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Suzy was lying in bed at the very comfortable king-size bed, unbothered by the mass of limbs that were her girlfriends who were passed out from the excitement of her Bachelorette party. It had been an evening of laughter, some tears, and lots of and lots of booze. Altogether, there were a dozen of them so they rented the cliche party limousine to take them around town and by the time they came back to the hotel, everyone was sufficiently intoxicated and exhausted that it didn’t take long for them to pass out on various surfaces of the large suite.
In less than six hours, she’ll be standing in a church with her white dress in front of a modest crowd of 300 (which was a result of a lot of arguing with her parents) and she knew that she should really try to catch some sleep lest she wanted the aunties to gossip about her eye bags for years to come.
But Suzy couldn’t sleep. She continued to stare at the ceiling of the darkened room with the gentle sound of the air conditioner and her bridal party’s snores filling the room. Moments later, she closed her eyes, taking deep, measured breaths.
She was about to force herself to keep her eyes shut when she heard faint knocking on the door. She paused and waited to see if the knocking would persist, considering that maybe she was reaching a point of exhaustion that she was hearing things. When moments passed without any more noise, she exhaled and she was just about to continue her attempt to fall asleep when she heard the sound of the door’s magnetic key opening. She abruptly sat up and grabbed the first thing she could find, which happened to be one of her friend’s stilettos, before heading towards the door. She made it out to the living room area of the suite when she saw a familiar figure emerge from the hallway and immediately exhaled, tension immediately leaving her body.
“What are you doing here?” she hissed, careful to step around someone’s leg that’s splayed across the sectional couch.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his hands on her elbows, drawing her closer.
“I’m fine.”
“Then why do you look upset?” Even in the dark, she could see his brows furrowed.
“Why?” she asked, in a harsh whisper, pushing him towards the hallway and away from the rest of the sleeping bridal party, “How would you feel if someone came at 3:00 am when everyone who has the key is currently passed out in the room with you? I thought you were an intruder.”
His eyes landed on the stiletto on her hand and he grinned, “Were you going to defend everyone’s honor with that?”
She gave him a warning glare before setting the stiletto gently on one of the open luggage next to her.
“What did you guys get up to tonight? Champagne? Sushi? Strippers?” he asked, trying to look past her to the rest of the room.
“Yes, yes, no, plus karaoke. And you still haven’t answered my question,” she answered, “What are you doing here? And you sound strangely sober for someone who was in the hands of Jackson Wang all night.”
Coughing noise came from the living room and he gestured towards the door. She nodded and followed him to the empty hotel hallway. Once he heard him shut the door ever so gently, she repeated her question by way of a demanding look that he was all too familiar with. He turned around to face her and it was then that she finally had a real look at him.
Jinyoung was in an all-black attire - black shirt, black leather jacket, black pants, and black boots while his hair was a little messy, his fringe no longer perfectly parted and styled. It made her conscious of how she looked, undoubtedly much less put together than him in comparison since she changed into a silk top-and-short pajama set a few hours ago and had stripped her face bare of makeup, her hair up in a messy bun. She had forgotten how much he loves leather jackets, suddenly recalling a corner of his closet where maybe half a dozen leather jackets were collecting dust due to lack of wear. His hands were shoved inside the jacket and for a moment, she had a glimpse of a much younger Jinyoung - one who was not a lawyer for one of New York’s top firms. This was the Jinyoung who’d go to a dive bar on a Friday night to watch live music and stay up until dawn, hopping from one place to another - the Jinyoung that hasn’t made much of an appearance lately.
“Jackson had an entire club rented out and DJ and endless booze,” he explained, “And that’s why everyone’s also passed out in my suite,” he gestured towards the end of the hall to his room.
She looked up and his face was close enough to her that she could see the fatigue around his eyes. His eyes, which were usually crystal clear and strikingly black, were dimmer. The smell of beer and soju were present, so she knew that he’s not completely sober. So she guessed that while his friends went for a steady 100 all night with the festivities, he had steadily refrained towards the end of the night. Jinyoung was never one for wild, all-night, black-out-drunk parties anyway - she knew that she didn’t like losing control of himself, which always made him the Responsible One in their friend group whenever they went out. So it was no surprise that he was standing straight while the rest of his friends were passed out in his room.
“We’re not supposed to see each other right now,” she reminded him, pulling on the collars of his jacket to get a closer look at a darkened stain that she just noticed. She used her thumb to brush off the stain but it wouldn’t budge; he probably already made plans to take this jacket to the dry cleaner’s to get the stain off but she kept trying to clean it anyway, licking her fingers and trying to rub it away. He was incredibly meticulous like that, something she had come to rely on in the course of their relationship. It had marveled her at first to find him coming to her apartment with one of her sneakers that he had taken to the cleaner’s, but she knew that while she’s a woman of many words and physical affection, taking care of her through those little gestures is his love language. So she’d come to rely on him to take care of her and in turn, she has been learning to do the same for him - to notice things the way he would.
“Because it’s bad luck?” he scoffed, “Screw that.”
She couldn’t suppress her smile at his indignant tone.
“I’m going to see you now, traditions be damned because, in six hours, I’m going to bravely and foolishly agree to see you for the rest of my life, guaranteeing that I’ll die of diabetes of some sort because of the sheer amount of desserts I’ll be ingesting…” oohh he’s definitely a little more than slightly tipsy , she concluded in her mind as she listened to his tirade. “...and leave that alone. I already tried and it won’t come off,” he shooed her hands away from his collar.
She chuckled, “Did you not enjoy your party? I honestly expected more from Jackson. And why won’t the stain come off? What did you spill?”
