You remember the way he’d winced as you cleaned the wound, his fingers gripping the edge of your desk. The mask lay crumpled on your floor like a dead animal, and you couldn’t stop staring at it, then at him, then back at the mask.

“So you’re telling me,” you’d said slowly, dabbing antiseptic on his arm with shaking hands, “that you’ve been swinging around New York in that tight little spandex number for the past three months?”

“It’s not spandex—it’s a special polymer—” he’d started, then caught your expression. “Okay, yes. It is spandex.”

The laugh that escaped you was half-hysterical. “And the ‘amazing’ part? The ‘friendly neighbourhood’ part?”

Yunho had looked at you with those big, earnest eyes that had been breaking hearts since middle school. “For the record, I did not come up with those names. They describe me pretty well, no?”

You’d bandaged his arm in silence after that, the TV still blaring in the background, some contestant crying dramatically over a burned soufflé while your entire understanding of reality shifted.

Your best friend was a goddamn superhero.

“You can’t tell anyone,” he’d winced when you’d finished wrapping the gauze. “Not your parents, not—”

“I know how secrets work, you dummy,” you teased, but your hands were gentle as you helped him into your desk chair. “I just... Why me? Why tonight?”

He’d looked down at his hands, blood still under his fingernails. “Because I nearly died tonight, and the only person I wanted to see was you.”

Your heart had done something complicated—something you’d been ignoring since that time he’d carried you piggyback through the rain because you’d worn the wrong shoes. Something you’d been pretending was just friendship for years.

“Okay, So what now?” you’d asked, sitting on your bed across from him.

Yunho had looked up, that familiar grin breaking through despite everything. “Now you become my guy in the chair.”

“Your what?”

“My guy—or in this case my girl—in the chair! You know, the person who helps from headquarters? Tells me where the bad guys are? Makes terrible jokes over the comms?” My girl landed somewhere it shouldn’t have, warm and unwelcome, before you registered that he’d said it the same way he said my homework or my lucky socks. You’d thrown a pillow at him, which he’d caught easily because of fucking course he had. “I’m not becoming your sidekick, Yunho.”

“Not a sidekick! More like... a partner in crime-fighting?” His eyes had lit up. “We could be a team! Like Iron Man and War Machine!”

“War Machine is literally the definition of a sidekick.”

“Okay, fine. Like... like uh Black Widow and Hawkeye!”

“Those are two different heroes who occasionally work together.”

Yunho had sighed dramatically, clutching his injured arm. “You’re being very difficult for someone who’s just been told their best friend is technically a superhero.”

“Fine,” you’d huffed, crossing your arms. “But I’m not calling myself anything embarrassing.”

His grin had been blinding. “Deal. But you have to at least help me come up with banger one-liners.”

══════════════════ 

Since that night, you became an expert at hiding things. You’d become a practiced liar. Obviously not to keep secrets from your best friend, but to keep his from the world. You’d learned to forge sick notes for his absences at work, to block calls from concerned managers when he vanished for days, to intercept the panicked messages from his aunt who was kept in the dark about all of this too. You kept a first aid kit under your bed, truthfully, you had bandages and gauze scattered throughout your apartment because of a certain somebody. You patched him up at least twice a week, maybe more. Sometimes with nothing more than aspirin and bandages, sometimes with trembling hands and whatever illicit painkillers you could barter from the night pharmacist.

At times, you wonder if he would purposefully get injured just as an excuse to come see you. Naturally, you set your wishful thinking aside, although you did feel some type of way seeing him scream and moan into your pillow when the antiseptic made contact with his open wound. Not even the FBI could get that information out of you—hopefully.

Then there was the pretending. Pretending not to notice the new bruises, the way he sometimes winced just from raising his arm to wave at you from across the street, the way he’d flinch every time sirens from downtown would go off. You’d become immune to the news reports: masked hero saves child from burning building, anonymous hero stops carjacking on Main. You’d scroll through the headlines with said hero asleep on your shoulder, trying to reconcile the two sides of him. The invulnerable icon that the world sees and the one you have the privilege of seeing almost daily, the boy who snored and always had his arm wrapped around your waist as you cuddled on the couch. Platonically, of course.

You’d always been the only one who knew. You’d never told a soul. Not even when you’d had to lie to your own mother’s face about why Yunho had to suddenly leave her birthday dinner, not even when you’d covered for him at his own surprise party by saying he had food poisoning, all while the TV in the corner was showing live helicopter footage of a chase downtown with streaks of red and blue going across the screen. You’d kept his secret for three years, and you’d never once wished for a normal life.

Not until tonight.

The city felt off, like someone had turned down the volume and dimmed all the lights. You’d spent most of the evening pacing the edges of your apartment, the kind of nervous energy that made your skin feel two sizes too small. Outside, the sirens were rare and far away, and every time the silence stretched too long you found yourself jumping at the smallest noise: the radiator knocking, the distant barking of a stray dog, the faint hum of the elevator in the hallway. You kept checking your phone, again and again, desperate to see if Yunho gave you any updates.

He’d called just after sunset, voice tight and urgent in a way that made your stomach twist. “Something’s up. They think one of the mutants that was in Detective De Wolff’s care escaped.”

You’d tried to protest, tried to remind him about the time he’d gone toe-to-toe with a “big threat” and ended up with an injury so severe that it made your med kit look like child’s play—sending him away to the nearest hospital to get proper medical care. That scared you more than you’d ever admit, but he’d just laughed it off, soft and gentle like he didn’t want to worry you.

“I promise I’ll be okay, bug. I’ll let you know when I’ve kicked their ass.”

That was 5 hours ago, and there was still no text. You sat on the edge of your bed, phone clenched so hard your knuckles ached, scrolling back and forth through his messages as if somehow, if you looked long enough, he’d reveal himself from the pixels on the screen. You tried to distract yourself the way you always did: catching up on missed emails, watering your already well hydrated plants, rewatching old anime episodes that you’d seen a thousand times. Nothing worked. You replayed every message he’d ever sent, even the stupid ones you scoffed at. That time he’d texted you eight times in a row to ask if pickles were technically fruits, the time he’d sent a selfie in the middle of a chase just to prove he wasn’t lying about being “airborne,” the time he’d admitted he started carrying a spare mask just because you told him the first one made his ears stick out too much. You wondered if these would be the last messages you’d ever get from him.

You tried to picture the fight, imagine him swinging between buildings with that impossible grace, dodging bullets and explosions and whatever else the city threw at him. You imagined him grinning beneath the mask, sticking the landing, making it look so easy. But then you remembered the other times when he’d come home with blood on his suit, with ribs barely holding together, with tears in his eyes. You remembered the way he’d clung to you, quietly, brokenly, just needing someone to tell him he was still a person and not just a symbol of hope and justice.

Midnight came and went. You tried to sleep, but every time you closed your eyes you saw him lying somewhere in some alley, hurt and alone. You gave up on sleep by 1:30, and by 2:00 you’d started pacing again, so wound up you thought your heart might shake itself right out of your ribs. And then you heard it, faint but unmistakable—the wet, sticky thwiiip of web fluid, just outside your window. You dropped your phone. Bolted to the window, hands shaking, and flung it open. There he was. Yunho, his mask dangling from his fingers, suit torn and bloodied, face streaked with sweat and something darker. He grinned, lopsided and exhausted, and you saw the relief in his eyes.

“You’re not going to believe the night I just had,” he murmured, and nearly toppled headfirst into your arms.

You caught him, barely, your knees buckling under the sudden weight of him as he half-collapsed against you. His body was hot through the torn suit, radiating heat like a furnace, and you could feel his heart hammering against your chest—too fast, too hard. You stumbled backward, dragging him with you, and managed to lower him onto the edge of your bed before your legs gave out entirely.

“Yunho—Hey, look at me.” Your hands were already moving, already doing the thing they’d been trained to do over three years of this. You cupped his face, tilting it toward the light, scanning for anything obvious, maybe a broken nose, split lip, the telltale glassy look of a concussion. His pupils were blown wide, dark and unfocused, and there was blood crusted along his hairline, but it looked like it had already stopped bleeding. You pulled your hands away, and they came back tacky with something that wasn’t blood—something iridescent and faintly pink, clinging to your fingertips like oil.

“Are you hurt? Where are you hurt?” Your voice came out sharper than you meant it to, the panic you’d been swallowing all night finally cracking through. You ran your palms down his arms, checking for fractures, for the signs of swelling that meant something was broken beneath the suit. His left shoulder was torn open, the suit shredded to ribbons, but the skin underneath was already knitting itself back together thanks to the accelerated healing you’d watched with horrified fascination so many times before. You pushed the fabric aside and saw the angry pink of new tissue forming, and you let out a breath you didn’t realise you’d been holding.

“Talk to me, Yunho.”

He caught your wrist, his grip warm and unsteady. “I’m—I’m okay. I’m not hurt. Not like that.”

The words landed wrong, and you felt something cold settle in your stomach. You pulled back, sitting on your heels in front of him, and searched his face. His jaw was clenched tight, a muscle ticking in his cheek, and there was a flush creeping up his neck that had nothing to do with exertion. He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven bursts, and when he swallowed, you watched his Adam’s apple bob painfully.

“Not like what?” you pressed, your voice dropping to something quieter. “What does that mean?”

He let out a shaky laugh, the kind that had no humour in it. “The mutant. It was some kind of—I don’t even know what to call it. Reptile? Lizard-thing? It had scales and claws and a tail, and it was fast, bug, faster than anything I’ve ever—” He broke off, dragging a hand down his face. “We were fighting on the old construction site off Fifth, the one that’s been abandoned since—doesn’t matter. I had him pinned. I thought I had him. And then right at the end, right when I thought it was over, he—” Yunho’s voice cracked, and he pressed the heel of his palm against his eye. “He released something. Some kind of gas. It was pink.”

You stared at him. “Pink gas?”

“Pink. Gas.” He dropped his hand and looked at you, and there was something raw and almost embarrassed in his expression that you’d never seen before. “I got a faceful of it. Couldn’t avoid it. And now I feel—” He gestured vaguely at his own body, a helpless, floundering motion. “Funny. I feel funny.”

“Funny how?”

He didn’t answer. His gaze dropped to the floor, and you watched his throat work as he swallowed again, harder this time. The flush had spread to his ears now, bright and unmistakable, and you realised his hands were trembling where they rested on his knees. You let your eyes travel down, following the path of instinct, the same clinical assessment you’d done a hundred times. Your gaze snagged on something and your brain stuttered to a halt.

The suit was tight. You’d always known it was tight. You’d teased him about it mercilessly, called it his “second skin,” joked that whoever designed it had a vendetta against modesty. But the fabric between his thighs was stretched to its absolute limit, straining against something that was clearly not part of the standard Spiderman equipment. The bulge was obscene, unmistakable, jutting against the spandex with an urgency that made your face go hot.

You looked away so fast you nearly gave yourself whiplash. Your eyes fixed on the wall, on the one piece poster you’d had since you were fourteen, on absolutely anything that wasn’t the very obvious, very prominent evidence of whatever that pink gas had done to him.

“Oh,” you muttered under your breath, very quietly.

“Yeah.” His voice was strangled. 

The silence that followed was the loudest thing you’d ever heard. You could hear the radiator knocking, the distant hum of the elevator, the sound of your own heartbeat hammering in your ears. You could hear Yunho breathing, ragged and uneven, and you could hear the faint creak of the bedsprings as he shifted his weight—trying, you realised, to adjust himself in a way that was probably physically impossible given the current circumstances.

“So,” you cleared your throat, still staring at the wall with the intensity of someone trying to burn a hole through drywall through sheer force of will. “The, uh, pink gas thing. The mutant you fought secreted it out or something?”

“I don’t even know what to call it. De Wolff’s notes again called it a ‘dispersal-type,’ whatever the hell that means. It could—it could secrete stuff. From these glands on its arms. Like a—like a skunk, but worse.” He confirmed miserably.

“So it’s a lizard-skunk hybrid mutant that so happens to exude this pink gas which makes you…hard?”

He made a frustrated sound, something between a groan and a laugh. “I don’t know what it is. Aphrodisiac? Maybe? I don’t know—” He cut himself off. “God, this is so embarrassing.”

You finally risked a glance back at him, and the look on his face. Tortured, mortified, his bottom lip caught between his teeth. This was Yunho. Your Yunho. The boy who’d once tripped over his own feet and face-planted into a birthday cake. The boy who’d cried during Up and tried to blame it on allergies.

“It’s not embarrassing,” you frowned, and your voice came out softer than you expected. “It’s not your fault.”

“It feels like my fault.”

“It’s not.” You reached out, hesitated, then placed your hand on his knee. The muscle beneath the suit jumped at your touch, and you felt him shudder. “How long do these effects last?”

“I don’t know.” He laughed, rubbing his hand on the back of his neck. “The mutant didn’t exactly leave me a FAQ sheet.”

Something about the sheer absurdity of it, the fact that the city’s most beloved hero was sitting on your bed looking like a kicked puppy with a boner, hit you all at once, and a laugh bubbled up out of your chest before you could stop it. It started small, a snort that you tried to smother behind your hand, but then Yunho looked at you with that wounded expression and it cracked wide open. You doubled over, clutching your stomach, tears pricking at the corners of your eyes.

“Bug, It’s not funny…”

“It’s a little bit funny,” you giggled.

“It’s not—” But then he was laughing too, that helpless, breathless laugh that always came out when he was trying to be serious and failing spectacularly. His shoulders shook, and he pressed both palms over his eyes, and the two of you sat there at two in the morning laughing like idiots while the radiator clanked and the world outside kept spinning.

“I can’t believe this shit,” you repeated, wiping your eyes. “The mighty Spiderman, borderline pussywhipped by a horny gas. This is kind of hilarious you have to admit.”

“Oh come on, no it’s not.” But he was grinning now with a ridiculous grin that made his eyes crinkle at the corners, and for a moment it felt almost normal. Almost like any other night where he’d come through your window banged up, and you’d fixed him and joked about it until the sun came up.

The laughter died slowly, fading into something quieter, something that left the air between you feeling charged and strange. Yunho’s grin slipped, and the flush crept back up his neck, and you watched his jaw tighten as another wave of whatever was coursing through him hit. His fingers dug into his own knees, knuckles going white, and a sound escaped him—low, involuntary, almost a whimper.

You sobered fast. “You okay?”

He dragged in a breath through his nose, held it, let it out through his teeth. “It’s getting worse,” he whined, stripped of the humour from seconds ago. “I thought it might fade, but it’s not. It’s getting worse.”

You bit the inside of your cheek. “Okay. Okay, so—what do you need? What can I do?”

He looked at you then, the expression on his face made something low in your belly tighten. His eyes were dark, almost black, and there was something desperate in them that you’d never seen before.

“Can you help me?”

The question hung in the air between you. You blinked.

“Help you—” You gestured vaguely at the general direction of his predicament. “With that?”

He nodded, just once, and the embarrassment on his face was so acute it was almost painful to look at.

You opened your mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Yunho. Can’t you just…” You mimed the universal gesture for self-service, two quick pumps of your fist. “Rub one out? Go to the bathroom, take care of it, come back when you’re…you know. Less bricked?”

Something flashed across his face—amusement, exasperation, something raw underneath both. He let out a sound that was half laugh, half groan. “Trust me, I tried. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t try.”

You tried, like really tried not to imagine your best friend jerking off. Yunho, alone in some bathroom somewhere, hand wrapped around himself, trying and failing to find relief. Your brain supplied the details without your permission, the way his jaw would clench, the sound he’d make, the way his chest would heave. You squeezed your thighs together so hard you felt the muscles protest.

“I tried three times,” he continued, oblivious to the war you were waging against your own imagination. “On the way here. I swung by to my place, thought if I could just… you know…but nothing. It just made it worse, actually.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. If it’s an aphrodisiac, shouldn’t it go away after you jerk off?”

“That’s the thing.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and the movement shifted the fabric in a way that made your gaze skitter sideways. “I found more information about the mutant. After the fight, before I came here. The mutant’s file was in the wreckage of the aphrodisiac gas, it’s targeted.”

“Targeted how?”

He swallowed. You watched the bob of his throat, the way his Adam’s apple moved, and you had to physically force yourself to look at his face instead.

“The effects only go away when the person that’s affected—” He paused. Drew in a shaky breath. “When they seek pleasure from the person they desire.”

The words landed in the silence like a stone dropped into still water. You stared at him. He stared at the floor.

“The person that you desire?” You repeated, and your voice came out thin and strange. 

“Yeah.”

“Meaning—”

“Meaning it doesn’t matter how many times I—” He made that same helpless gesture. “It won’t stop. It won’t go away. Not until I…” He trailed off. The flush had reached the tips of his ears now, bright red against the dark of his hair.

