Archive of Our Own

It wasn’t love at first sight – Yeon Joo knows that much. 

She isn’t the type of girl to fall for someone that quickly anyway but God knows he really made that scenario near impossible with how he was back then. 

Yoon Gyeo Re – on first impression – had been the kind of man she usually tried to avoid. He was a rude, stand-offish, irresponsible, rich troublemaker with no regards to anyone, dressed in gaudy (but pricey) clothes, tattooed like a gangster, with a face that didn’t make his personality one bit better. 

He wasn’t handsome to her, then. He was good-looking, yes, even striking (she would've had to be blind not to notice that), but every other thing about him just cancelled that out.

A constant frown, dull eyes underlined with dark circles and a down-turned mouth on a face that was long and gaunt, almost sickly looking. All of it made him look less like a young man and more like someone already halfway gone. And that was before he opened his mouth.

She remembers thinking: God, what kind of troublemaker did they bring here this time?

And she remembers the irritation that simmered in her chest whenever he did pretty much anything. Or when he didn’t. She wasn’t even naive – she’d worked at Uri Hospice long enough to know that some volunteers came in only half-heartedly, with ulterior motives or temporary intentions and left before people could learn their names. But something about the way he rejected everyone and everything, like he’d already decided he wanted no part of them, was especially grating.

Looking back now, Yeonjoo wonders how she didn’t notice it sooner. That he wasn’t as okay as he tried to make it seem. The shadows behind his sharp words. The tremor in his silences. The way his shoulders always seemed braced, as though expecting the world to hit him from any direction. Working in a hospice for years, depression wasn’t a foreign concept to her. She should have seen it in him instantly. 

But she didn’t. Guess she was just way too annoyed with him to notice the signs. 

(Or, he was just way too good at scaring people away from him before they could see.)

Though his peculiar, fiercely caring behavior towards Adeul did make her wonder about what kind of person he was in reality, even back then. Something wasn’t adding up.

Still, she didn’t realize just how much of it was a front until she overheard what he said that night while fulfilling the wishes of that elderly with the nice house and the persimmon tree. 

‘Harabeoji. Aren’t you afraid of dying? I was honestly a bit scared. But… living is even scarier.’

Yeon Joo was so floored by the sadness of that statement and how small he sounded, that she had to sit down on the steps in shock. That was the moment she realized her first impression had been wrong. Not entirely – he was rude, he was defensive – but it wasn’t the whole truth. It wasn’t even close .

As she paid attention in the following weeks, it became very clear to her that there was more to Yoon Gyeo Re than he would’ve liked people to know. And as the realization hit, with that in mind, she was able to think first and try to find out why he was acting up in a certain way, instead of getting offended or annoyed. 

His verbal barbs, instead of signs of simple rudeness, revealed themselves to be shields – thin, clumsy ones meant to keep people at bay, protecting himself. 

Refusing company and home-made meals weren’t signs of arrogance – it was unfamiliarity and feelings of being overwhelmed. 

He didn’t know what to do with kindness, so he pushed it away before it could settle.

Not accepting anything meant that no one was able to hold anything over him.

Keeping distance was less chance of getting hurt.

And despite all that, he stayed up all night painting persimmons, got horribly drunk over a practical stranger’s death, joined a musical even though he was completely out of his element and the whole thing clearly made him uncomfortable, and so many other little, kind, caring things that he did that were almost unnoticeable by most – but not by her anymore. 

He was a contradiction, wrapped in armor and barbs, but bleeding kindness through the cracks.

And once she saw that – once she allowed herself to look past the exterior – it was easy to start to like him. Especially since slowly, cautiously, he started to become more and more comfortable, his real personality showing, like an abused animal that was slowly starting to trust its new owner after a lifetime of hurt.

Looking back, Yeon Joo thinks the changes happened gradually – so gradual that if she hadn’t been paying such close attention, she might have missed them altogether.

At first, it was just little shifts in routine.

The way he started sleeping in the breakroom, for instance. In the beginning, he’d been restless, half-alert even in supposed rest, springing upright whenever the door creaked open. But slowly, as days turned into weeks, his sleep grew deeper. One morning she found him sprawled out, hair messy, blankets kicked off, breathing even – and she realized with a quiet jolt that he trusted the space enough to let himself be vulnerable in it.

Then came the accumulation of things. For someone who lived like a nomad, seemingly carrying his whole life in one bag, with Adeul taking most of the space in it, it was telling when he began leaving his mark in the break room. A change of clothes here. Two pairs of shoes there. A jacket slung over a chair. Small signs that he wasn’t just passing through anymore, that part of him was staying.

Another hurdle was food – his rejections and uncalled for criticisms lessened with time, and he could be found more often lending a helping hand to Mrs. Jeom in the kitchen; taking a bite of food here and there until he eventually joined the team for full meals. 

Then came the touches – which he no longer avoided but slowly started to initiate.

(Yeon Joo still feels mortified over how much it flustered her when he touched her lip, intending on wiping off a piece of seaweed, blinking those gorgeous Bambi eyes at her innocently. It’s probably what clued her in that there might be more layers to her feelings than what she knew of.)

And most importantly – the frown that had once seemed permanently etched into his face began to ease, giving way to tentative smiles.

When he wasn’t present, of course all of Team Genie noted sometimes that he looked much healthier and better than when he started working and hardly was in a dark mood anymore. But his smiles really drove it home how much he changed. 

At first, they were small things – a twitch of his lips when someone made a joke he liked, a brief curve when Adeul did something endearing. But soon they blossomed into full smiles, boyish and bright, transforming his whole face into something almost unrecognizable from the man she first met.

