Ara couldn’t believe how expensive a pint of ice cream actually was at the convenience store. Knowing one pint wouldn’t be enough for one heartbroken girl, she still struggled for that second pint. But digging up Yoonjo’s puppy face from the back of her mind, she paid for those two pints of rocky road ice cream, wondering at the last second if she should’ve added a box of tissues as well.

When she stepped out from the store, crimson and yellow flames scurried against blue and purple serpents in the sky.

Squinting, Ara followed the feral sunset. It was as if it mirrored her mind. Squirming under the pressure, trying so hard to break free from the bruises that golf ball eyes had left on her these past few years, and now even her friend.

She didn’t realize how her hands clenched into fists, until she felt her forearms strained from the effort. When she let her hands loose and looked down, the crimson and yellow flames looked up at her from the reflections, shimmering.

From the convenience store, she had wandered over to the famous sunset pond on campus. It was where everyone came, to let out their problems, let go of their past failures, refresh themselves.

Ara almost smiled at how appropriate it was. But then, she caught the pattering footsteps on the wooden steps behind her, before the call.

“Ara?”                                                                                                                                                 

She knew she shouldn’t have turned. Golf ball eyes didn’t smile at her with those heart shaped lips this time. Ara wondered if it was visible on her face, the swirling sunset raging in her mind.

“What brings you here?” Golf ball eyes asked, making his way down the rest of the steps and joining her at the edge of the wooden platform suspended above the pond.

“Just… ice cream craving at the dorm room.”

Ara halfheartedly showed him the convenience store bag.

“Nice. Yeah, Hyunshik and I were out of ramen, so we played rock paper scissors to see who had to go buy them and…”

Ara tried at least a little bit to maintain a polite listening pose, as she turned back to the stairs. She had to get out of there. As always.

“Ara, wait.”

It was so quiet. The campus was almost abnormally empty. Kyungsoo’s soft voice rang out unmistakably, just above the natural rhythm of the pond water.

“Kyungsoo, I have to go… the ice cream is gonna melt…”

“I’ll buy you another two, if I keep you that long. But I have something important to say.”

Ara grimaced. The stark sunset colors radiated behind him.

“What is it?”

“I owe you… an apology.”

This time, Ara really didn’t care if golf ball eyes noticed her bewildered frown or not.

“An apology for what?”

He heaved a sigh, biting his lip before continuing. The swirls of the sunset gleamed in those white irises, catching the glinting rays and colors and entrapping them there.

“Hyunshik… he’s been at me about it for as long as I can remember, I think. So, it’s really overdue. And I’m finally getting the chance now, thankfully. I’m really glad I ran into you tonight, and, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I’m sorry that I moved to your school and… took your hard-earned rank from you, and everything you worked for. It must have been frustrating beyond… my imagination.”

He met her eyes, those huge golf ball eyes not even blinking, as he spoke, not letting her any room to breathe.

“I never meant for that to happen to you. I didn’t even know it had to be that way. I just…”

Ara broke away from the unblinking eyes, white prominent in her head on top of the faint, swirling colors. She trailed her eyes elsewhere – the ground, the sunset, the pond – she just shook her head, exasperation sinking quickly like the sky.

“It’s not… You can’t just… I admit…”

She was stuttering. Nothing sensible formed in her mind. She didn’t want to look up and see what terrible expression those golf ball eyes could be making, and she certainly wasn’t prepared for this kind of abrupt apology. Did he even have the right to?

Before she knew it, Ara crouched to the ground, hugging her knees. She buried her face into the cocoon of her arms and the hair falling over her face. And she cried.

She sobbed loudly and uncontrollably all at once, exploding into the sunset and throwing the quiet into a tantrum.

“Ara? Ara… what…”

She faintly heard Kyungsoo’s panicked voice above her railing sobbing. The guy crouched down in front of her, putting his hands on her arms, trying to get her to look up.

“Ara, at least, let’s get you to sit on the stairs over there. Come on.”

Ara thought Kyungsoo half dragged her over to the wooden steps. One way or another, she sat there, golf ball eyes patting her back lightly, her sobs still obnoxiously loud and incoherent, her hands covering her face. The bag of ice cream tossed down somewhere.

