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THE KILL
GAME THEORY
355w, jeonghan/nayoung
Nayoung was on the wrong side of drunk well before new year’s, entirely and unfortunately out of her own volition. Jeonghan shifted from where he was leaning against the railing to face her. “You’re mad at me,” he stated with amusement.
“I needed to clear my head,” she still had the self-preservation to correct. But she wasn’t quite above the curiosity gnawing at the back of her throat like a dog with a bone, “Why would you think that?”
The wine glass balanced between Jeonghan’s fingers refracted the city lights on its curved face like a mirrorball. “Just a hunch,” he said.
She propped her chin against the palm of her hand. It was freezing on the balcony, and her cheeks were surely flushed from the winter cold. All conditions for the, “You say that like you’re privileged enough to know,” she accidentally let slip.
“Ah,” Jeonghan echoed.
“That’s not saying a lot.” After all, she’d watched from the couch as he took his sweet time after shrugging off his coat at the front door, talking to everyone on his long-winded path toward her. It wasn’t like her, she knew, to stalk out in haste as their eyes met from across the living room, her heart suddenly deafening in her own ears. "You know everybody."
He smiled. “And is that such a bad thing?”
“Why would it be?” she scoffed.
“It just seems like it,” Jeonghan replied so gently that she made the mistake of looking at him. His gaze steadfastly trained on her was gentle, too. “To you.”
Nayoung inhaled shakily. “I feel like I’m being cornered,” but she was the one leaning into him against her better judgment.
“You’re the one who led me out here into the dark to make out,” Jeonghan retorted, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “So who really started this?”
Feeling the liquid courage heat her belly, Nayoung tugged at the collar of his shirt. She proffered directly to Jeonghan’s mouth an open challenge, “Only one way to find out,” and he closed the distance to kiss her just as the crowd inside started the countdown from ten.
DWINDLING MERCURIAL HIGH
1622w, jeonghan/nayoung
Most of her peers had asked their husbands for jewelry, or lavish vacations, or limited edition designer goods for their third wedding anniversaries. Im Nayoung, on the other hand, asked for:
“A divorce,” echoed Jeonghan.
Nayoung put her chopsticks down with a finality. Neither of them had touched their three premium slices of wagyu, sizzling forgotten on the respective hot stones that had come with the elaborate dinner her mother-in-law arranged for them. “This isn’t going anywhere,” she reasoned, grasping at straws for the myriad of rationalizations she’d recited to herself every sleepless night leading up to the moment. Staring at Jeonghan, though, made her come up empty. She cleared her throat. “And we’re not getting any younger. The timing’s right.”
Jeonghan smiled, so kind it was almost sardonic, into the lip of his wine glass. “You’ve made up your mind.”
“This was a business relationship from the start,” Nayoung bristled. They’d been walking down the marriage aisle long before the day they said their vows on national broadcast, fated by meddling parents and matchmaking shamans and the future of the economy that the unity between their family’s conglomerates was to supposedly bolster. But worst of all, “And isn’t it miserable? Being trapped in a loveless marriage?”
“Is that what you think of this?” Jeonghan’s face was flushed down to the neck of his collared shirt. He turned red all over when he had enough to drink, which he had once confided to Nayoung that he hated.
He’d kissed her after the admission, and it’d made her weak in the knees at twenty-two, easily romanced by sweet words and Jeonghan’s warm hands on her hips. Nayoung blushed in tandem. “How else could I think of it?” she challenged.
Jeonghan leaned back in his chair, a picture of seeming defeat. Nayoung knew better than to believe the matter was truly settled, though. “Fine,” he agreed too readily for sincerity, finishing his cabernet. “But give it ninety days for the hotel merger to close. We can process the paperwork right after.”
Nayoung drained her own wine. She placed the glass back on the table and wiped her lips with the back of her hand, smudging her lipstick in the process. “Deal,” she agreed coolly, too acutely aware of how Jeonghan was staring at her mouth from across the dining table.
*****
“Your husband looks handsome today,” Sojung commented as Nayoung internally debated whether to grab another flute of champagne.
