Writer's Note: Salutations and welcome! Sorry for just now updating. I've been working on this chapter for a while now, but with life happening, it's been hard. But thank you for all the comments. Honestly, this update is because of the encouragements I've recieved. Thank you for all the support! Hope you'll enjoy this chapter. Sorry for the slow start, but I promise this is a bitter-little-fluff rom-com. Enjoy!

Author’s Note: This story is set in an alternate universe, in an imaginary town and country, and during an ambiguous time period.

“How was last night?”

 Jaejoong took in a deep, laborious breath and he stopped walking. Tilting his head back, forming his eyes into slits, Jaejoong took in the mid April morning sun. He tried to sound cavalier as he said, “Good morning, Bryan.” He sounded anything but carefree and happy.

He had too many issues: a pounding headache, the sunlight was too bright, and the coffee he made had been too weak. Even his coffee had betrayed him this morning!

The one morning he needed everything to be good and everything was the opposite. He believed in signs, and today of all days, all the signs he should have received yesterday were bombarding him. 

His head and his world was still spinning. Keeping his eyes to the ground, Jaejoong allowed his legs to carry him around campus.

“Who cares if the morning is good or not?” Bryan’s overzealous tone brought him back to Earth, and his world stilled for a little bit before he was smacked with grief and embarrassment. “How was last night?” Bryan’s usually much appreciated and adored preppy voice grated on Jaejoong’s frayed nerves.

Last night, around twelve A.M., Bryan had texted him—sending him a long string of non-stop messages asking about his encounter. He had ignored him. He needed space and time. But he could only ignore his best friend for so long. Plus, there would never be enough time to undo the damages that Yunho had caused, once again.

!

He massaged his forehead and tried to not cry. How could he have been so blind? Why was he always like this? So optimistic, naive, and stupid? He hated himself and his stupidity. When would he learn, he wondered?

“Earth to Jaejoong.”

He cleared his throat and blinked. His eyes hurt and his throat hurt. He choked out, “What?”

“Was last night that amazing?”

“Huh?” 

His friend’s excitement made Jaejoong uncomfortable. He was glad he had only told Bryan he was meeting his penpal. He never used the word date. It has been both an act of protection, because what if the meeting had not gone as planned, which it hadn’t, and also because he had been far too thrilled to not have someone to share his evening outing with. Bryan was his friend, his first best friend that was also of the same orientation and just understood him and saw him for who he really was. He loved that man. And he had shared a lot of what he hoped that meeting would bring about. Now, he was dying of embarrassment.

Bryan’s excitement right now would have been perfect if his so called “date” hadn’t turned out to be a nightmare. 

Sighing, Jaejoong muttered, “It was alright.” He took another sip of his coffee.

He didn’t know how he was going to ever tell him the truth. Maybe he shouldn’t. It was all too embarrassing and pathetic.

Bryan loved love. He was a complete hopeless romantic. He has been wishing for nothing more than for Jaejoong to meet the guy that was making him grin like an idiot every time his phone buzzed with a message alert and fall completely heads-over-heels in love with the real person, too. 

See, now, if it had been Bryan, this stranger with his face blurred out would have turned out to be the love of his life, but not Jaejoong. He was cursed.

“Just alright?”

And this is why he had turned his phone off last night. He didn’t want to talk about it. It was making him relive not only last night, but what happened four years ago, too. He had needed complete silence to cry his little heart out.

The crying session had been good, because it helped him realize that he was still confident and courageous and he would be okay. 

Now, going back to the months where he had shed the victim mentality and realized he was no longer in high school would take longer, but Jaejoong would get there soon. He refused to regress after all of the good work that he had done. All the therapy he was paying for. He better have some much better coping mechanisms now.

Still, he was hurt, and in a state of perpetual shock, and he wanted to forget about everything. 

About Yunho being A.aime. His ing Aime!

His brain could not process the feeling of disappointment, and anger, and, frankly, hurt. He was devastated and so hurt. Because, while he could lie to his friends about his hopes–one being of meeting the person who was exactly the same guy he had built in his mind these past months. He had set out to meet his best friend. He couldn’t lie to himself about those long nights on the phone and 24/7 text conversation he had been engaging in for the past months.

It was hard to let go of A.aime.

“Hey! Why are you so quiet?”

He sighed. “Just thinking.”

