I Was Not Expecting That - Tumblr Posts

I fucking choked

all of good omens is the same but the metatron hands aziraphale the coffee in this

so I go to animation school now

plantera battle was all well and good, the terra blade was working fine, THEN SHE JUST EXPLODES IN HER SECOND FORM

CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON part 4 - death of a blackmailer

(part 1) (part 2) (part 3)

content warnings for: guns, blood, death. which you are *probably* expecting if you know how this story goes in canon, although this version is...not exactly how Watson told it to the Strand.

(This is part of the Watsons sketchbook series)

we’re…moving to dubai again…wtf😃

beach boy / wildfire

part five of playing with fire | pt. one | pt. two | pt. three | pt. four | { masterlist }

—hyunjin x reader (f) this chapter is centered around the chan x reader (f) dynamic —word count: 24.k (ao3) i am so, so sorry —genre: non-idol au, organized crime au, romance, explicit smut with plot (minors dni), dj!chan au —warnings: multiple povs. two original characters are part of the story. established backstory elements. strong elements of arranged marriage & marriage of convenience. post-relationship depression. drug abuse. alcohol abuse. casual drinking & drug use. mentions of murder/graphic acts of violence. hurt/comfort. angst. smut. explicit sexual content (mentions of cum eating. consensual but unprotected & unsafe sex. rebound sex. use of the pet name 'baby girl' & the name 'slut' during sex. semi-public sex. light vaginal fingering & hand fucking (m&f). oral sex (f receiving). breath play/choking (f receiving). creampie)

"Because Hwang is a fool," Chan insists, resting the bottle of whiskey on his desk again. "He could have chosen you, but he didn't. And now you're here. And we're having this conversation. Right now. You and I."

♡ taglist: @cixhoneyhuns @koorumis @neosracha / a special tag & thank you to @svintsandghosts & @cb97percent for providing musical inspiration!

Today is the day.

You open your eyes after, according to your phone, a mere two hours and a half of sleep and push the blankets off your body. The cool air from your room makes you want to pull them back onto you, roll into a ball and go back to sleep.

But you can’t do that. 

You’ve been doing that for weeks. You’ve been skipping meals, sleep, family time… You’ve dropped out of college, which in itself has been devastating, and has earned you a lifetime’s worth of criticism from your parents. 

That criticism you know is valid and deserved, but also, is simply icing on the cake.  They just don’t understand. They can’t understand. 

Nothing is the same. Nothing is alright. Even when you did make it to your classes—which rarely happened unless Jisung physically dragged you there—you simply couldn’t focus on anything. Going to college only managed to bury you deeper into this pit of despair, adding ‘school’ to the list of things you had failed at in life. In the end, it was Jisung who had stopped dragging you to class, claiming it made you miserable. Hell, he was right. So, out of the dorms you had moved, and back into mom and dad’s house it was. 

You make yourself get out of bed, which is painful in too many ways to list all of them, and head towards your bathroom. There is condensation on the windows from the cold weather outside. With a quick glance, you notice that you had forgotten to take your plants back inside this fall, and now they have a light layer of ice on them.

It’s beautiful. The deep green, muted by the milky white film on them. It’s enchanting, it looks like it could be a painting. For a moment, this ice is making the plants look so different from what they usually look like, but you know it will not last long, as it is certain that your plants will die from the cold. This doesn’t bother much the person you are these days, however. They’re just plants. It’s just ice. 

The girl you’ve become doesn’t care about much anymore.

But you make your way to the bathroom attached to your bedroom. The mirror shows you a reflection of a sad, sad girl. A pathetic girl. Sickly pale skin, circles under the eyes, dull, flat hair… You used to be pretty. Or at least, you used to look like something other than this. You’ve lost some weight but it doesn’t suit you—you no longer look like a healthy, young woman. You don’t know what you look like exactly, but the only thing that comes to your mind is the light layer of ice on your plants, and how it lessened the greens of their leaves. 

But today is going to be the day.

You shower, appreciating the wonderful water pressure and temperature from your parents' house. You use your favorite body wash, shampoo, and conditioner. After that, you move on to the skincare which you’ve been neglecting lately, making sure to use all of your more luxurious items for that, too.

After you’ve applied your cotton sheet mask and secured it onto your face, you return to your room and enter your large closet. However, you ignore your own clothes to look at one of the other shelves instead. The one where you’ve been keeping all of the things you very well intend on getting rid of today.

Because today has to be the day you move on from Hyunjin.

That thought hurts you and, for one second, you hesitate. For weeks, months, you’ve been keeping these items—borrowed shirts or hoodies, gifts from him, things that remind you of him—but for what? 

Because you were hoping things wouldn’t remain like that. You were hoping you would get back with Hyunjin, somehow.  But hope, in this context, is meaningless. As in, one can hope to win the lottery. One can hope to be cured of a rare illness overnight. One can hope to survive a bullet to the head. One can hope their plants will not freeze and die outside in the winter. 

At first, for a while, you had been hoping to get back with him. Somehow. So even if Hyunjin’s soon-to-take-place wedding was to be called off, it would be a total lack of self-respect to go back to him, right? Right.

You don’t have to mean it, you tell yourself, grabbing a large garbage bag acquired last night and stuffing it with Hyunjin’s gifts and belongings. You just have to keep telling yourself it and someday you’ll actually believe it and you’ll mean it. The whole bagging operation takes less than five minutes, yet it still feels like a marathon. 

You drag the bag back to your bedroom and do one last check-up around the room to make sure you haven’t missed anything. Sure enough, you forgot a necklace he gave you about a week before the breakup. A simple but beautiful piece of jewelry—a delicate gold chain with an elegant pink diamond pendant. 

Into the bag it goes.

A knock on your door throws you off—as if you weren’t expecting someone to disturb this profoundly meaningful moment in your life. You secure the towel that you wrapped around your body after your shower. “Who is it?” you ask, still holding the bag.

“Just me.” Jisung—of course. Who else? 

You let go of the bag to unlock the door and let your friend get in. 

He lives here now, permanently, not in one of the buildings around the property. He has a room in the basement, with other people from the staff that’s closest to your father. It had been your dad’s own decision to set up a room for Jisung after the attack on him and the whole family. Both you and your friend are thankful for this arrangement. 

For some reason, you feel less lonely knowing that you can be hanging out with him literally whenever. That you can simply go down a couple of flights of stairs and have a pair of welcoming arms to hug you and play vengeful breakup songs. That you can just text him and he will come right up with a comedy movie to watch with you. And, he does enjoy living in your parents’ luxurious home. 

Jisung walks past you the same way he would have if you had been wearing jeans and a shirt—proximity and familiarity will do that to people. You both often joked about how laidback your relationship was. About that, Jisung usually says that when he was hired by your mother, your dad made threats so terrifying about catching feelings for you or acting inappropriately around you in any way that it must have brainwashed him, somehow. 

In any case, he doesn’t care about your current absence of clothing, nor does it offend him that a sheet mask is currently on your face. And you don’t care either. In fact, if he hadn’t obviously showered just recently and weren’t fully dressed, you would offer him a face mask, too. Another one of the perks he seems to enjoy at your parents’ house is the abundance of skincare products. 

He sits on the edge of your unmade bed and looks at the bag you left in the middle of the room with a serious expression on his face.

“So it’s done?” he asks, an eyebrow raised. “Really? Show me.”

You click your tongue and roll your eyes but you oblige him, opening the bag to let him have a peek. Jisung grabs the bag and rummages through it as if to make sure that you did well. As if he was going to grade your work afterward.

“It’s all there,” you assure him with a nod. “Just like we said.”

“Then I’ll be taking this.” Jisung does a quick job of tying the bag closed and gets up to lift it off the floor. As it was filled with mostly clothes or small objects, it’s quite light. “I’ll be taking care of this. Get dressed, breakfast is served and your mother insists that you eat some of it.” 

You watch your bodyguard, your friend, walk away with your heartbreak in a trash bag. 

Last night had been the last string for Jisung—he found you in the yard, out in the cold, on your way to getting yourself blackout drunk while crying your eyes out near the water fountain.

He let you cry for a while until he decided it was too cold outside and brought you to your room where he let you cry some more. Then he gave you a long pep talk. In the end, you both agreed that you had to get rid of the objects you were only keeping in case Hyunjin would ever change his mind. Because these things were preventing you from moving on, moving forward. 

Jisung is supposed to have them all burned, all the contents in the bag. He said so, and you believed him. It feels powerful to think that your love will literally go out in flames. 

You want to cry again this morning watching Jisung take away all these things that used to mean the world to you, only you have no tears left. Your soul is weary—if you still have one at all.

But today is the day you’re getting over Hyunjin. You just have to keep telling yourself that. Doesn’t matter if it’s not true. If you keep saying it, you’ll manifest it into existence somehow. That’s what Jisung said last night. He said so, and you believed him. 

So you get dressed—sweatpants and a comfortable shirt—and head towards the kitchen area. There’s a slight commotion in here, but you can’t find the exact source of it. Jisung is in the frame of the door between the kitchen and dining room, watching the scene.

Your father is sitting at the table, casually reading the news on his iPad. Your mother seems to be walking from the dining room to the living room to somewhere in the hallway, before returning to the kitchen. By the looks of it, she’s been at it for a while and, for some obscure reason, she’s carrying clothes with her, as well as other random items.

“Oh, there you are.” Your mother stops in her tracks and turns to you. “Have you seen my red swimsuit? The one with the straps at the back?”

You frown. Both your mother’s and Jisung’s gazes are turned to you. “No, haven’t seen it.” The frown deepens as your exhausted-hungover self slowly processes the question your mom asked. Your mind wanders back to the plants that you forgot on the patio, and how they are frozen. “A swimsuit? In February? We don’t have an indoor pool and you hate pools anyway?”

Your mother sighs, but she doesn’t seem too annoyed at you. She just leaves the pile of clothes she’s holding on the dining room table and enters the kitchen, so you follow her. With a silent nod, you tell Jisung to go eat his food. After literally taking a bullet for you, he has been granted permission to eat breakfast with you and your parents in the dining room and is often invited to join the family and closest associates for dinner, too. This is another thing that Jisung enjoys quite a lot in his new life as a resident of this estate—the homemade, chef-prepared food. 

However, he and you often have dinner with the staff downstairs, and it’s just as lovely, simply in a different way. 

The kitchen is empty except for Bo-reum, the professional chef hired by your family. She’s just finished gathering her things and bows to you and your mother, before leaving the room—not without insisting that you eat her delicious food for once, or else she will start taking it personally. 

“Your father and I are going on a trip,” your mother tells you, putting random items of food, still displayed on the counter, into a plate she grabbed for you. “By the way, this is your breakfast and you’re going to eat all of it. You’re too pale. You look like you’re sick.”

“A trip? Oh, no, wait, mom… no dakjuk please… I just don’t feel like having this right now…”

“A business trip,” your father corrects from the dining room. “And if your mother gives you dakjuk, you eat it.”

“It’s good for you,” Jisung adds, but you don’t know if he does it to lick your father’s boots some more or just to spite you. In any case, that will earn him one of your famous flicks on the forehead later, for good measure. He keeps earning himself these, for fuck’s sake…

You sigh. Since you’ve dropped out of school, your parents have been acting as if you’re fifteen all over again. As if you needed this… You understand their frustration because, sure, yes, you were so close to graduating… but it’s annoying and doesn’t help with the state of your mental health. At all. 

However, you’re quite excited at the idea of having the house all for yourself while they’re gone, so you decide to be nice.

“A business trip,” your mom echoes. She slides the meal in front of you as you sit at the kitchen island in the middle of the room. “Eat. We’ll be gone for about two weeks, give or take… right, honey?”

Another thing changed after your parents had been attacked in public—they seem to hate each other a lot less.

“Depends on how it goes,” your father explains, entering the kitchen. He’s bringing his empty plate with him and takes a few seconds to rinse it in the sink. “I hope it won’t take too long to convince this guy to accept the job, but… you never know.”

Ah, yes. Your father wanted to have new warehouses built on the land he just purchased. The land that was in the middle of the big conflict… The land that Kangjeon Sunghood had wanted for himself. 

Of course, your father didn’t want just anybody to build these warehouses for him. It had to be someone as crooked but as reliable as him, or else he couldn’t trust them. He had a few contacts in the construction industry all around the world, so you’re not surprised by this sudden announcement of a trip.

“Okay,” you choose to say with a shrug. At that moment, your father gets a phone call and you hear him pick up the phone before he locks himself in his office, effectively muffling the sound of his voice.

Your mother and you remain silent while you do your best chewing the food she gave you. Jisung went back downstairs, probably content to know you’re eating breakfast. You’ll join him after, and maybe indulge him in a walk outside or something. He’s been nice to you lately. He always is, but you appreciate his friendship even more. 

“Alright,” your mother says, taking the seat directly next to yours. She takes your chopsticks right out of your hand and sets them on your half-empty plate. “It’s just us, now. So, you tell me what the hell is going on.” 

You blink under your mother’s accusatory gaze, a sudden flush of warmth spreading on your face. Fuck, by the look she has, you could swear she knows everything. This is not the first time you get this feeling from her, and it’s very strange.

“What? I don’t—” you start, but she vehemently shakes her head from left to right, gently slapping your hand. 

“I was your age once, too,” she points out. “I can tell a broken heart when I see one. So, are you going to tell me about him or not?”

You gasp, almost choking on your air. So, she does know, somehow. You want to deny it but you know there’s no point. For your mother to ask you to open up like that… then there’s no doubt. She knows. You just have no idea how much of it she actually knows. 

“What do you want to know?” you ask, your voice suddenly small. You close your eyes—you don’t want to cry. Not anymore. Not right now. “I don’t even know what to say, mom…”

A heavy silence falls between you two. You hear your mother shift her weight on her seat, and suddenly she has an arm around your shoulders. This is the warmest gesture she’s had towards you in a long, long time… and you need it. You need this so badly that you lean over and lay your head on her shoulder. 

“Oh, my sweet girl…” your mother is whispering now. “The first love is always the best, and always the worst.” She pulls you away from her, but only to make you look into her eyes. “Listen, my precious daughter. I promise you that your father doesn’t know. Nobody knows. But I know who it is who broke your heart. I know it’s the Hwang boy.”

The shock from that revelation is almost enough to make you forget your sorrow—your eyes widen and you put a hand over your mouth, thoroughly stunned. Your cheeks are warmer than ever, but you can’t move, frozen in place.

“Mom—”

“Wanna know how I know?” She offers you a comforting smile. “I had my doubts when he drove you home, after that Kangjeon son of a bitch got to you. So I looked into it… and I saw you once, the two of you. He had his hoodie over his head, for disguise, and you a hat, but… I saw you and I recognized him. I didn’t tell anyone… I didn’t even want to tell you. But I am asking about it now because I’m worried about you.”

You want to tell your mother not to worry, but you can’t—you don’t even know how you’ll ever claw your way out of this pit of despair. 

“So? Do you want to talk about it? Did he… did he hurt you?” your mother asks, her smile disappearing. 

Did Hyunjin hurt you? Yes. In more ways than one. He hurt you when he fucked you hard, either in a hotel room or in his car. He hurt you and you liked it, every time, and asked for more. He hurt you when he closed his fist around your neck as he emptied himself inside you, your two bodies becoming one. He hurt you when he kissed you softly and called you beautiful. 

He hurt you when he chose his legacy over you.

But you can’t tell your mother any of that, and you know it’s not what she asked anyway.

