vesperine

chapter 14

out of bounds

Synopsis; one lives in a world under the weight of shadows the other lives in a world that screams.

"The sky is blue like Sacrifice by Elton John"

warnings; swearing, heavy themes pairing; jeongguk × female reader genre; angst, slowburn, smut, fwb word count; 10,5 k

a/n: hello hello. quick update i know. thing is,,,i’ll start finals soon (bummer) so the updates will take exponentially longer. i’m feeding yall now so you don’t miss me too much.

—

The quiet of the hallway was a different kind of quiet—not deadened by acoustic foam, but expansive, damp, and smelling faintly of rainy asphalt.

You walked toward the humanities fountain, and goddamn, your muscles were aching. It was a deep, heavy ache, the kind that radiated from your thighs and the small of your back, but it was an entirely good way to hurt. It was the physical proof of an eviction. For sixty minutes, your body hadn't belonged to your racing thoughts, or to the devastating humiliation Minho had left in your chest; it had belonged entirely to the friction, the noise, and the ruthless, grounding weight of Jeongguk.

You had finished. Genuinely, entirely finished.

Even more jarring was the realization that you had finished from oral, which was something practically unheard of in your past sexual escapades. Usually, that part of it was a performance—a chore of adjusting your angles, worrying about how you looked, or quietly waiting for the other person to get tired and move on. But Jeongguk hadn't been looking for a performance. He had taken care of you with a clinical, hyper-focused discipline, tracking the hitch in your breath and the tension in your hips until he delivered exactly what you said you needed. He had systematically dismantled your panic and replaced it with exhaustion.

But as the cool evening air hit your face, clearing the lingering scent of his strawberry-mint breathe from your senses, a persistent question began to hang in the space between your ribs.

Did you deliver your end of the deal?

He had been meticulous, unbothered, and entirely in control, but did he actually get what he wanted? Did he feel whatever it was he needed to feel, or had you just been a chaotic, frantic mess that he took apart out of sheer curiosity? It was impossible to tell with him. The deal was transactional, and the hour was up, leaving you with nothing but the ache in your bones and the sudden, terrifying silence of his absence.

By the time the stone perimeter of the humanities fountain came into view, you forced your shoulders to drop, fixing a practiced, unbothered expression onto your face.

Sora was already there, pacing under the amber glow of the courtyard lights, clutching a plastic container of warm soup like a shield against the damp evening. But she wasn't alone.

Leaning against the concrete pillar beside her, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his oversized jacket, was Jimin.

"Finally!" Sora exhaled, her eyes sweeping over you the second you stepped into the light. "I was about to start a search party. You look... completely wiped out. Are you okay?"

Before you could construct a believable lie, Jimin straightened up. His dark eyes locked onto yours, sharp and instantly assessing, cutting right through the casual shrug you were trying to manifest.

"I'm coming too," Jimin announced smoothly, his voice cutting through the space between you. He reached into his pocket, the familiar metal jingle of his keychain echoing in the quiet courtyard. "And obviously, I'm driving."

Jimin's car was a very sexy, polished Mazda Miata—because, of course, that was Jimin for you. It was sleek, immaculate, and possessed a low, purring engine that felt entirely too sophisticated for a campus parking lot.

You've been told in the past it's a red car and that it's "very Jimin" so you just rolled with it.

As Jimin unlocked it, the headlights cut through the misty dark, reflecting off the damp pavement in sharp glints. You braced yourself to open the passenger side door, expecting Sora to claim it, but she bypassed the front entirely and yanked open the back door.

"I am taking the rear," Sora announced, practically tumbling into the back seat with a dramatic, full-body sigh. She threw her legs across the row, completely unbothered, and propped her chin up on the headrest. "Do not argue with me. I have been hunched over a canvas for seven straight hours trying to calculate pillar girths for an architecture project, and if I have to keep my spine at a ninety-degree angle for one more second, I am going to snap in half."

"Pillar girths?" Jimin echoed, a slow, amused smirk tugging at the corner of his lips as he slid into the driver's seat. He adjusted his rearview mirror, his eyes briefly flicking to you as you climbed into the passenger side. "Sounds thrilling, Sora. Truly."

"Shut up, Minnie. It's a nightmare," she groaned from the back, shifting her weight to get comfortable. "My eyes are literally crossing. I just need to stretch out and pretend the physical world doesn't exist for twenty minutes."

You closed the passenger door, the solid, expensive thud of the Mazda sealing the three of you away from the damp campus air. Sitting in the front seat suddenly felt incredibly exposed. With Sora sprawling out in the back, it left you right next to Jimin, trapped in the intimate, lit bubble of his dashboard, where every shift in your posture was completely visible to his quiet, razor-sharp observation.

Jimin started the engine, the low, throaty purr of the Mazda vibrating right through the soles of your shoes. He shifted into gear with an effortless, practiced flick of his wrist, pulling out of the campus lot and onto the empty, slick roads.

For the first few minutes, the silence inside the car was heavy, filled only with the rhythmic clicking of the turn signal and the soft rush of the heater warming up. You kept your eyes locked on the passenger side window, watching the blurred streetlights smear against the glass, trying desperately to ensure your breathing sounded completely normal.

Sora broke the quiet from the back, her voice muffled against the headrest. "Jimin, please put something on. If I have to think about classical columns or structural integrity for another second, my brain is going to hemorrhage."

"Say no more," Jimin murmured.

He reached over, his silver rings catching the faint glow of the dashboard as his fingers tapped the touchscreen.

He skipped past his usual indie playlists and purposefully dialed into a radio station that was currently blasting a ridiculously high-energy, completely cheesy early-2000s pop song. It was the kind of track that was impossible to take seriously—over-produced, aggressively upbeat, and entirely out of character for Jimin's sleek, sophisticated car.

Sora sat up instantly, her exhaustion vanishing in a split second. "Oh my god. No way."

"Oh, yes way," Jimin grinned, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he checked his blind spot.

Before the first verse even hit, Sora had already rolled up her plastic container of warm soup to use as a makeshift microphone. She leaned forward between the two front seats, screaming the lyrics at the top of her lungs, completely off-key and entirely unbothered. Jimin didn't skip a beat—he joined in on the chorus, throwing his head back, pulling off a series of absurdly dramatic, soulful vocal ad-libs that had no business being delivered with that much passion while navigating a roundabout.

The sheer, ridiculous chaos of it caught you completely off guard.

For the first time in hours, the suffocating weight in your chest cracked. The phantom ache in your thighs, the memory of the acoustic foam walls, and the exhausting, lingering panic of Minho's betrayal were suddenly drowned out by your best friends screaming pop lyrics in a sexy Mazda.

Toxic by Britney Spears. You made a mental note to thank the pop princess for this insane performance.

A genuine, breathless laugh escaped your throat. You leaned your head back against the leather seat, the tension draining from your shoulders as you watched Sora aggressively point her "soup mic" at you, demanding you take the next line. You actually sang along, your voice mixing with theirs, filling the small car with a messy, loud warmth. For those few miles, you weren't a fractured person holding onto a dark, transactional secret just to survive. You were just you, driving home with your friends.

By the time Jimin pulled into the driveway of Sora's apartment building, the song was fading out, replaced by the quiet hum of the idling engine. Sora was out of breath, laughing as she collapsed back into the rear seat, grumbling about how she had definitely ruined her throat.

You let out a soft sigh, a small, residual smile still lingering on your face as you reached for the door handle. "That was... exactly what I needed. Thank you."

"Anytime," Sora exhaled happily from the back, already gathering her canvas bags. "I'm going to run up and unlock the door before my legs cramp again. Don't take forever." She hoisted herself out of the back, leaving the door open behind her as she hurried toward the building's entrance.

You went to unbuckle your seatbelt, but as the car door clicked shut behind Sora, the playful energy in the front seat instantly evaporated.

Jimin didn't turn off the ignition. He just rested his wrist on top of the steering wheel, turning his head slowly to look at you. In the dim, ambient light of the dashboard, his  eyes were completely still, stripped of all the theatrical humor from a moment ago.

He looked at you—really looked at you—with that terrifying, quiet intuition that always made you feel completely transparent. His gaze swept over the slight stiffness in your posture, the heavy way you carried yourself, and the strange, quiet numbness that had settled back into your eyes the exact second the music stopped.

He clocked it instantly. Your aura was entirely different. The frantic, erratic frequency of a girl drowning in a public breakup was gone, replaced by a dense, unreadable gravity.

You froze under his stare, your hand tightening against the fabric of your seatbelt. The silence stretched between you, heavy and loud, making you wonder if he could somehow smell the faint strawberry-mint or the unmistakable scent of another person's skin on you.

Jimin tilted his head, eyes narrowing just a fraction as he assessed the shift. He didn't know what had happened in the art building. He didn't know about the sixty-minute timer or the calculated pact you had just signed with a specific music loving man. But he knew you were hiding something massive.

For a long, agonizing second, you thought he was going to press you. You thought he was going to demand to know where you had been.

Instead, Jimin just let out a very soft, quiet breath through his nose. The tension in his jaw relaxed, and he gave you a small, incredibly gentle nod. He didn't push. He respected you enough to let you keep whatever boundary you were drawing, even if it clearly worried him.

"Let's go inside," he said softly, his voice dropping into a comforting, protective cadence as he finally turned off the engine, plunging the car into shadow. "Before the soup gets cold."

Stepping into Sora's apartment was like stepping directly into her mind. It was very fucking Sora, to a T.

Every square inch of the space reflected her chaotic, hyper-creative architecture major lifestyle. Cardboard mockup models of buildings with tiny, hand-cut windows were stacked precarious on the coffee table, right next to tracing paper, loose charcoal pencils, and thick textbooks on structural load-bearing. Swatches of heavy linen fabric hung over the back of the couch, and a massive, paint-splattered drafting board occupied the corner by the window.

Yet, despite the creative debris, it was incredibly warm and cozy. A soft lamp glowed from the kitchen counter, casting long, shadows across the hardwood floor, and the entire apartment smelled deeply of apple cinnamon—a comforting, sweet scent from a wax warmer plug-in she kept running near the entryway. It felt safe. It felt like a home.

Sora didn't waste any time. She kicked her shoes off into a messy pile by the door, dumped her canvas bags on the nearest chair, and immediately disappeared into the kitchen to grab three ceramic bowls.

Within minutes, the three of you were crowded around her small wooden dining table, the steam from the warm vegetable-and-barley soup rising into the air, fogging up your vision just a little.

"Eat," Sora commanded, pushing a bowl toward you and handing you a heavy metal spoon. "You look like you're about to evaporate, and I refused to let my architecture project claim two victims today."

You took the spoon, the heat of the bowl seeping into your cold palms. Sitting here, listening to the clink of silverware against ceramic and watching Sora aggressively blow on her hot broth, the contrast of where you had been just over an hour ago hit you all over again.

In Jeongguk's studio, the air had been thick with the sterile, artificial scent of strawberry, mint, tobacco and the heavy, electric hum of subwoofers. Here, it was apple cinnamon, homemade soup, and the familiar, grounding presence of the people who actually loved you.

You swallowed a spoonful of the soup, the warmth spreading through your chest, momentarily soothing the raw, exhausted ache in your throat.

Jimin sat directly across from you, eating quietly. He had pulled his hair back, a few loose strands framing his face as he navigated his spoon with characteristic grace. He was participating in Sora's mindless banter about her professor's impossible standards, laughing at her jokes, but his eyes never completely left you. Every time you took a bite, or every time you shifted in your chair—careful not to let your aching thigh muscles tighten up too visibly—Jimin's gaze would subtly track the movement.

He still wasn't pressing you. He was letting you eat in peace, letting you fade into the background of Sora's frantic energy. But the heavy, knowing quiet in his posture remained, a silent reminder that your secret was safe from Sora, but it wasn't entirely invisible.

The clink of your spoon against the ceramic bowl suddenly felt too loud. The warmth of the soup, the heavy scent of apple cinnamon, the sheer, unconditional safety of Sora's kitchen—it was all supposed to comfort you, but instead, it felt like a pressure cooker. The contrast between this gentle room and the clinical devastation you had been running from all day finally cracked your ribs wide open.

A hot, sudden tear spilled over your lower lash line, splashing directly into your bowl.

"Hey," Sora murmured, her voice instantly dropping its frantic, comedic edge. She set her spoon down, her eyes widening with immediate concern. "Hey, what is it?"

"I'm an idiot," you choked out, your voice breaking on the last syllable. You pressed the heels of your hands into your eyes, trying to force the water back, but the dam had completely burst. The exhaustion from the studio, the phantom ache in your muscles, and the absolute humiliation of Minho's betrayal all surged to the surface at once. "I'm a fucking idiot. How did I not see it? How did I let him make me look so stupid?"

Before you could spiral any further, Jimin reached across the small wooden table. His hands were warm, his fingers firm as he gently but unyieldingly pulled your hands away from your face, forcing you to look at him.

"Look at me," Jimin said, his voice dropping into a deep, steady register that demanded your attention. "You are not an idiot."

"I loved him, Jimin..I mean I still do maybe or I dont know—"

"It's okay to still love him. It's okay to not know right now and that is not a flaw," he interrupted softly, his dark eyes fiercely holding yours. "Cheating does not define you. It doesn't mean you were lacking, or blind, or stupid. It defines the person who did it. It is a reflection of his lack of integrity, his cowardice. Not your worth."

