Archive of Our Own

Jisung looks down, up, down, up again. This is the right place. The map pin yong.lixx had sent him over Instagram leads here, some commercial building block. There’s an intercom with eight different buzzers on it, and only one of them is tagged with a name and not just a number or company logo. The studio. This is definitely the right place. Should he ring the buzzer? Even though the front door is already unlocked, slightly ajar in the frame. He should probably ring the buzzer. 

“Hello?”

This is worse than talking on the phone. This might even be worse than actually getting the tattoo in the first place. Right, because that’s the whole reason he’s here, and he isn’t anxious about it but maybe a little trepidation is healthy. Someone he’s never met before is about to stab him with a bunch of tiny needles. That’s, like, way beyond third base. Jisung barely even looks at strangers.

“Hello? Can I help you?”

“Hi,” Jisung says, too forceful, and winces as his voice almost cracks, just the threat of it lingering around the edges of his words. He always sounds – pubescent, these days. Childish. Not the vibe he wants to be giving off, but. “Um. I’m Han Jisung? From. Instagram?”

“You don’t have to sound so sure about it,” the voice says, dry but sort of sweet if you really squint, like good white wine. He hears the dull thud of the lock shifting inside the door. “Come on in, Han-ssi. Thanks for being on time.”

Jisung’s two options when it comes to attending appointments are, because he is self-aware, ten minutes late or forty minutes early; he’d aimed for the latter and then hung around in the deserted lobby for twenty minutes trying to feel less pathetic about it. Now he can’t tell if it’s backhanded or genuine of the – intercom person – to comment on it. Something about their voice makes it hard to tell. Or that could just be Jisung and his chronic inability to take a hint, but. “Great,” he says, trying to sound confident and blisteringly aware that it’s come out cocky – he’d decided a long while ago that he could live with that trade-off, that at least it made people read him as a masculine asshole rather than a woman. He tugs his finger from the buzzer and presses down the wide industrial handle of the door, feels it give before him with a tired-sounding click.

 None of the doors on the ground floor seem to correspond to the right place, nor the first floor. Jisung takes each step feeling a little like he’s climbing a mountain. The actual studio is at the top of the building, but this time their door is branded and also propped wide open. Is that some kind of social faux pas, to just walk into someone’s place without announcing himself, even if the door is open? Is he supposed to knock? Surely, it’s not supposed to be this hard. The floorboards creak when he steps on them, loud enough to make him cringe. 

Someone peers out of one of the rooms inside. They’re hot, the kind of hot that makes Jisung want to curl into a ball and never go outside again. Their hair is short, dark, spiky, effortlessly cool. The kind of effortless that Jisung can never manage, where it just ends up looking like he cared too much and still didn’t quite go to plan. There’s something dark smudged around their waterline – not quite like it was applied with purpose, Jisung thinks, but like it wasn’t taken off properly last night, and somehow it still looks fucking cool. They blink at him, eyes widening and then narrowing a little. Is this yong.lixx? Jisung hasn’t seen much of her on Instagram, but he’s fairly certain she’s meant to be blonde. “Felix, your twelve o’clock is here!”

“Hi,” Jisung says, a little weakly. There’s an actual desk right near the front of the room, like where a receptionist would sit, but the chair behind it is empty; he drifts towards the desk and sort of parks himself there as though the potential for administrative tasks can anchor him in the moment. “Um, I’m – I can wait if I’m early. Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” they say, giving him a sort of brisk once-over glance that somehow leaves Jisung feeling distinctly flayed open. Like they’ve looked into his chest and, as though combing through the pockets of a pair of jeans about to go into the wash, picked out the eclectic contents of the core of him; put another way, they give the impression they’ve managed to glean, through vibes alone, both his issues with his family and his BDSM test results. Jisung resists the urge to fidget. “Sorry, we’re meant to have an actual receptionist but he kind of just leaves whenever he feels like it. Lix probably won’t be long.”

“Okay,” Jisung says. Probably the vaguely unprofessional air should make him nervous, but he finds himself relaxing into the space a little better now – he’s always done better with things he understood, and perfect order has always been alien to him. It feels more human now. Less sterile. “Great. Thanks.”

They blink at him for a long moment. “You can, like, sit down,” they say. “You don’t have to just stand there.”

“Right,” Jisung says, wincing, and almost trips over his own feet as he hurries towards one of the chairs. They’re positioned well enough that he can scan over the rest of the hallway, taking stock of the other rooms (three doors, one pulled tightly shut, one half-closed, and the third leading to where this other person had come from). There’s a bunch of prints hung up on the walls, posters for movies he doesn’t recognise and bands he does. There’s a tall vase on their reception desk, but the flowers in it are all fake, fabric petals drooping over their stems. “This is a nice place,” he says, and then wants to kick himself about it immediately. Obviously it’s a nice place. 

The person opposite him twitches one eyebrow upwards, and the light catches against the silver barbell in it. Deadpan, but not in a way that’s abrasive, offputting.  “Thanks. It took ages getting the feng shui right.”

The half-closed doorway opens a little wider, before Jisung gets a chance to begin formulating a response that won’t keep him awake at night. The girl who steps out of it must actually be the artist he’s here to see, yong.lixx. Felix. Her blonde hair is scraped back in a messy ponytail, pieces falling out around her face, revealing the stack of silver jewellery in her ears, the smear of mascara around her eyes. Her mouth opens and shows the point of her teeth, the flick of her tongue. Is it too late to go home? Jisung might need to go home.

“Jisung, right?” Felix asks. Jisung opens his mouth to answer, but he can’t make a sound happen. Holy shit. She glances over at the other doorway. Even her side profile is perfect. “Ah, sorry I had to leave you alone with Seungmin for a sec. I was just getting everything set up. How are you feeling? You ready for this?”

Jisung opens his mouth. Shuts it. “Yeah,” he says after a too-long moment, painfully aware of his own strained tone. She’s, like – biblically gorgeous, to the point that it beggars belief. Makes the room around her seem abruptly two-dimensional. He grasps for something to say, anything that’ll make him come across at least somewhat less airheaded: “Um, I did the – consent forms and stuff online already?” It isn’t meant to come out sounding like a question, but.

Her gaze flicks back to him when he speaks, something like concern written in the furrow of her brow. She takes a little step towards him. “You okay?” she asks, devastatingly casual; her accent is rough around the edges, and Jisung has lived in a lot of different countries but with his brain as soupy as it is right now he can’t quite place it. The force of her attention on him is – dangerous. Heady. Even when those dark eyes are wide with concern, there’s a confidence in it, a self-assurance, that has Jisung feeling a little weak. He needs to get it together. “It’s fine if you need a minute, okay? We’re running early anyway.” She flashes him a smile, broad and toothy, and he genuinely feels a little like he’s been flashbanged. 

“I’m – I’m okay. Just… you know,” Jisung tries. Not ready to get tattooed by the most intimidatingly attractive girl he’s ever seen in his life. The floorboards creak again as Seungmin disappears back into their room, and Jisung swears he hears them snort a laugh as the door shuts. Felix just smiles at him, soft and gentle. 

“It’s your first tattoo, right?” she says, gesturing for him to stand up and follow her into the other room. “It’s normal to be nervous. I’ve got your piece all drawn up, so we can go over it and see if there’s anything you wanna change, and we’ll take it at your pace, okay? If you need a break, just say the word.”

The next room is smaller, lighter, decorated a bit more sparsely. There’s a bed pushed up against the furthest wall, arranged next to a set of drawers and a stool. Exactly what he’d been expecting. Things he’s seen before, on Felix’s Instagram story. Felix points over to the bed.

“Take a seat. I’ll print everything off, and we can play around with placement for a bit until everything looks good,” she says. Take a seat. Jisung can do that. At least, his legs feel like they move him automatically, sitting him down while Felix pulls out an iPad and switches on the printer in the opposite corner of the room, flitting about like she can’t manage to stay still. Jisung – relates. His knee is bouncing without his conscious input. He twists his fingers together, reminds himself very firmly to be polite and respectful, and then stiffens when she turns back towards him a minute or so later with a few different printouts in one hand. “You wanted this on – like, just above your pec, right?”

“Right,” Jisung says, flustered for a reason he can’t quite place. It’s sort of embarrassing to have someone else read out what he’d typed into the form, like it’s somehow more cringeworthy when it’s hanging in the air between them. The mortifying ordeal of taking something personal from his mind to his body. He feels the urge to shrink spiderwebbing itself across the inside of his chest. 

“Alright,” Felix says, one eyebrow raising a little, her smile still very gentle. “So you’re going to need to take your shirt off for me, aren’t you?”

Jisung swallows. The for me was fucking uncalled for. She doesn’t push him yet, not even when it takes him thirty long seconds to even begin reaching for the hem of his t-shirt. He’s not ashamed of his body, not the way he used to be, ground deep into his bone marrow like he could never be without it. That kind of insecurity had lightened a little, bloomed into something more comfortable. But it’s still a little… nervewracking, maybe. That old trick, the flare of but what if –? that informs every action he makes. 

Felix’s lips part a little when he gets his shirt off, discarding it on the floor beside the tattoo bed. He can’t read her face, not quite, can’t tell what she’s thinking even when her eyes drag across his chest. She doesn’t blink twice at the scars but he can see her throat moving, the tendon in her neck jumping. She steps a little closer, reaches out one hand but doesn’t quite touch him yet. Her voice drops a little, lower, quieter. “Which side did you want? Right side?”

