Part Three of Three. 13k words.
---
It takes your eyes a few moments to actually open. They’re heavy for some reason, as though your body itself was resisting the inevitable arrival of dawn and hoping to spend just a few more minutes in the wonderful bliss of sleep.
But the dawn is merciless. Your eyes eventually pull open, adjusting to the bright beams of light piercing the blackout curtains she’d probably left open the night before. She herself is absent from the bed, but the warmth beneath your arm splayed out on her side of it meant she hadn’t left too long ago. With a grunt, you swing your legs onto the floor and sit on the edge of the bed for a while to allow the rest of your senses to actually come online.
You rub your eyes. You stretch muscles tired from the previous night’s activities - your hips, mostly, and your thighs. A slim smirk appears on your lips as you rise from bed and find last night’s boxers to throw on before heading into the kitchen.
The rest of the large, lavish apartment greets you as you emerge from the bedroom. Hardwood and marble, glass and oak - all modern, sleek, furnished like a glossy brochure from one of Vancouver’s high-end real estate offices.
And there she is, at the kitchen, half of her hidden by the marble and polished oak of the kitchen island. You watch as she pulls two mugs - a matching pair, one with her initials on it and one with yours - from the cupboard and places them onto the whirring, ridiculously expensive coffee maker that neither of you really needed, but had somehow become something neither of you could live without.
She’s wearing a t-shirt - yours, of course, although the lines that separated what was yours and hers had been blurred to the point of irrelevancy since you bought this apartment together a year ago.
She’s so small in it. She was always small, but today she’s drowning in the soft cotton, the soft, worn fabric draped over her slim frame and resembling a loose, short dress more than anything else. As she emerges from behind the kitchen island her long, slim legs come into full view. Even from your vantage point in the bedroom hallway, you can see the slight blushing and bruising around her upper thighs and hips, evidence of last night’s indulgences.
She stretches her arms above her head, her back arching slightly as she lets out a small, soft little yawn. The shirt rides up, up over most of that cute little ass of hers and confirming the fact that she was, indeed, wearing nothing else. The sun peeks through the gap between her thighs - the skin between them glistens as the sunlight catches on something wet or moist. Your cum from last night or her new arousal, you didn’t know nor care. You knew only that the sight of it stirred something inside you, chasing away the last vestiges of drowsiness and pulling you into full wakefulness.
“Come here,” she says, softly, without turning around to look at you. Of course she knew you were there. Of course she wanted to give you a little show first, with that performative little stretch of hers.
You leave the hallway and approach her, eyes drinking in the sight of her with every slow, measured step.
When you reach her, she leans back against you, her body molding to yours. You kiss the back of her head as your arms wrap around her tiny little frame - gentle, chaste gestures compared to what came before and what was probably to come soon.
Something like a soft purr leaves her throat. You can’t see it, but you know that her lips are pulling up the corners of her mouth in a soft little smile. You don’t waste any time. Your hands find their way beneath the shirt - one finds a small, round breast, relishing the soft weight of it in your palm; the other slips between her legs, finding her slick and ready, just as you’d thought she would be.
She says your name. It is soft and breathy as it leaves her lips, heavy with yearning as your fingertips glide along her slick, soft flesh.
You say hers.
“Taeyeon.”
The sound of her name as it leaves your mouth triggers something inside you. The feel of her body pressed against yours, her stiff nipple against your fingers and cunt dripping onto your palm - it sends you somewhere long past, a day you’d left behind…
Her lips open. When she speaks again it’s barely above a whisper.
“Fuck me. Don’t stop until--”
You remember--
---
“--you fucking cum in me!” she spits, four years ago.
“Fuck, Ryujin,” you hiss. You bring the tip of your cock between her legs. She rocks her ass back against you, needy, impatient. Angry.
“Just fucking do it,” she says between her teeth. “This is all I’ll ever be to you anyway, all we’ll ever be-”
You silence her by entering her with a deep, hard thrust that punches the air from your lungs and hers.
You’re there again, in Ryujin Shin’s apartment.
Her apartment is small, cramped - a far cry from the luxurious penthouse you’d buy with Taeyeon three years later. Half-packed moving boxes litter most of it, each haphazardly filled with the sundries of a young woman’s life. Her messy, looping handwriting labels each one - clothes, kitchen, random shit. The movie posters and abstract art that once breathed life into the walls are gone, rolled or folded into a box, leaving behind cold, empty voids where they once painted its cold walls with vivid colors.
The sound of a police siren off the street filters in through the open window. It mirrors the alarm and desperation in Ryujin’s voice.
“Just fuck me,” she says, even as you begin to slide in and out of her tightly grasping cunt. “Just, fuck--, oh, just fuck me.”
Your hand leaves her breast. It wraps around her torso, pressing her back tighter against your chest. Her fingers dig into your forearm, as though wanting to bind you to her, keep you from the inevitable parting that was at this point only days away. She winds her free hand back behind her to grasp your skull, nails digging into your scalp as her head lolls back against your shoulder.
“Please,” she hisses, a note of desperation now amidst the anger. “Just fuck me. I’m your fucktoy, that’s all I am-”
You want to silence her. Want to tell her she’ll be more than that. Want to comfort her, want to tell her that you’ll find a way to fix things, find a way where she can stay here in Vancouver, with you, and not end up on the other side of the planet next week-
But you couldn’t bring yourself to lie. Not when you weren’t sure what the future held for the both of you. Maybe she didn’t need to hear them. Maybe she already knew that whatever you said wouldn’t be enough, whatever promises you made would be hollow.
And so you let yourself indulge in the enticing if temporary pleasure you took from her body with each thrust into her tight, wet heat. There is an intensity, a needy impatience to her tonight that had not been there before. She’s miserable, frustrated, sad - at you, the world, the email in her inbox that would uproot her from her home and send her to the other side of the planet for the foreseeable future. She’s heartbroken, most of all, because just when she thought she could allow herself to be happy the universe decided that she wasn’t worthy of it.
She channels the anger, channels the sadness, turns the painful aching in her chest. She turns it into something dark, something dangerous.
She throws her hips back against you as much as she can. She clenches tight around you, her cunt pulsing and quivering around your shaft as it drills into her over and over again with a fast, harsh pace that matches the frustration in her own movements.
“Ryujin,” you begin, her name leaving your lips like a curse. “Fuck-”
“Shut up,” she spits, “shut up. Just fucking shut up--”
It was all too much. Her cunt, her anger, the flight next week waiting to take her away from you just as you’d finally found each other - it was all too much. You latch on to the guilty, disgusting pleasure worming its way up your spine. It wasn’t pure or pleasant, but you could feel it taking you over, just as it was taking over the young woman that had been reduced to a quivering, shaking mess in your arms.
“Fucking cum,” she spits, saliva flying from her lips. “Fucking cum in me, leave me a part of you--”
“Ryujin--”
You bury yourself inside her. As deep as you can go. Your cock quivers and your world goes blank as you fill her with thick, possessive ropes of thick white cum. She trembles in your arms, legs having long since given up on keeping her upright, relying only on your arms to keep her where she was. The feel of the cum pooling in her womb triggers her own orgasm, and she cums in your arms.
The pleasure is there, coursing through your bodies - and yet it is temporary, replaced quickly, all too quickly, with fatigue and something like disgust. Discontent. Dismay.
Ryujin’s hands finally leave your forearms, where they’d dug deep furrows in her pleasure. She holds herself against the wall, finally supporting her own weight again.
Your cum drips from her cunt, still stuffed with your softening cock. It leaves a slick slide of glistening whiteness down the softness of her inner thigh.
You catch your breath. You look down between you, at the trembling cheeks of her ass. You move slightly with your hips and she lets out a sigh at the movement inside her cum-filled cunt. You begin to withdraw, but she stops you.