Sora abandoned her chair entirely, sliding her seat right next to yours and wrapping a tight, fierce arm around your shoulders. She pulled your head down to her neck, letting you lean into her. "Minnie is right. You didn't do anything wrong except love a guy who didn't deserve it. You didn't do anything wrong by trusting the person who promised to hold your heart."

You let out a ragged, trembling breath, burying your face against Sora's shoulder. The tears were coming freely now, hot and silent, washing away the numb, synthetic armor you had tried so hard to build in the art building.

You've just loved a guy.

The phrase echoed in your mind, heavy and tragic. Because in a world this fragile, sometimes that's your death sentence. Sometimes, pouring your vulnerability into someone else's hands is the very thing that executes you, leaving you to wander around campus like a ghost, looking for any dark corner or dangerous transaction just to make the bleeding stop. You had let Minho kill a part of you, and the grief of that realization was suffocating.

Jimin squeezed your hand, his silver rings pressing into your knuckles, grounding you to the present moment. His expression was incredibly tender, a rare, raw softness rewriting his usually sharp features.

"It feels like an ending right now," Jimin murmured, his voice a soothing, quiet frequency in the amber-lit kitchen. "It feels like you're completely ruined. But you're not. You are going to love again. You are going to blossom again, even if the soil feels completely toxic right now."

"I don't know how to do this," you whispered into the quiet room, the scent of apple cinnamon wrapping around you like a shroud. "I don't know how to feel normal."

"You don't have to know right now," Sora whispered back, resting her cheek against the top of your head, her grip tightening. "We're going to carry it until you can. You just have to breathe."

"You have to allow yourself to feel all the conflicting emotions. You can still love the person that hurt you while aknowledging that's the end. It sucks—yes, but one day the ache will dull, " Jimin's wisdom washed over you. "Imagine how much love you'll carry for the person that will not mess up while holding your heart."

For a long time, the three of you just sat there at the cramped table, the soup growing cold as the conversation drifted into a quiet, deeply comforting space. They didn't ask you to map out your future, and they didn't expect you to be strong. They just sat with you in the wreckage, pulling you back toward the light, entirely unaware that you had already anchored your survival to a guy who sees colors in a soundproof room.

As the quiet, tear-stained safety of Sora's kitchen seemed to freeze in time, the heavy, comforting scent of apple cinnamon and hot broth gradually dissolved, bleeding into the sharp reality of a completely different room across the city.

In another dimly lit apartment—one where the air didn't smell like cinnamon, but carried the dense, bitter tang of strong coffee and the dry metallic scent of heavy sewing machinery—the atmosphere was thick with a completely different kind of chaos.

The floor was a minefield of structural ruin. Bolts of expensive, heavy silks and raw denim were rolled out across the hardwood, pinned down by heavy pattern weights. Discarded measuring tapes coiled like snakes over stacks of fashion lookbooks, and the low couch was practically buried beneath a mountain of unstructured cushions, velvet swatches, and stray tailoring pins that caught the amber glow of a single, industrial floor lamp.

Jeongguk was sitting on the edge of a sturdy cutting table, one leg dangling lazily as he spun a heavy silver ring around his thumb. His jacket was gone, his dark hair falling over his forehead in damp, unruly strands, and his mind was still locked in the deadened, synthetic silence of the soundproof studio. He was tracking the time in his head—the sixty minutes had expired long ago, the contract was technically fulfilled, but the residual weight of your voice breaking under his hands was still vibrating behind his ribs. He had delivered exactly what you needed, yet the quiet in his own chest felt uncomfortably loud.

Purple. Purple moans.

Across the room, standing under the harsh light of a drafting lamp with a pair of heavy fabric shears in hand, Taehyung paused.

Taehyung didn't look up from the collar line he was meticulously pinning into a mannequin, his long fingers working with a fluid, artistic precision that matched Jeongguk's own discipline. But Taehyung's sharp, eccentric intuition was always running in the background. He had been quiet for the last twenty minutes, letting Jeongguk stew in his characteristic, brooding silence.

Without warning, Taehyung snipped a loose thread, tilted his head, and finally cut his eyes over to the cutting table. A slow, knowing smirk crawled up his face.

"You have your 'I got my dick wet face' on," Taehyung remarked smoothly, his deep, baritone voice cutting through the hum of the apartment with zero hesitation.

Jeongguk didn't even blink. He didn't drop his gaze, didn't flinch, and certainly didn't try to deny the accusation. Denial was for people who felt guilty, and Jeongguk didn't do guilt. Instead, a slow, entirely unbothered smirk tugged at the corner of his lips, pulling on his lip piercing with a faint, metallic glint under the industrial lamp. He just kept spinning the silver ring around his thumb, his posture loose, dangerous, and perfectly composed.

He didn't care that Taehyung knew he'd gotten laid. He just had absolutely no intention of uttering your name in this room.

Taehyung set the heavy fabric shears down on the drafting table with a deliberate, metallic clatter. He leaned his hips against the edge, crossing his long arms over his chest, his sharp eyes practically gleaming with amusement as he surveyed Jeongguk's smug silence.

"Care to share with the class?" Taehyung asked, tilting his head. "Because you've been sitting there staring at a blank wall for twenty minutes like you're trying to decode a baseline, and frankly, it's disrupting my creative flow."

"Gentlemen don't kiss and tell," Jeongguk replied smoothly, his deep voice carrying that low, arrogant cadence that usually kept people from pushing him. He shifted his weight on the cutting table, the leather of his boots creaking slightly in the quiet apartment.

Taehyung let out a dry, incredulous scoff, a theatrical roll of his shoulders following it. "You're not a gentleman."

"And you're not a priest," Jeongguk countered instantly, his smirk widening into something sharper, his  eyes locking onto Taehyung's with zero intention of backing down. "So don't come at me for not telling you all my dirty deets. Go back to your mannequin, Kim."

Taehyung threw his head back, letting out a deep, booming laugh that echoed off the high ceiling of the studio apartment. "Jeon, you're so stiff sometimes when it comes to things, I'm sure you could pressure cook an egg inside your ass."

"Fuck off," Jeongguk muttered, though the corner of his mouth twitched up. He picked up a stray wooden pattern weight from the table and tossed it lazily at Taehyung's chest. Taehyung caught it with one hand, completely unbothered, chucking it back onto a pile of velvet cushions.

"I'm serious," Taehyung said, stepping back to examine the silhouette of the denim jacket he was constructing. "You walk around campus looking like you're carrying the weight of the entire engineering block, and then you disappear for an hour and come back looking like you just reset your master clock. It's unnatural."

"It's called efficiency, Kim. You should try it instead of spending four hours draping a single shoulder," Jeongguk fired back, his tone slipping into that easy, rough-edged banter that only existed between the two of them.

"I need perfection. You wouldn't know the difference between a pagoda and epaulet shoulder if it slapped you in the face."

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"Jeongguk... It's a fashion crime."

They both burst laughing.

They traded a few more sharp stabs—boyish chatter about an upcoming exhibition, Taehyung complaining about the soaring prices of imported silk, and Jeongguk making fun of a horrific avant-garde shoe design Taehyung had sketched the night before.

It really was an unnatural way to wear a shoe.

But as the laughter died down, the atmospheric pressure in the room subtly shifted. Taehyung wiped his hands on a scrap towel and looked over at the master console in the corner, where Jeongguk's mixing gear sat dark.

"So," Taehyung began, his voice dropping into a more grounded, serious register. "What about the recording? The voice memo." He leaned against the drafting table, looking directly at Jeongguk. "Did you give up on finding out who the voice is?"

Jeongguk's thumb stopped spinning the silver ring. His jaw tightened just a fraction, the boyish amusement instantly completely evaporating from his dark eyes. He kept his expression locked down, keeping his thoughts entirely to himself.

He would never give up. Truly.

That recording was his safehouse. Before he found it, his mind had been a hostile, hyper-stimulated territory—a constant, deafening roar of frequencies, internal chaos, and a restless anger that nothing else could quiet. Not the alcohol, not the mindless hooks, not even the brutal, systematic discipline of his own music production. Nothing had helped him manage.

Until he found that little piece of plastic.

It had been an accident. He remembered the exact texture of the afternoon—the air in the art wing had been thick with the smell of turpentine and wet clay. He had been practically tearing a communal desk apart looking for a lost guitar pick, his frustration peaking, when his fingers hit something small and solid. A bright red flash drive, looking completely ridiculous with a frayed, faded koala keychain dangling off the loop.

He had waited. He had left it on the corner of the desk for three days, posted a vague note on the department board, and asked the evening janitors if anyone had been looking for a drive. No one claimed it. It was a ghost asset.

So, he took it as his own. He plugged it into his laptop in the dead of night, expecting to find corrupted project files or boring lecture notes. Instead, he found the raw, unedited voice memo of ultramarine. The second the audio file initialized, the spoken-word poetry had washed through his headphones like a physical wave, grounding his frantic pulse instantly. The voice was an absolute refuge. It possessed a perfect, tragic resonance that managed to isolate all the noise in his head and kill it. He had spent months analyzing the wave file, isolating the breath patterns, trying to find the owner, but the trail had gone entirely cold.

The silence stretched long between the two friends, the hum of the industrial lamp the only sound in the room.

Jeongguk finally broke it, his voice low and raspy as he slid off the cutting table, shoving his tatted hand deep into his front pockets.

"I didn't give up, necessarily," Jeongguk muttered, his eyes flicking toward the dark window, his mind briefly flashing back to the raw, breathless weight of you shivering against his chest in the soundproof room just two hours ago. "But I'm focused on something else right now."

Taehyung arched a perfect eyebrow, a sharp, knowing glint returning to his eyes. "Focused on something else? Since when does Jeon Jeongguk get distracted from a puzzle? Especially one he's been obsessing over."

He pestered because he knew how Jeongguk worked. Taehyung was well aware that if left to his own devices, Jeongguk would gladly drown inside his own head rather than talk. He would let the thoughts calcify until they turned into a physical weight behind his ribs.

But Jeongguk just held his gaze, entirely unbothered. He liked to keep to himself—especially when the "something else" was you.

The truth was, the intense, grounding mystery of that voice memo had subtly begun to recede into the back of his mind over the last few weeks. It had been replaced by a much more visceral, chaotic frequency. He had completely forgotten about the recording now that your relationship with that asshole had finally exploded.

Happy accident.

Breakups were brutal—he'd watched the fallout from a distance, tracking the erratic, fragile panic that had been clinging to you all week—but they were always better than living a lie.

And you and Minho? Both of you had been lying to yourselves from the very start. Minho had lied to you about pretty much everything, weaving a cheap, cowardly narrative to keep you docile. And you? You had lied to yourself just to please a liar, shrinking your own edges and ignoring your instincts just to keep a fraud comfortable.

Jeongguk pulled his hands out of his pockets and walked over to the industrial window, leaning his forearm against the cool glass. From this high up, the campus looked dark, washed out by the persistent mist.

"It's just a thing," Jeongguk said quietly, his voice cutting through the dry, metallic air of the apartment. He thought of the deep, heavy ache you were probably feeling right now, the way you had finished so entirely against him, and the dark, transactional pact you both had signed. "Something that needed to be cleaned up."

Taehyung let out a soft, mocking hum, turning back to his mannequin with a slow shake of his head. "Right. Whatever you say, Jeon. A 'thing.' Just make sure you don't accidentally engineer your own downfall."

"I don't make structural errors," Jeongguk muttered, his eyes still tracked on the dark campus streets below.

"Sure, sure." Taehyung picked up a handful of tailoring pins from the table, expertly sliding them between his lips as he went back to adjusting the denim collar. "But honestly? You should get laid more often. You're actually almost talkative after you finish. It's a nice change from the usual gargoyle routine."

"Eat shit, Tae."

"Just stating the facts," Taehyung murmured around the pins, his long fingers pinning a sharp pleat into the jacket's shoulder.

They drifted back into a lighter rhythm, the tension dropping as they traded a few more insults about each other's work ethics. But Taehyung, as usual, couldn't just leave a quiet room alone. He was a creature of observation, someone who collected campus gossip the way he collected vintage buttons, treating every piece of drama like a texture to be analyzed.

Without looking up from his seam allowance, Taehyung casually smoothed down a layer of heavy fabric.

"Oh, by the way," he said, his voice dropping into that specific, theatrical cadence he used whenever he was about to drop a bomb. "Have you heard?"

Jeongguk didn't move from the window. His forearm remained braced against the glass, his silhouette dark and imposing against the reflection of the industrial floor lamp. He didn't answer, refusing to give Taehyung the satisfaction of an eager reaction, but his ears picked up the shift in frequency anyway.

" The medical and restoration departments are practically in mourning," Taehyung continued, a dangerous, lazy smirk playing on his lips as he stepped back to view the mannequin's silhouette. "Our resident golden boy, Minho, finally got caught with his pants down. Apparently, the whole facade completely crumbled."

Jeongguk didn't move an inch from the window, his forearm still braced against the glass, but every muscle in his back locked up. He let out a low, bored grunt, carefully modulating his tone to sound completely detached.