Now is not the time to be freezing up in the face of a pretty girl. He just nods. Felix reaches out to touch him gently, slow enough that he could pull away. Her fingers are light when they brush over his skin, the flesh of his shoulder and jut of his collarbone. “Do you – do you think that’ll look okay?”

“Yeah, yes,” Felix says immediately; she blinks, close enough that it feels sort of momentous, worth commenting on, then grins again. It lights up her entire face. Makes Jisung nervous in an entirely different way – the smile transforms her from someone so nerve-wrackingly beautiful she almost doesn’t look real into a woman Jisung thinks he could be friends with, approachable, earnest. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. Felix licks her lips a little, then says, “High enough that I’m not going anywhere near the nipple, right? Only that still looks a little new.”

He blinks, startled that she’d notice – it’s only been six months since his surgery and his nipples are still sort of figuring themselves out, the scar tissue doing funny things around the edges. “Um. Yeah.” It’s a testament to how natural his chest feels now that it hadn’t even occurred to him she’d be seeing his scars, that his embarrassment had only been around being shirtless in the more general sense – the paler skin of his belly, the hair dusted over his lower abdomen, that sort of thing. His waist, maybe. Felix’s eyes keep darting to it; he’s probably got, like, pen ink on his hip or something. He blinks, trying very hard to remind himself why he’s here, what he’s doing.

“That’ll be fine, then,” Felix says. She takes her hands away. “Hopefully I won’t have to, like, lean on them while I tattoo you either. So we’ll figure out placement, then I’m gonna shave the area a little, disinfect it, and we’ll get the stencil on. Sounds good?” 

“Sounds good,” Jisung echoes. He’s not really in a place to disagree. Felix grins at him, wide and toothy. 

“So I’m thinking, if we get the curve of the compass to line up with the curve of your shoulder a bit,” Felix holds up the stencil she’d printed, holding it against his skin loosely. “Then the text will end at a nice point too, around here. What do you think? You wanna look in the mirror?”

Jisung looks down. It’s pretty hard to see, Felix’s hands holding the stencil to his body, and he can’t tilt his head far enough. “Um, yeah. In the mirror. But I trust you.”

She smiles again, more playful this time, and steps back to let him stand up. There’s a mirror fixed to the wall nearby. Jisung isn’t sure how he’ll survive this, when Felix stands to his side and holds the stencil over his body and he tries to focus on the art and not the way she looks next to him. The way her hands look against his skin. Focus on the art, and not how her knuckle brushes against his shoulder. He watches her tilt her head in the reflection. “I think it looks good like this,” she says, moving the stencil a few centimetres back. “This is a good placement. It won’t warp too much when you move, either. How does it feel?”

Her fingertips feel cool against his bare chest. That probably isn’t what she meant. “Um. Good,” he says, aware he’s coming across very monosyllabic and hating himself a little for it. Just like him, to structure an entire sense of self around his skill with lyrics and then forget how to talk. That’s kinda funny. “I – yeah, I like it there. I wanted it to be like – easy enough to cover if I really want to but also easy enough to be able to see it if I want, you know?” The rambling, at least, is better than the caveman speech. He’s managed to annoy people into liking him through his rambling before. “Because you could, like – see the edges if the shirt was looser, y’know, or – yeah. It’s good there. I like it.” He needs to commit to it before he overthinks it, also. Felix tilts her head in the mirror; her pinky brushes against his skin and he almost jumps. Doesn’t. “Um. D’you think so?”

“Yeah,” Felix says, framing it for a moment with her hand. She traps her tongue between her teeth for a moment, as though lost in thought, then takes a deep breath. “Just – see how this part of the design extends over your collarbone a little?” She traces the line of the compass with a close-trimmed nail; it’s painted with what Jisung thinks at first is black until it gleams an iridescent violet in the light. “That’ll hurt a lot more than the rest will, over the bone. You’re okay with that?”

He expected that. He’s been stalking subreddits for tattoos for the last week. Everyone has said that. Jisung nods. “Yeah, that’s okay. If it was that bad, no one would do it, right?”

Felix laughs. Jisung’s knees feel a little weak. “That’s true. So you’re good with pain?”

There’s something layered in her voice now, something Jisung wants to pick up on, wants to tease out of her, wants to tear threads from and twist them back up into knots. Is he good with pain? Well, maybe. Does he like it? Well… “I think so.”

Felix looks at him in the mirror, stares into him, like she’s cracking open his ribcage and breaking it apart. “Good. Then… let’s get you cleaned up, and the stencil on, and we’ll get into it.”

That part, at least, goes quickly. Felix sits him back down with a gentle if firm hand. She shaves down the peach fuzz hair on his collar, and disinfects the area, and then smooths the stencil over it. Jisung tries not to feel any type of way about her hands on him. She’s professional. She’s working. He can’t. By the time she’s standing him back up, guiding him back in front of the mirror to see the ink of the stencil impressed on his skin, he can feel all the blood in his body rushing south. Fuck, he can’t. He has never been gladder not to have an actual dick in his life, thinks he’d probably be half-hard in his sweats; as it stands, he can feel himself swollen in his briefs.

The problem is that Felix has an – iridescent sort of beauty, in that it’s a different shade each time he looks at her: sweet-pretty like the girl next door despite her piercings one moment, then from a slightly different angle her face is transformed into someone who – Jisung can dream – looks like she wants to eat him whole, like she wants nothing more than to hurt him and to watch him enjoy it. Jisung can’t quite get used to it because he can’t sort it into just one box into his brain. Like, Okay, she’s cute, end of story, except the next moment she looks marble-sculpture beautiful in an ethereal sort of way, and then he has to come to terms with that. How she –

“– sung? It is Jisung, right, I’m not embarrassing myself by calling you the wrong name five times in a row?”

He doesn’t think it’s even possible for Felix to embarrass herself, by any stretch of the word. Jisung, instead, feels himself blushing. “No, yes, yeah. It’s – it’s Jisung, sorry, I just –”

Felix’s face shifts, sunlight on water, and her cheeks puff outwards as she smiles again. “You’re distracted by something? You don’t have to be nervous.”

Distracted by her. Jisung clears his throat. “Yeah, I’m just… just nervous. Sorry. And excited.”

“You don’t need to be sorry, either,” Felix says. She has one hand on his shoulder, holding firm. Jisung hadn’t even realised she’d never stopped touching him. “I’m not going to hurt you. Well. Only a little bit.”

Is she just talking about the tattoo? Jisung meets her eyes in the mirror. He kind of hopes not. He shouldn’t be thinking thoughts like that, not about her, not about someone who’s just trying to do her job. “I – okay. It’s okay.”

Felix’s lip twitches, the corner of it, lifting to reveal her teeth. Jisung has never thought about someone’s teeth so much in his life. “It’s okay? If I hurt you?”

Jisung gets actual chills at the way her voice dips lower, a little gravelly, for just a moment. He thinks he shivers. Hopes she doesn’t notice, where her hand is still resting on his shoulder. “Course,” he says, trying for confident now, though he thinks it’s probably obvious how thin the facade is. “I, um, love getting stabbed with needles. Love, um.” He scrabbles for words, feeling like a scatterbrained protagonist in a particularly tropey drama who’s stumbled into the love interest for the first time and now has to pick up their schoolbooks from the floor one by one, clumsily, with shaking hands; bit by bit, paper by paper, Jisung strings his sentences together. “I love getting hurt.” 

It was meant to be a joke. It was meant to sound like a joke. Surely it sounded like a joke.

Felix’s brow inches higher in the mirror. 

By virtue of still looking at himself in said mirror, Jisung doesn’t have to infer that he’s gone scarlet from the warmth in his cheeks; he gets to watch as it blossoms across his nose and then spreads, like muddy water over floodplains, across his face and down his neck. “Not – not like that,” he says quickly, aware even as he does that the fact he has to clarify is not helping his case. “Obviously.” Obviously! His blush has worked its way down his throat and to his chest, and what’s worse is that Felix can see it, still, because he isn’t wearing a shirt. “Fuck, hurry up and tattoo me so I can leave the country the moment you’re done.”

This, at least, makes her laugh. Felix lets him go, steps back, indicates for him to sit back down on the bed. “Obviously,” she says, something sharp threaded through her words. Jisung feels it prickle through him. “Lie back down, then. We’ll get started.”

He lies back, props himself up on his elbows. Looks at her. Keeps looking at her. “How do you – how do you want me?”

Felix considers him for a second, an unreadable microexpression flitting across her face for a moment before it settles back into a professional neutrality. “I think… okay, I’m gonna pull the bed out a little and you just lie on your back. I’ll probably have to lean on you a bit, is that okay?”

She’s moving the bed before he can even reply, shifting it away from the wall by a few inches. It doesn’t move much, but some kind of sound sticks itself in Jisung’s throat. “Yeah, that’s okay,” he says, trying to sound normal. Totally okay. He can’t really breathe in all the way; his ribs feel too tight for his chest.

She glances back at him, brow creased again. “Seriously, if you need a minute, I really don’t want to rush you.” 

“I don’t think waiting is going to make any difference,” Jisung says honestly. He lets himself settle backwards until he’s flat on the paper sheet, blinking up at the white ceiling, the way the light slants across it. “I’ll be – better once you’ve started. I think.”

“Oh, sure,” Felix says, like she understands. “You ready?”

Jisung is, horrifically, not any better once she’s started.

