even if it's just pretend
Title: even if it’s just pretend
Pairing: Kai/girl!Kyungsoo
Genre: angst
Length: 2145w
Summary: He comes back to her, one last time.
He comes back to her on a Thursday.
The fan in her family bookstore spins noisily overhead, blades cutting through the thick humidity of summer air. Her thumb caresses a spot on the page she’s reading, dark brown eyes scanning black ink, running along pure white paper like a squad on a mission. Don’t forget to lock up, says her father, his back to her when she nods in response, his lazy footsteps preceding the tinkle that accompanies the closing swing of the front door.
Evening begins to seep into the atmosphere, stealing the brightness of the skies peeping through the windows, replacing it with the muted beauty that only night can offer. She’s still reading, seated behind the counter with her legs crossed at the ankles, when the bell above the entrance rings again. ‘Welcome,’ she says, her voice escaping half-heartedly, her full attention still on the story she’s absorbed in.
‘Kyungsoo,’ says a male voice, deep and rich and so familiar it has her fingers shutting the book before her eyes even register who it is. When she does see him, her heart feels like it’s fluttering and afire all at once, a fresh blaze running rampant inside her chest.
It’s him.
Silhouetted against the last whispers of a typical beach-town day, hair tousled and smile still shy, is the boy she first fell in love with - and hasn’t seen since - exactly one summer ago.
It takes her three seconds to scramble out from behind her counter, rush up to the man, and sling her arms across his neck, face inches away from his.
It takes her five heartbeats to decide to tilt her head back and lean upward, her lips finding comfort in their long-lost companion.
‘Jongin.’
‘Kyungsoo.’
It takes her one kiss to decide - she never really fell out of love, in the first place.
(It takes another two before she realises that he doesn’t taste the same - and that he has the words three weeks pressed between their tongues.)
‘Everyone here seems to be doing good, still,’ says Jongin, large hand raking through uncombed hair. His body is draped across the length of Kyungsoo’s bed, limbs sprawled everywhere, the owner of the bed herself tangled up in them. His other hand is slung across her waist, and Kyungsoo feels herself almost sobbing at the feeling of that weight on her. It’s been so long.
‘Yeah,’ she answers, drawing circles on his forearm. There’s new ink on them, now - and when she recognises them as the first letters of the phrase nothing lasts forever, she withdraws her hand, fingers retreating into a fist. She presses her lips together. ‘Everyone’s been… Asking about you.’
Jongin rolls over, rests his head on her chest as gently as he can, and smiles. ‘Really?’ he asks, and when he feels her nod, his smile grows. ‘That’s good. I don’t like being forgotten.’ His second sentence is almost lost on Kyungsoo’s ears, his voice coming out so softly, but she hears. She hears, and her hand comes up instinctively to draw circles on his back.
‘Pride of the whole town,’ she muses, a wry half-smile dancing on her lips. ‘Nobody here’s ever going to forget the Kim Jongin. And you haven’t even debuted yet,’ she says. Her last few words come out tinged with bitterness, and she doesn’t mean to, but she can’t help herself. She’d lost her first love to opportunities she couldn’t rival and flashing lights that had blinded even her.
Of course she was bitter.
Jongin wasn’t hers anymore.
She holds him closer, and tries to uproot the thought that had begun to flourish inside her head.
‘Soon,’ says Jongin, after a long stretch of silence. He lifts his head up to look at her, rolls off to the side and props himself up on one arm, other hand reaching out to brush the hair off her forehead, out of her eyes. Her hair is still the same shade of dyed chestnut it was last summer, and it still smells like it used to, because some things - some things don’t change.
‘Soon?’ she questions, confusion drawing her brows together, making her forehead wrinkle. ‘What do you mean?’
‘My debut,’ he says, and the words slide off his lips so easily, it’s almost as if he’s unaware of how effectively they’d crush what little hope she had left in him.
What little hope she had left in them.
‘Debut,’ she repeats, rather dumbly, because she doesn’t really know what’s going on anymore, and her head is spinning, and she wants to push Jongin as far away as possible from her whilst still holding him close - and she knows that she should, but it’s so much harder doing things you need when you so desperately want the opposite.
She was stupid to hope, anyway.