"Minho? The guy with the immaculate transcript and the punchable face? What did he do, plagiarize a drug?"

Obviously, he knew. He knew the precise structural damage of that blowout, down to the exact shade of devastation in your eyes when you had crossed his threshold. But in front of Taehyung, he had to play dumb. He had to act just interested enough to see exactly how much of the wreckage had made it to the campus grapevines.

Taehyung, for all his eccentricities and sharp gossip-mongering, was a sweetheart at his core. He stopped pinning the denim jacket, his expression softening into something genuinely sympathetic. "No, worse. He was sleeping with some upperclassman in the studios. I heard it was brutal. Honestly, I just hope she's alright, truly. Y/N, I mean."

Taehyung sighed, wiping a hand down his face. "Though, I saw on Sora's close friends story that she's over at her place right now. They're eating soup with Jimin. She looks completely wiped out, but at least she's with them."

Jeongguk's brain snagged on a single phrase, his internal radar instantly spiking. He turned around slowly, leaving the window and leaning back against the sill, his dark eyes narrowing into an aggressive glare.

"Hold on. Sora has you on her close friends?" Jeongguk's voice dropped into a rough, incredulous scratch. "How the fuck? She literally can't stand me. She glares at me like she wants to slice my throat every time we pass in the humanities hall."

Taehyung shrugged, completely unbothered by Jeongguk's sudden intensity as he reached for more pins. "I don't know, man. Both Sora and Y/N followed me on Insta that night after Teaspoon of Sin. I guess I just have a trustworthy face."

There it was. A sharp, ugly twist of irritation flared in the center of Jeongguk's chest.

You followed him? You had actively looked up Kim Taehyung, clicked follow, and let him into a digital circle close enough to see your best friend's private stories—but you hadn't even blinked in Jeongguk's direction online.

You still didn't even follow him back.

The sheer irony of it was maddening. You didn't even care. You hadn't given a single thought to Jeongguk's digital presence, completely freezing him out, even though he was the one who had spent  minutes on his knees in a soundproof room. He was the one who had literally been inside you, learning the exact rhythm that made you lose your mind, delivering exactly what your broken body needed—and yet, to the rest of the world, he didn't even exist on your radar. You had given Taehyung a free pass into your life, while Jeongguk was kept entirely in the dark, restricted to a secret, transactional pact sealed behind a heavy acoustic door.

He knew the shade of your moans and sounds. He knew that cause he's heard that.

Because they were for him. Because he basically delivered them to you.

"Right," Jeongguk muttered, turning his head back toward the dark window so Taehyung wouldn't catch the sudden clench of his jaw. "Trustworthy."

Taehyung went back to talking, but Jeongguk completely tuned him out. His mind was already drifting back to the reality of how you were actually doing.

Taehyung thought you were just a girl recovering from a brutal breakup over a bowl of soup with your friends. Sora and Jimin thought you were fragile, an innocent victim who had just loved the wrong guy. None of them actually knew.

No one on this damn campus knew that you were doing bad—completely, destructively bad. No one knew about the girl who had entered his studio at 10 AM, shivering and crying so hard she couldn't breathe, looking for a place to hide from the debris of her life.

And absolutely no one knew about the girl who had left that same studio in the evening, her muscles aching in a good way, her throat raw from spilling moans and whimpers, and her mind finally quieted after being systematically taken apart and finished off by his hands.

Back in Sora's quiet, apple-cinnamon-scented kitchen, the heavy emotional crying session has finally wound down. You're sitting back in your chair, exhausted but emotionally hollowed out, feeling the comforting weight of Sora's arm around you and Jimin's warm hand still loosely anchoring yours on the table.

Then, your phone buzzes on the wooden table.

j.jk97: interesting how you have time to follow Tae but u couldn't even bother to tap follow back on me before you ran out of my studio.

Your heart dropped like an anchor through your ribs, hitting your stomach with a cold, heavy thud. You stared at the lowercase letters of his handle, the familiar initials striking a violent contrast against the safe, domestic sanctuary of your friends.

You didn't reply.

Your thumb hovered, trembling slightly, before you flipped the device face-down on the table, your pulse hammering against your throat.

Across the city, the silence in the messy designer apartment was just as thick.

Jeongguk didn't throw his phone down when the minutes ticked by without a response. He didn't lock his screen and go back to the conversation with Taehyung. He just sat on the edge of the heavy cutting table, his legs dangling, his  eyes fixed entirely on the glowing interface of his screen.

He was stalking your page. Methodically. Incessantly.

He refreshed the feed, his tatted thumb dragging the screen down over and over, waiting for the little bubble to pop up, waiting for you to reply to him. He didn't care that it was weirdly similar to caring about you, he cared about the silence. But on the third refresh, his sharp eyes caught the shift.

The grid had changed. A specific, rounded icon at the top of your profile was suddenly gone.

You had deleted the highlight with Minho.

Jeongguk's thumb paused on the glass, a slow, predatory spark igniting deep behind his eyes. He didn't need a text message from you to know exactly what you were doing. Right there, under the cover of the evening mist, while sitting in the safety of your best friend's house, you were finally scrubbed clean. You had systematically deleted the digital diary of a man that definitely wasn't for you—wiping away the curated smiles, the fake anniversaries, and the cheap, hollow promises of a fraud.

You were evicting the ghost, pixel by pixel.

A low smirk pulled at the corner of Jeongguk's mouth, tugging on his lip piercing. He didn't wait for your permission. He tapped the text bar and typed out a second message, his dark, heavy thoughts bleeding directly onto the screen.

Back in the kitchen, the phone buzzed a second time against the wood.

j.jk97: let's meet.

You stared at the text, your throat going completely dry. You could feel Jimin's quiet, hyper-observant gaze tracking the sudden stiffness in your shoulders, but your mind was already racing, trapped in the dark gravity of the art building basement.

Why? The question screamed in your head. Why now? Why outside the boundaries of the soundproof room? Why was he breaking the clinical structure of the transaction?

You swallowed hard, your thumb hovering over the glass before you forced a steady breath and typed a single, trembling line into the direct message bar.

y/n_00: The hour ended. We have a deal.

A minute passed. Then two. The low, rhythmic click of Jimin's spoon against his ceramic bowl felt agonizingly loud in the sweet, apple-cinnamon warmth of Sora's kitchen. Beneath the wood table, your fingers tightened around the aluminum edges of your device.

The three dots bloomed, dissolved, and then settled into a single sentence.

j.jk97: i'm parked by the brick pavilion.

You froze.

The brick pavilion. He meant the heavy, covered structure right outside the architecture block back on campus. The realization hit you with a cold jolt: he didn't know where Sora lived.

He had no idea you were across town, tucked away in an apartment that smelled like autumn, trying to piece yourself back together over a bowl of warm broth. He had simply messaged you, assumed you were within his immediate radius, and dropped an ultimatum.

Or so you thought.

If you wanted to see him, you couldn't just slip down a flight of stairs. You would have to actively choose to call a taxi. You would have to slip out of the apartment, book a ride in the dead of night, and travel all the way back to the very campus that had broken you hours ago.

Your chest tightened, a wave of profound hesitation washing over you.

Are you seriously going to do this? The question screamed in your head, sharp and critical. Are you really going to go?

You looked up from the glowing screen. Sora was leaning back in her chair, a soft, sleepy exhaustion washing over her features as she murmured something to Jimin about a morning lecture.

Here, there was safety. There was soup, there were blankets, and there were people who actually valued your heart.

But out there, past the glass of the window, the dark gravity of the art building basement was pulling at the edges of your mind. Jeongguk was sitting in the cold mist, completely unbothered, waiting to see if his influence over you had survived the sixty-minute timer.

Your thumb hovered over the screen, your heart hammering a chaotic, lawless rhythm against your ribs as you stared at his lowercase handle, caught between the warmth of the room and the dangerous, numbing promise of the dark.

You closed your eyes for a brief second, the aluminum edge of your phone digging sharply into your palm.

It was a test. A calculated, silent appraisal of power.

Jeongguk hadn't tracked your location, and he hadn't breached the perimeter of Sora's apartment building. He had simply dropped a pin at the epicenter of your worst day and waited to see if you would gravitate toward it. If you stayed here, wrapped in the apple-cinnamon safety of Sora's kitchen, you kept your dignity. You kept the boundary. You proved that the pact only existed within the sterile, soundproof limits of his studio walls.

But if you called that taxi...

If you spent the money, braved the  fog, and walked back onto that campus just because he typed a four-word sentence, you were giving him something far more dangerous than your body. You were giving him proof.

"Y/N?" Sora's voice drifted over the table, soft and laced with a sleepy, heavy concern. She was looking at you, her brow furrowing slightly as she noticed you hadn't touched your spoon in minutes. "You've been staring at that screen like it's a structural failure. Are you sure you're okay?"

"Yeah," you forced out, the word tasting like ash in your mouth. You slipped the phone face-down onto your thigh, out of sight. "Just... a classmate asking about the project slides for tomorrow. I need to handle it before I forget."

Jimin's eyes narrowed by a fraction of a millimeter. He didn't move, his jaw remaining relaxed, but the sheer intensity of his quiet observation felt like an interrogation. He knew the face you had from a school notification. This wasn't it. He could see the slight, erratic tremor in your hands and the way your breathing had gone entirely shallow. He was practically begging you with his eyes to just speak up, to let him handle whatever was threatening to pull you under again.

But you couldn't. How could you look at Jimin—with his clean, protective loyalty—and tell him that you were secretly mapping out a route back to him?

"I'm just going to go to the bathroom and wash my face," you murmured, pushing back your chair. The legs scraped against the hardwood with a sharp, jarring whine. "My head is just really heavy."

"Take your time, love," Sora said gently, already leaning her head back against the cushion of her chair.

You walked into the narrow hallway, the shadows swallowing you as you stepped out of the amber light of the kitchen. Instead of turning toward the bathroom, you stopped by the coat rack near the front door. Your hands were trembling violently as you pulled up your rideshare app.

Destination: Campus North Gate.

The app whirred, searching for a driver. A little silver car icon popped up on the map, four minutes away. Your thumb hovered over the screen, the weight of the choice pressing down on your chest until you could barely expand your lungs.

This wasn't about sex. This wasn't about the transaction. Jeongguk didn't care about the sixty-minute timer right now, and he certainly hadn't caught a single soft feeling for you. This was a matter of his own ego. He wanted to know if he possessed the slightest bit of influence over you when the physical contact stopped. He wanted to see if you would crawl out of a safe, warm bed and throw yourself into the freezing mist just because he beckoned.

It was humiliating. But he was the only one who got it.

Jeongguk didn't offer comfort. He didn't offer soup or soft words or promises that you would blossom again. But he had been in the wreckage. He knew how to exist in the absolute, frozen center of a storm without breaking. He could handle the sickness of things.

Before your brain could talk you out of it, your thumb pressed the screen.

Ride confirmed.

You quietly grabbed your heavy hoodie from the hook, sliding your arms into the fabric that still faintly carried the sharp, illicit scent of his studio. You didn't look back at the kitchen. You didn't look at Jimin's empty chair. You just turned the deadbolt, the metallic click sounding like a clean fracture, and slipped out into the freezing midnight air.

By the time the car pulled up to the North Gate and idled to a stop, the campus was completely deserted, swallowed by a thick, heavy midnight fog that muffled the sound of the engine.

You paid the driver with numb fingers, stepped out onto the damp pavement, and pulled your hoodie tightly around yourself. The chill cut right through the cotton, but it wasn't the weather that made your teeth chatter. It was the sheer, reckless idiety of what you were doing.

As you rounded the corner toward the brick pavilion, you saw him.

Jeongguk wasn't on his motorcycle. He was leaning against the hood of a heavy, matte-black Mercedes, his arms crossed loosely over his chest. The headlights were cut, but the ambient glow from the pavilion's overhead lamps caught the sharp, dangerous angles of his face and the silver glint of his lip piercing.

The visual hit you like a physical blow to the sternum, forcing a bitter, choked laugh from your throat. It was an insane, twisted parallel. Minho used to wait for you exactly like this. He'd lean against his clean, sensible sedan outside the architecture block, checking his watch, offering that practiced, golden-boy smile the second you walked out of a long critique. Minho had looked like a promise. He had looked like safety.

But Jeongguk? Jeongguk looked like a threat. Standing there in his oversized black hoodie, his hands exposed to the freezing air, his silhouette bleeding into the shadows—he looked like the exact place where promises went to die. Minho had waited for you to give you a curated version of love. Jeongguk had summoned you here just to prove he could.

As your shoes crunched on the gravel, Jeongguk slowly tilted his head up. His dark, unhinged eyes mapped your approach, watching the way you shivered, completely unfazed by the frantic, defensive energy rolling off you.

"You actually came."

There wasn't a trace of warmth in his voice, just a low, dangerous satisfaction.

"Shut up." you snapped, stopping a few feet away from him, your hands shoved so deep into your pockets your knuckles ached. "Don't flatter yourself. I only came because I had to see the look on your face when you realized how pathetic your little power trip is."

A slow, lazy smirk crawled up his face, pulling on his piercing. The familiar, razor-sharp banter—the specific,  frequency that only existed between the two of you—snapped instantly back into place, filling the void between you with a strange, dark electricity.