Nayoung scoffed, her gaze already focused on Jeonghan from where he was making small talk with his uncle down the hall. The pastel yellow of his tie and pocket square painstakingly matched the accents of her dress. “He looks the same as he always does,” she dismissed.
“Utterly and head-over-heels in love with you?”
Nayoung couldn’t help but snort. “Please.” If she’d had more foresight on the sequence of events, she would’ve waited another week before bringing up the divorce to Jeonghan. Nayoung had forgotten that they were scheduled to attend his family’s annual charity gala, and the ensuing car ride over had been horribly awkward for her. “Stop with that nonsense.”
Sojung sighed wistfully in her place. “But it was true once, wasn’t it?”
“For you, too.” Sojung and Jeonghan had been involved with each other sometime during their university years. Their circle was small enough for Nayoung to know everyone Jeonghan was speculated to have slept with. “It feels so long ago.”
“What part?” teased Sojung, “being in love, or me knowing your husband intimately?”
Nayoung decided she wasn’t sober enough for this conversation and flagged a waiter over for a refill. “I don’t know,” she said, quite honestly. There was a time, too, when Jeonghan used to kiss her like he’d die without it. When exactly had everything changed? “All of it.”
Sojung had gotten married the spring after Nayoung and Jeonghan, outside of Seoul. The plum blossoms were in full bloom at the venue they’d booked, and raining down over them during the reception.
“How does it feel, forced to attend your former fling’s wedding?” Nayoung had commented, aiming to barb as Jeonghan swayed her across the dance floor.
“It was never anything serious,” he bothered enough to clarify. He paused and tenderly pulled a stray blossom that had caught in her hair, before brushing the strand back behind her ear. “And besides,” he lowered his voice as if to hear the pavlovian quickening of her pulse, “I don’t have eyes for anyone else but you.”
“You two have always been such romantics in your own separate ways,” Sojung pointed out to her now, reassuringly. “That’s why you both like to suffer.” Or maybe not.
Nayoung had the tact to be somewhat offended. “Romance can’t help but burn out,” she reasoned more to herself than to Sojung, just as Jeonghan met her eyes from where he’d been on the fringes of what had undoubtedly turned into family politicking. She watched his toothy smile grow as he excused himself and started toward her. “You fall out of love eventually.”
Sojung only looked at her kindly and with pity. “Or you fall into it, over and over again.”
*****
Nayoung refused the hand Jeonghan proffered and stumbled up the path instead. “You’ve been acting different lately.”
Jeonghan trailed behind her. She could hear the smile in his voice when he volleyed back, “What do you mean?”
“This trip.” Jeonghan had paid for an entire villa for a weekend that they were perusing the enormous garden of. “Driving me to and from work every day. Taking me out to dinner.“ She looked over her shoulder to glare at him briefly. “Need I go on?”
Jeonghan’s footsteps slowed. When Nayoung paused to catch her breath, she noticed that he was examining a bush of pink peonies, her favorite. “I had a whole list of things I wanted to do with you,” he admitted to a flower’s open face. He picked it and held it out gingerly for her to take. “But now we’re pressed for time, aren’t we?”
Nayoung hated the traitorous reflex that made her heart skip a beat. “It doesn’t have to be me.” She whirled around and started down the trail once more, arms crossed over chest. “You’ll become the nation’s most eligible bachelor once you’re single again. Young, charming, filthy rich –”
“And handsome,” Jeonghan added. “Don’t forget that you married me for my good looks.”
“Infuriating,” corrected Nayoung, stopping at a fork at the end of their path. The sun was beginning to set and she wanted to head back to their lodging, but couldn’t tell the way. “If I’d known our marriage was going to end up like this, I would’ve eloped with someone in the States.”
Jeonghan rounded the corner to meet her eyes. “You say that like you would’ve had the guts,” he precisely called her bluff, which only made her fume more.
“I’m not a coward.” She stalked off in the opposite direction of the trail he was blocking. “I just don’t have any reason to be brave with you.”
