![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
001
HOMEMADE HOLIDAY
391w, seungcheol/joshua
i'm the problem, it's me.
Seungcheol gives him a look he’s never seen before when he repeats, “You’re ending things with me.”
“I said I was going home.”
“That’s practically the same thing, Jisoo.”
Joshua wipes the condensation off the side of his iced Americano; he never used to drink coffee when he was growing up, even in its namesake. “I don’t want us to fight,” he reasons.
“That’s the problem,” Seungcheol’s grip on his hand a vice. “You never fight.”
The thing was: Joshua was always so good at meeting other people on their terms that he completely forgot his own.
“Don't you miss America?” Jeonghan asked him once, when he’d come back to the dorm early after Chuseok.
“Sure, I miss it.” He couldn’t imagine what he’d be doing there if he went back, though. His life was in Seoul now. But he didn’t know what he’d be doing in Seoul if he didn’t have that either.
The thing was: there was a physicality to love that made Joshua utterly unfit for it. The roots of it were heavy and the branches of it scratched up his trachea and the flowers bloomed out from his limbs until he could replicate the delicate touch of a lover while his bones were heaving under the newfound weight of its parasitic growth within him.
“Stop saying sorry,” Seungcheol pressed into his collarbone. “You don’t need to be apologetic with me.”
Seungcheol was unintentionally ritualistic when they were in bed. Just as the rhythm of his hips started to go off-kilter, he’d help Joshua reach his own climax by jerking him off. His breathing would go jagged, every forceful inhale like it was puncturing his lungs.
Well, they never came in perfect synchronicity, and Joshua never felt emptier than in the moments of his own completion, Seungcheol’s mouth against his temple whispering words of devotion like a prayer.
“I’m not,” Joshua confirmed. But truthfully, he was sorry for a lot of things.
“I’ll buy you that jacket you lost in Tokyo again,” Joshua promises. “I know it was your favorite.”
“I would fight for you,” confesses Seungcheol. It looked so easy for him to say it that Joshua almost wanted him to suffer.
Joshua trains his gaze out the window. His heart puttered out before lurching forward once more in a feverish rush. “I’ll text you when I land.”
CYBAH
617w, chaeryeong/yeji
you know every reason to run away.
Chaeryeong pulls at a hangnail with her teeth. “You wanted to make out with me, right?”
“I won’t say no if you’re offering,” Jaemin flutters his lashes in the perfect bravado of innocence, leaning to bring his face closer to hers.
She pushes him with her shoulder. “Not here, doofus.” They were supposed to be Romeo and Juliet from the ‘96 Leo DiCaprio movie, but Jaemin never committed to finding the fake armor plates and showed up at her apartment fifteen minutes late in a slate gray Adidas long sleeve and a pair of black joggers he borrowed from his 5’6’’ roommate. At least he was hot, though. Chaeryeong sucks the blood from the side of her thumb, eyes still focused on the living room below from their vantage on the stair landing. “This party sucks.”
“Yeah?” Jaemin snorts, “It was your idea in the first place.”
Chaeryeong rolls her eyes and grabs his hand to lead him down the stairs. “I’ll suck your dick to make up for it.”
“How sincere.” Yeji finally meets her gaze from the couch across the room. Chaeryeong watches in real-time as the open grin on her face melts into a frown.
She presses a kiss to Jaemin’s cheek for show and smiles up at him beautifically. “Don’t you know I’m a girl with pure intentions?” fluttering her own lashes as Yeji pushes through the crowd to the back door.
“Yeji unnie!” Chaeryeong flags her down from the drop-off area.
Yeji checks her rearview mirror, like, twelve times as Chaeryeong’s loading her stuff into the trunk of her sedan. “I didn’t know what you wanted so I got you a Coke Zero,” Chaeryeong continues, clearing out a heap of crumpled receipts sitting in the cupholder of the console.
“Oh,” Yeji replies, distracted. “Thanks.”
Of course there’s traffic, but Chaeryeong’s last midterm didn’t end until 4PM. Just as the headlights flick on in time for sunset, Yeji blurts, “I didn’t know you were seeing Jaemin.”
“It started only recently.” Chaeryeong types a reply to a text on her phone. “We agreed to take things slow.” She declines to mention how Jaemin had pushed her into his mattress after they left the party and she emphatically pretended to come while he ate her out.
Yeji looks over at her when they’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper. “Be careful, okay, Chaeryeong-ah? Jaemin’s –” she presses her mouth into a poor attempt of a reassuring smile before gravity turns the corners of it down again, “he’s not as nice as you think he is.”
“Unnie,” Chaeryeong chastises, “I’m not a kid anymore.”
Yeji blinks profusely, the scintillating lights of the city catching in her eyes like tears. “Yeah, sorry.” A car from behind them honks at them to go. “You’re not.”
“Isn’t there some rule,” admonished Jaemin when she first drew herself close enough to him that their lips touched, “that you’re not supposed to date your friend’s ex?”
Chaeryeong pulled herself into his lap. “She’s my sister’s girlfriend,” she cradled his face in her hands, “there’s a difference,” and then he surged up to kiss her in earnest.
Chaeryeong dreams the night she gets home that Yeji comes back, three in the morning. “I’ve never seen you as a kid, Chaeryeong-ah,” she confesses through the headlights of her stupid Hyundai sedan as Chaeryeong’s clutching a blanket around herself in the driveway.
She wakes to the sound of Yeji and Chaeyeon giggling on the other side of the wall at 6AM instead. There’s an unread text from Jaemin on her phone: miss u :* that she opens but doesn’t respond to.
She puts her headphones in and closes her eyes, hoping to slip back into that dream.
LIVESTREAMING THE FINAL DAYS OF ROME
1273w, jr/suzy
when i watch the world burn, all i think about is you.
Suzy pulls her pink Miu Miu sunglasses down, standing with one knee balanced on the driver’s seat, other foot precariously balanced on the ledge of her Porsche parked outside Jinyoung’s apartment. She ducks back into the car momentarily to honk again.
Jinyoung’s calling her cell. Whoops. She reaches over to grab it from the passenger seat before settling back down. “Are you crazy?” is what he says as soon as she picks up.
“I’m gonna film the end of the world.” She examines her chewed off nails, manicured smiley face on her thumb like it’s been gone at by rats. “Wanna come with?”
Upon news that the asteroid was, in fact, heading straight towards Earth, brace for fucking impact, Suzy went ahead and broke 16 stipulations of her contract in less than 24 hours. 8 of those she spent in a salon chair, burning her scalp.
Jinyoung summarizes, “That’s why you’re blonde.”
“No one ever took me seriously,” Suzy corrects. A year ago when she’d taken her plans for a directorial debut to management, they smiled at her pityingly like she was no better than a grade-schooler who barely knew how to put together a PPT. The first guy she ever seriously dated confessed three months into their relationship that she’d been his first love, precisely like JYP’s marketing team had propped her up to be.
