sit-- have a nice warm cup of tea ‧𓍢ִ໋☕ ׂ 𓈒⋆ ۪

you weren’t heartbroken; that would’ve implied there was something left to break.

you’d been on dates.

enough of them to know when there wouldn't be a second one before the drinks even hit the table.

enough to hear the same compliments repeated back to you like a script.

enough to recognize the tone men used when they were trying to impress you without actually learning anything real.

you’d slept with some of them, too.

sometimes because you wanted to. sometimes because you were desperate for relief. sometimes just to prove to yourself that you could still feel something, even if it didn’t last.

you weren’t bitter. you didn’t walk around openly hating men or rolling your eyes at every couple on the street.

you just didn’t have it in you anymore.

the hope. the performance. the energy it took to pretend someone’s bare minimum was enough.

so when you got home from yet another date that left you completely drained, you didn’t even bother with the lights.

you left your bag by the door, kicked your shoes aside, and sank onto the kitchen floor with a box of cookies at your side.

you weren’t heartbroken. you weren’t even sad. it was quieter than that; almost like resignation.

maybe it wasn’t that love never came; maybe it was that you were never the kind of person people stayed for.

being alone didn’t scare you.

what scared you was how much work it always seemed to take to avoid it.

every man felt like a mirror you kept wiping down, but no matter how clean you made it, the image was never your own.

it was smudged with their ego, clouded by their expectations, and warped by the way they looked at you like you were a puzzle they were entitled to solve.

you were tired of carving yourself down. of softening your edges. of apologizing for being too much or not enough.

tired of folding yourself smaller and smaller until there was nothing left of you at all, except whatever version might finally be enough to make someone stay.

your phone buzzed against the counter, a small sound that cut through the stillness and broke the spiral of your thoughts.

you kept your focus on the cookies in your lap, thumb working over the cardboard as though the solution to all of your problems might appear if you traced it long enough.

until it buzzed again. then again. and again.

you let out a weary sigh and reached for the phone, answering blindly, not bothering to see who it was before lifting it to your ear.

mostly because you already knew who was on the other end of the line.

“hi,” you said, voice low and a little scratchy from disuse.

“you sound like shit,” mingyu replied, warm and easy.

you smiled without meaning to. “thanks.”

fabric shifted on his end, a soft thud like he was throwing himself deeper into a couch.

“you didn’t text me today,” he spoke, not accusing, just noticing.

“mm,” you agreed quietly. “didn’t really feel like it.”

a quiet hum of understanding slipped out before his voice turned lighter. “hold on. didn’t you have that date tonight? with moustache guy?”

you shut your eyes. “unfortunately.”

“so…how bad was it?” he asked, already seeming to know the answer.

your head tipped back against the cupboard, the cool surface steadying you for a moment. “he called me dramatic,” you muttered, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“ouch.” he made the sound like a real wince. “what’d you do, insult his shirt?”

despite yourself, you let out a small laugh. “no. i just didn’t want to sleep with him.”

the quiet that followed was brief, but you felt it; he was biting back his first thought and thinking of something more appropriate to say.

“ah,” he said finally, voice dry. “god forbid you make a decision about your own body.”

you snorted, the sound sharp in your throat. “right? how dare i.”

“so you blocked him?” he asked, though it sounded more like certainty than a question.

“while he was walking me home,” you admitted, reaching into the box for another stale cookie.

his laugh rolled through the receiver, low and warm. “brutal and efficient…i respect it.”

the sound pulled a laugh out of you too, small and worn around the edges, before it faded back into quiet.

his voice softened in the pause. “you doing okay, though?”

you hesitated, not because you didn’t want to tell him, but because you couldn’t figure out how to shape the heaviness in your chest into words.

“i’m tired,” you said at last, the words too small for what you actually meant. “not just tonight, though. it’s the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix.”

“mm,” his agreement was soft, a sound that told you he knew exactly what that felt like, and that he’d been there more times than he could count.

his breathing stayed steady in your ear, present in a way that made the silence feel less empty.

“how did you even know it went badly?” the question slipped out before you could stop it.

“because you picked up,” he answered simply, as if that explained everything.

you frowned at the ceiling, not satisfied. “that doesn’t even make sense.”

there was movement on his end again, the soft rustle of fabric and a dull thud in the background, though his voice never faltered.

“you never pick up during good dates,” he reasoned. a pause stretched, just long enough for the smile in his voice to be obvious. “not that you’ve ever actually had one.”

your mouth fell open, half offended, half amused. “you are such an asshole.”

“tell me i’m wrong,” the grin in his voice was obvious, even without seeing his face.

you opened your mouth, ready to argue, but nothing came out. you knew he was right.

“yeah. that’s what i thought,” he said, his tone dripping with satisfaction.

“you’re insufferable,” you muttered.

“and correct,” he shot back without missing a beat, the faint shuffle of noise still bleeding through the line.

you squinted, suspicion tugging. “seriously, what are you doing? it sounds like you’re losing a fight with your furniture.”

“i’m coming over,” he said easily, the kind of casual certainty that came from years of getting away with it.

“gyu—” you started, fully ready to argue with him.

“don’t even start,” he cut in. “you’re not winning this one.”

“you don’t have to come,” you mumbled, curling tighter on the kitchen floor. “my apartment is a disaster, and i look like i’ve been hit by a bus.”

“cool,” he said, not missing a beat. “and?”

you blinked. “and i don’t want you to see me like this?”

his laugh slipped through, low and amused. “please. i’ve seen worse. like that night you got super wasted, missed the bathroom stall completely, and made me hold your hair while you cried into the toilet about how you were ‘too pretty to suffer like this.’”

you let out a dramatic groan, dragging your palm down your face. “you swore you’d never bring that up again.”

“i lied,” he said, sounding far too pleased with himself. “messy hair and a graveyard of takeout boxes don’t even crack your top ten. i’ve watched you full-body sob during tangled.”

“that was emotional,” you defended.

“it was,” he agreed easily. “your eyes were swollen for hours afterwards.”

“you’re actually unbearable,” you muttered.

“maybe,” he said lightly, “but i’m still coming over. you don’t get to argue with me about it, either. i’m already out of the house.”

you shook your head, pressing the phone tighter to your ear. “this feels like harassment.”

his laugh came easy, smug enough to make your chest tighten in spite of yourself. “yeah, yeah. file a complaint when i get there. i’ll see you in ten.”

he ended the call before you could get another word in.

you stayed on the floor a little longer, the kitchen tiles cool against your legs.

your bra strap had slipped down your arm, the dress from earlier felt too tight, and the lingering scent of ramen from your date was starting to make your stomach turn.

eventually, you peeled yourself off of the floor and padded toward your bedroom, tugging at zippers and straps as you walked.

you made it to your room without bothering to flick on the light.

the soft outline of mingyu’s hoodie was easy to spot in the dark, still draped over your desk chair like it had been waiting for you.

you slipped it on and tugged a pair of cotton shorts from the drawer without bothering to check which ones they were.

you were already turning back towards the kitchen before you’d fully registered the choice; like your body had already decided for you.

the only light came from the lamp in the living room and the soft glow above the stove, casting a dim warmth over the mess you said you’d clean hours ago.

piled up boxes. dirty dishes. the garbage you should have changed yesterday.

none of it was catastrophic; just enough to be annoying.

you lingered in the doorway, taking it all in. like maybe, if you stared hard enough, the mess would clean itself.

you thought about moving. picking up a box, rinsing a dish, doing the bare minimum to prove that you weren't completely useless.

you stood there long enough to accept it wasn't going to happen.

you couldn't help but laugh at how pathetic it all felt.

it was a five minute job at best, yet you still allowed yourself to sink back down to the floor, because avoidance had always came easier than effort.

the apartment was quiet for all of thirty seconds before his voice crashed through it, loud and certain, like he’d been waiting for the perfect moment to make an entrance.

“yo,” mingyu called out. “sorry i’m late—traffic was actual hell, and your street is like a one-way to satan. also,” he paused, mostly for dramatic effect, “i brought some noodles and that weird mango drink you like. worship me accordingly.”

you leaned off the cupboards to glance toward the entrance. “you’re not late,” you said flatly. “i told you not to come.”

“and yet,” he replied, already kicking off his shoes. “here i am.”

he crouched down to fix them; heel to toe, perfectly aligned with yours like it was second nature.

it was just shoes. nothing more.

except most men you’d gone out with would’ve kicked them halfway across the floor, expecting you to deal with it later.

the care he gave to something so small shouldn’t have meant anything, but the heat that flickered low in your stomach said otherwise.

you dismissed it just as quickly as it came, telling yourself it was just the bad date making scraps of effort look bigger than they actually were.

with a groan, you tipped onto your back, landing against the tile with a quiet thud. one arm draped across your eyes, the other one splayed out like you’d officially given up. “god, you're annoying.”

“love you too,” he muttered, easing the bags onto the counter, careful not to knock over the leaning tower of unopened mail.

he turned and pulled the fridge open with one hand, already bracing himself. “wow. shredded cheese, expired oat milk, and…ranch? you’ve really outdone yourself.”

“oh my god,” you peeked out from under your arm to glare at him. “i literally had ramen earlier.”

he glanced at the takeout container still sitting on the counter; unopened and untouched.

“that from your date?” he asked, already tugging off the lid. “what, was the guy’s moustache so gross you lost your appetite?”

“can you not,” you sighed, laughter sneaking into your voice despite your best efforts.

he barely reacted. “you didn’t even eat this. the broth has a film.”

you rolled your eyes, not even bothering to argue. “stop inspecting my trash like a raccoon.”

“stop living like a raccoon,” he shot back. “and sit up. this is getting depressing.”

“no,” you said. “maybe i like the floor.”

“my bad,” he said, stepping over you without hesitation. “i’ll leave you two alone, then.”

he picked up your container of ramen you'd abandoned on the counter, emptied the broth into the sink, and scraped the noodles into the trash.

there was no hesitation. no second thought.

only quick, deliberate movements carried out with the kind of ease that came from knowing exactly what needed to be done.

if it were up to you, the container would have gone straight into the trash, broth and all.

yet for some reason, it stayed in his hands.

he held it under the stream of hot water, and watched it spill over the sides until the cloudy film began to dissolve. he made it look so natural, as if rinsing it had always been the obvious choice.

without breaking his rhythm, he crouched down and tugged open the cabinet beneath the sink. his hand slipped inside, bypassing the clutter you usually shoved in there, until his palm landed on the caddy tucked against the wall.

he didn’t fumble or search. his fingers closed around the sponge instantly as he pulled it free in one smooth motion.

you stayed frozen on the floor, eyes locked on the way he worked it over the container.

the water slid over his veins as if it had chosen that path on purpose, dragging your gaze there and daring you to keep staring.

every drop seemed designed to make you notice the strength in his hands and each flex of his fingers, until you couldn’t stop imagining what else they could do if they turned their attention towards you instead.

before you could spiral any further, he rinsed the last of the bubbles away and placed the container neatly into the drying rack, never once glancing in your direction.

he wasn’t doing it for praise. he wasn’t trying to make a point, either.

he simply noticed what needed to be done, and instead of judging you or making you feel guilty for letting it sit, he took care of it himself without needing a single thank you.

it shouldn’t have made your stomach drop. it shouldn’t have made your mouth go dry.

yet the heat was already there, rushing low until you felt the dampness pool against the cotton of your shorts.

you pressed your thighs together, trying to convince yourself it wasn’t as obvious as it felt, but there was no denying it.

your body didn’t care about the logic. it only cared about the way his hands moved, sure and unbothered, as if caring for the mess you’d left behind came easier to him than just leaving it.

your eyes followed him as he moved towards the garbage. he gathered the bag in his hands, twisting it into a knot with an easy strength that made his forearms flex, his muscles shifting with every pull.

it was quick and efficient; the kind of movement that never asked to be noticed.

he placed it by the door, not just to move it out of the way, but with the unspoken intention of taking it out later. the kind of small, thoughtless promise no one else had ever made you.

when he stepped back into the room, you told yourself he had to be finished by now, though every part of you already knew he wasn’t.

the fabric of his sweats pulled tightly across his thighs as he crouched again, reaching for the cabinet.

a new bag rustled open in his hands, his fingers working with quiet certainty as he slipped it into the bin. each edge was pressed down carefully, tucked into place until it held exactly the way you liked it.

a task that should’ve looked mundane somehow carried weight in his hands. your pulse climbed in uneven beats, chest tight, as if the air in the room had turned heavier just because he was in it.

there was nothing seductive in what he did, yet every precise movement drew the heat higher until your body responded as though he’d touched you directly.

too many bad dates had taught you to not expect this kind of care.

you were used to men who thought effort stopped at sending a text, and who never lifted a finger unless it benefited them.

the guy from tonight hadn't even bothered to hold the door open for you, so the thought of him replacing a garbage bag was almost laughable.

most men had always treated care as an obligation; something only performed because they felt they had to.

with mingyu, it was instinct; as natural as his next breath.

something in you gave way the longer you watched him.

it became too easy to let your mind wander, to twist the steady rhythm of his hands into something else; something meant just for you.

suddenly, his hands weren’t cleaning anymore. they were gripping your hips, sliding lower until his fingers pressed between your thighs, stroking through the damp heat he’d already put there without even trying.

you could almost feel them pushing inside, filling you with the same easy certainty he carried into every small thing he did.

the realization of what you’d just imagined made your eyes snap shut, mortified at your own mind and yet powerless against the pulse it left thrumming through you.

by the time you found the courage to open them again, he was drying his palms against his sweats, shoulders rolling back as if he’d just wrapped up a shift.

“alright,” he said, stretching with a groan, joints popping as his hoodie slid higher. “time to get up, princess.”

you didn’t budge. your cheek stayed pressed to the tile, knees pulled in close, hair half-in your face.

he tipped his head at you. “hello? earth to y/n.”

you blinked. “what?”

“i said it’s time to get up,” he repeated, flat like it was obvious. “we’re not eating dinner with you laid out like a crime scene.”

“i’m fine here,” you muttered into your arm.

he gave your hip a light kick with his socked foot. “i know i look sexy doing dishes,” he smirked, already catching the eye roll you tried to hide. “but come on. pull it together.”

your head tipped just enough to glare at him. “you’re delusional.”

“and you’re dramatic,” he shot back without missing a beat, crouching just enough to extend his hand toward you. “now get up before i drag you to the couch myself.”

your lips twitched, but you refused to give him the satisfaction of a smile. “i’d like to see you try,” you mumbled, even as your hand slipped into his.

he tugged you up in one smooth pull, steadying you with a hand at your back until your feet found the floor again.

the touch was brief, casual, but your skin still burned under it.

you shook him off a little too quickly, ducking your head like maybe he wouldn’t notice. his brows lifted anyway, but he let it slide.

“come on,” he said, already reaching for the takeout bags on the counter. “i didn’t bring all of this food over just so you could mope on the floor.”

you trailed him into the living room, trying not to stare at the way his shoulders shifted under his hoodie as he carried the takeout.

he collapsed onto the couch, bags spread across the table like he owned the place.

you hovered for a beat before sitting beside him, close but not too close, hoping he wouldn’t feel the heat radiating off of your body.

“so,” he started, tearing open the first container, “soonyoung threw a tantrum when i told him you weren’t coming to rehearsal today.”

your lips tugged at one corner. “define tantrum.”

“like…fully rolling on the floor,” he said, chopsticks already clicking into place. “claimed he couldn’t get through practice without his number one fan watching.”

“sounds about right.” you said, easily picturing his dramatics in your head.

“seungkwan even backed him up,” he went on. “got all serious about how you’re ‘the glue that holds us together.’” he mimed quotes in the air, rolling his eyes.

your laugh slipped out before you could stop it.

he turned his head upon hearing the sound, like he’d been waiting for it, then reached for another container. the lid snapped open, steam spilling up between you.

“they’re ridiculous.” you said, shaking your head.

“it gets worse,” he assured, “seokmin told everyone in the studio that you were cheating on him.” he said casually, as if it wasn’t the wildest thing to say.

your brows shot up. “cheating? he and i aren’t even—” you cut yourself off with a disbelieving laugh, shaking your head again. “my god, he’s actually insane.”

mingyu’s smirk tilted, like he wanted to say more, but he just went back to portioning noodles.

you watched him work. how his hands moved quick and precise without thought. the crease in his brow when the chopsticks slipped.

the way his shoulder brushed yours when he reached for another box, like he didn’t even register the contact.

even if he didn’t, it still left you warm and restless, your shorts clinging tighter as your pulse tripping over itself.

you forced yourself still, arms wrapped tightly around your stomach, hoping he couldn’t read what was written all over your body.

without any warning, he slid the plate onto your lap, already reaching for another.

you glanced down ready to thank him, only to freeze.

every bite was exactly what you liked; no stray toppings, no sides bleeding into each other. even the noodles sat neat, twisted in their own space like he’d portioned them with care.

your brows furrowed. “wait…this is for me?”

“yeah?” his tone was flat, chopsticks already busy over his own plate.

“no, but—you separated everything.” you gestured vaguely at the plate, thrown. “none of the food’s even touching.”

he shrugged like it wasn’t worth noticing. “yeah. you hate it when it does.”

your mouth opened, stalled. “since when do you—”

“since always.” his smirk tugged faint, eyes still on the food. “i just pay attention. relax, it’s not that deep.”

you sat there, pulse loud in your ears, trying to pretend it wasn’t.

your shorts clung even tighter when you shifted, and the heat crawling up your neck made the plate almost too warm to balance on your lap.

by the time he leaned back with his own food, your eyes still hadn’t left him once.

his brows drew together, catching it instantly. “what?”

you blinked, caught off guard. “what?”

“you’re staring,” he said, chopsticks frozen midair like he’d caught you red-handed.

“am not,” you muttered, keeping your eyes locked on the plate in your lap.

“are too,” he shot back, smirk tugging as his chopsticks hovered. “seriously, what’s your deal?”

you shifted slightly, tugging your knees in closer as the words spilled out before you could catch them. “you’re just…way too thoughtful.”

he blinked, deadpan. “that’s a crime now?”

“no, it’s—” you waved a hand at the table, trying to find the words. “you cleaned, you set everything up, you made my plate exactly right without even asking—”

he glanced up mid-bite, chopsticks pausing. “uh-huh.”

“and you didn’t even hesitate, you just—” your voice pitched higher, flustered. “you just did it, like it was nothing—”

he reached for his bottle of water, lifting it toward his mouth, eyes narrowing with a half-smile. “because it is nothing.”

“it’s not nothing, gyu!” you shot back, heat crawling up your neck. “it’s—it’s hot, okay?”

he choked mid-sip, coughing and laughing all at once, nearly spraying water across the table as his shoulders shook.

at the same time, you slapped your hand over your mouth, instantly mortified. “oh my god.”

he was still coughing through a laugh, sleeve dragging across his mouth as his grin broke wide. “hot?” his voice cracked, half-raspy. “you think me scrubbing your dishes is hot?”

“nope,” you blurted through your hand. “you’re hearing things.”

his eyes lit like he’d just been handed blackmail material for life. “unbelievable. years of friendship, and this is how i find out your kink is…choreplay?”

“shut up,” you groaned, dragging your hands down your face.

“no fucking way,” his hand patted at his sweats like he was checking his pockets. “where’s my phone? the boys have to hear this—”

your stomach dropped, panic snapping through you. “don’t you dare.”

his grin only widened, his hands now patting down the front pocket of his hoodie like he was already halfway to victory. “oh, i definitely dare.”

you scrambled to shove your plate onto the coffee table, causing the chopsticks to clatter against porcelain in your rush. “nope. no. absolutely not—”

he’d barely gotten his fingers inside of his pocket before you launched yourself across the couch, tackling him sideways into the cushions.

he landed flat on his back with a thud, and you climbed over him, straddling his hips while reaching desperately for his hoodie pocket.

“this is an invasion of privacy!” he gasped, twisting under you, but his laugh broke through every word.

“you don’t need privacy!” you shot back, breathless, hair falling in your face. “you need to shut up!”

his free hand darted to your side, fingers digging right into the spot he knew would make you squeal.

you squirmed against him, shrieking through your laughter. “stop, you asshole!”

he was laughing so hard his voice cracked, words tumbling out between breaths. “you picked the fight—i’m just defending myself!”

you finally slipped your hand into his pocket and yanked his phone free.

“mine!” you yelled triumphantly as you tossed it gently onto the carpet, way out of reach.

he burst out laughing, head sinking back into the cushion, chest shaking under you. “unreal,” he wheezed, grin splitting wide. “you just committed straight-up theft.”

“it was self-defense,” you corrected, still straddling his hips as you tried to hold him down. “you were about to ruin my life.”

his hands came up half-heartedly, bracing against your thighs as his laugh cracked again.

“you literally said i was hot when all i did was rinse a bowl—” he bucked his hips just enough to throw you off balance, making you squeal. “imagine if i started mopping the floors.”

“stop talking.” you slapped your hand over his mouth, desperate to stop the teasing.

he looked at you with mock innocence, then dragged his tongue across your palm.

you yanked it back with a yelp. “gross!”

he laughed so hard it broke into hiccups, chest still shaking.

your forehead pressed into his hoodie, both of you still caught in the aftershock of laughter.

the sound trailed off in little bursts, until it faded completely. silence settled around you, thicker than it had any right to be.

you lifted your head without meaning to, hair falling forward, your fists still bunched in the fabric of his hoodie.

he was right there; flat on his back, smile softening into something slower that tugged at your ribs.

the awareness of it all seeped in slowly, until every place your body touched his became impossible to ignore.

your thighs hugged his sides. your hips were pressed flush against his. his palms rested warm and steady on your bare legs, fingers splayed like he didn’t trust himself to move.

your faces hovered only inches apart from one another, the remnants of his grin fading as the air thickened between you.

the echo of laughter still hummed in your chest, but it was drowned beneath the heavy thud of your heartbeat.

the ache you’d been pushing down all night came rushing back, hot and relentless, flooding every nerve until there was no disguising it.

every slight shift of your hips made it worse. your slick heat pressed directly against him; betraying just how badly you wanted more.

his eyes held yours, steady and certain, as if he could read every thought you were trying to bury.

a quick flicker down to your lips slipped past his control; small enough to deny, but impossible for you to miss.

the second his gaze lifted to yours again, the tension snapped.

you closed the gap in a rush, kissing him with all the want you’d been choking down.

he answered immediately, almost as if he’d been holding back just as much. the kiss was deep from the start, his mouth moving against yours with a kind of certainty that stole your breath.

his palm skimmed up your bare thigh until it fit at your waist, while his other hand curled behind your neck, coaxing you closer, unable to bear an inch of distance.

the pressure of his hands anchored you as he shifted beneath you, pushing up from the cushions until he was sitting.

the movement never broke the kiss; it only dragged you closer, chest to chest, your legs tightening instinctively around his hips.

his mouth worked over yours hungrily, lips parting like he couldn’t get enough. you clutched at his hoodie, fingers knotted tightly in the fabric, pulling harder to erase whatever little space remained.

every brush of his mouth made your pulse spike harder. every drag of his lips left your lungs aching, but neither of you were willing to stop long enough to breathe.

his lips moved against yours like he already knew every secret you’d been hiding. each shift was deliberate, practiced without practice, pulling raw sounds out of you before you even realized you were making them.

his hand left the back of your neck first, dragging slowly over your skin before slipping down to join the other at your waist.

his hands slipped lower in a slow drag, following the natural curve of your body until both palms curved around your ass, pressing you down against the growing buldge in his sweatpants.

the press of him right against your center dragged a moan from your throat before you could stop it, hips rolling down on instinct, desperate to feel more of the friction you’d been aching for all night.

“breathe,” he murmured against your mouth, voice steady even through his own ragged breath. “i’ve got you.”

your hips rolled again before you could stop them, chasing more of the thick heat beneath his sweats. the noise he made vibrated through your chest, deep and broken, sending sparks racing down your spine.

you clenched around nothing, thighs tightening at his sides, every nerve screaming for more.

“gyu,” you whispered, voice trembling. “please.”

his thumb brushed slowly over your side through your hoodie, grounding you even as his mouth swallowed your plea.

“i hear you,” he said, rough and certain. “but we’re not doing this here. not on a couch.”

the protest tangled with want on your tongue, but you gave a shaky nod. “okay,” you breathed.

his grip tightened, both hands already firm at your ass, and in one motion, you were lifted off the couch.

your legs wrapped around his waist before you even thought about it, a startled laugh breaking from your chest as his mouth chased yours again.

he carried you like he’d done it a thousand times, steady even with your legs locked tight around him.

your back met the mattress before you even realized you had made it to your bedroom, the mattress dipping under your shared weight as he laid you down without once breaking the kiss.

he hovered above you, his weight balanced on one arm, while his other hand found your jaw. his thumb traced lightly along your skin as his eyes searched yours. “still with me?”

“still with you,” you whispered.

he brushed a strand of hair away from your lips, fingers lingering for a second longer than necessary before adjusting the pillow under your head.

he caught the details no one else ever did; every small adjustment only served as proof that he knew exactly what you needed before you said a word.

his hand drifted lower again, pausing at the hem of your hoodie. “can i?” he asked, eyes locked on yours.

“please,” you breathed, the word spilling out before you could catch it.

he pulled the hoodie over your head in one smooth motion, leaving you in nothing but your bra and shorts.

the air hit cool against your skin, though it was nothing compared to his stare, heavy with years of memorizing every detail; knowing you in ways no one else ever had.

“fuck,” he murmured as his hand lifted to your cheek, tucking your hair behind your ear. “you’re so beautiful.”

your breath hitched, chest pressing up into his. heat rushed over your skin, your body giving you away as your hips shifted closer, chasing him without thought.

his lips moved with purpose, each kiss a quiet claim as he trailed them along your jaw, across your cheek, down the line of your throat, and back up to your lips.

his mouth traced you in reverence, each touch tugging another tremor loose, stoking the ache already clawing at you.

his hands followed the same rhythm, palms sliding over your sides, dragging heat everywhere they lingered.

he touched you like he already knew what your body was asking for; steady where you needed grounding, firmer where you were aching for pressure.

he moved with purpose, mapping you in ways that left no part of you untouched, and no ache unanswered.

your fingers slipped to the hem of his hoodie, tugging at it clumsily, more desperate than precise. you weren’t subtle about it, trying to work it up his torso without breaking the kiss.

his mouth curved against yours in a half-laugh, half-groan. “you know you can just ask, right?” he murmured, amused even through the rasp of his breath.

you rolled your eyes, breath catching anyway. “just take it off,” you whispered, impatience clear in your voice.

he rocked back onto on his heels, and tugged the hoodie off in one smooth pull. the shirt beneath stretched across his shoulders, while his sweats slouched low on his hips like an invitation.

your gaze slipped down, dragging his with it, until you were both staring at the obvious wet mark stamped across his lap.

your stomach flipped, eyes flying wide before you could stop them. his laugh cracked out, caught somewhere between disbelief and delight.

“wow,” he said, brows shooting up. “i rinse one bowl and you baptize my pants?”

you slapped a hand over your mouth, laughter already breaking through. “oh my god—no! that is not from me!”

his grin only widened, mischief written all over it. “no? so what, i pissed myself?”

you let out a choked laugh, shoulders shaking. “maybe you did!”

he leaned closer, laughter still shaking out of him, his hands warm and steady at your hips. “mm. want me to check your shorts, just to be sure?”

you shifted in his grip, laughing helplessly even as your face burned. “absolutely not!”

his grin turned smug, laughter still ghosting in his voice. “that’s what i thought.” his thumbs pressed deeper into your hips, steady and sure. “guess initiative really does go a long way, huh?”

you rolled your eyes, though the smile tugging at your lips gave you away. “apparently.”

he hummed, pleased, leaning in closer until his nose brushed yours. “good answer,” he mumbled.

his mouth found yours again, the trace of a smile still there, though it melted quickly into something hungrier.

his knee slid between your thighs, nudging them a little further apart, while his hands tightened at your hips, keeping you close.

you gasped into him, the sound breaking into a whimper when he angled himself lower, kissing along your jaw.

“there she is,” he murmured, voice brushing warm against your pulse before his lips dragged down your neck.

your breath caught as your hands slipped to his chest, sliding lower, reaching for the hem of his shirt. he caught your wrists easily, pressing a soft kiss into your open palm.

“not yet,” he whispered, steady and certain. “this is about you.”

his mouth trailed down slowly, lingering against your collarbone before sinking down the curve between your breasts.

his lips lingered like he had all the time in the world, and every deliberate pause only made your need claw harder, trembling for the next touch.

he knew exactly what you needed without you ever having to say it.

he caught it in the way your legs tightened, in the way your hips tipped towards him, in the twitch of your hands gripping the sheets.

he noticed everything, always had, and now he was using it to unravel you piece by piece.

“i’ve been dreaming about this for so long,” he breathed against the lace of your bra, voice low like he almost couldn’t believe you were real.

his hand slid beneath you, guiding your back into a soft arch. the clasp of your bra gave way under his fingers like it had been waiting for him, undone without him ever breaking from your skin.

the straps slipped down your shoulders, one after the other, and his mouth followed their path in slow devotion.

every new inch of bare skin was met with his lips, each kiss a quiet vow that nothing about you would be left unseen. he traced you with patience, as though to prove that you were worth memorizing in full.

his lips found the swell of your breast, his hands steadying you against the tremor of your own breath.

his lips lingered wherever they touched, tracing the faint lines that marked your skin as though they were meant to be cherished, never concealed.

“so beautiful,” he said, voice quiet but unshakably sure, like the words had been waiting years to fall out of him. “every inch of you.”

his tongue flicked over your nipple and the moan that tore from you was answered instantly by his own; muffled against your breast, like the taste of you undid him as much as his touch wrecked you.

your thighs shifted restlessly, helpless in their search for relief.

“you’re already trembling,” he breathed, kissing down over your ribs, following the soft curve beneath your breast. “and i’ve hardly even touched you.”

your voice broke apart on his name. “gyu—”

he didn’t look up, lips still moving like prayer, heat spilling across your skin. “no one’s ever touched you like this, have they?”

the truth of it broke you open, unraveling you from the inside out. your breath faltered, stuttered, until it was nothing but gasps and moans, your hips tilting into his hands without thought.

“i—” the attempt at words dissolved into moans, “fuck—oh my god—”

his palms slid down, fingers tracing the edge of your shorts, stopping just above where you needed him most.

“yeah,” he said, already knowing the proof had been in your body all along. “i figured.”

instead of giving in right away, he bent to your waist, his lips dragging heat over the skin just above your shorts.

“they never earned this,” he said, voice quiet but edged with conviction. “never learned you like this.”

“oh god,” the sound tore out of you, thin and desperate, your fingers curling around his wrist with no strength behind them.

he took your weak hold as encouragement, not resistance.

“they didn’t take their time,” he whispered, lips tracing slowly over the softness of your stomach. “didn’t listen.”

your fingers found his hair, tugging softly, guiding him closer without words.

“p-please,” you pleaded, the word breaking before it even left your throat.

his head lifted just enough to meet your eyes, steadying you in an instant.

“oh, baby,” his voice softened as one hand left your waist, reaching for the pillow beside you.

he slid it close, eyes never leaving yours. “lift up for me, princess,” he coaxed gently. “just a little.”

you obeyed, lifting just enough for him to slide the pillow breath you. his hands adjusted it with care, easing your hips down until he was sure you were comfortable.

“there we go,” he muttered, brushing his thumb over your skin. “that’s better.”

his thumb traced idle circles at your hip, grounding you while the other hand slid lower. when his fingers brushed the band of your shorts, he lifted his gaze, catching yours with a question he didn’t need to voice.

the quiet in his eyes made your chest ache; knowing he would wait if you asked him to. your body answered before your words could, hips tilting up in silent permission.

his lips tugged into a soft smile, eyes fixed on you as he drew the fabric down.

he shifted your shorts and underwear down slowly, guiding the fabric over your hips with deliberate care; every motion unhurried, every detail handled with care.

he gently lifted your leg, his hand steady at your calf. his lips pressed to your ankle first, soft and lingering, before traveling upward in slow succession.

each kiss trailed higher — the curve of your calf, the dip at your knee, the inside of your thigh — like he was intent on worshipping every step closer to where you ached for him most.

your nails dug into the sheets as his palms splayed over your thighs, easing them apart.

“breathe for me, sweetheart,” his voice was strained, as if he was holding himself back just to guide you. “just breathe.”

your body obeyed his words before your mind could, chest lifting with a shaky breath.

he didn’t let you finish it.

his mouth found you the next second; no hesitation, no warning. just him, warm and certain, like he’d been holding back only for as long as you could bear.

the pillow lifted you right into his mouth, every inch of you exposed to the slow drag of his tongue. his mouth worked with a patience that burned, each movement a vow to remember every detail of you.

your fingers threaded into his hair, desperate for something to hold on to.

“oh my—fuck—” the words tore out half-formed before collapsing into a moan you couldn’t contain.

he groaned in response, the sound reverberating against you as his grip tightened on your thighs, steadying you when your body tried to jolt away.

the way he moved against you was unhurried, and devastating in its precision. every swipe of his tongue felt like he already knew what would break you apart.

your chest heaved, breath shattering into pieces. you tightened your grip in his hair, dragging him closer without thinking.

he let you guide him, humming low like the taste of you was everything he’d ever wanted.

heat rushed through your stomach, twisting tighter with every pass of his mouth.

you were soaked. aching. unraveling with every second he stayed between your thighs.

“feels so good—” you choked out, hand fisting in the sheets now. “i can’t—it’s—gyu.”

he paused just long enough to glance up at you, eyes dark and blown wide with need. “you’re doing so fucking good for me, baby.” he praised, voice filled with honesty.

he found you again without pause, urgency written in every motion. his lips tightened over you, his tongue pushing deeper than before.

your head tipped back, voice spilling out like prayer. “don’t—please don’t—don’t stop—please.”

another groan broke free from his mouth, vibrating through your every nerve.

pleasure ripped through you so fast it stole the air from your lungs, leaving you clinging to him as though he was the only thing keeping you tethered.

“that’s it,” he whispered against you, voice low, almost reverent. “let it happen, baby.”

your thighs quivered around his shoulders, hips twisting helplessly.

his hold only tightened, dragging you deeper into every surge of pleasure until you had no other choice but to give in.

“gyu—fuck,” you gasped, tears stinging from the intensity of it all.

he slowed his pace, pressing soothing kisses as his thumbs circled your skin.

“that’s it, sweetheart,” he murmured. “you did so good for me.”

your chest heaved, lungs struggling to catch up with the aftershock.

when his gaze lifted, the change was immediate; eyes softening on sight, like tasting you had only deepened the reverence already written into him.

your lungs were still searching for air when he started climbing back up your body, mouth brushing every inch along the way.

your thigh. your stomach. the underside of your breast. your collarbone.

each kiss softer than the last, like he was pulling you back into yourself piece by piece.

by the time he found your mouth, you were already leaning into him, reaching before you realized it.

his lips lingered, smiling faintly against yours. “felt good, huh, beautiful girl?”

a broken laugh slipped out, shaky as you tried to catch your breath. “good?” you asked, head shaking in disbelief. “gyu, no one’s ever—” you paused, voice breaking, “not like that.”

his grin tugged at the corner of his mouth, soft but smug, like he couldn’t help himself.

