#✏️ — alice writes !

[angelaiswriting]

Stage Love (3 of 3) | Park Joong-gil

✏️ Pairing: Park Joong-gil x fem!reader 

✏️ Summary: after the news of you and Joong-gil dating go public, many things change. (Not requested, based on an idea by @kind-wolf​)

✏️ A/N: LOL three months later but... 🤷‍♀️ enjoy! I really did manage to write a full story without angst, wow. This is also a gift for my dear friend Alice💗the whole story, really: it wouldn’t have been a thing without you :’)

✏️ Content Warnings: modern!AU, singer!AU + fluff, (maybe still a bit of) slowburn, unrealistic description of how business works, hints at Jumadeung’s supernatural nature, smut, so 18+ ONLY! > Fingering f/r, oral f/r, mentions of handjobs, unprotected sex; mentions of death and suicide (reader’s dad) [If I missed anything, just lmk.]

✏️ Word Count: 20,8k

part one  |  part two  << PART THREE

Lying next to you, you watch Joong-gil sleep. Your eyes trace the lines of his face the same way your fingers would – gently and slowly, above his brow, all the way to his temple, down his cheek and then his jaw until you reach his chin and look up at his lips. They’re set in a light pout that makes you smile – how peaceful and soft he looks when he’s asleep: not a complete one-eighty from his awake persona, but almost there nonetheless.

If your eyes could take a picture, you know you’d be storing it away in your soul and in your heart until you’d be too old to even remember it’s there. You want him etched everywhere, in every fiber of your being, every flower in your chest, every butterfly in your belly, and carry his memory with you everywhere you go. (Maybe you really are fucked, after all.)

There’s something in the silence of your (his, actually) room and in the safety of your blankets, the warmth of his arm slung over your hip, his soft breathing gently fanning your top lip… You can’t give a name to it, but it makes you want to stay here forever; to fall asleep and wake up next to him, time and time again, without ever growing tired of it. The part of you that wants all of that has already erased the mess those photos have started, like you’re not standing in the way of an avalanche but on an empty beach, early in the morning, when it would be just you, the waves, and the night sky slowly bleeding colors and turning into a bright new opportunity.

It’s quiet and soothing, just the way Park Joong-gil is. It feels like a shield, like a bubble you can hide away in just to be able to breathe. You know he’d give you that – and then he’d probably take a couple of steps further and give you something more, the same way he’s hiding you away in his home in Tongyeong, where no one can find either of you.

But is there such a thing as not being found?

That question pops up in your mind as soon as your phone’s vibrations start going off on your nightstand and while you don’t know exactly who it is, you have a whole list of possible options – your manager Ji-young calling in worry. Or the PR team calling in annoyance. The CEO and the rage he slapped you with first thing in the morning, back in your parents’ house, when you could still taste the painful tears you had shed the day before, in front of your father’s final resting place. And then you can already envision the reason for the call – it’s you and Joong-gil at the cemetery. It’s you crying and him holding you in his arms. It’s you living your private life and all those people wanting to wedge a foot and then a shoulder in the door and dictate what you can and cannot do – should and should not do with the time you’re given.

You start turning around at the sixth incoming text, after the two missed calls you let go straight to your voicemail, but Joong-gil’s voice stops you.

“Don’t.” His hand moves from your low back to your waist but when you turn your head back around to look at him, his eyes are still closed.

You wonder if he knows you’ve been staring at him for so long now, trying to memorize his face down to the tiniest detail lest you forget him somehow. Lest he disappear – from your sight and from your life, pulled back and down under by the waves of the ocean, the same infinite expanse you watched together three days ago, on your last night back home, sitting outside on your mother’s patio where the chill of the wind could give your eyes an excuse to water without it having to be ‘I’m hurting so much right now, I can barely keep myself glued together’. He sat next to you that night – Joong-gil. Your hand wrapped in his, both shoved into the pocket of his puffer jacket, not uttering a word because what was there to say that you already hadn’t?

“Ignore it,” he says, his voice gravelly, as he pulls you into him.

With your face nestled into his chest, his chin resting on the top of your head, all you can do is wrap an arm around him and pull him even closer – or allow yourself to melt into him, hoping you could just do that and ignore your phone and everything else and just… be.

“What if it’s my mom?” You’ve avoided enough calls from her during the years, either because you were busy or in pain or a sickening mixture of both. And sometimes, when circumstances rub the memory of your father and make it tender and sore again, you wonder what a missed call could lead to.

“It’s not.” The tone of his voice is final, like he can see your phone’s screen from where he’s lying with his eyes closed and read the ID of the person calling, or like he has a crystal ball inside his head that tells him everything. Can he tell you what will happen? What all of this will lead to? Will you sit in Jumadeung again, together, where no one else can see? Or will that be too much to ask? “She’d call the landline number if you didn’t pick up the first time. She’s busy working right now.”

How do you know? What if it’s her and something’s happened? You want to ask him that, and then a bunch of other questions – what if it pulls you under? What if it affects your career? What if you’re ruined because of me? Me and those stupid, stupid pictures, and Busan, and the snow, and all the paper butterflies in my living room? – but he’s tilting your head back and his eyes are staring into yours when you look up at him.

“It’s just us now,” he says, voice softer than you’ve ever heard it, tracing your bottom lip with his thumb. “I won’t let anyone else into my room.”

The kiss he leaves on your forehead is feather-light, barely there, like an echo of the dream you woke up from this morning – you and him, somewhere light and golden, your hands on his body and his lips kissing yours.

You’re about to part your lips to speak words you don’t even have the time to think, but he interrupts you again, his lips moving against the skin of your forehead.

“It’s raining.”

He’s so warm, burning as hot as a summer day under the t-shirt he managed to shove into his duffel bag before leaving his apartment in a rush when you asked him to come to you. Even the kiss of his lips on your skin is hot; it makes it so hard to believe it’s already winter outside. Maybe if you bask in his warmth a little longer – you think, closing your eyes for a moment – time will pass faster and soon it will be spring, and the rumors of you cheating on Joon-woong (or, even better, the story of your fake ass relationship) will be but a long-forgotten memory.

“Is it?” You’re still looking up at him, even when he’s looking past the crown of your head, out of the window on your side of his room. You wonder whether he can feel how cold your fingertips are, or even your feet as they seek his for a crumb of his body temperature. If staying here with him like this, without either of you moving a muscle, were something you could buy, you’d already be at check-out, wallet in hand.

He hums. It’s deep in his chest and your hand moves to rest against it of its own accord, making his next exhale shiver. “Damn, your hands are always so cold,” he chuckles, finally tearing his gaze away from what he can see of the scenery outside to meet yours with a smile tugging at his lips.

This time it’s his phone that vibrates but just as he ignored yours, he ignores his own.

“What if it’s an important call?” you wonder out loud as he grabs your hands in his. It softens your heart, the way he brings them up to his lips and, like a cliché, kisses your knuckles before bringing them down his torso and up into his nightshirt.

“More important than this?” he scoffs, pressing the palms of your hands against his heated skin. You feel the way his muscles contract at the chill of your skin and when you chuckle at it, he chuckles, too.

Fuck, the way you crave all of him…

There’s this fond look in his eyes when your gaze meets his that fills your heart with something warm and fuzzy, pushing it to grow five sizes bigger. You try to ignore it, but it still somehow brings unshed tears to your eyes and you wonder if this is it – if this is the last thing you need before you finally accept you’re absolutely, irreparably in love with him.

Fuck.

“What’s… this?” You want to hear him say it. Despite knowing already, you want those words to roll off his tongue because, despite everything, you need reassurance. The reassurance that this is real, that it’s not some dream, and that he’s fully, utterly yours – just one more time, you only need to hear it one more time, and then you’ll believe it. Just another crumb of confirmation in this slice of privacy you’re sharing.

“This?” he hums, shifting one of your hands up higher until it’s resting right above his heart. You can feel it beat underneath your fingertips, feel the way it picks up the pace when your eyes meet his once again. “It’s me and you?” You don’t mind the fact that it comes off as a question because then his hands leave yours where he’s put them and he pulls you closer into him. “It’s just us where no one else can reach.”

You smile.

For how long, though? you want to ask, but you bite your tongue before you can even think of voicing that thought out. Even just a drop in this sea of eternity carries more weight than a whole lifetime where everyone can see and pull you apart. So, you swallow those words and smile up at him again.

“I like the sound of that,” you manage to whisper instead, before he’s planting his lips on yours.

When you join him in the kitchen some time later, after the endless kissing in the peace of his bedroom and the nap you managed to fall into, Joong-gil is humming to himself as he stands by the stove. You immediately recognize the tune – it’s one of the songs you wrote for your collaboration deal at the end of last year and that you ended up discarding when his agency didn’t seem to particularly enjoy it – too sappy, too cheesy, doesn’t suit Park Joong-gil’s brooding persona. Scrap it. Write something else.

For a moment, you stand there, hands shoved into the front pockets of the sweatshirt you stole from his closet in search of some extra warmth, your shoulder leaning against the doorframe. The feeling you had earlier in the morning comes back, and you wonder if this is how your mom felt with your dad, or if this is how Bit-na feels around Seung-min or even Ryung-gu with this person of his he still has to disclose details to you about. Like your heart is a bunch of sizes too big for your chest, and like you’re warm even when you’re actually not. It makes you feel like you could really stand in a storm for him.

“I know you’re there,” he chuckles, turning his head slightly to the side before going back to his pans.

You smile.

There’s this beautiful human right here – you think to yourself – and he makes you feel like you’re walking on clouds, with this forgotten song of yours, not really fitting the theme of your collab album but that still feels like a great first song together and with all the small, insignificant things he remembers about you. It’s like he’s carved a space in the shape of you in his life, a corner in his garden that he never fails to tend to, even when you feel like he isn’t looking. Especially when you feel like he isn’t looking.

“My older sister brought over some food, so I’m heating it up for breakfast,” he continues. “Where do you wanna eat? Kitchen or couch?”

Is this just an instant in the span of your lifetime? Or is this something you’ll be able to hold on to for years to come?

“Y/N?”

He doesn’t have the time to turn around because you’re wrapping your arms around his waist from behind. He smells like you used to when growing up, that faint fruity scent of the shower gel your mother still buys just because you told her you liked it once, when you were ten, and that she bought you again before you left. So you don’t forget about me, she said, holding you closer than humanly possible, almost as though she was trying to hold on to you forever instead of letting you get into Joong-gil’s car. He must have stolen it when he took his morning shower. It makes your smile grow wider, and all those flowers are once again blooming in your chest, around your ribs.

You hum when he calls your name again. “This feels good. I just wanna stand here a moment longer.”

His heartbeat is a light drum underneath your fingertips when you move a hand up on his chest. You want to learn his rhythm. You want to commit it to memory like everything else about him. It’s something that’s grown over time, this need you feel to carve all of him inside all of you, almost like part of you is expecting him to leave one day, to exit your life from the back door without so much as a word and never come back.

“You okay?” He turns the stove off and then his hands are wrapping around your wrists, keeping you close.

You want to tell him you’re fine, that things are okay. That in spite of the storm outside – both here in Tongyeong and back in Seoul – you feel untouchable with him by your side. Maybe this is love, you reckon, pressing your cheek into the warmth of his back, between his shoulder blades. But instead of voicing any of that, you simply nod your head, and his low laughter rumbles right inside your chest.

“Sleepy?” He pulls your hands from his body and turns around in your arms, linking your hands behind his back before cradling your face.

You shake your head with a pout on your lips. “How did I get so lucky?” you muse, smiling up at him like you’re tipsy off of his presence alone. He melts your walls down and replaces all your cement with flowers, wipes winter away to make spring bloom.

It makes you want to fucking cry all over again. When did you let yourself fall for him this deeply? Were you not looking when it happened? Were you stuck on that hellish staircase leading down to Jumadeung, only able to see the dirt and darkness while he was trying to show you those fairy lights?

“Hm?”

“You make my heart beat so. fucking. hard,” you confess, barely aware you’re saying any of this out loud and not just in the safety of your head, where no one can hear and judge.

He chuckles – at your words, at the way you’re looking up at him, like he’s the moon in the dark sky of the night, so bright and beautiful and soothing. “You make my heart beat so. fucking. hard, too,” he says back to you, breaking out into a smile when you cradle his neck in your cold hands to peck his lips.

Can’t you stay like this forever, with him in your arms, standing in his kitchen, with the delicious smell of his sister’s food tickling your nose?

Couch it is. He ends up picking for you. He settles the dishes onto the coffee table and then pulls you down onto his lap and wraps his arms around you. It makes you giddy, the way you let him feed you while watching a cooking show on TV.

It’s so domestic, in a way that makes you crave more of this. More of him like this, of the two of you like this, doing normal things together without the eye of a camera watching your every move. More of him telling you about his family, stuff like I’m gonna introduce you to my sister one day or You and my dad have the same whack sense of humor, gee, give me a break.

You wouldn’t leave music, but maybe – just maybe – with him by your side you’d have the courage to set stricter boundaries around your private life.

“You know, a picture would last longer,” he teases you a while later, cheeky, turning to look at you from where he’s standing by the sink.

He looks good like this – dark t-shirt and sweatpants, hair slightly wavy, doing homey things around you like this is your every day and not a parenthesis in your hectic lives. With that smile on his face, bright and relaxed, you delude yourself into believing this is it. This is normal. This is what you’ll always get home to, after a long day of work. This is the warm, safe cocoon you can always come back to.

Would he fly away if you told him all these things? All the ways he makes you feel, and all the things he makes you want to live?

