EPILOGUE: The Way I Am

3 MONTHS LATER

Three months is basically a lifetime in idol years. Whole comebacks happen in three months. People debut, blow up, get a scandal, apologize on camera, and come back wholesome.

So a lot can change. And a lot had.

To see it, you'd have to cross the sea to Osaka. From high enough up, the whole city is just a lit-up grid somebody spilled juice on, all that wet neon bleeding into the canal and the canal bleeding it right back. Osaka was doing what Osaka does, glowing like it was getting paid for every bulb.

And if you came down out of that, past the rooftop bars and the office windows nobody's turned off and the trains stitching the dark together, you'd hit a magical place called Dotonbori. The crowd down there thickens into one big slow animal that breathes takoyaki smoke and barely shuffles forward.

Down another floor into the noise, past the guy selling crab on a stick the size of a forearm, past the screens stacked high running soda commercials and idol faces. Past that Glico man frozen mid-victory-lap over the water like he'd been sprinting since 1935 and nobody had the heart to tell him to stop. Down into the wet electric crush of the street, where izakaya touts shout over the mechanical rattle of gachapon machines.

Cameras everywhere, phones up everywhere, a whole city built just to look at things and be looked at, neon designed to grab you by the eyeballs and not let go.

If you pushed right through the middle of it, slipping past the dizzying strobe of pachinko parlors and the curtained doorways of purikura booths, you'd hit the automatic doors of a Namba arcade. A place designed to assault every earthly sense on purpose. Track inward through the noise, past the rhythm-game players sweating over neon buttons - all the way to the back wall, into the sad blue glow of a UFO catcher.

You'd see an eighth wonder of the world, hiding in plain sight.

Hair dyed cherry red and spilling over bare shoulders. A tiny strapless black corset held shut by nothing but delusion and a criss-cross of laces down an open back, the cords spanning a gap of bare skin from her shoulder blades to the small of her spine, no bra anywhere in sight. It pushed what little she had up into a respectable line of cleavage, and a pair of detached black sleeves bunched at her wrists were the only concession to the fact that it was November in Osaka, since the rest of her was bare from collarbone to the denim sitting illegally low on her hips. You'd see a twenty-one-year-old dressed like an absolute slut, losing her mind over a plush bunny wedged against the glass.

Three months ago she'd been performing goddess on a Jeju pool deck, letting an off-limits man completely wreck her from the inside out, then sobbing into a duvet by next night's end because getting her pussy repeatedly filled to the brim hadn't managed to fill whatever hole she actually needed filled.

Tonight, she was just a girl who wanted the bunny.

"You're gonna break the glass," the boy next to her observed.

Her legs were planted wide, denim riding low enough to expose the twin dimples at the base of her spine, where the corset's laces criss-crossed down to a bow she'd never have been able to tie herself. With her forehead pressed to the glass, her back sloped into a deep curve, thrusting her hips back in a deep doggy-style arch that men enthusiastically paid soapland money for in Tobita Shinchi, a couple districts away, except she was doing it for free, at a claw machine, for a bunny. The boned corset gripped her waist so tightly it made the flare of her ass look even more absurdly round, though up top it sat a little loose on her skinny frame, the cups gaping forward every time she leaned in over the machine.

"I'm literally asking it nicely! It's SO different."

"I don't think it can hear you," he said, and then, quieter, mostly to himself, "though honestly I get why it'd want to help." He went a little red the second it was out, like he hadn't meant to say it where she could hear.

"It TOTALLY does." She pressed her forehead harder against the glass, her huge eyes locked on a pink bunny wedged between a knock-off Pikachu and a deformed cat. "Come on baby, come to mama."

He hovered by the next machine, hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels. In a fuzzy white fleece over a white tee and black leather pants, he looked ridiculously soft, like a very expensive, very huggable sheep, and he'd been wearing that same shy, helpless grin since she'd dragged him in twenty minutes ago, like he couldn't believe his night was going like this and didn't want it to stop. "You've, um. You've spent like three thousand yen on this."

"That's literally an investment!" She fed another coin into the slot. "Like I'm SO close, I just need -"

"You said that four tries ago." He smiled at his shoes when he said it.

"Okay but this time I actually mean it!"

The claw descended - then grabbed at air. She let out a dramatic whine and smacked both hands flat against the glass, and across the aisle two girls at the photo booth leaned into each other, glanced over, and then looked very hard at their own photo strip instead.

"Maybe, um." He pushed off the machine, hesitating before deciding to put himself in the line of fire. "Maybe let me try?"

"No - wait, I totally have this -"

"Sunbaenim." He bumped his shoulder gently against hers, not quite meeting her eyes, and slid his own coins into the slot. "Just one go. If I lose you can leave me in Japan."

"Oh my gosh, STOP." She smacked his arm. "We've been over this. You can't call me sunbaenim while I'm losing my mind at a claw machine, it's so weird, I will actually -"

"Sorry. Sorry." He fought a grin. "Yuna-sunbae -"

"Woomin."

"...noona," he tried, going pink.

That one she let stand, mostly because of what it did to her stomach and her pussy, which was so rude of him. "Fine. Better." She stepped back, crossing her arms under her tits, squeezing them together and making the corset do heroic work. "But if you drop him, I'm literally leaving you in Japan."

She leaned over the machine to glare at the claw and caught his eyes drop, right down into the gap where the corset hung off her skinny ribs and showed him everything - her small tits swinging free, pale pink nipples already tight from the air conditioning. Then his gaze snapped back to her face, color crawling up his neck. This had been happening all night, every time she bent for a coin: he got the whole show and yanked his eyes away every time, like looking would be rude, like she was a person and not a thing to look at.

It was driving her insane. She found herself getting wet under the denim, which was literally insane because they were in a fucking arcade.

Three months ago she'd have taken that as a challenge and made it her life's mission to crack him. Would've leaned in close enough to make it a problem, found an excuse to touch his arm, made her eyes do that thing they did when she wanted someone to stop thinking clearly.

Tonight she just watched him line up the claw with a tiny, serious furrow between his eyebrows, utterly focused on winning her a cheap toy, and felt a fizzy flutter right between her legs.

This was the third time they'd hung out since an acting workshop back in September - JYPapi's idea, wrapped in three polite lies: "just for confidence," "just to broaden your range," "no pressure." There was maybe, possibly, allegedly an office-comedy role coming. Nobody said Park Shin-hye's name out loud, which meant everyone was thinking it. Woomin had been the guy who made her break character during the crying-on-cue exercise by whispering a joke right before her turn.

He'd had an audition in Tokyo yesterday, she'd had three days off, and Osaka was the middle point. She'd texted him "im in japan do u wanna hang??? or is that weird" and he'd replied "im in" within thirty seconds. She'd picked Osaka because she figured she'd be less recognizable here than in Seoul, which was delusional considering ITZY's Japan numbers, but she'd already decided, without consulting facts, that she was right. He'd happily gone along with it, which was either very sweet or very stupid.

Probably both, but, like, who cares?

The claw dropped, grabbed the bunny's ear, and lifted.

"Wait - WAIT -" Yuna's hands flew to her mouth.

The bunny swung, held, teetered, and finally dropped into the chute.

She shrieked loud enough to startle a knot of teenage boys two machines over, who'd been mangling a Taiko song for the last five minutes mostly as an excuse to keep half an eye on the redhead bent over the claw machine in the corset and the criminally low jeans, losing the beat every time she arched for a coin. One of them had gone still a while back, leaned into his friend's ear, mouthed something, and then very pointedly gone back to his drums. She was too busy lunging for the prize door and yanking the bunny out and clutching it to her chest like Woomin had handed her a Music Bank trophy instead of a ¥300 stuffed animal made of toxic fluff.

"NO WAY YOU DID IT!" She spun on him, eyes huge. "You literally just - how did you - WAIT!"

"Beginner's luck." He smiled, that shy, unguarded expression pushing the corners of his eyes up into tiny crescents.

She bounced on her toes, squishing the bunny against her corset, on the verge of exploding with ridiculous joy.

And he was looking at her like that was the best thing he'd seen all week.

"He's literally perfect," she gasped, holding the bunny up to examine it. "I'm naming him Osaka."

"Isn't that, um." He scratched the back of his neck. "A little basic?"

"Osaka-chan."

He ducked his head, laughing. "Still basic."

"You're just jealous because Osaka-chan is already literally obsessed with me." She hugged it tighter, grinning at him over the bunny's pink head. "You're literally the best! Like seriously, I was gonna be here all night."

She hooked two fingers into the hem of his fleece and tugged him in, just to see, and there it was - the pink climbing up his neck, his hand opening and closing at his side like it didn't have anywhere to go, the little half-step that wasn't away from her so much as into being basically useless about it. So cute. So freaking CUTE. She wanted to put him in her pocket next to the bunny.

"I know." He reached out, almost touching her fiery red hair, then seemed to think better of it, dropping his hand back to his side. "You had that look."

"Wait, what look?"

"Like you were ready to fight the machine."

"Okay, that's literally SO rude." She narrowed her eyes at him, then immediately ruined it. "Keep going though."

He looked down at his shoes, the tips of his ears going pink. "I just meant it's kind of cute. When you get like that."

A loud honking laugh burst out of her before she could stop it, the snorty ugly one she'd spent years trying to train out of herself for camera. She shoved his arm, gave up on training it, and knocked her forehead into his shoulder, still cackling. He went still, then relaxed, holding his ground while she stayed there, bunny squished between them, racing-game sound effects crashing around them.

Her phone buzzed in her back pocket.

Then again.

Then four more times in rapid succession.

"Oh no." She pulled it out. A wall of texts had piled up in the ITZY group DMs on Instagram, because she'd posted a story of the claw machine at some point and Ryujin had seen it and had opinions.

@iamfinethankyouandryu:is that a DATE 👀 @iamfinethankyouandryu:YUNA IS THAT A DATE @chaerrry0:OMG WHO IS HE @lia_loves___:cute bunny@yezyizhere: Please tell me you're being safe. @iamfinethankyouandry:SAFE???? YEJI THINKS SHES GONNA FUCK HIM 😭 @chaerrry0:In an arcade?!?!? @iamfinethankyouandryu:you don't know what our maknae is capable of @lia_loves___:she probably already did 💀

Yuna snorted, typing one-handed while Woomin pretended very hard not to be reading over her shoulder.

@igotyuandme: its LITERALLY just arcade games omg calm down

@igotyuandme: hes a friend 🐰

@iamfinethankyouandryu: a FRIEND

@lia_loves___: she said friend like that means something

@yezyizhere: Be good, ok?

@igotyuandme: im ALWAYS good unnie 😇

@iamfinethankyouandryu: thats the funniest thing youve ever typed 😭

She shoved her phone back in her pocket before they could spiral further. Then looked up at Woomin, who'd very obviously been watching her face light up at her phone and very obviously pretended he hadn't the second she caught him.

"Your members?"

"They're literally insane." She hugged Osaka-chan tighter. "Like they think every guy I talk to is automatically my future husband or whatever."

"Oh." He looked at the bunny instead of her. "Is that, um. Is that what they think I am?"

She bumped his shoulder with hers. "You're the guy who won me a bunny. That's literally WAY better than a husband. Like husbands don't win you stuffed animals, they just leave their socks everywhere and act surprised about it."

"That's, um. That's kinda specific? How do you know that?"

"Okay, so my unnie's boyfriend literally does it ALL the time and she loses her MIND about it, she found one in the actual fridge once and almost -"

She cut herself off.

Because the unnie she'd started describing, and her boyfriend and the socks, weren't really hers to make into a fun little arcade anecdote. Old Yuna would've told the whole story with sound effects. New Yuna apparently had standards now, which was honestly so inconvenient.

"Which unnie?" Woomin asked innocently.

"Hm? Oh. You know." She waved Osaka-chan in a vague circle.

"Don't like two or three of your members have boyfriends?" He started counting on his fingers, which was the worst possible thing he could be doing. "So is it the one who -"

"ALL of them," Yuna announced. "All my unnies. Every single boyfriend. Socks literally everywhere. It's an epidemic, it's so sad, you wouldn't get it."

He blinked at her.

"It's a generational thing," she added cheerfully.

"Right." He let it drop, mostly because she was so obviously talking out of her bubble butt that there was nothing to actually call out. "Noted."

They stood there for a second, arcade lights flashing pink and blue across her cherry-red hair, the machine behind them already eating someone else's coins. She looked down at the bunny, then back up at him.

"Wanna get out of here? There's a Uniqlo like two minutes away in Shinsaibashi, I checked, and I need a new top because I packed like a geoji, literally like a BEGGAR, it's so embarrassing."

"Uniqlo?" He blinked. "You want to go to Uniqlo. You."

"What, I can't do fast fashion? I'm literally SO relatable now."

"I, um." He rubbed the back of his neck, fighting a smile. "I saw what you wore to set last week. I didn't think you owned anything that wasn't, like. A whole outfit."

She gasped, clutching Osaka-chan to her chest. "Seriously?! I'm SO down-to-earth!"

"You wore Prada to a convenience store."

"It was CASUAL Prada!"

That got him this time, a surprised chuckle leaking out, his hand coming up too late to cover it. She decided on the spot that she wanted to hear it again, like, a lot, and was already walking backward toward the exit, bunny in one hand and his sleeve in the other, towing him along because she'd decided they were leaving and reality just needed to catch up.

She tucked Osaka-chan under her arm, Woomin half a step behind her. If her pulse was hammering a frantic pop-beat against the boning of her corset, she'd survive. This was just hanging out. With a boy who made her laugh and wouldn't look at her tits even when she made it easy, who won her a stuffed bunny and made being twenty-one and chaotic feel like enough.

The problem was, feelings that big had nowhere to go except the group chat. She had her phone out before she'd realized, thumbs already moving in their puppy-printed case while Woomin studied the recycling bins by the wall like the labels for PET bottles versus burnable trash were the most fascinating thing he'd seen all night.

@igotyuandme: GUYS 🐰🐰🐰

@igotyuandme: ok i KNOW i said it was just arcade games

@igotyuandme: but he won me the bunny i CANT. with the claw. EIGHTH try he would not give up @igotyuandme: like?? boys can do that?? just be CUTE??

@igotyuandme: ALSO we've been hanging out like 3 hrs and he hasnt looked at my boobs once

@igotyuandme:not ONCE

@igotyuandme: is he ok?? is something wrong w him?? 😭

@chaerrry0: YUNA HE LIKES YOU FOR YOU

@chaerrry0: IM GONNA CRY 🦊

@iamfinethankyouandryu: ^ this is the most baby thing shes ever said

@iamfinethankyouandryu: "boys can be cute" bitch last month you sent me a guys nudes and rated his dick out of 10 💀

@igotyuandme: UNNIE YOU LITERALLY TAUGHT ME HOW TO DO THAT

@iamfinethankyouandryu: someone had to after yeji went domestic on us

@iamfinethankyouandryu: needed a new project 🐱

@yezyizhere: ...

@igotyuandme: IM NOT A PROJECT 😭 IM ON A WHOLESOME DATE

@chaerrry0: SHES IN LOVE LEAVE HER ALONE

@lia_loves___: wait who taught her boys could be nice. was it not us

@yezyizhere: Proud of you 🖤

@yezyizhere: If you're going to sleep with him tonight, be safe

@igotyuandme: UNNIE?????? 🙈

@yezyizhere: I'm not judging, just send me and manager-nim the hotel name

@iamfinethankyouandryu: the mom has spoken 🐱

@igotyuandme: 😭😭😭

@yezyizhere: Have fun. Call me if he's weird 🖤

She shoved the phone away before they could spiral, grinning so hard her face hurt.

Outside, Dotonbori swallowed them back into its neon current. The Glico man still running his eternal race overhead. Crowds thick enough that nobody was looking at faces, just trying not to get trampled. A girl by the railing lifted her phone as Yuna passed, held it for a second, then lowered it again and went back to her boyfriend like it was none of her business.

Perfect.

She was just towing him through the crush, pulse going crazy, when she saw it glowing pink between a drugstore and a shuttered ramen place: a Life4Cuts, the four-cut booth that lived in every subway station back home in Seoul, somehow transplanted whole into the middle of Osaka.

"OH." She stopped so fast Woomin walked into her shoulder. "Oh my gosh! Come ON."

"Wait, what are we -"

She was already shoving him through the curtain.

These were always tiny, built for one, so one giant skinny girl plus a fully grown boy meant she ended up half on the bench with his hip jammed against hers and nowhere to put her elbow except his thigh. The back of his neck went the pink of the booth light. She was going to be smug about that later.

"Pick a frame," she said, smacking the screen. "Pick a - okay I'll do the frame, you hit the - no, the big green - the START -"

"I'm TRYING -" He poked the touchscreen with one careful finger, except the whole ugly UI was in Japanese neither of them could really read, and the menu lurched somewhere it shouldn't have, flipping to a grid of glossy idol headshots under a banner in English, which wasn't actually more helpful.

