그냥

[kisoap]

그냥
3115w; g (nayoung/jeonghan)
nayoung, jeonghan, quiet off-camera moments and the by-gone seasons. [terrace house au]
 

There’s a close-up on Nayoung’s face as she says this in the cozy yellow lighting of the girl’s bedroom, after Eunwoo asks well, what do you think about Yoon Jeonghan? “I think,” the Nayoung on the screen starts. The corners of her mouth are doing that funny downturning thing that her ex-boyfriend always told her they did when she hadn’t completely thought through what she was going to say before saying it. “He seems a bit flashy, doesn’t he?”

“Hey, you really think that about me?” Jeonghan asks from Eunwoo’s other side with an easy grin on his face. Nayoung feels Eunwoo shake with poorly-concealed laughter from where her head’s leaning against Nayoung’s arm. “You still think that now?”

He’d texted her a month after the show started airing, her ex-boyfriend. They’d broken up maybe half a year ago and hadn’t talked since, and the message he’d sent her was something well-meaning and generic. Nayoung doesn’t remember exactly what it’d said because right when she swiped at it, Jeonghan had looked up from where he’d been sprawled on the other section of the L-shaped sofa with his laptop tucked under his chin, and then she’d slid her phone back under her thigh hastily, like she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. That was maybe the third night after Jeonghan had moved in after Joshua’s sudden departure, and maybe two weeks before she’d looked down at the pretty lilac heels that Kaeun had lent her and told Seungcheol that she didn’t feel the same in front of the ferris wheel, lit up prettily at night.

Nayoung looks over the crown of Eunwoo’s bleached blonde fly-aways to meet Jeonghan’s eyes. Over his shoulder are the camera crew stationed against the wall, and over the recording of Kaeun and Eunwoo giggling on TV, Nayoung can hear the insistent beat of her own heart.

“No,” she says over all of that. Jeonghan either smiles with all his teeth, or none at all. Nayoung watches as, like a flower bud in time-lapse, what had begun to close blooms across his face once more.





The morning after Seungcheol moved out, Nayoung found Jeonghan scooping enough coffee for two into the coffee maker. She paused at the doorway to the kitchen, tilted back to glance at the clock on the wall, and then Jeonghan was yawning good morning over his shoulder to her.

“I didn’t think you were serious,” she admitted when he placed a cup of freshly-brewed coffee in front of her. A couple nights before, she’d embarrassingly cried at Seungcheol’s going-away barbeque, saying that she was going to miss having someone sitting across from her during breakfast. She’d hiccuped while inadvertently telling the world that none of the others were all that good at waking up before noon.

Jeonghan had laughed from where he was sitting next to her while passing along the tissue box. He’d been the only one not bawling by then, and Nayoung thought it strange, considering how close he and Seungcheol had become.

“Sorry, I just tasted the oi naengguk, and it’s a little bland.” He put down a bowl of soup next to her bowl of rice and an assorted plating of yesterday’s leftovers on the dining table between them. “I’ll go back to sleep again after this,” Jeonghan said, sitting down across from her and yawning again. “My conference call’s not until noon anyway.”

Nayoung didn’t answer until she’d begun picking out the bones in her mackerel with her chopsticks, when she’d had enough time to mull it over. “Then why’d you wake up so early?” she asked.

Jeonghan bit into a radish noisily. They’d started taking turns preparing breakfast, just the two of them, after that day. The meals became more and more simple as the weeks went on, and it all culminated to the point when Nayoung served toast and jam two days in a row because she’d forgotten. But these things she remembered: the slight shrug of his shoulders and the nonchalant curl of his mouth, like he was laughing at a joke he’d just thought of, not funny enough to share aloud, when he told her over that first shared meal of theirs – “Just because.”