“The moment would change if I got up to grab my phone.” You can feel the smirk on your lips widen when Joong-gil scoffs and shakes his head. “Can’t risk that. Don’t wanna.”

“Ah, is that it?” he tuts, walking across the kitchen while drying his hands in the towel he previously had slung over his shoulder. “Should I get it for you?”

His voice and the way he smirks make you shiver. They bring you back to some time after that night in his living room. It was the only time you took risks and allowed him to drag you to his van. He went down on you that night and then he took a picture, called you pretty with a voice that made you believe you were a thousand things more than just that.

It’s so easy to fall into a routine with him and forget the way his entire being makes you, just, crave.

He’s kneeling between your legs when you manage to tear yourself out of that memory – the shivers in your thighs, the glossy look on his lips and chin, his warm hand on your hip keeping you anchored. “You make me want…” he groans, crossing your ankles behind his back as he leans forward on his forearms, millimeters away from your lips from where you’re resting your head on the arm of the couch.

“Want what?” His hair is soft when you weave your fingers through it.

“Want you.”

He could have you right now and you wouldn’t say no. He’s so scorching hot – all of him is – that he turns everything else to dust. You don’t ask why he doesn’t take, why he doesn’t make a move, and later you’ll realize that you’re also not making a move. You’re also not taking. You’re keeping him there, a little closer than at arm’s length, dreaming and waiting – no clue what for, though. Shouldn’t your little game be over now?

But then he’s kissing you, all of him pressed into all of you, and you just enjoy the present moment. How stupidly real he feels in your arms, keeping you tethered to the ground. And how stupidly fast and hard your heart is pounding right against his, trying to escape your body to be sucked into his ribcage.

You wonder whether he’s also blooming with flowers in his chest the same way you are.

Whether he’s tingling everywhere.

Whether he’s afraid of tomorrow as much as you are.

*

Your apartment is eerily quiet when you step foot through the door.

There obviously was no way you could stay in Tongyeong forever, no fucking way you could wait this one storm out and get back to Seoul when the sea turned calm again. You’ve known that all along. You probably knew it back then as well, on your first night in Jumadeung, when Joong-gil had looked like the brightest fucking thing in the whole entire world, the center of the goddamn universe, everything else spinning around him, trying to keep up, trying to get closer.

It’s easier to believe in an illusion, however. To give it shape, and then give it life, falling in love with the idea of what could be instead of what really is.

“Where the fuck did you disappear to?” You don’t know who’s more pissed at the agency – your boss, the marketing team, or the people in public relations trying to answer every call and email they get because of the people that want to buy your personal life alongside your face and voice. “Do you have any idea of what we’ve been going through? The stock is crazy. Most of your shoots have been canceled and your album has been put on hold. Joon-woong, Ryung-gu, and Ryeon have been getting shit because of you, too.”

You don’t know what makes your heart hurt more – these words directed at you, the realization that you really are just another product on the market, the memories of your father that have surfaced back with the anniversary of his death… Couldn’t you have just one moment for yourself without it having to be torn out of your grasp?

“You had to do one thing. One thing only,” your CEO goes on, yelling your head off from the other end of the line when you drop your backpack onto the couch in your living room.

You wonder where your origami paper is. Do you still have a few sheets lying around?

“Shit, Y/N…” he sighs. You can picture him rubbing his eyes from behind the lenses of his glasses, holding his phone to his ear in a steely grip. He’s always been scary, ever since your trainee days, and although you managed to outgrow the fear you had of him, part of that uneasiness is coming back now. “Why couldn’t you just…?”

“What?” There’s no bite in your voice, behind your words; no actual strength to fight back over something that shouldn’t even be a problem. Naturally, you do see the problem, but at the same time… not really. Stock market? Angry fans? Shootings canceled? How can even just the rumor of a relationship stir all these things up? You sell music, not your whole entire life. “Just lie? You do realize I have a life, right? That I’m a person, too, first and foremost. With feelings and a heart.”

The smart lock of your door chimes and when you whip your head around, you see Ryung-gu popping his head into your apartment, brows furrowed and both worry and relief painted all over his face.

You alright? he mouths. Can I come in?

He’s rushing to sit next to you when you nod in his direction, barely even listening to what’s coming through your phone this time.

All you can hope for is that Joon-woong didn’t have to go through this.

“—nd all you had to do was. fucking. play. along! How hard could that be?” Another sigh.

The boss? Ryung-gu mouths.

A nod.

Want me to take the call?

You’re shaking your head no when the pause on the other end of the call comes to an end.

“Ha Dae-su of Nae-il Ent. has been on my ass for days because of you. Do you have any idea of what that means?” A scoff and then there’s laughter that feels like nails on a blackboard, scratching everything inside of you and leaving just scorching disappointment behind. “Of course, you don’t. You’re where you are only because of your pretty face, so let me explain it plain and simple. They want to sue us because of whatever fucking reason. With all the men you could have whored yourself out to, you had to go for Park fucking Joong-gil?” It’s almost comical, the way he still hasn’t popped a vein, but you reason this is his payback for trying to use you (and Joon-woong) in such a base manner. “The Park Joong-gil? If there’s one golden bachelor in this fucking country, it’s him! Do you have any idea of the amount of crazy-in-love idiot fans he has at his feet and that consider him theirs? Of fucking course, you don’t!”

From the corner of your eye, you can see Ryung-gu’s knuckles turn white on his knees from how tight he’s clenching his fists. He tore your phone from your hands and put it on speaker as soon as he got a whiff of what was being said at the other end of the call, and his anger is now paying the consequences for wanting to know.

“You shouldn’t even have to endure this,” he growls through gritted teeth a second before abruptly ending the call. “All of this… fuck! I…”

You watch him struggle for words, neck red and nails digging into the flesh of his palms, sitting there on your couch in his lounge clothes for the first time in forever.

“I’m fine, I just…” You’re taken aback by the spirited look in his eyes when he whips his head in your direction so fast that something in his neck pops and forces a groan past his lips. “I was all over the place because of my father at first, and then I spoke with Joon-woong in the car drive back here… He said he’s already thought up something and we’re gonna explain everything when we go live tonight, which is mainly why I’m back now and not back home. Maeng Jang-hyun is a piece of shit, but I haven’t been afraid of his empty threats since debut.”

“Y/N…”

“I’m just sorry you and Ryeon had to be hit by the storm, too. And Joon-woong, of course, but… I mean, we knew it was all fake and we couldn’t wait for an accident to happen and end all of—”

The confines of his hug are warm and calm, like he’s managed to keep his anger contained and swallowed it down, redirecting it to someone who really deserves it, like your CEO Maeng Jang-hyun. “The guys and I are fine, you shouldn’t worry about us. It’s bad to say out loud, but Joon has mainly been spared. Everyone thinks he’s the boyfriend who’s gotten cheated on, after all.”

You pull back to complain, but he silences you with a smile.

“Ryeon and I know he’s never been your boyfriend, but the public doesn’t. I think it’s sort of understandable that they’d act that way,” he continues before you can open your mouth again. “Park Joong-gil is also… extremely popular and extremely imposing sometimes, so despite some hate, his situation is also fine, we’ve been monitoring it. I’m sure Ha Dae-su won’t really sue anyone after Joong-gil has given him an explanation.”

“His agency is hell-bent on opposing his relationships, though,” you groan. “And… All that…” You wave a hand in the air almost as though such a simple gesture could encompass everything Ryung-gu has just said and everything he hasn’t brought himself to voice out. You know it’s stupid but, “Good to know I’ve been portrayed as the piece of shit in this whole situation.”

The tears you managed not to shed since that first tabloid article came out are finally prickling your eyes and while you know you won’t be able to hold them back, you at least manage to hide them by turning your head to look at the city on the other side of the window behind your couch.

“Fuck…” is Ryung-gu’s barely audible whisper before he pulls you into a hug again. “I didn’t mean any of that in a bad way, I swear.”

“I know, I just…”

“Plenty enough on your plate already, I know.”

His hand’s movement on your back is calming and you let the thumb of his other hand soothingly rub behind your ear, slowly bringing you down from the height of your breakdown.

“You will land on your feet, you have nothing to worry about. We’re all with you, okay? Ryeon’s even thinking about not renewing our contract with this agency. We can all move together.”

You nod, biting your tongue to stop yourself from out-rightly sobbing, even though there’s no stopping the silent tears trailing down your cheeks. Maybe you should have asked Joong-gil to come with you, instead of begging him to simply drop you off at the metro station on his way home. You feel dumb for allowing your fears to gnaw at your mind, for not wanting to show him your tears, even after that afternoon at the cemetery. Like that could make or break all the feelings you share, the moments you spent together and etched into your memory.

Stupid, stupid fears and stupid, stupid cement walls.

“Actually,” Ryung-gu chuckles, resting his chin on your shoulder, bringing you back to the here and now, “Joon-woong and I had to stop Ryeon from slapping Mr Maeng when he started bad mouthing you at the agency.”

A smile slips onto your lips before you can stop it. “Yeah?”

He hums. “Yeah. You know how scary she is when she gets mad, right?”

You nod. “I mean, she knows how to be scary even when she’s not mad…”

He laughs, chuckling a yeah of agreement under his breath. “Maeng probably pissed himself. If she could’ve scared everyone else to death as well, she would have.”

“I guess I should thank her.”

“Don’t let her know you cried, then. She said she’d scold you too if you let this get to you.”

When he chuckles, this time, you chuckle with him. Slowly, it’s like the burden that has been weighing your soul down all this time disappears bit by bit, eaten away by Ryung-gu’s hug and his tale of all the different ways Ryeon has cursed everyone who has tried to paint you in a bad light – at the agency, online, during an interview as well if Joon-woong hadn’t stopped her in time.

“Will Park Joong-gil go live with you and Joon?” he asks after a while, when your tears have gone dry and you’re not desperately clutching at the back of his hoodie anymore. When you nod, he continues with a, “good. I would’ve whooped his ass otherwise” that finally manages to really make you laugh.

“Can you stay with us?” you eventually ask, words jumbled together with how you’re pressing your face into the side of his neck. Just one more minute of this, you tell yourself. Maybe you’ll manage to forget about everything else and you won’t have to do a thing. You should have known from the beginning that things would have led to this, but somehow you’ve been taken aback by the harshness of the backlash.

“Hm?”

“You can check that everything goes well with the streaming and… To be honest you’re my best friend here. I love Ryeon and Joon-woong and Joong-gil just the same, but you’ve always been my best friend… Stay? Please?”

*

Hello, everyone! It’s Choi Joon-woong, Y/N, and Park Joong-gil! – your fake (ex) boyfriend’s voice chirps for the second time in your living room tonight.

Joon-woong, Joong-gil, and Ryung-gu are rewatching the livestream you ended not even half an hour ago, but you can’t really bring yourself to do the same. So, instead of joining them on the couch, you’re sitting in the kitchen, watching the skyline and the night lights outside your window.

It’s sleeting outside. It’s not nearly cold enough for it to stick yet, but the sight still brings a semblance of peace to your mind. Everything’s still there – Maeng Jang-hyun yelling your ear off, all the gigs you no more have, the comments you caught glimpses of before Joong-gil snatched your phone out of your grasp – but at least now you can breathe.

“Min and I watched your live and we think you did great,” Bit-na says over the phone, sensing the turmoil that’s making your insides clench and your mind wander. Or maybe it’s painted all over your face, but you don’t dare look down at your video in the corner of the call to make sure.

“Some comments were—”

“Fuck those people!” she exclaims, cutting you off before you can even think of coming up with any kind of excuse for the people that left hate in the live chat. You see how she leans closer to her phone for a moment before picking it up to go into her kitchen. “There’s always gonna be fuckers like that. From a marketing point of view— I mean, I’m no expert, of course, but as I was saying… I think y’all saved the situation pretty well. It was about time everyone knew the stunt your agency was trying to pull!”

You sigh, glancing toward the couch where Joong-gil is looking at you. It catches you off guard, the fact that he is already staring, brows set in a light frown, trying to decipher what feelings are buzzing through your veins. Is it the thoughts in your head? Or is it how hard your hands were shaking while you were busy explaining the situation you found yourselves involved in? Both he and Joon-woong got a hold of them off-camera, just a few inches outside the frame of the three of you sitting on your couch.

“If anyone comes at you,” Bit-na picks up again, making you face the screen of your phone once more, “I’m ready to throw hands. You know that, right?”

It makes you smile. It’s always been nice to know you have someone ready to watch your back, sides, and front, and it’s even nicer now. It nostalgically brings you back to when you were still in school, and you and Bit-na were attached at the hip. No matter what happened, you were her back-up and she was yours. It’s been a long time since things were like that, with all the distance now separating you and your lives.

“I know, it’s just…” Another sigh. Even without tearing your gaze from your phone, you’re now still aware of Park Joong-gil keeping an eye on you from where he’s sitting on the couch.

—nd the truth is, our agency has been making us live this lie for too long now. We apologize to all the people we’ve been forced to inadvertently hurt, but we hope you do understand that there are things going on in our private lives for which—

The tips of your thumb and forefinger are freezing cold when they come up to rub your eyes from behind your blue-lights-blocking glasses. “I don’t understand. Things shouldn’t even come to this. Aren’t we people, too?”

“I know, love, but this seems to be the way the industry is.” You hear a masculine voice in the background of her side of the video call – probably Seung-min muttering something similar to does she need back-up? – and your friend shakes her head with a small smile on her lips. “It’s not fair, and things do need to change, but for the time being that’s how it is…”

You nod, heaving a long exhale as you play with the black cord of your old earphones.