"Tay-kuh... photo... wit... yuh-oh bias?" Yuna read off the banner slowly, frowning, mouthing it twice more before it made sense. "Oh. OH! Take a photo with your bias. It's a K-pop one!"

A cheerful chime sounded, then a doll-face dropped into the corner of the preview, soft-focus, airbrushed into next week, posing next to her like they were besties.

It was her, Shin Yuna, ITZY's beloved maknae and visual.

"NO WAY!" She leaned into frame next to herself and giggled. Idol-Yuna beamed back in full stage makeup, cheekbones lit by some studio across the sea, like that one fancam-screenshot face people captioned with thirst emojis. The Yuna actually sitting there had sex hair that didn't come from sex and a stuffed rabbit in her lap. "It's ME! Woomin, it's ME, I'm photobombing myself, this is the best night of my LIFE - okay wait wait wait, serious question -"

She twisted to look at him, which in here resulted in her nose almost hitting his. He stopped breathing.

"Which one's prettier?!" She jabbed a finger at the screen, then at her own cheek, then back. "Idol me, or me me! And you HAVE to answer, no skipping!"

Up in the corner a tinny speaker was leaking the collab playlist, her own breathy lyrics threading through it, you're what I want and I'm not shy, and she bopped her head to it without once even realizing it was her.

His eyes flicked from the screen to her and back to the screen, and his mouth opened around an answer that never came while the pink climbed past his ears.

"That one's - I mean she's - " He waved a hand at idol-Yuna. "That's a really good photo of you?"

"WORST. ANSWER."

"No - wait -"

She planted both fists on her hips and stuck her bottom lip out, which in a box this size mostly meant jamming an elbow into the wall, and gave him the full pout. "You think the FACETUNE is hotter than the real thing?!"

"I didn't say hotter, I said good photo, the real one's - you're -" He ran out of road and just looked at her, ears gone full scarlet, and whatever his face was doing killed the joke right in her mouth.

She turned back and tapped idol-Yuna off the screen.

"Yeah, like, what do we even need fake-ass me for?" She flicked at the little X like it was a bug. "Got the real one right here."

The preview cleared, leaving her and him and the bunny, squished into a glowing pink box in the middle of Osaka.

"Okay, okay, for real this time! Hold him up!" She wedged Osaka-chan up between their faces, a paw in each of their hands. "On three we kiss the baby, ready? One - two -"

They both ducked in and kissed the bunny at the same time, her on one fuzzy cheek, him on the other, close enough over its silly pink head that she felt the warmth coming off his face.

The flash went off and caught all of it.

The rabbit, the two of them folded around it, his eyes cutting up to her at the wrong moment.

The screen flipped to the decorating part, the four shots lined up with a drawing pad and a tray of stickers, and she pounced. She scrawled 오사카 ♡ across the top in lurid pink, stuck a tiny crown on Osaka-chan, then slapped a sparkly heart over Woomin's startled face in the last frame before he could stop her, cackling while he went "hey - HEY -" and fumbled for the stylus too late.

The machine spat the strip out. She snatched it before it finished drying and flapped it in the air to set the ink, and Woomin leaned over her shoulder to see and then just kept hovering, breath on her jaw, and there was suddenly no air left in the box.

"You're -" he started, and didn't finish, and turned his head and kissed her cheek instead, so fast and so soft that her brain only caught up after he'd already pulled back with his whole face on fire.

Her stomach dropped through the floor of the booth.

"Okay," she said, strangled, jamming the strip into her back pocket and grabbing his hand because if she sat in this box one more second she was going to do something unhinged. "Okay we're going. Uniqlo. Right now. Up. Come on -"

Out on the street she had her phone out again one-handed, the other hand still locked around his, thumb flying.

@igotyuandme: GUYS

@igotyuandme: HE KISSED MY CHEEK 😭😭😭😭🐰

@igotyuandme: in the photo booth

@igotyuandme: ON THE CHEEK

@igotyuandme: like a little gentleman?? im DECEASED

@igotyuandme: anyway we're going to uniqlo now

@igotyuandme: to get me a top like NORMAL ppl do

@igotyuandme: soo wholesome. nothing weird. 🐰

@chaerrry0: A GENTLEMAN!!!

@chaerrry0: 🥹🥹🥹

@chaerrry0: IM SCREAMING he likes you SO much

@iamfinethankyouandryu: lmao youre so getting railed tonight

@igotyuandme: WHAT

@igotyuandme: unnie NO. STOP

@igotyuandme: its not even like that omg

@igotyuandme: hes SHY he won't even look at my boobs 🙈

@iamfinethankyouandryu: maknae you showed us your spreadsheet on that island

@iamfinethankyouandryu: the quiet shy ones are ALWAYS the freaks

@iamfinethankyouandryu: ask chaeryeong lmaooo

@chaerrry0: RYUJIN

@chaerrry0: WHY would you say that

@chaerrry0: thats PRIVATE 😳

@iamfinethankyouandryu: so you dont deny it

@chaerrry0: BYE

@lia_loves___: "just getting a top"

@lia_loves___: ok

@lia_loves___: send pics. of the top. and i dont mean u so make sure ur not naked

@igotyuandme: IM NOT

@igotyuandme: ok gtg we're HERE

@igotyuandme: bye love you all DON'T be weird 🐰

@yezyizhere: Yuna please don't blow him in the changing room. If you get caught it will be a whole thing. Save it for the hotel 🖤

She locked the phone and shoved it in her back pocket before the last message finished loading, so she never saw it.

Uniqlo late on a Friday was less a store than an LED-lit obstacle course, the white glare making the racks look sharp and endless, twice as much inventory crammed into half the space Seoul would've used. Which meant Yuna kept bumping into Woomin every time she turned around to check another shirt.

The fourth time her elbow hit his ribs, she caught him smiling about it.

"What?"

"Nothing." He stepped back half a step, hands in his jacket pockets. "You're just. You shop like you're being timed."

"I AM being timed, we close in like - " She checked her phone. "Less than half an hour. That's literally nothing."

"Most people would've picked something by now."

"Most people have bad taste." She held up a plain cream scoop-neck with long sleeves, considered it, then immediately put it back. "See? Bad taste. I almost fell for it."

"It looked fine?"

"It looked like a hagwon seonsaengnim, Woomin. I'd disappear. I'd become invisible and die." She moved down the rack, fingers skating over cotton and polyester. "I need something cute but not trying-too-hard cute, you know? Like effortlessly cute."

"You're putting a lot of effort into effortless."

She shot him a look over her shoulder, caught him grinning at his own joke, and had to fight down a smile. "You're SO annoying."

"Sorry."

"No you're not."

"No, I'm not."

She pulled another top off the rack, this one a white off-shoulder crop, frilled puff sleeves and a smocked ruffle bodice with a little cutout at the waist, a soft girly thing that needed a strapless something under it or nothing at all. Which was the whole problem she was trying to solve, considering the corset was actively trying to strangle her and her tits had been making a break for it all night. She held it up against herself, glanced down, then looked at Woomin. "Thoughts?"

His eyes dropped to the shirt, then immediately bounced back up to her face. "It's, um. It's nice?"

"WOW. Truly, your enthusiasm is overwhelming."

"No, I mean - " He rubbed the back of his neck, ears going pink. "I think it'll look good. On you. The color's good."

She squinted at him, then at the shirt, then back at him. He looked like he'd rather be anywhere else, which meant he was telling the truth and dying about it, and she felt a stupid flutter of victory in her chest.

"Okay." She tucked it over her arm. "I'm trying this on. You - " She pointed at him, then at a bench near the dressing rooms. "Sit there. Don't leave. If I come out and you're gone, I'm stealing Osaka-chan back."

"He's in my jacket."

"I WILL FIGHT YOU."

She didn't wait for an answer, just spun toward the dressing rooms before he could see her grinning like an idiot.

The changing room was the same deal as the rest of the store, efficient to the point of being punishing, a little box with a mirror and a curtain and just enough space to prove the concept of claustrophobia. She hung the white frilly top on the hook and yanked the curtain shut, then reached back to undo the corset.

The knot didn't budge.

She tried again, fingers scrabbling at the ribbon she'd tied way too tight hours ago in the Airbnb because it had looked good and she hadn't thought past that. Her two-inch acrylic nails, excellent as heat-resistant tongs to steal her unnies' cooking straight out of the pan but not so great for untying the sluttiest top in her closet, caught on nothing. The bow had welded itself into a tiny fabric rock at the small of her back, and her long arms weren't built for this kind of flexibility.

"Oh, come ON."

She yanked harder.

Nothing.

Wriggled her shoulders, tried to shimmy the whole thing up over her head. The boning bit down on her ribs harder than any of the dozens of guys who'd ever bent her over and gripped her hips from behind.

"You've gotta be kidding me."

She stood there for a second, still strapped into the corset, breathing hard, glaring at her reflection. Hair wrecked, face flushed, looking nothing like the goddess she'd walked in as. So NOT the vibe.

And Woomin was sitting just outside on a bench, probably scrolling his phone, having no idea she was in here losing a fight to her own clothes.

She could just... ask him for help.

Which was mortifying, because grown women handled their own stuff. She'd gotten herself off in an airplane bathroom a few months ago at thirty thousand feet with nothing but turbulence and her imagination; she could undo one dumb bow. A REAL woman didn't need rescuing from her own corset.

But also the corset was STUCK and she was running out of options and the store was about to close.

She cracked the curtain open and stuck her head out. Woomin glanced up from his phone, eyebrows lifting.

"So, um." She kept the curtain bunched at her side, the corset still clamped around her chest. "Don't freak out, but I need help."

He sat up straighter. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, the knot's just - it's stuck. I can't get it undone."

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "You... want me to -"

"I mean unless you want me to ask the staff?" She peeked over her shoulder at the register, where a teenage girl with highlights was stacking merchandise and absolutely not paying attention to the dressing rooms. "Because I can, but like, that's weird, right? That feels weirder. You're already here."

"I - um. Yeah. Okay." He stood, pocketing his phone, then just stood there looking at the curtain like it might bite him.

"Literally just a knot, Woomin, I'm not asking you to do anything crazy."

"Right. Yeah. Just a knot."

He stepped up to the open curtain and stayed right outside, the two of them facing into the cubicle toward the mirror. He kept his hands up like he was being arrested, locking his gaze somewhere over her left shoulder.

She turned her back to him, gathering her hair up with both hands and twisting it into a ponytail to get it out of the way. The corset gaped open at the top, boning loose against her ribs, the ribbon knotted tight at the small of her back. "It's right there, you just have to - I don't know, pull it or something, I literally can't reach."

"Okay. Okay, I can - " His fingers brushed the knot, feather-light, fumbling at the ribbon. "I think I've got it, just hold on -"

She held still, arms aching from holding her hair up, feeling his breath on the back of her neck. This close, she could smell him, and the curtain was so thin the white glow washed right through it and threw his shadow huge across the wall.

"Is it -"

"Almost, just - wait, I think I -"

There was a tug. Then another. The knot loosened, and she felt the tension in the ribbon give, the corset going slack.

"Oh, you got it! Wait, is it -"

His knuckles grazed the bare skin of her lower back.

He sucked in a sharp breath and snatched his hand back, and the ribbon came with it - the whole bow and the long trailing ends she'd spent all morning threading through the eyelets, all of it ripping free in one go. The corset dropped, boning clattering against itself, cups falling away, and she was still holding her hair up with both hands when the cool air hit her bare tits.

"Oh - "

"Shit - "

Behind Woomin, out in the aisle, a balding, sweaty pachinko uncle in a faded track suit stopped dead with a women's AIRism hoodie in his hands. A plastic convenience store bag crinkled against his leg, a Strong Zero can clinking inside it, as he let out a low, breathy "Egui na..." while staring straight past Woomin's shoulder at her bare tits with Strong Zero shame.

"SSIBAL!" She grabbed Woomin by the front of his fleece and hauled him inside, yanking the curtain shut so hard the rings rattled.

The corset skidded across the floor, sliding toward the gap under the swinging curtain, out toward the ogler's feet. Woomin, who'd fumbled every single thing all night, dropped and snatched it off the tiles a breath before the curtain sealed shut. The one clean move he'd managed all day.

He straightened up clutching the corset, looking like he'd surprised himself.

She shoved him back against the mirror, both of them breathing hard. The dressing room was the size of a closet and he took up half of it, back pressed to the glass, eyes screwed shut, face gone red as tteokbokki.

"Are you -" she started, then looked down and remembered she was topless. Tits fully out, the corset balled up in Woomin's white-knuckled grip.

"Oh."

Woomin's eyes were still closed, but his jaw kept working like he was chewing on something he couldn't swallow, and his free hand pressed flat against the mirror like he didn't trust it anywhere else. "I'm - I didn't mean to - I'm so sorry, I didn't see anything, I swear -"

"You didn't see anything?"

"I mean - I saw - but I'm not looking, I just -"

"You're looking right now."

His eyes flew open, met hers for half a second, dropped straight to her tits, and then snapped up so fast she heard his neck crack. "I mean - sorry - I -"

He whipped around to face the mirror, forehead pressed to the glass, shoulders up around his ears.

Watching him fight that hard to give her privacy went straight to her pussy. His whole body locked up against the glass, and he breathed out a strangled "aish" through his teeth.

She'd spent three months working very hard on not being that girl anymore. The one who treated boys like a game she was good at. Who could flip a switch and turn into someone she wasn't, just because it was easy and it worked and it felt good to be wanted even if it didn't mean anything.

New Yuna was wholesome. New Yuna went on dates to arcades and photo booths. New Yuna let boys win her stuffed animals and kiss her cheek and never once checked to see if they were hard.

Old Yuna dropped the shirt.

She lowered her arm from across her tits. Woomin was still facing the mirror, breath fogging the glass, looking like he'd give anything to be somewhere else.

"Hey."

He didn't turn around. "I can - I'll just wait outside, you can get dressed, I won't -"

"Woomin."

"I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to mess it up, I just -"

She stepped up behind him, close enough to feel the heat coming off his back through the fleece, and put one hand flat on the mirror next to his head. Her tits brushed his shoulder blade. He went completely still.

"Turn around."

"I don't think that's -"

"Please?"

He turned around slowly. His eyes stayed fixed on her face for approximately two seconds, dropped to her tits, and then flew back up with his ears gone crimson.

She slapped her arm across her chest. "HEY!"

"Sorry! Sorry - you TOLD me to look - I mean turn around - I wasn't trying to -"

His gaze pinged back to the ceiling, the curtain, the hook on the wall, anywhere but her, and she watched him cycle through multiple stages of panic in the span of a breath, like he'd never been this close to a half-naked girl in his life and didn't have a script for what came next.

He looked so cute she could've died.

She lowered her arm slowly, making very sure to drag it out, while watching his face the whole way.

His eyes caught the movement and dropped, following her arm down, and when it fell to her side and left her tits bare his breath stopped in his throat.

"I -" he tried.

She stepped closer, backing him up until his shoulders hit the mirror. The dressing room was so small her jeans brushed his leather pants, her bare tits a breath away from the white fleece hanging open over his chest. His chest rose and fell fast, his hands still pressed flat against the glass on either side of his hips like he didn't trust them.

"You kissed me earlier," she said sweetly.

"I - that was just - your cheek -"

She reached up and touched his face, fingers light on his jaw, tipping his chin down so he had to look at her. Then she leaned in and kissed his cheek, exactly where he'd kissed hers, soft and quick and chaste.

"There." She pulled back just far enough to meet his eyes, her hand still on his face. "Now we're even."

"Noona -" He choked out. "Yuna - your -"

"My what?"

"You're -" He swallowed hard, gaze dropping again before snapping back up. "You're not wearing -"

"Oh." She glanced down, like she'd only just noticed. Her tits were right there, small and pale and soft, nipples already tight from the air conditioning and the way he was looking at her and the absolutely insane thing she was doing right now. "Oh my, you're so right."

She looked back up at him through her lashes, biting her bottom lip, letting her eyes go half-lidded and sultry. This part she knew. This part she'd done a hundred times. Make them want it. Make them think it's their idea.

Except when she tried to hold the look, the memory of lying in her sad-pink bedroom in Jeju with her hand between her legs came back. Her listening through the thin wall while Yeji said her tits looked flat and Minho answered they're perfect, you're perfect, his voice bleeding through the plaster. Yeji had laughed, the sound bright and real, like sex could be funny and desperate at once. And Yuna had frozen in the dark thinking nobody's ever looked at me like that, mine are too small, I'm just something they grade, second to Wonyoung, nice to look at.

"So." She tried to make it come out breathy and sultry but it caught in her throat. Her arms twitched up halfway before she forced them back down to her sides. "What do you think?"

