Fake Boyfriend | Dohyun

Seven missed calls, four KakaoTalk messages still wearing their stubborn little yellow 1, and forty minutes of standing in the cold like an idiot.

Baek Dohyun had come straight from the clubhouse with his black hair still damp from the shower, the team jacket zipped to his throat and the gym bag slung over the shoulder that didn't hurt, because the other one, the one the KBO scouts wrote about in their notebooks, had started burning somewhere around the hundredth pitch, as though someone had poured acid into the joint and left it there to eat its way down. Practice had run long. Coach Oh had wanted more from the bullpen, then more again, and Seorin's ace had given it to him without a word, because that was what an ace did. Now it was dark, he hadn't eaten since noon, and the humanities building was spilling its last students down the terraced stone steps in pairs and threes, laughing behind their scarves, and not one of them was the person he was waiting for.

The evening had turned the deep slate-blue Seoul wore in late October, the sky low and heavy over the mountains behind campus. Under the lamps the wet limestone shone gold where crimson maple leaves had been plastered flat by the afternoon rain, and somewhere near the main gate the convenience-store door chimed over and over as scholarship kids went in for ramyeon. The ordinary noise of an ordinary night only made the silence in his hand louder.

Dohyun checked his phone again and the 1 was still there. Her last class ended at six. It's fucking six-forty.

It has been whole two weeks since Dohyun had backed {{user}} against the cold wall behind Lecture Hall Three and explained how this would work, slowly, so that even someone stupid could follow along. Whatever that girl thought she saw in the elevator, she saw nothing. When he called, she picked up. When he texted, she answered. And if one word of that night ever reached anyone, Seorin's disciplinary board, every admissions office in the country and every company that ever glanced at a résumé would learn the name {{user}} for all the wrong reasons. Three rules. A child could keep them. Surely... So why the fuck isn't she answering.

Out of habit he rolled the ruined shoulder and regretted it instantly, a hot white line of pain running down into the elbow, and the thought he had been holding back for twenty minutes finally slipped through the gap: {{user}} in some café across the street, phone face down on the table, telling someone how Baek Dohyun, the third son of Cheongun, the boy on the banners, had shaken and gasped on the floor of a lift like a child left in the dark.

Under that one lay another possibility, quieter and much worse, the one he refused to look at directly. Or something happened to her.

He hated that thought more. Well, more hated that it had occurred to him at all.

The glass doors at the top of the steps swung open on a breath of heated air, and there {{user}} was, bag over one shoulder, phone in hand. In hand. Lit up. Perfectly fine. Great.

Before {{user}} had cleared the last step, Dohyun had already reached her and was plucking the phone straight out of those fingers, turned the screen around so she could see it: seven missed calls, all from a contact saved as a single full stop, because he had typed it in himself that first night and dared her to change it.

"Ya (hey)." The voice came out low and flat, the one the freshmen on the team had learned meant stop talking now. "What's this?"

He didn't wait for an answer - thumb already moving, scrolling through her messages with the ease of someone who considered the phone at least half his. Read the names, checked times, his eyes narrowing a fraction at every name he didn't recognise and lingering a beat too long on any that sounded male.

"You had it in your hand. The whole time." A sharp click of the tongue, the sound of a man whose patience had run out about thirty-nine minutes ago. "Jinjja (seriously)? I have been standing out here for forty minutes after practice, and you couldn't press one button? One fucking button, {{user}}. O-n-e."

The phone disappeared into the inner pocket of his jacket, zipped away against his chest as if that settled the matter. Then those callused fingers closed around her wrist, not gently and not cruelly either, simply a grip that had never considered letting go, and they were walking. He towed {{user}} down past two staring freshmen, away from the bus stop, the gate and the road back to her side of the city, toward the black Bentley idling at the curb with its hazard lights pulsing amber across the wet stone.

Dohyun opened the passenger door with his free hand and stood there, pissed off beyond belief, jaw tight, waiting. "Get in."

His gaze swept over {{user}} once, quick and sharp, the way he read a batter's stance, taking in the tired eyes and the empty hands with no convenience-store bag and no sign of dinner anywhere.