“yeah?” he teased gently, eyes searching yours. “that’s because they were all idiots.”

he leaned in, brushing his nose against yours before kissing the corner of your mouth. “you deserve more than they’ll ever know how to give.”

his words sank deep, leaving you trembling all over again. you tried to laugh, but it broke halfway when his lips caught yours, sealing the truth of his words right into you.

what began tender turned restless in seconds.

his mouth moved against yours, only you couldn’t help but deepen it, chasing him like you couldn’t get close enough.

his chest pinned you down as his hips dragged slowly between your thighs. you felt him, hard and thick through his sweats, sending another wave of heat to rip through you.

it didn’t matter that you’d already fallen apart once; your body lit up for him all over again.

a whimper caught in your throat, swallowed by his kiss as your hands scrambled higher, clawing at his shirt.

you tugged like you were frantic; like the thin barrier of fabric was the only thing keeping you from breathing.

“off,” you rasped against his lips, desperate, the word breaking. “please—take it off.”

“yes, ma’am.” he said, a smirk tugging at his lips, but it vanished the second your fingers brushed his waistband like you couldn’t wait a second longer.

you shoved his sweats down with shaking hands, boxers going along, nearly knocking him off balance in your urgency.

he huffed a laugh, his eyes catching the hunger in yours. “greedy, are we?” he chuckled, sounding more undone than smug.

“shut up,” you shot back, no patience for his teasing.

your eyes had already landed on him; thick and already slick at the tip.

heat rushed hot up your chest, a grin tugging weakly at your lips despite yourself. “so that’s what i do to you?”

he groaned, dragging a hand down his face. “you know what you do to me.”

“still,” you whispered, tugging him closer, “it’s nice to have the evidence.”

a rough laugh slipped from him, cut short as his mouth slammed back onto yours, heavy with need.

your legs wrapped around his waist without thought, but he held himself back; grinding his hard length through your slick folds with a patience that felt merciless, his lips still on yours like he needed to drink down every sound before giving you more.

“turn over for me, baby.” his voice was rough at the edges, but his touch stayed soft, guiding you onto your stomach like he was handling something precious.

as you shifted, the pillow resting underneath your hips slipped slightly.

before you could react, his hand was already there, sliding it back beneath your stomach with quiet care; making sure the angle favoured your comfort more than his own.

“there we go,” he muttered, like he was admiring a work of art. “just like that, angel. fuck—look at you.”

you could feel the heat of him behind you, hovering close, and the way his hands coasted up and down your sides; thumbs pressing in like he was trying to memorize every inch.

“you’re unreal,” he whispered, mostly to himself. “my fucking dream girl.”

his palms settled at your waist, urging your hips higher before gliding up your spine, pressing lightly between your shoulders until your chest sank into the mattress.

“fuck, baby,” he groaned as he lined himself up. “you’re gonna kill me.”

the blunt press of him at your entrance had you gasping, nails twisting in the sheets.

“gyu—” your voice cracked, the sound nothing but a plea.

“i know, i know.” his hand smoothed down your side, soothing you. “just breathe, beautiful. i’ve got you.”

he slid in with agonizing slowness, every inch a stretch that stole the air directly from your lungs.

a broken sound escaped you, and his groan followed fast, spilling into the space between your bodies.

“f-fuck—” your cried helplessly, “it’s—oh my—fuck—”

he bottomed out with a shudder, his hips pressed flush against you, both of you shaking with the effort it took not to fall apart right there.

his forehead dropped between your shoulders, breath hot against your skin.

“jesus christ—” he groaned, the sound rough and reverent all at once. “you feel—fuck, baby, you feel insane.”

your back arched, body clenching around him, another helpless moan tearing through you. “too much—no, it’s—god, gyu—it’s so good.” the words spilled broken, tumbling past your lips before you could catch them.

his hand slid to your stomach, pulling you up into him, grounding you through the dizzy stretch. “that’s it,” he murmured, kissing along your shoulder blade. “you’re doing—f-fuck—you’re perfect—fucking made for me.”

your thighs quivered, but the need to feel him move was stronger than the ache. you shifted back against him, desperate. “please…move—i need—”

he groaned again, like your words undid him. “fuck—yeah, baby, i know.”

he slowly eased his hips back, dragging himself out until you thought you’d break, then pushed in again, steady and deep.

the rhythm was unhurried but merciless; every stroke deliberate, every thrust angled like he knew exactly how to pull you apart.

after a few slow strokes, his pace quickened; each thrust sinking deeper, chasing every sound that spilled from you.

“there it is—fuck, yeah. that’s it,” he breathed, forehead tipping down for a beat before he straightened again, eyes locked on the way your body yielded to him.

your moans spilled raw into the mattress, high pitched and broken, your hips rocking back into him without thought. “oh my god—don’t stop—please, gyu, don’t—”

he answered with another thrust, sharp enough to punch a cry straight out of you.

“never,” he panted, jaw tight, reverence spilling through every word. “you feel too fucking good—i could stay here forever.”

your walls clenched tight around him, the build snapping faster than you could process.

“gyu—i’m gonna—fuck—” the cry tore out of you as your whole body bowed into the mattress, release ripping straight through you.

he groaned at the feel of you breaking around him, hips stuttering once before he forced himself to steady, dragging it out for you instead of chasing his own end.

“fuck—yeah—” his voice cracked. “that’s it, angel…let go for me—just like that.”

your thighs shook uncontrollably, but his hands steadied you; one gripping your waist, the other pressing into your stomach, keeping you grounded as you unraveled.

the sob that followed buried itself in the sheets, your release hitting so hard it fractured every breath into ragged pieces.

he bent over you, lips trailing soft kisses along your spine, his hips still moving but gentler now, easing you down instead of pulling you higher.

“i’ve got you,” he whispered into your skin, kissing your shoulder like a vow. “just breathe for me, angel…that’s all you need to do.”

he eased out of you slowly, the sudden emptiness pulling a broken whimper from your throat before you could stop it. “gyu—w-why…what are you—”

“shh, i know, sweetheart,” he soothed, palms steady as they skimmed your sides, guiding you gently. “just needed to see you. fuck—look at you. you think i could stop now?”

desire threaded through his voice, yet his hands remained careful, guiding you as if you were fragile in his hold. he eased you onto your back, settling your hips back onto the pillow with a care that made it clear he wouldn’t let you feel anything but comfort.

you let him move you, pliant in his hold, your body trembling as you blinked up at him. his hand cradled the back of your neck, thumb tracing lightly like he needed to feel you breathe.

he kissed your temple first, lingering there, before trailing down to your cheek.

his mouth wandered unhurriedly across your skin; tracing over your brow, brushing the bridge of your nose, grazing the corner of your lips.

“hi, beautiful,” he whispered against your skin, words cracked but full of awe.

your smile barely surfaced, dazed and weak, but it was there. “hi,” you breathed back.

his forehead tipped to yours, lips brushing in a fleeting kiss. “you okay?” he asked, though the look in his eyes said he already knew the answer.

your breath caught, a soft laugh tumbling out with your words. “more than okay.”

the corner of his mouth curved into a soft smile before he slid his hand down to steady your hip.

he lined himself up and pushed back in with one long, steady stroke. the stretch tore a gasp from your throat, your body clenching around him so hard it forced a groan straight out of him.

“jesus—” his voice cracked, forehead pressing to yours again. “baby, you feel—fuck—you’re so tight.”

your fingers tangled in his hair, tugging him closer, mouth falling open on a sound you couldn’t swallow down.

“gyu—” his name slipped from your lips, almost a sob. “it’s—s-so deep—oh my god.”

his palm pressed firm to your stomach, making sure you felt every inch of him. “there we go,” he rasped, kissing your jaw through ragged breaths. “you’re taking me so well, beautiful. you’re—fuck, you’re perfect.”

his hips pulled back, just enough to make you feel the loss, before he drove in sharper. the force knocked the air from your chest as your nails clawed down his shoulder blades.

“eyes on me,” he mumbled, catching your gaze. “don’t look away, baby—want to see you fall apart.”

your gaze clung to his until the next thrust stole it away, lids fluttering shut as another cry tore loose from your throat.

“no, no—look at me,” he urged, groaning when you blinked back up at him, glassy-eyed and trembling. “that’s it. good girl.”

your moans came fractured, tumbling past your lips with every push. “please—gyu, please, just like that—f-fuck—feels so good, so good—”

“fuck—” his voice cracked, hips driving harder, the sound of you begging ripping the control straight out of him.

“oh my god—i’m gonna—” the words broke into a sob, your voice splintering. “mingyu, i—fuck—i can’t—”

his thrusts faltered, a groan tearing from his chest as he forced himself deeper. “yes, you can, angel. just a little more—fuck—i can feel you. you’re right there.”

you broke apart around him, crying out his name like it was the only word left in you. “gyu—”

“that’s it—oh, fuck—that’s it, baby,” he gasped, forehead dropping to yours as his own rhythm fell apart. “come with me—yeah, just like that—fuck—”

your third release tore through you, carrying his first with it. your body squeezed around him, causing him to let out a wrecked moan as he came inside of you.

he stilled for a moment, chest pressed to yours as both of you trembled through the last shreds of release.

there was no detachment. no instinct to turn away. he hadn’t looked anywhere but at you.

when his breathing finally slowed, he pressed a soft kiss to your jaw. “are you okay?” he asked.

you nodded, unable to trust your voice.

he gave you a moment longer before easing out, slow and careful, drawing a broken whimper from your throat.

his mouth followed the loss; kissing the inside of your thigh, the curve of your hip, and the hollow below your ribs; each one gentle and deliberate in their own way.

“stay here,” he said softly. “just rest, baby.”

your head fell back against the pillow in the faintest nod, eyes glassy with exhaustion.

he lingered a second longer, his thumb brushing your cheek in a touch that felt reluctant, before finally pushing himself to stand.

he bent down to grab his boxers from where they’d been tossed, sliding them on around his hips.

the quiet between you stretched thin, filled only by the sound of his breathing and the faint creak of the floor.

by the time he reached the door, your chest was already tight. you stayed where you were, staring up at the ceiling, the fan turning in lazy circles above you.

the longer you watched, the more the quiet shifted.

at first it was just silence, but eventually, that silence turned into space, which slowly turned into panic.

you weren’t naïve. you knew the script.

sex that good, that messy, that consuming, usually ended the same way.

a roll to the side. maybe a muttered ‘that was fun’. the scrape of denim. the excuse about an early morning.

sometimes the door would shut before you’d even pulled the sheets over yourself.

your heart sank.

what if this was that moment?

what if you’d just traded years of friendship for a few hours of wreckless, selfish pleasure?

what if you’d just ruined everything?

before the thoughts could spiral any further, the door creaked open again.

“hey,” he spoke softly, not wanting to startle you.

you blinked towards him, body still draped exactly where he’d left you.

his boxers hung low on his hips, hair damp and sticking to his forehead, chest still flushed from the heat of you. a towel was slung over his shoulder, two water bottles gripped in one hand, and a warm cloth in the other.

your throat went tight. “you came back,” you whispered, the words slipping out before you could catch them.

his face softened immediately, something tender breaking through. “of course i did,” he said, stepping closer. “what—did you think i’d just disappear after that?”

you tried to smile, but it wavered.

“hey,” he said again, lowering onto the edge of the bed. “don’t go quiet on me now, pretty girl. not after you already woke all of the neighbors up.”

a soft, broken laugh escaped your lips.

he bent to press a soft kiss to your knee. “scoot up a little, sweetheart. let me take care of you.”

his hands moved with quiet certainty, every touch measured and unhurried. patience lingered in everything he did; a tenderness you weren’t used to.

you felt the difference in your chest before you even felt it between your thighs.

no one had ever done this for you before.

the most you’d ever been given was a half-hearted towel tossed your way, like it was your job to deal with the aftermath alone.

but here he was, treating you like you were something worth handling with delicacy.

“i kept the pillow there,” he said quietly, “’cause i figured you’d be sore. didn’t want you shifting too much.”

he finished with quiet care, dropping the cloth and towel into your hamper before reaching for your hoodie on the floor.

he eased it over your head, guiding your arms through the sleeves, tugging it down until you were completely covered.

as he climbed back into the bed, you reached for him without thinking twice.

he was already leaning into you, arms sliding around your waist, pulling you against him like it was the only place you belonged.

“you still with me?” he asked, lips brushing your hair.

you nodded, eyes still shut until his voice pulled you back.

you blinked up at him as he dipped his head, catching your gaze. “you scared me for a second.”

your voice was small. “i just…wasn’t expecting you to come back.”

his brow furrowed, a little hurt, though his tone stayed soft. “come on. you really thought i’d leave you like that?”

you huffed out a laugh. “it wouldn’t be the first time someone did.”

his chest rose on a sigh as he shifted to really look at you. “baby…what kind of assholes are you fucking?”

the bluntness startled a laugh out of you. “you’ve heard all the stories,” you reminded him.

“unfortunately.” his hand stayed warm at your spine, steadying you. “and i hated every single one of them.”

you froze, but he continued nonetheless.

“you don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head. “listening to you try to laugh off how some guy left before you could even breathe again—” he paused, exhaling hard through his nose. “i swear, prison stripes nearly sounded worth it.”

“you never said anything,” you said, genuinely surprised at his words.

his lips lifted into a small smile, but the weight in his eyes gave him away. “never felt like my place.”

“gyu…” you whispered.

he shook his head gently, already seeing where your thoughts were headed.

“you really don’t get it, do you?” his voice softened, a little rough at the edges.

“get what?” you murmured as your eyes searched his face for any clues on what he could be referring to.

his hand came up to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear, so tender it made your chest ache.

“how easy you are to love.”

you froze, lungs stuttering like they’d completely forgotten how to work.

“i’ve wanted to do this right for so long,” he whispered, leaning his forehead to yours. “not just the sex. all of it. making you laugh. holding you when you cry. being the one who never leaves. giving you the kind of love you should’ve had all along.”

your lips parted, but no sound followed. the weight of his words pressed down until all you could do was hold his gaze, completely undone by the gentleness in his voice.

“and if i ever have to hear about one more guy who made you feel like you were too much, or too emotional, or not worth sticking around for…” he shook his head again, softer this time. “i’ll lose my fucking mind. because you—”

he swallowed hard, trying to find the courage to continue. “you deserve someone who worships the ground you walk on. someone who thanks god every night that you chose them.”

you blinked hard, tears threatening to fall as a soft laugh escaped you. “you’re not supposed to make me cry after sex, idiot.”

“i meant what i said, you know,” he told you, his lips curving into that same boyish grin you’ve adored for years. “and i know my feelings aren’t one sided, either, ms. choreplay.”

tears slipped down your cheeks as you let out a shaky laugh, swatting weakly at his chest. “you are such an asshole, kim mingyu.”

“am i wrong?” he smirked. “because you—” he paused, tapping your thigh, “—basically had tears running down your thighs from me washing, like, two dishes.”

you groaned, burying your face in his chest. “please never phrase it like that again.”

he laughed, the sound warm against your cheek. “don’t act like you didn’t whimper when i changed the garbage bag.”

you pulled back just enough to glare at him. “my god, you’re always so full of yourself.”

his grin only widened, cocky and unbothered. “wait till you find out i sort my laundry by whites and darks.”

Appreciations for @taeyongdoyoung 

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“Loved this entire story!”

Appreciations for @tomodachiii

“tamagotchiii!! (tomo, heheh) you are seriously pure sunshine, and just so cool. you’re so sweet, kind, and funny in a way that makes people feel at ease. i have always been at ease with you from the day i talked to you. i have to say, i genuinely fell in love with your writing. you mirror your writing. it’s as good as you are! happy holidays! i hope you get to rest, have fun, and enjoy this season.”

“You’re such a wonderful writer, and a lovely person. It’s sad that you no longer write, but it’s also understandable why you stopped. I hope that you’re happy and healthy and will continue to be! Have a wonderful holiday season and new year!” 

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“This was a wonderful story and I love the banner hehe”

Perspective

“I think this was the first Seventeen fic I read that truly blew me away. I remember being so awed at how beautifully written it is”

Appreciations for @viastro

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telephone

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“the way of the house husband opened the door for me to fall in love with your storytelling and from there i realised i love reading long fics.”

Seungcheol's Letters

Appreciations for @wooahaeproductions

“I hope you have a lovely Christmas (or that time period if you don’t celebrate) and next year treats you well!”

Appreciations for @wqnwoos

“She writes emotions so well and at a level I can only wish to achieve. I hope she knows how appreciated and TALENTED she is because I have never had a dull moment reading her works.” 

“hana’s voice in writing is truly one of a kind; i adore how much care you can see she puts in choosing her words when she writes. her characters are human, and the dialogue jumps out of the pages. caratblr is a brighter place with people like her here. <3”

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Appreciations for @xomakara

“I hope you have a lovely Christmas (or that time period if you don’t celebrate) and next year treats you well!”

Appreciations for @yoonguurt

“I hope you have a lovely Christmas (or that time period if you don’t celebrate) and next year treats you well!”

Appreciations for @yoonia

“I hope you have a lovely Christmas (or that time period if you don’t celebrate) and next year treats you well!”

“She's one of the first writers I found on Tumblr, one of the most talented and humble person I know. Her stories offer comfort for everyone who reads them. She has a way with words and description that pulls you into the world she created. Definitely one of the authors whose stories I go back to read time and time again”

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“I can talk about this fic for the rest of my life. If there's a fic out there that I want to see as a movie, this is it.”

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“I've read the original version and loved, and now she's back with a new version that gets even better. This is the kind of story that sticks with you for a long time.” 

Appreciations for @100vern

“not to be dramatic but jewel’s writing rewires my brain. i think about it for DAYS”

“I hope you have a lovely Christmas (or that time period if you don’t celebrate) and next year treats you well!”

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“I hope you have a lovely Christmas (or that time period if you don’t celebrate) and next year treats you well!”

Thank you to everyone who sent in notes. We’re really happy that you participated in this event and helped us to show appreciation for some of the wonderful writers of k-pop Tumblr this Christmas season!

Appreciation compilation posts:   A-C. D-G. H-L. M-R. S1. S2. T-1.

"Seungcheol?" The sound of his name down the cereal aisle pulled him out of his thoughts. He looked up toward the voice.

"Mrs. L/N?" He feigned a smile.

"Hi!" She pushed her cart up next to his. "How are you doing?" She smiled widely, he suppressed a wince. You look just like your mother.

"Oh, uh," He shrugged. "As well as I can I suppose."

"I understand, it's been a hard year." She nodded. "It's almost over though, hang in there and say hello to your mother for me." She patted him on the shoulder.

"I will, absolutely." He nodded at her. She gave him a small wave before moving down the aisle past him. He let out a sigh and put in his headphones. He didn't want any more unwelcome conversations.

Seungcheol dragged himself through the front door of his apartment, all of his groceries in his hands, he refused to make a second trip, not with the wind as cold as it was. He dumped the groceries on the floor of his kitchen and began to put everything in its place.

He didn't even want to make dinner for himself, he hated getting home late. He settled for throwing a frozen pizza in the oven. His feet ached for him to sit on the couch while he waited for dinner but if he didn't get his coat out of the closet now he never would. He dragged himself over to the hall closet. It shouldn't be hard to find the coat, he didn't keep much in here.

He sifted through the hangers until he saw his big brown coat. He pulled it from the hanger and folded it over his arm.

"What is all this shit on the floor in here?" He wondered out loud. He turned and threw the coat over the back of the couch and crouched down to see what he had shoved in here months ago and forgot about. Several pairs of shoes were scattered there, slides, tennis shoes, boots. He pulled out the pair of boots to set by the door. A green sweatshirt was nestled against the back wall of the closet, his heart sunk before he even reached for it. His fingers touched the fabric and he pulled it out only for his suspicions to be confirmed.

Vermont Law School was printed boldly across the chest and it still smelled like you.

"Are you sure you have to go?" Your coworker, Lina, asked while she watched you pack up for the day.

"What are you talking about?" You laughed. "I've had this PTO approved for months!"

"I know," she leaned against your desk. "But there's so much to do! You're one of our top attorneys and we'll really miss you."

"I know," you sighed. "But I haven't taken a day off in over three years so I could spend two weeks with my parents." You reminded her.

"Where are you from again?" She asked.

"Vermont," you slung your bag over your shoulder. "Small town about an hour from Montpelier." Lina looked at you blankly. "Montpelier? The capitol of Vermont?"

"Right." She said, not convinced. "How long of a drive is that?"

"A little under four hours." You told her. "I'm leaving in the morning so I can get there by around lunch time."

"Well be safe!" She smiled. "Can't wait until you're back!"

"Hold it down for me!" You winked before you practically ran out of the office.

Coming home wouldn't be complete without your soul leaving your body courtesy of the pothole off Elm Street. Your tire hit it full on and you just knew it was flat. Dread settled in your stomach when you remembered what that meant. You pulled over and desperately googled any tire repair shops in the immediate area, you knew it was a fool's errand because the only shop anywhere close to you was Choi and Sons and you would have to drive the small stretch of Main Street to get there.

You pulled into the parking lot slowly, feeling sick to your stomach. This isn't the reunion you were hoping for, you were actually banking on avoiding him for the next two weeks entirely. Now you realized how foolish that was.

Seungcheol watched the car, your car, pull into his lot. He snatched the hat off of his head and threw it beneath the counter. He was running his hands through his hair when the bell above the door chimed. Time seemed to stand still as you stood in the doorway of your ex-boyfriend's shop. Your mouth went dry and you fiddled with your keyring.

"Let me guess." He broke the silence after what felt like an eternity. "That pothole on Elm and Main is still givin' you shit?"

"I haven't been here in three years." You mumbled. "It should be filled by now."

"It's been there since before we could drive." There was a pain in his chest at the familiarity of the conversation. "You thought they'd fill it now that you're gone?" He forced a laugh. "Let's see what we're working with."

You led him out to where your car with an extremely flat tire was parked. Seungcheol walked around the car a few times as you shoved your hands into your coat pockets, shielding them from the cold. "You still drive this hunk of junk?" He asked finally.

"It's a perfectly fine car." You bounced on your heels. "Can you fix the tire or not?"

"You know I can." He fixed you with a look. "Don't talk crazy." He started back towards the lobby of the shop and you followed in tow.

"How long do you think?" You asked, leaning against the counter.

"Couple hours, tops." He assured you, typing your information into the system. "No one else is here so I can start now." He looked up from the computer at you, "you hangin' out here or is your mom coming to get you?"

"I'll probably just stay here." You nodded. "I wouldn't want to make you wait for me to come back later." Seungcheol bit back a response as he held out his hand.

"Keys."

"Oh." You fished out your keys from your purse and placed them in his hand. He shoved them in his pocket, trying to ignore the fact that the keyring with his football number was missing.

"Have a seat wherever." He told you, avoiding your eyes. "I'll give you updates as I have 'em." With that he was out the door. You watched him duck into your car and pull it into the garage.

The lobby of Choi and Sons was exactly as you remembered it. Pictures of the Choi family littered the walls, Seungcheol playing football, he and his brother's Little League team from elementary school, professional family Christmas photos his mother forced upon them. Your favorite seat in the house, a worn out denim couch, was still here. You sank into the well loved piece of furniture and lifted the matching cover on the arm. Doodles done in black sharpie, fading with time, were littered under it.

'Y/N ♡ Seungcheol'

'Class of 2013'

'Seungcheol and Y/N Choi ♡'

You sighed and placed the cover back down. You were a stupid kid, even so, you hadn't expected it to end the way it did. Looking around, you noticed while everything was pretty much the same, it was all like the couch, worn out. The neon sign on the wall behind the counter that boasted the name of the business was flickering, probably will need to be replaced soon.

Overall, the place felt empty. You knew Seungcheol's brother ended up moving halfway across the country after he graduated college, Mr. Choi and Seungcheol stayed behind. Distance was a big factor in your breakup, Seungcheol lost his scholarship after sustaining an injury at Semi-State your senior year. He was thankful to have the family business to pour into, but the plans the two of you had got shaken out in the wash.

You always felt bad. He assured you it wasn't your fault, and that you should still chase the future you wanted, but a future without him was hard to comprehend. Until it hit you in the face.

Now here you were, feeling 17 again, waiting for him to fix the tire you kept blowing out on the same pothole. It was embarrassing and uncomfortable.

The bell above the door pulled you from your thoughts. Seungcheol strode toward you, his cheeks bitten from the cold.

"Not too bad this time." He told you, wiping his hands with a rag. "Shouldn't be too long." You nodded. "Do you…can I get you anything?" You could tell his customer service instincts were betraying his feelings.

"No, I'm good." You forced a polite smile.

"You know where everything is, so if you change your mind…"

"Got it, thanks." You nodded.

"No worries." He took a step backward. "I'll get going and get you out of here."

It took Seungcheol less than an hour to replace your tire. You were always so impressed with how good he was at this. You watched him type everything into the system.

"How's your dad?" You blurted out. You don't know why you asked, it just bubbled up. Seungcheol's eyes cut to you suddenly. It was almost as if he was trying to figure out if you were serious.

"Dead."

The world came to a screeching halt. You hadn't even known that Mr. Choi was sick. It had been that long, and now you felt like the worst person on Earth.

"Oh, Seungcheol, I'm so sorry—" You started.

"Don't." He cut you off. "It'll be $90 today."

"Huh?" You blinked at him. "That's a lot cheaper than I expected.." You added, pulling out your credit card. You heard Seungcheol sigh behind the counter.

"Friends and family discount." He said through gritted teeth as he glanced at a photo of his father on the wall.

The clinking of glasses filled your ears as your two best friends smiled widely.

"The girls are back in town!" Nayeon beamed from across the table. You smiled into your drink before taking a sip, the cheap vodka burning your throat on its way down. This was the only bar in town, a town so small you knew everyone in it. You came back to this bar year after year, to visit with friends, and up until a few years ago, your boyfriend. However, with your schedule you've missed the last few opportunities, leaving Nayeon and Eunbi to fend for themselves, but not without protests in your messages.

"I'm so glad you're here, Y/N." Eunbi laid her hand over yours and gave you a sincere look. You smiled at her before you heard Nayeon tapping her nails on her glass.

"This is all very nice and gooey," she stated matter-of-factly. "But we're here to drink and have fun, remember?"

"Fine, fine." You laughed and lifted the straw to your lips once more. The three of you spent the better part of an hour catching up. Eunbi really likes her class this year, a lot of really bright kids. Nayeon was dead set on a promotion when she got back from the holiday break.

"What about you, Y/N?" Eunbi asked. You opened your mouth to respond but your response was cut off by the jingling of the bell above the door. Looking up, you saw his friends first. Jeonghan and Joshua greeted the bartender as soon as their feet crossed the threshold. Friendly, as usual. Your stomach dropped as Seungcheol followed them in, his head hung heavily and his hands were stuffed into his pockets.

You slumped back in your seat, your mouth tasted bitter. You could feel your friends eyes on you but you stared at the condensation pooling on the table under your glass.

"He follows me everywhere." You muttered. Eunbi and Nayeon exchanged a glance.

"This is the only bar in town." Eunbi leaned forward. "He comes out once a year."

"How do you know?" Your eyes flicked to hers.

"I still live here, remember?" She sighed. "I go out with the other teachers and I've never seen him anywhere but work, his apartment, or his mother's."

"Well, tonight isn't about him!" Nayeon smiled. "Right, Y/N?"

"Yeah…yes." You sat up. "Sorry, old habits and all that." You forced a smile onto your face.

It took Seungcheol approximately four minutes to glance in your direction. He should have known Nayeon and Eunbi would have dragged you out tonight, just like Jeonghan and Joshua drag him out the minute Jeonghan gets back into town.

"Don't worry about it." Joshua told him, following his gaze to the table the three of you were sitting at. "Tonight is for us, their night is for them, okay?"

"I'm fine." Seungcheol muttered into his beer.

"No one said you weren't." Jeonghan pointed out. "Pool?" He tacked on, hopping off of the bar stool. Seungcheol sighed and downed his beer, signaling to the bartender for another round before joining Jeonghan who was racking up the balls. Joshua opted to watch from the bar, his eyes dancing between his friends and Eunbi.

You eyed Seungcheol warily while Nayeon was rattling on about some guy she's been flirting with from the IT department at work. He sucked at pool, always had. He'd be lucky if Jeonghan didn't put money on it this time, he'd be stupid to play if he did. A few years ago you would have been sitting beside Joshua, laughing at the pout on Seungcheol's face as Jeonghan hustled him, again.

You watched Seungcheol line up a shot but suddenly, as you heard the crack of the cue ball, there was someone blocking your view. Their presence even stopped Nayeon's lightning speed recap of her week at work.

"Can we help you?" She narrowed her eyes at the guy in front of you.

"I just," his eyes darted from you to Nayeon and then back to you, "wanted to introduce myself." He gestured to you. Nayeon knew you better than almost anyone. She took one look at your confused face and spoke up again.

"It's girl's night," she sat up on her knees, getting closer to the man. "So we're not interested, but thanks!"

"I wasn't talking to you." He deadpanned. He was young, maybe just barely 21, that would explain why you didn't know him and why he felt so confident to talk to Nayeon that way. Plus, flirting with you in front of your ex-boyfriend was an interesting choice.

"I'm not interested." You rolled your eyes. "Especially if you're going to talk to my friends that way."

"You don't have to be a bitch." He didn't even have time to continue before a fist connected with his cheek. Your eyes widened as you saw Seungcheol standing over the man as he fell to the floor. Seungcheol just stood there, not looking at anyone, the skin of his knuckles reddening from the contact.

"Choi!" The bartender shouted gruffly as he approached. "Out." He grabbed Seungcheol by the collar. You watched wordlessly as Seungcheol shook the man's hold off and he stalked out the door. You could feel eyes on you, looking up you realized all of your friends were staring at you. All your friends and Jeonghan from across the room. He was waiting you out, wanting to see if you would follow or if he would have to do it.

"Go get him." He mouthed to you, stealing a glance at the front door.

"I'll be right back." You mumbled. Without giving Eunbi and Nayeon time to respond you crossed the small bar quickly. You cut a glare in Jeonghan's direction but tunnel vision prevented you from catching his reaction.

The cold air bit into you as you pushed out the door, you left your coat on the bench next to Nayeon. Seungcheol hadn't gone far, he was leaning against Joshua's car with his back to the bar. He had also forgotten his coat.

"I had that handled you know." You called out to him. His body flinched at the sound of your voice breaking the quiet of the night.

"He called you a bitch." He turned toward you.

"I've been called worse." You informed him stepping closer.

"Yeah well I wasn't around to hear any of that." He crossed his arms over his chest.

"It's not your responsibility to defend me." You bit, anger rising again. "Not anymore." You saw the expression on his face morph into something soft and hurt before hardening again. You had meant for the words to sting, you laced them with poison on purpose.

"What were you going to do?" He pressed. "Throw your little vodka cran in his face?"

"You think I can't do anything for myself!" You shouted. "I could have handled it, I don't care what he called me."

"What?" He cocked an eyebrow. "Like you can handle the pot hole on Elm and Main?"

"Fuck you Seungcheol." Your face twisted with disgust.

"You used to." He muttered.

"You're drunk and an asshole." You turned on your heel and pushed back into the bar. "Go get your friend, Jeonghan. Leave me out of it." You spat at the man who was watching Seungcheol walk in the direction of his apartment from the front window.

"Ma!" Seungcheol called, entering his childhood home through the garage. "It's me!" He knelt down to greet his dog, Kkuma. He cooed at her and scratched her behind the ears.

"Hi sweetheart," His mother entered the kitchen. "I wasn't expecting you today!"

"Brought dinner," he shrugged as he moved to kiss her on the cheek. "Preheat the oven to 350, it's a pasta bake from the store." His mom bustled over to the oven. He took the tray out of the plastic grocery bag and slid it onto the counter next to the oven. He attempted to shove his hand back in his pocket but his mother was faster.

"What's this?" She clicked her tongue as she held his hand, his knuckles painted with a bruise.

"Y/N's in town." He diverted as he pulled his hand away.

"Becky told me she was coming in." His mother had always been close to yours, so it was no surprise that they talked about you coming in for the holidays.

"And you didn't think to tell me that?"

"Seungcheol."

"Eomma."

"She's coming home to see her parents." His mom stroked his cheek. "Just like Jeonghan, just like every kid who moved away. No need to be so worried about it."

"Got banned from the bar."

"What?" She glanced at his hand again.

"Some kid was bothering her and Nayeon and Eunbi." He shrugged. "He deserved it."

"A kid, Seungcheol?" She nearly shrieked.

"21 probably, I didn't know him."

"Seungcheol you need to stop doing things like that."

"Ma, he was a jerk, Dad would've done it!" He dug in the refrigerator for something to drink.

"Even so, you can't do stuff like that!" She insisted. "You're 30 now. You can't punch 21-year-olds." Seungcheol shrugged again.

"Fine." He shut the refrigerator. "Next time some kid calls a girl I care about a bitch, I'll let him."

"Seungcheol." She warned. "That's not what I meant, and you know it. Watch your language." The oven beeped. Seungcheol slid the pasta bake in and set the timer.

"She came to the shop." He admitted quietly. "I wasn't expecting to see her."

"Did she?" His mother sighed.

"Yeah the pothole got her again." His fingers gripped the can of soda in his hand. "She didn't know Dad died."

"Oh.."

"Yeah, that was awkward." He chuckled in spite of himself. "Dad always liked her."

"We all did." She sat next to him. "We all do."

"I guess." He sighed. "I gave her the friends and family discount."

"Good, your father would've been beside himself if you didn't." She laughed.

"Why do you think I did it?" He smiled.

"Right," she sighed. "No other reason."

Nine reindeer made of tinsel crashed into the shopping cart. You leaned your arms onto the handle of the shopping cart and watched your mother reach for more garland. She grabs a package and looks back at you. Sighing, you move around the cart and grab a few bustles as well.

"What is all of this for again?" You asked tossing the garland into the cart.

"Are you serious?" She looked at you like you had grown a second head. "Our Christmas party, Y/N!" The two of you started down the aisle again, you pushing the cart behind her.

"Oh." You deadpanned. "You still do that?"

"Y/N, we've done this every year even before you were born." She sighed looking at snowmen figurines as you passed. "Those are overpriced."

"All of this is overpriced." You laughed.

"That's true." She noted before putting the snowmen in the cart.

"Do I have to come?" You asked.

"It's at our house."

"So yes?"

"Yes!"

"Is…he invited?" You stared at the back of your mother's head as she stilled for just a moment.

"His mom is coming, so I wouldn't be surprised if she brought him." She eyed you nervously. "It's been a terribly hard year for them, she still relies on Seungcheol a lot."

"I know.." You conceded.

"It won't be so bad, it's going to be enough people to avoid him." She assured you.

"Dad is gonna kill you for all this stuff, you know?" You changed the subject.

"I know." She winked.

The doorbell rang as you were hanging green and red tinsel around the door. You climbed down from the step ladder and opened the front door. Mrs. Choi smiled at you from the porch. You could feel your heart sink so low it settled in your stomach.

"Hi sweetheart!" She pulled you into a hug.

"Hi Mrs. Choi." You muttered. She pulled back and looked at you up and down.

"Boston is treating you well." She smiled.

"I think so." You smiled back. "Come in!" You moved aside to let her in. She somehow managed to smile even wider at you as she shuffled past you. "Mom's in the kitchen." You offered. The sounds of your mother and Mrs. Choi greeting each other echoed through the house.

The tinsel dangled from where you taped it above the door as you ran up the stairs to your bedroom.

You felt stupid for crying, you knew she would be here, Mrs. Choi helps every year. You just weren't expecting to see her so soon. The framed photos of you and her son were turned away from you, the first thing you did after he broke up with you. Your parents had left your room untouched, aside from the few Christmas presents for your nieces stashed away in your mostly empty closet.

Wiping your tears you pick up one of the photos, it was from your senior prom. Your dress was hot pink. You laughed in spite of yourself at the glaringly 2013 aesthetic of it. Seungcheol was smiling widely next to you in his black suit and matching hot pink tie. If your memory was accurate this was one of the few moments, in front of your parents, where his hands weren't on your ass. He loved that dress.