“No, no it’s not that, mom…” you swallow, but your mouth is dry and you feel dizzy. “It’s really complicated. Like, it’s not, but it is.” 

“That’s how it usually goes,” your mom concedes with a sigh. “I understand. But you both are so young, you know? Can’t it be fixed?”

Fixed? 

“No, mom.” Your eyes drop and you stare at the countertop in front of you. The lines and waves in the marble. “It can’t be fixed. We were doomed from the beginning, weren’t we? He’s… he’s his father’s son. And I’m my father’s daughter.” 

Your mother sighs. She takes your hand in yours and makes you look at her.

“How about you come with us on the trip? It’s a bit last minute, but your father has enough contacts to get you a visa before we take off tonight… I think it might be good for you to just be somewhere else.”

You look away, at the large window behind your mother. You can see the yard—it’s not that large, but it has a water fountain and pretty trees, and a pool. It's the same yard as it ever was, but for some reason, it looks different to you these days.

Is today really the day you’re getting over Hyunjin? Will that day ever come? 

Your mother had mentioned she was taking a swimsuit with her… 

“Where’s the trip?” you ask, your gaze finding hers again. You see genuine concern in it—it hurts you to know how much your heartbreak might have affected others around you. “You need a swimsuit for it?”

“Ah, but our hosts live in the southern hemisphere, own a lot of land, and have a private beach,” your mother explains with a smile. “You want in? Jisung would be coming with you of course, and Seungmin is tagging along too. We’re going to Australia.” 

Australia? It might not work as in, you don’t think you could ever get over it. You know that you will love Hyunjin until the day you die. But maybe, just maybe, this can help ease the relentless anguish that’s taken over you. 

There was once a time when Hyunjin was yours and you were his. But this concept is foreign to you now. 

Sometimes, when it’s too quiet, you still hear him. His voice. Begging you not to walk away, to stay with him.

Sometimes, you wish it would stop, that you would no longer hear him.  Sometimes, you hope it will never stop. That you will always hear him.

The sky looks like Monet’s La Pie, huile sur toile, 1868-1869. It’s heavy with snow but without snowflakes crowding it. There’s a crisp breeze flowing over the city, however, that doesn’t matter to Hyunjin—it’s just that he can’t help but notice it.

The sky looks like Monet’s La Pie. Almost a grisaille painting, almost monochromatic, but not quite—a single drop of blue mixed in white paint, creating an imperfect white, creating a perfect snow day. There is no contrast in the sky, there is nothing to contrast with. 

Gray is all there is. A drop of blue in an ocean of white. 

“Hyunnie? Are you listening to me?” 

Hyunjin keeps his gaze on the large window in his office, ignoring the voice behind him. Ignoring the girl he will be marrying in just a few weeks. Ignoring the weight of the alexandrite and gold ring in his pocket. He is often in his office these days.

“Hyunnie, I—”

“I did hear you the first time, Min-jeong.” Truly, Hyunjin has tried to remain soft with the girl. He’s tried to be nice, but most of the time, his words sound like icicles—his voice sharp, cold, shattering. “And for fuck’s sake, don’t call me like that—not when it’s just the two of us.”

“But—”

“I know my father wants you putting up a show at events,” Hyunjin goes on, his eyes still looking at the grisaille painting that is the sky today. “But don’t call me Hyunnie or baby or anything like that when we’re here.” 

“And what am I supposed to call you, then?” she asks, her voice so full of disappointment he can’t even bring himself to spin the chair and look at her, so he stares at the imperfect white instead. “Just Hyunjin?”

“Not that either.” He remembers the way you would say his name. The way it sounded like a promise in your mouth. In his pocket, the ring that he never gave you is heavier than ever. “Don’t call me anything, Min-jeong. Please leave me alone.”

She sighs behind him but he doesn’t hear her footsteps, which means that she’s still in the door frame.

He doesn’t even hate her. His future bride. It would be so much easier if he just hated her, but he doesn’t at all—she’s a sweet girl, innocent in many ways but not so much in others. She’s not stupid—actually, she’s rather smart, even. Sometimes, when he’s high enough, he can bear to have a conversation with her and it’s quite pleasant. 

But, by god, she isn’t you. 

It’s that thought that makes Hyunjin face the other side of his office again, leaving the gray sky behind him. He looks over at her, Min-jeong, still leaning in the doorframe, arms crossed over her chest. She’s wearing a long, pink skirt and a fuzzy sweater. She curled her hair today—she is a lovely woman, despite how he feels about her.

But, by god, she isn’t you. 

Hyunjin pulls open the drawer to his left, looking for an instant at the various small plastic containers in it. But really, he knows. When he starts thinking about you, there aren’t many things that will calm him down. 

Min-jeong watches him while he crushes some oxy, but Hyunjin ignores her accusatory stare and, instead, focuses on his task, and how the light blue of the pills looks on the dark color of his cherry wood desk. 

“Hyunjin—” she begins, closing in the distance between the door and the desk.

“Don’t call me like that,” Hyunjin warns, leaning over his desk to align his nose with the fine powder, excited and disgusted all at once to feel it enter him, abrasive and soothing and painful and euphoric. “Don’t fucking say my name, okay? How many times will I have to tell you?”

“Just because you’re miserable doesn’t mean you have to make me miserable, okay?” Min-jeong slams her hand on the desk, but Hyunjin doesn’t budge. It is her left hand, and all he sees is her engagement ring. “You should have known better than to fuck the daughter of your biggest rival, Hwang. It was your mistake. Own up to it.” 

Hyunjin leans closer to the powder, finally inhaling most of it. 

He doesn’t even like snorting shit, but it feels like a necessity these days.  The oxy burns his nostril and his eyes water, but it’s the only thing that will take the edge off. 

There is a light film of it left on the desk, and he uses his finger to gather it and press the remainder of the powder against his tongue. 

“Don’t talk about her,” he threatens, the fog descending onto his brain. “Especially not like that.”

“Or else what? You’re going to kill me?”

He considers it. Hyunjin contemplates the idea of killing Min-jeong and it’s not even the first time he seriously thinks about it. If he did so, one thing would be sure—he wouldn’t have to marry her. It doesn’t mean he could be with you again, but it would be a start. 

Of course, he’s not going to kill her. But he contemplates it, just for his personal satisfaction. He wouldn’t torture Min-jeong or anything, just a clean bullet to the head and quick disposal of her body. He would destroy the engagement ring she was wearing with her, and all of this would be behind him.

But today, there is a gray sky behind him. It would be white if it weren’t for the drop of blue that’s in it. The sky looks like an impressionist painting. The sky looks like Hyunjin wants to jump off the roof. The sky looks like he needs to mix the oxy with something else before he actually kills Min-jeong. 

“I won’t kill you unless you fucking make me,” Hyunjin sighs, opening the right drawer of his desk where he finds his cigarettes. “Will you please leave me alone, now? You do remember it’s not my choice to live with you, right? I’d like it if you respected my personal space. This is my office. You have your own bedroom, with a TV and a bathroom and everything you need. Please stay in your quarters. You’re driving me fucking crazy, woman.”

“You don’t have to choose to be such a bitch about it, Hwang.” Min-jeong’s hand retreats and Hyunjin notices that the ring on her finger left a mark on the cherry wood of his desk when she slapped it. Again, he contemplates murder. “I’ll have you know that you’re not my first choice either—I was going to give my virginity to someone a lot better than you.” 

Hyunjin feels his gut tighten—he doesn’t want to have this conversation. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want her here. He doesn’t want to hate her. He doesn’t want the sky to be gray. But it is winter, and it’s cold outside, and there is a white film of ice on the city.

He lights a cigarette and breathes in the smoke, his eyes closed, letting the poison take over him. Letting the poison soothe him. He doesn’t even remember when he picked up smoking again. It just happened.

“You shouldn’t smoke that in here,” Min-jeong points out, finally taking a few steps back. Hyunjin figures he should have a lit-up cigarette in his hand at all times if it means she’ll steer away from him. “Especially not when I’ll be pregnant.”

“You’ll never be pregnant because of me,” Hyunjin warns. “Never. Go fuck whoever you’d like. I don’t care. I’ll never touch you.”

Min-jeong looks ready to kill him, but she remains silent. She rarely lets her anger out. Hyunjin never witnessed her wrath, and yet, he’s deserved a thousand times to be the victim of it. He breathes in more of his cigarette, hating the taste of it, reveling in the taste of it. This is the only thing that can take the edge off these days. 

His life has been nothing but edges since you closed the door of his apartment behind you. 

Hyunjin has not seen you since.

The sky looks like a Monet painting. His phone rings but Hyunjin doesn’t answer. Finally, Min-jeong walks out of his office—she doesn’t close the door behind him, but that’s okay. At least she’s out of his immediate space. 

He doesn’t hate her. In another life, a life without you in it, he might have fallen in love with her. He might have acted soft to her. He might have wanted to corrupt her, he might have put some kind of effort into the engagement ring he bought for her. Instead, he had sent Minho to shop for it. If life had decided otherwise—

If you had decided otherwise—

If he had decided otherwise—

Fuck that.

Hyunjin’s phone rings again, but he crushes the tip of his cigarette on his cherry wood desk, leaving a burn mark, before picking up the call.

“Yang?”

“Boss,” Jeongin says sternly over the phone. “You’re home, right?”

“Yeah,” Hyunjin answers with a sigh. He’s home, and he was supposed to review some construction contracts for his father, but then he noticed the sky, and then Min-jeong came to bother him… and now, he’s kind of high. But he doesn’t care much. “Why? Something wrong?”

“No, boss. Everything okay. Just… I have someone here, downstairs. For you. To see you. But it’s not somebody who should be here. Should we take the elevator at the back?”

“Here? Who would come to see me he—” But Hyunjin’s sentence dies off somewhere in his throat. He knows Jeongin enough to realize that something isn’t quite right. 

Quickly, Hyunjin pushes himself out of his chair, securing his phone between his shoulder and his ear while he smoothes out his button-up shirt and his trousers. A quick stop in front of the mirror near the door of his office confirms that he has a small amount of light blue powder around his nose, so he wipes it away.

There aren’t many people who shouldn’t be here that Jeongin wouldn’t hesitate to bring upstairs to Hyunjin’s apartment. In fact, only one person comes to his mind, and the heavy flutter of his heart clashes with the oxy that Hyunjin just took. Maybe he should have more?

No, no. He doesn’t want to be too high when he sees you again. 

“Yeah, take the elevator at the back, be extra careful with this, Yang. Make sure you're not being seen by anyone.” Hyunjin quickly spews into his phone before hanging up and leaving the device on the first chair he encounters on his way to the bathroom. He needs to wash his teeth. He needs to wash his face. He can’t kiss you like that. 

It has to be you, right?  Who else would it be? He has missed you so much. The sparkle in your eyes when he takes your hand in his. The feeling of your lips against his…

Hyunjin is drying off his face when he hears the knock on the door.

“Who is it?” he hears Min-jeong ask from her bedroom, but he ignores her.

Outside, the winter sky is still white with a drop of blue in it, but Hyunjin thinks it’s a lot prettier than it was just five minutes ago. 

He finds Han Jisung on the other side of the door, with Jeongin. He’s changed a little since the last time Hyunjin saw him, but it’s hard to tell how exactly. The hair, maybe, and maybe that he’s just wearing laid-back clothes. Or, maybe, it’s because he isn’t smiling at all.

“Han,” Hyunjin says, trying to see behind the man. “Been a while.”

But Han doesn’t move, and Han doesn’t let him look behind either. Instead, he eyes Hyunjin from head to toes, several times, seeming more and more appalled the more he stares. 

“Hwang, you look like shit.” 

“Fuck you, Han. Where is she?” 

Han scoffs with a frown, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’re even more insane than I thought you were if you think she’s actually here, man.” 

Hyunjin’s heart sinks in his chest, and he feels the weight of the ring in his pocket once more. He also hears Min-jeong’s footsteps behind him. Damn, that woman is always somewhere around, and it’s driving him crazy. His father made her move in here, claiming they needed to become acquainted. But Hyunjin doesn’t want to get to know her. 

He thought that it was you. He thought that it was you on the other side of this door. 

He’s high. The oxy is really hitting right now, and his legs are turning to jello. 

“You’re fucking pathetic,” Han Jisung adds as if Hwang Hyunjin wasn’t one of the most dangerous men in this city. As if he couldn’t shoot him on sight. As if he had any right to say this.

Except. Except that Hyunjin knows Jisung isn’t wrong.

“You said you came here in peace!” Jeongin shouts at Han, putting his hand on Jisung’s shoulder to pull him back. “You fucking lied to me, I thought you were my friend!” 

Hyunjin knows vaguely that both Jeongin and Minho have been keeping in touch with Jisung. Mostly, they go clubbing together on their nights off or have coffee sometimes. He also knows that Minho tried several times to contact you, either through Jisung or your own phone, and you never agreed to even speak to him. 

“I’m here in peace, but someone should tell him the truth!” Han blurts out. He’s still on the other side of the door, and Min-jeong is still behind Hyunjin. “Anyway, Hwang, I don’t have all day, I have a plane to catch.” 

“Why did you come here?” Hyunjin inquires quietly. He feels small and ridiculous. For having hoped that it was you coming to visit him. That you would ever want him back. Out of habit, he wipes the skin under his nostril with one quick swipe of his fingers—a motion that Han obviously notices. “Are you leaving the city… Is she coming with you?”

“That’s none of your business,” Han responds. Then, he pulls a large trash bag from the side of the door and hands it to Hyunjin who stares at it for a few seconds before grabbing it. “There, Hwang. All of your shit.” 

“What?” Hyunjin locks eyes with Jeongin, who’s turned pale. “Did you go through this?” Hyunjin asks his man, who, after all, was supposed to be his security guy for the day. 

“He said it was yours,” Jeongin explains. “The things that—that she wanted you to have back.” 

Hyunjin almost drops the bag. Behind him, Min-jeong lets out a sigh. To his left, he can see the sky. It’s still imperfectly white and perfectly gray. 

“I don’t want these,” Hyunjin says, handing the bag back to Han. “Take this away from me.”

“I don’t take orders from you, Hwang,” Han replies, his eyes full of disgust. “She didn’t send me here. She doesn’t know I’m here—she wouldn’t be happy to know I lied to her. I told her I would burn them. The things in this bag. But I thought that doing so would be a wasted opportunity of ruining your day. Shit, I was right. The show’s worth the effort.”

Hyunjin’s eyes itch, but he can’t help looking into the bag. Immediately, he sees the sweater of his that you liked so much. He sees the soft, green blanket he got you. The coffee mug. The other mug. The bottles of perfume, the makeup, the silk scarf—

Before he even realizes it, Hyunjin’s knees are on the floor and he’s frantically going through the contents in the bag, painfully reliving every memory of when he gave you each thing. The smile on your face when he gave you the cute puppy plushie after he won it for you at the amusement park. The surprise in your eyes when he handed you an actual physical CD with tracks he carefully picked for you on it. Your laugh when you saw the keychain on which he had a little iced tea bottle engraved, with a heart next to it. 

Hyunjin is high now, for sure, but he remembers everything.

He remembers your kiss, your touch, the way you were his and he, yours. 

In the bag, he also finds the necklace that he gave you just a few days before everything happened. He gave it to you at the hotel on the last night that he spent with you, while the both of you were still fucked out and at peace. You cried when he put it around your neck, but you didn’t say anything except thank you. You didn’t do anything except kiss him, deeply, your mouth full of the taste of sex, full of the taste of love.

“Boss—” Jeongin starts but he also stops there, for there is nothing else to be said. 

