“Please, don’t go…”

The timid request slipped from the black-haired boy's lips, who didn’t hesitate to take the other's hand to prevent him from leaving the room. Kihyun stood still and turned his face, ready to listen to whatever the other had to say.

"I know it's difficult, but please believe me when I tell you that my feelings are sincere.”

The suffering was evident in his words, but these were even more heartbreaking for the one who was listening to them.

Kihyun sighed and let go of the grip to face the person who hurt him so badly in the past.

"Don’t talk to me about feelings," said the pink-haired, staring at him as coolly as he could. "We both know you don’t have that.”

"Listen to me, I-" Changkyun said almost desperately, trying to get closer to the shorter one, but he backed away with a grimace of disgust.

"Listen to you? Do you really think that with your lies you could fix something?"

Changkyun looked down at his feet, unable to face those menacing eyes; there was something he wanted to say, but he was afraid of the other’s rejection.

"I-I love you..." he admitted in a low voice.

An ironic laugh echoed in the bedroom in response.

"Yeah, right. If you loved me, you would never have allowed that man to get in our relationship.”

The silence took over the room that they shared. Time was ticking by and the black-haired boy continued to make no sound: he was beginning to get nervous and blinked again and again. When a full minute had passed, Kihyun became impatient and put his hands in his hips.

"Changkyun?" he urged him to go on.

"Er... I..." stammered the boy, not quite sure what to say.

Then he turned around and hurriedly picked up some papers from the table in the center of the room; he looked for a specific page and returned with Kihyun, squinting to read the phrase of his character.

"That... it doesn’t matter anymore," he read with difficulty, "my heart... beast past when I'm with you." he finished proudly for being able to decipher the fuzzy letters in the script.

But Changkyun's satisfaction didn’t last long: his friend's frustrated cry made him realize that he had screwed up the performance. Again.

"Beats! Beats fast!” The boy corrected him.

"…Didn’t I say that?"

He received another snort as a reply and Changkyun turned with a questioning face to Hyunwoo, who had witnessed the whole situation from the couch. The dark-haired man shook his head, dismissing all Changkyun’s hopes of having successfully interpreted his part of the dialogue.

"Hyung, I'm sorry," he apologized in a hurry, using the sheets of the script as a shield. “Let me try again.”

Kihyun raised an eyebrow and strode to the little table to take the glasses that rested on the wooden surface.

"If you’d wear your glasses, that wouldn’t have happened," he replied angrily. One of the things that upset him the most was his performance being interrupted.

Changkyun stepped back, not taking his eyes off the lens. He hated those glasses, they were huge and made him look like a nerd.

"I can read without them," he explained, trying to sound convincing, even though he knew that even a mole could see better than him.

His eyesight had worsened during the year before he entered college, especially because of the indecent amount of hours that he spent in front of the computer, but he always found some excuse to postpone the dreaded appointment with the optician.

However, after last month he got into the car of a stranger because he confused it with his mother’s, he couldn’t take refuge in any excuse to avoid going to see a professional.

Changkyun still thought that the two cars looked practically the same...

"If I were you, I’d wear them." Hyunwoo advised him without moving from his comfortable spot. He looked like a spectator of a circus who was witnessing how a lion was about to eat its prey.

The boy swallowed and looked frightened at Kihyun, who was approaching him, almost cornering him against the wall, waving his glasses in the air with a sinister countenance. When he wanted to, his friend could really be scary.

"You're going to wear your glasses," he hissed menacingly. It's more of an order than a request. “And you're going to help me keep practicing for this Friday's play, okay?” he added with a fake smile.

"But... what about Hyunwoo? He could help you..." Changkyun's voice trailed off as he realized how inconsistent his suggestion was: everyone knew that rehearsing a play with Hyunwoo would be like trying to talk to a stone. Even the stone would have more eloquence.

Changkyun had no choice but to resign himself and put on the big lenses, not without first cursing the dictator internally. Although it was better not to make comments out loud about his height: first because he wasn’t much taller than him, but the main reason that led him to keep his thoughts was that he didn’t want to end up underground.

And he needed to stay alive for his piano recital tomorrow.

