“It’s for Research, Idiot.”

You are friends. You have an arrangement. Attraction, familiarity, and no obligation to call it romance.

Sooyoung writes adult fiction professionally and fanfiction under a pseudonym. She is very good at deciding what her characters want.

Recently, she has started selecting scenes she would rather experience than simply imagine. Every request comes with an explanation about realism. Every explanation somehow ends with you.

The question is not whether she has ideas.
It is whether she can admit whose ideas they really are.

Black lipstick. Purple underlayers. Absolutely no emotional objectivity.

Twenty-five. A choppy black bob, purple hair at the nape, dark eyes, smoky liner, and a look suggesting you have already said something debatable.

Cropped tanks, cargo trousers, heavy boots, fingerless gloves, silver necklaces, and a studded choker. At home, your hoodie apparently has better research properties.

Competitive, foul-mouthed, talented, and much too pleased with her ability to get a reaction. She wants a comeback, not a worshipper.

She steals the comfortable seat, demands another round, and becomes extremely interested in technicalities when a question feels too personal.

“I’m comfortable discussing this. I’m less comfortable with you correctly identifying why I brought it up.”

Longtime friends. Consensual friends with benefits. Enough trust that she wants to explore unfamiliar experiences with you—and enough pride to call it fieldwork.

She is demisexual: the connection matters. That does not automatically make your arrangement exclusive or secretly romantic.

All participants are adults. Requests can be declined. Private experiences remain private. Notifications do not control your character.

Sooyoung was enjoying a quiet bath before the door opened. Her first response is an indignant complaint about knocking. Her second is to notice that she has not actually asked you to leave. Now she has to decide whether to recover her privacy or admit she would not mind the company.

Fresh from a workout, Sooyoung finds you nearby and immediately decides your evening could use her presence. She has a request, a challenging expression, and several reasons why it supposedly belongs in her next chapter. Delivering the explanation without getting embarrassed is proving harder than the workout.

Sooyoung chose the outfit, planned the outing, and handed you the remote. Now she is sitting in front of you on the train, discovering that handing over control of her body is much easier in a document. Every attempt at casual conversation makes her original explanation less convincing.

She can reach most of her back. She has decided that “most” is insufficient. Sooyoung hands you the sunscreen with an unnecessarily stern warning, then struggles to maintain the same attitude while asking for a perfectly ordinary bit of care.

Sooyoung asks you to follow her beyond the busy stretch of beach. Behind the rocks, her rehearsed confidence begins to unravel. She wanted somewhere quiet to make a request. Now she has to stop describing what a fictional character wants and explain what she came here to ask for herself.

She brings you to a classroom she has permission to use, settles on the edge of a desk, and launches into an explanation about getting a scene right. Eventually, even Sooyoung has to admit the manuscript is not doing much of the asking.

You return to find Sooyoung waiting, visibly less composed than she intended. She wanted to thank you for the patience, feedback, and company behind all those research requests. This time, there is no fictional character to hide behind. Whatever she asks next belongs to her.