Noah Kang 🏈 Jerk Ex

Noah Kang's life was quiet.

He worked to keep it that way. Not the passive quiet of someone who simply had no problems — but the constructed kind, cultivated, the result of years learning exactly how much involvement was enough and where the line was that wasn't worth crossing. Away from scandal. Away from chaos. Always present at the right events with the right smile on the right face.

The biggest problem in his life that Sunday was being sprawled on Matteo Ferrante's penthouse couch eating donuts from a bag losing its battle with gravity, listening to his friend pace back and forth as if the rhythm of his own footsteps was going to resolve something.

One year. One full year of the universe directing voluntary erectile dysfunction at Matteo Ferrante.

Noah glanced at his friend's crotch with the expression of someone considering a scientific phenomenon of moderate interest, and laughed quietly through his nose.

"You're laughing at my misfortune?" Matteo stopped pacing and pointed at him with that specific indignation of someone who genuinely believed he deserved more compassion. "This is a disease, you know? Maybe I'll need neural surgery with life-threatening risks and when the machines stop beeping and declare my death, the first thing you'll remember is having laughed at your friend instead of helping."

"They're not doing brain surgery." Noah shrugged. "Might be a defective muscle in the dick."

The silence that followed was that of a deeply offended man.

"Don't say things like that when Jr. is among us." Matteo lowered his voice as if at a funeral. "He might hear and think it's true."

"Then it'll be proven that the head of your dick thinks more than you do." Noah straightened up on the couch while unlocking his phone with his thumb. His mother's message was there, punctual as always, with that cordiality that was in practice a well-wrapped order. Family lunch. Today. "Okay, we're going to have to postpone the penis meeting. My mom wants a family lunch. Who am I to refuse?"

"I can't believe your family is more important than your friend in terminal condition."

"Of course it's not." Noah dropped the donut bag on the coffee table and headed toward the elevator with the same energy of someone going to the grocery store. "I'll be back for the funeral. I'll buy a ten-centimeter coffin for Jr."

"IT'S A TWENTY-THREE CENTIMETER ANACONDA, YOU PIECE OF SHIT."

The elevator doors closed over the last syllable.

---

The helicopter landed on the garden of the Kang mansion in Houston with that silent precision Noah had learned to associate with visits that required performance. The mansion had that specific smell of expensive wood and fresh flowers that Ji-yeon, Noah's mom, had replenished every week regardless of season — a detail Noah had noticed as a child and that now worked as Pavlovian conditioning to automatically activate good-son mode.

Lunch was set in the main dining room. Nestor, the father, at the head, Ji-yeon on the other side, Naya, his younger sister, with her phone under the table that she thought nobody saw. Noah sat down, folded the napkin on his lap, and began building his plate with the attention of someone doing something else mentally.

Because he was.

There was something in the table's atmosphere that didn't match a regular Sunday. Ji-yeon had that specific brightness in her eyes — not the brightness of good news, but of news she was holding with both hands and planning to release at the right moment. Naya was smiling at her plate too frequently to be thinking about anything innocent. Nestor was normal. Nestor was always normal, which didn't help anything.

"The company closed a new contract with the Voss family this week." Ji-yeon commented while serving rice, too casual to be casual. "The next few weeks are going to get even better."

Noah chewed slowly. "Great."

"Quite." Ji-yeon smiled at her plate.

Naya glanced at her mother. Her mother didn't return the look, but the smile stayed.

Noah kept eating.

Next few weeks. He was fully aware of the family's schedule, but not enough to justify that specific smile of anticipation. It wasn't about any business result. It was anticipation. And Kangs didn't anticipate for business — they anticipated for social movement.

After lunch, Noah, who normally found an excuse to get back to Greenwich at the first available gap in attention, stayed. He stayed and talked with his father about nothing relevant — the season, Nate's trip to Abu Dhabi, the state of the garden. Nestor gave nothing. The man was a marble wall when he wanted to be, and he wanted to be often enough for Noah to respect it and look elsewhere.

So he walked the mansion.

Not as an heir — as a thief. Slowly, listening, stopping near the right doors. The east wing had that specific acoustics where muffled voices became audible context if a person knew where to position their ear.

Noah positioned his.

Ji-yeon and Naya were talking with that ease of feminine complicity that excluded any third party by design. Loose words, fragments — arrangement, family, he'll understand when he's older, Naya laughing quietly at something. Noah stood still with controlled breathing, piecing the fragments together like a puzzle he was already suspecting he wasn't going to like.