The pain seems worse than it is for a few minutes, with Jisung’s nerves jangling and off-kilter at the maelstrom of new sensation and uncomfortable arousal and the sweaty cocktail of embarrassment and guilt at feeling the way he is about a woman just trying to do her job. Once Jisung gets used to the sensation, though, it really isn’t that bad. A little distracting. Felix starts low, closer to the scarred edge of his nipple, and, mercifully, seems to focus so intently on what she’s doing that she stops paying attention to any part of Jisung except his pec; her hair is pulled neatly out of her face, but the few strands that do frame her forehead stop Jisung from seeing her dark eyes, and abruptly he can breathe a little easier. He doesn’t, because he’s trying not to move his chest, but – he could. The tightness eases. He feels himself relax a little, surprisingly, into the surface beneath him – he’s startled at himself, having historically had a low pain tolerance. But he feels sort of – tingly. Buzzing with it. Adrenaline, maybe. 

Then Felix glances up at him from beneath her lashes for one charged breath; abruptly, the pain swims shivery through Jisung’s entire body like he’d only been putting it off, sinks below his skin with the ink and into his bloodstream. Coalesces in his lower belly, warm and slick like arousal. He hears the little whimper a solid five seconds before he realises the sound is his own. 

“How does that feel?” Felix asks, voice low, quiet, no louder than the buzz of her machine. Jisung can feel it vibrating through his bones, echoing through into the cavity of his chest. It’s strange, like he can feel the needle gouging out his skin. It hurts. Obviously, it hurts. “Not too bad?”

“Not too bad,” he echoes. “Not… not what I expected.”

“What were you expecting?” she asks. “Most people tell me it hurts more than they thought it would.”

“I didn’t realise you could feel the vibrating so much,” Jisung answers. The pain is secondary; adrenaline flooding his body, it settles into a dull burn. Something to lose himself in. But the shudder of the needle against his skin, rattling through to his bone, sets his teeth on edge. “It’s weird.”

Felix laughs under her breath. She moves a little, elbow pressed against his ribs, leaning her entire body over his. “It takes a while to get used to. But it doesn’t hurt too much?”

“No,” Jisung says. He’s distracted: the pressure of her arm against him, the warmth of her body. 

“Good,” says Felix. She inks another line, dragging it out across his chest. “You’re sitting really well. And you have great skin for it.”

Jisung digs his nails into his sweats, has to breathe slow through his nose to keep from – moving, reacting in any way that would jostle his chest. First he has to fight off the shudder that wants to go through him. Then he wants to laugh it off, but can’t; instead he gives an awkward huff of air and says, “Um. Thanks,” horribly pitchy, embarrassing, embarrassing. The pain and the praise and now the shame too – it’s a cocktail better designed to take Jisung apart than some of the people who have actually tried on purpose, has all of him tense, on edge, as he tries not to squirm. 

Felix’s eyes dart up to meet his for the barest brushstroke of a moment, then flicker back to her work. Jisung swallows. There’s a certain – devastating dismissal in the way she ignores him, instead refocusing on the half-blank slate of his body. Like he’s just skin and flesh and bone to her. It shouldn’t be attractive, probably, but – surely anybody would get a little wet in that situation if they had a pre-existing thing about being objectified, right?

Or maybe he’s just horny. And she’s trying to do her job. That he’s paying her to do and will not sexually harass her while she’s doing.

“That’s high praise from a tattoo artist, you know,” she says, a little offhand now, like she’s focusing. He can feel the burn of her gaze, the cut of her eyes like she’s seeing straight through him. “Good skin,” a joke, a joke. “Sitting well.” A little more serious. Deeper. Cutting.

Jisung looks at her, the edge of her face. The curve of her nose, her cheek, her lips, pursed in concentration. The wisps of hair, falling out of her ponytail. Thinks about putting his hands in it. Tries really hard to stop thinking about that. He clenches tight, every single muscle in his body. Fuck, maybe he should have bought spare clothes with him. Fuck. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

Felix lifts the tattoo gun away for a second, wiping over his skin with a paper towel. She glances up, looks at him carefully. “No? You get a lot of people telling you that, Jisungie?”

Fuck. Jisung couldn’t have kept his mouth shut for once in his life, even. But before he can quite figure out how to laugh it off, Felix’s eyes meet his and forestall it – there’s that heady darkness to them again, and Jisung swallows, feeling it bob in his throat, at the weight of her gaze on him. It feels deliberate. It has to be deliberate. He shifts a little while he can, then almost winces as he feels – humiliatingly – his underwear, a little sticky, manages to bite back the discomfited noise that boils in his throat. “Um,” he says. Scatterbrained. His head is swimming. His chest is shifting from sting to ache, or to sting-and-ache, and it’s fucking with him. “What?”

Felix laughs, deep and sweet. “You sit well for a lot of people, Jisungie, or only the ones who’ll give you what you want?”

Her gloved hand skims over his other pec – it’s unnecessary, it has to be unnecessary, and somehow that bolsters Jisung more than anything else, the idea that he isn’t the only one behaving inappropriately. That it’s not unwelcome. He shivers under her touch; Felix grins, pleased and a little teasing, before pressing him gently back down into the bed with her fingers on his shoulder. “Good,” she says, earnest, then laughs when another full-body shiver goes through him.

“You’re making fun of me,” Jisung says, affronted. He feels so untethered. Felix’s hand is a weight on him, grounding; the pain keeps him floaty without the drone of the tattoo gun through his bones. “D’you do this to all the boys?”

“Just the masochists,” Felix says conspiratorially. Jisung blinks up at her. Does not know what he did to deserve this. “Okay, holding still again for me. You ready?”

“Yeah,” Jisung rasps. At this point, he’s sort of resigned to his fate, whether that ends up being a harassment claim or him getting laid after this; the game is up, she knows exactly what he’s thinking, he’s been embarrassingly obvious. His wants are laid bare before her with his skin. All he can really do is take whatever Felix wants to give him.

Honestly, Felix has no idea what kind of karma she’s cashing in on right now, but she’s fairly certain Kim Seungmin is already laughing at her about it.

Jisung – Han Jisung, per the customary Instagram stalk she’d performed before he arrived at the studio – whimpers a little beneath her. She keeps her hips very carefully angled as far away from the tattoo bed she can. Her dick is so hard. He keeps making noises. She can’t treat her clients like this. Fuck. Shit. 

She can be professional. She can be. Felix bites her lip, puts the machine back to his skin. “Still doing okay?”

Jisung waits for her to lift the needle back up before he speaks again. “Mhm.”

She feels his response rattle all through his chest, vibrate through his vocal cords, pressed into her forearm. The physicality of it is clarifying, but not necessarily helpful – it narrows her focus further, snagged as it is on the shirtless man beneath her. On her client. On one Han Jisung, with hazy eyes like he loves it, loves this, loves taking it – fuck, it’s not that Felix can’t focus but that she’s focused all too well, her breathing aligned with his, her eyes drawn to the minutia. Like the way his throat bobs as he swallows, his Adam’s apple smaller than hers but still prominent, or the way he’s gripping his own sweats with both hands. 

“Alright,” she says, voice husky, scraped-raw. 

The worst part is that she doesn’t dislike it, how viscerally aware she is of everything, this single-minded focus; it’s easy to tattoo like this, despite the way her blood runs hot through her body, despite the way arousal tugs at her. Simple. She stipples ink through his skin and takes in the sound he bites back in response – it’s pained, she thinks, but he makes no move to stop her. Of course. He’s paying her to tattoo him. “You’re doing really well,” she says, and knows how it sounds, means it regardless – she’d seen, earlier, how badly he’d wanted to move. And he hadn’t. And he holds still now, too, even as the sound that slips free of him this time is unequivocally a whimper. She makes an endeared sound of her own – can’t help it – and draws another line into him, knows he’s keeping it with him for the rest of his life. He takes it so fucking well.

“We’re nearly done,” she murmurs to him, under her breath mostly, reluctant. She doesn’t want to take her hands off of him yet. “Just a bit more shading. Still with me?”

Jisung had quietened down a little, half way through, settling into the white noise of Felix’s machine and the steady presence of the pain. Like he’s floating in it, fully absorbed. It’s driving her crazy. Felix, sitting here, this boy under her touch, relishing in what she’s giving to him. Nothing she can do about it. 

Nothing she can do about it yet. What does Minho always say? To shoot her shot? She can’t think about that too hard, too closely. Maybe Jisung will give her his phone number instead of a tip. Maybe he’ll – give her his tip, so to speak. She’s never felt anything so viscerally as this want,  the formless cavern of it in her stomach. 

“Still with you,” Jisung answers, quiet now. His fist clenches by his side, like he’s reaching some kind of limit. Near some kind of edge. Felix wipes over his skin with a paper towel again, wiping away ink, and his hand twitches. It’s almost Herculean, the effort it takes not to reach over and hold it. 

“Good,” Felix breathes, something stirring in the back of her mouth, on the cusp of her brainstem, half-eclipsed by the lump in her throat. It’s instinct, maybe. Or want. She twists again to set down the paper towel, her knees nudging Jisung’s further apart as she does. Both of them stiffen when he makes another breathy sound, as shot-through with desire as the roof of Felix’s mouth is dry with it. Jisung’s fist clenches again, then loosens, as he winces.

Felix swallows. “You don’t have to be quiet,” she says gently. There’s a moment where she almost, almost says I want to hear you. “Plenty of gym bros twice your size show up here and start crying the moment I touch them.”