“But hey! Maybe this is where that change starts, no?”

“Well, this change has already made me lose most of my income in the immediate future,” you complain. It still stings, the fact that the album you’ve been working so fucking hard on has been indefinitely put on hold for something this minuscule. If this afternoon’s call with the head of your agency could shed any insight on how things might unravel for you, then it appears luck isn’t on your side and the new year will start without the release you’ve been working your ass off for.

“Come teach ballet with me,” Bit-na shrugs, grinning brightly at her camera. “Or, you know, k-pop stuff. Kids would love that stuff and they’d love you. It’s not every day that you have an idol as your dance teacher.”

Her offer makes you laugh out loud. “Yeah, maybe when I retire… I’ll come back to Busan and work for you.”

“Work with me,” she corrects. “But I’m serious, if you ever need a plan B… I got your Back. Got it? Your Back, plan B, with Bit-na,” she giggles.

“Gee, your sense of humor has truly never changed, you and your dad jokes…” You roll your eyes, but you’re sure Bit-na can see the amusement on your face the same way you could hear the seriousness behind her words just a moment ago. “I miss you,” you confess after a long pause, looking up from your hands to her bright face.

For a moment you’re back in time, when she came over with your mother and saw the tiny lighthouse she gifted you on your shelf. In your mind she’s still standing there, in your living room, looking at her pretty gift in her hands – she used to always touch the stuff in your room when you were younger, marveling at the knick-knacks you had on your shelves. Sometimes she truly is the lighthouse in your life, giving you direction when everything else feels like it’s falling apart.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m the best friend anyone could ask for.”

“Can’t even be emotional with you,” you bicker, amused.

“I’m just kidding. You know I miss you, too. I also love you.”

“More than Seung-min?”

She hums, tapping her chin with her pointer finger while looking off-camera as a grin spreads wide on her lips.

“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes… no,” she chuckles. “Just don’t make me choose.”

When you end the call, some ten minutes later, your soul feels lighter and breathing doesn’t seem as hard nor does your mind feel as clouded by worries of every kind as it did when your livestream ended.

“Noona?”

You turn around when Joon-woong calls you, and this time you find the three of them staring. They probably finished their rewatch of what you told the audience earlier in the evening, but your laptop is still on – you can see the light of its screen reflecting onto Joong-gil’s reading glasses.

“I’m sorry, I needed a moment away from everything.” Your voice is small when you approach them, house slippers padding on the hardwood of the floor.

The truth is, you don’t have it within yourself to rewatch the live, or to simply hear again all the justifications you had to give. I’m not a cheater and I also have feelings, a private life, you know? Why should I deny myself the things a normal person can freely do and have? What hurts the most, probably, is the fact that you weren’t even given the privacy to grieve. People saw what they wanted to see in the version of you someone else decided to sell the tabloids and post online. People saw a girlfriend cheating on her boyfriend when it was just someone’s daughter crying her pain out in the arms of a friend – a lover, more and more so every day – trying his best to keep her pieces together.

You stopped being you when you stepped onto that stage and became a product – that’s what your mother told you before you left Busan, wrapped up in her arms and in her scent, trying to make you discern between the person they think you are and the person she knows you to be. People buy a version of you that’s not really you. If they’d take the real you that is like any other normal person, they wouldn’t see you as special anymore, wouldn’t put you on a pedestal.

Is it bad that I’m a product, Mom?

It’s only bad when they want to force that product onto the real person.

What would she say if she were here now? You’re almost afraid to call her, to ask her whether she watched the livestream. What she thinks of it. What she thinks you should do.

Whether she’s still proud of you.

Whether she can shield you from the rest of the world like she used to.

“The first response isn’t bad at all,” Ryung-gu says, leaning forward and grabbing your hand. “You’re cold,” he points out, pulling you into his side.

“She always is,” Joong-gil chimes in, going back to reading the comments on the screen with Joon-woong.

“Your boyfriend sure does know a lot of things about you,” Ryung-gu whispers in your ear, making you chuckle.

It has a nice ring to it – boyfriend. You’ve considered Park Joong-gil a lot of things deep inside your soul, but you never really slapped a label on him. You have to admit, however, that ‘boyfriend’ feels nice. Maybe you should tell him later, when everyone else leaves. You realize that somehow you want to be his. Sure, you want to be free from all the contracts you’re tangled in, but wouldn’t it be nice to be free with him? To finally belong – somewhere, with someone, in a world that has no limits, not even to who you can be and what you can do as long as it makes you happy. You can’t run away forever; one day you’ll have to stop, and what better place than with someone that feels like home?

“Mr Maeng has been blowing my phone up, but most of the fans seem to be angrier at the agency than at us now,” Joon-woong says, showing you his Twitter feed. “Ryeon also called when you were talking with your friend.”

“What did she say?”

“That y’all did the right thing, speaking up for yourselves and bringing what the agency wanted you to do to light,” Ryung-gu replies, letting you climb past him to sit in-between him and Joon-woong to read the comments you’re being shown. “Based on how our agency reacts, she says we’ll all think about whether to renew with them or get signed under someone else.”

“‘I know a guy,’ she said,” Joon-woong adds, tugging on the lobe of his ear. “Whatever that means. I guess he’s supposed to help. Will help.”

When Ryung-gu and Joon-woong leave – We’ll be upstairs playing games if you need anything, the former promised – it’s just you and Joong-gil, who’s waited for you to close the entrance door and come back to the couch before making you straddle his thighs to sit on his lap.

There’s only tenderness – in the way the thumb of his left hand rubs slow circles into your hip and his right hand cradles the back of your head, in the way he stares into your eyes. He doesn’t say a word for the longest time; he just sits there, drinking you in, breathing you in, your hands on his biceps. The cashmere of his turtleneck is the softest thing you’ve ever touched, of that much you’re sure.

Then, eventually, he smiles. “Hi.”

God, you want to hug him so tight it hurts. “Hey.”

“How’re you feeling?” he asks, pulling you in closer until his lips are a breath away. His smile widens into grin when your breath catches in the back of your throat, and his hands pull your head closer for a quick peck on your lips. It’s like he rejoices in the effect he has on you, like he’s learned it long ago and he now pushes those buttons any time he can.

You don’t mind, though. It’s nice, to be loved as tenderly as he does you – and then as fiercely as he did when you were still playing that game of yours, chasing each other knowing you couldn’t go the whole way. So, you smile and hum, tipsy off of the smell of him, and his smile, his hands on your cheeks, his lips so close to yours that you can almost feel their gentle press against yours. “‘M fine,” you mumble, pecking his lips and smiling some more.

He’s so fucking handsome – in general, every minute of every goddamn day, but even more so up close – his long eyelashes, the curve of his lips, even the dark circles under his eyes.

“Ryung-gu said something earlier that really made me giddy,” you continue, pecking his lips once more, now unable to hide the grin that stretches wide on your lips.

Right then, his phone starts going off on the couch, but he doesn’t even spare it a glance. It’s another one of the small things he does that never fail to make you feel important, like he always has – or makes – time for you no matter the situation.

“Hm, yeah?” He leans back against the couch until he’s slightly looking up at you from where you’re still sitting upright, his hands now on your hips. “What’d he say?”

There’s a bird in your chest in lieu of your heart, fluttering its wings because of the way he’s looking at you – warm brown eyes, taking you in like he’s also trying to commit this moment – you – to memory, basking in the coziness of it all, of you in his lap looking down at him like there’s nothing else in the world. Later down the road, he’ll even tell you how bright your whole expression was tonight, like you had stars inside he couldn’t help but stare at.

“He called you my boyfriend,” you grin, leaning forward and digging your fingertips into the plush of the headrest.

He chuckles, surprised by how giddy you are at such a statement. “That’s so random. Am I not?”

Your grin hurts your cheeks. “Are you?”

“We just told the whole country you and I are the real couple in this situation!” he gasps, chuckling right after. “How more obvious should I make it?”

His lips spread into a grin when you peck them – you learned months ago how much you enjoy doing that, even more so if it catches him off guard. The way he holds his breath for a moment, the way he exhales, and the way he chases after you when you pull away.

“Am I your girlfriend?” you ask, mere millimeters from his lips. His breath is lightly fogging up the lenses of your glasses near the bridge of your nose, but you don’t care.

“Hell yeah! We even…” He grunts, pulling your right hand away from the couch and holding it up between you, interlacing the fingers of his left with yours. “We even have couple rings! See?” he continues, turning your hands so that you can catch a glimpse of the thin silver band on his middle finger matching the one on your index. “Do you and Bit-na have this?”

You laugh at that, shaking your head ‘no’ at his words. When you lean down to press a kiss to the ring on his finger, you try to hide yourself behind your joined hands and childishly ask, “So… Does that mean you’re my boyfriend?”

“You make me crazy,” he laughs, pulling on you so quickly that you end up losing your balance and crashing into his chest. “I’m your boyfriend, yeah.”

This time, when he kisses you, he doesn’t pull back. He pulls you closer instead, one hand still tightly wrapped around yours and the other splayed on the back of your head, and when you smile he takes his chance to pull your lower lip between his teeth.

“Now I know I should make things explicit.” He’s looking at your lips when he speaks, and you can feel them tingle, barely able to recover from the kiss you’ve just shared.

“Yeah?”

“Hm.” His gaze meets yours over a shared smile – or, rather, your smile and his smirk – and suddenly, that dangerous spark in his eyes makes the ghost of his past touches trail down your spine, under that hoodie of his you never gave back after your first time at Jumadeung. “Like how you’re mine. Or how I’m gonna make you mine.”

*

“Explain last night’s livestream.”

You’re sitting side by side with Joon-woong, feeling much calmer than you thought you would be last night in your living room, when you were talking to a camera while trying not to be terrified by the judgment of faceless, nameless people. Opposite you, at the other end of the long table in the meeting room, sits Maeng Jang-hyun, dark square glasses low on the bridge of his nose and jaw clenched tight.

“I don’t think anyone gave you permission to go live, least of all together,” he continues, voice as cold as can be. “Or with Park Joong-gil of Nae-il Ent.” (You don’t tell him you asked for your mom’s opinion, though, or your manager, Ji-young’s, and neither opposed the idea.)

On either side of Maeng Jang-hyun sit the heads of the Public Relations team and of the marketing department. Both Jo Yong-hee (the former) and Ji Hwa-ja (the latter) stare past Joon-woong and you, at the building on the other side of the street across from your agency, unreadable expressions on their faces. You’ve been trying to read the room with them ever since you showed up with your friend this morning, but until now it’s been impossible to gauge whether they’re on your side or on Maeng’s.

“All that bullshit you fed the viewers with…” Something ticks in his jaw when he turns his head to the side to take a deep breath and avoid the sight of you. “Maybe you don’t care about the agency employing you, but—”

“Maybe it’s the agency employing us that—” you try to say, using what little courage you’ve managed to put together as fuel before being unceremoniously cut off.

Joon-woong grabs your hand under the table and gives it a light squeeze of encouragement.

Maeng Jang-hyun slams a fist on the hard metal surface of the table and then tries to hide the hiss that slips past his lips at the pain that shoots up his wrist. “Maybe it’s the agency what?” he growls after he manages to calm down – a big word to mean he’s barely keeping his anger at bay.

Maybe this is when he pops a vein, you think to yourself, doing your best to not cower in front of him – you’ve never been afraid of him, but you’ve also never been in such a situation. Joong-gil promised you everything would be fine, and you made Joon-woong the same promise when you picked him up from his apartment earlier this morning.

“We came up with a strategy and you agreed to it. Now you dare bite the hand that feeds you?”

“We were forced to accept the fake relationship,” Joon-woong bites back, his voice sounding much more stable than yours did a while ago, standing up for the both of you.

This time, you’re the one squeezing his hand tight and not letting go.

“And you knew it was bound to come to an end,” he adds, sparing a glance at Jo Yong-hee and Ji Hwa-ja who have yet to make a sound, almost as if to dare them to utter a word in their boss’s defense.

“When we would say it should,” Maeng retorts. “Ms Ji.”

“Sir,” Hwa-ja bows her head slightly. You don’t miss the way she clutches the pen in her hand a little tighter, the golden rings on her fingers catching the light of the in-ceiling lamps when she does so.

“How were the sales going before this shitshow?”

Ji Hwa-ja glances in your direction with eyes full of pity before she goes back to looking straight out of the window behind your back. You want to hope she also is uncomfortable with the situation – the one that forced you and your musician friend to play a part more than the lecture the agency’s CEO is delivering. “The figures were through the roof.”

“Revenue?”

“Possibly the highest we’ve had since Y/N and RMT debuted.”

“Ms Jo.”

It’s Yong-hee’s turn to bow her head, but this time she doesn’t look at you. She fixes her gaze on her colleague, the other half of the J Sisters as some of the trainees dubbed Jo Yong-hee and Ji Hwa-ja a long time ago, and doesn’t look away.

“How’s the situation in your office?”

“Well…” Yong-hee clears her throat and you can see how she glances at you and Joon-woong from the corner of her eye. Her pointer finger incessantly taps against the table, and there’s some perspiration along her hairline. “We’ve been getting calls all morning. Emails…” She swallows, suddenly leaning forward to grab her water bottle for a sip of water. “They started coming in last night, a couple hours after the livestream.”

“And what are the newspapers writing about?” Maeng is staring at you specifically – like you’re the culprit in this situation. You, a whole-ass adult and not a puppet. If looks could kill, you’d be dead in the afterlife as well.

“They— Uh…” Jo Yong-hee stalls. Her thumb fidgets with the ring on her index finger, and even Ji Hwa-ja’s stoic façade cracks a little. “Not nice things.”

