Chapter Text
The cafeteria was loud in the way it always was during lunch — trays clattering, conversations overlapping, someone across the room laughing too hard at something that probably wasn't even funny. Kim Dohoon barely registered any of it. He was staring at the center of his tray, moving a piece of rice around with his chopsticks like it had personally offended him.
"So," Han Jihoon said, sliding into the seat across from him with the kind of easy confidence that Dohoon had always found both admirable and mildly irritating. "Hanjin said yes."
Dohoon looked up. "Woah?"
"Woah? Yes." Jihoon was trying to play it cool, but the corner of his mouth kept twitching upward. He looked disgustingly happy.
"Good for you, you have been telling me how cute he is," Dohoon said, and went back to his rice.
Lee Kyungmin dropped into the seat beside Jihoon a second later, unwrapping a triangle of kimbap with the focused energy of someone who had important news to deliver. "Did he tell you? About Hanjin?"
"Yup."
"And I'm going with Shinyu," Kyungmin added, completely unnecessarily, since Dohoon had already heard about Shinyu approximately forty-two times in the past week.
"I know. Congrats. Both of you. Truly. Very happy." Dohoon's voice was flat as pavement.
Jihoon tilted his head, studying him. "You still haven't found anyone."
It wasn't a question.
"Brilliant observation," Dohoon said. "Have you considered a career in detective work?"
"Dohoon-ah. Prom is in one month."
"I'm aware."
"One month," Kyungmin repeated, as though Dohoon hadn't heard him the first time. "Thirty days. And everyone in our year has basically already paired up. You know that, right?"
"I'll figure it out," he said.
Jihoon and Kyungmin exchanged a look. The kind of look that had been refined over years of friendship — wordless, efficient, and deeply annoying to be on the receiving end of.
"What," Dohoon said.
"Nothing," Jihoon said.
“You're doing the look."
"We're not doing a look."
"You're literally—" Dohoon pointed between them. "You're doing it right now."
Kyungmin set down his kimbap and folded his hands on the table in a way that felt uncomfortably formal. "Dohoon. How many people asked you to prom this year?"
A pause. "That's not relevant."
"How many."
"...Several."
"Seven," Jihoon said pleasantly. "Seven people asked you. I counted."
"I didn't ask you to count—"
"Kim Gyuvin. Park Gunwook. Park Seeun—"
"I remember, thank you—"
"Myung Jaehyun, Park Sungho, Han Dongmin, Kim Donghyun." Jihoon finished the list with the serenity of a man who had prepared for this conversation. "Seven people. And you said no to all of them."
Dohoon picked his chopsticks back up. "They weren't right."
"Weren't right," Kyungmin echoed, in a tone that suggested he found this genuinely delusional.
“Dongmin alone is—”
“Not right,” Dohoon said firmly.
“—objectively gorgeous—”
“Not right.”
Kyungmin threw his hands up. “So now it’s a month before prom, every single person in our year is already matched up, and Kim Dohoon, who rejected seven people because none of them were right, is sitting here moving rice around his tray and saying he’ll figure it out.”
Dohoon opened his mouth.
“You’re a disaster,” Kyungmin said, not unkindly.
Dohoon closed his mouth.
The worst part — the part he would never, under any circumstances, say out loud — was that Kyungmin wasn’t wrong. He had said no. To all of them. And he had known, even at the time, that each no was closing a door a little more firmly. He’d told himself it was fine. That he had standards. That showing up alone was better than showing up with the wrong person.
He still believed that. Mostly. Except now it was thirty days out and the hallways felt different, charged with the specific electricity of everyone having sorted themselves into pairs, and Dohoon walked through all of it completely, conspicuously alone.
“So,” Kyungmin said, leaning back in his chair with the air of someone about to say something terrible. “I have an idea.”
“I don’t want your idea,” Dohoon said immediately.
“You haven’t heard it yet.”
“I’ve known you for six years. I don’t need to hear it.”
Jihoon, to his credit, looked slightly sympathetic. Slightly. “Just listen to him.”
Dohoon exhaled through his nose. “Fine. What.”
Kyungmin smiled. It was not a reassuring smile. “Ask Choi Youngjae.”
The cafeteria noise continued around them, oblivious. Someone knocked over a water bottle three tables down. A group by the windows burst into laughter.