‘I’ve recorded all my lines,’ he says, softly, his eyes darting around different points of her face, taking in the soft curve of her cheeks, the gentle curl of her eyelashes - taking in a view he’d lost sight of for a year. She can feel his attention on her, and it would normally make her squirm - but the words he’d just said to her make her freeze up instead, quiet disbelief sinking into her throat.
He sits up, tugs her along until she’s straddling him, his back against the wall, his face buried in her shoulder. He can feel, faintly, the urgent beating of her heart, can hear, just slightly, every hurried step her racing heart is taking.
He asks her anyway.
‘Come with me,’ he murmurs, into the skin of her collarbone, like it isn’t a big deal, like he isn’t asking more of her than she could possibly give him. She remains silent, arms draped over his shoulders, his hands tangling themselves in her hair. ‘You could do it too, you know. Audition, get in, train, live this dream. With me,’ he adds the last two words quietly, trails kisses on her skin instead, as if trying to let the words he’d just said soak right into her, imprint the idea he has on her very being.
She doesn’t say a word, just lets him keep kissing her, lets him trick her into thinking this could last. The clock on her wall keeps steady time, in sharp contrast to the chaos brewing in her chest, the chaos that’s growing with every steady tick of a second that goes by.
One, two, three.
He lays her down and wraps himself up in her, and she takes him in so easily, so completely, as if she were an incomplete puzzle and he, the piece she had been waiting for for a long, long time.
She never tells him that the dream he mentioned is entirely his own - one she doesn’t share, and one she’ll never share. One that will, ultimately, tear them apart.
(He knows.)
They spend the next few days in much the same way, Jongin coming around to her bookstore to keep her company, Jongin saying things to make her laugh, Jongin smiling at her the way he used to. When night comes, they switch off all the lights, lock up and share private kisses in alleyways along the way home, eat dinner together, fall asleep in each other’s arms.
Sometimes they make love, other times, Jongin just takes and Kyungsoo just gives.
Their ending looms ever closer, its darkness beginning to creep into their little bubble of warmth and light, but neither of them say anything about it.
The future is coming for them, and Kyungsoo knows there isn’t anything she can do to save her from this heartbreak.
(The only way is to leave Jongin now, she knows, but she also knows he’s never coming back.
She decides spending whatever time she’s allowed left with him will leave her with less regrets.
The pain , when it comes, will be secondary.)
The night before his departure comes much too soon, its darkness riding on the tailcoats of the flames that have reignited in Kyungsoo’s heart for Jongin. The day wasn’t any better - she couldn’t look at him, refused to so much as kiss him back when he pushed their lips together - and already she feels pools of regret welling up in the pit of her stomach, threatening to drown her in it, threatening to suffocate her from the inside out.
Her fingers tremble when she locks up, her lip doing much the same. Her eyes fly to the pavement the moment she’s done, and she looks the opposite way when Jongin laces their fingers together. It takes her a while to notice that he isn’t leading her home, or into town, the way she’s used to on nights like this. Instead, he’s leading her down to the beach, his feet picking the way by a memory that’s rusted somewhat over the duration of time that he’d been gone.
He leads her down the stairs leading to the main beach, takes one look at the scenery before him, and takes a deep breath. It smells of salt and sea, and the moon hangs so nicely overhead, framed by stars against a background of midnight blue, and Kyungsoo makes the mistake of looking over at the boy who’s holding her hand and seeing that he’s looking at the scene in front of him like a child.
She lets her gaze linger for a minute too long, but it doesn’t matter. He begins to walk towards the shore, kicks his shoes off as he goes.
His hand is still intertwined with hers.
He pulls her. She lets him.
He leads, she follows.
He stops when the waves break just under their feet, presses their bodies together, forehead to forehead, palm to palm. She wants to say heart to heart, but she isn’t that stupid, not anymore. She knows he won’t let her in again. Not there.
Tell me you love me is whispered in her ear, and there’s no hesitation when she lets the words loosen her lips, tie up her heart instead. She looks him in the eye and says, ‘say it back.’
There’s something intense hiding in the shadows of his eyes, and he doesn’t drop his gaze when he asks her to leave with him.
She doesn’t say anything, just buries her face in his chest and shakes her head. She can feel his heartbeat under her ear.