“‘Not nice things,’” Maeng parrots, nodding his head, clenching his jaw so tight the tendons in his neck pop out. “Bang Guk-heon’s also heard from our main investors. They’re not happy.”

It almost feels like you’re a child getting scolded by the school’s principal, being talked to with the simplest words lest you not understand how bad they think the situation is.

You also vaguely remember the CFO Bang Guk-heon from one of your first big company celebrations many years ago, when you were still a trainee and YUNIE – or Jeon Bo-yun, who told you to call her unnie when you accidentally walked in on her studying her new choreography on the very last day of your first week of training – was the biggest star signed under your agency’s name. Back then he had seemed like a competent guy, boasting about how he had managed to chat some big name of the music industry into becoming a major partner. You’re sure there’s no reason to worry he’d let anyone withdraw stocks over a fucking marketing stunt gone wrong.

“Do you have any idea what the repercussions could be, Y/N?” Maeng leans forward on his elbows, looking down the slope of his nose and above his sunglasses to meet your gaze. Is he afraid of Choi Joon-woong? Or is he simply targeting you as the weak link? “Public outrage goes on. Our value on the stock market falls. Investors withdraw. We brush the line of bankruptcy. Are you gonna pay for the damages when that happens?”

Joon-woong snorts. His grip on your hand tightens and you have to bite down the yelp that manages to crawl past your lips at his intensity. “Over something like a fake relationship scandal? Be for fucking real.”

When you finally turn in his direction, only wanting to run away from Maeng’s hateful gaze, you realize you’ve never seen your friend Joon-woong this pissed. You used to think Koo Ryeon was the scary member out of the three of them, but you’re starting to believe Choi Joon-woong has simply managed to keep himself on a leash until now.

“Five years ago Kwon Sang-gu and his agency faced that fucking huge scandal when word came out that he had evaded his military service duty with their support,” he continues, as stern as can be, never breaking eye contact with his big boss and never letting go of your hand. “The agency debuted a girl group and made more money than Kwon Sang-gu ever brought them and today they’re only second to Nae-il Ent. DYNAMIC was caught tampering with votes at award shows and now they’re among the top five most-grossing companies in the country. Do you really think this scandal will make you lose even ten percent of what they lost? Cut your bullshit before you really lose us.”

Maeng Jang-hyun laughs, a robotic, unamused sound that scratches your eardrums and makes you look back at him. “Are you threatening me?”

Joon-woong shrugs his shoulders. “Stating a fact. Making a promise. The terms of our contracts are coming to an end and there are plenty of people who’d want to sign big names like us. We might decide to broaden our horizons if our interests don’t align with the company’s anymore.”

*

You’re alone in your car later that day, after meeting up with Ryung-gu and Ryeon, who wanted to eat lunch with you and Joon-woong and catch up on what transpired during the meeting. They make the situation less heavy, less weird than it has to be.

It’s alright, we’ll land right side up. I know a guy – Ryeon said over her salad, nodding to everything you and her fellow member tell both her and Ryung-gu.

You make it sound sketchy.

She grinned when Ryung-gu said that. It could be that way too, if you want it to be. I meant a lawyer in this case, though.

Driving around aimlessly, you wonder what a lawyer might do for your case. You do understand what happened – and you did read some of the comments people posted online even though Joong-gil explicitly suggested you avoid social media for a while – but at the same time… not really.

The most important false step would be a breached contract, but nowhere did you or Joon-woong sign anything about playing along with this marketing stunt. Can you still get in trouble? You can ignore the online, anonymous hate, but you can’t do the same with legal actions.

Maybe your friends are right, you think, taking turns in the road and simply following the flow of the early afternoon traffic. Maybe you should consider looking into other companies, other agencies. Find somewhere else that could – or would be willing to – get you signed when your contract with Maeng’s agency comes to an end.

You grumble, slamming both hands on the steering wheel at a red light.

You really did like it there. Maeng and his management might be annoying at times, but you still had – have, you have to remind yourself you can still use the present tense – a hella lot of creative freedom, more than Nae-il Ent. seems to give Joong-gil. After starting training with them, you thought you’d be able to have a long career under their name – and NABI felt like the right agency name to be working for.

“How did your meeting go?” is the first thing your mother asks when you accept her call.

You really don’t know, but you can’t tell her that, make her worry more than she already is. “Fine, I guess.” You take a left turn, but you barely have the time to realize you’re not really that familiar with this area of the city. It’s easy to go anywhere when it’s Park Ji-young who’s driving. “Remember Ryeon?”

Your mother hums.

What is she doing? Shouldn’t she be at work right now?

“Well, she said she and the guys are considering not renewing their contracts with the agency. That they’ll most likely switch to someone else. They already have a few names lined up.”

“Are you going to do the same?”

“I don’t know, maybe. I’ve always liked it here… But then they used me and Joon, and now they’re trying to make us look like the bad guys.” You sigh, and it’s silent on the line for a while. “Like, I do see where I went wrong, but I also feel like things could’ve been handled differently on their part, no?”

“They shouldn’t have played with your private life in the first place, so this is on them.”

“So, do you also think I should get signed under someone else?”

“I think you should do what you think is best for yourself, the way they’ve always done for themselves. This is not just work, this is also your life. I spoke with a school friend this morning, her husband is in the industry. She says you’re a big name, that you’ll have plenty of options elsewhere, even if you decide to stop with the performances and switch to producing or even just coaching.”

“Yeah?” You do your best to not let her hear the way your voice quivers. There’s this deep, heavy tiredness perched on your shoulders, spread everywhere in-between skin and muscle and fat, and it makes you want to break down and cry it all out. Maybe it was a good thing the truth came out. Maybe it should have stayed hidden until your agency let you free. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither.

She hums again. “Whatever makes you happy, that’s what you should do. Don’t give up on what gives you that happiness just because you want to be seen as the good guy.”

Don’t let the man you love go – that’s what she’s saying without saying it.

“I’m so proud of you, you know that, right? Whether you’re singing on the moon or working whichever other job. Whether you’re signed with a company or another. I’m proud of the person you’re inside. Your dad would be, too, I’m sure. We’ve both always loved you so much.” It’s her voice’s turn to quiver now. Reminiscing is never easy, especially when it makes you vulnerable and old wounds sting.

Somehow, after turning left and right an unspecified number of times, after driving mindlessly through one street after the other, you find yourself pulling up in front of the old building hosting Jumadeung in its bowels. After going back with your mind to the two nights you’ve spent here, it’s like your heart has brought you back a third time.

“Hm.” Why can’t you say those three words out loud? Why can you never bring yourself to voice them? Come on, you just open your mouth and say them. Just do it, fuck. “Me, too.”

Someone calls her name then, and you can hear something about having to go back to the ward.

“I gotta go now. Remember what I said, okay? Pursue your happiness, not anyone else’s demands.”

After a quick goodbye, it’s just you in the car. You realize now you haven’t even been playing any music, instead simply sitting there with the turmoil in your mind and in your soul, allowing Seoul’s traffic to dictate in which direction you should turn your wheel.

Pursue your happiness – that’s what she said. Be in control of your life! – even if something else seems to have brought you back to Jumadeung?

There’s no saying what possesses you, what makes you drive down the ramp that leads to the underground garage. All you know is that you’re parking your car in the deserted place and locking its doors. The headlights flash when you click on your car’s remote, and for a brief moment, you can see your shadow on the wall opposite you.

It feels so weird to be here during the day, like this is a completely different place than the one you’ve visited in the past. Like it’s on a completely different plane of existence. There’s water trickling down somewhere and the sound the droplets make seems amplified, echoing off the bare walls of this haunted-house-like building.

A shiver speeds down your spine when your brain suddenly realizes how much creepier it is here in broad daylight compared to at night. It’s like shadows are wrapped in an additional layer of threat, like some nightmare-esque being could jump out from behind one of the garage pillars.

Running toward the door that leads inside the building would be a bit too childish for your age, you decide when you clutch the shoulder strap of your bag, and walking would feed the uneasiness in your bones, so speedwalking it is. It feels like a good compromise between the two ends of the spectrum – not that there’s anyone here to witness. You doubt this place even has security cameras.

You still make it out of there alive, though, even without Park Joong-gil’s hand holding onto yours and guiding you toward the fairy lights. They’re on even at this hour of the day, those fairy lights, so colorful and reassuring even when you reach Jumadeung’s double door and are faced with a sign reading WE’RE CLOSED ON TUESDAYS in big, flashy characters.

A slight disappointment washes over you, trickling down your veins and settling in your soul. You weren’t really thinking about stopping by for a drink or a bite; you didn’t even want to come here, you simply happened to end up in front of the building. Still, you should have expected it to still be closed so early in the afternoon, but to also end up here on their day off feels like a joke on Fate’s part. That’s what you thought had guided you here: Fate, invisible strings pulling the threads of your life to lead you back to the one place where you felt like you belonged for the first time in long years.

Instead of just driving around, maybe you should have called Joong-gil, waited on the line with him before the meeting he was supposed to have with his agency right after lunchtime. You could have told him how yours went, then maybe invited him over to your place to eat dinner together and try to decide what to do, how to act. How to shush the bruising noises and breathe for a moment.

“Are you going to stand there for a while longer?” suddenly asks a voice coming from behind you, catching you so off guard that you jolt in place before you finally manage to turn around with your heart lodged at the back of your throat.

Golden glasses, white fluffy cardigan over deep green palazzo pants – you recognize the middle-aged woman as Jumadeung’s queen, Jade – whether that’s her real name or not. She stares at you expectantly, and it takes you longer than it should have to bow your head to her in greeting.

“I’m sorry, I…” Words fail you and your gaze is quickly caught by one of the lights toward the end of the fairy light string flickering. “I didn’t know you were closed, I’ll get going.”

Jade ends up coaxing you inside, past the door that separates the outside world full of chaos from the calm peace of Jumadeung. She leads you up to the counter and grabs your coat for you before carefully placing it on one of the empty tables.

The silence of the bar is not completely unwelcome, but it’s still somehow eerie in a way you can’t exactly explain. It’s always been quiet the times you came here, even with other patrons present, but this feels… different. Like Jumadeung is a beast alive of its own life and now it’s sleeping, waiting until it’s time to wake up again, to have its fill of living people.

“I don’t know how I wound up here,” you confess unprompted as Jade boils a tea for the two of you. You don’t know why you’re telling her, or why you feel the need to in the first place. Your tongue and lips are simply moving a fraction of a second before your brain even has the time to send out orders. “I was just driving and…”

Jade’s soft features light up when she smiles and when she walks past to grab two cups, her jasmine scent wafts toward you. It brings back a pleasant memory: your father gifting both you and your mother flowers on a random night, after a long day spent at work.

“That’s curious,” she smiles, pouring tea. She only continues when she walks around the counter and sits down next to you, so close that it really does feel like spring. “That’s how Park Joong-gil found this place the first time.”

To the surprised expression on your face, she replies with a chuckle.

“He said he had been driving around aimlessly, with lots of things on his mind. He stopped at the front of the building and walked inside,” she tells you. “I remember that back then the laundry upstairs was still in business. I found him just outside the door the same way I found you. It was also a Tuesday.”

Somehow, unexplainably, you’re hanging from her every word, tea cup in hand but not close enough to your lips to drink from it. It helps warm your cold hands up, however. “Really?”

She nods and takes a sip of her tea, finally turning her head slightly to look at you from above the rim of her glasses. “I’ve always thought some people are destined to find each other,” and then she glances down at the ring on your hand, whose twin sits around Joong-gil’s finger.

You want to ask her what she means by that. Reading too much into things has never done you any good, and you’re also unable to understand how this random woman hinting at Destiny – the one with a capital D – makes you feel. Had it been anyone else, you would have been bubbling in annoyance by now, but somehow Jade has you rooted to the spot, like you can’t really move unless she allows you to.

“Do you know what Fate does?” she asks, going back to looking ahead, at your reflection in the old, stained mirror of the bar.

It’s then that you feel like you can move again, and you take the chance to drink your tea, mulling over a million thoughts at once. Why she’s telling you these things. Why you ended up here in the first place. Your troubles at the agency. All the posts online about you and Joon-woong, and you and Joong-gil, and you and Joon-woong and Joong-gil. What’s your mom doing? Would Bit-na really let you teach at her dance school if things here go south? What would your dad say?

Eventually, you shake your head no.

“It connects people,” Jade says when you meet her gaze in the mirror. All the fairy lights are reflecting off of the surface as well, blinking and pulsing, seemingly following a rhythm so close to your own breathing. “It ties red strings between them so that they’ll always be able to find each other from one life to the next.”

Yeah, I’m aware of the legend, you want to say, but somehow your tongue is a piece of wood in your mouth.

“Sometimes some bonds are severed and if the people at the two ends meet again, the dynamics will always be different. Sometimes new bonds are formed and they open new doors. Like here at Jumadeung.” She smiles, and there’s this glint in her eyes that makes your breathing falter for a moment. “You don’t believe in coincidences, do you?”

Trapped here with her, stuck in a body that doesn’t seem to be able to move, you’re left alone with your thoughts. Do you? Do you believe in coincidences? It would be rational to believe that sometimes things happen just because, without some ancestral, almighty being operating behind the scenes to pull on invisible strings.

“Both you and Park Joong-gil showing up here on a Tuesday, after something else steered your paths in this direction. He asked for tea, and you didn’t refuse yours.”

“That’s just…” you manage to speak.

“A coincidence?”