“Don’t,” she says, a whisper. “Just a little longer.”
You sigh. Fatigue sets in, accompanied by unwelcome reality. You press your forehead to the back of her skull, your arms wrapping themselves around her torso once more. It’s all you can do, all you can give her. You hold her close.
You look for the words, but they still aren’t there. The ones that are won’t be enough, and ones that you want to say never come.
She clutches your forearm with her hands as though they were driftwood keeping her afloat. She doesn’t need words. She needs your arms, holding her close.
---
Four years later, you slide out of Taeyeon’s creamy, dripping cunt, and she lets something like a content but modest sigh escape her mouth. She raises her torso from the kitchen island, which you’d bent her over minutes before as you fucked her. Before she pulls her shirt back down a flushed imprint of your palm blooms over the pale skin of her lower back where it pinned her down onto the cold marble surface.
Cum drips from her cunt, down her thighs. She makes no effort to wipe it away. She turns, looks up at you. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes glassy - but she is composed, held together, the same way Taeyeon Kim always was in every facet of her life.
She kisses you, slowly, passionately. A rare moment of vulnerability. She was often cold and made of steel, but there were occasional moments of softness, chinks in her otherwise ironclad and imposing armor. These are the moments, rare and ephemeral, that bind you to her, that render you unable to walk away - because they convince you that one day, perhaps, she would shed her armor and never feel the need to put it back on.
The kiss ends. She turns, takes her cup of coffee, and starts to head towards the hallway and the bathroom within.
“We have a budget meeting at 10,” she says. “Better start getting ready.”
---
Four years ago, Ryujin is on her balcony. She’s wearing nothing save the white tanktop she’d stolen from you at some point during your month together overseas. Her nipples poke out from beneath its thin cotton in the chill of the evening Vancouver air, but she neither notices nor cares.
She takes long drags from the cigarette dangling between her fingertips. Her building was a non-smoking building, but the moving boxes littering her apartment and that fucking email in her inbox meant she cared little for what the strata council might say about her nicotine indulgence at next month’s meeting - not when she wouldn’t even be in the country this time next week.
You join her. For a while the two of you sit there in silence, leaning against the rail.
“We should end things,” she says, plainly, with a clarity that both surprises you and hurts you. She doesn’t look at you. She takes another drag. The smoke leaves her nostrils and lingers between you. Just four words, but with them she’d ended everything you’d built up in the month you’d been together.
You say nothing. She doesn’t say anything further. Maybe she already knew what you wanted to say, even if you never actually said them. She was good at that. Perhaps the right words - words that would somehow fix this - didn’t exist.
At some point, long after her cigarette has become ashes on her balcony floor, she steps back inside her apartment and walks wordlessly into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. The click of the door closing sounds much louder than it had any right to be in her packed up, empty apartment.
You don’t follow. You linger on her balcony. It reminds you of the balcony of your hotel suite in Tokyo.
---
“The request came from Sakura,” Taeyeon says over the phone, two weeks before. Despite being on the other side of the planet her voice was calm, measured, the voice of one with armor securely fastened and shield raised. “Hirai approved it.”
“She’s not even in Logistics, or Strategy,” you hiss. Your hand tightens its grip on the balcony railing, turning your knuckles white. Tokyo’s evening buzzes around you, loud and bright and glittering, but you process none of it. “She’s in Marketing. She’ll get eaten alive in Logistics. You know damn well Sakura and Kazuha can get the transition to rail done on their own. Fuck, Kazuha can probably do it all by herself.”
“She said she wanted overseas experience. Now she’s getting it. And a promotion to boot.”
You scoff. “This isn’t a promotion, Taeyeon. This is exile.”
“Exile?” her turn to let a faux-laugh escape her lips. “It’s three years, max. Less if she’s as good at her job as you think she is.”
Silence. The anger burns, bright and insistent, in your veins. Anger at her and the audacity of what she’d done to you; anger at the corporate mechanisms that ground on mercilessly, without heed for the lives it was carelessly altering; anger at the sudden darkness that would take someone away from you right when your future with them seemed so bright.
“I have work to do,” Taeyeon says, eventually, before the line goes dead.
You remain on the balcony for a while, long after the call ends. You look for a solution, somewhere within Tokyo’s palette of neon and LED - but the city is uncaring. It grinds on, cold and emotionless and relentless. Defeated, you step back inside the hotel room, empty handed.
Ryujin’s there, on the couch, knees drawn up to her chest. Her expression is unreadable, staring blankly in front of her. She’s still in shock, you realize, but the tears tracing glimmering streaks down her cheeks are unmistakable.
But as soon you re-enter the hotel room and her eyes find yours, she knows you have nothing to say - her features shatter, and she begins to cry.
---
Two weeks later, you leave Ryujin’s apartment, eventually. You take one last look at the hallway where her bedroom door remains shut.
Three days later she flew over the Pacific, and was gone.
---
Four years later, you are standing outside Taeyeon’s office as she finishes up a meeting with the Director of the London office, who was in town for another occasion that same evening. The door is slightly ajar, and you are able to catch most of what was being said inside.
“I don’t care how much she cares about her staff’s work-life balance,” Taeyeon states, sternly. “The UK is a key market for us and she needs to get her team’s numbers up. It’s on her to figure out how best to do that. If she doesn’t, then you would do well to remember that as one of your direct reports, her performance is a reflection of your own, Miss Park.”
The London office’s director, one Miss Choa Park - well known around the company for her upbeat and friendly demeanor - gives a terse acceptance of Taeyeon’s criticism before Taeyeon dismisses her. There’s no joy or friendliness in her features today. The Director leaves her office looking frazzled, hands balled into fists next to her navy blue miniskirt as she stomps away, every step of her high heels echoing throughout the hallway like sharp gunshots.
You enter Taeyeon’s office after Choa enters the elevator at the end of the hallway, arms crossed, a frown on her cherry red lips.
“Tough meeting?”
Taeyeon shakes her head, already readjusting, already pivoting to the topic of your own meeting with her.
She was machine-like, most of the time. She had to be, to succeed in her world. She rarely showed weakness or emotion, and certainly not here, in her office, where her position left little room for it. This was her throne, her element. Here, she was always in control of her emotions.
Except when she wasn’t.
---
Four years ago, Taeyeon’s office was dark, unwelcoming. There is something in the air, something heavy and unpleasant.
You storm in, all anger and rainwater from the heavy rainfall that had drenched you from the moment your plane had touched down in Vancouver after 9 hours of holding Ryujin’s hand as she trembled and sobbed in the seat next to yours.
Taeyeon speaks first.
“Surprised to see you here this late,” she says, with a glance toward the large designer clock on the wall that told you both it was nearing ten in the evening. She doesn’t make eye contact, eyes still fixed on her laptop and the documents littering her desk. “How did you know I was here?”
“Where else would you be, Taeyeon?” you spit. A hurtful statement. The indignation in your veins takes a perverse pride in the way she flinches at your words. It hurts her more than she lets on. Her lips purse into the slightest of frowns, but still she doesn’t look up at you.
“Sakura told me about the transfer,” you state. “She put it in, but you wrote it up and had her sign it.”
“I just did what Hirai implied I should do,” she says, not bothering to look up at you. She shuffles papers around on her desk, scribbling notes on the margins of one of them in red ink the color of freshly spilled blood. “Need I remind you that she said there ‘was a place for Ryujin in Strategy’?”
You step closer to her desk, leaning to plant your hands on the cold oak.
“You know damn well that didn’t mean you had to transfer her to Tokyo,” you hiss. “You knew that Hirai meant transferring her up a couple of floors, not across the fucking ocean. But you did it anyway. And for what, Taeyeon? Why did you do it? Because some lowly Marketing Lead stole your thunder and made you look stupid in front of Hirai? To make sure she didn’t steal me from-”
“I did it for us!”
