[italicized texts are events from the past]

I.

 

Kang Seulgi is Bae Joohyun's roommate and they are total opposites.

If Joohyun isn’t being the polite girl that she is she would've screamed at Seulgi for being too damn lazy. Joohyun likes it clean and Seulgi couldn't care less what the apartment looked like. Even when Joohyun wanted to approach Seulgi about it, about cleaning up and not leaving unwashed dishes on the sink or just throwing the garbage in the trash can, she can't.

She just can't find herself confronting the girl and the other girl was rarely home — if she is home she would just go straight to bed.

 

Bae Joohyun is Kang Seulgi's roommate and they are total opposites.

Seulgi knows that Joohyun was a homebody unlike her that always preferred going outdoors, going to parties and clubs to hang out during the weekends or after her classes. She also knows that the other girl liked things clean because whenever she would leave a mess in their shared living room and kitchen she would always come back to the place already tidied. Or whenever she would just leave the humper of her poorly washed clothes she comes back to it being neatly folded inside her room.

She appreciates the little gestures — or rather caring gestures — her roommate has done for her. But she can't express how grateful she is because every single time she wants to Joohyun would always be stressing over school works and Seulgi wouldn’t want piles of books thrown at her.

 

Kang Seulgi is Bae Joohyun's roommate and they are total opposites.

Joohyun has always been the type to always study–hard– even when there were no exams. She just always studied because that’s the whole purpose of being in school right? And she did want to study extremely hard especially now the she was in university. She believed that whatever happens in her years in uni would define her future. So she wanted to study extremely hard but then her roommate was Kang Seulgi.

Seulgi who couldn’t care less if she comes to class on time. Seulgi who doesn’t even flip the pages of her books. Seulgi who hangs out even when she had classes the next morning. And Seulgi who would come home drunk on school days when Joohyun was studying.

Then all her plans of supposedly staying up all night to study would be foiled because Seulgi was extremely noisy when drunk but not only because of that. She would ditch studying because then Seulgi needed someone to take care of her and Joohyun being the good girl that she is would tend to Seulgi. Even going as far as assisting her to bed and preparing hangover cures for her the next day.

Joohyun tries so hard to ignore her drunk roommate but she’s too noisy and she wouldn’t want Seulgi puking at unwanted places, so she helps her. Maybe it’s her good girl nature peeking through again or maybe because she just didn’t want Seulgi puking on their floor.

But sometimes she just finds Seulgi drunk cute and she couldn’t restrain herself from helping the other girl. Actually, she kind of liked taking care of drunk Seulgi, especially when she suddenly blurts out random things.

If given the chance she thinks that they could go past being casual roommates but she just can’t stop herself from studying, couldn’t she?

 

Bae Joohyun is Kang Seulgi's roommate and they are total opposites.

Seulgi thought that her finally living far from her parents and her finally being in uni meant only one thing, freedom. She does study, she does flip the pages of her book, she does come to class but she would only be dead serious about doing those when exam periods are near. She believed that attending some classes was just a waste of time because it wasn’t needed for her major so what’s the use of stressing over those? So she goes to clubs to party with her friends who also couldn’t care less.

What’s important is that they pass right? Seulgi really didn’t want to stress herself out on academics or just over subjects that were too irrelevant.

Then one day she came home drunk only to wake up the next day with a towel on her head and there are soup and medicine on the table with a note that says: “eat and drink the meds! p.s. you’re so noisy! if I fail my quiz today it’s your fault! ”

With that, even when her head was aching too much from drinking, a smile creeps on her face. She might've had a tiny crush on her roommate because she's really pretty and she’s really nice too.

Sometimes she thinks that, if they weren’t complete opposites, they could be much more than what they were already. Besides, she couldn’t stop herself from hanging out too much, couldn’t she?

Weirdly enough, despite the fact that they are total opposites and they have every reason to hate each other (especially Joohyun), they don’t.

If they were to put a label on the current status of their relationship it would probably be casual roommates. They know just enough about each other and they look after each after if needed. They eat together sometimes, watch TV sometimes, and tell jokes, but that was that.