“You’ve been holding it all in, haven’t you? Not telling anyone, how angry, and frustrated, and upset you were…”

He talked quietly and soothingly, running his hand up and down Ara’s back. Of all the people in the world, it had to be him. It had to be the main antagonist of her failures the last few years. The first witness of her breakdown, her defeat.

“You must really hate me, Ara.”

Without even thinking, Ara nodded. Sniffling and groaning.

“If I were you, I’d hate me too. But stupid me, dumb, brainless me, I didn’t figure that out. I was too caught up in my own emotions, I guess.”

Kyungsoo sighed again, pulling his hand away from Ara’s back. She heard him shifting. She didn’t dare look up. She was sure she was leaving heavy finger prints on her forehead, her dampened hands hard over her skin.

“But you know what’s funny? The reason you came to hate me. It’s because the first day I moved to our school, and you gave that speech before the midterms, you sort of… egged me on.”

The storm was slowly dying down. Ara pulled her hands away slightly, just so she could breathe. The crimson and yellow had seeped away, leaving cool, dark colors against a fading pink to mingle in the sky. She wiped at the stray tears running along her cheeks. She really wished she’d bought a box of tissues.

“I moved to Seoul to have a better chance at University, that’s true of course. I would’ve worked hard, in any predicament, but… it turned out, at my new school, a really pretty, confident girl was number one. And no one seemed to want to bother challenging her.”

Ara was calm enough not to interrupt golf ball eyes with her inconsistent sniffling. Putting her chin on her knees, she breathed in and out at the hollowness that followed her explosion, and let her ears do all the work, listening.

“I was stupid and selfish. I thought if I challenged you, beat you at your game, you’d notice me. What an , huh? And an arrogant one, at that. ”

Again, Ara didn’t mean to nod. She just did.

“All I can do is apologize, Ara. At this point, I don’t even know what I deserve. Maybe you should just, beat me, or yell at me, or… I don’t know what.”

When the pause took over briefly and Ara let out a sigh, she reprimanded herself for the single tear that fell. She was done with crying. She was done.

“Anything. Anything you want to do to me, to take your anger out. Just anything except, that you never want to see me again. Or you want me to, disappear from your life. Not that. Because, the other thing I’m as certain about as the fact that I needed to apologize… is that I like you a lot. I like you as much as you hate me. Maybe, even more.”

Ara cleared , trying her best to get rid of that lump. She tried her best not to let her voice quiver too much. It still managed to leave her lips and clash against the quiet pond, tolling.

“This is insane.”

She knew her voice was small, unsteady. He leaned forward to hear her better, but grimacing, she turned her head away. She couldn’t remember ever showing anyone, this side of her. This broken side.

“Even if… even if I accept all of what you just said, leading up to where we are now, there’s still… you’re still the enemy to me. It’s gone past just you and me now… you’ve gone past me and now you’ve affected someone around me… my roommate…”

Finally, it was his turn to sigh. To run his hand over his face, to not have an answer, to be caught completely off guard.

“I didn’t know you knew.”

Following the silence – a silence similar to when Ara first found herself there on the pond – she gathered back her senses. She straightened out her hair. She wiped her eyes away one last time. She reached out for the bag of ice cream. The tubs were squishy to the touch. The suffocating feeling of needing to run away from golf ball eyes, slowly grew from her toes.

“I’ll buy you two new ones. I said I’d do that.”

He gestured to the convenience bag.

“I can just stick them in the freezer when I get home. They’ll freeze back up.”

“But don’t you need it now? Right when you get home?”

It was a mistake that Ara turned toward him. She was just too caught in refusing, to remember her red, swollen eyes, possible finger marks deep and fleshy over her forehead and who knows where else. It took her a few precious seconds for her to realize. And then she snapped her head back in the opposite direction.

“Don’t worry. You’re still pretty.”

Ara bit her lip, holding her breath.

“You’re still pretty after you’ve cried. Honestly.”

The sky was darkening heavily. Street lights had come on around the campus. Ara gently stood up, feeling the strain in her stiff limbs. Straightening out her puffy face, she forced herself to meet those golf ball eyes.

“Alright. I’ll take up your offer to buy us new ice cream.”

