The world had stopped spinning as soon as he saw them. An unpleasant sensation rose in his throat and flooded his body; Changkyun wanted to stop looking at them, but he couldn’t. His body didn’t respond.

Then, Wonho stopped right in front of them and pulled the girl closer to him. He grabbed her chin and stared at her, and then his eyes fell on Changkyun's.

The little boy's blood froze as Hoseok's lips curved in a mocking smile. Then, he began to kiss her without taking his eyes off him.

Changkyun wanted to die at that moment.

The frantic beats of his heart became deafening, to the point that a sharp and unbearable beep rumbled in his head. He covered his ears and finally looked away from the painful image he was witnessing.

Why would he want to be with you? It was obvious that he would end up getting tired. He was just making fun of you. All this time everything was a pure lie. Lie. Lie. Lie.

Vertigo went up his body. He wanted to cry, to disappear from there. He wanted to wake up from that nightmare...

And so he did.

Covered in sweat, Changkyun's eyelids snapped open with heavy breathing. The rays of the sun that filtered through the curtains of his bedroom told him that it was daytime; feeling exhausted, he rubbed his face and cursed himself for having dreamed again with the same .

It had been three days since that fateful afternoon. Wonho had not even kissed that girl, they just passed by in front of the cafeteria; but his mind always played tricks on him and distorted reality, torturing him and preventing him from sleeping peacefully.

When he heard someone approaching the bedroom, he pulled the blanket over his shoulders and pretended to be asleep. He heard his roommate rummage in his backpack and a zipper closing; then, some steps stopped right next to him.

“Changkyun?” he called shaking him lightly. “You’ll be late.”

The black haired boy shuffled between the sheets and covered himself even more.

“I'm not going to class...” he muttered.

"You’ve been skipping classes for three days," Kihyun replied in an annoyed tone. “And let me remind you that your piano recital is this afternoon, you’ll skip that too?”

... the recital.

"I'm not feeling fine," he argued, unconvinced. He had already used that excuse the previous days, but he hoped that Kihyun would believe him and leave him alone.

However, a pair of hands grasped the blanket tightly and pulled it out, completely uncovering him. Changkyun let out a groan, hiding his face with his arms.

“Lim Changkyun, get up right now or I swear I'll call your mom to tell her that her son is a lazy who refuses to go to class.”

Changkyun sighed: he knew that Kihyun was capable of fulfilling his threat. Heavily, he straightened up and stared at nothing while his friend picked up his backpack from the floor.

"I'll wait for you to go together," he warned him before heading into the living room, closing the door behind him. He wanted to make sure that Changkyun wouldn’t go back to bed and go to college.

The black haired boy watched the door which his roommate had just closed: he didn’t know that he was depressed because of Wonho. Rather, he was oblivious to everything that had happened between them, and it would be better to keep it that way: he knew that, if he were to find out, Kihyun would make sure that Wonho’s body ended up at the bottom of the sea.

He got off the bed and pulled off his pajamas; he looked through the window and saw that the day was very sunny, and even so he decided to put on reluctantly his usual layers of clothes.

I don’t want to see Wonho. I don’t want it…

This whole situation reminded him of his painful years of high school. He used to pretend to be sick so he could stay at his parents' house and not have to meet those people: just remembering them made him feel nauseous.

He always wished he could erase those years, forget that they ever happened.

When he finally finished dressing, he fixed his gaze on his cell phone, which rested on the bedside table. Almost with fear, he reached it and lit it for the first time in three days, checking that he had twenty missed calls and almost a hundred messages from different chats.

He only saw the ones he received from Hyungwon and sighed: maybe it was time to give signs of life.

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

“, I’m melting!” Kihyun complained as he pulled out his denim jacket. “I don’t understand how you can continue dressing like this in June.”

Changkyun nodded absentmindedly and continued to walk along the campus. He was more aware of avoiding Wonho than of the conversation with his friend.

