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BITES
LOVE DUB FORTY
557w; pg-13 (sihyeon/seungyoun)
a story about longing, and tennis. inspired by video games - lana del rey.
Sihyeon looks good in her tennis skirt. She knows specifically because her ex-boyfriend told her so: whispered it into her ear, one hand pushing her hair out of her face and the other crawling up her thigh like a spider. Definitely un-sexy when you think about it that way. And like any other girl just looking for empty words of affirmation, she broke up with him the week after, and according to Facebook, he didn't get over it for half a year. Sucks, she thinks, blowing her bubblegum, tennis racket leaning against the bench, crossing her legs that look good in her tennis skirt, big sunglasses honestly too pretentious for a community rec center perched on her nose – but hey. She looks good.
Cho Seungyoun is her best friend's older brother's best friend. It's weird. Or at least that's what he told her when he turned down her prom invitation four years ago over Messenger, apologetic sad-eyebrowed emoji tacked on like a band-aid on a car wreck – It's weird. Sorry. Hope you find someone else. Emoji in question. Seared it into her eyes staring at her too-bright phone screen in bed because that was the only way to know it was a true, in-real-life rejection. Cried herself to sleep that night, too, but Sihyeon gets it now. Kind of. By then, he was a junior in college, and your best friend's little sister's best friend didn't matter in that case. Maybe you didn't even remember what she looked like in the first place. Who fucking cares – empty your red Solo cup.
He still looks as good as she thought he did when she was sixteen. She can see his torso in segments from the other side of the chain link fence, and the sun on the pool reflects in his own shades. Sometimes she clocks in an hour early, just to nab a locker near his in the staff room, and he'll grin when she tells him good morning as he's pulling his shirt off. Sixteen-year-old Sihyeon used to think the tattoos littering his skin were hot and stupidly fantasized that one day, he'd add her name to his collection.
Twenty-year-old Sihyeon thinks about tracing each inked line with her perfectly-manicured nails. Instead, she feigns nonchalance, slams her locker closed, and spends her extra hour practicing against the wall next to the tennis courts. There's gotta be some proverb out there about want, and how the sweetness of desire dissolves into the bitter aftertaste of a lifetime of yearning for someone you'll never get. She smashes the ball. Yeah, something like that. It breaks the strings in her sweet spot.
It's weird. He's too old to be a teenage heartthrob, but she's too stubborn to let him be anything else. He still says hi to her every time they pass by each other, offers to walk her home one day because you haven't moved from over by the middle school, right?, but she keeps turning him down. He still knows her name. And he still says it the same way.
He still thinks of her like this: his best friend's little sister's best friend, no matter how good her legs look in her little tennis skirt. Sihyeon pops her gum noisily before someone calls her in to play a set. And like four years ago – it's weird.
TRYPTOPHAN HEART
761w; pg (nayoung/jeonghan)
time travel doesn't talk about stories like theirs. inspired by like real people do - hozier.
"What are you doing?"
Jeonghan always smells faintly of bug spray. The citrus kind. That, or it's his fabric softener, and that fabric softener smells eerily like the mosquito repellent Nayoung grew up spraying haphazardly over her legs during summers, the citrus kind. She looks up at him from where she's crouched, hugging her knees, feet long fallen asleep. "Nothing," she says. The hallway light coming through the cracked open door catches in his light-colored hair.
He pauses. His hand's still on the doorknob. Indecision and the darkness tint his fingers purple. "Okay." Someone down the hallway's retching in the bathroom. "Okay."
Jeonghan's very calm for someone who's been looking for her for the past half hour. She only knows because she heard his voice over the thrum of the music ask five times, hey, did you see where Nayoung went? before he found her here. Hide and seek, the grown-up version, except Nayoung's been avoiding him since they broke up and Jeonghan pretends he's never actually looking for her on purpose.
"You're gonna stay here?" he asks, still stuck in the doorway. She nods numbly. "Okay," he repeats himself. "Okay."
Nayoung only stands up once he's closed the door, and she's swallowed by the indigo all over again, completely alone. Takes a step before her feet wake up from that pins and needles sensation, and then another, and then she's trailing after Jeonghan's footprints in the carpet, like a fawn that's just learned to walk on its own.
They broke up because Nayoung wanted to. Simple as that. Simpler ending it than trying to travel back in time to every instance where one of them messed up, fix it, jump back forward, and do it over and over again until all their wounds had been scabbed over.
