I'D DRAW YOU IN MY FAVORITE COLOR
(miss a/got7) suzy/jinyoung
canon. 3k.
suzy, jinyoung, and the wild goose chase of love.

(IMG CR 1 / 2)

Jinyoung had this innate tendency to measure his connections with people by how much he could potentially hurt them. As horrible as it could've been, this did not make him a bad person by nature, and he'd mostly outgrown the habit over the years – that, or he'd become such a stranger to Suzy that she could no longer read his carefully constructed facade, even in the warm lights of her new apartment. Both possibilities were equally probable, and terrifying.

"Sorry it's so stuffy," Suzy tells him, prying open the kitchen window. She'd spent the past month filming her latest drama in Spain, and Jinyoung looked so, so foreign sitting stiffly on the L-shaped sofa that arrived the day before she'd left. There were still dishes in her kitchen sink that she hadn't gotten around to washing and piles of only-worn-for-an-hour clothes scattered around the living room. There'd even been a used tied up in her on-suite bathroom trash bin that she noticed while washing her hands. She haphazardly covered it with tissues before turning off the light, as if it mattered.

Jinyoung shakes his head. Suzy starts clearing her kitchen counter, throwing half-finished perishables into a plastic bag. "Do you need help?" he offers, walking over to the other side of the marble island.

"No!" Suzy laughs. "I –" she looks at the expiration date on an old bottle of soju, one sip left at the bottom. Puts it in the sink and does not look at him. "You should just go make yourself comfortable. I'll get us something to drink."

Jinyoung's reflection shifts in her shiny countertop. "Suzy," he starts softly, as if not to startle her. She can see him lean over on his elbows into the space she'd just cleared. He waits. Suzy tells herself not to look at him.

He sighs after a minute in defeat, staring at his palms. His hands are amber in the kitchen light, but she knows they'd be cold if she held them in hers, and there's a shadow on his upper lip of where he hadn't shaved, and there's all the possibilities of what he could say to hurt her blooming around him like flowers in an endless field, ripe with their open faces turned toward him, tempting him to pick.

He finally catches her staring at him. Suzy tightens her grip on the plastic bag in reflex, bracing herself for the impact. But that doesn't matter, because he says it anyway, candidly and all at once: "Suzy – what are we doing here?"

The last time they'd naturally run into each other was a year ago, at the Korea Drama Awards. Naturally, because Suzy might've stopped singing but Jinyoung had started acting, and their concurrent social circles began to bleed into one another's again. He'd gone home with the Best New Actor award, and Suzy had given him a standing ovation as he walked to the stage. She wondered if he'd seen her in the audience as he gave his acceptance speech with an almost robotic-precision. She almost tripped over her dress sitting back down.

"Hey!" she called out to him later. They had both their respective co-stars at each of their arms, in order to keep the conversation short and wholly impersonal. "Congratulations." She hoped he could tell she meant it.

Jinyoung smiled back at her. "Thanks." He looked to her, then her co-star, and then back. "You guys were great this year, too."

Suzy wanted to tell him about how he'd looked in the spotlight with his hair gelled back and that small award in his hands and how she'd gotten a glimpse of how he used to feel about her, watching through his TV screen. But that overstepped their social niceties, so she smiled and let someone take their picture for the four of them instead.

His hand lingered at her elbow for a moment after the flash. Like they were suspended in their own universe at that one point of contact, viscous, stuck in each other’s gravity.

And then he let go, with a perfectly polite smile. And Suzy watched him walk away from her just like how it went in all the best tragedies of her own making, the place where his fingers had touched her bare skin startlingly cold.

Suzy looks down into the mouth of that soju bottle, sitting in her sink. She'd bought the specific brand because Jieun showed up on the packaging, and she'd sent her a picture of it the day she first cracked it open. That was months ago, and she couldn't remember what they'd talked about in the aftermath. "I don't know," she responds, half-honest.

Back in her old apartment, Suzy had stayed up the night her first solo record had been released. After all the cameras had left at five in the morning, she'd crawled back out of bed and into her beat-up one seater in the living room, watching TV brainlessly while listening to her own disembodied voice sing through her phone speakers.

At five-thirty, Jinyoung sent her a text, unexpectedly. how's the air up there? ㅎㅎ, it read alongside a screen shot of her EP sitting at number one.

ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ, she'd managed to reply after deleting several drafts. what r u doing now? she sent him after another ten minutes. He'd read it and never replied.

One time, the lot of them and their old trainee friends went out for a meal. They'd opted for a tucked-in family owned restaurant that reminded them of a place they used to go before they'd all debuted, where the owners never forgot how Wonpil had spilled his water across the table. They laughed and drank and talked about their old dance teacher and Suzy tried not to stare at how the lights cast shadows across Jinyoung's face like they had in those dim practice rooms after-hours, when they sprawled on the floor like starfish and took turns either talking about everything that mattered to them or nothing at all.

"I remember," she'd said suddenly when the conversation had lulled. "When Jinyoung used to like me." Jaebum had told her before she'd gotten sorted into debut, and then she never had the chance to actually talk to him about it. By the time he'd debuted and they started crossing paths again, it'd been years and she assumed he was long over it.

Jinyoung stared at her for a beat before laughing. Suzy couldn't tell if it was genuine. "I don't think I ever told you," he pointed out from down the table. "Was it that obvious?"

She smiled into her beer bottle. "Yeah." But she didn't tell him how she'd stolen glances at him too, or how she wished that she had reached out for his hand before they'd grown out of their recklessness and became too scared to hurt other people like they learned they had the power to.

They left it at that that night. Waiting under the canary yellow street light as all the others dissipated back into their own lives, Suzy still thought she'd always have a chance with him as they compared their shallow footprints in the snow.

Now, Jinyoung looks at her like he's afraid he'll break her heart. He's never looked at her like this before, but to be fair, a lot of times Suzy likes to pretend that she's forgotten.

"What do you mean?" he finally asks, the same way he'd say Don't d