When they were approaching the faculty, he heard someone call him to his left and he stopped. He saw a boy beckoning to him from a wooden bench under a tree: he wasn’t wearing his glasses, but someone with such long arms could only be Hyungwon.

He let out a sigh and started walking towards him.

“Hey! Where are you going?” Kihyun asked without moving from the spot. Once he reached the bench, he stared at Hyungwon's stylish appearance: his plaid shirt was knotted around his waist, and his white T-shirt showed his thin, pale arms. But without a doubt, the big sunglasses that covered his eyes were what gave him that model aura that characterized him.

Hyungwon patted the bench a few times, telling Changkyun to sit next to him. He hesitated a few seconds and did so; his whole body was tense until he received a gentle caress on the hair that calmed him a little.

“How are you?”

Changkyun shrugged without looking at him. There was no point in telling him he was okay, because it was a fragrant lie: after Hyungwon had witnessed what happened in the cafeteria, it must have been obvious to him that his mood was not the best.

They were silent for a few moments before the tall boy began rubbing his back gently, without making any comment. It was comforting.

But the tranquility didn’t last long.

“Who the hell are you?”

Kihyun watched them with crossed arms and with a distrustful face; Hyungwon lowered his sunglasses to the tip of his nose to see the intruder.

“Excuse me, are you talking to me?”

“No, I’m talking to your mom. Who else will I be talking to?” replied the pink-haired, growing impatient.

Hyungwon raised an eyebrow and addressed the little boy. “Changkyun, do you know him?” he asked gently. Kihyun couldn’t believe what he was hearing: first he sees Changkyun being close with some random guy, and now they were treating him like a stranger.

"He's my roommate," Changkyun said, his voice tired. “Kihyun, this is Chae Hyungwon.”

“Roommate?” repeated the eldest of all, analyzing Kihyun from top to bottom. Then, he let out a laugh full of disdain that got the pink-haired on his nerves.

“What?” Kihyun huffed, unable to hide his annoyance.

“Nothing…”

Kihyun wasn’t willing to put up with the stranger anymore, so he went up to Changkyun and held out a hand for him to get up.

"Let's go," he demanded authoritatively, "we have to go to class.”

"Give him a break," Hyungwon refuted with a frown, "don’t you see he's depressed?"

“Depressed? Yeah, right. Depression is what he’ll have when he sees his ty grades for skipping classes.”

Hyungwon rolled his eyes and continued arguing with him. Meanwhile, Changkyun's head was elsewhere; the warm breeze and the gentle swaying of the trees reminded him of a particular morning.

One morning that, unlike his high school years, he wanted to remember forever.

It had happened two months ago. After his piano recital, Wonho had approached the tree under which he was eating and, after having a little confrontation with Kihyun, had sat down next to him on the lawn to ask for his phone number.

His nervous giggle was still very present in his memory, and he couldn’t help but smile sadly.

“I... well, I just wanted to congratulate you for today’s recital. You were awesome! It was so cool hearing you play, really.”

Idiot.

"You look like an onion with all those layers."

Stupid.

“You know... the next time it would be easier to find you if I had your phone number.”

"Shut up..." he murmured in a broken voice. It hurt too much to think about him. But it hurt even more to miss him that much. He wanted to hate him... but he couldn’t.

Hyungwon and Kihyun stopped arguing as soon as they heard him; the pianist raised his legs on the bench and hugged them, hiding his face in between.

"Look what you've done," Hyungwon reproached the shorter one before he put an arm around Changkyun to try to cheer him up.

“Me?” Kihyun bellowed. “You started it!”

“Seriously, if you don’t lower the volume, I'm going to hit your head until you get even shorter.” The pink-haired boy was filled with indignation and opened his mouth to start another dispute, but Hyungwon interrupted him with great seriousness before he did. “Changkyun feels like because of Wonho, it’s not the right time to argue.”

Kihyun was silent for a few seconds. His brain was processing the information and, when the bulb went on, his eyes widened and he pointed with his index finger at his roommate.

