#tsbu 1

You have learned most of what you know about patience from things that cannot be hurried. You have also learned it from fifteen years of Kim Seokjin, which amounts to approximately the same education.

There is also a sugar work technique — unforgiving, not widely taught, will burn you if you do it wrong — where you pull hot caramel until it turns translucent and it looks like spun glass, like something that should not exist, and you have about four minutes before it sets and after that it is whatever shape it decided to be. 

You either made the thing you meant to make or you didn't. 

The timer is not a suggestion. Cameron, your right hand at the bakery, has burned it twice. You have told him the same thing both times: the problem is not the heat. The problem is that it looks perfect a full thirty seconds before it's ready. You will think you caught it in time. You will think, standing there watching it, that everything is fine.

And then it tips. And then it's burned. And then you have a lesson instead of a dessert.

Do not let it tell you it's fine just because it looks fine.

The stainless prep table in the back of your bakery is cold against your palms.

You know this because your hands are flat on it, braced, and your husband has his mouth at your throat and his hands in your hair and the specific relentless focus he is currently applying to taking you apart against your own equipment is the clearest indicator you've had in three weeks that something, underneath all of this, is... wrong.

But you don't know exactly what.

The memory surfaces the way it always does in this light — the yellow-low warmth of a kitchen after hours, the particular smell of broth and sesame and something sweet underneath, and the fact that your bakery at midnight smells nothing like your parents' restaurant and yet somehow always takes you back there.

You were nineteen. Working the floor between semesters, which your father considered a perfectly complete education in itself.

"Why pay someone else to teach you what three generations of this family already know?" he had said, gesturing at the restaurant with the pride of a man who had built something real with his hands and genuinely could not understand why that wouldn't be enough for everyone.

You hadn't answered him, because the honest answer was: because I want to make things that have never existed before, and this place already knows exactly what it wants to be. The culinary school brochure was under your mattress. Your dad thought your mom had thrown it away. Your mom had not thrown it away.

You loved your parents' restaurant. You also knew, with the particular certainty of someone who was the youngest in your family and therefore had significant experience identifying the difference between what a room expects from you and what you actually want — you knew it was not where you were going to stay.

But you were there that Tuesday. Apron on, order pad in hand, when the door opened and all seven of them walked in.

You had grown up with three older brothers. Loud was not a condition that alarmed you.

Loud was a Tuesday.

These seven were a specific kind of loud — young and hungry and slightly chaotic, the energy of people who are working toward something they can feel but not quite see yet, and the wanting of it is coming out of them sideways. They took up a table that was technically for four. Nobody mentioned this. The tallest one with the soft eyes had already knocked over a water glass and caught it before it landed. The one in the beanie was arguing with two others simultaneously about something that seemed to involve a choreography count. One of them — round-faced, the youngest-looking, enormous eyes — was reading the menu with the concentration of someone defusing something.

You went over.

Seven heads turned.

You noticed him before you noticed the rest of them.

That was not typical. Three older brothers and a restaurant full of people every night had cured you of most things, boys included. The others were cute — young and bright-eyed and fidgety, the kind of fidgety that comes from having somewhere to be and trying not to show it. But they were boys. And then there was him.

He was the same age as you, maybe — that was your first thought, because he had the kind of face that stopped you mid-step on a street, the kind that made you do a small involuntary recalculation of what you'd been planning to do next. Broad shoulders. Easy posture. Already looking at you when you arrived at the table.

You realized, approximately two seconds later, that you were staring.

He was smirking. Slow, unhurried, completely shameless — not mean about it, just aware, comfortable letting you know he'd noticed.

You looked down at your order pad. Composed, you thought. Immediately.

"What can I get you?" you said.

He held your gaze for exactly one beat longer than necessary — and then something shifted, just slightly, a flicker behind the confidence, there and gone before you could name it. Not embarrassment. Something closer to a decision being made quickly.

"Galbitang," he said. "Three bowls."

Three bowls. Seven people.

He said it easily, the smirk still mostly in place, but his eyes did a thing — a quick, almost imperceptible thing, like he was already aware of what you might be counting and was very much hoping the face would be enough of a distraction.

It was a decent attempt.

You wrote it down without comment. Around the table, shoulders dropped. A breath or two released. The youngest-looking one stopped gripping his menu. They had been braced for something — you could see it in the way they all exhaled at once, the way nobody quite looked at you — and you understood immediately. They'd counted the money before they came in. They'd made the calculation. They were hoping you wouldn't say it out loud.

You didn't say it out loud.

You were walking back to the kitchen when the laugh hit you — big, uncontained, the kind of laugh that happens to a room and not just in it — and you glanced back without meaning to.

He was laughing at something the beanie one had said with his whole body like he'd never learned to do it any other way. And then, as if he felt it, he looked up. Directly at you. And the laugh didn't stop — it just shifted, got a little more deliberate, and he raised an eyebrow.

You looked away first.

You told yourself that meant nothing.

Your mother noticed them before the food was ready.

This was how your mother operated: she noticed everything and responded to what she noticed through portion sizes. It was her primary language. A table she liked got served more food than they ordered. A table she didn't like got the correct amount and no more. The galbitang came out in three bowls that were, conservatively, large enough to concern you from a logistics standpoint, and then she kept going — banchan arriving in waves, small dish after small dish, the pickled cucumbers and the braised potatoes and the japchae and something she pulled from the back that wasn't even on the menu today.

"Eomma," you said, in the kitchen, watching her plate. "They ordered three bowls."

"They're eating seven," she said, not looking up.

"We can't —"

"From the house," she said. Which meant: I have decided this and it is not a discussion. "Good kids. Look at them."

You looked at them through the pass. The youngest-looking one had stopped reading the menu and was now taking a photo of the food with a phone he was holding very carefully, the way people hold things they are afraid of dropping. The one with the silver earrings was dividing one bowl into smaller portions with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this before. The tall one with the mohawk was explaining something to the one next to him with enormous hand gestures, and when the banchan started arriving his face did something very genuine and unguarded, something that looked like relief.

"Good kids," your mother said again, and went back to the kitchen.

The banchan was not from the house. You knew this because you knew every dish your mother kept back there, and at least two of those plates had been intended for the dinner service. She had decided, somewhere in the thirty seconds of watching them, that they needed it more.

