I didn't say anything in response to his last comment. I didn't know what I should say. I stared down at my plate, pushing the food around, not hungry anymore.

"Soo Young, why did you agree to date me?"

"Why did you ask me to?" I rebuffed him, fully aware that I was acting guilty but not being able to stop myself.

"Because I like you," he answered immediately, and when I looked up I saw his eyes were on me, but he glanced down and then back up, and I thought I saw some pink seeping into his cheeks. A surprise considering how he had been behaving. "Because I want to be in a relationship with you."

I stared back at him, feeling oddly blindsided by the statement. It wasn't like it hadn't already been obvious. He had asked me out. He had told all his friends we were dating by the next day. We were out on a date. Still, simply knowing it was somehow very different from hearing it being spoken, being put into words. I thought about that phrase we're thought when we're young, "sticks and stones may brake my bones, but words will never hurt me." It's not true, and it's never been true. Words affect us. Words have power. Not in a way that can be measured, but it's there, all the same. 

I found myself wanting to tell him the truth, but still tied to the desire to not reject him, not let him down. The desire was even stronger now than yesterday, now that I believed he was nice, and I had already grown to like him more. How I liked him, though, was now up in the air. I still liked him as a person, so there was that aspect irrelevant to how I wanted to like him, but I was also attracted to him. I guess I did like him in the way I should, at least a little bit, considering I'm now his girlfriend, but I was beginning to get the feeling it wasn't as much as he liked me.

"Did you mean it when you said you liked me the other day?" he asked, his eyes searching.

"Yes," I answered, looking back at him.

"Did you-" he hesitated, then began again. "Did you mean it the same way I did?"

I wanted to say 'yes'. Every fiber of my being was screaming at me to say yes because it would only hurt him if I said 'no', but outright lying was something I was never good at. I had no practice at it, having never needed it and thinking I never would. I was mad at myself for that at this moment.

"Not exactly."

He in a breath through his nose and looked down at his plate, and I hated myself. I hated disappointing people, and I hated that I disappointed him.

"So why did you agree to date me?"

Screw being honest, I thought. Time to learn to lie.

"Because you seemed nice."

It felt lame, but passable. I had seen him do something really nice, and he knew I saw. Maybe it would be believable.

He gave me a small smile that didn't reach his eyes, and we sat in silence after that until the waitress came back with our check. I felt awful. I felt bad for not liking him as much as he wanted me to, and for letting him believe that I had. I didn't know what was going to happen now. Was I still his girlfriend? Would we break up? Should I just assume one way or the other? I wished I could stop and ask someone, but I felt like pulling out my phone to text at this point would be rude.

He had pulled his feet back while we were quiet, and that had made me feel even worse. He didn't make a move to get up, so I didn't either. He just stared down at the table that had been cleared off for us, and then seeming to come to a decision he looked up at me and began to speak.

"Whenever I first saw you in class, I didn't think much of you. Not that I thought badly of you, but that you were just another classmate," he began, leaving me confused as to where he was going with this. "After the first week of school, I saw you were always reading, and you didn't talk much to other people. At first I thought it was just a really good book, but then I noticed the book change, but you still acted the same. I didn't really think much about it until the day my sister ended up dragging me into a book store and I saw one of the books you had been reading there, and I just decided to try it myself, and it was really good. After that I kept picking up books I saw you reading. Not all of them," at this he smiled, "you read a lot faster than I do, but the ones I read I liked."

Here he paused as if debating whether or not to go on, but then he took a breath and continued.

"One day while I was at the bookstore, looking for the last book I had seen you reading, I saw you there with another girl. Your friend, from the way you were talking. You guys were talking about something important, and I shouldn't have been listening, but I couldn't help myself," he smiled sheepishly at me. "You were talking about her relationship with her mom. How her mom was mad at her for wanting to become a singer. You're friend was mad at her mom for not understanding, but you told her that her mother was doing more than just taking care of her, and that her mom was trying to be a good mother but would never be perfect because she was only human, and she was just doing the best she could, and that sometimes we needed to meet our parents halfway."

I was completely surprised by this. I remembered that day particularly because it was one of the only times I had ever chastised someone like that. I hadn't been mean about it, but I hadn't been nice either. Ga In, who was the girl he saw me with, had been fighting with her mom for months because Ga In had decided she wanted to act for a living. Her mom had, of course, objected and they'd been fighting about it. Ga In had vented a lot of her frustration for her mother to me, and I let her for a long time.