Woomin stared at her. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

"I mean - " She glanced down at herself, then tried to look back up at him but her eyes slid to the curtain instead. Her fingers twisted at the rings on her other hand. "I know they're not... like, they're pretty small. I always thought they were too -"

"They're not - " He shook his head, still staring. "They're not too small. They're - " His hands twitched at his sides like he wanted to touch them. "I think they're really pretty."

It came out strangled, his eyes locked on hers, and her nipples pulled tight, a hot flush spilling down her throat.

She'd been waiting three whole months for someone to say that about her tits without sounding like they were grading her, and here it was, fumbled out by a boy too nervous to lie.

Whatever sultry thing she'd been holding on her face just dissolved.

Her whole face cracked into that oh-my-god-he-MEANS-it grin, giddy and delighted, like the one she gave Ryujin while she stole food off her plate or Chaeryeong every time she drunkenly revealed too much about her sex life with Sunwoo.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." He echoed, firmer this time, and his gaze dropped back to her tits like he couldn't help it. "I mean - yeah. They're - " He made a frustrated noise. "You're perfect."

The grin got wider. She could feel it stretching her cheeks, ruining whatever sexy thing she'd been trying to do. "Okay."

"Okay?"

She bit down on the smile, pulled the sultry look back on, easing back into her practiced rhythm. "Do you wanna touch them?"

His breath hitched.

She took his hand off the mirror, slow and careful, and guided it up to her chest. His palm was warm and a little - actually no, ridiculously - sweaty. She pressed it flat over her left tit, feeling her nipple dig into the center of his palm.

"Oh," he breathed.

"See?" She kept her hand over his, holding it there. "Not that scary. My unnie's like, WAY scarier. She makes boys cry. Boys like you especially. Like every single hookup ends with someone crying like a baby and calling her mommy, it's kind of her whole thing -"

"Wait, which unnie -"

"And she doesn't even feel bad about it, she's like, do I LOOK like your mommy, which is honestly so much worse if you think about -"

"Yuna, you keep saying -" He was doing the counting thing on his free hand again. "Okay but the boyfriends are off the list, so the hookup one would have to be -"

"What? No. NOBODY." She pressed his palm flat against her tit before he could get any further. "It's a group thing. We all make boys cry. It's in the contract. Anyway -"

He made a choked sound that might've been a laugh, and then his thumb moved, brushing over her nipple, and she gasped. He froze.

"Don't stop -"

His other hand came up, cupping her right tit, and then he was touching her for real, both palms warm and careful, thumbs circling her nipples until they went painfully hard. She pressed closer, her chest pushing into his hands, and let out a soft whimper that came out needier than intended.

"Is this - is this okay?"

"More than okay," she moaned, arching into his touch. "Keep going."

He got bolder, rolling her nipples between his fingers, gentle at first and then harder when she moaned. Her jeans were suddenly way too tight. She pressed her thighs together and felt herself soaking right through her panties.

She stepped closer, closing the remaining space between them, her hips brushing his. He was only half a head taller - she'd forgotten how tall she was, how at her height she could look most boys almost in the eye - and when her stomach pressed against his she felt it immediately.

The hard line of his cock straining against his leather pants, pressing right into her hip.

She rolled her hips forward, grinding against it, and he made a wrecked noise into her hair.

"Noona -"

"I can feel that," she whispered against his jaw. "You're so hard."

"I - I'm sorry, I didn't mean -"

"Don't be sorry." She pulled back just enough to look at him, then let her gaze drag down his body, catching on the obvious bulge tenting his pants. Her tongue darted out to wet her bottom lip. "Kinda hot, honestly."

His cock twitched against her hip.

She hooked two fingers into his waistband, tugging him forward, and then sank slowly to her knees. The floor was cold and probably filthy, but she was too fucking horny to care.

"What are you -"

"What do we have here?" She trailed one finger down the front of his pants, tracing the shape of him, root to tip. He shuddered. She popped the button on his leather pants, taking her time with it, watching his face while she slowly pulled the zipper down.

The bulge in his boxers was obscene, straining against thin black cotton, a dark wet spot already blooming where the tip pushed against the fabric. She licked her lips.

"Yuna, you don't have to -"

"I want to, like, so bad." She hooked her fingers into his waistband and tugged. His pants stuck to his thighs, leather clinging, and she had to peel them down painfully slow. His cock was still trapped in his boxers, tenting the fabric, and when she finally got the pants low enough it sprang free so fast it smacked her right in the face.

She reared back with a yelp, one hand flying to her eye. "OW!"

"Shit - are you okay?!"

"I'm FINE - " She was laughing, one eye watering, the other squinted shut. "Oh my gosh, that literally HIT me."

"I'm so sorry - "

"No, it's okay, it's just - " She dissolved into giggles, shoulders shaking. "I like pink, but not pink EYE, you know? I got that once and had to wear an eyepatch to a fansign, it was SO embarrassing, the fans thought I was doing like a pirate concept or something - "

"Wait, you've had that happen before?"

She froze.

His eyebrows were up, confused and maybe a little awed, and she'd just fully told on herself without meaning to.

"I mean - once or twice -" She felt her cheeks heat. "Not like, a lot or anything, just -"

"How many times have you -"

"Not that many!" she said too quickly, waving her hands defensively. She forced herself to take a slow breath, tipping her chin up to look at him through her lashes. "Just like. A few. Barely worth mentioning. Basically a virgin, honestly."

He was giving her a look.

"What?"

"You literally just said you got pink eye from -"

"ANYWAY." She wrapped one hand around the base of his cock, cutting him off, and he choked on whatever he'd been about to say.

She looked at it properly for the first time. He was hard, flushed pink at the tip, not as thick as Minho-oppa but smoother, twitching against her fingers with this eager little jump that made him look sweet and doomed at once.

She pushed him gently back against the mirror and took him in her mouth, hollowing her cheeks, sucking him down until he hit the back of her throat. His knees buckled. She pulled off with an obscene pop, then took him deep again, bobbing her head, working every trick she'd learned on a beach in Jeju three months ago - the twist of her wrist at the base, the flutter of her tongue along the vein on the underside, the hum in her throat, the way she let spit pool and drip down his shaft to make it filthy and wet. He groaned, one hand flying up to brace against the mirror, and vicious pride bloomed in her chest.

And then his cock softened in her mouth.

She froze, pulling off so she could stare down at it.

It was wilting, going from hard to half-mast before you could finish saying Yuna is angry, and when she looked up at him his face was bright red.

"I - I'm sorry, I don't know why - I'm just -"

"Wait, are you like, nervous?"

"Maybe? I just - this is a LOT, and -"

She frowned, feigning offense. "Are you saying I'm like, bad at this?"

"NO! No, you're amazing, I just -"

"Mm." She wrapped her hand around the base, giving it a slow pump while her tongue swept across her bottom lip. Her eyes flicked up to his face. "Don't worry, okay? I've literally got the perfect trick for this."

She dragged her tongue up his length from base to tip, keeping the stroke unbearably slow and dripping wet. She reached the head, looked up to lock eyes with him, and planted a soft kiss right on the tip.

Then she whispered, "No Hussey, no life."

His cock sprang back to life so fast it nearly hit her in the face again.

"Aigoo - " He slumped back against the mirror, mouth open, eyes blown wide. "What - where did you - how do you even -"

"Oh, my unnie taught me that." She pumped him slow and steady, eyes flicking up all innocent while pre-cum beaded at the tip. "Works really well on her boyfriend, apparently. She said she learned it from Sana sunbaenim."

"Which unnie?"

"Hm?"

"You said - " He was breathing hard, hips twitching up into her fist. "Which unnie, you have like four -"

"All of them." She leaned in and took him deep again, just long enough to make his knees buckle, then pulled off with an obscene pop. "It's a generational thing."

"That doesn't make any -"

"ANYWAY." She stood up, fingers already working at the button on her jeans. "Maybe I've done this a few times, but like - barely. I'm basically -"

"A virgin?"

"I didn't say THAT." She glared at him, scandalized. "Don't put words in my mouth. I need it for your dick."

"You just had it in there -"

"Shut up and look cute."

She shimmied her jeans and panties down together, got them past her hips, then stopped caring halfway through. The denim bunched around one calf, her panties twisted with it, and she left the whole mess tangled around one leg because Woomin was staring, mouth open, eyes wide and stupid. Her pussy was on full display, smooth and bare, pale pink and glistening wet, lips swollen and slick; she'd soaked right through her panties, the gusset dark and ruined where it clung to the denim at her ankle.

"Wow," he breathed, reaching out, stopping, looking up at her for permission like the world's shyest pervert.

"Go ahead, like - go ahead," she whispered, and his fingers brushed her inner thigh, then higher, sliding through her slick folds carefully enough to make her gasp much too loudly. The curtain swayed. They both froze, stared at the gap, then at each other, and Yuna pressed her lips together, shoulders shaking with silent laughter. "Okay, like, quiet. We are being SO quiet."

"That was you."

"Don't even start." She pushed his hand back between her legs, because apparently public humiliation hadn't fixed a single thing about her. His fingertips came away wet, his whole face going red, and she backed him toward the little bench with her pussy throbbing and her jeans strangling one ankle. "So your fault."

He sat when the bench hit the back of his knees, still staring between her thighs. "Noona, have you done this before?"

"Me? Like, barely." She swung one knee over his lap, fighting the denim still strangling her other leg. "A totally normal amount. A respectable, girl-next-door amount. I'm basically a nun, I don't know what you've heard." He glanced down at the soaked panties twisted around her calf, evidence she hadn't thought this lie through, and she pinched his chin back up before he could build a case. "Eyes up here, detective, that's not for you yet. What about you, hm? Bet you've been thinking about your noona for a while."

"Yeah. Just, um. Never in public?"

"Oh my gosh, same." The lie came out bright and shameless, because Jeju was ancient history and therefore didn't count as public if she decided it didn't. "First time for everything, right? Cute answer."

She reached down between them and wrapped her fingers around his cock. He flinched so hard his shoulders hit the mirror, an apology already starting, but she softened for the half-second it took to say, "Help me." His hand came down over hers, warm and shaking, and together they guided him forward, her slick coating the head as it slipped through her folds. His fingers tightened over hers when the tip caught at her entrance.

"Ready?"

"Yes. Yeah. I - yes."

She sank down slowly with both of their hands wrapped around him. The head stretched her first, thick enough to pull a sharp breath through her teeth, and then the shaft slid deeper, dragging through all that wet heat until her pussy had him gripped tight. Her thighs shook, one leg trapped by denim and the other braced on the bench, and when she finally sat flush in his lap his balls pressed slick against her ass.

"Oh - " Her head dropped, mouth falling open against his shoulder. "Oh my gosh, you're so deep, that's -"

"Are you okay?"

"So okay, so okay, don't move - " She rolled her hips, grinding her clit against his stomach, and slapped one hand over her own mouth when a moan tried to escape. "Mm - quiet. We gotta be quiet. Hands, Woomin. On me."

His hands hovered, then touched her waist like she might bruise from fingerprints. She grabbed his wrists and planted his palms hard on her bare hips. "No, like - HOLD me, my jeans are literally strangling my ankle, if I eat it in a Uniqlo I'm gonna die and it'll be YOUR fault."

"Like this?"

"Yes! Good. So good."

She started to move, dragging herself up his cock with a slick pull, then sinking back down until her wet lips met his base. The bench creaked under them; they froze, somewhere outside a hanger clicked against a rack, and Yuna leaned forward with her mouth brushing his ear. "If we get caught, I'm blaming you. Your dick started it."

"I don't think that's -"

She cut him off by grinding down, and whatever he was saying broke into a strangled little sound. "Shh, you're like, so loud."

"You're doing that on purpose."

"Doing what?" She blinked at him, wide-eyed, while her hips rolled with expert coordination. "I'm new, like - I don't know things."

He stared at her. She smiled sweetly and bounced once, slow and deep, wet skin slapping loud enough to make both of them wince. "Good boy."

His cock twitched inside her, and the smile slipped right off her face. "Oh. Oh my gosh, okay, you like that."

He could only manage a stuttering nod, and she laughed under her breath, clapping her hand over her mouth before the laugh turned into another moan. Her other hand slid between them, fingers finding her clit with quick, messy strokes. Woomin looked down and his eyes glazed over, because two slick fingertips were circling way too fucking fast and practiced for the innocent act while her hips kept pumping around him.

"Noona," he whispered, stunned.

"Don't say anything, okay?" She kept her palm over her mouth as he tried to thrust up and missed the rhythm, bumping awkwardly under her. "Wait - like this. When I go down, you go up. Match me. And don't make that face."

"What face?"

"The face that says you're about to ask where I learned that."

She clenched around him on purpose, and his mouth snapped shut. "Great, totally learning."

He tried again, thrusting up as she sank down, and this time he caught it. His cock drove in deeper, rubbing her just right, and her eyes fluttered before she could stop them. "There - oh my gosh, right there - yes, yes, don't you dare stop -"

Fortunately for him, he didn't. The awkwardness burned off fast once he had the rhythm, his hands tightening on her hips, pulling her down as he pushed up. Her trapped jeans tugged at one ankle every time she lifted, making each bounce short and hard, her wet pussy pumping down his shaft in slick, noisy strokes while her tits jumped under the LED glare and her arm-warmer sleeves slid down toward her wrists.

She yanked one arm free, then the other, not even slowing her hips as she ripped the stupid things off and flung them on the floor. "So annoying," she hissed under her breath.

She grabbed his shoulders for leverage, throwing her head back so her red hair spilled down her deeply arched spine. Riding him into a furious rhythm, she dragged his shaft up through her dripping wetness until just the flushed head caught at her entrance, then smashed her ass back down to swallow him base-deep. He plunged in and out of her slick pink folds with every violent bounce, the fierce friction stretching her swollen lips tight around his girth and echoing in wet, meaty slaps against his thighs. The wet noises their bodies were making should've terrified her, but the obscene thrill of getting her pussy ruthlessly pounded right on the other side of a thin curtain only fed the adrenaline, making her grind down even harder.

The curtain shifted again and they froze with him buried inside her as a pair of shoes passed by outside, paused, then kept walking. Fear clenched her pussy around him in one vicious squeeze. Woomin's eyes rolled back, his hips twitching up in tiny helpless jerks, and she smacked her palm tighter over her mouth while shaking her head at him. The footsteps faded; she exhaled through her nose and started moving again, faster now, all caution burned away by how good it felt to almost get caught and keep going. Her fingers dove back to her clit, working furiously, slick clicking under her touch.

"Yuna -"

She stopped dead. Noona had vanished; just her name, bare and shaky in his mouth, and the heat that hit her face almost made her dizzy. "Wait, say that again."

"Yuna."

Her hips rolled before she could answer. "Oh - " she breathed, then covered her mouth because the sound came out too loud. "Oh, fuck. Say it - keep saying it -"

Her fingers sped up, and his hands dug into her hips. She rode him with short, frantic pumps, grinding her clit into her own slick fingertips every time she came down, body giving away every lie she'd told about being new: the expert circles, the tight little pulses around his shaft, the way she knew exactly when to press harder and when to ride the high until her thighs started trembling.

"I'm gonna - " She swallowed the rest behind her palm, eyes squeezing shut. "Oh my gosh, Woomin, I'm gonna - don't stop, don't stop, don't you dare -"

Then her pussy clamped down on him so hard she felt it in her bones, her thighs locking around him as slick flooded out around his cock, as she pulsed tight-wet-tight-wet in convulsive clenches, and she was actually coming and coming in a Uniqlo fitting room, her trapped leg jerking against the denim around her calf while her body folded forward. Her hand wasn't enough - a squeal was coming - so she bit down hard on his shoulder through the fleece, teeth sinking in, and Woomin let out a strangled "YAH - " that he barely managed to choke off, his whole body jerking under her while she kept pulsing around him, thighs shaking so hard she thought she might actually pass out, still coming, her whole pussy throbbing wet and desperate and totally out of her control -

Woomin lasted two more thrusts. "Yuna, I can't -"

"Wait!" She blinked through it, still pulsing around him. "Wait, not -"

She'd picked up that no-leaking-in-the-pool sensibility from Yeji-unnie - who apparently never let anyone cum inside her until Minho-oppa came along - somewhere in the last three months. Which was honestly a pretty smart and professional thing to do. She was totally going to spend the whole night at the hotel draining Woomin's balls anyway, he just couldn't know that yet.

He started cumming inside her with a strangled gasp anyway, hips bucking up as his cock surged hot and deep. The first pulses filled her before she could move, his hands locked on her hips, and she pushed herself up fast, but her trapped leg caught and slowed her. "Woomin - my jeans -"

His cock slid out with a wet, obscene pop, still pulsing as the head slipped free. Two thick white spurts landed inside her before she cleared him, and she was already dropping to her knees, getting down to business, one hand catching his shaft as another pulse jumped against her palm. Behind her, unnoticed by both of them, cum leaked from her swollen pussy in a slow white drip, mixing with her clear wetness and running down the inside of her thigh toward the denim bunched around her calf.

