Baekhyun awoke to the smell of fresh farm eggs sizzling on a pan. He almost asked who was making it aloud, until he realized where he was. And then when he remembered why, he felt his heart feel about 20 pounds heavier. With a sigh, he threw his feet over the side of his bed and shuffled out towards the smell. “Good morning,” he mumbled.

“Good morning, love,” Nanna said. Without looking up, she asked Baekhyun to pass her the bowl of chopped vegetables. After he did, Nanna started to hum an old nursery rhyme she used to use to wake him up. The memory put a reluctant smile on his face. “What will you be doing today?” she asked him.

“I’m probably just going to finish unpacking so I don’t trip over boxes whenever I have to go to the bathroom at night,” Baekhyun replied.

“Okay, that sounds good.” Nanna slid the omelette into a plate and handed the plate to Baekhyun to set on the table as she poured them two bowls of soup.

Baekhyun stared at the table, and he realized how much he had missed his grandmother’s home cooking. There was rice on the table, and bowls of different pickles, most of which were Baekhyun’s favourites. He put the omelette in the centre and turned back to the kitchen to carry the soup. Nanna followed him slowly, holding on to walls and the backs of chairs to keep herself steady.

“So how is everyone at school?” Nanna asked. “How is Joonmyun, and Kyungsoo?”

Baekhyun bit the inside of his cheek. “Joonmyun is fine. He’s got some questionable friends, but I don’t know, he seems to be doing fine despite that. Kyungsoo is incredibly disappointed in me, and his boyfriend Jongin absolutely hates me for what I did to Chanyeol. I don’t blame them at all.”

Nanna sipped a spoonful of her soup before asking, “Tell me about the boy, Baekhyun. The one you were with on New Year’s Eve.”

Baekhyun rolled his eyes. “Lee Taemin,” he groaned. “I hardly know him at all. I know he used to be best friends with Jongin, until this surfaced. Along with some other things that jeopardized their friendship.”

“You must have known him more than that. Two people don’t just stumble into each other’s pants like that.”

Baekhyun smirked. “Times have changed, Nanna. But you are kind of right. I didn’t know him any more than that, but he knew me. He said he’d had a crush on me for a long time, and he’d asked Jongin about me back when Chanyeol was still in the closet, so Jongin had said that I was single because he didn’t know any different. So from his perspective, that night was just him finally making a move on his longtime crush.”

“Do you have any feelings for this boy?”

“Nanna!” Baekhyun exclaimed with a frown. “Don’t you think it’s a little early for you to try to get me to rebound from Chanyeol?”

Nanna shrugged. “No. You cheated on Chanyeol with this boy. Did you have feelings for him?”

“Absolutely not. I was drunk and didn’t know any better.”

Nanna raised an eyebrow. “Is he a nice boy?”

Baekhyun thought back to every single interaction he’d had with Taemin after the night that changed his life. He thought of how respectfully he took the rejection at the cafe. He thought of how polite he had been to Chanyeol, despite how much that must have hurt. He also remembered how easy it was to convince Taemin to help Baekhyun pack. Convince wasn’t even the right word; Baekhyun had simply asked and Taemin had shown up. “I…” Baekhyun stared at his soup. “I guess he is? What does that matter?”

“Would you not consider a relationship with Taemin?”

Baekhyun shut his eyes. “No, Nanna. That would be the worst form of disrespect to Chanyeol.”

“Is that the only reason you wouldn’t consider Taemin?”

“Nanna, I don’t even want to think about starting a new relationship with anyone but Chanyeol right now. Especially after what I did, I don’t deserve a happy ending of any sort.”

The rest of the breakfast was spent with Nanna telling her grandson tales of her friends. What Iseul had received from her son for Lunar New Year. What Nari and Duri had given each other on their birthday. “Sora got sick and stayed in the hospital for three weeks,” Nanna said softly. “Bora says she probably doesn’t have a lot of time left, and that she’s only holding on to the hope that her daughter visits her before she passes.”

With a bitter sigh, Nanna set her chopsticks down on her empty plate. “Well, time to clean up and get to work. You don’t worry about the table. I’ve got it. You focus on unpacking your stuff.” She stood up, with a stack of plates in one hand and a stack of bowls in the other. Baekhyun sat in his seat with the shock of what his grandmother had so nonchalantly breezed over and simply watched her. As she got closer to the kitchen, only about two steps away, her right hand fell to her side and the stack of bowls clattered to the floor.

Baekhyun shot up to pick up the bowls. They were made of hard plastic, so there was no damage done to them, but Baekhyun wasn’t worried about that at all. “Nanna? Are you okay?”

Nanna gave Baekhyun a half smirk, and nodded. “My arm just went numb for a bit. It does that after I’ve been sitting for some time. Don’t worry.”

It wasn’t like Baekhyun was good at listening to Nanna anyway, so he worried.

***

Joonmyun clapped Kyungsoo on the back as he was called up to perform his monologue assignment. As Kyungsoo set up his minimal props (a desk with a typewriter on it, the typewriter holding up a sheet of paper and the monologue he had to read. It wasn’t meant to be memorized anyway.) the teaching assistant pulled out what Kyungsoo had checked in as his costume at the beginning of the class. It was just a tweed jacket and a grey newsboy cap. Kyungsoo pulled his costume over his clothes and took a seat behind the desk, and pretended to be typing away. Then, starting softly he started to mumble to himself, slowly making his way to outright speaking to himself. In a bout of frustration, he took the paper in front of the actual monologue and crumpled it up, throwing it over his shoulder. “Okay,” he said to himself to calm down. “Start over. You’ve got this.” Then began the actual monologue. “A man seeking a companion.”