Your mouth has gone dry. You could hear your own pulse in your ears, a steady, insistent thrum that seemed to be getting louder by the second. The room felt too small, the air too thick, and Yunho was right there, close enough that you could feel the heat radiating off him, close enough that if you leaned forward just a few inches—

“So you’re saying,” you whispered, “that the only way this stops is if you fuck the person you love?”

“Yeah.”

“And you came here.”

The silence that followed was absolute. You watched his chest rise and fall, watched his fingers curl and uncurl against his knees, watched the way his gaze stayed fixed on the floor like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.

“Yunho.” Your voice barely made it past your lips. “Why did you come here?”

He lifted his head. Looked at you. And the expression on his face, raw, terrified, wanting, told you everything before he even opened his mouth. “Because it’s you, You’re the one I desire. The one I love. It’s always been you.”

The words hit you like a physical blow, knocking the air clean out of your lungs. You sat there, frozen, your hand still on his knee, your mouth hanging open in a way that would have been embarrassing if you’d had any capacity left for embarrassment.

“Since we were kids,” he continued, and his voice was rushing now, tumbling over itself like he’d opened a floodgate and couldn’t find the lever to close it. “Since the third grade, when you punched that guy for stealing my lunch money and told him you’d do it again if he ever looked at me wrong. Since middle school, when you sat with me on the fire escape for three hours after my parents—after they—” His voice cracked, and he pressed on. “Since forever ago, basically.”

You made a strangled noise that was supposed to be a laugh but came out sounding more like you were being strangled.

“Every time I put on that mask, every time I swing out there and the city is screaming at me to be something bigger, something better—I think about coming back to you. All I do is think about you. You consume my every waking thought.” His hands were shaking, and he was staring at you with those dark, desperate eyes, and you felt like the floor had dropped out from under you. “I’ve tried to tell you so many times. I’ve had speeches planned, bug. I wrote one down once and then I set it on fire because I thought it sounded so fucking stupid.”

“Yunho—”

“I tried to tell you on your birthday last year. I had this whole thing planned. With flowers, the whole thing—and…and then the Vulture showed up at the docks and I had to go and by the time I got back you were asleep on the couch and you just looked so upset I just—I couldn’t. I chickened out.” He laughed, wet and broken. “Imagine that. Your friendly neighbourhood Spiderman chickens out of confessing his feelings to his best friend.”

The memory of that night hit harder than it needed to. Your birthday, the one he’d missed. The only birthday he missed. You’d planned it for weeks. You’d bought a very revealing dress, the one that made your parents raise an eyebrow and your friend from middle school whistle low under her breath. You’d practiced the words in the mirror until they sounded less like a confession and more like something you could actually say out loud without combusting. You’d even—god, this was embarrassing—you’d even written it down, just like he had, except yours was still tucked into the back of your sock drawer because you couldn’t bring yourself to throw it away.

You’d waited for him. You’d waited on that couch for hours, the candles burning down to stubs, the cake going stale on the coffee table, and you’d watched the news with your heart in your throat because there was a fire downtown and a chase on the bridge and every time the camera panned to that familiar streak of red and blue your stomach dropped through the floor. 

You’d called him, the endless loop of the unanswered call drove you crazy. You’d left messages that started out annoyed and ended up terrified, your voice cracking on the last one when the news anchor said something about casualties, and you couldn’t breathe for a full minute.

You’d fallen asleep clutching your phone, your makeup running down your face, and when you’d woken up at four in the morning to find him curled on the floor beside the couch with blood on his suit and that stupid, apologetic grin, you’d screamed at him. You’d screamed at him for an hour about responsibility and communication and how he’d nearly given you a heart attack. He'd taken every word without interrupting. His head had stayed bowed, hands clasped tightly between his knees, dried blood flaking from his knuckles as he let you rage through every ounce of fear you'd been carrying. By the time your voice gave out, the anger had collapsed into something far more fragile. The tears came without warning, hot and relentless, and suddenly you weren't yelling anymore.

He'd crossed the room before you could stop him.

Strong arms had wrapped around you, careful despite the bruises hidden beneath the suit, holding you together while everything inside you seemed to come apart. His chin rested against your hair as his hand moved slowly up and down your back, steady and reassuring, never asking you to stop crying. He simply let you. Let you bury your face against his chest. Let you shake with every breath you'd been holding since the news broadcast. Let you mourn the version of the night where he never made it home.

You shake your head at the memory. Your chest was aching. Your eyes were burning. You could feel something building behind your ribs, something huge and terrifying and bright, and you opened your mouth to say something, anything, but the words wouldn’t come.

“And then tonight, when that gas hit me, the only thing I could think about was you. And I know this is the worst possible way to tell you, I know it’s insane, I know you probably think I’m only saying this because of the aphrodisiac, but I swear to god, I swear on everything, on my parents, on my aunt, on my life—”

“Wait—”

“—I’ve been hiding it for so long, and I’m so tired of hiding it, and if this ruins everything, if you never want to see me again, I’ll understand I promise, I’ll—”

You kissed him.

You didn’t think about it. You didn’t plan it. Your body moved before your brain caught up, surging forward off your heels, one hand gripping the front of his ruined suit, the other cradling the back of his neck, and you pressed your mouth to his with enough force to knock the rest of his rambling clean off its axis. He made a sound against your lips—surprised, desperate, almost wounded—and for one terrible second he went completely still, rigid beneath your hands like he’d been electrocuted. You felt his breath stutter, felt the heat of his skin against your palm, and you were about to pull back, about to apologise to take it all back, but his hands came up and grabbed you. Not gently nor carefully. His fingers dug into your waist, and he hauled you forward, pulling you into his lap with a strength that would have been frightening if it had been anyone else. But is anyone else’s best friend spiderman with stupid levels of strength? The kiss broke for half a second, just long enough for you to gasp, and then he was kissing you back. Hard and hungry. His mouth slanting over yours with a desperation that made your head spin.

You felt the groan rumble through his chest before you heard it, a low, broken sound that vibrated against your sternum. His fingers tightened on your hips, and you could feel him shaking—not from fear, not from pain, but from the sheer effort of holding himself back. You knew that restraint. You’d seen it in a hundred of his fights that aired on TV, that split-second pause before he threw a punch, the way he always, always pulled back just enough to avoid doing real damage. You didn’t want him to pull back. You shifted in his lap, your knees bracketing his thighs, and the movement pressed you flush against him—against the hard, insistent heat of his dick straining behind the spandex. The sound he made was unlike anything you’ve heard before. A ragged, punched-out moan that he tried to swallow and failed, his forehead dropping to your shoulder as his whole body shuddered.

“You don’t have to hold back with me,” you breathed, and your voice was wrecked, barely recognisable. You curled your fingers into his hair, tugging his head back up so you could look at him. His eyes were blown black, his lips swollen and wet, and there was a flush spreading down his chest that you could see through the torn neckline of his suit. “I can handle it.”

His expression cracked open. Something raw and vulnerable spilled through, and then he was kissing you again, and this time there was nothing held back. His hands slid up your sides, dragging your shirt with them, and the feel of his warm and calloused palms against your bare skin sent electricity crackling down your spine. The kiss deepened, messy and urgent, all teeth and tongue and the wet, desperate sounds neither of you could seem to stop making. You rolled your hips, just once, just to see what would happen, and the noise Yunho made was enough to make your entire body clench.

“Fuck—” he gasped against your mouth, his hips jerking up involuntarily. “You can’t tease me like that, I won’t last.”

“Let me feel you,” you whispered, and you did.

His head fell back, exposing the long line of his throat, and you didn’t hesitate. You pressed your mouth to the pulse point hammering beneath his jaw and bit down, not hard, just enough. His hands flew to your ass, gripping and pulling you harder against him, and the friction through the thin layers of your clothes was maddening, not enough, not close enough.

“Off,” you managed, tugging at the torn neckline of his suit. “Please…”

He reached for the clasps at his sides without a word. You helped where you could, your fingers clumsy against the slick material, and together you peeled it down to his waist, where it stayed, bunched and forgotten. The top half of him was bare now. The body you had memorised against your will over three years of late-night patch jobs and careful, practiced indifference. Bruises in deep purples and sick yellows spread across his ribs, and you touched one without thinking—the long scar from last winter, the one that had kept you up for a week straight.

He caught your hand. Brought it to his mouth. Pressed a kiss to your palm that was so tender it made your eyes sting.

“I love you,” his voice was steady now, certain in a way it hadn’t been all night. “I’ve loved you since we were kids. I’m going to love you when we’re old and grey. This situation doesn’t change that. Nothing changes that.”

You looked at him. The boy who’d swung through your window three years ago and trusted you with the biggest secret in the world. The man whose lap you’re sitting in right now, looking at you like you were the only thing that had ever mattered.

“I know,” you giggled as you nodded along with his sentiment. “You stupid idiot. I’ve loved you since the third grade too.”

The look on his face was priceless, his face painted with the look of surprise and disbelief, then something so bright and overwhelming it made your chest hurt. He laughed, breathless and disbelieving, and pulled you close, burying his face in your neck.

“Say it again,” he murmured against your skin.

“I love you, Yunho.”

“Again.”

“I love you.” You kissed the shell of his ear. “I love you, I love you, I—”

He gently grabbed your jaw and brought your lips to his again, kissing you with years and years of yearning. His mouth moved from yours to your jaw, slow and deliberate, pressing open-mouthed kisses along the line of it like he was mapping you, learning you. You tilted your head back without thinking, giving him access, and he took it—his lips dragging down to the soft spot beneath your ear, the corner of your jaw, the hinge where it met your neck. Each kiss sent a shiver cascading down your spine, pooling low in your stomach, and you could feel yourself melting into him, going pliant and boneless in his arms.

“You have no idea,” he murmured against your skin, his breath hot and damp, “how long I’ve wanted to do this.”

You laughed, breathless and shaky. “We should’ve done this sooner, then.”

His teeth grazed your earlobe, and you gasped, your fingers tightening in his hair. He hummed, pleased, as he continued his path down the column of your throat. Kissing, nipping, sucking in a way that you were absolutely going to have to explain with a turtle-neck tomorrow. Not that you cared. Not that you could think about turtle-necks or tomorrows or anything that wasn’t the feel of Yunho’s mouth on your neck and his hands on your hips and the hard, aching heat of him pressed against you. He kissed the hollow of your throat, and you felt his tongue flick out, tasting your pulse, and the sound you made was embarrassing. He laughed against your skin, nothing like the bright, sunny laugh you were used to. This was something else entirely. Something that made your toes curl and your thighs clench.

“Yunho,” you managed, and his name came out as a whimper. To your ears you sounded pathetic. To him? It was the sounds from an angel gracing his ears with a sweet melody only you had the power of creating.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, and the expression on his face—flushed, hungry, pupils blown so wide there was barely any brown left—made something hot and desperate coil tight in your gut. His hand came up to cup your cheek, his thumb tracing the line of your bottom lip, and you turned your head to press a kiss to his palm without thinking.

“You’ll help me, won’t you, baby?” His voice was wrecked, rough and low, and the pet name hit you like a live wire. He’d never called you that before. This wasn’t a joke. This was Yunho looking at you like you were the only thing keeping him alive, his thumb still tracing your lip, his hips shifting restlessly beneath you. “You’ll kiss away my pains, hm? Make it all better?”

Your face went so hot you were surprised the room didn’t catch fire. You opened your mouth to say something sharp, something clever, something that would put him in his place—but all that came out was a strangled little whimper as his thumb pressed against your lip again.

“God, look at you,” he breathed, and there was wonder in his voice, genuine wonder, like he couldn’t believe you were real. “After all these years of you being the bravest person I know, you’re blushing because I called you baby. You’re so cute.”

“Shut the fuck up,” you mumbled, burying your burning face against his shoulder. “You can’t just say things like that and expect me to act all nonchalant.”

“It’s cute that you think you’re nonchalant,” His grin was wicked, lopsided, and so unbearably Yunho that your chest ached with it. He leaned in, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. “Will you let me make you feel good? Let me repay you for all the nights you nursed me back to health.”

Your breath hitched. “Yunho—”

“Say yes,” he whispered. “Please say yes.”

You didn’t say yes. You didn’t need to. You kissed him instead—deep, slow, pouring everything you’d been holding back for years into it. His hands slid down to your waist, pulling you closer, and you felt the groan build in his chest before it escaped, vibrating against your mouth. You rolled your hips, deliberate this time, and he broke the kiss with a gasp, his forehead dropping to your shoulder.

“Fuck—fuck, you’re going to kill me.”

“You’ll live,” you grinned, and the smugness in your own voice surprised you. You pressed your lips to his jaw, his cheekbone, the bridge of his nose—gentle, lingering kisses that made him tremble. “You’ve survived worse.”

“This is worse,” he groaned, but he was laughing, that breathless, broken laugh that made your heart do stupid things. “I don’t think any amount of training could have prepared me for this.”

You kissed the bruise forming along his collarbone—the one from tonight, the one that would be gone by morning thanks to his enhanced healing abilities. You kissed the scar from last winter, the one that had nearly killed him, pressing your lips to the raised tissue with a reverence that made his breath stutter. You kissed every bruise, every scrape, every mark that the city had left on him, and with each one he shuddered, his fingers tightening in your hair, his breathing going ragged and uneven.

“Baby,” he whispered, and his voice was shaking. “Mmh, if you keep doing that—”

“What are you gonna do about it?” You looked up at him through your lashes, and the expression on his face—wrecked, desperate, utterly gone for you—made something fierce and possessive bloom in your chest. “I hope you keep this attitude up by the time we’re finished,” his voice threaded with a confidence that made your stomach flip. 

His hands were on your waist before you registered the movement. One second you were straddling him at the edge of the bed, your thighs bracketing his, and the next the world tilted. He lifted you like you weighed nothing. Like you were made of air and starlight instead of bone and muscle and the stubborn, aching want that had been building in your chest for years. Your stomach swooped, that dizzying freefall sensation you'd only ever felt when he swung you through the city, and then your back hit the mattress with a soft bounce.

You blinked up at him. He was already moving, already shifting, his knees pressing into the mattress on either side of your hips as he settled over you. The half-removed suit bunched at his waist, the red and blue fabric creased and torn, and above it the bare expanse of his chest—all smooth skin and lean muscle and the constellation of bruises you'd just kissed—blocked out the ceiling light. He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling in quick, shallow bursts, and the look on his face was something you'd never seen before. Something primal and possessive and so intensely focused on you that your breath caught in your throat.

"Better," he murmured, and the word came out rough, like gravel and honey.

His hands slid from your hair to your wrists, the stretch of your arms, the way it arched your back and pressed your chest up toward him, made a small, involuntary sound escape your lips. Before you could process what was happening, he’d lifted them—gently, so gently—and pressed them flat against the headboard. You felt the familiar wet thwip of web, and then your wrists were pinned, the sticky white strands wrapping around them with a precision that spoke of years of practice.

You tugged experimentally. The webs held firm.

“Wha—” Your voice came out breathier than you intended. “You did not just web me to my own headboard.”

“Shh.” He pressed a finger to your lips, and the casual authority in the gesture made your brain short-circuit. “Let’s just try it. If you don’t like it just tell me I’ll take them off of you.”

You stared at him, your wrists suspended above your head, your heart hammering so hard you were sure he could hear it.

“Three years,” he murmured, and his hands slid down your arms, slow and deliberate, leaving goosebumps in their wake. “Three years of you patching me up. Three years of covering for me. Three years of you sitting by that window waiting for me to come back to you.” His fingers found the hem of your shirt and tugged it up, exposing your stomach, and you shivered as the cool air hit your skin. “You’ve never asked for anything. Not once. You just—you were just there for me. Every single time.”

“Of course I was, I’m your best friend. You don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to.” He pulled your shirt off completely holding your bound hands together in his hand as he placed it back on your headboard. The webs regain their tract on the wood. You heard it hit the floor somewhere behind him. His gaze dropped to your chest, and the look on his face—reverent, hungry, almost pained—made your breath catch. “I want to. That’s the difference.”

He pressed a kiss to your sternum, right between your breasts, and you felt the vibration of his voice against your skin. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long. You have no idea.”

His mouth moved lower. Kissing your ribs, the dip of your waist, the soft plane of your stomach. Each press of his lips was deliberate, unhurried, and you squirmed against the webs holding your wrists, torn between wanting to pull him closer and wanting to cover your face because the look in his eyes was too much, too intense, it was everything you fantasised about late at night.

He hooked his fingers into the waistband of your sleep shorts and looked up at you from beneath his lashes. “May I?”

You nodded, because your voice had apparently decided to take the night off.

