Work Text:
Jugyeong is working on a model’s face — she knows she knows his name, but she’s really having trouble remembering it — when she hears a voice calling her name, and she looks up. “Huh?” she asks, not seeing anyone in front of her.
“You?” she hears, and she turns around. “Han Seojun?” she asks in disbelief, and then she’s squealing and dropping her brush and rushing at him.
Seojun raises an arm as if to defend himself, but Jugyeong pushes past the arm, hugging him tightly around the waist and burying her head in his chest. “Hey!” someone calls. But, “It’s alright,” Seojun says into her hair, raising a hand to hug her back.
She pulls back from him, holding him by the elbows. “I didn’t know you’d be here,” she says, whacking him. It’s been almost five years now since she’s seen Seojun, not since he’d debuted and Suho had moved to the States to go to school in Los Angeles, and Jugyeong had decided to stay in Seoul to work.
“Hey!” he calls. “I didn’t know you’d be here either.” But he looks pleased. It’s been so long since Jugyeong has seen that pleased look that she feels a smile spread wide across her face.
She’s missed him. She tells him so, and watches the pleased look warp. “You missed me?” he says as if in disbelief.
“Of course I did,” she says, promptly. He runs a hand up the back of his head, ruffling his hair. It’s dyed a shade of red now, and it suits him. Though he’d always been handsome, the kind of handsome that made people stop to look at him, she thinks he looks even better now. The thought causes a flush to go through her. She reaches up and ruffles his hair to chase the feeling, and he shoots her a look, catching her wrist.
“Hey,” he says.
“Do you two know each other?” the model she’d been working on asks, and Jugyeong turns back to look at him. She’d completely forgotten he’d been there. Seojun drops her wrist, and Jugyeong pulls it back into her chest. It feels strange and tingly.
“We went to school together,” Seojun says, dropping into the chair next to the model. Jugyeong’s coworker Kim Soo gives him a giddy, panicked look, which makes Jugyeong want to laugh. Seojun is far too ridiculous to obsess over.
But still, Jugyeong feels very aware of the fact that he’s here, propping his feet on the makeup table in front of him, and talking languidly to the guy beside him, apparently they know each other, though Jugyeong has still not been able to determine his name. He looks up at Jugyeong, and raises an eyebrow. “Don’t you have work to do?”
“Don’t you?” she says, automatically, swiping at his feet to remove them from the table.
“I do,” he responds, and gestures at his face, and Jugyeong laughs despite herself, screwing up her face at him, and he laughs, too.
“Sorry,” she tells the model, picking her brush back up and returning to looking at his face, tilting it to change the angle, and adjusting the blush slightly, and then stepping back. “You’re done,” she says, fluttering her hand to indicate that he can go.
He raises an eyebrow at her, but pushes off the chair, and with a wave to Seojun disappears. “Well,” Seojun says, and Jugyeong stares at him for a moment, “What?”
“Aren’t you going to make me over?”
“Oh,” she says. Why is she holding a brush again? “Yes,” she says, and then steps forward into his space.
She’d just been doing the same thing moments before, in fact she’s put makeup on hundreds of people at this point in her career, but suddenly it feels absurdly intimate doing it to Seojun. She feels as if his skin holds a charge. His eyes flick up to her face. “Are you normally this particular?”
Jugyeong flushes. She’d been smoothing cream on the edge of his cheekbones for a minute now, and she swipes a larger amount across his entire cheek clumsily. “Yes,” she says, tartly.
His eyes are warm. “I missed you, too,” he says, softly, so that only she can hear.
.
They get soju and samgyupsal after the show, and when they are sitting and eating, two girls come up to him to ask for autographs. “Is she your girlfriend?” the one on the left asked, looking shyly at Jugyeong. “She’s pretty.”
Seojun looks up at Jugyeong as if just now noticing she is here. “Is she?” he asks, but there is a humor to the question that Jugyeong doesn’t get. She tucks her hair self-consciously behind her ear. It’s shorter now, and back to her natural black. “I guess she is.”
The girls squeal, and walk off twittering. “You know they think you said I was your girlfriend,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. Seojun shrugs.
“Are you not dating anyone then?” Jugyeong asks, unsure why she is prying.
“Why?” he asks, mouth full. “Is this a date?”
“No,” Jugyeong says automatically. “We’ve been friends too long for that.”
