For the next two weeks, I spent as much time as I could with Jen.  At times, I felt like I was annoying her maybe but the day before I was due to go back to Japan we ended up laughing together for the first time in a long, long time.  It was like we had gone back in time before any of this happened.  We were in the kitchen together, I was attempting to cook, however, my cooking skills are not up to much.  I was trying to make pancakes, that we always eat together, and I just wasn’t getting it.  In frustration I flipped the pancake so hard it stuck to the ceiling, I looked up at it for what felt like 100 years, before it fell, as if in slow motion, and landed smack bang on my head.

‘.’ I cursed in anger, I turned to look at Jen, angry with myself, my lack of cooking skill and a pancake on my head and we both just burst into laughter.  We laughed so hard, for so long that we were both on the floor with tears streaming down our faces. 

She picked up the offending pancake from the floor, nibbled slightly at the edges and said with a completely straight face, ‘tastes like too.’  Causing the pair of us to fall about laughing for another 10 minutes. 

That was the first day I thought things were going to get better.  She was still a little distant and I knew unhappy but she never brought up the things she said the first night I was back home.  I didn’t dare to bring them up either, not wanting to tempt fate and push her away from me. 

I had begun to make plans on how and when I was going to ask her to marry me.  Trying to push on forward and start again, I was thinking, when I was back from Japan, the next week would be the year anniversary of when we met, and what better way to ask her to marry me, than to take her somewhere on the coast, under the stars and ask her to marry me.  The same way I fell in love with her on the cliff in Bali under the stars so many nights.  I ran it past Key and Jonghyun who both loved the idea and were the only two romantic and soppy enough to listen to me. 

I had not told anyone about the conversation.  I didn’t want anyone to burst my bubble I had imagined us in and tell me that actually, it was a stupid idea. 

The day before I left again, I decided to leave the ring I had bought with Jongin.  I couldn’t trust myself not to lose it in Japan, and at least he would put it s