CHAN YEOL

I felt better.

Going back home to Pyria had really taken its toll on me. If it weren’t for my mother, I wouldn’t go back at all and face the old man. If he didn’t have the information I wanted then I wouldn’t go and see him either. It was hard for me to believe that I’ve managed to last three weeks there and even after I returned to the capital, I was feeling half as bad as I was while at home. A lot of things had happened while I was gone and most of them were about Shinhye. She’s been discovering new things about herself and she smiled more often now, but still had the same aversion to Sehun and me. She wouldn’t even look at me anymore ever since I scolded her for injuring her hand. Baekhyun did as well, but she was talking to him, even laughing. I wonder what made me different.

That night, after her conversation with the Oracle Minister, she didn’t attend dinner. I found her later in the evening, asleep on the couch in the drawing room. Apparently, she never left since she went in. I carried her back to her room and it took herculean effort for me not to try and kiss her. Her lips just looked so enticing and I found myself smiling at the thought, but then, she began mumbling in her sleep, calling someone’s name. Just like the time I found her, she was saying one name – Jinhae. I couldn’t help but wonder if she missed her friends back in the human world. Jinhae might be one of her friends.

That morning, she didn’t come down for breakfast either and Chin insisted on bringing up food for her instead. We’ve all surmised that she was feeling ill so no one pressed on the subject any further, but when I went to the salon, I found her there, curled up on the edge of the sofa with a book covering her face. She was wearing a hooded, gray sweater that looked oversized and a pair of her awfully short breeches that exposed half of her thigh all the way down to her ankles. She didn’t seem to have noticed me come in since she had those things called earphones tucked into her ears so I walked over to where she was and sat down right next to her, eyeing the book she was reading. The moment I sunk down beside her, she inched away without looking up from the book, even raising it higher.

“Not now, Bacon, I’m studying,” she murmured and continued reading.

I smirked. She thought I was Baekhyun. Her zeal showed even in her studies that she failed to recognize who I was. I guess she had been around Baekhyun too much that she didn’t realize that other people existed around her aside from him. I stayed there and she shrugged. “Go bug someone else at the moment. I’ll take a walk with you later,” she said, squirming a bit then let out an irritated sigh.

Is this what he had to put up with every single day he dangles around her? I rolled my eyes and pulled the thing off of her right ear.

She jerked up and threw her book on the floor. She had a habit of throwing the things she was holding when she’s upset. “Hey! What the –” she stopped in midsentence when she saw me and tensed up. “Oh.” She slowly turned her head away and straightened up, sitting properly as she let her leg down, tucking her sock-clad feet into her shoes. She then pulled out the wire from her ear and placed it inside the pocket of her sweater.

“What were you reading?” I asked her, trying to strike up a conversation.

Shinhye glanced at me, looking jittery. “C-calculus…uh…yeah.” She bent down and reached for it on the floor and placed it on her lap.

I reached over and pulled it from underneath her hand and she flinched. I took a mental note of that. “What is it all about?” I leafed though it and all I saw was a bunch of strange inscriptions so I closed it and looked at her. She was staring at me, but looked away when our eyes met.

She extended a hand without looking at me. “Can I have my book back?” She tried to sound polite, but traces of terseness could be heard in her tone. Why was she behaving that way around me lately?

“Sure,” I said and handed her the book. Just as I’ve suspected, she stood up and quickly took it from me, but I seized her by the wrist and she stopped dead on her tracks. “Where are you going?”

She breathed in deeply, shut her eyes, held her breath in for a while and then exhaled loudly before turning to look at me. “I’m going to look for Baekhyun now.”

I arched a brow at her. “But you said you were studying.”

She stared at the direction of the door with a blank expression. “I’ve had enough reading for the day.”

“Really now?” I taunted her.

She gave me a withering look and tried to tug at her hand. “Really. Now if you don’t mind –”

“I mind,” I interrupted her. I honestly felt hurt that she was trying to get away from me again. I hated it when she does that.

Shinhye rolled her eyes at me. “What do you want?”

“You do have a habit of running away from me, don’t you?”

“What?” she lashed out as if she had just heard the most ridiculous thing in her life.

“So you’re not trying to run away from me?”

She shook her head. “Why should I? I haven’t done anything wrong to you except that you keep scolding me like a kid. Do you know how insulting that is?”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said gently and sh