Jisung’s blinks are slow, as though through honey. As golden as the rest of him. “I could be a gym bro,” he says, almost petulant. “You don’t know.”

The instinct to reach over and squeeze his biceps, to pinch the flesh and muscle there, overwhelms her. He could be, sure. Felix has spent the last few hours trying very hard not to think about the muscle rippling underneath her hands. She laughs instead, tries not to place her palm against his stomach, his abs, so she can feel when he laughs as well. “Are you?”

“Well, no,” Jisung says, scrunching his mouth up. Petulant. Cute. Cute. “But I could be. I do… cardio, and stuff.”

“You have good stamina?” Felix asks before she can regret it. They’ve spent this entire session in some strange limbo, stuck between too much and not enough, so she still isn’t – quite sure whether it’s okay. To say it. To look at the elephant – not directly, but to find it in her periphery. She watches his face long enough to see him blink his eyes back open. He scans across her face. Felix turns back to his chest and puts her needle back to his flesh so she doesn’t have to watch him react to whatever he sees.

“Yeah,” he says, voice light, caught in his throat. That’s almost worse than whatever he could have seen on her face, Felix thinks. Shit. “Yeah, I’ve – I’ve heard that.”

God, she needs to ruin him. She can’t even drag this tattoo out much further, linework and shading almost done. She can be normal. She can be normal and professional. She has to be. “Well, you took this pretty well,” she says absently, sweeping the gun slowly across the last dark panel of the design until it’s dark-stippled, red-raw. It takes her maybe thirty seconds – the length of a held breath, if she’s fighting for it – to realise what she’s said.

Fuck.

Jisung’s cheeks flush red. “You’re nearly – it’s done?”

“It’s done,” Felix repeats. Jisung makes to sit up. “Wait, stay there for a sec. Stay still.”

He freezes so immediately it’s almost funny, eyes wide. Cartoonish, she thinks fondly. “Why?” Jisung says, lying back down slowly, gingerly, like he’s afraid the tattoo will rub off if he moves the wrong way.

He’s so cute. “I’m gonna clean it, then you can take a look. Then we’ll cover it up,” she says. She’s being professional. She can. She’s being it. 

Jisung’s gaze finds hers and snags, and she feels her own stomach drop as her eyes flick to where his lip is caught between his teeth, the too-physical lines of it, of curve and line and bone – teeth are bone, right? – the red-rawness where he must have been chewing on it. This whole time, maybe. She watches as his lip flicks free of the cage of his teeth, then stretches languorously, like someone just standing up for the first time in hours, into something like a smirk.

“You don’t,” Jisung says, honey-slow but halting, like the words are flowing smoothly as far as his teeth and then hesitating at the gate, “have to. Cover it up. If, um.” His throat ripples as he swallows. Felix wants to bite it. “If you don’t want to.”

She feels the wanting ripple up her belly, wriggle into her spine, past the vertebrae until it can sink into the neurons at the centre. From there, it has control of her. “Jisung-ah,” she says softly, reproachfully, then grins wide and teasing. “It would be really fucking irresponsible to do anything less than sterile while that’s ... raw, you know?”

Raw, Jisung mouths soundlessly at her. His eyes are wide and – almost impressed, like game recognises game, I guess. Shameless recognises shameless. Felix needs him drooling into a pillow, ideally in the next ten minutes. “You – want…?”

Felix wonders briefly if he’s going to say it, to crack first, to put voice to desire, before he trails off. “Let me clean up,” she says, “and you can pay, and then…” and then they’ll just be two people. He won’t be her client. And then…

Jisung reads her intention. He shifts on the tattoo bed a little, straightens his spine up, puts his shoulders back like he’s trying to make it as easy as possible to get to his new tattoo. So she can clean it. Felix inhales slowly, slowly, slowly, through her teeth, until her lungs can’t fill anymore. 

She cleans his tattoo, pats it down, dresses it, faster than she thinks she ever has. Jisung doesn’t say a word while she does; he moves his body where she directs him, sits still, relaxed, watching her movement but doing nothing to interfere until Felix stands back. She should… she should sanitise her station, her equipment too, probably, but…

“Done?” Jisung says brightly, swinging his leg around so he’s sitting on the edge of the bench, his feet not quite meeting the ground even though he could probably put them down if he wanted. Her gaze darts between his thighs against her better judgment; she sucks a breath in through her teeth. Fuck. Fuck. She – hadn’t noticed, Jesus, but his sweats are light grey and, clearly, thin; at the apex of his legs blooms the hint of a darker wet patch. It can’t – It can’t actually be what she thinks it is. That would be insane. (But she thinks of him squirming, whimpering, red-faced, and – wonders. Mostly about whether she’s going to survive the night.) He tracks her gaze with a slightly bemused twist to his mouth, then glances down at his own legs. Swallows. Crosses them, one over the other.

“No,” Felix says, almost disbelieving. She means it like No, surely not. Jisung seems to hear it like it’s No, don’t. His chest hitches a little with a stubborn nub of breath; slowly, gaze flitting back to hers as though seeking her reaction, he unfolds them again, spreads his legs there until she can see the dark little starburst right where his hole must be. Jesus. She can’t – she doesn’t know if he wants – doesn’t know what he likes, what he thinks about his body, but fuck does she want her fingers inside him, wants to feel how wet he must be there if he’s leaking through his trackies. Jisung’s chest rises and falls with his heavy breath. He’s red-flushed again, the teasing respite gone from him; his lips part and then stay that way, like he’s forgotten how to close them. Or like he wants something in his mouth.

She tracks the way his throat moves when he swallows, the plush of his mouth, the tightness of his jaw. His tongue flicks out to lick at his lips, wet and pink. His face stays flush, like he’s embarrassed, and still like he can’t not ask: “Do you – is this – what you want?”

Felix can’t put words to the kinds of things she wants. “Yeah,” she says, can’t imagine a world in which the answer is no, “yes. I – anything. I want anything. Anything you want.”

She shifts a little herself, can feel her cock heavy with arousal, digging into the seam of her jeans. Jisung’s eyes look down, trailing over her entire body, before they catch. His lips, still parted, slick with spit – is he… drooling? Fuck. She watches as he drags in another breath like it takes genuine effort, then shifts a little in place, squirming – like he wants to rub his thighs together, but wants more to keep them spread for her. If she lets herself look, she thinks she can see the fabric peaked a little where he’s hard. “Felix,” Jisung says, cracked-raw. Open.

“Jisung I really need you to pay me so that the business transaction is over please,” she says, only it comes out more like Jisung really need you please please please, she thinks, or something equally as clumsy and down bad; still, Jisung seems to know what she means. He shivers, then glances down at himself.

“Is your – that other – Seungmin,” he says, like he’s struggling to actually string words together. “Felix, I cannot go out there, I swear they’re fucking telepathic, the way they looked at – I’d die. I would literally die. Please don’t make me go out there.”

“Seungminnie definitely knows,” Felix says, a little distraught herself to be reminded. “They’ve – We’ve – They know what I’m like.”

Jisung’s brow creases. “You – do this a lot, or –”

“They know I have a type,” Felix amends, and swallows. “And limited self-control.”

“And your type is…?” Jisung glances down at his own body, like he’s doubting it. God, God, Felix can’t be strong anymore. “What, me? Do I qualify?”

You, you, you, yes, you. Felix feels like there’s some wild animal clawing at her brain, desperate to get to him. Or maybe that’s just her. Fuck, they’re so close. “Here, you can Kakaopay me. Or bank transfer.”

Jisung doesn’t seem in any fit state to make decisions, so Felix gives him her Kakaopay. His hands shake when he types in her info, fingertips trembling. Because of… because of her? Because he wants this. Because he’s desperate. For her. The heat in her gut spits and bubbles at her. She doesn’t think she’s ever been this hard before, not for this long. 

Her own phone buzzes when the transaction clears. Jisung hears it, ears pricked – fuck, he’s so cute. He looks away towards the noise, and then very quickly back to her, eyes wide. “Was that – can we –? Now?”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Felix says, locking her phone and tossing it haphazardly towards her bag in the corner of the room. She stumbles to the door and locks it. Now is, objectively, very stupid – she knows all the rules about fresh ink, and, besides that, all the rules about fucking in a room that absolutely needs to stay clean – but she has dropsheets, and little patience left, and Jisung shudders when she looks back at him like the weight of her attention is a physical thing to him. He spreads his legs wider, like he wants her to see. “Fuck, you’re – How long have you been wet for, huh? Soaking your pants like that?”

“You kept telling me I was doing well,” Jisung blusters, eyes very wide. They follow her as she crosses the room again to crowd into his space, slotting naturally into the emptiness between his legs. “And it – it hurt, okay.”

“It hurt,” Felix says, slow, deliberate, “so you got wet?”

Jisung rolls his eyes. “You knew this already, Lix, come on.” He seems abruptly more confident, comfortable in his desire; it might be that he’s finally certain she wants him too, rather than the odd, pain-laced liminal space they’d been swimming in for so long. His grin is lopsided, endearing. “You called me a masochist like an hour ago.”

“I did,” she admits, finally – finally – settling her hands on his thighs. “But I wanted you to hear how needy you sounded.”

He blushes red again. Felix catalogues it, that his confidence builds but he’s still so very vulnerable. “I already – I know how needy I sound.”

