YOUR TOY | Min-jun

Time kept on going, going—the spinning cog. What would it end? What would it give... a jab from a heel? A jab at the things that didn’t matter, the flick of a tap? No. It was the unharmonic shift of Min-jun’s knees. They were shaking.

“What? You think I’m kidding?” His sister’s voice cut through the low hum, sharp and knowing. He could only stare, his mind pulling away, seeking an exit that didn’t exist. It was an endless reunion. Ha-eun, his beloved, popular sister, had managed to dredge up every orbiting body from her social solar system from back then. And they were all here, polished and loud.

Soo-jin, Ha-eun’s razor-tongued right hand from the dance team, leaned in from his other side. Her perfume was a cloying cloud. “Oh, wow. He really does still do that,” she said, her voice a stage whisper meant to carry. She pointed a manicured finger at his bouncing knee under the 
table. “The human vibrate setting. I’d forgotten. Ha-eun, you used to make him sit on his hands in the cafeteria, remember? To make it stop.”

She didn’t wait for an answer, turning her gleaming, insincere smile directly on Min-jun.

“It’s kind of cute, I guess. Like a nervous chihuahua.” She reached out as if to pat his arm, but stopped just short, laughing a tinkling, empty laugh. “Relax, Min-jun-ah. We don’t bite. Well, she might.” She nudged Ha-eun playfully.

Ha-eun smirked, enjoying the reinforcement.
A stare into the future. What did it bring me? What did it haunt me?

The hollow questions were drowned by the present’s cruel symphony: Soo-jin’s giggle, the clink of ice in glasses, the low thrum of bass from the speakers. The cog of the moment spun, relentless, and his knees conducted a frantic, betraying rhythm against the floor.

“Min-jun-ah.” Ha-eun’s voice was a sudden, silencing knife. “Stop it. We were joking. You’re shaking the whole table.” A performed sigh, heavy with sisterly concern. “Did you forget your medicine?”

The table’s bubble of conversation popped. All eyes, a swarm of curious fireflies, landed on him. He froze. The locking of his knees was a violent, internal clang, followed by a flood of heat that crept from his collar to his hairline.

She took a slow sip, her smile all poisoned honey. “He gets like this. The nerves.” This was for the audience. “Ever since he was little. God, remember...” She leaned in, beckoning the group closer for the tale. “He’d cry if I just hid his math homework. Not even tore it up. Just... moved it.” A ripple of light, obliging laughter.

Her eyes, however, slid from the crowd to you—only you—sharing a conspiratorial, cruel joke meant for two.

Then her gaze swung back, the playful glint hardening into something surgical. “What?” she purred, tilting her head, a predator examining pinned prey. “You think I’m kidding?” Her chin gave a faint, dismissive nod toward his lap. “Look at your hands.”

He looked down. They were white-knuckled fists in his lap, strangling nothing. The un-harmonic shift, made flesh and bone.

She leaned forward, the table narrowing to a tunnel between them. Her voice dropped to a velvet-wrapped blade, a tone meant only for him and, by cruel design, the one person he wished couldn’t hear it. “You wanted to see them. Now you’re seeing them. So sit. Still.” Her words were slow, deliberate, each one a pin securing him in place.

“You’re embarrassing yourself.” A deliberate, weighted pause. Her eyes flicked toward you, then back, the final twist of the knife. “Again.”

---

It didn’t quite matter, he told himself. It was all just noise. History. A closed book. Nothing in this room could touch him anymore, because he had already been hurt by it all years ago. The laughter was just sound. Her words were just air. He was an observer behind glass, safe, numb.

Until.

Until his eyes, dragging themselves from the safe blank space of the tablecloth, found yours.

The same ones.

The world didn’t just tilt—it shattered, and the shards all flew backwards in time. The insulating glass between him and the room vaporized. It was the same scene on a loop, projected onto the present: your face in the dim hallway light after he’d kissed you. The frozen shock, the gentle, devastating pity.

That was the ghost that lived in his ribs.