You nod. “Yeah.” What’s this woman going on about? Suddenly you want to be out of here. It’s like something has been rubbing you off the wrong way ever since you stepped foot through that door, and now you’re here, uncomfortable, listening to this woman speak about your relationship almost as though she knows more about it than you do.

“Maybe,” she concedes in the end, sighing over her empty cup while she absentmindedly traces random patterns on the shiny surface of the counter. “Maybe it was just a new tie forming where another one ended.” She points at your right wrist then and even though it’s covered by the sleeve of your hoodie, it’s like she knows what’s tattooed on your skin. “Some things have to die before one of those can fly. And I don’t believe in coincidences.”

*

You’re sitting in a random parking lot when the colors of the night sky bleed and flow into the warm hues of the sunset.

When you ran back to your car, after speed walking until you were out of Jade’s sight, you found her old, red car where she said it had been all day – at the end of the garage, under a flickering neon light. Despite what she told you, you’re sure it wasn’t there when you first arrived.

“I can’t spoil anything about the new drama. I’m afraid you’ll have to watch to know what happens,” Joong-gil says in reply to one of the endless comments he’s receiving on his live stream. You’re watching it on your second phone, the one you use for work-related stuff. “Yeah, there are some red strings, but that’s all I can say,” he continues with a chuckle, voice as warm as honey

Red strings. Again. Didn’t Jade say something about those, as well?

You sigh, placing your phone next to your other one in the passenger seat.

What the fuck even was that, this afternoon at Jumadeung? What’s all that crap about Fate leading you all the way across Seoul to some cryptic bar, and why does a part of you believe that woman’s words to be true?

You would like to drive back and ask her: is it true? Or do I simply want it to be?

The butterfly on your wrist is no secret to the world. It’s always been visible – in pictures and performances alike – because you’ve always refused to cover it up. You’ve been keeping your pains under wrap ever since you can remember, but no one’s going to take away from you the one thing your sorrows bleed out of. It still came as a surprise, the fact that Jade hinted at it almost as though she knew what you and your father used to talk about, what kind of metaphor butterflies have always been for the two of you.

Joong-gil is still talking in the background, addressing comments and answering questions.

“Why are you even taking that crap into consideration?” you ask yourself, weaving the fingers of your left hand through your hair, doing your best not to pull on it out of frustration. “C’mon, don’t be childish.”

It’s then that the man on your phone’s screen says, “I don’t like comments attacking her. With her in my life I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in a long time. Isn’t that what’s important?”

He doesn’t say your name – probably someone else already mentioned it in a comment and that’s why he’s saying those things – but you don’t need him to. You know it’s you he’s talking about. Hinting at the comments some people have been posting online… who else could it be if not you?

Did someone ask about you in his comments? Or is it something he decided to say unprompted? When you logged into the app, his live had already been going for almost an hour, so you figured that he had addressed the problem early on, at the beginning of his chat, so that he could move on and talk about his comeback, his new music, how well Tomorrow’s been doing – you really can’t tell, you’ve been distracted both by your thoughts and his looks. And his voice.

The expression on his face is serious, however, and it’s clear he means every word about you, whether he says them out loud or simply implies them. It awakens this thing inside you, this something that slowly grows and takes over everything else inside your body, interweaves itself with your soul. Like you matter, and like you belong.

And you’re also the happiest you’ve ever been in a long time, you realize as you look at Joong-gil, at the stern frown on his brow, at the lines of his face.

[5:57 PM] you: hii 💗

That’s what you end up texting him – a simple greeting, a heart emoji, nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to your text conversations with him. Still, you see the way he moves toward the side of his screen and how his face lights up when he picks up his phone to read your text, and you also see the way he doesn’t make a move to hide his reaction from his viewers.

He’s beaming, his smile so beautiful that something in your heart cracks and bleeds. Is that what he looks like when you text him? When you can’t see him, and when you think your heart is the only one pounding wildly at a simple notification from him?

It feels like lurking, like spying on him through a keyhole in the door of his life. This shard of him you’ve never had access to before this very moment and that wipes everything else out, makes tabula rasa of what your entire day has been.

A grin stretches on your lips: now you know why it always takes him a moment to reply to your first text.

He’s so fucking cute, you think as your face warms up and your heart throbs in your chest.

[6:00 PM] joong-gil 💗: hey! i’m live

[6:01 PM] you: i know, ive been watching you lol

[6:01 PM] you: do you always light up like a christmas tree when i text you?

He doesn’t mention you when he goes back to his stream and he proceeds to ignore any of the comments inquiring about his sudden mood change. Still, when you’re pulling out of the parking lot after the spontaneous decision of going to his place, your phone lights up with his reply.

[6:07 PM] joong-gil 💗: lol no clue what you’re talking about

*

“I do not ‘light up like a Christmas tree’,” is the first thing Park Joong-gil exclaims when he opens the door with a pout on his face.

And there’s that thought again – he’s so fucking cute. You can physically feel your face light up with the smile that pulls at the corners of your lips at his expression, and it feels so warm everywhere inside of you, even though it was freezing cold outside when you parked your car and the first snowflakes started to fall.

“You do,” you sing-song, walking through the door and wrapping your arms around his waist like you’d never want to let go again. Maybe if you hold on to him long enough, with enough intensity, you’ll be able to have more of that Tongyeong peace – more of his shared bed, his shared kitchen, your shared meals. “It was the most adorable thing I’ve seen in a while.”

He scoffs as he pushes his door closed, but then there it is, that smirk fighting against the serious expression painted on his face. It only lasts for a second, two at most, because then he’s turning his head to look at you, smiling so absurdly bright that your breath catches in the back of your throat and you’re left standing there like wow. I really do have him, don’t I?

He always catches you off guard, both with how handsome he looks and with how he makes you feel inside, like everything is finally falling into place and you can stop and breathe.

“So what if I do?” He shrugs his shoulders, crouching down to take your shoes off for you before leaving them by the door. He’s so stupidly nice you want to pinch yourself to figure out whether this is real life or just a dream. It’s gotta be real, you wouldn’t want it any other way at this point in your life. “I must’ve caught feelings.”

He says it almost jokingly, like that must have happened along the way, by accident, without him really wanting to or without him realizing that’s the direction things were taking. And maybe that’s how things went, for the both of you: you started off as simple coworkers, working on a music album together, that’s for sure, until you realized that maybe you also were catching feelings for him. That you were falling for him, for the Joong-gil behind the image of him Nae-il Entertainment and Ha Dae-su sell to the rest of the world. For the man that enjoys cooking, that hums forgotten songs while heating up your breakfast, that drops everything and comes to you when you call him in the middle of the night.

Maybe you also do light up like a Christmas tree when he texts you, when he calls you.

There is no ‘maybe’ when it comes to your feelings for him, though, you’ve put your heart at peace about that much, that’s for sure. Maybe you tried to deny them in the past, but now they’re so strong that you can barely even remember how you were doing before he came along and settled down in the middle of your everyday life.

“I’m so in love with you,” you blurt out when he tugs on your hand to lead you inside his apartment.

It seems to take him off-guard, for he stops and turns to look at you – mid-step, mid-sentence, a sentence your brain wasn’t even registering when you opened your mouth to speak.

He said that to you. At the columbarium, back in Busan, he told you those same words – I’m so in love with you. You were crying in his arms while everything inside you shattered for the billionth time, old cracks cracking some more as the kintsugi of your soul fell apart once more. You only now realize you never said it back that day, nor ever. You did your best to show him, but it was always through actions, never through a direct sentence. You never put your heart on your sleeve and presented it to him.

“I’m so in love with you,” you repeat, heartbeat deafening inside your skull and heavy in your chest, stomach knotting up in the absurd fear that he might turn you down. He’s seen your cracks, you tell yourself, and he’s still here. He’s seen your wounds, the way you bleed, and he’s seen your good sides, too. Whether or not you’re destined to be, as that Jumadeung lady said this afternoon, what’s there to fear when he’s proved himself more times than you can count? “Everything else slows down and fades away when I’m with you.”

He tugs on your hand, and this time you let him pull you to himself.

“I want to feel this way for a long time,” you go on, your heart a little higher up, almost in your throat. You choke on them, on your feelings for him, because this is a first and you have no clue what comes next. “You make me feel like I’m invincible in my fragility, and seeing you light up that way just because of a text made me realize how fucking deep into you I am.”

The hum of the television in his living room is the only sound in the room, although the volume of your heartbeat seems to spike up when his hand reaches your cheek. You wonder whether he even hears it with how deafening it is, pulsing right underneath your skin.

“Hell, I’ll let them fire me and drag me through the mud if it means I can keep you,” you ramble on. It’s all coming up, a word vomit you didn’t see coming – not when you were in Jumadeung, nor at home, nor in Tongyeong, not even earlier, in your car. It comes up your stomach and out of your throat like a punch, like the butterflies you had inside have finally found a way out of your body, out of their cocoon. “I want today with you, and tomorrow as well, and I haven’t felt this fucking alive inside in such a goddamn long time. It makes me wonder whether I’m going nuts because now you’re in all of my thoughts. And when I see something I like, something beautiful, I think, I wanna share this with him. I want him to see it, too. And that’s why I always send you all those pictures, even when you’re further than just a call away. Is it crazy?” you ask, out of breath. Your throat is knotting up somehow, and you really can’t understand why. Why would you cry? Why would that be your body’s first reaction to you opening up to him? “That I feel this way? I want you so much it hurts. Is it crazy?”

Joong-gil stays silent for a while longer and you feel each and every second pass by so excruciatingly slowly that they all feel like whole eternities. Whole eternities spent standing there, with one of his hands cradling your cheek and the other holding your hand.

“You know,” he says, a bit more hesitantly than you’d like, glancing up at the ceiling for a second before meeting your gaze again, “I think I’ve come to the conclusion that if I kissed you now, I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back any longer. And like, I know we started off crazy horny for each other, but in the meantime, I’ve also fallen for every other part of you as well. So now I’m torn between just holding you as we are right now or…”

“Or?” you egg him on when you see him stall again, gaze flickering between your eyes and your lips.

Fuck, you didn’t even come here with ideas in your brain, you just wanted to see him, ask him about his meeting, tell him about your afternoon, about the absurd time you spent in Jumadeung, but the way he’s staring at you is starting to make deep want trickle down your spine.

“Or we could not stop.”

There’s no hiding the thrill that courses through your body. He feels it, Joong-gil, and the hand on your waist pulls you that tad bit closer, until there’s physically no distance between the two of you.

“Our game ended weeks ago, after all, but then every chance we had didn’t feel like the right one. There was always something else and I didn’t want you to believe I only wanted you because of that.” He looks down at your lips, and suddenly you’re fighting against yourself not to make that first move. You want to see him take matters into his hands. After the chase settled down and you got closer in other ways, after he soothed your worries and your aches, you’ve been waiting for him to show you all the things he always said he would do to you. “But you still somehow don’t believe I’m crazy about you, too.”

He leans in closer, pecks your lips, and then trails kisses along your jaw until his nose brushes against your ear.

“So, of course I light up like a fucking Christmas tree when you’re involved,” he whispers, one of his hands trailing down your back until it’s dangerously close to your ass.

Your chuckle turns into laughter before it’s all cut off by another kiss – this time longer, deeper, no more a quick, simple press of lips against lips but something that makes you weak in the knees, something that makes you hungry for more of him.

“You’re also lighting up right now,” he smirks, both of his hands clasping behind your back as he holds you to himself. You feel him starting to stir in his pants, and you watch him try and ignore it, like he wouldn’t go there if you didn’t want to. “You do that a lot actually. Your lips start smiling and then it reaches your eyes, and it’s like a weight has been lifted off of your shoulders. Makes me fall harder for you every single time.”

You smile – or probably you’re grinning, you don’t even know anymore. All you know is that everything else has been put on hold once again – the snow outside, the storm at the company, even the wild rhythm of your heartbeat has gone down again, like now you know there’s no need – or reason – to worry about a damn thing. That you can stay, and that you’re safe here.

“Do you wanna stop?” he asks, honesty in his voice but hunger in his eyes.

You think about your mornings together, especially the ones in his home by the sea. You think about the way you woke up in his arms, or the times you woke up in each other’s. The way his voice would rasp, deeper than it usually is, and then the way he’d pull you even closer just to kiss you, to bask in your presence a little longer before eventually getting up.

Is that how it would be, to actually, truly be a constant in each other’s lives?

You feel like you’re finally ready to find out.

So, you shake your head no as you lean closer toward him.

“I need to hear you say it,” he mumbles, his lips barely brushing against your own.

A chuckle slips past your lips the moment you peck his. “I don’t wanna stop. Do you?”

“Hell no!”

You’re in his arms before you can even say anything but in the short time it takes him to walk to his couch – to the couch your stupid game started on – you still manage to giggle at his impatience and then at the way he unceremoniously lets you fall onto the cushions.

“We have all night,” you assure him when he tugs his hoodie off, kneeling between your legs.

He replies with a shake of his head. “I can’t risk your manager or whatever to drag you away again.”

“She’s at home with her family and Joon-woong told Maeng to fuck off.” You sit up and he only seems to stop when you take his face in your hands, heaving a breath like the world is finally coming to a stop for him as well. “No one’s gonna interrupt. Besides,” you say as you coax him to lie down with a pout on your lips as you straddle his thighs, “I wanna go down on you first.”

If he was hanging from your lips at first, drinking in your words of reassurance that everyone else and their mother can finally go fuck themselves, he’s laughing now, tugging you against him for a kiss. Both of his hands slap down on your buttcheeks and your surprised whimper is swallowed by his kiss. “You’d better get in line then, I called the shots first.”

