her. Though her face is half-covered, you can see the smile pushing up her eyes. “Date. Sounds good.”

“Okay. Good night, honey. I love you!” you whisper as you close your heavy eyelids. “Night night, sweetheart. I love you too!”

============

The sun is high and blinding by the time you stir awake, filling the room with a warm white glow. You let out a long groan as you stretch, which feels like heaven. It’s the most well-rested you’ve felt for days—probably because you slept at least ten hours—but also because you’re truly…back. With Jinsoul, here in your entirety.

Speaking of Jinsoul, you turn your head to find her still fast asleep. Somewhat unusual for her, as she’d usually be up and running at this hour, even on Sundays. Then again, the monumental unloading of emotions last night might have tired her out greatly. You shrug, smiling as you tuck away a tuft of hair on her forehead with the lightest of touches. “Hm. Cute.”

You could stay there for the whole day, but alas, things need to be done. Especially as you’re feeling spry as a fly this morning, almost leaping off the bed if not to prevent waking Jinsoul. With your best attempt at featherlight steps, you make your way onto the kitchen. 

Cosy sunlight bounces all over the bright walls of the living room, beating out the lights you forgot to turn off last night. You promptly turn them off and stretch out again. It is a dazzlingly beautiful morning, something else you haven’t had for days. Was it that the weather was kind of gloomy all week? Or was it just your mental state? “Hm. Could be both,” you yawn, heading towards the sink.

You start doing the dishes, mainly Jinsoul’s from last night. With that done, you motion towards making breakfast. A simple toast and eggs, you’ll eat fancier meals on today’s date anyways. As the food sizzles away on the pan, you also get some tea brewing, good old black tea. Lots of sugar for you, hardly any for her.

“Jinsoul! Wakey wakey, honey! Breakfast’s ready!” you shout as you plate the food. Feeling satisfied with the arrangement, you give a thumbs up and walk back towards the bedroom.

Jinsoul’s still asleep, not even changing positions. You chuckle and hop onto the bed, crawling next to her. “Good morning! Damn, you were properly knocked out,” you snicker, cuddling up to Jinsoul. You gently rock her for a few seconds, and then you feel something wrong.

She isn’t making any sounds. No matter how heavily she sleeps, Jinsoul always wakes up or at least reacts upon physical movement. “Jinsoul? Hey. Honey, you up?” You rock her harder this time. Still, no reaction whatsoever.

“Shit! Jeong Jinsoul! Can you hear me?” Your heart drops, leaning in to listen for breathing. Nothing—not even anemic, barely audible wheezes. You try her chest next, and the silence is even more terrifying; not a single heartbeat.

“No…no, no, no, no, no—honey! Wake up!” You rock her hard enough for the bed to squeak, and she still doesn’t respond. “Damnit!” you cry out, scrambling towards the end table for your phone and punching in the emergency number on the keypad.

“Come on, come on…” You bite your nails, glancing between Jinsoul, the window, the floor. “Hello? Yes! This—uh, we had…um—wait, hold on.” You put the phone on your chest, taking deep, increasingly unstable breaths to try and calm down. “I…uh, my wife! She—she isn’t waking up!”

“Address? Um…this, wait, lemme—ah! AZ Tower, B block, unit 619! Please, you gotta get someone out here! She isn’t breathing, and–and…” Your voice begins to break down. “ …I can’t hear her heart!”

You get off the bed and start pacing, clenching and unclenching your fist in rapid succession. “Uh…she—30, B positive. She has uh…that—CHD! Congenital Heart Disease! I’m really worried—please, send somebody!” you straight up whine, your breaths laboured. 

“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much! Please, hurry!” You toss your phone at the bed, not caring that it bounces off and clatters onto the floor. “R–Right, CPR. I’ve—I’ve done it before, yeah! I learned it! Can do this!” you mutter as you rush to her side.

You scoop her up to move her to the floor so you’re not compressing against the mattress. But the moment you lift, a harrowing detail unveils itself and makes your stomach churn.

Jinsoul’s entire frame is rigid, her back frozen in the slight upward angle it was in on the bed. And even against the rush of cold sweat on your palms, her body is colder. “No! Jinsoul! No way! I can’t…you—please!”

You lay her on the floor and start compressions. The apparent futility is immediately evident as you feel like you’re pushing against wood. Still, you push on; 100-120 compressions per minute, 30 at a time. “Please, please…come back to me…”

After thirty compressions, you bend down to give her two breaths. Her jaws are slightly parted, but they refuse to open any further. Cursing, you decide to go through anyway, pinching her nose and blowing through the miniscule gap. Her chest doesn’t rise. You try again with a different angle, using all your might to open her jaws that slightly wider as you blow another breath in.

Still, no chest rise. “Fuck! Please—okay, try again,” you cry out, restarting the cycle. Throughout your efforts, things start to run through your mind, pushing your actions to near autopilot.

Did we go too hard last night? Did I feed her something wrong? Were the meds the correct dosage? Were the emotions too much? What did I do? What did I NOT do? Did I miss something? Did I? Did I? Did I?!

“One, two, three, four…” You’re always prepared for this, that’s what you tell yourself. “ …five, six, seven, eight…” Childlike as it may be, you always imagined the scenario when it happens; you’re right around the corner, dashing to her side when she calls out for you before collapsing. 

“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen…” You’d rush her to the hospital with her in your arms, running on pure adrenaline. “ …seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty…” Even when you’re not around the corner, she has a whole system built in—she’s lived her whole life with this condition, for God’s sake! “ …twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, twenty four…” At least there are actions that can be taken in that case. “ …twenty nine, thirty! Please work…”

 But instead, almost as if to make a mockery of your vigilance, God has gone with the worst case scenario; one in which you’re as close to her as you could be, yet completely helpless to do anything. One which you prayed for its aversion every night, more desperately than all the other scenarios. Scratch that, you even begged for the other scenarios to unfold when it inevitably happens, so afraid are you of this one.

At some point, a compression cracks one of her ribs, snapping you back to manual control. Your sweaty hands slip and you collapse onto her, beseeching loudly. “No, no, no! Fuck! I made it worse! No, no, Jinsoul—please, wake up, my dear! Come back to me!”

Frantic and dazed as your actions are, the logical part of your mind has realised the full brunt of reality. Last night you and Jinsoul went to bed, and this morning, you’re the only one who woke up. She is no longer part of the world that welcomed you today, having passed onto another sometime in the night. Silently, peacefully, and with you not having any say whatsoever.

Your cries stretch into whimpering wails, opting to take her into your arms instead. “Please, honey! Wake up! I can’t—I just got back here! Don’t…” you rasp and cough. “Don’t leave me here alone! I can’t…I can’t be alone yet! Not without you! Please, Jinsoul! Pleaseee…”

“Please, that didn’t stop you before,” she points out, rolling her eyes after a teasing scoff.

“That was back then, Jinsol-ssi.” By instinct, you still keep your professional side on. “Like before everyone in the agency had a month’s worth of schedule in two weeks?”

The woman chuckles from your counter before taking her third sip. “Fair enough.” She places the half-empty mug on the table in front of her before crossing her arms. “But it doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun outside your duties. Remember the good days?”

She could mean anything, considering she’s brought back a lot of memories in your mind. The fruits of her group’s hundreds of successes and celebrations weren’t without having thousands more efforts and sacrifices, whether it’s in the spotlight or behind the scenes. Most, if not all, of your days with her, with them, have been some of your best.

“Mmm-hmm, I still get a lot of that from time to time. Doesn’t need to be outside them,” you admit with a suave cadence, making her chuckle a second time. Despite embracing the slow and comforting tension warming in your bodies, the whistles of the morning breeze from outside flowing between you, the same time another memory arises from Jinsol. Her eyes widen in dismay while you walk to the glass balcony doors to close it.

“I…” she lets out a deep sigh, before confessing what she expects you to be disappointed at. “I’m really sorry we didn’t get to go to the beach last night, Kwangsun-ah... We even agreed to do it since last week, but Jiwoo-yah had way more drinks than we expect—”

You walk back to her. “Aniya, aniya!” you shake your hands. You expected she’d bring it up, but what transpired last night made it cross your mind. “Gwenchanayo. No need to feel bad for anything. I mean, this is your last tour.” You imagine the members getting wild and wasted, an entertaining series of memories that used to give you nightmares. Now, it just makes you snicker. It’s always been an important moment of bonding for them. You want to remind her of that. “Stuff like that should be the least of our worries. I mean… In the longest time, you get to spend time with the members for most of the month and have your good old girls’ night, so there’s nothing wrong with that.”

She wants to say no and apologize further, but bringing up her members only reminds you of a bigger elephant in the room. You still made a good point, allowing her to smile for a moment before it sinks. “Yeah, I guess so… But, speaking of which… Our contract, I’m sure you’ve heard from the others, right?” She looks down on the floor for a second, rubbing her wrist with her other hand, before facing you. “Our… Decision?”

You nod, sensing her uncertainty and a sprinkle of unease. “I have, Jinsol-ssi.” Knowing the gravity of their situation, consoling and tending to her has always been your priority. “But that shouldn’t change things between you and the girls, right?”

“Of course, not,” she tells you with a burst of warm-hearted confidence, allowing herself to feel the exuberance of yesterday. “We’ve been a family for a long time. Even after our group split up into ‘units’, or whatever everyone calls them, we did our best to keep in touch.”

“You definitely are, and I’m just glad all of you have made up your minds about this…” You hold onto her left hand. “Even if it’s a tough decision to make for you.”

“We have…” She raises her left hand, flashing the golden ring on her finger to you. “You know, I couldn’t be more grateful that we have a manager this caring and thoughtful…”

“I’m just a pretty lucky guy,” you admit, your response stemming from the realization that, while you may necessarily no longer be her manager in a year, you still get to be someone who will be with her regardless of whatever endeavor she will be venturing.

She intertwines her fingers with yours, resting your hand on her chest. “Don’t you dare undersell yourself…” You’re pulled inches closer to her as she tilts her head to the side. “You’re not my fiancé for nothing, Choi Kwangsun.”

You can’t help but giggle at Jinsol’s proud retort. It’s been a year and a month since you proposed to her back in Seoul, but it’s always given both of you butterflies whenever you reminisce about that mundane yet special night. Before you can make your next move of comfort, she raises your hand and lets you rest your palm on her left cheek, allowing her to lean in and relax her eyes at the warmth of your touch amidst this gusty winter dawn.

“By the way, it’s still early and you’re not being your usual self…” She slowly raises an eyebrow with a mix of concern and suspicion. “Why’s that?”

“My usual self?” You tilt your head, your gullible mind still trying to process her phrase.

“You know what,” she sulks. “It’s not like everyone else is here, you’re still being formal with me. And I mean, almost half of the agency already knows about our engagement!”

“Ooooooooh, right… I should’ve known… Mianhaeyo,” you chuckle to lighten her up, making you fold and wrap her arms around your waist to cement your reassurance.”

She rests on your chest. “It’s not because the girls were around too last night, is it?”

“What?” You do not want things to escalate. At this point, there’s no use in talking like a manager to your own fiancée. You have to get rid of this habit before this talk takes both of you into a far more unpleasant kind of tension. You gotta act like her future husband.

“Is it because some of y’all had history too?” she questions you further. There’s not a hint of annoyance or suspicion from her tone now, only some concern about you, but also a sense of insecurity, something she rarely shows to anyone unless she’s bothered. “Heeki and Hyunjin-ie are the same age as you, plus Chaewon-ie, so you felt a little closer—”

“Aniya, noona,” you answer bluntly, killing the gust of chaos starting to befuddle her mind. “I know that we've had lots of fun and wilder days with other people, but I don’t know… I never cared about that.” You give her forehead a long kiss, exhaling a smile. “Looking back, I think a part of me has always been looking forward to seeing you the most, Jeong Jinsol-noona…” You kiss her left cheek. “More than anyone else.” You move to her right. “I’ve moved past that kind of life, ‘cause I wanna share mine with you.”

Her eyes glow and her cheeks warm up. You witness her blushing, prompting you to stroke her hair out of affection. She hears her own heart racing. While you process her initial reaction, a wider smile emerges on her lips. “You finally called me that…” She giggles, realizing that she’s able to break through your more timid, reserved, and sometimes stern and disciplined, “manager’s side.” For someone who often acts more than they speak, Jinsol has helped make you talk and open beyond speaking out of obligation, once from an idol to a manager, and now between lovers.

“Aaaaaahhh…” You finally figure it out, making you smack your face with one hand out of disappointment. Still, you don’t regret saying those words to her. It simply felt right. “Mianhaeyo, noona…” You place both your palms on each of her cheeks. “Jinjja…”

She rests on your forehead. “It’s just, I thought you weren’t comfortable with that word.”

“I’ve always felt comfortable with it,” you clarify. “It’s just, being a manager of one of the busiest and most beloved girl groups in Korea. It’s really kept me in a state where I often wish I could escape more often... I couldn’t juggle how I spoke to people or how I should treat them outside work… Things became a little blurry, before I had to adjust myself.”

“I get it…” She gives you a soft and long squeeze. “I don’t blame you for that, babe.”

“I don’t blame you either…” For you, Jinsol deserves everything a queen has, and a lot more. “I’m just happy we get to spend more time after work than usual.”

She finally pulls you in an embrace, lending each other warmth in this humid winter. You can’t be more over the moon for how far she has come, that you’ve been there to accompany and support her.

“Nado,” she mumbles. “But, that doesn’t have to stay the same way, does it? How you juggle the way you talk.” she asks, suggesting like their contract coming to a close isn’t all bad. Their disbandment may be bad for business or fandoms, yet it brings a fruitful promise for both of you.

You hope to lighten the mood up with a tease. “Well… I feel like it whenever you deserve it, maybe I’ll just call you noona in front of everyone. Even with the other managers.”

“Is that so?” she giggles. She leans closer to your ear, wanting you to virtually explore the possibilities with her. “When does it feel like I deserve to be called noona, babe?”

“All the time, actually,” you chortle your confession, before getting yourself back in your deeper voice. “But I think it makes things a little more special when I call you whenever you’d least expect.”

“Well, I just realized… This’ll probably be the last year I get to call you Manager-nim… What if I keep calling you that after all this?”

Your soft yet hoarse whisper to her left ear sends a wave of shiver that spreads a chilling sensation to Jinsol’s spine. Giving into the magnets radiating on your lips, you kiss your beloved fiancee with a sense of hunger that nothing else, except this woman can satiate. Falling into your own lust for her, your tongue enters her mouth, relishing in the traces of fruits, grilled pork, and beer from last night, mixed with the tea you gave her earlier.

“You getting hungry, noona?” you joke around with her, testing her desire. “We have breakfast downstairs in about thirty minutes or less… You sure you don’t wanna wait—”

With her soft palms, the woman gently pushes you until you land on the nearest chair to the left of the sofa. “It doesn’t hurt to have a little appetizer here first.” She takes off your underwear and shorts, tossing both of them away only three feet away from the sofa. “And a better one.” Getting down to her knees, she spreads your legs between her. Her eyes switch back and forth between your eyes and your cock, mesmerized by how hard and sweaty it already is from the palm of her hands. Without hesitation, Jinsol tilts her head and lunges at your rod like a ravenous and starved creature. Your balls receive a slow yet tender squeeze from her palm. You might have underestimated her quite a bit once she opens her mouth and takes your cock in without prolonging her usual teases.

Keeping you laid back on the furniture, you extend your arms on the backrest, gripping your nails on the leather, with Jinsol devouring you. As a minute passes, she adds a new trick, using her palms and tongue more to keep you lubricated and the back of your skull leaned on the backrest. Her gaze at your shaft remains as if it’s a sculpture she’s an artist trying to perfect and savor at the same time. You can only groan and giggle to the levels of stimulation rising from your member. She’s such a perfect goddess, your mind spurts, contrasting your dirtier lips, mumbling. “Fuck, you’re fucking… Flawless… Fffffmmmh!” Your fiancée’s mouth has made you fouler than you usually speak, and it’s giving her the fuel she needs to giving sucking on you for longer than she usually can.

Within over six minutes of your hog being sucked on by Jinsol has brought you to a heavenly plane, much like their concerts, especially whenever she gives you several winks and gazes of longing from the stage whenever you least expect it. It’s the same with the few winks she’s been giving you now on the floor.