"Oh my gosh, you're still - Woomin, you're STILL going."

"I can't - I don't know why -"

"Don't apologize, oh my gosh." She took him into her mouth before the next spurt could hit the floor, swallowing him deep, hand twisting at the base while he kept coming in helpless little pulses. He braced against the mirror, knees shaking as she sucked him through it, messy and loud and much too good for someone who'd allegedly done this a "respectful" amount.

"Yuna - fuck -"

She pulled off with a wet pop, eyes shining, and his cock twitched again, still leaking across her fingers. "Still? Wow, okay, I can like, totally work with that."

She pushed her tits together with both hands and leaned in, trying to trap him between them, chin tipped up like she was about to deliver the hottest finish of his life. His cock slipped straight out, already spurting, painting a hot stripe up between her tits and onto her collarbone. She tried again, squishing harder, but he was too slick now and the head squirted out the top of the squish, smeared a second pulse across her chin, then flopped against her chest and jerked one more time, the last of it landing in a messy ribbon over her cleavage and catching her right under the eye.

"OW! Why is it ALWAYS my eye?"

Woomin made a tiny strangled noise, and she looked down at the failed tit job, at the cum smeared across her collarbone, chin, and cheek, and lost it. The cackle burst out before she could stop it. She clapped a hand over her mouth too late, shoulders shaking, one eye still squinted shut, kneeling bare-chested on the filthy floor with her jeans tangled around one leg and his cream leaking down her thigh.

"I'm sorry," she gasped into her palm. "I thought that was going to be SO hot, like - I was going to be iconic."

Woomin started laughing too, breathless and helpless, his head hitting the mirror behind him. "You are."

"No, I'm literally such a mess."

"You're perfect."

The laughter caught in her throat. He was looking at her like she was the eighth wonder of the world, and the wonder had been thoroughly defaced - a glob cooling on one flushed cheek like a beauty mark that had escaped containment, a fat pearl strung in the dip of her collarbone, a long shining smear roped down between her little tits where her doomed squish had funneled it, one last bead clinging to her nipple like it had picked a favorite. She knelt there decorated head to chest in him, make-up wrecked, one eye still scrunched shut, and he kept staring like he wanted to frame the whole thing, and her whole face went so hot she had to look away first. "Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you mean it."

"I do though."

She stared at him, then wiped her eye with the heel of her hand and made a face. "Okay, well, romantic timing, but I'm sticky and legally in danger."

A knock rattled the partition wall beside them.

"Sumimasen, daijoubu desu ka?"

They both froze.

Yuna was still on her knees, topless, cum on her face and chest and leaking down her thighs, one leg caught in her jeans. Woomin was sitting on the bench with his leather pants shoved down and his cock softening in the open. The white frilly top lay on the floor beside the fallen hanger. Her corset, shrug, and arm-warmers were scattered near his shoes.

She slapped both hands over her mouth.

Woomin looked ready to leave his body. "What did she say," he breathed, lips barely moving, eyes huge. "Yuna. What does that mean."

"She's asking if I'm okay," Yuna whispered back, which was about the limit of what four years of Japan concerts and the same six MC phrases had left her with. She could say hello, thank you, I love you Osaka, and apparently are you okay, and that was gonna have to be enough.

"Daijoubu desu ka?" the clerk repeated.

Yuna swallowed, plastering on a bright customer-service smile before fumbling an answer in Japanese. "H-Hai! Daijoubu desu! Sorry, sorry, chotto... fuku ga... muzukashii desu!"

The clerk paused.

Yuna stared at Woomin.

Woomin stared back.

The clerk made a polite noise and moved away.

Yuna waited until the footsteps faded before she collapsed forward, forehead almost hitting Woomin's knee, laughing silently so hard she couldn't breathe. "We have to go. Right now."

"You're covered in -"

"I KNOW." She wiped her face with her palm first and made it worse immediately, smearing warm stickiness across her cheek and down her throat. "Oh, gross. Oh my gosh. Why is it warm. Why is that worse."

She grabbed her ruined panties from the denim knot around her calf and dragged them over her face and chest, over her collarbone, between her tits, under her chin. The tacky mess spread before it thinned, salt and sweat and him all over her skin, and her pussy clenched again because apparently she'd no shame and even cleanup was turning her on. "Seriously? Now? Nothing. I'm normal."

She shoved the panties into her purse, yanked her jeans up commando, and nearly fell when the trapped leg finally came free. Woomin caught her by the elbow. "See? Teamwork. Very wholesome."

"Wholesome isn't the word I'd use..."

"It is if we do it together." She grabbed the white frilly top off the floor and pulled it over her head, the smocked square neck settling off her shoulders. The fabric stuck immediately to the damp patches on her chest, and she grimaced, tugging it away from her skin. "UGH, that feels disgusting. Cute, though."

Woomin was still dazed, moving on a delay. He pulled up his leather pants, missed the button twice, then crouched and started grabbing everything that wasn't nailed down: the corset, the little shrug. He shoved all of it into his jacket pockets while Yuna finger-combed her now thoroughly-sexed red hair and checked her reflection with one watery eye.

"How bad?"

"Looks... cute?"

"Good lie!" She kissed his cheek, fast and messy. "Okay okay okay. We're so normal. We're two normal people who normally went into one dressing room together, super casual, nothing happened, we're CHILL."

"You don't have your -"

"My WHAT - oh. Yeah no that's gone, it's on the floor, leave it, I don't want it back." He opened his mouth, then shut it, one hand pressing over the bulging pocket stuffed with her corset and sleeves. She cracked the curtain and checked the aisle. Empty. "Okay just - just walk normal, why are you walking like that, you look SO guilty, stop it -"

"This isn't casual -"

"Then BE casual!! Casual is a CHOICE, Woomin!"

She grabbed his hand and towed him out of the dressing room, past the bench, toward the front of the store and the glowing exit beyond it.

Woomin slowed first. He tilted his head up at the ceiling, listening, and a slow grin spread over his face.

"What? Why are you - "

Then she heard it too, threading down through the racks at a polite retail volume. Five voices she'd know anywhere, hers stacked in with the others.

"I don't wanna be somebody - just wanna be me, be me -"

The universe, as it turned out, still had a sense of humor.

"I wanna be me, me, me," her tinny voice continued overhead.

"No," she whispered, already shaking her head, already mouthing it at Woomin like he had the intercom remote. "No no no no - "

Two girls by the sock display turned at the commotion, then at her, and their eyes went wide in perfect unison.

One of them grabbed the other's arm.

"Is that - Yuna?!"

Woomin's hand tightened around hers. The drying cum glued her skin to the new top. The photo strip dug into her back pocket.

The girl on the left was already lifting her phone.

"No no no -" Yuna's hands came up on instinct, patting the air, the universal please-be-cool motion that every celebrity about to get made in public did by muscle memory. "Shh, shh, hi, hi - it's okay, just - can we keep it kind of quiet? Please?"

The girl on the right was fumbling with her phone case, hands shaking, nodding way too hard. The first one took a step closer.

"Yuna-ssi! Daebak! Can we - can we get a photo?"

Every cell in Yuna's body screamed run. But her mouth, trained by five years of idol protocol, smiled instead.

"Of course! I love MIDZY!" She smiled brightly through gritted, cum-stained teeth. She felt the tackiness shift under the new top as she moved, a wet patch spreading where his cum had soaked through the cotton and was now smearing across her chest. She kept smiling. "You guys are so sweet!"

The girls rushed over, one on each side. Turn your face. Chin down. Peace sign up. Smile with your eyes. The commands ran through Yuna's head, years of training taking over. Don't think about the cum drying on your chest. Don't think about how your pussy is still throbbing. Don't think about the fact that you're commando under these jeans and you can feel yourself dripping. Wait, did he cum inside?

The first girl's selfie camera flashed.

"Gomawo! I can't believe - we saw you on Music Bank and you were SO good, and - " She was giving a Daesang speech a minute, gesturing wildly. Her friend just stared, starry-eyed and speechless.

"Thank you so much!" Yuna's smile stretched wider, cheeks aching. "That means everything, really!"

She caught Woomin in her peripheral vision. He'd backed up three steps and was now intently studying his shoes, one hand shoved in his fleece pocket where her corset and shrug were stuffed. His ears were red. He looked like he wanted to teleport back to Seoul.

"Are you -" The second girl finally breathed out. "Are you shopping? Here? At Uniqlo?"

"Yeah! Just, like, casual stuff, you know?" Yuna gestured vaguely at the racks around them, praying they wouldn't notice she was wearing a top she clearly hadn't walked in with. "I'm super relatable, I love Uniqlo!"

The first girl's eyes cut to Woomin. Back to Yuna. A knowing smile spread across her face. "Are you - is he your - "

"Friend!" Yuna said, way too fast. "Just a friend! We're just hanging out, super casual, very normal!"

"Uh-huh." The girl was grinning now, clearly not believing a word. "Well, you guys are really cute together."

"We're NOT - I mean - thank you?" The panic climbed her throat. She needed to leave. Now. "This was so nice, but we really have to - "

"One more?" The second girl held up her phone hopefully. "For my sister? She's gonna die when she sees this."

"Sure! Of course!"

They took three more photos. Yuna's smile didn't slip once, even with sweat starting to mix with the cum and her pussy literally aching and Woomin looking like he was praying for a sinkhole to open under his feet.

"Wah, so pretty - look, unnie, look!" The girl spun the phone around to show her, beaming.

And there she was on the little screen, glowing under the store lights, the soft white frill of the borrowed top sitting low and sweet off her shoulders. If you zoomed in - and somewhere a fancam account eventually would - you might catch a faint questionable sheen high on her chest, just above the neckline, exactly where the stylists always dusted her with shimmer before a stage because that was the spot the cameras loved most. It could be highlighter. It photographed identically to highlighter. Only two people in Osaka knew it wasn't, and one of them was pretending very hard to be interested in a sock multipack.

"So pretty," Yuna agreed faintly, looking at the most debauched angel in Japan. "Thank you!"

Finally - FINALLY - the girls thanked her about six more times and drifted toward the registers, already hunched over their phones, probably posting the photos before they'd even paid for their socks.

Which, yeah. That was the thing about phones.

Three aisles over, a little pack of teenage boys looked up from theirs all at the same time, found her, and just sort of stopped working. One made a kettle-like noise and smacked his friend's arm. Another dropped his phone and went down after it without taking his eyes off her, which seemed dangerous. One did a tiny wave. They looked like they might actually cry, which was honestly so cute, and also very much about to become a whole crowd.

And she was out. Done. Her last functioning Japanese was gone from telling a rack of clothes she was okay, and there was no way she was getting through a fresh group of fans on a language she'd been winging all night.

The boys took a collective step forward.

Idol triage took over before she'd decided anything. She grabbed Woomin's hand.

"RUN."

"What - why are we -"

"JUST RUN, GO, GO -"

They sprinted out the store down the street, dodging tourists and salarymen, her hand locked in his, Osaka-chan tucked under her arm. Her jeans chafed without panties. The cum under her top had fully dried now, tacky and tight against her skin, and it pinched with every stride. Behind them, Wannabe was still playing from the Uniqlo speakers, her own track chasing them down the block, and the absurdity of it all hit her so hard she started laughing mid-sprint.

Woomin looked over at her, bewildered and breathless, and then he was laughing too.

They didn't stop running until the canal opened up in front of them, neon bleeding into the black water and the water bleeding it back, and there he was overhead: the Glico man, arms thrown up over the bridge, still mid-victory-lap on the race he'd been running since 1935 that nobody ever had the heart to stop. They stumbled to a halt under him, both of them doubled over and gasping, and Yuna ended up bent with her hands braced on her knees and her hair everywhere, finishing a sprint of her own. When she finally looked up at Woomin, flushed and grinning and totally wrecked, she felt that stupid warm thing in her chest again.

"That was -" she started.

"Insane," he finished.

"Yeah." She was still catching her breath, still grinning. "SO insane."

She looked down at herself. She wore the white frilly top and her denim jeans with absolutely nothing underneath. Woomin's cum was drying sticky against her skin, her hair was a disaster, her makeup almost certainly ruined. She had just had public sex in a changing room, narrowly dodged the retail staff, taken a facial, and posed for fan photos with the evidence still stuck to her body.

Then her eyes caught the little plastic Uniqlo tag still threaded through the hem, and the scratch of the price sticker on the inside of the neckline.

"Oh shit."

"Wait, what?"

"Oh NO." She pinched the tag, holding it up, eyes huge. "Woomin. WOOMIN. I didn't pay for this. We literally RAN. I stole it, oh my gosh, I shoplifted, in JAPAN, they're gonna deport me, they're gonna make my mugshot into a PHOTOCARD -"

He looked at the tag and then at her and folded back over the railing, laughing too hard to say anything.

"It's NOT funny, it's a CRIME, okay, I'll just - I'll go back and give it -" She grabbed the hem and started hauling the top up, and Woomin made a strangled noise and caught her wrists, and only then did she actually look around, at the hundred phones and the bridge and the glowing canal and the giant lit-up landmark hanging right over her head, the most photographed corner in maybe all of Japan, where she'd been about to take her shirt off. She let the hem drop. "...okay. Not here." Then her hands went still for a different reason. "Wait. Where are my clothes?"

"In my pocket."

"WHY are my clothes in your pocket -"

"You told me to -"

"I can't even give it BACK now! I have to keep the crime shirt! This is YOUR fault -"

She was already laughing too hard to mean it. The panic just sort of evaporated, and she hopped up to sit on the canal railing with her feet swinging over the water and the neon wobbling around underneath, and dug out her phone, because if she didn't tell someone immediately she was going to die.

Woomin leaned on the railing next to her, hands in his pockets, watching her thumbs go. She didn't notice. She was kind of busy right now.

@igotyuandme: ok so dont be weird abt this

@igotyuandme: i just fucked him 🐰

@iamfinethankyouandryu: I FUCKING CALLED IT

@iamfinethankyouandryu: scroll up i SAID this while u were in that photobooth. SCROLL UP

@chaerrry0: OUR BABY 🥹🥹🥹

@yezyizhere: ...

@yezyizhere: I specifically told you not blow him in the changing room

@igotyuandme: ok in my defense i didnt JUST blow him in the changing room

@igotyuandme: i blew him AND we fucked sooo 💀

@lia_loves___: "just getting a shirt" 🙄

@igotyuandme: wannabe came on the speakers?? midzy saw me?? i had to do fanservice w sex hair??

@igotyuandme: AND THEN I ACCIDENTALLY STOLE THE SHIRT im wearing it rn im literally a criminal in a foreign country 😭😭😭

@chaerrry0: A CRIMINAL ARC 😭😭

@iamfinethankyouandryu: ok but was he good or did he just lie there

@igotyuandme: ok if im being HONEST honest

@igotyuandme: 6

@igotyuandme: he came in like 4 seconds and the titjob was a disaster

@iamfinethankyouandryu: 6 is brutal lol i raised u right

@igotyuandme: ok wait no

@igotyuandme: bc he also won me the bunny

@igotyuandme: and he wouldnt look at my boobs the WHOLE night like out of respect??

@igotyuandme: and he carried my actual clothes the whole time and didnt even make it weird

@igotyuandme: ok its like an 8

@igotyuandme: no wait its a 10

@iamfinethankyouandryu: 10?? wtf maknae u literally just said 4 SECONDS

@igotyuandme: i KNOW i cant explain it

@yezyizhere: ... Proud of you though 🖤

She left the group chat to erupt without her, thirty unread and climbing, Chaeryeong typing paragraphs and Ryujin firing off voice notes nobody would survive. But there was one more person she had to tell, and it wasn't a group chat kind of thing. She searched @katarinabluu and tapped into their DMs.

@igotyuandme Jimin-unnie!!!

@igotyuandme: unnie u up??

@igotyuandme: remember the golf cart when u asked me whats the fun part

@igotyuandme: ok so this boy wouldnt even LOOK at me all night

@igotyuandme: not in a rude way, like in a he actually likes ME way

@igotyuandme: and it was better than every guy whos ever stared

@igotyuandme: so u were right 🐰

She watched the screen for a moment. No little dots came up under Karina's name. It was late, and Jimin-unnie was probably asleep, and that was okay, because it wasn't really a question. She locked the phone and shoved it back into her back pocket.

When she looked up Woomin was still watching her, leaning on the rail with the Glico man glowing over her shoulder, wearing the same dumb amazed face he'd had on since the arcade.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing." He looked at his shoes, then back up, and lost the fight with himself. "Nothing, I just, you're so -"

"Hot?" She rolled her eyes and kept swinging her feet. "I know. Everyone says it. You're allowed."

"No." His ears went pink under the neon. "I was gonna say fun. You're, um, the most fun person I've ever hung out with."

Fun. Everyone always said hot. Gorgeous, perfect, whatever. In every language. Nobody ever said fun, and fun meant he wanted HER around, cameras off and everything.

