Moonlight and Memory

[MINHO]

The pool was the only light left in the villa.

Everything else had gone dark. The kitchen, the living room, the hallway where laughter used to bounce between walls. The fight had turned the whole house off like a switch, room by room, until the only thing still running was the pool and its underwater glow and me standing at the edge of it.

The same pool, twelve hours since dawn. The overcast had burned off hours ago and the sky had opened into something indecent. Stars everywhere, thousands of them, the water catching them and holding them as trembling copies scattered across the surface alongside my own reflection.

The filter hummed underneath, steady and patient.

I'd walked back through the villa past three windows, three snapshots of damage I'd helped cause: Ryujin on the terrace with her arms wrapped around herself, Yuna on the floor with her face doing nothing, Lia at the kitchen counter with knuckles white around a phone she wouldn't look at. I'd kept walking, didn't slow down, because if I stopped at any one of those windows I'd have to open my mouth and I had nothing in it worth saying yet.

And now the pool again. The thing I'd told myself all day - show up, be present, stop letting the water decide - was still sitting in my chest where I'd put it. My feet graced the edge of the water, and there was nothing in my hands.

The stone was cold, my legs numb. Somewhere in the villa behind me, doors were closed and music was playing through earbuds and people were sitting with the wreckage of a fight that had cracked open something that had been pressurizing for years. I'd heard Yeji's pitched voice through the walls defending something she wouldn't name.

Defending me, probably.

I wanted to deserve that. The wanting was a hook behind my ribs, pulling toward the house, toward her. Except I'd touched someone else right here yesterday morning and I still hadn't figured out how to say it.

I heard her before I saw her. Bare feet on tile, that soft, unhurried percussion of skin on stone. The sliding door had opened and closed so quietly I'd missed it, but the footsteps I knew. Five years of practice rooms and hotel hallways and 3 a.m. kitchen floors, and I could identify her walk blindfolded.

She was close, her body heat closing the distance before her arms did. Then contact. Her arms wrapped around my torso from behind, both of them sliding under mine, hands finding each other against my chest. Her forehead pressed between my shoulder blades, her nose against my spine, and then her breathing, slow and measured. She didn't say anything, but I knew her touch, since a practice room floor and a girl who couldn't stop shaking.

The noise stopped. The three windows went dark. Ryujin's silhouette, Yuna's blank face, Lia's white knuckles - all of it dropped out of my head so fast the silence had weight.

What replaced it was water lapping tile in small, patient intervals. Night insects threading the air with sounds so thin they were almost piercing. Her breathing against my back, slow and warm, fogging a small patch of skin between my shoulder blades that cooled each time she inhaled.

This. Just this.

I didn't turn around even though I deperately wanted to. Fuck, the instinct to see her was so overwhelming it took effort to override, my neck starting the rotation before I caught myself. But turning would break whatever she was doing. Whatever she needed from this moment where she could press her face into me without having to show me hers.

So I stayed. My hands found her forearms and held them where they'd landed across my chest.

The pool glowed beneath my feet, the stars trembling on the water. Her heartbeat raced against my back, through my shirt, through skin. Her arms were trembling.

Minutes passed, maybe five, maybe fifteen. The night hummed while her breathing slowed against my back until it found the same rhythm as mine, two sets of lungs running the same program without consulting each other first. I held her forearms and she held my chest and neither of us said a word until she spoke.

"I said things," she whispered, her voice unusually small. "To Ryujin. Things I can't -"

Her fingers tightened on my shirt. One small clench.

"She said I've changed. And she's right. I HAVE. I changed and I didn't - I didn't warn anyone." She took a breath. "I didn't ask if it was okay. I just did it. Because it felt right. Because YOU felt right. And now she's on the terrace and I'm here and I can't even fix it."

Her forehead pressed harder between my shoulder blades. Her hands stopped holding and started gripping. The words wouldn't stop.

I let them come. Honestly, I would have let her scream them. Twelve hours ago I’d been trapped in a nightmare watching a version of her try to scream without making a sound, her jaw trembling around silence while I drowned in it. This? This was the opposite. This was Yeji spilling over. Yeji refusing to edit. Yeji breaking the one damn rule she’d followed since trainee days: don’t burden them.

She was burdening me. Finally. And the weight of it felt like the only thing keeping me upright.

"And you've been - all day, Minho. All day. I saw it. The pool this morning - you thought I didn't notice but I noticed EVERYTHING. The way you held my hand at the kitchen counter and your fingers waited before they closed. A quarter of a second. Do you know I can feel that? Five years and I can feel when you hesitate. I FELT it."

My jaw went tight. She'd seen it. Of course she'd fucking seen it. The quarter-second delay I'd thought was invisible. She'd been reading my micro-responses since before either of us knew what we were doing.

Five years of that. I couldn't hide from her even when I tried.

"And I keep thinking - it's me. I'm the problem. I'm the weight." She pressed her face harder into my back. "I dragged you here. I put you in the middle of this mess and now there's a fight and it's all because I got greedy."

She stopped, her breathing gone ragged.

"I keep reaching for you. You know that, right? All day. Every time. Me reaching. And you catch me every time but I don't know if you're catching because you want to or because I'm not giving you a choice -"

My hands reflexively tightened around her wrists.

"It's not you." The words came out rough. "Yeji. It's not -" The rest of the sentence died behind my teeth, and I tried again. "I heard the fight through the walls."

Her arms loosened slightly as I said that.

"She's scared," I said. "And so are you. That's it. That's the whole fight."

"Neither of those things are your fault, Yeji."

Silence settled between us, the pool filling it back in with filter hum, water, insects. "I just -" Her voice cracked on the word, small and splintered, and then it stopped. She'd run out, nothing left but her breathing and her hands.

I turned my head just enough that my voice would reach her without my face. Her arms loosened the same moment I started to turn.

She came around me as I came around to her. Her hand trailed along my ribs as she moved, fingertips maintaining contact while the rest of her body repositioned. Like she needed to keep touching me the whole way or I'd disappear. I turned and she drifted and we met somewhere in the middle, face to face at the pool edge, the water glowing beneath us and the sky open above us and a breath of warm Jeju air between our chests.

The pool light hit her from below. I'd seen Yeji in a thousand kinds of light. Stage spots, practice room fluorescents, hotel lamplight, candlelight, the blue glow of her phone at 2 AM. This was different though. The teal radiance caught her from underneath, shadows falling upward, every line and angle of her reversed from what I knew. Her jaw sharper. Her cheekbones higher. Her eyes enormous, dark, wet at the edges. The cover-up hung translucent on her shoulders, the pool light travelling through the fabric and turning her silhouette into something half-visible, half-imagined.

I'd never get used to looking at her. Even after five years and counting.

Her eyes were dry. She'd held it through the fight, held it through the pour on my back, held it through everything she'd said in those five unbroken minutes. Her face had the set of someone who'd been clenching her jaw so long the muscles had forgotten how to release.

Then she saw my face.

Whatever I'd been wearing - the fear, the tenderness, the trying - it broke something in her that the fight hadn't reached. Her chin trembled first. Then her eyes filled fast, the moisture rising like water in a glass tipped past level, and the first tear spilled over before she could catch it. It ran down her cheek, catching the pool light, a bright wet trail that curved along the hollow under her eye and pooled at the corner of her mouth.

My thumb caught it on instinct, my hand cupping her jaw and catching the tear before it could change direction.

The backward tears, the empty eyes. It hit me without warning, nightmare-Yeji's face overlaid on this one, transparent and wrong, tears crawling upward while her mouth opened in a soundless scream. Then it was gone, blinked away. Because this tear was going down. Real gravity. Real physics. Real Yeji. Her eyes were full and bright and holding mine with a need so raw it nearly put me on the ground.

She was real. She was warm. The tear under my thumb was warm. Thank fuck.

I kissed where it fell. Her cheekbone, the wet salt path, the small hollow beneath her eye where the skin was thinnest and the pulse closest to the surface. I pressed my mouth there and held.

"I missed you." So quiet I almost missed it. Her mouth barely moved against my palm, the words warm and wet with salt.

My hand stayed on her face while her tears kept coming, silent and steady, tracking down over my fingers and wetting the heel of my palm. She let them.

"I've got you."

Her shoulders dropped half an inch, maybe less, the fight leaving her shoulders, her exhale long and shaky and honest. The pool glowed beside us, light rippling across the stone where we stood, her tears landing on my wrist, on my thumb, on the tile between our feet while the filter hummed and the stars held still.

My mouth was still on her cheekbone and I tasted salt, warmth beneath it, the faint mineral trace of her skin underneath. Her breath hitched when I didn't pull away.

She turned her head slightly, just enough that my lips slid from cheekbone to the corner of her mouth, the terrain changing from wet skin to the edge of something softer. Her lower lip brushed mine and the contact held.

Her hand came up to my face. Slow, certain, her palm fitting against my jaw the way it had fit against my chest minutes ago. Her thumb traced the line of my cheekbone. Her mouth found mine and I tasted more salt and then nothing but her.

She kissed me the way she danced, the way she did everything that mattered. With her whole body. Her hand on my jaw tightening, pulling me closer, deeper, her other arm wrapping around the back of my neck until the distance collapsed entirely. The tears were still wet on both our faces and she kissed through them.

Her weight shifted. I felt it before I understood it. A subtle release, her body drifting backward bit by bit, her hand on my face becoming less of a hold and more of a pull.

She broke the kiss but didn't pull away. Her forehead rested against mine, her breath warm and smelling of salt, her heels hovering just above the stone. She was trembling. Nerves or adrenaline, I couldn't tell which.

Her eyes opened, wet and shimmering, catching the moonlight and reflecting it back at me. The glow turned her gaze into something luminous, something alive with the night itself, and for a moment, I forgot how to breathe.

"Do you trust me?" she whispered.

The echo hit me instantly. The beach at golden hour. Yesterday she’d asked if she could trust me with her heart, and I’d looked her in the eye and lied straight to her face. Now she was asking if I would do the same.

The answer was easy. Honestly, it was the only thing I had that hadn't been complicated by the last five years.

"I do."

She smiled against my mouth and leaned back.

Her heels left the stone. Her body tilted over the glowing water while her eyes stayed on mine, taking me with her.

Stopping her would have been easy. All it would’ve taken was a shift of my weight, a firmer grip, a word. My hands were on her waist, the stone steady under my feet, the moment suspended. Her hand on my face, her mouth parted, the pool light climbing up to swallow us both. But I wanted to see where she’d take me.

I didn’t hesitate.

I followed her over the edge.

Her palm cupped my jaw the entire descent, through the tilt, through the rush of air, through the impossible stillness before the crash. Her eyes found mine, a smile breaking just as the water surged up to meet us. That was all I had: her touch, her gaze, her grace, and and the quiet promise that I wasn’t falling alone before the world went white with sound.

Then the water hit, and the world shattered.

A wall of water erupted where we'd been standing, sheeting outward across the stone deck, slapping the base of the loungers, flooding the cracks between tiles. The sound was enormous, a single percussive BOOM that swallowed our voices and the filter hum and the insects and every quiet thing the night had been holding, replacing it all with the roar of water displacing air, the churning white chaos of two bodies breaking a surface that had been still for hours.

I hoped the splash reached the villa windows, the terrace, the dark rooms where people were trying to or pretending to sleep.

Then silence - total silence - underwater.

The world went teal and silver, every sharp edge softened, every surface blurred. Her hair floated upward in slow strands that caught the underwater lights and turned copper, bubbles streaming from our noses and mouths and tumbling toward the surface in silver chains. The cover-up billowed around her in slow motion, the fabric weightless, spreading like wings I hadn't known she had.

Her hand was still on my face. Underwater, the pressure was different, lighter, her fingers gentle against my jaw and holding me in the silence, in the suspended blue-green world where the villa and the fight and the guilt were all above us, on the other side of the surface, belonging to the air.

We broke through gasping.

Her laugh came first. A bright, shocked, involuntary sound that cracked the pool's silence wide open and bounced off the villa walls and the stone deck and the dark sky above us. She coughed water and laughed harder, her hair plastered flat against her skull, slicked back from her forehead, her whole face suddenly bare in a way that makeup and styling and years of idol training had taught her to avoid. All cheekbone and jaw and sharp wet eyes and a grin so wide it compressed her cheeks into something almost childish.

I was laughing too because I couldn't help it, from the shock of cold water after hours of hot silence, the absurdity of falling into a pool at midnight in the same swimwear we'd been wearing since afternoon.

She splashed me. A small, stupid, perfect splash with the heel of her hand, and the water caught the pool light and scattered it across my face in tiny prisms, and I grabbed her wrist and she shrieked.

Her hand was still in mine from when I'd grabbed her wrist. Her other hand found my chest underwater, fingers spreading against my shirt. We were close. Treading water, bodies bumping, her knees brushing my thighs. Her hair was slicked back and the water had turned her cover-up useless. The white fabric clung translucent to every surface it touched. Her shoulders, her collarbones, the flat plane of her stomach, and the brown bikini underneath were fully visible now, the triangles pressed tight to her chest, the string cutting sharp across her ribs. The pool light caught her from below and the wet cloth glowed against her skin, and I'd never actually seen this before. Yeji's body through water and fabric, more explicit than any of the hundreds of times I'd seen her with nothing on at all.

The pool light hid nothing. I was witness to all of her, the tear tracks drying on her cheeks, the mascara that the water had pulled into faint grey streaks under her eyes, the moment her expression changed as the softness from the laughter drained away and something older and hungrier rose through it like heat through glass.

Her laughter faded to a smile, the smile fading to something else as her eyes dropped to my mouth, came back up, and she gave me a raw and direct look that had nothing tender left in it.

"Hi," she said softly, with water on her lips. Her voice had gone low, wrecked from laughter and tears and all the words she'd spent against my back.

I dropped my voice half an octave. Went for something smooth, something that matched the pool light and the wet hair and the moment. "Hey."

Except it came out as a croak. Somewhere between a trainee's voice crack at monthly evaluations and a variety show disaster. The pool water I'd inhaled chose that exact syllable to announce itself, the word breaking in half on the way out and dying in a register that hadn't existed since I was fourteen.

Her mouth twitched, then split open, and she laughed so hard she dipped underwater for a second, came back up sputtering, and the look she gave me when she surfaced was half wrecked, half starving. It was the most dangerous thing I'd ever seen on Hwang Yeji's face.

"Do - do that again," she said, her eyes bright, her voice steady in a way mine apparently couldn't manage.

I laughed, low and half-drowned, and her grin softened into something I'd never seen before. We were treading water a foot apart, the surface between us glowing. For a long moment neither of us moved to close the gap.

Five years and I could map Yeji's body in the dark. Every angle, every place that made her breath catch. But I'd never just looked at her, not like this. The pool kept us suspended, weightless, and I looked.

Her hair was darker wet, plastered against her skull in a way that should have been unflattering but wasn't. It stripped her face down to its barest. The sharp jaw, the high cheekbones, the cat eyes that usually cut through rooms, were now soft and wide and watching me with an expression I'd never been allowed to study this long. Water droplets sat on her eyelashes. The cover-up clung to her shoulders like a second skin, and where it gaped at the neck the line of her collarbone was visible, the hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse beat quick and steady.

Below that, the water had turned the fabric into a confession. It clung where her body pushed against it and drifted where it didn't. It hung tight across the firm set of her breasts, the bikini triangles pressed flat, the dark suggestion of her nipples through two layers of soaked cloth, floating at her waist, then catching again at the jut of her hips where the waterline cut across her body. Her stomach was visible through the wet fabric, dancer-flat, the ab lines I'd traced with my mouth in hotel rooms now rendered in light and translucent white, more devastating through cloth than every time I'd seen them bare. Water beaded on the skin above her collarbone and rolled down her chest in slow tracks that disappeared into the neckline of the cover-up, and I followed every single one.

She was beautiful. This was Yeji with mascara running and pool water in her ears and a grin still ghosting the corners of her mouth. This was Yeji being herself again.

"You're staring," she said quietly, her eyebrows lifting.

"Yeah."

"Again." The corner of her mouth twitched. "You did that at the beach too."

She was right. She was still wearing the same brown bikini, except it was underwater now instead of under sunlight. I'd stared then too, stared so openly she'd called me on it while Yuna yapped about sunscreen. That had been seconds, a glance before she'd rolled her eyes and the afternoon kept moving. This time I stopped, and stayed.

"I'm staring now."

Her chin dipped. The faintest flush climbed her neck, visible even in the teal light.

"Stop it."

"No."

Her foot found my shin underwater. A small kick, playful, but she left it there. Her toes rested against my calf, one point of contact in all that water.

"You look different," I said. "In the water. With the light."

"Different how?" she asked carefully.

"Like yourself."

She blinked slowly, her lips pressing together and then releasing as the flush deepened.

"That's -" she started, and stopped. Tried again. "That's a stupid thing to say."

"Probably."

She watched me for a second. Waiting, maybe, for me to defend it, or qualify it, or soften it into something that wouldn't land so hard. I didn't.

"I mean it. That's really dumb."

I let her circle. The water was patient and so was I.

"Yeah."

"You can't just SAY things like that when I'm treading water and can't -"

She didn't finish the sentence. Her hand found my forearm underwater. Her fingers wrapped around my wrist, loose and uncertain, nothing like the grip she'd had against my back or the controlled pull of the kiss.

"Like myself," she repeated.

The water pushed her toward me. Or she stopped treading enough to let it. Her knees bumped mine. Her hand tightened on my wrist. She was close enough now that individual water droplets were visible in the hollow above her upper lip, catching the pool light like tiny jewels.

"I want to say something," she said. "And I need you to not make a big deal out of it."

"...Sure."

"I mean it. Don't do the face."

"What face?"

"The attentive face. The one where you're LOOKING and I can see you doing it." She splashed water at me, weak. "It makes me want to punch you."

"I don't have a face like that."

"You have a face EXACTLY like that. You're doing it right now."

I rearranged my expression into something neutral. Based on her reaction - a snort, half-submerged - I didn't succeed.

The snort faded. She looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn't read. The pool moved us gently in a circle. Neither of us spoke.

Then she took a breath and let it out slowly.

"You're -" The word came out differently than the ones before it. "You're beautiful. Ugh, I hate saying that out loud. It's actually a problem."

"A problem?"

"Yeah. Because I look at you and I forget to be mad."

I let the words settle on the surface of the water between us.

"Come here then," I said. My voice had recovered. No croak this time, thankfully, just low and rough and meaning it.

She stayed exactly where she was, a hand's width away. Her eyes locked on mine. "Make me," she whispered.

I drifted forward, closed the gap by half, and waited. My forehead touched hers. Her breath caught with a sharp, small intake that I heard over the filter, over the water, over everything. Our noses touched. Her lips were right there, close enough that the warmth of her exhale sat on my mouth, the humidity of her breathing mixing with the pool steam rising between us.

She closed the last inch, her mouth touching mine so gently it barely qualified as a kiss. It was more of a brush, a question, her lower lip between both of mine, soft and unhurried, her hand sliding from my wrist up my forearm to my shoulder while the pool cradled us in a gentleness neither of us had ever chosen on our own.

Her legs wrapped around my waist underwater in one smooth motion, her thighs locking against my hips, her weight settling into my arms while the buoyancy made her light. Her arms draped over my shoulders and her forehead pressed to mine.

We drifted, the slow current of the pool carrying us from the shallow end toward the deep. Her weight in my arms was nothing. The water supported most of her, and what it didn't I held with one arm under her thighs and one hand spread flat against the small of her back. Her fingers played with the wet hair at the nape of my neck. Light rippled across both of us from below, shifting planes along the underside of her jaw and the line of her throat.

The deep end found us and my feet left the bottom, the world becoming liquid as her weight redistributed, floating. Treading with her wrapped around me, her thighs tight against my hips, my arms were the only fixed thing in all that water. My hand spread flat against her back and the muscles there were extraordinary; a record of years, dense and defined under the wet fabric, shifting beneath my palm every time she adjusted her grip around my neck. Dancer's back, one she carried like it weighed nothing.

My hand drifted. My palm sliding from the small of her back down over the curve of her ass, fingertips trailing along the elastic edge of her bikini bottom where it cut across her hip. The water made everything slow. My fingers slipped beneath the edge of the bikini and found skin, the tight curve of her hip, the crease where her thigh began.

She exhaled against my mouth. A warm, unsteady breath that tasted like chlorine and carried a quiet sound inside it.

My fingers moved inward. Following the fabric. The bikini bottom was a thin triangle of nothing, the strings cutting sharp across her hips, and where the fabric met between her thighs the water had pulled it slightly aside already. My fingertips found the edge and followed it, knuckles brushing along the juncture of her thigh and hip, and then -

Different.

The pool water was warm but thin. This was thicker. Viscous. The kind of slickness that doesn't dissolve in water, that holds its consistency against the chlorine and the current, that coats instead of dilutes. My fingers slid through it and it clung to them, tacky and rich, unmistakable. She was soaked.

Her hips shifted when I touched her in a small forward roll, grinding into my hand, her thighs tightening around my waist. Her eyes were open, watching me, and the pool light lit her face from below so I watched the moment her pupils dilated, the iris contracting, the black expanding.

"You okay?" My voice had gone rough, leaving barely a voice behind.

"I answered you." Her gaze stayed locked on mine while her hips rocked forward again, pressing herself against my fingers slowly. "Before you asked."

I realized I was hard, and probably had been since the forehead press, since her thighs locked around me. But seeing her like this, wet in both senses, her face open and flushed and wanting, made everything in my body reorganize around it. Her nipples were visible through the cover-up and bikini both, dark circles pressed against the wet cloth, pushing against the fabric each time she breathed. My cock ached against the inside of her thigh, pressed flat between our bodies by the water pressure. She shifted and the length of me dragged across the crease of her hip, across the place where her wetness had turned the water slippery, and the friction pulled a sound out of me that I couldn't have held back if I'd tried.

Yeji noticed.

She reached between us, her hand underwater finding me through my shorts and wrapping her fingers around my cock with easy confidence, freeing me with one quick tug at the waistband, the elastic slipping down my hips, and then her hand was on bare skin, stroking once, her palm sliding through the water and her own wetness mixed together.

Her thumb traced the underside of the head and my hips jerked while she watched my face the entire time.

She pulled the bikini aside with her other hand in a small, practiced motion, one finger hooking the fabric and dragging it clear of where we both needed it to go. Then she took me and pressed me against her, the head of my cock resting against her entrance, and the heat differential hit me like a wall. The pool was warm but she was molten, her lips parting around the tip, full and swollen and slick with that viscous arousal that the water couldn't touch, and she held me there, hovering, at the edge.

She rocked her hips forwards, dragging me along the length of her pussy, the head of my cock sliding through her folds, splitting them, spreading the slickness from her entrance up to her clit and back down once, twice, each stroke coating me in the heat of her and thinning the boundary between the pool's water and her body's, the head catching against her clit on the upstroke and drawing a breath out of her that was sharp and small and honest.

Then she sank.

The light from below followed her down, every bit of the descent painted across her face. Her jaw tightening, lips parting, the crease between her brows from concentrating with her whole body.

The water slowed everything. Her body opened around me with unhurried confidence; she knew she controlled the pace as she always did. The heat enveloped me in stages, the tight ring of her entrance stretching around the head, gripping, then releasing just enough to let the shaft follow. Her walls closed around me, a grip so contoured it felt designed for exactly this shape, this angle, for me.

She stopped halfway, her forehead pressed to mine, her breathing ragged.

"There," she breathed, and took the rest in a single, unhurried downward roll of her hips, sinking into a consuming depth where the heavy thud of her heartbeat pulsed directly against my cock. The pool water pushed against us, a persistent drag she defeated by locking her ankles behind my back and squeezing her thighs to force herself down the final inch. Floating in the deep water tilted our suspended bodies forward, pressing my shaft flush against the thick heat of her front wall and completely altering our fit. She let out a low, startled sound when she bottomed out entirely, a wet gasp dragged from her throat by a sudden friction that required this exact depth.

We drifted in the dark water, anchored entirely by the dense, slick junction of our bodies. Her internal muscles took hold of me in a series of slow, involuntary clenches, an unyielding pressure constantly drawing me deeper into the center of her heat. Each deep contraction pulled the breath straight from my throat and sent a raw shock up my spine. My cock throbbed in immediate answer, a heavy, escalating pulse that emptied my head of every thought and left only the overwhelming reality of being buried inside her.

Then my arms slipped.

Just an inch, maybe two. The water dragged her lower before I caught her, my forearms burning beneath the sudden drop. She sank onto me hard. Her pussy clenched around my cock, her muscles grabbing the only fixed object left in the deep end. The grip was total and ruthless. Her entire body clamped down, crushing me in one tight, unbroken hold. The sheer, heavy pressure consumed me completely, rooting me so deeply in her heat I couldn't feel the water at all.

We held there in the teal silence while her walls pulsed in those deep contractions her body had defaulted to, my cock throbbing inside her in answer, both of us breathing hard against each other's mouths and neither of us moving.

I thrusted - or tried to. The water resisted, every forward push met by the liquid drag of the pool, slowing me, softening the impact, turning what would have been sharp on land into something rolling and heavy and deep. My hips moved and the water moved with them and against them, and the rhythm that emerged was slower than either of us would have chosen. The deep end insisted.

She matched me, then passed me. Her arms tightened around my neck and she used the hold as an anchor, pulling herself up and sinking back down, her hips doing the real work while I held us afloat. She was doing most of the moving now, using her core, her thighs, the grip of her arms around my neck as an anchor, riding me with a rolling fluidity that the water turned into something almost hypnotic. Each upstroke she rose until only the head stayed inside her, her walls dragging along the length of me with that tight, reluctant cling, and each downstroke she pulled herself back to the root with a controlled roll that took me so deep her breath stuttered.

Her head tipped back, chin lifting, eyes drifting closed, lips parting around a sound that started somewhere behind her ribs and climbed her throat in slow motion. The pool light painted the underside of her jaw, the long line of her neck, the hollow where her pulse hammered visible and fast. Her eyes rolled and for a second she was somewhere else entirely, the cat-eyed focus gone, replaced by a looseness I almost never saw on her. Yeji uncontrolled, Yeji letting her body overrule her brain.

"Fuck," she breathed, looking at the sky.

Her head came back down and her eyes found mine, the look in them wrecked and luminous. My hands tightened on her waist and I thrust up into her descent and the collision of our rhythms drew a gasp out of both of us, sharp and honest, echoing off the water.

The deep end kept its own time, refusing to let urgency win, insisting on a pace that left room for every sensation to register. The drag of her walls along my length on the outstroke, tight and reluctant, clinging. The molten slide back in, her body yielding and gripping simultaneously, the wanting winning so thoroughly that by the third stroke she was pulling me in before I'd finished pulling out.

"I woke up, Minho," she said suddenly, punctuating the trance.

Her voice was quiet, steady in the way that meant effort. Her arms around my neck, her body moving with mine in the water, and this sentence arriving as though the rhythm had unlocked something in her chest.

"I woke up and you weren't there."

A thrust. Slow, deep. Her breath catching on it, her words pausing to accommodate the sensation, then resuming.

"And I wanted - I wanted your arms. Around me." Her hips rolled down. My cock buried to the root. Her mouth pressed to mine for a second, barely a kiss, more like punctuation. "I wanted to be warm."

The bikini string slid back, the fabric edge catching against my shaft on the outstroke, the triangle of cloth trying to reassert itself between us. I reached down without thinking, one hand hooking it aside, but the water pulled it back. She snorted with a small, wet laugh against my cheek.

"Leave it," she said. "Let me finish -"

In the commotion my hips pulled back too far and I slipped out. The bikini snapped home like it'd been waiting for exactly this opportunity, the triangle snapping home before my cock had cleared the exit.

My hips hadn't gotten the update. The next thrust went into taut fabric, the head pushing the cloth inward an inch - maybe two - her pussy yielding behind it just enough to be cruel before the elastic made its ruling and ejected me sideways. The bikini bottom was the only participant in this encounter with boundaries.

"Oh, COME on -" Yeji reached between us, hooked the fabric with two fingers, yanked it clear, and guided me back inside with her other hand in one efficient, annoyed motion.

The relief of being inside her again after five seconds of fabric-imposed exile was so disproportionate it broke something in both of us. She laughed first, breathless and shaking, her body convulsing around me, her walls rippling with it in small pulses that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the accumulated ridiculousness of trying to fuck in a pool while a bikini played cockblocker. Each pulse gripped me and I groaned and she laughed harder.

"Stop laughing," I said, dead serious.

"I can't - YOU stop laughing. You're the one who -" She gasped. My hips had moved without permission, one deep thrust that the water slowed into something thorough, and the end of her sentence dissolved into a sound that was closer to music than words. Her fingers tightened in my hair.

I held the bikini aside with one hand and held her with the other and found the rhythm again. We moved slower now, the teal glow pulsing beneath us with each movement, ripples chasing across her skin wherever the water thinned between our bodies. The laughter had dissolved whatever ceremony was left in the act. Two people who couldn't touch the bottom, holding each other up, moving together while the water insisted on tenderness.

"I wanted you inside me." Her hips punctuated it with a downward roll that took me so deep I saw light at the edges of my vision. "I woke up and that's where my body went first. Before I opened my eyes. Before I thought about anything else."

I thrust into her. Long and slow, the water dragging against us, her walls pulling at me in that relentless grip, those trained muscles that milked without permission, each contraction a small tidal pull that drew me deeper than the thrust itself had managed.

"I love..." She stopped. Her breath caught. My heart shot into my throat. The pause held. "...having you inside me."

Fuck, she almost said it, I thought. And this time I'm not dreaming. I exhaled and just held her with one hand on her hip, with the other spread flat between her shoulder blades where her heartbeat pulsed through her spine.

"And I wanted you..." She trailed off, her rhythm faltering.

Words were failing her, so I used the only language we had left. I gripped her hips, anchoring her against the water's resistance, and drove upward. The glide was a thick, heavy drag of pool water mixing with her own slick heat, my cock pushing through the grip, gripping resistance of her walls. I stretched her open bit by bit, the wet slosh and slap of our bodies colliding echoing off the tiles as I bottomed out completely.

A sharp, fractured moan tore from her throat. "Mh!" she cried out, and she gripped the base of my neck even tighter, digging her nails into my skin.

The deep, grounding pleasure forced the air from her lungs, pushing the rest of the sentence out of her.

"... to be near me," she finally finished, so quiet the pool almost swallowed it.

I kissed her. Her mouth was there and the words were there and my body couldn't answer them so my mouth tried. I kissed her slow and deep, matching the tempo the water had chosen for us, and she kissed me back with frantic energy because she knew she'd said too much and was trying to crawl back to safe ground through physical contact.

"You weren't there," she said again, against my mouth, her voice different now, smaller. "Where did you go?"

The question hung in the warm air between our faces. My hips slowed, but neither of us sank, as if the universe was waiting for an answer first.

"Couldn't sleep."

I gave her the same answer I'd given her in the morning. She'd accepted it then. Now, wrapped around me in the deep end, she didn't.

"You keep saying that," she murmured, her thumb tracing the line of my jaw. "And I keep not asking because I don't like to be the person who pushes."

I gave her a thrust in response, her walls clenching around me on the downstroke, automatic, and we both exhaled. The rhythm continued at its water-dictated pace.

"But something's been sitting on you all day," she continued, her eyes searching mine. "Is it about last night?"

"Yeji -"

"Is it about Karina?"

My hips stuttered. Karina, the threesome Yeji had sanctioned against her own instinct. My cock was inside her and she was asking me about another woman, and the tenderness in her voice gutted me.

"Because something changed," she said. "After. With us." Her hips found a slow grind, barely moving, keeping us connected without chasing anything. "You were... careful. With me. Like you were handling something breakable. And I'm not -" She swallowed. "I'm not breakable, Minho."

"I know you're not."

Her forehead pressed harder against mine. "You've been looking at me different. Since last night." She paused. "Like you owe me something."

We floated in the question. Two bodies, zero ground. My cock pulsed inside her and her walls responded with an unconscious squeeze.

"The threesome was -" I started, stopped. Tried again. "I think it was supposed to be simple. You wanted to help her, right?" I looked into her eyes and pressed my nose against hers. "And then it wasn't."

"Since when has anything with us been simple?"

She had me there, and I almost laughed - almost - but her hips rolled down, taking me deep, and the laugh turned into a groan.

"That's not why I'm asking."

"Why then?" I asked, genuinely puzzled.

Her body stilled around me, her hips stopping their rhythm, leaving her walls holding me in that steady, encompassing grip, her eyes on mine, the pool light painting us both from below like we were inside a lantern.

"You didn't put your arms around me." Like it had been sitting on her tongue all day. "Last night. When you came back to bed. You just -" Her hips stayed still. "You ALWAYS do. Even when I push you away." She swallowed. "So I know something's wrong."

The edge hit harder than accusation would have.

"Even in Busan," she said, her voice quiet and careful the rare way she got when she was handling something she'd never said out loud before. "In the hotel. After I turned away from you and told you to just sleep." Her hips shifted, a slow grind, her body maintaining the connection while her voice went somewhere neither of us had gone. "You still put your arms around me."

I remembered. The rigid line of her back. The flinch when my arm crossed her waist. Every tendon fighting the instinct to lean into it, and I'd held still, barely breathing, giving her the option to pull away. She hadn't.

In that Busan hotel her face had been a silhouette against city neon. Now the water lit her from below and everything - the tremor in her chin and the wet shine gathering in her eyes - was visible.

"I know," I said simply.

"By morning I was holding your hand," she said, swallowing. "I never told you that."

She hadn't, but I knew that too. I'd woken up with her fingers laced through mine against her stomach, her grip tight even in sleep, and I'd never mentioned it either. Neither of us had, because you don't talk about the thing that kept you alive in the dark.

"I never forgot that," she said. "The arms. And last night was the first time they weren't there," and her breath shuddered. "And I was scared of losing -" Her voice cracked into fragments. "Losing the person who - the only person who ever made me feel -"

She stopped, her whole body stopping with her, breaking her rhythm, her breathing, her words. She was looking at me with an expression I'd never seen on her, more naked than any of the times I'd actually seen her naked. Her body still speaking even though her mouth had gone silent with small involuntary contractions where we were joined.

"Feel what," I encouraged, barely a whisper.

She kissed me again instead of answering. A hard, bruising kiss that tasted like chlorine and salt and the tears she'd cried earlier and whatever word she'd just swallowed. Her hips started moving again, urgent, her body choosing a pace the water couldn't fully argue with, and her pussy gripped me with ferocity.

She pulled back and pressed her forehead to mine. Her breath was coming in short, uneven gasps now, her body riding me with the same relentless focus she brought to everything that mattered.

"Real," she whispered. "You make me feel real."

The light held her there, her body tightening around me as she said it, squeezing me in rhythmic waves.

The words made my heart physically ache.

But she was here, with her arms around my neck, body open, legs locked.

"This is me," she said, her voice steady now, the fragments gone and replaced by something clear and settled. "This, right now, is me. Not the leader, or the concept, or whatever I am when I'm performing for everyone else." Her forehead pressed harder against mine. "And I'm - I'm terrified of losing the only place where I get to be her."

She swallowed, her eyes on mine and hiding nothing.

"And this isn't about -" She rolled her hips, slow, purposeful, taking me deep. "This. Bodies. Sex. We've both fucked other people. While being - whatever we are. That's not what scares me."

"I kept telling myself it was," she said, her voice dropping, quieter now and aimed at the water between us more than at me. "Just the sex. For years. Every time. Every morning after. I'd put my leggings on and do my hair and walk out the door and tell myself, that's all it is. That's all he is. Just - the sex."

Her breath caught on the last word.

"It wasn't just the sex," she said, looking up, her eyes wet and clear and furious with herself. "I don't think it was ever just the sex."

The words landed on the tile where Yuna had been. On the pool edge where Ryujin had spread her legs. On Karina's living room couch where Yeji had watched me fuck another woman and called it permission.

She meant it generally. I was hearing Yuna's name. Ryujin's name. Karina's. Crimes she didn't know about, stacking up behind her kindness like debt.

"How is that not what scares you?"

Her hips answered before her mouth did. A slow roll that took me deep, her walls gripping with the downstroke, holding, then releasing as she rose. She did it twice more before she spoke, like she was gathering the words from below.

"Because I watched you," she said, her eyes on mine - steady. "Last night. With Karina. I watched your face while you were inside her."

My stomach dropped.

"And you were -" She swallowed, though her rhythm didn't break. "You were good. Generous. The way you are with everyone. Which is why I -"

She caught herself. The sentence just stopped.

I felt her breath hitch against my cheek, felt the exact moment her walls clenched involuntarily around my cock like she was bracing for impact. She dropped her chin, refusing to look at me, and forced the rest of the sentence out sideways.

"- which is what I love about you."

Another roll, slower. The pool light caught the wet shine at her lashes. "But your eyes kept finding me. Every time you touched her, you checked. Like I was the thing you were measuring everything against."

Her thumb traced my jaw. Her hips maintained their unhurried claim.

"Karina told me something after, when you were in the bathroom," she said, exhaling. "She said you were doing it for me. All of it. That you came home the second you could."

I knew. I'd heard it through the door I'd left cracked open, standing at the sink with water dripping off my hands while Karina said exactly that. To her. To the girl I couldn't stop coming back to. And then Yeji's silence - the long one, the kind she does when something hits so hard she forgets how to respond. I'd stood there holding my breath, terrified a floorboard would give me away. Eavesdropping on the most important conversation of my life through a bathroom door I didn't have the guts to close.

Hearing it again now, from Yeji's mouth instead of Karina's, in the pool instead of through a bathroom door, made everything sharper. The lotus, the forehead press. The way I'd turned back to her the second it was over, like my body had a compass and she was north. Coming home - that's exactly what it was.

And she didn't know about the moments I hadn't.

“I shouldn’t have listened. Except I did. And it made everything worse and better at the same time.”

"That's when I understood," Yeji continued, her voice quiet and certain, "what you are to me." Her body drew tight around me, one long contraction that felt like emphasis. "You could fuck every girl on this island and you'd still come home. That's not what scares me."

My lungs emptied. Every pocket of air I'd been holding since dawn, since the nightmare, since the morning I'd fucked Yuna against this pool's shower wall and set the clock ticking on everything falling apart - one long exhale that left me hollow against her chest. She held me through it, her arms tightening around my neck, reading the shudder as emotion when it was something closer to verdict.

She'd just forgiven me for everything. Without knowing there was anything to forgive.

Every girl on this island. She'd said it like a hypothetical.

I was hearing it as a roster.

"It's about -" She stopped and started again. "You seeing me. The real me. The one I don't show anyone," she said, her thumb tracing my cheekbone. "You're where I feel like me."

Her hips kept going. Through all of it, the confessions, the memory of Busan, the word she couldn't finish and the ones she finally could, her body had maintained its slow, rolling claim on mine. Her thighs tightening against my waist, the rhythm so deep in her muscle memory it didn't need her attention to continue. There was nowhere for either of us to hide. Her eyes were open, and so were mine. Her pussy full of me, her mouth full of truths she'd never said out loud.

She pressed her forehead to mine, her hips rolling down one more time, slow and complete, taking me to the root. Her breath steadied.

"Mine," she said.

The word, quiet. The first time was in a dark Busan hotel, her face hidden by shadows so she couldn't see what it cost. She'd repeated it until she believed it. The second time had been in Karina's living room only last night, our foreheads pressed in lotus, with Karina watching on. She'd said it like she was daring the room to argue.

This time needed nothing. Just her eyes and the pool and the light.

Something cracked in my chest and a sob came out of my throat before I could catch it. I buried it in her neck, my face pressed to the wet skin where her pulse hammered.

Her hand found the back of my head. She held me there. Her fingers in my wet hair, her body still around mine, her heartbeat against my mouth. She didn't ask why.

The water held us.

I don't know how long we stayed like that. Her walls held me in slow, unconscious pulses. My cock still inside her, softening by degrees. Her breathing against my neck had slowed to something tidal: long in, long out, each exhale warm against my pulse.

The pool light shifted with us. Every small drift sent the teal rippling across her shoulders, her collarbones, the wet plane of her back where my hand rested.

Her fingers moved in my hair. Slow, absent, tracing patterns she probably wasn't aware of. Her heartbeat pulsed through the walls of her pussy, a faint, steady thrum that synced with the pulse in my cock. Her cheek rested against the top of my head. Her jaw moved when she swallowed.

She lifted her head and looked around. "This pool is really nice," she observed, hushed and warm, with quiet sincerity. I felt a laugh build in my chest before I caught it.

"I haven't even used it since we got here," she said, shifting against me, her hips resettling, my cock stirring inside her from the movement alone. "This is the first time we've actually been in it together. And of course the first thing we did in it was to fuck."

She was joking about it, but my jaw tightened at the thought of the pool. This pool, the shallow end where Yuna had been spread on a lounger with her fingers inside herself and I'd watched when I should've turned away. The tile where I'd pressed her against the outdoor shower wall afterward. The deck where Ryujin had strode out naked with The Beast in hand and caught us mid-creampie. This pool had been a lot of things before it was ours.

"Yeah, well." I kept my voice even. "Yesterday was -"

"I know." She giggled into my neck. The sound vibrated through my throat, through my chest, through the water between us. Her hips shifted and she tightened around me and the combination of the sound and the sensation was enough to make me throb. "Yesterday was a lot of things."

She smiled against my skin, and the stretch of her lips, the edge of her teeth was pressing into me. Whatever she was remembering, it was making her warm. The beach, the photos, Karina's villa and the candlelight and the lotus where she'd pressed her forehead to mine and whispered "mine" while Karina watched and the whole room held its breath. Mine had different chapters. Same pool, different hours.

Her hips moved in a slow grind that brought me back to full hardness inside her within three strokes, my cock filling what her body had already made room for, the stretch drawing a quiet sound from her throat. She buried her face deeper into my neck and rolled her hips again, finding the angle she wanted, the one that pressed me against the front wall on the downstroke, and her breath went sharp.

"Mm." Muffled against my skin. Her teeth grazed my neck. Her thighs re-locked around my waist and the lazy float became purposeful, her body remembering what it had been doing before the sob, before the stillness, before the pool convinced us we were finished. She wasn't finished, and neither was I.

I held her waist and let her set the pace. Her hips found a rhythm that built from the lazy grind into something more insistent, each roll longer, deeper, her body rising higher on the upstroke, taking more of my length before sinking back down. The water churned between us, small waves breaking against my chest, against her collarbones, the surface roughening with the urgency her body was writing across it. Her arms tightened around my neck and she used the leverage to drive herself down harder, each downstroke punctuated by a wet slap of her thighs against my waist that the pool amplified into something obscene.

"Ah -" She breathed it into my ear. Her walls clenched on the downstroke, that trained grip, and I groaned and she responded with another clench, tighter, a targeted squeeze that she held for the full depth before releasing on the rise. Her fingers dug into the back of my neck. Her breathing had gone ragged and rhythmic, a pattern she was riding the way she rode me, with each exhale timed to the bottom of the stroke, each inhale on the rise, her body treating this the way it treated choreography.

The pool light caught her from below as her head tipped back again, teal washing up her throat, gilding the underside of her jaw, catching the wet strands of hair that clung to her neck. Her mouth was open, her eyes half-lidded, her expression stripped of anything careful or composed.

"Right there," she gasped. "Stay - right -"

I stayed, planting my hips and letting her work the angle, her body doing the moving, core and thighs pistoning in a rhythm the water couldn't slow anymore. She'd overcome the pool's resistance through sheer want, each thrust cutting through the water like it wasn't there, the buoyancy she'd been negotiating with earlier now something she used, letting the float lift her on the upstroke so gravity and muscle could drive her down harder. The deep end churned around us, water splashing over both our shoulders, and the sound was everywhere; wet skin on wet skin, her breathing pitched high and getting higher, the pool's surface breaking and reforming in chaotic patterns that scattered the glow across the deck, the villa walls, the dark sky.

My hands gripped her hips. Her body was moving fast enough now that holding her required effort, my fingers sinking into the muscle of her ass, and she was riding with the relentless focus of someone who'd decided on a destination and would reach it through sheer repetition. Every downstroke drove me into pressure that bordered on pain. She was tight and slick, her body milking with contractions that were half-voluntary, half-response, training applied to the deepest possible purpose.

"Fuck - Minho -" Her forehead pressed hard against mine. Her eyes found mine, close enough that the teal light reflected in her pupils, two tiny pools inside the pools of her irises. Her mouth open. Her breath ragged. "I'm -"

Her face was right there, lit from below, hiding nothing.

And in that moment, with her body wrapped around mine and the pool light turning us both translucent, with five years of practice rooms and hotel ceilings and mornings where I'd woken up beside her and pretended the wanting didn't live in my chest for five years - in that moment where the words I'd swallowed on a Jeju beach at golden hour and buried through two days of guilt and carried through a nightmare that showed me exactly what losing her would look like were rising in my throat with the inevitability of something that had been waiting years for an exit, with her eyes on mine and no mask left between us and the truth sitting so close to my tongue I could taste the shape of it - three syllables that carried the weight of everything I'd been too afraid to name out loud because naming it would make it real and real things could be lost and I'd already lost her once by leaving and couldn't survive losing her again -

"Yeji, I -"

My voice changed and my body changed with it. Everything tightened. My grip on her hips, my jaw, the muscles of my stomach, my cock swelling thick inside her from the weight of what I'd primed myself to say.

It locked every part of me rigid at once.

Her cat-eyes sharpened, the haze clearing, and I watched her read the shift in real time, in the tension in my arms, the catch in my voice, the way my cock had gone iron-hard inside her on a single beat.

"Don't you dare." Her leader voice surfaced through the haze, low and commanding. "I'm not leaking your cum into the pool. That's nasty."

She unhooked her legs from my waist in one smooth motion, her thighs releasing, her hands sliding from my neck to my chest and pushing me gently backward so the water opened between us. My cock slid free, the disconnect a gasping, wet loss that left me throbbing in the warm water, every nerve still firing.

She took a breath, held it, and went under.

"Yeji, that's not what I was going to -"

The surface closed over her head like glass reforming. Her hair fanned out in slow dark ribbons, catching the light in blue-green glints, spreading around her face as she sank. The pool light turned her into something from a painting: limbs pale and luminous against the deep blue, the bikini a dark interruption, her body moving with the fluid grace of someone who trusted the water completely. Bubbles trailed from her nose in a silver chain that climbed past my chest toward the surface.

Her hands found my hips. Firm, steadying, her fingers hooking into the waistband of my shorts and pulling them down. Two quick tugs, the fabric floating off somewhere behind her, and then her hands were on my thighs and she was positioning herself with the same quiet intensity she brought to everything.

Looking down through the surface was like looking through warped glass. Her face rippled and refracted, the teal light splitting her into shifting planes, her mouth approaching, her eyes open, looking up at me through the water between us with an expression that was equal parts tenderness and purpose.

Her mouth closed around the head.

She worked slowly. The water made everything different; supporting her, slowing her jaw, her movements languid and unhurried in a way that land never allowed. She took me deeper in measured increments, her throat opening to accommodate, her tongue pressing the underside on every stroke. Bubbles escaped from the corners of her lips and tumbled upward past my stomach. The visual through the warped surface was devastating: Yeji's face refracted by teal light, her mouth full of me, her eyes open and looking up.

She surfaced for air. A quick gasp, her hand still wrapped around my shaft, stroking through the water while she breathed. Water clung to her lashes in fat droplets that caught the teal light, blurring her eyes into something shimmering and half-drowned, and when she blinked they ran down her cheeks like she was crying pool water. She grinned at me, quick and filthy and sure of herself, and went back under.

My hand found her hair underwater. Fingers threading through the floating strands, gripping without pulling. Her rhythm deepened. Each stroke dragging the full length of me through the tight seal of her lips, her cheeks hollowing, her nails digging crescents into my thighs for leverage. Drawing it out. Pulling the orgasm toward her mouth with the patience of someone who'd decided exactly how this would end.

"Yeji - I'm -" Her name hit the empty deck, so my hand tightened in her hair because my voice couldn't reach her.

I came in her mouth with a groan that echoed off the water. The orgasm rolled through me slow and deep, the water dampening the usual sharp edge into something that crested and held, each surge unhurried, my cock pulsing against her tongue in long throbs that she swallowed through. Her throat worked around me on every pulse, lips sealed, suction steady, until my body gave her everything it had left. She held still through the last of it. Then pulled back slow, her lips dragging the full length of me, and surfaced.

She broke through the water gasping, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and pushed her hair off her forehead with the other. The pool light caught her from below and she looked like a myth, wet and glowing and thoroughly pleased with herself.

"Feeling better?"

I laughed. A real, wrecked, helpless laugh that came from somewhere beneath everything I'd been carrying. She'd solved the wrong problem with the exact right mouth. I pulled her to me and kissed her. Tasted chlorine and salt and myself on her tongue. She kissed me back lazy and satisfied, her arms draping around my neck, the two of us drifting in the deep end.

We floated while the pool light held us, the filter humming its patient hum and the stars doing their slow rotation overhead, and for a while there was nothing but warm water and her breathing and the taste of her mouth.

The pool settled around us, the surface going still. Something behind my ribs pulled tight like a fist closing around the part of me that knew this was borrowed time, and my arms loosened around her without permission.

Her fingers found the back of my neck. A small pressure, grounding, her thumb tracing the knob of my spine.

"Go rinse off," she said, softly but warmly. "I'm going to float for a bit."

I pulled myself out. Hands on the pool edge, arms hauling my weight up and over, water sheeting off me onto the warm tile. She swam to the ledge, folded her arms on the edge, rested her chin on her forearms, and watched me. The shimmering teal caught her from below, wet hair slicked back, bare shoulders reflecting the light, the dark line of her bikini, her eyes steady and unhurried above her crossed wrists.

I walked toward the outdoor shower. Behind me I heard her push off the wall and drift onto her back.

The outdoor shower was built into the dark volcanic stone at the far end of the deck. Chrome head, tiled cubicle, a slatted door that didn't lock, as I'd found out the hard way yesterday.

I turned the handle and the water came lukewarm against the back of my neck while my hands found the tile. I stood there and let it work away the chlorine, the sweat, the salt of her. The stone was warm under my palms and my body remembered other hands on this wall. Smaller hands, pressed flat at shoulder height, braced against wet tile for reasons that had nothing to do with rinsing off.

This morning I would have stood here scrubbing until the water ran cold and my skin turned raw. But it was just a rinse now.

The pool sounds changed behind me. The lazy metronome of water lapping tile broke into the poetry of a body in motion, water parting around purpose, the silver cascade of it sheeting off skin and striking the surface in a chord of small splashes, the low creak of the railing taking weight.

I turned.

Yeji pulled herself out of the pool and made sure I watched every second of it.

Hands on the railing, arms flexing with strength she'd spent years building, she hauled herself up and over the edge in one clean motion that bypassed the stairs entirely. She didn't need them. Pulling herself out put her back on display, her shoulders and lats working under wet skin, water sheeting off her in ribbons that followed every line she'd trained into her body. She knew what her back looked like. She'd spent enough hours in studio mirrors learning exactly what each muscle did when it engaged.

I knew what her back looked like too. I'd mapped it with my hands while she rode me, traced the valley of her spine while she came. She'd never once performed it the way she was performing it now.

She stood on the deck and didn't move for a three-count. Just stood there dripping, letting the moment arrange itself around her. One hand found her hip, planted, her weight shifting onto one leg the exact same way she held that pose under concert lights, with her head tilted back, chin lifted, her profile sharp against the pool glow behind her. She knew what that angle did. She'd built a career on knowing.

From where I stood in the shower she was silhouette, edges bright, everything between them dark. The shape of her shoulders, her waist, the hand on her hip, the wet hair plastered to her neck was barely visible, but I couldn't see her face. She pushed her hair back with both hands, arms raised, back arching, and the water ran off her elbows in streams that flashed as they fell through the glow behind her.

I'd seen her hide inside silhouette before.

Then she turned to face me and the pose came with her, the hand still on her hip, the weight still shifted, except now her chin dropped and her eyes found mine across the deck and the concert angle became something private, something that had never been for an audience of twenty thousand.

Bare feet on warm tile, her pace unhurried, staged as choreography. She was counting the steps in her head. I could tell from the rhythm because it was measured and even, the same control she brought to stage blocking. Each step carried her further from the pool's backlight and deeper into the open moonlight that fell across the deck, and each step the silhouette loosened; the brightness at her edges fading, details arriving where shadow had been.

Her collarbones first. Two lines of silver surfacing above the dark wet cover-up.

Three steps in she reached for the hem.

She could have left it on. It was already translucent, already clinging, already revealing more than it concealed. She pulled it off anyway in fluid, practiced motion. Her arms crossed to grip the fabric, peeling it up her stomach, her ribs, the wet sound of it separating from skin slow and obscene. She dropped it on the tile without looking where it landed, then her eyes found mine across the distance between us. Not checking if I'd seen, but confirming she'd wanted me to.

She kept walking and the moonlight kept arriving.

Her bare stomach next, the water running down it catching white now instead of teal, every stream visible, every path across her skin legible. Then her throat, the column of it long and wet. Then, somewhere around the midpoint of the deck, her face appeared slowly, in pieces, like a developing photograph.

Her jaw first, silver on wet skin, the line of it set and certain. Her mouth, the lower lip full and catching light along its wet edge. Then her eyes, already looking at me, and they were steady, dark, unhurried, and absolutely aware of what the light was doing to her.

My hands stopped moving under the shower spray.

The bikini was all that remained and the water had done the rest. Soaked transparent, the brown fabric clung to every contour with the cruelty only wet cloth could achieve. More explicit than bare skin because it outlined everything, drew the eye to every detail it was supposed to conceal. Her nipples pressed through the top in sharp relief, hard points visible through material that had given up its purpose entirely, the moonlight catching them with the same clarity it had caught her face. Pool water ran down her stomach in streams that split at her bikini bottom, following the creases of her hips to disappear beneath fabric that molded to her pussy with enough detail to show me the familiar shape of her, the outline of her lips where the wet material pressed flush and revealing.

Nothing was in shadow. She'd walked out of it.

Water dripped from between her thighs in heavy drops. Off the soaked bikini, off the seam where the fabric clung tight, each step releasing another as gravity pulled moisture from fabric too wet to hold more. She watched me watching and kept her pace.

Every step left a wet footprint on the warm stone. Every step released another drop.

My cock was getting hard just watching her walk, just seeing how the wet bikini revealed more than skin ever could, how water and moonlight mapped her body in paths she was choosing to show me. She saw. The corner of her mouth lifted. Just barely, just enough to confirm she'd chosen this approach because she'd wanted exactly this response.

She stopped at the shower entrance and leaned one shoulder against the frame like she wanted to turn the doorway into a stage. She was fully lit now, the last of the silhouette gone, and there was nothing between her body and the sky. Still dripping, the wet bikini clinging in ways that made breathing visible, that turned every small shift of her body into something I could track through how the translucent fabric moved against her skin.

She tilted her head. Water dripped from the ends of her hair onto her collarbone and tracked slow between her breasts while she watched me watch it fall.

It was beautiful. She was beautiful.

In the water, she'd been all warmth and weight. On the deck, she was only moonlight and memory.

"Room for two?" She asked, casually and warm, like she wasn't standing there dripping and half-naked and lit by nothing but open sky, like she hadn't just made me watch her cross the entire deck in a wet bikini that hid nothing, like the question wasn't the punchline to a performance she'd been choreographing since the moment she'd gripped that railing.

I was hard again. She hadn't touched me and was clearly smug about it.

"Of course." I stepped back and made room.

She came in and the cubicle halved. Her shoulder brushed mine. The shower spray hit her collarbone and ran down between her breasts, splitting into two streams that followed the edges of the bikini top before merging again at her stomach. She tipped her face up into the water and closed her eyes.

"You know," she said, "you finished and I didn't."

"I know."

"In my MOUTH."

"Yeah."

She opened one eye. "Seems unfair."

"You're right."

She bumped my hip lightly. “I’m not leaving this shower until that’s fixed, Minho.”

Her mouth twitched, but she didn't say anything else. Her hand found my hip, thumb tracing the groove of muscle above the bone. She was looking at my chest with intent.

I pulled her in and kissed her slowly, and she melted. Her hand stayed on my hip and her body stayed an inch away from mine, the shower water running between us, and she kissed me back with unhurried patience.

Her fingers walked from my hip to my stomach, then traced down, finding me rock-hard. She wrapped them around my cock loosely, not stroking, just holding, just to confirm the fact. Her thumb swept the head once, lazy, and I inhaled against her mouth.

"Hi," she murmured into the kiss.

My hands were on her waist. I pulled her the last inch and her body pressed flush against mine, the wet bikini fabric, the heat of her skin through it, her nipples hard points pressing into my chest. Her breasts flattened against me, small and firm, and I slid my hands down her sides, feeling every rib, the narrowing of her waist, the flare of her hips under the wrap-cut bottom.

Her back arched. My mouth found her neck. She tilted her head to give me room and her hand tightened around my cock, a slow stroke that matched the pace of my lips on her throat. I kissed down the tendon, the hollow above her collarbone, the wet neckline of the bikini where the fabric met skin.

"Get them off," she murmured against my skin. "Please."

I reached behind her neck. The tie was a simple knot, but it was swollen from the water. It took me both hands and she waited, her fingers still moving on me, while I worked it loose. The high-neck top fell away and then her breasts were bare. Modest, high-sitting, the wide-set nipples darkened and stiff from the cold. I cupped one and she sighed.

The bottom was easier. I hooked my fingers into the wrap-cut and pulled down and the fabric slid over her hips, her thighs, and dropped around her ankles. She stepped out of it, naked and wet in every sense of the word. The pool light bleeding through the slatted door threw pale teal stripes across her body, over her collarbone, the underside of one breast, a line across her stomach, the top of her thigh.

She shivered, and probably not from just the temperature.

"Cold," she said.

"Yeji, it's summer -" I interjected.

"I'm still cold." She reached past me and turned the shower handle. The spray shifted from lukewarm to warm and the steam started curling between us immediately, water thickening on our skin, heat flooding the small space. She stepped into it, into me, her arms sliding around my waist, her face pressing into my chest.

The water poured over my shoulders and down my back, ran in warm rivers over her hands where they held me, streamed through her hair and down her spine. I held her and the water did what I'd been trying to do earlier. It washed everything away: the chlorine, the night air, the invisible weight I'd been carrying. She'd turned it on warm for us, despite not knowing it was exactly what I needed.

Last time someone turned on this shower it was Yuna's hand flailing for balance, ice-cold water dumping on both of us. Then Ryujin was at the door.

Yeji turned it on warm, just for us.

I kissed her forehead and she looked up, her eyes heavy-lidded and dark, wide enough to swallow the teal light bleeding through the door slats.

My hand trailed down between us, over her stomach where the carved muscle softened under warm water, past her navel to where my fingertips found her groomed with Type-A thoroughness, her outer lips full and swollen from an hour of pool sex and no release. She was slick in a way the shower water couldn't account for. My middle finger parted her and she exhaled against my collarbone.

"Mh." Her hips tilted forward, taking my hand deeper.

I found her clit prominent, firm, having emerged from its hood and demanding attention. I circled it with slow steady pressure and she gripped my biceps, her forehead dropping to my chest.

"Ah - right there -" Her breathing shifted immediately, going quick and shallow, each exhale a small warm cloud against my wet skin.

She was already close. The pool had done most of the work, the riding, the friction, the hour of being filled without finishing. My fingers worked her in tight circles, pressing with every technique she'd fucked into me, direct and firm because anything gentle made her frustrated. Her hips rolled against my hand while her nails bit crescents into my arms.

"Faster, Minho, faster!" She cried out to the Jeju night.

So I gave her faster, and her thighs tensed against mine immediately. The shower spray ran down between her breasts, over my hand, and the water made everything slicker, hotter, her body responding in sharp micro-contractions against my fingertips.

"Turn around," I growled.

She turned and placed her hands on the tile wall, her palms flat and her back to me, the full length of her spine exposed. Shoulder blades, defined lats, the dimples above her ass, as she pushed that compact muscular shelf back toward me. Water ran down the channel of her spine and threaded down between her cheeks in a continuous braid while light through the door slats painted shimmering horizontal lines across her back.

I pressed against her from behind, my cock fitting against the cleft of her ass, hard now. She pushed back into it with a small grind that told me everything.

My hand found her again from the front, reaching around her hip while my other arm wrapped across her chest, palm flat against her breastbone, holding her back against me. She was pinned between my body and the tile, contained entirely. My fingers returned to her clit and she dropped her head between her arms.

"Ah -"

I kissed the back of her neck. The water splashed off my shoulders and rained down onto hers. My cock pressed against her from behind, sliding between the tight press of her thighs, and the friction drew a sound from both of us.

She reached back between her legs, found me, angled me upward, and pushed her hips back in one fluid sequence, and I slid into her in one slow, complete stroke.

There was no water resisting and no bikini getting in the way this time. Want pulled us together, her walls gripping with that honed muscle, tight and slick and hot in a way the pool had dampened. Every sensation the water had softened was restored at full intensity.

"Fuck -" She gasped to the tile. Her hands were pressed flat against it, fingers spread. I was buried to the root and neither of us moved for a second as I savored the fullness, the heat, and the shower raining down on us while my cock throbbed inside her and her walls pulsed around me in slow, deep squeezes.

I pulled back. Pushed in. The sound it made in the enclosed space was wet, heavy, amplified by the tile and the water and the three hard surfaces throwing everything back at us. The pool had been muffled, making the whole thing feel like an out-of-body experience. The shower amplified everything. Every thrust echoed, every sound she made bounced off the walls and came back louder.

"Ah - ah -" She wasn't holding anything back. Her voice hit the tile and returned to us louder. Her hips pushed back to meet each stroke with wet slaps, the impact sending water spraying off her ass, off my thighs.

I gripped her hip with one hand. The other found the wall beside her head, bracing. My hips found a rhythm, deep, steady, each stroke committed, and she matched it. Her ass pressed back into every thrust, taking me deep, and I watched the muscles of her back work beneath the wet skin, her shoulder blades shifting, her spine flexing.

"There - don't move -" she gasped.

I held the angle. Drove into it with steady, even thrusts that she met with a grind of her hips on the bottom of each stroke, pressing me against her front wall. The sound of her voice, her breathing, the wet percussion of our bodies, was everywhere. She was loud and she didn't care.

My hand left the wall and covered her mouth on pure reflexive instinct, the same instinct that had made me stuff her mouth with her own panties yesterday morning before I filled her up.

She grabbed my wrist, pulled my hand away, and held it against the tile beside her own.

"NO," she gasped, her eyes wild and wrecked and refusing to look away. "Let them hear -"

"Then tell them." I drove into her, a claim staked deep enough to bruise. "Tell them whose you are."

"Yours," she choked out, her head falling back to expose the long line of her throat, vulnerable and offered. "Fuck - Minho - yours."

I laced my fingers through hers against the wall and fucked her harder. The shower spray hit my lower back and cascaded over both of us, running down the crease where our bodies met, making everything hotter and slicker. Her forehead pressed against the tile, her mouth open and gasping, her sounds coming in sharp rhythmic bursts that matched each thrust perfectly.

"Deeper."

I adjusted. Wider stance, more of my weight behind each stroke so I could pound into harder. She moaned, a genuine, full-throated sound that resonated through the cubicle and out into the night air. Her pussy clenched hard on the next thrust, that punishing, full-body grip, and I groaned against the back of her neck.

She turned her head. "I want - hey - look at me."

I pulled out and she spun immediately, back against the tile, hooking one leg over my hip before I could reach for her. I lifted her, hands under those toned thighs, the muscles dense and defined under my palms, and her back slid up the wet wall until she was at the right height. She wrapped both legs around my waist and locked her ankles, the position bringing us face to face, her eyes level with mine. Teal light came through the door slats and painted her in horizontal stripes that fell on her collarbone, jaw, the wet glint of her eyes watching me with an intensity that made my breath catch.

I shifted my grip and she sank onto me slowly, her own weight driving her down bit by bit, and we both exhaled in unison as I filled her completely. Her forehead found mine, our breathing already synchronized.

"Oh -" The sound came out quiet, almost surprised, as her walls fluttered around me in quick startled pulses.

I started to move, pulling her down as I thrust up, using her weight and gravity together. The angle was different from doggy, deeper somehow, more intimate. Each stroke drove me against her front wall and I watched her face react to it in real time, the small catch in her breathing, the way her lips parted, the flutter of her eyelashes. My arms burned from holding her weight but I didn't care. She gripped my neck and rolled her hips to meet every thrust, her abs flexing against my stomach, small powerful crunches that added her strength to mine.

The rhythm built slowly. Down and up. Down and up. Her breasts pressed against my chest with each impact, small and firm, her nipples dragging across my skin. The wet sounds of our bodies were different here - deeper, more resonant, the slap of her ass against my thighs mixing with the splash of water and her voice.

"Ah - ah - ah -" Each thrust forced a sound from her, small desperate gasps that she breathed directly into my mouth, and I swallowed every one.

"Hold - right there -"

I held the angle and increased the pace, pulling her down harder, thrusting up with more force, and the water poured over us while steam filled the cubicle until we were moving in a white fog. Through the slats of the door, the pool glowed teal, the light painting us in fractured horizontal lines that shifted and slid across her skin with every thrust. Moonlight came through the gap at the top in silver shimmers where the teal couldn't reach. Her face moved between both colors, teal to silver to teal, her expression stripped bare and devastating.

Her breathing shortened, going shallow and quick, each exhale warm and damp against my lips. Her thighs tightened around my waist with the squeeze, the one that made breathing optional, and her walls started doing the thing they did before she came, contracting in slow greedy pulses that pulled me deeper on each stroke, trying to keep me inside her.

"I'm so close," she breathed against my mouth, the words barely forming. "Don't stop. Don't - don't change anything -"

I didn't. Held the angle, the rhythm, the depth, my hips driving up into her while my arms completed the circuit by pulling her down. Her eyes found mine and stayed locked there, pupils blown wide with arousal. She always watched during this part, watched me watching her, both of us seeing exactly what we were doing to each other.

Her orgasm started quietly. A held breath, a tightening that rippled upward from where we were joined through her stomach, her chest, her throat, then it broke. Her mouth opened, raw and unguarded, a moan that started low and climbed and cracked at the top into something breathless and wrecked. Her whole body seized around me, thighs crushing my waist, arms pulling me closer, her pussy gripping in deep rolling contractions that dragged sensation from the base of my cock to the tip on every pulse.

"Ah - fuck - Minho -" Her face buried in my neck while her body shook, trembling with the force of it. The waves kept coming, each one a full-body clench that squeezed me so hard the cubicle dissolved to static. I held her through it, my arms locked, my cock buried deep and unmoving inside her while she rode it out in long shuddering contractions that seemed endless.

She was still pulsing around me when mine started building, that familiar tightening at the base of my spine, the pressure mounting fast. The crush of her orgasm, the grip of her walls still fluttering, the heat, the weight of her in my arms, the water pouring over us and her sounds echoing in the small tiled space, it all converged at once.

"Give me everything," she moaned against my neck, the word muffled and breathless. Her legs locked tighter around my waist, heels digging in, making sure I understood.

I came inside her with my forehead pressed against the wet tile beside her head, the orgasm pulling from somewhere deep and primal. My cock pulsed in long heavy throbs, each one emptying into her while her walls wrung the release from me in deep milking contractions. My hips stuttered against hers, rhythm lost completely. My arms shook from more than just holding her weight. She held on through all of it, her heels digging into my lower back, fingers tangled in my wet hair, her pussy drawing every pulse out of me so she could keep it all.

The shower ran over us while the steam held us suspended in white heat. The last aftershock rolled through me and she let out a long quiet breath against my neck, her whole body going slack in my arms.

We stayed like that for a long moment. My arms were still burning, her weight still against the wall, the water still pouring over us both. I was still inside her and softening and neither of us moved to separate. Eventually, her legs, slowly and almost reluctantly, unwound from my waist. Her feet found the shower floor and she stood on her own, still pressed against me.

Her hand found my cheek, wet and warm and gentle. She turned my face toward hers and kissed me slowly, thoroughly, tasting like shower water and salt and everything we'd just done.

"That was nice," she murmured against my mouth. "But we should probably clean up."

She pulled back half a step and I slid out of her, both of us inhaling through our teeth at the oversensitive separation, swollen lips parting sharp after so long connected.

We stood there face to face, close enough that my cock settled naturally between her thighs, wedged in the space where her legs met, still half-hard and slick, pressed against the heat of her pussy from the outside. She stood there with her thighs closed around the length of me while the shower poured over us both and our breathing gradually found the same rhythm.

The first thick drop of cum slid out of her before I saw it. It was warmer than the shower spray and heavier, slipping through her folds and landing on the top of my cock where it rested between her legs. Then more came, her body giving back what I'd left inside her in slow pulses, each one coating my shaft. The shower spray washed some away but more kept coming, denser than what the water could disperse.

She looked down between us, watching it happen. Her eyes came back up and met mine, raw and satisfied and utterly unashamed.

Her hand moved between us. Her fingers wrapped around my shaft where it sat between her thighs, stroking once through the mixture coating it, her palm sliding through cum and shower water and the slickness she'd deposited. She brought her hand up between our faces and examined it under the spray, watching the shower water thin what her fingers had collected but not erase it entirely.

"Messy," she said matter-of-factly.

"Yeah."

"I'm not dripping that all over the villa floor."

"Let me."

I went down to my knees on warm tile, the shower spray hitting my shoulders while my face came level with her stomach. The scale of her changed from here, her abs becoming a carved wall above me, the V of her hips narrowing to the neat line of her grooming, and below that the evidence of everything we'd just done. Her pussy was flushed dark and swollen, inner lips parted and slick with the mixture of us, my cum leaking from her in a slow pulse that the water caught and trailed toward the drain.

I cupped warm water in my palm and rinsed her thigh with practical strokes, following the streak where cum had tracked down her inner leg and washing it clean while she planted one hand on the wall above her and watched.

The second pass was slower, my fingers tracing the crease of her thigh, the sensitive hollow where her leg met her hip, and her stomach tensed in response. I rinsed the other side while my thumb swept the tender skin where the bikini bottom had been pressing for hours, the faint red line it had left still visible as an imprint of a garment that had been doing its job until the pool made it irrelevant.

"Minho." Warning and permission simultaneously, the word serving as both with Yeji the way it always had.

My fingers found her properly now, not cleaning anymore, my middle finger parting her and sliding through the thick slick mess of cum and arousal that water alone couldn't dissolve, finding the heat underneath. She was impossibly soft after everything, the firm grip from earlier replaced by something plush and yielding, engorged, every surface hypersensitive and tender to the point that my fingertip brushing her clit made her hips jerk forward.

"Ah - careful -"

I slowly slid one finger inside her anyway. The resistance was gone and what remained was warmth and give and the slick evidence of what I'd left in her minutes ago, thicker than her own arousal and still deep enough that my finger pushed through it on the way in, pushing some of it back into her. Her body held both of us now.

I looked up to find her eyes half closed, her head tipped back against the tile, shower spray catching her jaw and running off her chin while her breasts rose and fell with breathing that had already lost its steadiness. Water streamed down her chest, over her nipples, pooling in the hollow of her collarbone before overflowing, and she was looking down at me between her breasts with the expression of someone who'd given up pretending this was still about cleanup.

I circled her clit with featherlight pressure. "Look at you," I murmured against the wet skin of her thigh. "Look how ready you still are."

"Only for you," she whispered in the general direction of the tile. "It's only ever for you."

One stroke became two, then a rhythm emerged, and she was close before I'd even started because the shower fuck had left her on a plateau her body hadn't fully descended from. My fingers found the rhythm that made her squirm and continued it, circling gently while my free hand steadied her hip and my mouth pressed an open kiss to the soft skin below her navel. The taste was shower water and underneath it salt, and underneath that, her.

Her hand found the back of my head, fingers threading into my wet hair and holding on.

"Don't stop." She whispered, her voice stripped of all pretense.

I kept going, maintaining the same circles and the same pressure and the same patience while her thighs trembled against my shoulders and her breathing went shallow and stayed there. I pressed my forehead to her stomach where her abs were already contracting in micro-spasms beneath my skin, her walls clenching around my finger in soft helpless pulses, her whole body tightening toward a center of gravity located exactly where my fingers were working.

Her breath caught and held. Her fingers tightened in my hair.

She made a small, broken sound, a gasp that cracked at its center, and her hips pressed forward once, twice, her clit pulsing against my fingertip in contractions so subtle I'd have missed them if I hadn't spent five years learning how to pay attention to this particular girl.

Her thighs shook while her hand stayed buried in my hair, and she came against my fingers in long, quiet shudders that moved through her, the smallest orgasm of the night arriving as an aftershock.

I stayed on my knees until her breathing evened out, my forehead resting against her stomach while her fingers combed through my wet hair in slow passes, each one lighter than the last. The shower poured over both of us and neither of us spoke, the silence warm and full and for the first time all night, clean in a way that had nothing to do with the water.

She exhaled long and slow, the last tension leaving her in one breath.

"Okay. For REAL this time. Let's clean up and go back inside."

I stood while my knees voiced their complaints about the tile, which had stamped two matching red ovals into my kneecaps that were going to be visible for an hour. She turned the shower off and the world went quiet, the white noise dropping out of the night and leaving only the drip from two bodies and the pool filter humming its devotion in the distance.

She studied me with that head-tilt she always deployed when she was reading something she wasn't sure about, whether a contract or a set list or a person she cared about who'd been carrying something heavy all day. Then, without a word, she reached behind me for the towel someone had left on the hook beside the shower, the only towel there, and she wrapped it around my shoulders instead of her own.

Her hands smoothed the fabric over my collarbones, adjusted the drape across my chest, fingers running along the edges, and she was naked and dripping and she'd just come twice and she was drying me off. The gesture sat in my chest warm and refusing to let me name it.

"You're shivering," she said.

"I'm not."

"Your shoulders are doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The stubborn thing. Where you pretend you have internal heating."

"I don't do that."

She raised one eyebrow with water dripping off it.

"Grab your stuff," I said. "Let's head up."

I glanced toward the pool. My shorts were in there somewhere, floating in the deep end where she'd pulled them off my hips an hour ago, and the prospect of walking back to that water naked to fish them out was not a mission I was signing up for at this hour.

She turned without argument, which should have been my first warning, and walked the three steps to where her top and bottoms were puddled together on the wet tile. She bent at the waist instead of the knees, and she bent slowly, and there was absolutely no version of reality where Hwang Yeji didn't know exactly what she was showing me when she did it. Her legs stayed straight and slightly parted, the muscles in her hamstrings pulling taut as she reached for the fabric, and from where I stood the view was total and devastating and delivered with the same casual authority she brought to everything. Her pussy, swollen and flushed and still carrying the evidence of the last hour, a thin line of white cream sitting undisturbed along the seam of her slit, glossy against the pink, visible even in the low light because her body was still holding what the shower hadn't reached. The line caught the pool's glow the way the water on her skin had caught it minutes ago, and I watched it the way I'd watched everything tonight, with the selfish attention of someone who understood that this exact frame, her bent forward, hair dripping, thighs taut, freshly fucked and glowing with it, existed for a handful of seconds and would never arrange itself precisely this way again.

She looked back at me over her shoulder. Hair falling across one eye, her mouth pulled sideways into something lazy and satisfied. She'd seen me looking. She was proud of it, and somewhere in the back of my skull the image of a hotel nightstand and a tissue crumpled too hard flickered once and went dark. She held the pose an extra moment, letting me have it, before she straightened with the bikini bottom hooked on one finger.

She started spinning it, one slow loop around her index finger, the wet fabric catching the glow as it went, then started walking toward the deck where the cover-up lay in the crumpled heap she'd left when she'd peeled it off. Bare feet on warm tile, her hips carrying the easy sway of a girl who knew exactly what her ass looked like from behind and had decided I deserved the full duration of the walk. It was compact, tight, every muscle visible, an ass that clenched with each step instead of giving, earned from ten thousand practice hours and currently being deployed as a weapon.

She bent again for the cover-up, and this time she took even longer about it. Wrung it once with a twist that flexed her forearms, tossed it over her shoulder, and turned back with the bikini still spinning on her finger, giving me a grin that clearly signalled she'd won something and wanted to make sure I'd noticed.

Then she walked back.

The bikini stopped spinning. The sway dropped out of her hips. She walked the same line she'd just taken away from me, reversed, slower, her chin lifting as the distance closed and her eyes found mine and held.

She stopped close enough that her exhale landed warm on the base of my throat. Her chin tilted up, the height difference putting her eyes right below mine, and she was naked and wet and holding her clothes like props she had zero intention of wearing. One deeper breath from either of us would have put her chest against mine.

She didn't take it. Just stood there, touching nothing, saying nothing, letting the proximity do all of it.

I'd never had this from her in five years. Yeji took, Yeji demanded, Yeji grabbed collars and pushed shoulders and said now and harder and don't you dare stop. She wasn't one to stand barefoot and quiet in front of a boy and dare him with nothing.

My cock stirred against my thigh and she saw it. Her eyes dropped, came back up, then raised an eyebrow.

I kissed that eyebrow first. Leaned down and pressed my mouth to the arch of it, slow, feeling her lashes flutter shut against my chin. Then her nose, the bridge, where she once had a cute little mole that she'd removed. My lips sat there and her breathing changed underneath me, her chest swelling and then stopping, held, waiting for where my mouth was going next.

Then I scooped her up without warning with both hands under her thighs. One clean lift, and Hwang Yeji was airborne and wet and completely unprepared for it. The sound she made probably violated the resort noise policies.

"WAHHH - MINHO -"

"Hold on."

"PUT ME -"

"Hold ON, Yeji -"

I was already walking. Naked and barefoot with the towel sliding off my shoulders, arms full of naked girl, cock swinging with honestly unnecessary enthusiasm for someone two orgasms deep. She grabbed everything in reach starting with my neck, then my shoulder, then the falling towel, which hit the deck with a wet slap that left her scrambling for new purchase. Then her hand went down and found my cock and grabbed it.

I stopped walking. "What are you DOING?"

"You told me to hold on!" She exclaimed, making it sound like she was defending a choreography choice.

"That's NOT a handle -"

"It's sturdy and it's right there!"

"HWANG YEJI."

She adjusted her grip and I was going to lose my mind, carrying a naked idol across the outdoor deck while she held my dick like a subway strap, and somewhere in the dark villa people were probably pretending to sleep while the pool still glowed behind us like a teal crime scene, and I'd never been happier in my life.

I hit the sliding door that was still open from when she'd come through it however many lifetimes ago, and the hallway was dark, cool air hitting wet skin so we both hissed through our teeth at the same instant.

"Cold cold cold cold -"

"HOLD ON."

"I AM holding on, that's the PROBLEM -"

My feet left wet prints on the polished floor while hers left nothing, suspended as she was with toes curled, her body folded against my chest, her face buried in my neck, her laughter so hard it had gone silent. Her ribs vibrated against my chest in quick spasms.

I'd seen her do this twice in five years. Laughing without breathing, both times. Both times I'd worried she was dying.

She lifted her head from my neck and looked me dead in the eyes.

"If you drop me on these stairs," she said, "I will NEVER forgive you."

"I've carried you through worse."

"When?"

"Trainee dorms, 2018. The night you raided Daehwi's soju stash."

"Wasn't me! Natty raided it," she argued indignantly, though her voice wobbled on the name. "I was just supervising."

"You refused to take the elevator because you said the machine spirit hated you. I had to carry you up three flights while you sang trot songs."

"I did NOT."

"You called me oppa and threw up in the lobby peace lily."

"That didn't happen."

"Daehwi has video."

"Daehwi does NOT have -" She pulled back far enough to check my face for the lie and found none. "Does he? Oh, I'm going to kill him."

I took the stairs two at a time while her grip relocated from my cock to my neck, an upgrade for my lower body and a downgrade for my airway. She had her arms locked in a chokehold her personal trainer would've been proud of, legs wrapped around my waist, every step bouncing her against me with wet skin on wet skin, her breasts pressing into my chest.

But as we climbed, the bounce started changing.

At first it was just a slide, her wetness smearing against a dick that had absolutely no business recovering this fast. Then she shifted. It turned into a grind, her pussy moving against me in a rhythm that matched my pace exactly. It felt less like she was just holding on, and more like she was actively trying to angle me inside her while we were moving up a staircase. I couldn't tell if she was doing it on purpose or if the climb was just forcing us into the most agonizing friction possible, but as she laughed breathlessly against my collarbone, devious and completely unapologetic, she worked me rock hard again.

"Yeji -" I grunted, my fingers digging into the wet muscle of her thighs as she rolled her hips again, the friction absolute murder.

On the next stair, the head dragged through her wetness and caught against her lips.

On the stair after that, she tilted her hips down exactly as I lunged up, and because she was so impossibly slick, I slid straight inside her.

We both gasped with a sharp, shocked sound that echoed in the dark stairwell. She shoved her face into my shoulder, her laugh fracturing into a wretched moan, and instantly clamped her thighs harder around my waist to try and trap me there. She tried to lock her ankles, trying to actually ride the carry, but we were just too wet. The very next step, our skin slipped, her hold shifted, and I slid right back out of her with a wet pop just as my foot hit the top landing.

I stopped walking for a second. My cock was slick, throbbing, and absolutely furious about the eviction, and the naked idol who had just "accidentally" fucked me on a staircase was giggling into my neck. The walk down the remaining hallway suddenly felt a lot less like a carry and a lot more like a countdown.

She kept bouncing up and down through the hallway, then bedroom door, which was open, thankfully.

Then I threw her onto the bed like a suitcase after a fourteen-hour flight.

She bounced theatrically with a shriek as the mattress launched her into the air with limbs splaying, wet hair fanning across the duvet.

The momentum broke her grip. The ball of wet swimwear she’d been clutching the entire way up the stairs launched out of her hand, sailed across the room, and hit the floor-to-ceiling window with a loud, profoundly un-sexy SMACK.

We both froze.

The cover-up and brown bikini stuck to the glass for two full seconds before starting a slow, pathetic slide down the pane, leaving a trail of pool water behind it.

I stared at the bikini bottom that had exiled me in the deep end, watching it peel off the glass and drop into a wet heap on the floor.

"Glad we finally got rid of the cockblocker," I said.

"Hey." She pointed a finger at the wet heap, her chest heaving. "I fought that thing in the deep end for you. And I won."

"It put up a hell of a fight."

"You're ridiculous," she gasped, dropping her head back against the mattress.

Her bright laugh echoed around the room. The sound was enormous and the opposite of everything this night had started as with the quiet pool and the careful silence and the tears, this loud and stupid and young, filling the dark bedroom the way the teal light had filled the water.

She settled on her back, breathing hard, wet marks spreading across white sheets.

I stood at the foot of the bed with my chest heaving, dripping and grinning like an idiot.

Her laughter died and her eyes changed. Those cat eyes, sharp and predatory and the reason her fancams went viral, shifted from bright to molten in an instant. The brightness stayed while the quality transformed, warmth contracting and concentrating into something feral. The grin pulled into something slower and hungrier, the same look from the pool and from the shower entrance and from every moment where Yeji decided the talking was finished and the next stage was starting.

She sat up and reached for my wrist, fingers wrapping around it and tightening, and pulled.

I fell onto her and every wet surface sealed to its counterpart on contact. Chest to chest, stomach to stomach, my cock landing along her mound where her body made space for it without hesitation. The length of me settled into the groove of her slit, and she was wet enough that it coated the underside of my shaft in slick increments, her body still releasing what I'd left inside her in slow pulses that made the contact hotter with each passing second. When she shifted her hips the friction drew a sound from my throat I hadn't meant to make.

Her legs wrapped around the backs of my thighs. Her arms crossed behind my neck, wrists overlapping, fingers hooking into opposite elbows. Every limb formed a circle with me at the center, and she tightened them all at once, her thighs pulling, arms drawing my weight down, her whole body contracting around the fact of me the way it had been contracting all night around every truth she couldn't say with words.

Her breathing slowed against my collarbone. Mine followed without effort, two distinct rhythms settling into the same quiet.

She shifted her hips upward ever so slightly. The movement dragged the head of my cock directly against her entrance. The heat there was absolute, the slickness parting around me, her body already opening, already demanding the rest.

My breath hitched. I braced my forearms on either side of her head to keep from sinking in completely, the restraint costing me everything.

Her hands slid from my neck to my jaw, her thumbs tracing my cheekbones the exact way they had at the edge of the pool before the fall. Her eyes were black now, dilated and starving, holding mine in the dark while her hips tilted again, locking me against the edge.

"Hi," she whispered.

[OUTSIDE - THE POOL DECK]

The pool glowed in the dark like an open eye, teal light bleeding across tile and stone and the wet trail threading from the outdoor shower through the villa's open sliding door into the hallway beyond.

In the deep end, a pair of swim trunks drifted just beneath the surface, dark fabric suspended in luminous water, turning patient circles in the filter's current. Left behind the way clothes are left behind when bodies decide they have better uses for their hands.

Two sets of footprints told the story. The larger ones spaced wide with heel-strikes driven deep, the gait of someone carrying weight they refused to put down. The smaller ones appearing and disappearing at intervals where feet had dangled, toes pointed inward, suspended in arms that had decided they belonged in the air. Between the prints ran a faint translucent line, thin and irregular, catching the pool's glow where the water hadn't yet absorbed it into the stone. Evidence that wouldn't survive dawn but existed now, threading through their path like a filament. Like a trail left by something that had leaked and dripped and been cheerfully ignored in favor of laughter and speed and the sheer stupid joy of two people sprinting naked through a house that wasn't theirs.

The trail ended at the base of the stairs.

The stairs climbed into darkness, each step ascending toward the second floor where a single window glowed warm and gold, the only light in the entire villa that hadn't been extinguished by the fight. Backlit movement flickered behind sheer curtains, two shadows merging and separating and merging again, bodies writing their own language against fabric that turned them into silhouettes. The frame shuddered once as something heavy hit a wall. Laughter spilled down through the open window, muffled by distance but unmistakable in its pitch, high and breathless and young, a girl who'd forgotten how to breathe through laughing. A lower sound followed, furniture scraping across floor, the sound of a bed protesting forces it wasn't designed to accommodate.

Everything else was dark.

Kitchen, living room, the hallway where earlier today laughter had bounced between walls before the fight killed it. The terrace where Ryujin had stood with her arms wrapped around herself. The guest rooms where Chaeryeong and Yuna and Lia had retreated to separate corners to sleep or pretend to sleep or stare at ceilings while trying to process what the group had become. All of it swallowed by the kind of darkness that only exists when people have given up on the day and gone to ground, when the house has been ceded to whoever refuses to stop living in it.