Seojun gives her a look, though with his mouth still full, she can’t quite read it. Jugyeong takes a large sip of soju to fill the silence, and sputters as she swallows it.
“You can’t hold your liquor very well,” Seojun comments smugly.
But later, as he is walking her home, she finds that it’s him that can’t hold his liquor well, not her. He’s stumbling, and Jugyeong has put his arm around her shoulders to steady him. He’s tall enough that he has to stoop to lean on her. His hand pats at her hair in an affectionate gesture, and Jugyeong smiles, pulling his fingers from her hair, and placing them more securely on her shoulder.
“You’re drunk,” she informs him.
“No, I’m not.” He pushes off from her and then turns around to look at her. “Your hair,” he says, gesturing.
Jugyeong raises a hand to it. “What?”
“You cut it,” he says, as if this is a big surprise.
“Yours is red,” she informs him.
He gasps, putting a hand to his scalp. “Is it? Where?”
She laughs, and then steps forward and puts her arm around his waist. “Come on,” she says. “You can sleep on my floor.”
“She’s inviting me into her house,” he says, and Jugyeong whacks his arm, and he laughs into her hair, and she thinks of how two nights before, she had gone for a walk by herself in the park, and passed Prince Comics, and thought about how boring her life was now, how in high school everything had seemed so much more intense, joy and anguish pungent enough to taste, but now it had all faded to a sort of mellow contentment. Perhaps that’s what growing up meant, she’d thought. But, here, arm and arm with Han Seojun, Jugyeong feels awake for the first time in a long time, as if she had blinked and gone backwards in time.
.
When she wakes the next morning, Seojun isn’t where she’d left him lying on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, snoring quietly, and she startles and swings her legs from bed, darting out into the main room. But then there he is, in the t-shirt and jeans he was wearing yesterday, leaning against the counter and talking to her mother, looking ridiculously put together for the time.
Jugyeong stops in the doorway, and he turns back to look at her. “Good morning,” he says, brightly.
Her mother turns more slowly to look at her, and Jugyeong gives her an awkward wave, unsure if she’s going to yell or not. She’d meant to sneak Seojun out in the morning. “You could have told me Han Seojun was dropping by,” Eomma says instead though, her voice somehow both cheerful and threatening. “I would have cleaned.”
Soejun looks around the place and his eyes widen. “Have you not? It looks spotless.”
He nods his head to Jugyeong and she sees that there is a bra hanging over the back of the couch — not one of hers but how is he to know that? — and she gasps, plucking it up and tossing it out of sight. But Seojun just laughs, still talking to her mother about his latest music video, which her mother watched nonstop after it was released, while repeatedly reminding Jugyeong that she had passed up the opportunity to make Han Seojun her son-in-law, and now look where he was. It had been a nice video. Though not really Jugyeong’s thing, Seojun has always been good at the sort of easy sexuality that sells. Sometimes she thinks everything comes easy to him.
“Leave him alone!” Jugyeong cries eventually, extracting Seojun from her mother’s clutches.
“I don’t mind,” he says, smiling as she drags him away and into her room.
He mock gasps when she presses the door closed behind them, trapping him against it. “Are you taking advantage of me?” he asks her, and it’s only then that she realizes how close they are, and she moves back from him, almost tripping in her haste to get away.
“Han Seojun!” she cries, but he just smiles. And Jugyeong realizes that she’s smiling too, that she’s hardly stopped smiling since she’s seen him again.
.
It’s only a little bit later when she goes to the bathroom and sees herself in the mirror that Jugyeong realizes that this is the first time Seojun has ever seen her without makeup. And while her skin is nicer than it was when she was a teenager, she still has spots, and her face is puffy from sleep and her hair is a wreck . “Ay,” she cries, splashing water on her face and then running a brush through her hair so it lies flat, and smoothing some bb cream on the red parts of her face. It’s not much, but it’s enough to make her feel more comfortable.
“Sorry,” she says, when she gets back to her room. “I must have given you a fright.”
“Hmmm, you always do,” Seojun says, not looking up from his phone. He’s half-lying on her bed as he texts, and Jugyeong flushes at the sight of it, though she couldn’t say why. Why would she think he would care if she was wearing makeup or not? He’s never thought of her like that. She throws herself down on the bed next to him, and he startles, moving his phone out of sight. “Aish,” he says. “You’re such a loser.”