Taeyeon finally looks up at you with an intensity in her eyes that catches you off guard. Her hands are fists now, the papers on her desk and the notifications on her monitor suddenly forgotten. There is silence for a few moments as her eyes bore into yours.
“Hirai’s going on maternity leave in a month,” she says, softly. She drops her pen and brings both her hands to her forehead, as though massaging away a headache that was on the verge of breaking out. “She wants me to take over for her while she’s away. Senior Vice President.”
Silence again. The title lingers in the air, fills the space between you with its weight. It was only a title, but it meant so much more to the relationship between you. You knew what titles meant. You knew what they’d meant to your relationship.
“I’ll need someone to take over for me. A Vice President of Strategy--”
“Oh fuck off, Taeyeon--”
“Fucking listen to me!”
Taeyeon rarely ever shouted, rarely ever raised her voice. Even in her most intense moments her tone and volume rarely elevated.
It shakes you, as does the sudden passion in her eyes as she rises from her chair and comes around her desk to approach you. When she comes close, she straightens the collar of your shirt and brushes stray raindrops from your goretex rain jacket - but you don’t miss the slight, barely noticeable tremble in her fingers.
“We’re finally here, baby,” she says, softly, quietly, her voice small in a way it hadn’t been in years, not since she was your girlfriend a lifetime ago. “All those years of hard work, all those late nights slaving away - we’re finally here, at the top. You and me. Like it used to be. Like it still can be.”
“You’re insane, Taeyeon.”
“And you’re in love with a girl you didn’t know existed a month ago.”
You step away from her, shaken. Her fingertips leave your shirt.
“That’s not fair.”
“How long have we known each other, huh?” she counters, eyes fierce now, burning with a passion you only rarely saw in all the time you’d known her. You wish you’d seen this passion, this vulnerability more often, even if it was in the heat of an argument as it was now. “How many years? How many Christmases, how many birthdays? How many long nights in this office or in the fucking boardoom? We’ve been working for this for so long, baby, and it’s finally here. And you’re going to throw it all away for a girl you barely know?”
Silence again. A painful, dark pit of something like pain forms in your chest, forms a lump in your throat that made it suddenly difficult to breathe. You wanted to cry, wanted to shout and hit something, wanted to run away. It was all too much.
“Listen,” Taeyeon continues. She takes in a deep breath, as though steeling herself, forcing control back over her emotions - armored panels sliding back into place. Her hands return to your shirt, fiddling with its collar and buttons as she speaks. “Let’s do this, okay? Me and you. We’ll fill in for Hirai while she’s away - it’ll look great on our resumes, to say nothing of the pay and the bonuses. When she comes back, we can do whatever you want to do. We can go back to our old jobs or find something new. Whatever you want.”
You run your hand through your hair and clamp it over your mouth, letting a long, heavy breath leave your nostrils. This was all too much. All too much, all at once.
“We’ll move to the other side of the country, or the other side of the planet. Whatever you want. But just give me one year. I need this. Please. After this, it’ll be just us. Me and you.”
She comes close again. She looks up at you with glistening eyes and a tremble in her lip. The smile on her lips is fragile, made of glass. She places her palm on your chest, above your rain jacket and shirt, over your heart.
“Me and you,” she says, one more time.
---
It didn’t happen right away. But when it did, it happened all at once.
She was an ocean away, and she’d wanted a clean break. It hurt, at first, and you’d spent many an evening with an empty bottle and thoughts of what might have been. But Taeyeon was there, as always, and soon enough her comfort became something similar to what you used to feel for her.
The apartment came next - with your respective salaries and her signing bonuses from taking over for Hirai’s maternity leave, the cost was never really an issue despite living in one of the world’s most expensive cities. It was almost trivial, the way Taeyeon had organized its purchase. It was in one of Vancouver’s most exclusive downtown districts, and was all newly-constructed exposed wood and steel and glass, with a view overlooking False Creek. She wasted no time in filling it with lavish furniture and fixtures, all of it arriving and being set up and installed almost at a whim. You’d come home from the gym or the office or drinks with friends and there it would be - a new designer side table, or art piece, or ridiculously expensive coffee maker that would soon become something you couldn’t live without.
A small part of you chafed at all the extravagant expenses, feeling uncomfortable amidst all the opulence - but as the seasons changed, you became more and more used to this new life.
Four years passed. Four more birthdays, four more Christmases.
You only rarely heard about her - a brief mention of her name during a Town Hall meeting or company newsletter, if that. But you never spoke, never interacted, not since the day in her apartment when she’d walked into her bedroom and shut the door behind her. She was on the other side of the planet. And it seemed, more and more with each day, that she’d moved on. The month you spent together seemed far off, becoming more and more of a memory than a what-if.
Life went on. Taeyeon was there. She wasn’t, not anymore.
To many it seemed you’d made it. Gorgeous, successful girlfriend; Vice President within your company; ridiculously expensive penthouse apartment to come home to every night.
Life seemed perfect. You almost let yourself believe it was true.
---
From across the well-decorated, extravagant ballroom, he seemed almost ridiculously normal.
And yet there he was - the man from all the stories that had constantly circulated throughout the office. The same man who’d brought down YG, who’d engaged in the kind of corporate espionage that wouldn’t have been out of place in the movies or in some triple A stealth action game. And yet here he was - an average, normal looking dude.
To be fair, he certainly seemed to be winning at life, if the people surrounding him were any indication. In his arms is a bundle of soft white cotton, within which was his new son. His wife, the almost equally legendary Hirai Momo, is greeting the latest of the arrivals to her baby shower - a delegation of three women, one of which you recognized from earlier that afternoon as Choa Park, director of the London office. JYP himself, CEO and President of the company that bears his name, is chatting away with him like an old friend about the recent trades the Vancouver Canucks have made in the offseason, and whether they would be enough to propel the team into the playoffs.
“Guy’s got it made,” you say out loud. Taeyeon, next to you, lets out a sound under her breath that sounded close to approval.
“Guy deserves it, if even half the things he did overseas that year is true,” she states, matter-of-factly. She takes another sip of her champagne, and you both watch as a new pair of women approach Momo and her husband, exchanging warm hugs and pleasantries before revealing the matching engagement rings on their left hands to shouts of joy that quickly spread throughout their little group.
Every attendee in the hall orbits Momo, her husband, and the new baby - rightfully so, you thought, it being her baby shower and all. They vie for her attention or that of the little bundle of joy in her husband’s arms - or both. You’d had a long day in the office and you were more than willing to sit back and nurse your glass of whiskey rather than actively engage in the festivities. As happy as you were for Momo and her new family, you were looking forward to making an early exit from the event and spending the rest of the night at home, unwinding.
You are watching another new pair of women approach the happy family - a short, tattooed woman and an elegant looking woman walking hand-in-hand - when a woman’s voice calls out Taeyeon’s name.
“Paging Miss Taeyeon Kim,” says the soft, melodic voice, which belonged to one Suzy Bae. The Director of Human Resources looked lovely in a slim, backless emerald green dress, the smile on her lips warm and polite in the way that those belonging to HR staff usually are. You’d always had the impression that there was a kind of sadness behind her corporate-approved smile, although you’d never had the chance to figure out whether your hunch was correct or not.
Taeyeon returns Suzy’s smile before the Director continues.
“Hirai would like to have a chat,” she states, “now, if possible.”
Taeyeon gives you a nod. “Duty calls,” she states, before leaving her champagne flute on your table and leaving arm-in-arm with Suzy, one of her only real friends in the company.
You watch as the two approach Hirai, but before they reach her, the Vice President’s attention is stolen by yet more new arrivals.
