“I’m proud of him,” Yunho said with a contented smirk on his face. “He knows what he wants in life.”

‘Unlike me,’ I mourned silently. ‘He is the antithesis of me.’

I curled up on my bed that night, totally incapable of sleeping. Haunting thoughts ran through my mind, thoughts that I had long promised myself of forgetting. The image of Yoochun standing above me made my heart quicken, and not in a good way. The sorrowful reminiscence of watching a large bird hiding behind tree leaves while chirping a low and woeful song in its lonely seclusion made my eyes close in fear of tears. The memory of my crumbling friendship with Changmin, who only wanted to call another human being his friend, triggered the escape of several discreet sniffles. Kangta, who was subconsciously trapped in the cycle of competition, reminded me of materialistic people caught in their materialistic needs, and I shed a few tears of pity for him.

And now this. This, of all things, to add to my list of regrets.

Yunho was married to the most perfect woman in the world. Yunho had the most perfect son in the world that he could call his own. Yunho had a perfect happy family that did not need any more people. If Yunho was a carbon atom, he already had four strong covalent bonds around him: I was an unstable electron, a mere piano student, able to bounce out of the orbital at any time just as long as the electrical forces allowed it.

All in all, I was nothing to him, or so I thought.

```

I was still in a befuddled daze the next morning, and it was a wonder that I did not burst into the tears the moment I saw Yunho smiling vibrantly at me when he shook my awake.

He was excited for my performance later that day—utterly excited, may I add. There was no nervousness in his face, not a hint of it at all, and his steps were lighter than before. The brightness of his smile put the sun to shame. It seemed as if he was fully confident that I would play perfectly fine and dazzle the audiences. Like that would ever happen.

There was a problem, though; there was a glitch, an overwritten code, a big ugly knot.

He did not know that he had hurt me and he did not know that he had intensified the pain that was eating me from the inside. Don’t get me wrong, he knew that there was something bothering me; he just did not know that he himself played a major part in causing it by trying to help. It was like putting alcohol on an open cut; no matter how much cleaner the cut would become or how much quicker the cut would heal, putting the alcohol on it would sting ten times more painfully than being inflicted with the wound in the first place.

“You ready for your performance?” he asked cheerily while we were eating breakfast in our hotel room.

“Don’t remind me,” I mumbled, staring at the French fries lying rather peacefully on my plate. Ironically, I envied those French fries. They looked content, ready to accept their hardly nutritional fate.

“Eat,” Yunho ordered, pointing to my food. “You must eat in order to play well.”

Mechanically, I took a fork in my right hand and stabbed at a fry, nibbling at the ends a little bit before swallowing. “I’m not hungry.”

“Oh, but you will be,” he argued. “And by the time that happens, you will regret not being able to eat when you had the chance.”

I ignored him and sulked in my own little bubble, doing the best I could to eat the foreign food placed in front of me.

My whole family had already called my hotel beforehand to wish me the best of luck, my email inbox was filled with support and encouragement, and still I was not the least bit moved. What’s the point in lifting your hopes when you know all would be in vain?

“Come,” Yunho snapped me out of my thought. “It’s time for you to start warming up.”

If my heart was a marathon runner, it just about won first prize in the race.

Shaking, I stood up and clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering. ‘Great, NOW I become nervous.’ If only nervousness came after a performance and not before.

“Your assigned practice room is on the first floor,” Yunho instructed. “Room 166, if I am not mistaken. Either way, you just enter the door where you name is posted. Have fun and good luck!”

I only nodded before grabbing my performance suit, leaving with absolutely no trace of a smile on my face. It was not because I hated Yunho or felt bitter towards his wife and kid, not at all, no. I just could not bring myself to smile; my lips were just too heavy.

Trudging down the stairs, I touched the cement wall and traced a broken heart onto it with my second finger.

“Jaejoong!” a familiar voice called out from behind me once I made it to the first floor.

I turned around with weary eyes and my lips twitched. “Kangin,” I acknowledged, as I saw the man walking towards me wearing a striped polo shirt.

“I’m heading towards my practice room,” he explained. “I assume you are as well.”

Able to understand fragments of his English sentence, I nodded to say that I understood. “I second.”

“I’m playing first,” Kangin chuckled. “Are you nervous?”

I nodded again. “Very. You?”

“Yes, of course,” he answered immediately, scrunching his face up a little bit. “Who wouldn’t be? I don’t want to lose to Leeteuk again.”

It was my turn to scrunch up my face. “It okay to lose. Life go on.”

“I know, but wouldn’t life be better if I won?”

‘It would,’ I noted. ‘But it is a superfluous detail.’ “Why you want win him so bad?” I inquired out of pure curiosity.

Kangin inhaled slowly and then exhaled. “I want to show him that I can do my best.”

My eyes lit up in knowingness. “You want impress him!”

“Sort of,” he shrugged.

“You like him?” I asked innocently.

Taken aback, Kangin blinked quickly, and I suppressed a giggle at his large fumbling form.

“Never mind,” I saved him from further embarrassment. “I need to practice. Good luck on your performance!”

My raccoon-like friend smiled gently and waved a goodbye. “Good luck on your performance as well. I’ll be rooting for you!”