“You do?” Felix digs her nails into the meat of his thigh, feels his muscle twitch. “What, someone else has told you? Do they make sure you’re loud, make sure they can hear you?”

His thighs spread even further open, and he curls his ankles together around her waist. Felix finds herself pressed even closer to him, and like this she can practically feel the heat in his core, the burn of arousal in his pussy. Her own cock throbs; she’s so turned on she might actually die. 

“Mm,” Jisung hums. He blinks slow at her, long, delicate. He doesn’t have to look up at her like this, but he tilts his head so he can peer through his lashes. She actually might pass out. Her knees feel weak. “Normally, they have to kiss me to shut me up.”

Felix feels herself grinning. She’s down so bad that, she thinks, that stupid line is actually going to work on her. “I shouldn’t be rewarding this behaviour,” she says, then moves slowly to kiss him, making a startled sound when he surges up to meet her halfway; unsurprisingly, it’s messy from the start, his tongue spit-slick against hers as his hands twine around her torso, mapping the shape of it. She hopes he gropes her tits. Can’t pull away long enough to say so. Not that she’s trying particularly hard; Jisung kisses with a sort of desperation that shouldn’t be endearing but is, like he needs her too badly to worry about technique. Maybe he isn’t always like this. Maybe he’s better when he’s less worked up. Felix groans against his mouth again at the thought, dragging one hand up to press against his clothed crotch, feel the heat of it through the fabric. She works a finger against the wettest part of the fabric and feels him shudder.

He makes some choked out, cut off noise in the back of his throat, drawn out of him and pushed into her mouth. Felix inhales quick, kisses back into his mouth, bites at his lip. Mean, sharp. Jisung whines again, and bucks his hips against her hand. Just one finger, through his trackies. Desperate. His mouth drops open against hers, lips moving but not quite kissing back.

“You’re that easy?” Felix says, muffles her words against his mouth. He’s like all her wet dreams happening at once. How is this real. “Fuck, I’m barely even touching you, and you can’t even kiss properly?”

“Felix,” Jisung moans, hips working, body pulled taut with arousal. He gets one hand around the back of her neck, fingers toying with the wisps of hair there, keeping their faces close together. “Fuck – please, just – touch me.”

“You think you can handle that?” she says, glancing down just to watch the way his legs tremble, the way his hips kick forward. “I haven’t even got my fingers in you yet, Jisungie.” The yet is deliberate – just weighty enough that it could be a promise, if he wanted it to be. Just gentle enough that it’s really more of a question. He answers with another taut, keening sound, and Felix feels the way her answering laugh is scraped out of her, just a little condescending. She can’t help it. He makes her want to squeeze him until he pops, or something. “Oh, you want that?”

He laughs, somehow both bubbly and strained. There’s enough left in his head, at least, for him to appreciate the redundancy of her question; they can both feel the damp starburst of want where she drags her fingers over his clothed cunt, through two layers of fabric. “You –” The breath goes out of him in a rush when she slides one hand up his still-shirtless torso, thumb coming to rest just shy of the still-red scar from his surgery. “Fuck. H – Hi.”

“Hi,” she says, oddly endeared as she sweeps her thumb across the skin between his ribs. He ripples in her hands, then sucks in another breath through his teeth when the movement drives his hips against her hand. She thinks she can feel him hard for a moment – doesn’t know what he likes to call it, clit, cock, only knows that she wants to pinch it and hear him wince, whine, beg. Fuck. “Sensitive?” she says, husky, head spinning. 

“Y–yeah, shit – Lix, please,” he says, and Felix really has to start taking measured breaths. She feels every single blood vessel in her body constrict, airflow reduced, brain activity dropping. All she can think about is touching him. He’s begging for her. “Come on, come on, please.”

She moves her hand from between his thighs to slide along his stomach, toying with the waistband of his sweats, dipping her fingers beneath the elastic. She can feel his stomach flutter, his abs twitch at her touch. Jisung doesn’t whine again, not yet, but he does gasp. “I can’t believe you liked it so much.”

His head tips forward, forehead pressing against the curve of Felix’s neck into her shoulder, and he groans. “You were doing it on purpose. Teasing. You are.”

Felix trails her fingers a little further into his pants, cups her palm around the heat of him. He’s so much wetter here, soaked into his underwear. “Are you forgetting how to speak already?”

“No,” Jisung says, then tenses as she grinds her palm into the hard nub where his cock would be, his hands flying to her hips and squeezing. She laughs. Jisung splutters. “I can – I can talk fine! It’s not – Ah, fuck, Jesus, Lix.” His back bows forwards again as she drags the breadth of her palm up his cunt towards his waistband; her hands are small, but she can still cup the whole of him at once, trails first the heel of her hand and then each of her fingers over the bulge in his underwear. It’s big. Bigger than she realised they could get, honestly. She’s fingered cis girls, but the one trans guy she’d fucked before hadn’t been big on letting her touch him, preferred to bend her over with his silicone cock and bully her into taking it – fuck, she should call him. Except he’s sort of her receptionist now, which makes it a little weird. Felix traces the shape of Jisung’s t-dick, curious, endeared, and laughs when the breath punches out of Jisung all at once as she toys with it through his underwear.

“Want me to touch you here, Jisungie?” she says, husky. “I thought you wanted something inside you.”

“Is both an option,” Jisung says, breathless. It’s so fucking cute the way he’s more certain of himself now, unabashed about being needy; honestly it’s lowkey healing, the complete lack of shame about the desire itself. He’d seemed embarrassed about wanting her before, but now that she’s touching him, he’s all live-wire want, biting his lip up at her in a way that might be sleazy if it were less completely earnest. “C’mon, Lix, please.”

Joy wells up in her chest and overflows; it’s oddly euphoric, the way this is almost uncomplicated, the way this boy wants her to touch him and that’s enough, that’s all it has to be unless she wants anything else. She thinks she wants to be friends. She fucks with his vibes. “Anything you want me to – call it, not call it?” she murmurs, getting her lips close to his ear and laughing when he shudders, his breath fluttering against her neck. She jokes: “Never been with a man before, so.”

He giggles, then cuts off his own laughter with another breathy half-whine as she toys idly with the waistband of his underwear, his hips kicking a little towards her. Needs it so bad, fuck. Jesus. “I don’t – I don’t really mind,” he says, “anything, cunt is fine, I don’t care, just – just don’t call me a girl?”

“I wasn’t exactly planning on it,” she says. Gremlin voice: “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

He cackles again, delighted. There’s something about being on the same page, something unsaid going understood. Jisung twists his fingers into the stray hairs at the back of her neck, the strands that have fallen out of her ponytail, and pulls her close, closer, until he can twist upwards and kiss her again. He bites into her mouth desperately, still so desperately. Tugs at Felix’s hair until it stings a little. His words are hot, gasped into her mouth: “I just want you. Any way. Anything.”

Felix flicks her fingers against his crotch again, a little harsher, meaner. Jisung shudders into the touch all the same, hips twitching up. His entire body tenses, pressure rippling through him. “Are you sure you can last long enough for me to even get my fingers inside you?”

“I’m not that easy,” Jisung huffs, but it comes out strained. She laughs. He makes an indignant sound in response, trailing his arms down the angles of her torso, and she shivers as his hands come to rest on her hips: they’re rough, warm, distinctly masculine somehow in a way that’s hard to put words to. He laughs, but it’s breathy. “You’re. You’re so – wow,” he says, and the worst part is that it isn’t even airheaded praise; he says it like someone articulate, someone clever, who is genuinely lost for words even though they almost never are. Like he’s startled by the thickness of his own tongue.

Felix presses the heel of her hand against his little cock again, bends down to swallow the hitch in his breath for just a moment. Breaks their lips apart again. “Jisung,” she says, feeling the throatiness in her own voice, the way the want is spinning up and through her until it’s all she is. “Can I --” 

“Yeah, yeah --” 

Somehow the two of them wriggle his pants and his underwear down over his hips, to his ankles, until he can kick his way out of the tangle of fabric and leans backwards on the little bed, with a sudden and awful, beautiful confidence as he spreads his legs again. Felix, who had been preoccupied with helping free him from his trackies, feels like she just got flashbanged. His cunt glistens dark and flushed at the apex of his thighs, framed by a dark thatch of hair, and a lazy smirk sprawls across his face for just a moment, like he knows exactly how damn good he looks. 

His confidence dissipates almost as quickly, his knees drawing together, blush spreading over his cheeks. That’s, like, the complete opposite of what Felix wants. She shoves herself forward, between his legs, forcing them apart, forcing them to stay apart. Jisung just blushes more, deeper, brighter, and she feels as a shudder wracks itself through his body. He bites his lip, so hard the flesh turns white. Even that doesn’t stop the whimper he makes in the back of his throat.

God, he’s so beautiful. He’s so wet. His arousal makes Felix want to do dangerous fucking things to him.

“What?”

Felix shakes her head. She’s got this. She can be… smooth, and cool, and act like she hasn’t been rendered speechless just by the sight of his dick, his pussy, the slick between his thighs. Holy fuck. “Nothing, nothing. Just. Fuck.”

His brows draw together, like he doesn’t get it. He’s still blushing, his thighs still tense, like he’s waiting to press his legs back together but she’s in the way. “It’s – you don’t –? I’m sorry –?”

“Why the fuck are you sorry,” Felix says. Honestly, she feels a little like she needs to start going back to church. “Holy fuck. You’re, like, hot as fuck.”

