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Reality kicks in. By reality, she means . On her first paper, she writes and writes and she can’t tell what any of it is about. It will be a shock if any of it makes sense.

She screws up already. And it’s all Mingyu’s face fault. For invading her whole headspace. His face is all she can think about. In fact, if she can draw, she can put his face perfectly on paper, down to the tiniest wrinkles on the sides of his eyes when he smiles, and grins, and laughs.

. For someone who just screwed up her grade, Sana walks out grinning like an idiot she is. But it doesn’t last long when she strides down the hallway and someone bumps on her shoulder, making her stumbles backward and one of her book slips out of her hold and falls to the floor. Sana looks at the book first, and then to the girl. She doesn’t seem to feel guilty as she throws her a smirk and continues walking.

Sana sighs. Her tummy is growing. And growing tummy makes it harder to just bend and reach down to the floor. But she downs to her knees anyway and picks up the book. When she looks up, and around, she realizes another girl at a locker giving her a stink eye.

Oh, right. That.

She’s been ignoring that because of exam and she really had no time between getting occupied with books and foods (Banana is growing and to grow, he demanded foods all the time). Since first and the toughest paper is over, maybe it’s about time to acknowledge the matter.

Yesterday, she woke up in her bed and Nayeon was sitting on her bed, looking over at her with a terrified look, saying something is about to go down and she has no hold on it. She was busy with studying and by that time, someone had created a topic and it blew and the damage was already done before she realized it.

She turned her laptop and sure there was a picture of her and Mingyu on her sick episode, walking hand in hand to his car and gahhh, she couldn’t look even more hideous than that and did she have to look that ugly? There’s also a new picture where he dropped her off in front of the dorm and before she climbed out of the car, he pulled her back in and with a smile on their face—they kissed. (She saved it, because why not?)

For an outsider, it’s easy to assume she and Mingyu are dating and well—you can imagine the rage for the rest of his admirers.

Nayeon wanted to use her veto and was hovering her mouse to the delete post option but Sana stopped her, saying she will be called out for being unfair and just let it be.

It would be total anarchy if they found out what she’s hiding under this huge sweater and jacket. So she has to be get used to this little chaos first before she can handle what’s coming.

After a short drive, Sana and Nayeon land at a cafe. It’s cozy and quiet and that means not many students are around. Sana is done revising two chapters of her notes and Nayeon is still typing—she always has something to type that Sana no longer questioning what it is.

That’s when Seungcheol casually takes a seat beside Nayeon, seemingly coming from out of nowhere. Nayeon doesn’t even look surprised. She just glances at him lazily and sighs. “How do you find me now?” She asks.

“You updated your Instagram. You tagged the location.”

She sighs louder. He yawns. And that’s that.

Sana pulls away her eyes from the pair and turns to her phone. It’s been bleeping non-stop. Her Instagram is flooding with request and she makes a mistake checking her Facebook messages and damn, people actually make death threat using their real account? How stupid is that? She cringes and changes her privacy setting.

But it really is hard to ignore. Especially when you are pregnant, you’re highly emotional. And this emotional state, needs a support system.

And her support system is M.I.A.

Sana thinks it’s because of final that Mingyu doesn’t reply to any single text she sent. He’s not big on phone anyway. She doesn’t see him anywhere today as well. Anxiety crippling in but she overlooks it. He has a paper tomorrow, they both do, so he must be studying. Studying so hard he checks out from the outside world for a while.

She tucks away her phone. If it’s in her grasp, it will be harder to ignore the notifications and she might just stare at the screen, waiting and dying for his name to lit up—to make it all better, to make it feels like all the ugly words thrown at her seem to be like just a tiny pinch.

She studies. Studies so hard . . . but at the back of her mind, she wonders how is it so easy for Mingyu to not contact her at all, when all she wants right now is his words. Orally or written--anything.

“Do you have a reason to sit this close to me?” Nayeon’s question makes Sana looks up. She missed the movement but Seungcheol is already sitting so close to Nayeon their arms are practically attached and when they both turn their heads to look at each other, their noses are only a finger apart.

“I want to whisper to you. I can’t whisper to you when I’m on the other side, can I, Little Monster?”

Nayeon frowns. And as Seungcheol draws closer and whispering something to her ear, her frown is easing away and her face is slowly turning red.