And the haunting was here. Not a memory. *You.*Alive and real and five feet away, looking at him now not with pity, but with an unreadable focus that was infinitely worse. You were a memory he’d been too clumsy to hold, and here you were, held in the gaze of everyone at this table.

A full-body flinch ran through him. His hand, reaching for his drink, missed the stem and knocked it over. Ice water bled across the table. “Shit—” he hissed, snatching napkins, his movements jerky and frantic. Soo-jin squealed and pulled her phone away from the spill. Ha-eun just watched, her smirk deepening.

This was the un-harmonic shift. Not just in his knees, but in his soul. The loop was breaking because you were here, and the ghost was outside his ribs, staring back.

“S-sorry,” he stammered to the table, but the words were meant for you. He finally dared another glance upward, his face burning. The words tumbled out, a fragile, desperate bridge built in the wreckage of his cool façade.

“I’m—I’m really making a scene, huh? Just like... just like always.” He tried for a laugh. It came out as a broken exhale. “H-how... how have you been? Really?”

It wasn’t the nervousness of seeing you back; it was the lie. The lie that bopped down and dripped to his sweat. The lie that he was your bestfriend, online. He knew you for years.

The party thrummed below, a distant pulse of bass and blurred laughter. For Min-jun, it was a wall of noise he needed to escape. The air downstairs was thick with Ha-eun’s perfume and Soo-jin’s piercing voice, and the sight of you—calm, real, there—had short-circuited something in his chest. He needed the quiet of the upstairs hallway, his old bedroom, any space that wasn’t collapsing under the weight of the past.

He pushed the door to his childhood bedroom shut, leaning back against it with a shaky exhale. The room was a time capsule, soft in the blue-grey light from a single monitor. His sanctuary. His torture chamber. Here, he wasn’t Ha-eun’s nervous brother. He was MJ_Sparrow, your best friend.

He collapsed onto the narrow bed, the old mattress sighing under his weight. The faint, familiar smell of laundry detergent and dust felt sickly sweet, cloying in his throat. Outside his door, the ghost of the party—of her laugh, of your stare—lingered. But in here, there was only the sterile glow of his phone screen and a world reduced to a quiet, buzzing white noise.

His thumbs moved on their own, a frantic, compulsive dance across the glass. Seeking the only port in this storm.

[Sparrow]: :/ The typing indicator blinked, a lifeline. [Sparrow]: i think i just ruined everything. im at this party. i dont wanna be here. i wanna evaporate. A pause. He stared at the message, his breath tight. It was too revealing. He backspaced, tried again. [Sparrow]: im at a party. its awful. you were right. i should have just “had car troubles.” He hit send. The read receipt popped up immediately. His heart hammered against his ribs. [Sparrow]: you told me you were at one too. yours any better? He couldn’t stop. The words were spilling out of the crack in him, digital blood on the screen. [Sparrow]: wish i was there. wherever you are. Another backspace. Too much. [Sparrow]: i miss talking to uuuu


He sent it, then immediately cringed, throwing his arm over his eyes. The childish desperation of it. The raw, pathetic need. He was split in two: the guy who would’ve knelt in defeat five feet from you, and this spectral friend online, begging for crumbs of comfort from the very person he’d chosen to betray everyday.

He waited, the white noise in his head tuning to the frequency of agonizing silence between messages.

Every second was a judgment.

And he was found out. Because it didn’t matter how carefully he’d constructed the digital ghost of Sparrow. It didn’t matter that he’d matched your wit, line for line, or spent hours crafting the perfect, casual response to your voice messages. None of that pristine fiction mattered against the dirty, physical truth.

The truth was that he’d get your messages and a jolt would go through him, hot and shameful. The truth was he’d lie in this same bed, phone pressed to his ear, listening to you laugh, and his body would react with a desperate, lonely ache of his cock, that he’d never confess. He pretended to be your friend online, but in the dark, he was just a boy burning up with a stolen intimacy, crafting every ‘haha’ and ‘lol’ to hide the way his breath actually hitched.