Jeonghan began to lose his composure. “You don’t have any reason to or you simply don’t bother?”
“Doesn’t one inform the other?” Good, Nayoung thought awfully, that he was getting just as worked up as she was. “Besides, everyone thinks we’ve been separated for months.”
Jeonghan grabbed her hand, forcing her to pause on her rampage down the winding garden trail. “So that’s what this is about.”
“It’s so condescending, pretending that you know everything you’d never understand,” Nayoung bit back like a wounded animal, cornered at a dead end.
Jeonghan’s gaze softened. “Everyone’s thought things about us since before we were born.” Everyone thought Jeonghan would never be ambitious enough to take up helm of the family conglomerate, and Nayoung too cold to care for anything but the utmost success. It would end disastrously, is what they all said when their engagement came to light. “What makes this any different?”
Nayoung felt pinned to the spot when all Jeonghan did was turn his palm against hers and lace their fingers together in a gesture so delicate it might’ve been love. ““We both could’ve chosen anyone,” she threw out, uselessly.
“You don’t think I wanted to choose you?”
“Not entirely out of your own volition.” The sun was rapidly setting behind the hills and their hands intertwined were tinted in the blue onset of dusk. She chewed her lip. “But if you did, that’d scare me more.”
He hummed, considering. “I think most of all, I’m scared that they’re right,” Nayoung confessed in a rush, suddenly afraid that this moment would fade with the sunset. “In fact, I think I’m so scared that I made everything they said about us come true.”
Jeonghan let go of her hand and dropped to a knee to attend to her untied shoe. She hadn’t noticed it at all up until then. “There’s more to love than courage,” his voice trembled with a vulnerability of his own. Bent over, Nayoung couldn’t tell what expression he was making. He looped the bunny ears of the laces into a double knot before standing back up. “I’m sorry, for never showing how much I cared.”
Nayoung looked at the dirt stain on the knee of his cream-colored slacks. “I’m starting to see it now.”
“I am in love with you,” Jeonghan said if she still couldn’t tell. The last dredges of light caught the pretty flush of his cheeks. “I don’t know if I’ll ever stop feeling this way.”
Nayoung moved contrary to her self-imposed instincts and drew herself close enough to hold him. “That’s the most terrifying thing you’ve ever said.” And like a dream, the fairy lights sparked on one by one around them.
WELL, BE RECKLESS FOR ME
1107w, jeonghan/nayoung
“Oh god,” Nayoung says after wrenching her door open before she can stop herself, “It looks horrible.”
Jeonghan laughs like he expected nothing less of her reaction. “You wound me,” like she’s played right into his hand, once again. “I haven’t even taken the hat off.”
“Please don’t.” But she can’t help but stare at where his hair’s been buzzed evenly at the nape of his neck as he toes off his sneakers by her shoe rack. At this point, Nayoung’s decided she’s seen enough and pointedly averts her gaze by the time he turns around. “Why’d you stop by, anyway?”
“I’m making my goodbye rounds,” explains Jeonghan, so nonchalant that she almost outright believes him. “You didn’t want to see me one last time?”
Nayoung clarifies, “I already did.” He’d picked her up in his car for dinner and attempted to send her off with a Guess this is it pressed tender into her jaw. She scrambled to draw him into a bruising kiss over the console before asking him up to her apartment. “Two weeks ago.”
He crowded her against the entryway that they were standing opposite of each other now and licked into her mouth with a desperation he’d never exposed over the eight months of their barely-a-situation situationship and the decade they’d peripherally known each other. “Don’t miss me too much,” he’d grinned easily the morning after, stealing one of her baseball caps to hide his over-processed hair that wouldn’t lie flat after she’d run her hands through it the entire night.
