Chapter 33: Just Us Girls
Welcome to Touchstone
“Hey, Jaewon–,”
Hanbin freezes at the door. He first notices Junhoe still snoring underneath his covers then, he sees the bed on the other side of the wall that lays unoccupied.
Weird.
“Junhoe.”
His call goes unanswered.
“Junhoe!”
Junhoe sits straight up in bed upon hearing the shout. Still groggy from just being woken up without warning, he doesn’t know how to react to Hanbin’s sudden appearance. It’s expected, since he wasn’t the one Hanbin is looking for.
“There’s no practice today,” Hanbin states more to himself.
But, Junhoe can’t help but want to understand. “Huh?”
“Jaewon doesn’t have practice today… so, where is he?”
Junhoe looks over to find Jaewon’s bed empty. How is he supposed to know? Junhoe finds himself too tired to question Hanbin.
A realization comes over Hanbin. “Oh no…,” he whispers.
***
Things happened so quickly that Yiseul’s mind tried to work quickly to catch up. It couldn’t be helped since she was just abruptly awakened from deep sleep. To start off, it appears that the door to her room was just thrown open. The culprit could only be Hanbin as he stands there in the doorway, eyes wide for some reason. For a moment, she sighs upon remembering that she had left it unlocked once again.
“Dude! Don’t you have practice?”
Dude? Practice? He couldn’t possibly be talking to her. Yiseul looks down to find Jaewon slowly waking up from his comfortable slumber in her bed.
Well, that somewhat explains the current situation.
“No, I don’t. Why would you scare me like that?” Jaewon asks before snuggling deeper into her comforter.
“I just… didn’t want you to be late,” Hanbin says calmly, with teeth clenched.
“Since when did you care?”
“On days like today,” Hanbin retorts.
Not surprised by this sight in the least, Yiseul merely pulls the comforter away from the boy. He flinches from the sudden lack of warmth and wrap his arms around himself. “Go back to your room, Jaewon.” Practice or no practice, he can’t stay.
Yet, he doesn’t budge.
Narrowing his eyes from the doorway, Hanbin takes a single step inside but, a single step too late.
Mino is already marching inside.
“That’s not going to work,” he simply says before forcibly tugging Jaewon out of her bed, causing him to drop down to the floor.
Unhappily, Jaewon looks up from his new spot. “Hey, are you going to take responsibility for injuring the university’s star basketball player?”
“Star player, my . You’re just the usual ert.”
Jaewon completely offended, shouts, “ert–,”
***
“Jaewon, why do you have to live in Touchstone dorms? They’re all weirdos there.”
Yiseul looks over to the row of bookcases where she heard the female voice come from. As sad as it sounds, she isn’t all surprised by how nonchalantly other students insult her dorm anymore.
“Can’t she keep her shrill voice down to a minimum when we’re in the library?” Jisoo mutters underneath her breath as she continues her reading assignment. Flipping through the pages, she tries to refocus.
Apparently, she isn’t the only one unfazed.
“Jisoo, you once said that Jaewon doesn’t think he’s one of you guys.”
“Right. He’s at Touchstone because he doesn’t want other people knowing about his strange sleep walking habit,” she answers.
“To be honest, there are worse things,” Rosé adds. “But, he gets touchy when we bring it up,” she says softly.
“Isn’t he worried someone from the dorms would say something?” Yiseul asks.
“Nope,” Jisoo answers without hesitation.
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