He was tired of thinking, because the longer he sat down in his small bedroom in his dorm, the stupider he felt. Jaejoong realized that not only would he have to come to terms with the fact that he “played” himself, he also had to come to terms with the fact that he would have to share his embarrassment with his friends —all of them, and not just Bryan.

He had told all of them about his penpal, this “A.aime guy” he spent his every waking moment messaging and dreaming about meeting. How special their relationship was. 

They didn’t even know what the other sounded like, even though they were on the same campus and talked everyday, and sometimes for many hours. Also, they hadn’t shared their phone numbers with each other. But, even with so much unknown, Jaejoong had felt like they knew each other like no one else. He shared with his closest confidants how he felt when he was talking with him and how he had thought they shared something special, a deep understanding that he had never experienced before. Not even with Bryan. Well he was correct in that regard. They shared a dark history. 

He did not know yet how he would relay the news to his friends back at home, the ones who knew Yunho. He did not want them to ever know that A.aime was...Yunho. It was both sad and pathetic.

Jaejoong bit his bottom lip really hard and quickly blinked. He could not believe A.aime was Yunho. Jung Yunho. The whole thing was ridiculous. One second he felt on the verge of crying, and the next he felt on the brink of laughing like a hysterical man–which he was.

“Hey,” Bryan’s voice broke through his deep reverie.

He sniffed and cleared his throat again. He felt like an imbecile. “What?”

“Are you okay? You just went silent.”

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

“Did something happen?”

Yes! His dream of an exciting love story, like the ones that others, lucky others got to experience, turned out to be an eye-opening experience that made it clear the kind of luck he had with men. He was ing cursed. 

“Last night?” He raked his fingers through his hair and chugged down a good portion of his coffee.

“Yeah?” He could hear the frown in his friend’s voice.

“I…Hey, let me call you back. Okay?”

“What’s wrong, dearest?”

Biting his quivering bottom lip, he inhaled and choked out, “I’m late to class.”

There was a quick pause on Bryan’s end of the conversation. “That’s not it. What’s wrong? You sound like….No! Did…What happened last night? Tell me now?” He hollered.

Bryan was anything but a cool collected person. He was always the first to jump to conclusions, wrong or right; for the moment, he had jumped to a conclusion that made Jaejoong finally crack a small, real smile.

Laughing, Jaejoong quickly clarified. “No. Nothing like that will happen.” Something equally as dark happened.

Why was he hiding this? He had nothing to fear with Bryan. He cared. He was his friend. A real friend.

He let out a dry, weary laugh. “I wished something did happen.”

“What do you mean?”

Before Jaejoong could snake his way out of the inevitable conversation, his friend commended, “Meet me in the east courtyard after your class is over.”

“Bryan,” he whined. He was planning on going home after class and sleeping. 

He had only one class today. It was an 8 a.m. class. He originally chose it because he was a morning person and with that just one class, that was his weekly scheduled down day. No work or class after 10 a.m. He also did not have to worry over making it to club meets, because it was near exams and they have officially closed for the semester.

He needed to recuperate after what happened to him last night and strategize how he was going to break the news to everyone without showing how vulnerable he felt and was.

“No, no, we’re meeting.”

“Bry–”
    

“Please?”

Exhaling loudly, fatigue entered his bones and made his body feel like it weighed tons.

---------

Sitting next to Bryan on the grassy ground, back against the large trunk of the shady sycamore tree, he nursed a large reusable cup of black coffee. A gift brought by Bryan. His eyelids felt heavy. Too heavy that he truly believed he was on the edge of passing out and going to sleep right in the open courtyard.

A couple walked a little too close by, holding hands, the guy held a picnic blanket under his arm. They threw the friends a quick, uninterested glance.

The hot sun was shining bright and hot, but Jaejoong felt cold that day. He huddled close to Bryan, needing his warmth and support.

Bryan slipped an arm around his shoulder and pulled him even closer.

The moment Bryan’s eyes had landed on him, he was tugging and pulling everything out of him. He could hold back nothing. It was freeing to share his burden.

Bryan was like a mother hen. One of the many reasons they became friends so quickly. Bryan was gay, like him, and while they shared a somewhat similar personality, especially their world view and how they understood and conceptualized many concepts, they were like day and night in their expression of their uality and the ways they handled their masculinity. 

