all these reasons why
Jul. 20th, 2021 04:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlrocktitle: all these reasons why
fandoms: red velvet, pentagon
pairings: hongseok/yeri, past yeri/saeron
rating: t
word count: 12.0k
i wrote my last tinhet fic during this exact timeframe last year so stay tuned for my 100k jangjeong epic in summer 2022 i guess ❤️ just kidding that will never happen. ok enjoy!
🐥🐢
Yerim meets the hottest man alive on an unassuming Tuesday morning. He has shiny black hair and sits next to her in the French course she'd impulsively decided to pad her hectic second-year schedule with, and her mouth goes dry the moment she sees him.
"Him?" Sooyoung asks dubiously. They're sitting at her favorite on-campus café, Yerim resting a cheek against her palm and nibbling at the straw of her flowery grapefruit ade. Sooyoung swipes out of the Facebook profile photo she'd thrust into her face and then taps on it again, as if a second look will magically shift her opinion of him. "Are you sure you have the right guy?"
"Unnie," Yerim sighs. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"I don't know," Sooyoung says. Her perfectly manicured nails pick at her croissant, and Yerim watches in quiet apprehension as she pauses to chew through a huge mouthful, clearly deliberating her next words. "I mean. He's kind of…? Sorry, no. He's fine."
"No, what? Tell me!"
"He's cute," Sooyoung tries again. Yerim hasn't heard her sound this insincere since they visited the poetry club Sooyoung's stupid ex was in and she had to pretend to care about the Shakespearian quality of his work until she could convince him to go make out in an empty club room. He read, as he constantly assured Sooyoung. Yerim found him constantly annoying. "Well, he's kind of ugly. But he's cute!"
Speaking of said stupid ex:
"What do you mean, kind of ugly? Weren't you with that—with Wonwoo-sunbae last year?"
"Exactly, Yerim-ah," Sooyoung replies. She sighs with all the wisdom of an overbearing ahjumma. "Take it from me. Mediocre-looking men are never worth the trouble—"
"This is starting to sound like a personal issue, you know."
"—and I'm just saying. For you… it's kind of a downgrade."
There it was: a downgrade.
Yerim swallows back the rest of her rant, nervously biting her bottom lip. She tries to take a sip of her drink and then starts slurping obnoxiously through the straw when she realizes she's already gotten to the bottom of it, the ice starting to melt into a muted pink pool along the cup's plastic recesses.
It's been months since she and Saeron officially broke up, but Yerim still remembers every moment of it in excruciating detail. The Minnie Mouse headband so tight on her scalp it had given her a headache, a half-eaten pork bun swinging in a plastic bag fastened around her wrist. The two of them holding hands for the very last time, multi-color fireworks going off overhead.
To be more specific: it's been eight months. Eight months since she and Saeron called it quits right by the bustling Disneyland gate, eight months since Yerim cried through two subway lines and a brisk transfer back to her youth hostel and stormed past a nice Australian girl to draw the curtains of her box bed and fume in silence. She'd lain awake the entire night contemplating the absurdity of romance and existence, of letting your heart be torn into pieces by the girl of your dreams.
Of course, eight months is a long time. Eight months is—eight months is an entire premature baby. It's a fall semester spent being oppressively, horrifically single. It's weeks and weeks of sad-posting on Instagram and trying to thirst trap Saeron through her well-angled pilates photos to prove that, well. Even if Saeron were inherently destined for more in life, Yerim was still hotter than any of the annoyingly overachieving girls at Seouldae, what the fuck?
Eight months is also enough time to decide that the boy who'd sat next to her in their ill-advised French course and had given her his name with a shy smile was the cutest, hottest person she'd ever laid eyes on.
Yerim has never felt better. She's Kim Yerim, after all. She's Yerim, and the Australian girl at the hostel had still demanded they exchange numbers the morning after her horrible breakup, even though her face had been bloated from overpriced ramen and her eyes bloodshot from the angry tears. She'd even managed a sly, inviting grin through the dehydration migraine bashing her brain into a lifeless pulp.
So, anyway. Yerim straightens up and musters her bravest face. She brings her A-game. Settles her expression into one that isn't clouded with heartbreak, one that isn't marred by the ambiguity of moving on.
"Why are you saying it like we're already together?" she complains. "I met him two days ago. I just learned his name!"
She waves her hands around uselessly in protest, and for a second Sooyoung just stares at her. It's a deeply considering look, one that sees plainly through Yerim's easy and useless façade. Yerim tries her best not to squirm.
"Yeah, yeah," Sooyoung concedes eventually, letting the subject drop. She leans forward and bumps the tip of her finger into Yerim's cheek. "But who wouldn't fall for you, hmm? A pretty girl like you?"
Yerim giggles, batting her hand away. "Honestly, unnie. I'm twenty-one."
"Sure," she says liltingly. "But you'll always be the girl who couldn't handle her alcohol at her first MT to me."
"Ugh, still?" she protests. "When are you planning on getting new material?"
Sooyoung is a great friend. Unfortunately, she's also terrible at letting things go.
Actually—now that Yerim thinks about it, that might be why they get along so well. Sooyoung cackles at her. Yerim grabs at her iced coffee, uncaps the lid, and takes a huge gulp.
It's only 2PM and she's exhausted.
Yerim thought taking an introductory French course would be kind of fun, maybe even romantic. She's one of those people who are prone to aestheticizing Paris, and she used to fantasize about going on a boat date through the Seine, eating crêpes by the Eiffel Tower with—
Anyway.
As it turns out, French is very boring and tedious.
"Why are you taking this class?" she asks Hongseok in a harsh whisper. Most of her classes are in standard lecture halls where she avoids interacting with the professor at all costs, but their language courses are much more intimate, plain old high school desks fashioned into a collective circle.
Hongseok smiles at her. His lips are very nice, her brain supplies unhelpfully.
"My friend is an Art History major," Hongseok explains. "And he's incredibly annoying. He convinced me to take this with him because of his foreign language requirement and then dropped last minute."
"But you didn't?"
"Ah," he says. "Well, it's my last year. I figured I might as well discover the joys of—" he lowers his voice and puts on a ridiculous accent. "you know, français."
"I'm pretty sure I'm terrible at languages," Yerim confesses. "The only English I know is from high-teen dramas."
Hongseok smiles again, sweet and amused, and suddenly it hits Yerim full-force. She feels like the world is shifting, just slightly, on its axis. Like two asteroids colliding, a show of sparks and debris and untethered pieces spinning and spinning in endless orbit. A comet crashing down toward Earth.
"We can suffer together," he offers, nudging his shoulder against hers. The press lasts just a little too long. To her horror, she can feel the warm firmness of his muscled arm through the thin material of his t-shirt. And—
Bam. The impact, of course, is devastating. The crater formed is deep and endless, smoking. Yerim feels positively afloat.
"That sounds good," she whispers.
Before he can say anything else, the TA walks in.
The truth is: Yerim finds Yang Hongseok rather embarrassing.
Somehow, though, this makes her like him even more.
Hongseok has an easy giggle and deep smile lines that perfectly complement his golden skin. He barely looks his twenty-six years: not that twenty-six is old, of course, but still. And while Yerim had been correct about her prospective French performance, Hongseok's alleged multilingual experience from living abroad through his teens actually makes him the star of their unexciting 9AM lessons. Every morning their TA lauds him excessively as he stumbles his way through a compound sentence that will never be used in a real-world scenario like, ever, all while Yerim struggles at his side to fight herself awake.
His apparent smarts are definitely why, the day their TA assigns them a partner project, she turns a full 90 degrees in Hongseok's direction and asks, "So, do you want to work together?"
This is definitely why. It's not the fact that he has at least 20cm on her and holds the door open with a cheerful grin whenever she sprints her way to class every morning, teasing her for her tardiness. Or the way he sits patiently through her poor reading attempts when the TA tells them to go over the textbook dialogue with the person sitting next to them, prompting her at all the right beats whenever she gets stuck.
Yerim is just being resourceful. When he gives her his KaTalk ID and promises to message her after his last lecture, she's just looking out for her midterm grades.
Yerim has never, ever, in all her twenty-one years of existence, had ulterior motives.
That being said, Yerim is also a fucking liar.
Of course, Yerim is definitely not thinking about her 20-year-old ex-girlfriend.
It's fine, except it's not.
Yerim turns over in bed and heaves a weary sigh. She checks the time on her phone and then double-takes when she realizes it's only 10PM, because—seriously? She feels like she's lived through three entire lifetimes in one evening.
Just to torture herself some more, Yerim spends another five minutes scrolling through her chat history before she gets the genius idea to catch up with her infuriatingly perfect Instagram feed, which just makes her feel even worse. It's at this point that she decides 10PM is a perfectly acceptable time to go to bed, rubbing at her eye in the bathroom mirror as she brushes her teeth.
Yerim stands there for so long the mint starts to burn in her mouth. When she slips into bed, she falls asleep wondering why nothing in her life has ever made sense.
Yerim somehow sleeps eleven uninterrupted hours, and she spends her morning groggily drinking coffee while her mother watches her judgmentally at the kitchen table. Afterward she retreats to her bedroom to decipher the chickenscratch notes she'd taken on her iPad last Wednesday during Consumer Economics, legs swinging restlessly beneath her desk.
For what it's worth, Yerim is definitely not freaking out when she steps up to Yang Hongseok's studio apartment at 3PM sharp on a warm Saturday afternoon. She's wearing a knit lilac sweater and a matching headband with her hair down and she feels very, very cute. But she is definitely not freaking out.
"Hey," Hongseok greets as he opens the door.
Fucking shit. Yerim looks up at him and wills her heart to calm down.
"Come on in?" he prompts. She ducks in under the arm he has propping the door open, and then throws a glance around his place as she toes her shoes off. She sees the tiny kitchen corner and the expanse of his bedroom down the long hallway, a small bed tucked next to a wooden desk and a towering shelf. As she reaches the mouth of the hallway, she realizes that Hongseok has a huge monitor and one of those obnoxious red-and-black gaming chairs that she and Sooyoung—tried-and-true mobile gamers—constantly make fun of.
Yerim realizes with a distinct heaviness that she can never, ever, tell Sooyoung about any of this.
"Your place is really nice," Yerim offers. Gamer chair aside, she means it; there's a kind of coziness she's come to associate with Hongseok here. Something unassuming, simple. She spins around and catches his eye. "Um, if you don't mind me asking…"
He smiles at her knowingly. "No, go ahead."
"Your parents," she starts. "Do they...?"
"They work abroad," Hongseok explains easily. "I actually used to live with my older brother, but he moved in with his girlfriend last year, so I started working part-time at the GS25 right off-campus. Now I live here."
"GS25 pays that well?" Yerim teases.
"Dear god, no." He chuckles and rubs at his neck sheepishly. "My parents definitely help. But it's a nice job, so I do it anyway. Mostly night shifts and a lot of drunk students, and my manager never cares about what I do on the job."
"And you—you aren't seeing anyone?" Yerim asks, hoping she sounds somewhere in the innocently curious ballpark. Maybe even a little bit worried, pitiful. She'd have to melt into a puddle right then and there if she read as desperate.
Hongseok laughs quietly and settles himself on the floor, right by the coffee table in the middle of his room. Yerim puts her backpack down and quickly follows suit.
"Nope," he answers, and every piece of Yerim has to restrain the urge to either mentally cheer or curse Jiwoo out, just a little bit. "It's just me. What about you?"
"Oh, I live at home," Yerim instinctively replies, her brain catching up a second too late. Fuck. Did he mean—? "Um, and I'm not… Yeah. I'm not seeing anyone, either."
Not anymore. Not since eight months ago. But Yang Hongseok doesn't need to know that.
"Cool," Hongseok tells her.
Yerim almost has to stifle a laugh, because—really? Cool? Cool is quite literally the opposite of what she's feeling right now. Cool is in a whole different country, another planet, putting as much distance between it and her disaster self as possible. Kim Yerim is not chill, and she is freaking out, and she's a liar, and she is not cool.
Yerim clears her throat. Turning to her side, she starts to unzip her backpack, quickly sliding her laptop out.
"So," she starts. "I already wrote down an outline in the doc earlier, but I had this other script idea. I thought we could go over it first…"
She and Hongseok spend half an hour going over their script, a jumble of stilted and incomprehensible sentences that make liberal use of all thirty vocabulary words she's successfully memorized this semester. They call it quits after she prays for a ninety-five and the TA's lenient completion-based grading habits, and then she cracks open her textbook again and begs him to help her study for their upcoming midterm.
Ten minutes later, Yerim is lying down and despairing loudly on his fuzzy black carpet.
"Who invented the concept of midterms again?" she whines. "I still have this stupid group project for Econ with the worst partners ever, and four papers I haven't even started."
"I know the feeling," Hongseok commiserates. "Uh, do you need to go home and work on them?"
"Maybe in a bit," she says, stifling a yawn. "Actually. Would you mind—would it be okay if I worked on my essay here for a little longer?" Her youngest sisters are always a little too boisterous and energetic at home, and she knows she'll give up immediately the moment they come running up to her, grabbing at her legs to play with them.
Hongseok smiles at her. "Yeah, sure," he says. "Make yourself at home."
Ugh.
When it starts getting too late to ignore the hunger pangs in her stomach, Hongseok orders takeout and tells Yerim to help herself to whatever she'd like, claiming he bought extra. He goes over his notes and cracks stupid jokes as she alternates between bites of food and typing away at her empty doc, and when she eventually leaves his apartment and walks those five minutes to the nearest subway station, she's successfully written two pages on Confucianism.
Yerim makes her way down the stairs and feels her stomach form into knots, fluttering. She's so lost in thought she gets jostled by someone rushing across the platform and only just catches herself from stumbling over. Later as the train rattles on, she lets her favorite Taeyeon songs play on shuffle and shifts back quietly in her seat, wondering.
They message again once she gets home. A week later, they receive a wholly undeserved perfect score on their stupid project, and when Hongseok high-fives her she can feel the skin of her palm tingling.
She's out for dinner with Sooyoung at their favorite Italian restaurant when Hongseok sends her a selfie of him wearing baby chick pajamas, complaining about it being a ridiculous birthday gift from his friend. Yerim momentarily freaks out about not knowing it was his birthday, and then plainly informs him, you look 10 lol.
Hongseok doesn't miss a beat. thanks noona ㅜㅜㅜ, he replies, and she has to stifle a giggle in her palm.
"What are you smiling at?" Sooyoung demands, fork paused in her carbonara pasta.
"Nothing," Yerim quips.
Sooyoung fixes her with a disapproving stare. "Kim Yerim, you don't smile like that at nothing. Are you still talking to your Hongseok guy?"
"We're getting closer," is all she offers. She types out ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ ur welcome hongseok-ah and hits send with a small laugh, feeling stupid and impulsive, toeing the line of pathetic. Hongseok sends back a crying sticker and she sets her phone down with the screen facing the table.
"Unnie," she says. "If his birthday were hypothetically today, and we hypothetically had class together tomorrow morning… would it be weird if I brought him macarons?"
Sooyoung blinks at her. "You know that the way you ask that makes it sound like you've already made up your mind, right?"
"I—" Yerim sighs. "Okay, yeah."
She twists her hands together and stares down at them, long and hard. Sooyoung tuts at her and brings both of her arms up to fold in front of her, commanding Yerim's attention again.
"Yerim-ah." Her smile is gentle and playful. "Do you want unnie to buy you the new gelato on the dessert menu?"
Yerim didn't spend an entire breakup sobbing her way through stolen Haagen-Dazs to turn down free ice cream. In times of distress, it's the most fool-proof way to cheer her up, and Sooyoung is intimately aware of this fact. In fact, it's one she exploits to her advantage whenever she catches Yerim moping by her side.
"No one knows my heart the way you do," she announces later, muffled around a spoonful of cold pistachio.
Sooyoung pats her on the shoulder.
"There, there," she says.
After another round of gelato therapy with Sooyoung and a trip to a nearby bakery, Yerim walks into their third-floor French classroom the next day in high spirits.
Two weeks ago their TA had asked them to change seats and try working with new partners, but Yerim and Hongseok had miraculously ended up together again, this time in the back of class. She quietly slinks into her seat and heaves a sigh of relief at the classroom's relative emptiness. She isn't that close to anyone here, but she's still terrified of being witnessed in the act by whichever few lingering strangers, so she removes the package from her backpack as surreptitiously as possible.
When Hongseok walks in a few minutes later, he blinks at her occupied seat.
"You're early," he remarks in surprise.
"Haha, um," Yerim tries. Then she gives up on a proper segue and quickly thrusts the package she'd been holding onto in his direction, clearing her throat. "Happy—happy late birthday?"
"Oh," Hongseok breathes out. He grabs the plastic container and then settles down next to her, smile big and wide and sincere. Yerim stares at his arms and tries to not be viscerally reminded that Yang Hongseok does, in fact, go to the gym four times a week.
"Thank you, Yerim-ah," he says, nudging her just like he did their first day of class—the first time she'd stared at his baby face and big dark eyes, the first time she'd had to convince herself, just a little bit, to look away.
"I thought I was your noona now?" she blurts out.
God. Her filter is just about nonexistent around this man. She winces and considers whether it's socially frowned-upon to slap herself in public, but to her relief Hongseok just bursts out laughing. He shakes his head and pouts at her.
"I can't help my youthful looks, you know?"
"Hmm." Yerim pages through her textbook just to give her hands something to do. "Could you be any less humble?"
"Actually, I really could," Hongseok informs her. Yerim scoffs and turns away.
When the TA finally walks through the door and starts fiddling with the HDMI cables at the front of the classroom, Hongseok leans into her again.
"Hey. Want to get lunch later?" he asks, voice loud and bright by her ear. Yerim flits her eyes toward him with her brows raised up, her signature Inquisitive Look.