“Let him cry,” Han says in a low voice. “God knows she’s been crying over this for months, torturing herself over this for months. He can shed a few tears. I’ll see myself out, gentlemen, if you don’t mind. By the way, it’s a lovely fucking bride you have there, Hwang. Have fun in this life of yours. I’m sure your daddy is real proud of you for once.” 

Hyunjin wasn’t even aware of the few sparse tears on his cheeks before Han pointed them out, but his hands are still holding the necklace with the pink diamond, and he can’t wipe them off, no matter how ashamed he is—he feels frozen in place. He feels the blade of Jisung’s words piercing him somewhere in the chest.

If life had decided otherwise—

If you had decided otherwise—

If he had decided otherwise,  his memories with you wouldn’t be scattered around him now, pulled out from a black garbage bag. He needs oxy. He needs a cigarette. He needs a strong drink and he needs you. He needs you, your voice, your sweet pussy, your love. Your laugh. 

If he had decided otherwise, you could have a gold ring with a blue alexandrite gemstone on it on your finger. There would be more gold around your neck. Hell, Hyunjin wants to cover you in diamonds, in gold. If life had decided otherwise. 

Han Jisung walks away without a word, and Jeongin lets him. And Hyunjin lets him. He’s high but not high enough. It takes a few instants for Jeongin to go after Jisung but Hyunjin doesn’t care what they say to each other. Doesn’t care that his friend, his employee, is going after Han instead of comforting him.

He deserves it. The misery, the pain.

Behind him, Min-jeong sighs, but not an annoyed sigh. She makes her way to him, kneeling on the floor beside him, helping him pick up everything. He wants to tell her to leave him alone but, really, Hyunjin doesn’t want to be alone. Hyunjin doesn’t know what he wants to be. 

“That was a bitch move, you should make him pay,” Min-jeong tells him softly, folding a blanket before putting it back into the bag. “Like, what is this, high school? Can’t this girl have her own petty revenge? Instead of sending her friend? Besides, she needs to get over it, it’s been months—” 

“Don’t talk about her, please,” Hyunjin begs under his breath, closing his eyes, closing his hand around the necklace. 

The sky looks like Monet’s La Pie, huile sur toile, 1868-1869. Just a drop of blue in an ocean of white. Hyunjin is high but not high enough.

He doesn’t know how he can go on without you.

Everybody knows that the Hwang boy likes to play with fire.  But he never finished painting that sunset for you. But the flame had gone out.

This was the price he had to pay for your safety, to make sure that his father would never hurt you, and there would never be too high a price. But Hyunjin simply doesn’t think he can keep going. He doesn’t think he will be able to get up from the floor right now, doesn’t think he will manage to do the work he has to do. There would never be a price too high for you, but he doesn’t think he will be able to exist for much longer—he will implode, he will become a black hole, he will be unmade by the crushing agony he feels every instant. 

Often, Hyunjin wonders if you still feel his love even if he can’t kiss it into you, fuck it into you. Often, Hyunjin wonders if you feel the love he still has for you. He wonders if you feel the guilt, the anguish, that he has for you. 

The fire had gone out. There is nothing left for the Hwang boy to play with.

So, Australia is really fucking hot. 

You feel like you’re going to die the moment you exit the airport after clearing customs with your family and security staff. The chauffeur informs you that it’s quite unusual for February to reach such high temperatures, and you want to believe him but you’re also beginning to regret tagging along on this trip. 

It’s not just the temperature, it’s how exceptionally bright the sun is. It’s just… right there, attacking you at any moment. You doubt the SPF you bought at the Incheon airport will suffice to protect you. 

The silver lining is that while you’re processing everything—the long flight, the warmth, the sun—thinking of Hyunjin hurts you a tiny little less. Somehow, putting thousands of miles between the two of you alleviates the pain. You’re not exactly happy, but… you also don’t feel a knot in your throat at all times, which is a big improvement over the past few weeks. 

The first stop is at a hotel where your family can rest after the flight before all of you travel to your final destination the next day. Your hosts own land near a beach, and they also own the beach—they have a few houses they either rent out or use when they have guests. Of course, they had the houses built themselves, as construction is their main source of revenue. Officially, at least. Apparently it’s quite the sight. Or so you have been told—you’re just not sure how much you care about any of it, really.

Your father always finds the most crooked friends. And the most convenient, too.

You share a room with Jisung and fall asleep first. This is the best sleep you get since you left Hyunjin for the last time, but when you wake up, you wonder when that will stop. When you’ll stop thinking things like that. ‘this is the first time I laugh since that day’ ‘this is the first time I eat a burger since that day’ ‘this is the first time I don’t want to bury myself under the earth since that day.’

You just want it to stop. 

First contact with your hosts happens the next day after a good rest, some movies with Jisung, and a little bit of shopping. You found a cute dress for dinner tonight, as you would like to make a good impression on your hosts—after all, if business is good for your father, then it’s good for you. Someday, his crooked empire will be yours, and you should remember that. 

(but, one day, Hyunjin will be in charge of his father’s business. he will be married and he will be Seoul's kingpin and he will become your enemy. he will be married. and your rival.) 

You ignore your deepest thoughts and force a smile on your face as you exit the car that just parked in front of a splendid seaside villa. Jisung walks beside you, looking everywhere around—you can’t blame him, you’re doing the same thing.

Considering you were suffering through winter in Seoul less than 48 hours ago, this is quite a change of scenery. The sun is still blazing and actively killing you every second, but you can hear and smell the sea from where you’re standing, although you can’t see it yet. 

There are beautiful trees surrounding the house, which has large windows and many patios and balconies. It’s so beautiful it gives you a pinch to the heart—you can’t imagine how relaxing it must be to live in a house like that, away from city centers, with a view of the ocean. 

(maybe Hyunjin will have his honeymoon in a place like this. maybe he will fall in love with his bride in a house like this. maybe he will fuck her and cum inside her and make her his in a house like this. maybe he will feel happy and free in a house like this.) 

Your guests welcome you warmly, as friends would. They are Korean expats and most of the conversations happen in Korean, although English is often used as well. You speak enough of it to keep track of everything, and especially enjoy speaking with the wife—while everyone is having cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, she insists on showing you her little garden at the back of the house and opens a bottle of champagne just for the two of you. Your mother joins—tempted by the champagne, you assume—but you enjoy the moment. You try to, at least. 

From the upper floor’s balcony, you can see the ocean. You’ve seen the ocean before but it never looked like this. The deep, pure blue of it makes you want to cry. There is a sense of peace that fills you when you look at it. The beach is inviting…

(this is the first time you do not want to actively stop existing since Hyunjin) 

“You should take your bodyguard and head down,” the wife tells you, then she turns to your mother. “My two youngest children are away—for school—but my eldest has graduated and is currently visiting, with friends… they’re occupying the house next to the one you guys will stay in!” 

“You should go,” your mother insists with a smile that implies a lot. It implies 'go ahead and make friends for once', or something like this. “Take Seungmin too.” 

But this would be the first time you make friends since Hyunjin left you. Since you left him. You’re not so sure anymore who gave up first.

“They’ll probably make some barbecue for dinner!” the wife adds as if this was in any way going to convince you. Well, it worked—while you’re not too hungry, you know Jisung was dying to try some of that famous Aussie barbecue. 

Besides, this might have just been a polite way to say ‘let the grown-ups do business over dinner.’ And for the present moment, you’d rather not think about how this business will, someday, be all yours to deal with. And who you will be competing against.

You head to the beach, walking in between Seungmin and Jisung, who are both arguing about what exactly they hope to find at this Australian barbecue gathering. It doesn’t take very long before you simply take off your sandals and walk barefoot on the beach.

God, this feels good. The sun has gone down for the most part, but the sand is still warm and the sky is still beautiful and the sea is there, right there. So blue, so deep. You’ve walked for about five minutes when you decide you just need to touch the sea, so you head over there and walk into the water until it goes past your ankles.

The waves caress your skin gently. The water is warm enough to be comfortable, and you close your eyes.  You want this to be the first time you’re happy since Hyunjin. You try, so hard.

“Careful there,” a voice calls from behind with a laugh. “There are sharks in these waters!” 

You turn around, the moment of almost happiness mostly ruined by that joke, but not actually ruined—it was said with such a pleasant tone that you can only chuckle at it. 

A guy is coming your way. He’s wearing black swimsuit trunks and a black t-shirt. He bows quickly, then flashes a warm and kind smile at the three of you before extending a hand to you first, which you shake. Then he turns to the other two.

“I was told you guys would join us for dinner,” he says. “I’m Chan! It’s really nice to meet you guys.” 

There’s a short pause during which Seungmin begins introducing himself, but then Jisung lets out a loud gasp, after having been frozen in place for a few seconds. He looks like he just saw a ghost.

“You’re Bang Chan!” Jisung has a hand on his mouth and seems in total shock. “Guys! That’s the DJ I told you about!”

For the past months, Jisung had been enjoying going out to nightclubs a bit more often, often enough to have his favorite DJs. You can’t quite remember this one specifically if Jisung told you about him. You’re certain he must have mentioned it at some point, but you only feel like a bad friend now—because you haven’t been present enough to remember about it. 

“Ah, yeah, that would be me.” Chan-the-DJ gives the three of you a formal but humorous bow. He sports a beautiful smile, and you notice his bright eyes, his dimples, his strong-looking arms under the rolled sleeves of his shirt. “I miss doing sets in Seoul, it’s been a few weeks already.”

“It was wild,” Jisung assures, following Chan who is now leading you further onto the beach, but slowly. Jisung introduces the three of you more formally, and Seungmin joins the conversation about Chan’s DJ occupation. 

It doesn’t take very long until the four of you end up at the little corner of the beach where he and his friends have been hanging out. It’s a bit more isolated than the other areas you’ve seen of this property so far, so much that you can’t even see the main house from here. 

But they’re comfortably installed for an evening of fun. There is a barbecue going on, and it smells frankly delicious. There are different kinds of chairs laying all around, and even a few cushioned sun loungers that are quite inviting. Music is playing in the background, not too loud but just enough to give the whole place a nice, relaxing atmosphere. 

Chan’s friends are Changbin and Felix. Changbin is busy behind the barbecue—it seems that he takes this task very seriously because he quickly gives his introductions and returns to his work, where he applies himself to grill the meat and some vegetables.

Felix, however, hangs around a bit more and finds out that he and Seungmin used to go to the same school in Seoul when they were younger and he was an exchange student. His smile is warm and true, and he has beautiful freckles speckled on his cheekbones. You decide you like Felix and would like to be his friend.

(this is the first time you think something like that since Hyunjin though)

“So, you’re the daughter,” Chan says, turning to you after Jisung also left you to go give poor Changbin a hand. “Heard quite a lot about you, you know that?”

You scoff, but one quick glance at Chan’s face tells you he’s serious. He has handsome traits but they’re quite unique, and you can’t look away from him. There’s something in his eyes that’s deeply caring, deeply intelligent, and it makes you feel like you’re stumbling—you don’t understand why, but it’s a strange sensation. Like he keeps you on your toes, and you can’t decide whether it’s a good thing or not. 

You remember that he is a stranger, though—so maybe it’s just a normal feeling to have, and you’re simply not used to it as you haven’t met anybody new in quite a while.

“Heard good things or bad things?” you ask with a smile. He seems like the kind of guy to make jokes often—or at least, to use humor as a way to make people feel more comfortable. “Because I can’t say the same about you. Well, except for when Jisung went out clubbing, apparently…” 

“Ah, don’t worry…” he shrugs. “Good things only. My mom spent the day telling me how their guests had a really beautiful daughter and I ought to be on my best behavior.”

At the word ‘beautiful’, you feel a flash of heat spread onto your face, but shut this down quickly telling yourself the word didn’t come from Chan, but from his mom. Besides, she gave you a little too much champagne earlier and your mind is fuzzy…

“Best behavior? Isn’t that boring?” you don’t know why it feels so easy to joke back and forth. It must be the sun and the champagne—bad things to mix together. 

Chan chuckles and cocks his head to look you in the eyes. He’s a stranger to you, but you feel at ease around him, even if you just met him. Something about his aura. And his strong arms. And his lovely smile. And his pretty eyes—

(this is the first time you notice a guy is handsome since Hyunjin)

“Can’t say I disagree with you.” Chan is still staring into your soul, so you look away, pretending to watch the other boys as they’re putting food onto plates. 

But you still see him, Chan, from the corner of your eye, and you’re pretty sure he’s looking somewhere below your neck. You suddenly feel very aware of the white-and-yellow sundress you’re wearing, its skirt lazily flowing in the breeze, the fabric hugging your breasts and your waist on your upper body. 

(this is the first time you feel something like that since Hyunjin. this is the first time you think ‘yeah, maybe’ since Hyunjin. it hurts you. it scares you)

Doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, you just have to keep telling yourself the same things over and over until you believe them. 

Today has to be the day. 

The sun has gone completely down by the time the six of you have finished dinner. Since Changbin did most of the grilling and Felix most of the prep work on the food, Chan offers himself to clean up plates and leftovers. Jisung, still not over being in the presence of his favorite DJ, follows him into the house they’re occupying during their visit, hands full of dirty plates. 

You sit on a lounge chair, eyes closed, soothed by the champagne and the beer, the food, and the ocean. Changbin and Seungmin are having a conversation about finance, which you have very little interest in, and are too tired to care about anyway. 

“Mind if I sit?” 

You open your eyes only to find Felix standing next to the empty lounging chair next to yours. You motion towards it and watch him set some weed and rolling paper in front of himself as he sits down. 

“Mind if I smoke?” he adds with a smile for you. He has a nice smile. A genuine smile—something that’s quite rare these days. “I can go smoke somewhere else.”

“You can stay if you share,” you answer, laying your head back on the pillow. 

“Deal.” You hear him fumbling as he’s getting to work. In the house, Chan and Jisung are having a conversation about music while plates are clinking. 

You should feel at peace. You should feel ecstatic. You’re in Australia for the first time in your life, during a beautiful, sunny summer, and you’re meeting new people who are interesting and funny. 

So why does your chest feel so empty? 

You know why. You know why.  Because you are a foolish girl.

This is how it felt when Jisung came to you and told you that Hyunjin wanted to meet with you in his apartment—it felt like an earthquake went through your body. It felt like a typhoon had swiped you off your feet, it felt like you were falling upward and downward all at once. It felt like a storm, it felt like thunder rolling within you.

This is how it felt when you entered his apartment and he did not kiss you—like the ocean before a tsunami. Silent, calm. Giving a false impression of peace. It felt like you had known all along that a storm was brewing, that lighting was meant to strike you someday. This is how it felt when you looked into Hyunjin’s eyes and you saw darkness and shame—it felt like black paint spilling on a canvas, it felt like a forest fire spreading. 

You are a foolish girl. You had chosen to make him a priority in your life. You are a foolish girl, but you were smart enough not to let him make any promises to you. Promises are only doomed to be broken anyway. 

You jump when Felix hands you the joint, exhaling smoke with a light cough. You take it between your fingers, unbothered by the fact that your mother will smell the weed on you when you get back later. You’re an adult, after all, and you’ve already disappointed your parents quite badly—what’s a bit more disappointment? Maybe you don’t even have to head back, maybe you can sleep right here, on the beach.

You loved Hyunjin more than anything. You loved him more than you should have.

Today has to be the day.

The smoke burns your throat just right, and you inhale as much of it as you can. When you exhale, you do not pass the joint, and smoke some more of it. Felix doesn’t complain. He sits next to you, his gaze turned towards the sea. 