“I won’t.” Nayoung had reassured herself the week prior that it was ultimately futile to think about him when there was no possible way that he would think about her in return. She’d watched as the corner of his lips twitched downward briefly before he leaned in to leave a chaste kiss on her cheek. Maybe a younger version her would’ve cried about the entire exchange as soon as the door clicked shut behind him, but Nayoung wasn’t in her twenties anymore and had been rendered so hopelessly unromantic from a career fueled by rose-tinted idolatry that she couldn’t find it within herself to dredge up a single tear of pity for her ill-fated choose-your-own-adventure ending credits scene.
Jeonghan moves to pull off the hat. “I meant to give this back to you.” It’s the same one he took that she didn’t have any prior sentimental attachment to. Nayoung hadn’t even noticed it missing from her closet.
Until now. “Just mail it to me when you’re done.” Though they both know the logistics of that aren’t very sound at all.
“You don’t want to see the hair that badly, huh.”
Nayoung busies herself with putting away her plates from the dishrack. They haven’t even crossed the threshold into her apartment proper. And then she’s realized she’s made a grave mistake, letting Jeonghan take one step further in. “What are you really here for?” she finally asks, more annoyed with herself above all else.
“My own selfishness,” he admits too readily from behind her.
Nayoung reels, almost dropping her favorite mug into the sink. No amount of acting lessons or failed debuts could make her aloofness convincing enough. She whips around to face him. “What do you mean by that?”
Jeonghan leans over the kitchen countertop facing her and cups his chin with his hand. “What else could it mean, Nayoung-ah.”
“I’m asking you,” she manages over the hammering of her heart. Her cheeks burn in the direct sunlight shining through the balcony windows, cutting a scar of gold across the self-effacing slope of his smile. “Don’t you think you’re too old to be playing games?”
Jeonghan clicks his tongue and turns to look outside. “I don’t ask for things often, you know,” he defends, sounding a bit petulant.
“You took my hat without even asking me.”
“I did come here to give it back.”
Nayoung places the mug, only half-dry, back on the counter. Her fingers feel stiff from gripping the handle too tight, an effort for some semblance of control when Jeonghan’s intentions were too nebulous to get a grasp on. “I don’t want you to give me hope,” she snaps, acting on her own imagined worst case scenario.
Jeonghan meets her eyes again at that, solemn. “Do you hate the idea of me having feelings for you that much?”
“That’s not what this is,” Nayoung swallows.
Jeonghan straightens and stares at his hands. “You think this is easy for me.” He looks thin. “It’s fine,” he’d justified when she brought it up, “I’ll come back from the army jacked.” It’s the same excuse he used when she joked about how frequently he was asking if he could see her in the past month leading up to his enlistment. I’ll be out of your hair soon. “But I couldn’t ask you to wait.”
Nayoung doesn’t mean to be intentionally difficult, but can’t help but say, “Yet you’re okay telling your fans to?”
“I’ll live if they find some new idol to swoon over in my absence.” Jeonghan pins her with his gaze, “But I don’t know if I could when it comes to you.”
Of all the possible paths she could’ve chased, Nayoung doesn’t quite understand how she ended up here, staring Yoon Jeonghan down in her kitchen at thirty, the gravity of his confession weighing over them. Or maybe every road was bound to lead them to this inevitable junction, unimaginable to their younger selves that first met eyes in the Melona green Pledis practice room. “You wouldn’t give me the time of day, but you were so polite about it,” Jeonghan chuckled when he divulged he used to have a schoolboy crush. “I liked that about you.”
And now the sun is setting, and Nayoung wants with a hunger she’d starved herself of for so long that she’d lost all touch with it, chewing raw in time with each beat of her heart. “You can ask me,” she tells him quietly, urgently. Her fingers grip the tile counter behind her. “You should’ve asked me.”
He doesn’t. Instead, Jeonghan rounds the kitchen island to her. He holds her face like he’s about to kiss her, heartachingly gentle, but he doesn’t do that, either. “Wait for me,” he whispers like a dream. Nayoung doesn’t know whose. “Please.”
She tugs the bill of the cap out of his eyes with a shaking hand. The afternoon light leaves her overexposed while he’s backlit. A silence takes them like the moments before a predator lunges at its prey.
And then she surges forward to press her mouth to his, which has to be an answer enough.