“I don’t want to be your first love,” she’d been honest because she’d still been naive, “I want to be your last.”
“And this,” Jinyoung reaches over and holds a strand of her damaged hair between his fingers, gingerly, “is going to make everyone take you seriously?”
It was a cosmic truth that people hated when Suzy asked for things outside of what they already allotted her. Her first boyfriend broke up with her not long after that and it was fine: she wasn’t in love with him anyway, and she was Bae Suzy. She could basically have anyone on the planet.
But of course, the person she wanted the most was just outside what the universe would allow her to have. “Isn’t that why you’re in this car with me?” that hopeless naivete burning somewhere in the back of her nasal cavity still.
Jinyoung was a friend, is the extent of what Suzy would admit professionally. They were trainees together but lost touch after she’d shot to astronomical stardom. She wishes him the best in all his future endeavors with a picture-perfect smile.
What the press will never know: Jinyoung was her first kiss. In that stairwell of the old JYP building when they were going home after practice, and it was so brief that Suzy extricated all the details, only pocketing the idyllic longing to return to that moment every time.
But Suzy’s thought it all through. Packs full of double A batteries and enough memory cards for four day’s worth of footage stowed under the backseat. Cases of water bottles and canned non-perishable food, lighter fluid and a portable gas stove, a pot and pan for cooking that clang together every time she makes a turn on the road.
Jinyoung looks mildly impressed when he takes stock of everything. They’re the only car in a rest stop parking lot; he’s leaning his forearm against the door as she’s facing the back in the driver’s seat and giving him the run-down. “You’re very prepared,” is all he says.
“What?” Suzy bristles, “You didn’t think I was capable?”
Jinyoung was the first love of the nation’s first love. Would’ve been a hell of a PR slogan, if only it didn’t break all of their silly self-imposed rules. Jinyoung slips back into the passenger seat, his face tilting towards hers purposefully. “No,” but he doesn’t kiss her, “you’ve always scared me, Bae Suji,” with a wicked grin, said like a compliment.
Suzy figured she had nothing to lose after watching an expert on the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction go into excruciating detail about what was to occur in a hundred and forty-three hours. She also figured she had nothing to lose when she and Jinyoung finally got out of Seoul, and when they drove past fields and fields of countryside without another car in sight doused in complete silence, and again when curled up in her motel bed alone, playing back the footage from the drive on her camera. It kills the first set of batteries just as the zoom settles on Jinyoung’s face, handsome even through the blurry 2010s Sony digital camera.
But alas: Suzy can figure and rationalize and repeat the same mantra to herself for years leading up to this penultimate moment, but she’ll still stutter out of an awful self-preservation when Jinyoung opens the door to his room after she knocks, unsolicited, “I didn’t want to die alone.”
Jinyoung considers. He’d insisted on separate rooms from the owner who was still manning the front desk and let them stay for free, and Suzy pretended to agree with the arrangement. “You’re here with me,” he reassures in seeming defeat, “Is that what you wanted?”
Suzy feels her face go hot. She’d read hate comments in the bathroom before she earned her Best New Actress award when she was nineteen and managed to smile convincingly for the nation when her name was announced. Now, her performance for a party of one embarrassingly unravels at the seams when she snaps, “I’ve been in love with you since we were fifteen,” daring to step closer, “Don’t you think I’d want anything more?”
Jinyoung only presses his forehead against hers, admission enough. So close that he’s breached her point of double vision, it all suddenly makes sense. “And don’t you know that I’ve always been crazy about you?” he says, chivalrous at the end of the world anyway, before Suzy responds by catching his smile in a kiss.
There was a line that went viral in Jinyoung’s last drama. Critics and the public lauded him and his co-star for their portrayals, and he swept the best actor awards for it just months before. Suzy had watched in the audience in her designer gown as they played the clip and pretended that such a perfect love had to exist out there in the universe somewhere, even without fifty crew members monitoring a shoot of bombastic production value.
“Say it,” Suzy urges him, lips pressed on the crook between his neck and shoulders.
The crows feet gather at the corners of his eyes when he laughs, “Still making me work?” Suzy feels the vibrations of his words from where her hands are on his chest. She tilts her head up to meet his eyes and he acquiesces, slipping into his sageuk character, “In every lifetime, I’m yours.”
Suzy clicks her tongue. “Like you mean it for me.”
Jinyoung’s eyes soften. “In every lifetime,” he repeats into the side of her mouth in his own voice, “I’m yours.”
Suzy had focused the camera out the window after she’d moved her things into Jinyoung’s room. It looks like a normal night, all things considered, half a moon left in the sky and ready to bloom whole again. She’d thought about setting a timer to countdown to doomsday but decided it was nicer to believe in the fantasy of having all the time in the world.
Because at least the universe lets her have this: “I want you just like this,” she confesses, leaning over him on her elbows, “Forever.”
She watches as Jinyoung angles his face toward hers and closes her eyes before he kisses her. On the camera footage at 21:03, the moon is eclipsed into total darkness.
I WILL HAVE YOU KNOW – MY SWAN SONG WILL NOT BE MY LAST
746w, minghao/mingyu
“You say that only because you think you have to say it.”
“And did you get everything you wanted?”
Minghao snaps his focus back to the present, caught off-guard. “Yes,” he affirms automatically. “Yes, I did.”
Mingyu snorts to his champagne flute, gold band on his ring finger molten in the sunlight. “You’ve become so agreeable,” he remarks in disbelief.
Their newly wed mutual friend in the center of the venue has an arm around her husband’s side, other hand holding the knife with him to cut the cake. Minghao returns her smile when they briefly make eye contact. They’d all clamored over Mingyu in the down time between the ceremony and reception with the woes of wedding planning, and Minghao had watched as he took their overbearing advice graciously with a winning smile from the sidelines. “And you’ve become so sure of what you want,” replies Minghao in stride, “On your way to married life.”
“But have you ever–” Mingyu’s jaw sets, stubborn, as he cuts himself off. “I knew you would’ve said no if I asked.”
“But you never asked.”
“You told me to stop being desperate!” Mingyu bursts out. He lowers his voice when the group of bridesmaids turns to look at them. “What was I supposed to do, let myself keep getting hurt from all your rejection?”
“No,” Minghao admits staring straight ahead. Everyone around them starts clapping at something they hadn’t been paying attention to. Mingyu joins in absentmindedly while Minghao continues, “I don’t have everything I want.”
“What?” Mingyu applauds five beats longer than the rest of the crowd.
“But you’re still too impressionable,” Minghao elaborates. “That’s why we broke up, remember?” Just then, a waiter carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres utilizes the space between their shoulders and cleaves them in two.
