It's kind of funny in retrospect that he thought figuring out a way to get shielded from Nightmare would help. Nightmare knows him by now, probably knows him better than anyone else. It doesn't matter that he got someone else's shielding without them knowing that he did, because Nightmare does not need any access to his mind anymore to have a real fucking good guess of how to get to him.
"Ehh. He can be your person to talk about Kang Jaeha with, if you want, I will probably go explain everything to my mother. Who has some of the information on this, but not everything, because I did not want to get my mother involved in a lawsuit."
"Mhm. Or I could make other friends! Maybe! ... Ugh, lots of people are going to ask me questions and feel sorry for me, aren't they. I'm going to hate that."
"Just smile in a way you don't mean and tell them you have somewhere else to be. Like this."
Giggle. "Speaking from experience, hm? Yeah. Sounds good." Kiss. "Now c'mon, out of the tub, I can dry us both off."
It is much easier to dry off after a dramatic shower of angst with a fire esper girlfriend!
And once they are fully dry he places a hand behind Hye-jin's lower back and pulls her close to his body. "I think I'm in the mood to do some boyfriendly activities with you that are completely unrelated to my backlash, right now."
... Giggle!
"Well you should have mentioned sooner! We could have just taken off the clothes."
"Didn't realise I wanted it until I saw you standing there being gorgeous and got reminded of how much I like you."
yoo-min-max: what the fuck
yoo-min-max: what the everloving fuck
yoo-min-max: is that why tae-gun stopped coming to the gay meetups?
yoo-min-max: is that why he fucking vanished for years?
yoo-min-max: that fucker???
yoo-min-max: he did this??????
Zzzzgirl: is that why he hadn't had a partner for so long????
Zzzzgirl: because his last one sucked????
Zzzzgirl: poor hunny gunny!!!!
Tconnoisseur: and tried to kill the one partner he did accept
Tconnoisseur: like out of a bad manhwa
ChoiBokBok: hey quick question
ChoiBokBok: why did we let him RUN RAMPANT FOR HALF A DECADE
๐งyoungwoo: a combination of an NDA that would get Quasar to go bankrupt, prez keeping close and constant track of that dude's actions to make sure he wasn't doing anything weird, and tae-gun specifically asking us to not do anything
๐งyoungwoo: mostly that last one, clearly we're no good at figuring out that he's up to shit
๐งyoungwoo: but you guys must've realised something had happened
๐งyoungwoo: at least the ones of you who were around back then
๐SeoAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA: it's one thing to realise that something's weird and a whole other thing to guess this
yoo-min-max: I thought it'd been a bad breakup
yoo-min-max: like a really, really bad breakup
yoo-min-max: i wanted to believe that was all it was
๐ชfreefall: bro you literally cannot say that
๐ชfreefall: you wanna know who the worst fucking friend ever is?
๐ชfreefall: me, his ex-partner, who really, really should've known better than this