He leans away and smirks. “You can give it a title, I’ll put your name on credits.”

“I’m not having my precious name being associated with a band named Toasty Toad.”

“You don’t seem to have a problem with it before. You’ve been in all of our gigs.”

Nayeon breathes hard. “That was before I realized the band’s name is inspired by your face.”

Sana snorts.

“How long did you stare at me before you came to the realization?” He’s still smirking.

“Ugh, go away.” She turns back to her book but she doesn’t physically push him away.

He seems to be used to Nayeon’s passive aggressive acts and is having fun with it. It’s clear by how he puts his arm around her.

Nayeon closes her eyes and through her gritted teeth, she asks, “Do you have to put your arm around me?”

He shrugs. “This is how I study.”

Sana knows Nayeon enough to know that she’s capable of throwing a huge variety of arguments back and forth more than just “Ugh!”

But that’s that. They stay that way and before her eyes, Sana watches as Seungcheoul leans his head on Nayeon’s shoulder and if Nayeon is affected, she’s doing a good job concealing it.

Sana goes back to her study and is better at focusing now that her mind is distracted away from Mingyu. After an hour and she’s done making notes, she looks up.

Nayeon may not have realized it yet, but the way she absentmindedly leans her head on his head when she pauses to think, that means her shield is cracking around the guy and by the way he smiles, obviously not about what he’s studying—he knows it too.

It feels like their y weekend was so long ago. And the shoes—stones, what it seems like—keep dropping and when people said don’t be too happy because bad things will follow—they know what they are talking about.

Mingyu is alive, after all. She saw him in passing before they moved to different halls for their next paper this morning. He called her after it’s over, and when he said they need to talk, Sana knows another stone is about to drop and this one is going to break something. She doesn’t know what or why. She would call it mother intuition, but that’s irrelevant.

She opens the door to his car, parked under a tree in front of Engineering faculty building. Away from the eyes of people and that’s the first cause of her wary.

“Hey.” He smiles—though it looks a bit weak.

Sana mutters a hey in reply.

Stephen’s Remembering Myself is crooning in the car and they let it fills the silence for a while.

She doesn’t know why there’s a wrongness in the air. Just two days ago they were the closest two human beings could be and now—now it feels like this small space they are in and this proximity are about to swallow her.

She looks over at him and he looks awful in a way she can’t put her finger on it. She wants to ask why but over the course of spending a y weekend with him, she feels like she knows him enough that he doesn’t want to talk about it right now.

“How’s your final so far?” He asks.

Awful, considering everything else. But she doesn’t say it, instead she just nods. “Good. Yours?”

“Awful.” He chuckles. “There’s too much going on, and it’s such a wrong timing for all of these overwhelming . . . things.”

And doesn’t that make two of them?

“I assumed you already heard the rumours?” She prods.

“Yeah.” His eyes cast on her face, her hair, her clothes and pauses at her tummy. It’s as if he makes a mental document—memorizing. He takes a deep breath before he looks up to her face. His eyes turn sad, but determined. “I read all the comments. Did you? Please tell me you didn’t.”

“I did.”

He looks away, scraping a hand down his face she spent three days adorizing over last—gosh, had it really been just last weekend?

His breathing turns weighty. “How—” he clears his throat, “How are you holding on?”

“I’m not letting them affecting me now—of all times.” And she wants to add, it would’ve been better if he wraps his arms around her where she could feel safe but right now, if she’s reading his body language right . . . he’s actually leaning away from her.

He chews on his lip, his palm clenches on the steering wheel. “It’s going to be okay from now on. I told them the truth and I’ll make sure everything will be right from here. They won’t hurt you again, I promise.”

Her chest heaving, staring at him in horror. “What did you tell them? Did you tell them I’m pregnant, because if you did, I swear . . .”

“I didn’t. I told them about us. That we’re not dating.”

She exhales, easing out from her freak-out. But there’s something else . . .

He looks over at her. “You know we’re not dating, right?” He almost whispers.

Sana takes a short breath, keeping her eyes lock at him. “Yeah.”

His eyes waver, his throat is bobbing in worry. The silence might as well be a bomb ticking and when he asks his next question—the dropping stone she thought would break something earlier, she knows what it is now.

He breaks his heart.

With one single question.

“And you know we will never date . . . right?”