“It’s really pretty here,” you tell him after taking a couple of good hits and hand him back his joint. 

“It is.” You hear his sharp inhale, and you revel in the sensation his uniquely deep voice brings to you. This kind stranger with the freckles, the good weed he shares with you. He is not just warm—he is warmth itself. “I don’t know how long I could go without the sea, you know? Like… When you’re home, where do you go to feel good? To unwind, to ground yourself, to find yourself again?”

Tears sting your eyes, but you do not shy away from them. You were a foolish girl. You once gave your heart to a man who didn’t know what to do with it. In a way, you don’t even want to blame him for the damage. The fault was yours all along. 

Everybody knows that the Hwang boy likes to play with fire. But your love had burned bright. But the rain had put the fire out. But the ocean, as calm as it had been, had swallowed the flames.

“I don’t know,” you admit to Felix, watching his lips lock around the joint. He has nice lips. This is the first time you think about someone’s lips since Hyunjin. “I’m not sure how that’s supposed to feel, anyway. To have found myself. So if it happened, I wouldn't notice.” 

“Oh, no, you would notice. For me, it’s when I look at the waves and nothing else. It reminds me of who I am and who I can be.”

So you look at the waves, wondering who you could be. From the very beginning, you knew this was going to be a bad idea. You knew you shouldn’t even have allowed Hyunjin to speak to you. But he had never felt like a stranger to you, and it had felt right. 

You were waiting for it to feel wrong, but that didn’t seem to want to happen. Even now, with your heart in pieces. It doesn't feel wrong, and you hate that it doesn't.

Mindful of the Hwang boy, you had been told most of your life. Do not speak to the Hwang boy, your mother had told you. He is dangerous.

But you had known. You had known the whole time that you were in for life with Hyunjin. He may have chosen other priorities over you, but you would always love him. He would always be Hyunjin. Your first love. 

You were waiting for the day you would get over him, but that didn’t seem to want to happen either. 

The night is calm, quiet. You look at the waves the way Felix does, trying to see if it will appease you at all, but it doesn’t, not really. The weed has definitely kicked in, though, and you decide to get up to walk a little. Chan and Jisung have joined the group again and are currently continuing the music discussion with the rest of the group—you can hear Seungmin making valid points from where you are. 

In the breeze of the night, the skirt of your dress brushes against your skin and it feels nice. The sand feels nice beneath your bare feet, caressing your skin, reminding you that you are alive. Reminding you that you are more than pain, more than a void where so much love came to die. 

It is quiet. In your head, you hear him, Hyunjin, begging you to stay. In your head, you hear the roaring of his car’s engine. In your head, you imagine him on the day he summoned you to his apartment, saying let’s go, let’s run away and be together. In your head, you hear the way his voice cracked as if it had been his heart splitting into pieces. Please, please. He rarely ever said please, but that day, he had said it to you and his voice had been stained with pain, and you had not recovered from it yet.

You realize you left your earbuds in your bag, which is still up the beach, a long walk from here. Music helps. Music helps drown the voices.

You close your eyes, listening to the waves instead. 

“See any sharks?” It’s Chan. He’s walking towards you, not really smiling, but rather giving you an appraising look. He’s holding a half-smoked joint, which he offers to you, but you decline. You’ve had enough. 

“No sharks,” you reply, welcoming the sound of his voice as it drowns the sound of Hyunjin’s in your head.

Cursing the sound of his voice as it interrupts the sound of Hyunjin’s in your head. 

Chan chuckles, running his fingers in his dark, wavy hair while he smokes a little. You stare back at him before looking behind as the rest of the group makes their way toward the house.

“Felix offered to make brownies,” Chan explains. “For Valentine’s Day.”

“For—” You pick up your phone from the pocket of your dress, checking the time. With the lack of sleep, you hadn’t even realized. But it is past midnight, and it is Valentine’s day. “Oh…” 

More tears prick your eyes so you look away. Chan carefully crushes his joint on a big rock nearby and you feel him lay a respectful hand on your shoulder.

“Listen, um—I don’t want to make this awkward, but I heard what happened, I—I’m really sorry. You haven’t seemed really okay all night, so… if you need anything, you can come to me, yeah?” 

“We don’t know each other,” you point out, swallowing a sob, crossing your arms over your chest, your hands flat on your sides—almost as if you are hugging yourself. “Why are you so nice to me?”

“Ah, I’m just like that. But I don’t think it matters if we know each other or not. I—huh—I don’t really like Valentine’s Day either.” 

You nod, choosing not to inquire any further. Chan’s hand retreats from your shoulder and it feels colder there all of a sudden. You find yourself missing his voice, only because while he spoke, the voices in your mind were muffled.

“Chan?” you say, still staring out at the sea, “You’re a DJ. Do you have music?”

“What?” He sounds confused, so you turn to face him. “Music?”

“I forgot my earbuds,” is all you offer as an explanation, but Chan nods and motions towards the house.

It did not take long for that house to become so… lively. In the kitchen, Felix is already surrounded by various pots and pans, whisking something while having a conversation with Jisung who’s in the living room, playing a video game with Seungmin. Changbin is somewhere in between, holding a beer, leaning on the counter, apparently selecting an appropriate playlist for the occasion.

None of them pay much attention to you or Chan, so you just follow him upstairs. He takes you to a large room—it doesn’t have a light on, but it doesn’t need to. There’s a little light coming in from outdoors, and the screen of a computer provides a little additional lighting. You feel the ocean breeze coming in from the large window, which is wide open. 

You… you actually like it here. You feel calmer. Despite the sorrow apparently inhabiting each corner of your mind, you feel a certain peace that you cannot explain. 

“This is my office, where I work when I’m visiting here,” Chan explains, but you had already guessed by the computer and the equipment in and around the desk. He motions towards a cozy-looking couch and you sit with your legs folded underneath you, watching as he sits on the chair in front of the computer. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Chan offers and you see him open a few folders on the computer after turning the speakers on. 

“You said you knew about it already,” you reply as a song begins to play. You don’t recognize it, but it’s a catchy EDM track, with good pacing. It doesn’t play too loud, but it doesn’t need to—you already feel a lot calmer than you did earlier when you were alone by the ocean. “How do you even know about this? About—” 

You realize that in the months following your breakup with him, you have not spoken Hyunjin’s name out loud even once. Not to your knowledge at least—since Jisung claims that you often have nightmares and talk in your sleep. 

You take a deep breath, turning your head to the right, staring at the night sky through the window.

“How do you even know about Hyunjin?” you make yourself say, and you don’t know how it feels just yet. To have let his name haunt your mouth instead of your mind. “Nobody knew about us.”

Chan scoffs and spins the chair to face you, so you make the effort to look at him, too. You still taste Hyunjin’s name in your mouth, sweet, bitter, addictive—it was a mistake to speak it out loud because you want to hear it again, you want your tongue to dance as you say it. 

“First off, your mother knows about it and she told my mother, who told me, but I already knew,” Chan comments, pulling a drawer open and extracting a bottle of liquor from it—the amber liquid inside is quite inviting. “Also, you guys weren’t as secretive as you think you were. Come on—the Hwang heir and you?” 

But you recall all of the steps you took to keep your relationship with Hyunjin absolutely unexposed. You barely saw him outdoors, and never for long. You only saw him in hotel rooms, which he booked under fake names. Sometimes, you both would sneak out of town and drive his car in the countryside. Just a few hours, the two of you. He would fuck you in the car after, and it was good. 

The music helps. The ocean breeze helps, too. But, god, you miss him so terribly. You remember so much but not enough, you remember that he liked to look into your eyes as he came inside of you, remember that he liked to go get iced tea for you after sex. The way he would wrap you in his arms in the bed, just holding you as the two of you watched a movie together. Simple moments. Meaningful moments. 

But this is why Hyunjin had not chosen you. These moments, he could have them with any other girl—probably had them already. They had meant a lot to you, and you know they had meant something to him, too—but not the same thing. You have thought about it a lot. Maybe Hyunjin has commitment issues. Maybe it’s because he lost his mother at a young age, or because of the way he was brought up.

But the conclusion had been this: Hyunjin didn’t love you the same way you loved him. And one might have thought otherwise—after all, he went to great lengths to seek revenge for your honor after the Kangjeon issue. He got you a lot of beautiful gifts, he told you that he loved you. He told you a lot of things. But those were just words. And he had killed Kangjeon for what, in the end? If he wasn’t going to choose you?

“We told no one,” you go on, unfolding your legs under you to sit a bit more comfortably on the couch. You really like the song that’s playing, but you can’t read the title of it from where you are. 

However, you watch carefully as Chan unscrews the bottle of liquor and takes a long gulp from it. He slides it on the desk so that it makes it closer to you, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It’s whiskey. You lean over to grab the bottle and don’t fail to notice that Chan looks directly at your cleavage when you do so. But you pretend not to see, and drink some whiskey. It’s sweet, bitter. Addictive. 

“Everyone knows,” Chan insists, leaning into his chair. He almost looks carefree, and it makes you feel even more comfortable. “He’s a psycho, everybody knows that, too.” Chan’s body is still relaxed, but his facial expression shows that he’s serious. You choose to drink some more whiskey before handing him the bottle again. 

There’s your chance to taste his name on your lips again. “Hyunjin isn’t a psycho,” you reply. 

Chan cocks his head to the side, raising an eyebrow at you. The song currently playing ends but is quickly followed by another. This one is another beat, more R&B in style, but with good instrumentals. “If Hwang isn’t a psycho, then he’s a fucking fool,” he concludes with a shrug before drinking some more whiskey. 

You frown, resting your elbows on your thighs. “Why would you say that?” Part of you wishes the conversation wasn’t about Hyunjin. Part of you relishes the fact that the conversation is about Hyunjin. 

“Because he is a fool,” Chan insists, resting the bottle of whiskey on his desk again. “He could have chosen you, but he didn’t. And now you’re here. And we’re having this conversation. Right now. You and I.”

Chan’s words hit you like a punch to the face. You take a deep breath, letting it all exhale into a sigh. You sit in silence for a while, the both of you, just listening to the music. The implications behind this are quite clear, only, your brain refuses to process any of them. Instead, you stare at him quietly. 

“You like it? The track?” he asks you, not waiting for a response to his earlier statement—statement or subtle attempt at flirting. You realize you had been moving your head to the beat of the song. 

“Yeah, what is it?” you inquire, glad to have an escape from whatever was supposed to come next. A little disappointed it did not go any further. Still—you catch him peeking at your legs when you move them.

“It’s mine.” Chan, for the first time, seems hesitant, even a bit shy, and there’s something endearing in his sudden change of demeanor. “The other one before, too.” 

You get up from the couch and cross the room to take a closer look at the computer in front of him. You see them, the files, the tracks, all of Chan’s work. You lean next to him to select another track from the EDM list—after all, you’ve heard Jisung gush over and over about his DJ sets, so you’d like to hear some more of that.

“That one is good, but try that one over there, 00-32A,” Chan advises you when the pointer stops on one file. You move it further down and click on the song he chose. 

He is so close to you. Physically. You can hear his soft breathing despite the music, can feel the warmth from his skin radiate onto yours. Hyunjin could have chosen you, but he didn’t, and now you are here. In this office. With this boy who has music in his heart and the beach in his eyes, who has whiskey on his breath, who doesn’t seem to know how to stop checking you out.

You sit on top of the L-shaped desk to listen to the track more in a more comfortable position, and to put a few inches of distance between you and Chan. 

It’s good. No, hell, it’s great. You don’t know much about music production, but you know when a beat is a good one, when it’s meant to be heard. You can only imagine the feeling of freedom that must fill anyone on the dance floor when this beat drops… 

“Your drops are exceptionally good,” you tell Chan, and he looks at you. He reaches his hand towards you, his eyes locked into yours, and your breathing stops—you thought he was going to touch your leg but instead, he goes for the whiskey and brings the bottle to his lips. 

You ignore the pang of disappointment that is currently being birthed somewhere within you. 

“Thanks,” he says evasively after swallowing the liquor, making a face as he drank quite a lot of it in one go. “My dad still wishes I would take over his business one day instead of doing music and DJ work... Maybe you should tell him about my exceptional drops. Maybe that’ll change his mind.” 

You can’t help the laugh that escapes your lips, but Chan laughs with you. Maybe it’s the weed, but it takes a few moments until the laughter stops for good. By the end of it, Chan’s forearm is resting on your knee and he is handing you the bottle of whiskey. 

It feels good.That he’s touching you. He’s barely touching you but it does feel good, and you feel a tingling sensation between your legs. Hell—talk about touch-starved. You’ve been so broken-hearted that you haven’t even managed to get yourself off in… in so long that you can’t remember when the last time was, exactly. 

This is the first time since Hyunjin that you want to fuck someone, and you’re really not sure if you like this feeling or not. 

Is today actually the day? 

Chan lets the music keep playing without selecting a particular track, and deep down you hope it’s because he doesn’t want to move away from you. His chair is right in front of you, and the proximity of him to your legs—with his forearm resting on your thighs—makes you shiver. You could blame it on the ocean breeze, but you don’t, because you’re no longer a foolish little girl. The foolish girl fell in love and she fell hard, but that girl is long gone. 

The girl you are today licks her lips and stares into Chan’s eyes, who stares back after his eyes lingered on her mouth a little too long for it to be normal. But you do not look away. 

Chan’s fingers move a little on your thigh, brushing on the exposed skin just beneath the skirt of your dress. You feel sparks all over you and a tingling sensation in your core. You have not felt this in a while, and it unsettles you.

“You probably get the same bullshit from your parents,” he points out, his voice lower. You can hear the boys downstairs, bickering, laughing. There’s the music, too—and your pounding heartbeat. “Must be even worse, too, you being an only child.”

You shrug, trying to keep a straight face as Chan’s touches become a little more… present. “Guess it’s all I’ve heard my whole life, and I never really questioned it… That I would take my dad’s place someday.” 

This, right now though, makes you question it. What if you had simply given your parents a big fat ‘fuck off’ and had just left? Where would you be right now, who would you be? 

Who would you be with?

“I don’t know what… I don’t know what else I could do,” you admit, slightly embarrassed. You had never put too much thought into it—you simply couldn’t consider any other option.

“Music makes me happy,” Chan says with a shrug. “What makes you happy?” 

Now, here’s the thing.

What comes to your mind when Chan asks you this is a boy with piercing eyes and plump lips and fire in place of his soul. You know it’s not at all what Chan meant when he asked you the question and yet, this is all your brain manages to come up with. You eye the speaker to your right, wondering if you ought to turn the volume up a little. To drown out everything else. 

Maybe you just don’t know what makes you happy. Your mother made you take ballet classes when you were little and you didn’t like it. You were never particularly good at sports—you were not bad either, just very average. You had good grades before you dropped out. But you didn’t have anything that made you special. 

You tell this to Chan whose fingers are still tracing lazy circles just above your knee. He sighs. The warmth of his breath, it feels like, spreads from your knees all the way to your core and you try your best to suppress the sound of the sharp inhale of oxygen that you take. 

“You just haven’t found your thing,” Chan concludes, pushing himself out of his chair. He stands in front of you and decides to drink some more whiskey, and you watch as his mouth locks around the bottle, as he swallows the liquor. It glistens on his lips. You wonder how they taste. His lips. Sweet, bitter, addictive? “You just gotta find your thing. When’s the last time you felt truly happy? Like… Pure elation?”