They could be friends, but the knowledge they have about each other wasn’t enough for them to consider each other as friends. Heck, they don’t even spend enough time with each other.

So, they settle for the casual roommate label.

 

-----

Then one-day Seulgi comes home earlier than usual because her friends had bailed on her. To her surprise, their kitchen was a mess and her roommate was lying face down on their shared living room couch. She can't help but approach the other girl when she hears sobs that if Joohyun hadn’t covered her face with a pillow sounded so loud and broken.

And broken she was, the girl was nothing but broken. Her eyes that were always bright as Seulgi had remembered were replaced by a pair that was too swollen from crying.

She sees Joohyun quickly get up from the couch as soon as she had realized that Seulgi was there, frantically wiping the tears that won't stop falling from her eyes. Seulgi sees her tries to fake a smile, but it comes up nothing but just a sad attempt at pretending to be fine.

 

"S...Seul...Seulgi, you're home early," she even sounded broken, the brightness in her voice was gone.

 

Seulgi can't help but feel concerned for her roommate, she had never seen the girl like this— or maybe she just wasn't there often— but that was hardly the point she thinks. At this moment she just wants to be there for the girl who had always been patient with her.

"Everything fine?" Seulgi feels stupid for asking such question, of course, nothing is fine just by looking at her she looks like she had cried the whole day.

She sees Joohyun nod, but even a three-year-old can tell that she wasn't fine, she was far from being fine. Seulgi sits down beside the girl. She feels Joohyun shift a little bit when she sits. Seulgi hesitates if she would try and comfort her but over thinking gets the best of her and she does completely nothing.

Silence had filled the air and faint sobs from the girl beside her can still be heard, in fact, it was the only sound that filled the room aside from car noises from time to time.

“H…He…He was seeing someone else, I wasn’t the only one,” Seulgi finally hears the girl beside her speak up, although the uttered words were low and almost inaudible.

 

“He told me I was the only one he was seeing at the moment, but hey who am I to get mad about it we didn’t even have a label for what we supposedly had, I’m so petty,” Joohyun says her mood changing from sounding sad to fake laughing.

 

Seulgi remembered that her roommate was seeing someone, a certain guy that was one of Joohyun’s classmates from a class. Seulgi knew little about the relationship but she did assume that they were together because sometimes the guy would be around their apartment or she would see them together.

Seulgi did wonder a bit how they got into a relationship because she knew that the guy was somehow infamous for dating girls way too much. Although Seulgi did assume that he changed because it was Joohyun–Joohyun the girl too pure for this world.

Though she still somehow hated his guts she became fine with it since she saw that Joohyun was happy. She thought it was real, that he did change, but habits are really hard to drop right?

 

 

"If it makes you feel any better he actually looked like an anyway."

 

 

Joohyun's eyes widened at Seulgi's remark and Seulgi had smacked her own head because she was being too straightforward. Yeah she hated the guts of Joohyun’s someone but she never really expressed it, not until now.

 

"I'm sorry," Seulgi looks at the girl beside her whose head was down but Seulgi could see that even Joohyun was constantly trying to wipe away the tears that were constantly falling from her face, there was a faint smile forming on her lips.

 

"Don't be Seulgi, he actually is. He lied to me."

 

Seulgi could've punched the guy right in the face for doing that to a girl like Joohyun. Joohyun is one of the good ones, unlike her.

She’s like the girl all the guys would want and yet that guy just couldn’t abandon his old habits, couldn’t he? Not even for a girl as perfect as Joohyun.

Seulgi still hesitates but after inching little by little to get closer to the girl beside her she finally does something and she slowly gives the girl a hug.

The hug was quite awkward at first because of Seulgi’s constant hesitation but Seulgi's shocked when other girl hugged her back. Her grip tightening after every sob and Seulgi couldn't help but feel sorry for Joohyun.