He takes one of her hands and makes her fingers brush against the skin of his forearm.
Nothing lasts forever.
He leaves again the next morning, as soundlessly as how the darkness of the night lifts to give way to light. She wakes up to an empty bed, an empty room, and a renewed coldness in her heart. She’d seen it coming, of course she did.
It doesn’t stop her from gathering her covers up into a ball, into something she can hug, something she can hold and pretend that it’s warming her as much as his body used to.
She drifts back to sleep after tears dampen her pillow.
She’d seen it coming.
‘Have you heard of that new boy band SM debuted?’
‘I heard the Kims’ boy is the dancer!’
‘He’s pretty good! I was impressed!’
Kyungsoo bites her lip as a couple of middle-aged women enter the store, the heels of their shoes clicking noisily against hardwood floor. They bustle off into the fiction section, and she feels her shoulders slump and her greeting smile fade.
It’s been a month since she’d last seen Jongin, a week since his face began appearing all over Korea, all tight pants and styled hair, his practiced smile feeling so fake and foreign, even though she’d only been able to see it on screen.
She scrolls through her Twitter feed, sees her high school friends talking about Jongin’s debut!, what the fuck did they do to his hair?, and photos and screenshots and she wants to ignore him, but.
But she opens a photo anyway, traces the line of his jaw with her finger.
He looks different, but the same all at once. As her finger travels along the screen, she imagines how warm his skin felt under hers, how much he made her feel even when she knew it wouldn’t end well. She knew he’d leave her in shambles, but.
But when she opens another link, watches a video of him dancing, she sees that glint in his eye, the one that only emerged when he was really, really happy.
She smiles, shakes her head and clicks her phone off before she deposits it in her pocket.
Some things are worth sacrificing for, she thinks.
Author’s Note: Based off Wildest Dreams by Taylor Swift.
I might… Write… a prequel. Based on Photograph by Ed Sheeran. For. Project Multiply.
(I hope you guys like the song!!! IT’S SO GOOD IT MAKES ME SO EMOTIONAL and I CANNOT HANDLE and I hope… you recover from the pain of that song… and… have a good rest of the day orz)
:)
ask.fm
Pairing: Kai/girl!Kyungsoo
Genre: angst
Length: 2145w
Summary: He comes back to her, one last time.
He comes back to her on a Thursday.
The fan in her family bookstore spins noisily overhead, blades cutting through the thick humidity of summer air. Her thumb caresses a spot on the page she’s reading, dark brown eyes scanning black ink, running along pure white paper like a squad on a mission. Don’t forget to lock up, says her father, his back to her when she nods in response, his lazy footsteps preceding the tinkle that accompanies the closing swing of the front door.
Evening begins to seep into the atmosphere, stealing the brightness of the skies peeping through the windows, replacing it with the muted beauty that only night can offer. She’s still reading, seated behind the counter with her legs crossed at the ankles, when the bell above the entrance rings again. ‘Welcome,’ she says, her voice escaping half-heartedly, her full attention still on the story she’s absorbed in.
‘Kyungsoo,’ says a male voice, deep and rich and so familiar it has her fingers shutting the book before her eyes even register who it is. When she does see him, her heart feels like it’s fluttering and afire all at once, a fresh blaze running rampant inside her chest.
It’s him.
Silhouetted against the last whispers of a typical beach-town day, hair tousled and smile still shy, is the boy she first fell in love with - and hasn’t seen since - exactly one summer ago.
It takes her three seconds to scramble out from behind her counter, rush up to the man, and sling her arms across his neck, face inches away from his.
It takes her five heartbeats to decide to tilt her head back and lean upward, her lips finding comfort in their long-lost companion.
‘Jongin.’
‘Kyungsoo.’
It takes her one kiss to decide - she never really fell out of love, in the first place.
(It takes another two before she realises that he doesn’t taste the same - and that he has the words three weeks pressed between their tongues.)
‘Everyone here seems to be doing good, still,’ says Jongin, large hand raking through uncombed hair. His body is draped across the length of Kyungsoo’s bed, limbs sprawled everywhere, the owner of the bed herself tangled up in them. His other hand is slung across her waist, and Kyungsoo feels herself almost sobbing at the feeling of that weight on her. It’s been so long.