You set the photo back down on your dresser and moved to the next. Seungcheol sweaty from his football game, still in his uniform. Your lips were pressed to his cheek as he held your waist, you were draped in his Letterman jacket and a warm headband wrapped around your head.

It was strange that things could just fall apart seemingly out of nowhere.

You heard your mother downstairs and the sound of the front door. Scrambling, you ran to down the stairs to see Mrs. Choi on her way out. You ran on to the porch.

"Mrs. Choi!" You called to the woman in the driveway. She turned around, smiling brightly at you. "I'm so sorry about Mr. Choi…and I'm so sorry I didn't say anything to you until now." She walked toward you and you almost thought she was about to yell at you, something she has, to your knowledge, never done to anyone. To your surprise, she wrapped you into a warm hug.

"Thank you, honey." She whispered. "It's not your fault."

The weight of her words was not lost on you.

Seungcheol woke up, earlier than he wanted to, to his mother calling. He contemplated ignoring her and going back to sleep, but he knew that was a bad idea.

"Hi Eomma."

"Are you up?" She sounded frazzled. Seungcheol checked the time, it was 10:03 in the morning. Later than he thought but still not late.

"Well I am now." He grumbled.

"Don't get smart with me, Seungcheol." She warned.

"Mama, what's going on?" He sighed.

"You forgot?" She deflated.

"Forgot what?" He panicked, it's not her birthday.

"The Christmas party is today and you just woke up!" He could hear her shuffling around, stuffing things into grocery bags. Seungcheol silently tried to wrack his brain for an excuse. "Mrs. L/N's Christmas party, Seungcheol!"

"Do you really think that's a good idea…" He started.

"This is my social event of the year." Her voice was becoming stern, Seungcheol knew this voice well.

"Ma.." Seungcheol scrubbed his face. "It's at Y/N's house, where Y/N will be."

"It's the first year your father won't be at this party with me." Her voice was quieter now. "I just..would like you to be there."

"Of course, Eomma." He hated the crack in his voice. "I'll be there."

There were only a few cars in your driveway when Seungcheol and his mother pulled around the corner. He recognized your car and Eunbi's. He assumed Nayeon would be here too, if she wasn't already and hadn't carpooled with Eunbi. He was feeling unprepared. He'd seen you twice since you came back to town and both of those times were unbearably awkward. This will be worse.

Your mom greeted them before they had the chance to ring the doorbell. Nayeon, Eunbi, and yourself were gathered around the kitchen island stealing bites of the snacks your mom told you to leave for the party. Your friends stole glances at you as they heard her greet Seungcheol.

"I'm fine." You hissed at them, "stop looking at me." You popped a pretzel in your mouth and wandered toward the dining room to straighten up the table settings that had already been set to perfection.

You were able to avoid him while he helped your dad with getting folding chairs from the basement. Your mom enlisted you and your friends to make punch, so it wasn't hard to stay busy. Nayeon buzzed by your side the entire time so even if Seungcheol wanted to talk to you he wouldn't want to piss Nayeon off.

As the other guests began to arrive Seungcheol stalked into the kitchen and stood behind the island. He nodded at you and you as you scurried out of the kitchen to retrieve your nieces from your brother.

The girls squealed as you greeted them, Seungcheol smiled to himself in the kitchen as he popped a piece of the puppy chow into his mouth. Your mom always had the best recipes.

"Where is Uncle Seungcheol?" Charlotte asked, affixing a crown to your head. You froze for a moment. What were you supposed to say? He's in the kitchen.

"Oh, I'm sure he's around here somewhere!" You faked a smile. "Am I princess yet?"

"Oh!" She skittered over to where her sister was organizing the necklaces from your old copy of the Pretty Pretty Princess board game. She scooped up a handful of the necklaces and some plastic rings and ran back to you. "Here, these are your family gems." She put the necklaces over your head. "You must protect them Princess Auntie Y/N!" She exclaimed as she slid the rings onto your fingers.

Charlotte and Madison wouldn't allow you to take the jewelry off even when your brother came to get them ready for bed. They insisted that you wear it downstairs. You loved these girls so you humored them, you'd take it off when you got to the kitchen.

Seungcheol was still there when you got there, powdered sugar on his lips and his black button down. You stifled a laugh and he raised an eyebrow at you.

"You've got powdered sugar.." You gesture to your lips.

"Nice get up." He mumbled. "Nice of you to talk to me."

"You've been hiding out in here the entire party." You reminded him as you took off the crown. The plastic rings clattered onto the counter next to the crown.

"Can you blame me?" He muttered, crossing his arms over his chest.

"I was upstairs with the girls all night." You deadpanned.

"And risk Nayeon grilling me?" He leaned against the counter.

"She could've come in here on her own." You reminded him. "Your logic isn't really airtight."

"Whatever." He sighed. "Are the girls good?" He asked.

"They asked where you were."

"You haven't told them?"

"They're 6 and 7, Seungcheol." You reminded him.

"Shit." He pushed off the counter. "They're that old now?"

"It's been four years since you've seen them, yeah." You watched as he crossed the kitchen to you. He reached past you to grab a cup.

"I guess that's true." He ladles your mom's 'famous' holiday punch into the paper cup, there was something amusing about him drinking punch out of a green paper cup with snowmen all over it. "Crazy how things change."

"Funny how things don't." You mutter, watching the powdered sugar melt off his lip as he sips the punch.

"What?"

"Nothing." You push off the island, suddenly wishing to be anywhere else. "See ya, Seungcheol." Something about how you said his name had his heart sinking. He searched frantically for something to keep you close to him, even for a few minutes.

You were on your way to the dining room, all of the guests were in the living room. Setting his cup down he met you in the doorway, away from the eyes of everyone you've ever known you crashed into his chest. "What are you doing?" You bit, agitated. He cleared his throat and glanced above your heads.

"Rules are rules…" He whispered. You followed his eyes up and there it was.

Mistletoe.

"No." You attempted to move past him but he caught your arm.

"No one is watching."

"It doesn't matter." You tore your arm away. "I don't want to kiss you." You lingered in the doorway for a moment too long for that to be believable. He saw it in your body. You did want to kiss him, and he knew it.

"Just one." He said lowly, taking your hand. "To appease the Mistletoe Gods."

"My mother?" You asked, dazed as he pulled you to him.

"I guess." He shrugged. "We've kissed in her kitchen enough, she won't mind just one more." He pressed his lips to yours softly. It was a whisper of a kiss, he didn't linger. You could feel how unsure of himself he was, as if he didn't think this was a good idea either. It was over before it started and he left you standing in the doorway as he busied himself with the snacks again.

Your lips tasted of powdered sugar and cherries for the rest of the night.

"Soooo…" Nayeon smiled mischievously at you over her glass of iced tea.

"So?" You stirred the ice in your drink.

"You were talking to Seungcheol at your mom's party." She raised an eyebrow.

"And he's annoying." You cut. "Nothing much has changed."

"I don't know." She flipped through her menu. "Looking kind of cozy these days."

"Nayeon." Eunbi warned.

"It's fine." You shrugged. "We're not back together, we won't be getting back together. Can it rest now?"

"Fine, sure." Nayeon sighed. A silence fell over the table as the three of you looked through the menu, you knew that none of you actually needed to look it over, you would all end up getting the same thing you always did. You couldn't help feel a bit fidgety over the fact that you're lying to them. Seungcheol kissed you in your parent's kitchen and you hadn't stopped him. That isn't technically lying is it? A quick kiss didn't mean you were getting back together. Right?

The waitress pulled you from your thoughts asking for your orders. You were right, same orders since you were in high school and started coming here. Once the waitress had walked away Nayeon turned her attention to Eunbi.

"So you and Joshua?"

"Oh my God, Nayeon!" Eunbi rolled her eyes. "You're just a gossip."

"We knew that." Nayeon stated, feigning boredom. "Spill!"

"Um.." Eunbi's gaze flicked to you.

"He's had his eyes on you since junior year." You forced an airy laugh, "it's okay." Eunbi smiled at you widely before launching into a recount of all the little dates Joshua has been taking her on for the last few months. You were happy for her, but it did nothing for the pit that was slowly forming in your stomach.

The sun was starting to set and you were pounding your fist on the door of Seungcheol's apartment. The ghost of your breath fanned out in front of you as you heard him shuffling around inside. You continued banging until the door flew open. He looked down at you, bewildered.

"What are you doing here?" He blurted.

"To give you a piece of my mind!" You jabbed a finger into his chest.

"Okay?"

"You shouldn't have kissed me."

"Oh." He crossed his arms over his chest. "You leaned in first."

"No I didn't!" Your voice raised in spite of you trying to keep yourself calm.

"If you're going to yell at me let me drive you out to our spot." He leaned against the door jam.

"No." You replied firmly.

"Why not?"

"We never 'talk' out there." You roll your eyes, accentuating 'talk' with air quotes.

"We will this time."

You fidgeted in the passenger's seat of his truck, you hadn't been there in so long. Your hands were wedged under your thighs as you stared out the windshield. Music was playing lowly on the stereo you helped him install four years ago. Everything about this truck, hell this town, was a tapestry of your relationship with Seungcheol.

Night had fallen soon after he convinced you to get in the car. The headlights sliced the darkness in front of you just enough to recognize the familiar incline of the small hill. Seungcheol and yourself used to come here to get away from everyone, and eventually to hook up in this same truck. He cut the headlights but kept the engine running to combat the cold of the outside.

"You can talk now." He murmured from the other side of the truck bench.

"We're not getting back together." You said, not looking at him.

"Okay." He chuckled. "Is that all you needed to say?"

"No." You turned toward him. "You need to stop trying to defend me, or talk to me at all."

"Got it."

"You're not reacting."

"What do you want from me, Y/N?" He turned toward you. "Do you want me to beg? You don't want me."

"I want to know what you really think!" You threw up your hands. It would be so easy to reach toward him and feel the warmth of his skin.

"What I really think?" He inched closer to you.

"Yes." You nodded not moving away from him.

"You're it for me." He stated simply. "You've ruined me for anyone else." He continued as he slid across the bench to you.

"What are you talking about?" You pressed, looking everywhere but his face.

"I don't want anyone else." He insisted. "And maybe you're mad at me now, but you won't be forever. And the minute you're not anymore, that's when I'll prove to you, I'm it for you too."

"Seungcheol.." You whispered as he leaned into you.

"It's us in the end," his breath fanned across your face. "It always has been." His hand snaked through your hair and anchored itself on the back of your head. He leaned in close to you without allowing himself to touch his lips to yours.

The warmth of his breath wrapped around you and the intimacy of his words went straight to your core. You squeezed your thighs together, desperate for some relief. His free hand wrenched your knees apart.

"Want me to help?" You nodded chasing his warmth. He pawed at the waistband of your leggings as you tilted your hips so he could pull them down to your knees. The pads of his fingers grazed the patch of arousal soaking through your panties. He sucked his teeth, "oh baby, I've missed that." Without another word he hooked his fingers in the fabric and pushed it to the side. "Come over tomorrow." He demanded, almost too quiet for you to hear.

"What?" You breathed.

"You heard me."

You gasped as you were exposed to the cool air. He began to slowly drag his fingers through your wet cunt, it was almost agonizing. His lips connected to your skin, just below your ear. It seemed as if Seungcheol did not forget anything about how to drive you crazy. His index finger began to circle your clit as he left sloppy kisses on your skin. A moan ripped from you as he pressed the pad of his finger pressed onto the bundle of nerves harshly. "Missed that too." He grunted. Your hips sputtered as you started to feel the pleasure mounting. "Not yet, please baby, you can't cum yet." He whined.

Something about his pathetic whining set your skin on fire.

"Please." You choked. Your hips bucked in search of any kind of relief. He lazily dragged his fingers away from your clit, gliding through your folds again. A broken protest fell from your lips but was silenced quickly as he slipped two fingers inside of you. "Fuck, Cheollie." You breathed.

"Shit." He muttered, his voice deep and gravely with lust. "Missed Cheollie." He emphasized his sentence by pumping his fingers in and out of you, setting a pace you were happy to keep up with. Your hips jerked in time with his passes at the spot inside of you only he could reach. "God you're beautiful." His lips were on your hairline now. The thread in your stomach was snapping, you couldn't help yourself from crying with pleasure as fireworks exploded behind your eyes. "That's it, let go."

Your fork scraped against the plate as you pushed the green beans around. Your mother was asking your father about the mundane details of his day while you were weighing your options. You knew your mom had no idea what your dad was talking about, even after nearly three decades of marriage she didn't understand his job, but she always asked anyway. Your parents had a way of making each other feel valued despite it all.

Suddenly, you felt like TV static took up residence in your ears.

"I have to go." You announced as your fork clattered out of your hand. "I have plans with the girls, don't wait up!" You were already grabbing your keys and fleeing the house before your parents had a moment to react.

Your car roared to life as you turned the keys in the ignition. The air vents blasted out cold air, begging for a moment to heat up before you left but you didn't care. You threw it into drive and peeled off for the short drive to Seungcheol's apartment.

Your usual spot next to his truck was somehow miraculously empty for it being a Wednesday evening. The knocks on his door were gentler this time. He knew it was you before he even saw you.

"You came." He smiled down at you.

"Just to talk." Your face hardened. "We didn't get a chance to talk yesterday."

"Right," he stepped aside for you. You entered the apartment, it looked the same as it did the last time you were here. Not surprising, considering how busy Seungcheol is and not to mention his aversion to change. You laughed in spite of yourself. "Talk." He offered, closing the door behind him.

"I have questions for you." You started, standing in the middle of the living room, feeling somewhere between comfort and like you were a stranger in a place you had been a thousand times.

"Okay, shoot." Seungcheol busied himself with arranging the cushions on the couch, clearly he was also having some feelings about seeing you in his apartment again.

A million questions swirled around in your mind but for whatever reason the one that escaped your lips was, "why did you punch that guy in the bar?" You heard a surprised chuckle bubble up from him.

"He was bothering you."

"I could have handled it." You protested. "I know the owner I could have gotten him kicked out. "

"We all know the owner, Y/N." He deadpanned.

"Well…still."

"Sure, I handled it a lot faster than you could have." He moved to straighten the magnets on his refrigerator.

"Now your banned from the only bar in town." You crossed your arms over your chest.

"They'll let me back around in a few months, besides, it's not like I care much about going out." He scoffed. "I only go around Christmas to appease Jeonghan." You nodded quietly from where your feet might as well have been glued to the floor.

"Why did you come to my mom's Christmas party?"

"My mom made me." He straightened a magnet from your school trip to Washington D.C. "You know how she can be, remember senior prom?"

"Of course I do." You smiled. "Treated those pre-prom pictures like a tight scheduled photo shoot."

"So I assume that answer will suffice." You hummed in response. "Anything else?"

You stared down at your shoes, a long silence filling the room.

"Y/N?" He called.

"Why didn't you kiss me?" You asked, barely above a whisper. Something fluttered in his chest as your words.

Suddenly he was crossing the apartment with purpose, once he reached you he cupped your cheeks with his calloused hands and tilted your face toward his. He smashed his to yours so forcefully that it almost hurt. Properly kissing Seungcheol was like riding a bike, you might have forgotten what it felt like but it didn't take long for you to remember how to do it. His lips moved against yours hungrily, like he's been craving you his entire life. His hands stayed there on your cheeks as he swiped his tongue against your bottom lip. Your lips parted for his tongue. He re-familiarized himself with your mouth as your hands anchored at his hips.

You raked your tongue against his, drawing a deep rumbling sound from his chest. You knew that sound, you've missed that sound terribly. His hands dropped from your face to wrap his arms around your shoulders. Your chest brushed against his as your head tilted up more sharply. You reached under his shirt and splayed your fingers over his back. He broke the kiss and sucked in a lungful of air at the cool touch.

"I didn't think you'd want me to." He muttered, so quietly you almost didn't hear him. His nails raked over your sweatshirt covered skin lightly.

"Why wouldn't I?"

"You know why." His gaze hardened for a moment. You leaned toward him and let your breath linger on his lips.

"Well kiss me now, make up for lost time." You watched his pupils blow wide.

"Let me do more." He breathed. "Let me show you how much I missed you…how sorry I am." You felt your heart sink in your chest at his words. You felt yourself nodding your head. He pushed you back towards his couch, you felt the cushions against your legs. He sat you down and gently pressed a kiss to your hairline, the intimacy of it almost sent you reeling. Before you had time to react Seungcheol was sinking to his knees between yours.

He took his time, untying and removing your shoes, he tossed them to the side before shuffling closer to you and tucking his fingers beneath the waistband of the Christmas pajama pants you came here in. If the burning between your legs wasn't so intense you might be embarrassed. "Cute." He mumbled as he hooked his fingers around the fabric and pulling them down your legs, impossibly slowly.

Leaning forward he kissed every swath of skin that came into view. Goosebumps rose in the wake of his lips and you shuttered in anticipation as the pants finally landed next to your shoes. You caught him staring up at you from the floor. You opened your mouth to speak but nothing came. The arousal between your legs was so intense you longed to squeeze your thighs together for any sort of relief.

Suddenly Seungcheol lurched forward buried his face in your clothed cunt. You gasped as his nose pressed your clit despite the barrier of your underwear. Slowly, his teeth brushed against your panties, you threw your head back onto the couch at the stimulation. You knew you were soaking through at this point but you weren't sure where your arousal ended and his saliva began.

He was moaning into your wet underwear. He felt pathetic, but maybe he was. His fingers peeled the ruined fabric from your body. He barely gave you a moment to catch your breath before he was diving back into you. His tongue was warm as he licked the first fat stripe up your cunt. He groaned at the taste, he missed it so much. Your skin was on fire as he dipped his tongue into your leaking entrance. His tongue pumped in and out slowly as you unspooled in his mouth. He pulls you closer to him, sliding his arms underneath your bare thighs, his tongue flattens over your folds as he lets you rock your hips over it. Eventually, he dragged his mouth up to latch on to your swollen and neglected clit, you nearly screamed at the contact.

You could feel your orgasm bubbling under the surface, almost ready to boil over. His fingers ghosted over your weeping hole.

"Yes." You screwed your eyes shut at the rumbling of his laugh in your pussy. He slipped two fingers in easily. Immediately your hips bucked, chasing your high. As your stomach tightened Seungcheol added a third finger. A moan ripped from your chest as you rode his fingers, he let you fuck yourself as his tongue circled your pulsing clit.

Your orgasm ripped through you. Seungcheol pulled out his fingers, replacing them with his tongue. He lapped up every last drop. The warmth of him left you as you came down. You shivered at the cold air. Your eyes stayed closed until you heard the sound of his pants joining yours on the floor.

Cracking open your eyes you watched him retrieve your underwear from where he threw them. His cock was stiff and leaking as he wrapped your wet panties around it. He hissed as the slick covered fabric touched him. Slowly, he began to pump himself, moaning at the ruined sight of you in front of him. He stood tall, jerking himself off into your panties, your arousal covering his chin. He has never looked better to you.

You itched to touch yourself. The visual in front of you was too much, despite your orgasm from just a few minutes ago the burning between your thighs was back. Without taking your eyes off where his cock disappeared into your panties in his fist you slowly spread your legs open. He bit his lip. Your fingers trailed down your body and dipped into your folds shallowly.

"God baby." He breathed. You couldn't stop the whimper from escaping your lips at the pet name. Your fingers circled your clit slowly. You were hurtling yourself toward overstimulation but you didn't care. "Can I.." He moaned. "Can I fuck you?" You nodded, maybe too eagerly.

He discarded your underwear back onto the floor. He pulled you toward him by your ankles, you wrapped your legs around his waist as he hoisted you up off of the couch. He nipped at the skin below your ear while he walked you back to his bedroom. Suddenly you were flat on your back on his bed. His familiar scent was flooding your senses. The room was dark, you shuttered when you felt his hands on your body. He pulled your shirt over your head, chuckling at the sad excuse for a bra you wore. That joined the shirt somewhere in the dark room quickly. "One second, honey." His hands left you and you heard him fumbling with a condom.

When he joined you in the bed he was everywhere. You felt the sting of his teeth on your collarbones and your breasts. The process of biting was followed by licks of his tongue to soothe. You knew his affinity for marking well. He knew where to place them so they were only for the two of you to see. You felt almost giddy to see his art on your skin later after the bruises had bloomed on your skin.

"Ready?" His voice was was gravely and laced with lust. You nodded your head eagerly. "Gotta hear you, it's dark in here."

"Yes." You whined. "Fuck me, please."

"I love when you beg, you sound so beautiful."

The fat head of his cock nudged your entrance. Excitement fluttered low in your stomach. Slowly, he pushed himself inside of you, the stretch stinging as every inch dragged against your walls. He stilled every few seconds to give you time to adjust before he continued before he bottomed out. You felt like you could feel him in your throat.

Slowly, he began to thrust in and out of you. You could feel every drag against your walls. After a few slow drags he began to pound into you at a faster pace. Tears began to prick at your eyes as you cried out in pleasure.

"Cheollie…" You moaned.

"Take it, baby." He grunted. "Take it all. You know how." He articulated his words with harsh thrusts into your cunt. The command set your skin on fire. You wrapped your legs around his waist so he could get deeper. He hoped the evidence of your nails on his back was still visible later. He wanted you to claim him as yours again.

Suddenly, he flipped you. You were on your knees, your back to his chest. He held you to him with a hand lightly wrapped around the column of your neck. You leaned your head back until it hit his shoulder. His free hand found your breast. He pistoned in and out of you from behind as he kneaded the flesh.

"You're doing so well." He praised. "You're always a good girl, I've missed this pussy." He whispered to you. You could feel your walls tightening around his cock as your pleasure began to mount. "Gonna cum?"

"Mhmm.." Was all you could manage. His hand moved from your breast down to stimulate your clit as he continued to fuck up into you. You felt his hips sputtering but he kept going. His calloused fingers stroked your abused bumdle of nerves as your white hot orgasm took you by surprise. You cried out in pleasure and surprise as fireworks burst behind your eyelids. You chanted his name like a prayer as you came undone on his cock with the assistance of his fingers. Your nails dug into his thighs below you.

"That's a good girl." He coaxed the last of your orgasm out of you before laying you facedown in the bed. "I'm gonna make quick work of myself, okay?"

"Okay." You whispered between aftershocks. He thrust in and out of you a few more times before he sped up and his thrusts got sloppy. You heard him moan as he finished into the condom. "Are you okay?" He whispered after a few minutes. His cock softened inside you as he pulled you to him.

"Yes." You breathed as he stroked your hair.

"Can I get you cleaned up?"

"Shower with me."

"Deal." He kissed your hair.

The warm water cascaded over your skin as you stretched out your muscles. Seungcheol had to hold you up every so often. He held you to his chest as he ran a warm washcloth through your folds and over your skin. "Did a number on you, didn't I?" He chuckled.

"Don't you always?" You yawned.

"At least I take care of you." He kissed your temple. "Did anyone in Boston do this for you?"

"Are you asking about my other exes right now?" You turned to face him.

"Exes?" He cocked his head. "Multiple?"

"Two." You pluck the shampoo from the shower rack. "Neither of them took care of me or washed my hair." You held the bottle out to him.

"Turn around, brat." He teased, taking the bottle from you.

A comfortable silence settled between you while he massaged the shampoo into your hair.

"Cheol?" You broke the silence after several minutes. He hummed in response. "What happened to your dad?" You whispered.

"Oh." His fingers stilled for a moment.

"I'm sorry..I shouldn't have asked."

"No, it's okay." He continued scrubbing. "You should know, I'm sorry no one told you. He got sick just before Christmas last year. Maybe…the end of November?" He sighed. "It happened really fast, he was gone by mid December."

"I'm so sorry…"

"Byungcheol and Sadie came in for the funeral and stayed for Christmas but they were gone by New Year's." He continued. His mouth had a bitter taste after mentioning his brother and his sister-in-law. "Your mom really helped pick up the pieces." He admitted.

"Really?" You whispered.

"Yeah, turn toward the water, baby." He began to wash the suds out of your hair. "I lived at my parent's for a month and your mom organized a meal train for us. Everyone came through for us." He smiled sadly. "I only came back here because my mom made me. I contemplated moving back in." He admitted.

"I'm sure Kkuma would have loved that." You mumbled.

"You're right." He chuckled. "She slept in my bed every night."

"Cheol, I really am sorry."

"Don't be, you didn't tell the universe to do that."

As much as you didn't want to leave him, you had to go. You bid him goodbye and he stole as many kisses as he could manage before you were out the door. You snuck in through your bedroom window that night, as if you were 17 again.

"Cut to the chase, Y/N." Nayeon demanded as she slammed a shot glass down on the bar. The liquor barely had time to warm your stomach before she was looking at you with those eyes that told you she wasn't about to back down this time.

"What?" You sputtered.

"What's going on between you and Seungcheol?" She demanded. You cut a glance toward Eunbi but she and Joshua were huddled close to each other, absorbed in whatever conversation they were having.

"Yeah!" Jeonghan's voice rang in your ear as he slung his arm over your shoulders. "What is going on there?"

"I told you!" You insisted, letting Jeonghan warm your shoulders. "Nothing, we're not getting back together."

"Mhmm." Jeonghan hummed, leaning his cheek into the crown of your head. "That's why your car has been parked next to his at his apartment twice since you got back last week." You stiffened at Jeonghan's side. You had forgotten that his parent's house, where he was staying, was the block over from Seungcheol's apartment.

"Nothing is going on…" You repeated. You wanted another shot, or ten.

"You can tell us, you know." Nayeon's voice softened as she reached out to run her hand over your arm. You suddenly felt out of control, the situation was out of hand. You should have never let him talk you into kissing him.

"Can I have another drink?" You muttered. Nayeon and Jeonghan shared a glance before Nayeon turned toward the bar to order another round.

"You can tell me." Jeonghan echoed Nayeon's previous statement. You heard the sincerity in his voice. You broke free of his hold and dragged him to the table you sat at just a week ago when Seungcheol got banned from this bar. "You're really this freaked out?" He asked, sliding into the booth.

"Yeah.." You nodded.

"Did you fuck him?" You cut him a look. "Oh, Y/N…"

"Jeonghan don't do that." You crossed your arms.

"Do what?" He pulled your hand free and held it across the table.

"Talk to me like you pity me for sleeping with your best friend."

"I don't pity you because you slept with my best friend." He squeezed your hand. "I pity you because you slept with your ex."

"You slept with him?" Nayeon attempted to conceal her shock with a thin veil of nonchalance. She set the shots on the table as well as a vodka cranberry for you. You groaned. "Take the shot, girlfriend, and then spill." She told you, holding out her shot for you and Jeonghan to cheers. The three of you clinked your small glasses, tapped them on the table, and threw them back.

You confided in your best friend and Seungcheol's best friend, who you had grown close to in all your years of dating. They listened attentively as you told them all about how it came to this.

"Do you still love him?" Jeonghan asked bluntly, four shots in, at the end of your story. The room was going fuzzy at the edges and you were probably drunk. Your suspicion was confirmed as soon as you answered his question.

"Yes."

"Then you should go tell him that." Jeonghan tipped his glass toward you.

"What if he doesn't love me?" You slumped in your seat.

"Y/N, a guy doesn't treat a girl the way Seungcheol has treated you in the last week if he doesn't love her." Nayeon pointed out.

"And he hasn't shut up about the fact that he loves you in the last four years." Joshua's voice chimed in from your left as he pulled up a chair for himself. Eunbi squeezed in next to Nayeon. "We are talking about Seungcheol aren't we?" He smiled at you.

"Obviously!" You whined. "Has he really been talking about it that long?"

"Yes." Eunbi and Joshua asserted at the same time.

"Come on," Joshua stood and held his hand out to you. "I'm designated driver, I'll drive you over to his."

"Should I tell him when I'm drunk though?" You were grabbing his hand anyway.

"No," Joshua laughed, walking you toward his car. "But you won't tell him when you're sober."

For the third time in a week you were knocking on Seungcheol Choi's door. It was one in the morning, you were drunk and cold. Seungcheol answered the door in his boxers, hair askew.

"Y/N?"

"I'm drunk." You stated matter-of-factly before pushing past him into his apartment. Joshua waved from the car, Seungcheol waved back, more confused than he was before. Seungcheol closed the door behind him. You were standing in the middle of his living room.

"Are you okay, baby?" He asked groggily.

"I love you." You blurted out. He blinked at you.

"You're drunk."

"I'm drunk and I love you."

"I love you too." He told you. "Let's talk about that when you're sober." He wrapped an arm around you and led you back to his room. "You need a shirt to sleep in?"

"Yeah." You yawned. "You love me?"

"Never stopped." He rifled through his drawer. "Here." He set a shirt from your high school on the bed. It was still big enough for you to swim in. He helped you undress and get into the shirt before tucking you into his bed. "Where's your phone?"

"Pants." You snuggled down into his bed.

Seungcheol fished your phone out of the pocket of your jeans and walked back into the kitchen. Keying in your passcode, Charlotte's birthday, he unlocked your phone and scrolled through your contacts before he found the one he was looking for and pressed call. It only rang once before she picked up.

"Y/N?" Your mom's voice crackled through the phone. "Are you okay?"

"Hey Mrs. L/N." Seungcheol grabbed a glass from the cabinet. "She's fine, Joshua dropped her off here."

"Oh, okay. Good." She sighed. "Is she staying over?"

"Yeah, she's already in bed." He chuckled. "She's safe."

"Thank you for the update Seungcheol." He could hear the smile in her voice. "Have a good night."

"No problem, you too."

He filled the glass with water and padded back into his room, expecting you to be asleep.

"If we love each other," he jumped at the sound of your voice. "We should sleep together again."

"Not tonight." He laughed. "You're drunk." He set the glass of water on the bedside table next to you. "And falling asleep already."

"'m not." You insisted.

"Goodnight, baby."

You woke up the next morning with only a slight headache. You thanked the universe for bestoying this gift upon you. Seungcheol was latched to your back, his warmth spreading through you. You blushed as you realized his hardening cock was pressed to your ass.

"Do you remember last night?" He whispered before you even had time to wonder whether or not he was awake.

"Yeah.." You whispered back, terrified he would reject you now that you were sober.

"You love me." He pulled you closer.

"I seem to remember that you love me too." You smiled, grinding your ass back, rubbing onto his length just slightly.

"Never stopped." He repeated.

"You also declined to fuck me."

"What a fool I was." He breathed. His fingers pressed to the spot of arousal soaking through your underwear. "Let me fix it." He pleaded.

"Mhmm.."

He picked your leg up and hooked it over his hip and shimmied out of his boxers carefully. He continued to spoon you as he moved your panties to the side and slid into you slowly. He groaned at the feeling of your walls hugging him tightly. He savored it as he let you adjust.

"You still look good in my clothes." He mumbled before biting your shoulder. You began rocking your hips slightly, seeking relief. He took the hint and began thrusting into you lazily.

"You love me." You moaned, meeting his thrusts.

"I love you." He agreed.

"What does that mean for us?" You asked as his fingers came back to press your clit.

"You're asking what being in love means while I'm inside of you?" His finger applied slightly more pressure. You whined.

"I'm efficient." You moaned.

"Let me fuck the girl I love." He pleaded.

"Fine." You conceded. His fingers circled the bundle of nerves while his thrusts picked up their pace.

Apparently, being in love makes a person cum faster because you both lazily tumbled off the edge too soon.

"Hand me the tape, please." Your mom asked, her finger holding down a piece of wrapping paper. You slid the roll of tape across the table to her. You fluffed the tissue paper in the bag in front of you. "So.." She started.

"So?" You pressed, moving the present to under the tree in the living room.

"Seungcheol called me last night." She stated casually.

"He did?"

"He wanted me to know that you were at his house and safe." She taped the paper down.

"That was nice of him." You pulled another present from the pile.

"Are you guys getting back together?" She asked. The question was valid enough, but something about talking about the possibility with your mother had nerves settling in your stomach.

"I…" You bit your lip. "I don't know.."

"I support you either way, I just know that long distance was really hard for you guys last time." She reminded you. "I would hate for it just end the same way if you did try again."

"I know.."

"Seungcheol is a great guy, Y/N." She moved the present to the done pile. "I would just hate for one or both of you to get hurt again is all."

"I know Mom." You sighed. You would hate for that to happen too. "Mom..?"

"Mhmm?" She hummed as she tried to figure out how to wrap a seashell shaped toy for one of the girls.

"Why didn't you tell me about his dad?" You whispered. You watched your mom put the tape down on the table.

"Honey.." She started.

"No, seriously." You insisted. "Why wouldn't you tell me?"

"You two had broken up…"

"Three years before he passed."

"And you were so busy with work.."

"I should have been able to go to the funeral." You pressed.

"See, that's why." She conceded.

"What?" You blinked at her.

"You're so headstrong, and I knew if I told you, you'd insist on being there." She sighed. "And I didn't want to take that choice away from Seungcheol."

"And he never told me.." You mumbled.

"I'm so sorry…"

"No I get it."

Not even two hours later, Seungcheol had you pinned to his bed under him. Your wrists crossed under his hand as he fucked into you.

"Tell me again." He pleaded.

"I..I love you." You choked out.

"Good girl." He pulled almost all the way out just to slam himself back into you. "I love you." He reminded you. You felt every vein drag against your walls deliciously as he said it. You knew he meant it, so why did it scare you suddenly? "You're so perfect." He continued, "like you were made for me."

Even though you were nervous about what the end of the week might mean for this fragile relationship, his praises went straight to your cunt. You moaned his name. His thrusts picked up their pace as he chased his high. If he had any inclination that your mind was somewhere else he didn't let on. He fucked you the way he knew you liked to be fucked all while making himself feel good as well.

You felt your orgasm run its course through you as he finished in the condom. He cleaned you up in silence, he had to know something was up by now. He never said anything. He laid you down and pulled you to his chest.

He placed featherlight kisses to your shoulder as he waited for you to tell him what was going on. Tears blurred your vision, everything in his room being distorted.

"Why didn't you tell me?" You finally whispered.

"Tell you what?"

"About your dad.."

"You weren't here." He stated simply.

"I would have been." You sniffled. "For your dad, of course I would have come back."

"No." He fidgeted behind you. "You weren't here." You sat up, his arms falling from your body limply.

"You broke up with me." You reminded him, looking around for your clothes.

"Because you weren't here." He repeated.

"You broke up with me because we were long distance?" You grabbed your leggings from the floor. "Something you agreed to?"

"Well excuse me for thinking you'd still have time for me when you were off doing better things!" He bit. His sudden venom caught you off guard, you weren't expecting a fight.

"Preparing for my future?" You leveled.

"A future without me."

"What are you talking about?"

"I was never a part of your world, once you went to college." He sat up. "I didn't fit anymore. I saved you the headache of breaking up with me."

"Seungcheol what are you talking about?"

"God, Y/N” Seungcheol all but shouts, “The crazy thing is, I could listen to you talk about blueberry yogurt, or law, or the branches on the trees all day!” he shoves a hand through his hair, “I don’t care, as long as you’re talking to me—"

"Cheol.." You attempted.

"No, let me get this out or else I will regret it forever," he continued, holding a hand up, "I needed you, fuck, maybe I still do, but you weren’t there. You weren’t there and how the fuck am I supposed to live with that?" Your mouth went dry. "Everyone left, aside from Joshua, but he's always so busy with Eunbi, I see him just as much as I see Jeonghan."

"It's not my fault that your plans fell apart." You spat.

"Remember when they were our plans?" He laughed. You looked at him in disbelief. He just shrugged. "Am I wrong?"

"What happened?" You asked.

"You used to love—"

"I still lo—"

"No, you don't." He assured you. "It's fine. But you used to love Vermont.." He wiped his eyes. "You used to love me." He stood up off the bed and pulled on his boxers. "You've changed."

