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The jet lag hits you hard in the middle of your old dean’s speech. You basically black out in a yawn and come to when she’s raising her champagne and toasting to everyone in the hotel ballroom, Happy ten year reunion everyone! To the California Institute of Technology class of 2022!

Yeesh, you’re old.

You down your champagne a second too late, so you’re forced to chug it to not look like a bumbling idiot in the crowd. As soon as you’re done, you grab Wendy’s arm and grumble, “Why did you ever convince me to do this.”

When you started your new job in Switzerland ten years ago, you found out by coincidence that a girl on your floor in your building - who moved to sing opera - also went to CalTech at the same time as you did. You stayed friends, became best friends, even, and when the invites for your... gulp... ten year reunion were sent across the Atlantic, she insisted you both go.

You protested at first, because Mark said he wasn’t going to go and the rest of your friend group wasn’t in the class of 2022. But Wendy convinced you you hadn’t been home to see your dad in a while and that it was time. And, of course, a college memory that you try not to think about began poking around in your head, lingered and loomed until you bought the ticket, and now is just beating you up as you try to keep focused on the small group of her old sorority sisters that you met earlier in the night.

You haven’t seen that familiar face…. not yet. But you don’t think that’s even going to happen.

“Wanted to make sure you weren’t too good for us yet!” Wendy jokes, just as you think the exact same thing about that familiar face. They’re too good for this event, wouldn’t dare to show themselves here.

Which is why you can’t admit that the reason you came back to California isn’t just because Wendy asked.

“I just feel old,” you grumble, wishing you had another glass of champagne to calm your nerves. “And tired, I should’ve napped, the jet lag is so bad.”

You should’ve never come.

“When’s our flight back?” she asks.

“Tonight, one am.” It’s almost nine already, which means only a few more hours to go until you’re freed from this personal entrapment and can be disappointed on your own time. You booked first-class tickets back to Europe - those at least come with the little eye mask, just in case you feel the tears start to well. Which you won’t.

“I assume we’re pulling an all-nighter, which means we need more alc—,” Wendy stops and starts, and then loses her mind when she sees something, “Holy shit.”

Her lungs have never been any less impressive at saying whatever she wants at an incredible decibel.

“What now?” you drawl-yawn, not wanting to exert the effort to turn to where she’s looking but reluctantly doing so when she won't turn away, “Someone from the retirement home here to pick me up?—,” You finally do the half-pirouette, crane your neck to see, and your tender, tired body nearly snaps in two when you see what had provoked that reaction.

Not what, who.

“I had no idea he was coming to this,” Wendy gasps, eyes not leaving the striding figure for a second. “I thought he was in Turin for his new project!”

She’s not wrong. That’s what Google said on the flight over, at least.

“See? He’s not too good for this, either,” you murmur, though it’s more to yourself and this quietly overreacting part of your heart than it is to Wendy or any of her friends.

He’s here, you cannot believe he actually came to this thing. You cannot believe you came and you stayed and now you’re in the same place with him at the same time for once in the past ten years.

Wendy's reaction is the status quo. The hushed buzz in the room escalates into something threatening and bursting, every single man and woman glances in the same direction, whispering, staring, not holding themselves back from making him the inadvertent star of this event. And you don’t blame them, seeing him in a suit in photos in such an experience. However this grey one now, with the skinny navy tie and his hair dyed to match, means nothing can compare to reality. He’s never stopped looking like a romance hero, stepped right out of a book… or a movie.

Yeri has straight up swooned onto the bar, she has little hearts of blushes over her cheeks when she warbles, “Should I talk to him?”

Like your lungs lose their minds, your breathing quickens at the thought of her talking to him in front of you. Which you don’t understand, because it’s not like… it’s not like you’re his…

“OMG, no way,” Joy pushes her - and you by the wayside - into a vat of deep realism, “Honey, you aren’t even on the same level as he is.”

“It’s been ten years!” Yeri whines. “We’re all adults, I can talk to a classmate if I want.”

It’s been ten years and you’re all adults and you still had the same reaction to seeing him that you did the first time. He is a far cry from the curly-haired hoodie boy that you remember, but wow, that feeling was too familiar, too fresh and too new. And you still aren’t on the same level he is.

“That’s not just a classmate, that’s Jaehyun freaking Jeong!” Wendy exclaims, and maybe he hears it, because his head twists sort of in your direction and you hide right behind Seulgi’s elegant frame.

That’s Jaehyun freaking Jeong, looking exactly the same as you remember him from school.

Yeri nudges Irene, the president of their sorority and the defacto head of their friend circle, and wonders, “Did you ever talk to him when we were there?”

Interesting, that Irene is the one that's asked first, because Irene is the only one that’s kind of close to his level. She’s a model that does like, fashion weeks and stuff, and has a good hundred thousand followers on Instagram. That’s the sort of thing that would make sense for Jaehyun Jeong.

But even then, she denies it with a shy little shake of her head, “No way,” before she turns to Seulgi, “Did you?”

“No, too scared,” Seulgi answers, and Joy chimes in right after, “I couldn’t look at him.”

And bold, confident, approaches-random-European men-in-bars-with-full-confidence Wendy finishes it off with the starkest denial, “Believe me, I tried, but he wouldn’t even glance my way if we crossed paths on campus,” before she remembers their little circle has an addition, and all five of them look over at you as she asks, “Did you?”

The ghost of who you used to be at school melds with your evolved presence, and some lost, forgotten shyness begins to explode over every bit of you. You don’t think it has anything to do with the champagne you chugged. Maybe if you chugged like, three bottles, and also had a fifth of vodka. This isn't alcohol.

You clear your throat of the desire to lie, and admit, “Once.”

They lose their minds, there’s no way to describe it other than that. Just gasps and shocked stares galore through all five of them.

“What?!” Wendy yelps, in complete disbelief that in the ten years you’ve been friends this has never come up. “You talked to him?!”

Not like you ever… you weren’t keeping this from her on purpose. You just never shared this story with anyone.

“Yeah. I don’t even remember what it was about,” A big lie slips past your defenses, “it was at the library for like, two seconds…” another lie, “and that was it.” The biggest lie of them all.

You remember exactly what it was about - what started in the library for two seconds and involved into so much more. You’ve never forgotten.

“But still,” Yeri breathes in awe. “You talked to him.”

Yes. Yes, you did. Only he wasn’t Jaehyun Jeong then. He was far from it.

—

Hot Guy With the Hoodie is so hot.

So freaking hot. Hotter than every boy you’ve seen at CalTech, hotter than every male lead of every romance novel you’ve ever read. So freaking hot that every time you come to the engineering library and sit at your usual table (that just happens to be in perfect view of the spot he sits in with his mountain of textbooks) you feel like you and your chair are going to burst into flames. And then that flame will become an environmental hazard, because, you know, the wooden chair plus all the paper in here. 

But he has a dimple. 

You’ve been seeing him around for an entire semester and didn’t notice until now. He’s chowing down on prim little strawberries, which, you can’t even look at the bursts of red in his big hands without feeling some kind of way. And each time he chews there’s a literal rainbow of an indent in his cheek, almost hidden by the material of his hood that he always wears flipped up. 

You press your flaming face right into the middle of the novel you were reading - coincidentally open to the page where Woody the bare-chested cowboy hero comes to strip Scarlett the heroine of her soaking dress in the middle of a passionate romp - and try to calm down. He’s not even… well, yes, he’s hot all the time, but he looked so cute just then you couldn’t handle it. What you wouldn’t have given to have a cute college boyfriend, but here you are, on graduation eve, still without that box checked off. 

Tantrum over, you glance up again to get another look at HGWH (saying Hot Guy with the Hoodie to your roommates so many times got tiring) so you can picture his face as the male lead’s for the rest of this story, but he’s… he’s gone. You can’t help the defeated whine, because this is your last night at CalTech and you’re never going to see him again. The books are there but he is not, and a cursory glance around the floor does not bring up—, 

Your tender nose inflates with the magical essence of strawberries and an artificially lovely dousing of pine, and a shadow crosses upon the lustful pages you were about to fantasize about. When you look up........ Hot Guy With the Hoodie is right there. Like, you could reach out your hand and tuck it into the pocket of said infamous hoodie. And finally, you can see his eyes are the same honeyed brown as his curly hair, peeking over his forehead in the softest fringe. Not to mention he has dimples, plural, that come out when he… he smiles at you. 

He’s smiling at you, Hot Guy With the Hoodie is smiling at you. 

Hot Guy With the Hoodie is talking to you, and gosh, his voice is hot, too, “Hey.”

“Hello?” You’re an idiot! An idiot! You’ve spent an entire semester nursing this very wild crush and the one chance you have to talk to him all you can say is hello? And not even a sexy hello?

Scarlett has a line of dialogue in the book you can read in your periphery, "Woody, I want your Wild West of an existence in me, right now," and you feel the chagrin build for thinking you should look to a book called Wrangled and Tangled for advice. That’s what you get for reading a steamy novel instead of highlighting your articles and prepping for your job interview. Not that you’re even going to be able to accept this job if you get it, but you like to be prepared. For everything. 

And you’re not prepared for this.

He sits down and feeling his knee knock into yours is just crazy. The conversation opener he picks out is even crazier, “How much student debt do you have right now?”

“Um….” You lose all sense of rational thought, barely remembering you probably shouldn’t tell this stranger your dad works here. That makes doxxing you so easy. Not that he seems capable of doing that. 

“Everyone here takes out loans unless they’re ungodly rich. Please don’t be ungodly rich,” he whines and you watch with your own eyes - your own eyes! - as his fingers dart to tease your elbow and stop millimeters from actually touching you.

Good, because you don’t know what you would’ve done if he did. 

Your mind works before your mind works, “Uh, forty thousand or something? I think it’s like, ten k a year?”

That’s the amount of debt that Mark told you he once had after four years at school - you don’t want to end the conversation by telling HGWH you don’t have any debt because of your dad’s position. You’re not ungodly rich, either. Is that a point to you in his favor?

“I will get rid of all of it for you.”

Maybe his name should be amended to Crazy Guy With the Hoodie, because this is all so insane. He… as in, your fellow college student, a fellow twenty-two year old, can get you out of thousands of dollars of fictional debt. And you’re believing him?

He glances around the library for a moment of panic, before turning back to you and repeating his offer again, “I will get rid of any debt and interest you have if you can do two things—, shit.” He curses and ducks when he spots something, and his sudden action causes you to duck, too. Now your heads are on the table, caught between your laptop screen and the pages of your improper book, and he’s staring at you and whispering, “Two things. One, don’t report me for sexual harassment, and two, just follow along.”

You think the thoughts you just had about him might be the sexual harassment here.

“What the heck are you talking about?” you whisper-laugh back. As soon as you feel the smile dot against your mouth, his smile is back, and seeing the dimples up close is just… that’s the crazy part here. 

“Yes or no?” He touches you then, the fleeting press of his index finger against the tip of your nose, and although your mind was already made up, that just puts a charming bow on top of it all.

“Yes,” you murmur.

His nose scrunches when he’s really smiling, there are dozens of little whisker lines around it that make you swoon into the table.

What are you getting yourself into. 

He straightens up from your hiding spot, and when you do the same, feeling a rush of adrenaline spike through your body, you come face to face with a couple that he’s chatting with, a couple that suspiciously…. looks like him. And are talking to him like they know him, “Jaehyun! We’ve been looking everywhere for you! Since this morning!” The woman, in particular, her face looks just like his when she glances over at your surprise presence and wonders, “Oh? Who’s this?”

There’s a moment where you’re frozen, trying to figure out what alternate dimension you’ve been thrust into that you’re not only talking to Hot Guy With the Hoodie, but Hot Guy With the Hoodie’s parents. This is a scene from one of your books, you swear. This is when the female leads gets confident and charming and leaves the conversation with her boyfriend even more in love when he sees how well she gets along with his parents.

That is not going to happen here.

Not when you can’t think of a response. You’re so flustered by how veined the back of his hands are when he rearranges your papers, snatches your pen and scrawls something in the margins of the article you were supposed to be reading–,

Girlfriend!!

And then he underlines it in a flourish, just to make a point.

“I’m…” You seriously forget who you are when you feel his arm reach over your shoulders, tuck you into his side that smells so much like a fresh Christmas tree. “I’m… I’m, his…. girl…. girlfriend.”

Your whole body feels like it’s on fire. 

His dad looks more like him on second glance than you thought, the man has a dimple of his own and seems far more friendly. But again, his mom crosses her arms and begins to fuss right away, “No, that can’t be right, wasn’t that young lady from the Teen Wolf reboot coming with us, what was her name? Jennifer something.”

What the heck is Teen Wolf? Is that a show? The only thing you can think of is this awful book you read last month called Feral Sins. It was really bad, really, really bad, it was about werewolves and the love scenes didn’t even make up for it—, 

“No, we’ve been serious for almost the whole semester,” he whines at his mom, shakes you under his arm before he gives you a cute, beckoning glance, “Haven’t we?”

You’ve been seriously crushing on him this whole semester, sure. That’s how serious this relationship is when you haven’t spoken a word to one another before this.

“Y-yes,” you stutter with so many nerves. The pages of your book flutter when you move to adjust your hair and you realize…. that’s not how people in relationships talk. You take this silent, deep breath so you don’t go crazy, then lean your head into his shoulder and warble, “It's been five whole months with my cutie!”

His quiet chuckle makes the crush even stronger.

“Okay, well, you better have your things packed, we're leaving in an hour,” she orders without a care, and you’re getting the sense that this guy’s mom and your dad couldn’t be more different. 

His hand is moving again with the pen, this time writing out No!!!. As in No, he doesn’t want to leave?

His fingers dip into a divot in your arm to goad you on, and you quickly think up some not unbelievable excuse, “Ah, we have to study for our last final before graduation! It’s for our hardest class—,”

Nuclear physics!!!!!!!

Is he… is he serious?

You blink once to make sure you’re properly reading what he is now circling over and over again, and there’s no way. There’s no way Hot Guy With the Hoodie is actually smart, let alone smart enough to be a nuclear physics major.

“Nuclear physics, you know how explosive that can get,” you make the lame joke, give a sheepish laugh that Mrs. Mom definitely doesn’t laugh at, then stuff your cheek further into his shoulder and mumble, “Gotta get As before we go off into the real world for the first time.”

His parents together give you a really strange look that you have no idea how to decipher. You’re going to go home tonight and hug your dad extra hard for always being an open book. 

“Gotta stay, Mama, can’t take it remote,” he whines, hamming up a show as he proceeds to play mama’s boy and ruffle your hair in flirtation all in one. “She’ll help keep me on my toes.”

That’s your cue.

You shuffle the articles around so she can’t read the titles, pretend that they have something to do with a vague topic you can pluck out from memory, “We’re in the middle of neutrino-electron scattering, I’m so sorry.”

The dad finally cuts in, using an exasperated, pleading tone that you figure is probably a signature of how they usually interact, “Honey, if he has an exam tomorrow the jet has no choice but to be delayed…”

His jet? The forty thousand offering makes so much more sense now.

The pen is dancing along again and you have no idea how you don’t gasp out loud when you see what he’s written. 

Kiss me 

Your fingers scrunch into the bottom of your skirt when you literally stop breathing, unable to even look his direction. He pauses for a moment too, fingers across your upper arm sending what feels like a weight of bricks against your chest, and then he adds the curling ? at the end of it. 

Kiss me? 

A question.

You don’t just… you don’t just go around kissing people! It’s been a while since the last time, and you didn’t really enjoy it. You much prefer reading about it because there’s no disappointment! But then again, you don’t just go around getting kiss proposals from guys, let alone very, very, very hot guys. So, flustered and flushed and about one second from fainting, you decide to channel your inner romance heroine for once in your life.