After doing your best to hold it in, your trembling cock fires the first barrage of semen straight at Jinsol’s face. Splattered across her lower face and upper chest. Slowing down your breathing, you lean in and rest on her chest, which she welcomes with open arms, somewhat cradling you with soft hums and coos, now that you’re both seated. “You… You did perfect…ly. Thank you,” you muttered weakly. “So much…”

“Anything for my manager-nim…” Motivated by her phenomenal blowjob, you cup Jinsol’s chin and kiss her with a surge of carnal aggression. Jinsol was almost taken aback, but her surprise incites another sense of arousal with how forward you acted. While your lips lock and twist, your fingers trail her curves, down to her scrumptious thighs, which you give a brief squeeze, and make their stop on her cooch, feeling a wet spot through the veils of her jogger shorts. “It’s sooo… Nice,” she howls into your kiss.

At the same time she starts mumbling praises, you become determined to make it nicer for her. You wrap your left arm around her shoulder, leaving your fingers to begin their work on lubricating her with a smooth rub. In moments like these are when you realize how much you love your beloved’s lips, and her tongue even, as much as the rest of her body, unable to completely part them, relying on your sense of touch to slide your hand under the hem of her shirt and inserting two of your fingers through her tight entrance, before adding a third. Meanwhile, your thumb stays outside to keep her clit entertained.

Frenching Jinsol and fingering her on this sofa and delicately holding her like she’s a string instrument weirdly feels like a romantic moment, but any signs of your rational thoughts are currently silent under the dominance of your primal instincts. With each quick rub on her clit down to her labia before moving back inside her pussy, each note you make with her vulva allows her to keep howling and crying a seraphic melody that is on par with her live performances. You’re feeling not just lucky everyday, but you’re also grateful you get to do something that’s exclusive for her.

It takes five whole minutes of going back and forth between her most sensitive spots, and out of her pussy, until you feel her hand hold onto your wrist, locking it in place with fingering her entrance as fast and as long as you can. At the thirtieth second, the woman lets out her final moan of this session, gushing out her juices. A broken dam, smearing most of your hand with her essence. Your tongue scrapes off the juice on your thumb, taking delight in the sweet taste and slippery texture of her nectar, like you often would whenever one of you is lustful enough to take the other to somewhere isolated.

Still laying on her back after your breathtaking service, you take the chance to kiss her sharp and sweet jawline, before moving down to her neck and collarbone, licking out her sweat mixed with your splattered cum. With your fingers also soaked in her juices, Jinsol pulls your hand to her mouth and starts slobbering on it without a word. You thought of finishing it off yourself, but this sight is much better. She pulls you to your fingers, making you lick off her remaining juices right in front of her, similar to when you’re sharing an ice cream. Hearing her giggles throughout your lickings provokes you to clash against her mouth in between your fingers. You don’t stop until your hand has been cleaned with both your saliva.

And yet, just as you thought things were over, Jinsol follows her carnal instinct and takes your lips with more aggression. You make out for five seconds before your lips part. “Still hungry, noona?” you ask her if this was enough to feed her early cravings.

“Hungrier than ever,” she exhales, triggering a guffaw from you. Just as you expected.

Going back to her lips, you ought to take things to the next step after this point, having given each other the foreplay to keep yourselves going while the sun is still asleep.

Deep down, you’re itching to give her the same treatment, laying her on the sofa and eating her up like nyotaimori. However, the ticking clock on the wall catches you off guard for a second. “I believe everyone will be awake pretty soon.”

“Shit... Majayo.” She bites her lower lip, dismayed by this fact. “Time really flew by fast.” You shouldn’t have brought it up, but your manager's sense made you aware.

“Yeah… But I’ll try to make this worth our time,” you whisper back, bringing her back into the rhythm of your tension by nibbling on her collarbone. You yourself can’t stop yourself from tasting her, thirsting to taste her even longer. “If you want to, noona…”

Challenged by the running clock, neither of you does not bother to waste any second. You both pull yourselves into each other's lips while your libidos burn faster, allowing yourselves to undress each other within a minute. Jinsol takes off your shirt and tosses it right into the sofa, leaving you naked for her to drool over while you get through the many temptations of kissing her lips by stripping down her oversized concert shirt on the floor until she’s left with her bra. While locked with her lips, your fingers return to her still dripping pussy. Giving it another smooth rub, she lets out a hoarse moan, before mumbling, “Fuck, Kwangsun-ie…” With her eyes shut, she can only imagine and recall your length and girth inside her walls. “I really can’t wait… anymore.”

Neither can you. “I hear you,” you mumble with a grin. You give her another kiss before helping her unclasp her bra, taking fifteen seconds to savor her skin. Holding onto her legs, you flex your core and biceps, and, in a burst of vigor, exert enough strength to lift Jinsol off the floor. Feeling your next act fulfilling her plea, she quickly wraps them around your hips. At the same moment, your cock slides into her cunt as you pull her, closing the space between you. Every step you take leads closer to her room, which catches her attention.

“Not inside, babe,” she makes sure you catch her suggestion after lightly tapping your shoulder. “The room, I mean… We don’t have to head inside.” She giggles right after hearing herself. She didn’t have to clarify what she meant, yet her craving made her.

“Hmm?” You stop your tracks. “What’s wrong with it, noona?” Your brain goes back to manager mode. “Does something still need to be cleaned or..?”

“Aniya… It just reeks of liquor in there,” she lets out a slight pout, clenching her teeth and closing her eyes from the shivers you brought her, simply from hearing that term.

“I really don’t care about that.” You found her reasoning amusing and adorable. “But I’m guessing you have a better suggestion in mind?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she nods slowly. Her fingers trail on your arms, wanting to get a better feel of your muscles in action. “We can just do it here, Manager-nim…”

“Here?” Outside your bedroom, you take a quick look around your hotel room. There is not much special to see, except for a legless blue sofa, two different tables and a counter. But none of these spots are anything new to the both of you, so any of it will do, as Jinsol lets you make the first call at daybreak. For this beautiful and exceptional woman, you ought to make this special somehow.

“I mean, why not?” She leans closer to your ear, making you stop your quick inspection. “It’s not like we don’t spend most of our time back home in bed, right?”

“Touché,” you chuckle, right before a fresher idea seeps into your lust-filled brain makes you grin and tell her, “Hang on tight, Miss JinSoul.”

The woman giggles at your retort, letting out an enticing moan as you give one more thrust inside her walls, your tip rubbing onto her cervix a second time. This time, you raise her until her head levels with yours. Interlocking each of your arms under her legs and your palms under her ass cheeks for better comfort, you begin to pounder her at a faster pace. The pleasure you felt from her mouth now doubles with every thrust, such an elevating sensation is now connecting to hers with how deep your shaft rams in and out of her. Your speed forces Jinsol to wrap her arms around your neck, her second seat belt for this ride you’re taking her to.

“You really know—” she gasps out next to your left ear, keeping her eyes open through the surges of stimulation building up down her most sensitive zones, spreading across her breasts and muscles, it causes her to dig her sharp jaw down your shoulder. Oddly enough, it adds a pleasurable sensation to you in a similar way to a shoulder massage, almost slowing your pounding. “Just where… to fuck…iiing—touch me, Manager-nim. Ngaaaaauuuugggh!”

“Of course, babe,” you huff with a chortle, slowly giving more power to your thrusts while you pound her on the wall. “Anything… for my… perfect—fuckiiiiiing—idol…”

You savor each minute, traveling from corner to corner of the room without dropping her. When you almost lose balance, you take her to the counter so she can sit down and, seeing your nonstop effort, lifts her breast for you to suck on. Your thrusts take intervals of hastening and slowing down your pace, ensuring that you can witness her arching her back, sticking her tongue out, and rolling her eyes to the back of her head. “Yeeeeeeeees, babe!” she gasps, invigorated by how hard you suckle her tits while sniffing on her scent, from sweat to her candy perfume. “I’mauugggh… I’m really deli…cious… Am… I not?”

“You’re the tas--tiest!” you grunt to her ear. Of course, this little room tour requires you more strength and endurance to keep yourselves in this mobile position, yet it’s always been worth the challenge. The counterbalance between giving and receiving pleasure from each other only draws out your passionate morning for much longer than you planned. Once a minute passes, you lift and take her from wall to wall, even reaching both of your rooms, and still, you don’t finish there. You thrust as hard and as long as you can, while Jinsol leaves her mark on your upper body with her licks and nibbles.

Ten minutes in, your hands have made their mark on her cheeks the longer you squeeze, and yet Jinsol does not make you stop with her ecstatic moans and lust-driven laughter, doing her best to keep her cries down. At this moment, the heat shared between your bodies has reached its boiling point. Each of the fluids flowing through your nethers give you a withstanding pressure which you can barely contain the longer your throbbing cock hardens and pumps inside her walls.

Your legs finally begin to sore and shudder, prompting you to slowly walk yourselves back to the sofa, your step getting slower and heavier than the last. As you reach the sofa, you gently lay Jinsol on the middle of the high-grade leather seat. Tightening her legs around your waist, you give your last thrusts inside her. The “lids” on your tip and her entrance start to spurt and spill its respective essence inside her. The patience on your trembling bodies is wearing thin, and one of you should start giving a heads up. “I’m clo--ck—close,” you choke on your own spit and words while trying to warn her.

“Me--me too,” Jinsol garbles, and in a sense of panic and urgency, you follow your rationale and try to pull out of her cunt, but she only tightens her grip around you, digging her nails on your skin, which gives you one stingy and gratifying sensation.

“Gwen…chana… I brought pills, member?” she mutters weakly, her drained smile washing over you in relief. You almost forget that. Well, for a moment, you actually forgot she often brings them. Note to yourself, you’re gonna have to trust each other more, even in the littlest of things. “Mmgggnnnhh… I need you warm inside-uh me!”

It takes one slow and robust thrust before you let go of the pressure off your manhood, quickly flooding and filling Jinsol’s womb with your seed. Having already come a couple of times earlier, the woman’s final wave of juices clash with yours, dripping out her cunt. Her head thuds into the soft surface, gently tapping your skin as she laughs hysterically. Something that’s odd to some is basically music to you with how much you adore her.

In the afterglow of your sweet and crazy lovemaking, your forehead rests on Jinsol’s. And wanting to keep your weight off her, you try to get up from the couch, only for her to pull you back to her. Thanks to your knees supporting yourself on the couch, she remains comfortable under your embrace. She initiates a kiss one more time, feeling you fire a little more cum inside her. Even from the balcony, the rays of the sun inevitably reach your skin. It’s not as beautiful as the one from the west coast, but the light nevertheless gives you a soothing sensation, and not an irritating one, thanks to the solar control in the glass doors. From the furniture, you both take a quick glance at the sky glowing into bright orange before your heads turn to take a good look at each other, soaked in your sweat and feeling your heartbeats racing on each other’s chest.

Carefully, you pull your cock out of her entrance, dripping a few drops of semen on her thighs and stomach. “That’s one way to start the morning,” you mumble, looking down at her with an uncontrolled grin and your eyes squinted until you’ve caught your breath and regained your thinking. You didn’t notice how the skies have already brightened up.

“It sure is,” Jinsol bursts out in laughter with you, fizzing out the remainder of her libido while clinging onto your arms. Caressing your cheek, her eyes have a glint of playfulness left despite her ragged breath. “We could get used to this… A little more often.”

“I think we can get that arranged,” you chuckle, bringing out a pinch of your manager voice in your tone, which swoons over her. Finding relaxation in the slow exchange of your breaths, you don’t hesitate to fix her disheveled hair. “I love you, Jinsol-noona…”

She accepts your lips for another quicker, albeit just as sweet kiss. Once your lips part, you find each other with grins of endearment. “I love you too, Kwangsun-ie... So much.”

You think of spooning or cuddling with her on the sofa, up until you three thumps struck the door, followed by a familiar light voice. “Unnie! Manager-oppa!” Yerim’s sparkling voice yells from the outside, slightly muffled by the wooden door. “Are you guys still fucking in there or what? ‘Cause I doubt you’re still asleep—”

“Yerim-ah, keep it down! There are other people here, you know?” Haseul’s warning follows in a much softer yet more commanding tone. “Guys, don’t listen to her,” she mumbles to you, more mellow and cordial. “Just take your time to fix yourselves...”

You immediately reach for your shorts hanging on the table next to you, realizing you still have a lot of jobs to do on your last day in the Western hemisphere, at least for a long while.

“C’mon, unnie. We gotta head to Fashion Island later, you know!” the younger woman whines while her trivial argument with Haseul ensues outside.

“I’ll get the door,” you tell Jinsol. After exchanging a hearty chuckle, you get up from the sofa first and help Jinsol sit down to dress and tidy up. Juggling between walking to the door and wearing your shirt, you were able to get there. Jinsol catches up after you toss her shirt at her with precision.

“Fashion Island again?” your fiancée yells behind you, tying her hair up with a black rubber band. You muffle your laughter with your hand. “Didn’t we go there last time?”

“Yeah, but they got new launches, and we don’t wanna miss out, so you two better get your asses at the lounge in ten minutes!”

Jinsol opens the door, ready to face the younger member. “Oh, so you’re a part-time manager now?”

“Yeah!” Yerim maintains her grumpy attitude, feeling as if she’s got the upper hand over you two. “You guys may have been boning here, but I’m sure I even woke up a lot earlier than you and oppa.”

Jinsol shakes her head, unable to hold her laughter alongside Haseul. “I assure you, Yerim-ah… You did not.”

“Whatever…” she lets out a chortle. “So are you guys coming downstairs or not?”

“We still have ten minutes,” Jinsol makes her point, hoping to stay here a little longer.

“Fifteen, actually,” you correct, just having taken a quick peek on your phone. All three are intrigued. “We just got a text from daepyonim… Our flight’s rescheduled to four hours later, so we can stay here a little longer before we can make our last stops.” Such news makes Jinsol take your unoccupied hand as her eyes glow.

“Really?” Haseul’s face brightened all the same at your live update. “Oh, wow.”

“Yeah,” you elaborate, resting your hands on your lap. “I think everyone’s readjusting things ‘cause of the contract expiration... Plus, all of your old members are here too, I think the hotel’s preparing a little farewell breakfast of some sorts…”

“How’d that happen?” Yerim wobbles her head, taken aback by the surprise.

“I only heard that a couple of managers and some staff here are Orbits,” you explain.

“Like they’re Or—” Haseul attempts to clarify, alongside a nod from Yerim.

“Like Orbits, Orbits, yeah…” Fortunately for them, you expect this kind of question more often from your personal social circle. “The first followed the group since, like, your first comeback. Some of them don’t follow as much, but they still listen to your newer stuff.”

“I guess that answers our question last night, unnies,” Yerim cheers up, clapping once.

“What question?” You wonder, now only realizing that you’re the odd one out among them. “I, uhh, don’t mean to pry…”

“It’s fine, oppa,” she assures you. “It's just some hunky dongpo was hitting things off with Chaewon-unnie in the lounge last night… And I think we’re the same age, too, if I'm not mistaken.” She puts her index finger under her chin. “Or is it Yeojin-ie’s? Hmmm…”

“Hunk? Choi Yerim, you know you’re married, right?” Tilting her head to the left, Jinsol reminds the younger woman with a raised eyebrow and a smirk while still being curious.

“Unnie, I love my hubbie.” Yerim crosses her arm, pouting at her playful suspicion. “Just trying to spill the tea… That’s how Jungie-unnie describes him. Heck, Hyeju’s impressed with him, the same Son Hyeju-yah we know, like that’s how fascinating the situation is.”

“Okay, okay, I believe you and appreciate the tea, but you tell us about it later,” Jinsol’s natural type of leadership still awes you with admiration and adoration for her, even if it's exemplified in the most trivial situations. “You know, when all of us are together.”

“Exactly… And that means we’re having a fancy breakfast later, right?” Haseul smoothly brings you all back to the original topic, which you went along well with. “Did I get that right, Kwangsun-ah?”

“Pretty much… But that’s just a heads-up, Haseul-ssi, I mean, noona…” Your sudden correction of wording and clearing of your throat cracks a chortle from Jinsol. “You can tell the others, but pleeeease don’t make it too obvious to the staff once you reach the lounge.”

