Prompt By: @kireitenshi

-Title: Kiss By Kiss

-Ship: Park Hyungsik x Go Ara

Characters: [MAIN] Hyungsik/Park Hyungsik (ZE:A), Go Ara (actress) [SIDE] Kwon Eunjin (OC), Park Hyungho (OC), Park Boyoung (actress), Kim Soohyun (actor), Jo Insung (actor)

Word Count: 2458

Warnings: Implied ual references; strong language

Summary: In which Go Ara is gutsy enough to always show her feelings for Park Hyungsik, but he’s too dumb to tell.

Go Ara has been kissing Park Hyungsik for nearly three years now.

They met their first year of high school, and fourteen-year-old Ara was too confused and too young to be able to deal with and show her emotions properly, so she resulted to what she saw in movies - just going in for the kiss.

The two became quick, fast friends, and they would go as far as to call each other their best friend. But Ara wanted more than that, and so she kissed Hyungsik.

In the morning, by their lockers, a kiss on the cheek. Walking to classes, a kiss on the forehead. Saying goodbye after school, a ‘joking’ kiss on the hand. Sitting close to each other on movie nights, tilting up and kissing his jaw. But never on the lips.

When Ara first met Hyungsik, he wasn’t the Hyungsik she knew now. He was colder, always wearing the same grey hoodie zipped up to his collarbone and the hood thrown over his head to hide his face.

Despite sitting at the back of the class alone, having such an off-putting vibe and quite obviously not wanting to talk to people, Ara clung herself to him.

She didn’t mean to, she just wanted a good grade on their project.

Through the time they worked together, Hyungsik slowly opened up. She saw him smile and laugh for the first time, and one day they met up after school to work on it, he had ditched the hood, and eventually, the sweater altogether.

Hyungsik was more open and friendly now, and he had high social status in their school, as his guy friends were popular. “Popular with the ladies,” they would say, and Ara would roll her eyes, even though it was true.

Ara felt like girls always hung off Hyungsik and his friends as if they were nothing more but things that needed attention from them. Despite Ara’s need for attention from her best friend, she could care less what other people thought of her. The only person that mattered to her was Hyungsik.

It was true Hyungsik had a few people after him. It was obvious by the way girls would act ditzy around him, twirling their hair around their fingers, pulling them hems of their shirts down, asking him useless questions in an attempt to get him to talk.

Ara hated seeing those girls stoop to that. They were all fantastic, intelligent girls, who, if they wanted to, could get practically any guy they wanted.

Just not Hyungsik.

“Why won’t you date me?” A girl asked him one time, her books clutched tightly to her chest, her bottom lip pushed out in a pout. “Is there something wrong with me?”

“No, no,” Hyungsik rushed to tell her, closing his locker shut. “It’s nothing about you. It’s me, really. I just think we’d work better as friends!”

Hyungsik was always careful with his words when letting girls down, as one “I’m not interested,” would lead to kids spreading gay rumours about him.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay,” Hyungsik lamented one night to Ara. He laid stretched across the sofa in Ara’s basement, his hand dangling off the end and drabbling in a bowl of popcorn on the floor. “I’m just not. And I don’t want people thinking I am. Does that sound homophobic? I swear I’m not. I’ve kissed a guy before, you know that.”

Ara did know that. It was Hyungsik’s second kiss (his first being in elementary, when he kissed his second-grade girlfriend of a month), at a party in their sophomore year, when Hyungsik was almost blackout drunk.

“Still enjoyed it, though,” Hyungsik told her the day after when he had sobered up (and stopped throwing up from his hangover). “He was a good kisser. And he had a great .”

That was the first time Ara really acknowledged she had real feelings for Hyungsik, and it wasn’t some weird sort of longing or estranged jealousy at the attention he received. Ara just liked her best friend as more than a best friend.

A best best friend, she tried to convince herself at first. Not lovers, not partners, just really, really good friends. With benefits. No, no, that’s not it…

So Ara kissed Hyungsik. As a way to say, Hey! Look at me! Your best friend, who also happens to be hopelessly in love with you! Kiss me back!

