Of course, you fought again. It wasn’t even two months after the last one where you both got worked up over something, and once again you walked out the door, going over to Ashley’s house to stay. This time you withheld for two whole days before you started to crack. You had serious withdrawals and missed Kihyun too much.

Ashley, however, refused to let you go home. “Come out with me and the girls tonight. I think you need this more than you realise.”

“I’m not in the mood to drink my sorrows away. I just want to go home.”

“We’re not going to the club,” Ashley stated, and you frowned at your best friend. “Pull yourself together and go wash your face. We’ll leave in ten minutes.”

“A coffee shop?” you questioned when you followed Ashley down the sidewalk.

She smiled weakly at you and prodded you inside gently. At a booth in the corner were three of your closest friends and you noticed the serious expressions on their faces.

You attempted to greet them happily, but you could feel the foreboding atmosphere engulfing you. “Girls, what’s going on?”

“Y/N, we’re staging an intervention,” Bryony announced, and the others nodded in agreement.

“Huh?” you hummed and then laughed, waving them off. “Oh, I’m fine. Seriously. We just had another silly fight. I’m over it now.”

Claudia shook her head. “What’s going on between you and Kihyun isn’t fine. At all. It’s toxic, and we’re sick of you settling for it.”

“I’m not settling for anything but my own happiness.”

“Are you happy, though? Really happy?” Ashley asked, and you swallowed slowly, not answering as immediately as you had been.

You nodded eventually. “Of course! Don’t be so serious, girls. We’re twenty-one and have our entire lives ahead of us. Love right now is meant to be fun and vivacious.”

“You’re right. But the love you and Kihyun have for one another is destroying you both,” Lauri commented, and you glanced around at your friends one by one before letting out an agitated laugh.

“I don’t have to sit here and listen to you talk badly about my relationship. Kihyun is a good person!”

“I have no doubts about that,” Bryony agreed, smiling gently. “I grew up with him and know he’s worth more than this too. But together, you’re two magnets with the same pole. You’re fighting so hard to be together but don’t realise you can never meet long enough before the repulsion of the magnetic charge between you starts again. Surely you know this too, Y/N.”

“You need to end this relationship for good. You both are amazing people, but together it’s not working. Can’t you see that?”

With tears in your eyes and a lump forming in your throat, you scraped back your chair, shaking your head at them all.

You knew they were right, but you wanted to pretend it was falling on deaf ears a little longer.

---

 

The words of your friends weighed heavily on your heart, and even after being home for a week, you felt uneasy. You weren’t sleeping well, dreaming of Kihyun and you both sending the other over the edge. When you weren’t studying for your thesis, you were evaluating what you truly had with the man you loved.

Was it even love? You had been convinced it was love that kept bringing you back together each time, but now you wondered if there was any true love between you at all. You were comfortable with Kihyun. You knew what to expect, both the good and bad, and that was enough for you to become complacent. Your heart did flutter whenever you saw him smile, but lately, that was few and far between. Kihyun equally seemed troubled, and by the time the weekend arrived, you were estranged from each other.

“Can we talk?” Kihyun asked hesitantly, rubbing the back of his neck when you entered the kitchen. You noted he had already cooked breakfast, and you nodded silently, taking a seat across from him at the small table. You both ate quietly, though the longer you watched Kihyun mull over the words he wanted to say, the more you lost your appetite.

Placing down your piece of toast, you cleared your throat. “Ki, you and I, we shouldn’t be together, should we?”

You watched as Kihyun’s shoulders slumped, but with relief not disappointment. “You’ve been thinking about us too?”

“The girls said some things,” you admitted, and Kihyun nodded.

“I met with some of my friends and talked about it too. It’s not that I don’t care about you. Gosh, I really do care about you.”

“I know you do.”

Kihyun sighed. “We are like two matches. We can be side by side with ease, but if we rub against the other even just a little, sparks fly.”

“Which is why passion between us works so well,” you pointed out and shared a smile with Kihyun. It soon faded, and you tried to hold back your emotions. “Yet, it’s also why we fight so much too, right?”

“Meeting you isn’t something I regret, but I can’t say during our relationship that I have always felt this way. There’s a lot I’ve done wrong by you and vice versa. Maybe we’re too immature for each other, or maybe we’re just meeting at the wrong time for us.”

“Or maybe there shouldn’t be an us,” you offered, and Kihyun stilled, not disagreeing with you openly. “We’re magnetic, you and I. But not in a good way.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“This will be the first time we’ve not fought for me to walk out of this apartment,” you said with a wry smile. “But I think its best that I leave this one last time. For good.”