The days after Mingyu rejected Eunwoo were stifling. He’d announced he was leaving the show not much later, and Vernon came in the next day, and maybe the night after that, Jeonghan let Kaeun down by the Han River. He’d done so kindly, but in a somewhat blunt manner, or at least that’s what she’d said in the girl’s room after it all happened, eyes sparkling with tears. Nayoung let her cry against her shoulder for hours after the camera crew left, Eunwoo clinging to her other side.

“To be honest,” Jeonghan had told Kaeun in the playroom the night before her departure, where the two of them were sitting across from each other on the floor. His arms hugged his knees, and the camera perfectly captured the way he looked at her like he was sorry to break her heart. “I was so surprised that I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t know you felt that way about me.”

Kaeun smiled. There were a cluster of pillows in the space between them, and Nayoung thought they looked like a wide expanse of sea separating the two of them by the way the camera framed the shot. “I thought you’d figure it out,” said on-screen Kaeun. “You’re very observant.”

“Am I really?” Jeonghan replied, laughing and falling onto his back. Arms spread out and looking at the ceiling, he continued, “I know you wanted to find love here, but you’re leaving the house without any regrets, right? It’d make me feel better to know that.”

Nayoung, who’d been watching the episode with Eunwoo resting her head on her lap, suddenly realized that her legs had fallen asleep. She’d also been waiting for a chance to go to the bathroom but hadn’t found an opening, out of laziness and the fear that she’d miss something important.

“I’ve made so many lifelong friends.” A close-up of Kaeun’s face in the dim warm lighting came into focus. “I was happy these four months here, having people to come home to. And love, romance, I’m glad I got to experience it, even though it didn’t end the way I hoped it would.”

Jeonghan rubbed his face with a sigh. “That’s thanks to me, isn’t it?”

“That’s thanks to you,” agreed Kaeun, grinning along. “What about you? When do you think you’ll be ready to leave the house? You don’t have your eye on someone yet?”

Nayoung unconsciously held her breath as the camera cut to Jeonghan looking thoughtfully at Kaeun. He was sinking into the cushions, arms propped behind his head. She gently moved Eunwoo’s head off her thighs and stood up abruptly, ignoring the pins and needles sensation shooting up from her still-asleep feet.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she whispered before TV Jeonghan could reply, dodging Yewon’s insistent but unnie, this is the best part! Nayoung limped away and shut the door behind her just as she could hear Jeonghan’s voice over the speakers admit No – no, I think there’s someone.





It doesn't matter that he's moved out of the house for a month, Choi Seungcheol always seems to make his way back like a Jindo dog. At least that's what Jeonghan says into the intercom along with a, “Don’t you think the panel’s going to make fun of you again?” before buzzing him in anyway. Nayoung laughs from where she’s curled up on the sofa, and Jeonghan shoots a blinding smile over his shoulder at her while shaking his head.

"It's nice that we can still meet each other as friends like this, even after everything," Seungcheol offers after Jeonghan excuses himself to use the bathroom. The ends of his hair are clumped together in triangles, wet from the summer rain that he said he'd been caught in when he got off the metro. It'd dusted the outside of the plastic bag that he'd been hefting the beer in, too, and Seungcheol's general refusal to carry around an umbrella despite the weather report had been a big point of contention the first time he'd asked Nayoung out for lunch, just the two of them. They both ended up soaked by the time they got back to the house, and the cloth of Nayoung's sneakers had turned scratchy and stiff after a week of being left out to dry.

Everything said, that hadn't been exactly the reason why Nayoung ended up turning Seungcheol down. "Yeah," she nods from across the dining table. Seungcheol had claimed the middle seat on the right side two meals after they'd moved in, and the many nights that they spent sipping on beers together with Jeonghan, they'd always taken the same positions – Nayoung in front of Seungcheol, and Jeonghan next to her – like preordained chess pieces. “Wouldn’t it be weirder if we just never saw each other again?”

Seungcheol smiles into the lip of his glass. “Would it?” he muses, eyes bright and hopeful. Give Seungcheol a drop of love and he’ll return it to you tenfold, but Nayoung was never the type to go beyond the shore at the beach because she didn’t like the feeling of water in her ears.