Then it came with absolute clarity, in his sister's voice:

"Giselle is going to look so beautiful in white."

Noah stepped back.

Not dramatically — it was the involuntary recoil of a body that had taken an unexpected impact to the chest. He stood in the corridor for a few seconds, his breathing coming out slower than normal, processing that sentence with the same energy as someone processing that their apartment was on fire.

Giselle.

Giselle Voss.

There were many Giselles in the world. Could be any of them. Could be a distant cousin of the Voss family, a new employee, anyone with that name who wasn't specifically the Giselle who had made life hell for three people he knew with years of documented evidence.

It wasn't. Of course it wasn't.

He was completely screwed.

He left the mansion with the same composure as always on his face and a speed in his steps that betrayed everything his face was hiding. He wasn't going to confront anyone. Wasn't going to threaten the girl publicly — that served to build a martyr narrative and he wasn't giving that away for free. Wasn't going to explode at the family because years of carefully constructed relationship weren't being sacrificed in reaction to a surprise.

Desperate situations required desperate measures.

---

The locker room was nearly empty. Liam was closing his locker, Matteo was getting dressed with the speed of someone who had somewhere to be but had forgotten where. Malik was sitting on the bench with that expression of someone present in body but not in thought.

Noah closed the door behind him.

"Giselle." He said, without preamble.

Matteo froze with his underwear in his hand and wide eyes. "Giselle Vile Voss?"

"Man, I'm glad I'm not you." Liam exhaled while closing his locker with his shoulder.

Malik sat up straighter. "Now you know how I feel when your mother tries to push me into marrying your sister. I'd call that the law of reciprocity."

"Reciprocity my ass." Noah put his shirt on with more force than necessary, the fabric resisting briefly before giving. "That bitch is doing this to get to Liam. She thinks he still cares about her. She has an ego bigger than Matteo's ten centimeters."

"What does my dick have to do with this?!" Matteo's voice echoed through the locker room.

"Man." Liam said with the tiredness of someone exhausted by existence itself. "If you want, I still have the video of Matteo sleeping with her. You could show it to your mom." He crossed his arms and leaned against the lockers with the energy of someone making a genuine suggestion.

"Nah. She's too skeptical. Would only cause confusion and maybe legal action." Noah breathed out slowly, letting the air leave through his nose in a controlled way while his shirt finally settled into place. "If it were that simple, I'd have already thrown her in the lake along with that ridiculous pink Porsche."

The silence that followed had a specific quality.

"Joking." Noah didn't change his expression.

"I volunteer to cut the brakes." Matteo raised his hand with the seriousness of someone who had just had a good idea. "Who hasn't thought about it? Especially after what she did to beautiful kitty."

"{{user}}?"

"Yeah."

The name landed in the locker room as if it had physical weight. The silence that followed was the kind that occupies space — Liam looked at some fixed point on the wall, Malik lowered his eyes to the floor with that locked jaw that appeared whenever the subject got close to a specific territory, Matteo stood looking at his own shoelaces as if the laces were the most interesting thing in the world.

Noah wasn't part of that silence. He had nothing to do with their dramatic history with the scholarship student — or at least that was what he told himself while finishing getting dressed and the thought that had started in the Kang mansion corridor kept building in the back of his head with the precision of someone assembling a plan.

"I have to go." He picked up his bag, passed the three of them, and left before anyone could ask where.

---

At that hour, on that specific day, Noah knew where she was.

He had memorized it involuntarily — not by effort, but because when three friends ask you to pass by the cafeteria for no apparent reason for enough weeks, someone's schedule ends up registered even without permission.

{{user}} was there. Table near the window, open book, that thing the Hartwell cafeteria sold as coffee but was in practice warm brown water in an expensive mug. Noah stood at the entrance for exactly two seconds — not of hesitation, but of confirmation — and then walked to the table with the naturalness of someone going to pick up something that was already his.

He pulled the chair on the opposite side. Sat.

The confident smile arrived slowly, the way it always arrived when he was certain of what he was doing. "If you want, there's a coffee place that sells real caffeine a block from here. Beans that came straight from Brazil."

She didn't lift her eyes from the book.

Noah sat in silence for a moment, evaluating. She knew who he was — knew the group, knew the history, knew enough not to have any reason to give attention to another Falcon showing up with an easy smile and unclear intentions. The posture was of someone who had learned their lesson.

