Chapter Seven

I was not expecting to hear from Luhan again, after the way I treated him and broke his heart, but on the morning of the first day of my semester break, I find him standing outside my front door.

“Luhan?” I ask, wondering if my lack of sleep is causing me to hallucinate. “Is that you?”

“Oh Sehun. I’m deeply insulted that I’m so unimportant to you, you actually forgot how I look like after just two weeks of not seeing me.”

It definitely sounds like Luhan. I rub my eyes and shrug. “Sorry. I just woke up.”

“Can I come in? I need to talk to you about something.”

I turn back to look inside the house. My parents are at the dining table; my father busy with the newspapers, and my mother pouring coffee for him. “I don’t know,” I say to Luhan. “Mum and dad are both home and –“

“It’s important, Sehun. Please,” he pleads. I bite my lip, then nod. Almost instantly, I watch his expression light up. I hope he meant it when he said it was serious. My parents will definitely not be happy.

“Just for a little while,” I say before walking into the house, leaving the door open for him. I hear it closing after a moment, prompting my mum to put down her coffee pot and look at me. “Luhan’s here,” I tell her before she could ask.

My dad drops his spoon, and it clatters against the ceramic bowl he was eating his porridge from. I don’t know what to make of the silence. In a way, they aren’t immediately chasing Luhan out of the house, which is a good thing, but on the other hand, they are probably just thinking of the best way to tell him to leave without sounding rude.

“Sehun.”

“It’s just going to take a few minutes, mum,” I assure her.

“Okay. Fine.”

I don’t wait for her to change her mind, and instead drag Luhan to my room quickly. He surveys the room, looking around like he hasn’t been there before. Of course, my room has changed quite a bit over the last few months; new curtains, new bedding, new desk, just to name a few. My parents are very keen believers in throwing out the old and bringing in new things to signify a new beginning, so as soon as I got back from the hospital, they made me redecorate my room. I discarded a lot of trash I didn’t even know I had.

Some things, however, I couldn’t bear to throw.

“You still keep the flowers?” Luhan asks when his gaze lands on a collection of vases with withering and dried up flowers in them, and realizes that those are the ones he gave to me.

I smile sadly. “Yeah.” Those were the times. But surely he didn’t come here to reminisce about our time together. Cautiously, I remind him. “You said you have something important to talk to me about?”

“I do. Actually, Sehun, I –“ he stops abruptly, like he’s trying to think if he should continue.

“What?” I prompt. The first thought that pops into my mind is: relapse. Oh God, please don’t let him be sick. His skin is a pale milky color but his cheeks are tinted pink, probably due to being under the sun earlier. He looks healthy, more or less the same as he always is. But that’s what makes cancer deadly. You can’t normally tell if a person is suffering from it just by judging how well they look on the outside.

“Do you really have to look like that?” Luhan groans. He makes a gesture with his hand. “No one is dying.”

I straighten up and exhale in relief. He’s alright. After taking a second to compose myself, I ask him again. “So what is it that you want to tell me?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, Sehun, and you know what? I don’t like how you dumped me just like that. It’s kind of unfair to me, don’t you think?”

And it took him this long to come up with that conclusion? “I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not here to hear you say you’re sorry. You’ve said that before already.”

“I don’t know what else I can say.”

“You can make up for it, more or less.”

“And how will I do that?”

Luhan’s dark brown eyes are fixed on me. He narrows them and crosses his arms. “I think it’s only fair, after what you’ve done, that I get to do the same to you.”

A minute of silence passes by as my brain takes its own sweet time to digest his words. Either my comprehension is becoming worse, or he is not making any sense. “What?” It’s the only word I’m capable of producing in my state of confusion.

“I propose that you spend another ten days with me as if we’re still in a relationship; as if we’ve never broken up. And once the ten day timer is up, I get to dump you.”

It sounds so silly that I actually laugh. I was expecting him to do the same, and probably yell ‘Gotcha!” or “Just kidding!”, or something along those lines, but he doesn’t. He continues to stare at me, and that stare is hardening into a glare.

“You’re being serious?” I gulp.

He sighs in exasperation. “Yes, and I thought it was a pretty good plan too.”

I shake my head. “It’s stupid,” I say blatantly. Who in the world goes to their ex and asks to get back together just so they could break up again? I point this out to Luhan, hoping that he’ll see how crazy his proposal is. He’s usually not so naïve. “It’ll be like reading the same book twice. You already know how it ends.”

“Consider it an alternate ending to a story you love so much, but is terribly disappointing because you don’t enjoy how it ends,” he says. “Haven’t you ever read a book with a lousy ending before? There’s no closure. The aim of an alternate ending is to provide a closure so you won’t keep feeling like you want to murder the author.”

“I don’t really read fiction,” I admit.

“That’s not the point here!” he grunts. “The point is that I’m not getting any closure because our story ended so suddenly and not in the way I imagined. It’s very frustrating. I can’t move on like this.”

I glance at the door, wondering if my parents are secretly eavesdropping and if they hear everything. “I don’t know, Luhan,” I say. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

“How hard is it, really? You’re not the one whose heart is broken.”

Ouch. That stings a lot more than it should. “I’ve shed my fair share of tears too, okay?” I retort defensively. “You think I’m not upset at how things turned out? I don’t want this either. You’re not the only one who has a heart.”

“I’m not saying you don’t have a heart. I’m just saying that it’s covered up with so much ice, you can’t break it even with a sledge hammer.”

I wince and turn away. I can’t look at him anymore, not without all the painful memories rushing back into my mind. They aren’t all bad memories, but the beautiful ones are the worse. They remind me of how much we used to have; the happiness and the love – and it hurts so much more because I know we can never go back to being the same again.

“I’m leaving.”

“Now?” Did he seriously just come over to remind me what a dickhead I have been?

“You said ‘just for a little while’. And ‘just a little while’ is over.”

“I didn’t say how long that is.”

Luhan shakes his head and smiles wistfully. “Really? Now you want me to stay?”

“I…” I don’t know.

“Don’t bother, Sehun. I know when it’s my cue to leave.” With a shrug, he heads past me for the door and lets himself out. I stay frozen right where I am, even as I hear his footsteps down the hallway, and his ‘goodbye’ to my parents, and finally the opening and closing of the front door.

What the hell just happened?

“So, did you agree to it?” Kai asks me after I finish telling him what Luhan said to me that morning. He had listened attentively like he was listening to an audio book about two star-crossed lovers. I guess one of the good things about him was that he was as good a listener as he was a talker.

“I didn’t really give him an answer,” I say, even though I’m sure Luhan took my dilly-dallying as a no. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Did he say his reasoning behind this?”

I explain it to Kai, who nods like he actually understands Luhan’s point of view.

“That’s fair,” he says. “Given the way you treated him, he’s kinda entitled to this request.”

“But it’s so stupid.”

“Hey, what if he’s behaving weird like this because your break up came so suddenly that it sent him into depression or something? Don’t you feel responsible?”

“You’re not helping!”

Kai shrugs. “I’m just saying you can go along with it. Doesn’t mean you have to fall back in love. Just try to make up for your poor decision-making skills by making him happy. Ten days aren’t that long.”

“But what if someone sees us together? I’ve worked too hard to get back my reputation, and I’m not about to ruin it again.”