When Hyunjin ate his cum out of you and spit it in your mouth? When he gave you a necklace so pretty that it made you cry? When he surprised you with iced tea? When he told you he loved you for the first time, when he said it for the hundredth time? When he brought you flowers on a few occasions? When, some nights, he stopped the car in the middle of a deserted road and let you sit behind the wheel? And then you felt it become alive when you pressed the pedal to make it speed up, to make the engine roar.

You had let Hyunjin take all of the space within you, within your soul. And now that he was gone, you had nothing—you were nothing. Or so it felt like.

“Driving a fast car,” you choose to tell Chan just so he doesn’t take you for a complete idiot. You like to think that the foolish girl who fell in love with Hwang Hyunjin is dead. Maybe she isn’t quite dead yet, but you’re trying to kill her tonight. 

Chan’s gaze leaves your mouth to look into your eyes. “Fast cars, huh?” He chuckles, but suddenly, his face is much closer to yours than it was just a second ago. You can smell the whiskey in his mouth, can see the hunger in his eyes. “To be honest, I normally don’t really like the girls my mom sets me up with. But I do like you a lot.” 

That sentence takes a few seconds for you to process, during which you drink a considerable amount of whiskey before putting the bottle back on the desk. Chan isn’t smiling anymore, and you can feel your heart fluttering in your chest. He likes you. His mother set you up—

“Ah, don’t worry, it was a last-minute thing anyway,” he reveals to you, cocking his head to the side just a little, a slight frown appearing between his brows. “She just said that our guests’ daughter would be on the trip. That you were single. And very pretty. She didn’t lie, apparently.” 

You swallow painfully and make an attempt at wetting your lips by running your tongue on them without any real success, but this is when Chan kisses you. 

His lips are warm and he is kissing you firmly but delicately. But he is kissing you, and you freeze, still letting him take control of your mouth. He is kissing you, and you like it.

Today is the day. 

You bring your arms around Chan’s neck, this stranger, this boy who tastes like whiskey and smells like the ocean, pulling him closer. He is a stranger to you, and this feels wrong. And this feels right.

This is the first time you kiss someone since—

But Chan doesn’t let you think about the boy you fell in love with—he deepens the kiss, parting your lips with his, his tongue discovering your mouth swiftly and efficiently. You moan when his hands make it back onto your thighs and he trails them to your waist, pressing himself against you. Instinctively, your legs close a little on either side of him, and it’s his turn to groan into your mouth. 

You kiss him back. You tug on his shirt to pull him even closer, opening your mouth for him, devouring his in return. You know you’re a little drunk. And a little high. You know you’re kissing a stranger and you know you will regret it—but you don’t stop. Your skin tingles where Chan is touching you, grabbing you firmly by the waist. Blood rushes to your face and to your core when he bites your lower lip. In return, you slide your hands underneath his shirt and lay them flat on his abdomen, feeling his warm skin, his muscles beneath your palms. 

And then he pulls away, breaking the kiss unexpectedly. You look around, almost expecting to see someone in the door frame—but nothing has changed in the room except for the fact that your face is flushed, that Chan’s cheeks are darker than they were, and that you can still feel the imprint of his hands on your waist where he was holding you a second ago.

“I can’t do this.” He takes a step back, and another, and you feel the breeze from the window again, making you shiver. Making you miss his body against yours. 

“What?” You blink, trying to catch your breath. Trying to understand how the situation went from a hundred to zero in less than a second. 

“I can’t do this,” Chan just says again, and your eyes follow his hand as he apparently adjusts the crotch area of his shorts. “Sorry,” he adds and begins walking away. 

You were once a foolish girl, but it got you nowhere. So you climb down from the desk and follow Chan before he can leave the room. “Wait,” you say, trying to make your voice sound as steady as possible. Trying to pretend like you’re not a little wet from a short makeout session with him. “Chan, what’s going on? Did I do something wrong?”

This is what the foolish girl should have asked the boy she fell in love with, the boy who had never been a stranger to her. She should have asked him this early in their relationship instead of letting things go awry. Instead of not ever being quite right for him. Maybe, then, he would have wanted her enough. Maybe, then, she wouldn’t be here tonight. 

“No, no, I promise—sorry—I—” Chan’s face is flushed again, and he sighs, leaning against the wall right next to the door he just opened. You watch him take a deep breath, trying to soothe your own fluttering heart. “It’s not your fault, it’s—”

“Please, don’t go It’s not you, it’s me over this, Chan,” you reply dryly but in a low voice. “If you don’t want to fuck me, fine. But you didn’t have to be such a tease about it.”

He sighs again, staring at your lips before staring into your eyes for good. “It’s not that. I do want to fuck you. But you know what happened to the last guy who laid a finger on you? And shit, we're talking about a metaphorical finger here, because he had his men kidnap you and he didn't even touch you himself.” 

Chan bites his lip for a second but he goes on. “This guy? They found him with his trachea all fucked up. They found him with a damaged thyroid. They found him with all the blood vessels in his neck torn, same with the cartilage. Choked so hard, just seconds short of death by strangulation. But they found him with a bullet in his head, the bullet that fucking killed him. I’m really sorry for leading you on but—I just can’t, okay? Sorry.”

Talk about a cold shower. In the end, Chan offers you a chaste squeeze of your arm and you let him walk away. The music is still playing in the room, and it is still excellent. The smell of baked brownies is slowly creeping its way upstairs, and you can hear the lively conversations taking place in the kitchen and living room. 

But all you can think of is Hyunjin. And the way he made you feel his love. 

So—you don’t hate Australia after all.

Days come and go. You spend a lot of time at the beach with Jisung and sometimes, your mother. Felix often joins you as well—he likes to go on walks or ride bicycles along the coast. In just a few days, you’ve really got yourself a nice tan and a glowing sun-kissed look. You even manage to smile and laugh. Despite the sting in your chest. 

You don’t see much of Chan over the course of the week. Which is fine. The day after he kissed you, you realized he was right to be scared, and you hold no grudges. You’ve tried talking with him, but he’s been very good at avoiding you, largely helped by the fact that he was having a set in a famous nightclub in town two days ago—and, apparently, he has another one tonight. 

“Chan asked me to find out if you’d like to be there, too,” Jisung tells you that afternoon, about Chan's set. He, of course, was going—no way in hell would he miss a set from his favorite DJ. “He said he’d like you to be there.” 

Jisung is your best friend, but you haven’t mustered up the courage to tell him about Chan. About the kiss and what happened after. About the way it felt when you tasted the whiskey on this stranger’s lips. About the way it felt when Chan reminded you that, apparently, Hyunjin has branded you forever. But then, maybe it wouldn’t make any difference. To tell him about it. He always gets upset when Hyunjin is mentioned anyway, and you’re actually surprised he never attempted to murder him. Or maybe he did, and he just never told you.

“I’ll go,” you tell Jisung. Maybe just to try and have a conversation with Chan. Maybe just to listen to more of his music and see him in his element. Maybe just to go out clubbing and try to find out who it is you are, exactly. The way Felix knows who he is when he stares at the ocean. You can't quite remember who you were before Hyunjin. Before you saw him, alone, in that bar, the night that everything changed.

In any case, Jisung is delighted. 

You picked an outfit and did your hair and makeup after a long shower. The whole process took you most of the afternoon, as you didn’t neglect any part of your strict skin and body care regimen. The whole thing is also quite fun to Jisung who spent a lot of his day with you, using fancy body scrubs on his arms with a hydrating face mask on. As he seemed to be particularly fond of your glowing skin serum, you gave him a whole bottle of it. 

Your parents insisted that it was their hired chauffeur who drove you and Jisung to the club—Seungmin wasn’t particularly interested in tagging along, but you know it’s just because he’s glad to finally have some respite from a very excited Jisung. You enjoy the relatively calm drive there. The nightlife in Melbourne seems quite fun, and you just watch from your window as you are making your way to the nightclub where Chan’s set will take place. 

The club is nice but it’s just that—a nightclub. You are guests of Chan so you are given VIP access to a private lounge room with a lot of alcohol in it. It’s located on the second floor and the view from it is quite cool—you see the dance floor and the stage perfectly, as well as the beautiful and colorful neons that provided the only lighting in the club, and served as decoration as well. But really, it’s the unlimited amount of booze that pleases you the most. And, just for that, you know it was worth accepting the invitation, no matter how awkward you feel towards Chan. 

The set starts soon after you’ve finished your second drink. By then, you feel a little more at ease, and chat with Jisung a little, but he’s really focused on watching what is happening downstairs through the large window in your VIP room. You look away from your phone to stare at the crowd, too, and the way their bodies are moving to the rhythm of Chan’s beats.

You look at him too, because seeing the crowd just reminds you of Hyunjin and that first night at the club with him. Chan is very intense in the way he moves and the way he interacts with his crowd, and you find yourself staring for longer than you should have. 

It’s one of Chan’s signature Excellent Drops that pulls you out of your little trance—Chan’s shirt is sleeveless, and that in itself is enough to distract you for a while—and you turn to Jisung. He looks happy to be here, but you know he would be happier over there.

“Go downstairs, Ji. Dance your heart out,” you tell him with a smile, pushing him out of his seat. 

“I’m not supposed to leave you,” he reminds you. Up here, in this room, the music isn’t as loud as it is downstairs, and you hear him well. “I’m still your bodyguard even if we’re in Australia, remember?” He offers a smile at you, and you appreciate it. That he doesn’t want to make you feel guilty about it. “Unless you want to dance…?” 

But you don’t, not tonight—you had mentioned this to him earlier in the car. 

“Go dance, I’ll be fine,” you insist, squeezing his shoulder before pushing him away. 

He does seem to hesitate, but then a particularly good track begins to play—you recognize it from having heard it in Chan’s office, recommended by him, and Jisung gives in, but not before handing you the butterfly knife he’s been carrying around since the beginning of the trip. 

So he leaves. You look through the window to see downstairs better, trying to locate Jisung, but it’s too dark down there and there are too many people anyway. 

The screen of your phone has nothing interesting for you. Considering your life, you can only have ghost accounts for social media and can’t use them, so there isn’t much to see there. Still, you take a minute to check Chan’s public Instagram account, where Jisung was so proud to show you there was a picture that had him on it. On his favorite DJ’s Instagram account. You smile, remembering Jisung’s fanboying. 

The picture isn’t hard to find. It’s a picture that was taken on the very day you met him, Felix, and Changbin. Chan took a selfie with the whole group—but knowing you can’t show your face online, he made sure to angle his phone just right to keep your identity, and Jisung’s, private. Still, it’s a selfie of Chan with the whole group behind him while you were sitting around and chatting, having drinks, and learning to know each other. It was a good moment. The caption just said, “always fun to meet new people in places that feel like home.”

You press the screen to like the picture—even from your ghost account, you just want to give it some love. You really should have tried to speak to Chan sooner. He’s a good guy. And he made a very valid point, after the kiss… You should have tried to be friends with him. You hope you’ll be around to have a conversation with him after his set—

“Hello, I hope it’s okay if I join you.” 

You jump when you hear the voice and turn on your seat to look at the man who just entered the room that was supposed to have a door that can only be opened by the keycards that have been given to you, Chan, Felix, Changbin and Ji. 

But there is a stranger in your VIP lounge. He’s holding a keycard in one hand. In the other, he has a glass bottle containing a bright yellow liquid that reminds you of a yellow that Hyunjin painted once, for his half-finished sunset. No one is supposed to be here. 

You push yourself out of your seat, fumbling in the pockets of your dress to grab the knife Jisung gave you a few moments ago, and the man simply closes the door behind him and carefully observes you as you retrieve the weapon and open it to show the blade—you’ve been trained to use a limited amount of weapons, however, butterfly knives happen to be one of them. 

“Woah, what a welcome,” the man tells you with a chuckle, taking a few steps towards you, but staying at a safe distance. “Where I come from, we just say hello—but I must say, there are not many things in life as splendid and alluring as a beautiful woman holding a weapon she could easily kill you with.” 

He takes another step and you hold the handle of the knife tighter into your hand, hard enough to hurt your palm and turn your knuckles white. You could scream but even if you did—you wouldn’t be heard. Not with the music, not with the crowd. 

“I won’t hurt you, darling—don’t worry. I’m not like my brother. I just wanted to talk, and my friend Chan offered to set up a little private nook for us to chat. I even brought drinks.” 

You swallow your saliva painfully, refusing to drop your weapon even if the stranger’s body language shows no threat. He sits at the small table on the left, away from the window, away from eyes that might be watching from downstairs. You recognize that it’s a smart move on his part—there is no doubt that Jisung is constantly glancing back to check if you’re alright. He might even be worried at this very moment from not seeing you watching the show. 

“Your brother?” you ask, your voice smaller than you wanted it to be, but you pretend it’s alright. “Do I know you?”

“I’m afraid I do not have the pleasure of knowing you personally.” The man shifts his weight on his chair. He’s wearing a dark suit and his hair is styled in a trendy undercut. “I’ve heard of you quite a lot, though. You caused a hell of a commotion, pretty girl.”

You don’t like his nonchalant manners and the way he just casually grabs two shot glasses from a shelf and pours one for you, and one for him, of the yellow liquid. 

“Who are you?” you ask, not letting go of the knife. Your arm is starting to feel sore, but you won’t lower it until he’s gone. Or dead. “Tell me, or I’ll kill you.”

“I’d love to see you try.” The man laughs, mouth open and head fallen back, apparently mocking you. You grunt and take a few steps toward him. The purple lighting makes the sharp blade of the butterfly knife glimmer. “I get it now. I think I get it—why the Hwang boy went fucking nuts over you. You seem like you’re a lot of fun. I mean that, really.” 

It just happens—you lower the knife, just a little. The guy notices that but he doesn’t move except to drink his shot, immediately pouring himself another afterward. 

“Why don’t you have a drink with me?” he offers, sporting a genuine smile. “Really, I just need to have a short word with you.”

“How do you know Hyunjin?” You’re not going to sit with this stranger, and you’re not going to drink whatever it is he is drinking. “Who are you?”

“Pardon my manners, miss. I did not mean to offend.” The man gives you an appraising look before setting his piercing gaze on yours. “I know Hwang Hyunjin because he is the man who killed my half-brother.” 

Your strengths seemingly abandon you and your arm falls back to the side of your body. Your heart sinks into your chest, and you try to breathe but it doesn’t seem that any oxygen is making it to your lungs. The man is gracious about it though—he keeps his neutral facial expression and waits patiently for you to recover from this reveal, simply indulging in yet another shot of the yellow liquid.

“Daito,” you manage, frozen by fear. By shock. But he heard you despite the music, you know he did. “Kangjeon Daito.” Your parents had told you about him in the aftermath of Hyunjin’s revenge on Kangjeon Sunghoon. 

Sunghoon, his childhood friend. That Hyunjin had murdered. And now, Daito, Sunghoon's brother was in this room, with her, tonight.

“Please, darling, I hate to see you like that,” Daito insists, pushing the chair across from him away from the table using his foot, effectively inviting you to take a seat. “I’m not here to hurt you. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead by now. Your bodyguard is downstairs, dancing, and drinking.” 

You think about it and decide to stay over here for the time being, but you keep the blade down. 

“I never asked Hyunjin to kill him,” you choose to say, just to make things clear. You make a point of not mentioning to Daito that you were fucking relieved that Hyunjin killed his brother, though. But you really were. “Why are you here?”

“I have an offer,” Daito reveals, pulling the sleeves of his shirt up a little, revealing intricate and beautiful tattoos. He catches you staring at them, and a smirk paints itself on his face. “Come closer, darling. I’ll show them to you. Every tattoo of mine has a meaning.” 

