𝒆𝒍𝒚

CHAPTER 1: LATE NIGHTS IN LAKE COMO

I didn't come to Lake Como to fall into bed with a stranger. I came because my father's company was closing a deal with an Italian textile group and someone with a Singaporean passport and a decent grasp of contract law needed to sit in on the meetings, and that someone was me. Three days of negotiations, translators, and men twice my age calling me "young lady" instead of my actual title, and by the third night I was so done being professional.

"One night," my colleague Minji had said, clinking her glass against mine while we were on a terrace that overlooked the water so still it looked like it was painted on. "One night where you're not Mr. Song's daughter. Just you."

I'd laughed her off at first. And then I'd had a second glass of wine, and a third. Somewhere between the second bar and the third… a place with string lights and a DJ who clearly thought hip hop was a personality, Minji had gone off with some guy she just met at the last bar we were at. So I'd found myself alone at the counter, spinning the handle of my glass between two fingers, when a voice beside me said, in heavily accented but confident English…

"You're doing that thing where you're thinking too hard for someone on vacation."

I'd turned, ready to deliver the practiced brush off I gave every man who tried his luck with me in a bar, but the words had evaporated somewhere in my throat.

He was… objectively, impersonally, in the most detached way I could manage while I was literally half drunk… the best looking man I'd seen in person in my entire adult life. Dark hair pushed back like he'd run a hand through it and wasn't bothered to fix it, a jaw I could've used as a straightedge, and eyes that held a kind of lazy, unbothered amusement, like he found the whole world a little bit funny and had decided I was the funniest part of it tonight.

"I'm not on vacation," I said. "I'm working."

"In a bar. At eleven at night."

"It's a very demanding job."

He'd smiled then… slow, crooked, entirely too aware of its own effect, and ordered us both something with too much rum in it, and by midnight I'd learned nothing true about him. Not his last name, not what he did, not which hotel he was staying at, only that his name was Jay, that he laughed like he meant it, and that he had a way of looking at me that made me forget I'd sworn off men in suits after my last two relationships had both ended over a damn spreadsheet.

"You're trouble," I told him, somewhere around my fourth bar, when his hand had found the small of my back and left it there like it belonged.

"I get that a lot," he said. "You gonna do something about it, or just complain?"

Somewhere between bar three and bar four, I'd made him guess my job, "finance," he'd said immediately, squinting at me like he could read a balance sheet off my face, "no, wait… something in law, you argue like someone who's used to winning," and I'd neither confirmed nor denied it, just let him keep guessing, delighted by how genuinely invested he seemed in being right. He, in turn, had refused directly to tell me what he did, only that it involved "a lot of boring meetings and even more boring men," which had made me laugh so hard I'd nearly knocked my drink into a total stranger's lap.

"You're avoiding the question," I'd told him, jabbing a finger into his chest.

"I'm creating mystery," he'd corrected. "It's a strategy."

"It's evasive."

"It's working, isn't it? You're still here."

I couldn't argue with that. By the fourth bar, the DJ had switched to something with a Latin beat that made the whole floor move as one body, and Jay had pulled me into it without asking, hand at my waist, hips finding the rhythm like it was something he did often, and I'd stopped pretending, even to myself, that I had any intention of going back to my hotel alone that night.

"For someone who does boring meetings," I'd shouted over the music, "you dance like you do this professionally."

"Hidden talents," he'd said against my ear, and I'd felt the words more than heard them, warm and low, and something in my chest had done a slow, dangerous flip that I chose, deliberately, not to examine.

I should have called it a night right there. I didn't.

The walk back to his hotel blurred into a memory I'd revisit more than I'd ever admit… the lake at my left catching the moon, his jacket over my shoulders because I'd complained once about the wind, his mouth against my temple at a red light because apparently he couldn't wait until we were inside. The lobby of his hotel was the kind of quietly obscene luxury that told me he wasn't just some backpacker with a nice face… marble floors, a chandelier that had probably cost more than my apartment, a night staff that greeted him by name with the particular deference reserved for people who paid for entire floors.

I noticed. I filed it away. I didn't ask.

Neither of us were interested in talking anymore anyway.

I didn’t even make it past the doorstep of his suite before he had me pinned against the door, his mouth claiming mine in a kiss that stole every last bit of breath from my lungs.

The click of the lock was barely audible over the pounding of my heart. His body pressed flush against mine… hard chest, strong thighs, the unmistakable bulge of his erection already straining against my hip. One of his hands tangled in my hair, tilting my head exactly how he wanted while the other gripped my waist, fingers digging in like he was afraid I might disappear.

“God, you taste even better than I imagined,” he growled against my lips, tongue sweeping in to taste me deeper. The kiss was messy, urgent, all teeth and tongue and raw hunger. I moaned into his mouth, hands fisting the front of his shirt, pulling him impossibly closer.

When he finally broke away, both of us gasping, his lips trailed hot, open mouthed kisses down my neck. He sucked hard at my pulse point, then soothed it with his tongue. “Been thinking about this since the second I saw you at that bar,” he murmured, voice low and rough. “Wondering how you’d sound when I finally get my mouth on you.”

My dress was already riding up from how I wrapped my legs around him earlier on the dance floor. Jay’s hand slid under the hem, palming my ass, squeezing. “So fucking soft. I can’t wait to taste every inch.”

He lifted me effortlessly, my legs locking around his waist as he carried me toward the massive king bed. The suite’s floor to ceiling windows overlooked the moonlit lake, but neither of us spared it a glance. He laid me down gently, but the look in his eyes was anything but… dark, predatory, starving.

Jay knelt between my spread thighs, pushing my dress higher. “Let me see you.” His fingers hooked onto my lace panties, dragging them down slowly, teasingly. Once they were off, he spread my legs wider, eyes locked on my glistening pussy. “Look at you. Already so wet for me. Such a pretty little cunt.”

I whimpered at his words, hips shifting restlessly. He leaned in, blowing cool air over my heated flesh before his tongue licked a slow, broad stripe from my entrance up to my clit. The sensation made my back arch off the bed.

“Fuck—Jay—”

“Mmm, say my name again,” he demanded, then sealed his mouth over my clit, sucking gently while his tongue flicked rapidly. Two thick fingers pushed inside me without warning, curling to stroke that spongy spot that made you see stars. The wet, obscene sounds of his mouth and fingers filled the room.

He ate me out like a man possessed… long, hungry licks, tight circles around my clit, then sucking hard while his fingers pumped faster. “Tastes so fucking good,” he groaned against me, the vibrations shooting pleasure through my core. “Sweet and creamy. I could stay down here all night.”

My hands flew to his hair, gripping tight as my thighs started to tremble. He added a third finger, stretching me deliciously, scissoring them while his tongue worked my clit relentlessly.

“Come for me, baby. Let me feel this pussy squeeze my fingers.”

The orgasm hit me like a wave, crashing over me hard. I cried out his name, hips bucking against his face as he licked me through every pulse, drinking down every drop.

But he didn’t stop. He kept licking, gentler now, until the overstimulation turned back into building pleasure. Only then did he pull back, lips shiny with my arousal, and crawl up my body.

He kissed me deeply, letting me taste myself on his tongue. “See how good you taste? I’m going to make you come on my tongue again before I fuck you.”

I reached for his belt, desperate to feel him. He helped me strip him, his cock springing free… heavy, thick, veined, the head already glistening with precum. I wrapped my hand around him, stroking slowly.

“Fuck, your hand feels amazing,” he hissed. “But I need your mouth first.”

He guided me up, sitting back against the headboard. I settled between his thighs, looking up at him as I licked up the underside of his cock. Jay’s head fell back with a groan.

“That’s it… just like that. Take your time, baby. Worship it.”

I swirled my tongue around the head, tasting the precum, then sucked him into my mouth. He was big… stretching my lips wide. I bobbed my head, taking more each time, using my hand on what I couldn’t fit.

“Shit—your mouth is perfect. So warm and wet. Suck harder—yeah, just like that.”

His hand rested lightly on my head, not forcing, just guiding. I relaxed my throat and took him deeper, humming around him. Jay cursed, hips twitching.

“Gonna come if you keep that up,” he warned, but I didn’t stop. I wanted to push him over the edge.

When he finally pulled me off, his eyes were wild. “Not yet. I want to be inside you when I come the first time.”

He rolled on a condom quickly, then positioned himself between my thighs. “Ready?”

“Yes—please, Jay.”

He pushed in slowly, letting me feel every thick inch stretching me open. When he bottomed out, he stayed there, grinding deep. “So tight. Taking me so well. This pussy was made for my cock.”

Then he started moving… long, deep strokes that built steadily. I wrapped my legs around him, nails raking down his back. He leaned down to suck on my nipples, alternating between them while he fucked me.

The pace quickened. Skin slapped against skin. He reached between me to rub my clit in tight circles.

“Come again for me. I want to feel you milking my cock.”

I shattered around him, clenching hard. Jay groaned, thrusting through my orgasm before pulling out.

“On your hands and knees,” he ordered.

I obeyed, ass up. He spread my cheeks, licking from my clit all the way up, teasing my other hole briefly with his tongue before diving back into my pussy.

“Fucking delicious,” he muttered, then slammed back inside me from behind. The new angle was devastating. He fucked me hard, one hand in my hair, the other reaching around to rub my clit.

“Tell me how much you love my cock,” he demanded between thrusts.

“I love it—fuck—so deep—don’t stop—”

He reached around and pinched my clit, sending me over again. This time he followed, burying himself deep and coming with a guttural moan of my name.

"Gosh, y/n"

We collapsed together, but the night was far from over.

After a short breather, he pulled me into the shower. Under the hot spray, he dropped to his knees again, water falling over both of us as he ate me out against the glass wall… tongue fucking into me, fingers everywhere, until I came screaming.

Then I returned the favor, sucking him off on my knees until he spilled down my throat with a hoarse shout.

Back in bed, he took me slow and deep in, whispering filthy praises the whole time, “Look at how well you take me… your pussy is so greedy for my cock… gonna fill you up again soon…”

I rode him next, grinding down, his hands guiding my hips while he sucked marks into my breasts.

By the time the sky started to lighten, I'd lost count of how many times he’d made me come… on his tongue, on his fingers, on his cock. The room smelled of sex and sweat. Jay held me close afterward, kissing my temple, both of us boneless and satisfied.

But even as sleep pulled at me, I knew I’d have to leave soon.

CHAPTER 2: THE NOTE

I woke up to sunlight shining gold across a bed that wasn't mine, in a room the size of my childhood living room, with an arm slung heavy and warm over my waist and my flight… my flight… leaving in three hours.

For one forgiving, traitorous second, I let myself lie there. Let myself feel the solid heat of him at my back, the slow rhythm of his breathing, the absolute stupidity of how good it had felt to be someone else's for one night, no expectations, no last names, no Song Corporation trailing behind me like a shadow with a balance sheet.

Then my phone, buried somewhere in my discarded clothes, buzzed with a reminder, and reality slapped me awake.

I slid out from under his arm with the sneakiness of someone who had, in a past life, definitely been a cat burglar. He stirred, murmured something impossible to understand, and rolled onto his front, and I froze mid motion for a full ten seconds before he settled again.

Dressing in the dark… or rather, dressing in far too much golden Italian sunlight while trying to be quiet about it… was its own special kind of chaos. I found my dress inside out on an armchair, one shoe by the door and the other, mysteriously, on the balcony. I did not investigate how it got there.

I should have just left. That would have been the smart thing. The clean thing. I had done this before… not this exact scenario, not a man who made my pulse skip just by saying my overthinking out loud, but the general shape of it, the one night stand that ended at sunrise with no numbers exchanged and no promises made. I was good at leaving. I'd built an entire adult life around being good at leaving before anyone got the chance to leave me first.

So why did my hand shake, just slightly, reaching for the hotel notepad.

I told myself it was the time pressure. The flight. The three hours narrowing by the minute while I stood in a stranger's hotel room debating the ethics of a goodbye note like it was a legal document requiring careful drafting. I told myself it had nothing to do with the way he'd said my name… just my first name, I realized with a small, absurd jolt, because I'd never told him last name, nothing to do with Song, just hey, you, careful, murmured against my hair sometime after midnight in a way that had felt, in the moment, more intimate than anything a stranger's name had a right to feel.

Instead I found a hotel notepad by a bowl of fruit no one had touched, and a pen with the hotel's logo engraved in gold, and I stood there chewing my lip, staring at a man whose last name I didn't know, feeling something uncomfortably close to guilt.

Had to run… flight I can't miss. Last night was fun. Sorry for ghosting, it's not you, it's timing. Left some money for the minibar since I definitely helped myself. Take care of yourself, stranger.

I looked at it, cringed, and added a folded stack of euros on top… not much, just enough to make the note read as a joke instead of what it actually was, which was panic dressed up as nonchalance. Then I slipped my shoes on in the hallway, and I left.

I did not look back at the bed. I told myself that later, on the plane, somewhere over the Arabian Sea with a complimentary champagne I didn't taste, three separate times, and I did not believe myself even once.

CHAPTER 3: THE ANNOUNCEMENT 

Jay woke up to an empty bed, a note that made his jaw tighten in a way he didn't examine too closely, and a stack of euros that felt, more than anything else that morning, like an insult.

Money for the minibar. Like he was a service she'd paid for and rated four stars. Like he was forgettable.

He wasn't used to forgettable. He wasn't used to being forgotten, not by women who'd looked at him the way she had… like he was the punchline to a joke only she knew, like she'd already decided he was fun but temporary before he'd even opened his mouth. He'd let a stranger walk into his hotel room, into his night, into apparently his head, and she'd left him folded currency like a tip.

He didn't know her last name. He didn't have her number. He had a room that still smelled like her perfume and a bruised ego he was going to pretend, for the sake of his own dignity, that he didn't have.

Fine, he thought, staring at the note until the words blurred. Fun while it lasted.

He had no idea, standing there in a hotel bathrobe at nine in the morning with wounded pride and lake view sunlight in his eyes, that the universe had already decided this was very much not over.

…

Three weeks after returning from Lake Como, I'd almost convinced myself the whole thing had been nothing more than a reckless business-trip mistake. I landed back into my routine feeling like myself again...… jet-lagged, sunburned in one uneven stripe across my shoulder, but myself, the version of me that answered emails and knew her own last name and hadn't spent a night pretending to be someone with no responsibilities. I told myself the whole flight home that Lake Como had been a bracket I was closing. Nothing that would follow me home.

My family had built Song Corporation from a single shipping route between Busan and Singapore three decades ago, back when my grandfather first left Korea with nothing but a cargo plan and a stubborn streak my father had inherited in full. I'd grown up between two languages and two sets of expectations… the quiet formality of my parents' generation, still rooted in Seoul even after thirty years abroad, and the faster, blunter world I'd built for myself in Singapore. Dinners at my parents' house still opened with a bow to my grandmother's photo on the mantel. My father still switched to Korean the second he was truly angry, which was usually the only warning I got before bad news landed.

My father was waiting for me at the dining table that evening, which was never a good sign. My father did not wait for people. People waited for him. The fact that he'd cleared his calendar to be sitting there with my mother, both of them wearing the particular stillness of people about to deliver news they'd already decided I would accept, made my stomach drop before he'd said a single word.

"Sit," he said. Not unkind. Just certain.

I sat.

"The Park deal," he began, and I already hated where this was going, because my father only used that tone… measured, deliberate, like he was reading from a contract instead of speaking to his daughter, for things he knew I wouldn't like. "Chairman Park and I have been in discussion for the last several months. Song Corporation and Park Industries merging our shipping and logistics divisions would put us in a position no one in this region could touch."

"Okay," I said slowly. "That's… good news? Why do you look like you're about to tell me someone died."

"Because," my mother said gently, reaching for my hand, "the merger comes with a condition. A marriage. Between you and Chairman Park's son."

The room tilted slightly. I laughed… an actual, disbelieving bark of a laugh, because surely, surely this was a joke, the kind my father sometimes attempted and always failed to land. "I'm sorry, what?"

"It secures the partnership for a generation," my father said, unmoved by my reaction, already reciting the argument he'd clearly rehearsed for this exact response. "It's not unusual in either of our families' histories. You know that."

"I know it's not unusual for it to happen to other people," I snapped. "I didn't think it would be me. I have a life, I have a job, I have… I don't even know this man!"

"You'll meet him tomorrow night. Dinner, here, informal. Chairman Park's son has agreed to the arrangement." My father's voice didn't so much as waver. "His name is Jay. I'm told he's reasonable. Personable. You could do far worse." Common name, right?

"And if I say no?" I hated how small my voice sounded, even to my own ears. "What happens then?"

My father set down his fork with the deliberate care of a man choosing his next words carefully. "Then the merger falls through. Ten years of negotiations, gone. Six thousand jobs across both companies put at risk over your reluctance to have dinner with a man you haven't even met." He softened, marginally, seeing something in my face he hadn't intended to put there. "I'm not asking you to marry a stranger tomorrow. I'm asking you to give this a chance. If, after time, you genuinely cannot stand him, we will find another solution. I promise you that. But I need you to try."

"That's not a real choice, father, and you know it."

"No," he admitted, quietly, which was somehow worse than if he'd simply argued. "It isn't. I'm sorry for that. But I built this company for you to inherit one day, and I need it to still exist by the time that day comes."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to slam my palms on the table and demand to know since when my entire future got decided over a boardroom handshake while I was out of the country closing a completely different deal for this same family. But I'd grown up in this house, under this roof, with this particular brand of love that came wrapped in obligation, and I knew… the way I knew the tide would come in, the way I knew the sun would set, that there was no version of tonight where I won this argument.

"Fine," I said, because it was the only word left that didn't come out as a scream. "Fine. I'll meet him. But I'm not promising anything beyond dinner."

My father, for the first time all evening, allowed himself something like a smile. "That's all I'm asking."

I went to bed that night thinking of Lake Como. Of a stranger's mouth against my temple, of a note I'd left folded on a hotel pillow, of the particular freedom of one night where nobody expected anything of me at all.

I had no idea how badly the universe was about to collapse those two lives into one.

CHAPTER 4: THE MAN ACROSS THE TABLE

I spent the following day in a fog somewhere between denial and minor panic, which was, in thinking back, an appropriate emotional state for what was coming.

My mother had chosen the restaurant… a private dining room in one of the hotels my family half owned, all dark wood and candlelight and a view of the skyline that was supposed to make everyone feel expansive and hopeful about the future. I wore the green dress my mother liked, the one that made me look, in her words, "like someone a Chairman's son would be lucky to marry," which was possibly the least comforting compliment I'd ever received.

I sat between my parents, watching the door, running through every version of this conversation in my head. Hello, nice to meet you, I hear we're being sold to each other for a logistics contract. I'd decided, somewhere around my second glass of water, that I would be polite. Cool. Unbothered. I would give this man exactly as much warmth as the situation legally required and not one degree more.

Then the door opened, and every rehearsed line I had died in my throat at once.

He walked in like he owned the room… because, I would later learn, in a very literal sense, he frequently did… dressed in a black suit that fit him with the kind of precision that only exists on men who've never had to wonder if they could afford tailoring. Dark hair, pushed back. A jaw I would recognize with my eyes closed, in a pitch black room, from memory alone, because I'd spent an embarrassing amount of a transatlantic flight trying not to think about that exact jaw.

He stopped mid stride. His eyes found mine, and for one full second, the easy, practiced charm on his face cracked straight down the middle into something like disbelief.

Him.

The stranger from Lake Como. The one I'd left a note and a stack of euros for. The one whose bed I'd slipped out of eighteen hours ago like a thief in the night, convinced… convinced… I would never see him again.

He recovered faster than I did. Of course he did. He slid into the seat across from me, straightened his jacket, and looked at me with an expression that was, if I had to name it, delighted… the specific delight of a predator that had just realized its dinner walked directly into the trap.

"Jay," my father said, standing to shake his hand, oblivious to the silent war being waged across his dining table. "This is my daughter."

"We've met," Jay said, eyes never leaving mine, mouth curling into a smile with teeth in it. "Haven't we?"

I picked up my water glass and drank the entire thing to keep from saying something that would get me disowned.

"Briefly," I managed. "In passing."

"That's not really how I'd describe it," Jay said, settling back in his chair with the unbothered ease of a man who had just been handed the single best piece of leverage of his entire life. "But sure. In passing."

My mother, blessedly, missed the hidden meaning entirely and launched into some pleasantry about the wine list. My father asked Jay about his flight in from Lake Como… of course he'd been in Lake Como, of course the business trip that ruined my life and the business trip that arranged my marriage were the exact same trip… and I sat there, spine locked straight, silently calculating how many ways I could disappear from this table without causing an international incident.

Jay answered every question my parents asked with the polished, charming ease of someone raised for exactly this kind of performance. And every few sentences, without fail, his eyes would slide back to me… amused, sharp, unmistakably promising that this conversation was very much not over.

Under the table, his knee brushed mine. Deliberately. I yanked my leg back like I'd been burned.

"So," he said, once dessert had arrived and my parents had drifted into a side conversation about the merger's logistics, low enough that only I could hear him. "Fun while it lasted, huh?"

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. "You read the note."

"I read the note." His voice was pleasant. Terrifyingly pleasant. "Money for the minibar was a nice touch. Very classy."

"I panicked," I hissed. "I had a flight to catch."

"You could've woken me up."

"I didn't want to wake you up. That was rather the point of leaving quietly."

"Right." He leaned back, studying me the way I imagine a shark studies a swimmer it hasn't decided whether to eat yet. "Because I'm just some guy you paid for room service and left behind. Except now it turns out I'm the guy your father wants you to marry. Small world, huh, Ms. Song?"

I hated how good my last name sounded coming out of his mouth like a threat. "This isn't funny."

"I think it's a little funny."

"Jay—"

"Relax." He picked up his wine glass, and something flickered behind his eyes that wasn't amusement at all… something colder, sharper, a decision being made in real time. "I'm not going to tell them. Wouldn't want to embarrass you in front of your parents. But you and I—" he tilted his glass toward me, the picture of civility, "…we're going to have a lot to talk about."

I had never, in my entire adult life, wanted to disappear so badly.

"This isn't a punishment," I said. "For me. Whatever you're thinking. I don't owe you an apology for leaving."

"Didn't say you did." His smile turned into something private, something I didn't trust at all. "But you left before I got the chance to make an impression. Seems only fair I get a second shot. We're going to be married, after all." He said the word married like he was trying it out for size, testing its weight, and something about the way it landed in his mouth made my whole body go warm and furious at once. "Might as well make it interesting."

He's going to make me pay, I thought, watching him raise his glass toward my parents in a toast neither of us had agreed to. This is a man who is going to make me pay for that note for the rest of my life.

I had absolutely no idea, yet, how right I was… or how much I'd eventually come to regret ever wanting it any other way.

…

Jay walked me to my car after dinner, which I was fairly certain was less about being a gentleman and more about getting me alone long enough to finish the conversation my parents hadn't been allowed to overhear.

"You could've said something," I hissed, the second the valet was out of earshot. "At the table. You let me sit there thinking I was about to meet a total stranger."

"And what would you have preferred? Me standing up mid appetizer announcing, 'Actually, we've met, she left me for dead in a hotel room in Lake Como after we did it'? Your mother would've had a heart attack into the bread basket."

"This isn't funny, Jay."

"I told you, I think it's a little funny." He leaned against the hood of my car, entirely too relaxed for a man whose entire future had just been decided over dessert. "Here's what I don't get. You looked at me tonight like I was a problem to be managed. But less than three weeks ago you looked at me like—"

"Don't."

"…like you couldn't get enough," he finished anyway, watching my face for a reaction he clearly enjoyed getting. "What changed? Besides the small detail of our fathers turning it into a business contract."

"Everything changed," I said. "That night was supposed to be nothing. A story I'd tell at parties. Not a… a lifetime commitment."

"Scared?"

"Furious," I corrected. "There's a difference."

"Is there?" He straightened off the car, close enough now that I had to tip my chin up to hold his gaze, and something in his voice dropped, lower, more serious than the teasing he'd kept up all night. "For what it's worth, I didn't ask for this either. I found out about the arrangement two days ago, same as you probably found out today. It's not like I knew it was you either… only to discover tonight it's the lady who decided I wasn't worth a proper goodbye."

That landed harder than I expected. "I told you. I panicked."

"I know." Something in his expression softened, just slightly, before the familiar smirk slid back into place like armor. "Doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy watching you squirm about it for a while."

"You are the worst person I have ever met."

"You said something very different 3 weeks ago," he said, opening my car door for me with an exaggerated little bow. "Goodnight, Ms. Song. See you at the engagement shoot."

"The what—"

He was already walking away, hands in his pockets, whistling something I was fairly sure was deliberately, infuriatingly cheerful, and I sat in my car for a full five minutes after he'd disappeared around the corner before I trusted myself to drive.

…

The engagement shoot, as it turned out, was very real, and very public, and scheduled for exactly six days later… a joint press release for two companies merging their shipping empires needed a photogenic couple to sell it, and apparently Jay and I were now, officially, that couple. A stylist tumbled in my apartment with three racks of clothing. A photographer with an assistant who called him "genius" without a trace of irony spent two hours arranging us against a backdrop of the harbor, murmuring instructions like closer, a little closer, now look at each other like you mean it.