You don’t kiss his mouth - this is not! the time, nor is it really appropriate, nor would you be able to handle it. You dash your lips against the corner of his cheek that is uncovered by the fabric of his hood, and his skin peals with salty, smitten goosebumps at the contact, coupled with his laden sigh when you fit yourself even further into his hold. He smells so gosh darn sweet you can barely breathe. 

“Mama.” You watch his fingers extend like, come on now, and he puts every inch of sticky pleading into his tone. You're not feeling like you’re yourself, you’re some other, fictional person who’s actually dating him, who sits at his table every day while he studies and kisses his cheek whenever she wants. 

Her eyes flit between the two of you, and she sighs, “I don’t see why the flight couldn’t…”

“Yes!” he exclaims. When his shoulder knocks into your chin the slightest bit and your teeth crackle together in a light burst of pain, he reaches for your face in apology. You experience the sensation of his pretty fingers flitting under your cheek to check for momentary damage and swear he must be able to feel the blush, no?

Over her son’s excitement, his mother adopts the most stern voice you’ve ever heard from anyone, including several hotshot professors who were your dad’s bosses, “It’ll be pushed until tomorrow morning. Take your exam, then we will be off. I’ll be waiting at home so we can work blocking tonight.” He palpably deflates, something in her reasonable (? you're not sure, maybe none of that was reasonable) offering bothers him, and your smile falters when she looks to you with mild politeness and gets it wrong, “Very lovely to meet you Jen— y/n.”

He’s gets pissed off then - you don’t know him but you can feel it, and you’re so confused.

That confusion explodes when his mom heads down the staircase, leaving her husband behind, who immediately looks at his son and raises his eyebrows in a doublet of approval. He lowers his voice and rumbles with much pride, “Ayy. Good man. Finally took my advice for once.” 

And then he tilts his head right at you.

Your fingers claw against the fabric of your skirt one last time as the boy beside you gets flustered at some unspoken conversation he has with his dad. Finally, the man goes walking off to join his wife, leaving the two of you alone again. And then there’s at about ten full seconds where you and Hot Guy With the Hoodie are slumped against each other in this awkward embrace of exhaustion, like you’d just been through Hell and back together.

Then, you rip yourself out of his grasp to stare at him with shocked, wide eyes. The strange reality of it batters right into you, forcing these high-energy, out of character, rambling, fumbling questions, “Nuclear physics? Who are you? Why are you? What?”

You pinch your hand under the table just in case you dreamt all this up, you’re going to wake up in a puddle of drool and he’ll be over at the other table, but no. No, no. He’s still there. 

He’s still there and he’s sticking out a hand for you to shake like it’s no big deal, “Hi, I’m Jaehyun.” 

Even his name is hot. Why.

“Y/n,” you whisper, your vocal cords seized into shyness when your hands come into direct contact. Just as soon as you snatch your fingers back, you regain the ability to speak, “Again, what?”

His very very very hot name and face don’t really explain what just happened. 

“There’s something I have to do in Italy tomorrow, but I don’t really want to miss graduation for it.” His answer only lends to your confusion, “Thought spending some quality time studying with my girlfriend,” and gives you goosebumps, “Would be enough to convince them to let me stay, but apparently not.”

And more questions from you, “What’s up with that Jennifer person? Why not her?”

His mom definitely called you by his (ex? current? you hope it’s the former) girlfriend’s name. Why is he not scheming with her right now.

“Hot is typically not what parents look for for their beloved son,” Jaehyun says as he leans back in his seat, eyebrows dipping in flirtation when he says the first word. “Mama likes her, but Pop… he’s a stickler for the classics. Smart, confident, accomplished.”

The caramel goodness of his gaze settles right above the sweetheart neckline on your favorite pink top, where your heart is going insane at the realization that he means those things about you. 

“I think you have the wrong person for that,” you whisper, wishing you had a sweater, blanket, jacket, anything you could close over yourself, to make your presence tiny and impenetrable by his fluttering gaze. 

“Really?” Jaehyun looks genuinely surprised at that, “I imagined you were like, really smart. I always see you in here.”

He.

What.

“Isn’t that a little creepy?” You brush off his comment with what might be categorized as flirtation - you don’t know, none of the novels you’ve read have prepared you for this - mainly to hide the fact that you are completely taken aback by the fact that Hot Guy With the Hoodie—, Jaehyun, he has a name, you can’t forget it, has watched you in the library, too. 

“It’s coincidental. I’m just in here all the time.” That… that sounds flirty. The smile he gives you, with his dimples so deep you could push your thumbs into them, means it definitely is. 

Your chin tucks into your shoulder out of pure shyness. “I know.”

The first time you saw him in January, he had an extremely rare dusting of Los Angeles snow all over the crown of his hood. Today, you remember wondering if he ever got hot - literally, temperature wise - under the cotton sweater, because it’s summer now.

He shrugs. “So?”

He wants to know why you don’t think you’re smart and confident and accomplished. He thinks you’re just like him. You’re definitely not. 

“I’m always in here because it’s quiet, and I live with a lot of messy, loud roommates,” you explain. “I’m like every other regular student here, I’m not… I’m not that.”

You’re just… another CalTech student. No awards, not president of anything, not even top of your class, you studied and did well and that was about it. And you come to the engineering library so you can have dinner with your dad without walking across campus.

Jaehyun gives you this sly little look like he doesn’t believe you at all, and that makes you so hot and nervous your eyes glue themselves to your lap. Would melting in your seat would be a merciful way to die? When you manage a glance back up, he’s once again re-arranging your papers, so his prettier than pretty eyes can read the title of the article you were once again supposed to be reading, and then wonders out loud, “Studying…. CAR-T therapies. Cancer biology?”

Oh, what is he doing!

“You don’t have to care, it’s okay,” you mumble, snatching your things back up from him and stacking them in a tower of defense on your lap. You tuck your romance novel in between the articles, then use the whole sandwich of stuff to hide behind, feeling like your clothes and your heart and your everything get tangled up in it. 

He is smart, rich, good looking, confident, and kind, and he can stop pretending he’s interested in you now that his parents are gone. 

“I’m just trying to get to know another student here.” His words are dipped in so much double intention as he reaches over and smooths out the edge of your skirt where it’d gotten caught in the screen of your laptop. Your leg explodes in smitten shivers as his fingertips stroke your skin lightly for a moment, and he sighs, almost a little dramatic, “Ugh, now I have to figure out where to hide until graduation tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to study for… nuclear physics?” you wonder. You can’t remember when that final was supposed to be. 

His one hand doesn’t move away, in fact, it slips a little, so he’s holding your thigh under the desk table as he reaches for the pocket of his shorts with the other, to pull out his phone. He unlocks it and pulls something up, and when you squint… you see that it’s his transcript, a neat row of As straight across the page in all of these super hard classes - astrophysics, electrical engineering, machine learning, ah yes, nuclear physics, and…. particle physics. 

Your heart gives an insane, explosive flutter. No way. No way, no way. 

Jaehyun leaves his hood on, sneaks his hand under there to ruffle up his hair so it hangs in his eyes like the perfect curtain of enchantment, then he murmurs, “Maybe I should sneak out and hit the bars, find some bed to sleep in tonight.” The fluttering dies and is replaced by some kind of sticky greenness you’ve never experienced before. You must tense up, because his thumb strokes an insane rainbow across the top of your thigh, and he hums, “Or…”

What did Scarlett say right before she let Woody take her to bed, that’s the energy you’re trying to channel right now, please… what was it? I’m going to save a stallion and ride a cowboy like you all night long? You can say it, you can say he can try out your bed for himself and see how he likes it. And that you just have to come along with it. In more than one way, in fact, the exact way he’s thinking of, you should be… coming.

“Or?” you whisper, heart going insane again. 

That was decidedly not very Scarlett-like of you!

But you can’t help it, he is so… so….. so. SO. And you are oh so very shy, always have been. He only makes it worse. You spent a whole semester fifteen yards away from him, drumming up the courage to even say hello, and now you’re here, with his hand on your leg and his smile imprinted on your heart. You need him to take the lead, just one more time. 

“Hmmm, I’m not sure,” Jaehyun says, sly and perfect, with the teeniest little cock of his head. “Just or.”

—

There’s no one here in this corner of the bar - emphasis on no one - and that is so darn relieving. That conversation with Wendy and her girls nearly choked you out and they wouldn’t let the subject go, so you made an excuse to get another glass of champagne and then didn’t step away from the bar again. It’s in the stuffiest corner of the whole hotel ballroom, right by an emergency exit that keeps blaring, yet somehow you feel more comfortable than you had the whole night. Here in this spot where it’s just you—,

A familiar, deep, unforgettable voice spirals right into your ear, “Have any student debt left?”

Your heart slips into a cadence that only one person knows how to conduct.

“What?” You whip around so fast, trying to get it over with, hoping that it may have just been your mind making it up with how much he’s been discussed. But no, you turn right into the waiting arms of Jaehyun Jeong himself, and the moment he smiles at you and his dimples imprint themselves into your vision again, you can no longer speak. Just whisper, “Hi.”

He approached you. He approached you, for the second time.

“Hey, stranger.” His voice is still so hot, and when his fingers go around your elbow to make sure you don’t fall off the barstool, you know you’re in trouble.

Out of instinct, you stick your hand out for the handshake, just as he spreads his arms for the hug, and he’s still so big and strong that the hug is what you get. Jaehyun wraps you up in his embrace, not bothering to hold back or be proper about it, especially when his head buries itself into this little divot in your shoulder. Hugging him is one of the best things ever, a perfect bolus of warmth and affection that makes it so you don’t care if people look - which you're sure they are. You don’t care because his fingers splay out against the back of your dress, and you remember how his hands felt against your bare skin, like they were spun from the finest gold satin and tailored specifically for you.

You swear you feel his mouth ghost against the seam of your neck, or maybe it’s just the remembrance feeling all too real. You grasp at him lightly, chuckle just as such, “We’re still strangers last time I checked, don’t get any ideas.”

No matter what you shared during that impossible slip of time, you know just as little about him now as you did back then. Even though the parts you know… you still like just as much.

“I think we crossed that line a tad too far for a take back,” he teases, and the spot you think he kissed nearly lights itself ablaze, definitely does so when he lifts a perfect eyebrow and sears you up with some perfect eye contact. “And I was beginning to think you were avoiding me.”

“What? Me? No,” you play it off with a shade of self-deprecation he’ll recognize. “I’m not anxious or avoidant at all!”

You don’t think you are anymore. You grew out it of a long time ago, maybe two boyfriends ago, but there’s something about Jaehyun that will always make you nervous. Always. He sits on the barstool without an invitation and the spread of his thighs in his suit pants, gosh, you’re already blushing just off of that. You want to tell him to get up, that more people are going to stare, but you just… you can’t.

Jaehyun dips his head like he did, phantom cowboy hat at the ready, and jokes, “Well, when there was no girl falling out of the saddle of her horse onto my bare chested presence, I was kinda worried that something happened to you.”

He remembers what you were reading back then?

“I see you’ve also become funny,” you gripe, rolling your eyes and trying not to laugh and then giggling when he does so first. You haven’t read a romance novel in years, because they couldn't live up to what you actually lived through. Smart, rich, good looking, confident, good in b… you can’t think that. And now he’s extra funny, on top of it all. Just great.

“How have you been?” he asks, getting the requisite small talk out of the way.

“I’m good. I’m just… I’m working in my lab, came home to see my dad,” you raise your eyebrows in turn at that, and his wry smile pricks at you. “You know how it is.”

He is still so cocky, too, he takes in your comment you make about your dad and turns it back on you, “Did you tell him you actually came here to see me?”

Your dad never knew this story, either. So no. And Jaehyun does not have to act like the whole world revolves around him! (Despite it kind of doing so!)

“How are you?” you ask instead, so he knows you’re not entertaining the comment on purpose.

And sure, you know more about him than he does about you. You’ve seen the articles and interviews here and there - you didn’t look him up on purpose… sometimes it just happened - but you want to know what he’ll say to you.

“I’m about to start the Game of Thrones reboot. Crazy, lots of traveling. Had to make it back here, though, ‘cause we only get a ten year reunion once,” he brushes over his career with the lightest of strokes, typical him, and gets to a more important point, “I’m going to be all over Europe. You still in Europe, too?”

Never mind that that was a pointed comment suggesting that you’re no longer going to be separated by half a globe, Jaehyun knows you live in Switzerland without that ever coming up once in your previous conversation. You know that, because what you talked about that night is branded in your brain like a memorized speech.

And he takes it a step further, “And how’s that legacy Nobel Prize nomination treating you?”

“How….?” you breathe.

How does he know your lab director was nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine when it hasn’t even been covered extensively in the media yet? The big press conference is this week, after you get back.

“I have my ways,” he drawls. Which is either code for him Googling you like you Googled him on the way here, or other things you don’t want to contemplate. Like getting his personal assistant to look for you… or something crazy and unbelievable. Like remembering the subject you were studying and searching up every lab in the field until he found you.

You roll your eyes again, but you can’t hide the smile. “You’re still a lot.”

“I’ve been waiting to talk to you all night,” Jaehyun says, right away and without reservations. “How’s that for a lot.”

It’s a lot, it’s so much. He says it and then his hand is right there by your uncovered knee - not quite touching you yet you can feel his fingertips on your bare skin and you’ve never forgotten any of it. Any of it.

“You remember?” you whisper, so shy and smitten in an instant, back in the vestibule of bashful existence that you lingered in through college, one he managed to demolish in one night. It’s been ten years, and he’s lived a gloriously full ten years - you’ve seen the girlfriends, believe you - and you didn’t think he’d… you thought you’d be the only one living your glory days in the past.

Jaehyun’s smirk confirms that he has not forgotten a single thing of it, just like you didn’t, and his hand fully grasps your knee then, soft and pliant and enticing. When he draws a prim little curve up your thigh, his whisper sears in with his touch, “Are you seriously going to act like you forgot?” 

You had to. You had to forget, otherwise his perfect existence would haunt your very regular life.

You bite your lip out of habit, then when his breathing catches and his fingers dig in, you remember exactly what that did to him. You get even more flustered, stick your gaze to the bar and mumble, “I haven’t even had a drink yet, and you’re already talking about that whole thing.”

You fucking—, you bite your lip when you read.

The slip of vulgarity from a decade ago takes its sweet time in settling on your chest, and this is now becoming more than a lot, his slightest touch and the fact that he… oh, he still smells like pine, and that maybe he hasn’t stopped smiling once since he sat down.

“Okay, what am I buying the most beautiful woman at the bar?” Jaehyun flirts, and when your mouth falls open at his brazen audacity, he quickly rewinds and it somehow gets even worse, “No, sorry. The most beautiful woman who’s ever attended CalTech? Or ever lived in California. Or ever existed, really?”

You’re dreaming this. You have to do it, you pinch your hand right in his plain view, and he cannot hold back the sweet chuckle at your disbelief. Jaehyun is here with you in the exact same situation and still finds you beautiful.

“She can afford to buy her own drinks now,” you tease.

All that nonexistent student debt he got rid of for you made it possible. That little check, you’ve never forgotten yet either. Forty thousand dollars could buy you a lot of drinks. Maybe you could buy him a drink.

Something about that pricks at him, though, makes him even more determined. His hand grasps around your bare thigh to tug you even closer, so there’s no missing his murmured sentiment, “It’s the principle of the thing, not the money. A gentleman always buys the first drink for a woman he’s interested in.”

You don’t mean to do it, your fingers dip to your skirt to tug it down just in case, but they miss and fall against his hand instead. In a practiced motion, his palm lifts up off your thigh and catches your hand before it sets back down. Your fingers are tucked reliably in the crook of his palm, and his thumb smoothes over the back of your hand, just to say hello, I’m here, for the second time.

