I

Myunghee

Despite Han Myunghee’s love of her English class, her eyes felt heavy the entire class. She supposed she could credit it to her lack of sleep the previous night from working on her World History paper, but she felt exhausted and drained. Even as Mr. Kim gave his usual easy banter to his class, her head lulled periodically side to side before she snapped out of it and shook her head to regain focus. Mr. Kim seemed to notice her daze but said nothing to her about it, although she could swear she heard him chuckle after he had given everyone a silent assignment to work and she almost fell asleep again.

By the time her class was over, Myunghee barely had enough consciousness in her to gather her things and leave. She was grateful she only had English on Thursdays, but she knew that she still wouldn’t be able to go home and sleep like she wanted to until that late afternoon. Danbi would be waiting for her at the Cafe in roughly an hour, and if she tried to get out of it, her best friend would never let her live it down.

It would’ve been better had she been in her right mind, and she had been paying attention to where she was going as she exited the class. But, to her defense, she had gotten precisely two and a half hours of sleep, and as someone who needed a solid eight hours to function properly, she was out of it entirely. 

That was why she missed it when someone was entering the classroom at the same moment she was leaving.

"Oh , I'm so sorry."

Myunghee groaned out loud as she watched all of her books tumble to the ground. One of her folders flipped open, allowing the content inside of it to spew across the hard linoleum floor. Sighing, she squatted down to begin picking up the paper and secure it back in the pockets of her folder. Without looking up, she mumbled a reply to the stranger she had bumped into since it had technically been her fault, to begin with. "Don't apologize. I should have been paying more attention."

"I'm still sorry." She heard the stranger say back in a guilty tone before hearing him shuffle in front of her. She glanced up quickly to see him crouching down to help her gather her belongings, and if she looked hard enough she could have sworn she saw a pink tint flushing his cheeks. But, she blinked those thoughts away and attributed the sight to her sleep-deprived brain. And, upon further inspection, Myunghee even recognized the man to be a somewhat popular upperclassman, in his final year of University; Byun Baekhyun. There was no way he could’ve blushed at her like that. She was nothing more than a sophomore, and Byun Baekhyun was far too pretty to be associated with someone as plain as her.

He was wearing a baseball cap, the bill was thrown back, and his dark fringe pulled underneath the material. A loose tank top adorned his upper body, and while he was definitely more lean than muscular, the tone of his biceps was still noticeable. She bit her lip as she glanced down at her clothes. She hadn’t even bothered to wear anything extravagant after barely waking up in time to make it to her class. She was still in the sweatpants she wore the night before and a blue t-shirt. She had no make-up on, and her hair could only just be categorized as brushed and untangled.

She supposed she could understand why he was so popular, after seeing him up close for the very first time. His features were soft, yet still sharp. If she hadn’t known better, she might have even allowed herself to have a crush on him; he was definitely her type. But that was something she knew could only happen inside the pages of a romance novella. She would never be so lucky.

He must have sensed her gaze on him, because Baekhyun stopped moving and tilted his head up at her, his eyes landing on her face. It took Myunghee a total of fifteen seconds before she realized he had finished gathering her things and was attempting to hand them to her, and she had just been caught staring. She noted the way his thin (yet, somehow plump? She wondered how that were even possible) lips curved at the ends into what could be described as a smirk if her mind wasn’t jumbled and her vocabulary didn’t exceed her.

"Ah, t-thank you." She stuttered, taking the stack he held wi