355w, jeonghan/nayoung
Nayoung was on the wrong side of drunk well before new year’s, entirely and unfortunately out of her own volition. Jeonghan shifted from where he was leaning against the railing to face her. “You’re mad at me,” he stated with amusement.
“I needed to clear my head,” she still had the self-preservation to correct. But she wasn’t quite above the curiosity gnawing at the back of her throat like a dog with a bone, “Why would you think that?”
The wine glass balanced between Jeonghan’s fingers refracted the city lights on its curved face like a mirrorball. “Just a hunch,” he said.
She propped her chin against the palm of her hand. It was freezing on the balcony, and her cheeks were surely flushed from the winter cold. All conditions for the, “You say that like you’re privileged enough to know,” she accidentally let slip.
“Ah,” Jeonghan echoed.
“That’s not saying a lot.” After all, she’d watched from the couch as he took his sweet time after shrugging off his coat at the front door, talking to everyone on his long-winded path toward her. It wasn’t like her, she knew, to stalk out in haste as their eyes met from across the living room, her heart suddenly deafening in her own ears. "You know everybody."
He smiled. “And is that such a bad thing?”
“Why would it be?” she scoffed.
“It just seems like it,” Jeonghan replied so gently that she made the mistake of looking at him. His gaze steadfastly trained on her was gentle, too. “To you.”
Nayoung inhaled shakily. “I feel like I’m being cornered,” but she was the one leaning into him against her better judgment.
“You’re the one who led me out here into the dark to make out,” Jeonghan retorted, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “So who really started this?”
Feeling the liquid courage heat her belly, Nayoung tugged at the collar of his shirt. She proffered directly to Jeonghan’s mouth an open challenge, “Only one way to find out,” and he closed the distance to kiss her just as the crowd inside started the countdown from ten.
DWINDLING MERCURIAL HIGH
1622w, jeonghan/nayoung
Most of her peers had asked their husbands for jewelry, or lavish vacations, or limited edition designer goods for their third wedding anniversaries. Im Nayoung, on the other hand, asked for:
“A divorce,” echoed Jeonghan.
Nayoung put her chopsticks down with a finality. Neither of them had touched their three premium slices of wagyu, sizzling forgotten on the respective hot stones that had come with the elaborate dinner her mother-in-law arranged for them. “This isn’t going anywhere,” she reasoned, grasping at straws for the myriad of rationalizations she’d recited to herself every sleepless night leading up to the moment. Staring at Jeonghan, though, made her come up empty. She cleared her throat. “And we’re not getting any younger. The timing’s right.”
Jeonghan smiled, so kind it was almost sardonic, into the lip of his wine glass. “You’ve made up your mind.”
“This was a business relationship from the start,” Nayoung bristled. They’d been walking down the marriage aisle long before the day they said their vows on national broadcast, fated by meddling parents and matchmaking shamans and the future of the economy that the unity between their family’s conglomerates was to supposedly bolster. But worst of all, “And isn’t it miserable? Being trapped in a loveless marriage?”
“Is that what you think of this?” Jeonghan’s face was flushed down to the neck of his collared shirt. He turned red all over when he had enough to drink, which he had once confided to Nayoung that he hated.
He’d kissed her after the admission, and it’d made her weak in the knees at twenty-two, easily romanced by sweet words and Jeonghan’s warm hands on her hips. Nayoung blushed in tandem. “How else could I think of it?” she challenged.
Jeonghan leaned back in his chair, a picture of seeming defeat. Nayoung knew better than to believe the matter was truly settled, though. “Fine,” he agreed too readily for sincerity, finishing his cabernet. “But give it ninety days for the hotel merger to close. We can process the paperwork right after.”
Nayoung drained her own wine. She placed the glass back on the table and wiped her lips with the back of her hand, smudging her lipstick in the process. “Deal,” she agreed coolly, too acutely aware of how Jeonghan was staring at her mouth from across the dining table.
*****
“Your husband looks handsome today,” Sojung commented as Nayoung internally debated whether to grab another flute of champagne.