You’ve never not been interested in him and his cute smile, so you cave, “A vodka—,”

“Oh my gosh, Jaehyun Jeong! Hi!” 

A random woman in a beautiful gown that definitely outclasses the very simple pink dress you're wearing interrupts the back and forth. It’s to your utmost dismay that Jaehyun lets go of your hand - though you remember exactly the situation you’re in, and accept that it's good he did. Because there’s no way you could be caught holding hands with Jaehyun Jeong at your college reunion like you’d been dating this whole time.

You wait, for the charm to come, the flirting, anything to show you that you aren’t as special as you think you are. But Jaehyun keeps his face neutral, handsome, and polite, and just says to the woman, “Hello.”

Your heart isn’t used to beating the way it did when you were twenty-two. It’s out of practice and is racing to keep up.

“It’s Seola, from our filmmaking elective?” She introduces herself and gives a full flirty flutter of her lashes and he still doesn’t seem to have a clue who she is. That, in turn, only makes the fluttering in your chest more insane. “Can I get a picture with you?”

He stands up, not minding the request as you’re sure he’s used to, but he knocks his knee onto yours on purpose while he does so. And with it, strikes the sliver of memories straight back into you.

—

You’d almost forgotten Jaehyun was there beside you on the walk home.

He was so quiet when he slunk out of the engineering library with his backpack and books and his flirty little don’t stop me grin. And of course, you wouldn’t think twice to stop him from accompanying you home. Somewhere between the engineering quad and the strip of convenience stores that led to your off campus house, a group of frat guys nearly bowled you over into the street. Jaehyun caught your hand to keep you from falling and then just… didn’t let go.

You tried to take your hand out of his, made a feeble excuse that you couldn’t drop your computer when three girls in a row on the sidewalk did a double take that made you nervous, but he wouldn’t have it. And at that point his fingers felt too at home in the spaces between yours for you to want to try again.

You hold hands until you get to the landing of your house, and then you have to break apart to unlock the front door. You almost accidentally toss your keys into the shrubbery when Jaehyun holds your waist while he waits, and presses his chin right into your head. You don’t know what you’re supposed to do, you’ve never really… cuddled with a boy before, and so you do just that, snuggle right into his chest. You’re rewarded with a host of sweet, soft, deep giggles, right in your ear, the press of his mouth against the top of your head. 

What! Is! Happening! When has something like this ever happened to you! This is better than any book!

You fit the keys into the lock, and when it clicks you get a throaty, teasing Good job that makes your spine tingle, and have to take a moment of separation away from Jaehyun and collect yourself. And announce your less than solitary presence to the rest of your roommates, “I’m home! Someone’s with me, so please be decent, my loves!”

Jaehyun looks at the litany of male shoes scattered around the entryway and the number of baseball hats hung on the hooks, not to mention the lacrosse jerseys and the soccer cleats. That plus the way you said my loves, gives him this strange look on his face when he scratches at his head through the hoodie hood and tries to figure out what exactly he walked into. 

Ah ha. Now the roles are reversed. 

You’re trying to think of a way to explain your living situation when you hear the bellow from upstairs, “Someone? Did she finally bring home a guy?!”

The retort is immediate, “On her last day of school?! No.”

“Hey, five dollars, you’re on!”

The decidedly loud, childish male voices echo throughout the empty space, and Jaehyun’s porcelain expression goes downright peachy with embarrassment when he realizes he read this all wrong. If he’s embarrassed, you’re downright mortified, because your housemates just exposed your romantic solitude to the man trying to break it. 

Like they always do, the three trio of annoying freshmen come clomping down the stairs in a race to find out first, and you wave your hand in a panic to get Jaehyun to turn away. He barely does in time, awkward and hovering while he faces the door, leaving you to deal with a messy-haired Jeno, Jaemin, and Jisung, standing on their tiptoes to peek over the banister.

“Hi, what are you guys talking about?” you feign ignorance as you wave at them like you would on any other night. “Did you have a good day?” 

You subtly point your finger behind you to the person trying to hide himself, and you mouth, HGWH.

Not a single one of them has any idea what you’re talking about despite coming up with the acronym themselves, their faces scrunch up in confusion as they try to figure it out. You thought they’d be happy you finally gathered up the courage to talk to your library crush - or he talked to you and you managed to survive - but they don’t care. 

H. G. W. H. you try again, hoping that going slower and putting more emphasis on each letter will help, but no.

“Okay, what? Who’s—,” Jeno starts to say, before his eyes narrow at something and then his droll little face drops into visible awe, “Oh my gosh.”

He nudges Jaemin, who nudges Jisung, and the trio of them bend even further over the banister to look… and nearly fall over. They stare and gape and stare and gape, and you look where they’re staring and only see the covered back of your… your new friend. 

“What, what’s wrong?” you wonder, right before mouthing HGWH!!!! at them one last time, making your lips form the letters as obviously and obnoxiously as possible. But Jeno and Jaemin and Jisung still seem like they saw a ghost, which is why you have to wonder again, “Why do you guys look like that?,” and when they don’t answer that, you move on and try and get them talking, “Is there any dinner left for me?”

Silly question, you didn’t get home until now, which means nothing was cooked. Why you decided to live with a group of six underclassmen is beyond you. It’s Mark’s fault. It always is.

Jeno hits Jaemin square in the back of the head with a slap, and he groans out the answer for all of them, "We were about to go out to Olive Garden, then hit LA Legoland!”

They’re so cute! You love them so much and you’re about to give them money to buy Legos and order Ubers, but they don’t… they don’t leave. The three boys stay on the staircase loitering around, staring at Jaehyun like everyone stared when you were walking over here holding hands. And you can tell that he knows they’re doing that, he’s bouncing up and down like all of this is making him uncomfortable, and that makes you uncomfortable. You’re the one who brought him here, you don't want him to feel that way. 

He was the one who grabbed your hand first, though, so maybe it’ll be alright for you to be a bit touchy. To walk over to the corner he’s standing in and snake your fingers into the front pocket of his hoodie, to stand on your tiptoes and put your chin on his shoulder, brush his cheek with your mouth as you whisper, “Do you… do you want to go out in LA tonight?”

He said he wanted to hit the bars and find a place to sleep, and one of those has already been checked off. He should see you in something nicer than just this old jean skirt, though. You have a ton of nice dresses you never had an occasion to pull out. 

Though, he seems to like it… a lot. 

HIs fingers tuck in one of the belt loops as he scrunches your waist up for a second, and you can feel the soft brush of his hood as he shakes his head no. But you don’t have a moment to be disappointed, because his fingers slip and touch a spot on your hip that doesn’t have anything covering it, and murmurs back, “Where’s your room?” The soft catch of your breathing must be a detonation, because his fingers smooth out in a reassuring little circle, and he clarifies, “Not like that.”

Only a few novels you’ve read opened straight out with a love scene and in each of them, the characters were already in a relationship. So you’re utterly relieved Jaehyun doesn’t mean it like that. But you kind of wish he did. 

You can’t turn, there’s no way you can, you just say it, “Down the hall.”

He won’t be able to miss it, it’s the only room in this entire house that is pink and smells like fresh dryer sheets. 

“Thanks,” Jaehyun whispers, head dotting against yours for a fond little knock of appreciation, before he turns first and gives your still! goldfishing roommates a cute little wave of his own, “Hey everyone.”

He stuffs his hands in his hoodie and goes strolling into your home with his head drooped and humble, right to the room at the end of the hall that, like you predicted, he's able to pick out for himself. At most, he gets a squeak of surprise from Jaemin, but Jeno and Jisung are knocked silent by everything that just happened. Even the click of your door closed isn’t enough to get them to stop… are they drooling? 

You wave a hand and they don’t blink. You flap your arms up and down, signaling for the plane of consciousness to land, and that gets them out of their daze enough to look at you and not the empty space where your new companion just was. You ask with genuine concern, “Why are you guys being so weird, are you okay? Were your finals okay?”

Are they freaking out? You know they’re only freshmen but still. 

Jisung points a shaky, shaky finger in the direction of your room, and just about faints before he gets it out, “Do you even know who that is?”

“Did you not see me mouth HGWH like a gazillion times?! That’s Hot Guy With the Hoodie, I am trying not to freak out.” As soon as you say it, your body conjures up the appropriate freak out that you’ve been holding in since the library. Your hands fly to grasp your waist, the same spot he touched with those beautiful hands, and you whisper to yourself in a panic, “He’s really, really hot, oh no. I have a fever.”

Every time you leaned against his chest - again, what?! - you could feel the cords of his muscles through his shirt. Experiencing that in person was about a gazillion times better than reading the sinewy breadth of his shaven chest rippled in the wind. 

“That’s?!” Jeno squawks, joining his best friend in pointing and making a scene, “That’s Hot Guy With the Hoodie?!”

You can’t believe it. He is so much better than you ever dreamed about. And there were dreams….

A door on the second floor creaks open at the commotion, and once that door opens, the other just has to. Which means you get Chenle’s loud scream first, “Hot Guy with the Hoodie?!,” followed right by Renjun’s much more controlled, yet still excited squawk, “You talked to him?!”

You can see all the way up to the attic of your house, the stairs brimming with the raucous enthusiasm of your funny little friends, all gathered to witness this once in a lifetime opportunity of you bringing home a real life romance novel protagonist. 

“Yeah, he came up to me in the library. I almost died,” you say so shyly, unsure if the low timbre of your smitten confession will carry up to the second floor. 

He approached you. He approached you, after he spent all semester spying on you.

“That guy right there in your room, Jaehyun Jeong…,” How does Jaemin even know his full name, what?! You don’t even know his full name, have they met before? Last time you checked, Jaemin was a political science major. He says it again with full confidence, “Jaehyun Jeong is Hot Guy With the Hoodie?”

“Uh, yes?” you answer, before you have to turn it back around, “Wait, who?”

You still don’t understand how it’s possible they know Jaehyun’s last name and you don’t. Jaehyun Jeong, why does that name sound kind of familiar? 

In unison, all five of them squawk, “You did not just say who?!”

Honestly, who is he? You kind of want to know now.

“Ubers are here!!!!!!!” Haechan and Mark burst through the doors at the same time, to herd up their little minions for a night on the town that’ll leave you with an empty house. Mark switches his Leafs cap out for a Dodgers one, thinking it’ll help him with the girls, and he begins herding them along, “Hey, assholes, let’s go! Hi, y/n! Love you!”

“Hi, Marky! Hi, Hae! Love you!” You give them both a little wave, and take one step down the hallway because surely Jaehyun—, 

“Guess what, our roommate has a sleepover date with Jaehyun fucking Jeong!”

Chenle’s fat mouth makes the announcement at ear-piercing level from the apex of the house, so there's no chance that your best friend and his best friend will miss it. Your fingers twist up in your skirt as you look back to your room and hope that the door doesn’t open, that somehow your… date? Is he your date? Will have missed that. Though it doesn’t open, you figure you’re in big trouble anyways. 

Because Haechan has a fatter mouth than his friend, and his gasp detonates in your ear, “What the fuck?! You’re going to fuck him?!” 

First off, you almost die when he says it that crudely.

Secondly, what are you missing here?

Mark, he’s such an f-word-er sometimes. He gives you this sly little look that makes the heat crawl up your back, then raises his voice on purpose, “Guess we’re staying out late tonight, boys!” They all laugh, and your best friend looks at you with his face egging you on, and drawls, “It’s Jaehyun fucking Jeong, she deserves the house quiet.”

He has been trying to get you to quote, 'be a f-ing word that rhymes with hut and starts with sl for once in your life,' and claims that clinging to romance novels and keeping to yourself is going to do you no good when you’re out in the real world. If Mark wants to leave you alone with Jaehyun… and Hae’s first instinct was to say something that inappropriate… that means. 

That means. 

“Go! Have fun!” You wave to shoo them out of there before they get in your head and ruin the night, “I love you guys!”

Is he a campus legend, known through the frats and sororities and lecture halls and corridors as some kind of… lovemaking god? Is that why literally all of them know who he is, despite their varying ages and majors? They must know girls near and far that have been swept under the tides of his charm like you and somehow lived to tell the sordid tale?

Of course romance novels aren’t going to do you any favors in the real world. They aren’t real. 

Are you going to go back in your room and open the door and find the space transformed into a clearing in the middle of the woods? With rose petals and champagne and an open spot of grass to lie in, and he’s going to be in a silk shirt with his chest out, and he’ll look at you and call you my princess before kissing your body all night—, oh gosh. You really need to stop reading those books. 

No. None of that is going to happen.

You only got one part of it right, he’s definitely going to be in your bed with his clothes off, because he… he… he came here with the intention to have sex with you, and now you’re going to have to decide whether or not you want to.

He’s just another student at your college, yet people seem to know him. You’re curious enough about that to not stop yourself from doing this. So, the door is barely open before you’re blurting it, “Hey, are you, like famous—,”

Or perhaps you’d been a little too quick to speak, because none of what you just imagined is realistic. 

What’s there waiting for you is the cuter than cute sight of Jaehyun sound asleep on your chaise - your chaise, not your bed - his entire body tucked into his hoodie like a sweet, sleepy little cookie, hoodie strings pulled so all you can see are his bangs and his nose. 

You were right, romance novels aren’t real. 

Reality is so much better.

You tiptoe over to grab the quilt off your bed, made out of all your old t-shirts and the softest thing ever, and you wrap up his already tiny form in a cocoon so he can continue his sweet nap. He doesn’t rouse once, not even when you press a little kiss on the top of his head, and you realize he needed a bed… to sleep in peace. His parents probably didn’t let him, probably drove him so crazy he couldn’t have a moment of quiet in his house.

So you will give that to him.  

—

Jaehyun finishes taking the pictures with Seola, posing a thousand different ways and touching her way too much. Or maybe you just think it’s way too much, because he really just puts an arm around her waist and doesn’t even touch her hip. However, you’re back in that crazy place only he takes you to and can’t stop thinking of him holding your waist with his warm hands - and he’s smiling at her like a… movie star or something… the whole time.

You think he’s going to leave with her, but he doesn’t, even when she tries to get him to join her and her friends for a drink. You don’t know how he gets out of it, and somehow he’s back on the barstool next to yours and turning his real smile your way.. .the one where his dimples are so deep you’d want to poke them.

“Where were we?” He wastes no time grasping for your hand in the way you adored so deeply, the spaces in his existence neatly filled out with yours. He doesn’t even hide it under the bar, your interlinked hands are right there resting on his thigh like that’s just where they go, and then he plays so innocent, “Right, the drink. Vodka something?”

“You don’t have to,” you murmur.

He doesn’t have to hold your hand and ignore the people who are here to see him in your favor. He doesn’t have to bring up the memories and pretend he cares, or pretend that somehow it’ll work out this time when it didn’t before. Ten years ago you shared a night together, one night, and he’s acted like you’ve been pining away for each other, longing, yearning, this whole time. Which like, okay, maybe you were a little, but it still wouldn’t work.

You didn’t hold his hand enough that night, there’s something about the way he carefully moves so that you’re never split apart, you’re clung onto each other out of true desperation and care. His thumb dips to swipe your palm again and he flirts so, so hard, “Ah, but there’s one or two things that I need to pay you back for.”

“That particular debt has been cleared,” you retort.

You saved him so he could go to his graduation, he made a bigger fuss out of it than he should, and that check was a very important step in starting your life. More than he realizes.

Jaehyun’s eyebrow lifts. The ten years was enough to get your defenses lowered, so you don’t remember that every time he does that, something inappropriate is going to follow.

