note: Thank you for the overwhelming love you guys gave for the last chapter! I don't know how this chapter will fare with you guys in comparison, but I preemptively apologize if anyone's greatly disappointed lmao. I'm really trying to play it by ear here, because I did say it would take some time before they get together, but apparently the ideas in my head got impatient, too, and wanted a little more /action/ from the two of them haha. But hey, we're barely even halfway through the pregnancy, so there's still a lot of things that could happen /ominous smile/.

Also! lol I've never been quite 100% sure if Jihyo still lives with her family or if she's moved out on her own (I'm leaning towards the former), but for the purpose of this fic, let's conclude that she's been living in her own apartment since, like, mid-2017 lmao.

Again, thank you for all the new subscribers/comments/votes! You guys are always such mood-lifters!

+

She wakes up to a full bladder and the sound of water running, which consequently heightens her urge to pee, so she shucks her blankets off her legs and pads her feet groggily across her room, thinking that it was way too early for this in her pregnancy—and her day, really, because the sun hasn't even risen up yet, even with the peak of summer, so she knows it's not any later than five at the moment—and that she probably needs to call in the building's super, no reason for her faucet to leak when she makes sure to turn it off every single night before she goes to bed.

Until she reaches her bathroom and sees Kang Gary, shirtless and bed-headed, splashing water on his face, and the significant part of her brain that's been muddled by sleep switches into gear, her cognizance rearing back to life, and she thinks, oh, thinks, I had with Kang Gary, thinks, again? thinks, no wonder why I feel so great, thinks, oh my god what the  are you thinking—

"Oh, hey. Morning." Gary, who's thankfully unaware of her mental monologue and concomitant crisis, only grins at her lazily when he realizes that she's there, and she thinks, who needs the sun when you have that?, thinks, he really does look good wet, thinks, seriously, just stop thinking. "Did I wake you up?"

"I need to pee," she says, because her mind doesn't have a filter after just waking up, and apparently, neither does . "Why are you awake so early?" That was a safe question, not leading in any way to...it. She really needs to stop calling it it. She's an adult, and she's mature enough to handle things like one, and considering that this was already the second time they've done it—okay, stopping. 

"Not everyone can sleep all day like you do," he says, smile turning teasing, and a droplet of water trickles down from his cheek to his mouth that he off with a dart of his tongue, reminds her of everything else he'd last night, and her gut coils and her eyes fasten onto the tattoo on his chest instead, because this wasn't the plan; the plan was to sleep with him and get her hormones sated and then get over whatever infatuation it is she's been harboring for him, not to find him even more tolerable and charming and, god forbid, enticing, than she'd had prior to all of this.

She's been thinking this a lot, recently, probably to the point of overkill, but nothing else can succinctly describe what she's feeling other than the timeless sentiment of what the .

He must sense the impending awkwardness as well, because his smile tapers off a bit, turns a little wooden, and he averts his gaze too, swipes a hand down his face to try and wipe off the remaining moisture on his skin.

"I'll get you a towel," she says, finally tasked with something to do besides marvel at the contours of his biceps, his pecs—he still has no abs, she'd found, when she'd passed a hand down his stomach on the way to other...things, but everything else says that he's been working out, and that's not hot, or anything, she doesn't find him hot, no—but he catches her hand in his before she can fully turn to leave and forces her to swivel back around from the unnatural flexion it puts her arm in.

"Sorry," he says, hastily letting her hand go to balance her with both of his own, gripped on either side of her elbows. She knows he wasn't pulling her, so it's no big deal, but she still refuses to look up past the level of his tattoos, which he probably figures out is intentional, because he releases his hold on her arms with a sigh and says, "We should probably...talk. About last night."