Ara bought two different flavors this time, banana and coffee. Kyungsoo advised her to take all four of the tubs with her, and save the melted ones for later after they’d frozen back up. For himself and Hyunshik, he grabbed an assortment of ramen packages.

They didn’t have too much of a choice than to walk back in the same directions. The dorms were packed in like a carton of eggs. But fortunately, they walked in silence. Ara welcoming the light evening breeze, cooling her puffy eyes and cheeks. She had no idea what she’d tell Yoonjo when she got back, how to explain the new and melted ice cream tubs. The whole evening was a jumble of events she couldn’t make any sense of. 

At the parting point in the path, the silence broke.

“Ara?”

In the dim light, those wide, white irises sparkled like two miniature moons. Somehow, the antsy need to run away from golf ball eyes had subdued itself in Ara’s heels, leaving her with an experience she found odd. Finding ease in the quiet companionship of Do Kyungsoo.

“What do I need to do to make up for everything, pay for everything I did?”

It was an honest, confused question. A difficult, loaded question. And Ara could only shake her head in response.

“Ara, I need you to answer that for me… just that…”

Her voice felt far away from the extended silence, but she let it out nonetheless, interrupting him.

“It’s true that you started this, all of this, but it was never something anyone could… pay for.”

Kyungsoo nodded. He ran his hand through his hair. The sound of a noisy crowd, coming their way from the dorms, didn’t help. For once, his usually focused eyes faltered, unsteady.

“What if… we started everything over? Like a blank, white sheet of paper. From the beginning. You, and me.”

There was a reserved sort of politeness to his stance, that didn’t match the unsteady whirl of confusion in his eyes, his voice. Ara’s own body, just felt exhausted.

“Kyungsoo… It’s… too many things at once. Everything is jumbled up. I need some time to think… About me, about you, about… just everything.”

The crowd was getting closer. The quiet, almost solitude they’d had at the pond, wasn’t there anymore, and by default, any room for Ara to weaken any more. Nearly every personal barrier she had built around herself had broken down that evening. It was time to rebuild it, bit by bit.

“Yeah. Okay,” Kyungsoo hesitantly mouthed.

The way golf ball eyes looked back at her, white irises still full of apology, overwhelmed her with the thick emotions from the pond. And even though it would be easier to just never see the guy again, even though it would end so quickly if she just blotted him out from her life, she knew she couldn’t live with that.

“Get home safely, Ara.”

“You too.”

Golf ball eyes turned and walked away first. Not looking back, just slowly trudging toward the overlapping buildings. Ara could tell, his back and shoulders carried a lot of weight.

The weekend passed by in a blur. Appeasing Yoonjo. Ara, leaving her dorm over one weekend more than she has probably ever done, in her college career.

They had fun. Just the two girls. No studying, no homework. Just trying to get away from life for a few precious days: restaurants, cafes, clubs, friends.

But it was back to the school days too quickly. At least, for Ara.

Yoonjo seemed to get over things faster. But then again, as she explained herself, it had been a clean rejection. There was nothing more for her to pursue. She couldn’t remember who had actually coined the term. It was overly used. But it was still true all the same: there were simply more fish in the sea. The way Yoonjo handled the whole situation almost made Ara reproof herself, for taking it more seriously than necessary, for blaming golf ball eyes more than necessary.

And then, it finally came for Ara to spill to her roommate. Yoonjo was full of outward energy and emotion in a way that Ara was not, and the way she took in Ara’s story – the past couple of years of Do Kyungsoo – reflected her roommate’s carrot-orange-hair personality perfectly.

“What kind of awful disaster is this? Yoo Ara, you poor, poor thing, why didn’t you tell me earlier! Just look at what a terrible friend you’ve made me now.”

Yoonjo’s advice made Ara’s days that much more bearable. Being the honest, emotion-driven person she was, Ara’s roommate’s perspective was simple, unlike Ara’s.

“You have every right to accept or refuse his apology. And he said he owed you, he said he would do anything. Which means whatever you decide, he has to abide. So it’s all up to your decision, Ara. Just empty your mind, and see what you want. Don’t think too hard about it. Just go with what you feel.”

Ara didn’t even dream of telling her the other part of Kyungsoo’s confessions.

A/N:

Don't go away! Part 5.2 is right on your tail!