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

Changkyun walked discreetly outside the first-year classroom when the bell that indicated afternoon classes were over rang.

The little boy felt exhausted: to have spent all morning under the tyranny of Kihyun didn’t help him to stay awake and pay attention to the economy’s lesson.

The idea of returning to the campus residence and sleep his off was very tempting, but to his disgrace, he had hardly practiced for the concert of the next day. At times like this, Changkyun regretted joining the music club.

Lately, the boy preferred to stay in his room playing some video game or reading a book rather than playing the piano.

It wasn’t like this before.

Although he was forced to play that instrument since he was a kid, Changkyun always enjoyed the melodies his fingers were able to create just pressing a few keys.

But that didn’t change the fact that, in his opinion, he was a rather mediocre pianist; having attended professional concerts had been enough to undermine his confidence in his own skills. Changkyun was happy to be in a middle point: he didn’t at it, but neither was some kind of modern Beethoven.

However, lately he had lost his motivation. The piano left him a bittersweet feeling; he no longer felt the same when he played it years ago, as if his music was empty. It just was not the same.

With a sigh, the boy made his way to the faculty hall. As he entered the enormous room, he walked over the worn red carpet of the corridor that traversed the place through the center, with many rows of seats at the sides.

Taking the small stairs of the right, he went up the stage and the spotlights with the electric panel placed backstage. Then, he took some sheet music from his backpack and walked to the grand piano that was in the middle of the place.

He settled himself on the bench and, placing the papers on the music stand, he sharpened his eyes and tried to distinguish some musical note in the blur that his tired eyes could see.

He clucked his tongue and, in defeat, took the huge glasses from the outer pocket of his broad denim jacket; once he had recovered his vision, he put the tip of his right foot on one of the pedals and put the tips of his fingers on the cold keys, without actually pressing them.

Taking a deep breath, he finally began to play. It was a very delicate song and Changkyun's hands moved carefully, caressing the keys and respecting the softness of the piece. As the melody gained a certain intensity, the boy played more firmly.

He could feel the sadness of the composer, his joy and his anger: the song conveyed many feelings, and just when it reached the highest point, of greater emotional weight, the boy hesitated.

And his fingers stopped obeying. Some off-pitched notes came out of the piano before a complete silence took over the auditorium.

The thin hands became insecure, and despite of starting over three more times, they failed him again at the of the song.

Changkyun sighed and rubbed his eyes under his glasses: he was too tired to continue practicing. Nor did he want to stay until much later, as he used to do when he still enjoyed playing the piano.

He stared at the sheet music from his seat, and inevitably recalled the pages of the script that Kihyun forced him to learn: he was 100 percent sure that his dear roommate would force him to rehearse for the play that night again. Changkyun was not even part of the theater club, he was doing it for his friend ... or rather to stay alive and kicking.

"Please don’t go," he murmured, looking at the front. "I love you."

The black-haired boy grimaced in his own words: it sounded so fake. He cleared his throat and straightened his back.

"I love you," he repeated, raising his voice, trying to imitate the feeling with which Kihyun interpreted all his lines, "my heart beats fast ... when I’m with you.”

Were really people out there that actually talked like this? Saying all these cheesy things? He wasn’t able to understand how someone could confess his love with a paragraph that seemed taken from a romantic novel. And not from a good one, precisely.

He couldn’t help but imagining himself saying all those lame lines to another person, with a background sunrise to bring drama and make everything more romantic. He laughed at the ridiculous thought and shook his head: he was quite sure that, if he ever fell in love with someone, he would never confess in such a corny way.

Still with a smile on his lips, Changkyun the bench with the intention of getting up, but stood motionless as he made eye contact with the stranger that watched him from the front row of the seats.

All the muscles in his face froze, and his brain was slow to process the information: since when had that person been sitting there? Had he... heard him?

The unknown boy, who had witnessed part of the piano recital and the curious love confession, stood up and walked up to the stage, supporting his forearms on the wooden surface. A smile crossed his rosy lips and watched amused how Changkyun's cheeks began to look like an erupting volcano.

“That was adorable.”

Changkyun had never wanted to disappear this much in his entire life.