Foreshadow ahead of me

The bus station in Fairview Fall is not really a bus station. It is a parking lot beside the post office with a painted sign on a wooden post that reads Fairview Fall — Pop. 2,847 and a single bench that has seen better decades. You step off the bus into heat so thick it feels like walking into something solid, and the first thing you think is that your mother would have had something to say about this. Something funny. She always had something funny. You are still working on finding it funny.

Your bag is on your shoulder and your mother’s cardigan is tied around your waist because you could not bring yourself to pack it and you could not wear it either, not in this heat, but you needed it close. The driver hands down your suitcase from the hold and then the box — your father’s records, wrapped in an old bedsheet and taped within an inch of their lives — and you take it with both hands like it is something that could break, because it is. “Y/N.” You turn around.

Birdie is standing at the edge of the parking lot in a yellow sundress with her dark hair pinned up and her hands clasped in front of her like she is trying to hold herself together by sheer force of will. She is younger than you keep expecting — younger than your mother was, softer somehow, with the same eyes. That is the thing you were not prepared for. The eyes. She opens her arms and you walk into them and she holds on tight and doesn’t say anything for a long moment and that is exactly right, that is the only right thing, and you press your face into her shoulder and breathe. “Okay,” she says finally, quietly, into your hair. “Okay. Let’s get you home.” She takes the suitcase without asking. You keep the records.

Her truck is an old Ford the colour of rust and good intentions. It smells like vanilla and, underneath that, the faint ghost of something that went wrong in a kitchen recently. Birdie swings out of the parking lot with the ease of someone who has been driving these roads for years and cracks both windows so the hot air moves, and for a minute neither of you says anything.

The town scrolls past — the diner, the hardware store, the church, a barbershop with a striped pole still spinning — and you watch it go by with your elbow on the window ledge and the sun on your arm. “It’s smaller than I thought,” you say. “It’s small,” Birdie agrees easily. “You get used to it. Then you start to like it. Then one day you realise you can’t imagine being anywhere else and that’s just that.” She glances over at you. “Happened to me and I came here for a man, which tells you something about how good the town is.” “What happened to the man?”

“He left.” She says it without any weight on it, like a fact about the weather. “Best thing he ever did for me, honestly. I got to keep the town.” You look back out the window. There is a bookshop on the corner of main street with a display in the window — paperbacks arranged around a small ceramic rooster — and a hand-painted sign above the door that reads Read a Cookie in cheerful red letters. “Is that—” “That’s mine,” Birdie says, and the pride in her voice is warm and uncomplicated. “Named it myself. People told me it didn’t make any sense. I told them that was the point.” Something loosens very slightly in your chest. “My mom would have loved that name.” Birdie’s hands shift on the steering wheel. “Yeah,” she says softly. “She would have.”

The town gives way to a residential street, quieter, lined with oak trees that are losing the fight against the August heat. Birdie pulls up outside a small white house with a porch and a hanging basket and a cat sitting in the front window staring out at the street with the energy of someone who has appointed himself neighbourhood watch. “That’s Gerald,” Birdie says. “He doesn’t warm up to people easily.” She pauses. “He’ll be on your lap by Thursday.”

The house is warm and slightly chaotic in the way that feels lived-in rather than messy — books on every surface, a quilt over the sofa, a kitchen that smells like sugar and ambition. Your room has a window overlooking the street and a quilt that matches the one downstairs and a small vase of wildflowers on the dresser that Birdie must have put there this morning, and you have to look at the ceiling for a moment before you can say anything. “It’s lovely,” you manage. “Thank you, Birdie.”

“Don’t,” she says simply. “You’re family. This is just where family goes.” She leaves you to settle in. You sit on the edge of the bed for a while before you do anything else. Then you open the box of records carefully, take each one out, and line them up against the wall until you can find something to put them on properly. You run your thumb along the spines of them — your father’s handwriting on some of the paper sleeves, little notes he’d written to himself, great for Sunday mornings and Y/N will like this one when she’s older — and you breathe through it, in and out, until you can. You take out the journal Birdie sent you in the weeks after. Brown leather, your name on the inside cover in her loopy handwriting. You open to the first page. We’re here, Dad, you write. It seems like a good place.

August bleeds away slowly, the way time does when you are somewhere new and the shape of your days has not yet formed. Birdie puts you to work in the bookshop most mornings — not because she needs the help, though she doesn’t turn it down, but because she is perceptive enough to know that you need somewhere to be. You shelve books and make change and learn the names of regulars who come in and stay too long, browsing without buying, talking to Birdie about their lives while she leans on the counter and listens like she has nowhere else to be.

They look at you with open curiosity every single one of them. Not unkind. Just unsubtle. “This your niece, Birdie?” “That’s her. In from New York.” “Well, welcome to Fairview Fall, honey. You settling in alright?” “Yes, thank you,” you say, every time, and mean it, and still go home some evenings feeling so full of warmth from strangers that you don’t know what to do with it. You write about it.

You write about your mother and how she would have made friends with every single one of them inside of five minutes, your mother who could talk to anyone, who remembered every name, who made a room feel like a party just by walking into it. You write about your father and the record shop you found on main street, the one he would have disappeared into on day one and emerged from an hour later sheepish and happy with something tucked under his arm. You write in present tense. It is the only way you know how to keep them with you.

The grief comes without warning and without schedule. A song on the radio in the bookshop one afternoon that your mother used to hum in the kitchen and you have to go into the back and sit down until it passes. A customer who wears the same cologne your father wore and you spend the rest of the morning slightly underwater. Birdie always knows. She brings you things — a cookie, a glass of water, a hand on your shoulder — and she does not ask you to explain and she does not try to fix it and that, more than anything, is why you are starting to love her. She is an awful cook. She is a spectacular baker. These are two entirely different skills that exist peacefully in the same person and Fairview Fall has long since made its peace with this fact. The dinners are ambitious and variable. The baked goods are extraordinary, and she knows it, and she is not modest about it.

September comes and brings with it the particular dread of a first day at a new school. The night before, you cannot sleep. You lie in the dark and listen to Fairview Fall settle into quiet around you and you think about your old school, your old locker, your old seat by the window in English class, your old life. You think about how none of it exists anymore in the same way. You think about walking into a building where everyone already knows everyone and you are the city girl, the new girl, the one staying with Miss Birdie, and how that will precede you through every door.

In the morning Birdie is up before you. You come downstairs in your mother’s cardigan and your jeans and your stomach in knots and she turns from the kitchen and says “sit down, baby” and puts a plate of blueberry muffins in front of you that are so good it is almost offensive. She sits across from you with her coffee and she talks — about the town, about the teachers, about nothing important — and she lets you eat and lets the morning be ordinary, and by the time you have to leave your stomach has unknotted itself by about half.

She drops you at the school gates in the truck and squeezes your hand before you get out. “You’re going to be just fine,” she says. “I know,” you say, which is not the same as believing it.

Fairview Fall High School is a low brick building with a football field that is clearly the town’s real pride and joy — the grass better maintained than anything else on the property, a hand-painted banner above the gymnasium doors reading GO HAWKS in red and gold so fresh it must be new this week. The gate is open and everyone is moving through it with the ease of people who have done this a hundred times, which they have. They know where they are going. They know who they are going with. They move in clusters that have been the same clusters since middle school and they talk and laugh and do not notice you standing just outside the gate with your bag on your shoulder and your mother’s cardigan tied around your waist trying to figure out if you could leave without anyone noticing.

You are still trying to figure it out when a car pulls up to the kerb beside you — a blue thing, old and a little battered but clearly loved, clearly tended to — and the door opens and someone gets out, and he is tall, dark-haired, broad across the shoulders in the way of someone who has been physical his whole life without thinking about it, wearing a Fairview Fall Hawks t-shirt with the sleeves cut and an easy, unhurried look on his face that you will come to understand is just him, that is just what he looks like, like the world is something he finds genuinely good.

He leans against the side of his car and looks at you. Not in a way that makes you feel looked at. Just in a way that sees you. “You look like you’re trying to figure out if you can leave without anyone noticing,” he says. “That obvious?” “Little bit.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “You’re staying with Miss Birdie, right?” Of course he knows. Of course. “That’s me.” He nods, easy, like this confirms something he already suspected, and then he just pushes off the car and extends his hand like it is the most natural thing in the world. “Lee Heeseung,” he says. “Come on, I’ll walk you in.” You look at his hand. You look at the gate. You look back at him. “Okay,” you say, and shake it.

He walks with the kind of ease that parts a crowd without trying. People call his name and he calls theirs back — first names, last names, nicknames, little details lobbed like catching up even though school has not started yet, how’s your daddy’s back, tell your sister congratulations on the baby — and he does it all without breaking stride, without making you feel like an afterthought beside him. He introduces you to people in the hallway with a hand half-raised in your direction, this is Y/N, she’s staying with Miss Birdie, and they say hi Y/N and welcome to Fairview Fall and love your cardigan and you say thank you, thank you, thank you. He takes you to the principal’s office himself. Sits in the chair beside you like he belongs there, which apparently he does because the secretary says “morning, Heeseung” without looking up, and the principal shakes his hand before he shakes yours. You come out with a timetable and a map of the building and Heeseung looks at both and says “okay, your first class is this way” and just starts walking.

At the door of your first class he leans in the doorframe — just leans there like he was born to lean, like all doorframes exist in anticipation of him — and looks at you with that easy grin. “I’ll find you before lunch,” he says. “You can sit with me and my friends.”

“You don’t have to do that,” you say. “I know I don’t.” He says it simply, without any performance behind it. “I’ll find you before lunch.” You look at him for a moment. “Okay.” “Okay.” He pushes off the doorframe. Starts to go. Then he glances back over his shoulder at you, grin already in place. “See you later, city girl.” The door closes behind him. You turn around and find a seat and spend the first ten minutes of class thinking about absolutely nothing related to the lesson.

He finds you before lunch. He materialises at your locker with the punctuality of someone who means what he says and says what he means, and he falls into step beside you down the hallway and pushes open the cafeteria door and steers you toward a corner table where two people are already sitting. The boy is leaning back in his chair with his arms folded and the look of someone who has a lot of feelings about Wednesdays and none of them are positive. He is handsome in a sharp, clean way, dark-haired, and he looks up at you and nods once like you have passed some preliminary inspection.

The girl beside him is already looking at you like she has made a decision. She is in a bright green dress with her hair down and she has the kind of face that is interesting before it is pretty, quick and watchful and warm all at once, and she says “oh good, another girl” before you have even sat down. “I have been the only one for six years and I want you to know it has been a lot.” “Hi,” you say. “Hi,” she says, and scoots over to make room. “I’m Immy. That’s Hoon, he’s not as unfriendly as he looks.” “I’m plenty friendly,” Sunghoon says, and steals something off her tray without looking at it. “Hoon.” Her voice goes flat. “Sweetheart.” His doesn’t change at all. “I told you not to call me that.” He looks at her then, and there is something in his face that is so straightforward and so completely unbothered that you almost laugh. “I know you did,” he says pleasantly. Immy stares at him. She is fighting a smile and losing. She turns back to you like none of that happened. “So. New York City.” She says it like she is tasting it. “What’s it like?”

“Loud,” you say. “A lot of people. Everything’s very fast.” “Do you miss it?” It is a direct question. You appreciate that she asks it like she actually wants to know rather than like she is being polite. You think about it honestly. “I miss the familiarity of it,” you say. “I miss knowing where I am.” Immy nods. “You’ll know where you are here pretty quick,” she says. “It’s not a big place to learn.” She slides a chocolate milkshake across the table to you. “You look like you need this.” You did not order it. You do not know when she did. “Thank you.” “Don’t mention it, honey.”

Across the table Heeseung is watching you with that quiet, attentive look he has — the one that notices things, that collects details and keeps them somewhere. He catches you looking and grins, easy, and goes back to his food. Sunghoon steals from Immy’s tray again. She elbows him without looking up from asking you about the bookshop. He absorbs the elbow with equanimity. He does not stop eating her fries. You think: Mom, you would love these people. Present tense. Always.

The school day ends and you come out through the front doors into the late afternoon gold of a September in Texas and you are thinking about the walk home — Birdie drew you a map this morning on a paper bag, fifteen minutes, turn left at the church — when a car horn sounds once, short and friendly, and you look over and there is the blue car at the kerb and Heeseung leaning out the window. “Get in,” he says. “I’ll give you a lift.” “I was going to walk.” “It’s a hundred degrees.” It is not quite a hundred degrees. It is close enough that you do not argue. You go around and get in the passenger side and the inside of the car smells like worn leather and something warm, like a radio that’s been on all day, and there is a small St. Christopher medal hanging from the mirror that swings when you close the door. He pulls out into the street unhurried, one hand on the wheel, and you tell him the address and he nods like he already knew. “How was the rest of it?” he asks. “Okay,” you say. “Miss Beaumont gave me a book.”

“She does that.” He says it warmly. “She gave me East of Eden sophomore year and told me to come back when I’d read it. I came back two weeks later and we talked about it for an hour after school. She’s good people.” You look at him sideways. He is watching the road. “You don’t seem like someone who stays after school to talk about books,” you say. He glances over, amused. “What do I seem like?” You think about the football banner. The teammates who called his name in the hallway. The easy authority of someone the whole building seems to orbit without him asking for it. “I don’t know yet,” you say honestly.

He nods like that is a fair answer. “Good,” he says. “Keep looking.” He pulls up outside Birdie’s house before you have figured out what to say to that. You are still working on it when the front door opens and Birdie comes out onto the porch, dish towel over her shoulder, and her face does something warm and immediate at the sight of the car. “Heeseung Lee,” she calls. He cuts the engine and gets out — of course he gets out, of course he does not just wave from the window — and he pulls himself up to his full height and says “afternoon, ma’am” with such genuine politeness that you watch it happen like it is something to study. Birdie gives him a look. “Ma’am,” she repeats. “Yes, ma’am.” “Heeseung.” She puts a hand on her hip. “I have known you since you were a tot. Small enough to fit in that window box.” She points at it. “Now you call me Birdie.”

He has the grace to look slightly abashed, which on him is mostly just the grin getting a little sheepish. “Yes, ma— yes. Sorry. Birdie.” “Better.” She looks between the two of you with an expression that is doing several things at once and landing primarily on satisfied. “You staying for supper?” “No thank you, I’ve got to get home. But I appreciate it.” “Another time then.” She says it like it is already decided. “You drive safe.” “Always do.” He looks at you. “See you tomorrow, city girl.” “See you tomorrow,” you say. He gets back in the car. You stand on the kerb and watch him pull away — the blue car disappearing around the corner at the end of the street, the St. Christopher swinging — and then Birdie is beside you with the dish towel still over her shoulder and a look on her face that is entirely too knowing for this time of day.

“Come inside,” she says. “I’ll put the kettle on.” You follow her up the porch steps. Gerald is in the window, watching. Inside the house it smells like vanilla and a baking experiment and something that might be dinner taking a turn for the ambitious, and Birdie fills the kettle and sets it on the stove and leans against the counter with her arms crossed and that look still on her face. “So,” she says. “You met Heeseung.” “He found me outside the gates,” you say, dropping your bag on a chair. “He showed me around.” “Mmhm.” She says it in a way that contains a lot. “He’s nice.” “He is.” She nods slowly. “He’s a good boy, Heeseung. His family have been here as long as mine have. His daddy taught him to fix that car himself, the blue one — he was about fourteen when they started on it, worked on it for two years. His mama makes the best peach preserves in the county and she will give you a jar if you so much as look at them.” She pauses. “He’s going to be offered a football scholarship.” You look up. “Yeah?” “Yeah. He doesn’t want it.” She says it simply, without editorialising, like it is just a thing she knows. “He wants to stay here and study music. Plays guitar, did he tell you that?” “No.”

“He wouldn’t, first day.” She unfolds herself from the counter as the kettle starts to murmur. “He doesn’t show that to many people.” She glances back at you with those familiar eyes, your mother’s eyes, and something in her expression is soft and deliberate. “You had a good day.”

It is not a question exactly. You think about Immy’s arm through yours in the hallway. You think about Sunghoon’s complete indifference to being elbowed and Immy’s losing battle with her own smile. You think about Heeseung in the doorframe, easy as breathing, see you later, city girl. “Yeah,” you say. “I think I did.” Birdie smiles and pours the tea and doesn’t say I told you so, which is generous of her, and the evening settles around you soft and warm and ordinary in a way that feels, for the first time, like something you might be able to live inside. Gerald comes down from his windowsill and sits on your feet. “Thursday,” Birdie says, without looking. “I told you.”

By the end of the first week you have learned the following things about Fairview Fall High School. The bathroom by the science block floods if someone flushes the third stall, which Immy told you on day one and which you have since witnessed firsthand. The cafeteria does a peach cobbler on Fridays that is apparently worth rearranging your entire lunch schedule around, according to Sunghoon, who said it with a sincerity usually reserved for serious matters. Miss Beaumont assigns reading like she is prescribing medicine — specific and deliberate and not up for debate. The football team practises every day after school on the good grass and half the school finds reasons to walk past the field while it’s happening, which everyone pretends is coincidental and nobody believes.

You have also learned that Heeseung is there every morning. Not waiting for you, exactly. He is never standing at the gate with any kind of obvious intention. He is just — there. Leaning against the blue car with one ankle crossed over the other and his face tipped up to whatever the morning is doing, talking to someone or not talking to anyone, and when you come through the gate he sees you the way he seems to see everything, which is immediately and without making a production of it, and he falls into step beside you like it is the most natural thing in the world, which by Friday it almost is.

“Morning, city girl.” “Morning.” “Sleep alright?” “Better than the night before.” “That’s something.” He holds the door. You go through. “Birdie feed you before you left?” “Lemon muffins today.” “Lord.” He says it with feeling. “Her lemon muffins are something else.” “You’ve had them?” “She used to bring them to my mama when I was small. I’d eat about four before anyone noticed.” He grins at the memory, easy and unguarded, and you look at him sideways and think about what Birdie said — he doesn’t show that to many people — and you file it away without knowing exactly why.

On Friday Immy decides, without consulting anyone, that you are all going to the diner after school. She announces this at lunch with the confidence of someone who has never once proposed something and been told no, which you are beginning to understand is simply accurate. Sunghoon says “I was going to go home” and Immy says “no you weren’t” and he considers this and says “you’re right, I wasn’t” and that is the entire negotiation. Heeseung looks at you across the table. “You in?” “I don’t have anywhere else to be,” you say. “That’s the spirit,” Immy says, pointing a fork at you approvingly.

The diner is called Mae’s, which is also the name of the woman behind the counter who is somewhere between sixty and ageless and who looks at you when you walk in and says “you must be Birdie’s girl” before you have opened your mouth. You say yes ma’am and she nods like you have passed something and brings over four menus that nobody looks at because apparently nobody here needs a menu. “Usual?” she says to Heeseung. “Yes ma’am.” “Immy, you want the grilled cheese or the club today?” “Grilled cheese, Mae, I’m not complicated.” “Hoon.” “Chocolate shake and whatever Immy doesn’t finish,” Sunghoon says. Mae looks at him over the top of her notepad with an expression that has lived in this diner for thirty years. “I’ll put in an order for you like a normal person.” “I appreciate that.” She turns to you last and there is something in her face that is not pity but is in the neighbourhood of kindness, the particular kindness of someone who has watched a lot of life come through a door and knows what it looks like when someone is still finding their feet. “What do you like, sweetheart?”

You look at the menu properly. Everything on it is the kind of food that takes its time — burgers and cobbler and sandwiches that come with a side of something and a pickle that nobody asked for and nobody minds. You order a club sandwich and a chocolate milkshake and Mae writes it down and goes, and you put the menu back behind the napkin holder and look around. The diner is warm and a little worn in the way of places that have been genuinely used — the vinyl on the booths cracked at the edges, the counter stools slightly uneven, the jukebox in the corner playing something slow and country that you do not recognise but that sounds like it belongs here.

There are photographs on the wall near the register, decades of them, Fairview Fall laid out in black and white and faded colour. Football teams and school groups and a ribbon cutting for something and a woman who might be a younger Mae standing in front of the counter with her arms crossed and a look on her face that has not changed. “She’s been here since before I was born,” Heeseung says, following your eye line. He is beside you in the booth, close enough that you are aware of it without it being a thing. “Her husband built the counter. She buried him about ten years ago and kept coming in every day.” “That’s sad,” you say. “She doesn’t seem to think so.” He tilts his head slightly, considering. “She says this place is where she’s most herself. That she can feel him in it.” He pauses. “I think that makes sense.”

You think about your father’s records lined up on the shelf in your room. The way you run your thumb along the spines of them sometimes before bed without taking any out. You think about how some things are sad and a comfort at exactly the same time and how nobody tells you that before you need to know it. “Yeah,” you say. “It does.” Across the table Immy is telling Sunghoon something with her hands, which is how she tells everything — full body, gestures large and certain — and Sunghoon is watching her with his chin in his hand and the expression he gets when he is listening to her properly, which is soft in a way he would probably deny. She is talking about something that happened in her chemistry class, a lab that went sideways, and she is making it very funny, and Sunghoon is not laughing but he is very close to it, the way he always is with her, like she is the only person who can find the seam of him. “How long have they been together?” you ask quietly. Heeseung glances over at them. “They’re not,” he says. You look at him. “Really.”

“Really.” He says it with the patience of someone who has had this conversation before. “They’re just — Immy and Sunghoon. They’ve been Immy and Sunghoon since we were thirteen.” “That sounds like together.” “Don’t tell Sunghoon that, he’ll short-circuit.” He picks up his water glass. “He knows what it is. He’s waiting for her to decide she knows too.” You look back at Sunghoon, who has apparently made a quiet comment because Immy has stopped mid-gesture to stare at him and then shove his shoulder and he has absorbed the shove with complete serenity, the ghost of something pleased at the corner of his mouth. “How long has he been waiting?” you ask. Heeseung thinks about it. “Thirteen,” he says. “So about four years.” You consider this. “That’s very patient.” “That’s Sunghoon.” He says it simply, like it is just a true thing about his friend, like patience is just the shape of him. “He’d wait forever if that’s what it took.”

The food arrives and the conversation opens up and you let yourself be carried by it — Immy asking you about New York with genuine curiosity and not the performative kind, what do people do there, what does it smell like, is it true the pizza is actually better. Sunghoon asks if you’ve ever been to a baseball game and when you say yes, a lot, his whole face does something interested. Heeseung mostly listens, eating his food — a burger, you note, always a burger — and occasionally adding something that reframes the conversation entirely without seeming to try.

You order the peach cobbler because Sunghoon tells you to and because by now you understand that Sunghoon’s food opinions are to be taken seriously. It arrives warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream going slowly soft at the edges and the first bite is the kind of thing that makes you close your eyes for a second. “Told you,” Sunghoon says. “You did,” you admit. He nods once, satisfied. Steals a bite of Immy’s cobbler. She moves it closer to him without comment, which is so unconscious that you are not sure either of them notices they’ve done it. You notice.

Mae brings the check and Heeseung takes it before anyone else can reach it and there is a brief argument about this that he wins through the simple method of already having his wallet out, and you make a note to be faster next time.

Outside the diner the September evening is doing something beautiful — the sky going amber and deep at the edges, the heat off the day softened to something almost gentle, the main street quiet in the way it gets when school is out and supper is being thought about. Immy loops her arm through yours on the sidewalk. This is already just something she does. “Walk me home?” she says, and it is not really a question. “It’s on the way to Birdie’s.” It is not on the way to Birdie’s. You have seen Birdie’s map. You walk with her anyway. She talks the way she does everything — fully, with her whole self in it. She tells you about growing up in Fairview Fall, about the way the town feels small until you know where all the seams are and then it feels like it contains everything. She tells you about the lake, twenty minutes out, where everyone goes on Friday nights in summer. She tells you about the drive-in and how Heeseung once narrated an entire film in the wrong voices because the sound wasn’t working in his car and had half the lot in tears laughing. She tells you about the high roads above the town, the ones that wind up through the hills, and how on a clear night you can see the lights of Fairview Fall spread out below you and it looks like something impossible. “You’ll see it,” she says. “When the time’s right, you’ll see it.”

You walk through a neighbourhood that is going golden in the evening light, porch lights coming on, someone’s radio on somewhere, a dog barking once and stopping. It smells like cut grass and the beginning of autumn and something good cooking in someone’s house. “Can I ask you something?” Immy says. “Sure.” “How are you doing.” She says it without the question mark, which you understand means she wants a real answer and not the performed one. You think about it. The real answer, not the easy one. “Some days are okay,” you say. “Some days it hits me out of nowhere and I don’t know what to do with it. Today was okay.” You pause. “Today was actually good.” Immy nods, arm still in yours. “Good days are allowed,” she says. “You know that, right? You’re allowed to have them.” You do know that, in theory. You are still working on knowing it in practice. “My mom would be furious with me if I wasn’t living,” you say. “She was — she was very much a person who lived. Loudly and fully. She would hate for me to stop because of her.” “She sounds amazing.” “She was.” Present tense is the only way. “She is.”

Immy doesn’t correct you. She just squeezes your arm and keeps walking, and you are grateful for that in a way you couldn’t put into words if you tried.

Her house is a white clapboard on a corner lot with a porch swing and a magnolia tree in the front yard that has shed its flowers all over the path. You stop at the gate. “Same time Monday?” she says. “For what?” “For everything.” She waves a hand. “School. The diner, probably. Heeseung driving you home and pretending it’s just convenient.” She gives you a look that is very Immy, which is to say warm and blunt and absolutely certain of itself. “He drove you home the first day.” “He said it was a hundred degrees.” “It was seventy-eight.” She smiles. “See you Monday, honey.” She goes up the path through the fallen magnolia flowers and up the porch steps and the door opens before she reaches it — Sunghoon, who apparently walked her home by a different route and got here first — and she stops on the top step and looks at him and says “how did you—” and he says “I know a shortcut” and she shakes her head and goes inside and he follows her and the door closes.

You stand at the gate for a moment in the evening quiet. Then you walk home through the golden streets of Fairview Fall with your mother’s cardigan tied around your waist and your hands in your pockets and something in your chest that is not quite happiness but is something adjacent to it, something that has warmth in it, something that you think might be the beginning of okay. Birdie is on the porch when you get back, coffee in hand, Gerald at her feet. “Good?” she says. “Good,” you say. She smiles and opens the door and the house wraps around you, warm and vanilla-scented and familiar already in the way that good places get familiar, like your body knew before your mind caught up, and you go upstairs and take out the journal and sit on the bed and write.

Mom, you write. I think I’m making friends. Real ones. The kind you would approve of. Dad, there’s a record shop on main street. I keep meaning to go in. I think I’m working up to it. I wore your cardigan today. It still smells like you, a little. I’m glad.

Outside your window Fairview Fall is settling into night, the street going quiet, a dog somewhere and a radio somewhere and the distant sound of a screen door. Gerald jumps up onto the bed and turns three times and lies down against your leg with the certainty of an animal who has decided this is now his arrangement. You close the journal. You think about Immy saying good days are allowed, the matter-of-fact kindness of it, the way she said it like it was just true and not something that needed softening. You think about Heeseung in the diner, his voice low, she can feel him in it — I think that makes sense. You reach over and touch the edge of the nearest record sleeve. Your father’s handwriting. Y/N will like this one when she’s older. “I’m getting there, Dad,” you say quietly, to the room, to the record, to wherever he is. “I promise I’m getting there.”

—

Miss Beaumont teaches English the way some people play music — like she means every note of it, like she would be doing it even if nobody was listening. Her classroom is the kind of room that accumulates over years. There are books on every surface that was not strictly designed for books. There are quotes written on strips of paper pinned along the top of the blackboard, running the full length of the room, and on your first day you spent the better part of the lesson trying to read all of them instead of paying attention to what she was actually saying, which she noticed, and which she did not comment on, which told you something about her. There is a rug under her desk that does not match anything else in the room and a lamp in the corner that she switches on instead of the overhead light on grey days, which makes the whole room feel like somewhere you might voluntarily spend time. You like it in there. You did not expect to like anything about a new school this much this quickly and you are choosing not to examine it too closely.

The poem is Whitman. Song of Myself, the sixth section, the one about the grass. Miss Beaumont writes the last few lines on the board in her clean, deliberate hand and then sets down the chalk and turns around and looks at the class the way she always does, like she is genuinely curious what you are all going to do with it. “Well,” she says. “What is he saying?” The class does the thing that classes do, which is to say it does very little. Someone offers something careful and non-committal about nature. Someone else agrees with that person. Miss Beaumont listens with her arms folded and the expression of someone waiting for the room to warm up. Your hand goes up before you have fully decided to raise it. “Yes,” she says, and looks at you with something that sharpens slightly, like a lens adjusting.

“He’s not really talking about grass,” you say. “The child asks what grass is and he says he doesn’t know, but then he spends the whole section telling you exactly what it is. It’s the handkerchief of the Lord. It’s the hair of graves. It’s everyone who ever lived, compressed into something ordinary that we walk on without thinking.” You pause. “He’s saying that everything we’ve lost is still here. Just in a different form. And we keep stepping on it and not noticing.” The room is quiet for a moment. Miss Beaumont looks at you with an expression you cannot fully read. “And what do you make of that?” she says. “The idea that the lost are still here.” You think about your father’s records. Your mother’s cardigan. The way you write in present tense because past tense feels like a door closing. “I think it’s something people need to believe,” you say carefully. “Whether or not it’s true.” Miss Beaumont holds your gaze for a moment longer than feels strictly academic. Then she nods, once, and turns to the rest of the class, and the lesson moves on, and you look back down at the poem in your textbook and read the last line again. The smallest sprout shows there is really no death. You underline it. You are not sure if you believe it. You are not sure you need to.

She asks you to stay after. The class files out around you and you gather your things slowly and approach her desk where she is making notes in the margin of something, and she finishes her thought before she looks up, which you appreciate. Teachers who perform attentiveness by stopping what they’re doing the second you arrive have always made you vaguely suspicious. “Sit,” she says, nodding at the chair beside her desk. You sit. The lamp in the corner is on today.

Outside the window the school grounds are going quiet, the afternoon emptying out. “Where are you from originally?” she says, though you suspect she already knows. “New York.” “I thought so.” She sets down her pen. She has the kind of face that has always been interested in things, fine lines at the corners of her eyes from a lifetime of reading in insufficient light. “What did you read there?” “Everything I could find.” You think about your bedroom in the apartment, the shelves your father built along one whole wall, the library card that you used until it was soft at the edges. “My dad used to take me to the Strand on weekends. We’d spend hours.”

“Good man,” she says simply. She opens her desk drawer and takes out a book and sets it on the desk between you. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston. The cover is worn in the way of a book that has been loved by more than one person. “Have you read it?” “No.” “Then read it.” She slides it across. “And come back to me with those wide opinions from the city.” She says it without any edge, but with something pointed in it, something that is less criticism than it is challenge. “You see things. That’s good. I want to know what you see when you’ve read something that will make you work for it.” You look at the book in your hands. “When do you need it back?” “I don’t,” she says. “It’s yours.” You look up. She is already picking up her pen again. “Thank you, Miss Beaumont.” “Come back when you’ve read it,” she says, by way of goodbye.

Heeseung is leaning against the blue car in the parking lot when you come out, turning his keys over in his hand, face tipped up to the sky in that way he has, like he is checking what the weather is planning. He looks over when he hears the door. “Beaumont keep you?” he says. “How did you know?” “She kept me twice in the first month of sophomore year.” He opens the passenger door. “What did she give you?” You hold up the Hurston. He looks at it and nods with the slow approval of someone who has been given books by this woman and understands the system. “Good one,” he says. You get in. He goes around and folds himself into the driver’s side and starts the engine and pulls out of the lot and the afternoon opens up around you — the sky wide and still going gold at the edges, the roads quiet, the radio low. He drives the way he does everything, unhurried, one hand on the wheel, the St. Christopher medal swinging gently. You are almost at Birdie’s when he takes a turn you don’t recognise. “This isn’t—” “I know.” He glances over. “I need to drop something at my daddy’s. Two minutes, I promise.”

He pulls up outside a house that is not unlike Birdie’s — white, porch, well-kept, a truck in the drive — and cuts the engine and reaches into the backseat for a brown paper bag that you didn’t notice before. “Come on,” he says, like it is obvious you would.

You get out. The front yard has a garden along one side of it that is clearly someone’s serious project — beds of herbs and late-summer tomatoes and something flowering that you don’t know the name of, staked and tended, the kind of garden that is visited every day. There is a woman kneeling at the far end of it with her sleeves rolled up and a wide-brimmed hat and garden gloves gone brown at the fingers, and she sits back on her heels when she hears the gate.

“There he is,” she says, and her face does the thing that mothers’ faces do, warm and immediate, like just the sight of him settles something. She pulls off a glove and pushes up the brim of her hat and looks at you with eyes that are Heeseung’s eyes, that same quality of attention, noticing and not making it a thing. “Mama, this is Y/N,” Heeseung says. “She’s staying with Miss Birdie.” “I know who she is.” His mother stands, brushing her knees off, and extends her unglov­ed hand to you with a smile that is the easiest thing you have ever encountered. “I’ve been meaning to get over to Birdie’s and introduce myself properly. I’m sorry it’s taken me this long.” “It’s lovely to meet you,” you say. “Likewise, sweetheart.” She looks at you for a moment with that honest, unhurried attention. “You settling in alright?” “Better every day,” you say, and mean it.

She nods like this is the right answer, then turns to Heeseung and takes the paper bag he’s holding out. “Your daddy’s in the back.” “I’ll just be a minute.” He goes around the side of the house and you are left in the garden with his mother, who does not seem to find this strange at all. She pulls her glove back on and crouches back down beside the tomatoes. “Do you garden?” she asks, conversationally. “No. We had a balcony in the apartment. My mom grew herbs in pots.” You look at the beds, the order of them, the care. “This is beautiful.”

“It keeps my hands busy and my head quiet.” She ties a stem to its stake with a small piece of twine, efficient and practiced. “There’s a lot to be said for things that do both at once.” She glances up at you. “Birdie tells me you’re working in the bookshop.” “Most days after school.” “Good.” She says it simply. “Good for you, and good for her. She’s been on her own in that shop a long time.” She pauses. “She loves having you there. She tells it differently but that’s what she means.” You look at the garden so she does not see what your face does with that. Heeseung comes back around the side of the house with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, and his mother stands up again. “Stay for supper,” she says to him. “I was going to take Y/N home.” “Take her home and come back.” He looks at you. You look at him. Something in his face is asking a question without exactly asking it.

“Actually,” you say, before you know you are going to say it. “Birdie would probably— I mean she always makes too much.” You pause. “You could stay. At ours. If you wanted.” He blinks. Just once, just briefly, like you have slightly surprised him, which is not something that seems to happen to him often. Then the grin settles back into place. “Yeah?” “She’ll be pleased,” you say. “She always asks.” His mother is looking between you with an expression she is not bothering to conceal, which is to say fond and unhurried and absolutely certain of something. “Go on then,” she says, and turns back to her garden.

Birdie opens the door before you have reached the porch steps. She looks at Heeseung and then at you and then back at Heeseung and the smile that crosses her face is the most unguarded thing, warm and quick and immediately suppressed into something more dignified. “Staying for supper?” she says. “Yes ma’am,” Heeseung says. She gives him the look. The I have known you since you were a tot look. “Birdie,” he says, correcting himself. “Better.” She steps back to let you both in. “I’m making pot roast. I want no opinions about it until it’s on the table.” “I don’t have opinions about pot roast,” Heeseung says, following her into the hallway. “You haven’t had mine yet.” She disappears into the kitchen. “Y/N, show him where everything is.” You look at Heeseung. He looks at the house around him with the comfortable ease of someone who is good at being in other people’s spaces — not intrusive, just present, taking it in without making it a thing. He looks at the books on every surface, the quilt on the sofa, Gerald on the windowsill who opens one eye and then closes it again. “Nice place,” he says quietly, and means it. “Come on,” you say. “She’ll want someone to set the table.”

You show him where the plates are and he takes them down without being asked twice, and he sets the table with the straightforward helpfulness of someone raised by people who taught him how to be in a house, and Birdie comes in and out of the kitchen with things and talks to him about his parents and about the football season and about a leaking gutter on the bookshop that apparently his daddy offered to look at three weeks ago and has she called him about it, and he says no ma’am — Birdie — and she says she will tomorrow, and it is the most ordinary thing, the three of you moving around each other in the small kitchen and the small dining room, and it does not feel strange. That is the thing you keep noticing about Heeseung. He does not make things feel strange. The pot roast arrives at the table and Birdie sits down and looks at it with the particular expression of someone who is unsure and hoping for the best, and Heeseung looks at it and says “that smells incredible, Birdie” and she looks at him and says “it could go either way” with such naked honesty that you both laugh. It goes fine, actually. More than fine.

You eat and the conversation wanders — Heeseung talking about the football season, the game next Friday, the way he says it with enthusiasm that is genuine without being the only thing about him, just a part of him, one part among many. He asks you about the Hurston and you tell him what Beaumont said, come back to me with those wide opinions from the city, and he laughs and says “she said something almost exactly like that to me once, I don’t remember what about” and Birdie says “she said it to everyone who’s worth saying it to, she said it to me years ago and I’ve never forgotten it either.” You look at Birdie. “You know Miss Beaumont?” “Before she was Miss Beaumont.” Birdie waves a hand. “She’s been here a long time. Came for reasons of her own and stayed.” She says it with a look that suggests the reasons are a whole other story and not for tonight.

The evening goes slow and easy, the way good evenings do. Gerald comes and sits under Heeseung’s chair, which Birdie points out has never happened with a dinner guest in living memory, and Heeseung looks down at him and says “hey there” very quietly and Gerald does not move, which is apparently a significant endorsement. You clear the plates and Birdie produces a peach cake from somewhere that is extraordinary and the three of you eat it at the table while the night comes in through the window screens, and Heeseung talks about music — carefully, like he is not quite used to doing it, like it is something he keeps in a different pocket — and Birdie asks questions that are good questions, not polite ones, and you watch him answer them and think about what his mother said in the garden.

It keeps my hands busy and my head quiet. You think Heeseung understands that too. You think music is that for him. You think the guitar is something he goes to the way you go to the journal, the way you go to the records — because some things need somewhere to go. He leaves at half past eight, because he has school in the morning and because he was raised right and he knows when an evening has found its natural end. He thanks Birdie for supper with a sincerity that is so complete it is almost formal, and she squeezes his arm and says come back anytime and means it, and he says good night to you at the door with that easy grin, the one that is just him, that is just what he looks like. “See you tomorrow, city girl.” “See you tomorrow.” The door closes. You stand in the hallway for a moment and listen to the blue car start up outside and pull away down the street.

Birdie appears from the kitchen with a dish towel. “Nice boy,” she says, in a tone that contains an entire conversation she has decided not to have yet. “He is,” you say simply. She nods and goes back to the kitchen and you go upstairs and sit on the bed and open the journal and look at the blank page for a while. You don’t write anything tonight. You just sit with the evening, the weight of it, the warmth of it. Gerald jumps up and settles against your leg. Some things don’t need words yet.

The record shop is called Spinning Wheel and it has been on the corner of main street since before Heeseung was born, which he tells you on the walk over on a Thursday afternoon in late September when the heat has finally started to relent into something that feels like the beginning of a season changing. You have walked past it every day since you arrived. You have looked at the window display — a handwritten chalkboard of new arrivals, a turntable set up so you can see it spinning from the street, a cardboard cut-out of Johnny Cash that has been there so long it has faded at the edges — and you have not gone in. You were not ready to go in. The record shop was your father’s thing, his particular joy, the errand that was never really an errand, and you needed to be ready. You did not tell Heeseung any of this. He asked on Wednesday if you had been in yet and you said no and he said “come on then” like it was the simplest thing in the world, which for him it probably was, and that was that.

The bell above the door sounds when you push it open. Inside it smells like dust and something warmer underneath it, like the particular smell of vinyl that you know from your father’s study, from Saturday mornings, from every good memory you have of being small and sitting on the floor beside the record player while he talked you through whatever he was playing. The walls are shelved floor to ceiling. There are crates on the floor sorted by genre in handwriting that has changed systems at least three times.

At the back counter an old man with reading glasses pushed to the end of his nose looks up when you come in and nods at Heeseung with the recognition of a regular. “Lee,” he says. “Mr. Cole,” Heeseung says back. “This is Y/N. She’s staying with Miss Birdie.” Mr. Cole looks at you over his glasses. “You browse,” he says, which you understand to mean take your time and don’t ask me where anything is because it’s organised in a way only I understand. “Yes sir,” you say. He goes back to whatever he is reading. Heeseung moves through the shop the way he moves through everything — easy, familiar, at home. He goes to a crate near the window and starts flicking through without any urgency, pulling things out to look at the sleeve and putting them back, occasionally holding something up in your direction with a questioning look. You move through the other side, slower, running your fingers along the tops of the sleeves.

It hits you about three minutes in. Not hard, not the kind of grief that knocks the wind out of you, but the quiet kind — the kind that just settles behind your sternum and sits there. Your father’s hands doing exactly this. Your father’s voice: you have to feel the edges, you can tell a lot about how it’s been kept. Your father’s face when he found something he had been looking for, the particular happiness of it. You stop at a sleeve and look at it for a moment without seeing it.

“Hey.” Heeseung is beside you, not quite touching. He has learned already, somehow, when to come closer. “You alright?” “Yeah.” You mean it, mostly. “It’s just — my dad loved record shops. This is the first one I’ve been in since.” You pause. “It’s fine. It’s a good thing. I just needed a second.” He nods. He does not say I’m sorry or we can go or any of the things that are well-meaning and wrong. He just waits, turning the record in his hands, giving you the second. Then he holds something out to you. “Look at this one,” he says. You take it. The sleeve is navy blue, simple, the title in clean white lettering. You look at it and something moves in your chest because you know this record. You know this record the way you know your own name — you know the A-side and the B-side and which track your father always skipped back to and the scratch at the beginning of the third song that he said was just part of it now, just part of how it sounded.

“This is—” Your voice does something you do not intend. You clear it. “My dad had this one.” Heeseung looks at the sleeve and then at you. He does not know what he has just handed you. He genuinely does not know, you can see that, he picked it up because he loves it and wanted to show you and that is all, and that somehow makes it more rather than less. “It’s one of my favourites,” he says, carefully, watching your face. “Mine too,” you say. “My dad’s too.” A beat of quiet. Mr. Cole turns a page at the back counter. “You should have it,” Heeseung says. “Heeseung—” “I’ve already got a copy.” He nods at the shelf like this is a minor logistical point and not a kindness. “Take it.”

You look at the sleeve in your hands. Your father’s copy is on the shelf in your room at Birdie’s. This one would be yours. Given to you by someone who loved it without knowing why you needed it. “Thank you,” you say, and your voice is steady, and you are grateful for that. He just nods and goes back to the crate and pulls out something else entirely and holds it up. “What about this one. Your dad ever play you this?” And just like that the shop becomes something you can be in. You spend an hour in there, moving through the crates, playing things on the turntable that Mr. Cole sets up for you without being asked — he is gruff and does not make conversation but he puts a record on when you hold one up with a question in your face and that is its own kind of welcome. Heeseung knows more than you expected and less than your father did and the combination of those two things makes the whole afternoon feel like something that was supposed to happen.

You leave with two records. The navy blue one and a second one Heeseung insisted on, something you had never heard of, trust me, city girl, just trust me. He drops you at Birdie’s in the early evening and cuts the engine but doesn’t get out this time, one arm resting on the wheel, easy.

“There’s a game Friday night,” he says. “Football?” “The very same.” He glances over at you. “You should come. Immy’ll be there — Sunghoon plays, so she’s always there. It’s a whole thing.” “A whole thing meaning what?” “Meaning the whole town comes out. Mae’s does a special. There’s a band that plays in the parking lot after, sometimes.” He says it without selling it too hard, just laying it out, taking or leaving. “It’s a good time.” You think about Friday nights in New York. The specific texture of them — the noise, the speed, the way the city never once lowered its voice. You think about a football field in Fairview Fall with the whole town in the stands and Immy beside you and the evening going cool. “Okay,” you say. He grins. “Okay.” He reaches over and opens your door from the inside, which is a thing the blue car requires because the handle sticks. “See you tomorrow, city girl.” “See you tomorrow.”