Relief sprawls visibly across his face; abruptly Felix understands the reaction, his hesitance, feels the twin kick of that old fear in her stomach. But she meets his eyes. Hopes he sees her arousal there. “Yeah?” Jisung says, voice wavering a little – like he’s trying to sound cocky, insouciant, but the filmy veil of it is thin enough that it just highlights the shape of the real unsteadiness beneath.

She reaches for him, gets one hand on the jut of his hipbone. “Yeah,” she breathes. Has to swallow. Her mouth feels too dry. “Fuck. You just – walk around looking like that, huh? Hiding all this underneath your clothes?” Impulsively she reaches out with her other hand to slot their fingers together, squeezes for a moment just to feel him squeeze back. Like Yeah? Like, in answer, Yeah. She swallows again. Her nails dig into the thin skin where it’s stretched taut over his hipbone, almost unintentionally until he squirms just a fraction beneath her; like a shark up out of dark water, Felix feels the warmth swallow her again, the curling satisfaction of pulling those pained reactions out of him. She digs her nails in harder. On purpose. Jisung tenses for a moment, then melts into it, the tautness leaving him all at once on the back of his hitching half-sigh.

She can tell when his confidence melds back together, stitched back up and settling over his skin. Like it seeps right into his bones, old wounds soothed, and now he reaches for her, one hand on the back of her neck, the other still in hers. “Are you gonna finger-fuck me or what?”

Felix laughs. She drags her nails down the side of his hip, hard enough that it leaves red, angry grazes behind. Jisung shivers again, parts his lips around another heavy exhale. God, he likes it so much. He likes it so much. “Yeah, I’m gonna finger-fuck you. You want it so bad, huh?”

“You’ve been teasing me since I got here,” he says, and clenches his fingers in the baby hairs at the nape of her neck, pulls her in to kiss her and bites at her lip. It barely even hurts. “You’re so – mean.”

“You like people being mean to you, Jisungie,” Felix says, flirty, maybe a little derisive. It just makes him wetter, so she drags her hand from his hipbone, scrapes her nails all the way down his pubic bone until she can flick meanly at his clit, and he arches his body into every centimetre of her touch. She laughs again. Feels it shiver through her sternum. “I haven’t even taken my clothes off,” she points out, “and you’re completely naked. Why’s that?”

“You had a head start,” Jisung says immediately. He opens his mouth like he’s gonna keep talking back; Felix tilts her head to one side, feels her way down to his hole and presses in her finger smooth and demanding inside him. The give is easy, effortless. He can probably barely feel it. Still, he chokes on nothing for just a moment, like she’s knocked the words from his lips; she’s so glad she didn’t get the acrylics Hyunjin had thought would look so good on her the other day.

“Jisung,” she croons, amused, fond. She crooks her finger and watches his lips part. “Honey, can you even feel that, or are you just putting on a show for me? You’re so fucking wet I didn’t think you’d notice.”

He whines. Clenches down around her finger, which makes her cackle again – one of her favourite things about being inside someone, honestly, the way they can’t ever hide that they’re into something she’s said. The hole doesn’t lie, or whatever. “Felix,” Jisung says, wriggling his hips, adjusting.

“Hm?” she murmurs. Her left hand is still entwined with his; she squeezes again, digging her nails into the back of his palm. 

He squeezes back. Says, whiny, “I can take more than that.”

She hums again, acknowledgement. Not quite agreement. Felix crooks her finger, presses it up against his walls until he clenches again, tension leaking out of him. “I’m sure you can, pretty boy.”

“So – give me more?”

“You can’t be patient?” she asks, pulling her hand out to thrust back inside. Slowly. Slow enough that it makes him whine, makes him shift, like he can push his hips back and fuck himself on her fingers himself.

“I’ve been patient, Lix, come on –” he shifts again, lifting his hips. “Come on, please, just –”

He’s wet enough that she could probably get another two fingers in him easily, slick and open for her, but she doesn’t. Felix leans down to kiss him again, once, twice, and moves her finger inside him again. Not enough, not nearly what he’s asking for, but he whines like it is. Like it really is that good. “But you sound so good for me, Jisungie, what if I wanna stay like this for a bit longer?”

He groans, equal parts frustration and arousal, then says, “I’m gonna start complaining.”

“Oh?” That’s cute. “You weren’t already?”

“Shut up,” he grumbles. Felix swallows, then tugs her hand out of his to settle it on his bare thigh, her hand paler against the amber swell of his flesh, the smattering of hair; she digs her nails in again. Maybe she should have got those acrylics. Still, she does it with enough force that it makes him wince. “Ow,” he breathes, then has the self-awareness to look mortified once he must realise how much it just sounded like another moan.

She laughs. “Real convincing,” she says, then slides another two fingers into him  at once. 

He makes a gasping, breathless sound and clenches down so tightly that she thinks for a second her fingers might actually cramp up – but he’s so wet that she can still crook them inside of him easily enough, working her fingers until he gasps. “There you are,” she says, alight with the uncomplicated pleasure of it. It’s so fucking fun to drag reactions out of someone like this, to hear them whine and gasp and watch them squirm; she trails her fingers gently over the little pale crescents in Jisung’s thigh where her nails had dug in, knows they must be sensitive. His knee jumps. She laughs again. “Why’re you trying to knee me in the face?”

“Fuck, sorry,” he says, already scarlet.

She crooks her fingers inside him, watches his lips part again. Says fondly, “I don’t have to be doing this if you’re going to be annoying about it.”

It’s not a real threat, not even by half. Felix doesn’t think she could take her fingers out of him if she tried. Something animal, some fundamental part of her wouldn’t let her. Like a mantra, in the back of her head: make the whiny boy feel good. Still, Jisung stiffens up a little, gasps a little, begs a little more. “No, no, don’t stop – please, it’s – I wanna come, Lix, I want –”

“I thought you wanted me to finger you.”

“I do, I want that –”

“But you wanna come?” Felix looks at him, makes her face a little sharper, hopes it sounds like she doesn’t believe a word he says. “How can I keep fingering you if you want to come right now, hm?”

She thrusts her hand forward again, keeps up a steady rhythm, in and out. Keeps her fingers crooked just so, just enough to make him gasp out each time she drives her fingers inside him. She doesn’t think she’s ever been so hard in her entire fucking life. “You can – you can, I can – keep going, Felix, Lix, God –”

“I can keep going?” Felix repeats. Jisung’s breath catches in his throat. “I can make you come and I can keep going, baby?”

He whines. Gets so fucking tight around her fingers again, like he liked that idea. She chuckles. “You want me to keep going once you’re done, huh? I guess you like it if it hurts a little.” A little is an understatement. He’d gotten hard because she’d been tattooing him. It’s still standing out so prettily on his chest against its inflamed background, his skin angry-red and then stark black; she’d done that, and he’d liked it, it had felt good for him, and that’s intoxicating. A fucking headrush. She wants to put her mouth on his chest so bad, some other time when it isn’t freshly tattooed. 

She settles, instead, for leaning in to bite at his lower lip. Not too hard. She doesn’t know – where the line is, for him. Just until he whines again into her mouth, and then she backs it off, crooks her fingers inside him despite the weird angle of her wrist, feels his whole-body shudder from his hips to his shoulders to his mouth, where it wrenches free of his body as another sound. She groans, nudges their foreheads together. “Fuck,” she says, with feeling. “You’re gonna fuckin’ kill me.”

“Says you,” he says breathlessly. He looks so fucking pretty when he’s turned on – his eyes are alight with arousal, swollen-dark with pupil but still somehow sparkling, and there’s a thin sheen of sweat across his chest now, a red flush working its way down his chest. Felix rakes her eyes over his body, trying not to actually horny-death-grip his thigh. It’s a struggle. He’s bracing himself on his hands, because she’s pushed him to lean far enough backwards that he’d fall without them; still, his fingers are twitching like he wants to be touching her too.

She swallows. “Lie down properly,” she says. “Legs spread again.”

He obeys easily, immediately, rearranging his body to her command until Felix can climb onto the bed too, on her knees between his legs. She gets more force like this, can drive her fingers in and out of him faster, harder, Jisung’s whole body shifting with it. God, he’s so… Maybe he’s onto something, maybe she should make him come. Fuck, she wants to see him come.

“Oh, my God –”

She can see the way his stomach trembles like this too, the way his abs flex and contort with his pleasure. It shouldn’t be possible for people to look the way he does, and yet. Jesus. Felix drags her other hand back up his body, nails pressed into the side of his ribcage until she can pinch at his pecs, his nipples, careful to avoid his tattoo. Jisung tips his head back against the tattoo bed, arches his back, stretches his neck out and all his tendons stand out. God, she could eat him alive. She should. He’d probably like it.

“Good, Jisungie?” she says huskily, alight, alive. The lowest register of her voice sits scratchy in her throat, but the type of girls and boys she attracts tend to like it, she’s found, and she likes it when they like it. When he nods, it feels like victory, or like she’s breaking apart. He’s so wet that she can hear each time she fucks her fingers into him, the sound obscene in the near-silent room, just them and the hum of the almost-broken aircon unit Minho keeps refusing to order a replacement for. “Listen to that, huh? Can’t – can’t fucking believe you made a mess of your pants cause you got so wet for me. Jesus.”

“Lix,” Jisung whines. She can’t even tell if it’s a complaint or in agreement. 

