A/N: This fic is inspired by conversations with the lovely sanreir over on AO3! I have no clue which ideas belong to whom anymore, but without out her, this fic would never have happened. Thank you for being my companion in Jaemin hell! I hope you enjoy!
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Chapter 1: It Wasn't Her Finest Moment
Jaehee took her only solace in this situation – the wine was damn good. Too good to down each glass in thirty seconds or less, but that didn't stop her from doing it. It occurred to her too late that perhaps her boss would not be happy that she had somehow managed finish the entire bottle, one of the expensive ones he'd brought back from his business trip to the vineyard. This was one of his bottles. Hers was still in her apartment. Or maybe he wouldn't care. His empathy circuits may be shorted, and his perfectionism creeping over the line of clinical, but he could be lenient and generous in the weirdest of ways. She just had to hope it would be one of those times.
Jaehee held her phone in front of her face, the words blurring on the screen. She removed her glasses and placed them on the bedside table, hoping to bring clarity to her vision – completely forgetting they weren't prescription. The chat logs were still the same. It wasn't safe to go home. She needed to stay where she was, in Jumin's apartment. His and the guest bedroom were separated only by a wall. She couldn't picture him on the other side because she couldn't picture him in any setting other than the office or the doorway to his apartment. Jumin. In bed. Relaxing – was he even capable of such a feat? That was impossible to imagine. Realistically, she knew he was probably also working.
The only method of relaxation Jumin was capable of was showering Jaehee with more work. Work... That's right. She couldn't be sitting there wasting time not imagining her boss relaxing in bed or hating the fact that she was stuck with him for the unforeseeable future. There was work to be done. A lot... of... work. She sighed, long and suffering, as she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and reached for her bag on the floor. Time for some work project roulette. She blindly pulled out a thin black folder and her small laptop.
She opened the folder, took one look at the cover page – the title written in large, cruel bold font – and shoved it violently from her lap. It fluttered to the floor, scattering its contents, innocent and unaware of its offense. No! Not that one! Tears stung the corners of her eyes. She would work on the coffee project. Yes. That always was fun. She rummaged in her bag. Found its binder. But the letters on its pages were no kinder. Her vision was watery with tears and the effects of the wine. They danced merrily, taunting her – robbing her of her haven in the eye of this shitstorm of work Jumin had mercilessly piled upon her.
She looked again at the latest layer of hell on the floor. Loose photos of Elizabeth the 3rd lay strewn about the floor, freed from their manila prison. She could make out the cat's visage despite her blurred vision. She could pick out photos for the cat hotel project – the only thing she could see well enough to do in her state. But the coffee project was the only thing that might ease her nerves. Her one escape denied to herself by the indulging of another – that damn wine. She slid to the floor, ready but unwilling to crawl to the cruel fate that demanded her weary soul. Once more she held her phone out, staring blankly at the RFA messenger. She wondered if MC was on. She wondered if two in the morning was too late in the night to call someone. Probably...
The moisture that had been welling behind her eyelids finally spilled over, droplets gliding down her face and spattering against her hand. Her screen. At the realization that she was crying, she only cried harder. Her shoulders trembled as she collapsed in on herself, a singularity the sucked the very oxygen from her lungs. She found herself gasping.
"Assistant Kang?"
Shit. The door was open this whole time. Just a fraction, but more than enough for sound to travel. The embarrassment at being found out only spurred more gross sobbing. She wanted to tell him she's fine, don't come in. But she couldn't because she choked on the words. They snowballed into a mass that got caught in her throat and could neither come up nor be swallowed.
Her hands flew to her mouth to push the pitiful sobs back, to keep Jumin out. But it didn't work. The door breezed open on well-oiled hinges and Jumin stood in the doorway.
