massiekurrb

Massiekur

Just a fan girl :) And fic Recs!!

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I Opened The Same Drabble Request Game A Few Days Ago But No One Requested Me What I Wanted To Write

I opened the same drabble request game a few days ago but no one requested me what I wanted to write the most... so.....

please write a All of the Girls You Loved Before + Jin 😭😭😭😭

Ilysm 💜

all of the girls you loved before | ksj

✰ pairing: seokjin x f!reader (married au) ✰ warnings: fluff; husband! and dad!jin; discussions of and reflections on past relationships and breakups, including teenage romance and long-distance; alcohol; some mild but loving teasing of their children ✰ word count: 2.8k (oops) ✰ notes: thank you for the request, sweet nika! writing inspired by ‘love in the big city’ by sang young park, one of my favorite novels of all time; story inspired by ‘the last’ by wong fu productions (LMAO throwback). not quite sure how i feel about this type of story (where the women in his past exist solely as one-dimensional character development tools lmao) but i think it turned out okay in the end. also, you may all blame @daechwitatamic for the dad!jin brainrot. thanks

✰ listened to: all of the girls you loved before - taylor swift

—

“Seokjin.” You cross your arms in the doorway. “Honey, the movers are going to be here in an hour—“

He jumps. Glances over his shoulder, looking caught. "I know, I know, I'm just finishing up here.”

"What are you even looking at?" You venture into the room, surveying the scene in front of you. Seokjin's sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of your bedroom, right where the foot of the bed used to be. Instead of packing away the last of his clothing as instructed, though, he has a shoebox open in front of him.

Around it, spilling out of it, spread all over the floor—letters. Notes on pink, yellow, blue stationery, some folded into hearts, some spread open, crowded with bubbly handwriting and doodled hearts. Photos, film prints to Polaroids to strips from the old-school purikura booths that you'd frequent in high school. Little trinkets and souvenirs, too, like Lotte World tickets, keychains, and receipts. He keeps a wary eye on you as you approach.

"What... oh, my god, is that—"

"Me and Nabi," he says. He rests a hand on the old photo, faded a bit with age. In it, an adorable, seventeen-year-old Seokjin is smiling in front of a bowling alley, his arm around a girl you'd both gone to hagwon with back in high school.

"I took this photo," you say, folding yourself down next to him. "I remember this. I didn't know you've been keeping all of these...."

You take a closer look at everything spread out in front of him. They're all mementos of Seokjin's past relationships, you realize. Letters from girls named Dahye, Eunkyo, Chaewon. Photos under cherry blossoms, in lecture halls, in pubs. A pencil sketch of Seokjin's profile, in blurred strokes. All of them kept in a nondescript shoebox, one that had been gathering dust on the highest shelf in your shared wardrobe for years but that you'd never really bothered to investigate.

You realize Seokjin's watching you carefully—gauging your reaction, it seems, the tips of his ears turning red. "What?" you ask, playfully nudging him with your shoulder. "Were you worried I'd be upset?"

"Not worried, exactly," Seokjin says. He absently rests a hand on your thigh, letting his thumb trace little circles on the exposed skin there. "But... yeah, maybe not the reaction I was expecting?"

You understand what he means—anyone would be concerned about their spouse coming across a box full of keepsakes from their past relationships. But you know Seokjin. Know that he's sentimental even though he comes off as flippant; know that he likes to hold onto pieces of things even when he's left them in the past.

Know that the union you and Seokjin have is something to which he dedicates himself on a daily basis, and that he's never once given you reason to doubt his commitment to you.

You glance at your phone. "Well... we have some time." You pull a handful of the photos toward you, loop an arm through your husband’s, and rest your cheek on his shoulder. “Want to tell me about these girls?"

—

The first girl I loved was Nabi.

You know Nabi. We all went to the same hagwon together, and you'd always sit in the front row because you were a huge nerd—yah!—but Nabi and I.... Well, we were a bit less devoted to our studies, let's say. And you know how some of us would go out, get dinner after class? Nabi always tagged along whenever she knew I was going. I suppose I've always been irresistible—yah, why are you laughing?!

Teenage love.... I know you didn't have your first real relationship until college, and maybe what I had with Nabi wasn’t quite real, either. But I really did love her. Or maybe I was just in love with the feeling of being loved. I know it's hard to believe, seeing how dashing I look here, but I really didn't think much of myself back then. I suppose a lot of teenagers don't—it's a horrible time, with all the stress of the CSATs and college admissions and growing into our own skin. But it did feel nice to be admired. To know that someone liked me for me, and not for what I did or didn't accomplish.