"We're supposed to look like we mean it," Jay murmured, tilting my chin up with two fingers, entirely for the camera, entirely too gentle for a gesture that was supposed to be fake. "Think you can manage that?"

"I've been managing it all week," I muttered back, aware of how thin the line had become between performing something and actually feeling it.

The photos ran three days later… me in cream, Jay in navy, his hand at my waist and my head tipped back mid laugh at something he'd actually said, not scripted, a genuine reaction the photographer had caught by accident and declared "the shot." My mother framed it. Chairman Park used it for the official press release. Half my social circle sent me messages about how happy we two looked, how natural, and I sat there scrolling through the comments feeling something uncomfortably close to guilt, because the photo wasn't a lie, exactly. It just wasn't the whole truth either.

CHAPTER 5: ENGAGED, APPARENTLY 

The engagement was announced within the week, because apparently when two companies decide to merge their shipping divisions, nobody sees the point in a long engagement. There was a press release. There was a photo… me in a dress that cost more than my first car I bought for myself, Jay's hand at the small of my back in the exact same place it had been in a bar in Lake Como, except this time there were cameras, and this time it meant something entirely different.

"Smile," Jay murmured through his teeth as the photographers called for one more shot. "You look like you're being arrested."

"I am being arrested," I muttered back, teeth also gritted, smile also plastered on. "Just with better lighting."

"Careful," he said, low enough that only I could hear. "People might start thinking you don't like me."

"People would be correct."

"That hurts," he said, sounding not remotely hurt. "Especially considering how much you liked me a few week ago in a hotel room with a view of the lake. While you moaned my name—"

I stomped, discreetly, on his foot. He didn't even flinch, just smiled wider for the cameras, and I hated… hated… how much I wanted to laugh.

…

Jay and I were, by both families' decision, to move into a penthouse together ahead of the wedding… "to get comfortable with each other," my mother said, with the specific confidence of a woman who had clearly never had to share a bathroom counter with a man she was furious at. The penthouse was Park property, forty floors up, all glass and steel and a view of the harbor that would've been romantic under literally any other circumstances.

It had two bedrooms. Thank goodness…

The first month was a war led almost entirely through passive aggression and pointed silences. Jay left his shoes in the hallway specifically, I was convinced, because he knew it drove me insane. I reacted back by rearranging his entire closet by color instead of by season, which he discovered at seven in the morning while trying to find a specific navy suit and instead found himself surrounded by a rainbow of confusion.

"You're a menace," he told me over breakfast, hair still damp from a shower, tie hanging undone around his neck because he hadn't had time to finish it.

"I'm efficient," I said, not looking up from my coffee. "Color coding is a perfectly reasonable system."

"It's an act of war."

"Tie your tie, Jay, you have a board meeting."

He glared at me. I didn't look up. He tied the tie badly out of spite, and we both knew it, and neither of us said another word about it, and somehow that felt like the closest thing to a truce either of us had managed in weeks.

…

The banter was constant, and it was, if I was being honest with myself… which I tried very hard not to be… the best part of my day. He teased me about my coffee order (too complicated, he said, for someone who claimed to hate complications). I teased him about the fact that he talked to his car like it could hear him. He'd catch me smiling at something he said and immediately point it out, "Was that a laugh? Did I just make Ms. Song laugh?" and I'd immediately stop, purely on principle, which only made him laugh harder.

It would have been easy, dangerously easy, to enjoy it. I reminded myself, nightly, in the privacy of my own bedroom with the door locked, that this was a business arrangement wearing the costume of a relationship, and that the man three doors down had made it very clear, that first dinner, that he intended to make me pay for leaving him in Lake Como. I didn't trust charm that came with a motive. I'd learned that the hard way, long before Jay Park ever existed.

So I kept my walls up. Mostly.

It was easier some days than others.

…

RULES

Two weeks into this, I'd decided the situation required structure, so I'd drafted… because of course I had, I was my father's daughter whether I liked it or not… an actual list of household rules and taped it to the refrigerator.

Jay found it while looking for orange juice.

"'Rule one,'" he read aloud, deadpan, holding his glass of juice like a prop, "'No shoes in the hallway.' Sweetheart, this is a shared home, not a monastery."

"Rule one exists because you have never once, not a single time, taken your shoes off before the front door."

"'Rule two: knock before entering shared spaces if the other person is, and I quote, "visibly stressed."'" He looked up at me over the side of the paper. "How am I supposed to gauge 'visibly stressed' from outside a closed door?"

"You'll know."

"'Rule three—'" he squinted, "'… do not, under any circumstances, refer to this arrangement as "cute" in front of either family.' Why would I call this cute?"

"Because you called it cute to my mother yesterday and she looked ready to start planning nursery colors."

"It was cute. You made me a cup of coffee without me asking. That's basically a marriage proposal in this household."

"It was leftover coffee. I was being economical."

"Sure." He folded the list in half, tucked it into his back pocket like a souvenir instead of leaving it on the fridge, and I decided, very firmly, not to comment on that either.

Jay and I fell, without either of us quite agreeing to it, into a rhythm that felt almost domestic… he made appalling instant noodles at midnight and somehow always made a second bowl without being asked, I learned, against my will, the exact way he liked his coffee, dark, no sugar, one useless ice cube "for the aesthetic," his words, not mine. We argued about the thermostat. We argued about whose turn it was to deal with the dry cleaning. We argued, once, for a full twenty minutes, about whether pineapple belonged on pizza, an argument Jay won not through logic but through the sheer, relentless force of ordering one anyway and watching me eat three slices while insisting I hated it.

It didn't feel like an arrangement most days. It felt, terrifyingly, like something closer to a life.

I still wasn't ready to call it that. Not yet.

…

My mother had opinions about wedding dresses the way my father had opinions about shipping contracts… extensive, firm, delivered with total confidence regardless of whether anyone had asked. I stood on a small pedestal in a boutique that smelled like tea and money while a worker pinned fabric at my hips and my mother circled me like she was appraising livestock.

"This one," she declared, for the third dress in a row. "No… wait. The last one. Definitely the last one."

"You said that about the first one too."

"I have many opinions ." She adjusted a stray pin. "You seem distracted, darling. Everything alright with Jay?"

I hesitated a beat too long, and my mother, who missed almost nothing when it came to my moods, caught it instantly.

"Everything's fine," I said. "It's just… a lot. All of it happening so fast."

"You've been happier since Lake Como," she said gently, not unkindly, folding a swatch of lace over her arm. "Whatever's between the two of you, real or not, I've watched you smile at your phone more in the last two months than you did in the entire two years you dated that awful man from the shipping conference."

"His name was Nick, and he wasn't awful, he was just—"

"He once corrected your grammar during your own birthday toast. He was awful." My mother fixed me with a look I recognized from childhood, the one that meant she already knew the answer and simply wanted me to say it out loud. "I know this didn't start the way either of you wanted. But I've been married to your father for thirty one years, and I promise you, some of the best marriages start as arrangements. It's not how it begins that matters. It's what you both decide to make of it."

I didn't have an answer for that, not one I trusted myself to say without my voice cracking, so I just let the worker finish pinning the dress and hoped my mother would mistake the shine in my eyes for exhaustion instead of what it actually was.

CHAPTER 6: BACK TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

Six weeks before the wedding, the Park-Song merger required one final round of negotiations … in person, in Lake Como, with the same Italian business I'd first met with the night I'd met Jay. My father, delighted by what he assumed was budding chemistry between his daughter and her fiancé, insisted we both attend together.

"Absolutely not," I said, the second I found out.

"It's one trip," Jay said, entirely too pleased with himself, lounging in the penthouse's kitchen doorway with his arms crossed. "Besides, you love it there. You told me so yourself. Very memorably, actually."

"I will end you."

"Promises, promises."

…

The flight over was, against my best efforts, almost pleasant… Jay stole my armrest for the entire eleven hours and somehow made it feel less like an act of war and more like an invitation, and by the time we landed I'd watched two mediocre romantic comedies with him, argued about which one was worse, and split a truly ill advised amount of the airline's complimentary chocolate.

The negotiations themselves ran two full days, and I found myself, for the first time since this entire arrangement began, genuinely impressed by him… not by the practiced charm he displayed at dinner parties, but by the sharp, unglamorous capability he brought to a boardroom. He caught a clause in the shipping contract that would've cost both companies millions if it had gone unnoticed, argued the business's lead counsel into a corner without ever raising his voice, and did it all with the same easy confidence he'd used to talk me into a second drink the very first night I met him.

"You're staring," he murmured, leaning close under the act of reviewing a document, during a break in the second day's session.

"I'm reviewing your work," I said. "It's a legitimate business function."

"Sure it is." His mouth twitched. "For what it's worth, you're better at this than half the men in this room. Your father should let you run point on these negotiations instead of just sitting in on them."

I blinked, thrown by the sincerity of it, the total absence of teasing. "That's—" I fumbled for a second, "…actually a genuinely nice thing to say."

"Don't get used to it," he said, already back to his usual smirk, though something warmer lingered behind it that neither of us acknowledged out loud.

…

With the negotiations wrapped early that afternoon, we found ourselves with a rare, unscheduled block of hours before the celebratory dinner… no meetings, no families, no reason to be anywhere but exactly where we wanted to be. Jay suggested, with the particular casualness of a man trying very hard not to sound like he cared about the answer, that we take the hotel boat out onto the lake.

"That sounds suspiciously romantic for a business trip," I said.

"It's efficient sightseeing," he said. "You've been to Lake Como twice now and seen nothing but hotel lobbies and a boardroom. That's practically criminal."

I went. The lake in the afternoon light was almost romantic in its beauty… pastel villages stacked along the hills, the water so clear I could see straight through to the rocks below, mountains still capped faintly with snow despite the season. Jay, it turned out, was a genuinely terrible boat driver, and I spent a solid twenty minutes laughing at him trying to dock at a small café along the shore, nearly clipping a much nicer boat belonging to a very unimpressed elderly Italian man.

"In my defense," Jay said, mortified, as we both scrambled onto the dock, "boats are unreasonable vehicles."

"You almost took out a man's entire summer."

"He'll live." He handed me out of the boat with more grace than his docking had suggested he possessed, and didn't let go of my hand once I was steady on solid ground. Neither of us commented on it. Neither of us let go, either.

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering a village whose name I never quite caught, eating gelato that Jay insisted, with total confidence and zero evidence, was "objectively the best in Italy," and browsing a tiny shop that sold hand painted ceramics, where Jay bought a small blue bowl for no reason he'd admit to and I caught him, later, packing it carefully into his suitcase like it mattered.

"For the penthouse," he said, when he caught me watching. "Somewhere in that place we could use a little color that isn't gray and glass."

"That sounds suspiciously like nesting, Jay."

"It's interior design. Don't read into it." He absolutely wanted me to read into it. I absolutely did.

By the time the sun started dipping toward the hills, gold spilling across the water in a way that made the whole afternoon feel like something out of a memory I hadn't made yet, I'd stopped keeping track of how many times he'd made me laugh, or how many times I'd caught myself wishing this particular afternoon didn't have to end.

That night, with the contracts finally settled and one more signing ceremony scheduled for the following week, the business's lead partner insisted on a celebratory dinner… the same terrace, coincidentally or not, where I'd first found Jay leaning against the bar with a drink in his hand and a comment about my overthinking. I wore red. He noticed. He didn't bother pretending he hadn't.

"This feels like déjà vu," I said, watching the same lake catch the same moonlight it had the night we first met, a lifetime ago, back when I still thought I'd never see this man again.

"Good déjà vu or bad déjà vu?" he asked.

"Ask me tomorrow," I said, though we both already suspected we knew the answer.

The hotel… a different one this time, a relief, at least, though not by much… had, thanks to some administrative mix up that I was fairly certain Jay had personally engineered, booked the two of us into a single suite. One suite. One bed.

I stood in the doorway, staring at it, then at Jay, who was already unbuttoning his cuffs like this was the most natural thing in the world.

"No," I said.

"There's a couch," he said, gesturing vaguely at a chaise longue that was approximately five feet long and shaped like a crescent moon, entirely unsuited to the human spine.

"You take the couch."

"I'm six foot."

"That sounds like a you problem."

He grinned, infuriatingly. "We've shared a bed before. I don't remember you complaining."

Heat crawled up my neck, fast and unwelcome. "That was different."

"How, exactly?"

"That was one night with a stranger. This is—" I gestured helplessly between the two of us, "…this. Whatever this is."

"Fiancés," he supplied, far too casually, sitting on the edge of the bed like he already owned it, which, technically, given his family's stake in the hotel chain, he might have. "That's the word you're looking for."

"I know what the word is, Jay."

"Then use it. Might make the whole thing easier." Something flickered behind his eyes when he said it… not quite a challenge, not quite something softer. I didn't examine it too closely.

I ended up sharing the bed. I told myself it was purely logistical… a strict, enforced border down the middle of the mattress, a wall of decorative pillows stacked between us like the Berlin Wall reincarnated as home decor. Jay found the entire arrangement hilarious and said so, repeatedly, until I threatened to relocate him to the crescent-moon couch by force.

I woke up at 3 a.m. tangled against his chest, his arm slung over my waist exactly the way it had been the first time, in a different hotel, a different life, and I lay there in the dark for a long, unbearable minute, listening to him breathe, hating how much it felt like coming home.

I didn't move. Not right away.

When I finally did, careful, silent, he caught my wrist in the dark.

"Stay," he said, voice thick with sleep, and there was none of the usual bite in it. Just something quiet. Something real.

I stayed. I told myself, the next morning, that it hadn't meant anything. Neither of us brought it up again.

CHAPTER 7: JEALOUSY… WAS IT?

The closing gala for the merger was held on the terrace of the same hotel where the Italian business had first courted my father's business, string lights, a jazz trio, champagne that flowed like the lake itself had been bottled and served. I wore navy. Jay wore black. We'd agreed, wordlessly, over breakfast, to be civil for the cameras, which had somehow, without either of us fully noticing, evolved into being civil in general.

For the first hour, it was almost easy. Jay kept a hand at the small of my back as he introduced me to a rotating different executives and their spouses, and I found myself falling into an easy rhythm with him… finishing his sentences when he got bored of a conversation, catching his eye across the terrace when someone said something particularly absurd, sharing the kind of silent, private laughter that made me forget, for whole stretches of time, that any of this had started as a contract instead of a courtship. My father caught the two of us mid laugh at one point and looked, for a moment, so un-embarrassingly pleased with himself that I almost forgave him for the entire arrangement on the spot.

"You're enjoying yourself," Jay murmured, refilling my glass. "Careful. Someone might think you actually like me."

"Don't get used to it," I said, echoing his own line back at him, and he grinned like I'd handed him a gift.

That lasted exactly until Karina Yu showed up.

Karina was the business's newest assistant, stunning, sharp tongued, and, I gathered within about four minutes of watching her operate, extremely aware of exactly how good she looked with her hand resting on Jay's forearm while she laughed at something he'd said. I told myself I didn't care. I told myself this several times, with increasing insincerity, while I held a glass of champagne on the other side of the terrace and watched Jay throw his head back and laugh… an actual laugh, not the polished business one… at whatever Karina had just said.

So when Yeonjun Choi, a family friend from Singapore who happened to also be at the gala for reasons that felt suspiciously well timed, walked up beside me with two fresh glasses of champagne and an easy smile, I let myself lean into it. Just a little. Just enough.

"You look like you could use better company," Yeonjun said.

"You have no idea," I said, and let him make me laugh… genuinely, loudly, at a joke that wasn't even that funny… specifically angled so it would carry across the terrace.

I felt it the second Jay noticed. The air seemed to change temperature. I didn't dare look over, but I could feel the exact moment his attention snapped away from Karina Yu and landed, heavy and distinctively, on me and Yeonjun and the two inches of space between our shoulders that Yeonjun had very deliberately closed.

Ten minutes later, Jay's hand found the small of my back.

"Having fun?" he asked, voice pleasant, smile fixed, eyes doing absolutely none of the smiling.

"Loads," I said sweetly. "Yeonjun was just telling me about his new venture. Weren't you, Yeonjun?"

"I was," Yeonjun said, entirely oblivious to the fact that he had just become a casualty in a war he didn't know was being fought. "Actually, I was going to ask if you'd want to—"

"She'd love to," Jay cut in smoothly, "catch up with you later. Right now I need to steal my fiancée for a dance."

He didn't wait for my answer. His hand slid from my back to my waist, and he was already pulling me toward the small cleared space where a few other couples swayed under the lights, and I went, because making a scene in front of half of Lake Como's business elite was not on my evening's agenda.

"That was rude," I said, once we were close enough that only he could hear.

"That was necessary."

"He was being friendly."

"He was flirting with you." Jay's jaw was tight, his hand at my waist gripping just a little too firmly to be casual. "In front of me. At our engagement gala."

"And you were doing what, exactly, with Karina Yu for the last half hour? Discussing shipping tariffs?"

"That's different."

"How is that different?"

"Because I wasn't trying to make you jealous," he said, and then, a beat too late, the muscle in his jaw ticking, "Were you? Trying to make me jealous?"

I didn't answer. Which was, in itself, an answer, and we both knew it.

"You were," he said, something dark and satisfied slipping into his voice even through the anger. "You wanted me to see that."

"Don't flatter yourself."

"I'm not flattering myself. I'm reading the room. And the room says you didn't like watching me talk to another woman any more than I liked watching you flirt with Yeonjun Choi's Rolex collection."

"I don't care who you talk to."

"Liar," he said, low, and pulled me a fraction closer, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off him through two layers of expensive fabric. "You've been glaring at Karina Yu's dress since she walked in."

"It's a hideous dress."

"It's a Valentino."

"It's a hideous Valentino."

Something in his expression cracked then… not quite a smile, something rawer than that, something that looked almost like relief that I was finally, finally saying something true. The song ended. Neither of us stepped back.

"We're going back to the hotel," Jay said. It wasn't a question.

I didn't argue.

CHAPTER 8: CRASH… HEHE

The elevator ride back to the penthouse floor was silent in the way that meant it wasn't silent at all… every inch of space between us charged, both of us staring straight ahead at the doors like the reflection there might explain what exactly we were doing.

The second the door clicked shut behind us, it all came out at once.

"You embarrassed me out there," I said, rounding on him, heels forgotten by the door, adrenaline and champagne and something far more dangerous humming under my skin. "Pulling me away like I'm a possession you needed to reclaim—"

"I embarrassed you?" Jay's jacket was already off, tossed over the back of a chair, tie loosened like he couldn't get it off fast enough. "You spent an hour hanging off Yeonjun Choi's arm—"

"I did not hang off his arm—"

"…laughing at everything he said like it was the funniest thing you'd ever heard—"

"Because it's more fun than watching you and Karina Yu practically undress each other with your eyes across the terrace!"

"There it is." He turned to face me fully, and the look on his face wasn't the charming, lazy amusement I'd grown used to… it was something sharper, hungrier, months of banter and almost truths finally boiling over into something neither of us could pretend was just anger anymore. "That's what this is about. You don't get to be jealous of me, sweetheart. Not after Lake Como. Not after you left me a note like I was room service."

"I'm not jealous."

"You're jealous." He took a step closer. I didn't step back. "You've been jealous since the second she put her hand on my arm, and you know what? So was I. Watching Yeonjun Choi look at you like that. Like he had any right to."

"Maybe he does," I said, breathless, reckless, the words leaving my mouth before my brain could stop them. "Maybe I'm tired of being handed off to a man who's spent the last two months trying to make me pay for one night I don't even regret."

Something in his face went dangerously still. "You don't regret it."

"No," I said. "I don't. And that terrifies me. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

The distance between us disappeared.

In a crash of mouths and hands. Jay’s kiss wasn’t gentle… it was a claim, teeth clashing, tongue demanding entry as he backed me against the nearest wall with enough force that a framed picture rattled. I bit his lower lip hard enough to taste the faint metallic tang of blood, and he growled into my mouth, the sound vibrating straight down to my core.

“You think I don’t know what you were doing?” he rasped, one large hand fisting in my hair and yanking my head back so he could bite down the side of my throat. “Parading Yeonjun in front of me like I wouldn’t lose my fucking mind?”

“I wasn’t—” My words cut off in a gasp as he sucked hard on my pulse point, hard enough to leave a mark I’d have to hide tomorrow.

“Bullshit.” His other hand shoved the hem of my navy dress up roughly, fingers digging into the soft flesh of my thigh. “You wanted me jealous. Mission accomplished, baby.”

He spun me around suddenly, pressing my front to the cool wall, his chest hot and solid against my back. The zipper of my dress gave way under impatient hands, the fabric pooling at my feet in a whisper of expensive silk. I was left in nothing but lace panties and heels. Jay’s palm slapped against my ass… sharp, possessive, before he kneaded the sting away.

“Mine,” he snarled against my ear, teeth grazing the shell. “Say it.”

“Fuck you,” I shot back, even as I pushed my hips back against the hard line of his cock straining through his trousers.

He laughed, low and dangerous. “That’s the plan.”

He dropped to his knees behind me without warning, yanking my panties down my legs and tossing them aside. Strong hands spread my cheeks, and then his mouth was on me… hot, wet, relentless. His tongue dragged from my clit all the way up, circling the tight ring of my ass before diving back down to lap at my dripping pussy. I cried out, forehead pressed to the wall, fingers scrabbling for purchase.

“Jay—fuck—”

He ate me like a man starved, like he could erase every second I’d spent smiling at Yeonjun by devouring me instead. Long, broad licks that made my thighs shake, then tight, focused suction on my clit while two thick fingers plunged inside me, curling viciously against that spot that made stars burst behind my eyes. The wet, obscene sounds filled the room… his groans vibrating against my folds, my own broken moans echoing off marble.

“You taste so fucking good when you’re jealous,” he muttered, pulling back just enough to speak before spitting on my pussy and diving back in. A third finger joined the first two, stretching me open as his tongue flicked rapidly over my clit. “Gonna make this pretty cunt remember who it belongs to.”

I came hard, suddenly, thighs clamping around his head as my walls pulsed around his fingers. He didn’t stop… kept licking me through it, gentler then rougher again, until I was whimpering and trying to twist away from the overstimulation.

He stood, spinning me to face him. His mouth was shiny with my arousal, eyes dark with lust and something fiercer. He kissed me again, letting me taste myself on his tongue while he stripped off his shirt and trousers. His cock sprang free… thick, heavy, already leaking at the tip. I reached for it, but he caught my wrist.

“Not yet.” He lifted me effortlessly, my legs wrapping around his waist as he carried me to the massive bed. He dropped me onto it and followed immediately, crawling over me like a predator.

His mouth latched onto one nipple, sucking hard while his hand pinched and rolled the other. I arched into him, nails raking down his back hard enough to leave marks. He hissed in pleasure, grinding his cock against my thigh.

“These tits,” he groaned, switching sides, biting down gently before soothing with his tongue. “Been thinking about them all night while that asshole flirted with you.”

He worked his way down my body with single minded focus… kissing, licking, biting every inch of skin he could reach. Over my ribs, across my stomach, dipping into my navel, then lower. He settled between my thighs again, pushing them wide apart until I was completely exposed.

“Look at this greedy little pussy,” he murmured, spreading my folds with his thumbs. “Still dripping for me even after you came on my tongue.” He leaned in and licked a slow stripe up my slit, eyes locked on mine. “Tell me you don’t want anyone else tasting this.”

“I don’t,” I gasped, hips bucking. “Just you—fuck, Jay—”

He rewarded me by sucking my clit into his mouth while two fingers pumped steadily inside me. The pressure built again, fast and overwhelming. He added a third finger, scissoring them, stretching me as his tongue worked magic. When I was right on the edge, he pulled back, ignoring my whine of protest.

“Not yet. You don’t come again until I say so.”

He moved up my body and straddled my chest, knees on either side of my shoulders. His heavy cock bobbed in front of my face, glistening. He tapped the head against my lips.

“Open.”

I did, eagerly. He pushed in slowly at first, letting me swirl my tongue around the head, tasting the precum. Then he gripped my hair and thrust deeper, fucking my mouth with controlled rolls of his hips.

“Fuck, your mouth y/n…always so perfect.” He groaned as I hollowed my cheeks and took him deeper, relaxing my throat. “Suck it like you mean it, sweetheart. Show me how sorry you are for teasing me tonight.”

I hummed around him, the vibration making his thighs tense. Saliva dripped down my chin as he used my mouth, not rough enough to choke but deep enough that my eyes watered. I loved it… the weight of him on my tongue, the way his abs flexed above me, the filthy praises falling from his lips.

He pulled out suddenly, breathing hard, and flipped me onto my stomach. He hauled my hips up so I was on my knees, ass in the air, face pressed into the sheets.

“Gonna fuck you so deep you forget Yeonjun’s name,” he growled, lining himself up and slamming in with one brutal thrust.

I screamed into the mattress, the stretch bordering on too much after his fingers. He didn’t give me time to adjust… just pulled back and drove in again, setting a punishing rhythm. Skin slapped against skin, his balls hitting my clit with every thrust. One hand fisted my hair, the other gripped my hip hard enough to bruise.