The night Nayoung turned him down, Seungcheol had asked her, “Are you interested in someone else?” kindly, like she hadn’t just punched a hole through his heart. He’d love with the still-whole parts with it, anyway, because that was his first instinct.

The camera crew had left them alone to get back to the house first. Nayoung considered a lamppost in the park they were walking through. She’d sat on the swingset in this same park less than two weeks before, staring at this same lamppost as Jeonghan pumped his legs to take him higher beside her. The motion made his words oscillate to the point that she had to ask him to repeat them, and the conversation was either so important or held no lasting significance at all that she’d already forgotten what they had talked about.

Her socks were damp at the toes. She belatedly realized that she’d stepped right into a puddle, and when she turned to Seungcheol, he was still looking at her for an answer.

“Not really,” Nayoung tells him now like she did in the middle of that path in the park then, sounding a lot more like yes.





Jeonghan’s first claim to fame on the show had to be when he and Mingyu had this awful argument over the dismal state of cleanliness in the bathroom. It’d been a bad fight that happened to be caught entirely on camera and an escalation of pent-up genuine lifestyle incompatibility between the two of them. They’d let it blow over after a copious amount of conflict mediation by Seungcheol and Nayoung, but the resulting cold front between them could be felt up until the day Mingyu left the house, hugging everyone except Jeonghan, who he offered a handshake instead.

That’s why Nayoung’s surprised when she asks Jeonghan who he’s texting one night after they’ve finished doing the dishes and he replies, like it’s no big deal, “Kim Mingyu.”

“Oh,” she says, not knowing how else to respond.

Jeonghan grins from where he’s wringing out a dishcloth. “You should see your face right now,” he mentions. “Is it that shocking?”

“I didn’t –” The first one-on-one conversation she ever had with Jeonghan was after he and Mingyu had taken their fight to the living room, and as a result, made it everyone else’s business when they’d started harshly attacking each other as people. Do you think you could talk to Jeonghan?, Seungcheol had asked her, tired, once Mingyu finally decided he’d had enough and stormed off. Nayoung didn’t think she was in a position to tell him no, but she had also barely spoken to Jeonghan at that point in time, after mentally writing him off for forgetting his laundry in the washing machine twice. “I thought the two of you weren’t friends,” she admits.

This is the thing with Jeonghan, though. By appearances, it was easier to think he was simply inconsiderate of people’s feelings than it was to think of him kindly. “I gave him one of my old classmates’ numbers and he ended up getting an internship at her company,” Jeonghan explains. “To say thanks, he wants to treat me to dinner. Do you wanna come? I’ll ask him to pay for you too.”

Nayoung looks at him weird. “It really has nothing to do with me.”

“I think out of everyone in the house, Mingyu liked you best,” Jeonghan points out while filling two cups with water. He hands the first one to her before bending back down to fill the second. “You should take advantage of that.”

“I don’t want to impose.” It’d been past two in the morning when Nayoung finally cracked open the door of the boy’s room, where Jeonghan had holed himself up after he and Mingyu had burnt out. What do you think, honestly? he’d asked while Nayoung tried to figure out what exactly to tell him.

Jeonghan straightens back up from over by the water dispenser now, taking a sip from his own glass. “You wouldn’t be,” he assuages. “But if not, let’s go out to dinner together some other time. Without Mingyu.” He says this in such a way that Nayoung can’t tell if he’s actually serious or not.

“You just don’t want to get the bill, huh.” I don’t think you’re completely wrong, she’d replied, picking at the unravelling thread of a cushion. But I don’t think you’re completely in the right, either. When she actually looked at him for once, she could tell – You seem sorry about it, so I think you should talk to him and apologize. Even if he might not apologize back.

