8 | It's All In Your Head
ミ★ You Just Don't Get It 。
I need to grow up. That's what everyone thinks. I need to become this man that I have always thought I should be, I should mop up my own tears and heartache because damn, I feel like a woman.
So that is why I found myself sitting next to you on a bench adjacent to the Han River.
There's an eerie silence as either of us wait to talk. I sit with my elbows bent and resting against my knees, my back slouching over and my hands folded tightly with each other. From the corner of my eye, I see you fiddle and diddle with your fingers, looking down at your lap like a child who had just smuggled our of a kitchen cupboard.
"So, um, I heard you guys were going to debut a couple of months from now," you say as you lean against your palms that are pressed on the bench's seat. "Still got a long way to go, huh?"
I turn to look at you, wondering why you know this. Taemin obviously couldn't have told you because no one else in the company except our group and management knows this. I raise an eyebrow.
"I talk to Se Hun and Baekhyun oppa, too, you know," you reply as a matter-of-factly before I could ask how you knew these things.
"Oh," I deflate. You talk to my groupmates, too. Who's next? Don't tell me they teach you Chinese at your high school, too, because then I know you'll start talking to those guys in EXO M.
"I, uh, also hear that you're seeing someone."
"Not true."
"Jongin, come on."
"Whatever you heard, it's not true," I croak out, sitting straight up. "But look, if you believe it, then ok, sure. I may or may have not been seeing someone."
Finally. You smile, and the tension seems to be eased out by my little jibe.
"Is she pretty?" You stifle a little chuckle and I try to hold in my smile, too.
"No," I lie.
"She must've been a stunner, huh?"
"Oh, definitely. Had the whole room standing in a puddle of their own piss whenever she walked in."
You laugh out loud and I join in - because this is how it's meant to be. Even though I love you and even though it breaks my heart to see you with Taemin, you're still my best friend. I should know who I am by now, and that is just your friend.
Our laughter dies out eventually, and you rifle through your handbag to pull out a small, clear bottle filled with blue TicTacs. You shake one of them out of the bottle and pop it into your mouth, swallowing instantly.
"Mind if I?" I insist, holding out my hand.
You look down at your bottle. "Oh, um."
Instead of handing me some of the blue TicTacs, you take out another TicTac case - this time they're white - and pour two of them onto my palm. I don't say anything as I take in the breath mints.
As charming as it turned out, we both had to get up and go our separate ways for the day. You had another tutoring session to attend and I had practice with the rest of the group. Before we go, we both hug. I can smell you - sweet like pineapples and bergamot - and I wish that we could stay like this just a little longer.
You let go of the hug, but not my arms. You look at me and tell me that you'd call the minute you're done with tutoring. I tell you that I'd anticipate it with every living cell in me. You laugh at my melodrama, but I know you know that I'm telling the truth. There's a splinter in our relationship, but I think it doesn't matter because by the end of the day, I know I'll kill a huge part of me if I would have let you go.
***
Sehun and Krystal are cute together, I think. Though they both are good friends of mine, I think when they get together, I would just have to shoot myself in the head.
Sehun and Krystal - once they step inside our dorm, every time actually - are the bearer of bad news.
"Jongin-oppa~" she says coming up to me. I'm sitting on our dorm's kitchen counter, eating from a bowl of cereal and cold milk. Sehun trails behind her, his face placid. Krystal clings onto my arm and I am compelled to stop eating and ask her what the hell does she want.
"Jongin-oppa," Krystal whines again, sitting on the stool next to me. "We found out something today. And it's not good."
I turn back to my cereal. "Okay, then let me finish eating before I end up without an appetite."
I was just about to pick up my spoon when Sehun steals my bowl right from under me and eats some of it. I scowl, perturbed. Sehun lazily shrugs and says in between mouthfuls, "What? Management wants me to gain some weight too. I'm just as skinny as you also!"
I don't say anything, because him admitting his faults in his body is already a bad enough thing considering that his girlfriend is right here to hear all that. I guess they are already at that point when they are both comfortable with farting in the presence of one another - though, I think Krystal would do all the farting because Sehun looks like he's too glamorous to release any excess gas. I snap back to reality, feeling incredibly odd to be thinking about my two friends and their flatulence.
"Well, anyway, shoot," I tell Krystal, now that Sehun has possession of my afternoon snack and is sulking off to the living room to finish it.
"Okay, don't get mad but - "
"I have a feeling I already will be."
"Just don't freak out! Or punch walls, ok?" Krystal squeaks, clutching my arm tightly.
"I have never punched walls."
"Good, but don't start now!"
"I won't, alright. Now, tell me." I urge her, feeling a tiny bit exasperated by all these word games Krystal always plays before divulging something important. "Go."
"Taemin's already had his first kiss."
"With his mother, right?" I deadpan.