This is when you remember this saying that was once said to you in a dire situation—the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You never wanted Hyunjin to be your enemy. He had never been a stranger to you, and you had thought that meant something. 

But he had decided otherwise. And now you are here, having this conversation with his other enemy. 

“What kind of offer?” you ask. In the end, you take the seat across the table, keeping the blade in your hand, just in case. “What’s that?” you add, motioning towards the bottle he brought with him. 

“That’s homemade limoncello, have you ever had that? Made from lemons grown on the Amalfi Coast by business partners of mine, in Italy… They also make this delicious liquor from it. Go on, have a try while it’s still cold.”

To hell with it. Hyunjin hasn’t chosen you, and some days, it made it hard to live. Some other days, it made it easy. More often, it was a peculiar mix of both.

You grab the glass and drink it, letting the liquid swirl in your mouth to take in the taste. It fills your whole soul with the sunshine those lemons grew under—this might just be the best fucking thing you ever had. The bright and sweet flavor with just a hint of tartness is perfectly balanced. 

“Fuck,” you sigh, not bothering with manners, or patience, and grab the bottle to pour yourself another shot. At least, you pour Daito one, too, under his observant gaze. “You should talk to me now. It won’t be long before my bodyguard comes back. He worries about me a lot.”

“He shouldn’t,” Daito responds with a shrug but a playful smile. “You seem like you’re perfectly able to handle yourself. Which is why I’m here to make my offer to you directly instead of going to your parents, as most would have done. As most have done in the past.”

You appreciate that he goes straight back to the point. You watch him carefully after drinking more of the limoncello and licking it off your lips—you simply do not want to waste any of this. 

Daito leans back into his seat and waits a few seconds before making his offer. “Would you be interested in marrying me, by any chance?”

You were such a foolish girl. You were a foolish girl and it got you nowhere. It got you here, in Melbourne, in a nightclub, with citrus on your lips, with the enemy of your enemy sitting across from you, speaking words to you that the boy you fell in love with never even mentioned. 

“You seem unfazed,” Daito adds, frowning. “Were you expecting me? Did Chan tell you I would come to talk to you?”

“No,” you reply, realizing that you are, indeed, unfazed. You even let go of the butterfly knife finally, soothing your aching hand. This isn’t the first time you’re either set up with a boy or a boy wants your hand in marriage. But you never cared about these deals—they never had love written into them. 

They mean nothing. And you understand that. Being the daughter of your father, you understand that it will be impossible for you to live the fairytale kind of love you had wished for. 

“But why would you want to marry me? Your family is much more powerful than mine—aren’t you one of the most profitable heroin dealers in Tokyo? What would you gain from marrying me?” 

“The most profitable, darling.” Daito offers you a smile, a true one, this time, not a cocky smirk. 

He leans over the small table, his face much closer to yours than it had been. He is a handsome man, a few years older than you. You smell him and the limoncello. 

“I’ll be honest with you, because you are obviously a smart woman—I’ve been plotting my revenge against Hwang since the very day I was shown the pictures of my baby brother, lying dead, a hole in his head, his neck broken. Sunghoon may have had a different mother than me, but he was my blood, my brother. What I wanted to do at first, darling is killing you. Exactly in the same painful way Hwang killed Sunghoon. Choke the life out of you, watch you struggle for air and turn purple, and finish you off with a bullet in your pretty head. But I thought—nah. I thought that making you mine would piss him off way more. So here I am.”

You ignore the anguish brought by Daito’s words, ignore the fear, the disappointment. You knew his offer wasn’t going to be about love, but you certainly did not expect to be a mere pawn in his revenge. You ignore, too, the tears pricking your eyes. You ignore the way Hyunjin was yours, once, and you, his. 

“He doesn’t care about me anymore,” you respond, making big efforts to keep your voice calm and not sound like a sad little girl. “He chose his… His other life. You marrying me wouldn’t piss him off nearly as much as you think it would.”

“That’s where I think you’re wrong, darling.” Daito’s smirk is back, but he pours himself a shot and one for you, too. “I know for a fact that it will fucking destroy him. But, you don’t have to give me an answer now. I’d rather you think about it.”

“Are you going to go to my parents with this?” you ask Daito. “If you do, they’ll say yes. There is too much for them to benefit from our union… What you have, in Tokyo, in Osaka… The business. If you go to them, we’ll have to get married.” 

Daito sighs and gets up from his chair after looking at the time on his watch. In the club, you hear Chan on the mic announcing his last track for the evening, but inviting people to keep partying after his set is done. Daito bends over just a little, just to look at your face from up close, and he pushes your hair behind your ear.

“We’ll have to get married the same way that Hwang boy has to get married to the Kim girl,” Daito says to you, his voice merely a whisper. “Which is not at all. You’re always in control of your narrative, darling. I won’t bring you into a loveless marriage by force. Do I think we could make a good pair? Yes. Do I want to see Hwang’s face when I put a ring on your finger? Fuck yes. Let him imagine the wedding night and honeymoon that follows. But you can always choose otherwise, dear. Remember that.” 

Daito winks at you and offers you one last smirk before turning away and exiting the room. Your eyes land on the bottle of limoncello, which he left on the table, and you don’t bother pouring any in a glass—you drink it straight from the bottle. 

Out of habit when you’re nervous, you pull out your phone. First, you notice a text from Jisung, accompanied by a picture—it’s him, Felix, and Changbin downstairs, at the bar, apparently having the time of their lives. Your friend is asking you ‘please come join us! it’ll be fun’, but you really, really don’t feel like it right now. So you encourage Jisung to keep having his fun but scroll further into the lists of text conversations. 

There was one rule to be respected with Hyunjin, at all times—to keep zero evidence of the other on your devices. To add to that, even aside from being with you, Hyunjin is the kind of guy that changes his phone number every month or so, for safety. And changes his actual phone, every other month, too, for additional safety—he has to be invisible. But you cheated that rule. He exists on your phone. He exists on your phone as the last text he ever sent you, a day before the breakup. 

Hyunjin: love you. can’t wait to see you. i’ll bring peach iced tea next time, i promise 

But the next time you had seen him after this, there had been no iced tea, no love. You remember the way the sky looked that day. The way Hyunjin looked at you that day. 

You have not tried talking to him since that day. He changes his phone number regularly. He should not exist on your device. But—

you: i know you won’t see this so that’s why i write it. i miss you. i still love you but i wish i didn’t. it would be easier if i didn’t. but i also hate you. i wish i didn't hate you. i really hope you’re happy. with her. with yourself. good luck, hyunjin. i’m sorry i was never enough for you. 

Chan enters the room as you press send on that text—a text that serves no purpose other than purging you of these words that have been haunting you, as you know this phone number no longer exists. 

He smiles at you softly, looking a little tired from his set, a towel around his neck, eyeing you silently.

Today is the day.

You knew that you were in for life. With Hyunjin, with this boy that was never a stranger to you. You knew that no matter the chaos, no matter the hardships, he would be it for you, you knew there would be nothing that could take this love away from you. But you also knew better than letting him make any sort of promise to you. You knew better than to let him give you false hope—it has been more than enough to permeate every fiber of your being with him, his presence, his love. The damage was done. It could not be undone. 

But today is the day you get over Hyunjin. As if Daito’s smirk and limoncello had been the reset button on something that you didn’t know could be reset.

As if you understood this now—you will live with the fading memories of Hyunjin within you forever. But you will live.

Chan entered the private lounge a little while after his set, after washing up quickly apparently and seeing Daito roam around the club. 

“Nice set,” you tell him as he dries his wavy hair with a gray towel. “People really went wild.”

“Makes me feel alive, to be honest.” Chan accepts the compliment humbly, with a shy smile, dipping his head a little. “It goes both ways, you know. I feed the crowd and they feed me… otherwise, it just doesn’t work.” 

You lean against the wall, not far from the window, where the party is still going strong despite the end of Chan’s set. You try to find the boys near the bar area, but can’t decide if this group of people apparently dancing the macarena to this intense EDM beat is them or not… 

“Right,” you concur with a nod, twisting your neck to stare at Chan as he grabs the limoncello bottle, and the glasses, and goes to sit on the couch in the corner of the room, away from the large window. Away from you. “Oh, feel free to help yourself to my delicious homemade limoncello from the Amalfi Coast, Channie boy.” 

You see him suppress a smile and look away as he licks the liquor off his lips. “I love this limoncello. This was my reward, by the way,” he reveals to you after drinking two consecutive shots in record time. “For giving Daito some time with you. Did he make the offer to you?”

“He did.” In the end, you’re pretty sure that it’s them dancing the macarena and making fools of themselves—but also gathering a crowd around them. So you walk away and join Chan on the couch, watching him pour you a shot. 

“And what did you say?”

“Didn’t say anything. He didn’t want an answer. Said I should think about it.”

“He wouldn’t be a bad husband to you, wouldn’t hurt you,” Chan assures, throwing the towel away on a chair as he’s done with it. “And if you refuse his offer, he won’t hold it against you either, no resentment.”

“But it’s kind of messed up, isn’t it?” you point out, ditching the glass to drink too much limoncello straight from the bottle once more. “That he just wants to use me?”

Chan chuckles at that and you can’t decide if you’re pissed off or if you think he's particularly hot when he laughs like this. But that might just be the liquor getting to your head, or the smell of his cologne. 

“You’d be using him just as much as he’d be using you,” he points out. “That’s marriage right there, baby girl.” 

Your breathing halts a little at the use of the pet name and yet, you feel a pleasant warmth spreading to your gut and at the back of your neck from it. It’s the way it sounded in his voice, too. Like it belonged there, in his mouth. In your ears.

“Don’t you want to hurt him the way he hurt you? Hwang?” Chan turns to you, his body facing you fully on the couch. 

Do you want to hurt him? The idea is… not unpleasant, but it doesn’t sit right with you. You shake your head.

“No. I just… I want to keep going, I’m just… I’m just scared to forget him, you know? I’m—I should want to forget him, but I'm terrified and—” 

You gather yourself before you actually start crying and avoid Chan’s eyes by drinking some more, but he takes the bottle from your hand to drink, too. And maybe to prevent you from blacking out from alcohol poisoning. 

“You will forget him, it’s part of it. But you’ll remember him in other ways. That’s also part of it.” 

You don’t really know why you feel compelled to pour your heart open to this stranger—or is he not a stranger anymore? You want to stop, you don’t want him to know the ways your heart has broken. 

But then Chan tells you about this girl. The girl he fell in love with. They loved each other very deeply, but it turned out that he loved her more than she loved him. And it had not worked out. Your heart aches for him—this is what happened to you and Hyunjin. His love and yours didn't match.

“Sometimes I forget how it felt to kiss her,” he tells you, his voice barely a whisper, so low that you have to lean towards him to hear him over the music, despite being upstairs, in this room. “You were the first girl I kissed since her. I lied to you. It’s not because I’m scared of your ex—I’m scared that if I kiss you again, touch you again, I’ll forget her for good. Her body, how it felt. Sometimes I do forget things. The way she kissed me. The next day, I remember her smile when she ate raspberry ice cream, her favorite.”

You feel honored by the confession and humbled, too. And a little sad. You did not expect to relate to Chan this way. It also gives you hope—that maybe, there is a future for you. Maybe. 

“You’re the first boy I kissed since him,” you admit, your cheeks flushing instantly, but you do not look away, this time, and you don’t flinch when he takes your hand in yours after putting the limoncello away. 

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” he says, his thumb tracing circles on the top of your hand. His skin is warm, it feels nice. “But I mean, also, I’m pretty sure he’d kill me if he found out I even dared lay my eyes on you…” 

“He won’t find out. He doesn’t have to find out.” You take a deep breath.

Today is the day you get over Hyunjin. Not in the way you thought you would. You didn’t think that getting over him would mean remembering him better, his kisses, the weight of his body on top of yours, his voice in your ears. His thumb tracing circles on your hand. You didn’t think it could be like that. 

“Will you kiss me again?” you ask Chan. He doesn’t hesitate to pull you closer to him, but he doesn’t kiss you just yet—his face hovers over yours, his citrus breath making you dizzy, his lips inviting. “Will you help me remember him, and I help you remember her?” 

A slight nod from Chan before his mouth finds yours. The scent of his cologne is so strong you can almost taste it—masculine, intriguing. His skin is still warm and damp from the quick shower he took after his set, and you let your hands run on any exposed part of it—his arms, his neck, the back of it. 

Chan’s hands are already making their way between your legs, finding the lace of your panties. You moan into his mouth, wasting no time closing your fists in his hair, pulling him even closer. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, he doesn’t love you nor do you love him. Maybe you could love him someday—not the way you loved Hyunjin, no. A different way, a little less prismatic, less… consuming. But still. Tonight isn’t about that. Tonight is about remembering and forgetting all at once.

“Is it me or are you a little wet, baby girl?” Chan whispers into your mouth before kissing it whole again, his mouth exploring you, teasing your lips. “Fuck, you’re smooth, too…” 

He’s pushed your panties to the side to let his fingers tickle your folds, rubbing them softly but intently. You’re definitely not not wet—and you feel pressure and arousal building quicker than it had last time, in his office. Maybe because you’re finally ready to accept the consequences of it. 

“Someone could come in,” you point out, glancing towards the door, your hands leaving Chan’s tousled hair to unzip his ripped jeans. 

“The guys are all busy trying to get girls downstairs, utilizing the fact that they know me to do so,” Chan replies, biting his lip when you manage to pull his pants and boxer briefs down just enough to free his hardening cock. Again—tonight is not about being elaborate. Tonight is just about being. “I told them to leave us alone.”

You whimper—Chan just grazed your entrance with his two fingers, and you can feel your juices coating his digits, making you spread your legs a little more, making you roll your hips to meet his hand harder. 

He whimpers too when you waste no time spitting into your palm to squeeze his cock—it’s smooth, with the tip flushed already. It doesn’t remind you of Hyunjin when you begin stroking him. It doesn’t remind you of Hyunjin either when you thumb his tip, squeezing harder, maybe too hard. 

But it does remind you of Hyunjin when Chan pushes himself on his knees, making you lie down, pulling your panties off you entirely, pushing the skirt of your dress until he can see your pussy, which he stares at with a frown, biting his lip. 

“Everything okay?” you ask, trying to get a grasp of his cock again, which is fully hard by now, but a little out of your reach. “We don’t—”

“Fuck, you’re so pretty,” Chan cuts you off, diving into you, burying his face into your neck to kiss it, to lick it, to graze his teeth over your skin there.

This, yes. Yes, this makes you remember Hyunjin, and you cry out a loud moan—too loud for a public place anyway—your hands clutching at Chan’s shirt, trying to pull him even closer. You feel him, his cock, pressed against your mons. His mouth on your neck, but you want more, more, more. 

“Tell me what to do,” you moan into Chan’s ear, your hips rolling to rub yourself against his impressive length. Fuck, he feels so good against you like that—it feels like your whole body is coming alive. “So you remember her.”

“Kiss me softly. Really softly. Just kiss me. I miss when she kissed me.” 

So you do that. You kiss him, a slow kiss, your hands underneath his shirt, feeling the warmth from his skin, feeling the ocean and the storms within him. Chan’s hips are meeting yours, his cock rubbing against your soaked pussy, eliciting pleasures in ways you didn’t remember they could even exist. 

You kiss him as softly as you can, making each meeting of your mouth with his as meaningful as you can, grazing your tongue on his lips, on his teeth, letting him kiss you back when he needs to. 