"You haven't."

"Maybe I haven't." He handed you your shirt from the floor. "Better than selling my soul."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"You used to be cool." He pulls on a shirt. "Since when are you a lawyer?" Static sounded in your ears.

"I was in law school when you broke up with me." You couldn't help the tears falling from your eyes now. He shrugged. "You knew that. Seungcheol there is no way you didn't know that!"

Did he not know you at all?

There was a sleeve of green fabric sticking out between his bed and the wall. He followed your eyes to it.

"Is that my Vermont Law sweatshirt?" You moved to go pull it out but he stopped you. "Why do you have that still?"

"It smelled like you."

"Why did you lie about not knowing I'm a lawyer?"

"I don't know."

Christmas after fighting with your ex sucks. There's no other way to put it, both of you felt it. Too bad neither of you wanted to make the first move to extend the olive branch. Seungcheol thought of you the entire day, he spent his time at his mom's house watching cheesy Christmas movies in his pajamas with Kkuma in his lap.

Your day was spent with the chaos of two little girls on Christmas, it warmed your heart to see them so happy. However, every so often you longed to share this moment with someone, with Seungcheol. You thought about texting him several times, but his words rang in your mind every single time.

You ended up going home early.

"I have lunch!" Joshua announced happily, entering Choi and Sons at noon three days after Christmas. Jeonghan followed him into the lobby of the shop. It was Jeonghan's last day in town before going back to being the big corportate HR guy he was most of the year.

"Be right there!" Seungcheol called from the garage. Joshua and Jeonghan busied themselves with setting everything up in the employee break room.

"You're gonna tell him, right?" Jeonghan whispered to his friend.

"Well, yeah, I just need the right time." Joshua muttered.

"What'd you bring?" Seungcheol asked, crossing the small room to wash his hands at the sink.

"Leftovers from my mom." Joshua smiled as he took the lids off of the tupperware.

"Nice, tell her thanks from me." Seungcheol sat at the table. The three of them ate in silence for several minutes before Jeonghan started giving Joshua glares from across the table.

"Sooo.." Joshua started.

"Spit it out, Hong." Seungcheol said with a mouthful of noodles.

"What?" Joshua faltered.

"Jeonghan has been making mean faces at you for ten minutes," he swallowed. "So out with it."

"Are you done trying with Y/N?" Joshua sighed.

"What?" Seungcheol put his fork down. "What are you talking about?"

"It's just…" Joshua leveled with him. "Don't you think you've fucked it up with her one too many times?"

"I mean, it'll work out." Seungcheol sighed. "It's us."

"How can you be so sure?" Jeonghan asked.

"I'm going to go apologize to her today."

"Cheol…" Joshua turned to him. "She went home on Friday."

"What?" Seungcheol shouted.

"Yeah, Eunbi told me she left early.." Joshua said cautiously.

"Fuck.." Seungcheol scrubbed his face and slumped in his chair. He had really messed up this time. He was so hellbent on not losing you a second time that he didn't even realize that he neglected to fix what went wrong the first time.

"Maybe it's time to move on." Jeonghan suggested. He wasn't afraid to say what Joshua was implying more directly. He knew Seungcheol needed people to be direct with him sometimes.

"Do you not like Y/N?" Seungcheol asked. He wasn't sure why.

"No, I actually love Y/N." Jeonghan bit. "And I love you. Which is why I know you need to move on."

"What are you talking about?"

"You're terrible for each other." Jeonghan sighed. "At least you have been for the last six years. The two of you have serious shit to work out if you can ever dream of actually giving it another go." He put a hand on Seungcheol's shoulder. "You've put that girl through enough."

"I need to fix it." Seungcheol sighed.

"Do you think she even wants you to fix it?" Joshua asked.

"I don't know." Seungcheol crossed his arms over his chest. "I really don't"

Your apartment felt too big. You felt too small. There was still several days left of your time off from work, you weren't supposed to be back yet. Days were spent pacing around the apartment, you were worried you might wear holes into the ground. Seungcheol's words were still bouncing around in your mind. You could call Nayeon or Eunbi but you were worried they would just lecture you about how foolish it was to sleep with your ex.

Being alone was awful, Lina was your only friend in Boston and she was a work friend. Most of the time you didn't mind the lonely nights but this was not one of those times.

You woke up the next morning to a voicemail.

Voicemail: Seungcheol 3:12 am

'Hey. I shouldn't be calling you, I know that. But I'm drunk and I wanted to hear your voice. Don't worry, I'm still banned from the bar, I took from my personal stash. I know you probably don't wanna hear from me, especially when I said what I did, and when I lied. I really don't know why I did that, Y/N. Because the truth is, I'm so proud of you. You achieved everything you said you would, everything I always knew you would. I'm jealous, sure. But above everything I am so so proud of you. God' he laughed. 'You're so amazing, you always have been. But you just keep getting more and more amazing. I want to try again. Like, us, I mean. Long distance sucks, but I can do it. And this time I won't get weird and distant and jealous. If you'll have me of course. If you don't want any of this, tell me to fuck off. Block me. You probably should have done that a long time ago. But you didn't, which has to mean something right? Anyway, call me back. I need to sleep, but I miss you and I can't wash my sheets because they smell like you. I love you, I'm sorry.'

You were crying.

You listened to that voicemail every night before bed for three days. His voice, heavy with sleep and intoxication lulled you to sleep. That should have given you the answer long before it hit you.

You loved him. You wanted him back, no matter the cost. You knew that now and you felt ashamed that you ran away from home before you realized.

Incoming Call: Y/N 11:54 pm

"Shit." Seungcheol cursed as he stared at your name on his phone. The wind whipped his hair as the last snow of the year swirled around him. He accepted the call. "Hello?"

"Hi." You breathed on the other line. He felt his heart squeeze in his chest at the sound of your voice.

"What's up?" He tried to sound nonchalant.

"About your voicemail…" You started.

"I'm sorry, Y/N." He sighed.

"No, no it's okay." You laughed, nervously. "I thought about what you said."

"Oh." He braced himself.

"Yeah I think we should try again." You breathed. Suddenly there was a knock at your door. You jumped. "I'm sorry, someone knocked on my door."

"You should answer it." Seungcheol's heart was beating in his ears.

"No, it's 11:56 pm on New Year's Eve." You laughed. "It's probably some drunk idiots being annoying."

"Y/N." Seungcheol pressed. "Open the door."

"No? That's dangerous!" You insisted. "Besides don't you care about what I just said.”

The knocking turned into pounding. You could hear it at the door and through the phone.

You could hear it through the phone.

You ran to your front door and flung it open. Your phone fell to the ground.

You didn’t mean to.

The incantation you studied for nearly six months was perfect. In no way, shape, or form should the ritual have gone awry even if stray magic emerged. At worst, nothing should have happened. You’d should’ve ended up with an empty summoning circle, wasted materials that would need to be vacuumed up. At best, you’d have a servitor ready to assist with the more mundane parts of your thesis research. 

As with every ritual, you drew the proper wards in salt and bone ash, some graveyard dirt on hand just in case. You had the knife, ready to sacrifice a few drops of blood for such a useful creation.

You recited the incantation, pricked your finger and then…

Nothing.

The sulfurous stench occult didn’t flood the room, the wards didn’t even manage a flickering glow. The candle flames didn’t even wince.

Utter failure.

You were too tired to do much more than release a choked scream in frustration before blowing out the candles and running upstairs.

Tomorrow you’d study the ancient manuscript for what you missed and try again. You just needed some sleep first.

You barely managed a few hours when you wake up with the distinct feeling something was wrong. 

Everyone else left for winter break, leaving you alone with a mountain of books and articles to skim for the thesis you’ve been writing for years. It’s why you need a servitor to begin with; there was too much work to be done and simply not enough time. 

No one should be in the house, but you got the distinct feeling someone, or something, was.

Only the noise of the house rang through your ears, the creak of the floor boards, the wind battering against the windows. The occasional owl calling from the tree outside the window of the living room on the ground floor. You swiped a knife from the kitchen and one of the spare jars of graveyard dirt before heading downstairs.

What a terrifying image you portrayed: a raggedy university sweater and pajama pants, dark circle bruised beneath your eyes, and a dirty kitchen knife.

None of it mattered.

The sharp scent of magic clouded the air at the bottom of the steps leading to the basement, thick as a curtain. But it wasn’t the rotten scent you were accustomed to. It was heavier with the sickly sweetness of flowers, like a poisonous bloom attempting to lure you in.

And what would want to lure prey into a trap more than a predator?

Standing in the circle was a man, but he was too perfect to be just a man. Gold flowed through his veins, illuminating him from the inside out. His eyes glowed like honey as he stared at you, watching. Waiting.

You were so distracted by his eyes you barely realized he was naked. He didn’t seem to care either, or register the fact he’s hard and you could see the way his length bobbed between his thighs. 

Embarrassment didn’t have a chance to take root because he said your name just as sweet as the flower smelled. 

You launched the jar of dirt at him in shock, the bottle shattering into a thousand pieces at his feet. The man made no move to avoid the explosion, didn’t disappear like the undead usually did when confronted with the reminder that they were no longer of the living. He didn’t even blink. 

“What are you?” you shouted, brandishing the knife as if that could do anything. He was in the circle, that was safe enough for now.

“Yours.”

“That’s not,” you start, breathless. “What are you?”

“I’m…” He struggled with the words to explain his purpose. 

You tried to keep your eyes level with his but miles of bare, tan skin, with taunt muscles corded underneath proved too tempting. A few silver scars littered his body, indecipherable in the light and the passage of time. He was much older than you could even begin to imagine; this form only the briefest glimpse of his actual power.

“I’m a servant.”

“You’re the servitor I summoned?”

The manuscript you studied didn’t specify what a servitor looked like, only that it would serve its summoner with whatever tasks it was assigned. 

He nodded widely. “I’m meant to serve whoever I’m bound to.”

“And now you’re bound to me.”

“Yes,” he swallowed. For the first time, he seemed to realize he’s naked but continued to be unbothered by it. His palm shakily grazed over himself before curling around his thighs. 

Other passages from your reading came to mind as you forced your gaze away. 

Bind your servitor to their duties as soon as possible, they don’t do well without direction.

They are eager to please and are capable of any task their summoner presents them with.

“We need…” you swallowed, trying to hide the squeak in your voice. “We need to make a deal.”

He nodded.

“You have to follow all of my commands.”

“Of course.”

“If you don’t,” you stuttered, grasping at straws for a threat. “I–I’ll banish you to a demiplane.”

His head tilted to the side, eyes pouring down your figure. Perhaps the stains of your sweater weren’t intimidating to him, but you held the power. He was still stuck in the circle, and you could send him away with a few words. Either he listened or turned back into nothing. Or worse; stuck in a demiplane with no purpose for the rest of time.

“Whatever you tell me to do, I’ll do,” he rasped.

“Good. Give me your name.”

“Hoshi.”

You almost settled for that but something told you that wasn’t right. Occult creatures weren’t predisposed to honesty no matter how simple minded.

“Your true name,” you commanded.

He watched you for a long moment, eyes fading from gold to brown. Human eyes. Something familiar flickered in them when he said, “Soonyoung.”

As you repeated it, he shivered, a strangled inhale to match. You didn’t mean to, but a quick glance down showed he was still hard and leaking. Obscenely so. To the point it mixed with the circle drawn on the floor.

“Swear to do everything I say, and to never disobey me,” you said, eyes fixed on his, now golden once again.

“I swear to follow your every command, exactly as you say them.”

“And…”

“And to never disobey you or betray you. I bind myself to you, and anything you wish of me,” he vowed. Soonyoung attempted to take a step forward but stopped once he realized the circle was unbreakable.

Something wasn’t right. Soonyoung seemed like he wanted to tell you more, but you needed to ask the right questions. You knew what the question was, and that made you dread it all the more.

“You’re not a servitor at all, are you?”

Soonyoung rolled his shoulders, his muscles shifting and flexing with the motion. He seemed to grow taller, take up more space with the action as if only a fraction of his true form existed in front of you and the rest hid out of sight. “No.”

“Then what are you?”

“I think you know what I am.”

Since childhood you managed to summon all types of beings: spirits, a few hellhounds, a shade that left your mother locked in her room for weeks, refusing to see you. They appeared whether you called on them or not, flocking to you like a beacon. Summoning had never been your forte and now was no exception. But Soonyoung wasn’t like anything you accidentally called before. 

A demon.

A demon who gave you his name and bound himself in service. To you.

Horrified, you rushed back up the way you came, the worn edges of the stairs bruising your knees as you tripped. If Soonyoung was truly a demon, then the wards would only keep him trapped for so long and the last place you need to be was next to him when he escaped. Profound relief greeted you once you were safely tucked back upstairs knowing that he hadn’t followed.

And perhaps a trickle of disappointment.

The dreams started a few nights after Soonyoung got stuck.

Stuck was the only way to describe him. Sandwiched between this world and the next, trapped in that tiny circle in the ritual room like a chained animal. He couldn’t leave the circle anymore than you could send him back where he belonged. You didn’t plan to conjure a demon with the incantation, which means you didn’t have a plan to banish him either. What had been done needed to be undone the exact same way, without error. Which meant late nights reading the same books you studied for weeks leading up to summoning the servitor, looking for any clue as to what went wrong; if it was the words, or materials, or anything else seemingly inconsequential. But no amount of reading gave you a clue because you followed the ritual to the exact letter.

He proved no help in the beginning, simply staring at you after each question about what he was and how he got here. The hairs on the back of your neck stood up each time you ventured to the ritual room for a new book, no matter how you tried to ignore his presence. He studied you with hunger

Then the dreams started.

They always began the same: you waking in bed, the aching in your core demanding attention. And then you’d be in the ritual room, or still in bed, occasionally in the archival library. You looked for something, someone. He was always there too. Soonyoung would pin you to the bookcase, down into the sheets, or against the floor boards so hard it hurt.

It was his teeth biting along your hips.

His lips sucking bruises into your thighs.

His tongue working over you in heavy strips; from your ankle, between your legs, across your breasts, caressing the sensitive flesh of your neck.

His voice crying your name, desperate pleas for something. To touch him too. To reveal in the bliss he so freely gifted.

Soonyoung knew how to touch you, skillfully working you into a pitiful mess every night. He knew exactly how your body worked, what you needed, all the tender spots to abuse until you begged him to stop.Every dream ended the same: you alone, overly aware who waits in the basement, unable to shake the feeling he knew and his pleas in your dream was for you to join him and make them reality.

Two weeks passed and you stood no closer to banishing Soonyoung than you were curing cancer. Perhaps closer to the latter.

You’ve all but ceased visits to the ritual room since he decided to finally speak. Soonyoung stared at you every time you entered the chamber. Even after weeks he did nothing to hide his arousal. The sweatpants you dug out only hide the plain view of his cock, not the fact he’s hard or the fact he wanted you to look.

They do nothing to muffle how he watched your every move, the heat of his gaze burning down to your core. Like he’s studying you, figuring out any sign of weakness, what made you tick.

“If you’re stuck here, you might as well work,” you said, approaching him. Magic had a unique smell. Stale smoke and rot. This close you realized Soonyoung didn’t smell like the magic you were used to. He smelled like old paper and night air, the richness curled around you and tempted you to take another step closer to him.

Your demon watched as you shuffled forward, eyes glued to your hands. “How?”

“Read this. I don’t have time to figure out how to banish you and continue my research.”

You handed him the leather bound tome through the circle without losing your hand, ready to release it the second it passed into his domain, but Soonyoung was faster. He snatched the book, pulling you in up to your elbow. Your wrist snared between his fingers, his tongue on your palm. 

“My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie, How blest am I in this discovering thee, To enter in these bonds, is to be free; Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.”

He licked between your fingers, sucked one into the hot swell of his mouth. The prickle of his teeth vibrated to your core. 

“You taste amazing,” he moaned, eyes slipping shut. He followed the arch of your thumb, tonguing at the bare skin of your wrist between his fingers. “Better than those dreams.”

That snapped you out of whatever lust-fueled trance he put you under. Snatching back your hand, Soonyoung blinked as if he too was put under a lull, but you couldn’t focus on that. You needed to be away. As far away as possible in the massive house. And even that wasn’t far enough.

You had a demon problem. 

Winter break was almost over, which means students floating back to campus. And students back on campus meant Soonyoung couldn’t stay a secret much longer. 

No one else could know. Summoning creatures was out of bounds even for a house that specialized in using the dead and demonic for their bidding. When the dean discovered a demon on campus the punishment would be tenfold that of if you did manage to summon a mindless servant.

After nights researching in other libraries on campus, buried under books so old they verged on crumbling, you had answers but you’re no closer to a solution.

A servant of Asmodeus. Lustful, sinful.

Soonyoung’s purpose was to serve whoever calls on him, but the fine print is that he is the embodiment of desire. Not exactly an incubus but not exactly anything else you could find either. There are basic ways to expel him: exorcisms, burning incense, birch branches. Though, all your research leaves more questions because the creatures described in text take the form of dead lovers and Soonyoung is like no one you’ve ever seen before.

The stress of research made the dreams worse.

Soonyoung on top of you, behind you, beneath you. The positions changed depending on where you found him, but he was always inside you. His fingers, his tongue. Untangling all your nerves until they exploded and then doing it again and again and again.

The one time you begged, salty tears streaking down your cheeks, he gave you his cock. Inch by inch until your ass sat flush with his hips, Soonyoung’s arms bracketing you on either side, his chest sticky against your back.

“Imagine how much better I can do,” he moaned into your hair, hips ripping the air from your lungs, “if you let me.”

Another week and no matter how much you avoided Soonyoung, his presence lingered like the chill of winter barking at the windows.

The dreams changed again. Still full of naked skin and debauched sounds, but sometimes you woke in his arms, limbs heavy and satiated as if you really did let him into your bed. He was still behind you, on top of you, beneath you but he curled around you like a soft blanket instead of a needful lover as he pulled you apart until you couldn’t breathe.

Soonyoung would whisper more poems in your ear, lips etching the words into your skin, gently rocking into you with sweet whimpers. No longer were you bound to just the house, your subconscious took you farther and farther; into fields and caves, castles and mansions; in the soft glow of sunrise and into the eye of hurricanes; and your bodies met again and again and again.

After, he’d pull you his chest, tracing the skin between your shoulder blades as you dozed off.

“She walks in beauty, like the night. Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright. Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellow’d to that tender light. Which hell to gaudy day denies.”

“I don’t remember that being the line,” you hummed.

Soonyoung pressed his mouth to your hair, inhaling deeply before speaking. “Blasphemy won’t earn you favors down the line.” 

“I think I’ve crossed the line too many times already…” you said, moving to straddle him. “What’s one more?”

After another round — Soonyoung fucking up into you while you held on for dear life, eager to take pleasure from someone so willing to give — he laid you back down and buried his face in your stomach.

“How could something as divine as you be a sin?”

You realized the dreams were as much his as they were yours.

A week is all you had to banish Soonyoung back to wherever he belonged.

In seven days, the other members of the house returned and shortly after that, they’d descend to the ritual room and find him. He needed to go home. The sooner the better.

After an entire day studying the necromancy texts kept in the archives, you moved to one of the other society houses, hoping their library proved more useful. None of them liked sharing their magic but it’s easy enough to lie your way in under the promise of noting anything useful. They’d rather have a bookworm pick through the fluff and regurgitate the most interesting pieces than look for answers themself.

Chan was no different but he liked to pretend demonomicons and dusty grimoires fascinated him if it meant you’d let him sit with you. Two dates and nothing more didn’t seem to deter him from trying for a third, if anything he seemed eager to prove he deserved another chance.

It was well beyond midnight when he offered to walk you home, frigid wind curling through the streets. Chan was the one struggling to keep up as you all but sprinted home.

“I could come inside,” Chan suggested with a hopeful look on his face.

“No,” you shouted. “I mean…I have to clean up before everyone comes back. It’s a complete mess.”

He nodded, pretending not to be embarrassed from your easy refusal. “Alright. Well, have a good night.”

Maybe he’s what you needed. A quick romp, something to clear your head. Someone to fulfill all the fantasies Soonyoung planted and let bloom for the past month. 

“Actually,” you said. “Maybe you could come in. Just for a little bit.”

Chan’s inability to satisfy you had nothing to do with him. Even as he rolled into you, attentive to every embellished moan you rewarded him with, you had to remind yourself that it felt good. His fingers between you would make you cum, his lips on your neck would make your blood boil. The way he groaned around your name sounded divine.

But every time your eyes slipped shut, someone else was saying it. Someone else touched you, tasted you, fucked you. You felt Soonyoung’s hands on you, confident where Chan was clumsy, knowledgeable where Chan was a novice. 

If Chan knew something was wrong, he didn’t let it show, leaving just as the sun rose with a bit more pep in his step.

You managed a few hours of sleep, dreams melting with reality. Chan in your bed, except it was Soonyoung’s throaty moans filling the air as you rode him. Then you sprawled between his legs, back to chest, while Chan took the space between your thighs. Soonyoung gripped his hair, pushing his face firmer against your pussy, guiding him exactly how you need to be touched. But when Chan failed to do a satisfactory job, Soonyoung shoved him out of the way and showed Chan how you like to be played with until you woke up with a cry.

An hour long cold shower left you with numb fingers but had no effect on what plagued your mind.

Two days buried in books and diaries to avoid sleep and finally you had a lead.

There’s something to be said for carnal desires, and those created in service to them. The only way to banish those beings mirrors one’s own methods for purification in times of rabid depravity. — Jeonghan Yoon, class of 1923

Soonyoung must be what Jeonghan referenced in his diary; what he was and how to get rid of him once and for all. The ritual room had an entire bookcase dedicated to exorcisms, both new and old texts mingling on the shelves. You already exhausted most of them but the earlier pages of the diary quoted a line in a demonomicon you pushed to the side; it’d only been twenty pages, all shuffled around in the worn binding.

Jukoth’s Daemonum.

The pages were online, the LED screen of your laptop presenting the neat script. They held no rituals or instructions. Merely classifications of demons, from kings of hell to lowly vampires. You knew the copy downstairs would be far more useful. Frustratingly, Jeonghan’s handwriting littered many of the house books, Jukoth’s Daemonum would no doubt be graffitied in the same fashion. 

Soonyoung said he’d do whatever you asked. Perhaps he knew the ritual to send him back where he came from. If he didn’t, maybe he knew where to look for one. 

Tip toeing down to the basement, your demon waited inside the circle of salt and wax just as you left him. The aura of gold had yet to fade. Soonyoung looked almost more punishingly beautiful here than in your dreams. The full force of his presence warned every part of you to go back upstairs, put up the safety of new wards added in the last few days, lock the door, and hide until you found a way to get rid of him.

But wasn’t that why you were here? In this very house, at this very university? Decades of illicit occult activities the university would never officially acknowledge, silenced by millions of alumni dollars to keep the houses open. Your research was valuable enough for a well funded PhD as long as there were results. Results you couldn’t obtain if your demon stuck around much longer.

Thumbing through Jeonghan’s diary, you looked for the page you read last night. Several other books were listed along with the demoniomicon; all stored in the basement. Eyes low, you entered the room and scurried to the bookshelf opposite the door, Soonyoung's gaze pierce into your back the entire way. 

Each leather spine slipped under your finger, a clean streak left in the dust as you searched for what you needed. Whoever last organized the shelves, some new initiate decades ago most likely, didn’t have a knack for alphabetization. French, Latin and Greek translations were sandwiched in tightly, obscuring the titles. 

The basement was silent, sans the creaks of the warped wood beneath your feet. You could almost pretend to be alone. 

Almost.

“You smell like him.”

Jeonghan’s diary tumbled out of your hand onto the floor as you choked on a scream. “What?”

“Chan.” He spat the word, something animal and primal and full of disdain behind it. Soonyoung’s rage washed over you like a blast of heat. Of course he’d know Chan’s name, he knew everything.

“Oh,” you squeaked, cheeks heating. There was no reason to feel ashamed but you curdled like a scolded child. “Just a friend. He was helping me with research.”

“Did you tell him about me?” Possessiveness twined through his voice.

“Tell him what? That I have a demon in my basement I can’t get rid of? Of course not,” you scoff.

You flipped through Jeonghan’s journal, nearly tearing the pages in an effort to ignore your demon’s eyes raking over your skin.

“Did you tell him how wet you get when you have my tongue between your thighs?” he asked smugly. “Or how you like being taken from behind?”

“Shut up,” you whispered.

“I listened to the entire thing and never heard those little sighs you make right before you come. Did you fake it for him?”

“Stop.” You didn’t dare risk looking at him. You didn’t dare risk turning around and fleeing upstairs either. If you moved a muscle, you’d be lost. 

“He didn’t help you at all, did he? You wanted me inste—”

“I said shut up!”

Your hand came down onto the bookshelf, knocking an ancient vase covered in dust to the floor where it splintered into a thousand pieces.

“Shit!”

Only in a pair of wool socks, you stood trapped, surrounded by jagged shards in the dim candle light. Soonyoung’s very own captive. Diving to the floor, you clumsily picked up pieces to clear a thin path. The splinters split the skin of your bare knees and fingers, ribbons of blood trickling down your skin.

The smell of night and incense washed over you as you worked in a trance. You needed out. Out of this room, out of this house, out of this town. 

But the warm presence kneeling over you wiped those thoughts away.

“Let me see,” Soonyoung murmured, warm hands wrapping around your wrist.

“It hurts,” you whimpered, dropping all the pieces you so carefully collected. He felt warm, real. Solid. That rich smell of night washed back over you, urging you to dive into his bare chest and drown in it.

And you realized—

Soonyoung was out of his circle.

“You—”

“I’ll go back, if that’s what you want,” he whispered. Despite his promise, he nuzzled into your neck, inhaling deeply.

“You could leave the whole time?”

“You need something stronger than salt to keep something like me contained.”

“Like what?”

“Words,” he says, with no hint of amusement. “You do your work somewhere else. Why?”

“Because…”

“Because why? I can help you,” he whispered, pulling your hand to his mouth, waiting for you to pull away. When you didn’t, his tongue flicked out, lapping away your blood before sucking it into his mouth. 

“I…” You faltered under his ministrations. Soonyoung’s tongue curled around your knuckle, his teeth teasing just enough to light a fire in your belly.

Realizing you couldn’t answer like this, he released your finger but moved on to licked across your palm before inhaling deeply. 

“Because you’re still afraid of me,” Soonyoung sighed, disappointed. He rose to his full height, pulling you along. The movement gave you enough clarity to speak.

“You stare at me.”

He stared at you now. Past your rumpled pajamas and stretched out sweater, beyond the surface fear and annoyance he wouldn’t just go away. Soonyoung looked at you like he saw the very core of your entire soul. 

“How could I not?”

You went silent.

“You know why I stare at you?” he pleaded, chest brushing against yours. He still held your hands, your blood making his grip slick and warm. “Because I don’t want to miss those moments when you look back.”

Soonyoung buried his face in your throat, lips tracing over your pulse. Tasting, teasing. “Every night, you cry in your sleep. For me. You beg me to touch you like I do in our dreams and I stay down here despite wanting nothing more than to bury my head between your legs like you need me to.” Instead of his tongue, his nose followed the curve of your shoulder, greedily inhaling your scent like it might evaporate. “I listened to him fuck you and it made me want to destroy the entire house. The entire town.”

With each word, you stepped back, Soonyoung quick to follow, his thigh slottied between your knees. With your eyes shut, it felt like all your shared dreams. You could pretend it was just another night of Soonyoung plaguing your subconscious as your back met the wooden bookcase, arching away from the dig of the shelves. All those useless manuscripts that failed to warn you, kept the secret of what Soonyoung was tightly bound up, were better used like this. For him to show you exactly what he was.

“You called me here. I’m yours. I’m always yours. Every time I’m yours.”

You squirmed in his hold, hips rutting against the muscle of this thigh. A step ahead, he flexed and pressed harder, enough to hurt in the best way. He was already hard. You knew what he looked like — what he felt like — beneath the pair of sweatpants you currently loathed, the draw string tied tight enough to prevent you from pulling them down in the haze of lust.

“The first day you summoned me, you asked me what I was made for.”

Your head tilted back against the bookcase, Soonyoung’s teeth razing into your neck. You wanted him to bite you and he knew it, digging his teeth in just enough to hear you moan before drawing back and moving to a new patch of revealed skin as he tugged down the collar of your sweater. Every rut against his thigh pulled you closer to the sun, you were Icarus and he was melting you into nothing. Maybe this was the only use those books would serve; a backdrop to using Soonyoung’s body like he wanted you to.

“I was made to do this,” he sighed, drawing in a long breath of your scent. “To please you, to serve you. To love you.”

“I—” you choked, hips curling into the muscle of his thigh. He was so close. Close enough to taste and feel and it was far better than any of the dreams. Better than anything before. 

“I was made to fill this perfect,” his fingers squeezed your ass for emphasis, “fucking pussy until you can’t take anymore. Until you can’t think of anything else. Not your research, nothing. Just us.”

You were tempted to let him take you. On the floor, against the bookshelf, on the stairs because the bed was too far away. Fucking around the entire house, everything beyond where your bodies join burning into nothing. Every squeeze of his fingers, the raze of his teeth, pure gluttonous temptation to give in. 

Wedging a hand between your bodies, twin sighs of relief mingled together. Your knees ached to buckle so you could taste him, the glass still scattered around the floor. The burn of his teeth on your throat answered your desperate plea to do just that.

Nimble fingers shoved your shorts and panties to the floor. If it was anyone else you’d be embarrassed at the sticky cling, but Soonyoung was made for this. He was made for you and only you. 

Your mouth caught his roughly, eager to suck at the swell of his bottom lip for a distraction from the unbearable want. 

You wanted his hand around your throat, forcing you to watch the mess between your thighs soak between fabric down to his skin. You wanted his fingers tangled in your hair, pulling hard enough your back bowed. But you couldn’t keep your eyes open at the soft pets to your clit. 

You needed to touch him too. Scratching at his sides wasn’t enough to curb the potent need to feel all of him unfiltered through sleep. He just needed to give you enough space to do so. 

A mangled wait just barely passed between your lips.

Woken from a trance, Soonyoung jumped away. His hair is a mess, chest heaving.

It was enough to send the consequences of whatever this was toppling down on you like a house of cards.

When you didn’t speak, he returned to his circle and faced the wall, back stretching over each ragged breath. He didn’t turn around as you pulled your bottoms back up, now cold and uncomfortable but you saw the way his hands flexed; the tremor he tried to hide. You shuffled away from the wall, only to realize too late that the vase would be a problem. 

Or it would have been but the glass once littering on the floor sat back together on the shelf, the vase perfectly mended as if it never fell. 

The isolation and darkness of winter break was catching up to you. It had to be. The lack of sleeping or eating as well. Your muddled senses had led you down this path without care for the consequences. and without Soonyoung seducing you, they became much sharper.

The entire night Soonyoung stayed downstairs, most likely fighting the same thoughts you were. He didn’t follow you upstairs. It’d only take a word, but you stayed quiet, tucked between the sheets, door locked as if that could stop him when fine tuned wards couldn’t.

The only proof of what happened was the teeth marks at the base of your throat and the mortification that even hiding in your room with new salt wards and ruins to keep him away, your fingers itched to take advantage of the wetness in your panties and finish what he started.

But for the first time since Soonyoung arrived, your dreams were filled with nothing.

Two days until campus came back to life and you remained hidden in your room. The first floor of the house was a makeshift no man’s land; an illusion of space between you and the demon waiting in the basement. Somehow you knew he hadn’t moved since you fled the other night, he hadn’t so much as made a sound.

His absence in your dreams was almost worse than his presence. You’re still looking for him; searching the house, bumbling through a maze, calling for him on the shores of the beaches you two tangled at before. But he never answered. Like some demented game of hide and seek, he evaded you even though you knew he’s somewhere watching. Waiting for something. 

Every morning, you woke up more aggravated than before. Sweaty and confused, frustrated because you were just on the verge of finally catching him before your alarm went off. 

Jeonghan’s notes in the demonomicon, and Soonyoung's explanation that night in the ritual room tangle together until you finally have an answer.

Command him to return to hell, and he will.

Overly simple. Embarrassingly obvious you didn’t consider it. A command would get rid of him entirely. Forever.

But even with the knowledge, you couldn’t bring yourself to do it.

You wanted him to stay.

Which meant he had to go.

You woke up a sweaty, pitiful mess. Soonyoung remained hidden in your dreams but the seed of want continued to bloom, choking out any other desires you might have. You couldn’t breathe without remembering his scent, couldn’t look in the mirror without imagining how his body would look draped over yours as you both watched your reflections move together.

You wanted him.

You needed him.

It was a slow start. You didn’t remove all your clothes, just pushed your shirt up and your panties to the side. Somehow that would be admitting defeat but not the careful way you retraced Soonyoung’s path. Pinching where he pinched, squeeze at your breasts like with the same force he did. Your hips ground down, desperate for something after so many weeks of torture. 

You fucked yourself in jerky strokes, dedicated to pretending it’s as satisfying as when he did it. Three fingers don’t substitute for even one of his. 

You didn’t care anymore. If this damned you to hell for all eternity then at least you’d have Soonyoung there to make it worth it.

“Soonyoung,” you whimpered, beckoning him from the basement where you knew he listened. 

When you opened your eyes, your demon waited at the foot of the bed. 

“Tell me what you need,” he demanded, crawling over you. Soonyoung followed a frustrated tear as it streaked across your cheek only to kiss it away. “Tell me what you need. Please.”

“You.”

There was no fear here, only the relief of his lips on yours. You sighed in relief as your hands found his skin and cataloged every curve and dip. He tried to take off your shirt but you wouldn’t release him, forcing him to rip it into ribbons of fabric instead.

“Dreamed of this,” he moaned, nipping at your chin before descending to your breasts. 

Your hips kicked at the sting of his teeth. “I know.”

“You don’t,” he said as he kissed over to your neglected breast, pinching at your nipple. “You can’t.”

“Show me,” you commanded.

Visions flashed in your head: Soonyoung curled on the rug in front of a fire, chin on your stomach as you cried at some silly joke; floating in a deep lake with you tangled around his back, counting the freckles sprinkled over his shoulders from the sun. Fingers intertwined under a full moon.

Distracted by his dreams, you didn’t realize he settled between your legs, the thin pajamas tattered on the floor. His fingers pressed your legs apart. Completely bare. All for him as Soonyoung traced the crease of your thigh with his teeth.

“I’m yours,” he murmured again and again.

“Mine,” you answered.

Soonyoung lapped between your legs like a starved animal, whimpering at the taste of you. His fingers twisted, welcomed by the soaked warmth of your walls. Nothing would ever replace the intoxicating bliss of how perfectly he was made for your body.

“Oh god,” you moaned before wincing from a punishing bite to your thigh, hard enough to draw blood. But Soonyoung sucked away the mess and returned to your clit.

You’re covered in sweat, hot to the touch from his touch and freezing from the chill in the air.

“That’s right,” he moans. “Touch yourself like I do.”

Head falling back, you tweaked your nipples still wet with his spit. His unused hand snaked possessively up your chest, pinning you to the mattress while splaying you on his fingers. You rocked into the dull throb of it.

“Soonyoung, fuck,” you hissed, hand tangling with his. He sucked your clit hard enough to break you.

The rush of your orgasm blasted through every pore.  There wasn’t enough oxygen in the room to keep you afloat, inky splotches staining your vision. Sweat whimpers turn to pitchy whines as he whispered dulcet praises between each punishing suck to your sensitive clit.

You shoved him to his back, surprised by your own strength until realizing Soonyoung was merely eager to do exactly what you wanted him to do just as you were for him.