Some time after the break up, Minghao was sitting across from Junhui at the same hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant they’d been going to for years, eating the same dishes they always ordered and pecking at the pickles the owner always piled high for them for free with their chopsticks when Junhui pointed out suddenly, “Hao Hao, you don’t realize you’ve changed?”
Minghao looked up from the work email he’d been skimming on his phone. “Why do you ask that?”
Junhui only smiled, sheepish and curling in on himself over his bowl of noodles. “Because you have.” When Minghao didn’t reply, he added, “You regret ending things with him.”
“I don’t regret cutting off a relationship before we both got irreparably hurt from it, if that’s what you mean,” was Minghao’s canned response. “And Mingyu didn’t know what he wanted. You know it's dangerous, not knowing what you want. That's how people get taken advantage of."
Junhui placed the last radish on Minghao’s plate gingerly. “You say that only because you think you have to say it.” It was even worse, knowing what you wanted but knowing it was never possible the way you dreamed it to be.
Mingyu calls him a week after the wedding. “I just have to understand,” he stammers as soon as Minghao picks up the line, “When you said you didn’t have everything you wanted. Did you mean – shit, this is so stupid, I just… I think I’m reading too much into this, but did you mean me?”
Minghao’s heart is beating in his throat. “Mingyu, this is–”
“Myungho,” Mingyu interjects like he’s afraid Minghao will hang up at any time, “I don’t think I’ve stopped loving you.” A dangerous hope shakes in his voice. “So if you still love me–”
When they were still together, it’d become a running joke that Mingyu was always bombarding him with a never-ending stream of questions, most of which Minghao answered to with some version of no.
“Don’t you ever get tired?” Minghao asked once, half-laughing and apologetic. Mingyu’s thumb was rubbing against the cracked skin on Minghao’s knuckles, dry from the winter. The touch was so tender it stung. “You hear ‘no’ more often than a cold call salesperson.”
“Congratulations on your engagement,” Minghao settles on, hanging up the phone right after. It buzzes with an incoming call less than ten seconds later, and again, and again, and again until it finally quiets like something on its dying breaths inevitably succumbing to the end.
Mingyu on that couch had peered up at him from where he’d been resting his head on Minghao’s shoulder. “All it takes is one yes to make it worthwhile,” he said, playing the part to a T with a full-canine smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
FUCKIN' NEW YEAR
1315w, chaehyun/jay
do you want somebody? like i want somebody?
Chaehyun checks her phone again once the stereo system cuts out after the car’s been parked for too long. The where r u??? she’d sent Jay twelve minutes ago doesn’t even have a read receipt. She glances up from where she’s reclined the driver’s seat, scanning across the Theta house green only to make eye contact with a street sign she’d almost clipped with her passenger side mirror with bolded red font: NO PARKING SATURDAY 8AM TO 10AM, STREET SWEEPING.
In the midst of typing ur paying if i get ticketed, the front door opens. Jay’s standing on the porch with his walk-of-shame certified Adidas duffel crossbody slung over his shoulder grinning at – Chaehyun has to squint – is that Taehyun Kang from student council?
Chaehyun spurs the engine back on as Jay lingers down the steps, Taehyun’s hand in his. She’s got the windows rolled all the way down by the time Taehyun leans over to press his lips to the corner of Jay’s mouth. Perfect timing, really, for her to lean over the console and let out the loudest catcall she can muster.
“Hi Chaehyun,” Taehyun calls over Jay’s shoulder, still the epitome of his high school superlative “Most likely to network at a funeral.” Chaehyun sees the tips of Jay’s ears flush a bright red under the 8:30 sun. She waves back, honking for good measure.
“Did you really have to do that?” Jay hisses once he’s thrown himself into the passenger seat. His bag hits Chaehyun’s shoulder when he tosses it to the back and the seatbelt warning goes off before the windows are fully closed.
Chaehyun slows to a rolling stop. “I’ve been waiting for like, half an hour.” She hits the gas again. “I’m understandably pissed playing getaway car for all your morning afters.”
“Fuck, that's not –” Jay sighs, finally pulling on his seatbelt. His voice quiets as he confesses, “I think it’s serious this time with Taehyun.”
“You hated him after he screwed you over during that case competition last year,” Chaehyun recalls.
“Which he apologized for,” corrects Jay. “Just – shit,” he leans his elbow against the windowsill while they’re waiting for the signal to turn onto the on ramp, “I think he’s what I’ve been looking for all along.”
“Is he going to drive you home weekends instead?”
“I’m talking about love, Chaehyun,” Jay says, like he’s about to school her on the whole ritual of emotional intimacy.
“I’m just saying,” she starts, unimpressed, right as the light turns green, “for someone who’s really into monogamy, you sure do date around a lot.”
Back when they were sixteen, Jay passed his road test before Chaehyun did. He showed her his driver’s license in the backseat of her mom’s car on the way to school once it’d come in the mail with a lopsided self-satisfied grin. Two weeks later, he reversed into her family’s front fence, and the rest of Chaehyun’s inherited unpaid Uber driving duties are history.
“His mom still doesn’t trust him behind the wheel,” Chaehyun explains to Chaeyoung once Jay’s left after dropping off a Vietnamese coffee for her in the quad.
“The barista said the extra espresso shot’s gonna kill you,” Jay told her emphatically while she stabbed her boba straw through the plastic cover.
“Good,” she reassured him, taking a long, gloating sip, “that means I’ll take your secret hookups to the grave with me.” He flipped her off while walking backwards and she just laughed when he bumped into the nearby lamppost.
Chaeyoung gives her a pointed look. “Is that really the only reason?”
Last Saturday, Chaehyun found herself waiting outside the Theta house once more angrily texting Jay i can’t believe ur making me wait for ur dumb ass again. To which Jay immediately responded, uhh i don’t c ur car outside tho??
“Can you drop me a fucking pin next time,” Chaehyun grumbled as soon as Jay got in the car, fifteen minutes and a whole drive across campus later.
Jay replied, distracted, “Sorry.” There was a purple hickey blooming on the base of his neck, half covered by the cut of his sweater.
“What happened with Taehyun?”
Jay’s jaw clenched. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You were basically planning your wedding the entire drive back last weekend,” Chaehyun persisted.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Chaehyun,” Jay finally broke, sounding too exhausted to be truly mad.
Chaehyun held up her free hand in surrender. “Ok, fine,” she conceded. “You deserve better, anyway,” she added after a moment.
Jay snorted while readjusting his position in his seat, “Stop making fun of me.”
“I’m being serious,” she insisted.
Chaehyun shields her eyes from the sun as she faces Chaeyoung now. “I don’t know,” she says, blinking away the spots suspended in her vision. “It’s complicated.”
In the car, Jay had turned to look at her. “Thanks,” was all he could say thickly, mouth pressed into a grimacing sort of smile after an indeterminate amount of time had passed. Then he focused his gaze back out the window, and Chaehyun felt a sudden sense of loss she didn’t think she had any claim over.
