Joohyun’s eyes were slowly glazing over as the sun started setting behind her through the window of the library. Although her main study was one of the more casual ones in her university, she was beginning to understand why first-years avoided the Women’s Studies department altogether. It was a simple major that ironically required a lot of intuition and research, which was speaking of it lightly.

Her focus on depictions of female idols in the public sphere ended up being even harder than she expected as she only had a good three decades worth of history to pull from, more than half of it leaning strongly towards men. Other than the recorded history, she also had to manually connect all her findings to relative historical figures, which made it even worse.

She’d been working on her thesis for ten straight hours now and was practically burnt down to the core by the time Seokjin showed up to the library. He had been looking for her since his last period but was unsuccessful until now. Although it wasn’t necessary for him to go on a full campus hunt for her, she had turned off her phone and no one knew exactly where she was. For the first fifteen minutes of his search, he considered just leaving her alone, but the more he thought about how no one knew where she was exactly, a slight hint of fear had crept over him. Such an event of her disappearing was quite unlikely, but for some reason, he just couldn’t shake the uneasiness he felt when he noticed it had been two hours and still there was no reply.

As soon as he entered the library out of breath, his eyes moved directly to gaze at his prize. She had the side of her head placed on top of a stack of books on the table. Her eyes were shut with a frown due to her uncomfortable position and her lips were just slightly agape as if she were about to mutter the loveliest words to him. Catching his breath and shaking out of the slight shock, he slowly made his way through the aisles of books and continued to explore the atmosphere around her. He smiled and reveled at how perfectly shaped her face was and how her naturally pink lips called to him like the lips of a siren.

Just as he reached the edge of the table, she slightly stuck her tongue out and the corner of , then grumbled some inaudible words. The corner of his lips curved up into a grin as the feelings of unease and fear slowly left his body. He just stood there, frozen in place with his eyes wide open in a state of shock. Just then, she furrowed her eyebrows just a bit more and slightly pouted her lips as if to argue with him over something trivial. He chuckled and couldn’t help the lustful feelings that were beginning to brew up in the pit of his stomach with every passing second.

While he continued to lust over her mature and sensual appearance, her expression suddenly changed into a gentle foxlike smile, which indicated that she had won the argument in her dream. His smile disappeared into a frown as a thought crossed his mind; he had to be very careful with his next few steps or he’d be completely possessed by her power, knowing that he always had a thing for foxes.

He chuckled and shook himself free of those lustful thoughts and joined her at the table, taking the seat across from her. For another few minutes, he continued to study her until he noticed her laptop. He didn’t like being nosy, heaven knows he hates it when others are nosy with his business, but her exhaustion proved to inspire his curiosity. He turned her laptop just slightly to face him and then he started reading over her notes.

Ever the intellectual, he had an interest in her work instantly. Although he studied something entirely different from what she was working on, he decided that he’d lend her some of his expertise. While his main study was Family Psychology, he had spent the last month diving into studying the changes in how motherly figures were depicted in Korean films, which only naturally led to researching female historical figures, including those who had a knack for entertaining government officials. It should fit into her research quite easily, he thought to himself.

He quickly entered in a few of the figures he had researched onto her document, quickly wrote descriptions of each and then also included the citations for his primary resources. Pleased with how he was able to find her and assist with her research, he took one last long look at her sleeping face and then left the library.

When the librarian woke her up an hour later to check on her, she was shocked to see that the library was already empty. She groaned and cursed to herself for having wasted so much time and then resolved to continuing her research at home. With little to no energy left for dealing with other people, she waited until she was snug on the city bus and then finally her phone. To her surprise, her lips instantly curved into a smile when she saw that Seokjin had called her over ten times and had left her a very eager voicemail to call him back.

She had no clue on how to take in his actions. She had always believed that a needy boyfriend would be the worst thing to experience with dating, but somehow, she felt flattered. She should have hated the fact that he had made such an unnecessary effort to search for her, but all she could think about was how good it felt to finally have someone worry about her and care for her wellbeing. She groaned, shut her eyes, and shook her head gently in confliction to the contradicting thoughts. Was she supposed to like it or not?

As soon as she got off the bus, she called Seokjin and decided upon hearing his voice that she did indeed like it very much. She loved the tone of concern in his voice, especially because it incited the slightest touch of butterflies in her gut.

“Hello,” he answered within a single ring, “did you get home okay?”

She couldn’t help but chuckle, “I did-”

“Yah, why was your phone off,” he started to lecture her, “what if someone was trying to contact you? What if there was an emergency?”

Her usual authoritative manners reminded her that she should have refuted his needless sermon, but she was too tired to even come up with a response, so instead she simply answered him with a soft chuckle.

“Wha-,” he stuttered and then drawled out in exasperation, “you’re laughing? Are you laughing at me? I was really worried, you know.”

Too taken aback by his sudden banter, she laughed even louder and made the passerby’s eye her thoughtfully. Because she sounded so wonderfully entrancing, he went quiet and simply listened to the beautiful sound of her laughter.  

After a good minute of letting everything out, she dabbed the tears in the corners of her eyes and finally let out a deep sigh, “geez… I haven’t laughed like that in years.”

Not knowing how to respond, he just chuckled with her, “what are you up to?”

“Oh, you know,” she continued walking, “going home right now… and if you should know, I was in the library all day.”

“Working hard on your thesis?”

“Yeah, it’s due in two weeks and I feel like I’m getting nowhere.”

“Oh, don’t worry too much,” he sounded confident, “it’ll come together s