He pulled them down—your shorts, underwear, everything—in one smooth motion, and the cool air against your bare skin made you gasp. You were completely exposed, completely at his mercy, and the vulnerability of it should have been terrifying. The cool breeze of the night air kissed your wet and dripping core.

Yunho noticed. His enhanced senses meant he could probably smell it and the way his pupils blew even wider, the way his breath stuttered, confirmed it.

“Wow,” he breathed, and the curse sounded almost reverent. “You’re—”

“Don’t,” you warned as your cheeks turned rosy. “Whatever it was you were going to say, don’t say it.”

He grinned up at you and pressed a kiss to your inner thigh. “Don’t say what? That you’re beautiful? That you’re perfect? That I’ve spent approximately six hundred and forty-two nights lying awake thinking about exactly this?”

“Six hundred and forty-two? Pause, you counted?”

“My IQ is 250. Of course I’m good with numbers.” He kissed higher, his lips dragging along the sensitive skin of your thigh, and your hips jerked involuntarily. “Also I’m insane about you. That might have something to do with it.”

His breath ghosted over your pussy, and you whimpered, like something out of the trashy romance novels you’d deny reading until your dying breath. His hands gripped your thighs, spreading them wider, and you felt the webs shift as you pulled against them, your back arching off the bed.

“Yunho, please—”

“Please what?” He was teasing you, the bastard, his lips barely brushing against you, close enough that you could feel the heat of his breath but not close enough. “Use your words, baby.”

“You goddamn tease, if you don’t eat my—”

He laughed, and the sound vibrated against you in a way that made your toes curl, and then he was kissing her—soft, open-mouthed, achingly slow—and every thought in your head evaporated like smoke.

At first, it was just heat, raw, electric, searing up your spine and making your vision go white at the edges. The first flick of his tongue, slow and exploratory, made your thighs jerk open even wider, and you heard the sticky sounds of the webs as the force of it strained them. Your fingers curled uselessly against the webs, and you pulled hard, but the strands held firm—Yunho’s handiwork was nothing if not thorough. But the next lick, and the next, and the next, sent your body into panic. Panic and delight were the same now, a tangle of nerves burning up and reforming into something new each time he dragged his tongue across your clit, or sucked it into his mouth with a pressure that stole your breath.

“Feel good?” he murmured against you, and the casual confidence in his voice, the way he said it like he already knew the answer, made something primal and desperate claw at your insides.

“Yeah, s’good,” you managed, the words half gasp, half sob, all need. “Just like that.”

But Yunho didn’t just keep doing it. He did more. He locked his arms around your thighs, pinning them like you weighed nothing, and devoured you like a dying man at his last meal. His tongue was every bit as strong and agile as the rest of him—sometimes flat and broad, sometimes pointed and fast, always knowing exactly when to change rhythm or pressure, as if he was listening to the pulse in your wrists, reading every spasm of your hips as a line of code he’d written himself. And even that wasn’t enough for him.

And then you felt it. The bed shifting, a slow, rhythmic movement beneath you. You managed to crack your eyes open, to look down past the mess of your own hair and the flush of your chest, and what you saw made your breath stutter. He set his jaw and started grinding his cock into the mattress in slow rolls. It looked mechanical, desperate, the same instinct that made him clench his fists on the rooftop when he was trying not to scream at the world. The movement made the bed groan beneath you, made the headboard slam against the wall in a syncopated rhythm with your own breathless cries. You watched him through the haze of your own hair and the sweat running into your eyes, watched his face twist up, his brow furrowed, his lips wet and shining, his whole body tense as a tripwire. His eyes were closed and the sounds he was making were almost as devastating as what his mouth was doing to you.

He was getting off on this. On you. On every sound you made and every twitch of your hips and every trickle of slick that ran down your thighs. It was as if the taste of you was the antidote to every poison he’d ever soaked up from the city. He was doing it for you, because he wanted to, because the years of being patched up and lied for and loved unconditionally had built up into something so enormous that the only way he could express it was with his mouth between your thighs and his hips moving in helpless, desperate circles against your bed.

“Yunho—fuck, feels so good,” you mewled, and you fought the webbing, actually fought it, muscles flexing and tendons burning. You’d never felt so powerless, and that should have scared the shit out of you, but all it did was make you want more. “H-how are you so good at this?”

He looked up at you, eyes huge and shining and so dark you barely recognised him, and he grinned, wolfish and so full of pride that it broke your heart a little. “Well,” he purred, his breath hot against your skin. “Let’s just say that extensive research went into this, I want my baby to feel good.”

You wanted to snark back but the words got lost somewhere between the damp of his tongue and the fire in your gut. He didn’t give you time to recover. He dove back in, tongue working with a precision and speed that bordered on terrifying. You felt it—he was holding himself back, calculating every movement. He could probably make you come in ten seconds flat, but he wanted to drag it out, wanted to make you feel it, wanted to watch you lose it piece by piece.

His hands slid under your ass, lifting you up, tilting your hips so he could bury his face even deeper. The angle changed everything. It was deeper, more intense, the pleasure building so fast it made your vision blur at the edges. As he sucked your clit into his mouth, you jerked so hard your back arched off the bed, and the webs flexed, stretching but never breaking.

But it was the way he rutted against the bed, the way he ground his cock into the sheets as he ate you out, that turned your brain inside out. It was so greedy, so unguarded, and you realised he was just as desperate as you were. He was falling apart at the same rate you were, unravelling with every choked gasp you made, every drop of slick that hit his tongue. His breath hitched each time you clenched your thighs, and when you looked down you saw that his knuckles had gone white where he gripped your skin.

The sounds filling the room were lustful. The slick noises from between your legs, the creak of the bedsprings as Yunho desperately humped against the mattress, your own broken moans and half-formed pleas tumbling out of your mouth without your permission. You could hear him, the desperate little sounds he made each time he rolled his hips, the way his breath hitched when you clenched around nothing, and the combination of it—his pleasure feeding yours, as yours fed his—was creating a feedback loop that was rapidly destroying your ability to think.

He was losing it.

“Close,” you gasped, your thighs trembling in his grip. “I’m s-so close—”

He moaned into you, like an animal, and the vibration sent electricity shooting through every nerve ending. He didn’t let up. If anything, he doubled down, licking faster, sucking harder, hands bruising your thighs as he pulled you onto his mouth. Every muscle in your body tensed, every sense tunnelling down to where he sucked and lapped and wrecked you. He slipped a hand between your legs, the tip of one finger circling your entrance. He hesitated, just a second, like he needed your permission, and you yanked at the webs, desperate.

“Please,” you begged. “Ahh, shit. Need you. Please—just—”

He pushed in, one thick finger, and the stretch of it was so much, so perfect, you nearly saw god. He crooked it just right, hitting that spot inside you that made your vision go white. Your hips bucked, trapped between his unyielding arms and the mattress, and you whined, high and helpless, as the pleasure spiked.

“Holy shit,” he mumbled, his lips moving against you. “You’re so fucking tight, baby.”

The words dissolved into a groan as his hips stuttered against the mattress, and you realised he was close too. It was so sweet, so gentle. He was everything at once: the infuriating genius who’d built a drone out of your old shitty microwave last summer, the city’s golden boy, the one in the mask, the only one who’d ever been yours. And now he was here, worshipping you like you were the secret at the center of the universe. The grinding had grown erratic, even more desperate, his whole body trembling with the effort of holding himself together. 

The bed was shaking. The room was shaking. Something inside you was shaking, too, something you didn’t have a name for. Your body felt too small to contain all of it, and you begged him, the words falling out of you like sobs.

“Yunho, please, I can’t—I’m gonna cum—fuck, please, don’t stop!”

“That’s it,” Yunho moaned against your thigh, his voice thick and wrecked. “You look so beautiful like this. Cum for me.” 

He didn’t stop. He added a second finger, the stretch nearly painful, but he worked you open with such care it felt like a promise, like he’d never let anything hurt you that didn’t make you feel good too. He was so gentle it made you want to scream, and so rough you almost did. He curled his fingers, his tongue never letting up, and you shattered.

You came so hard you thought you might black out. The world went white, then red, then back to the ghostly blue of your bedroom, and you screamed, not caring who heard. You clamped your thighs around his head, crushing his ears, but he kept licking, kept fucking you with his fingers, pushing you higher and higher until the pleasure became pain and the pain became pleasure again. You lost track of time. Of breaths. Of words. You only knew the wild rush of his mouth, the slick heat of his fingers, the iron bands of his arms holding you down, keeping you safe, making you absolutely his.

You were still coming, the aftershocks wracking through you in waves, when he finally slowed, drawing it out, coaxing every last tremor from your body. He kissed you there, soft and sweet, and you whimpered, limp and boneless, your body spent.

"Yun—Yunho, shit! I can't, it's too much," you whined, your body convulsing in a mix of pain and pleasure.

But Yunho—he wasn’t done. He pulled back just enough to speak, his lips glistening, his chin soaked, his eyes blown so dark they were almost black. “You can take it,” he panted, and his voice was wrecked, raw, barely human. “You’re so strong, baby. You can take a little more for me, can’t you?”

Before you could answer, he added a third finger, and the stretch made you cry out, your hips bucking against his hand. He scissored them slowly, working you open, and the oversensitivity from your first orgasm was already fading, replaced by something deeper, something that coiled low in your belly and built with each thrust of his fingers.

"God, you taste—" He groaned, pressing his forehead against your inner thigh, his breath hot against your skin. "You taste better than I imagined, and I imagined it a lot. Like, an embarrassing amount."

"Shut up you cornball," you sobbed, half-laughing, half-moaning, because even now, even with his fingers buried inside you and your release still slick on his chin, You could’ve never imagined in a million years that it would be your best friend making you cum like this. 

He laughed against your thigh, and then he pulled back, sitting up just enough to free his mouth for a moment, his fingers still moving inside you. His free hand slid up your stomach and back down, his thumb settling against your clit, and the combination—fingers curling deep while his thumb worked slow, relentless circles—had you arching off the mattress, the second wave already building before you’d even finished shaking from the first.

“You’re doing so well f’me,” Yunho murmured, his words a hot whisper pressed right into you. The old mattress creaked beneath his driving hips, the steady grind of his cock into the sheets a relentless counterpoint to the maddening rhythm of his mouth and hands. He sounded almost pained now, like he could barely contain himself, but the greedy glint in his eyes said he wasn’t letting up until you’d given him everything. “Feel you getting close again. You’re so fucking responsive, it’s killing me.”

You were shaking so hard your teeth chattered, every nerve ending in your body humming with static. He had you stretched wide, back arched off the bed, the pulse in your throat pounded loud, loud enough that you swore he could hear it, and still he wouldn’t relent, wouldn’t break character for even a second. There was a wild pride in the way he looked at you, like he’d scaled your tallest building and was drinking in the view from the spire.

He slowed only when your breath hitched—a little whimper, raw and cracked. You thought maybe you’d snapped him out of it, but then you noticed: he was savouring it. Savouring you. Every tremor, every gasp, every desperate clench of your thighs around his head. It made your face burn. No one had ever made you feel this raw, this bare, this holy. No one had ever wanted you so openly, so shamelessly, like you were the only source of oxygen in a city choking on smog.

His hands were everywhere. One impossible grip holding your hips up, bruising your flesh in a way that made you want to weep with gratitude, the other hand mapping the trembling planes of your stomach, your ribs, the slick heat between your thighs. When he circled your clit with his thumb, you nearly levitated off the bed.

You tried to curse at him, tried to get a grip, but all that spilled from your mouth was a trembling, “Yunho—” and then nothing, just a long, stuttering moan that built in your chest and broke into a cry.

He pulled back just enough to glance up at you. His face was glazed with sweat, his lips and chin wet and shining, his pupils blown so wide his eyes looked inky. “Yeah?” he panted, the word more a growl than a question. “Tell me what you need, baby.”

You couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Every question he asked you was a test, a challenge to see how much of yourself you’d give him. If you’d bare your throat to the wolf, or run. “I need—” Your voice cracked, and the webbing around your wrists flexed under the strain as you pulled against it. “Your mouth. I need your mouth on me again, please—”

He shot you a look, all teeth and hunger and adoration, and then went right back to work. He licked a broad stripe up your folds, slow and deliberate, before sealing his lips around your clit and sucking so hard your vision whited out. The sound you made was high and lewd, a noise you didn’t know you could make. His tongue flicked, relentless, and his free hand snaked between your thighs to rub circles that bordered on cruel, the slick from your cunt making it all glide and catch in the most maddening way.

He moaned into you, like he’d just taken a bite of the best thing on earth. It vibrated through your bones. He was fucking shameless, humping the mattress with the same manic energy he devoured you with, hips rutting in time with every lap and suck. The sight of it nearly broke you; the way his whole body quaked with restraint, the way his hands trembled against your skin, the desperate, reverent way he clung to you like if he let go for even a second, he’d die.

You felt it, hot and massive, rearing up inside you. The pressure was so consuming, so sharp, you almost wanted to escape it, but he wouldn’t let you. He held you open, tongue and fingers working in tandem to drag you to the brink, then shove you right over it.

“Cum for me,” he rasped, barely pulling his mouth away, the words muffled by your skin. “Let me have another taste of you.”

You screamed. There was no other word for it. You screamed as he sucked and licked and fucked you with his fingers, building you higher and higher until the pleasure flipped over and became terror, a feeling like you might shatter apart and leave nothing behind but the broken pieces of yourself and the taste of him. You clamped your thighs around his head, squeezing so tight you feared you’d crush him, but Yunho just groaned louder, like he loved it, like he craved being smothered by you.

He curled his fingers inside you, pressing hard against the spot that made you see god. Your whole body seized, your lungs refusing to work, every cell in your body focused on the place where his mouth and hands were ruining you. It hit—harder than before, a relentless, rolling orgasm that tore through you like a bomb going off in a vacuum. You sobbed, your body going rigid, your hands clawing at the webs until you almost tasted blood.

And then—

You squirted. A hot, wet gush that splattered against his face, his neck, the sheets beneath you. The way your cunt pulsed around his fingers as you came and came and came, and then you were crying, fat wad of tears streaming down your face, because it was too much—too raw, too big, too terrifying.

He didn’t stop. He licked you through it, drank up every drop, and only when your body jerked with oversensitivity and your voice broke with a final, shuddering sob did he finally, finally come up for air.

"Oh my god," you gasped, your face burning so hot. You wanted to die.

You didn’t even know your body could do that. Sure your sex life was average but no person you’ve ever been with ever made you squirt like that— hell you think this is the first time you’ve ever done that.

Your hands pulled uselessly against the webs as you tried to cover your face, to hide, to disappear into the mattress. "Oh god, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to do that."

You were babbling, your brain short-circuiting between the lingering pleasure and the mortification, but Yunho pulled back slowly, his lips swollen and glistening, his chin wet, and the look on his face stopped you mid-sentence.

He looked like he'd just witnessed a miracle.

His eyes were wide, dark, and his mouth hung open in something that wasn't shock but awe—pure, unadulterated awe. He sat back on his knees, his chest heaving, and he just stared at you for a moment, like he was trying to commit every detail to his enhanced memory.

"That," he groaned, wiping his mouth clean with the back of his hand, "was the hottest thing I have ever seen in my entire life."

"You're lying," you whispered, your arms still straining against the webs above your head. "You're just saying that because—"

“Why would I ever lie to you?" He crawled up your body, his movements fluid and predatory, and the wetness on his chin caught the moonlight streaming through your window. "I need to make you do that again for me. Next time, though."

Next time? You sure fucking hope so.

He hovered over you, his face inches from yours, and you could feel the heat radiating off his body, could smell yourself on his skin. His hands framed your face, his thumbs brushing your cheekbones, and the tenderness of the gesture contrasted so sharply with the raw hunger in his eyes that it made your chest ache.

"You're so beautiful," he murmured, and then he was kissing you.

The kiss was filthy. His mouth tasted like you—salty, sweet, intoxicating—and you moaned into it, your tongue sliding against his as he deepened the kiss. He kissed you like he was trying to consume you, like he needed you closer, and you strained against the webs, wanting to wrap your arms around him but unable to. He pulled back from the kiss, his breath ragged, and looked up at your bound wrists. Something shifted in his expression, the dawning realisation that he’d been holding you captive for longer than he’d intended.

“Let me get you out of those.” He reached up, and with a careful tug, the webs dissolved, crumbling away from your wrists like spun sugar. Your arms dropped, aching and tingling, and you rubbed at your wrists as he helped you sit up, his hands gentle on your shoulders.

“Sorry,” he murmured, pressing a kiss to each of your wrists where the webs had left faint pink marks. “I got carried away.”

“Don’t apologise,” your voice came out hoarse, wrecked. “I liked it.”