Because this is the worst way to break someone's heart:
The wind blew her hair into her mouth. In the distance, a gull cawed and she said this through the strands of her ponytail stuck in her lip gloss – "Thank you for liking someone like me."
Jeonghan holds his heart like a hand of playing cards. Close to his chest, only showing them when he knows he's won. Meaning: it's like he hasn't been affected at all after Nayoung ended things. They keep running into each other and he's the paragon of post-relationship phase gotten over it while she slides back and forth between the first and second stages of grief.
"It's not fair," she tells Kyungwon over dinner one day. She ran into Jeonghan at the subway station and he was nothing but polite and it was utmostly infuriating. "He doesn't just get to be okay after all this."
Kyungwon looks at her. "Nayoung," she starts like she's talking to a child, "you were the one who broke up with him."
"Exactly." She puts another spoonful of rice into her mouth. He waved goodbye to her through the crowd, as if it was all too easy. "Exactly." She feels empty.
"I think he's still cut up about it," Seungcheol tells her over coffee. They used to have a thing back in university, back when they had people in common. Now, their conversations peter out after talking about everyone else's lives. "Jeonghan," he adds, in case her mind didn't fill in the blank.
"Is he?" Nayoung traces the lip of her cup. She'd burned the roof of her mouth earlier, and the coffee's since gone lukewarm. "I can't tell."
Seungcheol laughs. "Just because someone doesn't show it," and he sounds sorry for some reason, "Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist."
Nayoung corners him in Jonghyun's kitchen after she's thought about it for a month. "I wanted to make you bleed," she confesses out of nowhere.
Jeonghan looks at her like he did two years ago, when someone put on a slow song and the dim lighting colored half his face in a canary yellow as he asked if she wanted to dance with him. "Hmm?" It comes to Nayoung then that he'd never stopped looking at her like that. He'd never stopped looking at her like that.
So. She takes a deep breath. So. "Would you like someone like me again?"
Jeonghan smiles. Jeonghan still smells like that mosquito repellent Nayoung grew up spraying haphazardly over her legs during summers, the citrus kind. Jeonghan unfurls his hand from his chest for Nayoung to take, along with his heart, and that’s how it’s always been.
"Okay.” He makes her believe in absolutist statements so easily like that.
Time travel doesn't talk about stories like theirs.
NEON ZEBRA
805w; pg-13 (brian/nayeon)
it's every bad rom-com cliché for a failed relationship, honestly. inspired by boyfriend - ariana grande, the social house.
Nayeon's reapplying her lipstick in the bathroom mirror when she blurts, "You're texting Ayeon again, aren't you?"
Brian twists his head to look at her from where he's still sprawled on the bed. Nayeon messes up her cupid's bow, cusses, and reaches for a tissue. "I'm right, aren't I?" she scoffs before he can put in a word. The pipes shudder when she turns the sink knob. "You're so freakin' predictable."
"Does it bother you?" Nayeon wipes away the stray lipstick. Left behind is a faint coral stain. She cusses again, wads up the soggy tissue into the trash can, and gives up. "I can stop."
When she turns to look at him, she finds that he's already looking at her. His eyes don't betray an inch of what he's thinking. "Do whatever you want." Nayeon turns back to the vanity. "I don't care."
"Oh." She watches through the mirror as he zips up his jeans, pulls his sweater back on. She usually makes it a habit to leave the room first, because the one time she had to deal with seeing the door close after him, it felt like her heart had been run over by a semi, and Nayeon's smart enough to know what's good for her. "Okay."
"See you next week," she says as she shoves her left foot into her right stiletto.
Brian sits back on the bed, picks up his phone. "See you next week." He's not even looking when she closes the door. "I'll call you," he promises after her, emptily.
Okay, yeah:
If Nayeon really knew what was good for her, she'd stop seeing Brian altogether.
Too bad she's just a freakin' masochist, it seems.
Here's the thing.
"Oppa," Nayeon says into his ear. It's supposed to be hot, except Nayeon's using her baby voice which has got to be a true boner-killer, sorry man, according to Jae, and now Brian can't think of it as anything else. He can smell the alcohol on her breath when she leans over. "I think Ayeon's here."