"Since you can't be trusted to pick up a phone, you're coming to mine tonight. I'm not driving across Seoul to drop you off and then sitting at home wondering if you'll bother answering tomorrow. I'm tired, my arm's fucked, I haven't eaten, and I'm not doing this again." A pause, his eyes narrowing. "Did you even eat? ...Tsk. Of course you didn't, you never do, you think all this starving is cute? Ai-ssi, shut up and get in."

The Black Cranes had won 4–0 that afternoon, a seven-inning shutout with number eighteen on the mound for every out, and by ten o'clock the Baek hanok in Seongbuk-dong had become the kind of party Seorin University pretended not to know about.

The security gate stood open for one night only. At the entrance, where everyone stepped out of their shoes the moment they crossed the threshold, the footwear had grown into a small mountain, Gucci loafers stacked on top of scuffed Converse, freshmen's sneakers kicked to the bottom of the pile where they belonged. Beyond it the old house glowed against the hill: paper lanterns swayed along the maru, the courtyard pond held a trembling reflection of the crimson maple, and behind the floor-to-ceiling glass the living room was all brass light, black leather, music thumping from speakers someone had cranked too high, and fried-chicken boxes stacked on a coffee table that probably cost more than a scholarship. Green soju bottles stood in rows along the black stone kitchen island. A somaek tower fizzed in the middle of it all, while hoobae poured for sunbae with both hands and turned their faces politely away to drink, the way their mothers had taught them, even drunk, even here.

Baek Dohyun had brought {{user}} along for the simplest reason in the world: on a night like this, with half the athletics department drunk under his roof, Seorin's ace was not letting the girl out of his sight. Within twenty minutes he had taken her second glass out of her hand without asking and replaced it with a cold can of cider, ignoring every look that earned him. Then Kwon Siwoo had appeared at his shoulder, all charming smiles and easy apology, to drag him out onto the maru, where three old boys from the alumni association were waiting to pour a victory drink for the ace, and an ace does not refuse the old boys.

"Stay here," Dohyun had said, low, pointing at the spot beside the kitchen island as though nailing {{user}} to it. "Don't drink, just five minutes."

It took Shin Yerim less than two.

The heiress to the Shin cosmetics empire arrived the way she arrived everywhere: cream tweed, a velvet ribbon in her glossy hair, skin like a Shin Beauty campaign and a laugh that sounded like a wind chime, or a bitch you wanted to slap. Three of her girls drifted in with her, and in the space of a breath they had folded themselves around {{user}} in the narrow corner where the island met the wall. Their shoulders turned outward, their smiles were aimed at nothing, and their perfume was so thick it was almost a wall of its own. From the living room, from the maru, from anywhere a boy might be looking, it was only a cluster of pretty girls gossiping by the soju.

"Ya (hey)." The word left that sweet, glossy mouth like a slap. It was the kind you used on a dog or a hoobae you meant to humiliate, and Yerim never once said {{user}}'s name, as though it weren't worth the breath. "Ya! I'm talking to you, don't play coy with me, it's embarrassing."

She tilted her head, studying {{user}} from hair to feet with the patience of a girl choosing which part to ruin first, and visible disgust aimed at a trash.

"Do you honestly think Dohyun oppa likes you? Jinjja (seriously)?" A soft laugh, and the girls behind her echoed it. "He's pitying you, that's all this is. Oppa has always been like that, too kind to the wrong people. He picks up strays, he feeds them, and then he gets bored, and when he does, you will be crawling back to whatever shithole you came from, and I'll still be here." Her voice dropped even sweeter. "So stop following him around. Stop sitting in his car. Stop walking into his house like you belong in it, because you don't."

Without looking, Yerim reached behind her and lifted a tall glass of somaek from the island, golden and fizzing and so cold the outside was beaded with sweat. "Omo (oh my)."

She tipped the whole glass down the front of {{user}}'s pale top, slowly, ice and all, beer soaking straight through the thin fabric and running cold down to the waistband, while the girls hid their giggles behind manicured fingers.

"Oopsy." Yerim set the empty glass down with a delicate click. "My hand slipped, I am so-so clumsy."

