I wanted coffee.

And a nap.

Yeah, that would have been nice.

It was summer.  I could have been at home, sitting on my couch, blinds drawn, alone except for a family-sized bag of Doritos and my Netflix account.

Could have.  Instead, I had been forced to get up at 7 A.M and drive for an hour so I could attend the mandatory summer training sessions the school district was holding for us.  My alarm hadn’t gone off on time, my car had run out of gas, and I had run out the door without eating breakfast.

Screw my life.

My students were luckier than I was.  Sure, they always stayed up until the early morning hours studying for their exams and whatnot, but at least they had summers off, right?  Teachers on the other hand, didn’t.  We were required to go to summer training sessions that lasted for six hours a day, every weekday for an entire month.

I was tired and hungry and there was still about an hour until lunch break.  My stomach grumbled and I tried my best not to slump forward on my desk.  There were about twenty teachers in the small classroom with me, learning how to operate chromebooks.  What was the point?  Sure, maybe I wasn’t exactly as young as I used to be, but I wasn’t that technology impaired.

As the instructor explained how to operate the chromebooks, one of the teachers, a bald man who looked like he was in his fifties, raised his hand as if he were a student again.

“Excuse me?  Could you please summarize what we just learned so that I can be sure that I got everything right?”

I rolled my eyes and scoffed inwardly.  Honestly?

I know I always encouraged my students and everyone else I knew to ask questions if they were ever confused, but this was too much, even for me.  All the instructor had talked about during the past five minutes was how to turn the chromebooks on and off.  Was it really that difficult to comprehend?

The instructor began to drone on again and I slipped my hand beneath my glasses, rubbing my eyes.  I suppressed a yawn, but then I suddenly heard a muffled laugh to my right.

It was one of the younger teachers.  His flyaway wavy brown hair was swept up away from his face.  He had intelligent brown eyes, partially veiled by black framed glasses.  Even though his face remained expressionless so that the instructor couldn’t tell what he was doing, his eyes were laughing.  As I watched, the corners of his mouth slowly turned up in a wry smile and we made eye contact for a fraction of a second.

I was frozen for a brief moment.  My headache dissipated, my hunger pangs vanished, and I secretly snuck another glance at him out of the corner of my eye.

He was hot.  Really hot.

He was on his phone instead of listening to the instructor, which was exactly what I would have been doing if I hadn’t forgotten to charge my phone the previous night.  As the instructor rambled about how important it was that the chromebooks be plugged in after the last period of the day, I watched as he leaned back in his seat and half-smiled at something on his phone.  He sat up straighter in his chair and hid the phone underneath his desk, his fingers flying over the keypad as he made eye contact with the instructor, feigning attentiveness.  A small smile spread across his face as he glanced down at the screen again.

Damn, he had a really pretty smile.

“A-HEM,”  I suddenly heard.  “Earth calling the man in the plaid shirt… earth calling the man in the plaid shirt…”

My eyes tore away from him and landed on my plaid shirt, then on the instructor, who was towering in front of my desk.  His eyebrows were raised and his facial expression was sour.

“Yeah?”  I asked in the steadiest voice I could manage.  “I’m sorry, what was the question?”

“I said, do you have any questions about the chromebooks?  You looked like you were spacing out on us.”

I felt an instant surge of annoyance towards the man next to me for distracting me.  To my irritation, his phone was nowhere to be seen and he seemed alert and observant.

“No.  I don’t have a question.  Everything makes sense to me,” I said, trying not to grimace under the instructor’s sharp gaze.

The instructor raised his eyebrows again but shuffled back to the front of the room.  I fumed quietly in my seat and shifted my eyes to the right.

He was on his phone again.  I leaned over slightly, watching him taking selfies and putting them on Snapchat.  I scoffed under my breath and rolled my eyes at his teenager-like antics.

I was quiet enough so that the instructor wouldn’t hear me, but unfortunately, not quiet enough so that the man wouldn’t hear.  His eyes slid away from the screen and landed on mine.  We stared at each other for a few seconds.  Then he flashed a smile at me and went back to snapchatting.  Not knowing what to do, I just looked away and tried to appear interested in the lesson so the instructor wouldn’t single me out again.

But goddamn, he was cute when he smiled.

Lunch came at last.  Although the food they provided wasn’t exactly appetizing, I was too hungry to care.  I heaped my paper plate with banana bread and egg rolls and sat down in a table in the corner of the main meeting room with my laptop.  There was no coffee, but the food would make do for now.

I munched on an egg roll as I randomly scrolled through Reddit, skimming over meaningless sports articles so that the other teachers would think I was busy and wouldn’t approach me.  Right now, I wasn’t in the mood to do anything except eat and sleep, and seeing as I couldn’t exactly sleep at the moment, I wanted to enjoy-- for lack of a better word-- my meal in silence.  My plate of food was gone in minutes, and I got back up to get more.  I figured it was better to sit through the training session on a full stomach rather than a half-empty one, even if the food wasn’t great.  When I returned, however, the seat across from me was occupied by the same man who had landed me in trouble earlier in the day.