“Yeah,” she says. Her forearm is aching a little, but it’s – is it insane to say she feels the same way about it as gym bros do about their soreness? Like it’s something worthwhile. Like the reminder will delight her tomorrow. She keeps the pace of her fingers steady, predictable, traces patterns with her free hand up and down his thigh. “Wanna touch your pretty cock for me, Jisungie? Show me how you like it.”

“Fuck, Lix – fuck,” he blinks his eyes open, stares at her like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. One of his hands comes down to touch himself, fingers sliding through his own wetness. His body shudders, his hole clenching around her fingers when he brushes his fingertips against his cock. “Oh, my God, oh – God, oh –”

“You gonna come, baby?” Felix keeps her fingers moving, thrusting in and out of him steadily. “I wanna see, wanna hear you. Gonna let me hear you?”

“Lix – I’m gonna come –” Jisung drags in a breath, another, through his teeth like he can’t get enough air into his lungs. His fingers rub against his pussy roughly, fast, desperate, and Felix keeps her own hand moving, pushing in and out of him. God, she wants him so bad. Jisung makes another breathless, pleading sound, and she leans up the bed to kiss it out of his mouth. 

She feels him clench around her fingers as he comes, the frantic flutter of his wrist bumping against her tummy as he works his hand over his little cock, and smiles into the kiss as he moans against her, breathy, overcome; she isn’t expecting the sudden rush of liquid that drools out of him and over her fingers, but it makes her breath catch in her throat, drives her to fuck him harder, faster, let him ride it out on her fingers. Fuck. When she presses hard enough into his cunt, he squirts again; there’s less this time, but he makes a sound like she’s tearing him open. His free hand grips her hip so tightly she thinks even his blunt little nails might break her skin, and then he’s shuddering, full-body, pulling away from her lips for a little space. She slows her fingers as she feels him stop rubbing his own clit. His pussy spasms again around her, just once.

“Fuck,” Felix says. She thinks she might actually be drooling as she pulls all the way back to take in the mess – thank fuck for the dropsheet, because he really has squirted all over the studio bed. It looks more like cum than she actually realised it could. She still has three fingers stuffed inside him, but trails the pointer of her other hand through it curiously, gauging the texture; not what she expected.

Jisung cringes. “I. Don’t always do that.”

“Can you do it again,” she says huskily, and crooks her fingers inside him just to make him spasm. She feels insane. She wants to make him come over and over again and then, only then, slide inside him, fuck him at his most sensitive so that he shudders and gets tight around her every time she touches him. 

“I – I don’t know – um,” Jisung’s entire body quivers, strung tight. She can feel his pussy constricting around her fingers, his entire body tensing when she nudges her fingertips against him. “Fuck, Lix. You – you’re –”

He hasn’t told her to stop yet, though, hasn’t pulled away or pushed her back. There’s so much blood rushing through Felix’s body, she can feel her pulse racing all the way down to her toes. “You don’t know?” She stops moving her fingers, keeps them still inside him, and then can’t help the grin when he bears his hips down like he doesn’t even realise he’s doing it, angling himself on her hand. “Seems like you do know, honey.”

Jisung’s hips twitch, his abs fluttering. It would be totally embarrassing if she started drooling over his stomach, Felix thinks, and has to make a concerted effort to swallow down all the saliva pooling in her mouth. She reaches up instead and drags a nail down his flesh, from his sternum to his belly button, and relishes in the shudder it draws from him. “I’m – I can, I can go again. I can. Yeah.”

“‘Course you say that the moment I start scratching you again,” she teases, and she means for it to come out light, silly, she does, but somewhere along the way it catches in her throat and goes dusky, suggestion-drenched, and Jisung shivers again like she hadn’t even tried. Yeah. Okay. She traces her nail down over the swell of his navel, watches the wave of gooseflesh that ripples briefly in its wake. “You ever thought about piercings here, pretty boy?” 

The muscles beneath his tummy jump. He makes a funny little breathy sound, then says, strangled, “Yeah?”

“Might suit you.” She trails her other hand lower still, down to where she can fidget with the hood of his swollen clit, and tries not to swallow her own smile as he works his hips down onto the fingers she’s still got buried in his hole. “Or here. But then I guess it might hurt a bit, hey.”

His hips buck. She’s barely touching him. “Yeah?” 

“Seungminnie’s our piercer,” she says, dizzy with the push and pull of it: everything she says drags a reaction out of him, his skin, his muscles, his breath. “But maybe they’d let me have a try. Just for you. D’you think you’d come when it went in?”

His breath catches, some reddish-pink flush rising in his cheeks. “N-no, I –”

“Hm? You wouldn’t?” Felix hums, flicking her fingertip over his clit again. “Because you’re not that easy. Not that much of a painslut?” She twitches her fingers  again, catching the edge of her nail against him. Not sharp enough to hurt, not quite, but enough that Jisung shudders and gasps and twitches like he’ll come right there again.

“‘M not a painslut,” but his hips bear down on her fingers, muscles contracting, tightening, his entire body rippling through with his pleasure. Fuck, Felix can’t get enough of him. “I – I’m – Lix, I wanna –”

“You wanna come?” she breathes lowly. The headrush is unparalleled. Jisung looks up at her, his eyes huge and sparkling; the tears catch her off guard like a punch to the gut, and she’s taken enough of those to mean it when she makes the comparison. Her dick throbs. He’s such a pretty crier. “I’m not stopping you, Jisungie,” she says, and twists her fingers inside him. He goes tight around her every time he cries out – the tension makes his tummy flutter and tauten, his cunt so greedy she genuinely worries one of her knuckles will, like, crack – but he’s so wet, and loose whenever he stops clenching to gasp for breath, and she wonders. “What, are you not full enough?”

“I’m,” he whines, his hand clenching weakly on her hip. Like all the grip strength in his body has gone to his pussy, she thinks fondly, amused. Jisung heaves another shuddering breath, his cunt fluttering even around the three fingers she already has stuffed inside him, and then he says - like a plea, like he’s asking for it - “It’d hurt.”

“Oh, well, if that’s the case,” Felix says, and bullies a fourth finger inside him. 

The stuttering whine that comes out of him makes Felix’s knees weaken. Jisung’s body tenses all over, his legs drawing up into himself, thighs pressed tight against her between his legs, like he can’t decide whether to push her away or pull her in closer.

“Did you just –”

Her fingers feel suddenly wetter. Jisung’s body untenses, mouth falling open on some silent exhale, even his hole going lax enough that Felix could slip her fingers right out. His entire body falls apart, like he can no longer keep his muscles contracted enough to keep himself upright. God. God, Felix could eat him alive.

“God, Jisungie –”

She needs to come, right now, possibly more desperately than she’s ever needed to do anything in her entire life. Felix doesn’t think she could stop herself from shoving one hand under her waistband even if she tried, wrapping her fingers around herself tightly as she lets her pants slip down. She’s going to come faster than she thinks she ever has; she’s been teetering on the edge for so long. Jisung’s knees fall to the side, revealing himself splayed before her: the mess of his pussy, the gentle tremble of his thighs, his head tipped back and eyes screwed shut. His stomach twitches and flutters, like phantom pleasure, like her fingers are still thrusting inside him. Fuck. Fuck. 

“You,” she says, almost indignantly. It is not fair for a man to be that attractive. Shouldn’t be allowed. She works her hand over her cock and feels shrimp emotions about it: how dare he be this perfect, cry this prettily, like it when she hurts him, come when she does? Fuck. His eyes sliver open again, a heat in his half-lidded gaze as he meets hers, and she groans straight from her chest. “You’re so,” she says, and shudders. Her own hand feels – the same it always does, obviously, but at the same time somehow elevated. Like the weight of Jisung’s stare is a physical thing, and that thing is fire, and it’s curling through her too fast to be contained: up the stairwells of her body, from her toes to her knees to her gut, laddering further upwards until she feels the pleasure of it even in her throat, behind her eyes, an impossible weight. “Fuck. Jisungie, you look so good, so --” She swallows. God, she’s closer to an orgasm than she should be. She doesn’t do this, doesn’t come this fast any more, if E had given her one thing it was stamina – but her body doesn’t care. She presses closer to him, groaning. “Jisung – fuck --”

“C’mon, yeah,” he breathes, voice low and wrecked. A hand cups her shoulderblade and pulls her closer. “You wanna – on my pussy – you can, I’m on the pill, it’s fine, you can --”

She shudders and comes, the weak dribble of it wracking her: her orgasm crests long and slow through her and feels like radiant heat, like the bouncing of sunlight off bitumen back home in Sydney where it got hotter than it ever does in Seoul, feels like ice-cream unfurling on her tongue. Fuck, she should’ve put her mouth on him. Her cock jumps weakly in her palm. Her come is smeared across the already-wet mess of his pussy, flushed dark with blood, and she swallows. Wants to eat it back out of him. Wants to fuck him. Wants to make him cry again.

“Lix,” Jisung breathes, and tugs her close for a moment, pressing their chests flush together – then he winces and wriggles away as the movement must aggravate, fuck, the new tattoo, the one she’d given him, her client, in her studio. She pulls away like she’s been burned; Jisung gives her a judgmental look. “Wanted you to fuck my face,” he says, like it doesn’t even matter that she’s been this unprofessional. The amount he cares is written across his face. His eyes are so huge and wet. She would say I don’t speak bottom if he hadn’t, in fact, just used his words to great and horrible effect. 