Upstairs your room is the particular gold of a late September evening, the light coming in low through the window and lying in strips across the floor. Gerald is on the bed, which is his default position. You drop your bag and sit beside him and look at the records on the shelf for a moment — your father’s, lined up the way he kept them, spines out, everything in its place. You take the navy blue one out of the paper bag and hold it.

Then you get up and go to the shelf and take out your father’s copy of the same record and sit on the floor with both of them in your lap and that is when it comes, the grief, the real kind, the kind that does not warn you. It comes up from somewhere low and you put your face in your hands and you cry in the way you mostly cry which is quietly and completely, not performing it for anyone, just letting it happen because there is nowhere else for it to go. Dad, you think, not in words exactly but in the way grief communicates which is more like weather than language. Dad, someone gave me your record. Someone who didn’t know it was your record. Someone who just loved it. I think you would like him. You sit on the floor until it passes. It always passes.

You wipe your face with the sleeve of your mother’s cardigan and sit there in the evening quiet with two copies of the same record in your lap and Gerald comes and presses his head against your knee, solemn and warm. “Thanks, Gerald,” you say. He purrs. You put your father’s copy back on the shelf in its place. You put Heeseung’s copy beside it. Then you take out the journal. Dad, you write. Someone gave me your record today. He didn’t know. He just handed it to me because he loved it and wanted to share it with me and I think that’s one of the most him things anyone has ever done without knowing they were doing it. I think you would have liked it here. I think I’m starting to.

Friday night arrives cool and clear, the sky over Fairview Fall the deep blue of early evening with the first stars coming through. Birdie sends you out in your jeans and your mother’s cardigan with a scarf she presses into your hands at the door because it gets cold by the second half, baby, take it. Immy is waiting at the gate to the football field in a red Fairview Fall Hawks scarf and an expression of someone who has been doing this for years and still finds it genuinely exciting, which you are starting to understand is just Immy. She finds things genuinely exciting. She is not performing enthusiasm, she simply has it, in abundance, about most things. “You came,” she says, like she is pleased but not surprised. “I said I would.” “I know.” She loops her arm through yours. “Come on, I’ve got us good seats. Middle of the stands, you can see everything.”

The field is lit up and the stands are already filling — families and couples and groups of kids and older men with their arms folded and the studied expressions of people who take high school football seriously, which in Fairview Fall is everyone. There is a smell of popcorn and cut grass and the first bite of real autumn air, and the band is warming up on the far side and someone is selling something from a cart by the gate and the whole thing has the particular energy of an event that a town has built its Fridays around for generations. You find your seats and the teams come out and the stands go up like a wave. You find Heeseung immediately. You are not looking for him specifically but you find him anyway — tall, easy even in the middle of forty people doing drills, moving with the same unhurried quality he has everywhere, like he has never once been in a hurry in his life. He is laughing at something

Sunghoon has said, head tipped back, and from this distance you can see the shape of him clearly — the way he takes up space without demanding it, the way people orient toward him. “There’s Hoon,” Immy says, pointing, then looks at you. “And there’s Heeseung.” She says it without inflection. “I see them,” you say, equally without inflection. She smiles at the field.

The game is not something you know well but Immy talks you through it in a low running commentary that is partly explanation and partly editorial — that was a bad call, that ref has always had it out for us, oh that’s good, that’s Heeseung, watch — and you watch. Heeseung plays the way he does everything, which is to say with a kind of complete and total presence that makes it look effortless even when it isn’t. He is fast and he thinks ahead and when he does something good the stands go up and you find yourself going up with them without quite deciding to. “You’re cheering,” Immy says, pleased. “I got caught up in it,” you say. “Everyone does.” She is already back to watching. “Hoon!” she shouts, when Sunghoon does something that earns it, and he does not look up at her because he is a professional, but something about the set of his shoulders changes. Fairview Fall wins by two touchdowns. The stands come down in a wave of noise and Immy grabs your arm and squeezes it and you are laughing and you are not entirely sure when you started.

The diner after is Mae’s again, every table full, the jukebox going, the particular noise of a town celebrating something. You are in the big corner booth — you and Immy and Sunghoon, still in his jersey, and Heeseung, hair damp from the locker room, the easy energy of someone who has just played well and knows it and is not making a thing of it. The booth is full and warm and loud and Mae brings milkshakes without being asked because she knows, she always knows, and Sunghoon and Immy are already in a detailed debrief of the game in which Immy is more knowledgeable than you would have expected and Sunghoon is listening to her notes with the expression of someone taking them seriously.

Heeseung nudges the milkshake toward you and you take it and then he takes it back and takes a pull through the straw and pushes it back and neither of you mentions that this has just happened, that you are sharing a milkshake, that this is apparently a thing you do now. “Good game,” you say. “Decent game.” He says it honestly, not falsely modest, not proud. “Second quarter was sloppy.” “Immy said the ref had it out for you.” “Immy says that every game.” He glances over at her, fond. “She’s usually right though.” The booth is loud and easy and you eat and talk and the evening stretches out comfortable around you and Mae brings cobbler that nobody ordered and everybody eats and Sunghoon says something very quiet to Immy and she goes pink in a way you have never seen on her before, pink and pleased, and she shoves him and he grins and steals her spoon. You are watching them when you become aware that Heeseung is watching you watch them. You look over. He does not look away. “What?” you say. “Nothing,” he says. He picks up the milkshake. “You just look like you’re somewhere good.”

You take a second with that. With the diner and the noise and Immy’s laugh and the cobbler and the autumn air coming in under the door. “I think I am,” you say. Outside the temperature has dropped the way Birdie promised it would and you cross your arms against it and Heeseung, without any preamble or ceremony, takes off his letterman jacket and holds it out to you. You look at it. “I’m fine.” “You’re cold.” “I’m from New York.” “New York is cold in winter,” he says patiently. “This is October in Texas. Completely different kind of cold.” He shakes the jacket slightly. “Take it.” You take it. It is warm from him and heavy across your shoulders and smells like the blue car — worn leather and something warm — and you put your arms through the sleeves and the cuffs come past your hands entirely and Immy, walking ahead of you with Sunghoon, looks back and says nothing, which is somehow louder than if she had said something.

Heeseung walks you home. Not formally, not announced, just — falls into step beside you through the streets of Fairview Fall while Immy and Sunghoon peel off at the corner with goodnights, and the town is quiet around you, lit up warm in the dark, and your breath shows faintly in the air. You talk about nothing in particular. The game. A song that was on the jukebox. Whether the peach cobbler is better at Mae’s or Birdie’s, which is a debate that has a clear answer and you both know it but you negotiate it anyway because it is the kind of conversation you have when you are not ready for the walk to be over. Birdie’s porch light is on. You stop at the bottom of the steps. “Thanks for coming tonight,” he says. He is standing close enough that you are aware of it, the way you are always aware of it lately, something you keep not naming. “Thanks for asking,” you say. “I didn’t know I’d like it that much.” “Football?” “Fairview Fall,” you say, and mean something slightly larger than that.

He looks at you for a moment with those attentive eyes, and then he leans in and presses his lips to your cheek, warm and brief, the most natural thing in the world. “Goodnight, darlin’,” he says, and takes a step back with that easy grin, hands in his pockets. “Goodnight,” you say. You watch him go back down the street toward where he parked the blue car, unhurried as always. You stand on the bottom porch step in his letterman jacket with the sleeves too long and your cheek warm and you think: that’s just what people do here. That’s a western thing. A friendly thing. That’s just Heeseung being Heeseung. You go inside. You hang his jacket on the hook by the door and go upstairs and sit on the bed and open the journal and look at the blank page for a long time. You write: I think people are just more affectionate here. Then you look at what you have written. Then you close the journal and lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling and listen to the quiet of Fairview Fall and your cheek is still warm and you think, carefully, about nothing at all.

October arrives and picks up speed. This is the thing about settling somewhere — it happens in the background, without announcement. You do not notice you are settling until you already have, until the shape of your days has formed without you consciously building it, and then one morning you wake up and know where everything is and it does not feel like someone else’s house anymore. Birdie bakes on Saturday mornings. This becomes a fact of your life the way the sun coming through the east window becomes a fact, the way Gerald on your feet becomes a fact — inevitable, warm, something you would notice immediately if it stopped. She does not ask you to help but she does not tell you not to, and somewhere in the second week of October you start appearing in the kitchen on Saturday mornings in your mother’s cardigan with your hair still unbrushed and she hands you something to do without comment and you do it, and that is that.

She is teaching you, without calling it teaching. How to fold butter into pastry. How to know by smell when something is ready. How to clean as you go because a clean kitchen is a kind kitchen, which is a thing her mother told her and which she says with the particular tone of someone passing something down. “My mom couldn’t bake,” you tell her one Saturday, your hands floury, watching her crimp the edge of something with a thumb that has done this a thousand times. “She could cook though. Really well. Everything from scratch.”

“Different skills,” Birdie says, without looking up. “I can’t cook to save my life and I’ve made peace with it.” She pauses. “What did she make? Your mom.” You think about it. The specific things, the ones that come with smell and light attached. “Sunday pasta,” you say. “Always from scratch, never from a box. She’d make it in the morning and leave it to dry on the rack and the whole apartment smelled like it all day.” You pause. “And her chicken soup. When I was sick. It was the kind of thing that actually made you feel better, not just warm.”

Birdie is quiet for a moment, working the pastry. “She learned from your grandmother,” she says eventually. “Their mama. She was an incredible cook.” She glances over at you. “Your mom used to write me letters about it when we were young. She’d describe meals she’d made like they were events.” This is new. You look at her. “You wrote letters?” “We weren’t close in the way that means seeing each other all the time,” Birdie says carefully. “But we were close in the way that means I knew her.” She smooths the pastry down. “She wrote beautifully. You get it from her.”

You look back down at what you are doing. Your hands in the flour. The kitchen warm around you. “I know,” you say quietly. “I get it from both of them actually. Dad too.” “I know you do,” Birdie says. “I’ve read your journal.” You look up sharply. She meets your eyes with an expression that is completely unrepentant. “It was open on the table,” she says. “I read one page. The one about the record shop.” She pauses. “I closed it immediately after. I’m not a monster.” You stare at her. “You write beautifully,” she says again, simply, and goes back to the pastry. You go back to the pastry too. There is nothing to say to that, or there is everything, and either way the kitchen is warm and smells like butter and Saturday morning and for a moment the grief sits quietly, like it is giving you the room.

Shopping with Immy is its own education. She moves through the two clothing shops on main street — there are only two, a fact that she acknowledges and has made her peace with — with the authority of someone who knows exactly what she is looking for and exactly where it is and has strong opinions about everyone else’s choices too. She holds things up to you without asking if you want her opinion and gives it anyway and you have learned that her opinion is usually right, which is annoying and convenient in equal measure. “This,” she says, holding up a blouse in a warm amber colour. “I don’t know.” “I do.” She puts it in your hands. “Your colouring. Trust me.” You try it on. She is right. You buy it without further discussion. In return you talk her out of something she has convinced herself she needs on the grounds that she doesn’t need it, she wants it, which is fine, but the cut is wrong and Immy is a woman who should only wear things that are right on her and she knows that, and she knows that you are right, and she puts it back with the reluctant dignity of someone conceding a fair point.

“How do you know about cuts?” she says, on the sidewalk after, linking her arm through yours. “My mom,” you say. “She was very particular about clothes. She said wearing something that doesn’t fit right is like telling a lie with your body.” Immy considers this with the seriousness it deserves. “I’m going to think about that for a long time,” she says. “She was good at saying things like that.” “She sounds incredible.” “She was.” Present tense is the only way. “She is.” Immy squeezes your arm and keeps walking and you walk with her through the golden October streets and the trees are starting to turn and Fairview Fall in autumn is something you were not prepared for, the particular beauty of it, the way the light goes amber and the air goes clean and everything smells like something ending and beginning at the same time.

Their Eyes Were Watching God takes you a few days, which is fast for a book that requires that much of you. You read it in the evenings after the bookshop and in the mornings before school and once for two hours on a Sunday afternoon while Birdie baked downstairs and Gerald slept on your legs and the wind moved in the oak tree outside your window. You go back to Miss Beaumont on a Tuesday after school with the book under your arm and she looks up from her desk and says “sit” before you have opened your mouth and you sit. The conversation lasts forty minutes. She asks you questions that are not really questions — what did you make of Janie’s horizon, what does the pear tree mean to her, where do you think she ends up when it’s all over — and you answer them and she listens and pushes back and you push back at her pushing back and at some point you realise you are arguing, genuinely arguing, about a novel, and it is the most alive you have felt in a classroom in longer than you want to think about.

When you finally stop she looks at you over the top of her glasses with an expression that takes you a moment to read. It is not quite pride — it is something more precise than that, something more like recognition, like she is seeing something she suspected and has now confirmed. “You argued three of those points better than my graduate students did,” she says. “And I was one of them.” “I disagreed with part of your reading,” you say. “About the ending.” “I know you did.” She takes the book back and holds it for a moment. “I think you’re right.” She says it plainly, without qualifying it, and then puts the book on the shelf behind her. “What do you want to do with this? With reading and writing and thinking. After school.”

You have not been asked this since before the crash. You have not asked it of yourself. “English literature,” you say, slowly, like you are finding it as you say it. “I want to study it properly. I want to learn how to talk about books the way you just did.” Miss Beaumont looks at you for a moment. “Good,” she says. “Don’t let anyone talk you out of it.” She opens her desk drawer. “Take this.” Another book. To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf. “Come back when you’ve read it,” she says. “Same deal.” You look at the book and then at her and you think about your father, who would have loved her, who would have argued with her for hours and walked out glowing. “Thank you, Miss Beaumont,” you say. “Go home,” she says. “It’s getting dark.”

The cardigan tears on a Wednesday. You catch it on the corner of a shelf in the bookshop — the left cuff, your mother’s favourite, the one she always pushed up to her elbow when she was doing something with her hands — and it snags and you hear it before you feel it, a small clean sound, and you look down and there is a pull in the wool, a run, and then a tear, and you stand very still in the aisle of the bookshop with your hand over it like you can hold it closed. Birdie finds you like that. She comes around the end of the shelf with a stack of returns and sees your face before she sees the cardigan and puts the books down. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, what happened?” You show her. You cannot speak around it, which is ridiculous because it is a cardigan, it is a thing, it is wool and buttons and it can be fixed, but it is also your mother’s and it smells like her and you have worn it every single day since the crash and you cannot speak around it. Birdie takes your hand away from the tear very gently and looks at it. Then she looks at you. “Come on,” she says. “We’re closing early.”

She sits you on the sofa and takes the cardigan and her sewing kit and she fixes it while you watch, her hands sure and small and practiced, and you do not cry while she is doing it because you are past the acute part by then, past the part that takes your breath, and you sit with Gerald in your lap and watch her work and the lamp is on and the house is warm and quiet. “She bought it in a shop on fifth avenue,” you say eventually. “I remember going with her. I was maybe nine. She tried on about six things and came back to this one and said this one is me and bought it.” You look at your hands. “She wore it all the time. It was her comfort thing.” “And now it’s yours,” Birdie says, without looking up from the needle. “And now it’s mine.” Birdie ties off the thread and smooths the cuff and holds the cardigan up to the light and inspects it and then holds it out to you. The repair is invisible. You cannot see where it tore. “Birdie,” you say. “Don’t,” she says, which is what she always says when you thank her, which is her way of saying of course, you don’t have to say it. You put the cardigan back on. She refolds her sewing kit. Outside the window Fairview Fall is going dark and gold and the first proper cold of October is in the air. “Mom loved you,” you tell Birdie. “She thought you were the funniest person..”

Birdie laughs, short and bright and a little wet at the edges. “She was funnier than me,” she says. “She always was.” She closes the sewing kit. “We should have been closer. I should have — I kept meaning to, and then there wasn’t — “ She stops. Clears her throat. “Anyway.” “I know,” you say. “I know you know.” She stands up and smooths her skirt. “I’m making pasta tonight. I’ve been practising.” She pauses. “It will not be as good as your mother’s.” “It won’t,” you agree. “But I’ll eat it.” She laughs again, more solidly this time, and goes to the kitchen, and you sit on the sofa with Gerald and your mended cardigan and the quiet of the house around you, and it is not fine, exactly, but it is something that can be lived in. In the morning you come downstairs and there is a note on the kitchen table. Birdie’s handwriting, on a piece of paper torn from the back of a receipt. For my girl — who is braver than she knows and more her mother’s daughter than she realises. Keep wearing it. She’d want you to. You fold it up and put it in the journal.

The Lees have you and Birdie over for dinner on a Friday in late October. Heeseung’s mother has made enough food for twice as many people, which Heeseung says is just how she cooks, she cannot make a small amount of anything, it is a documented fact. His daddy is a broad quiet man with Heeseung’s eyes and a handshake that is very firm and a way of listening that makes you feel like whatever you are saying is worth hearing. He asks about New York and you tell him and he asks follow-up questions and you tell him more and by the time you are at the table you have told him things about the city you have not thought about in months — the specific smell of the subway in summer, the way the light hits the buildings at six in the evening, the sound of it, the particular sound that is not one thing but all things at once. “You miss it,” he says. Not accusing. Just observing. “I miss parts of it,” you say. “It’s complicated.” He nods like he understands complicated. “Most real things are,” he says, and passes you the bread.

The dinner is loud and warm and good, Birdie and Heeseung’s mother finding each other across the table with the ease of two women who should have been friends years ago and are making up for lost time, and Heeseung’s daddy and Birdie talking about the bookshop gutter which he has apparently actually been meaning to fix, he is sorry about that, he’ll come by Tuesday. At some point the adults move to the sitting room with wine and you and Heeseung look at each other across the cleared table and he tilts his head toward the back door.

The garden is dark and cool, lit by the light from the kitchen window and a three-quarter moon that is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There is an oak tree at the back of the yard and from one of its lower branches hangs a wooden swing — old, clearly original to the house, the rope thick and worn. Heeseung sits on it and you sit beside him on the grass, your back against the trunk, and for a while neither of you says anything in particular. “Mocks next week,” you say eventually. “I know.” He pushes the swing back and forth with one foot. “You worried?” “A little.” You pull your knees up. “I didn’t miss much school after — after the crash. My teachers were good about it. But I still feel like I’m playing catch-up.” “In what?” “Everything except English.” “English you could teach,” he says, easily, matter-of-fact. “I’m not sure about that.” “I am.” He says it simply, like it is a thing he has assessed and concluded. “I’ve seen you in Beaumont’s class. You think differently to everyone else in there.” He pauses. “That’s not a criticism of everyone else. It’s just — you see the seams of things.” You look at the moon through the oak branches. “My dad used to say that,” you say. “He said I could find the argument in anything.” “Smart man.” “The smartest.” You pause. “He would have talked to your daddy for six hours straight tonight. They have the same way of listening.”

Heeseung is quiet for a moment. “I’ll take that,” he says. “That’s a real compliment.” You sit in the cool dark and talk about the mocks — his, yours, Immy’s periodic panic and Sunghoon’s inexplicable calm — and about what comes after, the haziest outline of it, what it might look like. Heeseung says community college like he always does, easy and certain, and you think about Miss Beaumont saying don’t let anyone talk you out of it and think that maybe you are starting to know what you want too, the shape of it at least, English literature and something that uses the part of your brain that found the argument in Whitman and the horizon in Hurston.

“You’ll pass everything,” Heeseung says, when you circle back to the mocks. “I know you will.” “You don’t know that.” “I know you,” he says. “Same thing.” You look at him on the swing in the dark. The kitchen light on one side of his face. The moon on the other. “Heeseung,” you say. “City girl,” he says back. You look away. “Goodnight.”

The mocks come and go in a blur of early mornings and index cards and Birdie’s good baking and Immy’s voice notes that are mostly panic and occasionally useful. You sit in the exam hall with your pen and your mother’s cardigan and you write and write and write, and when it is over you go to the bookshop and shelve things in alphabetical order because it is the most calming thing you know how to do.

The results come on a Thursday morning. You open the envelope at the kitchen table with Gerald watching from his windowsill and Birdie pretending not to hover by the kettle. You passed everything. English, highest mark in the year. Miss Beaumont’s handwriting in the margin of the practice essay: This is what I meant. Well done. You sit with it for a moment. Then you pick up the journal. Mom, you write. I passed. All of it. English highest in the year. I wish you could see it. I wish I could call you. I wish I could hear you say you knew I would. I know you knew I would. Dad, Miss Beaumont says I think differently. You always said that too. I’m starting to think it might actually be true. I’m going to study English literature. I think I’ve known for a while. I’m writing it down now so it’s real.

You close the journal. Birdie puts a cup of tea in front of you and squeezes your shoulder and doesn’t say anything and that is exactly right. You run into Heeseung outside the school gates at lunch, which is where he always is when the weather holds, leaning against the blue car with his face in the sun. He looks over when he hears the gate and reads your face before you have said a word.

“Well?” he says. “Passed everything,” you say. “English highest in the year.” What happens next is that he crosses the space between you in two steps and picks you up, both arms around you, lifting you clear off the ground and turning once, and you make a sound that is mostly surprise and partly laughter and you grab his shoulders and hold on, and he is warm and solid and he smells like the blue car, like worn leather and something warm, and he is laughing too, low and real, right beside your ear. He sets you down. His hands stay on your waist for a moment, just a moment, before they don’t. “Told you,” he says. His voice is the same. His face is the same. Everything is the same except that your heart is doing something you do not have a word for yet. “You told me,” you agree. He grins. “Highest in the year.” “Don’t make it a thing.” “City girl.” He steps back, easy, hands in his pockets. “It’s already a thing.”

That evening Sunghoon finds Heeseung in the parking lot after practice, when everyone else has gone, and leans against the blue car with his arms folded. Heeseung is loading his bag into the back. He glances over. “What.” Sunghoon does not say anything for a moment. He has the expression he gets when he has thought about something thoroughly and arrived at a conclusion and is choosing his moment. “You picked her up,” he says. Heeseung straightens. “I was happy for her.” “I know you were.” “She passed everything. Highest in English.” “I know.”

Sunghoon looks at him. “Heeseung.” “What.” “You know what.” Heeseung is quiet. He shuts the car door. He looks at the middle distance with the expression of someone who has been told a thing he already knew and was hoping not to have confirmed out loud yet. “It’s not—” he starts. “It is,” Sunghoon says. Not unkind. Just clear, the way Sunghoon is always clear, the way he cuts through the middle of things without making a mess of them. Heeseung puts his hands in his pockets. He looks at the school building, the last of the afternoon light on the brick. “She’s still finding her feet,” he says, finally. “I know,” Sunghoon says. “I don’t want to—” “I know.” He pushes off the car. “I’m not telling you to do anything.” He picks up his bag. “I’m just telling you what I see.” He pauses. “You’ve known since the gate on the first day. You should probably get used to the idea.” He walks off across the parking lot.

Heeseung watches him go. The school is empty and the afternoon is going gold and the blue car is warm from sitting in the sun all day, and Heeseung stands beside it for a long time after Sunghoon has gone, looking at nothing, thinking about a girl who talks about her parents in present tense and picks arguments with Whitman and holds his record like it is something precious without knowing why. He gets in the car. He sits for a moment with his hands on the wheel. “Yeah,” he says to no one. “Okay.” He starts the engine and pulls out of the lot and drives home through the golden streets of Fairview Fall with the radio low and the St. Christopher swinging and something settled in him now, something named, sitting quiet and certain in his chest like it has been there a long time. Because it has.

November comes in quietly, the way months do when you have finally stopped counting them. You notice it first in the light — the way it changes angle, goes thinner and more golden, lying longer across the floors in the mornings and disappearing earlier in the evenings until the town is dark by five and the porch lights are all on by the time you walk home from the bookshop. The oak trees on Birdie’s street have gone fully now, the last of them letting go, and the sidewalks are deep in leaves that nobody seems in any hurry to clear because they are beautiful and this is Fairview Fall and there is time.

You have been here four months. You know this the way you know the layout of Birdie’s kitchen, the way you know which stair creaks and which drawer sticks and the precise angle Gerald prefers to be scratched behind the ear. You know the regulars at the bookshop by name and by reading habit. You know Mae’s by booth and by order. You know the way Immy talks with her hands and the way Sunghoon goes quiet when he is actually paying the most attention and the way Heeseung’s voice drops slightly when he is saying something he means, which is most of the time, because Heeseung does not say things he doesn’t mean. Four months. You turn it over in your hands like a stone, testing its weight.

It is heavier than it sounds. It is lighter than you expected.

November does what November does, which is arrive and then be over before you have properly registered it. There are things inside it — Immy’s birthday, which is celebrated with the particular enthusiasm of someone who has been looking forward to it since October, a dinner at Mae’s that goes on until closing and ends with Sunghoon presenting her with a gift that makes her go very still and then throw her arms around his neck while he stands there absorbing it with his hands in his jacket pockets and a look on his face that is the most unguarded thing you have seen on him yet. You do not ask what the gift was. Some things are not yours to know.

There is a Sunday afternoon at the bookshop with Miss Beaumont, who comes in on her day off and spends an hour in the poetry section and buys three things and talks to you about To the Lighthouse across the counter in a conversation that keeps getting interrupted by customers and keeps resuming the moment they leave. She says before she goes, pulling on her coat, “you should think about what you want to write, not just what you want to read” and then she leaves before you can ask her what she means, which you are beginning to understand is her preferred method.

There is a Tuesday when the grief comes out of nowhere — a smell in the street, someone’s perfume, your mother’s perfume, and you are at the corner of main street and you have to stop walking and stand very still for a moment and breathe through it with your hand against the wall of the hardware store while the town moves around you. It passes. It always passes. You write about it that night — three pages, which is more than you usually write, and when you are done your hand aches and the feeling has somewhere to be that is not inside your chest.

There is a Thursday when Heeseung drives you out past the edge of town for no stated reason and parks on a rise where you can see for miles — the land going flat and wide in every direction, the sky enormous above it, the late November light turning everything amber and still. You sit on the hood of the blue car and don’t say very much and it is one of the better silences of your life, the kind that only happen with people you trust without having decided to. November passes. December arrives and brings with it cold that is serious now, cold that means something, and Birdie puts a second quilt on your bed and buys cinnamon for the baking and the town strings lights along main street that go on at dusk and make the whole place look like something you would make up if you were trying to imagine a Christmas.

The drive-in is showing Christmas movies on a Friday in mid-December. This is announced on a chalkboard outside as Holiday Double Feature and whoever writes the chalkboard has drawn a small lopsided Christmas tree beside it that has clearly been done with great affection and no particular artistic talent, and Immy calls it the most charming thing she has ever seen and takes everyone.

Sunghoon’s truck is better for this than the blue car, which Heeseung acknowledges without any defensiveness because the blue car is many things and a comfortable place to sit in the back of on a cold December night is not one of them. You all pile into the truck bed with blankets from Immy’s house — she brought four, which was the right number — and the speakers rigged up on the dash inside play the drive-in audio through the open rear window, tinny and warm. The first film starts. Something black and white, something with snow and a big house and people in good coats making complicated decisions about love. You are not entirely following it. You are warm enough, tucked under a blanket with your knees drawn up, and the cold air is sharp and clean on your face, and above the screen the actual sky is enormous and dark and full of stars in the way that a sky over a small town in December can be, which is a way that the sky over New York never was.

Immy is against Sunghoon’s side with his arm around her in the way that is just their arrangement now, comfortable as furniture. He says something low to her and she tips her head up to answer him and you look away because some things are private even in a truck bed.

“You cold?” Heeseung is beside you, close in the way the small space of the truck bed makes everyone close, close enough that you are aware of it as something other than proximity. “I’m fine,” you say, which is the answer you give. He looks at you sideways. “I’m a little cold,” you say. He lifts the blanket and pulls it more squarely over both of you and you shift slightly without meaning to so that you are closer, and he stays very still when you do, and then he is just — there, warm along your left side, solid and present, and you look at the screen and do not think about it because you have been not thinking about it for a while now and you are getting quite practiced. You are not getting that practiced.

Immy and Sunghoon disappear at some point in the middle of the first film — popcorn, Immy says, we need more popcorn, and they climb out of the truck with the blanket and do not come back for a while. The drive-in hums around you, other cars and trucks glowing softly in the dark, the screen washing blue and white light across everything. You are watching the film. You are also aware of his hand, which has found your knee through the blanket, just resting there, warm and heavy, the way his hand always rests on things — without urgency, without asking for more than it is. “Do you like it here?” he says.

You turn to look at him. He is already looking at you, and his face in the light from the screen is soft and serious and very close, and his eyes have that quality they always have, that quality of seeing you, and you look at him and something in your chest does something you are not ready to name but can no longer pretend is nothing. “Yeah,” you say. Your voice comes out quieter than you intended. “I really do.”

He looks at you for a moment longer. The film plays on. His thumb moves once against your knee through the blanket, a small thing, barely a thing at all. Then he leans in and presses his lips to your temple. Warm and still. Not the quick friendly press of before — this one stays, just a moment, and his nose is cold against your hair. “Good,” he says quietly, against your hair. You look at the screen. Your heart is doing something complicated. It’s not just friendliness, you think, clearly, for the first time, the thought arriving with the quiet certainty of something you have known for a while and have finally let yourself know. It is not just western friendliness and it is not just him being Heeseung and I have been so careful not to see it and I see it. You do not say this. You look at the screen. His hand stays on your knee. The film goes on.

Immy and Sunghoon come back with popcorn that is too buttery and a shared expression of people who went for popcorn and did something else as well and are not talking about it. Immy drops back into the truck bed and looks at you and then at Heeseung and then at you again and her face does the thing it does when she knows something, which is to do nothing, perfectly, too carefully. You take some popcorn. You watch the rest of the film. On the drive home Immy sits in the front with Sunghoon and you and Heeseung are in the back seat of the truck and his shoulder is against yours and neither of you moves away and the St. Christopher swings on the rear view mirror and the heater makes the windows fog at the edges and outside Fairview Fall goes past, lit up and cold and yours, more and more yours every day.

Christmas is the two of you. You and Birdie in the small warm house with Gerald and the tree she made you help her decorate on the first of December because she does not believe in waiting, and the smell of whatever she has attempted for Christmas dinner which is ambitious this year, genuinely ambitious, and the radio on the kitchen windowsill playing carols that neither of you knows all the words to and both of you sing anyway. It is a good day. It is also the hardest day. You knew it would be. You have been knowing it was coming the way you know weather is coming, something in the air before it arrives. Your parents were people who made Christmas — made it loudly and fully and with too much food and a specific record your father played on Christmas morning while your mother made coffee and you sat on the floor in your pyjamas and the apartment smelled like pine and something good. That record is on your shelf in your room. You did not take it out this morning because you were not ready and you knew you were not ready.

After dinner — which is better than it had any right to be, Birdie has been practising — you sit on the sofa with your tea and Gerald and the tree lights going soft in the corner and Birdie comes in from the kitchen and sits beside you and she has something in her hand.

“I’ve been thinking about when to give you this,” she says, “and I decided Christmas was right because your mother would have given it to you herself someday and I want to be the one to do it in her place.” She opens her hand. Your mother’s wedding ring. You know it immediately. The plain gold band, the small diamond, the slight asymmetry where she knocked it against something years ago and had it repaired and you could always see where if you looked. She wore it every day of her life. You have not seen it since the hospital. You cannot speak for a long moment.

“How—” you start. “It came to me with her things,” Birdie says quietly. “I’ve been keeping it safe.” She takes your hand and presses it into your palm and closes your fingers around it. “It’s yours. It always was going to be yours.” You look at your closed hand. “Birdie,” you say, and your voice does not work properly, and she opens her arms and you go into them the way you did in the bus station parking lot in August, and she holds on and you cry into her shoulder, properly, the way you mostly don’t let yourself in front of people, the way you usually save for your room alone.

You cry for your mother and your father and the Christmas morning with the record and the coffee and the apartment and the life that was yours before it wasn’t, and Birdie holds you through all of it and does not say hush or it’s alright because she is too wise to say either of those things and she just holds on. When you surface she is crying too, quietly, in the way she always cries which is privately even when she is in company. “Sorry,” you say. “Don’t,” she says. Which means of course not, never. You sit together on the sofa with the tree lights and Gerald and your mother’s ring in your hand and the radio still playing something gentle from the kitchen, and it is sad and it is also okay, both things fully true at the same time, and you are learning that this is how it is and how it will be — the grief and the warmth living in the same rooms, not cancelling each other out, just coexisting, because they have to. You put the ring on the chain you wear around your neck, the thin gold one your father gave you for your sixteenth birthday. It rests against your chest. It is warm from your hand. You write about it that night. Mom, you write. Birdie gave me your ring. I’m wearing it. I’ll wear it every day the way you did. I’m okay. I’m more than okay, most days. I miss you both so much it’s like weather — it changes, it comes and goes, and sometimes it’s very bad and sometimes it’s just there in the background, part of everything. I think I’m building something here. I think you’d both be glad. Merry Christmas.

January comes cold and clear and the town shakes itself out of the stillness of the holidays and picks back up, and with it comes the Winter Festival.

You have heard about this since October — Immy mentioned it in passing as something the whole town does, and Birdie mentioned it as something that has been happening since before she arrived, and Mae mentioned it as her second busiest weekend of the year and said it with the satisfaction of someone who likes being busy. It takes over the centre of town for a weekend — stalls and food and a brass band and lights strung between the buildings and a stretch of the main street cleared for dancing on the Saturday night, which is the real reason anyone comes, which nobody admits.

Heeseung picks you up in the blue car on Saturday evening. You are wearing the amber blouse Immy picked out for you in October under your coat, and your mother’s cardigan underneath, and the ring on its chain, and he looks at you when you come down the porch steps with the same expression he gets sometimes, the one that is only there for a second before the grin settles back into place, but you see it now, you have been seeing it, you are done pretending you don’t. “You look nice,” he says, easy. “Thank you,” you say, equally easy, and get in the car.

The festival is everything Immy promised and a few things she forgot to mention, including the fact that the brass band is genuinely excellent and the food stalls go on longer than the main street which means someone has taken over the hardware store car park and nobody seems to mind. You move through it in a loose group — you and Heeseung and Immy and Sunghoon, picking up other people from school and putting them down again, stopping at stalls and eating things that are too good and too hot and burn your fingers in the good way. Immy buys something fried and inexplicable and shares it with you and declares it the best thing she has ever eaten and Sunghoon takes one look at it and says “absolutely not” and eats it anyway when she holds it out to him, and you are laughing, you are genuinely laughing in the cold January air with the lights above you and the brass band somewhere close playing something that gets into your feet.

The dancing starts at eight. The main street clears itself in the way of places where this has happened for generations — people just know, they move back, they make space — and the band shifts into something slower and the first couples move into the middle and then more, and it is warm from all the bodies and lit gold from the strings of lights and it smells like winter and something sweet from the stalls. Heeseung holds out his hand to you. You take it. He dances the way he does everything, which is well and without making a production of it, and you know the steps well enough because Birdie taught you in the kitchen in November on a rainy evening when there was nothing else to do, this is just a two-step, baby, it’s not complicated, and it is not complicated, it is just his hand warm in yours and his other hand at your waist and the two of you moving through the same space in the same direction. You dance for a while.

Around you Immy and Sunghoon are dancing the way they exist, which is easily and entirely, and other couples are moving and the band is warm and the town is all around you, Fairview Fall in January, lit up and cold and full.

The song changes to something slower. Heeseung does not let go. You do not move away. The space between you closes in the natural way of a slower song and you are close enough now that you can feel the warmth coming off him and you look up at him and he is looking at you, and his face is doing the thing it has been doing for a while now, that serious and certain thing, and he opens his mouth. “I’ve been thinking,” he says. “Okay,” you say. “I’ve been thinking that—” He stops. Starts again. “The thing is, I—” He exhales. “You know when you know something and you keep not saying it because you don’t want to—” “Heeseung,” you say. “Yeah.” “Kiss me.” He blinks. Just once. And then something in his face settles, completely, like a thing that has been held at tension for a long time and has finally been allowed to let go, and he brings his hand up from your waist to your jaw, careful, and he kisses you.

It is soft and unhurried and entirely certain, the way he is — no performance, no question in it, just him, just this, just the two of you in the middle of the Winter Festival in the middle of Fairview Fall in January with the brass band playing and the lights overhead and the cold air around you and his hand warm on your jaw.

When he pulls back his eyes open slowly and he looks at you and neither of you says anything for a moment. “Hi,” he says finally. “Hi,” you say. He laughs, low and real, and you laugh too, and he presses his forehead to yours and you stand like that in the middle of the street while the town moves around you, and it is so far from where you started — the bus station, the parking lot, the small wooden sign that said Fairview Fall, Pop. 2,847 — and so completely, entirely right. His thumb traces your jaw once, gentle. “Darlin’,” he says softly. “I know,” you say. “I know.”

You walk home from the festival with his hand in yours. This is not discussed. It just happens — the crowd thinning around you, Immy and Sunghoon peeling off at their corner with goodnights that contain entire conversations neither of them says out loud, and then it is just you and Heeseung on the quiet streets of Fairview Fall in January, your breath showing in the cold air, the festival lights fading behind you, and at some point between the main street and Birdie’s road his hand finds yours and holds it and that is that. You walk without talking much. There is not much that needs saying yet. The kiss is still warm in you, sitting somewhere low and certain, and the town is quiet around you and the stars are out and his hand is warm and you think: this is what it feels like when something is right. You have not felt it before, not exactly like this, and you hold it carefully the way you hold things that are new and true and slightly frightening.

At Birdie’s porch he stops at the bottom step and you turn to face him and he is looking at you in the way he has been looking at you for a while now, except that now neither of you has to pretend it isn’t happening. “Goodnight, darlin’,” he says.“Goodnight, Heeseung.” He squeezes your hand once before he lets go. You watch him walk back down the street — unhurried, hands in his pockets, the blue car waiting at the kerb — and you stand on the bottom step until he is gone and then you go inside. The house is quiet. The tree lights are still on in the sitting room, Birdie having forgotten or having left them on deliberately, which is entirely possible. You hang up your coat and stand in the hallway for a moment, your hand still warm from his. Gerald appears from the sitting room, looks at you, and turns around and goes back. “I know,” you say, to no one. You go upstairs. You sit on the bed. You pick up the journal and hold it and then put it back down because some things need a night to settle before you put them into words. You lie back and look at the ceiling and you are smiling and you do not try to stop it.

Birdie knows in the morning. You do not tell her. You do not have to tell her. You come downstairs in your mother’s cardigan with the ring warm on its chain and she is at the kitchen table with her coffee and she looks at your face and her whole expression does something slow and warm and satisfied, like a woman who has been patient about something for a long time and has been proven right. “Morning,” you say. “Morning, baby,” she says. “How was the festival?” “Good,” you say. “Mm.” She wraps both hands around her mug. “Just good?” You get yourself a cup and sit down across from her and look at her and she looks back at you with those familiar eyes, your mother’s eyes, and she is fighting a smile with everything she has and losing.

“Birdie,” you say. “I’m not saying anything,” she says. “You’re saying everything.” “I’m drinking my coffee.” She takes a very deliberate sip. “I’m simply a woman drinking coffee who is extremely happy on a Sunday morning for no particular reason.” You look at her. She looks at you. The smile wins, on both sides. “He’s a good boy,” she says, finally, simply. “I know,” you say. “His mama will be insufferable about it.” She says this with the warmth of someone who likes his mama very much. “In the best possible way.” You wrap your hands around your cup and look out the kitchen window at the January garden, frost on the grass, the oak tree bare. Something has settled in you, something that was restless and is not restless anymore, and you sit with it in the warm kitchen while Birdie finishes her coffee and does not make a production of anything, because she never does, because she is exactly who she is. “Thank you,” you say, eventually, not about anything specific. She reaches across the table and puts her hand over yours for a moment. “Don’t,” she says. Which means of course. Always. You don’t have to say it.

Monday morning arrives and you walk through the school gate and Immy is there. She is leaning against the wall beside the gate with her arms folded and an expression that is doing extraordinary things — warm and knowing and delighted and restrained all at once, the expression of someone who has known something for a long time and has finally been vindicated. “Hi,” you say. “Hi honey,” she says. “Good weekend?” “Good weekend.” “Anything interesting happen?” “Immy.” “I’m just asking.”

She falls into step beside you. “I’m asking a perfectly normal question about your weekend. I happened to be at the Winter Festival. I happened to see certain things. I’m not saying anything about those things. I’m just asking about your weekend.” “Immy.” “Yes?” “He kissed me.” She stops walking. You keep walking. She catches up in three steps. “I know he kissed you,” she says, and her voice has gone high and bright around the edges in the way it does when she is genuinely delighted and cannot fully contain it.

“I saw him kiss you. Sunghoon saw him kiss you. Half of Fairview Fall probably saw him kiss you.” “That’s fine,” you say, because it is. She grabs your arm and stops you in the middle of the hallway and looks at your face with her hands on your shoulders and her eyes going soft. “Are you happy?” she says. Just like that, direct and real, the way Immy always asks the things that matter. You think about it. The honest answer, the real one. “Yeah,” you say. “I really am.” She makes a sound that is mostly just joy, pulls you into a hug that is brief and tight and completely certain, and then releases you and straightens and composes herself into someone who is simply walking to class. “Good,” she says briskly. “That’s all I wanted to know. Come on, we’ll be late.”

You walk to class. You are smiling. You cannot stop doing that today. Heeseung finds you before lunch. He always finds you before lunch. This is not new. What is new is that when he falls into step beside you in the hallway he takes your hand, easy as anything, like it is something you have always done, and you look down at your joined hands and then up at him and he looks back at you with that grin that has always been just him, that has always been the most natural thing in the world. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say.

“Is this okay?” He means the hand. “Very okay,” you say. He nods once, satisfied, and walks with you down the hallway through the midday noise of Fairview Fall High School, and the school moves around you the way it always has, except that now you are holding his hand and the whole building seems to know it and most of it seems pleased.

It is in the corridor outside the science block that you see Cassie Howard. She’s been interested in Heesueng since October from what you’ve seen. Always loitering beside his locker and asking him to help her with reading for English. She’s a nice girl. But when these interactions happened you couldn’t help but feel jealous. She is with two girls from her class, laughing at something, her hair in a high ponytail, and she looks up when you pass and her eyes go to your joined hands and then to your face. Something moves through her expression — you see it, brief and honest, the particular look of someone who has let something go and is at peace with having let it go — and then she smiles at you. A real smile. Warm and direct. She lifts a hand. You lift yours back. She turns back to her friends and keeps talking and that is the whole of it, clean and simple and kind, and you look at it as you walk past and feel something in your chest that is gratitude, or respect, or both.

“What was that?” Heeseung asks. “Cassie Howard waved at me.” “Yeah,” he says, easy. “She would.” He glances over at you. “This town doesn’t really have time for conflict.” You look up at him — the grin, the certainty of him, the way he says it like it is just a true thing about the place he loves — and you smile, properly, all the way through it. “I like this town,” you say. “I know you do,” he says. “I’ve known for a while.”

The conversation about what you are happens that afternoon, in the blue car, parked outside Birdie’s with the engine running for the heat and the radio low. It is not a serious conversation. That is the thing you will remember about it — it is not fraught or uncertain or full of the nervous energy of something that could go wrong. It is just the two of you in the warm car in the cold January afternoon, talking about it the way you talk about most things, which is honestly and without making it harder than it is.

“So,” he says. “So,” you say. He looks at the steering wheel. Then at you. “I’d like it if you were mine,” he says, which is simple and direct and so entirely him that something in you softens completely. “If that’s something you want too.” “It’s something I want,” you say. He nods. The grin. “Okay.” “Okay,” you say. He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind your ear — careful, like he has been wanting to do it for a while and is allowing himself to now — and his fingers brush your jaw and rest there for a moment. “I’ve wanted to do that since October,” he says. “Which part?” “All of it.” He says it plainly. “The hair. The—” He pauses. “All of it.” You look at him in the afternoon light, this boy who found you outside a gate on the first day and showed you around a town that was not your town and drove you home and stayed for dinner and gave you a record he loved without knowing why you needed it, and you think: I was not supposed to stay. I was not supposed to build anything here. I was not supposed to end up in a blue car in January in Fairview Fall, Texas feeling like this. You think: I am so glad I did.

“Heeseung,” you say. “Yeah.” You lean across the console and kiss him, soft and certain, and his hand comes up to your jaw the way it did last night and he kisses you back the same way he does everything, which is completely and without any hurry, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it, and you think that there is something very specific about being kissed by someone who actually means it, who is not performing it, who is just — there, entirely, in the moment with you. When you pull back he is smiling. Not the grin, not the easy public one — something smaller and more private, something that you think might be just yours. “Go inside,” he says. “It’s cold.” “It’s warm in the car.” “Go inside,” he says again, and the smile gets wider. “Birdie’ll be watching from the window.”