 

"I… fell for him Seulgi. I was stupid enough despite the constant warnings people told me, I was stupid enough to believe his lies when I didn’t even had something to hold on to in the first place. I was stupid Seulgi! Now look at me, I’m such a mess, even the apartment’s a mess.”

Seulgi doesn't know what to say. She hasn’t been in the same situation so she was thinking that she might say something wrong and that would only make Joohyun more upset. So with the situation at hand, she doesn't know what to do.

She only lets the other girl cry while rubbing her back, hoping that it would provide some sort of comfort. She felt guilty though, how could she be so poor at doing this when Joohyun had taken care of her every time she was drunk. She couldn’t even provide anything to stop the girl from crying, she can’t even come up with something that could at least cheer up Joohyun.

She tries to create a speech in her head, or at least come up with something to comfort the girl. When she finally thinks that she figured out what to say, she says something else because she is an idiot,

 

"Don't worry you have me."

 

 

Maybe Seulgi's stupidity was working because in the middle of sobbing she hears the other girl laugh, "You don't even do the dishes.” Seulgi was at a loss for words. So she just resorts to patting the other girl's back and letting the other girl hug her for as long as she wants.

 

 

“I also failed one of my midterm exams today,” Joohyun continues while still hugging Seulgi, “I studied really hard for it, that’s why I’m sadder,” Joohyun whines.

 

Seulgi could feel her heart skip a beat. The one she feels whenever she sees Joohyun does the adorable things she does, to Seulgi at least.

Like the one time she threw the mini stuffed animal that was on her desk out of frustration because she couldn’t get a lesson. There was also that time when she threw a paper because it got a low grade and she wouldn’t stop whining about it so she got as far as asking Seulgi how to drink alcohol because of it. She thinks that Joohyun whining was cute and it made her heart beat a little faster than normal.

And right now, even when Joohyun was feeling extremely sad, her whining about failing an exam amidst of all the other things that happened to her that day was cute enough to send Seulgi bursting out the faint laugh she was suppressing.

 

“Hey what’s so funny?” and again Joohyun decides to whine, while still not breaking the hug between them, making Seulgi’s heart skip a beat once more although she tries to mask it off by laughing.

 

“Nothing, it’s just that you still whine about failing an exam when you just got your heart broken,” Seulgi says jokingly. When Joohyun replies a faint ‘hmph’ she just couldn’t understand why her heart was now erratically beating through her chest, it’s almost about to burst.

 

“It was partly your fault you know, why do you always go home drunk?” Joohyun complains while still hugging Seulgi and maybe the other girl doesn’t realize that.

 

The hug wasn’t helping at all, to Seulgi at least, because her Joohyun being adorable and that wasn’t a very good combination for her heart. She just hopes that the hug makes Joohyun feel better, she really hope it does, because it was the only thing she could offer.

 

Well at least for now.

 

Seulgi apologized because it was true and she was feeling really embarrassed. She lets out faint to shake off the embarrassing feeling. Though after that she heard Joohyun let out a tiny laugh and that alone made Seulgi somehow relieved. At least she knows that she could also be there for the girl who had always been patient with her.

 

----

Seulgi hears the sobbing stop, and the girl had fallen asleep right in her arms. Her eyes were still swollen. Her eyelashes somehow twinkled from being drenched in tears and her face still etched with the traces of tears that had fallen from her eyes. She looked so delicate, so fragile Seulgi thought, yet she still looks so peaceful.

Seulgi struggles to pull away from the girl without waking her up. Seulgi succeeds after a few tries and she decides that she won't let Joohyun who had just cried so much wake up in an old squeaky couch, so she decides to carry the girl inside her bedroom. Luckily, Seulgi was strong enough to carry Joohyun.

"Wow," Seulgi says under her breath with Joohyun in her arms as she entered the other girl's room.

Seulgi looks around the neatly organized room that smelled like lavender and thinks that even if they have identical rooms she can't help to think how different Joohyun's room looked like compared to her ‘trashy’ room. She lays Joohyun carefully on her bed, lifting the blankets first before putting her down.

