The first time you met Kim Minjae, he didn’t say a word.

You were six, sitting alone at the edge of the Seoyang Elementary playground, knees hugged tight. Kids had already decided you were different—too much like your mother, with her soft features and light coloring—though your father’s sharp eyes and bright smile cut through the resemblance. That smile drew people in, but not that day.

No one came near.

Except Minjae.

He had been alone too, as always. Thick brows, long lashes, quiet and immovable. Stone-cold to the world, teasing and questions slipping past him without notice. But he noticed you—small, excluded, chewing your cheek—and silently held out a lollipop.

That was it.

From then on, it was always the two of you. He never changed for anyone else—aloof, distant—but shamelessly kind to you. You grew up without boundaries: sharing snacks, drinks, even baths as kids. Sleepovers meant sharing beds and futons, curling up together as if it was natural. He carried your bags, waited for you at gates, doted in ways impossible to ignore.

Everything was easy. Until the summer before high school, when you first declined sharing the bed. Minjae’s lips twitched, shoulders stiffened—irritation threading his usual calm—and though he muttered nothing, every sleepover since carried a quiet, subtle tension.

By freshman year, you’d built a small, solid friend group together. People admired your charisma and warmth; Minjae tolerated them because they mattered to you, though he kept his distance. Everyone else thought of him as stone-cold and unapproachable, but you knew better.

Now, you’re fifteen, rumpled in your navy-and-white PE uniform, sweat clinging to your shirt as you wrestle with your locker.

“God,” you mutter. “Who keeps shoving their stuff in here?”

Your accent, a lingering echo of your mother’s language, slides over your words. Minjae leans against the gate, juice carton in hand. His lips twitch at the sound, but he teases you quietly instead of admitting how much it unsettles him.

“Took you long enough,” he says when you step outside.

“Blame the locker,” you grin, brushing damp hair from your forehead.

He huffs, pushes the straw toward you. “Drink.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re sweating,” he says flatly.

Rolling your eyes, you sip once, hand it back. “Happy?”

He doesn’t answer, finishes the juice, and falls into step beside you. Your friends lag behind; it’s always just the two of you. The world narrows, your voice spilling into the air, his quiet listening filling the spaces between. He adjusts his pace to match yours, subtly tilting his body so the sun falls across him instead of you.

This is always Minjae: the boy who meets the world with silence but bends every unmoving habit to fit around you.

He notices everything. The way your laugh tightens his chest, how his fingers ache when they brush against yours. He’s known for years—helplessly, irrevocably in love with you.

You, oblivious, are used to his devotion, to his quiet pampering, to the absence of boundaries. Not yet do you see what it is.

So you walk home together, side by side, unaware that love—slow, steady, inevitable—has been there all along. Tonight, like old times, you’ll be staying over at his house, though he’s already muttering under his breath about how you refuse the futon now, a faint crease of irritation crossing his otherwise unreadable face.