The same way you help him undress, he does you, and then, for good measure, he picks up a remote from the coffee table and uses it to close the automated curtains of his living room. You undress in-between messy kisses and hungry touches – a swipe of his thumb over your nipple, a teasing brush of his fingers so close to where you’re starting to ache for him. Your hands trail down his torso and the low moan he lets out at the sensation makes you want to squeeze your thighs together.

By the time he has you on your back again and he’s settled between your legs, you’re already trying not to squirm. The way he’s looking at you – hungry, like he’s been waiting a long time for this very moment and now that he finally has you where he wanted, he’s not going to let you go. Not that you’d complain, that is. You’ve lost count of all the times your innocent calls have turned into phone sex, his deep voice coaxing orgasms out of you.

“Remember that night at your place?” he asks against the skin of your inner thigh, kissing and gently biting his way toward your core. Every time your pussy throbs around nothing, you feel yourself inch closer and closer to desperate tears. “When we said we’d be exclusive and you made me come inside my pants?”

God.

He kisses your clit then and his tongue coming out to drag up your slit makes you gasp out loud.

“Do you?” he insists, kissing his way up your body until he’s speaking against your lips. Why are you so out of breath already? “Remember?”

The fact that you can feel his dick brush against the crease of your thigh and hip doesn’t help your mush brain work any smarter, but you still somehow manage to tell him that yes, fuck, yes you do. You even remember how his words often came back to your memory every now and then, while you were doing the most random things and how they always, without fail, managed to distract you.

You suck on his fingers when he slips them past your lips. He pulls a moan out of you when he presses them down onto your tongue, and then he makes you moan once again when he uses them to tease your entrance.

If you didn’t want to come off as the impatient one, if you didn’t want him to be the first to cave in, you’d tell him to hurry the fuck up. That you’ve been waiting long enough. That you’ve been pretending your fingers were his for one too many times and now that you’re free to do as you please, he should finally be putting them to good use.

Obviously, however, you keep your mouth shut, resorting to simply chasing his lips when he pulls his head away.

“You can tap out whenever you want,” he says against your lips, finally deepening the kiss when he thumbs at your clit.

Your drawled-out moan is once again lost on his tongue, quickly joined by another one when he pushes a finger inside you.

“Want me that much?” He must feel the way you’re pulsing around that single digit and maybe even the way your heartbeat picks up.

You can feel the smirk on his lips when he kisses down your neck, your collarbones, before he takes your left nipple into his mouth. That’s when he curls his finger inside you and then pulls it out.

“Joong,” you whine, and his lips are back on yours, kissing and licking your complaints away. He rolls his hips against your thigh – it’s slow, almost sensual, the briefest taste of how he’s going to thrust into you later, when he’s satisfied with how wet and opened-up you are for him.

“What?” His free hand teases your nipple. The touches are gentle at first, until they’re not: he tugs on it and your whine morphs into a moan when he takes that chance to slip his middle finger back into your wet heat, quickly joined by his ring finger as well. His chuckle dies on a curse when he feels the way your walls clench around him – again, the briefest taste of how you’re going to be wrapped around him later.

You look up at the ceiling for a moment, contemplating what answer you should give him, but when your gaze finally meets the hunger in his eyes, you think to hell with it! Why drag it out when you’ve been waiting long enough already? So, you wrap a leg around his hip and tug him right into you.

“Please.”

You want to fuck that smirk off of his face. You want to flip your positions around, straddle him, and ride him until he can’t hold himself composed anymore.

“‘Please’ what?” he asks when he starts fucking you on his fingers, pulling up slightly when your leg falls open to the side, no more able to keep the hold it had around him. “All those words before, and now you can’t tell me what you want?” The tone of his voice is so condescending against your chest, but you can’t find it within yourself to complain, not with the way he’s lavishing your tit with his attention, licking and sucking, and then tugging on your nipple before looking up at you again.

“I want you,” you whine, your hips writhing to catch his attention to where, exactly, you want him. His response is a mischievous smirk, and then he’s stretching you open on another finger.

“But you do have me,” he pouts mockingly, kissing up the side of your neck – what an unfair tease. When your whines turn petulant, he chuckles and concedes: he moves down your body and finally flicks his tongue against your clit, and suddenly you’re ready to swear you’re a lot closer to your climax than you thought you were.

His tongue replaces his fingers, and he uses his now free hands to grab your hips and pull you closer into his face, trying to keep you still when you try to ride his face. It’s stronger than you, this sensation cursing through your whole system, rendering you impatient and restless even when Joong-gil is basically making out with your pussy. You barely even have the presence of mind to realize that this is a first, even for him; that maybe he really has been holding himself back all those times he ate you out, because there’s no other explanation for how you’re this breathless this quickly.

The words that leave your mouth are incoherent at best, pleading with him to give you more – or maybe give you less. Definitely to make you come. The pleasure has been building and building, and in the process, it has erased everything else.

You come on his groan, the one he lets out when you tug harshly on his hair – or maybe it’s because of the way his lips latch on to your clit and two of his fingers press up inside you again, curling at just the right moment. Either way, it makes you see stars and it takes you a while to come back down on Earth, and a bit longer for the oversensitivity to kick in and for your hands to push Joong-gil’s head away.

He kisses his way up your body while chuckling low in his throat, until he’s making out with a soft spot in the crook of your neck. You barely realize you’ll have a hickey, but it doesn’t even cross your mind the fact that you would probably have to conceal it before you go out in public again – when he’s going to let you go, and when you’ll convince yourself to leave his apartment.

“You came so easily,” he murmurs in your ear, and you feel it in his body, how he’s holding back another chuckle.

You barely have the time to whine that he’s kissing that sound away. His tongue brushes against yours and you taste yourself, and fuck, is he addicting. You can only whisper out, “unfair.”

“I told you.” His smile is so pretty when he takes your head in his hands and forces you to look up at him. “Once I’d get started on you, I wouldn’t hold back.”

The lower part of his face is glistening in your arousal and the shiver that travels down your spine catches you off-guard when it makes you throb around nothing, and suddenly all you can think about is his dick. You don’t know whether it’s because of your wetness glossing over his lips, or the state of disarray his hair is in, or maybe the depth of his voice as his breaths start coming out labored. Your senses zero in on where his erection is pressed against your stomach and the way you can feel he’s started leaking pre-cum.

It’s hard to tell whether you want him in your mouth or between your legs right now.

You think that’s just a thought, one of the very few your brain can even conjure up right now, chest still heaving in the aftermath of the head Joong-gil gave you, but it slips out.

Joong-gil chuckles, and his right hand comes down to cup your boob, squeezes it for a moment before his thumb brushes over your nipple. “I wish I had the self-control to hold out longer, but I need you to ride me.”

You don’t want to stop and consider the way his use of the verb need makes you feel – nor the way it makes you throb, like it’s impossible to keep your body and your lust in check when it comes to him and all the way he fucks with your brain. His words still make you grin, however, and he doesn’t miss his chance to let you know just how fucked out you are even before he’s put even just the tip in.

He pulls away from you, and for a moment you just look at him. The way he manspreads, and then the way he cups his balls, his erection standing tall and proud, makes you squeeze your thighs together as a whimper slips past your lips.

One of his hands slaps his thigh when you don’t make a move and simply stare at him. You’ve been thinking about this very moment for so long and yet, now that you’re here, you feel rooted to your spot on the couch.

“You coming?”

His hand moves from his thigh to your ankle, and he gives your leg a gentle tug that brings you back down to planet Earth.

“Fuck, yeah.”

The way you scramble over to him makes him laugh and the way you slap his shoulder to shut him up as you straddle his thighs pulls another chuckle from his lips.

“Stop,” you whine. He’s caught off guard when you grab a hold of his dick and a moan gets trapped in his throat at the way you give him a quick squeeze. “Or I’m gonna get my payback.”

Why are you so out of breath already?

Why is your heartbeat still somersaulting inside your chest?

His hand joins yours around the base of his erection and you let him slide its head along your entrance. He doesn’t hold that moan back when he feels how wet you are.

His lips so close to your ear make you shiver. “I’m all yours anyway,” and then he’s sliding you down his length.

“Yeah?”

You don’t know what it is about it, about him saying he’s all yours, that gets you this way – all up in your head and in your feelings, clenching around him and panting into his neck, where you’re hiding your face. It gets you all vulnerable, somehow, and for once it’s not scary.

He hums in reply and it’s as though he does it inside your chest with how pressed flush against him you are. “Feel free to go wild when you’re not fucked out by just some head,” he taunts.

“Ah, fuck off,” but there’s no real bite behind your words, especially when you lift your hips before you drop down again, knocking a moan out of the both of you.

He teases you, lips pressed to your shoulder while his hands move down your sides until he’s grabbing and spreading your butt cheeks. “Into you?” You feel his smile against your skin as he starts guiding your rhythm.

You’re out of breath when you manage to groan back a yeah, but then you’re straightening your back, hands gripping his shoulders. The look in his eyes makes you realize you’re not the one who feels like you could touch the sky at the feeling of him buried deep inside you. “My turn now,” you say when he moves you up his length again.

He smirks at your words and his hands slip down from your ass to your thighs, until he’s gripping you behind your knees. His dick twitches inside you, and the proud look on his face makes you throb around him. “Go ahead then.”

After the way he ate you out earlier, you give this your best shot, even though your legs still tremble every time you drop down on him.

Even with his face pressed between your tits, his hands on your back holding you close as you moan at each movement, you still make out his words. The dirty things he says, almost as though he can’t even control his mouth anymore, and the compliments he throws your way. All the times he says so fucking good or such a tight fit, or even when he lets you know exactly how he can feel your arousal drip down to his balls.

It gets to a point where maintaining a rhythm turns into such a foreign concept because his cock feels so deep inside, hits all your right spots every time, that it erases everything else from your mind. There’s just him, and the way he throbs for a beat, your hands holding his head to your chest, and his hands moving back to your ass, groping it, guiding your movements.

You’re about to mumble out something – slurred words that would probably resemble a so good or a please more – but that’s when he decides to hold your hips still and starts thrusting up into you.

It does feel good, but with the pace he slowly builds when he pushes off of your chest, there’s no way you can tell him coherently. There’s the overstimulation from before, that oversensitivity that makes your thighs tremble and your moans and whimpers spill out uncontrolled, and then there’s him – hair a mess, voice deep and just as incoherent as yours. He can barely keep his eyes open, but you don’t mind, because so can you.

He surprises you when he leans up, licks a kiss into your lips, and groans, “you have no clue how fucking good you feel right now” – which is probably the only coherent thing he’s managed to string together in a while. And he accentuates the feeling in his voice and behind his words by giving you a harsher thrust. The head of his dick hits that one spot deep in your walls and it makes your back arch and your toes curl.

The pleasure builds and builds. It makes your vision cloud, and all you can manage is a please, don’t stop that makes him lose focus. While he was laser-focused before, he’s faltering now, your walls spasming tighter around him.

You come a heartbeat after he does, and everything goes static. You’re barely aware both of the way you’re cradling him to your chest, panting heavily, legs burning, and of the way he’s holding onto you, like you might crawl out of his lap and leave him there, moaning and whimpering under his breath.

“We should’ve grabbed a towel,” you groan out when he eventually lifts you off of his length and you feel the way his cum drips down onto the couch alongside your juices.

He lays you down on the cushions, making sure to not drop you into the puddle of your orgasms, before he kneels between your legs once more. “Fuck that towel,” he groans a second before placing a kiss on your clit. “Remember you can tap out whenever you want, right?”

You look down at him when he speaks, your thighs perched on his shoulders and his face so close to your pussy that you can feel his breath even through the fog of your pleasure. And boy, is that a sight. The tips of his ears are flushed red, and his skin feels scorching hot against yours. The hunger in his eyes seems to tell you that you’re in for quite the night if you don’t tap out now.

For the nth time tonight, you’re breathless when you say, “I’ll let you know when I do.”

*

Even Bit-na would never know how sore you were the day after – or, well, the night after, when you and Joong-gil finally plopped down onto his chaise longue to eat ice cream. Still butt-naked, you feared you’d try going at it again, giving every surface in his apartment a repeat of the promise he made you and which he kept, but there was no way you could stay out of his arms. He didn’t give signs of wanting you to, anyway.

Then, before you know it, things seem to start falling into place. You settle into Joong-gil’s life the way he settles into yours – your origami animals in his bedroom, a pile of his clothes in your closet, a pair of your shoes by his door and a pair of his shoes by your door.

Things start rolling like you are two gears meant to be together.

Time passes. First one day, then two weeks, then months.

In March, when your contract with your old agency comes to an end, you don’t renew it. Your RMT friends don’t, either, and together, the way it’s always been since both you and they debuted, you sign under a different company, the one Ryeon’s lawyer friend recommended.

In April, you have your first photoshoot after a four-month hiatus, and in May they allow you to release a single. No music video, just your music and your voice, the way it always used to be with your dad on the beach. It’s one of the songs you started writing together a few months before his suicide, the one your mother found while cleaning out the attic when she finally gathered the courage to go through her late husband’s things. His handwriting made you feel like there was still a piece of him here, alive – his corrections in green ink (because not every mistake is a bad thing, that’s what he used to say), his smiley faces, the smudges the side of his left hand would cause while writing.

In June, Joong-gil releases the news of your next collaboration album, the one you joked about at the end of your first tour, and he introduces you to his older sister in July, when you go back to Busan and she and her family come over for a barbecue by the beach.