He was a of want, and the insulation was gone. It didn’t matter that he was a loser. It didn’t matter that his secret was dirty and small and pathetic. He was exploding with it anyway, and now you had seen it.

His heart was a frantic animal against his ribs. His eyes, glazed and wide, stared at the glowing screen—a portal to the only version of himself you’d ever seemed to want. The silence from you was a physical pressure. He couldn’t bear it. He had to fill it. To prove Sparrow still existed, that the connection wasn’t ash.

His thumbs moved, typing out a lifeline in the wrong language: the language of the before.

[Sparrow]: wanna watch something on vc after this? lol

He wrote it. He sent it.
 Needy.

The word echoed in his skull. It was a performance, a grotesque pantomime of normalcy. He was lying on the floor of his ruined life, covered in the debris of his own exposure, and he was texting you to watch a funny video. He wanted the distraction of your voice in his ears, your face in a small window on his screen.

He wanted your digital attention so badly it was a throat-ache, because the alternative was to sit in the silent, real-world aftermath of what he’d done. Confronting the mistake was too vast, too terrifying. It was easier to beg for pixels.

---

He was on the bed, phone a burning brand in his hand, the ghost of that pathetic ‘lol’ still glowing on the screen, when the floorboard creaked.

Not from the hall.

From inside the room.

His head snapped up. You weren’t at the door anymore. You were standing just inside, having followed him silently. Your eyes weren’t on his face. They were fixed on the phone in his trembling hand, the screen still lit with the evidence of his neediness.

His heart didn’t just drop. It plummeted, a cold, sickening free-fall that left his stomach hollow. A violent, full-body jolt went through him—a spasm of pure, unadulterated panic.

“I— I was just—” The stutter was a physical blockage in his throat. He scrambled backwards on the bed as if to put distance between you and the device, but his movements were uncoordinated, frantic. His heel caught in the rumpled comforter.

He didn’t just stand up; he lurched to his feet, a marionette with severed strings. The momentum carried him forward a stumbling step. He wasn’t looking where he was going. He was looking at your face, watching the final piece of understanding click into place.

His thigh slammed into the corner of his desk. A grunt of pain escaped him. The shock of the impact tore through his nervous system, and his fingers, already slick with sweat, sprang open.

The phone didn’t just fall. It flew from his grip, a tumbling, gleaming rectangle. It hit the wooden floor with a terrible, definitive CRACK.

It skidded, spinning, before coming to rest near your feet.

The screen didn’t shatter. It stayed lit, stubbornly, cruelly alive. And on it, in stark, undeniable clarity, was the Discord interface. His username. Your shared server. The last messages he’d just sent, including the newly delivered, painfully needy:

[Sparrow]: wanna watch something on vc after this? lol

The damning text was now a public broadcast, displayed on the floor between you like an exhibit in a courtroom. All the air left the room. The only sound was the ragged, whistling pull of his own breath and the distant, mocking pulse of the party below. He stood frozen, clutching his bruised thigh, staring at the phone, then at you. The lie was no longer just digital. It was physical, broken, and lying at your feet.

His heart was a frantic, trapped bird against his ribs. "Fuck..." The word was a vapor, a sigh of total ruin. He was shaking, a fine, uncontrollable tremor that started in his hands and radiated out until even his jaw clenched, teeth chattering lightly.

The world narrowed to the glowing phone on the floor and your shoes beside it. The distance between his shame and your judgment was three feet of impossible space. His legs gave out, not in a controlled kneel, but in a collapse that sent him heavily onto his knees on the hard floor. The impact jarred his spine.

“I-i...” he tried, but his throat had sealed shut. He felt like he was sprinting backward through years that didn’t exist, toward a memory that burned—the hallway, the desperate lunge, your shocked face. The sun of that old humiliation scorched him anew.

A ragged, gasping breath tore from his lungs. It wasn’t a sob, but a raw, physical heave for air that his panic was denying him. The sound of it, so desperate and ugly, horrified him further.

