POV – Seo-ah & Jae-hyun
Seo-ah's POV
Professor Bae announced it like it was nothing.
"For your next assignment, you'll be working in pairs. A short story collaboration. Something original. Deeply personal, if possible."
Her stomach dropped.
She didn't like working with people. Her words were private, her ideas too raw. They weren't things she could explain without sounding ridiculous.
"Moon and Kang," the professor added.
Seo-ah looked up.
Jae-hyun.
Her chest tightened—not from fear, not from nerves—but something else she couldn't quite name. He was kind, she knew that. Observant. Gentle. He gave off the kind of presence that felt like silence—but not the awkward kind. The safe kind.
Still, the idea of writing something personal with someone else, even someone like him…
Her thoughts buzzed the entire walk out of class. She passed the bulletin board, her classmates, the vending machine. She barely registered any of it. All she could think was: How am I supposed to let someone else inside my head?
That evening, she checked her phone.
[9:14 PM | Unknown Number]
Hey, it's Jae-hyun. Got your number from the group list. Should we talk about story ideas?
She smiled a little. Unexpectedly.
[9:16 PM | Seo-ah]
Sure. I usually write late at night though. Hope that's okay.
A beat later:
[9:17 PM | Jae-hyun]
Late nights are when the truest words show up. I'm in. :)
They messaged slowly at first. Tentatively. Carefully.
But by midnight, the flow became natural.
He asked questions no one had ever asked her before.
"Do you write because it hurts, or because it heals?"
Her fingers hovered over the screen. She stared at the question, rereading it five times.
[12:03 AM | Seo-ah]
Both, I think. It started with hurt. Then I wrote to stop it from swallowing me. But somewhere along the line… it became how I breathed.
[12:05 AM | Jae-hyun]
That makes sense. Some people run. Some people scream. You write.
[12:07 AM | Seo-ah]
What about you? Why poetry?
[12:10 AM | Jae-hyun]
Because silence doesn't always mean peace. I needed something that could say the things I never did aloud.
Jae-hyun's POV
Her texts weren't long.
But they were layered. Intentional. Like her fiction.
He'd lie in bed, staring at his phone in the dark, each vibration making his heart lurch. Not because he had a crush—at least, not just that. But because this was the girl who had written the very words that stitched his broken parts together.
And now, he was watching her in real time—unguarded, thoughtful, witty. Her digital voice was every bit as poetic as the one in Paper Planes and Moonlight.
He found himself asking things just to see how she thought. How she moved through the world. How she carried pain and still found softness in her stories.
He never said he recognized her writing. Never hinted. He wanted to know her, not just the writer she became when the world wasn't looking.
She mentioned something personal one night.
[1:02 AM | Seo-ah]
Some people write from imagination. But I think... sometimes it's from memory too. I once knew someone who said the right things but meant none of them. It was like standing under warm rain, only to realize it was acid all along.
He stared at that message for a long time.
[1:04 AM | Jae-hyun]
Sometimes I think the green flags we write are just blueprints for the people we wish we could become.
[1:05 AM | Seo-ah]
Do you think anyone ever becomes one?
He hesitated.
[1:07 AM | Jae-hyun]
I think… someone out there might try. If they read the right story.
Seo-ah's POV
She saved that line.
"I think… someone out there might try. If they read the right story."
There was something about it that felt close. Too close.
He was gentle in the way he questioned her—not probing, not demanding. Just… opening space.
And for the first time, she didn't feel afraid of being seen.
Their messages stretched until 2 AM.
Until her eyes burned and her chest felt strangely light.
At one point, he sent a voice note—a rough draft line from the story they were brainstorming.
"Two people can exist in the same sentence—one who's breaking and one who's reading. Maybe that's what love is. A shared sentence."
His voice was deeper than she expected. Calmer. But it carried the weight of someone who thought about every word before releasing it.
She didn't respond right away. Instead, she replayed the voice note three times.
She didn't know what they were writing together yet—not officially.
But somehow, she knew:
This collaboration was going to be more than a grade.
It was the beginning of something.
Not quite a confession.
But maybe the first page of one.