note: I consider this more of an interlude/filler-ish chapter since it's kind of just gratuitous fluff lol (I just can't help myself x2 lmao), but it's still overall a part of the plot....if I even have one, that is. :P

Also, congratulations to Haha and Byul for the birth of their second child! I know I've set this fic to start from Soul's (when I read the subs for the episode where they revealed his name, I genuinely missed the fact that So Wool = Soul lol. I should've had the foresight to make the educated guess, since this is coming from the same parents who named their first kid Dream. Anyways, all mentions of his name in this fic has been changed to the correct one!) 1st birthday, which I put as April 2018 because that's what the news said was Byul's expected due date. I'm still going to stick by the April time frame I'd originally gone for, because I can't be bothered to change all the date specific scenes I'd already set lol.

And as always, thank you to my lovely subscribers/commenters! You guys keep me going when the muse is down, truly.

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Waking up in bed with Kang Gary's arms wrapped around her is warm, weighted, wondrous, and really, honestly, truly ing weird.

It's always been weird—the near apoplectic seizure she'd had the morning after that first drunken night together, the half-lucid confusion on his couch even just last week—but knowing what she knows now, being where they're suddenly at, it's...good. A good kind of weird, like being roused from a dream which details she can't quite remember aside from how much she'd wanted it to be real.

Almost on its own accord, the hand that she'd somehow landed on his chest during sleep moves to trace the shapes of his tattoo with her fingertips, checking. When he stirs at her touch rather than disappears, she knows that this—him—is.

"Don't," he groans, catches her wrist in his grip when she tries to pull her hand away, much too fast for someone who's supposed to have just woken up himself, boxer's reflexes or not. "Keep going. Feels good."

He sets her palm back over his pec, eyes still closed, but he opens them soon enough when she slaps his chest instead of doing what it is that he'd said. "Ow, the hell Jihyo—"

"Were you just pretending to be asleep this whole time?" she accuses, to save face, because caressing him out of her own free will was undignified enough already, much less was it for him to actually catch her in the act.

"I wasn't pretending," he says, places his own hand over hers to rub the pads of her fingers against the spot she'd just hit. "I was enjoying. There's a difference."

She glares up at him, sinks her nails shallowly into his skin. "You're so annoying."

"But you put up with it," he smirks, entirely too smug for her liking, which just proves her claim correct.

"Aren't you so certain," she says, frees her hand from his hold and rolls herself away from him to the edge of his bed. "I take back what I said. I don't want to try anymore."

His lips only notch up higher at the corners. "Oh, so it's like that?" he says, and then he's sitting up to pull her back by her hips and lift her up to straddle his lap, and it should be telling that her only two thoughts are when did he get this strong and I really wouldn't mind more of this. "You're dumping me already after just one night?"

"Yes," she says snottily, but the edge of it's probably ruined by the heat pooling in her face and the immediate way she scrambles over to cover herself up with his bed sheets. "It's not working out."

"What a shame," he says, uncowed, clasps onto both ends of the cloth after she's draped it over her back to close it for her, keeping her modesty. She looks up at him in pleasant surprise, and he takes the opportunity to lean forward and kiss her on the lips.

"Guess I can't do that anymore," he murmurs, pulling away once she'd parted open for more, because in addition to being annoying, he's also an to boot. 

She doesn't know when that had stopped being a deal breaker for her, when she'd gone from just putting up with him to actually liking him, in spite of it all. 

"Guess you can't," she whispers back, but she still can, so she bends her head down to kiss him again.

He doesn't take as long as she had to start deepening it, her lips insistently and presses his tongue against hers the moment she lets him, sifts one hand through her hair from the back of her neck while the other stays on the curve of her hip. There's heat from every point of contact that spreads throughout her body, building on the low flow of his room's air conditioning, but she scoots in closer anyways, tries to grind against him and finds herself obstructed by the bump of her stomach.

He laughs into , letting up for the exhale to say, "Looks like Junior's telling me I can't either."

"Already disobeying me before he's even born," she grumbles, but the hand he slips through the gap of the blanket to rest against her belly makes up for any serious complaint she may have. "Is that a Kang trait too?"

"What? Stubbornness?" he says, ghosts a teasing peck against her lips, "No. He's definitely getting that from you."

