8. Jae
Chapter eight
Jae
My next class is one of my business core requirements—Business Ethics, or whatever euphemism they’re using this semester to pretend that capitalism has a conscience.
The fluorescent lights above me have the warmth and personality of a hospital morgue.
They hum at a frequency that lives somewhere between hearing and feeling, a low, persistent note that makes the inside of my skull feel like it’s gently vibrating.
The professor clicks through another slide.
His voice has the particular cadence of someone who has delivered this exact lecture forty-seven times and is now operating on a combination of muscle memory and existential resignation.
The slide is blue. The text is white. The bullet points march down the screen in perfect formation, each one more forgettable than the last.
My binder is open. My pen is in my hand. My notes, theoretically, should be happening.
They are not happening.
Somewhere around the third slide—something about market saturation and consumer behavior, I think, though I couldn’t swear to it in a court of law—my handwriting trails off mid-sentence.
The letters get smaller, then crooked, then they stop entirely, and what replaces them is a doodle.
A dragon, or possibly a pig, or some unholy hybrid of the two.
It has scales and a snout and eyes that look vaguely judgmental, which feels appropriate given the circumstances.
My pen taps against the edge of the desk. Not a rhythm, exactly. More like the irregular pulse of a body that’s trying to stay awake through sheer percussion.
Tap. Tap-tap.
Pause.
Tap.
I keep replaying it.
The pink cashmere sweater.
Not the pink cashmere sweater itself—though it was a very nice sweater, but the girl in the sweater.
Her argumentative attitude precision. The way she dismantled my argument about the seat without raising her voice above a conversational murmur.
The specific way her jaw tightened when I refused to move—that tiny, involuntary betrayal of irritation she immediately tried to swallow back down, like she’d been caught doing something indecent.
It was so fucking hot.
The professor’s clicker advances another slide. The image changes. Something with a graph. Lines crossing. Arrows pointing.
My pen stills.
I look down at the blank half of the page below my abandoned notes. The dragon-pig stares up at me with its judgmental eyes. I press the tip of my pen to the paper and write, in letters smaller than my usual handwriting:
uncomplicated
I underline it once. Then I draw a box around the word.
Uncomplicated.
That’s what I came here for. That’s the entire point of Jae Kim.
Uncomplicated means anonymity. Uncomplicated means sitting in a library without twenty people with phone cameras.
Uncomplicated means walking down a street where no one knows your face or your name or the fact that you’ve spent the last decade of your life learning how to exist for an audience of thousands.
Uncomplicated does not mean thinking about the specific way a girl’s jaw tightens when she’s trying not to react to something. It does not mean replaying a ninety-second argument about desk space for hours.
The professor raises his voice slightly on a point about market elasticity. A few students shift in their seats.
I turn the page.
The dragon-pig stays behind, imprisoned in the margin of a lecture I barely heard, next to a word I’ve boxed in like it’s something I can contain.
Tap. Tap.
My pen finds its rhythm again.
The girl two seats over has been basically eyeball fucking me since I sat down. She’s pretty, I guess. Brown hair, brown eyes, full lips, sharp jawline, big tits spilling out of the tiny crop top she’s wearing—Instagram pretty in a nutshell.
My cock twitches in my pants.
I shift in my seat, adjusting my posture in a way that hopefully looks casual and not like I’m trying to redirect blood flow away from my groin. That’s the problem with being a man—your body has opinions your brain didn’t authorize.
She smiles, licking her lips as she twirls a piece of her hair between her fingers. She has that pick me, choose me, love me energy going for her for sure.
She won’t find love with me, but I’d definitely fuck her.
Later on in the lecture, she leans in, close enough that I catch a whiff of the synthetic sweetness of vanilla and something else—cotton candy, maybe. It’s enough to choke a horse.
She smiles. “You’re new.”
It’s not a question.
“Uhhh, yep. Just transferred here.”
“Are you in Business?”
“Yes and no.”
She laughs, and it’s almost like listening to the sound of bells.
“Elaborate.” she demands.
“Vet Med, technically. But I’m also doing business so I can run my own practice someday.”
“Wow, productive, aren’t you?”
“I like to think so.”
She’s close enough now that I can feel the heat from her breath.
Her eyes connect with mine and she bites her lower lip. “You’re cute, new guy.” she whispers in a sultry tone.
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
“Brittany.” she offers.
“Jae.” I offer back.
She takes out her phone, taps her thumb on the screen and hands it to me. “Here,” she says. “In case you want to study together, or, you know. Whatever.”
I take the phone from her palm without overthinking it and pull up the contacts app and type my name and number. Moving on to Snap, I open up the app, add my username—a private one, not the one with three million followers or the one attached to my birth name, then casually hand it back to her.
My phone is laying in front of me. She notices.
Snatching it up before I can stop her she shoves it toward me. “Unlock it so I can return the favor.”
I do and hand it back to her.
She types something fast. Her thumbs moving at damn near the speed of light. Then she turns the phone around, poses, pouts her lips and snaps a selfie before handing my phone back.
The contact image is already set and she made sure to angle it to where her cleavage is taking up most of the picture.
I look at the photo for exactly the amount of time it takes to be polite.
Two seconds, maybe three. To be honest—her cleavage is doing a lot of work in that picture, so I feel it only slightly necessary to appreciate the effort she put forth.
She bites the tip of her nail, “So you don’t forget,” she says.
She tucks her phone away with a small, satisfied smile. One that says she’s pretty used to getting what she wants.
I know this because I have dealt with these types of girls all the time as Kai.
The professor raises his voice slightly. Something about next week’s reading. An important concept. The kind of pedagogical emphasis that translates, in the universal language of lecture halls, to this will be on the exam, and if you’re not writing it down, that’s a you problem.
I press the home screen button on my phone and pocket the device.
Brittany winks before leaning back in her seat, her attention drifting to the lecture as the professor drones on.
She seems like a nice girl.
She's beautiful. Confident. Fun.
Under any other circumstances, she'd have my full attention.
But she doesn’t.
Instead, my brain keeps circling back to pink cashmere.
To the girl who didn’t smile. The one who didn’t flirt. The one who looked at me as if I were a complete and total inconvenience to her day.
Which, according to her…I was.
Tap. Tap.
My pen taps the paper and I look down at the little boxed word in my notebook next to the dragon pig, my mouth twitching at the edges as I replay our argument from this morning in my head.
Yea.
Uncomplicated, my ass.