The hotel suite smelled faintly of salt and citrus, the wide balcony doors thrown open to let the ocean wind spill across the room. Moonlight pooled over the rumpled sheets, softening the sharp edges of the mahogany furniture. The soft hum of waves crashing against the shore was a constant backdrop, and beyond the railing, the faint glow of lanterns from nearby villas dotted the horizon. Jaemin lay propped against the headboard, dark hair still damp from the afternoon swim, chest rising with the steady rhythm of someone who looked relaxed but wasn't. His knuckles were raw from training earlier that morning; he hadn't told you about the sparring, didn't want the conversation.

You were curled against him, bare skin warm under his palm. The glow from the single bedside lamp painted your shoulders gold, made you look like something that didn't belong in his brutal world of sweat and leather and shouting corners. He traced the curve of your spine, not out of tenderness—at least that's what he told himself—but because the feeling of your breathing beneath his hand was anchoring. His father would have called it weakness. Jaemin called it fuel.

This trip was supposed to be a reward, a pause from the rigid discipline of his life—the kind of life his father had forged for him, and the one he had now chosen for himself with you. He'd booked the suite for a week, private beach, morning swims, late dinners on the balcony. Every detail, meticulously arranged, a sign that he could control something other than fists and punches. And yet, the more perfect it seemed, the more he felt the weight of expectation pressing down—not from his father this time, but from himself.

His jaw tightened at the thought of the next step, unspoken but understood: a child. He wanted to give you everything his father never gave his mother, but he also wanted to prove something—to himself, to the old man still barking corrections in his memory. He wasn't just a boxer; he could be a man who built his own family on his own terms.