He came to the counter to pay.

You watched him gather the bill from the table — watched him do it in a specific way, lifting it before anyone else could reach for it, saying something that made the one with the silver hair roll his eyes and the youngest-looking one grin.

"Aish — hyung's got it," he said, loud enough that you heard it from across the restaurant, and the resulting cheer from the table was completely disproportionate to what had happened.

He came to the counter. Up close he was more — more everything, really. The kind of face that was slightly unfair, and he seemed to be aware of this in the comfortable way of someone who had made peace with an advantage early and stopped thinking about it.

Then he put a card on the counter.

Black. The kind that didn't have a limit printed on it because people who carry them don't need to see the number.

You looked at the card. You looked at him. You didn't say anything.

He looked, for approximately half a second, like he was going to explain it. Then he didn't, which was the right call.

You processed the payment.

"Thank you," he said. And then: "This place is great."

"It's been here for thirty years," you said.

"I can tell. It tastes like — " He paused, searching. "Like someone actually cares what you think of it."

You looked at him.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Y/N," you said.

"Seokjin," he said.

"I didn't ask," you said.

He laughed — the real one, the full-body one, surprised out of him — and you felt it land somewhere in your chest and told yourself firmly that was not relevant information.

His eyes went to the small shelf behind you where you kept the things you made yourself, separate from the restaurant menu. Your bread. A few pastries. Things that had no business being in a galbitang restaurant, which your father had mentioned, and which you had responded to by putting up a small handwritten sign that said baked fresh daily and continuing to make them.

"You sell bread here?" he said.

"I make it," you said.

"You make it," he repeated, like this was interesting to him specifically. His eyes moved along the shelf. "What's that one?"

"Pain au chocolat."

He looked at it. He looked at you. "Can I—"

He looked at the pain au chocolat for a moment, then at you.

"I'll take it," he said.

You put it in a small paper bag and slid it across the counter. He reached for it and then — instead of picking it up like a normal person — grabbed the top of the bag between his teeth, both hands occupied tucking his wallet back into his pocket, and the move was so casually, effortlessly ridiculous that you almost missed the way his eyes cut back up to yours.

He caught you watching his mouth.

The wink was slow. Unhurried. The full deployment of someone who had done this before and knew exactly what it did.

And something in you went: oh, so that's how it is.

You tilted your head. Let your eyes drop — deliberately, slowly — to his lips. Held it there just long enough to be a statement. Then looked back up.

The wink died.

The color started at his neck and moved fast — ears, jaw, the tips of his cheekbones going pink so quickly it was almost impressive. He turned. Walked toward the door. Clipped the edge of a chair on his way and grabbed it before it fell, not looking back, not stopping, the back of his neck still completely red.

The door closed behind him.

You laughed out loud — surprised out of it, genuine, the kind that happens before you decide to. So the flirting was a performance. The confidence was real but the landing wasn't, not when someone gave it back to him, and he was something, he was truly something, and you were still smiling when you turned back to the counter and found approximately six things that needed doing.

You didn't know it then — you were still laughing, still turning back to the counter, still recalibrating — but when you glanced up a moment later, all six of them were already through the door.

All six.

The seventh was still inside.

He was by the door, beanie pulled low, hands in his pockets, and he was looking at you with an expression that wasn't performing anything at all. Just looking. The kind of looking that doesn't know it's been caught yet.

Your mother came out from the kitchen with a rag and a expression that missed nothing.

He noticed her notice him.

The embarrassment was immediate and total — he dropped his eyes, ducked his head, and was out the door before you'd fully processed that he'd been there. No smile. No wink. Just a boy in a beanie who had stayed one second longer than the rest of them and then left like the floor had shifted under him.

You stared at the closed door for a moment.

"Good kids," your mother said, already collecting plates from their table, not looking up. There was barely anything left — seven people, three bowls, everything she'd sent out from the house, gone. "They'll come back."

You picked up a side dish someone had finished down to the last drop of sauce.

"Maybe," you said.

They came back the next Tuesday. And the one after that.

It had been bothering you since three in the afternoon and you couldn't put your finger on why.

Not the pastry — the pastry was coming along, a brown butter tart with a black sesame base that Cameron had declared a masterpiece-in-progress before leaving at six, which was high praise from a man who considered his own opinions definitive. The pastry was fine. The pastry was actually almost there, which you knew because you'd been staring at it for two hours making very small adjustments and it kept getting better, and that was not the problem.

The problem was your husband.

Specifically: the version of your husband you'd seen this morning, which was the loud version, the full-performance Jin, the one who took up every available inch of the kitchen doing a bit about the coffee machine that had made you laugh hard enough to spill yours, who had kissed you on his way out with the energy of a man auditioning for the role of World's Most Charming Person, who had said something so absurd on his way through the door that you'd still been smiling about it on the drive in.

You knew that version of him better than almost anyone.

You had also, from approximately the third Tuesday he walked into your parents' restaurant, understood that it was a version. Not fake — he was genuinely funny, genuinely warm, the performance and the person were not so far apart that it was a lie. But the real him was quieter. Calmer. The one who sat on the kitchen counter at midnight not saying anything in particular and didn't need to. The one whose humor settled into something dryer and more offhand when he stopped performing it. The one who looked at you sometimes like you were a problem he was very glad to have.

You had clocked him at nineteen across a restaurant counter and you had never unclocked him since.

So when Kim Seokjin was being very, very funny, you paid attention to what he was being funny about. And this morning he had been funny about everything, which meant he was thinking hard about something, and whatever it was he hadn't offered it yet and you hadn't asked because you knew the shape of him well enough to know when to wait.

You piped a clean line of sesame cream and told yourself to leave it alone for tonight.

Three knocks on the back door. His rhythm. You'd know it in a coma.

You looked at the clock. 11:43.

You unlocked the door.

He leaned against the doorframe, hands in his pockets, and looked at you with the expression that had been making you recalibrate since you were nineteen years old.

"My wife is in here," he said. "I saw the light."

"Your wife is working," you said, and left the door open behind you, which he correctly interpreted as an invitation.