You look at the house. The curtain moves. “Oh my God,” you say. He laughs, fully, head tipping back, and you get out of the car before you start laughing too, and you take the porch steps two at a time and the front door opens before you reach it and Birdie is standing there with the most unconvincing innocent expression you have ever seen. “How was school?” she says. “Birdie.” “What? I’m asking about your day.” You push past her into the warm house and she closes the door behind you both and the sound of the blue car pulling away from the kerb is very clear in the quiet and Birdie hums something small and satisfied to herself in the hallway. “Not a word,” you say. “Not a single one,” she agrees, and goes to put the kettle on, and you lean against the wall and press your hand to your mouth and smile into your palm while Gerald winds around your ankles and the house wraps around you, warm and full, yours.

February in Fairview Fall is the quiet month. The festival is over and the holidays are long gone and the town settles into the particular stillness of a place waiting for spring, going about its business without any special occasion to dress itself up for. The cold is still real but it has lost the bite of January — it is a softer cold now, the kind you can walk in without bracing, and on the clearest days there is something in the light that is almost a promise, a brightness at the edges of the afternoon that was not there in December.

You and Heeseung find your rhythm the way rivers find their course — not by deciding, but by going the way that is natural, the way that offers the least resistance. He picks you up in the mornings. He walks you to class. He finds you before lunch without fail. He drives you home in the blue car with the radio low and his hand finding yours across the console somewhere between the school and Birdie’s road, easy and unhurried, like it is the most obvious thing in the world. It is the most obvious thing in the world. You are still slightly amazed that it gets to be. Birdie makes pointed remarks about how often there are two cups on the drying rack now instead of one, which she does with such elaborate innocence that it is impossible to be annoyed by it. His mother sends peach preserves home with him for you — a jar, then another jar, then a third with a small note attached in handwriting that is Heeseung’s handwriting in thirty years that simply says for Y/N, with love — and you put them in Birdie’s kitchen and they make everything taste like summer. Immy has taken to calling you both insufferable with enormous affection. Sunghoon has said nothing, which is the loudest thing Sunghoon can do.

He takes you to the high roads on a clear Saturday in late February when the sky is the particular shade of blue that only happens in winter, deep and cloudless, the kind of sky that goes on forever. You have seen the high roads from below — from the town, looking up, the winding line of them against the hillside — but you have not been up them yet, and when he turns off the main road and the blue car begins to climb you understand immediately why this is somewhere people go.

The town falls away below you slowly, revealing itself in pieces — the water tower, the church steeple, the football field, the grid of streets you know now, that you could walk from memory — and by the time he pulls off onto the flat ridge at the top and cuts the engine you can see all of Fairview Fall spread out beneath you like a map of a life. You get out of the car without speaking. You both do. The wind up here is different — wider, cleaner, coming from somewhere far away — and you stand at the edge of the ridge and look at the town below and the land beyond it going flat and enormous in every direction and the sky above it all doing what the sky does up here, which is everything. “My dad used to take me to the roof of our building in the city,” you say. You do not plan to say it. It comes out the way things come out when you are somewhere that opens you. “Not to see the city — we could see that from our windows. He took me up for the sky. He said the city was too bright to see it properly from the street but if you got high enough above the light you could still find them.” You pause. “The constellations. He knew all of them.”

Heeseung is beside you, not quite touching, listening the way he listens which is with his whole self, not waiting for you to finish so he can speak but actually receiving what you are saying. “He’d stand behind me and point over my shoulder,” you say. “And he’d say there, do you see it? and I’d say yes even when I couldn’t always see it because I loved the way he talked about them. Like they were old friends.” You look at the sky. The February afternoon is going and the first stars are beginning, faint at the edges of the blue. “He said every constellation has a story and every story is about the same things. Love and loss and people trying to find their way home.” The wind moves. “He sounds like someone worth knowing,” Heeseung says, quietly.

“He was the best person I’ve ever known,” you say. “Him and my mom both. They were—” You stop. The grief is here, the real kind, the kind that comes up from the ground. “They were just the best people. And I don’t know how to—” Your voice goes. “I don’t know how to stop feeling like I should call him every time I see something I want to tell him about.” Heeseung puts his arm around you. Not to stop the crying — you are crying now, quietly, the tears going cold on your face in the wind — but just to be there, to be solid, to be the thing you are not falling into even though you are falling. “You don’t have to stop,” he says. “You can want to call him every time.” “It doesn’t go away,” you say. “People say it gets easier but it doesn’t go away.” “No,” he says. “I don’t think it does.” He says it simply, without flinching from it, without trying to fix it into something more comfortable, and you love him for that in a way that you do not yet have a word for — the particular love of someone who tells you the true thing instead of the easy thing.

You cry for a while in the wind on the high roads above Fairview Fall with his arm around you and the town below and the stars coming through above, and he holds you and does not say it’s okay because he is too wise for that, and he does not say hush because that is not something he would ever say to you, and he does not let go.

When you surface he turns to you and lifts his hand and presses his thumb to your cheek, gentle, and catches a tear that has not finished yet, and then he leans in and kisses where it was, soft, his lips cold and warm at the same time, and then the other cheek, and your eyes close. “Hey,” he says softly, against your face. “Hey,” you say back. He pulls you in properly, both arms, and you press your face into his jacket and breathe and he rests his chin on top of your head and you stand like that on the ridge above the town until you are steady again, until the grief has done what it came to do and settled back into the place where it lives, and the stars are properly out now, a handful of them at least, and you pull back and look up.

“There,” you say. You find the one you know most certainly, the one your father always found first. “That one. Orion. My dad said find Orion first and everything else follows.” Heeseung looks where you are pointing. “I see him,” he says. “He’s always there,” you say. “My dad said that. He said some things are always there, you just have to know where to look.” Heeseung looks at the sky for a moment and then looks at you, and his face in the starlight is so careful and so certain and so entirely his. “Smart man,” he says. “The smartest,” you say. He takes your hand and you stand on the ridge and look at the stars until the cold drives you back into the car, and on the drive home the radio plays something soft and country and his hand is warm over yours on the console and Fairview Fall comes up to meet you, lit and small and entirely yours.

Spring arrives in March like it means it. Overnight, or what feels like overnight, the brown gives way to green and the air changes temperature and quality and the town opens up the way it does when winter is done — windows, doors, people on porches, Mae’s putting tables out on the sidewalk for the first time since October. The football field goes bright again. The oak trees on Birdie’s street bud out and within two weeks are full and green and moving in the warm breeze. Immy announces the lake on a Friday in late March the same way she announces everything, which is as a fact that has already been decided. “Saturday,” she says at lunch. “The lake. All four of us. It’s warm enough.” “It’s barely warm enough,” Sunghoon says. “It’s warm enough,” she says again, with finality. It is warm enough. Just. The lake in spring is the colour of something deep and clear and cold, ringed with trees that are only just coming into leaf, the banks soft with new grass. There are other people there — it is a public place, a Friday night place in summer, but on a Saturday morning in late March it is quiet enough that you have the good stretch of bank largely to yourselves.

Immy has brought a blanket and approximately half of her kitchen and she sets up on the bank with the efficiency of someone who has done this many times while Sunghoon wades in without ceremony and makes a sound that suggests Immy was generous in her assessment of the temperature. You are standing at the edge of the water in your swimsuit — the one Immy helped you pick out, the green one, the one she said was exactly right with your colouring — with your toes in the cold and the spring sun warm on your back, looking at the lake and deciding whether you are brave enough.

You become aware that Heeseung has stopped moving beside you. You look over. He is looking at you. Not in a way that is rude or obvious — in a way that is simply honest, a way he does not quite school fast enough, a way that you catch before it becomes the grin. “What?” you say. “Nothing,” he says. The grin arrives. “You just look—” He does not finish the sentence because Sunghoon, from the water, sends a splash that catches him full across the chest, and you take several steps back to avoid the second wave. “Eyes forward,” Sunghoon says, with absolute serenity. “I wasn’t—” Heeseung starts. “In,” Sunghoon says, and splashes him again. Heeseung goes in, retaliating immediately, and you stand on the bank and laugh at both of them until Immy materialises beside you and says “we should go in before they start trying to dunk each other” and takes your hand and you go in together, fast, because fast is the only way, and the cold hits you all at once and you gasp and then you are in it, properly in it, and after thirty seconds it is perfect, the kind of cold that makes you feel entirely alive.

You spend the morning in the water and on the bank and in the water again. Sunghoon and Heeseung have an argument about something that happened in a football game two years ago that neither of them can fully remember and that Immy referees with the authority of someone who was there and remembers everything. You and Immy lie on the blanket in the midday sun while the boys swim further out and she tells you about the summer she was twelve and she and Heeseung and Sunghoon built a raft in Heeseung’s backyard and carried it out here and it sank immediately and Sunghoon said he knew it would and he had told them so and Heeseung said he was the worst and Sunghoon said he knew that too.

“He was right though,” Immy says. “It was terrible construction.” “Did Heeseung admit that?” “Eventually.” She shades her eyes to look at the water. “He always admits it eventually. He just needs a minute.” She pauses. “That’s one of the things about him. He comes around. He always comes around.” You look at the water too, at Heeseung out in the middle of it, dark head, easy stroke. “I know,” you say. She smiles at the sky.

The afternoon goes golden and then the four of you build a fire on the bank in the early evening in the practiced way of people who have done this before — Sunghoon doing most of the actual work while Heeseung hands him things and makes suggestions that Sunghoon ignores — and you sit around it with blankets and the remains of what Immy brought and the lake going dark and still in front of you.

At some point Immy stands up and says she needs to be home for dinner and Sunghoon stands with her immediately, the way he always does, and there is a small exchange of goodnights and the sounds of them packing up, and then their voices going up the bank toward the road, and then quiet. Just you and Heeseung and the fire and the lake. He has been quiet the last hour in a way that is not unhappy, just interior, something running underneath. You sit with it because you know him well enough by now to know when to wait. Gerald is teaching you this too. Everyone in your life is teaching you to wait. He gets up and goes to the car and comes back with his guitar. You look at it. You have never seen him carry it out of the house before — you know it exists, Birdie told you, you have known it was coming in the way you know spring is coming, something in the air before it arrives.

He sits back down beside you and settles it in his lap and does not look at you. “You don’t have to listen,” he says. “I want to,” you say. He nods once. He adjusts the tuning quietly, the small careful sounds of it, and then his hands find the strings and he begins to play.

It is not a song you know. You do not think it is a song anyone knows — it has the quality of something made, something that grew rather than was written, the melody finding itself as it goes. It is quiet and unhurried and the notes go out over the water and the fire pops and the spring air holds it and you sit very still because you do not want to be the thing that breaks it.

He plays for a while. You look at the lake. You look at the fire. You look at him — his hands on the strings, the concentration on his face, the way he is entirely present in the music, the way everything else about him is here but this particular part of him goes somewhere else, somewhere interior, the same place the journal takes you. He lets the last chord go. The quiet comes back. “That was yours,” you say. Not a question. “Yeah.” He sets his hand flat against the strings to still them. “I’ve been working on it for a while.” “Does it have a name?” He looks at you sideways, and something in his expression is careful and open and slightly vulnerable in a way he rarely is in company. “Not yet,” he says. You look at the lake. “It should,” you say. “It’s too good not to have a name.”

He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “I’ll figure it out,” and it sounds like he already has, and you do not push it, and the fire burns down and the stars come out and the two of you sit by the lake in the early spring dark and he plays a little more — things you half-know, things that are fully his — and it is one of the best evenings of your life, quiet and full, the kind you will come back to when you need to remember what good feels like.

March becomes April and the bookshop comes into its busiest season — spring cleaning, Birdie says, people remember books exist when the weather turns — and you are in after school most days, shelving and helping and making change and talking to the regulars who have become your regulars too, people who ask after you by name and bring you things from their gardens and tell you things about the town that Birdie has not told you yet.

You are on the ladder reaching for the top shelf on a Thursday afternoon, a stack of returns to be reshelved, when the bell above the door sounds and you do not look down because you are busy and Birdie is at the counter. “She’s in the back,” you hear Birdie say, and then, a beat later: “second aisle.” Footsteps on the wooden floor. You are still reaching for the shelf. “Need a hand?” Heeseung says, below you. “I’ve got it,” you say. You get it. You come down the ladder with the empty stack and he is there at the bottom of it, leaning against the shelves with his jacket on and his hair slightly messed from the wind outside, and he looks at you the way he looks at you now — that private, warm, certain look that is just yours, that you have stopped being surprised by and started simply receiving. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say. “I’m working.” “I know.”

He pushes off the shelf and steps into the aisle and it is narrow enough that he is very close, and he takes the empty stack from your hands and sets it on the floor without breaking eye contact and you look up at him and the afternoon light from the window at the end of the aisle is warm and golden and his hands find your waist. “Heeseung,” you say, with a very specific kind of not-seriousness. “I’ll be quick,” he says, and he is grinning, and then he kisses you back against the shelves, his hands warm on your waist, and you put yours on his chest and the shelves press gently into your back and it is soft and thorough and entirely him and the bookshop smells like paper and vanilla and spring through the open window.

A sound from the direction of the counter. A very deliberate cough. You pull apart. Heeseung drops his forehead to yours and his shoulders shake once, silently. Another cough. Pointed. Patient. With the timing of a woman who has been a bookshop owner for years and has heard everything happen in her aisles and has Opinions. “We should—” you start. “Yeah,” he says. He steps back. He picks up the empty stack from the floor and holds it out to you with the expression of a man attempting innocence. “Reshelving.” “Reshelving,” you agree.

You go back to the front of the shop. Birdie is behind the counter with a customer, her back to you, discussing a book recommendation with complete concentration. She does not look at you. She also does not stop smiling. You catch Heeseung’s eye across the shop. He presses his lips together against the grin. You look at the ceiling. “Really?” Birdie says, to no one, to the air, conversationally, still not looking at you. “We’re working,” you say. “Mm,” she says. “I see that.” The customer looks between all three of you with polite confusion. Birdie recommends them something excellent and sends them on their way and then turns around and looks at you both with the expression of a woman who has said everything she intends to say on the subject without saying a word.

Heeseung clears his throat. “Afternoon, Birdie.” “Heeseung,” she says pleasantly. “You know my stockroom needs reorganising if you’ve got time on your hands.” He reorganises the stockroom. You shelve the returns. Birdie bakes something in the back that smells extraordinary and pretends this is all very normal and you work through the afternoon in the warm, paper-scented air of Read a Cookie while the spring goes on outside the window and Gerald sleeps on the counter and the town moves past the glass. Later, walking home, Heeseung says: “I like your aunt.” “She likes you too,” you say. “That’s what makes it worse.” He laughs, and takes your hand, and you walk home through the April streets of Fairview Fall with the trees fully green and the light going gold and warm and the ring on its chain warm at your chest, and everything is tender and good and slightly too full to hold, the way the best things are.

Birdie goes to visit a friend in Austin on a Friday in April — an old friend, someone from before Fairview Fall, someone she has been meaning to visit for two years and has finally committed to, leaving Thursday evening with a bag and a list of instructions about Gerald that is longer than it needs to be. “He eats at seven,” she says, at the door. “Not six-thirty. Seven. He knows the difference and he will make your life very difficult if you get it wrong.” “I know, Birdie. I live here.” “I’m just saying.” She picks up her bag. “There’s a cobbler in the fridge. Don’t let Heeseung eat all of it.” “I wasn’t planning on—” “I know you weren’t planning on it.” She gives you the look, the fond and entirely unsubtle one. “I’m just saying.” She kisses your cheek. “Be good.” “Always,” you say. She gives you a look that suggests she finds this moderately believable and goes.

The house is very quiet on Friday evening. You feed Gerald at seven — exactly seven, he does know the difference — and you sit on the sofa with your book and the lamp on and the spring evening going dark outside the window, and it is fine, it is completely fine, you have been alone before, and then the phone rings and it is Heeseung. “Hi,” you say. “Hi.” His voice is warm and easy. “How’s the house?” “Quiet.” “Birdie get off alright?” “With a list of Gerald’s dietary requirements and a pointed comment about cobbler.” He laughs. “She left cobbler?” “Don’t.” “I’m just asking.” “Heeseung.” A pause, warm at the edges. “My parents are at my uncle’s tonight,” he says. “I’m at the house alone.” Another pause. “You could come over. If you wanted.” You look at the quiet room. Gerald looks back at you from the armchair with the expression of an animal who has no opinions about your personal life. “Give me twenty minutes,” you say.

The Lee house is lit warm from the inside when you come up the front path, the porch light on, the garden going dark around it. He opens the door before you knock — he must have heard the gate — and he is in a soft shirt with the sleeves pushed up and his feet bare and he looks at you on the doorstep for a moment with that expression, the private one, the one that is just yours. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say, and he steps back to let you in. The house has the particular quiet of a place that is usually full and is not full tonight, and it is warm from the day’s heat still in the walls, and it smells like his mother’s cooking and something underneath that is just the house, just the smell of a place that has been lived in well. He takes your jacket and you follow him to the kitchen where there are two glasses on the counter and something on the stove that he has apparently made, which surprises you. “You cook?” you say. “My mama taught me.” He lifts the lid and checks it. “I’m not as good as she is.” “Nobody is.”

He makes a sound of agreement and you sit at the kitchen counter and watch him finish it and it is domestic in a way that sits warmly in your chest, the ease of it, the two of you in a kitchen with the evening outside and nowhere else to be. He plates it up — something simple, something good — and you eat at the kitchen table and the conversation wanders the way it does when you are somewhere comfortable, from school to music to something Sunghoon said at practice that made the whole team laugh, to the book you are reading, to nothing in particular. “Miss Beaumont asked about you today,” you say. “Yeah?” “She said you were the best argument she ever lost.” He looks pleased. “What were we arguing about?” “She didn’t say. She said you were wrong but you made her think harder about why, and that’s rarer than being right.” He considers this with the seriousness it deserves. “I’ll take that,” he says. “That’s a real compliment.” “I told her that’s what you’d say.”

He smiles at his plate, private and warm, and you look at him across the kitchen table in the lamplight and think about what it is to know someone — to know the way they receive things, the way they hold compliments, the way they go quiet when something matters and loud when something is funny, the way they drive and the way they listen and the way their voice drops when they are saying something true. You have been building this knowledge for eight months without knowing you were building it and now it is just — there, solid, a thing you can lean on.

After dinner he washes up and you dry, the way you have fallen into doing it at Birdie’s, and it is the same quiet domestic ease, his hands in the water and yours with the cloth and the radio low on the windowsill, and at some point he says something that makes you laugh and you lean into his shoulder without thinking about it and he turns his head and presses his lips to your hair and stays there a moment, and then he takes the cloth from your hands and hangs it over the tap and turns to you. “Come on,” he says, quietly.

His room is at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, the oak tree visible through the window in the dark. It is a room that has been lived in for seventeen years — worn at the edges, comfortable, everything in its place but none of it arranged for display. There are records on the shelf, the good kind, stacked carefully. His guitar in the corner on its stand. A photograph on the desk of the three of them — him and Sunghoon and Immy, young, maybe thirteen, standing at what looks like the lake, all of them squinting into the sun and grinning. Books, more than you expected, stacked on the nightstand and on the floor beside the bed. You go to the records first, because you cannot help it, running your finger along the spines the way your father taught you. “You and my dad would have gotten along,” you say. It comes out soft and easy, not weighted, just true. “I know,” he says, from behind you. “You’ve told me enough about him that I feel like I know him a little.”

You turn around. He is close, in the way he is always close now, in the way you have stopped registering as proximity and started registering as just — him, just the space he takes up in your life. “I love you,” you say. You have not said it before. You have known it — you have known it for longer than you have allowed yourself to know it — but you have not said it, and it comes out now in this room with his records and his guitar and the photograph of him at thirteen with his whole life ahead of him, and it comes out the way true things come out when you stop holding them, which is simply and without apology. He looks at you for a moment. Something in his face does what it does when something matters, which is go very still and very certain. “I love you,” he says back. “I’ve loved you since the gate on the first day and I’m done not saying it.”

You look at him. He looks at you. “Since the gate,” you say. “Since the gate,” he confirms. You step into him and he meets you halfway and the kiss is different to the others — not urgency, not the sweet tentativeness of the first one, but something fuller and more certain, something that has all the months in it, all the mornings in the blue car and the evenings at the diner and the high roads and the fire by the lake and the bookshop and the kitchen and all of it, every bit of it, and his hands are in your hair and yours are on his chest and you are both entirely present in it, entirely there. He pulls back just enough to look at you, his forehead against yours, his hands framing your face. “You sure?” he says. Quiet and straight, the way he always is. “I’m sure,” you say. “Are you?” “Since the gate,” he says again, soft, and you laugh against his mouth and he smiles into the kiss. Your hands slide into his hair immediately, pulling him closer, and he exhales sharply, his hand moving from your face to the back of your neck, gripping a little tighter now, holding you in place as the kiss deepens. His mouth moves against yours with more intent, his tongue slower but heavier, like he’s tasting you properly now, like he’s not holding back the fact that he wants this. Wants you.

Your hands move down his back, pressing him closer, feeling the solid warmth of him, and he responds instantly, his body shifting into yours, his thigh pressing between yours without thinking. “Fuck—” he exhales quietly against your mouth. He pulls back just enough to breathe, but his lips don’t leave you — they trail along your jaw instead, down your neck, slower again but heavier, his mouth open against your skin. You feel it everywhere. “Heeseung—” you breathe. He hums softly against your throat, the sound low, vibrating through you, and then his teeth graze your skin — not enough to hurt, just enough to make your breath catch.

“Heeseung—” you breathe. He hums softly against your throat, the sound low, vibrating through you, and then his teeth graze your skin — not enough to hurt, just enough to make your breath catch. “Darlin’…” he says again, against your neck this time, his voice rougher. “You have no idea—” His hands move down from your face, your neck, over your shoulders, your arms, then back in — pulling your shirt up, slower than before but more intentional, like he’s aware of every inch of skin he’s uncovering. You lift your arms for him and he drags the fabric off you, his eyes dropping immediately to your chest.

He exhales. “Jesus—” His hands come up to your tits instantly, full, firm, like he’s been waiting to touch you like this. His thumbs drag over your nipples and you arch into him without thinking. “There,” he murmurs. “Yeah— you feel that?” “Yes—” He presses harder. Rolls your nipple between his fingers. You gasp. “Fuck—” he breathes, almost to himself. “You’re so—” He cuts himself off and leans down, his mouth replacing his hand, taking your nipple into his mouth, his tongue circling slowly before he sucks. Your fingers tighten in his hair. “Heeseung—” He groans softly against your skin, the sound unguarded, and it makes your stomach flip. “Yeah,” he murmurs, pulling back just enough to speak, his breath warm against your chest. “Say it again—” You say his name again, softer this time, and his hands tighten on you, his mouth returning, slower but deeper, like he’s losing track of how careful he was trying to be. His other hand stays on your other breast, squeezing, his thumb dragging over your nipple in time with his mouth, and the combination makes your hips shift under him. He notices immediately. Of course he does. “Sensitive,” he murmurs. “Fuck— I can feel it—”

Your hands move down his chest now, pushing his shirt up, needing to touch him too, needing something solid under your palms. He lets you, lifts his arms so you can pull it off, and the second your hands hit his skin, he exhales. “Yeah,” he says softly. “There—” You run your hands over him, his chest, his stomach, feeling the tension in him, the way his body reacts to your touch just as much as yours reacts to his. “You’re shaking,” he murmurs, kissing along your neck again. “So are you,” you whisper. He lets out a quiet, breathless laugh against your skin. “Yeah,” he admits. “I am.”

His hand slides down your stomach, slow, his fingers tracing the line of your waist, your hips, before settling on your thigh. He presses gently, encouraging you to open for him. You do. His breath catches slightly when he sees you open.. His fingers brush between your thighs, light at first, feeling the warmth, the slickness already there. “Fuck,” he exhales quietly. “You’re already—” He stops himself and looks back at your face. “You okay?” “Yes,” you say, breath uneven. “Yeah?” he asks softly. “Good girl,” he murmurs. His fingers move again. More deliberate now. He runs them through your folds, slow, spreading the wetness, learning you the same way he learned everything else — carefully, completely. When his thumb finds your clit, he presses lightly, testing. You react instantly, hips shifting. He notices. “Right there?” he asks. “Yes—”

He circles it slowly, steady, his other hand still resting on your thigh, holding you open. His touch isn’t rushed, but it’s precise, like he’s mapping exactly what you need. “You’re doing so well,” he murmurs. “So good for me.” His fingers slide down, then back up, then he presses one finger into you. Slow. You gasp. He stills. “Okay?” “Yes,” you breathe. “Don’t stop.” He nods slightly. “Alright. I’ve got you, darlin’.” He moves again, pushing deeper, then adding another finger, curling them slightly inside you, watching your face for every reaction. “That’s it,” he says softly. “Just relax— I’ve got you—” His thumb keeps working your clit, his fingers moving in a steady rhythm, and you feel it building, tightening low in your stomach. “Heeseung—”

“I know,” he murmurs. “I know—” He leans down and kisses you again, softer now, his movements syncing — his fingers, his mouth, everything aligned. When he finally moves over you properly, settling between your thighs, his body warm and solid against yours, the shift is immediate. Closer. Heavier. Real. He lines himself up slowly, his hand coming back to your face again, thumb brushing your cheek. “Look at me,” he says softly and then he pushes into you. You gasp, your body tightening around him instinctively. He stops immediately. Completely still.

“Okay?” he asks. “Yes,” you breathe. “Don’t stop.”He moves again, slower than he wants to, you can feel it — the control, the effort — but underneath it there’s something stronger now, something that wants more. His hips press into yours, deeper each time, his hand sliding to your hip, holding you, grounding you. “Fuck—” he exhales. “You feel—” You say his name and it breaks him. His rhythm deepens, still controlled but heavier now, more intent, his forehead pressing to yours again. “I’ve got you, darlin’,” he says. “You’re alright— I’ve got you—” Your hands move all over him — his back, his shoulders, pulling him closer, and he responds immediately, pressing deeper, his pace shifting just enough to make your breath catch.

“You feel incredible,” he murmurs. “So warm— so tight—” You gasp. Your body tightens. He feels it. “Yeah— I know—” he breathes. “I know—” His mouth finds your neck again, kissing, slower now but deeper, like he can’t stay away from it, like he needs to feel you there while he moves. “Stay with me,” he murmurs. “I am—” “Good girl,” he says softly. “That’s it—” It builds. Steady and inevitable.. Your body tightens, your hands gripping him, your breath breaking, and he stays right there with you, not rushing, not pulling away, just with you.

“Darlin’—” he breathes. “You’re doing so well—” You come.. His whole body reacts, his rhythm stuttering, then deepening as he follows, his voice breaking softly against your neck as he finishes, still pressed close, still holding you. He stays there. Inside you. Breathing hard. His hand comes back to your face again, thumb brushing your cheek, softer now. “You okay?” he murmurs. You nod, smiling faintly. “Yeah.” He exhales. Relieved. And kisses you again, slow and warm, like he’s not done touching you yet. “Stay with me,” he says softly.

Afterward you lie in the warm dark with his arm around you and your head on his chest and his heartbeat under your ear, and neither of you speaks for a long time because there is nothing that needs saying and it is enough to just be here, to just be this. “Hey,” he says eventually, into your hair. “Hey,” you say. He tightens his arm around you once, just once, and then loosens it, and you lie there in the quiet of his room in the house where he grew up and you think: I was not supposed to stay. I was not supposed to build anything here. You think: I am going to stay.

You fall asleep without meaning to and wake to the dark room and Heeseung warm beside you and the clock on his nightstand reading half past ten. You lie still for a moment, listening to the house, the spring night outside, a dog somewhere distant. Heeseung is awake. You can tell by his breathing. “You okay?” you say. “Yeah.” He says it easily, and he means it, but there is something underneath it, something that has been there since dinner, something you noticed and did not push. You wait. He exhales. “There’s something I should have told you,” he says. “I’ve been meaning to and I kept — I don’t know. I kept waiting for the right time and there wasn’t one so I just didn’t.” You lift your head to look at him. In the low light his face is serious. “The scholarship,” he says. You go still. “Coach put my name forward in January,” he says. “To three programmes. I found out in February that one of them wants me. Full ride. Music programme at a school in Nashville.” He pauses. “It’s a good programme. It’s a real one.” The room is quiet.

“You’ve known since February,” you say. “Yeah.” “It’s April, Heeseung.” “I know.” “That’s—” You sit up. The warmth of the last hour is still in you but something else is in you now too, something cold and specific. “That’s two months. You’ve known for two months and you didn’t—” You stop. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “Because I didn’t want it,” he says. He says it simply, like it is an explanation. “I still don’t want it. I want to stay here. I want community college and music and—”

“That’s not the point,” you say. “The point is you didn’t tell me.” You look at him in the dark. “I heard about it, Heeseung. Someone at school — I don’t even remember who — said something about Coach pushing you for a scholarship and I thought they meant the football one, I thought — I had no idea there was a music one, I had no idea it was real and current and something you were sitting on—” You hear yourself and stop. He is looking at you with an expression that is not defensive, which somehow makes it worse.

He looks like someone who knows he is wrong and is not going to pretend otherwise. “You heard about it at school,” he says. “Weeks ago,” you say. “I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t know enough to ask.” You get up and find your clothes and he sits up and watches you and does not try to stop you because he understands that this is not something to stop, this is something to let happen. “I’m not angry about the scholarship,” you say, pulling on your cardigan. Your mother’s cardigan, warm and familiar. “I’m angry that you didn’t trust me with it. I’m angry that I heard it from someone else. I’m angry that you let me fall in love with you and didn’t tell me there was a version of the future where you might not be here.” Your voice does not break. You are grateful for that.

“That’s what I’m angry about.” “I know,” he says. “You’re right.” “I know I’m right.” You pick up your jacket. “I’m going to go home.” “Let me drive you.” “I’ll walk.” “It’s dark—” “Heeseung.” You look at him. He looks back, and his face is open and honest and not making excuses, and you love him, you still love him, that has not moved at all, which is its own kind of complicated. “I just need tonight. Okay? I just need tonight.” He nods. “Okay.” You go to the door. You stop. “I’m not going anywhere,” you say, and you mean Fairview Fall, you mean him, you mean all of it. “I just need tonight.” “I know,” he says. “I’ll be here.”

You go home through the spring dark, the streets of Fairview Fall quiet and lit around you, your mother’s cardigan warm on your shoulders and your heart doing several things at once. Gerald is in the window when you come up the path. You go inside and sit on the sofa in the lamplight and pick up the journal. You write for a long time. At the end of it you close the journal and sit in the quiet house and you are still angry and you are still in love and both of those things are fully true and you are learning, slowly, that love is not the absence of anger, it is just what is there when the anger passes. It will pass. He will be there. You know both of these things the way you know Orion — certainly, completely, because someone you loved taught you where to look.

The thing about being angry at someone you love is that it lives in your body. It is not a clean, distant thing. It sits in your chest and your throat and behind your eyes and it makes everything heavier — the morning, the walk to school, the seat at lunch, the backseat of Sunghoon’s truck where the space beside you is wrong now, off-balance, like a room where the furniture has been moved in the night.

You give yourself the weekend. You walk home Friday night and you cry into Gerald and you write in the journal and in the morning you get up and you make tea and you sit with the quiet and you let yourself feel it fully — the anger, and underneath the anger, the fear, and underneath the fear, everything else. You give yourself the weekend because you said you needed tonight and one night was not enough and you are learning to know what you need. Monday comes and you walk through the school gate and he is there, beside the blue car, and you look at him and look away and keep walking, and the air between you is something you have never felt between you before, which is distance.

You do not sit with him at lunch. You sit with Immy, who does not ask questions, who hands you half her sandwich and talks about her chemistry coursework with the focused energy of someone who understands that the best thing she can do right now is be normal, and you love her for it even as you are aware of Heeseung across the cafeteria not looking at you in a way that is very much looking at you. Sunghoon says nothing. He eats. He is a barometer of the situation and he knows it and he stays very still.

Wednesday he comes to the bookshop. You hear the bell above the door and look up from the returns you are sorting and he is there in his jacket with his hands in his pockets and he looks at you with an expression that is not an argument, that is just — him, open and present and a little wrecked around the edges in the way you have not seen him be before.

“Hey,” he says. You look back at the returns. “I’m working.” “I know.” He does not move from the door. “I’m not here to push. I just—” He stops. “I wanted to see you.” “I’m here,” you say, to the books. He stands there for a moment. Then he goes to the shelf nearest the door and starts looking at things, not browsing, just — being in the same room. Giving you something without asking for anything back.

Birdie comes out from the back and sees him and sees your face and does the thing she always does which is to read the room completely and not comment on a single thing she has read. She says “Heeseung, those top shelves need dusting if you’ve got a minute” and he says “yes, Birdie” and she hands him a cloth and he dusts the top shelves and you sort returns and nobody talks and the afternoon goes by and he leaves at closing without saying anything else and the door bell sounds and then the shop is quiet. Birdie puts the closed sign up. She comes to stand beside you at the counter. “You don’t have to tell me,” she says. “But I’m here if you want to.”

You look at the counter. The grain of the wood. The small chip at the corner that has been there since before Birdie bought the shop, that she has never repaired because she says it is part of the history of it. “He kept something from me,” you say. “Something important. For two months.” Birdie is quiet. “A scholarship,” you say. “A real one. Music, in Nashville. He knew in February and he didn’t tell me.” You pause. “I heard it from someone else. I didn’t even understand what I was hearing because I didn’t have enough information.”

“Ah,” Birdie says. “I’m not angry about the scholarship. I know he doesn’t want it. I believe him.” You press your palms flat to the counter. “I’m angry that he didn’t trust me with it. That I had to find out from someone else. That—” Your voice does something unexpected. “That there’s a version of this where he’s not here and he didn’t tell me.” The last part is the real part. You hear it when you say it. Birdie hears it too. She turns to face you fully. “That’s not really about the scholarship,” she says, gently. “No,” you say. “That’s about not knowing,” she says. “About not being told. About something changing without warning.”

The grief comes up then, the real kind, the deep kind, the kind that has been sitting underneath the anger all week waiting for you to stop being angry long enough to feel it. Your parents did not call to say they were leaving the work event. They did not say goodbye. One moment they were in the world and the next moment they were not and you had no warning, no preparation, no chance to hold the last conversation more carefully because you did not know it was the last one. You know this is not the same. You know Heeseung withholding a scholarship is not the same as a car crash on a highway. But fear does not do logic. Fear finds the shape of itself wherever it can. You put your face in your hands and you cry, properly, the ugly kind, the kind that has been building for days and longer than days. Birdie puts her arm around you and holds on and lets you. “I know,” she says, softly, into your hair. “I know, baby.”

“I’m so scared of losing someone else,” you say, into your hands. “I know that’s not fair to him. I know it’s not the same. But I’m so scared.” “That’s not unfair,” Birdie says. “That’s just true. You’re allowed to be scared.” “I love him,” you say. “I know you do.” “It makes it scarier.” “That’s how it works,” she says. “That’s just how it works. The loving and the scared are the same size.” She rubs your back. “That doesn’t mean you stop. You just carry both.” You cry until it’s done.

The shop is quiet and dark except for the lamp at the counter and outside the April evening is warm and the town is going about its business and Gerald has appeared from somewhere and is pressing himself against your leg. You wipe your face. You breathe. “I need to talk to him,” you say. “You do,” Birdie agrees. “When you’re ready.” “I’m almost ready,” you say. She squeezes your shoulder. “Almost is enough,” she says. “Come on. I’ll make tea and we can eat cobbler for dinner and not tell anyone.” “Birdie.” “I’m just saying what’s going to happen,” she says, and goes to put the kettle on, and you stand in the quiet bookshop and breathe and look at the chip in the counter and think about history and what you carry and what you build and the difference between the two.

Almost ready turns out to be another week. Finals are close now — three weeks out — and the school has that particular compressed energy of the end of a year approaching, everyone slightly too loud or slightly too quiet depending on their disposition. You study in the evenings at the bookshop after closing, your books spread across the counter, Birdie moving around you with tea and the occasional baked thing. You study well. Miss Beaumont has given you a reading list for the summer that is long enough to be a compliment, and you are working through it alongside the exam texts, because you cannot not. Heeseung studies too. You know this because Immy tells you, casually, the way she drops things casually that are not casual — Heeseung’s doing his English revision at the library after school, he asked me to recommend something Beaumont would like — and you do not comment and she does not push and the information sits with you.

He still drives you to school in the mornings. You did not ask him to keep doing it. He just keeps doing it. You get in the car and you say good morning and he says good morning and the radio is low and the drive is short and it is the saddest version of something that used to be the best part of your day. He offers his hand one afternoon in the backseat of Sunghoon’s truck, the four of you coming back from somewhere, and you look out the window instead, and you feel him pull his hand back, and the silence in the truck is enormous for about ten seconds until Immy says something completely unrelated in a bright voice and Sunghoon responds and the moment passes but it does not pass, not really, it just goes underneath.

Immy appears at your locker on a Tuesday morning two and a half weeks before finals with an expression that is equal parts loving and done. “Come with me,” she says. “I have class.” “You have ten minutes before class.” She closes your locker for you. “Come with me.” You go with her. This is the thing about Immy — you always go with her. She takes you to the science block. The old one, the one that floods, the one nobody uses anymore for anything except storage. She has a key, which you do not ask about. She opens a door at the end of the corridor and you follow her into a room full of old equipment and afternoon light through dusty windows and— Heeseung.

He is standing by the window with his hands in his pockets and when you come through the door he looks at you and then at Immy and she says “you’re welcome” and steps back into the hallway and pulls the door closed and you hear the key turn in the lock. You look at the door. You look at Heeseung. “She planned this,” you say. “Since last week,” he says. “Sunghoon drew a diagram.” “Of course he did.” A pause. The room is dusty and warm and smells like old chemicals and something that has been closed up for a long time. Light comes through the window in long stripes and dust moves in it.

Heeseung looks at you. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I need to say that first and I need to say it properly.” He takes his hands out of his pockets. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry you heard it from someone else. I’m sorry I let two months go by and kept it from you.” He pauses. “I thought I was protecting you from something that wasn’t going to be a thing. I thought if I turned it down before you had to know about it then it would just — not exist. Not be something you had to think about.” He exhales. “That was wrong. I treated it like my decision when it was about both of us and I didn’t give you the chance to be part of it.”

You look at him in the dusty light. He looks back. “You scared me,” you say. “Not the scholarship. You. The not telling. It made me feel like—” You stop. Start again. “My parents didn’t tell me they were leaving that night. They didn’t call to say goodnight. It was an ordinary evening and then it wasn’t and I had no — there was no warning, there was no chance to—” Your voice is steady. You are proud of that. “I know it’s not the same. I know that. But fear doesn’t do logic and when I realised you’d been keeping something from me about your future it hit me in the same place.”

He crosses the room. He does not reach for you — he stops just short, close enough, and he looks at your face with that quality he has always had, that complete attention. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “I know.” “The scholarship—” “Tell me,” you say. “Tell me properly. What do you want to do.” He is quiet for a moment. “I want to turn it down,” he says. “I’ve known since February that I want to turn it down. Nashville is — it’s far. It’s not here. It’s not—” He pauses. “Music is mine. It’s the thing that’s actually mine, more than football, more than any of it. And I want to study it the way it deserves. But I want to do it here. Community college. Close to my family. Close to Birdie.” He looks at you. “Close to you.” He says it plainly, without making it a plea, just a fact. “This is my life. You’re in it. That’s not something I’m willing to set aside for a programme in a city that isn’t mine.” You look at him. “It has to be your choice,” you say. “Completely yours. Not because of me.”

“It is completely mine,” he says. “You’re part of my life. Choosing my life isn’t choosing because of you. It’s choosing because this is where I belong.” He pauses. “But I should have told you. I should have trusted you with it. That part I got wrong and I know I got it wrong.” The room is quiet. Dust moves in the light. “I was so angry at you,” you say. “I know.” “I’m still a little angry.” “That’s fair.” “I cried to Birdie about it.” Something moves through his face. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and means it.

You look at him for a long moment. The boy who found you outside a gate. Who drove you home and stayed for dinner and gave you a record and took you to the high roads and held you while you cried and played guitar by the lake and kissed you at the Winter Festival and said since the gate and meant it completely.

You close the space between you and put your arms around him and he wraps his around you immediately, both arms, tight, and you press your face into his shoulder and breathe and he presses his lips to the top of your head and holds on. “I’m not going anywhere either,” you say, into his jacket. His arms tighten once. “I know,” he says. “I love you,” you say. “Even when I’m angry at you.” “I love you,” he says, into your hair. “I’m sorry it took me so long to be honest.”

You stand like that in the dusty science lab in the old building that floods, held together by a plan that Immy drew up and Sunghoon diagrammed, and it is not romantic exactly and it is also completely romantic, because this is Fairview Fall and this is them, and you would not have it any other way. From the other side of the door, very faintly, you hear Immy say something to Sunghoon. You hear Sunghoon’s low response. You hear Immy make a sound of satisfaction. Heeseung laughs against your hair. You laugh into his shoulder. He pulls back enough to look at your face and he wipes your cheek with his thumb — you did not know you were crying until he does it — and he kisses you, soft and certain, and you kiss him back the same way. “Are we okay?” he says, against your mouth. “We’re okay,” you say. “Go tell your coach.” “Tomorrow,” he says. “Today,” you say. He looks at you. He nods. “Today,” he says. You step back.

He goes to the door and tries it and it is still locked and he knocks twice and from the other side Immy says “are you done?” and he says “yes” and the key turns and the door opens and Immy is there with Sunghoon behind her, both of them wearing expressions that are so carefully neutral they are the least neutral things you have ever seen. “Good talk?” Immy says. “Good talk,” you say. She looks at your face and his face and her carefully neutral expression gives way completely to something warm and bright and entirely herself. She puts her arm around your shoulders. “Come on,” she says. “We’re going to be late.” You walk to class through the old science corridor — you and Immy ahead, Heeseung and Sunghoon behind — and from behind you you hear Sunghoon say, very quietly, something you cannot make out, and Heeseung says something back, and then there is a sound that is Sunghoon being shoved and not minding. Immy squeezes your shoulders. “Okay?” she says. “Okay,” you say. And mean it, fully, all the way through.

Finals arrive the way the end of things always does — faster than you were ready for and slower than you could stand. The last three weeks of the school year compress into a particular kind of time, dense and pressurised, the days full of index cards and highlighters and the specific exhaustion of a brain that has been asked to hold too much at once. You study at the bookshop counter after closing and at the kitchen table with Birdie’s tea going cold beside you and in the blue car in the school parking lot during free periods, your textbook open on your knees and Heeseung beside you doing the same, the two of you in companionable silence broken occasionally by one of you reading something out loud that the other has to hear.

This is its own kind of intimacy. You did not know that before. You know it now — the particular closeness of working in the same direction, of being tired together, of someone handing you a biscuit at ten o’clock at night because Birdie left a tin and they know you forget to eat when you are deep in something. Immy studies in bursts — intense, focused, slightly panicked, then suddenly fine.

Sunghoon studies the way he does everything, steadily and without visible stress, which Immy finds both reassuring and personally offensive. “How are you not worried?” she says at the diner one evening, revision notes spread across the booth. “I’m worried,” Sunghoon says. “You don’t look worried.” “I know.” He takes a fry from her plate. “It’s a gift.” She stares at him. She steals his milkshake. He lets her. You watch them across the booth and Heeseung’s knee presses against yours under the table and you look over at him and he is already looking at you and the grin is there, warm and private, and you think: I am going to be okay. I have been okay. I am building something here that is mine.

The exams themselves are five days of early mornings and the exam hall and the scratch of pens and the particular silence of a room full of people thinking as hard as they can. You sit in your assigned seat with your mother’s cardigan over your shoulders and the ring warm on its chain and you write. English is last. Three hours in the same hall, the same seat, and Miss Beaumont is one of the invigilators and she does not look at you differently to anyone else in the room — she is professional and precise and entirely fair — but when you hand in your paper at the end and walk past her desk she looks up briefly and gives you one small nod, and that is everything.

