[kaisoo] sweet on the tip of my tongue
sweet on the tip of my tongue; jongin/girl!kyungsoo | pg | ~3700w
au, romance | highschool!au where jongin is supposedly the perfect boy and is trying to get kyungsoo to go out with him. that’s it.
✧
kyungsoo first notices him on the first day of her second year of high school. to her, he’s the classic epitome of perfect: tanned skin sunkissed and healthy-looking, complimenting his soft black hair just right. wide eyes so expressive and crinkled up in a laugh that shows almost all of his white teeth. a nice smile, cheery and bright. he’s everything she’s ever dreamed her future boyfriend would be in terms of looks, all princely demeanour and charming smiles, and she’d be lying if she said her heart didn’t flutter a little at the sight of him.
she finds out that he’s in her korean literature class when she turns the doorknob of the classroom, steps in and the first person she sees is him. he looks up when she enters and flashes another of those brilliant smiles and kyungsoo feels her heart melt right there and then.
the teacher makes them introduce themselves individually to the class, citing the first day of school as the reason why she’s even bothering with it, and kyungsoo discovers that the boy’s name is jongin and he has a nice voice, all soft and melodious unlike the rough tones of the crass boys she grew up with in middle school. she learns that she really likes the way he stands all prim and proper, like he’s been brought up like a gentleman unlike most of the hooligans she knows. she finds out that he likes a lot of the same things she does, like the books they read and the music they listen to, and a tiny part of her mind wonders about the what-ifs, the endless possibilities, but just as fast as the dreamy thoughts enter her head reason and logic quash them like flies.
we’re all shallow like that, she argues with herself inwardly even as she beats herself up for falling prey to good looks so easily, hook line and sinker.
✧
jongin first notices her when she trips over in the corridors sometime in the second week of school. he sees it all happen seemingly in slow motion - he’s joking around with some of his friends but they’ve moved onto a new conversation topic he doesn’t understand, so he looks around the hallways in hope of finding something to distract him with just so he won’t be The Awkward Friend. she’s approaching their classroom, head turned toward another of her friends trailing behind and she’s laughing, probably saying something like hurry up, hey, we’re going to be late when all of a sudden she steps on her shoelaces and somehow loses all her balance, causing herself to pitch forwards and land with a hard ‘thump’ on her knees on the unyielding cement tiles of the school floor. all of her papers and files fly out of her hands and scatter, almost as if the hallway’s a vacuum they’re being sucked into.
he’s over by her side before he knows what’s happening, but then he attributes it to his upbringing, the way his parents taught him to have manners and act like a gentleman at every possible opportunity. he gathers up her papers, chasing after those which’ve blown away and extends a hand to help her up.
he doesn’t notice the blush on her face as she scurries away, but his friends do and they tease him about it endlessly for the rest of the week.
“hey, looks like you’ve got a new admirer,” chanyeol guffaws as he elbows him in the chest, but jongin shoves him back and vehemently denies anything of that sort.
(kyungsoo thinks she falls a little bit for jongin, really gives a tiny piece of her heart to him, that day in the hallway. in that moment she realises why exactly he’s so popular and well-liked by pretty much everyone: kim jongin is good-looking and everyone naturally gravitates to attractive people, it’s almost as if the law of the universe had dictated it to be so. but more importantly, kim jongin is also the sweetest, kindest boy she knows, the kind of boy who’ll sacrifice his saturday to head down to volunteer at animal adoption drives, the kind of boy who’d give a poorer student his lunch money if he thought they needed it more than he did. after all, he’s done it before, if the gossip flying around school is anything to be believed.)
✧
jongin first realises that kyungsoo’s cute when they have their first oral presentation of the semester. it’s a major individual assignment spanning over a long duration of four weeks, requiring intensive preparation work and research before actually being able to start on the presentation itself. somehow, kyungsoo’s name is drawn as the unlucky first person to kickstart the entire thing, and she sighs and rolls her eyes in indignation when the teacher pulls the slip of paper bearing her name from the mess of folded slips in her hands. everyone’s eyes are fixated on kyungsoo as she makes her way to the front, bottom lip jutting out just a little in an unconscious pout as she shuffles her cue cards nervously. still, when she gets there and starts talking, it’s almost as if her trepidation from just now disappears, almost as if someone had flipped a switch inside kyungsoo and turned her from nervous to confident.
when kyungsoo talks, her audience can somehow tell exactly what’s she’s feeling and thinking from the way her eyes look, the way they glimmer with suppressed laughter or broil over with sarcastic retorts bitten back for the sake of manners and cordiality. she also includes a lot of little hand motions to try and get her point across, gesticulating cutely with them as she defends her opinions against her classmates’ questions.
when she makes her way back to her seat at the end of it, jongin makes sure to catch her eye and flash her a little smile. he enjoys the shy smile that comes in return, her eyes averting themselves from his quickly but darting back just as fast to fix themselves on him once more.