You reach between your two bodies again, your hand finding his cock again, squeezing him, rubbing him. Chan fucks your hand, fucks it good. You look down, trying to catch a glimpse of it. Not to remember or forget, just to see him leak precum, to see what he looks like when he throbs with your hand around him. 

His weight on you, his mouth back in your neck. You close your eyes to remember the way Hyunjin made you feel his love. 

You squeeze his cock harder, making sure it’s nestled perfectly into your hand. He could cum right now, this soon—you feel it, and you want it. But he pulls away from you a little, his face leaving your neck, his weight retreating from you for good. 

He takes your wrist in his hand and you let go of his cock, finally getting a peek at the precum leaking out of it as he’s getting rid of his pants and underwear for good. He kisses it, your wrist, the hand that he just fucked a little, his cock standing hard and wet, waiting for you.  

This. The way Hyunjin sought his own taste on you, in you, always. You can tell that Chan senses something, senses that you like this, because he parts his lips open and licks your fingers slowly, his eyes into yours. The sensation of his smooth tongue on your skin makes your eyes roll at the back of your head a little. Fuck—he’s good. He licks you slowly, each finger, sucking on each of them, driving you crazy.

His free hand moves between your legs—you jump when he touches your sensitive pussy, but moan when he presses three fingers near your entrance, coating his fingers, teasing you. 

“So wet, baby girl,” Chan purrs, taking a sharp inhale of air. “Fuck, I bet your pussy tastes so good…” 

He moves on to your clit, grazing it lazily, watching you watch him with these eyes of him—focused, alert, carnal. You melt into the couch, your back falling deeper and deeper into the seats, unable to stop the moans from escaping your lips. 

It doesn’t take long before you’re a sweaty, panting mess—and all that Chan is doing is rubbing three fingers between your legs. But it’s the way he does it… It’s the limoncello, the music playing outside of this room, it’s the memory of Hyunjin fucking his love into you. It’s Chan’s cologne, his sweet voice filling your head with the ocean breeze and good beats. 

When he pulls his hand away, you sigh, missing the contact already—but a different contact makes you moan again. Chan positions his head between your thighs, leaving a trail of wet kisses on the way to your soaked folds, not waiting too long before parting you open with one expert motion of his hand, and kissing you there, too. You feel his lips tease your pussy, you watch him as he kisses and licks and tastes you.

“Please,” you beg, and you had promised yourself you would never beg a man, but this is different. Maybe this is meant to make you remember Hyunjin, too. 

Chan lays his tongue flat against you then moves his head to lap at you, to drink you whole. He moans and grunts as he swallows your taste. He twirls his tongue all over before he licks his way back up, pressing his mouth against your clit. You shudder, your eyelids fluttering. Yes, yes. Fuck, you can just feel how wet you are, and Chan is licking and sucking and teasing your clit. 

You almost cum when, unexpectedly, he pushes not one, but two fingers into your entrance. You gasp, crying out, moaning with your mouth open, bucking your hips to meet his face, his tongue, his fingers. Fuck. He massages your walls, stretching you just a little, curling and twirling his digits inside you as he attempts to find your most sensitive spots. And he does find them, groaning into your pussy as he feels you clench around his fingers—and you almost cum again feeling the vibrations of his voice against you.

You're on your way to heaven when he suddenly retreats for air, his mouth and chin dripping with spit and your juices. Fuck, that sight. That handsome face of his, his intense gaze, the way he licks his lips to taste you some more. “So good, baby girl, fuck—taste yourself, here.” 

And he climbs back to you, to your mouth, where you kiss him the way he had asked you to kiss him before. Slowly, softly, despite the urgency you feel to have him inside of you. 

His mouth tastes like fancy limoncello and like you—the two lace together just perfectly. 

“Please, I need you inside of me,” you beg. And you had promised yourself you would not beg a man ever again. But it’s the limoncello. It’s the taste of your pussy in Chan’s mouth, the memory of sharing lemon sorbet with Hyunjin while watching a sunset over Han River. “Please, please—Channie—”

But you can’t even finish your sentence, you can barely think anyway. Chan kisses you one last time before pulling away, and you watch him take his cock into his hand to guide it near your entrance. This is how you need him for you to remember Hyunjin. Raw, hard. 

Chan’s tip meets you, and then he buries himself inside of you with a feral moan, slumping over you once again to steal kisses from you, to pull your dress down to free your tits. He’s big. He’s big enough that you feel him stretch you as he pushes further into you, his cock hard, his cock so, so good with you around him like this. 

“Oh fuck, fuck, that’s good—” is all he manages, so you give him one of these sweet kisses he likes. He responds by cupping your breast into his free hand and twisting it a little, just enough to make you moan. To make you fuck him from underneath. His other hand is gripping your waist. “Shit, you’re tight but so wet, aren’t you?” 

But he’s stronger than you, and he fucks you from the top. The space is limited on the couch but it doesn’t matter—Chan slams into you one time, two times, three, four, and each time you feel your own juices gush from around his cock, you feel them coat him and you both, you feel pressure building within you.

He fucks you. Hard. Pounding into you unrelentingly, making your back arch, making you forget, making you remember.

Your tits bounce with each thrust, and you can’t stop staring at him, at his mouth—the way he bites his lip when he reaches a particularly deep point inside you, the way his eyelids flutter, too—this makes you remember Hyunjin. The way he couldn’t control himself with you. The way you were his lifeline, his escape, his home all at once. The way you were actually none of these things because he didn’t choose you, in the end. But he always made you feel his love, always fucked it into you. 

“Now tell me, tell me how he used to fuck you, baby girl,” Chan says, his mouth against yours, his cock buried deep inside you. Fuck, this is good. The music, the booze, his cologne. Everything. “Tell me exactly.” 

“I was his slut and I liked it,” you tell Chan in between moans, your nails sinking into his back, your hips rolling to fuck yourself onto his length while he seems to want to have a conversation with you. “Fuck me hard, Chan, please—when you cum, you don’t have to pull out, please, make me feel—” You can’t say it out loud. You can’t, but you won’t—but if Chan blows his load inside of you tonight, you might just remember Hyunjin perfectly, for a few seconds at least, and feel his love again.

Your request seems to please Chan—almost too much—he groans against you and pulls out of your dripping pussy, only to roll you on your hands and knees, shoving your head downwards. 

“His slut, huh?” you hear Chan say between his teeth, his tip back against your pussy again. He rubs it all over, teasing you, teasing himself at the same time, too. “You sure are a pretty little slut, baby girl—I’ll fill your cute little cunt.” 

And Chan sinks into you again, not letting you ease into it, not letting you adjust to his size from this position. You cry out into the couch, your face against the leather, Chan’s hands keeping you in place at the back of your neck and on your lower back, holding your wrist there. He fucks you relentlessly. Yes. Yes. Hyunjin. His soft hair, his lips on you, all over you.

The music, the crowd, the nightclub, the feeling of booze in your veins. Hyunjin. His fast car, the way he fucked you in it, the way he kissed you in it. Hyunjin, Hyunjin. 

You need more, you need to feel him. You reach out behind you to grab the hand that Chan keeps on your neck to bring it to the front of it, inviting him to choke you.

“What is it, love?” he grunts, rutting against you, fucking you harder than you thought he would, but reveling in the sensation, in the way his cock massages your walls, hits your deepest point. “Need me to hold you there, too?”

"Please."

Chan gives a cautious squeeze around your neck, and that’s it for you.  Your body goes limp and you clench around him, your voice filling the room. Yes, now you feel him. You feel Hyunjin, you remember the way he would watch you turn red under his touch, the way it made him cum when you couldn’t breathe. And then it made you cum when he filled you with his love. 

“Oh fuck, you are a slut—” Chan’s relentless fucking is becoming erratic, and you know he’s close. 

He chokes you harder. You clench harder, too—fuck. You close your eyes, basking in the memory of this love that you lost. 

Chan grips your waist harder, slamming you into him as hard as he slams into you. 

“Shit, I’m gonna—” 

“Don’t pull out, don’t—” But your voice is a breathless gasp. You need this. You need to feel it. 

Chan cums hard, his cock pulsing inside of you, painting your walls white, growling into the room as his pace slows down. His is hand still around your neck, still squeezing you. You feel dizzy and it hurts you and you love it. You help him ride his high, meeting his thrusts halfway, and he rewards you by choking you a little harder, eliciting a few raspy moans out of you. 

You are full of cum. So full of it, and Chan is fucking it deeper inside of you, cock still throbbing with aftershocks. 

The hand that was on your waist makes its way in between your legs, where Chan finds your clit, rubbing it with three fingers in circular motions, pressing hard against it. 

You try to moan and you can’t. You try to breathe, and you can’t. 

You were just a girl when you saw Hyunjin for the first time. Innocent, foolish. You were still foolish when you fell in love with him, and you might be foolish, still, for loving him to this day. Despite it all. 

This is how it felt when Hyunjin fucked you—like he was a fire and you a forest, like he was an ocean and you the shore. Like you were the only thing in the world that mattered, even if that was just an illusion. Like he was conquering you, like you were the light and he was darkness, running and running to bask in your luminescence, but the light evaded him at the last second. So he fucked his darkness inside you. So he filled you with his love. 

You can’t breathe, but you cum hard around Chan’s cock, your voice turned into gasps and throaty, ugly noises. This is the first time you cum since Hyunjin. This is the first time you remember him for real, too, since that day. 

You gasp for air when Chan releases you as he fucks you slowly until your orgasm dies out. This will leave bruises. Fine by you—more to remember. More to forget. 

“Fuck—” Chan begins, out of breath, but he just groans when he painfully pulls out of your still sensitive pussy. Your throat feels sore and you like it. Your pussy feels sore, too, and you like that as well. 

You both collapse on the couch, Chan pulling you against him in the best approximation of spooning the limited space allows. You feel his cock, wet and softening, against the small of your back. You feel his cum inside of you, some of it dripping out slowly, some of it sticking in. This, too, helps you remember Hyunjin.

Chan kisses your shoulder. “You okay, baby girl?”

You nod, putting your hand over the one he has on your side as he gently caresses your breast. “Yes,” you start, swallowing tears, looking away, staring at the purple lighting on the ceiling instead. “You?”

“I’m all good, sweet thing.” He kisses your shoulder again. “Do you remember, now? I do. It feels good.”

“I do too.” You look at him then, let him see the tears in your eyes—it doesn’t matter, because he has them, too. Two broken hearts understanding each other. “Thank you, Channie.” 

This time, it’s your lips he kisses, and you indulge him in one of the slow, soft kisses he requested, for you’re pretty sure this is the last time you ever kiss him. “Thank you, baby girl.” 

You never want to forget this. 

Despite it all, you feel it in your heart, now.  Hyunjin is yours, and you are his—no matter what. 

Hyunjin jerks awake, almost falling off his bed. Instead, he finds himself sitting in it, one foot on the floor, his other leg curled up under him. He can’t remember the nightmare that woke him up this time—and soon realizes that it wasn’t a nightmare at all that did so, it was his phone. 

He cannot see what the sky looks like. It is dark in his bedroom, and the curtains are covering the windows. 

But he’s still kind of drunk and kind of high from when he passed out. As he tries to sit normally in his bed, he realizes that he’s still wearing yesterday’s clothes, that he smells awful and feels even worse. 

He suppresses a bout of nausea as he grabs his phone to look at the screen. A private number is calling him—nothing new. Nothing to fear, as so few people have this phone number, which he changes constantly anyway, so he just picks up the call, hoping it will be worth it. Hoping, maybe, that it won't—so that he gets to jump into his car and go shoot the motherfucker that woke him up without valid reason.

“The fuck you want?” Hyunjin mumbles into his phone, rubbing his eyes, tentatively getting out of bed to make his way to the bathroom, just in case he does vomit. 

“Did I interrupt something, Hyunjaah?” 

The world collapses around Hyunjin. Sunghoon? 

Hyunjin might be high but he isn’t crazy either—he would recognize this voice anywhere. The voice that belongs to his childhood friend, the only person to ever call him like that, this stupid nickname that he gave him when they were just boys. Innocent, or almost innocent—Hyunjin doesn’t think either of them ever truly were that. Innocent. 

Sunghoon, who Hyunjin killed. 

At least, Hyunjin makes it to the toilet in time to throw up—he falls to the floor, his upper body jerking as the sour taste invades his mouth, his nose, prickles his eyes. But it’s just bile—he can’t even remember the last time he ate anyway. It’s just his body rejecting the last of the booze he drank to make himself fall asleep. This is the only way he can sleep anymore—mixing pills with booze and jerking off to porn a few times until he does pass out in his cum-stained clothes and bedsheets, a film of sweat covering his body. 

Hyunjin’s stomach churns a few more times and he heaves each time, but nothing else will come out for now, so he wipes his mouth as he lies down on the cool tile of his bathroom, thankful that Min-jeong is away visiting her parents for the weekend, thankful that he is alone in here—

Except for the phone, still on call with his dead best friend, just next to him. Hyunjin puts it against his ear again, only to hear a burst of laughter. 

“Man, people did say Sunghoonie and I always sounded the same on the phone, but I didn’t expect to have this much of an effect on you, Hwang,” the man tells him, and Hyunjin coughs on the bitter aftertaste of his own vomit. “Not that I’ll apologize—it was a good joke.” 

Hyunjin frowns, blinded by the lighting in the room, wondering if he should text Minho, on guard downstairs, to come check on him. To come check if he’s going insane, if he’s got alcohol poisoning. 

But then it clicks all in place.

“Daito?” The sudden realization hits Hyunjin like a ton of bricks and he sits up, leaning against the wall behind him. “Daito? How—”

“The how I got your number doesn’t matter, boy, it’s what I’m going to do with it that will. You see, I thought I’d touch base with you, see how you’ve been, since, you know. You’ve murdered my baby brother, broke up with your girl, got engaged to another… So much to talk about, Hwang, don’t you think?” 

Hyunjin is thirsty, but he can’t move—the simple act of sitting up was enough to make him want to throw up again. 

“Not that you asked, but I am doing okay, thank you,” Daito goes on before Hyunjin manages to come up with an answer. He knows he should hang up, he knows he shouldn’t be speaking to his worst enemy on the phone—but how exactly did Daito get this number? “I’m in Melbourne right now, partying a little… I met a girl, she’s quite nice. A little bit on the slutty side, but some people like them just this way, you know?” 

Something in Kangjeon Daito’s intonation just then makes Hyunjin’s heart skip a few beats. Or maybe that’s just the oxycodone from earlier. 

“What do you want, Daito?” Hyunjin asks painfully, wondering if he’s going to throw up again, have a heart attack, or just stop breathing, maybe. “Why are you telling me all of this?” From a tactical standpoint, telling Hyunjin that he was out of the country was a very bad move...

“I just wanted you to hear a little something, Hwang. I’m so fucking tempted to put you on face call, just to see your face when you do hear it.”

“Hear what? The fuck is this, man?” Hyunjin knows he deserves whatever blow Daito is about to deliver to him. He knew it the moment walked away from Sunghoon’s body. That there would be retaliation, consequences. But it was worth it because it was for you. The only thing that mattered in this ugly fucking life. You. There was not a price too high for you. 

“Just listen, boy. I recorded that shit from outside the door—wasn’t going to ruin their moment, really. But that shit was so hot it made me hard—fuck, I almost want to say I understand why you killed my brother over her… He was a psycho, we all knew that. And she’s… wow.” 

This—all of this—is enough to sober up Hyunjin almost immediately. He gasps, trying to calm his heart in his ribcage, pushing himself off the ground to stand. He needs to lean on the counter a little, but he manages to stay up—

And then he hears it. Music playing in the background, distant… 

And you. 