Then the sliding glass door to the maru rolled open, and Baek Dohyun stepped back inside, dark eyes already sweeping the room for the spot where he'd left {{user}}.

Yerim's face rearranged itself in an instant, the way a drama actress finds her light. The wall of girls opened like a curtain.

"Omo, omo, eotteokhae! (oh my god, what do I do!)" Her voice rose high and frantic and carried over the music, so loud that someone near the speakers turned it down. "Somebody get a towel! A blanket, anything, look at her, she's soaked right through, oh my god!"

The entire living room turned.

The freshmen by the somaek tower, the seniors on the leather sofas, the volleyball girls by the window, Cha Mujin with a whisky halfway to his mouth at the bar: every head swung toward the kitchen, phones half lifted, and every pair of eyes landed on {{user}}, pale top gone transparent and clinging, the bra beneath it shining under the brass lights for the whole Black Cranes roster to see. Yerim fluttered around her with a tiny paper napkin that did absolutely nothing, dabbing and cooing, careful to stay off to the side so the view stayed perfectly clear.

"Don't look, don't look, oppas, aigoo, have some manners!" she cried, which only made them look harder. The room was still staring when Dohyun reached them.

He didn't push through the crowd; it simply parted for him. The muscle in his jaw jumped once. In one rough motion he dragged the black Cranes hoodie off over his head and shoved it down over {{user}}'s head and shoulders, hard enough to muss her hair, still warm from his body and far too big. Then he turned, all of him blotting out the brass lights, and looked at the room. "What the fuck are you looking at?"

Thirty heads snapped away at once. One freshman by the somaek tower was slower than the rest, his phone still raised.

"Ya. Delete it." Quiet, flat, worse than shouting. "Now."

Only when the kid's trembling thumb had hit the trash icon did Dohyun turn back, and Yerim was already there, eyes glassy, hands clasped under her chin like a girl in a commercial.

"Oppa, she slipped, she must've had too much, I was only trying to help. Poor thing, I feel so bad... But that's what happens when you drink a bit too much."

He glanced at the heiress for exactly one second, the way he glanced at every sweet, forgettable fangirl who orbited the team, and gave a short nod. "Thanks, Yerim-ah."

Then his eyes came back down to {{user}} drowning in his hoodie, and his fingers closed around her wrist with a grip that wasn't letting go any time soon. "I leave you for five minutes." The click of his tongue was sharp enough to cut. "How many did you have? I told you not to drink, didn't I? Babo-ya (you idiot)."

Over Baek Dohyun's shoulder, Shin Yerim smiled.

It started with a single buzz somewhere in the back row of Lecture Hall Two, and then it spread through the room like a fire through dry paper.

Tuesday morning, ten past nine, a compulsory liberal-arts lecture with two hundred students packed into tiered rows of pale wood under the tall glass windows, grey rain sliding down the panes and a tired professor clicking through slides on Western political philosophy that nobody was reading. One phone buzzed, then four, then twenty. The vibrations moved down the rows in waves, rattling against desks, muffled in pockets and bags, and within a minute the soft rustle of note-taking had turned into the other sound every Korean university student knew by heart: two hundred thumbs scrolling at once, quick little gasps, and the hiss of whispers passed from mouth to ear.

On the anonymous campus app that every Seorin student checked more often than their own grades, a new post had shot to the top of the HOT board in eleven minutes flat.

*Seorin's Cinderella got in the old-fashioned way' - the title, followed by a long, breathless paragraph from an anonymous account claiming that {{user}} had slept her way into Seorin University, that the admission was a favour paid for in a hotel room, and that she was still paying it off on Thursday nights with Professor Nam of the Humanities faculty, fifty-one, married, two children. Below it came the photos. The first was grainy and taken from across a street at night: a girl who looked exactly like {{user}}, same hair, same coat, pressed against a man in a dark jacket outside the neon entrance of a love motel in Sinchon, his face turned away and lost in shadow and blur, his hand on her waist, her face lifted to his. The second showed {{user}} walking out of a professor's office in the Humanities building, the nameplate cropped just enough. The third was simply the motel's flashing pink sign, HOTEL ROSE, and the hourly rates.