✧
it’s just kyungsoo’s good luck (or bad, depending on how you see it) that she gets paired up to work with jongin on yet another assignment for their literature class. he wanders over to her desk, flashing her yet another of those smiles, and she bites her lip and blushes because, well, just /because/. it gets better, though, when she realises that jongin is actually really easy to talk to her, the conversation between them flowing smoothly as the discussion moves from work (because both of them are intelligent, analytical people and hence A+ literature students so they get their work done fast) to other things like their shared interest over the latest contemporary fiction novel and melodramatic coming-of-age teenage film. he even tells her a lame joke somewhere in between which makes her giggle and shove at him playfully, booing him. what’s even dorkier is that he pretends to fall over from her push, pretending that she actually has the power to hurt him physically when in reality kyungsoo’s pretty tiny, has a fist half the size of jongin’s and only comes up to his collarbone in terms of height at the very most.
(“what’s the coolest answer to a multiple choice question?”)
“i have no idea. care to enlighten me?”
he grabs a piece of scrap paper from her desk and one of her pens with cutesy designs all over it and if it looks odd in his hands, he doesn’t give any indication of finding it weird. “it’s…. drumroll please…” and kyungsoo rolls her eyes but obliges him anyway, tapping her palms on the tabletop lightly.
“B)” he draws on the paper, his small and rounded penmanship oddly neat for a teenage boy.
“you’re terrible. the joke itself is terrible.” kyungsoo tries to suppress the little grin that twitches at her lips but fails.)
at the end of the class, jongin gets up and stretches, working out the tense knots in his muscles and kyungsoo can’t help but stare at the endless expanse of his slim body, at all the grace and energy that lies packaged into sinewy muscles and long limbs. it’s almost as if everyone’s conspiring against her, providing her with these little pockets in time where she repeatedly realises how attractive jongin actually is. it’s not hard, actually, seeing as how it’s pretty much shoved in her face every single time she talks to him.
kyungsoo also tries very hard not to think about how much she likes this dorky version of kim jongin. in her opinion, his laughter and stupid jokes make him seem all the more lovable, but god forbid this crush get more serious than it already is.
“so, wanna exchange numbers?” jongin’s voice breaks into her subconscious again and oops, kyungsoo realises she’s just been preoccupied with jongin-thoughts when the real boy is right in front of her, talking to her and (assumedly) asking to exchange numbers. kyungsoo thinks this might just be the main reason why she’s never had a boyfriend.
“uh, yeah, sure,” she stammers, whipping out her own phone. “here, key in your number and i’ll text you.”
“okay,” jongin smiles, but it’s so different from his normal polite smile that kyungsoo sits up and take notice. this smile is almost shy, his eyes darting up to catch hers as he periodically looks up from her phone screen, and in typical kyungsoo fashion every time that happens she looks back down at the wooden table even though there’s nothing really fascinating about it, running a nervous hand through her wavy hair even as she tries to avoid his gaze.
“your hair’s fine,” kyungsoo hears jongin speak up again and not really comprehending what that sentence has to do with anything, she peers up at him and blinks in confusion.
“huh? what?”
“i mean.” jongin stammers, obviously caught off-guard. “your hair looks good to me, no need to keep fiddling with it. i mean. it looks nice like this, yeah. you should wear it down more often.”
kyungsoo doesn’t know what to say to that compliment because it’s so shy and awkward and sweet at the same time, so she awkwardly fumbles a little with her hands and settles for reclaiming her phone from jongin before promising to text him.
“now, hurry up, the tardy bell’s going to ring soon and i can’t be late for biology or the teacher’ll kill me. she’s a real bitch,” kyungsoo grumbles and jongin laughs, telling her not to be so rude. and so they leave the classroom together, all shy smiles and faint blushes. they separate at the junction, kyungsoo turning left to room 104 while jongin heads right to 120, but that doesn’t stop either of them from turning back to wave at the other before hurrying off to their next class.
✧
“if you really like her, you should just ask her out!” chanyeol yells at him during lunch period one day when he catches jongin staring at kyungsoo across the crowded cafeteria for the twelfth time that week.
“i don’t,” jongin mumbles. chanyeol makes an extremely unattractive “whaaaat” sound that goes just a little overboard with its incredulity.