Teenage love is so uncomplicated, isn't it? All you have to do is hold hands, daydream, buy each other little trinkets and delude yourselves into romance. Nabi was sweet. And all we did was meet at the playground and pass notes in class—and take photos at the bowling alley, I guess—but she meant a lot to me at that time.

You know how it goes, though. Girls are fickle—yah, why do you keep hitting me!—and someone else eventually caught her eye. We only dated a few months, but I was ridiculously devastated. I got over it soon enough, and it was good that we ended things, because we were just two foolish kids playing at a relationship.

But she was special to me, at one point in my life. She was the first person to show me what that kind of love felt like.

—

The second girl I loved was Chaewon.

Whatever we had was brief, just a month or two in the winter before we enrolled in university. She was my mom's friend's daughter, lived two floors up from us, so naturally we had to keep things secret.

I was still too shy to do much of anything with her. But I remember this one night—the first snowfall, and she insisted that we go watch it together. Something about the person you watch the first snowfall with being the love of your life, right? So we held hands and took the night bus to this lookout point, but the snow didn't end up falling that night. I laughed, but she was really upset about it—yah, stop hitting me, I was just a kid!

My mother eventually caught us outside the building and gave me an earful. Lectured me for hours, then forced me to break up. I don’t remember much about it, but the one thing she told me that really stuck was that I wasn't good enough for someone like Chaewon.

I'm fine, I'm fine, don't worry about me—I think she was right, in some ways. I acted like a kid, still. Immature for my age, not great at school. But Chaewon was more mature than I was, much smarter, and came from a better family to boot. I wasn't much compared to her, at least on paper.

The words hurt at the time, but I knew she was wrong. It didn't matter to me or to Chaewon who our families were or how much money we had or who did better at school. We liked each other—loved each other, even, in the way we thought of love back then—and that was enough. Love is so difficult when you introduce too many factors. Can’t it just be enough to love? Why do we make it so hard for ourselves?

That love came at an important point in my life: at the cusp of adulthood. I wasn’t a child anymore, but I wasn’t quite grown yet—I’d disabused myself of childlike notions of soulmates and romance, but I still held on to a bit of hope. Or maybe I should call it naïveté, because I simply didn’t know that love took work. That it's not so easy to love someone else in this world.

Anyway, my mother’s words motivated me to do better once I reached university. To become someone that she could be proud of, someday.

—

The third girl I loved was Dahye.

You know Dahye—we met her at the last reunion. I met her for the first time at our freshman orientation. A group of us went out for drinks at the start of the term, and there she was. You know how shy I can be around new people, right? Well, I was being Classic Seokjin that night. Red ears, red face, couldn’t stomach a thing because I was so nervous. And here was this pretty girl sitting across from me, pouring me drinks with two hands even though we were the same age. I walked her home afterward even though I was plastered, and apparently I kissed her in front of the bus station—yah, don’t worry, it was consensual!

I was learning what it meant to be a real man at that age, living out of home on my own. I learned how to do my own laundry, find my own way around the city, make my own doctor’s appointments. You see this extremely good-looking, capable man sitting in front of you now, and you must wonder how he was ever incompetent—okay, fine, I’ll be serious—but it’s really thanks to her. I felt the need to show her that I was grown up. Responsible. I learned that I should offer to walk girls home at night. That I should pay the bill at dinner. That I should text her good morning. Little things like that, things that no one seems to teach you but everyone knows anyway. I couldn’t be a clueless, insolent kid forever.

We dated for quite a while. A couple of years, give or take. I’m sure we both were at fault for the breakup, but the gist of it is that I felt she was too controlling, and she felt I wasn’t doing enough for her. That’s fair, because I was working a ton back then. Interning, part-time jobs, studying. I focused so much on making myself a person worthy of admiration that I forgot who I was doing it all for. But at times, it seemed like she wanted an entirely different person and didn’t love me for who I actually was. We’d have terrible arguments over the phone, and I’d wake up next to her in the morning but still feel alone.

I was the one to finally end things. She taught me a lot, but in the end, I had to teach myself to be brave enough to say goodbye. I’d grown comfortable with her presence, and I can imagine a life in which we carried on like that forever, not totally satisfied with each other, only staying together because we’d already been together for so long.

But I knew it wasn’t right, and it would be best if we both moved on. If we both found the person we truly deserved to love.

—

The fourth girl I loved was Eunkyo.

I met her on a blind date, actually, just out of school. My mother, convinced I'd be single forever, had set me up with a daughter of one of her church friends. I only went to please my mother, so you can imagine my surprise when this woman and I hit it off.