He laughed, soft and breathless, and helped you lie back down, settling beside you on the bed. You turned on your side to face him, and he mirrored you, his arm pillowing his head, his eyes dark and warm in the low light. The sheets were ruined beneath you, soaked through. You never thought you’d end up in this situation. You let your gaze drift down, because you couldn’t help it. The suit was still bunched around his waist, and the bulge straining against the fabric hadn’t diminished at all. If anything, it looked worse than before. The spandex pulled so tight it looked painful, the outline of him hard and aching, making it impossible to ignore.

“Sorry,” he apologised, and this time he sounded genuinely pained. “I thought humping your bed would at least solve the issue temporarily.”

“I know.” You reached out, your fingers hovering just above the fabric. “Does it hurt?”

He let out a shaky laugh. “More than you know.”

You chewed your lip, your brain spinning through possibilities, and then an idea occurred to you. Something so ridiculous, so absurd, that you almost laughed out loud. Almost. But the more you thought about it, the more it took root, growing from a passing thought into something that made your thighs squeeze together in anticipation.

“So,” you hummed. “What else can you do with your webs?”

Yunho blinked. “What do you mean?”

“You know.” You traced a lazy circle on his chest, feeling the muscle jump beneath your fingertip. “I’ve seen all the people that you’ve webbed up, like on the walls and shit. Are your webs that strong?”

He stared at you for a beat, and you watched the gears turning behind his eyes. “I mean... yeah. The fluid is versatile. I can adjust the density, the tensile strength, the—wait, why are you asking?”

“Just curiouuus.” You propped yourself up on one elbow, looking down at him with what you hoped was your most innocent expression. “It seemed pretty strong when you tied me up but like, could you make a cocoon out of it? A little web hammock thing?”

“Probably?”

“Wouldn’t it be fun,” you whispered, letting your voice drop lower, “to have you fuck me on my ceiling?”

You watched it happen in real time. His eyes went wide. His breath stuttered. And between his legs, his cock twitched—a visible, unmistakable jerk against the spandex that made your mouth go dry.

“Baby,” he breathed, and his voice had gone rough, stripped of every ounce of composure. “You want to me to fuck you on your ceiling?”

You grinned, slow and wicked. “Did I stutter? Can you make that happen for me, my spiderman?”

The sound he made was almost feral. He sat up so fast the bed groaned in protest, and his eyes were blazing with something that made your entire body flush hot.

“Fuck, y-yeah I can make that happen.”

He was off the bed in a heartbeat, and you watched, transfixed, as he turned toward the ceiling. His hands pressed flat against the wall, and then—you’d seen him do it a hundred times on the news, but never this close, never in your bedroom—his fingers curled, and he began to climb. Not swing, not leap. Climb. His body moved with that impossible, liquid grace, each hand and foot finding purchase on surfaces that should have been smooth, and he scaled the wall like it was nothing, like gravity was a suggestion he’d chosen to ignore.

You sat up clutching the ruined sheet to your chest, and watched him crawl across your ceiling like something out of a nightmare or a very specific, very vivid fantasy you’d been harbouring for longer than you’d care to admit. He moved to the centre of the room, directly above your bed, and you could see the concentration on his face, the way his jaw clenched as he worked.

His wrists flicked, and the web fluid shot out—not in the thin, precise strands he used for swinging, but in thick, dense ropes that he wove together with practiced efficiency. You watched him build it, layer by layer, his hands moving in quick, fluid motions, and within minutes he’d constructed something that looked like a hammock. A dense, webbed platform suspended from the ceiling by dozens of anchor points, each one reinforced with extra layers of webbing. He dropped down from the ceiling, landing on the balls of his feet with that impossible Spiderman grace. Looking at you with a grin that was equal parts nervous and exhilarated.

“Okay,” he exhaled, running a hand through his sweat-damp hair. “It’s not perfect, but it should hold. I reinforced the anchor points, and the strength is strong enough to—”

“Yunho.”

“—adjusted for dynamic load, so even if we—”

“Babe.”

He stopped. Looked at you.

“Less engineering, more fucking, please?”

His grin widened, and he crossed the room in two strides. His hands found your waist, and he lifted you—effortlessly, like you weighed nothing—and pressed you against his chest. You wrapped your legs around his hips on instinct, and the hard line of him pressed against you through the spandex made you gasp.

“Hold on tight,” he murmured against your ear, and then he was climbing again.

The sensation was surreal. Being carried up a wall by your superhero best friend, his hands gripping your ass, your legs locked around his waist, the world tilting sideways as gravity became irrelevant. You buried your face in his neck, breathing in the scent of him. Sweat, musk and something faintly sweet that you now recognised as his web fluid and tried not to think about how high you were getting. He reached the cocoon and manoeuvred you into it with careful, deliberate movements. The webbing was soft beneath you, softer than you expected, with a strange give to it that cradled your body like a memory foam mattress. Yunho climbed in after you, and the cocoon swayed gently with the added weight, the anchor points creaking but holding firm. You looked up. The ceiling was right there, close enough to touch, and the perspective was dizzying—the room below you, your bed with its ruined sheets, the window still open to the night air. You were suspended in midair, cocooned in webbing, and Yunho was above you, his body blocking out the ceiling light, his eyes dark and hungry.

“This is insane,” you breathed.

“Good insane or bad insane?”

You reached up and pulled him down to you. “Good insane.”

He kissed you, deep and slow, his tongue tracing the seam of your lips before diving in, claiming every inch of your mouth like he had all the time in the world. His hands slid up your sides, thumbs brushing the undersides of your breasts before cupping them fully, fingers teasing your nipples through the thin lace of your bra. The sensation was electric, sending sparks straight to your core, and you arched into his touch with a whimper. He chuckled against your lips, low and knowing, before his fingers hooked into the lace and tugged it down, freeing you. His palms were warm and rough as they kneaded your flesh, thumbs circling your nipples until they hardened into aching peaks. You gasped into his mouth, your hands flying to his shoulders, nails digging in as he rolled and pinched, each touch sending a jolt of pleasure straight between your legs. 

Distantly, you registered the sound of fabric tearing as you helped him peel the ruined suit down past his hips, but your focus was on the way his hands worshipped your body, the way his breath hitched when you moaned. And then he was finally, finally free, and the sound that escaped you was half-laugh, half-sob at the sight of him. He was big—thick and heavy, flushed dark at the tip where a slow bead was forming, the veins along his shaft raised and visible in a way that made your breath catch somewhere between your lungs and your throat. The sight of him, fully hard and straining upward, made your pussy ache for him. 

“Condom?” he managed, his voice cracking.

You shook your head. “Okay for one, it’s a little hard to get condoms from up here. Also, I’m clean and on birth control.”

“Fair, and yeah I’m clean too.” He swallowed hard. “Are you sure?”

You answered by reaching down and wrapping your hand around him. The sound he made was devastating. A low, broken groan that echoed through the cocoon. His hips jerked forward involuntarily, and you felt the weight of him in your palm, hot and heavy and pulsing with each beat of his heart.

“Ah—shit, don’t do that, or I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” You stroked him, slow and deliberate, watching his face contort in pleasure. “You’ll cum before you even get inside me? The mighty spiderman, brought down by a hand job? Tsk, c’mon now.”

His eyes snapped open, and there was something dangerous in them—something that made your thighs clench. “You’re going to regret saying that.”

He grabbed your wrist, gently but firmly, and pulled your hand away. Then he was positioning himself, the head of his cock pressing against your entrance, and the sensation—the heat, the pressure, the sheer size of him—made your breath stutter.

“Ready?” he murmured, and his voice was so tender it made your eyes sting. You nodded. He pushed in. So agonisingly slow and the stretch was intense, bordering on painful, but your body was still wet and pliant from before, and he gave you time, his forehead pressed against yours, his breath coming in ragged bursts.

“Are you okay?” he whispered.

“Y-yeah fuck,” you gasped. “You can move more, please Yunho.”

He sank deeper, and the sound you made was pornographic—a long, broken moan that echoed in the cocoon. You could feel him everywhere, filling you completely, and the new angle, being suspended and gravity pulling you down onto him was unlike anything you’d ever experienced. Every inch of him pressed against walls you didn’t know you had, and when he bottomed out, your hips flush against his, you both froze.

“Oh my fucking god,” you whimpered.

“Holy shit,” he groaned, and his whole body was trembling. “Fuck, you feel—I can’t—”

He pulled back and thrust forward, and the cocoon swayed with the force of it, the webbing creaking beneath you. The motion drove him deeper, and you cried out, your fingers scrabbling for purchase on his shoulders, his back, the webbing beneath you.

“That’s it,” he panted, setting a rhythm that was slow and deep and devastating. Each thrust pushed the air from your lungs, each withdrawal left you aching and empty, and the suspended position meant you felt every inch of him, every ridge and vein, in excruciating detail. “Feel so good around me. So tight. So perfect.”

You couldn’t form words. You could barely form thoughts. The pleasure was building in slow, rolling waves, each thrust sending sparks cascading through your nervous system, but then something shifted. You felt it before you saw it—the change in his rhythm. His thrusts grew faster, harder, the careful restraint he’d been holding onto fraying at the edges. His breathing went ragged, his jaw clenched, and his hands gripped your hips so hard you were certain there would be bruises—bruises that would be gone by morning, thanks to his stupid super strength.

“Baby—” he gasped, and his voice was wrecked, barely human. “You’re so warm…fuck, you’re pulling me in, I can’t—”

“Yunho,” you whined, but he wasn’t listening. Not anymore.

His enhanced senses were betraying him. You could see it in his face, in the way his eyes glazed over, pupils blown so wide they swallowed the brown entirely. Every nerve ending in his body was firing at once, and you—your warmth, your wetness, the way your body clenched around him with each thrust—were overwhelming him. The aphrodisiac had dialled his sensitivity to something inhuman, and the combination of the gas and your body was too much, too intense, too everything.

He snapped. One moment he was fucking you slow and deep, the next he was driving into you with a force that made the cocoon swing wildly, the anchor points groaning under the strain. His hips pistoned forward, each thrust punching the air from your lungs, and the sound that filled the cocoon was raw and animal—the wet slap of skin against skin, his broken groans, your shattered cries.

“Fuck baby—” you tried to cry out his name but nothing came out as a moan, and he swallowed it with a kiss that was more teeth than tongue.

“You feel so good,” he groaned, and his voice had gone rough, almost feral. “I—I can feel everything, every—thing—”

His hand slid down between your bodies, his thumb finding your clit with devastating accuracy, and the first brush of his calloused pad against the swollen bud made you scream. He circled it, rough and relentless, matching the punishing pace of his hips, and the dual sensation—his cock filling you completely, his thumb working your clit—had pleasure building so fast your vision went white at the edges.

“Right there,” he growled against your mouth. “Feel you getting tighter. Am I making you feel good, baby? ”

His free hand found your breast, fingers closing around the soft flesh, and he squeezed—not gently, not carefully, but with a grip that made you cry out. His thumb rolled over your nipple, pinching and pulling, and the sharp burst of pain-pleasure combined with everything else was too much, too much, your body seizing as the overstimulation pushed you toward a peak you weren’t sure you could survive.

“Yes holy shiiit,” you sobbed, your hands flying to his wrist. “O-only you can make me feel this good.”

But instead of pushing him away, your fingers wrapped around his wrist and pulled. You guided his hand up. Past your collarbone, past your jaw, until his palm settled against your throat. His fingers were warm and rough, and you felt his pulse hammering against your skin where his wrist pressed against your neck. Yunho went still. Completely, utterly still, his cock buried to the hilt inside you, his hand resting against your throat with the barest pressure. His eyes locked onto yours, dark and questioning, and you saw the fear there—the fear of hurting you, of going too far.

“Squeeze,” you whispered.

“Baby—”

“Please.” You tilted your chin up, pressing your throat more firmly into his palm. “I trust you.”

His fingers curled, just slightly, the pressure gentle but unmistakable, and the rush of oxygen being slightly restricted sent a dizzying wave of heat straight to your core. He began to move again. Slow at first, testing, his thumb tracing circles on your pulse point as his hips rolled forward. But the restraint lasted all of ten seconds before the pleasure took over again, and he was fucking you hard, his hand tightening fractionally with each thrust, the pressure ebbing and flowing in time with his movements.

“You feel so good,” he groaned, his voice wrecked, barely above a whisper and heavy with disbelief. “So fucking good f’me. Can feel your pussy getting wetter every time I squeeze.”

The words echoed through the cocoon, amplifying every flicker of tension in your body until it felt like you were vibrating along the gossamer threads. His thumb kept up its merciless pressure on your clit, ungodly accurate, never missing a beat—and with every roll, your limbs stiffened and your spine arced, suspended and helpless under the dual assault of pleasure and a touch of well-placed pain.

His palm remained steady at your throat, fingers spread wide and strong as they pressed against the hollow just below your jaw, neither choking nor letting go. You were acutely aware of each millimetre of pressure, the way your body yielded under his hand, how the tightness made your world shrink to a pinpoint: the lightning bolt of his cock inside you, the dizzying flow of blood at your pulse point, the white-hot friction of his thumb circling your swollen clit. The more he gripped, the more your head spun. Your toes curled and every muscle in your body tightened until you thought you might snap, the whole world narrowing to the slick, filthy grind of his hips and the endless, overwhelming pleasure.

You tried to form words, to beg or warn him but all you could manage was a strangled moan, guttural and desperate, that just made his eyes darken further. The overstimulation swallowed you whole. It wasn’t just the way he moved inside you or the insistent drag of his hand; it was the position, the surrender, the very air in your lungs. With every thrust, your vision flickered at the edges, bursts of color behind your eyelids, nerves on fire and ringing with sensation.

You could feel yourself getting close, the pressure gathering low in your belly, tighter and tighter, until you were sure you’d break open from the force of it. Then you did. You broke, just as his teeth grazed the shell of your ear and his hand squeezed, just a little more, on your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like a live wire, fire consuming every cell. Your body seized around his cock, walls pulsing in rhythm with the frantic beat of your heart, and you cried out—tried to, but the sound barely escaped around the cage of his fingers. The only evidence was the look on his face: eyes wide, slack-jawed, like he couldn’t believe the way you milked him, couldn’t believe the power of it.

He never stopped moving, not even for a second, but the tension in his body shifted, hips beginning to stutter, movements no longer perfectly controlled. You could feel it in the way his cock thickened, twitched, the way his hands trembled where they gripped you. He pressed his forehead to yours, both of you sweating and gasping, and the cocoon rocked with every erratic thrust as if the whole world was swaying in time with your bodies. His breath was hot and desperate against your mouth, his voice ragged with need.

“Ngh—fuck, I can feel you cumming, milking me dry.” His own rhythm faltered, hips jerking unevenly as you pulsed around him. “You’re so tight, baby, gonna make me—”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but you didn’t need him to. You could feel it coming, that raw edge, the frantic, unspooling tension as he lost himself in you. You wrapped your legs around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back, urging him closer, deeper, until he was all but fused to you. The feeling of him—so deep, so hot—clawed at something animalistic inside your chest, and you wanted him to let go, wanted to watch him fall apart the way you just had.

“Where—tell me where—” He was babbling, out of his mind, and even in the midst of your own aftershocks you fought to answer.

“Inside,” you gasped, the word nearly lost as your body convulsed again. “Cum inside me, please, I want it so bad.”

His hand left your throat, finally, dropping to the webbing behind your head as though he needed the anchor to keep from floating away. The sudden rush of oxygen made you lightheaded, the world spinning even more wildly, but then he was kissing you, messy, desperate, open-mouthed and biting. He poured himself into you with one final thrust, hips slamming flush against yours, his entire body snapping tight as he came. You felt every pulse of it, every ripple of pleasure as he emptied inside you, hot and thick and so much you could feel it spill out around the seal of his cock.

For a moment, neither of you moved. The world was nothing but the sway of the cocoon, the sticky-sweet heat between your bodies, and the thud of your matching heartbeats. His head dropped to your shoulder, lips pressed to the curve of your neck, and you felt his breath—fast and shallow but gradually slowing—as he tried to recover. His body was heavy on top of you, all the strength gone out of him, muscles trembling with effort and leftover adrenaline. You could feel the aftershocks still working through him, tiny spasms that made his cock twitch even as it softened, and the sensation kept you riding the edge of your own pleasure, unable to let go.

You ran your hands through his hair, damp and tangled from sweat, and felt him melt against you, weightless but somehow grounding you at the same time. His arms came up to cradle your ribcage, gentle and careful, as if you were something precious that he might break if he wasn’t careful. The sudden tenderness after so much ferocity made your chest ache, and you closed your eyes, content to float in the aftermath.