She is. Brian sees her talking with Sungjin in the kitchen, and her hair's cut to her chin, just like he'd seen in her Instagram pictures. Nayeon takes the seat next to him on the couch, except she kind of misses and ends up half in his lap instead, and then Ayeon's suddenly standing in front of them. Shit.
"Hey," she tells Brian. "Seems like you're doing okay." This is when Brian awkwardly remembers the last text he'd sent her was I miss you so much, can we go back to how we used to be?
"Oh, we're," Nayeon intervenes. "We're not together."
Ayeon looks pointedly at where Brian's hand is on her hip, absentmindedly thumbing circles into her jeans. Smiles, polite, back at him. "Uh-huh," she says. She sounds positively unconvinced. "Sure."
Another thing.
Brian told her pretty early on that she wasn't his type. He liked older women. "Not because I want them to take care of me or something," he clarified. "I want to take care of them. Like, in a moment of weakness kind of thing, she can lean on me and tell me her problems."
Nayeon rolled her eyes. "Are you sure you're not the one with problems?" He flashed a blinding smile at her instead of getting offended.
Funny – that's the way he broke her heart the first time. And yet she still came crawling back the next time he texted her, like nothing ever happened.
It's every bad rom-com cliché for a failed relationship, honestly. She can't leave him on read, and he can't delete her number off his phone.
Too bad they can't seem to stop derailing.
Last thing.
Nayeon calls him from the bathroom of the restaurant. "How's the date?" is the first thing he says when he picks up.
"Awful," she scowls. Jeongyeon set her up with her on-and-off-and-on-again boyfriend's old college roommate, and nothing on his dating profile indicated that he'd be an absolute snooze fest. "Please save me from my misery."
She gets into his car fifteen minutes later, right before their entrées arrive. "My knight in shining armor," Nayeon all but melts into the passenger seat. She's wearing a dress Brian remembers taking off for her once. "Thanks for coming to get – " She pauses from where she's turning the radio dial. "Why did you come to get me?"
"Would you believe me if I said you're my type?" Brian wonders if she can tell he's only half-kidding.
Nayeon laughs. She wonders if he can tell that if he said it again, she'd fall for him – hook, line, sinker. "If you promise not to say cheesy shit like that," Brian laughs through his nose next to her, "I'll even let you buy me dinner." And then she's back to flipping through channels.
557w; pg-13 (sihyeon/seungyoun)
a story about longing, and tennis. inspired by video games - lana del rey.
Sihyeon looks good in her tennis skirt. She knows specifically because her ex-boyfriend told her so: whispered it into her ear, one hand pushing her hair out of her face and the other crawling up her thigh like a spider. Definitely un-sexy when you think about it that way. And like any other girl just looking for empty words of affirmation, she broke up with him the week after, and according to Facebook, he didn't get over it for half a year. Sucks, she thinks, blowing her bubblegum, tennis racket leaning against the bench, crossing her legs that look good in her tennis skirt, big sunglasses honestly too pretentious for a community rec center perched on her nose – but hey. She looks good.
Cho Seungyoun is her best friend's older brother's best friend. It's weird. Or at least that's what he told her when he turned down her prom invitation four years ago over Messenger, apologetic sad-eyebrowed emoji tacked on like a band-aid on a car wreck – It's weird. Sorry. Hope you find someone else. Emoji in question. Seared it into her eyes staring at her too-bright phone screen in bed because that was the only way to know it was a true, in-real-life rejection. Cried herself to sleep that night, too, but Sihyeon gets it now. Kind of. By then, he was a junior in college, and your best friend's little sister's best friend didn't matter in that case. Maybe you didn't even remember what she looked like in the first place. Who fucking cares – empty your red Solo cup.
He still looks as good as she thought he did when she was sixteen. She can see his torso in segments from the other side of the chain link fence, and the sun on the pool reflects in his own shades. Sometimes she clocks in an hour early, just to nab a locker near his in the staff room, and he'll grin when she tells him good morning as he's pulling his shirt off. Sixteen-year-old Sihyeon used to think the tattoos littering his skin were hot and stupidly fantasized that one day, he'd add her name to his collection.
Twenty-year-old Sihyeon thinks about tracing each inked line with her perfectly-manicured nails. Instead, she feigns nonchalance, slams her locker closed, and spends her extra hour practicing against the wall next to the tennis courts. There's gotta be some proverb out there about want, and how the sweetness of desire dissolves into the bitter aftertaste of a lifetime of yearning for someone you'll never get. She smashes the ball. Yeah, something like that. It breaks the strings in her sweet spot.