Her expression must show. She’s unable to hide the pain she’s feeling. He raised her up and then tore her down and she knows it shows. Her silence, too, must compute on some level because he looks like he’s having a hard time breathing—living. His expression turns the saddest she’s ever seen. He must have worked it out.

He knows.

He knows that she wants more. And now she knows that he can’t give her that.

With a little tremble to his lips, he talks. “What happened last weekend—Sana, you have to know, you’re my impulse. Whenever you’re around, I turn stupid, I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m always about the thinking before the doing. But when it comes to you, it’s another way round and for that, I keep making mistakes. And I’m not even talking about our baby. She or he will never be a mistake for me. It’s about us. Me and you.”

“You mean the weekend was a mistake?” She can hear the wobble in her voice because—because she was stupid enough to fall in love with him over the course of the weekend and to hear its completely otherwise for him?

It’s. Brutally. Painful.

He takes a deep breath. “It shouldn’t have happened. I shouldn’t let how much I wanted you consumed me whole.”

Her lips quiver, a sob threatening to push in . But she clenches her fists as hard as she can.

She stares—probably more to glare at him—and she doesn’t see Mingyu that she fell in love to. She feels like she’s staring at someone else. Someone she never met. Never knew.

And she can’t look at him anymore without feeling heavy pains pressing her chest. She grabs her bag pack and storms out of the car. She needs to get away. So far away from him. Before she explodes. Because if she does, things will get uglier than this.

He doesn’t know it, because he follows after her. “Sana, please, you have to understand—”

And that is the trigger. She explodes.

She whirls around, coming right in front of him and pushes. “It was you!” Another shove at his chest, seeing him wince but take it. “It was you who came to me when I was sick. I didn’t ask you to! It was you who held my hand and took me away, brought me to your place, swayed me, and it was you! You’re the one who wanted me to kiss you more. You’re the one who kept taking. It was all you!” At some point, her bag has fallen to the ground. “You’re the one who kept wanting, wanting, wanting, knowing it yourself that you couldn’t give back. And now that I want more from you, you can’t give me any.”

His eyes are glistening. “It’s my weak moment and—”

“You didn’t seem to be weak for all the three days you’d been using me.”

“I was not using you.”

“Yes, you were! Mingyu, I—” Her eyes start to water and damn, damn, damn! “I thought from there we could be more. You made me think so. You said you couldn’t stop wanting me. You planted it in my head, and the moment I believed you, you stopped anyway.” And she starts to sob. “It was all you.”

He starts to reach out to her. “Baby bird, please—”

She shoves his hands away. Wiping her tears away, she puts a hand holding her stomach, “My name . . .” and another hand picking her bag from the ground. She shoulders it and gives him a determined look. “—is Minatozaki Sana.”

She turns to leave and apparently, he’s not finished.

“Do you think we can be in a relationship anyway?” His voice is sharp. And her steps faltered. He continues, “We can’t. I’m the worst when it comes to a relationship and we’re having a baby. If we date, one or two years from now, we will break up and I’m not risking the consequences that surely, will affect our child.” This time, his voice seems to come closer. “Sana, you have to understand why. It’s not that I don’t want you, you know I do. I do very much and it terrifies me so I have to stop. I can only choose one role, and that is being a father.”

She straightens her posture, and for some reason, she feels a lot calmer—or maybe even numb—after her big show of emotional distress just now. She turns back towards him.

She understands his point, alright?

She just thinks it’s so . . . belittling.

“I get it. And you don’t have to worry, I agree we are hopeless now. I’m not going to be with someone who has such a little faith in me, in us, that he already thinks of a break up before we’re even started. I’m not going to date a ing coward.” She watches him wince, and it gives her a little sense of satisfactory. “It’s enough that I already have to put up with one for the rest of my life.”

This time, when she walks away, he’s not stopping her.

And guess what? She’s not going to let him to be in her way anymore.

a/n

*shrugs* this needs to happen

i'm sorry about mingyu's character but from the start, we all know he's more about being a father than he is anything else.

we're heading to the , guyssss and by that, we're also getting close to the ending. i can't waitttt

Thank you for reading! and for the new readers, subs, thank youuu for choosing to be here! and upvoters, omaigahhh thank youuu so much. I'll try my best to give u better! *bows*

p/s : Alsooo, we finally have a pinterest board! Check it out here.