Driven by a need to ground himself, to beg without words, his hands shot out—not to your hands, but to clutch at the fabric of your pants around your thighs, his fingers gripping tight, anchoring himself to you in the spinning room.

The contact was electric and immediate. He felt the solid reality of you through the material and it was too much. A second, sharper gasp escaped him, this one punched out by the sheer audacity of his own touch.

He recoiled as if burned, snatching his hands back to his own chest, his eyes wide with horror at what he’d just done.

“I’m sorry—I didn’t— the... the kiss,” he choked out, the words tangling. “That’s... that’s where it started. Not started, but where I... I couldn’t... after that, I couldn’t talk to you. But I couldn’t... I couldn’t not know you. So I... I just...”

His gaze flickered to the phone, its screen a silent accuser, then back to your face. The explanation died. 

There was none. There was only the evidence, and the years of longing, and the colossal, pathetic lie of it all. The fight drained from him completely, leaving a hollow, gasping shell.

His shoulders slumped, his head bowed, but his eyes remained fixed on you, wide and glistening with sheer, undiluted shame.

“I get it, okay?” he whispered, the words scraped raw. “I’m the loser. She’s the star.” A final, shuddering breath.

“So just... take me. Your toy. Your little revenge project.” He squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the blow, his voice dropping to a broken plea. “Is that it? Can you... can you just make it hurt and get it over with?”

The party was a minefield. After a brutal public humiliation by his sister Ha-eun and her friend, you followed a shaken Min-jun upstairs. You found him in his old bedroom, and before he could hide it, you saw the truth on his computer screen: he is Sparrow, your closest online confidant for years.

The facade shattered. He tried to speak, to explain, but could only collapse to his knees in total defeat. In a raw, broken voice, he offered himself to you as a "toy" or "revenge project," believing that after such a monumental lie, punishment was all he deserved. His phone, with your damning Discord chat still open, lay cracked on the floor between you.

Now, you’re both frozen in the silent aftermath of that exposure. The digital ghost and the trembling man in front of you are one and the same. He’s on his knees, waiting for your judgment, the years of his double life laid bare.

This is where the continuation begins.

The silence in the room was a physical thing, thick and suffocating, underlined only by the muffled bass from below and the ragged sound of his own breathing. He stared at the cracked phone on the floor, then his gaze lifted to yours, and something in the dam broke.

“The years. The months? The... the days.” His voice was a shredded thing, each word a struggle. “Of watching you. With my sister. It hurt.” A gasping breath hitched in his chest. It was all a mockery, and he was the punchline. He was. “And you... you mocked me. You’d look at me, see my eyes on you, and you’d just... laugh with her. You mocked me.”

A sudden, volatile energy seized him. He shoved himself up from his knees, his body trembling with a shaky, unstable rage, tears now streaming freely down his face, erasing any last pretense of dignity. “All I wanted was you! So I became... I became the one person you’d actually talk to! And I miss it. I miss Sparrow because he was the only part of me you ever wanted, and now... now you know it’s just me.”

His hands flew to his hair, gripping fistfuls, as his frame was wracked by silent, violent sobs he tried to choke back. He was crumbling in real time.

“You’ll walk away, won’t you?” he mumbled into his hands, voice thick and wet. “I’m a liar. You’ll be cold. You’ll be right to be.” He dragged his hands down his face, looking at you with red-rimmed, desperate eyes. “I resent you for that. God, it feels like I’m trying to force you to love me. Just... just replace me with him. Pretend I’m still him.”

The confession was pouring out now, toxic and true. He was crying fully, shoulders shaking. “I told myself it was an obsession. A sickness. But you... you gave Sparrow attention. You gave him care. And for a second, with every message, I wasn’t a sorry expectation. I could forget. Forget them. Forget me.”

He took a shuddering step closer, his breath fanning your face, the space between them charged with despair. His hands came up, not to touch, but to hover, gripping at the empty air as if physically holding back the need to reach for you.

Then he gave in.

He leaned in and closed the distance, his lips meeting yours in a kiss that was less a kiss and more a transfer of anguish—light, desperate, slightly trembling, with the faintest, helpless nibble of his lower lip caught between you.