While Jaejoong was, for the most part, a traditionally masculine guy, Bryan was the opposite. He was extremely femininity, more so than many of the feminine girls that Jaejoong knew, and he knew a lot, one being his oldest sister, Soohyeon. Bryan actually wore clothing articles he bought from the section in the store that was labeled as “Women.” He was flamboyant in his expression of his gender, but he was a socially quiet guy, going against the stereotype that a man as showy as him was supposed to be. 

The hilarious thing about Bryan’s expression of his gender and uality was that he was a strict “top” in his ual relationships and was very much so attracted to gay men who were as equally feminine as he was. Another laugh at the stereotypes of what a gay man like him was presumed to be like by society, and another place Jaejoong and him diverged.

Jaejoong did not know what he liked and didn’t like. He had settled on devoting his college years to figuring himself out. He wanted to experience it all and did not have a mandate nor a preference.

For all his flashy outfits, Bryan was a very quiet, mild mannered person on first appearance that had people falsely presuming he was shy until you began a conversation with him and he grew comfortable. Jaejoong was loud, talkative and a very social creature, though he tire of social events too quickly for Bryan’s liking. 

Bryan had always joked that they balanced each other out.

Bryan dropped his head on Jaejoong’s rather boney shoulder. He ran his palm up and down the exposed part of his arm.

“I am sorry.”

“Why?” he crooned.

“Because…” he shrugged after a long second passed with nothing but silence between them. “I feel like...I encouraged you, so it is partially my fault, you know?”

“No, I don’t. That’s what friends do. I would have done the same thing.”

“I know; I really wanted it to work out. I know you really want to find the one and—”

“Stop.”

“Don’t give up on love just because—”

“Bryan, you know this has nothing to do with that. And, I just wanted an experience, not this whole true love hoopla,” he snapped. 

Blinking at his harsh tone, he was quick to apologize. “I’m sorry. I…. Bryan, I was talking, for months, with my high school bully.” He covered his face with both hands. “I was bullied in high school by him because I was gay, Bryan. He is a homophobe. A dangerous homophobe.”

The slightly bulky young man pulled back and peered curiously at his distressed friend. Choosing his words carefully, he opened his mouth and said, struggling to arrange each word, “I think….” He paused and shook his head. “Being honest,” he rolled his shoulders, “I do not think he is straight.”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“He’s just a sad case of a deeply closested gay man.”

Jaejoong said sardonically, “Or this was his final grand act of humiliating me. High school was not enough, apparently.”

Uncertainty flared in Bryan’s bright eyes, and it was gone as soon as it appeared. “I really do not think…” he let his sentence suffer a premature death.

“I just want to forget the whole experience.” 

“I’m sorry.” Bryan wrapped his arms around his friend and dropped his chin on his shoulder. “We can and will forget about him.”

They were silent for a few seconds before Jaejoong talked again.

With a distant look in his eyes, Jaejoong ate his bottom lip before he finally said, “I was tortured in high school by him and his friends.” Which he had shared with Bryan once during a drinking session in one of their dorms. Bryan had opened up about a horrible childhood experience and he had been vulnerable. To further the bonding, Jaejoong also shared his dark past.

“Babe, we don’t have to talk about it.”

He knew that, but he needed Bryan to understand that he wasn’t using the word torture lightly.

“I was locked in the locker room for three hours after a track practice that ended by six P.M.”

“Hey, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to invalidate your experiences or reasons.” He dropped a comforting palm on top of his raised knee. “He was…is, a horrible person. But, I just do not think he knew he was talking to you.”

“Even if he didn’t, it doesn’t matter. A.aime is dead to me now.”

Bryan was quiet, but he did not remove his hand. Finally, he said in a soft voice, “Well, I am sorry. Let’s just forget about him. He’s insignificant.” He tried a comforting smile.

“I feel so stupid, you know?”

“I know how horrible you must be feeling, but don’t. You are not.”

“All I can think about is ‘what if he knew it was me?’ and how could I have thought I was falling in love with him?”

“Well, you did not know it was him.”

“That makes it worse.”

Because he had truly loved the guy he thought A.aime was, and all he knew of him was his personality.

“But if this is not a sick joke, I thought he, Yunho, had a great personality! I thought he and I were…That’s what you’re not getting.”

“I’m pretty sure he is just a good liar.”

“Then he knew it was me?”