“Arasseo…” The older woman snickers, exchanging a teasing stare with your fiancée. “That’s really sweet of them, actually… I’ll let everyone know in our dantokbang.”

“We’ll head downstairs in ten minutes,” Jinsol rapidly raises both eyebrows, which only you failed to notice. You look back to her too late; she only meets you with a wide smile.

“Sooooo, that means, we should go…” Haseul nudges Yerim’s shoulder with a light titter. “Thanks for the update, Kwangsun-ah.”

You bow to them, which they reciprocate by instinct. “No problem, Haseul-noona.” Looking back, you also owe her for being one of the first to believe in your love for Jinsol, similar to you with your older siblings and closest friends.

Yerim’s hands sway together in slight embarrassment. “I suppose, y’all can still have fun for now…” She turns to you and bows a second time with a frown. “Mianhaeyo, oppa...”

“It’s fine, Yerim-ah…” With a pursed smile, you give her shoulder a couple of light taps. “You girls should probably just chill for a while. You all had the busiest month in a long while. You deserve a long rest… Longer than what you’re getting, even.”

“Gomawoyo... And we will,” Haseul also speaks for herself and Yerim, pulling her closer like a parent to her shy child. The younger member beams at your reassurance. Being a manager means you’ll have to look after all of these idols. Thankfully, they also end up getting a good friend to confide in from time to time. “We’ll head back to our rooms.”

“Take care, unnie, Yerim-ie,” Jinsol huddles them into a hug. “I’ll see you girls later.” You wave them farewell before closing the door while hearing some of their banter.

“You realize your husband might be waiting for you in your room by now,” Haseul murmurs to Yerim while resting her hands on her shoulders from behind; they both rush outside the hall of the floor to the elevator.

“Aniya, aniya, unnie… I’m sure his snores are still filling up the room,” the younger woman tries to tell her otherwise. “I guess I still have little time to surprise him.”

Back inside your room, you face Jinsol with a smile mirroring hers. “So, noona, do you wanna shower first?” you ask your beloved. “I’ll clean up our little mess here for a bit.”

She pulls you closer, wrapping your waist with her long arms. “We can just do that later and get in together… I may not be able to stay close to you… Not until the flight.”

Her pouting expression has always made your heart melt. “Well, I’m pretty sure we can stay close the whole trip. Physically,” Your technical answer brings a swift giggle to her. “But for your offer… How can I say no to that?”

You can tell that something’s been lingering on her mind since she chatted with them. It’s a little mysterious, mischievous even. “Okay, but, um, you know, I was thinking…”

“Yeah?” you tilt her head to the right, encouraging her to confess her alluring thoughts.

“I wouldn’t mind if you start using… Less honorifics with me every now and then.”

Your eyes light up. You even feel a little throb down on your flaccid member. “Jinjja?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she hums, biting her lower lip with her sharp, sultry gaze locked on you.

“That’s—Wait…” Feeling how it sounds too good to be true, your hunches warn you of a possible reason for her tempting suggestion. Your domineering allure becomes invaded by some concern for her. “It’s not about what I called Haseul-noona earlier, is it?”

“Not…” Her eyes avoided yours for a second, wandering from left to right to figure out how to phrase it. Nevertheless, she doesn’t wanna lie to herself, nor to you. “—Entirely.”

“Come on, noona…” You pepper kisses into her cheeks, going down to her right hand. “That doesn’t make you jealous, does it? I mean, I’ve also called you noona before, as much as I call Haseul or Jungeun… Even Vivi, Sooyoung, and Jiwoo insisted on it, and I’ve rarely met them.”

“I know, I know. But I’m not bothered by that,” she snickers from embarrassment. “We know you had time with some of them, and even before that, you were already close… I also met your sisters…” She rubs her nape. “It's more on myself. Just wondering about the idea that maybe we can do a little bit of switching things up next time, you know?”

Sensing the sincerity in her look and words, you shake your head with a chuckle of both disbelief and fascination. There’s nothing for you to worry about. Not in this chapter of your lives. “Huh. Well, I guess…” You inch closer, resting the tip of your nose with her. “There’s still a lot I can look forward to before the wedding, Jinsol-ah…”

“Oh, you have no idea what you’re in for, Kwangsun-ie,” she whispers deep in your ear.

Her hot breath striking your ear spirals into your spine. In the seconds that follow, your cock naturally hardens as a response to her, shortly before you feel her fingers wrapping around your crotch. “Heh… I, uh, I tend to love most surprises, so I’m think I can han—”

Feeling an enticing sense of heat from your anticipation, Jinsol giggles and pounces on your lips, slowly tiptoeing and wrapping her arms around you. Your hands travel down her leg, giving her the signal to jump and wrap them around your hips as you catch her bottom. Having regained your strength, you carry your beloved and, with your lips still dancing, walk yourselves to the bathroom, cherishing half of the additional ten minutes given to you, before going about your day.

= = =

I am not a longtime fan/stan of LOONA, but I really admire their talent and music in general, especially the post-BBC units. I missed a lot of great stuff when they first came out, even though I was familiar with some memes related to them, but I'm happy they've made quite left a mark on kpop, and most of them are still active. with that, I don't have a bias, considering they're simply all stunners, but JinSoul just happens to catch my eye the most. I think mintwithchoco's loonathesmut series might've been an influence on why I wrote this fic this way, without the stepsibling aspect, of course. plus, noona JinSoul fics are rare outside that series (maybe I'm wrong), so like, I couldn't help it lmao.

alongside JinSoul, I also considered writing Choerry before this, but maybe I'll just save it for another time. there's a tease here, after all. I thought if I could've made this a little longer, but I like how this turns out. not all fics have to be a full-on series. already got a lot of that on my plate lol. they can have continuations in the future if I'm tempted.

Once inside your home, Heejin finally gets comfortable. She hangs her coat on the rack before settling on the couch. You land beside her, where she suddenly starts nestling under your arm. “Still cold?” you joke. “Or do you just want a hug?”

“Maybe a bit of both?” She says with a smile. You relent, pulling her onto your lap while your arms wrap around her waist. She nuzzles her face against the crook of your neck as she adjusts the rest of her body. She settles in a cradling position, with her arms wrapped around your neck. “I love your hugs. They always make me feel warm.”

You sit in silence as you and Heejin cuddle, your body heat adding to the warmth of the fireplace. After a few months of being with her, you’re still in utter disbelief that you met an actual vampire, even more so with the fact that they’re real. Still what surprised you was that they aren’t as terrifying as you thought they would be. Or, at the very least, Heejin isn’t.

“So, what other rules do you actually have to follow?” You ask her as you grew bored of watching Chucky for the millionth time since you started dating. But it’s her favorite movie so you’re not going to complain. “I mean, aside from the constant need for an invitation into a home?”

“The sunlight rule is real.” Heejin answers. “Though it won’t kill us. Or make that sparkly shit from twilight. It just hurts a little bit. Like millions of mosquito bites at the same time.”

“That doesn’t sound like a little bit. What about garlic?” “Painfully yes. And to think I loved having Aglio Olio back when I was still human.” “What about crosses?” “50/50. Some of us still practice considering it wasn’t our choice to be turned. Maybe those that really get into the demonic aspect are the only ones affected.” “Wow. So rules really are rules for you guys, huh?” “Yeah. Pretty much.” “And to think I had such an irrational fear for vampires before I met you.” “I wouldn’t say that was an irrational fear, babe. There are some bad ones out there.” “Yeah well I’m not afraid of them. Especially after meeting you.” You say as you hold on to her chin and have her look up to you. She gives you a bright smile. “It helps that somehow you’re the first ever human that’s actually immune to all of our powers.” Heejin says as she swings her leg over your lap. “Impervious to our hypnotism. A bite doesn’t turn you. You really lucked out didn’t you?” She says as she straddles you, pushing you on to your back on the couch.

“I only lucked out when I met you, Heejin.” You say as you try to sit up. She uses her supernatural strength to push you down again. Her hands ghost over your arms before they grab hold of your wrists. She pins them to the couch above your head, nearly burying them into the cushions. She lays her head on your chest, getting to hear your heart is beating faster, not out of fear, but of anticipation. She raises her head, looks deep into your eyes before her mouth grows into a smile. As she presents to you her toothy grin, you can see her canines slowly grow. “Hungry?” You ask her. She gives you a subtle nod. “Grab a Snickers”  You angle your face to one side, presenting your neck. You can see her mouth water as she waits for your consent, enough encouragement for you to give it.

“Go.” It was only one word that came from your mouth, but the weight that it lifted off of Heejin felt like the entire world. In a split second she had latched on to your neck. Her fangs dig deep into your flesh. The moment your blood enters her mouth, her eyes go red with bloodlust. Was it painful? Sure. But only for a moment. Even if you did try to fight her, you wouldn’t be able to as she uses her strength to keep you pinned down. But you never wanted to. Not even from the first time she did it. The pain was temporary, but the pleasure that followed was something you ended up getting addicted to. A rush of adrenaline and serotonin that you find yourself chasing after every single day. Clinging to the singular source that could give it to you. Clinging to Heejin.

When she has her fill, Heejin pulls away from your neck. In the wake of her hunger are visible bite marks on your flesh, along with a few drips of your blood around the bite. Some of it was evident on her mouth as well. She wipes the traces off her mouth with her hand, before she notices your deep and heavy breaths. “I didn’t hurt you, right?” She asks you worriedly, her thumb brushing over the bite mark on your neck. A shriek escapes her mouth as you suddenly over power her. You manage to sit up, your hands exchanging places as you hold her wrists now. Your face gets close to hers, your hot breath crashing into her ice-cold skin. You lean and whisper to her your reply that makes the immortal shudder with anticipation. 

“Never.”

Heejin doesn’t get a chance to reply as you crash your lips onto hers. Now, you know at any moment she can stop this. She can flick you away with just one finger if she wants to. But she doesn’t. She indulges your desire for momentary control, enjoys it when she plays along and surrenders to your whims. You know she’s just letting you, but you’re going to make it worth your while. For the both of you.

As the two of you continue to kiss, you manage to push Heejin onto her back and pin her against the couch. The kiss grows erratic. There’s desperation in your actions. Fueled by the built up tension and arousal from when she was feeding from your neck. With all the energy you bring, she matches it like it’s second nature. Her fangs retract, but leave just enough to mark your lower lip when she bites you while making out. She shows flashes of her strength, guiding your hands to where she wants you to place them. Right now, she leads your fingers to dig into her waist. Your thumbs sinking into her well toned abs. If a passerby would see this scene right now, they would mistake you for the blood hungry monster. It was a complete 180 of how you and Heejin were just mere moments ago. If she was the one who was earlier hungry and filled with bloodlust, now it’s you who was hungry for her and desperate to fulfill your own lust.

For a quick moment, Heejin pulls away from the kiss. You’re left a panting wreck, desperate to get your lips back onto her. She holds your back in order to say what’s on her mind.

“I’ve already had my fill.” She says as she holds your cheek. She caresses you with her thumb. “Now, it’s your turn.” Ironically, having your fill would be you filling her up. 

In a last show of strength, Heejin makes quick work of her clothes, tearing them off her and exposing her lean and perfect body to you. She doesn’t let you waste time with your own clothes as she tears them off of you too. With both of your naked figures fully uncovered, you’re both able to get straight to business.

Heejin once again surrenders to your control, indulging your illusion of momentary power. She melts into your touch letting you guide your entangled bodies on the couch. You carry her up, letting her head rest on one of the throw pillows for her comfort. Normally, you’d happily eat her out before going any further, but right now her work on your neck has you too riled up. Now, you’re desperate for more than just her lips. You're hungry for your own release, which would preferably be inside of her.

Before either of you could get carried away with trying to swallow each other whole, you pull away just enough for Heejin to get the message. She spreads her legs, her lower lips spreading in an inviting fashion. You grab hold of your length, aim it and let it nestle at her entrance before you start easing into her. A shared moan escapes from the both of you, one that is immediately muffled as she pulls you into another kiss. You keep pushing until you feel yourself hilt inside her, your tip pressing against the entrance of her womb. The second the two make contact, you can feel Heejin lose a bit of control. Her fangs extend a bit, digging deeper into your lips whenever she bites your lips during the kiss. You feel yourself start to lose control as well, your hips moving on their own with a relentless pace. Repeatedly plunging into Heejin with no rhythm or rhyme. For a while you stifle her moans by letting them escape into your mouth, but you decide to pull away and leave your own marks on her neck to match the ones she left on you. Her moans freely escape to fill the room, your grunts, on the other hand, crash against her flesh.

To say your actions grew erratic would be a lie, since you already started with an erratic tempo. Each time you bottom out into Heejin, your tip presses on to her cervix. Normally, you’d be worried that you were being too rough. However, the sound of her moans and whimpers has you thinking something else. Her actions match your intensity, pulling your hair while you kiss, lick and bite the flesh of her neck washes any and all doubts away. She can take whatever you give her. She wants to take it. 

With every thrust, you can feel Heejin’s walls spasm and contort around your length. Each time you fill her up, her walls slowly turn her pussy into a perfect mold that matches your dick. Soon, her inner walls start to spasm more often. Coupled with the whimpers and moans escaping from her being at max volume, you had an idea that she was close. “Fuck— faster! I’m close! I’m close!”

Well, now you know she was close. Though you weren’t far behind her either. 

You indulge Heejin’s request, going even faster than whatever erratic speed you were going. Your grip on her wrists tighten as you continue to mark her neck. You get your lips on every single inch of her flesh, tongue darting and tasting the salty pools of her sweat (another new tidbit you learned today, vampires sweat during sex). Your mouth travels all over her shoulders and neck, leaving temporary marks that heal faster than those on humans. You even reach low enough to capture one of her exposed nipples, earning a groan from her when your tongue flicks at her swollen nub. All the sensations work together as a symphony that pushes Heejin over the edge.

Heejin’s mouth is left ajar as a mixture of a moan and cry escapes her mouth. You can feel her tense up under you, her strength showing just enough that it has you putting more effort in holding her down. Her hips buck against you. Her walls start contracting around you. The noises from her mouth suddenly stop, but the searing pain on your shoulder provides the answer why. In her throes of pleasure, her fangs extend once again before she latches on to your shoulder. Now, there’s no major vein or artery there. No big source of blood. But she’s found comfort in biting on your muscle, another avenue of release as she rides out her high. The momentary sharp pain, however, is what gets you to your peak. “Fuck me… Heejin! I’m— ARGH” You’re unable to finish your warning as she bites down harder. Though that was already a prior agreement. She knows you’re about to unravel. She knows you can’t pull out. She wants it inside. So go. Cum.

So, you do. You let go and defer any and all attempts to hold back. You feel your dick pulsate inside of Heejin. Each time releasing a stream of cum. While you flood her womb, she finally relents and releases your shoulder. The flurry of moans that escape both of your mouths fill the living room.

After a while, you both finally come down from your shared high. Your labored breaths begin to slow down, though still desperate to get more oxygen in your lungs. Your eyes meet. Heejin’s, blood red with bloodlust. Yours wide from both pain and pleasure. Sparks fly in the short distance between the two of you before you both lean in another kiss. You taste a bit of your blood before your senses are filled with just Heejin. It fuels the kiss, making it hungrier as if you two didn’t just have sex. 

Still, the fatigue catches up with you. You pull away with some of your blood staining the area around your mouth. Heejin forms a soft smile. You eventually manage to muster up some strength to pull out and plop beside her on the couch. Within a second of getting comfortable she snuggles up beside you once again, finding warmth and comfort under your arm. You pull a blanket over the two of you before giving her a quick kiss on her forehead. Silence once again conquers the living room, the two of you sitting there and resting in each other’s presence.

“So…” You break the silence. “You really can’t eat garlic?” “I would be having aglio olio right now if I can!”

The both of you laugh before the silence sets in again. In that moment, you can feel her start to relax, sinking into the warmth of your hug. You know she’s slowly losing consciousness, the exact opposite of what’s expected from a creature of the night. In her last few waking moments, you whisper one last declaration that gets her mouth to curl into a soft smile. “I love you, Heejin.”