He came in. Looked around. Looked at you. His eyes went to the tart on the counter with the focused attention of a man who has located something he wants and is deciding on his approach.

"Don't," you said.

"I haven't done anything."

"You're thinking about it."

"I'm thinking about a lot of things," he said, moving toward the testing station with the casualness of someone who believed if you moved slowly enough it didn't count as stealing. "I'm a complex person."

"Touch that tart and I will end you."

He stopped. Pivoted smoothly. Looked at you instead. "Can I touch you?"

"That's a completely different conversation."

"I'm very good at conversations." He was in the kitchen properly now, the way he always was in your kitchen — taking up all the available space without appearing to try, gravitating toward wherever you were standing the way he always had, since before either of you had acknowledged it was a thing he did. He stopped next to you and looked at the tart with what was almost respect. "What is this one?"

"Brown butter, black sesame, miso caramel."

"When's it going on the menu?"

"When I decide it's ready."

"It looks ready."

"It looked ready an hour ago too. I'm not rushing it."

He made a sound that was not agreement and not disagreement and was mostly just him being in your space, which was, you were aware, entirely intentional. You piped another line. He watched. This was also a thing he had always done — watched you work with the patient, genuine attention of someone who found it interesting and wasn't performing the finding.

The quiet lasted about forty seconds, which was about as long as he ever let a quiet last when he was avoiding something.

"So," he said, in the voice he used for announcements.

"So," you said.

"I'm here on official business."

You looked up at him. He was trying not to smile, which meant he was about to say something ridiculous. You knew this. You braced accordingly.

"The members know," he said. "We agreed there's never going to be a right time. There's always another album, always another tour, always something." He paused. "So I thought —" another pause, pure theatre, he was absolutely milking this — "that tonight is a very good night for someone to put a bun in the oven."

You stared at him.

"You're in a bakery," he said, gesturing around at your bakery. "You put buns in the oven. Professionally. It's practically in your job description." He tilted his head. "I'm here to assist."

"You," you said, "are unbelievable."

"I'm also," he said, closing the remaining distance between you with the confidence of a man who knew exactly how this was going to go, "the only one here who can help you with this particular recipe."

"That is the worst —"

"I know."

"— the absolute worst —"

"I know." His hands found your waist. "Is it working?"

You looked at him. The full Jin. The loud, funny, charming, completely shameless face that you had seen through at nineteen and loved every day since — and underneath it, right now, something that was just him, just Seokjin, quieter and more certain, looking at you like you were the only fixed point in whatever was going on in his head tonight.

Something is wrong, you thought. And then his mouth was at your throat and your hands were flat on the prep table and you thought: I'll ask him later.

The thing about Kim Seokjin — the thing that had taken you approximately three weeks to understand at nineteen and which had never stopped being true — is that he contained multitudes, and those multitudes were fully operational in every context, including extensively, this one.

He was loud. He had always been loud. The kind of man who said exactly what he wanted in a voice that suggested he had never once been embarrassed about wanting it, who would tell you in specific and unambiguous terms what he was going to do and then do it, who had weaponized the sound of his own voice in ways that should be illegal and were definitely immoral and which you had absolutely zero complaints about.

He was also — and this was the part that got you every time, still, ten years in — completely undone by you. You knew exactly what it took. You had always known. And there was a particular satisfaction in being the person who could take someone that large and confident and shameless and reduce him, through targeted application of what ten years had taught you, to something considerably less composed.

It was genuinely one of your favorite hobbies.

His mouth was warm at your throat and his hands were at your waist and you had approximately four things on your mental list for tonight that were not this, and then he did something very specific with his mouth and the list evaporated.

"I still have work," you said, into the air above his head.

"Mm," he said, which was not an acknowledgment, it was a noise he made when he was not listening and knew you knew he wasn't listening and had decided this was fine.

"The tart needs —"

"The tart is fine."

"You haven't even tried it."

He pulled back just enough to look at you. Then, without breaking eye contact, he reached sideways, picked up the testing spoon off the station, and ate what was on it. His expression shifted — the eyes closing briefly, the specific unguarded reaction he had to food you made that he had never once been able to fake and had never tried to. A sound escaped him that had no business occurring in a professional kitchen.

"The tart," he said, setting the spoon down, "is incredible and it's done and you know it's done."

"That's not —"

"You've been here since seven AM."

"I open at seven, I get here at —"

"You've been here since six," he said. "Cameron told me."

You made a mental note to speak to Cameron about loyalty.

Jin's hands moved from your waist to the prep table on either side of you, not caging, just — present, the way he was always present, filling up the available space until there was just him and you and the low hum of the proofing oven and the city outside not knowing any of this was happening.

"Hi," he said, quieter.

Not the Jin voice. The other one.

"Hi," you said.

He looked at you for a moment — really looked, the way he did when he wasn't performing anything, when it was just the two of you and the late hour and ten years of knowing each other down to the bone. Something in his face was tired in a way that the loud morning version had not let you see. Something that had been running underneath the bit about the coffee machine and the kiss on your way out and all the very funny things he'd said today that had kept you from being able to put your finger on it until now.

There it is, you thought. There's the thing.

You didn't say it.

You reached up and pushed his hair back off his forehead, the way you had done ten thousand times, and he leaned into it without thinking, the way he always did, like your hands on him was a reflex he'd stopped being able to help a long time ago.

"You came all the way here," you said.

"You were here," he said. Simply. Like that was the complete explanation. Like it was.

He kissed you then — not the throat thing, not the performance, just a kiss, slow and certain, the kind that had nothing to prove and knew it. You kissed him back. His hands came up off the table and found your face, tilting it up toward his, and you felt him exhale against you like something released.

You would ask him later. You would ask him tonight, on the drive home, or tomorrow in the kitchen, or whenever he was ready to put it down and let you see it. You knew how to wait. You had always known how to wait for him to find the door.

But he had come here. At 11:43 on a Tuesday he had gotten in his car and come to where you were, because that was what he did, had always done, since he was a boy with a loud laugh and a black card he was slightly embarrassed about who kept finding reasons to come back.

You pulled back just enough to look at him.

"There's never going to be a right time," you said.

Something in his face shifted. "No," he said.

"Another tour. Another album."

"Always," he said.

