Naeun enters the café with a blank expression on her face. unsure of whether or not to curl up into a smile, she leaves it as a straight line and her eyes match her uncertainty. With no idea to why she’s there, or why she took a second train for thirty minutes when the café was a smile ten minute walk from the first station, she sits down in the far corner of the building and sets her eyes on the monochrome floor.

With a heavy heart, she slumps into the leather chair, aimlessly staring at the menu but not bothering to pick it up and order because despite being in a place that served food, she had no appetite at all.

She allows herself to ignore her surroundings – the hushed conversations, the tempting smell of sweet delicacies and frothy milkshakes, and the never-ending sound of coffee makers steaming and whistling. This was the only place where she could truly be alone, but never feel alone.
The only thing she focuses her mind on is the ringing of the door chime as it opens and closes, customer after customer, but it suddenly it stops and she has no choice but to look up, frustrated that it broke her concentration.

She watches as a customer enters and falls in line to order, but he is not what catches her attention. Truthfully, it is the lingering figure hanging around the door that her eyes were drawn to, unmoving and staring at her with crestfallen eyes that held no surprise.
opens slightly, but no words come to her and instead, her heartbeats are lodged in . However, her heart beats his name once and she’s unable to swallow it away.

I could never escape you, no matter how much I try.

She closes her eyes tightly shut to check if he was simply just a hallucination, but as she opens her eyes she is no longer sitting in the café.

//

As Kim Myungsoo entered the train, Naeun frantically looked towards her left and right only in dismay to see the empty seats beside her.

“Please don’t sit by me, please don’t sit by me, please don’t-“ she could only pray, but of course she never received the answer she wanted.

Myungsoo greeted her with his signature ‘painfully-handsome’ smile that she had more than once confessed to liking during a before-class gossip with her girlfriends, and took the seat right next to her. “Well, look who we have here- hey, Naeun!”

She forced a smile and wrinkled her nose as she breathed in his perfume. “What the hell did you spray yourself with- a skunk?”

He laughed and placed an arm around the back of her seat. She immediately leaned in forward and avoided any physical contact with him completely. “It was a present.” He noticed her moving away and smirked. “Relax, I’m not that bad!”
 

“You were with Sungyeol when you saw me last week, and you laughed at me for no apparent reason. The other day, we accidentally met on the same bus and you wouldn’t quit kicking my seat. You-“

“You have an endless grudge against me, don’t you?” he whispered, neither trying to be funny not serious.

Naeun stayed silent, knowing he knew the answer just as well as she did. “What stop are you getting off at?”

He laughed as she didn’t answer. “Yours. You’re heading to that café by Lizzy’s house, right?”

She turned around with slightly open, “How the hell did you know that?”

Scoffing, he pulled his arm off of her seat and leaned forward with them resting on his legs. He looked at her from the side, but she refused to meet his eyes and turned her head. “Son Naeun, you’re so predictable.”

“I hope you’re not a stalker. That would make you so much worse-“ she rolled her eyes, “are you really getting off at the same stop?”

He could only laugh at her. “Seriously, how much of a bad guy do you think I am?” Without hesitation, she opened to answer but he frowned at her. “No, please don’t answer that. I’m meeting someone at the same café. I’m not a stalker.”

Naeun felt the weight on her shoulders lighten one second, but lean down on her again another second. “What a coincidence.”

Myungsoo stood up and placed his hands in his pockets, whistling a tune familiar but also very unfamiliar to her. “Might as well walk there together then.” He smiled down at her and she stared at the train door as the world outside began to slow down.

“Promise me you’ll leave me alone afterwards.” She murmured through narrow eyes at him, to which he just smiled and nodded.

“I hold no promise at all, Naeun.”

“And you wonder why I think so less of you…”

Myungsoo was the first one to step off as the train halted completely. Naeun lagged behind, but she was only hesitant to follow his steps, somewhat suspicious of him.

Immediately, the crowd began to surround them and with her being a few steps behind, she was almost engulfed by the walking figures until Myungsoo painfully squeezed his way back to her.

“Son Naeun, you’re so predictable.” He whispered the same words again, his tone different from before; gentler, softer, kinder in Naeun’s ears. He crouched down, seeming to be the only one not bothered by the countless travelers shuffling their way around them, and held out his hand.

She could only stare at it, uncertain to whether or not she should take it.

He answered for her though. “You’d be a fool to not take my hand, little Naeun.”

Her name rang in her ears, the way he said it- it reminded her of the tiny box of memories she held in a locked cage in the back of her mind, it completely erased everything she thought of him at that moment and slowly, began to unlock it.

She took his hand and he pulled her up, holding her so close to him that she didn’t have a second to pull away like before. Without words, she looks down and swallows her angry thoughts of him.

The crowd began to die down in a blur, leaving them standing completely still until the platform was clear enough for them to move. He too had no words for his actions, but a smirk that played along his lips told him he had no regret.

He took her hand once again, this time to drag her out of the station. “I’m not actually meeting anyone.”

Naeun didn’t respond. She found it the hardest to reply to him when he dropped his unreal mask .