When he finally moved, it was only to shift a little, curling his body protectively around you as if to shield you from the open window and the night beyond. His breath tickled your collarbone, his nose nuzzling the space just beneath your jaw, and the sensation was so unexpectedly soft you almost laughed. You flexed your wrists against the webbing, experimentally. The sticky strands held fast, supporting your body in a hammock of silky white, but you were so boneless and spent that escape was the last thing on your mind. Instead, you let yourself relax completely, surrendering to the hold, to Yunho’s arms still braced around you, to the delicious, throbbing ache between your legs.

He drew lazy circles on your hipbone, fingers gentle now, and every so often he would press a kiss to your shoulder, your jaw, the corner of your mouth. You could feel him smiling against your skin, lips quirking with each affectionate touch. It was so at odds with the way he’d just ravaged you that you had to smile, too, the intimacy of it almost more overwhelming than the sex itself. You opened your eyes and found him staring at you, brown eyes half-lidded and warm, eyelashes stuck together from sweat and tears and god knows what else. He looked so soft like this, so open and unguarded, you could almost forget he was the same person who had just fucked you within an inch of your life.

“Hi,” he whispered.

“Hi,” you whispered back.

He laughed and pulled back just enough to look at you. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face flushed, and there was something so tender in his expression that it made your chest ache. “I think I just had the best orgasm of my life while suspended from your ceiling.”

You snorted, the sound wet and undignified. “Romance is dead, they said.”

“I’m being serious.” He pressed a kiss to your nose, your cheek, the corner of your mouth. “I don’t think anything will top this.”

You wrapped your arms around his neck, pulling him closer, and the cocoon swayed with the movement. “You’re such a sap.”

“Only for you.” He nuzzled into your neck, and you felt his lips curve into a smile against your skin. “Also, I think we broke your ceiling.”

You craned your neck to look up. One of the anchor points had pulled slightly away from the plaster, leaving a hairline crack in the ceiling. You groaned.

“My landlord is going to kill me.”

“I’ll fix it.” He kissed your throat, right over the pulse point where his hand had been. “I’ll web it back together. She’ll never know.”

“Yunho, you cannot web my ceiling back together. That’s not how home repairs work.”

“Says who?” He pulled back, grinning that stupid, lopsided grin that had been making your heart do stupid things since you were fourteen. “I’m a superhero. I think I know a thing or two about structural integrity.”

You rolled your eyes, but you were smiling so hard your cheeks hurt. “You’re ridiculous.”

“And you love me.”

“I do.” You kissed him, slow and sweet, pouring every ounce of the years you’d spent hiding into it. “I really, really do.”

He hummed against your mouth, content and warm, and you lay there together in the suspended cocoon, swaying gently, the city humming below you. The aphrodisiac, the mutant, the fight—all of it felt distant now, like a dream you’d already started to forget. The only thing that was real was the weight of him on top of you, the feel of his heartbeat against your chest, the knowledge that after everything—after the secrets and the lies and the years of pretending—you were finally, finally here.

“Yunho?” you murmured against his lips.

“Mm?”

“Can we do this again tomorrow?”

His laugh was bright and warm and full of everything you’d ever wanted. “Baby, why wait until tomorrow?”

You grinned, feeling that familiar thrill shoot through you. The one that always came when Yunho looked at you like that, like you were the only person in the entire city that mattered to him. “Bet. One more round. But on my bed this time. Pretty pleaseee?”

The way his eyes darkened made your stomach flip.

“Since you asked so nicely,” he murmured, reaching up to cup your face with both hands. He pressed a kiss to your forehead, then your nose, then your lips. So soft and slow and achingly sweet. “Let me help you down.”

He made it look effortless, the way he always did. One arm hooked around your waist while the other shot a line of web to the ceiling, lowering the two of you down with a controlled swing that landed your feet on the carpet. You wobbled for half a second before his hand steadied you at the small of your back.

“Easy,” he whispered against your temple.

You watched him clear the web hammock with a flick of his wrist, the sticky strands dissolving into nothing against his palm. His fingers found the seam at his hips where the suit was still bunched, the last of it clinging to him like a second skin. He peeled it down over his thighs with a soft hiss of fabric, freeing himself completely. The crumpled heap of red and blue landed somewhere behind the nightstand, forgotten. Naked. Both of you. Standing in the dim amber glow of your bedside lamp, and you couldn’t stop staring. The definition of his chest, the lean muscle of his thighs, the way his cock was already half-hard again just from looking at you. Your body flushed hot all over.

“Bed,” you blurted out, it came out breathier than you intended. You took his hand and pushed him, guiding him until the backs of his knees hit the mattress. “Lie down.”

He obeyed with a smirk, settling against your pillows and folding his arms behind his head like he owned the place. Which, at this point, he kind of did. His eyes tracked you hungrily as you climbed onto the bed, and you could see the assumption written all over his face — the slight parting of his lips, the way his hips shifted expectantly. He expected you to sink down onto him, to ride out the last of your high with lazy circles against his cock, but you didn’t give him what he was waiting for. Instead, you shifted your weight and swung a leg over his chest, pinning his wrists to the mattress with your knees as you straddled his face. The look of shock that crossed his features was so raw, so unguarded, you nearly laughed out loud. Instead, you bent forward over the long plane of his body, bracing your palms against his thighs and arching your back, so your cunt hovered just above his mouth.

“Surprise,” you purred, and you shuddered at the answering heat in his eyes. He didn’t waste a second. His hands came up to your thighs, fingers digging into the flesh as if to mark you, and he jerked your hips down until your pussy met his hungry mouth. He licked into you with a filthy, greedy groan, tongue lapping at your folds with a single-minded focus that bordered on reverence. He mouthed at you like he was trying to eat you alive, and with every flick and suck, he made good on the threat. The first brush of his tongue sent a jolt straight through your body—a shockwave that left your vision shimmering at the edges. You steadied yourself with one hand pressed flat against his toned stomach, the other curling around his thigh, and savoured the solidity of him beneath you. He was so strong, so capable, so yours.

You looked down the length of his body. Sprawled beneath you, Yunho was pure muscle, the lines of his abs flexing with every movement of your hips. You watched his cock twitch and swell, flushed dark and glistening against his stomach, leaking in anticipation. You didn’t even think about it; your free hand wrapped around him, thumb circling the tip before stroking him in long, deliberate pulls. The dual sensations—the ferocious heat of his tongue inside you, the weight and pulse of him in your palm—made your head spin. Yunho moaned into you, the vibration of it traveling up your spine, and you rewarded him by squeezing him tighter, twisting your wrist at the top on the upstroke.

“God, you’re perfect,” he gasped into your skin, voice muffled by the press of your thighs, and the words made your knees shake.

You rolled your hips, chasing that perfect pressure, revelling in the messy sounds of him eating you out. He was all in, tongue and lips and nose buried in your cunt, and his hands were everywhere, kneading your ass, spreading you wider, holding you right where he wanted you. You could feel the wetness coating his chin, feel it glisten on your own thighs, and it only made you more desperate. You ground down harder, suffocating him on your pussy, and he groaned in approval, slapping your ass with one open palm.

“Don’t stop,” you hissed, and the sound of your own voice shot a thrill through you.

Who was Yunho to deny you of your wishes, of course he didn’t stop. Yunho was always hungry for you, but tonight he was ravenous. He devoured you with a focus that bordered on savage, lips latching onto your clit and sucking with just enough force to send you crashing toward the edge. The closer you got, the more he gave, tongue working you in tight, relentless circles, his hands pulling you down so you couldn’t squirm away. He wanted you to suffocate him, and you were happy to oblige.

But the hunger inside you was just as fierce. You wanted him in your mouth, wanted to feel the weight of him on your tongue, to taste him the way he was tasting you. You wanted to see how much self-control he really had. You shifted your weight again, angling your hips so you could bend forward over his body. The movement made your pussy drag across his lips, and he moaned into your folds as you bent down to nuzzle his cock.

You licked a stripe up the underside, savoring the salty-sweet taste, and then took the head into your mouth. The way Yunho bucked beneath you, almost lifting you off his face, told you exactly how much he liked it. You bobbed your head, taking him deeper, and the taste of him—salt and musk and something uniquely Yunho—made your eyes roll back. It was an endless loop of pleasure, a symphony of moans and gasps and frantic wet sounds that filled the room. The pleasure was building in tandem, feeding off each other, and you could feel it. The way your moans made him twitch against your tongue, the way his groans sent shockwaves through your core.

Yunho wasn’t quiet, not with you. He grunted and gasped and swore under his breath, the noises muffled by your pussy but still unmistakable. He ate you like a man starved, and every time you trembled, every time you gasped, he redoubled his efforts. It was a game of brinkmanship, seeing who could push the other over the edge first, and you were both playing to win. The wet sounds filling your bedroom were doing things to you. The way he was panting, the way his cock pulsed in your fist, the way his free hand had slid around to grip your ass and hold you in place.

“Oh baby, that feels so good,“ he managed between strokes of his tongue, and the curse was muffled against your skin, hot and wet and absolutely devastating.

You felt his cock twitch against your tongue, leaking even more, and you knew he was close. The tension in his thighs, the way his hips bucked up into your mouth, the frantic pace of his tongue, all of it pointed to one inevitable conclusion. But Yunho, even here, even with your thighs clamped around his ears and your lips choking his cock, was still Yunho. Still holding back. Still waiting for you.

He pulled his mouth away just long enough to suck in a breath. “W-want you to cum. C’mon baby give it to me,” he panted, and then dove right back in, tongue fucking you with a desperation that made you see stars.

You came with a shattered moan, the orgasm ripping through you so hard your arms gave out. Your entire body clenched, thighs trapping Yunho’s head in a vise grip as you rode out every last pulse. At the same time, you felt his cock jerk in your mouth. Your jaw went slack around him, and you felt him pulse against your tongue, feeling the exact moment he tipped over the edge because of it. His groan was guttural against your oversensitive clit as he came, and you swallowed. Every drop. The taste of him flooding your mouth, thick and warm, and you moaned through it, the sound vibrating around him, drawing out his orgasm until he was shaking beneath you.

Yunho’s hands found your hips again, steadying you as you both trembled through the aftershocks. He licked you gently now, soothing little kitten licks, and you whimpered at the oversensitivity. For a long, suspended moment, neither of you moved. Your mouth still around him, his lips still pressed to you, both of you trembling and spent and utterly ruined. Then you slowly pulled off him, letting his cock slip from your lips with one last, filthy pop before you climbed up next to him and collapsed onto the bed.  

Yunho turned his head to look at you. He reached for you, pulling you against his chest, and you went willingly, nestling into the space beneath his chin. His heartbeat was still hammering, fast and strong, and you pressed your ear to it, listening to the rhythm slow gradually back to something resembling normal. His arm tightened around your waist, pulling you closer, and you tilted your face up to look at him. His eyes were half-lidded, the adrenaline of the last few hours finally bleeding out of him, leaving behind something soft and sleepy and unbearably fond. You reached up, tracing the line of his jaw with your fingertips, feeling the stubble that had grown in over the course of the night. He turned his head, pressing a kiss to your palm, and then he was leaning down, his lips finding yours in a kiss that was nothing like the ones that had come before.

This one was slow. Painfully slow. His mouth moved against yours with a tenderness that made your chest ache, his lips soft and warm, and you felt the sound he made before you heard it. A low, contented hum that vibrated through your sternum. You kissed him back just as slowly, your hand sliding up to cup the back of his neck, your fingers threading through the damp strands of his hair.

And then you tasted it. The faint salt of yourself still lingering on his lips, the musk of him still coating your tongue, and the sound that escaped you was somewhere between a moan and a laugh. You felt him smile against your mouth, felt his breath hitch as he tasted the same thing, the mingled evidence of what you’d just done to each other, and the kiss deepened, not with urgency but with something quieter. Something that felt like coming home.

He pulled back just enough to rest his forehead against yours, his eyes closed, his breathing steady and warm against your face. “You taste like…you,” he murmured, and the wonder in his voice made you laugh.

“Wow! Funny how that works.” You giggled, shaking your head at his brutal honesty.

“If Ben and Jerry’s made a flavour of you, I’d eat it.”

You swatted his chest, but you were smiling so wide it hurt. He caught your hand, lacing his fingers through yours, and pressed another kiss to your lips—shorter this time, but just as sweet. You settled back against his chest, your head tucked beneath his chin, his heartbeat a steady drum beneath your ear. The sheets were ruined beneath you, the room smelled like sex and web fluid, and somewhere outside your window, the city was still spinning, still throwing its chaos at the world. But here, in your bed, with Yunho’s arm wrapped around you and his breath evening out against your hair, everything felt impossibly, perfectly still.

Your eyes grew heavy. The exhaustion of the night. The waiting, the worrying, the sheer physical exertion of everything that had followed was crashing down on you all at once, pulling you toward sleep like a tide. You fought it for a moment, wanting to stay awake, wanting to memorise the feeling of his skin against yours, but your body had other plans.

“Yunho?” you whispered, your voice slurring at the edges.

“Mm?”

“I’m glad you always find your way back to me.”

You felt him shift, felt his lips press against the crown of your head. His arm tightened around you, pulling you impossibly closer, and when he spoke, his voice was so soft it was barely there.

“Of course I do,” he breathed, his voice rough with emotion. “You’re my home, you’ve always been.”

Something warm and liquid spilled through your chest, filling every crack and crevice that years of secrets and pretending had left behind. You turned your face into his neck, pressing a kiss to the pulse point there, and felt him shiver.

“I love you,” you mumbled, the words already half-lost to sleep.

“I love you too, more than you’ll ever know.”

His lips found your forehead—a kiss so gentle it felt like a promise. You felt his breathing slow, felt the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath your cheek, and the last thing you registered before sleep pulled you under was the faint sound of his heartbeat, strong and sure, carrying you both into the dark. The city outside didn’t exist. There was just this. Just you and Yunho and the quiet hum of the world holding its breath, waiting for its hero to come back. And he would. He always did.

But for now, he was yours.

☆ note: let's all join hands and say our sacred motto: "if lei proofreads these she will surely die" thank you

“Just like that, yes”, the director called out, flashes and clicks of cameras everywhere around you. “A little bit closer to his - oh my god - so good, yes” The photographer was just shooting shots mindlessly, as he heard the director call out instructions, his voice authoritative and bouncing off every wall in the big space.

Wooyoung was watching you from behind the scenes like usual. Phone dangling from his hand as he scrolled on social media, not particularly paying attention to his best friend and girlfriend on set.

“Okay, now, maybe just seductively pull her panties out and let it snap back”, he called out again, and San did just that. “Amazing, do it a few times again.” He hummed appreciative noises in the back of his throat, eyes shining as he took in your tempting poses.

“Do we have the video cam on? I feel like this would work well on that,” he called out to no one in particular again. Staff came with video cameras now, swarming the scene you and San were creating. “But what would I even do without two such good models?”

The bright lights of the set were melting the minimal makeup you had on, making your face feel sticky and uncomfortable. How could you even feel comfortable? This was hell on earth. the constant clicking of cameras around you, letting them photograph you in underwear, not saving a piece of you that won't be on the internet. But at least it paid well.

The director could've been more subtle in checking you out, especially in front of the guys. If Woo were paying attention, he would've already killed him with his gaze - and San, too, for his hand placement, even though its purely professional.

The frown was begging to break through the masked emotion on your face. Something about this set was way more intimidating and alluring than your normal; maybe it was the sweat running down your side where San has been touching you. The knowledge of other people being in the room while he was doing it so sensually - especially in your boyfriend's presence. Not like he would ever share…

—

Turns out he would.

"You've been practically begging to get our hands on you, doll," Wooyoung whispered in your ear while San worked on your bra's clasp, freeing your tits to the cold changing room's air, making your nipples perk instantly. "You think he didn't smell your arousal from right next to you?" he bit your collarbone, hard, pulling a raw moan from your chest. You felt him smile against your chest before he looked deep in your eyes, "Hell, be grateful if the director didn't get a whiff of it," a chuckle rumbled deep from his ribs.

San's palms danced along your sides, caressing your silky skin, just to wrap them around you and get the branded bra off you. As soon as it left your body, his hands fondled your breasts, moans escaping your mouth at his mere touch.

While that happened, Wooyoung peeled your wet panties back, pulling them to the side to slide a finger through your folds, dipping them knuckle deep into you, only to pull them away just as fast as they came. Everything was happening so fast, the sensations of San's fingers rolling your nipples, Wooyoung sinking to his knees in front of you - it was way too fast, catching you off guard.

But there was no time to stand there and stare at your boyfriend, trying to figure out his intentions, because San got a hold of your chin, forcing you to turn your face to him as he kissed you deeply. His kiss was different from what you were used to. Wooyoung kissed slowly, biting your lips teasingly, and pulling back here and there to put his forehead against yours and smile at you.