She was a year my junior, so still in school. Studied art, and she'd get paint stains all over my clothes and my car. But I didn't really mind. I was working some horribly depressing entry-level finance job at the time, a regular cog in the machine, and she brought color to my life.

I confused domesticity for permanence, then. We basically lived together even though she was still in school, and she was busy, but she still made time to pack my lunch, and make me dinner, and sometimes even ironed my shirts. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. I liked being taken care of, but worried that it was something she felt like she had to do, instead of something she wanted to do. But I accepted that this was her way of showing love to me, and tried to reciprocate it as best as I could. I hated myself for thinking it, but I imagined this was what marriage would be like, and imagined that she could be my wife someday.

Reality hit eventually, though, and once Eunkyo was done with school, she was offered a prestigious post-grad fellowship in New York. I didn't want her to go, of course, and looking back that was selfish of me. But I wasn't going to hold her back. I told her to go—that she couldn't turn down an opportunity like this, and that we would try to make it work. So she left, and I stayed.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't go very well. The time zones are nearly polar opposites, and she was so busy, and I was neck-deep in grunt work for the company. We always seemed to miss each other's calls. I'd send flowers for Valentine's Day that arrived two days late. She'd send a message that somehow never got to me until I was asleep. Little things like that built up, and eventually, on one of her trips back to visit Korea, we agreed to end it.

I don't regret telling her to go to New York, because I don't think I could have lived with myself if she had given up this huge step in her career for me. But still, I wondered a lot in the months after whether things could have been different. Maybe if I'd gone to New York with her, or if I'd prioritized her over my job, we could have made it work.

Later, though, I came to realize that there was a reason everything happened the way that it did. I learned to let go of things out of my control, especially the mistakes I'd made in my past. It was a painful heartbreak, but I knew everything would work out in the end. It did for her, too—the last I heard, she wound up moving to Paris and becoming a prominent artist there.

I loved her at one time, yes, but I learned that love isn't immune to timing and circumstance. And I learned how to make an effort for the person I love, but that I can’t force something that was never going to work anyway.

—

“I lied, earlier. When I said Nabi was the first girl I loved.”

You glance at Seokjin curiously. “Hmm?”

“The first girl I loved,” he says—soft, deliberate, turning to face you, “was this unbelievably huge nerd who sat in the first row of our hagwon classes. She loved photography. Always had a film camera around her neck, so she'd run around taking pictures of us, of her friends. I thought it was adorable.”

You breathe a laugh. Feel your cheeks growing warm, even as you roll your eyes. “Please stop talking.”

“She never gave me a second glance, though,” he continues, as if you haven’t spoken. He reaches for one of your hands, lacing his fingers through yours. “She was too smart for that. She actually didn't notice me until much, much later, when we were both adults, and we happened to meet again at a friend’s wedding. But… I’m glad she didn’t see me back then.” He leans in, touching his forehead to yours, and you feel your cheeks growing even hotter. “Because imagine if she dated me before I became the drop-dead gorgeous, perfect guy I was when we met—“

“Umma! Appa!”

You both jump apart and look up, startled. Standing in the doorway are Yerin and Yeseong—or, as you and Seokjin like to call them, Chaos Demons One and Two. “Umma,” your five-year-old whines, racing to climb into your lap, “Noona said you aren’t taking me with you when you go to the new house.”

“Not true,” seven-year-old Yerin insists, throwing her arms around her father’s neck, at the same time Seokjin gasps dramatically and says, “Yerin-ah, that was supposed to be a secret!”

You roll your eyes as your son’s lip quivers, threatening tears—and as Seokjin and Yerin visibly fight their mirth. “Okay, okay, knock it off. Yerin-ah, stop teasing your brother. Did you finish packing your toys like Umma asked?”

“Well—“

“Go. Run along. The movers are going to be here soon.”

Yerin obediently departs for her room, her little brother trailing after her like a shadow. The second they’re safely out of earshot, you smack Seokjin’s arm.

“Yah!” he yelps, indignant.

“Yah you! Would you quit traumatizing our offspr—“

Before you can even finish your sentence, Seokjin’s impossibly soft lips are on yours, effectively shutting you up.

You wonder how he manages to make every kiss feel like it’s the first. How the stars managed to align so that his past and yours, two parallel lines, wound up converging in the end. How he managed to find a path, despite all the dead-end streets, back to you.

He tastes like morning coffee. Like home. Like your forever.

I Opened The Same Drabble Request Game A Few Days Ago But No One Requested Me What I Wanted To Write

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