Nayoung scoffed, her gaze already focused on Jeonghan from where he was making small talk with his uncle down the hall. The pastel yellow of his tie and pocket square painstakingly matched the accents of her dress. “He looks the same as he always does,” she dismissed.
“Utterly and head-over-heels in love with you?”
Nayoung couldn’t help but snort. “Please.” If she’d had more foresight on the sequence of events, she would’ve waited another week before bringing up the divorce to Jeonghan. Nayoung had forgotten that they were scheduled to attend his family’s annual charity gala, and the ensuing car ride over had been horribly awkward for her. “Stop with that nonsense.”
Sojung sighed wistfully in her place. “But it was true once, wasn’t it?”
“For you, too.” Sojung and Jeonghan had been involved with each other sometime during their university years. Their circle was small enough for Nayoung to know everyone Jeonghan was speculated to have slept with. “It feels so long ago.”
“What part?” teased Sojung, “being in love, or me knowing your husband intimately?”
Nayoung decided she wasn’t sober enough for this conversation and flagged a waiter over for a refill. “I don’t know,” she said, quite honestly. There was a time, too, when Jeonghan used to kiss her like he’d die without it. When exactly had everything changed? “All of it.”
Sojung had gotten married the spring after Nayoung and Jeonghan, outside of Seoul. The plum blossoms were in full bloom at the venue they’d booked, and raining down over them during the reception.
“How does it feel, forced to attend your former fling’s wedding?” Nayoung had commented, aiming to barb as Jeonghan swayed her across the dance floor.
“It was never anything serious,” he bothered enough to clarify. He paused and tenderly pulled a stray blossom that had caught in her hair, before brushing the strand back behind her ear. “And besides,” he lowered his voice as if to hear the pavlovian quickening of her pulse, “I don’t have eyes for anyone else but you.”
“You two have always been such romantics in your own separate ways,” Sojung pointed out to her now, reassuringly. “That’s why you both like to suffer.” Or maybe not.
Nayoung had the tact to be somewhat offended. “Romance can’t help but burn out,” she reasoned more to herself than to Sojung, just as Jeonghan met her eyes from where he’d been on the fringes of what had undoubtedly turned into family politicking. She watched his toothy smile grow as he excused himself and started toward her. “You fall out of love eventually.”
Sojung only looked at her kindly and with pity. “Or you fall into it, over and over again.”
*****
Nayoung refused the hand Jeonghan proffered and stumbled up the path instead. “You’ve been acting different lately.”
Jeonghan trailed behind her. She could hear the smile in his voice when he volleyed back, “What do you mean?”
“This trip.” Jeonghan had paid for an entire villa for a weekend that they were perusing the enormous garden of. “Driving me to and from work every day. Taking me out to dinner.“ She looked over her shoulder to glare at him briefly. “Need I go on?”
Jeonghan’s footsteps slowed. When Nayoung paused to catch her breath, she noticed that he was examining a bush of pink peonies, her favorite. “I had a whole list of things I wanted to do with you,” he admitted to a flower’s open face. He picked it and held it out gingerly for her to take. “But now we’re pressed for time, aren’t we?”
Nayoung hated the traitorous reflex that made her heart skip a beat. “It doesn’t have to be me.” She whirled around and started down the trail once more, arms crossed over chest. “You’ll become the nation’s most eligible bachelor once you’re single again. Young, charming, filthy rich –”
“And handsome,” Jeonghan added. “Don’t forget that you married me for my good looks.”
“Infuriating,” corrected Nayoung, stopping at a fork at the end of their path. The sun was beginning to set and she wanted to head back to their lodging, but couldn’t tell the way. “If I’d known our marriage was going to end up like this, I would’ve eloped with someone in the States.”
Jeonghan rounded the corner to meet her eyes. “You say that like you would’ve had the guts,” he precisely called her bluff, which only made her fume more.
“I’m not a coward.” She stalked off in the opposite direction of the trail he was blocking. “I just don’t have any reason to be brave with you.”
