Dairyu, you, Heejin and Eunbi go on a cute date.
Another week later.
Dairyu woke up in a bed that wasn’t his, to scents that weren’t familiar. No cherries, no green tea. Just oranges and vanilla.
He started to sit up and found arms around him — not Sakura’s.
“Go back to sleep, baby.”
The voice was husky, unhurried, unbothered by the hour. He turned his head. Under a short dark bob, a pair of gemstone-brown eyes looked up at him — soft, still half-unfocused, the kind of gaze that had no interest in performing wakefulness before it was ready.
He lay back down.
Four days ago.
“The girls and I are going to a concert in Japan. I’ll be gone all week.” Sakura had said it like she was reading off a grocery list. “But don’t let that stop you from having a good time. I’ll call my unnie Eunbi — you can spend the week with her.”
“Sakura. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not? Do you have a crush on her?”
He’d nodded. Flatly. Without any particular attempt to soften it.
Sakura had stared at him for exactly one second before laughing — the real one, wide open, the one she usually kept on a short leash. “Duly noted,” she’d said, wiping the corner of her eye. “Let the best woman win.”
Now.
Eunbi pulled him back into her arms. She was warm and unhurried about it — impossibly soft, her touch careful in the way of someone who understood that ease was something you gave to people, not something you performed at them.
“It’s alright, baby,” she murmured into his shoulder. “I got you.”
She coiled around him and he let himself be held, and somewhere between one breath and the next he was back asleep.
Hours later, they woke up to your call.
You were calling to remind Eunbi about the double date — you, Tsuki, and now Dairyu standing in for Mark. Eunbi surfaced slowly, unwinding from around Dairyu by degrees, and reached for her phone.
“Yes?” she said.
“Noona?” Your voice on the other end went up half a register. She still sounded like sleep itself. “Are you — did you just wake up?”
“I’m awake.” A pause. “Oh, fuck. Breakfast.”
The sound of scrambling.
“I didn’t forget, I just had a late night — I was helping Sakura get to the airport. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” More scrambling. “Twenty. Twenty tops.”
You listened to what sounded like a small domestic emergency unfolding and said, “Okay, noona.”
Heejin smiles at you from the couch as you turn to her.
“I guess you were right,” she teases.
You laugh and say, “i guess that means I win our little wager,”
Heejin smiled, “I suppose it does, so what will it be. My ass or mouth? Since we have the time maybe a bit of both?”
“I want those pretty lips wrapped around me you say,”
Heejin smiles and says, “as you wish.”
She lowers herself between your legs before pulling your sweats down revealing your swollen head. Heejin smiles and says, “all for me?” Before engulfing you in her velvet soft lips.
She wastes no time, slathering your shaft and head with her saliva. You moan as her spit pools from her mouth onto her tits. She smiles around you before bobbing deeper the sounds of glucking and gagging echo through your small shared apartment as she begins to throat you.
“Fuck Heekie I only said a blowjob not a deep throat,” you say but she’s not listening her lust overwhelms her as she constricts her throat muscles around your length she smiles and moans,
“Fill my throat” she encourages, as she stares into your eyes intently. as she bobs along your throat you groan as your balls tighten.
“Fuck Heekie! I’m close” you sigh. Heejin smiles before taking you fully down her throat and resting there. she leaves locked there for what feels like hours, but in reality minutes. her eyes go dark as her lusts speak to her.
“Make him cum!” is all that reverberates through her mind as she uses her throat to get you off.
it’s all too much for you. the first spurt fires into her throat followed by the rest as it pours down her thirsty throat she smiles and says, “Thank you for the meal” when you finally finish unloading inside of her throat.
you groan and say “You are an evil woman,”
Heejin smiles and says, “I try. Now let’s get ready for Eunbi and her boy toy,”
you nod and smile.
You and Heejin arrived first — or thought you had, until the waitress walked you through the restaurant and sat you down at the table directly next to Eunbi and Dairyu, who were already there.
Both of them looked up.
Eunbi laughed. “I probably should have mentioned the reservation wasn’t under my name.”
Heejin absorbed this without missing a beat and redirected the two of you to their table. You slid into the seat across from Dairyu and got your first real look at him.
