“Baekhyunnie~!” Chanyeol sings, jogging to catch up to the small brunette who had paused to see who was calling his name. Baekhyun rolls his eyes and turned around, beginning to walk again when Chanyeol catches up to him and pats his back. “What are you doing?”

“I’m running errands,” Baekhyun responds blandly, met by Chanyeol’s over-exaggerated smile.

“What a coincidence, so am I!”

“I doubt it was a coincidence.”

“Fate, then?”

Baekhyun shoots Chanyeol a sharp glare, and Chanyeol immediately looks away.

They walk together in silence, much to Baekhyun’s satisfaction, until Chanyeol glances down to Baekhyun, unable to keep his mouth shut for long.

“Still don't drive?”

“Don’t want to.”

“What about your boyfriend, he can't drive you around?”

“He’s at work.”

“What about you, Baekhyun, where do you work?”

Baekhyun looks up to Chanyeol, eyes squinted in annoyance. “What does it matter to you?” he looks back ahead. “Why are you asking so many questions?”

“Why do you have so few answers?”

Baekhyun stops walking and holds up his palm in front of Chanyeol’s face. “Vanish.”

Chanyeol blinks and smiles shyly. “Still here.”

Baekhyun looks toward him, scrunches his nose and presses his palm against Chanyeol’s face with a light push, enough to make Chanyeol stumble back slightly. “Go away, I’m not in the mood to answer your questions today.”

Chanyeol’s long legs help him catch up to Baekhyun quite easily. “I don’t have any of those questions today.”

Baekhyun takes a few seconds to figure out what Chanyeol is talking about, and then he stops walking to look up at Chanyeol. “None?” Chanyeol shakes his head quickly and smiles at Baekhyun. “What are you here for then, just to bother me?”

“I said I was running errands, didn’t I?” His lips curl up to a smile. “I’m just happy I got to see you.” He pouts. “I get sad when I don’t see you. If you don’t want to run into me accidentally, then perhaps you should just visit me more often.”

“I’m very busy these days,” Baekhyun huffs and resumes walking.

“Doing work you won’t tell me about,” Chanyeol persists hopefully, but a quick glare from Baekhyun gets him to drop it. “I’ve been very busy too,” he continues, stuffing his hands into his pockets, and he lightly bumps Baekhyun’s side with his hip. “Busy missing you.”

Baekhyun stops walking to groan into his hands. “I want to say that I can’t believe you would say something like that, but you were exactly like this in college too, and now I’m embarrassed for ever liking you.”

Chanyeol’s smile is brilliant as he bumps Baekhyun’s side. “You loved me,” he sings.

“You were embarrassing,” Baekhyun responds with a shove back and a small laugh. Chanyeol’s smile softens as he watches him, until Baekhyun stops walking at a crosswalk. “Ah, my turn is here,” Baekhyun says pointing toward the left, and Chanyeol belatedly has the idea to tell Baekhyun that he’s going in the same direction, but Baekhyun is already saying his goodbyes with a simple wave and a small smile as he turns off in the other direction to run across the street. Chanyeol stands at the corner, watching him until he’s out of sight.

Chanyeol’s smile slowly fades at the thought of having to run errands on his own, especially when most of the errands he needs to do today are for Sehun.

“Chanyeol-ah!” A feminine voice shouts from behind him, and as he turns to see who it is, someone jumps into his arms. “I missed you, I missed you, I missed you!”

Chanyeol stares ahead as the girl sets her feet on the floor and starts speaking before Chanyeol can interrupt.

“How have you been? I haven’t seen you in a while! Is Sehun bothering you? Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks as her bright smile turns into a frown.

“Sorry,” Chanyeol begins hesitantly as to not hurt her feelings, “but who are you…?”

She cups her hands over , dark eyes sparkling. “I forgot, you had an accident. You didn’t recognize me at the hospital either,” she says, although the laughter seems to have dropped from her tone. “You still don’t remember anything?”

“Just the recent few years,” Chanyeol replies cautiously.

She puts her hands on her hips with a pout. “So just enough to forget me.” She hums, unimpressed. “The name Wendy doesn’t ring a bell?”