"So." You held his gaze. "We decided."

The tired thing in his face didn't go away. But something else came up alongside it — warm, certain, the real smile, not the performance one — and he said, "We decided," and kissed you again and this time it was not slow, and his hands moved, and yours did too, and the brown butter tart sat finished and ignored on the counter behind you while the proofing oven hummed and the city outside carried on without you.

He walked you back until your hands hit the cold prep table.

"I have been working on that table all day," you said, against his mouth.

He looked at you.

The look said: and?

"Seokjin —"

He lifted you onto it like the objection was a formality you were both observing out of politeness, and you decided, comprehensively, that it was.

The prep table was cold.

You registered this distantly, the way you registered things when Kim Seokjin was looking at you like that — as information, present but not particularly relevant, filed somewhere behind the much more immediate fact of his hands and his mouth and the ten years of accumulated knowledge he was currently applying to making you forget you had ever cared about anything else.

"Hi," he said again, against your jaw. Lower this time.

"You already said that," you managed.

"I like saying it." His mouth moved to your throat. "Hi. Hi. Hi." Each one punctuated, deliberate, working down. "My wife is so —" a sound escaped him that was not a word, more like something that had outrun language — "I cannot believe you're real."

"Seokjin —"

"Ten years," he said, into your collarbone. "Ten years and I still —" he pulled back enough to look at you, and his face was the undone version, all that careful loudness gone quiet — "every single day I think, that's my wife. She chose me. She keeps choosing me." He shook his head slightly. "Insane. You're insane. I love you."

"I love you," you said. "You're also insane."

"Deeply," he agreed, and kissed you.

His mouth had been the problem since the beginning. Since a Tuesday afternoon in your parents' restaurant when he'd grabbed a paper bag between his teeth and looked up at you and you'd had to actively reconstruct your own personality. Ten years later and you were still reconstructing. You had made peace with this.

He kissed like he did everything else — with his whole self, no reservations, the kind of kiss that made it very clear he had nowhere else to be and nothing else he'd rather be doing. His hands moved to the knot of your apron and he pulled back just enough to look at you with the specific question that he had asked with his eyes approximately ten thousand times and would apparently never stop asking with his eyes despite the fact that the answer had not changed once.

"Yes," you said, before he could.

He grinned. "I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was," he agreed, and your shirt was gone.

He took off your apron first.

His hands found the knot at your back without looking, unfastening it with the ease of someone who had done it enough times that his hands knew the way without being asked. Which he had. Which they did. He dropped it somewhere behind him without checking where it landed and moved to your shirt next, and then your bra, and he was — as he had always been, infuriatingly, consistently — extremely good at this, the kind of good that came from ten years of dedicated practice and genuine enthusiasm, and he did not hide how pleased he was about it, not even a little.

He hooked his fingers into the waistband of your jeans.

"Wait," you said.

He looked up.

"Don't you think it's a bit unfair," you said, "that you get to have me completely naked in my own kitchen while you're still fully dressed?"

He took one step back.

You missed the heat of him immediately and absolutely did not say so.

He placed one hand on his chest, a gesture of theatrical gravity, and said: "Mrs. Kim." A pause for effect, because he was Kim Seokjin and he would always pause for effect. "Do you have any idea how much people would pay to see all of this?" He gestured at himself, a slow top-to-bottom motion that managed to be simultaneously ridiculous and completely justified. "So." The eyebrows went up. "What are you offering?"

You stared at him.

"Seokjin," you said. "I swear to God I will go home right now if you don't take off that hoodie."

He laughed — the real one, loose and warm — and closed the distance between you again. "So bossy," he said, and reached behind his head, grabbed the back of the hoodie, and pulled it off in one motion.

You did not hide your face.

You had decided, approximately the first time you'd seen him like this, that hiding your face was a battle not worth fighting. Ten years had not changed the situation. If anything ten years had made it worse, which should not have been possible and yet here you were, doing the same involuntary recalculation you'd been doing since you were nineteen.

He noticed. He always noticed. The smile that crossed his face was slow and warm and only slightly smug, which for him was restraint.

"Now," he said, stepping back into your space, hands returning to your waist, voice dropping into the register that had also been causing you problems since you were nineteen. "Can I please fuck my wife in peace?"

"Yes," you said. "But you're helping me clean and disinfect this entire surface afterward."

"I promise." He kissed the corner of your mouth. "Babe."

"Don't call me —"

He kissed you properly and the objection dissolved, which he had been counting on, which you were aware he had been counting on, and which you allowed because some things were simply not worth fighting and this was one of them.

His hands moved. Yours did too.

The jeans went.

"Insane," he said again, quieter. Then his mouth was at your collarbone and moving down and you stopped thinking about much else.

His hands found your waist and moved lower, and his fingers — his infuriating, talented, completely unreasonable fingers — found exactly where they were going with the confidence of ten years of detailed research, and you made a sound that you would be taking to your grave.

He pulled back to look at your face.

The expression he was wearing should have been illegal. Satisfied didn't cover it. It was the expression of a man who had just been proven right about something he had never doubted, which was worse, which had always been worse, because Kim Seokjin confident was one thing but Kim Seokjin vindicated was something else entirely.

Two fingers, deep, moving at a pace that was specifically, deliberately calibrated to undo you, and the worst part — the part you would never say out loud and he would never need you to say out loud because he already knew — was that it was going to work embarrassingly fast. It was always embarrassingly fast when he touched you like this, had been since the beginning, something about the combination of his hands and that look on his face and the ten years of him knowing you so completely that your body simply stopped pretending it had any resistance left.

He knew this.

"There she is," he said.

"Don't," you said.

"My wife," he said, to no one in particular, the way he sometimes narrated his own life when something was going well. "Look at her."

"Seokjin, I swear to god —"

"I'm looking," he said. "I'm allowed to look. You are my wife and you are beautiful." His hands moved and you inhaled sharply and his expression got worse, more satisfied, more devastating. "Hi," he said again, softly, watching your face. "Hi, love."

"Stop saying hi —"

"Tell me to stop and mean it."

You didn't tell him to stop.