“Whose pussy is this?” he demanded, angling his hips to hit that perfect spot.

“Yours—fuck—yours, Jay!”

“That’s right.” He reached around to rub my clit in tight, fast circles. “Come on my cock like a good girl. Let me feel you.”

The orgasm ripped through me, walls clenching around his thick length as I shook and moaned. He rode me through it, thrusts growing erratic, then pulled out and flipped me onto my back again.

He buried his face between my thighs once more, licking up every drop of my release with long, hungry strokes. “Can’t get enough of this taste,” he muttered against my folds. “Could eat you for hours.”

I was oversensitive, trembling, but he didn’t stop until I was whimpering and pushing at his head. Only then did he crawl up and kiss me deeply, sharing my flavor.

“On top,” he ordered, lying back and pulling me over him. “Ride me. Show me how much you need my cock.”

I straddled him, sinking down slowly, savoring the way he filled me completely. His hands gripped my ass, guiding me as I started to move… rolling my hips, grinding down so my clit rubbed against his pelvis with every motion.

“Fuck, look at you,” he groaned, eyes hooded as he watched his cock disappear inside me. “So fucking beautiful taking every inch.”

He sat up suddenly, wrapping his arms around me, mouth latching onto my breasts again as I rode him harder. I threaded my fingers through his hair, tugging as I bounced on his cock. He met me thrust for thrust, one hand sliding between us to rub my clit.

The angle was devastating. I came again, clenching around him, and he flipped us so he was on top once more, pounding into me through the aftershocks.

He pulled out and moved down my body again, this time pushing my thighs up toward my chest, folding me in half. His tongue attacked my pussy and ass with renewed passion… licking, sucking, probing, while two fingers fucked into me and his thumb pressed against my clit. I was a mess of sobs and pleas, overstimulated and desperate for more.

“Please—Jay—I need you inside me again—”

He rose up and slammed back into me in one smooth motion, the new position letting him hit impossibly deep. His hand wrapped around my throat… not squeezing hard, just holding me there, possessive.

“Mine,” he repeated with every thrust. “No one else gets to see you like this. No one else gets to make you come like this.”

I clawed at his back, legs locked around his waist as another orgasm built. He leaned down, biting my shoulder, then soothing it with his tongue. His pace became brutal, hips snapping against mine, sweat slick skin sliding together.

“Come with me,” he growled. “Now.”

We shattered together. He buried himself to the hilt, pulsing deep inside me as my walls milked him through wave after wave of pleasure. His groan of my name… raw, broken, sent fresh aftershocks through me.

"Oh gosh—y/n fuck!"

We stayed locked together for long moments, breathing hard. Then he pulled out slowly, watching his cum drip from my pussy with dark satisfaction. He gathered some on his fingers and brought them to my lips. I sucked them clean without hesitation.

But he wasn’t done.

He slid down my body again, gentle this time, and began licking me clea… soft, deep strokes of his tongue that had me twitching and sighing. He paid attention to every sensitive inch, my clit, my entrance, even pressing soft kisses to my inner thighs where faint marks from his grip were already forming.

When he finally moved back up, he pulled me into his arms, my head on his chest. His hand stroked down my back in long, soothing lines.

“I hated seeing you with him,” he admitted quietly, the roughness gone from his voice, replaced by something vulnerable. “Even knowing it was just to piss me off.”

“I hated seeing her touch you,” I whispered back, pressing a kiss to his collarbone.

He tilted my chin up and kissed me… slow, deep, thorough. “No more games like that.”

“No more,” I agreed.

But even as we lay tangled together, bodies sated and hearts still racing, I knew the fire between us was far from extinguished. If anything, the jealousy had only stoked it higher.

He rolled us so I was beneath him again, already hardening against my thigh.

“Round two?” he murmured, lips brushing mine.

I smiled, wicked and wanting. “Make me forget every other name but yours.”

And he did… thoroughly, roughly, with his mouth and hands and cock worshipping every inch of me until the sky outside began to lighten and all that remained was the two of us, breathless and undeniably bound.

…

He lay awake long after I'd fallen asleep against his chest, staring at the ceiling of a hotel room in the one city on earth that seemed determined to keep rewriting the terms of his life without asking his permission first.

He'd meant what he said, in the heat of the argument, about making me pay for Lake Como… he'd meant it that first dinner, watching me go pale across the table as I recognized him, some petty, wounded part of him lighting up at the thought of finally getting to watch me squirm the way he'd squirmed reading that note. He'd built an entire plan around it, in the weeks after the engagement was announced. Charm her. Get close. Make her want him the way she'd wanted him in Lake Como, and then, at the last possible second, be the one who walked away first.

It hadn't survived the second week. It hadn't survived me falling asleep on his shoulder during a boring merger briefing, or the ridiculous, genuine way I argued about pineapple pizza like my life depended on it, or the morning I'd stayed in his bed instead of running, hand in his under the sheets, no note, no euros, no goodbye.

He looked down at me now, curled against him, and felt something settle in his chest that had nothing to do with revenge at all.

So much for making her pay, he thought, and pressed a kiss to the top of my head, careful not to wake me. Guess the joke's on me.

CHAPTER 9: THE MORNING AFTER THE MORNING AFTER

I woke up tangled in sheets that smelled like him, sunlight cutting gold across the same kind of luxury bed I'd woken up in months ago in a different hotel, in a different life, except this time there was no flight to catch, no note to write, no reason at all to leave.

Jay was already awake, propped on one elbow, watching me with an expression I didn't have a name for… something quieter than the smugness I'd come to expect, something that looked almost unguarded.

"No note this time?" he asked, but there was no real bite in it. Just a question, testing the ground.

"No note," I said. "I'm still here."

"You are." He reached out, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and the gentleness of it undid me more than anything he'd said in the heat of the night before. "I keep waiting for you to run."

"I keep waiting for you to actually let me stay," I said, quieter than I meant to. "You've spent two months telling me you were going to make me pay for Lake Como."

"I know." His jaw tightened, something like guilt flickering across his face. "I meant it, at first. I wanted to. You made me feel like—" he stopped, exhaled, started again. "You made me feel like something I wasn't used to feeling, and then you left like it didn't matter, and I didn't know what to do with that except be angry about it."

"And now?"

"Now I don't know what I'm angrier about," he admitted. "That you left. Or how much I don't want you to leave again."

"For what it's worth," I said, tracing an absent pattern against his chest, "I thought about you. After Lake Como. More than I wanted to. I told myself it was because you were a mystery I hadn't solved. Turns out it was just because I liked you, and I didn't know what to do with that, either."

"You could've texted."

"I didn't have your number. That was rather the design flaw in my whole escape plan."

He huffed a laugh, low and real, pressing it into my hair. "I looked you up, you know. After the note. Took me two days and an embarrassing amount of Google searches involving 'Singaporean businesswoman' and 'Lake Como' before I gave up entirely."

"You didn't."

"I absolutely did. My assistant thought I'd lost my mind." He tipped my chin up with two fingers, the same gesture from the engagement photoshoot, except there was no camera now, no performance, just the two of us and the quiet. "Turns out I didn't need Google. I just needed my father to have terrible timing and worse business instincts."

"Remind me to thank him," I murmured, "right after I finish being furious at him."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I didn't say anything. I just reached for his hand under the sheets and let the silence be its own answer, and for one suspended, golden morning, it was almost enough to believe none of the rest of it… the merger, the arrangement, the families watching my every move like a stock ticker… mattered at all.

It wouldn't last. It never did, not for people like me.

…

I called Minji the second I landed back in Singapore, because if I didn't say any of this out loud to someone, I was fairly certain my own head was going to implode from the sheer volume of unprocessed feelings rattling around inside it.

"So," Minji said, the second she picked up, "you disappear on a stranger in Lake Como, said stranger turns out to be your arranged fiancé, and now you're calling me at nine in the morning sounding like you just ran a marathon. Catch me up."

"I think I like him," I said, miserable. "For real. Not in the fake engagement, keep up appearances way. In the actual, terrifying, can't-stop-thinking-about-him way."

There was a pause on the other end, and then Minji, ever helpful, burst out laughing. "You're just now figuring this out? I could've told you that the second you texted me a full paragraph about the way he tied his tie badly on purpose."

"That's not… that was an observation, not a—"

"It was absolutely a symptom." I could hear Minji grinning through the phone. "So what's the problem? You like him, presumably he likes you, considering the man rearranged an entire hotel's booking system to get you both in one bed—"

"The problem," I said, "is that this whole thing started because our fathers wanted a shipping contract. What if none of this is real? What if I fall for him for real and it turns out I'm just… convenient? The easiest option? The daughter who happened to be in the right hotel room at the right time?"

"Do you actually believe that," Minji asked, gentler now, "or are you just scared?"

I didn't answer right away, because I didn't have a good one. "Both, maybe."

"For what it's worth," Minji said, "I watched that man's face when you walked into that gala in navy. He did not look like a guy fulfilling a business obligation. He looked like a guy who forgot how to use words." A beat. "Stop trying to find the exit before you even know if you want one. That's the same thing you did in Lake Como the first time, and look how well that turned out."

I hung up feeling more unsettled than before I'd called, which I supposed was the entire point of calling Minji in the first place.

CHAPTER 10: THE FIGHT THAT ACTUALLY MATTERED…

The trouble with almost truths is that they don't survive daylight for long, and by the time Jay and I were both back in Singapore, back in the penthouse, back under the weight of two families and a merger worth more than either of our lives combined, the softness of Lake Como had curdled, slowly, into something more complicated.

It wasn't any one thing at first. It was the wedding planning eating into every spare hour of both our schedules, endless calls with caterers and venue coordinators and a florist who seemed personally offended by every choice I made. It was Jay's schedule filling up with calls from the conglomerate's Singapore office as the merger moved into its implementation phase, calls that ran later and later into the evening. It was the two of us, still learning how to be honest about wanting each other without immediately following it with a joke to soften the admission, slowly running out of jokes to hide behind and not yet having anything solid to replace them with.

It started, as these things always did, over something small. A dinner Jay canceled at the last minute for a call with Karina Yu's firm… purely business, he swore, and I believed him, mostly, except believing him didn't stop the old, ugly voice in my head from whispering that I was, at the end of the day, a business arrangement he could deprioritize whenever something more important came along.

"You could have told me sooner," I said, standing in the kitchen while he shrugged his jacket back on for the second time that night.

"I told you the second I knew."

"You told me twenty minutes before we were supposed to leave, Jay."

"It's work. This merger doesn't run itself just because we had a nice morning in Lake Como."

The words landed harder than he probably meant them to. A nice morning. Like that was all it had been. Like I hadn't spent the last week turning it over in my head, wondering if it meant what I desperately, quietly hoped it meant.

"Right," I said, voice gone flat. "Of course. Wouldn't want the merger to suffer because you spent an evening with your fiancée."

"That's not what I—"

"It's fine." It wasn't fine. We both knew it wasn't fine. "Go to your call."

He didn't go, not right away. He stood there in the kitchen doorway, jacket half on, looking at me like he wanted to say something and couldn't find the shape of it. "I'm scared," he finally said, so quietly I almost missed it. "Of how much I want this to be real. And every time I get close to saying that out loud, I remember it started because our fathers wanted a shipping contract, and I don't know how to trust that any of this is actually about us."

The anger drained out of me at once, replaced by something far more exposed. "I'm scared of the exact same thing," I admitted. "That's why I left Lake Como the first time. Not because of you. Because of how much I already didn't want to."

He crossed the kitchen in three steps and kissed me like he was trying to prove something to both of us at once, and when he pulled back, forehead resting against mine, he said, "Cancel your evening. I'll cancel the call. Let's just… figure this out. Together. No merger. No fathers. Just us."

We canceled the call together. Neither of us brought up Karina or Yeonjun again.

…

It didn't stay easy. I hadn't expected it to… nothing about the two of us had ever been easy, not from the very first night in a bar with too much rum in the drinks… but the fight that came three weeks later still managed to knock the wind out of me in a way none of the others had.

It was over something stupid, in looking into the past. Jay had made a decision about the wedding venue without consulting me… a favor to both fathers, he said, a way to smooth over a disagreement about vendor contracts that had nothing to do with either of us and everything to do with two companies trying to look good in front of shareholders. I'd found out from my mother, not from him, and something about hearing it secondhand had cracked open every insecurity I'd been quietly protecting since the day this arrangement started.

"You didn't think to ask me," I said, voice tight, "because at the end of the day, this is still a business decision to you. I'm still a line item."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it? You made a decision about my wedding to smooth over a contract dispute, Jay. Tell me how that's not exactly what I was afraid of from the beginning."

"I did it because I was trying to protect you from getting dragged into another negotiation," he snapped, temper flaring to match mine. "I didn't think you'd rather sit through another four-hour meeting about seating charts and vendor exclusivity clauses just to prove a point."

"I'd rather you asked me. That's it. That's the whole point. You don't get to decide what I can handle."

"Maybe I overstepped." His voice cracked, just slightly, on the word. "But don't stand there and tell me this is still just business to me, because I have spent the last four months falling in love with a woman I met in a bar and then spent every day since terrified she was going to wake up one morning and leave another note."

The room went very quiet.

"That's not fair either," I said, softer now, the fight draining out of me as fast as it had risen. "Using that against me."

"I'm not using it against you. I'm telling you the truth, because I'm so far past pretending this is manageable that I don't know what else to do except be honest and hope it doesn't scare you off." He dragged a hand through his hair, the picture of a man who had clearly rehearsed a calmer version of this speech and abandoned it entirely under pressure. "I love you. I've loved you probably since the hotel room I woke up alone in. And I am so sick of both of us treating that like a liability instead of just… saying it."

I stood there, heart hammering, every practiced defense I'd built over the last four months suddenly useless in my hands. "You've never said that before."

"I'm saying it now." He looked, for the first time since I'd met him, genuinely unguarded… no charm, no smugness, nothing performative left in him at all. "I love you. And if you walk out that door right now, I'm not going to chase you, because I'm done being someone you run from. But I'd really, really rather you stayed."

I didn't walk out the door.

I crossed the room instead, and kissed him, and neither of us brought up seating charts again for the rest of the night.

…

Two days later, I came home to find the penthouse dark except for a trail of candles leading from the front door to the balcony, which was, I thought, either the most romantic thing Jay had ever attempted or a genuine fire hazard, possibly both.

"If you set off the smoke alarm," I called out, toeing off my heels, "I will never let you live it down."

"Just come outside," his voice floated back, suspiciously nervous for a man who negotiated multi-million-dollar contracts for a living without breaking a sweat.

I found him on the balcony in the same suit he'd worn the night of the engagement announcement, the harbor spread out gold and glittering behind him, and something in his posture… hands shoved in his pockets, weight shifting like he couldn't decide where to put himself… made my chest go tight before he'd said a single word.

"We're already engaged," I said slowly, eyeing the candles, the suit, the unmistakable set dressing of a moment he'd clearly planned. "This is either extremely romantic or you're about to tell me something has gone horribly wrong with the merger."

"Neither." He huffed a laugh, more nerves than humor in it, and pulled a small velvet box from his pocket… not the ring our families had already selected together for the official engagement, the one that had been photographed and press released and worn on my hand for months now, but a different one entirely, simpler, clearly chosen by him and no one else. "The first ring was picked by a committee. Our fathers, a jeweler, a PR team who wanted something 'photogenic for the press release.' I didn't get a say in it, and I don't think you did either. This one, I picked myself."

I stared at him, throat suddenly too tight to speak.

"I know we're already getting married," he continued, dropping to one knee anyway, the picture of a man determined to do this properly no matter how backwards the order of operations had gotten. "I know the contracts are signed and the venue's booked and my father's already started planning the honeymoon like it's his own. But none of that was ever really us choosing this. So I wanted to ask you myself. Not because a merger needs it. Because I do." He opened the box… a simple band, understated, nothing like the statement piece on my hand already. "Will you Marry me, y/n? For real this time. Not because of Lake Como, or the contract, or the note, or any of the reasons this started. Just because I love you, and I'd choose you even if none of the rest of it had ever happened."

"You're an idiot," I said, laughing and crying at once, dropping to my knees on the balcony floor to be level with him because I couldn't stand to have him below me for this. "You already had me. You've had me since the boat, or the pizza argument, or possibly since the very first night, I genuinely can't tell anymore."

"Is that a yes?"

"That's a yes." I kissed him before he could say anything else insufferably charming, and somewhere behind me, entirely unnoticed until this exact moment, I registered that he'd set up a small speaker quietly playing something slow and warm, the kind of song that made the whole ridiculous, candlelit, slightly hazardous scene feel like something out of a life I never would have predicted for myself a year ago and wouldn't trade now for anything.

"For the record," Jay said, sliding the second ring onto my finger beside the first, "I'm keeping both rings on you. One for the contract our fathers wanted. One for the choice we actually made."

"Sentimental," I accused.

"Only for you," he said, and meant it.

CHAPTER 11: FULL CIRCLE

The final signing ceremony for the merger was scheduled, fittingly, for Lake Como… the same business, the same lake, the same string light terraces where this entire impossible chain of events had started. My father called it poetic. I called it the universe having an extremely specific sense of humor.

This time, there was no confusion about the hotel booking. Jay booked the suite himself, one bed, no crescent moon couch in sight, and when I raised an eyebrow at him over the reservation confirmation, he just shrugged, entirely unbothered.

"Figured we'd save everyone the trouble of pretending," he said.

The signing went smoothly… my father practically glowing with the kind of pride that came from watching two companies and two children merge into one very profitable future. Chairman Park shook my hand with real warmth, told me Jay had been, in his words, "unbearable to live with" in the weeks after Lake Como the first time, and that he was glad to see I'd apparently cured that particular ailment. I'd laughed, genuinely, and looked over to find Jay watching me with an expression that had nothing to do with business at all.

That night, after the papers were signed and the champagne toasts made and the last of the business's executives had finally, mercifully, gone home, I found myself back on the same terrace where I'd first met him… string lights, dark water, a version of myself that had walked into this exact spot months ago convinced she'd never see this man again.

"You know," Jay said, coming to stand beside me at the railing, his tie long gone, sleeves rolled to his forearms, "I used to think about what I'd say to you. If I ever saw you again. I had this whole speech planned. Very cutting. Very devastating."

"What happened to it?"

"You showed up at my dinner table three weeks later and I forgot every word of it." He turned to face me fully, and whatever careful distance he usually kept even now, even after everything, was entirely gone from his eyes. "I don't want to make you pay for Lake Como anymore. I just want Lake Como. Again. With you. For real this time… not a stranger's name, not a note on a hotel notepad. All of it. If you'll let me."

My throat tightened. "I was so sure I'd never see you again," I admitted. "I left because staying scared me more than leaving did. I didn't know how to want something that wasn't part of a plan I'd already made for my life."

"And now?"

"Now the plan includes you," I said. "Which terrifies me a little less every day."

He reached for my hand, threading his fingers through mine, and I let him pull me back toward the suite with none of the panic of that first morning, none of the urgency to run before the sun came up. This time, I wanted to stay for the sunrise.

We walked the short distance to our suite. The moment the door closed, the rest of the world fell away. Jay turned to me under the soft glow of the bedside lamps, the moonlit Lake Como sparkling beyond the windows like a painting made just for us. No rush. No games. Only the quiet weight of everything we had finally admitted.

He cupped my face with both hands and kissed me deeply… slow, soulful, like he was pouring every unsaid feeling into the press of his lips. His thumbs stroked my cheeks as his tongue gently explored my mouth, tempting soft sighs from me. I melted against him, hands sliding up his chest to loosen his tie and work open the buttons of his shirt.

“I love you,” he breathed between kisses, voice low and thick with emotion. “Not because of the merger, or our families, or Lake Como. Just you. The woman who argues with me about pineapple on pizza and rearranges my closet to drive me crazy.”

Tears pricked at my eyes as I smiled against his mouth. “I love you too. I think I have for a long time… I was just too scared to stay.”

He kissed the corner of my eye, then my temple, then the sensitive spot beneath my ear. With soft hands, he eased the zipper of my dress down my spine, following the path with his lips… pressing open mouthed kisses along my shoulders and the nape of my neck. The fabric slid to the floor in a whisper. He unclasped my bra and let it fall away, then hooked his fingers into my panties and drew them down my legs, dropping to one knee to kiss my thighs, my knees, the delicate skin just above my ankles as he helped me step out.

When I stood completely bare before him, he rose slowly, eyes dark with desire but softened by something far deeper. I finished undressing him with the same care… pushing his shirt off his broad shoulders, tracing the lines of muscle in his chest and abdomen, unbuckling his belt and sliding his trousers and boxers down until he was as bare as I was.

Jay lifted me effortlessly and laid me in the center of the large bed. He followed, covering my body with his, but keeping most of his weight on his forearms so I felt surrounded, protected, cherished. He kissed me for a long time… deep, slow kisses that left me breathless… before trailing his mouth downward.

He lavished attention on my breasts, sucking one nipple into his mouth while rolling the other between his fingers, switching sides with unhurried devotion until I was arching and whimpering. Lower still, he kissed every inch of my stomach, my hips, the tops of my thighs. Then he settled between my spread legs, spreading me open with gentle hands.

“Look at you,” he murmured, voice full of awe. “So beautiful. So mine.”

His tongue traced a slow, broad stripe from my entrance to my clit, then circled the swollen bud with patient, loving strokes. He took his time, exploring every fold, savoring my taste with soft hums of pleasure that vibrated through me. Two thick fingers eased inside me, curling gently against that perfect spot while his mouth sealed over my clit, sucking with tender rhythm. The pleasure built gradually, like a wave rolling in from far away, growing deeper and warmer until it crashed over me in a long, shuddering orgasm. I cried out his name softly, thighs trembling around his head as he licked me through every pulse, gentle and devoted.

He kissed his way back up my body, settling between my thighs. His cock… thick, heavy, and leaking at the tip… nudged against my slick entrance. Our eyes locked as he pushed in slowly, letting me feel every inch as he stretched and filled me completely. When he bottomed out, he stayed there, buried deep, forehead pressed to mine.

“Feel us,” he whispered. “This is real.”

We moved together in a slow, rocking rhythm. Long, deep strokes that dragged pleasure through every nerve ending. His hips rolled against mine in a sensual grind, hitting that spot inside me with each thrust. I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck, holding him as close as physically possible. Our breaths mingled, soft moans and whispered “I love you" filling the space between kisses.

Jay slipped a hand between us, fingers finding my clit and circling it with perfect, gentle pressure. The pace stayed tender but grew more intense… deeper, more intentional thrusts as pleasure coiled tighter inside me. I came again with a broken moan, walls fluttering and clenching around him, pulling him deeper. He followed moments later, burying himself to the hilt with a low, guttural groan of my name as he spilled inside me, pulsing hot and deep.

Even after, he stayed buried within me, holding me close while we caught our breath. He rolled us onto our sides, facing each other, still connected. His hand stroked down my back in long, soothing lines, fingers tracing my spine, my hips, the curve of my waist. I pressed soft kisses to his chest, his collarbone, the hollow of his throat.

“No more running,” he said quietly, tilting my chin up to kiss me again… slow and sweet.

“No more notes,” I replied, smiling against his lips. “Just us. Every morning. Every night.”

We stayed like that for a long while, trading lazy kisses and touches, bodies still joined, hearts finally in perfect sync. Eventually he pulled out gently, cleaned us both with a warm cloth from the bathroom, then pulled me back into his arms. I fell asleep with my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, the same lake outside the window that had once watched me slip away now witnessing me stay… willingly, completely, forever.

The universe had brought us full circle. This time, we were exactly where we belonged.

CHAPTER 12: THE HILLS, REPRISE 

Minji threw me a bachelorette dinner two nights before the wedding… small, just a handful of close friends on a rooftop bar overlooking the exact stretch of harbor I could see from the penthouse, which Minji swore was a coincidence and I was fairly sure was not.

"To the world's most chaotic love story," Minji said, raising her glass. "One night stand, arranged marriage, at least one shouting match that the building's security definitely heard—"

"That happened one time—"

"… and somehow, against every possible odd, an actual, real, sickeningly cute relationship. I still can't believe you almost didn't recognize him at that dinner."

"I recognized him immediately," I admitted. "I was just praying I was wrong."

"And now?"

I looked out at the water, dark and glittering, not so different from the lake that had started all of this, and felt something settle in my chest that had taken the better part of a year to arrive. "Now I can't imagine having prayed for anything else."

Across town, in a considerably less sentimental gathering, Jay was enduring a bachelor party that mostly consisted of his closest friends ribbing him mercilessly about the note.

"Money for the minibar," one of them said, for what had to be the fortieth time that week, raising a glass in mock tribute. "A toast… to the greatest insult ever survived by a Park heir."

"I've moved past it," Jay said, entirely unconvincingly.

"You named your dog after the hotel."

"That's… unrelated."

It was not, in fact, unrelated, and everyone at the table knew it, and Jay let them have the joke because some jokes you'd earned by now, and because in two days none of it was going to matter anyway. He was going to marry the woman who'd left that note, and somewhere between the fury and the note and the year that followed, he'd stopped thinking of it as something to make her pay for and started thinking of it as the first sentence of a story he was, against every prediction he'd have made about his own life, deeply grateful to be living.

…

The Ceremony…

The wedding, when it finally came, was nothing like the dinner where it had all started… no stiff formality, no families sizing each other up across a table like it was a negotiation. Just our two families, genuinely joined this time instead of merely merged, and Jay at the end of the aisle wearing the same crooked, unguarded smile he'd worn the night he first bought me a drink with too much rum in it and told me that I looked like I was thinking too hard for someone on vacation.

"You're doing that thing again," he murmured, when I finally reached him, voice pitched for only me to hear. "Thinking too hard."

"I'm just wondering," I whispered back, "if you're going to make me regret leaving that note for the rest of our lives."

"Every single day," he said, grinning. "But mostly because it's the reason I got to fall in love with you twice."

When it came time for vows, Jay went first, and the room, which had been politely rustling with the low murmur of two hundred guests, went entirely still.

"I had a whole speech written," he admitted, pulling a folded card from his jacket pocket and then, after a beat of consideration, tucking it away again unread. "My assistant helped me write it. It had a quote from a poet I've never actually read in it, to sound sophisticated. But I think you'd know if I was reading someone else's words instead of mine, so… here's the truth instead. I met a woman in a bar who told me she was working, at eleven at night, in a bar, and I thought that was the funniest, most transparent lie I'd ever heard, and I decided right then I wanted to know everything else she wasn't telling me. It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit to realize that the version of myself I like best is the one that exists around you… the one that argues about pizza toppings and loses fights about thermostats and gets absurdly, embarrassingly jealous over nothing. I promise to keep choosing that version of myself, and to keep choosing you, for every single day we get, starting today and not stopping for a very long time."

My own vows came out shakier than I'd rehearsed them in the mirror that morning, but I got through them anyway. "I left you a note once," I said, and heard the ripple of laughter move through the crowd, most of whom had heard some version of that story by now. "I told you it wasn't you, it was timing. I have never told a bigger lie in my entire life. It was absolutely you. You were the first person who ever made me want to stay somewhere I hadn't planned on staying, and I've spent the year since trying to figure out how to say that without sounding as terrified as I actually was. I'm not scared anymore. I choose this… I choose you… not because of a contract, or our fathers, or a shipping deal neither of us fully understood at the time, but because somewhere between a bar in Lake Como and this exact terrace, you stopped being an arrangement and started being home."

Minji, somewhere in the crowd, would later swear she heard me laugh mid vow, which was, everyone agreed, entirely on brand.

Chairman Park gave a toast at the reception that started as a speech about shipping tariffs and ended, somewhere around his third glass of champagne, in genuine tears about how he'd never seen his son smile the way he smiled around me, contract or no contract. My father, not to be outdone, stood up next and admitted… publicly, in front of two hundred guests… that he'd fully expected me to hate the arrangement forever, and that watching me dance at my own wedding like I'd chosen this myself was the best business decision he'd ever made and he intended to take full credit for it at every future shareholder meeting.

"He's never going to let this go, is he," Jay murmured against my ear, swaying with me under string lights that looked, deliberately, unmistakably, like the ones from a terrace in Lake Como.

"Never," I agreed. "You're stuck being his favorite success story for the rest of your life."

"Worse things to be stuck with," he said, and spun me once, easy and sure, the same way he had the very first night, except this time there was no mystery left between us at all… no last name withheld, no hotel notepad, no note to write in a panic before a flight. Just the two of us, exactly where we'd both, somewhere along the way, decided we wanted to be.

Later, much later, when the guests had thinned and the band had switched to something slower, Jay pulled me toward the edge of the terrace, away from the noise, and pressed his forehead to mine the way he had the night everything finally cracked open between us.

"No regrets?" he asked. "Even with everything it took to get here?"

"None," I said. "Although I do think you owe me for two months of insufferable jealousy and a color coded closet war."

"I owe you," he agreed, "for a lot more than that. I'll be paying it off for the rest of our lives. I'm looking forward to it."

…

Years later…

Somewhere over the years that followed… the arguments that still happened, because two people that stubborn were never going to stop clashing entirely, and the jealousy that occasionally flared, more playful now than desperate, and the quiet mornings that mattered more than either of us had expected an arranged marriage to ever produce… I'd think back, sometimes, to a stranger in a bar in Lake Como who told me that I looked like trouble.

He'd been right. He usually was, though I'd never admit that to his face.

There would be more trips to Lake Como over the years… anniversaries, mostly, an unspoken tradition neither of us had planned but both of us protected fiercely, the same terrace, the same string lights, a standing reservation at a hotel that still, to this day, kept a bowl of untouched fruit in every suite because Jay had once complained, half joking, that nobody ever ate it. There would be a dog, badly named, exactly as his friends had predicted. There would be, eventually, a nursery my mother had been quietly hoping for since the night of that very first engagement announcement, though that particular chapter belonged to a different story entirely.

I wouldn't have changed a single second of it. Not the note. Not the running. Not the fights, or the jealousy, or the year it took the two of us to stop being afraid of wanting something that started as an arrangement and ended up as the realest thing either of us had ever had.

Some things, it turned out, were worth staying for.

THE END

I hope you guys like this fic! I didn't get to proofread it properly, so hopefully everything makes sense! I lowkey teared up writing the end of it. I really like this storyline so I hope I delivered it well! If you have any suggestion what who or what I can write next please drop a comment!

wonluvzu taglist ;)

WEEK 1

Neither of us moved.

The hallway light buzzed above, too bright, too honest, like it wanted to make sure neither of us could pretend we hadn't seen the other clearly.

"You're—" Jake started.

"Yeah." I cut him off before he could finish the sentence I already knew. "I'm your neighbor. Apparently."

He looked down at the box in his arms like it might offer an explanation the universe hadn't bothered to give him.

"Small world," he said finally.

"Extremely small."

Somewhere behind him, a voice called out. "Is that Y/N? The girl you wouldn't stop talking about?"

Jake's ears went red so fast I almost laughed despite myself.

A guy appeared in the doorway behind him… tall, blond, grinning like he'd just been handed the best piece of gossip of his entire semester abroad when it literally just started. "Felix," he said, holding out a hand toward me like this was a completely normal way to meet someone. "I'm his roommate. We've know each other for a bit… right mate? Oh, and I heard everything about you literally, so. I know things."

"Felix," Jake said through his teeth.

"What? I'm being hospitable."

I shook Felix's hand, fighting a smile. "I'm going to need you to tell me those things at some point."

"Absolutely not," Jake said.

"Absolutely yes," Felix said at the same time.

Sophia chose that exact moment to come around the corner with an armful of snacks from the kitchen down the hall, stopping short when she registered the four of us standing in the hallway like a very awkward reunion.

"Did I miss something?"

"Apparently my high school friend lives across the hall from me now," I said.

Sophia's eyebrows shot up. "The Jake… sorry, the Jake you mentioned while unpacking?"

I hadn't meant to mention him at all, really. It had slipped out somewhere between unpacking my toiletries and explaining why my hometown friend group had scattered across three continents for the summer. Apparently I'd said more than I thought.

Jake looked at me. "You talked about me?"

"Don't let it go to your head."

"Too late," Felix said cheerfully. "It's already there. Massive head. Constantly talking about—" Felix said while poking Jake.

"Felix."

"…nothing! Nothing at all. I said nothing."

Sophia and Felix exchanged a look over our heads, the kind of look that meant they'd both clocked exactly how much tension was sitting in that narrow hallway, and were already forming their own conclusions about it.

"Well," Sophia said, far too brightly. "This is going to be an interesting semester."

She wasn't wrong.

…

That first night, unpacking the last of my boxes long after Sophia had fallen asleep, I lay awake listening to the muffled sound of Jake's voice through the wall… laughing at something Felix said, low and easy in a way that used to be so familiar it hurt to hear it now, passed through the wall instead of directly to me.

I told myself it didn't matter which room he ended up in.

I told myself the universe hadn't done this on purpose.

I didn't believe either of those things, not really, but I said them to myself anyway, the way I'd been saying things to myself for over a year now, hoping that if I repeated them enough times they'd eventually come true.

They never did. But it didn't stop me from trying.

WEEK 2

I got good at it fast… the art of being polite without being warm. A nod in the hallway. A "morning" that ended the conversation before it started. Enough acknowledgment that no one could call it rude, not enough that it meant anything.

Jake noticed. Of course he noticed.

"You're doing the thing," he said one evening, catching me in the hallway with my laundry basket balanced on my hip.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you talk to me like I'm a mildly annoying classmate instead of someone you've known for six years."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Y/N."

"I have laundry to do, Jake."

He stepped slightly to the side, not blocking me, just standing there. Present in a way that made it hard to walk past him without acknowledging it.

"We live across the hall from each other," he said quietly. "We're going to see each other constantly. You know that, right?"

"I'm aware."

"So are we just going to do this? The whole semester? Just act nice and nothing else?"

I hitched the basket higher on my hip, mostly so I'd have something to do with my hands. "What's your plan huh?"

Something flickered across his face… frustration, maybe, or something closer to hurt. "I don't know. Maybe we actually talk. About last summer. About—"

"I have laundry," I said again, and walked past him before he could finish trying to get out of there quickly.

I made it three doors down before I let myself exhale.

Behind me, I heard his door close a little harder than necessary.

…

The laundry room in the basement was the kind of place nobody wanted to linger… bright lights, the constant noises of the machines, a bulletin board covered in flyers for clubs nobody joined. I liked it just because of that. Nobody came looking for you in the laundry room.

Except, apparently, Jake had learned my schedule.

"We have to stop meeting like this," he said, appearing in the doorway with a basket of his own just as I was pulling my clothes from the dryer.

"Do we have the same laundry day, or are you following me?"

"Little bit of both, honestly." He set his basket on the folding table beside mine, close enough that our arms nearly brushed. "Felix keeps buying the wrong detergent and it's giving me a rash, so I've started doing his laundry too. Don't ask."

Despite myself, I laughed. "That's the most Jake thing I've ever heard. Getting dragged into doing someone else's laundry. How?"

"He has a very convincing personality. Hard to say no to."

"Must run in your family from what I know, apparently."

The words slipped out before I could stop them, something soft and unguarded creeping into my voice, and I watched Jake go very still beside me, like he was scared to move in case it broke whatever this was.

"Y/N—"

"I didn't mean anything by it," I said quickly, folding a shirt with far more focus than the task required.

"Okay," he said, though the way he said it made it clear he didn't believe me either.

We folded laundry in silence after that, but it wasn't the same silence as before. It felt lighter. Dangerous, in the way that things that feel good usually are.

WEEK 3

The international student party was Felix's idea, which meant it was loud, chaotic, and somehow already crowded by the time Sophia and I arrived, half an hour late because she couldn't decide between two identical black tops.

"They're not identical," she insisted as we walked in.

"They're the same shirt, Sophia."

"They are NOT."

The flat Felix and Jake shared was packed wall to wall, string lights taped all along the ceiling, music thumping from a speaker someone had propped not securely on a stack of textbooks.

I spotted Jake almost immediately.

Because of course I did.

He was leaning against the kitchen counter, laughing at something a girl beside him had said… tall, effortlessly pretty, her hand resting lightly on his arm in a way that made something ugly and a quick twist in my chest.

I hated how fast it happened. How little control I had over it. Over myself…

"You okay?" Sophia asked, following my line of sight.

"Fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I'm fine, Sophia."

I grabbed a drink from the counter and made myself walk in the opposite direction, toward a cluster of people I vaguely recognized from one of my lecture halls, and threw myself into conversation with an intensity that had nothing to do with genuine interest and everything to do with not looking back toward that kitchen.

It didn't work for long.

Every few minutes my eyes betrayed me, flicking back toward Jake, toward the girl still standing close, toward the easy way he smiled at whatever she was saying.

He caught me looking. Once. Twice.

The third time, I made myself hold his gaze instead of looking away first, something sharp and deliberate in the way I did it, and then I turned to the guy beside me… James, a literature student who'd been trying to get my attention for the last ten minutes, and laughed a little too loudly at something that was only half funny.

I felt Jake's eyes on me for the rest of the night.

I told myself I didn't care.

I was getting very good at telling myself things that weren't true.

…

Across the room, Felix elbowed Jake hard enough to make him spill a little of his drink.

"You're staring."

"I'm not staring."

"You've been staring at her and that literature guy for the last twenty minutes. I timed it."

"Why would you time it?"

"Because it's the most entertaining thing that's happened at this party, and I organized this party." Felix took a sip of his own drink, watching Jake with barely unemotional amusement. "You gonna do something about it, or just glare at the poor guy from across the room until he spontaneously combusts?"

"There's nothing to do anything about."

"Sure." Felix didn't sound convinced in the slightest way. "That's why your jaw's been doing that thing for the last twenty minutes."

"What thing?"

"The thing where it looks like you're trying to crack a coconut with just your face."

Jake didn't add to that with a response, mostly because he suspected Felix was right, and he didn't particularly want to admit it out loud.

…

Later, when James excused himself to refill drinks and Sophia disappeared to find Felix, I ended up alone on the fire escape outside the kitchen window, the London night cool and damp against my skin, grateful for a moment of quietness.

I wasn't alone for long.

"You looked like you were having fun in there," Jake said, climbing out through the window behind me, two drinks in hand. He held one out. I took it without really thinking.

"I was."

"With James."

"Is that a problem?"

He leaned against the railing, jaw tight, staring out at the skyline instead of at me. "No."

"You sound thrilled about it."

"I said it's not a problem, Y/N."

"You don't have to say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're trying to convince yourself."

He turned to look at me then, something raw flashing across his face before he shut it down, tucked it away the way he always did. "Maybe I am. Trying to convince myself. Is that what you want to hear?"

My heart stuttered. "What does that mean?"

"It means—" He cut himself off, running a hand through his hair, frustration written across every line of him. "It means watching you laugh like that with someone else is doing something to me that I don't really want to look too closely at right now."

The honesty of it caught me off guard.

"You don't get to be jealous," I said quietly. "Not after everything."

"I know that."

"Do you?"

"I know I have no right to be. Doesn't stop me from being it anyway."

We stood there, the London skyline stretched out beyond the fire escape, neither of us saying the thing that actually needed saying, both of us circling it the way we always did.

"I should go find Sophia," I said finally.

"Y/N—"

"Goodnight, Jake."

I climbed back through the window before he could stop me, my heart pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold.

WEEK 4

Classes fell into routine faster than I expected. Lecture halls and reading assignments and the particular chaos of navigating a city that still felt too big for me. Somewhere in the noise of syllabus weeks and new friendships, Jake and I settled into an uneasy truce… not quite friends, not quite strangers, something put off between that neither of us had the guts to name.

We saw each other constantly. The hallway. The shared kitchen at such odd hours. The campus coffee shop where, annoyingly, we both seemed to have the exact same study schedule.

"You're here again," I said, sliding into the seat across from him one Thursday afternoon, more out of habit than decision.

"You're here again too."

"I was here first."

"Debatable."

We worked in silence for a while, my highlighter scratching against a reading packet, his laptop keys clicking steadily. It wasn't uncomfortable. That was the strange part. Somewhere in the last few weeks, the silence between us had stopped being a wall and started being something closer to peace.

"Can I ask you something?" he said eventually, not looking up from his screen.

"Depends on the question."

"What actually happened? Last summer. From your side."

My stomach dropped. "Jake."

"I'm not trying to start anything," he said quickly. "I just… I've spent a year wondering what you thought you saw. What you actually think happened."

I set my highlighter down carefully, trying to buy myself a second. "I saw you. With someone else. In a bedroom, at a party, with your arms around her."

"That's what you saw," he said. "It's not what happened."

"Then what exactly happened?"

He was quiet for a long moment, jaw working like he was fighting with himself over how much to say. "She kissed me. I was trying to get her to stop. That's the whole story. That's genuinely the whole story, and I've wanted to tell you for a year, and every single time I try, something interrupts us, or you walk away, or—"

"I didn't walk away just now."

"No," he agreed softly. "You didn't."

Something in my chest cracked open, just slightly. "Why didn't you just tell me? That night. Or the next morning. Or literally any point in the last year!?"

"Because you looked at me like I'd broken something," he said. "And I didn't know how to explain it without it sounding like an excuse. And then you left for school, and I left for school, and every month that went by made it feel like a bigger and bigger thing to bring up. Like I'd missed my window."

"You could've called."

"You could've answered."

Fair.

"There's more," he added quietly, almost hesitant. "I should've told you before that night, too. That I'd liked you for way longer than a summer. I think part of why it hurt so much when you walked away is because I'd been trying to work up the nerve to tell you exactly that, for weeks, and then everything just… fell apart before I got the chance."

I stared at him, something in my chest twisting painfully. "You never said anything."

"I know. I was a coward about it. I'm still kind of a coward about it, honestly, considering it's taken me an entire year and living across the hall from you to say any of this out loud."

We sat there, the coffee shop noise fading into background static, a year of silence sitting heavy on the table between us.

"I believe you," I said finally, quietly. "About that night."

Relief flooded across his face, so visible it almost undid me completely.

"But," I continued, "it doesn't undo the year we lost pretending it didn't matter."

"I know."

"I don't know how to just... go back to normal."

"I don't want normal," he said, and something in his voice made my breath catch. "I want—"

His phone buzzed loudly against the table, cutting through whatever he'd been about to say. He glanced at it, jaw tightening.

"I have to go," he said, standing abruptly, gathering his things with more urgency than the moment warranted. "Study group. I forgot."

"Jake—"

"We'll finish this," he said, already halfway to the door. "I promise."

He didn't look back.

I sat there long after he'd left, my coffee gone cold, replaying every word, wondering … again, what he'd almost said, and when, if ever, I'd actually get to hear the end of that sentence.

WEEK 4 ½ 

The study group Jake mentioned in passing turned out to include a girl named Lara, sharp and funny in a way I noticed immediately and hated myself for noticing, who apparently sat next to him in every single one of their shared lectures and had, according to Sophia's extremely reliable intelligence network, been "very obviously into him since week one."

I told myself it didn't matter.

I told myself I had absolutely no right to feel the hot, and that damn ugly twist in my chest every time I walked past the library and saw them at the same corner table, heads bent over the same textbook, Lara laughing at something Jake said with her hand resting lightly on his arm.

UGH!

I told myself all of this while standing frozen in the library doorway for a solid thirty seconds before Sophia physically pulled me away by the sleeve.

"You're doing the staring thing," she said.

"I'm not staring." I said sternly.

"You've been staring for so long a librarian looked concerned."

"I don't have any right to be upset about this. We're not even together. We're just… whatever we are. I don't get to be jealous."

Sophia gave me a look that suggested she found that argument quite exhausting to listen to for the fourth time that month. "You're allowed to have feelings, Y/N, even messy, complicated, technically not justified ones. That's just what feelings simply are. They don't wait for permission."

"That's literally annoyingly reasonable."

"I have my moments." she says proudly.

…

Jake, for his part, was having a nearly identical crisis roughly forty feet away, sitting across from Lara at the library table while doing an extremely poor job of concentrating on anything she was actually saying.

"You're not listening to a word of this," Lara said eventually, not unkindly, closing her textbook with a soft thud.

"Sorry. I am. Photosynthesis, right?"

"We're doing European economic history. There has been no photosynthesis discussed at any point during this study session."

"Right. Sorry. I'm a little distracted."

Lara followed his gaze toward the library entrance, where Y/N had just disappeared around the corner with Sophia, and something knowing crossed her face. "Is this about your neighbor? The one Felix won't stop bringing up?"

Jake's ears went predictably red. "Felix has a big mouth."

"Felix has told approximately everyone in a four block radius that his roommate is, quote on quote, "hopelessly, tragically in love with the girl across the hall," so. Yes. I'm aware."

"That's… an exaggeration."

"Is it?"

Jake didn't answer, mostly because he thought it wasn't much of one.

"For what it's worth," Lara said, gathering her things with a small, understanding smile, "you should probably just tell her. Whatever it is you're clearly sitting on. Life's too short to keep having imaginary study dates with me while you're actually thinking about someone else the entire time."

"Was I that obvious?"

"Extremely."

Jake groaned, dropping his head into his hands, while Lara laughed and headed toward the door, leaving him alone with a stack of unread notes and a growing, insistent certainty that he'd been wasting far too much time being careful about something that clearly wasn't going anywhere just on its own.

WEEK 5

Sophia decided, with the same unstoppable enthusiasm Yunjin used to bring to bonfire nights back home, that we all needed a day away from campus. "A reset," she called it, though none of us were entirely sure what we were supposed to be resetting from three weeks into the semester.

It turned into an entire group outing… me, Sophia, Jake, Felix, and a handful of others we'd picked up along the way, a French exchange student named Chloe who'd become fast friends with Sophia in one of their shared seminars, and a quiet, dry witted guy named Kai who Felix had adopted somewhere in the dining hall.

We took the train out to the coast, a stretch of rocky cliffs and gray water that looked nothing like the beach back home and somehow felt achingly familiar anyway.

"This is basically our beach," Felix said, throwing his arms wide as we climbed off the train. "Just colder. And greyer. And the water will probably try to kill you."

"Very reassuring," Chloe said.

"I specialize in reassurance."

The day unfolded easily, the kind of loose, wandering afternoon that reminded me painfully of every beach day from the summer before, Sophia and Chloe racing each other along the tide line, Felix and Kai getting into an increasingly ridiculous argument about whether a rock formation in the distance looked more like a dragon or a very large potato, and me, trailing slightly behind, watching it all with an ache in my chest I couldn't quite name.

Jake fell into step beside me without a word.

"You've got that look again," he said.

"What look?"

"The one where you're somewhere else entirely."

I let out a breath. "It just reminds me of last summer. Before everything got complicated. All over again"

"Yeah," he said quietly. "Me too."

We walked in silence for a while, the wind picking up off the water, salt and cold air settling over both of us.

"Do you ever wish we could go back?" I asked. "Before the beach house. Before any of it. Just… reset the whole thing?"

Jake considered the question seriously, the way he always did. "No," he said finally. "I used to. For a long time, honestly. But I think if none of it happened, I don't know if I ever would've told you any of what I told you at the coffee shop. I think I needed to almost lose it completely to actually be brave enough to say any of it."

"That's a very optimistic way to look at an entire year of misery."

"I contain many."

I laughed despite myself, and for a moment, walking along that cliffside with the wind whipping my hair across my face, it felt like nothing had ever gone wrong between us at all.

Then Felix's voice rang out from up ahead. "Y/N! Settle this! Dragon or potato!"

"Dragon," I called back immediately.

"THANK you," Felix said proudly, throwing a look of pure victory at Kai.

"It's clearly a potato," Jake muttered under his breath, just for me.

"Don't ruin my moment."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

…

We ate fish and chips out of paper wrapping, sitting in a loose circle on a stretch of the pebbled beach as the sun started its slow descent, and for a few hours, everything felt easy in a way it hadn't in a long time.

"Okay, confession time," Chloe announced, regarding to nothing, licking salt off her fingers. "Sophia told me there's history between the two of you." She gestured vaguely between me and Jake. "Is that true, or is Sophia just enjoying stirring up drama in her spare time?"

"Little bit of both," Sophia said cheerfully, entirely unbothered by being called out.

I felt my face heat up. Beside me, Jake suddenly became very interested in a piece of driftwood.

"There's history," I admitted.

"Complicated history," Jake added.

"The most complicated," Felix agreed, nodding sagely like he'd personally witnessed every second of it, which, admittedly, he basically had… kind off.

"So are you together, or—" Kai started.

"No," Jake and I said at the exact same time, a little too quickly.

The whole group exchanged a look.

"Right," Chloe said, drawing the word out slowly, clearly not buying it for a second. "Not together. Sure."

Sophia caught my eye across the circle, something warm and knowing in her expression, and didn't say another word about it… which somehow felt louder than if she had.

VISITORS!

Yunjin announced the trip with exactly zero warning, just like the way she announces most things.

"guess who booked flights to london for reading week," the group chat read, followed immediately by four separate boarding pass screenshots and a string of exclamation points that took up most of my screen.

"They're WHAT," Sophia said, reading over my shoulder.

"Apparently coming here. All four of them. Reading week."

"Oh, this is going to be incredible," Felix said, appearing in the doorway with the particular delight of someone who sensed chaos on the surface and wanted front row seats to. "I finally get to meet the infamous Sunghoon."

"Of course you do.. your literally a copy and paste of him."

"I've heard the skee-ball story four separate times and I need to witness the legend in person."

…

They landed on a gray Thursday afternoon, and the arrivals hall exploded the second Yunjin spotted me, dropping her carry on entirely to sprint the last twenty feet and nearly tackle me to the ground.

"WE'RE HERE," she screamed, loud enough that several nearby travelers turned to stare. "LONDON. WE MADE IT."

"You couldn't have texted ahead of time? Like, weeks ahead of time?"

"And ruin the surprise? Absolutely not."

Chaewon hugged me next, considerably calmer but no less delighted, followed by Sunghoon, who immediately declared the airport "smaller than he expected, honestly, kind of a letdown," and Heeseung, who took one look around and asked, with complete sincerity, "Is it always this cold, or did we just get unlucky?"

"It's London," I said. "It's always this cold."

Jake hung back slightly, watching the reunion with an expression somewhere between amusement and nerves, until Sunghoon spotted him over my shoulder.

"THERE he is," Sunghoon announced, abandoning his suitcase entirely to pull Jake into a hug that lifted him half off the ground. "London's own Charmer. We heard EVERYTHING."

"Everything?" Jake asked, shooting me a look.

"Sophia has a big mouth," Heeseung said cheerfully. "In the group chat. Constantly."

"I do not have a big mouth," Sophia said, entirely unbothered. "I have accurate and thorough reporting habits. Plus I helped plan this surprise so don't come for me"

…

We spent the next four days playing tour guide, dragging the four of them through every corner of the city Sophia and I had come to know, the market Chloe swore had the best pastries, the little pub near campus where Felix knew the bartender by name, the museum none of us had gotten around to visiting until Chaewon insisted.

It was strange and wonderful, watching our two worlds collide, Yunjin and Sophia bonding almost instantly over a shared, slightly alarming enthusiasm for claw machines they found in an arcade near the tube station, Sunghoon and Felix engaging in an argument about football so intense it nearly got them removed from a pub, Heeseung quietly charming every barista in a three block radius.

"Your friends are unhinged," Felix told me, watching Yunjin attempt to win a stuffed frog from a machine with the same single minded fury she'd once brought to a claw machine back home. "I love them."

"They have that effect on people."

On their second night, we ended up crowded into Jake and Felix's dorm room, takeout containers spread across every surface, the six of us, plus Sophia, Felix, and Chloe, who'd wandered in somewhere along the way, crammed together in a way that felt almost exactly like every bonfire and beach day from the summer before, just different location to a different continent entirely.

"Okay," Chaewon said, pointing a chopstick at me and Jake, who were sitting slightly closer together than strictly necessary on the edge of the bed. "What is actually happening here. And don't say nothing, because Sophia already told me there was A Fight and A Party Where You Made Him Jealous On Purpose, and I need details."

"Sophia," I said.

"I report accurately," Sophia said again, entirely without shame. "It's a service, really."

I felt Jake tense slightly beside me, the old careful distance threatening to creep back in for just a second, and something in me… maybe emboldened by having my oldest friends in the room, maybe just tired of committing… decided to just say it.

"We're figuring it out," I said. "Slowly. There's history. Bad history. We're working through it."

"Define working through it," Sunghoon said, entirely too interested.

"Sunghoon."

"What? I'm invested. I've been invested since the ping pong table two summers ago."

Jake let out a quiet laugh beside me, something easing in his shoulders. "It's complicated."

"Everything with you two is complicated," Yunjin said, not unkindly. "It has been since we were seventeen. Frankly it's exhausting watching it from the outside. I can't imagine what it's like living it."

"It's exhausting," I agreed. "From the inside too."

…

The visit ended too fast, the way visits always did. At the airport, saying goodbye for the second time in as many months, Yunjin pulled me aside while the others were distracted saying their own goodbyes.

"I like watching you here," she said quietly. "You seem different. Lighter."

"Good different?"

"The best different." She squeezed my hand. "Whatever's happening with Jake… don't let it slip through your fingers again because you're scared. You've been given a second chance most people don't get. Don't waste it being stubborn."

"When did you get so wise?"

"I've always been wise. You've just been too busy denying to notice."

I laughed, pulling her into one last hug before she had to go, her words settling somewhere deep in my chest, refusing to leave even after their plane had disappeared into the gray London sky.

Jake found me still standing at the window, watching the runway, lost in thought.

"You okay?" he asked, coming to stand beside me.

"Yeah." I leaned into him slightly, the motion easier than it had been even a week ago. "Yunjin just said something that's stuck with me, is all."

"What'd she say?"

I looked up at him, something resolving in my chest that had been sitting unfinished for over a year. "That I shouldn't waste a second chance being stubborn."

Something in his expression shifted, careful hope flickering across his face. "Do you think you're wasting it?"

"I think," I said slowly, "I've been trying very hard not to. And I'm failing. A lot."

"So have I," he admitted. "For what it's worth."

We stood there a while longer, watching planes take off into a sky the color of unfinished business, both of us thinking, I suspected, about exactly the same unresolved thing.

WEEK 6

I wasn't proud of it. I want that on record.

But when James asked if I wanted to get dinner Friday night, something petty and reckless in me said yes before I'd fully thought it through.

"You're doing this on purpose," Sophia said, watching me get ready, an amused, knowing look on her face.

"Doing what?"

"You know exactly what shirt you picked. You know exactly whose door you have to walk past to leave this room."

"It's just dinner."

"Sure."

I ran into Jake in the hallway exactly on schedule, right as James knocked on my door to pick me up. I watched Jake's expression shift in real time… surprise, then something darker, something he tried very hard to smooth over into indifference.

"Going somewhere?" he asked, voice carefully even.

"Dinner. With James."

"Have fun," he said, in a tone that suggested he meant the exact opposite.

I told myself I felt nothing watching his jaw tighten.

I told myself a lot of things that night.

…

Dinner with James was fine. Pleasant, even… he was funny, easy to talk to, genuinely interested in what I had to say. He was, by every reasonable measure, exactly the kind of distraction I should've wanted.

I spent half the meal thinking about someone else entirely though…

Somewhere between the appetizer and the main course, James asked about London, about my program, about whether I had a boyfriend back home… a question that shouldn't have made my chest tighten the way it did.

"No boyfriend," I said. "Just... complicated history. With someone."

"Ah." James smiled, unbothered. "The neighbor? Jake?"

I blinked. "How did you know about Jake?"

"Sophia may have mentioned something at the party. Also," he added, gesturing vaguely, "you've checked your phone four times in the last ten minutes like you're expecting a text from someone who isn't me."

I set my phone down, embarrassed. "Sorry."

"Don't be. It's not exactly a secret how you feel. You're wearing it pretty openly, honestly."

I didn't have a response for that.

…

When James walked me back to the dorm and lingered a beat too long at my door, clearly angling for something more, I found myself stepping back before I'd even consciously decided to.

"I had a good time," I said. "But I don't think I'm looking for anything right now. I'm sorry."

He took it well, all things considered, offering a sorry smile before heading back down the hallway.

I turned toward my door and nearly walked straight into Jake, who was standing in his doorway with his arms crossed, clearly having heard every word.

"Were you listening?" I asked, mortified.

"The walls are thin."

"Jake."

"I wasn't trying to," he said, though the look on his face suggested he wasn't exactly sorry either. "I just happened to be standing here when you happened to reject him three feet from my door."

"Don't sound so pleased about it."

"I'm not pleased." A pause. "Okay. Maybe slightly pleased."

Something reckless rushed up in me, a whole summer and a whole year of unsaid things pressing against the back of my teeth. "Why do you even care, Jake?"

"You know why."

"I don't, actually. Because you've had a year to say something. A whole summer of so many almost conversations that never actually finish. So why don't you just fucking say it! Whatever it is you keep almost saying and then swallowing back down every single damn time!"

"Maybe I'm scared of what happens after I say it," he shot back, frustration finally cracking through the careful surface he usually kept so tightly controlled. "Maybe every time I open my mouth to say it, some part of me remembers exactly how badly it went the last time I let myself want something with you!"

"That's not fair. You don't get to hold that over both of us forever."

"I'm not holding anything over anyone. I'm being honest, which is apparently a completely foreign concept between the two of us!"

"You want honest!?" My voice rose, months of restraint finally giving way. "Fine. I've tried to make you jealous on purpose. James. Every guy I've talked to at every party since we got here. I knew you'd see us leave together tonight. I wanted you to feel exactly what I've been feeling for the last year, watching you exist near me and not being able to do anything about it."

Something shifted in his eyes… surprise, and underneath it, something hungrier.

"It worked," he said quietly.

"I know."

"Do you have any idea," he continued, voice low and rough, stepping closer, "what it's been like, living across the hall from you for six weeks? Watching you laugh at James's jokes. Watching you make yourself unreachable on purpose, every single day, when all I want—"

"What do you want, Jake?"

"You. I want you. I've wanted you since we were seventeen and I was too stupid to say it before everything fell apart. I want you so much it's genuinely inconvenient, and I'm tired… I'm so tired, of pretending otherwise just because I'm scared."

We were standing too close now, the hallway narrow enough that there was barely any space left between us, the tension of an entire summer…an entire year, stressed and trembling. 

“And you know that,” he growled low and dangerous in his throat, stepping so close that his chest brushed against mine with every breath. One of his hands came up, slamming flat against the wall beside my head, effectively caging me in without quite touching me yet. His familiar scent… clean cologne, wrapped around me, making my head spin and knees feel weak.

“I don’t, actually,” I shot back, even as undeniable heat began to pool low in my belly despite defiance. “Because you’ve had a whole year—”

“Jake—”

The second his name left my lips, soft and breathless, he cut me off completely.

Jake surged forward without warning, crashing his mouth against mine in a fierce, possessive kiss that stole the rest of my sentence and every coherent thought in my head. It was all teeth and tongue, desperate and claiming, filled with every ounce of frustration, longing, and jealousy that had been simmering between us for far too long. His free hand gripped my waist hard, fingers digging into the fabric of my top as he yanked me flush against his body. I gasped sharply into the kiss, my hands flying up to clutch desperately at the front of his shirt. Shyness flooded me at first, my fingers trembled slightly against the cotton, but the raw intensity of his kiss quickly melted my hesitation. I kissed him back, tentative at first, then with growing hunger, matching his desperation.

When he finally pulled back just enough to breathe, his forehead pressed tightly to mine, both of us panting heavily, his voice came out rough and gravelly with need. “Say it again. My name. Like you fucking mean it this time.”

“J-Jake…” It came out shy, needy, almost a plea, my cheeks burning hot with embarrassment and arousal.

That single word was all the permission he needed.

He kissed me again, even deeper and more demanding this time, his tongue sweeping in to claim every inch of my mouth as he walked me backward through his open door without ever breaking contact. The moment we were fully inside the room, he kicked the door shut behind us with his foot. The lock clicked into place with finality. Felix was out for the night. No interruptions. No escape. His hands were already moving with urgent hunger, sliding under the hem of my top, his palms scorching hot against the smooth bare skin of my waist as he shoved the fabric upward inch by torturous inch, savoring every new strip of skin he revealed like he had been starving for it.

“That party, I was watching you all damn night,” he murmured hotly against my lips between kisses, then trailed open-mouthed kisses down my jaw to the sensitive side of my neck. His teeth grazed my pulse point before sucking hard, determined to leave a visible mark that would linger for days. “Laughing with him. Letting him stand so close to what’s mine. You knew exactly what you were doing to me the entire time, didn’t you, princess?”

I shivered violently, a soft, needy whimper escaping my throat despite myself. “I was mad… I wanted you to feel it the way I did—”

“Yeah?” His fingers found the clasp of my bra beneath the bunched-up top and undid it with a quick, expert twist. He yanked the top up and over my head in one rough motion, tossing it carelessly across the room. The bra straps slid down my arms and joined the top on the floor. His dark, hungry eyes raked slowly over my now exposed breasts, drinking in the sight. “Well, I felt every fucking second of it. Now you’re going to feel exactly what that does to me.”

Before I could feel too exposed or let shyness take over, his large, veiny hands cupped my breasts fully, thumbs brushing firmly over my nipples until they hardened tightly under his touch. I arched into his palms with a gasp. Jake bent his head immediately, capturing one sensitive nipple between his lips. He sucked hard, his tongue swirling and flicking relentlessly while his fingers pinched and rolled the other nipple with just the right pressure. The combination of wet heat and sharp pleasure-pain drew loud, involuntary moans from deep in my throat.

He spent his time giving attention on my chest… switching sides, sucking deeply on one nipple while pinching the other, grazing both with his teeth, then soothing the sting with broad, wet licks… until both peaks were swollen, red, glistening, and incredibly sensitive. “These perfect tits are mine,” he growled against my skin, voice vibrating through me. “Only mine to touch like this. Only mine to mark up.”

Jake… oh god…”

His mouth continued its relentless journey downward, kissing and sucking fresh marks along my ribs and soft stomach. He dropped to his knees in front of me, shoving my jeans and panties down my legs in one rough, impatient tug. He helped me step out of the pooled fabric, his hands running possessively up the backs of my thighs. Then he looked up at me with completely blown pupils, eyes dark with lust. “Get on the bed. Legs spread wide for me. Now.”

I sat back on the edge of the mattress, instinctively trying to close my thighs out of lingering shyness. Jake’s strong hands gripped my thighs firmly, spreading them apart and holding them open. “Don’t hide from me. I’ve waited too long for this,” he warned. He started with slow, deliberate kisses along the inside of one thigh, then the other, sucking dark hickeys into the soft skin, marking me thoroughly. His tongue traced higher, teasing the crease where thigh met core, breathing hotly against my dripping center.

Finally, his mouth reached my pussy. He gave me one long, slow lick from entrance to clit, savoring my taste with a deep groan. “So fucking wet already. This pretty pussy is dripping for me after you spent all night teasing me.” He dove in fully… his tongue lapping at my folds, circling my swollen clit with firm, precise strokes, then sucking the sensitive bud between his lips while two thick fingers pushed deep inside me, curling instantly to stroke that perfect spongy spot.

“Good girl… such a good fucking girl.”

"J-jake fuck-" I gasped.

“That’s it, say my name.” My head fell back, my fingers threading tightly into his hair as loud moans spilled from my lips. Jake ate me out with single-minded, ravenous intensity… alternating between rapid flicks on my clit, long broad licks through my folds, and deep thrusting of his fingers. He added a third finger, stretching me open while his tongue worked my clit relentlessly. The obscene wet sounds of his mouth and fingers filled the room, mixing with my increasingly desperate whimpers and moans.

“Come on my tongue, princess,” he commanded, voice muffled but dominant against my flesh. “Let me taste how much you need me after making me watch you with him all night.”

The orgasm crashed over me violently. I cried out his name loudly, my thighs shaking and clamping around his head as waves of intense pleasure ripped through my body. Jake licked me through every single spasm, greedy and thorough, drinking down every drop of my release without mercy.

“So tight… gripping my fingers so perfectly. Can’t wait to feel you on my cock.” But he still wasn’t satisfied. He rose to his feet, wiping his glistening mouth and chin with the back of his hand, his eyes completely feral. In quick, efficient movements he stripped off his shirt, revealing the lean, toned chest and abs I had tried so hard not to stare at all semester. His jeans and boxers followed, kicked aside. His thick, hard cock sprang free, heavy and leaking at the tip. My eyes widened, a fresh rush of shy heat flooding my face and chest.

Jake climbed over me, caging my body completely with his. He pinned my wrists above my head with one large hand. “Eyes on me the entire time,” he ordered. He teased my slick entrance with the blunt head of his cock, rubbing it against my swollen clit, then thrust in deep in one powerful stroke, burying himself to the hilt.

The pace he set was brutal, hard, deep, punishing thrusts that made the bed creak loudly. Skin slapped loudly against skin with every snap of his hips. He kept my wrists pinned while leaning down to suck and bite at my sensitive nipples again, never slowing his relentless rhythm. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” he growled between powerful thrusts. “Me fucking you raw because you made me so fucking jealous tonight?”

“Yes—Jake—harder—please—” I begged, voice breaking.

“You like it rough like this? Like when I fuck you deep and hard? Tell me.”

“I love it—Jake—please—”

“That’s right, beg for it,” he groaned, snapping his hips harder, driving into me with long, punishing strokes. “You feel so fucking good squeezing my cock like this. So wet and tight after teasing me all night. This pussy knows exactly who it belongs to.” He released my wrists to grip my hips with both hands, angling me perfectly as he pounded deeper. The head of his cock dragged against my g-spot with every thrust, sending sparks of pleasure through my body.

He leaned down again, sucking hard on one nipple while thrusting relentlessly. “Look at you taking every inch. So pretty when you’re getting fucked like this. No one else gets to see you like this. Only me.”

"J-jake fuck so fast" 

"Yeah too bad huh…ass up higher for me princess.”

He flipped me onto my hands and knees without pulling out, then renters me from behind with a deep groan. One hand fisted in my hair, tugging my head back gently but firmly, while the other slapped my ass lightly before reaching around to rub my clit in tight, fast circles. He pounded into me relentlessly, hitting deep with every thrust. “Feel how deep I am, princess? Take it. Take every fucking inch like the good girl you are. So pretty when you’re getting fucked like this.”

Another shattering orgasm tore through me. I cried out, clenching hard around him as my body shook. Jake followed moments later, spilling hot and deep inside me with a guttural groan of my name. “Fuck—take it all… that’s it.”

Even then, his hunger hadn’t faded. He pulled out carefully, flipped me onto my back again, and buried his face between my legs once more. This time he licked and sucked messily at our combined release, tasting both of us while his fingers worked my oversensitive clit and curled inside me. “You taste so fucking good like this… full of me,” he groaned. He brought me to a third, shaking orgasm on his tongue and fingers.

Only after that did he slide back inside me for a final, still possessive round. He kissed me deeply, tongue tangling with mine as he fucked me with slower but still deep, claiming strokes. “I love how you feel around me… so warm and tight. You’re going to be sore tomorrow and every time you feel it you’re going to remember exactly who fucked you this good.” He whispered filthy praises against my ear until we came together once more, completely spent.

Afterward, he gathered my trembling body into his arms, stroking my hair and back with surprisingly tender hands. “You’re mine,” he whispered against my temple. “No more games. No more running. Say it.”

“I’m yours,” I whispered back, shy but utterly satisfied, curling into his chest.

WEEK 7

I woke up before he did, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling of his dorm room, the weight of what had happened settling over me slowly, thickly, like fog rolling in off the river.

I didn't regret it. That surprised me most of all.

But I also didn't know what to do with the terrifying deepness of it, the way it had cracked something open in me that I wasn't sure I knew how to close back up.

I left before he woke up…

I wasn't proud of that either.

…

Sophia found me an hour later, curled up on my bed, staring at nothing, and took one look at my face before closing the door behind her.

"Okay," she said, sitting down across from me. "Talk."

So I told her. All of it… the fight, the confession, the years of unsaid things finally spilling over all at once, and what happened after…

"And you left," Sophia said slowly, "before he woke up."

"I panicked!"

"Why?"

"Because it meant something," I admitted. "It meant more than I was ready for it to mean, and I didn't know how to face that in the daylight."

Sophia was quiet for a moment, studying me with a gentleness that made my throat tight. "Y/N. You can't keep running every time something actually matters."

"I know."

"So what are you going to do?"

I didn't have an answer for that. Not yet.

"For what it's worth," Sophia added, softer now, "I don't think there's anything wrong with being scared. I think there's something wrong with letting that scared make all your decisions for you. There's a difference."

I thought about that for a long time after she left the room.

…

Across the hall, Jake was having a similar conversation, though I wouldn't find out about it until much later.

"She was gone when I woke up," Jake told Felix, sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at the space on his sheets where I'd been.

"And you're surprised by this because...?"

"Because I thought—" He stopped, frustrated. "I thought it meant we were finally past the running part."

Felix sat down beside him, uncharacteristically serious. "Maybe it wasn't running from you. Maybe it was running from how much it mattered to her."

"That's not better, Felix."

"No," Felix agreed. "But it's not just nothing, either."

Jake rubbed a hand over his face. "I don't know what to do. I said everything last night. Everything I've been sitting on for a year. And she still left."

"Did you mean it? Everything you said?"

"Every word."

"Then you don't take it back," Felix said simply. "You wait. And when she's ready to stop running, you make sure she knows the door's still open. That's it. That's the whole plan."

"Since when did you get so wise about relationships?"

"I've been taking very thorough notes on your disaster of a love life for six weeks. It was bound to teach me something eventually."

…

We didn't talk for four days.

Four days of passing in the hallway with careful, this aching politeness. Four days of neither of us knowing how to carry the distance we'd built in the space of just a single terrified morning.

On the third day, we nearly broke.

I'd gone down to the shared kitchen late, well past midnight, assuming… correctly, usually, that no one else would be awake to witness whatever sad, microwaved dinner I was about to make for myself. I hadn't accounted for Jake having the exact same idea.

We both froze in the doorway.

"Oh," I said. "Sorry. I can come back."

"You don't have to leave." His voice was quiet, careful, like he was afraid one wrong word would send me straight back out the door. "There's plenty of kitchen for both of us."

I hesitated, then stepped inside anyway, keeping a careful few feet of distance as I pulled a container of leftovers from the fridge.

The silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable in a way it hadn't been in weeks. I could feel him watching me, could feel the exact shape of everything neither of us was saying pressing against the edges of the small kitchen.

"I'm not angry at you," I said eventually, staring resolutely at the microwave timer instead of at him. "In case that's what you think this is."

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know how to be near you without it meaning something," I admitted, the words slipping out before I could stop them. "And I don't know how to let it mean something without being terrified of what happens if it falls apart again."

Jake set down the mug he'd been holding, taking a slow step closer, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him even without touching. "It's not going to fall apart because of anything you did that morning. I need you to know that. I'm not upset you left. I'm upset we're still circling this instead of just… being honest about what we actually want."

"What do you want?" I asked quietly, echoing a question I'd asked before, in a different hallway, a different context, but somehow it felt like the exact same question all over again.

"You already know the answer."

"I want to hear you say it."

Something in his expression cracked, raw and unguarded. "I want you. Not just the version of you that's easy and uncomplicated. All of it… the running, the jealousy, the year we lost, the stubbornness. I want to actually try, for real, without either of us finding a reason to bolt the second it gets scary."

The microwave beeped, loud and jarring, breaking whatever fragile thing had been building between us. I jumped, the moment fracturing instantly.

"I should—" I gestured vaguely at my food, unable to finish the sentence.

"Yeah," Jake said, stepping back, disappointment flickering across his face before he tucked it carefully away, the way he always did. "Yeah, of course."

I left the kitchen without eating, my food forgotten on the counter, my heart pounding the entire walk back to my room.

It would take one more day, and one very direct intervention from Felix, before either of us actually managed to finish that conversation.

…

It was Felix, in the end, who forced the issue, cornering me outside the dorm building with the particular bluntness of someone who'd apparently had enough.

"He's miserable," Felix said without preamble. "In case you were wondering."

"I wasn't asking."

"I know. I'm telling you anyway." He crossed his arms, uncharacteristically serious. "Look, I don't know everything that happened between you two. I know enough. And I know he's spent the last four days pretending he's fine while very obviously not being fine, and I'm tired of watching it."

"It's complicated, Felix."

"Everything worth having usually is." He softened slightly. "For what it's worth… I've known him for a bit, and I've never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you. Not even close. He talks about you like you're already the best decision he's ever made, even when he's terrified you're going to walk away again."

I didn't have anything to say to that.

But I thought about it for the rest of the day.

That evening, I found a piece of paper slid halfway under my door… Jake's handwriting, familiar even after all this time, three words and nothing else.

I'm not leaving.

I held onto it longer than I probably should have, sitting on the edge of my bed, reading it over and over until the words stopped looking like words and started looking like a promise.

WEEK 8

I knocked.

Felix opened the door, like he was heading out.

"Oh your here…?"

"Wanted to talk to him…"

"Well, I'm heading out, so the space is yours. He's right over there… hasn't really moved," pointing at him before leaving.

I found him on the fire escape again, the same one from the party weeks earlier, staring out at a skyline that had started, slowly, to feel a little like home.

"Hey," I said, climbing out through the window.

He turned, surprise flickering across his face before he changed it into something more careful. "Hey."

"Can we talk? Actually talk. Not the almost kind."

"Yeah," he said quietly. "I think we're overdue."

I sat down beside him, close enough that our shoulders almost touched, the cool night air settling around us.

"I got your note," I said.

"I wasn't sure you'd even read it."

"I read it about fifty times, if I'm being honest."

A small, relieved smile tugged at his mouth. "Good. I meant every word of it."

"I left because I was scared," I said, before I could talk myself out of it. "Not because it didn't matter. Because it mattered too much, and I didn't know what to do with that."

Jake let out a slow breath. "I thought I'd done something wrong again."

"You didn't. It was me. It's always been me, running the second things get real."

"So what do we do now?" he asked, voice careful, like he was scared of the answer.

"I don't want to keep running," I said. "I'm tired of it. I'm tired of pretending I don't feel what I feel, or making you jealous to prove a point, or leaving before things get too honest."

"What do you feel?" he asked quietly.

I looked at him… really looked, the way I'd been too scared to for over a year, and let myself say it.

"I've loved you for longer than I've been willing to admit. Probably longer than either of us wants to do the math on."

Something in his face broke open, raw and unguarded in a way I hadn't seen since that night at the lookout point, right before Sunghoon interrupted us.

"I love you too," he said. "I think I have for years. I just didn't know how to say it without it costing me everything."

"So say it now," I said softly. "No one's going to interrupt this time."

"I love you, Y/N. I don't want distance. I don't want almosts. I want to actually try, for real, no running, no pretending. I want to know what we are."

"What do you want us to be?"

"Yours," he said simply. "If you'll have me."

The honesty of it undid something in me completely.

"Yeah," I whispered. "Yeah, I'll have you."

He reached for me then, slow and certain in a way that felt entirely different from the desperate collision of the week before, like this time, there was nothing left to rush toward, nothing left unsaid standing between us.

He kissed me right there on the fire escape… slow and deep, like he was pouring every unsaid promise, every sleepless night, and every hidden longing into it. His lips moved against mine with aching tenderness at first, savoring the softness, the taste of me. Then hunger grew as I parted for him. Our tongues slid together unhurriedly, exploring, relearning. One of his hands slid into my hair, cradling the back of my head, while the other rested possessively at the small of my back, pulling me closer until there was no space left between our bodies. The cool night air raised goosebumps on my arms, but his warmth chased them away.

When we finally broke apart, both breathing harder, chests rising and falling in sync, Jake rested his forehead against mine. His breath mingled with mine in the small space between us. “Inside. Now. I need to feel all of you. I need to show you what you mean to me.”

He helped me climb back through the window first, steadying me with gentle hands on my waist, then followed, closing it behind us with a soft click. The dorm room was dimly lit by the city glow passing through the thin curtains, golden streetlights and the occasional flash of headlights painting soft patterns across the walls. Jake pulled me into his arms again the second his feet hit the floor, kissing me like he couldn’t bear even a second of separation. His hands roamed my back, learning the curve of my spine as if it were the first time.

“Let me undress you properly this time,” he murmured against my lips, voice low and reverent. “I want to memorize every inch of you tonight. No rushing. No fear. Just us.”

His fingers found the hem of my shirt. He didn’t rush. Instead, he slowly dragged it upward, palms skimming over my ribs and the sides of my breasts as the fabric lifted, leaving trails of fire on my skin. He paused halfway to press open mouthed kisses along the newly exposed skin, soft, lingering presses to my stomach that made my muscles flutter, teasing kisses to the underside of my breasts, and gentle sucks along my collarbones that drew quiet sighs from me. When the shirt finally cleared my head, he tossed it aside gently and just looked at me for a long moment, eyes tracing every curve like he was committing me to memory.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he breathed, the words heavy with awe. His hands cupped my breasts through my bra, thumbs circling my nipples in slow, deliberate strokes until they tightened visibly against the lace. “I’ve dreamed about touching you like this for so long. Not rushed. Not scared. Just… us. You and me, finally honest.”

I shivered under his gaze. “Your turn. I want to feel you too. All of you.”

Jake helped me pull his shirt off, revealing the familiar planes of his chest. I ran my hands over his warm skin, tracing every ridge. He groaned softly. “You have no idea what your hands do to me.”

He reached behind me, unclasping my bra with steady fingers. The straps slid down my shoulders, and he peeled it away slowly. “Perfect,” he whispered. He bent his head, taking one nipple into his mouth with gentle suction. His tongue swirled around the peak, then flicked it lightly before he sucked harder, drawing a soft moan from my throat. The wet heat of his mouth sent sparks straight to my core.

“Jake…” My fingers threaded through his hair, holding him to my chest.

He switched to the other breast, giving it the same devoted attention, licking, sucking, gently grazing with his teeth while his hand kneaded the one he’d just left. “I love how you sound when I do this,” he murmured against my flushed skin. “Love how responsive you are for me. How your body lights up under my hands. My girl. Always has been. These pretty nipples get so hard for me… fuck, I could spend hours just on your tits.”

Clothes continued to disappear slowly. He hooked his fingers into my pants and panties, sliding them down my legs inch by inch, dropping kisses along the way, my hips, the tops of my thighs, the sensitive crease where my leg met my body. He lingered there, breathing me in, pressing reverent kisses to the soft skin. “So beautiful here,” he whispered, nipping gently at my inner thigh. “I love marking you so everyone knows you’re taken.”

When I stepped out of the fabric, he looked up at me from his knees with such open adoration that it stole my breath.

“You’re everything I’ve ever wanted,” he said quietly, voice thick. “Everything I need. Let me show you.”

Then he stood, shedding the rest of his own clothes until he was bare before me, hard, flushed, cock heavy and curving upward. I drank him in, heat pooling low in my belly.

Jake guided me onto the bed, laying me down like I was something precious. He settled between my thighs but didn’t rush. Instead, he kissed his way down my body, pausing again at my breasts, sucking and licking my nipples until they were swollen and aching, whispering, “I love how they fit in my hands… love how you moan when I suck them like this,” before moving lower.

When he reached the top of my thighs, he spread my legs wider with gentle hands. “Let me taste you,” he requested, voice husky with need. “I want to make you feel good first. I want to hear you fall apart for me. I’ve missed you so much.”

His mouth descended slowly. A long, broad lick from entrance to clit, savoring me. “You taste so fucking good,” he praised, eyes fluttering closed for a moment. “Sweet and wet… all for me.” Then focused swirling attention on my clit. Two fingers slid inside me easily, curling while his tongue worked me with patient, rhythmic strokes, circles, flicks, gentle suction. “You taste so good,” he praised between licks, pumping his fingers steadily. “So wet and sweet for me. I could stay here all night, just listening to you moan my name. Tell me how it feels, baby.”

“So good… Jake, your tongue—ah—” I gasped, hips rolling against his face.

He hummed in approval, adding a third finger to stretch me deliciously while murmuring endless praise against my folds. “That’s it, baby. Ride my face. Let go for me. I’ve got you. I love you so much. Love feeling you clench around my fingers like this.”

The pleasure built gradually, deep and rolling. Jake took his time, alternating between gentle suction and broad, flat licks, scissoring his fingers while sucking my clit. “Come for me, princess. Let me taste you coming on my tongue. I need it.”

I came with a soft, shuddering cry of his name, thighs trembling around his head as pleasure rolled through me in long, powerful waves. Jake worked me through every aftershock, slowing his movements but not stopping until I was gently pushing at his shoulders, oversensitive and glowing.

He kissed his way back up my body, settling over me. His cock rested hot and heavy against my thigh, leaving a smear of precum. “Look at me,” he whispered, cupping my face with both hands. Our eyes locked, deep and unwavering, as he positioned himself at my entrance. “I love you, Y/N. This is us now. No more distance. No more walls.”

“I love you too,” I breathed, wrapping my legs around his waist, heels pressing into his lower back. “All of me, yours.”

He pushed in slowly, inch by inch, until he was buried all the way in. Both of us groaned at the feeling, tight, perfect, intimate. The stretch was perfect, filling me completely. Jake stayed still for a long moment, forehead pressed to mine, just savoring the connection, our breaths mingling.

“You feel like home,” he said softly, beginning to move in slow, deep rolls of his hips. Every thrust was deliberate, grinding against me with each downward stroke so my clit received constant friction. “So tight… so warm… made for me. Like you were always meant to be right here, wrapped around my cock.”

Our bodies moved together in perfect sync. Jake’s hands explored everywhere, caressing my sides, cupping my breasts again to tease my sensitive nipples while he thrust, rolling them gently between his fingers. He leaned down to kiss me deeply, swallowing my moans as the pace gradually built, still loving and controlled.

“Tell me how it feels,” he urged, voice strained with pleasure but still in control, eyes never leaving mine. “Talk to me, baby. I need to hear you.”

“So full… so good, Jake. I love feeling you inside me like this. Deep. Like you’re part of me,” I gasped.

He groaned, hips snapping a little harder but still measured. “Good girl. I love being inside you. Love hearing you say my name while I’m fucking you slow and deep. Love the way you clench around me when I hit that spot right… there.”

The emotional intensity mixed with the physical pleasure until tears pricked my eyes again. Jake noticed immediately, kissing the tears away tenderly, slowing his thrusts to a gentle rock. “I’ve got you,” he promised, voice breaking with emotion. “I’m right here. Not going anywhere. Never again. You’re safe with me. I love you so fucking much.”

He shifted slightly, changing the angle so he hit that perfect spot inside me with every thrust. One hand slipped between us, fingers circling my clit in time with his movements, firm, steady pressure. “Come for me again, baby. Let me feel you. I want to feel you come while I’m buried so deep inside you.”

I came again with a broken moan, clenching tightly around him, waves of pleasure pulling me under as I gasped his name like a prayer. The feeling of me pulsing around him pulled Jake over the edge right after me, he buried himself as deep as possible, groaning my name long and low as he spilled inside me in long, powerful pulses, filling me with warmth.

We stayed joined for a long time afterward, trading soft kisses and whispered “I love you”s between breaths. Jake eventually pulled out gently, both of us hissing at the sensitivity. He disappeared for a moment, returning with a warm, damp cloth to clean us both with careful, loving strokes. Then he pulled me into his arms under the covers, tucking my head against his chest.

“I’m never letting fear get between us again,” he murmured against my hair, one hand stroking soothing patterns down my back. “You’re my future, Y/N. Whatever comes after London… graduation, jobs, whatever life throws at us… we face it together. No more running.”

She snuggled deeper into his chest, listening to his steady heartbeat. “Together. Always.”

WEEK 8 ½

Unlike the first time, I didn't leave before he woke up.

I lay there instead, watching gray London light creep slowly across the ceiling, Jake's arm heavy and warm around my waist, and let myself feel it fully… the terrifying, wonderful weight of staying instead of running.

"You're still here," he murmured eventually, voice thick with sleep, surprise and relief tangled together in his tone.

"I'm still here."

He propped himself up on one elbow, studying my face like he was trying to memorize it. "How does it feel?"

"Terrifying," I admitted. "In a good way. Is that a contradiction?"

"Only a little." He brushed a strand of hair away from my face, the gesture so soft it made my chest ache. "For what it's worth, I've been terrified in a good way for about two months now. You get used to it eventually."

"Is that supposed to be reassuring?"

"A little bit, yeah."

I laughed, pulling him back down beside me, in no hurry at all to let the morning end. Outside, the city was slowly waking up, the sound of traffic and distant voices filtering faintly through the window, but inside that small room, time felt entirely suspended… no rush, no fear, no reason at all to be anywhere else.

"I keep thinking about all the time we wasted," I admitted quietly. "The year. The silence. Everything we could've had if we'd just been honest sooner."

"Don't do that," Jake said gently, tightening his arm around me. "Don't spend the good part mourning the part that's already over. We're here now. That's what actually matters."

"When did you get so wise?"

"I've had a lot of time to think, apparently. Mostly about you."

"That's embarrassingly sweet."

"I contain a lot," he said again, and I laughed against his shoulder, feeling, for the first time in over a year, like the future ahead of us was something worth being excited about instead of something to brace against.

We stayed in bed far longer than either of us should have, skipping the first lecture of the day entirely, wrapped up in each other and the quiet, unhurried certainty that neither of us was going anywhere.

WEEK 9

News, it turned out, traveled fast in a dorm with paper thin walls.

"So," Sophia said the next morning, eyeing me over her cereal with the barely restrained energy of someone who already knew but wanted to hear it officially. "Anything you want to tell me?"

"We're together," I said, unable to fight the smile spreading across my face. "Officially. For real this time."

Sophia's spoon clattered against her bowl as she shot up, pulling me into a hug so enthusiastic I nearly spilled my own breakfast. "FINALLY. Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for this? I've been managing two separate emotional crises simultaneously for two months."

"I'm sorry for the emotional labor."

"You should be. I want a full recount. Everything. Don't skip a single detail."

Across the hall, a similar conversation was unfolding, though considerably louder.

"YES," Felix's voice boomed through the wall, loud enough that Sophia and I both dissolved into laughter. "FINALLY. Do you understand how long I have had to listen to you sigh dramatically at that girl's door? MONTHS, Jake. Actual months of suffering."

"You've only seen me for two months total, Felix."

"It FELT like months. Emotional months. Time is relative."

…

Word spread through our small circle of friends quickly after that, Chloe sending an enthusiastic string of exclamation points in the group chat, Kai responding with a single dry "called it," James, when I ran into him at the coffee shop a few days later, offering a genuinely gracious smile and a "good for you, honestly" that eased whatever awkwardness might have lingered.

Back home, the reaction was even louder.

Yunjin's video call came through so fast after Sophia… apparently under strict instructions from me… leaked the news that I barely had time to answer before Yunjin's face filled the screen, Chaewon crowding in beside her.

"IS IT TRUE," Yunjin shrieked, loud enough that I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

"Define 'it,'" I said, biting back a smile.

"DON'T YOU DARE. Sophia texted me. You and Jake. TOGETHER together."

"...Yes."

The scream that followed was loud enough that Sophia, in the other room, yelled "TOLD YOU" without even looking up from her book.

"I cannot believe," Chaewon said, once the screaming had died down to something resembling normal volume, "that it took an entire ocean and two months of you two being insufferably obvious for this to actually happen."

"We were being obvious?"

"Y/N. You two used to stare at each other across a bonfire like it was a fucking slow-mo Kdrama scene. Yes. Obvious."

I laughed, warmth spreading through my chest at the familiar chaos of their voices, at how easy it felt now to say his name out loud without flinching.

"We're happy for you," Yunjin said, softer now, all the teasing falling away for just a second. "Both of you. You deserve this. After everything."

"Thank you," I said, and meant it more than I could properly put into words.

WEEK 9 ½ 

Being together didn't mean the arguing stopped. If anything, it just changed shape… less about what we weren't saying, more about the ordinary, stupid things couples actually fought about, which was, I discovered, a strange kind of relief. At least this time the fighting didn't come with a year of silence attached.

It started, as these things often did, with something small.

"You didn't tell me you had a study group tonight," I said, standing in his doorway with my arms crossed, watching him grab his bag in a hurry.

"I forgot. I'm sorry. It came up last minute."

"You've had it planned for a week, Jake. Felix mentioned it three days ago."

He paused, guilt flickering across his face. "Okay, that's fair. I should've said something."

"We had plans tonight."

"I know. I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you, I promise, I just… this project's worth thirty percent of my grade and I genuinely forgot to tell you, it wasn't on purpose."

"It's not really about the study group," I admitted, some of the frustration draining out of my voice. "It's that you keep doing this thing where you make a decision and then just... tell me after, instead of with me. Like I'm someone you're updating instead of someone you're actually including."

Jake set his bag down slowly, giving me his full attention in a way that eased something tight in my chest. "You're right. I'm sorry. Old habits, I think… I spent so long assuming I didn't get a say in what you wanted, or what we were, that I think some part of me is still operating like I have to just... work around you instead of with you."

"That's not what this is anymore."

"I know. I'm working on it." He reached for my hand, thumb brushing gently over my knuckles. "Can I make you an offer? Skip the first hour of study group, take you to that dumpling place you keep talking about, then go back after?"

"You'd fail your project for dumplings?"

"I'd fail a lot of things for dumplings, if we're being honest. But mostly I just don't want you thinking I take you for granted. Because I don't. I spent a year without you. I'm not interested in wasting a single night I actually get to have you."

Some of my remaining frustration melted despite my best efforts to hold onto it. "That's annoyingly effective."

"I've been told I have a gift."

"Felix told you that, didn't he."

"Felix tells me a lot of things. Most of them are lies. That one might be true."

…

We got the dumplings. He went back to study group an hour late, considerably more relaxed, and I spent the rest of the evening curled up with Sophia watching a show neither of us could really follow, thinking about how strange it was that even the fighting felt different now… lighter, solvable, the kind of disagreement that ended in dumplings instead of a year of silence.

"You two are going to be fine," Sophia said, referencing to nothing, halfway through an episode neither of us was paying attention to.

"You think?"

"I think you finally figured out how to actually talk to each other instead of just orbiting the same unspoken thing for years. That's the hard part. Everything else is just logistics."

I thought about that for a long time after she said it… how much of the last year, the last summer, even the years before that, had really just been two people too scared to say the thing that mattered, circling it instead, hoping the other person would say it first.

We'd stopped circling. That had to count for something.

WEEK 10

Being together, officially, unraveled something in both of us that neither of us had realized we'd been holding so tightly.

The banter didn't disappear… if anything, it got worse, sharper, more affectionate, Felix and Sophia rolling their eyes at us with increasing frequency as the semester went on.

"You two are unbearable now," Felix announced one evening, watching Jake steal food directly off my plate with the shameless confidence of someone who considered it a fully earned privilege.

"You're just jealous," Jake said.

"I am extremely jealous, yes."

"Get your own girl to steal fries from," I said, though I was smiling too hard for it to land as an actual complaint.

Sophia and Felix had become fast friends themselves over the course of the semester, bonding over the shared experience of watching two idiots dance around each other for two full months before finally getting it together.

"We should get credit," Sophia said. "For emotional labor."

"Absolutely," Felix agreed. "A whole semester of watching you two almost talk. I deserve a medal."

"You deserve nothing," Jake said. "You made it worse. Constantly. On purpose."

"I made it entertaining," Felix corrected. "There's a difference."

…

There were still hard conversations, even after. The kind that came with actually trying, actually staying, instead of running at the first sign of something real.

We talked, really talked, about that night at the beach house… all of it, every piece we'd left buried for a year. We talked about what happened after the semester ended.

"I keep thinking about what happens when the semester ends," I admitted one evening, sitting cross legged on his bed while rain dropped slow lines down the window. "We go back home. Back to everyone. It won't be just the two of us anymore."

"Does that scare you?"

"A little. I don't want this to be a London thing. Something that only makes sense here, in this bubble, and falls apart the second we're back in real life."

Jake reached over, threading his fingers through mine. "It's not going to fall apart. I've spent two months proving to myself I'm capable of not running from this. I'm not about to start the second we cross an ocean."

"Promise?"

"I promise." He pressed a kiss to my knuckles, something achingly sincere in the gesture. "Wherever we end up… here, home, somewhere we haven't even thought of yet… I want it to be with you. That's not a London thing. That's just a fact now."

"I don't want to lose this," I admitted. "Not again. Not for another year of pretending."

"You won't," Jake said, pressing a kiss to my forehead. "I'm not letting you run this time. Even if you try."

"I'm not planning on it."

"Good. Because I've spent way too long almost telling you things. I'd like to spend the rest of it actually telling you things instead."

WEEK 10 ½

 It was Chloe who noticed it first, which meant, by the transitive property of our friend group, everyone knew within the hour.

"Have you two considered," Chloe said, watching Sophia and Felix bicker over whose turn it was to pick the movie for the fourth week running, "that you argue exactly like a couple who hasn't figured out they're a couple yet?"

"We are not a couple," Sophia said immediately.

"We're roommates' friends," Felix added, equally quick. "Adjacent. By association."

"Sure," Chloe said, in the exact same skeptical tone she'd used on me and Jake months earlier, clearly enjoying herself immensely. "Adjacent. By association. That's definitely what that was."

I exchanged a look with Jake, who was fighting visibly not to laugh.

"You two are being ridiculous," Sophia said, though the flush creeping up her neck suggested otherwise.

"We're being observant," Felix corrected.

"There's a difference," Sophia shot back, echoing, almost word for word, the exact argument Felix himself had used on me and Jake weeks earlier.

The whole room dissolved into laughter, Sophia and Felix both looking equal parts mortified and unconvincing in their denials.

…

Later that night, after everyone else had wandered off, I found Sophia sitting on her bed, hugging her knees, uncharacteristically quiet.

"You okay?" I asked, settling across from her.

"Do you think it's obvious? With Felix?"

I softened, recognizing the exact same nervous uncertainty I'd carried around for two entire months before finally saying anything to Jake. "A little. In the best way, though. He looks at you like you're the punchline to his favorite joke. It's very sweet, honestly."

Sophia groaned, dropping her face into her hands. "I didn't come to London to fall for my best friend's boyfriend's roommate. That feels like a very specific and unnecessary complication."

"Welcome to the club," I said, laughing. "It's a very exclusive, very exhausting club."

"Does it get easier? Saying something?"

I considered the question seriously, thinking back to the fire escape, the fight in the hallway, the note slid under my door, everything it had taken to finally get here. "Not easier, exactly. Just… worth it. Once you actually do it."

"That's very unhelpful advice."

"I never claimed to be good at this. I spent an entire year avoiding my own feelings. I'm hardly an expert."

Sophia laughed, some of the tension easing from her shoulders. "Fair enough. Maybe I'll just take a page from your book. Wait an excessive amount of time, panic, and eventually get cornered by a well meaning intervention."

"It worked for me."

"Barely."

"Barely," I agreed, grinning. "But it worked."

…

Whatever happened between Sophia and Felix after that stayed mostly their own business… quiet, careful, unfolding in the margins of everyone else's much louder story… but by the time reading week rolled back around, I noticed her sitting a little closer to him at dinner, noticed the easy way his hand found the small of her back when the group walked somewhere together, noticed the matching, slightly embarrassed smiles neither of them bothered denying anymore.

"Called it," Jake murmured to me one evening, watching them from across the room.

"You did not call it. Chloe called it."

"I called it internally. That still counts."

"It does not count."

"It counts a little."

I rolled my eyes, leaning into him anyway, grateful… endlessly, quietly grateful… for the strange, roundabout way London had given all of us exactly what we didn't know we were looking for.

WEEK 11

The semester wound down faster than either of us wanted, the city taking on a strange, bittersweet quality as move-out dates crept closer, boxes reappearing in hallways, goodbyes practiced in advance for people we weren't ready to say goodbye to yet.

Sophia and I spent our last free weekend doing all the things we'd kept meaning to do and never had time for, the museum we'd walked past a hundred times without going in, the little bakery near campus that Chloe swore had the best pastries in the city, one final wander along the river as the sun set gold over the water.

"I'm going to miss this," Sophia said, echoing Chaewon's words from a lifetime ago, back on a different continent entirely. "This exact version of things. You, me, this ridiculous dorm room."

"We'll see each other again."

"I know. It still feels big, though."

It did feel big. Standing there, watching the city lights start to flicker on across the water, I understood, maybe for the first time… exactly why Chaewon had said the same thing a year ago on a different coastline. Endings always felt enormous, even the good kind. Especially the good kind.

Felix organized one last gathering before everyone scattered back to their respective corners of the world… a rooftop, borrowed from a friend of a friend, string lights and takeout containers and someone's portable speaker playing music too quietly to really hear over all the talking.

"To London," Felix said, raising a paper cup like it was crystal. "And to whatever we all managed to figure out here."

"To London," everyone echoed.

Jake's hand found mine, fingers lacing together easily now, none of the hesitance that had defined the entire first half of the semester.

"To not running," he murmured, just for me.

"To not running," I agreed, and meant it with my whole chest.

HOME

The semester ended faster than either of us expected, the way good things always seem to.

We flew home together, this time… no separate flights, no unresolved silence hanging over an entire ocean. Just the two of us, hand in hand, walking off the plane into the familiar California sunlight.

The whole group was waiting at the airport, Yunjin practically tackling both of us at once, Chaewon screaming loud enough to draw looks from strangers, Sunghoon and Heeseung trading knowing glances the second they saw our hands linked together.

"FINALLY," Yunjin shouted. "Do you understand how long we've waited for this?"

"We called it in week two," Chaewon added smugly. "Week two, Y/N. We are never letting you live down how long this actually took."

Jake laughed, pulling me closer, pressing a kiss to my lips in front of all of them without an ounce of the hesitation that had defined the entire summer before.

"Worth the wait," he said, quiet enough that it was just for me.

I looked around at all of them… the friends who'd known us before any of this started, who'd watched an entire year of careful distance finally give way to something real… and let myself feel it fully, for the first time in over a year.

Not almost.

Not around.

Just, finally, together.

…

That night, back at Yunjin's house with the whole group crowded onto her back patio the way we always ended up whenever everyone was home at the same time, I sat curled against Jake's side, listening to Sunghoon recount some exaggerated story about a professor back at his own school, the fire pit crackling low between us, string lights strung overhead just like that very first bonfire two summers ago.

It felt, impossibly, like coming full circle.

"Remember the first bonfire?" I asked quietly, just for Jake, while the others laughed at something across the fire.

"The one where I splashed you in the ocean and you declared war on me for the rest of the afternoon?"

"That's the one."

"I remember thinking," he said, voice low, "that I'd never seen anyone look that annoyed and that pretty at the same time. It was very distracting."

"You hid it well."

"I had a lot of practice hiding things, apparently."

I laughed, leaning into him further, watching the fire throw shifting light across all the faces I loved most in the world. "I'm glad we're not hiding anymore."

"Me too." He pressed a kiss to the top of my head and then my lips, quiet and certain. "I plan on making up for lost time. All of it." 

6 MONTHS LATER

The strange thing about coming home from somewhere that changed you was how normal everything else still looked. The same coffee shop on the corner. The same crack in the sidewalk outside my parents' house that I still forgot about every single time and nearly tripped over. The same string lights Yunjin… Yunjin insisted on draping over her back patio for every single gathering, rain or shine, season notwithstanding.

Only now, Jake's hand found mine without either of us thinking twice about it. Now, when the group scattered toward the water on lazy Sunday afternoons, he fell into step beside me without hesitation, without the careful distance that used to sit between us like something neither of us knew how to name.