It's weird. He's too old to be a teenage heartthrob, but she's too stubborn to let him be anything else. He still says hi to her every time they pass by each other, offers to walk her home one day because you haven't moved from over by the middle school, right?, but she keeps turning him down. He still knows her name. And he still says it the same way.
He still thinks of her like this: his best friend's little sister's best friend, no matter how good her legs look in her little tennis skirt. Sihyeon pops her gum noisily before someone calls her in to play a set. And like four years ago – it's weird.
TRYPTOPHAN HEART
761w; pg (nayoung/jeonghan)
time travel doesn't talk about stories like theirs. inspired by like real people do - hozier.
"What are you doing?"
Jeonghan always smells faintly of bug spray. The citrus kind. That, or it's his fabric softener, and that fabric softener smells eerily like the mosquito repellent Nayoung grew up spraying haphazardly over her legs during summers, the citrus kind. She looks up at him from where she's crouched, hugging her knees, feet long fallen asleep. "Nothing," she says. The hallway light coming through the cracked open door catches in his light-colored hair.
He pauses. His hand's still on the doorknob. Indecision and the darkness tint his fingers purple. "Okay." Someone down the hallway's retching in the bathroom. "Okay."
Jeonghan's very calm for someone who's been looking for her for the past half hour. She only knows because she heard his voice over the thrum of the music ask five times, hey, did you see where Nayoung went? before he found her here. Hide and seek, the grown-up version, except Nayoung's been avoiding him since they broke up and Jeonghan pretends he's never actually looking for her on purpose.
"You're gonna stay here?" he asks, still stuck in the doorway. She nods numbly. "Okay," he repeats himself. "Okay."
Nayoung only stands up once he's closed the door, and she's swallowed by the indigo all over again, completely alone. Takes a step before her feet wake up from that pins and needles sensation, and then another, and then she's trailing after Jeonghan's footprints in the carpet, like a fawn that's just learned to walk on its own.
They broke up because Nayoung wanted to. Simple as that. Simpler ending it than trying to travel back in time to every instance where one of them messed up, fix it, jump back forward, and do it over and over again until all their wounds had been scabbed over.
Because this is the worst way to break someone's heart:
The wind blew her hair into her mouth. In the distance, a gull cawed and she said this through the strands of her ponytail stuck in her lip gloss – "Thank you for liking someone like me."
Jeonghan holds his heart like a hand of playing cards. Close to his chest, only showing them when he knows he's won. Meaning: it's like he hasn't been affected at all after Nayoung ended things. They keep running into each other and he's the paragon of post-relationship phase gotten over it while she slides back and forth between the first and second stages of grief.
"It's not fair," she tells Kyungwon over dinner one day. She ran into Jeonghan at the subway station and he was nothing but polite and it was utmostly infuriating. "He doesn't just get to be okay after all this."
Kyungwon looks at her. "Nayoung," she starts like she's talking to a child, "you were the one who broke up with him."
"Exactly." She puts another spoonful of rice into her mouth. He waved goodbye to her through the crowd, as if it was all too easy. "Exactly." She feels empty.
"I think he's still cut up about it," Seungcheol tells her over coffee. They used to have a thing back in university, back when they had people in common. Now, their conversations peter out after talking about everyone else's lives. "Jeonghan," he adds, in case her mind didn't fill in the blank.
"Is he?" Nayoung traces the lip of her cup. She'd burned the roof of her mouth earlier, and the coffee's since gone lukewarm. "I can't tell."
Seungcheol laughs. "Just because someone doesn't show it," and he sounds sorry for some reason, "Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist."
Nayoung corners him in Jonghyun's kitchen after she's thought about it for a month. "I wanted to make you bleed," she confesses out of nowhere.
Jeonghan looks at her like he did two years ago, when someone put on a slow song and the dim lighting colored half his face in a canary yellow as he asked if she wanted to dance with him. "Hmm?" It comes to Nayoung then that he'd never stopped looking at her like that. He'd never stopped looking at her like that.
So. She takes a deep breath. So. "Would you like someone like me again?"
Jeonghan smiles. Jeonghan still smells like that mosquito repellent Nayoung grew up spraying haphazardly over her legs during summers, the citrus kind. Jeonghan unfurls his hand from his chest for Nayoung to take, along with his heart, and that’s how it’s always been.