Jugyeong just hums. “Han Seojun?” she says, watching him carefully. He looks over at her, something cautious in his eyes. Their legs are brushing.
“What?” he says, suspiciously.
“Let’s stay friends this time,” she says. “Let’s not miss each other again.”
He looks at her for a moment longer, and then, “Alright,” he says before he shoves her so that she goes falling onto the ground below.
.
They keep their word to stay friends. They’re both busy with work, but she finds it’s easier to slot him into her life than she could have imagined, and even though several weeks before, she hadn’t seen him in years, she finds now she can hardly imagine her life without him. He’s meant to go on tour in a couple of weeks, and she’s already mourning the loss of him.
She’s at his apartment now, and they’re arguing about which movie to watch. Seojun likes to talk throughout the whole thing, which is endearing, but also means that it can’t be a movie Jugyeong really wants to see. But she finds she likes squabbling with him, too. It feels natural.
She lunges for the remote in his right hand, and he holds it high out of reach. “It’s not,” she leaps, “fair for,” she presses forward again and he dangles it just out of reach, “you to use your height,” she’s pressed tight into him now, and she stretches just a little further and feels the remote right at her fingertips, “against me!”
He is silent, and she looks down and realizes his face is millimeters away from hers. She freezes for a moment, the remote forgotten. And then she remembers herself, and scrambles backwards across the couch and away from him. His face has softened, in surprise, she thinks, but then he smirks, and presses the button to start the film. “‘Fair is fair,” is all he says, settling back into his spot.
He falls asleep part way through the film, despite it being his choice, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Juyeong is curled up all the way on the other side of the couch, wrapped tightly in her blanket, but she extricates herself from it, crawling towards him to see if he’s really asleep. The credits are rolling now, and she thinks to do something to tease him, tickle him awake maybe, but she finds when she is close, she doesn’t want to. Instead, she just stares at him, his face sleep-soft and handsome, his hand clutching his blanket tight to his chest, and Jugyeong feels a sort of overwhelming tenderness wash over her. It’s a feeling she’s only ever associated with Suho before, and she’d mainly felt it when she’d seen him in pain and wondered what she could possibly do to help. Now, she feels it again unprompted, like an itch in her fingertips, like a tiny heartbreak. Like a smile.
.
He is walking her home after dinner again, sober this time, when he says, suddenly, “Why did you and Suho break up?”
Jugyeong makes a sound in response, considering. “Why do you want to know?” she asks, eventually.
“I don’t,” he says, coughing, and then when this response seems too absurdly untrue, “I was just curious.”
“Well,” Jugyeong says. “He wanted to go to the States for school. And I wanted to stay here.”
“And that’s it?”
“No,” Jugyeong says, because it’s not. It was far more complicated than that. She’s never tried to tell anyone before, but if there was anyone that she could explain it to, it’s Seojun. And she tries to think of how to put it to words: “I don’t know if you know, but I was really badly bullied back at my old school.”
Seojun makes a sound, but Jugyeong’s not sure she can keep talking if she looks at him, so she doesn’t, just keeps her gaze on the landscape. “And when I came to Saebom and people seemed to like me, I was so frightened that they would find out that I was a fraud. And that they would all leave. But Suho,” she released her breath. “He didn’t care about that. He just thought well she likes comics, too. Or I don’t know, l like that she’s so ridiculous. And he was popular, but he was alone too, you know? He felt just as alone as I did. We needed each other.” She smiles. “And he was the first person to tell me I was pretty that I believed, you know?”
“I’m sorry,” Seojun says, finally. The streets had passed as they walked. “That people treated you like that back then.”
Jugyeong looks over at him in surprise, and she finds that his face is both strange and deeply familiar. He’s looked at her like this before, she thinks. “It feels like a long time ago now,” she says.
They walk a ways further, and then she says what she’d meant to say all along, “You don’t forget your first love,” she says, “But you don’t always end up with them either.”
.
He goes on tour and it’s not as bad as she’d thought it would be. He calls her most nights. Everyone else in the house goes to bed early, and Jugyeong sometimes goes out and sits on the patio and looks up at the stars as he talks. “Are you tired?” he’ll say when she’s been quiet for too long. The concern in his voice will always touch her, and even if she is, she’ll say, “No,” and he’ll start talking again, and she will hug her legs to her chest, and think this is almost as nice as being with him, the knowing that he wished they were together, too.