"Assistant Kang...?" Disbelief, mostly, was in his voice. A confusion – Jaehee the Robot, crying. He'd seen women cry before. Plenty of times, in fact, before Jaehee had taken over managing his other assistants. But their crying was never more than a soft whine in the words they spoke. Never pretty, but still somehow delicate. But the heaving, uncontrollable, and unrelenting sobs. That was new. Something he was only vaguely aware happened – not having experienced it himself except for perhaps when he was a wailing infant too young to understand that such displays of emotion were nothing short of a waste of energy. And now he was witnessing this phenomenon take hold of the one other human being in the world he least expected it from.
His hand fell to the doorknob. He was ready to turn around, say something about giving her her privacy, and pretend he never saw her like this. But just as he was about to do so, Jaehee's eyes locked onto his, and in doing so they locked his feet in place. There was a ferocity behind those brown eyes that plucked a sensation in him he was unable to describe.
Jaehee pushed herself to her feet. She wobbled in place for a split second before charging toward him. Her intent was to push him out. To close and lock the door behind him and wallow in self-pity. But her limbs were with heavy with drink, and the floor swayed under her feet. She stumbled forward. She didn't know if she made it to Jumin before tripping or if he'd actually had the decency to move to catch her. In any case, he caught by the elbows as she fell against his chest. She gasped for the wind the collision had knocked from her lungs, her face pressed into his collar. His scent consumed her senses and she hated herself for thinking even for a second that he smelled really fucking good. And not an expensive cologne kind of good but a Jumin just smelled good kind of good.
Jaehee tried to get away, but walking backwards proved even more difficult than forwards motion. Her knees buckled. Luckily, Jumin still had a grip on her.
He cleared his throat. "Let's get you to bed."
"It's too soon to go to bed," Jaehee protested weakly, her words partially slurred but still discernible. "If I sleep now, I won't make the deadline."
"You can barely stand," he pointed out as he guided her slowly back into the room.
"Wait, wait." Jaehee stopped him, wriggling in his grasp. "Shut the door. I don't want Elizabeth the 3rd's hair on my stuff."
So she ordered him but she found a way to reach around with her foot to swing the door closed herself.
"I wish you wouldn't treat Elizabeth the 3rd's hair as if it were dirt. She deserves better than that."
"And I wish you would stop coming up with stupid cat projects that are self-servicing wastes of money (and time) that ultimately hurt the company. I deserve better than being saddled with the burden of overtime on projects that are doomed to fail from the start. You'd think you'd learn by now." Jaehee gave herself an inward pat on the back for that one.
"They are not a waste of time or money." Jumin furrowed his brows ever-so-slightly at her. "Cat projects are fun."
"For you maybe," Jaehee snorted. "All they do is cause me pain. At least give them to someone else."
"I can't trust anyone else with such an important project."
Jaehee grunted.
"That is a compliment," Jumin explained.
"It doesn't feel like one."
"I compensate you more than enough for your time, and you've always handled things perfectly before." Jumin sat her down on the bed. "I don't understand what the problem is now."
"This," Jaehee gestured toward the empty wine bottle, the mess on the floor, her wet face, "This, Mr. Han, is the problem. I'm so stressed I feel like I'm going to explode. I can't function like this. It's too much."
"I'm stressed too with all the work my father has decided to dump on my shoulders after finding out about the cherry farm."
Jaehee scoffed at how almost-sympathetic he sounded. Because she knew how shallow his pool of sympathy was to draw from.
Jumin continued in his usual passionless voice, "Cat projects are a fun way to relieve stress."
"No!" Jaehee stomped her foot like a child throwing a tantrum. "They are not fun for me or for anyone else you force them on. You need to find another way to relax."
He startled at her display and she seized the moment to gather his shirt into her fists and yank him onto the bed next to her so she wouldn't have to crane her neck to glare up at him anymore. Caught off guard and off balance he had no choice but to yield.
"Please, Mr. Han," Jaehee rasped, her voice cracking, "no more cat projects."
"Please let go of my shirt, Assistant Kang."
"Not until you promise!" Jaehee growled. "No! More! Fucking! Cat projects!"
"I can't promise that. I don't know of any better way to relax."
