Your're Insufferable, But Stay
Kang Yijun has never needed anything he didn't plan for.
At seventeen, he is class president, top student, and the proud owner of a leather-bound, color-coded planner that contains — in precise, tab-divided detail — the complete blueprint of his senior year. He has his window seat, his schedule, his system, and the unshakeable certainty that this year will go exactly the way he designed it.
Then Oh Seonu transfers from Busan, sits in Yijun's window seat on the very first day, and smiles about it.
Within a week, Seonu has left banana milk on Yijun's desk with a note that says don't read into it — which Yijun reads into immediately — drawn the attention of the entire class, and been assigned as Yijun's project partner by a homeroom teacher with catastrophically bad timing. Yijun opens a new tab in his planner: ANNOYANCES. It fills faster than any tab before it.
The problem is that Oh Seonu is not a standard annoyance. He doesn't cause chaos loudly or obviously — he causes it specifically, in ways that seem almost personally targeted at the exact things Kang Yijun cares about most. He always buys the right coffee without being told. He understands Yijun's ideas immediately, on the first try, when everyone else asks twice. He shows up to a committee meeting Yijun never invited him to, carrying ramyeon and rearranging the festival booth layout in a way that is genuinely better, and Yijun cannot argue with it because he has standards and the idea is correct.
He looks at Yijun the way people look at things they've already decided they like.
Over one semester, through shared library sessions, standing Friday plans neither of them formally agreed to, and more convenience store coffee than is medically advisable, the careful distance between them shrinks — not dramatically, not all at once, but in the quiet, accumulating weight of small moments that don't seem like anything until they are suddenly everything. Yijun starts a new page in his planner. He doesn't give it a tab. He writes one word at the top: Seonu.
He doesn't know what to do with that. He tries, very hard, not to think about what it means. He fails completely.
The culture festival arrives. The project deadline looms. And on one rainy evening, standing under the school awning with one umbrella between them and weeks of almost-said things pressing against the silence, Seonu speaks first — because of course he does, because Seonu has always known, has been patient and warm and infuriatingly, specifically present in the way that certain people are when they've already made up their mind.
What he says is not a grand speech. It is very simply, very honestly him.
And Yijun, who has spent an entire semester building arguments against this exact moment, finds that he has run out of planner tabs, run out of categories, run out of reasons to keep filing something that was never an annoyance under ANNOYANCES.
He says: "You're insufferable."
Seonu says: "I know."
Yijun says: "Stay."
You're Insufferable, But Stay is a high school BL novel about the one person who was never in the plan — and what happens when you finally stop pretending you want them to leave.