"What about it?" she says, leaning her shoulder on the jamb of the door, hoping for it to look casual rather than the support she needs to keep herself from fidgeting around in nervousness and discomfort about what it all could mean. Thinking in retrospect, nothing had really been made clear last night; she still doesn't know what he wants besides being a father to their child, still doesn't know what she herself expects from the two of them together besides a mutual physical attraction—or so she guesses, because last night had been fantastic, and she doesn't know if that's just the hormones or the four months she's gone without or because it's him, specifically, who's just that good in bed—and now that she's finally kept her libido in check, she's not entirely sure if she even wants to know the answer, scared of—scared of a lot of things, scared of the same monsters she'd always been scared of before. "It's like what you said, right? We had , it was one time, and that's all there is to it."

He scowls, crosses his arms over his chest, and she resituates her stare onto the tattoo on the back of his left forearm, reads, Mom Is Never Wrong, thinks, if only. "That'd make sense if it wasn't already the second time."

She can almost physically feel the blood rushing to her face. "Sober. It was one time when we were sober," she adds, and that's fresh out of his lifetime transcript too, so he can't complain. "Or—god, weren't you drunk anyways? That's—"

"Not by much, I told you," he says, like he's been busted on his deceit, but there's not a relic of embarrassment to his voice when he says, "I knew what I was doing."

Which he definitely did, both in the sense of what he probably means and what she's been triggered to think about with words like that—gentle hands and hot lips and grazing teeth, and an easy, steady pace to both of their hips to contribute to the most thorough build her body's ever had to climb and the fastest she's ever felt like descending—but none of that was relevant now, can't afford to read too much into it when there's so many other pages they've already missed.

"It doesn't matter," she says, eyes moving onto the tattoo on his arm, tracing the fine lines on the totem pole's design and the dimensions in its shading to distract herself from the clumsy fluttering of her heart. "We were just—you've been stressed out, and haven't found the time for—you know, and pregnancy's really messed with my hormones, so it was just...convenient, that it happened. We were helping each other out." She stops there, but doesn't feel like it's enough, so she adds, "Like friends. It's just what friends do, helping each other out."

She can't even blame him for the way his face briefly pinches into astoundment, because it sounds just as stupid vocalized as it does staying as a last gasp thought in her head. Friends don't do the things they do, have done: they don't sleep with each other and then agree to keep the baby they ended up conceiving and they definitely don't sleep with each other again, not without some type of agreement made or some warped version of a commitment to each other that she's not even sure either of them want.

It's one thing to be jealous—which she was, she is, she'll admit to that, but only because he'd been jealous, too, only because she wants to play fair—and another thing to genuinely want a relationship with who you're jealous about. Jealousy could arise from a lot of other reasons, a lot of other factors that no one ever takes into consideration before jumping into one ill-advised. Hadn't he told her that he was worried about losing his place, someone else taking up the role of fathering their child? Wasn't that reason enough? Did it have to be something more than that?

His expression settles: mouth straightened, wrinkles relaxed, eyes devoid of any further reaction to what she'd just said, and he says, "Of course. Friends," proves her right, because a relationship's not what he wants, not with her, and that's fitting, because she wants a lot of things, that's true, but what she's allowed to want and have both has never included having this—spending the night over at her apartment, lying in bed together, waking up to him in her bathroom, smiling at her and feeling all sorts of content for it—with him. That's never been what they were about, because that's what they chose, with the limited options they had, with all the cameras, all the fans, all the things they've both sacrificed to be able to stand where they are now.

"Just friends," she confirms, knotting her hands together behind her back to keep them from shaking.

"Just friends," he repeats tonelessly, and when she finally looks straight up at him, it's him who starts looking away, eyeline trained on the mirror above her sink. "Well. Does a friend mind letting another friend have a shower in their bathroom? Because I have to finalize the album's release with the bigwigs in an hour, so if I could just...?"

"Uhm, right, sure," she says, suddenly flustered, because that's not quite what she expected him to say. She doesn't know what she expected him to say, but it wasn't anything as near flippant as that. "I'll...go and get you that towel. Toiletries are in the cabinet under the sink. Do you need clothes to change into?"

She can see him smirk, even with his face turned to a side profile, but there's something unusual about it, not up to par with how it normally looks. 

