lx. Adjectives for the Wicked

Four.

Four seconds before Myungsoo noticed you staring. He didn’t call you out on it. He didn’t say anything, in fact. He only tilted his head towards you, giving you a better angle. 

You said something and he laughed, dewy cheeks rising as he smiled. Hair frizzy at the ends, he tucked his bangs under his beanie, revealing pink ears for a single second — a matching pair to your own. He cleared his throat and you laughed, scooting across the porch steps — closer to him — on this warm summer night. 

“It’s obvious.”

Shaking out of your daze at that one phrase, you were back in your house. Not with the boy of your dreams, but with the girl friends of your present: Minah and Yura. Both of whom were too enamored with their conversation to notice you’d begun to daydream about last night. About Myungsoo who had texted you early this morning. 

Cold cereal and milk?

He’d asked.

Insinuating he wanted to come over and eat breakfast with you again. Undeniably, waffles and pancakes sounded far inferior to cereal and milk — cold the best kind. Unfortunately, Minah and Yura were knocking on your door before you could answer. They had come to you with boy trouble of their own, seeking answers from you who had rejected plenty of the opposite to know more than they did. Thus, their current question towards you.

“Is it the same for you, Joe?” Yura took to Minah’s nickname for you like she’d come up with it herself. Not that you minded it. It mimicked the one you’d had as a child too much to dislike it. “When someone likes you, isn’t it obvious?”

The long answer was: it depends. The situation you’re in can affect how blind you are to the feelings of others. When you’re busy trying to solve one mystery revolving around the supernatural world of werewolves, deciding who to like and who likes you are the last things on your mind. When you’re whisked off to another part of the world, when all of the mysteries begin to unravel themselves, it’s easier to notice the way he looks at you. Easier. But obvious? The short answer was: it depends.

“The obvious ones have less to lose.” You decided with a nod. 

“So, basically, they say ‘ it’?” Minah concluded, understanding you with ease thanks to how long she’d spent talking to you; listening to your ambiguous words and responding to your questionable answers had taught her well when it came to how your mind worked.

Your reasoning not at all obvious to her, Yura frowned, “You’re saying Niel’s scared of me?”

“More like,” Minah paused, thinking of a way to phrase it, before settling with, “he’s scared to lose you.”

And it took a moment for Yura to form the most appropriate reply.

“Bull.” 

You laughed outright.

“No male should be afraid of the girl he loves! If he loves her, he knows what lines not to cross. If he loves her, he knows her well enough to notice she’s being obvious, too.”

“I take it Niel didn’t react as you’d have liked to your impromptu kiss yesterday?” Minah smiled in the face of her friend’s woe, earning herself a smack to the knee. A headlock. And new hairstyle as Yura’s hand twirled circles into her scalp. 

Minah gave in within seconds, slapping Yura’s forearm in surrender. Yura gave way instantly, gazing over at the front door curiously. While Minah was choking out the most unattractive sounds she’d ever made — in her words — someone had rung the doorbell. Before you could move to answer it, someone else beat you to the punch.

“I’ll get it.”

The slim, long-haired beauty Seohyun sang out from the kitchen, mug of tea in hand as she walked out, smiling your way. With the antics of Minah and Yura distracting you just as much as another infamous pair, you’d forgotten she had also arrived at your doorstep this morning. To talk, apparently. 

She hadn’t said anything up until this point other than, “Don’t mind me.”

But it was hard not to.

From the looks of it, she failed to tell anyone about meeting you in Thailand. Failed, as in, she surely attempted to. There was no way she hadn’t tried to. Because it was a juicy bit of gossip too succulent to simply let cool. Because if she hadn’t intended on speaking on it, she wouldn’t have knocked on the door this morning. Because she was obvious — just like you.

Drawing your eyes away from where she peeked through the peephole, you nudged Yura with your foot, “Thanks for that, by the way.” That, as in, her bold lip lock with the boy of her own dreams. 

“It’s no problem, really. Niel’s feelings aside, I needed to do something before I internally combusted.” Yura shrugged, smiling despite herself. “From the looks of it though,” whispering so only yourself and Minah could hear, she sold you out without meaning to, “you got kissed anyway, didn’t you?”