As time flies by, Jumadeung leaves your mind. The memories there, the fairy lights, how dirty that railing was that first night, when you still had adrenaline pumping through your system after your first stage with the Park Joong-gil – now just joong-gil 💗, or Joong, or my boyfriend. Bit-na calls him ‘the love of your life,’ and the only reason why you don’t say that out loud is that it makes your face heat up until it’s hotter than the sun – and maybe it’s also a bit cheesy.

Maybe that’s why she’s getting married in eight months, you think as you look down at the red beads of the bracelet on your wrist, hugging it right above your tattooed butterfly. Because she called Seung-min the love of her life, out loud, and told him she wanted to spend the rest of forever with him.

In September your mother agrees to go on vacation with you, on that honeymoon she never managed to enjoy with the love of her life. Sunny beaches, clear water, she has the time of her life sipping on drinks under the shade of a beach umbrella and walking around barefoot with you. She goes back to being ten years younger – hell, maybe even fifteen. You’re not even sure you’ve ever seen her enjoy something so much ever since that day or maybe even before that, when you were still in Incheon.

She smiles, and her eyes light up. The wrinkles on her face seem to smooth out and on the day before your return to Korea, she walks into the first hair salon she finds, sits down, and asks for the bold haircut she never had the courage to go for.

That’s when you feel like it’s starting to crack, the cocoon you’ve been living inside – when she smiles and starts flying again. It makes you realize you haven’t felt like you’ve been dragging yourself through the mud in months. It lightens up the burden, especially when another realization hits you out of nowhere on your flight: you’re finally being you, not the version of yourself your former agency sold.

You wonder whether your father can see your new colors, wherever he is.

In October Joong-gil takes you to the butterfly park in Incheon and you sit there for hours, underneath caps and behind facemasks, looking at the butterflies on show. He holds your hand through your struggle against that knot of tears in the back of your throat, his thumb rubbing reassurance into your skin. That day makes you realize that he’s your anchor. That he gives you strength when you feel at your weakest, and that suddenly, if he’s by your side, it’s not so scary, to go back to places you formed happy memories in when you were a child.

Halfway through the month of November, your tour with Joong-gil begins. There are more dates than on your first one, more destinations, and this time you touch Europe as well. Interviews are on a roll, both on film and on paper, and there’s always some new comment popping up about the promotional photoshoots the two of you do.

Everything gets critiqued and put under a magnifying glass – your poses in pictures, your dance moves, the way you hold livestreams. But nothing is as scary as you thought it would be – even Joon-woong is finally having the time of his life now that everything about the fake relationship you were forced to portray has been digested.

If anything, all that mess has helped your popularity. Even though your current company was smaller than your previous one when you signed under them, their business is sailing smoothly now. Fans have started showing their support – for your and Park Joong-gil’s relationship, your bold move to go public, for your new collab, for the tour, and even your solo projects. The shipping comments have started popping up again, and this time neither of you shies away from them.

It makes living that tad bit more normal, in a way, like this time you’re not just a face on a poster or a voice on a music file, but a whole person, with feelings and a personality, both shades and lights, 3D.

For the first time in forever, it makes you enjoy what you do, every single aspect of it all – the shootings, the recording, the producing, the performing. It’s probably what makes this your favorite tour ever – not the fact that you’re doing something you love with someone you love (or, well, not just that), but the fact that finally, it doesn’t feel like you’re tied down to the ground. The adrenaline is twice as much, the fun – three times.

By the time you jump down the very last stage of your tour, back in Seoul, you’re both exhausted and feel like you’re ready to take on the world at the same time. There’s nothing stopping you, not with this excitement coursing through your veins as you and your team share one big group hug behind the scenes.

Someone ends up ordering take-out and it feels surreal, to be eating in a parking lot, in the late January cold, wearing barely anything underneath your ankle-long puffer jacket that always makes you feel like the Michelin woman. (You like to consider Joong-gil to be your Michelin man, even though literally nothing will ever manage to look bad on him.)

They make you breathe, all these people around you. Your manager Ji-young – and then her husband, holding their sleeping daughter Ji-min in his arms, both of them come to the show as your personal VIP guests. Your make-up artists and your stylists. The technicians and the assistants, who followed both you and Joong-gil around the world for what has felt both like a never-ending tour and also the quickest one ever. They’re all around you, all huddled together as condensation leaves your mouths every time any of you speaks, and you feel the warmest you’ve ever felt.

When you finally sit down in Joong-gil’s car, your excitement has toned down a bit. Now you can also think, finally, even though all you can think about is him.

“Do you wanna go home?” he asks, shoving both your jackets onto the backseat before grinning at you. “Or can I take you somewhere?”

You know where he wants to take you even without asking him. It’s come up in passing, every now and then, during the tour – Jumadeung. He had also forgotten all about it, but every time you left a venue and sat down in the van to go back to the hotel, the memory came up. Now, going back there feels like part of a ritual you have been neglecting.

It also feels like going back to your roots, to that first night, where all you and Joong-gil shared was a crush. Now there are pretty couple rings on your fingers, and a red bracelet around both of your wrists.

The car drive is mainly enjoyed in silence. Part of your brain is still thinking about tonight’s show and how you can finally enjoy some downtime, the other is complaining about the nightmarish traffic.

You haven’t been to Jumadeung in forever and every time you thought about it, you could never trace back the right route to get to the building. With Joong-gil, however, it’s different. The memories come back one by one and everything becomes clear again – or maybe it’s like that afternoon, when you were driving around aimlessly before you wound up there, and that lady told you Jumadeung does that, leads people into its belly.

When you reach the building and drive down to the garage, the memory of how scared you were that first night makes you chuckle. You had really forgotten about that, you realize with a smile.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks, parking underneath a blinking neon light, one of the few still working in the otherwise dark garage.

You turn to look at him, but your eyes stop on the bracelet on his right wrist first. The tiny, red beads seem to twinkle in the light above you like they’re their own version of fairy lights.

“Just…” You shrug your shoulders, meeting his gaze, and you feel the smile grow on your face. It makes your face warm up, somehow, and no matter what you do, you just can’t wipe it off – the way he looks at you, like he loves nothing else in the world as much as he does you. “You. How terrified I was when you took me here the first time. And also that I’m really happy with you.”

There’s this noisy, amused exhale he does every time he’s caught off guard and smiles. It’s one of the things you learned about him by spending your time with him, trying to commit every single thing about him to memory.

“Every day you make me want to see what tomorrow will bring,” you confess, looking down at your hands in your lap. “Like I’m not afraid of it because you’re here. You could take me to the shadiest building in town and I’d still feel safe with you.”

He takes your hand in his. “If you don’t stop taking the cheesy stuff out of my mouth, I swear…”

You laugh with him, and you chuckle even when he presses a kiss to your lips.

“What the hell am I supposed to say to not sound dumb now?” he complains on an amused huff, cradling your face in his hands and kissing you again. And again. He pecks your lips like he doesn’t want to deepen the kiss, but then like he also can’t pull away completely. It makes you giddy, the way he seems to always crave you.

“You’re going to ruin my make-up.” But you’re grinning when he pulls away: his lips bear traces of your lipstick, after you reapplied it before leaving the parking lot of the concert venue.

“I’m gonna ruin it anyway,” he whispers when he leans forward and kisses your cheek, “whether it’s with my mouth or with my dick.”

It takes you a while before you manage to leave the car, one hand job later. You watch as he fixes his pants underneath the blinking neon light, hanging on a miracle above the car, and you try to wipe that mischievous smirk from your lips before he has the chance to take matters into his own hands and ruins the outfit you wore for tonight’s performance.

“You could’ve let me return the favor,” he pouts, walking hand in hand with you, but you both know you wouldn’t have left the car tonight had you let him anywhere near your pussy.

“After we leave Jumadeung,” you promise.

But the hallway to Jumadeung is dark, you realize. The fairy lights are gone, and there’s only the creepy light of an emergency lamp guiding you to the double door. When Joong-gil manages to push it open, after fighting with its unexpected weight and unoiled hinges, you shine your phone’s flashlight into the room.

It’s like Jumadeung was never there.

The fairy lights, the booths with their cushioned benches and tables, the counter, everything is gone, replaced by cardboard boxes piled pretty much in every corner, covered by a thick layer of dust and spiderwebs that surely took longer than one year to form. Even the nice, flowery smell has been replaced by humidity and the stench of a moldy place that hasn’t seen fresh air in way too long.

“Are we even in the right place?” Joong-gil wonders out loud, almost as though he wasn’t the one who took you here the first time.

The mirror wall behind the counter is still there, however – just, without the counter standing in front of it. It’s still stained by old age, and you’re standing in the same spot you were that afternoon, when Jade – you only remember her name now – went on and on about Fate and red strings and reincarnations, and about you and Joong-gil being tied together from this life onward.

Was that a dream?

If it wasn’t for the fact that Joong-gil is just as confused as you are, you would wonder whether Jumadeung itself was a dream. Whether it was something your brain made up at a point in your life when you needed an escape hatch where you could feel safe, whether on your own or with someone else.

“Maybe they moved somewhere else,” Joong-gil says, pulling out his phone as you walk closer to the mirror.

You looked at her through it, that afternoon. She made you tea and then she met your gaze in the mirror, looking at your reflection more than she did you, sitting next to her. You remember doing the same, unable to move or to speak, listening to the absurdities leaving her mouth. With time, however, her words stopped feeling absurd.

Maybe all that Fate stuff does explain it, why being by Park Joong-gil’s side feels so right, in a way. Like that’s the place you’ve been looking for your whole life. Or maybe like he is it, your home away from home.

As you suspected, Joong-gil ends up finding absolutely nothing about Jumadeung online. There’s no single trace about Jade either, and now it’s painfully obvious that that wasn’t her real name. It stings like defeat, Jumadeung being gone – or never having been here in the first place. But it also feels right, in a way – Jumadeung always felt like another world, every time you came here.

When you turn to look at the man behind you – look at him, not at his reflection in the mirror wall – you smile, holding your hand out to hold. “I think we should go back home.”

You don’t see it in the darkness, your eyes trained on your hand in Joong-gil’s, his chatter filling your ears, but there’s a butterfly, a twin of the one you carry on your wrist, drawn in the layer of dirt covering what used to be the door to Jumadeung.

Thank you for reading💕

If you’d like to be tagged in what I write, let me know!

Original video used for banner: https://www.pexels.com/video/close-up-video-of-dried-roses-6092477/

#MBC TOMORROW #tomorrow kdrama #park joong-gil #park joong gil #mbc tomorrow imagine #tomorrow 내일 #park joong-gil imagine #park joong gil imagine #park joong-gil x reader #park joong gil x reader #park joong-gil smut #park joong gil smut #park joong-gil au #park joong gil au

[oatmilktruther]

omg I LOVE ASK GAMES LIKE THIS

👻☕️📌✏️🤔🖊 (I had to restrain myself from picking like..... half the list, I love hearing people talk about their own writing)

Mwah kissing you for sending so many thank you

👻 Have you written holiday-themed fics? If yes, which is your fave? If not, what’s one holiday you’d want to write for, and which character(s) would the fic be for?

I have not written a holiday themed fic, and I think if I ever wrote a holiday fic id write a winter solstice fic because I think Ed and stede deserve to hold each other close on the darkest day of the year

☕️ Do you drink anything when you write? Coffee, tea, alcohol, etc?

Big bottle of ice water on standby, if it’s late in the evening a cup of green tea with raspberry syrup to give me an extra boost

📌 If all your fics/WIPs fell off a ship and were drowning (go with it), and you could only save one, which would it be?

Kalahari Down, aka the sad gay cowboy wip. That thing is my biggest labor of love and the story I have been practicing to tell since I first started writing and if I had to never see my own writing again to keep KD I would.

✏️ What is your fave fic from another writer?

Okay sorry to cop out but I can’t narrow to just one especially considering how much I’ve read. Some of my desert island fics though would probably be When He’s Given Something to Keep, Rum and Linen, and This Tired World Could Change because those are the ones I consistently reread

🤔What’s one genre you’ve never written that you’d like to try?

Horror. Would love to try my hand at making people afraid to close their eyes (and afraid they’ll try to fuck whatever they see when they do)

🖊 What is the most recent line you’ve written?

“The moment Alice comes to a stop, Stede doesn’t so much dismount as he does collapse to the ground, boneless as a dog in the doghouse, and looking just as kicked. “

From the sad gay cowboy fic, you can see I was not lying about the sadness

#m #ask game

[andywinter16]

Here are my asks for the writer ask game if you feel like playing:

✏️- favorite part about writing

☕️- favorite passage

⭐️- how do you get your inspiration?

Thanks 😍

Hi there!! @lathalea Thank you very much for your ask, I will gladly join in too :)

✏️ - That I can get lost in the story and "live it" alongside the characters. Like you´re writing it, but there is not the outside world to disturb you. The writing will just consume you. If you read Alice in Wonderland there is the passage when Alice is falling into the rabbit hole. And that´s exactly what writing fells for me. It´s the excitement, the unknown where will the writing take me next.

☕️ - Oh no, that´s a hard one XD Well, maybe this one ...

"I´ve acomplished my mission, sir. The body will be found in the morning. " he said with carefully plastered poker face. His body rigid in army posture.

"Splendid, we will discuss it more at the meeting. The usual time and place. Now both of you, get to your stations." captain said firmly from signing his documents on the table. Luche and Tredd saluted their captain and left him to his work.

"Was it quick?" asked the redhead quietly when they left the office, it was unusual for Tredd to act like this. Luche exhaled softly and looked at him, his eyes were usually cold and calculating but now shards of remorse got to the surface.