“okay. maybe i do. just a little bit. or maybe more than a bit. i don’t know, i’m so confused??”
chanyeol smirks. “knew it. so, whatcha going to do?”
jongin groans and flops onto the table, unminding of how dirty it is. “i still don’t know. any ideas? i mean, i really want to tell her i like her, but then what if she doesn’t like me. and what’s more i’m the guy so i’m expected to do the confessing but what if i get rejected? ugh, being a guy is so hard.”
“there, there.” chanyeol pats him sympathetically on the back. “at least you’re not a girl, you’ll never have to go through being on your period.” well, surprise surprise - chanyeol is strangely perceptive for a stereotypical dumb best friend.
“man up, yo,” jongin’s other friend, sehun, mumbles through a mouthful of food. jongin cringes as he sees the half-chewed mess comprising of eggs, lettuce, tuna and bread swimming about in sehun’s mouth, trying hard to resist the urge to chide him for his bad manners. after all, jongin’s parents had brought him up that way, smacking him hard for every time he talked with his mouth full.
sehun swallows. “i mean, you’ve got to be brave, you know. if you don’t ask her out someone else is gonna do it and you’re just going to mope around not being able to forget her.”
chanyeol casts a judgemental look over at sehun, who’s gone back to trying to drown his sorrows in food. “ignore him, he’s just speaking from experience with luhan. sehun’s such a loser.”
jongin thinks that this chat with his friends hasn’t exactly helped him in coming up with a plan to ask kyungsoo out, so he’ll probably have to do it himself.
“what’s the use of having best friends if they can’t even help you get the girl you like,” he mumbles to himself disgruntledly.
“well excuse me,” sehun drawls, his mouth thankfully empty this time. “try cute pickup lines on her, girls seem to really like it. of course, you’ve gotta choose the right one, though, don’t pick those which are overly sexual. seems like it’ll just scare her away.”
“shut up,” jongin mutters, rubbing his temples to try and ward off the impending headache he’s sure is going to develop if sehun continues talking. sometimes, he really, really wonders why they’re friends. “i wouldn’t -- i mean, i’m not…”
“he’s not that kind of person, he’s too nice for that shit,” chanyeol finishes, slinging a brotherly arm around jongin’s shoulders. “don’t you dare go for the pickup line approach, just write her something from the bottom of your heart. something sincere, you know. she’d like that more.”
“whatever.” sehun rolls his eyes as he hears his suggestion being shot down and takes a vehement bite out of his sandwich once again.
✧
to be fair, jongin decides to try both ideas, beginning with sehun’s since it seems easier. and so, he spends his whole lunch period the next day hidden away in a tiny nook somewhere in the school library alone with his laptop and notebook, intensely combing google for suitable lines to use on kyungsoo.
“will you grab my arm, so i can tell my friends that i’ve been touched by an angel?”
“if i could rearrange the alphabet, i’d put u and i together.”
“do you have a map? because i can see myself getting lost in your eyes.”
jongin groans upon reading that last one - they’re all pretty cliched, definitely nothing he hasn’t seen before and he thinks kyungsoo deserves more than that, deserves something more than reused lines and tired words. suddenly, however, something springs into his mind and he jots it down in his notebook instantly, pen scribbling furiously against the stiff white page.
--
“your hand looks heavy. here, let me hold it for you,” he whispers in kyungsoo’s ear later on as they walk to their literature class. it’s become a habit, really - kyungsoo waits for jongin at the bottom of staircase E and they lead up to the room together (because after all they’re friends and that’s what friends do with each other. right). kyungsoo blushes, stumbles a little on the stairs and almost falls over in front of jongin all over again but thankfully his reflexes are faster this time and he grabs onto her, hand shooting out and clamping tight around her skinny forearm to prevent her from tripping. of course, this only makes kyungsoo blush harder and push her hair behind her ear nervously in that nervous tic she sometimes has, but she doesn’t pull away from him and so jongin takes it as a good sign, slowly manoeuvring his fingers down until they’re threading through the gaps of kyungsoo’s and closing around her digits gently.
jongin thinks they must look pretty odd like this, two figures stranded somewhere in the middle of the staircase with him holding her hand gingerly (like he’s afraid to break it) and her looking down at the floor with pink cheeks and heated face, but kyungsoo’s not running away or slapping him in the face and so he figures that it turned out pretty well.
they walk up the stairs like this, kyungsoo’s folders balanced in the crook of one arm. jongin doesn’t let go until they’re outside the door of the classroom.