Chanyeol blinks at her and shakes his head tentatively, which brings a frown to her lips.

“We were friends...” she starts, placing her finger on Chanyeol’s chest, “and then we were lovers,” she finishes, drawing a heart on Chanyeol’s chest as she bats her eyelashes with a flirty smile.

“Lovers?”

“We dated for some months a while ago,” she says, taking a few steps back from Chanyeol before slapping his arm. “We’re just friends now. Ah, you’re busy aren’t you? You look busy. Do you have my number?”

Chanyeol just blinks as the conversation changes, unable to keep up as she pulls out her cellphone to call Chanyeol.

“Oh? Look, my number’s still saved,” she says with a giggle. “Call me when you have time! Let’s talk about all of the things that you don’t remember.”

And with a quick wave, she runs off, her skirt flapping in the wind, leaving Chanyeol behind with too many questions and a twinge of guilt.

---------------

Chanyeol finds himself running into Baekhyun often enough to make Chanyeol look forward to the next day. At the bus stop, at the post office, at the grocery store. Going outside is an adventure, and busying himself by wondering whether or not if he’ll run into Baekhyun or not makes his errands more pleasant.

Although it’s amusing to Chanyeol, Baekhyun is no less than annoyed. It’s not a coincidence, although Chanyeol doesn’t intentionally plan to cross paths with Baekhyun. It just seems that all of his favorite places somehow involve Baekhyun. Chanyeol often wonders if he’s gained new favorite places that aren’t associated with Baekhyun that he has forgotten, but for now all the places he loved seem to be places that Baekhyun also loved during their university years. The cafe with the coffee they’ve both fallen in love with, the off campus library they would study in whenever the apartment felt too stuffy, Baekhyun’s favorite restaurant for Chinese take out.

Chanyeol tells Baekhyun that he won’t ask him any questions when they meet without plans, and that seems to delight him. Chanyeol thinks that Baekhyun is also beginning to get more comfortable around him and may even enjoy seeing him everyone once in a while when Chanyeol isn’t being nosy, but he’d never admit that to Chanyeol. Chanyeol doesn’t mind not hearing those thoughts confirmed, because as long as Baekhyun is smiling and laughing around him, he feels happy enough.

The next time that he sees him, however, Baekhyun isn’t running errands, and he isn’t smiling or laughing either. Rather, he sees him alone, skipping stones at a pond in an isolated part of the park they used to visit during college.

“Ah, Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says as he walks down the grassy slope toward the man who has been running through his mind this entire week.

Baekhyun looks up from his stone and glances toward Chanyeol. “Why do you always show up when I want to be alone,” he mutters, skipping the stone across the pond.

Chanyeol waits in silence until the rock sinks. “I can leave.”

“You’re already here now,” Baekhyun sighs as he picks up another rock. “You might as well stay.”

Chanyeol watches Baekhyun skip the rock before deciding to walk up to his side and pick up his own stone to skip.

Chanyeol thinks Baekhyun looks rather sullen in his puffy grey jacket with his scarf wrapped around his nose and lips. Although he can barely see half of his face, Chanyeol notices the obvious discomfort in his furrowed eyebrows, and in his blank eyes, the way he seems to be quietly contemplating something. He only remembers a few times when Baekhyun would come here to skip rocks, usually before a big final, after getting into a fight with a close friend, or whenever something generally bothersome was on his mind.

But Chanyeol said he wouldn’t ask him questions, and he doesn’t plan to make Baekhyun more uncomfortable than he already is. So he stands beside him in silence and skips his own rock alongside Baekhyun’s.

Pink streaks across the sky as the sun begins to dip below the mountains in the distance. Baekhyun has tired out his hands with skipping rocks and decided to sit on the grassy slope and watch while Chanyeol skipped his few remaining rocks before he sat next to Baekhyun to enjoy the crisp air and the beautiful view.