She tucks the loose strands of Joohyun's hair that had covered her face, she also wipes some of the tears that were left on the latter’s face. She found herself staring at the other girl, looking at every single feature that she had and telling herself how damn pretty the other girl actually is and now she hates Joohyun's ‘someone’ even more for breaking the heart of a girl so pure like Joohyun.

Seulgi gets up and puts a blanket over Joohyun, with one final look at the other girl who was sleeping soundly, she turns to the door and proceeds to leave the room. But before she even closed the door she whispered something even though she knows Joohyun can't hear it.

 

"Good night Hyun-ah."

------

 

Joohyun wasn’t so excited about leaving home and going to university.

She was excited about the part of a new page in her life unfolding but there was one concern she just doesn’t know how to deal with.

She always felt uncomfortable being alone in places that she’s not familiar with and going to uni and living alone was a hundred steps, even a thousand, ahead of what she feared.

She lived in the province far away from where the university she always dreamed of attending was. In the end, she chose to follow her dreams and besides making her parents proud was one thing that made her the happiest in the world. So even with her fears and doubts, she goes to uni– a place far away from home.

But even though how hard she tries to adjust, she just couldn’t, she at making herself feel comfortable. University was one heck of a scary place and adjusting to it felt harder than any other thing Joohyun has done.

There’s also the thing about expectations. Since she lived far from the city, they always had this view of what the city was like. Crazy, wild, full of people taking advantages of others, polluted air, traffic; in a nutshell, they believed it was a jungle full of terrors.

They weren’t wrong.

Culture shock was the word for it. Combine it with the unsettling feeling she has towards being alone in a strange place made her feel more scared than ever.

Then a week after being alone in the apartment her roommate arrives and she didn’t want to expect but she did. She thought that maybe having a roommate would make her miss home less, that she could finally feel like the apartment was somehow a temporary home.

 

But Kang Seulgi wasn’t the roommate she was expecting. Kang Seulgi was a social butterfly.

They were opposites in every way possible. She ended up being alone in the apartment a lot. Although they would be with each other from time to time and sure, sometimes they have fun but most of the time Seulgi wasn’t there. Being alone made her miss home more, it made her lonely.

Most of the times she was lonely.

Joohyun just spent most of her time studying, she didn’t hang out with other people. She did have people that she talks casually to but somehow she still felt lonely. Is homesickness really this hard to overcome?

Then one day a guy shows up, one of the first person to ever approach her and he makes her life in uni completely different.

She found comfort in him. The comfort she always sought the moment she went to this strange place. With his sweet words, Joohyun felt that finally, she could be at ease, that finally she felt like she wasn’t alone in such a strange place; she felt safe. She felt that finally, she found home.

 

Despite warnings she heard from some of her classmates and from gossips she ignored them. She didn’t believe them, his sweet words and gestures were enough for Joohyun to feel loved. It was enough for her to shut off even the warning signals in her own head. She believed that he could change, that he could change for her.

She let his sweet words mask what he really was, he didn’t change, he was still the same. Now, she was left with a broken heart.

Or that’s what she thought, maybe it wasn’t completely true.

------

 

Joohyun wakes up later than usual the next day. Her eyes were still heavy from all the crying last night.

She rubs her eyes, letting it adjust to the light coming in from the windows. Her eyes roamed around her surroundings and she expects to see a bunch of tissues in front of a coffee table and a television set in front of her but to her surprise, she was lying comfortably in her own bed with her blanket even wrapped around her.

There's no way, she thought, that she had the strength last night to even walk to her room so she expected waking up in the squeaky old couch they had in the living room. She also remembers having slept in the arms of her roommate, and for a second she was embarrassed at the thought. But when she realized what Seulgi might have done for her, she felt heat consuming her cheeks.

She gets out of bed rubbing her eyes that were still sore from crying and it hurts, still, both physically and emotionally. She was still tired and she just wanted to stay in her bed all day but knowing all the mess she made last night, the scattered kitchen utensils that she had threw out of anger and the tissues that she had used to wipe all those tears that she shed, she just couldn't stand the thought of that.