"Okay.” He makes her believe in absolutist statements so easily like that.
Time travel doesn't talk about stories like theirs.
NEON ZEBRA
805w; pg-13 (brian/nayeon)
it's every bad rom-com cliché for a failed relationship, honestly. inspired by boyfriend - ariana grande, the social house.
Nayeon's reapplying her lipstick in the bathroom mirror when she blurts, "You're texting Ayeon again, aren't you?"
Brian twists his head to look at her from where he's still sprawled on the bed. Nayeon messes up her cupid's bow, cusses, and reaches for a tissue. "I'm right, aren't I?" she scoffs before he can put in a word. The pipes shudder when she turns the sink knob. "You're so freakin' predictable."
"Does it bother you?" Nayeon wipes away the stray lipstick. Left behind is a faint coral stain. She cusses again, wads up the soggy tissue into the trash can, and gives up. "I can stop."
When she turns to look at him, she finds that he's already looking at her. His eyes don't betray an inch of what he's thinking. "Do whatever you want." Nayeon turns back to the vanity. "I don't care."
"Oh." She watches through the mirror as he zips up his jeans, pulls his sweater back on. She usually makes it a habit to leave the room first, because the one time she had to deal with seeing the door close after him, it felt like her heart had been run over by a semi, and Nayeon's smart enough to know what's good for her. "Okay."
"See you next week," she says as she shoves her left foot into her right stiletto.
Brian sits back on the bed, picks up his phone. "See you next week." He's not even looking when she closes the door. "I'll call you," he promises after her, emptily.
Okay, yeah:
If Nayeon really knew what was good for her, she'd stop seeing Brian altogether.
Too bad she's just a freakin' masochist, it seems.
Here's the thing.
"Oppa," Nayeon says into his ear. It's supposed to be hot, except Nayeon's using her baby voice which has got to be a true boner-killer, sorry man, according to Jae, and now Brian can't think of it as anything else. He can smell the alcohol on her breath when she leans over. "I think Ayeon's here."
She is. Brian sees her talking with Sungjin in the kitchen, and her hair's cut to her chin, just like he'd seen in her Instagram pictures. Nayeon takes the seat next to him on the couch, except she kind of misses and ends up half in his lap instead, and then Ayeon's suddenly standing in front of them. Shit.
"Hey," she tells Brian. "Seems like you're doing okay." This is when Brian awkwardly remembers the last text he'd sent her was I miss you so much, can we go back to how we used to be?
"Oh, we're," Nayeon intervenes. "We're not together."
Ayeon looks pointedly at where Brian's hand is on her hip, absentmindedly thumbing circles into her jeans. Smiles, polite, back at him. "Uh-huh," she says. She sounds positively unconvinced. "Sure."
Another thing.
Brian told her pretty early on that she wasn't his type. He liked older women. "Not because I want them to take care of me or something," he clarified. "I want to take care of them. Like, in a moment of weakness kind of thing, she can lean on me and tell me her problems."
Nayeon rolled her eyes. "Are you sure you're not the one with problems?" He flashed a blinding smile at her instead of getting offended.
Funny – that's the way he broke her heart the first time. And yet she still came crawling back the next time he texted her, like nothing ever happened.
It's every bad rom-com cliché for a failed relationship, honestly. She can't leave him on read, and he can't delete her number off his phone.
Too bad they can't seem to stop derailing.
Last thing.
Nayeon calls him from the bathroom of the restaurant. "How's the date?" is the first thing he says when he picks up.
"Awful," she scowls. Jeongyeon set her up with her on-and-off-and-on-again boyfriend's old college roommate, and nothing on his dating profile indicated that he'd be an absolute snooze fest. "Please save me from my misery."
She gets into his car fifteen minutes later, right before their entrées arrive. "My knight in shining armor," Nayeon all but melts into the passenger seat. She's wearing a dress Brian remembers taking off for her once. "Thanks for coming to get – " She pauses from where she's turning the radio dial. "Why did you come to get me?"
"Would you believe me if I said you're my type?" Brian wonders if she can tell he's only half-kidding.
Nayeon laughs. She wonders if he can tell that if he said it again, she'd fall for him – hook, line, sinker. "If you promise not to say cheesy shit like that," Brian laughs through his nose next to her, "I'll even let you buy me dinner." And then she's back to flipping through channels.