chapter 14
the psychology of good studentsThey don’t talk about the drunk man the rest of the way home. It is stiflingly awkward, and Jooyoung has no idea why. So when they goes back to the apartment she hurtles towards the table and buries herself in her notes again. She flips open her computer and begins to type. In the background, Jooyoung can hear Kyungsoo getting a cup of water from the kitchen, then going to his room to remove his coat, then going back to the kitchen again to do something, but she can’t decipher what.
When her mind returns to her notes she realises she has typed the same paragraph twice. Blinking, she wills herself to concentrate! even though her mind is drifting off every second or so to so many different things, drunk man included.
“Ugh, Han Jooyoung...” she groans softly, rubbing her temples. The heater heating the other side of the apartment and not reaching the table is making things worse.
Now she can’t concentrate and is cold. What a great situation. She plonks her head on the table.
The next thing she hears is the soft drop of a textbook right beside her. And when she bounces up from her crouched position her eyes meet with Kyungsoo’s. He sets down his laptop as well and settles into his seat, looking unbothered.
“What,” he asks monotonously, flipping open his textbook. “Never seen a handsome man before?”
Jooyoung strangely feels a nice relief run through her — she can always count on Kyungsoo’s teasing to make an awkward or bad situation better.
“Yeah, even now I haven’t,” she teases back. “Are you actually studying, Do Kyungsoo?”
“No, no, it’s my hobby to read textbooks at near midnight. What fun,” he sarcastically says, and Jooyoung rolls her eyes. He continues to flip through his textbook, and she cracks her knuckles to start work again. Then, without looking up, he speaks, his sarcastic tone completely removed and his voice now hesitant. “Is it better now? As in if I sit here with you.”
Aw. How does Kyungsoo always know when she isn’t concentrating, or isn’t feeling good? She smiles, but doesn’t look up at him. “It’s cold,” she says breezily, not wanting to give him an answer.
“Dumbo, you could’ve just adjusted the heater.” He gets up to do it himself, and before she knows it she can feel warmth radiating behind her. Goodness, she really shouldn’t have been so lazy and gone to adjust it herself — this feels like heaven.
Then Kyungsoo comes back to the table and sits beside Jooyoung again, only this time he’s changed sides to sit on her left. He gestures at her to pass him his textbook and she slides it over to him, confused. But he begins to study again, so she decides not to probe. After all, she’s used to Kyungsoo being weird.
She is rewriting some information when she feels her left hand being tentatively held by Kyungsoo. His touch is light, and it is almost as if he isn’t confident about what he’s doing. She looks over at him, but his face shows no sign of uncertainty.
“What are you doing?” She asks, trying not to let her pounding heart eat her words up. “Don’t tell me it’s that crap about touch reducing stress again. It doesn’t work for me.”
He doesn’t flinch. “You said you’re cold.”
“Then why the need to move to my left?”
Kyungsoo’s hand flipping the textbook is left in mid air. He looks directly at Jooyoung and she is sure he’s holding back a laugh. “You really are a dumbo,” he says in a pitch slightly higher than usual. “If I were to hold your right hand how are you going to write?”
“Oh.”
She wants to joke with him about how he’s so especially thoughtful these days, about if he has any ulterior motives, laugh at him for his gentlemanliness. But the words are stuck in . So she just lets him hold her hand. It feels nice and warm — even warmer than the heavenly heater.
Kyungsoo holds her hand with more certainty this time, closing his fingers round tight. They stay like this for a while.
But knowing Kyungsoo, he can’t study for too long. Soon he begins to get bored and shuts his textbook, pushing it away. He slides his laptop towards him and before anyone knows it, starts to game. He’s switched off the volume and (so far) not obnoxiously smashed his keyboard, but the flashy graphics and the fact that he’s playing already distracts Jooyoung so much.
“Can you stop gaming and get back to work?” She nags, but this time it’s because it’s affecting her as well.
He laughs. “But I’m bored. I wanna game. So, no.”
Jooyoung decides it’s no use getting him to switch off his game since he has nothing better to do anyway — he probably already has his entire textbook unconsciously memorised. So instead she lightly shakes her hand out of his (which makes him look up from his screen, finally) and shifts her stuff to the other side of the table, where she is relatively far away. Then she gets up and moves.