Jaehee just wanted all the stress to just go away. But there was no way out. Not as long as Jumin was stressed and drumming up stupid cat projects to relieve his own stress. Did he really know no other way to relax? She was desperate.
"Why can't you relax by doing normal-people things? Like taking a hot bath or going for a walk or having a hobby – a hobby that isn't cat projects," Jaehee begged, the alcohol raising the octave of her plea.
"I don't have time for baths as of late, and I simply do not find those other things to be particularly relaxing." Jumin closed a hand around one of her wrists, trying to extricate himself. "Now if you'll just..."
His grip was warm and came with a gentleness Jaehee had not thought him capable of.
Why couldn't he just do something normal people did when stressed? Why couldn't he be more like her – relax with something that never hurt anyone else. Just watching Zen's DVDs and then... And then an idea struck her. A really, really bad idea. But she was drunk enough to just realize it might be a bad idea with only a very small part of her brain. Because at this point it didn't matter how bad it was. She just needed the cat projects to stop. For the love of God, she needed relief from this stress and the only way she was going to get it is if Jumin found stress relief. The answer revealed itself in drunken clarity – the one thing she suspected Jumin had never tried, because she could not imagine that particular part of his anatomy reacting to anything at all. But desperate times called for desperate measures.
"I have an idea," she blurted forcefully, her cheeks rosy from the wine.
"An idea?" Jumin peaked a brow at her, genuinely curious.
"To relieve your stress but you have to trust me."
"What is it?"
"No, no." Jaehee shook her head. "If I tell you ahead of time, you won't agree to it."
"...That's not exactly a great or reassuring sales pitch."
She released his shirt and wiped the tears from her face. She made eye contact. "Please. Relieving your stress will relieve mine. If you don't like it, we can stop. But you have to trust me. Do you trust me?"
Jumin shifted, the question clearly making him uncomfortable in the current context. But he didn't look away when he finally answered, "Other than V, than is no one alive whom I trust more than you."
Jaehee ignored the way those words squeezed her heart.
"Turn this way." She had him sit straight on, instead of at an angle like he had been in order to face her.
"All right."
She slid onto the floor and kneeled in front of him. As she rested her hands on his knees, her voice of reason, muted by alcohol, began to rear its ugly head, screaming at her to back out. This was ridiculous and completely inappropriate. But she shushed it, the wine's hold on her still present. It whispered in her ear. It told her she was already in this deep. She wasn't going to back out now.
Jumin regarded her curiously, evidently not knowing to expect. It was an alarmingly naïve response, that confirmed he really must have been telling the truth when he said he'd never had a girlfriend before and made Jaehee wonder if he had a sex drive at all. She felt a little guilty taking advantage of his inexperience, but she supposed she was about to find out.
She fumbled for his belt and his eyes expanded to saucers.
"What are you doing?" he asked, his tone a mix of surprise and warning.
"Relieving your stress," she replied. "Do you not like my idea?"
He physically stopped her after his belt and first button were already undone. "I've never done this before. I can't know if I like it or not. However, that is not the point. This is completely inappropriate; I'm your employer."
"Technically, we're not at the office," Jaehee reminded him.
"That does not change our relationship."
"Neither does this if you choose not to let it." It sounded better in her head than it did to her ears. Her head was still fuzzy and things made more sense in there for some reason.
Jumin's mouth thinned into a line. His grip on her wrists loosened.
"If you really don't like it, we can stop," she repeated.
He let go but didn't say anything. She waited.
Then she made quick work of the remaining button and his zipper, stripping him down until his flaccid dick was bare before her. Jaehee didn't like touching flaccid penises. She felt there was something weirdly clinical about it that didn't fit with sex. So she cupped his balls in one hand. A gasp rushed past Jumin's lips like he hadn't been expecting her touch. His dick began to crawl out of its shell as her thumb massaged gentle circles on his scrotum. He gripped the edge of the mattress with white knuckles.