From the living room, I hear Sehun bark out laughter and I know it's not because of what he was watching on TV. Krystal slaps me on the shoulder and I edge away, smiling foolishly.
"I'm serious here!" She snaps. "Hye Rin kissed him!"
"I know they would eventually," I say, masking my disappointment by taking a drink from my glass of water. "I mean, they're going out so yeah. Kiss, kiss, kiss."
"I just hope you're alright." Krystal looks at me like I'm a dying patient.
I pull away almost too roughly and slip out of my seat to go to my room. "I am. Of course I am."
***
First boyfriend, gone.
First kiss, gone.
I don't want to hear the sound of losing what was never mine, anymore. I was shot out of the sky and this fall from grace seems to never stop. I can't wait to hit ground zero, just so I can get back up on my two feet. After Krystal tells me all of this and after I retreat to my room to take a nap, I step out to talk to Sehun. Krystal is now gone and it's just the two of us in the living room. WIth the addition of Chanyeol, who is trying to complete puzzle of a penguin. It's a damn cute picture of a mother penguin and her little ones, I might add.
"How did Krystal know about this? I ask him.
Sehun pries his eyes away from his favorite Wednesday-Thursday drama for a millisecond in an attempt to acknowledge me. "Well, Taemin told her."
"Taemin likes to exaggerate things a lot, don't you think?"
"Hell yeah," Chanyeol pipes up and Sehun and I look at him as if he just appeared in the room from thin air. "There was this one time when we were all eating out and Taemin said he couldn't eat his bibimbap I paid for because he said his brother got strep throat after eating it from that certain restaurant. Turns out, the little kid lied and he robbed me of 8,000 won! What a cheeky little bastard!"
Sehun and I stare at him.
"Taemin just likes to tell Krystal things," Sehun tells me, clearly dismissing Chanyeol. "He tells her stuff like how much money he makes and how many dogs he's owned."
"Doesn't that even bother you? I mean, clearly, he's showing off to Krystal," I conclude.
Sehun shrugs. "I don't care."
"That doesn't make you a very concerned boyfriend, you know."
He sighs. Sehun isn't the most sympathetic of all people I've known, but when he has something to say and when he has to be really "deep" about certain things, you could tell. Anyone could tell that he's about say something that's out of his character, and Chanyeol stops picking up his scattered puzzle pieces because he, too, knows that Sehun is going to be saying something worth hearing.
"Jongin-ah, sit down," he pats the empty cushion next to him on the couch. By now, his alter-ego admits him to dismiss me as his 'hyung' and thus instructs me like I'm some child. But I comply nonetheless because this only happens rarely. I sit down next to him and he all but lazily slungs his arm around my shoulders. "I'm going to tell you one thing, and I really, really want you to keep it in that thick head of yours. Do you know why you feel like everyday?"
"Because reality is depressing?" I offer.
Sehun chuckles darkly. "No. Because you overthink a lot of things. And you know what? That totally dampers your happiness. Look at hyung over there," he his head toward Chanyeol. "Instead of doting over the fact that Baekhyun-hyung ate all of his mother's kimchi pancakes, he's just sitting over there ignoring the situation with that dumb penguin puzzle."
"What?!" Chanyeol exclaims suddenly. He gets up and starts storming off to Baekhyun's bedroom, rampaging on a mile a minute about his mother's kimchi pancakes and who the hell actually finished and God he was going to snap Baekhyun's neck in two right before he makes that little brat apologize to Jongdae for falsely accusing him.
Meanwhile, Sehun and I ignore him once again.
"What are you trying to say?" I narrow my eyes at Sehun.
"I'm trying to say that you should stop thinking about Hye Rin, and really, stop making this whole situation of yours seem like it's written for a drama - which, by the way, I am supposed to be focusing on before you came here and accused me of being an unconcerned boyfriend."
"How do you even think I feel?" I get up, suddenly feeling a wave of emotion - no, anger.
"You feel like , I get it," Sehun says, desperately rolling his eyes. "We all get it. We've all heard the same sob story about a million and one times and that should be the last. Hye Rin is going out with Taemin, ok, that's great for him, for both of them whatever. But what you have to understand is that you will get over it. Just stop overthinking things."
"I don't overthink things!"
Sehun shakes his head that, in a way, denotes pity in its most putrid state. "Hyung, you just don't get it, do you?"
A/N: I'm sooo very late with this EXO fandom and I learn a lot of things really late. Like why Chanyeol is called the Happy Virus, or how adorable HunHan is when they all went to Disneyland <3 But yes, glad to say that I am now obsessed with EXO all over again.
Also, I realized that this story really does seem to coincide with a lot of things that have happened to my bestfriends (both online and off). So, I'm thinking of making the ending just like how one of my friend's stories ended :)
[Don't Get It] (March 8, 2013) GOOD NEWS: this fic will be continued! However, I'll re-write the last few chapters.
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