“Won-Wonho and y-you...” he stammered totally shocked. Changkyun didn’t dare raise his head: he didn’t want him to find out, but now there was nothing to do about it. “You and him…”

"Yeah, they have something," Hyungwon said without patience. “You sure are slow, god.”

Kihyun was about to explode. He knew that, eventually, Wonho would put his dirty hands on his innocent friend. But his maternal spirit prevented him from taking the news calmly: that ing brat was the cause of Changkyun’s depression.

Taking a deep breath, he clenched his fists and spoke as calmly as he could.

“What happened with Wonho?”

The sinister expression of the pink haired frightened Hyungwon a little, who cleared his throat before speaking.

“There was... a little misunderstanding.”

Kihyun closed his eyes and breathed deeply; after a few seconds, he took a seat on the other side of Changkyun.

“Tell me. All of it.”

Hyungwon sighed and looked at Changkyun's eyes for approval; he nodded slightly, resigned to telling the truth to his friend.

And so they spent the next hour; Kihyun made almost no comment as the two boys told him what happened in the last two months. Changkyun skipped many details and simply explained the essentials, which included the fact that Wonho asked him out, and also the event of the cafeteria.

"It just doesn’t make sense," Hyungwon insisted frustrated. “I'm sure he likes you like crazy, he would never be with two people at a time. He would never cheat on you.”

“Cheat on me?” Changkyun repeated with a wry smile. “We don’t even have a relationship... he has every right to be with whomever he wants.”

 Hearing this, Kihyun suddenly stood up, attracting the attention of the other two.

“And you're not going to do anything?” the pink-haired asked without looking at him.

Changkyun remained silent: what was he supposed to do? Go ask for explanations to Wonho?

“No...” he answered unconvinced.

"If I were in your place, I would crush that ing insect," he explained, stamping his fist against the palm of his other hand, "I would make him suffer until he crawled back into the hole from which he came out.” Everything said with a cynicism to which Changkyun was already used to, but that made Hyungwon shudder. Then he turned to them and put his hands on his hips. “The first thing we need to do is to find out who the hell is that girlfriend of his.”

Hyungwon leaned back on the bench.

“Well, I don’t know how you intend to find out, because we had never seen her before...”

Just then, a laugh reached their ears and everyone turned their necks towards the place from which it came. A few meters away from them was the parking lot; Wonho was leaning on his own car, talking with the unknown girl from the other day.

Changkyun shrank in the bench, feeling a huge pain in his chest.

"There's that little ," Kihyun hissed without taking his eyes off the couple.

She was pulling the brunette’s arm while laughing: it seemed she wanted to take him somewhere, but he had no intention of following her. In the end, the girl gave up and, after talking with Wonho for a while, got into the passenger seat.

When Hoseok began to get into the car too, Kihyun turned quickly to Hyungwon.

“Do you have a car?”

“Uh, yeah, but...”

“Come on, there's no time to lose.”

Immediately after, he went decisively to the parking lot. Hyungwon was stunned for a few seconds, but ended up getting up and following him in a hurry.

Changkyun remained seated, watching them scared.

“Guys! What are you doing?” he shouted in whispers, praying that they wouldn’t do the madness he was thinking.

Both turned to him and beckoned with his hands to follow them. He hesitated a few seconds, alternating his eyes between his friends and Wonho's car. Were they really going to follow him to spy on him?

Time ran and he didn’t know what to do; but when he heard the engine of Hoseok's vehicle turn on, he finally reacted. He got up and ran until he reached them, getting into the back seats of Hyungwon’s old car.

He fastened his seatbelt with heavy breathing, not believing that he had agreed to participate in such a crazy plan. His body had moved by itself: maybe he wanted to know what was going on between those two.

The tall boy turned the key and started the car; beside him, Kihyun pulled a pair of sunglasses from his backpack and put them on before turning to Changkyun.

“We'll hunt down that bastard.”

That was when the regret came and Changkyun considered jumping through the car’s window.