"I'll treat you," he tells her, and—
Oh.
Their TA asks them to turn to page 84. Yerim feels along the paper edge of her textbook and ends up on 87, the slightest overshoot. She shuffles the pages back and then looks up at Hongseok again, who sits with an elbow resting on his desk and his body angled in her direction, waiting patiently for her answer.
"Okay," she whispers back.
The most interesting lecture in the world wouldn't be enough to regain her attention for the rest of class. To make matters worse, today's topic—imperfect conjugation, as she reads with a frown—is quite literally at the bottom of her hypothetical interests list.
Yerim's next fifty minutes crawl by at a snail's space.
As it is, Yerim can't be so sure.
The thing is that:
A few months ago, you'll be okay were the words Sooyoung had told her back in Taeseob's apartment, when Yerim had been heartbroken and wallowing in her own self-pity, lying on his couch as he stroked through her hair with gentle hands.
Months and months ago, Yerim was only twenty years old. She'd cried herself into a migraine in an unfamiliar train station and clung to her skirt as she tried to fight back her hiccups, feeling pathetic and too softhearted, wondering why it was so easy to break her heart in half.
Of course, Yerim isn't twenty anymore. During her first year of university she realized that her life was starting all over again, and she took three buses to and from school every single day, out of the house at 6AM on early-lecture mornings. Saeron was in her last year of high school and held larger aspirations than Yerim ever did. She studied obsessively and was planning on applying to SNU early admission, and she didn't have time for their afternoon dates anymore, and Yerim spent too many nights reading their messages over and over again, terrified of distracting her from yaja and practice exams. Worse: terrified of being ignored. Terrified of not even qualifying as a distraction.
Saeron spent her last summer as a high schooler on a special 3-week academic program at the University of Tokyo, the kind of arrangement only people who are going places in life know about. Yerim, lonely and listless, had arranged to visit her for a few days. She still remembers begging her parents to help fund the trip fare, how she'd been crazed and insistent then, scrolling through the cheapest flights and hostel listings she could find. A part of Yerim should have already known that she was losing her, that they were only dragging out the inevitable. But it wasn't until later—with the time and the distance, the moments alone that she would finally allow herself—that Yerim really, truly saw it. Through clearer eyes, across calmer waters.
The thing is that:
It took Yerim an entire year to get her heart broken, and then another eight months to face a simple, glaring truth. It took two steady hands and a stronger conscience to lift this veil. This—the opaque fabric fluttering in the wind, eclipsing the impossibilities of their relationship. The way their connection had been stretched bare and thin, taffy just waiting to snap.
The thing is that:
Yerim isn't stupid, really.
A part of her knows why she was drawn to Hongseok in the first place. How, on almost every level, he'd been what Saeron would never be. The Hongseok Yerim knows at twenty-one is older and laid-back, dark-eyed, handsome. He has long bangs and doesn't care about academics the way Saeron did, and his social circle is small, restricted to tiny gatherings in his studio apartment. He barely knows how to use Instagram and his proudest achievement is his embarrassing PC setup she doesn't really care to know more about.
The thing is that:
Saeron was never perfect, and Hongseok isn't either. Yerim believes in love, but. She believes in a kind of love that's malleable, self-determined. Yerim believes in the soulmate that is deliberately constructed. She understands that Saeron was right person, right place, right time—just, wrong course of events.
When Sooyoung had stared at her pityingly, whispered Yerim-ah with all of her boundless kindness and open-faced care, Yerim understood exactly what she meant. The way Sooyoung looked out for her would always be the same. Even if they couldn't understand, Yerim knew her friends had only ever meant well.
A first love is meant to be a sounding board, after all. Something you leap off of to brighter pursuits and bolder advances. Finally a year older, finally ready to take on the world.
For Yerim, though, her first love was transformative and blinding. Saeron was hers—and she was Saeron's—and Saeron was—they were. Yerim felt, in every sense of the word, bold and committed. Hongseok was nothing like Saeron was, and even with these long eight months Yerim must have looked so foolish and reckless to everyone she knew, a girl who barely knew her own heart.
The thing is that:
A part of Yerim wants to press play on her life again. Sometimes she imagines scrubbing past all of this in fast-forward motion, every painful conversation she's ever had since the breakup cut jagged and abrupt through the TV static, rewritten in memory. In another world she'd be able to forget how lonely she'd been all this time, a loneliness she'd never let her friends truly understand.
But, still.
It feels like the remote is jammed. Defunct—
She can't get her heart broken if she never gives it a chance, after all.
—the wires snipped and ripped out, sparking at the ends.
Yerim doesn't know.
Yerim doesn't know how.
"Why did you wear heels to a festival concert?"
"I'm stupid," Yoojung is saying as she clings to Doyeon's middle. "I'm stupid and a fool and now my feet hurt!" Yerim rolls her eyes when Yoojung pouts at Doyeon and goes to kiss her neck, begging, "Carry me?"
A tale as old as drunken time. Yerim has only seen this exact scene unfold about, oh. One hundred times.
Yerim's favorite part of the year always comes this time in May, in the form of her school's three-day festival. By that, she specifically means the part where the organizers manage to book a trendy girl group for the big concert event, and afterward she and her major friends go out drinking in a large group, obsessively singing one of the performance songs that follow a variation of dun dun dun boy I love you wooh wooh wow! for the entire night.
The club booths are fun too, of course. But last year she'd convinced Saeron to stop studying for an afternoon just to go with her, and now the memory is a little bit depressing. They'd held hands past all the food stands, sharing tornado potatoes dusted in onion powder and slipping into random abandoned corners to steal open-mouthed kisses together, and for those few hours everything had felt right again.
Tonight Yerim is single and lonely and confused. She gets very drunk, tries to hit on a straight girl, and then finds herself at the edge of the table arguing with some stupid first-year named Choi Soobin for an entire hour—strictly in that order.
Of course, this all happens because Yerim is lovesick and terrible at handling her alcohol, which means she's already operating at 50% capacity an hour into their outing, inhibitions severely lowered. And, well. Is she really to blame for flirting with the second-hottest woman she's ever met? Is she? Wouldn't anyone, boosted on enough liquid courage?
Choi Yewon is wearing a cropped fuzzy top with thin straps and has her wavy hair thrown haphazardly to one side. The slope of her bare shoulder is so hot Yerim nearly drools into her makgeolli.
Unfortunately, Choi Yewon is also painfully straight, so she decides to let Yerim down by grabbing someone sitting next to her and generously offering an effusive introduction to the hapless boy who is, apparently, "just like her." The boy turns out to be first-year Choi Soobin, who is definitely not like her at all; Yerim quickly realizes that Yewon had just meant the enjoys kissing people of the same gender thing when she'd said this. Ten minutes later she and Soobin are engaged in a disastrous conversation on the respective virtuosities of Ariana Grande and Bebe Rexha, and it's turned heated to the point of near-physical altercation.
"You're terrible," she announces. "You're terrible and your opinions are horrible and I hate you."
Soobin is also very drunk, so he doesn't take this to heart. Finally he concedes that any song off Sweetener is better than Baby, I'm Jealous, so Yerim figures he'll do. When she realizes that she's officially veering into nausea territory, they exchange contact information and go outside to breathe in some fresh air, where they are immediately hit with the fumes of noisy smokers instead. Yerim plops down on the steps with a slight stagger.
"Wh—who are you calling?" Soobin slurs into her shoulder. Yerim doesn't have the energy to maneuver a man this unnecessarily large around, so she lets his head thud dully against her.
"No one," Yerim replies, and then Hongseok is picking up.
It takes him approximately twelve whole seconds to catch on to her situation.
"Yerim-ah," he laughs. "Are you drunk?"
Yerim makes a garbled noise that moonlights as a yes. Couldn't he see—well, hear—that she wasn't in the right mind to entertain his line of questioning at the moment?
"'m really drunk. And makgeolli is evil. And now I'm sitting outside with some random guy." She looks down and realizes that Soobin is currently fast asleep, which is actually an incredibly validating sight. She'd grown up all her life hearing that her shoulders were far too bony and uncomfortable to lean on, and how was she supposed to control the way they jutted out?
Anyway.
"Do you need someone to come get you?" Hongseok asks.
Yerim hums and squints ahead of her. Cars roar by on the nearby stretch of parallel road. One of the smokers by the bar entrance throws down his cigarette and stamps it out with the toe of his boot, and she watches him walk away with open-mouthed disgust.
"No," she finally manages. "No, I'm okay. Sooyoung-unnie is picking me up soon."
"Okay," he says. "Good. Should I hang up, then?"
"No!" she repeats, more frantically this time. "Um, don't go. Can you just—could you just talk to me, while I wait for her?"
There's a pause. Then Hongseok is chuckling through the phone again, and he goes, "Okay. What about?"
"Mm. Oppa," she begins plaintively. "I'm bored. Sing me a song?"
"Like what?"
"I dunno. Any song." She thinks of the dun dun dun song from earlier, the idol girls in their multi-colored skirts. "A girl group song!"
"You've come to the right person," he announces proudly. He immediately launches into a noisy cover, and Yerim laughs at his show, reveling in the charming tone of his voice. It's nice even through the distinct lack of training; Yerim can't sing either, so she's really in no place to comment.
"I know all of their point dances," Hongseok whispers through the phone. "It's my hidden skill."
At that, Yerim gasps. Hongseok dancing? No mental image has ever been more distinctly appealing to her makgeolli-addled brain, and she scrambles to turn on her video camera.
"Show me!" Yerim demands.
"I'm in bed," he laughs, but he turns on his camera anyway. His face looks kind of smushed up from this angle, and it's horrifying to Yerim that she couldn't care less, finding him cute-hot all the same.
Soobin chooses that moment to wake beside her, glancing instinctively at her phone screen, where the screen light glares harshly into the surrounding night.
"Oh. Hi, Hongseok-hyung!"
Hongseok goes, "Soobin?" at the same time Yerim blinks and asks, "You two know each other?"
"My boyfriend is in dance club," Soobin says by way of explanation.
Yerim has never met anyone more adept at creating new questions with every answer.
"You have a boyfriend?" she asks critically. This dweeby first-year? she thinks. Yerim imagines spending more than five minutes with him sober and immediately feels her headache worsen. Turning to Hongseok, she goes, "Wait. Are you in dance club?"
"Definitely not," Hongseok laughs.
Soobin shifts around on her shoulder and blinks at Hongseok sleepily. "Hyunggu-hyung is," he continues. He lifts his head just slightly, movement slow and heavy. "Hey, are you two still—"
"Ah," Hongseok interrupts. He looks uncharacteristically nervous, as if he doesn't trust whatever Soobin might share in his shameless moment of inebriety. "Hey, Soobin-ah, you look really flushed. Shouldn't you go get some water?"
"'m fine," Soobin mumbles near-inaudibly. Train of thought successfully averted, Yerim realizes. If she were any more sober she'd know how to bring this up. But she doesn't, so she lets it go with narrowed eyes. "Yerim-noona got me some earlier."
"Yah!" she says. Yerim-noona? Yerim gears up to berate him for thinking them already at this level—because really, where's the respect? What was happening to their youth?—but, ugh. Did his eyes have to be so imploringly huge?
She sighs. "Fine."
"I'm glad you two are getting along so well," Hongseok teases. Yerim sticks her tongue out at him, and then giggles to herself when he sticks his back. He's still wearing his stupid chick pajamas and lying back against his bed's headboard, right underneath the only window in his entire apartment. Through the pixelated video screen, she thinks his hair looks slightly damp, tousled messily around his head.
It's a horribly, uncomplicatedly domestic sight. Vulnerable in its simplicity, preserved in the quiet that unfurls between them. Hongseok with his face just-washed, his cheeks the slightest bit pink, teeth pulling at his bottom lip.
Without warning, a pang blooms in Yerim's chest. The pain seizes at her heart. Squeezes, and squeezes, and squeezes.
"Oppa," she starts. "Do you—"
Most people already know this, but: Kim Saeron was Yerim's first everything.
Saeron was her first kiss. Not her first technical kiss, because of that one time at a middle school trip when she'd been dared to kiss Kang Hyunwoo from class 1-4 on the cheek after the talent show. She still remembers shrieking and running away—furiously rubbing at her mouth with the back of her hand—after she accidentally brushed past his lips.
But Saeron was Yerim's first real kiss. She was Yerim's first midnight date through the streets of Hongdae, her first impassioned makeout session in a purple-tinted noraebang corner. Four fumbling hands forgetting the deafening K-pop instrumental booming around them, two girls lost to the world. A week after Yerim graduated high school, Saeron took her to her bedroom while her family was out and stuck a hand down Yerim's pants, and a part of her honestly thought she was going to die right then and there.
Everything is so much more complicated after high school.
I want to make this work, Yerim remembers telling her over the phone, desperate. She remembers Saeron whispering it back, that sullen me too into the dark stillness. It'd been a hushed confession: a secret too fragmented, warped in its own shape, to maintain any meaning.
For some reason, they never did.
Yerim realized it too late: how maybe they had never really meant it.
You know how the rest goes.
On the phone, Hongseok is asking: "Yeah, Yerim-ah?"
The night air is cool around her now, and Yerim wills herself to not shiver so much in her skirt and short-sleeved shirt. Yerim has always been the kind of person who believed that something like that could be controlled. That coldness could be overcome with simple determination, and that if she just gritted her teeth hard enough, her body would eventually get the memo and roll with it.
Sooyoung is a block away, per the notification that had just rolled down her video screen. Yerim knows that a few minutes later they'll be locked arm-in-arm, and Sooyoung will support her all the way down the subway steps and onto the train platform, Yerim wrapped tightly around her in front of the large security panels.
Hongseok shifts around her screen. His voice is warm, sticky-sweet. Like honey.
She takes a breath. She's still shivering uselessly, her shoulders pressed tightly together.
"Oppa. Do you want to go with me to the festival tomorrow?"
Between their first study date in April and the yearly festival held mid-May—a full month of getting to know Yang Hongseok and his various shades, his wide grins and strangely infectious energy—Yerim goes back to his apartment three more times.
The third time, Yerim remembers lying there and chatting away for hours. Head rested against the carpet (It's fine, Hongseok always said. I vacuum very aggressively.), a tiny, reckless, genius part of her had decided to bring up Saeron.
So: Hongseok knows. He knows how Yerim was stupidly in love with the girl of her dreams, how she got her heart broken on a warm night in July. After she tells him all of this, he leans back quietly and regales her with tales of his own disastrous high school relationships, the people he'd once let go.
"I used to be kind of angsty," Hongseok confesses later. "Especially when I lived abroad."
Yerim huffs a laugh. She sits up and hums as she glances around his room. "I can see it. Your place is kind of dark."
"What? No, look. It's 'ambient'!"
"Sure," she teases. She gestures at his black desk and rainbow-light keyboard, the gaming chair taking up half of his study space. "Oppa, every moody teenage boy in South Korea has a room like this."
Hongseok rolls his eyes with a light smile. Yerim only catches it because she'd turned to look at him in that exact moment, forever drawn to his expressiveness, the ways in which he reacts to her. She tears her eyes away, suddenly embarrassed.
"How did you stop, though?" she asks. "I mean, you're not like that anymore."
Hongseok hums.
"Well," he says. "You have to grow up eventually."
"True."
"And—at some point I realized it was easier to just be happy, I guess. It was exhausting to be so angry at everything, all the time. I used to care so much, but about all the wrong things. It got so bad it started to eat away at me."
"Ah. It's kind of the opposite for me," Yerim admits.
It's something she remembers talking about with Jiwoo once. Every time she'd smiled and told Saeron it was fine when she canceled on another date, every time she'd put her head down and let someone tell her, in certain and authoritative words, how she was supposed to feel about something. Yerim had tried so hard to see past the cracks in the foundation, glossing over everything with a practiced smoothness, a master of acommodation, that she didn't even know how to be angry about it all until it was too late. The impulse to be constantly smiling had been too ingrained to stamp out, stuck to her like sticky tape, only work and heartbreak capable of pulling her along. She was on the cusp of twenty-one when the bandaid finally ripped off.
"Anger is good, I think," she tells him. "In the right contexts."
Hongseok nods. He's always deathly quiet when he considers something like this, mapping out the possibilities in his head, weighing her words carefully.
"Everything in moderation," he says.
The next day—the day of reckoning, the ultimate karmic mockery of the tragicomedy Yerim calls her life—disaster finally strikes.
Yerim and Hongseok meet up at the entrance of the endless festival street. The first hour or so is perfect—exactly as Yerim had envisioned. She wishes she were brave enough to hold his hand, but she doesn't. Hongseok wears an oversized sweater that does approximately nothing to hide his larger frame, and she pulls him along giddily by the edge of his sleeve, stopping them in uneven intervals at random club booths and food stalls.
They run briefly into Choi Soobin, who is busy blatantly flirting with a considerably shorter man by the dance club booth, a man Yerim presumes to be his boyfriend. The boyfriend has shaggy brown hair and an absurdly long neck, and absolutely neither of them is paying attention to the small line slowly forming behind them.
Ridiculous, Yerim scoffs to herself. The dance club will have no choice but to blame this self-important first-year when they come up short on their yearly budget, she decides. She pushes past the slight crowd and waits for Hongseok to follow along, opening her mouth to comment on the unprofessional absurdity of it all.
Of course, this is when it happens.
This is when, between two long rows of club booths, standing next to her crush in her sunflower-print sundress and beat-up sneakers, long hair tied back in a low ponytail, Yerim sees them walking toward her.
Them, as in…
Well, as in Saeron and Suhyun. Saeron—her ex. Suhyun, whom she'd relinquished custody of during the divorce. Walking with them is another girl Yerim has never met before, and her throat goes parchment dry when she trails her eyes down and realizes that she and Saeron are holding hands, arms swinging together in even motion.
