Mom, Dad and their princess went out for a family dinner. Mom forced me to go along but I knew I couldn't handle sitting at the same table, laughing at Dad's lame jokes and even made some skinship in front of other people in the middle of the restaurant so I made a false front of having a stomach cramp. Dad, being mindful of my health assured Mom that they could go for a dinner themselves.

 

So here I was, lying on my bed when I decided to call Ji Min. I told him that if he wanted to come over since my parents weren't home. About half an hour later, he arrived. He was wearing a plain white tee with a black jeans, looking casual while I was trying hard not to make like I am indeed trying hard with my oversized short-sleeves t-shirt that reached my thighs with a short pants.

 

I invited him to come in and walked him around the house for a while until I decided to bring him to my bedroom. It took him a while to suit his eyes with the bright red and yellow combination of the wall of my room. My room was kinda messy with things here and there, messed up make-up things on my make-up table. He sat down on my bed while I went to the music player and inserted The Fray CD into the player and the first song played.

 

I went to my bookshelf and took a photo album before jumped onto the bed next to him. I didn't believe in digital photos because I always format the memory card of the camera and will be crying mess once the photos were gone so I printed them instead and put them all in the album.

 

"This is when me and the girls were going to Fiji during summer break during our sophomore year." I flipped the first page and Ji Min made all the appropriate noises and comments of fascination of each photo until I flipped to a new page when all of us took a group photo with each of us wrapped around a guy's arms at the beach. They were just some random hotties that we found at the beach and we had some fun too meeting them.

 

I quickly flipped into other pages where more pictures of us playing in the water happily like having some intimate moment when I was caught in the picture hugged by one of those guys revealed. I snapped the album shut when I felt my face heated up.

 

"It's okay. I didn't see that." I could see the teasing glint in his eyes.

 

"Maybe I should show you the one when I went to the cheerleading camp." I said, quickly went to the bookshelf.

 

"That's something I got to see." He said, being the cooperative gentleman he was.

 

I trailed my hands through the albums on my shelf, trying to look for the one with the cheerleading camp sticker. My mind flashed with the memories during that time. I didn't make any male friends there, right? Darn it, Tiffany brought some of hers and we hit it off right away. My fingers paused when I already found it and sighed unknowingly.

 

"Not safe, either?" Ji Min asked. I couldn't tell if he was more turned off or entertain seeing me embarrass. I used to be so good in dating but now I'm like super uncool in front of him.

 

"Okay, I gotta be honest with you." I sat back on the bed, looking at him in the eyes. "I had tons of guy friends but almost 99% of the time they were just friends."

 

"You don't need to explain, So Ra." He said as he my hair. "And that's before you met me, right?"

 

"Yes, yes. They were all BJM to me. Before Ji Min" I explained and he smiled, apparently looked entertain that now he held the most part of my life.

 

"Aha!" I flicked my fingers and went to the bookshelf again. "There is a safe one."

 

I knew exactly what to show him. I had a bunch of photos when I learned ballet briefly during my elementary school and I gotta tell you folks, those were adorable. I took the album and sat down next to him again and I handed him the album, asking him to flip the paged himself, convincing that it was 100% safe. The innocent were real that time.

 

"Seems like you've been beautiful your whole life." He commented while looking at the photos when I was doing the swan movement in the practice room.

 

"Yes. That's like my one and only talent." I joked, which was partially true. I didn't know what else I'm good at beside shopping and trying to look pretty.

 

I threw a lot of myself after my Dad died and even more after Mom married another Dad. I got a new myself and I was really good at putting up the happy, queen bee facade in front of everyone while at home my exterior completely torn off with the insecurities of living holding onto no one but myself and the vacillation of my Mom stopped paying intention to me.

 

"I bet you're beautiful your whole life too." I said, quickly tried to direct the attention away from myself.

 

"Not really. I had braces in middle school." He replied while still looking at the photos.

 

"Who's this?" He asked as he pointed to on of the pictures. I started to become nervous with thoughts flowing my mind like a flood if my innocence in my kid's memories didn't last that long. I smiled in relief when my eyes finally settled on the person he was pointing at.

 

"Oh, that's my father." I said. In the picture Dad was standing at the side of the practice room, right net to the big mirror, watching me doing the ballet routine. He was smiling proudly at me while I was really focused into my practice, completely unaware of Dad's gaze on me the whole time. I even remembered when I fall once trying to that kind of princess on my own until I fall. Instead of coming to help me, Dad laughed his heart out first and then snapped out of it that his daughter fell.

 

"He looks like he's funny." He smiled as he kept flipping the pages to another pictures of Dad with me.

 

"You know..." I trailed. "Actually he was... he was really funny."

 

I looked up at him and stared his features from aside. Then I felt an unfamiliar feeling building in the pit of my stomach. I suddenly had goosebumps all over my body and the veins of my blood felt as if they were shrinking. You know that kind of a feeling when you heard a really good song from a live performance that was really good you might cry?

 

That was what I felt right then and there as I continued looking at him. I remembered the last time I get feeling like this. I even remembered the hundred scenes playing in my mind.

 

The time when Dad was still around.

 

I felt safe, secure and vulnerable. So defenseless that I just wanted to cry.

 

I don't think I like Park Ji Min.