‘Yeah,’ she answers, drawing circles on his forearm. There’s new ink on them, now - and when she recognises them as the first letters of the phrase nothing lasts forever, she withdraws her hand, fingers retreating into a fist. She presses her lips together. ‘Everyone’s been… Asking about you.’
Jongin rolls over, rests his head on her chest as gently as he can, and smiles. ‘Really?’ he asks, and when he feels her nod, his smile grows. ‘That’s good. I don’t like being forgotten.’ His second sentence is almost lost on Kyungsoo’s ears, his voice coming out so softly, but she hears. She hears, and her hand comes up instinctively to draw circles on his back.
‘Pride of the whole town,’ she muses, a wry half-smile dancing on her lips. ‘Nobody here’s ever going to forget the Kim Jongin. And you haven’t even debuted yet,’ she says. Her last few words come out tinged with bitterness, and she doesn’t mean to, but she can’t help herself. She’d lost her first love to opportunities she couldn’t rival and flashing lights that had blinded even her.
Of course she was bitter.
Jongin wasn’t hers anymore.
She holds him closer, and tries to uproot the thought that had begun to flourish inside her head.
‘Soon,’ says Jongin, after a long stretch of silence. He lifts his head up to look at her, rolls off to the side and props himself up on one arm, other hand reaching out to brush the hair off her forehead, out of her eyes. Her hair is still the same shade of dyed chestnut it was last summer, and it still smells like it used to, because some things - some things don’t change.
‘Soon?’ she questions, confusion drawing her brows together, making her forehead wrinkle. ‘What do you mean?’
‘My debut,’ he says, and the words slide off his lips so easily, it’s almost as if he’s unaware of how effectively they’d crush what little hope she had left in him.
What little hope she had left in them.
‘Debut,’ she repeats, rather dumbly, because she doesn’t really know what’s going on anymore, and her head is spinning, and she wants to push Jongin as far away as possible from her whilst still holding him close - and she knows that she should, but it’s so much harder doing things you need when you so desperately want the opposite.
She was stupid to hope, anyway.
‘I’ve recorded all my lines,’ he says, softly, his eyes darting around different points of her face, taking in the soft curve of her cheeks, the gentle curl of her eyelashes - taking in a view he’d lost sight of for a year. She can feel his attention on her, and it would normally make her squirm - but the words he’d just said to her make her freeze up instead, quiet disbelief sinking into her throat.
He sits up, tugs her along until she’s straddling him, his back against the wall, his face buried in her shoulder. He can feel, faintly, the urgent beating of her heart, can hear, just slightly, every hurried step her racing heart is taking.
He asks her anyway.
‘Come with me,’ he murmurs, into the skin of her collarbone, like it isn’t a big deal, like he isn’t asking more of her than she could possibly give him. She remains silent, arms draped over his shoulders, his hands tangling themselves in her hair. ‘You could do it too, you know. Audition, get in, train, live this dream. With me,’ he adds the last two words quietly, trails kisses on her skin instead, as if trying to let the words he’d just said soak right into her, imprint the idea he has on her very being.
She doesn’t say a word, just lets him keep kissing her, lets him trick her into thinking this could last. The clock on her wall keeps steady time, in sharp contrast to the chaos brewing in her chest, the chaos that’s growing with every steady tick of a second that goes by.
One, two, three.
He lays her down and wraps himself up in her, and she takes him in so easily, so completely, as if she were an incomplete puzzle and he, the piece she had been waiting for for a long, long time.
She never tells him that the dream he mentioned is entirely his own - one she doesn’t share, and one she’ll never share. One that will, ultimately, tear them apart.
(He knows.)
They spend the next few days in much the same way, Jongin coming around to her bookstore to keep her company, Jongin saying things to make her laugh, Jongin smiling at her the way he used to. When night comes, they switch off all the lights, lock up and share private kisses in alleyways along the way home, eat dinner together, fall asleep in each other’s arms.
Sometimes they make love, other times, Jongin just takes and Kyungsoo just gives.
Their ending looms ever closer, its darkness beginning to creep into their little bubble of warmth and light, but neither of them say anything about it.
The future is coming for them, and Kyungsoo knows there isn’t anything she can do to save her from this heartbreak.