Jay texts her on a Friday night while she’s procrastinating on her Gen Ed paper by painting her toenails. sorry, the first one goes. i know ur driving me back tomorrow but if ur not busy, comes the next. if ur free rn can u pick me up from heeseung’s?
“Heeseung Lee?” Chaehyun can’t help but blurt once they’re already down the street from the party. She’d seen him standing on the balcony with his arm wrapped around someone she’d been in freshman Physics with. Jay had slid into the passenger seat without addressing it, a clouded-over expression on his face. “Seriously, Jay?”
Jay closes his hands into fists over his knees. “I didn’t ask for your judgment.”
“Well if you didn’t want my judgment, maybe you should’ve called an Uber,” she snaps in return.
“Fuck, ok!” Jay says. “You’re right! You’re always right.” He rubs a hand over his forehead. “It’s not like I don’t know it or anything. I just,” he pauses, crossing his arms and slouching into his seat, “sometimes I need some kindness instead.”
The passing street light cuts a triangle of light onto his cheek. “It’s hard to be kind when you’re literally subjecting me to a highlight reel of your most self-destructive moments,” Chaehyun admits with a gnawing sense of guilt.
“Nothing was going to happen,” Jay manages. “I just had to see it with my own eyes. That things haven’t changed between us.”
Chaehyun picks out, “You were hoping things changed.”
“Love isn’t so easy,” continues Jay. “You talk about things like I should’ve seen them coming from miles away. But it’s never that straightforward, you know?”
Chaehyun sighs as she pulls into her parking spot. “You’re always talking about love like it’s so far out of your reach,” she tries to clarify, “but are you sure that’s how it really has to be?”
Jay laughs like he might start crying when she kills the engine. “I told you, it’s not that easy Chaehyun.”
“I’m not saying it is.”
It’s dark in the garage aside from a square of pale blue coming through the gates. “Then what are you saying?” asks Jay, the shadow of his shoulder leaning against her seat.
Chaehyun swallows and peers out the rearview mirror. “Maybe what you’re searching for isn’t as far away from you as you think it is,” she tells him with an impulsive, overwhelming courage that she nearly chokes on.
Jay cracks open the passenger door. The overhead light abruptly floods the cabin. “Well,” he begins, hand still looped around the handle in pause, “I’ll let you know when I find it.” And when Chaehyun finally looks over at him, she finds that he’s been facing her this whole time.
SO WE COULD CALL IT EVEN
826w, jeonghan/nayoung
if i wanted to know who you were hanging with while i was gone, i would've asked you.
Nayoung stares at him, incredulous, “What are you doing here?”
“You’re the only person I know in this master’s program,” Jeonghan states plainly. He holds out the bouquet of pale blue roses to her. “Congratulations.”
Nayoung wordlessly adds them to the pile already gathered in her arms. The gold tassel on her graduation cap hits the side of her cheek when she re-rights herself. She’s wearing the navy slip dress under her gown that Jeonghan remembers hooking off her shoulders at his apartment a week ago while his mouth sucked a mark over her clavicle. She’d hated him for it to the point that she refused to respond to his texts for days, and Jeonghan can still see the faint line of it under the midday sun now.
“You can’t be here,” she warns, readjusting her collar. “My parents are out front, and all of my friends, and…” Nayoung trails off while her eyes shift away from his face. “Do you even know what these mean?” she finally asks about the roses.
Jeonghan shrugs, taking a step closer to where she’s standing a stair above him. His dress shoes pinch at his toes. “No,” he admits. He reaches over to tuck the strand of her hair that’s falling into her face behind her ear. “I just know that you like them.”
Nayoung chews her lip. “You’re impossible.”
“What are you doing later tonight?” Jeonghan says just for her to hear.
“I don’t know,” she replies, wary. “I’ll be busy for a while. And I have to go take pictures now.”
“Okay,” Jeonghan steps back with a smile. “Text me when you get home.”
Nayoung pushes past him, bumping his shoulder with hers. “You’re not my boyfriend, Yoon Jeonghan,” she reminds him.
He laughs at that, “I can pretend, can’t I?” Nayoung shoots him one last withering glare before walking off. “Congratulations again!” he calls after her, watching until she’s out of sight. She doesn’t look back once. Not like Jeonghan expected her to, anyway.
“You and Nayoung are more alike than you think,” Jisoo points out when Jeonghan resolutely refuses to continue talking about her.
Jeonghan picks at the remnants of his pasta with a fork. “How so?”
“You’re both too terrified to take a leap of faith for love.”
“You haven’t spoken to Nayoung one-on-one before,” Jeonghan grins wryly, trying to call his bluff.
Jisoo gives him that, “I haven’t.” But it wasn’t rocket science, either.
“I would do it,” confesses Jeonghan after giving it some thought. They’d agreed to eat at this restaurant for the beach view, but it was overcast and storming outside the floor length windows that they were so famous for. “Just not with Nayoung.”
“No?”
Jeonghan takes a stab at a cherry tomato, but it goes rolling off the plate. “Because I don’t know if she’d meet me halfway.” That’s what made it all so frustrating, yet impossible for Jeonghan to stay away.
In their second year of university, Jeonghan went to excruciating lengths to set Nayoung up with their mutual friend Seungcheol. It was a relationship that was doomed to fail though, because Jeonghan knew from the outset that Nayoung had a crush on him instead.
“There’s something clinical about your ambition,” is what Nayoung always said when they came back to the topic. Today, she’s sitting with her back to him in his bed, trying to zip up her dress. The light filtering in through the cracks between the blinds catches in her hair. “You’re always waiting for the other person to spill their guts first,” she adds this time around.
“You say that like you’re different.” Jeonghan walks across the room to her, stooping over to pull up the zipper. His knuckles brush the skin on the small of her back, collateral damage, to which she shivers.
“I wish I was,” Nayoung laments as Jeonghan moves to sit beside her. “But I don’t think I am.” She turns to look at him, gaze flickering down to his mouth momentarily before settling to meet his eyes. “And on top of all that, I don’t get you.”
Jeonghan twines his fingers with hers in slow motion. “What do you mean?”
Nayoung says distractedly, “I don’t know.” She tenses when he presses his forehead against her hair and relaxes again when he moves to kiss the side of her neck, featherlight. “I feel like I should know what to expect from you, but I never do.”
Jeonghan suddenly wishes he could give her that predictable kind of love. “But what’s the fun in that?”
Nayoung leans away so they can look at each other, head on. “You’re no good for me.” She sounds like she barely believes it, either. Even in the skewed light with the shades closed she’s beautiful.
Jeonghan feels the corner of his mouth quirk up, apologetic. “Maybe,” he agrees too easily. And then Nayoung closes the distance between them again and kisses him, like every second they spend apart kills her inside the same way it kills him.
391w, seungcheol/joshua
i'm the problem, it's me.
Seungcheol gives him a look he’s never seen before when he repeats, “You’re ending things with me.”
“I said I was going home.”
“That’s practically the same thing, Jisoo.”
Joshua wipes the condensation off the side of his iced Americano; he never used to drink coffee when he was growing up, even in its namesake. “I don’t want us to fight,” he reasons.
“That’s the problem,” Seungcheol’s grip on his hand a vice. “You never fight.”
The thing was: Joshua was always so good at meeting other people on their terms that he completely forgot his own.
“Don't you miss America?” Jeonghan asked him once, when he’d come back to the dorm early after Chuseok.
“Sure, I miss it.” He couldn’t imagine what he’d be doing there if he went back, though. His life was in Seoul now. But he didn’t know what he’d be doing in Seoul if he didn’t have that either.
The thing was: there was a physicality to love that made Joshua utterly unfit for it. The roots of it were heavy and the branches of it scratched up his trachea and the flowers bloomed out from his limbs until he could replicate the delicate touch of a lover while his bones were heaving under the newfound weight of its parasitic growth within him.
“Stop saying sorry,” Seungcheol pressed into his collarbone. “You don’t need to be apologetic with me.”
Seungcheol was unintentionally ritualistic when they were in bed. Just as the rhythm of his hips started to go off-kilter, he’d help Joshua reach his own climax by jerking him off. His breathing would go jagged, every forceful inhale like it was puncturing his lungs.
Well, they never came in perfect synchronicity, and Joshua never felt emptier than in the moments of his own completion, Seungcheol’s mouth against his temple whispering words of devotion like a prayer.
“I’m not,” Joshua confirmed. But truthfully, he was sorry for a lot of things.
“I’ll buy you that jacket you lost in Tokyo again,” Joshua promises. “I know it was your favorite.”
“I would fight for you,” confesses Seungcheol. It looked so easy for him to say it that Joshua almost wanted him to suffer.
Joshua trains his gaze out the window. His heart puttered out before lurching forward once more in a feverish rush. “I’ll text you when I land.”
CYBAH
617w, chaeryeong/yeji
you know every reason to run away.
Chaeryeong pulls at a hangnail with her teeth. “You wanted to make out with me, right?”
“I won’t say no if you’re offering,” Jaemin flutters his lashes in the perfect bravado of innocence, leaning to bring his face closer to hers.
She pushes him with her shoulder. “Not here, doofus.” They were supposed to be Romeo and Juliet from the ‘96 Leo DiCaprio movie, but Jaemin never committed to finding the fake armor plates and showed up at her apartment fifteen minutes late in a slate gray Adidas long sleeve and a pair of black joggers he borrowed from his 5’6’’ roommate. At least he was hot, though. Chaeryeong sucks the blood from the side of her thumb, eyes still focused on the living room below from their vantage on the stair landing. “This party sucks.”
“Yeah?” Jaemin snorts, “It was your idea in the first place.”
Chaeryeong rolls her eyes and grabs his hand to lead him down the stairs. “I’ll suck your dick to make up for it.”
“How sincere.” Yeji finally meets her gaze from the couch across the room. Chaeryeong watches in real-time as the open grin on her face melts into a frown.
She presses a kiss to Jaemin’s cheek for show and smiles up at him beautifically. “Don’t you know I’m a girl with pure intentions?” fluttering her own lashes as Yeji pushes through the crowd to the back door.
“Yeji unnie!” Chaeryeong flags her down from the drop-off area.
Yeji checks her rearview mirror, like, twelve times as Chaeryeong’s loading her stuff into the trunk of her sedan. “I didn’t know what you wanted so I got you a Coke Zero,” Chaeryeong continues, clearing out a heap of crumpled receipts sitting in the cupholder of the console.
“Oh,” Yeji replies, distracted. “Thanks.”
Of course there’s traffic, but Chaeryeong’s last midterm didn’t end until 4PM. Just as the headlights flick on in time for sunset, Yeji blurts, “I didn’t know you were seeing Jaemin.”
“It started only recently.” Chaeryeong types a reply to a text on her phone. “We agreed to take things slow.” She declines to mention how Jaemin had pushed her into his mattress after they left the party and she emphatically pretended to come while he ate her out.
Yeji looks over at her when they’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper. “Be careful, okay, Chaeryeong-ah? Jaemin’s –” she presses her mouth into a poor attempt of a reassuring smile before gravity turns the corners of it down again, “he’s not as nice as you think he is.”
“Unnie,” Chaeryeong chastises, “I’m not a kid anymore.”
Yeji blinks profusely, the scintillating lights of the city catching in her eyes like tears. “Yeah, sorry.” A car from behind them honks at them to go. “You’re not.”
“Isn’t there some rule,” admonished Jaemin when she first drew herself close enough to him that their lips touched, “that you’re not supposed to date your friend’s ex?”
Chaeryeong pulled herself into his lap. “She’s my sister’s girlfriend,” she cradled his face in her hands, “there’s a difference,” and then he surged up to kiss her in earnest.
Chaeryeong dreams the night she gets home that Yeji comes back, three in the morning. “I’ve never seen you as a kid, Chaeryeong-ah,” she confesses through the headlights of her stupid Hyundai sedan as Chaeryeong’s clutching a blanket around herself in the driveway.
She wakes to the sound of Yeji and Chaeyeon giggling on the other side of the wall at 6AM instead. There’s an unread text from Jaemin on her phone: miss u :* that she opens but doesn’t respond to.
She puts her headphones in and closes her eyes, hoping to slip back into that dream.
LIVESTREAMING THE FINAL DAYS OF ROME
1273w, jr/suzy
when i watch the world burn, all i think about is you.
Suzy pulls her pink Miu Miu sunglasses down, standing with one knee balanced on the driver’s seat, other foot precariously balanced on the ledge of her Porsche parked outside Jinyoung’s apartment. She ducks back into the car momentarily to honk again.
Jinyoung’s calling her cell. Whoops. She reaches over to grab it from the passenger seat before settling back down. “Are you crazy?” is what he says as soon as she picks up.
“I’m gonna film the end of the world.” She examines her chewed off nails, manicured smiley face on her thumb like it’s been gone at by rats. “Wanna come with?”
Upon news that the asteroid was, in fact, heading straight towards Earth, brace for fucking impact, Suzy went ahead and broke 16 stipulations of her contract in less than 24 hours. 8 of those she spent in a salon chair, burning her scalp.
Jinyoung summarizes, “That’s why you’re blonde.”
“No one ever took me seriously,” Suzy corrects. A year ago when she’d taken her plans for a directorial debut to management, they smiled at her pityingly like she was no better than a grade-schooler who barely knew how to put together a PPT. The first guy she ever seriously dated confessed three months into their relationship that she’d been his first love, precisely like JYP’s marketing team had propped her up to be.
“I don’t want to be your first love,” she’d been honest because she’d still been naive, “I want to be your last.”
“And this,” Jinyoung reaches over and holds a strand of her damaged hair between his fingers, gingerly, “is going to make everyone take you seriously?”
It was a cosmic truth that people hated when Suzy asked for things outside of what they already allotted her. Her first boyfriend broke up with her not long after that and it was fine: she wasn’t in love with him anyway, and she was Bae Suzy. She could basically have anyone on the planet.
But of course, the person she wanted the most was just outside what the universe would allow her to have. “Isn’t that why you’re in this car with me?” that hopeless naivete burning somewhere in the back of her nasal cavity still.
Jinyoung was a friend, is the extent of what Suzy would admit professionally. They were trainees together but lost touch after she’d shot to astronomical stardom. She wishes him the best in all his future endeavors with a picture-perfect smile.
What the press will never know: Jinyoung was her first kiss. In that stairwell of the old JYP building when they were going home after practice, and it was so brief that Suzy extricated all the details, only pocketing the idyllic longing to return to that moment every time.
But Suzy’s thought it all through. Packs full of double A batteries and enough memory cards for four day’s worth of footage stowed under the backseat. Cases of water bottles and canned non-perishable food, lighter fluid and a portable gas stove, a pot and pan for cooking that clang together every time she makes a turn on the road.
Jinyoung looks mildly impressed when he takes stock of everything. They’re the only car in a rest stop parking lot; he’s leaning his forearm against the door as she’s facing the back in the driver’s seat and giving him the run-down. “You’re very prepared,” is all he says.
“What?” Suzy bristles, “You didn’t think I was capable?”
Jinyoung was the first love of the nation’s first love. Would’ve been a hell of a PR slogan, if only it didn’t break all of their silly self-imposed rules. Jinyoung slips back into the passenger seat, his face tilting towards hers purposefully. “No,” but he doesn’t kiss her, “you’ve always scared me, Bae Suji,” with a wicked grin, said like a compliment.
Suzy figured she had nothing to lose after watching an expert on the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction go into excruciating detail about what was to occur in a hundred and forty-three hours. She also figured she had nothing to lose when she and Jinyoung finally got out of Seoul, and when they drove past fields and fields of countryside without another car in sight doused in complete silence, and again when curled up in her motel bed alone, playing back the footage from the drive on her camera. It kills the first set of batteries just as the zoom settles on Jinyoung’s face, handsome even through the blurry 2010s Sony digital camera.
But alas: Suzy can figure and rationalize and repeat the same mantra to herself for years leading up to this penultimate moment, but she’ll still stutter out of an awful self-preservation when Jinyoung opens the door to his room after she knocks, unsolicited, “I didn’t want to die alone.”
Jinyoung considers. He’d insisted on separate rooms from the owner who was still manning the front desk and let them stay for free, and Suzy pretended to agree with the arrangement. “You’re here with me,” he reassures in seeming defeat, “Is that what you wanted?”
Suzy feels her face go hot. She’d read hate comments in the bathroom before she earned her Best New Actress award when she was nineteen and managed to smile convincingly for the nation when her name was announced. Now, her performance for a party of one embarrassingly unravels at the seams when she snaps, “I’ve been in love with you since we were fifteen,” daring to step closer, “Don’t you think I’d want anything more?”
Jinyoung only presses his forehead against hers, admission enough. So close that he’s breached her point of double vision, it all suddenly makes sense. “And don’t you know that I’ve always been crazy about you?” he says, chivalrous at the end of the world anyway, before Suzy responds by catching his smile in a kiss.
There was a line that went viral in Jinyoung’s last drama. Critics and the public lauded him and his co-star for their portrayals, and he swept the best actor awards for it just months before. Suzy had watched in the audience in her designer gown as they played the clip and pretended that such a perfect love had to exist out there in the universe somewhere, even without fifty crew members monitoring a shoot of bombastic production value.
“Say it,” Suzy urges him, lips pressed on the crook between his neck and shoulders.
The crows feet gather at the corners of his eyes when he laughs, “Still making me work?” Suzy feels the vibrations of his words from where her hands are on his chest. She tilts her head up to meet his eyes and he acquiesces, slipping into his sageuk character, “In every lifetime, I’m yours.”
Suzy clicks her tongue. “Like you mean it for me.”
Jinyoung’s eyes soften. “In every lifetime,” he repeats into the side of her mouth in his own voice, “I’m yours.”
Suzy had focused the camera out the window after she’d moved her things into Jinyoung’s room. It looks like a normal night, all things considered, half a moon left in the sky and ready to bloom whole again. She’d thought about setting a timer to countdown to doomsday but decided it was nicer to believe in the fantasy of having all the time in the world.
Because at least the universe lets her have this: “I want you just like this,” she confesses, leaning over him on her elbows, “Forever.”
She watches as Jinyoung angles his face toward hers and closes her eyes before he kisses her. On the camera footage at 21:03, the moon is eclipsed into total darkness.
I WILL HAVE YOU KNOW – MY SWAN SONG WILL NOT BE MY LAST
746w, minghao/mingyu
“You say that only because you think you have to say it.”
“And did you get everything you wanted?”
Minghao snaps his focus back to the present, caught off-guard. “Yes,” he affirms automatically. “Yes, I did.”
Mingyu snorts to his champagne flute, gold band on his ring finger molten in the sunlight. “You’ve become so agreeable,” he remarks in disbelief.
Their newly wed mutual friend in the center of the venue has an arm around her husband’s side, other hand holding the knife with him to cut the cake. Minghao returns her smile when they briefly make eye contact. They’d all clamored over Mingyu in the down time between the ceremony and reception with the woes of wedding planning, and Minghao had watched as he took their overbearing advice graciously with a winning smile from the sidelines. “And you’ve become so sure of what you want,” replies Minghao in stride, “On your way to married life.”
“But have you ever–” Mingyu’s jaw sets, stubborn, as he cuts himself off. “I knew you would’ve said no if I asked.”
“But you never asked.”
“You told me to stop being desperate!” Mingyu bursts out. He lowers his voice when the group of bridesmaids turns to look at them. “What was I supposed to do, let myself keep getting hurt from all your rejection?”
“No,” Minghao admits staring straight ahead. Everyone around them starts clapping at something they hadn’t been paying attention to. Mingyu joins in absentmindedly while Minghao continues, “I don’t have everything I want.”
“What?” Mingyu applauds five beats longer than the rest of the crowd.
“But you’re still too impressionable,” Minghao elaborates. “That’s why we broke up, remember?” Just then, a waiter carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres utilizes the space between their shoulders and cleaves them in two.