She slid off the rail. Osaka-chan squished flat between her sticky chest and his fluffy jacket with the bulging pockets as she crowded into his space and Woomin sort of froze, as she put a hand on his silly pink face and kissed him on the lips with everything she had.

He went stiff for a second and then he melted, his hand finally finding the courage to land on her waist, and all Dotonbori straight up EXPLODED with fireworks. Over the canal, everywhere. The camera whipped a full circle around them and the crowd lost it and her own songs came swelling up underneath like the last ten seconds of a teaser SM would've sold a kidney for, and her leg just kicked up behind her on its own, the full kdrama princess pop that Chaeryeong would be proud of, ten thousand people screaming her name -

She pulled back, breathless, glowing, ready for the applause.

There was no applause.

Just the canal being a canal, some tourist editing around them, and Woomin blinking at her like she'd turned him off and on again. The fireworks were all in her head. The camera too. And the extras. And the backing track. Every bit of it, just her main-character-syndrome whipping up an MV on the spot.

And her leg was still up. She'd actually done the leg thing. In real life. To nobody.

She put it down, slowly, like nobody would notice if she was slow enough.

The real version was better anyway.

"So," she said, already grabbing his sleeve and walking backward toward the lights, bunny swinging from her free hand. "My hotel?"

"Sure?" Woomin nearly tripped over his own feet keeping up. "Yeah. Okay. Yes."

"Cool. My unnie's got the address, so if you murder me they'll find you."

"Wait, which unnie? Is that the sock one, or the mommy -"

"All of them!"

"That's not an answer -"

"COME on."

She towed him off into the crowd, the bunny bouncing against her hip and Woomin still trying to figure out which unnie and still getting nowhere with it, and the two of them got smaller and smaller down the canal until the crowd swallowed them whole and they were gone.

SEOUL - THE NEXT MORNING

She cracked her eyes open and blinked.

This wasn't her ceiling.

An unfamiliar crack spidered across the plaster above her, her mind bracing against the light. Her bedroom faced east, taking the morning sun hard and white. This light rippled through thin curtains, soft and gold. Across the room, a shelf of battered paperbacks and film canisters sat where her dresser ought to be.

She wasn't in her own bed.

There was an arm draped over her bare waist. A warm hand gone slack against her hip. He'd curled into her back in the night, his knee slotted behind hers, his heartbeat drumming a steady rhythm into her shoulder blades. She was in her underwear and nothing else.

Old Karina would already be reaching for her bra. That routine was practically muscle memory: get up, get dressed, get the Hell out.

Normally she'd be out the door by now. She didn't really have anywhere to be on a weekend like this, but the aftermath was always predictably bleak. Usually she lay there tallying the deficits: he'd finished too fast, or handled her like a slippery trophy, or touched her with that annoyingly reverent, fanboy awe. The creeping fact that she could let a man physically inside her and still leave untouched. It was always better to be fully dressed before the facts caught up. Better to text had fun from the back of a cab, safely out of reach.

But this morning, lying in the gold light with his heat pressing down her back, she waited for the drop and found nothing. There was no inventory to take, only the rise and fall of his breathing against her skin, dust motes swimming in the sun, and the humiliating urge to stay exactly where she was.

God. How embarrassing.

Her phone lay face-down on the rug. She fished it off the floor, lifting his arm ever so slightly to maneuver, easing his wrist back down so he wouldn't stir. She caught herself being careful about it. Months ago, she would've used that stealth to slip out unnoticed. Now, she was using it just to burrow back in.

The screen glowed a rude 7:05 AM. It also offered a cluster of blue notifications from Yuna, fired off in the middle of the night while Karina had been busy getting thoroughly wrecked and enjoying every moment of it. ITZY's maknae had a well-documented talent for broadcasting her 1 AM disasters across group chats, but weaponizing her chaos in a direct message was new. Yuna had apparently decided back on that bonfire in Jeju that they were confidantes now. Karina, too tired to be aloof, hadn't corrected her.

She read the texts lying on her side, cheek mashed into the pillow. By the third message, a wry smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. The girl had clearly survived some kind of night. And then, under the chaos, quieter, the actual point of the message - shy, for Yuna, which was its own small miracle:

so u were right

Of course she was right. She'd told Yuna her truth in a golf cart three months ago, the whole ugly thing - the Yonsei boys gawking at her like a hallucination, the men who wanted the poster and not the girl holding it up. She hadn't said it to teach the kid anything in particular; it was simply true and it'd wrecked her for months, so it was nice to finally get to tell someone young and stupid enough to get it. And the kid had gone off and learned it in three months flat. It was annoying because Karina needed a breakup, a frat house, and then getting annihilated in a threesome with her best friend and her terrifyingly competent man to get there, which meant she was only now, this morning, in a bed that wasn't hers, finally finding out what the other side of it actually felt like.

She could've typed I know, but that was a confession. The man breathing against her back didn't need anything going to his head. Instead, she locked the screen, let the phone drop, and sank backward into his warmth, smiling at no one in particular.

His name was Junho.

They met in August not long after they returned from Jeju, on the shoot for UP, which was her first single without the other three and therefore the most exposed she'd ever felt with her clothes on. The first concept boards had been pure aespa, the cyber-goddess gloss she'd worn her whole career - and the director had taken one look and lost it. She still remembered him on his feet, sending the whole stack skidding off the table.

"No. No, no, no. What the FUCK is this?" He'd flung a hand at the renders fanning across the floor. "Too clean. We are NOT - " he'd actually had to stop and breathe " - we are not shooting another fucking Whiplash. The whole country already saw Whiplash. Give me something you could leave out in the rain."

So they'd hired the guy who shot ILLIT's Magnetic, the one who made idols look like they were remembering their own lives instead of selling something, and told him to make her solo an art film.

Junho took the job and quietly walked it somewhere darker than anyone ordered.

The first thing he ever said to her was that she was turning her face wrong. He said it frowning at his monitor, in a studio full of people calling her gorgeous, and explained that she kept giving the lens an angle she'd drilled in front of a mirror at fifteen. He asked if she could just look at the camera like there was someone behind it.

She'd been too surprised to argue, so she did. He tapped the side of his monitor when he got it and moved to the next setup.

They spent the lunch break of the second day sharing bad catering on the fire escape. He sat on the grated metal steps and told her she had two faces. One was flawless and impenetrable, built for the billboards. The other showed up when the director yelled cut and her shoulders dropped. He asked her which one she liked giving to the camera.

She'd caught him filming between takes earlier, when she thought the camera was off. When she'd asked what he was doing, he'd just said he was testing something. But his monitor showed her face in a frame she didn't recognize, catching the exact second her guard slipped to reveal the exhausted human underneath.

"What are you looking for?" she'd asked him on that fire escape.

He considered the question while watching traffic blur past below. "The person carrying the image," he said finally. "Not the image itself."

She hadn't really understood what he'd meant, but it stuck with her. Most cinematographers she'd worked with cared about lighting and composition. He studied the exhaustion she hid from the lens.

He'd apparently gotten the SM contract through Giselle. They'd gone to the same arts high school in Tokyo years ago, and when Giselle ran into him at the resort in Jeju over the summer, she'd spent a whole night "networking" - her word, delivered nonchalantly when she'd returned to the villa looking thoroughly destroyed and extremely satisfied.

Karina had heard the full story at the bonfire the night after. Giselle told it to the whole group with aplomb: the karaoke booth, the golf cart, the hotel rooftop washing machine. Everyone had lost it. Ryujin and Yunjin called it cinema. By the end of the night, Winter still didn't understand what "networking" meant.

Karina hadn't known it was Junho until weeks later, when his name came up in a production meeting and Giselle inhaled her caramel latte down the wrong pipe. She coughed until their manager looked worried, wiped her mouth, and let a wicked grin spread across her face. Then, because Giselle had zero filter and even less shame, she'd leaned over during the coffee break and whispered: "Remember the golf cart guy? That's him."

Karina had stared at her. "You're fucking joking."

"Nope." Giselle had grinned, unrepentant. "Ten out of ten, would recommend. Very attentive. Excellent multitasking skills. Decent driver. And now he's your cinematographer."

So Giselle had spent a whole night in a dress that barely qualified as one, thoroughly evaluating a cinematographer's technical abilities, only for him to take the SM gig and fall for the one girl in the building who hadn't tried at all.

He asked for her number on the last day of the shoot. Said he wanted to show her something about her own face - angles she'd never seen, frames where she looked real instead of perfect. He made it sound like a favor he was doing for science.

She said yes because she was curious. And because his hands were nice, which Giselle had also enthusiastically reviewed.

He texted her two days after the shoot wrapped. Said he had the B-roll to show her if she was free.

She picked the first place, which surprised them both. Banpo, the riverside steps under the bridge, golden hour going down over the water while the fountain came alive above them in long arcs of pink and gold. They sat on the wide stone tiers with the rest of Seoul's twenties, couples and convenience-store dinners and someone's bad bluetooth speaker a few steps down, the whole bank lit soft and reverberating with other people's evenings. Nobody looked at her twice. For once she was one more girl by the river with a boy.

He'd stopped at the GS25 on the way and come out with caramel maple corn, her favourite, which she hadn't told him. When she went for her card he waved it off and then went pink about it, like letting her pay would ruin something. She opened the bag her way, ripping a small hole into the dead center with her teeth and pulling it wide into a clean round mouth, and looked up to find him watching her do so with great fascination.

"Do that again," he breathed, half-laughing.

"It's just how you open it."

"That's not how anyone opens it." He was almost laughing, but seemed to feel bad about it. "You opened it like there's a correct way and the rest of the world is wrong."

There WAS a correct way. She held the bag out instead of saying so. He ate a piece watching her, she ate one watching the fountain, and it was the easiest minute she'd had in months.

A cloud was pulling apart over the far bank, and before she could think better of it she pointed up at it.

"That's a brachiosaurus," she said. "The neck's too long for anything else."

He tipped his head back to look, studying it as seriously as he studied everything, then asked if that one was her favourite.

"No, mine's the mosasaurus." She nodded out at the river, where the fountain was throwing its light across the water. "Sea one. It's like a levelled-up version of a shark or crocodile. Looks super cool."

He nodded along like he knew what a mosasaurus was, which he clearly didn't, and somewhere in the middle of pretending his eyes had come back down to her instead of the sky.

She liked his hands when he talked. He gestured the whole time, fingers framing shots in the air, stopping mid-speech to catch a stranger against a lit window or the fountain light moving on the water. He talked about cameras the way she only let herself talk about singing. She leaned in to listen.

A few days later it was his pick: Seonyudo, the old water plant out on the river that someone had let the plants reclaim, concrete gone green, a high arched footbridge out to it. It was a beautiful, broken place a man like him might call a date. He shot the whole walk on film, golden hour pouring through the rusted frames, and he shot her too when he thought she wasn't looking, and she let him point a lens at her without arranging her face for it.

They kept meeting up. Weeks of schedules rearranged, walking until her feet hurt in the good way, learning his face in streetlight and cafe glow. He never suggested coming back to his place, never framed it as anything other than showing her something about light or composition. She didn't name what they were doing either.

Something she'd apparently picked up from a close friend of hers.

But she started noticing his hands more. The snacks he'd buy and pretend weren't gestures. How he'd text her about a sunset and she'd already be thinking about whether he was free.

Then he invited her to see the finished cut.

His apartment was in Yeonnam-dong, a fourth-floor walkup with shoes piled by the door and warm incandescent light spilling into the hallway.

Inside were clean lines and wood tones, everything intentional. A mechanical keyboard sat on his desk with custom keycaps in off-white, black and rose gold pink. Film cameras lined up on a shelf like a museum display. A framed In the Mood for Love poster above the couch, Wong Kar-wai's signature color grading making the whole room feel like a still from someone else's memory.

Edison bulbs overhead glowed amber. The whole place felt analog, like he'd built a darkroom for living instead of developing film.

"Sorry about the mess," he said, which was hilarious because there wasn't any.

She'd brought a Dujac from Morey-Saint-Denis, not to make a point, just because it was in the rack and she wasn't going to turn up empty-handed. He poured it into the only two wine glasses he owned, which didn't match, and handed her the better one without seeming to think about it. She sat on his couch and watched him move through his own space, fingers finding the corkscrew without looking.

The footage was from the UP shoot, his cut, not the label's. Her face in angles she'd never seen, half of it dropped into shadow and the other half pulled gold by a single light just out of frame, so she looked like two different girls sharing one jaw. The frames were holding on small things: her hand, the line of her throat, the half-second her chin tipped down between takes.

"You see?" He leaned forward, tapping on the monitor. "Right there. That's the face I was talking about."

On the monitor she was laughing at something off-camera, her guard down and her edges gone soft.

"I look tired," she said.

"No, you look real."

He clicked forward through the timeline until he hit a frame she didn't remember him shooting, where she sat between takes staring at nothing, her mouth neutral and her eyes gone somewhere far off.

"This one," he murmured, eyes still on the screen. "This is what I meant on the fire escape. About the person carrying the image."

She stared at herself on his monitor. The frame caught something she'd spent years learning to hide. It wasn't sadness exactly, but a specific kind of aloneness. Like she'd gotten used to being looked at without being seen.

"You looked lonely," he observed. "I wanted to know why."

The Yonsei boys and everyone else had crowded around her poster, hungry to possess the perfect girl. Junho had pointed his camera at the loneliness behind her face and asked what it needed.

"Do you know Wong Kar-wai?" he asked, and when she shook her head he lit up, which was the first time she'd seen it happen, and then he was off.

He talked about a director who shot people half in light and half in dark on purpose, who never let you see all of a face at once because nobody was all of one thing at once. Chiaroscuro, he called it, an old painting word the films had borrowed, the bright part and the buried part in the same frame so you couldn't pretend the buried part wasn't there. He said most idol work lit the bright part and killed the rest, flattened a girl into a single flawless plane, and it drove him insane, because the whole point of a face was the argument going on across it. He wanted the UP video to do the opposite, film her the way the old films shot women who carried things they couldn't say out loud.

Somewhere in there Karina had ended up with her chin in her palm and her wine going warm in her hand, watching his hands cut shapes out of the air, following maybe half the actual cinematography and giving the other half to the way his whole face changed when he talked about the thing he loved. She'd come up here to see footage but ended up staying for a lecture on shadow, and she was riveted.

Because he wasn't performing any of it for her. He'd have said all of it to an empty room. He just happened to be saying it next to her, about her, and didn't seem to have worked out that I want to film the part of you that you hide was close to the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her face.

She took another sip of wine, warm in her chest now, the last of her careful decorum going with it. He'd pulled his chair close to walk her through the timeline, near enough that his knee rested against hers.

His hand came up to her jaw, fingers gentle, tilting her face toward the light.

"Can I -" He tilted his head, studying her profile with furrowed brows. "The shadow here. I want to see if -"

And against every bit of her better judgment, with his fingers still warm on her jaw and the wine loose and easy in her chest, she turned her head and pressed her lips to his. He froze against her mouth. Then he gave in, his hand sliding from her jaw to fist in her hair, and weeks of careful professionalism dissolved. The kiss turned wet and impatient. Mouths slanted wide, tongues sliding in a slick, careless rush that tasted of the wine they'd shared. He gripped her waist and dragged her flush against his chest, kissing her with a messy urgency that left her chin wet.

When she pulled back to breathe, his eyes were dark and slightly stunned.

"I thought you were never going to -" she started.

"I didn't want to be -" He dropped his gaze to her mouth, swallowing hard. "Every guy you meet probably -"

"Yeah," she said, and kissed him again before he could finish being careful.

His hands stayed polite right up until her back hit the desk, rattling the mechanical keyboard. Then his mouth came down on hers, and polite evaporated into the warm Edison-lit air. She felt him hard against her hip through his slacks and bit his lower lip to hear the noise he'd make, low and startled against her mouth.

After that, everything blurred. Last night's memory would come back in amber slices: his shirt half-unbuttoned by her hands, his fingers unclasping her bra while he kissed her, the room growing hazier every time she blinked. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe he'd arranged a smoke machine because of course a cinematographer with an In the Mood for Love poster over his couch would.

Her bra slid loose, and Junho went still above her. His hand, still caught in the strap, tightened once and let go. He looked down at her for one unguarded second, mouth parted, then pressed his forehead to her collarbone like the sight had knocked the next move out of him.

"Bed," she heard herself saying through the haze.

She walked him backward with the wine glass still in her hand, her palm flat against his chest. The red climbed the inside of the glass with each step. When the backs of his knees hit the mattress, she pushed, and he sat down hard enough to drag a breath out of both of them. His hands found her waist. Hers found the waistband of his slacks.

She hadn't had sex since Jeju, since that threesome. Her panties were still on when she got his cock out, still on when she straddled him, when his hand slid between her thighs and found how wet she was through the thin fabric.

"Karina," he breathed.

"Jimin," she corrected.