“Hey...” Kyungsoo says, almost in a whine.
She settles down at her new seat, where she can’t feel the heater. It is cold again. But Jooyoung doesn’t budge.
“I can’t concentrate,” she says nonchalantly. “Let’s just sit separately.”
“I don’t even have the volume on.”
“Still no.”
Kyungsoo glances at her for a moment. Then he glances back at his laptop. And then he sighs (softly, but she catches it), slams it close resolutely, before looking at Jooyoung again. “I turned it off.”
“Okay,” she says.
“So come and sit here now? You can’t feel the heater there,” he persuades. “And I won’t hold your hand if you don’t want me to.”
Jooyoung stops typing, and he takes it as a sign that she has agreed. So he grins and moves her laptop and notes back to her original position. She saunters back like it’s no big deal, but really, she’s feeling happy inside.
And when she gets back she stuffs her hand into Kyungsoo’s again, making sure his hand wraps around hers. “It’s cold,” she explains.
Kyungsoo laughs.
Nights where Jooyoung stays up way too late to do work are the worst. She either goes to sleep feeling all drained and dead, or she goes to sleep as normal and is haunted with nightmares instead.
Tonight is the latter; the kind she hates more.
Tonight she wakes up sweaty and yet shivering, her toes curling up underneath the blanket and her mind a mess.
Tonight her heart is pounding but she can’t exactly remember what her nightmare was even about; maybe it was about her grades, probably it was. And it keeps her awake.
She hurls the blanket over her head and forces herself to get to sleep, clamping her eyes shut. With every passing minute the room seems to get darker, the wind outside get stronger, and the chills down her spine get colder. There’s something that feels so creepy about being alone in the dark like this that she can’t fall back asleep.
For a split second Jooyoung thinks about going to Kyungsoo — who’s just next door, literally — just so that she’ll have some company to get through the night. But she decides against it because she knows she should solve her own problems and stop being a burden all the time.
So she lays there until she drifts back to sleep, eventually.
It is a mistake because the same nightmare haunts her again, and this time she can remember it clearer than ever. Jooyoung is shocked awake again for the second time that night with cold sweat literally pooling everywhere on her face. Her hands shiver as she forces her transfixed body to move, and when her locked muscles loosen she throws her blanket off her and dashes out of the room.
Kyungsoo’s door is open. She feels her heart race as she runs into his room — boundaries don’t matter now, not when she feels an underworld would consume her any moment.
He’s sleeping with his body sideways, a small figure buried under thick blankets. Wordlessly Jooyoung crawls into the space beside him, curling herself into a ball underneath his blanket.
There’s shuffling before she hears his voice. “Jooyoung?” The surprise in his tone is evident, and for a moment she’s afraid he’ll kick her out of his room, so she inches closer to Kyungsoo, sticking herself onto him.
He’s frozen in place too, and Jooyoung doesn’t want to open her eyes, but she can imagine the absolute shock on his face that she is suddenly on his bed in the middle of the night.
“You’re shivering,” he says, covering her completely with the blanket. When she doesn’t move nor show any sign of reaction, he seems to know something is wrong. She feels him move again, then a hand comfortingly patting her back in a steady rhythm.
“Everything’s okay now. Everything’s okay,” he repeats softly. Jooyoung’s body relaxes, and she slowly unfurls from the ball she had curled up into. Then Kyungsoo stops patting, and instead pulls her impossibly closer into an embrace.
“I’m with you now. Don’t be afraid.”
And the whole night he holds her tight like this, comforting her although he has no idea what’s wrong, but knows better than to question.
The next morning Jooyoung awakes feeling cold. She hurls the blanket on top of her head, but it smells different from usual. Then she remembers she’s in Kyungsoo’s bed. Not bothering to open her eyes, she feels around for his body but can’t find it. Instead her fingers close around some sheet of paper, so she slowly opens her eyes to see what it is.
It’s a reused post-it, with the original content cancelled away in a scribble and the new message written in the little space remaining at the bottom: I made you breakfast, but you owe me.
She finds herself biting back a smile, although it’s early in the morning and she isn’t even fully awake. Kyungsoo’s probably getting them groceries from the mart before heading to college, because between the two of them, he’s the mom.