This was the only thing they've ever bested Seouldae at. Yerim's boring, unprestigious university and its incredibly unevenly-allocated student budget, their stupid little festivals. As it turned out, even this couldn't be sacred. Suddenly Yerim understands how Sooyoung feels whenever she invokes Wonwoo’s wretched name in their chat.
"Yerim?" Hongseok says, and Yerim starts. She realizes that her eyes are still fixed on those two hands, clasped together in a vaguely unplatonic fashion.
Then she makes the fatal mistake of looking up.
Because the moment her eyes travel away from the girl, so do Saeron's. First there's the flicker of recognition. Then, a beat later, a double take. When Saeron's head angles conspicuously to the side, Yerim realizes that she must be looking at Hongseok, focused on the way Yerim's hand had instinctively gone to cling at his sleeve again.
"Oppa," she warns under her breath. Like a prey animal shocked to stillness, silently burrowing away and waiting to be passed over. No sudden movements lest she be uncovered.
"What's wron—" Hongseok begins to say. Yerim doesn't let him finish his sentence.
In one swift motion, she grabs at his hand and drags them away.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
What do you do when you see your ex and her new girlfriend at your university festival, by the booths you'd once taken her to, the last place you'd thought you'd ever see her again?
No, don't answer that.
But what do you do when your crush is standing next to you right in this terribly-lit alleyway by an empty booth stall, one of those little nooks and crannies you'd spent an afternoon scanning for with your girlfriend a year before, wanting to kiss him so badly it scares you?
"Hey. What's wrong?" Hongseok asks again. He's hunched over in the shadows, within easy grabbing distance. His mouth is perfect and inviting, lips parted ever so slightly in question.
It's May, so the heat is starting to take shape again, a warmth just beginning to build. Her cheeks feel flushed and red-hot. If she didn't know better, she'd think she were having a heatstroke in perfectly mild 18-degree weather.
But really.
What do you do?
Because it's probably not what Yerim does next, in a show of non-existent heatstroke folly. It's probably not the way she tugs at his sweatshirt's fabric and pulls him in close, pulling herself up on her tippytoes. It's probably not the way she presses his mouth against his, a long, meaningful press, something with too little finesse but still too much care, the very worst way a kiss can be shared.
It's probably not the way Hongseok leans back up with wide eyes, or the way Yerim slaps a hand to her mouth, immediately awash with a wave of horror, the dread dropping like a stone in her stomach.
"Oh my god," she blurts out, already backing up. "Oh my god, oppa. I'm so sorry. I have to go, I'm sorry."
When Hongseok calls out for her, it's already too late.
"Yerim, wait—" he tries anyway, like a fool. Yerim is faster than him, of course, and she thanks her practical side for having put on those sneakers earlier today, the worn-in soles taking mercy on her as she rushes down the cobblestone and away from the crowd, feet busy tapping away.
She hears Hongseok behind her. She hears her name on his tongue, the way he shouts Yerim-ah, knowing a part of her wants desperately to turn back. But she also thinks she sees Saeron somewhere in the crowd, her eternally beautiful silhouette, the silky black hair she always wears all the way down her back.
Yerim feels trapped, boxed in.
A trapped girl's first instinct can only be escape.
The thing is, Yerim is unbelievably stupid.
"What's wrong?" her sister asks when she gets home. The familiar question spoken in its childlike innocence takes her so off-guard that she laughs in disbelief as she scoops her sister up in her arms, fingers gently tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Don't worry about it, baby," she coos. Yerim brings her to her bed and sets her down gently, arms wrapped around her tiny frame. "Unnie is going to be okay."
The thing is, Yerim is still a fucking liar.
Honestly: if Yerim were okay, would she be lying here wasting away, slowing trying to fade into thin air? Of course not. Yerim doesn't want to talk; she wants to disappear for a long, long time. She wants to pack up her bags and run away and never speak to anyone again.
Well, except for her sisters. And maybe her mom.
Yerim spends five minutes restlessly pulling down on her notification bar, reading and rereading the message previews. She can't click on them lest they see the number by their messages disappear, an incriminating acknowledgement of all the questions she isn't ready to answer yet.
Yerim whines and swipes open her phone. She'd avoided going onto the Forbidden Instagram Page for so long, but now a part of her knows, more than ever, that she needs to see. She needs to know for herself, for her own pitiful sake.
Saeron's account is still the top result when she types sae into the search bar. She scrolls to her feed and finds the girl Saeron had been holding hands with before with just one cursory glance. It's the middle post in the second row. Filtered candids of each other sitting in a café together, the girl's head angled toward the window.
Yerim feels a punch to her gut. She recognizes the décor from high school, another thing she'd given up with a new school and the newfound distance. Back then Saeron would take her hand and say, Unnie, you're the only person I post individual shots of on my feed, as if it were a secret, and Yerim would just laugh and reply, Yeah, that's why everyone knows we're dating.
The new girl is tagged, of course. Her bio says SNU 19 @snu.official with a horrific amount of sparkle emojis in the next line, and all her photos are low-angled shots of her wearing long jeans and short shirts. Yerim is almost affronted. Hot and embarrassing? Those were supposed to be her representative qualities!
But the part of her that is her full twenty-one years, the part that can act just a little bit more adult, feels a certain peacefulness wash over her. It makes instinctive sense, of course, that Saeron would move on. Saeron had moved on in the same way Yerim did, and now Saeon has a new girlfriend, and the world can turn on its axis again. Yerim isn't crazy for her affections. She isn't foolish for loving another person, the guy from her useless French class, the boy who'd bought her food all the times she wanted it, the man who knew her in a way Saeron hadn't, not better or worse or more or less. Just new.
Is she?
Isn't she?
Is she?
"The distance was too hard," Yerim remembers telling Hongseok once, back in his apartment. The breakup hadn't only been about that, of course. But that notion of letting Saeron slip through her fingers, that unbearable notion of letting go: it had still been some unconscionable part of it.
Yerim has always been like that. Possessive, but only in ways that could never serve her.
"You're very needy," Hongseok remarked then, in a matter-of-fact voice. When Yerim punched him in the arm, he whined and rolled over, rubbing at the sore spot petulantly. "Where the hell are you packing these punches in your tiny body?"
"Tiny?" she challenged primly.
"What? Are you not?"
"I'm a very healthy 160." After a disbelieving snort: "Well. Give or take a few centimeters."
"I'm glad you can be honest with yourself," he said.
"Oppa, please stop looking so smug. Being tall to a short girl is not a feat."
More than anything, Yerim remembers loving the way he laughed then: the sound bright and clear, like fruit ade.
Yerim's Hongseok was easy with his laughter and affection, easy with his care. He ruffled her hair in the restaurant booth whenever he treated her out to lunch, let her ramble on and on about her classes, her assignments, the way her friends were driving her crazy. He was proudly his twenty-six. Someone mature and honest, steady. But there was also a childlike fascination to him, the qualities of his character simple and earnest. Whenever Yerim felt exhausted or low, Hongseok danced in a purely embarrassing fashion to cheer her up, and every single one of his shameless antics was stripped bare of any sense of sobriety or prudence.
The first thing Hyunggu asks when Yerim pulls open the door to his dance club's studio is: "So. What did Hongseok do this time?"
Yerim momentarily startles at his proximity. Behind him Soobin shuffles out of the practice room, walking side-by-side with his boyfriend, and he smiles at her for a sheepish moment before turning down the length of the hallway, offering her a final small, subtle waving motion. Yerim is suddenly filled with a sense of belated unease at the conversation she's just been pulled into.
She takes a second to put appropriate distance between her and Hyunggu, letting her mind process his question. Soobin, the traitor, is long gone.
"'Hongseok?'" she questions eventually. "Isn't he four years older than you?"
Hyunggu waves a dismissive hand. "We have a casual relationship. But also—don't tell him."
"Sure," she says, aware that she won't care or remember this in thirty seconds. "But what do you mean by—uh. Why would oppa have done something?"
Hyunggu sighs, putting his hands on his hips.
"He's all mopey," he announces. "And most things in his life are categorically his fault, so..."
Oh, god.
If Yerim didn't already feel like a terrible person incapable of handling the slightest conflict in her life, this would certainly do the trick. Hongseok is mopey because of her, the unopened message burning a hole into her jean pocket. To make matters worse, her cryptid high school sunbae who has an apparent-yet-inconceivable relationship with her crush is now standing in front of her and accusing him of unsavory acts, assigning him undeserved culpability.
"He didn't do anything," Yerim says. "It's really only my fault. I'm the one who kissed him."
"You did?" Hyungguk asks. She nods in confirmation, and his brows furrow. "Okay. Then what's the problem?"
What's the problem?
"Too much," Yerim tells him petulantly, even though a part of her knows this isn't actually true. The problem is only her overactive brain. Her fragile heart unwilling to let go, the pieces of her too scared to mend, a structure weakened by its collective ability to love again. "I kissed him, and then I ran away. And now I'm ignoring his messages because I'm not actually okay, and I just—I really—there's just a lot going on!"
"Damn," Hyunggu says.
Yerim can't believe she's just spilled her guts out to this man, but it had felt weirdly therapeutic once she got started. Hyunggu offers her a slight smile, his front teeth blindingly white, almost to the point of complete obscurement. Yerim is a people's person, and yet she's never met someone more impossible to read.
"You really like him, huh?" he asks.
She sighs. There's no point beating around the bush, no merit in pretending that Hongseok is anything less than he is to her.
"Yeah," she says. "I mean, I think I do. He's only ever been nice and he takes good care of me. And I've liked him all this time, even if I didn't really know."
"Then you should tell him that!"
"But I messed up," Yerim whines, burying her face in her hands. When she looks up Hyunggu is watching her and looking as unreadable as always. "I look so stupid now."
Hyunggu tuts and crosses his arms together. "No, Yerim, seriously. You're fine. No offense, but hyung is kind of…" He tilts his head and makes an ehhh noise. "Well. Hyung is kind of easy, you know? So don't worry about all of that."
"Easy?" She blinks, thinking back to Jiwoo's old messages and Soobin's strange implications those few nights before, everything suddenly slotting into place. "Were you guys actually together, or—"
"Oh, god no," Hyunggu rushes out. He throws his head back with a cackle, as if this is the funniest thing anyone could have ever asked him. It feels like an affront to Yerim's taste, but she says nothing. "Hyung isn't my type, don't worry. We did hook up a few times—"
Eh?
"—but that was only because my boyfriend—ex at the time, haha—thought he had a new boyfriend, and I was waiting for him to get over it, and it was kind of this whole thing. But that was a while ago! We've never been together. I mean, hyung is kind of a loser, isn't he?"
Yerim has no idea what he wants her to say. Hyunggu seems to run his words through his head again, because his eyes widen several beats too late. "Of course, you know, not that… that doesn't mean that—ah. Nevermind. That was on me. Your taste is fine!"
She's torn between defending Hongseok's merits as potential boyfriend material to yet another non-believer or just rolling over, acknowledging the whirlwind of Kang Hyunggu's interpersonal exploits instead. In the end, knowing a lost fight when she sees it, Yerim settles on the later.
"I'm kind of scared of you," she tells him. "Did you and your boyfriend figure it out, at least?"
"Yup," Hyunggu says through a smirk. "And you can too, Yerim-ah!"
Maybe, she thinks. She feels strangely worse and better at the same time. If she hadn't gotten dumped outside of Tokyo Disneyland a year before, she would be shocked to learn that a simple conversation could be so emotionally and physically taxing, putting her entire brain and body through the ringer.
Hyunggu pats at her shoulder and motions her out of the practice room. "Go get your man," he tells her plainly, gesturing ambiguously in front of them. Yerim looks down at the empty hallway, at the row of lockers outside the studio. The overhead lights flicker imperceptibly in staccato pattern, a man-made falter.
"Um." She turns around. Hyunggu gives her an encouraging thumbs up, mouth pressed into that same unsettling grin. "Okay. Thanks?"
Maybe Choi Soobin was okay.
Like, 30% of the time. Yerim pockets her phone and picks up her pace to the bus stop.
It's 6PM when Yerim finally sits down at her desk and contemplates it: the Perfect Confession.
She first considers a symbolic gesture, something that would appeal to their origins. An origin was inherently romantic, after all, right? The first place she ever saw Hongseok, the first place she'd felt her heart hammering out of her chest looking at his pretty mouth and broad shoulders, wanting so recklessly to kiss him. Right? She takes out her pen and writes out Je t'aimes on her lined paper in the prettiest script she can manage, spending a few seconds simply admiring her penmanship, the letters' sloping curves and varied weight, a testament to her sincerity.
She squints at it again.
Wait. Was there supposed to be that s there?
"Fuck," she mutters, striking through the offending letter. Now it just looks stupid with the ink smeared at the end, so she crumples the paper up with a sigh and throws it into the bin under her desk, thudding silently against the metal ring and sinking to the bottom.
Maybe she should go for more simple, then. Direct and honest, her heart poured out sans abandon?
Yerim writes hunched over, in huge cramped letters over the ink lines. Her horrible, hopeless brain spills out onto paper, soaking it all the way through.
I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU. she reads. GO OUT WITH ME!
Yerim circles the second part once, twice, three whole times for good measure, and then immediately comes back to reality.
What am I doing, she despairs in her head. In the next moment she thinks of Hyunggu at the practice room, saying the word easy with his casual slouch, his strangely piercing gaze. Hongseok's message still burns away in her pocket. She knows that this will only ever be an exercise in delaying the inevitable, trying to work her feelings out without an audience, a controlled spectacle.
The problem is that there is really only one person who needs to hear all of this, and it isn't her yellow notebook paper, the printed script at the very top that says TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DAY! in tiny, cutesy letters.
Yerim ducks under her desk and stares at the paper crumpled in the bin. She sighs, long and slow. Then she unlocks her phone, pulls up Naver Map, and searches up the nearest GS25 to campus.
Yerim has always been working toward this epiphany:
At twenty-one, she wants to be ready for heartbreak again. She wants to be the girl who can confess to another person with confidence. She wants to be comfortable enough around someone to lie in their arms bare-faced, wearing old, raggedy sweatpants, casually curled around their sheets. She wants to have all her anger and fear back, all the emotive complications that are capable of coexisting in moderation, in context. She wants another chance.
She wants—she wants—
She wants.
Yang Hongseok is wearing a standard blue GS25 vest and sitting at the check-out counter when Yerim walks through the double doors. He's scrolling through his phone with his eyes fixed downward, which means he doesn't see her slip through the store aisles after she enters, effectively blocking her view of the counter.
It's now or never, she thinks. She scans the snacks in front of her and reaches forward, plucking a box of Whiteheim wafers off the shelf, remembering how Hongseok had once told her he liked them in French class.
Yerim tucks the box under her arm and shuffles quietly out of the aisle. Only now does she finally let herself pull the fireball out of her pocket. It burns at her skin, but she lets it. Blisters bloom across the palm of her hand. The fire simmers out in vast waves of smoke, settling down like a difficult child, with a loud hiss and whimper. The 1 next to Hongseok's message fades into the ashes.
look in front of you, she sends, and then she watches the notification roll in real-time.
Hongseok looks up at the same moment she steps forward. Her phone is still in her hand when his eyes widen, when he goes, "Yerim-ah?" in one breathless whisper.
"Oppa," Yerim says, pressing herself against the edge of his counter. She sets down the Whiteheim box and gives him a slight, hopeful smile. "Just this, please."
Hongseok rubs at his eye and blinks at her. Once, twice, and then another time. He takes the box from her hands and rings it up, and when she hands him a 5,000 won bill he slips back 1,000 or so in coins. Their hands touch over the counter, his fingers brushing gently over her palms, her skin tingling with the touch.
"Oppa," she repeats. She pockets the coins and picks up the box again. "Actually, this is for you."
"Huh?"
"For you. The box—I—it's an apology gift."
Hongseok laughs disbelievingly. "Thank you," he says, setting it next to him. "Is that—will that be all?"
And, okay:
This time.
This time, really, it's now or never.
"I like you," she announces suddenly. "I like you so much, and none of my friends get it, because they think I'm all heartbroken and that I can't think for myself."
"You talk to your friends about me?" he asks, sounding faintly amused.
"I talked to Hyunggu-oppa. It was terrifying and confusing, so please never make me go through that again." Yerim knows that Hongseok is going to ask about why she was talking to Hyunggu in the first place if he opens his mouth, which they really don't have time for, because this isn't about Kang Hyunggu and she won't let it start now. So she takes hold of Hongseok's hand and barrels on, mouth moving a mile a minute. "Also, I want to go out with you! And I'm sorry I freaked out at the festival. And I really, really want to kiss you again."
"You—" Hongseok says. "You—want to? Oh my god, Yerim."
Yerim takes that for a positive exclamation when Hongseok brings a hand to her shoulder and pulls her in from across the counter, leaning down to slot his mouth against hers. The kiss is long and slow, warm and building. A promise of the future—their future. Yerim presses against him more insistently, deepening it. She revels in the way his hand flexes against her.
Hongseok tries to move closer and then moves back in a flurry, unceremoniously breaking them apart in the process.
"Ow, ow," he whimpers. "Sorry, my hips were just—really digging into the counter."
It's with that that Yerim realizes she's making out with her first boyfriend in an empty GS25, of all places, right at the check-out counter. A sense of mild shame and self-awareness floods her like a tank.
"So. Your place?"
Hongseok and Saeron are nothing alike, as a fact.
But when it's midterm season and Hongseok texts her at three in the morning to keep her awake, and when he sings to her in his stupid pinched voice whenever she gets drunk and feels prone to loneliness, and when he puts his arms around her and makes her feel horribly, all-encompassingly safe, a piece of her sees it all. In startling 4K, HD clarity.