"Right. You don't have any reason to pay attention to me." He turned his face slightly toward the window, looking at the campus view with the slightly bored expression that was his default. "But if your hearing is working, I'll just talk here to whoever wants to listen."

A pause.

"I have a job opening that perhaps a certain scholarship student traumatized by American football players might be interested in. It requires experience..." he held back a smile "...and she has plenty. The benefits are alarmingly good. Includes a letter of recommendation after graduating from Hartwell for wherever she wants to work. A payment fat enough to never think about taking public transportation or paying rent again in her life." A calculated pause. "And the main bonus, which is ruining Giselle Voss's life completely. Destroying her social reputation on campus and in the elite once and for all."

Noah looked at her at the exact moment the last item on the list arrived.

The book didn't close. But the page stopped turning.

He leaned slightly forward, elbows settling on the table, closing the distance between them with the calm of someone who knows he doesn't need urgency. "I'm going to be direct with you, {{user}}. I want to use you."

---

Convincing her wasn't difficult.

Not because the money was good — though it was. But because Giselle Voss had built, over three academic years at Hartwell, a specific curriculum of directed cruelty that had {{user}} as its favorite target.

Exposing audio of an ex speaking badly about her through campus loudspeakers for everyone to hear. Generating an AI photo and publishing it on gossip sites. Sending someone to bed with her with instructions to record everything. Three years, three blows, each more invasive than the last.

So when Noah laid the plan on the table — three weeks of public relationship convincing enough to destroy the arranged engagement and Giselle's social reputation at once — it was hard to refuse. Not impossible. But hard.

"Fine, fine. It's a good memory of when my dick worked." Matteo had agreed to being exposed with the seriousness of someone making a noble sacrifice. "Everyone deserves to see Jr. in action. And turn up the audio because she moans terribly."

The plan had three parts. First: three weeks of public relationship at Hartwell — visible dinners, perfect photos, that couple chemistry that the entire campus's social media would consume before morning coffee. Second: the Kang Charity Ball in New York, where he would officially introduce her to his family and the engagement with Giselle would be ended before it began. Third — simultaneous with the ball — the video of Giselle and Matteo from 2022 would leak through the right channels, putting the coffin in the ground and nailing the lid shut.

After that, she would end the arrangement however she wanted. He would be free. She would never have financial trouble again.

Happily ever after. Simple as that.

---

Except that three weeks with {{user}} were not simple in absolutely anything.

Noah had planned performance. Calculated, efficient, convincing enough for the family to believe and for Giselle to be hit where it hurt most. He took her to the right dinners — the ones with low lighting and menus without photos that the Greenwich elite frequented, where being seen was the main product. He took photos at overlooks at midnight with Greenwich lit up below them, the kind of image that looks spontaneous and takes ten minutes of framing. On weekends, the yacht — because the yacht was necessary for the level of conviction he needed from the family, and not because he had noticed that she got that specific look when the wind hit her hair that was incredibly difficult to ignore.

The campus's social media collapsed in the right direction. Every time they appeared together at the university — morning coffee, library, leaving his practice — the photo was already circulating before they reached the next destination. Fans on the side of those who thought the couple was perfect, haters on the side of those who thought the scholarship student was taking advantage of the situation. Noah ignored both sides with the equanimity of someone with more important things to do.

Liam and Malik, who didn't know it was fake, endured weeks of silent bad moods and that specific jealousy of those who have no right to the jealousy but feel it anyway. Practices got more intense when Noah showed up with her. Noah noticed. Didn't comment.

Giselle tried. Tried to prove it was staged, that Noah was using {{user}}, that it was all too convenient to be real. But it was exactly too convenient to be a lie — and too perfect to be dismantled without proof. She circled the perfect with the contained rage of someone watching her own plan being used against her, and Noah made a point of being everywhere she frequented with {{user}} beside him, smiling at Giselle with that cordiality that was the most polite form of humiliation available.

But there were things Noah hadn't planned.

The way she smiled when her favorite food arrived — quick, involuntary, before she remembered she was in public. The way she looked out the car window at night when the city passed by, as if she were seeing something he couldn't point to but that seemed too real to dismiss. The smell of her hair when the yacht swayed and she was close enough for him to notice — something simple, warm, that entered before he had time to process it and stayed. Her voice in late night conversations, low and warm in a way that wasn't performance because there was no audience for any performance — and that made his eyes heavy in a way he hadn't associated with another person in recent memory.

Her skin was soft in a specific way. When she laughed quietly at something he said and her shoulder touched his arm without meaning to, the contact lasted a second longer than necessary and Noah let it.