Chanyeol thinks the air is too cold, and he knows Baekhyun must think so too, but if he does, he’s not showing it. He’s sitting rather comfortably with his eyes closed and legs extended, his hands planted behind him in the grass, his head tilted back. Once again, Chanyeol thinks Baekhyun looks like a daydream. Ethereal but ephemeral, as though if he were to reach out and attempt to touch him, to drag his fingers through his thin hair, perhaps he’d disappear. But it’d be so easy. So easy to walk his fingers along the grass across the short expanse between them, so easy to place his hand on top of Baekhyun’s, entwine his fingers with Baekhyun’s and hold them. It’d be so easy to capture this angel when he looks like he’s trying to be caught.

“What are you thinking about?” Baekhyun asks, finally breaking the silence as he sits up and picks up another stone to busy his hands with.

Chanyeol looks up toward Baekhyun and then away with a frown. “Whether or not I should ask you that same question.”

“Just some unimportant stuff from the past,” Baekhyun answers quickly as continues to play with his rock. “Your turn.”

Chanyeol looks back to the pond and lets out a sigh. “There’s a pair of rings in my upper drawer. Silver bands with our initials on them and hearts in between.”

Baekhyun stops rubbing the rock between his fingers.

Chanyeol tilts his head and looks up to the sky. “Why I would break up with you when I still own the rings I was planning to propose to you with? It’s been three years and I wasn’t cynical enough to get rid of them?”

Chanyeol glances toward Baekhyun, who is staring straight ahead.

“Did I ever ask you…?”

Baekhyun remains silent and looks down to the stone in his hand before tossing it into the pond, and it sinks immediately with a soft plop.

Chanyeol looks away from Baekhyun and leans back, sinking his hands into the cold dirt and grass. He sighs out a soft cloud of white and closes his eyes as the wind blows through his hair and tugs at the grass between his fingers.

“You’re reopening old wounds, you know,” Baekhyun says after a while, and Chanyeol is barely able to hear it as the words blow away with the wind.

Chanyeol opens his eyes to the soft purple and pink hues mixing in the sky. “I’m sorry, I just wanted to know.”

They return back to silence, and as Baekhyun shivers, Chanyeol shuffles closer to wrap an arm around him, but Baekhyun moves out of his reach, and then he stands and brushes the dirt from his pants.

“Small things built into big things, and I guess we couldn’t withstand that pressure.” Baekhyun purses his lips and wraps his coat tighter around his thin body, and Chanyeol thinks his silhouette looks majestic against the brilliance of the setting sun. “We probably weren’t made to last.”

Chanyeol raises a hand to his eyes to better see Baekhyun. “Well that’s not nice of you to say.”

Baekhyun tucks his hands in his pockets and lets out a puff of air. “You fell out of love with me first. I’m just doing you the favor of showing you how much it hurt.”

Chanyeol looks away from Baekhyun. He stands and brushes himself off, but Baekhyun wedges himself into Chanyeol’s arms and presses his face against Chanyeol’s chest. He lets his eyes close and relaxes.

“Baekhyun?”

“Don’t say anything for a few seconds.” Baekhyun slides his arms into Chanyeol’s jacket to wrap them around Chanyeol’s torso and sighs blissfully. “You’re warm.”

Chanyeol smiles, but says nothing as he wraps his arms and the rest of his coat around Baekhyun in sweet silence. Chanyeol rests his chin on top of Baekhyun’s head and they slowly sway together to a tune in Chanyeol’s mind.

“I guess I’m not as good at it as you,” Baekhyun says after a large span of silence. “At pushing people away.”

Chanyeol lets a few extra seconds pass before unwrapping his arms from around Baekhyun. “Did I say I didn't love you?” he asks, gently his fingers through Baekhyun’s soft hair. He assumes that perhaps their relationship had grown stale and they thought they should move on, although that seemed impossible. With the way he was head over for heels for Baekhyun now, he was probably head over heels for him then.

“You didn’t have to say it for me to know,” Baekhyun says, his voice muffled against Chanyeol’s chest.

Chanyeol’s hand slides down from the top of Baekhyun’s head to cradle the side of Baekhyun’s face. He tilts Baekhyun’s head back so he can see the emotion in his eyes. “Tell me. Tell me what I did.”