The breakfast he’s talking about ends up being a very sad looking peanut butter sandwich and an even sadder looking fried egg, but Jooyoung doesn’t stop smiling as she brings her breakfast back into Kyungsoo’s bed and eats it with her legs underneath his soft, amazing smelling blanket, just for the sake of it.
The subsequent days in London pass with classes in the mornings and afternoons, then frolicking around occasionally with Minseok (and once with Krystal tagging along), but mostly just with Kyungsoo. And in the night, either procrastinating the entire evening away or panicking and studying for hours straight, with no in between.
Before they know it, it’s their last day in the university in London. Like almost every exchange programme there is an obligatory farewell party in which students from both colleges are welcomed (and in their case, “strongly encouraged”) to attend. Jooyoung had tried to persuade Kyungsoo against going for the party because she really wanted to walk around London together for the last time, but being the annoying miser he is, he insisted that there would be free food at the party so he wanted to go there instead.
So they end up hovering around the free food the entire party. Kyungsoo passes a croissant-like bread to Jooyoung. “Try it,” he says between bites of food. “This is nice.”
The funny thing is that the ratio of students from London versus students from South Korea is horribly skewed. Jooyoung and Kyungsoo are probably already the majority of the South Korean students who bothered to turn up. Krystal’s here too, but she’s busy flirting socialising with the students here so they haven’t interacted. They’ve been just standing near the food, and eating non-stop.
“I told you we should’ve gone out instead. Now you don’t have your usual swarms of people wanting to be your friend,” she says, taking another of the croissant-like bread.
He shrugs. “Why would that stop me from coming? The food is good.”
Just as Jooyoung is going to start spewing her sarcastic remarks a tall English man comes up in front of the two of them. He glances at Kyungsoo, and she instinctively steps away so that the two can have conversation. Given Kyungsoo’s social skills, he probably had made some friends in the course of the two weeks, and maybe this man is part of his new London friend group.
So she’s surprised when the man’s eyes turn to her, and he gives her the widest smile. “Hey,” he says, extending his hand out for a shake. Jooyoung takes a quick glance at Kyungsoo, confused, and wanting him to claim the man back. But when he doesn’t, she turns back to the man and awkwardly shakes his hand.
“I’m Blake,” he continues, and Jooyoung is confused once more. What did he say his name was again? Black?
“Um, I’m Jooyoung,” she says, and he smiles even wider. Honestly, Black’s (?) pretty cute, but she didn’t come here to socialise, she’s come here for the food, so she isn’t very interested in making lifelong friends (nor partners) on her last day on campus. Jooyoung offers him the smile that she gives acquaintances, and he seems pleased she’s responding.
"It's your last day here, right?" He asks, tilting his head slightly.
"Yeah."
“Wanna go take a trip around London with me now? I know all the best places,” he says. Jooyoung’s sure he doesn’t have any bad intentions, and he’s just being really friendly and perhaps, a little flirty, but it doesn’t stop her from looking at Kyungsoo, who is busying himself with more food.
“Go with him,” he says assuringly, as if he knows what’s on her mind. “Didn’t you say you wanted to explore London for the last time? I’ll be okay by myself.”
Jooyoung narrows her eyes at Kyungsoo. Does he really think she would abandon him to walk around with some guy she‘s barely met? She turns back to Black (what a name) again and clears in a fervent attempt at English conversation. “Thanks, but I am fine here,” she says.
He looks slightly upset and she feels bad, so instead her eyes dart around the room for a familiar brunette, whom she spots almost immediately. She directs him to her. “See that lady? She probably would like to explore,” she says. “Her name is Krystal. Very pretty.”
Black’s eyes light up and she knows she’s done him a favour, so when he gives her a final smile before levitating there she returns to Kyungsoo’s side, proud of her valiant attempt.
“I just had an English conversation with a student here,” she boasts, as if it is a big deal (but it is, to her at least).
“What’s his name?” Kyungsoo asks, feeding her a forkful of cake. She eats it directly from his fork.
“Black,” she answers confidently, but he bursts into laughter instead, and she is disgruntled immediately.
“Black?” He laughs. “Blake, you big noob. Blake!”