"You're staring again," Jake said, nudging my shoulder with his as we sat on the porch steps one evening, watching Sunghoon attempt, badly, to teach Heeseung how to skip a rock across the pond behind Yunjin's house.

"I'm allowed to stare. You're my boyfriend. It's basically a contractual right."

"Is that in the paperwork? I don't remember signing anything."

"You signed it the second you slid that note under my door in London."

He laughed, low and warm, pressing a kiss to my temple. "Fair. I suppose I did."

We'd settled into something neither of us had quite dared to imagine a year ago… easy mornings, familiar arguments that resolved instead of festering, a whole future ahead of us that finally felt like something we were building together instead of something we were both too scared to reach for.

Sophia and Felix, somehow, had stayed close too… a group chat that never quite went quiet, video calls at odd hours across time zones, plans already forming for all of us to meet up again the following summer, wherever any of us happened to land.

"Do you ever think about it?" I asked Jake one night, both of us lying in the grass in Yunjin's backyard, staring up at a sky considerably clearer than London's ever managed to be. "What would've happened if we'd never ended up as neighbors. If the universe hadn't shoved us back into each other's lives like that."

Jake was quiet for a moment, considering the question with the same careful seriousness he gave everything that actually mattered.

"I think we would've found our way back eventually," he said finally. "Maybe slower. Maybe messier. But I don't think either of us was built to just... let this go. Not really. Not permanently."

"That's very romantic, for someone who once tried to convince me a rock formation looked more like a potato than a dragon."

"I contain a lot. I told you that already."

I laughed, turning onto my side to look at him properly, memorizing the way the porch light caught the edge of his face, the easy, unguarded warmth that had replaced all that careful distance from the year before.

"I love you," I said. Simple. Certain. No hesitation left in it at all.

"I love you too," he said, reaching for my hand in the grass, lacing our fingers together the way he had a hundred times since London, a hundred times that still, somehow, felt as significant as the very first. "For the record… I plan on saying that every single day for a very long time. Just so we're both extremely clear on where things stand."

"Extremely clear," I agreed, smiling so wide it almost hurt.

Somewhere behind us, Yunjin's voice rang out, calling everyone in for dinner, and Sunghoon's laughter carried across the yard, and Chaewon was already arguing with Heeseung about whose turn it was to set the table, and it all felt, impossibly, exactly like it always had… except now, walking back toward the house, Jake's hand stayed in mine the entire way.

Not almost.

Not around.

Just, finally, ours.

THE END

Hope you guys enjoyed this two fic series!! Please drop any feedback please!! I would also love to hear what you guys like to see in the next fics, like tropes, members, anything!!

wonluvzu taglist ;)

I spent a whole year convincing myself that I’d be able to avoid Jake this summer…

Oh I was so wrong.

Last summer was supposed to be another summer spent enjoying time with my friends before returning to our college lives. Everything was perfect until the final night before we all went our separate ways.

Yunjin convinced our entire friend group to go to a party hosted at a beach house where many of our old classmates would be. When we arrived, the boys immediately separated to play games while the girls headed toward the drinks.

I grabbed a cup, not realizing what I was drinking until it was too late.

“Is this spiked with vodka?” I gagged.

“Yes, we’re at a party, girl,” Yunjin laughed.

The beach house was crowded as I looked around the room, my eyes scanning over familiar faces. Then I stopped.

Jake.

He was playing a stupid ping pong game with the others before excusing himself to Sunghoon and Heeseung. I didn’t realize I had been staring until someone spoke.

“Girl, when are you going to tell him?” Chaewon sighed.

“Don’t even deny it,” Yunjin added, pointing at me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, pretending to be clueless.

Yunjin gave me a knowing look.

“What? Fine, but what do you want me to do about it?” I exclaimed.

“Tell him. Obviously. And he definitely likes you back,” Chaewon said.

“You think?” I asked nervously.

“It’s so obvious! You two have been flirting nonstop,” Yunjin said.

“I’ll think about it,” I replied, hoping to end the conversation before taking another sip of my drink.

But soon, my stomach started to feel heavy.

“I’m going to look for the bathroom,” I told them before walking away toward the quieter part of the house.

I opened door after door, searching for the washroom, until I opened one without realizing someone was inside.

A bedroom.

Then I saw him.

Jake.

His arms were wrapped tightly around another girl.

For a moment, everything stopped.

It felt like I had walked in on something I was never supposed to see.

Before I could process what was happening, Jake noticed me.

“Y/N?”

“Uh… sorry. I should’ve knocked. Seems like I interrupted something… important,” I said, my voice cracking.

I turned around quickly, but before I could leave, someone grabbed my wrist.

Jake.

“It wasn’t what it looked like,” he said, breathing heavily.

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” I replied coldly. “We’re just friends, right?”

The words sounded more like a statement than a question.

Before he could respond, I pulled my arm away and walked out.

I called an Uber home and texted the group chat that I wasn’t feeling well and had to leave.

The next morning, everyone said their goodbyes before heading back to college for sophomore year. When it was Jake’s turn, I only said one word.

“Goodbye.”

Everyone noticed the tension between us, but no one said anything.

After we left, Yunjin and Chaewon immediately called me. I explained everything, and they tried convincing me that maybe it was a misunderstanding.

But I knew what I saw.

And somehow, it hurt more than it should have.

Because it’s not like we were dating.

So why did it feel like I had lost something?

PRESENT

The school year went by too quickly for my liking.

And now, it was already summer again.

Everyone was meeting at Yunjin's house before heading to the beach. Thankfully, I was the first one there, along with Chaewon.

Yunjin checked her phone before groaning. The boys had already texted the group chat saying they were running late.

Of course they were.

"The boys said they're five minutes away."

"Five minutes?" Chaewon scoffed. "That's basically twenty."

"They're probably stopping for food," I said.

"Definitely." Yunjin adds.

"Or Jake forgot something," Chaewon joked.

Yunjin laughed. "Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised."

“Anyways…I’ve missed you guys so much!" I said, pulling Yunjin and Chaewon into a hug.

"We missed you more," Yunjin laughed, squeezing me tighter.

"So, how was college?" Chaewon asked.

"Boring, but I definitely partied more than I studied," Yunjin admitted.

"It was alright..." I smiled. "Speaking of college, I have some news."

Yunjin's eyes widened.

"What is it? Spill!"

"I got accepted into the study abroad program in London!"

For a second, they both stared at me.

Then they screamed.

"Oh my gosh, congratulations!" Chaewon yelled as the three of us jumped up and hugged each other again.

I couldn't stop smiling.

A whole semester in London.

It felt like exactly what I needed. A fresh start.

"So..." Chaewon asked with a smirk. "Anyone have a summer fling?"

"I wish," Yunjin groaned. "Everyone at my school is either taken or just plain weird."

I laughed. "That's... surprisingly accurate."

Yunjin looked over at me. "What about you?"

"Nope."

Chaewon raised an eyebrow. "Liar."

"I'm serious!"

Yunjin opened her mouth to speak. "You haven't even looked at anyone since..."

She cut herself off.

The room fell silent.

I knew exactly who she was talking about.

"So..." I forced a smile. "Can we please change the subject?"

Then Yunjin ruined the moment.

"The boys will be here any minute."

She glanced at me.

"What?" I asked. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"You know you're not going to be able to avoid Jake forever, right?"

Chaewon nodded in agreement.

"I know," I sighed.

"So what's your plan?" Yunjin asked

"Avoid eye contact." I say while thinking

Chaewon laughed. "That's your genius plan?"

"I'll also avoid conversations."

"And?" Yunjin asking if there is more than just that.

"...That's all I've got."

Yunjin shook her head, trying not to laugh.

"You do realize he's probably going to talk to you eventually."

"I'll deal with that when it happens."

"You're hopeless."

"I prefer the term optimistic."

"Hypothetically..." Yunjin quickly looks at me

"No." I sternly say.

"I didn't even finish." She looks at me to let me hear her out

"Because I already know where this is going." I pointed out

"What if Jake apologizes?" Chaewon tries to add on

I hesitate.

"...He has nothing to apologize for. I thought we had something but, I was clearly mistakend.”

The words don't even sound convincing to yourself.

Before either of them could respond, we heard a car pull into the driveway.

"They're here! Let's go!" Chaewon said, grabbing the beach bags.

We stepped outside as everyone got out of the car.

"Long time no see!" Heeseung exclaimed, pulling each of us into a hug.

"Missed you guys... I guess," Sunghoon joked before breaking into a smile and hugging us too.

Then came the one person I'd spent the last year trying to avoid.

Jake.

He hugged Yunjin.

Then Chaewon.

Then he stopped in front of me.

Neither of us spoke.

We just stared at each other.

The silence felt suffocating.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell everyone was watching, waiting for one of us to say something.

Jake took a small step forward.

Without a word, he wrapped his arms around me.

I froze.

For a second, I didn't know what to do.

Slowly, I hugged him back.

Neither of us said a single word.

After a few seconds, I pushed away first and immediately climbed into the car.

Thankfully, I wasn't sitting next to him.

I couldn't even look at him without remembering that night.

I wasn't about to let one hug change everything.

Heeseung drove while Yunjin sat in the passenger seat. Chaewon sat beside me, and Jake and Sunghoon climbed into the back.

The drive was quiet.

Too quiet.

The silence only lasted a few minutes before Yunjin finally gave in.

"So... how was everyone's school year?"

Thankfully, it got everyone talking again.

The car felt a little less suffocating.

Unfortunately, that didn't change the fact that Jake was still sitting right behind me.

After what felt like an an eternity…

The beach finally came into view as Heeseung reached over and turned the radio up.

For the first time since Jake hugged me, I let myself pretend everything was normal.

Maybe the knot in my stomach was just from the long drive.

Maybe that hug didn't mean anything.

I rested my head against the window, watching the waves crash against the shore as the sunlight reflected across the water.

This summer would be different.

It had to be.

In a few months, I'd be in London, starting over somewhere new. No awkward run ins. No painful memories.

Just me.

I just had to make it through the summer first. That’s all.. right?

The moment Heeseung parked the car, Sunghoon practically threw his seatbelt off.

"I call the spot closest to the water!" he shouted with a grin as he reached for the door handle.

"Oh, absolutely not," Yunjin scoffed, laughing as she climbed out of the passenger seat. "You say that every single year."

Sunghoon shrugged dramatically.

"And every single year I win."

"You literally start running before the engine's even off," Heeseung said, shaking his head as he opened the trunk.

Sunghoon pointed at him with a proud smile.

"That's called strategy."

"No," Chaewon laughed as she grabbed one of the beach bags. "That's called cheating."

"It only counts as cheating if you get caught."

Everyone burst into laughter.

I couldn't help smiling.

Maybe today wouldn't be so bad after all.

Chaewon bumped my shoulder with hers as we started walking toward the sand.

"You remembered sunscreen this time... right?" she asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

"I remembered," I answered confidently.

She folded her arms.

"You hesitated."

"I packed it!"

"Barely," Yunjin teased. "Last summer you looked like a tomato.”

"It was just a tan!”

"You were red," Heeseung corrected with a laugh.

Sunghoon nodded seriously.

"You looked like a walking stop sign."

I gasped dramatically.

"You guys are so fake."

"We're honest," Chaewon replied, smiling innocently.

As everyone continued laughing, Heeseung picked up the cooler with an exaggerated groan.

"Can somebody help me with this thing?"

Yunjin immediately took two steps backward.

"Nope."

"You packed half the food," Heeseung complained.

"And?" she replied with a shrug.

"So help."

"I contributed emotionally."

Heeseung blinked.

"...Emotionally?"

"Mhm."

Sunghoon nodded in agreement.

"I support her argument."

"Of course you do," Chaewon muttered.

The familiar banter made something inside me loosen.

For the first time all day, everything almost felt normal.

We found a spot near the water and spread our towels in a messy circle.

Heeseung immediately launched into a story about one of his professors accidentally emailing the wrong class.

Within minutes everyone was laughing.

Even me.

I looked up, still smiling...

Only to find Jake already looking at me.

His smile faded the second our eyes met.

Mine did too.

Neither of us said anything.

I looked away first, pretending to adjust my beach towel.

The second our towels were down, Sunghoon was already sprinting toward the water.

"Last one in is gonna get thrown into the water!" he shouted over his shoulder.

"Oh, you're so on!" Yunjin laughed as she chased after him.

"Wait for us!" Chaewon yelled, grabbing my wrist and pulling me along.

"Hey! That's cheating!" I laughed.

"Life isn't fair!"

The cool water rushed over my feet as we reached the shoreline.

Heeseung walked in after us, shaking his head.

"You guys are actually children."

"Says the oldest one here," Sunghoon teased before splashing him.

Heeseung stopped in his tracks.

"Oh... that's how we're playing?"

A second later, a wave of water crashed into Sunghoon.

"What the—HYUNG!"

Within seconds, everyone was splashing each other.

Yunjin screamed as Chaewon shoved a wave toward her.

"Chaewon!"

"You started it!"

"I literally didn't!"

I laughed so hard my stomach hurt.

For a little while...

I forgot.

Forgot about last summer.

Forgot about the awkward hug.

Forgot Jake was even here.

Until a splash of cold water hit me square in the face.

I gasped.

"Seriously?" I laughed, wiping the water from my eyes.

Sunghoon immediately pointed at Heeseung.

"It was him!"

"It was not me."

"It literally wasn't," Chaewon giggled.

"Then who—"

I looked up.

Jake stood a few feet away.

A tiny smile tugged at the corner of his lips.

"I think my aim was a little off," he admitted.

For a split second, I almost smiled back.

Almost.

Instead, I scooped up water and splashed him.

"Now it isn't."

Jake let out a surprised laugh as water soaked the front of his shirt.

"So that's how it's going to be?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Facing the other way

He shook his head with a quiet laugh before turning and splashing Sunghoon instead.

"HEY! Why me?" Sunghoon yelled.

"Wrong place, wrong time." Jake

"I've been betrayed!"

After nearly an hour of splashing each other, racing through the waves, and trying to dunk Sunghoon every chance we got, we were all completely exhausted.

"I can't feel my legs," Sunghoon groaned dramatically as he flopped onto his towel.

"That's because you kept trying to tackle everyone," Heeseung laughed, setting the cooler between us.

"I was winning."

"You were losing," Chaewon corrected with a grin.

"Barely."

Yunjin rolled her eyes as she reached into the cooler for a drink.

"You two are going to argue about this all summer, aren't you?"

"Probably," Heeseung answered, handing everyone a bottle of water.

I took mine with a quiet, "Thanks," before sitting cross legged on my towel.

The ocean breeze felt nice against my skin as I took a sip.

For a few minutes, everyone just sat there, listening to the waves.

Sunghoon finally broke the silence.

"I still can't believe we're finally done with sophomore year."

"I know," Chaewon sighed happily. "No homework. No exams. No professors emailing at two in the morning."

"I've never appreciated summer break more," Yunjin said as she leaned back on her elbows.

Heeseung laughed.

"So... what's everyone's plan this summer?"

"I have to work for most of it," Sunghoon answered with a groan.

"That's tragic," Yunjin teased.

"Some of us need money."

"I'll be traveling with my family for a bit," Chaewon said. "Then probably just relaxing."

Yunjin nodded.

"I might visit my cousins before classes start again."

Everyone eventually looked at me.

"What about you?" Heeseung asked.

I opened my mouth to answer, but Chaewon suddenly gasped.

"Wait!"

Everyone looked at her.

"She has news."

I laughed. “Of course you remember that"

"Because you were literally screaming about it earlier," Yunjin said, smiling.

"Okay, okay," I said, sitting up slightly. "I got accepted into a study abroad program."

"Right!" Chaewon exclaimed. "London."

My smile grew.

"Yeah. London."

"That's actually so exciting," Heeseung said.

"A whole semester in London?" Sunghoon asked, impressed. "That's crazy."

"I know," I admitted. "I think I really need the change."

A fresh start.

I didn't say those words out loud, but they were exactly what I was thinking.

Then there was pause of realization on Sunghoon’s face.

"Wait..." Sunghoon suddenly looked over at Jake. "Didn't you say you were going to London too?"

My smile faded slightly.

I turned my head.

Jake looked up, clearly caught off guard by the question.

"Yeah," he answered after a moment. "I am."

The group went quiet.

"Wait, what?" Yunjin looked between the two of us.

Jake glanced at me.

"I got accepted into a study abroad program there."

I blinked.

"You did?"

"Yeah."

Neither of us said anything after that.

Then Chaewon slowly looked between us.

"Hold on..."

Her eyes widened.

“That means you both are going to London?"

The words hung in the air.

"That means you both are going to London?" Chaewon repeated, looking between the two of us.

No one spoke.

Jake rubbed the back of his neck before letting out a small sigh.

"...Looks like it."

Sunghoon looked between us, completely oblivious to the tension.

"That's actually kind of perfect."

I blinked.

"Perfect?"

"Yeah." He shrugged. "At least you'll know someone."

I forced out an awkward laugh.

"I'm sure we'll manage just fine separately."

Jake's eyes flickered toward me.

"...Right."

Yunjin and Chaewon exchanged a glance.

They knew.

They definitely knew.

The conversation stalled until Heeseung clapped his hands together.

"Well, that's future us's problem."

He reached into the cooler.

"Who's hungry?"

"Me!" Sunghoon answered immediately.

"When are you not hungry?" Chaewon laughed.

"I burn calories differently."

"By breathing?"

"Exactly."

The tension eased just enough for everyone to laugh.

Just enough.

Jake looked down at the sand, a small smile appearing on his face.

"I guess we'll see each other around."

His words were casual.

Too casual.

But somehow, they still made my stomach twist.

"Yeah," I replied quietly.

Around.

That was the goal.

Just around.

Not together.

Not like before.

Just around.

The rest of the afternoon went by faster than I expected.

After the London conversation, everyone eventually moved on. Sunghoon challenged everyone to a volleyball game, which somehow turned into everyone arguing over the rules.

"That's not how you play!" Heeseung laughed.

"Yes it is," Sunghoon argued.

"You literally changed the rules halfway through."

"Because the original rules were boring."

I shook my head, laughing.

Some things never changed.

For a moment, I forgot everything.

I forgot the awkwardness.

Forgot the distance.

Until Jake ended up standing beside me during the next game.

"You're still terrible at serving," he teased.

I looked at him.

A year ago, I would've immediately argued back.

"You still talk too much."

His smile widened slightly.

"There she is."

I froze.

The volleyball bounced toward me, rolling across the sand.

I jogged over and bent down to grab it.

Another hand reached for it at the exact same time.

Jake.

Our fingers brushed.

It lasted barely a second.

But it was enough.

I immediately pulled my hand back.

"...Sorry," I mumbled.

Jake looked at me for a moment before picking up the ball.

"You don't have to apologize." His voice was quiet. Gentle. It caught me off guard.

He held the ball out to me.

"You were closer."

I hesitated before taking it from him. "Thanks."

He nodded once. "Yeah."

Neither of us moved.

The silence between us stretched longer than it should have.

It wasn't awkward because we had nothing to say.

It was awkward because there were too many things we wanted to say.

The way he acted like no time had passed.

It was almost unfair.

Because part of me missed it.

And that was the part I hated the most.

By the time the sun started setting, everyone was exhausted.

We packed up our things, leaving behind the spot that held a hundred memories.

"Same time next week?" Yunjin asked as we walked back to the car.

"Obviously," Sunghoon answered.

"You say that like you weren't the one complaining about being tired five minutes ago," Chaewon teased.

"I was tired emotionally."

Everyone laughed.

Even me.

The drive back was different from the one there.

Not completely normal.

But not as painful.

Jake and I still didn't talk much.

But for the first time in a year...

It didn't feel impossible.

WEEK 1

The next Friday, Yunjin declared it was "bonfire night," which really just meant she'd found a fire pit rental online and convinced her older brother to drop it off at the beach before disappearing for the rest of the night.

"I still don't understand how you talked him into this," Chaewon said, dragging a cooler across the sand while I carried a stack of folding chairs that kept threatening to collapse in my arms.

"I told him I'd stop borrowing his car without asking."

"Will you actually stop?"

"Absolutely not."

By the time the sun started dipping toward the water, the fire pit was crackling, and the six of us had claimed a stretch of beach far enough from the boardwalk that the noise of tourists faded into a low hum behind us.

Heeseung guarded the fire like it was a full time job, feeding it driftwood with the seriousness of someone performing surgery, while Sunghoon kept trying to throw marshmallows into the flames "to see what happens."

"That's not what marshmallows are for," Heeseung said, swatting his hand away.

"I'm expanding their purpose," Sunghoon laughed, reaching for another one.

"You're wasting them," Heeseung said, rolling his eyes.

I settled into a folding chair between Yunjin and Chaewon, pulling my knees up to my chest as I watched the fire throw shifting orange light across everyone's faces.

Jake was on the other side of the pit, half a bag of chips in his lap, laughing at something Sunghoon said.

He hadn't looked at me all evening. Not directly.

I told myself that was fine.

Easier, even.

Except every time the wind shifted the smoke away from him and toward me, I found myself watching the exact moment he laughed... the way his head tipped back just slightly, the way his eyes disappeared into it.

Realizing I was staring...

Finding myself doing that a lot lately.

"Ghost stories," Sunghoon announced suddenly, standing up like he was delivering an important speech. "It's a beach bonfire. It's basically the law."

"Nobody made that law," Chaewon said.

"I'm making it now."

"You're going to scare yourself," Yunjin warned.

"I fear nothing."

Twenty minutes later, deep into a story about a hitchhiker who supposedly haunted the very road we'd driven on, Sunghoon shrieked at his own sound effect and nearly knocked over the cooler.

Everyone dissolved into laughter—the kind that doubled you over, the kind where you couldn't even remember what had been so funny five seconds later.

I was laughing so hard I didn't notice I'd shifted my chair closer to the fire, leaning toward Jake's side of the circle...

Until I looked up.

He was already looking at me.

His mouth was still curved from laughing, like he'd been watching me instead of listening to Sunghoon.

The look didn't last long.

Two seconds.

Maybe three.

But it was enough to make my stomach do something complicated.

I busied myself finding a stick to poke the fire with, mostly so I'd have somewhere to put my hands.

Later, when the fire had burned down to glowing embers and Sunghoon had passed out sideways in his chair, Yunjin announced she was starving and someone needed to walk with her to the gas station up the road for snacks.

Chaewon volunteered immediately.

Heeseung, ever the responsible one, said he'd stay behind to make sure the fire was completely out and that Sunghoon didn't somehow wander into the ocean in his sleep.

Which left me and Jake.

Neither of us said anything as Yunjin and Chaewon's flashlights bobbed away down the road, their voices fading into the darkness.

The silence that followed wasn't loud.

But it wasn't comfortable either.

"You're not going to fall asleep too, are you?" I finally asked, mostly just to fill the space.

Jake let out a quiet laugh, stretching his legs toward the dying fire.

"No promises."

I pulled my sweatshirt sleeves over my hands, staring at the glowing wood instead of him.

"Sunghoon's ghost story was actually kind of terrible."

"Ten out of ten delivery, though."

"The shriek really sold it."

"He commits."

Another silence.

Not unbearable.

Just... full.

Full of things neither of us was saying.

I could feel him glance at me a few times, quick, almost hesitant.

Like he was building up to something.

Each time, my heart did that stupid, traitorous stutter.

Maybe this was the moment.

Maybe he'd finally say something about that night at the beach house.

Maybe he'd explain.

He didn't.

"You excited?" he asked instead.

"For London?"

"Yeah."

I hugged my knees a little tighter.

"Nervous, but yeah."

"You'll be fine."

I looked over at him.

"Yeah?"

"You're good at throwing yourself into things."

I blinked.

"You think so?"

"I've known you for six years," he said simply, like that answered everything.

Something about the way he said it...

Quiet.

Certain.

Like it was just a fact about the world.

It made my throat tighten unexpectedly.

I looked back at the fire before he could notice.

"You too, though," I said. "London, I mean. That's..."

"Terrifying," he finished for me.

I laughed.

"I was going to say brave."

"Same thing."

Down the road, Yunjin and Chaewon's flashlights reappeared, along with the crinkle of plastic bags and Chaewon's voice complaining loudly about the gas station's broken slushie machine.

The moment we'd almost had...

Whatever it was...

Dissolved as easily as it had formed.

Jake stood, brushing the sand from his jeans before walking over to help Heeseung put out the fire.

I watched him kneel beside the fire pit, saying something that made Heeseung laugh.

For a second, he glanced back.

Our eyes met across the dying fire.

Neither of us smiled.

Neither of us looked away.

Then Sunghoon snored loud enough to startle himself awake.

"Did I miss the snacks?" he mumbled sleepily.

Everyone burst into laughter.

The moment broke.

I laughed too.

But later that night, lying in bed with the faint smell of smoke still clinging to my sweatshirt...

I couldn't stop thinking about him.

About the almost conversation.

About the way he'd looked at me across the fire like he wanted to say something.

Maybe I should've been relieved he didn't.

Instead...

I found myself wondering what would've happened if he had.

WEEK 2

Another week goes by, and we are at the arcade this time."I refuse to lose to Sunghoon again," Chaewon announced, slamming a fistful of tokens onto the arcade counter as if she were placing a bet in Vegas.