He wasn’t what you’d pictured when Eunbi said she was borrowing Sakura’s boyfriend. He looked — unremarkable, mostly. Solid. The kind of person your eyes would move past in a crowd. Then he shifted slightly in his seat and you got a sense of the actual size of him, and you revised the assessment.
Heejin spoke first, her voice carrying its usual easy authority. “So. Eunbi — introduce us.”
“This sweetheart is Dairyu.” Eunbi leaned her chin on one hand, smiling with the particular satisfaction of someone holding several cards at once. “He is Sakura’s kinda boyfriend.”
You didn’t manage to keep the expression off your face in time. “What do you mean, kinda?”
“He’s only here for five weeks. They’re making the most of the time they have.”
“That sounds complicated,” Heejin said.
“It isn’t really. They’re feeling each other out. Seeing if it’s worth pursuing past the vacation.” Eunbi said it lightly, like it was simple math.
You turned to Dairyu. “So why are you here with Eunbi-noona instead of Sakura-noona?”
Dairyu, who had been quiet and observant through all of this, finally spoke. “Kura had to go to Japan for a concert. I couldn’t go.”
“Oh,” you and Heejin said, at the same time.
Eunbi’s smile widened. “I might have to steal him, though.”
You stared at her. Heejin tilted her head. “Why?”
“Well.” Eunbi considered Dairyu with the calm assessment of someone appraising something they’d already decided they liked. “He looks a little dull when you first meet him. Naive, maybe. But I assure you — he’s quite charming.”
Dairyu turned to her. “Elaborate.”
“When you first showed up at my door I thought Sakura had sent me a very large, very blank-faced homework assignment.” She smiled at him without any apology in it. “But then we talked for four hours about Digimon. And I noticed that when his brain is going faster than his mouth he gets this little stutter — just for a second, before he catches up to himself.” She paused. “And he spends considerably less time looking at my chest than at my eyes.”
You inhaled your water. Dairyu did the same.
“He’s a sweetheart,” Eunbi concluded simply, while the two of you recovered. “He just wants to be nice to me.”
Heejin smiled at that — a real one, warm at the edges. “I’m glad for you, unnie. But I have to ask.” She glanced at Dairyu, then back. “What about Sakura?”
Eunbi shrugged. “We’ll see. Le Sserafim added another show and a round of promotions for their new Japanese single, so she won’t be back for another seven days.”
Dairyu went still. “I didn’t know that.”
“Kura-ah didn’t want you stressing about it.”
“Okay,” he said, measured but not quite calm. “But finding out this way pretty much guarantees that I’m stressing about it.”
Eunbi looked at him. Had the decency to wince slightly. “Fair. I’ll make it up to you, big guy. I promise.” She picked up her menu. “Now let’s order — I’m starving.”
Dairyu held her gaze for one more beat, then let it go and picked up his own menu. You and Heejin exchanged a glance across the table.
Whatever was happening between the three of them — Dairyu, Sakura, Eunbi — it was either going to resolve itself very cleanly or get very complicated in the next seven days.
Possibly both.
After brunch, Eunbi decided they were getting bingsu and that was simply the end of the discussion.
The four of you ended up at a small dessert place two blocks down — the kind with mismatched chairs and good lighting and a menu written in chalk — and somehow the easy momentum of the meal followed you there without losing anything. You’d expected the energy to shift when you changed venues. It didn’t.
Dairyu came back from the counter with four bowls and distributed them with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been paying attention to what everyone ordered and committed it to memory without making a thing of it. Heejin got hers and looked up at him. Something in her expression recalibrated slightly.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, and sat down.
Eunbi caught your eye across the table and said nothing, which said everything.
The conversation found its own level quickly. Heejin, you’d learned over the months, had two modes in new company — watchful, and then suddenly all the way in — and somewhere between the main course and the walk over she had crossed from one to the other. By the time the bingsu arrived she was leaning forward with her elbows on the table, which meant she was comfortable, which meant Dairyu had passed whatever internal assessment she’d been quietly running on him since introductions.
“Okay,” she said, pointing her spoon at him. “Eunbi said Digimon.”