Some time after the break up, Minghao was sitting across from Junhui at the same hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant they’d been going to for years, eating the same dishes they always ordered and pecking at the pickles the owner always piled high for them for free with their chopsticks when Junhui pointed out suddenly, “Hao Hao, you don’t realize you’ve changed?”
Minghao looked up from the work email he’d been skimming on his phone. “Why do you ask that?”
Junhui only smiled, sheepish and curling in on himself over his bowl of noodles. “Because you have.” When Minghao didn’t reply, he added, “You regret ending things with him.”
“I don’t regret cutting off a relationship before we both got irreparably hurt from it, if that’s what you mean,” was Minghao’s canned response. “And Mingyu didn’t know what he wanted. You know it's dangerous, not knowing what you want. That's how people get taken advantage of."
Junhui placed the last radish on Minghao’s plate gingerly. “You say that only because you think you have to say it.” It was even worse, knowing what you wanted but knowing it was never possible the way you dreamed it to be.
Mingyu calls him a week after the wedding. “I just have to understand,” he stammers as soon as Minghao picks up the line, “When you said you didn’t have everything you wanted. Did you mean – shit, this is so stupid, I just… I think I’m reading too much into this, but did you mean me?”
Minghao’s heart is beating in his throat. “Mingyu, this is–”
“Myungho,” Mingyu interjects like he’s afraid Minghao will hang up at any time, “I don’t think I’ve stopped loving you.” A dangerous hope shakes in his voice. “So if you still love me–”
When they were still together, it’d become a running joke that Mingyu was always bombarding him with a never-ending stream of questions, most of which Minghao answered to with some version of no.
“Don’t you ever get tired?” Minghao asked once, half-laughing and apologetic. Mingyu’s thumb was rubbing against the cracked skin on Minghao’s knuckles, dry from the winter. The touch was so tender it stung. “You hear ‘no’ more often than a cold call salesperson.”
“Congratulations on your engagement,” Minghao settles on, hanging up the phone right after. It buzzes with an incoming call less than ten seconds later, and again, and again, and again until it finally quiets like something on its dying breaths inevitably succumbing to the end.
Mingyu on that couch had peered up at him from where he’d been resting his head on Minghao’s shoulder. “All it takes is one yes to make it worthwhile,” he said, playing the part to a T with a full-canine smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
FUCKIN' NEW YEAR
1315w, chaehyun/jay
do you want somebody? like i want somebody?
Chaehyun checks her phone again once the stereo system cuts out after the car’s been parked for too long. The where r u??? she’d sent Jay twelve minutes ago doesn’t even have a read receipt. She glances up from where she’s reclined the driver’s seat, scanning across the Theta house green only to make eye contact with a street sign she’d almost clipped with her passenger side mirror with bolded red font: NO PARKING SATURDAY 8AM TO 10AM, STREET SWEEPING.
In the midst of typing ur paying if i get ticketed, the front door opens. Jay’s standing on the porch with his walk-of-shame certified Adidas duffel crossbody slung over his shoulder grinning at – Chaehyun has to squint – is that Taehyun Kang from student council?
Chaehyun spurs the engine back on as Jay lingers down the steps, Taehyun’s hand in his. She’s got the windows rolled all the way down by the time Taehyun leans over to press his lips to the corner of Jay’s mouth. Perfect timing, really, for her to lean over the console and let out the loudest catcall she can muster.
“Hi Chaehyun,” Taehyun calls over Jay’s shoulder, still the epitome of his high school superlative “Most likely to network at a funeral.” Chaehyun sees the tips of Jay’s ears flush a bright red under the 8:30 sun. She waves back, honking for good measure.
“Did you really have to do that?” Jay hisses once he’s thrown himself into the passenger seat. His bag hits Chaehyun’s shoulder when he tosses it to the back and the seatbelt warning goes off before the windows are fully closed.
Chaehyun slows to a rolling stop. “I’ve been waiting for like, half an hour.” She hits the gas again. “I’m understandably pissed playing getaway car for all your morning afters.”
“Fuck, that's not –” Jay sighs, finally pulling on his seatbelt. His voice quiets as he confesses, “I think it’s serious this time with Taehyun.”
“You hated him after he screwed you over during that case competition last year,” Chaehyun recalls.
“Which he apologized for,” corrects Jay. “Just – shit,” he leans his elbow against the windowsill while they’re waiting for the signal to turn onto the on ramp, “I think he’s what I’ve been looking for all along.”
“Is he going to drive you home weekends instead?”
“I’m talking about love, Chaehyun,” Jay says, like he’s about to school her on the whole ritual of emotional intimacy.
“I’m just saying,” she starts, unimpressed, right as the light turns green, “for someone who’s really into monogamy, you sure do date around a lot.”
Back when they were sixteen, Jay passed his road test before Chaehyun did. He showed her his driver’s license in the backseat of her mom’s car on the way to school once it’d come in the mail with a lopsided self-satisfied grin. Two weeks later, he reversed into her family’s front fence, and the rest of Chaehyun’s inherited unpaid Uber driving duties are history.
“His mom still doesn’t trust him behind the wheel,” Chaehyun explains to Chaeyoung once Jay’s left after dropping off a Vietnamese coffee for her in the quad.
“The barista said the extra espresso shot’s gonna kill you,” Jay told her emphatically while she stabbed her boba straw through the plastic cover.
“Good,” she reassured him, taking a long, gloating sip, “that means I’ll take your secret hookups to the grave with me.” He flipped her off while walking backwards and she just laughed when he bumped into the nearby lamppost.
Chaeyoung gives her a pointed look. “Is that really the only reason?”
Last Saturday, Chaehyun found herself waiting outside the Theta house once more angrily texting Jay i can’t believe ur making me wait for ur dumb ass again. To which Jay immediately responded, uhh i don’t c ur car outside tho??
“Can you drop me a fucking pin next time,” Chaehyun grumbled as soon as Jay got in the car, fifteen minutes and a whole drive across campus later.
Jay replied, distracted, “Sorry.” There was a purple hickey blooming on the base of his neck, half covered by the cut of his sweater.
“What happened with Taehyun?”
Jay’s jaw clenched. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You were basically planning your wedding the entire drive back last weekend,” Chaehyun persisted.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Chaehyun,” Jay finally broke, sounding too exhausted to be truly mad.
Chaehyun held up her free hand in surrender. “Ok, fine,” she conceded. “You deserve better, anyway,” she added after a moment.
Jay snorted while readjusting his position in his seat, “Stop making fun of me.”
“I’m being serious,” she insisted.
Chaehyun shields her eyes from the sun as she faces Chaeyoung now. “I don’t know,” she says, blinking away the spots suspended in her vision. “It’s complicated.”
In the car, Jay had turned to look at her. “Thanks,” was all he could say thickly, mouth pressed into a grimacing sort of smile after an indeterminate amount of time had passed. Then he focused his gaze back out the window, and Chaehyun felt a sudden sense of loss she didn’t think she had any claim over.