"Is that why you spent twenty text-less minutes in a taxi?" Jeongguk countered smoothly, stepping away from the car hood. He closed the distance between you with slow, predatory strides until he was towering over you, blocking out the cold wind. "To tell me I'm pathetic? You could've done that from the comfort of whatever cozy bed you ran away from."

"I was eating soup, actually," you fired back, tilting your chin up to look him dead in the eye, refusing to flinch as his shadow enveloped you. "Before you decided to act like a digital stalker. What is this, Jeongguk? The hour ended. The transaction was closed. You don't get to command my presence outside the basement."

"I didn't command anything," he rough-whispered, leaning down just a fraction, his eyes dark and consuming as they locked onto yours. The faint scent of strawberry-mint and cold leather rolled off him, instantly making your head spin. "I dropped a hint. You're the one who booked the ride. You're the one standing in the freezing fog with red eyes, looking at me like I'm the only thing keeping you from collapsing."

"I am not collapsing," you breathed, though your voice trembled just a fraction on the last syllable.

"Sure you aren't," he murmured, his gaze dropping to your mouth before cutting back up to your blown-out pupils. He didn't reach out to touch you sexually. He didn't pull you against him. Instead, he just stared right through your defenses, stripping away the lies you'd been telling yourself all evening. "You deleted the highlight. With Minho."

The name slipped into the air and transformed into a dagger that was aimed at your heart. You didn't dignify the statement with a response.

He had won the gamble, and you both knew it.

He had wanted to see if his influence lived outside the soundproof walls, and you had handed him the proof on a silver platter. It was sickening, a completely toxic realization that you were already hooked on the numbness he provided.

But as you stared at him, the coldness in his jaw seemed to settle into something steady. He didn't mock your vulnerability, and he didn't coddle your grief. He just stood there, a solid, unyielding force in the middle of your ruined world, proving that while everyone else was trying to fix your pieces, he was the only one who could look at the wreckage and not blink.

Jeongguk let out a low, dry breath through his nose, a cloud of pale vapor blooming between you before it was instantly torn apart by the midnight breeze. He didn't look away from your eyes, but his gaze drifted over your shoulder, tracking the way the distant campus streetlamps bled through the heavy, wet fog.

"Look at the lights," he murmured, his deep voice dropping into a raspy, observant cadence. He didn't point, just tilted his chin toward the edge of the pavilion. "The mist tonight. It looks like a shade of burnt orange."

You blinked, the sudden shift from his usual cutting arrogance to an artistic, quiet observation catching you completely off guard. You turned your head slightly, looking at the way the halogen glow from the old architecture building filtered through the thick moisture, turning the air into a dense, rust-colored haze. It looked heavy. It looked suffocating, like a canvas that had been overworked until the colors turned bruised and dirty.

"It looks suffocating," you whispered, the sharp wind biting at your lips. "It looks like the whole campus is under water."

"It's not suffocating," Jeongguk countered smoothly, his eyes cutting back to your face, tracing the sharp line of your jaw in the dim light. "It's just dense. It filters out the background noise. Everything else gets erased when the air gets that heavy. It's practical."

"You find a way to make a toxic fog sound practical," you muttered, a bitter, breathless laugh escaping your throat as you shoved your hands deeper into your hoodie pockets. "Figures."

"I find a way to survive the climate," he said, stepping just a fraction closer, his towering frame cutting off the worst of the wind. "You're the one standing out here pretending you aren't freezing to death just to keep up an attitude."

As if on cue, a violent, uncontrollable shiver wracked your entire body, making your teeth click together. You tried to lock your jaw, tried to force your shoulders to remain rigid and unaffected, but the damp  chill had thoroughly soaked through the thin cotton of your clothes.

Jeongguk's eyes dropped, tracking the slight, erratic tremor in your frame. A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch of irritation crossed his brow, his  expression hardening. He didn't reach out to wrap a hand around your wrist, and he didn't offer you his own heavy hoodie like a conventional gentleman would.

Instead, he turned on his heel, his silver chains clinking sharply as he reached back and pulled open the heavy passenger door of his vehicle.

"Get in," he commanded flatly.

It was a direct order. Typical.

The interior of his car instantly glowed with a dim, moody ambient light, the soft leather seats looking entirely too luxurious for the bleak, gritty courtyard. The low, expensive hum of the climate control was already running, pushing out a wave of dry, enveloping warmth that practically begged you to step inside.

You hesitated for a fraction of a second, your pride warring with the bone-deep exhaustion weighing down your limbs. But the cold was malicious, and the dark gravity of his presence was already a done deal. You pulled your hands out of your pockets and climbed into the high passenger seat, the heavy door closing behind you with a solid, expensive thud that instantly sealed out the rest of the world.

The interior of the Mercedes smelled deeply of him—leather, expensive musk, and that dark, illicit hint of strawberry-mint tobacco.

Jeongguk walked around the hood, his movements fluid and unhurried as he opened the driver's side door and slid into the cockpit. He didn't look at you right away. He just rested his forearms against the steering wheel, his long fingers tapping a slow, rhythmic pattern against the leather.

Sitting there in the  warmth, the realization hit you all over again, settling into your chest like concrete.

He was so violently different from Minho.

The contrast wasn't just in the cars they drove—Minho's sensible, pristine sedan versus Jeongguk's aggressive, blacked-out Mercedes. It was in the very fabric of how they existed in your space. Minho's car had always felt like a stage. When you sat in Minho's passenger seat, there was an unwritten expectation to perform. You had to look a certain way, smile at his jokes, ask about his day, and carefully maintain the clean, perfect image he had designed for the two of you. Minho required your energy to keep his own ego inflated.

But Jeongguk? Jeongguk didn't demand a single thing from you.

He didn't ask you how you were doing, he didn't expect you to be polite, and he didn't need you to put on a face. In his car, you could be entirely ruined. You could sit in the dark, bleeding your silent panic into the expensive leather, and he wouldn't look at you with pity or discomfort. Minho had loved you for the lie you were living; Jeongguk was the only one who seemed entirely comfortable with the truth of your disaster.

"You're staring," Jeongguk murmured, not even turning his head to look at you. His  eyes were fixed on the windshield, watching the burnt orange fog roll against the glass.

"I'm not staring," you lied instantly, your tone automatically snapping back into that bratty, defensive frequency. You shifted in the leather seat, crossing your arms tightly over your chest. "I'm just trying to figure out why someone who claims to be entirely transactional is currently running up his gas mileage to sit in a parking lot with me."

"I told you," he said, a faint, lazy smirk tugging at his lip piercing. "I wanted to see if you'd come. And you did."

"Because I'm an idiot," you muttered, cutting your eyes back toward the side window. The glass was entirely fogged up now, thick condensation turning the streetlamps outside into smeared, bleeding halos of rust. "A literal, textbook masochist. I should be in bed right now. I was actually warm."

"You were freezing when you walked up to my car," Jeongguk countered smoothly, his tone low and even as he shifted his weight. The dark leather of the driver's seat creaked beneath him, a heavy, expensive sound that filled the quiet cockpit. He didn't sound triumphant or smug; he just stated it like a cold, architectural fact. "Your teeth were chattering."

"That was from anger, not the cold."

"Sure." He finally turned his head, his dark, sharp gaze dropping down to watch the way your hands were still tightly clenched against your ribs. "That's why your shoulders are still up to your ears."

Before you could fire back another sharp, bratty retort, Jeongguk reached out. His finger clicked a button on the sleek console, and the low hum of the climate control shifted, a steady, intentional stream of hot air blowing directly into the passenger footwell, melting the chill right out of your damp shoes.

The immediate, enveloping warmth made the defensive bite in your throat dissolve before you could stop it. You let out a quiet, defeated breath, your shoulders finally dropping an inch.

The silence that settled over the car wasn't like the heavy, clinical vacuum of the soundproof studio. It felt different—vaguely nostalgic, pulling your mind back to weeks  ago, long before the chaotic breakdown and the dark, transactional pact you'd signed earlier today.

There had been a day on the far edge of the campus benches, where the two of you had just sat in the talked.

No performance, no masks. Just two people trading rough, cynical observations about nothings. About colors. About his weekends when he was 10. About your car revving maroon top.

"The highlight," you breathed softly into the dark, the admission slipping out before your brain could build the wall back up. "I deleted it because looking at it made me feel like I was actively participating in a lie. I just... I couldn't look at his face anymore."

Jeongguk stopped tapping his thumb against the leather steering wheel. He didn't offer a shallow platitude, and he didn't tell you it was going to be okay. He despised Minho too much for fake sympathy, and he respected your intelligence too much to feed you cheap comfort.

"Good," he said, his deep baritone dropping into a raw, raspy resonance that felt entirely too close in the violet shadows of the dashboard. He leaned his elbow on the center console, turning his upper body toward you. "He didn't deserve the real estate on your page anyway. You're better off empty."

"It feels heavy," you whispered, your voice cracking just a fraction as you stared at the glowing  lights of the dashboard. "Being empty."

Jeongguk didn't answer right away. He reached out, his hand moving with a slow, deliberate discipline that gave you every opportunity to pull back, to demand the clinical boundaries of your deal. But you didn't move. His thumb, slightly rough and smelling faintly of tobacco and cold metal, hooked gently under your chin, tilting your face up until you had no choice but to look into his unhinged, deep eyes.

He just held you there, his grip steady and unyielding, anchoring you in the middle of your ruined world.

"I told you," Jeongguk murmured, his thumb brushing against the line of your jaw, his gaze mapping out the raw, exhausted reality of your face. "The air is dense tonight. It filters out the noise. Let it be empty for a while. I can handle the weight."

He took his hand back slowly, his thumb trailing off your skin with a lingering, heavy drag that left a patch of intense warmth behind. He slid back into his side of the cockpit, his large frame relaxing against the leather as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his lighter.

He didn't spark it. He just flipped the heavy metal casing open and closed, a steady, rhythmic click-snap filling the quiet  interior.

"So," Jeongguk began, his voice dropping a register, sounding casually detached but carrying that sharp, engineering focus that noticed everything. "Sora and Jimin. They're babysitting you through this?"

You swallowed the small lump in your throat, leaning your head back against the headrest, your eyes tracking the small orange flame as he finally flicked the lighter alive for a brief second before snapping it shut. "They're not babysitting me. They're just... being good friends. They care."

"Right. Friends," he echoed, a dry, cynical tilt to his mouth. He knew exactly what Jimin's protective frequency looked like, and he knew how much your circle wanted to shelter you from the ugly parts of this breakup. But Jeongguk also knew you had run straight out of that shelter the moment he gave you a destination. "They think you're sleeping in the bathroom right now or what?"

"They think I'm clearing my head," you muttered, cutting your eyes over to him, the bratty edge returning to your voice just to cover up the sudden vulnerability. "Which I was. Until you decided to drag me out into a parking lot to analyze my social media habits."

Jeongguk let out a low, rough chuckle that vibrated deep in his chest. He stopped flipping the lighter, sliding it back into his pocket as he leaned his head back against his seat, turning his face to look at you in the dim, moody light. His eyes narrowed slightly, a sudden, wicked spark dancing behind his pupils—the exact, unhinged look he got right before he dismantled your composure.

"You know," he murmured, his lip piercing catching a glint of violet as a slow, dangerous smirk stretched across his face. "Taehyung was talking a lot of shit earlier about how immaculate and proper you and Minho used to be. Said the two of you looked like a goddamn university brochure."

You frowned, your chest tightening slightly at the mention of the ghost you had just deleted. "What's your point, Jeongguk?"

"I'm just saying, as bad as he was for you, you put up quite the reputation."

"So...?"

Jeongguk leaned in just an inch closer, his gaze dropping to the leather console between you before lifting back up to lock onto yours with absolute amusement.

"So," he rough-whispered, the cadence of his voice turning entirely dark and provocative. "Is it real you've never fucked in the car?"

chapter 13

friction and inertia

Synopsis; one lives in a world under the weight of shadows the other lives in a world that screams.

"The sky is blue like Sacrifice by Elton John"

warnings; swearing, heavy themes pairing; jeongguk × female reader genre; angst, slowburn, smut, fwb word count; 11.1k

a/n: ohmygod. it's here. i've been waiting to write and publish this for the longest time haha!!

fasten your seatbelts, lock the door, and grab a glass of ice water. jeongguk said the studio was soundproof, which is great, because you guys are going to need to scream. yes there is smut in this. you've been warned!!

—

"We broke up."

The words tasted like acid against your tongue.

The cafe's background noise—the sharp hiss of the espresso machine, the clinking of porcelain—seemed to instantly vanish under the sudden, suffocating weight of Jimin's gaze. Sora froze, her coffee cup hovering halfway to her mouth.

"What?" Sora whispered, her eyes widening. "What do you mean, you broke up? You guys were fine yesterday."

"He was cheating," you forced out.

You kept your voice level, entirely flat. You anchored your hands firmly in your lap so they wouldn't see the slight tremor in your fingers.

You didn't give details. You didn't mention Irina, or the precision of Minho's hands, or the way your ribs had felt like they were collapsing into your lungs just twelve hours ago. You gave them the bare minimum—a clean, digestible heartbreak.

Sora's face went entirely pale before a dark, dangerous flush crept up her neck.

