“Okay I’m gonna say it,” Jisung huffed, clutching the rink wall like it was his last salvation in life, “This was the dumbest idea I’ve ever had and I once tried to microwave a boiled egg.”
“Yeah, and that exploded,” Felix added, deadpan, inching across the ice like a terrified penguin in a fashion magazine.
“Shut up, both of you,” Seungmin growled from behind them, legs wobbling, arms flailing like a windmill on Red Bull. “You’re the ones who screamed ice rink adventure like toddlers on sugar. Live with the consequences.”
“YOU CAME WILLINGLY.”
“I swear to every god and deity in existence, Jisung, if you scream ‘YOLO’ one more time—”
“YOLOOOOO!” Jisung still screamed.
A crash. A shriek. And an over-caffeinated squirrel in the form of a 20-year-old named Han Jisung slammed straight into the rink wall.
Felix, standing nearby in a puffball jacket that made him look like a very fashionable blueberry, doubled over laughing so hard he almost slipped too. “Bro—BRO—did you just try to dab and skate at the same time?”
“I THOUGHT IT WOULD LOOK COOL!”
“It looked like you were having a seizure on blades.”
Kim Seungmin sighed like he was babysitting toddlers on a sugar rush. Technically, he was. Best friends or not, Jisung and Felix were collectively a disaster. A loud, sparkly, bouncing disaster.
And now, thanks to Jisung’s “end-of-semester-we-need-to-do-something-fun-or-I’ll-implode” speech, they were all here. At a public ice rink in Seoul. Without knowing a single thing about skating.
Seungmin was doing his best to glide in a straight line, holding onto the side railing like it was his only lifeline. Because honestly? It was.
“I hate this,” he muttered, teeth clenched, legs wobbling like wet spaghetti. “I hate this, and I hate YOU, Han Jisung.”
“I LOVE YOU TOO!” Jisung chirped from the floor, attempting to army crawl his way to safety.
Then—
Then fate—or maybe Satan himself—decided to spice things up.
Because Seungmin, who was just barely starting to think he had his balance, skated a little too confidently toward the center, his legs suddenly forgetting they were made of bone and not wet noodles.
“OH NO—nononono—crap—!”
In his frantic attempt to skate away from the chaos, Seungmin’s skates twisted sharply beneath him and he lost control. Completely. His arms flailed wildly, a dramatic yelp left his lips, and just when he thought he was going to faceplant brutally onto the hard ice—
THUMP.
He crashed chest-first into someone. Correction: someone’s chest.
It was warm. Firm. Distinctly muscular. And this stranger smelled subtly of rich vanilla and sinful danger.
Seungmin was about to snap something like “Are you blind?” or “Watch where you’re—” when the words died on his tongue.
Seungmin blinked rapidly as he tried to regain his balance, one hand desperately clinging to the stranger’s arm. And when he finally looked up, his brain genuinely short-circuited.
He froze, immediately losing all ability to breathe.