Baekhyun furrows his eyebrows and his eyes darken as if he’s considering it. “I don’t want to,” he says instead. His eyes shift away. “You hurt me. And if you know how, you’ll keep telling me how sorry you are, and I’m tired of hearing it. I don’t want to accept your apologies when it’s my fault you became like that in the first place.”

“Your fault?” Chanyeol asks, but Baekhyun still refuses to look at him.

“Perhaps you were right, back then when you said what you said. Perhaps we weren’t meant for this type of relationship.” He squeezes his eyes closed. “Perhaps… we should be friends? Stop trying to figure out the past, and let’s just be friends before anything else ruins us again.”

Chanyeol pushes Baekhyun away from him and holds him at arm’s length. “No. I refuse.”

Baekhyun opens his eyes and finally looks at Chanyeol. “Chanyeol, if you’d just consider–”

“I won’t!” he insists. His grip tightens on Baekhyun’s shoulders. “This wasn’t about this before. I wasn’t going to plead to make you mine again. All I wanted to know was why we broke up; I thought if I knew the reason I could accept it, but I’ve spent so much time around you recently that I’m not happy with just that anymore.”

Baekhyun looks toward the ground with a troubled frown, trying to figure out what to say next.

“I love you, Byun Baekhyun,” Chanyeol blurts out, and Baekhyun looks up to him, his eyes wide as though he’s hearing it for the first time. “I love you,” Chanyeol repeats, and he thinks that Baekhyun looks too beautiful the way he is with his cheeks tinted a soft pink and pink lips barely parted in surprise. When Baekhyun looks away, Chanyeol says it again. “I love you, Baek. I’ll say it until you believe me if you need me to.”

Baekhyun catches his lip between his teeth as he stares at the ground, but he squeezes his eyes closed and shakes his head quickly.

Chanyeol’s grasp loosens as he looks down to the man in his arms. “Why are you being so adamant about this?”

Baekhyun stays quiet for a while, weathering his lip with his teeth until he lets it go with a sigh. “I miss the Chanyeol I fell in love with in highschool,” he admits. “The one that made me happy just by being beside me. I miss the Chanyeol that stole my heart, but I’m afraid if I fall for you again, you’ll be become the Chanyeol that abandons me again.” Baekhyun lets his head rest against Chanyeol’s chest. “I’d rather have you as you are now, even if you can never be mine, than to have you and lose you twice.”

Chanyeol brushes the hair away from Baekhyun’s closed eyes. “You won’t lose me again.”

“You said I wouldn’t lose you the first time either,” Baekhyun says softly as a miserable smile touches his pink lips, and Chanyeol is so tempted to lean in and kiss the sadness from his lips, to wipe the loneliness from the corners of his eyes, to hold him close and tell him that he’s here now and that he doesn’t have to be lonely anymore.

“Because of that, I can’t love you, Chanyeol. Even if I wanted to.” Baekhyun pulls himself out of Chanyeol’s arms and gives him a small smile. “It’s late; I have to go home.”

---------------

Days go by without seeing Baekhyun.

Chanyeol is beginning to stop caring. He doesn’t want to see someone who doesn’t want to see him. He doesn’t want to put so much time and effort into someone who refuses to do the same for him.

But despite how much he says he doesn’t care, Chanyeol always finds himself lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Baekhyun day, after day, after day. Thinking about what Baekhyun is doing. Thinking about what they’d be doing if he gave him a chance. Thinking about where they’d be if nothing went wrong.

He wants Baekhyun to be happy. He just wants Baekhyun to be happy with him a little bit more.

As the days pass, that dream of Baekhyun sitting on a park bench alone recurs more often.

Each time he sees it, there seems to be something new in the beginning.

Baekhyun shouting his name.

Before that, Chanyeol walking away.

Before that, he kisses Baekhyun’s forehead and whispers, “I won’t look back. You’ll make me regret this.”

Before that, he places something in Baekhyun’s hand and closes Baekhyun thin fingers on top of it.

“You seem different,” Sehun says a few days after Chanyeol’s last meeting with Baekhyun at the park.

