[CONTENTID1]Fahrenheit 451 and French Toast[/CONTENTID1]

[CONTENTID2]“It means I’m really bad at this sort of thing. But I can’t stop thinking about you and I tried everything I could to stop, but then I realised that I don’t want to.”[/CONTENTID2]

[CONTENTID3] Yeseul had to stop by the apartment to pick up Chanyeol’s birthday present before she could go to the party. She changed too, because she was still wearing ripped boyfriend jeans and a cable knit sweater, and Chanyeol’s party wasn’t going to be like Sehun’s where she could show up in something like that without anyone glancing at her twice.

Even after she’d washed her face and redone her makeup, lipstick and all, Yeseul felt strange. And horrible. And very much not like herself. She hoped that with a few drinks her stomach might settle, because it was tearing itself up with nerves. Yeseul shrugged on her leather jacket and zipped it up, not wanting the three inches of bare skin between her cropped cami and black jeans to get cold. The present tucked into her handbag, she made sure she had everything else she needed and left the apartment.

There were messages on her phone, people wondering where she was, but Yeseul ignored them. She’d be at the house soon, but she wasn’t ready for it. Yeseul wasn’t good with apologies, with fixing things, because she almost never realised what had gone wrong until it was too late. Now all she could hope for was that she wasn’t too late with Chanyeol, even if she had no idea what she was going to do or say when she saw him.

By some odd coincidence, Joonmyun was walking down the pavement from the opposite direction when Yeseul turned the corner. He spotted her immediately and waved, breaking away from his slow-moving, small group to meet her halfway, right in front of the gate to the house. Since it was rather late, the party was already in full swing. They’d probably already done cake and sung ‘Happy Birthday,’ which Yeseul felt terrible for missing.

“I thought you’d be here by now,” Joonmyun said, giving her a one-armed hug.

“I got caught up,” Yeseul replied. “Why are you here so late?”

“Apparently it was close friends only before ten,” he said with a shrug. “Or that’s what Kyungsoo said, anyway. The real party only started about thirty minutes ago.”

“Oh.”

“Let’s go in,” he said, slinging an arm around her shoulders. Yeseul didn’t try to shrug it off like she normally would have; she was almost too anxious to move, so Joonmyun guiding her up the steps was helpful. What she wanted was something strong to drink, so her legs would stop feeling like jelly and her heart didn’t feel like it was going to rip through her chest and run away.

Much to her relief, they made it to the kitchen without encountering any of Yeseul’s friends. She nodded in response to Joonmyun’s offer to make her a drink, knowing that from past experience that he made them with way too much alcohol.

“There you are!” Serin cried from the doorway just after Yeseul downed half her drink in one go. “God, Yeseul, where the hell have you been?”

“Um …” Yeseul mumbled, fiddling with the belt of her jacket.

“Come on, you can leave your things in Kyungsoo’s room, that’s what the rest of us have done,” Serin said, dragging Yeseul from the room.

She had time to wave awkwardly at a confused Joonmyun before they rounded the corner. Upstairs, Serin checked that Kyungsoo’s room was empty before hauling Yeseul inside and shutting the door. There was a pile of coats on the bed that Yeseul added hers to, slipping the strap of her handbag back over her head and onto her shoulder. She took another drink, and whatever Joonmyun had put in there was already enough to make her feel pleasantly buzzed. She could go for one (or three) more before she would feel ready to so much as look at Chanyeol.

Yeseul did not usually get nervous about this sort of thing. But that was because it had never been anything other than , there were never any stupid complicated feelings for her to process. Even with Eunha, the feelings had been fairly simple to navigate, until they weren’t. Apparently things started out difficult with Chanyeol, which she should have seen coming. Yeseul cursed herself for kissing him in the first place, for letting a bit of drink and curiosity get the better of her, planting a seed in her head that she didn’t realise at the time would actually grow into something, leaving her thinking about him constantly and wanting something more.

“Hello? Are you listening?”

Yeseul looked up from her drink, which she’d been staring into for far too long, and blinked at Serin. “No.”

“Of course you weren’t,” Serin rolled her eyes. Yeseul thought she looked nice in her little black dress, and wondered if Baekhyun did too. “You missed the cake and everything. Sehun had done broccoli and little whisks on it with icing.”

“Cute.”