The filter hummed its patient devotion. Water lapped tile in steady intervals, the pool's heartbeat, the only honest machine still telling the truth. The landscape lights threw long shadows across hedges and stone and the figure standing at the back gate.

Motionless. A silhouette against the perimeter fence, shoulders broad and squared, posture rigid in a way that could read as control or collapse depending on how you were inclined to interpret a spine held too straight for too long.

The gate's hinges made a sound. Metal on metal, quiet but sharp enough to cut through the night's silence. The figure stepped forward once, then again, moving from shadow into the pool's radial glow, and the teal light climbed from feet to knees to torso to face the way water climbs a body descending into it.

Ryujin stepped into the light.

The pool light hit her from below the same way it had painted them, and it inverted everything it touched. Sharp shadows falling upward across her face instead of down, her cheekbones rendered harsh and angular, her eyes enormous and dark and fixed on the trail threading from shower to door to stairs to the window still glowing above like a beacon someone had forgotten to extinguish.

She looked at the footprints. At the translucent line threading between them. At the evidence of bodies moving through space with such careless joy that they'd left a map any forensic eye could read.

She didn't move toward it. Didn't crouch to examine the details, didn't avert her gaze to grant them privacy they hadn't known to ask for. Just stood in the pool's glow and let the light paint her from below while every angle went wrong and every shadow inverted and her face became unreadable in the upward illumination, a study in light and darkness and the emptiness that arrives when someone has finished fuming and hasn't yet decided what comes after fuming is done.

The window upstairs flickered. More movement. A shadow crossing the frame, followed by another, bodies in motion creating stories the curtains turned into suggestions. Laughter again, softer now, intimate, the sound of two people who'd forgotten the world could hear them. Then silence. Then a single long creak, rhythmic, the universal language of furniture bearing witness to what furniture wasn't meant to witness.

The filter hummed. The water lapped.

Ryujin stood in the light they'd floated in, the light that had turned them both luminous and honest and whole, and she let it do the same work on her that it had done on them. Lit from below. Shadows climbing instead of falling, her face carved into something between verdict and absolution.

She couldn't look away from the glowing window.

The teal light held her in its frame and waited for a decision it couldn't influence.

The window stayed lit and Ryujin stood still in the pool's glow.

And somewhere in the space between the three sources of light, in the gap between what had been witnessed and what would be done about witnessing, the Jeju night held its breath and refused to answer the only question that mattered.

Author's Note

I put up a poll asking if Yeji should find out about what happened at the pool. The response was overwhelmingly yes, but I'm not doing it, and I want to explain why.

I know what you're expecting. Yeji finds out, there's a big confrontation, some coldness, a period of earned suffering, and eventually they make up with groveling, grand gestures, and probably some really emotional makeup sex. It's a good story. I've seen it a hundred times and liked it every time. But that makes it fundamentally a Minho story, where the guy messes up, the girl judges him, and forgiveness drives the plot. The women involved just become supporting characters in his redemption arc, or villains in her betrayal arc, or both. Ryujin becomes "the girl who slept with her best friend's man." Yuna becomes "the maknae who crossed the line." Their whole arcs just collapse into what they did to Yeji, turning them into plot devices in someone else's story instead of main characters in their own.

That bothers me because Jeju Heat was never a Minho story. It's an ITZY story. It's about five girls and how they love each other and themselves. Minho is the catalyst, but he was never the point.

I think what gets lost if you look at this like a traditional cheating story is that Yeji and Minho aren't actually in a relationship. Like I mentioned in 'Drowning in Air', there's no label and no exclusivity. For five years, she's explicitly refused to define what they are. Yeji's one real boundary, the one she drew with her whole chest, was "not my members." And that boundary isn't about monogamy or owning Minho's body. It's about fear. She's afraid someone will take away her safe space, the one place she doesn't have to be Leader Yeji, where she can just be the girl who steals shirts, does bad impressions, and falls asleep on someone's chest without her armor on.

So the betrayal isn't about breaking rules - it's about feelings. The story cares more about emotional truth than technicalities, which is exactly why 'Drowning in Air' exists. Minho's subconscious doesn't check the terms of their arrangement before turning it into a horror movie. His guilt doesn't care that technically he didn't cheat. He knows what Yeji means to him, and he knows what yesterday would do to her. His nightmare IS the discovery scene, it just happens inside the person who actually needs to deal with it instead of the person who'd get hurt by it. I think that's more honest.

If 'Drowning in Air' is the punishment, 'Moonlight and Memory' is the absolution, and both only work because Yeji doesn't know.

The pool where Minho sits at the start of ‘Moonlight and Memory’ is the exact same pool where Yuna straddled him on a lounge chair, where Ryujin pinned him against the tile, and where he came inside two of Yeji's members in one morning. The outdoor shower is where he and Yuna hid from Ryujin, and where Ryujin caught them mid-creampie. He knows what happened there. Yeji doesn't. She walks out to the pool, sees moonlight on the water and the boy she's been wanting all day, and then she accidentally recreates almost every single moment, just softer.

In 'The Siren', Minho fell backward into the pool because Yuna pushed him in, chaotic and laughing. In 'Moonlight and Memory', Yeji falls backward into the same pool, but she pulls Minho by the face, eyes open the whole way down. One was losing control, the other is trust so complete she doesn't even brace for impact. Yuna fucked him in the shallow end where she could touch the bottom and leave whenever she wanted. Yeji takes him to the deep end where neither of them can stand, where staying means they have to hold each other. Yuna's underwater blowjob was a performance meant to be remembered, trying to be someone she's not to prove her worth. Yeji dives under because she won't let him cum in the pool, being practical and thinking about cleanup while his brain is still short-circuiting, because even in lust, she gets to be true to herself with him.

And then there's the shower. She sees warm tile and steam and asks "Room for two?" like it's the most natural thing in the world, because she simply wants to be close to him. He sees the exact spot where Yuna's back pressed against the wall, the handle she grabbed, the drain where the evidence washed away. But Yeji is just standing there smiling, and her total lack of baggage starts to overwrite his memories. She's not reclaiming the space because she doesn't know there's anything to reclaim. She's just being herself, and that's enough.

Even the smaller moments echo like this. In 'Shower Thoughts', Yeji locked Minho out of the bathroom after sex because letting him see her clean up felt too intimate. In 'Moonlight and Memory', she lets him stay, lets him help, and leaves the door open. In 'Skin and Shadows', she whispered "mine" over and over, frantic and desperate, hiding her face in the shadows. In 'Moonlight and Memory', she says it once, looking right at him in the water. It's not a plea anymore, but a partial declaration of something she's not quite ready to say.

This is why the secret matters to the story, not just the characters. If Yeji knows what happened in the shower, "Room for two?" becomes a test or a confrontation instead of a simple invitation. If she knows about the pool, pulling him backward becomes a way to reclaim him instead of pure trust. The innocence is what makes it work. Her moving through those spaces with total confidence proves that what happened there doesn't own them forever. She's not forgiving him because she doesn't know there's anything to forgive, but somehow that matters more.

If Yeji finds out, her arc goes backward. She has to put her armor back on. The shower door closes again, the walls go back up, and the whole back half of the story becomes about whether she can forgive and trust again. That means we'd just be retreading the same ground the first seventeen chapters already covered. Her arc was never "girl who forgives." It was always "girl who learns to love without fear." Finding out forces a regression that makes the happy ending feel conditional, like it's built on surviving a crisis instead of two people choosing to be vulnerable.

But the real reason I'm doing this is because of what it means for the people keeping the secret.

Those three people love Yeji deeply. Minho loves her like the first love you've been orbiting for five years without the guts to put a label on it. Ryujin loves her like the best friend who made chaos feel like home, where her growing away from you feels like a personal rejection. Yuna loves her the way the youngest loves the oldest, a mix of admiration, competition, and a desperate need to be seen as an equal instead of a baby. All three of them, on their own, for different reasons, come to the exact same conclusion: protect her from what I did. Not because they're scared of getting caught, but because they love her enough to let her be happy without knowing the cost.

I think that distinction matters. In cheating stories, confessing is almost always framed as brave, the hard but right thing to do, the painful truth that sets everyone free. But confessing is also often really selfish. You just dump your emotional baggage onto the person you hurt, because you make them carry it so you don't have to anymore. You get the relief of being honest and they get the devastation of knowing, and somehow we call that love? I think choosing to live with it, letting the guilt change you instead of dumping it on someone else, waking up every morning knowing what you did and deciding to be better instead of feeling lighter, that's arguably the harder road, and it's the one that lets the person you hurt stay soft.

This choice feels right to me because it matches how I think people actually deal with their mistakes. We all have something we've never told someone we love, not because we're liars or cowards, but because telling them would just transfer the pain without actually fixing anything. We make these calculations all the time, choosing what to absorb and what to pass on, deciding which truths help the person hearing them and which ones only help the person saying them. That kind of math is one of the most complicated, human things we do.

Growing up is partly about learning that some mistakes can't be undone, you just have to carry them. You don't always get a clean confrontation, a cathartic resolution, and a redemption arc. Sometimes you just have to live with what you did, let it change you quietly, and hope the person you become is worth more than the person who messed up. It's less dramatic than a screaming match in a kitchen, but I think it's also more true.

The dramatic irony is part of the point. You, the reader, know what happened at the pool. You know who was there. And as the story reaches its close, you'll carry that knowledge right alongside these characters as they make their choices. That gap between what they know and what you know is part of what gives the story its weight.

To be clear, I'm not denying you a confrontation scene because I already gave it to you. It happened in 'Drowning in Air', inside Minho's subconscious, in a looping nightmare that kept escalating. It was worse than any real-life confrontation could ever be because it was built by the person who hates himself most for what happened. The nightmare IS the consequence. What comes after IS the resolution.

Some truths you carry so someone else doesn't have to. That's not a cop-out. To me, that's actually the hardest kind of love there is, and it's the kind this story believes in.

And for the film/literature nerds: this chapter is meant to be the equivalent of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, or if you've seen the 1996 movie - the pool scene.

In my opinion, the way that film works is that the pool replaces the balcony as the place where they first actually meet each other, not as a Montague and a Capulet but as people. The balcony scene is about distance - he's below, she's above, the gap between them is what makes the conversation possible in the first place. The pool does the opposite. It pulls them under the surface of the ordinary world, somewhere with its own physics and its own quiet, where everything above - the families, the feud, all of it - belongs to the air and can't follow them down. That's what the water is for in that scene. Not romance as a backdrop, but submersion as a mechanism. You go under and the world stops being able to reach you, and I've tried to describe the sounds of the world under as part of the sensory immersion, too.

'Moonlight and Memory' is both scenes at once, and I made sure to research and study them while building it. The pool glowing at night is the balcony - it's liminal in the truest sense, a threshold that's neither inside the villa nor outside it, suspended between the fight that just happened and wherever they're going next, lit from below like something out of a dream. And the fall into the water is the plunge into Luhrmann's pool, the moment where everything that was happening above the surface goes somewhere unreachable. The line I kept coming back to while writing was the villa and the fight and the guilt were all above us, on the other side of the surface, belonging to the air - which is, as far as I can tell, exactly what Luhrmann was going for, just set in Verona.

What makes the film's pool scene actually work, though, isn't the water. It's what the water makes possible, which is that these two people stop performing. In the pool they're not their families or their names or whatever role the story needs them to fill - they're just themselves. And that's the thing 'Moonlight and Memory' is trying to do the whole way through, starting before either of them is even wet. Yeji breaks the rule she's held since trainee days and says everything she'd been editing for five years. He stares at her and doesn't apologize for it. She tells him he's beautiful and then basically wants to be struck by lightning for having said it. He tells her she looks like herself, which is maybe the strangest and most devastating thing you can say to a person who's spent a decade building a persona, and she has to tread water while she figures out what that does to her. The armor comes off one piece at a time, all of it before they touch.

The film also uses the water to foreshadow the tragedy - drowning love, beautiful and doomed. I wanted to use it as the opposite of that. Going somewhere you can't stand, where staying means holding onto someone - in a tragedy that's the setup for disaster. Here it's just where they want to be.

And yes, I know five years is the opposite of strangers. But I think this is still a first meeting, because the version of Yeji who shows up at that pool has never actually been in the room before. "I haven't even used it" reads, through the pool's symbolism, as: I haven't let myself be in this kind of space. I haven't been this undefended. This is the first time. The pool at midnight is where she finally walks out. That's what the scene is, and that's what it was always going to be.