His hand stopped. Then he nodded, kissed her softer than anyone else ever had, and said, "Jimin," against her mouth.

She couldn't wait any longer, pulling the lace aside instead of taking it off. His laugh broke into a groan when she wrapped her fingers around him and dragged the head through her slick, and then she sank down before either of them could turn careful again. The stretch opened her mouth against his, slow because she made herself go slow, even with the wine glass tilting in her fist and his hand closing over hers to keep it steady.

They made love that night in pieces she could barely hold together afterward. She rode him slow and deep, rolling her hips down to take all of him, then grinding forward so her clit dragged against him with each stroke. She was soaked, slick running down his shaft and pooling where their bodies met, the wet sounds echoing in the quiet apartment. His hand slid between them, fingers finding her clit and rubbing tight circles while she moved. She gasped against his mouth, sinking down to swallow him whole, her pussy gripping him so tight he groaned into the back of his hand.

The glass passed between them. She'd rock forward with Burgundy warm on her tongue, his thumb still working her clit, then bring the wine to his lips while she ground down on him. His groan echoed through the thin crystal. Wine and salt and the taste of his mouth. She remembered him stretching her out when she arched back to wet her lips with red, her juices slicking his fingers as he rubbed her, the amber light catching her throat. His gaze stayed fixed on her face even when she gave him everything else to look at.

At some point he flipped them over. She remembered the mattress taking her back, the wine glass landing on the floor without breaking, his mouth at her throat while he tried to pull her panties down one thigh and gave up when they caught.

He pushed back inside her and moved slowly now, each thrust deep enough to drag the moans out of her mouth before she could feel embarrassed about it. Her hair stuck to her cheek, the panties pushed aside like an afterthought, her legs open around a guy who kept looking down at her like the bare truth of her was enough.

"Stop looking at me like that," she whispered.

"I can't."

So she let him. The apartment glowed around them, amber bulbs catching on the wood and the red slash of the poster over the couch, the room hazy in her memory even now. Maybe the smoke machine was real. Maybe the alcohol invented it.

She remembered coming with her face pressed into his neck, one hand buried in his hair while the other gripped the back of his open shirt. He murmured her real name against her throat, and they broke together, like they'd stumbled onto something beautiful neither of them knew how to name. She felt him pulse inside her as her body pulled him deeper, his heat spilling into her while she was still writhing in ecstacy, and it blurred together into one long moment. Shared, for once. Then he stayed there, still hard enough inside her that her pussy kept tightening around him whenever he shifted, and she should've told him to move because disappointment, cleanup and distance usually came next.

Instead, she wrapped her arms around him.

His breathing slowed against her throat until she realized he was falling asleep still inside her. She cradled the back of his neck anyway, fingers sliding into his hair, and stared past his shoulder at the blurred amber bulbs.

Morning would come with a rude phone screen and Yuna's disaster texts. Last night, under the wine-invented haze, Karina let herself hold him.

And that was how she ended up in a strange apartment in Yeonnam-dong, feeling more comfortable in a bed that wasn't hers than anywhere she'd ever slept.

She felt him stir, his hand twitching on her waist before going perfectly still while his breathing hitched shallow in his chest. She stayed quiet and waited right up until he jerked his hand away, catching his wrist before he could retreat, closing her fingers over his pulse as his whole body tensed beneath the sheets.

"Karina, I -" He croaked groggily. "Shit. You're still here."

"Mm." She guided his hand back and pressed his palm flat against her hip. "Good morning to you too."

"I didn't mean -" The mattress gave as he shifted to piece the morning together, staring at her like he'd just remembered who he brought home. "Did... did we -"

"We did," she said softly, letting the silence linger until his thumb stroked her hip on its own, his hand remembering what the rest of him was still catching up to.

"I'm not usually -" He stopped and swallowed hard. "This isn't how I - I don't just -"

He sounded anxious, so she rolled over to face him. Pillow creases crossed his cheek, his hair pushed all the way to one side, his shirt collar still hanging open where she'd unbuttoned it last night and never bothered to finish. He looked wrecked and wonderfully human. She leaned in and kissed him, offering a soft press of her mouth that cut off the rest of his panic.

"The only thing that happened last night," she murmured against his lips, "was magic."

His eyes searched her face for a joke or a dismissal, but she just smiled back until he asked, "What are you going to do now?"

She felt the answer pressing hot and urgent against her thigh inside his boxers. She let her fingertips trace the dip of his ribs, slipping a thumb just under the elastic to brush his morning wood beneath.

"I think," she whispered, her mouth hovering a breath from his, "we just pick up where we left off." She worked the last buttons loose and pushed his shirt off his shoulders, tossing it somewhere in the direction of the poster.

"Karina -"

"Jimin," she corrected, sliding her body flush until her bare breasts pancaked against his chest. "You earned that last night. Use it."

"We don't have to -"

"I want to." She stroked him gently to draw a strangled noise out of his chest. "Do you?"

He looked at her, and whatever professional barrier he had left simply collapsed.

"I do -"

"Show me."

So they made love all morning.

The wine was gone and the sun was up, spilling gold over the rumpled sheets. He dragged her damp panties down her thighs and buried his face between her legs before she could even kick them off, his tongue carefully sweeping her clit to track every gasp and find the spot that made her toes curl and her hands fist in his hair. When she came the first time, it tore through her so hard she screamed his name over and over until the helpless sound echoed through the fourth-floor walkup loud enough to make a door slam somewhere above them.

He lifted his head with a grin. "I think everyone in the building knows my name now."

She hauled him up by the hair to kiss her own taste off his mouth.

They tore the apartment apart in blurred, golden frames. Her palms flat on the desk, the mechanical keyboard clattering under her fingers with every blind thrust driving deep into her from behind. She came with her chin pressed to the wood, his hand fisted in her hip and his fingers slick against her clit while her pussy clenched tight around him. On the couch under the poster, amber light sliding over her arched back, his hands bruising her skin to pin her while she ground her ass back against him, taking him deeper and deeper as they crashed over the edge in a messy, tangling rush. And her thighs slick on the kitchen counter, pussy dripping down the tile while he drove back inside her so fast a coffee mug rolled off to shatter on the floorboards, her voice breaking hoarse and raw in her throat while her whole body shook.

She pushed him down onto the cushions eventually so she could swing her legs over him and gather her tits in both hands.

"I want to try something," she told him.

She'd only done this once before. Jeju, three months ago, offering herself to a man who looked at her like a rare gift, discovering she could actually want it. Junho was looking at her with that identical reverence now, breathless and still, waiting for whatever she decided to give him.

She positioned him between her breasts and pressed them together, starting slow to mix spit and pre-cum into a slick channel before sliding up and down his shaft until the friction turned heavy. Every time the flushed head crowned her cleavage, she dipped her mouth and caught it.

"Jimin -" His hips drove up to push frantically into the vice of her tits. "I can't -"

"You can." She took him deep into her mouth, her tongue circling the ridge while her breasts kept him squeezed tight. "I want you to."

He came in a hot surge, painting her collarbone and the curve of her chest before she swallowed the rest of him down. She kept her mouth sealed around him through it all, milking the last pulses until he shoved weakly at her shoulders to gasp for air.

She pulled off and smiled at him through the mess dripping down her chin.

"Your turn," he breathed.

He bent her over the couch and ate her out until her screams probably taught the whole building her voice, making her cum one more time with his tongue buried inside her and his thumb working her clit in tight circles. Then he dragged her back to the bed. Time dissolved into sunlight and hoarse voices, both of them wrecked and greedy. The last time he finished he was buried deep inside her with her legs locked around his waist, murmuring her real name into the sweat on her throat, staying there to breathe hard against her before he finally rolled away and passed out flat on his back.

She lay there staring at the ceiling, chest heaving, sore and still feeling the aftershocks, discovering she was smiling.

Later, when he'd passed out without warning, she understood why. One second he was breathing hard against her throat, the next he went slack on top of her and his breathing evened out into sleep. No breakfast, probably still hungover from last night's wine, and he'd just fucked her through his entire apartment. His body had simply quit.

She waited, his arm pinning her ribs, then carefully slid out from under him. Her phone lay face-down on the rug near the desk where it'd been deposited during the carnage. She stretched her fingers toward it, feeling the pleasant ache in her hips, the rawness between her legs, the tackiness drying on her chest and thighs. When she finally caught the edge and dragged it close, the screen lit up her face.

8:03 AM.

A laugh burst out of her. She slapped her hand over her mouth and turned to look at Junho, dead to the world with one arm thrown over his face, his mouth slightly open. Under an hour. They'd destroyed his apartment and each other in under an hour on empty stomachs.

Her shoulders kept shaking. Junho mumbled something unintelligible into the pillow and rolled onto his side, taking half the sheet with him. She let him have it.

Her thumb hovered over her messages. She wanted - no, needed - to tell someone.

The only person who'd understand.

@katarinabluu: we made magic last night 💙

@yezyizhere: The cinematographer?

@katarinabluu: you were right

@yezyizhere: About what?

@katarinabluu: turns out being seen is way hotter than being worshipped 🥺

@katarinabluu: anyway wyd today?

@yezyizhere: Waiting for mine to wake up

@yezyizhere: Might have to take matters into my own hands 🙄

@yezyizhere: What is this with you two then?

@katarinabluu: no idea

@katarinabluu: but for now is enough 💙

@yezyizhere: 🖤

SOMEWHERE ACROSS SEOUL

The first thing I woke to was warmth.

But it wasn't a warmth somebody else paid for. The villa in Jeju had a private pool, and as luxurious as it was, also had a checkout date. This place had a window facing the wrong direction and a bathroom door that stuck when it rained. The heating came on uneven, the pipes clanged when the building's ancient boiler kicked in at 6 AM, and the subway was ten extra minutes away because she'd toured seven better apartments before pointing at this one and saying she wanted it.

The realtor tried talking her out of it. He pulled up the others on his tablet, walking us back through better layouts and more practical locations, visibly confused why a top-tier idol would pick the worst option. She just smiled sweetly at him, having already decided three buildings ago. "This one's got an electric stove."

We were sitting in that dingy office while she signed the lease, the realtor's pen clicking through paperwork. She leaned over and whispered, "You know I'm gonna burn everything I touch in that kitchen, right?"

"It's fine."

I was fine with it, honestly. We'd been burning ourselves for five years and were now signing a lease for an old apartment with my name on it because she didn't trust herself around fire.

That was a couple months ago. It came back in pieces because my brain was barely awake, still trying to figure out why I was warm. Grey light leaked through the curtains. It was early. Saturday early, when I didn't have anywhere to be and could just lie here half-asleep. Everything was comfortable, more than the villa ever was. I was in our bed, which shouldn't have been weird anymore but still caught me off guard most mornings.

Then I realized the warmth was wet.

I opened my eyes and looked down. A pair of cat eyes stared back at me from between my legs, accompanied by a mouth stretched around my morning wood. Just her head visible above the duvet, hair everywhere, the blanket tucked under her chin like she'd set up camp down there. Her tongue dragged slow up the underside of my shaft and my hips jerked, which made those eyes go all amused and crinkly.

She came off just long enough to mumble something that sounded like "muh-ning, jag-ya" with my cock still in her mouth, all muffled and wet before sinking right back down.

"Morning," I managed, sounding wrecked already. I pushed her hair back and she pressed into my hand, eyes fluttering closed before she got back to work. When she looked up at me again, still sloppily working me with her mouth, her whole face had this beautiful happy glow to it.

Five years we'd been doing this in secret, but the happiness was recent. She used to treat blowjobs like a performance, something choreographed. Now she was doing it on a Saturday morning in the shitty apartment we'd picked together because she'd woken up and apparently decided this was how she wanted to start her weekend.

I'd spent most of my twenties figuring this part wasn't for me, the lazy Saturday part, the part where she does it because she woke up wanting to and nobody's keeping score. So watching the duvet rise and fall with her shoulders while she worked me over, I realized I'd never been this happy in my life. Which is a stupid thing to be thinking with someone's mouth around your cock.

The duvet moved with her head bobbing up and down. She moaned around me and I felt it everywhere, my hips lifting off the mattress before I could stop them. Her tongue circled the tip, catching the pre-cum leaking out, then she hollowed her cheeks and took me deeper. I felt the back of her throat, the wet heat of her mouth sliding down my cock, her lips stretched tight around me. She was getting into it, too, which made it so much hotter.

"Yeji," I groaned, my hand tightening in her hair. "I'm gonna -"

She pulled off with a wet pop. Her mouth was red and slick, and she had the biggest grin on her face.

"I know. I'm not done with you yet -"

Then she shoved the duvet off and got up on her knees.

The blanket slid down her body in slow-motion and I couldn't help but ogle as she emerged from the depths. Her shoulders came first, the muscle there catching the grey morning light, then the dip of her collarbones and the soft hollow of her throat where I'd left a mark last night that she'd kill me for once she saw it in the mirror. The fabric kept going. It uncovered her tits, high and firm, her brown nipples already stiff in the cool apartment air, and then it bared the flat plane of her stomach where the ab lines sat even now, even relaxed, even half asleep with my cock in her mouth.

I'd gladly look at her all morning and forever.

We'd crashed last night after enough rounds that I was honestly worried about the neighbours downstairs and the lease. Living with her was teaching me things about my own stamina I'd never had reason to learn before - mainly that it had a ceiling. Who knew? Jeju was all a fever dream, anyway.

The duvet pooled around her thighs and there she was, bare to the cold air with her neatly trimmed mound on full display, kneeling between my legs because she was about to ruin my morning in the best possible way.

Watching her kneel there, I immediately forgot what those limits were.

The morning light hit her skin. Her hair was tousled, catching on her shoulders, and I watched as she lazily stretched, arching her back like a cat. Five years of that and it still got me the same way every time. The way her tits lifted when she rolled her shoulders back, and I wanted nothing more than my mouth on them.

She knew I was staring. She always knew, and she loved it.

She crawled up my body on her hands and knees, tits swaying under her, and straddled my hips. She reached back, took my cock, and dragged the wet head through her slit before notching it against her hole. Just the tip. She held there, breathing through her nose, making herself wait. Then her thighs gave and she dropped, took all of me at once, her cunt clenching so tight I groaned into her hair and she moaned in response.

"Move with me," she breathed, hands bracing flat against my chest.

She could've eased into it, but five years taught her what we both wanted. She started slamming down on my cock, taking it all at once, and locked into a furious rhythm. Her dancer's body knew exactly how to fuck me into oblivion. I grabbed her waist, thumbs digging into soft skin, and thrust up into her every time she dropped.

The mattress shook. Skin slapped wet and loud in the quiet room. Her cunt swallowed me whole, clamping down hard enough to squeeze the breath out of me.

"Yeji -"

"Shut up and keep up," she panted, her eyes dark as she picked up speed. Her tits bounced with each brutal drop, nipples stiff and begging for my mouth. I sat up and caught one between my lips, sucking hard. She moaned so loud the windows rattled, arching back, pressing her tit deeper into my mouth. Her hands grabbed my hair, holding me there while she ground her clit into me with every drop.

Sweat gleamed on her skin in the morning light. She was fucking me like her life depended on it, gasping for air. Like she did pretty much every day now.

She leaned back, hands bracing on my thighs, taking me so deep I hit bottom. This morning, I was the only audience to her glorious show: her abs flexing, tits bouncing, her pussy stretched around my cock, wet and dripping.

Holy fuck, I couldn't look away.

She caught me staring. That filthy smirk spread across her face, and that sultry tone somehow became sultrier.

"You like that, jagiya?" she breathed, grinding down hard. "Seeing your cock disappear into my pussy?"

"Of course," I groaned, thrusting up deep enough to make her gasp. "It's mine. You're mine."

Hearing that made her miss a bounce, the smirk melting into a sincere smile while the tips of her ears flushed pink. "Oh? Stealing my catchphrases now?"

"You stopped saying it since, I don't know?"

She sank all the way down, burying me deep, and leaned forward until our breath mingled. Her cat eyes locked onto mine, hot and sure.

"I don't need to anymore," she purred.

That was music to my ears.

I quit trying to hold back. She leaned forward to kiss me, as she effortlessly did now, her tongue sliding into my mouth. Her pussy clamped around my cock, milking me as she picked up the pace.

She broke the kiss with a ragged gasp, throwing her head back to expose her throat as she abandoned any pretense of pacing. "Fuck, Minho," she whimpered, grinding down hard. "You always feel so fucking good inside me."

She started bouncing with a frantic, animal urgency. Every heavy drop buried my cock so deep my balls slapped against her wet thighs. Her slick inner walls stretched tight around my girth. The sound of our fucking echoed off the walls, skin slapping wetly against skin, her pussy letting out loud, obscene squelches as a thick lather of our juices foamed between our bodies.

"Don't stop," she panted, chasing her orgasm like she was fucking starving for it. Her face flushed red, twisted in pure ecstasy, her hair whipping wildly around her shoulders.