It transformed his whole face and made him look achingly handsome, and if Yeon Joo only suspected before that she really, really liked him, then she definitely knew. A single smile was able to make her heart pound, and it was embarrassing and unbelievably cheesy but she greedily, selfishly wanted to see them more. She made it a point to gently tease him, to tell awful jokes and funny stories from her time in the ER and drank in the sight of his boyish grins and the sound of his laugh. 

The late nights that were spent talking when she was on shift and he had insomnia, became her secret little pleasures. 

Yeon Joo actually wasn’t planning on telling him she liked him anytime soon – it just happened. He asked her so curiously and earnestly what were her joys in life and she couldn’t not include him somehow. Because watching him grow more and more comfortable in his space and opening up like a flower was indeed a joy to witness. 

His subtle interest in her even more so. The little gifts that he constantly left her, be it small snacks or little post-it doodles to cheer her up. The increasing amount of deep, personal questions that he was throwing her way, being sharp-eyed and paying utmost attention to her answers and noticeably filing them away in his head somewhere. The small, respectful but lingering touches. Him trying to cook for her and feed her. 

She was so afraid that her unplanned somewhat-confession would ruin all of it, she could hardly look at his reaction. She had half-expected him to retreat, to build his walls back up.

But after the initial shock wore off, he turned adorably shy . Touched. And the pleased little smile that he tried to hide from her made Yeon Joo fall even more in love with him.

She knew then – that she was gone for this wonderful, complicated man. Completely smitten. And they hadn’t even gone on a single date or kissed yet, back then. But she somehow knew – this was it. And the feeling only grew from then, day by day, gesture by gesture. 

Yeon Joo isn’t going to lie – it wasn’t a quick process. 

Gyeo Re – unconsciously or not – was being even more careful in opening up his heart to her than when he first joined the hospice, but she didn’t mind. Yeon Joo was a patient woman by nature and she expected it, honestly. Just like the hurdles and the up-and-downs along the way. 

She knew that in the end, it would all be worth it – and she was right. 

Not pressuring him about his feelings, letting him voice it out when he was finally ready to acknowledge them.

Waiting for him to give the green light for a first date. 

To not kiss his adorably pouty, whiny mouth at the wall-climbing centre or when his coffee shop fantasy didn’t come to fruition, but let him initiate. 

Being patient until he felt safe enough to become intimate with her. 

Last night had been… Well.

She’s a nurse, she should be able to put precise words to things – but she found that she didn’t have the vocabulary for what happened between them. Not the right one, anyway.

It wasn’t a firework display or a whirlwind of passion like the books and movies sometimes made it out to be. It had been soft . Tentative. Quiet in a way that somehow felt louder than anything else. More meaningful than any other times she slept with a man.

Yeon Joo’s fingers drift lazily through his hair now, the silky strands catching between them. He’s sleeping – or at least, pretending well enough that she doesn’t want to risk disturbing him. His face is half-buried in the pillow next to her, lashes brushing his flawless cheeks, mouth relaxed in the way it almost never is when he’s awake. An arm still loosely around her, just like last night when he cuddled close and fell asleep after the second round of their lovemaking. The sight pulls at something deep in her chest.

She remembers how hesitant he had been at first. How his hands had trembled – not from desire alone, but from the sheer weight of letting someone in so close and being so intimate with them. She could feel it in the way he paused between touches, as though giving her time to step back, giving himself time to decide if he could handle this. And every time, she met his gaze and stayed, waited for him, until the pause passed and the next moment carried them further.

There’s an intimacy in that kind of trust that no amount of casual encounters could ever replicate.

If someone had told her a year ago she’d end up here, she probably would’ve laughed. She used to think she was good at reading people, but Gyeo Re had been her most confounding puzzle – and, ironically, the most rewarding to figure out. Even now, she knows there are corners of him still shadowed, still holding their secrets. And traumas. And that’s okay. She doesn’t want to pry them open like locked doors. She’d rather wait for him to offer the key.

Her thumb sweeps across his cheek absently, memorizing the way he feels under her touch. He shifts faintly, murmuring something half-formed, the sound sending a quiet thrill through her – but he doesn’t wake. He trusts her enough to fall this deeply asleep next to her. That might not sound like much to most people, but for Gyeo Re, it’s monumental.

She thinks back to the months it took just to get him to sit beside her without a defensive quip, to let his guard down long enough for a conversation that wasn’t about work. The months after that, where his smiles started to come more easily, though always as if he were testing the waters. And the long, slow build of something unnamed but undeniable between them, until it finally tipped over into the open.

Last night wasn’t about crossing a finish line. It was about him letting her see the unguarded parts of himself – the ones he usually kept buried under barbed wire and carefully chosen distance.

She wants to believe he felt the same quiet wonder she did, in every look, every touch, every slow kiss, every whispered word. That this wasn’t just about attraction and desire, but about all the little steps that led them here.

Yeon Joo smiles faintly to herself. He’ll probably wake up and try to act like nothing’s changed, maybe even toss out one of his wry little comments to cover his awkwardness. But she’ll know. She’ll see the difference in the way his eyes linger, in the way his hand might find hers without thinking. The way he will stick closer. 

Because he gave himself to her – finally, fully.

She bends down and presses a feather-light kiss to his hair. He stirs, sighs, and settles again, his breathing evening out.

She decides she’ll let him sleep - it’s the weekend and neither of them are working. The only thing she planned for the day is food and cuddles. Maybe exploring each other's bodies more if he is up to it. There’s no rush. They’ve taken their time to get here, and they’ll take their time with what comes next.

Because that’s how you love someone like Yoon Gyeo Re – slowly, patiently, until they realize they’ve been safe with you all along.