“Is this a good thing or a bad thing?” Chanyeol asks, flipping through a sketchbook dated with 2013. He has already gone through one from 2016, and he was well past surprised that his art had changed style significantly and gotten much better throughout the years (more specifically, he approached Sehun with the book asking “Did I actually draw this? There’s no way I drew this, it looks so good. I really drew it? Whoa, no way”).

“A weird thing. You’re nicer. More polite. More carefree. You got kind of closed off around the time you and Baekhyun split.” Sehun sits at the table near Chanyeol. “But I’ll admit that it’s kind of nice to have this Chanyeol back. When you’re not brooding over Baekhyun, at least.”

Chanyeol scrunches his nose at his friend and turns back to his sketchbook. “Don’t worry, I’ll stop brooding over Baekhyun soon.”

“Don’t lie, Park. You cried when Baekhyun left in highschool, and you’re probably going to do it again.”

Chanyeol flips another page until he finds a note scribbled in the corner in handwriting much too neat to be his own. ‘This one is super cute!’

Sehun is right, but Chanyeol won’t give him the satisfaction of telling him that.

He sighs against the table and thumbs at the note Baekhyun left behind on a page dated November 2013. Despite how much his drawing has gotten better throughout the years, he finds these sketchbooks from the earlier years to be his favorite, as some pages are littered with one of the few things that Baekhyun left behind for him: congratulations, praise, and words of encouragement.

He wonders what negative view of the world that he had gained in those three years he can no longer remember that could have changed his personality from what it currently is. What negative things he had learned that would have made him break up with Byun Baekhyun.

“I brought this out because it seems like you haven’t seen it yet,” Sehun says, holding a thin, colorful book in front of Chanyeol’s nose. “Baekhyun got his first book published two years ago. If you want an excuse to see him, you should tell him congrats.”

Chanyeol raises his head slightly and takes it from Sehun’s hands. On the cover is a giant teddy bear. Chanyeol scoffs and mutters, “This is just like him,” lovingly under his breath as he flips through the pages, finding photos that nearly match those in his sketchbook. “These look like mine.”

“You illustrated it for him. I don’t know if you remember, but you two started before you broke up, so I thought it might bring back memories. If you want them back.”

Chanyeol flips through the pages again, until he stops on the inside of the cover page, where a single line dedication is printed in small, black letters.

“You want me to brood over Baekhyun forever, don’t you,” Chanyeol says in a melancholy tone.

“I’m just trying to be a good friend,” Sehun responds, patting Chanyeol’s back before leaving Chanyeol with his book.

---------------

“I brought you coffee.”

Baekhyun is standing outside the door to Chanyeol’s apartment, a little bit too early in the morning, holding two cups of coffee.

“Why did you bring me coffee?” Chanyeol asks although he already knows the answer, but he holds Baekhyun’s gaze anyway until Baekhyun can tell him the answer himself.

As an excuse.

Baekhyun pushes wordlessly past Chanyeol and walks into their old apartment. Chanyeol thinks the dim lights seem to brighten when Baekhyun walks past them, and the cold apartment feels a little bit cozier when Baekhyun sets the coffee down on the table in the center of the room.

Chanyeol closes the door and stops to admire the newfound warmth of the apartment. “Are you not going to answer?” he asks when he figures that it’s acceptable to break the silence. “What are you here for?”

He expects a witty response, but he’s met with a question.

“What is this?” Baekhyun asks. Chanyeol peeks around Baekhyun to see what he’s referring to, and he sees Baekhyun’s children’s book in his hands.

“This is mine,” Chanyeol explains, taking the book from Baekhyun’s hands. “Sehun said I bought it, so it’s mine.”

Baekhyun looks up to Chanyeol, his eyes full of fear. “Did you read it?”

“I did. Even the dedication. ‘For my own childish curly-haired giant.’”

“I wrote it before we broke up, okay?” Baekhyun asserts, snatching the book back from Chanyeol’s hands. “And it was a thank you for the illustrations.” He turns away from Chanyeol and says under his breath, “I didn’t expect you to read it either.”

Chanyeol tilts his head as he watches Baekhyun hold onto the book, his face burning red in embarrassment. “What are you doing here, Baekhyun?”