Hongseok kisses her again the moment they get through his door, and she leans up as he licks into her mouth, the pressure near-bruising. His lips are full and soft, and it's just the right kind of touch, the press she'd always wanted. Eventually her neck starts to cramp from this angle, though, so she fists her hands into the fabric of his shirt and pushes him onto his bed. He falls down with a heavy oof, then brings two hands to hold at her waist as she settles herself easily in his lap.
"By the way," she asks, between languid kisses. "Who the hell is Hyunggu-oppa's boyfriend?"
The look Hongseok gives her is deeply unimpressed. "Really? That's what you're thinking of right now?"
"Well, it's kind of mysterious, right? I really wanted to know, but I didn't think it was a good idea to ask."
"Actually, I don't know either," Hongseok admits. "He doesn't tell us stuff like that, just all the messy and unsavory details. It's like he thinks sharing anything good about his relationships will make them fall apart."
"That... sounds like a terrible relationship model," Yerim says, even if a part of her almost gets it.
"Yup. Not everyone can be as functional and healthy and communicative as us, of course."
Yerim snorts, thinking about the entire ordeal of her past 48 hours. "Okay, relax. But sure."
"Thanks for coming today," he mumbles into her neck, soft and hushed, teeth teasing at the skin. She hums an affirmation and feels the warmth run all the way through her stomach, the heat nurturing, raw. Real.
"You know," Sooyoung starts pensively. They're sitting in their favorite fancy Italian place again, because after Yerim broke the Hongseok news to her Sooyoung had announced: Holy shit! Our Yerimie finally found love again? to an entire study room. Yerim had dragged her all the way out of the building with her face aflame, and now they were eating their carbonara pasta plates and taking selfies together, as they were wont to do. "Wonwoo has been messaging me a lot lately."
Yerim gasps. "Unnie, no. Did you forget the poetry?"
"It could just be a some this time!" she tries, following up with a short, perfunctory ha-ha. "You know me and my commitment issues, right?"
"Unnie. Seriously, the poetry." Yerim feels her frantic energy rising, arms waving around indignantly. "He wrote you an alternate ending to Romeo and Juliet for your twenty-third birthday! He tried to explain the hidden symbolism of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 to you!"
Sooyoung sighs. "You make him sound very unfavorable when you put it like that."
"Well," Yerim crosses her arms, pouting, "you called my boyfriend ugly."
"Ah. You know, I may be many things in life." She leans back and starts to count off her fingers. "Too hot for my own good. A woman with terrible taste. The best friend you've ever had. But what I am not, unfortunately, is a liar."
"God," Yerim scoffs. "You say that, but you're the one stuck with Mr. Romeo and Juliet."
"Yeah, yeah. So I'm guessing you don't need gelato tonight, then?"
"Wait a minute—"
fandoms: red velvet, pentagon
pairings: hongseok/yeri, past yeri/saeron
rating: t
word count: 12.0k
- 1) this fic will likely self-destruct (read: lock to access list) in a few days
2) sorry i'm not immune to HONGRI optics. but also why are they so freaking cute??? T___T
3) this is poorly researched, kind of bad, highly inaccurate, very ridiculous, and exclusively meant for dreamwidth posting. yes i wrote this in 2 days don't ask OTL
4) yeri is a 2nd year, kino is a 3rd year, joy and hongseok are 4th years… or something?!?! please ignore mildly questionable age gaps and/or assume hongseok took extra time with his military service sorry 😭 this is MY college au and i'll do what i like!
5) once again i need to learn how to write normal fic but unfortunately i cannot and will not change. i am so so sorry
6) title song ♡
i wrote my last tinhet fic during this exact timeframe last year so stay tuned for my 100k jangjeong epic in summer 2022 i guess ❤️ just kidding that will never happen. ok enjoy!
Yerim meets the hottest man alive on an unassuming Tuesday morning. He has shiny black hair and sits next to her in the French course she'd impulsively decided to pad her hectic second-year schedule with, and her mouth goes dry the moment she sees him.
"Him?" Sooyoung asks dubiously. They're sitting at her favorite on-campus café, Yerim resting a cheek against her palm and nibbling at the straw of her flowery grapefruit ade. Sooyoung swipes out of the Facebook profile photo she'd thrust into her face and then taps on it again, as if a second look will magically shift her opinion of him. "Are you sure you have the right guy?"
"Unnie," Yerim sighs. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"I don't know," Sooyoung says. Her perfectly manicured nails pick at her croissant, and Yerim watches in quiet apprehension as she pauses to chew through a huge mouthful, clearly deliberating her next words. "I mean. He's kind of…? Sorry, no. He's fine."
"No, what? Tell me!"
"He's cute," Sooyoung tries again. Yerim hasn't heard her sound this insincere since they visited the poetry club Sooyoung's stupid ex was in and she had to pretend to care about the Shakespearian quality of his work until she could convince him to go make out in an empty club room. He read, as he constantly assured Sooyoung. Yerim found him constantly annoying. "Well, he's kind of ugly. But he's cute!"
Speaking of said stupid ex:
"What do you mean, kind of ugly? Weren't you with that—with Wonwoo-sunbae last year?"
"Exactly, Yerim-ah," Sooyoung replies. She sighs with all the wisdom of an overbearing ahjumma. "Take it from me. Mediocre-looking men are never worth the trouble—"
"This is starting to sound like a personal issue, you know."
"—and I'm just saying. For you… it's kind of a downgrade."
There it was: a downgrade.
Yerim swallows back the rest of her rant, nervously biting her bottom lip. She tries to take a sip of her drink and then starts slurping obnoxiously through the straw when she realizes she's already gotten to the bottom of it, the ice starting to melt into a muted pink pool along the cup's plastic recesses.
It's been months since she and Saeron officially broke up, but Yerim still remembers every moment of it in excruciating detail. The Minnie Mouse headband so tight on her scalp it had given her a headache, a half-eaten pork bun swinging in a plastic bag fastened around her wrist. The two of them holding hands for the very last time, multi-color fireworks going off overhead.
To be more specific: it's been eight months. Eight months since she and Saeron called it quits right by the bustling Disneyland gate, eight months since Yerim cried through two subway lines and a brisk transfer back to her youth hostel and stormed past a nice Australian girl to draw the curtains of her box bed and fume in silence. She'd lain awake the entire night contemplating the absurdity of romance and existence, of letting your heart be torn into pieces by the girl of your dreams.
Of course, eight months is a long time. Eight months is—eight months is an entire premature baby. It's a fall semester spent being oppressively, horrifically single. It's weeks and weeks of sad-posting on Instagram and trying to thirst trap Saeron through her well-angled pilates photos to prove that, well. Even if Saeron were inherently destined for more in life, Yerim was still hotter than any of the annoyingly overachieving girls at Seouldae, what the fuck?
Eight months is also enough time to decide that the boy who'd sat next to her in their ill-advised French course and had given her his name with a shy smile was the cutest, hottest person she'd ever laid eyes on.
Yerim has never felt better. She's Kim Yerim, after all. She's Yerim, and the Australian girl at the hostel had still demanded they exchange numbers the morning after her horrible breakup, even though her face had been bloated from overpriced ramen and her eyes bloodshot from the angry tears. She'd even managed a sly, inviting grin through the dehydration migraine bashing her brain into a lifeless pulp.
So, anyway. Yerim straightens up and musters her bravest face. She brings her A-game. Settles her expression into one that isn't clouded with heartbreak, one that isn't marred by the ambiguity of moving on.
"Why are you saying it like we're already together?" she complains. "I met him two days ago. I just learned his name!"
She waves her hands around uselessly in protest, and for a second Sooyoung just stares at her. It's a deeply considering look, one that sees plainly through Yerim's easy and useless façade. Yerim tries her best not to squirm.
"Yeah, yeah," Sooyoung concedes eventually, letting the subject drop. She leans forward and bumps the tip of her finger into Yerim's cheek. "But who wouldn't fall for you, hmm? A pretty girl like you?"
Yerim giggles, batting her hand away. "Honestly, unnie. I'm twenty-one."
"Sure," she says liltingly. "But you'll always be the girl who couldn't handle her alcohol at her first MT to me."
"Ugh, still?" she protests. "When are you planning on getting new material?"
Sooyoung is a great friend. Unfortunately, she's also terrible at letting things go.
Actually—now that Yerim thinks about it, that might be why they get along so well. Sooyoung cackles at her. Yerim grabs at her iced coffee, uncaps the lid, and takes a huge gulp.
It's only 2PM and she's exhausted.
Yerim thought taking an introductory French course would be kind of fun, maybe even romantic. She's one of those people who are prone to aestheticizing Paris, and she used to fantasize about going on a boat date through the Seine, eating crêpes by the Eiffel Tower with—
Anyway.
As it turns out, French is very boring and tedious.
"Why are you taking this class?" she asks Hongseok in a harsh whisper. Most of her classes are in standard lecture halls where she avoids interacting with the professor at all costs, but their language courses are much more intimate, plain old high school desks fashioned into a collective circle.
Hongseok smiles at her. His lips are very nice, her brain supplies unhelpfully.
"My friend is an Art History major," Hongseok explains. "And he's incredibly annoying. He convinced me to take this with him because of his foreign language requirement and then dropped last minute."
"But you didn't?"
"Ah," he says. "Well, it's my last year. I figured I might as well discover the joys of—" he lowers his voice and puts on a ridiculous accent. "you know, français."
"I'm pretty sure I'm terrible at languages," Yerim confesses. "The only English I know is from high-teen dramas."
Hongseok smiles again, sweet and amused, and suddenly it hits Yerim full-force. She feels like the world is shifting, just slightly, on its axis. Like two asteroids colliding, a show of sparks and debris and untethered pieces spinning and spinning in endless orbit. A comet crashing down toward Earth.
"We can suffer together," he offers, nudging his shoulder against hers. The press lasts just a little too long. To her horror, she can feel the warm firmness of his muscled arm through the thin material of his t-shirt. And—
Bam. The impact, of course, is devastating. The crater formed is deep and endless, smoking. Yerim feels positively afloat.
"That sounds good," she whispers.
Before he can say anything else, the TA walks in.
The truth is: Yerim finds Yang Hongseok rather embarrassing.
Somehow, though, this makes her like him even more.
Hongseok has an easy giggle and deep smile lines that perfectly complement his golden skin. He barely looks his twenty-six years: not that twenty-six is old, of course, but still. And while Yerim had been correct about her prospective French performance, Hongseok's alleged multilingual experience from living abroad through his teens actually makes him the star of their unexciting 9AM lessons. Every morning their TA lauds him excessively as he stumbles his way through a compound sentence that will never be used in a real-world scenario like, ever, all while Yerim struggles at his side to fight herself awake.
His apparent smarts are definitely why, the day their TA assigns them a partner project, she turns a full 90 degrees in Hongseok's direction and asks, "So, do you want to work together?"
This is definitely why. It's not the fact that he has at least 20cm on her and holds the door open with a cheerful grin whenever she sprints her way to class every morning, teasing her for her tardiness. Or the way he sits patiently through her poor reading attempts when the TA tells them to go over the textbook dialogue with the person sitting next to them, prompting her at all the right beats whenever she gets stuck.
Yerim is just being resourceful. When he gives her his KaTalk ID and promises to message her after his last lecture, she's just looking out for her midterm grades.
Yerim has never, ever, in all her twenty-one years of existence, had ulterior motives.
That being said, Yerim is also a fucking liar.
yang hongseok
should we work on the script in a doc together??
https://docs.google.com/…
i set it up just in case ^^
but we could meet up to practice if you'd like?
kim yerim
ah that sounds good
let's meet up! ㅋㅋㅋ
we could also study for the exam together?
yang hongseok
yeah, sure
do you want to go to a cafe?
or maybe my place???
i live alone, if that's okay
but it's really quiet
kim yerim
your place sounds good. i can never focus in cafes ㅜㅜ
yang hongseok
see you there :D
should we work on the script in a doc together??
https://docs.google.com/…
i set it up just in case ^^
but we could meet up to practice if you'd like?
kim yerim
ah that sounds good
let's meet up! ㅋㅋㅋ
we could also study for the exam together?
yang hongseok
yeah, sure
do you want to go to a cafe?
or maybe my place???
i live alone, if that's okay
but it's really quiet
kim yerim
your place sounds good. i can never focus in cafes ㅜㅜ
yang hongseok
see you there :D
yerim
unnie
i think he's flirting with me!!!
sooyoung-unnie
wah kim yerim ㄷㄷㄷ
meanwhile unnie is pathetically single
[crying sticker]
why are men so intimated by my beauty?
yerim
......i don't know what you want me to say
didn't you turn down 4 first-years at orientation last week?
sooyoung-unnie
why would i want to go out with a 20 year old who has only felt the caress of his high school textbooks
and have to treat him to all the soju he can't hold down??? no thank you
yerim
that's true, i couldn't imagine it either…
unnie
i think he's flirting with me!!!
sooyoung-unnie
wah kim yerim ㄷㄷㄷ
meanwhile unnie is pathetically single
[crying sticker]
why are men so intimated by my beauty?
yerim
......i don't know what you want me to say
didn't you turn down 4 first-years at orientation last week?
sooyoung-unnie
why would i want to go out with a 20 year old who has only felt the caress of his high school textbooks
and have to treat him to all the soju he can't hold down??? no thank you
yerim
that's true, i couldn't imagine it either…
Of course, Yerim is definitely not thinking about her 20-year-old ex-girlfriend.
It's fine, except it's not.
yerim
but as long as you don't go back to wonwoo-sunbae, you'll be okay!!!
sooyoung-unnie
흐으으으윽
don't bring up his name here!!!
yerim-ah...
in our sacred chat box…….
yerim
;;;;
sooyoung-unnie
well i hope you have fun with your perfectly fine-looking man
yerim
unnieee
what are you trying to say!
sooyoung-unnie
i have to go
but i love you! ❤️
but as long as you don't go back to wonwoo-sunbae, you'll be okay!!!
sooyoung-unnie
흐으으으윽
don't bring up his name here!!!
yerim-ah...
in our sacred chat box…….
yerim
;;;;
sooyoung-unnie
well i hope you have fun with your perfectly fine-looking man
yerim
unnieee
what are you trying to say!
sooyoung-unnie
i have to go
but i love you! ❤️
yerim 🖤
everyone
it's urgent
do you think he's cute ㅜㅜ
doyeon 💛
ummm
context?
yerim 🖤
just tell me ㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜ
yuqi 💜
do you want the honest answer or the nice answer?
yerim 🖤
can't those be the same thing????
yuqi 💜
ah
ok
so you want the nice answer
yerim 🖤
i'm just going to ask taeseob-oppa -__-
everyone
it's urgent
doyeon 💛
ummm
context?
yerim 🖤
just tell me ㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜ
yuqi 💜
do you want the honest answer or the nice answer?
yerim 🖤
can't those be the same thing????
yuqi 💜
ah
ok
so you want the nice answer
yerim 🖤
i'm just going to ask taeseob-oppa -__-
yerimie
taeseob-oppa
yeah he's hot
yerimie
??? i didn't even say anything
taeseob-oppa
why else would you be sending me a photo of an objectively attractive man i've never met before?
what's he like though
is he nice?
yerimie
yes :(
but everyone says i can do better
taeseob-oppa
well...
yerimie
oppa...
what if i don't want to do better ㅜㅜㅜㅜ
taeseob-oppa
ahhh
well, we all just want you to be happy!
so if you like him then you should go for it!
it's just that your heartbreak is very loud and sort of expensive
so
maybe be careful...
i still can't believe you ate all of my ice cream -__-
yerimie
you're the only person i know who splurges on haagen dazs!
taeseob-oppa
yeah, because i'm the only person you know with a full-time job
……..
except nayeon-noona
yerimie
hahahahaha…
and i love you for that!!!
unnie is too cheap 🙄
taeseob-oppa
yeah he's hot
yerimie
??? i didn't even say anything
taeseob-oppa
why else would you be sending me a photo of an objectively attractive man i've never met before?
what's he like though
is he nice?
yerimie
yes :(
but everyone says i can do better
taeseob-oppa
well...
yerimie
oppa...
what if i don't want to do better ㅜㅜㅜㅜ
taeseob-oppa
ahhh
well, we all just want you to be happy!
so if you like him then you should go for it!
it's just that your heartbreak is very loud and sort of expensive
so
maybe be careful...
i still can't believe you ate all of my ice cream -__-
yerimie
you're the only person i know who splurges on haagen dazs!
taeseob-oppa
yeah, because i'm the only person you know with a full-time job
……..
except nayeon-noona
yerimie
hahahahaha…
and i love you for that!!!
unnie is too cheap 🙄
jiwoo ❤️
wait, yerim-ah
is that yang hongseok? :O
yerim 🖤
you know him???
jiwoo ❤️
no but
remember hyunggu-oppa from high school!!!??
they're really close
i kind of thought they were dating?
but maybe not ㅎㅎ;;
yerim 🖤
엥????
yuqi 💜
HAHAHAHAH WHAT?
jiwoo ❤️
^^;;;;; or not!!!
yerim 🖤
ㅜㅜ um ok thanks for letting me know…
wait, yerim-ah
is that yang hongseok? :O
yerim 🖤
you know him???
jiwoo ❤️
no but
remember hyunggu-oppa from high school!!!??
they're really close
i kind of thought they were dating?
but maybe not ㅎㅎ;;
yerim 🖤
엥????
yuqi 💜
HAHAHAHAH WHAT?
jiwoo ❤️
^^;;;;; or not!!!
yerim 🖤
ㅜㅜ um ok thanks for letting me know…
Yerim turns over in bed and heaves a weary sigh. She checks the time on her phone and then double-takes when she realizes it's only 10PM, because—seriously? She feels like she's lived through three entire lifetimes in one evening.