You walk out of the exam hall into the May sunshine and Heeseung is there — leaning against the blue car in the car park, face tipped up to the sky, and when he hears the doors he looks over and reads your face before you have reached him. “Well?” he says. “Good,” you say. “Really good.” He opens his arms and you walk into them and he holds you in the school car park in the May afternoon sun and you press your face into his jacket and think: Mom. Dad. I did it. I really did it. “Proudest person in Fairview Fall,” he says, into your hair. “Birdie might have something to say about that.” “Tied,” he says. “Birdie and I are tied.”

The weeks between exams and graduation are the loosest, most golden weeks of the year. There is nothing left to do but wait for results and show up and let the school year finish itself, and so you do — you and Heeseung and Immy and Sunghoon filling the days with the things that have become your things, the diner and the lake and the high roads and the bookshop and long evenings on Birdie’s porch and longer evenings in the blue car parked somewhere with the radio on. The results come on a Thursday morning and they are good — better than good, all of you, and Miss Beaumont leaves a note in your locker that is two lines long and says more than two lines usually can: You were the best argument I ever lost. Go do something with it. You keep it. You put it in the journal.

Heeseung turns down the scholarship the week before graduation. He calls Coach into his office himself — does not wait to be summoned, does not ask anyone to do it for him — and he tells him clearly and without apology that he is grateful and he is declining. He tells you after, in the blue car, with the same simple directness he brings to everything that matters. “How did he take it?” you ask. “He was disappointed,” Heeseung says. “He’ll get over it.” He pauses. “He said I was making a mistake.” “What did you say?” “I said I disagreed.” He looks over at you. “Respectfully.” “Of course.” “I’m always respectful.” “Always,” you agree. He takes your hand across the console.

“Community college music programme starts in September,” he says. “I already registered.” “I registered for English literature last week,” you say. He squeezes your hand. You look out the window at Fairview Fall going past — the main street, the bookshop, the diner, the church, the barbershop, all of it so known to you now, so entirely yours — and you think about September and what it will look like, this town in autumn again, the light going amber, the oak trees turning. You think about being here for it. You think about the shape of a future that is not the one you were supposed to have and is better than you could have built on purpose. “Birdie’s going to cry at graduation,” you say. “My mama’s going to cry at graduation,” he says. “My daddy’s going to pretend he’s not crying and fail.” You are both smiling and the blue car takes you home through the early summer streets of Fairview Fall and the St. Christopher swings and the radio plays and everything is very good.

Graduation is on a Saturday in early June. The ceremony is held on the football field — of course it is, this is Fairview Fall, everything important happens on the football field — with white chairs set out in rows and a small stage at one end with a podium and the faculty in a line behind it and the bleachers full of families who have been looking forward to this for eighteen years. Birdie is in the front row of the family section in a yellow dress — her good one, the one she saves — with her hair pinned up and Gerald’s absence conspicuous because you would not let her bring him, which she argued about and lost.

She is already crying when you find her before the ceremony and she says “I’m not crying” and you say “Birdie” and she says “I’m just very warm, it’s June” and you hug her and she holds on tight. Heeseung’s mother is two seats down with a camera that is serious enough to suggest she means business. His daddy is beside her in a good shirt with the look of a man who has decided to hold it together and is not certain he will manage it. They both pull you into a hug before you go to find your place in the graduating line and his mother holds your face in her hands for a moment and says “we’re so proud of you” and means the we completely. You find your place in the line. Immy is two ahead of you in her gown with her cap at an angle that is very her, and she turns and finds you and grabs your hand and squeezes it hard. “We did it, honey,” she says. “We did it,” you say. Sunghoon is behind Heeseung somewhere in the line and you cannot see him from here but you know he is doing the thing he always does which is standing very still and holding everything together quietly, and Immy knows it too and the knowing is in her face.

Heeseung is ahead of you by several places. He turns before the line starts moving and finds you over the heads of the people between you and he grins — that grin, the one that has always been the most natural thing in the world — and you grin back and then the music starts and the line begins to move.

The ceremony is long in the way that ceremonies are long, which is to say that individual moments of it are everything and the rest of it is just time passing. Names are called and people walk across the stage and the bleachers erupt for each one the way small towns erupt, which is completely and without irony, and Mae is in the stands hollering for every single graduate regardless of whether she knows them, because this is Mae and this is what she does.

When your name is called you walk across the stage and shake the principal’s hand and the bleachers go up and you hear Birdie clearly above everything else, Birdie who is not crying, who is simply very warm, and you think: Mom. Dad. Look. And then the speeches.

The principal speaks first, the usual things, and then she says: “This year’s student address will be given by someone who needs very little introduction in Fairview Fall. Lee Heeseung.” The bleachers respond the way the bleachers always respond to Heeseung, which is warmly and immediately.

He walks to the podium with his hands in his pockets and his cap slightly crooked and he looks out at the crowd with that easy, unhurried quality he has, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it well. He speaks about Fairview Fall the way someone speaks about a place they love without sentimentality — honestly, specifically, with the detail of someone who has paid attention. He talks about what it means to grow up somewhere that knows your name, about the particular gift of a community that shows up, about Mae’s cobbler and the football field grass and the record shop on main street. He makes people laugh twice and mean it both times. And then he pauses.

“This year we welcomed someone new to Fairview Fall,” he says. “Someone who came here when she didn’t choose to, who stood outside these gates on the first day of school not knowing a single person inside them.” He looks out at the crowd and his eyes find you in the graduating class with the ease of someone who always knows where you are.

“She taught this town a few things this year without meaning to. She taught me what it looks like to carry grief and keep living inside it. She taught me that some things are always there if you know where to look.” He pauses. “She came here for someone else’s reasons and she stayed for her own. And I think—” He stops. The grin, private and certain, just for you. “I think that’s the best thing a place can do for a person. Give them reasons that are theirs.”

The bleachers are quiet in the way of people who are feeling something. Then they are not quiet at all. You look at him at the podium and your vision goes slightly and you blink and the ring on its chain is warm against your chest and you think: Mom. Dad. Do you see? You know they see. The caps go up. This is the moment — the principal says I hereby declare you graduates of Fairview Fall High School and the field erupts and every cap in the graduating class goes up into the June sky at once, a cloud of them, black against the blue, and you throw yours and you are laughing and Immy beside you is laughing and Sunghoon beside her is smiling the widest smile you have ever seen on him and the bleachers are a wall of noise.

Heeseung finds you in about four seconds. He crosses the field with purpose and when he reaches you he takes your face in his hands and he kisses you, right there, in the middle of the graduating class of Fairview Fall High School with the caps still coming down around you and the bleachers still going and Birdie in the front row making a sound that is probably not crying because she is simply very warm. He pulls back and looks at you and his eyes are bright. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say. You are still laughing. “That speech.” “Too much?” “Perfect,” you say. “It was perfect.” He keeps his hands on your face for a moment. Around you the field is full — families flooding in from the bleachers, people finding each other, photographs being taken, the particular happy chaos of an ending that is also a beginning.

“Fairview Fall, Texas,” you say. “Population now includes you,” he says. “Permanently.” “Permanently,” you agree. He kisses you again, softer, and then his forehead is against yours and the June sun is warm on both of you and the town is all around you and somewhere behind you Birdie is making her way across the field in her yellow dress with her camera and his mother is right beside her with hers and the two of them are going to take approximately forty photographs of this moment and you are going to let them. “What comes next?” he says, against your forehead.

You think about September and community college and English literature and his music programme and the bookshop and the blue car and the high roads and the record on its shelf and the ring on its chain and Birdie’s baking and Immy’s late night phone calls and Sunghoon’s quiet certainty and Mae’s cobbler on Fridays and the lake in the summer and Fairview Fall in every season, yours in every season, for keeps. “Everything,” you say. He smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Everything.” The caps come down around you like the beginning of something. You catch yours. You stay.

Your grip tightened around the broken twig. What if he doesn't? The thought made your stomach twist. What if he got tired of waiting? What if he forgot? What if there was someone else standing beside him now, smiling at him the way you used to? Someone who could actually stay with him.

You shook your head violently. No. No. No. That wasn't possible. Riki loved you. He loved you. The princess was never who he wanted. None of them were. It had always been you. You were the one who knew his favorite places. You were the one who sat with him by the creek. You were the one he whispered promises to in the dark.

The walls around you seemed to blur as your thoughts spiraled faster and faster. He couldn't have forgotten. He couldn't have moved on. Because if he had, then what was the point of all this suffering? What was the point of surviving another day in this prison? What was the point of counting the days at all?

A laugh escaped your lips, shaky and broken. Your eyes burned as tears gathered along your lashes. He's mine, you thought. The words echoed in your head over and over until they drowned out everything else. He's mine. He's mine. He's mine.

Your chest tightened painfully. Somewhere deep inside, a small voice whispered that people changed, that two hundred and four days was a long time, that kingdoms moved on even when hearts didn't. You crushed the thought immediately. You couldn't allow yourself to think like that.

"He loves me," you whispered to the empty cell. The silence answered. You swallowed hard and repeated it again.

"He loves me."

This time it sounded less like a comfort and more like a desperate plea. Yet you clung to it anyway, curling tighter into yourself as though you could hold the belief together with your bare hands. Because if he didn't love you anymore, then you weren't sure what would be left of you when these walls finally opened.

Two hundred and four days since they found you and Riki. Two hundred and four days since they separated you from him. Two hundred and four days since they locked you away in this prison. Two hundred and four days since you had properly slept. Two hundred and four days since you had properly eaten. Two hundred and four days since you had properly drunk water.

Once upon a time, your life wasn't miserable. Once upon a time, you had a happy life.

You used to walk freely through the halls of the castle. You used to sneak glances at the Crown Prince. You used to watch him fight in the training courtyards.

The Crown Prince. Nishimura Riki. The one you fell in love with at the mere age of eighteen.

Your mother had taken you with her to work at the castle. The Queen let you roam around like a free spirit. She looked at you as if you were something precious and beautiful. Why? Because she had no daughters. She had three children, and all of them were boys. First came Nishimura Riki , then Nishimura Ren, and finally Nishimura Hiroto. She loved her three sons dearly, but she had always yearned for a daughter. And you? You became her pretend daughter.

While your mother cleaned everything from the court halls to the royal chambers, you spent your days dressed in the pretty clothes the Queen bought for you. You twirled in them happily. You loved the gardens just as much as she did. You loved everything the Queen loved. Literature, painting, gardening. By the age of thirteen, you had started looking at the Crown Prince with something far deeper than admiration.

You loved him. You loved his bravery, his kindness toward animals, his style, and everything else about him. When you were twenty-one, you followed him into the forest one afternoon. You watched him sit beside a creek. For a while, he did nothing but stare at the flowing water. Then he turned around.

"Y/N, I know you're hiding behind that tree," he said.

Heat rushed to your face. You were utterly embarrassed that he had caught you. Slowly, you stepped out from behind the tree and walked over to him. Sitting beside him, you kept your gaze fixed on the creek.

"Why did you follow me?" he asked, his fingers finding a stray twig and turning it over in his hands.

You stared at him. You had no answer. What were you supposed to say? I followed you because I love you? You couldn't say that. He would think you were strange. Worse, he might tell his mother, and the Queen would send you away from the castle!

"Uhm... I was just roaming around," you murmured, staring at his hands and the twig between his fingers.

"Do you like me?" he asked. Your head snapped up so quickly that your neck almost hurt. "Excuse me?" you blurted out. A small smile tugged at the corner of Riki’s lips as he watched your shocked expression. "You heard me," he said calmly. Your heart hammered against your ribs. "Why would you ask that?"

He shrugged. "Because every time I turn around, you're there." "I am not," you protested immediately.

"You are."

"I'm not."

"You followed me into the forest."

"That was a coincidence."

Riki raised an eyebrow. "Was it?" You opened your mouth to argue but found yourself speechless. The knowing look in his eyes made your face burn even hotter. "You stare at me when i’m practising," he continued.

"I do not!"

"You do."

"I don't."

"You think I don't notice?" he asked, amusement flickering across his features. You groaned and covered your face with your hands. This was a disaster. You wanted the earth to crack open beneath you and swallow you whole.

Riki laughed softly at your reaction before tossing the twig into the creek. "So?" he asked.

"So what?"

"Do you like me?"

The question settled heavily between you. The gentle sound of rushing water filled the silence as you stared down at your lap. You couldn't look at him. Not now.

"I..." you began, your voice barely above a whisper. Your fingers twisted nervously in the fabric of your dress. You had loved him for years. Loved his smile, his kindness, the way he cared for everyone around him. But saying it aloud felt impossible.

"Yes... I do," you admitted, turning away and looking at the creek and the flowing water. His hands gently cupped your face, making you look at him. Suddenly, his lips were on yours. The kiss was gentle and passionate, and it made your brain shut down.

That's when it all began. The sneaking around, the stolen glances, the stolen kisses, and the lingering touches. Sometimes, the two of you would lock yourselves in the maid's room, where you would talk, dance, and steal a few kisses.

Sitting at the entrance of the small cave you had found during one of your many adventures, you were celebrating your first anniversary together. A small sweet dish, flowers, the waterfall, and the crystals inside the cave made the moment feel magical.

What started as innocent touches quickly became something more intimate. His hands settled on your waist as your arms wrapped around his neck. You lay down on the blanket while he hovered above you. When the kiss finally broke, the two of you giggled softly. He leaned in again, pressing gentle kisses just below your ear.

The water cascaded down, its sound natural and soothing. The crystals sparkled in the moonlight, and cats purred in the distance, but none of it seemed to reach either of you. You were lost in your own world of kisses, touches, and quiet exploration.

His hands found the back of your dress, carefully untying the delicate threads. Soft gasps and sighs escaped between you as his lips found yours again, deepening the kiss. His lips trailed down to your jaw, pressing soft, promising kisses as they slowly made their way to your now-exposed collarbone.

You closed your eyes, the touch overwhelming you. His hand found yours, intertwining his fingers with your own. For a moment, neither of you moved. The sound of the waterfall echoed through the cave as he rested his forehead against yours, his breathing uneven. When you opened your eyes, he was already looking at you. His gaze lingered on your face as though he were trying to memorize every detail. Slowly, he lifted his head, his chest rising and falling with each breath. There was something vulnerable in his expression, something almost desperate.

"Y/N..." he whispered, your name barely audible above the rushing water. His thumb brushed over your knuckles.

"I... I need you."

Your breath caught in your throat. All those years of stolen glances across crowded halls, secret meetings, and whispered promises suddenly came rushing back to you. Looking at him now, you saw none of the confidence of the Crown Prince. You only saw Riki.

Slowly, your fingers tightened around his. "You have me," you whispered back.

The tension in his expression softened, and he let out a breath that sounded almost relieved. For a moment, he simply looked at you, committing every detail of your face to memory.

"I love you," you admitted quietly. "I don't think I've ever known how not to."

The confession felt strangely freeing. Like a weight you had carried for years had finally been lifted. Riki smiled then, a genuine smile that reached his eyes, and you couldn't help smiling back. ‘’I love you more.’’

Two hundred and four days later, the memory still lingered. Sometimes you wished it wouldn't. Sometimes you wished the hunger, the thirst, and the pain would finally be enough to erase it. But no matter how hard you tried, you could still remember the warmth of his hands, the sound of his laugh, and the way he had looked at you that night. The memory clung to you like a curse, replaying itself over and over inside your head until you could no longer tell whether it brought you comfort or pain.

Back then, you had thought nothing could tear the two of you apart.

You were wrong. You were so wrong.

A few months after your first anniversary, it was announced that he would be engaged to the Princess of Kaze-no-Shima. As the Crown Prince of Nishimura-no-Kuni, he was expected to marry someone of equal royal standing. The marriage would strengthen the alliance between the kingdoms and serve as a display of their power and influence.

Your heart had shattered. Alone in your room, you cried until your throat ached, but whenever you were around him, you forced a smile onto your face.

You sat beside him, your expression blank as he complained endlessly about the princess, his soon-to-be fiancée. He didn't like her one bit. Every complaint felt like a twist of the knife in your chest. Your thoughts always drifted to the same questions.

If he doesn't like her, then why is he marrying her?

I'm right here...

His mother loves me...

Maybe she would accept us.

Yet deep down, you already knew the answer. He was the Crown Prince of Nishimura-no-Kuni. Love had never been a part of the arrangement. Duty came first, and duty was slowly tearing the two of you apart.

But one day, in the small field where he was practicing with his sword, you sat nearby feeding the goats.

"Riki, why don't we just tell your mother that we love each other?" you asked quietly.

He froze. The sword slipped from his hand and landed in the grass.

"Are you crazy?" he asked, staring at you in disbelief. "No matter how much my mother loves you, she would never accept us." The words hit harder than you expected. He looked away, running a hand through his hair.

"I'm the Crown Prince," he continued. "Things like this... they're not that simple." Your heart sank as you nodded and went back to feeding the goats.

Two hundred and five. You scratched it onto the wall, your vision blurring. Was it the lack of proper food? Proper water? Sleep? You couldn't tell anymore. Maybe it was the hunger. Maybe it was the thirst. Maybe it was the loneliness. Maybe it was him. Maybe it was the way his name still echoed through your head every waking second of every day.

Your head rang as you pressed trembling hands against it, trying not to scream. It hurt. God, it hurt. The sound wouldn't stop. The thoughts wouldn't stop. Everything felt too loud and too quiet at the same time. Your heart hammered against your ribs, your breath catching in your throat as tears welled in your eyes.

Stop it, stop it, stop it, you prayed desperately. You weren't even sure what you were begging to stop anymore. The pain? The memories? The endless thoughts that chased each other around your mind until you thought you might go mad?

Rolling onto your side, you pulled your knees tightly against your chest. The stone floor dug into your skin, but you barely felt it. All you could feel was the ache. The ache in your head. The ache in your chest. The ache that had settled deep inside you two hundred and five days ago and never left.

For a brief moment, you thought you heard his voice. Soft. Familiar. Calling your name the way he used to. Your head snapped up so quickly that the room spun. You stared into the darkness, your pulse racing. Nothing. There was nothing there. Of course there wasn't.

Yet your eyes remained fixed on the empty corner of the cell. Waiting. Hoping. Listening. Because some pathetic part of you still believed he would come. That somehow he would tear through these walls and find you. A broken laugh escaped your lips.

Two hundred and five days. If he was coming, he would have come already. The thought made your chest tighten so violently that you gasped. Immediately, another voice in your head screamed over it.

No.

He loved you.

He loved you.

He loved you.

He had to.

What if he didn’t..?

Because if he didn't, if he had forgotten you, if he had moved on while you rotted away in this prison, then everything you had endured would have been for nothing. And that was a thought far more terrifying than the darkness surrounding you. A sharp pain rose in your chest, and you clutched at it, crying. It hurt so much. So fucking much.

You fell unconscious, your mind carrying you back to your wonderland. Your wonderland was him. Nishimura Riki. Your lover. Your one and only. You remembered the day the two of you had snuck out to the pond behind the castle courtyard. It was hidden away from prying eyes, its sparkling water illuminated by the moonlight that danced across its still surface. The two of you had stripped down and jumped into the cold water. But the chill of the pond was nothing compared to the warmth you shared with each other.

You both laughed, giggled, and held each other until the crack of dawn arrived. Reluctantly, you climbed out of the water and went on with your day. You sat beside the Queen as she launched into one of her endless discussions about literature. Normally, you would have listened eagerly, hanging onto every word. But today was different. Today, all you could think about was your lover.

The way he had laughed beneath the moonlight. The way the water had glistened on his skin. The way his eyes had found yours even in the darkness. Every memory replayed itself in your mind over and over, making it impossible to focus on anything else.

"Are you listening, dear?" the Queen asked suddenly. Your head snapped up.

"Yes, Your Majesty," you replied quickly. The Queen smiled, unaware that your thoughts were miles away, hidden beside a moonlit pond with the Crown Prince.

You woke to a loud thud. Your vision blurred as you forced your eyes open. Through the haze, you saw the guard stepping into the cell, carrying food and water.

Food.

Water.

The smell alone made your stomach twist painfully. You craved it. You craved anything. Your eyes locked onto the tray as though it were the most precious thing in the world. The sight of the water made your throat ache with thirst.

Oh. Oh, how they treated you.

The guard was an old friend of your mother's. You were certain they had ordered him to give you as little food and water as possible, hoping to break you slowly. But the kind guard, the kind, kind guard, always found ways around their orders. Whenever he could, he brought you extra scraps of food, an extra cup of water, anything that might help you survive another day within these stone walls.

"Eat up, kid..." he said as he sat down on the floor opposite you. He stared for a moment. You looked wrecked. Your once beautiful hair was tangled and unkempt, your eyes red and swollen, your face pale. The lack of food had stripped so much weight from you that you looked almost unrecognizable. You ate like you were starving.

Because you were. He watched silently as you devoured the food, his chest tightening at the sight.

"Did... did he come?" you asked suddenly between bites. The guard froze. He just stared. What was he supposed to say?

No?

No, your lovely prince hasn't come.

No, the man you love hasn't asked about you once.

No, nobody is coming to save you.

The words sat heavily in his throat. He couldn't say them. He couldn't break you any further than you already were. Not when hope was the only thing keeping you alive. His gaze dropped to the floor as he rubbed a hand over his face.

"Just eat, kid," he muttered quietly. You stared at him for a moment before looking back down at your food. The silence told you everything. Still, you pretended not to understand. Because the moment you accepted the answer, the last piece of hope left inside you might disappear too.

He took the plate and cup once you were done. The heavy door slammed shut behind him, leaving you alone once again. You dragged yourself to the sink in the corner and washed your hands before turning toward the wall. The wall covered in scratched numbers. The wall that held every single day you had spent trapped here. Two hundred and five. Your fingers brushed against the mark absentmindedly.

Suddenly, a cough tore through your throat. You doubled over, clutching your chest as another followed. Then another. Pain exploded through your ribs, sharp and unforgiving. Your head began to pound again, the familiar ringing returning as tears welled in your eyes. You tried to breathe through it, tried to force the coughing to stop, but it only grew worse.

Cough after cough wracked your body until your legs gave out beneath you. You fell to your knees, gasping for air. Your chest burned. Your throat felt raw. Something wet gathered in the corners of your eyes as you pressed a trembling hand over your mouth.

Then something slipped past your lips. You froze. There, resting on the stone floor, was a flower petal.

A petal.

Your breathing stopped.

Slowly, you reached for it, your fingers trembling as you picked it up. The delicate thing sat in your palm as though it belonged there. For a moment, you simply stared. Confused. Horrified. Unable to understand what you were looking at.

It looked strangely familiar. Of course it did. It reminded you of that day in the field of flowers. It was spring. The two of you had been running through the meadow, chasing butterflies beneath the warm afternoon sun. In your excitement, neither of you noticed where you were going until Riki crashed into you, sending both of you tumbling into a bed of flowers.

You laughed so hard your sides hurt. So did he. Lying beside you, he wrapped an arm around your shoulders before reaching out and plucking a nearby flower. It was a beautiful blend of red and pink, its petals soft and delicate. He tucked it into your hair and looked down at you with a smile that made your heart race. Then he leaned closer and pressed a kiss to your lips.

You’re holding a petal like it’s a message. Like it means something. Like it was left here on purpose. A smile touches your lips before you can stop it. Of course it means something. He’s coming back. He has to be.

You think of him the way you always do carefully at first, then all at once, until there’s no space left for anything else. His name doesn’t feel like a word anymore, it feels like something stuck in your chest, something that won’t stop repeating itself no matter how quiet you try to be. And if he’s coming back, then everything after that is already decided.

You’ll leave. You’ll follow him. You’ll disappear with him into something smaller, quieter, safer. A village no one bothers to remember. A place where nothing looks at you too long. A place where you can finally breathe without feeling watched. Just you and him. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

The petal trembles in your fingers and you stare at it like it’s proof instead of coincidence, like the world doesn’t randomly place fragile things into your hands without reason. It knows. It has to know.

You shouldn’t be this certain, but you are. Because why else would everything feel like it’s leaning toward him? Why else would silence feel like anticipation? Why else would your chest tighten like something is already in motion, already halfway here, already close enough to matter?

He’s not gone. He’s just not visible yet. You press the thought closer until it stops feeling like a thought and starts feeling like fact. And if it isn’t real yet, it will be.

Two hundred and ten.

You scratched it on the stone wall, the lines were something real enough to hold onto. You had coughed out about seventeen petals since that day. Seventeen small, trembling proofs that he might come. He might come to save you. You gathered them. Kept them. Hid them like they were holy. Each petal reminded you of your soft prince. Your lovely prince.

But it had been two hundred and ten days since they found out. Since everything changed shape but never really ended You both were in the cave again. The same quiet, the same hidden air, the same place where the world couldn’t quite reach you properly. A blanket beneath you, soft and worn, like it had memorized your outlines.

He was beside you. Close enough that the thought of distance felt almost fictional. Like something that only existed outside this space, in a world you weren’t currently inside. And for a moment, there was nothing else. Just him and you. Him. You missed him so so so much. He was talking about the new technique he learnt to fight with a sword and you stared. Stared at his beautiful face.

You leaned in, your lips brushing lightly on the mole on his chin. He flinched softly, turning to you. “Did you know moles are marks where your past lover kissed you in your previous life?” you said. He chuckled. “Oh really?” he said. “Then you must have loved me so much…!” “Why wouldn’t I!”

Suddenly, it started raining. Loud. The thunder screamed. And you held him a bit closer. And in a blink, there were screams, yells, scolds. The prince was pulled away from his father’s guards. The king’s guards. The queen stared at you, mortified, angry, everything at once. His little brothers stood next to her, holding her dress.

“Riki, how dare you love someone as low life as her!” the king screamed.

The guards dragged him back like the decision had already been made for him, like his hands reaching for you meant nothing at all. He fought anyway. Of course he did. Your name tore out of his mouth again and again, breaking against the rain, breaking against them, breaking into nothing they cared to hear.

“Stop—let go of me!” he shouted, voice cracking as he twisted toward you. “Don’t you dare touch her!” But the space between you only grew worse, filled with bodies and orders and things louder than love was allowed to be. The queen didn’t move. She only looked at you, like she was trying to understand how something so small had managed to ruin something so carefully built. There was no softness in her face. Only disappointment sharp enough to feel like judgment.

You reached out anyway, even though no one was going to let you have him. Even though you already knew that. “Riki,” you called, but it didn’t sound like a voice anymore. It sounded like something drowning.

He turned his head just enough. Just enough for you to see it. The moment he understood he wasn’t going to reach you again. His expression broke before anything else did. And then they took him completely.

You tried, you tried to go after him, but the guards pulled you back. The thunder roared so loudly it felt like it split the sky open, drowning out everything except the sound of your struggle. You reached forward anyway, fingers straining toward where he had been taken, like your body refused to accept what your mind already understood.

The king’s glare cut through the rain, sharp and final. “Lock her up in the west prison. I don’t want her near the estate,” he said as he turned away, like you were already no longer worth looking at. Like the decision had been made long before you ever spoke to his son. The guards tightened their hold and dragged you back as you called his name again, and again, and again, until it stopped sounding like a word and started sounding like something breaking. But the storm swallowed it whole. It swallowed everything.

The queen still stared at you, unmoving. Her eyes were distant now, not angry anymore, but something worse—emptied, like she had already lost something she hadn’t fully admitted she cared about. Betrayal sat in her expression like a weight she didn’t know how to carry.

Then she turned away.

The two boys followed her silently, one clutching her dress tighter as if that could anchor her to something real. No one looked back at you again. Not even once. And as you were dragged away through the rain, toward the west prison, it didn’t feel like you were being punished for what you did. It felt like you were being erased from something that never meant to keep you in the first place.

Two hundred and eleven.

Two hundred and twelve.

Two hundred and thirteen.

Days kept on passing, but the flower petals didn’t stop. You coughed, coughed, coughed, until your body started to recognize it like a routine instead of a warning. Your vision stayed hazy all the time, edges of the world soft and unreliable, like reality itself couldn’t stay in place around you anymore. Your head pounded constantly, your chest aching in a way that made breathing feel like something you had to earn.

Sometimes you spat out blood with the petals. You would stare at them afterward, almost calm, as if it was normal for something inside you to bloom wrong and break you open from the inside out. Still, you gathered them. Still, you kept them. Like they were proof of something only you were allowed to understand.

You could barely eat the meals the guard gave you. The food would sit untouched, losing meaning the longer you looked at it, like survival was a language you were forgetting on purpose. And yet, you hid the petals from him. Always. Carefully. Desperately. Because he would be disappointed. He would look at you with that same soft expression and not understand why you were still holding on so tightly, why you were still waiting for your crown prince like the world hadn’t already tried to end the story for you.

But you were waiting. Even when your body refused to cooperate. Even when your thoughts started to feel too quiet, too distant, like they were happening underwater. Even when the cave, the prison, the days all began to blur into something that didn’t feel like time anymore.

Because if you stopped waiting, then what would the petals mean.

And you couldn’t afford for them to mean nothing.

He loves me.

He loves me not.

He loves me.

He loves me not.

He loves me.

He loves me not.

You thought as you counted the petals, one by one, like they were the only proof you had left that time was still moving.

THUD.

You heard it before you really saw it—the guard dropping the plate of food and water. Metal and ceramic hitting the ground, spilling everything into a mess that didn’t matter as much as what he had just seen.

“What… dear, what is this?” he asked, voice breaking, mortified in a way that didn’t feel like anger, but fear. Real fear. You didn’t flinch. You didn’t hide them fast enough this time. Blood-covered petals sat in your hands like something sacred and wrong all at once. You looked at him properly, as if you were answering a normal question.

“I coughed them out,” you said.

And that was it. That was what broke something in him. He stared at you, frozen. Like his mind couldn’t decide whether to understand or deny it. No, no, no, no—the poor girl, he thought. The poor, broken, impossible girl. The realization hit him harder than anything he had expected from a prisoner. Hard enough that his hands didn’t know what to do with themselves anymore. Hard enough that he couldn’t look away, but couldn’t keep looking either.

You, meanwhile, looked back down at the petals as if nothing had changed. As if this was still just counting. Still just waiting. Still just love, in the only form it knew how to survive in you. The guard took a step back, then another, like distance might undo what he had seen. But it didn’t. Nothing did. Because you were still there, holding them carefully, gently, like they were the only thing keeping you from falling apart completely. And for the first time, even he understood—this wasn’t just sadness anymore. This was something that had already gone too far to stop.

“You—you gotta snap out of it, kid. He’s not coming back. He… he got married weeks ago. He’s with the new princess. He won’t come back for you,” he said. You laughed. Soft. Immediate. Like the idea didn’t even land properly in your mind before you rejected it. Like it couldn’t possibly be about you.

“He will,” you said. “He always does. The princess means nothing to him. I’m his everything. He’s mine. And I’m his. He will come back for me. He promised me he will find me every universe.”

Your smile stayed sweet at the thought of him, gentle in a way that didn’t match anything the guard was seeing in your eyes. Like devotion had settled so deeply inside you it had stopped needing proof.

The guard went quiet. Not because he agreed, but because something in him couldn’t keep arguing with you anymore. It felt useless. Wrong, even. Like talking louder could fix something that wasn’t responding to logic at all.

He looked at you for a long moment, really looked, and whatever he saw there made his expression shift confusion first, then something heavier. Fear, maybe. Or pity he didn’t know how to carry without dropping it.

“You’re… you’re not listening,” he said finally, but even his voice sounded tired now. “He’s moved on. You need to understand that.” You tilted your head slightly, still calm. Still certain.

“He didn’t move on,” you said simply. “He just hasn’t found me yet. He wasnt there when the king told the guards to lock me in the west. He will come back for me. He will.”

That answer didn’t sound like defiance. It sounded like fact. The guard took a step back. Then another. Like proximity itself had started to feel unsafe. Like staying in the same belief too long might change him too.

He turned suddenly and left. Fast. Uneven. Almost stumbling in his urgency to get away from the room, from the air, from the way your certainty refused to break no matter what he said.

He ran.

Down the corridor, past stone and locked doors and torchlight that flickered too slowly for his pace. He ran like something was chasing him, even though nothing was.

He needed a healer. He needed someone to explain what he had just seen. Not just the words but the way you said them. The way you smiled. The way you believed it like the world had never once contradicted you.

The healer listened to the guard and sighed, as if he had already suspected the answer.

“Yes, Haruto,” he said quietly. “She has hanahaki disease.”

The guard froze. For a moment, he didn’t respond at all. The coughing. The petals. The blood. It all rearranged itself in his mind into something he could finally name, and it made it worse, not better. He shook his head slowly. “No… that’s not—she’s just a girl.”

The healer didn’t correct him. He didn’t need to. Understanding settled in anyway. The guard looked away, disturbed. He had seen her as confused, delusional even, but now it felt different. She wasn’t simply waiting for someone who wouldn’t return. Her body was reacting to that belief, collapsing under it.

“She’s going to die,” he said, almost to himself.

The healer nodded once. “Unless the feelings are returned, there is no cure.”

Silence followed. The guard swallowed hard. The image of her in the cell came back to him calm, smiling, speaking about the prince as if nothing had changed, as if time itself was wrong and she was the only one still correct.

He left soon after, quieter than he had arrived. Not running anymore. Just heavy, like something in him had shifted and wouldn’t go back. As he walked, he thought of her mother. Of how she had already been treated, already judged because of the prince, because of what her daughter was accused of feeling. If this reached her, it would destroy her completely.

The girl in the west prison had hanahaki disease.

She was not just imprisoned. She was dying.

The guard returned on the two hundred and seventeenth day, finally gathering the courage to face you and tell you the truth about the disease. But when he entered the prison cell, he saw you already coughing uncontrollably, petals falling one after another, blood spilling from your mouth as your body finally started to give in completely.

He ran toward you, trying to hold you steady, but you gasped and clutched your chest as if something inside you was tearing itself apart. “It hurts, stop, stop, stop, I can’t, I don’t, I want to see him, I want to see him so bad, it hurts, stop, stop, stop,” you cried, your voice breaking into panic as something felt wrong, unbearably wrong, like your body was no longer obeying you.

You couldn’t understand why it hurt like this now, why it was becoming impossible to bear, why waiting suddenly felt like drowning instead of love, and you kept trying to breathe through it even as it failed you, even as everything tightened and collapsed at once. Then you coughed out your last petal.

The guard, who had run to bring the healer, came back too late and saw it—saw the final petal fall, saw your body still for a moment as if it didn’t know it had already ended, saw you stop breathing, saw you dying right there in front of him, and there was nothing left to fix, nothing left to say, only the unbearable silence of a love that had destroyed you completely.

A few days later, the news broke out. Everybody found out about the girl who died from hanahaki disease, the girl who had lost herself completely in her love for the prince. Nishimura Riki stood beside your body, now dressed in white. Your face had been cleaned, the blood removed, everything made quiet in a way that felt wrong. He stared at you without blinking, as if looking long enough might undo what he was seeing. Tears welled in his eyes. When did I fall out of love with you? he thought, but the question didn’t feel real—it felt like something had been taken from him before he ever got the chance to choose. He had lost the person who truly loved him, and now all he could see were the petals, and they made him wince, made something in him twist with disgust and grief at the same time. He hated it. He hated himself. He hated everything about this.

The princess, now his wife, stood beside him and held his hand loosely, her voice bored and almost amused. “Why are we here?” she asked, arrogance still present in her tone. Then she looked at you properly. “Oh. The poor servant girl. She died? What a shame. I remember you fooled around with her before our marriage. I caught you both and told the king and queen. I can’t believe she manipulated you into falling for her.”

Riki went still.

Slowly, he turned to look at her.

Wide-eyed. Hurt. Something in his expression broke before he could stop it.

So it was her. The person he had trusted. The person he had grown close to. The person he had started to believe he might even love in place of the memories he couldn’t explain anymore.

It was her who had taken everything from him.

His first love.

His y/n.

And for the first time, standing beside your body, Riki understood it wasn’t distance or time that killed you. It was betrayal he never saw coming.

Standing beside your body, Riki felt that truth settle in with a clarity that hurt more than denial ever could. The princess’s words still echoed in the space between them, but they no longer sounded distant or harmless. They sounded final.

He looked at her properly now not with affection, not with confusion, but with something colder as the pieces finally aligned. The accusations, the timing, the way everything had been reported and decided without ever reaching him truthfully. It had not been love protecting him. It had been manipulation shaping his choices while he mistook it for care.

His hand loosened from hers.

The princess frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Riki didn’t answer right away. His gaze drifted back to you, to the stillness that no longer held breath or pain. There was no response left to wait for, no possibility left to hold onto.

For the first time, he understood that what he had built after losing you was not something that saved himit was something built on a lie that had cost you everything.

And now there was no undoing it.

Only the consequence of it, standing in a quiet room where love had ended too late to matter.

THE END.

You were on your feet, screaming yourself hoarse, Jake beside you with his fists cupped around his mouth, and her parents clapping with the ferocity of people who had only ever dreamed of this moment for their daughter. She was passion distilled into motion, chasing after the ball as if it were oxygen, and you believed she could outrun anything: doubt, failure, even fate. But then— like a whisper — something happened. Not in a grand, cinematic collapse, but in a wrong turn of bone and tendon, a sound you didn’t hear but somehow felt, sharp and terrible. Mimi crumpled mid-stride, her scream slicing the air so cleanly it silenced the entire stadium. You felt the world tilt. For a second you didn’t breathe. The game froze. She was on the ground, clutching her knee as if trying to hold her whole life together through that one fragile joint. Almost like her life had shattered the same way the bone did and you guess in some way, it did. 

Instead of thinking, you ran. The barrier between the stands and the field might as well have vanished. Your sneakers pounded against the turf as you reached her, Jake a heartbeat behind you, Mimi’s family rushing in a blur. She was sobbing, choking on air, saying only, my knee, my knee, it’s gone, like she knew before the doctors did. You knelt beside her, grasping her hand, but her eyes were wild with pain and already searching for Jake. The chaos that followed hardly belongs to you. The stretcher, the flashing lights, the siren’s wail, all of it smeared together in a streak of red and panic. You remember gripping the side rail of the ambulance as if the metal might steady you, Mimi thrashing as she begged them not to touch her leg. You whispered her name like a prayer, but the only voice that calmed her was Jake’s, low and steady in the back as he promised her it would be okay. 

The waiting room was a purgatory of fluorescent lights and linoleum floors, time dripping like molasses from the clock. Her parents clutched each other, her siblings sat hollow-eyed, Jake paced until you thought his shoes might burn tracks into the tiles. You sat with your hands clenched in your lap, imagining all the ways life could split in two from a single wrong step. When the doctor finally emerged, white coat and grave eyes, the words fell like a verdict: She’ll never play again. Just like that, an entire future vanished, and the air seemed to leave the room. Walking into Mimi’s hospital room was like stepping into the ruins of something holy. She was pale and trembling, her face wet, her voice hoarse from screaming. You hovered at the doorway, your throat burning with all the things you wanted to say. But when she lifted her eyes, she didn’t call for you. She called for Jake. Her anchor, the only thing to keep her afloat when it was clear she was drowning in the aftermath of the doctor's diagnosis. 

So you nodded: a small, invisible gesture and slipped back into the hall. The door clicked shut behind you, and you sank down against it, knees pulled to your chest. Through the thin wood, you heard her sobs breaking into pieces, and beneath them, Jake’s voice, soft as water, whispering lies both of you wished were true: that it would be okay, that she was more than soccer, that nothing was ending here. And you sat outside, listening, feeling the faint throb of a fracture not in bone but in friendship, in love, in something unnamed that would only grow sharper with time. 

1 year later 

This apartment feels like a tomb. 

You’re sitting on the edge of Jake’s couch, the cushions stiff beneath you as though they too are holding their breath. Mimi’s family is gathered in fragments, her mother perched upright in the armchair like if she loosens her spine she’ll fall apart, her father pacing the kitchen tile, her younger brother staring into the glow of his phone though the screen has long since gone dark. And Jake: Jake is next to you, his knee bouncing against yours in restless rhythm, a tremor he can’t contain. His hands twist together in his lap, cracking knuckles, dragging at the thin skin over bone. You want to reach for him, still him, but you don’t. 

You’re all waiting. Waiting for the sound of her key in the door. Waiting for Mimi to stumble into this intervention you’ve dressed up as an ordinary evening, waiting for the confrontation that feels like an ambush no matter how many times you rehearse it in your head. Your throat is already sore from all the things you know you’ll have to say. When the lock clicks, the room stills. Jake goes rigid, his breath snagging in his chest. Her mother clasps her hands so tightly you hear the bones shift. Then she’s there, Mimi, wearing the same soccer hoodie she’s worn for years, threadbare at the cuffs, but her eyes are too wide, too bright. There’s a slackness to her smile, a gleam that doesn’t belong to her. She stumbles a little on the threshold, giggling under her breath as if she’s walked into the wrong apartment. And then she sees you all. 

It’s like a shadow passes over her face, dimming that unnatural joy in an instant. Her body stiffens, a marionette with its strings yanked taut. “What is this?” she spits, her voice already climbing, already sharpening. She drops her bag by the door, the thud echoing through the silence. “Seriously? What the fuck is this?” She knew immediately, there was no hiding the staunch of emotion, the height of what was to come next. She wasn’t dumb. 

“Mimi—” Jake starts, his tone soft, pleading, but she cuts him off with a laugh that isn’t really a laugh at all.

“No. No, no, no. Don’t you dare,” she snarls, pointing at him, then sweeping her gaze across her family, finally landing on you. “This is, God, this is pathetic. What? You all sitting here, waiting for me like I’m the problem? Like I’m sick? You don’t know anything.” Her mother’s voice cracks as she whispers, “We’re just worried, sweetheart—” 

“Worried?” Mimi’s laugh is a razor blade, sharp and bright and dangerous. “You think I don’t know what I’ve lost? You think I don’t wake up every day remembering that my knee is ruined, that my life, my future is over? Soccer was everything. Do you hear me? Everything. And none of you will ever understand what it’s like to lose it all. Not you—” she jabs a finger at her father, “not you—” her voice wavers at her mother, then hardens, “and especially not you.”

Her eyes cut to Jake, and he flinches, but before he can speak she wheels toward you. The fury in her gaze is molten, but beneath it you see something else, fear, shame, grief. Still, her words burn. “And you,” she seethes, the syllables drenched in venom. “Don’t think I don’t know. You were always jealous of me. Always in my shadow. You wanted my place, my team, my friends, my boyfriend—” 

“Stop.” Your voice breaks, hoarse and useless. You want to reach her, but the distance between you feels like miles. “Mimi, please, it’s not like that—”

“Shut up!” she screams, the sound shattering whatever fragile restraint was holding her together. Tears streak down her face now, hot and furious. “You think you’re helping me? This is betrayal. You’re all against me. You’d rather lock me up than let me breathe. I’d rather die than go to rehab!”

The words hang in the air like smoke, suffocating. Her mother sobs into her hands. Her father mutters something under his breath, voice thick with helpless rage. Jake looks like he’s about to fall apart, his hand twitching as if he wants to reach her but doesn’t know if he should. You, your body feels hollow, as though her accusation has scooped you clean out. You know it’s the drugs talking, the pain and the desperation twisting her love into barbed wire, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. Your vision blurs, your throat aches with unshed tears. Her brother finally speaks, quiet but firm. “We already signed the papers,” he says, barely above a whisper. “They’re coming for you right now. You don’t have a choice.”

Mimi’s scream rips through the room, raw and feral, like something being torn from the inside out. She hurls a picture frame off the wall, glass shattering against the floor, and then she collapses onto the couch, sobbing so hard her body shakes with it. You can’t look at her. You can’t look at Jake either, not with his eyes glossed with tears he won’t let fall. Instead, you stare at your hands in your lap, trembling, and tell yourself this is for the better. This is mercy, even if it feels like murder. Even if your insides feel like jello and a collapse in your chest. This was for the better, she needed this, no matter how much it hurt. 

The night air is damp when you step out of Mimi’s apartment, the echo of her screaming still stitched into your skin. It clings, loud in your ears even as the hallway goes silent behind you, like the ringing after a gunshot. Jake jingles his keys in his hand as if the sound could fill the hollow between you, but it doesn’t. You follow him to his car, both of you moving like ghosts, the kind that know they shouldn’t exist anymore but linger anyway. The ride starts in silence. The engine hums low, headlights cutting tunnels through the darkness. You watch the streetlights flicker past, each one carving Mimi’s face into your memory again and again, her eyes wild, her mouth spitting poison, her body collapsing in on itself. You blink hard, but the image burns against the backs of your eyelids. Beside you, Jake grips the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles whiten, his jaw clenched as if holding something back.  