One is a blur of neon pink hair and a loud screech that somehow passed for a greeting - Sakura Miyawaki. Kazuha followed closely behind, composed and refined as always in a conservative black dress.
The Tokyo office. Which could only mean--
At the entrance to the ballroom, framed by the light of the hallway outside, was Ryujin Shin.
---
Your heart leaps to your throat, and for a moment there is an ache in your chest, as though you’d been physically struck.
You consider, for a moment, hoping she hadn’t seen you and disappearing into the crowd - but it’s too late for that. Her eyes find yours across the ballroom, and you see that same flash of fear and hesitation in her that you no doubt had plastered all over your face.
But it softens. Quickly. For a moment she looks sad, forlorn, as if she, too, was hit with the same unnamable ache in her chest. It’s only there for a moment, but you don’t miss it. She replaces it swiftly with a polite smile.
It stings, how casual her smile is, as though you were just another work colleague she hadn’t seen in a while, and not the woman you’d spent a month falling in love with.
She’s wearing a short black dress, similar but not identical to the one she wore during that stupid networking event in Seoul - a lifetime ago. Another life. Her hair is a dark crimson now, falling around her bare shoulders in loose waves the color of spilled wine, framing a face slightly slimmer but still possessing the youthful charm that made her so ridiculously attractive four years ago.
She steps towards you, right hand raised tentatively in a small, friendly wave. Her heels sound impossibly loud on the hardwood of the ballroom floor despite the jazz quartet playing in a corner, each one bringing her closer and closer to you, each one making you feel something between fear and longing.
Your legs suddenly feel like they’re made of gelatin, but you do your best to remain upright. You’d known that her presence tonight was a possibility, especially given Hirai’s relationship with Sakura, but you’d assumed that the crowd would be larger, or that you and Taeyeon could have made an early exit, or that--
“Hi,” she says, the first word she’s said to you in four years, and somehow with that single syllable the ache in your chest widens, deepens, and begins the gradual transition into pain.
“Hey,” you manage.
Silence reigns for a few moments longer than you wanted. You stare at your champagne, and her at ruckus Momo and Sakura’s reunion has caused within the group at the center of the banquet hall.
“Your, uh, your hair-” you stammer.
“Yeah,” she says, too quickly, eager to end the awkwardness. “Is it nice? I think it’s nice. Sakura said it’s ‘sooooo 2017’.”
“Funny, coming from her.”
There is silence for another moment, but this time your eyes meet. There is something there, in those dark chestnut pools, that you want to capture and keep and never give away. She gives you a smile - small, awkward, unsure, but genuine.
“It’s good to see you,” she says, finally, voice small.
Her words break you and fill you all at the same time. So warm, and yet so casual.
“It’s good to see you too, Ryujin.”
Her name on your lips sends a little shiver up her spine that she hopes you don’t notice - but it’s there, in the little quiver of her lips, the glimmer in her eyes that speak of too many lonely nights in her Tokyo apartment wishing she could hear it again.
“So how’s uh…” you begin. “How’s-”
“Trucks to trains?” she says, smile a little looser now, a little freer, now that you’d given her a mundane topic to speak on. “Went great. We wrapped up the last contracts in the last quarter.”
“Went?”
“Yeah. Now we just sit back and wait for the cash to roll in so I can rub it in Taeyeon’s face,” she says with a small grin - that small, sly little grin you used to know well.
The mention of her name causes your eyes to snap, involuntarily, towards Taeyeon’s last known direction. She’s deep in conversation with Momo now, the topic likely work-related, if her rigid posture were anything to go by.
“Speaking of which,” Ryujin says, carefully. “I hear you two are-”
“-yeah,” you finish, sparing her the need to actually say words she didn't want to. “It, uh, kinda just happened. Not married, or anything. Just… yeah.”
Ryujin nods, but there’s a flicker of something between surprise and hurt on her features. She does her best to hide it, and most people would’ve missed it, but you knew her better than most people. She smiles, but there’s no joy in it.
“Got it. You two were meant to be, anyway.”
You shrug, unwilling to give voice to a confirmation. “And you?”
A moment passes. Her eyes are locked on yours, as though she were surprised by your question, or didn’t quite know how or if to answer it. Then she smiles. “There’s a guy,” she admits, as she takes a champagne flute from a passing waiter’s tray.
It’s then that you notice that the silver chain that she was never without is missing from her wrist. Its absence makes you wonder for a moment - and what could have happened in the past four years that might have caused it. Another story, another part of her life you had no insight into.
While you are wondering about the chain, you realize that on the ring finger of her left hand is a glimmering diamond.
---
The conversation flowed easier from then on, even if a part of your chest ached every time she raised her glass to her lips or brushed stray locks of hair from her temple, because it brought that ring on her finger into your view. She shares anecdotes from life in Tokyo, talks about how the best places to get vintage games is in the used goods stores in the suburbs and not those in Akihabara; about how the coffee is so much better there but her first sip of a Tim Horton’s double double this morning almost gave her an orgasm; about how she feels like she’s baking alive in the almost 40 degree Tokyo heat come summertime.
Every story, every tale about the past four years of her life hurts just a little more than the last. Here was a woman who you had no trouble imagining the rest of your life with - and she was out there living that life without you. You wanted nothing more than to have been there with her - digging for that copy of Lunar: Silver Star Story in a bin of used games; sharing coffee at a small hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in Nakameguro; fanning each other in vain as you struggle with a broken air conditioner in July.
But that life belonged to someone else. And the diamond on her ring seemed to remind you of it with every glimmer of light it caught in its many facets.
“What about you?” she asks, ignorant of the internal battle being waged in your chest. “How’s life dating the queen of JYP?”
“Great,” you answer, quicker than you would have anticipated, answering almost out of reaction and instinct rather than genuine thought. “Great,” you repeat, as though wanting to convince her or you, you weren’t sure. “She’s great. We… have a place. On Homer Street. By False Creek.”
“Wow,” she says, trying to appear surprised and impressed even when it was obvious not a bone in her body was either surprised or impressed. “Fancy.”
“Yeah,” you force. “But who knows where we’ll be soon. Taeyeon took over for Hirai while she was on maternity leave, and we promised each other we’d do the executive thing for a year. But now that Hirai’s coming back, we might do something different. Maybe travel? Something quieter, something less intense. Taeyeon’s promised me we’ll do something I want to do. Maybe we’ll sell mini donuts at the fair. Who knows,” you quip, earning a smile from Ryujin.
“Nice. Let me know when you open up your stand. I like the ones with sprinkles. Oh, and the ones dipped in caramel. Those are an S-tier mini donut if there ever was one.”
You let a small chuckle escape your lips despite yourself. When she doesn’t immediately continue the conversation, you find yourself in silence again - but this time you are oddly okay with it, the seconds seeming to pass slowly as you look into each others’ eyes. You aren’t sure what she sees in yours, but in her eyes you see the girl that you spent one of the best chapters of your life with.
You’re stirred from your reverie by the sound of someone testing a mic. You hold Ryujin’s gaze for a moment longer before you both turn your attention to the small, raised stage at one end of the hall, where Momo has approached the podium with her husband and child.
“This on? Suzy? Am I-” Momo begins, until Suzy gives her a thumbs up from the corner of the stage. “Great. Good evening, everyone,” she begins, bright and radiant in the way that new mothers are. “Thanks for coming. My little brat appreciates it. My kid does too.”
The crowd gives a small, polite chuckle. Her husband turns the baby in his arms towards the crowd, and the baby wriggles his hands and feet to a chorus of “awws.”
“As you know, I’ve been away from the company for the past year giving birth to and taking care of this little one,” she continues. “Thankfully the company has been doing great-”
“Hell yeah we have!” comes a shout from JYP himself, to a healthy dose of diplomatic laughter from the audience.