She opens with the intention to contest that and then thinks better of it, because it'd only mean that he's right, and his phone rings before she really can, anyways. 

"Sorry," he says, waits until the fifth ring before moving his hand away from her stomach to reach for his phone, and even then he's lagging, like he'd rather let the call go to voicemail than let go of her. "Business. Seems like everyone's telling me I can't."

"It's alright," she says, because he'd given her time, so she'll give him his. She'll wait. "You owe me for all the clothes I bought for Junior anyways. You have to pay it off somehow."

"Always with the money on your mind, huh, Gold Ji?" he smiles, and then gives her one last searing kiss before answering the call. "Hello?"

While he's preoccupied, she tries to detangle the hook of her legs from his, but he snakes the hand on her hip fully around her back and draws her back in. There's probably a getting-to-know-you phase due for them that this whole trying thing entails—that's at least one step which order they can never get wrong—and this right here's already started them off: Kang Gary, behind closed doors, is physical, likes touch, and can cling on for very, very long.

"I gotta go overlook some incoming clothing shipments at HQ," he says, sets his phone back down on his bedside table, bends awkwardly over the edge of the bed to pick up the shirt he'd shed last night, and not once does he release his hold on her throughout. "They were due for tomorrow, but I guess they'd decided to send it off a little early."

"Go ahead, be the boss," she says, even though he wasn't really asking for her permission, nor does he need her to give it; business is business, has always come first, but now she feels weird again, having to send him off to work from his apartment like a common-law spouse.

Which she isn't. They're something to each other, that much they've agreed upon, but she doesn't know if they can go around and be placing labels on it so soon. 

"I have to leave in half an hour," he says, both irritated and regretful, slings his bunched up T-shirt over his shoulder. "I thought maybe we could talk things over this morning, but—"

"It's alright," she assuages, because she can't hold him back, and she needs a bit of time to go over what it is she wants them to be before they can have a thorough discussion about it. "We can talk later."

"You sure?" he asks, skeptical and relieved in one go. "You're not just gonna up and avoid me again after this?"

The question's not uncalled for—she has a tendency to detach when things get a little too serious, okay, she can admit to that—but it's still a tad bit irksome that he'd doubt her after everything she'd told him last night. "You don't trust me?"

"It's not about trust," he says, jaw working, like he's trying to grind his next words down into smaller pieces to be able to make them come out. "It's—I told you, I'm tired of trying to figure you out. I think I like you enough as it is, so I don't want to risk liking you even more if this isn't really what you want to be doing."

It's the closest thing to a straightforward admission as he's ever gotten; it also sounds exactly like it is about trust. She hasn't earned his yet, not after all of her back-and-forths, but when her pulse spikes and her gut whirls at the way he tells her I like you, she knows that she's willing to work for it just as much as he's willing to work for hers.

"Okay," she says, pulls his shirt off of his shoulder and puts it on herself, the cotton settling loosely over her body to end just a few inches above her knees. "How attached are you to this shirt?"

His face twists in confusion at the sudden change in subject, but the way his eyes roam slowly down her body is enough of an indicator that he doesn't really mind.

"Depends," he says, fingers pulling the fabric taut from underneath with the hand he still has splayed over her hip, "Right now, I'm more than happy to let you keep it."

She rolls her eyes. "You men really are that simple-minded, huh?" she says, unimpressed, but something coils beneath her belly when he still can't seem to look away. "Just—think of it as collateral, alright? Now you know I won't avoid you off because I'll have to give the shirt back to you eventually."

His expression shifts to amused. "Couldn't you have just said no, I won't avoid you, I promise to call you after I leave?"

"I—shut up," she says, acutely embarrassed, because being exorbitantly cheesy and metaphorical had always been a TV forte of his that she'd found to be more dispiriting than it was attractive, so the fact that she's emulating it now must mean that liking Kang Gary back is equatable to having a disturbance of the mind. "You just said you don't trust me, so I'm just—"

"I trust you," he interrupts, sweeps her hair out of the shirt's collar with his free hand. "I don't need any collateral. All I need's your word." He smiles boyishly up at her, leans in close until he's a hair's breadth away, "I'll let you keep the shirt this time, t