He groans into my mouth, and I use that moment to push back, trying to take control again. But Han is stronger than he looks, and for once, he's not letting me win.
"Frustrated?" he murmurs between kisses, smirking against my lips.
I bite at his jaw...
A/N: 8.2k words everyone. Eight thousand two hundred words.
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I've always feared change. Feared it like a child fears the dark, like a wounded animal fears the reaching hand of a stranger—like something inevitable that will gut me if I let it in.
Change has broken me one too many times before. It has taken pieces of me I'll never get back, stolen things I didn't realize I couldn't live without until they were gone. So I did what I had to do. I built walls. I made rules. I locked doors and never dared to open them again. I convinced myself that if I kept everything exactly the same—if I held people close enough, controlled the pieces of my life with a tight enough grip—nothing would fall apart again. I told myself I could stop the world from shifting beneath my feet if I just held on hard enough.
But all I ever did was hold onto a lie.
Not rejecting Seo when I should have, letting him in even when my heart didn't want to, forcing myself to love him simply because I was too scared of what losing him might mean—it was proof of that. God, I was so fucking afraid of change that I convinced myself the worst thing I could do was let go. I thought holding onto someone—even dishonestly, even unfairly—was better than the possibility of them slipping through my fingers. That losing someone by choice was worse than losing them in any other way. And now, looking back, I see how stupid it was. How cruel it was.
Because the truth is, I didn't do it for him. I did it for me.
I didn't want to lose him. I was so desperate to keep things the way they were that I was willing to fake my own emotions, to shape myself into something I wasn't, just to avoid the ache of another absence. Because I knew what absence felt like. I knew what change could do to a person. I saw what it did to Soobin, how she unraveled under the weight of her own heartbreak, how she made the kind of choice you can't take back.
I told myself that if I did what Hyunjin did—if I rejected someone who had given me their heart, if I chose honesty instead of lies—then maybe I'd get the same outcome. Maybe I'd be the reason someone decided they couldn't exist anymore. Maybe their death would be on my hands.
But now, standing here in the wreckage of my own mistakes, I finally understand.
What happened to Soobin was not Hyunjin's fault. It never was.
He didn't kill her by telling her the truth. He didn't push her off that ledge by choosing himself, by being honest about his heart. She made that choice on her own. She decided, somewhere deep in the places none of us could reach, that she couldn't stay. And that was not his burden to carry. It never should have been.
And fuck, for so many years, I've needed change. I've needed to let go, to stop clinging to things that aren't real, to stop forcing myself into places where I don't belong. But instead, I fought it. I resisted. I twisted myself into someone unrecognizable just to keep the past from slipping through my fingers.