"So, do you like it?" Jaehee asked, with the same level of sultriness you'd ask someone what their favorite color was.
She caught him nodding briefly.
Jumin let out a small, pleased "oh" when she took his hardened member in her hand and started stroking him. His hips jerked with the movement as she pumped his cock faster, unable to restrain himself in his state of inexperience. His breath grew erratic. It then occurred to Jaehee that for once she was in complete control – a little spark of a thought that she might enjoy this more than she'd anticipated, a spark which she remorselessly stamped out. And yet... it flickered to life again. Testing the power she held over him, her hand stopped, tearing a plaintive whimper from Jumin. She circled her fingers around the head of his cock, her thumb pressed into the underside, squeezing gently. The tail of a stifled moan hissed past his teeth.
Jumin had tried masturbation only a few times, when he was fourteen. Not because he'd found himself aroused and sought release. It was purely out of curiosity. What was it that women were capable of, that he could not do himself? If media were to be believed, men would do anything for sex, especially if it was good sex. That was supposedly why older men of considerable wealth would tolerate the machinations of their – often much younger - trophy wives. So while the thought of that being his father's vice was repulsive in itself, he wanted to understand why his father was so weak to pretty gold diggers, unable to think objectively or rationally when he had a woman on his arm.
Every time Jumin tried, the result was the same: pleasure not worth the mess on his hands or the unclean feeling of playing around with parts that were meant to be contained by his pants. After a handful of mediocre orgasms, he abandoned the effort. Jaehee, however, was beginning to shift his perspective.
Jaehee started fisting his erection once more, the abrupt increase in stimulation coaxing a long moan from the depths of his throat. Her touch ignited a river of searing want that coursed through his veins. It tingled beneath the surface of his skin. Just as he felt himself on the brink of an eruption of pleasure, Jaehee decided to take the path of torment. She released his shaft. Her fingertips stroked just the head of his cock, teasing a deep-seated ache for her touch along rest of him. It wasn't enough.
She knew that, which is why she did it. But it wasn't enough for her either. She wanted to watch him come undone. She stole a glance upward. His head was bowed forward, eyes shut tight. She waited for them to flutter open. She met his half lidded gaze, surprised when he didn't look away. Then slowly, so slowly he could not mistake her intentions, she met the head of his cock with an open-mouthed kiss.
Jumin made a strangled noise. He hadn't known anything in life could possibly feel this good. He hadn't imagined that Jaehee might possess a magic in her touch that he hadn't been able to produce with his own hands. He fell backwards, catching himself on his elbows. He slid slowly back until he was laying flat on the mattress, with his legs still over the edge and his cock in Jaehee's mouth.
Jaehee could feel the wine slowly draining from her system. She began bobbing her head slowly, almost mechanically, one hand moving in sync to make up for the length she could not contain. The reality of the situation was slowly creeping into the peripherals of her awareness. How inappropriate this was. And yet she couldn't stop, couldn't flush away the part of her that was enjoying this. She let her eyes fall closed, making this all right by believing the man she was pleasuring was the same one she fantasized about in the dark of her room with a small vibrator tucked against her clit. Slipped inside her.
She imagined his silver hair loose and scattered around him. It was Zen's member that was like warm velvet in her hand. She savored every hitched breath, the twitch of his dick, the hiss of fabric as his fingers clawed the sheets into tight fists. It was Zen's needy whimpers that graced her ears as she pulled back to enthusiastically suck the head of his cock, lick clean the beads of salty precum that formed at the tip.
The moans Jaehee jerked from him with every squeeze of her hand – as she took him even deeper into her mouth – pulsed between her legs. She hastened her movements, desperate to make her idol come – the thought alone almost enough to undo her. Until a voice she knew more intimately than any other, that could only belong to one man, breathed her name.
"Assistant Kang." Jumin's voice fractured Jaehee's illusion like glass. He licked his dry lips while he searched for the words to warn her he was close.