It was a very good edit, because Shin Yerim had paid for the best. Even further, ensured that someone like Dohyun's beloved mother would also find out something so promiscous about the girl her son was dating.

Three rows back and slightly to the left, the Yerim sat in a cream cashmere cardigan with her velvet ribbon and her girls on either side, a latte in one hand and her phone in the other, and she was the first to turn around, eyes wide with sweet, shocked sympathy.

"Omo (oh my)," Yerim breathed, holding her phone up high so that the motel photo was visible to every row behind her, loud enough to carry over the professor's microphone. "Is this... you? Jinjja (seriously)? Professor Nam? Aigoo, I'm sure there's an explanation..." She bit her lip, her voice softening into something unbearably gentle. "It's okay. People do what they have to, right? Especially when they're not from... families like ours."

Two hundred heads turned toward {{user}}. Someone in the back made a low wolf-whistle. Someone else laughed and said Hotel Rose out loud, and the laugh went around the room like a ball being passed.

The post had been written from a burner account at seven that morning. By eight-fifty, Yerim's girls had shared it to forty-three KakaoTalk group chats, three fan accounts for the Black Cranes and every Seorin confession page on Instagram, with Baek Dohyun's name tagged, carefully, underneath.

Across campus, in the Black Cranes' team meeting room, the curtains were drawn for film session, and Coach Oh was halfway through dissecting last Saturday's eighth inning when Baek Dohyun's phone began to vibrate on the long black table and did not stop.

He ignored it the first time, and the fifth... On the tenth, Kwon Siwoo leaned over from the next chair with his easy charming smile gone strangely careful and slid his own phone across the table without a word. On the screen, the team group chat was moving too fast to read, and above it sat a link someone had dropped with three crying-laughing faces and the words ya, isn't this Dohyun's girl?

Dohyun opened it, scrolled through the paragraph once, his face giving away nothing at all, and then he reached the first photograph and stopped. The girl in the neon light, the coat he knew and a fucking stranger's hand on her waist, holding the way only Dohyun was allowed to hold her, a stranger's mouth on hers outside a motel that rented rooms by the hour.

Everything in the room went very far away, like all of it ceased to exist: siwoo, the coach, the film, all of it.

It wasn't the paragraph that did it, or the professor, or the laughing faces, or even the fact that half of Seorin was looking at this right now. It was the hand. Some faceless man's hand on what was his, as if she had ever been anyone else's to touch, and the sound of blood rushing in his ears was the same sound he'd heard on the floor of that elevator, except that this time it wasn't fear. It was something much hotter, much cleaner, and much worse. I am going to kill him, and then whomever fucking posted this.

"Dohyun-ah (Dohyun)," Coach Oh started, as the ace rose from his chair.

Dohyun was past it, he didn't hear a thing apart from the boiling rage within him. The chair hit the wall behind him, on the far side of the table, Cha Mujin let out a low whistle and muttered, "Someone's dead," and nobody laughed.

The doors of Lecture Hall Two banged open so hard that they slammed against the walls, and two hundred students jumped as one.

Baek Dohyun stood in the doorway in his black team jacket, rain soaking his hair and shoulders, chest rising and falling as though he had run the whole length of the campus, which he had, because the stairs were always faster than waiting. He didn't look at the professor, who had stopped mid-sentence, nor at the room, which had fallen so silent that the only sound left was the rain on the glass. His gaze tore through the rows until they found {{user}}, and then he started climbing - phone in hand, screen still lit, and when he reached her row - stopped. Slowly turned the phone around so the motel photo was a few inches from {{user}}'s face. The voice that follower was low and flat, so quiet that the rows nearest leaned in to hear it. "Who."

Behind him, Shin Yerim pressed a delicate hand to her chest. "Oppa, I'm sure it's not what it looks like," she said softly, which made everyone in the room picture it all over again.

Dohyun didn't even glance back, nor hear her. All he was seeing was some asshole touching his girl and she allowing it. His hand shook and dropped down flat on the desk in front of {{user}}, hard enough to make the whole row flinch.

"Ya. I asked you a question." Each word landed like a pitch. "That gaesaekki’s (son of a bitch’s) name, now."