Ara kissed him in hopes that Hyungsik would pick up on her subtle (and other times, not so subtle) hints and clues, in hopes that he would instigate something, and that she wouldn’t have to muster up the courage to tell him and risk ruining their relationship, risk losing the most important person to her.

But what if he thinks the same way? Doesn’t want to ruin what we have? No, it’s too obvious...

Even if Hyungsik didn’t like her that way, and even if he didn’t pick up on her subtlety, she could still pass it off as the fact that they were just that good of friends. Best friends. Best best friends.

Of course, other people had picked up on the kissing, and, being at that age where people couldn’t keep business to themselves, they pestered them about it.

“Ooh, are you two dating?” Hyungsik’s friends asked him in a teasing way. “Have you ed her yet?” they would pester.

Hyungsik was sensitive to this topic, however, and often grew stiff when people about it. “I’ve told you, it’s not like that.” he would say, exasperation in his voice as his face flushed, doing his best to avoid eye contact with them.

He would still stand up for Ara and throw them off when it got too much. Someone once told him, “Bone her and ditch her like the rest of them,” and Hyungsik had gotten deeply upset about that.

“They can’t just talk about you like that,” Hyungsik later complained to Ara, sitting in her car after school, Hyungsik picking apart a sub sandwich. “It’s disgusting and mean. They talk about you as if you’re like, just a… thing. Like a doll. Which you’re not. Obviously. dolls aren’t alive. You are. You breathe and I can’t blow you up. I mean, I could with a grenade or something, but I wouldn’t do that. This is getting messy, I’ll stop talking, how was your day?” He turned to her expectantly, a look of desperation etched across his face, and Ara had laughed at him, muttering something about silly he was, pressed a kiss to his temple, and put her car into reverse.

Hyungsik and Ara had made plans to go to Ara’s house after school one day, intending to work on a project for school they were partners for, but they both knew they would get distracted, and end up doing something completely different, like a run to the corner store for snacks or going to the park for inspiration.

Their last period classes were different, their lockers in separate parts of the school, and so they met up in the front foyer of the school.

Ara was their first, and Hyungsik joined her, coming in through the large double doors, his backpack slung over one shoulder, his arms slipped through the grey hoodie to combat the chill in the air, his earphones having been looped through it so one hung out of his ear and the other left dangling over his chest like drawstrings.

He took one out when he approached her, smiling. “Ready?” he asked, and she nodded, smiling as she leaned over to press a kiss to his cheek.

“What are you listening to?” she asked as they made their outside to the crisp, new northern air and to her car.

“It’s new.” he replied, slipping one of the buds into her ear. It wasn’t like what Hyungsik usually listened to, the thick, heavy guitar layered with bass being stripped down to a simple, light guitar, repeating the few notes over and over. It picked up, adding a simple drum beat, one Ara, with no musical ability, would be able to mimic. The singer was female, with a soft voice, and you could hear the love and how much she cared about whoever it was she was singing about. It was a huge contrast to the heavy, harsh, deep male vocals Hyungsik usually had blaring, and this woman’s voice in her old-sounding song was different to the barely intelligible of what she was used to hearing from those earbuds. This was a sweet, cute. sentimental song, not one like the dark and sad ones.  

“It’s different,” Ara argued as she dropped the earbud and opened her car door. “It’s so… stripped.”

“Yeah,” Hyungsik laughed, turning in the passenger’s seat to throw his school bag in the back. “It’s something Eunjin listened to. I’ve had it stuck in my head.”

Kwon Eunjin was Park Hyungho’s girlfriend, Hyungho being Hyungsik’s older brother. Ara could never remember how long Eunjin and Hyungho had been together, but she did know that Eunjin was at the Park household often, as Hyungho was yet to move out, still being in college.

“Not something I thought you’d listen to,” Ara admitted. “Not exactly your type.”

“I know. I’m really only listening to it because I have it stuck in my head.”

They dropped the song topic after that, talking about their days, the stupid comments Park Boyoung made in Ara’s History class, the way Kim Soohyun and Jo Insung would bicker all throughout Hyungsik’s English class, how much they hated their Math teacher.