San was all teeth and tongue, harshly reminding you of the fact that it wasn't your boyfriend. He kissed with haste, yet deliberately, and unapologetically, almost as if he was trying to say, "turn off your thoughts."

The kiss broke when you pulled away from him, at the feeling of Wooyoung's tongue touching your clit, making your hands grab a handful of his blonde hair, tugging on it like a lifeline. One of San's hands stayed on your chin; it was soft, but demanding. The other joined yours on the blonde's head, guiding his face on your cunt, where he was rougher with his touch.

"Let him make you feel good, huh, princess?" he whispered, lips touching your earlobe, gently nipping at the skin. "You worked so hard today, looking pretty in front of a camera isn't something anyone could do," his chest rumbled against your back as he chuckled mockingly, and pushed his hardness into your ass. "Mmh, and you do it well too, huh?" he tsked, sarcastically puckering his lips, his eyebrows furrowing.

Wooyoung pushed one of your legs into San's hand, opening you up to his mouth for better access, so now he could lick his way from your hole to your clit, drawing a deep moan out of you. "fuuck… Woo, baby, that's so good," you stretched the syllables, throwing your head back onto the other man's shoulder. He moaned into you, the vibrations sending a chill down your spine, arching it against San, whose breath hitched at your ass pushing back into him.

His tongue worked hard on you, switching between licking deep and sensual strokes and slow little nips on your clit. He was looking at you and San from under his lashes, a wicked glint shining in his eyes at both of your heated gazes. He pulled away from your cunt, stopping the stimulation fully. But he didn't bother to stand up before spitting on your mound, letting it run down between your folds.

He looked proud of his work, head tilted playfully, looking deep into your eyes as he leaned forward, resting his forehead against yours, but never really kissing you as you thought he would do so. Instead, his hand left your face, wrapped around the other man's neck, and he kissed him intensely, both of them moaning in the moment of the first touch.

They exchanged your taste in their mouths along with spit, and San's hands wrapped around your hips to easily let him rut his hips into your ass. Wooyoung didn't break from his lips, but let a hand fall from the taller man's neck to dip his fingers back between your folds, stimulating you while they kissed. Little did he know them kissing might've made you more aroused than all of the things they've done to you before.

It was a sight that's for sure, the two most prominent figures in your life - your boyfriend and his best friend - two very attractive people kissing right next to you while they both touched you, whose skin hadn't left yours. Something you will never tell them, but it's been a deep fantasy of yours.

Watching San wander around your and Wooyoung's house like he was at home, sweatpants low on his hips without a shirt on, getting casted to the same photoshoots with Calvin's, Diesel's and Skims' underwear line, letting him touch your body intimately, but just for the sake of pictures, and only professionally because the heat of his gaze always left his eyes when the cameras turned off. He never made a move before today, never let his hands wander on your body, finally letting him get a taste of you.

Your walls tightened around his fingers as he massaged that spongy spot in you. The moan it drew out of you, made them break their kiss and turn their attention back to you. Hungry gazes settle back on your writhing body, which was still held by San, and your hole scissorred open by Wooyoung.

Wooyung's face had a wide smirk on it. He stretched his neck to the side, tilting his head in the process, and fastening the pace of his fingers at the same time. Your moan was ragged, high, hands flying to San's hands on you for a better hold, nails already pushing crescent moons into his tan skin.

"You're taking it so well, m'love." his tone was honey sweet, overly sweet, and that's how you knew he could withdraw the pleasure from you any second now, but first, he would let that knot tighten in your lower abdomen, playing you dirty.

Your whines got closer together, and higher in pitch, and that's when he knew to pull his fingers out of you, robbing you of the feeling of euphoria. "Such a good girl, taking whatever is given to her," San whispered in your ear, his hand wandering for your hip to join Wooyoung's between your legs.

"Sannie," your boyfriend thought out loud, "She's so wet," his lips curled, "She would let you do anything, right baby?" Uncoherent moans and whines came from your mouth, and both men chuckled at your desperation. "So worked up, ready to take cock, hm?" he questioned, as he felt San's fingers start rubbing your clit, in soft circular motions, making your hips chase the stimulation. "Maybe you even want to take two today…" That wonder got both men groaning.

Both of their hands left the place you needed them to touch the most, backing you up against the table in the break room, turning you around and folding you over it in one motion. "Please…" your voice was weak, whiny, ready to voice anything to get one of them inside you.

"What do you need, love?" San asked from behind you, gently pulling your panties down your legs, letting them fall where they may.

"You," a breathy moan left you as his hips ruttend into you. Your wetness unmistakably staining the cotton of his briefs, making his eyes roll back into his head at the feeling of it on his sensitive mushroom tip. Wooyoung settled next to you, resting against the edge of the table, his hand smoothing down your hair, with a lopsided smile on his face.

San, behind you, was pushing his shorts down with a quick movement, pushing his head through your folds with ragged movements, pulling moans out of both your mouths. His head lolled back with the contact, savouring your wetness on him. He was teasing at first, not pushing into you quite yet, but thrust his length forward, letting it glide between your folds all the way to your clit.

His cock felt girthier than your boyfriend's, but sensations were quick to overtake your senses already, eyes closing gradually with each slide of his dick, and mouth opening wider and wider until your chin pushed against the hard surface of the table.

Wooyoung tried to look at both of you, San's pleasure-ridden expression and your falling apart one. His hand travelling to palm his own cock through the rough denim of his pants, trying to relieve his painful arousal.

"Stop teasing her, Sannie, don't be so cruel." Wooyoung chuckled over your whines' rising volume, "let her have it, she was so good…" freeing his own cock as he spoke, extending his hand in front of your head, "Spit in my hand, love."

As your saliva hit his hand, San thrust into you with one quick motion, pushing all air out of your lungs, with a breathy moan, oh, and was he girthier than Wooyoung. "Fuck..." his head was still hanging towards the ceiling, praying to every God not to come as soon as he hits your cervix.

His pace was brutal, punishing even though all you've been is pliant and good in their hands. The table's creaking, wet slaps, and breathy moans bounced off the four walls, making the atmosphere so much more intimate and close.

"You're so tight around me," San grunted from behind you, walls pulsating with every snap of his hips, so devoted to chasing his pleasure, dying to paint your insides, "made for us, right?"

A chuckle escapes from the man next to you, his hand matching the pace San's hips have in you, "such a wonder why we never done this before…" The pleasure was overtaking your senses, eyes rolling back into your head, that specific tightness in your lower stomach becoming more prominent with each time his head pushed against your pulsing spot.

The orgasm had you seeing stars, with the previous teasings, coming hard around his cock with a loud moan, only to Wooyoung slide three fingers into your open mouth, "Baby, you have to be quieter, some staff are still outside," he murmured as he leaned against your ear, his breath hot on your cheeks. "We can't exactly let them know two men are ruining you, can we now?"

You shook your head as best as you could with his fingers stuffing your mouth, trying to escape San's iron-hold on your thighs from the overstimulation. Still, he didn't seem like he was about to stop any time soon, pushing you into another orgasm so quickly after the first. "n-no.. stop, ah- Sannie," body burning in a way it rarely did, muffled moans and words escaping around the fingers in your mouth.

"Can I come inside her?" he tried, calmly talking over your ragged moans, his cock pulsing inside you. Wooyoung couldn't even let a word out before the other man's release painted your insides, mixing with your own, but his cock was still half hard inside you, still pushing his load deeper.

Wooyoung's hands were tugging your head up so his lips could connect with yours in a kiss, letting your body relax in his hold. His hand never stopped on his own cock, it only slowed down its pace, dragging it out as slow and measured as he could. He was moaning inside your mouth, tongue mapping out every part of you.

San slowly slid out of you, as he watched your boyfriend kiss you, a moan escaping both of your mouths, making Wooyoung pull away from you, resting his forehead against yours, "You think you could take both of us, doll?" his thumb played with your lower lip, gently pulling it down and letting it snap back, as a smile played on his lips.

You felt San's gaze on your bare back, even dropping back down to your cunt, where your mixed juices flowed out of you, wetting the inside of your thighs artfully.

You nodded against Wooyoung's head, gulping a bit of spit down your throat, even though your mouth felt so dry. You never took two at the same time before, especially not someone their size. Wooyoung liked to play around in bed with you, sometimes putting his fingers inside you with his cock, stimulating both of you further, stretching you beyond limits.

Maybe he had always been prepping you for this, to take him and his pretty best friend in you at the same time. Let them rub against each other inside your pulsing walls, making you come around them, pushing them over the edge with only a few thrusts.

His hands settled on your waist, pressing a soft kiss on your forehead before guiding you to the couch. He looked at San with a wicked glint in his eyes, before kicking his jeans down, while you tugged the shirt over his head. Then he settled on the couch, hands instantly going back to your hips, tugging you down with him.

"Are you gonna be a good girl and take both of us, baby?" you could only nod at his question, feeling both his tip prodding at your entrance, and San came closer to the couch behind you, stroking his already hardening dick. "I can feel San's come in you," he grunted, looking down where you were about to be connected, before throwing his head back with a groan.

You pushed him down, with a soft shove from your hands, reaching down to line his length up with your entrane before sitting down on it, "better push it right back then." All three of you moaned as you sat down on him, his cock easily gliding through your walls with San's release. If he could also slide in this easily.

Wooyoung's hands found their place on your waist, pulling you up from him, as the couch dipped behind you, and another hand joined your boyfriend's below your ribs. "Are you still sure about this princess?" his voice was husky and low, making the hairs stand on the back of your neck.

"Yes, please, Sannie, put it inside-" you whined breathily, brows furrowing together, just like when you first came, but this time in frustration. Wooyoung was already inside you, but held you so still that no stimulation came from it, and San was just lining up with your entrance, moving so calmly like you had all day. "Please, just put it in, I can't take it any-"

The words died in your mouth as he started pushing in, a hiss came from both men's mouths, eyes closing in the overwhelming pleasure. San was slow with it, not as mean as he was before with his hips, letting all of you get used to the new sensation.

When he bottomed out, a guttural moan came from them, their tips rubbed against each other, almost already making it too much, and you were already done for. As soon as he started pushing into your walls, they were pulsing around them, the stretch so good, making you feel so full.

"Oh my-" Wooyoung moaned under you, his breath hitching when San started moving, his hands holding onto your waist - and Wooyoung's hand, grabbing at it hard, grounding himself. He had never been with a woman and felt the immediate need to come, and you've done that to him twice already today, but this was different from the earlier stimulation. Your insides were stretched around them, making it tighter, warmer, and so much more intense to feel.

There was something so intimate about this; other than the actual intrusion of both of them in you, their praises hit your ears, but never actually made it to the point where you could comprehend it over the overwhelming sensations.

They started moving in tandem, Wooyoung's hips working up into you while San did the same from behind you, splitting you way beyond your limits. You were a moaning mess, no actual thought behind your eyes, and Wooyoung clearly saw when his chuckle hit your ears, "already fucked dumb princess?"

His words went over your ears, you folded over him, both men working hard so you don't actually fall from the couch. "Such a pretty sight-fuck," San moaned, looking where you were connected, hypnotised by the way you took their lengths.

It didn't need too many thrusts from them to have you shaking in their hold, thighs begging to let your weight fall against the man under you, but they held you up, fucking you through your orgasm while whispering sweet little nothings to you.

The sight of your eyes rolling back into your head, and the endless moans reverberating off the walls, got Wooyoung closer than he would've liked, "'nna fuck you full of our come, baby," he groaned, thrusting harder and faster up into you, making San even more vocal than he was before. "make you pregnant with one of our's baby alright?"

His hand came down on your belly, caressing the silky skin there, right over the bump their cocks caused, and he pushed down there softly, his own moan escaping from his mouth, "Feel this, baby?" You nodded at him, head rolling back against San's shoulders, thighs burning as you bounced on them, helping their movements.

It took one perfect trust from San against your spot for you to come again, tightening even more around them, as liquid spills down your thighs, soaking your man's abdomen, and San's thighs, "Fuck, princess-" one of them moans, following you close with their high. Your thighs shaking from the overwhelming feeling, tears running down your cheeks, messing up whatever makeup you still had on.

The other follows with their orgasm too, twitching and pulsing deep inside you, as you collapse against Wooyoung's chest. His hands instantly wrap around you, pulling you closer, but making you all whine as the movement makes San slip a little bit out of you, but he doesn't stretch the euphoria long.

He pulls out of you, crashing against the side of Woo, his head resting against the shorter one's chest, with a content sigh. "How come we've never done this before?" your voice muffled against Wooyoung's skin.

Both men chuckle at your question, but don't actually have answers for you. They are good in the comfortable silence that has settled over the room, letting all of you rest after an exhausting day. But then the realisation comes over you, you're still in the changing room at a studio, both sets that were on you and San ruined, with bodily fluids you are sure the brand won't ask for back, but there is still a bigger question at stake, "How the fuck do we get out of here without getting it to everyone's knowledge what happened in here?"

taglist (open): @belongjoong @kisssan @strhwa @thatateezgirl @karlee10261990 @stxrrywoo @minkieater @moooonandroses @redemptions

You weren’t one of those girls who fell for every smooth-talking suit that popped up on Tinder.

At least, that’s what you liked to tell yourself.

Sure, you’d entertained a few late-night chats here and there. Sent the occasional picture to people who earned it - and by “earned it,” you meant they sent one first, and it was worth your time. But it was rare, nothing serious, and definitely not something you lost sleep over.

Then came Yunho.

Tall, magnetic, every inch of him looking like he’d stepped out of a magazine ad and straight into your messages. The kind of man who knew he didn’t have to try too hard - which was exactly why you couldn’t stop replying.

He wasn’t from around here. Just “in town for work,” he said, like that explained the tailored suits, the late meetings, and the pictures from hotels that looked more like penthouses. You told yourself you’d seen men like that before - charming, too busy to be real -  but somehow, he felt different.

Three days of messages later, even your coworkers started leaning over your shoulder during shifts, whispering about “the CEO from Tinder.” You laughed them off, pretending it was no big deal. But every time his name lit up your screen, your heart skipped like it hadn’t learned restraint.

It was supposed to be harmless - a few witty texts, a little back-and-forth tension.

Until you pushed him.

And he pushed back.

That’s how it started - not with a match, or a photo, or a spark - but with a line you didn’t mean to cross and a reply that changed everything.

The first time he called you out, it wasn’t even serious.

He’d sent a picture - half mirror, half smirk - and you’d made some comment about men who take selfies like that. He joked back, and you rolled your eyes, sent a teasing message that didn’t quite land the way you meant it to.

Then his reply came through:

Yunho:

That’s not how you talk to me.

You stared at the screen, thumb hovering.

He wasn’t angry - you could tell. The words felt calm, deliberate. A warning, but one that made your pulse trip over itself.

You smirked.

You:

Oh? And how am I supposed to talk to you, then?

Three dots blinked, then vanished.

You waited.

You:

You can’t expect me to guess what you want if you won’t say it.

A minute passed. Two. Then-

Yunho:

I’m giving you a chance to set that tone back.

You laughed softly under your breath.

You:

Or what?

Yunho:

Do you really want to find out?

He wasn’t flirting like the others did. There was no try-hard charm, no predictable lines. Just a quiet confidence that made every word feel heavier than it should have.

You:

Why do you think I’m asking? To run my mouth?

Yunho:

Careful, sweetheart.

That one did it. The kind of pet name that hit too close, too casual, too soon - and yet, you didn’t hate it.

You smiled at your reflection in the dark of your phone screen, hair falling into your face, and typed before you could think better of it.

You: I think you’re all bark, no bite.

For a moment, nothing.

Yunho:

You’re lucky I like when you’re mouthy.

You shouldn’t have grinned the way you did.

But it was too late.

He’d already gotten under your skin.

Across town, Yunho’s phone lit up again, the glow cutting through the low hotel room light. He was sitting on the couch, jacket still on, glass of some fine whiskey half-empty beside him. Mingi leaned against the desk, sleeves rolled up, scrolling through emails that neither of them really cared about.

“Still working, huh?” Mingi asked without looking up.

Yunho’s mouth twitched. “Something like that.”

Mingi finally glanced over, catching the look on his friend’s face - the one he only got when something actually managed to hold his attention. “Is that the girl from this city?” he asked, already smirking. “The one who made you late to the meeting?”

Yunho tilted his phone toward him for just a second, enough for Mingi to see the chat - the last line from you still visible on the screen.

I think you’re all bark, no bite.

“Oh, she’s good,” Mingi said, letting out a low laugh. “You usually shut them down before they get that far.”

Yunho’s thumb hovered above the keyboard, a faint crease forming between his brows. “She’s not like the others.”

“Right,” Mingi teased. “That’s what you said about the one from Seattle.”