The quiet is unbearable. It’s thick, oppressive, the kind that presses on your chest until you can hardly breathe. You open your mouth once, then shut it again, the words dissolving before they can form. You’re too afraid to break the silence, too afraid that if you do, you’ll both shatter. It’s Jake who finally speaks. His voice is cracked, rough with something you’ve never heard from him before: helplessness.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” he says, eyes fixed on the road though you can see the shine of tears building. “I feel like I’m losing her. Like she’s slipping through my hands no matter how hard I hold on. And I’m terrified.”

Your chest aches, your throat tightens. You whisper, “Terrified of what?”

He swallows, his breath trembling. “Of both things. That she won’t come back. Or that she will, but she won’t be Mimi anymore. Not the Mimi we grew up with. Not the girl who would drag me to the field at six in the morning, barefoot and laughing. Not the girl who believed in me when no one else did.” His voice cracks. “What if I lose her either way?” 

The question is a blade, and it cuts you too, because you feel it, you’ve felt it for months. The slow death of someone still breathing. The grief of watching her become someone you don’t recognize. But hearing Jake put it into words makes the grief heavier, unbearable. You want to reach for him, to put your hand over his on the wheel, to tell him you understand, that you’re just as scared, that you’d do anything to rewind time to before everything broke. But your body stays still, weighed down by guilt. How can you comfort him when you’re complicit in this? When you signed the paper that will lock her away in a sterile place she’s never seen before, among strangers who will dissect her pain clinically? The word friend feels rotten in your mouth. How could you call yourself a friend when you’ve done all that? 

“I feel like a terrible person,” you say finally, your voice low, almost drowned out by the hum of the car. “We’re supposed to help her. That’s what friends do. But all I can think about is how much she hates us right now. How much she hates me. We’re sticking her somewhere she doesn’t want to be, somewhere she’s scared of. How can that be love? How can that be right?”

Jake exhales shakily, a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “You’re not a terrible person,” he murmurs, but his voice lacks conviction, as if he’s trying to convince himself too. “We’re trying to save her.” He pauses, his eyes glinting in the blur of passing lights. “But I don’t know if she’ll ever forgive us for it.” 

The car fills with the weight of that truth, heavier than the silence that came before. You glance at him, his profile lit by the glow of streetlamps, his lips pressed thin, his lashes wet. He looks wrecked, unmoored, like a boy lost at sea. You ache with the urge to pull him close, to promise him he won’t drown. But you keep your hands in your lap, nails digging crescents into your skin. Because that would be wrong, it would be wrong to offer anything more than encouraging words, and a gentle pat on the back. So you keep your hands and your feelings to yourself and you let it swallow you whole in the process. 

That night, your bed feels like both a sanctuary and a coffin. The sheets are cool against your skin, the silence of your room pressing down until you almost can’t stand it. You lie on your back, staring into the dark, and the ceiling becomes a movie reel of the past. Memories that cruel archivist, dredges up scenes you’d give anything to step into again. You see Mimi at twelve years old, all legs and fire, sprinting down the grass field. The ball is at her feet, clumsy but determined, her ponytail flying behind her like a banner. You hear Jake’s voice, cracked with adolescence, bellowing from the sidelines “Go, Mimi! You got this!” and your own laugh tumbling out when the ball actually slides into the net.  

Mimi throws her arms in the air, a warrior in shin guards, and the three of you collapse together afterward on the grass, the sky a bruised blue overhead, your stomach aching from laughter. That was the first time you thought maybe you’d never need anything else but them. Just the three of you, forever. 

The memory sharpens, shifts. You’re thirteen now, sitting on Mimi’s bedroom floor surrounded by magazines and nail polish bottles, the air sharp with acetone. You had confessed it clumsily, cheeks hot, words stammering out before you could stop them: I think I like Jake. The confession hanging in the air like sin in a church on sunday. 

Mimi had looked at you, mascara wand frozen mid-air, and then she had laughed, warm, easy, unbothered. “Oh, that’s cute,” she’d said, like it was nothing more than a passing fancy. “But I kinda like Sunghoon.” She’d grinned then, whispering about Jake’s best friend, the boy with the dark eyes and sharper smile, and you had laughed along, hiding the way your heart folded in on itself. You told yourself it didn’t matter. You told yourself it would pass. But it never did. 

Back in the present, you roll onto your side, clutching your pillow to your chest as though it might anchor you to something solid. Your throat tightens, and the tears come before you can stop them. They slip hot down your cheeks, soaking into the cotton, carrying with them the ache of everything you’ve lost, not just Mimi, but the version of her who used to light up the field, who used to laugh until she wheezed, who used to be yours in a way she isn’t anymore. And Jake, the boy who once felt like a safe place, who you loved silently for years, quietly building your own ruin. 

The ache isn’t only about losing them. It’s about losing you. The version of yourself who still believed life was simple, who thought the hardest choice was which shirt to wear on picture day, or whether to braid your hair or leave it loose. That child is gone, and in her place is someone who signs papers that feel like betrayal, someone who sits in cars with her best friend’s boyfriend, someone who lies awake at night drowning in guilt and longing. You bury your face in the pillow and sob, soundless and raw. If you could, you’d crawl backward through time, claw your way into those grass-stained afternoons and acetone-scented nights, back when everything was still whole. But the past is merciless. It doesn’t bend, it doesn’t break, it only haunts. You fall asleep like that, with your chest aching and your eyes swollen, tears drying salt-heavy on your skin. Sleep takes you not because you are ready for it, but because grief wrings you dry until there is nothing left. 

It’s a week later when the phone rings, cutting through the hollow stillness of your room. Jake’s name glows across the screen, and for a second you hesitate, because you already know. You know from the way your stomach drops, from the way the silence beforehand felt charged, waiting for this very thing. You answer anyway, because of course you do. His voice comes through fractured, jagged around the edges, slurred with alcohol and grief. “I found her jersey,” he chokes out, no greeting, no preamble. Just pain, naked and immediate. “It was stuffed in the back of the drawer. God, it still smells like her. Like grass and sweat and—” His breath hitches, a sharp inhale like he’s been punched in the ribs. “I don’t know how to do this without her. I don’t know how to exist when she’s not here.” 

You close your eyes, pressing the phone tighter against your ear as if that could steady him, as if your silence could soak up his breaking. You want to tell him he’s not alone, that you’re still here, but the words feel dangerous, too heavy with everything you’ve buried. Instead, you whisper, “Jake…” softly, as though saying his name could keep him tethered. “She’s not dead —” 

“I hate it here,” he blurts, voice ragged. “The apartment, it’s all her. Her shoes by the door, her books on the nightstand, that stupid chipped mug she loves. It’s like she’s everywhere, but she’s not, and it’s, fuck it’s driving me insane. Please… please come over. I can’t—” His voice cracks again, collapsing into silence that vibrates with his uneven breathing. And of course you agree. How could you not? Even if it’s reckless, even if your chest is a knot of guilt, you can’t leave him drowning alone. “Okay,” you breathe, almost too quickly, your answer stitched together with both desperation and inevitability. “I’ll come.” When you hang up, your reflection in the darkened window looks like a stranger, eyes too wide, lips trembling, a girl who doesn’t know if she’s running to save him or herself. You pull on a jacket, slipping out into the night. The air is sharp, biting, the kind that makes your lungs ache, and every step toward Jake’s apartment feels like walking deeper into a labyrinth you may never escape. 

The fresh air feels like a christening on your skin, you needed it before you walked into what you know or certain was going to be a disaster, Jake was grieving someone who wasn’t even dead, you as well. You needed this time to comfort one another, you were friends and that's what friends did for each other. That’s what you kept telling yourself the entire way to the apartment. By the time you knock on his door, your pulse is loud in your ears. The hallway smells faintly of dust and someone’s leftover takeout, but when Jake opens the door, the world narrows to him. His hair is a mess, his eyes swollen and red, his shirt wrinkled and damp where he must have wiped at his face. In his hand, crumpled like something holy and ruined, is Mimi’s jersey. 

“You came,” he whispers, like he didn’t believe you would, like you’re some kind of salvation. And you step inside, into the apartment that still hums with her absence, into the gravity of his grief, knowing this night will mark you both in ways you can’t undo. Although she’s not dead, a part of her feels like it is. The apartment feels like a mausoleum when you walk in. The lights are dim, the air heavy with the faint musk of stale beer and laundry left too long in the basket. But it isn’t the mess that gets to you, it’s the ghosts. Her sneakers by the door, scuffed from practices she’ll never go to again. Her handwriting on a crumpled grocery list still taped to the fridge. A lipstick tube on the counter, the cap missing, as if she might walk in and swipe it on before a night out. She’s everywhere, but not here, and the absence presses down like a weight. 

Jake drops the jersey onto the couch as though it burns him, and collapses beside it, his shoulders hunched, his hands trembling. He looks at you like he doesn’t know what to do with himself, like he’s afraid if he breathes too hard the whole place will collapse. You sit beside him, close enough that you can hear the unevenness of his breathing, but not close enough to touch. You’re both careful with the space between you, though the air hums with the temptation to close it. He doesn’t last long sitting upright. Eventually, with a sigh that sounds more like surrender, he folds sideways, resting his head in your lap like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The weight of him there nearly undoes you, his hair brushing against your arm, his cheek pressed into your thigh, the tremble of his breath against you. You should stop this. You should push him upright. But you don’t. 

“I’m so scared,” he murmurs, his voice muffled by the fabric of your jeans. The words are soft, broken, like a child’s confession. “I call the facility every day, you know? Every day. Just to try to hear her voice. But she won’t talk to me.” His throat tightens around the last word, and your chest aches with the sound of it.

“Jake…” You whisper his name like it might steady him, though your own voice shakes.

“She hates me,” he continues, voice rising with desperation. “She won’t take the phone. She won’t even let them put me on hold for a second. I thought—” He breaks off, pressing his face harder into your lap. “I thought I was the one person she wouldn’t shut out.” Your hand hovers uncertainly in the air before it lowers, almost against your will, to stroke through his hair. The strands are soft beneath your fingers, and the intimacy of it stings, too tender, too dangerous. He exhales at the touch, a shudder running through him like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered.

“I want to write to her,” he admits after a long silence, voice muffled, raw. “A letter. Something she can’t hang up on. Something she can hold. But I know—” His laugh is bitter, jagged. “I know she’ll just tear it to shreds. That’s who she is now. Angry. Tired. Gone.” His voice cracks, splintering into silence.

The apartment is so quiet you can hear the hum of the refrigerator, the tick of the clock on the wall, his breath uneven against your leg. You keep stroking his hair, each pass of your hand a balm and a wound at once, until the intimacy becomes unbearable. You realize what you’re doing, what this is, and panic floods your chest. You yank your hand back as though burned, clasping it tight in your lap. The absence of your touch makes him stir, lifting his head just enough to glance up at you with wet eyes and a frown that twists your heart. He doesn’t ask why you pulled away. He doesn’t have to. The unspoken hangs between you, dense and dangerous. 

You want to tell him you’re sorry. You want to tell him you can’t be what he’s reaching for, not like this, not when Mimi is still out there, still alive, still his. But the words stick, caught in your throat with the taste of longing and guilt. So you say nothing, sitting in the silence and filling the void that was Mimi’s absence. The night you left with a heavy heart, seeing your friend so broken, it wilted you. 

The next day the coffee shop smells of cinnamon and burnt espresso, the kind of scent that clings to your clothes long after you leave, the kind of scent that makes you think of winter afternoons in college, back when life was simpler, when your biggest worry was a term paper or whether you should skip a lecture just to watch the leaves fall outside the library window. Heeseung is already there, leaning against the back of a booth, his familiar lopsided grin softening the sharpness of the morning. He waves when he sees you, and for a moment, you feel like you’ve stepped into another version of yourself, the one who once laughed too loudly at his jokes, who once kissed him under the haze of fairy lights in a dorm room too small to hold the both of you. 

“Hey,” he says as you slide into the booth across from him. His voice hasn’t changed, it still carries that lazy warmth, the one that made everything feel less heavy back when you were nineteen. In college Heeseung was the closest thing you had to your everything. He was the one man who had pulled your feelings away from Jake, until he couldn’t. Until the honeymoon phase ended and you realized Heeseung wasn’t enough to quench your thirst for your best friend's boyfriend. And Heeseung knew it too, or suspected it. So, your relationship ended mutually, vowing to stay friends and unlike many other people you kept true to that word. For you two, it was the best outcome. 

“Hey yourself,” you answer, forcing a smile that feels like it doesn’t quite fit your face. The conversation starts light, complaints about the bitter coffee, the weather, how the barista spelled his name wrong again, but eventually it drifts, as conversations always do, into the territory you’ve been dreading. So… how’s Mimi?” he asks, his tone careful, as if the word itself is fragile enough to break in his mouth.

Your throat tightens. You wrap your hands around the warm mug in front of you, holding on as though it might anchor you. “We uh we had an intervention. It didn’t go well.” The words fall flat, insufficient, as though they could ever capture the chaos of that night. “She didn’t want to go. We forced her.”

Heeseung flinches, a soft grimace flashing across his face before he hides it behind a sip of coffee. “That’s… rough. I can’t even imagine.”

“Neither could I,” you admit. Your laugh is hollow, a brittle thing. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever done. She looked at me like I’d betrayed her.” Heeseung sets his cup down, the ceramic clicking against the table, his gaze fixed on you in a way that feels both grounding and exposing. “And Jake? How’s he holding up?”

The mention of his name sends a ripple through you. You shrug, eyes darting to the rain-streaked window, unwilling to be pinned beneath Heeseung’s steady stare. “I had to go over to his place last night. He… he wasn’t doing great.” 

Something flickers in Heeseung’s eyes, something like understanding but also suspicion. He’s always been perceptive, always able to read the subtle tremors beneath your words. That suspicion had once been one of the many invisible strings tugging your relationship apart. He doesn’t voice it now, but you can feel it lingering, like smoke that refuses to leave a room. You force yourself to change the subject, desperate to escape the weight pressing down on you. “What about you? How’ve you been?”

His expression softens, his lips quirking in a half-smile. “Actually… there’s someone.”

Your brows lift, curiosity cutting through the heaviness for the first time that day. “Oh?” You lean forward, tilting your head. “Do tell.”

Heeseung chuckles, a low sound that feels almost nostalgic. “Met her at work. She’s… different. I don’t know. I can’t get her out of my head.”

You grin despite yourself, warmth sparking in your chest that isn’t tangled up in guilt or grief. “Heeseung, that’s great. She must be special if she’s got you like this.”

“She is,” he says simply, and there’s a quiet conviction in his voice that makes you believe him. You let yourself bask in his happiness, in the relief of knowing that someone you care about is moving forward, finding light where you can’t seem to. You smile at him, genuinely this time, because Heeseung deserves it, deserves someone good, someone who won’t carry their heart in the shadow of someone else’s name. Heeseung is moving forward, while you are suspended, caught in the purgatory of old memories, torn between guilt and the dangerous comfort of Jake’s presence. And though you don’t say it out loud, you know Heeseung sees it in you anyway. Like you said, he always did. 

Your phone buzzes against the nightstand, its glow cutting through the dim quiet of your room. Jake’s name lights the screen, and for a heartbeat you consider letting it ring out, afraid of what version of him you might find on the other end. But you answer anyway, because you always do. His voice comes through soft, frayed at the edges, like fabric that’s been worn down to threads. “Hey,” he says, and there’s a pause, one of those pauses that hums with the weight of unspoken things. “I… I wanted to say sorry. For the other night. For calling you like that. For being—” His breath hitches. “Weak.”

You close your eyes, clutching the phone tighter. “Jake. Don’t. You don’t have to apologize. I get it. Really, I do.”

He lets out a shaky laugh, the kind that isn’t laughter at all. “Sometimes I feel like you’re the only one who does.”

There’s silence, long and heavy, and then he clears his throat, shifting into something else. “I was thinking… maybe you could come by. To the apartment. I need to—” His words falter. “I need to pack up Mimi’s stuff. Not everything, just… the trophies, the medals, the posters. All the soccer things. I keep looking at them and all I can think about is how much it’ll crush her when she comes home. I don’t want her to see it, not like that. Not reminders of what she lost.”

Your heart pulls tight. The thought of dismantling Mimi’s shrine of victories feels sacrilegious, like erasing her in the name of protecting her. But you hear the desperation in Jake’s voice, the plea tangled between each word, and you can’t say no. “Of course,” you whisper. “Whatever you need.”

“I’ll order food,” he adds quickly, as though the promise of takeout might soften the gravity of what he’s asking. “Make it more like… a hang out. Less depressing.” You almost smile, though it comes out fractured. “Alright. I’ll come.”

You leave quicker than you’d like to admit but you truthfully had nothing else to do. you stand outside the apartment you once thought of as half-home. The key you don’t have dangles in your imagination, and you hesitate before Jake opens the door. His face looks tired, like he hasn’t been sleeping, like grief has become the new skin he wears. Still, he tries to smile when he sees you. “Hey. Thanks for coming.”

“Always,” you murmur, stepping inside.

The apartment smells faintly of dust and takeout grease, and the air feels wrong without Mimi’s voice echoing through it. On the coffee table sits a half-eaten box of pizza and two cans of soda sweating condensation, but your eyes are drawn to the stack of cardboard boxes by the couch. Open, waiting. Jake gestures toward Mimi’s room, his movements stiff, reluctant. “Most of it’s in there.”

Jake runs a hand through his hair, his voice low. “I thought I could do it alone, but… every time I touch something, it feels like I’m betraying her.” You kneel by the nearest shelf, picking up a small trophy, her first, from when she was ten, the base chipped from being dropped on the pavement after she ran to show you. The memory tightens in your chest. “It’s not betrayal,” you whisper, more to yourself than to him. “It’s… making room. For when she comes back.” He nods, but his jaw clenches, like he doesn’t believe himself either.

The cardboard box yawns open at your knees, swallowing the weight of years one relic at a time. Each trophy you lower into it feels like lowering a body into the ground, a burial for a version of Mimi who might never exist again. The air tastes like dust and nostalgia, thick enough to choke you. Every poster you peel from the wall leaves behind faint squares of brighter paint, shadows of what once was, absences that mark the walls as permanently as scars. Jake is quiet beside you, methodical in his movements. He wraps medals around his fingers before placing them gently into a box, his head bent, his shoulders slouched. The silence between you isn’t empty; it thrums with memory, with all the words neither of you dare say aloud. 

You reach for a stack of photo albums on the bottom shelf, the spines faded, the corners bent with love. One slips free, tumbling open in your lap. And there it is: a photograph from senior prom. Mimi stands in the middle, radiant in a shimmering gown that caught the light like it was made of stars. Jake stands tall on her right, hand draped around her waist, a boy on the cusp of becoming something more. And there you are on her other side, his arm slung casually over your shoulder, as though you were just another part of the scenery. Your breath stills. That night blooms in your mind in fractured flashes: the thrum of bass through the gymnasium floor, the sweat on your palms, the ache in your chest when you watched Mimi laugh at something Jake whispered in her ear. You’d loved him even then, loved him with the reckless clarity only seventeen can hold. But it didn’t matter, because that was the night they kissed under streamers and disco lights, the night they became “Jake and Mimi,” and you learned what it meant to lose quietly, to swallow your own heart in silence.

The photograph trembles faintly in your hands, and then Jake is leaning over, his eyes falling on the same memory. His lips curve in the smallest smile, soft and wistful. “That was a good night, huh?” he murmurs, his voice so low it feels meant only for you. You force a smile, the edges brittle. “Yeah,” you whisper, though the word tastes like glass. Your throat tightens, tears pressing hot behind your eyes, but you blink them back, unwilling to let them fall here, now, in front of him.

Jake doesn’t notice. His thumb brushes lightly against the edge of the photograph, tracing Mimi’s smile, and for a moment you envy the paper, envy the way he can touch the memory without consequence. You want to tell him everything, that you remember the way your stomach dropped when you saw them together, that you wanted to be the girl he kissed that night, not the one who smiled through the pain of losing him before you ever had him. But instead, you tuck the photo carefully into the box, your hands steady even as your heart trembles. “We should keep going,” you say, your voice a fragile thread.

Jake nods, but his eyes linger on you a moment longer than they should, like he’s searching for something in your face. Then he looks away, busying himself with another stack of medals, and the moment passes, slipping into the silence that swells around you again. By the time the last of Mimi’s trophies are packed and stacked the room feels emptied, hollow, as though you’ve boxed away not just her triumphs but her presence itself. The ache sits heavy in your chest, but Jake, maybe sensing the air has become too brittle, orders dinner. He insists on paying, though you offer, and the ritual of waiting for greasy paper bags to arrive at the door feels almost normal, almost like college nights spent cramming for exams with Mimi sprawled on the couch between you. Almost.

When the food comes, you eat side by side on the couch, cartons balanced precariously on your laps, a movie flickering across the screen in colors that wash the room in pale, ghostly light. Neither of you are paying much attention to the film. Instead, conversation winds between you like smoke, fragile but lingering. “Remember that time Mimi tried to teach us soccer in the backyard?” you say around a bite of lo mein, laughing softly. “You kicked the ball into Mrs.Chen’s rose bushes, and she threatened to call the police.”

Jake chuckles, his head tipping back against the cushion. The sound is tired, but genuine. “We were, what, twelve? I was convinced I’d get arrested for murder-by-soccer-ball.”

You grin despite yourself, warmth curling at the edges of your chest. “Mimi was so mad at you. She wouldn’t pass to you for, like, a week.”

“She never let me live it down,” Jake admits, shaking his head. His eyes flick toward you then, softer, almost vulnerable. “God, we used to laugh so much. Everything felt lighter back then.”

Silence slips between you for a beat, comfortable but charged, like a string pulled too tight. Jake exhales, his voice dropping quieter, almost hesitant. “You know… I had a tiny crush on you back then.”

The words land like a spark in your chest, unexpected and electric. You blink at him, startled. “Really?”

He nods, a sheepish smile tugging at his lips. “Yeah. Always did, when we were kids. I mean, don’t tell Mimi I said that, obviously.” He lets out a short laugh, the sound embarrassed but honest.

You stare at him, caught between disbelief and something deeper, something dangerous. “Funny,” you murmur, your lips quirking into the smallest smile. “I had a crush on you too. Back then.” Jake’s head turns toward you fully now, his eyes catching yours. For a moment, you both laugh, soft, awkward, like two kids confessing secrets in the dark. But the laughter dies quickly, replaced by something heavier. His gaze lingers, searching, and you feel it like a touch on your skin.

The room narrows, the movie forgotten, the food cooling in your hands. The silence is loud, beating against your ribs. You don’t know what possesses you, recklessness, longing, the cruel ache of nostalgia, but you hear yourself ask, your voice quiet, trembling: “Do you… still feel that way?”

The question hangs in the air, fragile and irretrievable. Jake’s smile fades, replaced by something raw in his expression. He sighs, his chest rising and falling as though he’s fighting with himself. Slowly, unbearably, he leans closer, his face inches from yours. You can feel the warmth of his breath, the weight of his hesitation. Your whole body stills, frozen, waiting, terrified and wanting all at once. The moment teeters, lips nearly brushing, and for a heartbeat you think it’s going to happen, that the dam is going to break. But then he pulls back sharply, eyes shutting as though the act itself hurts him. His voice cracks on a whisper. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t.” 

The space between you yawns wide, cold rushing in where warmth once lingered. You swallow hard, forcing your face into something that resembles composure though humiliation burns hot under your skin. “Right. Yeah, of course,” you murmur, your voice brittle. You gather your things too quickly, fumbling for your bag, your jacket, desperate for escape. “I should go. It’s late.” The words tumble out fast, clumsy, your throat tight.

Jake doesn’t stop you, doesn’t argue. He only nods, his eyes shadowed with something unreadable. “Goodnight,” he whispers, as though the word itself aches. You force a quiet “Goodnight” back, but it splinters in your mouth. Then you’re at the door, slipping into the hallway, the air outside the apartment pressing cool against your burning skin. As you walk away, the weight of what almost happened presses down, heavier than any box you packed that night. The embarrassment floods you like a broken dam, the night air is crisp against your heated skin and you welcome it. Though it did little to slow your rapidly beating heart. 

The next day dawns gray, as though the sky itself had grown tired of pretending to be bright. Your room feels smaller than usual, the walls leaning closer, crowding in on you as you sit at your desk. The wood beneath your palms is scarred with faint scratches from years past, remnants of pens pressed too hard, of coffee mugs set down carelessly, of long nights where you sought refuge in words because you couldn’t find it anywhere else. You open your journal, its spine cracked and pliant from being confided in too often, the pages already soaked with memories you half-regret writing down. Your pen hovers over the paper like a held breath, and then, ink bleeds out, hesitant at first, then steady, like a wound reopening. You write to her, to Mimi.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, I wish I could have been there for you more. Helped you through the pain you were feeling. I hope through your healing that you can forgive me and we can be best friends just like we’ve always been. Me you….and jake. Together. 

The words come simple, almost childlike, but the ache behind them is heavier than you can carry. You tell her that you hope one day she’ll understand why you did what you did, that it wasn’t betrayal but love, even if it felt like a knife in her back. You tell her that she needed help, that she wasn’t herself anymore after the accident, that she had been unraveling thread by thread, and none of you knew how to stop it. You write that you couldn’t just stand by and watch her dissolve, that the thought of losing her forever was unbearable, that maybe she’d hate you now but perhaps, one day, she might thank you.

The words tremble as you carve them into the paper. You try to tell her about the nights you lay awake, wondering if she’d pick up the phone if you called. About the way you saw the light in her eyes flicker, gutter like a dying candle. About how much it broke you to watch her slip further and further from the girl you grew up with, the girl who once laughed so loudly in hallways that everyone else couldn’t help but smile. But halfway through, the sentences blur. Ink bleeds into tears that spill silently, dampening the paper until your words look like they’re drowning. Your chest is tight, your throat raw. You whisper her name under your breath like a prayer, like a plea, like something you could chant until she comes back to you whole.

By the time you finish, you feel emptied out, like the letter has siphoned something essential from you. You fold the pages with trembling hands, slide them into an envelope. The sound of the flap sealing is sharp in the quiet, like a finality you’re not ready for. You set it gently on your desk, next to the lamp, where it waits like a secret. You don’t know if you’ll ever send it. Maybe it will stay there forever, yellowing under layers of dust, a monument to the words you never had the courage to share.

Exhaustion swells heavy in your limbs, grief pulling you down like an undertow. You crawl into bed without brushing your teeth, without even changing. The room is dark now, only the faint glow of the streetlight filtering through the blinds. You pull the blanket up to your chin, curling around the ache in your chest. Your eyes close, though your mind won’t stop spinning. The letter waits on your desk in the dark, like a ghost with its hand outstretched. You let sleep take you anyway, because there’s nothing else left to do. 

Your sleep is torn open by the shrill cry of your phone. It doesn’t sound like a ringtone but like something breaking, a glass dropped, a nerve cut raw. You lurch toward consciousness, hand fumbling beneath your pillow until your fingers find the smooth rectangle of your phone. The glow sears through the darkness, a ghost-light that makes your pupils ache. On the screen: Jake. The letters swim in the fog of sleep, steady and undeniable, with the time blaring beneath, 3:18 AM.

Your breath catches. Why would he call now, at this hour where even the city holds its breath? Outside, thunder snarls against your windowpane, making the glass shudder in its frame. Lightning follows, a blade of white slicing across your room, illuminating every corner in a violent flash. The familiar shadows rearrange themselves into monstrous shapes, stretching tall, stretching wrong. You swipe to answer before you can think better of it, pressing the phone to your ear. “H-Hello?” Your voice is rough, scraped thin by sleep.

On the other end, his voice comes through, shaking, small, not the voice you know. “Can you come over? Please.” A cold pulse threads through your veins. Surely he knew what time it was. You rub at your temple, trying to fight the weight pressing down behind your eyes. Before you can respond, his voice softens, almost breaking apart. “It’s storming.”

Those two words undo you. The thunder outside is no longer tonight’s storm, it’s another one, long ago. You are pulled under, swallowed whole by memory. It was storming then, too. The sky an endless bruise, purple-black and angry, the rain beating the roof like fists demanding entry. Lightning cleaved the heavens open, and thunder came right after, loud enough to shake the walls of Mimi’s room. At thirteen, the sound had felt apocalyptic, like the world might split in two if it kept on. You lay awake, eyes wide in the dark, fists balled tight under your chin, heart pounding like a trapped bird.

Beside you, Mimi had slept through it all. She always did. Even as a child she could sleep through earthquakes, through slammed doors, through chaos. A heavy, unshakable sleeper. She dreamed while you drowned. But Jake hadn’t been sleeping either. He reached over, tapping your shoulder, whispering your name. You turned, already wide-eyed, and found his face outlined in the faint glow of lightning sneaking through the curtains. His hair was mussed, sticking up, his mouth pressed thin. He looked scared too, though he tried to mask it.

Minutes later, you both ended up huddled in Mimi’s closet, a cocoon of safety carved into the dark. The air was cramped, smelling faintly of old wood and fabric softener. A blanket covered you both, shoulders pressed together, and you pulled your knees to your chest. Your pajama pants, too long for you, pooled at your ankles in soft folds, the fabric warm against your bare skin. The storm outside raged like a monster rattling its cage, but in there, you could almost pretend you were safe. “Let’s play a game,” Jake said suddenly, voice pitched low but steady, like he wanted to tether both of you to something other than the storm.

Your head tipped toward him, curiosity flickering in the dimness. “What kind?”

“Never Have I Ever.” You gave a small shrug and nodded. Anything was better than listening to thunder crash around you. It started light. Innocent confessions. Never have I ever cheated on a test. Finger down. Never have I ever faked sick. Another finger down. Never have I ever eaten something expired. Laughter followed groans as more fingers fell. For a while, the storm felt like background noise, thunder clapping but distant, muted by the sound of your laughter.

And then Jake tilted his head against the wall, eyes half-hidden in the dark, and said, “Never have I ever kissed anyone.” Silence bloomed, thick as the air before lightning.

Your hands stayed whole. So did his.

“But you dated Wonyoung?” You exasperated, shocked. Jake just shrugged, a sly shrug that you hated at that moment. You hated that the revelation that Jake had never kissed Wonyoung had felt relieving, like a weight that you didn't even know was on you was lifted. You had always been jealous of Wonyoung, for many reasons. She was gorgeous, popular, and smart. Every guy in school wanted to date her, every girl wanted to be her friend but when Jake and her started dating in the beginning of year seven that jealousy turned to hatred. She had what you wanted, she was confident enough to get him — unlike you. You had dwindled in the background whenever she was around. And sure she was nice…enough but you knew it was all an act. Jake was her only priority and she only tolerated you and Mimi because the three of you were some kind of package deal. So finding out that they had never kissed was like winning a lottery you had never even entered in the first place. Like getting a trophy you didn't even earn. 

“Never kissed her,” he said eventually, voice calm, almost dismissive.And then his gaze caught yours. “What about you? Why haven’t you kissed anyone?”

Your throat tightened. “I don’t know.” And it was true. No one else mattered enough. No one else had ever been worth it. Only him.

He leaned forward, curious. “Do you…not have a crush on anyone?” Lightning flashed, thunder cracked, and for a moment you thought the world itself would expose you. Of course you did. Of course it was him. But you were thirteen, terrified of being seen. So you lied.

“I—uh—I like Sunghoon,” you stammered.

Jake made a face, nose wrinkling, tongue sticking out. “Yuck.”

The sound of your giggle surprised you. It burst out, light and raw, and for a moment it felt like the storm cracked open not outside, but inside you. “What? It’s not funny!”

“It is!” he insisted, grinning wide now. “Park Sunghoon? Seriously?” You shook your head, shoulders trembling with laughter you couldn’t hold in. You knew how flimsy your lie was, how paper-thin. But he didn’t press it, didn’t tear it apart.

Instead, the laughter faded, and in its place you found yourself asking, voice brittle: “Do you…like anyone?” He hesitated. You could see thought flicker across his face, his lip caught between his teeth. Then he said, almost softly, “I think I do.”

The words sliced you open. They were said like a secret half-kept, like something he was afraid to make real. They carried curiosity, hesitation, hope. But for you, they carried weight. You wanted to ask who. You wanted to shake the answer out of him. But all you could say was, “Oh.” And then he leaned forward again, eyes flickering with something reckless. “I have an idea.”

Your breath snagged. “What?”

“What if…” He paused, wet his lips. “What if we give each other our first kiss? So when we kiss our crushes, we won’t be so…inexperienced.” The words detonated in you. Not a suggestion, but an earthquake. Not a game, but a dare from the universe itself. Jake wanted to kiss you. Jake, whose name had already built a nest in your chest, whose smile you carried like a secret. The storm outside didn’t matter anymore. The real storm was here, in the dark, between his mouth and yours.

Your heartbeat was thunder. The kind that rattled windows, that made the world feel like it might break apart. You nodded before you even realized you were moving, your body betraying the yes that your lips couldn’t form. Jake shifted, turning toward you fully, his knee brushing against yours beneath the blanket. His hand hovered awkwardly, like he wasn’t sure if he should touch you, like the simple act might ignite something neither of you could control. And then, slowly, hesitantly, he leaned in. The first brush of his lips was so light it could have been mistaken for an accident, the fleeting ghost of touch. But the moment it happened, the storm outside disappeared. The thunder faded to a faraway hum, the lightning nothing but background light. The only thing real was the warmth of Jake’s mouth, the awkward tilt of his head, the way his breath hitched like he couldn’t believe it was happening either. 

It wasn’t perfect; not smooth, not practiced. Your noses bumped, and the kiss was clumsy, soft, almost laughable. But to you, it felt monumental, the kind of moment that rewrote everything you thought you knew about love. His lips were slightly chapped, tasting faintly of the soda he’d sipped earlier, and still it felt holy. Like the world had narrowed to just this small space in the closet, the storm both inside and out. When he pulled back, it was only by an inch, his breath warm against your skin. His eyes were wide, startled, as if he hadn’t expected it to feel like this. Neither had you. “That was…” He stopped, searching for a word, but none seemed big enough. His hand lifted halfway between you, then fell back into his lap. “We don’t… have to tell anyone, right?”

You shook your head quickly, though part of you wanted to shout it from the rooftops, to let the storm carry it into the sky: Jake kissed me. But instead, you whispered, “Just ours.” And he smiled at that, small and secret, before leaning back against the wall, closing his eyes like he could hide inside the memory. 

The memory was sweet, something you hadn’t thought about in such a long time. “Of course i’ll come.” You say to Jake, the phone still pressed firmly to your ear, sleep gnawing at you but still you rise out of bed and get yourself ready to leave. 

The rain hadn’t let up by the time you reached his building. It poured in sheets that shimmered silver beneath the streetlamps, the world outside blurred into watercolor. You climbed the stairs two at a time, shoes squeaking, hair plastered to your cheeks, the storm still drumming against your skin even as you stepped into the warmth of his apartment. Jake was waiting for you in the doorway, one hand on the frame, his shoulders hunched like the storm had seeped into his bones. His shirt was wrinkled, his eyes shadowed from lack of sleep, but when he saw you, the lines of tension in his face softened. “Hey,” he murmured, voice low, almost sheepish, as though he couldn’t quite believe you had actually come.

Inside, the apartment was dark save for the dim glow of a lamp in the corner. It smelled faintly of rain-damp clothes and takeout boxes. And then you saw it, the mattress pulled clumsily into the middle of the living room, blankets tangled, pillows stacked carelessly at one end. It looked almost childlike, a fort built against the chaos outside. Jake rubbed the back of his neck, his gaze darting away in embarrassment. “I, uh… I couldn’t—” He cleared his throat. “I couldn’t sleep in there without her. The room feels… wrong. Too empty. So I dragged this out here.” His laugh was small, humorless, the sound of someone trying to make light of something too heavy.

You blinked at him, at this boy who was once a storm himself and was now building fragile shelters just to weather it. A laugh tumbled out of you, softer than you expected, breaking the tension. “You’re ridiculous,” you said, stepping forward, the words warm rather than cruel. “But…” You glanced at the mattress, at the absurdity and sweetness of it all, then lowered yourself down onto its plush surface. The blankets gave way beneath your weight, swallowing you in their warmth. “I get it.” Jake’s relief was subtle, but it was there, the way his shoulders dropped, the way his lips tugged into the ghost of a smile. He followed suit, settling onto the mattress beside you, close enough that you could feel the dip of his weight, the faint brush of his sleeve against your arm. 

Outside, thunder cracked, a great drumroll across the sky. Lightning flooded the room for a moment, bleaching everything in sharp, unnatural white. But here, inside this makeshift refuge, it felt less like a threat and more like a heartbeat, steady and relentless, something you could weather so long as you weren’t alone. Jake exhaled, long and tired, as though the storm outside was mirroring the one inside him. “It’s easier,” he admitted, his voice barely above the hum of rain against the windows. “With you here. The quiet doesn’t feel so loud.”

Your throat tightened, and you turned your head just enough to see his profile, the dark curl of his lashes, the furrow in his brow, the way his lips pressed together like he was swallowing back everything he couldn’t say. You wanted to reach for him, to smooth the storm from his features, but instead you curled your hands into the blanket. “Yeah,” you said softly, because it was all you could manage. “It’s easier for me too.”

The two of you lay there in silence for a while, the mattress dipping beneath the shared weight of memory and unspoken things. The thunder continued its ancient song, but in that dim room, with Jake only inches away, it no longer felt like the sky was trying to break you apart. Instead, it felt like an echo of something long ago, another storm, another night, another time you had found refuge in each other. It started innocently enough, as so many things between you always had. A nervous chuckle, a shared memory, Jake’s elbow nudging into your side until you finally cracked a smile. He glanced at you like he couldn’t quite believe he had coaxed joy from you, like he was holding a fragile treasure in his palm.

“Let’s play something,” he said suddenly, his voice low but threaded with that boyish spark you hadn’t seen in him since before the accident. “Like… those stupid games we used to play. You know. Back when storms felt like the end of the world.”

You blinked at him, startled, then laughed into the blanket. “What, like Never Have I Ever?”

“Exactly.” His grin spread slowly, crooked at the edges, and it was like looking at a version of Jake you thought had been buried forever. “Come on. Don’t tell me you’re too mature for it now.” You rolled your eyes but gave in, because how could you not? The storm could rage on outside, Mimi could haunt the walls of this apartment with her absence, but for a fleeting hour, you wanted to remember what it felt like to be thirteen, to be scared of thunder and unscarred by grief.

The game started light, harmless. Never have I ever snuck out of class to nap in the library. Never have I ever eaten an entire pizza by myself. The kind of things you laughed about because they were so pathetically true. Jake kept score on his fingers, exaggeratedly accusing you of being the bigger delinquent, and you couldn’t remember the last time your stomach hurt from laughing like this. Then he asked one that sent you both into a ridiculous fit, laughter bubbling up so hard you could barely breathe. You doubled over, holding your stomach, tears springing to your eyes from how much it hurt, and Jake’s laugh, God, his laugh was a balm, echoing against the dim walls like the apartment itself was remembering joy. 

“Yeah! Yeah!” you gasped between breaths, trying to catch yourself. “Remember that was when Mimi was trying out for that big soccer team and—” You didn’t even finish. The words lodged in your throat like broken glass. Because you both remembered. The laughter died as abruptly as if someone had shut a door. The silence pressed in heavy, suffocating, every detail of reality rushing back, the trophies you had packed in boxes, the bedroom stripped of posters, the hollow in the center of Jake’s life where Mimi used to stand. Jake’s eyes dropped, his jaw tightening. You swallowed hard, your chest heaving, the storm outside thundering its agreement.

“I’m so stupid,” you blurted, your voice cracking under the weight of it. “For even thinking, just for a second, that we could forget. That we could pretend like everything wasn’t… falling apart.” Your words tumbled out, a torrent you couldn’t stop now that it had started. “It’s not fair, Jake. None of it. She didn’t deserve this. You didn’t deserve this. And I—” Your breath hitched, the confession clawing at your ribs. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been handed the shit end of the stick my whole life, and I’m so tired of pretending it doesn’t hurt. I’m so—” 

And then, without warning, Jake’s lips crashed against yours. It was not gentle. It was not careful. It was a storm colliding with another storm, a desperate, bruising thing that stole the air from your lungs. His hand cupped the side of your face, almost clumsy in its urgency, fingers trembling like he wasn’t sure if he was holding you too tightly or not tightly enough. Your mind screamed no, screamed Mimi, Mimi, Mimi but your body betrayed you. You kissed him back. Harder, deeper, surrendering to the ache that had lived in you for years. His mouth was hot, demanding, tasting of grief and beer and sleepless nights, and yet it was everything you had wanted since you were old enough to know what wanting meant.  

The mattress shifted beneath you as you leaned into him, your hands fisting in his shirt, pulling him closer as if proximity might make the pain ebb. Jake groaned softly against your lips, the sound ripping something open in you, and you let yourself fall, into him, into the storm, into the recklessness of a moment you had no right to claim. You didn’t think. You couldn’t. Thought would mean guilt, would mean restraint, would mean remembering whose name was woven into the very walls of this apartment. So you chose the kiss instead, the dizzying, dangerous gravity of it because for once, it was easier than choosing the grief. 

The kiss does not stop where it should. It deepens, thickens like thunderclouds swelling with rain, growing heavier with every second until you’re not sure if you are kissing Jake or if the storm has simply swallowed you both whole. His mouth is firm against yours, urgent, desperate, as if this one act could rewrite every unfair twist of fate, could silence every loss that gnaws at the marrow of your bones. You don’t remember deciding to move, but suddenly you’re leaning back, and Jake follows without hesitation. The mattress beneath you dips with your weight, the thin quilt crumpling like paper, and he hovers above you. For a brief heartbeat, your eyes meet, wide, startled, dark with something unspoken and then he claims your mouth again, harder this time. His hands frame your face, fingers splayed as if trying to memorize the shape of you, trying to hold together something that’s been splintering for years.

There is no talk of wrong or right. No rules, no names for what you are or what this means. There is only the pulse in your veins, the ache that pulls you toward him, the way your body bows beneath his as if you’ve been waiting, unknowingly, for this gravity all along. His breath is hot against your cheek when he breaks away for half a second, his forehead pressed to yours, and he whispers your name like it’s both a question and an answer. “Jake—” you start, though you don’t know what you mean to say. He silences you with another kiss, rougher, and your protest dissolves on his tongue. 

Every thought is too heavy, too sharp, and right now you want only the softness of his mouth, the pressure of his body, the illusion that maybe if you let yourself fall deep enough into him you can forget. Forget the storm raging outside, forget the silence left in Mimi’s absence, forget the sharp edges of grief cutting you open from the inside out. Jake shifts closer, his weight pressing you into the mattress, and it feels like drowning and breathing all at once. Your hands clutch at him, his shirt, his shoulders, the nape of his neck, desperate anchors in this tide you’ve let yourself slip into. He tastes like something forbidden and familiar, like the boy who once pulled you laughing through sprinklers in the July heat, now made older, heavier, and more dangerous.

Neither of you speaks. There’s no need. The kiss says everything: I need you. I’m breaking. Don’t let me go. And so you don’t. You let yourself burn in him, in this reckless, trembling, unspoken thing that feels less like a choice and more like destiny cracking open right under your ribs. 

Your hands move as though guided by hunger itself, clawing at his shirt like a starving animal tearing through the last barrier between it and sustenance. The fabric bunches in your fists, your movements frantic and unrestrained, and Jake groans into your mouth, a deep, guttural sound, rough with years of want unsaid. His breath comes ragged, heated, slipping between the seam of your lips like smoke, like confession, as he lets you drag the cotton up and over his head. The shirt is discarded somewhere into the shadows of the storm-lit living room, but you hardly notice; all you see is the bare expanse of him above you, the solid strength you had always imagined but never dared touch, the body that has haunted you in the quietest corners of your mind. 

There is no time to beg, no need for pleading. The plea is already etched in your skin, written in every tremor of your hands and every desperate press of your mouth against his. He knows, and you know, and that knowledge is enough to fuel the fire burning between you. You feel, with startling clarity, that he is ready to give you everything you had secretly yearned for in silence, every fevered dream, every aching what-if.

Jake’s hands are not tentative, they are rough, claiming, sliding over your breasts through the thin barrier of your shirt, his grip greedy and unrelenting. The pressure makes you gasp into his mouth, your back arching instinctively, urging him closer, urging him deeper. You welcome the drag of his calloused palms, the heat of his touch, the way his thumbs press hard enough to leave echoes in your flesh. And when his hands shift, sliding up beneath your shirt, he doesn’t pause, he yanks it over your head in one swift motion, leaving you bare to the stormlight and his ravenous eyes.