His cock shined in the light filtering in through the window, wet with arousal and so hard you’re tempted to skip this and plant yourself on his lap and never leave. You would. Eventually.

You took him into your mouth, sighing at the weight against your tongue, eyes slipping shut. This was a rare occurrence in all the shared dreams. All of them were your demon serving you like he promised, focused on your pleasure at his hand. Now, you wanted to reward him. 

Soonyoung might be from hell but his groans sounded like pure heaven. You swallowed down what you could, unafraid of the consequences if it meant hearing him sigh your name again.

When you looked up, Soonyoung was already watching, eyes glued to his cock disappearing between your lips. He stroked your hair gently. You appreciated the sentiment but you didn’t need him to be sweet. You needed him as desperate as you felt. 

Soonyoung continued to stare and you stared right back. A demon rendered speechless. He’d done so well, snuffed the clawing ache in your veins temporarily. You wanted to reward him. Show him how much you cared even if he was something otherworldly. 

He wanted the moments you looked back and you would give him that in spades.

His cock sat pretty in your hand, glossed in spit and his own need, throbbing with each tight stroke. Every pass allowed you to take him deeper until you choked.

“Angel, fuck, look at you,” he panted.

Yes, you thought. Look at me. Never stop looking at me.

You drew out the next stroke, moaning at the taste of him. It’s all so much better than you imagined it would be but the euphoria didn’t last long enough. Soonyoung pawed at your face, fingers wet against your cheeks, your own arousal smeared against your jaw as he dragged you into a kiss. He knocked your hands away when you attempted to keep stroking him. His mouth tasted like you.

The room filled with desperate pants. Soonyoung pinned you to the bed, wrists caged in one hand, the other titling your chin for more languid kisses. You lit up inside, his glow consuming you as well.

Hours or days passed like that: pathetically rutting against each other, whimpering for more each time the friction was too much. Your ankles linked over his hips, encouraging him to finally make those dreams real but Soonyoung had a millennium of patience on his side.

“You deserve this.” He nipped along your neck, sucked the delicate skin beneath your ear until your pulse sped up.

“Soonyoung,” you whimpered, tears blooming. You thrashed in his hold, nails scratching at his hands frantically, humping down against in hopes he’d give you something. But your strength was no match for a demon’s.

“Say it,” he commanded. “Tell me you deserve this.”

“I—” you break. You can’t. Not with the way he choked the next breath out of you with a press of his cock.

He pinned you in place, golden eyes level with your own. “Say it.”

“I deserve this!”

“That’s right. So fucking smart,” he grunted, finally giving you what you both needed. “You’re perfect. Gonna fuck you until you believe me.”

He drew back slowly, the pull out verging on pain at the idea of being empty for even a moment. But Soonyoung was in full control and rolled back into your tight heat eagerly. You want everything he can give you so bad it hurts.

“Oh my god,” you croaked.

You’re torn between sinking deeper into the mattress and taking, letting Soonyoung ring you out to dry with each thrust. Or forcing him on his back and taking every last drop of pleasure he offered.

“S-soonyoung.”

He ignored the command but freed your hands. You only got a moment to scramble for balance as he pulled you up into his lap, sitting on his heels as he fucked you deep. A hand punishingly tight on your ass. Entirely at his mercy.

You fall into a daze like that, nothing more than a limp ragdoll as Soonyoung wrings another orgasm from your body. 

“That’s it,” he cooed against your trembling lips. “Mine. All mine.”

Speech evaded you. All you knew was the feeling of him inside you, the heat he kissed you with. Completely limp, you whimpered.

Yours.

He came like that, trembling and hot in your core, forcing your body harder onto his cock as you promised your soul to him. There’d be bruises on your ass and hips, teeth marks branded into your neck but you didn’t care. You never wanted this to end as he caged you into the bed, both of you limp and sated.

On your back, Soonyoung’s fingers prodded between your thighs, sinking into the mess of your cunt. You couldn’t survive another orgasm so soon but the idea of him stopping silences your concerns. After a few curls, he reveals the dewy pads of his fingers. You’ve already committed yourself to a life of sin. That’s what you tell yourself when you snag his wrist and suck his cum from his fingers, never looking away from him as you swallow. Soonyoung took the taste back with his tongue in your mouth and then with his tongue inside you, collecting his spend before spitting it into your mouth and watching you greedily.

You swallowed and whimpered, “more.”

Soonyoung obliged, lapping at your entrance, leaving wet kisses to your clit that made you twitch. You wanted to pull him off and taste the combined mess. You wanted to soak in the press of his fingers. You wanted him to fuck you until the house collapsed around you two.

He did all those things. Rolled you onto your front and spread your ass, touched you like no one else ever had. He held you against the bookcase in the corner of the room, kissing away the overstimulated tears. Soonyoung balanced you in his lap, whispering praises despite the jerky way you rode him, muscles fatigued. 

You lost all sense of self through it.

Soonyoung’s arms wrapped possessively over your naked body, the moon already dipping low outside the window was what you woke up to. 

“You never told me what you are,” you said.

“I’m yours, and you're mine.”

“Like soulmates?”

“I don’t think that’s a strong enough word.” Soonyoung pulled you further into his chest, his lips dragging over the pulse of your wrist. “I find you in every lifetime.”

“Have you?” you asked, half asleep. “Found me before?”

It was a joke. A demon and a human? Something without a soul bonded to something as fragile as a mortal? It couldn’t work.

“Always,” he said, rolling you onto your back. Every inch of him burned against you, weighed you down into the mattress as if you’d run away. As if the idea would cross your mind to leave him ever again.

“And?”

“It never stops feeling like the first time even if it always ends the same.”

You wanted to ask him how this ended but the words melted on your tongue as he sheathed himself inside you again, opened your heart to him like a flower in bloom. All you could do was splay beneath him, taking everything he offered, sucking his vows of devotion straight from his lips until you both seized with a cry.

Curled around your back, he memorized your body with his hands, molding you to fit perfectly in the curve of him. In the warmth of his body, you drifted off.

This dream didn’t feel like a dream at all.

It was a memory. It had to be Soonyoung’s, because you only recognized the cottage from the other dreams you shared; but those in those dreams it was merely a stage for his torture. You recognized this place. This was home. 

You knew outside the winter had killed off the beautiful flowers he tended to, that up in the attic a cat slept curled up near the bricks of the fireplace rather than chase off any mice. The bed in the corner was barely big enough for the two people who lived here to share. A husband and a wife. The unique little girl from the village who talked to ghosts and everyone vexed in public but begged for help in private. And the boy who burned so bright everyone turned towards him like flowers searching for the last sun before winter.

It was dark outside, the chill of winter creeping in as you tended to the bubbling caldron, stirring just right for the potion to have the effect the mayor’s wife wanted. A simple love potion to stop his affairs meant enough gold pieces so that Soonyoung could afford a new horse.

Humming the incantation, you turned towards the door when your husband arrived. Instead of the dramatic dip and kiss he greeted you with even on the coldest days, Soonyoung opened his bag and began shoving things inside.

“You need to leave.”

It was your demon but not. He lacked the sharp edge of the supernatural you knew him to have. Soonyoung was human and he was your husband. Or he should have been. The Soonyoung you summoned and this Soonyoung blended together. He moved with unnatural speed he didn’t possess before. His shoulders were broader, more intimidating.

You grabbed his arms to stop him from packing but he was too strong.

“What did you do?”

Soonyoung continued shoving valuables in a sack. “They’re on their way here.”

“What did you do?” you cried. 

“I’m protecting you.”

Something was wrong with him. You didn’t know what but this wasn’t the Soonyoung that left the cottage this morning for the mills. He was different. He wasn’t yours.

“No,” you shook your head, “this isn’t right! Tell me what yo—”

“We’ll be together,” he smiled, tears streaking down his face to join yours. “I’ll always find you, I promise. Now go!”

“No,” you argued. 

“You have to go, they’ll kill you if they find you here.”

“They’ll kill us both! I won’t leave you to die alone.” 

But that wasn’t true. If you gave yourself up, they’d let Soonyoung live. His marriage to you was their betrayal. One of their own siding with the woman who kept death around her like an old friend. Soonyoung’s life could be bartered with your own. 

Outside, the darkness morphed into torch light, the hum of an angry crowd swelling as they surrounded the house. There was nowhere to run. 

“You have been accused of witchcraft!” called the mayor. “Come out at once or we will burn this house to the ground.”

Soonyoung pulled you into his chest, hands framing your face. A gold ring had begun taking over the warm brown you’d grown to love. “I will love you until we are nothing but dust.”

Before you could respond, Soonyoung kissed you like he did the night of your wedding and then marched towards the front door, skin glowing a faint gold. You tried to follow but he was too fast, out the door before you could even take a step. 

Then the screaming started.

Clawing at the door, you found it locked. The back one was as well. You couldn’t do anything but try to watch from the soot stained windows as the screaming crescendoed like a boiling kettle.

When it finally stopped, you scrambled for the door once again and opened it to a graveyard.

Blood stained the ground, thick puddles collecting like it rained for days. Lifeless bodies decorated the ground. Some ripped in half, others with their extremities bent at unnatural angles. Skulls indented and bones protruding out. 

You didn’t care.

You searched the dead for hours, until the sun hid behind the clouds and cast everything in blues and greys. The mess of bodies clung to your skin and beneath your nails. You had to breathe through your mouth because the metallic scent became too much. 

No matter how long you searched, Soonyoung’s body was nowhere to be found.

The memory changed. Soonyoung crouched in a dirty cell, a woman with your face sneering at him. A different life where he arrived at your doorstep and you took him in like a wounded animal without any fear. Lifetimes of your bonded souls flashed by, some where you loved him and others where he was nothing more than a pest. The only constant was you never recognized him but despite that, Soonyoung kept loving every new version of you he met even if they refused to love him in return.

You watched your lives play out over and over before finally settling back in your bed, tucked beneath your lover's body as he stroked your hair, your stomach, your thighs. He committed this version of you to memory while you lived the ones forgotten.

“Why?”

He focused on the dip of your waist, fingers curling perfectly like you were made for him to do so. Soonyoung pulled you closer before whispering, “Because an eternity in hell is worth seeing you again, even if it’s only for a short time.”

“Isn’t it torture? When I don’t recognize you?”

This time he didn’t answer. Your heart ached, having felt what he felt in those memories. Soonyoung didn’t care if you couldn’t love him in return, he only cared to hear your voice. He would love you until time ceased to exist. He needed to know you were happy on Earth, that his pain in hell wasn’t in vain even if it didn’t serve him.

“Please stay,” you croaked. 

Soonyoung nuzzled your throat, delaying the obvious truth. 

He was never meant to stay.

“You’re the most you here,” he whispered. “Always summoning things you weren’t supposed to.”

Nudging him away, you looked at him. Really looked at him. The scary demon you once believed haunted your existence stared back. A few hours ago you would’ve wilted under the intensity but now you embraced it. Him. The closer you looked, the more human he became. You didn’t want to hide from him anymore, the man who sold his soul for you.

“I’m sorry I didn’t remember,” you said.  You needed him to know that even if you didn’t recognize him in this life, you believed him. You wanted to remember him. 

“Hear my vow before I go.” He said something else; something in Greek you couldn’t decipher as he pushed your legs apart and rolled into you. Your new memories of your first life together flashed in your head: a secret wedding, making love beneath a full moon, a harvest festival where every other woman in the village watched as you and your husband spun around the room like teenagers drunk for the first time.

You tried to ask him what it meant, but Soonyoung silenced you with a kiss.

When you finally woke up, the sun was high in the sky and the sheets were cold. 

Your skin was pristine where the stain of bruises and hickies and bite marks should be.

You knew the house was empty. Nearly a month of Soonyoung’s presence lurking in your mind, weighing down your shoulders. You knew he was gone. 

But it didn’t stop you from looking.

The other bedrooms were empty, beds made and ready to welcome home their rightful owners. In the kitchen, the accumulated mess from break disappeared; no dishes, or towels, or stains on the cabinet. Dusty books were all that greeted you in the archives.

You saved the worst for last.

You tried to take the steps slowly, delaying the inevitable knowledge that waits beyond the basement landing. But no matter how much you try to pry the seconds apart and make them last, you’re in the empty ritual room staring at nothing.

The circle was gone. The candles and ruins vanished as well. 

Like he never existed at all.

“Soonyoung,” you said, voice cracking.

Nothing.

“Come back.”

Still nothing.

Your demon was gone.

All alone, you sank to your knees, curled on the floor until sleep took you away. Hopefully where he waited for you.

Students were set to return to campus that evening and you weren’t ready for different reasons than a few days ago.

No matter how many times you called for him or followed it with a command to return – whether cursed, spit, or plead – Soonyoung was gone.

You walked the house aimlessly searching, knowing he wasn’t waiting behind a closed door or just up the steps. The dreams you shared didn’t hold him hostage either. There’s no proof he even existed beyond the fading bruises and soreness in your muscles.

The book you brought him with was open in front of you, a circle of salt drawn haphazardly in the corner of your room. If you could summon Soonyoung once you could summon him again. You just needed to concentrate on messing up in the exact same way.

But right as you opened your mouth to being, someone knocked on the door.

Throwing the door wide, you barked. “What?”

“Sorry!” The man jumped back, nearly tumbling down the steps before he caught on the last stair. “I’m Soonyoung, the new grad student. Dr. Credew said we might be able to help each other. He said he emailed you about me.”

You must be hallucinating. This Soonyoung didn’t have the same golden aura as the Soonyoung you knew but he looked the same. Same sharp jaw, fox like eyes. 

But it couldn’t be.

“I…” you trailed.

“This is 1520 Orange street, right? Or am I completely lost?” He joked.

“No, this is it. I must have missed the email. The past few weeks have been…Weird.”

The street bustled with the few early student arrivals but was mostly abandoned. 

“Your thesis is on ritualized sex, yeah?”

You nodded and he said, “Cool. Mine is on Asmodeus and blood rites.”

As the initial shock wore off, the winter chill creeped beneath your robe and you remember that you’re not wearing much beneath. 

“Have we met before?” he asked.

“I—” you choked. “No, I don’t think we have.”

“Sorry, I’m just getting weird deja vu. Really weird,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” you mumbled.

He walked through the house like he’s visited before even though you both know he hasn’t made himself at home in the living room before you excused yourself upstairs to change.

“She walks in beauty, like the night. Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright. Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellow’d to that tender light. Which heaven to gaudy day denies.” 

You rooted to the spot on the stairs, limbs locked. “What did you say?”

“Are you a fan?”

“Of what?”

He flashes you the cover of a book. A collection of Byron’s poems you don’t remember leaving on the table but must have. The only person in the house all winter break was you. 

“Personally, I think Maid of Athens is his best work.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard that one.”

“Maid of Athens, ere we part. Give, oh, give me back my heart! Or, since that has left my breast, Keep it now, and take the rest! Hear my vow before I go, Ζωή μου, σᾶς ἀγαπῶ,” he recites again, flipping through the pages but not reading them. “She Walks in Beauty is another great one but you seem to know it already.”

Ζωή μου, σᾶς ἀγαπ.

My life, I love you.

“Would you like some tea?” you asked, mind half gone.

“Tea sounds great. I can do it while you get dressed.”

He ignored your protest, racing into the kitchen and filling the kettle before you were able to stop him.

In your room, you rushed to get dressed only to find the pair of sweatpants your demon wore folded and tucked away in the back of your dresser. You pulled them on, along with a thick sweater and socks before collapsing onto the bed.

Soonyoung had come back. He returned in a form that might be able to love you in the light of day, in front of others, even if this Soonyoung didn’t know it yet. Maybe this was what he meant. This was the way things always ended in every life, he got to have you before sending you off to be with his mortal self.

The whistle of the kettle beckoned you back downstairs to find out.

“Thank you,” you said as he handed you a mug full of tea. 

Soonyoung shrugs, the fabric of his shirt pulling tight over his chest. “I like being useful.”

Weeks later, after a successful ritual to raise the dead for Soonyoung’s thesis, when you’re both thoroughly debauched —sweaty and pink between the sheets of your bed, the windows fogged and clothes strewn haphazardly about — you find his tattoo.

Soonyoung dozed on his stomach, one arm wrapped around your middle to pull you closer every time he woke back up. Your fingers traced along the dark ink of a double ouroboros, two snakes intertwined, swallowing their own tails, nestled between his shoulder blades. Every loop around the circuit brought you to the same start.

“It means—”

“Fates. Intertwined,” you cut him off.

Silence hung heavy in the air. Comforting, not suffocating. You’ve got new bruises and teeth marks painted over your skin, ones you knew would last. Soonyoung is covered in ones of his own but you feel the need to add more, just to make sure they’re real.

Sooyoung leaned back from your shoulder, pulled your hand to his mouth, lips grazing your knuckles as he spoke. “Do you believe in soulmates?”

“I think some people are destined to find each other in every life.”

“Me too.”

In the afternoon winter sun, the warm brown of his eyes flashed gold.

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The palace gates are not built for mortals. They tower above you like mountains clothed in vermilion and jade, swallowing the sky with tiled wings that gleam black-blue in the sun. Their shadow falls over you as if to remind you of scale: you are small, you are nothing, you are already consumed.

The men in uniform do not slow. Their steps drum against the stone as though this march were inevitable from the day you were born. You stumble after them, your thin shoes slipping against flagstones polished smooth.

A eunuch in blue silk glides forward, his voice cold. “This way.” You follow because there is nowhere else to go.

The women’s quarters are a braided hush tangled with whispers. A matron waits beneath the eaves, hair built high as a crown of lacquer, mouth pinched. Her name is not offered; her authority is enough.

“Strip her,” she says.

It is not a request, and so your rough cotton is peeled from your limbs; the sting of air on your bare arms a cold slap. You want to fold yourself small, hide the plain stubborn bones of your body, but the room gives you no shelter. Hands, practised and impersonal, lift your arms and measure your waist. A basin appears, steam trembling the surface. Another woman scrubs your skin with scented cloths until you are raw and new, and no longer yourself.

The robe they pour you in is heavier than it looks, a pale blossom patterned with moons; the underskirt murmurs against your calves. Your hair is combed until it crackles and pinned into an obedient, shining shape. When they set the final hairpin, something within you clicks shut with it.

In the bronze mirror, a stranger blinks. The stranger’s mouth is soft and quiet; yours has lines bitten into it. The stranger’s eyes gleam; yours are rimmed with sleepless red. You lift your gaze and meet yourself anyway. The silk is beautiful. You are not moved.

The matron looks you up and down. “Better,” she says. “Remember, your head must bow and your voice must sweeten. Remember whose air you breathe.”

The words taste like iron on your tongue. “Whose?” The matron’s smile does not reach her eyes. “The Crown Prince’s, of course.”

A tremor starts in your left hand. You crush it by curling your fingers into the silk and anchoring them there. You have the sudden, foolish thought that if you run—now—you might still find the street outside your house where the fishmonger shouts and the stray cats argue over fish heads and your father—

Your father, who could not meet your gaze that morning when the men came.

The memory unfurls without permission. The yard smelled of damp straw. Your father’s hands shook, the dirt forever lodged under his nails. He kept saying your name, and you kept thinking he would laugh, he would swing you into his arms and say you were too old for such tricks, he would tell the men to go. But the men did not go. They had papers. Seals. The smooth, expensive silence of men who move with the weight of the palace behind them.

“It’s only service,” your father said then, as if words could blunt the blade. “Honourable. You will be fed. You will be safe.”

“You sold me,” you said, and watched the words reveal the truth in his face.

Now, in the palace, the matron claps, and the memory snaps shut. “This way,” she says, and you are shepherded into a low room whose floor smells of rice paste. A group of women sit on cushions, wrapped in silks like yours but better. Their mouths are lacquered into timid roses. Their eyes roam over you the way crows consider shiny things.

A lady in pale jade presides at the head, her hair adorned with pearls that drip from their pins. Her face is beautiful the way a blade is beautiful. She does not introduce herself either. She does not need to. You bow because your world depends on it.

“She is the new one,” the matron announces.

A low flutter moves through the room. You hear your name—your real one, the one your mother used to sing into your hair—offered up to their mouths and rewritten there. The jade lady studies you with palate-cleanser calm.

“Stand straight,” she says. “Smile. No teeth.”

You shape your mouth.

“She is plain,” murmurs a woman to your left.

“But fresh,” another counters.

The jade lady raises a hand, and the whispers die. “You will be instructed,” she says, “in comportment and conversation. You will learn the Prince’s preferences and how not to become troublesome. You will not forget your place, which is below the law and within my sight.”

A soft laugh moves around you. You do not laugh. You regard the jade lady’s hands: long fingers, nails dull, the skin where a ring once sat a little paler than the rest. She has been here long enough to shed pieces of herself and learn not to be noticed.

“Today,” the matron says, “you will learn the corridors.”

Corridors. A dull word for a labyrinth. They unfold like a thousand lines: the passage with its painted lotus floor, the corner smelling of cedar and women’s nervous sweat; a narrow door leading to a courtyard where carp make slow turns beneath the lily pads; another door to a colonnade that frames an inner garden. You file with the other women behind the matron as she narrates the rules you must memorise to go on breathing.

“Do not cross the Red Pavilion without express summons. The Prince walks there when he pleases.”

“Do not speak to men unless they speak to you, and then only what is pleasing to hear.”

“Do not eat fruit unless it is offered by the proper hand.”

“Do not look directly into the Queen’s eyes if you are questioned. It is taken for insolence.”

At the mention of the Queen, the women’s shoulders tighten. The jade lady’s mouth softens a breath. The matron leads you into a hall resplendent with a painted flock of cranes. You think their wings must know the shape of escape.

As you pass, the women brush you with words disguised as kindness. “Poor child.” “Lucky girl.” “Do you know how to sing?” “Can you embroider?” “The Prince admires quiet.” “The Prince admires beauty.” “The Prince admires obedience.”

You admire air. You admire roads. You admire a door that opens onto a street that is not guarded by men with spears.

In the afternoon, they bring you to another room. A girl with moth-soft hands paints your lips the proper red and draws a crescent moon at your temple. “Pretty,” she murmurs, though her eyes look far away, as if searching the backs of her eyelids for a different life.

The jade lady returns with graceful disapproval. She adjusts a fold of your robe with two fingers and a sigh. “You will not stare,” she instructs. “You will keep your voice low. You will bow until you are told to rise.” Her gaze drifts to your hands. “You have worker’s scars.”

“They are mine,” you say.

A thin smile. “Not anymore.”

They take you to the antechamber of the Red Pavilion. The floor gleams with the kind of care that requires someone else’s back to break. Outside, pine trees shape the courtyard. A small fountain speaks to itself. The guards at the far doors remain perfectly still.

The jade lady arranges you on a cushion with the others. You are placed near the back, the place for fresh acquisitions.

“You will be summoned as he wishes,” says the jade lady. “Do not speak unless address is clear.”

Time passes achingly slow. Somewhere, a bell counts the hour. Your knees ache; the silk grows hotter; the scar at your right thumb throbs its small, stubborn drumbeat. You watch a bee struggle against the paper lattice of the window until it finds a hole and escapes into the courtyard. You wonder if you are the bee or the lattice.

Footsteps. The eunuch emerges from the inner chamber, his expression the practised neutrality of a man who has mastered both service and survival.

“Her Highness will see you,” he says, and the words fall over the room.

The Crown Prince’s wife enters not with a flourish but with a silence that forces the air to still. She wears white, the exact shade of disdain, and her hair is a temple of jewels. Her face is beautiful the way winter is beautiful: precise, bloodless, absolute. The women bow low; you follow, the floor’s wax kissing your forehead. When she speaks, her voice is clear.

“Rise.”

You rise. Her eyes pass over you as one might pass over a ledger. “The new one,” she says; it is not a question. “Stand.”

You stand. The jade lady shifts; a note too careful in a composition of carelessness.

The wife comes closer. “You understand your good fortune,” she says, and the line between statement and threat is a hair’s breadth.

You hold her gaze because you have not yet learned not to. Behind her eyes, there is calculation; behind the calculation, a certain fatigue. You realise with a jolt that she is not old. Power has made its mark upon her early.

“I understand I am here,” you say.

The wife’s mouth tilts, not precisely a smile.

“Pretty,” she responds. “Untrained, but pretty.” She turns away dismissively. “See that she is taught the songs he favors.”

The jade lady bows. “Yes, Your Highness.”

“And the rules,” the wife adds, lightly, like a benediction. “Especially the rules.”

She glides away. The room exhales, and the jade lady’s fingers tighten on your shoulder for the briefest moment—possession or warning, you cannot tell.

Evening sinks its ink into the lattices; the light stains the floor a last amber and then withdraws. Lamps are lit, their halos small domestic suns. Dishes appear—fruits cut into half moons, rice plump, soups breathing steam. You taste none of it. The other women eat with beautiful mouths, telling small, careful jokes. Laughter hangs and vanishes.

Then the inner door opens.

He enters without ceremony, which is a ceremony of its own. The Crown Prince is tall, his shoulders kept rigid by the invisible hands of expectation. His robe is cerulean blue, the embroidery at the hem the colour of gold you were never invited to have. His hair is bound with a simplicity that must have cost someone else an hour. His face is handsome, yes, in the unimpeachable way a coin is stamped. But his eyes are somewhere else entirely, tilted towards a horizon that can never be reached.

The women bow, and you bow with them, forehead to the floor, silk hushing around you. The Prince pauses; you feel it in the small hairs at the back of your neck. You want to look up because you were born with that flaw, the one that insists on knowing the source of the shadow. You do not look up.

“Rise,” he says finally.

He does not look at you. He does not look at anyone in particular. He accepts tea with a flick of his fingers; he accepts a song with a nod of his head. His voice is quiet when he uses it; mostly, he does not.

You watch him from beneath your lashes and understand what this place is: a stage with one audience whose gaze is averted. A shrine whose god has elsewhere to be. A game of fortunes played with pieces that bruise and bleed.

When he stands to leave, he leaves as he came: with his attention neatly folded. The women’s eyes follow him. Your eyes stay on the floor.

The jade lady tilts her head. “You will be shown your quarters.”

You rise. Your knees complain.

In the small chamber that is now yours, a single lamp flickers on a low table. The bed is narrow, its frame plain wood lacquered in black, the blanket neatly folded, the pillows stacked too high and too soft. On the chest at the foot of the bed lies a folded bundle of garments—another silk robe, underlayers, and a set of instructions neatly stitched into the fabric.

You lower yourself onto the mattress, the silk of your robe whispering against itself as you move. The pins in your hair tug sharply with every tilt of your head, a constant reminder of the weight now fastened to you.

You press your palms together and feel the calluses the matron noticed—the humble proofs of a life that asked your hands to work honestly. They are not gone. They are only hidden.

It is only service, your father’s words echoing in your head. You will be fed. You will be safe.

Safe feels like a word someone else invented to sell you to a softer cage.

You close your eyes and see the Prince’s profile—aloof, disinterested, a mountain that will not acknowledge the pilgrim. You open them and see the ceiling—plain, immovable, yours for the staring. Between the two is a sudden realisation that tastes like iron: you are not here to be loved. You are here to be arranged.

The palace has always had a particular way of reminding Mingyu of his station.

It does not scold; it arranges. Rank is the angle of a roofline, the hush inside a threshold, the way a corridor seems to narrow for one son and open for the other. Even the flagstones participate: they remember which feet matter.

As a boy, he misread all this. He thought the carp rose because they loved his humming, that the cranes in the painted screens shifted their eyes to follow him, that the moon collected itself in the slick of stone for his delight. He learned the true alphabet of the palace the first time his brother’s name moved through a room and every head turned toward that sound.

There was a spring day, blossom heavy in the air, when he sent an arrow clean through a tossed gourd. It broke in a fragrant shiver; men turned; boys shouted; the captain’s brows lifted—brief, real recognition. Mingyu tasted it, sweet and new. He ran to where the King stood beneath the pines, the Crown Prince at his side, and held up the bow as if holding up a relic.

“Appa, did you see?”

The King’s gaze slid past him and landed, gentle as habit, on the elder son. “Your brother will require men who shoot true,” he said, not unkindly. “You will be one of them.”

A wall disguised as a blessing. Mingyu clapped when his brother’s arrow later missed by the width of a fingernail, and the court applauded as if the sun had learned courtesy. Such applause is the palace’s native weather: it falls where it falls.

He remembers a winter morning when ink bled obediently beneath his brush and the calligraphy master let praise escape him. The King studied the page, nodded once.

“You will copy your brother’s edicts someday. Write them clean.”

Recognition turned to utility so neatly that one could mistake it for generosity. Mingyu looked for it for years afterwards—on the hunt for the moment affection becomes function, family becomes committee, son becomes instrument.

He did not envy the title. He watched the Crown Prince carry an egg-shaped stone—delicate and impossible, always threatening to crack into something living or to remain, stubbornly, a stone. Mingyu did not want that egg. He wanted to be counted in the room where it was weighed.

The Queen once told him he was fortunate. “Spared the crown’s hunger,” she said, smoothing his hair.

“Then why am I still eaten?” he asked without planning to, and her laugh—that soft, tired sound—was the first time he understood that comprehension and power sleep in different beds.

So he learned to build a smaller country where he could be sovereign: the patient release of a bowstring; the blade that sings if you angle it right. He became competent in the quiet things.

Mingyu is in the practice yard, a staff warm in his hands, body moving through drills when the summons arrives. The eunuch’s bow is exact.

“His Majesty requests Daegun’s presence.”

Request is a courtier’s word for come now. Mingyu wraps the staff with oiled cloth and follows.

The throne room is a landscape arranged to remind you of scale. Mountains glide along the walls; a single chair insists that altitude can be sat in. The King sits as if carved there. The Crown Prince stands to his right, straight-backed, attentive, a man who has trained his breath to serve him in public.

Mingyu bows, the floor meets his forehead.

“Rise,” says the King. “You are appointed to the Guard.” The words drop with finality, leaving no room for rebuttal.

“You will see to the new girl,” his father continues. “A debt sent her. She will require… supervision. It will give you purpose.”

Purpose settles sour in his mouth. He has always had purpose, but this is the kind that arrives with a leash and calls itself benevolence. “Yes, Father.”

The Crown Prince’s eyes flicker—relief, perhaps, or gratitude at having one complication removed from his circumference. Mingyu does not resent him. The Crown Prince must live at the point of every circle. Second sons learn to measure radius.

“Discretion,” the King adds. “The palace is a drum; whispers are hands.”

Mingyu bows again and leaves. He stands a moment beneath the eaves and lets that nearly-rain cool his face.

Purpose. Fine. He will do it. He will also resent it in the particular way he has trained himself to resent: tidy, bloodless, silent.

The women’s quarters receive him with professional quiet. The matron arrives, lacquered hair and careful eyes.

“Daegun.”

“The King sent me,” he says, which is to say: do not pretend this is avoidable.

She leads him through the halls and shows him the room.

You sit too straight to be comfortable, hands folded in your lap. Silk tries to tame you and fails; it makes the attempt obvious. Your chin tilts that fraction above obedience; your mouth is a line that understands it is being asked to become a flower and refuses. Eyes forward, not glassy—focused.

Recognition is the first danger. It finds him before he can duck.

It isn’t your beauty that strikes him first, though beauty is there—unvarnished, a river rock shown to light. It is the way you refuse to let the room name you before you have finished pronouncing yourself. He knows that refusal. It has lived under his tongue for years in the shape of swallowed retorts and renegotiated breaths.

The jade lady—he knows her as the wife’s favourite instrument—bows in polished reverence. “Daegun honours us.”

“The King honours order by believing it lives here,” he replies dryly.

Her eyes measure him, then flatten. “We keep peace.”

“Peace without bruises is the durable kind.”

He doesn’t say why he’s here. To announce you are to be watched is to place a hat on a fox and call it a hunter. He will do this the way he knows—constant, invisible.

“Continue,” he says, and steps back into a pillar.

A zither starts quietly. Women move in practised patterns. He allows his gaze to pass. When it reaches you, he does not let it stop. He will not give the room a place to set its hooks.

Still, he catches the first thread of your voice when a woman leans over her own prettiness. “How fortunate you are.”

Your answer is for yourself and for anyone listening. “Fortune is a word with a debt inside it.”

Mingyu rolls the sentence on his tongue, surprised at how it tastes like the truth. He catches the faint scars across your knuckles—work’s punctuation. He thinks of his own years spent excelling at things that made other people comfortable.

The lesson ends. You rise with the others.

“Daegun,” the jade lady says, “shall we show you the new girl’s quarters?”

“Briefly.” He is not here for spectacle, but sometimes the corridor you are forced to walk offers a view worth noting.

Your chamber is the same geometry of comfort they all are: a lamp, a bed, a window. You pause before entering, as if the threshold might bite. He remains a respectful distance behind, as etiquette requires.

“Welcome,” the jade lady says to you, and Mingyu hears the softest note of contempt.

Your nod. “Thank you.”

Without looking at you, he speaks to the air near your window. “The nights here are colder than they look.”

A glance. “Cold reminds you that you are alive.” He allows a breath to become almost a smile. “So does heat.”

That is enough. He cannot overstep. “Ensure she knows the rules,” Mingyu tells the jade lady. “And ensure the rules know her.”

By the time he returns to his compound, the sky opens up. He sits and lets the storm comb his thoughts. Memories linger, uninvited.

Once, fever held him like a tight-laced robe. The tutor insisted on lessons regardless; the Crown Prince sat upright, preventing the indignity of a second-born lying down in his presence. Mingyu recited until each character tasted like copper. The Prince’s head nodded toward sleep and then jerked back, again and again, a bird refusing the water. When the lamps finally sank, the Prince patted the chair. “Sleep,” he said. No argument, no pity, only that one syllable.

In the morning, their father said, “Your brother was dutiful to keep you from idleness. Learn from him.”

There are others: the first time Mingyu beat a captain at the cutting of straws—and the captain’s grin was wide and delighted until the King walked past and turned it into an advisory nod for the Crown Prince to receive. The afternoon when the Queen smuggled him a handful of roasted chestnuts and said nothing, which was better than saying the wrong thing. The evening he stood on a roofline and stared at the city lights, wondering how many lives do not hinge on a month and a womb.

He thinks of your chin, which refuses instruction, and the way silk fails to domesticate you.

Mingyu stands, the world beyond his door glistening. He walks the outer ways, the backs of buildings, where servants laugh softly when they think they are alone. A guard nods. Mingyu nods back.

He pauses beneath the eaves facing the small court outside your chamber. He does not look directly at your lattice; there is safety in angles. A servant passes with linens. Another with empty cups. Rain beads along the roof’s lip and drops, evenly spaced.

His mind returns to the throne room. “This will give you purpose,” the King said, and meant: Be useful inside the shape I have cut for you. Mingyu hears it and translates: Take the sharp thing that lives in you and dull it against obedience.

But there are sharp things the palace cannot reach. He has kept some of them where they cannot be seized—quiet loyalties, a private hunger for a kind of justice that is small and meticulous, rarely grand. He has done harm in the palace’s service and learned to call some of it unavoidable. He has also learned the leverage of a half-hour, the use of a hinge, the power of getting someone the right fruit at the wrong time. The world turns on such pettiness. The world is saved by such pettiness.

He thinks of you. Fortune is a word with a debt inside it, you said, and he wants to know what you would name the creditor. He suspects you will not grant the palace that dignity. He hopes you won’t.

He turns back, takes the long path to his rooms, knowing every board that will creak under his steps. The rain slims into a fine veil, each drop a small pin prick in the night’s fabric. He lies down on his mat, waiting for sleep to overtake him.

In the morning, duty will put on its robes and call his name. He will watch. He will speak softly. He will do what needs doing.

“Purpose suits a spare son,” his father had once said.

Perhaps. Perhaps purpose will have to be taught how to suit him.