“Yeah but I mean it this time,” Yunho said simply, leaning back, gaze still on the phone. His tone wasn’t defensive - just certain, like he was stating a fact.

Mingi studied him for a second, then poured another drink and walked over, handing the glass off. “Careful,” he said, voice light but eyes sharp. “You’re starting to sound like a man who’s losing.”

Yunho let out a quiet chuckle, clinking his glass against Mingi’s. “Losing’s only a problem if I stop playing.”

The phone buzzed again.

Another message.

Another round.

Losing a game they didn’t have rules for - or more importantly, a goal for - wasn’t new. Maybe it was finding their version of ‘true love’ along the way - though they knew they wouldn’t - more like a game of timing and attention.

A different pool of girls in every town, no strings attached, just entertainment - and not only for themselves but the entire company they worked at.

Mingi leaned back in his chair, swirling his drink. “You ever think about slowing down? Hitting pause on the messages?”

Yunho shook his head, eyes still on the phone, knowing exactly what Mingi meant - has he thought about actually finding a partner? To put an end to their playboy games and settle down - “What’s the point? The game’s more fun when it’s unpredictable.”

Mingi smirked. “Unpredictable, huh? Sounds like someone’s got a new favorite.” Yunho didn’t answer immediately. He let the phone light wash over his face, thumb hovering above the screen like it weighed more than it should. 

“Maybe,” he said finally, voice quiet. 

“Maybe.” Mingi leaned closer, curious. “This one different from the rest?”

“Yeah,” Yunho admitted, a hint of something unspoken in the way he said it. “She’s… not playing along. Not like the others.”

Mingi laughed, low and amused. “That’s dangerous, you know that? The ones who actually fight back.” Yunho’s lips curved into a small, knowing smile. 

“Exactly.”

The phone buzzed again, and Yunho’s eyes lit up. Another line from you. Another volley in a game that didn’t have rules, and maybe, for the first time, no one really knew who would win.

You laughed softly, shaking your head. The dark of your apartment, the hum of the city outside, made it feel like it was just the two of you -  and somehow, he wasn’t even here.

You:

Then it’s a good thing I don’t plan on stopping.

The bubble flickered again, shorter this time.

Yunho:

You really don’t know when to quit, do you?

You:

Why would I, when it’s this fun watching you try to stay calm?

The phone stayed quiet for a moment, just long enough to make you bite your lip. Then:

Yunho:

You think I’m the one struggling here?

You:

Aren’t you?

The bubble appeared and disappeared faster this time, almost impatient. You could picture him there - smirking, jaw tight, trying not to let it show that he was actually enjoying the game.

Yunho:

Keep that same energy when we meet, sweetheart.

You froze for a heartbeat. Meet? The word lingered in your mind, teasing, dangerous, intoxicating. You had drawn the line - said no, kept your boundaries. But now, with the casual promise in that one message, everything felt like it was about to tilt.

You typed, deleted, retyped, finally settling on the one line that felt equal parts daring and amused.

You:

Oh, so you plan on meeting me? How sweet of you to fit me into that tight schedule of yours.

The three dots blinked back, and you grinned at the phone like you’d just won a round.

Sarcasm was in your blood, and with this man you loved using every ounce of it because you got put right into your place. Every. Fucking. Time.

And somehow, every late-night chat ended with him sending a picture - and every time, there was less fabric involved. You were hoping that little pattern would continue.

Yunho:

I would’ve loved to, but I don't like to reward brats.

Mingi laughed softly, glancing at his friend’s screen. “You’re in deep, my friend. She’s pulling strings you didn’t even know existed.”

Yunho’s gaze lingered on the screen, jaw tightening, lips twitching in that way that always meant he was enjoying the struggle more than he’d admit. “I don’t care,” he said. “We keep playing. Together.”

Mingi raised his glass in a silent toast, grinning. “Together,” he echoed. “But this one… this one’s going to be fun.”

You read his message again, rolling your eyes. I don’t like to reward brats.

Oh, so that’s how we’re playing?

You shook your head, biting your tongue to hide a smile - and failing miserably. How even could you? This man was a wet dream, and his best friend? God really took his time as when he worked his delicate time on them. How does that one song go? Two bad bitches at the same damn time?

Yunho was the man your coworkers wanted to meet at the bar, hoping someone like him would take them under their arms. The fantasy of a man who’d take them home, drape them in silk, spoil them senseless while they sipped wine and waited for him to return from his empire. Even you wanted a man like that once. 

But when the opportunity came, when it wasn’t just a fantasy on your screen, you hesitated.

Meeting a man who seemed too good to be true off Tinder? You liked living. You didn’t have a death wish - not yet, anyway.

Even working at a strip club had its dangers, but at least that thrill was one you could control.

These kinds of playboys were only good for a few days of entertainment. After they got to know your ambitions of not meeting them they fell off, and the cycle started again.

You:

Reward? You’ve been the one showing off all week, remember? I’m practically keeping score at this point.

The typing bubble appeared almost instantly.

Yunho:

Then maybe it’s your turn to even the score.

You:

You’re awfully confident for someone who’s already run out of shirts to take off.

Yunho:

Confidence looks better when it’s shared.

You rolled your eyes, smiling anyway. He never asked, not really - just left space, like an invitation you could accept or ignore.

You:

Tempting. But I wouldn’t want to make it too easy for you.

Yunho:

You already have. Every time you reply.

That one landed harder than you expected. He wasn’t demanding; he was just there, patient, coaxing.

You:

So this is your strategy? Charm until surrender?

Yunho:

No. Wait until you decide losing doesn’t sound so bad.

You stared at the screen, half laughing, half restless. Somehow, he’d flipped the game again - without a single instruction.

You:

Maybe I’ll send you something small

just so you remember who’s in charge.

Yunho:

Small? I’ll take my chances. 

You roll your eyes, but you are already adjusting the lighting, checking your reflection in the mirror. It’s your move, your idea; the photo’s barely anything, but it’s enough to shift the balance again. Still in your work clothes barrel crashed the couch when you decided texting him back was more important then getting in decent and comfortable clothes but this was maybe your win.

On the other end, Yunho’s breath caught halfway through a sip of whiskey. He tried to hide it, but failed. The image filled his screen - You're on your stomach on a couch, a fur coat around your shoulders just for show, not actually looking like it's there for holding you warm the way your cleavage is spilling out of your top, hair cascading down around your shoulders. 

A low whistle left Mingi’s mouth beside him. He ran a hand through his hair, eyebrows raised in disbelief and admiration. “You’ve outdone yourself this time,” he muttered, still staring at the screen.

Yunho only smirked, eyes fixed on his phone. “I didn’t do anything,” he said quietly. “She did.”

Mingi’s head fell into his hands “I can’t believe she has me sporting a boner over that picture” His voice muffled through his hands as Yunho chuckled, his own situation not much softer.

Yunho’s phone buzzed in his hands again.

You:

Good enough for your high standards, Mr. “I don’t reward brats”?

Yunho leaned back in his chair, the corner of his mouth twitching into a slow grin. Mingi was still shaking his head, muttering something about him feeling like a teenage boy.

Yunho:

More than enough. But now you’ve ruined every excuse I had to stay calm tonight.

You read it twice, smirking.

You:

Guess we’re even then.

For a long moment, nothing. Then your phone buzzed again.

Yunho on the other side of the phone was smirking and proud of his work.

A few minutes earlier a spark lit up in his mind while looking at your picture, which basically sounded like “Wanna get her back for that?” outloud. Mingi looked up from his hands, his one eyebrow lifted in a curious manner, and Yunho went on.

“We send a picture back just follow my lead” he said, voice authoritative leaving Mingi no room to argue. 

And then Yunho did the thing that no one in their right minds would have thought about, and put his hand on Mingi’s lap basically palming his hard on. Mingi’s eyebrows flew to his hairline jumping back in his seat, hands coming up in a defensive manner.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa- hold on,” Mingi said, eyes wide as he looked straight at Yunho. “You know I don’t have a problem with this stuff, but I don’t actually swing that way.”

Yunho just grinned, unbothered. A low chuckle slipped out as he adjusted his phone. “Relax. Just do the same. I snap a pic, send it to her, and she’s done for.”

Mingi swallowed hard but nodded anyway, muttering something under his breath about getting dragged into his best friend’s bad ideas. Still, he did as he was told.

A few seconds later, your phone lit up.

You blinked once, twice - then just stared, mouth slightly open. If someone had walked in, they’d have caught you frozen mid-breath, eyes wide, the picture still bright on your screen. For a second, you wondered if your mind had made it up.

You didn’t move for a full minute.

The photo still burned on your screen, your reflection faintly visible over it in the glass. You weren’t sure if you were shocked, impressed, or just entirely thrown off your balance.

Another message lit up.

Yunho:

You still breathing, sweetheart?

You:

Didn’t impress me that much.

A lie, obviously, but a convincing one if you didn’t read too close.

Yunho:

You hesitated long enough to make me think otherwise.

You:

I was bored. Deciding whether to pretend to be impressed or not.

Yunho:

Sure. Keep telling yourself that.

You smiled at the screen, half exasperated, half entertained. He wasn’t biting the way other men did - he was steady, unshaken, the calm to your noise.

You:

Don’t get used to me replying this fast.

Yunho:

That sounds like a challenge.

You:

No, Yunho. It sounds like a boundary.

He didn’t answer right away this time. When he finally did, his tone felt softer, deliberate.

Yunho:

Boundaries make it more interesting. Still not giving up on seeing you.

You stared at your phone a second longer, watching the last message sit there. Still not giving up on seeing you. He meant it. You could tell.

You tossed the phone onto the couch, the screen face-down, as if that would mute the part of your mind still replaying his voice in your head. He was a problem you didn’t need - and one you couldn’t stop thinking about.

For the rest of the night, you convinced yourself it was over. You’d drawn your line. He’d won.

--

The dressing room smelled like perfume and setting spray, the air thick with laughter and the static buzz of neon from the hallway.

You were sitting in front of the mirror, head tilted slightly as you traced the last swipe of lipstick across your mouth. The reflection stared back at you - composed, collected, not at all like someone who’d spent the last few nights dodging messages she still wanted to answer.

You leaned back, brushing glitter from your collarbone, fixing the strap of your top. The other girls were finishing up beside you, talking about weekend plans, customers, the same stories on repeat. You smiled when they did, pretending you were listening.

Your phone buzzed once on the counter, screen lighting up with his name.

You ignored it.

Across town, Yunho tossed his own phone onto the hotel couch, the same unread message still sitting at the top of his chat.

He’d been patient - patient for him, anyway - but the silence was beginning to itch.

Mingi was sprawled across the other end of the couch, flipping through channels like he was auditioning them for boredom. “We done here?” he asked. “Because this city’s not getting more interesting the longer we sit in it.”

Yunho exhaled, rubbing his jaw. “You wanted to hit that place by the river, didn’t you?”

Mingi perked up. “That strip club?”

Yunho’s mouth twitched into a half-smile. “Yeah. Why not.”

Mingi grinned, grabbing his jacket. “Finally. I thought you were gonna mope all night.”

Yunho didn’t reply. He just reached for his key card, pocketed his phone, and followed him out the door - still thinking about the messages you hadn’t answered.

The drive across the city was short - lights blurring into gold and red outside the car windows, the kind of restless hour that made everything feel possible. Mingi talked about the week, about the trip, about anything to fill the space. Yunho just listened, half there, half somewhere else.

He wasn’t used to being ignored. He was the one controlling the conversation - when it ends, the tone of it, everything. This was an unfamiliar feeling for him, and for a girl he wouldn’t have minded getting known.

By the time they pulled up outside the club, the night had folded into that in-between hour - too late for the after-work crowd, too early for the drunks. A valet waved them in without question; men like them didn’t need introductions.

Inside, the air was cool and dark, laced with perfume and low music. Velvet curtains, mirrored walls, and a stage glowing in half-shadow.

Mingi whistled under his breath. “Nice place.”

Yunho only nodded, eyes flicking over the room before settling into their booth near the stage. He still hadn’t touched his phone, though his thumb brushed against it once, out of habit.

Back in the dressing room, you could hear the low murmur of voices beyond the curtain - the kind that always picked up before a late set. One of the girls leaned over your shoulder, reapplying her gloss. “You’re on in five.”

You nodded, smoothing your hair one last time. The music from the floor shifted, the tempo slower now, heavier.

You stood, slipped your heels back on, and caught your reflection in the mirror again - one deep breath, a small smile, a flicker of something you didn’t name.

Outside, the lights dimmed.

Yunho leaned back in his seat as the music swelled, the spotlight cutting through the smoke.

And then you stepped into it.

The haze of the lights made everything on the floor look soft around the edges, faces melting into shadows. You kept your steps measured, practiced, the music guiding your body.

Then one shape sharpened out of the blur.

Tall. Broad shoulders.

Eyes locked on you like he’d been waiting for you to walk into that exact spotlight.

Yunho.

Your heartbeat skipped, just once.

Right beside him sat the friend from the elevator photo. Mingi. Taller, built like trouble in a leather jacket, a slow smirk pulling at his mouth the moment he recognized you.

You didn’t break rhythm, but your pulse kicked up another notch.

As you turned, passing near their booth, Yunho leaned in just enough for his voice to carry to you.

"Seems like we meet afterall, Sweetheart"

You didn’t look at him. Couldn’t.

But the corner of your mouth twitched up, betraying you.

Mingi noticed immediately. He let out a low whistle, tapping Yunho’s arm.

"She’s even hotter in person," he murmured, not bothering to hide the amusement in his voice.

Yunho didn’t look at him. His eyes stayed on you, dark and steady.

"Focus," he muttered back. "She can hear you."

"Good," Mingi said, smirking wider. "Maybe she’ll look over here again."

You didn’t. Not yet.

But your next spin wasn’t as effortless as the last.

You passed the booth again, and this time you let your gaze flick toward them for half a second.

Yunho noticed.

Mingi definitely noticed.

Mingi grinned, leaning back with one arm stretched over the booth. "Oh yeah," he said, low enough for only Yunho to hear. "She’s gonna be fun."

Yunho’s jaw tightened, but his eyes burned hotter.

You shouldn’t have spoken, but the words slipped out anyway, soft and perfectly aimed.

"Don’t flatter yourselves. I’m working."

Mingi laughed under his breath, delighted. 

Yunho didn’t laugh.

He just leaned forward, elbows on his knees, attention cutting straight through the dim lights.

"Finish your set," he said quietly. "We’ll talk after."

A spark shot through your chest. Irritation. Attraction. Both.

You turned away before either of them could read the expression on your face.

The song dipped, then faded out completely, leaving your pulse loud in your ears. You walked offstage without a single glance back, heels clicking against the floor with more confidence than you felt.

Behind you, Mingi blew out a low breath, still smirking.

"Damn," he muttered.

Yunho didn’t move. Didn’t blink.

"She heard me," he said quietly.

"Yeah," Mingi replied, amused. "And she liked it."

Yunho didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to.

You weren’t one of those girls who fell for every smooth-talking suit that popped up on Tinder. At least, that’s what you liked to tell yourself.

Sure, you’d entertained a few late-night chats here and there. Sent the occasional picture to people who earned it - and by “earned it,” you meant they sent one first, and it was worth your time. But it was rare, nothing serious, and definitely not something you lost sleep over.

Then came Yunho.

Tall, magnetic, every inch of him looking like he’d stepped out of a magazine ad and straight into your messages. The kind of man who knew he didn’t have to try too hard - which was exactly why you couldn’t stop replying.

He wasn’t from around here. Just “in town for work,” he said, like that explained the tailored suits, the late meetings, and the pictures from hotels that looked more like penthouses. You told yourself you’d seen men like that before - charming, too busy to be real -  but somehow, he felt different.

Three days of messages later, even your coworkers started leaning over your shoulder during shifts, whispering about “the CEO from Tinder.” You laughed them off, pretending it was no big deal. But every time his name lit up your screen, your heart skipped like it hadn’t learned restraint.

It was supposed to be harmless - a few witty texts, a little back-and-forth tension. Until you pushed him. And he pushed back.

That’s how it started - not with a match, or a photo, or a spark - but with a line you didn’t mean to cross and a reply that changed everything.

The first time he called you out, it wasn’t even serious. He’d sent a picture - half mirror, half smirk - and you’d made some comment about men who take selfies like that. He joked back, and you rolled your eyes, sent a teasing message that didn’t quite land the way you meant it to.

Then his reply came through:

Yunho: That’s not how you talk to me.

You stared at the screen, thumb hovering. He wasn’t angry - you could tell. The words felt calm, deliberate. A warning, but one that made your pulse trip over itself.

You smirked.

You: Oh? And how am I supposed to talk to you, then?

Three dots blinked, then vanished. You waited.

You: You can’t expect me to guess what you want if you won’t say it.

A minute passed. Two. Then-

Yunho: I’m giving you a chance to set that tone back.

You laughed softly under your breath.

You: Or what?

Yunho: Do you really want to find out?

He wasn’t flirting like the others did. There was no try-hard charm, no predictable lines. Just a quiet confidence that made every word feel heavier than it should have.

You: Why do you think I’m asking? To run my mouth?

Yunho: Careful, sweetheart.

That one did it. The kind of pet name that hit too close, too casual, too soon - and yet, you didn’t hate it. You smiled at your reflection in the dark of your phone screen, hair falling into your face, and typed before you could think better of it.

You: I think you’re all bark, no bite.

For a moment, nothing.

Yunho: You’re lucky I like when you’re mouthy.

You shouldn’t have grinned the way you did. But it was too late. He’d already gotten under your skin.

Across town, Yunho’s phone lit up again, the glow cutting through the low hotel room light. He was sitting on the couch, jacket still on, glass of some fine whiskey half-empty beside him. Mingi leaned against the desk, sleeves rolled up, scrolling through emails that neither of them really cared about.

“Still working, huh?” Mingi asked without looking up.

Yunho’s mouth twitched. “Something like that.”

Mingi finally glanced over, catching the look on his friend’s face - the one he only got when something actually managed to hold his attention. “Is that the girl from this city?” he asked, already smirking. “The one who made you late to the meeting?”

Yunho tilted his phone toward him for just a second, enough for Mingi to see the chat - the last line from you still visible on the screen. I think you’re all bark, no bite.

“Oh, she’s good,” Mingi said, letting out a low laugh. “You usually shut them down before they get that far.”

Yunho’s thumb hovered above the keyboard, a faint crease forming between his brows. “She’s not like the others.”

“Right,” Mingi teased. “That’s what you said about the one from Seattle.”

“Yeah but I mean it this time,” Yunho said simply, leaning back, gaze still on the phone. His tone wasn’t defensive - just certain, like he was stating a fact.

Mingi studied him for a second, then poured another drink and walked over, handing the glass off. “Careful,” he said, voice light but eyes sharp. “You’re starting to sound like a man who’s losing.”

Yunho let out a quiet chuckle, clinking his glass against Mingi’s. “Losing’s only a problem if I stop playing.”

The phone buzzed again. Another message. Another round.

Losing a game they didn’t have rules for - or more importantly, a goal for - wasn’t new. Maybe it was finding their version of ‘true love’ along the way - though they knew they wouldn’t - more like a game of timing and attention.

A different pool of girls in every town, no strings attached, just entertainment - and not only for themselves but the entire company they worked at.

Mingi leaned back in his chair, swirling his drink. “You ever think about slowing down? Hitting pause on the messages?”

Yunho shook his head, eyes still on the phone, knowing exactly what Mingi meant - has he thought about actually finding a partner? To put an end to their playboy games and settle down - “What’s the point? The game’s more fun when it’s unpredictable.”

Mingi smirked. “Unpredictable, huh? Sounds like someone’s got a new favorite.” Yunho didn’t answer immediately. He let the phone light wash over his face, thumb hovering above the screen like it weighed more than it should. 

“Maybe,” he said finally, voice quiet. 

“Maybe.” Mingi leaned closer, curious. “This one different from the rest?”

“Yeah,” Yunho admitted, a hint of something unspoken in the way he said it. “She’s… not playing along. Not like the others.”

Mingi laughed, low and amused. “That’s dangerous, you know that? The ones who actually fight back.” Yunho’s lips curved into a small, knowing smile. 

“Exactly.”

The phone buzzed again, and Yunho’s eyes lit up. Another line from you. Another volley in a game that didn’t have rules, and maybe, for the first time, no one really knew who would win.

You laughed softly, shaking your head. The dark of your apartment, the hum of the city outside, made it feel like it was just the two of you -  and somehow, he wasn’t even here.

You: Then it’s a good thing I don’t plan on stopping.

The bubble flickered again, shorter this time.

Yunho: You really don’t know when to quit, do you?

You: Why would I, when it’s this fun watching you try to stay calm?

The phone stayed quiet for a moment, just long enough to make you bite your lip. Then:

Yunho: You think I’m the one struggling here?

You: Aren’t you?

The bubble appeared and disappeared faster this time, almost impatient. You could picture him there - smirking, jaw tight, trying not to let it show that he was actually enjoying the game.

Yunho: Keep that same energy when we meet, sweetheart.

You froze for a heartbeat. Meet? The word lingered in your mind, teasing, dangerous, intoxicating. You had drawn the line - said no, kept your boundaries. But now, with the casual promise in that one message, everything felt like it was about to tilt.

You typed, deleted, retyped, finally settling on the one line that felt equal parts daring and amused.

You: Oh, so you plan on meeting me? How sweet of you to fit me into that tight schedule of yours.

The three dots blinked back, and you grinned at the phone like you’d just won a round you didn’t even know you were playing.

Sarcasm was in your blood, and with this man you loved using every ounce of it because you got put right into your place. Every. Fucking. Time.

And somehow, every late-night chat ended with him sending a picture - and every time, there was less fabric involved. You were hoping that little pattern would continue.

Yunho: I would’ve loved to, but I don't like to reward brats.

Mingi laughed softly, glancing at his friend’s screen. “You’re in deep, my friend. She’s pulling strings you didn’t even know existed.”

Yunho’s gaze lingered on the screen, jaw tightening, lips twitching in that way that always meant he was enjoying the struggle more than he’d admit. “I don’t care,” he said. “We keep playing. Together.”

Mingi raised his glass in a silent toast, grinning. “Together,” he echoed. “But this one… this one’s going to be fun.”

You read his message again, rolling your eyes. I don’t like to reward brats.

Oh, so that’s how we’re playing?

You shook your head, biting your tongue to hide a smile - and failing miserably. How even could you? This man was a wet dream, and his best friend? God really took his time as when he worked his delicate time on them. How does that one song go? Two bad bitches at the same damn time?

Yunho was the man your coworkers wanted to meet at the bar, hoping someone like him would take them under their arms. The fantasy of a man who’d take them home, drape them in silk, spoil them senseless while they sipped wine and waited for him to return from his empire. Even you wanted a man like that once. 

But when the opportunity came, when it wasn’t just a fantasy on your screen, you hesitated.

Meeting a man who seemed too good to be true off Tinder? You liked living. You didn’t have a death wish - not yet, anyway.

Even working at a strip club had its dangers, but at least that thrill was one you could control.

These kinds of playboys were only good for a few days of entertainment. After they got to know your ambitions of not meeting them they fell off, and the cycle started again.

You: Reward? You’ve been the one showing off all week, remember? I’m practically keeping score at this point.

The typing bubble appeared almost instantly.

Yunho: Then maybe it’s your turn to even the score.

You: You’re awfully confident for someone who’s already run out of shirts to take off.

Yunho: Confidence looks better when it’s shared.

You rolled your eyes, smiling anyway. He never asked, not really - just left space, like an invitation you could accept or ignore.

You: Tempting. But I wouldn’t want to make it too easy for you.

Yunho: You already have. Every time you reply.

That one landed harder than you expected. He wasn’t demanding; he was just there, patient, coaxing.

You: So this is your strategy? Charm until surrender?

Yunho: No. Wait until you decide losing doesn’t sound so bad.

You stared at the screen, half laughing, half restless. Somehow, he’d flipped the game again - without a single instruction.

You: Maybe I’ll send you something small just so you remember who’s in charge.

Yunho: Small? I’ll take my chances. 

You roll your eyes, but you are already adjusting the lighting, checking your reflection in the mirror. It’s your move, your idea; the photo’s barely anything, but it’s enough to shift the balance again. Still in your work clothes barrel crashed the couch when you decided texting him back was more important then getting in decent and comfortable clothes but this was maybe your win.

On the other end, Yunho’s breath caught halfway through a sip of whiskey. He tried to hide it, but failed. The image filled his screen - You're on your stomach on a couch, a fur coat around your shoulders just for show, not actually looking like it's there for holding you warm the way your cleavage is spilling out of your top, hair cascading down around your shoulders. 

A low whistle left Mingi’s mouth beside him. He ran a hand through his hair, eyebrows raised in disbelief and admiration. “You’ve outdone yourself this time,” he muttered, still staring at the screen.

Yunho only smirked, eyes fixed on his phone. “I didn’t do anything,” he said quietly. “She did.”

Mingi’s head fell into his hands “I can’t believe she has me sporting a boner over that picture” His voice muffled through his hands as Yunho chuckled, his own situation not much softer.

Yunho’s phone buzzed in his hands again.

You: Good enough for your high standards, Mr. “I don’t reward brats”?

Yunho leaned back in his chair, the corner of his mouth twitching into a slow grin. Mingi was still shaking his head, muttering something about him feeling like a teenage boy.

Yunho: More than enough. But now you’ve ruined every excuse I had to stay calm tonight.

You read it twice, smirking.

You: Guess we’re even then.

For a long moment, nothing. Then your phone buzzed again.

Yunho on the other side of the phone was smirking and proud of his work.

A few minutes earlier a spark lit up in his mind while looking at your picture, which basically sounded like “Wanna get her back for that?” outloud. Mingi looked up from his hands, his one eyebrow lifted in a curious manner, and Yunho went on.

“We send a picture back just follow my lead” he said, voice authoritative leaving Mingi no room to argue. 

And then Yunho did the thing that no one in their right minds would have thought about, and put his hand on Mingi’s lap basically palming his hard on. Mingi’s eyebrows flew to his hairline jumping back in his seat, hands coming up in a defensive manner.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa- hold on,” Mingi said, eyes wide as he looked straight at Yunho. “You know I don’t have a problem with this stuff, but I don’t actually swing that way.”

Yunho just grinned, unbothered. A low chuckle slipped out as he adjusted his phone. “Relax. Just do the same. I snap a pic, send it to her, and she’s done for.”

Mingi swallowed hard but nodded anyway, muttering something under his breath about getting dragged into his best friend’s bad ideas. Still, he did as he was told.

A few seconds later, your phone lit up.

You blinked once, twice - then just stared, mouth slightly open. If someone had walked in, they’d have caught you frozen mid-breath, eyes wide, the picture still bright on your screen. For a second, you wondered if your mind had made it up.

You didn’t move for a full minute. The photo still burned on your screen, your reflection faintly visible over it in the glass. You weren’t sure if you were shocked, impressed, or just entirely thrown off your balance.

Another message lit up.

Yunho: You still breathing, sweetheart?

You: Didn’t impress me that much.

A lie, obviously, but a convincing one if you didn’t read too close.

Yunho: You hesitated long enough to make me think otherwise.

You: I was bored. Deciding whether to pretend to be impressed or not.

Yunho: Sure. Keep telling yourself that.

You smiled at the screen, half exasperated, half entertained. He wasn’t biting the way other men did - he was steady, unshaken, the calm to your noise.

You: Don’t get used to me replying this fast.

Yunho: That sounds like a challenge.

You: No, Yunho. It sounds like a boundary.

He didn’t answer right away this time. When he finally did, his tone felt softer, deliberate.

Yunho: Boundaries make it more interesting. Still not giving up on seeing you.

You stared at your phone a second longer, watching the last message sit there. Still not giving up on seeing you. He meant it. You could tell.

You tossed the phone onto the couch, the screen face-down, as if that would mute the part of your mind still replaying his voice in your head. He was a problem you didn’t need - and one you couldn’t stop thinking about.

For the rest of the night, you convinced yourself it was over. You’d drawn your line. He’d won.

--

The dressing room smelled like perfume and setting spray, the air thick with laughter and the static buzz of neon from the hallway.

You were sitting in front of the mirror, head tilted slightly as you traced the last swipe of lipstick across your mouth. The reflection stared back at you - composed, collected, not at all like someone who’d spent the last few nights dodging messages she still wanted to answer.

You leaned back, brushing glitter from your collarbone, fixing the strap of your top. The other girls were finishing up beside you, talking about weekend plans, customers, the same stories on repeat. You smiled when they did, pretending you were listening.

Your phone buzzed once on the counter, screen lighting up with his name. You ignored it.

Across town, Yunho tossed his own phone onto the hotel couch, the same unread message still sitting at the top of his chat. He’d been patient - patient for him, anyway - but the silence was beginning to itch.

Mingi was sprawled across the other end of the couch, flipping through channels like he was auditioning them for boredom. “We done here?” he asked. “Because this city’s not getting more interesting the longer we sit in it.”

Yunho exhaled, rubbing his jaw. “You wanted to hit that place by the river, didn’t you?”

Mingi perked up. “That strip club?”

Yunho’s mouth twitched into a half-smile. “Yeah. Why not.”

Mingi grinned, grabbing his jacket. “Finally. I thought you were gonna mope all night.”

Yunho didn’t reply. He just reached for his key card, pocketed his phone, and followed him out the door - still thinking about the messages you hadn’t answered.

The drive across the city was short - lights blurring into gold and red outside the car windows, the kind of restless hour that made everything feel possible. Mingi talked about the week, about the trip, about anything to fill the space. Yunho just listened, half there, half somewhere else.

He wasn’t used to being ignored. He was the one controlling the conversation - when it ends, the tone of it, everything. This was an unfamiliar feeling for him, and for a girl he wouldn’t have minded getting known.

By the time they pulled up outside the club, the night had folded into that in-between hour - too late for the after-work crowd, too early for the drunks. A valet waved them in without question; men like them didn’t need introductions.

Inside, the air was cool and dark, laced with perfume and low music. Velvet curtains, mirrored walls, and a stage glowing in half-shadow.

Mingi whistled under his breath. “Nice place.”

Yunho only nodded, eyes flicking over the room before settling into their booth near the stage. He still hadn’t touched his phone, though his thumb brushed against it once, out of habit.

Back in the dressing room, you could hear the low murmur of voices beyond the curtain - the kind that always picked up before a late set. One of the girls leaned over your shoulder, reapplying her gloss. “You’re on in five.”

You nodded, smoothing your hair one last time. The music from the floor shifted, the tempo slower now, heavier.

You stood, slipped your heels back on, and caught your reflection in the mirror again - one deep breath, a small smile, a flicker of something you didn’t name.

Outside, the lights dimmed.

Yunho leaned back in his seat as the music swelled, the spotlight cutting through the smoke.

And then you stepped into it.

The haze of the lights made everything on the floor look soft around the edges, faces melting into shadows. You kept your steps measured, practiced, the music guiding your body.

Then one shape sharpened out of the blur.

Tall. Broad shoulders. Eyes locked on you like he’d been waiting for you to walk into that exact spotlight.

Yunho.

Your heartbeat skipped, just once.

Right beside him sat the friend from the elevator photo. Mingi. Taller, built like trouble in a leather jacket, a slow smirk pulling at his mouth the moment he recognized you.

You didn’t break rhythm, but your pulse kicked up another notch.

As you turned, passing near their booth, Yunho leaned in just enough for his voice to carry to you.

"Seems like we meet afterall, Sweetheart"

You didn’t look at him. Couldn’t. But the corner of your mouth twitched up, betraying you.

Mingi noticed immediately. He let out a low whistle, tapping Yunho’s arm.

"She’s even hotter in person," he murmured, not bothering to hide the amusement in his voice.

Yunho didn’t look at him. His eyes stayed on you, dark and steady.

"Focus," he muttered back. "She can hear you."

"Good," Mingi said, smirking wider. "Maybe she’ll look over here again."

You didn’t. Not yet. But your next spin wasn’t as effortless as the last.

You passed the booth again, and this time you let your gaze flick toward them for half a second.

Yunho noticed. Mingi definitely noticed.

Mingi grinned, leaning back with one arm stretched over the booth. "Oh yeah," he said, low enough for only Yunho to hear. "She’s gonna be fun."

Yunho’s jaw tightened, but his eyes burned hotter.

You shouldn’t have spoken, but the words slipped out anyway, soft and perfectly aimed.

"Don’t flatter yourselves. I’m working."

Mingi laughed under his breath, delighted. 

Yunho didn’t laugh. He just leaned forward, elbows on his knees, attention cutting straight through the dim lights.

"Finish your set," he said quietly. "We’ll talk after."

A spark shot through your chest. Irritation. Attraction. Both.

You turned away before either of them could read the expression on your face.

The song dipped, then faded out completely, leaving your pulse loud in your ears. You walked offstage without a single glance back, heels clicking against the floor with more confidence than you felt.

Behind you, Mingi blew out a low breath, still smirking.

"Damn," he muttered.

Yunho didn’t move. Didn’t blink.

"She heard me," he said quietly.

"Yeah," Mingi replied, amused. "And she liked it."

Yunho didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to.