"With who? Since when? I'm going to kill him. I swear to God, I'm going to his apartment right now—"

"Sora, stop," Jimin cut in. His voice was low, his sharp eyes locked onto your face with a terrifyingly intuitive intensity. He looked fiercely protective as his hand reached across the table to cover your cold knuckles. "Let her breathe. Look at her."

You leaned into Jimin's touch just enough to play the part, letting your shoulders drop as if the weight of the confession had broken your spine.

As they kept talking—Sora's voice rising in a sharp, appalled cadence in the background, Jimin murmuring his quiet, steady counterpoints—the world outside the cafe patio seemed to drift into a blur.

A sudden, sharp gust of  wind swept over the outdoor seating, catching the damp ends of your hair and whipping them across your face.

The movement released a heavy, concentrated burst of the gardenia shampoo you had fished out from the bottom of the trash can.

If Minho can lie, you can use the good shampoo.

It bloomed in the cold air—thick and sweet and intoxicatingly loud. It completely enveloped you, drowning out the faint, lingering scent of Minho's cologne. It didn't smell like safety anymore. It smelled raw. It smelled like an invitation.

You've officially washed any lingering scent of your past lover.

It hurts.

As you stared blankly at the rim of your mug, your mind began thoroughly chewing on the reality of the deal you had made.

Was it actually a good idea?

The rational, stable part of you—the part that belonged here, sitting with friends who cared about you—knew it was insane. It was a dark, dangerous gamble. You were stepping off a cliff with a man who didn't offer safety nets, only exit ramps.

But as you stared down at Jimin's hand over your knuckles, your throat tightened with a deeper, uglier question.

Could you even do this? Could you actually be intimate with another person right now?

The mere thought of a normal, soft touch made your stomach turn. The idea of someone trying to gently heal you, or kiss you with pity after what had happened, felt entirely impossible. Your body felt like glass that had already shattered, you couldn't be handled with care.

Maybe that was exactly why your skin wasn't rejecting the thought of him. He didn't want to fix the pieces, he just wanted to manage the chaos.

Every time you closed your eyes to blink against the wind, the image of Jeongguk sitting in that dark leather chair—his unhinged, dark pupils tracking the movement of your bruised mouth—flickered behind your eyes.

The next time the loop starts running, you know where the studio is.

"...right?" Sora's voice broke through the fog, eyes full of frantic sympathy. "You shouldn't be alone tonight. You should stay at my place."

You looked between her and Jimin, the weight of their concern pressing hard against your ribs. You couldn't face your apartment yet. You couldn't face the quiet.

"Okay," you breathed, managing a small, tired nod. "Yeah. I'll stay with you."

Sora immediately let out a breath of relief, her shoulders dropping. "Good. I'll make that soup you like, and we can just shut the world out."

But first, you had to survive the rest of the day. You had to live.

Sora leaned back against her chair, her fingers nervously tapping the table. She was clearly trying to find a wedge to break the suffocating silence, her mind searching for any topic that didn't involve Minho's ghost.

"Honestly, at least the weekend wasn't a total bust," Sora murmured, a small, genuine soften in her expression before it quickly shifted to a deep scowl. "I mean, Taehyung is great. He's genuinely sweet. But that Jungleguk motherfucker? I seriously cannot stand him. He is too arrogant."

Jimin let out a low chuckle, shifting his weight against the back of the chair.

He liked Taehyung. He knew him.

He liked Jeongguk. But he didn't know him.

"Jeongguk's alright," Jimin offered, a slight note of limitation in his voice. "He's fine when he's just standing on his own, doing his own thing. But honestly? I don't know what to think about him when it comes to you. He operates on a completely different frequency, and it makes me uneasy."

Hearing his name drop into the crisp afternoon air sent a sudden, sharp spike of heat straight beneath your collarbone.

"Yeah," you murmured, keeping your voice level and entirely hollow as you stared down at your lap. "He is... different."

As their voices kept moving in the background—Sora still ranting about why exactly Jeongguk rubbed her the wrong way, Jimin defending him with careful boundaries—your mind completely derailed.

You couldn't help it. Your thoughts drifted straight back to the blue-lit vacuum of the studio last night, replaying the exact pressure of Jeongguk's mouth against yours.

It was... different.

Not in a bad way.

Just entirely foreign.

With Minho, intimacy had always been carefully packaged as "safe." His touches were gentle, predictable, and polite. Kissing Minho was like stepping into a well-lit, sterile room where you knew exactly where everything belonged. It was comfortable. It was the kind of safety that made you feel tucked in, shielded from the world.

But Jeongguk's kiss didn't care about your comfort. It was daring.

It felt like a deliberate, lawless collision. There was a raw, unhinged edge to the way his hand had anchored the back of your neck, demanding your absolute presence without a single ounce of pity or caution. He wasn't trying to handle you like fragile glass or help you piece yourself back together. He was just pulling you directly into the dark with him.

And looking down at your trembling fingers, you realized the most terrifying part.

Safe had left you completely ruined. Daring was the only thing loud enough to make you forget.

"Hey," Sora's voice gently tapped against the fog in your head. Her hand waved slightly across your line of sight. "You still with us, babe?"

"Yeah," you lied softly, clearing the tightness from your throat as you forced a synthetic smile and reached for your bag. "Just... realizing how much stuff I actually have to cancel today if I'm staying over at your place."

You stood up from the table, needing the physical movement before the secret inside your chest could bleed through your expression.

As you reached for your jacket, a cold, heavy wave of guilt suddenly crashed straight through your ribs, hitting you so hard it made you slightly breathless.

You had just agreed to the deal. You had practically signed a contract to touch, to use, and to be used by a man your best friend utterly despised probably for good reason.

He's arrogant and direct and doesn't care about he how delivers information.

Even if the information is correct.

It was correct.

A hollow, twisting anxiety settled deep in your stomach, instantly feeding the toxic spiral of low self-esteem that Minho's betrayal had left behind.

Was something deeply wrong with you?

Were you just a bad person?

You just broke up.

The ink on the ending of your relationship wasn't even dry yet, and here you were, already anchoring your survival to a lawless, transactional pact in a dark studio.

You felt cheap. You felt fractured and impulsive, like a stray wire throwing sparks in the dark.

But then your mind flashed back to the precision of Minho's hands, to the agonizing reality that he had been the one to shatter the rules first.

He had cheated.

He had systematically dismantled your worth while you were busy trying to be his version of perfect.

You weren't looking for a rebound. You weren't looking to heal. You were just trying to survive the suffocating weight of the quiet, and Jeongguk was the only one who had offered an exit ramp without forcing you to explain the wreckage. Because he knew why.

He told you.

The sky was Sacrifice by Elton John.

Did Minho steal the gold chime in the color of your eyes or was it buried deep under tears of yesterday?

"Hey," Jimin's low, steady voice broke through your thoughts as he stood up beside you, evaluating the sudden paleness of your face. "You okay to walk to campus? We can take a cab if you're feeling dizzy."

"No, I'm okay," you lied softly, adjusting the strap of your bag to anchor yourself. "The walk will be good for me. I just need to send these messages first."

You pulled out your phone as the three of you began heading toward the exit, your fingers trembling slightly as you opened your email app.

First, you typed out a polite, formal message to Mr. Zhang, canceling your evening appointment and requesting to reschedule. The digital click of the send button sounded like a tiny, sharp snap in the quiet of your mind.

Next, you pulled up the tutoring coordinator's contact. It felt like a fresh sting of failure, but there was absolutely no way you could put on a bright, patient smile for a room of energetic eight-year-olds when your own head was a lawless mess. You sent a generic excuse about a sudden fever, watching the confirmation bubble pop up with a heavy dose of shame.

By the time you locked your screen, the three of you were crossing the threshold onto the university campus grid lines, the sprawling concrete plaza swarming with students who had absolutely no idea your entire world had turned into a classified file.

Sora and Jimin walked you as far as the humanities building, their heavy presence on either side of you acting like a temporary shield against the crisp autumn air.

"We'll meet you right back here at the fountain the second your seminars are done, okay?" Sora reminded you, her fingers hooking briefly into the sleeve of your jacket to ground you. "Don't check out on us."

"I won't," you lied, offering a tight, practiced nod that seemed to satisfy her enough to let go.

The moment you pulled open the heavy glass doors of the lecture hall, the wall of over-circulated, suffocating heat hit you.

The room was massive, an amphitheater of steep tiered seating rapidly filling with the rhythmic clatter of plastic theater seats flipping down, the collective zippers of hundreds of backpacks, and the aggressive clicking of laptops waking up.

You climbed the stairs to the very back row, deliberately seeking out the highest, darkest corner of the room. You needed the distance. You needed to look down at the crowd rather than be a part of it.

When you sat down, you pulled your laptop from your bag, opened a blank document, and stared at the blinking black cursor.

For the next ninety minutes, the professor's voice became nothing more than a low, droning frequency bouncing off the acoustic panels of the ceiling.

You tried to take notes. You forced your fingers to type out phrases like structural methodology and historical framework, but the words looked completely hollow on the screen, like a language you used to speak before your ribs were crushed.

Instead, your eyes kept tracking the digital clock in the bottom right corner of your desktop.

2:14 PM.

2:19 PM.

2:27 PM.

Tick-tock. Seconds passing. Time pouring.

Too fucking slow.

Every minute felt like a grueling, physical climb through wet cement. Your anxiety was a living, breathing thing inside your chest, a tight coil that tightened every time you blinked.

The internal spiral of low esteem was relentless, chewing away at whatever confidence you had left.

Was something fundamentally broken in you? Were you actually a bad person for what you had done in that blue-lit studio?

Normal, good people grieved. They went home, they cried into blankets, and they let their friends handle them with care.

But you? You had gone to a lawless vacuum.

And as the professor finally dismissed the class, the echoing roar of hundreds of students packing up their things drowned out the thoughts, leaving you completely numb as you headed down the stairs toward the library.

The third floor of the library was a stark contrast to the lecture hall—quiet, sterile, and smelling of old paper and industrial carpet cleaner.

You found your group project mates already huddled around a long wooden table covered in highlighters, printed rubrics, and half-empty energy drinks.

Sour cherry and lime.

Yikes. Not even energy drinks give you a break.

"Finally,"  Paul muttered, not looking up from his tablet as you pulled out a chair. "We're trying to lock down the media presentation structure before the deadline next week, and the rubric is completely brutal."

"Sorry," you murmured, opening your laptop and sliding into the empty space between them. "I'm here. What do we have left?"

"Just the audio-visual framework and the final summary slides," Minji sighed, rubbing her temples. She looked exhausted, her eyes wide as she turned her screen toward the group. "But honestly, everything I'm finding for the modern sound design section feels so generic. We need something that actually feels contemporary, or the department head is going to tank our grade."

Logan leaned back in his chair, locking his hands behind his head as a sudden, eager spark lit up his face.

"If you want contemporary sound design, we should just analyze the gala track," Logan suggested, knocking his knuckles against the wood of the table. "Have you guys heard the rumors? The art department's annual gala is in less than a week, and it's supposed to be massive this year."

Minji's eyes perked up. "Wait, the one at the gallery downtown? Did they finally announce who's handling the production?"

"Yeah, it leaked this morning," Logan said, a grin spreading across his face. "This guy Jeongguk is doing the official remix for the opening showcase. Apparently, it's some heavily guarded, totally unhinged electronic set. The department spent half their budget just to secure him for it."

Your fingers instantly froze over your keyboard.

The sudden drop of his name in the middle of a sterile library table felt like a physical blow to your sternum. The heat from earlier flushed right back up your neck, hot and suffocating.

"Jeongguk?" Minji repeated, her brows furrowing as she chewed on the cap of her pen. "As in Amaranth?"

Logan nodded quickly. "Yeah, him."

"God, he's so elusive. His stuff is brilliant, but he's such an arrogant asshole to deal with. My roommate tried to interview him for the campus paper last semester and he completely blew her off without even looking up from his console."

Love-lies-bleeding. Amaranth. His tag name.

"Who cares if he's a jerk? The guy is a genius," Logan countered, tapping his phone screen. "Everyone is talking about it. It's the biggest event of the semester. Honestly, having that gala looming over this boring month is the only thing I'm actually looking forward to right now."

"True," Paul chimed in, finally looking up. "If we can somehow tie his production style into our final slides as a case study, the professor will probably give us an automatic A."

As they kept talking, their voices shifting into a debate about how to break down his mixing techniques, the air in your lungs turned to ice.

It was looming. He was looming. He was everywhere.

The very man you had made a secret deal with last night was a campus legend, an unattainable force that your classmates were treating like some untouchable god of sound design. They were stressing over grades and slide layouts, looking forward to a fancy gala, completely oblivious to the fact that the man they were analyzing had his thumb pressed firmly against your neck.

That he had kissed you.

You stared at your screen, the letters blurring together as the memory of his daring, unhinged mouth flashed behind your eyes again.

You were in his orbit now. There was no escaping it.

Minji sighed, pulling up a shared document on her screen and turning it toward the center of the table. "We can't just throw him in there for extra credit, Paul. Our entire thesis is supposed to focus on the preservation and replication of acoustic environments in historical spaces. We're restoration majors, not media critics."