Then he drawls so casually - and loudly, he is so loud!, “Nah, that one thing you did with the…” His hand pretend grasps an invisible something, and then his tongue presses into his cheek as he twists his pretty fingers up and down in the most lewd gesture you’ve ever seen in your life.... an imitation of what you did to him without hesitation. When he sees you get flustered, his cheeky dimple comes poking out and he plays innocent again, “… that was worth more than forty k. Where’d you learn that, by the way?”

Your head is going to explode in heated embarrassment.

You’d never done that with anyone before him! And he knows! And he is loving every second of teasing you for it!, “Was that from… what was that book? Wrangling for a Banging?”

 “Oh, gosh. Please stop!” you exclaim quietly, and in a hurry.

You are going to melt right into this barstool and Wendy is going to have to ship you back to Switzerland on a boat for furniture. You squeeze his hand so tightly as the other comes to brush your flaming cheek and he melts into the same kind of pristine laughter that rang throughout the entire night. Those kind of notes you haven’t heard again from anyone.

Those books are long gone out of your life, and for good reason.

His free hand floats through the air, and then it’s on your cheek, multiplying the heat you’re already feeling, and he strokes you so carefully. Again, all of this is in plain view, the whole hotel might be watching and you’d have no idea because you’re enraptured by his pretty brown eyes lit up in the chandelier lighting - before he sighs, “I don’t know how, but you got even cuter.” 

“Why are you doing this!” you exclaim again, face ducking against your shoulder in such a bout of shyness his hand gets caught up there.

He doesn’t seem to mind, because he only presses his fingers further into your skin, leaving a constellation of boiling affection stained between your cheek and your shoulder. The compliments, the hand holding, the caressing, the staring, you’re not going to be able to take much more, and you thought you came into tonight with a very clear head. This is just like last time, and you both know how last time ended.

He seems to protest against your immediate thought without recognizing it, “Why not—,”

“Wow, Jaehyun Jeong! I’ve been a fan for forever!”

For the second time in less than twenty minutes (and you’re honestly surprised it’s only the second, that there isn’t a line down the bar of women just waiting to take their turn with him), another person from your graduating class approaches him with stars in her eyes, and smitten anticipation in her words, “Can we take a picture?”

And Jaehyun reacts the exact same way, with the exact same polite neutrality, “Sure.”

He can’t be saving the rest of it for you.

He stands up to take a picture with this woman, just like he did with Seola, but this one moves his fingers down so he’s actually holding her waist instead of doing the hover hand. She flirts with him hardcore without noticing how tense he gets, “Ooooh, like this, that’s how you hold a lady.” His eyes flicker over her head right at you and your hand involuntarily slips to the corner of your hip that he made himself familiar with when he was in your bed—,  “Gonna tell my mom this was a pic with my boyfriend!”

You blink and you’re no longer in your old bed in your old house, with him below you in a picturesque display of open wantonness. You’re watching this lady put her hand on Jaehyun's chest and lean into him like he is indeed her boyfriend. He looks away from you to be present for the photo, and you take that slip of solitude to gather up your purse and your tender little heart, wrung out for no reason by the sight of him with somebody else, and escape through the blaring emergency exit into the balmy LA night.

It’s been ten years, and apparently he’s still known for his boyfriend image.

You… you lived that for yourself. You did. And you were never supposed to be stuck here, jealous, that it never remained exclusive to you.

—

The book is getting too good to put down.

Woody put his hands on Scarlett’s ample, heaving bosom. He could feel her heartbeat shoot a firestorm of electricity through every inch of her bare, slippery skin, but most of all the moist pink vessel between her legs. He looked right into her eyes, the dark black orbs widened into pools of lust, and then he kissed her. Their tongues battled for dominance and their teeth clashed and she could feel his member harden–, 

“No, Jacob! No! I pick Edward!” A scream rips through the silent space and startles you back into the headboard with the pages of your book splayed against your chest. More loud gasping follows right after, “What the fuck?! What!”

Jaehyun startles awake from where he’d been having a… Twilight themed nightmare in the middle of his deep sleep. And you mean deep, because you cooked, cleaned the kitchen, packed some of your things, and showered (that was an interesting experience, trying to go so fast just in case he woke up and figured out what you were doing), and he didn’t wake up once. He sat there tucked into the cocoon of blanket and hoodie and slept his life away. He rubs his fingers into his eyes as he tries to make sense of where he is - the explosion of pink and the girl he doesn’t know sitting in the middle of the bed.

He blinks in the most gorgeous display of long eyelashes possible, and his mouth dips into that heart-stopping smile. Tthe sleepiness in his voice makes it sound even better, if possible, “Hey there.”

You clutch the book to your chest for a second, just in case he can see how fast your heart’s going, whisper right back, “Hi.” 

He yawns, a massive thing that shakes his whole body, then he tries to make sense of this for real, “What’s going on? Did I fall asleep here?” You nod, finding everything about this display so freaking charming, and he huddles over his legs as he tries to shake himself awake, “Shit. Ah, shit. I’m so fucking tired.”

The bed was so much more comfortable than the chaise. Was he trying to be respectful? He really could’ve slept in your bed, it’s okay. Mark says it smells like cupcakes in here.

“I could tell, you sleep with your mouth open.” A soft, soft pink twinges the corner of his nose that you can see, and you get shy again when you tell him, “If you’re going to go out, now is the time.”

He said he wanted to find a bed to sleep in, and sure, you could provide any type of furniture for him to do so - the chaise, the bed, the couch in your living room. But the unspoken disclaimer was he wanted a person there with him, and if he wants it to be literally anyone else, he has to go now. 

Jaehyun stretches all the way out then leans into the chair in a way that has you flustered again, his legs spread before him, his arm propped up beside him, and he wonders, “You’re not going out?”

No. You’d only really want to go out if he… you know. 

Gosh, okay, you’ll say it. You’d only really want to go out if he went with you. So you could be in a bar together downtown somewhere, where the lights dimmed to the point of impossibility and he had no choice but to crowd beside you in a tiny booth. Where you’d share a spiced margarita and kiss the salt off his mouth and his fingers wouldn’t be able to stay off a tie in your dress. 

Again, that’s never going to happen. 

You shake your head, try to keep your heart in sync with the rational part of your mind, “That’s not my thing, will probably just stay in and read before my dad gets here in the morning for commencement.”

“Oh, from where?” He’s just trying to get to know another student, but you know he’s not.

And for some reason, that propels you to be honest about this for the first time ever. You put your book down so you can clutch at the comforter enveloping your legs instead, and say quietly, “Ah, here. He’s a professor.”

Only the seven boys who live here with you are aware of that fact. It wasn’t ever anything to hide, it’s not taboo, but you just… you don’t know. You liked the bubble where no one knew about it, where it was just you and your dad and the special people that were gifted the knowledge that he was one of CalTech’s most famous professors. 

“Are you sure you’re not smart then? Like, a legacy thing? You have a ton of books,” Jaehyun asks as his eyes scan the headboard behind your bed, lined with novels and textbooks and every other precious scrap of your favorite hobby. “Is your dad a bio professor, too?”

Here we go. 

“No, particle physics.”

You expected that once you said it, there'd be some kind of reaction, but you weren't ready for Jaehyun almost falling off your chaise when he jolts in surprise. He tries to sit up properly and gets tangled up in the blanket like a flopping little fish, trying to control his body and his face and his everything and force it to process this insane revelation. The revelation that the head of his department and one of his professors this semester is your dad. 

“Are you shitting me?” he laughs in disbelief. “Your dad’s Professor Particle?” 

You nod and can’t help the smile.

Professor Particle is what you called your dad when he won the Nobel Prize in physics when you were ten, because you couldn’t grasp what particle physics was. It somehow stuck, even until now, as a cute nickname for  your favorite person in the world. It’s just the two of you - your family is the happiest existence possible, just a dad and his daughter, and that’s why you don’t think you’ve ever… thought to bring someone into that circle. 

“He talks about you all the time,” Jaehyun says absentmindedly, and that makes you so happy. A lightbulb goes off for him and he ahhhhs in wonder, “Thaaaaaat’s why you’re always in the engineering library.”

You do live in your own off-campus house, but you have every meal with your dad, wait until he’s done grading papers so you can say hello on your late nights, have breakfast and lunch with him in the dining halls and make him drive you everywhere. And the biology quad is on the opposite side of campus, so why waste the effort.

HGWH was only a fun little reward for being a good daughter.

A strange bit of confidence crashes into you after telling him your secret and not having your world implode, and you use that to get a sly bit of information, “I won’t tell on you if you tell me about why you’re always in the engineering library.”

You wouldn’t characterize yourself as a judgy person, but you don’t think anyone would ever look at Jaehyun and guess his major correctly. You didn’t even guess it correctly, you assumed he was like a… business or management person or something. One of those easy majors. Again, not like you judge. 

“I just need a really expensive piece of paper to put on my wall,” Jaehyun answers with a laugh, too cool for you, and for school. “Isn’t that why everyone’s here?”

“No, I genuinely like biology,” you answer.

You’re sure your dad wanted you to get into physics, but he got you a microscope as a child and that kind of held your hand for the rest of your education. He never made a fuss, only did what he could to support you. And yes, your diploma is going to go on the wall, but for a much more prideful reason than it seems in return?

Jaehyun’s answer is a cop-out anyways, the way he laughs but can’t quite meet your eyes is enough for you to hone in on. So what quintessential trope is this? The overachiever? Too simple. The well-rounded All-American boy? Too obvious. His parents are a clue, as is him coming to hide here. Plus, calling a physics degree from a prestigious engineering university a piece of paper is what an author does when they get too tired of making the character development subtle.

“But you don’t have to tell me the truth, I can figure it out." You hone in on his tired face and find it open in its honesty, which jiggles the final piece of this puzzle into its neat space, “A career path that you’re on and another one you want to take instead, it’s not my dream, Mom, it’s yours, drama and hysterics and crying and you never getting your way.”

Just the way his mom acted in the library said it all.

“Sheesh, what’s the point of us even getting to know each other, then?” he cops to it in a sarcastic, short chuckle, without even trying to deny it. His stance becomes more lackadaisical in the chaise, trying to come off unaffected. 

To have his interests brushed aside like that? And by his parents? That makes you feel bad for him, if you’re being honest. You kind of (really) want to give him a big, snuggly hug in hopes that’ll make him feel better. But you can’t, you’re not… you don’t do that. 

You try to brush it off with a bad joke, hope he forgives you for making him uncomfortable, “I read a lot. It was easy for me to guess which cliché male hero trope this is.”

You should’ve stuck with All-American hero! He would’ve liked that one!

Jaehyun peeks over at the novel discarded on your comforter and you realize, too late and to your utmost horror, that the cover of Wrangled and Tangled  is of a random man’s shirtless body with a massive Texas-style belt buckle. You go impossibly hot when he wonders out loud, “Shirtless romantic hero… cowboy? You like this stuff?” You want to sink into your bedframe and melt away into a little stain of embarrassed nothingness when he pretends to tip a cowboy hat at you and drawls in this awful Southern accent, “I left my spurs at home, darlin’.”

You’ve never seen him without the hoodie on but you think he’d make a better book cover ten out of ten times.

Your frame folds further into the comforter, to hide every bit of your blushed existence from his funny little stare, and you wave him off in such a shy, quiet voice, “Shush, that’s not what I like.”

He’s what you like, just six feet of pure, cute boy.

And that makes you so nervous because you’re sure you’re not what he likes. You thought about putting a dress on - even though you never wear anything but pajamas at home - because it sounded like something Jennifer from Teen Wolf would do for him. But you got nervous at the last second and reached for the usual. There’s no way Jaehyun would look at you in your Biology Olympiad tee with the hair dye stain on the corner from when you did Ren’s hair red, with Mark’s old gym shorts because you thought for a second (for only a second!) about not wearing pants and nearly had a heart attack of embarrassment, and think that you’re just what he likes.

But that’s exactly what he’s doing, taking his sweet time traversing his way over the map of your existence.

Then, his pretty, pretty gaze dips to where your legs are half entangled in the comforter, and something about his eyes grazing upon your bare ankle has the temperature in your room soaring into the earth’s core of blazing tension. You have to do something about it before you’re cooked into oblivion.

You weigh his curious gaze one last time, then your fingers splay out over the comforter and you wonder quietly, “You wanna sit over here?”

In the bed?

With you?

Not a full heartbeat passes before Jaehyun’s nodding, the corner of his lip bitten up so tightly his dimple has no choice but to come out. You get so nervous so fast you sink further into the comforter when he stands up with the quilt you gave him, and in less than one stride is already leaves the mattress shifting with his weight, the air sizzling with the fresh scent of pine. He sits on top of your comforter, doesn’t dare to join you underneath, but doesn’t settle himself into the pillows quite yet.

No, he reaches an arm behind your head, and before you know it, you’re getting cuddled in the blanket and pulled into his side in one impossibly smooth motion. Your fabric-covered legs tangle in his, and somehow, through the feeble protection of the cotton, his fingers find your knee to hold you there as he dips under the blanket, too. He leans you against the backboard, tucks the soft fabric around your head so you’re prim and perfect and comfy….

And then his head dips, so he can press a dandelion’s wisp of a kiss against the side of your neck.

The quiet gasp comes from your mouth, you can’t stop it or the fact that your hands clutch at his shoulders to hold yourself steady as his equally as quiet chuckles burrow into your skin. He drags his mouth up towards your face, right by your trembling mouth, and gives you another puncture of a kiss, another dot of him left behind.

Your existence is the epicenter of an earthquake, impossible that you could sit still maybe ever again. But you stare at the square of color by his nose, the way he can’t quite look in your eyes, and you just… you reach a shaky hand to his hoodie hood, lower it off his head, so you get the full sight of his wavy hair and his perfectly matchy eyes and how…. Hot isn’t even the right word, he’s probably the most handsome boy you’ve ever seen in your life.

He has a lone freckle in the middle of his cheek. Something about its cuteness makes you giggle, and you poke at it so gently before whispering, “Hi.”

And though you don’t have a freckle in that spot, he does the same thing, in the same place, and whispers back, “Hey.”

This is the moment.

Pages and pages of exposition, plot twists, development, they’re all leading to this moment, when Jaehyun’s inimitable gaze slips right from the nonexistent freckle in your cheek to the very much existing swollen nervousness in the middle of your mouth. He’s going to do it, you know he is, nothing about him has given you the impression that he wanted to do anything other than this, and everything about you is screaming that you’re not ready. You’re not ready yet, you want to do this with him but you’re not ready.

So the moment overpowers you into familiar, comforting avoidance, as you push yourself back from him - though not far enough that his hand comes off your leg, and babble a tad too loud, “By the way, why were my housemates talking about you like you were campus famous? Are you?”

You’re not going to judge him, none of this is done to judge him. Of course he probably has a very long, very nice list of girls - because who wouldn’t want to do this with him - and you just don’t know how you feel about it.

Jaehyun gets nervous, maybe not in his face, but his fingers slip against your knee and that’s the answer. And that’s also your answer. You don’t care if you’re another bullet point in his long list, for some odd reason, you feel like he gets you. Or, at least, the parts of your personality you thought maybe weren’t as charming as they could be... he hasn’t minded them.

“Maybe,” he mumbles, a second confirmation.

That somehow only relaxes you.

“What am I going to find if I Google you?” You sink back in closer to him and he gets all funny looking when you start to tease, or honestly, maybe flirt—,  “Renowned CalTech serial killer schemes women by having accomplices play his parents?” 

When Mark finds your body later tonight, you’ll think it’ll still be blushing.

He laughs in such disbelief, his head falls forward against your shoulder and he knocks it there and whines, “Please don’t. Please.”

You grasp his neck to hold him in the embrace and you can’t help the snide comment, “Okay then, mental note, avoid cute guys in libraries because they will sell your organs for cash,” nor the little kiss you give the side of his head.