You bring her in tighter, sharing your warmth with the cold, undead being. You surrender to the fatigue and lose consciousness yourself. Your last lingering thoughts were about your earlier fears. Facing them now seems textbook. Easy. Especially with Heejin by your side. Now you know they were never really terrifying. They were what they have always been, and always will be. 

You don’t notice her specifically at first. There are three or four people who rotate behind the counter, and in those early weeks they all blur into the same polite smile and the same rehearsed gamsahamnida. But somewhere around the third week, you start recognizing a pattern in the rotation. She works mornings. Monday through Friday, almost always. Blonde hair pulled up in a ponytail, bangs across her forehead, a face that looks like it belongs somewhere more interesting than behind an espresso machine.

She’s quiet. Not unfriendly—she smiles when she takes your order, and it’s a real smile, not the customer-service kind that starts and stops at the mouth. But she doesn’t make small talk. Doesn’t ask how your day is going. Doesn’t try to upsell pastries. She takes the order, makes the drink, writes something on the cup, slides it across the counter. Done.

You appreciate the efficiency. You appreciate not having to fumble through pleasantries you don’t have the vocabulary for yet.

It takes about a month before you realize she’s been watching you too.

Not in an obvious way. You catch it in small things—the way she’ll glance up when you walk through the door, a half-second recognition before she drops her eyes back to whatever she’s doing. The way she starts reaching for a cup before you’ve even reached the counter on days when the line is short. The way she pauses, just slightly, pen hovering over the cup, as if she’s thinking about what she’s about to write.

You figure she’s just good at her job. Baristas learn regulars. That’s how it works.

Then one morning, your coworker Jun—one of the few on your team who speaks enough English to be dangerous—comes with you.

"You come here every day?" he asks, looking around the small shop with mild interest.

"Pretty much."

"What do you usually get?"

"Depends on the day."

Jun gives you a look like that’s not an answer, and you shrug because you don’t know how to explain it in a way that doesn’t sound weird. The truth is your order has become a kind of barometer, a shorthand for how you’re feeling that you didn’t consciously develop. Black coffee when the day ahead is dense with work and you need to be sharp—something bold, no sweetness, just the clean bitter bite of arabica against your tongue. A latte when you woke up feeling good, when the city felt a little less foreign, when you actually understood most of what the cab driver said—the warmth of steamed milk softening the espresso into something gentle, drinkable, forgiving. An espresso—small, bitter, over quick—when things are heavy. When you stayed up too late staring at your apartment ceiling wondering what you’re doing here. When you missed home in a way that sits in your chest like a stone.

You don’t think about it as a pattern. But she does.

You know this because on a Thursday—a black coffee Thursday, meetings stacked from nine to five, your Korean phrasebook open on your phone under the conference table like a cheat sheet—she slides your cup across the counter and you see what she’s written.

Not your name. She always writes something that’s almost your name but not quite, letters rearranged or swapped in a way that suggests she heard it once and is working from a half-memory. You’ve never corrected her. It doesn’t bother you. It’s kind of endearing, actually, this mangled version of yourself that exists only on coffee cups.

But today, underneath the misspelled name, she’s drawn a small flexed arm. A tiny bicep emoji, rendered in Sharpie.

You look up. She’s already helping the next customer, but there’s the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth. Like she knows you’re looking.

You take your coffee. You go to your meetings. You survive them.

And on the walk back to your apartment that night, you realize you’re still thinking about a drawing on a cup.

❤︎

The next morning is a latte morning. You slept well. You understood a joke in the elevator. Small victories.

She has your drink ready before you reach the counter, and when she slides it across, there’s a tiny sun drawn next to the misspelled name.

"How did you know?" you ask. In English, because your Korean isn’t ready for this question.

She blinks at you. Tilts her head slightly. "Hm?"

"The—" You gesture vaguely at the cup, at the sun, at the whole impossible thing she’s apparently been doing. "How did you know I wanted a latte today?"

She looks at you for a moment, and something in her expression shifts. Not surprise, exactly. More like she’s deciding something.

"You look like latte today," she says. In English. Accented, careful, but clear.

You stare at her.

"You speak English?"

She holds up her hand, thumb and forefinger close together. "Little bit." Then, quieter: "Your face is different. Latte days, espresso days. Is different."

You don’t know what to say to that. Someone you’ve never had a real conversation with has been reading you more accurately than anyone in your life right now, and she’s been doing it through coffee orders and whatever crosses your face in the thirty seconds between the door and the counter.

"That’s…" You laugh. Not because it’s funny but because it’s disarming. "That’s kind of terrifying."

She smiles. Really smiles. It changes her whole face—pushes her cheeks up, narrows her eyes into crescents, makes her look younger and warmer and like someone you want to keep talking to. There’s something about the way the morning light catches her face when she smiles like that. It reminds you of the color of honey held up to a window—golden, translucent, warm in a way that has nothing to do with temperature.

"Terrifying," she repeats, testing the word. "I don’t know this word."

"It means scary. But in a good way. I think."

"Scary good?" She looks skeptical.

"Yeah. Like—you’re good at reading people. That’s scary."

She considers this, then nods once, satisfied. "Scary good. Okay. I keep this."

The person behind you clears their throat. You take your latte and step aside. She’s already moving to the next order, ponytail swinging as she turns.

But when you glance back from the door, she’s watching you leave. And the smile hasn’t fully gone away.

❤︎

You try Korean the next time.

You’ve been practicing. Not for her specifically—or at least that’s what you tell yourself—but because the language classes your company arranged meet twice a week and you’ve been paying more attention lately. You learned how to say how long have you worked here and where are you from and your coffee is really good, and you’ve been repeating them in your apartment like prayers.

So on a Wednesday—latte Wednesday, second one this week, things have been okay—you step up to the counter and say, in your best Korean, "Have you been working here for long?"

At least, that’s what you mean to say. What comes out is something closer to have you been long here working, which is grammatically backwards and probably sounds like a malfunctioning translation app.

She stares at you.

"Sorry," you say immediately, switching to English. "My Korean is—"

"No, no." She waves her hand, and then she laughs. It’s a small sound, almost private, like she didn’t mean to let it out. "I understand. It’s okay. Your Korean is…" She searches for the word. "Cute."

"Cute is not what I was going for."

"What were you going for?"

"Competent. Professional. Maybe even impressive."

She shakes her head slowly, lips pressed together like she’s trying not to laugh again. "No. Cute."

"Great."

"Don’t worry." She leans her elbows on the counter, and it’s the most relaxed you’ve ever seen her at work. "My Korean is also not so good."

This catches you off guard. "Wait—you’re not Korean?"

"No." She taps her nametag. It says Vivi. "I’m from Hong Kong."

"Hong Kong?"

"Mm. My Korean is…" She makes a seesawing gesture with her hand. "Okay. Not perfect. I still say things wrong sometimes. People are polite about it, but I know."

Something unlocks between you. Not dramatically—it’s not a movie moment. But the air changes. Two people fumbling through the same foreign city in a language that doesn’t quite fit either of them, and suddenly the distance between the counter and the customer isn’t quite as wide.

"How long have you been in Korea?" you ask.

"A long time." Something flickers across her face. "Many years. Since I was young. But still…" She shrugs. "Still not home. You know?"

You know.

"I’ve been here two months," you say. "I still can’t read half the signs on my street."

"Which street?"

You tell her the neighborhood—your Korean is good enough for that—and she nods.

"I know this area. There’s a good tteokbokki place near the station. You know it?"

"I don’t even know what that is."

Her eyes go wide with something that looks like genuine offense. "You’ve been here two months and you haven’t eaten tteokbokki?"

"I eat a lot of convenience store kimbap."

"That’s—" She puts her hand over her heart like you’ve wounded her. "That’s so sad."

"I’m surviving."

"Surviving is not living." She says this quietly, and for a second it sounds like she’s not talking about food anymore. Then she straightens up, pulls a napkin from the dispenser, and starts writing on it with her Sharpie. "Here. This place. You go. Tell them you want the cheese tteokbokki. It will change your life."

She slides the napkin across the counter. Her handwriting is neat, precise—the address in Korean with a small arrow pointing to what you think is a landmark.

"Thank you," you say. "Vivi."

She looks at you, then down at her nametag, then back at you. "Vivi is… it’s not my real name. It’s what I go by here. What people call me."

"What’s your real name?"

She hesitates. Just a beat. "Maybe one day," she says. And smiles like she’s filed the question somewhere she’ll get to later.

"I get it. My name’s—" You say your name. Slowly, clearly.

She repeats it back. Gets it slightly wrong. The same slightly wrong that’s been showing up on your cups for weeks.

"Close," you say, and you say it again.

She tries again. Closer, but still not right. A consonant softened, a vowel shifted.

"We’ll work on it," you say.

She smiles. "We will."

❤︎

You go to the tteokbokki place that night. She was right. It changes something, if not your life then at least your evening. You sit alone at a tiny table, burning your tongue on cheesy rice cakes, the chili oil blooming across your palate like a slow fire, and you feel less alone than you have in weeks.

The next morning, you tell her.

"You went?" She claps her hands together once, a quick bright movement that doesn’t match her usual composure. "Was it good?"

"I burned the entire roof of my mouth."

"That means it was good."

"It was incredible. I almost cried. From the spice and from the experience."

She laughs again, louder this time. The other barista—a college-aged kid whose name you still don’t know—looks over in surprise, like this is not a sound he hears often.

"Okay," she says, pulling out another napkin. "Next recommendation. You like chocolate, yes?"

"How do you know I like chocolate?"

She gives you a look. "You buy the chocolate croissant every time we have it. Which is Tuesday and Friday. You always look sad on the other days when there are none."

"I don’t look sad—"

"You look a little sad." She’s already writing on the napkin. "There’s a bakery. Ten minutes walking from here. They make a chocolate tart that is…" She pauses, searching for the English word. "Jinjja mashisseo. Really, really good."

"Your Korean is better than you think," you say.

"For food words, yes. For immigration paperwork, no." She slides the napkin across. "Go today after work. Trust me."

You go. She’s right again. The chocolate tart is dark and rich and slightly bitter at the edges, the ganache dense enough to coat the roof of your mouth, and it’s the best thing you’ve eaten in this country that didn’t come from a recommendation on your phone.

This becomes the rhythm. She writes you napkin guides to the city—a jjigae place for rainy days, a fried chicken spot that delivers, a convenience store that stocks imported snacks—and you report back each morning like a food critic delivering verdicts to an audience of one. Your conversations stretch from thirty seconds to two minutes to five, and the people in line behind you start to notice, but you don’t care much and she doesn’t seem to either.

Your cup still has the misspelled name. Every single day. You’ve told her the correct spelling three times now. She nods, she repeats it, and the next morning the same wrong letters appear on the cup.

You’re starting to suspect she’s doing it on purpose.

On a Saturday, you see her outside the shop.

You almost don’t recognize her. She’s in a varsity jacket, grey hood pulled over a white blouse, pleated dark skirt, hair down instead of in the work ponytail. She looks younger. Softer. Like a different version of the person who’s been handing you coffee every morning.

She’s sitting on a bench near the Han River, watching joggers pass, and she doesn’t see you until you’re almost next to her.

"Vivi?"

She startles. Looks up. And then her face does that thing—the shift from surprise to recognition to warmth, all in the space of a breath. Up close, out of the fluorescent light of the shop, you notice things you haven’t before. The way her skin catches daylight like it was made for it. The faint scent of vanilla and something floral—not perfume exactly, more like a lotion she put on without thinking. It mixes with the autumn air and the distant mineral smell of the river, and something about the combination is so specific, so her, that you know you’ll remember it.

"Oh. Hi." She scoots over on the bench, an invitation so automatic it seems like instinct. "What are you doing here?"

"Running." You gesture at yourself—gym clothes, headphones around your neck, slightly out of breath. "I try to do this on weekends. You?"

"Just… sitting." She looks back at the river. "I like watching the water. It’s quiet here."

You sit. The bench is small and your shoulders are almost touching. She doesn’t move away.

"You run a lot?" she asks.

"Three or four times a week. Gym on the other days."

She looks at you sideways, a quick assessment she probably thinks is subtle. "I can tell."

"Was that a compliment?"

"Just an observation." But her ears are pink.

You sit in silence for a while. It’s comfortable, the kind of silence that doesn’t need to be filled. Joggers pass. A cyclist rings his bell. The river catches sunlight and throws it back in pieces.

"Can I ask you something?" you say.

"Mm."

"Why do you keep spelling my name wrong?"

She goes very still. Then, slowly, a smile creeps across her face. Not the customer-service smile, not even the warmer one she gives you at the counter. Something closer to mischief.

"I don’t know what you mean."

"You absolutely know what you mean. I’ve spelled it out for you. I’ve written it down. You still put the wrong letters on the cup."

"Maybe I’m just bad at spelling."

"In three different languages?"

She presses her lips together, fighting a grin. "Maybe."

"Vivi."

"It’s…" She looks down at her hands in her lap. Her fingers are slim, fidgeting with the edge of her jacket sleeve. "It’s because you make a face. When you see it. You look at the cup and your eyebrows do this—" She demonstrates, scrunching her brows together and then relaxing them, a pantomime of mild confusion resolving into amused resignation. "Every time. And it’s…"

She trails off.

"It’s what?"

"Cute." She says it to the river, not to you. "I told you. Your Korean is cute and your face when you read the cup is cute and I just… I like seeing it. So I keep doing it."

Your chest does something involuntary.

"So you’ve been deliberately misspelling my name every day for weeks because you like my confused face."

"Yes."

"That’s—"

"Scary good?" She looks at you now, and she’s fully smiling, and the sunlight is on the river and on her face and you’re in trouble.

"Yeah," you say. "Something like that."

❤︎

After the bench, things shift. Not dramatically—you’re both too careful for that—but the edges soften.

You learn her morning routine. She gets to the shop thirty minutes before it opens, sets up the machines, puts on music. If it’s a good day, she hums along. You know this because you started arriving early enough to catch her through the window, swaying slightly behind the counter with her eyes closed, and you always wait until the music stops before you walk in because some things aren’t meant to be interrupted.

The humming. There’s something about it. She hums songs you don’t recognize—not the K-pop that plays on the shop speakers, something else, something that sounds rehearsed in a way that goes deeper than casual singing. Sometimes she stops mid-phrase and her jaw tightens, just for a second, before she switches to a different melody. You file this away. You don’t ask.

She learns your schedule. She knows you have late meetings on Tuesdays and that you’ll come in earlier than usual, looking tired. She knows Fridays are lighter and you linger longer at the counter. She starts making your drink before you order on days when the pattern is obvious, and on the days when it isn’t—when you’re somewhere between moods, between coffees—she asks.

Not "what do you want?" Not the standard barista question.

"How are you today?" she asks. And means it.

And depending on what you say, or don’t say, or how you say it, she decides.

"You made me a cappuccino," you say one morning. "I’ve never ordered a cappuccino."

"You looked like you needed something warm but not heavy. You had your thinking face."

"I have a thinking face?"

"You have many faces. I am learning them."

One Tuesday, you bring her chocolate. Not from the bakery she recommended—from an import shop you found in Itaewon that stocks European brands. Dark chocolate with sea salt. You put it on the counter when you pick up your coffee.

"What’s this?" she asks.

"Napkin recommendations go both ways."

She picks up the bar, reads the label, and her face does something complicated. You don’t realize until later that it might have been the face of someone who hasn’t been given a small, thoughtless gift in a very long time.

"Thank you," she says. Quietly.

"It’s just chocolate."

"It’s not just chocolate." She puts it under the counter, somewhere safe. "You thought of me. That’s different."

The next morning, there’s a small wrapped pastry next to your coffee cup. Something homemade—a kind of egg tart, golden and delicate, still warm.

"Did you make this?" you ask.

"It’s called dan tat. Egg tart. From home." She adjusts the cup on the counter, lining it up with the pastry like a place setting. "My mother taught me."

You take a bite right there at the counter. The custard is silky, the pastry flakes in your hand, and it tastes like someone’s kitchen and someone’s care. Rich and clean, with a sweetness that doesn’t announce itself, that builds slowly across the tongue the way good caramel does, the way certain wines open up only after you’ve been patient with them. It’s the kind of flavor that makes you close your eyes.