"I'm not doing anything," he said. His fingers moved and your head dropped back and he made a soft sound that was almost reverent. "Look at you." Quieter now, the smugness folding into something warmer underneath. "All this time and you still —" the fingers curled and the sentence you were going to say became a sound instead and he exhaled slowly like he was the one coming undone. "God, I love you. I love you so much. You have no idea —"

"Seokjin —"

"Tell me." The pace shifted and your grip on his shoulders tightened and he watched your face like it was the only thing in the room. "Tell me."

"I love you," you said, because it was true and because he asked and because with him it had never been a thing you needed to think about, just the most accurate sentence you knew. "I love you, don't stop, I love you —"

"I know," he said, soft and certain, lips at your temple. "I know. I've got you." His thumb moved and you stopped being able to form words entirely. "I've always got you."

He found the bowl of brown butter cream on the counter behind you — your testing bowl, the one Cameron had declared magnificent, the one you'd been adjusting for two hours — and dipped two fingers into it, and looked at you.

"Don't you dare," you said.

The look on his face was slow. Unhurried. Completely without shame.

He spread it in a slow, deliberate line down your throat, across your collarbone, lower, and then followed it with his mouth, and the sound he made when he tasted it — the same sound as the testing spoon, the genuine unguarded one, except layered now with something else entirely — dissolved what remained of your ability to form complete thoughts.

"Perfect," he said, against your skin. "It's perfect. It's done. Put it on the menu."

"I hate you," you breathed.

"No you don't." His mouth moved. "You love me. You tell me all the time." Another movement. "Tell me again."

"I love you," you said, because you did, because it was simply the truest thing and always had been and you had never seen the point in withholding true things from him. "I love you, you absolute menace, I love you —"

"Again," he said.

"Seokjin —"

"I like hearing it." His mouth found a place that made you grip the edge of the table. "Again."

"I love you," you said, and it came out wrecked, and he made a sound against you that meant he knew exactly what he'd done and was not remotely sorry.

He was loud.

He had always been loud. This was not new information — you had known this since approximately month two, which was also when you had understood that the shameless confidence was real and not a performance, that Kim Seokjin in private was if anything worse than Kim Seokjin in public, which was saying something, which had taken some adjusting to, which you had adjusted to completely and then some.

He talked. He had always talked, told you what he wanted in a voice that suggested the wanting was the most natural thing in the world, said your name the way he said everything — like it was worth saying properly, like he had decided early that he was never going to be embarrassed about any of this and had fully committed. He told you you were beautiful approximately four times in the span of ten minutes with the sincerity of someone saying it for the first time every time, and you believed him every time, which was its own kind of problem.

And then you got your hands on him and he came apart and that — that was the other thing about Kim Seokjin, the thing that lived on the other side of the loudness and the confidence and the complete shamelessness — he was undone by you specifically, had always been undone by you specifically, in a way that was clearly involuntary and clearly had not decreased in ten years and clearly was not going to.

The whimper that escaped him when your hands moved was soft and genuine and did something devastating to your chest.

"Hey," you said.

"Don't," he said, into your hair. "Don't say anything."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were going to say something smug."

"I was going to say I love you."

A pause. His arms tightened around you.

"Oh," he said. Quieter. "Okay."

"I love you," you said.

"I love you," he said, muffled, face pressed to your hair. "I love you so much it's genuinely embarrassing. Ten years and it's worse. It just keeps getting —" your hands moved and the sentence dissolved into something that was not words.

You smiled against his shoulder.

"I know," you said.

"Okay," he said, at some point, pulling back to look at you with the focused attention of a man who has made a decision. "We had a plan."

"We had a plan," you agreed.

"The bun."

"The oven."

"Exactly." He looked extremely serious. He was not serious. "This is important work we're doing."

"Critical," you said.

"For the family."

"For the future."

"Jungkook," he said, "is going to be so annoying about being an uncle."

You laughed — surprised out of it — and he caught it with his mouth and kissed you and it went from warm to not warm very quickly and then his hands were moving with considerably more intention and you stopped thinking about Jungkook entirely, which was the correct outcome.

He had always been thorough. The kind of thorough that made you understand, every time, that he was paying attention not just to what worked but to you specifically, the particular inventory of ten years — what made you gasp, what made you say his name, what made you grip his shoulders and forget what you'd been planning to say. He kept all of it. He used all of it. And periodically he looked up at your face with an expression that was equal parts wrecked and wondering, like he was still, even now, slightly amazed by the whole thing.

"You're looking at me," you said.

"I'm always looking at you," he said.

"We're a little busy."

"I can multitask." His mouth curved. "I'm very talented."

"You're very —" he did something and the word dissolved.

"What was that?" he said.

"Don't be smug."

"I'm not smug," he said, doing it again. "I'm appreciative. There's a difference."

There was not a meaningful difference. You chose not to say this because you had lost the ability to construct the sentence.

Afterward, the bakery was very quiet.

You were both on the floor — not planned, the floor had simply been where you ended up, which had happened before and would happen again — and he had his back against the cabinet and you were against him and his arms were around you and neither of you was saying anything, which with Kim Seokjin meant something, because Kim Seokjin always said something.

His hand moved slowly up and down your arm.

"Hi," he said, into your hair.

You laughed. "Hi."

"My wife."

"Your wife," you confirmed.

A long pause. His chin rested on top of your head. Outside, Seoul was doing its late night things, indifferent and ongoing, and in here it was just the two of you and the hum of the proofing oven and the brown butter tart on the counter that was definitely done and definitely going on the menu.

"I love you," he said. Not performing it. Just saying it, the way he said true things — like it was simply the accurate word and he saw no reason not to use it.

"I love you," you said.

His arms tightened slightly. You felt him breathe.

Something is wrong, you thought. The thought that had been sitting with you since three in the afternoon, patient, waiting. You were going to ask him. You were going to find the right moment and knock on whatever door he'd been keeping closed and wait for him to open it, because that was the shape of you two, had always been the shape of you — you knocked, he opened, eventually, in his own time, and you had never once not been let in.

But not right now.

Right now his arms were around you on the floor of your bakery at half past midnight and he was warm and present and here, which was the thing about him, the most load-bearing thing — when it mattered, he came. He had always come. Since he was a boy who kept finding reasons to come back to a restaurant two streets from the old Big Hit building, he had always found his way back to where you were.

