“What are you doing here?” Soul asked him with scornful expression. Chanyeol sighed at how difficult this girl was making his life out to be.

Just half and hour ago, his mother said, “You and Soul have to go to school together. It has not been long since she moved and you have to be a nice host, okay?” Chanyeol nodded to appease his mother but he was not that willing knowing how she might just be a block of ice and not human.

He smiled at the girl, “My mother said we should go to school together.”

“I don’t want to,” she replied bluntly, her expressions sombre.

Chanyeol took a deep breath, “Then you give me no choice…” He suddenly put his arm around her, looked back at his mother, who was looking out from the front garden of his house, which can be seen from hers, waved at his mother with a huge, forced grin and dragged her away.

“Get. Off. Me!” Soul struggled and tried to break free from his hold, which he resisted.

Once they were out of his mother’s sight, Chanyeol let her go. “Look. Your mother and my mother want us to be friends. Why don’t we play nice and pretend like we’re close friends, hmmm? Just two years of playing friends and we’ll be done with the act once we graduate and go off to different universities.” She lifted her eyes up and looked into his eyes, unflinching,

“Fine.” She replied shortly, again, before striding away from him.

~

“What does she have against you?” his close friend, Byun Baekhyun – the other resident prankster, flirt machine, and another soul blessed with a smooth voice to croon sweet tunes for the ladies. He is, in fact, very much similar to Chanyeol except that he is stellar at music rather than academics and also the fact that he’s much shorter than the giant.

Chanyeol shrugged as he shoveled his lunch down his mouth in the canteen. His eyes were on Soul, who was eating her lunch slowly, again, one mouthful after another as if she was meditating.

“She’s interesting, you know,” Baekhyun spoke carefully as he observed her, “she is so different from other girls. Look at her.”

Chanyeol looked at his friend incredulously, “Baekhyun-ah, do you possibly have a crush on her?”

His friend let out a shrill laugh in delight and amusement, “No. All I’m saying is that she is quite interesting. She doesn’t try to make friend. All she does is sit by herself and look at her lunch.” He nudged Chanyeol and his eyes looked around the hall, which Chanyeol followed. The latter was surprised to find out that most of the students were observing her while trying to be discreet about it. Soul didn’t care. All she cared about was her meal in front of her.

~

Two years later –

“Soul-ah,” Chanyeol spoke in curiosity as he looked at the girl who was eating her meal slowly in front of him. She lifted her eyelids to meet his curious gaze. “Why do you eat your meals like they are the only things that matter to you?”

She blinked, “Chanyeol, It’s how people should eat,” she answered like it was a general knowledge.

“You’re still so formal with me,” Chanyeol took a bite of the meal that he made that day, “come on. Loosen up a little. We’re roommates now.”

“We are roommates because we can’t escape being roommates, Chanyeol,” she replied coolly as she blew onto the pasta before taking a bite of it. “This tastes really good. I really like it,” she complimented with a beam.

“Of course. It is from Chef Yeol,” he gloated as he smirked and took a bite from his own fork. He studied her face for a reaction from his gloating but all that happened was a faint smile that flashed across her face.

Both of them ate the pasta quietly in the small dining space of the apartment they were sharing in Seoul. The apartment was small but cozy – two bedrooms with separate bathrooms, a small living room area attached to a dining area, which was followed by a similar sized kitchen and a laundry room. It was enough for two people to live in – maybe even a small family.

Chanyeol looked around the silent apartment and took in a deep breath. The place looked awfully unfamiliar and he was stuck with Soul, the one who is always quite cold towards him.

“Have you taken your meds?” Chanyeol asked. Soul looked up at him from across the dining table and shook her head.

His eyebrows rose ever so slightly as he was about to open his mouth, ready to scold her, she smiled, “I always take them after the meal, Chanyeol. Not before.”

~

Half of their penultimate year of high school went past them like a brisk autumn breeze. Chanyeol spent most of that time studying hard since he had known that the last two years of high school are important for their university admission reference letters from the teacher and their university entrance exam scores.

Chanyeol never really got why Soul was cold towards him until their results from the half-year exam came out.

“Park Chanyeol!” Baekhyun cried out in front of the exam sheet ranking board for the top 10 students in their year, “you bastard. How do you do it? You are in almost every club and you are also acing the exams.”

Chanyeol laughed shyly and ruffled his hair at the back of his head. There were people surrounding him, congratulating him. Through the bustling crowd that surrounded him, he saw a familiar face looking at him with intense eyes. It was Soul. She had unreadable expression but her eyes had a strong look to them as she looked at him and the board alternately. Chanyeol turned and looked at the board again.