"Vivi," you say. "This is incredible."

She looks at the counter. She looks at your hands holding the tart. She looks everywhere except directly at you, and her ears are pink again.

"I’m glad," she says. "I’ll make more."

She does. Not every day, but enough. And you bring her chocolate, and she brings you tarts, and neither of you calls it what it is.

But the misspelled name stays. Every morning, without fail. Your private running joke that neither of you ever officially agreed to.

One rainy morning, she draws a small umbrella next to it. Another day, a tiny coffee cup. Once, on a day when you ordered an espresso—a bad day, a heavy day—she draws a small heart.

She doesn’t mention the heart. You don’t mention the heart. You both know it’s there.

You see her outside the shop a second time. This one isn’t accidental.

It’s a Sunday, and she texts you—she gave you her KakaoTalk after the bench, just her username, no explanation, and you added her and neither of you mentioned it—a single message:

Vivi: Are you busy? There’s a market in Mangwon I want to go to but I don’t want to go alone.

You are not busy. Even if you were, you would not be busy anymore.

The market is crowded, loud, and overwhelming in the best way. Stalls selling fish and produce and street food and flowers, ajummas shouting prices, kids weaving between legs. She moves through it like she belongs, stopping at vendors she knows, exchanging rapid Korean that’s better than she gives herself credit for. The air is thick with competing aromas—sizzling scallion pancakes, roasted sweet potatoes splitting open in their skins, the bright green punch of fresh perilla, sesame oil darkening in a pan. You breathe it in like it’s language, like it’s the Seoul you’ve been trying to learn but can only taste.

"You said your Korean wasn’t good," you say, watching her haggle over a bag of tangerines.

"For market Korean, it’s fine. For feelings Korean, it’s terrible." She peels a tangerine in three quick motions, separates a segment, and holds it up to your mouth. Not hands-it-to-you. Holds it up. Like you’re a child, or a lover, or something in between that doesn’t have a name yet. "Eat."

You open your mouth before your brain catches up. Her fingertips brush your lips as the segment lands on your tongue—citrus and sunlight and the faint salt of her skin, a flavor you will never be able to separate into its parts. Sweet and cold and bright, the juice sharp against the roof of your mouth, but underneath it, barely there, the warmth of her fingers. She pulls her hand back and you swallow and neither of you acknowledges what just happened, except that her ears are pink and you’ve stopped breathing.

She peels another segment. Eats it herself this time. Looks straight ahead at the stall.

"Good?" she asks.

"Yeah," you say. Your voice sounds strange to you. "Really good."

She nods. Peels another one. Holds it up again.

This time you take it with your hand. Your fingers close over hers for a half-second, and the touch is so small it shouldn’t register, but it does. It registers everywhere.

She buys too many things. Vegetables, fruit, a bag of dried anchovies, sweet rice cakes wrapped in plastic. You carry the bags because she lets you, and walking through the market with grocery bags feels so domestic, so ordinary, that it aches.

The crowd thickens near the produce section and she reaches back without looking and grabs your wrist. Her fingers wrap around the bone, firm and sure, the grip of someone who’s used to navigating crowds but not used to having someone to pull through them. She leads you between stalls and her hand stays on your wrist and your pulse is right there, right under her thumb, and you wonder if she can feel it hammering.

She doesn’t let go until the crowd thins. When she does, she doesn’t acknowledge it. But a minute later, at a stall selling roasted chestnuts, she steps back to let someone pass and her shoulder presses against your chest and she stays there. Just a second too long. Warm and solid and real against you, her hair close enough to your chin that you can smell her shampoo—something clean, faintly herbal, like chamomile steeped too long.

"Sorry," she says, stepping forward. Not looking at you.

"You’re fine."

She’s more than fine. She’s the most interesting thing in a market full of interesting things, and you’re carrying her groceries and your wrist still feels warm where she held it.

At a street food stall, she orders hotteok—sweet pancakes filled with brown sugar and nuts—and hands you one without asking if you want it. The dough is crisp and golden and the sugar inside has gone to molten caramel, so hot it burns the tip of your tongue, and she laughs when you wince and reaches up to wipe a crumb from the corner of your mouth with her thumb. The same thumb. The tangerine thumb. She does it without thinking this time, the way you’d brush lint off someone’s shoulder, and then she freezes when she realizes what she’s done.

"Habit," she says. Her ears are pink again. "Sorry. I—"

"Don’t be."

She looks at you. Her thumb is still near your mouth. The market noise is everywhere—vendors shouting, oil sizzling, a child laughing two stalls over—but in the twelve inches between your face and her hand, it is completely quiet.

She drops her hand. Picks up her own hotteok. Takes a bite.

You think: this. This is what the city has been trying to give you. Not the job, not the language, not the apartment or the coffee or any of it. This. A woman touching your face in a crowded market and not knowing what to do with the fact that she wants to.

"Vivi," you say, standing in the middle of a market with a pancake in one hand and grocery bags in the other and people flowing around you like water around stones. "Can I ask you something weird?"

"You always ask before you ask. Just ask."

"Why don’t you want to go to markets alone?"

She takes a bite of her hotteok. Chews. Swallows. "Because markets are for sharing. If you eat alone in a restaurant, that’s fine. If you cook alone in your kitchen, that’s fine. But a market is—" She gestures at the crowd, the noise, the colors. "A market is supposed to be noisy with someone. Otherwise you’re just standing in someone else’s noise."

"That’s the loneliest thing anyone’s ever said to me in front of a pancake stall."

She laughs. That real laugh, the sudden one. "I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be sad. I just—" She looks at you. "I’m glad you came. That’s what I mean. I’m glad I’m not standing in someone else’s noise."

"Me too."

You walk her to the subway. At the entrance, she takes her grocery bags back, redistributing the weight across her arms with practiced efficiency. She’s done this a thousand times. Carried things home alone.

"Thank you for coming," she says.

"Anytime. I mean that."

She nods. Starts to turn. Then stops.

"Your name," she says. "On the cups. I want you to know—I learned how to spell it correctly a long time ago. After the first week, maybe."

"I know."

"You know?"

"Vivi. I’ve known for weeks."

She stares at you. Then a smile breaks across her face, slow and wide and helpless, the kind of smile that doesn’t belong in a subway entrance on a Sunday afternoon, the kind that belongs somewhere private where no one else can see it.

"And you never said anything."

"I like my misspelled name."

"You’re strange."

"Says the woman who’s been deliberately getting it wrong for months."

She’s still smiling when she disappears down the steps. You stand there for a while after she’s gone, holding a tangerine peel in your pocket and a warmth in your chest that the November air can’t touch.

❤︎

Four months in, you know the following things about her:

Her favorite color is pink, but she’ll deny it. She moved to Korea when she was young for a dream she describes only as "something that didn’t work out," and she says it with the practiced lightness of someone who has rehearsed the sentence until it doesn’t hurt anymore. She can cook Cantonese food from memory but uses a recipe for everything Korean. She thinks dramas are predictable but watches them anyway. She’s afraid of dogs, which she’s embarrassed about. She takes the subway home and transfers at Hapjeong. She lives alone.

She knows the following things about you:

That you came here for work and stayed because the work is good and going back feels like giving up. That you go to the gym because it’s the one place where language doesn’t matter—gravity is the same in every country. That you love chocolate the way some people love wine, with specificity and opinion and mild snobbery. That you call your mother every Sunday evening and it’s the only time you speak your first language all week and afterwards you feel both better and worse. That you are lonely in a way you have stopped trying to name.

She knows this last thing because you told her. Not directly. You said, "Seoul is amazing but sometimes I miss having someone to do nothing with," and she looked at you with an expression that cut straight through the careful distance you’d both been maintaining.

"I know," she said. "I know exactly what you mean."

It happens on a Friday. Late afternoon. You leave work early because the project milestone hit and your team celebrated with delivery chicken and beer in the conference room and you were part of it, really part of it, laughing at jokes you mostly understood and making one of your own in clumsy Korean that landed well enough to get a real laugh from Jun. You feel good. Buoyant. Like maybe you belong here after all.

You go to the coffee shop even though you don’t need coffee. She’s wiping down the counter, the post-lunch lull emptying the place out. She looks up when you walk in and something in her expression tells you she can read the frequency you’re broadcasting.

"Latte day," she says.

"I already had coffee. I’m good."

She tilts her head. "Then why are you here?"

The honest answer is: because I wanted to see you. The answer you give is: "I had a good day. I wanted to tell someone."

Her expression softens. "Tell me."

So you do. You tell her about the milestone, the chicken, the joke that landed. She listens the way she always listens—completely, with her whole face, asking small questions that show she remembers details from weeks ago. She remembers Jun’s name, remembers that he’s the one who speaks English. She remembers the project timeline you mentioned once, offhandedly, over a Tuesday espresso.

"You’re happy," she says when you finish. Simply, like she’s identifying something.

"Yeah. I think I am."

"Good." She folds the rag she’s been holding, sets it down, and says, "Come. Sit."

She makes two drinks—a latte for you, something with honey and milk for herself—and brings them to the small table by the window. She sits across from you, and it’s the first time you’ve ever been on the same side of the counter.

Everything about it feels different. Closer. Real. She smells like espresso and vanilla and the faintest trace of whatever she bakes with at home—butter, sugar, something warm that clings to her the way smoke clings to a campfire. You’ve been around coffee every day for months but it’s never smelled like this, like it’s become part of someone rather than just something they serve.

"Can I ask you something personal?" you say.

"Maybe."

"The dream. The one that didn’t work out. What was it?"

She wraps her hands around her mug. She has a way of holding warm things—both palms pressed flat, fingers curled, like she’s trying to absorb the heat through her skin.

"I was a performer," she says. "Singer, dancer. In a group. We trained for years and debuted and then…" She makes a gesture, fingers opening outward. Dissolving. "It ended. Not because we were bad. Just… circumstances. Business decisions. Things we couldn’t control."

She says it evenly, without self-pity. But her eyes have gone somewhere else.

"I’m sorry," you say.

"Don’t be. It was a long time ago." She sips her drink. "I stayed because I thought maybe something else would come. Another chance. Another group. Another… something. But it didn’t. And then I was just here, and years had passed, and I wasn’t a performer anymore. I was a person who used to perform. Who makes coffee now."

"That’s not all you are."

"No?" She looks at you. Really looks. "What else am I?"

And you want to say it. You want to say: You’re the person who reads me better than anyone. Who makes egg tarts that taste like home. Who misspells my name every day because she likes my face. You’re the first person in this city who made me feel like I wasn’t just surviving.

But you’re sitting in a coffee shop on a Friday afternoon and the light is coming through the window and landing on her hands and her hair and the curve of her mouth, and sometimes the right words are too heavy to carry across a small table.

"You’re my favorite barista," you say instead.

She laughs. Short, surprised. "That’s not very high praise. You only come to one coffee shop."

"Exactly. I only come to one. I wonder why."

Her laughter fades to a smile fades to something else. She looks at you, and the distance between your hands on the table is about six inches, and neither of you closes it.

"I should get back to work," she says softly. "Before the evening rush."

"Yeah. Of course."

She stands. You stand. And for a second you’re both just standing in the narrow space between the table and the window, too close for strangers and not close enough for what you’re becoming.

"Thank you for telling me about your day," she says.

"Thank you for listening."

She reaches out and adjusts the collar of your jacket. A nothing gesture. The kind of thing someone does without thinking, the way you’d straighten a picture frame as you walk past it. Except her fingers brush your neck and she freezes, hand still on your collar, and her eyes meet yours, and the six inches between you on the table has become two inches of air between her fingers and your skin.

She smells like honey. Not the processed kind, not the bear-shaped bottle from a grocery store. The real kind—dark, amber, complex, with floral notes you can’t name and a sweetness that sits at the back of your throat like a word you forgot how to say. You will remember this smell for the rest of your life. You don’t know that yet. But you will.

She pulls her hand back. "Your collar was crooked," she says.

"Thanks."

"See you Monday."

"See you Monday."

You leave. You walk home. You don’t go to the gym. You sit on your apartment floor with your back against the couch and your phone in your hand, and you think about asking Jun if he knows how to say I think I’m falling for someone in Korean.

You don’t text Jun. You text your mother instead. She asks how you’re doing and you say good, really good, and she says you sound different, and you say maybe I am.

❤︎

Monday. She’s there. Of course she’s there. She slides your coffee across the counter—latte, she read you right again—and the name is misspelled and there’s a tiny star drawn next to it.

"Good weekend?" she asks.

"Yeah. Really good." You’re looking at the star. "You?"

"Quiet. I cooked a lot. Watched a drama. The usual." She straightens a stack of napkins that doesn’t need straightening. "I thought about texting you."

"You should have."

"I know." She looks at the napkin stack. "I typed something and then deleted it. Three times."

"What were you going to say?"

"I don’t remember." This is a lie, and you both know it’s a lie, and she knows you know it’s a lie, and she tells it anyway because some truths need more runway than a Monday morning coffee counter can provide.

Tuesday, she’s quieter than usual. Not withdrawn—she still makes your drink, still draws on the cup (a small cloud, because it’s overcast, because she annotates the weather now like a meteorologist with a Sharpie). But there’s something behind her eyes. A distance that wasn’t there before.

"Hey," you say. "You okay?"

"Mm. Just tired."

"Vivi."

She looks up.

"You told me once that my face is different on different days. Latte face, espresso face. Well. You have faces too. And this isn’t a tired face."

Her jaw works, like she’s chewing on something she doesn’t want to swallow. Then: "I got a phone call last night. From home. My mother. She wants me to come back."

The floor tilts. Just slightly. Just enough.

"Come back as in visit?"

"Come back as in come back." She says it flat. Factual. The way you’d report the weather. "She says I’ve been here long enough. She says whatever I came here for, it’s not coming. She says—" Her voice catches, and she clears her throat, and the customer-service composure slides back into place like a mask she’s worn so long it fits better than her real face. "She says a lot of things. Mothers do."

"What do you want?"

"I don’t know." And for the first time since you’ve known her, she sounds like she means it completely. Not the practiced I don’t know of someone deflecting. The real one. The one that sits in the body like nausea. "I’ve been here so long that I don’t know if I’m staying because I want to or because leaving means I failed. And I can’t tell the difference anymore. Does that make sense?"

"It makes perfect sense."

"You’re supposed to say don’t go."

She says it lightly, almost joking, but her eyes aren’t joking.

"Don’t go," you say. Not lightly.

She stares at you. The espresso machine fills the silence.

"I have to get back to work," she says. And turns away. And you stand there with your coffee getting cold and the word don’t still hanging in the air between you, heavy and useless and too small for what it’s trying to carry.

Wednesday, she’s bright again. Almost too bright. She makes you try a new drink she invented—honey, oat milk, a shot of espresso, a sprinkle of something she won’t identify. It’s good. It tastes the way she smells—warm and layered and sweet without being simple. She wants to know if it’s good and you tell her it’s incredible and she beams and writes an exclamation mark on your cup next to the misspelled name.

You don’t bring up the phone call. She doesn’t bring up the phone call. You talk about the chocolate tart from the bakery and how your team is doing and whether she’s watched the new season of the drama she likes, and it all feels normal, and underneath the normal there is a low hum of something you can’t name, like a frequency just below hearing.

The following week, you start staying later at the shop. Not by much—ten minutes, fifteen—but enough that the morning regulars clear out and it’s just you and her and the hiss of the espresso machine. She lets you linger. Sometimes she talks while she cleans, wiping down counters and restocking cups, and her voice in the empty shop is different. Quieter. More open. Like the absence of an audience gives her permission to be someone she keeps folded away during business hours.

She tells you about Hong Kong. The harbour at night, the neon reflecting off the water. Her mother’s kitchen, small and always warm, the sound of oil in a wok. The way Cantonese sounds compared to Korean—rounder, she says, more musical in the tones. She tells you she sometimes dreams in Cantonese and wakes up disoriented, her brain taking a full minute to remember which city she’s in, which language the day requires.

"Do you ever think about going back?" you ask.

She doesn’t answer immediately. She’s organizing cups—small, medium, large—stacking them with a precision that looks automatic.

"Sometimes," she says. "But going back means… admitting it’s over. All of it. The reason I came, the person I was supposed to become. If I go back, I’m just… someone who tried something far away and it didn’t work."

