Chapter Text
Deok Sun sometimes thinks that time and love cannot be friends.
Most days they don’t meet. Deok Sun travels from city to city to city until she walks unsteadily on flat ground. Taek is still Taek, gone for weeks of long matches and little sleep. On the rare days they meet, they walk the alleys of Ssangmun Dong, fingers intertwined and smiles like a secret.
“Do you think time will stop if we stop moving?” Deok Sun says once through sleepy eyes. Taek simply smiles and runs his hands through the hair spilled onto his lap.
“I think airports are a place without time. The empty seats. The running. The bright lights. You lose track.” Deok Sun has lost her sleep cycle completely. She uses Taek for now, his fingers stroking her hair until she falls asleep faster than the pills he used to take, muttering a stream of unbaked thoughts.
“Is that why your airline is always late?”
A beat.
“Yah!” Deok Sun sits up and smacks Choi Taek 9-dan’s arm, pushing them onto the floor. “Ow! Okay, okay, I’m sorry” Taek laughs and catches her wrists. He holds on, running his thumb across her pulse.
Deok Sun’s breath hitches. They are close. Her hair is brushing his face. They hold their gaze, a little guilty a little excited and mostly wanting. Deok Sun remembers Taek kissing her in his room, his hotel room, his car and how she is always kissed and how he looked certain right before he kissed her but she feels certain now. She thinks of how she had come to his room, brought up the dream that was not a dream and told him she loved him and even if he kisses her first she is the one who comes to him. Not this time, she thinks, pressing her lips to the boy below her.
Deok Sun thinks that there are three types of kisses. Soft ones that stretch out forever, born from a simmering want, still and loving and timeless. There are firmer and shorter ones, born of the moment, charged with its feelings of elation, gratitude and assurance. Then there is this, something more physical and visceral, bodies pressed closed and hands drifting from their hair, their back, their neck, their face.
They are a tangle of limbs on the floor now, kissing lips and jaws. Sometimes Taek will fit his lips on Deok Suns neck like he had all those tired nights but no. Not like that. Because he hadn’t been kissing her then. He hadn’t been grazing his teeth down her pulse. He hadn’t pulled her so close. And Oh. That was new. The kisses on her sternum. His hands slipping onto her thighs.
“Taek-ah” Dong Ryong’s voice calls from the foyer. They part in shock, hastily fixing their clothes and hair and the blanket tangled between them. Deok Sun plays the tape she had brought and when Dong Ryong enters the room bearing bowls of jjangmyeon, he finds them cross legged on the floor, Jurassic Park playing on the television. They don’t quite meet eyes again that night. Still, Deok Sun can feel his gaze burning holes into her back as she walks home.
It’s hard, she thinks that night, curled away from A snoring Bo Ra. It’s hard to miss out on all the time she wants with him. It’s hard to sneak around, hold hands loosely, stand apart, meet the eyes of other people when she could look at him smiling. But their parents are still reeling from Sun Woo and Bo Ra. Still, there are surprising benefits to staying hidden.
The way the thrill of hid shadowed car in the evenings made him kiss her harder. The way she could hide away his pages for herself. The way they could sleep on each other’s laps and talk about their day without disapproving eyes. The way she could simply enter his room and close the door. The way he was hers and only hers like nothing else had ever been.
Maybe time and love could not be friends but these amiable moments they stole were good enough.