A few days before the one Kai was talking about, Ga In's mom had been over at my place visiting my mom. She was telling my mom her side, almost in tears over the matter. The reason was that her mom was a nurse, and her dad an engineer, and Ga In also had one older and two younger siblings. Her mom was pretty much always crazy busy and so was her dad, and the added stress of Ga In wanting to pursue a career she had deemed impractical wasn't helping. I didn't know who was right, and it was my place to try and say, anyways, but I thought the fighting had gone on long enough, and it couldn't be good for either of them. 

When I said what I had to her, I had meant it to be only for her. I didn't remember my exact words, he seemed to remember more than I did, but Ga In had managed to smooth things over with her mom after that, although they still disagreed on the matter. Ga In told me that they're conversations over the matter had become much more civilized, and less likely to break out into fights.

I had no clue how what I said would be important to Kai, at least important enough for him to remember and bring it up now.

He took another breath and continued on again, though.

"A couple years ago my dad walked out on my family, and it's been hard on all of us. I've never had the best relationship with my mom, and it's been worse recently. I know what you said was for your friend, but it really resonated with me. That night I went home and apologized to my mom, because I knew I hadn't been very easy to deal with. After I apologized she started crying, and apologized too."

At this point he leaned forward against his forearms on the table and stared down at me, watching my face. After a few seconds where neither of us said a word-me being too stunned by his speech to even try-he finally spoke again.

"You're different."

"Everyone's different," I countered automatically. "I'd never be able to apologize for something that big. I'm too proud."

"I wasn't able to for years. It wasn't until I heard what you said that I finally did," he insisted.

I thought about that, and tried to make sense of his story with what I knew first hand. My mind was still reeling from all of this information. The part about his family was shocking to me, but I didn't know what to say on that. I had never been good at saying the right things when it came to stuff like this, but it didn't seem like he wanted to focus on that, anyways. So instead I focused on how the reason he remembered my name wasn't just because I sat next to him in class, but because he had been paying attention to me almost since the beginning of the year. I started thinking about why he had noticed me, why he had been paying attention to me.

"So you respect me."

"Yes."

"Respect isn't the same thing as like," I said, unable to fully quell my feelings of insecurity. They had been built on years of guys only wanting to date me to get closer to Ga In, so they weren't the baseless kind, which was just something else to make it worse.

"I like you, Soo Young." His answer was so swift and serious, I believed him.

"You still don't know me," I couldn't help but say, feeling like a petulant child.

"Hence the date. That's why I wanted to spend time with you, to get to know you. Not that that's been working very well," he said not unkindly, but I thought I noticed a little bitterness in his voice, and I felt even worse than I already had about how I've acted. "I feel like the only thing that's really happened today was me asking a bunch of questions and getting a bunch of vague answers."

"Plus the weird leg thing," I said, not wanting to be the only one in the wrong.

"Now that's your own fault." At this he cracked a smile and I couldn't help but smile back, relieved he wasn't too upset with me.

"How?" 

"I had spent the whole time before that thinking you would have rather been anywhere but with me then suddenly you were asking questions and acting interested." He shrugged here. "I got a little excited."

"A little excited?"

"I got carried away." He shrugged again, still smiling.

I rolled my eyes at his noncommittal responses, my own smile only growing.

"But you are starting to like me for real now," he said, his face stretching into a full grin.

"And what makes you say that?"

"I just know."

"That comment wreaks of arrogance."

"But you're not denying it."

"And I certainly haven't confirmed it."

"Come on," he said, fake pleadingly. "You already know I like you and I told you how I started to like you. You can tell me."

Trying to come up with something to say, as I was not telling the truth since I still wasn't sure what the truth was exactly myself, I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be meeting Ga In later. Instead of answering, I pulled out my phone and checked the time, before shoving it back into my purse. "We need to finish here soon, Boyfriend. I need to be home soon."

"So you still want to be my girlfriend?" He asked. "You like me."

I didn't say anything, just stood up to head out of the restaurant.

"We should hold hands," he said when he caught up to me.

"No."

"But it's something couples should do," he said, nudging me.

"No, you already got your couply touching earlier."

"It sounds dirty when you say it like that."

I gave him a look as we kept on walking, but couldn't help the small laugh that slipped out.