.
Six months after the runway show, they find themselves working together again, a photoshoot this time. She finds him in a crowd of fawning costume assistants, and smiles over at him, overlarge. He’s thinking of getting into acting, and he’s cut his hair short for a role, and it makes him seem unfamiliar. When he comes up to her, she reaches up, and he bends down so she can smooth a hand over the shaved hair. “Am I a dog?” he asks her.
She barks at him, and he laughs. “Make me pretty,” he says, smiling at her as he takes a seat in her chair.
She smiles back, smoothing a hand down his face. She’d meant it to be joking, but it comes across as too intimate instead, and she snatches the hand back, heading over to the mirror, flushing, though he hadn’t seemed to mind. Kim Soo had come along as well to assist, and she gives Jugyeong a look. “Are you really not dating him?” she asks, as if the possibility of them not dating is an absurd one.
“We’re just friends,” Jugyeong shoots back automatically. She’s said the same thing hundreds of times over the years. Even when she was dating Suho and the three of them went out together, people still assumed it was her and Seojun that were dating. But it’s the first time she’s said it, and it’s rang false, like she wishes it weren’t true.
She catches Seojun’s gaze in the mirror, and he makes a mock-frowny face at her, and then shrugs, as if to ask, you good?
It is both startling and ridiculous to realize she had been moping about the concept of not dating him several feet from him, and she nods emphatically to make up for it, heading back to him, and brandishing her brush with a zeal she does not feel. “I’m going to make you so dazzling no one will be able to resist you.”
“Watch out,” he says, eyes sparkling, and Jugyeong feels that thing again, a kind of pained happiness, like she can’t stop, “I wouldn’t want to dazzle you.”
.
Jugyeong is waiting outside his studio building for Seojun to be done with rehearsal, tapping through a game on her phone, when a group of girls pass by, staring up at the building and giggling, as if even just the sight of it were enchanting. “Han Seojun is signed with them, you know,” the one on the right says. She says it with a kind of proprietariness that has Jugyeong’s hackles rising, and she glares over at the both of them. As if they have any claim on him. But soon they’ve passed on, leaving Jugyeong standing there alone.
She’s still frowning when Seojun exits the building. His manager shoots her a look as if to say behave , which she doesn’t understand at all, but lets him leave with her, and they start down the street together. She loves being his friend, Jugyeong reminds herself. In some ways he was her first real friend. Even more so than Sujin and Soo-ah. She doesn’t know why all of a sudden the designation grates. All these years, she had caught sight of him on billboards and in magazine spreads, in ads on tv and in tagged instagram posts, and she hadn’t thought anything of it. And now, even his fans annoy her. She tries to imagine what he would say to such a strain of thought, and is struck by such an intense mortification that she can hardly bear it.
“What’s got you all pissy?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says hastily, and he laughs at her expression.
“It must be something very embarrassing,” he says. “Go on. Tell me then.”
“No,” she says, and then when his expression grows even more intrigued. “I just got my period,” she says, lamely. “It’s nothing important.”
“Ah,” he says, shortly. “I know where to go then.”
He takes her to a corner store, and buys her the most ridiculously sugary ice cream she could possibly imagine, and then watches as she eats the entire thing. “It’s Gowoon’s favorite,” he says, smiling, and Jugyeong thinks, I’m so screwed, I’m so screwed, I’m so screwed, on repeat.
She goes home and throws herself down onto her bed, and cries. And then thinks it would have been better if she really had gotten her period, because there is no one to blame this melodrama on but herself.
.
Jugyeong is at Seojun’s apartment cooking dinner when her phone rings. It’s sitting on the counter while she is stirring at the stove. Seojun is fresh from the shower, and he keeps ruffling his hair, slightly longer now that the role is over, but still disconcertingly short, and it’s distracting Jugyeong. He smells like apple shampoo and soap, and she’s had to remind herself not to think about what he smells like on repeat for the last thirty minutes.
“Get it, would you?” she says. “My hands are full.”
He looks down at her phone, and then frowns. “It’s Suho,” he says.