His nose nudges away your tee so he can press a kiss to your bare collarbone instead of being forced to go through the fabric, and you think you might have goosebumps for the rest of your life. Especially when he slips back to your neck and kisses a little deeper this time, pulling out the burgeoning strains of an ache, and then he murmurs against your skin, “Mental note, cute girls in libraries probably have cute organs. Will get a much better offering on the black market.”

Okay, wow. You both find each other cute.

His fingers slip from your leg to your belly, and you’re not expecting the cute burst of tickles that explodes there. You knock heads when you jolt in laughter, and as you push at his shoulders to try and get him to stop, he tickles you over every inch of your stomach. You’ve never had a happier laugh in your life, you think, and all of it is sucked into nothingness when the hem of your shirt slips, and suddenly his hand is on your bare torso, and it’s curving around to hold your waist with more intention than the innocent tickles held.

Your breathing immediately slows into the labored pace of smitten laziness as his thumb smooths over your side, and he leans in to press another kiss to your jaw, forcing his nose and his eyelashes far too close to your mouth for sanity’s sake. When he pulls back, you don’t know if you can see a speck of honey brown in his eyes anymore.

He bites at his lip so tightly you have the odd urge to slip your fingers there and get him to stop, before he lets out a low breath. Things seem back to normal when he resumes the conversation, “Speaking of money, I owe you some. You want a check or Venmo?”

That conversation in the library with his parents feels like it happened literally ten years ago. You don’t know who the heck you were back then, or who you are now.

You knock your shoulder into his and scoff, “Venmo forty thousand dollars, who are you.”

“Come on, just tell me which one you want.” His whine almost gets you, he’s so cute without even trying that you really are about to cave and tell him a check is okay. Because you share your Venmo with your dad, and then he would know…

His hand slips up your back to try and tease you into agreeing, and he… you watch his face blow apart in subtle surprise when his fingers splay out and find nothing there. HIs fingers tug at your skin, like he’s trying to decide if he should let you go but really can’t deal with the fact that you’re not wearing a bra. You don’t want him to let go, you can feel his palm’s warmth straight into your heartbeat, so you scoot even closer, if possible, and his hand tucks around you in a full embrace, right before he lets out this stupidly glorious sigh when his fingertips brush the side curve of your bare chest.

If this feels so good and he’s barely touching you, you don’t know how you’d survive what is certainly going to follow.

“You don’t have to give me money,” you chuckle so softly. “I don’t need it, and I’m not your… situational prostitute.”

Jaehyun's cheeks puff up when he tries to hold in his laughter. He looks so silly and funny you can’t help but laugh first, and then his hand is out from under your shirt (thank goodness but also please put it back!) so he can clap and cackle in full entertainment at the idea of a situational prostitute.

He’s still laughing when he offers it up, “What can I do for you, then? There’s gotta be something I can do to pay you back.”

Of course, the only thing you want is for Jaehyun to tell you why he’s supposedly famous, yet you know that a protest will come no matter how much you ask. And beyond his - still shocking - presence here in your bed, there’s no material things he could give you that you lack.

“I don’t know. I kind of already have everything I need,” you admit, the shyness forcing your shoulders up into a shrug when you get honest with him. “I’m graduating, I have two job interviews lined up, love my dad, love my friends…”

He cuts in over you so fast, “Have a boyfriend?”

Does he really think you’d be this affected by his presence if you weren’t perpetually single? Doe he really think you’d be letting him kiss you up like his life depended on it if you had a boyfriend?

You lean in, kiss his shoulder, whisper right there, “No.”

His hands loop around you then, and you find yourself being brought to sit in his lap, your hips neatly fitting into the fold of his, his hands finding their way home to settle at the apex of your thighs where your shorts have folded to give you away. And here, like this, you can see that he has the littlest bits of sunshine yellow in his eyes, that match the sprigs of blonde in his brunette, and you think you’ve never seen anything better.

“Want one for the night?” He is too much, too, too, too much, “I’ve been told I have quite the boyfriend image. Or whatever that is.”

Whoever told him that knew what they were talking about.

Because, gosh, is it easy to imagine this being a part of your daily life, his head dips as he grasps the back of your neck, his sodden mouth marking the hollow of your throat and stamping his signature across your racing pulse. Your body gives a great big quake when he bites you with the barest of touches, then smooths his lips over the spot to ease the prick of pain. You wonder if you’ll have a mark in the morning, you’ve never seen yourself with another’s presence and you think you’re going to like what you look like.

“You’re a—, a lot,” you gasp as his fingers slip even higher under your shorts, and his tongue darts to join his lips against bit of your neck that belongs to him now. “Are you always like this?”

How did any of those girls survive to tell the tale?

He peeks up and his dimples are so, so cheeky when he banters, “Gotta make up for my deep, crippling, personal insecurities by flirting with anything that walks.”

He’s flirting, he’s teasing, he’s just trying to stay in the mood that this night has been draped in. Yet… is it a crime for you to want him to say, No, you’re the only one for me and always have been, my mind is consumed with singular thoughts of your existence. That’s a line ripped straight from the last chapter of Return to Sweetheart Lake, but he’s toed the line of romance hero pretty well before this.

You give him your best mean mug, trying to hide the worry, and get haughty and petty as you try to get off him, “No, thank you!”

But Jaehyun catches you before you can roll away, chuckles as he shifts to hug you sweetly instead of the way he was before. He peeks at you and whines, “Really? Wow, self-deprecation usually works.”

Self-deprecation did work. The way he was so harsh on himself in the library softened you to him in record time.

“A line that is used freely amongst the public isn’t that enticing,” you sneer, though your serious and scolding comes out more like muted and teasing.

He is so utterly charmed by it, all he can do is laugh, “Damn, okay Socrates.” His mouth crosses to kiss the middle of your cheek and light a small bloom of your skin on tender fire, before he jokes, “Mulan’s dad in Mulan,” and moves his mouth to the shell of your ear, where you get a comet shower of sweet kisses, “Plato,” he lifts your hair so he can move behind your ear, dip his tongue right into an unseen spot, “Kirkegaard,” before he buries his mouth right in the space that isn’t quite your lips yet but makes you yearn to experience the real thing. Then he stops his lustful ministrations and murmurs, “I certainly didn’t crush on any other girls in the library, if you’re wondering.”

That… that is kind of close to what you wanted. Almost.

“Just your teenage wolf friends or whatever,” you mumble. He called that Jennifer girl hot, and if that’s what he actually wanted and dated, then what the heck is he doing here with you. What the heck is Jaehyun Jeong - two name wonder, forty thousand dollar disposable income, flying around in a private jet Jaehyun Jeong, whoever he is - doing here with you?

He pulls back with a genuine look of disbelief shadowed across his pretty features, and he wonders, “You seriously don’t know who I am?”

Or maybe he’s…

Maybe he’s not Jaehyun Jeong, he’s just Jaehyun. He’s just the physics major who takes class with your dad and gets nervous when you even look at him, and wears his hoodie hood flipped up every day. Maybe this version of him does want you. He’s just… he’s just….

“Oh yeah, you got me, I know you,” you tease, and he tenses under your hold for a second before you admit, “You’re HGWH.”

He could not be more confused. “HG what?”

This has been your secret for an entire semester, and you never thought you’d ever get a chance to explain to him in person.

“HGWH. Hot Guy With the Hoodie,” you explain, shyer than you’ve ever been in your life as you reach to flip the hood back over his head, tighten the string to tease. Then you open it back up, so you can smooth your thumbs into his dimples like you’d wanted to since you saw them, and you confess so quietly, “The guy I crushed on for the entire semester without even knowing.”

His little laugh is doused in the purest joy, and it buries itself straight into your heart.

He gets all close again, still hugging you to him, his arms wrapping all the way around your waist as he settles you back into his lap, smitten and perfect, and you don’t think you’re ever going to forget this. This, and him, and the way his eyes take one more descent to your mouth, before his hoarse murmur makes itself known, “Can I kiss you?”

The fact that he asks, even after everything… you cannot believe that someone like him exists.

“Yeah,” you whisper.

He’s smiling when you kiss him for the very first time, you can feel the indents in his cheeks where his dimples can’t hide. His lips felt so good on your body but the best against your mouth, like the divots and cracks and stretches of pretty pink were designed perfectly to compliment yours. He has you lightheaded and lovesick after just one touch, just one pretty smooch and that’s it.

Your hand slips up to cover your mouth when he pulls back and a shuddering gasp escapes your lungs. You weren’t expecting this, you weren’t expecting any of it, and his face melts in infatuated affection, cheeks reddening into the ripest red apples. His eyes flutter shut as his hand reaches to hold yours, to knot your fingers together like you walked home in, and that one last defense is slipped away so that he can…

So he can kiss you again, with one hand on yours and the other holding your cheek, the spaces between your lips are neatly filled with his and he doesn’t hold back, the crushing pressure nearly blows your head into fuzzy glory. You don’t know how he could be kissing multiple spots on your mouth at once, but none of it goes untouched - the hidden corners of your lips’ meeting spots, the dazzling center of your bottom lip, the swollen cupid’s bow that yearns to reach his.

He kisses you with such delicate, yet convicted practice, that you’re still trying to process that he’s so darn good at this too when the slickness of his tongue darts against your mouth. This whole thing changes. He notices the catch of your breath and his head dips in a subtle nod of reassurance, before his lips nudge yours in a tiny kiss, to tell you that everything’s okay.

You have to do this, you have to be brave.

You chase his mouth in the kiss this time, wanting to feel all of it, not just the beautiful little parts. Then, when you draw your next breath, you let your mouth fall open and his tongue is inside in the next second. That is already so much, and he keeps licking this corner of your tongue that gives you a feeling so hot you nearly sizzle into ash, and then you feel that his hand back at your waist, slipping to feel the skin at the small of your back where your shirt is ridden up. And gosh, now he’s biting your lip too, right in the middle where it pouts with want for him, and licking it, and biting it, and repeating that cycle in countless, heady repetition.

You’re so overwhelmed, you don’t know where to go or what to do. The only place you can think of is down, so you let him bite on your lower lip one last time, the harsh peal of his breath against your chin feeling utterly insane, and then your hips bear down against his, to try and make some space for yourself in his embrace of utter seduction. A fatal, flawless mistake, because the shorts that you’re wearing are so worn down that you can… you can feel him. There, between your legs.

“Oh, shit,” he curses right into your mouth, which, you can’t even describe the sensation it induces down to the very tiniest cell of your existence.

Only to have it swallowed up by cold, crippling solitude as Jaehyun abruptly shoves you off of him so you’re perched with the comforter clutched to your chest and this flicker of longing trying to stay aflame. He rolls right over and face plants in your pillows, and you can see the tension in his shoulders through the hoodie.

What? Did you do something?

Your hand darts out to touch his shoulder blade, then you decide against it and instead dumbly ask, “Are you okay?”

Did he change his mind, decide he didn’t want you?

“I don’t want to be an asshole to you,” he groans into the pillow, which, like, confusing, because he’s the furthest thing from it. “I’m just thinking about… Donald Trump on Twitter.” Um, what? You have never been more confused in your entire life. “And mmm… god. Raw potatoes… cold showers… Knitting with my gran…”

Is he?

You didn’t know this was a real thing, is that really what he’s doing right now?

“Smashed up roadkill. Increasing national debt,” he’s muttering with increased franticness as he clutches the pillow to him and tries to calm down. You try to touch his hair and he flinches away and panics even further, “Oh, god, blood, dying, death, death, death, definitely what Professor P would do to me if he found out.” 

He’s trying not to get too excited too fast.

He might be the cutest boy you’ve ever met.

And his mention of your dad in his quest to… unexcite himself, has you all smitten and shy again. You hug your knees up into your chest as you memorize the look of him shredding himself apart because of you, and you murmur, “My dad would probably invite you to dinner.”

Your dad never says it anymore, because he respected you when you asked him to stop, but he’s been waiting for years for you to bring home a boyfriend. Would always used to joke that he hoped you picked someone smart instead of good-looking. And now you have someone - well, kind of - that’s both? How would he not?

The corner of Jaehyun’s cheek goes pink, and he peeks out from under the pillow to warble, “Really?”

“You got an A in his class, right?” you tease so softly.

His face gets all tiny in embarrassment, and his luscious hair blowing in the breeze is the only sign of his smaller than small nod of affirmation.

And before you know it, he’s holding your waist so you can cuddle on the pillow next to him. So he can kiss you again.

You’re close here, lying together on your mattress, closer than you had been when you were in his lap. Every brush of him is a stroke on you, you can feel his toned stomach pressing into yours where both your shirts have ridden up, and you let yourself feel impossibly small and wanted in his embrace as he keeps kissing you with abandon, but just your mouth. Only your mouth. You figured his hands would slip from your waist and travel back to the expanse of emptiness by your chests, or his mouth would return to the hollow of your throat, or he’d take his shirt off, or something.

But no, he is simple and satisfied with just his tongue in your mouth and the sweet little noises he’s able to coax from you when he starts the kiss one way and it slips the other without warning. When your skin is caught up in his hold and ends up marked under a ring of fire, when the only slightly lewd thing he does is lick up the entire side of your mouth so he can close his lips around your top one, and you just blossom apart in his grasp. It doesn’t go any further than that. You push your chest into his a little and nothing, you try to arch your back and he doesn’t take the bait, he is perfectly fine with the just kissing.

Why? The worry creeps up again, is it not what he wanted? Is it not enough? Did he expect you to be in charge, for this to be further than just kissing already?

His knee nudges in between your legs just a bit further, and the sensation of his leg hitting there and what you can feel at the front of his pelvis in return has your eyes flying open in shock. He does want to do more than kissing, he wants to do a lot more, there’s no way he can hide it.

He senses that you’re in your head, and his mouth unseals for yours for a moment of quiet stillness, and you’re so hypnotized by his eyes that all that comes out is a vapid little, “Hi.”

Jaehyun smiles, you don’t think you’ll ever get enough of his smile. He smooths the hair away from your face before he kisses you softly and laughs, “Haha. Hey, again.”

He doesn’t say anything more, do anything more, and you just lie there in his arms and try not to let this fall apart. You could put a stop to this, draw the line, extricate yourself from his pull, which is the wise choice here. Because the alternative? Sleeping with him once and having to be okay with that being it? Having this memory linger like an un-washable stain, having every encounter that follows try to live up to this one and fail?

Would that be worth it?

“I....…. uh…. Do you….” The words are a recipe of smitten fumbling, none of it makes sense, and Jaehyun strokes your cheek softly, his own way of telling you not to be nervous. So you screw your eyes shut, just get it over with, “Do you want to have sex?” 

Yes, it would be.

You’re okay with it being once, you’re okay with him leaving in the morning and never speaking to you again, you just. You want to do this with him, just once.

“You wanna have sex?” His breathless query forces your eyes back open, and he is staring at you with his mouth open and his cheeks pink, before he gets nervous, “I’m okay just kissing you, sweetheart.”

He… he didn’t want to take it further because he wasn’t sure if you were okay with it.

You bury your face in the pillow because the shyness becomes overwhelming, and then you figure, you just propositioned him, there’s no need to be shy. So you dart forward to kiss his mouth, flirty and quick, and then wonder, “Is having sex with you part of my boyfriend experience, or would that additional cost be docked from my forty k?”

Who are you?! That was literally Scarlett from Wrangled and Tangled taking over your body!

“Oh, jeez,” he chuckles, consumed with embarrassment at his own comment. “I never should’ve said that.”

His hand clutches at your waist as he rolls back onto the pillow, his arm over his eyes as he weighs all of this together - you, him, your nonexistent relationship that has suddenly become the most important, centering thing that has ever happened. You are happy to just lie there in his arms for one more moment, even if the rejection is going to come. Maybe he doesn’t want you to get attached, not just you, either of you.