"Perhaps too quick." Luche's voice sound dull to his own ears. Tredd nodded his head, dissapointment flashing briefly on his face. Without other words he went on his way when Luche called back to him weakly. "I did offer her to join us."

- Roses on your grave

⭐️ - Usually at work when I have no time to write it down. (which is a shame) But usually when I get into bus or any kind of public transport and get headphones. And I look around. Sometimes it´s bizzare with how the inspiration cames to me. Like the last time I was spacing out and this old gentleman took seat across from mine. And he had really cool cane! *snap* What if the the character had a cane and in it was sword!? It´s that simple with me. (In all honesty I never lacked ideas, like in my head I have planed a epic story that would took 30 books at least. I am just not good at writing it. XD)

#ask game #writer ask game #lathalea #small fic that i work on #its really short but i like it #Roses on your grave

[chattingwiththelightkeeper]

🎩🐰 Happy Mad Hatter Day 🎩🐰

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be.

On this delightfully whimsical day, inspired by the eccentric Mad Hatter from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we celebrate silliness, laughter, and the joy of embracing the unconventional. Let's don our imaginary hats and embark on a journey filled with absurdity and wonder! 🌟🐇

🤪 Did you know that "mad as a hatter" originated from the curious history of haberdashers and mercury nitrate exposure in the 18th and 19th centuries? It's a fascinating piece of trivia from the past that adds a touch of historical whimsy to this day. 🕰️🧪

But today is all about having fun and spreading happiness! Channel your inner Mad Hatter and break free from the usual routine. 🪄 Ask silly riddles, just like the Hatter's famous "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" 🦜✏️ Play croquet with plastic pink flamingos or wear the quirkiest hat you can find to work. Let your imagination run wild and celebrate the day with a dash of silliness that would make the Mad Hatter proud! 🎉🍄

And remember, a little Mad Hatter fun can empower a D/S dynamic by infusing it with laughter, creativity, and the freedom to explore uncharted territories together. So, whether you're enjoying a tea party with friends or adding a touch of whimsy to your D/S adventures, let's make today and every day a bit more mad, magical, and marvelous! 🍵🎶🐇

©TLK2023

#MadHatterDay #Silliness #Empower The Adventure

[emilykaldwen]

✏️😊

✏️ The first fanfiction you ever wrote? (doesn’t have to be a posted fic)

OH WOW Okay. Ummmm. Nellie Olsen and Almanzo Wilder actually comes to mind (it did not end well, she ran into the prarier with a broken heart). I must have been ten? I don't remember if it was BEFORE or AFTER I wrote Star Wars fic. But that was all circa 1997-2000 so my memory is really fuzzy on what I wrote and published and what I just wrote.

😊 The fic that you’re the most proud of?

Um, my first instinct is to say none of them? Because the ones I've put out there haven't been like, super great? But I guess if I had to pick one, it's Fight For Me (If It's Not Too Late) which is a Derek x Lydia teen wolf fic that I actually FINISHED (as in multichaptered). It's still up on AO3. Also I forgot about all the Hook x Aurora fic I actually finished. Soulmates Never Die is also really close to my heart (I ran the community back in the day on LJ).

🎨 Show us a sneak peek from a WIP!

omg omg okay uh... fuck. This is my HotD re-write I'm doing and I'm really trying to be okay with embracing that it's going to be a rewrite or canon and that it's okay? I never used to be this nervous.

(Also I couldn't indent this so sorry)

The more often you’re pregnant, the more he’ll leave you alone.

Alicent recalled the advice given to her when she could hardly move, trading barbs with the other women who thought they were giving the young queen all the advice she needed. She was loath to admit that they were indeed right. Her three babes had quickened faster than she’d expected, but her insides were crippled from generations of incest.

Lyonel Strong had always been kind to her, facilitating ravens sent from his wife, her cousin. The older woman’s messages had been a balm to her soul, but Celeste had been held at Harrenhal as she’d been prone to sickness. To have gone to sup with her father not long after Helaena was born - inconsolable or silent at the drop of a hat - and to be wrapped in the warm embrace of Celeste had been a homecoming. 

It could not replace the ache of lost friendship, but Celeste had slotted into the scarred wound that her mother’s absence had left, filling the rift with the loving, guiding hand of an older sister. Celeste Strong had the same auburn curls as her own, the same soft features, and a child of her own. And gratefully, she discovered that she was not a mother who only sat with her in hopes of chaining their children together.

Abrogail, the same age as her little Helaena, had a usually sweet temperament, and had picked up on the little quirks of the princess in the way that only children could do. Aegon had grown sullen after the birth of his brother, unhappy with his place in her lap being replaced once more.

“Daven would do the same. It’s not unusual,” Celeste offered as Helaena was passed to a maid so Alicent could pull her precious Aegon into her arms. The boy was red faced, angry and tearful with his wounds. 

“‘Laena bit me!” Aegon wailed, throwing himself into Alicent with dramatics that she couldn’t understand. On some deep level, however, she felt she understood.

I just wanted someone to tell me they were sorry for what happened to me.

Alicent pressed kisses to the soft, pale crown of her boy’s head, stroking his back as Abrogail watched him warily from her mother’s arms. 

His tears soaked the collar of her dress as she rocked him. She had not been able to rock him in so long, and she found she’d missed it. She wanted him to be little forever. She would put up with hundreds of fights just like this, if she could always hold him in her arms, protective and full of love.

She’ll kill them, if you do not protect them, if you do not make Aegon king. Your children are the threats to her rule, Alicent.

“M’sorry, Aegon,” Abrogail’s little voice came. Alicent looked at the child with her cloud of golden-red curls as she hesitantly reached out to gently pat Aegon’s back. Her boy snuffled, glaring down at her, and Alicent lifted her hand to stop Aegon’s fist from flailing out.

“That was very kind to say, Abby,” Alicent said, smiling at her little cousin and then to Aegon. “Everyone should be sorry, right?” 

His sullen expression met hers, with eyes round and a deep violet that could almost be blue. 

Alicent raised her eyebrows at her boy. “It is just and princely and honorable.”

A sigh. “Sorry, Aemond,” came his apology.

Helaena, who did not speak, merely shrieked and bared her bloody mouth.

#ask memes #TY for asking! #I have to run out but I will try get back to people who reblogged this as well

[thetiredassistant]

RULES ✏️

Same mun as @hinataxsunshine/@thewildsorcerer/@theclubsspecialist -- so theose rules also pertain to me. I have a small life outside of Tumblr, and with this blog im terrible at reaching out-- So please, interact

Have a habit of bringing my other OCs into this world because why not. Jordyn is no different. Originally a Succession OC who has been converged to Alice In Borderlands. He is now Orion's assistant instead

I try to match with my partners writing style, but I am an amateur writer, so please bare with me on that. Sometimes I can write paragraphs on paragraphs, sometimes I can only write 2-3 sentences. Its not you I promise though, Its me

There will be NSFW stuff on here, so proceed with caution. Mun is 19 years old so this blog is 18+ :)! Mun is also male and pronouns are He/They, if you ever use them.

Let me know if I'm EVER out of line. I'm horrible at reading the room and stuff like that, and I never know when its too far. I wont be mad!! I’m also very, very shy. I try to be brave ( my words ) and reach out, but i always appreciate it so much if others reach out first. It helps me get comfortable with you and get the courage to reach back out

#alice in borderland rp #aib rp

[teachandwrite-blog]

My heroes have always been writers ✏️

Harper Lee

On January 30, 2006 the New York Times published “Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day" by Ginia Bellafonte. (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/books/harper-lee-gregarious-for-a-day.html)

The piece is about an awards ceremony at the president's mansion at the University of Alabama.

Yearly, a high school essay contest is held there on the subject “To Kill A Mockingbird.”

The winners of the contest, their families and their teachers got to meet HarperLee and eat lunch with her, before she passed on in the winter of 2016.

The literary luncheon was a serendipity of sorts because Lee, who seldom spoke to the press or made public appearances, signed copies of her novel and provided photo opportunities for the guests.

She politely refused to speak about her writing.

“What I have to say is already there on the page,” said Lee.

Monroeville, Alabama, is a quintessentially small, Southern town with a population of about 7000.

This is the town into which Harper Lee was born.

She lived with her nonagenarian sister, Alice, who was one of the most sought after attorneys in the region, and became known as “Atticus in a skirt.”

You could often find them puttering around the First United Methodist Church, where they were lifelong members.

They maintained an apartment in New York City, the place where Lee journeyed to write TKAM, but spent most of their time in their home town.

“Unlike Thomas Wolfe, I can go home again,” said Lee.

And she did.

To Kill A Mockingbird is behind only the Bible as the book that has made the biggest difference in Americans’ lives.

MLK was deeply moved by his reading of TKAM. In 1963 he said of Black folks and Atticus Finch, “It had become obvious that non-violence could symbolize the gold badge of heroism…”

Life Magazine did a special edition titled “The Enduring Legacy of Harper Lee and To Kill A Mockingbird.”

A graphic novel of TKAM was adapted and illustrated by Fred Fordham in 2018. I bought it today and am marveled and astonished by it.

It continues to sell 1,000,000 copies a year.

It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, was made into an Oscar nominated movie in 1962 (Gregory Peck won the Oscar for best actor and Horton Foote won for best adapted screenplay), and there are people who give their lives traveling from place to place acting the part of Atticus Finch.

Lee was able to say all she hoped to say to the world through the eyes and heart of Scout, Atticus, Boo Radley and the other characters who made up the story like people make up the cities and towns and farms where we live.

What do we hope to say to the world and how are we saying it?

Are we writing it, painting it, sculpting it, being it and/or doing it?

Here is a small prayer I prayed at church on Sunday.

“Caring God,

Who made us from dust and breathed life into us.

Help us hear these words from Atticus Finch to Scout.

‘First of all, if you learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along better with all kinds of folks.

You never really understand people until you consider things from their point of view…until you climb into their skin and walk around in it.’

Caring God,

Please help un climb into the skin of anyone we think of as OTHER and walk around in it.

Caring God,

Please help us be a little more like Harper Lee.”

Thank you Nelle Harper Lee for showing us a way!

#brown eyed girls #whales #kindness #lonelywhale #astonishing #fibonacci #harper lee #marvel

[ava-ships]

“Sweet Afternoon”

————————————

The sound of footsteps pressing against the cool grass caught Milo’s attention.

Those footsteps belonged to Alice.

She took a quick second to gaze at the wide open spaces of the farm they live on.

He had been tending to the pokemon on his farm as per usual.

The sun was shining high above the clear blue sky, it’s rays glistening on the blades of grass below it.

She turned her attention back to Milo, a couple of Eldegoss at his side.

“I haven’t seen you in a while....must have been working pretty hard, dear.”

As soon as Milo said that, a feeling of shyness washed over Alice.

“I made you something since you’ve been working so hard...” Alice said finally, shuffling one of her feet in the ground gently.

Milo looked and saw that Alice was carrying a plate that had a pile of oddly shaped scones on top of it.

He couldn’t help himself but to smile.

“Those are some lovely looking scones.” He grinned.

Alice looked down, her face slightly souring at the blobs of baked dough on her plate.

She didn’t see Milo take one and have a small bite.

“I couldn’t cut all of the butter in the right way.” Alice said glumly, “maybe I just need more milk or-“

“These are delicious”

“...huh?”

Milo was eating one of the scones when she looked back up.

He had that tender expression on his face that always made a warmth surge through her chest.

“You’ve worked really hard on these.”

Milo proceeded to gently pat the top of her head, his glove gently ruffling parts of her hair.

“Have you tried them yet?”

Alice shook her head “no” with a blushing face.

Milo looked at the rest of the scone in his hand.

He gestured it to Alice, who was still blushing. With a touch of curiosity, she slowly took a bit of the scone.

After a couple of chews, her eyes lit up almost instantly .

“Told you so.” Chuckled the tall trainer.

Holding a Wooloo in one arm and wrapping another around her shoulder, Milo pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“I could always help you if you want.”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

—————————————

Got this cute idea after making scones with my mom the other day 😊

#food tw #✏️ava writes #ship: farmhands #s/i: galar!alice #f/os #self shipping #self ship #self insert #pokemon #pokemon selfship #pokemon self ship #Milo pokemon #pokemon milo

[lebrookestore]

✏️ 🖊 😈😐 as i’m running to get ready for school

SKDNDKFJN ALICE I SAW YOUR REBLOG PLEASE GET READY FOR SCHOOL AND GET OFF TUMBLR 😭😭

✏️ Do you write every day?

i try 🧍‍♀️ most of the time i do write everyday even if its a little but sometimes i just don't lmao like if I'm really behind on school work, etc

🖊 Post a snippet from a current WIP.

“Love you too,” Hyuck cooed, wrapping his arms around your waist snugly. You managed to drag the boy out of the frat house and to where you had parked, tuning out all his whining and grumbling (and sudden urge to sing ‘careless whisper) as you helped him into the passenger's seat.

- kiss me more | l.ty

Initially i gave you a minor makeout scene but then i decided<3 no<3 take hyuck and careless whisper instead. next time, he'll sing the tequila song 💏

😈 Is there anything you enjoy doing that you think your readers hate?

i LOVEEEE making people cry and writing intense angst but since i do it so much i have had people lovingly (i think) tell me they hate me for it<//3

😐 What embarrasses you most about your own writing?

everything. okay but hmm the fact i keep running back to taeyong fics ig 💀 i also tend to get super literal with the word 'slowburn' and they'll be finally kissing at like 27k (true story) so i think i need to tone that down .

fanfiction writer asks!

#(—💌: love letters) #ask games