1. Park Chan Yeol
2. Kang So Eul

“Park Chanyeol-ssi,” Soul spoke, an extremely rare occasion, on their way back home on one rainy day after school, “how do you do this?”

“Do what?”

“Always scoring the highest. You are always doing club work after school and yet you score higher than me.”

“Are you, perhaps, jealous of me scoring higher than you in almost every tests?” he looked to his side, where the girl was walking beside him.

Chanyeol let out a chuckle when the girl didn’t respond but hid her face by tilting the umbrella to cover her face. He may have found out the reason why Soul hardly ever spoke to him. She rarely socialized with other people at school, and usually kept everything to herself. Most of the time, she can be found reading or writing something related to their schoolwork. He discovered that Soul has a talent in languages and literature for she scored higher than him in all of the language subjects in pre-tests and end of semester tests. However, Chanyeol’s strength is in mathematics and science, which happened to be her weakness.

“Are you asking me to tutor you, Soul-ah?” Chanyeol joked, trying to sound homely and flirty, just like his usual self. She stiffened up and glanced at him sideways.

“No,” she mumbled, “I just want to know how you study.”

“Stop and do not move,” a stranger’s voice appeared from their back and all the hairs on Chanyeol skin fluttered in a wave of goose bumps throughout his spine. He cursed at himself and his hasty self for taking a shortcut through a suspicious looking alleyway on a rainy day like this, blaming his want to get back home as early as possible.

“Take out your wallets and all the valuables you have in your bag,” the instruction was cold and ruthless. Soul had started to reach for backpack to take out her wallet with one hand but Chanyeol did not move. “Listen to me or this dagger goes through you,” the voice continued.

“Chan- Chanyeol-ssi,” Soul’s voice was shaky. Chanyeol was about to reach for his wallet but he remembered how expensive it was. Most importantly, it was a present he got from his father as he came 1^st in the entire school. Then, he also remembered the expensive watch he was wearing. He cannot take bullying like this.

“Soul-ah, careful!” Chanyeol pushed Soul to the side, where she fell sideways on her leg in a sitting position; her umbrella was blown away by the impact. She let out a scream as she witnessed Chanyeol hurling at the armed robber.

Chanyeol was unnaturally tall for a high school student due to his fondness for athletic sports, which gave him an advantage towards the robber. He looks lean but well built, giving off an impression that he is scrawny, which he was not. He gave out a dramatic wail and kicked the ground, spinning mid-air, before landing his right leg on the jaw of the robber.

The opponent lost balance and fell onto the ground before getting up and charged towards Chanyeol. Soul let out a small shriek and pressed her back against the wall as the fight broke out.

The fight was as intense as it could be between a grown robber and a high school boy. The robber probably was not expecting Chanyeol to be this hard to handle and he was not particularly strong either, which gave Chanyeol an advantage. Chanyeol’s long legs gave him a strong point in the fight and after the final kick, the robber was flat on the ground.

Chanyeol looked down at him from his fighting stance. He felt muddy and sticky; his hair was sopping wet and so was his uniform. “Kang So Eul,” he wheezed, “are you okay?” He looked at the girl, who looked paler than she already was – if that could still be possible. She looked up at him, her eyes filled with horror and fright, and nodded wordlessly. He walked towards her, picking up his bag from the ground half-way.

“Chanyeol-ssi, CAREFUL!!” Soul screamed when he was about an arm length away from her. Before he realized what has happened, Chanyeol was tackled onto the ground. A loud crack was heard and a sound of two large bodies falling onto the ground. He tumbled and rolled on the wet ground a few times. Chanyeol whipped his head around and saw the robber on the ground, limbs tangled with him, with a visible vertical bruise on his forehead, which was not there after Chanyeol hit him earlier.

He looked at Soul, who now appeared more terrified than ever, holding her umbrella like a sword with both hands like a kendo athlete. She looked at him, then at the robber, then at him. “Park Chanyeol-ssi,” she whispered, in a very airy voice, with her trembling lips before the rest of the colour completely drained out from her as she tumbled down on the ground.

Next thing he knew, he was running through the rainy alleyways with Kang So Eul unconscious on his back, desperately looking for help in the vacant alleyways. 

~

[Author's monologue:] Hello. I hope you enjoyed this update. Let me know if you had enjoyed it. Comments are very much welcomed cuz I love reading them and sometimes take inspiration for future chapters from them. 

See you soon in next chapter!