Jeonghan began to lose his composure. “You don’t have any reason to or you simply don’t bother?”
“Doesn’t one inform the other?” Good, Nayoung thought awfully, that he was getting just as worked up as she was. “Besides, everyone thinks we’ve been separated for months.”
Jeonghan grabbed her hand, forcing her to pause on her rampage down the winding garden trail. “So that’s what this is about.”
“It’s so condescending, pretending that you know everything you’d never understand,” Nayoung bit back like a wounded animal, cornered at a dead end.
Jeonghan’s gaze softened. “Everyone’s thought things about us since before we were born.” Everyone thought Jeonghan would never be ambitious enough to take up helm of the family conglomerate, and Nayoung too cold to care for anything but the utmost success. It would end disastrously, is what they all said when their engagement came to light. “What makes this any different?”
Nayoung felt pinned to the spot when all Jeonghan did was turn his palm against hers and lace their fingers together in a gesture so delicate it might’ve been love. ““We both could’ve chosen anyone,” she threw out, uselessly.
“You don’t think I wanted to choose you?”
“Not entirely out of your own volition.” The sun was rapidly setting behind the hills and their hands intertwined were tinted in the blue onset of dusk. She chewed her lip. “But if you did, that’d scare me more.”
He hummed, considering. “I think most of all, I’m scared that they’re right,” Nayoung confessed in a rush, suddenly afraid that this moment would fade with the sunset. “In fact, I think I’m so scared that I made everything they said about us come true.”
Jeonghan let go of her hand and dropped to a knee to attend to her untied shoe. She hadn’t noticed it at all up until then. “There’s more to love than courage,” his voice trembled with a vulnerability of his own. Bent over, Nayoung couldn’t tell what expression he was making. He looped the bunny ears of the laces into a double knot before standing back up. “I’m sorry, for never showing how much I cared.”
Nayoung looked at the dirt stain on the knee of his cream-colored slacks. “I’m starting to see it now.”
“I am in love with you,” Jeonghan said if she still couldn’t tell. The last dredges of light caught the pretty flush of his cheeks. “I don’t know if I’ll ever stop feeling this way.”
Nayoung moved contrary to her self-imposed instincts and drew herself close enough to hold him. “That’s the most terrifying thing you’ve ever said.” And like a dream, the fairy lights sparked on one by one around them.
WELL, BE RECKLESS FOR ME
1107w, jeonghan/nayoung
“Oh god,” Nayoung says after wrenching her door open before she can stop herself, “It looks horrible.”
Jeonghan laughs like he expected nothing less of her reaction. “You wound me,” like she’s played right into his hand, once again. “I haven’t even taken the hat off.”
“Please don’t.” But she can’t help but stare at where his hair’s been buzzed evenly at the nape of his neck as he toes off his sneakers by her shoe rack. At this point, Nayoung’s decided she’s seen enough and pointedly averts her gaze by the time he turns around. “Why’d you stop by, anyway?”
“I’m making my goodbye rounds,” explains Jeonghan, so nonchalant that she almost outright believes him. “You didn’t want to see me one last time?”
Nayoung clarifies, “I already did.” He’d picked her up in his car for dinner and attempted to send her off with a Guess this is it pressed tender into her jaw. She scrambled to draw him into a bruising kiss over the console before asking him up to her apartment. “Two weeks ago.”
He crowded her against the entryway that they were standing opposite of each other now and licked into her mouth with a desperation he’d never exposed over the eight months of their barely-a-situation situationship and the decade they’d peripherally known each other. “Don’t miss me too much,” he’d grinned easily the morning after, stealing one of her baseball caps to hide his over-processed hair that wouldn’t lie flat after she’d run her hands through it the entire night.
“I won’t.” Nayoung had reassured herself the week prior that it was ultimately futile to think about him when there was no possible way that he would think about her in return. She’d watched as the corner of his lips twitched downward briefly before he leaned in to leave a chaste kiss on her cheek. Maybe a younger version her would’ve cried about the entire exchange as soon as the door clicked shut behind him, but Nayoung wasn’t in her twenties anymore and had been rendered so hopelessly unromantic from a career fueled by rose-tinted idolatry that she couldn’t find it within herself to dredge up a single tear of pity for her ill-fated choose-your-own-adventure ending credits scene.