She knows damn sure that even when Seulgi was there to comfort her last night she couldn't actually rely on the girl about cleaning up — besides the girl might've already left.

With her towel draped over her shoulder and a basket of her toiletries in one hand, she opens her door. She badly needed a shower to wash away everything, the tears, and hopefully the pain.

As soon as she opens her door she was surprised to see that her roommate was still there. It was a weekend and she was used to Seulgi being gone early and being back late. What shocks her, even more, is that Seulgi was doing something in their kitchen, which she assumes is cooking.

 

"Good morning Hyun! uhh... I tried to cook breakfast?"

 

Seulgi lifts up the pan she was holding to let Joohyun see clearly what she was doing. The kitchen was a mess with piles of used plates and pans on the sink. The counter almost looked like an abstract painting from the number of marks it had and the smell of something that had burnt lingers in the air.

 

"You can cook?" Joohyun asks while inspecting what she assumes to be pancakes placed on their table.

 

She sees Seulgi approach her and she was wearing that cute bunny apron that Joohyun had bought. But now it wasn't looking as cute as before because of the smudges of flour, batter and all the other things that she could not even tell what is. Seulgi also had various marks on her face which she tries to wipe but fails. Joohyun resists the urge to just burst out a laugh because Seulgi looks like a complete mess, well she is a mess too but Seulgi's case was different.

Seulgi laughs first as she places the plate of bacon and judging from the number of pieces that made it into the plate, she assumes that the other half had made its way to the trash can.

Seulgi playfully laughs first before speaking, “I tried to cook, and pardon me because I never really had done this a lot."

 

Joohyun finally lets out a giggle when she hears her confession, Seulgi had only cooked two dishes and the amount of mess she made looks like she cooked up a feast for their whole neighborhood.

 

"When I woke up earlier and you were still not awake, uhh I figured that I should at least cook breakfast right?" Joohyun looks at the clock and sees that it was already 9:30 am, three hours past her usual time of waking up, “But this is all the food I can cook aside from ramen that’s available in the mart.”

 

"Don't worry you have me."

 

Joohyun remembers Seulgi's words from last night but she never thought she'll actually do it. A smile forms on her face because of Seulgi's attempt at comforting her. She knew that Seulgi might've seen how much of a mess she looked last night, that even Seulgi wasn’t around a lot Seulgi might actually care for her.

"Thanks, Seulgi, I'll just go take a shower then we'll eat together, okay."

She sees Seulgi nod but she really can't take the marks on the other girl's face anymore so she tries to wipe them off but Seulgi backs away maybe because she was unsure of Joohyun's intentions.

"Hey, I was just trying to wipe those off," she points at the marks stained across the other girl's face and Seulgi's hands were quickly wiping her own face turning her back against Joohyun.

"Ah, I'll get this, you go on and take a shower."

 

 

Joohyun steps out of the bathroom feeling somehow refreshed, her eyes were still heavy but not as much as before.

As soon as she had closed the bathroom door she notices Seulgi wiping the kitchen counter. She moves closer to have a better look at what Seulgi was doing, the other girl was busy wiping off stains that were on the counter. She also notices that the unwashed dishes on the sink earlier had all been placed in their proper cabinets. Seulgi almost jumps up at the sight of Joohyun who had been monitoring what she has been doing.

Seulgi wipes her hands on a towel placed on her shoulder, "I don't know if it's up to your standards, but I uh, tried to clean up."

There was a hint of uncertainty in Seulgi's voice and Joohyun can't help but smile. She scans their apartment and she had noticed that it was cleaner than last night, the whole room even smells lemony. She can still see a few places that might've needed more cleaning but she's fine with it considering Seulgi rarely does it and she had no energy to clean up anyway.

 

"It's fine Seulgi, thank you for doing this." She lets out a genuine smile.

Seulgi doesn't realize that whatever she was doing was making Joohyun somehow happy and forget the things that happened.

Simple unusual things that Seulgi rarely does was enough for her to feel a l