She hit the edge fast, the climax tearing through her. She screamed my name, her spine snapping into a tight arch that lifted her ass slightly off my thighs. Her cunt started convulsing around my cock, the slick walls squeezing the head in rapid, merciless spasms that pushed my own climax straight to the brink.

I gritted my teeth, gripping her waist to steady her. I stayed sat up, watching her chest heave. "Should I slow down?"

Her eyes snapped open, looking instantly offended. She planted both hands on my chest and shoved me flat against the mattress.

"If you slow down now, I'll kill you," she threatened, breathless and mean. "And don't you even fucking think about making me beg for it."

She backed it up by lifting her hips and slamming down on my cock, burying me so deep our hips cracked together. She rolled her hips, squeezing the absolute fuck out of me.

"Where do you want it?" I groaned, thrusting up to meet her heavy drops.

"You already know the answer, idiot," she panted, grinding her swollen clit against my stomach. "Give me all of it. Fill me up."

That destroyed my last shred of control. I grabbed her hips, my fingers bruising her soft skin, and held her locked down tight against my groin. I let go, pumping my hips up aggressively as the first thick rope of cum shot deep inside her. Lying flat on my back gave me the perfect, filthy view of what we were doing to each other. I thrust up just enough to pull the head out halfway, watching the slick pink lips of her pussy stretch tight around my thick shaft, before slamming back in balls-deep and pumping my hot load into her.

She threw her head back and moaned loudly in response. The messy white cream started bubbling up around my base with every thrust, overflowing from her swollen cunt and spilling down my balls. I kept thrusting, sliding in and out of her dripping slit, slicking our connected skin in foaming semen. I let her convulsing pussy milk every jagged pulse out of me until I was drained.

When I came back to myself, both of us were sweating, panting, and fucking wrecked.

We lay there breathing while we came down. I was still inside her, cock slowly softening while her pussy kept fluttering around me in little aftershocks. She stayed on top of me, warm and sweat-slick, her cheek pressed to my shoulder and her hair stuck damp against my neck.

"Morning," she rasped after a while.

"Morning," I said, kissing the side of her head and stroking her hair.

She turned her head sideways to kiss me back, then laughed against my skin.

Then she started getting to her knees, bracing one hand beside my ribs, trying to lift herself off. My cock slipped halfway out and a hot rush of cum followed it, spilling around me and smearing down between us.

"I need to shower," she murmured.

My hands caught her waist before I had time to pretend I was cool about it. "Stay."

She froze. Her face went soft and private the way it only did for me, and then she sank right back down, taking me in again with a wet little gasp that made us both shudder.

"Baby," she whispered, and melted, both arms wrapping around my shoulders as she dropped back down on top of me, chest to chest, her face burrowing into the side of my neck. Her mouth moved lazy along my jaw, found my ear, closed on it and nibbled. My cock twitched inside her and she felt it and giggled into my cheek.

"See, this is the problem with you," she mumbled. "I had a whole responsible morning planned for us. Shower, breakfast, smoothie, leave on time, be a functional adult. And then I woke up and you were right here, all warm, doing nothing, and now look at me."

"You climbed on me," I shot back.

"Mhm. And I'd do it again, so." She rolled her hips affectionately, and the cum squished warm around where she kept me plugged inside her, some of it sliding down my shaft because there was only so much she could hold after I'd given her all of it. "I love this. I love it so much it's actually embarrassing. Don't tell anyone, yeah?"

I ran my hand up her bare back into her hair and she made a small pleased sound and pressed closer, sinking into me. This got me every time. Five years of wanting her through locked doors and bad timing, and here she was, gone soft against my chest because I'd asked her to stay.

"Stay a bit," I repeated.

"Okay! I'm staying." She kissed the corner of my jaw, then sighed into it. "I really have to go soon, though. Practice."

"It's Saturday."

"It's the new album, that's what Saturday is now." She propped her chin on my chest and looked up at me, and even like this, hair everywhere, both my cock and my cum still inside her, the work crept into her eyes and pulled them sharp. Sex wrecked her voice and ruined her hair, and then the job showed up and Leader Yeji showed up right behind it. "We're going in for concepts. Early. PD-nim wants the whole thing to be about us, the five of us, you know, friendship and girlhood and all that, and every single title he throws out sounds like it belongs on a tote bag. I'm supposed to come back Monday with something good and my brain is empty."

"Yuna doesn't even have to go in, though," I said. "She's still in Japan, right?"

"Osaka. Days off between shoots, supposedly." She dragged a hand back through her wrecked hair to get it out of her face, the morning light catching the tangle of it. "By the sound of the group chat she spent them on some actor boy from her classes. Sent us about forty photos last night and then went very quiet, which with Yuna means it went well." Her smile pulled, then flattened, and she bit the inside of her cheek. "I'm really happy for her. She sounds like herself again. Like, finally herself." She poked my chest absently. "And she's flying back this afternoon for our housewarming tonight, so don't even think about cancelling, we've been promising people that party for weeks."

Then she shrugged. "You know me, though. I'll go in even when nobody asks. Especially when nobody asks."

She absently rolled her hips again while she talked, and I had to hold her waist still to keep my head on straight.

"You're doing it again," I said.

"Doing what?" She did it slower, watching my face, and then her gaze dropped to where my cum had pearled at the base of my cock, sliding toward my balls, and her eyes went narrow and amused. "Hey. Up here. Focus. You work in music, this is your job, help me."

She poked me in the side, way fucking harder than she meant to. Her casual touch always came with trainee-room force behind it.

"Ow!" I winced.

Her whole face went soft. "Oh no, did that actually hurt? I'm sorry, jagi, I always forget." Her palm flattened over the spot and rubbed slow circles, fussing over me, and then she remembered herself and pressed her lips flat. "Okay, but you're still helping me. Don't pretend you're not good with words. I've read your session notes, I know how you talk about music. Give me something."

I caught her wrist and kissed the inside of it.

While she kept grinding on me, I tried to think about the question, because she deserved a real answer. The room stayed quiet around us except for a truck reversing outside and the wet squelches she made when she moved.

What came back wasn't really that week in Jeju. Instead my mind went to all of them, with my cock still inside her, except the thing I was thinking wasn't the sex. Or it wasn't only the sex. It was the faces underneath it, the ones none of them ever showed a camera, the versions I'd somehow ended up on the other side of.

Yuna with her bravado spent and her hands gone shy on my thighs, asking if it was okay like the answer mattered more than the act. Ryujin with her forehead dropped against my shoulder, shaking, every weapon she owned laid flat on the deck between us. Jimin on her back staring at the ceiling like she'd just found out she was a person and not a poster. Chaeryeong scowling into Sunwoo's collarbone because Giselle's story hadn't had enough romance in it for her, proof the week hadn't been only the mess I kept making of it. Lia's wink across a crowded kitchen, the one that knew exactly what I'd done and decided, for reasons of her own, to let it go.

And Yeji. The tear at the edge of the pool that went down instead of up, real gravity, real girl. The word she finally let out in the dark, fast asleep, after five years of holding it. The one sitting on my cock right now, dripping around me and squinting like she'd fire me if I didn't come up with an album title, the only one I got to keep.

All of them, messy and loyal and impossible. All of them still there when morning came. And me, somewhere in the middle of all of it, a guy who'd shown up to that villa thinking he was just visiting his secret and walked out three months later with his name on a lease.

"I don't know," I started, and then stopped, because I wasn't sure where it was going yet. "I keep thinking about that week."

"Jeju?" Yeji's hand slowed on my chest. She looked at me quietly, waiting, her hips settling into a slow roll that made it very hard to think and very easy to keep yammering at the same time.

"All of you," I continued. "You fight like there's a medal in being difficult. And then one of you gets hurt and everyone just - moves. Nobody stands around. I don't know how to say it."

"Say it badly," she murmured. "I'll fix it." She slowly rolled her hips again.

"It's just - you're competitive. Protective. Honest when it hurts, a disaster when it matters. You're just girls, and that makes you extraordinary." I heard how dumb it sounded out loud and almost dropped it. "That's the whole thing, though. Girls being girls, and somehow that's the most amazing thing about all of you. I don't know. Maybe that's nothing."

"That week changed you," she said quietly, watching me.

"It changed all of us. You know it did." I tucked a piece of damp hair behind her ear. "Me too. Went there one person, came back yours."

She stared at me a long moment, sitting on my cock in the middle of our wrecked bed, doing her best to be leader-nim while her pussy dripped around me, and then her sharp features turned soft.

"Aww, that's so sweet," she cooed. "I hate that it's sweet. It's also a whole-ass paragraph, jagiya! We can't put a paragraph on a poster. The girls-being-girls part, though." She rocked on me again, trying to coax the rest out of me. "Say that part again? But shorter."

"I don't - " I shook my head, fumbling for it. "Girls. Girls being. I don't know how you'd even - " And then it was just there, the way these things are once you stop chasing them.

"Girls will be girls...?"

I didn't even have the balls say it out loud. It came out half under my breath, more to myself than to her.

She went so still I felt her stop breathing.

"...was it that bad?" I asked tentatively.

"No - shut up, say it again." Her hands found mine. "Say it again, the way you just said it."

"Girls will be girls."

"Damn." Her eyes were huge and shining and she was grinning like I'd handed her something profound. "Minho, that's it! That's actually it - everyone gets it instantly and nobody can argue with it because that's just what we are." She grabbed my face in both hands and kissed me hard, laughing into my mouth, kissing me again between words. "I'm putting it in the meeting and watching PD-nim lose his mind and I'm taking all the credit, you understand? None for you, this never happened."

"It happened while I was inside you."

"No witnesses." She kissed me one more time, soft and slow now, gone gooey, and then she eased back with a little wince as my cock poked her womb, and more cum slid out hot around me and ran down toward my balls. She looked down at the mess and made a pleased little sound. "Okay. Okay, I really, really have to shower now, for real, before I change my mind and waste the whole morning on you."

"You could waste the morning on me. It's a good use of a morning."

"You're evil." She was still smiling, both hands flat on my chest. "Right, practice. New album. Four-word title some genius gave me. Have to go be a professional now."

She slowly lifted off me. My cock slipped free, and the cum we'd been keeping plugged inside her finally spilled out in a thick rush, dripping over my shaft and down onto the sheets.

"Minho," she whined, betrayed, like the leaking was a thing I'd done to her on purpose. "Look at this! Look what you do to me. Every fucking time, how do you have this much?"

"You're the one who wanted all of it. Repeatedly and loudly, I might add."

"I know what I wanted." She cupped herself fast, both hands catching the mess before it hit the sheets, and climbed off the bed with her knees pressed together, waddling toward the bathroom.

At the doorway, she looked back over her shoulder. Her hair was a disaster. My cum was leaking between her fingers. She looked smug enough to hand herself a daesang. She held my eyes, gave her bare ass a slow little wiggle, that tight muscle flexing once, and bit her lip at me.

Then she stepped inside and started to close the door.

I stared at it.

For one soul-sucking moment, my body remembered Jeju. The locked door. The shower running without me.

Five years I stayed on the wrong side of that door because it was what she needed. The one morning she shut it and sent me off to cool down was the morning everything went sideways - and everything that mattered started. Worst thing she ever did to me. Best thing, too.

The door opened again before it clicked shut. Her head poked out, cat eyes narrowed.

"You coming or what?"

I put my hands behind my head and savored it, just for a moment. We'd taken the long road, but at least we were here.

Then I got up and went, because my whole life was a furious little ball of light standing in a steamed-up bathroom telling me to hurry up, and you go when she calls, before she gets angry and comes to find you.

So, yeah. We fucked in the shower again. I'm not gonna pretend we got in there to save on the water bill.

It started out innocent enough. I slid in behind her, wrapped my arms around her waist, and buried my face in her wet neck. It was nice, up until the moment I looked down at how perfectly her tight little ass was poking out, dripping wet, and just fucking slapped it.

Hard enough to leave it jiggling and mark an angry red handprint on her ass cheek.

"AH! Fuck!" She shrieked, whipping around to glare at me. "Do you have a death wish?!"

"Just checking if it's real."

She kept glaring at me, the steam hanging thick and still around us while she decided exactly how to murder me. Then she lunged, attacking my mouth and slamming me right into the soaking tile.

It escalated instantly into a mess of steam, slapping skin, and filthy noises. I pinned her back against the shower wall, grabbed her hips, and drove straight back into her hot, slick pussy. She hiked one wet leg up and planted her foot flat against the tile to brace us. We'd debuted our brand new three-legged shower stance shortly after signing the lease so we didn't slip and break our necks like we almost did back in Jeju. Three months in, and we'd finally cracked the physics of sliding my cock in and out of her wet cunt in a shower stall without needing a trip to the ER. Living together teaches you things, I suppose. I pounded her until she was screaming my name over the rushing water, unloading deep inside her once more while she wrung every last drop out of me.

After, with the water gone lukewarm and both of us completely wrung out, I worked her shampoo through her hair. I always did this now. She used to wash her own hair her whole life, and somewhere in the last three months she just stopped. Now, the second the bottle clicked open, she stepped right into me.

She wrapped her arms around my neck, pressing her wet tits flat against my chest, while my softening cock rested heavy against the tight ridges of her stomach. She dragged her slick hands lazily up and down my spine, pretending to "wash" my back but mostly just holding me close while I massaged the lather into her scalp, keeping her eyes shut. The old Yeji would've filled the silence with a joke. This one just tipped her wet face up to blindly catch my mouth, drawing me into slow, lazy kisses. The steam settled thick around us, her dark tangled hair sliding through my fingers, and there was nowhere in the world either of us had to be before the shower spray washed it away.

She sat at the vanity in nothing but her panties and started on her eyeliner, and I stood behind her with the dryer, working it through her hair in sections the way she'd taught me. I kept losing the part I was supposed to be holding, because she was topless in the fogged-up mirror and I am who I am.

She caught me at it in the glass with a smirk. She sat back, lifted both her tits in her hands, and raised an eyebrow at my reflection. "You still think these are perfect?"

She'd made me answer that once before, back in Jeju, when she'd actually needed to hear it. This time she just wanted to watch me agree.

I bent down and kissed the top of her damp head. "Yeah. You are."

I meant all of her, not just the handful she was holding, and she knew it. Her whole face went warm and smug, and she settled back down into the towel, pleased with herself, before she picked the eyeliner up again.

Her phone leaned against the glass, the group chat apparently going since before she woke me up with her mouth. She tipped it toward me without putting down the brush.

@chaerrry0: HOUSEWARMING TONIGHT 🦊🎉 Sunwoo and i are bringing tteokbokki and a plant u are NOT allowed to kill

@chaerrry0: now that u two stopped """""friends""""" 🥹

@iamfinethankyouandryu: FINALLY.gif 🐱

@igotyuandme: omgggg so sorry i went dark last night osaka ate me ALIVE 🙈🙈

@igotyuandme: UNNIE can i bring someone tonight 🐰

@lia_loves___: called this at the busan yacht party btw 🍯

@iamfinethankyouandryu: LMAOOO baby hoe came back from osaka with a fucking SOUVENIR

@igotyuandme: unnieeee 😭😭😭

@yezyizhere: Bring him 🖤

"How long do you think they knew?"

"Since Jeju." She tapped Lia's message with the end of the brush. "Maybe before."

I read it again. "She said Busan? That was nine months ago. That's WAY before Jeju."

"That's the point." She laughed, tipping her head back into the heat of the dryer and my hand. "I guess we were the last two people to figure it out."

"That's embarrassing."

"That's us. Emotionally oblivious until we weren't." She pressed her lips flat to set the colour, watching herself in the glass, and her smile went soft at the corners. "We got there eventually, though."

"We did."

I clicked the dryer off when she was dry. She stood, kissed me once, and went to do her thing in the kitchen. I stayed to make the bed.

Back when we were a secret, Yeji was the most disciplined person I knew. She sorted everything. Three months of living together proved she saved that discipline strictly for the company. At home, she was a goblin. She built mug civilizations on the nightstand and left the bed every morning like a crime scene. I made the bed because she knew I'd fix it. People spent her whole life grading her on being immaculate, so with me, she just got to be a disaster. I'd take that trade every single morning for the rest of my life.

By the time I padded out to the kitchen she had her playlist going and was standing at the counter in my hoodie and nothing I could see under it, frothing milk for the chocolate matcha thing she made me every morning. She had a whole ritual now. The little electric whisk, the chocolate going soft in the microwave that she wasn't really authorized to use without adult supervision, the milk worked into a thick pale foam that climbed and bubbled up the sides of the jug, frothing over the rim where she'd overfilled it.

I watched it spill. Without any input from the responsible part of my brain, I realized that it looked exactly like the mess that had foamed up around the base of my cock earlier when she'd ridden me into the mattress, the white of my cum churned thick with her slick, spilling out of her stretched pussy and bubbling down over my balls.