And Minah’s smile faded, head turning towards you so agonizingly slowly she could have been the star of a horror movie. The fish-eyed stare she gave you only further bolstered her potential for the role. Too scared to look, you diverted your eyes, coughing awkwardly.

Yura, not too oblivious to not notice the obvious in this case, gasped, hand to mouth, exaggeratedly. Pointing over-excessively. “You haven’t told her yet?”

Deadpan, you said with a waving gesture, “Because, ‘Good Morning, I kissed Kim Myungsoo, the guy you’ve liked for multiple years, last night,’ is the best greeting to give a girl’s best friend at nine in the morning.”

“It’s not the best greeting to give at any time of the day!” Yura stood up, still pointing an accusatory finger.

“Exactly!” You stood up along with her, not wanting to be left on the couch where Minah could lunge for you without inhibition. 

“But it should still be given!”

“I was going to!”

She put her hands to her hips, “When?” 

You mimicked her pose, recalling a study you once saw on television, “Sometime between us yelling at each other and later today!”

Copying the mannerisms of someone else lowers aggression and increases the chance for civil, friendly conversation to take place — a far cry from the screaming contest the two of you were engaged in.

Yura rolled her eyes, “Well, the cat’s out of the bag now.”

You rolled yours right back, “You think?”

Your head almost rolled right back as Minah rose from her seat and reared back her hand. Your first instinct was to dodge it. To be a coward and run barefoot through the forest from a raging Minah as fast as your legs would carry you.Your second instinct was to take the hit. To, for the sake of friendship, accept the punishment you deserved for your betrayal. 

Quite obviously, you took it.

You took what you expected to be a slap. 

Minah gave the most unexpected right hook to your left cheek. 

If the immediate headache wasn’t enough to wish you’d never woken up this morning, leaving your sweet dreams behind, the voice whose owner supernaturally-heard every single word of the conversation that just ended entered stage left.

“See you later, Minah.” Hoya sent a smile the Pink Princess’s way as she stomped out of the house. Hobbling away while simultaneously putting on her shoes, Yura didn’t stick around for whatever boy problems were torpedoing their way towards you. 

“See you, Joe!” She waved, the charmingly persistent sellout, before making her own grand exit.

And if Hoya wasn’t enough, there was yet another male werewolf who had decided to accompany his spontaneous trip to your house this eventful morning: B-bomb.

“Why don’t we talk about this over some cold cereal and milk?”

It seemed Myungsoo was just as obvious as you were.

Seohyun hadn’t meant to return home with nothing. She wanted to be able to quell his fears. She wanted to be the one to comfort him because she understood. She wanted him to know she did. She had started to want a lot of things since she first met him.

He wasn’t particularly good-looking at first glance. The only thing mildly attractive about him was his surname. Yet, somehow, he had managed to completely upset her expectations of him. Not with the news she learned later: he’d successfully brought an impure and pure pack together despite their differences. His cold personality when it came to strangers wasn’t appealing either. 

It was the string of words he’d whispered to Jung Soryong mere seconds after meeting her, in her own family’s home, where no insult could have done greater harm.

“When will we return to Springfield?”

Selfless. Righteous. Slightly arrogant. Utterly lonely.

His grandfather’s entire legacy was thrown onto his shoulders in a mere matter of hours and the first thing he wanted to do was return to the people he had left behind. Seohyun, dolled-up at her mother’s request, lithe and breath-taking, modest and soft-spoken, could never say something so selflessly selfish. So self-righteously righteous. Arrogantly, like a lonely heiress, “When will you leave? I was in the middle of watching juicy celebrity gossip unfold into deliciously devious attacks via social media.”

But, she did say, “When I let you.”

From then on, she took him under her wing. Despite being older than him by a year, she neither thought she was more mature than him nor believed she had the right to order him around. She did consider herself, however, quite good at giving advice.

She was a top-tier sympathizer. 

Never experiencing the difficulties that came with having thousands reject her right to her own last name. Never knowing what it felt like to face resistance whenever she attempted to accomplish her goals. Never feeling the raw emotion of “love.”

Able to imagine all of these things and more, thinking on the latter of these subjects more often than naught recently, she approached Kim Sunggyu for the umpteenth time.