You had rushed here in the middle of the night, unthinking, careless, and now you pay the consequence of that recklessness. No bra. No protection from the weight of his stare. Your chest rises and falls rapidly, completely exposed, your skin prickling beneath the intensity of his gaze. He curses under his breath, the sound breaking into a half-groan as he lowers his head and seals his mouth over your nipple, sucking harshly, almost punishingly. “Fuck,” you whimper, your voice a high, strangled note as your hips lift against him, desperate for friction, for something more than the molten pull of his tongue. His teeth scrape, just enough to sting, and you shiver as he groans low against your skin. 

“I’ve dreamed about these tits,” Jake admits between kisses, his voice heavy, almost reverent despite the vulgarity. His palms roam freely, kneading, savoring, memorizing. Then his mouth trails lower, hot words spilling across your skin like fire. “I dreamed about this pussy.” His bluntness sends heat coursing through you, shame and thrill mingling into something heady. You don’t shrink from it; you open to it, to him.

“You can have it,” you breathe, your voice broken, urgent. Your fingers fumble at the waistband of your sweatpants, dragging them down your hips in clumsy desperation. Jake mirrors you, pulling his own down with impatient hands, both of you too caught in the storm of each other to care about finesse. “It’s yours.” Jake pulls back just far enough to look at you, his chest heaving, his eyes dark and wide. For a moment, he studies you like he doesn’t quite believe what you’re offering, what you’ve said. Then his mouth curves into that smirk, sharp, knowing, dangerous,  the smirk of someone who has wanted this for far too long.

“It’s mine?” he asks, the words heavy with promise, with possession.

“Mhm,” you hum, teasing, the corners of your lips curving in defiance even as your body trembles beneath him. You lower your hand, your fingers slipping past the soft cotton of your panties to press against your clothed clit. His gaze sharpens instantly, drinking in every flick of your wrist, every stutter of your breath. “All yours, Jakey.”

He groans, a sound that borders on a growl, and you watch his control splinter in real time. “Fuck,” he pants, watching as your body arches and spasms beneath your own touch, your moans filling the small room, competing with the storm outside.

“I want you,” you whine, your voice breaking open, a plea slipping free before you can stop it. “Please, Jakey, I want you—” You don’t finish, because Jake moves, fast, decisive, unrelenting. His hands grip your waist, hauling you upward before twisting you around, pressing you down onto your hands and knees. The mattress dips beneath you, the air thick with lightning and want. Your ass lifts instinctively, high, offering. You barely register the cold air as he yanks your panties down and off, leaving you utterly bare. The apartment’s air does nothing to soothe your pulsing heat; it only makes you ache more, makes you tremble.

Jake’s hands slide over your ass, kneading, savoring, grounding himself in the reality of your skin. Then, with one sharp, deliberate motion, his palm lands against you, a quick, stinging smack that makes your whole body jolt forward. You yelp, your cheek pressing into the mattress, your body bowing, trembling at the raw intensity of it. And behind you, Jake exhales, rough and shaky, like a man barely holding himself together. 

“Look at you…” Jake drawls, his voice low and smooth, like silk dragged across the raw edge of your nerves. His palm spreads wide over your ass, the heat of his touch grounding you before the sting comes again. “So wet and ready for me.” His tone is both mocking and reverent, the kind of worship that sounds like ruin. Another sharp smack lands, making your body jolt forward, your breath catching in your throat as a strangled yelp escapes you. “You’re like a fucking whore,” he murmurs against the storm, each word deliberate, meant to slice into you and brand you at once.

The shock is immediate, sharp as lightning splitting open the sky. A gasp bursts from your lips, sharp, startled, but it isn’t anger that coils through you, isn’t shame that rises. It’s heat. Pure, unrelenting, dizzying heat. The word settles heavy in your chest, and instead of rejecting it, your body thrills at the sound. To be called that, by him, to be seen as something shameless, desperate, his. The power of it rushes through you like electricity. You don’t want to fight it. You want to drown in it. “Yes,” you cry, your voice breaking as your hips shake, pushing backward, searching, begging. The need is unbearable, clawing up your spine and spilling out of you in gasps and whines. “I’m your whore.” 

Jake groans, the sound guttural, dragged out from somewhere deep in his chest. His hand comes down again, hard, biting, leaving your skin hot and stinging. Then another. Each strike burns, each echo cracks through the thunder outside, each one making you sink further into submission. “Yeah,” he hisses through clenched teeth, his rhythm cruel and unrelenting. “Yeah, you fucking are.” His voice is jagged now, rough with hunger, every word scraped raw. And then, with no warning, no pause, no mercy, he’s inside you.

The stretch rips a cry from your throat, your moan spilling into the mattress, muffled and broken. He fills you all at once, like a man who couldn’t hold back even if his life depended on it. His hips slam against yours in one sharp, desperate thrust, the air rushing from your lungs as your body tries to take him in. “Oh, fuck,” you gasp, the sound dissolving into shuddered breaths as your fingers clutch at the sheets, your nails digging into the fabric like you’ll fall apart if you don’t hold on. Jake groans behind you, deep and harsh, his hands gripping your hips with bruising force. His thrusts are relentless from the start, fast and hard, each one hitting deeper, sharper, as though he wants to leave his mark on every inch of you. His grip never falters; he holds you still, refusing to let you escape the intensity of him, the way he carves himself into you with every snap of his hips.

“This pussy’s so fucking tight,” he growls, his voice ragged, laced with disbelief and hunger. The words strike hot against your skin, filth dripping from his lips like a confession. His thrusts grow harder, sharper, the sound of skin against skin filling the small apartment, drowning out even the thunder outside. You cry out into the mattress, your voice muffled, desperate. “Fuck me!” The words fall from your mouth raw and unrestrained, like prayer, like surrender. “Oh god—” And still he moves, unrelenting, giving you exactly what you asked for, exactly what you didn’t know you needed until now.

Your body betrays you before your mind can even catch up, your hips moving of their own accord, slamming back against Jake’s with a frantic rhythm, desperate for more. Each thrust of your own making sends a jolt through you, your body alive with the unbearable sweetness of being filled so completely. You move without hesitation, without shame, grinding and rocking back against him like you’ve been waiting years for this, like every beat of your life had been counting down to this moment.

Jake groans behind you, low and raw, the sound dragging out of his throat like it’s pulled from somewhere deeper than his lungs. He stills, letting you take control, his hands locked tight around your hips to steady you as he pants raggedly against the storm. “That’s it, sweet girl,” he growls, voice cracking at the edges. “Fuck yourself on my cock. Just like that. Show me how bad you need it.” His words slither down your spine, filth and praise wrapped together, and they only make you want to move harder, faster, more desperately.

“It’s so—big,” you gasp, the syllables falling out in broken fragments as your body grinds back with abandon. “So fucking—big.” Each word splinters into a moan, your breath hitching with every shift of your hips. Your thighs tremble with the effort, with the sheer overwhelming force of sensation, as though your body is on the verge of collapsing and yet can’t stop seeking more. Every thought you’ve ever had, every rule, every piece of restraint is gone, burned out of you in the heat of him. All that’s left is this moment, this rhythm, this desperation. You give yourself over completely, letting him take and take, letting yourself be used in the way you’ve always secretly craved. Jake’s voice comes again, dark and reverent, a tether against the chaos unraveling inside you. “You’re shaking,” he observes, his tone nearly breaking with the sound of it, his chest heaving in jagged pants. “Does it feel that good?” 

You try to answer, but the words tangle in your throat, breaking apart into moans you can’t control. He doesn’t wait. His hand cracks down against your ass again, the sting blooming across your skin in a wave of heat that only makes you push back harder. The sharp sound echoes in the room, blending with the slap of skin against skin, the storm pounding outside like a chorus to your ruin. “Yes,” you finally manage to gasp, your voice muffled into the sheets, thin and trembling, as if every letter is dragged from your lungs. Your nod is frantic, small, desperate, your cheek pressed against the mattress, hair damp with sweat clinging to your face. Your body feels like it’s being torn apart and remade all at once, the intensity so sharp it borders on unbearable, and still you want more.

Jake hisses behind you, his breath harsh and heavy, his control fraying at the edges as he watches you unravel for him. His grip tightens on your hips, his nails biting into your skin as though he needs proof that you’re really there, that you’re really his. “Keep making those sounds, I'm addicted.” he mutters under his breath, more to himself than to you, though the words still scorch against your skin. 

Suddenly, without warning, he pulls out of you, leaving you empty and gasping, the sudden absence stealing the breath straight from your lungs. A whine tumbles from your lips, sharp and involuntary, your body twitching in protest at the loss. “Jake—” you start, but the syllable barely has time to leave your mouth before his voice cuts through, ragged and sharp.

“Shut up.” The command slices the air, dark and undeniable, sending a shiver racing down your spine. His hands are on you immediately, rough and unrelenting, dragging you onto your back. You land against the mattress with a soft thud, wide-eyed and breathless, staring up at him as he looms above you. His fingers hook beneath your thighs, hauling them up until your knees are pressed against your chest, your body bent and folded beneath his control. You’re spread wide open, utterly vulnerable, utterly his. 

And he’s back inside you. With one brutal thrust, he buries himself deep, deeper than you thought possible, the sheer force of it tearing a cry from your throat. It feels like he’s splitting you apart, carving into the very core of you, and yet you can’t get enough. He leans over you, his chest brushing yours, his eyes locked on yours with an intensity that could burn through flesh. “I want you to look at me when you fall apart,” he grits out, his voice low and rough with need. His hips move with unrelenting precision, each thrust sharp and devastating, pulling almost all the way out before slamming back in, the rhythm enough to shake the air from your lungs. The mattress creaks beneath you, the storm outside crashing like a mirror to the storm inside you, every clap of thunder swallowed by the sound of his body against yours. He holds you there, locked tight beneath him, caging you in so you can’t move, can’t run, can’t do anything but take him.

Your hand scrambles between your bodies, frantic and searching, until your fingers find your clit. The moment you press down on the sensitive nub, your back arches off the mattress, your cry breaking in your throat. You rub in desperate circles, the added stimulation catapulting you closer, pulling you headlong toward that sharp edge where pleasure begins to blur into pain. “You feel so good,” you choke out, the words torn and trembling, your voice thick with tears. Hot streams streak down your cheeks, mingling with sweat, your face damp and shining in the dim light. “So fucking good…” Jake growls low in his chest, and then his hand slides up your body, fingers wrapping tight around your throat. The sudden pressure steals the sound from you, chokes your words before they can form, forces your mouth open in a silent gasp. He squeezes at the base of your throat, just enough to make your pulse hammer against his palm, his thumb pressing into the hollow beneath your jaw as his hips piston into you with savage fervor. Each thrust rattles through your bones, each motion a brutal reminder of his strength, his power, the fact that you are entirely at his mercy.

The world narrows to this: his hand at your throat, his body driving into yours, your own fingers frantic between your legs. Every nerve is alight, every breath a struggle, and still you can’t get enough. You’re unraveling, fraying at the edges, falling apart beneath him exactly the way he demanded. And he watches it all, eyes burning into yours, making sure you never look away. Your vision begins to blur at the edges, everything sharpening down to the single overwhelming point of him, inside you, above you, around you. His grip tightens around your throat, not enough to steal your air entirely but enough to make every breath hitch and stutter, every sound break apart in your chest. His thrusts grow reckless, deeper, faster, as though he’s chasing something he knows he’s about to lose if he doesn’t reach it now. 

The slick sounds of your bodies meeting fill the room, drowning out even the thunder outside, drowning out your thoughts until you are nothing but sensation. Your fingers tremble against your clit, the rhythm uneven, desperate, but it’s enough, it’s too much. The tension in your stomach coils so tight it’s painful, and when his hips slam home again, your body breaks. You come undone beneath him, mouth falling open in a silent scream as your orgasm rips through you. Your thighs shake violently against his chest, tears spilling down your temples and into your hair. The pleasure is blinding, your walls pulsing around him, dragging him deeper into the inferno of your release.

“Fuck—” Jake hisses between clenched teeth, his eyes locked on your face, drinking in every detail of your unraveling. His thrusts turn punishing, almost frantic, until his own rhythm falters. He buries himself to the hilt and stills, his whole body shuddering as he comes inside you, the heat of it spilling deep, filling, overwhelming. For a moment neither of you move. Your chest heaves as you suck in air, his hand finally slipping from your throat to brace against the mattress beside your head. His forehead drops against yours, damp strands of his hair clinging to his skin, his breath ragged and hot. 

The storm outside crashes against the roof, but in here, it’s just the two of you, sweat-slicked, trembling, bodies tangled in the aftershocks of something you don’t dare put a name to. Slowly, his weight sinks onto you, less force, more collapse. His chest presses against yours, his heartbeat hammering wild and frantic against your sternum as though it’s trying to match your own. And you let him, let him cage you in, let yourself drown in the dizzy haze of release, knowing the silence that follows is heavier than the storm ever was. Then he rolls over and right onto the mattress, breathing still lightly heavy. 

The room is quieter than it should be after something like that. No voices. No laughter. Just the storm groaning outside, the walls creaking, the rhythm of rain against the roof. And in the middle of it, him, you, and the silence stretching between like a chasm. Your chest rises and falls with uneven breaths, but you don’t speak. You can’t. All you can do is look at him, the boy who isn’t yours, the boy who should never have touched you like that. Jake’s eyes are already on you, sharp in the dim light, unreadable in a way that makes your heart ache. You expect anger, shame, maybe even guilt flickering across his face, but there’s nothing. Just the blank weight of him, watching. The longer he looks at you, the heavier it becomes, until the tears sting behind your lashes and spill freely down your cheeks. You try to turn your head away, try to hide the evidence, but his gaze doesn’t let you escape.

His lips press together, jaw shifting as if he’s holding something back, some truth that can’t be spoken aloud. You wait, trembling, hoping, but nothing comes. Instead, after what feels like a lifetime, his hand lifts. His fingers brush the side of your face, calloused pads catching the wet trails of your tears. He wipes one away, then another, his thumb ghosting across your cheekbone. But the touch isn’t tender. It isn’t gentle. It’s mechanical, thoughtless, like a reflex, a gesture done simply because it’s what one is supposed to do when someone is crying. Not because he wants to. Not because he feels anything at all. “Jake…” Your voice breaks around his name, heavy and fragile all at once, but he still doesn’t respond. His hand lingers for a second more, then falls away. 

And just like that, he turns from you. No explanation. No comfort. He shifts his body onto his side, his bare back stretching across your vision like a wall built in an instant, shutting you out. The muscles of his shoulders tense, then slacken, his breath evening out as if he’s already surrendering himself to sleep. The silence grows unbearable. You stare at the line of his spine, the way it rises and falls with each inhale, the faint sheen of sweat cooling on his skin. You wonder if he feels anything at all, guilt, regret, even shame, or if this, too, will be something he can just fold into the background of his life, like shadows swallowed by night. 

Your own body doesn’t grant you the same mercy. You lie there, naked and raw, every nerve ending still trembling with the ghost of what you did, what you shouldn’t have done. The mattress smells like him, like you both, like something ruined. And though exhaustion drags at your limbs, though the storm outside could lull even the restless into sleep, you remain awake. Your eyes sting, wet lines carving paths down your cheeks until your hair dampens beneath them. You try to be quiet, careful not to let the small, hiccuping sobs shake the space between you. Because that’s the cruelest part: the boy who held your body, who knew the shape of your breath and the tremor of your pulse, is now no more than a stranger lying inches away. A stranger who turns his back, closes his eyes, and leaves you alone with what the two of you destroyed.

 Eventually, even grief finds its way into slumber. The weight of your tears, the ache in your chest, the storm’s lullaby, they drag you under, slow and unwilling. You fall asleep naked, tear-streaked, curled into yourself beside your best friend’s boyfriend. And in that fragile sleep, the guilt is quiet, but it waits, like a storm that never really passes, only pauses, ready to break again come morning.

You wake with a start, though it isn’t the thunder or the hiss of rain that pulls you from the shallow grip of sleep, it’s warmth. The press of lips against skin, soft but deliberate, a trail of heat weaving itself up your inner thigh. At first, you think you’re dreaming; the sensation is too intimate, too dangerous to belong to reality. But then another kiss, closer this time, and another, the air shivering around each one, drags you fully awake. Your breath stutters in your throat, a gasp breaking free before you can stop it. “Jake!” The name spills out of you, half warning, half plea, trembling like a secret torn from its hiding place. 

His head lifts at the sound, slow and sure, and when his eyes meet yours, the world tilts again. He smirks, that crooked, dangerous curve of his lips, the kind that feels like it knows too much about you already. His hair is messy, shadowing his forehead, and his mouth is still glistening from where he’s been kissing you. There’s nothing apologetic in his gaze, nothing uncertain, it’s bold, defiant, as if he’s daring you to stop him. Your hand, traitorous and desperate, falls into his hair before you can think better of it. The strands are damp with sweat, soft and unruly between your fingers. You fist them lightly, a whine breaking from you as he presses his mouth back to your thigh, closer, closer, until the sound of your own pulse fills your ears.

This wasn’t how you thought the morning would go. You thought, hoped, maybe that there would be words, however sharp, however painful. That the two of you would name the thing that happened in the storm’s dark, dissect it, tear it apart until it was just a mistake you could both bury. But Jake, Jake seems intent on something else entirely. He chooses silence, chooses the heat of your body over the heaviness of words, his mouth a language far more dangerous than anything spoken. And to your own shame, to your own ruin, you’re okay with that. The thought of speaking terrifies you more than this does. Talking would mean facing it, facing him, facing yourself. This way, with his hands gripping your thighs and his mouth worshipping the soft parts of you, you can almost convince yourself the world outside doesn’t exist. That there’s no betrayal laced into every breath, no guilt threading itself into your bones. 

“Jake,” you whisper again, softer this time, like a prayer and a surrender all at once. He looks up from between your legs, that smirk still painted across his mouth, and you know, you know, that this silence he’s chosen isn’t empty. It’s deliberate, sharp-edged. It’s him telling you without words that last night wasn’t an accident, and this morning won’t be the end.

His mouth lingered at the very edge of you, tongue tracing maddening patterns over your inner thigh, the heat of his breath skimming against skin already hypersensitive from want. Each kiss felt like a promise left unfulfilled, each pause like a cruel delay. You fisted the sheets, your chest rising and falling in shallow bursts. “Please,” you whispered, voice thin and aching, your fingers sinking into his hair like it was the only anchor you had. He tilted his head, the curve of his lips caught in a smile that was equal parts sin and satisfaction. 

“If you want something,” Jake murmured, his voice low, velvet edged with steel, “then ask for it.” His hands tightened at your thighs, thumbs pressing into your flesh hard enough to leave ghosts of bruises, holding you wide open for him. He leaned close, exhaling one soft, deliberate breath across your soaked core. The sensation was devastating in its simplicity, sending shivers rippling down your spine. Your hips jerked upward of their own accord, chasing him, a broken whine tearing from your throat before you could stop it. 

“I want your tongue,” you moaned, the words raw, stripped of pride, as your hands shoved at the back of his head with unrestrained desperation. The need bled through you, dissolving every other thought you might’ve had about restraint, about reason, about the lines you’d already crossed. “Please, Jakey,” you begged, the nickname tumbling from your lips like a prayer and a curse all at once. A harsh sound left him, half-growl, half-groan, and his palm pressed flat against your hip, pinning you to the mattress with a force that warned you who was in control. And then, finally, his tongue was on you. Hot, wet, unrelenting. He licked into you like a man undone, like someone who had been imagining this taste for years, and now that he had it, he was never going to stop.

Your head fell back, a choked cry escaping you, your fingers clawing at the sheets until your knuckles burned white. “Holy—” The curse split off into a gasp, shuddering from deep in your chest as he moved faster, hungrier, his mouth sealed around your clit with devastating precision. He sucked, adding pressure that sent fire cracking through your veins, making your thighs twitch and close instinctively around his head, but he only growled against you, prying them apart again with brutal strength. “Fuck, Jake,” you sobbed, body writhing beneath him, untamed, ungovernable, like an animal finally loosed from its cage. You were incoherent, nothing but need, and he devoured you like that was exactly how he wanted you, messy, ruined, desperate. His hands abandoned your hips for your chest, greedy palms closing over your breasts, kneading rough circles into the supple flesh before his thumbs flicked against your nipples. The dual sensation had you arching up, back bowed, a cry tearing from you so raw it felt like surrender.

Every stroke of his tongue was measured destruction, every groan vibrating through your body like a second heartbeat. He relished you, consumed you, not with patience but with urgency, with a hunger that mirrored your own. You could feel him smiling against you, feel his satisfaction in the way your body buckled, your legs trembling as you lost all sense of yourself in his mouth, in his hands, in the way Jake knew exactly how to ruin you. Your body was trembling now, every nerve raw and aching, each stroke of his tongue pulling you higher and higher into a place you weren’t sure you’d ever come back from. His mouth worked at you with a rhythm both relentless and deliberate, like he was crafting the moment of your undoing with the precision of someone who wanted to memorize exactly how you broke. Your thighs shook uncontrollably, your heels dragging against the mattress, desperate for purchase, desperate for anything to ground you while he took you apart.

“Jake,” you gasped, his name a broken plea, falling from your lips over and over, each repetition more fragile than the last. Your fingers tangled in his hair, pulling, tugging, grounding yourself in the rough strands while your other hand reached blindly across the sheets, clutching at nothing, at everything. You couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t stop arching into his mouth like your body had decided for you, like it was no longer yours to control but his.

His groans rumbled against you, deep vibrations that spread through your core, amplifying every flick of his tongue, every calculated swirl, every sharp suck at your clit. He was devouring you with such intensity it felt dangerous, like he meant to ruin you in a way you’d never recover from. His hands held your thighs open like iron bands, his grip bruising, refusing to let you twist away even as the pleasure became unbearable. You felt it building fast, violent, a tidal wave rising from the pit of your stomach and curling through every inch of your body. You tried to warn him, words tumbling out half-formed, incoherent, “I’m close, Jake, I’m gonna, fuck, I can’t—” but your warning broke into a sob, your chest heaving as the tension coiled impossibly tight.

“Cum for me,” he growled into you, pulling his mouth away for only a split second before returning with even more hunger, his tongue pressing harder, faster, dragging you straight to the edge. “Fall apart for me, sweet girl. Let me taste it.” That was all it took. The wave crashed, sharp and unforgiving, and your world detonated. Your orgasm tore through you in violent shudders, hips jerking wildly against his mouth as he held you down, devouring every ounce of your release. You cried out, a broken, guttural sound you couldn’t contain, your fingers pulling his hair so hard you thought you might tear it from his scalp. Your vision blurred, white-hot sparks dancing behind your eyes as your body convulsed, every muscle locking tight before dissolving into nothing but tremors. 

He didn’t stop. His tongue kept working you through it, drawing out every spasm, every gasp, until you were shaking uncontrollably, until tears slipped down the sides of your face and your chest rose and fell in frantic, uneven bursts. Only then did he slow, his mouth pulling back, lips glistening, a satisfied smirk curling at his face as he looked up at you, ruined, breathless, undone.

“You taste like fucking heaven,” Jake rasped, his voice wrecked, his eyes dark with something unreadable. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then licked his lips anyway, like he couldn’t bear to waste a drop of you. You lay sprawled out before him, chest heaving, limbs trembling, the echo of your orgasm still sparking faintly through your veins. Your voice was gone, your body spent, but your eyes found his, wide and vulnerable, as if you weren’t sure whether to thank him or hate him for what he’d just done to you.

The air in the room was still heavy with your release, the remnants of it clinging to your skin like dew on glass. Jake leaned back on his elbows, chest rising and falling with a languid calm, as if what had just happened were the most natural thing in the world. His lips glistened faintly, the ghost of you still on him, and he looked at you with a crooked smirk, a spark of satisfaction dancing in his eyes. “Would you like breakfast?” he asked, his voice unhurried, almost casual, as though he were offering something simple, like a glass of water, instead of dangling the weight of normalcy in the space between you. 

Your head turned sharply toward him, your body still trembling, your chest heaving with the echoes of pleasure that hadn’t yet settled. For a moment, the words didn’t even make sense, breakfast, food, morning, how could such ordinary things exist in the wake of what had just unfolded? You could only nod, dumbly, slowly, like a puppet whose strings had been cut and poorly tied back together. The nod came too late, awkward, and you hated yourself for it. You stood, legs unsteady beneath you, and reached for the nearest fabric, a blanket tossed carelessly at the side of the mattress. It did little to cover you, slipping off one bare shoulder as you stumbled toward the bathroom. Jake’s eyes followed you, though he said nothing more, and the silence felt both relieving and suffocating, pressing in on you with each hesitant step. 

Inside the bathroom, the air was cooler, quieter. The mirror stared back at you, cruel and unflinching. You hadn’t expected to look different, yet somehow you had, your hair was disheveled, your lips swollen, your skin blotched with the warmth of touch that didn’t belong to you. You were still naked, exposed, and the sight of yourself made your stomach turn. It wasn’t just your reflection, it was the knowledge behind it. Mimi’s apartment. Mimi’s walls. Mimi’s toothbrush still propped neatly by the sink. And Jake, Mimi’s boyfriend, lying just outside the door, his smell clinging to you, his touch still burned into your skin. 

The weight of it broke something open inside you. A sob rose before you could stop it, and you slapped your hand to your mouth, desperate to keep the sound trapped in your throat. Your body shook as the tears spilled anyway, hot rivers streaking down your cheeks. The ache wasn’t just guilt, it was disgust, a hollowing sense that you had stepped outside of yourself, that you had become something you swore you never would. For a moment, you pressed your forehead to the cool glass, trembling, trying to steady your breathing. You hated how small you felt, how fractured. You hated how badly you wanted to crawl back into the warmth of that mattress, into Jake’s arms, even as you drowned in the knowledge of what it meant.

Eventually, you wiped at your cheeks with trembling hands, collecting yourself piece by piece. You straightened, adjusted the blanket over your body, forced your expression back into something neutral, something less raw. You practiced a smile, though it quivered and fell apart the moment it touched your lips.

When you finally opened the door, stepping back into the quiet of the apartment, Jake was still there. Still waiting. His gaze flickered to you, unreadable, as though he’d known all along what you’d done in the bathroom but chose not to acknowledge it. And so you walked forward, each step deliberate, a performance of composure while inside you carried the wreckage of what had just begun.

Steam from the running water was already beginning to whisper against the walls of the bathroom when you padded back into the living room, blanket draped loosely around your shoulders, skin still marked with what had happened between you. Jake was in the kitchen now, moving with a calm domesticity that made your chest ache, spatula in hand as though the smell of eggs and sizzling butter could disguise the fact that your world had just caved in. His hair was mussed, his body wrapped in the soft ordinariness of gray sweats and a t-shirt, a look so familiar it hurt. You lingered in the doorway, words caught like fish bones in your throat. Finally, you forced them out, fragile, trembling. “I’m going to shower,” you murmured, as if confessing something dangerous. “But I’ll need to go home to grab some clothes first.” 

Jake didn’t look up immediately. He tapped the spatula against the pan, as if the rhythm could steady him. Only when he turned did you see the faint tug at his lips, not a smile, not quite mockery, just something resigned, casual. “You can borrow some of Mimi’s clothing,” he said, like it was nothing at all, like it wasn’t the cruelest suggestion you’d ever heard. The air left your lungs in a sharp inhale. Borrow Mimi’s clothing. As if the act of draping her fabric across your body could ever disguise the stain of what you had done. As if wearing her t-shirt, her shorts, could make you less naked in your betrayal. The words you wanted to speak, sharp, jagged, furious, stayed buried. Instead, you nodded, a tiny motion that felt like swallowing glass. “Okay,” you said, though the syllables tasted bitter on your tongue. 

You turned before he could see the storm in your face, feet carrying you down the hall you knew too well. Each step was a trespass. Mimi’s door creaked softly as you pushed it open, the room unchanged, except the mattress from their bed, it was the same from all the nights you’d sat cross-legged on her bed, whispering secrets, laughing until your stomach ached. The air was still scented faintly with her perfume, sweet and floral, clinging to the curtains, to the quilt, to the very walls themselves. It made your eyes sting. You went to her closet with heavy hands, fingers brushing over fabric that wasn’t yours. The cotton of her shirts, soft from too many washes. The shorts she wore on lazy Sunday mornings. Each hanger rattled with the echo of her presence, each garment a reminder that this was her space, her life, her love, and you were the intruder. Still, you reached in, because what else could you do?

You pulled a shirt free, pale and unassuming, and a pair of shorts that felt too intimate, too hers. Standing there, holding them, you thought of how they would look on you, how Jake would see them on you, and the thought carved you open. You were a thief wearing another girl’s skin, draping her innocence over your guilt. Clutching the clothes to your chest, you slipped into the bathroom, shutting the door softly behind you. The shower roared louder now, steam fogging the mirror, curling the air around your naked form. You leaned against the sink, staring at the reflection you could barely face. Mimi’s clothes rested on the counter, folded neatly like offerings, like confessions. And as the water beat against porcelain, you realized that no amount of steam could wash away what you had done, and no borrowed cotton could disguise the truth that clung to your skin. 

The steam still clung to your skin when you emerged from the bathroom, hair damp and curling against your shoulders, Mimi’s borrowed shirt hanging loose on your frame. It smelled faintly of her fabric softener, that sweet floral note that made your stomach twist, but you forced yourself to keep moving, to pretend the cotton didn’t burn against your skin like an accusation.

The apartment was filled with the warm, homey scent of butter and eggs, the faint crackle of bacon cooling on a plate. Jake was setting the table, his movements calm, almost domestic, as though he hadn’t just broken you open hours ago in a storm of desperation and want. His t-shirt clung to his shoulders in ways you’d memorized a hundred times but had never been meant to see like this. He looked up when he heard your steps, and a smile touched his mouth, easy, practiced, like it cost him nothing.

“Food’s done,” he said simply, gesturing to the plates. His voice was warm but not intimate, the kind of tone a friend might use on a lazy Sunday morning. That casualness made your chest ache more than if he’d looked guilty. You nodded, unable to summon words, and moved to sit down at the table. He sat across from you, the distance between you somehow both too close and unbearably far. The clinking of forks and knives was the only sound, the silence swallowing the air whole, pressing against your ribs like a weight. You chewed without tasting, each bite heavy in your mouth.

Finally, you couldn’t bear it. The quiet was louder than any scream, more damning than any confession. Your fork paused midair, trembling slightly, and you forced the words out. “Jake, can we—”

But he cut you off before you could finish, his voice sharp, decisive. “Can we not talk about it?” The words landed like a slap, stealing the air from your lungs. You blinked at him, stunned. Not talk about it? How could he suggest silence when every inch of your body still remembered him, when the sheets in the other room still smelled of betrayal? He must have seen the shock flash across your face, because he softened slightly, running a hand through his hair as if searching for the right defense. “I just—” he exhaled, eyes darting away from yours. “I just want to have fun, okay? Can we just… do that? No guilt, no heavy talks. Just… fun.” 

Your throat tightened, questions clawing their way up, desperate to be spoken. What did “fun” mean to him? Was it stolen mornings like this, where you played at normalcy while your heart crumbled? Was it pretending Mimi didn’t exist, pretending you weren’t both betraying someone who trusted you? You wanted to ask, to demand answers, to scream. But instead, you sat there, studying the boy across from you, the boy who was both comfort and ruin, who had pulled you into the fire and now asked you to dance in the flames. And somehow, impossibly, you found yourself nodding.

“Okay,” you whispered, though the word tasted like ash. You managed a small, broken smile. “Yeah… we deserve to have fun.” The table fell silent again, but it was a silence remade, filled with unsaid truths and the weight of everything you’d agreed to bury. The eggs cooled on your plate, untouched, as you wondered just how long you could survive pretending “fun” was enough.

The walk back home after breakfast was quiet, almost too quiet. The streets hummed with the ordinary life of a city morning, neighbors watering their small front gardens, a child skipping rope on the sidewalk, the hiss of a bus braking at the corner. Everything looked painfully normal, and you carried the weight of your sin like an invisible shroud, heavy and suffocating. The taste of bacon and eggs lingered on your tongue, but it wasn’t breakfast you remembered, it was Jake’s voice, Jake’s request, Jake’s silence. It was the word fun echoing like a curse, a fragile bandage stretched across a wound too deep to heal. And then you saw it.

Your mailbox hung crooked against the gate, the metal squeaking as you pulled it open. Inside, among the useless flyers and bills, lay one envelope. White. Sealed. Your name scrawled in handwriting you knew as well as your own. At the top corner, stamped clear as day: Seoul Rehabilitation Facility. You froze, blood draining from your face, the world tilting beneath your feet. Your heart plummeted to your stomach, and suddenly you were trembling. Mimi. She had written back. She had actually written you back.

The air left your lungs in a sharp, broken gasp. For a moment, you couldn’t move, couldn’t think, only stare at the black letters that spelled her absence, her distance, her exile. That envelope might as well have been a stone tied around your neck, dragging you under. Then you snapped back, fumbling with clumsy fingers, nearly ripping the paper in half as you tore it open. You didn’t care about delicacy, this wasn’t a relic, this was salvation, or condemnation, and you had to know which. The folded sheet slipped out, and there it was: her name, the first line like a knife slipped beneath your ribs.

Hi. I have a few things to say and I hope you take these words and let them really sink in. I mean them with my whole heart.

Your heart stuttered, your throat constricted. You had missed her, missed her voice, her laughter, the steady way she anchored you when everything else spun out of control. You had prayed for forgiveness, or at least for words that weren’t soaked in venom. And now, here they were, spilling across the page like blood. You read further, even though each word felt like barbed wire cutting into your palms.

I hate you. I hate you for putting me here. I hate that you think I was so pathetic that I needed to be locked away. Go to hell.

That was it. That was all. Short. Brutal. Final.

Your knees buckled, and you stumbled inside, slamming the door behind you as if shutting out the world would make the words go away. The letter shook in your grip, your eyes burning. Mimi had been gone for two weeks, two long weeks of silence, and you’d let yourself hope, stupidly, naively, that maybe she’d softened, maybe she’d begun to understand. That maybe you weren’t the villain she saw in her dreams. But her voice, etched in ink, left no doubt. She still hated you.

A rational part of you whispered that these were anger’s words, sharp and fleeting, that she was lashing out because she hurt. That maybe, in time, she would forgive. But that voice was drowned out by the jagged truth: the words cut anyway. They sliced you clean, leaving nothing but emptiness in their wake.

You slammed the letter down on the table, the paper fluttering like it wanted to escape your shaking hands. And then you grabbed your phone, her phone, his number already glowing on the screen like it was meant for this moment. Your thumb hovered for only a heartbeat before you pressed call. “Jake,” you whispered when the line clicked, your voice breaking, more plea than greeting.

“Did you get a letter too?”

No greeting, no hesitation. Straight to the marrow of it. You closed your eyes, pressing the phone tighter to your ear as though the plastic could anchor you in the storm. “Yes,” you whispered, your throat raw, the single syllable shuddering out of you like a confession. Silence stretched on the other end, thick and suffocating. You could almost hear his breathing, the heavy exhale of someone who already knew the answer but needed you to confirm it anyway.

“Was it bad?” His voice cracked on the word bad, as if it was too small a container for what you both were carrying.

“Yes,” you said again, sharper this time, the truth scraping up your throat like broken glass. “Bad doesn’t even—” Your words faltered, choked down by the swell of emotion you couldn’t seem to stem. He let out a bitter laugh, humorless and dry, like sand slipping through fingers. “Yeah,” he muttered, “figured as much.” Another pause, his silence filled with unspoken words, regret, anger, grief, things you couldn’t reach through the thin wire between you. And then, suddenly, his voice shifted, rough but deliberate. “Do you want to get a drink?”

The question hung there, absurd and yet not absurd at all. What else was there to do with this kind of pain but drown it, numb it, pretend for a few hours that it didn’t exist? Your lips parted, a protest caught somewhere between your teeth. You should have said no. You should have told him this was a bad idea, that you had already crossed lines you could never uncross, and liquor would only blur them further until there was no map back to who you used to be. But the words died in your throat, smothered by the aching want, for him, for release, for forgetting. “Yes,” you said instead, your voice quiet but firm, carrying a weight you didn’t want to examine.

There was a beat, and then you heard him exhale, a long drag of air as though your answer both relieved and condemned him. “Okay,” he said simply. No more, no less. You pulled the phone from your ear, staring at the black screen after the call ended, your reflection warped in its glassy surface. Your hands trembled, your chest heaved, but beneath all of it was that same bone-deep ache you couldn’t seem to shake. A drink. That was what he’d offered. A drink was simple, a drink was easy. But you both knew it was never going to just be that.

The bar was dimly lit, its walls bruised with amber shadows, its air heavy with the perfume of whiskey and fried food. The hum of voices bled together like a half-forgotten lullaby, and every now and then the sharp clink of glass against glass rose above it. When you pushed through the door, the chill of the night still clinging to your skin, you didn’t expect to see more than Jake waiting with that half-smile that could always undo you. But there they were, Heeseung, Jay, Sunghoon, sprawled around a table by the window, laughing at something one of them had said. For a moment you stood in the doorway, caught between surprise and something softer, almost fragile: the sudden awareness of belonging and of distance all at once. 

Jake looked up first, catching sight of you, and his expression shifted, warmth curling across his face. “Hey,” he said, his voice low, just for you even though the others could hear. You offered him a small smile in return, a threadbare gesture that couldn’t quite disguise the heaviness still lodged in your chest. Then Heeseung waved you over, a lazy sweep of his hand. “About time,” he said with a grin, his dark eyes glinting under the low light.

Sliding into the empty chair, you greeted them all. “Hi,” you said, the syllable barely more than breath, though you tried to coat it with brightness. Jake’s eyes flicked toward you, studying, as if to check whether your smile was real or borrowed. You didn’t touch him, didn’t lean closer, didn’t cross the invisible thread stretched between you, but still his presence seemed to hum against your skin like static. Drinks arrived quickly, cold condensation slipping down the glass. You let the sharpness of the first swallow burn its way down, something to distract from the raw echo of Mimi’s words still carved into your chest. Sunghoon leaned back in his seat, his voice easy, casual, but edged with curiosity. “So,” he asked, “how’s Mimi doing?”

The question landed like a stone dropped in water. The ripple reached you before you could prepare for it, and you froze, eyes darting to Jake. He looked at you, his jaw tightening for just a breath before he answered. “I’m not sure,” he said finally, voice flat but not unkind. “She won’t answer us.”

Silence lingered, fragile as glass, until Jay reached across the table, his hand brushing against the rim of his glass as if uncertain what to do with the weight of sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said, his words soft, steady, carrying more sincerity than anything else you’d heard tonight. “I can’t imagine how difficult that must be, for both of you.”

Jake nodded, his fingers drumming against the table in a restless rhythm. “Thanks,” he said, the word clipped but genuine. You felt your throat tighten, your lips parting as though you might add something, but the ache in your chest made it impossible, so you swallowed the words down with another sip of liquor. And just like that, as if the subject had been a wound they’d touched too closely, the conversation shifted, skipping to safer shores, sports, music, some half-hearted debate about the best late-night food spots in town.

The hours bent and stretched around you, and soon the glasses began to pile, the weight of alcohol softening your edges. Laughter grew louder, looser. Heeseung told a story about running into an old teacher, his animated gestures spilling beer across the table, and Sunghoon leaned in, teasing him mercilessly until Jay was nearly crying from laughter. Jake sat beside them, smiling, though his smile always seemed to linger a little too long when he looked at you. You drank more than you intended, each swallow another small rebellion against the gnawing voice inside you that whispered Mimi’s words again and again. The burn in your throat blurred into warmth, until soon your head felt light, the room wrapped in the cotton-soft haze of tipsiness. At one point, Sunghoon slid his glass toward you, eyebrows raised. “You can handle one more, right?” he teased. 

“Don’t encourage her,” Jake said quickly, though there was laughter in his voice, the sound curving around the sharpness of his earlier restraint.

“I’m fine,” you said, though your laugh cracked in the middle. You lifted the glass anyway, the weight of Jake’s gaze pressing against your hand as you drank. “I’m just going to use the bathroom.” You excused yourself away, stumbling to the bathroom through the dark of the bar, mounds of drunken people in your way. You push the door open with a huff. The bathroom was small, lit by a flickering bulb that cast shadows like trembling ghosts against the tiled walls. You leaned over the sink, your palms pressed flat to the porcelain, your reflection fractured in the mottled mirror. The alcohol hummed in your bloodstream, not enough to make you dizzy, but enough to soften the edges of the letter still etched into your chest. You had come here to breathe, to steal back a moment of quiet from the noise of the bar, from the constant weight of laughter and voices you couldn’t quite match. 

But then, a knock, a soft and insistent sound rattled the hollow door. For a moment your stomach turned, wondering if you’d taken too long, if some stranger was waiting. But then the voice came, low, familiar, unmistakable. “It’s me,” Jake said. His words slipped through the door like smoke, and you froze, caught between instinct and want.

You opened the door, the hinge creaking in protest, and there was Jake, framed by the hallway’s dim light, his face flushed with drink and something darker, deeper, burning in the set of his jaw. He stepped inside without asking, and before you could form a word, before your thoughts could catch up, his mouth was on yours. It wasn’t tentative. It wasn’t careful. It was fire meeting dry kindling, sudden and consuming, the press of his lips sparking against every nerve you had kept buried beneath grief and silence. His hands moved with a desperate certainty, sliding over your arms, down your sides, gripping your waist like he was terrified you might vanish if he let go. You gasped against him, the sound caught between protest and surrender, but he swallowed it whole, pulling you closer until your back met the cold tile wall.

“Jake—” you managed, breathless, breaking the kiss for just a heartbeat. His forehead pressed against yours, his breath hot, uneven.

“Don’t,” he whispered, voice roughened by urgency. “Don’t talk. Just… let me—please.” The plea in his tone unraveled you more than the kiss had. You felt the world tilt, your body betraying your mind, because some part of you, lonely, aching, wanted this too, had wanted it longer than you could bear to admit. His mouth found yours again, softer this time, though no less hungry, and his hands roamed like he was trying to memorize you by touch alone, the dip of your waist, the line of your hip, the trembling shiver of your ribs under his palm. 

“Jake,” you said again, your voice catching as his fingers brushed the hem of Mimi’s borrowed shirt, the irony slicing you even as heat coiled in your belly. His name left your lips like confession, like a prayer you shouldn’t be uttering, and still you didn’t push him away.

“I can’t stop,” he murmured against your mouth, every word a kiss in itself. “I don’t want to stop. Not with you. Not anymore.” 

The bathroom seemed to shrink around you, the walls pressing closer, the air thickening with the scent of him, soap, whiskey, something distinctly Jake. You felt trapped and freed all at once, as though the cage of grief you’d been carrying had finally cracked open, only to release something more dangerous. His hands kept moving, frantic and reverent all at once, and you let yourself dissolve under them, the taste of him erasing the bitterness that had lived on your tongue since Mimi’s letter. 

It was reckless, it was cruel, it was inevitable. But you didn't want it to stop. His lips found yours, frantic as his hands skimmed your body up and down. His hand found the base of your hair, pulling you to him deepening the kiss like he was trying to consume you, and you’d let him. You’d let him take every piece of you if that's what he wanted. You’d let him turn you inside out because he’s been doing it for years. This was Jake, your Jake. Before he was Mimi’s Jake he was your Jake. You had dreamed about feeling him this way and ever since the sex in his apartment and waking up to him between your thighs you could rarely think of anything else. 

He was all-consuming, his taste still burning on your lips, the press of him seared into your lungs like smoke. You broke from his mouth, chest heaving, sliding downward until your knees kissed the cold tile. If you weren’t so drunk on him, on whiskey and want, on the way his hands had mapped your body as though you were something sacred, you might have recoiled at the thought of kneeling on a bathroom floor sticky with spilled beer and bleach. But none of it mattered now. The filth of the bar seemed distant, muted, compared to the fever coursing through your veins. “Holy shit—” Jake’s voice came ragged, cracked open by disbelief, his wide eyes locked onto you like he couldn’t quite process that you were really there, sinking lower for him, undoing him piece by piece. His hand hovered at his side as if he didn’t trust himself to touch you, until instinct won out and his fingers tangled in your hair, trembling.