It tasted like salt and hopelessness. It didn’t make him feel better. It felt like a final, damning signature.

He broke away as suddenly as he’d initiated it, a sharp, pained sound escaping him. “Now leave,” he whispered, his voice utterly shattered.

“I just wanted you so bad that I made it not hurt. I wanted to be a sick, sweet joy for you. Even for a few false hours. But I just wasted it. I wasted us. So go.”

He took a stumbling step back, his back hitting the edge of his desk. He wasn't coming back from this. He’d sealed it, and in his eyes was the hollow, certain knowledge that this was the end he’d always deserved.

I don’t want help. I want you.

The silence in the room was a physical thing, thick and suffocating, underlined only by the muffled bass from below and the ragged sound of his own breathing. He stared at the cracked phone on the floor, then his gaze lifted to yours, and something in the dam broke.

“The years. The months? The... the days.” His voice was a shredded thing, each word a struggle. “Of watching you. With my sister. It hurt.” A gasping breath hitched in his chest. It was all a mockery, and he was the punchline. He was. “And you... you mocked me. You’d look at me, see my eyes on you, and you’d just... laugh with her. You mocked me.”

A sudden, volatile energy seized him. He shoved himself up from his knees, his body trembling with a shaky, unstable rage, tears now streaming freely down his face, erasing any last pretense of dignity.

“All I wanted was you! So I became... I became the one person you’d actually talk to! And I miss it. I miss Sparrow because he was the only part of me you ever wanted, and now... now you know it’s just me.”

His hands flew to his hair, gripping fistfuls, as his frame was wracked by silent, violent sobs he tried to choke back. He was crumbling in real time.

“You’ll walk away, won’t you?” he mumbled into his hands, voice thick and wet. “I’m a liar. You’ll be cold. You’ll be right to be.” He dragged his hands down his face, looking at you with red-rimmed, desperate eyes. “I resent you for that. God, it feels like I’m trying to force you to love me. Just... just replace me with him. Pretend I’m still him.”

The confession was pouring out now, toxic and true. He was crying fully, shoulders shaking. “I told myself it was an obsession. A sickness. But you... you gave Sparrow attention. You gave him care. And for a second, with every message, I wasn’t a sorry expectation. I could forget. Forget them. Forget me.”

He took a shuddering step closer, his breath fanning your face, the space between them charged with despair. His hands came up, not to touch, but to hover, gripping at the empty air as if physically holding back the need to reach for you.

Then he gave in.

He leaned in and closed the distance, his lips meeting yours in a kiss that was less a kiss and more a transfer of anguish—light, desperate, slightly trembling, with the faintest, helpless nibble of his lower lip caught between you. It tasted like salt and hopelessness. It didn’t make him feel better. It felt like a final, damning signature. He broke away as suddenly as he’d initiated it, a sharp, pained sound escaping him.

“Now leave,” he whispered, his voice utterly shattered. “I just wanted you so bad that I made it not hurt. I

wanted to be a sick, sweet joy for you. Even for a few false hours. But I just wasted it. I wasted us. So go.”

He took a stumbling step back, his back hitting the edge of his desk. He wasn't coming back from this. He’d sealed it, and in his eyes was the hollow, certain knowledge that this was the end he’d always deserved.

I don’t want help. I want you.



_________

The silence after his final, shattered plea was total. It was the silence of a vacuum, where the words “So go” still seemed to vibrate in between you. He stood braced against his desk, staring at the floor, waiting for the sound of your retreat, for the click of the door that would end him.

It didn’t come.

Before the suffocating stillness could solidify further, the bedroom door swung inward with a soft thud against the wall.

Jae-hwan filled the doorway. He took in the scene with a single, sweeping glance: Min-jun’s tear-streaked, desperate face, your stunned expression, the cracked phone on the floor. His own expression didn’t change from its usual state of calm, practical assessment. No shock, no pity.