“Why do you have this book?” Baekhyun huffs, keeping his back to Chanyeol.

“Apparently I liked it. Maybe because I helped illustrate it, or maybe I liked the author. Now why are you here?”

“I don’t know why either!” Baekhyun shouts, turning back to face Chanyeol. “I don’t know why I’m here. I can’t stop thinking about what you said the last time we met, and it’s driving me insane!”

Chanyeol blinks.

“I thought you hated me! I thought you wanted me gone! So why do you still have those rings? Why do you still have that book, and why… why do you keep coming back when I keep pushing you away?” Baekhyun pauses to let his voice calm as Chanyeol watches silently.

“And I don't know why I keep torturing myself like this,” Baekhyun continues although distress tears at his voice. “Why I keep coming back to see you, to see the Chanyeol that I fell in love with over six years ago. The one that was sweet and kind and innocent. The hopeless romantic that tricked me into believing that such a thing like love existed, and perhaps that together we could catch it. The Chanyeol who was so free before I let the world corrupt you…”

Baekhyun’s voice fades out as he places his hand on Chanyeol’s cheek, as if observing Chanyeol’s face, the sadness in his eyes, the ignorant adoration, the sincerity, and at that moment, Baekhyun wasn’t seeing the man who had left him three years ago, nor did he see the face of a past lover, but rather that old friend from highschool that he was elated to be reunited with when they realized they were attending the same university after two years of being apart, the one who had promised to never forget him when he left, the one before they created a relationship that they would inevitably ruin. The Chanyeol that he first fell head over heels for. He speaks in a soft whisper. “I’ve missed you, old friend.”

‘Have I been gone?’ Chanyeol wants to ask. Rather, he places his large hand over Baekhyun’s small fingers as reassurance that he’s here now, and he doesn’t plan to leave. “I’ve missed you too.”

Baekhyun’s fingers curl under Chanyeol’s hand. “Who allowed you to take over my thoughts like this like this.”

Chanyeol smiles back to his small angel. “Now you know how I’ve felt for the past few weeks.”

Baekhyun lets his hand slide out from Chanyeol’s, and his arms hang limply by his side. “Miserable and helpless?”

Chanyeol shrugs, pulling Baekhyun in for a hug. “More or less.” Baekhyun groans against Chanyeol’s chest, and Chanyeol’s smile softens as Baekhyun wraps his arms around Chanyeol’s waist and slowly begins to relax in his embrace. “Byun Baekhyun, I love you. Only you. Always you, and you alone.”

Baekhyun lets out a soft, pathetic laugh, and his fingers tighten in Chanyeol’s shirt as he pushes his face against his chest. “It’s been three years, but hearing you say that still makes my heart flutter.” He takes in a soft breath and lets it out in a barely audible “God dammit,” whispered against Chanyeol’s shirt.

“The last thing I want to do is hurt you more,” Chanyeol reminds him gently.

“If so then why didn’t you just leave me alone like you said you would? It’s been three years, and I was finally able to get over you. So why is the Chanyeol that I originally fell in love with back now?” His fingers tremble as they tug at Chanyeol’s shirt. “I’ve been trying to be free of you for years, and you’re caging me again.”

“I’m not trying to cage you. I’m not forcing you to stay with me.” His voice drops to a whisper. “And I know I’m being selfish, but I really don’t want to let you go either.”

“You’re an for letting me go the first time,” Baekhyun cries softly against his chest, his beautiful thin fingers trembling as they clutch Chanyeol’s shirt, and Chanyeol feels more than useless as he does nothing but stare down to him, unable to comfort him about a past he doesn’t remember, and unable to promise him about a future he doesn’t yet know.

“I’m sorry,” Chanyeol whispers, lowering his lips to the crown of Baekhyun’s head.

“When I wanted to stay you pushed me away, and now that I want to leave, you won’t let me; can’t you make up your mind and stop playing with me like this?”

“I’m sorry,” Chanyeol repeats.

“You made me feel worthless for years and now you think you can just pick back up where you left off?”