Your own hands worked quickly, clumsy in your eagerness, tugging at his belt with more force than grace. The metal clinked against itself, harsh and sharp, before finally loosening under your grip. You tugged his pants down just enough to free him, his cock heavy and thick in your hand, flushed at the tip. A rush of heat climbed your throat at the sight of it, the sheer weight of him in your palm. You leaned in, dragging your tongue slowly up his length, savoring the sharp intake of breath that tore from his lungs.

“It’s so big,” you whined softly, not even meaning to say it, the words spilling like a confession against the humid air. Your lips painted a trail of kisses along his shaft, each one deliberate, reverent, tasting salt and heat and the heady pulse of his arousal.

Jake’s answer was a sound that gutted you, a low, guttural moan that seemed to come from someplace deeper than his chest. His fist clenched tighter in your hair, pulling but not cruelly, begging rather than commanding. “Come on, sweet girl,” he rasped, his voice hoarse, cracked around the edges of desperation. “Please… just—please.” You tilted your head, smiling up at him, a soft, almost innocent curve of your lips that contrasted wickedly with the filth of what you were about to do. He looked ruined already, his face flushed, his jaw tight, his pupils blown wide. You lingered there, letting him feel the anticipation claw at him, before finally giving him what he wanted.

Your lips wrapped around his tip, sucking gently at first, teasing him, tasting the faint salt that clung to his skin. His breath hitched, sharp and loud, echoing off the cramped walls, and you felt the shudder ripple through him. You lowered yourself slowly, inch by inch, your throat tightening as you took him deeper, stretching yourself around him until you could feel the heat of him flood every corner of your mouth. “Just a little more,” Jake panted above you, his voice breaking apart, a rough prayer caught between his teeth. His hips twitched forward, restrained but barely, as though every part of him warred against the urge to lose control. His eyes shut tight for a moment, head tipping back against the door, the tendons in his neck straining. “Good girl,” he groaned, his hand fisting tighter in your hair, grounding himself in you. “You can take a little more, can’t you? Just, fuck, just a little more.”

The praise, the way it spilled from his lips like broken glass and honey, only pushed you further. You hollowed your cheeks, sliding down until he hit the back of your throat, gagging faintly around him but refusing to pull away. His hips jerked despite himself, a curse spilling from his lips, raw and unfiltered. He looked down at you then, eyes wide, dark, worshipping and sinful all at once, as though he couldn’t believe you were real, kneeling there, ruining yourself just for him. 

He was trembling above you, his whole body drawn taut like a bowstring. You could see the veins in his forearm flex with every twitch of his grip in your hair, could hear the uneven stutter of his breath as it fell ragged against the bathroom’s tiled walls. The bar’s muffled laughter and clinking glasses beyond the door barely reached you; all you knew was the small, enclosed world of Jake, his scent, his sounds, the taste of him filling your mouth until there was nothing else. Your tongue dragged slowly along the underside of his shaft as you pulled back, tracing every ridge, savoring the heavy throb against your lips. You let him slip free with a wet pop, the sound obscene in the hush of the bathroom. A thin strand of saliva stretched between your mouth and his tip, glistening before it snapped, and you licked it away with a smirk that made his jaw clench. 

“Fuck—” he groaned, his voice breaking, as if the sight of you undone yet grinning at his expense carved him open. His hips jerked forward like his body was trying to close the distance his restraint fought to keep. “You’re gonna kill me.”

You tilted your head, lips brushing over him again in a feather-light tease, leaving kisses along his length as though you were worshipping something divine. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” you murmured against his skin, your words muffled but heavy with intent. Your eyes flicked up to meet his, watching the way his stare darkened, torn between tenderness and hunger.

Jake’s hand tightened in your hair, urging but not forcing, guiding you with a desperate restraint. “Please,” he whispered again, the word trembling, as though pride itself had left him. “Don’t—don’t tease me like this.” Your smirk widened, a flicker of power rushing through you at the sight of him like this, Jake, who always carried himself with such easy charm, now unraveling, begging, coming apart because of you. You swirled your tongue around his tip before sinking your mouth back down, slower this time, dragging it out until his head fell back against the door with a dull thud.

“Jesus Christ,” he hissed, his chest heaving, his free hand slamming against the wall as though he needed something to steady him. His thighs trembled beneath your touch, his muscles twitching as you worked him deeper, your throat tight around him. You hollowed your cheeks, pulling a moan out of him that rattled from somewhere low in his chest, primal and raw. He tugged at your hair again, his body caught in the push and pull of need, his hips jerking forward only to stop himself, shaking with the effort of holding back. “God, you feel so fucking good,” he breathed, the words cracked and reverent, like a prayer.

Your nails grazed the backs of his thighs, grounding him, urging him, and the way his legs nearly buckled made something coil tight in your stomach. You pulled back again, slowly, your lips glistening as you licked a broad stripe up his cock, eyes locked on his. The sound of your breathing mingled with his own, the bathroom thick with the scent of sweat, sex, and need. “Say it,” you whispered, your voice breaking the silence with a soft command, one that made his eyes snap open to you. “Say you want me to make you cum.”

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing, his lips parting like he wanted to resist. But he couldn’t, not with you kneeling there, mouth wet and wanting, the weight of your stare pinning him down. His voice came low, broken, surrendering. “Make me cum, sweet girl. Please. Ruin me.” Your lips parted wider, sliding back down him, deeper this time, until your throat tightened around his length. His breath shattered into fragments above you, curses and half-formed prayers breaking in his mouth. His hand fisted harder in your hair, not rough enough to hurt but enough to anchor himself, because without you grounding him he would’ve floated straight out of his body.

He gasped your name like it was the only word he knew, his voice hoarse and cracking. “Fuck, god, you’re perfect. You’re—” His head tipped back again, his throat exposed, the line of his jaw cut sharp beneath the dim bathroom light. He looked like he was burning alive and begging for the fire not to stop. You set your rhythm slow at first, dragging him out, then swallowing him down again, letting your tongue swirl around him in a way that made his knees buckle. The bathroom floor pressed cold against your knees, but the heat radiating from Jake’s body drowned everything else out. He was trembling, unraveling, each moan deeper than the last.

Your hands pressed against his thighs, holding him steady as your mouth worked him, your tongue teasing the sensitive ridge until his hips betrayed him, jerking forward against your lips. “Shit, don’t stop, don’t stop—” he panted, the plea ripped from his lungs like he couldn’t control it. His fingers dug into your hair. You pulled back just enough to let your tongue drag across his tip, savoring the salty taste, then dove down again, taking more of him, pushing yourself until your eyes watered and his moan echoed off the tile. The sound was raw, guttural, something pulled out of the depths of him. You could feel him trembling beneath your hands, could hear the strain in his voice as he fought for control that was slipping through his fingers like sand.

His breathing grew ragged, shallow, each gasp catching like he couldn’t get enough air. “I’m—I’m so close,” he groaned, voice shaking, his hips stuttering despite the way he tried to hold them back. “Don’t stop, please, don’t—” And you didn’t. You worked him harder, your mouth and hands moving in tandem, your tongue flicking against him in ways that made his entire body twitch. The sounds spilling from him were unrestrained now, broken gasps and guttural moans, the kind of noise that would’ve had anyone on the other side of the door knowing exactly what was happening.

He pulled at your hair once more, his body convulsing as the wave finally broke. With a strangled moan he came undone, spilling into your mouth with a shudder that shook through his entire frame. His head thudded against the door, his throat baring a sound between a groan and your name. His free hand covered his mouth like he could muffle the force of it, but it was useless, he was too far gone. You swallowed him down, slow and deliberate, never looking away from the wreck he became above you. His body buckled, trembling as though he had been split apart, and when you finally pulled back his cock twitched against your lips, still sensitive, glistening. You licked him clean with the patience of someone who wanted to prolong his torment, drawing another broken curse from his lips.

When you finally sat back on your knees, breathless and flushed, Jake looked down at you with eyes blown wide and glassy. His chest heaved like he’d run miles, his skin damp with sweat, and for a moment he could only stare, lips parted, utterly ruined. “Holy fuck,” he whispered hoarsely, almost like he couldn’t believe what just happened. His hand reached for you then, not in command but in surrender, brushing your cheek as though you were the only thing tethering him back to earth. 

You lift from your spot on the floor as Jake breathes heavily beside you, working on putting himself back into his pants and fixing himself back up. After cleaning yourself up a bit you reach for the door. The door to the bar’s bathroom creaked open as if protesting your exit, the dim hallway yawning before you in neon-lit shadow. Jake’s hand was still warm on your wrist, his grip a tether that pulled you forward, stumbling, your bodies brushing as though you hadn’t yet disentangled from the fever you left behind on that tiled floor. 

But in the haze of the bar, the dark lights casting shadows over his face was Heeseung. He stood there waiting, as if fate had staged him just outside, his tall frame catching the dim light from a buzzing overhead bulb. His eyes widened, locking onto yours, then flicking to Jake’s hand still on you. His face was an open wound of realization, shock painted in strokes too sharp to be missed. The air around the three of you thickened, oppressive, like smoke choking the throat. You froze, pulse thundering in your ears. The laughter and chatter from the bar carried faintly down the hall, but here it felt as if the whole world had narrowed to this silent collision. 

Heeseung’s lips parted, but no words came. Instead, his gaze faltered, sliding away with an awkwardness that said more than accusation ever could. His jaw tightened, shoulders squaring, and then he simply moved, brushing past with a stiffness that was almost painful to watch. His shoulder brushed yours, fleeting and electric, before he disappeared into the bathroom, shutting the door firmly behind him. Jake cursed under his breath, a quiet, rough “fuck” that scraped out of his throat. His jaw worked, tension flashing in his features, but instead of lingering in the silence Heeseung left behind, he tugged at your hand. “Come on,” he murmured, pulling you back toward the main room, as though forward motion alone could erase what had just happened.

The bar swallowed you whole again, neon signs glowing against walls stained with time, glasses clinking in every direction, the low thrum of bass vibrating through the floorboards. The scent of beer, sweat, and cheap perfume hung heavy. Jay and Sunghoon were still at their table, two girls now draped over their sides, laughter spilling from their lips like champagne. You smoothed your hair, pasted on a smile, and leaned toward them. “We’re heading out,” you announced, pitching your voice steady, though the edges trembled with leftover adrenaline. 

Jay didn’t even lift his head, too occupied with the girl whispering into his ear. Sunghoon, lazier, tilted his chin up just enough to grin at you. “Yeah, yeah,” he drawled, his words softened by liquor. He flapped a dismissive hand, attention drifting back to the girl twirling her hair at his shoulder. You and Jake exchanged a glance, half relieved, half absurd and then turned away. The night air outside was a balm, cool and bracing after the heavy press of the bar’s atmosphere. You gasped softly at the shock of it, your breath rising like smoke into the crisp dark. Jake’s laugh cracked beside you, low and unsteady, and then your own giggle spilled free, the absurdity of what had just happened unraveling in shared hysteria.

“Heeseung’s face,” you whispered, covering your mouth with your hand, though laughter still burst through your fingers. 

Jake shook his head, his own grin crooked, half-embarrassed. “God, he didn’t even say anything. Just, just looked at us like…” He trailed off into another laugh, rough around the edges. Then quieter, almost to himself: “Shit.” The two of you stumbled across the lot, your laughter tapering into quiet giggles, then into silence, until the only sounds were the distant music leaking from the bar’s open doors and the crunch of gravel under your shoes. Jake unlocked the car, and you slid into the passenger seat, the leather cool against your legs. He climbed in beside you, his hands gripping the wheel though he didn’t start the engine.

You studied his profile, the sharp cut of cheekbone in the glow of the streetlight, the way his brows knit together in concentration. “Are you okay to drive?” you asked softly, the words heavy in the close air of the car. He stayed still for a moment, then glanced at you, his eyes shadowed and unreadable. “Maybe not,” he admitted, his voice low, almost sheepish. His fingers flexed against the steering wheel before loosening their grip. “Maybe we should just… park for a while. Wait it out.”

The suggestion settled between you, thick with implication. You nodded slowly, the motion small, deliberate. “Yeah,” you murmured. “That’s smart.” Jake shifted the car into gear, easing it across the lot, past the noise and bustle of the entrance. Streetlamps arched above, casting fleeting pools of light through the windshield, cutting his face into flickering slices of brightness and shadow. With every turn, the sound of music and laughter behind you grew fainter, until it was only a dull echo swallowed by the night.

Finally, he pulled into a darker corner of the lot, where trees leaned heavy over cracked pavement and the hum of the highway was a distant ghost. He killed the engine, leaving only the ticking of cooling metal and the uneven rhythm of your breath. The silence felt alive, brimming with unsaid words, with the weight of what had happened and what might happen still. The car became its own small world, sealed tight, the rest of the night locked outside.

The car became a coffin of silence, sealed tight and suffocating. The night outside was heavy with shadows, the rain tapering off to a faint mist, streetlights casting pale, fractured halos against the windshield. You sat still in the passenger seat, your hands clenched in your lap, and Jake sat next to you like a statue, his knuckles white against the steering wheel, his chest rising and falling in uneven bursts. The silence was not peaceful. It was loud, a scream disguised as quiet, each unspoken word stretching the air until it throbbed between you.

You found yourself the first to break. The words tumbled out, shaky, but true. “What are we doing?”

The question hung there, heavy as smoke, heavier still when Jake let out a sigh so deep it sounded like it had been stored inside him for years. He tilted his head back against the seat, eyes shut as if he couldn’t bear to look at you when he answered. “I don’t know.”And you did know what he meant. You knew without further explanation. This, whatever this was, was wrong, dangerously wrong. It was betrayal wrapped in desire, grief woven into longing. But why did it feel so devastatingly right? Why, when his voice cracked with uncertainty, did your heart still lurch toward him, a moth to a flame that promised only to burn?

Another silence followed, thicker this time, pressing down on your chest. You could almost feel your pulse in your throat as you turned your head, watching him. He looked tired, shadows carved under his eyes, but beneath that exhaustion was something more, something alive, restless, and clawing at the edges of his composure. And for a moment, a wild moment, you thought you could tell him. You thought you could unravel it all, lay it bare, tell him the words you’d swallowed for years: I love you. I’ve loved you for as long as I’ve known you, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

So you leaned toward him, mouth parting with a trembling inhale. “Jake, I—” But you never finished. Because his mouth crashed against yours before the confession could take shape, stealing it from your tongue. It wasn’t gentle, it wasn’t measured, it was desperate, clumsy, the kind of kiss that scraped teeth and gasped for air. His hand cupped the side of your face with a fevered urgency, pulling you closer, closer, until the line between where you ended and he began no longer seemed to exist.

You gasped into him, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt, the world outside vanishing until there was only the humid fog of the car, the taste of him, alcohol and salt and sorrow, and the feral way his lips moved against yours. The kiss turned quickly, dangerously, into heat: your mouths devouring, teeth catching, breath spilling into one another’s lungs. His hands slid down, over your jaw, your neck, your sides, grasping as though he feared you’d vanish if he didn’t hold you tight enough. “God,” Jake breathed against your lips, pulling back only for the smallest fraction of a second before surging forward again, hungrier now, his voice ragged. “I can’t stop.”

And neither could you.

The kiss deepened, every second heavier, hotter, until the air inside the car felt suffocating. His hand tangled in your hair, tugging just enough to tilt your head back so his mouth could roam lower, your jaw, your throat, the tender hollow beneath your ear, each kiss searing, each touch unraveling the thin thread of restraint holding the both of you together. Your breath stuttered, a plea escaping before you could even think. “Jake…”

But he swallowed it with another kiss, this one rough, like he wanted to erase the space between you entirely, as though he believed he could crawl inside your skin and stay there. The car was no longer a car, it was a confessional, a battlefield, a sanctuary, a prison. And you were trapped inside it with him, your hearts pounding against the wrongness of it all, but still, you clung to it, clung to him, because it felt too good to let go. Your hands fumble in the dimness, clumsy with urgency, with the clatter of need ringing through your chest. The fabric of his shirt catches on your fingers, your knuckles scraping against the warmth of his skin as you tug it upward. He helps you, impatient, peeling it off in one swift motion, the cotton whispering across his shoulders before it’s discarded somewhere in the darkness of the car. 

His chest gleams faintly in the low light, smooth planes of skin stretched over muscle, and you can’t help but fall into him, mouth greedy, leaving wet kisses along the sharp edge of his jaw, the column of his throat, the pounding pulse beneath it. You map him with lips and teeth, as though claiming every inch could keep him tethered to you, as though this frantic devotion could be enough to explain the storm inside you. “Want you…” The words spill out between kisses, a whimper more than a confession, your voice high and airy, trembling with need. Your hands explore him blindly, skimming the ridges of his torso, desperate to touch more, desperate to erase every inch of distance.

Jake groans, low and ragged, the sound vibrating through his chest as his hands close around your breasts, kneading through the thin barrier of your top. His touch makes your back arch, your breath catch, as if he’s discovered the strings that hold you together and begun tugging them loose. His thumbs sweep across your peaks, and the sensitivity has you gasping, clutching harder at him. “Yeah?” he teases, though his own voice is frayed at the edges, thick with arousal. You can feel the tremor in his restraint, the coil wound tight inside him as his free hand drags at the waistband of his jeans. He yanks them down just far enough, fumbling with urgency, until his cock springs free, thick and heavy, flushed with heat. The sight alone knocks the air from your lungs. He fists himself once, slowly, deliberately, before looking back up at you with hooded eyes that burn. “How bad do you want it, baby?” 

“So bad,” you cry, the words broken, unpolished, raw with hunger. You reach for your own pants, shoving them down with frantic fingers, clumsy from the alcohol still fogging your body, but sharp enough in your desire to ache. The denim tangles at your ankles before you kick it away, your hands shaking as you bare yourself for him. “Please, Jake. Please.”

His teeth catch on his bottom lip, eyes dark, fixed on you like you’re the only thing left in the world worth wanting. His hand finds your wrist, then the other, guiding you with firm control. “Ride me,” he orders, his tone deep and rough, no hesitation in it, just hunger. The command strikes through you, a jolt straight to your core, and you obey without thought. You swing one leg over his lap, straddling him in the cramped space of the car, the closeness suffocating in the best possible way. The steering wheel looms inches behind you, but all you can focus on is the way Jake’s body feels beneath yours, solid and hot, the anticipation thrumming like a second heartbeat. You hover over him, your thighs quivering with restraint, his cock pressed against your folds, slickness coating him as you tease yourself, dragging his tip up and down your entrance. 

“Fuck,” Jake hisses, head tipping back against the headrest, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows hard. His hands grip your hips tight, fingers digging crescents into your skin, grounding himself in the feel of you. His eyes flutter shut, but his body arches upward, chasing the friction you give him, waiting for the inevitable. And then you sink down. A sharp breath catches in your throat, your nails clawing into his bare shoulders as he fills you, inch by inch, stretching you wide until the air leaves your lungs entirely. It’s too much and not enough all at once, the kind of overwhelming pleasure that borders on pain, that makes your body tremble as it accommodates him. Jake groans, guttural, his hands tightening on your waist as though to steady you, or himself, as you take him to the hilt.

The world outside the fogged-up windows vanishes, blurred into nothing, as you clutch him close and let him consume you whole. The moment you begin to move, it’s reckless, frantic, a pace born out of desperation rather than patience. Your thighs burn with the effort, the confined space of the car making every movement feel clumsy and chaotic, but none of that matters. What matters is the way he feels inside you, thick, overwhelming, stretching you open again and again with every sharp rise and fall of your hips. You cling to his shoulders for balance, nails digging into the taut muscle, using his body as leverage as you bounce along his length. Each downward push knocks the breath from your lungs, each upward drag leaves you aching for the plunge again.

Jake’s breath comes out ragged, torn from his throat as though it’s costing him something to even keep up. His head tips back against the headrest, eyes squeezed shut, jaw clenched, but his hands are everywhere, clutching at your waist, dragging over your thighs, finding their way down to fist at the flesh of your ass. His grip is bruising, anchoring you to him as though he’s terrified you might slip away. “I’m not—” his words cut off into a groan, his chest heaving beneath you, “I’m not gonna last long if you keep tightening around me like that, sweet girl.” 

The pet name, hushed and hoarse, makes your heart trip over itself even in the midst of the chaos. He’s panting now, broken sounds spilling from his lips as his large palm spreads across the curve of your ass, guiding you, forcing you down harder, deeper, as though he can’t bear to let you set the pace. Then, suddenly, the sting of his hand lands sharp against your skin, a smack that echoes in the tight space of the car, making you jolt and moan all at once. The sound only fuels him. He groans, low and guttural, and kneads the tender spot he just struck, molding you back into his grasp. “Tight fucking pussy,” he growls, voice frayed and dangerous, “sucking me in like you don’t ever want to let me go.”

“Jakey—” the nickname tumbles from your lips, a whimper, high and needy, as your rhythm falters for a moment, your body trembling from the mixture of pain and bliss. Your hand slips from his shoulder, falling flat against his chest, feeling the frantic beat of his heart hammering against your palm. You can’t find words big enough, eloquent enough, to describe what he’s doing to you, what you’re doing together. All you can manage are half-formed pleas and broken praises, spilling from you in a haze. “So good,” you cry, breath shuddering, “so, so good—” 

The alcohol still buzzing in your system strips away any hesitation, any lingering shame. You let yourself go completely, surrendering to the heat, to the rhythm of your body moving against his, to the raw animalistic need that drives you. You chase your own ruin like it’s the only thing left that matters, fucking yourself dumb on his cock, your hips finding their own punishing tempo. The car rocks faintly with the force of it, windows fogging deeper, the scent of sweat and sex clinging to the air like smoke. And through it all, Jake is beneath you, undone, unraveling, his voice rough with curses and praise, his hands dragging you back down onto him over and over again, like he never wants this moment to end.

Your body keeps moving, reckless, breathless, every drop of restraint bled out of you in the fogged-up cocoon of the car. The rhythm you’ve fallen into is brutal, hips rising and falling, muscles straining, each slam of your body against his rattling the seat beneath you. Every nerve in your body feels alive, lit like a fuse, chasing the fire you know is coming. Your thighs quake, trembling with the effort, but still you don’t stop, you can’t. You ride him harder, faster, as though the heat itself is keeping you alive.

Jake’s hands are everywhere at once, clawing at your hips, dragging you down deeper onto him until you’re certain there’s no part of you left untouched by him. His voice cracks, a strangled sound that’s half groan, half plea. “Fuck—baby, slow down or I—” His sentence splinters into a sharp moan, his head falling forward, forehead pressed to your collarbone, sweat dripping hot against your skin. His hands clench, bruising you with their insistence, trying to ground himself in the madness of it. “You’re so tight—so fucking perfect—I can’t—”

But you’re beyond hearing, beyond logic. All you can do is whine his name, over and over again, your voice cracking each time you hit the bottom of him. “Jake—Jakey—” It’s a chant, a prayer, your entire world narrowed down to the drag of him inside you, the way he splits you apart only to put you back together in the same breath. You collapse forward, pressing your mouth to his shoulder, biting at the skin just to muffle your cries. The taste of him, salt, sweat, desperation, burns on your tongue. 

He lifts his head suddenly, lips crashing against yours, messy and desperate. The kiss is teeth and tongue, clumsy from the way you’re both gasping for air, but it only makes it more real, more consuming. He groans into your mouth when you clench around him, his hand sliding between your bodies, fingers finding that aching bundle of nerves at your core. The touch is too much, too sharp, too sudden and your whole body jerks like you’ve been shocked. “Cum for me, sweet girl,” he rasps, his voice breaking apart under the weight of his own desire. “Want to feel you—want to feel you lose it on me.”

The demand tears through the haze, and you’re powerless against it. You ride him faster, chasing that jagged edge, your body tightening like a bowstring drawn too far. Heat coils low in your belly, sharp and relentless, winding tighter and tighter until it finally snaps. Your orgasm crashes over you like a tidal wave, violent and all-consuming. You cry out his name, broken and raw, nails clawing down his chest as your body spasms around him. The world blurs, the car vanishes, and there’s only the shattering relief of release, every nerve alight, every inch of you burning. 

Jake is right there with you, undone by the way you convulse around him, the sound of your voice unraveling into gasps. He thrusts up into you hard, once, twice, before he breaks completely. His groan is guttural, dragged from the depths of him as his release spills into you, hot and overwhelming. His grip on your hips is bruising, holding you down against him as though he can’t bear to let you go, as though he wants to be buried inside you forever.

For a long moment, neither of you move. You sit slumped against his chest, his arms wrapped tight around you, his breath ragged in your ear. The only sound is the pounding of your hearts, the ticking of the cooling engine, the faint hum of nightlife still buzzing somewhere beyond the fogged-up windows. He presses a kiss to your temple, tender and trembling, almost reverent. And for that brief heartbeat of silence, it feels like the world is holding its breath with you, like nothing exists outside this tiny space where you and Jake have come undone together.

The ride back to Jake’s place is a silence all its own. Not awkward, not strained, but weighted, the kind of silence that feels like it could shatter if you breathe too hard. The car still smells of sweat and heat and the sharp bite of alcohol, a mix that clings to the both of you like evidence, like sin. You don’t speak, and neither does he, though his hand remains steady on the wheel and the streetlights flicker across his face in broken gold. For a moment, you think about saying something, anything, that might give shape to what happened between you. But the words won’t form. They live at the back of your throat, heavy and unspeakable, so you simply stare out the window, pretending the blur of neon and the smudge of the city is enough to occupy you.

When you finally reach his apartment, the door clicks open and you both step inside like thieves sneaking into someplace sacred. The quiet of the space feels different tonight, less suffocating than before, almost welcoming in its emptiness. Jake tosses his keys onto the counter and lets out a long exhale, like he’s been holding his breath the entire way here. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t need to, and you don’t ask for words he isn’t ready to give. Instead, the two of you move through the familiar space in sync, an unspoken rhythm guiding you. You toe off your shoes, and he shrugs out of his jacket, and it’s as though you’ve both rehearsed this moment. 

He pulls his shirt over his head and drops it carelessly onto the floor, and you follow suit, slipping into the blankets as though they’ve been waiting just for you. He joins you a moment later, the heat of his body seeping into yours as he settles beside you. There’s no hesitation this time, no sharp edges of guilt slicing at your ribs. Just the soft warmth of his skin brushing yours, the steady sound of his breathing evening out as he lies back, arm thrown lazily across his face like he’s too tired to carry the weight of the world tonight. 

For a long time, you stare at him in the dim light spilling in from the window. You trace the slope of his nose, the curve of his lips, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw. He looks almost peaceful here, stripped of the tension that usually knots his shoulders, stripped of the sharpness he wears like armor. And maybe it’s the exhaustion, or maybe it’s the alcohol still buzzing faintly in your blood, but for once, the guilt doesn’t come crashing in. For once, you don’t curl into yourself and cry.

Instead, you let yourself breathe. You let yourself stretch out beside him, close enough that your shoulder brushes his chest. And when your eyes slip shut, the corners of your lips curve upward without your permission, a smile settling there like it belongs. A small, secret smile, the kind born from the reckless knowledge that you’ve done something unforgivable, and yet it feels so devastatingly good. You fall asleep that way, smile pressed into the pillow, body curled against Jake’s warmth. And in that fragile pocket of night, before dreams take you under, it almost feels like love.

The shrill cry of Jake’s phone shattered the stillness of the morning, an ugly sound tearing you from sleep like a knife dragged across silk. Your eyes fluttered open, heavy with exhaustion, and you rolled toward him, hand brushing his shoulder, voice soft but urgent. “Jake, your phone,” you murmured, the device rattling against the nightstand as if it were alive, desperate to be answered. 

Jake stirred with a groggy groan, rubbing his eyes, and reached for it. His gaze, clouded with sleep, cleared in an instant when he saw the name flashing on the screen. He sat up so fast it startled you. “It’s Mimi,” he said, his voice both stunned and sharp, like he’d been stabbed awake. Your stomach turned to stone. You froze, the name burning through you like fire on an open wound. Mimi. The woman whose absence had left a void so vast it had driven you and Jake into each other’s arms. The woman whose ghost had haunted every kiss, every touch, every fleeting second of your stolen closeness. 

Jake pressed a finger to his lips, wide eyes demanding your silence. His thumb trembled as it slid across the screen, pressing accept. He put it on speaker, perhaps out of instinct, perhaps because he didn’t want to hide anything—but that choice made every word that followed fall like a dagger directly into you.

“Hello?” His voice was hesitant, almost boyish, stripped raw of its usual certainty.

On the other end, Mimi’s voice quivered, fragile as glass. “Hi.”

Just one syllable, but it cracked open the room like thunder splitting the sky. Jake swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, fingers curling into the sheets. “Hey… how are you?”

“I’m… better,” she whispered, though the tremor in her tone betrayed her. Then, with a sharp intake of breath, she said words that made your chest constrict, that pulled the floor out from under you. “Jake, I owe you an apology.”

The guilt in you sharpened to a blade. You could feel it twist in your ribs, merciless. Your hands clenched in the sheets, nails digging into the fabric, as though anchoring yourself to something, anything, to keep from floating away into the storm of shame. Jake’s face collapsed into devastation, his features written with the same guilt carved into your bones. You knew he felt it too. Knew the weight of what you’d both done was now heavy enough to crush the room.

“Mimi,” he said gently, “you don’t owe me anything. It wasn’t your fault. You had every right to be angry, every right to… to shut down. I should’ve—”

“No,” she cut in, her voice breaking, and then the sound of her sobbing filled the room. Raw, messy, real. “No, Jake. You guys were just trying to help me. And I pushed you away. I hurt you. I hurt us.” You closed your eyes, but it was no use. Her grief poured through the phone like floodwater, and every drop of it drowned you. You bit your lip so hard it bled, because how dare you listen to her heartbreak when you were part of the reason for it.

Jake’s jaw clenched, tears pricking his own eyes. He whispered her name again, helpless, useless, while she wept. And then she said it, words that cracked you open like a fault line splitting the earth. “I love you, Jake. I don’t want to lose you. I’m so sorry for treating you so badly. I should’ve talked to you instead of shutting you out. You’ve been nothing but good to me, protecting me, loving me, and I’ve been the worst girlfriend. You deserve so much better than me.”

The sob in her voice fractured into something soft, pleading, desperate. You thought maybe Jake would stay silent. Maybe he would let her words fall unanswered into the chasm. Maybe fate, just this once, would spare you. But no. His voice, gentle and trembling, killed you. “Stop crying, baby. I love you too. More than anything. It’s okay.” The sentence hit you harder than any blow. You couldn’t breathe. The words weren’t meant for you, had never been meant for you, and yet hearing them now, from lips that had kissed you only hours ago, tore you apart in ways you didn’t know you could break.

Your jealousy burned green and hot, twining with guilt until it was unbearable, a sickness rising in your chest. You tried to mask it, your face still, your body frozen in the bed. You told yourself you were invisible, a ghost in the room, while Jake whispered love into someone else’s ears. When the call finally ended, silence filled the air like smoke. Dense, suffocating, impossible to breathe through. Unspoken words crowded the space between you, truth settling heavy on your shoulders. You swung your legs off the bed, every movement mechanical, like a puppet pulled by strings. You gathered your clothes, your bag, your everything, tears falling silent and merciless. “Wait—” Jake’s voice cracked as he reached for you, panic breaking through his exhaustion.

But you shook your head, the tears sliding down your cheeks faster now. “No. Please. I have to go.” You didn’t dare look at him, because if you did, you might unravel completely.

And so you left. You opened the door, stepped into the hallway, and the moment it closed behind you, the dam broke. You crumpled, pressing your hands to your face, sobs tearing free of you with a violence you couldn’t stop. You stumbled down the hall, each step heavy, each breath a wound. You hated yourself. For every moment of weakness, for every kiss you’d stolen, for every line crossed that could never be uncrossed. The guilt clung to you like oil, thick and inescapable, and no amount of crying could wash it away. By the time you reached home, you were nothing but a hollow shell of grief and shame, the echo of Jake’s voice, I love you too. More than anything, still lodged like glass in your heart.

It had been days since you’d last seen Jake, days since that night in his apartment when his voice had broken your heart in two with the simplest words, words meant for someone else. Days since you’d walked away with your chest hollowed out, a ghost of yourself carrying a body that no longer felt like home. And in those days, silence had become your tormentor. Mimi had not called. Not once. Not even a message. Just that letter from before but now the stillness from her side of the world pressed down on you like a storm cloud, thick and suffocating, promising lightning. You were sure she knew. She had to know. Why else would she remain so quiet?

The thought was a shadow that stalked you from the moment you woke to the moment your eyes finally slid shut. It gnawed at you, chewed through your insides, left your stomach raw and empty. Food no longer held shape or taste; it turned to ash in your mouth. Sleep, too, abandoned you. Your mind was a cruel stage that replayed the same scene again and again, Jake whispering baby, I love you too, more than anything, while your heart bled out quietly in the wings. Every time you closed your eyes, you saw it, heard it, felt it split you open. And when you opened them, the silence from Mimi was worse, because silence felt like accusation, like proof.

Jake had tried. You saw his name light up your phone more than once, his voice breaking into your voicemail with soft words, hesitant words, please, can we talk? and I just want to explain. But you ignored every single one. Let them pile up like unopened letters from a past life. Because to answer him would be to look in the mirror, to face what you’d done, to face the feelings you had no right to carry. And you couldn’t. You weren’t strong enough. When your phone buzzed again one evening, you didn’t even glance at the screen. You silenced it, placed it face-down on your nightstand, as if turning it over could bury the truth. You sat on the edge of your bed, body curled inward, hands trembling in your lap. Anxiety had grown teeth by now; it bit and tore at you from the inside.

Finally, the words broke free from you, though no one was there to hear. “She knows,” you whispered into the empty room. “She has to know.” The sound of your own voice startled you, hoarse and cracked from disuse. You hadn’t spoken much these last few days. What was there to say? To whom? The walls kept your secrets, and you hated them for it. Your phone buzzed again. You almost threw it across the room, but something inside you stopped you. Instead, you picked it up and stared at the name on the screen. Jake. Always Jake. His persistence was both a balm and a wound. You didn’t answer.

Instead, you whispered to yourself again, softer this time, as though saying it aloud might exorcise it from your chest. “I can’t. I can’t see him. I can’t hear him.” And yet, beneath the anxiety, beneath the gnawing guilt and the exhaustion, a different ache throbbed. The ache of longing. Because as much as you told yourself you didn’t need him, as much as you reminded yourself that what you felt was wrong, your heart still reached for him in the quiet hours, when you were most alone. That was the cruelest part of it all, you weren’t only running from guilt, but from the truth of your own desire.

The days without Jake carved into you like a dull blade, dragging slow and merciless. Time had a way of mocking you, each morning stretching endlessly, each night hollowing out your chest until you felt like you were nothing more than a shell filled with restless longing and guilt. His name appeared on your phone again and again, a bright flare you couldn’t bear to look at. You let it ring out each time, telling yourself it was self-preservation, though really it was cowardice, you couldn’t risk hearing his voice, that familiar warmth that would unravel every fragile barrier you’d tried to build. Sleep eluded you, food turned to ash in your mouth; anxiety gnawed at your ribs, whispering over and over the same fear: Mimi must know. She must know what you did, what you and Jake had become in the dark. Why else would she stay silent? Why else would she not call?

And then, on a night when you thought you’d finally made peace with solitude, the knock came. It was sharp, steady, three raps that rattled not only the door but your very bones. You froze where you stood, the crinkle of the ramyeon packet in your hands loud as thunder in the stillness. Nobody ever came unannounced. You opened the door. Jake.

He stood there like a vision conjured straight out of your aching heart, disheveled hair that had clearly been tugged at by restless hands, dark circles bruised beneath his eyes, his lips pressed thin in that way they did when he was trying to hold too much inside. For a moment, neither of you spoke. The silence felt like the space between lightning and thunder, heavy with everything unspoken. “Can I come in?” His voice was quiet, uncertain, almost apologetic. You couldn’t find words, so you simply stepped aside. He passed you, and the faint scent of him, familiar, devastating, swept in with him. You closed the door behind him, turning your back quickly before you betrayed too much. 

“I’m making ramyeon,” you murmured, focusing on the pot of water that was just beginning to quiver with heat. Your voice sounded foreign, brittle in your own ears.

But Jake didn’t accept the distance you were trying to create. He moved closer, his presence warm and insistent at your back. “Why have you been ignoring me?” His voice cracked, a thin thread of hurt woven through the question.

You shrugged, your shoulders rigid as stone. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t do that,” he said, closer now, and then his hand was on your wrist. It wasn’t forceful, just enough pressure to turn you toward him. The world narrowed to the heat of his skin against yours, to the plea in his eyes as they locked onto yours. “What’s wrong? I’m sorry Mimi hasn’t called you yet—” The words lit a fuse inside you. Anger rose sharp and fast, burning away every ounce of restraint you had left. You yanked your wrist back, your voice trembling with rage and heartbreak. “Are you serious, Jake? That’s what you think this is about?”

His brows drew together, confusion etched into every line of his face. “What do you mean?”

And that was when the dam broke. Years of silence, years of restraint, years of swallowing your truth until it poisoned you, everything came spilling out in one wild, unstoppable torrent. “I’m in love with you.” The confession tumbled from your lips before you could second-guess it, raw and bare. Your chest heaved with the weight of it. “I’ve been in love with you since we were kids. I never stopped. I don’t think I ever will. Do you understand what it’s been like? Torture. Watching you with Mimi, watching you give her everything I’ve dreamed of—it’s been killing me, Jake. Slowly. And I can’t—” Your voice broke, thick with tears, “—I can’t take it anymore.”

The room stilled. The only sound was the angry bubbling of the pot on the stove. Jake stared at you like you’d struck him, like the ground had given way beneath his feet. His mouth opened, but nothing came at first, and then, finally, two small words, fragile as glass: “I… I’m sorry.”

The words gutted you. You shook your head violently, tears spilling down your cheeks as if you could shake the sound from your ears. But Jake stepped forward, anguish carved across his face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again, voice trembling. His hands rose slowly, hesitantly, before cupping your face as though you were something fragile he feared might shatter. His thumbs brushed your tears away, though his own eyes were rimmed red, glistening. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he repeated like a prayer, a mantra, the only words he could reach for in the wreckage between you. And then his lips were on yours.

It was nothing like the fevered, desperate kisses in the dark of a bar bathroom or the backseat of his car. This was trembling, reverent, fragile. A kiss that carried the weight of years unsaid, years unlived, years buried under silence. He kissed you like he wasn’t sure he had the right but couldn’t stop himself anyway. His lips lingered, pressed to yours like an apology, a confession, a plea. When he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours, both of your breaths uneven, mingling in the charged silence. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again, softer this time, as though it was both a wound and a vow. And then he kissed you once more, deeper, less tentative, like he was surrendering to something he could no longer deny. 

You reached for him, your hands tangling in his hair, pulling him closer. The years of restraint crumbled to dust around you as you guided him down the hallway, every step heavy with the weight of inevitability. Neither of you spoke, but the silence between you was deafening with meaning. Every brush of lips, every trembling touch was a word unsaid, a truth shouted without sound. You fell back onto your bed, the sheets cool against your skin, Jake’s body hovering above yours. His hands roamed your sides, tentative still, as though he wasn’t sure if this was allowed, if this was real. The air between you grew heated, desire sparking alive, but there was a softness woven through it, a tenderness that anchored the fire. 

Your clothes seemed to scatter like autumn leaves caught in a sudden storm, drifting from your body before you could even process the moment. In a breath, you were bare, every secret, every soft curve exposed to him, as Jake hovered above you, his body both a shield and a burden. But this time, it was different. This wasn’t the frantic collision you’d shared before, driven by desperation and the frantic need to smother feelings beneath heat. No, this was something slower, heavier, more dangerous. His touch was reverent now, almost worshipful, his palms gliding over your skin as though he was memorizing the topography of your body, pressing his fingerprints into you like scripture. Every brush of his hands ached with meaning, and you felt yourself unravel under it, undone not by the force of him, but by the unbearable tenderness.

You were so in love with him it felt like ruin. The ache was sharp, lodged between your ribs, a shard of glass you could neither swallow nor spit out. And yet you clung to him, let him hold you, because pulling away would have been like stepping off a cliff without wings. It was self-destruction, and still, you surrendered. Love had always been a kind of car crash, and you were already tangled in the wreckage, except the twisted metal, the burning gasoline, was your own heart torn apart by wanting him. 

His lips trailed across your skin, scattered kisses like embers catching on dry grass. Along your collarbone, the side of your throat, each kiss was a promise, each drag of his mouth a tether binding you closer. When his hand slid down, guiding your thigh upward, you instinctively wrapped your legs around his waist, locking him to you. He slid inside you with the kind of precision that comes only from knowing another body deeply, intimately. He knew you now, knew the map of your shivers, the exact point where sighs turned into sobs, and he wielded that knowledge like a weapon cloaked in velvet. 

His hips met yours in slow, deliberate rhythm, the sound of your bodies colliding a quiet symphony. He wasn’t chasing release; he was savoring it, as though every thrust was another chance to hold on to you, to steep himself in the feeling of your walls pulling him deeper. You gasped, nails scratching down his back in delicate trails, your voice breaking as his name fell from your lips like a prayer. “Jake…” It was half-moan, half-plea, a surrender you couldn’t take back. You tipped your face into his shoulder, breath ragged, eyes damp. “I love you.” The words cracked open inside you, hoarse and trembling, an offering torn straight from the hollow of your chest.

Jake’s eyes fluttered shut as though the sound of it undid him, as though your love was too heavy to bear. His head tipped back, throat exposed, and a shaky exhale escaped him, caught between agony and bliss. His pace quickened only slightly, just enough to blur the line between gentleness and need, his brows knitting together as if the pleasure were almost painful. “Feels so good,” you whispered, your moans breaking higher, your body clinging to his as if you could fuse yourselves together and vanish into the sweetness of it all.

And then, like lightning striking a house already ablaze, it happened. His voice, rough and ragged, cracked into the air between you. “Fuck—Mimi—”

The world splintered. Your body froze beneath him, still as a porcelain doll dropped carelessly to the floor, unplayed with and forgotten. The name, her name, hung there like smoke you couldn’t breathe through. Mimi. He had said Mimi. Jake’s eyes shot open, wide with dawning horror, but his body didn’t stop. His hips still pressed into yours, the betrayal still carved deeper with every thrust. Your tears slipped soundlessly, hot rivers that burned tracks down your face as you looked at him, saying nothing, your silence heavier than a scream.

And though your heart lay shattered in your chest, You let him keep moving inside you. You let the ruin continue, even as it consumed you, because wanting him — even in betrayal — was stronger than the will to save yourself. You still wanted him, and that was the cruelest truth of all.

Your head turned to the side, unable to bear the sight of him, as though his face itself had become a blade pressed to your skin. The tears still fell unchecked, a quiet cascade slipping down your cheeks, each one burning as it slid into your hairline, into the pillow beneath you. Your thighs trembled with the pleasure he was still wringing from your body, traitorous muscles quivering even as your heart fractured. It was unbearable, this contradiction, pain and ecstasy braided together so tightly you could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. It hurt. God, it hurt so badly, this love that had become a wound you kept pressing your fingers into, knowing it would never heal. How much longer could you do this to yourself? How much longer could you keep loving him with this kind of devastation stitched into every kiss, every touch, every thrust? When would you finally choose yourself? When would you stop letting him destroy you in ways he didn’t even seem to understand?

“I’m close,” you sobbed, voice cracking under the weight of it, your head still turned away, eyes clamped shut as though that could spare you from the truth unraveling between you. Your words weren’t joy or relief, they were confession, the final collapse of something fragile you had tried so desperately to hold together.

Jake’s pace faltered, his breath shuddering against your ear. “Look at me,” he whispered, his voice jagged, shredded by the very desperation that bled out of him with every word. “Please, look at me.”

It was a plea, not a command, and that desperation broke you in new ways. Slowly, with your body still trembling around him, you turned your head. And there he was. His eyes found yours instantly, as though he’d been waiting, praying for it, and what you saw there cut deeper than the sharpest betrayal. His own tears had gathered, glassy and trembling at the edges, before spilling freely down his cheeks. He was breaking too, though it felt crueler somehow, because his cracks had been carved by his own hands. Your gazes locked, the room falling utterly silent except for the ragged sound of your breaths and the rhythm of his body inside yours. It was a mirror of devastation, your anguish reflected in his sorrow, your love reflected in his regret, and yet neither of you stopped. You couldn’t. You were caught in it, in the terrible beauty of ruin, two people clinging desperately to the wreckage even as it dragged you both under.