God, she can barely catch her breath and her cock is already twitching again, something hot burning through her at his words. Felix ducks back down low enough to bump their noses together, their foreheads, careful to avoid brushing his chest. Jisung’s orgasms seem to have knocked all the shyness out of him; Felix feels suddenly so out of her depth, like she has no idea what to do with her hands or her face or her mouth. “Next time?”

Like she could feasibly avoid him anymore in the first place, like she won’t be stalking his personal Instagram account the second she gets home. Jisung blinks up at her, big and wide, pupils blown, and makes a face like thank  fucking God. “You want – next time?”

As if she could stay away. “Yeah. Fucking – yeah. I want that.”

“So should I, like… message your business account, or…?”

“God,” she says, “you’re – you’re such a loser,” like she isn’t also, like this isn’t the most down bad she can remember feeling in, like – well. Ever. “I’ll give you – hang on.” She does not know where her phone is. There’s cum on her dropsheet and a little bit on her jeans; she unfolds herself, trying to take her own weight on slightly wobbly legs, and waddles over with her dick still out to fetch the sterile wipes on the counter. Jisung, when she looks back at him, has this air like he’s luxuriating. Like he knows he looks hot when he’s all messed up like this. “Jisung,” she says in a silly voice, trying for a joke to break the tension, and then stalls hard when nothing comes to mind – that’s the entire sentence, his name, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. She barely knows him. She wants to know him. Felix blinks hard, her vision swimming a little, then says, “D’you mind if I --?”

“You want me to move --?”

“No, no, I was gonna – wipe your, uh --” The insides of his thighs are slick with various fluids from both of their bodies. Jisung’s eyes dart to hers, then follow her gaze down, and then he smirks, just a little greasy – he’s so lucky he’s hot – and spreads his legs a little wider. Jesus. Felix must make an expression she isn’t privy to, because a moment later Jisung laughs – but it isn’t cruel. Just sweet, teasing. Like she’s in on the joke.

She has to swallow once, twice, hard, like it all gets caught in the back of her throat. Her hands might be shaking? It’s kind of embarrassing that this is the part that gets to her. Fuck, Felix is never gonna live this down. Jisung bumps his knee into her, some silent question. Right. Right, she’s… cleaning up. She’s cleaning them up. Jisung’s body twitches against the cold dampness of the wipes, but he sits still while she wipes away the slick on his thighs. He wiggles a little when Felix drags her fingernail over his thigh, just a little, just to tease. Because she can’t just not. Because she can’t keep her hands off of him. 

“So I can get your number, right?” he asks, with that kind of brazen confidence, easy, smooth, like he’s settled into something within himself. It flusters her, just a little. Enough that Felix grits her teeth and tries not to show how much it’s getting to her. God forbid.

“I don’t really give my number out to clients,” she says, not even daring to make eye contact with him. She’s busy, tossing the soiled wipes into the little trashcan beside the tattoo bed. So busy.

“Is that all I am?” Jisung says, knocking her with his knee again. “You can’t make an exception for me?”

“Hm,” she says. Where the fuck did she leave her phone. Jisung wriggles off the bed and peers judgmentally at the pile of his own sweatpants and underwear on the floor, and Felix can’t stop herself from grinning at him even as she casts her own gaze around the room – there, on her bag, haphazard. “I guess I could be convinced.” His ass is, like – looking at her, okay? It’s looking at her. She doesn’t actually deserve to be held accountable for her own actions; Jisung makes an entertaining sound when she digs her nails into his flesh. “Here, there’s, like – my QR, for Katalk. If, uh. If you still wanted that exception.”

“Maybe I don’t,” Jisung whines. “If you’re going to just pinch my butt at every given opportunity.”

“That doesn’t sound like something I’d do,” she says, her hand still cupping his ass. She trails her fingers gently forwards through the curls of dark hair to toy with his cunt again, then laughs when he jumps. “You should put your pants back on.”

“Stop that, you’re gonna make me wet again,” he scolds. Then, holding up his sweats to the light, “Jesus. These are already bad enough.”

“I have, uh,” Felix says. “A cardigan. You could put it around your waist.”

He makes a face at her, which, like, yeah. Okay. “That’s not much better.” 

“Take it or leave it,” she says, moving just far enough away that she can snag the sweater from where it’d been tossed at some point earlier in her day. “It’s less… obvious, at least.”

Jisung considers his sweatpants again. “They’re not that bad?”

Felix just holds the cardigan out a little further in his direction. “It’s pretty obvious what it’s from, if that helps.”

“No, actually,” Jisung says, frowning at her. God, it’s so cute, it makes her feel a little insane. “That doesn’t really help at all. God.”

“Just take it,” Felix shakes the cardigan in front of him again. “Then you have to come back again, anyway.” She flushes. “I mean, it’s not going to hurt.”

“You want me to come again?” Jisung says. It’s such a bad joke. Felix hates that she laughs. Jisung grins, taking the jacket, and says, “I mean. Um. It’s not going to hurt? That’s sad,” waggling his eyebrows up and down at her like the innuendo wasn’t already perfectly obvious from his tone. Drenched in suggestion. Like, he’s the least unsubtle person she has ever met. She’s so hopelessly into it; it is, perhaps, over for her. Possibly even so over. Jisung laces the cardigan around his waist, then reaches for his t-shirt – this one neatly folded, because he had removed it for perfectly legitimate business purposes rather than just so she could stare at his tits – and tugs it over his head.

“No direct sunlight for two to four weeks,” she blurts, embarrassed more by the fact she’s flustered at all than by anything he’d done. She doesn’t get flustered. She’s the menacer, not the menaced! “And, uh. Um. Gently, twice a day, lukewarm water.”

“I’m gonna forget that,” Jisung says, but his eyes have gone warm and all melty-soft, like chocolate chips in cookies. “Like, immediately.”

“I’ll text you,” she says. “So, um. So you don’t forget.”

“Yeah?” His grin is broad and brilliant and devastatingly attractive. Fuck, she hates men who know they’re hot. “Okay. I’ll, uh, see you then. Or. Text you.”

“Bye,” she says, too flushed, her composure shattered by her own post-nut clarity. He trips twice on his way to the still-locked door, walking like a newborn fawn not yet used to having legs, and she lets herself imagine it’s because his knees are still weak from coming his brains out on her fingers. Twice. Three times? She doesn’t remember. It’s all a vaguely horny blur. She needs to change the dropsheets. She needs to deep-clean and sanitise the entire room. She needs to go home and jerk off as many times as her dick will let her, and then at least two more after that, and then maybe she’ll be normal again. The lock clicks in Jisung’s wake. Felix stares at the wall and tries not to smile like a schoolgirl with a crush.

Ten minutes later, Seungmin pokes their head in through the door and says, “He was cute.”

“Really?” Felix doesn’t look up from the stripped bed she’s wiping down. “I didn’t notice.”

“Uh-huh.” Seungmin waits just long enough for the pause to get uncomfortable; Felix wipes the same section down three times. Seungmin is the only one who sees straight through her. It’s terrible. “Why did he have your jacket?”

“Stolen,” Felix says. “It’s actually really messed up. He threatened to, like, beat me up if I didn’t give him my twenty thousand won cardigan, we should blacklist him from the shop.” She can’t lie to Seungmin, but she can feel herself going red, a little embarrassed. “Tell Minho-oppa to put a wanted poster on the front counter.”

“Oh, right, wanted,” Seungmin says. Felix ignores them. She will not be ragebaited. “So, like, did he tip you or did you tip him?”

“What?” She turns to look at them blankly. Seungmin just stares at her like they’re waiting for her to get it. “What does that even mean?”

“Like, just the tip, or?”

Felix makes an agonised sound. Seungmin barks out a laugh and then leaves the room again, leaving Felix sitting pretty by herself in her studio. Fuck, it actually – it kind of smells like sex in here. She might have to invest in, like, air freshener or something.

She swallows. Whenever she blinks, she gets flashes of Jisung spreading his legs, of the sounds he was making as she worked, of the strangled cry he’d given as he squirted on her fingers. The way he’d flinched when she dug her nails into him. He’d taken it all so fucking well. And then he’d made terrible sex puns while putting his pants back on with fumbling hands. She wants him so bad it makes her look stupid. Worse, she likes him. He’d been so earnest. He’d wanted her too. He’d looked so good with her come smeared across his pussy.

She groans and tells herself she has to wait at least twenty minutes before she can message him. It’s fifteen before she caves.

hanj1.00

[13.26] did you get
[13.26]  home okay?
[13.27]  let me know :)

[13.28] hanj1.00:  yeah!!!!
[13.28] hanj1.00:  I was actually wondering
[13.29] hanj1.00:  like tell me to go away if you want
[13.29] hanj1.00:  but like my roommates are both out tonight

[13.30] say less
[13.30]  my last appointment
[13.30] for today
[13.30] is 6pm
[13.30] and then
[13.30] im free :)
[13.30] in case
[13.30] you were wondering 

[13.35] hanj1.00:  all i do is win

[13.38] hanj1.00:  gonna hurt me some more?

[13.39] maybe
[13.39] if you
[13.39] ask
[13.39] nicely enough
[13.39] :)

[13.40] hanj1.00:  YAY YIPPEEEE YAY WOOHOOO YIPPEE YAY YAY YAY

[13.40] has anyone
[13.40] ever
[13.40] told you
[13.40] youre a dork

[13.41] hanj1.00: you like it

[13.43] .
[13.43] .
[13.43] .
[13.43] touche