“She did,” Dairyu confirmed.
“Favourite season.”
“Personally it’s Frontier but objectively it’s Tamers.”
Heejin pointed the spoon at Eunbi. “I like him.”
“I know,” Eunbi said serenely.
“Tamers is the right answer,” Heejin said to you, with the gravity of someone issuing a ruling.
“I know it’s the right answer,” you said.
“A lot of people say Adventure.”
“A lot of people are wrong,” Dairyu said. “Adventure is the cultural landmark. Tamers is the better show. Those are both true at the same time.”
Heejin sat back in her chair with the satisfaction of a person who had just had an opinion confirmed by an independent source. “See. This is what I’m saying.”
Eunbi was smiling into her bingsu. You were fairly sure she had orchestrated this exact outcome from the moment she chose the dessert place.
The conversation moved the way good conversation does — without agenda, without anyone pulling it. Heejin and Dairyu discovered a shared and completely sincere appreciation for obscure nineties action movies, which they discussed with the intensity of academics. Eunbi told a story about a fan event that had gone sideways in a way that was only funny now, in retrospect, from a safe distance of several years. You added things when you had them and listened when you didn’t and found that the listening was genuinely easy — the kind of easy that meant the company was good, not that you’d gone quiet.
At some point Dairyu said something in response to one of Heejin’s movie opinions that made her laugh — a real one, loud and unself-conscious, the kind she usually kept closer to the chest — and Eunbi looked at you with an expression of mild wonder, like she was witnessing a rare atmospheric event.
“He does that,” she said quietly, while Heejin and Dairyu were still going.
“Does what?”
“Makes people comfortable without trying. You don’t notice it happening and then suddenly you’re talking like you’ve known him for years.” She watched him for a moment. “Sakura didn’t stand a chance, honestly.”
You thought about that. “Do you?”
Eunbi considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
“Probably not,” she said, and didn’t sound unhappy about it.
Eventually the bingsu was gone and nobody moved to leave, which was its own kind of verdict on the evening. The dessert place was thinning out around you. The chalk menu on the wall listed things nobody at the table wanted anymore. The conversation had slowed into the comfortable register of people who had run through the good material and were now just enjoying the aftermath.
Heejin leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. “Okay. This was a good double date.”
“Told you,” Eunbi said.
“You didn’t tell me anything. You showed up twenty minutes late.”
“I showed up eventually. That counts.”
“It does not count.”
“Suda, back me up,” Eunbi said.
“I’m staying out of it,” you said.
“Wise,” Dairyu said.
Heejin pointed at him. “You’ve been in Korea for how long?”
“About three weeks.”
“And you already know to stay out of it.”
“I learn fast.”
“Hmm.” She studied him for a second, then nodded once, like she was closing a file. “Okay. I approve.”
Dairyu blinked. “Of what?”
“Whatever this is.” She gestured vaguely at him, then at Eunbi, then at the general situation. “I approve.”
Eunbi pressed her lips together, delighted. “You don’t get a vote.”
“I have a vote. I’m using it.” Heejin stood up and reached for her coat. “Let’s go. I’m tired and I’ve been nice for four hours and I’m approaching my limit.”
Outside, the four of you stood on the pavement while the city moved around you. The afternoon was warm enough that nobody rushed to get anywhere. Heejin linked her arm through yours and leaned her head briefly on your shoulder, which was her version of that was a good time, and you leaned back into it.
Across from you, Eunbi had her hand tucked into the crook of Dairyu’s elbow, looking up at something he was saying. He said it. She laughed — soft, private, not the performance laugh but the other one — and bumped her shoulder against his arm, which given the height difference barely reached.
You watched them for a second.
“Hey,” Heejin said quietly, close to your ear.
“Yeah?”
“Whatever happens with Sakura.” She nodded toward Eunbi. “She’s going to be okay.”
You looked at Eunbi again — relaxed and warm in the streetlight, the dark bob, the oranges and vanilla of her that carried even out here — and thought she looked, more than anything, like someone who had decided to stop holding herself at a careful distance from something good.
“Yeah,” you said. “I think so too.”