"You say that every time," Sunghoon said.

"And I mean it every time."

"You've lost four times in a row."

"You're an asshole!"

We'd ended up at the arcade after Heeseung suggested it half-jokingly but Yunjin had taken it seriously, texting the group chat within minutes: "arcade night." Mandatory. Bring lots of quarters.

The place buzzed with flashing lights and the clicking overlapping music of a dozen different games, air thick with the strong smell of popcorn. Yunjin and Heeseung had disappeared toward the claw machines almost immediately, Yunjin insisting she had "a strategy." At the same time, Sunghoon dragged Chaewon toward the racing games for the fifth round of their ongoing bet.

Which left me wandering toward the skee-ball lanes, mostly to have something to occupy my hands with.

I didn't notice Jake had followed until a ball rolled into the lane beside mine.

"You're doing it wrong," he said.

"Excuse me?" looking a bit offended.

"Your form. You're aiming too high." He nodded at the ramp. "You want the ball to hit right before the curve, not at it."

I raised an eyebrow. "Since when are you a skee-ball expert?"

"Since I've been coming to this arcade since I was eight."

I rolled my next ball, and it landed solidly in the 10-point hole, barely, while completely missing every higher target. Jake didn't say anything, but the look on his face was unmistakably smug.

"Don't," I warned.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking it very loudly."

He laughed, and the sound of it did something warm and unwelcome in my chest. So I picked up another ball, determined not to take a single glance at his smug face, and threw it with more force than necessary. It bounced off the ramp entirely and rolled onto the floor.

"Okay, that one wasn't even close to the rules I gave you," he said, grinning now.

"I panicked."

"Why would you panic? It's skee-ball."

Because you're standing right next to me and I forgot how my own arms work, I didn't say that, but that's how I felt…

"I don't know," I said instead. "Just quite clumsy today."

He picked up the stray ball from the floor and handed it back to me, his fingers brushing mine for half a second… barely anything, nothing at all, really, and I still felt it travel all the way up my arm like static.

"Try again," he said. "I'll walk you through it."

And so, for the next ten minutes, in the middle of a crowded, blaring arcade, Jake Sim stood beside me correcting my skee-ball form with much unnecessary patience, occasionally reaching over to nudge my elbow at the right angle, and I forgot, briefly, dangerously… that I was supposed to be keeping my distance.

By the end of it, I'd racked up enough tickets for a small plastic dinosaur from the prize counter. Jake had walked away with nothing but the satisfaction of having taught me, which felt somehow very him.

"You could've won something," I said as we made our way back toward the others.

"I did." He nodded at the dinosaur in my hand. "Your form's better now. That's the real prize."

"That's the corniest thing you've ever said."

"I have a lot more cornier things in me. Don't test me."

I laughed before I could stop myself, and for a second… walking beside him through the noise and light of the arcade, the little plastic dinosaur clutched in my hand, I forgot to feel guilty about it.

We found the others crowded around the claw machine, where Yunjin had apparently spent an alarming number of tokens attempting to win a giant stuffed frog.

"I'm so close," she muttered, eyes narrowed at the machine like it had personally wronged her.

"You've said that eleven times," Heeseung said.

"Twelfth time's the charm."

"That's not how the saying goes."

"Yes it does!"

Sunghoon and Chaewon reappeared moments later, Chaewon practically vibrating with victory. "I won!" she announced. "Finally. Documented. On record."

"One win in five tries," Sunghoon grumbled.

"A win is a win."

We spent another hour wandering between games, Heeseung dominating the basketball hoops with his unfair amount of skill, Sunghoon nearly getting us kicked out for climbing partially into a claw machine to "help". Yunjin, Chaewon and I splitting a giant paper plate of nachos we probably shouldn't have bought.

At one point, reaching for the same nacho, my hand brushed Jake's again.

"You keep doing that," I said before I could stop myself.

"Doing what?"

"Reaching for things right when I do."

He looked at me for a second too long, something unreadable passing behind his eyes.

"Maybe I like the same things you do," he said finally, quiet enough that only I could hear it over the arcade noise.

I didn't have a response for that. Not one I trusted myself to say out loud, anyway.

Thankfully, Sunghoon chose that exact moment to accidentally set off an alarm on one of the claw machines, and the resulting chaos gave me an excuse to look anywhere but at Jake for the rest of the night.

Thank goodness…

WEEK 3

It was nearly midnight when Yunjin texted the group chat: "does anyone else NEED boba right now or is it just me"

Within a couple of minutes, Chaewon had replied with exclamation points and her order. Right after, Sunghoon had somehow agreed which I thought he would be sleeping. By the time I finished typing my own reply, Heeseung said that he'll drive and Jake had said nothing at all… which was somehow more unsettling than if he'd said something.

We piled into Heeseung's car twenty minutes later, all six of us crammed in despite the fact that it technically only fit five comfortably since Heeseung decided to take the SUV. I ended up in the middle of the backseat, wedged between Chaewon and Jake, my shoulder pressed against his with absolutely no room to create distance.

I spent the entire fifteen minute drive intensely, painfully aware of every place our arms brushed against each other over every bump in the road.

"You're quiet," Chaewon whispered to me at one point, while Sunghoon argued loudly with Heeseung over the radio up front.

"I'm tired."

"Mm." She didn't sound convinced. Her eyes flickered meaningfully toward Jake, then back to me, and I shot her a look that hopefully communicated do not.

She grinned and said nothing else, which somehow felt worse.

The boba shop was nearly empty at that hour, glowing lights buzzing overhead, a tired employee behind the counter who looked up slightly when six very loud college students walked through the door.

"I want the one with that weird syrup," Sunghoon announced, squinting at the menu like it owed him an explanation.

"They're called popping boba," Heeseung said.

"I know what they're called. I said weird that on purpose."

We ordered too much, per usual, and took the corner table by the window, spreading out across the scattered chairs. Conversation moved easily, the way it always did with this group, Yunjin spilling an exaggerated story about her roommate, Sunghoon and Heeseung arguing about something sports-related that I stopped following halfway through, Chaewon laughing so hard at one point she nearly spit out her drink.

I found myself, more than once, glancing across the table at Jake, who was laughing along with everyone else, easy and unguarded in a way that made something in my chest ache.

At one point, our eyes met across the table, and instead of looking away immediately like I usually did, I let myself hold his gaze for one extra second.

He smiled. Small. Just for me.

I looked down at my drink, feeling my face warm despite the boba shop's aggressive air conditioning.

By the time we went back into the car for the drive home, everyone had gone quieter, the late hour finally catching up with all of us. Chaewon fell asleep against the window almost instantly. Sunghoon was scrolling through his phone with heavy eyelids. Even Yunjin had stopped talking, humming along softly to whatever Heeseung had put on the radio.

Which left me and Jake, once again pressed shoulder to shoulder in the backseat, surrounded by people too tired to notice either of us.

"You okay?" he asked quietly, so only I could hear.

"Yeah. Why?" tried to say dryly.

"You've been quiet tonight."

I shrugged, watching the streetlights slide past the window. "Just thinking."

"About?"

You. Always you, lately. Ugh…

"London," I said instead. "It's getting close."

He was quiet for a moment. "Yeah. It is."

Something in his voice made me glance over at him. In the dim light of passing streetlamps, his expression looked almost soft. Almost like he wanted to say something else. Almost…

"Jake—"

"We're here," Heeseung announced loudly from the front, pulling into Yunjin's driveway, and whatever moment had been building dissolved instantly into the chaos of everyone waking up and unfolding themselves from the car.

I told myself it didn't matter, whatever he'd almost said. It won't change anything…

I told myself that a lot, too.

 WEEK 4

With just under three weeks left before everyone scattered in different directions, Yunjin decided it was time for what she dramatically called "The Great London Shopping Trip," which mostly meant dragging me and Chaewon to the mall for an entire day.

"You need an actual coat," Yunjin said, holding up a wool peacoat against my shoulders and squinting critically. "London is not like summer in California weather."

"I have a coat."

"You have a hoodie you call a coat."

"...Fair, I guess."

Chaewon came back from a nearby rack holding up two nearly identical black sweaters. "Okay, which one says 'effortlessly European chic' and which one says 'I just got this from a clearance rack'?"

"They're the same sweater," I said.

"They are NOT."

We spent the next two hours moving from store to store, Yunjin narrating everything like a fashion documentary, Chaewon trying on hats she had absolutely no intentions of buying, and just me slowly accumulating a small pile of practical, boring, extremely very necessary items: a proper umbrella, a scarf, a coat that Yunjin approved of after four separate outfit changes in the fitting room.

"I'm going to miss this," Chaewon said suddenly, while we sat at the food court eating overpriced pretzels. "Like… really miss it. All of us being in the same place."

"Me too," Yunjin said, quieter than usual.

I felt something tighten in my chest. "It's not forever. We'll all be back."

"I know." Chaewon picked at her pretzel. "It's just weird. This whole summer feels like it's counting down to something."

None of us said anything for a second, and I knew, without either of them saying it out loud… that they were both thinking about the same thing I was.

Jake. London. The two of us, somehow, ending up in the same city an ocean away from everyone else.

"Speaking of counting down," Yunjin said, clearly deciding to just address it directly, "are you ever going to tell us what's actually going on with you and Jake?"

"Nothing's going on."

"y/n."

"I mean it. We're just... figuring out how to be normal around each other again."

Chaewon raised an eyebrow. "Is that what you call all that eye contact at the arcade?"

"What eye contact?" getting a bit defensive.

"The one where you two forgot the rest of us existed for like a full minute."

"That did not happen."

"It happened," Yunjin confirmed. "Heeseung noticed too. He asked me about it later."

I felt my face heat up. "There's nothing to notice. We're just... trying to be friends again. Figuring things out."

Yunjin and Chaewon exchanged a look, the kind of look that said they didn't believe me for a second, but were choosing, for now, to let it go.

"Okay," Yunjin said, dragging out the word skeptically. "Well. Whatever's going on, or not going on—" she smirked, "you're going to be living in the same city as him for a whole semester. So."

"So?"

"So maybe figure it out before you're both across an ocean pretending nothing's happening."

I didn't have a response for that.

Mostly because some small, quiet part of me was already dreading exactly that.

WEEK 5

Two weeks before everyone left, Heeseung suggested, with surprising genuineness for someone who usually communicated primarily through sarcasm, that we should do something low-key. "Not the beach again. Not another loud thing. Just... us. A picnic, maybe."

Which was how we ended up spread across a blanket in the park near Yunjin's house on a lazy Sunday afternoon, a spread of sandwiches and fruit and a whole pile of snacks between us, the late afternoon sun shining gold through the trees overhead.

It was quieter than our usual hangouts. Slower. Sunghoon, for once, seemed satisfied to just lie back in the grass with his eyes closed, occasionally throwing in a comment. Chaewon had brought a portable speaker playing something soft and new. Yunjin was working her way through a container of strawberries with much focused determination.

I sat near the edge of the blanket, legs stretched out in front of me, watching the clouds drift lazily overhead.

Jake settled down beside me at some point… not dramatically, not with any particular meaning behind it, just naturally, the way he always used to before everything got complicated.

"You've gone quiet again," he said, echoing the boba shop night without seeming to realize it.

"Just enjoying it. The quiet."

"Fair."

We sat there for a while without talking, and for once, it didn't feel heavy. It felt almost like it used to... comfortable, easy, the kind of silence that didn't need any filling.

"Can I ask you something?" he said eventually, voice careful in a way that immediately put me on alert.

My stomach tightened. "Sure."

"Are you excited? Actually excited. Not just… nervous, excited. Actually looking forward to it."

It wasn't the question I was expecting. I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

"Yeah," I admitted. "I think so. It feels like... I don't know. A reset button."

He nodded slowly, picking at a piece of grass. "Yeah. I get that."

"Do you need one too?"

He was quiet for a moment, longer than the question probably warranted. "Maybe," he said finally. "There's some stuff I've been wanting to leave behind. Or fix. I haven't decided which yet."

Something in the way he said it made my chest ache with a feeling I didn't want to name. I wanted, so badly, to ask him what he meant. Whether stuff meant that night. Whether fix meant us.

But before I could work up the nerve, Sunghoon's voice cut through the quiet.

"Okay, does anyone else think it's suspicious how good these strawberries are? Like, unnaturally good?"

"They're strawberries, Sunghoon," Heeseung said.

"Exactly. Suspicious."

The moment faded into laughter, into Yunjin defending her strawberry selecting skills with the intensity of a courtroom argument, and whatever Jake had been about to say, or almost say, slipped away with it.

He caught my eye once more before the conversation fully swallowed us back up, something apologetic in his expression, like he knew exactly what he'd almost done and wasn't sure if he regretted the interruption or was relieved by it.

I wasn't sure which one I was, either.

WEEK 6

"Absolutely not," Chaewon said, staring at the horror movie Sunghoon had pulled up. "I will not be sleeping tonight if we watch that."

"That's the whole point of horror movies."

"No no, the point is to be scared for two hours, not to lie awake until sunrise still convinced myself that something's under my bed."

They eventually settled… after nearly twenty minutes of increasingly ridiculous debate, on an old romantic comedy that Yunjin swore was a classic and everyone else pretended to remember for the sake of ending the argument.

We crowded into Heeseung's living room, blankets and pillows dragged from every corner of the house, the six of us spread across the couch and floor in a configuration that had clearly not been planned but somehow worked anyway. Sunghoon and Chaewon claimed the couch spread out. Yunjin and Heeseung took the loveseat. Which left me and Jake on the floor, backs against the couch, a single shared blanket draped over both our laps because apparently no one had thought to bring enough for everyone.

I was hyperaware of every inch of space… or lack of it, between us.

The movie played, some overly dramatic plot about these mistaken identities and a wedding gone wrong, but I found myself only half paying attention, more aware of Jake's shoulder occasionally brushing mine, of the warmth thats radiating from him under the shared blanket, of the way his breathing seemed to slow every time something quiet happened on screen.

Halfway through, during a particularly cheesy declaration of love scene, Sunghoon made a loud gagging noise. "This is so unrealistic. Nobody actually says stuff like that."

"Some people do," Yunjin argued.

"Nobody I know."

"That's because you scare everyone away before they get the chance."

"Rude. Accurate. But rude."

I laughed, and beside me, Jake laughed too, low and quiet, close enough that I felt it more than heard it.

"Do you believe in that?" I asked without really thinking it through. "Big dramatic confessions?"

He considered the question seriously, which surprised me. "I think... the real ones are usually quieter than that. Not some big speech in the rain." He glanced at me, something careful in his expression. "I think the real ones happen in normal moments. When you're not expecting it."

My heart was doing something complicated and loud in my chest.

"Yeah," I said quietly. "Maybe."

Neither of us said anything else, but I noticed, sometime later, that his hand had found its way closer to mine under the shared blanket, not touching, not quite, but close. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of it.

I didn't move away.

I didn't move closer, either.

I just sat there, hyperaware, heart pounding, while a fictional couple on screen finally got their happy ending, and the six of us watched in the dark, and Jake's hand stayed exactly where it was… close, unclaimed, full of everything neither of us was saying.

By the time the credits rolled and the lights came back on, the moment had passed, swallowed by Sunghoon's loud complaints about the ending and Chaewon's insistence that it was, in fact, "a perfect film, actually," and I told myself I'd imagined the whole thing.

I was getting very good at telling myself things this summer.

WEEK 7

It was Jake's idea, which surprised everyone, including… I think, himself.

"Anyone want to just... drive somewhere? No plan. Just drive."

It was a lazy Tuesday evening, the kind where nobody had anything better to do, and somehow it turned into all six of us piled into Heeseung's car again, windows down, no destination in mind, just the open road and the radio turned up loud enough to drown out any need for real conversation.

We ended up almost an hour outside town, on a stretch of road that curved along the coastline, cliffs dropping down to dark water on one side, the last light of sunset bleeding orange and pink across the horizon.

Heeseung pulled over at a scenic lookout, mostly because Yunjin insisted, and we all go out to watch the sunset properly.

The group scattered slightly, Sunghoon and Chaewon wandering toward the cliff edge to take pictures, Yunjin and Heeseung sitting on the hood of the car, deep in some quiet conversation of their own.

Which left me and Jake… again, standing a little apart from everyone, watching the sky change colors over the water.

"This was a good idea," I said.

"I have them occasionally."

"Rare, but they happen."

He smiled, looking out at the water instead of at me. "I used to come out here a lot. Freshman year. When things got overwhelming."

"I didn't know that."

"There's a lot you don't know," he said, and something about his tone made it not quite a joke.

I looked at him. "Like what?"

He was quiet for a long moment, jaw tight, like he was weighing something carefully.

"y/n—" he started.

My heart stopped.

"Yeah?"

He looked at me then, really looked, something raw and unguarded in his expression that I hadn't seen from him in over a year. The kind of look that made my breath catch, that made me forget, for one dangerous second, all the reasons I'd built the walls in the first place.

"That night," he said quietly. "Last summer. I—"

"GUYS." Sunghoon's voice cut through the moment like a knife. "You need to see this sunset from over here, it's insane—"

Jake's jaw tightened. Whatever he'd been about to say disappeared behind his usual careful expression, tucked away again.

"We should—" he gestured toward the others.

"Yeah," I said, my voice barely steady. "We should."

We walked back toward the group without finishing whatever that had almost been, and I spent the entire drive home staring out the window, replaying the moment on a loop, wondering what he'd almost said, wondering if I'd ever get another chance to hear it.

WEEK 8 

The night before everyone started leaving, Yunjin flying out first, then Chaewon, then more flights for the rest of us over the following days, we gathered for one final dinner at the little Italian place near the boardwalk where we'd celebrated every birthday, every ending of a school year, every milestone since freshman year.

The table was loud with conversation, plates passed back and forth, the kind of easy chaos that only happened when six people had known each other long enough to stop performing for one another.

"I can't believe this is it," Chaewon said at one point, swirling pasta around her fork without actually eating it. "Like… this exact group. All six of us, together, before everything changes."

"We'll see each other again," Heeseung said. "It's not, like, permanent."

"I know. It's just…" she sighed. "It feels big."

It did feel big. I felt it too, sitting there, looking around the table at each of their faces, Yunjin mid laugh at something Sunghoon said, Heeseung quietly amused in the way he always was, Chaewon's eyes a little too bright, Sunghoon loud and warm and constant.

And Jake, across the table, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read.

We hadn't talked, really talked, since the lookout point. Whatever he'd almost told me remained unsaid, hovering somewhere between us, and I didn't know if I was more frustrated by that or relieved.

After dinner, we walked along the boardwalk one last time, the ocean dark and steady beside us, string lights strung between lampposts casting everything in a soft golden glow.

"To London," Yunjin said, holding up her half-finished slushie like a toast. "And to whatever happens there."

"To London," everyone echoed, clinking cups and cones together.

Jake's eyes found mine across the small circle, and for a second, neither of us looked away.

To London, I thought, and to whatever this is, and to whatever it's going to become.

We said our goodbyes slowly, reluctantly, hugs lasting a bit too long, promises to text made a dozen times over. Yunjin cried, then blamed it on her allergies that she didn't have. Sunghoon tried to lighten the mood and ended up getting a little emotional himself, which none of us let him live down.

When it was Jake's turn, he pulled me into a hug the same way he had at the beginning of the summer… careful, warm, lingering just slightly too long to be casual.

"See you in London," he murmured against my ear, quiet enough that only I could hear it.

My throat tightened. "Yeah," I managed. "See you there."

We pulled apart, and for a moment his hand brushed mine, fingers catching for just a second before letting go.

Neither of us said anything else.

There was nothing left to say… not yet, not with everyone watching, not with a year of unresolved history still sitting heavy between us.

But something had shifted, quietly, over the course of that summer. Something neither of us had fixed, or named, or confessed.

Just something that was, unmistakably, still there.

Its getting real…

Packing for London felt unreal in a way I hadn't expected.

I spent my last two days at home surrounded by half filled suitcases, my mom hovering in the doorway, offering unasked-for folding advice, my little brother periodically wandering in to ask if he could have my room while I was gone ("No," I told him, for the fourth time. It's just for a semester).

"You have everything?" my mom asked the night before my flight, sitting on the edge of my bed while I did one final check of my carry-on. "Passport, visa documents, adapter—"

"Mom. I've checked like six times."

"Check a seventh."

I checked a seventh time, mostly to make her feel better.

That night, unable to sleep, I lay in my childhood bedroom staring at the ceiling, my suitcase zipped and waiting by the door, and let myself feel the full weight of what was about to happen. A whole semester. An entire ocean between me and everything familiar.

And somewhere in that unfamiliar city, Jake.

I didn't let myself think too hard about that part.

The morning of my flight was a blur: my dad insisting on driving me to the airport despite my protests that an Uber would be easier, my mom crying at security in a way that made me cry too, my brother giving me an awkward, too tight hug that surprised both of us.

"Don't die in London," he said, which was, I supposed, his version of I'll miss you.

"I'll try my best."

The flight itself passed in a strange, in a blur of turbulence and bad airplane food and an attempt at sleep that mostly failed. I spent most of the eleven hours staring out the window at clouds, half-watching a movie I couldn't focus on, my mind drifting, as it so often did that summer, back to a boardwalk lit with string lights, a hand brushing mine, three words said too quietly for anyone else to hear.

See you in London.

When I finally landed, stepping off the plane into the crowded, unfamiliar bustle of Heathrow, exhaustion and adrenaline hit me in equal measure. Everything felt too bright, too loud, too real.

I navigated customs on autopilot, dragged my suitcases through endless corridors, and finally stepped outside into the cool London air that smelled like rain and something entirely new.

The city unfolded around me on the taxi ride to campus, red buses, narrow streets, buildings that looked older than anything back home, a sky heavy with clouds that somehow still managed to feel beautiful. I pressed my forehead against the window, watching it all pass by, equal parts terrified and thrilled.

A fresh start, I reminded myself. This is what you wanted.

The university's international housing office was a small, overly warm room tucked into the corner of a much larger administrative building, staffed by a cheerful woman who handed me a folder of paperwork and a single silver key with practiced efficiency.

"Building E, room 1009," she said. "Elevator's down the hall, but fair warning, it's a bit temperamental. Stairs are usually faster."

I thanked her, gathered my suitcases, and made my way through unfamiliar hallways, following signs toward Building E, my heart doing something anxious and fluttery with every step.

The dorm itself was older than I expected, brick walls and narrow windows, hallways lined with identical wooden doors. I found room 1009 near the end of the second-floor hallway, my key sticking slightly in the lock before finally giving way.

The room was small but bright, two beds tucked against opposite walls, one already claimed, a scattering of belongings, a half unpacked suitcase, a string of fairy lights draped lazily over the headboard.

"Oh my gosh, hi!" A girl popped up from where she'd been kneeling by her dresser, dark curly hair pulled into a messy bun, a warm smile immediately putting me at ease. "You must be y/n. I'm Sophia."

"Hi." I set my suitcases down, already feeling some of the tension in my shoulders ease. "Sorry, was I supposed to text ahead or—"

"No, no, don't worry about it, I just got here myself like an hour ago." She gestured vaguely at the chaos of her side of the room. "Clearly still figuring out where anything goes."

We spent the next twenty minutes in easy small talk while I started unpacking, where we were both from, what we were studying, mutual nervous excitement about the semester ahead. Sophia was easy to talk to, warm in a way that made the unfamiliar room feel a little more like it could eventually become home.

"I'm starving," she said eventually, glancing at the small clock on her desk. "I think there's a kitchen down the hall? I might go find snacks. You want anything?"

"I'm okay, thanks. I think I'm just going to keep unpacking."

"Ok! I'll bring something back just in case!"

She disappeared out the door, and I turned back to my suitcase, pulling out clothes and beginning the slow process of finding places for everything in the small closet and dresser that would apparently be mine for the next several months.

About twenty minutes in, I realized I'd left my toiletry bag zipped inside my carry-on, which I'd left just outside the door in the narrow hallway alcove where luggage was apparently supposed to wait until move-in was fully complete.

I stepped out into the hallway to grab it.

At that exact moment, the door directly across from mine opened.

I looked up.

And froze.

Jake stood in the doorway of the room across the hall, mid-conversation with someone I couldn't see inside, a box tucked under one arm, his expression caught somewhere between mid-sentence and complete shock as his eyes landed on me.

Neither of us said anything.

For a long moment, the hallway seemed to shrink around us, the vibrant lights overhead suddenly too bright, the space between our two doorways feeling impossibly small.

His mouth opened slightly, like he was about to say something, then closed again, like he couldn't quite find the words either.

I felt my heart slam against my ribs, disbelief and something far more complicated crashing over me all at once.

Because there was no way.

There was absolutely no way.

Out of an entire university, an entire building, an entire hallway of identical wooden doors…

Jake was my neighbor.

And for the rest of the semester, there would be no avoiding him at all…

PART 2? WHAT YOU NEVER KNEW...

My first fic! Please comment with any feedback or anything you really liked! But I do hope you like the story so far! Part 2 will be more interesting hopefully… and spicer maybe…