“It was freaking adorable and you missed it. Chanyeol’s been gloomy all night and I’m pretty sure it’s because you weren’t here.”

Yeseul took another drink, finishing what was left of the potent concoction Joonmyun had made for her. While she wouldn’t have been able to talk to Serin a few weeks ago, now that she knew everything (well, nearly everything), Yeseul found that she was grateful to have someone to talk to about what was going on in her head when it came to a certain culinary, poetry-writing, messy haired idiot. “I sort of shouted at him earlier.”

“I think he’s used to that by now,” said Serin, folding her arms over her chest. “What was it about?”

“I told him to get over what happened at New Years.”

“You didn’t.” Yeseul looked at her friend, and Serin sighed. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I thought he should.”

“Thought?”

Yeseul shrugged, tossing her empty cup into the bin next to Kyungsoo’s messy desk. “Remember when you said that I couldn’t talk to you forever? That I should find someone to open up to, that it might help?”

The other girl looked at her knowingly, even though she was being vague. Yeseul didn’t know what to make of it, there were too many other things on her mind for her to try and figure out why Serin was looking at her like she knew something Yeseul didn’t. “You like him, don’t you?”

“I have absolutely no ing idea,” Yeseul replied. Serin raised her eyebrows, but didn’t stop smirking. “But I think I’d like to find out.”

They returned to the ground floor, finding it even more crowded than it had been all of ten minutes ago. Yeseul managed to find Joonmyun again and asked him to make her another drink, which he obliged to happily, once he made her promise she’d play a round of beer pong with him.

He made Serin one too, but she stopped him from putting in as much vodka as he did with Yeseul’s. “You already had one of these?” She asked, and Yeseul nodded. “How drunk are you right now?”

“Not as drunk as I’d like to be.”

“You know this is the time to be sober, right? He’s not going to take you seriously if you’re drunk.”

Yeseul realised that Serin had made an excellent point, but the alcohol had also done a fantastic job of making her nerves disappear. “Maybe I’ll see how it goes, then.”

“Okay,” Serin said hesitantly. “Find me if you need anything, okay?”

“You too.”

While Serin left the kitchen through one door, probably in search of Baekhyun, Yeseul took the other. It led to the living area rather than the front room, where the sound system (currently operated by Sehun) was located. Yeseul budged through the dancing bodies and sat down on the side table next to him, crossing her legs.

“When did you get here?” He asked without looking up, too focused on scrolling through a playlist on his laptop.

“Twenty minutes ago, maybe?”

“Seen Chanyeol yet?”

“Why would you–?” Yeseul started, then decided not to finish her question.

“It’s his birthday.”

“Right.”

Sehun nodded toward one of the corners. “He’s over there making out with some blonde if you wanted to say hello.”

It was almost as if the music had stopped, though she could still feel the vibrations coming through the soles of her boots and making her bones shake. Yeseul’s nerves had only really started when she got on the bus outside Daeho’s apartment, she’d been reeling with the possibility of kissing Chanyeol again and actually meaning it this time before that. Then the nerves disappeared when she had some alcohol running through her system, and she thought she might actually be able to tell him she’d made a mistake. That she shouldn’t have pushed him away or said the things that she did, because she was paying attention now and wasn’t going to let anything else important slip through her fingers.

Almost as an afterthought, she realised that she’d never actually seen Chanyeol kiss somebody else before. In the time that she’d known him, Chanyeol had dated one or two other girls. Yeseul could only remember the name of one, Soon, because she’d been on Yeseul’s floor and she saw Chanyeol far too much that month for her liking. And although she was certain that all he’d ever had were girlfriends, with the rare one night stand, Yeseul had only ever seen him hold their hands or whisper something in their ear that made them giggle. At the time, even that had made her nauseous.

This was not like that at all.

She was too late.

“Cigarette,” she said to Sehun, and found the closest door that would get her outside without passing Chanyeol and the girl.

Though she had hoped that something like this wouldn’t happen, she had not really considered the possibility that it would, and what she would do. She hadn’t gotten much further than knowing that Chanyeol was something and she needed to figure out what.

Yeseul glared at a boy sitting in one of the lawn chairs until he got out of it, then dragged it away from the other smokers and set up against the opposite fence. She’d forgotten her jacket, but she was too drunk and distracted to feel the cold, and put down her drink so she could light a cigarette. Yeseul leaned back in the chair, trying to process what had just happened.