“Hey,” you beckon softly, trying to remove his arm that he keeps there over his eyes. You’re not sure what to do here, not sure what you want to do, but you just give in and let it happen. You kiss over his heart in a gentle transfer of affection, and you murmur, “I want to. I don’t want to a lot… I don’t… ” The last time you slept with someone was so forgettable you don’t even remember who it was with or where you were. You know someone as impossible as him is going to be burned into a tender part of your brain for forever.

“I don’t usually do this, either. Ever,” Jaehyun whispers into the night air, eyes still covered.

Courage.

Courage, courage, courage, and one dash of spiced affection.

You lean up and kiss his exposed mouth with a feather’s touch, and even that isn’t enough to convince him. So, you sit back on his hips and his hands move involuntarily to hold your waist, and you cherish the feel of the gratuitous warmth against your bare skin. He’s still not looking, and you kind of want him to, you want a captivated audience… and wanton encouragement… for what you do next. To get him to look, you do the only thing that you can think of, push your hips back down into his.

HIs eyes fly open in a second, all dark and hazy as he tries to make sense of you there on him, and he is so nervous he stutters, “W-what are you doing?”

Your hand dips around the hem of your shirt.

“You generally start with taking your clothes off, no? Or are you out of practice?”

And as you say it, the enticing words falling from your lips like a waterfall of seduction designed to push him under, you lift your sleep tee all the way off, leaving your entire torso bare for him to see.

“Wow, that’s…. wow,” he breathes, when your shirt is discarded and he can see for himself what he felt earlier. His hand moves before his thought is even finished, so he can hold between your neck and your collarbone, so his thumb can sweep over one of your breasts without getting too close to the tender center of it, a calculated motion that has you shivering and pressing yourself further into his hold. “You’re so… you’re beautiful.”

He thinks you’re beautiful.

Beautiful.

He sits up with an urgency and tugs you to him, so his mouth can continue its ownership of yours, kissing much differently now. He can’t take his slow, lazy time to bite you this way and that, he can’t even close his mouth properly beyond smearing your lips with the outline of his and make sure his tongue is fit in the space between yours. He’s far too preoccupied with letting his hands go wherever, your breasts, every part of them, the divot in your side that entices him so precisely, the arc of your back that he’d indulged in without needing to ask, holding your neck for a moment of breathlessness as you burrow your mouth further into his to have enough air. And then it’s impossible to miss, his hand trailing past your sternum and the dip of your bellybutton, right to where your sleep shorts are barely hanging on, the waistband folds easily when he—,

“W-what,” you gasp. “Jae, what are you doing.” 

His hand stops just short of dipping into your underwear, moves back up to tickle the place on your stomach from before. He contorts to press a kiss to your side, gets the goosebumps pealing when he murmurs, “Gotta check out the organs for myself.”

You burst out laughing with each other for the countless time, and you have to, you have to, you have to.... you have to beat back the thought that if you were together you’re sure you’d never stop laughing for a moment in your life.

That’s too. That’s too much….

You can’t do that right now, there’s more important stuff to think about. You move to pull his hoodie and his undershirt off all at once, get a headache-inducing expanse of toned stomach to take in. He chuckles at your reaction and kisses your shoulder when you get all swoony silent at the sight of his muscles. You let your fingers go everywhere they like in return, a crevice in his shoulder, a trio of little freckles in the middle of his sternum, in every dip and dancing ridge of his abs and…

You bite your lip so that the nervousness is focused into the pain there, and you one up him, lift off his lap to shift and slip your hand in his shorts. His hand flies to grab your wrist and he looks at you with such care in his eyes that it only makes you want to do this more. You lean and kiss him, a sweet wisp that does not match everything that you’re entangled in, and you press your hand right into him. His whole body gives with the sordid tension you inspire when your fingers fit neatly around him, and you might end up with little anxious bruises around your waist from how he’s gripping you.

The sight of him there underneath you, already whining because of what you’re doing, makes you so bigheaded you just blurt it, “Is there a reason you never talked to me before?”

He could’ve done this with you the whole semester.

“Mmmm….” He can’t even make words form as your hand carefully shifts over his warm, soft skin, feeling so foreign yet familiar. Going slow is probably agony for him, the way his neck is pulled with taunt veins as he grits his teeth to hold on tells you enough, so you quicken your pace, and that catches him off guard. His word catch, too “S-scared,” before he grabs your wrist again mid-stroke and groans, “Oh, you gotta stop that.”

You do it once more, just to tease him, move your hand up and down, and his head knocks back into the headboard.

“Scared?” you wonder. You’re not scary, you’re not scary at all, you’re just a smitten girl with a crush, there was nothing to be scared of.

“I—,” He tries to speak again, does so just as you give him one more stroke despite his hold around you, and he hugs you so you have no choice but to let go of him and orders, “You realllyyyy need to stop.”

You lean back and his face is scrunched up in so much controlled tension, and you… oh, wow. He was that riled up from just a little bit of touching? You didn’t think.... You didn’t think it was as good as the books said, you weren’t ready to use your mouth so you settled for your hand, but if he liked it, you’re certainly not going to be upset…

His eyes open in this darkened sunset of complete and utter lust, and your body dips into a pool of wanton longing when you anticipate what sexy sentiment he’ll lay upon you. Before he gets nervous again and admits, “I…. I just thought you wouldn’t like me.”

He’s going to get locked up for larceny one day or another, for stealing your heart so many times.

“So did I,” you confess in return. “I was so scared.”

Scared of absolutely everything - that Jaehyun would reject you, worse, that he’d make fun of you. Even worse, that he’d entertain you just for a bit of meaningless fun and you’d be left to pick up the pieces. You were so scared. Still are, a little bit.

Like he can sense that fear still lingering, he leans in to press maybe the most perfect kiss yet against your mouth, and he sighs, “Don’t be. I’m just me.”

Just him.

Just another college student that you like.

Suddenly, you find yourself being lowered back onto the pillow so he can be above you now, so he can dip his head in for one more stellar kiss before his mouth lingers for too, too long. It gets your mind all hazy and thoughtless so he can move without warning, slip his hand in the band of your shorts and pull them and your underwear all the way off, leaving you fully bare for him to freely take in. Your instinct is to hide in the covers, to try and melt away so he can’t see what no one has really seen, but his mouth smooths over yours in a kiss of reassurance. His hand feels so comforting around your thigh that you fall open to him, giving him undeterred access to slip his hand between your legs, making you acutely aware of how slick that tender spot is.

And now you get why he’d panicked like that, a few strokes of his fingers and you’re pressing into him more and trying to pull away, the unfamiliar beckoning that he's provoked in you is something you don’t know how to deal with. He can’t do more than one thing at a time, the kissing has stopped so he can take you in, whining softly when his fingers twist just right and the beckoning becomes insane, and when he tries to move to stroke your hipbone, dance over your thigh, you grab his wrist out of urgency and force his fingers right back to that spot. His chest heaves hard when you grab his back and all of the dehydrated air comes crashing out of your lungs when his fingers tease you like you did to him. When his hand dips lower, you gasp and shake your head, because you don’t want his fingers there inside you, you’d rather… you’re both ready, why wait.

You gesture through the haze towards the box on your nightstand shelf - you were always prepared, for anything and everything, that included the unopened condoms for all the sex you weren’t having - and you get an eyeful of his cute, bare body as he tugs his shorts off and reaches for one, gets himself ready for this. There’s no words exchanged when he returns, nothing, he just hovers over you in the position of eternal affectionate protection, and his gaze conveys the wordless query. You sink into your pillows and decide to trust him with your entire heart.

You nod, and he grabs one of your hands to give you a tiny kiss in the middle of your palm, and then he moves it between you. The odd, stirring sight of your little hand next to his, the strange, welcoming, pulsating warmth that comes with him lining himself up in between your legs, it makes your heart crunch—,

He fits inside you in one go, smooth, seamless, sensationally criminal, and all thoughts of anything other than him, him, and him, wow, fly out of your mind.

“Is that okay?” he breathes with his eyes shut, half into your hair, half into your neck, half to himself, half to you, before he focuses back on you and asks in specifics, “Are you okay with this?”

He is everything.

“Mmmm. Yeah,” you exhale at the uncomfortable sensation of him adjusting inside you before he accidentally dips into the perfect spot and all you can feel is just… is him. You clutch at his shoulder blades and you can barely form the words, “Yeah, yeah. Okay.”

There is so much hesitation and awkwardness on both of your parts, unsure if the other is ready, or can handle the torrent of emotion that is wrapping you up alongside the comforter. All you can feel is him in you and his heart beating an insane tune through his chest, and something about it makes your whole body tense up. You didn’t realize he could feel it until his hips snap with such sudden, instinctual lust that your vision goes black.

“Fuck,” he groans as he tries to stop himself from moving again and can’t, the slide of him inside you electrifying these spaces you’ve never known about. “Fuck, you feel so fucking—,” he moves two or three times, so fast you can’t count, and you’re gasping and he’s apologizing and cursing in this stream of lust that makes you sear with warmth, “I’m sorry, I can’t… fuuuuck. Fuck, you’re so good.”

An insane burst of pride swells inside your chest, and it nearly brands all of you.

You grasp his back and you hope it doesn’t hurt, or if it does that he likes it. When he moves to hold your chest, kiss a little sunburst on the inside curve of it, all you can do is gasp his perfect name that you didn’t know before today, “Jae.”

“Yeah, sweetheart,” The sweet little nickname falls from him so easily as he leans up to nudge your mouth apart in a kiss, to beckon, “I wanna hear you.” He drives in so deeply you have no choice to let out this tender little sigh, which deepens when it seems to drive him up the wall. He pushes your hair into his grasp so he can see your face plain, and he kisses your mouth again, marks it as his, gasps right into it, “You sound so pretty when you’re like this.” You hold him so close, you don’t want him to float away for even a second, and his hand flies back to your waist, to smooth out over your hipbone, as he watches himself slipping into you over and over again, “So fucking perfect. Fuck. I’ve wanted to for so long… fuck.”

“Since when?” you sigh, and you don’t even know if he heard you.

“New Year's.” His answer is immediate, before his hand moves to hold your chin in place, so you have no choice but to watch him move back and forth above you. His eyes darken as the dirty talk starts to seep out of him, “You fucking—, you bite your lip when you read.”

His teeth mark up your bottom lip for the countless instance, only this time, you have the context that you weren’t aware of. He imagined doing it for himself, and his cursing is an insane flavor of seasoned and unraveling control. He didn’t break apart until this very moment and that makes this feel so forbidden and perfect.

“I fucking. Fuck. I dreamt about you all the damn time.” You know he meant all kinds of dreams, the kinds that you pretend you don’t have. He must’ve gone to bed with the idea of you in his brain and the conjured up feel of you on his hands. “I wanted to taste your fucking mouth,” he gasps before he steals your lips into a kiss that is going to leave a permanent stain of his mouth upon yours, “Just once.”

You had no idea. No, no, no idea. You never let yourself fantasize about him, except on those lonely, cold nights, where a book got too good and the house was quiet enough. But hearing this, seeing him fall apart - because he looks damn close - this is insane.

“T-that long?” You are having trouble speaking now, having trouble doing anything but experiencing the little pinprick comets of pressure that come as he keeps moving. “Really?”

“Like I said. Scared,” he whispers honestly, before he swoops in to kiss your cheek. “But at least I get one night of the the real college sweetheart experience.”

The comets turn into a supernova, one that’s about to collapse in on itself.

“Shush,” you teasingly, as always, stop him from saying words he doesn’t mean.

Pretending you’re his college sweetheart when this is just a one night stand is so ridiculous. And you’re okay with it being a one night stand. You’re okay with it.

“Shush,” he mocks you, then kisses your mouth before you have a chance to protest, and then maybe…. Says something that he shouldn’t. “You’re so cute, I want to do this for forever.”

Forever.

That’s…. That’s a lot. That’s a length of time you won’t let yourself contemplate. You’re now the realist here.

The lovey talking is all good and fun, a distraction from the fact that it’s been mere minutes and he seems to be dangling at the edge of the same galaxy of consumption you are. And you need to know what this feels like, something you’ve never experienced before. You lean in to kiss his mouth, accept his tongue slicking back to paint by yours in clear seduction, and you hold him close, let him move his hips however he likes, hit the spots that are just as good for him as they are for you, and let the solar system of your existence expand and expand and expand—,

He dips in you so far you didn’t even know it was possible, and at the same time, his hand expertly slips from yours to join him between your legs. And well, he must know the way tension forces work from physics, because he presses in just a centimeter further at the same time, his hand and him, and… and when he bites your lip and then sucks….

The universe of you ceases to exist, driven apart in one detonation of consuming nothingness.

“O-oh,” you gasp, through a sticky, sweet, consuming, mindless outburst of feeling, the words dripping out of you in symmetrical motion, “F-fuck.”

Your uncharacteristic vulgarity drips straight into him, and he murmurs right against your mouth, “That’s my girl.”

The phrase is a brand on your heart that is etched in his handwriting. You fall into your bed, boneless and owned by him, and watch in this strange, perfect outsider’s vantage point, as he closes his eyes and moves inside you once or twice more. Or maybe it's a thousand times or maybe you're there for a lifetime, but it honestly feels like it doesn’t take him much longer before his own galaxy of a wondrous existence shatters apart just the same.

He collapses on top of you with a groan and he is so heavy and sweaty you nearly suffocate with the lovely pressure.

And out of flustered, usual instinct, you don't know what to do. So you poke right at his back, where his kidney would be if you would harvest it. You poke it, and poke it again, and that tickles him because he starts laughing, sweet and swooning, in a little melody of cute crushing that will be stuck in your head for a long time. Then he pokes you back, your cheeks and your stained red chest, and he kisses you in a tiny, charming smooch because he can, and soon you’re just laughing and holding each other and soaking in the ridiculousness of it all.

And of course, he’s the perfect gentleman, cleans you both up and gets you some water after you insist on checking that none of your roommates are home (because he wanted you two to walk into the kitchen naked! you draw the line and make him put on his underwear!) And when you get back in bed, he even lies a respectable distance away from you with his eyes closed because he’s not sure if you want to cuddle or what.

Which you cannot thank him enough for, because your mind is a whirling spot of sweet sugar, and nothing else. You had sex with him, you had sex with Hot Guy With the Hoodie, and it was… it was amazing. It was better than anything that you’ve ever done and it wasn’t just because of the physical aspect of it. He was good at that, he was better than good, but it felt like....

It felt like you both needed to do this, because you’ve never met anyone good enough for it before.

You’re not sure if that last breath he gives was a snore or if Jaehyun's lungs are still as caught up in the excitement as yours are. One last time, you have to gather up the courage to do this, though you cocoon yourself into your comforter and face the other way. You take a deep breath and you whisper, “Jae.”

You can tell from the way his voice sounds just as throaty as it did when he woke up on your chaise, that he’s almost clutched in the hands of sleep. Yet he still answers you, “Mmmm yeah.”

I just thought you wouldn’t like me.

“I like you,” you whisper.

And you immediately have a quiet freak out of your own, stuff your cheek into the pillow, kick your legs, let out this really silent scream, because you can’t even... You can’t believe you just told Jaehyun you liked him like that, and did it without holding back. You told him you liked him. What!

There’s the sound of him rolling over, and maybe you’ll chastise yourself later for being worried that he’s rolling the other way to get out of your bed. But then you feel his arm lazily drape around your waist, and then you’re smoothly being fit into his front so he can kiss your ear and spoon you close, and then he murmurs through the strains of sweet, smitten sleep, “I like you, too.” Before he actually exerts the effort to lean all the way over you and kiss your mouth, a searing crest of desire and ardor all together, then he sneaks back onto the pillow and sighs against the back of your head, “You’re the fucking girl of my dreams, baby. Goodnight. Goooooooooodnight. The best night.”