Dohoon stared at Kyungmin.
“…Choi Youngjae,” he said finally.
“Class 12A. Sits in the corner of the library during lunch every day. Has headphones in approximately a hundred percent of the time—”
“I know who Youngjae is.”
“Then you know he’s technically available,” Kyungmin said. “Because he looked at the prom sign-up sheet like it was written in a language he didn’t speak and walked away.
The guy clearly has zero interest in going. So he’s probably the only person in this entire school who hasn’t paired up.”
Dohoon was quiet for a moment. Then: “No.”
“Why not?”
He reached for his drink. “He’s not my type.”
Kyungmin squinted at him. “Your type. What does that even mean, your type? It's prom. You're not marrying him."
"I just..." Dohoon made a vague gesture. "He's — look, it's not going to work. He's going to say no anyway."
"Exactly!" Kyungmin pointed at him. "That's exactly why it's perfect. He'll say no, you'll have technically tried, and then you can come to prom alone and pretend it was a choice."
"That's the plan you're pitching me."
"It was either that or I was going to suggest Han Dongmin again, so—"
"Don't."
Jihoon had been quiet through most of this, turning his water bottle in slow circles on the table. Now he looked up. "I've talked to Youngjae before," he said. "Earlier this year, when we were grouped together for the literature project."
Dohoon glanced at him. "And?"
"He's not what you think." Jihoon shrugged. "He's kind of quiet, but not in a bad way. He's actually pretty easy to talk to once he takes the headphones out." A small pause. "You should just go for it, honestly. What's the worst that happens? He says no?"
"He's going to say no," Dohoon said.
"Maybe." Jihoon didn't look particularly convinced of that. "Maybe not."
Kyungmin was grinning now, the kind of grin that preceded something Dohoon was already regretting. He reached across the table and held out his hand. "Bet."
Jihoon looked at the hand. Then, slowly, he smiled and reached over to shake it. "Bet."
"What are you—" Dohoon looked between them. "What are you betting on?"
"I'm betting," Kyungmin said cheerfully, "that you won't go to prom with Youngjae. Because you're going to be too proud to actually ask, or Youngjae's going to say no within ten seconds and you'll give up. Either way." He shrugged. "You'll end up going alone or skipping altogether."
Jihoon shook his hand once, firm. "And I'm betting he goes with Youngjae."
They both turned to look at Dohoon.
Dohoon looked at Jihoon. Looked at Kyungmin. Looked at the hand they'd just shaken.
Something cold and prickly moved through his chest. He recognized it — had felt it enough times on the court, in competitions, in every situation where someone had decided, in front of him, that he wouldn't.
He hated that feeling.
He picked up his chopsticks again. "You're both going to lose money."
Kyungmin grinned wider. "Sure."
Dohoon pointed a chopstick at him. "Don't smile like that."
"I'm just sitting here."
"You're smiling like that."
Jihoon was also smiling, quieter and more infuriating. "So you'll ask him?"
"I didn't say that."
"You also didn't say you wouldn't."
Dohoon ate his rice. Around him, the cafeteria hummed on, indifferent. Thirty days. One school full of already-paired people. One Choi Youngjae who sat in the library corner with his headphones in and had looked at the prom sign-up sheet like it was a foreign document.
He's going to say no, Dohoon thought again.
But Kyungmin's grin was still there at the edge of his vision, certain and smug, and Jihoon's quiet bet was already sitting in Dohoon's chest like a small, irritating splinter.
He hated being told he wouldn't.
— ✦ —
He found himself walking past the library on Tuesday.
Just to see, he told himself. Just to know what he was dealing with. It wasn’t a decision yet. He hadn’t decided anything.
Through the library’s glass panel, the reading corner was visible — two bean bags and a low shelf of paperbacks that nobody ever touched. And there, exactly as Kyungmin had described, was a figure curled into the far bean bag. Dark brown hair. Oversized sweater. Headphones. A book held open in one hand, and the expression on his face was the specific, private kind that people only wore when they thought nobody was watching.
Like whatever was on those pages actually mattered.
Dohoon stood in the hallway for three seconds longer than he’d meant to.
Then he kept walking.
Thirty days, he thought.
He had time to figure out how to start. (He didn’t even think of studying for exams harder than this)