Seated in his grandfather’s office, he thumbed through old files, new layers of dust disturbed in the process. You had cleaned the room just last season, after all. This was a fact Seohyun could tell both physically and emotionally bothered Sunggyu when he spent time in this gloomy room. Coming to terms with his grandfather’s death at the unjust hands of humans was seemingly easier to deal with than the conflict that now plagued his every morning and night.

To tell or not to tell, that was the question.

“Your skin’s growing paler each day.” She laid a hand on his shoulder, squeezing down harder than she meant to. Causing him to shrug away her touch, smiling when he looked up at her.

“The werewolves that once lived in Springfield fled to different corners of the world. Seeing as how some of them were once part of the Kim House, I can’t exactly not even try to track them down.”

“You’re not trying too hard though, are you?”

“I honestly don’t think I’m trying hard enough.” He sincerely replied, alone in this empty room. Filled with books he’d never read and journals he’d never even glance at. Hollowing him out spoonful by spoonful. The throne he sat on engulfed him. 

Filled to the point of being empty, she lent him some comforting words, “Why don’t the two of us go for a walk?”

Sunggyu seemed to think about her proposition for a moment before saying, “Maybe next time.”

Laughing, she placed her hand on his shoulder once more, “Maybe? That’s a shame. I’ve heard the lake’s beautiful in the afternoon; when the sun sets it aflame.”

The implications she’d made didn’t go unnoticed as his smile faded. He was visibly caught between thinking he hadn’t done a single thing wrong and wondering if he should apologize. If they were strangers, he would have done the former. Since they were more than just that, it relieved her to hear his first syllable of: “I—”

“An apology would be nice. It’s been ages since I’ve gone for a dip and I feel positively robbed of the opportunity to do so.” She interrupted him, not wanting the issue to be buried so easily.

“I’m sorry.” He finished anyway, as he always did.

She rounded the couch, sitting down across from him, her career as a psychiatrist seeming more attainable with each falter in his expression, “If you want to go on a date with her, shouldn’t you fail to invite more than just me?”

Sunggyu laughed, for the sake of it, “It was a gathering between friends.”

Seohyun nodded in agreement, for his own sake, “Because she’s just a friend to you?”

That question had him thinking for longer than a moment. It was easy to deduce the root of his conflict. To tell or not to tell. To pretend or to reveal everything. Considering Seohyun had seen you at the Cha family reunion not even a week ago, his final decision didn’t matter. At least, to Song Hyunjoo, it didn’t. 

You already knew of your questionable origins: half human, half pure bred.

Sunggyu had figured it out somewhere along the line, finally giving into the unavoidable fact during his stay in Denmark. The unnatural attraction both his pack and Zico’s had towards you, thus, was a result both of the presence of your half-ness and the absence of any other female werewolf. Maturing without a female in either pack desensitized them to what one smells like.

To what you smelt like to other females. 

Jiyeon knew from day one. 

Seohyun, upon questioning the impure bred, learnt she had kept it secret due to what she called “true love.” The kind of love that “crosses the boundaries of what’s acceptable.” The “strong” kind. The kind that “endures.” The kind Seohyun wasn’t able to emphasize with.

But, that didn’t mean she couldn’t pretend. 

That she couldn’t pretend to know exactly what she was talking about as she replied to Sunggyu’s ridiculous reply of: “I don’t have anything to offer her.”

“What about Kim Sunggyu?” A gift Seohyun thought was well-worth the effort of giving.

Someone who both understood her and willingly told her when she was wrong was hard to come by. Kim Sunggyu was precious to her, in this sense. Pretending to live vicariously through him, experiencing opportunities robbed from her since birth, she chose her words carefully.

As any modest, beautiful heiress would.

“You’ve been waiting around all this time for her to choose you.” She didn’t reach out for him selfishly, didn’t comfort him to cure her own loneliness, as she convinced him to give himself away — to someone who wasn’t her. “Have you ever wondered if maybe she’s waiting for you to choose her?”

When Seohyun was a child, her family’s doctor said she had a severe superiority complex.

Since birth, she never had trouble convincing herself an empty castle surrounded by happiness was better than a castle full of happiness.

Her head of neon red jerked upwards, eyes slowly fluttering open. Pins and needles pierced through her from the balm of her feet to her aching thighs. She had been squatting here, outside these two, large maple-carved doors, for a long time now. Pulling her phone from her lap, she realized three hours had passed.