The best night, indeed.

—

You’ve never felt like LA was home. You lived here for twenty-two years and it was just a place you existed in, and you thought that moving to Lausanne would change things. And sure, maybe you like the seasons in Swizerland more than the acrid humidity that always seems to be in the air here in California, plus you have an apartment there, a life, a good job you love. But it’s never felt like a home, either.

“Running away from me already?”

You truly convinced yourself there was no way Jaehyun was going to chase after you, yet you shouldn’t be surprised, considering he’s the one who’s gone for you first, every time. His tie is missing, and the top buttons on his shirt are undone under his suit, and his flawless forehead is lined in just the littlest… bit of sweat. As if he’d run through the hotel when he’d noticed you were missing from the bar and panicked, hoped with all his might that you wouldn’t be gone before he could find you.

The relief in his eyes might say as much, and you can still tell what trope this is. Desperate man desperate to cling onto the desperate slips of the past that’ve desperately returned.

You blink, and Jaehyun is right there in front of you, closer than you had been on those barstools. You can feel the brick of the hotel exit press into your back as he gives you the most teasing smile yet and panders, “Or maybe just trying to get me alone?”

That was not your intent, though you can’t deny the fact that this alley is totally empty brings a great deal of alleviation to your anxiety. It felt like you were dying in there, thinking of everyone that might be watching.

“Don’t think so highly of yourself,” you scoff, and he rolls his eyes like he can’t stand himself either. “My car will be here in fifteen minutes.”

You came out here and you felt alone and you did the one thing you could to escape it.

“Going home to see your dad?” Jaehyun asks.

The whole week leading up to this was spent at home with your dad. You wanted to scoop him up and take him to Switzerland with you, sure there were institutes that would just die to have him teach there. He protested, said that he couldn’t leave his post at CalTech since he just got a batch of new grad students, and you felt more emptiness than possible at the thought of returning home alone.

“To the airport,” you clarify. “Red-eye flight awaits.”

“Ah, I know that one well, unfortunately. Helps when you’re flying private. You can lie down and sleep… or do other things.” You don’t think it’s possible for Jaehyun to speak in anything other than flirtation unless he tries specifically not to, and the back of your neck is in absolute flames.

“Oh, gosh. I’m not sure your head could get any bigger,” you laugh, because that’s the only thing to do - laugh at how ridiculous and persistent he is, at how feeble and pliant you’re about to become.

“My head has been the same size since college,” he brags, giving his shiny, dark blue hair a shake, before his features darken with so much feral anticipation. “So’s my—,”

His hand loops around an invisible half-circle that is truly too big to be anything realistic - he could fit a log in there! or a stuffed Chipotle burrito! - and he makes the same lewd up and down gesture, the implications turning downright dirty and straightforward without a second warning.

“Jaehyun!” you gasp, and your hands flies to cover your eyes and your cheeks in one go because you can’t watch him do that anymore. It’s not good for your health.

He laughs so happily at your mortification you just know you’re going to be left with a little husk of a heart after this.

His fingers poke the side of your cheek, and you flinch softly at the tickle it induces. When he smooths his hand out against your cheek to get you glance up at him, through the star-hued eyelashes that are making your vision of him so shiny and pretty, he murmurs, “Two questions.”

You beat him to the punch, try to be snappy and confident and like him for once, “Why are you out here? Shouldn’t you be in there with your adoring fans?”

Jaehyun keeps circling back to you, and you want to know why.

“The two questions are mine, thank you very much,” he drawls, index finger dropping to your mouth so he can silence you in a gesture that makes you hot for no reason.

His thumb quickly replaces it, tapping a morse code reminder of how that bit of you was under his sole possession for that entire night, and then his hand fully shifts, to hold your chin in affectionate control. You watch, fascinated, as the flirting and the cockiness and the strains of who he’s supposed to be disappear in favor of who he really is - just as worried and shy as you are - and you can predict the question before it floats out on the quietest, stressed cloud,

“Why didn’t you ever text me? I waited.”

—

You’re not disappointed when you wake up and there’s no warm form snuggled beside you. You figured as much would happen, and Jaehyun has… he’s left behind a scavenger hunt of his sweet, hidden feelings scattered throughout the room.

The first comes when you roll over and the pillow is stained with an unforgettable pine scent that you hope never washes off. The second follows right after when you go to reach for the Biology Olympiad tee, because he left you as bare as he made you, and you make contact with unfamiliar cotton instead. His white tee you barely got a glimpse at, that’s what he left for you. And he took yours.

The same blush you made yourself home in the night before comes roaring back when you put it on and find the shorts that he took off.

On the other pillow is a stack of your papers, positioned in a cheeky way so that they’re stuck in between the glaring, inappropriate cover of Wrangled and Tangled, and there’s something pinned to the CAR-T paper you still haven’t read a page of.  His handwriting sends a rush of warmth right to your heart,

sorry :( i tried to wait for u to wake up but ur the cutest sleeper ever and i was about to be on a mf amber alert. u should text me if u want tho ill def answer :) happy graduation ♡

His little smileys and the heart he scrawls at the end send you into another fit of smitten squealing, and then you notice that pinned underneath it, using the paperclip holding the leaflets together, is a check. Underneath his name and the starred and arrowed address of what must be his regular apartment in LA, is one addition - 323-555-1277, underlined no less than five times.

The check is for forty thousand dollars, marked with his flourish of a pompous signature, and made out to…

my favorite situational prostitute :)

You slip the papers out of the book to hold them to your chest, conjure up the phantom notion of Jaehyun holding you the same way, and you again flail about in utter belief that what happened last night happened. You’re still experiencing the glowy aftershocks, even here on your own. Because when you look down at the papers one last time, to read his cute note, laugh again over his stupid check, you see that - maybe in the time he was waiting for you to wake up - Jaehyun doodled in the margins of the paper, more smileys and hearts. One of them even has a J and your first initial linked inside.

(Ah!)

Then you spot Jaehyun's last notes to you, by each place where he scrawled his desperate pleas in the library, crossed off and with addendums. The beginning of something you couldn’t have even predicted.

Girlfriend!!   :( I wish :(

No       Thanks again for this. You’re the best for giving me my graduation.

Nuclear physics!!!!!!!       Don’t tell Professor P lol. Unless you want to hehe

Kiss me?  Kissing you was the best thing ever.

You suppose it would be insane to say you were in love with him, right? Right?

—

You eventually have to emerge from your room, to eat and pack your kitchen stuff before your dad - oh gosh, you’re going to have to wash the sheets before your dad comes here - and you pick the worst possible time to do so.

You walk into the kitchen and the entire dining table is filled, which means you get seven pairs of eyes staring at your messy hair and your men’s shirt and a small blossom of bruises on your neck (you checked). They don’t say anything, but a piece of pancake actually falls out of Jisung’s mouth as he stares, and Jeno chokes on his milk and you feel all hot and cotton-y again. You go for a glass of water and think of how you kissed Jaehyun right in that spot by the sink and you... wow. That wasn't a dream. 

Then your body nearly gives out when Haechan decides to buck up and ask it, “Care to elaborate on what Jaehyun Jeong was doing in our house last night?”

He means for you to give them details, he means for you to tell them exactly what went down when they were at Legoland, but you can’t. That story is just for you, no matter how many sordid tales you’ve heard against your will.

You clear your throat to make sure you’re not emotional, and while you’re pouring yourself the glass and you say nonchalantly, “He’s in Dada’s class, just here to drop off some stuff.”

Mark stuffs a massive breakfast sausage in his mouth, perhaps as a metaphor, and comments, “Like his pants.”

“Mark Minhyung Lee,” you warn, when all seven of them get the same identical shit-eating grin that you do not like at all. He only wriggles his face around to poo-poo you for scolding him being inappropriate when he knows exactly what you did last night.

A flash of Jaehyun bare and shrouded in the moonlight crowds your vision so fast you barely stop the water glass from overflowing in time. You’re never going to forget it, he was so beautiful. He called you beautiful but he was the pinnacle of beauty.

“Wait, wait, back up,” Jeno interrupts when he registers something important you said, “Your dad?"

You nod.

That gets their attention, and then Jaemin squawks right after for the important clarification, “Particle physics?! Someone like him is taking particle physics?!”

Okay, see? At least you weren’t the only one trying not to be judgy about this. You nod again and the three Js plus Chenle collapse over the table, with Mark and Haechan laughing out loud at the extreme reaction and Renjun rolling his eyes at the dramatics.

“Holy shit,” Chenle whines, banging his fist on the table in mock anger and frustration. “Of course he’s smart, too. Of course! Leave some ladies for the rest of us!”

That causes the dam to burst, “Why do you guys keep acting like he’s such a big shot? Is he in, like, a top tier fraternity or something?”

The question wasn’t answered last night, in fact, Jaehyun spectacularly avoided it, and you gave up caring just because everything else about him was enough to satisfy your longing. But now he’s gone, and he won’t ever know you’re talking about him behind his back, so you just want to find out. Because if they say he is a womanizing douchebag, you’re going to laugh in their faces and tell them they’re wrong.

“Maybe crawl out from under your rock and do some Googling,” Mark drawls.

Googling?

Like, on Google? That probably means there’s some kind of campus webpage or instagram he’s the star of, he’s maybe some CalTech influencer and that’s why everyone knows him. Jeno hands you his phone so you can look it up yourself, and you go right to google, type in Jaehyun Jeong, the name he hadn’t told you, but his friends and his check did,

And it autofills….

Jaehyun Jeong Marvel

Jaehyun Jeong Jennifer Kim are they dating

Jaehyun Jeong Teen Wolf reboot

Who is Jaehyun Jeong dating

How tall is Jaehyun Jeong

Jaehyun Jeong abs photos

Jaehyun Jeong Oscars

Oscars?

You press search, and are bombarded with the first row of Google Images, pictures of the boy you know in his hoodie and workout shorts, dressed to the nines in a gorgeous midnight blue suit. With his hair all done, earrings in his ears, jewelry just dripping with diamonds, familiar dimples pressed into his cheeks as he smiles for the paparazzi taking his shot at the Golden Globes.

Jaehyun is not just campus famous, he is worldwide famous and definitely not just another student at CalTech. He’s a critically acclaimed actor, who, according to his freaking Wikipedia page, is going to be in a Marvel movie next month. And has already been nominated for an Oscar when he was fifteen when he was in a movie alongside Tom Hanks and… oh my gosh, Lady Gaga. Two years ago he worked with the director that did Parasite and was nominated for another Oscar, and wow, he actually won that one. It was for best picture, but still… he won an Oscar.

What is going on.

There are endless pages for you to scroll through, shots of him at various red carpets, with his parents and without, videos and interviews where you’re sure his laugh will sound different than it did in the night. Gossip pages about who he’s dating (not you), Reddit pages of tea, and a very curated personal Instagram page of his that has a lot of black and white landscape pictures and not much else. The latest announcement says he’s going to Venice for the Venice Film Festival, and you never once thought that the reason he had to take his private jet to Italy and skip graduation was for something like that.

A little thing itches at your brain, and you click back to his Wikipedia page (you cannot believe the boy you had sex with has a long article on Wikipedia!) and you scroll down to the personal life section, hoping and praying there’s no mention of a relationship. There’s not. There’s only one line.

In between shooting, Jeong is completing his undergraduate degree at the California Institute of Technology.

“Oh, wow,” you breathe.

You don’t want to say your heart hurts, because you went into this with the realistic mindset that all of it was a too good to be true. Yet you can’t deny that a small part of you wasn’t basking in a spring sunrise of hope, that Jaehyun's talk about girlfriends and you texting him, that maybe... somehow… this wouldn’t be the end of it.

But this is the end of it.

“Oh, wow is right,” Mark teases, giving you a funny grin you can’t match, just as Haechan chimes in over him, “HGWH was fucking Jaehyun Jeong this whole time. What the fuck is wrong with you. He could’ve been our friend-in-law!”

No, he wouldn’t have been.

Because you’re not… you don’t want to date a celebrity, that’s not the kind of life you want at all. The small bit of notoriety that came with your dad's Nobel Prize was a lot, and this is unquestionably a different level of it. Jaehyun made you brave last night, the shyness dissipated for a moment when you wanted him to see your honest heart, but there’s no way you could be like that all the time. To be in the public eye, to have your name on these gossip sites too, to have everyone wonder why he’s dating a regular girl when he could be dating Jennifer Kim - your Google search of her shows that she's so beautiful, not just hot - or at least someone like her.

And you don’t think Jaehyun actually wants, or is even able, to date you.

You were a fantasy for each other in different ways - for you, a moment where you could experience what actual affection and not have to search for it amongst the cultivated lines of a published book. And apparently for Jaehyun - a night to escape his life, a night to pretend he got the real college experience instead of having it be a Wikipedia line hidden away amongst the rest of his accomplishments.

So no, you’re not going to get to date him, and if you’re being honest, you might not even have the guts to text him. It seems like he's unlikely to remember to respond, after the Venice Film Festival he’s staying in Italy to film… wow, a movie with Steven Spielberg. Why would he bother?

You’ll deposit his check, save his shirt and his neat notes, and savor the slip of time that you were a worldwide star’s dream girl. Because you’re certainly never going to experience any of that again, least of all with him.

—

Your dad arrives to a clean room and a you that should be a little bit happier that she’s graduating. But he doesn’t say anything.

When you move out of the house, the romance novels go right into the recycling.

—

The sizzling LA air knocks your answer right out of you, “It wasn’t on purpose.”

You reach to take Jaehyun’s hand off your chin - you can’t be paralyzed and have the conversation, yet you can’t let go, either. You keep your hand tucked in a quiet corner of his as you weigh what might change after you have this conversation.

“Kinda felt like it after I called you the girl of my dreams, and then got nothing,” he admits with a wry smile that sets your heart racing again. You spent so many lonely nights in Switzerland thinking of how he felt curled around you when he slept, and how you didn’t sleep a wink that night because of your heartbeat. He gets even shyer when he makes the joke, “You can see there’s a lot of people waiting in line for that. So, gotta know if you should get the boot from the top spot or not.”

He’s dated other actresses, a few models, one or two singers, but none of them lasted very long - do not ask you how you know this! - and he has his pick of the lot from the very smitten alumni here at the party. And you're still… he still thought of you like that?

“You were an idiot and wrote your number on the check,” you grumble, squeezing his fingers to scold him. “But I was a bigger idiot and deposited that thing without memorizing it, then moved halfway across the world and forgot.”

The resolve to not text him and keep your worlds apart lasted a good month and a transatlantic move. The day your dad left you in Switzerland to begin your life, you sobbed on the floor of your apartment and wanted to call the one other person who you thought might understand. You combed through the box of things you brought - past an old tee that is now in your pajama rotation, past the one book you saved that you haven’t opened in years - and you found the scribbled up papers that you smashed your interview with, and realized the check was gone. It was gone because you needed it to be gone, and not in that way.

And you couldn’t remember what the numbers were… because, you don’t know. You were scared?

Jaehyun has gone a little green against the dark night sky, and you realize how your words could be misconstrued, quickly backtrack to make it clear, “Forgot the number…. not you.”

That was impossible anyways.

“Oh, that’s it?” he breathes, stunned that there isn’t more twisted backstory beyond the same old simple tale of misunderstandings and fright. His grip on your hand gets so tight then when he admits, “I thought you like, regretted it. Or wanted nothing to do with me. Huh.”

Is it odd? To say that you’re kind of relieved Jaehyun hasn’t changed much even though you might have? His old insecurities creeping out are ironically one of the most soothing gestures he could give you, a reassurance that you aren’t as different as you seem.