"There’s nothing wrong with that."

"I know." She places the last cup on the stack. "But knowing and feeling are different languages. And I’m not fluent in either."

One evening, you come by after the shop has closed. You didn’t plan it—you were at the gym, ran longer than usual, and your route home takes you past the coffee shop out of habit now, the way rivers follow paths they’ve carved. The lights are still on inside. She’s sitting at the window table with a notebook open in front of her, pen in hand, staring at the page with an intensity that tells you she’s not reading what’s written. She’s somewhere else.

You knock on the glass. She startles. Sees you. And the smile that comes is different from all the others you’ve catalogued—not the customer smile, not the amused one, not the warm one. This one is relieved. Like she was waiting for an interruption she didn’t know how to ask for.

She opens the door. "The shop is closed."

"I know. I was just passing by. You okay?"

"I was writing." She looks back at the notebook on the table. "Trying to write. It’s not going well."

"What are you writing?"

"A letter. To…" She hesitates. "To someone I used to know. From the group. We haven’t spoken in a long time and I thought maybe if I wrote it down…" She trails off. "It’s stupid. You don’t write letters anymore. Nobody does."

"Can I come in?"

She steps aside. You walk into the dark shop—only the counter lights are on and the table lamp she’s been writing by—and it feels different at night. Smaller. More intimate. The espresso machine is quiet for once, and without its hum the space holds only the sound of your breathing and hers.

She makes you a coffee anyway. Muscle memory. She doesn’t ask what you want, just starts pulling a shot, and you sit at the table and look at the notebook. The page is in Chinese characters, dense and precise. Cantonese—her private language. The one she keeps for herself, for the thoughts that don’t belong to Korea or to the person Korea asked her to be.

"Is the letter in Cantonese?" you ask.

"Mm." She sets the coffee in front of you and sits down across the table, in the same chair as the Friday afternoon. "It’s the only language I write for myself in. Korean is for work, for daily life. English is for… you, mostly." A small smile. "But Cantonese is mine. I keep my journals in it. My letters. The things I don’t want anyone here to read."

"Because no one around you reads Cantonese."

"Because no one around me reads Cantonese." She wraps her hands around her mug. "In the group, I was the only foreigner. Everyone else was Korean. So everything was Korean—rehearsals, conversations, arguments, jokes. All of it. I learned to think in Korean, to dream in Korean, to feel in Korean. But at night, when I was alone, I’d write in Cantonese. It was the only place I didn’t have to translate myself."

She says this looking into her mug, and her voice is steady, but something underneath it is not.

"Vivi."

She looks up.

"You don’t have to tell me anything. But if you want to, I’m not going anywhere."

She holds your gaze. The lamp throws shadows across her face that make her look older, or maybe just more honest. In this light, she looks like a painting you’d see in a museum and stand in front of for too long—something rendered in oil and amber, all warmth and depth, the kind of beauty that isn’t about symmetry but about the specific way a face holds its history. You want to memorize her. You want to study her the way you study a wine you know you can’t afford—every note, every layer, every subtle thing that makes it irreplaceable.

Then she closes the notebook. Pushes it aside.

"Not tonight," she says. "Tonight I just want to sit here and not think about letters or languages or any of it. Is that okay?"

"That’s okay."

So you sit. The shop is dark and closed and quiet and you drink coffee you didn’t need at an hour when caffeine is a bad idea and she sits across from you with both hands on her mug and neither of you speaks for a long time. It’s the silence from the bench again, the one that doesn’t need filling, and in the warm half-dark of the closed shop it feels like the realest thing that’s happened to you in this city.

At some point, she reaches across the table and puts her hand on yours. Not holding it. Just resting there. Her fingers are warm from the mug.

You don’t move. She doesn’t move.

"This is nice," she says quietly.

"Yeah."

"I wish—" She stops. Shakes her head. "Never mind."

"What?"

She doesn’t answer. Instead she stands, picks up the mugs, carries them to the sink. You follow her because the alternative is sitting at the table while she walks away from you and you’re tired of watching her walk away from you.

She’s rinsing the mugs when you reach the counter. The sink is behind the bar, in the narrow space where she works every morning, and you’re standing on the wrong side of it for the first time. Her territory. The spot where she makes your coffee and draws on your cups and exists in a version of herself you only see in fragments through the counter.

She turns off the water. Turns around. And you’re right there.

The space behind the counter is small. Built for one person, not two. Your chest is inches from hers and her back is against the sink and her hands are wet and she’s looking up at you with an expression you’ve never seen before—not the smile, not the composure, not the warmth. Something underneath all of those. Something stripped.

Everything slows down.

You notice the way her breath catches—a tiny hitch, barely a sound, more a pause in the rhythm of her breathing. You notice the way her eyes drop to your mouth and stay there for one second, two seconds, three. You notice the pulse in her throat, visible in the low light from the table lamp, quick and alive. You notice a single drop of water on her wrist, tracking down her forearm, catching the light.

She smells like espresso and honey and the clean mineral scent of tap water and underneath all of it something warm and specific that is just her, that you have been cataloguing for months without admitting what the catalogue is for. You want to close the distance. You want to close it so badly that your hands ache with it, that your jaw tightens with the effort of staying still, that every nerve in your body is leaning forward even though your feet haven’t moved.

Her chin tilts up. Barely. A fraction of a degree. An invitation so small it could be accidental, except nothing about the way she’s looking at you is accidental.

You lean in. Slowly. Giving her time to stop you. Giving her time to decide.

Her eyes close.

Your mouth is close enough to feel the warmth of her breath. Close enough that you can taste the honey from her drink in the air between you. The space between your lips is the width of a word. A name. A single syllable you haven’t earned yet.

And then her hand comes up and presses flat against your chest.

Not pushing. Just… there. A boundary drawn with a trembling palm. You can feel her fingers shaking through your shirt.

"I can’t," she whispers. Her eyes are still closed. "I want to. But I can’t."

You don’t ask why. You don’t need to. The can’t tells you everything—not don’t want to, not shouldn’t. Can’t. Like the word is a wall she built and she’s standing on the other side of it, pressing her hand through the only gap.

You step back. One step. Enough.

She opens her eyes. They’re wet.

"I’m sorry," she says.

"Don’t be."

"You should go," she says. "It’s late. You have work tomorrow."

"So do you."

"I do." She steps sideways, out of the narrow space, and the distance between you doubles, triples, becomes normal again. Becomes bearable again. She picks up the rag from the counter and folds it, unfolds it, folds it again. "I’ll see you tomorrow."

"Vivi."

She stops folding.

"I’m not going anywhere," you say. "Whenever you can. If you ever can. I’m not going anywhere."

She nods once. Doesn’t look at you. Her jaw is tight and her hands are still shaking and she is the most beautiful thing you have ever been close to and not touched.

You let yourself out. The door chimes behind you. Through the glass, you can see her standing behind the counter, both hands braced on the edge, head slightly bowed. You watch for a moment. The ache in your chest is so specific it feels like a flavor—something dark and bittersweet, like the chocolate you bring her, like espresso without milk, like the aftertaste of almost.

You walk home. You lie on your apartment floor with your back against the couch and your hands on your chest where her hand was and you can still feel the ghost pressure of her palm. You can still smell the honey. You can still taste the air between your mouths.

You have never wanted anything the way you want her. Not the job, not the city, not the language or the life or any of the things you crossed an ocean for. You want her in a way that lives in your body, in your hands, in the back of your throat. You want to know what her real name is. You want to know what she tastes like. You want to sit across from her at a table that isn’t in a coffee shop and watch her wrap her hands around a wine glass instead of a mug and hear her laugh in a room where she’s not working.

You want time. That’s what you want. More time. And you don’t know yet that time is the one thing she’s already decided not to give you.

The next morning at the counter, she’s composed again. The mask back in place. She makes your coffee and slides it across and the cup has your misspelled name and a small moon drawn beside it—because it was late, because you were there after dark, because she annotates everything.

"I’m sorry about last night," she says.

"Don’t be. I meant what I said. I’m not going anywhere."

She looks at you. Really looks. And then she says, quietly: "You’re a good person. I want you to know that. However long you’re here, however long this—" She gestures between you, the first time either of you has acknowledged this as something that has a shape. "I want you to know you’re good. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay." She picks up a rag, turns back to the counter, and the conversation is over.

But the word however sits in your chest all day. However long. As if she already knows something you don’t. As if she’s already counting the days you’re not counting yet.

On Thursday, you decide. You’re going to ask her out. Not to a napkin recommendation. Not to a bench by the river. On a real date, with a real plan, in a real restaurant where you’ll sit across from her and there won’t be a counter between you.

You practice the Korean. Would you like to have dinner with me? You say it in the mirror. You say it in the shower. You say it walking to work, mouthing the syllables to the rhythm of your steps.

Thursday morning at the shop, she’s humming again. One of those songs—the ones that sound too rehearsed, too precise for casual singing. You stand outside for a moment, watching through the glass. She’s arranging pastries in the display case, moving each one with careful hands, and she’s singing softly, and even through the glass, even without hearing the words, you can tell this song means something to her. That it belongs to the person she was before she was the person making your coffee.

She looks up. Sees you through the glass. And for one unguarded second, before the smile arrives, her face is something else entirely. Open. Unprotected. The face of someone caught in the middle of a memory she hasn’t figured out how to put down.

Then the smile comes. And she waves you in. And you go.

"Caught me," she says, a little sheepish.

"You have a nice voice."

"I used to." She says this automatically, a correction so practiced it’s almost a reflex. Then she catches herself. "I mean. Thank you."

You don’t push it. You take your coffee—black today, you’ve got a long one ahead—and the cup has your misspelled name and a small music note drawn beside it.

At your desk, you look up restaurants. Somewhere nice but not formal. Somewhere you can talk. You find a place in Yeonnam-dong that does Italian food with Korean ingredients and has window seats and candlelight that doesn’t try too hard. You save the link.

You’re going to ask her. Tomorrow. Friday. After the evening rush clears.

You’ve run the scenario in your head so many times it’s worn smooth. You’ll go in. She’ll be wiping down the counter the way she does. You’ll say her name—Vivi—and she’ll look up, and you’ll say the sentence you’ve been practicing, and she’ll say yes because she has to say yes because everything you’ve built these past months—the napkins, the egg tarts, the misspelled name, the market, the bench, the collar—has been building toward a yes.

You fall asleep Thursday night with the restaurant link still open on your phone.

Friday comes.

❤︎

You wake up Friday morning and the city is different. Not literally—same skyline, same traffic hum, same slant of winter light through your apartment window. But you feel it the way you feel weather changing, a shift in pressure that has nothing to do with the sky.

You get dressed carefully. Not differently—she’d notice if you dressed differently and you don’t want to telegraph anything before you’re ready. But you iron the shirt. You pick the good jacket. Small concessions to a moment that hasn’t happened yet.

You eat breakfast standing at the kitchen counter. Toast, a banana, the last of the imported jam your mother sent in a care package. You check the restaurant link one more time. Still available for Friday night reservations. You don’t book it yet—you want to ask her first, want to hear her say yes before you lock anything down. Let the moment be uncertain. Let the yes mean something.

On the subway, you practice one more time. The sentence sits in your mouth like a coin—smooth, weighted, ready to spend. Would you like to have dinner with me? The Korean is right. You checked it with Jun without telling him why, disguised it as a grammar question, and he corrected one particle and you fixed it and now it’s perfect. It’s ready. You’re ready.

The walk to the coffee shop is fourteen steps. You’ve counted a hundred times.

The door chimes.

And the person behind the counter is not her.

It’s the college kid. The one whose name you never learned, even though you’ve been coming here for months. He looks up when you walk in, and his expression is the standard customer-service greeting—polite, blank, waiting.

"Good morning," he says. "What can I get you?"

You look past him. At the espresso machine, the cup stacks she organized, the spot where she always stood. You look at the small shelf underneath the counter where she kept her things—her phone, her water bottle, the chocolate bar you gave her that she rationed for two weeks.

The shelf is empty.

"Where’s Vivi?" you ask.

The kid blinks. "Sorry?"

"Vivi. The other barista. Blonde hair, works mornings."

Recognition crosses his face, followed by something you don’t want to see. "Oh. She—she doesn’t work here anymore."

The floor doesn’t move. The espresso machine keeps humming. Outside, the city keeps going.

"Since when?"

"Her last day was Wednesday, I think? Or Tuesday? She gave her notice last week. Said she was going home."

Last week. She gave her notice last week. You saw her Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Four days. Four cups. Four misspelled names. She worked through her final shifts and she made your coffee and she drew on your cups and on Tuesday she told you about the phone call from her mother and when you said don’t go she looked at you and said I have to get back to work and she was already going. She was already gone. The leaving had already happened somewhere inside her and the rest was just her body catching up.

On Wednesday she was bright. Too bright. She made you that new drink, the honey one with the mystery sprinkle, and she wanted you to like it and you did, and now you realize she was giving you something to remember. A taste she invented. The last recipe.

"Did she—" You stop yourself. What are you going to ask? Did she leave a note? Did she mention me? You’re a customer. You’re a regular who stayed too long at the counter and brought her chocolate and practiced Korean in the mirror. You’re not someone who gets a forwarding address.

"Did she say where she was going?"

"Back to Hong Kong, I think. That’s what she told the manager."

Hong Kong. The harbour at night. Her mother’s kitchen. The sound of Cantonese, rounder, more musical. The language she dreams in. The language she kept for herself, for the thoughts that didn’t belong to Korea.

"Okay," you say. "Thank you."

"Did you still want to order something?"

You almost say no. You almost walk out. But then you see it.

On the pickup counter, pushed to the side, there’s a cup. A single paper coffee cup, empty, with the sleeve already on it. It’s sitting apart from the stacked clean cups, like it was placed there deliberately, waiting for someone specific to find it.

"Is that—"

"Oh. Yeah." The kid glances at it. "She left that yesterday. Asked me to keep it out. Said you’d know."

You pick up the cup.

Your name is written on the side in her handwriting, the neat precise strokes you’ve seen every morning for months.

Spelled correctly.

Every letter in the right place. No swapped consonants, no shifted vowels. Your name, exactly as it is. As it’s always been. As she’s always known how to write it.

Underneath, no drawing. No flexed arm, no sun, no umbrella, no heart. Just two lines, written small:

Thank you for the chocolate. —Wong Kahei

You stare at the second line. A name you’ve never seen before. Two words in a handwriting you’d know anywhere. Not Vivi. Not the name on the tag, not the name everyone calls her, not the name she gave the city she came to with a dream. Her real name. The one she kept for family. For friends from home. For the people who knew her before Korea, before the group, before the stage name and the coffee shop and the misspelled cups.

She gave it to you on the day she left. The only day she couldn’t stay to watch you read it.

You stand in the coffee shop for a long time. The kid behind the counter makes an espresso for someone else and the machine hisses and the door chimes when they leave and none of it registers.

She gave her notice last week. Four final days. Four misspelled names. On Tuesday she told you about the phone call and you said don’t go and she said I have to get back to work and she was already gone. On Wednesday she invented you a drink. On Thursday she hummed behind the counter and you stood outside watching her through the glass, planning a dinner you’d never get to ask about. The leaving had already happened inside her. The rest was just her body catching up.

The kid behind the counter is watching you. You realize you’ve been standing in the same spot for several minutes, holding an empty cup, and your eyes are wet.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

"Yeah," you say. "I’m fine."

The last time you saw her, she slid your cup across the counter and you took it without looking at the name because you’d stopped checking weeks ago. You took the cup and you said see you tomorrow and she said see you tomorrow and neither of you knew it was the last time.

Except she did.

She knew. And she still said it. Because what else do you say?

You put the cup in your bag. Carefully. The way you’d carry something that would not survive being dropped.

You walk to the office. Fourteen steps across a sidewalk that doesn’t stop moving, into a building where people are already gathering for the morning stand-up and someone asks if you want coffee and you say no, I’m good.

You’re not good.

But you sit at your desk and you open your laptop and you do the work because that’s why you’re here, that’s the reason the city gave you, the one that fits on a visa form and a job contract and a life that makes sense to explain. You’re here because you’re good at what you do. Everything else was just coffee.