He sighed, his annoyance clear.
He didn’t typically emote as much as she does and she knew that it is a true privilege to be able to see all of the ranges of Park Jinyoung’s emotions completely unfiltered. Annoyance is one that he typically processed first through his ever-logical brain before it manifests into a quick twitch, followed by some measured explanation of why this or that is wrong (on the flip side, she’d yell and rant - finger-wagging and all before collapsing on the couch as Jinyoung talked her through whatever was making her upset). So seeing him thoroughly annoyed and almost scowling like he was now is a rarity and she was intent on enjoying it as much as she could.
“Well, because this is my Bachelor’s party and my parents want my family to be as involved as possible, they insisted that my cousins joined us. So I had to try to prevent Jackson from breaking the law by giving my underage cousins alcohol. Jaebum and Wonpil were completely useless. And then the strippers came and Jehoon Hyung spilled whatever it was he drinking--”
“Strippers?” she interrupted.
He sighed, this time even heavier and deeper, eyes pinched shut for a moment before finding hers again, “Jackson thought it would be funny.”
She chuckled, “In his defense, it probably was funny to see how upset you were. You know he was just trying to make sure everyone was having fun.”
“Well, much fun was clearly had by everyone - at my expense - since they’re all dead to the world right now.”
“Did you have fun?” she asked with an amused grin on her lips as her fingers absentmindedly ran through the collar of his jacket.
He paused for a moment before nodding with a small smile, “I did. But don’t tell Jackson for a few days, okay? Let him feel bad about the strippers for a bit. My cousins were 14 and 15 for god’s sake…” he muttered.
She chuckled and rested her palms on his shirted chest, underneath the jacket.
“Did you have fun?” he asked, his eyes losing that fiery aggravation that had been there earlier, replaced with tenderness with large hints of exhaustion.
She nodded, enjoying the feel of his hand running up and down her back, “Unfortunately, we didn’t have strippers at ours,” she gave him a pointed look, grinning mischievously, “But I had a great time with the girls. They, too, are passed out in my room as you saw.”
“I’m gonna ignore that strippers comment,” he huffed before continuing, “How come you’re not asleep? I thought Jieun was gonna have you drunk out of your mind. You guys even went to the noraebang.”
“Ehh…” she shrugged, “I don’t want to be hungover tomorrow and you know how I get before an important day.”
He smirked, “Important day? What’s going on tomorrow?”
She played along and sighed nonchalantly, “Oh you know that thing where you’ll say something about bravely and foolishly vowing to see me for the rest of your life.”
His smile was blinding, the corners of his eyes scrunched into lines, “Are you gonna say something similar?”
“Probably. I mean, it is brave and foolish of me to agree to see you for the rest of my life since that guarantees that I’ll never be able to find anything in my closet since you’d move them around without my knowing.”
“It’s called organization,” he piped back.
“I call it interfering with my system.”
“...which is?”
“Organized chaos.”
“An oxymoron.”
“You’re an oxymoron.”
He laughed, “Nice comeback.” With his free hand on top of her palms that were splayed on his chest, he leaned down and placed a quick kiss on her lips.
She grinned into the kiss and wrapped her arms around his torso before sighing in contentment. She felt his hand caressing the back of her neck and she let her eyes close as she took comfort in the feel of his soft cotton t-shirt on her ear.
They stayed that way for a while, in each other’s arms, saying nothing. Whatever nerves were keeping her awake earlier dissipated slowly, even though the hum of it was still present.
“Nervous?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Second thoughts?”
“No way. We’re thirteen years past the return date.”
He chuckled.
It was surreal to think that their nuptial had been thirteen years in the making. This was pointed out to them by their parents as they insisted that they get married just six months after Jinyoung’s birthday, saying that “they were sick of not being actual in-laws.” Most of their friends’ reaction to their announcement weren’t dissimilar (“Finally! If I had a child when you guys first got together, the kid would be a teenager by now,” Wonpil had said) and it just made them grateful to have friends who had been there for them through it all (“Honestly, if I wasn’t the Maid of Honor after everything you both put me through all these years, I would end our friendship,” Jieun had said when she asked her to be her Maid of Honor). At times, it was hard for her to reconcile how their upcoming wedding felt like an inevitability and a miracle, all at the same time. In her heart, she’d always known there was no version of her that’s not going to be married to Jinyoung. But there was also a part of her that remembered those years of heartbreak, of not having Jinyoung, of the chest pains she got whenever he heard that he was dating someone else, thinking that it was a feeling she needed to get used to.
But they had made it. Somehow, after all these years, they made it.
“Yah!”
They both turn to the source of the sound and found a very disgruntled and rumpled Jackson stalking towards them with as much as gusto as a person who was probably hungover could. It made Suzy wish she had her phone with her to record Jackson wobbly stomping down the hallway towards them. She looked up and rested her chin on his chest, knowing that their little bubble of peace and calm has burst.
“See you in a few hours?”
His smile was bright and his eyes were crystal clear, “See you in a few hours.”
She squeezed his torso before letting go, just as Jackson reached them, leaning against the wall for support as he blinked furiously, probably still trying to gather his bearings. Jinyoung nudged her towards her door as he grasped Jackson’s arm, steering him back towards their room, saving her from Jackson’s hungover mumblings that she could still hear faintly as she gently closed the door, “Jinyoung-ah, I thought you had gone missing. Like in The Hangover… ”
She chuckled, walking ever so quietly through the living room before settling down in her bed. She closed her eyes, relieved that it won’t be much longer until she’ll finally be married to the person she has been in love with she was fourteen.
Finally.