“-and that’s thanks mostly to the work of Taeyeon Kim, who’s been filling in for me as Senior Vice President!”
Momo extends an arm towards Taeyeon, who is waiting at the edge of the stage with Suzy. The crowd gives her a healthy, if reserved, round of applause.
“Well,” Momo continues, “I have a little announcement that I hope you’ll all enjoy. I know you’re all just waiting with baited breath for me and my husband to come back to the company, but you’re all going to have to put up with Taeyeon a little longer, because she’s agreed to continue in the SVP role while my husband and I - and our little brat - go on extended sabbatical. Two years, maybe three - as long as Mr. JYP himself will let us!”
“Take as long as you want!” JYP himself answers, to cheers and laughs from the crowd.
Momo continues her speech. She thanks everyone for coming. She shares stories and jokes about her husband, her child, and motherhood.
All you see is the way Taeyeon avoids your gaze.
---
“Wait. Stop. Let’s just fucking talk about this-”
You spin on your heel. The audacity. The gall. You step up close to her.
“No, Taeyeon. The time to talk about this was before you decided to stay on with that title for the next three years.”
You turn and continue towards the waiting Uber. Taeyeon follows.
“Listen-”
“No, you fucking listen to me, Taeyeon,” you snap, turning to face her again. Your hands ball into fists, and it took more self-control than you would care to admit not to grasp her by the shoulders and shake sense into her. Every inch of you brims with anger. It makes you tremble. “You asked me to do this executive thing for one year. One year. Then you promised me - you fucking promised me, Taeyeon! - you promised me that we would stop and do something that wasn’t wasting away the best years of our lives as slaves on the fucking corporate ladder.”
She holds your gaze. Her hands, like yours, are fists at her side. She is small and tiny here, in her short dress and outside the fancy hotel ballroom and on the street, but she holds her ground. Composed. Like she always was, even if a part of you wanted her to explode and shout and fight you - because then at least you would’ve known it meant something to her.
You’d been waiting forever for that moment, you realize. For that moment for her to choose emotion - choose you - over logic. Over her work. Over a title.
“You promised me,” you say, one more time, the words heavy in the air between you. “And I stayed, because I thought you’d keep that promise. Because you were building a life with me, or because - fuck me - maybe you were as much in love with me as I was with you.”
That’s it - that’s when the first crack in her armor appears. It’s small, subtle. But it’s there. She crosses her arms, now, as though to plug the gap and ensure it didn’t widen. For a moment she looks away. Her eyes linger over the space between you.
“Listen, I-”
“No,” you state, as firmly as you can, given the lump in your throat and the aching emptiness in your chest that Momo’s announcement left there. “No, Taeyeon. I spent most of the years I’ve known you listening to you. I spent it watching you choose a title over me once. And when we got back together I thought, just one more year. Fuck, maybe finally she’ll choose me - choose us - over another promotion.”
Silence. She looks up at you again. For a second, there is a quiver in her glassy eyes, as though the great Taeyeon Kim might actually shed a tear or submit to emotion over logic. You want her to say something. You beg her.
“But here we are, Taeyeon,” you continue, when she says nothing. “And you chose the title over me. Again.”
You turn and open the Uber’s door, climbing into the back seat. The car peels away from the curb, leaving Taeyeon there alone.
---
Taeyeon handled it like she did most things in her life - efficiently.
It took a single day, all in all. You got a knock on the door of your new apartment one morning and the movers started piling the boxes in neat stacks in your empty living room - each one filled with all your belongings, neatly packaged and labelled. Neatly folded clothes, your PS5 and gaming computer, your mountain bike and snowboard.
It took her less than eight hours to completely erase all trace of you from the apartment you shared. Her lawyer sent you a PDF to electronically sign that same day, finalizing the 50:50 split of everything you owned jointly - investments, season tickets for the Canucks chief among them - except for the Audi, which she gave you, and now sat in your parking space in the garage. Maybe she didn’t want to drive around in a car that you picked out. Maybe she couldn’t be bothered to spend time removing the mountain bike rack. You didn’t have a couch or even a bed, but at least you had a luxury SUV. Lucky you.
When the movers finished before noon, you took a few minutes to peel off the egregious amount of packing foam and moving tape they’d wrapped around your gaming chair - the only thing you currently owned resembling something to sit on - and cracked open a beer.
You’d taken a few days off work - Suzy was kind enough to explain it to the board as a “family emergency,” and quickly found and settled on a small but comfortable apartment in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighborhood. You’d had to call in a few favors with friends in real estate to fast track the paperwork, but you were willing to do anything to get away from Taeyeon. The mere thought of returning to your shared apartment to gather your things filled you with dread - until, thankfully, she decided to take care of it for you. Efficient, as always. You expected nothing less from the Senior Vice President of JYP Inc.
You wonder if she felt anything as the movers came in and took your things. If she did, she probably hid it well, behind her armor. She was good at that.
---
The next day you’re putting your new desk together and cursing the fact that your set of allen keys was likely buried somewhere in the cardboard fortress that still took up most of your living room when there’s a knock on your door. As you get up your bare foot lands on a stray screw, sending a sharp spike of pain up your heel. Thankfully it doesn’t break the skin. Small mercies.
You hobble over to the door. Probably a furniture delivery. Hopefully it was your bed. Your back was not a fan of the inflatable camping mattress you slept on last night.
It’s Ryujin.
In her hands are a couple of paper bags, one of which clearly carried green glass bottles.
She looks at you - messy clothes, favoring a leg, messy hair - complete mess. She is about to say something, decides not to. She smiles, crookedly, as though she is stifling a laugh at your present condition. That told you all you needed to know.
You smirk, open the door fully, and let her in.
---
You’re sitting in the middle of the cardboard box fortress, sharing soju and rice crackers on the floor, when she asks.
“So,” she begins, throwing another cracker into her mouth. “The fuck happened to you?”
You let a breath out through your nostrils and smile, despite yourself. You empty your glass, and Ryujin quickly refills it.
Vancouver’s golden hour sunset makes the ring on her left hand glimmer.
“She did what she does,” you answer, vaguely. You look up at her and assume that she needs further detail than that, but you can tell by the look in her eyes that she doesn’t. She understood exactly what you meant, even when you didn’t actually say the words.
“What did you want to do?” she says, carefully, as though she were afraid of poking a fresh wound. “I mean, if she hadn’t chosen work over your sorry ass. Again.”
You shrug, taking a cracker and nibbling on it. “Move to New York? Stockholm? Manila? Fuck around, maybe get married and have brats of our own because we’re bored?”
“Taeyeon having kids. They’d be born wearing pantsuits.”
You let out a laugh under your breath. “She’d have quarterly KPIs for them to meet in pre-school.”
You’re both quiet for a few minutes. She downs the rest of her shot of soju, and you refill her cup only to find the bottle empties mid-pour. You crack open the next one. Ryujin gives you a moment, letting you choose to continue - if you wanted. The silence isn’t heavy or oppressive. It’s easy.
“She told me everything she did was for us - the late nights, the relentless climb up the corporate ladder,” you continue. “But it was never for us. It was for her career. I was just an accessory. Can you believe it? Me, a trophy boyfriend.”
Ryujin smiles and plays with the rim of her soju glass, fingertips tracing the edge. “Did you love her?”
“Yes,” you answer, after a moment spent staring at the clear alcohol in your cup. “But the more I think about it, the more I realize maybe I was in love with the girl I’d convinced myself she was. A girl that would pick me over her career, once it was all said and done. But fool me once…”
You down your shot. Ryujin re-fills it, spills a little over on the floor, but doesn’t bother moving to clean it up.