(The only way is to leave Jongin now, she knows, but she also knows he’s never coming back.
She decides spending whatever time she’s allowed left with him will leave her with less regrets.
The pain , when it comes, will be secondary.)
The night before his departure comes much too soon, its darkness riding on the tailcoats of the flames that have reignited in Kyungsoo’s heart for Jongin. The day wasn’t any better - she couldn’t look at him, refused to so much as kiss him back when he pushed their lips together - and already she feels pools of regret welling up in the pit of her stomach, threatening to drown her in it, threatening to suffocate her from the inside out.
Her fingers tremble when she locks up, her lip doing much the same. Her eyes fly to the pavement the moment she’s done, and she looks the opposite way when Jongin laces their fingers together. It takes her a while to notice that he isn’t leading her home, or into town, the way she’s used to on nights like this. Instead, he’s leading her down to the beach, his feet picking the way by a memory that’s rusted somewhat over the duration of time that he’d been gone.
He leads her down the stairs leading to the main beach, takes one look at the scenery before him, and takes a deep breath. It smells of salt and sea, and the moon hangs so nicely overhead, framed by stars against a background of midnight blue, and Kyungsoo makes the mistake of looking over at the boy who’s holding her hand and seeing that he’s looking at the scene in front of him like a child.
She lets her gaze linger for a minute too long, but it doesn’t matter. He begins to walk towards the shore, kicks his shoes off as he goes.
His hand is still intertwined with hers.
He pulls her. She lets him.
He leads, she follows.
He stops when the waves break just under their feet, presses their bodies together, forehead to forehead, palm to palm. She wants to say heart to heart, but she isn’t that stupid, not anymore. She knows he won’t let her in again. Not there.
Tell me you love me is whispered in her ear, and there’s no hesitation when she lets the words loosen her lips, tie up her heart instead. She looks him in the eye and says, ‘say it back.’
There’s something intense hiding in the shadows of his eyes, and he doesn’t drop his gaze when he asks her to leave with him.
She doesn’t say anything, just buries her face in his chest and shakes her head. She can feel his heartbeat under her ear.
He takes one of her hands and makes her fingers brush against the skin of his forearm.
Nothing lasts forever.
He leaves again the next morning, as soundlessly as how the darkness of the night lifts to give way to light. She wakes up to an empty bed, an empty room, and a renewed coldness in her heart. She’d seen it coming, of course she did.
It doesn’t stop her from gathering her covers up into a ball, into something she can hug, something she can hold and pretend that it’s warming her as much as his body used to.
She drifts back to sleep after tears dampen her pillow.
She’d seen it coming.
‘Have you heard of that new boy band SM debuted?’
‘I heard the Kims’ boy is the dancer!’
‘He’s pretty good! I was impressed!’
Kyungsoo bites her lip as a couple of middle-aged women enter the store, the heels of their shoes clicking noisily against hardwood floor. They bustle off into the fiction section, and she feels her shoulders slump and her greeting smile fade.
It’s been a month since she’d last seen Jongin, a week since his face began appearing all over Korea, all tight pants and styled hair, his practiced smile feeling so fake and foreign, even though she’d only been able to see it on screen.
She scrolls through her Twitter feed, sees her high school friends talking about Jongin’s debut!, what the fuck did they do to his hair?, and photos and screenshots and she wants to ignore him, but.
But she opens a photo anyway, traces the line of his jaw with her finger.
He looks different, but the same all at once. As her finger travels along the screen, she imagines how warm his skin felt under hers, how much he made her feel even when she knew it wouldn’t end well. She knew he’d leave her in shambles, but.
But when she opens another link, watches a video of him dancing, she sees that glint in his eye, the one that only emerged when he was really, really happy.
She smiles, shakes her head and clicks her phone off before she deposits it in her pocket.
Some things are worth sacrificing for, she thinks.
Author’s Note: Based off Wildest Dreams by Taylor Swift.
I might… Write… a prequel. Based on Photograph by Ed Sheeran. For. Project Multiply.
(I hope you guys like the song!!! IT’S SO GOOD IT MAKES ME SO EMOTIONAL and I CANNOT HANDLE and I hope… you recover from the pain of that song… and… have a good rest of the day orz)
:)
ask.fm