“Hey,” he smiled, his entire face brightening up.  “Do you mind if I sit here with you?”

I raised my eyebrows.  I couldn’t exactly say no.  I mean, he was already sitting there and I couldn’t just tell him to get up and sit somewhere else.

“Nah, it’s fine,” I said at last, plopping a plate of sandwiches next to my laptop.  He continued to eat his potato salad and I continued to attempt to ignore him.  But I could feel his eyes drilling into me.  I peeked up at him after a minute and sure enough, there he was, staring at me as if there was something about me that he found amusing.  His lips turned up at the corners as I looked back at him.

God, he really was handsome.

I nearly face-palmed as I realized what I was thinking, mentally scolded myself as I bit almost aggressively into my sandwich.  He laughed gently, as if he could read my thoughts.

“Hey, have we met before?”  He suddenly asked me, a glint in his eyes.

It took me several seconds to respond because I was too busy staring.  Then I realized he was waiting for an answer and I was just sitting there, gawking like the idiot half my students thought I was.

“No, I don’t think I know you,” I said slowly.  He didn’t look the slightest bit familiar to me.  “Why do you ask?”

“You keep staring.  Either I have something stuck in my teeth or I look familiar and you’re trying to figure out who I am..  So which one is it?”

“Oh, no,” I said quickly, trying to keep my face from turning red.  “It’s neither of them.”

He shrugged.

“Alright then.  Anyways, my name’s Hyukjae.  Lee Hyukjae.  Does that ring a bell?”

I shook my head no.  Hyukjae was a really pretty name though, and I found myself grinning as I said it over and over in my head.

“I’m Donghae,” I said nervously.  “Lee Donghae.”  He smiled at me and his eyes crinkled up at the corners.  He tucked a strand of his short, wavy hair behind his ear and took another bite of his potato salad.

“That’s a nice name,” he remarked.

“Thanks, my parents gave it to me.”

The words were already out of my mouth before I realized how stupid they sounded.

“Uh, Hyukjae’s a really nice name too,” I said, frantically trying to make up for what I had said earlier.  He just smiled, and without even realizing it, I smiled back.

“I like your shirt.  Plaid looks nice on you.”  His eyes sparkled again.

My heart was kind of racing by now.  Holy granola bars.  Did he actually just say he liked plaid?

“Thanks!  My plaid shirt likes you too!” I replied before my brain had finished processing my words.

Crap.

Crap.

Holy crap.

That was a cringeworthy response, to say the very least.  It didn’t make any sense.  What the hell was I thinking?  My cheeks scorched crimson with embarrassment and at that moment, I wanted nothing more than for my sandwich to grow to fifty times its size and swallow me whole.  Anything so I wouldn’t have to face him.

Hyukjae burst out laughing, but to my utter astonishment, it wasn’t a mean laugh.  It was one of pure amusement, and I found myself laughing with him.  His laugh was the kind that made others want to laugh with him too.  Once he had calmed himself down enough so that he could speak, he leaned back in his seat.

“Anyways, I teach literature at Keimyung University.”

“Really?  What a coincidence, so do I!  Well, I mean, I teach literature here at Yeungnam University.”

The rest of our lunch was filled with conversations about school, favorite novels, favorite authors, even lesson plans for the upcoming school year.  To my delight, Hyukjae seemed genuinely interested in literature, just like I was.

We were so different, but we had so much in common.

The rest of the day flew past.  Maybe it was because I knew that today’s training session was more than half over.  Or maybe it was because Hyukjae and I spent the entire time passing notes to each other whenever the instructor wasn’t looking.  I no longer felt like I was going to fall out of my tiny desk out of boredom.  Well, that wasn’t exactly it.  The truth was, I still felt like I was going to fall.

To fall in love.  If I hadn’t done so already.

“Goddamnit, Donghae.  You sound like a smitten fool.”

I was back in my Seoul apartment, on the couch with a family-sized bag of Doritos and my Netflix account.  But I repeatedly found myself drifting further and further away from the movie and more and more towards the thought of Hyukjae’s smile.  Hyukjae’s laugh.  Hyukjae's eyes and the way they looked when he was talking about the books he was passionate about.

As I absentmindedly shoved Dorito after Dorito into my mouth, an idea popped into my head, surfacing above the many other Hyukjae-related thoughts.  Before I could convince myself otherwise, I grabbed my laptop and went to Keimyung University’s website.  After a minute of scrolling and searching, I spotted his name, my heart rate speeding up at the sight of it.  Copying the link to his school email, I logged into my own email and pasted his email into the recipients box.  My fingers hovered over the keyboard and I hesitated for a moment.

“Lee Donghae, you really are a smitten fool.  He’s going to think you’re an insane stalker or something,” I muttered out loud.  Nevertheless, I forced myself to click on the subject box and follow through with my decision.  I began to type carefully, pondering over every word to make sure the email sounded right.

I would love it if we could meet up sometime over the summer.