Except it wasn’t. And you know it wasn’t. And somewhere over the Yellow Sea, heading south toward a harbour that shines at night, she knows it too.

❤︎

Months later, you’re still in Seoul. Your Korean is better now. Not fluent, but functional—you can argue with cab drivers, understand most of a drama without subtitles, make jokes that land more often than they don’t. Jun calls you a local. You’re not, but you’re closer.

The team is good. Your specialty has taken root here, and the people you trained are training others now, and sometimes you sit in meetings and listen to them explain concepts in Korean that you taught them in English and you feel a strange, displaced pride. Like watching your words translated into a language you’re still learning. Like watching something you built continue without you holding it.

You go to a different coffee shop. It’s closer to the office, actually. Better location. The coffee is good. The barista is a cheerful guy named Minjun who remembers your name after the second visit and spells it correctly every time and draws a smiley face on the cup because that’s what he draws on everyone’s cup.

It’s fine. It’s all fine.

You still have the cup. It sits on your desk at home, next to a framed photo of your team and a half-eaten bar of dark chocolate with sea salt. The ink has faded slightly. Your correctly spelled name. Thank you for the chocolate. And underneath, in the same steady hand: Wong Kahei. You could read it with your eyes closed. You have read it with your eyes closed.

Sometimes you wonder what she’s doing. If she found another dream in Hong Kong or if she let herself rest. If she cooks dan tat in her mother’s kitchen, the custard silky, the pastry warm. If she goes to markets with someone. If the noise feels like hers now.

If she ever thinks about a foreigner with bad Korean who loved chocolate and made a face every time he read his cup.

You went back to the coffee shop once. The original one. Two months after she left. Ordered a latte. Sat at the table by the window. The coffee was the same. Nothing was the same. You didn’t go back after that.

What you can’t explain to anyone—not to Jun, not to your mother, not to the version of yourself that’s supposed to be rational about things—is the specific way you miss her. It’s not abstract. It’s not a mood. It’s sensory. You miss the smell of vanilla and espresso that clung to her hair. You miss the weight of a tangerine segment placed on your tongue by fingers that tasted like salt and citrus. You miss the ghost-pressure of her palm on your chest in a dark coffee shop, trembling, holding you at the distance she couldn’t bear to close. You miss the way your name looked wrong on a cup, and how that wrongness became the most right thing in your day.

You miss her hands. You miss her voice. You miss the particular frequency of her laugh—the real one, the surprised one, the one the college kid looked up at because he’d never heard it before.

You miss the almost. The almost is the worst part. You can grieve something that happened. You can’t grieve something that was on its way to happening and stopped.

Sometimes, on Sunday evenings after you call your mother, you open KakaoTalk and scroll to her username. She hasn’t been active in weeks. The profile picture is still there—a photo of the Han River at dusk, no face, just water and light—and her status message is blank. She exists as a digital outline, a shape without content, a name that was always just a stage name wrapped around a real one she gave you too late.

You’ve typed messages to her. Dozens. None sent.

You: Hey, the tteokbokki place closed. Thought you should know.

You: I found a chocolate shop in Hongdae that would ruin you.

You: The bakery still has the tart. I went last Tuesday. It tasted the same.

You: I never got to ask you to dinner. I had the restaurant picked out. Italian with Korean ingredients. Window seats. You would have liked it.

You: I miss you.

You: I miss you, Kahei.

You delete them all.

One night, late, you’re lying on your apartment floor the way you did the night after the collar, after the Friday when everything in your chest rearranged itself around a person who made coffee for a living and read your moods through the thickness of a paper cup. The ceiling is the same ceiling. The city hums outside the same way.

You think about what she said at the market. A market is supposed to be noisy with someone. Otherwise you’re just standing in someone else’s noise.

You think about the fourteen steps. How you counted them once to make the city smaller and now they’re just steps and the city is as big as it always was and the thing that made it smaller was never the counting.

You think about the closed shop. The narrow space behind the counter. Her back against the sink. The way her eyes closed before you leaned in, like she was bracing for something beautiful and terrible at the same time. Her hand on your chest. I can’t. The tremor in her fingers. The honey-taste of the air between your mouths.

You would give anything to go back to that moment. Not to change it. Just to live in it longer. Just to stand in that twelve inches of almost and feel her breath on your lips one more time.

You reach for your phone. You open KakaoTalk. Her profile picture catches the light from your screen—the river, the dusk, the water holding the sky.

You don’t type anything. You just look at it for a while.

Then you close the app. You get up off the floor. You go to bed.

In the morning, you’ll walk fourteen steps across a sidewalk and through a different glass door and someone will hand you a coffee with your name on it, spelled correctly, and you’ll drink it and it’ll be fine.

Her name was Wong Kahei. She told you once, on a paper cup, on the day she left. She carried it through years of being someone else in a country that wasn’t hers, and she put it in your hands the only way she knew how—in ink, on something disposable, with no return address.

You kept it. You’ll always keep it.

Your name was always easy to spell. She just liked watching you figure that out.

You figured it out too late.

Sometimes, on your way to work, you catch the smell of honey from a bakery you've never been inside. It stops you for half a step. Just half. And then you keep walking, carrying a flavor you never tasted and a name you only said once, in a message you deleted before you could send it.

Some people leave you with scars. Some people leave you with stories.

She left you with notes of honey — faint, warm, impossible to place, lingering long after the cup is empty.

Outside your window, Seoul wakes up the way it always does—gradually, then all at once. Fourteen steps from your office, a coffee shop opens its doors. Someone turns on an espresso machine. Someone stacks cups. Someone writes a name.

Yours, probably. Spelled right.

“Give me at least some time to have a second look before the meeting.” She flashes a smile. “Irene didn't like the numbers last time.”

“The numbers are the numbers, Heejin. What does she expect me to do - magically change the metrics into something they're not?”

“Which is why - I said - try and give me some review time.” Her eyes settle on a bobblehead on the table next to you. “What am I your mentor for?”

“To show me around the cafés.”

“That I do on my own unpaid time, thank you very much.” She taps the toy’s head - on the otherwise empty table - and it springs back with a sharp bounce. “Looks like the rest of the team isn’t in today either.”

“Yeah, well - Christmas week. Unlike me, most people have a life.” A momentary pause, then you squint your eye at the unsaid implication with her right there. There's lines, you see - unspoken, but drawn all the same. You're supposed to be coworkers - same team - but there's boundaries you don’t cross.

Her hand presses down on the toy’s head, holding it still. “Lunch?”

“Sure. Yes. Where do you wanna go?”

—

You raise a hand at her from far behind. She's looking around, tray piled high with three bowls of food. Her eyes catch yours - and she starts mouthing something, but it's anyone’s guess what. Finally she gives up, and walks over to the table.

“I was asking if you wanted the cake. It just got refilled, so I figured you probably didn't have the chance to pick one up.”

“Oh - no,” you blurt out without thinking.

Maybe you did. Either way, it's too late to change your mind now.

“Sure? You can have half of mine.” She furrows her brow.

Well, it can only be a stronger no now. Dig a hole, and you have to lie in it. Or something.

“Yeah. Sure. Eating light today.”

She glances at the four slices of pizza you've appropriately chosen to take today. “Light.”

“No sugar light, I mean.” The hole only gets deeper.

“Suit yourself,” she says, taking a bite of the pasta. “I'm not getting scammed by airport prices later, so I'm filling up while I can.”

“Oh, right,” you recall. “Packing all done?”

“Yeah, did most of it over the weekend.” She sighs. “My room got so moldy last time; I'll keep the windows open.”

“You could maybe leave the fan on too,” you suggest.

“I thought of that, but I don't want my roommates to think I'm careless or something.” She spins her fork, tapping the back of it against her chin. “Maybe I'll inform them in advance.”

“Yeah. Maybe you should.” You take a bite of the pizza, which is actually surprisingly light.

“What did you do this weekend?”

You look up at the ceiling. “Bed-rotted, mostly. Caught a movie.”

Chomping on her pasta, she gestures with her hand - which one?

“A documentary.”

Gestures again - about what?

“Uhh…”

—

“I think I had too much. Why did you choose this place?” she asks, stepping out the door.

“Did I?” You raise a hand at the sun, squinting. “I kinda don't remember who suggested.”

“Me neither. But the junior's supposed to take the blame.”

“Blame taken.” A curt bow with your head. “A walk could help,” you offer.

“In this heat? My knees have been hurting too.” She thinks for a few seconds. “Alright, maybe it'll help.”

The main entrance rolls by: workers hanging lights from the ceiling, Christmas trees being unloaded from a truck, decorations lining the wall.

“Dunno if it'll be ready by the time I leave today,” she muses. “Bet it's gonna look real pretty when it's done.”

“What time's your flight?”

“Seven, but I'll be leaving earlier - going with my roommate whose flight’s an hour before mine. Save the costs, y'know?”

“Smart.” You nod. “Better to be early than late, too.”

“Tell me about it.” Heejin laughs. “One time my cab ran out of gas on the way - can you believe it?” Her index finger traces slow, soft circles at her temple. “It was kinda the middle of nowhere, too. Scary! I made the driver stay till my next cab came. I thought my flight was gone.“

“Was it?”

“No. But why take risks again?”

You run a hand through your hair. “Maybe you can also tell her in the cab - about the fan.”

“Well, the assumptions will start the moment we leave the house. So I’ll probably have to tell her before that.”

“Smart.” You tap your finger against your jeans. “Guess that's why you're the mentor.”

Heejin's eyes drift back to the Christmas tree, naked and bare. Not dressed up - not yet - for her night of the year. “I really hope they finish decorating soon.”

—

“Ugh, I am in no mood to resolve these compliance issues,” she sighs. “Will probably work on these in the airport later.”

Your eyebrows perk. “Are they urgent?”

“Not really. I’ll be bored. What else to do?”

You stare past her. A slight drizzle falls; not the kind that calls for an umbrella, but enough to leave shadows ghosting on the long office windows. It’ll wash away her question too - what else to do?

Heejin starts packing her bag: her laptop slides into the compartment, and her headphones follow suit. She throws a half-eaten pack of peppermints in her hoodie pocket.

“Leaving?” you ask.

“In a bit. I’ll go have coffee downstairs, then leave.” She smiles. “So - Merry Christmas!”

So if you draw a decision tree here, there’s a few ways to take this. When it’s just the two of you, she usually calls you for coffee. But if she doesn’t ask, there’s really just one valid option - however unappealing. Not much of a tree, more like a stem. Of course, you didn’t actually draw the tree before saying what you did; it just happened to coincide with what you would have said if you did:

“Merry Christmas, and have a safe flight!”

“Thanks, take care.”

—

Sunset, and you're leaving. Slide deck is not anywhere near done, and that's just as well. You'll be bored when you get home - what else to do?

Some calculations - you'll have a couple hours until her flight lands, and ideally you want to send it to her by then. She's not gonna stay up for what is technically your work. Why would she?

Meeting’s first thing in the morning, and she's definitely not a morning person. So - if you’re gonna send - it has to be by tonight.

You walk past the first block, music playing in your ears. The headphones are bright, but outside noises creep in from time to time. A car horn, a screeching bike, and when you get close enough - workers chatting loudly.

You turn, and the main entrance looks much the same as before. A few more lights, a few more ornaments on the Christmas tree - but still not nearly as pretty as she should be.

Why aren't they done? Isn't it supposed to be ready by tomorrow?

Maybe they planned on working the night.

What else to do?

—

Heejin joins the call - “Hey, good morning. We have, what, five minutes before the meeting starts?”

“Hm, yeah. Ballpark.” You fidget with the UI, trying to put your slides on. “Can you see my screen?”

“Mhm.” She smiles, peering behind you. “Didn't go to the office today?”

“No I stayed up all night working on the slides, and, uhh…” See, there's a thread you can follow here. She asked you something, and you can maybe ask something back - how was the flight? reached on time this time? but -

She cuts off the phantom thread: “I see. Okay - walk me through it. Quick, quick, quick.”

What started as a smile on Heejin's face - step-by-step - evolves into a frown as the slides roll by. Much to your concern.

Thank-you slide, and “Well?” you ask.

“Well,” she says, shaking her head, “this won't do. Irene's gonna grill you on this.”

You cover your face in disbelief. Disbelief is… rich. It's not like you didn't know the data sucked. Just that you didn't want to admit it, hear it said out so loud. Not this soon, atleast.

Heejin exhales sharply and sits up straight. “You're still gonna have to present - I already told Irene that. But the cross-questions, maybe I can take them.”

“But…” you stutter. “Are you sure? You - you don't even have context on the numbers.”

“I'll go through them quickly, build a narrative. You just - focus on - ”

Irene joins the call.

—

You weren't planning to go to the office today. It just didn't feel right not to, after this morning. You could swear the lack of sleep was killing you but - here you are, standing in front of the main entrance.

You were never someone who cared much for aesthetics like these. Sure, they looked nice - yellow lights shimmering on the walls, a Christmas tree dressed in ornaments from top to bottom, lanterns swaying gently from the ceiling - but that’s all they were to you: nice. Nothing more.

Again, it's not planned or anything, but when every passer-by is pulling out their phone for a click - it just feels wrong not to. So you do, too.

There's a bit of a crossroads here, a decision tree: you have the picture on your phone - you can now either just keep it, let it weigh down on you. Or do something with it.

And that's when lines come into the picture. There are lines, sure, but they're not well defined. When you're far enough in either direction, it's clear which side you’re on. But when you hover near the edge - around where dots blur - who's to tell where you stand? It's not an exact science.

You wish it were, but it's not.

So, like all other things, you'll leave it up to fate. You're in the lobby - surrounded by automatic doors on all sides - and your elevator is here. Cool. While coming back down, if your ride is on the right, you'll hit send; otherwise, well.

Yeah.

—

Sunset again, and you're leaving. You press the down button and wait for your ride to arrive politely.

After a long day of trying to disambiguate the position of the line - not much unlike a high-school math problem - it's time for you to receive your answer. The gods themselves will decide what's right. And you'll receive the message, of course, if you remember which way you were pointing when you decided on left and right.

You do remember, right?

The thread floats in the air, still. A few seconds.

A ping shuts it down. The lift has arrived, and you'll have to get on. There's people waiting. There's a line.

You don't remember which way you were pointing, but you sure know which way you hope you were.

Open work chat, and Heejin’s name sits at the top - reacted thumbs up to thanks for saving my ass.

Pull up the picture and type: “you wanted to see it fully dressed up - well, there ya go.”

Your finger hovers over the send button for a couple of seconds, then presses down. Hard.

A typing bubble pops up almost instantly, then vanishes just as quick: “hehe thanks for sharing, it looks really good!!!”

Perhaps it's just very photogenic.

You'll smile nonetheless.

~~~

“Oh, you look gorgeous.” At the door stands Eunbi, a bouquet of hydrangeas cradled gently in her arms and a plastic bag of fried chicken and plum wine bottles dangling by her fingers. She sports a bright smile contrasted by the poorly lit hallway she stands in, waiting to be welcomed into the house. Immediately off the bat Haseul senses no ill intent behind the statement—she even thinks her friend is being genuine about it despite Haseul feeling like Gangwon roadkill herself—though she does sense a note of patronizing.

“Come in, Eunbi…” Haseul opens the door a bit wider and steps aside to make room. Eunbi hops in and makes for the kitchen counter, setting down her gifts. With her guest’s back turned and her appearance brought to the forefront of her consciousness, Haseul takes the opportunity to check herself in the mirror, finding dark circles under her eyes, a wrinkled shirt that looks like it’d been slept in for four nights straight, and a bedhead that’s sorely out of place for the 6 p.m. atmosphere.

Then again, Eunbi’s cheery demeanor isn’t a good fit for the somber mood of Haseul’s apartment either. She’s too bright, Haseul thinks somberly, as Eunbi just carries on opening the boxes of chicken and popping the cap off one of the bottles of plum wine using one of her sturdier rings. Haseul can only watch as she heads off to the fridge and rummages through, looking for something to mix the liquor with.

“You know,” Haseul finally sighs out, taking her seat in one of the barstools. Eunbi dumps the last pack of Haseul’s Yakult onto the kitchen island as Haseul continues, “you didn’t have to come over. I’m fine.”

In response, Eunbi sighs and tilts her head, shooting a disapproving look at her friend. “Sure, Miss Hasn’t-Showered-Since-Friday,” she teases as she shakes her head. She turns around one last time, and sets two sets of plates, glasses, and chopsticks in front of her and Haseul before sitting down herself. “It isn’t like you to not reply for days and then say you stopped bathing. Think of this as a welfare check—I had to make sure you were still alive.”

"Dead people typically don’t text their friends to say they forgot to take a shower.” Haseul only picks at the chicken, but ultimately gives in to the enticing honey garlic aroma. The sticky sauce meets her lips, and by some mysterious divine decree, she immediately feels marginally better.

Eunbi looks on as her friend finally starts eating. The way she fills her cheeks with big bites of chicken bring a smile to her face, but also an adjacent concern: how long has it been since she ate? “Alright, honey garlic, noted,” she says in a stern but thoughtful tone. She places another piece on Haseul’s plate before taking one for herself, “Could’ve saved me the trouble picking flavors.”