“It was my birthday a few months ago and I actually really wanted to talk to you then, but…things happened. And today, it just felt like the right time to get up and go, so I was on my way to your house but then-“ he laughed, to himself, “you were just sitting there and it seemed…it seemed like…”

Naeun tugged on his hand and stopped him from walking any further out of the doors, she wouldn’t meet his eyes and shook her head. “Seemed like what? You’d ruin a day for me without you, the most annoying little-“

She was so close to punching him, he could feel it, and the only way he could save himself was to close the wide gap between them and lean into her. And if he could just lean in closer, their lips could have touched and he would have given into the temptation of her.

Instead, he left space for her to breathe and let go of his hold on her. “It seemed like fate. Remember when we’d take this train when we were young? You’d be the one pulling me out of the crowd, you’d hold my hand all the way until we were out of this damned station, and then you’d ask me for a piggyback?”

Naeun, as usual, did not want to answer. “No. Yes. No.” she clenched her hand into a fist. “I have to go-“

“You remember, but you just don’t want anything to do with me or the past, right?”

His voice echoed in her ears in its sad tone, something she had never heard from him- it seemed unnatural to her that he would let his guard down for the first time in so many years. This Kim Myungsoo was unheard of to the rest of the world, except for Naeun.

“I’ll see you later.” She lied, walking past him before he could reach for her again.

He did nothing but watched her as she left.

//

“Naeun, please-“ he rushes to her table and ignores the people staring at him as he walked past.

Unable to snap out of it, she continues staring into nothingness.

“Please listen to me?”

“Are you going to be a di-“

“No.”

“Will you be gone from my sight in five minutes”

“No.”

“Will you stop smelling like a skunk?”

He didn’t expect her to make a joke so easily, so the serious mask he had put on before entering the café completely wore off. He laughs and coughs it away in a second when he realises she’s not joining in.

“Do I really smell that bad?” he smiles weakly in an attempt to brighten up the mood.

She nods, “I hope it really was a skunk and not some knock-off perfume one of your girlfriends got you.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Right, sure you don’t.”

“You think I’m a player?”

She nods with a dry smile painted on her face. “Yes. And an idiot. A very big idiot.”

Myungsoo sighs and gives in, “Let me say what I have to say and I’ll go.”

Naeun thinks before she replies. She shakes her head at him and leans her arms on the table. He watches her carefully, trying to figure her out but finding it hard to as she placed another wall between them. “If a random person came up to me and asked me what I thought of you, nine years ago I would have said ‘I would not be Son Naeun without my Kim Myungsoo’ which basically means I thought the world of you at one point. If you ask me the same question now, what do you think my answer would be?” She does not wait for him to answer and he does not even consider it. “I would have nothing to say at all. Nothing, and I wouldn’t even know why.”

Myungsoo’s lips quiver. “Naeun-“

“I try to pinpoint where exactly it all went wrong and how a friendship like Naeun and Myungsoo’s could have self-destructed. I get nothing, Myungsoo, nothing again. We drifted the most in high school, when we were set to be apart, and you made other friends. We just simply stopped talking. Truthfully, it felt like I had lost my Myungsoo years before that, and I don’t even know how!” Tears regretfully begin to trail down her cheek, and she is angry and frustrated at herself for allowing them to break her.

“How did we become strangers?”

Myungsoo takes a deep breath and blinks hard once. “You’re nineteen now, you’re not so much of a fool as you thought you were before.” he lets a smile hint in his voice. “I’m sorry, I really am. I realised that I wanted to grow up fast and have everyone as my friend, or someone below me…which I understand as the reason why you began to dislike me so much. But this year, when I thought of you on the 13th of March, I finally realised what I lost. In the midst of forcing myself to be someone, I lost the one person who was a puzzle piece in the wonderworks of
Kim Myungsoo.”

Naeun wipes her tears with the back of her hand. “I want to so badly go back and kick you where it hurts, just so you would notice it earlier.”

He laughs and reaches for her hand. “If you forgive me now, I’ll owe you the world.”

She cracks a smile. “I haven’t said I’ll forgive you yet.”

This is when a light bulb appears on the top of his head and he jumps up and down in rising excitement as he thinks of himself as a genius. “Come on.” he says, standing up while still holding her hand.

Confused, she raises her eyebrow at him. “And where are we going?”

He smiles down at the girl who had always been with him. “To a place where we can fix things. We have a bad past, that we both know, but it doesn’t mean we can’t have a good future.”

Naeun takes his hand, willingly this time, and with just the desire to return to her childhood deep in her heard, follows him out of the café.

He drags her to the train station and walks in, but doesn’t go any further than just beyond the entrance. He leads her right to the middle of the area and takes her hand. She watches him with silent eagerness. He begins to lean in, eyes open to watch her reactions, and smiles when he sees no objection.

“Naeun. Just being here means there’s a chance, you know, for us.”

Myungsoo brings his face closer to hers, slowly and steadily as he still gripped her hand, not wanting to lose the moment. The tiny space between them in which he had previously left on purpose was closed when he leaned in to meet his lips with hers.

xxxxxxx

the end.

oh myungsoo you are so shippable with so many girls.