"Come home," you said.

"Yeah," he said. "Let's go home."

Neither of you moved for another five minutes.

You were doing your skincare when he started talking.

This was normal. Jin talked the way some people breathed — continuously, naturally, without apparent need for a response, though he always wanted one. You had learned in year one that the correct approach was to keep doing whatever you were doing and answer from wherever you were, and over ten years this had evolved into its own domestic language, conversations held across rooms and through walls and with one of you occasionally disappearing entirely into a closet and still being expected to participate.

You were in the bathroom doorway, toner in hand, and he was on the bed in the specific horizontal position of a man who had decided the day was over and his body was no longer taking requests.

"They are so hopeless," he said, to the ceiling. "All of them. Completely hopeless."

"Mm," you said.

"Jimin." He said the name with the gravity of a diagnosis. "Babe. He built an entire dance center. Curated the whole program. Handpicked every collaborator himself." A pause. "Handpicked her himself. And now he's walking around telling everyone he doesn't know why management assigned him this particular choreographer and she's very challenging to work with."

You looked at him over your shoulder. "He handpicked her?"

"He sent three emails," Jin said. "I saw them. He cc'd me by accident on the second one."

You turned back to the mirror. "He's going to be insufferable about this."

"He's already insufferable about this. He spent forty minutes yesterday explaining to me why their working dynamic is strictly professional." Another pause. "He had a presentation."

"A presentation."

"Slides."

You pressed your lips together.

"And Namjoon —" Jin's voice shifted slightly, the way it always did when he landed on something that was funny and also not. "The Girl-Doctor Friend. Two years, babe. Two years of whatever that was and she just — stopped. Ghosted. Nothing."

"I know," you said, quieter.

"He's fine. He says he's fine." The ceiling received this information. "He is not fine."

"He'll get there."

"He will. He just —" Jin exhaled. "He falls so completely. Like, all the way. It's a lot to watch."

A small silence. You moved on to moisturizer.

"Taehyung," he said, recovering his momentum. "You know what's happening with Taehyung."

"I know what's happening with Taehyung."

"I'm not going to say anything about Taehyung."

"Very wise."

"I'm just going to say that the situation is —" he made a sound that was not a word but communicated clearly — "It's a whole thing."

"It's always a whole thing with him."

"Always." He shifted on the bed. "Oh. Oh, babe. You don't even know about Yoongi."

You turned around. "What about Yoongi?"

He sat up slightly, propping himself on his elbows, with the expression of a man about to deliver news of significant quality. "He told his parents he's dating someone."

You waited.

"The director," he said. "Of the music center. The one with the — he told his parents they're together."

You stared at him. "They're not together."

"They are not together."

"Seokjin."

"I know."

"He told his parents —"

"He told his parents." He fell back against the pillow. "I don't know what happened. I don't know what he was thinking. She agreed, apparently, which — I don't know what she was thinking either."

"Oh my god." You turned back to the mirror because you needed a moment. "He is going to blow that up so badly."

"Spectacularly," Jin agreed, with a fondness that meant he was also terrified for him. "I give it two weeks before someone cries."

"Two weeks is generous."

"I'm a generous person."

You laughed. He smiled at the ceiling.

"And Jungkook," he said, with the energy of someone saving the best for last. "Our Jungkook. The baby. You've seen him lately?"

"I've seen him."

"The Harley."

"I know."

"The tattoos."

"I know, Seokjin."

"The —" he gestured vaguely at his own face to indicate piercings.

"I have eyes," you said. "I've seen him."

"He looks like someone's bad decision," Jin said, "and I mean that with my whole chest as a compliment." He paused. "I thought I was going to be the fun uncle."

You looked at him in the mirror.

"I had plans," he said. "I was going to be so fun. The cool uncle. The one they call when they can't call their parents." He shook his head. "It's going to be Jungkook. It was always going to be Jungkook. I've been replaced by a man with a motorcycle and I haven't even —" he stopped. Recalibrated. "We haven't even started yet."

"We started tonight," you said. "Technically. In my bakery."

"We did," he said. "On your prep table."

"Which you're helped me disinfect."

"Which I absolutely helped you disinfect." A beat.

"How is Hoseok doing?" you said. "Actually doing."

Jin was quiet for a moment. Not the thinking kind of quiet. The kind where he already knows the answer and is deciding how much of it to hand over.

"Not good," he said.

You looked at the ceiling.

"He's trying," Jin said. "You know how he is. He turns it into work, into movement, into — he keeps going. But underneath all of that." He stopped. "Not good."

"Yeah," you said.

A beat.

"How is she doing?" he asked.

You exhaled slowly. "She's not doing any better. And I don't know what to do to help. I keep trying to find the thing and there isn't a thing and it's —" you stopped. "It's hard to watch."

Jin turned toward you in the dark. "Hey," he said, gently. "You can't walk their path for them."

"I know."

"I mean it. You're going to break your own heart trying to fix something that isn't yours to fix." His hand found yours again under the covers. "They have to find their way through it. Same as everyone does."

"Same as we did," you said.

"Same as we did," he said. A pause that was almost a smile. "And we were not any better, let's be honest."

"We were terrible," you said.

"Terrible," he agreed. "Fifteen years we've known each other. Ten together. And those first five —" he made a sound that was part laugh, part something more complicated. "A disaster. Genuinely. I don't know how either of us survived it."

"You were so stubborn," you said.

"You were also stubborn."

"I was waiting for you to figure it out."

"I was —" he paused, reconsidering. "Okay. I was also stubborn." His thumb moved across your knuckles. "The point is, nobody could have helped us through that either. It had to be us. It was always going to have to be us."

You thought about Hoseok. About her. About the particular specific sadness of two people who hadn't found their way to each other yet and didn't know if they were going to.

"I just want them to be okay," you said.

"I know," Jin said. "Me too."

A small silence.

"We turned out okay," he offered.

"We turned out okay," you agreed.

"Better than okay." Another pause, lighter now, the register shifting the way it always did with him, the pivot from real to fond that had always been his way of saying: I've got you, we're okay, come back. "Look at us. Matching pajamas. A Mortgage."

"You did buy us matching pajamas."