Just to torture herself some more, Yerim spends another five minutes scrolling through her chat history before she gets the genius idea to catch up with her infuriatingly perfect Instagram feed, which just makes her feel even worse. It's at this point that she decides 10PM is a perfectly acceptable time to go to bed, rubbing at her eye in the bathroom mirror as she brushes her teeth.
Yerim stands there for so long the mint starts to burn in her mouth. When she slips into bed, she falls asleep wondering why nothing in her life has ever made sense.
Yerim somehow sleeps eleven uninterrupted hours, and she spends her morning groggily drinking coffee while her mother watches her judgmentally at the kitchen table. Afterward she retreats to her bedroom to decipher the chickenscratch notes she'd taken on her iPad last Wednesday during Consumer Economics, legs swinging restlessly beneath her desk.
For what it's worth, Yerim is definitely not freaking out when she steps up to Yang Hongseok's studio apartment at 3PM sharp on a warm Saturday afternoon. She's wearing a knit lilac sweater and a matching headband with her hair down and she feels very, very cute. But she is definitely not freaking out.
"Hey," Hongseok greets as he opens the door.
Fucking shit. Yerim looks up at him and wills her heart to calm down.
"Come on in?" he prompts. She ducks in under the arm he has propping the door open, and then throws a glance around his place as she toes her shoes off. She sees the tiny kitchen corner and the expanse of his bedroom down the long hallway, a small bed tucked next to a wooden desk and a towering shelf. As she reaches the mouth of the hallway, she realizes that Hongseok has a huge monitor and one of those obnoxious red-and-black gaming chairs that she and Sooyoung—tried-and-true mobile gamers—constantly make fun of.
Yerim realizes with a distinct heaviness that she can never, ever, tell Sooyoung about any of this.
"Your place is really nice," Yerim offers. Gamer chair aside, she means it; there's a kind of coziness she's come to associate with Hongseok here. Something unassuming, simple. She spins around and catches his eye. "Um, if you don't mind me asking…"
He smiles at her knowingly. "No, go ahead."
"Your parents," she starts. "Do they...?"
"They work abroad," Hongseok explains easily. "I actually used to live with my older brother, but he moved in with his girlfriend last year, so I started working part-time at the GS25 right off-campus. Now I live here."
"GS25 pays that well?" Yerim teases.
"Dear god, no." He chuckles and rubs at his neck sheepishly. "My parents definitely help. But it's a nice job, so I do it anyway. Mostly night shifts and a lot of drunk students, and my manager never cares about what I do on the job."
"And you—you aren't seeing anyone?" Yerim asks, hoping she sounds somewhere in the innocently curious ballpark. Maybe even a little bit worried, pitiful. She'd have to melt into a puddle right then and there if she read as desperate.
Hongseok laughs quietly and settles himself on the floor, right by the coffee table in the middle of his room. Yerim puts her backpack down and quickly follows suit.
"Nope," he answers, and every piece of Yerim has to restrain the urge to either mentally cheer or curse Jiwoo out, just a little bit. "It's just me. What about you?"
"Oh, I live at home," Yerim instinctively replies, her brain catching up a second too late. Fuck. Did he mean—? "Um, and I'm not… Yeah. I'm not seeing anyone, either."
Not anymore. Not since eight months ago. But Yang Hongseok doesn't need to know that.
"Cool," Hongseok tells her.
Yerim almost has to stifle a laugh, because—really? Cool? Cool is quite literally the opposite of what she's feeling right now. Cool is in a whole different country, another planet, putting as much distance between it and her disaster self as possible. Kim Yerim is not chill, and she is freaking out, and she's a liar, and she is not cool.
Yerim clears her throat. Turning to her side, she starts to unzip her backpack, quickly sliding her laptop out.
"So," she starts. "I already wrote down an outline in the doc earlier, but I had this other script idea. I thought we could go over it first…"
She and Hongseok spend half an hour going over their script, a jumble of stilted and incomprehensible sentences that make liberal use of all thirty vocabulary words she's successfully memorized this semester. They call it quits after she prays for a ninety-five and the TA's lenient completion-based grading habits, and then she cracks open her textbook again and begs him to help her study for their upcoming midterm.
Ten minutes later, Yerim is lying down and despairing loudly on his fuzzy black carpet.
"Who invented the concept of midterms again?" she whines. "I still have this stupid group project for Econ with the worst partners ever, and four papers I haven't even started."
"I know the feeling," Hongseok commiserates. "Uh, do you need to go home and work on them?"
"Maybe in a bit," she says, stifling a yawn. "Actually. Would you mind—would it be okay if I worked on my essay here for a little longer?" Her youngest sisters are always a little too boisterous and energetic at home, and she knows she'll give up immediately the moment they come running up to her, grabbing at her legs to play with them.
Hongseok smiles at her. "Yeah, sure," he says. "Make yourself at home."
Ugh.
When it starts getting too late to ignore the hunger pangs in her stomach, Hongseok orders takeout and tells Yerim to help herself to whatever she'd like, claiming he bought extra. He goes over his notes and cracks stupid jokes as she alternates between bites of food and typing away at her empty doc, and when she eventually leaves his apartment and walks those five minutes to the nearest subway station, she's successfully written two pages on Confucianism.
Yerim makes her way down the stairs and feels her stomach form into knots, fluttering. She's so lost in thought she gets jostled by someone rushing across the platform and only just catches herself from stumbling over. Later as the train rattles on, she lets her favorite Taeyeon songs play on shuffle and shifts back quietly in her seat, wondering.
They message again once she gets home. A week later, they receive a wholly undeserved perfect score on their stupid project, and when Hongseok high-fives her she can feel the skin of her palm tingling.
She's out for dinner with Sooyoung at their favorite Italian restaurant when Hongseok sends her a selfie of him wearing baby chick pajamas, complaining about it being a ridiculous birthday gift from his friend. Yerim momentarily freaks out about not knowing it was his birthday, and then plainly informs him, you look 10 lol.
Hongseok doesn't miss a beat. thanks noona ㅜㅜㅜ, he replies, and she has to stifle a giggle in her palm.
"What are you smiling at?" Sooyoung demands, fork paused in her carbonara pasta.
"Nothing," Yerim quips.
Sooyoung fixes her with a disapproving stare. "Kim Yerim, you don't smile like that at nothing. Are you still talking to your Hongseok guy?"
"We're getting closer," is all she offers. She types out ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ ur welcome hongseok-ah and hits send with a small laugh, feeling stupid and impulsive, toeing the line of pathetic. Hongseok sends back a crying sticker and she sets her phone down with the screen facing the table.
"Unnie," she says. "If his birthday were hypothetically today, and we hypothetically had class together tomorrow morning… would it be weird if I brought him macarons?"
Sooyoung blinks at her. "You know that the way you ask that makes it sound like you've already made up your mind, right?"
"I—" Yerim sighs. "Okay, yeah."
She twists her hands together and stares down at them, long and hard. Sooyoung tuts at her and brings both of her arms up to fold in front of her, commanding Yerim's attention again.
"Yerim-ah." Her smile is gentle and playful. "Do you want unnie to buy you the new gelato on the dessert menu?"
Yerim didn't spend an entire breakup sobbing her way through stolen Haagen-Dazs to turn down free ice cream. In times of distress, it's the most fool-proof way to cheer her up, and Sooyoung is intimately aware of this fact. In fact, it's one she exploits to her advantage whenever she catches Yerim moping by her side.
"No one knows my heart the way you do," she announces later, muffled around a spoonful of cold pistachio.
Sooyoung pats her on the shoulder.
"There, there," she says.
After another round of gelato therapy with Sooyoung and a trip to a nearby bakery, Yerim walks into their third-floor French classroom the next day in high spirits.
Two weeks ago their TA had asked them to change seats and try working with new partners, but Yerim and Hongseok had miraculously ended up together again, this time in the back of class. She quietly slinks into her seat and heaves a sigh of relief at the classroom's relative emptiness. She isn't that close to anyone here, but she's still terrified of being witnessed in the act by whichever few lingering strangers, so she removes the package from her backpack as surreptitiously as possible.
When Hongseok walks in a few minutes later, he blinks at her occupied seat.
"You're early," he remarks in surprise.
"Haha, um," Yerim tries. Then she gives up on a proper segue and quickly thrusts the package she'd been holding onto in his direction, clearing her throat. "Happy—happy late birthday?"
"Oh," Hongseok breathes out. He grabs the plastic container and then settles down next to her, smile big and wide and sincere. Yerim stares at his arms and tries to not be viscerally reminded that Yang Hongseok does, in fact, go to the gym four times a week.
"Thank you, Yerim-ah," he says, nudging her just like he did their first day of class—the first time she'd stared at his baby face and big dark eyes, the first time she'd had to convince herself, just a little bit, to look away.
"I thought I was your noona now?" she blurts out.
God. Her filter is just about nonexistent around this man. She winces and considers whether it's socially frowned-upon to slap herself in public, but to her relief Hongseok just bursts out laughing. He shakes his head and pouts at her.
"I can't help my youthful looks, you know?"
"Hmm." Yerim pages through her textbook just to give her hands something to do. "Could you be any less humble?"
"Actually, I really could," Hongseok informs her. Yerim scoffs and turns away.
When the TA finally walks through the door and starts fiddling with the HDMI cables at the front of the classroom, Hongseok leans into her again.
"Hey. Want to get lunch later?" he asks, voice loud and bright by her ear. Yerim flits her eyes toward him with her brows raised up, her signature Inquisitive Look.
"I'll treat you," he tells her, and—
Oh.
Their TA asks them to turn to page 84. Yerim feels along the paper edge of her textbook and ends up on 87, the slightest overshoot. She shuffles the pages back and then looks up at Hongseok again, who sits with an elbow resting on his desk and his body angled in her direction, waiting patiently for her answer.
"Okay," she whispers back.
The most interesting lecture in the world wouldn't be enough to regain her attention for the rest of class. To make matters worse, today's topic—imperfect conjugation, as she reads with a frown—is quite literally at the bottom of her hypothetical interests list.
Yerim's next fifty minutes crawl by at a snail's space.
yerim
ㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜ
sooyoung-unnie
what is it
did he not like them?
do i have to go beat up yang hongseok????
yerim
unnie noooo
just
he took me to lunch and
yerim
i think
i
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
ㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜ
sooyoung-unnie
oh honey.....
you'll be okay
you know that, right?
ㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜ
sooyoung-unnie
what is it
did he not like them?
do i have to go beat up yang hongseok????
yerim
unnie noooo
just
he took me to lunch and
yerim
i think
i
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
ㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜ
sooyoung-unnie
oh honey.....
you'll be okay
you know that, right?
As it is, Yerim can't be so sure.
The thing is that:
A few months ago, you'll be okay were the words Sooyoung had told her back in Taeseob's apartment, when Yerim had been heartbroken and wallowing in her own self-pity, lying on his couch as he stroked through her hair with gentle hands.
Months and months ago, Yerim was only twenty years old. She'd cried herself into a migraine in an unfamiliar train station and clung to her skirt as she tried to fight back her hiccups, feeling pathetic and too softhearted, wondering why it was so easy to break her heart in half.
Of course, Yerim isn't twenty anymore. During her first year of university she realized that her life was starting all over again, and she took three buses to and from school every single day, out of the house at 6AM on early-lecture mornings. Saeron was in her last year of high school and held larger aspirations than Yerim ever did. She studied obsessively and was planning on applying to SNU early admission, and she didn't have time for their afternoon dates anymore, and Yerim spent too many nights reading their messages over and over again, terrified of distracting her from yaja and practice exams. Worse: terrified of being ignored. Terrified of not even qualifying as a distraction.
Saeron spent her last summer as a high schooler on a special 3-week academic program at the University of Tokyo, the kind of arrangement only people who are going places in life know about. Yerim, lonely and listless, had arranged to visit her for a few days. She still remembers begging her parents to help fund the trip fare, how she'd been crazed and insistent then, scrolling through the cheapest flights and hostel listings she could find. A part of Yerim should have already known that she was losing her, that they were only dragging out the inevitable. But it wasn't until later—with the time and the distance, the moments alone that she would finally allow herself—that Yerim really, truly saw it. Through clearer eyes, across calmer waters.
The thing is that:
It took Yerim an entire year to get her heart broken, and then another eight months to face a simple, glaring truth. It took two steady hands and a stronger conscience to lift this veil. This—the opaque fabric fluttering in the wind, eclipsing the impossibilities of their relationship. The way their connection had been stretched bare and thin, taffy just waiting to snap.
The thing is that:
Yerim isn't stupid, really.
A part of her knows why she was drawn to Hongseok in the first place. How, on almost every level, he'd been what Saeron would never be. The Hongseok Yerim knows at twenty-one is older and laid-back, dark-eyed, handsome. He has long bangs and doesn't care about academics the way Saeron did, and his social circle is small, restricted to tiny gatherings in his studio apartment. He barely knows how to use Instagram and his proudest achievement is his embarrassing PC setup she doesn't really care to know more about.
The thing is that:
Saeron was never perfect, and Hongseok isn't either. Yerim believes in love, but. She believes in a kind of love that's malleable, self-determined. Yerim believes in the soulmate that is deliberately constructed. She understands that Saeron was right person, right place, right time—just, wrong course of events.
When Sooyoung had stared at her pityingly, whispered Yerim-ah with all of her boundless kindness and open-faced care, Yerim understood exactly what she meant. The way Sooyoung looked out for her would always be the same. Even if they couldn't understand, Yerim knew her friends had only ever meant well.
A first love is meant to be a sounding board, after all. Something you leap off of to brighter pursuits and bolder advances. Finally a year older, finally ready to take on the world.
For Yerim, though, her first love was transformative and blinding. Saeron was hers—and she was Saeron's—and Saeron was—they were. Yerim felt, in every sense of the word, bold and committed. Hongseok was nothing like Saeron was, and even with these long eight months Yerim must have looked so foolish and reckless to everyone she knew, a girl who barely knew her own heart.
The thing is that:
A part of Yerim wants to press play on her life again. Sometimes she imagines scrubbing past all of this in fast-forward motion, every painful conversation she's ever had since the breakup cut jagged and abrupt through the TV static, rewritten in memory. In another world she'd be able to forget how lonely she'd been all this time, a loneliness she'd never let her friends truly understand.
But, still.
It feels like the remote is jammed. Defunct—
She can't get her heart broken if she never gives it a chance, after all.
—the wires snipped and ripped out, sparking at the ends.
Yerim doesn't know.
Yerim doesn't know how.
kim yerim
why do relationships have to be so complicated
kim doyeon
tell me about it :(
kim yerim
???
kim doyeon. do i need to remind you that you've been in a committed relationship since your 1st year of high school?
that you and yoojung are together literally every single day??
kim doyeon
yeah but our schedules aren't the same anymore ㅠㅠ
we used to get lunch and dinner together but now we only have time for lunch
kim yerim
you…….
you were both posting tiktoks of the two of you kissing while i was going crazy texting you to meet up at the library to study!
yesterday. 24 hours ago!!!
i looked like a fool hogging all the chairs for you >_>
kim doyeon
ummm
haha
so do you want to talk about your boy problems?
kim yerim
yes plz ㅜ___ㅜ
[kim yerim is typing...]
why do relationships have to be so complicated
kim doyeon
tell me about it :(
kim yerim
???
kim doyeon. do i need to remind you that you've been in a committed relationship since your 1st year of high school?
that you and yoojung are together literally every single day??
kim doyeon
yeah but our schedules aren't the same anymore ㅠㅠ
we used to get lunch and dinner together but now we only have time for lunch
kim yerim
you…….
you were both posting tiktoks of the two of you kissing while i was going crazy texting you to meet up at the library to study!
yesterday. 24 hours ago!!!
i looked like a fool hogging all the chairs for you >_>
kim doyeon
ummm
haha
so do you want to talk about your boy problems?
kim yerim
[kim yerim is typing...]
"Why did you wear heels to a festival concert?"
"I'm stupid," Yoojung is saying as she clings to Doyeon's middle. "I'm stupid and a fool and now my feet hurt!" Yerim rolls her eyes when Yoojung pouts at Doyeon and goes to kiss her neck, begging, "Carry me?"
A tale as old as drunken time. Yerim has only seen this exact scene unfold about, oh. One hundred times.
Yerim's favorite part of the year always comes this time in May, in the form of her school's three-day festival. By that, she specifically means the part where the organizers manage to book a trendy girl group for the big concert event, and afterward she and her major friends go out drinking in a large group, obsessively singing one of the performance songs that follow a variation of dun dun dun boy I love you wooh wooh wow! for the entire night.
The club booths are fun too, of course. But last year she'd convinced Saeron to stop studying for an afternoon just to go with her, and now the memory is a little bit depressing. They'd held hands past all the food stands, sharing tornado potatoes dusted in onion powder and slipping into random abandoned corners to steal open-mouthed kisses together, and for those few hours everything had felt right again.
Tonight Yerim is single and lonely and confused. She gets very drunk, tries to hit on a straight girl, and then finds herself at the edge of the table arguing with some stupid first-year named Choi Soobin for an entire hour—strictly in that order.
Of course, this all happens because Yerim is lovesick and terrible at handling her alcohol, which means she's already operating at 50% capacity an hour into their outing, inhibitions severely lowered. And, well. Is she really to blame for flirting with the second-hottest woman she's ever met? Is she? Wouldn't anyone, boosted on enough liquid courage?
Choi Yewon is wearing a cropped fuzzy top with thin straps and has her wavy hair thrown haphazardly to one side. The slope of her bare shoulder is so hot Yerim nearly drools into her makgeolli.
Unfortunately, Choi Yewon is also painfully straight, so she decides to let Yerim down by grabbing someone sitting next to her and generously offering an effusive introduction to the hapless boy who is, apparently, "just like her." The boy turns out to be first-year Choi Soobin, who is definitely not like her at all; Yerim quickly realizes that Yewon had just meant the enjoys kissing people of the same gender thing when she'd said this. Ten minutes later she and Soobin are engaged in a disastrous conversation on the respective virtuosities of Ariana Grande and Bebe Rexha, and it's turned heated to the point of near-physical altercation.
"You're terrible," she announces. "You're terrible and your opinions are horrible and I hate you."
Soobin is also very drunk, so he doesn't take this to heart. Finally he concedes that any song off Sweetener is better than Baby, I'm Jealous, so Yerim figures he'll do. When she realizes that she's officially veering into nausea territory, they exchange contact information and go outside to breathe in some fresh air, where they are immediately hit with the fumes of noisy smokers instead. Yerim plops down on the steps with a slight stagger.
"Wh—who are you calling?" Soobin slurs into her shoulder. Yerim doesn't have the energy to maneuver a man this unnecessarily large around, so she lets his head thud dully against her.
"No one," Yerim replies, and then Hongseok is picking up.
It takes him approximately twelve whole seconds to catch on to her situation.
"Yerim-ah," he laughs. "Are you drunk?"
Yerim makes a garbled noise that moonlights as a yes. Couldn't he see—well, hear—that she wasn't in the right mind to entertain his line of questioning at the moment?
"'m really drunk. And makgeolli is evil. And now I'm sitting outside with some random guy." She looks down and realizes that Soobin is currently fast asleep, which is actually an incredibly validating sight. She'd grown up all her life hearing that her shoulders were far too bony and uncomfortable to lean on, and how was she supposed to control the way they jutted out?
Anyway.
"Do you need someone to come get you?" Hongseok asks.
Yerim hums and squints ahead of her. Cars roar by on the nearby stretch of parallel road. One of the smokers by the bar entrance throws down his cigarette and stamps it out with the toe of his boot, and she watches him walk away with open-mouthed disgust.
"No," she finally manages. "No, I'm okay. Sooyoung-unnie is picking me up soon."
"Okay," he says. "Good. Should I hang up, then?"
"No!" she repeats, more frantically this time. "Um, don't go. Can you just—could you just talk to me, while I wait for her?"
There's a pause. Then Hongseok is chuckling through the phone again, and he goes, "Okay. What about?"
"Mm. Oppa," she begins plaintively. "I'm bored. Sing me a song?"
"Like what?"
"I dunno. Any song." She thinks of the dun dun dun song from earlier, the idol girls in their multi-colored skirts. "A girl group song!"
"You've come to the right person," he announces proudly. He immediately launches into a noisy cover, and Yerim laughs at his show, reveling in the charming tone of his voice. It's nice even through the distinct lack of training; Yerim can't sing either, so she's really in no place to comment.
"I know all of their point dances," Hongseok whispers through the phone. "It's my hidden skill."
At that, Yerim gasps. Hongseok dancing? No mental image has ever been more distinctly appealing to her makgeolli-addled brain, and she scrambles to turn on her video camera.
"Show me!" Yerim demands.
"I'm in bed," he laughs, but he turns on his camera anyway. His face looks kind of smushed up from this angle, and it's horrifying to Yerim that she couldn't care less, finding him cute-hot all the same.
Soobin chooses that moment to wake beside her, glancing instinctively at her phone screen, where the screen light glares harshly into the surrounding night.
"Oh. Hi, Hongseok-hyung!"
Hongseok goes, "Soobin?" at the same time Yerim blinks and asks, "You two know each other?"
"My boyfriend is in dance club," Soobin says by way of explanation.
Yerim has never met anyone more adept at creating new questions with every answer.
"You have a boyfriend?" she asks critically. This dweeby first-year? she thinks. Yerim imagines spending more than five minutes with him sober and immediately feels her headache worsen. Turning to Hongseok, she goes, "Wait. Are you in dance club?"
"Definitely not," Hongseok laughs.
Soobin shifts around on her shoulder and blinks at Hongseok sleepily. "Hyunggu-hyung is," he continues. He lifts his head just slightly, movement slow and heavy. "Hey, are you two still—"
"Ah," Hongseok interrupts. He looks uncharacteristically nervous, as if he doesn't trust whatever Soobin might share in his shameless moment of inebriety. "Hey, Soobin-ah, you look really flushed. Shouldn't you go get some water?"
"'m fine," Soobin mumbles near-inaudibly. Train of thought successfully averted, Yerim realizes. If she were any more sober she'd know how to bring this up. But she doesn't, so she lets it go with narrowed eyes. "Yerim-noona got me some earlier."
"Yah!" she says. Yerim-noona? Yerim gears up to berate him for thinking them already at this level—because really, where's the respect? What was happening to their youth?—but, ugh. Did his eyes have to be so imploringly huge?
She sighs. "Fine."
"I'm glad you two are getting along so well," Hongseok teases. Yerim sticks her tongue out at him, and then giggles to herself when he sticks his back. He's still wearing his stupid chick pajamas and lying back against his bed's headboard, right underneath the only window in his entire apartment. Through the pixelated video screen, she thinks his hair looks slightly damp, tousled messily around his head.
It's a horribly, uncomplicatedly domestic sight. Vulnerable in its simplicity, preserved in the quiet that unfurls between them. Hongseok with his face just-washed, his cheeks the slightest bit pink, teeth pulling at his bottom lip.
Without warning, a pang blooms in Yerim's chest. The pain seizes at her heart. Squeezes, and squeezes, and squeezes.
"Oppa," she starts. "Do you—"
Most people already know this, but: Kim Saeron was Yerim's first everything.
Saeron was her first kiss. Not her first technical kiss, because of that one time at a middle school trip when she'd been dared to kiss Kang Hyunwoo from class 1-4 on the cheek after the talent show. She still remembers shrieking and running away—furiously rubbing at her mouth with the back of her hand—after she accidentally brushed past his lips.
But Saeron was Yerim's first real kiss. She was Yerim's first midnight date through the streets of Hongdae, her first impassioned makeout session in a purple-tinted noraebang corner. Four fumbling hands forgetting the deafening K-pop instrumental booming around them, two girls lost to the world. A week after Yerim graduated high school, Saeron took her to her bedroom while her family was out and stuck a hand down Yerim's pants, and a part of her honestly thought she was going to die right then and there.
Everything is so much more complicated after high school.
I want to make this work, Yerim remembers telling her over the phone, desperate. She remembers Saeron whispering it back, that sullen me too into the dark stillness. It'd been a hushed confession: a secret too fragmented, warped in its own shape, to maintain any meaning.
For some reason, they never did.
Yerim realized it too late: how maybe they had never really meant it.
You know how the rest goes.
On the phone, Hongseok is asking: "Yeah, Yerim-ah?"
The night air is cool around her now, and Yerim wills herself to not shiver so much in her skirt and short-sleeved shirt. Yerim has always been the kind of person who believed that something like that could be controlled. That coldness could be overcome with simple determination, and that if she just gritted her teeth hard enough, her body would eventually get the memo and roll with it.
Sooyoung is a block away, per the notification that had just rolled down her video screen. Yerim knows that a few minutes later they'll be locked arm-in-arm, and Sooyoung will support her all the way down the subway steps and onto the train platform, Yerim wrapped tightly around her in front of the large security panels.
Hongseok shifts around her screen. His voice is warm, sticky-sweet. Like honey.
She takes a breath. She's still shivering uselessly, her shoulders pressed tightly together.
"Oppa. Do you want to go with me to the festival tomorrow?"
Between their first study date in April and the yearly festival held mid-May—a full month of getting to know Yang Hongseok and his various shades, his wide grins and strangely infectious energy—Yerim goes back to his apartment three more times.
The third time, Yerim remembers lying there and chatting away for hours. Head rested against the carpet (It's fine, Hongseok always said. I vacuum very aggressively.), a tiny, reckless, genius part of her had decided to bring up Saeron.
So: Hongseok knows. He knows how Yerim was stupidly in love with the girl of her dreams, how she got her heart broken on a warm night in July. After she tells him all of this, he leans back quietly and regales her with tales of his own disastrous high school relationships, the people he'd once let go.
"I used to be kind of angsty," Hongseok confesses later. "Especially when I lived abroad."
Yerim huffs a laugh. She sits up and hums as she glances around his room. "I can see it. Your place is kind of dark."
"What? No, look. It's 'ambient'!"
"Sure," she teases. She gestures at his black desk and rainbow-light keyboard, the gaming chair taking up half of his study space. "Oppa, every moody teenage boy in South Korea has a room like this."
Hongseok rolls his eyes with a light smile. Yerim only catches it because she'd turned to look at him in that exact moment, forever drawn to his expressiveness, the ways in which he reacts to her. She tears her eyes away, suddenly embarrassed.
"How did you stop, though?" she asks. "I mean, you're not like that anymore."
Hongseok hums.
"Well," he says. "You have to grow up eventually."
"True."
"And—at some point I realized it was easier to just be happy, I guess. It was exhausting to be so angry at everything, all the time. I used to care so much, but about all the wrong things. It got so bad it started to eat away at me."
"Ah. It's kind of the opposite for me," Yerim admits.
It's something she remembers talking about with Jiwoo once. Every time she'd smiled and told Saeron it was fine when she canceled on another date, every time she'd put her head down and let someone tell her, in certain and authoritative words, how she was supposed to feel about something. Yerim had tried so hard to see past the cracks in the foundation, glossing over everything with a practiced smoothness, a master of acommodation, that she didn't even know how to be angry about it all until it was too late. The impulse to be constantly smiling had been too ingrained to stamp out, stuck to her like sticky tape, only work and heartbreak capable of pulling her along. She was on the cusp of twenty-one when the bandaid finally ripped off.
"Anger is good, I think," she tells him. "In the right contexts."
Hongseok nods. He's always deathly quiet when he considers something like this, mapping out the possibilities in his head, weighing her words carefully.
"Everything in moderation," he says.
The next day—the day of reckoning, the ultimate karmic mockery of the tragicomedy Yerim calls her life—disaster finally strikes.
Yerim and Hongseok meet up at the entrance of the endless festival street. The first hour or so is perfect—exactly as Yerim had envisioned. She wishes she were brave enough to hold his hand, but she doesn't. Hongseok wears an oversized sweater that does approximately nothing to hide his larger frame, and she pulls him along giddily by the edge of his sleeve, stopping them in uneven intervals at random club booths and food stalls.
They run briefly into Choi Soobin, who is busy blatantly flirting with a considerably shorter man by the dance club booth, a man Yerim presumes to be his boyfriend. The boyfriend has shaggy brown hair and an absurdly long neck, and absolutely neither of them is paying attention to the small line slowly forming behind them.
Ridiculous, Yerim scoffs to herself. The dance club will have no choice but to blame this self-important first-year when they come up short on their yearly budget, she decides. She pushes past the slight crowd and waits for Hongseok to follow along, opening her mouth to comment on the unprofessional absurdity of it all.
Of course, this is when it happens.
This is when, between two long rows of club booths, standing next to her crush in her sunflower-print sundress and beat-up sneakers, long hair tied back in a low ponytail, Yerim sees them walking toward her.
Them, as in…
Well, as in Saeron and Suhyun. Saeron—her ex. Suhyun, whom she'd relinquished custody of during the divorce. Walking with them is another girl Yerim has never met before, and her throat goes parchment dry when she trails her eyes down and realizes that she and Saeron are holding hands, arms swinging together in even motion.
This was the only thing they've ever bested Seouldae at. Yerim's boring, unprestigious university and its incredibly unevenly-allocated student budget, their stupid little festivals. As it turned out, even this couldn't be sacred. Suddenly Yerim understands how Sooyoung feels whenever she invokes Wonwoo’s wretched name in their chat.
"Yerim?" Hongseok says, and Yerim starts. She realizes that her eyes are still fixed on those two hands, clasped together in a vaguely unplatonic fashion.
Then she makes the fatal mistake of looking up.
Because the moment her eyes travel away from the girl, so do Saeron's. First there's the flicker of recognition. Then, a beat later, a double take. When Saeron's head angles conspicuously to the side, Yerim realizes that she must be looking at Hongseok, focused on the way Yerim's hand had instinctively gone to cling at his sleeve again.
"Oppa," she warns under her breath. Like a prey animal shocked to stillness, silently burrowing away and waiting to be passed over. No sudden movements lest she be uncovered.
"What's wron—" Hongseok begins to say. Yerim doesn't let him finish his sentence.
In one swift motion, she grabs at his hand and drags them away.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
What do you do when you see your ex and her new girlfriend at your university festival, by the booths you'd once taken her to, the last place you'd thought you'd ever see her again?
No, don't answer that.
But what do you do when your crush is standing next to you right in this terribly-lit alleyway by an empty booth stall, one of those little nooks and crannies you'd spent an afternoon scanning for with your girlfriend a year before, wanting to kiss him so badly it scares you?
"Hey. What's wrong?" Hongseok asks again. He's hunched over in the shadows, within easy grabbing distance. His mouth is perfect and inviting, lips parted ever so slightly in question.
It's May, so the heat is starting to take shape again, a warmth just beginning to build. Her cheeks feel flushed and red-hot. If she didn't know better, she'd think she were having a heatstroke in perfectly mild 18-degree weather.
But really.
What do you do?
Because it's probably not what Yerim does next, in a show of non-existent heatstroke folly. It's probably not the way she tugs at his sweatshirt's fabric and pulls him in close, pulling herself up on her tippytoes. It's probably not the way she presses his mouth against his, a long, meaningful press, something with too little finesse but still too much care, the very worst way a kiss can be shared.
It's probably not the way Hongseok leans back up with wide eyes, or the way Yerim slaps a hand to her mouth, immediately awash with a wave of horror, the dread dropping like a stone in her stomach.
"Oh my god," she blurts out, already backing up. "Oh my god, oppa. I'm so sorry. I have to go, I'm sorry."
When Hongseok calls out for her, it's already too late.
"Yerim, wait—" he tries anyway, like a fool. Yerim is faster than him, of course, and she thanks her practical side for having put on those sneakers earlier today, the worn-in soles taking mercy on her as she rushes down the cobblestone and away from the crowd, feet busy tapping away.
She hears Hongseok behind her. She hears her name on his tongue, the way he shouts Yerim-ah, knowing a part of her wants desperately to turn back. But she also thinks she sees Saeron somewhere in the crowd, her eternally beautiful silhouette, the silky black hair she always wears all the way down her back.
Yerim feels trapped, boxed in.
A trapped girl's first instinct can only be escape.
The thing is, Yerim is unbelievably stupid.
"What's wrong?" her sister asks when she gets home. The familiar question spoken in its childlike innocence takes her so off-guard that she laughs in disbelief as she scoops her sister up in her arms, fingers gently tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Don't worry about it, baby," she coos. Yerim brings her to her bed and sets her down gently, arms wrapped around her tiny frame. "Unnie is going to be okay."
The thing is, Yerim is still a fucking liar.
saeron
hey
can we talk?
yang hongseok
is everything okay?
hey
can we talk?
yang hongseok
is everything okay?
Honestly: if Yerim were okay, would she be lying here wasting away, slowing trying to fade into thin air? Of course not. Yerim doesn't want to talk; she wants to disappear for a long, long time. She wants to pack up her bags and run away and never speak to anyone again.
Well, except for her sisters. And maybe her mom.
Yerim spends five minutes restlessly pulling down on her notification bar, reading and rereading the message previews. She can't click on them lest they see the number by their messages disappear, an incriminating acknowledgement of all the questions she isn't ready to answer yet.
Yerim whines and swipes open her phone. She'd avoided going onto the Forbidden Instagram Page for so long, but now a part of her knows, more than ever, that she needs to see. She needs to know for herself, for her own pitiful sake.
Saeron's account is still the top result when she types sae into the search bar. She scrolls to her feed and finds the girl Saeron had been holding hands with before with just one cursory glance. It's the middle post in the second row. Filtered candids of each other sitting in a café together, the girl's head angled toward the window.
Yerim feels a punch to her gut. She recognizes the décor from high school, another thing she'd given up with a new school and the newfound distance. Back then Saeron would take her hand and say, Unnie, you're the only person I post individual shots of on my feed, as if it were a secret, and Yerim would just laugh and reply, Yeah, that's why everyone knows we're dating.
The new girl is tagged, of course. Her bio says SNU 19 @snu.official with a horrific amount of sparkle emojis in the next line, and all her photos are low-angled shots of her wearing long jeans and short shirts. Yerim is almost affronted. Hot and embarrassing? Those were supposed to be her representative qualities!
But the part of her that is her full twenty-one years, the part that can act just a little bit more adult, feels a certain peacefulness wash over her. It makes instinctive sense, of course, that Saeron would move on. Saeron had moved on in the same way Yerim did, and now Saeon has a new girlfriend, and the world can turn on its axis again. Yerim isn't crazy for her affections. She isn't foolish for loving another person, the guy from her useless French class, the boy who'd bought her food all the times she wanted it, the man who knew her in a way Saeron hadn't, not better or worse or more or less. Just new.
Is she?
Isn't she?
Is she?
"The distance was too hard," Yerim remembers telling Hongseok once, back in his apartment. The breakup hadn't only been about that, of course. But that notion of letting Saeron slip through her fingers, that unbearable notion of letting go: it had still been some unconscionable part of it.
Yerim has always been like that. Possessive, but only in ways that could never serve her.
"You're very needy," Hongseok remarked then, in a matter-of-fact voice. When Yerim punched him in the arm, he whined and rolled over, rubbing at the sore spot petulantly. "Where the hell are you packing these punches in your tiny body?"
"Tiny?" she challenged primly.
"What? Are you not?"
"I'm a very healthy 160." After a disbelieving snort: "Well. Give or take a few centimeters."
"I'm glad you can be honest with yourself," he said.
"Oppa, please stop looking so smug. Being tall to a short girl is not a feat."
More than anything, Yerim remembers loving the way he laughed then: the sound bright and clear, like fruit ade.
Yerim's Hongseok was easy with his laughter and affection, easy with his care. He ruffled her hair in the restaurant booth whenever he treated her out to lunch, let her ramble on and on about her classes, her assignments, the way her friends were driving her crazy. He was proudly his twenty-six. Someone mature and honest, steady. But there was also a childlike fascination to him, the qualities of his character simple and earnest. Whenever Yerim felt exhausted or low, Hongseok danced in a purely embarrassing fashion to cheer her up, and every single one of his shameless antics was stripped bare of any sense of sobriety or prudence.
choi soobin
ummm
noona???
hyunggu-hyung said he wanted to talk to you
kim yerim
hm??
he told you that?
choi soobin
uh, through my boyfriend
dance club hahaha
it's about hongseok-hyung?
[kim yerim is typing…]
[kim yerim is typing…]
[kim yerim is typing…]
kim yerim
okay
where?
ummm
noona???
hyunggu-hyung said he wanted to talk to you
kim yerim
hm??
he told you that?
choi soobin
uh, through my boyfriend
dance club hahaha
it's about hongseok-hyung?
[kim yerim is typing…]
[kim yerim is typing…]
[kim yerim is typing…]
kim yerim
okay
where?
The first thing Hyunggu asks when Yerim pulls open the door to his dance club's studio is: "So. What did Hongseok do this time?"
Yerim momentarily startles at his proximity. Behind him Soobin shuffles out of the practice room, walking side-by-side with his boyfriend, and he smiles at her for a sheepish moment before turning down the length of the hallway, offering her a final small, subtle waving motion. Yerim is suddenly filled with a sense of belated unease at the conversation she's just been pulled into.
She takes a second to put appropriate distance between her and Hyunggu, letting her mind process his question. Soobin, the traitor, is long gone.
"'Hongseok?'" she questions eventually. "Isn't he four years older than you?"
Hyunggu waves a dismissive hand. "We have a casual relationship. But also—don't tell him."
"Sure," she says, aware that she won't care or remember this in thirty seconds. "But what do you mean by—uh. Why would oppa have done something?"
Hyunggu sighs, putting his hands on his hips.
"He's all mopey," he announces. "And most things in his life are categorically his fault, so..."
Oh, god.
If Yerim didn't already feel like a terrible person incapable of handling the slightest conflict in her life, this would certainly do the trick. Hongseok is mopey because of her, the unopened message burning a hole into her jean pocket. To make matters worse, her cryptid high school sunbae who has an apparent-yet-inconceivable relationship with her crush is now standing in front of her and accusing him of unsavory acts, assigning him undeserved culpability.
"He didn't do anything," Yerim says. "It's really only my fault. I'm the one who kissed him."
"You did?" Hyungguk asks. She nods in confirmation, and his brows furrow. "Okay. Then what's the problem?"
What's the problem?
"Too much," Yerim tells him petulantly, even though a part of her knows this isn't actually true. The problem is only her overactive brain. Her fragile heart unwilling to let go, the pieces of her too scared to mend, a structure weakened by its collective ability to love again. "I kissed him, and then I ran away. And now I'm ignoring his messages because I'm not actually okay, and I just—I really—there's just a lot going on!"
"Damn," Hyunggu says.
Yerim can't believe she's just spilled her guts out to this man, but it had felt weirdly therapeutic once she got started. Hyunggu offers her a slight smile, his front teeth blindingly white, almost to the point of complete obscurement. Yerim is a people's person, and yet she's never met someone more impossible to read.
"You really like him, huh?" he asks.
She sighs. There's no point beating around the bush, no merit in pretending that Hongseok is anything less than he is to her.
"Yeah," she says. "I mean, I think I do. He's only ever been nice and he takes good care of me. And I've liked him all this time, even if I didn't really know."
"Then you should tell him that!"
"But I messed up," Yerim whines, burying her face in her hands. When she looks up Hyunggu is watching her and looking as unreadable as always. "I look so stupid now."
Hyunggu tuts and crosses his arms together. "No, Yerim, seriously. You're fine. No offense, but hyung is kind of…" He tilts his head and makes an ehhh noise. "Well. Hyung is kind of easy, you know? So don't worry about all of that."
"Easy?" She blinks, thinking back to Jiwoo's old messages and Soobin's strange implications those few nights before, everything suddenly slotting into place. "Were you guys actually together, or—"
"Oh, god no," Hyunggu rushes out. He throws his head back with a cackle, as if this is the funniest thing anyone could have ever asked him. It feels like an affront to Yerim's taste, but she says nothing. "Hyung isn't my type, don't worry. We did hook up a few times—"
Eh?
"—but that was only because my boyfriend—ex at the time, haha—thought he had a new boyfriend, and I was waiting for him to get over it, and it was kind of this whole thing. But that was a while ago! We've never been together. I mean, hyung is kind of a loser, isn't he?"
Yerim has no idea what he wants her to say. Hyunggu seems to run his words through his head again, because his eyes widen several beats too late. "Of course, you know, not that… that doesn't mean that—ah. Nevermind. That was on me. Your taste is fine!"
She's torn between defending Hongseok's merits as potential boyfriend material to yet another non-believer or just rolling over, acknowledging the whirlwind of Kang Hyunggu's interpersonal exploits instead. In the end, knowing a lost fight when she sees it, Yerim settles on the later.
"I'm kind of scared of you," she tells him. "Did you and your boyfriend figure it out, at least?"
"Yup," Hyunggu says through a smirk. "And you can too, Yerim-ah!"
Maybe, she thinks. She feels strangely worse and better at the same time. If she hadn't gotten dumped outside of Tokyo Disneyland a year before, she would be shocked to learn that a simple conversation could be so emotionally and physically taxing, putting her entire brain and body through the ringer.
Hyunggu pats at her shoulder and motions her out of the practice room. "Go get your man," he tells her plainly, gesturing ambiguously in front of them. Yerim looks down at the empty hallway, at the row of lockers outside the studio. The overhead lights flicker imperceptibly in staccato pattern, a man-made falter.
"Um." She turns around. Hyunggu gives her an encouraging thumbs up, mouth pressed into that same unsettling grin. "Okay. Thanks?"
choi soobin
did everything go okay?? :D
kim yerim
you are so annoying
but yeah
i'm figuring it out
choi soobin
ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
noona fighting!!!
did everything go okay?? :D
kim yerim
you are so annoying
but yeah
i'm figuring it out
choi soobin
ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
noona fighting!!!
Maybe Choi Soobin was okay.
Like, 30% of the time. Yerim pockets her phone and picks up her pace to the bus stop.
It's 6PM when Yerim finally sits down at her desk and contemplates it: the Perfect Confession.
She first considers a symbolic gesture, something that would appeal to their origins. An origin was inherently romantic, after all, right? The first place she ever saw Hongseok, the first place she'd felt her heart hammering out of her chest looking at his pretty mouth and broad shoulders, wanting so recklessly to kiss him. Right? She takes out her pen and writes out Je t'aimes on her lined paper in the prettiest script she can manage, spending a few seconds simply admiring her penmanship, the letters' sloping curves and varied weight, a testament to her sincerity.
She squints at it again.
Wait. Was there supposed to be that s there?
"Fuck," she mutters, striking through the offending letter. Now it just looks stupid with the ink smeared at the end, so she crumples the paper up with a sigh and throws it into the bin under her desk, thudding silently against the metal ring and sinking to the bottom.
Maybe she should go for more simple, then. Direct and honest, her heart poured out sans abandon?
Yerim writes hunched over, in huge cramped letters over the ink lines. Her horrible, hopeless brain spills out onto paper, soaking it all the way through.
I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU. she reads. GO OUT WITH ME!
Yerim circles the second part once, twice, three whole times for good measure, and then immediately comes back to reality.
What am I doing, she despairs in her head. In the next moment she thinks of Hyunggu at the practice room, saying the word easy with his casual slouch, his strangely piercing gaze. Hongseok's message still burns away in her pocket. She knows that this will only ever be an exercise in delaying the inevitable, trying to work her feelings out without an audience, a controlled spectacle.
The problem is that there is really only one person who needs to hear all of this, and it isn't her yellow notebook paper, the printed script at the very top that says TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DAY! in tiny, cutesy letters.
Yerim ducks under her desk and stares at the paper crumpled in the bin. She sighs, long and slow. Then she unlocks her phone, pulls up Naver Map, and searches up the nearest GS25 to campus.
Yerim has always been working toward this epiphany:
At twenty-one, she wants to be ready for heartbreak again. She wants to be the girl who can confess to another person with confidence. She wants to be comfortable enough around someone to lie in their arms bare-faced, wearing old, raggedy sweatpants, casually curled around their sheets. She wants to have all her anger and fear back, all the emotive complications that are capable of coexisting in moderation, in context. She wants another chance.
She wants—she wants—
She wants.
Yang Hongseok is wearing a standard blue GS25 vest and sitting at the check-out counter when Yerim walks through the double doors. He's scrolling through his phone with his eyes fixed downward, which means he doesn't see her slip through the store aisles after she enters, effectively blocking her view of the counter.
It's now or never, she thinks. She scans the snacks in front of her and reaches forward, plucking a box of Whiteheim wafers off the shelf, remembering how Hongseok had once told her he liked them in French class.
Yerim tucks the box under her arm and shuffles quietly out of the aisle. Only now does she finally let herself pull the fireball out of her pocket. It burns at her skin, but she lets it. Blisters bloom across the palm of her hand. The fire simmers out in vast waves of smoke, settling down like a difficult child, with a loud hiss and whimper. The 1 next to Hongseok's message fades into the ashes.
look in front of you, she sends, and then she watches the notification roll in real-time.
Hongseok looks up at the same moment she steps forward. Her phone is still in her hand when his eyes widen, when he goes, "Yerim-ah?" in one breathless whisper.
"Oppa," Yerim says, pressing herself against the edge of his counter. She sets down the Whiteheim box and gives him a slight, hopeful smile. "Just this, please."
Hongseok rubs at his eye and blinks at her. Once, twice, and then another time. He takes the box from her hands and rings it up, and when she hands him a 5,000 won bill he slips back 1,000 or so in coins. Their hands touch over the counter, his fingers brushing gently over her palms, her skin tingling with the touch.
"Oppa," she repeats. She pockets the coins and picks up the box again. "Actually, this is for you."
"Huh?"
"For you. The box—I—it's an apology gift."
Hongseok laughs disbelievingly. "Thank you," he says, setting it next to him. "Is that—will that be all?"
And, okay:
This time.
This time, really, it's now or never.
"I like you," she announces suddenly. "I like you so much, and none of my friends get it, because they think I'm all heartbroken and that I can't think for myself."
"You talk to your friends about me?" he asks, sounding faintly amused.
"I talked to Hyunggu-oppa. It was terrifying and confusing, so please never make me go through that again." Yerim knows that Hongseok is going to ask about why she was talking to Hyunggu in the first place if he opens his mouth, which they really don't have time for, because this isn't about Kang Hyunggu and she won't let it start now. So she takes hold of Hongseok's hand and barrels on, mouth moving a mile a minute. "Also, I want to go out with you! And I'm sorry I freaked out at the festival. And I really, really want to kiss you again."
"You—" Hongseok says. "You—want to? Oh my god, Yerim."
Yerim takes that for a positive exclamation when Hongseok brings a hand to her shoulder and pulls her in from across the counter, leaning down to slot his mouth against hers. The kiss is long and slow, warm and building. A promise of the future—their future. Yerim presses against him more insistently, deepening it. She revels in the way his hand flexes against her.
Hongseok tries to move closer and then moves back in a flurry, unceremoniously breaking them apart in the process.
"Ow, ow," he whimpers. "Sorry, my hips were just—really digging into the counter."
It's with that that Yerim realizes she's making out with her first boyfriend in an empty GS25, of all places, right at the check-out counter. A sense of mild shame and self-awareness floods her like a tank.
"So. Your place?"
Hongseok and Saeron are nothing alike, as a fact.
But when it's midterm season and Hongseok texts her at three in the morning to keep her awake, and when he sings to her in his stupid pinched voice whenever she gets drunk and feels prone to loneliness, and when he puts his arms around her and makes her feel horribly, all-encompassingly safe, a piece of her sees it all. In startling 4K, HD clarity.
Hongseok kisses her again the moment they get through his door, and she leans up as he licks into her mouth, the pressure near-bruising. His lips are full and soft, and it's just the right kind of touch, the press she'd always wanted. Eventually her neck starts to cramp from this angle, though, so she fists her hands into the fabric of his shirt and pushes him onto his bed. He falls down with a heavy oof, then brings two hands to hold at her waist as she settles herself easily in his lap.
"By the way," she asks, between languid kisses. "Who the hell is Hyunggu-oppa's boyfriend?"
The look Hongseok gives her is deeply unimpressed. "Really? That's what you're thinking of right now?"
"Well, it's kind of mysterious, right? I really wanted to know, but I didn't think it was a good idea to ask."
"Actually, I don't know either," Hongseok admits. "He doesn't tell us stuff like that, just all the messy and unsavory details. It's like he thinks sharing anything good about his relationships will make them fall apart."
"That... sounds like a terrible relationship model," Yerim says, even if a part of her almost gets it.
"Yup. Not everyone can be as functional and healthy and communicative as us, of course."
Yerim snorts, thinking about the entire ordeal of her past 48 hours. "Okay, relax. But sure."
"Thanks for coming today," he mumbles into her neck, soft and hushed, teeth teasing at the skin. She hums an affirmation and feels the warmth run all the way through her stomach, the heat nurturing, raw. Real.
yerim
talk about what?
saeron
everything that happened?
us?
yerim
it's been almost a year, saeron-ah
[saeron is typing…]
[saeron is typing…]
saeron
i know that, unnie
but for closure's sake?
[yerim is typing…]
yerim
okay
okay yeah
tell me about school?
talk about what?
saeron
everything that happened?
us?
yerim
it's been almost a year, saeron-ah
[saeron is typing…]
[saeron is typing…]
saeron
i know that, unnie
but for closure's sake?
[yerim is typing…]
yerim
okay
okay yeah
tell me about school?
"You know," Sooyoung starts pensively. They're sitting in their favorite fancy Italian place again, because after Yerim broke the Hongseok news to her Sooyoung had announced: Holy shit! Our Yerimie finally found love again? to an entire study room. Yerim had dragged her all the way out of the building with her face aflame, and now they were eating their carbonara pasta plates and taking selfies together, as they were wont to do. "Wonwoo has been messaging me a lot lately."
Yerim gasps. "Unnie, no. Did you forget the poetry?"
"It could just be a some this time!" she tries, following up with a short, perfunctory ha-ha. "You know me and my commitment issues, right?"
"Unnie. Seriously, the poetry." Yerim feels her frantic energy rising, arms waving around indignantly. "He wrote you an alternate ending to Romeo and Juliet for your twenty-third birthday! He tried to explain the hidden symbolism of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 to you!"
Sooyoung sighs. "You make him sound very unfavorable when you put it like that."
"Well," Yerim crosses her arms, pouting, "you called my boyfriend ugly."
"Ah. You know, I may be many things in life." She leans back and starts to count off her fingers. "Too hot for my own good. A woman with terrible taste. The best friend you've ever had. But what I am not, unfortunately, is a liar."
"God," Yerim scoffs. "You say that, but you're the one stuck with Mr. Romeo and Juliet."
"Yeah, yeah. So I'm guessing you don't need gelato tonight, then?"
"Wait a minute—"
yerimie 💘😡👼
oppa.
please tell wonwoo-sunbae to stop bothering sooyoung-unnie.
^^
seungkwan-oppa 🍊👻🙄
잉?????????????????
oppa.
please tell wonwoo-sunbae to stop bothering sooyoung-unnie.
^^
seungkwan-oppa 🍊👻🙄
잉?????????????????
no subject
Date: 2021-07-20 05:19 pm (UTC)everything was so good, college aus are fun tbh!!! love, love it!! ❤️❤️❤️
no subject
Date: 2021-07-24 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-20 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-24 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-21 03:57 am (UTC)Well, he's kind of ugly. But he's cute! LMFAOOOO he’s not The One if ur friend doesn’t say this about him first <333 also WHY ARE THE GIRLIES SO MEAN TO HONK!!! he's cute...... at least holland (kinda) has her back jfksdskl
the entire “the thing is that:” part T____T perfect and heart wrenching and hits so close to home. i love this sort of repeating stanza structure that you use in your writing so much!!! it’s simple yet soo effective and always makes me Feel so much. first loves are truly so deeply impactful and you wrote her mourning/reflecting/beginning to move on process so beautifully. i loved that her residual feelings about her and saeron's relationship was just as big a part of the story as her budding r/s with hongseok, and i love how they intersected and impacted each other.
of course always obsessed with the CAMEOS… dodaeng and arin and QSOOB!!! jfklsjsdlk actually why do i want to see yeri and soobin together now.. drunk “random guy” soobin relying on tiny yeri to support him is sooooooo cute wtf
Yerim has never met anyone more adept at creating new questions with every answer. LMFAOOOO THE CHOI SOOBIN WAY!!! i love you for this. also obsessed with how for some reason if we didn’t know soobin’s dance club bf was jichang you hit us with the “absurdly long neck” JUST TO CONFIRM!!
"I'm kind of scared of you," she tells him. WHY DID THIS MAKE ME LAUGH OUT LOUD..