"Either you're trying to get me to wear your clothes out in public," he says, tone convivial, but his smile's still in that limbo of being incomplete. "Or you regularly keep some other guy's clothes in your closet. I'm not sure which to be more concerned about."

It's enough to break some of the tension off the situation, but the lag in his smile keeps her from fully relaxing, along with everything else that's still hanging over their heads after making the most idiotic decision they've made together in the eight years they've barely known each other. Just when she thought it couldn't get more idiotic than them getting drunk and having and getting pregnant from it, she goes along with whatever misrepresentation of feelings she's gleaned from having him constantly around and actually goes to have with him another time, Christ.

"I'm not trying to get you to do anything," she says, glares at him weakly, still too wary of how quickly their initial topic's been dropped, "And I'm not hiding any man's clothes in my closet. I was just trying to be hospitable."

"No use to that when you have nothing to actually offer," he says, brushing shoulders with her when he tries to slip through the bathroom door past the block of her body. "If you really want to be hospitable, how about making me some coffee to bring on the go?"

She spins on the balls of her feet to follow him back into her room, staring at him all the while as he picks his shirt off the floor, flaps it like a matador ready for the bull to charge, dusts it off of whatever creases and dirt it's collected overnight for another day's use. And that's really...it. He looks calm, concentrated on rubbing at a particular spot on the collar of his shirt, and besides the weird shape that his smile took on just a second ago, there was nothing else to imply that he even cared about what she's said today, or even about what they've done last night.

"Does my apartment look like a coffee shop to you?" she asks, annoyance seeping into her words, because it bothers her. She doesn't get why it would, when dismissing the whole ordeal as the emotionless, non-spectacle it should be—the emotionless, non-spectacle it was, because it was great , but it was just —was what she'd intended to do, but still, it bothers her. "I have nothing to put it in. You'd just be carrying a ceramic mug out in the open."

"You can't even lend a friend a thermos? So much for hospitality," he says, grin sketched more naturally across his face this time, and she'd take it as him mocking her, him finally retaliating, him doing something about what's happened, but the elbow he pokes into her ribs when he makes his way back to her bathroom is nothing but friendly, so she deduces that them being just friends even after a night like last, even after compounding it with the fact that she's fifteen going on sixteen weeks pregnant with his child, is actually something he truly believes in. "Just make me some normal coffee, then. By the time I'm done showering, it should be cool enough for me to be able to chug it down in one go."

"Are you seriously ordering me around in my own apartment?" she asks, but she hears the door being closed shut behind her, the lock clicking into place, the shower turning on at full blast, and all she stands with is a complainant bladder that still hasn't been emptied, and a feeling of having been left oddly bereft.

+

For all her postured grumbling, she still goes and makes him his coffee: brews it fresh from the pot, lets it drip from the filter, pours it into one of the older mugs on her shelf. She adds a couple of teaspoons of sugar, because that's the one thing she'd get right if an interviewer pulled out another Monday Couple Trivia Game for them to answer: Kang Gary likes his coffee—amongst other things—tooth-achingly sweet.

"Is my coffee ready?" he says, walking out from her room, voice muffled by the towel draping down his face, scrubbing it into his scalp to dry his hair. He has his pants back on, she sees, the blackness of it stark against the incoming rays of sunlight, but she realizes that he still doesn't have a shirt on when he steps up behind her to grab at the cup she's prepared for him, the damp skin of his chest grazing against the back of her arm.

She almost knocks the coffee pot over from the sharpness of her about-face. "Oh my god—why are you creeping up on me like that?"

He takes a sip of his coffee, his eyes and the uplift of his brows the only thing visible over the rim of the mug. "You didn't hear me come in? I asked you if the coffee was ready."

"I heard that," she snaps, the tail of her spine digging into the edge of the counter, because he was awfully goddamn close; she can smell the scent of the spare soap she keeps for guests on his skin, can feel the heat of the shower radiating from all expanses of his body, and it's oxymoronic, for it to make her shiver, but shiver's exactly what her snitch of a body does. "But still, you shouldn't—can you put a shirt on?"

The hope of him