It was past midnight.

He was taking too long.

“Dae.” She called out towards the doors she didn’t have the courage to enter. “Dae.” She whispered in fear of being caught waiting for him. “Dae.” She whimpered as she lost her balance, legs crying out in agony as she finally seceded to gravity. 

Jung Daeryong was always in the habit of making her worry.

Uselessly, usually.

But, lately, he had become bolder.

More in the habit of taking risks. 

Saying things that drew attention to himself. Doing things that made those superior to him, much higher up the food chain, bear grudges against him. Ignoring her warnings to stay in his lane.

Kim Taeyeon’s near expulsion from the Enforcers, EN00 to EN10 in a matter of seconds, was a big, red flag to any and all enforcers who took sides. 

If that wasn’t enough to wake him up from whatever illusion he’d fantasized, she didn’t know how else to knock some sense into him. 

Nothing had changed from when they were children. He was as hard to get through to then as he was now. He wouldn’t listen to her no matter how loud she screamed or how much she cried. At least, back then, the stakes weren’t as high.

At least, back then, he eventually got the hint.

He wasn’t an idiot. 

Despite her words when the door finally opened, the surname Hwang on a shining plague above her head, he was smarter than this.

“Idiot.” She embraced his beaten body, face bloodied and bruised beyond recognition. “Idiot.” She yelled into his shirt, muffled screams shaking against his fractured ribs. “Idiot.” She cried again, feeling his trembling arms wrap around her.

Jung Daeryong had attempted, and failed, to kill the leader of the Hunter Faction.

He was an idiot beyond compare.

After an extensive question and answer session with B-bomb and Hoya for over two hours, you decided it was best to stay at home today — because things could only go up from here. The interrogation itself consisted of the phrase, “You’re not lying, are you,” at least ten times. Choosing to skip the semantics and not believe it, the idea of you kissing someone seemed an almost immoral concept to discuss for the two boys.

It seems that despite their imaginations of what you’d done with Sungyeol in Italy, kissing never crossed either's mind.

“I’m no saint.” You argued, no miracles under your belt that you could think of.

“But, you’re also Song Hyunjoo. The girl who’s evaded the advances of over ten supernatural beings. Your argument is invalid.” B-bomb debunked, the image blurry and incomplete in his mind. 

“Aren’t you happy for me?” 

You asked the two of them then. Hoya smiled. B-bomb laughed. And you took that as a definite yes.

“I’m indifferent to the revelation, quite honestly.” Hyosung now replied, tucking her feet under her thighs as she got comfortable on your couch. Fondling at the pillow beneath her arm, she yawned widely. Bored in the face of learning the truth of yet another mystery surrounding Springfield and its inhabitants. 

To the people she cared about, knowing such a well-kept secret would mean the world. The world over. All the galaxies and stars over. Everything would be over.

This is where the problem lied.

“I get you wolfsbane to test out exactly how potent your other half is and what?” Hyosung waved her fingers in the air, gesturing with a jeer, “What do I get in return?”

You opted for the cliche response of: “My friendship?”

“No thanks.”

She was a firm believer of the policy: Keep your friends alive and your enemies dead. Since killing you wasn’t an option anymore, despite now having a viable reason to do so, all she could do was keep her competition at bay.

“I’ll help you out,” she began, striking gold on that single thought, “on one condition.”

Figuring out how to avoid an ominous “Game Over” screen, she was selfish, arrogant, pure evil, and the epitome of lonely as she said, “Don’t tell Zico what you are. Deal?”

Her hand hadn’t even lifted from her side before you were shaking it.

“Deal.”

A/N: This chapter is too long. I thought about cutting it up, but that didn't feel quite right. It came to me a lot easier than other ones. The Sunny/Daeryong relationship is one I was really pumped about while writing, too. Thanks again to Lynnda for the poster! I'll use it randomly 'cause why not? That's it from me for today. I'll see you all again soon, though! No worries!

I'm like that piece of paper that keeps getting stuck to your foot
because you're not bothered enough to throw it away and just end up plucking it
off again and again and again and it keeps sticking because it loves you. Marry it. Have children together.
I admit, this subnote got out of hand. But it's all yours now.

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