Before he could find them, Jaehee whimpered around his cock, trying to call the dream back. However, the vibration struck a cord in Jumin, untying the knot of pleasure that had been building since she first wrapped her hand around him.
"Ah, I'm –"was the most Jumin could manage before a moan flooded from him and drowned out the rest of his words in its wake.
His warm seed splashed against the roof of Jaehee's mouth, salty and a little sweet before turning into something sour. She pulled away and put one hand over her mouth as if she were expecting to gag on his semen. She swallowed immediately, eager to be rid of it. She climbed onto the bed, crawled towards the night stand, and downed the glass of water that had been sitting there before flopping down onto the mattress beside Jumin.
She kept her eyes closed, because to look over at Jumin's face would be to admit that she was at least a little bit curious.
Jumin cleared his throat after a long and painful silence. "Ah, uh, thank you, Assistant Kang." His tone was infuriatingly polite despite his lingering breathlessness. "I do feel considerably lighter after that."
"So no more cat projects?" Jaehee asked, candidly hopeful.
Jumin chuckled and it was such a strange sound to behold, Jaehee had to open her eyes. He had propped himself up on an elbow, and was smiling down at her. It was a scene she could never have predicted in a million years. Normally when he smiled like that, with his eyes sparkling, it meant trouble: another cat project. And yet in this moment, she wasn't afraid of his smile.
He seemed to seriously consider her question.
"I can't promise never," he eventually said, "but, I'll be more prudent about them and I won't let the brunt of the work fall to you in the future. Not after what you were willing to do for me – what you did – all on your own."
"I didn't just do it for you." The bitter words left her tongue of their own accord.
"I know that." He said it so softly, almost affectionately, that Jaehee doubted for a moment whether she'd heard him right.
Jumin's thumb brushed away a stray drop of water that had dribbled down Jaehee's chin as he brought his face close to hers. She didn't miss the way his gaze dropped to her mouth as his fingers hovered at the edge of her jaw.
"Mr. Han?" she whispered. Her eyes were wide in fear of his behavior meeting her expectations.
He froze. His brow creased. Then he abruptly withdrew, looking as if he'd walked into a room and forgotten the reason he entered.
"I should let you sleep," he said over the sound his belt made, jingling as Jumin stood up to pull his pants over his hips.
"Even without the cat hotel project, I can't really afford to-"
"I'm giving you a break." He cut her off, brooking no room for argument. "An eight hour break. I feel very," he hesitated, "refreshed thanks to you. I think I can make up for some of what you'll miss, and I'll see if I can't get some deadlines pushed back."
Jaehee felt tears prick the very corners of her eyes. Where was this suddenly coming from? "Um, thank you..." she managed to say. She didn't want to jinx this goodwill with further protest.
"Good night, Assistant Kang." Jumin left and quietly closed the door behind himself without leaving room for her to reply.
Jaehee lay, dumbfounded, on the bed. She felt gross, like her body was slick with a film of slime that coated her head to toe. Had all this unprecedented kindness come simply from performing a sexual favor? When she thought about it with her rapidly sobering brain, she could not find any other way to comprehend what had just happened.
She buried her face in her hands and groaned. She wished tomorrow would never come, that she'd never have to face Jumin in the morning or think about how this was going to affect their working relationship. She never wanted to examine why she'd ever thought the best way to relieve his stress and halt all cat projects was to put her mouth on Jumin's most intimate anatomy, shit-faced and desperate. God, had it really been that long since she'd gotten laid – was that why? She just wanted to touch a dick so badly she didn't care who it belonged to? She hadn't thought herself that sexual of a person, but she supposed it possible. Still, she didn't want to face it. She'd rather just sleep through the next day into the next, and so on until the memory of performing fellatio on her boss was as distant and unreal as a dream.
Unfortunately, tomorrow had other ideas.
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A/N: Thank you for reading! I'm not going to promise there will be more chapters, because I honestly don't know. A chapter 2 seems fairly likely, but beyond that I dunno. This is just going to be something I will update when inspiration strikes and as practice for writing smut.