“Shut up. If you knew already, you shouldn't have asked me.” Jooyoung rolls her eyes, but feels a laugh bubbling inside of her. So that was his name, ah.
But before they can continue, another guy comes up to her and she is yet again confused. This time he’s accompanied by friends who seem to be egging him on, and she starts feeling the slightest bit uncomfortable. Jooyoung inches closer to Kyungsoo, making sure his hand is within reach.
“Your name is Jooyoung?” The guy in the front asks, and she is surprised.
“H-How did you know?”
He smiles a lopsided smile. “You’re cute, there’s no way we don’t know,” he flirts, then hands her the drink in his hand. “For you.”
Jooyoung politely declines it. “I don’t drink,” she lies, and Kyungsoo beside her starts choking loudly on air, so she sends him a death glare.
“That’s okay,” the guy casually says, then finishes the drink in one-shot himself. “How do guys usually ask girls out in Korea?” His tone is playful and she doesn’t know if he’s drunk, or just really... proactive.
“They don’t,” she answers flatly.
“So girls ask guys out? Ooh, y.” He wiggles his eyebrows and she frowns. She really wants to say something back but her thoughts don’t run in English, so she doesn’t.
Instead he speaks again. “Do you know what my shirt is made of?” He asks suddenly, pinching the fabric. She frowns some more. Is this some kind of prank? Or is she just understanding him wrong?
“Um...”
“Boyfriend material!” He exclaims, laughter booming from his flamed nostrils. His friends behind him cackle as if it’s the funniest thing ever. Jooyoung decides that this guy is no longer cute. At all.
“You’re a cute little bean,” he says. “Want to come with me somewhere fun?”
She stares at him from head down, looking for a way to reject him without seeming silly. She turns to look at Kyungsoo for support but he’s gone all quiet, twiddling with something on his thumb. Compared to the tall guys he’s really small, and him just standing there makes him look like a little boy.
Jooyoung looks at the man again and sweetly smiles. Then she grabs Kyungsoo’s hand, pulling him towards her. She leans her head on his shoulder.
“Babe, this place is no fun,” she says in English just to irk the guy. Kyungsoo! Please, please, please play along, she prays in her mind.
He looks downwards, at her on his shoulder. It is mere moments before he starts talking too.
“You big baby. Where do you want to go?” He coos, seeming totally unsurprised at the situation. He naturally places both their hands in his hoodie pocket, and Jooyoung has to force herself not to smile too wide. Jackpot. Kyungsoo’s so natural it’s almost as if they’d planned this. She watches as the man’s face contorts.
Jooyoung gives her most cringe-worthy pouting expression (or at least she tries) and shrugs. “Anywhere. As long as it’s with you.” Her tone is sickeningly sweet and honestly if someone told this to her in real life she’d probably leave straight away, but maybe it’s because they both are acting that makes everything so funny.
“Oh, my honey!” Kyungsoo swoons, almost as if he’s in a Shakespearean play, and Jooyoung has to literally close her eyes and divert her attention in order to stop the laughter in from bursting out. What in the world is he doing?
“Oh, my baby!” She gushes back when she is more confident of holding in her laughter. She doesn’t dare to look at the guys’ reaction in case she starts to laugh, so she nudges Kyungsoo in an attempt to get him to move. He seems to understand her.
“Let’s go!” He drags her away, her head with his free hand, leaving the troop of guys bewildered. Once they know they are out of sight Jooyoung bursts out laughing and she reaches out her hand for a high five.
“Yeah, Do Kyungsoo!” She grins. “Our chemistry isn’t that bad, is it?”
“Out of this world,” he agrees, returning the high five. “Let’s do this again next time.”
“Definitely.”
a/n: hi my name is black. nice to meet you, white. (sorry i'm high)
slightly belated but eid mubarak to those celebrating!!
and sighghghgh you all don't know how happy reading your comments make me hehe :") thank yall for just enjoying my story, it means a lot to me!
I OWED SO MANY OF YOU REPLIES i’m so sorry!! just replied to everyone i hadn’t replied to aaa but i hope everyone’s having a great 2019 so far! i think it’ll take a while before my next story because of circumstances.... but i promise i’ll be back :”)
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