"I absolutely did. Last Chuseok. You said they were ugly."

"They were ugly."

"They were couple pajamas," he said, with great dignity. "That's the point. The ugliness is the point." He shifted beside you. "And you wore them."

"You made me."

"You wore them three times after that when I wasn't even home."

You said nothing.

"I have evidence," he said.

"Good night, Seokjin."

He laughed, soft and real, and pulled you slightly closer, and you went, because you always went, because after fifteen years you had stopped pretending you needed convincing.

"Do you really think we're ready?" you said, into the dark.

He turned his head toward you. You could feel it rather than see it.

"I think," he said, carefully, "that I want what you want. If you feel ready, we try. If you don't, we wait." A pause. "I'll wait as long as you need."

You looked at the ceiling.

"I want to try again," you said.

Not we should try. Not I think it's time. Try again. The words landed in the room and he let them, didn't push on what they carried, just received them the way he received things that mattered — completely, without flinching.

"Okay," he said.

"I really want to."

"Okay," he said again, softer. "Then we will." His hand found yours under the covers. "And we're going to have a lot of fun trying." The eyebrows were audible even in the dark. "A lot of fun. Extensively. With great dedication to the cause."

"Good night, Seokjin."

"I'm just saying. The work ethic alone —"

"Good night."

"Weekly minimum, at least. Maybe more. I'm very committed —"

"Seokjin."

"I love you," he said, switching registers without warning the way he always did, dropping from the bit straight into the true thing underneath it, clean and simple and completely meant.

You squeezed his hand.

"I love you too," you said. A pause. "Are you okay?"

The question sat in the dark between you.

He was quiet long enough that you felt it — the shape of something he was turning over, deciding whether to set down or carry a little longer. You knew that silence. You had memorized that silence.

He turned toward you. Kissed you softly, once, his hand coming up to your face in the dark.

"I'm fine," he said, against your mouth. "I will be fine." Another kiss, slower. "I'm just tired, love. The comeback, the schedules, the press — it's been a long stretch." His thumb moved along your jaw. "And I'm going to miss you. When tour starts. I'm already missing you and I haven't left yet."

You put your hand over his.

"Okay," you said. "Get some sleep."

"Yeah," he said.

He kissed your forehead.

"See you in the morning," you said.

"See you in the morning," he said.

He was asleep before you were. Or he was performing it. You lay in the dark next to him and listened to him breathe and thought about caramel, and the thirty seconds where it looks perfect, and the thing underneath the tiredness that he wasn't ready to say yet.

You were going to wait.

But not much longer.

You were almost there — that last soft edge before sleep, the city outside faded to a low hum, his arm warm and heavy across your waist — when he said it.

Quiet. Half-formed. The kind of thing that comes out when the body is already letting go of the day and the guard comes down with it.

"—don't know if I have anything left to give them."

You stilled.

"Seokjin," you said.

Nothing.

You turned over carefully. He was asleep — fully, genuinely asleep, face slack and unguarded, the tiredness that had been living underneath the whole day finally visible now that there was no performance left to hold it back. His breathing was slow and even. He had no idea he'd said it.

You lay there in the dark and looked at him for a long moment.

There it is, you thought. There's the thing.

You didn't sleep for a while after that.

The tart was perfect.

You knew it the moment you cut the first slice — the black sesame base holding clean, the miso caramel exactly where it needed to be, the brown butter coming through on the finish the way you'd been chasing for two weeks. You stood alone in the bakery at six forty-seven in the morning and ate a slice at the counter and felt, for about ninety seconds, like everything was fine.

Then Cameron arrived and you remembered that it wasn't.

He came through the back door already talking, coat half off, the specific morning energy of someone who had been awake and enthusiastic for longer than was reasonable. He stopped when he saw the tart. Walked over. Looked at it the way he looked at things he had been personally rooting for.

"Tell me that's what I think it is," he said.

"Try it," you said.

He grabbed a fork. Tried it. Put the fork down. Looked at you with an expression that was genuinely moved.

"You got it," he said. "You actually got it."

"I got it."

"Okay." He clapped once. "Okay! It's going on the menu. This week. I'm making the sign myself, don't try to stop me."

You laughed despite yourself. "You're not making the sign."

"I'm making the sign," he said, already moving toward the prep station with the energy of someone who had decided. "I have a vision. It involves calligraphy. You're going to love it."

"Cameron —"

"You're going to love it," he said again, warmly, finally, the way he said things he had already decided were true. He pulled on his apron and looked at you properly for the first time since walking in, and his expression softened slightly. "Hey. You okay? You look a little —"

"I'm fine," you said. "I'm good. Just didn't sleep great."

He nodded, easy, not pushing. That was the thing about Cameron — he knew when to and when not to, had always known, which was one of the many reasons you had hired him and one of the many reasons you were glad every day that you had. "Okay. Well. We have a big day so you're gonna need to be at least seventy percent operational by nine."

"I'll be operational."

"The sesame delivery is at nine. And —" he paused, reaching for the order folder, and when he looked up his whole face had changed. "Did you see the Jeong confirmation come through last night?"

You had. You'd seen it at half past eleven, standing in your own bakery with flour on your wrists, and you had stared at it for a full thirty seconds before the reality of it landed.

"I saw it," you said.

"A hundred and twenty guests," he said. "Passed appetizers, full dessert station, centerpiece cake, custom theme." He looked at you. "This is the biggest thing we've done."

"I know."

"The client is —" he stopped, because you had both agreed not to say the name out loud until after the public announcement, a professional courtesy that you were finding genuinely difficult — "significant. Like, very significant."

"I know," you said again.

"So we're going to be —"

"Insane for ten days."

"Insane for ten days," he agreed. "But we're going to be so good." He said it with complete conviction, the kind that wasn't performing confidence but actually had it, and something in you settled slightly because Cameron had never once told you something was going to be okay and been wrong about it. "We've got this. You've got this. This tart alone — if we put this on the dessert station they are going to lose their minds." He pointed at it. "You made that. You've been making things like that your whole life. This is going to be incredible."

You looked at him.

"Thank you," you said, and meant it fully.

"Obviously," he said, and went back to the prep list. "Now. Do you want to go through the order schedule or do you want me to do it while you —" he glanced at you — "take a minute?"

