It's Seunghyun again. I'm pretty sure i'm doomed to have every chapter of this be horribly short. Alas.

January came coupled with a leaden grey sky and a blanket of snow that hung heavy over the city. The heavy layer of white seemed to bring a sense of calm to the normally frenetic bustle of the city, but it did little for the tumultuous storm that seemed to brew in my bones. Unable to feign concentration, I left the last of my emails forgotten and stood, making the familiar trek to the large office three corridors down.

Unceremoniously I entered the the obsessively well kept office, lazing myself onto the entirety of the cold leather sofa. Dongwook merely glanced over the top of his monitor and returned to his work.

“Let me guess…”

“You know you don’t need to.”

Jiyong had reappeared into my life, leaving cracks to run in the already unsteady foundation of my heart, and I was unsure if he would be the one to repair it or bring it crumbling to my knees. It left me with a pile of innumerable uncertainties and a weight of words that desperately needed to be said.

“When did everything get to be so difficult?” I bemoaned more to myself than anything else.

“You know, I’m an advertising director, not a therapist.” Dongwook quipped.

“And you know if there was anyone else I could go to, I wouldn’t need your sorry excuse for advice.” I retorted. A commiserative smile fell on his face. Standing up from his work he ambled over to my side, lifting my legs before replacing them on his lap as he sat. 

“How do you bridge the gaps of time?”

“You can’t. You can only try and strengthen the roads that lie on either side.” His words rang with a certainty I could only wish to possess.

“I don’t know if I can do it on my own.”

“That’s why there’s two of you.”

What if there really wasn’t the two of ‘us’ at all? What if those roads were nothing more than long forgotten lines on a map? What if Jiyong had carved a new path on his own? One I wasn’t meant to follow.

“Stop with the ‘What ifs’ already. I can see them written all over your face.” Sometimes I wasn’t quite sure whether to be infinitely grateful for his insightfulness or hate him for it.

“Unfortunately they seem to be a trend these days.”

“There wouldn’t be the questions if you were willing to look for the answers.”

“You give my nerve far too much credit.”

“Just use your words. You’re surprisingly pretty good with them when you actually try.” he chuckled, and gave me that knowing smile that, at least temporarily, calmed the storm that had worked into my marrow.

I honestly had no idea what words I could really say. I could search for eternity and never find the perfect words to properly articulate all the feelings that seemed to hang between Jiyong and I. But maybe for now, they didn’t need to be perfect. They just needed to be said.

Our conversation faded to silence, but I lingered in that obsessively organized office. My thoughts finding safe refuge in it’s stillness. From my spot on the now warm sofa, I could see little but the endless sky of clouded grey that hung over the city as before. But now the snow, it seemed, had began to dissipate. Maybe winter had finally reached it’s end.

But on another note I've started the Jiyong one-shot for love letters. Yay for fic writing instead of homework! My illustration professor must hate me...