~~~

“Is this really necessary?” Haseul hugs her knees, covering herself as best as she can from the curtain covering her from Eunbi on the other side. The showerhead throws warm water over her head generously, soaking her hair and rehydrating her skin.

“Yesh, ish absholuhly nesheshayee,” Eunbi replies, mouth full of toothpaste suds. Haseul hears the bristles drag against her teeth through the shower curtain from inside the bathtub, listening steadily for when she spits and gargles. “You’re brushing your teeth too when you’re done in there.”

“I'm not a child…” Haseul retorts, but fails to muster defiance nor determination in her voice. She tries recalling when she did last brush her teeth, drawing only blanks. She hears the toilet lid shut, followed by a dull thud, and what is unmistakably Eunbi's sigh from the other side of the curtain.

“I know, Seul. Me neither. We have to tough it out, okay?”

“That's not helping. That's just the usual bullshit in a different voice.”

A moment of silence takes the bathroom, making way for the beads of shower water hitting the bathtub in light clunks. The water level tries rising, and Haseul finally gives in and helps it along—she unfolds her legs to let them sink into the collecting water. The initial split second of cold fades just as fast as it comes, and with a harsh shudder Haseul empties her lungs sharply again.

~~~

“One last thing,” Eunbi announces as she fluffs her pillow, “I'm right out here. I can hear you, and I'm a light sleeper. Don't try anything, funny or otherwise,” she chides with finality.

“I don't appreciate being talked to like that.” Haseul’s tone is wistful, or thoughtful at the very least. She only leans in the doorway connecting the hall to the living room, and her arms cross by themselves as she unconsciously shields herself from the prodding into her psyche.

“Yes, you do. Deny it all you want.” Satisfied, Eunbi falls gently back onto the couch, and then throws her borrowed blanket over her feet and legs. She tugs her sleep mask over her eyes and flashes a smile and a thumbs up in Haseul’s general direction, missing only narrowly and reassuring the light switch beside her instead.

Haseul only watches. Eunbi settles her pillow onto the couch's armrest, and then her head onto the pillow. The smile never leaves her unnie's face, and for the first time this night, Haseul starts to believe it's genuine.

She heads back to her too-big bedroom, gets in her too-fluffy bed, claps twice to turn off her too-fancy light. The glow-in-the-dark moon and shapes stickers on her ceiling swirl in her eyes as if actually in orbit; the circles, squares, triangles, and single crescent all pull her into a meditative trance. She contemplates just what Eunbi means by everything she's said and done, as well as anything she's yet to say and do.

Complimented on her looks even though she's a mess. Scolded for not bathing and made to brush her teeth. Comforted like a child who's scared of the monsters under her bed. She knows Eunbi means well and come from a place of genuine concern, but that doesn't change the fact that Haseul isn't someone to handle like some glass figurine—she’s not fragile, not pretty, and certainly not teetering on the edge. She can’t—

Tears run down her face to the back of her head. They slice a line of cold on her temples as they fall, while she lies there defenseless and gasping for air that can’t seem to make its way into her lungs. Her hands can’t find themselves either: they lay motionless, folded over each other on her stomach, not even able to wrap around one another. Above all else, her blanket feels like spikes and feathers on her skin, millions of pounds of what should only be cotton crushing her under its weight.

Try as she might, Haseul doesn’t have enough sharp fear to build panic with in her chest. It’s only the dumb, soft knockoff kind of fear that she knows rises from something not even real. She should be able to call for help, scream, even just cry properly, but there’s just not enough air, not enough strength in her for it. So, as she lies there motionless, voiceless, helpless, she ponders the situation she finds herself in: one she can only ever think of as absurd.

A beam of light cuts through the suffocating darkness and through Haseul’s wallowing in despair: “Hey, where’s your ramyeon?” All her hope rides on it being Eunbi, of course it’s Eunbi, please god let it be Eunbi—come back, I’m awake, I can’t move—

“Shit.” Heavy footsteps on Haseul's wooden bedroom floor, and Eunbi appears next to her. “What's wrong? Why aren't you talking?” Her leader's intuition serves her well, and she hears Haseul's light, labored breathing through the ambient hum of the humidifier and sees her ice-cold tears amidst the cloudy darkness. Gentle and gentler, she helps Haseul sit up—more like doing the heavy lifting all by herself, but she was never one to complain. Neither of them were.

Haseul can only gasp and sob as her lungs start back up. She mumbles through her hiccups, feeling sorry for herself while Eunbi looks on with a concern that Haseul has only ever found disgusting. It only weighs more on Haseul’s tired shoulders, and once she's calmed down and crying properly, she slumps back against her headboard while Eunbi only stares and waits.

“It's…” Haseul finally chokes out, “It's in the kitchen island,” she wipes her tears away with her sleeve, “t-take as many as you like…” and Haseul finally completely breaks down. Her hand shoots to her pillow and grabs like a bird clenching claws around prey, then bringing it to her face as if about to rip it to shreds.

A wail muffled, and Eunbi knows why.

~~~

“A disservice to look away,” Eunbi thinks, “a dishonor to look back.” She tentatively squeezes Haseul’s knee as the latter sobs pathetically into her pillow. She just waits; there’s nothing to be said nor done when this starts other than to ride it out. And it’s all too familiar: the weight of responsibility—and the sudden lack of it—can be crushing.

It’s a good while before Haseul fully settles down. So Eunbi’s attention wanders around her friend’s room: the humidifier humming softly in the corner, the glow-in-the-dark space stickers right above her bed, the window that showcases the best of the Seoul skyline after dark. She recalls the singular time Haseul had ever told her about what it’s like in her house, when the power cut across the entire city, and for the first time ever, in that one split-second you could see the universe in the sky like it was a dream. It was the one time Haseul had ever shared something like that to someone who, in Haseul’s own words, “understands.”

“I’m so tired…” Haseul confesses wearily. She retreats her pillow off to the side, though her sobs still punctuate her speech. Eunbi wraps an arm around her shoulders, and Haseul slumps onto hers in turn. Eunbi makes to wipe every tear that forms at the corners of her friend’s eyes, long before Haseul musters the will to do so herself. It’s a burden to carry, something the both of them know all too well.

“It’s okay,” consoles Eunbi as her shoulder continues to grow wetter, “Lean on me.”

“That’s really corny,” Haseul retorts with as much of a chuckle as she can muster, “even for you.”

And Eunbi can only keep wiping away her tears, can only let her lean; she can’t take away the source of her tears or her weakness. She could never admit it, but Haseul already knows: it tears at Eunbi’s heart too.

“I’m really sorry… I know this is hard.” Haseul finally rights herself off of Eunbi’s shoulder. Eunbi can only scoff at the thought, wishing for this to be the “hard” she had to go through again, what she would give for this to be the weight she bore every day like before.

“You don’t have to apologize. It isn’t easy for you either,” she comforts, “you called me here because I understood, right?”

~~~

It stops Haseul in her tracks. “Was I always that easy to read—No, where the hell did Eunbi get that idea—How dare she come into my home uninvited and—”

“Could you tell me about it? What it’s like still having chicks in your nest?” She never feels Eunbi’s eyes on her; the faint reflection on her bedroom window only shows her friend gazing out at nothing of importance. She can see the flat, almost bored expression in her face as she asks a question much more loaded than probably even Eunbi could have ever expected to ask.

She meets her eyes through the makeshift mirror instead, looking past the skyscrapers and headlights and into the heart of the friend who understands. “I caught you. It hurts too.” Haseul says it with more surprise than anything else, finding something in herself she didn’t know was still there.

She feels the mattress bounce ever so slightly, sees Eunbi drop her head and chuckle at the accusation. “I can’t be the one who understands forever, you know? We grow up all the same, things change. We of all people should know that.”

“Your nest isn’t empty, is it? They still look up to you for support and guidance.”

“Yeah,” Eunbi concedes, “but it isn’t the same. They write their own songs now, have their own members to look after, follow rules that don’t also apply to me. I can pretend all I want, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not their leader anymore.”

They sit in silence, sharing a view that reveals different things. Haseul looks out to the night sky, the stars hiding behind the blinding lights of Seoul. She grows wistful herself, recalling but not mourning a past that’s been both too long ago yet not long enough.

“Jiwoo calls,” Haseul sighs. “She calls a lot more often now. I remember when she played with the other members, and would try to turn and hide when the tears came. And Hyunjin—bless her heart—she complains about her members. Kahei laughs at her because she says she’s turning into me.”

Eunbi chuckles back, “Is that good? Turning into you?”

Haseul takes a moment to really, really think: “What does it mean to be turning into me?” She notes how her members would poke her cheek awake when they needed something, when she had to do the same when their schedules called for too-early mornings. She always ate last, but never least—her members made sure of that. She was a shoulder to cry on more often than not, and she’d told herself so many times that she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“It’s… good. It’s like a dream, being theirs to have and…” Haseul’s voice lowers much more than she meant it to, finding comfort in the responsibility instead of burden, “and bother.”

Eunbi tilts her head, seeing past the intrusive lights of the world below. Her hair falls over her shoulder, and a smile buds across her face. “That’s all that really matters at the end of the day, right?”

“You gave me too much credit, by the way.” Haseul gives her friend a gentle shove, and Eunbi can only smile and breathe out in response. “You’re putting words in my mouth, ‘because you understood,’ I’m not that smart.”

“That’s not for me to decide, Seul. It’s for you, and it seems like you made a good decision.” She finally meets her eyes—properly this time—and Eunbi pats her head. It’s not comforting, not patronizing, certainly not grandstanding. It was simply recalling something Eunbi had lost herself.

Haseul can do nothing to hold back the question, intrusive or disrespectful it may be. “Eunbi, does it get any easier?” Most of her wishes she could take it back, but part of her thinks Eunbi can’t answer quick enough. She waits with a hope she can’t understand, one between anticipation and despair, for an answer she couldn’t possibly prepare for.

It takes Eunbi a few moments, the gears quietly turning in her head as if they hadn’t turned in ages, “Yeah, it does. It gets so easy that it gets hard again. You start to miss the feeling of missing rather than just missing the thing itself.”

Haseul notes the wistful tone woven into her friend’s voice, finding nothing but bitter truth and an honesty that can’t help but be brutal. “That sounds really scary.”

“Growing up is scary. Scary when it’s them, weird when it’s you. But you do anyway.”

“Do… do you ever wish it didn’t happen? Disbanding, I mean.” Haseul knows this is dangerous territory now, but with Eunbi, it feels tender, if not a little bit sore. “Sorry. Don’t answer that—”

“Of course I did. Of course I do. What do you take me for, Haseul?” Eunbi laughs a shy laugh, feigning offense at Haseul’s pitiful attempt at dissecting her. “I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I made a sacrifice for the good of everyone else. I tried to hold on so hard. And I lost. Lost the group, lost them. How does that make you feel?”

“Afraid… like it’s prophetic. Like there’s not a universe out there where I win.”

~~~

“Seoul had never looked so pretty,” Eunbi thinks. She wonders about what it would be like to see it when everything was dark, and the embroidered starlight behind the cloudy city lights would be bare to admire as much and as long as she liked.

Nearly four years now, the only thing Eunbi can wave over Haseul in this moment: the certainty of an ending rather than the dwindling hope of a cliffhanger. It isn’t envy—Eunbi can’t afford to let herself get jealous—but a victory that lets her simply call it a day. She rests easy, knowing her legacy had never really disappeared, but took on new forms and reached greater heights in her kids: Chaewon still calls, much more often now, and Wonyoung laughs when Yujin complains.

“Well, who’s to say?” Eunbi shrugs, “But there is a universe where it’s just dreamlike.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

Jeon Heejin eyes you, warily, as you approach her in the kitchen.

“You thought parties weren’t my… thing?” She draws out the last word, inviting a rebuttal from you.

You’re too smart to take the obvious bait, but too stupid to leave the conversation alone in its entirety.

“Didn’t think you were one to shoot vodka straight.” You gesture to the red solo cup in her hand - you’re a foot away from her, but you can practically taste the liquor in the air.

The smell makes you wish that you had drank something before starting this conversation. It’d help you feel less bad about what happens afterward.

“Maybe I like the way it tastes.” She teases before lifting the cup to her lips.

You’d almost believe her, if you didn’t know her so well, but the ghastly grimace on her face gives away her true thoughts about the drink.

Heejin scowls at the nickname - a long standing tradition between the two of you. You’d call her a role model or a perfect princess, and she’d respond by calling you a jackass or rolling her eyes at you.

“No person drinks vodka because they like the taste. What’s on your mind, Little Miss Perfect?”

Two people, perfectly molded to be each other’s opposite.

So why are you here, at this party, with her of all people?

“Would you believe me if I told you?”

“No,” Your response falls from your lips, immediately, and a teasing grin appears on your face, “but I’m willing to hear you out anyway.”

“You’re a liar.”

“It’s my charm, really.” You shrug before leaning against the fridge. “Are you in the mood for confessions or not?”

“Well…” She trails off, an unreadable expression on her face.

She leans against the counter after setting her drink aside. Her shirt lifts up, perfectly showing her well-defined body.

Why does she play this game with you, again and again? You’re both losers in the end.

Heejin is a perfect calamity of a woman - her eyes a whirlwind of emotions, a smile that is genuine but never quite reaches her eyes, her gestures as icy as they are warming.

You can’t tell if you want to slap or kiss that shit-eating grin off of her face.

And, based on your previous encounters with her, it’s most definitely going to be the latter option.

“Like what you see?” She winks at you before grabbing her drink again.

Her eyes study you, just as she studies her materials in class. Brutally methodical, looking for any errors or opportunities to pounce on.

She wants to lure you into her trap, into her clutches - you wanted her first, right?

“Fuck you.” The words would sound malicious coming from anyone else, but they’re oddly playful from your lips.

“You told me you wanted to know what’s on my mind…” Heejin strolls towards you with an unmistakable amount of confidence, the type that comes with experience.

She’s got you right where she wants you - as she does every time.

When she lands right in front of you, one of her hands lands on your abdomen. Heejin leans in close, close enough for only the two of you to hear.

“You. I’ve only had you on my mind, and it’s ruining my day.”

She leans back, a playful pout on her face.

A lioness with her prey in her claws - so much for her façade of innocence.

You should resist, push her hand away and let yourself get some air. Maybe it’s the booze in her breath that’s making you drunk, or maybe you’re just drunk on her.

Either way, that fleeting thought of rationality doesn’t seem to stop you from chasing Heejin’s lips as you kiss her with the pent-up frustration of her teasing.

Her hand leaves your chest as you place your hands on your lips - if you’re letting this happen, you may as well be in control of your actions.

You know you want this, as does she. You’re both just scared of the after.

The eternal after, the words you two should tell each other.

I love you. I miss you. I want you. I need you.

But you’re stuck in this charade, this mess where you push and pull against each other, hoping one will give before the other does. 

Heejin’s too prideful, and you’re too resistant to the idea of “us”.

But you’re both content, especially as she pulls at your shirt for more as her lips continue to meet yours.

Why should you deny her of you, of the things that make you both content?

Maybe next time will be different.

It won’t be. 

You know this.

She knows this.

Yet you’re still kissing her, and she’s still kissing you.

Forever in limbo.