"I'm fine," you said.

"Sure," he said, very gently. "But if you needed a minute, like, your office is right there and I have everything out here completely handled."

You looked at the office door.

"Five minutes," you said.

"Take ten," he said, already turning back to the counter. "I'll start the sesame dough."

You sat down in your office chair and did not do anything for a moment.

The order folder was on the desk. Your phone was in your pocket. Through the wall you could hear Cameron moving around, the familiar sounds of the bakery starting its day, and normally that sound settled you completely, the rhythm of it, the proof that the thing you had built was real and working and yours.

Right now it was just sound.

—don't know if I have anything left to give them.

You had lain awake for a long time after that. Watching the ceiling. Listening to him breathe. Running it back the way you ran recipes back when something wasn't working — looking for the step where it had changed, the moment the thing you thought you were making became something else.

He had been funny this morning. Genuinely funny, the eggs and the spatula and the joke that had made you inhale your coffee, and you had laughed because it was funny and because you loved him and because for twenty minutes the kitchen had been exactly what it always was. And then you'd tried — carefully, casually, just you seemed tired last night — and he'd pivoted so smoothly you'd almost missed it. Almost.

You knew that move.

You had watched him deploy it on interviewers and managers and members and his own mother, the joke arriving precisely when the real thing was getting close to the surface, the laugh like a door closing gently but firmly in your face.

He had never once used it on you before.

That was the part you kept coming back to.

Not what he'd said — though that sat in you heavy and unresolved, the image of him asleep with that half-sentence hanging in the air between you, don't know if I have anything left. But the fact that this morning, for the first time in ten years, he had used the bit on you. Had looked at you across the kitchen and chosen funny over honest and walked out the door.

Like he didn't trust you with it yet.

Or like he didn't trust himself.

You pressed your fingers to your eyes. Breathed.

The sesame dough wasn't going to make itself and you had a catering event in ten days that required you to be completely present and you were going to be completely present because that was what you did — you showed up, you made the thing, you did not fall apart in your own office at seven fifteen in the morning over a half-sentence your husband had said in his sleep.

You were also, under all of that, very scared.

Not of him. Never of him. Scared of the space. The thing you'd been feeling at the edges for weeks and not looking at directly, because looking at it directly would make it real, and you had both been so busy and so full and so fine — or performing fine, which until very recently had felt like approximately the same thing.

What if it wasn't fine.

What if the house being full and the laughter and the late nights at the bakery and all of it — what if underneath all of that something had been quietly, without either of you noticing, going wrong.

And underneath that thought, softer and more private, the one you hadn't said out loud to anyone: you wanted this. The baby. You had wanted it for longer than you'd admitted, even to yourself — had wanted it through another tour and another album and another press cycle and every time someone said there's never going to be a right time you had nodded and agreed and privately thought I know, I know, but I still want it, I want it so much. You had dreamed about it in a way that had nothing to do with timing or logistics, just the simple wanting of it. A life that was already full, fuller still.

You were ready to try again.

The word landed quietly in your chest. Again. Like it always did when you thought it. Like it carried something you weren't ready to put down yet.

You were ready.

You just needed your husband to be okay first.

Your phone buzzed.

Minji: lunch today yes or yes, I have things to tell you and also I need to eat something that isn't a chicken nugget my children are feral

Sooah: lunch. I have news. Not bad news. Weird news. Come.

You looked at the ceiling.

You typed back: yes. 12:30. I have things too.

You put your phone in your pocket. Stood up. Smoothed your apron.

Tonight, you thought. I'm asking him tonight. And he's going to answer me.

You went back out to the bakery.

"Okay," you said. "Let's go through the order schedule."

Cameron looked up from the dough. Looked at your face. Smiled at you — warm, real, no bit in it.

"Let's go," he said.

You had learned most of what you knew about patience from things that could not be hurried. Dough that needed its time. Caramel that looked perfect thirty seconds before it burned. A boy with a loud laugh who had taken five years to say the thing he'd been saying with everything else since the beginning.

You knew how to wait.

You knew how to watch.

What you did not know — what you were only now beginning to understand, standing in the bakery that he had built for you, in the life that you had built together, with his half-sentence still sitting unresolved in the back of your chest — was how to wait when it was him you were waiting on.

When it was the space between you that needed closing.

You picked up your piping bag.

You got to work. Read Part 2

hey. hi. hello. long time no see.

surprise — i'm back 🍞

okay so. i have been sick. genuinely, properly, miserably sick. it was a whole thing. i won't go into the details but i will say that my sister was approximately forty-eight hours away from physically confiscating my laptop and i think she was right to threaten it. i needed to rest. i actually rested. i did not open a single document for the days i needed to recover and it was the hardest thing i have done in recent memory.

and then today i sat down. and i started writing. and i finished this. at a completely unreasonable hour. and i thought — you know what, i'm posting it. right now. tonight. because i finished it and i'm happy and i missed you guys so much.

i know it's late for most of you. i'll repost tomorrow morning so nobody misses it. but i just couldn't wait.

i am so happy to be back. i am so happy to feel like myself again. and i am SO happy to finally be giving you this story because this one — this one is really special to me.

the space between us is doing something none of the other stories in this series have done yet. it's not about falling. it's not about finding each other for the first time. it's about two people who have been choosing each other for ten years and know each other so completely — so deeply, so fully — that she can tell when he's performing fine. she can see the seam. and the story is about what happens when the space opens anyway. quietly. slowly. the way it always does when you stop paying attention.

i love this. i love them. and i love jin so much it's genuinely embarrassing. his older brother energy, the way he holds everyone together and makes it look easy, the way he cares so deeply about the members that he would do anything for them — i really wanted to write a story that was worthy of him. funny and warm and a little chaotic on the surface and then you look closer and your heart is on the floor.

so yeah. this is going to be a fun ride. a wild ride. a messy, emotional, occasionally filthy ride. i am so excited for you to read it.

thank you for every single message and ask while i was gone. i saw all of them. i will be answering them over the next few days. they genuinely made me feel so loved when i was feeling so terrible and i am so grateful for every single one of you.

okay. i'm done being sappy. go read.

welcome to jin's story 🍞

— ria

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