Jugyeong pauses, unsure what to do in this scenario. She hasn’t actually talked to Suho since he last came back to Seoul over two years ago now. They had gotten tea and then walked around the neighborhood afterwards. The silence had felt heavy between them, and when he had left, they had hugged and Jugyeong had wished him well, and it had felt final in a way that was satisfying. Tied up. She doesn’t know if Seojun still talks to him. She hasn’t asked. And now, she dithers, before she sighs and says, “Don’t burn it,” picking the phone up and handing him the spoon as she walks a bit away into his living room.
“Hello?” she asks.
It is silent for a minute on the other line, and Jugyeong repeats the question. “Hi,” Suho says, finally. “I’m in Seoul for the weekend.”
She wonders what the proper response for this is, and just settles on, “Oh?”
“Would you like to meet?” he asks, and there’s laughter in his voice. It’s a familiar tone. Jugyeong relaxes upon hearing it, and then she looks up and makes eye contact with Seojun in the kitchen. He looks away when he sees she’s looking, fiddling with the pan.
“What are you doing now?” she asks.
.
Suho looks different, Jugyeong thinks. But then so does she. So does Seojun. None of them are eighteen any more. For some reason, this strikes her as funny and she begins to giggle. The two men turn and look at her.
“Something funny?” Seojun says, archily.
Dinner had been awkward, but afterwards, they had brought out the alcohol, and Suho had started talking about a song he was writing that he thought Seojun would be good for, playing bits of it on the guitar while Seojun sang, first in mocking tones and then genuine ones, and Jugyeong had sat on the chair in the corner and watched them, apart, but still included, and thought again, as she’d thought so often that year she and Suho had dated, that she was glad that they had come back together, that whatever had been between them had healed. They deserved to have each other in their lives.
“I was just thinking that we’re not kids anymore,” she says now.
“You sure?” Seojun says, and pokes her, and she yelps and pokes him back.
Suho watches the exchange, looking between the two of them. “Are you dating now?” he asks in that calm way of his.
Seojun stiffens, removing his hands from her, as if he’d been struck, “Why do you ask?”
“No,” Jugyeon says right on his tail, fluttering her hands. “We’re just friends.”
“Ah okay,” Suho says. Jugyeong wonders if that means he still has feelings for her, or if he doesn’t care what they do any more. He had been so jealous of Seojun before, and she’d never understood why. But she does now.
But just because she wishes there were something there, doesn’t mean that there is. In a way nothing has changed since they were young. Everyone thinks it, but there’s still nothing between them.
.
Seojun has a morning rehearsal, and he goes to bed early, looking strangely glum. It’s Suho who offers to walk Jugyeong home. The alcohol has loosened the conversation between them, and they talk easily together as they walk. He has a fiance back in the States, a Korean-American girl, and he likes living in Los Angeles, though he misses Seoul sometimes. He enjoys writing songs but he’s thinking about trying producing. Jugyeong sighs, listening to him talk.
“Am I boring you?” he asks.
“No,” she says. But her gaze has gone back down the road as if she can still see Seojun’s apartment and him within it though it’s blocks and blocks away now.
“Are you really not dating?” he asks, seemingly following her train of thought. There is a genuine confusion in his tone that baffles Jugyeong.
“We’re not,” Jugyeong says, but it comes out much more wistful than she’d intended. But then Suho’s not one to pick up on stuff like that. He just hums, and Jugyeong sighs again. She really is quite pathetic, she thinks. Worthy of all sorts of mockery. And yet….
And yet she can’t seem to stop.
.
Several weeks later, she runs into Gowoon at Prince Comics. She graduated from university and moved back to Seoul a couple of months ago and yet Jugyeong still hasn’t seen her yet. They’d kept missing each other. They embrace, and then spend almost thirty minutes talking about the latest novel releases, and it’s only when Jugyeong is pausing for breath, that Gowoon says, “So I heard you and my brother have been seeing each other?”
“What?” Jugeyong says, aghast, clutching at her chest. “Where did you hear that? Did he say that? What did he say?”
Gowoon huffs a laugh, looking rueful, and then pumps the air. “I totally called it,” she says. “You like him. I mean, poor taste, ew, but you like him.”
“Of course I like Han Seojun,” Jugyeong says, defensively, folding her arms in front of him. “We’re friends.”
“You like like him though,” Gowoon says, leaning forwards, and smiling in Jugyeong’s face.
“What about my brother?” Jugyeong counters. “You commented on his instagram photo the other day. He talked about it for three days.”
Gowoon flushes. “He’s annoying,” she says.