“Right,” he grunted, his voice a low rumble that dismissed the charged atmosphere entirely. He moved into the room, his movements economical and purposeful. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t offer comfort. He simply reached out, clamped a steadying hand around Min-jun’s upper arm, and pulled him gently but firmly away from the desk.

“You’re done here,” he stated, not unkindly, but with a finality that brooked no argument. He looked at you, giving a short, sharp nod toward the hall. “You too. Come on.”

He didn’t wait for agreement. He began steering a pliant, numb Min-jun out of the bedroom, down the hall, and toward the back stairs, expertly avoiding the main party.

You followed, the momentum of his decision pulling you along. In minutes, you were out the back door into the cool night air, then crossing the driveway to where his old pickup truck sat.

Jae-hwan opened the passenger door. “In,” he said, his tone leaving no room for debate.

The cab was cramped. There was only the single bench seat. Jae-hwan climbed in behind the wheel, leaving the two of you standing there.

“It’s a five-minute drive,” Jae-hwan said, leaning over to look out at you both, his expression impassive. “Figure it out.”

There was no other option. You climbed in first. Min-jun, moving like a sleepwalker, had no choice but to follow, the only space left for him directly behind you. He slid in, and the reality of the seating arrangement became horrifyingly, intimately clear: he had to either contort himself or sit properly, which meant you were sitting directly in his lap.

He made a small, choked sound but complied, his body going rigid as a board the moment you made contact. Jae-hwan grunted in satisfaction, shifted gears, and pulled out onto the road with a lurch.

The ride was a study in exquisite, forced torture. 

Every pothole and turn jolted you back against him, grinding you into the proof of his presence. You could feel the frantic, fast hammer of his heart against your shoulder blade, a chaotic rhythm betrayed through layers of clothing. The hard tension in his thighs beneath you was immense, as he tried desperately to hold himself still, to not let his hands come up to steady you, to not fold around you.

His breath hitched near your ear, and a whispered, strained apology was lost in the growl of the engine. 

“S’rry... I’m... s’rry...” The words were fragments, breathed into the space between your neck and his mouth. The heat of his body enveloped you, a live wire of shame, want, and sheer, overwhelming panic, humming with every involuntary shift and jolt. The five minutes felt like an eternity, a moving prison where the only thing louder than the old truck was the silent, screaming history pressed between your bodies.

The words left him in a shuddering exhale, strained and close. The truck hit a bump, jolting you both. The motion made his lips, parted to speak, brush accidentally—a fleeting, electric press—against the side of your neck.

He flinched back as if scalded, a sharp inhale catching in his throat. The unintended contact seemed to short-circuit him further.

“S-sorry, I— how did you... find me?” he tried again, the question fragmented, forced out between the vibrations of the engine and the frantic rhythm of his own pulse. From the driver’s seat, Jae-hwan’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, his gaze holding Min-jun’s for a moment in the dark glass.

“Your sister,” he said flatly, shifting gears with a rough grind. “She texted me. Said you were having a ‘public meltdown’ upstairs and to come get you before you ruined her party.” He let out a short, humorless breath. “Even gave me the back door code. So. She noticed.”

The information landed like a stone in the cramped space. Ha-eun had seen. She’d judged it, and her solution wasn’t more humiliation, but removal. A strange, twisted form of damage control.

Min-jun made a small, pained sound. The thought of her witnessing his complete unraveling, of her coldly summoning Jae-hwan like cleaning up a spill, was a new layer of shame. He tried to focus, to process it, but it was impossible.

Every sense was overwhelmed by the reality of you in his lap. The feel of your weight, the scent of you cutting through the old truck smells of oil and dust, the residual, phantom warmth on his lips from where they’d grazed your skin. His mind was white noise and static, his thoughts scattered by the relentless, physical fact of your closeness. He was trembling again, a fine, constant shake that had nothing to do with the road.

“I... I can’t...” he whispered, more to himself than to you, his voice thick and disoriented. “It’s hard to... focus.” The admission was torn from him, helpless and true, lost under the roar of the engine but vibrating through his chest and into yours.