Fast forward to that night, when Sungjong joined Heejin in her room. Sungjong walked into the room, leaving the door ajar to avoid any weird misunderstanding with the other guys. After Heejin joined the household, everyone was on the lookout for anything to gossip about.

"Hanbin is holding a formal dinner next week to commemorate you, and your joining into... whatever this is." Sungjong flung his hands around for a dramatic effect, looking at her for a reaction, but the latter doesn't even look up from her laptop. Sungjong sighed. "Hey, are you listening or what?"

Heejin finally looked up, a confused look on her face. "Yeah, I was. Dinner. Go on, I'm listening."

Sungjong momentarily wonders why girls are able to do that, but not guys, but quickly shakes the idle thought off. "We want to go shopping for clothes tomorrow, do you want to tag along?"

Heejin nodded. "Sure. Just us, right?"

Sungjong thought for a moment, and then, "There'll probably be a few extra guys, but don't sweat it."

After a long silence (the comfortable one, not the awkward one), Heejin asked, "Did you get a party?"

Sungjong smiled slightly. "Nope."

"Then why am I getting one? What's different, timing?"

"No," Sungjong paused, "you've probably heard this a million times, but girls are rare in our circle. So when a girl joins us, she is made known to everybody, like a precious gem or something."

"It's pretty ist." Heejin commented.

"I never thought of it like that. But now that I think about it, yeah, it is. You know what, whatever it is, I'm glad you're here. You'll do much good for Sunggyu, at least."

"Why Sunggyu?"

"He's our leader, always taking everything as his responsibility, always blaming himself. Even with your fiancé..." Sungjong's voice trailed off, realizing what he brought up. "I'm sorry, forget I said that. My point is, your coming here is really symbolically an acceptance of his apology. For the incident."

"It's cool, you can talk about him. I'm sure you guys were affected too. Anyway, I'm glad I can help around here. For a second I felt like I was just living with a group of guys who help pay my education fees." Heejin smiled, her upper lip lifted slowly, like the tension.

"I didn't say that wasn't the case." Sungjong commented, playing. 

"Yah!" Heejin picked up the pillow closest to her, throwing it to Sungjong's face.

The latter whined, throwing it back, and soon enough, it became a pillow fight, and the two laughed as they hit each other, until Heejin stopped to sneeze.

Sungjong smiled and took a last hit, followed by saying, "I win!" Heejin just rolled her eyes. Sungjong just smiles, noticing the way her eyes are turned into slits when she smiles, and her eye-smile is more epic than internationally famous gang member, Tiffany, and how she has a feminine flair to everything she does. What he doesn't notice, though, is Woohyun looking at them from the gap of the door. 

Strangely, Woohyun doesn't mention it the next day when they go out. They have breakfast first; the cook had whipped up kimchi stew for dinner the night before and reheated the leftover to eat with rice, and some radish. They move out of the house at 10.00 to meet up with Hanbin, Kevin, Hoya and Dongwoo.

As their car rolled up in front of a mall, Heejin frowned. "The heck. It's closed."

"Yeah." Sunggyu replied a-matter-of-factly. "Your point?"

"How are we going to shop for clothes if it's closed?" Heejin asked, and just then, a row of neatly and uniformly dressed staff lined out in front of the entrance.

"We booked the place for today, silly. It's closed for us." Hoya chuckled, and coincidentally because he sat beside her in the car, he could ruffle her hair. Heejin frowned even more, grumbling about how it took forever to do her hair that morning.

As they filed out of the car, Heejin asked, still moody, "