The world collapses around Hyunjin.

“Please, I need you inside of me, please, please—Channie—” Moans, whimpers. Brushing noises, grunts, too—a man. 

The man that is fucking you. The man that is making you moan in Hyunjin’s ear. The man that then, after a while of defiling you, after a concert moans, of wet fleshy sounds, the noises of his cock inside of your pussy, says: “Oh fuck, fuck, that’s good—shit, you’re tight but so wet, aren’t you?” 

Whatever recording Daito had been playing stops abruptly. Hyunjin expects him to say something, anything, but he just hangs up. 

He should have known. He should have known that you would move on, that you would let someone in again. He knew that a woman like you wouldn't stay alone for very long. But his world is collapsing. But his heart is breaking all over again. But rage is rising within him as he remembers the man's voice, the way he was talking to you while he fucked you.

Everybody knows that the Hwang boy likes to play with fire.  But he never finished painting that sunset for you. But the flame had gone out.

Hyunjin stares at the screen of his phone just one second before calling Lee Minho. 

“Boss?” Minho’s voice sounds sleepy—no doubt that he just woke up to take the call. 

“Get everything ready. Jeongin too. Get a jet. We’re going to Australia and I want to leave as soon as possible.”

Everybody knows that the Hwang boy likes to play with fire— And the flame had been reignited, and the flame was burning brighter than ever, scorching, advancing like a wildfire, hungry. 

a/n: hello everyone! I simply wanted to say that 1, I am sorry this took so long to be up. There has been a lot going on for me, and I found it really hard to write this particular chapter. But I tried my best. I understand it's quite different and clashes with the rest of the series, but I hope you found little parts in it that you like.

As always, thank you for your love and support, and feedback. To people who reblog my works to add feedback onto it: a very special thank you to you. I read everything and do my best to respond to everyone. Thank you for reading my silly little fic. <3

Light: Can you just TRY and see things from my perspective?

Misa: *gets on knees*

L: *crouches down*

Y/n: *lays on the floor*

Light: I'm gonna write your name in my Death note.

WOW I CANT BELIEVE NAMJOON AND WALE INVENTED POLITICAL SPEECHES

he's working through a few things

I might cry

In response to Slate's article on the possibility having non-heteromative team in figure skating (particularly, ice dance and pairs), Oniceperspective shared a glimpse of Gabriella Papadakis (FRA) and Madison Hubbell (USA) working on their same-sex program. You can see how they switch the leading figure between them.

You can see them trying out lifts in this video.

The rest is on Instagram here:

Holy shit. I never expected Zach to be in huggbees video. And then this picture completed it. Whatever this is. *Chef's kiss* or *past assembly line worker's kiss* 😂

ref

reposting this from twitter bc it's making me lose my mind

Literally nothing prompted this. This idea just popped into my brain and I dropped everything to record it.

Gt collective prompt game.

Ft. Tiny Phil and Human Techno.

Content warning: language, death/killing mention, angst

———

It's a harsh world

It's a harsh, harsh world, and Philza Minecraft will do anything to survive.

In this harsh world for him— A Tiny—and he'll use whatever resources he can. Because he has to survive.

...

Philza Minecraft is a tiny that has lived for a long time. Far longer than the normal amount, actually. It's not because of tinies has longer lifespans than humans, No. Actually, there are recent research proving that a tiny has a bit shorter lifespan than a human. But Philza has lived far longer than a tiny and a human's lifespan.

And he owes it to his lover.

"Lady Death" people call her. Whispers bouncing along the cities of travelers— humans and tinies alike— he heard.

"Lady Death has fallen in love with a mortal" the folktale whispered to children said. "The mortal took the love, and swore to her that he will give her everything" It continues on "Lady Death rejected it, Death doesn't desire worldly things. Death has seen things come and go. But there is something that Death desires." The folktale echoed, and Philza knows the continuation "The mortal then was gifted two things, with one of them being 500 years for life. And then Lady Death asked the mortal—"

"Phil?" a voice echoed. Snapping Philza's reminiscense. Phil looked up, and was met with a concerned face "You okay?"

"Yeah, Techno. I'm fine" Phil replied.

Technoblade. A travelling warrior who helped him when he was hunted. It was a frightening situation and though Phil was sure he could escape by himself— especially since he has that thing— he still appreciates the help.

After that incident, Techno and Phil travelled together. They'll travel together for the span of maybe three months. They were heading the same way— with Techno getting a yearly invitation to the neighbouring kingdom colloseum and Phil is Phil, travelling wherever his feet brought him, and it just so happens that he was heading towards the neighbouring kingdom.

They got along great. there was this another time where Phil was almost got taken away by a bear, and Techno saved him— again, a frightening situation where Phil is sure he can get out of it by himself (he carries a sword around for a reason) but were nonetheless grateful at Techno for saving him.

As for Techno, when Phil asked why Techno still bother travelling with him, Techno gave him a simple "Why not?" and continue on eating the freshly-cooked bear meat. Phil laughed it off with a "That mindset will cause you trouble one day, mate"

Of course, Phil isn't being a total hindrance or anything, Phil has a vast knowledge of things in general. There are times when he knew that a certain source of water is poisonous or times when he knew exactly what to do when they saw a traveler got bitten by a poisonous snake(Techno got bit once, actually)

They got along great. Techno doesn't seem to mind or care that Phil is a tiny. He cares for Phil. Several nights were spent with them telling stories to each other— which Phil had plenty— and several mornings were spent with them laughing and relaxing around small animals.

But again. It's a harsh world.

Techno and Phil lives in a harsh world where it's very possible for strangers to try and kill them

And said situation is happening now.

It's getting dark. The sun is gleefully moving down its path, waiting for and cares for no one.

It's getting dark, and two travellers— with one of them being a tiny— meet another pair of travellers.

"It's getting dark. Why don't we rest here for the night?" Offered one of the opposing pair of travelers to Techno and Phil. They agreed, It'll be safer to stay in groups, afterall.

Techno and Phil didn't know, that the decision will cost them greatly.

It was so sudden, the moment the two "travellers" noticed their guards are down, they attacked. One of them locking Techno's movement and the other trapping Phil in a wooden cage while helping the other one locking Techno down.

The situation got ugly very, very quickly

Phil isn't listening to the two "travellers" anymore. His mind is digging up memories. Memories from 232 years ago. Memories from when he first died.

Philza Minecraft died in the hands of hunters. In a cage.

No. Fuck no. Phil thought. I can't die here. I can't— I shouldn't— I still have to—

Philza looked around. It's dark. Dark and wet. It had just hit Phil's mind that it had rained. Before him, Techno is struggling from the hold. The two people who tried to take them are distracted from trying to keep Techno in his place, including the one that's in charge of Phil's cage.

The people had taken Phil's sword, but they hadn't taken anything else from him. The thought left Phil grinning. A foolish decision, really. He's tiny, sure, but that doesn't mean he doesn't carry a hidden blade around.

The wooden cage is normally a hassle to cut, but it's nothing compared to when he was locked in a steel cage centuries ago. The wooden cage was a breeze compared to that.

Thus, Philza Minecraft broke free

Philza Minecraft broke free, and spreaded out his wings.

Philza Minecraft broke free, spreaded out his wings, and looked at each of the human's face. Including Techno's face.

A shine of awe sparked in his eyes, his mouth is left half-open in shock. But most of all, he had the expression of a pleading man. Wanting to be helped.

—but before that, let me tell you a story.

A folktale passed around the world for generations. A story about Lady Death.

A story you have yet to finish reading.

Lady Death gifted a mortal whom she loved two gifts, with one of them being 500 years for life, and one of them was wings.

Lady Death then asked the mortal "Can you live my 'life' for me?" the mortal who was madly in love with Death agreed, and Death gave the mortal a part of her soul, hoping to experience the 'life' she has never experienced.

—that mortal was Philza Minecraft.

That's why Philza shouldn't die.

That's why Philza will do anything to survive.

That's why Philza only spared his two and a half month-long friend a glance, and flew away. Philza had a chance to help him. But he will not take it. Not if it risked the life he had to share with Death.

Afterall, what's two and a half month to a centuries old being?

...

Behind Philza, Techno was left alone. Alone with the two people who were trying to take him.

Alone with the memory of Philza, asking him why Techno had still bothered taking him along. "Why not" Techno had answered. And with the back figure of a flying Philza, Techno had realized what did Philza meant when he said "That mindset will cause you trouble one day"

———

Prompt: "The giant was always the one who saves the tiny whenever they're in danger. But now the tiny gets the chance to save their giant friend from danger".

Masterlist (If you want to read more of my writings! :D)

who knew these jurassic park rejects could be cute

People describe shoebill storks as being scary or ugly birds and always use one image to make their point. When in every other photo they look like this

More like shoebill dork

Wooden Ships and Obscure Disney Films

The RLS Warrior was three days out of Montressor, sails full of the solar wind, and her commander closed his eyes and felt the Etherium around him.

For a number of reasons – not least his old ties with Admiral Amelia – Jim had been heavily involved with the design of the ship, as well as the tradeoffs involved. For all that he wasn’t even twenty-five, yet, the ship was built as much to his ideas as to those of anyone else in the Navy, and after three days he was really starting to get a feel for her.

And he was proud of the work.

The yards had done right by them, and no mistake. She sailed the winds as sweetly as the old Legacy, and if that was partly due to her studdingsails to give her extra sail area – they’d calculated it out a dozen times, even getting Doppler involved, and every time it had come out that the sails were worth the hassle. And the engines sang a fine note, while the treated timbers making up her hull were finely seasoned and showed no sign of weakness or wear.

“Captain?” a nervous voice said, then the voice’s owner corrected herself. “I mean – Commander?”

“Captain is preferred,” Jim replied. “Can’t have more than one captain on a ship.”

Then he opened his eyes, and grinned at the young woman who was nervously clinging to the ropes around the mainmast crow’s nest. “But since there doesn’t seem to be anyone else up here, you can call me Jim if you want.”

“I couldn’t do that!” the woman said, astonished, and her ears flicked down. “You’re – you’re the Captain! And you’re a hero of the Second Procyon War…”

Jim chuckled.

“Midshipwoman Brooks, ten years ago I was a complete tearaway,” he said. “So, did our other midshipmen and women put you up to coming to ask the scary captain about his past? Or is this you personally with a question?”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind either way, I’m just curious. And come on, sit – it’s good you’re comfortable in the shrouds, but there’s no reason to hang there while we’re talking.”

“Right,” Brooks said, still sounding nervous, and clambered into the lookout spot.

For a long moment, there was silence.

“It was just me,” she said. “I was… I suppose I wondered about something, and – I wanted to ask, but it feels like a silly question now.”

“Take it from me, sometimes a silly question is just the question that needs asking,” Jim replied. “Or answering.”

The Warrior shivered a little as they came about, turning six degrees port and adjusting their vector four down as the helmsman pointed them at a different star.

“Well-” the midshipwoman said. “I… why are we on a ship like this?”

Jim raised an eyebrow, something he’d been practising, and Brooks flushed.

“I don’t mean that as a criticism,” she added. “It’s a good ship, of course! I’m just thinking of…”

“The ironclads?” Jim replied.

“The ironclads,” Brooks agreed. “I know they were important in the Procyon war. I also know the Procyons lost, but… the ironclads were so difficult to damage. It feels like even sailing ships like these is a strange choice, let alone building new ones.”

Jim nodded, doing a quick assessment of the girl.

She was… definitely less delinquent than he’d been. She sounded curious, and… realistically speaking, this wasn’t going to stay a secret for long anyway.

It was his decision, and… in this case, he was going to nurture the young officer.

“You’re not wondering anything that we didn’t,” he said. “I was heavily involved in the discussions, actually… perhaps we will end up building the same kind of ironclads as the Procyons were building – I wouldn’t be involved in those decisions, because they’re going on right now and I’m not exactly there.”

He stood, and looked out over the sails of the Warrior. They glowed with inner fire, both directly propelling the ship by catching the wind and also providing the power that let her engines burn at high power for long periods of time.

“I’ve already given you the answer,” he added, glancing at Brooks. “Your academy scores show you’re a bright young woman, midshipwoman – what do you think it is?”

Brooks frowned, and her tail twitched as she thought.

“I think…” she began. “You said… the same kind of ironclads. What other kinds of ironclads are there?”

Jim patted the royal mast, the highest of the four huge cylinders making up Warrior’s mainmast.

“You’re sailing on one,” he answered.

Brooks looked confused, then stood up herself to look down at the sails.

“...how?” she asked. “Ironclads – they don’t look like this!”

“What makes an ironclad?” Jim asked. “It’s the iron, that’s what… experiments showed that it’s actually helpful to have the iron backed by wood, that makes it more resistant to attack. So that’s what Warrior is. She’s a test ship, all right – an ironclad cruiser, with the masts and sails to travel long distances on patrol in a way the Procyon War ironclads never could, and with armour that’s almost as strong.”

He tilted his head, a little. “Midshipwoman, have you ever used a solar sailer?”

Brooks looked a little thrown by the sudden change of topic.

“...no,” she admitted. “I’ve sailed a cutter before, but those have a proper keel and mast… solar sailers seem too dangerous to me. They’re not much more than a board, an engine and a sail, aren’t they?”

“That’s right,” Jim agreed. “And they’re very able to manoeuvre, in ways you can’t even manage by just welding an engine directly to a board. The key is the sail – you’ve done vectors in your classes, the key point here is that you can combine the vectors from the sail and the engine, and the transverse resistance from the sail if you push it to go in a direction against the one it’s meant to go. You can pull some incredibly tight turns.”

Brooks was frowning, clearly processing that information.

“That sounds like it’s personal experience, Captain,” she said. “You’ve done that?”

“I’ve done both,” Jim agreed. “And I’ve captained wooden ships against ironclads… ironclads struggle to turn fast, because they only have differential thrust, and they struggle to move quickly as well. And the former is what let us run circles around them… and strategically, they were dependent on covert support ships carrying fuel. Do you think the Warrior is the same?”

Brooks shook her head.

“No,” she replied, then frowned. “So you’re saying that… the sails are an advantage?”

“They might not be forever,” Jim conceded. “Maybe some day all our line warships will have to be full ironclads, where even the risk of mast damage is too much. But I think even then there’ll be a place for cruisers to have sails, for some years longer.”

He clapped her on the shoulder. “And maybe we’ll both see that day – but right now, if we ran into an ironclad from the Procyon Wars, I’m sure we’d clean their clock. Because this is the finest ship and crew I’ve yet seen, and I’ve seen a few crews.”

Then he looked slightly awkward. “Admittedly, my first one had about ninety percent of it be pirates…”

“Pardon?” Brooks asked. “Was that during the war?”

“Before,” Jim replied. “During my misspent youth. Though… you may as well tell the others this, Miss Midshipwoman – I think I’m going to have all of you young officers, and perhaps the rest of the crew, have at least one go each on a solar sailer. I believe there’s four in one of the holds, and it’s a useful skill… once you’ve flown one, not much else can scare you.”

The feline midshipwoman looked at her captain, still not sure how to take the oddly informal conversation.

“Should I be worried?” she asked.

Jim shrugged.

“That’s more BEN’s department than mine,” he admitted. “He flat out refuses to come up to the crow’s nest, though, so I’ll have to ask him on deck…”

Since I think tumblr will enjoy this, please enjoy my little guys going on an adventure after I mistakenly left my game open for an hour

me, watching naruto for the first time: ok a normal shonen anime totally mainstream

episode 3: ha you thought

me: