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chronically-ghosted · 7 months

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can you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills?

rating: T (this is the tamest thing I’ve written in years)

pairing: dieter bravo x f!reader

word count: 8K

summary: a year into secretly dating, you are overwhelmed by your feelings for Dieter Bravo, confident and resigned to the fact that he doesn’t feel the same way. But on Oscar’s night, drunk on sparkling wine and a terrific win, Dieter gives you a reason to doubt your fears.

warnings/tags: age gap, self-aggrandizing rumination on our public vs private personas, a stupid amount of kissing, angst but soft angst, angst that is resolved, this is very different from anything i’ve done recently, and there’s no smut? just kisses? What have you become Taylor? one very very very soft Dieter, waxing shamelessly poetic about being in love and being loved by Dieter Bravo

a/n: this comes from the same request by two of my LOVELY followers ( @tvversionperson and @bitchwitch1981) from my 100 followers event: “I’m not drunk. Can a drunk person do this?” “You’re not doing anything.” “But… I sent you my love. Did you… did you not get it?” with Dieter Bravo. this is so wildly different from anything i've done before, i'm flinging this into the internet like a goddamn trapshooter of emotional angst

shout out to @iamdesibell for the visuals of Dieter at the party. She spoils me with all of her incredible Dieter artwork.

🤍Masterlist

Every artist knows it's about the looks. The aesthetics of it all, the internet’s new favorite buzzword. Increasingly too often, the merit of the artwork is equated to the moral merit of the artist; it’s not so much about selling the image you create, it’s about selling the image of yourself. Does the artist fit into the image of what the masses imagine when they hear what the artist offers? Can the artist balance both the expectations and provide something new? When is the right time to break the mold, and be different, or when is it best to follow the crowd? Keep your head down and make more content than art. When does the aesthetics of a thing matter more than the thing itself?

For Oscar’s night, often there is nothing more important than the look of things. The elegance. The allure but approachability of the stars. Beautiful but obtainable. Handsome but effortless. But beneath all the veneer, all the lights, and gold and glitz, there is a yearning, an animalistic hunger, for a quite literal shiny object waved in their faces to clamor and push and shove for. The beauty is a mask that covers fragility and fear and anticipation – and that mask must remain firmly in place, no matter the outcome. Remember, they’re watching, always watching, and you cannot want a thing too much, lest you become conceited or conniving. You cannot love in a way that scares them.

And sometimes, you think you love him in a way that scares yourself.

His warm palm grips yours over your knee. He, along with the other nominees, wait patiently as the names are read allowed from the gilded stage. His face, a mask – of curiosity, of wonder – but only you, perhaps because you are so close to him, can see the fraught want in his eyes. You know how much he wants this, how much you want this for him. He wants it so much he’s trembling. Microscopically. Barely at all, barely a flinch of genuine human emotion, it makes you sick. Because Dieter, the Dieter you’ve come to know in the past year, is so wonderfully unpolished, such a sterling testament to the beauty in the raw, it makes a spot behind your sternum ache to watch him hold himself back.

You want to give him a smile of encouragement, to kiss his knuckles and soothe his hammering pulse with your thumb, but you can’t. You can’t even look at him, any movement immediately flagged by the cameras. Always watching.

But behind the rows of seats, they can’t see your clasped hands. Can’t see his tapping foot. They can’t see how much he wants, how much he loves. As the names are read aloud for the category of Best Actor, you lift your thumbnail to the meat of his palm, between his own thumb and index finger. Gently, softly, quietly, so as not to startle the molecules of air around you, you draw a heart in his skin.

But by his rigid posture, you’re not sure he registers it. You can’t tell if he knows you’re there at all.

It began a year ago.

After a truly spectacular break up that left you bereft and aimless, you decided to quit. Quit it all. Quit and start over doing the one thing you actually had passion for: screenwriting. Was it risky and dumb as hell at your age? Absolutely. But it didn’t matter if you never ended up writing for a big Hollywood film, you told yourself, as long as you were writing, that’s all that mattered.

So you quit writing articles about car insurance, packed up everything, and moved to the City of Angels.

Two years later, you were still earning your dues. Still working from the bottom of the barrel up, climbing through muck and verbal abuse and emotional exploitation and the very dredges of the industry.

You tried to focus on your craft, on getting more than just getting coffee for the actual writers, but after multiple days spending nineteen hours on your feet, the capacity to be creative so rarely comes, your brain often sizzled and fried like the back end of a janky, unreliable toaster. The production company you worked for had just purchased the rights to a popular novelist’s book for a film adaptation. The party you were at was more of a “pat yourself on the back” sort of thing for the director and novelist to rub elbows while surrounded by beautiful people. Attending mind-numbing parties for the sake of building connections was one thing. You could actually have fun when you wanted, but this? This self-indulgent, ego-driven, flattery bullshit, when all you wanted to do was sleep?

You watch as Eliot Baker, friend of the director and whose house is currently being trashed by a bunch of dangerously drunk and high animals, steps up onto his kitchen table. His pupils nearly dilated to the size of quarters, he holds up a baggy of white powder.

“Anyone interested in Colombia’s finest, please join me in the bedroom. Beautiful women, please stay.”

The three shots you had done earlier had done nothing to dull your irritation, now amplified by the grating cheer that goes up from the crowd. Coke rarely puts you in a better mood, but at least it’s better than sulking by the stairs. Eliot leaps off the table and leads a gaggle of giggling women, and men with their hands all over their sparkly asses, down the hall and you try not to roll your eyes, your feet all but dragging beneath you.

Then someone catches you by the elbow.

And you wonder how a homeless man got past security.

A comically large green beanie on his head, a blindly yellow hood zipped up over what perhaps had been a white t-shirt – you are immediately arrested by his dark, soft eyes. Thick, furrowed brow. He hasn’t let go of your elbow.

“That guy is a fucker,” he tells you with vehemence.

“What?” He could have asked you your name and you would have said the exact same thing.

“Baker,” he sneers over your shoulder at the small crowd tumbling through the open door, Eliot’s too blue eyes watching like a farmer counts cattle to the slaughterhouse. “He laces his shit. Makes you too fucked up. He’s the kind of evil fucker who roofies drinks.”

The stranger looks at you, the twist of rage around his mouth fading, eyes softening again, as if he is worried about you.

“Don’t go in there,” he says.

His warm hand is still around your elbow.

“Okay,” you say because you haven’t come across anyone this earnest, maybe in your entire life, and certainly not since moving to LA.

He blinks, as if surprised, and slowly withdraws his hand. You stare at each other for perhaps too long before he jerks his thumb over his shoulder.

“Wanna smoke some weed?”

The cool night air of LA always surprises you. It’s never cold, no, but the chill is noticeable, tangible, always right at the back of your neck when you least expect it. You stifle the urge to shiver as the man slides the glass door behind him, immediately deafening the party inside. You hadn’t realized it had been so loud until there is blissful silence, the sound of blood rushing in your ears replacing the trance music and the dull hum of overlapping voices.

The man straight off the set of The Big Lebowski unhurriedly digs around in the pocket of that obnoxious hoodie for a bit, as if he could lose an item in that small pouch.

He finds what he’s looking for with a grin on his face, and when he brings both the lighter and blunt to his lips, you realize his left arm is in a cast.

He sees you eye it, managing to light and hit the blunt with one hand before pocketing the lighter and offering the smoke to you. The browns in his eyes are overcome by the darkness surrounding you on the back porch overlooking the valley below, the skyline of Los Angeles winking in the far distance.

You notice something, not writing or words on his cast, more like a dark blot, but you don’t ask him about it. Most people in this business you’ve found are only on for the cameras and when it comes to personal, quiet moments, the less personable they have to be the better. You feel like you’re already pressing your luck by getting a few free hits off this guy so you wait your turn, ready to be as silent as he wants it to be.

Which apparently isn’t very much at all.

“How’d you end up here?” He asks with genuine interest and just a touch of weariness.

You shrug as you take the blunt from him again. “My boss is here to schmooze his new writer. As his assistant, I think I’m contractually obligated to be around him more than his own shadow.”

“You’re a PA?” He asks, voice strained and full of smoke, before he puffs out the side of his mouth. A considerate smoker, then.

“No,” you shake your head. “I’m whatever is lower than a PA. I think an actual bottom-feeder in a fish tank has more power than me.”

“So you’re new to the scene?”

You scowl, one arm tucked around your waist, the other tapping on your thigh. “Yeah, if two years is still new.”

He frowns. “What are you trying to break into?”

His fingertips brush yours over the next exchange and maybe it’s the earnest look in his eyes, or the bizarre fact that he actually smells good despite looking like he’d raided a garbage can, or maybe it’s the weed finally hitting, but you are honest with this complete stranger.

“I wanna be a screenwriter.”

Maybe it’s the drugs finally hitting him too, but the glossy shine to his eyes doesn’t seem to be from boredom as you explain to him the past few years of your life, starting from the breakup in Boston to getting a very specific brand of q-tips from a drugstore on the other side of town for your boss at midnight.

“I know I have to pay my dues, and I don’t mind that, but I just want to do something that matters, you know?” The unexpected chill of the night air curls around your neck as he listens intently to your uninterrupted ramble for ten minutes. “I don’t even care about big movies, or the awards, I want to write something that touches just one person. Give them something to think about for years to come. Comforts or encourages them to do the thing they’re scared of doing.” You feel heat climb up your ears as he watches as though you’re the most fascinating thing in the world. “It’s silly. It’s just a job, and I know I should treat it like that . . .”

You trail off, waiting for him to admonish you, but instead he grins. A smile that widens his whole face. On someone else it might look condescending, but he’s grinning wildly as he slides the joint back into his mouth with two fingers and leans back on his heels.

“So you’re a little dreamer, huh?” That faint blush now beats a harsh red. Fuck, you knew you sounded like an idiot – always opening up too soon and too fast to strangers who don’t really give a fuck. You were just supposed to have a conversation with this nice, albeit weird guy and go on your way and –

He cocks his head as he looks at you, takes in your beet-red ears and cheeks and that smile falters.

“You know that’s not a bad thing, right? The world needs more dreamers. People, who despite all the bullshit, continue to believe they can be happy.”

“You could also call that being delusional,” you mutter as you take the halfway-spent joint from him when he offers.

One of those thick eyebrows jerks as though thinking of a funny joke. He shrugs, his mouth twisting down in a disbelieving smirk. “Personally, I like to call it whimsy.”

Whimsy? Who talks like that?

You fight a giggle and find him looking at you again, that smile smoothed out and warm again. One glance and you snort loudly, then bust out laughing.

Those magnanimous eyes glitter as he watches you laugh yourself silly.

“Child-like, wondrous whimsy,” he teases and you laugh harder as though he tickled you. Another snort explodes out of you and you clap your hand over your mouth, finally hearing the noises you’re making and mortified beyond reason. You glance over your shoulder, worried someone else might have heard your donkey laugh. In fact, you wish anyone other than the gorgeous man standing next to you had heard it.

But if he finds it unpolished or annoying, he doesn’t show it. He just rolls on his heels, grinning and looking overly pleased with himself. When the giggles subside, you bite your lip at him.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Fire away, Pistol Pete.”

“How’d you break your arm?”

He looks down at it as he forgot it was there.

“Uh, it’s a long story.”

He finally pulls it out of the sleeve of his jacket. Your mouth drops.

You can’t even tell what medium had been used, either paint or sharpie or something else entirely, but the cast is a mosaic of some of the most gorgeous artwork you’d ever seen. Birds in gold and blue hues, flowers and leaves in stunningly rendered detail, the curves of anonymous noses and lips and teeth and earlobes – all wound together in collage by someone with an eye for detail and a precious reverence for the mundane.

But for all the artwork, designs you fully believe should be in a museum, you realize no one has signed it. Maybe only twelve year olds sign each other’s casts, you think harshly to yourself. Grow up.

But still, the sight makes you a little sad.

“Did you do these?” You ask quietly.

He nods, turning his arm to give you a better look, as if eager for your approval. You think you see the horns of Goya’s El Gran Cabrón before he pulls his arm back.

The man hasn’t answered your original question, watching your face for every microexpression. Finally, you do glance up and he has his bottom lip in teeth, as though preparing to be scolded.

At that moment, you want nothing more than to kiss those plush lips. You swallow, feeling rather lighted-headed and capable of making terrible decisions, so you take a clear step back.

“I got daydrunk and fell in my pool wrong.”

You frown at him. “That’s not a very long story.”

He drops your gaze, suddenly bashful, and shakes his sleeve back over his cast. “Yeah, well, I couldn’t come up with a better story that makes me look really cool, or makes you laugh, so I went with the lame truth.”

You don’t remark that it sounds like he wanted to impress you so you go for the easy alternative.

“Why would I laugh at you?”

He flops his arms in half-shrug. “I don’t want you to laugh at me. I just want you to laugh. I like your laugh.”

How does someone who wears their heart so openly on their sleeve survive in a place like this? You want him to swallow you down so you can count the rings in his stomach, learn his history like oak trees.

“Who are you?” You blurt out, your mouth full of cotton and brain somewhat disconnected from your brain stem.

At that, he laughs. “Gimme your number and you’ll find out.”

His smile elongates the longer you stare at him. “It’s not a line. I mean, it is, but not like that, if you don’t want it to be. This fucking industry is built on who you know and I know a couple of people to know. You can call me if you have any questions or need a reference.”

The whiplash between flirty tease and professional contact is jarring. Your fingers shaking from shock, you take your phone out of your pocket and hand it to him.

He taps away, bobbing his head to some tune only he can hear, before lifting it up to his face and snapping a selfie – tongue out and eye squinting into the flash.

He tosses your phone back and you learn his name for the first time.

The shock wears off immediately and you roll your eyes.

“Okay, my turn.”

He digs into his back pocket and slides a bright pink 2007 motorola flip-phone into your outstretched hand.

Full – chock full, in fact – of surprises.

“I’m not gonna get tracked,” he says seriously, eyes narrowed. “You really should think about giving up your iPhone. All kinds of bad vibes.”

You eagerly look forward to him explaining the Big Foot Conspiracy and his theories about the magic silver bullet.

It takes you a second to type out your name with the multiple buttons, some old sense memory from seventh grade coming back like a grumpy, displeased ghost, but finally, you snap the phone together and toss it back to him.

With the nub of the smoking joint poking out of his mouth, he frowns when he looks at the phone screen.

“Dolly Parton?”

You pluck the joint out of his mouth, a surge of playful confidence keeping your eyes locked on his. You nod. “Since we’re doing the whole fake name thing . . .”

You want to wink, with your hand on your hip, so clever to have figured out his little game, but when he continues to frown, that rush of bravery fizzles out.

“But the name I put in your phone is actually my name?”

You chuckle, surprised and confused he’s still committing to the bit, a little frustrated at this point because you are actually starting to like this guy and . . .

Unless . . .

“You’re actually Dieter Bravo? The actor? Three-time Emmy nominated actor Dieter Bravo?”

He loops his finger through one of the free-roaming curls from under the beanie and twists it. “That’s what it says on my underwear . . . when I remember to wear it.”

The blush on your face now scalding, you dart across the space between you and him and snatch his phone back. You can literally feel the shameful heat in your spine, your lower back, as you delete Dolly’s name and frantically type in your own.

“I’m so, so, sorry. I was just trying to be funny. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you but it’s dark and, um, you don’t look like I thought you would and I-I had no idea – I’m so sorry –,”

“Girlie, take a breath,” he chuckles and strokes your fingers as they tremble over the keypad. “I’ve never seen someone so stressed out after smoking half a joint before.”

You’ve gone stock still as he bleeds the panic out of you with just his touch. You watch as his warm hand, dwarfing yours in size, slowly moves up to your wrist, your pulse point. His thumb presses into the vein and gently rubs. You can’t help the sigh that eases out of your throat as all the tension in your arm collapses into that one focal point, that one place he presses against you. You inhale, not realizing you had stopped breathing for a second and he releases gently, the ache in your body left over from the rigidity gone.

A brief dark haze passes over his eyes when you sigh, but gives you space easy enough when you settle.

He takes the phone out of your limp hands and reads what you’ve typed out.

“Cute name. But I think I’m still gonna call you Dolly.”

Humor is your gut instinct. Defuse a situation or calm your nerves, sometimes the best you can do is crack a (often poorly timed) joke. You feel all fluttery inside, partially because you’d been talking to Dieter “I know people who know people” Bravo all night and partially because you’re about 86% sure he’d been flirting with you. And so, without thinking, you say:

“Because of my massive tits, right?”

His eyes flit up from his phone screen to, presumably, your tits. Which are very much not Dolly-Parton-comparable.

But he grins. He actually giggles, pressing the back of the hand holding his phone against his lips as if trying to hide his smirk.

“Yeah, that’s definitely it.”

It is the kind of laugh that you know he’s laughing with you and not at you and he’s still staring when his laughter subsides.

He is still staring at your tits.

Just as your face flushes what feels like the hundredth time tonight, he glances up at you. He offers you the last puff, you shake your head, so he sucks in down before flicking the nub over the railing of the patio. His hands sit heavy in his front pocket, the frown on his face contemplative, eyes searching the horizon.

“I think you’re going to text me . . . on a Tuesday,” he says, like he’s divining portents from the shapes of the clouds.

You swallow, trying to purge yourself of this whiplash embarrassment, but you can’t quite decide what exactly to make of this man or this conversation. “What makes you say that?”

His smile is so genuine it rattles something inside you. “It’s my favorite day of the week.”

This feels too good, too real, too intense, too fast. It was a quiet, but familiar story passed around in writer’s rooms or on the back lots of sets: an older man seduces a young girl, promising the world, and then offering nothing once he had gotten what he wanted.

You beg your heartbeat to slow down.

But Dieter Bravo doesn’t seem capable of that, not with his honesty, his open heart, but then again none of them ever do.

That’s the whole point.

“So, um, I should go. My boss is probably out back, breaking things, pissed off because I’m not behind him with a fresh macchiato.” Your phone feels absurd in your hands, as if it now carries something vital inside of it. “But, uh, thank you – for everything. The smoke, the advice, listening to me ramble endlessly –,”

“You weren’t rambling,” he says, arms crossed and finger tugging at an errant curl again. “You were talking about what makes you happy and I was listening. I like listening to you.”

You wanted to believe him. You really did.

“I’ll call you sometime, okay?”

He nods, raising a hand in a wave, but as you turn away, something final, the last piece of the puzzle, pops into your brain.

“Why me?”

Dieter looks at you, big brown eyes confused like a puppy whom you scolded for chewing on your shoe.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s gotta be at least fifty people here. Why did you stop me from going into Eliot’s room?

Dieter shrugs, that easy smile returning. “You looked like the only other person who didn’t want to be here. And you’re really pretty,” he adds casually and your heart launches itself into your throat. “I’ve got a thing for really pretty girls. Gets me into a lot of trouble.”

There comes that heat, that flare in his gaze that makes you wonder how someone like him fucks, all proof necessary that he has a working cock, and he’s not some mystical, Willy-Wonka-esque Ken doll.

It’s a look that makes you wonder if he wants his cock in you.

“Good night, Dieter.”

“Night, Dolly.”

Weeks passed and immediately you were so drowned in work, Dieter Bravo occasionally slipped your mind, falling back on your list of things to do when a deadline was approaching.

But when a contract for a position in a new writer’s room passes over your desk, you pause, and immediately think of him. The offer is unbelievable. More money than you thought possible working as an underling. The channel set to produce was the real deal, likely to order more seasons if the first went well.

“Saw your writing,” your boss told you by way of explaining your dreams falling directly into your lap. “Good work. I sent some of it off, and the studio came back with this. Don’t take too long signing the dotted line, okay?”

You nod, dumb-founded as he walks off, and you glance back at the contract.

And, despite your almost desperate elation, something felt off. But you didn’t know enough about the industry to confidently say if this is a bad deal or not.

So, with a glance down the hall, you call the only person you know who would.

He is immediately livid. Not that you haven’t called, of course, but that someone has clearly tried to take advantage of you.

“Do not take that deal. That corporate bullshit means they’ll own your IP for years to come. I can’t believe they’d do that to you. Stay right there and whatever you do, do not sign that. I’m calling someone at the studios.”

“Yeah. Uh, okay, Dieter, I won’t,” you murmur, half-expecting your hand to burn if you picked the contract up again. “But, um, thank you, for being honest with me. It felt weird, but I didn’t want to pass up an opportunity and I was freaking out that this was the only one I was gonna get but I didn’t want to be rash,so I, um, . . .”

You trail off, the sudden silence on the other line only making your panic and shame more pronounced. You cringe inwardly – Dieter Bravo had better fucking things to do than console a baby screenwriter out of her first mistake – and Jesus, if there was ever a chance he was going to sleep with you, it’s long gone now – it must be, no one willingly sleeps with someone so goddamn gullible.

“Dolly?” His voice is quiet, but with a certain edge that makes you picture that implish little smirk. “Do you know what day it is?”

“No?”

“It’s Tuesday.”

That phone call turned into a new job with a female-led production team, thank yous over drinks, late-night dinners at obscure and dark Chinese food restaurants, movie nights at your shamefully small apartment, and then . . . a kiss.

Which led to all the rest.

A year later and you’re so in love with Dieter Bravo, you crank up Beyonce’s Countdown and belt it from the top of your lungs every time you hear it on the radio.

There’s a new irritant, a new agitation that can only be soothed by him. He’s remade you, changed you, reformed your very being to be missing a piece when he’s not around. He’s made space for him inside you, there was no life – not a real one, not a happy one – not before him and there won’t be anyone or anything after him. No one else fits with you anymore. Ever again.

Your blood runs hot over the ridges of his fingerprints, stamped deep on your soul and your bones.

Trouble is, he’ll never know.

“And the award for Best Actor goes to . . .”

His grip is almost painful and you return it with everything you can, your jaw drawn tight.

The pause feels like it lasts forever.

You hear his name and you think for a second you’ve blacked out, that you’ve somehow missed the moment, or you’ve somehow slipped into a pungently real dream.

And the crowd erupts.

The spotlight finds him in the crowd and you’re being pulled into his chest.

The cologne he wears costs more than your car payment but the instant you’re crushed up into his silken shirt, it’s him. Beneath all the layers, beneath the veneer, the man with the green beanie and fervent yellow jacket is still there. Somewhere. You love them both.

“You did it, darling, you did it,” you whisper into his ear and that’s all you can say before you know you have to tear yourself back, because every second you linger on him, the harder it becomes to quell this rising tide inside you that increasingly tastes like salt water whenever he’s around. It’s become so obvious his name resides in the cup of your mouth.

But when you do pull out of his embrace, in the ringing shout of the crowd, the sparkle of the spotlight, his hand lingers on your elbow, and in a space of a heartbeat that lasts impossibly longer in your memory, you’re met with such a look of profound regret you feel it take up room in your chest.

And in an instant, it’s gone. Grinning broadly, he drops your elbow and moves on down the line, cheered on by his peers, the white light from above illuminating his broad back, the bits of gray becoming ever more present in his beard. You cheer and you cheer and you cheer and you hope it’s from all the cheering that your voice grows hoarse and the tears start to trickle out of the corner of your eyes.

You’re trembling visibly as he accepts his award, showing just the right amount of awe, and appreciation, and excitement. He glances up into the spotlight and there’s the real Dieter for just a split second before he humbly gawks at the golden statue in his hand.

The clock begins.

Make your speech thoughtful and poignant – relevant to what is close to people’s hearts right now.

Be profusive with your thanks. Better start with that, actually. Lower yourself at the height of your glory.

Mention family, friends, names and faces that the masses don’t know because it makes you appear connected to a reality those watching on the television can only speculate about. Say something kindly about how this means so much to you.

Cry a bit, but not too much. Keep your voice steady but with tears in your eyes. Cut yourself off, the emotion too much, and say thank you again.

And anything more than three minutes, they start to play you off.

You’re mentally going through the notes on a potential acceptance speech his PR manager gave him on the drive over, but in the end, it’s clear he doesn’t need it.

Dieter’s speech is excellent.

Really good. Really, really, really good. It has a flare of genuinity, but not the bite of vulnerability that makes people uncomfortable.

He’s been practicing for weeks now, editing as he talks, in the mirror, while driving home from the grocery store, before he goes to sleep. Tonight’s speech, a compilation of all that you’ve listened to time and time again, is the best version of all of them.

He’s soft when he needs to be and excited when he can. He’s onto the gratitude bit, going through the director, the writers, the cast and crew, even his costar, whose beautiful face is shown on the twenty foot screen above the stage, joyful tears in her eyes. And as the applause dies down, his big hand dwarfing the tiny metal statue, his fingers flexing, Dieter’s back goes ridgid, his eyes downcast. A smile slips out infinitesimally.

Dieter clears his throat and looks up.

“And there’s someone else I’d like to thank. This, uh, this one goes to all the little dreamers out there. Working nine to five, to make your dreams happen. We did it, baby, couldn’t have done it without you.”

He stares into the camera and you swear, you fucking swear, he’s looking right at you.

It’s a drowning sort of wave, this focal point that draws you down into him. It’s all consuming and it’s tender and it touches places you didn’t know could go this warm and what else could describe this but love? You resent the Academy, this place, these people for keeping him away from you. You think you’ll claw out the eyes of anyone who tries to separate you again.

You are crying – for your industry friend, his guest at the Oscars, so sees the cameras and the glitz and the glamor.

You’re crying because you’re in too deep.

The rest of the night is dipped into a champagne glass and swirled fast, catching like lighting in a bottle.

Gold dust falling fast, dizzily.

Bubbles, glinting green and pink in the light, rising and winking out of existence.

Golden bubbles in your drink, in your mouth. Your throat. Your stomach.

You feel lighter than air.

With him, you feel as bright and as strong as diamonds. As timeless and luminescent as pearl.

As beautiful as gold.

When the door finally shuts behind you in a darkened apartment, you’ve entered a secret, separate realm of domesticity: mismatched shoes, coffee creamer flavors you don’t like, and shampoo bottles that take up too much space in your shower.

It’s quiet here, blue and shadowed. The girl who left here hours ago to get ready in a hotel halfway across town forgot to leave on a light, rushing out in her haste.

Behind you, you hear him snicker, his tongue behind his teeth, champagne bubbles still in his nose, as he hangs his silk jacket on your coat rack, right next to your muddy raincoat and baseball caps faded with sweat.

“We gotta be quiet,” he hums, wobbling a bit as he toes out of his expensive loafers, pushing them near your off-brand birkenstocks. “Nala’s gonna hate me forever if we wake her up now.”

He is, of course, referring to your tabby cat, who hates everyone who isn’t you, and has a distinct requirement for twelve hour naps with no interruptions. Dieter swears he’s going to wake up one morning with that cat flexing her claws against his throat.

It takes you a moment to recognize and comprehend how your lives have melted together, how extracting you from him and him from you would be akin to destructive alchemy, the process of deconstructing two things causing both of them to oxidize and reduce to flaky rust. You’re drunk and you’re a little dizzy and you’re swaying slightly because your feet hurt but you are too consumed by introspection on your own feelings, what it means to love something other than yourself, to do anything about it.

You’re so far gone from your own body you float, untethered and lost in thought, right up until the moment his arms come around your waist and he pulls you into his chest, like slipping on a beloved coat.

“I think I can buy you for a quarter at Coney Island,” he murmurs into the nape of your neck like he is reciting Neruda’s poetry. You stifle a smile, your hands gripping around his elbows, as he sways with you. He does this a lot; thinks one thing, then two, then three, and by the time it comes out of his mouth, it’s nonsensical to anyone not strapped into his train of thought.

“Try again, darling.” You stroke his cheek with your thumb, his chin tucked over your shoulder, ear pressed to yours. “I think you missed a couple of steps.”

Your voice is gummy even to your own ears, the endless drinks at the afterparty stitching your syllables and consonants together into some freakish creature. He’s slightly blurry in your eyes, his presence overwhelming all of your senses as they try to keep you upright.

He chuckles and presses his face into your neck in what you believe is an attempted kiss.

“I mean, you glow,” he admits quietly to your skin. The grin falls from your face when your heart constricts. “You fucking shined tonight and I couldn’t stop thinking how beautiful and sweet you looked. Sweetness I wanna lick up.” He chuckles again, this time through his nose, laughing at his own absurdity. “And then I remembered cotton candy is sweet too and you can buy cotton candy at Coney Island for a quarter and. . . I think I can buy you for a quarter at Coney Island.”

He scrapes the back of your neck with his teeth as he nudges you forward down the hall, not sparing an inch between your bodies. Which makes for a disastrous time, both of you drunk, his socked feet slipping on the wood, and your heels and dress tangling up together.

“Baby, wait–,”

“We’re almost to the bedroom, we can make it–,”

“Not if we break our necks first. Gimme a second, I’ll just–,”

You slide out of his grasp, inching down the wall and tucking up the truly insane amount of tulle they managed to stitch into your dress. You feel like you’ve been digging for five minutes before you find what you're looking for.

You stick your heel in the air and fiddle with the clasp around your ankle, drunk and working in near total darkness.

Dieter huffs and slides to the floor next to you. He watches you struggle for a minute, nearly swallowed up by the layers and layers of tulle, before he squeezes the air with his open hand.

“Gimme. We’ll be here all night.”

You pout visibly and awkwardly rotate until your foot is in his lap. His fingers are warm as he plucks at the clasp.

“I am perfectly capable of getting dressed on my own.” You toss your hair indignantly.

“Yeah, but you’re always going to need my help to get undressed, right?” He smirks, eyes bleary, as he slides the heel off your foot and takes up the other one when you don’t move.

Always, he said.

Forever.

He’s being so soft, so gentle.

He sees the red marks left behind by the straps of your heels and frowns, displeased. Slumped over in the hallway of your tiny, pathetic apartment, his top few buttons of his pressed dress shirt hopelessly gone, tonight’s bow tie slung around his neck like a tipsy snake, Dieter gives you a foot rub by way of kneading out your pain.

He kisses your ankle with such reverence, adoration, the liquid in your mouth vanishes and ends up in the crotch of your tights.

You’re both too drunk for an actual fuck (“don’t make fun of my whisky dick, baby, it makes it sad,”) but you don’t want to be anywhere else but in your bed with him when you do sober up. So, you let the tulle drop, Dieter giggling as he gets hit with an avalanche of dress and you both clamor over each other to stand up.

Towering over you and smelling like rich, warm, leather and splash of something spicy, he raises an eyebrow at you. You scrunch up your face, your twisted-up mouth betraying the stern look in your eyes, and put your knuckles to your hips. He matches your stance, this town ain’t big enough for the two of us . . .

“You’re in my way,” he grumbles, his mouth twitching.

“Maybe you’re in mine.”

“Well, then it looks like we’ve got on our hands a good ol’ Mexican standoff.”

“By all means, pardner, stick ‘em up.”

You eye him like PopEye, cheek full of nothing but air, your one eye all squinty. At that, he completely breaks, going red as he laughs. You hold the pose for a second longer before you collapse against him, laughing until tears run out of the corners of your eyes. You press your forehead into his chest, his heartbeat like a homing beacon, as he nuzzles the back of your head, giggles escaping occasionally on puffs of air.

“That’s it!” He says after a moment of silence and tosses his hands into the air. “I’ve had enough! I can’t do this anymore!”

Without warning, he bends down and hauls you over his shoulder. He continues his tirade over your brief gasp of surprise – “Dieter!” – his finger indignantly in the air as he marches off towards the bedroom.

“I can no longer date a girl who is funnier than me and so goddamn, fucking pretty. Who let you do that, huh? Who taught you how to be so fucking adorable? Answer me, you sexy, little weirdo.”

He tickles you enough just to make you squirm before dramatically tossing you onto the bed. You assume your best heart-broken divorcé pose, hand draped over your forehead, one leg tucked under the other.

“Think of the children, honey! Nala needs a father’s influence, a lonely girl trying to survive in a man’s world! You can’t shoulder me with the responsibility of single motherhood!” You sit up, eyes fluttering up at him. “Everything I learned, I learned it all from you!”

Smirking, he kneels onto the mattress, your body folding back as he hovers forward, his nose inches from yours. You fight the shiver that arches up your body every time he gets that look on his face. He’s got your sanity between his teeth. “That child loathes me, darling,” he purrs. “She’s better off with you. She looks far too much like the milkman to be mine anyway.”

Your fake gasp is buried beneath the lunge of his mouth over yours. His hand cups your cheek as his mouth seeks out all its favorite places against your lips, your skin, your jaw. Your fingers dig into his wrinkled, once-starched shirt, the heat of his skin pricking your fingertips.

It’s right there, that knife edge between starting something there’s no going back from, no alternative path that ends in anything other than him buried deep inside you, filth that still makes you blush pouring from his mouth into your ear. A part of you, the part of you that’s been stalking behind every smile and touch he sends your way all night, the part of you that every nerve sing for him, is begging you to continue. To touch him in the right places that make his eyelids drop, mouth wrench open, to take on the animal that’s gnawing at you both.

But you don’t. You can’t.

The simple fact of the matter is – you’re exhausted. You know he is too. The Oscar statue sitting on your entryway is a culmination of dozens of exhausted nights that finally paid off.

He sighs when you pull back, there is no anger on his face, no disappointment that you’re ending things here. There’s only . . .

“You looked really, really pretty tonight,” he confesses to your nose with a smile. “Thanks . . . for coming with me tonight. You make everything better.”

You tuck his hair over his ear, feeling whole and small beneath the gentle search of his gaze. His hair is getting long and you love it, but you don’t want to nag him about it. The universe has finally balanced itself with him in between your legs, the foundations that make up the galaxy all settled in right here.

He takes it one step further, reaching back behind him to the comforter you keep on the end of the bed that inevitably gets kicked to the floor every time he stays over. You’d pick it up and put it back every day of your life without complaint if it meant him in your bed until the end of time.

Dieter tosses the blanket over both of your heads and crawls back in between your legs, elbows tucked by your ribs. All the champagne in the world couldn’t give you this same warm, bubbly feeling in your chest as his weight sinks into you.

He’s submerged you both in another realm, a deeper one than the one before, and in this one you have to whisper, even though the only other person in all of existence is inches from your nose.

“You’re drunk,” you murmur, hushed. You can barely find the outline of his chin, his lips, his nose. The steady drum in your chest misses a beat as you consider where he might be looking on you.

He awkwardly tugs your knuckles from both hands beneath his head, kissing them gently before allowing them to quietly slide into his hair. He’s so warm, nearly completely invisible to you in the blackness, the weight of his broad chest threatens to choke the air right out of you. But this exactly is how you want it to be. You want to be overwhelmed by Dieter Bravo.

“I’m not drunk,” he tuts, a soft slur still tucking his words together.

You reach down just inches to his temple, following the lines of his body that swear all lead to you, to find the arch of his cheek. He closes his eyes, lashes fluttering like butterfly wings against your thumbs.

“Could a drunk person do this?” He asks quietly, as close as he could come to indignant in this special, dark little world.

You wait, for a sloppy kiss, for something hard to tap against your thigh, but nothing comes. In fact, he doesn’t move.

You inhale as best you can, grinning, ready to start another proverbial sparring match with him.

“You’re not doing anything, Dieter.”

His eyelashes stroke your thumbs again, a kitten lick, as he opens his eyes.

“I sent you my love. Did you not get it?”

All in the air in your lungs is purged in a heavy gasp as his words impact your chest the way comets collide with meteors.

He says your name, concerned by the wounded noise you just made, and when you don’t answer, he leans back, tugging the blanket as he goes.

It’s not until you’re looking up at him in your bedroom, his face blurry and your cheeks cold, that you realize you’re crying.

“Dolly, what did I do?” He sounds so concerned, so visibly shaken, you can’t help but cry harder. He only touches your wrist, as if he’d been banished from your body.

If you hadn’t had so much to drink, this wouldn’t be happening or at least you’d be able to get it to stop, reign in those explosive feelings that you had kept for so long deep and buried until he came along with a match in the dark.

You take a deep breath, eyes locked onto the ceiling, hands clenched in fists. You know he can feel the tension in your forearm beneath his thumb making circles inches below your pulsepoint. You thought you never, ever wanted to have this conversation, but now you understand this has been the only thing that’s been on your mind for months.

“You don’t mean that,” you croak into the darkness. You feel small and foolish, embarrassed for having a body that produces emotions.

“Don’t mean what, darling?” He’s still talking quietly, but firmer, providing a hook onto which you can grasp and fight the current in your mind. He knows this feeling, anxiety, and he hates how it looks on you.

“That you love me.”

Your words ring in the air, like the distinctive pitch of singing glass. You swallow that choking knot further down your throat and, wrenching your gaze down from the ceiling, finally look him in the eyes.

It’s the same look he blinked at you from the seats, there and gone so fast you partially convinced yourself you’d imagined it: profound, deep regret.

“You think I don’t love you?”

His tone makes you instantly feel guilty. Did you miss something? What if he texted it to you and you didn’t see it? Or wrote it in a note . . .

“You’ve never said it. At least not to me.”

And his face crumbles.

He slides off his haunches, feet dangling over the edge of the bed, his big shoulders curved.

Slowly, as if believing he has no right to, he touches your ankle, where he had rubbed away those painful marks in the hallway. He shakes his head, smirking darkly at himself.

“At the risk of sounding like a dramatic fucking actor, I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way.”

You sit up, unable to help yourself from curling up next to him, his grip adjusting to your thigh, instantly finding the heat of it beneath all the tulle. Cutting right to the core of you.

He gets this furtive glance when he’s thinking about something unpleasant, his eyes darting rapidly back and forth, as though unable to choose the right course of action. How much does he say, how much does he give away?

He rubs your dress material between his fingers.

“I’m older than you,” is how he starts. When your mouth twists open, ready with a litany of reasons why you don’t care, why no one should – reasons you’ve already said to him a dozen times – he meets your gaze and silences everything in your head. “And it’s not me they’re going to come for.”

The weight, the finality to his voice shoves that knot right back up your throat, your eyes hot and tight.

“I . . . I didn’t say it, outloud, because then we’d have to do something about it. I don’t want to keep us in the dark, but . . .” he swallows as if choking too. “But after the dox two years ago and then the incident in Austin, I feel like I’ll be putting you in physical harm when they find out we’re together. And I would literally rather die than have anything happen to you.”

He kisses your temple, the touch a consolation.

You don’t want to turn away, you want every kiss he gives you, but all you can feel are the studio’s words, the words of your managers, pressing down on you:

You know how some fans get. For your safety, let’s give it two years.

We’re happy for you, we really are, but you can’t be seen together too much. Minimal instagram, rare public appearances. We’re just trying to keep up appearances until the fans settle.

Appearances.

Aesthetics.

Image.

You’d happily kill anyone who tried to take him from you.

But you know he’s right.

“It has nothing to do with how I feel about you, what I feel for you,” he promises, voice warm, dipped in honey. “I just . . . I can’t lose you.”

“Then can you say it just this once? Just to me?” You try to smile but the tightening of your skin only spills the tears. “Please, Dieter, I won’t ask again. I have to hear it once from you. After that, I promise I–,”

His great warm palm covets the back of your neck, rolling you into him like melting chocolate drips onto the floor. He stops, inches from your mouth, so close you can feel your neutrons mix with his.

“I love you.”

Earnest, genuine, real.

A green beanie and a yellow jacket.

Chinese food and dreams of a better life. Of a happy life.

You steady yourself, your spinning world, against his hand around your cheek, clutching onto his wrist like it’s the last great lighthouse at the end of the world.

You open your eyes and, yes, yes, there is adoration in his smile, in the way he watches his words soothe some ache inside of you with joy.

“I love you too,” you tell him, in case it wasn’t obvious. If somehow he couldn’t smell your obsession for him. “I love you,” you say again, firmly.

It’s an inevitable sort of fall, his mouth into yours.

Like neutron stars collapsing together, alone and quiet in the far reaches of space.

Like the stone bones of an ancient church cracking and tipping into the sea as time and erosion eats away at a once great monument.

Like the spinning metal within a compass, never failing to find north, to find home.

When you awake next to him the next morning, warm in a way that goes behind physical body heat, he kisses your nose.

I love you, he tells you, with his words, with his body. With the dozens of ways he’s been mulling over in his mind to keep you safe and make you his for everyone to see.

I love you, he tells you that morning.

And every morning after that.

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sungbeam · 2 years

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AHH REQUESTS OPEN?? omgomg OK could you perhaps write an angsty yeonjun friends to lovers drabble with a happy ending <//3 like reader and jun are best friends but one night they kiss and either reader or yeonjun completely freaks out over it and starts avoiding the other until they realize they’re in love w the other and need each other SORRY IM SUCH A SUCKER FOR THE ANGSTY FRIENDS TO LOVERS TROPE😩😩😩 anyways if you decide to write this, please don’t rush yourself and take all the time you need duckie!!! have a good day 🤍🤍

𝗶𝘁 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘀 𝗺𝗲

choi yeonjun x gn!reader

2.5k words (sorry I KNOW i said 2k max but how can i not y'all), angst, fluff in the beginning if u squint, bffs2l, kithing, idk why but they cry at the end, barely proofread

a/n: nana !! thank u so much for ur request, my luv ^_^ i loved writing it sm i'm so honored to write u an angsty yeonjun fic <3 took much inspo from the vibes of "it kills me" by dxmentia and keshi so yeah (_ _;)

"Ow."

Choi Yeonjun clicked his tongue, his lips pursing into a cooing pout. "Sorry, honey."

You suppressed your wince and prayed to god he couldn't see your pink-dusted cheeks. Or at least, maybe he would think it was from all the pain coming from your recently pierced ears. No matter how gentle Yeonjun was (and trust that he was incredibly gentle with you), the rubbing alcohol would simply never cease to bring you great pain as it rid your piercings of bacteria and infection. "It's okay. Not your fault. It just kinda hurt."

"You're doing really well," he murmured under his breath. He was so close to you that you could feel his body heat, but he had claimed he had to be so close because the bathroom light was so dim and because he didn't want to miss any blood. Then came his constant praises as he helped you through the process, "It looks good so far, Yn-ie."

You sighed in relief as he stepped away and tossed the soiled cotton swab into the trash. "Does it?" You peered into the mirror and took a peek at your reddened earlobes, studded in sterling silver earrings.

Yeonjun appeared beside you again and nodded his head. He had even swapped his main earrings to match your studs. Your best friend currently boasted a whopping five piercings, and he'd even thought of an eyebrow piercing at one point. But, as you stared at his pretty, sculpted face, you realized how much you appreciated his decision to only get an eyebrow slit.

Only. Tch. As if it was something small. It amazed you how attractive such a little thing could be on a person, but you also couldn't help but admit that everything about your best friend was attractive. Even in the dim, cruddy light of his bathroom, he somehow glowed like a sculpture under display lights.

Yeonjun caught your eyes in the mirror—smiled. His eyes crinkled at the corners, and he leaned against the wall next to the door. You wished he hadn't folded his arms across his chest, because now, all you saw were his arms. And his chest. And his smile. And his— "You should get an upper cartilage piercing on your left side," he suggested mindlessly, eyes intent on your face. "Like mine."

You leaned your hip against the bathroom counter. "Okay, slow down, mister. Let's make sure these ones are successful first." You gestured to the studs in your earlobes now.

He pushed off the wall and stepped into your space, teeth capturing his bottom lip. "It'll be fine," he said with a roll of his eyes. He raised his hand and gently brushed a strand of hair from your eyes. He was so close again.

"Didn't your second ones almost get infected, like, four times?"

He deadpanned, and you giggled, head tilting back slightly.

Oh, if only you'd seen the stars in his eyes whenever he watched you laugh. It made his heart palpitate whenever he made you happy. (He just wished he could make you even happier.)

Yeonjun snapped out from his daze, clearing his throat. It was wrong to have feelings for you like he did, wasn't it? But what about all of your lingering stares? Did they mean anything like his did? "Laugh all you want, but they're still here, aren't they?"

You sobered into a wide grin. "Okay, okay. Whatever." You placed your palms on his chest and gave him a light push out of the bathroom door. "Now, out! I gotta do my things."

Yeonjun's bottom lip jutted out. "Aww, why can't I just do my night things while you do your night things?"

"Because you always insist on brushing each other's teeth?"

"It's not that weird."

You rolled your eyes. "Yes, yes it is that weird, Jun."

You stepped out of the bathroom for a moment, intent on going to grab something from your overnight bag. What you hadn't anticipated was the slight lift in the carpeting; you swore it hadn't been there before. Your foot hooked onto the crevice and your eyes widened as you were sent flying.

Yeonjun's instincts caught you, and your body hit his with an "oomf" falling from his lips. The both of you landed in a heap on the floor, but he had broken your fall, your body parallel over him. Your noses brushed, your hair fell over his forehead.

His eyelashes fluttered and he licked his lips with his eyes darting between your eyes and your mouth. "Yn…" he murmured, and you felt the delicate, but hesitant touch of his hand smoothing the hair on the back of your head.

He coaxed you down to him, his head lifting slightly to meet your lips.

You wondered if the heartbeat pulsing like a bass drum was yours or his or both of yours—your chests were pressed together like glue, sandwiched together and clinging to dear life. Yeonjun's head hit the carpet, and his fingers threaded in your hair, a small content hum spilling into your mouth.

That woke you up.

You rocketed off of him, quite literally scrambled away.

He seemed to realize the same thing when you noticed how wide his eyes had gotten. Yeonjun sat against his bed, his gaze settled on you as he waited with bated breath for your next move.

"I'm sorry," you choked out and fumbled to your feet. In a daze, you hurriedly grabbed your overnight bag from the foot of his bed.

"Yn—wait, Yn!" Yeonjun could only sit there and reach for you helplessly as you swept yourself out of his room, out of his apartment, as if you hadn't even been there in the first place.

The kiss had been a mistake, you'd told your roommate Yeji.

She had scoffed, and pressed, "You love him, Yn. That's what this is, isn't it?" But she'd drawn up a bath and put on a movie for you to make you feel better anyway.

You could hear the exasperation in her voice, but you didn't need her to tell you that to know. Harboring feelings like this for Yeonjun was always difficult when you spent so much time in his presence, hearing about his day, feeling his affectionate gestures, dealing with your heart skipping every time he did something as small as open the door for you. No, you definitely did not need Yeji to tell you that you were in love with him.

There was this certain uneasiness about you the next few days. The hair on the back of your neck was constantly standing up; you always felt colder, emptier, even with the fan off and sunlight streaming through the windows. There was something so miserable about having no notifications from your best friend, especially since a part of you hoped that you had dreamt the kiss and that it truly had been all your imagination.

But reality slammed back into you on Saturday morning.

Early Saturday morning grocery shopping had always been something that you and Yeonjun did together, but as you stood in the self check-out lane, mindlessly scanning your items and placing them in the bagging area, you tried imagining doing this all over again next week—alone.

The lane next to you opened up, and you had the sudden urge to look up.

Yours and Yeonjun's eyes met at once, a clashing of waves against a cliff face, the memory of that night resurfacing and lingering. He was swaddled in a hoodie with his dark hair hanging in his eyes, and you wondered if he'd lost sleep over that night like you had. Or maybe you were being dramatic, but you feared what came next.

"Hey," he said first, then abruptly cleared his throat.

You set a head of lettuce onto the scanner to be weighed. "Hi."

You went quiet when, after you'd moved the lettuce, Yeonjun stepped over and lifted the large carton of mangoes from the counter for you so you could scan it. He set the mangoes down in your shopping cart, and you continued on like clockwork. You hadn't asked, and you never needed to ask with him, and thus, you were left at a crossroads now. (How did one ask their best friend if they loved them back in a way that best friends shouldn't?)

Yeonjun went back to his own station and started checking out his selected items, while you pulled your wallet out to pay for yours.

"Thank you for the help," you murmured beneath the sound of the chirping register.

He bobbed his head, swallowed. "No problem."

And then you were ready to leave—your items were bagged up and loaded into the cart, you'd grabbed your receipt from the printer—but you lingered still. Because he wasn't done yet.

You bit your lip and drummed your fingers along the handle of your cart. Yeji's voice urging you to just tell him echoed in your mind, over and over again. When you opened your mouth to say something, he beat you to it.

"Your, uhm, piercing might be infected."

You blinked, then turned to him. Out of all the things he could've said… maybe you were hopeless. "Is it?" You twisted the urge to reach up and touch your piercings, and though you'd tried to clean them out these past few days like he showed you, perhaps you had missed a few spots.

Yeonjun hoisted the bags from his counter and walked out with you toward the exit. "It's a little red. I—" he stopped himself, hesitated. "Did you want to come over tonight?"

"Jun…"

He stopped to face you, and there in his expression, you saw the lines of desperation. This wasn't about the piercing or the infection. "I just wanna make sure you're okay."

And dear god, if you didn't want to make sure he was, too.

It was just a kiss, right?

You had been weighing the pros and cons of—well, whatever was going to happen next. It was less of pros and cons, and more of convincing yourself that you hadn't just ruined one of the relationships you cherished most in your life. Because when you realized that you full-blown, head-over-heels, oh-good-lord loved Choi Yeonjun… man, did the world cave in.

You inhaled deeply before slotting your copy of his apartment key into the lock and letting yourself in. The smell of spices and the crackling sound of sizzles erupted into your senses as you closed the door behind you. Just to your left, Yeonjun stood at the stove with his back to you, laboring over a pan of what you could guess was fried rice. He knocked the plastic spatula along the rim of the pan and set it down on the counter.

"Hey," he said over his shoulder while he shut off the hood range's fan. "Thanks for coming."

You nodded and fiddled with the hem of your shirt. "Thanks for having me." You didn't know what to do, where to sit, how to exist in this space for some reason.

Yeonjun walked toward you and rested his hand between your shoulder blades. "Let's take a look at your ears, hm?"

Of course, you wanted to say. Of course he would worry about you first.

The bathroom light was dim as it flickered on. The bottle of isopropyl had been sitting untouched in the corner of the medicine cabinet, and Yeonjun pulled it out and dipped the tip of a cotton swab into the clear liquid. His touch was gentle as the alcohol bit its way into the earring hole, cleaning out any of the build up that might have accumulated there.

You stared at the counter, your neck and head tilted to give him easy access so that he could see in the dim lighting. You wondered if the reason why he hovered a little farther away this time was because he didn't want to make you uncomfortable.

When he had finished cleaning up your piercings and confirmed that it wasn't infected just yet, you found yourself sitting across from him at his small table in the kitchen. Yeonjun set a bowl of fried rice in front of you, and you murmured out a small thank you. The steam rose to meet your face and you realized that the smell of the food he always made you had your body relaxing. Home-cooked meals were things that either you, Yeonjun, or the both of you made for each other—and with that in mind, you wondered once more, how could you think about a world without him around?

He settled in his seat, posture slumped, as he watched you take a bite. Then he picked up his spoon and picked at his own bowl. "Yn… are we cool?

Your spoon slowed on its way back into the bowl. When you looked at him, you found that he was waiting for your answer with a nervous sheen in his eyes. You set your spoon down to play with a stray thread on your jacket sleeve. "I think so."

"You think so," he echoed, but it sounded empty, as if he was uncertain if he heard you correctly. He scratched the side of his face, his jaw clenched in thought. "The—the kiss, Yn."

You inwardly winced. "Yeah."

He was fumbling for words. "I—I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable or step over boundaries, and I… I totally get it if you hate me for it. I just thought that was…" His voice died, lost its confidence, as he met your gaze again. He whispered, "I just thought you liked me, too."

Oh, dear Lord. Did he just say too? Your head was spinning at how your heart thundered in your ribcage. "Jun, I don't just like you," you stammered. "I literally—I'm in love with you. And I could never hate you."

"But Yn, you just left—"

"I know," you cut in and your hands flew to your hair. "I'm sorry, Jun. I'm so sorry. I was just… I was just scared of what that might have meant, and I didn't wanna lose you." You heard your voice break at the lattermost words, and your vision was beginning to blur.

Yeonjun's chair rattled against the floor as he clambered out of his seat, then rounded the table to get to you. He was shaking his head, hands grabbing your face in his warm palms, begging you to look at him. His eyes were lined in gold from the warm light of the kitchen reflecting off the tears pooling.

"Oh, sweetheart," he rasped, kneeling before you. Both yours and his hands shook in the other's hold, lips quivering. "Christ, I thought I lost you, Yn."

You shook your head back and forth. "I love you," you repeated. "I dunno what I'd do without you."

His mouth pulled into a smile as he laughed through the tears now streaming down the slopes of his cheekbones. "Glad we're on the same page now."

He rose up a little to pull an extra chair closer to sit next to you. "I love you too, Yn," he promised, leaning toward you and ghosting his lips over yours. "I love you so much."

a/n: yeah,, , so that happened kdnfjd tbh i can't even tell if that was sad or not i can't even tell my own angst writing anymore T_T

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