There’s a glint of something in Jeonghan’s eyes. Nayoung could probably figure out what it was if she looked longer, but she averts her gaze. “So you’re coming?” he says to that.

You know, I didn’t think you liked me all that much, Jeonghan had confessed to her then. A gentle smile tugged at his mouth, and it was as if Nayoung had only seen him for the first time like that. But the fact that you came to talk to me and give me advice despite that – thank you.

There are just some people who draw your attention to them like gravity. Nayoung’s back to looking at him again before she’s consciously aware. “Only if I’m not paying,” she tells him, rinsing her glass and putting it in the dish rack.

I hope you’ll continue to speak with me honestly like this, he’d said before calling it a night. Nayoung, truthfully, hadn’t stopped looking since.

The grin widens on his face. “Call.”





nunu: let’s order delivery tonight

nana: can’t. going out for dinner

nunu: omg im nayoung do you have a date??

nana: nooooooo

nana: it’s just mingyu and yoon jeonghan

nunu: lol ㅋㅋㅋ “yoon jeonghan”

nunu: my point still stands btw. about the date

nana: please explain what you mean by that

nana: JUNG EUNWOO

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Nayoung does end up paying. For her share, at least. She'd seen Mingyu blanch a bit when he saw the total and then Jeonghan reached across the table for the bill and put his card down over it. Nayoung, suddenly feeling guilty, scrambled to pull her own card out in time and tell the waiter dutch pay.

“I thought you said you weren’t paying,” Jeonghan comments as they’re waiting to cross the street. They’d waved goodbye to Mingyu and Jeonghan had driven the house car over, but parked it in a structure a few streets over.

“And I thought you said you were going to make Mingyu pay,” counters Nayoung. They haven’t walked for five minutes yet, but her baby hairs are already sticking to the back of her neck.

The corner of Jeonghan’s mouth that’s facing her curls up. “Do you think I’d really do that?” he says lightly. If Nayoung didn’t know any better, she’d be afraid that she hurt his feelings.

“I don’t know,” Nayoung catches herself being vulnerably honest. She waits for them to finish crossing the street before gathering enough courage to continue. “Sometimes, I can’t tell if you’re actually being serious or not.”

“Hmm,” Jeonghan considers with his hands in his jacket pockets.

“Like,” she starts without really thinking about it much. “What does it mean that you wake up early to eat breakfast with me, just to go back to sleep right after?”

Jeonghan turns to look at her. The overhead street lamp casts the shadows of his eyelashes long across his cheeks. “What do you think it means?”

Nayoung frowns. “I don’t know,” she says again. In truth, maybe she gets the gist of it, a little, but she doesn’t want to be wrong. “You don’t want me to be lonely?”

Jeonghan stops in the middle of the small street they’re walking down. He’s standing right where the words ONE WAY printed on the pavement end, and Nayoung has to circle back from where she’s gone ahead.

He asks, “And why do you think I don’t want you to be lonely?”

This is the thing with Jeonghan, though. Nayoung presses her lips together and inhales and exhales deeply through her nose. By appearances, it was easier to think he was simply inconsiderate of people’s feelings than it was to think of him kindly. But when you really took the time, you’d find –

Silence between them, other than the distant rush of cars from the busy road beyond the row of buildings and a cricket, chirping faintly. No camera crew, just the two of them standing facing each other, like chess pieces. She looks at him head-on, terrified and brave all at once.

“I,” Nayoung begins. Thinks better of it, her heart loud in her chest. It’s not easy, taking a leap before knowing where you’ll fall, but she takes a step closer to him. “I forgot what I was going to say.”

Jeonghan either smiles with all his teeth, or none at all. “That’s okay.” She sees the beginnings of it in the curl of his mouth, like he was laughing at a joke he just thought of, not funny enough to share aloud. But this time, Nayoung knows the punchline.

“Tell me anyway,” and she watches as, like a flower bud in time-lapse, what had begun to close blooms across his face once more. And this time, Nayoung smiles back.