For a few moments there’s silence between you. Rice crackers are chewed upon, soju swallowed.
“How long?” she asks, quietly, as though the words took every ounce of her willpower to say. “How long after we-”
“A while,” you answer, sparing her the trouble of finding the words. The mood shifts. The silence gets a little weightier. “You… wanted to end things, Ryujin. She was there. I thought you moved on. I thought it was clean.”
Ryujin nods. She stares at her glass.
“It wasn’t clean to me,” she says.
You look at her, but her eyes are cast down at the floor, and she doesn’t look back. Perhaps she is afraid of what would happen if she did. Perhaps she was afraid of showing you what was there in her eyes.
“I had it in my head that you were going to show up at the airport,” she begins, voice starting strong but quivering slightly as the words left her mouth. But she continues, bravely. “Or maybe you’d booked a seat on the plane and you’d get up and sit next to me, because you decided to transfer along to Tokyo with me, and we’d spend the next three years living together in Tokyo. Or maybe you’d show up at Haneda. Or at Tokyo Station…”
Her voice breaks, as though each word cost her a piece of herself to say. She brings a hand to her mouth, covering her lips, gathering herself.
“Kazuha had to pull me out of bed those first couple of weeks,” she admits, softly, the quivers in her voice more apparent now. She sniffles, choking back emotion. “Then for a while I convinced myself you’d show up at the Tokyo office one day with a bouquet of roses. Maybe you were delayed, y’know? Maybe you had some trouble with HR arranging your transfer to Tokyo for the project.”
She lets out a sound that is somewhere between a laugh and a whimper. She wipes a tear from her eye before it has a chance to fall, and seeing it makes your chest hurt.
“Stupid,” she says, taking a sharp, wheezy inhale. “I was stupid. So stupid. I wanted a clean break and you gave it to me and it broke my fucking heart.”
Your lip quivers, the way it does when your heart aches. You look at her and you want to gather her into your arms and kiss her and chase away her pain and heartache. But you don’t. You can’t, because she’s not that woman anymore. She’s not yours.
“I’m sorry, Ryujin,” you say, eventually. “Those first few weeks… they were hell for me too.”
She nods. She wipes away another tear before it breaks free of her eyelid. You had to touch her - had to do something - and you reach out with your right hand. She sees you, with your outstretched hand, and for the first time in a long while she makes eye contact. Her eyes are glassy. The smile on her lips is a sad, broken thing.
She reaches out with her left hand and grasps yours. You squeeze it for a moment, but the ring on her finger makes you pull your own hand away.
“Your fiance won’t like that you’re having drinks at the apartment of a guy you used to fuck,” you say, softly, with a smile, to make sure she knew you were joking.
Ryujin looks at you for a moment, searching, as though she were incredulous that you would try and make a joke right now. But eventually her lips curl into a smile. She straightens out her fingers on her left hand, eyes fixated on the ring.
She laughs, and twists the ring off her finger.
“He would be, if he were real.”
She tosses the ring at your chest. It’s cheap pot metal, the “diamond” actually clear plastic.
You reach for her hand, examining her ring finger. No tan, no indent - she hadn’t been wearing it for very long. She hadn’t been wearing any ring there at all.
“I bought it at Haneda on my way here,” she admits. “Wanted to piss you off. Make you jealous. Show you what you missed out on. But…”
“...but?”
She laughs, despite herself, washing her face with her palms as though ashamed.
“Ah, fuck,” she sighs. “The second I saw you I wanted to tear it off my hand. So stupid-”
You kiss her.
You were moving before she’d even finished her sentence, crawling across the floor and pressing her lips against hers. She is surprised, caught off guard - but it takes only a second for her to ease into the kiss, lips opening and tongue finding yours.
The tension between you snaps, shatters under the weight of your mutual need for each other - for lust, yes, but also for comfort, for a reminder of what once was before the world decided to send you to opposite sides of it.
Her hands find their way into your scalp, and suddenly she’s falling onto her back on the hardwood floor, your lips and the tongues duelling all the while. You break the kiss for a moment, and your eyes find each other. You will the words to appear and you get the sense that she is doing the same - but the moment passes without one being spoken. She lets her actions speak for you both, pulling you to her mouth and kissing you again.
You break the kiss, wanting to have more of her. You delve into her neck and she hisses your name into the air between your teeth. She’d said your name more than once since you’d reunited but not like this, not the way she used to - half breath, half gasp.
Before you know it she’s pulling her wool sweater off, revealing the modest bralette she wore beneath. She’s slimmer now, a little more toned than she was four years ago, and the sight of her body steals the breath from your lungs. She watches you take her in and giggles, reaching for the hem of your t-shirt and pulling it over your head.
When you return to her neck it’s hotter now, more passionate, the increased skin-to-skin contact between your upper bodies making every touch feel like electricity. You place messy, rushed kisses down her neck and upper chest and collarbone, and before you know it she’s arching her back and reaching behind her to undo her bra. The garment sags on her when she undoes the clasp and she practically tears it off her body.
Her small, soft breasts give the slightest bounce when her back hits the floor again - and the sight of her makes your mouth water.
Her hands - which have found their way into your hair, nails digging into your scalp - pull you down to her.
You find her left nipple first, the one she told you on a warm afternoon in Seoul was the more sensitive one, and latch onto it with your lips. Your tongue darts out to flick her sensitive bud and the sound that it tears from her throat sounds like relief and pleasure and something more, something deep and primal. You suckle deeply from her, tongue weaving random patterns atop her stiff bud, your other hand capturing her other nipple and pinching and rolling the nub between your index finger and thumb until it too is taut with pleasure.
She’s writhing on the floor now, lower body moving restlessly, capturing your hips between her warm thighs and pressing herself against you. You can feel the heat of her on your own thigh, knowing that she was probably already dripping.
Your hands slide down her side, catching on the waistband of the small black skirt she wore. Through the pleasured haze your suckling on her breasts has brought upon her, she quickly finds the skirt’s zipper beneath the small of her back. Her back arches off the floor again, pushing her breasts further into your mouth, and allowing her room to pull her skirt - and the drenched panties beneath - off her hips and down her legs.
You take a second to take her in - naked, needy, wanting. Her cheeks are flushed, hips still writhing, still needing you between them. You glance down, at the glistening, slick flesh between her thighs as she spreads them and allows you between her legs.
“Fuck me,” she says, a hiss, a whisper - something you’d heard her say many times before but never like this, never so soft, so vulnerable. “Please,” she adds, as she pulls you down for a kiss. “Please, I need you--”
You reach to pull your sweatpants down just far enough to free your cock. It bounces free of your boxers and glances against the slick flesh of her cunt and that first contact is enough to wrench a wispy, breathy gasp from both of your lips. You grasp your aching shaft and bring your tip to her dripping entrance.
“Please,” she hisses, and then you push forward, and you’re inside her again.
You force your eyes open, despite the overwhelming desire to close them and simply savor the feeling of her tight cunt taking you - but you want to watch her, want to see what she looks like as she takes your cock again. Eyes closed, brow furrowed as if in pain, lips apart as a low, breathy moan leaves them - sublime.
It’s uneven and wild, the rhythm you quickly find and settle into, as you fuck her on the floor of your new, messy apartment. The unresolved history between you, the empty void of four years you spent apart, the lingering ghost of what might have been and question of what still could be - it’s all still there - but it fades for just a moment. Right now it’s the feeling of her body taking you in that matters, and that sensation is all consuming.
She’s tight and wet, so tight and wet around you. You still remember what she felt like four years ago - how could you forget? - but she somehow feels even better now, as if her body remembered what you felt like, how you stretched her, and was waiting for you to return to it.
