Soojung runs her hand through her hair as she looks around her room. All she could see is the white wall. There’re not much things in her room, and she wonders if her room is always that empty. She doesn’t know. She feels like it’s the same, but then when she looks back, she realises things are really changing now. She’s only left with her bed and a closet and that’s it. “We don’t need the bed and the closet,” her father once said to her. “They’re already there.” She doesn’t need to ask to know what ‘there’ refers to.

She’s glad that winter break has already started because that means lesser time to be with him. She doesn’t get to meet him more often, to see at his face and his smile, to listen to his voice and his laugh, to touch him, which is good because she thinks it’ll help her to move on with a life that he isn’t involved in. But it —because that’s not what she wants to do, that’s not what she wants—what she wants is to stay and tell him that she misses him so bad and she loves him very much.

But, she can’t.

And even when Myungsoo said to her ‘We can try’, she’s still questioning herself will it work. What will happen when she’s there and he’s here? Maybe it’ll work at first, but how about later? And as much as she believes him, things that happened change her mind in a split second. It’s just to be someone that has the habit of overthinking things instead of just going with the flow and see what happens next. But it’s Soojung we’re talking about here, and she really loves to overthink even though it kills her from inside out.

She heaves a deep sigh before she gets up from her bed and that’s when she accidentally kicks the Rubik’s cube that Jongin gave to her. She picks it up from the floor, looking at it for a few seconds before she puts it into her bag pack. She sighs again and when her watch beeps, telling her that it’s already six in the evening, a teardrop falls from her left eye.

+++

Soojung puts her hands around the coffee cup, feeling the heat transferring into her body through her skin. She takes a good look around the café; the same café that Myungsoo had found her doing her homework there, the same café that he showed her his ridiculous magic trick. She smiles a little, counting how much days have passed since that night. An eternity, maybe? She doesn’t know.

“I’m sorry I’m late.” The chair in front of her is now occupied and she has to suppress her laugh looking at the sweaty, panting guy. “Did you run all the way here?” she asks and he nods. “I overslept.”

Soojung finally laughs, thinking how fast he ran here because he’s really sweating and it’s snowing. He then calls the waiter, and precisely 5 minutes after that, his order has arrived. He digs in his cookies, and Soojung might be thinking he’s starving if she doesn’t know that he’s such a big eater and always hungry. Soojung smiles, and he wonders why.

“What?” he asks, his eyebrows raised high. “Do you miss me that much that you can’t even tear your gaze on me?” his blank face is now replaced with a playful smirk, and usually Soojung would threat him to throw away anything that’s close to her to him, but not this time. She shakes her head instead and this time, he’s the one who laughs. “Okay, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?” he pushes his plate forward before he completely focuses on her.

“Nothing’s wrong.” She shrugs.

He raises his eyebrows again. “You know what, I know one thing about women.” He says and before he could continue, Soojung cuts him off. “That they’re not men?”

He sighs. “Okay, two things.” He rolls his eyes. “When women say nothing is wrong, it means eeeeevveeerything is wrong.” He spreads his arms wide, showing her what he means by everything. “Mind to tell me? Well, you do have to tell me because that’s what we agreed in our friendship contract.”

Soojung feels her chest tightens and it feels like there’re rocks on both of her shoulders. She then finds that one of her weaknesses is probably Jongin’s pleading eyes. She takes a few deep breaths, and Jongin waits patiently. And when she’s ready, she says, “I guess this is the last time I’d be seeing you.”

Jongin takes some moments to finally digest those 10 words in, and then he laughs, but it sounds wrong. “Soojung, if you’re trying to be funny, then stop it, alright? It’s not fun—“

“I’m seriously serious right now.” Soojung says, cutting him off for the second time and silence engulfs them for a few minutes. Soojung doesn’t talk, so does Jongin. The only thing that’s exchanged between them is only the stare they give to each other. Jongin’s dying to talk, to say something, but every time he opens his mouth, nothing comes out.

‘When’ is the first word he says after getting lost in his thought. Soojung musters up a smile that’s not reaching the eyes before she replies, “Soon.”

“When?” he asks again, searching for the exact answer.

And when she tells him the exact when, he feels sad. And lost.

He’s in love with her, after all.  But of course, he acts like it’s just merely a crush and she never knows the truth. He never has the chance, anyway.

+++

Soojung walks through the night breeze, hugging herself from the cold as she keeps arranging the sentences she practised in front of the mirror in her head. The more steps she takes, the faster her heartbeat becomes, the stronger the pain she feels under her chest. And she suppresses herself from crying. She knows she’s going to cry, but not now.

She finally reaches to her destination, and immediately after that she presses the doorbell. Myungsoo’s house isn’t that big despite the fact his family is, well, kinda rich. He once said that his father wants to make it simple as long as they’re comfortable, and Soojung likes them already.

She then hears a heartfelt, bona fide laugh that she misses to death behind the door and as time passes, it gets louder. The door is o