The conversation would always evolve from there, but in such a way one would not be able to pinpoint the exact place it would go, as it was different every time.

That’s the thing that was so great about Ara and Hyungsik. They could talk about anything for hours, from the most meaningful conversations to the most useless.

This Thursday afternoon, still sitting in Ara’s hand-me-down car, stopped at a traffic light at a four-way intersection, due to turn left past the HOLLYS Coffee, was when they had a meaningful, serious, relationship-altering conversation.

A rare type and moment, at that.

“Ara? Why do you always kiss me?”

The light turned green, yet Ara was in such a shock that she couldn’t move the car forward until the driver behind her honked loudly, causing her to startle and lurch forward sharply around the turn.

She couldn’t believe this was happening. She had thought so often of this, had practiced so many times what she would say, had played the scenario out so many times in her head…

“Because.” was not the answer, the speech, she had planned. Not her shining moment, not the moment she told Hyungsik about the feelings she harboured for him and the moment he realized he felt the same, and they would kiss, and all but run off into the sunset.

Or maybe they could, if that’s what they both wanted.

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

“Well, uh…” she slowed to a stop in traffic, having missed the turnoff.

“It’s not that hard of a question. Why do you always kiss me? You can tell me. You can trust me. You’re my best friend, remember? And I’m asking you. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want to know.”

“I think this is a question better answered parked.” Ara said, flicking on her blinker and changing into the other lane. They were silent as she drove in the lane, turning into the parking lot of a grocery store.

“You’ll answer me now? I don’t see why this is that big of a deal.”

“Hyungsik, it’s more important than you think it is,” Ara sighed, turning in her seat to face him. “I kiss you because I like you, Hyungsik.”

“Saying my name makes it so much more intimate,” he whispered, his face paling and becoming weary. “Could you not?”

“Sorry,” Ara muttered, matching the same soft tone he took on. “But did you hear me? I like you. I don’t… I don’t know why. Because… I want to, I guess, and you’ve never told me no.”

“I did hear you,” Hyungsik’s tone rose, becoming more exasperated. “But like, what kind of like do you mean? Like, friend like or…?”

“Like more than friends! Like ‘I want to kiss you and date you’ type of like!”

“Ara, I…”

“Forget it. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t have told you! I should’ve lied. You hate me now, I get it.”

“No, Ara, you don’t get it,” Hyungsik sighed, leaning back in the car seat, running a hand through his hair. Ara was silent, not wanting the tense air to grow anymore then it had already, giving him the space to talk. “I… I like you, too. I don’t know why it took me so long to say this, I guess I didn’t want to ruin our friendship, what we had, I guess I thought you just kissed me because you’re a pretty touchy-feely person and I-”

Ara opened to speak, and then shut it. She then leaned in and hesitated, but before she could move back, Hyungsik’s lips were on hers, gingerly, carefully, as if he, too, was unsure about kissing her, thought it was a mistake, too much of a risk, as if it bore him bare, exposed, to places he was too scared to hide.

He pulled away, his eyes gently fluttering open after a moment. “Sorry,” he muttered, shifting in his seat as if to leave the car. He avoided Ara’s gaze, focused on the stitches in the upholstery, his hand itching for the smooth, cool metal of the door handle. “I shouldn’t’ve…”

“Do it again,” Ara said hurriedly, as if the words came out of , but she didn’t speak them. As if some otherworldly being had taken over her, possessed her, and made her move forward with the things she wanted but was too scared to ask for. “Kiss me.”

He did, again, gently at first, the kiss gradually increasing, until it was messy and sloppy as they still figured out what they were doing, until eventually her hand was tangled in his hair, his thumb gently tracing her lips, his arms cradling her, she pressed up against him.

When they finally tore apart, Ara’s lips felt numb, and Hyungsik leaned back in the car seat, his head tipped back to touch the back of the seat.

“What are we?” Hyungsik asked, his voice gentle yet again.

“I’m not sure,” Ara whispered. “Whatever you want us to be.”

“I’m not sure what I want us to be.”

“Take your time. I can wait.”

FIN