She hisses your name into your ear. “Oh god,” she spits. “Oh god, fuck me - fuck… for so fucking long, god--”
You only catch fragments of sentences - or perhaps she could only manage fragments - but the meaning is clear. She’d wanted you for so long, had waited for this moment for so long.
Her nails dig into your scalp. Her thighs tighten around your waist, heels digging into the small of your back and butt.
“Harder,” she says into your ear, and you obey, increasing your pace, thrusts gradually increasing in pace until you’re hammering her against the floor. The wet slap of skin on skin echoes in the empty living room, the raw, carnal sound echoing against the cardboard boxes and half-assembled furniture.
“So big, stretching me out, fuck-” she sighs, pulling your head from where it had settled in the crook of her neck so you’re in front of her now, face-to-face, every thrust sending a stiff vibration through her body. “Needed you, needed this--”
“Fuck, Ryujin,” you spit, between gritted teeth. She was so tight, so slick around you. “Still so fucking tight for me.”
“Yes,” she answers, immediate. “Just for you, fuck, just for you. Fuck me, okay? Fuck me-”
You silence her with a rough, violent kiss, hard teeth clashing against soft lips and causing spikes of pain that lend the pleasure more sharpness. You break the kiss and raise your upper body with your arms, placing your palms flat on either side of her head.
What a view - her slim, tight body beneath you, small breasts bouncing with each thrust, saliva-streaked nipples tight and taut; warm, flushed thighs spread wide; the slick, pink lips of her cunt taking you in and squeezing tightly around you on the way out; her juices glistening on your shaft as it drills in and out of her, gathering and pooling on the wiry hairs at your base.
You relish the sight of her body, her lips, her eyes. She does the same. Her right hand grasps onto your left bicep, her nails of her free hand digging into your side as she tries to anchor herself against the pleasure building to a peak inside her.
“Gonna fucking cum,” she spits. Saliva drips down her chin, and her makeup runs. She doesn’t care. Doesn’t even notice.
“Cum for me,” you order, and almost as soon as the words leave your mouth, she does.
Her body quivers, trembles, then goes rigid - then does it again. Her nails dig almost painfully into your side, and her heels pull you against her as though she were afraid you would pull out and leave her wanting. But you don’t, slowing but not stopping your pace, fucking her through her orgasm with slow but firm thrusts, elongating the length of each wave of pleasure that courses through her body.
You feel your own peak coming - quickly, far too quickly. Your arms give out, suddenly weak, and you find yourself back in the crook of her neck as the last aftershocks of her orgasm slowly fade from her.
“Gonna cum, Ryujin,” you say into her ear, almost embarrassed at how quickly it was coming - but the time apart, the emotion, the spoken and unspoken words between you - it was all too much.
“Inside me,” she says, the same way she’d said it so many times in the past, but this time is different, is unlike all the others. “Fill me up, please. I’m yours, okay? I’m yours--”
Just as your words instantly brought about her orgasm, hers brings about yours - and before you know it you’re burying yourself as deeply as you can inside Ryujin Shin and letting your orgasm overtake your senses. You quiver, tremble, and go rigid - your cock pulses as it spurts thick, warm ropes of your semen deep inside her cunt and into her womb.
“Oh god, yes, please,” she says, the words half-moan as she feels you cum inside her. “Yes, cum inside me, cum inside me just like that. Give it to me, Daddy please-”
Her old pet name for you breaks you, shatters what’s left of you. Your orgasm shakes you to your core, and you’re a trembling mess in her arms by the time you begin to recover.
You raise your head from her neck to look at her. Flushed, eyes half-lidded, makeup messy - and somehow more beautiful than you’d ever seen her.
You want to say something, something that will resolve all the ghosts and make clear whatever future lay before you. But she smiles, warm and soft, and you realize there was no need for words with Ryujin. She knew what you were going to say, knew how you felt, even if you never gave those emotions a voice.
In recent days you’d found yourself searching for words that were always somehow eluding you. The emotion is there, but the articulation of them wasn’t.
The words you need are in the kiss she gives you.
---
You both spend a few minutes there, cuddling naked on the floor of your apartment, surrounded by cardboard boxes and soju bottles, sharing kisses and making jokes, fingertips tracing idle patterns on each others’ skin as though trying to etch the feeling of each others’ bodies into your memories - or perhaps trying to re-learn the same.
It’s quiet for a moment as her eyes find yours, and before you know it her hand, which was cradling your cheek, is pushing you gently onto your back.
She’s on you before you know it, thighs cradling your hips. You can feel the wet heat of her above your cock, the soft drip of your cum or her juices falling from her open, cum-filled cunt and onto your crotch. She grinds on you, the lips of her cunt splayed on either side of your rapidly hardening shaft, coating it in a slick sheen of juices.
Throughout it all she doesn’t say a thing - just lets her body and that unspoken connection between you speak for her.
Her brow wrinkles, her eyes shut, and her lower lip curls under a tooth as the first spikes of pleasure begin to work their way up her spine and into her brain. When you’re fully stiff she reaches between you, points your tip at the pink, slick lips of her pussy, and slides you inside her.
She begins to ride you - slowly, passionately. Your hands find their way to her hips and stay there, not pulling her down or guiding her, just touching her, anchoring yourself to her. You let her lead the way, let her find her own pleasure, at her own pace.
You take her in - the sight, the feel, the sound of her. She’s small - she’s always been small - but toned, now, slim and tight. The fading sunlight of the afternoon highlights the ridges and curves of her body - her round, small breasts and the taut nipples atop them, the flex of her abs, the fullness of her thighs.
She moves with a grace and flow that takes your breath away with each movement, her full hips moving softly and slowly upward as you slide up and out and away from her, only to drive herself down and forward with a little more force as she takes you into her cunt. Her hips move in slick, slow gyrations. Every twitch, every movement sends another quiver of pleasure up your spine.
“Yes, Daddy,” she says, eyes finally opening. Her hands dig into your chest, her upper arms bringing her tits together into a delicious looking cleavage. “Fuck, you feel so good, stretching me-”
“You feel better, baby,” you reply. Your hands dig a little deeper into her hips, fingers clutching at her soft flesh, slowly pulling her toward you with each gyration of her hips, no longer able to contain the need for more of her, faster, harder.
“Can feel… fuck, can feel your cum inside me. I’m so full of your cum already, Daddy. Can feel you pushing it deeper inside me-”
“Ryujin-”
“Fuck,” she snaps, reaching between your bodies, her fingers finding her slick clit and teasing it. “Gonna cum on your cock, Daddy. Are you- are you gonna watch me cum?”
“Yes, baby-”
“--Fuck!”
Ryujin Shin shatters atop you, body trembling as she momentarily loses control of it. Her cunt pulsates around your shaft and for a moment you think you might cum there and then. Your hands tighten even further around her hips, surely leaving bruises for tomorrow - and you do your best to keep your eyes open, watching the orgasm course through her tight little body, watching her go rigid and tense for a long moment before loosening and falling to a heap atop you.
You kiss, passionately. She breathes heavily into the kiss and into your mouth, suddenly exhausted. You don’t give her long to recover. The hands on her hips slowly push her off your cock, and you both let a sigh out at the sudden emptiness.
You guide her onto her hands and knees, rising to take up position behind her. No words, no pausing to give her time to catch her breath - not when your need for her was so strong. You take your slick shaft in your hand and point your tip at her and you’re inside her again, her cum-slick, tight heat welcoming you, taking you.
You’re fucking her again, quickly finding a fast and firm rhythm, the wet smack of your hips meeting her ass filling the room. Your hands clutch at her hips and waist, pulling you back against her - and soon she’s doing the same, throwing herself back onto you, meeting you thrust for thrust.
“Fuck, Daddy, feels like, fuck, like-- feels like--”
“Use your words, baby girl,” you say, giving her ass a firm smack that leaves the full cheek reddened.