Jugyeong adjusts the stack of books in front of her, and when Jugeyong looks up at Gowoon again, she is watching Jugeyong closely, something akin to pity in her gaze. She is pitiful, Jugyeong thinks, miserably. “You should tell him,” she says. But Jugyeong couldn’t. She has lived both a life with Seojun in it and one without, and she’d never want to do anything to risk him leaving. Not again. She can just suck it up. She can.
.
Two months later she gets an invitation to Suho’s wedding. The wedding is in Los Angeles and at first Jugyeong thinks she just won’t go, but then she worries that if she doesn’t go, it will seem like she’s not happy for them. When she is. She looked the fiance, Amanda, up on facebook, and she’d looked sunny and happy standing arm and arm with Suho. They’d been wearing matching jackets and grinning stupidly. It had been nice to see Suho like that, stupidly happy. And then Jugyeong thinks, well if she is going to go, to prove she’s happy for them at the very least, she’s relatively certain that Seojun will be going as well. And then she thinks, well if they are both attending, going as far as leaving the country to attend even, they might as well just go together. But if that were the case, she would have to ask him to go with her, which would involve confessing, which she has no intention of doing.
“I’ll just not go,” she says, miserably. She’s sitting on the floor of her sister’s living room. A bottle is between her legs and the room is lightly spinning. She still feels weird about coming over to their house sometimes since Joon-wo was her teacher, but admittedly he’s been her sister’s husband much longer than he was her teacher at this point, and well, it’s better than drinking at home.
“Don’t be stupid,” Unni says, brandishing the wooden spoon she’s holding to mix the greens. Jugeong thinks it’s rather indecent of her to be cooking while Jugueong suffers alone, but her sister is seven months pregnant now and using her belly as a resting board so perhaps it can be forgiven. “You just need to man up and tell him.”
“I can’t do that!” Jugyeong cries. “He’ll hate me.”
“He won’t hate you. He’ll respect you for owning your feelings.” She nudges Joon-wo. “Right?” she prompts .
He looks up at her, wide-eyed, and then back at Jugyeong. “Yes,” he says.
Jugeyong shakes her head, not convinced. “You are not going to that wedding alone, Jugeyong,” Unni says, emphatically, and Jugeyong finds herself nodding along. Her sister has a way of sounding convincing like that. Like it was just a fact. Jugyeong was not going to the wedding alone. The thought causes a thrill to go through her.
.
Still, Jugyeong puts off doing it for weeks. She’s positive that he’s received an invitation, because she saw the pale green envelope sitting in his mail almost a month ago now, but neither of them have brought it up. In fact, they’ve hardly talked about Suho at all since the night he asked her why they’d broken it off. But it’s at the point where she’s having to buy her plane ticket soon, and she really doesn’t want to fly alone for the first time, and the fear of that makes it somewhat easier to say, “Are you bringing a date?”
Seojun had been laying out snacks for movie night, and he jerks, and then turns to look at her. “Huh?” he asks.
Jugyeong bites her lip, looking at him. “To Lee Suho’s wedding.”
Seojun looks torn, and he doesn’t immediately answer. Probably, Jugyeong thinks, because he thinks it would be awkward to tell her while she’s there at his place that he is. Because he knows that Jugyeong will be at her ex’s wedding alone, following after him and his glamorous date, and he feels pity for her. Of course he does. “It’s alright if you do!” Jugyeong says. “You should!”
“I should,” Seojun says, slowly, and then he curses, and stands up, walking into the kitchen. Jugeyong follows after him.
It’s not fair of her to be upset, she reminds herself, although she can admit to herself that she is upset. The more she thinks about the idea of Seojun bringing a date, the more upset she gets. Already, she can feel the conversation spiralling out of her control. “If you want to,” she says, miserably.
Seojun turns to look at her, and she has the sense, all of a sudden that he’s angry. “Okay,” he says.
Jugyeong blinks back at him. “Okay what?”
“Okay I’ll bring a date." He turns towards his phone as if he’s going to call one up right now, and Jugyeong lunges for it without thinking. He looks at her in astonishment, and she snatches the hand back, mortified, clutching the offending article to her chest.
“Sorry,” she whispers, and then before she can stop herself, she’s begun crying.