Joonmyun felt his heart drop to his knees and he slid as far down in his seat as he could. He recognized those words. Those were his words. Kyungsoo had gotten his monologue? Oh no.

On stage, Kyungsoo was killing it with perfect delivery. “A man seeking a companion sounds too brash, doesn’t it? A man seeking a friend? But that’s misleading. A man seeking a partner? For what? A tennis match?” Kyungsoo scoffed in character. “A man looking for love. Too cheesy. Because am I really a man looking for love? No. I am a man looking for a particular love. A particular love only one other human being can give me. I am a man in love with another man who is in love with another man. Why? Why couldn’t I just be normal? I have everything that would make me the perfect suitor for women. I have the money. I have the looks. I have the smarts. I definitely have the charisma. Seems like a waste. Yet even with all of that, and with the added of luck that the man I love also happens to love men,” Kyungsoo took a pause and a deep breath before shouting, “that man still doesn’t love me back!” and throwing his newsboy cap to the floor.

Joonmyun peeked from between fingers. He wondered if this character Kyungsoo was talking about was even present in the room and listening?

“We made love, but to him it wasn’t love. I wish I understood what the man he loves has that I don’t. I wish I could be that man for a day. What can I write here that will raise all of my love’s flags and wave them loudly enough for him to notice that they are waving for him?”

Joonmyun was terrified to look around. He was afraid that every pair of eyes would be fixated on him, so he simply looked forward.

“I need to find someone who will truly appreciate me for what I can give them. I need to, or else I will wither away, chasing wild geese, holding pattern for the rest of my life. So I need to be a man seeking a companion. I need to be a man seeking any companion. Friend. Tennis partner. I don’t care anymore.” Still in character, Kyungsoo stood up and crumpled the sheet with the monologue written on it, and threw it over his shoulder before delivering the last line, “I just can’t care about him forever.”

The class offered semi-enthusiastic cheer as Kyungsoo bowed. The teaching assistant cleared the stage.

Mrs. Choi asked, “Alright, any questions or comments for Do Kyungsoo?”

Only one person raised their hand, Joonmyun saw from his peripheral. He didn’t register who it was until he heard the voice.

“Yeah,” Yixing said. “I have a question. I thought we weren’t allowed to perform our own monologues.”

Kyungsoo sighed. “This was not my own monologue.”

Mrs. Choi looked at her laptop screen momentarily, clicking a few times. “No, Kyungsoo’s right. This monologue was not written by him. What gave you that impression?”

Kyungsoo rolled his eyes, waiting for some sort of inappropriate response.

“Oh, well, it’s obviously how he feels about me,” Yixing said. “So I just guessed that he had just slipped under the radar.”

“Yixing, what the heck?” Kyungsoo asked. “This is not how I feel about you. Not even close. It’s how you feel about me.”

The class started to chuckle awkwardly. Mrs. Choi cleared . “Okay, guys, keep the drama out of the class. Does anyone else have anything to say?”

“Yeah.” Joonmyun had no idea when he had stood up, but surely he was standing. “You’re right, Yixing. This monologue was about you. Only, Kyungsoo didn’t write it.”

Kyungsoo held a hand above his eyes to try and confirm that the voice he was hearing did indeed belong to Joonmyun. Yixing was staring straight at Joonmyun.

“I did.”

***

Chanyeol woke up late with a text. While that wasn’t unusual, given Baekhyun’s inability to step back, the message wasn’t from Baekhyun.

Hey, I need your help with something. The message was from Kris, and seeing how the last time the man had texted Chanyeol was when he was stranded at a bus stop with no funds on his bus pass half a year ago, Chanyeol deduced that it must be quite the urgent matter.

He decided that calling would make conversation easier. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Are you busy today?” Kris whispered. “I kind of really need your help but it’ll probably take most of the day.”

“What do you need help with?” Chanyeol asked. “Also, why are you whispering?”

“Because Zitao is sleeping beside me, and he can’t know what I need help with. Can I come over?”

“Sure, I guess,” the groggy man said. He looked around at how messy his side of the room was and how bare the vacant side looked.

Within moments, Kris knocked on Chanyeol’s door. “Come on in,” Chanyeol said. “It’s unlocked.”

“Honey, I’m home,” Kris said as he entered what used to be his room. “Why would you leave your room unlocked? Aren’t you worried someone might walk in on you and Baek--” He stopped in his tracks as soon as he saw how empty the room felt without a second occupant. “Where is Baekhyun?”

“We broke up,” came Chanyeol’s nonchalant reply. He threw his legs over the side of the bed and stood up.

Sensing that Chanyeol didn’t want to talk about it, Kris simply made a remark about how he’d been away for too long and moved on. “So, are you free today?”

“Pretty much,” Chanyeol answered. “I’ve already missed the first half-hour of the only class I have today.”

“Oh good,” Kris said. “Well, not good that you’ve missed class. You should go to class. But good because you can he