Hera was on the verge of losing her mind by the time she marched into the coffee shop down the block from her apartment later that evening. At the sound of the door bell ringing, Wendy instinctively glances up from her book to expect a customer, not her flustered roommate charging towards her.

“He’s from my dreams!” Hera exclaims with her palms slamming onto the table in front of Wendy. “I’m 100% positive.”

Wendy blinks as her brows furrow in confusion at her roommate. “What.”

Hera takes a moment to catch her breath before slipping into the chair across from Wendy to explain. “You know those dreams I keep telling you about? About me and this boy in the palace?”

After a few seconds, Wendy nods. “Yeah, and?”

“The guy I’m interning for or assisting or whatever I’m doing!” Hera huffs and waves off the fact that she doesn’t really know what Baekhyun is to her. “He! He’s the same person from my dreams! I’m sure of it! The first time I met him, I had this odd feeling I’ve seen him before but I couldn’t quite figure out where but as I was napping in the stud—.”

“—You were napping?” Wendy interrupts. “On the clock?”

Hera spares her a little shrug. “Hey, he suggested it—but that’s not important. What’s important is that as I was napping, I dreamt of the boy again, it was the one I told you before, of us catching sparrows in the meadow. When I woke up, it hit me. The guy I’m interning for and the boy in my dreams are the same person—or they at least have the same face.”

Wendy doesn’t say anything for a moment as she tries to process what just came out of Hera’s mouth and the more time that passes, the more Hera starts to slowly doubt herself.

“Are you sure you’re just not mistaken?” Wendy finally asks. “You once told me that each person in this world has about seven look-alikes. What if he’s just a look-alike? Plus, what if your brain just made it him because he was the last person you saw and spoke to before falling asleep?”

Hera shakes her head. “No, Wendy. It’s him. I swear it is.”

“Okay then,” Wendy shrugs. “What if it is him. What does that mean? Why does it matter?”

The questions render her speechless and it gets Hera thinking. Why does it matter? Or more like, why does it feel like it should matter? Before Hera can come up with an answer, the door rings again and Wendy instantly jumps onto her feet to greet the two teenage girls entering. Sighing, Hera props her head up in her hands and thinks back to the dream. She’s absolutely sure it’s Baekhyun but then again, even if it is him, why does that matter?

After swerving the two students, Wendy quickly slips back into her seat where Hera is still lost in thought and sighs.

“I know how curious you are about these dreams but I don’t think you should linger on them for too long. Dreams are just dreams after all, aren’t they?” Wendy shoots her a small yet warm smile.

“Yeah,” Hera agrees quietly after some seconds. “I think meeting my bias today and finally having him know I exist is just making me crazy.”

Wendy’s eyes widen before a sharp gasp escapes from her. “What? Bias. What? You met Johnny today?! TELL ME EVERYTHING.”

***

“Can I ask you something?”

From her peripheral vision, Hera notices Baekhyun pop his head into the separate room attached to the studio where she was filing in new music for him.

“Hit me,” he says.

Closing the D-E-F cabinet, Hera picks up the next stack from the ground and slides open G-H-I. “So,” Hera purses her lips. “Be honest. Is the company just letting me “intern” because Seohyun asked, not because they actually need or want an intern?”

She turns to him as he slides over in his chair to the doorway with his legs crossed and an elbow propped up on the arm of the chair as if he was deep in thought. He pushes up his fake round glasses with his index finger and gives her a nod. “Yes.”

Grunting, Hera pushes the cabinet closed with her shoulder and stays there with her arm pressed against the cold metal. “It’s stupid of me to be complaining isn’t it?”

Baekhyun shakes his head and rises up to grab the next stack off the ground to help her. “Just because this is a multi-billionaire company doesn’t mean you can’t feel like your time and effort is being wasted,” he says. “Lots of people leave this place because it often forces them to forgo originality. It’s okay to feel that way, you’re human.”

With her lips pursed, Hera takes the stack Baekhyun hands her and returns to filing. “If the pay wasn’t so good, I probably would’ve left,” she admits. “They must really have money to waste to be basically paying a random girl to do nothing.”

Baekhyun snickers and slides open the cabinet next to hers. “Seohyun told me you’re a Mass Comm major with an emphasis in advertising?” Hera nods. “Do you have a portfolio? Would you mind showing me some of your work?”

She turns to him slowly with eyes of disbelief and he smiles warmly. “Really?”

He nods and pushes his cabinet closed before turning to leave. “Yeah, show me.”

Following him out back into the main room, Hera seats herself next to Baekhyun on the couch after fishing out her laptop from her backpack. Baekhyun takes notice of how her eyes lit up and changed the moment he asked her to show him her portfolio. He sees the passion and it’s a pity that she’s locked up in this studio with him.

“So this is a series of mock campaigns I did for Lotte world last semester,” Hera explains as she tilts her laptop screen towards him. To get a better look, he leans in and their shoulders brush but neither notices the subtle touch. “So basically Lotte would give us a campaign and we’d pitch them ideas as if it was the real deal. We had four of them. I basically didn’t sleep the entire semester and did lots of crying.”

He snickers and runs his fingers along the track pad to go through her work. “Wow,” he awes. “I’m impressed. What was your role?”

Please Subscribe to read the full chapter