It’s right for him to bring a date, she reminds herself. In fact, in the whole time they’ve been friends again she hasn’t known him to date anyone, though he’s always being asked, and before, she’d used to read articles about all the various people he was linked to, and he’s young and handsome and charming, and he should date people. Just because he doesn’t want to date Jugyeong, doesn’t mean he should be alone.
“Why are you crying?” Seojun looks baffled, and also concerned, as if he’s not sure whether he should comfort her or not. And she knows that she should stop, because she’s perilously close to doing something that she can’t come back from, but Jugyeong has started in earnest now, and she’s always been a bit of a sloppy, uncontrollable crier. Her mascara is streaking down her face, and her breath is coming in awkward hiccups, as she looks back at him. And he has the nerve to still look handsome, even now. “Is it Suho? Is it because he’s getting married? I mean I know—”
“I like you!” Jugyeong wails, crying harder, and Sujoen pauses, looking as if she’s struck him with an iron.
“What?” he says, and Jugyeong buries her face in her hands. She’s actually so embarrassed she thinks she might die.
“Are you crying because you like me?” she hears him saying as if from a distance away. He sounds vaguely distressed. She’s totally and completely ruining their friendship. Jugyeong cries harder. “You hate me!” she cries. He pulls at her arm to get her to come out from her curled position, but Jugyeong is resolute. She’ll die in here if she has to, he’s not looking at her puffy, awful, friendship destroying face. Ever again. “We used to be friends, good friends, but now you hate me.”
“Aish, let go,” he says, tugging again at her arm, and Jugyeong pulls it in harder, murmuring, “You let go,” but somehow she’s not at all prepared for when he actually does, and her elbow comes up, and whacks him hard across the face. She hears a crack, and when she lowers her hands in horror to look at him, she sees him clutching his nose, blood leaking between his fingers. She gasps.
“What?” he says, in shock, looking down at the blood on his hand.
Jugyeong scrambles forward, looking for a towel and then dousing it in hot water and coming back and pressing it to his face. His expression is petulant. “Is this how you confess?” he asks.
“I wasn’t confessing,” she snaps, though admittedly, she was.
He gives her a look. The look is equal parts sceptical and fond. It is a look, that Jugyeong is used to, though normally with a bit less fondness. She’s always been an abysmal liar.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be sorry,” he says. He bats at her hand holding the towel and she removes it. His nose has stopped gushing blood, but the heat of the towel has given him a pink cheeked look, and Jugyeong has the thought all of a sudden that he looks bare-faced, too.
He leans towards her, and Jugyeong jerks back, and Seojun releases his breath through his teeth. “What are you doing?” she asks, putting a hand between them, as if to ward him off.
“I’m going to kiss you.”
“I thought you just wanted to be friends,” Jugyeong says, not lowering her hand. This seems an important point. She’d been sure that was what he had wanted. She’d poured over their conversations time and time again, and always came to the same conclusions.
Seojun pushes at her hand, and she slowly lowers it, letting him take her face in his palms. His hands are large enough to completely cover her overwarm cheeks. His face is very close to hers, his eyes dark and serious on her face. “Im Jugyeong,” he says, slowly, as if he doesn’t want her to misunderstand. “I have never wanted to just be friends with you.”
And then he does kiss her. His mouth is warm, and Jugyeong is frozen for a moment, still not processing what that means, because really they’ve been friends now for a year and before that a full year back in high school, and she’s going to have to do an in depth analysis with someone, someone who is neither Gowoon, Kim Soo or Unni who would all be far too triumphant, about what all of this means, and what the signs were that she had missed, but she doesn’t know why she’s thinking this much when she could be kissing him. So she does. She kisses him back.
And Jugyeong can feel something inside her unfurling, like some tiny part of herself that has been tensed for months, for years maybe, is relaxing. He likes her. Seojun likes her. He doesn’t want to be her friend. He’s here, pressing up against her, making a pleased sound as she leans forward to kiss him more fully. She can feel his smile.
And she thinks, maybe, that she could do this for a very long time, press her smile against his.
But when her nose brushes his, Seojun shudders and Jugyong pulls back, raising a hand to her mouth, horrified. “Did I hurt you?” she asks, her hands fluttering over his shoulders “I can stop.”
“Im Jugyeong,” he says again. He says it like he’s pleading with her. His eyes are half-lidded now, and he is not at all looking at her like he hates her or thinks she’s pathetic or minds at all that she definitely still has mascara streaked down her cheeks. “I think we’ve wasted enough time.”