I like him. 

I don’t have any reason to, but I know I do.

It’s like when you see someone for the first time and you think to yourself, “I can see myself living the rest of my life with him or her,” but then you quickly back pedal and think, “But he’s kind of a demon living on the spirit plane, aka not human at all, so there’s no way our relationship would work out anyway.” Okay, so I know that that probably doesn’t happen to everyone. I get it, no need for the judging eyes, alright?

I was just easy. 

Undeniably so.

All it took was him saving my life from the mess that was partly his fault in the first place on multiple occasions. Mix in that heroic, prince on a white stallion image with his mind that’s always in the gutter, his intoxicatingly raspy voice, and the fact that — sometimes — he cares way too much about me for me to be comfortable with him doing so. 

So, I crack jokes and stave off the for another day. 

But, that. 

Right now, I give no s. I gave up my last one just then. I had none as I felt him, like he was real, like he was human, pull me close.

He smelled like a mixture of throw up and sewage water on my account; the dark goop that had stuck to me blackening his spaces under each of his fingernails. Fingernails on fingers on hands he used to distance himself from me, running his fingers through my hair, smoothing it back as he said words I didn’t understand but that I loved listening to anyway.

And then I passed out, like the damsel in distress that I am. 

I collapsed into him. I folded into him. I ing wanted to just melt away into him. 

To become nothing. 

To embrace all those existential questions about my existential existence. To wonder why I couldn’t have been born some three thousand years ago too. To not care in the end, because I can’t help what I like.

I can’t help who I like, Bang Yongguk. 

“I like you.”

Those were the words I woke up to that next morning. I think I said them. I probably said them. I’m not quite sure really. All I know is that when I opened my eyes, my prince charming wasn’t there, and I was understandably disappointed. Instead, there was Jung Daehyun, the Tokebi. 

“You’ve been asleep for two days,” he informed me as he stuck his hands into his pockets. 

“And what a sight to wake up to,” I mused out loud, disappointed he wasn’t Mr. Demon, but still grateful enough for Daehyun’s handsome presence. 

I groaned as I sat up, my whole body feeling like Oh Sehun had subjected me to what he liked to call “Exercise.” University starting up again had thankfully taken care of his random impulses to burn the fat of late night pizza parties and week-long pajama parties — which entailed him, Jongdae, Minseok, and I doing nothing but hanging out in our pajamas and ordering take-out food as we wasted our young lives away, buried neck deep in chocolate and carbs. 

“Are you being sarcastic?” He, the spirit who rarely, if ever, cared about the feelings of another existential existence, asked. 

“No,” I answered, too tired to deal with thinking about his change in demeanor due to how much I’ve both thought and dreamt about Bang Yongguk for, as Daehyun said, the past two days I’ve been out of it, “who wouldn’t want to wake up to such a pretty face?” 

I reached past the barrier separating us, most likely the only thing that kept Kim Himchan from smothering me in my sleep, and granted him a motherly pat on the cheek. 

“So cute,” I cooed, though my stomach clenched in on itself as I did so, causing my voice to sound more like a predator ready to devourer its prey. 

Speaking of which, I have yet to mention the fact that, yes, I was eaten by a spirit two days ago. In case you were wondering, it takes a lot out of a girl — though it also gives her an opportunity to sort out her twisted attraction for something so human its a shame he isn’t. 

Daehyun leaned over towards me, letting me proceed to pinch his cheek as a wave of pain washed over me, saying only, “It’s been two days since you’ve woken up, which means it’s been two days since you’ve eaten, which means it’s also been two days since I’ve eaten.”

Of course. It always comes full circle, doesn’t it?

“Did something happen to Ms. Kim?”

“Spontaneous trip to the Caribbean with her sisters,” he explained, his lips as he most likely imagined all of the tropical delights he was missing out on. She deserved it though, putting up with everything she did from Mr. Demon and his traveling band of spirits. Feeding them, clothing them, treating them like her own sons, she probably loved it, didn’t she? She must be missing them right about now, isn’t she?

When she gets back, I have to make sure to leave them alone for a bit, just the seven of them. 

Because I know what it feels like to be away from these fools for extended periods of them, and I wouldn’t subject anyone to that kind of abysmal, awkward, self-pitying, lonely loneliness.