"But that's exactly why Amaranth works," Logan argued, leaning forward, his eyes bright with the debate. "Think about it. The gala opening downtown isn't just a concert. The gallery is a converted industrial warehouse from the early twenties. The concrete walls, the high iron rafters, the exposed brick—the acoustics in there are an absolute nightmare for sound clarity."

He swiped on his phone, pulling up a leaked schematic of the venue.

"Jeongguk isn't just playing a track. Rumor has it he's using digital mapping to actively counteract the structural echoes of the warehouse, blending industrial noise with classical ambient tones. He's literally doing sound restoration in real-time, matching the history of the building to the frequencies he uses."

You sat perfectly still, your hands resting flat on the cold wood of the table to hide the way your fingers were vibrating.

"Y/N, what do you think?" Minji turned her head toward you, her brows slightly furrowed in concern. "You've been quiet. For our section on the 19th-century theater acoustics replication, do you think we can draw a parallel to how modern artists treat industrial spaces, or should we stick strictly to the physical plaster and wood restoration models?"

The question hung in the air, forcing you to drag your mind out of the blue-lit basements and back into the sterile light of the library.

"I think..." You cleared the sudden tightness from your throat, forcing your voice to sound analytical, professional—the version of yourself you had spent years cultivating. "I think the parallel works if we focus on the integrity of the space. We shouldn't try to change the cracks in the stone; we work around them to preserve the original resonance. If he's using digital frequencies to fill the void of the industrial warehouse without altering the brickwork, it's the same principle."

"Exactly!" Logan snapped his fingers, pointing at you. "See? It's a conceptual mirror. The department head will love that."

" Fine," Minji conceded, though she still looked skeptical as her fingers flew across her keyboard, updating the presentation outline. "We'll add a case study slide on modern industrial acoustic mapping. Yo,Y/N, since you already have the notes on the physical materials side, can you take the lead on drafting the introductory summary for that section?"

"Yeah," you murmured, staring at the cursor blinking inside the shared document. "I can do that."

"Great. Let's lock down the specific timeline for the slides," Paul said, pulling up the assignment rubric. "The presentation is due next Wednesday, but we need everything finalized for peer review by Friday afternoon. We're running out of time, and with the gala looming at the end of the month, the campus is going to be completely chaotic."

You nodded mechanically, typing a few placeholder lines into the document.

Preservation of original resonance.

Non-invasive acoustic interventions.

Every term you wrote felt like a twisted metaphor for your own life.

You were trying so hard to maintain your outer framework, to look like a dedicated  student, while the internal structure of your world was completely hollowed out.

The meeting dragged on for another forty minutes. Paul and Logan argued over the formatting of the bibliography, while Minji meticulously checked the image resolutions for the architectural diagrams.

You played your part flawlessly. You chimed in when necessary, adjusted a few sentences in your assigned section, and kept a polite, distant smile plastered on your face.

But beneath the table, your phone remained dark. No messages from Minho. The complete, heavy silence of the breakup was starting to settle into a cold, permanent reality. He wasn't going to call. He wasn't going to explain. He was simply gone, leaving you with the suffocating aftermath of his betrayal.

When Paul finally closed his laptop and announced that they were done for the day, the relief that washed over you was almost sickening.

"Okay, fire." Logan chimed.

"See you guys tomorrow in the lab," Minji said, packing her bag and giving you a small, encouraging smile. "Get some rest, Y/N. You look a little pale today."

"I will," you lied softly, hoisting the strap of your bag onto your shoulder as the group began to disperse.

You left the third floor of the library alone, deliberately letting Paul, Logan, and Minji take the elevators while you opted for the concrete stairwell. You needed the isolation, even if it was just for a few flights of stairs.

When you stepped out of the library building, the crisp afternoon air hit your face, catching the strands of your hair and bringing forward the faint, clean scent of your gardenia shampoo.

You had an hour to kill before you were supposed to meet Sora and Jimin back at the humanities fountain.

Instead of heading toward the student center or a crowded cafe, you found yourself walking aimlessly through the older quadrant of the campus. This part of the university was filled with gothic-style architecture—heavy stone facades, arched entryways, and weathered brick walls that always smelled faintly of damp earth and ivy.

Usually, walking among these buildings grounded you; it reminded you of why you had chosen restoration in the first place—the desire to protect things that time had tried to wear away.

But today it felt useless. Rome wasn't built in a day but it did fall in one. So what's the point?

The hour of isolation you had carved out was supposed to be a reprieve, a small pocket of time to reconstruct your walls before you had to look Sora and Jimin in the eye again.

Instead, it was just a long, agonizing corridor of echoes.

You turned the corner of the courtyard, your boots crunching quietly against the stray gravel lining the path. The sun was filtering through the high glass atrium of the neighboring fine arts pavilion, casting long, geometric shadows across the stone floor. You kept your eyes down, tracking the line of your own shadow, desperately wishing you could just dissolve into it.

Then, a voice broke the quiet.

"Y/N?"

The sound of your name wasn't loud, but it hit you like an electric current delivered straight to the base of your skull. Your entire body went rigid. The faint, clean scent of gardenia shampoo suddenly felt like an iron collar around your throat.

You didn't want to look up. Every survival instinct you had left screamed at you to keep your chin tucked, to turn on your heel and sprint toward the crowded library elevators. But your head moved on its own, a slow, mechanical rotation that forced your eyes across the narrow courtyard.

Irina was standing less than ten feet away.

She looked exactly like she always did—effortlessly integrated into the campus environment, a thick charcoal scarf looped loosely around her neck, carrying a leather portfolio under one arm. She looked whole. She didn't look like someone who had spent the last twenty-four hours carrying a torch through another person's life.

She took a small, hesitant step forward, her fingers tightening around the edge of her portfolio. There was an expression on her face that made your stomach turn—a soft, careful look of concern that felt entirely unearned.

"Y/N, wait," she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, confidential register she used whenever she wanted to sound gentle. "Please. I didn't think I'd see you here today. I wanted to talk to you...about yesterday."

The precision of Minho's hands. The familiar layout of his apartment, suddenly made grotesque and alien because she was probably inside it.

The sterile, polite way he had broken the rules while you were busy trying to preserve them.

The memories didn't flash behind your eyes—they felt like they were happening right now, in real-time, overlaying themselves onto the grey stone of the courtyard until you couldn't tell where the wreckage ended and the university began.

Your chest tightened, a sharp, white-hot line of anxiety slicing straight through your ribs. You couldn't breathe. The air in the courtyard felt forty degrees hotter than it had a second ago, thick and choking.

Irina took another step, her leather boots clicking against the gravel. She reached out a hand, her fingers extending toward your sleeve as if she had any right to ground you.

"Look, Minho and I... it's complicated," she started, her eyes wide with a desperate need to explain away the rot.

"It wasn't supposed to happen like that. If you just let me tell you what happened—"

"Don't."

The word came out of you before she could finish, but it wasn't a shout. It was a low, jagged vibration that barely cleared your teeth—flat, hollow, and laced with a terrifying finality that made her hand freeze mid-air.

You didn't recognize your own voice. It sounded like the dead space between radio stations, empty and cold.

Irina's mouth remained slightly open, her fingers hovering a few inches from your arm.

"Y/N, please. We've known each other for three years. You can't just—"

"Don't speak to me, Irina," you whispered, your hands balling into fists inside your coat pockets until your nails bit into your palms. You needed the pain to keep from completely dissociating right there on the gravel. "Don't look at me. Don't say my name. Just... don't."

The look of shock that crossed her face should have given you some small sense of satisfaction, but you felt entirely numb. You couldn't look at her for another second without vomiting up the sheer volume of anxiety rising in your throat.

Without waiting for her to drop another syllable, you turned your back on her.

You didn't walk toward the humanities fountain where Sora and Jimin will be there for you. You couldn't.

If you went to them now, Sora would see the phantom print of Irina's voice on your face. They would handle you with sympathy, they would take you to the apartment, they would feed you soup and try to cushion the fall with soft blankets and gentle words.

They would try to make you feel safe.

But safe was a lie. Safe was the sterile room Minho had kept you in while he dismantled your worth from the inside out.

Your legs moved faster, your shoes pounding against the concrete plaza as you bypassed the main exit entirely, heading straight for the perimeter of the campus grid lines. Your heart was hammering an unhinged, lawless rhythm against your ribs, the toxic spiral of low self-esteem whispering that you were already ruined, that you were cheap, that you had already crossed a line you could never walk back from.

The next time the loop starts running, you know where the studio is.

The daylight was already beginning to die, the horizon bleeding out into that cold, bruised gray color as you descended the concrete steps into the depths of the music department.

Your lungs felt raw, still suffocating under the weight of Irina's voice, your chest tight with a frantic need to just stop existing in the clean, safe world that had discarded you.

But the moment your fingers wrapped around the heavy brass handle of the studio door, the adrenaline vaporized.

A sudden, paralyzing wave of shyness hit you, anchoring your feet straight to the floorboards. Your throat went completely dry. The wild, reckless impulse that had carried you all the way across the campus suddenly felt terrifyingly real.

Wow. You are really doing this.

You were standing at the threshold of a pact about to hand your body over to a man who was practically a dangerous stranger.

What if he kills you?

What if he doesn't?

You pushed the door open slowly, the heavy soundproof vacuum instantly swallowing the muffled noise of the city outside.

The studio was washed in its signature midnight state—suffocatingly dim, quiet, and completely illuminated by the cold, electric glare of his dual monitors. Jeongguk was exactly where you had left him. He was slouched low in his dark leather chair, a black oversized hoodie pulled up over his head, shielding his face in shadow. His long fingers were resting idly against the master faders of the mixing console, tapping a silent, erratic rhythm.

He didn't turn around when the door clicked shut. He didn't even blink.

"7 hours," Jeongguk rough-whispered into the quiet room, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that instantly made your heart spike. A dark, humorless curve touched the corner of his mouth as he tracked your position purely by the sound of your uneven breathing. "You lasted longer than I thought you would, Void."

You stayed frozen against the door, your hands gripping the straps of your backpack like a shield. You felt incredibly small beneath the high, acoustic-paneled ceiling, your skin hot with a mix of anxiety and sudden, crushing vulnerability.

You had no remark in this moment.

Like the cat got your tongue.

Jeongguk finally spun his chair around. The blue light from the screens caught the sharp angle of his jaw, the dark, unhinged depth of his pupils tracking your pale face and the slight tremor in your jaw. He looked as arrogant as ever—completely detached, fully aware of the power he held in this vacuum, and entirely unfazed by the wreckage written all over your expression.

He didn't mock you, though. For all his cold arrogance, there was a steady, deliberate calm in the way he stood up from the chair. He didn't rush your space. He closed the distance between you with slow, measured steps, his heavy boots making no sound against the studio floor.

Like a cat.

He stopped just a foot away, his towering frame completely blocking out the glare of the monitors, casting you in his shadow. Without a word, his tatted hand reached out. His fingers didn't touch your skin—instead, he gently took the heavy strap of your backpack, sliding it off your shoulder with careful precision, before reaching for the other side. He set the bag down on the sofa behind you, treating you with a quiet, grounding discipline that felt entirely steady.

"I have to leave soon," you whispered, your voice cracking slightly under the weight of his proximity. You forced yourself to look up, meeting the anarchic dark of his eyes. "We only have one hour."

Jeongguk's left brow twitched upward, a slow, dangerous tilt of his head as he looked down at your bruised, trembling mouth.

"One?" he repeated, the word dropping between you in a low, gravelly drawl.

"Because I have to meet Sora and Jimin," you murmured, the talk about your schedule tasting like cotton on your tongue, though the sheer panic of being caught in this dark transaction was real enough.

Jeongguk didn't blink. He took one step closer, invading your space until the faint scent of his musk, leather and something oddly sweet today completely choked out the trace of gardenia on your collarbone.

Strawberry?

His hand rose, his long, calloused fingers wrapping firmly around the back of your neck—not rough, but with that same daring, absolute authority that left no room for retreat.

"I'll manage," he rough-whispered against your lips, his thumb pressing just hard enough against your pulse point to make the loop in your head completely die.

His thumb stroked the side of your neck, a slow, calloused sweep that ground you completely into the present. He was incredibly soft with you.

He leaned down just a fraction more, his nose tilting into the curve of your jaw, inhaling deeply. A faint, knowing smirk touched his lips in the dim blue light of the monitors.

"You changed it back," he murmured, his breath hot against your skin.

"Changed what?" you breathed.

"You know what."

He noticed it. Of course.

Quiet. Silence.

He noticed again.

"I'm glad though, suits you better anyways."

For all the cold defiance he projected to the rest of the world, his touch didn't have a single drop of violence or rush in it. It was disciplined. Deliberate. He handled you with the absolute precision of a master artisan working with a highly unstable, fragile material—knowing exactly how much pressure to apply so you wouldn't shatter under his palms.

Jeongguk didn't say another word, giving you a quiet, heavy moment to change your mind. When you didn't pull back, his other hand settled against your waist, the wide texture of his palm warm and unyielding right through the thin cotton of your shirt.

Then, he leaned down and closed the final inch between you.

The first point of contact was the sudden, biting chill of his  piercing. The cold metal pressed right against the corner of your bottom lip, a stark, freezing shock that sent a violent wave of electricity straight to your core.