I found my practice room at the end of the hall, and as Yunho predicted, my name was posted on the door. I entered and found a medium-sized black piano situated at the corner of a large studio as big as a ballet studio. ‘Pity,’ I frowned. ‘The piano should be in the middle.’ Nonetheless, I strode towards the instrument and some of the keys as if afraid of the piano.

Warming up, for me, is a necessity, since performing with ice cold fingers is not at all fun. It was like stretching before going for a run: it prepared you for the hardship that awaited you and prevented strains.

Of course, warming up is also a dangerous activity. When you stretch too hard, you may in fact pull a muscle, making the rest of your run quite painful. Similarly, if I hit a wrong note or play a passage incorrectly during the warm-up, the mistake would then be reflected ten times as ostentatiously during the real performance. How, you ask? Well, anxiety of course! Once you know that a slip-up could happen, anxiety builds up within you and eventually everything would eventually just blow up in your face.

It just so happened that I played a wrong note.

On the other side of the room was a little television, where competitors could watch what was happening on stage before they themselves walked up to perform.

I eyed the device for a minute and then tensed when I saw Kangin walk on stage. He was dressed in a spiffy suit and had his hair gelled just so, and I watched as he started his performance with a nervous aura around him. His movements were cold, his attempts at musical passion looked forced, and thus his music was dead.

I pitied the poor man. Already I knew that this was not the feeling that music should be like. Music should not be icy or strained or fake; it should be expressed from the deepest pit of your soul, filled with all the warmth and love you could muster.

Then I snickered when I guessed that I probably sounded just like Kangin, perhaps even worse considering my faltering technique.

It was then when I realized what the conservatory had done to me. I no longer played music like I enjoyed it, despite the fact that I hit more correct notes or accurately followed the written crescendos and diminuendos. The conservatory turned playing piano into a chore—something to do for ten hours a day, seven days a week.

I looked down at the piano keys and let my body frame relax. The clock read ten minutes until show time and I deemed myself ready to start changing into the tuxedo I brought along.

I saw Kangin walk off the stage after his performance and I applauded him despite the fact that nobody was there with me. Then I heard a knock on the door and felt my heart clench with dread.

“Come in,” I called out.

The door opened, revealing a young blonde woman with cherry red lipstick. “It is time for your performance,” she said in English, her French accent as thick as the icing on a gingerbread house.

I only nodded as I followed her backstage. ‘Time to show them who’s boss,’ I mentally coached myself. ‘Make Yunho proud. Bring honor to the Kim family. Make my whole trip to Belgium worth it!’ I stood at the entrance to the stage and exhaled sharply.

“Kim Jaejoong,” my name was called.

I squared my shoulders and smoothed out the wrinkles of my suit. I stepped out of the blackness of behind the stage and held my breath when the audience gave a polite applause. ‘You can do this, Jaejoong.’

Positioning the piano bench and sitting just so that my forearm was parallel to the keys, I inhaled and gulped down my dry saliva. My right hand lifted onto the monochromatic surface, and my finger pressed down into the first note. My program had officially started (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLHU2ES51uw).

It was all going fine at first, all according to my well thought of plan. There were no funny notes, slips, or any sort of mistakes. That was, until, two minutes in.

A wrong note. A big fat ugly wrong note. The same one I played in the practice room.

Things went downhill from then on.

Nowadays, I would scoff. One wrong note—just ONE wrong note—and then I gave up with the rest of the program. ‘How stupid could I get?’ I would chide myself. Then a millisecond later I would remember how difficult it must have been to recover from such a blow on stage in front of hundreds of people.

Oddly enough, it was at that moment, the moment of that one wrong note, which made my inner hermit crab wake up from its narrow stupor to realize the importance of turning left and right. The hermit crab finally opened its half-closed eyes to its widest and for the first time in its life, it steered away from its goal. It was not giving up—not a bit of it!—it was just trying to succeed via another, less tedious route, and was taking its first baby steps at a fulfilling life filled with tricky curves and sharp corners. It was starting to free its mind.

My inner hermit crab understood the situation I was going through. It understood the trauma I endured while I was still at the conservatory; it understood the disappointment I felt knowing that the career of a concert pianist would never be the career for me; and it understood the pain I suffered knowing that Yunho would never be mine. At that moment, it understood the panic and despair I felt after that one wrong note. As a result, it came up with a solution by teaching me life’s most difficult lesson.

My inner hermit crab told me to turn around, to make a whole one hundred and eighty degree turn: it told me to let go.

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Yay, I updated!
Sorry about not updating before. My computer sort of broke down :'(
But my baby's okay now, so it's all good!!!
Oh, and there will be some more Yunjae action in the next chapter.
I have already finished this story, but I am having troubles with the ending (as usual). As I said before, it is a bittersweet ending, but it's leaning more towards the happy side, so don't worry ;)
Yunjae forever xoxo