“Feels like… fuck, like you’re pushing your cum deeper inside me.”
Her words tear a sound that feels like a growl from your throat.
“Do it, Daddy,” she continues, looking back over her shoulder with fierce, needy eyes. “Do it, okay? I can feel your cum inside me, in my fucking womb, making me yours-”
The wet slap of skin on skin increases in pace.
“God, I want it,” she hisses, eyes still not leaving yours. Spit drips from her lips. Her eyes want, plead. “I want it so bad. Want you to breed me, please, so I’ll have part of you in me always-”
You reach forward, grasp her hair, pull her upright - until her back is pressed against your chest. One hand wraps around her torso, claiming her breast in your palm, squeezing tightly - the other grasps her bruised hip tightly as you continue to fuck her. Juices - your cum, her arousal - drip from her overflowing cunt and onto the floor beneath you in heavy, slick drops.
“Yes, Daddy please,” she begs. “Breed me. Do you- do you feel… your cum, already inside me? I want more, Daddy please, give me more, cum inside me again I’ll be good, please, I’ll be so good for you, Daddy please--”
Your orgasm hits you all at once, without warning. You bury yourself inside her and lose yourself to her. Your cock quivers and pulses inside her, filling her already cum-filled cunt with another load of thick, warm semen.
You hug her tight against you, hand squeezing her breast almost painfully, the other surely leaving bruises on her hip that she’ll feel tomorrow. You empty yourself inside her - every part of you, every lonely night you spent in the last four years wishing she were there next to you. She sighs and moans as you fill her for the second time and there is nothing you want more in the world than to stay there, in that moment, joined with her in the most intimate way possible.
Your strength gives out, eventually - muscles burning with effort for a few moments too long. You release her, reluctantly, from your grasp, and she falls forward onto the floor again. You join her, her back pressed to your chest, and gather her into your arms. She wraps her own arms over yours, as though making sure you weren’t going to let her go ever again.
---
The third time is softer than the others.
This was not about ownership, or possession, and really not as much about pleasure. It’s about the way she looks at you, the way her hands cradle your face as you move in and out of her body. It’s about the words that linger between you, unsaid and unspoken, but still somehow understood, as though you were communicating on some level other than the physical.
But she took it, translated the unsaid and turned it into emotion, the way no other woman in your life could.
She’s sore and leaking, and maybe already bruised from your hands and the hard floor, throat raw from moaning and sighing her pleasure into your apartment. You’re similarly sore, exhausted, drained. But none of that matters. All that matters is telling her with your actions what you never could with your words.
When she cums it’s softer, more subdued, but no less impactful on you. The way her back arches up off the floor, the way your name leaves her lips half-moan, half-gasp as the orgasm courses through her tired, exhausted body - it’s perfect. When you spill into her for the third time that night it’s far from the thick spurts you gave her earlier, but no less pleasurable.
She takes every drop. Her body is filled to the brim and the slickness between you, sweat and cum and her juices, drips onto the floor and binds you to each other. Her arms wrap around your neck and her legs around your waist like she’s afraid to let you go, as though she wants to take you and this moment and make it a part of her forever, make it a part of who she is.
You kiss her. When your faces part it’s her that wants to say something, wants to tell you how she feels. Her lips part, but like you, she cannot find the words.
So you kiss her again, and remind her that between you there’s no need to speak.
---
She’s gone in the morning.
There’s a note on the floor where she lay sleeping just hours before, hastily scribbled in her loopy, messy handwriting.
We’re never fucking around moving boxes ever again.
P.S. Clean your floors and get a bed, you fucking neanderthal.
Beneath the note is her ring, cheap and plastic. It still glimmers in the sunlight.
---
“I wish you'd found a way to stay,” Suzy says, as she stares down at the formal resignation letter you’d handed her. She takes it and gives it a sad look before placing it atop another recently received letter on her desk. “I suppose I can’t blame you. This is a case study in why you shouldn’t date co-workers, I guess.”
She stands, walks around her desk and gives you a warm hug. Suzy was a real and genuine person, and a small part of you would miss seeing her around the office.
“What are you gonna do now?” she asks.
“Not sure,” you answer, honestly. “But I’ll figure it out.”
You give her the best smile you can manage, pick up your suitcase from the floor next to your seat, and make your way out of JYP HQ for the last time. You don’t look back.
---
You’re stepping outside the front doors of the building when you see her standing there - an iced caramel macchiato (extra whipped cream, extra caramel drizzle) in her hand, phone in the other. Next to her is her carry-on luggage.
“Hey,” you say, motioning towards her drink. “Thanks for not randomly spilling that on my suit in some weird attempt to hit on me.”
She blushes. “Fuck off,” she spits, but with a smile.
“Don’t you have a flight to Tokyo to catch?”
“Had one last meeting with HR this morning. My flight’s this afternoon,” she says. She takes a sip of her drink. “Heard you’re quitting. What are you going to do?” she says, eventually.
“No idea,” you admit.
Ryujin nods to herself. “You’ll figure it out,” she says, eventually, with a small smile.
“What about you?”
She shrugs, takes another sip of her drink, and looks up at the imposing tower of glass and steel that made up the JYP HQ building. “You’re not the only one that’s breaking up with JYP. Sakura’s put in her two weeks notice. Sounds like Hirai recruited her for another off-the-books adventure. Her job’s up for grabs.”
“Wow,” you say, genuinely surprised. “Gonna take it?”
“Maybe,” she says, playfully swaying in place and shooting you that crooked, mischievous smile of hers.
“Kazuha doesn’t want it?”
She scoffs. “Kazuha wouldn’t touch that job with a ten foot pole. I’m thinking about it, though. Ryujin Shin - Director, Tokyo Office,” she says, free hand fanning out in front of her as though picturing the title on a nametag or on a wall. “It has a nice ring to it.”
“It does,” you agree, a soft smile managing to perk up the corners of your lips.
The city bustles around you, but for a moment, it’s quiet between you. The space between you fills with unsaid words and thoughts, the way it often did around her. You look up at her and for several long moments you look into each others’ eyes.
For a moment you see it all - the moments in your relationship when things could have gone differently.
Maybe you could have remembered your ramen date, back when she was new to the company and you were her mentor; maybe you could’ve remembered who she was when she was assigned to be your translator for your trip; maybe you could have argued more to keep her in Vancouver instead of having her transferred to the other side of the ocean; maybe you could have stepped into her bedroom on your last night together, finding her door unlocked because she was hoping you would open it, and spend the night comforting her, telling her you could both leave the company and start all over again somewhere else - together; maybe you could have stopped her at the airport, or met her in Tokyo; maybe you could have reached out to her at some point in the four years that passed since.
You see all those different paths in a heartbeat, and you picture yourself in them, allowing yourself to wonder what might have been had you done this or that differently. Maybe you would both be living in Tokyo, and were about to catch the same flight this afternoon to the apartment you both called home; maybe you would have realized that you just weren’t the right fit for each other, and the resulting breakup would have been messy and painful for the both of you.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Ryujin’s phone vibrates in her pocket, and she slips it out of her pocket to check the notification. A check-in reminder for her flight? A message from Sakura or Kazuha? A text from a boyfriend back in Tokyo? You didn’t know. You didn’t much care.
Her eyes return to you. After a moment, she turns and heads toward the sidewalk, dragging her luggage behind her.
She looks over her shoulder back at you. She smiles and calls out.
“I hear the ramen place a block from here makes a good tonkotsu!”
She continues to walk down the block.
You smile and follow her.
---
Author’s Note:
“Maybe it will be an epic poem. Maybe it will be a short story. Maybe it will be a dirty limerick. You don’t know, but part of the joy is finding out what it will be.”
-Dr. NerdLove, on relationships
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