You measure the palace by shadows.

They stretch long across the flagstones in the morning, cut sharp at noon, and pool by the evening. Every corridor teaches you a different shape of darkness, and you come to know them better than the painted walls or the gilded beams. Sometimes you walk faster, thinking you might step free of them; sometimes you slow, testing if they will loosen their grip. They never do. The palace is a sundial, and you are the mark it keeps drawing, whether you consent or not.

Prince Mingyu is there. Always there.

The first day, he is little more than a blur at the edge of your vision, a presence you convince yourself you’ve imagined. By the second, the pattern is undeniable—every corridor carries him like a second shadow, every doorway frames him just long enough for you to notice. By the third, his persistence grinds at you; what was once ignorable now presses like a stone inside your shoe, small, constant, impossible to forget.

He keeps a distance so exact it must have been measured by rule and string. A length of silence between you—respect on paper, surveillance in practice. His footsteps do not hurry you, yet you walk faster, as if speed might shear him off. It does not.

When you sit to learn songs in a room full of women who have already mastered the art, he takes a place along the far screen. He studies the pattern of bamboo someone has painted there: black leaves, white joints. You want to believe he is enthralled by paint. You want to believe you are not the subject of a lesson about obedience.

His face—when you allow yourself a fraction of a glance—is ironed into neutrality. You cannot read what language his eyes speak. They are too calm for comfort, too steady for safety. He is not looking at your mouth; he is not looking at your hands; he is not looking at you—until he is, and then it is a fraction, a glance that comes and goes.

You tell yourself you have survived worse gazes. This is merely a prince, and you are merely a woman he will forget to remember.

“Again,” the tutor murmurs, and your voice joins the others. You shape the court’s favoured melodies as if they were delicate bowls you might chip with breath. The jade lady makes small approving sounds. Your throat aches with politeness.

The day unrolls in its appointed knots. Etiquette, posture, embroidery. “Smile without teeth,” the jade lady says.

When they release you for air, you go hunting for a piece of sky; the inner garden offers a rectangle of it. Pines lift their hands in permanent prayer; carp idle like old men beneath lily pads; a stone lantern wears its moss as if it had grown it deliberately. You sit at the edge of the path and tell yourself you are resting. What you are doing, in fact, is listening.

There: the steady presence, a few steps behind, as if he, too, were a lantern given legs. You refuse to look. A silence you cannot stomach makes your jaw knot. Finally, you say, without turning, “Is there a crime in my steps I have not been told?”

He responds. “None that I have seen.”

You look then. He stands under the eaves, his robe disciplined into lines your fingers would refuse to follow. You hate, abruptly, the way the palace makes people into statues and then blames them for being stone.

“Then why are you there?” you ask. The words fall hard. His expression does not change. “I am assigned.”

“Assigned,” you repeat, tasting the letters. “Like a guard to a doorway. Am I a doorway now?”

He looks at your eyes because to avoid them would be to concede shame. “You are under the palace’s protection.”

“Protection,” you scoff. “Call it what it is.”

There is a flicker in him so small you would miss it if you were not the sort of person who has taught herself to live on the crumbs of honesty. The flicker is not gloating. It is not apology. It is something more troubling: understanding.

“If you prefer another word,” he says, “I will use it in my head.” You laugh, a single chortle of sound. “Use it in your orders instead.”

He does not defend himself. He does not say the obvious thing—that orders do not consent to be rewritten by the mouths of those who receive them. He inclines his head, the gesture so perfectly measured it angers you anew.

You stand, unable to bear his stillness. “Of course,” you say, the words sharp enough to cut. “Why should I expect otherwise? A prince is a prince—trained to keep his mask still, to hold himself above the rest of us.”

Mingyu does not flinch. His hands remain easy at his sides. Where the Crown Prince had seemed untouchable, distant in the way thunder is distant even when it shakes the ground, Mingyu chooses another kind of distance: a refusal to give you the satisfaction of breaking his calm. His silence offers you nothing to strike against, and that denial stings worse than open disdain.

“Say something,” you snap, before you can stop yourself. “Defend him. Defend yourself.”

“What would satisfy you?”

The question is not a challenge; it is a bench offered to a woman too tired to stand. You refuse to sit. “Truth. At least once, in this palace built of lacquer and lies.”

“Truth is a guest here,” he says quietly. “We are asked to feed it but not to let it sleep.” You make a sound that resembles amusement if only you were feeling giddy. “You speak like a book that learned despair.”

“Books do not despair,” he replies. “People do. Books keep them from drowning.”

The conversation has gone off the rails that were meant to keep you safe. You cannot bear it. You bow a fraction—a mockery of courtesy—and leave him beneath the eaves.

Back in the women’s hall, the jade lady’s scent arrives before she does.

“You should not address the Daegun unless he speaks first,” she murmurs. “It is… unbecoming.”

“What does it become?” you ask.

Her smile is perfectly polished. “Trouble.”

That afternoon, you see the Crown Prince once. He does not look your way. In that neglect, there is a relief you hate yourself for needing.

All the while, the other prince is there. You keep your eyes on the floor, or the bowl, or the seam you are stitching into a flower. Still, you feel him like a shadow.

On the second evening, you slip through a side door you tracked earlier, the one that opens onto a narrow court where the stars shine more brightly. The stone is cool beneath your soles; the air carries a thread of sandalwood. You lean against the red wall and let your skull press into the wood. One, two, three—your heart counts itself.

“You should not be here,” says a voice.

You open your eyes and do not turn. “I have learned the rules. I am trying to meet them halfway.” Mingyu steps into your peripheral vision. He keeps his distance, that faithful dog. “Halfway,” he repeats. “The palace prefers obedience that is given fully.”

“And yet you are here.”

A pause. “I am the exception that proves the cruelty.”

“You mean the rule.”

“Rules are cruel,” he says.

You close your eyes because exhaustion is a tide and you are tired of building sandcastles in its path. “Then let me break one.” Silence, then. You expect the lecture. You expect a hand on your arm. Neither comes.

“Five minutes,” he says instead, so softly the wind drifts the words away. “Then return by the long corridor, not the near, and if you pass the Red Pavilion, walk like a woman who has a good reason.”

You turn despite yourself. “What reason is good enough to be me?”

“Almost any reason, if you walk as if it were yours.”

A humourless smile lifts the corners of your mouth. “Is that how you live here?” He does not answer, which is answer enough.

You look away, toward the slice of sky, taking in the ragged clouds. Your five minutes feel like stolen grain: small, coarse, sustaining. For them, you are grateful, and gratitude makes you disloyal to your anger. You hate that.

On the third morning, you decide, as you tie the last ribbon on your robe, that you will ignore him. You will make him into furniture, a column to be circled. You will not give the palace the theatre of your agitation. You step outside with your head the proper angle above humility.

You last until midday.

In the practice court, the women rehearse bows—such useful rehearsal, bowing to the space where a man might be. Your back complains; your knees recite their chagrin. After an hour, your temper flexes and demands air. The jade lady raises an eyebrow. You bow once more and step away.

A boy is sweeping the far colonnade, the broom pushing dust over stone. Beyond him: a red painted gate. You walk toward it, not because you intend to cross—for that would be stupid, and you are done being stupid—but because you want to see the world framed by another red than the pavilion.

You make it halfway when the air announces his presence.

“Do you plan to test the guards?” he asks calmly.

“Do you plan to leash me in the courtyard?”

“If I intended to leash you,” he says, “you would not be this close to the gate.”

You stop. The gate is a portal. Beyond it, you imagine streets that do not end in doors guarded by men. Your throat tightens. “Then let me stand here and pretend I have legs.”

You hear him exhale. “Pretend is often the first draft of freedom.”

“And the last,” you say.

Another silence. The palace is full of them; you are beginning to distinguish their idioms. This one says: I understand, and I refuse to help you destroy yourself while proving it. Anger rises again because it is easier than grief. You pivot and step toward him. “Ask me to be quiet. Give me a rule I can hate.”

“No,” he says, which is not what you expected. “I will not teach you to hate the wrong thing.” You flinch. You do not ask what the right thing is. You are afraid he will name it, and you will be forced to admit you already knew.

That evening—the third—brings you a third glimpse of the Crown Prince you receive in these first days. He crosses a veranda diagonally to your antechamber, attendants flocking around him. You bow because there is a floor. He passes without a glance downwards.

You straighten slowly. Your neck feels older by a year.

Later, in your small room, you sit on the edge of the bed and inventory your chains. Costumes. Rules. The shape of corridors. The jade lady. The Prince you barely see. And the other—this quiet sentinel whose presence drags on your mood. You add them up and arrive at a number too large for your throat.

You shake the thought away.

Somewhere in the corridor, a step pauses—Mingyu’s, you are sure of it—and then moves on without claiming your sleep.

You do not thank him. But, for the length of one breath, you admit that the chain he is may not be the chain you thought. Then you bury the admission and dream of a road that does not end in gates.

The summons arrives at dusk.

The Crown Prince has returned from council, his steps louder than usual, his attendants hurrying to keep up. There is a tightness in his jaw, and when he lowers himself onto the raised platform of his chamber, the silence about him is as sharp as unsheathed steel.

Mingyu is waiting. He has learned to be near whenever the council ends, because the aftertaste of politics is unpredictable—sometimes his brother will drink it down with ease, sometimes it will sour his temper so quickly the servants tremble before the wine is poured. Tonight it is the latter.

“Send for the new girl,” the Crown Prince says abruptly, his voice clipped. “If I must endure poison in daylight, I will have balm at night.”

The attendants bow and prepare to obey. Mingyu feels his body stiffen before his mind has caught up. The words are ordinary, the command no different from others his brother has given. And yet, dread lands in him. He cannot name why, only that the image rises unbidden: you walking into this chamber, forced to kneel, your defiance curling useless against the weight of his brother’s ennui.

It is not the act itself that sickens him. He has seen such summons before. He has learned to silence the disquiet they bring. But tonight, the thought of you as a concubine, stripped of your unyielding chin and bitter wit, feels unbearable.

He steadies his breath and steps forward.

“Hyungnim.”

The Crown Prince glances at him, irritation already sparking. “What is it?” Mingyu bows, not too deep. A second son’s bow must always hover between humility and presence. “The new girl has been… unwell.” His brother narrows his eyes. “Unwell?”

“Yes.” Mingyu keeps his voice flat, factual. “The matrons reported fever after the lessons. They were concerned the timing was ill-omened.”

The Crown Prince scoffs. “Ill-omened? Since when do I heed the gossip of old women?”

“Since the Queen herself placed weight on such signs,” Mingyu answers smoothly. “If the new girl enters your chamber under sickness or omen, tongues will wag. Some will call it an insult to your dignity. Others will say the heavens frown upon it.”

The words are a gamble, but he has learned how to shape them like dice weighted to his favour. He watches his brother’s face for the small flicker of hesitation.

“You speak as if you are my keeper,” the Crown Prince says at last, voice cold. Mingyu bows his head again. “I speak as your brother.” The silence that follows is thin and dangerous. Mingyu holds it without blinking. Finally, the Crown Prince exhales, long and sharp. “Very well. If she is weak, I will not waste my night. Choose another.”

The attendants bow deeper, grateful for the decision that spares them from carrying out a command turned sour. A name is whispered, a different girl’s fate sealed for the evening. Mingyu steps back, his pulse loud enough that he fears it may be heard.

He leaves the chamber without haste, though every part of him aches to run. He closes his eyes for the briefest moment, steadying the lie he has set loose.

When he opens them again, he knows where to go.

You are in the women’s hall, seated apart from the others. Their laughter runs carefully and rehearsed. Yours does not join. Instead, your fingers play with the hem of your robe. Mingyu takes a place near the column and watches, content to let you believe the night is simply another night without summons.

The other concubines, however, notice.

A girl with glossy hair leans close to you, her smile sugared. “Strange, is it not? The Prince usually favours the newest among us first. Perhaps you do not please the stars.”

Another laughs softly into her palm. “Or perhaps he is merciful. Some would envy your reprieve.” A third tilts her head, voice dripping pity. “But what is a concubine without summons? A vase that is never filled with flowers. Decorative… but unnecessary.”

They scatter their words like petals—pretty, fragrant, hiding thorns.

Mingyu watches you lift your chin, watches your eyes gleam. “Then I am fortunate,” you answer evenly. “An unnecessary vase does not crack under use.” The women titter, feigning admiration at your sharpness. But when their laughter dies, they exchange glances that do not mask their contempt.

Mingyu sees your hand tighten on your robe. Outwardly, you are untouchable. But when you look away, he sees it: the flicker of doubt you cannot quite swallow.

When the others go to their quarters, he hears your whisper to yourself. “If I am not summoned, then why am I here?”

You laugh, quiet and bitter, and shake your head to yourself.

One of the concubines pauses at the doorway, just long enough to murmur: “Perhaps you were meant only as ornament.” Then she drifts away, her silks floating behind her.

Mingyu lets the silence absorb the insult, though it burns in him. If only you knew. If only you knew that your bitterness is built on the scaffolding of his deceit, that the reason you sit untouched is because he has painted you with sickness, with omen, with danger. That he has risked his brother’s anger to keep you free for one more night.

But he cannot tell you. If he does, you will see the chain for what it is, and chains are never forgiven, even when they save. So he remains silent, watching as you rise and leave the hall too, your shadow long against the paper screen.

In the courtyard, he finds you alone. You stand with your hands clasped behind you, staring at the pond.

He does not mean to speak, but the words slip out. “Why do you laugh if it wounds you?” You turn, startled, your eyes narrowing. “What does it matter to you?”

He shrugs, though his heartstrings are pulled taut. “Laughter should be a blade you choose, not one that cuts you in passing.”

Your mouth twists. “Spare me philosophy, Your Highness. If you shadow me to measure my obedience, then write your report and be done.”

“I was not ordered to report,” he says quietly. That silences you for a moment. The pond ripples. Finally, you look back at the water. “Then perhaps you are simply bored.”

He lets you think it. Better bored than revealed. Better unwanted than a secret saviour you would resent. You sigh, and the sound is heavy in the silence. “At least he does not call for me. That is something.”

Mingyu feels the words strike. They are gratitude directed at the wrong man. He clenches his hands behind his back until the ache steadies him. “Yes,” he answers. “That is something.”

You do not see the way his throat tightens. You do not see the storm gathering inside him. You only see a prince who refuses to step closer, who lets the night close around you.

When he returns to his own quarters, the storm breaks within him. He sits at the low table and stares at his hands. They are steady, capable hands, hands that have strung bows and carried swords, hands that have obeyed orders all his life. And tonight they lied. Tonight they shielded. Tonight, they proved themselves useful in a way no one will ever know.

He thinks of you, laughing at your own undesirability, and feels a strange fury—at his father, at his brother, at the palace itself, at the fact that you, who burns brighter in defiance than any of the silken women who bow too easily, should sit alone and believe yourself unwanted.

For now, he chooses silence. For now, he lets you believe you are overlooked. For now, that lie is mercy.

The banquet hall is a world unto itself.

Lanterns hang from gilded beams, their light spilling over rows of tables set low to the ground. Musicians sit at the far end of the chamber, plucking zithers and striking drums in patterns meant to please, though the sound is mostly drowned by laughter and polite cruelty.

You sit among the concubines. Silk hems brush against yours, and hairpins glint sharply when the women turn their heads. They lean toward each other, their laughter subdued yet barbed, a constant stream of comparisons and insinuations.

“His Highness smiled today.” “At you? Surely not.” “He preferred the song, not the singer.” “Still, a smile counts as a favour.”

The words fall on deaf ears with you as you keep your eyes on your cup. The plum wine burns your throat when you swallow, but at least it reminds you that you are alive.

Before you, the table groans under a feast lavish enough to shame hunger itself. Whole gilt-skinned pheasants glazed in honey, their wings tucked neatly. Towers of jeon—egg-battered pancakes layered with fish, zucchini, and lotus root. Porcelain bowls of steaming rice, flanked by soups fragrant with beef bone and ginseng. Platters of yakgwa and honeyed persimmons glisten beside trays of nine delicacies—gujeolpan—arranged like a painter’s palette, each sliver of meat and vegetable awaiting thin crepes to wrap them. Even the humble kimchi is dressed in elegance: baek-kimchi, pale and delicate, perfumed with pear and chestnut.

You taste little of it.

At the head of the chamber, the Crown Prince sits beside his wife. She is resplendent in white, her posture a picture of perfection, every gesture a performance of control. He leans toward her often, speaking in tones too low for others to hear, his attention a gift he only grants her. When he turns from her, it is only to acknowledge another concubine who has positioned herself artfully in his line of sight.

Not once does his gaze find you.

You tell yourself this is mercy. That his neglect is protection, a shield you did not earn but will take all the same. And yet—something in you knots with each moment of dismissal. A murmur rises near your elbow. A concubine in pale lavender tilts her head toward you, her smile syrup-sweet. “The Prince must not favour wildflowers. He seems to prefer blossoms already trained to bloom.” Another, her lips lacquered in the deepest red, chuckles. “Or perhaps our new sister is too shy to catch his eye. Shyness can be charming—if it doesn’t fade into invisibility.”

You shape your mouth into a smile and say nothing. To answer would be to prove them right.

The Queen sits further down the hall, her expression unreadable, the weight of her presence pressing. Her gaze slides across the rows of concubines and lingers only briefly, as though she is tallying currency. When her eyes pass over you, they do not pause. You are counted but not considered. The heat in the room builds, oppressive, the smoke of braziers and roasted meats heavy in your lungs. You shift, longing for air. Your gaze drifts against your will.

And finds his.

Mingyu sits on the opposite side of the chamber, slightly apart. His robe is as dignified as ever, but the space around him is barren. No wife at his side, no concubines clustered near to curry favour. Even the servants approach him more cautiously, as though wary of the silence that clings to him. He eats sparingly—just a spoonful of clear beef broth, a bite of rice, a morsel of grilled fish—his movements deliberate, careful not to demand notice.

Like you, he is a shadow in a hall of lanterns.

But unlike the others—who do not see you, who refuse to see him—his eyes do not pass over. They linger. Not boldly, not enough to draw whispers. Just long enough to remind you what it feels like to exist in someone else’s sight.

And it terrifies you.

Because in that gaze there is no dismissal, no condescension. There is recognition. The kind that threatens to undo you, to unravel the careful armour you have been weaving since the day your father sold you into your newly designed fate. You tear your eyes away and fix them on the untouched platter before you, where honey-glazed chestnuts gleam. But the knowledge remains, thrumming beneath your ribs: you are seen.

The music swells, the courtiers toast, and the Crown Prince leans back in his seat. His gaze shifts across the hall, then lands on Mingyu. “You are quiet, brother,” he remarks, loud enough for the nearby guests to hear. “Do you not find the feast to your liking?”

Mingyu bends his head, his voice steady but soft. “The food is well prepared. I have eaten.” A thin smile curls on the Crown Prince’s lips, one without warmth. “Always measured. Even at a banquet, you train yourself for restraint.”

“Restraint keeps the blade sharp,” Mingyu answers. The air stills. Before the Crown Prince can reply, the Queen speaks from her place, her voice calm but weighted. “Sons should not quarrel where wine is poured. The court looks to you both for harmony.”

Mingyu bows slightly in acknowledgement, while the Crown Prince raises his cup and drains it. The musicians play on, their notes sharper than before.

You find yourself staring—unable to look away from the tension strung tight between the two men. Brothers, yet each word between them feels like a weight laid on a scale, one shift away from imbalance. You risk another glance towards Mingyu. He has turned back to his plate. Yet, you know that he had been watching, and that he will again.

You hate him for it. You hate yourself more for the comfort it brings.

When the banquet finally ends, you walk in silence, your chin lifted. You are unseen by the Prince. You are ignored by the Queen. But in the corner of your vision, you still feel the weight of eyes that refuse to erase you.

And you do not know whether that is salvation or another chain.

The palace does not celebrate as the city does.

Within the walls, the Lantern Festival is a rehearsal, not a revelry. Lanterns line the garden paths in rigid order: lotuses, dragons, scrolls, all painted with approved verses, each tassel cut to an identical length. The Queen parades among them at dusk, the Crown Prince and his wife close behind, courtiers bowing on cue. Every flame burns at the same height, every reflection in the ponds lies flat as if too afraid to ripple.

Beyond the walls, joy ignores rulers and lines. Lanterns bloom where hands can reach and where they cannot—dangling off eaves, clustered along alleys, bobbing from poles hoisted by laughing boys, drifting out on the river. The air fills with voices that do not wait for permission to be heard.

Mingyu knows this difference in his bones. He learned it as a boy when the Queen’s carriage rattled past a street fair and he pressed his forehead to the lattice, trying to draw the colour through the wood. That ache returns tonight, the moment he sees you angle toward the southern gate.

He steps from the shadow before you lay your hand on the latch. “The southern path is watched,” he says, not unkindly. You halt as if his words bit you. “Then I will test their eyes.”

“And be seen,” he answers. “Being seen is the only crime that never requires proof.” You don’t back away. You tip your chin, daring him to make you relent. “You spend your days shadowing me, and your nights telling me where I may place my feet. Is there anything not owned by your rules?”

He could tell you the truth: that this is the shape of protection in a place that carries wrath inside compliments. He doesn’t. Instead, he reaches past you and lifts a different latch—the one hidden behind stacked cords of wood—and opens it into a slit of dark.

“This way,” he murmurs.

You study him as if this might be another trick. The lanterns outside the wall wobble with a breeze and paint your cheek in strokes of gold. Then you nod once, quick and fierce, and slip through.

The passage smells damp. Slits in the stone catch light from above and spill it in thin bars across the floor. You say nothing. He counts your steps and notices how your hands hover at your sides, unsure whether to grip your robe or let it swing. You catch on a loose stone, stumble, and right yourself. He stops his hand before it can reach you. Touch is not a language he’s allowed to use.

At the end waits a low door hidden behind stacked kindling. Mingyu pushes it open, and the city rushes in.

Lanterns. Hundreds. The first of them close enough to warm your face, the farthest making a trail to the river. A vendor passes with skewers of grilled mackerel, the skin blistered and salt-flecked; a girl runs with a rabbit-shaped lantern; a monk moves among the crowd with a wooden clapper. A man balances a bamboo pole across his shoulders—the pole hung with paper fish that jostle like live ones—shouting “Fresh rice cakes! Hot!” while steam escapes a clay pot at his hip.

You stay still, taking everything in. It’s as if your whole body has turned into listening. Then your mouth remembers how to smile, and the surprise of it hits him hard, sharp and sudden.

Mingyu thought he knew the shapes you could take—angry, proud, sharp-tongued, or silent. But not this: eyes widening at an ink-seller painting blessings onto fans, feet carrying you closer to a string of bird-shaped lanterns until their painted claws almost catch your hair, breath slipping out freely, as though you’ve just remembered the world might still hold places where you aren’t punished for being alive.

You turn your head toward a candied haw stall. Red hawthorns gleam under lacquered sugar, skewered three to a stick. The vendor’s smiles. “Princess,” he croons to no one in particular, “make a sweet night sweeter.”

Mingyu steps forward with coins before you can decline. He pays too much, and when the vendor tries to offer change, Mingyu only shakes his head. It isn’t generosity; it’s habit—never linger long enough at a stall to be remembered.

He hands you the skewer. “Try,” he says, his voice careful. You part your lips and bite. The sugar shell cracks, giving way to the tart fruit beneath. Your eyes widen, then brighten, and an unguarded laugh escapes you. You lift the skewer in mock defence. “It bites back.”

“Good things often do,” he answers.

You take another bite, and he watches you—ridiculously, helplessly—as your mouth wrestles with sweetness and sharpness all at once. The sight leaves him aching. He despises himself a little for the hunger it stirs, a hunger that isn’t for food. He tells himself this is simply what it means to be alive, to have eyes and a heart that refuses to stay asleep.

A drum troupe takes one end of the square. Their leader, bare-armed and grinning, raises his stick; the others follow. The rhythm starts. You step closer to the ring of watchers, your shoulder near his sleeve, and for a moment, he lets the crowd’s jostle decide the distance between you.

“I thought the palace had drums,” you say. “It does,” he answers. “They behave.” That earns him a side glance, lit with something almost like mischief. “These do not.”

“No,” he agrees. “And they’re better for it.”

He buys sweet rice cakes from the man with the clay pot because you look at them too long, and because he wants to know what else makes you laugh. The rice is hot enough to push heat through the crack in the paper; you juggle it between your fingers and hiss through your teeth, then break it open. He does not note the way the sesame–honey paste glistens. He is busy pretending he does not want to lick the sweetness from the crease of your knuckle.

You move through the crowd like a leaf finally choosing its current. A puppet show gathers a knot of children, and you pause, kneeling briefly behind them. The puppet—a fox with a paint-chipped grin—snatches a paper coin from a farmer, only to return it with exaggerated shame when the farmer’s baby begins to cry. The children shriek forgiveness, as children always do.

You don’t join them. Your mouth shifts, folding then unfolding, caught between mockery and something sadder. Mingyu can’t tell which it is, so he looks at the puppet instead of your face, giving you the dignity of privacy.

As you rise, he asks quietly, “What would you buy if you had a coin?” “A door,” you answer without hesitation. Then, hearing the weight of your own reply, you soften it. “And a pair of shoes that don’t squeak when I try to be quiet.”

“You don’t squeak,” he says. You shoot him a look that hovers between humour and defence, a shield masquerading as jest.

The festival draws you onward. Mingyu shows you where the older women sit with lacquer boxes, their tiny brushes painting lantern skins with careful symbols—cranes for longevity, carp for perseverance, plum blossoms for endurance in winter. You linger near the stall, eyes moving over the painted lanterns without reaching for one. An auntie with walnut-brown hair pats the space beside her. “Come,” she beckons, as though you were a niece overdue for a visit. “A word for your light.”

You shake your head once. “I don’t ask for favours anymore.” The woman only tsks and dips her brush into ink. “Then call it advice, not favour.” She picks a lantern the colour of milky tea, draws a single bold character across its centre, and blows gently until the shine fades into matte. Holding it out to you, she lifts her brows. “Take it. You have a face that argues with the dark.”

You glance at Mingyu. He feels the pull of two instincts—one to nod, one to shake his head. He chooses the first. You accept the lantern. Your thumb finds the edge of the brushstroke and lingers there, as though touch might soften meaning.

“What does it mean?” you ask. “견,” the woman answers. “Steadfast.” The word makes you almost flinch. “Cruel word.”

“True word,” the woman replies. “You can hate it later. Tonight, carry it.”

You carry it. You let Mingyu tie the thin cord around your wrist—not a tether, just a way to keep from dropping what glows. His fingertips graze your pulse.

Later, a boy with a brush and a pot of ink calls, “Wish-scrolls! Hang your wish!” A rope has been strung between two posts, bowed by slips of paper: I want a brother back from the war; I want a mother to live to see spring; I want to be tall; I want to marry the one who laughs like rain. You stop in front of them and read quickly. You nearly reach for the brush. You pull your hand back as if burned.

“No wish?” Mingyu asks gently. “I have had enough of wishes not being granted,” you say. “What about curses?” he offers, and your head snaps toward him, astonished. He shrugs. “Ink doesn’t only make blessings.” You smile. “I wouldn’t waste a curse on paper.”

He is supposed to be clever. He cannot find a clever way to say I would defend you from any god you wrote to that would not ruin the night, so he says nothing.

The river calls next. People kneel at its edge, the mud sucking quietly at their knees, and place small, floating lanterns onto the ink-dark surface of the water. You stand just behind the line of kneeling backs and hold your rented light a little higher, as if it could guide ships. He stands at your shoulder, slightly back, so he will not be the first thing you feel if you step into the notion of turning.

You say, almost to yourself, “If I put one out there, the river brings it to the sea, and the sea brings it to larger things, and somewhere it burns unseen and is still flame.”

“Yes,” he says. The answer seems insufficient. He tries again. “Some lights are only themselves by leaving.”

“Are you trying to teach me philosophy again?”

“I am trying to agree with you,” he says, and you huff a giggle. A girl of seven drags her grandmother toward you. “Ajumeoni,” she says to you without shyness, “your lantern has a strong word.” She points. “Does it work?” You crouch to eye level, the silk of your robe dragging over the mud. “Only if I carry it.” The girl thinks very hard about this answer and then nods with gravity. “Good.” She looks at Mingyu then, very seriously. “Ajusshi, your face looks like you forget to sleep. You should sleep.” Mingyu bows to her solemnly. “Yes.”

You laugh, and for a second, he feels foolish and young. It is not a sensation he despises.

The crowd thins near a shrine built where the river narrows. In the shrine courtyard, a man plays a reed flute poorly, and his wife looks at him as if talent had nothing to do with staying.

You drift toward the courtyard’s edge. He stops choosing to watch the crowd and chooses to watch you. You feel it. You turn. The lantern hangs between you, swinging once, twice.

“Why?” you ask, and the question returns. “Why this?” You do not name what this is—city, night, you and him standing in a shrinking pocket of unattended space.

“Because the walls were swallowing you,” he says. “Because I have desired to do something right and small for so long that I forgot right can be small.” You search his face. “And what do you want in return?”

“Nothing,” he says, because the right answer is nothing. The wrong answer is everything. “Only for you to breathe.”

“I do not owe you breath,” you tell him. “I know,” he responds.

You stand with that, weighing it, and he can almost hear the balance creak. A breeze lifts the ribbon on your lantern, brushing your wrist. Far behind you, someone drops a tray, porcelain shattering into astonished silence, then noise. The world makes space, accidentally or by mercy.

He raises a hand. He makes it slow enough so it can be refused without pain. You do not refuse. His knuckles skim your cheekbone. The skin is warmer than night but cooler than his palm; he did not know that would matter until this second. Your breath hitches—not in fear. He is practised enough at fear to recognise when it isn’t in the room.

Mingyu kisses you.

He is not a boy. He knows the difference between wanting and rushing. So he does not press. He offers. Your lips are soft, but they do not yield; you meet him as an equal, not as someone conquered. His hand steadies along your jaw, anchoring you both. Somewhere in the distance, a child laughs, a dog barks, the river stirs—but none of it touches the space he shares with you.

You lean toward him, though it feels less like surrender and more like a choice. Your lips part, and he tastes the memory of sugar, the tart ghost of hawthorn, and something nameless he knows will haunt him long after tonight. He closes his eyes, not to deepen the kiss but to honour it. Above, the lantern swings once, its glow circling your joined shadows.

When he pulls back, it is only slightly—just enough to breathe. Your faces remain close, your exhales tangled, the air between you charged. Any closer, and restraint would break. Any further, and the moment would be denied. He holds the fragile middle ground.

You whisper: “Why?” The question is the same as before, but now it asks something deeper—what of him answered in this act.

“Because I could not bear not to,” he replies. The words feel reckless even as he knows they are the only true ones he has. You look down at the lantern tied to your wrist. The brush character pulses. 견. Steadfast. The auntie declared a wish when you refused to make one.

He wants to speak; he will not. It is your turn to decide if the night broke you or mended something. You lift your gaze again, meet his with an expression he has never been given: allowance, not surrender.

“Do not ruin it,” you murmur. “I am already trying not to,” he answers, and finds the truth is bitter and redemptive both.

He kissed you in a city whose gossip moves faster than lanterns. He led you through a passage no one should know he knows. He set himself not only against the King’s notion of usefulness but the wife’s notion of comfort and the Crown Prince’s sense of ownership. He taught his mouth a habit that his duties cannot forgive.

And worst: he gave the night a version of you that the palace will want to erase if it learns of it.

“We should go back,” he says, very low. You nod without saying why now. He is startled by your acceptance. He admires it. He hates the necessity that demanded it. He guides you through streets beginning to empty of their brightness. Vendors stack away their product; a drunk sings a war ballad with the wrong words in the right places; two boys quarrel over who gets to carry the last lantern home.

The hidden door opens quietly. You duck through first; Mingyu follows, and the passage closes the world behind you. The silence lingers between you until you reach the cooler air of the women’s quarters. Then he stops. You stop too.

“If there is a summons tonight,” he says, “it will not be for you.” You look up sharply. “Have you—”

“No,” he interrupts, lying. “I only think the Crown Prince has grown tired of pageantry.” It is a poor excuse, and he knows you hear it. Quickly, he adds, “I will be near.”

Your mouth almost curves into a smile, but then it fades. “If I am not summoned, and not free… what am I?” The word Mine rises in his throat, reckless and unwise. He swallows it and says instead, “You are the one who tied a lantern to her wrist, called it cruel, and carried it anyway.”

You blink at him, startled. “That sounds like a curse.”

“It is admiration,” he answers.

You study him for a quiet moment. At last, you nod and turn away, your lantern flickering in the draft before catching the light again.

He remains very still until your shadow has vanished from the corridor. Only then does he move.

At his brazier, he goes through familiar motions—charcoal, water—yet none of it soothes him. The kiss returns again and again, burning brighter than the lanterns he saw. It should make him feel alive, and it does. But with it comes the sharp weight of consequence.

He knows what he has risked: his brother’s suspicion, his father’s judgment, the palace’s cruel appetite for disobedience. More than that, he knows he has crossed a line he cannot uncross. Not because of the kiss alone, but because it was a beginning.

He sits in silence, tasting both sweetness and dread, and understands what he has done is reckless. He knows it may cost more than he can pay. Yet he also knows he would not take it back.

He has made his mistake. He has made his vow. The night can keep both.

The morning after the festival, the concubines are speaking.

Every corridor carries their voices, thin threads of sound that dare not rise above a murmur. Behind painted screens, in the shade of pavilions, between the sweep of silk sleeves. Their language is not the bluntness of commands, but the slanted cruelty of whispers.

“She was gone during the festival.” “Ungrateful girl. Others would give their life for a glimpse beyond the walls, and she hides.” “Perhaps she thought herself too fine to join the procession.” “Or perhaps she hoped to be missed, to test His Highness’s patience.”

The words float, impossible to wave away. You keep your face still, your steps measured, but each sentence presses closer, like fingers at your throat.

By the lotus pond, two concubines lean together, their fans raised in mock secrecy. “She plays at being invisible. It will not last. The Crown Prince grows weary quickly.”

“Do you think he will cast her out?”

“If he doesn’t, the Queen’s patience will.”

Your hands clench in your sleeves. You do not stop to give them the satisfaction of your presence. Still, their laughter follows.

That night, sleep evades you. The paper walls are too thin, the silence between candle flickers too loud. Every sound in the hall becomes a herald of doom: a eunuch’s cough, the shuffle of feet, the hollow clap of doors. You lie rigid on your mat, braced for the inevitable summons that never comes.

By dawn, the hearsay has multiplied. You hear it whispered in the garden as you pass—how you feigned illness, how you refused your duty, how the Crown Prince has already tired of you. Each comment wears a different robe, but all of them bear the same face: your ruin.

And then, as suddenly as they rose, the whispers falter.

The Jade Lady speaks.

Her words move fast, carrying to every corridor, every mouth: “The girl was unwell. A fainting spell during the procession. His Highness himself ordered her to rest.”

Shock sweeps through the harem. “Unwell? I saw her walking.”

“The Jade Lady never lies. If she says the Prince excused her—”

“Then it must be so.”

The whispers still, but you know better.

The Crown Prince has never spared you more than a flick of his gaze. He would not excuse your absence. The Jade Lady would not bend her tongue for your sake.

There is only one name the lie can belong to.

Mingyu.

The memory of him at the festival—the brush of his hand as he tied the lantern cord around your wrist, the taste of hawthorn still clinging to your lips, the kiss stolen under swaying light—returns with a sharpness you were not prepared for. He has shielded you. Not once, but twice.

The question seethes inside you until it burns. You cannot keep still.

You find him at dusk.