Jeonghan moves to pull off the hat. “I meant to give this back to you.” It’s the same one he took that she didn’t have any prior sentimental attachment to. Nayoung hadn’t even noticed it missing from her closet.
Until now. “Just mail it to me when you’re done.” Though they both know the logistics of that aren’t very sound at all.
“You don’t want to see the hair that badly, huh.”
Nayoung busies herself with putting away her plates from the dishrack. They haven’t even crossed the threshold into her apartment proper. And then she’s realized she’s made a grave mistake, letting Jeonghan take one step further in. “What are you really here for?” she finally asks, more annoyed with herself above all else.
“My own selfishness,” he admits too readily from behind her.
Nayoung reels, almost dropping her favorite mug into the sink. No amount of acting lessons or failed debuts could make her aloofness convincing enough. She whips around to face him. “What do you mean by that?”
Jeonghan leans over the kitchen countertop facing her and cups his chin with his hand. “What else could it mean, Nayoung-ah.”
“I’m asking you,” she manages over the hammering of her heart. Her cheeks burn in the direct sunlight shining through the balcony windows, cutting a scar of gold across the self-effacing slope of his smile. “Don’t you think you’re too old to be playing games?”
Jeonghan clicks his tongue and turns to look outside. “I don’t ask for things often, you know,” he defends, sounding a bit petulant.
“You took my hat without even asking me.”
“I did come here to give it back.”
Nayoung places the mug, only half-dry, back on the counter. Her fingers feel stiff from gripping the handle too tight, an effort for some semblance of control when Jeonghan’s intentions were too nebulous to get a grasp on. “I don’t want you to give me hope,” she snaps, acting on her own imagined worst case scenario.
Jeonghan meets her eyes again at that, solemn. “Do you hate the idea of me having feelings for you that much?”
“That’s not what this is,” Nayoung swallows.
Jeonghan straightens and stares at his hands. “You think this is easy for me.” He looks thin. “It’s fine,” he’d justified when she brought it up, “I’ll come back from the army jacked.” It’s the same excuse he used when she joked about how frequently he was asking if he could see her in the past month leading up to his enlistment. I’ll be out of your hair soon. “But I couldn’t ask you to wait.”
Nayoung doesn’t mean to be intentionally difficult, but can’t help but say, “Yet you’re okay telling your fans to?”
“I’ll live if they find some new idol to swoon over in my absence.” Jeonghan pins her with his gaze, “But I don’t know if I could when it comes to you.”
Of all the possible paths she could’ve chased, Nayoung doesn’t quite understand how she ended up here, staring Yoon Jeonghan down in her kitchen at thirty, the gravity of his confession weighing over them. Or maybe every road was bound to lead them to this inevitable junction, unimaginable to their younger selves that first met eyes in the Melona green Pledis practice room. “You wouldn’t give me the time of day, but you were so polite about it,” Jeonghan chuckled when he divulged he used to have a schoolboy crush. “I liked that about you.”
And now the sun is setting, and Nayoung wants with a hunger she’d starved herself of for so long that she’d lost all touch with it, chewing raw in time with each beat of her heart. “You can ask me,” she tells him quietly, urgently. Her fingers grip the tile counter behind her. “You should’ve asked me.”
He doesn’t. Instead, Jeonghan rounds the kitchen island to her. He holds her face like he’s about to kiss her, heartachingly gentle, but he doesn’t do that, either. “Wait for me,” he whispers like a dream. Nayoung doesn’t know whose. “Please.”
She tugs the bill of the cap out of his eyes with a shaking hand. The afternoon light leaves her overexposed while he’s backlit. A silence takes them like the moments before a predator lunges at its prey.
And then she surges forward to press her mouth to his, which has to be an answer enough.