☼ ☼ ☼

“I asked Seulgi out yesterday.”

Mingyu takes in a deep breath, fingers pausing momentarily in the turning of the book’s pages before he’s looking down at the older boy sitting beside him. Wonwoo glances up at Mingyu to meet his gaze, and there’s an expectant smile on his lips.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Wonwoo pouts, tapping his pencil against the tip of his nose. “It took a lot of courage to ask her out, you know.”

Mingyu arches an eyebrow, and regards Wonwoo with an innocent blink. “Gosh, how could I have been so insensitive? Here’s a medal for finally growing the balls to confe—”

Wonwoo laughs and smacks Mingyu lightly on his thigh, eyes quickly disappearing into two smiling crescents. His ebony hair is swept up in a disarray by the young winter wind, and the longer strands are falling into his eyes. Mingyu resists the urge to chide Wonwoo and brush his fringe back. There's no reason for him to do so. They're not young, naive children any longer.

Wonwoo’s scarf is slipping off his shoulders, though, and exposing him to the growing chill, so Mingyu reaches forward to tie it more securely around Wonwoo's neck. Mingyu can allow himself this much.

The older boy scrunches up his nose and sneezes; Mingyu had wrapped the scarf a little too tightly around his neck and mouth, and the frayed ends were now tickling Wonwoo's nose. Mingyu laughs at Wonwoo’s reaction, and earns himself a half-hearted glare.

“No medals needed, but perhaps a pat on the back or two?” Wonwoo replies, looking back down at the sketchbook he has sprawled out on his lap. His voice is muffled by the soft wool.

Mingyu steals a quick glance at the pages. There’s a half-finished drawing of a girl on one of them, and Mingyu can just barely make out the gentle slope of Seulgi’s nose and the charming upslant of her slender eyes.

“You’ve liked her all the way through high school and university. Frankly, I think I have the right to be more exasperated than happy that you've only asked her out now, after we’ve all graduated,” Mingyu says.

Wonwoo smiles and shrugs his shoulders. He’s tracing the sketch lines of his drawing faintly with his fingers. Mingyu doesn’t think that Wonwoo is consciously doing so, judging by the far off gaze in his eyes and the way his lower lip is caught beneath his teeth.

“Life works out in the ways we don’t expect it to, Mingyu."

Wonwoo’s phone rings then, and Mingyu manages to catch a glimpse of the name flashing on the screen before Wonwoo is quickly putting it away. Mingyu turns to look at the view of the Hangang river in front of him, his lips once— they’re chapped and dry. Mingyu should probably invest in some lip balm.

“You should probably get going, no?” Mingyu says, closing his book with a quick snap. He focuses on the rhythmic rise and fall of the river in a bid to quell the sinking feeling in his stomach. “Wouldn’t want to be late for your date.”

“Nah, I want to stay out a little longer with you. We haven’t seen each other in more than a week,” Wonwoo says, frowning as he looks down at his watch. “She’s early, anyway.”