The palace is quieting, servants retreating, the courtyards heavy with the scent of pine smoke. He stands at the edge of the training grounds, back straight, hands folded behind him, his figure cut against the orange bleed of the sinking sun. He looks as though he belongs to another world entirely—untouchable, distant, carved from the very walls that cage you both.

Still, you step forward.

“It was you,” you say, your voice sharper than you intended.

He does not turn. “What was me?”

“The Jade Lady’s words. The alibi. You gave her the lie that saved me.”

At that, he glances over his shoulder, his expression infuriatingly calm. “If you already believe so, why ask?”

Your nails bite into your palms as you clench your hands. “Because I need to hear you say it.”

He exhales through his nose, something between a sigh and a laugh. “Need?” he echoes. “Or want?”

You falter, heat prickling at your cheeks. “What difference does it make?”

His gaze sharpens, though his tone remains steady. “Enough of one.”

The air thickens between you. You take another step closer. “Why? Why protect me? You could have left me to their teeth. You should have.”

His jaw tightens, the smallest crack in his composure. He looks away, toward the distant roofs gilded by the last of the sun. For a long time, he says nothing. Then:

“Because they are already waiting for you to fall. I will not help them push.”

Your breath stutters.

Anger, confusion, and something far more dangerous twist inside you. His words are not a vow, not a declaration—just a simple refusal. And yet, the ground beneath you feels altered, unsteady.

You search his face. “Is that all?”

He holds your gaze. “Does there need to be more?”

You swallow hard. The memory of his mouth on yours re-ignites in your chest. You want to strike him. You want to thank him. You want to demand the truth he is keeping behind his silence.

Your voice trembles despite yourself. “I don’t understand you.”

A faint curve touches his lips. “Then you understand me perfectly.”

The words sting, though not in the way you expect. You take a half step back. Gratitude wars with suspicion, longing with rage. You are a woman made of contradictions, and he is the fire that keeps them alive.

You turn before the tears gathering at your lashes can betray you.

Behind you, his voice reaches softly, barely more than a whisper in the air. “Do not thank me. Gratitude is a weight I never asked you to carry.”

You pause, your back still to him. A hundred words rise to your tongue, none willing to be spoken.

So you walk away, your footsteps too quick, your heartbeat too loud.

That night, you lie awake once more, but the silence is different. The whispers have died; no one speaks of you now. The palace has moved on to a new target, a new cruelty.

But the echo of his words clings to you.

I will not help them push.

You turn onto your side, fists pressed against your lips, the memory of lantern light and the taste of candied hawthorn flooding your senses until you cannot tell if you are burning or drowning.

Mingyu has placed himself between you and ruin. And you do not know whether to hate him for it—or to let yourself breathe in the space he has carved.

You have always liked the rain.

Even as a child, when the roof leaked and the floor grew slick, you would press your face against the open window and breathe in. Rain was honest. It did not flatter or deceive. It did not whisper behind doors or weigh you against your neighbours. It simply fell—on tiled roofs and thatched ones, on fields rich and poor, on children who danced barefoot until their mothers dragged them inside.

The palace does not welcome it. Here, rain is a nuisance: courtyards flooded, silks ruined, servants scolded for letting water sneak past the eaves. But for you, rain is a reprieve. It blurs the sharp corners of your cage, muffles the laughter of concubines, washes clean the air that so often smells of resin and incense.

So when the storm breaks, you do not run from it. You walk into the garden and let yourself be drenched. The silk clings, heavy, but you lift your face and open your mouth to the night. The water tastes like memory, like hills you once climbed and roads you once promised yourself to follow. For the first time in weeks, you feel as if the world belongs to you again.

“You will make yourself ill.”

Mingyu’s voice has learned how to arrive without scaring you. You open your eyes and find him: the fringe of his hair pasted to his brow, robe heavy with water. He looks taller in the rain, or perhaps it is only that he’s closer than the palace permits.

“Leave,” you say. “This is my storm.”

He steps into your rain as if you’ve told him the opposite. He unclasps his cloak, shakes it once, and settles it across your shoulders. The wool holds the day’s heat and, absurdly, the faint scent of pine smoke. The weight drags you back into a body you had almost let the rain carry away.

He touches your sleeve, and you let him guide you toward the pavilion at the garden’s edge.

The pavilion is small and open; you sit with your back to a beam worn smooth by generations. Mingyu lowers onto the bench beside you and says nothing. The cloak anchors your shoulders. Water threads off the roof and splits into droplets before hitting the ground. The world shrinks to the square of floor you share.

“Why are you here?” you ask, keeping your eyes on the watery curtain. “Truly.”

“Because you are,” he answers.

You let out a breath. “You keep saying that as if it’s a reason.”

“Sometimes reason is only that simple.”

You pull the cloak tighter and stare past the rain at the dark shape of the apricot tree, leaves shaking. “I cannot trust you.”

“I know.”

“You are the palace.”

“I was born in it.” He considers. “It was not my choice.”

“None of this is,” you say, and you hate how fragile your voice sounds.

He doesn’t reach for your hand, doesn’t move closer, doesn’t push—only waits with you. The waiting loosens something inside you. Words rise, and this time you don’t silence them.

“When I was little, there was an apricot tree just beyond the paddies,” you say, tilting your chin toward the dark shape beyond the pavilion. “The fruit wasn’t ours. The tree leaned into the path, the way generous things do. In spring, the petals would fall like late snow. I used to lie under it and pretend I could hear the petals land.”

“Could you?”

“No.” A thin smile. “But I told myself I could. My mother said that was a good beginning for a writer.”

The word hangs between you. Mingyu turns toward you, interest softening his mouth. “A writer.”

“I wanted to be one.” The admission comes out small. “Not a poet for court—don’t laugh, I wasn’t foolish—but a woman who keeps memory with ink. The kind who can write a village into staying, even when people leave it. The kind who puts the right names to things so they won’t be stolen.”

Clouds thunder. You can see it now: your mother’s hands stained with chili and salt from autumn kimjang, rinsing again and again until the sting eased; the way she pushed a stray lock behind your ear with her knuckle because her fingers were busy; the sound of hemp thread humming through a needle; the bowl of soot you stole a pinch from to grind with water and pretend it was ink.

“There was a scribe who came through each season,” you go on. “He carried a box of brushes and hanji and a quietness that made people lower their voices without being told. I used to watch him copy petitions. He made the characters bloom as if they’d always been waiting in the paper. Once, he let me sharpen a brush. He said, ‘Soft, always soft, or the hair will sulk and refuse to hold the ink.’”

“Did you write?” Mingyu asks, voice so gentle you almost miss it.

“I learned hangul from an auntie who taught children their letters,” you say. “The men laughed—they always do—but the auntie said letters make good company when food is scarce.” You smile, then swallow it. “I wrote on scraps. On leaves. In dust behind the granary. My mother saved rice paper for me whenever the scribe sold to us cheap. I kept a little book under our floor mat, stitched out of flour paste.”

“Where is it?”

You lift the cloak as if it might produce the book like a parlour trick. “Gone. The night before—” The words stick. You force them through. “The night before the broker came, I took it out to read and found the pages damp. A pot had cracked; water crept in. The ink bled until my words turned into indecipherable pools.”

You are grateful for his stillness. You would have resisted comfort.

“I made maps,” you admit quietly. “They weren’t good. Lines for the river and dots for the houses, a crooked square for the market, a bigger dot for the apricot. I thought if I drew the road far enough toward the hills, it would reach the sea.” You rub your thumb along the cloak’s seam. “Once I climbed the ridge and the whole world opened. I could see the river glinting, then twisting away. I promised myself I’d follow it. I promised myself I’d write down what it told me.”

“What did it tell you?”

You look at him. “That leaving is not the same as being lost.”

You wipe rain from your cheek and don’t pretend it’s only rain.

“I liked markets,” you continue, because stopping now would be cowardice. “Not for buying. For watching. There was a woman who sold thread by looping it around her fingers and letting it slide, clicking her tongue at knots. A man who could carve a bird from a piece of gourd and make its beak open and close. A boy who learned every vendor’s shout and mimicked them until the whole lane laughed. I wrote the shouts down and practised them alone. I wanted a voice that could gather people without scaring them.”

“You have one,” he says.

“Not here.”

A gust flings rain under the roof; drops spatter your wrists. Mingyu shifts closer to shield you with his shoulder. The gesture—unadvertised—makes you want to cry more than pity ever did.

“Say the worst of it,” he says after a moment.

You brace your elbows on your knees and interlock your hands. “My father taught me how to lift sacks by bending the knee, not the back,” you say. “He taught me the feel of good rice from its chaff. He taught me to look a horse in the eye before judging its gait. And then he taught me something I didn’t ask to learn: the sound of a man lying sweetly.” The cloak tightens with your small shrug. “Debts. They pull like traps. First your ankle, then your knee, then your soul.” You fix your gaze on the edge of the floor. “I don’t know when the number he owed became a number I was worth.”

Mingyu exhales. “Worth,” he repeats. “That is a word men soil with their hands.”

“They made a ledger of me,” you say. “Measured like grain.”

Silence.

“My mother tried to stop it,” you finally continue. “She shut the door and pushed the bolt across with her hip and told me to run. I didn’t.” You look down at your crossed fingers. “I thought if I ran, I would lose the ground my mother was standing on.” Your mouth twists. “The brokers laughed in our courtyard and called my mother dramatic. My father said it would be an honour.”

“It was not,” Mingyu says flatly.

“No,” you agree. “The morning after they came to measure me, I climbed the ridge once more. I took my small book. I drew the apricot blossom at the corner of a page and wrote, ‘I, who wanted to write the world, am being written by it.’” You lift your hand to the lantern’s trembling glow. “The ink bled in that corner too.”

Your breath shudders in your throat.

“Say the best of it,” Mingyu asks then, and the question surprises you.

“The best?”

“Give me a scene that refuses to make your hope die.”

You search in the caverns of your mind. The memories come easier than you expect.

“New barley,” you say. “The year the rain remembered to come in time. The fields were low, green, and then high, green, and then green with a gloss of gold. My mother sent me with a bowl of cold barley tea to the men in the field.” The memory blooms. “After harvest, the whole village put mats in the lane and ate outside. Someone burned pine cones. The scribe told a story about a princess who kept her name hidden in a gourd. That night, I dreamed I could put mine in one and plant a new life.”

You look at him and find that he is already looking at you.

“What would you write about me?”

You shoot him a look that wants to be scorn yet keeps failing. “That depends on what you do next.”

He huffs, almost a laugh, and tilts his head toward the rain. “Write me as a man who knows the sound of a closed door and the weight of it, and is tired of holding it shut.”

“That’s too many words for a line,” you say.

“You can make the letters smaller,” he says, and you smile again.

Lightning strikes the sky. Thunder follows.

Mingyu shifts, his arm brushing against yours. His hand rests in his lap, fingers flexing once as if he is deciding something. Then, slowly, he turns his palm upward and reaches for yours. The touch is gentle—his fingers finding yours as though he expects you to flinch away.

But you don’t.

The surprise is not in his boldness but in your own stillness. You do not pull back. You do not hate the warmth that seeps through your damp skin. Instead, you let your hand remain inside his, the silence between you deepening.

“Tell me another,” he says. “Something with honey in it.”

“Persimmons,” you answer at once. “We dried them on strings behind the house, little lanterns turning slowly in the wind. My mother would nick the skins with her fingernail and say, ‘Patience is a sweet-maker.’ When the frost came, we ate them with our hands and licked the honey off our wrists.”

His mouth softens. “And the worst thing you ever wrote?” he asks.

“A letter I never sent,” you say. “To a future me. I told her I hoped she had learned to be brave. I told her to keep a clean brush and a clean heart. I told her she would not have to apologise for wanting more.” You press your fingertips against his. “I ended it with my name. The only time I wrote it large.”

“Say it now,” he asks, “as if the person you wrote to is here.”

You shut your eyes and breathe air into your lungs, then you speak your name. It sounds different in a pavilion with a prince listening. You open your eyes and find he has not flinched from it.

“Thank you,” he says simply.

“For what?”

“For saying yourself aloud.”

Something in you shifts. You should have guarded that shift; you let it happen. His face is closer now, so close you can count his lashes.

You are the one who swipes your mouth to his.

The kiss begins softly, tentatively, but it does not stay that way. Mingyu’s hand comes up to cradle your face, thumb brushing the damp edge of your jaw. When his mouth parts, yours answers without hesitation, letting grief and hunger spill into the space between you. You lean closer, closing the small gap until your chest brushes his, until the storm outside feels like nothing compared to the storm you’ve invited in.

His lips coax, then deepen. When your mouth opens to him, his tongue finds yours, tasting what words cannot carry. The lantern above you swings, throwing light and shadow in trembling circles, and for one suspended heartbeat even the rain seems to forget itself.

You move even closer, drawn by something older than reason, and his grip on your jaw tightens—as if he is afraid you might vanish mid-breath. Heat climbs through you, fierce and disarming.

And then you feel it—that terrifying ease, how natural it is to fall into him, how quickly you are becoming willing. The realisation sears through you. You tear yourself back, breath shattering, the echo of him still on your lips.

“I can’t,” you say.

He doesn’t chase you. He doesn’t comment on your refusal.

“All right,” he simply responds as he lowers his hand.

You stand too fast; the cloak slips. You catch it and shove it at him, then realise you don’t want to give up its heat, then hate yourself for wanting anything, then hate the palace because it is easier. The storm yawns; you step into it.

“Wait.” He doesn’t say it loudly. It still stops you. “Let me walk you to the eaves.”

“No.” Your head shakes of its own accord. “If you come, I will not go.” It’s too honest. You turn and vanish into the rain before the truth can blush.

You run until the pavilion is a ghost and the garden takes itself back from your feet. Rain finds every seam and insists on becoming you. Your hair plasters to your neck; the silk drags; your teeth click once and then refuse to. You slip under the women’s eaves, into your chamber and hold a post at your doorway until the world decides to stop moving.

You do not send yours tonight.

The storm takes a long time to end. You let it. You have been speech for too many other mouths. In this thunder, at last, you heard your own.

The doors to the antechamber part, and she enters.

The Crown Prince’s wife arrives without spectacle. The concubines rise and fold themselves to the floor in practised angles.

“Jeongsil,” they chorus, and the room bows as one body.

She saunters, as if inspecting furniture she did not order. The jade lady trails at her shoulder, eyes bright with the pleasure of usefulness. Every few paces, the wife’s fan snaps open and closed—shade, light, verdict, reprieve. She pauses to compliment the neatness of one girl’s hair, to correct the set of another’s shoulders, to ask a third whether she understands the difference between sweetness and cloying.

When she stops before you, the room holds its breath.

You kneel correctly. You look at the floor, not at her face. Your hands rest where they should, palm to palm, no tremor.

The fan opens. “There is an edge to your gaze,” she says, her tone calm but edged with disdain. “In a man, such sharpness may be called resolve. In a woman, it is untidy… unbecoming.”

She lets the silence stretch, then adds, “Do you know what men want from the women they are given? Softness. Patience. A voice that does not bruise when it speaks.” Her smile is rehearsed. “Learn this quickly. A concubine is chosen to adorn, not to argue.”

Her eyes flick down and then back up, appraising you once more. “You are new. New things are sometimes indulged, but indulgence is not affection. Do not mistake one for the other.” The fan snaps shut. “Jade madam, see that this one learns how to lower her eyes without lowering her worth. Wildness belongs in poetry, not in the chambers where men collect promises.”

The concubines do what they do best: they let their faces become mirrors to whatever authority wants to see. A ripple of sympathetic sighs that says, ‘Ah, the lesson has been learned.’ You bow your head further and say nothing. You do not break. Mingyu feels you choose not to break.

He stands behind a screen, exactly where a daegun is meant to stand when the wife inspects what the palace calls delicate things. He cannot see your eyes, only the angle of your neck, the way your shoulders hold. The first hot note of anger hits him in his stomach and refuses to settle. He thinks, with treacherous clarity: you are speaking to a woman, not a piece of property.

At the threshold, the wife slows. She bends her head toward the jade lady, her words so low the concubines cannot hear—only Mingyu does.

“She will be trouble if she learns she can be. Watch where she looks.”

The jade lady nods, eyes glittering.

A seed, planted. Not yet watered. Seeds remember rain.

Mingyu later finds you at the turn where the Willow Cloister becomes the narrow servants’ corridor. Your face wears no injury; only the skin beneath your eyes has discovered a new shade.

You try to pass him, eyes lowered, determined not to draw notice. But as you step by, his voice cuts softly through the corridor.

“Walk with me.”

You study him, as if testing for a trap. He does not offer explanations. He turns and walks, expecting you will follow. Your steps arrive behind his at the fourth flagstone.

He takes a path no one chooses on purpose: past a dead-end storeroom where old festival banners hang, under a beam whose carvings the servants have stopped dusting, behind a shed where kindling is stacked. A low door waits, half-swallowed by ivy. He lifts the bar, the wood answering with the patient groan.

Inside, the garden is alive with quiet sound: the low hum of bees, the soft creak of bamboo brushing against itself. Four walls of old brick hold the space, open to the sky above—a hidden square the palace has forgotten to name.

At its centre, a stone basin catches water from a narrow spout, each drop falling with steady patience. Moss carpets the ground where no feet tread. Along the sunlit ledges, chrysanthemums push toward their season, while beneath the eaves, orchids burn like delicate flames. A crooked plum tree leans freely, unashamed of its shape. Two shallow tubs cradle lotus long past their bloom, their round leaves still holding the storm’s last drops like scattered pools.

You stop at the threshold. Your eyes widen in a way Mingyu has learned to recognise—the way you look when the world offers you something and does not ask you to pay for it.

“What is this?”

“A mistake the palace forgot to correct,” he says. His voice feels different here; it belongs to him.

He leads you along a path edged in river stones he carried in two at a time the first winter he found this place. A low table sits by the plum, an inkstone worn smooth, brushes drying in a rack, a roll of hanji that looks innocent if you didn’t know the price of paper. A small knife. A lacquered case half-open, revealing neat stacks of sketches weighted down.

Mingyu sits, waiting to see whether you will ask.

You rise and drift toward the table. Your gaze lands on the rack with its brushes. “You paint,” a statement, not a question.

“I try to,” he answers. He pulls a few sheets from beneath the weight and sets them where you can see: One shows a bouquet of plum—three quick strokes for each petal, a darker mark anchoring the flower at its calyx. Another sketch features bamboo, with its straight segments and pointed leaves evoking a sense of patience. A third shows orchids, their round leaves curved, their blossoms modest and unshowy. The last is a chrysanthemum, dense and layered, rendered with the slow weight of endurance.

“The Four Gentlemen,” you murmur. “Plum, bamboo, orchid, chrysanthemum.”

“They behave better on paper than people do,” he says, and for the first time, laughter comes out of him freely. It startles both of you. The sound is lighter than he remembers it being.

You look up at that laugh, a smile touching your mouth. “You laugh like a man,” you say. “Not like a prince.”

“Here I am allowed to be smaller,” he says, honest in a way he cannot be elsewhere in the palace.

You circle the table and let your finger hover above the case. You do not touch the paper. You have a village girl’s surety around work that is not yours. “Do you show anyone?”

“No.” He taps the inkstone with a knuckle.

You turn your head toward the entrance in the wall you had walked through. “How did you find it?”

“By following a cat,” he says, and when your eyes flash, amused, he adds, “Very dignified story.”

He points at a gap near the base of the far wall. “I was a boy and angry. A cat’s curiosity was louder than my anger. I chased it and ended up here. I shared my food. We signed a treaty.” He gestures to the ivy. “The garden was forgotten when I came. Yet, the water still ran. Someone once meant this to be a place.” He pauses. “I decided to finish the meaning.”

You kneel, touching the moss at your feet. “Do you tend all of it?”

“Most.” He shows you the chisel marks where he braced loose stones, the way he has trained the plum not to go where it will break itself, the slender bamboo he planted three years ago that just now has learned the word stand. He names the moths that come in late summer and the way lotus leaves grip rain.

“And you hide,” you interrupt, gentle but not blind.

“Not hide. Breathe. Out there, every glance asks something of me. Here, no one is watching to decide what I am worth.” He admits.

You sit back on your heels, weighing the truth of it. Mingyu sees the wife’s words still clinging to you, but here, under this square of open sky, the weight of them seems lighter. You lift your gaze, following the strip of blue, then lower it back to him.

He does not look away. He lets you catch him watching, lets the silence between you stretch. The caution of the past days remains, but it is no longer alone.

“Show me,” you say, nodding at the brushes.

He sets the stone near you, pours just enough water, and grinds an ink cake until the surface is covered in colour. He hands you a soft brush. You hold it incorrectly at first—fist, not fingers—and he moves closer, letting his hand hover over yours to show the angle. You correct yourself. You dip. Your first stroke is too shy; your second is better. You do not try to be perfect. You draw not a flower but a road: a line that wavers and then firms, a bends toward something unseen.

“I always draw the road,” you say confidently.

“Keep drawing it,” he responds.

You set the brush down and look at him across the table. “The wife will not forgive me my eyes.”

“She forgives nothing she cannot control,” he replies, and his anger returns. “It is her practice.”

“That is also the palace’s practice.”

He wants to reach for your hand; he lays his palm on the table’s edge instead. “I wanted to take the fan from her hand.”

Your eyes widen a fraction—surprised at his boldness. “And then?”

“And then I would have destroyed what little protection I can still give you,” he continues. “Anger makes good kindling. It does not keep anyone warm.”

You breathe out. “I hate this fate,” you confess. “The rules that make me force smiles. The way absence becomes a crime, presence becomes an expectation. How a woman must show herself to survive and hide herself to live.” You look down at the road you just drew. “I hate the way I can already hear my voice imitating theirs when I am tired.”

He closes his eyes because he recognises the shape of that hatred. “You are describing me,” he murmurs. “With different words.”

You consider him for a long time. “You look like a man who knocks and waits,” you say at last. “Who has learned to stand straight while doors decide whether they will be doors.”

He opens his eyes and lets you see him without the second skin he wears for court. Loneliness must be visible in him; it is a muscle that has been doing labour too long. You see it. He watches you see it. The look on your face is not pity. It is comprehension.

“If I were only myself,” he says, “I would leave this place, follow a river, hire a cart when my legs complained, lie under a different tree each week, and draw every roofline I met.” He smiles, but sadness creases the lines of his mouth. “And perhaps I would follow a woman who laughs like she is learning a new country.”

Colour fills your cheeks. “If I were only myself, I would sell a good story to pay for ink and keep walking.”

A bee tacks between chrysanthemum buds.

Mingyu takes a clean sheet and, without looking at you, draws a single line that could be a stem or a horizon. He stops. He pushes the brush toward you.

“Finish,” he says.

You add a second line, and the two become a path in the act of being a plant. You chuckle at the trick and shake your head at yourself. He laughs back—an easy sound, unarmoured. This time, you don’t look surprised.

He thinks, not for the first time, about choosing: passion over loyalty.

He pictures consequences as a soldier would: who bleeds, where, and how long it takes to stop. The two visions of his life overlap until he cannot tell which one is the lie he has lived and which one is the truth he has been avoiding.

A foot scuffs a pebble outside the garden wall—someone passing by, no more—but both of you still. He waits. No second sound. He hears instead the echo of the wife’s words: Watch where she looks. He remembers how suspicion grows in this place—first a seed, then a trellis appears, and no one admits to building it.

“We cannot be careless,” he says, quietly.

“We have not been,” you whisper back.

“Not yet.”

You set the brush down and wipe a dot of ink from your knuckle with the corner of your sleeve. You lift your hand then and extend it across the table. He meets you halfway. Your fingers, stained now in the same places, rest against his.

No one will know that for the span of three breaths, two people decided to be less alone. No one will suspect that in a walled square of green, a prince learned how to laugh without an audience and a concubine remembered what it felt like to choose the next line on a painting.

You draw your hand back first. You stand. Mingyu rises with you.

At the door, he looks once more around the garden, memorising where the shadows fall at this hour, as if he could set them back in place with his hands later if someone disturbs them. He bars the door when you have slipped through, the ivy falling back into its place.

In the corridor beyond, the air smells of the public world again. Somewhere behind a screen, a maid from the wife’s household lingers longer than a maid needs to linger, the way a person does when they know where to stand to hear without being seen. Mingyu marks her face without letting his own change.

Watch where she looks.

He walks you to the bend at the edge of the Red Pavilion. You do not thank him. Gratitude would make this a transaction.

“Remember the road,” he says instead, nodding at your ink-stained hand.

“Remember the door,” you reply, and he grins.

Mingyu leaves you there and turns toward the duties that will wear his other face. As he walks, he carries the weight of what you look like when you do not belong to the palace.

And for the first time since he learned the word duty, he lets himself imagine a different word as his future.

The summons reaches you by accident.

Two women speaking behind screens in the washing court — the jade lady’s voice overlapping with the matron’s. “The Prince will request the new girl tomorrow. The King has pressed him to renew his vigour. She will be sent.”

The words fill you with dread. Tomorrow. The chains will tighten tomorrow.

And so, tonight, you go.

The corridors are melancholic, bathed in moonlight and the hush of sleep. Your steps are soft but urgent, your robe pulled close, your heart a drum within the cavern of your chest. At the old ivy door, your fingers hesitate only once before sliding it open. The wood gives way.

Inside, the hidden garden waits. And him.

Mingyu is already there, sleeves pushed to his forearms, brush laid aside. The lamplight he keeps pools beside the inkstone. When the door closes, he looks up. His stillness does not last. “What has happened?”

You swallow. “They said—” Your voice breaks. “Tomorrow, he will summon me. The Crown Prince. If you do nothing—if I do nothing—”

A muscle jumps in his jaw. He takes one step and then another.

“You came here,” he says, the rough edge of disbelief sanding the words.

“I could not—” You shake your head; your hands tremble, and you order them to be still. “I could not let the first time be with him. I will not give him what I did not choose.”

You lift your face to him, and the admission is final. “I choose you.”

He exhales harshly, his lungs struggling against his ribs. “Do you know what you are saying?”

“Yes.” The word leaves no room for hesitation. “If tonight ruins me, then let me be ruined by my own will.”

Mingyu reaches you. His hands rise—hesitate at either side of your face—and then cup your cheeks. His forehead tips to yours, his brow brushing yours. “You undo me,” he whispers, the confession raw. “You are my undoing.”

“Then be undone,” you answer.

The kiss feels inevitable.

It is not careful, not the way you have kissed before, soft and untested. His mouth covers yours and claims, the sound he makes vibrating onto your tongue. You clutch his robe and feel muscle, heat, the build of him. He moves you without thinking until your back hits the garden wall, the roughness of old brick shocking against the silk you wear. His body shields you from the night.

Your lips part; breath mingles with breath. The kiss deepens—first cautious, then certain—as he listens to every sound you cannot keep back. When he pulls away, it is only to trace your cheek with his mouth, to find the tender skin beneath your ear, to press against the pulse that carries your blood.

“Tell me you want this,” he pleads, mouth warm at your throat, “Tell me now, and I will never let him touch you.”

The answer is instant. “I want this,” you say, and the truth falls between you. “I want you.”

He groans against your skin, relief and hunger braided into the sound. He sinks to his knees, robes darkening as they gather the damp of the moss. His hands travel the lines of your hips, leaning the curve of your body. When his forehead presses to your stomach, you feel the breath he releases warm your skin through the fabric.

The garden keeps its silence as he bares you. Cool air brushes your thighs, and gooseflesh prickles—not from chill, but from the startling reverence of being seen this way. He lifts your foot and sets it gently on a low ledge, spreading you wide—not to claim, but to look, to take you in. His hands stroke the insides of your thighs in long, unhurried passes that make you arch before his mouth has even lowered.

“Beautiful,” he murmurs, breath ghosting over your core, “My light.”

Your head thuds softly against the wall. Your fingers fall into his hair as he parts your folds with his tongue, slow at first, mapping the length of your core, then deeper. His hand comes up, two fingers circling your entrance before slipping inside, the stretch making you gasp as they learn how your walls flutter with every curve inwards. Mingyu doesn’t stop—his lips and tongue work a steady pace that unravels you. Your world fixes to this: the wet heat of his mouth, the slip of his fingers, the claiming grip of his hand on your hip, keeping you against the wall.

Release takes you by surprise, smothering your cry against your wrist as the wave crashes over you. He does not rush you through it—he stays, patient, murmuring soft praise while your body trembles and stutters against him.

He rises. His mouth glistens, his eyes dark, tender, dilated by want. You grab for him: his collar, his neck, the truth that he is yours because you chose him. Your palms skim down his chest, learning the shape of him through his silks until you find the hardness straining against his trousers. He shudders, breath shaking as you rub his clothed cock gently, squeezing and pressing against the heat. Your fingers tug at his sash; fabric loosening.

With trembling care, you free him, and the weight of his hardness fills your hand. You brush your thumb over the flushed tip, slowly and curiously. Mingyu curses low, his hands tightening on your face as if to anchor himself.

“If I take you now, there is no going back. Do you understand?”

“I don’t want to go back.”

His restraint breaks. Mingyu gathers your thighs and lifts you, the wall holding your balance. When he presses forward, his cock finds your hole—thick shaft sliding into your wet cavern. He pushes slowly, a single steady stroke that parts you, fills you, and stretches you until the sound that breaks past your lips is half pain, half awe. He stills, buried deep, trembling with the effort not to move, his mouth pressing to your ear.

“Easy… I have you. I have you.”

You breathe through it. The ache folds—your body relearning itself around him. You tighten your grip on his shoulders; the tremor in your thighs steadies. You nod, a small, wild yes pressed into his temple.

He begins to move. Slow at first, hips rocking, searching the place where your pleasure tips into need and makes you push back for more. The friction pulls a gasp from you. He buries his face in the crook of your neck in response.

When the angle shifts and he finds the spot that makes your vision blur, your nails biting his skin

“My light,” he gasps, the words falling out of him.

Your hand finds his jaw; you force him to look at you, eyes blown wide, heart in your throat. “My moon.”

He makes a sound that could be prayer, could be surrender. His mouth comes down hard, swallowing your gasp, and the rhythm builds. When he breaks away, you clamp a hand over your mouth to quiet the cry that wants to climb; Mingyu groans into your shoulder, whispers skimming over your skin—perfect… taking me so well… mine, only mine…

You clutch his behind with your free hand to pull him in deeper, greedier. He answers, thrusts quickening. He braces you higher, your bare heel slipping against his flank, your body opening like it had been made for this.

“I’ll fill you,” he groans, voice broken, “I’ll keep you so no one else can touch you.”

Heat envelops you—fearless, claimed. “Yes,” you gasp, head thrown, “Yes—please.”

The plea takes him. He thrusts deep, deeper, the last stroke a finality. He buries himself to the hilt and goes still, body locked. His groan is low, his forehead touching yours, breaths mingling as his seed spills into you, pulse after pulse searing a promise against your walls.

Time loses count.

When the world returns to its shape, you are still pinned between him and the wall, your heartbeat answering his. His cock softens inside you, and the slick heat escapes in a slow, indecent slide. The loss makes you whimper. He feels it, and it drags another sound out of him. His hand drops between your thighs, thumb circling your entrance.

“Keep it,” he murmurs, thumb pushing his cum back in. “Keep all of me inside you.”

You bite down on your lip, eyes closing, the gentlest tremor rolling through you at his careful touch. He holds you there, not moving until the shiver passes and only warmth remains.

He lowers your legs slowly, hands attending to every inch, steadying you when your knees threaten to buckle. Your robe falls closed, hiding the reddened marks his fingers left on your skin.

You do not feel owned. You feel kept—like something valuable you decided to give and were given back, more.

He tucks you against his chest, his breath easing finally. His mouth finds your hair, your temple, the place above your brow.

You pull back just enough to see his face. The mask is nowhere. He looks younger and older at once, a man who has finally taken something for himself and is astonished not to be struck down.

A breeze crosses the garden; the plum leaves answer in rustles.

You let your weight rest against him, your cheek pressed to his collarbone, and listen to the hush your bodies have left in the air. Tomorrow waits just beyond the walls. You feel it. He must, too; his jaw tightens, then eases, a decision deferred.

He does not say I will lie for you or I will burn for this. He does not break the fragile clarity of what you have made together. Instead, he takes your hand and lifts it to his mouth, kissing each knuckle slowly.

You tilt his face up with your palm, making him meet you. In his eyes, you find what he saw in yours the first night he kissed you: not rescue, not salvation. Recognition.

Your thumb brushes along his jaw. “Mingyu…” It is all you say, but it feels like a whole confession.

He bends closer, his voice raw. “If I had nothing else—no name, no place—tonight would still be enough.”

Your chest tightens.

“You should go before the patrols change.”

You swallow. “I don’t want to.”

“I don’t want you to.” His mouth curves, but the smile falters. He presses one last kiss to your temple. “But I’ll be here. Whenever you come, I’ll be here.”

You draw him down again, one more kiss—slow, sealing, ardent—and then you step back, your hand sliding from his body.

The ivy door groans. You glance over your shoulder. He is still standing there, the moon silvering his skin, his eyes fixed only on you.

The door closes. The ivy will fall into place. But the moon will remember. So will you. So will he.

The summons comes at dusk.

The eunuch’s voice is formal, but the weight beneath it is audible: the Crown Prince wants to claim what he is owed. It is time.

Mingyu’s body stills. He has known the night would come—has bought you time with excuses, with whispers of ill omens, with feigned rituals that delayed the inevitable. But he cannot stretch the thread forever. And now it frays.

Not tonight.

The thought comes with a violence he cannot temper. His hands curl in his sleeves as though his body means to shield you even here, in the hollow of his chambers.

When he enters the prince’s hall, the Crown Prince is lounging with his fan half-open, a glass of rice wine dangling loosely in his grip.

“Where is she?” his brother asks.

Mingyu bows low, his voice level, though his heart pounds. “Forgive me, hyungnim. She is unwell again. The matron feared her presence would bring illness to your chamber.”

The fan stills. His brother’s eyes narrow. “Unwell?”

“The signs were clear,” Mingyu presses. “The physician recommends she remain apart until the moon turns.”

For a long moment, silence stretches between them. Then the Crown Prince laughs hollowly. “If she proves useless, I will send her back where she came from.”

Mingyu bows again, concealing the fury in his throat. “As you command.”

He leaves with his pulse hammering, the echo of his brother’s disdain following him outside. By the time he reaches the women’s quarters, the decision is already made. He will not wait for tomorrow. He will not gamble with fate again.

He goes for you.

You startle when you see him—no servant, no matron, just Mingyu, his mask removed. He doesn’t give you time to ask. He only whispers, urgent: “Come with me. Now.”

Your robe swishes as you follow, steps light but quick, fear and fire tangled in your blood. You slip past courtyards, through the narrow ivy door, into the secret garden that has become your world.

The door closes, the ivy falls back, and the storm breaks.

He is on you before you can form words, his mouth claiming yours, his hands clutching at your hips. The kiss is frantic, teeth clashing, tongues tangling. He cups your face, then your breasts, desperate to feel your whole body pressed to his.

“We don’t have long,” you pant against his lips. “Please—just take me. I don’t want to lose this moment.”

His heart lurches at the plea. He wants to worship, to spend hours unravelling you again, but the truth is written in your eyes: you have only stolen minutes.

“Let me ready you,” he begs.

“Then be quick.” Your cheeks flush with urgency. “I can bear it—I want you too much not to.”

He curses softly, dragging you into the shadows of the wall, lifting your robe with trembling hands. His fingers slip between your thighs, finding your folds already slick, your body betraying its hunger. He strokes your clit once, twice, then presses two fingers inside. You gasp, your head falling against the wall, and he feels your walls clench, hot and needy around his digits.