“Don’t be silly. I don’t do…,” you pluck up a spry bit of courage and lift your unoccupied hand, twist your fingers into an open circle and make the same stupid stroking gesture he teased you with. He goes from green to pink when you flirt, “… that with just anyone.”

And you don’t know what it is, the night air, him, being back here, him, the alcohol, him, but you lift up on your tiptoes and give the side of his neck above his collar the sweetest smooch.

Jaehyun's whole face scrunches shut for a moment of calm, before he rights the ship, resumes the conversation you need to have. “What’d you use it for? My check?”

“I told you I had two interviews, right? The first one, I could afford. It was at a biotech firm in LA, comfy, easy. Could live at home with Dada and work. The other was for a lab in Lausanne, and I could never afford living in Europe.”

The biotech interview was a shoo-in, you did an internship and had the verbal return offer, the questions were just a formality. The one thing you did back then was dream big though, and you wanted desperately to work in this place that was coming up with a novel way to treat cancer. Though... there was no possible way you could pick up your whole life and move to Europe without incurring a pile of debt.

Forty thousand dollars is a lot of money.

“So that nice, shiny, cancer-curing Nobel nomination maybe had something to do with me?” he drawls, and you can literally feel the pride seeping out of him. 

“Maybe,” you murmur.

It has everything to do with him. The courage he gave you that night to do what you wanted in your life for once, and the monetary addition he had no business giving you, literally changed your life.

So you have to do this, rise up again in sweet affection to thank Jaehyun for what he did for you. When you get to the slope of his neck, and the plane of his cheek, you remember who you are now and just do it. You press the softest little kiss against his mouth, and nearly float away in happiness just on that alone.

“Husband?” He blurts right away with his eyes still closed, lips pressing together as he tries to hold in the taste of your mouth. “Boyfriend?”

Does he really think you’d kiss him first if you were not otherwise unoccupied?

“That’s three and four questions,” you gripe, and he opens his eyes to give you such a pointed look you immediately cave into the shy answer, “No. And no.”

“Good, me neither,” he says so fast.

He’s single and you’re single, coincidentally at the same time when you both might see each other.

This insane rush of feelings takes over, and you hide it with the littlest bit of sarcasm, “No boyfriend for you? No way.”

Jaehyun is back in this space where he’s in charge, he’s the one that controls the mood,  and no stupid comment from you is going to go unpunished. His arm slips around your waist then, so you’re trapped between a hard place and the most wondrous place possible. His face dips so, so close, and then he whispers, “I think you’d have a big, fat crush on me even if I did.”

And to put the sealing exclamation point on his truer than true statement, he kisses you, you're kissing him. You’re kissing Jaehyun, a real kiss, not just a shy smooch, his insane, lewd, pristine mouth crushes deeply into yours, like he can’t be satisfied with the tender kisses you’d both hinted at. The ache that he conjures up at that, slipping his mouth the other way so your lips have no choice but to get caught up in his, makes your head a silly place for him to live in with no repercussion.

“Wait, come on,” you gasp against his mouth, put your hands on his chest to get him to stop. “I don’t even know you.”

Jaehyun could very well be a secret serial killer alongside a worldwide famous actor and you’d have no idea. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but there’s a few beautiful crossroads of his existence that you’ve never walked along.

He leans in to kiss your cheek, a flighty, subtly loaded return of affection, then he whispers, “Do you want to?”

It would be interesting, maybe even life changing, to find out for yourself where Jaehyun Jeong becomes Jaehyun and the same in reverse. And to have him do the same with you.

“Yeah,” you breathe.

You both move at the same time. Gone is the need for him to take the lead and you follow, you slip your arms around his neck as he presses his hands deep into the places on your waist he hasn’t forgotten, and his mouth wastes no more time in staking its ownership over yours. Coming out here was the best possible choice you could’ve made - not just to this alley where no one would find him pushing his tongue into your open, gasping mouth, shifting his fingers so he can grasp your chest through your dress. Coming to LA to see him, to see only him, to feel his heartbeat through his suit shirt like it never stopped beating for you, that’s the best thing you could’ve done.

Your lip is tugged out to an impossible place in his bite, and it snaps back with a sting and a slick little noise that has you covered in goosebumps. He bites down again with a muted groan that says everything about how his feelings haven't changed, and it’s quickly ameliorated by a dewdrop of a perfect kiss against your bottom lip, and another against your top one. Your eyes snap open at the same time, he’s breathing so heavy and you feel like your hair is a mess, and you can see marks from your nails on the side of his neck.

He looks down and sees his hand still on your chest - sooooo awkward now that you’ve stopped - and he drops it in a flash like a hot potato, lets out this quiet burst of chuckles.

You get so overwhelmed you bury your face in his shoulder and warble your worries out, “I’m sorry, but this is legitimately crazy! We haven’t spoken in ten years! Our lifestyles don’t even match!”

The reason you thought it wouldn’t work out back then is still there, unavoidable, looking at you right in the face. He is still famous, and you’re still not.

“Yet here we are,” he says, dramatically spreading his arms out like LA can be framed behind him instead of the trash cans. “Acting like we’ve been in love that whole time instead.”

That word, you weren’t the only one who thought it.

He waggles his eyebrows at you like he is one hundred percent confirming what you're thinking and you just fold in smitten embarrassment, “Ohhhhh, gosh. You’re a lot.” 

And you… love that about him.

Jaehyun steps back from the wall and sets you straight up, then fixes his shirt and his coat. Before he gets all serious, coming to you with another business deal proposition like the one that got you into all this trouble in the first place, “Okay, how about this. Call your dad, ask if he remembers me.”

He is so crazy! “I—,”

Jaehyun knows you’re going to shoot him down, so he talks over you, “If he doesn’t, or if he does and just totally hated me, it’s your choice what we do next. Whatever you want. You can tell me to kick rocks if that’s what it is.” You think you would be an idiot to do that, yet it’s quite kind of him to give you the option. “If it’s a good memory, though, then it’s my choice.”

Ugh, fine.

He’s too cute to say no to, so you’ll do it. But you’ll also do it because you’re sure your dad either didn’t give a single care about him or might’ve honestly hated that Jaehyun Jeong was famous because he hated being famous himself. And then you'll win and you can choose to do whaaaaaaaatever you want with this man.

You don’t agree, you don’t say anything, you turn to the side to hide your stupid smile when you take out your phone and do exactly as he asks. It rings and it rings, and Jaehyun’s accomplished scoff rings into the night when it connects. You put it on speaker and use a voice he’s never heard you use, all girly and innocent, “Dada! Hi! It’s me!”

“Hi, cutie quark!” Your dad uses a nickname that Jaehyun guffaws at (it is so like your physics professor dad to call you a quark!) and you feel genuine love blossom in your chest for a multitude of reasons. “Did you leave something at the house?”

A hand darts upon your waist, and you find yourself being cuddled into a familiar position, leaning into a warm chest instead of the cold brick wall.

“No, I’m good!” you warble as you press yourself further into Jaehyun. “I miss you already.” 

“I miss you too! Are you still at the reunion?”

“Mhmmm,” you hum in response, all you can get out because Jaehyun presses his mouth right at the juncture of your neck, in a suave kiss that makes you forget what you’re doing. You nudge him in the ribs so hard so he flinches, and you take that moment to get right to it, “Hey, listen, did you have a Jaehyun Jeong in one of your classes when I was at school?”

“Jaehyun Jeong?” You know your dad’s voice so well, that’s a why the heck is this coming up kind of voice. Bingo, you’re going to win, and you know what you want - you want at least a hundred more kisses, and maybe his hand on your chest again.

“Yeah, it’s been ten years, I know you probably won’t remember." You feel the topic of discussion’s mouth dart right back to your ear, biting the lobe a little in retaliation for your droll comment about him.

“You mean Jaehyun Jeong, my graduate student?”

You sever yourself out of the embrace so fast, heart racing a mile a minute as you make sense of the ringing between your ears. Nothing about this makes sense, “I—, I’m sorry?” 

Your hand presses into the wall to keep you upright when your dad’s innocent voice rings through the speaker, “I think like six or seven months ago? Whenever he finished that huge, awesome movie with Robert Downey Jr.,” Noooooo, the way he says it is so in awe, your dad actually doesn’t mind that Jaehyun is famous, “He called me and asked if he could do a particle physics PhD in my lab in his spare time. That's why I couldn't leave!”

You whip around to look at Jaehyun, look at his super red face and twitchy hands and nervous legs highlighted in perfection in the moon, and feel your heart work into overdrive, to the point you nearly drop your phone.

“What?” you breathe, eyes not leaving his for a second. “What did you say to him?”

“Of course, yes? He was one of the most intelligent students I’ve ever had, on top of being quite kind and generous. We’ve made a lot of progress on his project together,” your dad details this relationship they’ve cultivated in secret while you were off halfway across the world, before he gets a bit confused, “Why? Did you meet him at the reunion or something? I always figured you might’ve crossed paths at school.”

He’s working with your dad. Your dad.

Gone is the shy Jaehyun living for the protection of the moon, and back is the cocky Jaehyun Jeong that says at the top of his lungs, “Professor P, I’m here—,”

“LoveyouDadabye!”

Your greeting flies out at the speed of light before you can be exposed as to what you’re really doing and you hang up. This is a dream, this is a dream, this is something out of a Nicholas Sparks novel - the good kind, not the truly terrible ones - where the heroine comes home after all this time and finds her old lover a part of her family. And has no choice but to fall in love with him again.

“You knew it would be good,” you accuse, and Jaehyun's smile spreads into a beam he can’t hide as you throw a little tantrum of being a sore loser, “You knew it! I can’t believe you!”

That’s how he knew everything about you, too. That you’d moved to Europe, that your lab got the nomination, all these other little things… because he must’ve been talking to your dad about you. Tried to fill the void with your dad's stories like you did with the interviews and articles he did.

“Oops,” Jaehyun drawls, the flirtation and innocence mixing into one perfect concoction that knocks you straight out. “Cancel your car.”

His order curls into your ear and beckons, and you think you at least have to put up some fight, “No, I have to make my flight home.”

You’re thinking about falling in love with him, you have to be realistic.

“You agreed, whatever I want,” he gets high and mighty with his rightful, or possibly deceitful, victory, “And what I want is for you to cancel your car and get in mine.”

Your last dreg of resistance is barely hanging on, “And what? I get in your most likely stupid expensive car and we…?”

“We go to my hotel room.”

The swoon is imminent, you can feel your shoulder back against the wall after his lurid words. He probably has a driver for that expensive car, which means once you get in the back seat he’s going to have a hand up your skirt, and won’t remove it until he has to take the dress off when you’re in the middle of his king bed. Your hands clutch feebly in front of your chest as you try to calm down, so smitten and overcome and blushy it’s like you never grew out of that summer.

He sees you get nervous and walks right over, moves your hands so that he can sweep you up into a hug and spin you around, then put you back on the ground and place a dozen, trillion, googolplex, blooms of soft, soft kisses against your mouth. Kissing him is everything, you thought you might be able to take a tally but you want to be at the point where they'd be impossible to measure. You press the side of your cheek into his shoulder so you can stare up at him for a moment, and let the totally girly giggle out, “I have to get home for work, you silly boy!” 

You have lives.

“You heard him, I’m smart, which means I know how time zones work, which means if we leave in the morning after a good night’s sleep…” Jaehyun’s shoulder knocks into your cheek and you bury yourself into his neck when the piqued, painted emphasis of his words comes back to nip at you, “You won’t have to do the red-eye, and you won’t get horrible jet lag. Which means you’ll look all pretty and perfect for work on Monday.” He leans to ghost his mouth over the apex of your cheek, and finishes, “And I’m thinking the hotel plus the jet back to Switzerland is more than enough time for us to catch up.”

He can’t possibly be this daft in thinking that you’re going to spend all that time talking, right. His hand is about two centimeters away from being nowhere near your waist.

You poke his cheek in return and warble, “About your physics PhD that you’re doing with my dad?”

Jaehyun kisses your mouth one last time, a kiss that differs from the rest with how drenched in purity it is, hallowed and soft and carved through the toilings of a heart that stood alone for so long. And he sighs from the depth of his existence, “Decided I wanted another expensive piece of paper… after someone gave me the courage to.”

Your heart separates from your chest to gift itself straight into his gentle hands. Like, you’re honestly.... You’re. You might be in love with this man.

Because you changed his life, too.

“So, I cancel my ticket for a dalliance in your hotel and another on your private jet, and then….?” You don’t want this to be a hookup, you don’t want it to be another one night stand. You were okay with it back then, but you're not twenty-two and smitten anymore. This is your life you're talking about.

“We’re filming in Turin, which is only a few hours away from Lausanne. And no one knows who I am there yet.” Which isn’t just a random answer, it means you’ll no longer be a double digit hour plane ride away. You could… you could see each other whenever you want. And you would be safe.

“And then?” You want to know what comes next, you want the spoilers, you want to know the happy ending before it’s even begun.

“You could finally tell your dad about us,” Jaehyun tries, and you roll your eyes so hard at him. Not a no… just a not yet.

“And then?”

You continue to prod at him without giving him the answer he wants to hear - that he knows you’re going to give, and you can’t hold back from. Jaehyun gets all frustrated, throws his hands in the air, and whines, “Jeez, lady! I don’t have all the answers! I don’t know, we live happily ever after?!”

Oh, you’re in this.

You’re in this with him and it’s going to be hard to get you out.

“But why?” you whisper, letting yourself be that shy girl for one last time, wanting to hear some special words, wanting to know why he held on for this long. Jaehyun scoffs as loud as he possibly can, and slips his phone out of the inside pocket of his jacket to show you something. Which like, your vision is so full of him you have to ask him to explain, “What’s this.”

“Messages with my agent from right before I got here. Read.”

[6:57 pm] jhj: just landed
[7:07 pm] Johnny J. Suh: is cfcg going to be there?
[7:08 pm] jhj: it’s cgfc, come on now dude
[7:08 pm] jhj: but not sure, her dad didn't say and nobody knows her except me :(
[7:15 pm] Johnny J. Suh: all for you then?

You think you’re going to have a permanent fever for the rest of your life.

[7:16 pm] jhj: lol. if she remembers. i hope so, she’s the only reason im going to this stupid ass thing
[7:17 pm] Johnny J. Suh: lmfaoooo god ur in trouble. i’ll book u a super nice hotel jic

What’s worse than a fever, honestly?

You push his phone away when he tries to stick it right in your face and be annoying, and all you can warble out is, “CGFC?” Knowing him and how lewd he is - especially in private moments when it comes to you - one or maybe both of those C’s might be a word that you’ve never said in your life.

“Cute Girl From College,” Jaehyun murmurs. “CGFC stands for Cute Girl From College.”

Cute Girl From College and Hot Guy With the Hoodie. It kind of works. He can pitch it as a TV show to star in, have Scarlett Johansson play you, and maybe Timothee Chalamet and Tom Holland will play Mark and Hae.

Your heart is soaring through the cloudless LA sky as you hug Jaehyun close, and you finally re-experience a reality than is better than any story you’ve ever read. You grumble right into his cheek before another kiss, “Fine. I’ll get in your car.”

Wendy is going to hate you for more than one reason when you get home.

His fingers tease in your side as a preface to his sweet mockery of you, “And then?”

“Oh, shush,” you grumble. You seal your smiling mouth to his to make sure he can’t say another word, and when he takes your hand to fit it in his, you know that this is just the beginning.

And then… you suppose you could fall in love with Jaehyun and marry him and live happily ever. But that’s skipping to the end of the book when there are too many good chapters left to read. So you’ll start with another kiss, and maybe a few more.

Aaaaaaaaand maybe just a few more. You know, for good measure.

fin.