(Dohyun pov)
Jihwa had been acting strange all week.
Not bad-strange. Not the kind of strange that used to make my stomach drop and my mind start cataloging exits. Just... off. He kept humming to himself and stopping mid-sentence like he'd forgotten what he was saying. Twice I caught him staring at his phone with an expression somewhere between panic and determination before shoving it back in his pocket the second he noticed me looking.
"You're doing the thing," I told him Thursday night, echoing his own words back at him. "The staring-like-you're-hiding-something thing."
"I don't have a thing."
"You very much have a thing."
He'd just laughed, too quickly, and changed the subject to what Haneul wanted for his birthday, and I let it go because pushing had never gotten me anywhere useful with people, and I trusted him enough by now to believe that whatever it was, it wasn't something that would hurt me.
So when he asked me Saturday evening if I wanted to take a walk to the park — our park, the one with the bench and the ice cream cart that closed at sunset — I didn't think much of it beyond how nice it would be, warm evening, his hand in mine, nothing that needed explaining.
The park was quieter than usual. No kids on the swings, no joggers cutting through. Just the two of us and the long gold light stretching across the grass, and something about the emptiness of it should have tipped me off, but I was too busy watching the way the light caught in Jihwa's hair to notice.
We stopped at the bench — the same one from that first real night, ice cream melting between us, his forehead pressed to mine. He didn't sit down.
"Jihwa?"
"Give me a second," he said, and his voice came out rougher than I expected. He was still holding my hand, but his grip had gone tight — not the loose, careful hold he always used with me, but tight, like he needed something to steady himself with.
Then he got down on one knee.
For a second, I couldn't process what I was looking at. My mind went strangely blank, the way it used to when something bad was about to happen — except nothing about Jihwa's face said bad. His eyes were wet, his jaw tight with the effort of holding himself together, and his free hand was fumbling in his jacket pocket for something small.
"Dohyun," he said, and had to stop, swallow, start again. "I've been trying to write something for this all week. I had, like, four different speeches. I deleted all of them because none of them said it right."
I couldn't speak. My hand was still in his, and I could feel his pulse hammering through it.
"So I'm just going to say it plain," he continued. "You spent thirteen years being told you were something to be owned. Something that didn't get to want things, didn't get to choose anything, not even your own face when it wanted to smile. And I don't ever want you to feel that way again. Not with me. Not ever."
He opened the small box. A simple ring, nothing showy — he must have remembered, somehow, without me ever having to say it, that anything too loud would have felt like another kind of ownership instead of a gift.
"I'm not asking you to belong to me," he said. "I'm asking if you'll let me belong to you too. If you'll let this be something we both choose, over and over, for as long as you want it. No debts. No obligations. Just — you, if you want. Me, if you'll have me."
My chest had gone tight in a way that had nothing to do with fear. Somewhere behind my eyes, heat was building, and I realized, distantly, that I was crying — not the kind of tears I used to have to swallow down and hide, but the kind that just came, unguarded, because for once nothing bad was chasing them.
"Say something," Jihwa said, half-laughing, half-terrified. "You're kind of killing me here."
"Yes," I managed. "Yes. Obviously yes."
The sound he made was somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and then he was up off his knee and I was in his arms, and the ring was cold against my finger where he slid it on with shaking hands, and somewhere above us the sky was doing that same soft gold thing it had done the very first night he ever made me smile.
"I love you," I said into his shoulder. "I love you, I love you—"
"I know," he said, laughing wetly into my hair. "I know. Me too. God, me too."
We stood there a long time, wrapped around each other in the empty park, and I thought about the boy who used to sit in the corner of a café hating a stranger for smiling so freely, and how impossible it would have seemed to that boy that one day the stranger would be kneeling in front of him, asking to belong to him instead.