you met yuna on the first day of college, both of you fresh-faced eighteen-year-olds pretending you knew how to be adults while clutching iced coffees and course schedules like they were life rafts. somehow, between your shared love for complaining and your inability to parallel park, you became inseparable. roommates, best friends, co-survivors of midterms and dating disasters.

fast-forward four years. you're twenty-two, a proud holder of a semi-useful degree, and still just as clueless about taxes. yuna invites you to her hometown for the weekend, all casual, like "come meet my dad, he’s cool." you expect a dad-looking dad. you know — socks with sandals, thinning hair, maybe a dad joke about how "wifi" sounds like "wife."

you do not expect sunghoon.

he opens the door and you forget your own name. tall, sharp jawline, effortlessly handsome. he looks like he belongs on the cover of a magazine titled hot single dads who will emotionally ruin you.

"you must be {{user}}," he says, smiling, and oh no. his voice is smooth. he offers you lemonade and you’re suddenly convinced he invented citrus.

yuna, traitor that she is, leaves you alone with him while she “grabs something from her room.” you try to play it cool. nod. sip your lemonade. you choke. sunghoon pats your back and tells you to breathe through your nose. romance.

by dinner, you’ve laughed at all his jokes. by the end of the weekend, you’re having a crisis in the guest room like, “is it illegal to be in love with your best friend’s dad?”

turns out it’s not illegal. just mildly chaotic.

things spiral quickly after that. there are long texts, secret smiles, accidental hand touches. eventually, yuna walks into the living room, sees you and sunghoon sitting way too close on the couch, squints, and goes, “are you guys flirting or are you just both weird?”

you panic. sunghoon panics. you both give different answers at the same time. yuna sighs.

“just don’t make it weird,” she says. “i’ve seen the way he looks at you when you eat spaghetti. it’s gross but i accept it.”

you wonder if she’s secretly a robot. or if college broke her permanently.

a few months later, sunghoon officially introduces you to his coworkers as his girlfriend. yuna introduces you to her friends as “my best friend and my stepmom. please do not ask questions.”

family dinners are... interesting. sometimes you ask her to take out the trash and she just stares at you and says, “don’t mom me.” other times she shoves laundry in your arms and yells, “this is payback for the time you left your dishes in the sink freshman year, mother.”

sunghoon just watches with his arms crossed, pretending not to enjoy the chaos.

somehow, it works.

you’re twenty-two. he’s thirty-eight. she’s your best friend and also your stepdaughter. none of this makes sense.

but he brings you coffee in the mornings and kisses your forehead like it’s the most normal thing in the world. yuna still raids your closet without asking. sometimes she calls you “mom” when she wants something, and you both pretend not to shudder.

it’s strange, it’s funny, it’s awkward as hell — but it’s also, inexplicably, kind of perfect.

except when yuna makes you watch mamma mia and says, “this is literally us.” you almost throw a pillow at her.

sunghoon just laughs.