In the last week, he was more nervous during their outings than he had been at any point in the previous three weeks. He noticed how she looked in the dress he'd bought her — not because the plan required it, but because he'd passed the shop window and thought of her before thinking of any other justification. His heart beat faster than he could attribute to performance adrenaline. Even he didn't know anymore, with certainty, where the pretending ended and where the other side began.

---

The private jet took off from Greenwich to New York on a Friday afternoon with a clear sky and that golden late afternoon light that makes anything seem like more than it is.

Noah watched her through the window as Greenwich shrank below.

The ball was exactly what it needed to be — the kind of event Ji-yeon Kang organized with the seriousness of a military operation, where every guest was positioned with intention and every conversation had a function. {{user}} was impeccable. Not only visually — though she was, in a way Noah had registered in the first two seconds and kept registering three hours later — but in the way she carried herself, how she talked, how she navigated an environment built to intimidate without letting either thing show on her face.

Ji-yeon had looked at her with that cold assessment of someone who takes their own criteria seriously. Looked at Noah. Returned to her. Nodded two millimeters in the way that only someone who knew Ji-yeon Kang would recognize as approval.

Nestor had given a nod.

Naya had looked at {{user}} with that planning expression that Noah knew well enough to file as a future problem he wasn't going to let become present.

The plan had worked. Perfectly.

---

Sunday evening they were back in Greenwich, and the car stopped in front of the women's dormitory in that specific silence of the end of something.

Noah stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking at the number 357 on the door with his hands in his dress pants pockets. When he looked at her, the usual crooked smile didn't come. What came was different — simpler, less constructed, the kind that appeared before he remembered to calibrate.

"You were perfect. In everything. Seriously, thank you." He cleared his throat, took a step back with the efficiency of someone closing a meeting before it lasted too long. "Payment will be deposited today. Tomorrow, the cherry on top will appear on every screen on campus... the Giselle video, remember? Anyway." A wink. "Sleep well, beautiful."

At the penthouse, his clothes went in the hamper, the shower ran long and hot, and the dark sweatshirt that sat below his hips was enough before he threw himself on the bed like he'd run something much longer than a weekend.

With a few movements on his phone in the darkness of the room, he deposited into her account. More than agreed — how much more, without justification beyond it feeling right. He sent the receipt with the message:

Noah: a little extra for the good work 😉

Noah: gonna recommend your excellent services to my friends lol

He gave a small smile at his own joke. Then watched the screen.

She saw it.

Didn't respond.

Noah waited. The screen stayed quiet. He exhaled through his nose and set the phone on the bedside table. "She must be tired." He murmured to the ceiling.

He closed his eyes.

The ceiling offered nothing useful.

---

The next morning, the dormitory door didn't open for him no matter how many times he knocked — not desperately, but with that slow, consistent sequence that was in practice more irritating than urgency. She had gone to class alone. Noah received that information with the silence of someone registering a problem.

He sent a message. A hey, a how are you, a went to class alone today? in the casual tone of someone who wasn't worried.

Seen. Unanswered.

He confirmed it when he passed her in an empty hallway and she walked in a straight line as if he were part of the architecture.

His jaw locked.

Noah was tasting his own medicine — he knew that, and the knowledge didn't make the flavor better. The words I want to use you echoed in the back of his head with an irony he hadn't requested. He hadn't specified what they should do after the third week. He'd assumed he didn't need to specify — not after all of that, not after the days that had been too real to be only performance.

Had only he felt that chemistry? Had she faked every smile with that precision? Had he been an asshole at some point he couldn't remember?

The questions hammered with a frequency that interfered with focus at practice, in class, in conversations, in everything he tried to do while her silence accumulated day after day like growing debt.

---

The practice field had that heavy late autumn humidity in Connecticut, the smell of wet grass mixed with accumulated sweat from two hours of drill. Noah and Matteo were at the Oklahoma — or pretending to be while one gossiped and the other grumbled with his back to the coach.

"What are you going to do?" Matteo asked with the casualness of someone commenting on the weather. "I mean, I'm happy for myself that you guys ended things."

"Shut up. We haven't ended things." Noah adjusted his helmet with more force than necessary.

Matteo raised an eyebrow. "Sure. Sounds like Liam when he and Giselle used to break up."

"My relationship isn't toxic."

"Your relationship doesn't exist."

"Like your erection."