Sleeping with Daeho had made Yeseul realised she had made a big mistake when it came to Chanyeol, and more importantly, herself. Seeing Chanyeol kiss someone else had made Yeseul realise that if she felt like this afterwards, then she really did like the .

“Oh my god,” she muttered, and took out the present she had tucked under her armpit.

Because there was no way Yeseul was going back into that party while Chanyeol was kissing someone that wasn’t her, she decided to make use of the present she’d bought for him. It had been a last minute thing, after she saw the books he had in his room and noticed that Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t there, though it seemed to her like exactly the thing Chanyeol would enjoy. The copt she’d picked up was secondhand from one of her favourite bookshops down along the riverbank. Without any hesitation whatsoever, she tore off the wrapping and turned to the first page, the spine already worn and cracked from its previous owner.

Instead of going inside and trying to find Chanyeol and pulling him away from the other girl, Yeseul was going to read. It was probably the opposite of what she should be doing, and only making things worse, and not at all the sort of behaviour she wanted to exhibit (since avoiding the issue was exactly what she’d been doing all along), but Yeseul couldn’t bring herself to go inside. She still wasn’t ready, even though she didn’t feel as nervous as she had before. There was something like defeat seeping into her system that Yeseul didn’t want to accept, because she’d done that before after Eunha split up with her and it had resulted in months of feeling sorry for herself and not talking to anybody properly.

Of course, Chanyeol wasn’t Eunha, but Yeseul didn’t want to keep going on with the same pattern of unhealthy behaviour. The whole point of paying more attention to what was going around and within her was that she’d start feeling better. It didn’t even have to have anything to do with Chanyeol, he was just the only thing she could think about at the moment, a present and physical thing for her to focus on. The rest of it was all in her head, all tangled and confusing and frustrating. All Yeseul wanted was to start feeling like the person she knew was buried down inside her somewhere, the one who’d shown herself in glimpses before, when she slept and smiled more and wanted to be there for other people. Not when she was forcing herself to do those things, but when they happened without her consciously making a decision about it.

She flipped the page.

Once she separated what she was beginning to feel for Chanyeol – or what she had felt before, and not realised it – and the real issue that had been there for months, if not years, without her properly paying attention to it or trying to move forward, Yeseul felt herself relax a little. It might have been the cigarette, or the rest of her second drink, but she was going to let it be the other thing.

After her cigarette was done and she’d read several pages, it was easier to go back inside somehow. No matter how much it felt that way, he was not the most important thing. She had to tell herself – out loud, so her intoxicated brain could comprehend it better – that she couldn’t let herself get worked up over him kissing someone else. She’d ed someone else, so it was only fair that he did too, if it came to that.

But then Yeseul realised that she was thinking like someone who didn’t care about the emotions involved in this sort of thing and tried to fix that.

Chanyeol was there and he was important, but she had to let him do what he wanted. All she could do was make herself clear and tell him what she’d been planning to tell him all night, and hope that it really wasn’t too late. Yeseul knew from experience that just because you kissed another person, didn’t mean that you’d moved on. Rather a lot of the time, in circumstances like these, it means that you hadn’t.

Chanyeol and the girl weren’t in the same corner they had been when she left, but Sehun was still sat cross-legged on the floor with his laptop playing music. She took a seat on the side table again, moving his cup out of the way, and kicked his knee lightly.

“Thought you might have gotten lost or something, you were gone for so long. How was your smoke?” He asked, still not looking at her. “Feeling better?”

“Yeah, actually.”

“Bit of a shock seeing Chanyeol kissing someone, isn’t it? When was the last time he did that do you think?”

Sehun did look at her them, and Yeseul knew immediately that either he’d seen her and Chanyeol on New Years or Chanyeol had told him about it. She guessed the latter, because he hadn’t mentioned it to Serin, and it seemed to her like they rather enjoyed discussing their respective best friends.

“Are you okay?”

“Fantastic,” she said. “Where’s Sumin tonight?”

“California,” Sehun answered.

“What? Since when?”

“This morning.”

Yeseul frowned, happy to have something else to focus on instead of all the places Chanyeol could possibly be with the blonde girl in that moment. “She didn’t mention it to me when I saw her two days ago.”

“It was sort of last minute,” Sehun shrugged. “She’s been doing lots of stuff for a gallery affiliated with the one here so the curator said she could come alo