Your breath hitched, a soft gasp escaping your throat, and Jeongguk immediately used the distraction to deepen the collision.

His lips were surprisingly smooth, a plush, heavy texture that caught against the raw, chapped edges of your own mouth. He wasn't aggressive, but he was entirely unyielding—parting your lips with a slow, commanding swipe of his tongue that tasted faintly of sweet, minty fruits. It was a clean, sharp flavor that instantly cut through the stale, suffocating air of the university courtyard still lingering in the back of your throat.

You let your eyes close, grateful for the familiar darkness that always leveled your world.

Your entire universe narrowed down to the raw, tactile mapping of his body against yours.

The heavy, coarse weave of his black cotton hoodie beneath your trembling fingers.

The scratchy friction of the silver chains looping around his neck as you unconsciously reached up to anchor yourself.

The blunt, solid pressure of his tatted knuckles sliding up your jawline, holding your head at an angle that left you completely exposed to him.

Jeongguk didn't inspect. He possessed. He was a soft, obstinate weight that simply took over the space where your panic used to live, replacing the toxic spiral of your low self-esteem with the sheer, undeniable reality of his hands on your skin. He wasn't trying to heal you, and that was exactly why it worked. He was just managing the chaos, taking the wheel while you finally let yourself drop into the dark vacuum.

He broke the kiss for a fraction of a second, his lips dragging slowly across your cheek to find the sensitive skin right beneath your ear. His hot, mint-laced breath fanned over your neck, making your knees instantly buckle.

But you didn't fall. Jeongguk's arm tightened around your waist, hoisting you effortlessly against the solid, unmoving wall of his chest.

"I've got you," he rough-whispered against your pulse point, his teeth grazing the skin just enough to leave a stinging promise. "Keep your eyes shut, Void. I'll handle the clock."

His hand slid down from your waist, the wide, heavy plane of his palm mapping the curve of your hip before his fingers hooked into the waistband of your jeans. He didn't pull or jerk; he just applied a steady, grounding downward pressure that forced you to step even closer, until your thighs flushed completely flat against his.

"Open your mouth a little more for me," Jeongguk murmured against your lips, his voice a low, physical vibration that left no room for hesitation.

You obeyed instantly, a soft, involuntary whimper escaping the back of your throat as his tongue swept back in. The sound was small, raw, and entirely pathetic, echoing loudly in the soundproof vacuum of the room.

Jeongguk caught the sound directly in his mouth. A low hum of approval rumbled deep in his chest, the vibration transferring straight into your lips. His touch remained agonizingly soft, but there was an absolute authority in the way he guided you. His fingers unhooked from your waistband, his palm sliding up the bare skin of your stomach beneath your shirt. His hand was warm, slightly calloused, and large enough to completely cover your ribs.

"You're shaking," he rough-whispered, breaking the kiss just enough to brush his lips down to your jawline. His cold lip piercing dragged a sharp, electric trail along your sensitive skin, making you shiver hard against him. "Look at how much you're vibrating. Do you feel that?"

"Yes," you breathed, your fingers desperately clutching the heavy, coarse cotton of his hoodie to keep your knees from giving out.

"Say it properly," he commanded softly, his hand sliding higher, his thumb tracing the soft underside of your breast with a agonizingly slow, deliberate stroke. He wasn't rushing you, but he was completely taking over. "Tell me exactly what you feel."

"I feel... your hands," you whispered, another ragged whimper clipping your breath as his thumb brushed over the sensitive peak of your skin through your bra.

You could slap yourself for how easy you've given yourself.

But his hands.

"And do you like it?" Jeongguk's voice was steady, conversational, and entirely arrogant, yet the way his fingers cradled your ribcage was incredibly gentle. He was looking for your voice, demanding your presence in the dark. "You have to tell me. If you don't talk to me, I don't know how hard I can press."

"I like it," you confessed, the admission slipping out in a broken rush. You leaned your forehead against his shoulder, letting the dark vacuum completely swallow the leftover image of Irina and the suffocating guilt of the university courtyard. "Please, Jeongguk."

"Please what?" he asked, his teeth grazing the soft slope where your neck met your shoulder, biting just enough to make you gasp before his tongue immediately licked the sting away. "Be specific, Void. We only have an hour, remember? Don't waste the clock being shy."

His hand moved down to the button of your jeans, his tatted knuckles brushing against your skin as he popped it open with a single, practiced motion. The slow, metallic slide of your zipper tracking down sounded deafeningly loud in the quiet studio.

Jeongguk didn't slide your jeans down yet. His hand remained flat, hooked firmly over your hip bone, using his weight to keep you pinned entirely against his solid frame. He leaned back just an inch, his eyes locking onto yours in the deep gloom. The soft, gentle cadence of his movements didn't change, but his jaw clenched, a sudden wave of dangerous gravity anchoring his voice.

"Look at me," he murmured, his thumb rubbing a slow, heavy circle against your hip. "Stop hiding in your head and look at me."

You blinked, forcing your focus through the dark vacuum to meet his gaze. His pupils were wide, consuming the irises, tracking the frantic rise and fall of your chest.

"I need you to promise me something before I touch you any further," he said, his tone conversational but completely unwavering. "I know who you broke up with yesterday. I know what he did. And I don't give a single fuck about his ghost in this room, but I need to hear you say that this—this right here—is exactly what you want."

His hands cupped your head, locking his gaze onto yours.

Has he always had such expressive captivating eyes?

"Promise me, Void," he rough-whispered, his lips brushing yours as he spoke, tasting of those sweet, minty fruits. "Promise me you're choosing this. Choose me for the next hour. Say it."

"I promise," you whimpered, your fingers clutching the thick, coarse cotton of his hoodie so tightly your knuckles turned white. You leaned into his palm, desperate for the friction. "I want this. I really want this,Jeongguk. Please."

"Just a transaction. A deal. You have the kill switch. You can stop this at any point."

You nodded.

The confirmation hit him like a physical jolt.

A sudden, fierce heat flared behind his eyes, the soft, patient discipline he had been using completely evaporating. He didn't break out into a frantic rush, but the intensity of his grip shifted instantly. The person who held you softly a second ago tightened into something deeply primal, fired up by the absolute surrender in your voice.

"Good." he growled against your mouth, a low, guttural vibration that went straight to your core.

Before you could even process the shift, his  hands gripped your waist, his  forearms flexing as he effortlessly lifted you off your feet. You let out a sharp gasp, your legs instinctively wrapping around his hips to anchor yourself against the sudden loss of gravity.

He took two heavy steps back, carrying you through the dim blue light, and literally plopped you down backward onto the massive mixing console.

The physical layout of the studio shifted beneath you. The cold, smooth plastic and aluminum chassis of the audio desk met the bare skin of your lower back, a shocking, freezing contrast to the intense heat of his body. Your hands flew back to stabilize yourself, your palms brushing against the textured plastic sliders and the cold metal knobs of the master faders, a few of them sliding out of place with a soft, mechanical clatter.

Jeongguk didn't care about the audio equipment. He stepped deep between your thighs, crowding your lap, his towering frame completely eclipsing the glare of the dual monitors behind him.

"Jeongguk—" Your voice was a ragged whimper, your head tilting back as you adjusted to the hard, cold surface beneath you.

"Shh," he murmured, his long fingers instantly catching your jaw, tilting your face up. "I told you I'd handle everything. Don't worry about the gear."

He leaned down, his mouth abandoning your lips to bury itself directly into the sensitive crook of your neck. His soft, heavy lips delivered a sharp, burning suction that made your entire spine arch off the console.

"Are you leaving a mark?"

"No."

Oh.

"I only mark people I'm romantically involved with."

His words felt like a splash of freezing water straight to your face, instantly triggering a sharp, familiar spiral.

Romancially involved. The word tasted like a warning label. The heavy, dark fog of self-esteem immediately began to crawl back up your throat, bringing a fresh wave of suffocating anxiety with it.

Of course he wasn't leaving a mark.

Why would he? This was a transaction. A cold, calculated deal struck in a soundproof basement to keep you from drowning in your own head. You were a mess, a fractured girl who had practically run away from her real life because she couldn't handle the quiet. You had no right to expect anything more than the bare minimum of physical contact to numb the pain. Minho had spent months convincing you that you were disposable behind closed doors, and here you were, proving him right by throwing yourself onto a mixing console for a man who didn't even want his name tied to your skin.

The realization twisted painfully in your stomach, your fingers locking so hard into the fabric of his hoodie that your nails bit through to his shoulders. Your breathing went shallow, your chest tightening as the mental loop threatened to drag you under.

But before the panic could completely swallow you whole, Jeongguk moved.

He didn't give you the space to retreat into your thoughts. He stepped deeper between your thighs, his large hands shifting from your jaw down to the small of your back, lifting you slightly off the aluminum chassis. He pressed forward, his heavy, solid frame leaning into you until the thick, unmistakable ridge of his bulge pressed firmly, unyieldingly, right against your center.

"Stay with me now, don't float." His hot breath fanned over your skin, making you shiver. "I can hear your brain short-circuiting from here, Void. Stop thinking."

He ground his hips forward into you, just a slow, deliberate fraction of an inch, forcing a ragged, breathless whimper out of your throat.

"I told you I don't give a fuck about the ghost in this room," he murmured, his thumb finding the patch of skin he's warmed already on your ribs, applying a steady, torturous pressure that made your hips helplessly tilt into his hand. "And I don't need to be romantically involved with you to make you forget your own name. Do you feel how hard I am for you right now? Tell me."

"Yes," you cried out softly, your head dropping onto his shoulder as your fingers clutched his hoodie for dear life.

"Good," he growled, his soft lips dragging back up your neck to find your mouth, his cold lip piercing shocking your system all over again. "Then let me do my job. Wrap your legs tighter around me."

You obeyed, your thighs flexing as you locked your ankles behind his lower back, anchoring yourself completely to the heavy, merciless heat of his waist.

The movement forced your pelvis even harder against him, and a dark, rumbling sound of pure approval vibrated deep in Jeongguk's throat. He broke the kiss, his breathing coming in heavy, jagged patterns that fanned hot against your wet lips.

"Let's get these off," he murmured, his voice thick and low as his hands moved with a sudden, efficient purpose.

He reached down, grabbing the hem of his oversized black hoodie. In one smooth, fluid motion, he pulled it up and over his head, tossing it blindly into the dim shadows of the studio.

Oh.

Your breath caught completely in your throat, your eyes widening as the cold glare of the dual monitors washed over his bare upper body. You had known he was in good shape, but you had never seen anything like this. He possessed an incredibly lean, intensely toned physique—every muscle group defined with razor-sharp precision, his broad shoulders tapering down to a ridiculously narrow waist.

It's almost a shame he was into music and not modelling for anatomy books.

But it was the ink that made your heart completely stop. You knew he had tattoos, but you hadn't anticipated just how far they stretched. The dark, intricate designs weren't just a sleeve; they bled aggressively over his shoulder, mapping the heavy contours of his chest and trailing down the side of his ribs like a permanent, lawless armor. In the electric light, the dark ink against his smooth, pale skin looked almost lethal.

Jeongguk didn't give you time to admire the view. His expression remained fiercely arrogant, fully aware of the way your eyes were tracing his skin as he stepped back into your space.

He didn't wait. His hands descended, his fingers hooking firmly into the waistband of your unzipped jeans and underwear at the same time. He began sliding them down your thighs, exposing your legs to the cool, conditioned air of the basement.

Suddenly, a cold, sharp spike of vulnerability hit you. The sheer reality of what was happening—the speed of it, the raw nakedness of the transaction—slammed into your chest.

You froze. Your muscles locked up instantly, your hands flying down to grip the cold metal edges of the console as you tried to pull yourself back, your knees tensing up.

Jeongguk stopped immediately. He didn't force a single thing. His hands stayed resting lightly against your knees, his dark, unhinged eyes scanning your face, reading the sudden panic written across your features.

"What's the problem?" he asked, his voice steady, quiet, and completely level.

"What... what are you doing?" you whispered, your throat tight, your eyes darting from his bare, tatted chest down to his hands.

A slow, devastatingly confident smirk touched the corner of Jeongguk's mouth. He didn't look annoyed, if anything, the absolute cockiness in his gaze only deepened as he slowly slid his hands down to your ankles, parting your legs just a fraction wider.

"I intend on having a nice meal before we get to it," he rough-whispered, his head tilting to the side with an effortless, boyish charm that made your pulse instantly hum. "Why?"

Your mouth fell open slightly, a warm flush crawling up your throat that had absolutely nothing to do with the cool air of the basement. You swallowed hard, trying to anchor your defenses as you looked down at his beautiful  torso.

"Don't bother," you whispered, your fingers tightening into the edge of the aluminum console. "I don't... I don't come from oral. It's pointless."

He didn't look discouraged in the slightest.

"Pointless?" he repeated, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly vibration that sent a direct spark to your thighs. He stepped closer, the heat of his bare chest hovering inches from your skin. "Is that a challenge, Void? Because you're talking to a perfectionist."

He reached out, hands gently mapping the backs of your thighs, lifting your legs until they rested securely over his broad, bare shoulders. The position was entirely exposing, leaving you completely vulnerable beneath him. But he didn't move an inch further. He kept his head right there, his eyes locking onto yours, waiting.