She caught me staring. Her eyes flicked to the jug, then back to my face. She pointed the whisk accusingly.

"No -" she started.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're making the face. Whatever you're thinking, it's not the same. You're gonna drink this and say thank you."

"Thank you," I said, and she narrowed her eyes at me because I'd said it too fast, and then she gave up and laughed, because we were exactly as filthy as each other and always had been.

I crossed the kitchen and wrapped my arms around her from behind. She leaned back into my chest. The whisk went quiet. She turned to say something but I kissed it out of her mouth. Her hands were already scrabbling at the waistband of my shorts, and mine were shoving the hoodie up over her hips.

I lifted her onto the table and pulled her panties to the side.

She spread her knees and pulled me in by the back of my neck, and I went down to my knees on the cold tile and put my mouth on her. Three months in, I knew exactly what she liked first thing in the morning. I kept my tongue flat and steady against her clit while furiously pumping two fingers in and out of her tight hole until she ran out of patience. She fisted a hand in my hair, swearing at the ceiling, grinding against my mouth until her thighs shook. When she came, she pulled my hair hard enough to sting. I licked her wet cunt clean, so devoted to her I could've died right there on the floor.

Then I stood up and shoved my cock inside her while she was still coming. She gasped, all the air knocked out of her, wrapping her legs around my waist and locking her ankles tight to trap me deep.

"Harder," she mumbled against my jaw. "And don't even think about pulling out."

"Don't you have practice soon?"

"And?"

"And you're going to leak through your leggings in front of PD-nim."

"That's what tampons are for, silly." She bit my ear, grinding down on me, her slick walls clenching tight. "Besides, I dance better full of you. Hit my marks every time. It's basically a performance enhancer." She rolled her hips, slow and filthy. "So finish what you started and help my career while you're at it."

So I did. I fucked her across our cheap kitchen table. The wood groaned violently under us, exactly the way it did yesterday, walking across the cheap laminate with every thrust.

"We're gonna -" she gasped as I drove in deep, her knuckles turning white on the edge of the table, her whole body arching. "Ahhh - break this thing -"

"It's fine," I grunted.

I buried myself deep enough to make her breath hitch and she shook her head frantically, eyes squeezed shut. The table shrieked against the floorboards.

"It's SPLINTERING, Minho - fuck - we need a new one -"

"Fine," I panted. "We'll go to IKEA - nngh - tomorrow?"

She rolled her hips, squeezing my cock tight. "Casa - ahh - Casamia."

"IKEA." I thrust hard, turning her moan loud and shameless. "Because they have - hrngg - meatballs, and we're not - " I had to stop to catch my breath, as my balls slapped against her meaty lips. "Not spending three million won on a table we're just gonna ruin exactly like this -"

"West Elm -" She dug her heels into my back to drag me deeper. "Ahhh - West Elm, then." Her eyes were glassy, but she was grinning. "And we go - oh fuck yes - in person. Together -"

I knew how much a West Elm dining set cost and my wallet sweat just thinking about it, but I also knew what she was actually asking for. It wasn't really about a sleek wooden table. She wanted an excuse to walk through the front doors of a crowded showroom in broad daylight, hold my hand under the display lighting, and take silly mirror selfies in the bedroom section that were definitely not going on Bubble.

"Fine," I said, leaning down to kiss her. "West Elm it is."

"Good boy."

Then she got too loud for conversation to continue. I pounded her until our neighbours definitely heard, and I stopped pretending I gave a shit about the noise. When I came, I buried myself deep and pinned her flat against the wood as she milked it out of me, her heels digging brutally into my back.

We stayed like that, breathing, my forehead on her shoulder.

Then the smoke detector shrieked.

It took my post-nut brain a moment to realize the shrieking was real. Behind Yeji's shoulder, the microwave was lit up like a small angry sun. The bowl of chocolate had bypassed melting and simply caught fire, as furious streaks of orange light licked the glass while the timer counted down from ten minutes.

"Why is it on for thirteen minutes?" I asked. The math wasn't mathing.

"It is NOT on for - " She twisted to look, still impaled on my cock, and her jaw dropped. "I pressed one-three-zero! One minute thirty! Ssibal, Minho, it's ON FIRE - "

"No shit, I can see that -"

"Don't just stand there, DO SOMETHING!"

"What the fuck do you want me to do?!"

"Use your - " She gestured wildly at my groin, meaning either my cock or the cum dripping out of her. Even mid-crisis, with the smoke detector shrieking and our breakfast blazing across the kitchen, she doubled over laughing and slapped the table. "Put it OUT!"

"I'm NOT putting out a fire with my DICK -"

"I'M JOKING, GET OFF ME!"

Living with a girl who can't cook really tests a man's housekeeping abilities. But once I'd performed firefighting heroics that didn't involve questionable use of my dick, Yeji decided to have another crack at the kitchen, cracking three fresh eggs into a pan that was already too hot.

The oil spat at her. She snatched her hand back and set her jaw like the flinch had been her own idea, refusing to admit that a kitchen had hurt her. Then she tipped the eggs in and the pan erupted, oil leaping the rim and splattering the backsplash, the whites turning grey and rubbery before she'd even found the spatula. She had her tongue caught between her teeth and the spatula in a death grip.

Smoke poured off the pan, and right on cue the detector started screaming. I'd already reset it once while dousing the microwave, same as every morning, and here it was earning its keep again before nine. I reached up and killed the noise, then pulled the drawer open. A fresh nine-volt rolled out from our stockpile - we had a dozen packs of them, half still in the shrink-wrap, because you learn to buy in bulk. We'd already gone through a couple packs since we'd moved in. I set it on the counter for later.

She can't say the soft stuff out loud, so she says it in burnt eggs, which is the whole reason I keep the batteries stocked and my plate clean.

She slid the plate in front of me and plopped into the chair across the corner of the table, chin in both hands, watching. I forked up a bite. It tasted like a campfire that had once, at a great distance, met an egg. I chewed it, swallowed it, and pointed my fork at the plate.

"Incredible."

She lit up. She sat up straighter, propped her chin back in her hands, and beamed proudly as she watched me chew, her eyes crinkling, her grin stretching wider with every forkful. I ate all of it, and would gladly do it again.

I'd dragged the wobbly chair under the smoke detector and climbed up to put the fresh battery in. I'd barely got the cover open when two arms clamped around my legs.

Yeji had left the ruined pan on the stove, crossed the kitchen, and wrapped herself tightly around my calves. She pressed her cheek to the back of my thigh and held on.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Making sure you don't fall!"

"You're gonna make me fall, you know that?"

"I'm SAVING you!" She squeezed tighter, indignant, her face mashed into the back of my legs, giggling against me before she'd got the words out. "If you fall I'll kill -" She stopped, the threat falling apart since I'd already be on the floor. "- I mean - I'll never forgive you. Hold still."

"I can't move, you've got me in a -"

"GOOD. Stop moving."

I got the battery seated. The little light blinked green, the detector chirped once, and we were armed for the next disaster. She was still wrapped around my legs, grinning up at me, thrilled with herself for saving me from a fall I was only risking because of her.

"You can let go now," I deadpanned.

She didn't. She held on a while longer, cheek warm against my calves, giggling sorry-sorry-sorry into my legs, and I stood up there in the smoke-hazed kitchen and let her keep me safe.

Hongsam had been with us a week. He was her parents' dog, technically, a toy poodle the color of red ginseng who lived down in Jeonju and ran the place like a small furious landlord, except Yeji had come back from her last visit carrying him in the crook of her arm like contraband, and nobody back home had put up a fight. Insam, his brother, stayed in Jeonju. Within a day Hongsam had claimed my side of the bed and most of my pillow, and within two he'd worked out that a closed bedroom door meant the morning had started without him, so he spent a good slice of every morning scratching at the wrong side of it and howling his objection to the management. I knew the feeling, having done five years on the wrong side of Yeji's doors myself, so he could survive for however long Yeji got away with keeping him here.

She used to miss both of them from two hours down the KTX line, calling home on the holidays she couldn't get back for, asking her sister to give them a treat from her. Now Hongsam slept against the backs of my knees.

She came out of our bedroom dressed for practice, hair tied back, dance bag over one shoulder, and Hongsam lost his mind, because the bag meant someone was leaving and leaving was the worst thing anyone had ever invented. I scooped him up before he could throw himself at her shins. He weighed nothing and smelled like the HYPONIC shampoo Yeji bought him by the bottle.

"Say bye to your mom," I told him, and held him up.

Her cat eyes went round and helpless. She took his face in both hands, put her nose to his, and gave him the voice she'd sooner die than let the public hear.

"You be good, okay? No attitude, and NO barking at the delivery guy," she scolded, trying to look tough, before going all goo-goo-ga-ga on him. "You're the most handsome boy in Korea, yes you are, I love you, be GOOD -"

That put me third most handsome boy in Korea, behind two poodles, holding the winner up to her face. She gave me a quick peck over the top of his head so I wouldn't feel left out.

"Don't give the whole day to the album," I said, kissing her back on the forehead. "He's only up from Jeonju another couple weeks. Come home early for once and spend it on the stuff that actually loves you back."

"I KNOW." She rolled her eyes, already folding, scratching Hongsam under the chin. "I'll be back by four. We'll take him to the river before people start showing up, and we still have to buy the food, you cannot throw a housewarming on what's in our fridge."

The old Yeji would've taken the late slot and called it discipline. This one had somewhere she'd rather be.

She kissed Hongsam, then kissed me, in that order, which I decided not to take personally, and disappeared through the door.

Except she was back twenty seconds later, the door opening just wide enough for her sheepish face. I'd already pulled her keys off the hook and tossed them at her before she could ask. She caught them without looking.

"Kill it at practice," I said.

"Always do," she grinned. And she was gone, the door clicking shut as the apartment fell quiet. Hongsam went tense in my arms, ears up, staring at the door she'd walked out of, already wriggling to get down and inspect the betrayal.

I put him down to let him get on with his investigation and started cleaning up the kitchen, which was a total war zone. Under the table, I found a sock.

It was hers. They're always hers. People walk into a place this messy and assume there's a messy girl living in it, but Yeji alphabetizes her supplements, and the only place her self-control fails is the ten seconds it takes her to get out of her clothes and onto me. Most nights she manages that the second the door shuts. The socks just go flying. By morning she's forgotten she ever had them on, so when a straggler turns up a day later she holds it up accusingly. I take the blame, because I'm the reason she can't remember undressing. So I pick them up, every morning, all of them, and keep my mouth shut. My reward, I guess, for being very competent at my job.

I find most of them, stuffed in a shoe or behind the books. The one I missed ended up in the fridge - I still don't know how a sock even gets in there - and Yeji found it and lost her mind, holding it out at me like I'd planted it to ruin her life. I took that on the chin too. Which is why, every morning since, I open the fridge to check.

Thankfully, no sock this time. Just the kimchi and last night's leftovers. I let the door swing shut and looked at the gallery of photos she'd stuck all over the front.

Hongsam was scratching at my shins again, done with the door and wanting up, so I hauled him into one arm and turned us both to face the fridge.

"Look," I told him. "That's your mom."

The beach one was held up under a magnet shaped like a tangerine, Yeji sitting between my legs on the sand with her back to my chest and my arms crossed over her, both of us gone soft and golden in the last of the light. She'd carried it in her wallet for three months before it earned a spot up here. She was smiling at the camera, except she'd been smiling at me a second before the shutter and a second after, and I was right there in the frame where I'd always been. I made myself look at it a while, because I'd had a dream once where I wasn't. Hongsam sniffed it and twisted to check the door again.

"Okay, ignore that one. See this one? That's the two of us in the water."

Somebody had caught it from the beach, the first time all day I'd put my arms around her like I meant it, salt at our waists and her leaning into me. You couldn't see our faces. You didn't need to. Hongsam gave it a single thump of his tail, maybe for the water, maybe for nothing.

The breakfast one Chaeryeong took without either of us noticing, Yeji's fingers on my wrist at the table, both of us laughing at some joke I can't even remember now. She'd stuck it dead center.

Hongsam yawned.

"That's your auntie Yuna." Yeji had shot that one herself, Yuna's hair braided down her back, caught mid-preen and pretending she wasn't. His head sank against my arm.

The bonfire one was bigger, printed out properly, the whole drunk lot of us crammed around the last fire in Jeju and yelling at a phone wedged in a soju bottle. I was in it. Took me five years to get into a group photo, and there I was, right in the middle, holding the girl and grinning like an idiot.

Hongsam had stopped looking by then.

He just wanted his mom, and paper photos couldn't help him with that. But I kept going anyway, down to the last one. It was a blurry back-row shot I'd taken of her at the Hulu show on a phone that couldn't handle the dark, just a small bright figure under the lights with a smear of motion where her arm came up. I never told her I took it. She'd found it on my laptop, stolen it, printed it, and stuck it on our fridge like a trophy.

By the time I finished, his eyes had gone to slits, and a second later he was asleep with his chin over my shoulder. I stood there in the messy kitchen, holding a sleeping dog in front of a fridge covered in photos, and held him for a while.

When my arm finally went dead I laid Hongsam in the warm dent he'd already claimed on the couch. Without her in it, the apartment felt strange, too quiet for the hour.

My phone buzzed.

Yeji: It's finally done!

Yeji: I wanted you to be the first to hear it 🖤

Yeji: Tell me what you actually think?

She'd guarded that song for weeks. I played it off the speaker she'd left running, and her voice filled the place, rough mix and all, flat in the corner where she'd run out of air.

"I don't need armor, or anything like that,"

Her spare keys were tangled with mine in the bowl by the door and her sneakers were dumped in the middle of the floor, three months of her scattered across an apartment that used to be half mine. This was a girl who once alphabetized her own fridge. My camera gear in the corner was the last thing in the place still only mine, and even that she borrowed.

In the kitchen a post-it in her blocky hand stuck to the fridge said WE NEED EGGS!!!, underlined twice. I laughed in the empty room, because we always needed eggs. Nobody alive went through eggs like a girl who couldn't cook one, and she'd never forgive me if she caught me finding it funny.

"Even invisible thorns are piercing me,"

I bent down and picked one of her hair ties up off the floor and put it in my pocket, the way I did most mornings, without a word.

"In the dark, I set off a new flame,"

The sun had come round to the front of the building, lying in long strips across the floor, her sneakers, the dog, the wall of photographs she'd hung and taped and wedged into every corner of the place.

"I bloom again proudly, as if you can see,"

I stopped at the window.

A tangerine seedling sat on the sill in a pot a few sizes too big for it, three months in the dirt and maybe four leaves tall, leaning furiously at the light.

Ryujin gave me the seeds. Our last morning in Jeju she caught me alone by the pool, took my hand, and tipped a few tangerine pips into my palm like they were illegal.

"She wanted to build a house in the mountains here once," she muttered. "Live here. Grow her own." She closed my fingers over the seeds. "You won't get it, and don't ask her about it. Just grow them, don't let them die." The bravado went out of her for a moment. "And she never finds out it came from me."

I didn't get it. I still mostly don't. But I planted them the week we signed the lease, and the stubborn little thing came up anyway, and every morning it leaned a bit further toward the window.

"I'm fine, no matter how much I'm hurt," "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger,"

Her protein powder crowded my coffee. Our toothbrushes shared one cup. Her skincare had my razor backed into the corner of the shelf. The bed was still wrecked from this morning, and the dishes she'd sworn she'd do were stacked in the sink, all the daily mess of two people living on top of each other.

"The hunnids scars on my heart, that's all me," "I have no regrets about my choice,"

I stood in the middle of all of it and let her tell me the thing she'd never once said to my face.

"Crown on my head," "The only thing that's on my mind, oh,"

The song ran out.

My phone buzzed again.

Yeji: Miss you already 🖤

Minho: you left 20 minutes ago

Yeji: So? Still miss you

Yeji: See you tonight 🖤

I texted her back that she was a menace and to bring home soju, which was the kind of thing we actually said to each other; then took two mugs down out of the cupboard, because by tonight there'd be two of us plus her ITZY family again, and there always would be now.

Months ago, the night I woke up out of the worst dream of my life, she'd said something in her sleep. Half-swallowed, gone before she knew it had left her, the first time in five years, and I'd lain there with my mouth open, sure I hadn't earned the right to say it back and never would.

I looked around at the keys and the sneakers and the sleeping dog and her tangerine reaching for the window.

"Yeah," I said, to the empty room, to the life we'd chosen, the life we'd built, the life we finally had.

"Love you too."

This story is dedicated to everyone learning to be seen for who they truly are - and to everyone learning to see the people they love without filters, expectations, or fear.

To everyone who's ever felt too much, needed too hard, or loved too deeply - while somehow still feeling like not enough - and to everyone learning that both were true all along.

And to everyone who picked this up expecting one thing and stayed for something else - thank you for seeing it as it truly was.

JEJU HEAT

Brought to you by noodles

2024-2026