“Alright then,” I moved out of bed, slowly but surely, “breakfast, lunch, or dinner?”

“Breakfast,” he answered immediately, his head working fast when tempted by the promise of food. And according to the clock at my bedside, he wasn’t lying. It was seven in the morning on a Saturday. Perfect. I had two days to figure out how in the world I would make up my missed days of school work — a problem I would soon learn had already been solved for me. 

“Pancakes, eggs, and bacon?” I asked him, finding my first steps on land in a long while to be much steadier than I thought. Damn. And here I thought I could play the “mermaid learning to walk” card to a certain demon. Help me walk! Carry me everywhere! Take responsibility for both ruining and saving my life! A girl can dream, can’t she?

“What else?” He scoffed, and I wanted to sock him in the mouth for his cheekiness. But, I couldn’t. Not because I wouldn’t have hit hard enough to knock out a few teeth. Rather because, as I said earlier, he has a pretty face. You shouldn't hit a pretty face; it may just hit back. 

“And once again, you’re not even attempting to show how grateful you are for being fed to your liking.” He opened his mouth to speak, but I stopped him, “I know you are even if you don't say it, but words are nice too, you know? Actions speak even louder than words too, you know? Even after being rescued from the stomach of a corrupted spirit, saved from slowly and painfully rotting to death, I’m still hard-pressed to thank Bang Yongguk. But you won’t catch me not doing it, so why can’t you just say “thanks for feeding me, Sora” every once in a while?”

Again, remember that two days ago, if it wasn't for Mr. Demon and his band of fools, I would have been eaten by the corrupted spirit that whisked me out of the supermarket as though it had been waiting for me all along; I was almost all absorbed into its black mass of stinking goop and what not. How do I know this, the specifics of the attack on me, you ask? 

“How did you know that?” Jung Daehyun — the gullible, curious, by still undeniably clever Tokebi — too asked, his nonchalant expression turning serious. The kind of unreadable seriousness that sprung up from unknown origins. The kind he showed me only once before at the hospital over a month ago. 

I shrugged as I moved past him, my destination the kitchen, “Know what?” 

He followed closely behind me, not giving an inch, “About that spirit.”

“What?”

“The spirit,” he clarified again.

“What?”

“What?”

“What?”

“What?” He looked like he was beginning to get angry at this point. 

“Really, Daehyun, we’ve got to stop mimicking each other. It’s becoming creepy, ya know what I’m sayin’?” 

I walked off just like that, leaving him to his thoughts and me to my Yongguk-filled own. How did I know what? What? I think you’re going crazy, don’t you? 

You know that feeling? 

You know what I mean! 

It’s that feeling you get when you realize you like someone. 

You kind of go through this honeymoon phase where you see everything through rose-colored glasses. Without even thinking about anything past your own, selfish feelings, those precious feelings you’re feeling all for yourself, you start seeing things that aren’t even there. 

And you paint it all so deliciously sweet. You start to color outside of the lines with that big, fat, pink crayon because you can’t help yourself. The feels you feel are too infinite to be contained. 

So many feels. So many uses of the word “feel.” So many things I felt just watching him stand there, out of the corner of my eye. Leaning against the counter, slouching as it were, he was. Saying things again with that vibrating, gruff voice of his, he was. Smiling that gum-showing smile, like he knew it drove me wild, he was — can I get some props for rhyming on that one?  

Don’t even get me started on the fact that his t-shirt said in big, white text-blocked letters on black fabric:

“Trust me, when I 

woke up 2day, 

I had no plans 

2 B this Y. 

BUT HEY,

happens.” 

happens, indeed. 

“Turns out the kids were just scared the 'Big, Bad, Corrupted Spirit' would eat them. Apparently, it’s been following them around for awhile now, thinking they’re easy targets, but it would always turn tail and run whenever they’d get near any shrines. Which, I'm guessing, answers our question of why they never wanted to leave the shrine. Looks like after it saw you though, just a walking ball of untamed spiritual energy trapped in the body of a human, it decided it’d take what it could get while we weren’t expecting it.”

“I feel somewhat offended.” I said, and he laughed, and I took pride in that. “Thanks for not letting me become spirit chow, by the way.”