"I need your permission first," he murmured, his arrogant demeanor melting into that soft, incredibly disciplined focus. "Tell me I can prove you wrong."

"You can try," you breathed, the challenge slipping out in a ragged, breathless whisper.

A nod. That's all.

Jeongguk leaned down, and the first point of contact was the freezing, shocking bite of his silver lip piercing pressing right against your sensitive, aching center. A violent gasp tore from your lungs, your spine arching off the cold console as the sharp contrast of the icy metal and his boiling hot skin sent a wave of electricity straight to your core.

Then he dived.

He didn't handle you with the polite, cautious hesitation you were used to. Jeongguk was unhinged, using his mouth with a heavy, wet precision that completely erased the remaining walls of your sanity. His tongue was wide and unyielding, delivering deep, rhythmic strokes that targeted your sweet spot with a terrifying accuracy, while his hot breath fanned over your slick skin.

"Oh fuck," you cried out, the loud, uninhibited curse echoing sharply in the soundproof vacuum of the studio.

Your hands abandoned the metal frame of the desk, reaching down blindly through the dark to find him. Your fingers tangled deep into his thick, dark hair, gripping the strands tightly, pulling him closer, burying his face directly into your warmth. You couldn't help it.

The sheer, overwhelming texture of his mouth was too much, completely drowning out the toxic loop of low self-esteem and the ghosts of your past.

It was good. Too good.

Jeongguk let out a low, muffled moan against your skin, fired up by the desperate grip of your fingers in his hair. He didn't slow down.

He only got dirtier, his movements turning heavier, suctioning against you with a fierce intensity that had your hips helplessly rolling against his mouth.

"Jeongguk—oh my god," you whimpered, your head thrashing side to side against the plastic surface of the console. Your voice was broken, a string of raw, pathetic sounds filling the room.

He knew exactly what he was doing. Hands slid up to grip your hips, his thumbs pressing firmly into your hip bones to lock you in place so you couldn't back away from the pleasure. He increased the pace, his tongue flattening out, creating a heavy, desperate friction that had you vibrating from head to toe.

You were melting. Every single theory you had about your own body was being systematically dismantled by the arrogant man between your legs. The tension in your lower stomach built into a tight, unbearable coil, a heavy pressure that made your thighs tremble violently against his bare shoulders.

"Please," you sobbed out, your fingernails digging into his scalp as the edge of the cliff loomed closer than it ever had before. "Please, Jeongguk, I can't—"

He didn't stop. He gave a sharp, wicked flick of his tongue right against the swollen peak of your skin, his cold piercing catching the friction perfectly, sending you entirely over the edge.

You fractured completely, a sharp, choked cry tearing from your throat as your orgasm crashed over you with a violent, rhythmic intensity that left you blind. Your hips jerked off the console, your thighs trembling uncontrollably against his broad shoulders as the heavy, crushing waves of release completely emptied your mind.

Every leftover thought of the university, of Irina's voice, of the suffocating weight of the past forty-eight hours—it was all violently burned away, leaving nothing but the slick, burning heat of his mouth grounding you to the desk.

Jeongguk held you through it with an absolute, anchoring grip, heavy hands keeping your hips locked in place until the last of the tremors finally began to fade.

When he slowly lifted his head, he looked absolutely insufferable.

A massive, fiercely arrogant grin stretched across his face, his dark eyes practically beaming with a dangerous, triumphant satisfaction in the  gloom.

He reached up, casually wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his tatted hand, his piercing catching the glare of the monitors.

"Pointless, huh?" he murmured, his voice a low, gravelly purr that vibrated with pure confidence. He leaned down, catching your chin between his fingers and giving your bottom lip a soft, possessive bite. "Don't ever debate me on sound design or your own body again, Void. I don't lose."

Before you could even drag air back into your lungs, he stepped back just half a foot. His hands dropped to the waistband of his dark trousers, unbuckling them with a swift, fluid motion. He didn't bother stripping them all the way down; he just lowered them just enough to clear his hips, freeing the  heavy length of his erection that was already glistening in the dim light.

You watched him through half-lidded eyes, your chest still heaving, your skin hot and completely flushed. From the small pocket of his jeans, his tatted fingers expertly slid out a small, square foil wrapper, tearing it open with his teeth with a ruthless, practiced ease.

"I'm on birth control," you breathed out, your voice a ragged, breathless whisper as you watched him roll the latex down.

Jeongguk paused for a fraction of a second, his dark eyes snapping up to meet yours in the shadows. A slow, mocking tilt of his head accompanied the devastatingly arrogant smirk that re-centered on his face.

"We don't know each other like that for raw, you impatient little overthinker," tone dripping with a steady, dominant amusement that instantly made your face flush even hotter.

He didn't give you a syllable to argue. He stepped right back into your space, crowding your lap on the console, his hands gripping the undersides of your thighs and flaring your legs wide open to receive him. He aligned himself against your slick, dripping center, the blunt, burning head of his length pressing directly against your entrance.

Holy fucking shit.

"Hold onto me," he commanded softly, his jaw clenching as he prepared to push inside. "And keep your mouth open. I want to hear exactly how this feels."

The blunt, burning pressure of him at your entrance made your entire lower stomach tighten in a violent mix of anticipation and raw, sweet agony. Your hands flew to his bare shoulders, your fingers digging into the firm, tatted curve of his skin, searching for a single steady point in a world that was tilting completely on its axis.

"What if someone hears?" you breathed out, the words small and frantic, your head thrashing back slightly against the hard surface of the desk.

"It's soundproofed in here," Jeongguk rough-whispered, his jaw clenching hard as he took a slow, deep breath to steady his own racing pulse.

He didn't wait for your anxiety to spin another thread. With a slow, heavy, and completely unyielding thrust, he pushed all the way inside you.

The sensation was massive—an absolute, stretching fullness that forced a loud, high-pitched gasp straight from your throat. Your eyes snapped open, your vision narrowing to the sharp, lit contours of his face as he buried himself to the absolute hilt, taking up every bit of the empty space inside you. The piercing brushed against your upper lip as he leaned in, a sharp spike of sensory contrast that made your inner muscles instantly clamp down around him.

Jeongguk let out a ragged, gravelly groan against your mouth, his eyes closing tight as your tight, your slick warmth gripped him. He stayed perfectly still for a long, torturous beat, letting your body adjust to the sheer size of him, hands squeezing your thighs where they were draped over his shoulders.

He began caressing your thighs, trying to ease you to the size, peppering kisses on your neck.

"Look at me," he commanded softly, his voice dropping into that quiet, grounding register as his eyes blinked open. "Open your eyes and look at me, Void."

You forced your eyes to meet his, your breath coming in short, uneven hitches.

"Good. Very fucking good."

A low, arrogant hum rumbled in his chest, his hips immediately establishing a steady, agonizingly deep rhythm. He wasn't slamming into you with reckless violence; it was a disciplined, heavy pace, each thrust deliberate and deep enough to hit the exact spot his tongue had spent the last minutes priming.

"I've got you," he rough-whispered, his chest heaving against yours as he picked up the speed just a fraction. "Keep your eyes right on mine. Don't drift off. Stay right here with me."

"I am," you cried out, a loud, broken whimper escaping you as his pelvis ground hard against yours, the friction hitting your sensitive spot with a merciless accuracy. "Oh god, right there... do that again."

"Like this?" he murmured, delivering a sharp, angled thrust that had your hips helplessly rolling into his heat. He talked you through every single movement, his voice a steady, unfiltered stream of reassurance and dominance that completely blocked out the rest of the world. "Do you like it like this? Tell me."

"I like it," you sobbed, your head dropping back onto the console as the aluminum sliders shifted beneath your shoulder blades. "Fuck, Jeongguk, it's too much... I'm going to break."

"You're not going to break," he growled softly, his hands sliding down to hook under your lower back, lifting you up slightly to meet his pace. His bare  chest was slick with a thin layer of sweat, his heartbeat a frantic, heavy thudding against your own ribs. "I've got you completely. Just breathe and take all of it."

The steady, heavy rhythm of his hips became a relentless tide, driving you closer and closer to a second breaking point. Every verbal reassurance that left his lips—low, gravelly, and entirely centered on your body—acted like a physical weight anchoring you to the cold aluminum desk, refusing to let your mind drift back into the dark.

He never once took his eyes off you, sucking up all your little indentations and contorsions your face made. Like he was an addict. Like he needed to see what he's doing to you.

"Look at me, Void," he muttered, his pace shifting from long, sliding strokes to a shorter, devastatingly deep cadence that targeted the very core of your heat. "Don't you dare close your eyes now. Look at how hard you're gripping me."

"Jeongguk—" Your voice fractured entirely, a broken, desperate sound as the internal coil tightened to an impossible, burning knot. Your fingers dug into his bare, sweat-slick shoulders, your head thrashing against the hard surface of the console. "Oh god, please... I'm going to—"

"Go," he growled softly, his jaw clenching as he delivered a sharp, angled thrust that hit the exact center of your release. "Come for me again. Let me feel it."

The second fracture was even more violent than the first. A sharp, muffled cry tore from your lungs as your core violently clamped down around him, a series of intense, rolling spasms crashing over your body. Your hips arched off the console, your legs tightening around his shoulders as the sheer, overwhelming release flooded your system, completely wiping out the last remaining thread of your anxiety.

Hearing the broken, ragged hitch in your breathing, Jeongguk let out a low, guttural sound deep in his chest. The absolute, pulsing surrender of your body was the final straw for his own control.

He didn't slow down. He leveraged his weight, his forearms flexing as he buried himself to the absolute hilt, his thrusts turning fast, heavy, and desperate. His head dropped into the crook of your neck, his hot breath fanning against your skin as he chased his own edge through the tight, burning friction of your release.

"Ah... fuck," he rough-whispered, his voice cracking with a sudden, rare vulnerability as his entire body went rigid.

With two final, deep, and utterly blinding thrusts, Jeongguk came. His posture locked completely, a low, breathy groan vibrating against your collarbone as he poured himself into the latex barrier, his chest heaving violently against yours as the waves of his own release took over. He stayed buried deep inside you, his forehead resting heavily against your shoulder, his frame trembling slightly as the two of you slowly collapsed back into the absolute silence of the soundproof room.

It felt deeply intimate how you can hear his heartbeat beating against your own.

How even under all the sex smell and slight sweat, his scent is still at the forefront.

How you actually finished from oral. How he listened to your body.

Weird.

The only sound left in the vacuum was the synchronized, frantic wheezing of your lungs and his, a messy cadence that slowly began to level out against the sterile hum of the hardware beneath you.

Jeongguk remained heavy and unmoving over you for another full minute, his face still buried in the curve of your neck. His skin was blazing hot, slick with a thin layer of sweat that glued his chest to yours, the sharp, solid line of his collarbone pressing firmly into your sternum. Slowly, the tight, possessive grip of his  fingers on your hips relaxed, his hands sliding down to rest idly against the cold plastic casing of the mixing desk.

He let out one last, long breath that fanned warm across your collarbone before he pulled back.

With a smooth, practiced retreat, he disengaged, the sudden absence of his heat leaving you feeling instantly exposed to the cool, conditioned air of the basement. You watched through heavy, half-lidded eyes as he stepped away, his tatted hand reaching down to efficiently strip off the latex barrier and dispose of it in a small bin tucked under the console. He pulled his trousers back up to his hips, fastening the buckle with a quick, metallic click that sounded brutally transactional in the quiet room.

You stayed exactly where he had left you—sprawled backward across the audio desk, your unzipped jeans bunched around your thighs, your chest still heaving as the post-climax tremors slowly left your muscles.

You swallowed hard, your throat feeling completely parched as you weakly pushed yourself up onto your elbows. Your fingers brushed against the shifted knobs and sliders, a dull ache beginning to bloom in your lower back from the hard aluminum chassis.

You glanced toward the digital clock illuminated in the corner of the dual monitors.

"See?" you breathed out, your voice a tiny, raspy thread that barely carried through the space. "It didn't even take an hour."

Jeongguk didn't look up immediately. He reached into the pocket of his discarded trousers, his fingers pulling out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a matte black lighter. He slipped a single cigarette between his now puffy lips, the cold silver metal catching the  light as he clicked the flame to life.

He took a deep, dragging pull, the cherry glowing a bright, violent orange in the gloom before he exhaled a thick cloud of grey smoke that smelled faintly of toasted tobacco and mint.

"Well, I timed it," Jeongguk rough-whispered, his dark eyes finally snapping over to you through the haze.

The fierce, triumphant satisfaction from earlier hadn't completely vanished; instead, it had settled into a quiet, devastatingly arrogant calm. He leaned his lower back against the edge of the adjacent workstation, crossing his bare arms over his chest as he held the cigarette between two fingers.

He's smoking shirtless, of course.

"I handled the clock exactly the way I wanted to," he murmured, his gaze dropping down to track the flush on your bare stomach and the messy layout of your clothes.

"Which means I still have ten minutes left. And I intend to spend them smoking this cigarette and looking at you."

The unfiltered directness of his stare made your skin burn all over again.

"Fix your pants, Void," he commanded softly, taking another slow, dragging pull from his cigarette without breaking eye contact. "Sora's waiting for you."