--
kyungsoo wants to punch jongin in the face for fucking up her life like this, for whispering in her ear and making her think about his lovely pleasant voice, for delivering corny pickup lines that she likes anyway particularly because it’s jongin, for holding her hand in that protective, almost possessive way that makes her feel like she belongs to him when she doesn’t, when nothing’s confirmed yet, when she’s not sure if jongin is kidding around or doesn’t know just how much it means to her.
still, she can’t deny that the sensation of his hand in hers, large palm engulfing her own tiny one, the warmth of his own hand transferring itself to hers, hasn’t left her mind.
✧
it gets progressively more lovely but at the same time more painful after that. now every time their eyes meet kyungsoo blushes and looks away as fast as jongin can blink, but her eyes always gravitate back towards him when she thinks he’s not looking. it’s like he’s the sun and she’s just another planet trapped in his orbital pull, floating in circles around him, irresistibly drawn to him.
nowadays kyungsoo doesn’t text jongin with the easy familiarity they used to have; now it’s a lot of second-guessing and frantic deleting on her part just so she can formulate a perfect reply to his messages. it’s a lot of trying to impress jongin and present the best side of herself to him just so he’ll find her attractive, she supposes.
what kyungsoo realises, of course, is that liking a person as a friend is vastly different from falling in love with them. as a friend, you want to impress them, sure, but they’re not as essential to you as the latter is. when you’re in love with someone you want to keep them by your side forever, like they’re an integral portion of you you can’t be rid of. and for kyungsoo that vital part is jongin, the boy who stole her heart with perfect smiles and cute laughter, who took her breath away with kindness and chivalry.
the magnitude of this realisation scares her, if she were to be honest, yet at the same time also thrills her and makes her smile stupidly at thin air when she thinks nobody’s watching.
✧
i wanted to tell you that i have scars on the insides of my eyelids shaped
like your smile so that every time i wake up and open my eyes, i’m reminded
of my one and only reason for getting out of bed every morning.
i wanted to tell you that the way you blush makes my day
because every color spreading across your face is more enticing to watch
than any sunset, no matter how long it lasts.
i wanted to tell you that my breath is yours and always has been.
that you never took it away
because it was with you right from the beginning.
--
i like you. go out with me, please?
it’s 2am on a thursday morning and he has school in a few hours, but all that is irrelevant because jongin is finally done and he thinks that this, maybe, is good enough for kyungsoo, good enough for the girl who stole his heart with her petite stature he wants to shield from everything bad in the world and her wide eyes, the girl who took his breath away with her unexpectedly caustic humour and pricelessly adorable reactions.
✧
kyungsoo finds the note in her locker the next day, written on a blank white page that looks like it’s been torn out of a certain notebook belonging to a certain boy in her lit class, written in a certain penmanship with rounded letters all cramped together. her grin grows larger and larger as she reads on until finally, she’s reached the end and she finds herself smiling so brightly that her lips are stretched all the way across her face but who cares because kim jongin finally asked her out in the most beautiful way possible and everything is suddenly perfect in the world. there’s something strangely precious in this, in being so in love with someone that your heart hurts and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
she rips off a sheet of notebook paper (lined, A5 sized this time) and scribbles one word in red marker and capital letters.
yes.
✧
kyungsoo finds jongin waiting for her at the bottom of the staircase again, the familiar meeting place now her favorite location in the world. approaching him shyly, she holds up the piece of paper bearing her answer and sees the exact moment where he realises it for himself. the trepidation in his eyes dissipates and turns to delight instead and he laughs, rushing forward to meet her and taking her hand. kyungsoo watches his eyes crinkle fondly at her and she giggles too, pressing herself closer to him as she tries to convey her answer without words (yes, yes, a thousand times yes).
jongin just leans down to ruffle her hair lightly as kyungsoo bats him away, running fingers through it again to make sure it’s no longer mussed up. it’s hard to do so with only one hand, sure, but she thinks that she’d trade all the convenience in the world away just for more time with her hand in jongin’s.
the best part, of course, is that this time when they make their way up the staircase there is no longer any uncertainty and when they reach their classroom, jongin doesn’t let go.
end
+ screeching bc whAT IS GIRL!KYUNGSOO IM CRY. my excuse is that school is so ridiculously irritating i just want cute kaisoo fic. so.
+ also i didn’t think of that B) joke my friend was the one who told it to me
+ jongin’s poem actually wasn’t written by me, it was taken from this tumblr blog and wow, she’s insanely talented. her poems were actually what spawned this fic. well, her poems + that terrible pick-up line. go check out her writing ;w;
+ p.s. welcome to my new fic comm!! \o/ yehet