“You’re perfect,” he murmurs, his lips at your neck. “So ready for me… my light.”

“Mingyu—” your voice cracks, “please. Now.”

The sound of your begging shatters his restraint. Mingyu pulls out his fingers, grabs your waist, and turns you swiftly. He bends you forward, his hand pressing between your shoulder blades until your palms find the wall. “Hold it,” he commands, voice rough, trembling with urgency.

You obey, fingers splayed against the cool stone, your breath hot and uneven. Behind you, he frees himself with shaking hands, the blunt head of his cock nudging against your slick entrance. He pushes forward in one swift thrust, burying himself, letting you accustom to the stretch. Your hips rock back in reply, impatient, desperate for more.

With a groan, he pulls back and drives even deeper.

You muffle your cry against your arm, your body arching beneath the weight of him.

The fit is perfect, unbearable. Your walls are tight around him, slick and hot, pulling him deeper. He braces one hand against the wall, the other gripping your hip.

“Mine,” he gasps, thrusting faster. “All mine.”

You push back against him, your voice breathless. “Even if the world condemns me… I would rather belong to you for one stolen night than live unloved for a lifetime.”

The confession undoes him. His rhythm grows faster, harder, his hips slam into yours with the desperation of a man who knows time is both enemy and witness. Each thrust jolts a cry from your lips, swallowed quickly into your skin to keep them hidden.

“So good… so perfect,” he praises, his words whispered against the shell of your ear. “Taking me so well… made for me.”

“Yes,” you gasp, shuddering beneath him. “Yours.”

Your words drag him closer to the edge. Mingyu reaches around, his fingers finding your clit again. You clench around him as his thumb rubs tight circles on the nub, your whole body shaking with the force of release.

Your orgasm tears him apart. He drives into you once, twice more, then spills deep inside, groaning your name into your hair, his body shuddering with the sheer violence of it. He presses himself tight against you, holding you there.

“Keep all of me inside you. My light… my only.”

You whimper at the fullness, clutching the wall as though it were the only thing anchoring you.

When he finally pulls back, his seed slips down your thighs. His thumb catches it, pushes it gently back into you, just as he did last night.

“Look,” he murmurs behind you. “Your body keeps me. You were always meant to.”

Your eyes flutter closed, a sound half-sob, half-laughter leaving you. You lean your forehead against the wall, then turn just enough to whisper back: “And you were always meant to find me.”

He gathers you against him then, despite the haste, despite the danger. He kisses your hair, your temple, every place his mouth can reach.

You have minutes left, perhaps less. But here, in this garden, pressed together in ruin and worship, it feels like eternity has bent just long enough to give you this.

The days after look peaceful from a distance.

Mingyu knows better. Calm is how the palace hides a storm.

He keeps you untouched—once, twice, three times more—by small moves that look like coincidence. A moon-day unsuited to intimate rites. A physician’s note, gently acquired, that suggests rest is prudent. Each excuse buys a night. Each night costs him something he does not calculate until dawn.

The Crown Prince’s wife counts, too. She is a woman who inventories absence.

She noticed that the new concubine—the one with the eyes that do not stay down—remains unclaimed.

She comes to the women’s hall without announcing herself, and the floor learns again how to shine. The concubines fold; the jade lady glides behind her. The wife’s fan opens and closes, a soft arithmetic of verdicts.

“How is the new one’s health?” she asks idly.

“Delicate, Jeongsil,” coos the jade lady. “The air still weighs on her.”

“The air weighs on all of us,” the wife replies. “Send for the physician. Send for the matron. Send for the girl.”

Mingyu hears about this not from the servants who owe him favours, but from the way the corridor itself changes—footsteps that begin to circle instead of passing straight through, voices that lower only after the first word. Danger is a scent learned in his childhood. He smells it now.

He widens the space between his shadow and yours. He takes different routes. He lets the captain of the guards find him on the captain’s terms, not his. He issues neat, forgettable orders that look routine. In the hidden garden, he slides the brush rack from the open table into a low chest—not because anyone will look, but because the act steadies his hands.

The jade lady examines your chamber. She admires your hairpins, your robes, your comb, and leaves a ribbon tucked deep under the folded silks—dyed a shade the Queen’s household uses for steward’s sashes, cut to a length no servant would wear. She watches a maid’s fear grow, then buys the fear with a handful of coins and a promised promotion. She visits the scribe who writes letters for women who cannot ask men for help and pays him twice to describe your hand. She sends a runner to a gate guard with a message that registers as a warning: Tell me what you see, or I will ask someone with sharper eyes.

The letters appear three days later, crisp and smelling faintly of cedar.

They are found, of course—tucked behind the lintel of your door where only a frightened maid would dare to dust. The jade lady holds them by their edges, as if avoiding blame. The physician, who was instructed to bring a brazier for colds, is instead made to warm wax for seals.

Mingyu reads the copies in secret. They are not given to him, but he knows how to find what others would keep hidden. The handwriting is wrong: too careful where yours would move, too ornate where you would choose simplicity. Yet the voice they have forged is perilously close to yours.

There are lines about secret meetings under eaves. About a lantern tied to a wrist. About a prince’s shadow that lingers too long. Some even name him—Mingyu—as if to knot the noose tighter, hinting at a bond between you that would shame his blood.

The Crown Prince had seen the forgeries before he did, and the smugness still clings to his words. “So much for your watchful eyes, little brother. You couldn’t even guard what was given to you. If she has strayed, perhaps it’s you she’s strayed with.”

Mingyu swallows the retort that claws up his throat. He cannot say this is not her hand without being asked how he knows. He cannot protest that the words echo things that have not happened without revealing how closely, how often, he has been in your presence.

Instead, he goes to the captain of the guards.

“Search again,” he instructs. “Truth behaves consistently. If there are letters, there are couriers; if there are couriers, there are payments. Trace them.”

The captain bows, loyal to a fault and to the Crown above faults. “We have a witness, Your Highness.”

“Who?”

“A gate boy who saw a woman pass a folded paper to a laundry girl near the Southern Eaves.”

“He saw without seeing faces?”

“He saw a sleeve and a hairpin.”

Mingyu’s fingers press the bridge of his nose.

He goes to the Queen, because her eyes sometimes see differently than the King’s. She receives him with the calmness of a woman who has shaped men into choices for longer than he has lived. He bows low; she gestures for him to rise. He speaks carefully, circling the truth.

“There is mischief in the women’s hall,” he begins. “If left unchecked, they could corrode more than reputation.”

Her fan stirs the air once. “Rumours are the palace’s second language. Why should this one trouble me?”

“Because it is falsehood with teeth,” he replies, his voice harder than he means. “And once it bites, it will not release.”

Her gaze fixes on him, unreadable. “What would you have of me, then?”

He holds her eyes, offering her a weapon that could as easily be turned on him. “Let it be examined quietly. No proclamations, no punishment until certainty is beyond question.”

She tilts her head, tapping her fan against her palm. “You are asking for time.”

“I am asking for fairness,” he says, though the words taste weak even to him.

The Queen studies him for a long moment. Then her mouth curves, the faintest shadow of a smile. “Fairness,” she repeats softly, as if testing the weight of the word. “Tell me, my son—fairness for which woman?”

He bows again and leaves without a reply.

His brother’s wife does not wait for justice. She cultivates certainty.

Two maids swear they have seen you slip out at night. A eunuch remembers—now—that your lantern burned longer than it should have. A gate boy repeats his story until he forgets who taught it to him. The jade lady produces a scrap of blue-green cord that once lived in Mingyu’s cloak hem, a thread she lifted weeks ago from the hidden garden’s threshold after a night when he was not careful enough to leave no trace. The cord is pressed into wax by the physician like a signet.

Word arrives that the King will hear the matter at noon.

Mingyu sits very still on the edge of his mat.

He could confess. He could ruin the letters by burning himself in front of them. He could say I took her to a garden that should not exist, I kissed her, I took her body as she took mine, and every lie you punish her with is a lie you owe me first. He could. He runs the scene in his mind and sees where the blade falls: on you. Confession from a prince is romance in a poem; in a court, it is a net that tightens around the smaller neck first.

He dresses. He ties his sash too tightly and does not loosen it. He goes to the hall at noon.

They come for you when the shadows are shortest.

The women’s hall opens its mouth, and the jade lady’s smile gleams from the gaping crevice. Guards stand in a neat row behind her. The concubines do not need instruction; they have been rehearsing their faces since morning.

“You are called,” the jade lady says, all duty.

“Called for what?” you ask.

“To answer,” she replies. “Bring only yourself. You will not need… ornaments.”

They remove your hairpins, they unhook your sash, not because they need to—your robe would hold—but because the looseness will read as shame when you walk. They take the finest silk and leave only the inner layer, which wrinkles when a hand presses it. Your hair falls in a single heavy rope you do not have fabric for to bind; a maid reaches with a strip of plain cotton and ties it with a firmness that says I am sorry without saying anything at all.

As you pass, the concubines show sympathy for each other and malice for you in alternating breaths.

“Poor thing,” one murmurs.

“Pride will do it,” another answers.

“She always looked beyond the walls,” a third offers, as if seeing were a crime.

The throne room is colder than your chambers. The King sits as if he has grown out of the seat. The Queen is a painting of calm. The Crown Prince wears a satisfaction that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with being bowed to. The wife stands a half-pace behind his shoulder, the jade lady behind hers, and together they form a line that points at you no matter where you move.

You kneel. The stone remembers every person who has pressed their forehead against it and records you now.

Mingyu is there.

He stands to the side where lesser men of royal blood stand when they are meant to be useful but not central. His face is a flawless mask. Under it, the muscles in his jaw are tight. You look at him only once, and you do not beg with your eyes, because you have learned that begging is a performance this room enjoys. You only look and place your breath where his breath is.

The jade lady reads the letters.

“Found hidden in the defendant’s chamber,” she says, “describing assignations and conspiracy. The hand is consistent. The content is damning.”

You do not rebut. You have no self to lend her lines. When she finishes, she offers the papers up to the Crown Prince’s wife.

The King nods. “Witnesses.”

The first maid cries delicately. “I saw her by the southern eaves with a folded paper.”

The second complements the first. “I was told to keep my mouth shut, but I must not place loyalty above truth.”

The gate boy bows so low his forehead will bruise. “I saw a sleeve. It was not plain. It moved like hers.”

The jade lady produces her piece of thread with a flourish. “A token,” she says, “caught where her path should never have crossed a daegun’s.”

Mingyu watches the thread and knows its history in a single flash—night air, ivy, his laugh unguarded—and understands that something he was careless with has learned how to be poison.

The King looks at you.

“What say you.” He does not waste a question mark on it.

Your mouth is dry. You hold the word innocent in it until it tastes like ash.

“I did not write those letters,” you say. Your voice is steady because you make it be. “I have left the women’s quarters only when ordered.”

A hum like interest moves through the hall. It is not sympathy.

The wife’s fan opens. “You lowered your eyes properly this morning,” she observes kindly. “One must learn to lower one’s habits as well.”

You turn your face without turning your head. “Jeongsil,” you say, “I am being made into a story you have written ahead of me.”

A soft intake from the concubines—audacity will always be admired when it is punished elsewhere.

The Queen lifts her chin a fraction. “Child,” she says, and the word is both balm and warning, “you stand before a throne. Be careful of speech.”

You bow again, your forehead to cold stone. “I speak only myself.”

Mingyu closes his eyes for the length of one breath. When he opens them, the wife is already looking at him. Her smile is revealing. She knows. Not everything. Enough.

The King says, “Strip her of these outer robes.”

You do not cry when the fabric is taken. You do not cry when your hair is untied fully and falls like a curtain along your back. You do not cry when the jade lady steps forward and draws a line of red across your name tag with a brush, striking it through. You save crying for places that have earned it.

“Pending sentence,” the King says, “she is to be held below.”

Mingyu hears the decision fall.

He takes the smallest step forward.

“Father,” he says, “the palace earns dignity when it matches accusation with care. Allow me to oversee—”

The King turns his eyes to him with slow displeasure.

“You will oversee nothing,” he says. “If you would like purpose, look to your brother’s campaigns and not to his women.”

The Crown Prince smiles, enjoying the old game. “Our daegun forgets where usefulness ends.”

Mingyu bows. When he straightens, he is a man with a rope around his throat pulled just tight enough to keep him breathing.

He leaves the hall before the Queen can call him back by name. He is not sure what his mouth would do in this room if he were to stay.

They take you then, not with violence, but with efficiency, which is worse. Two guards, one at each arm. You rise without stumbling. You walk without being dragged. The hall swallows your figure quickly.

The dungeons smell of metal and the apprehension of men who have counted days and lost track of them anyway. The light here is sparse, not right. It slopes through grates too narrow and leaves bars striped across the walls.

The cell is not the worst. It has straw that has been changed this week. It has a basin that has been scrubbed. It has a bench that remembers other backs.

When the gate slams, your breath trips.

You sit. You place your hands in your lap because that is how you have trained them to look calm. You stare at the wall, but you don’t see it. You see apricot petals. A little book. A river that promised you a road. A cloak that smelled of pine smoke. A man who learned how to laugh without permission.

You had not meant to rely on him. Reliance is a dangerous verb here. It invites ownership. It invites punishment. And yet, you had measured your days lately by small certainties: the direction his steps made across the stones, the way the air shared heat with your skin when he stood one pace closer than courtesy required, the existence of a door that opened with a bar you knew where to find.

How fragile, you think, and the thought is not bitter, only accurate. How beautifully fragile.

The women above you know your name again now that it is in trouble. Their whispers come down through the cracks.

“She did it.”

“She thought she was different.”

“She always looked like she was listening to walls.”

You lean your head back against the wall and close your eyes. Behind your lids, the garden squares itself: the basin, the plum, the little rack of brushes, the low table with ink pooled like twilight. If you breathe slowly enough, you can still smell wet moss. If you borrow the right memory, you can feel a thumb on your knuckles, counting without saying numbers.

Footsteps come and go. One set stops outside your gate and stays. You open your eyes.

It is not him. It is the jade lady, with a guard who looks everywhere but at you.

She holds the letters—and the way she holds them tells you they have already done their main work and are now props for an encore.

“Do you want to say anything useful?” she asks pleasantly. “Useful means true, of course.”

“Truth and usefulness are rarely related here,” you answer, and your voice is rough from disuse already.

Her smile is quick. “That is truer than it is safe. You must be tired.”

“I am.”

“Rest, then,” she says. “Tomorrow will require stamina.”

“Tomorrow?”

“A hearing that will look like mercy,” she says, and drifts away, satisfied with the taste she has left in your mouth.

You go quiet for a while. Then you let yourself cry.

You wipe your face with your sleeve and resent the fabric for not being silk anymore, and then resent yourself for caring about fabric.

You think of what you did not say at the throne. You think of what you did say.

You picture Mingyu standing in the throne room.

You do not let yourself ask if he will come. Men with freedom rarely walk toward cages, and princes are taught early to turn their faces from pity. And yet—you have seen him stare into a basin as if the water itself were teaching him how to be decent. You have watched him lift a brush as though each stroke could preserve more than paper. You have felt his mouth shape your name into something even the moon might choose to keep.

You rest your head against your arm and speak your name into the straw until it sounds like a promise again.

Above, the palace performs order—torches lit, incense burned, doorways bowed through, bells tapped to tell rooms they can sleep. Below, your cell practices the old, old art of not taking a person away from herself.

You open your eyes to the seam of light under the door and think:

I will not let their story be the only one.

Somewhere beyond the corridor’s curve, steps begin—measured, muffled, familiar in their way of refusing to hurry. The guard at the far end coughs and then decides not to. Keys do their metal screech. A flame lowers the dark by one shade.

You lift your head, not hope—readiness.

The steps stop. Silence stands up next to your gate.

You breathe in once. If it is Mingyu, there is danger. If it is not, there is danger. In both rooms, you plan.

The key does not turn. The footsteps move on.

You lean your head back and let your heartbeat slow one notch at a time.

In the hidden garden, a plum leaf loosens and settles in the basin. In a chamber with too much air, a prince sits on the edge of his mat and twists a paintbrush in his hand.

Night pools. The story sharpens its quill. You close your eyes and hold fast to yourself.

For now, it is enough to be unbroken where no one can abuse it.

Mingyu keeps to the edge of the dungeon, footsteps lighter than the guards deserve to hear. He had borrowed a key and chosen the moment between patrols when the path would have been empty. He breaks every law of his duty by walking downward—past storerooms; past the turning; past the last guard, who had been dragged underneath sleep’s weight.

The sound is too loud when he turns the key.

You are there on the other side of the bars. When you look up, the dim torchlight finds your face. Your name rises in Mingyu’s throat; he swallows it.

“My moon.”

Just that, and the whole journey crashes into purpose.

He grips the bars first, because the act of opening them would end you both. The iron is cold. His forehead bows to it, breath joining yours in the narrow space. He forces his voice into quiet.

“I am here.”

“You shouldn’t be,” you whisper, moving closer until your hands find his through the gap. “If they catch—”

“They will not.” He is not sure, but he lets certainty become a bridge anyway and walks you both across it. “I could not leave you to this silence.”

Your fingers tighten over his, the bars press between your knuckles.

“Are you hurt?” he asks, searching your face, the line of your throat, the place beneath your eyes.

You shake your head. “Only frightened. Not of death.” The smile that touches your mouth wavers. “Of what the palace will make of my name.”

He has no remedy for it. He has only his face, unmasked. He lets you see the man who has been walking the length of his room all day, learning the floor with a new kind of devotion.

“I tried,” he says, the admission low, raw. “I went to the Queen. I sent the captain back over every step. The thread they hold—”

“Is yours,” you finish, too gently. “And they shaped it into a noose meant for me.”

He hates that you are right. He hates that he did not notice the cord missing, the ivy disturbed, the way fate can be braided out of a single careless strand.

He leans in until the bars kiss his cheek and yours. Through iron, your mouths find each other, the kiss awkward, yet urgent, stubborn. Tears fall without permission; neither of you bothers to hide them. Salt meets iron and iron learns salt.

When he pulls back, it is only enough to speak against your mouth. The words arrive before caution can draft a replacement.

“I love you.”

They are not elaborate. They are not princely. They are only truth.

Your breath catches. Your eyes close, open. Your answer comes.

“I love you.”

The walls do not know what to do with such sentences. They have been trained to hold rulings, not vows.

He rests his brow to the bars and shakes with the relief and terror of having said it aloud. “Forgive me,” he whispers. “For being late. For not burning their lies before they learned to speak.”

“Forgive me,” you return, “for giving you something you must now keep safe from your own blood.”

He laughs brokenly. “Then we absolve each other.”

You fall into the small choreography of solace—his thumbs circling the backs of your hands, your forehead leaning to the cool iron and then to his, kisses like stitches placed where fear might tear. You speak in fragments that make a whole: “I will find a way.” “Do not ruin yourself.” “What else am I good for if not this?” “For living.” “Only if living keeps you in it.”

Footsteps brush the corridor and move on. A torch sighs. Your time thins.

He tries to plot aloud and gives up. He returns to vows because they are the only currency left that he owns.

“If they set a day,” he says, “I will cut it apart. If they send a rope, I will place my throat before yours.”

You flinch, not from the image but from the part of him that means it. “Do not offer death as if it were a gift.”

“And what would you have me offer?” He cannot keep despair from roughening the whisper. “Petitions? I am a petition they have never signed.”

Your hands slide down the bars and lower, until your lips meet again through the cold. “Offer me tomorrow,” you breathe. “Even if you must lie to do it.”

He nods, once, the movement small and decisive. “Tomorrow.”

Neither of you knows the corridor is not empty.

In the shadows, the Crown Prince stands, silent witness to his brother’s ruin. He does not interrupt. He only watches, storing every word, every touch, every tear, until the night has given him more than enough. Then he turns, leaving just as soundlessly as he arrived.

Mingyu kisses your fingers, one by one, and then the thin inside of your wrist where your pulse proves he has not lost you yet. “My light,” he says.

“My moon,” you answer.

He goes because to stay would be to choose discovery. He goes because leaving is sometimes the only way to carry a vow into motion.

Morning shows its teeth too early.

By midday, the court gathers, arranged into near architectural angles. The King sits in judgement; the Crown Prince’s smile is measured and expensive. Behind him stands the wife, fan shut; behind her, the jade lady glows with the satisfaction of a tool that fits the hand.

They bring you in. You do not stumble. Mingyu admires how, even now, you move as if rooms cannot quite claim you.

Charges are recited. Letters appear again, their false breath held steady by seals. Witnesses repeat what they were trained to remember. The cord—his own small sin of carelessness—enters once more, damning not by nature but by stewardship.

The King turns a stone gaze to the room. “The scandal has grown beyond patience,” he says. “The palace will not be made a stage for it.”

The Crown Prince speaks the sentence. His voice is steady and smooth, savouring every syllable with satisfaction. “She is to die by hanging. A concubine who stains the house is better ended than endured.”

Mingyu’s heart drops to his stomach. He steps forward before wisdom can chain him still. “Your Majesty—”

The King lifts a hand, silencing him. His gaze is angry, carved by disappointment. “You would defend her? Already, the court whispers that you failed your duty. And now, your brother tells me you did more—that you reached for what was not yours to touch. If she is guilty, then you are guilty too.”

The Crown Prince’s mouth tilts. “Little brother mistakes the women’s hall for his hunting ground. Here, his strength avails him nothing.”

Mingyu bows because to do otherwise is rebellion. But when he rises, the mask is gone. He chooses the only weapon left to him: himself.

“Then let the sentence fall on me,” he says, each word measured, unflinching. “If impropriety was born, it was in the space I carved for her to breathe. I failed my charge. I pursued what I should not, and I will not let her pay for what I asked her to share.”

He drops lower, his voice ringing across the chamber. “Strip me of rank. Exile me. Break me. But do not grind an innocent woman to dust only to make this hall smell clean.”

The room stirs, gasps curling like smoke. What he has held in secret is now naked before the throne—every vow, every trespass, every truth too sharp to bury.

The Queen’s fan pauses. Something like pain crosses her eyes but is folded away. The King regards him, then you. The room waits for the air to be less suffocating.

You lift your head. He watches you inhale. When you speak, your voice is clear—not to save yourself, but to take the blade from him.

“Your Majesty,” you say, bowing just enough to honour the throne but not enough to hide your face. “The daegun lies. He shoulders blame because he has always carried what others will not. But I acted alone. I let pride twist itself into secrecy, let rumor become a ladder I climbed with my own hands. No prince guided me. No prince touched me. Every misstep is mine.”

The room stirs.

Mingyu breaks. “That is not—”

The Crown Prince’s wife cuts him off. “You dare call a prince a liar? Even in your last moments, you reach for insolence.”

But you do not flinch. You do not answer her. Instead, you turn your eyes, pointed and unyielding, to the Crown Prince. The silence between you speaks louder than protest: you know where the true rot sits, and you are no longer afraid to let him see that you know.

The King nods once. “Very well. At dawn tomorrow, she will hang.”

Tomorrow. How cruel faith can be.

The Crown Prince bows, relieved to be done with this nuisance. “The house will be grateful for your decisiveness, Father.”

The wife’s fan opens—not for air, but in silent victory. The jade lady glows, already drafting the measures that make your quiet death look like good housekeeping.

They take you away. You do not look back, not because you are heartless, but because you are disciplined enough to follow up on your promises.

When the hall empties, Mingyu remains where he is expected to stand, because the thought of moving might make him collapse. The Queen passes and pauses. For a long beat, she says nothing. Then:

“If you mean to be a fool,” she murmurs, “be an excellent one.”

It is not permission. It is not a map. It is—perhaps—the only pity she can legally offer a son who has already chosen his path.

The evening bell sounds in the distance, counting the hour. The sound awakens Mingyu to start moving before the emptiness of the room can claim him.

Outside, the night waits, testing whether men can ever be braver than their titles. His pulse steadies as he steps—anger beaten into rhythm, resolve sharpening with every pace.

He does not know yet what saving will look like. He only knows the shape of ruin if he does nothing. And so, he chooses: he will not let you die while he still breathes.

Tomorrow, you told each other.

A whole rebellion can fit into that word.

The night before your death arrives, the palace has never been quieter, as if it were ashamed of itself.

You draw your knees closer and lace your fingers in prayer until the ache convinces you your hands still belong to you.

Keys rattle in the corridor.

You do not rise. There is no use in spending your body before the moment demands it. The keys pause, a breath, then try the lock. A second torch joins the first, and the shadows climb the wall.

Your gate does not open. It lifts.

The bar comes free in a single quiet motion, a hand catching its weight so the iron does not clatter. The lock turns with a softness that should be impossible for metal. The door swings open in a careful span.

He is there. Mingyu. Bareheaded, breath damp, his face stripped of every courtly habit. He has cut his hair at the nape. All that remains is the man. “Come,” he says, and the word is both plea and command. “There is no time.”

“You will lose everything,” you answer, because truth is the first language you shared.

He steps into the cell, into the narrow space of straw and stone, and kneels so fast his robe scrapes the floor. The chain at your ankle shivers when he lifts it; the lock clicks open. He moves to your wrists. Cold iron kisses air, and then your skin remembers how to be only skin. “I already did,” he says, eyes never leaving yours. “I lost it the first night I chose you.” A swallow. “I am choosing you again.”

You say the only thing that fits the shape of the moment. “Then I will not let you run alone.” He pulls you to your feet.

Mingyu blows the torch low with a careful breath as you pass through the corridor; the dark leaning in but not biting. He leads, counting steps under his breath in the old guard’s rhythm, and you find his count without being taught. At the corner, he holds up a hand. A guard turns in a chair, snorts, and returns to the bargain it made with wine. Mingyu slides a coin on the bench by the man’s elbow as if paying for silence were a courtesy, not a crime.

Stairs spool upward. A door. Another key. An empty courtyard. The moon hangs over the roofline and lays a paler path on the flagstones—just wide enough for two. “We will be seen,” you whisper. “Then they will learn we are faster,” he answers.

At the laundry eaves, he has left a bundle: a plain cloak for you, a soldier’s cap to shade his face, a strip of cloth for your hair. He ties it quickly, fingers gentle. A rope ladder waits inside a rain spout; he draws it out, hooks it to the lip, and tests the pull. The wall rises. You look at it and laugh—once, shocked at the boldness of your lungs.

“Do you trust me?” he asks, already bracing the ladder. “Yes,” you say, because you already leapt when you said I love you. “More than I trust the ground.”

You climb. Your feet remember the ridge above your old village, the way stone gives when you ask it properly. The wall’s top is a thin barrier between two lives. You throw your leg over, look back once—not at the palace, not at the lattice of windows where women fold and unfold their days—but at him. He comes up after you, eyes brighter than anyone should afford in this moment.

As you reach the far side, you see trees that were cleared out long ago and then grew back anyway. A lane where carts drag. Space. At the backside gate, a single horse stands, head down. Two bundles hang from the saddle: water, a pouch of coins, a roll of cloth, a wrapped packet that will turn out to be rice cakes and dried persimmons and a knife. Mingyu’s hands move like he memorised the motions.

He cups your foot and lifts you to the saddle. He mounts behind you, one arm circling your waist, the other finding the reins. His mouth is at your ear. “Hold,” he says. “And do not look back.”

You look forward at the lane, and he clicks his tongue. The horse answers, and the world begins. You do not look back.

The first alarm sounds much later than it should. A horn sounds from the inner court, then another. Torches wake like small stars. A gong beats the night, and the night throws it back.

In the King’s chamber, word arrives in a rush and collapses at his feet. He sits up with the cruelty of being summoned by betrayal rather than pain. “Which son?”

The servant does not dare say the name at first. “The daegun,” he answers because he must. “With the condemned.”

The King’s breath goes thin. A lifetime of choosing between father and law tightens into a single, exhausted line. He issues orders as if the words will stave off the ache.

“Strip him of title. Strip him of rank. By morning, he is no more than a man with a name. Send riders.”

In the Queen’s rooms, the message arrives softer, as if kindness could be folded around this kind of news. She closes her eyes because she had seen this end before it could be written. When she opens them, her gaze is clear.

“Tell the Jeongsil,” she says to her women, “that she has won a smaller victory than she thinks.”

The Crown Prince is already awake, as some men always are when they have invested in a bad harvest. At the report, satisfaction lifts his mouth and then falls. He motions with his hand, sharp and neat.

“Send riders,” he says, “fast and quiet. Bring the girl back before dawn. If you cannot bring her back, bring the proof that she will not walk again.”

He does not mention his brother. The omission is not mercy.

The wife stands at her window, watching the courtyard fill with hurried men. She holds only a cup. In the glass, she can see her own expression. She speaks to the jade lady without turning.

“Set another place at my table,” she says. “For absence.”

The jade lady bows her head. The Jeongsil drinks from her cup.

The road unwinds.

Fields sleep in their winter stubble. Ditches hold thin ice that breaks like old lacquer at the horse’s hooves. Your hands learn the sinew of the animal, the way it moves under your knees, the language of speed.

Behind you, faint at first and then less faint, a courier bell taps: one, two—silence—one. Soldiers. The old message: We are coming.

Mingyu’s arm tightens. You can feel his breath notch and smooth, notch and smooth. You lean into him to remind him on how to keep moving.

“Left,” you whisper at a break in the hedges, because a childhood of climbing walls gives you a nose for gaps. He turns the horse; branches scrape, then fall away; an ox track becomes a path becomes a trail becomes a thumbprint of hard dirt between scrub pines.

“You planned this,” you say, half accusation, half awe.

“I hoped for it,” he answers, then corrects himself. “I decided on it when I said I loved you to iron.”

There is only truth in his confession. Your chest loosens and tightens at once.

The path narrows. A stream, newly arrogant with snowmelt, chatters and then hides again. The horse takes a slope. You find a rhythm—breath, hoof, twig, the occasional call of a bird.

On a high shelf of ground, you dismount to spare the animal. Mingyu leads; you follow, your hand at the saddle, the horse tossing its head. When the trail kinks around a boulder, Mingyu halts, listening with his whole body.

“Two riders,” he says. “One farther back.” A pause. “No dogs. Good.”

“How—”

“Hoofs argue with gravel,” he says, as if it were a proverb.

You smile without meaning to. He catches it with a glance and—God, even now—finds a way to look a little astonished that joy would choose your face.

The first riders appear low on the slope. Mingyu takes your hand and pulls you into a cut where the ground has slumped, a pocket of earth with just enough thorn to suggest no passage here. The horse lowers its head and pretends to be a bush.

You press shoulder to shoulder, heart to back, breath to breath. The riders pass. One speaks and the other laughs. Their bells say nothing.

When the sound fades, Mingyu does not move. He turns his face into your hair.

“Say it again,” he whispers.

“What?”

“Anything that belongs only to us.”

You find the words easily now. “I love you,” you say, and everything in you says it with you.

He exhales as if he has been holding a plank above his head for a month.

“I love you,” he answers, and everything in him answers with him.

You move again.

The mountains meet you like old gods—aloof, patient, unconcerned with human names. A frozen fall locks itself to a cliff. Spruce lift black spires into the air.

At a fold in the ridge, a hut reveals itself. Mingyu pulls the door beam free. Inside: a low hearth, a broom worn to its last dozen straws, a pallet that remembers other fugitives, a jar with three chestnuts and a handful of cracked barley. Enough to call this a place.

He has stashed a bundle under the floor plank where the wood darkens. Coins. A second knife. A pair of coarse coats too large to be yours but small enough to be better than cold. He spreads a blanket, lights the ashes until a sigh of heat rises, and knuckles each log as if greeting a fellow.

You lower yourself. Mingyu drops to his knees in front of you and takes your feet in his hands as if feet were things princes cared to touch.

“Breathe,” he says gently.

“I am.”

“Again.”

You do.

When he looks up, he is smiling, a secretive, helpless tilt that lives on in your mind.

“I have no title,” he says softly, as if introducing himself. “No land. No right but what we make.”

“You have a name,” you answer, “and you gave it to me to keep.”

You eat in silence, grateful for barley that refuses to stop being itself even when boiled to softness. The chestnuts tilt toward sweetness. Mingyu unwraps the persimmons and hands you the one that kept its shape best. You bite and taste a memory you did not know you would need: frost and honey and the cleverness of patience.

When the light thins to the blue that comes before deep blue, he pulls another blanket around your shoulders and draws you outside.

The moon is polished tonight.

It hangs above the black line of the next ridge, round and gleaming. Beneath that calm and patient eye, he wraps his arms around you from behind and fits his chin to your shoulder.

“Do you regret it?” you ask tentatively.

“Choosing you?” His breath warms your ear. “If ruin were the price, I would have paid it sooner.”

You turn in his arms. The mountains do not look away. You touch his cheek with the back of your fingers, a gesture you learned from women who handled hot pots and loved grandly anyway.

“We are free,” you say. “We are hunted,” he says.

“Both can be true,” you answer, and the night, which has been listening impolitely, murmurs its approval in the firs.

From far down the valley a bell speaks—faint, uncertain. Riders at the foot of the mountain. You do not stiffen. You lean into him and feel how a body holds against another—how two warm places make a third.

“We can keep moving,” he offers. “North to where the river forgets its name. East to a village that never learned ours. West to a coast so wide your maps would have to be stitched to hold it.”

“Or we can stay,” you say, looking at the hut. “A season. Enough to learn what the wind calls this ridge.”

“And after?”

“After,” you say, and you smile, “we will see which direction wants us.” He laughs—the sound startles the night and then pleases it.

“Say it again,” he asks, selfish for once. “I love you.” He closes his eyes. “I love you,” he returns, no less greedy.

You finally kiss him. Slowly, knowing you will return to the motion tomorrow and the next day.

At the palace, banners are moved, seals are pressed, a name is stripped clean of its titles and set back on the table like a plain bowl. The King signs. The Queen folds her hands and does not open them again that night. The Crown Prince sends men with tired horses to bad ground and calls it diligence. The wife sleeps with a straight back and wakes with the taste of iron in her mouth.

A servant will say later that a plum leaf fell into the stone basin in the hidden garden and refused to float.

None of that lives here, on this shoulder of the mountain.

Here, your breath creates soft clouds that move in and out of each other. Here, the horse pushes its nose into Mingyu’s hand and tells him in the old animal language that it will carry you farther if asked. Here, frost writes thin letters on the plank, and you read them as permission.

You are cold. You are not unarmed.

When you finally lie down, he draws you into the hollow under his collarbone as if you were made to live there. He says nothing more of kings or brothers. He listens to your heart until his own decides to walk the same pace.

In the hours before dawn, you wake and realise that even hunted, even hungry, you are more yourself than you have ever been. You wake with your name intact.

“Ready?” Mingyu asks.

“Ready,” you say, and mean it twice.

The trail runs ahead, a thin thread on the foundation of the earth.

You step into the future. You are not forgiven. You are not condemned. You are chosen, and you are choosing.

The soldiers will come and then go. The Crown Prince will sit taller and then wonder at the ache in his back. The King will grow old, the Queen older, the wife will eventually learn that victory is a room with no windows. The jade lady will count seeds and someday lose track of which season she is in.

You will count streams. You will find a market where the thread-seller loops patience around her fingers. You will map a coastline that tastes of salt and forgiveness. You will stop under an apricot tree when spring remembers it is allowed, and you will lie beneath it and pretend you can hear the petals land.

My light, Mingyu will say, not because he wishes to own you, but because he needs a word for the way you turn the world visible.

My moon, you will answer, not because he lights your path every night, but because he knows how to stay when the sun decides to be elsewhere.

A/N: Have I ever written a piece this long? No. Am I very unconfident with how this turned out, but did I post it anyway? Yes. Did it break my heart while I wrote this? Heck yes. I hope you enjoy reading it! And I apologise in advance for any historical inaccuracies I may have made, I tried my best. 💟

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