Chapter Text
“The stars in the sky…”
The message arrived just before your alarm went off, the blue glow of your phone cutting through the gray-blue quiet of early morning.
“…don’t compare a fraction to you, my dear.” You smiled before you could stop yourself.
Your mornings always began like this: Kim Taehyung and you waxing poetic at one another, trading fragments of thought like offerings. Whether it’s a masterpiece of writing or not never mattered to you. Never mattered to either of you.
Some mornings, the lines were short, barely awake.
“Dawn spills itself carelessly across the room,”
“like it’s trying to find you before I do.”
Other nights, they were longer, heavier; sent just before sleep, words trailing off like hands that didn’t want to let go. Neither of you acknowledged it outright, never named what you were doing. But somewhere along the way, the poems stopped being exercises in talent and became your way of saying good morning and good night; a language just the two of you slipped into without thinking about it, a ritual that asked for nothing and promised even less.
You’d met in an introductory English Composition class your freshman year of college, paired together for an assignment by sheer coincidence. Late-night texts about thesis statements and peer reviews blurred into personal conversations the way they always do when you’re young and exhausted.
At first, you wrote to sharpen your skills. To practice voice and imagery. Those early lines weren’t flirtatious. Not really.
They’re curious, if anything. Two people circling language, circling each other, pretending that’s all it is.
But if you’re being honest, you liked him from the moment you saw him. He was handsome, after all, and unfailingly polite. But nothing compared to what happened once the poems became routine. Once his words began to arrive with the consistency of sunrise. Once you started waking up expecting him.
“I think the day behaves better when it knows you’re awake.”
You had read that one three times before getting out of bed. He impressed you endlessly, his writing effortless in a way that felt unfair, lines unfurling with a confidence you hadn’t learned yet. You told yourself you admire the craft more than the person. That this was purely academic.
But was it?