He proceeded to do this thing with his tongue, dragging it across his lips, thinking about something I couldn’t even begin to wonder upon. I was too busy thanking him for that too inside of my head — may I be struck down now for my thoughts lest I be subjected to endure them again. Spoiler, I wasn’t. Spoiler number two, I would fail in my attempt to forget it. After much, much too much, contemplating and lip-, he admitted with a frown, “Himchan did most of the work.”

“An extra serving of bacon for him it is!” I announced, breaking out of the staring contest his lips were winning, and he laughed again.

Was I always able to make him laugh like this? Am I naturally hysterical? Or am I just rolling high on these feelings of mine?

“Anyway, thankfully we were able to rip you out of it before it got away.” Bang Yongguk — let’s take a moment to relish in how amazingly that rolls off the tongue — finished his elaborate explanation of the spirit that had attacked me physically, as well as the situation with the kids who had previously attacked me emotionally, “Jongup calmed the siblings down, though they insist on going to the supermarket again. Hell if I know why.”

“But you didn’t manage to un-corrupt it, right?” I rounded out the edges of the pancake I was currently frying up. 

You see, as Mr. Demon was previously just explaining to me — an explanation you already know I glossed over in exchange for glossing my ogling eyes over his body instead —, a spirit that begins to feed on other spirits, or that strives on negative or even intense emotions and feelings, eventually becomes this large, black, indiscernible mass. It becomes corrupted: a twisted version of itself that, after awhile, forgets what it used to be.

Who it used to be. 

“We’re not capable of something like that.”

I flipped the pancake over, revealing a honey golden backside, “But my grandfather is, right?”

Then, the spirit becomes something only someone like my grandfather can fix; a human with a supernatural connection to, well, the supernatural. I can’t say much about this connection exactly, but it has something to do with those electric fingers he gave Yongguk the first day we met. Sparks of spiritual energy that he, unlike me, can control at will. He can do it to keep spirits or demons at bay. He can also “purify” them with those same aged, currently hospitalized, fingers of his.

I don’t know how. 

I just know for a fact that he can. 

“And so are you,” Bang Yongguk added. 

I turned to him fully now, and it took me a moment to stop myself from acting on my urge to yell, “I like you,” due to my current, bubbly, love-induced high. As much as I would love to tell him now, I’m the romantic type. Give me a night alone with him, a candlelight dinner, rose-petals in the shape of a heart surrounding us while we eat — you know, the cliche stuff — and I’ll gladly profess my love. Confessing over a plate of pancakes? I’m not that spontaneous. 

I’m perhaps just a bit cowardly. 

Especially when he shows me that eye smile that must have won him all the Mr. Demon beauty pageants. 

“Just not right now,” he nudged me with his elbow, seemingly reading my thoughts, while leaning in closer to get a good look at the pancake in its pan — looking at it like he was attempting to seduce it. So sue me for being jealous over food. “Shall I commence roll call for breakfast?”

“Shall we take the kids to the supermarket today again?” I asked right back, feeling my elbow twitch with the urge to playfully nudge him back. But I resisted. I regretted all the times I had so easily come into physical contact with him without a second thought of how lucky I was in the past. I refused to be so obvious with my feelings now. No guy likes a girl that tries hard, right?

Right?

Like he had done it tens of hundreds of times before, he stood up straight, swung his feet together, and saluted me, “Yes, ma’am!” 

And then, laughing again, he left. Just like that. Just like there’s no way he could have felt even an inkling of what I did. Just like, ! Just me for what happened next! Because it’s just what I wished would have happened with the supernatural being I just recently realized I like. 

Walking into the kitchen first was Jung Daehyun, as though the call to food was his one and only calling. All was normal, everything was hunky-dory, as I handed him his plate of two pancakes, sunny-side up eggs, and crispy bacon. Not a thing could have been wrong with the extra pancake he asked for.

An extra pancake I had anticipated the necessity of and had been cooking beforehand. Everything was going as originally planned as I pretended our conversation from earlier this morning never happened.

Everything was thrown out the window as, before I could turn back around and prepare Himchan’s plate, he leaned forward and kissed me. 

Just a peck. 

Just a chaste touch that caused stars to explode across my eyes. 

Just that, before he too left, but only after saying, “Thank you.”

All I could manage as he walked off, flashing a victorious smile, was, “What?”