Yerim's Hongseok was easy with his laughter and affection, easy with his care. He ruffled her hair in the restaurant booth whenever he treated her out to lunch, let her ramble on and on about her classes, her assignments, the way her friends were driving her crazy. He was proudly his twenty-six. Someone mature and honest, steady. But there was also a childlike fascination to him, the qualities of his character simple and earnest. Whenever Yerim felt exhausted or low, Hongseok danced in a purely embarrassing fashion to cheer her up, and every single one of his shameless antics were stripped bare of any sense of sobriety, prudence. SORRY TO QUOTE THIS WHOLE THING BUT LIKE T_____T you have me sold on them now!!!!! so fucking cuutteeeee
finally yeri planning out her confession + how it actually went down was PERFECT!!!! honestly yeri is one of my favorite characters to read in fic bc she's just so FUN and i really loved her voice thru this entire story <3
SO YEAHH UMMMMM HETFIC QUEEN?????!!!!! i loved this soooooo much and i'm gonna go search up yeri/hongseok content now T____T as always thank u for sharing ur wonderful writing with us!!! ily miss girlrock ^^
no subject
Date: 2021-07-24 11:18 pm (UTC)ALSO HONK IS CUTE <333 i just think they would be way too judgmental of him for no reason HKLSDFHLH and that was actually the initial premise of the fic and what inspired me to write 12k words in a daze. like yerim becoming way too obsessed with this random guy and all her friends going "u were dating the perfect girl and now ur with THIS hag?" LMFAO but you know i support hongri rights ❤️ and YEAHH i just really loved this idea of yerim feeling way too deeply about her first love/first breakup and trying to navigate that with someone who is fundamentally so different but still feels "right" independent of any of her messy feelings about the past... but also being worried that she's acting in some way influenced by it T___T
ALSO WHY ARE YOU KILLING ME WITH THIS SOOBRI TINHETTINGGG BUT HONESTLY IT WOULD BE SO CUTE NOW THAT I THINK ABOUT IT??? 😭😭😭😭 me tinhetting the gayest man alive with any 99 noona i can get my hands on like get a load of THIS. can i please save some girls for cyj at least he'd be into them
also ”also obsessed with how for some reason if we didn’t know soobin’s dance club bf was jichang you hit us with the “absurdly long neck” JUST TO CONFIRM!!” LOL SO GLAD U CAUGHT MY INTENTION!!! it’s important to be blatant in moments of ambiguity 😌
ANYWAY ONCE AGAIN... THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR KIND WORDS T___T yeri really is so much fun to write because of how RICH her personality is imo!! and i’m super glad you enjoyed this and hope we can all walk the flower path of HONGRISHIPPING from now on etc. etc.!!! love u dearly miss landofnights <3333
no subject
Date: 2021-07-21 04:45 pm (UTC)SO YERIM IS PITIFUL????!?! okay well Yes she kind of is for going after this haggly not_even_that_cute man… but whatever it’s fine. i honestly love yeri being this pathetic bisexual qt SO MUCHHHHH…? like does anyone else relate to her or is that just me.
like idk anything about Actual Red Velvet Yeri but this was sooo fun. also this fic caused me to go down a saeri rabbit hole… why were these bitches dating in 2018 like that’s SO REAL. idkk not to get too personal in ur dreamwidth comments section but ur yerim portrayal srsly resonated with me sm… like the stress of dating someone who’s going thru a stressful time themselves and being terrified of being ignored. Terrified of not even qualifying as a distraction… THAT’S REAL. also all of the stuff about hongseok being not-cute and kind of a loser is sooo funny to me.
LIKE SERIOUSLY CAN THIS GIRL GET A BREAKKK her existence is so pitiful and humiliating to meee. but we’ve all been there (or maybe you haven’t, idk) and i feel like u can’t have a fun tinhet fic without SOMEONE being a little pitiful… like that’s just an inherent part of writing straight fic abt these people. another part (sorry to combine this whole section to be about HONGSEOK’S LOSERISMS…? not) that was fun was when yeri is at hongseok’s apartment and she sees the massive GAMING SETUPPP HDJASHKGHAGH i lost my mind at that part. like u already know how i feel about GAMERS and how they represent the worst of malekind. and the way that
Somehow, though, this makes her like him even more. is so real like JKHKHADSkjfdsjhkgfhkdshjfdsk okay you’re perfect for this.
also the cameos in general were so funnnnn like what’s the point of writing a crazy college au if you can’t insert self-indulgent cameos!!! also your chatfic in general is always a delight and you’re a mixed media queen as always <3 ++ i know i said that u were kind of just mentioning anyone BUT THAT WAS A LIE i actually thought ur cameos were perfect and well-thought out… in particular i loved wonu/joy being the Worst Tinhet Of The Year and HOLLAND being like “yeah he’s hot” immediately and, of course, SOOBIN’S GENERAL EXISTENCE…… yeri & i both find him a little annoying so <3 speaking of which:
ABSURDLY LONG NECK??? IS THAT CHWE YEONJUN?? #yeonbin_real #lovewins #pride just kidding. also yeri thirsting over arin is ALSO SO TRUE AND REALLLL like arin is so pretty & i love the slightly convoluted way u managed to work in qsoobrin JKHJKDHSJKgh. oh yeah and before i forget… i would say that “hyunggu” and kinonognseok are so personal but in reality i barely know what ptg is so just like… believe me when i say that whole convoluted side story with the fwb thing was sooo amusing <3
okayyyy now i liked the romance… like sometimes a cute little college au is exactly what you need. and it’s just so comfortable and sweet in the way it unfolds, sort of hitting a lot of those romcom beats, but at the same time the narrative still has a lot of Nuance because of the whole lingering SAERI backstory and stuff. IDK SOMETIMES SIMPLE IS GOOD! and you execute it so well. but also i like the depths too… what am i even saying. i feel like u captured the embarrassing experience of having a crush on someone so well :’))) these moments in particular stood out to me:
LIKEEEEE idk i feel like ive been in situations where i was embarassed and i did the exact same thing… like hiding my head in a book would save me. i felt this moment so viscerally JKHSDA
like first of all i loved the quiet domesticity of all the studying scenes that yeri had with hongseok like to me True Love is studying together. and second of all this conversation rlly felt like… idk it just felt so true to yeri’s arc and the way that she’s trying to find balance amidst all of these tumultuous feelings and how HONGSEOK stabilizes her. it’s cute ok
speaking of which i just loveddd all of yeri’s introspective moments in general T___T it just made me want to root for her so much. like
At twenty-one, she wants to be ready for heartbreak again. GIRL I’M JUST CHEERING YOU ON!!!! and the whole process of moving on from a first love and feeling like you’ve spent too long wallowing in your feelings yet also wanting things to change is just soo… well i get it. and i loved when she stalked saeron’s insta to see the new gf lol:
like does anyone else think YERI PERFECT GIRL? no? just me?? okay then T___T
idk this was just so much fun and endlessly sweet and NOT BAD AT ALL!!! please have more faith in yourself. i can’t believe that you wrote this in 2 days though like you were insane for this one
no subject
Date: 2021-07-25 12:15 am (UTC)also T___T glad you enjoyed my saeri stuff! like i think high school gf angst is literally so real and i couldn't help myself when /i/ was going down the SAERI RABBIT HOLE lol <3 AND IT'S NOT HER FAULT THAT SHE'S INTO THIS RANDOM MAN I SUPPORT HER 😭😭😭😭 as a honk fan myself... etc. etc. AND YUP I KNOW EXACTLY HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT GAMERS.... but well... unfortunately that part is canon 💔
and literally i think college aus are so fun because you can just write in ANY CHARACTER!!! some of them were definitely a little bit random but i enjoyed shoehorning chwesoobin in way too much for no reason like i can't imagine them ever meeting irl but i'm sure if they did it would somehow be through miss arin. because HOW ELSE? DAEHWI? those bitches don't even talk. not that soobin actually talks to arin either but they DO see each other every week with ambiguously positive feelings
anddd why does u people blockquoting my fic do more for my proofreading attempts than my actual proofreading LMFAO T__T like the amount of GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN HERE dear lord. ok i'm back. "#yeonbin_real #lovewins #pride" CAN YOU PLEASE you were so sick and evil for this btw
AND I AGREE THAT SIMPLE INDULGENT BASIC TROPEY SHIT CAN BE GOOD!!! (<- person who wrote a miniz college au for no reason) like you know not actually Good but fun and rewarding LOLLL who cares about objective evaluations of our writing!! certainly not i. "to me True Love is studying together." CAN YOU PLEASE [2] BUT ALSO YOU KNOW WHAT? same here. like let's advance our academic potential together or something #girlboss_moment ❤️
ANYWAY T___T love you so much miss shakti thank you for entertaining my silly stupid fic and being so kind to me always!! but also hopefully i will never do anything like this again. LOL
no subject
Date: 2021-07-21 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-24 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-22 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-24 01:32 am (UTC)anddd i'm v glad to hear you liked the relationship buildup / saeron backstory / thought that i did yeri's character justice because yeah i think tragic high school gfs are such a deeply relatable experience + i don't usually go here (rv ficdom) BUT I TOTALLY GET THE PLIGHT OF NO ONE SHIPPING MAKNAELINES T___T it's like damn even when these people are in their 20s people will go out of their way to make maknaeline into the daughter/son/little sibling characters 😭 what did we do to deserve this.
also i cannot take credit for wonwoo/joy because my friend suggested it after i was like "what's a joy tinhet but like. a bad one" and i think she got it from this iconic miuyi (rainiest) fic! but anywayyy thank you so much for reading my silly little tinhet and leaving such a kind comment i really appreciate it n__n <3
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Date: 2021-07-24 01:58 am (UTC)re: no one shipping maknaelines i think the age gap does make it a little hard for ppl to ship kyr with the other rv members and joyri isn't as much of a thing (anymore ?) due to park sooyoung unnie hunting tendencies (i'm chronically ill wenjoyist but that is so not relevant here) but i think the crossover potential is unlimited!! so it was very nice to see this. when someone writes yeri x twc chaeyoung x wjsn yeoreum what then!!!
omg ive actually read that fic before haha i dont know how i didnt remember but thank u for bringing it back... i think they would be so incompatible and totally not each other's types at all and thats what makes it so fun! ok ill stop rambling in ur inbox now haha but thank u again for the fic!!
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Date: 2021-07-25 12:46 am (UTC)— wendy youngstreet
— seulgizip
— kang hanna's volume up
except the subs are pretty inaccurate and they're probably not worth watching in full LOL... but their playlist originals interview is only 10 minutes long and it's where they do their compatibility quiz (and hongseok shows these candid shots he's taken of yeri TTT) and it's rly cute imo!! ^^ and then some other perfect moments from their radio appearances include just generally wendy/seulgi 3rd-wheeling them, esp this part with seulgi laughing in disbelief when they didn't answer her question because they were so focused on each other (because hongseok was helping yeri and teasing her like "do i have to teach u everything" SOB TTTT) and there's this part in wendy's show where yeri is like "ah oppa why are you like this~ he's not usually this kind of person!" since he's more high tension around her and he stares at her and is like "so what kind of person am i?" LIKE UM HLSDKFHKLH T___T here's a timestamp if you're interested imo this show was the cutest of the 3!!!
also during the compatibility quiz hongseok is like "ah yeri bragged all about learning chinese to me that's why i knew she would choose that" which is so much because he spent years studying in china LIKE SHE REALLY WANTED TO IMPRESS HIM 😭 and they also have this cute joke where he calls her noona when he messes up and he dances to dumb dumb to cheer her up... which also kills me because of them dancing to red flavor and how everyone was like "um why would she be dancing FACING HIM THE ENTIRE TIME if she's not a little bit into him???" and it was kind of MY personal hongri revelation.
ANYWAY... so sorry for this entire essay clearly i have been Gotten by the optics. but yeahh that does make a lot of sense for rvshipping huhu i hope she gets more crossover fic soon though!!! like i just know she has insane jungkook tinhet shippers and that's it... however THIS crossover sounds so good so I'LL JOIN YOU IN MANIFESTING!!! [is super basic yeoreum paen and would eat this up]
and yup yup i agree i am no longer a permanent resident of caratland but that's definitely the impression i get of their potential dynamic which is why it's perfect for STUPID TROPEY COLLEGE AUS <33 but anyway no worries on rambling considering i just sent you a monstrous tinhet primer back in response i really appreciate your commentary! hope we all continue to walk the flower path of baseless shipping and unabashed tinhetting and indulgent k-pop truthing from now on :DDD
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Date: 2021-07-22 07:23 pm (UTC)everything was just so deeply enjoyable like. yeri’s pov is sooo compelling ++ not to mention relatable and i love the little bits of humor tucked into again deeply relatable crises about relationships and what it means to be ready for love 😭😭 also the CAMEOS! im obsessed with the soobin yeri interactions [ "You're terrible," she announces. "You're terrible and your opinions are horrible and I hate you."] honestly idk most of these people BUT I ENJOYED IT IMMENSELY NONETHELESS? thank u for making perfect content as always <3
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Date: 2021-07-24 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-23 01:28 am (UTC)now why is this us whenever you would bring up hongri during the past week... <3 but ANYWAY I RESPECT YOU AND I'M GLAD WE GOT MORE GIRLROCK FIC OUT OF IT CUZ IT'S ALWAYS PERFECT AND AMAZING<333 like i think u did suchhh a good job with the yeri pov i always think u do such a good job with character voice T__T she's seriously so endearing and i think her struggles hit home for a lot of us. ie:
Yerim spent too many nights reading their messages over and over again, terrified of distracting her from yaja and practice exams. Worse: terrified of being ignored. Terrified of not even qualifying as a distraction.
and the whole "high school girlfriend being your entire world" thing is also super real and i really adored ur more introspective sections, the whole "the thing is that" repetition had me going through something (in the best way). i also really loved this paragraph:
For Yerim, though, her first love was transformative and blinding. Saeron was hers—and she was Saeron's—and Saeron was—they were. Yerim felt, in every sense of the word, bold and committed. Hongseok was nothing like Saeron was, and even with these long eight months Yerim must have looked so foolish and reckless to everyone she knew, a girl who barely knew her own heart.
looking at my notes like idk why i was so hyperfocused on her rltnship with saeron and did not note anything about hongseok but i also know why. but reading through again and u did a rly good job at making him super lovable thru yeri's eyes but mostly just like. the person she needs at this point in her life! he's a loser and kind of questionable but it works.
a couple more things i loved:
> the DOYEON CONVO (she is so perfect) and the yerim hitting on yewon lore actually knocked me out
> SOOBIN'S EXISTENCE AS THE DWEEBY FIRST YEAR WHO GIVES PEOPLE AROUND HIM A HEADACHE<333333 you already know
> KANGKINO???! HYUNGGGUUUU????? the kino scene actually made me cry. next ur gonna tell me his boyfriend is seungyeon and the “new boyfriend” was wooseok. also you making him a total cryptid was way too funny like Yes He Has Hidden Depths... we get it. also his ambiguous rltnship with hongseok was perfect lolol
> wheezing at the last quote i have saved being "because this isn't about Kang Hyunggu and she won't let it start now." alright but have we considered that it COULD BE ABOUT KANG HYUNGGU? :D
sorry for having an agenda and unbelievably pointless commentary but i loved this & u <3
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Date: 2021-07-24 11:27 pm (UTC)anyway thank you for your kind words and reading this stupid tinhet even though you truly did not have to FSDLHLKDFH love u so much T___T ”looking at my notes like idk why i was so hyperfocused on her rltnship with saeron and did not note anything about hongseok but i also know why.” yes yes i wonder why anyway any dykes here? i’m glad u thought the hongri r/s mostly worked tho LOL. AND YUP I WAS SO HAPPY WHEN I WAS LIKE WAIT THIS FIC IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR ME TO WRITE IN MY SOOBRI/YERI HITTING ON ARIN IDEAHLKSDFHLHLH.... the joy i felt writing factually the worst scene ever known to man just so yeri could strangle chwesoobin over his terrible bebe rexha opinions. next he's going to say that kara did more for k-pop than snsd ever could
AND YUP THAT’S KANGKINO FOR U… SCREAMMM ok i literally just wanted his bf to be open to interpretation but at first i was going to have this thing where SEUNGYOUN WAS HIS OTHER FWB OR WHATEVER…??? DON’T ASK ME WHY. but let’s just go with your idea so that kimwooseok can exist in my literary universe ❤️ and ur right maybe it SHOULD all be about kang hyunggu 😌
anyway once again thanks for your generous readership and thanks for being the only person ever LOVE U <333
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Date: 2021-07-24 03:16 am (UTC)but this truly is perfect content! i love your characterization of everyone here—obviously yeri and hongseok shine the most given that we see them the most but all your side characters have so much life too… i’m super endeared by sooyoung relentless teasing unnie who just wants the best for yerim while also being haunted by POETRY CLUB WONWOO??? why do i want fic for THIS tinhet now. joyri with their significantly lamer boyfriends <333 okay sorry getting sidetracked i also really liked yeri’s 99z groupchat and her tragic flirtation with arin and then SOOBIN BEING BASTARD… like everything about this is just so perfect <3
but yeri’s voice is genuinely so sweet and endearing and lovely :’) i think you’ve perfectly captured how caught up she is in high school loves and firsts and trying to find her footing again after all the things that she’d thought were a sure bet suddenly aren’t anymore T_____T and hongseok who is definitely a loser but also more handsome than yeri’s friends give him credit for and also just really patient and kind at a time in her life when she needs that was so touching to read :’) i just liked their dynamic so much!
this was truly such a wonderful read and im so thankful to have read it TT_____TT thank u for writing u are a legend in everything u do!
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Date: 2021-07-25 01:31 am (UTC)and truly thank you so much for your kind words huhuhu <333 i really think we all deserve our personal sooyoung actually and i love none of the men in joyri's lives being TRULY good enough for them 😌
also the legend here is ofc YOU but thank you againnn i'm super flattered you read my ridiculous hongri and thought that their relationship development worked for their characters even though it's mostly just a generic meet-cute college au <3 i'm dw user stoplight fan btw!!!