Jay texts her on a Friday night while she’s procrastinating on her Gen Ed paper by painting her toenails. sorry, the first one goes. i know ur driving me back tomorrow but if ur not busy, comes the next. if ur free rn can u pick me up from heeseung’s?
“Heeseung Lee?” Chaehyun can’t help but blurt once they’re already down the street from the party. She’d seen him standing on the balcony with his arm wrapped around someone she’d been in freshman Physics with. Jay had slid into the passenger seat without addressing it, a clouded-over expression on his face. “Seriously, Jay?”
Jay closes his hands into fists over his knees. “I didn’t ask for your judgment.”
“Well if you didn’t want my judgment, maybe you should’ve called an Uber,” she snaps in return.
“Fuck, ok!” Jay says. “You’re right! You’re always right.” He rubs a hand over his forehead. “It’s not like I don’t know it or anything. I just,” he pauses, crossing his arms and slouching into his seat, “sometimes I need some kindness instead.”
The passing street light cuts a triangle of light onto his cheek. “It’s hard to be kind when you’re literally subjecting me to a highlight reel of your most self-destructive moments,” Chaehyun admits with a gnawing sense of guilt.
“Nothing was going to happen,” Jay manages. “I just had to see it with my own eyes. That things haven’t changed between us.”
Chaehyun picks out, “You were hoping things changed.”
“Love isn’t so easy,” continues Jay. “You talk about things like I should’ve seen them coming from miles away. But it’s never that straightforward, you know?”
Chaehyun sighs as she pulls into her parking spot. “You’re always talking about love like it’s so far out of your reach,” she tries to clarify, “but are you sure that’s how it really has to be?”
Jay laughs like he might start crying when she kills the engine. “I told you, it’s not that easy Chaehyun.”
“I’m not saying it is.”
It’s dark in the garage aside from a square of pale blue coming through the gates. “Then what are you saying?” asks Jay, the shadow of his shoulder leaning against her seat.
Chaehyun swallows and peers out the rearview mirror. “Maybe what you’re searching for isn’t as far away from you as you think it is,” she tells him with an impulsive, overwhelming courage that she nearly chokes on.
Jay cracks open the passenger door. The overhead light abruptly floods the cabin. “Well,” he begins, hand still looped around the handle in pause, “I’ll let you know when I find it.” And when Chaehyun finally looks over at him, she finds that he’s been facing her this whole time.
SO WE COULD CALL IT EVEN
826w, jeonghan/nayoung
if i wanted to know who you were hanging with while i was gone, i would've asked you.
Nayoung stares at him, incredulous, “What are you doing here?”
“You’re the only person I know in this master’s program,” Jeonghan states plainly. He holds out the bouquet of pale blue roses to her. “Congratulations.”
Nayoung wordlessly adds them to the pile already gathered in her arms. The gold tassel on her graduation cap hits the side of her cheek when she re-rights herself. She’s wearing the navy slip dress under her gown that Jeonghan remembers hooking off her shoulders at his apartment a week ago while his mouth sucked a mark over her clavicle. She’d hated him for it to the point that she refused to respond to his texts for days, and Jeonghan can still see the faint line of it under the midday sun now.
“You can’t be here,” she warns, readjusting her collar. “My parents are out front, and all of my friends, and…” Nayoung trails off while her eyes shift away from his face. “Do you even know what these mean?” she finally asks about the roses.
Jeonghan shrugs, taking a step closer to where she’s standing a stair above him. His dress shoes pinch at his toes. “No,” he admits. He reaches over to tuck the strand of her hair that’s falling into her face behind her ear. “I just know that you like them.”
Nayoung chews her lip. “You’re impossible.”
“What are you doing later tonight?” Jeonghan says just for her to hear.
“I don’t know,” she replies, wary. “I’ll be busy for a while. And I have to go take pictures now.”
“Okay,” Jeonghan steps back with a smile. “Text me when you get home.”
Nayoung pushes past him, bumping his shoulder with hers. “You’re not my boyfriend, Yoon Jeonghan,” she reminds him.
He laughs at that, “I can pretend, can’t I?” Nayoung shoots him one last withering glare before walking off. “Congratulations again!” he calls after her, watching until she’s out of sight. She doesn’t look back once. Not like Jeonghan expected her to, anyway.
“You and Nayoung are more alike than you think,” Jisoo points out when Jeonghan resolutely refuses to continue talking about her.
Jeonghan picks at the remnants of his pasta with a fork. “How so?”
“You’re both too terrified to take a leap of faith for love.”
“You haven’t spoken to Nayoung one-on-one before,” Jeonghan grins wryly, trying to call his bluff.
Jisoo gives him that, “I haven’t.” But it wasn’t rocket science, either.
“I would do it,” confesses Jeonghan after giving it some thought. They’d agreed to eat at this restaurant for the beach view, but it was overcast and storming outside the floor length windows that they were so famous for. “Just not with Nayoung.”
“No?”
Jeonghan takes a stab at a cherry tomato, but it goes rolling off the plate. “Because I don’t know if she’d meet me halfway.” That’s what made it all so frustrating, yet impossible for Jeonghan to stay away.
In their second year of university, Jeonghan went to excruciating lengths to set Nayoung up with their mutual friend Seungcheol. It was a relationship that was doomed to fail though, because Jeonghan knew from the outset that Nayoung had a crush on him instead.
“There’s something clinical about your ambition,” is what Nayoung always said when they came back to the topic. Today, she’s sitting with her back to him in his bed, trying to zip up her dress. The light filtering in through the cracks between the blinds catches in her hair. “You’re always waiting for the other person to spill their guts first,” she adds this time around.
“You say that like you’re different.” Jeonghan walks across the room to her, stooping over to pull up the zipper. His knuckles brush the skin on the small of her back, collateral damage, to which she shivers.
“I wish I was,” Nayoung laments as Jeonghan moves to sit beside her. “But I don’t think I am.” She turns to look at him, gaze flickering down to his mouth momentarily before settling to meet his eyes. “And on top of all that, I don’t get you.”
Jeonghan twines his fingers with hers in slow motion. “What do you mean?”
Nayoung says distractedly, “I don’t know.” She tenses when he presses his forehead against her hair and relaxes again when he moves to kiss the side of her neck, featherlight. “I feel like I should know what to expect from you, but I never do.”
Jeonghan suddenly wishes he could give her that predictable kind of love. “But what’s the fun in that?”
Nayoung leans away so they can look at each other, head on. “You’re no good for me.” She sounds like she barely believes it, either. Even in the skewed light with the shades closed she’s beautiful.
Jeonghan feels the corner of his mouth quirk up, apologetic. “Maybe,” he agrees too easily. And then Nayoung closes the distance between them again and kisses him, like every second they spend apart kills her inside the same way it kills him.
no subject