“No.” He shook his head firmly. “He had been trying to impress you, the stranger he was talking to, and that’s all.”

Jaejoong was hysterical now, he cut Bryan off. “I told him some of my deepest secrets! I thought...I was...You know what, it doesn’t matter.”

“Hey, don’t hold it in. Let it out.”

He shook his head and dropped his face on his raised knees. He let out a muffled scream. “I do not know how or what to feel,” Jaejoong said, being honest as he rubbed his bottom lip.

He just felt stupid. So stupid and pathetic.

What was he going to do?

He couldn’t forget. Not the past, and definitely not how Yunho, when he had been A.aime had made Jaejoong feel. The giddy feeling, the feeling of being seen, and the feeling of a budding romance. It all made him feel worse.

While Bryan had been there for him when he took his first major leap in university and did something he had always wanted to do, yet was denied because of where he was from, by joining the LGBTQ+ club chapter on campus. Where he had met his amazing Bryan, there was nothing he could do or say to make Jaejoong feel better about this situation. 

It was nothing but a nightmare.

He had met this A.Aime on their university freshmen page during the first week of his new semester away at university; someone had made a post about how unassuming, therefore, unprepared he/she had been of being scared to be away from everything they were familiar with. 

Jaejoong had felt the same way. He was happy to be away from home and everything he hated, and trying new things, meeting new people, and getting to possibly be his true self to the fullest. However, he had never been away from home. He has gone to Korea many times during summer vacation to spend time with his grandparents and extended family, but this was the first time he was completely alone and away from family and familiar faces. And the realization was slowly suffocating him.

Something about the post resonated with him, and so he felt compelled to say something. He created an account and had written a long three paragraph response, in which he mentioned his ethnicity, uality, and his home city. Everything. 

A.aime liked his response, because he replied to his response with his own essay, beating him by writing four paragraphs. Before long, they took their conversation off the University website. They were fast becoming friends. They were both freshmen, both males, both from the same town, both were of the same ethnicity, and while he was still trying to figure out his uality, he believed he might like men, as Jaejoong does. They instantly hit it off. It was like a cosmic reaction.

It felt as if they were made for each other.

It took only two nights of talking till three in the morning to realize they were not only from the same town, but had graduated from the same high school. That was when A.aime had shared how frightened he was to be opening up to someone who might know who he was in real life. Telling faceless strangers your deepest secrets was easy when you know they’d never be able to place you in a crowded room and judge you. 

He had written that he feared Jaejoong calling him one day and hearing his voice mail, and hearing his name, and knowing who he was. He was not ready yet. He was still trying to figure himself out and how far he wanted to go. They decided to not exchange their real names, their phone numbers or any incriminating socials. Jaejoong had been bummed, because he felt like he had finally met his person. He felt as if he had met his best friend. But he understood.

Two weeks into talking to each other every day, Jaejoong realized he was slowly developing a crush on this faceless guy from his old high school. Someone he might have bumped into without giving him a second look. It was both exhalerating and petrifying.

High school had been trying for him. While homophobia was not as it used to be in 2019, teenagers were still mean, and some kids still thought making someone’s uality a punishable offense was all right—funny even. 

The thought had occurred to him a few times that, what if the person he was talking to was one of his tormentors in high school, and somehow he had realized who he was because of how descriptive his original post was and he was getting a high out of it. But he would catch himself and reread some of A.aime's messages. He had appeared too genuine through his texts to be anything but the sweetheart Jaejoong had started to believe that he was. He was a literal angel. Too sweet. Too caring. Too sincere. A.aime had to be perfect. He was too introspective, too forgiving and gentle to be anything but an amazing human being.

Two months in and their conversation had turned flirty and thick with . Whoever A.aime was, he appeared too invested and genuine. A.aime had made it clear in more words than necessary that he felt something that went beyond friendship and allyship for Jaejoong.

Their interactions could not have been fake. An evil, dark twisted joke. His fears were abade the more they talked, and his heart had felt as safe as he could allow it to be when he would get butterflies over waking up to a text message from his anonymous online friend who could be anything and anyone  

Yes, he had known his height, six-foot and two inches, like him, with tan skin from his hobby of surfing, and the basic ‘boi’ hair style, as he jokingly told him when they exchanged personal description, per Jaejoong’s demands. He wanted something a bit more concrete and since they could not know what each of them looked like, descriptions would do. 

What a ing joke!