“Do you want to eat outside today?” Sehun suggested as he came up to their usual table.

Nari looked up at him and began packing her lunch away before standing up.

“Jongin and Sunhi told me they’re busy so I figured we could walk around the school for a bit. For a change of scenery,” he explained as they walked out of the lunch hall.

They fell into step with one another, that being a seemingly hard thing for Nari to accomplish with Sehun’s long legs but she managed it somehow.

It reminded her of the primary school days, when it was just the two of them. They’d wander the playground for a bit until they sat on the bench in front of the slide. Watching as kids slid down the slide, they ate their lunch in perfect company. Nari would pick at her leftovers, trying to avoid the slices of cucumber or spinach, and Sehun would take them from her box, mixing them into his own. Two straws were stuck into a single banana milk to share that Nari would buy from what coins her mother gave her that morning. Little things that became habits they still had to that day.

They walked silently and peacefully and comfortably. A thing she could only achieve with Sehun. A thing she treasured. A thing she hoped would apply to more people one day. But, she’d mostly resigned herself to the fact that that wouldn’t happen.

Though to others they appear to clash, it was as if their brains were friends in a past life and understood exactly what they wanted from each other. Nothing more was taken and nothing less was given. They rode along a wavelength that no one else could hitch a ride on, and they were content that way.

“Are you really joining?” Sehun asked suddenly and seriously.

“The music club?” Nari replied, taken aback by his intent tone.

“Yeah.”

“I went on Monday.”

She looked up at him, but found no response or reaction.

“Is there something wrong with that?” she asked gradually.

“Why would there be? I was just curious…” he replied half-heartedly.

Her eyebrows furrowed as she grew more and more confused with the situation. He said there was nothing wrong, but… she thought. They made their way to a bench under a tree by the football field and sat down.

“Do you think I shouldn’t do it?” she pressed lightly.

She continued to glance up at him as they walked but he gave no signs of reaction. Well, any other person looking at his face would think so, but Nari had known him too deeply and for too long to not recognise his expression. He was holding it in, keeping his face at the straightest he could to not arouse suspicion. She knew why he did it. To make sure she didn’t feel guilty. But when he made that face it always doubled her sickly feeling.

She didn’t want to push him because she knew he didn’t want to be pushed. He always came around, in his own time. Much like her. She turned away, sighing.

“Do you want me to?” he spoke finally.

Nari’s eyes widened. Those kind of words, those kind of questions. Whenever she tried to dig just a tiny way into his emotion to get him to confess something, anything, to her, he came at her with those questions. Ones she never had an answer to. He was so cryptic it pained her sometimes.

And this time was the same as any other, except she could feel a subtle difference. One that unsettled her. An unfamiliar feeling within his words and eyes and questions that made her feel like she genuinely didn’t know what he was trying to say.

“Don’t try to be smart. It doesn’t suit you,” she brushed it off.

“I’ve always been smart,” he replied calmly.

“Whatever you say.”

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