The sight of his tears undid you. They mingled with yours in the silence, an invisible river between your bodies, flowing with everything unsaid and unfixable. And still, neither of you stopped. His hips moved with that same careful rhythm, as if he wanted to memorize the exact shape of you, the way you fit around him, the way your body trembled beneath his. Every thrust felt like a confession he couldn’t put into words, a prayer murmured into your skin that he didn’t know how to make whole. 

Your nails dug into his back, clinging as if he might vanish if you let go. Each drag of his body inside you made your chest tighten, your lungs collapse, your heart split wider. The pleasure was unbearable in its sweetness, tangled so tightly with grief that you could hardly tell if you were crying from pain or from ecstasy. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps there was no difference anymore. “I love you,” you whispered again, though your voice was barely a breath, cracked and trembling. You weren’t sure if you said it for him or for yourself, to remind yourself that this was real, that the devastation blooming in your chest came from something that had once been pure.

Jake’s lips found yours in that moment, soft and frantic all at once. The kiss was wet with tears, with salt and sorrow, his mouth moving against yours as though he could apologize without words, as though he could stitch the wound shut simply by refusing to let you go. His thrusts deepened, desperation leaking through the careful pace, his body trembling above you. You clutched at him, your body betraying your heart as heat coiled tight in your belly, every nerve ending strung taut. The tears blurred your vision but you never looked away from him, not once, not when his jaw clenched in pleasure, not when his eyes squeezed shut before finding yours again, not when his whisper broke into the air like a confession. 

You cried out his name, your back arching, your legs locking around his waist as your release tore through you like a tidal wave. It was overwhelming, the pleasure crashing into your pain, the devastation magnified by the way he held you through it, his forehead pressed to yours, his tears falling onto your cheeks as though they belonged there. He followed you over that edge a moment later, his body shuddering, his breath catching in broken sobs as he spilled inside you. The sound he made, half moan, half cry, was something you knew you would never forget, because it wasn’t just pleasure. It was grief, and regret, and love twisted into something so unrecognizable it hurt to witness.

When the waves finally subsided, the room was filled with silence so heavy it seemed to press against your ribs. Jake collapsed gently onto you, careful not to crush you, his face buried in your neck as his breath shivered out against your skin. His arms wrapped around you as if holding you tighter could erase the cracks that had already split you apart. You could still feel him inside you, still feel the warmth of him, but the intimacy was hollow now, like clutching ashes in your palms.

Neither of you spoke. Words would have shattered whatever fragile thread still bound you together in that moment. Instead, you lay there in silence, his heartbeat slowing against your chest, your tears drying sticky against your cheeks. Exhaustion dragged at your limbs, at your eyes, until finally you let yourself sink into the darkness, not because you wanted to, but because it was easier than facing what waited for you in the light. You both fell asleep like that, twined together in the wreckage, holding on as though it might stop the pieces of your hearts from scattering too far apart. 

You woke to silence. The kind of silence that feels like abandonment, like the ringing of a church bell that never truly fades from your ears. Your hand reached out instinctively, still drowsy with sleep, searching for the warmth you had clung to in the night. But the mattress was cold, untouched since his weight had left it. The emptiness on the other side of the bed was louder than any alarm, louder than his phone had been the morning Mimi’s voice cut through your world. It was absence that screamed, the void of him beside you that spoke more clearly than words ever could. 

For a moment you lay still, staring at the faint cracks in the ceiling as if they might spell out a reason. The sheets smelled like him, salt, skin, and something almost floral, a scent you’d come to memorize over the years without ever realizing it. That scent was both comfort and cruelty now, a reminder that he had been here, that he had held you through the night, that he had made love to you with tears in his eyes, and that he had left without a word. The ache that bloomed in your chest felt unbearable, sharp, tearing through you as though your heart were glass dropped on a concrete floor. 

The sob came before you could stop it. Then another. And another. Soon you were curled into yourself on the mattress, hands covering your face as if they could shield you from the truth. But there was no protection from this. You cried until your throat was raw, until your stomach clenched, until you thought there couldn’t possibly be any tears left in you, and still they came, spilling over and soaking into the pillow he had slept on. When the storm of it finally ebbed just enough for you to breathe, your trembling hands reached for your phone on the floor beside the bed. The screen glared back at you, his name sitting at the top of your call list, his number already etched into your fingers before you could think twice. You pressed it. You pressed it because you had to, because you couldn’t live with not knowing why he had gone, why he hadn’t said goodbye, why he hadn’t woken you. 

The line rang. Once. Twice. A third time. Hope flared and dimmed with each hollow chime, like a match catching then dying in the dark. And then it went to voicemail. You tried again. And again. Each time, the same result. The calls disappeared into the void, swallowed by a silence more punishing than words. He wasn’t answering. He wasn’t there. And that absence carved into you more deeply than any rejection ever could. Your phone slipped from your hands, landing somewhere in the tangle of sheets, and you buried your face into the mattress, into the place where his warmth should have been. You let yourself break open again, sobbing until the morning blurred into afternoon, until the sound of your grief became the only rhythm in the empty room.

Later that day, when the weight of the morning had already hollowed you out, the sound of a knock rattled through your apartment again. It was gentle, hesitant almost, like the sound of someone afraid of not being let in. Your heart jumped, wild and reckless, already preparing itself for Jake, his figure leaning against the doorframe, his face apologetic, his voice soft as he tried to make sense of what had broken between you. But when you pulled the door open, bracing yourself for him, it was not Jake you found standing there. It was Mimi.

For a moment, time fractured. The girl you had loved for so long, your best friend, your sister in everything but blood, stood there, her eyes wide and glistening, her hair falling like a curtain around her face. And before you could even summon a word, before your throat could open, she was in your arms. She collapsed against you like she had been waiting for this moment for months, her body trembling, her grip on you so tight it almost hurt. The sob caught in your throat immediately, and then it spilled out, unbidden, as your arms closed around her. You pressed your face into her shoulder, inhaling the familiar scent of her, different now, faintly sterile as if the air of treatment facilities still clung to her.

You both stood there, two broken halves clinging to each other, and the silence was full of the sound of your shared crying. It felt endless. It felt like home and grief and forgiveness all tangled into one knot of an embrace. When she finally pulled back, her hands still clutching at your arms as if afraid you might disappear, her words came out in a rush, like a dam broken. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and then said it again, and again, the words spilling over each other until they lost shape. “I’m so sorry for everything, for this past year, for shutting you out, for letting it get so bad. For letting the drugs take me. For letting them consume me until there was nothing left but the shell you couldn’t reach anymore. I’m sorry for sending you that letter. God, that letter, I didn’t mean it, I swear I didn’t. I didn’t mean any of it. You were only ever trying to help me. You were being the friend I didn’t deserve and I punished you for it. I hated you because I hated myself. And I love you, I love you so much for never walking away from me, even when I gave you every reason to.”

The sobbing started again in your chest, jagged and raw, but you let her words wash over you, let them soak into the parts of you that had been waiting, aching, for her to come back. You brought her inside and the two of you sat together, side by side, on the worn couch that had witnessed more of your tears than any person had. Her hand never left yours, her grip tight as though she feared she’d lose you if she let go. You wiped at your eyes, finally finding your voice, though it was fragile and threadbare. “How are you, Mimi? Really?”

Her face softened into something weary, but lit from within by a tiny ember of hope. “It’s been hard,” she admitted, her voice carrying the weight of every sleepless night, every withdrawal, every battle fought in silence. “Harder than I thought it would be. But I’m better. I feel… lighter. Like I finally see the world again instead of just the haze. I’m happy to be home.” Her smile trembled but stayed. “Happy to see you.” You tried to hold onto that, to let her words sink in without cracking you further. But then she said his name, the one that lived like fire in your chest. “And happy to see Jake.”

It was all you could do not to flinch, not to let the memory of his body over yours last night, his mouth whispering Mimi while you gave him everything, claw its way onto your face. The syllables of her name spoken in that moment rang in your head like a curse. You forced your lips into something that looked like a smile, nodding faintly, and asked instead, “Have you… seen him yet?” She nodded, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Yeah. As soon as my parents brought me back, I wanted to see him. I went over, but he wasn’t home yet. I waited, and when he finally came back he told me he was out on a jog. He said he’s been doing that lately.” She laughed softly, as if the thought of Jake running at dawn or dusk pleased her. “Said it clears his head.”

Your stomach twisted. You knew where he had been. Not on a jog. Not on some quiet, cleansing run through the streets. He had been leaving your apartment, your bed still warm with his body, your lips still tasting of him. But you swallowed the truth like a blade, letting it cut you from the inside out, and said nothing. Instead, Mimi brightened suddenly, her eyes shining with that familiar spark of mischief and warmth you hadn’t seen in months. “I was thinking, we should celebrate. All of us. Tonight. At my place. I’ll cook dinner.”

You blinked at her, caught off guard. “Dinner?”

She nodded eagerly, her hands tightening around yours. “Yes. A proper homecoming. I’ll invite Heeseung, Jay, Sunghoon, you, of course. We’ll all be together again. Like old times.” The mention of Heeseung made your stomach clench further, the memory of his eyes burning into yours that night outside the bar bathroom still vivid, the silent judgment, the knowledge of what he had seen. But you kept your face even, your voice steady, as if you hadn’t already been unraveling all morning.

“Yeah,” you murmured, almost robotically, the word flat and hollow. “Of course. I’ll be there.” And Mimi smiled, relieved, like you had just given her the greatest gift she could ask for.

Later that night, you stood outside Mimi and Jake’s apartment with your hand lingering on the doorknob longer than it should have. The hall was dim, washed in the weak glow of a single overhead light that buzzed faintly, and you could hear muffled laughter and the faint hum of a record player from inside. Your heart clenched at the thought that everything could somehow feel so normal when you felt anything but. With a breath that trembled more than you wanted to admit, you let yourself in. 

The first thing you noticed was the absence of the mattress in the living room. The bed that once lay sprawled across the floor, messy sheets tangled like evidence of something you wished you could scrub from your memory, was gone. It had been tucked away back in their bedroom, back in its rightful place. The room looked ordinary again, but the ghost of that night clung to the walls, and to you most of all.

Only Mimi and Jake were there when you stepped in. Mimi’s face lit up as soon as she saw you, a spark of unguarded joy that made your chest ache with guilt. She bounded toward you, her arms open wide, and pulled you into a hug so tight it knocked the breath out of you. You let yourself sink into it, because this was Mimi, because she was here and warm and alive, and you owed her that. Her hair tickled your cheek as she murmured, “I’m so glad you came. The boys should be here soon.”

You forced a smile, shaky but serviceable, as she pulled away. Jake was a different story. He looked up from where he leaned against the kitchen counter, his eyes finding yours instantly like they always did. The moment was sharp, electric, unbearable. You looked away so fast it was almost a flinch, your body betraying how much you couldn’t bear the weight of his gaze. Just one glance at him and the memory of his hands, his voice, his body over yours came rushing back, tangled with the sound of Mimi’s name falling from his lips.

Mimi tugged you toward the kitchen, chattering brightly, oblivious to the storm raging just beneath the surface. She asked you what you’d been up to while she was gone, her voice light, teasing almost, as though she were trying to stitch the missing months back together with ordinary conversation. You gave her a small smile, your voice steady even though your pulse thundered. “Just… working out a little more. Writing in my journal. Trying to keep busy.”

Her head tilted thoughtfully, her smile warm. “That’s good. That’s really good.”

But in that moment your eyes betrayed you. They flickered, quick as lightning, to where Jake still stood. Just the briefest glance, as if some part of you couldn’t resist checking, couldn’t resist seeking him out like a compass that no matter how broken still spun north. You prayed Mimi hadn’t noticed. From the way her grin stayed, from the way her gaze remained innocent, it seemed she hadn’t. But Jake had. You could feel it in the way his posture shifted, his shoulders stiffening almost imperceptibly. A knock at the door broke the moment apart, sharp and sudden. Jake was the one who went to open it. He pulled it wide to reveal Heeseung standing there alone, his tall frame filling the doorway. His eyes swept the room quickly, pausing on you, on Jake, before softening slightly when they landed on Mimi.

“They’ll be here soon,” Heeseung said, his voice calm but carrying that unreadable weight you’d grown to expect from him. “Jay and Sunghoon wanted to stop at the store, grab some wine.”

Mimi’s whole face brightened. She wrapped her arms around Heeseung in a hug that lingered a moment too long, full of relief and gratitude. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she murmured against his shoulder, her voice small but genuine. He patted her back once before pulling away, offering her one of his rare smiles.

But then Mimi’s gaze dropped to her clothes, her pajama bottoms and loose shirt, and she gasped softly, almost laughing at herself. “Oh no! I can’t believe I’m still in these.” She shook her head, embarrassed but playful. “I need to get changed. I’ll be right back.” And just like that, she disappeared down the hallway toward the bedroom, leaving the three of you, Jake, Heeseung, and you, alone in the kitchen.

The silence that followed was thick, nearly unbearable. You stood there, your palms pressed against the countertop for grounding, your chest tightening under the weight of it. The air felt charged, heavy with everything unspoken. Heeseung’s presence was steady but piercing, and Jake’s was restless, shifting slightly as though the walls themselves were closing in. You stand there, stiff, barely breathing, trying not to let your eyes stray toward Jake even as you feel the weight of his presence pull at you like a tide. But it’s Heeseung who breaks the silence, his voice a knife cutting through the stillness.

“Do you plan on telling her,” he says, his tone calm but laced with venom, “that the entire time she was away getting better, the two of you were fucking?” The word fucking hangs heavy in the air, thick and crude, impossible to ignore. Your breath catches. The floor beneath you feels suddenly unstable, like the ground might crumble and swallow you whole.

“W-What?” you stammer, your voice cracking under the pressure. The blood drains from your face, and you feel your body seize, frozen in the spotlight of his accusation. Heeseung shakes his head, a bitter laugh pulling from his chest. “Come on. Don’t play dumb. We all know what I saw. You two stumbling out of that bathroom at the bar, it doesn’t take a genius.” His eyes are fire, unwavering, and you can’t look away. “This is fucked up, and you both know it.”

Jake steps forward, his jaw clenched so tight you can hear the grind of his teeth. “Heeseung, you need to mind your business.” His tone is sharp, defensive, but there’s a tremor underneath that betrays him. But Heeseung only laughs again, darker this time, humorless. “My business? Don’t make me laugh, Jake. She’s your best friend—” his finger jabs toward you like a spear, “—and she’s your girlfriend.” His hand slams against Jake’s chest in accusation. “You’re both fucked in the head. Do you even realize what you’ve done?” 

The words hit you harder than a physical blow, and tears brim at your eyes before you can stop them. You shake your head weakly, mouth trembling. “You don’t under—” But then, before you can finish, a voice slices into the room. A voice you dread more than any storm, more than any nightmare.

“You guys what?”

Mimi.

The world stills. The clatter of your heart feels deafening in your chest. She’s there, just around the corner, standing rigid in the doorway, her eyes wide and unblinking, her expression fractured into something you’ll never forget. She heard. She heard everything. “Mimi…” Jake whispers, reaching a hand toward her like he can undo this, like he can pull her back into ignorance.

But she stumbles backward, her face crumpling in disbelief. “No,” she breathes, and then louder, harsher, her voice breaking into shards, “No! You—you—” Her words fracture, tripping over one another as her gaze darts between you and Jake, searching desperately for some thread of denial, some lifeline that doesn’t exist.

Your silence condemns you. The tears falling down your face condemn you. To the deepest pits of hell.

“I’ve been away…” she says, her voice splintering, her hands trembling at her sides. “I’ve been away getting better, fighting for my life—and you, the two of you—” She chokes, gagging on the words. “Oh god.” She looks sick, like the truth has poisoned her, like bile is rising in her throat.

“Please—” you whisper, stepping forward, but you’re cut off by the sound of her rage, sudden and violent. Her hand whips across your face, the slap so sharp it echoes through the room. Your ears ring, your cheek burns, and a sob tears itself out of your chest before you can swallow it down.

“You fucking whore!” Mimi screams, her voice shattering, raw. “That’s why Jake came home early this morning. That’s why—he was with you, wasn’t he?” Her face is streaked with tears now, wet trails down her skin. “Was he with you!?” You can’t lie anymore. You nod, once, broken, because the truth is the only thing left. Her body lunges forward, fury consuming her, but Jake and Heeseung catch her before she can reach you. She thrashes in their grip, her sobs morphing into screams. “How dare you!” she spits, her body shaking with the force of her rage.

“Mimi, stop—” Jake pleads, holding her back, but she jerks away from him with violent disgust.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” she screams, her voice hoarse. “You disgust me. Both of you. You’re fucking sick.”

You’re sobbing now, clutching your arms around yourself like they’re the only thing holding you together. “Mimi, I love him—” you blurt out, the words spilling raw and desperate.

But she only laughs, a laugh so cold, so broken, it curdles your blood. “You’re fucking pathetic,” she spits, her lip curling. “Do you really think he loves you? You’re nothing. Just a replacement pussy while I was gone. He’ll never love you.” The words cleave through you, sharper than the slap, sharper than anything you’ve ever felt. And suddenly, you can’t breathe. You can’t stay. You stumble toward the door, the sobs tearing out of you too violently to suppress. You just need to get out, to escape before you dissolve completely.

But before you can slip through, her voice catches you one last time. “You’re dead to me.” The words are ice. Final. “I never want to see you again.” And then the door slams, the sound reverberating like a gunshot, like the end of something sacred, and you’re gone, thrown into the night, your heart in pieces, your soul shredded by the very person you thought you could never lose. 

You don’t remember how you got home. Only that the night seemed to swallow you whole, the streetlights blurring into halos through your tears, the air cutting sharp against your skin like glass. You stumble into your apartment and slam the door behind you, the sound too loud, too final, but you don’t stop. You barely manage to kick your shoes off before you collapse face-first onto your bed, your body shaking with sobs so violent you can’t catch your breath. The pillow muffles your cries, but it doesn’t stop them; it only soaks up the grief like it’s been waiting for this moment, waiting to hold everything you’ve been carrying.

You pound your fists against it, over and over, each strike fueled by a different kind of rage, at Mimi for calling you names, for cutting you out of her life with words sharp enough to kill; at Jake for lying, for breaking something inside you that will never heal the same; but most of all, at yourself. For still loving him. For loving him so deeply it feels like rot spreading through your veins. For never having the courage to tell him first, never daring to whisper the truth when your heart begged you to. Mimi had. Mimi was brave enough to speak her love out loud, to place it in his hands no matter what he did with it. And what did you do? You sank your knife into the one place she was weakest, and you twisted. You chose silence until it was too late, until it ruined you both.

You stagger to your feet, the room spinning around you, and stumble into the bathroom. With trembling fingers you wrench the shower knob on, steam rushing up like it wants to suffocate you. You strip your clothes off in frantic jerks, every seam tearing at your skin, until you’re bare and trembling, your sobs breaking into hiccups. You step under the spray, the water scalding, biting at your body until you gasp, but you don’t step away.

Instead you scrub. Hard. Your nails scrape your skin raw as you drag the soap up and down your arms, across your chest, down your legs, again and again until angry red marks bloom everywhere you touch. You want to peel yourself away, to scrape off every layer until there’s nothing left, until you’re pure again, until you’re no longer this person who betrayed her best friend and ruined herself. But the dirt isn’t on your skin. It’s deeper, lodged in your soul, and no matter how much you scrub, it won’t come off.

Your legs buckle, and you sink down against the cold tile, sliding until you’re curled in the corner, your knees pulled tightly to your chest. The water cascades over you, flattening your hair against your face, mingling with the tears that still fall and fall and fall. You sob until your throat aches, until your chest feels like it might cave in. The sound is ugly, broken, like something wild caught in a trap.

“I hate you,” you whisper, your voice barely audible beneath the roar of the water. But you’re not even sure who you’re talking to. Mimi. Jake. Yourself. All of you. None of you.

Minutes blur into hours, time dissolves with the steam until you’re emptied out, wrung dry of every tear. You sit in silence, your skin raw and stinging, your heart hollow. Eventually, your body forces you to move. Slowly, with the heaviness of the dead, you push yourself up off the tiles. Your movements are sluggish, mechanical. You step out of the shower, but you don’t reach for a towel. You don’t bother to dry off.

You walk straight to your bed, water still streaming down your body, dripping onto the floor, soaking into the sheets. You collapse against the mattress, hair plastered to your face, skin clammy and cold. The wet fabric clings to you, but you don’t care. You curl on your side, your chest still heaving, and finally, exhaustion wins. You fall asleep like that, naked, wet, and hollow. As if the water has drowned everything inside you, leaving only silence.

The morning does not greet you gently. It rips you from the shallow, dreamless sleep you had collapsed into, the echo of knuckles against wood reverberating through your apartment like thunder. At first you don’t move, your body aches too much, your heart feels too heavy, but the sound comes again, louder this time, insistent. With a groan, you drag yourself upright, pulling on the first clothes you can find, fabric clinging to your still-damp skin from the night before. Every movement feels stiff, like you’ve been stitched together with grief instead of sinew.

You shuffle to the door, hair unkempt, eyes swollen, the ghost of last night still heavy on your shoulders. When you open it, you nearly choke on the air in your lungs. There they are. Jake and Mimi. Side by side. Two ghosts you conjured from your nightmares, now standing on your threshold as if summoned by your sins. Jake’s eyes are rimmed in red, exhaustion etched into his face like bruises. He looks hollow, a man who hasn’t slept, a boy who has carried too much. And beside him, Mimi. Her face is pale, her eyes swollen too, but not from sleeplessness alone. She looks like she’s been crying. You don’t doubt it.

Before you can even form words, Mimi pushes past you, slipping into your apartment with a force that doesn’t match her small frame. She’s trembling, but she’s steel. You stumble after her, your throat already tightening, and manage a broken, “What—” before she cuts you off.

“How many times?” Her voice is sharp, cutting through the silence like a blade.

You blink, disoriented, your lips parting with no answer ready. “W-What?” you stammer.

Her eyes, wet but blazing, lock onto yours. “How many times did you fuck my boyfriend?”

The air leaves your lungs in a rush. You glance down at your trembling hands, twisting them together as if they might produce the right answer. But there is no right answer. “I don’t know—” you manage, your voice small, ragged.

“So more than once,” she says, flat, almost calm. A calm that’s far more terrifying than her rage.

You nod, slow and heavy, shame dripping from the motion. Her lips press together, trembling, her face carrying the expression of someone who has just confirmed what they already knew. She doesn’t stop. “Did he cum?”

Your head snaps up, startled by the vulgarity of the question, the intimacy of it. “Why—”

“Just fucking answer,” she snaps, her voice cracking, “because he won’t.”

You swallow hard, your throat tight, and drop your gaze again. Shame scorches you. You nod. Barely. “Yes.”

Her jaw clenches, and she takes a shaky breath, her hand pressing against her stomach like she might be sick. “Did you use a condom?”

Your silence is damning. You shake your head. “No.” For a moment she looks like she’s about to collapse, her face twisting with nausea, with heartbreak so vivid it hurts to look at. She stares at you as though she doesn’t even recognize you anymore, as if you’ve become a stranger carved from betrayal. Finally, her voice drops into something cold and final, every word a nail in the coffin of your friendship.

“I’ll never forgive you for this. Ever. Don’t call me, don’t text me. I never want anything to do with you again. Consider me dead, because that’s what you are to me.” The words rip through you like claws. You stagger back a step, your tears falling fast and silent, but before you can even find your breath to respond, she’s already turning, already walking out of your apartment, her body trembling but unyielding. The door slams shut behind her with a sound that echoes like a gunshot. And then there’s only Jake.

He stands there in the wreckage of the silence, his hands useless at his sides, his lips pressed together in something that might be grief or might be shame. You can’t look at him without remembering the way his body pressed into yours, the way his mouth had whispered lies into your skin. Tears blur your vision. “I’m sorry,” he says softly, finally, his voice hoarse and quiet.

You let out a laugh, bitter and broken, the sound foreign to your own ears. You shake your head, wiping furiously at your cheeks though the tears only keep coming. “Are you?”

His eyes flicker to yours, raw and red, and he nods. “I love Mimi,” he says, each word deliberate, like stones laid down to form a wall between you. “And we’re going to try and make it work. She and I both made mistakes.” Mistake. The word hits you harder than Mimi’s slap ever could. Your breath catches in your throat, because that’s what you are to him. A mistake. “But I love her, okay?” he continues, his voice breaking as he looks down at his hands.

Your body shakes with something between a sob and a laugh. “How could you love someone and do what we did to her?” Your voice cracks, high and jagged.

He doesn’t answer at first. His shoulders slump, his gaze fixed on the ground as if the floor might give him an answer. Finally, he whispers, “I don’t know. But she’s giving me an ultimatum. Her or you.”

The world tilts. Everything inside you breaks, splintering into shards so sharp you feel them cutting into every part of you. You stare at him, your heart hollowed out. “So you pick her.”

His eyes close, and when they open again, the finality in them is unbearable. “I always would have picked her.”

The silence that follows is suffocating. He steps forward, reaching for your hand like muscle memory, like instinct, but you rip it back, your face twisting in pain. You wipe at your eyes again, furious at the tears that won’t stop, and spit the only words you can manage. “Just get out.”

He flinches, but nods. His voice is barely more than a whisper. “I’m sorry.” Then he’s gone. The door clicks shut, softer this time, but it feels just as brutal.

And you are alone. Again.

The hours stretch, slow and merciless, as if the world has conspired to elongate your suffering. You sit there, motionless, your body a monument carved from grief. The sheets cling to your skin where dampness has not yet dried, a reminder of the shower you abandoned yourself in, a reminder that you are still flesh, still living, though you wish you weren’t. The room smells faintly of mildew, salt, and despair, like a sea storm that never breaks. Your hair sticks in strands across your face, but you cannot summon the will to brush it away. You are a ghost trapped in your own body, staring at the cracked ceiling as if it might reveal answers, or at least a reason for why love has been so cruel to you. 

Outside, the sun has slipped quietly from the sky, leaving behind a velvet bruise of indigo. Darkness folds itself across the room like a heavy blanket, smothering the edges of everything until you are left in a silence so profound it feels alive. The world carries on without you, cars hum distantly, someone laughs in the street below, a dog barks against the night, but none of it breaches the cocoon of stillness around you. You are alone, abandoned in the cavern of your own heart, a hollow place where Jake’s voice once echoed and Mimi’s shadow now lingers. Your hands remain limp at your sides, fingers curled like wilted petals. Not even the strength to weep remains in you; the well of your tears has finally run dry, leaving only the aching residue of salt on your cheeks. Anger has burned itself to embers. Shame has quieted into a low hum. What is left is nothing. A vast emptiness. The kind of silence that makes you question whether you still exist at all. 

You do not move. You cannot move. Hours bleed into one another, the clock on the wall ticking with cruel insistence, marking time as if it means anything. The world outside may turn, but you remain a still point in a storm, collapsed under the weight of all the words you never said, all the love you never confessed, all the mistakes you cannot take back. Eventually, night claims everything. Shadows swallow the room whole until you can no longer tell where your body ends and the dark begins. You are nothing but a breath in the silence, a hollow shell with a heart that refuses to stop beating despite everything it has endured.

And so you stay. Alone.

You knew this would happen. You knew it would, yet you let the chaos unfold. Engage in the slow-moving crash you had no brakes for, and you're entirely to blame. 

A weekend away, surrounded by a mix of yours and Riki's friends, shedding everyday melancholy and retreating to a rented mansion built by the hands of luxury, high ceilings and polished floors, severely out your price range but better as a pooled splurge. After all, it's been so long since you've all been together ─ meat and vegetables on the grill, wine bottles littering the dining table on the balcony you sit on, laughing with no troubles. It's everything your heart's longed for, adoring eyes given to everyone around you despite the antics of your boyfriend, his cheeks flushed with the throaty hiccup of his laughter, using any chance he gets to annoy you. 

You reprimanded him, of course. But it's water off his back, cooed over by your friends who say you'll bicker all the same into old age together. Timidity flames beneath your cheeks, not helped by the warmth of alcohol coursing through your body, making you antsy, itch out your skin as your foot taps to the speaker's music. You could do with some water, jugs of it cleared at the table. Perhaps a salty snack too, excusing yourself from the table with a hand on your friend's shoulder before your chair drags, your figure stumbling to its stand. 

"Sure you'll manage?" Riki teases, forehead creased with the mirth rife in his smirk. "Bit unstable there." 

"I'm just fine," you firm, the joking drop of his jaw earning him a stuck-out tongue, childish on your behalf but you're too tipsy to care. Those around you laughing along as you amble back into the house, pushing back sliding doors and peeking through drawn curtains, pattering into the kitchen with all its lights on. 

You're only alone with your thoughts for so long before the door slides open, music filtering through. It's a song queued by Riki, no doubt in your mind as the heavy bass thumps, raunchy lyrics meant for Tiktok thirst traps and edits blaring. Your eyes roll, bending over to look in the low cupboards for your beloved snack amongst cabinet groceries. Something salty, something to bite into. 

And of course, who is your boyfriend if not a menace?

He's come up behind you, dancing his way to his destination during the inattention you paid him, pausing in the cast of your shadow. The sliding doors are closed, curtains drawn, but you can still hear some semblance of the ongoing song, lyrics murmured about making someone come and Riki just─

His large hands fall to your hips, fake banging you as he raps along, laughing because he's sick and twisted. Laughing at the shock jolting you in his hold, how your body stumbles a touch forwards because he's not all that stable either and accidentally bumps into you, hands grappling the countertop so it doesn't barrel into your forehead.

"Riki." Your voice carries a warning, not the least bit amused. 

"Whaaat?" he drags the vowel, continuing to fake bang you from behind. Still laughing. "No one's around."

"That's besides the─" he bumps into you again, sending you into a brace. Your throat bobs, eyebrows drawn. "─the point." 

Your curt tone is nothing but a source of amusement to him, his chuckle light and taunting as his hands firm on the curve of your waist, bumping into you again.

"You're just embarrassed because you love it," he reasons, doomed with that stupid chuckle of this. "Can't get angry at me when you're worse on wine."

True. An unnecessary truth. Because with wine-blurred googles on, your brain makes the trek to its memory, flashes of moments when the same taste lingered on your tongue, your tear eyes and desperate pleas taking up the majority as you'd been folded every way you begged for. 

God.

"Hm? Did I make you remember something?" Riki's on a mission to annoy you, his hips ceasing but presence there ─ hovering for you like bait. A dangled carrot your hips have no shame in chasing, hinged backwards as the flesh of your ass falls back on his bulge, indulging. "You're cute when you're like this…"

His words pause, ears peaking in anticipation as your eyes flutter closed, grip adjusting against the countertop's edge as your bottom lip folds in a mess of teeth. Molten lava swirls in the pits of your stomach at the clothed press, gashing away at the little self-restraint you wish you had. 

"Cockdrunk."

The word hits you like a tonne of bricks, back an inch straightened as shame makes itself known, in the dirty mix of your belly even so while your eyes blink fiercely, head turning to the sliding doors just metres away. 

"Riki."

"Say the word and I'll pull your panties aside," he's doing it again. Fake banging you, which should irritate you, your body jutting forwards with the real force he puts into his motions, except─ "Ease the ache you're trying to hide,"

"Bet you're wet too," he notes, your head needing not to turn to know the shit-eating grin marking his face, one hand deserting your hips as it slithers undettered beneath the frill of your skirt to where he gets his answer. "Shit,"

"Please,"

Something's wrong with you. Something must be wrong with you, the wine doing all the talking because you're yielding. Relenting to something only the dark corners of your mind can conjure, hips seeking his as you sink into the feel of him, half hard with fingertips ghosting over your panty-clad cunt.

"Fuck you?" he has the audacity in questioning. "Oh, you'll have to ask me nicely. None of this rubbing shit against me," 

He stalls your hips mid-hinge, a frustrated whine an auto-response as your head starts to spin, swimming in an abyss of nothing but filth. 

"Riki," you hate how brittle your voice sounds, so desperate to be pleased. "Come on, please? I can't─I need it."

"Need what?" his favourite pastime is taunting you, ever so evident as his fingertip dips into the hollow of your entrance, closing around the vacant spot he's quick to desert. "At this point, fake banging you might just get you off. I know you're all teary eyed too ─ poor baby." 

"Let's check," his hand comes to your jaw, the hand where you wanted him most leaving and craning your neck to put your face in view, a sad and frustrated gloss sparkling your eyes. "Crying from two places, you poor thing,"

If he has pity for you, it's without substance, his hand back under your skirt as your expression sours, head hung as you catch a glimpse of his ghosting hand. "You know you've soaked through these already, right?" 

"Were you sat there with all our friends, crossing your legs, reprimanding me because you were so pent up?" he questions, reading you like an open book. His finger trails down the spine of your book as his middle finger pushes in your entrance again, teasing you to no end. "I wouldn't be surprised if you leaked onto your seat." 

"Put it in," is your sharp remark, wavering under the buckle of need rushing through. "This isn't funny."

"It is a little. Watching you squirm," you hear his smirk, another bump against you done as a prompt. "Say please."

"Please."

It comes out quick. Unhurried, breaking the half-hearted facade you'd constructed for yourself, his finger pushed deep enough for a soft squelch to sound, licked off his fingers in a smack that scatters goosebumps across your heating skin. "Fuck,"

"Bend over." 

You're already bent, on show for anyone who could stumble upon the sight, but you know Riki. Knows how he likes you, how you'll comply to his wishes to a tea as the arch in your back deepens, its bow rewarded by his satisfactory chest-born hum. He doesn't pull your panties to the side, a knack for putting you beneath him as he tugs them down to bunch around your knees coming together, relinquishing the pressure-built over his teasing, worsened by the sound of ruffling clothes, the clink of his undoing belt swarming your head with deep lust.

With your skirt bunched up, he lifts the material higher, your entire ass on show to bring out a sheepish yelp, chilled air meeting hair-standing skin as his buckle and unzipped trousers graze the back of your thighs. His tip slides from beneath, catching onto your entrance to paint it in the precome it beads with, sliding further up to knock against your clit, Riki getting his kick out of watching you squirm once again. 

"I'm putting it in," he warns like he needs to, smirk hanging on the end of his words. "Any last words?"

"Stop messing arou─" 

Syllables are left to die on your tongue, falling into the back of your throat as it clogs with a shaken inhale. It's immense ─ the feeling your body's hotwired for, the stretch of him pushing through to walls that can't help give him a warm welcome, folding and moulding to ridges and veins as he does a torturously slow slide into you. Your jaw pops with its unhinge, too lost for words and thankful your arms are already placed on the countertop, elbows digging with your sinking weight as nails pierce into your palm, fist coming together with a white-knuckle hue. 

He doesn't stop until he's at the hilt, so snug where he resides, at least allowing you a moment to catch your breath. Above you, you hear him stifle a moan, a racked whimper gritted out in a broken groan, only amplifying the dangerous swirl in your stomach. Your walls flutter at the sound, an invitation to proceed that he takes, momentarily stopped because he knows he's abrasive like this ─ too much to handle, but you love it anyways, skin sweat-veiled and humming for what awaits as Riki drags himself back by inches, pulling out until only his tip's left in you. 

Your skirt's bunched up even more, your whole lower back on show. A hand once used to line himself into you comes to the plush of your ass, kneading the flesh to spread you further, Riki sinking in soon after with a groan only described as animalistic. 

"You have no idea how good you look right now," he grits out, voice gravel in your ears as he starts off with slow strokes, accustoming you to the stretch of his cock, feeding off the prolonged squelches that come with it. "Is this all for me, baby?"

You're a slave to your own pleasure, soft gasp rasped in your throat having gone dry, saliva gulped down in a mewl as he fills you over and over again, not in the way that scratches your desperate itch but enough to melt you into putty.

"God, you sound so needy," he moans, rings welding into your skin with the heft of his grip, hips picking up speed to your detriment. "Gripping me so tight. God, I just have my hands full with you, don't I?" 

"Riki," you whine helplessly, left with nothing but the echo of your smacked skin together in the lulls of your voice. 

"I never get tired of watching my cock go in and out of you," he voices, memorised. Eyes trained on where you meet, your own hips falling back to his pelvis, too eager for decorum. "Baby, I'm not going anywhere. Give me a little breathing room," 

"Is it because you can't wait or," he chuckles, leaning over to hover his lips over your ear. "Am I too big for you?" 

His chuckle haunts you, warm wind blown past your flushed ears as he purposely knocks harder into you, impaling wails out of you as you simply take what he gives ─ bent over a sparkling kitchen counter, panties of shame hung at your knees while your tongue's lolled out like you're in heat.

If anyone could see you right now…the shame would ruin you. 

"Ah, ah ─ needy, needy thing," Riki makes a mockery of your moans, something that ticks in your brain, walls doing a vice grip on his cock. "Taking all of me because you're too cockdrunk to think otherwise. Feels good, princess?"

"So good, oh my─" the words are sloshed in your mouth, weighted down by your tongue that feels too big for its container, eyes glazed over and unfocused. "Don't stop. Please?"

"I won't, princess," he has the heart to confirm, too far gone in his own lust as he pistons into you, just as needy. "Even if someone comes in, I'll keep going. Give you what you really want." 

The moment is marked by something you'd rather forget, of course brought to light by your dearest boyfriend. 

"Did you just clench?" he huffs, incredulous."Oh baby, you tell on yourself so bad. It's cute." 

His chest falls over your back again in what's meant to be an embrace, quickly souring as his wrapped arms stumble upon something. An open secret he voices regardless. 

"Oh?" his arms unwind, one hand on your hip and the other splayed over your lower stomach, the faint outline of his cock pressing against his palm. "I can feel myself here. Is that why you're so incoherent?"

"Because you're stuffed full?"

Nails scrape into the marble countertops, hard enough to break off with how delirious you feel, your brain a hot pile of melting mush between your ears as you get drunk off Riki's words, panting as if already exhausted. 

A firm palm presses into the small of your back, your arch emphasized with the cold graze of his chunky bracelets, whimper clawed back as your hand slaps against your mouth, the angle he's moulded you into hitting deepest. Moisture threatens to clump your lashes together, lust conjuring a storm in the stomach he's actively trying to rearrange, hands bruising against skin as smacked skin sounds, urgent and echoed by the slick between your legs.

Your eyes roll to the back of your head, limbs dreadfully unstable. 

"You're holding back," he grunts behind you, his tone a lick of sinister work. Amused, always so fucking amused. "Keeping all your pretty moans to yourself. You know I'll fuck them out of you, right?"

"Let all our friends hear how good you're at taking cock," he insists, making a point of bringing your hips harder into his, smacked skin deafening in your ringing ears. "That what you want? Them knowing how dirty you are?"

It's too much and not enough. You always get like this, so docile, so lost in your desires and the sensations of it all that the brink of release is nothing but a short distance away, fogged over by your clouded thoughts but undeniably there. The pleasured stretch of his cock bullying into you, his hand accented with cold rings firmed against your lower stomach, the ecstasy pumping rife through your blood, rendering you the mess you're quickly crumbling to.

"W-wait, I'm gonna─"

"Don't tell me you're coming," A huffed chuckle sounds behind you, the hand he has on your shoulder pushing your hair off it, down to your back with his fingers left on your accelerated pulse. "Wine makes you so easy, baby. Haven't even touched your clit."

It detaches. His hand on a mission under your body, meant to destroy you from within. "Lemme─"

"Where'd they go?" 

A pin drops. Silence, and painstaking horror. Enough fear to drain the rushing blood in you, body a mannequin as you're frozen in place.

The glass doors leading to the kitchen push further, wind blowing in, meat still sizzling on the grill as the voice speaks again.

"She went to grab some snacks but," Sunoo seemingly deflates, a presumably pout on his lips as hands smack down at his sides. "Riki just left."

"He's probably terrorising her," Jake reasons, laughing as he does. They're venturing further into the kitchen, right where you once were. "He loves to get under her skin."

Hidden behind a nearby wall, your head burrows into the hard surface, tears smudging into the clean paint coat as your body curls into itself, an attempt to make yourself as small and unseen as possible.

Riki had manhandled you, circled arms around your middle, plucking you off your useless feet only meant to dangle as he'd retreated behind the wall. His cock was in you the entire time, burrowed too deep to leave, and with each knock into your sweet spot, paralysed by incoming company and his steps, you'd been a goner. 

An absolute goner. 

"He's right," a dark whisper crawls in your ear, lips brushed against the shell of your ear. You shiver violently. "Little does he know…"

"Should we save her?" Sunoo asks, still loitering in the kitchen, cupboards creaking as they open. 

"Nah, let them be," Jake thankfully responds, a cabinet door shutting in his wake. "They'll come back soon enough. I need another drink,"

"I'll get one, I guess…"

"Sure you can handle another?" Jake teases, mirth rife in his teased words. "You said you get 'weird' when you're drunk,"

"Shut up! That was one time!" Sunoo yells, voice carrying as they venture back outside, sliding doors closing with a resounding click. 

The house is eerily quiet, murmurs of outside noise blocked off, making inside noise all the more stark. Your shaken pants, the ruffle of grated clothing, Riki's cock doing a slow plunge back into your slick-lined walls, only removed to his tip and pushed back in to hear you squeal. 

"This excites you?" he teases, voice a dark husk only submerging you further. "Almost getting caught? You're clenching around me so hard,"

He's close again, not deterred by the bow of your back as his chest presses into you, teeth grazed over in a bite he sinks into at the bottom of your earlobe, a pained whimper dragging your nails into drywall. 

"Or is it because you want me to breed you?" he asks, a rhetorical question nonetheless. Because you both know the answer, how ever much you wish to deny it. "It's okay, I know how you like your hole stuffed." 

A dial's turned, to the max where there's no return, shameless in the thrusts you're nearly punished by, Riki fully knocking you into the wall you're sobbing into, your lips pleading for mercy to wash over you. 

"I'll give you a nice load, send you back out with these stupid soaked panties on," he grunts, the palm of his hand on the back of your head, pushing you into the wall for leverage as he bruises you from within. "Good luck not messing the place. I'm backed up," 

You break. Shatter in premeditated pieces because your fuzzy mind can't handle anything, delicate to the touch as miraged images infiltrate. The indecency of his words, the shame coming with them ─ questioning looks, raised eyebrows, thoughts kept to your friends when they've discovered how unkept you are ─ the feeling. The unadulterated pleasure taking over your entire being, submerged in everything Riki gives you to where, you have no choice but to shake. 

"Ah, there you go. There's my baby," he coos, the howl of laughter following after his condescending words. "Just watch you shake. You're so close, aren't you?" 

You nod into drywall, tears staining your flamed cheeks.

"Poor thing, it's okay. You should come," he encourages, taking false pity that only unravels you more. His bracelets jangle, fevered fingertips having collected slick and rubbing against your clit, the pull and push of his cock ontop of the sensation too much to bare. "Come and I'll give you all mine. Come on, pretty girl. Let Riki know how good you feel," 

You detonate. Timer on its last digits, pushed over by words you'll think of long afterwards, back of your hand inched up the wall for your lips to magnetise to, a loud shriek in no way muffled before teeth hinge into skin, eyes squeezed shut with cascading tears as you orgasm. You're not yourself, hollowed out and entirely separate from the body existing in a parallel universe, soul free-floating out its case as it lays witness to the convulsions you're condemned to, a prisoner to your release as it racks through you with devastating destruction. 

Falling apart right before him, Riki groans. Hungry and needy, his teeth bury into the flesh of your quivering shoulder as his hips pistons a few more times, half-hearted strokes with his last strain used to knock right up into you, your body forced to the tips of your toes in a high squeal. Hot come coats your walls, like he'd cornered you for wanting and the warmth blends with the hot mess you feel, a malleable puddle slumping against the wall Riki pins you against, arms bracketing your head. 

Time passes on, the gathering outside still ongoing with hearty laughs and thumping music, and you're here. The laboured cycle of your breath, the sweat lining your skin cooling as you regain a normal pace of breath, fingertips digging into the wall for stability meanwhile your body's already pinned, Riki a hot brand on your back as his tongue darts out, licking a stripe of salt off the column of your neck, to which he groans. 

"We're fucking on the bed next," he mumbles into your skin, smile pressed into it as your head swivels, eyes wide in alarm. "Didn't get to see your pretty face enough when you came." 

Fuck wine. You're burning every vineyard and dispensary to the ground.

After you've had your fill. 

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