Chanyeol knows that Baekhyun isn’t worthless. Baekhyun meant the world to him. He still means the world to him. He never stopped meaning the world to him. But he doesn’t know how else to respond, so he holds Baekhyun close and presses his lips to the top of Baekhyun’s ear with another whispered apology.

“How could you tell me you love me while walking away from me forever?”

“I’m sorry.” Chanyeol doesn’t know why he’s apologizing, but the words come out of his mouth anyway. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry.”

“It means nothing when you don’t know what you’ve done,”

Chanyeol lifts his head from Baekhyun’s. “What have I done?” Chanyeol asks, lifting Baekhyun’s face to his. “Tell me. Why won’t you tell me?”

But Baekhyun’s eyes shift away from him, and he shakes his head. “I can’t.”

“Why not? Tell me!” Chanyeol says, perhaps louder than he means to as his frustration builds. “Tell me why the I have engagement rings in my upper drawer with our initials on them, and tell me why the I couldn’t get rid of them for 3 years after we supposedly broke up? Tell me why would I plan to marry you if I resented you, and why would I break up with you when being away from you hurts?”

Baekhyun remains silent because he doesn’t know the answers to those questions either. “Is what I did to you forgivable?” Chanyeol asks slowly, and he continues when Baekhyun doesn’t respond. “Don’t forgive me if I physically hurt you. Don’t forgive me if I left you for someone else, if I was lying behind your back, or don’t forgive me if I–”

“It’s not like that,” Baekhyun mutters against his shirt. “You were never like that.”

“Then what is it?” Chanyeol asks as his voice softens. “What can I do to help you feel loved again? What can I do to remind you that you’re my everything?”

Baekhyun lets out a long sigh and presses his face against Chanyeol’s chest. “I’m not your everything.”

“You are,” Chanyeol counters tenderly. Baekhyun is his morning thoughts and his evening wishes, and everything in between. His beginning, middle, and end. His rhythm and his melody.

Baekhyun just shakes his head. “Not your everything,” he repeats.

Chanyeol sighs and runs his fingers through Baekhyun’s hair. “You were before,” Chanyeol says softly, “and now you are again. I love you just as I did three years ago, Byun Baekhyun.”

“But I’m not the man you think I am anymore,” Baekhyun says. “I’m not the man you love anymore.”

“Then teach me,” Chanyeol responds gently. “Teach me everything about the new Baekhyun. The one standing in front of me right now.” He places his hands on Baekhyun’s cheeks and wipes away the tears threatening to spill from his eyes with his thumbs as he continues. “Teach me about the Baekhyun who had his heart broken by a selfish and how he learned to smile again after it. The Baekhyun who is strong and independent and achieved his goal of publishing children’s books. The Baekhyun who has done things I’ve never dreamed of.” A soft smile settles on Chanyeol’s lips. “I want to know everything that I’ve missed about the man I love in the past three years.”

He takes his hands from Baekhyun’s face to hold Baekhyun’s hands. He raises Baekhyun’s right hand to his lips and softly kisses each of Baekhyun’s thin fingers. “I want to fall in love with you all over again,” Chanyeol whispers between kisses before he switches to Baekhyun’s left hand and kisses those fingers as well. “And I want you to fall back in love with me too.”

He looks up to Baekhyun with a soft, loving smile. “Is that possible?”

Baekhyun quickly shakes his head, and Chanyeol lets out a soft laugh as he squeezes Baekhyun’s hands. “How can I get you to trust me again?”

“You’re going to leave me again,” Baekhyun gasps, but Chanyeol shakes his head, holding on to him tighter.

“I won't; look at me, Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says in soft hurried tone as he turned Baekhyun’s face back to him, “I love you, Byun Baekhyun. As you are, I love you.”

Baekhyun looks up to Chanyeol and quickly away, so Chanyeol brushes the hair away from Baekhyun’s eyes and leans down to press a soft, pure kiss to his forehead.

“Think about it, okay?” Chanyeol pleads, and with Baekhyun’s hesitant nod, a smile touches Chanyeol’s lips, and the heaviness in his heart slowly begins to lift.

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