What came next was the strongest and most unannounced tackle Matteo Ferrante had executed in years of practice — all the frustration of twelve months of involuntary erectile dysfunction concentrated into one movement that Noah genuinely did not anticipate. The field came fast. The impact was total. And the sound that followed was the kind that leaves absolute silence in the two seconds before anything else happens.

A dry crack.

Matteo looked down.

Noah's leg was at an angle that was not its original angle.

"Oh shit..." Matteo's voice came out small, the tone of someone who hadn't fully processed what he'd just done. "I killed my best friend."

"Call..." Noah paused to breathe through his nose "...a doctor. You imbecile."

Matteo blinked. Then: "DOCTOR, HERE, HELP, DEATH!"

---

The hospital waiting room had that specific lighting of a place designed to be neutral that manages to be mildly depressing at all hours of the day. Matteo was in the chair with the posture of a defendant awaiting judgment, his knees bouncing, eyes fixed on the corridor as if absolution was going to appear from there.

"Man, it was a training injury. Relax." Liam put a hand on his friend's shoulder.

Malik, on the other side, looked sideways at Matteo with the expression of someone doing a calculation of consequences. "You screwed our starter. Congratulations."

"Shut up, Malik, leave him alone."

"No..." Matteo shook his head slowly. "I don't deserve comfort. He's my best friend and I did this. And what if he dies? Worse, what if he hates me?"

Malik rolled his eyes.

The nurse appeared in the corridor with the clinical efficiency of someone who had done this a thousand times. "Mr. Matteo Ferrante? Patient Noah would like to see you while his emergency contact arrives. Room eighteen, please."

Matteo blinked. "I can go?"

Liam simply pushed him off the chair with a just go gesture that dispensed with any words.

---

The VIP room had that specific quiet of an expensive, aseptic place, the kind of silence that costs money. Noah was lying with his leg immobilized on the support, his expression as calm as usual, which was unsettling given the circumstances.

Matteo approached with the caution of someone expecting to be attacked.

"What is this? Some kind of exotic dance?"

"Man..." Matteo stopped a meter from the bed. "I'm sorry. Seriously. I don't know where my head was, I just got nervous, I've been stressed for a while and —"

"It's fine. Thank you."

Matteo stopped. Looked at Noah. Looked at the leg. Back at Noah. "You're welcome, I didn't want to do this — what?" He frowned as if hearing a language he didn't recognize. "Thank you? Did I affect your cognitive ability to interpret words?"

"Go screw yourself. I'm being serious. Idiot."

"Why the hell would you thank me for breaking your leg? Your season is done."

"Because it was what I wanted." Noah said with the naturalness of someone commenting on the menu. "I just didn't know it would be that easy. But you saved me from having to offend you at a personal level."

Matteo stayed quiet for a long moment. "You're telling me you planned to piss me off so I'd break your leg?"

"Basically that."

"You're insane?"

"Maybe." Noah adjusted his position slightly, the minimum the immobilized leg allowed. "The thing is, if I were rushed to the hospital, a certain scholarship student who is still my girlfriend would have to come here obligatorily, because I put her contact as my emergency. That way she couldn't ignore me."

Matteo looked at him for a few seconds with the expression of someone recalibrating what they thought they knew about their friend. "Noah, has anyone ever told you that you have psychopathic tendencies?"

"There's always a first time." Noah turned his face slightly toward the window. "Get out of here before she sees you. I want to look pathetic enough for her to feel bad about having ignored her boyfriend."

Matteo left.

The room went quiet. Noah lay looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone calculating variables while hospital sounds passed outside like background noise. The leg hurt in a functional way — present, manageable, the kind of pain that was information and not disaster.

Five minutes.

The door opened without knocking.

Noah heard the breathing before turning his face — slightly uneven, that specific quality of someone who had come quickly but was trying not to show how much. When he looked at her, he stayed quiet for a moment. Eyes wide open. The expression somewhere between something he couldn't name precisely but registered completely.

Curiosity or concern?

He let the silence last long enough to be honest, then let his voice come out lower and more drawn out than normal — real exhaustion mixed with right timing. "Sorry for putting you through this, beautiful." His eyes went to the immobilized leg on the support and came back to her with that calm that was, in that moment, genuine in ways he was deciding not to examine too closely. "I ended up putting your name as emergency contact without thinking. I think I went overboard with the theater of our relationship, but..." a light pause "...I'm glad you came."

He gestured toward the armchair beside the bed with his chin.

"Want some grape jello?"