Chapter Five

Click, Click

Your classes this semester weren’t as hard as you had worried they would be. Luckily despite them all being in Korea you didn’t take any of your classes entirely in Korean, except for the course that helped you understand the local language. When you were at school you were surrounded by a ton of people that were your age and were all from other countries as well. There were only fifteen of you guys, but you all got along pretty well.

Unluckily for you, they had all heard about your run in with Seventeen, because they were pretty much all Kpop fans. They too were all wondering what you had done to deserve that attention from the boys.

What is Vernon like? Why did they comment on your post? Are you two really dating?

There was so much you wanted to say. So much you wanted to ask but so much that you couldn’t. Instead, you nervously smiled and responded that you supposed you were just lucky.

That had to be it. You must just be really lucky.

“We need to get some groceries,” Caitlin murmured as she looked through her phone. You glanced at her.

“We should swing by the store then,” you replied, putting your notebook into your backpack.

It had been about a week and a half since you last saw Jihoon. Your classes were a ten-minute walk away from Seventeen’s dorm. Your apartment was in the direction of Seventeen’s dorm from your classes. The grocery store you were going to was twenty minutes away from Seventeen’s dorm.

You hated it. You hated how you kept track of everywhere you went based on these measurements now.

You wanted to go by every day. You wondered if you did if one day you would see Jihoon there.

They were promoting their album. They were busy but you were selfish, you wanted to see him again. You wished you could see him again, you had so many questions you still needed to ask.

“Can we get a lot of snacks?” You asked. “Our budget is pretty good, right? I swear, recently all I want to do is eat.”

Julia laughed.

“Oh, we’ve noticed. I’m sure we can afford some… You’re getting a job soon right?”

You nodded.

You had applied for a job at a convenience store. It wasn’t that you needed to work while you were here. You were all well off and had saved a lot of money up for this trip but without having to work every week… Well, you were getting antsy. You had too much free time on your hands.

You really liked to be busy. Even though you generally got too busy and became very stressed you found that in the end, you were happiest when you had a lot on your plate. It made you feel productive when maybe somedays you weren’t really.

You had of course gotten the job. You started in a week, and you were excited to get back into customer service. You missed the customer interactions. You missed getting paid. You missed having coworkers. You missed doing more than just sitting around your room all day.

“You know, maybe while we are there we’ll see some idols,” you joked, a large smile crossing your face. “Jeon Jungkook oppa, where are you?”

Caitlin’s face reddened and she smacked your shoulder.

“Shut up, you’re one to talk Mrs. Lee Jihoon,” she cooed back. You rolled your eyes.

“Don’t be ridiculous, if anything he’s just humoring a fan.”

Even as you wrote off the situation a large smile was spread across your face. You couldn’t help but notice that recently you had been feeling a lot happier. Maybe it was because you were finally getting over your anxieties here in Korea. Maybe it was because you had blocked your dad who had been giving you so much anxiety in the first place. Making you feel bad for striving for the opportunity to study abroad. Maybe it was just that you were finally away from all of those people who made you feel especially worthless all the time. You had been told countless times that you couldn’t come to Korea. It would be too hard for you. You wouldn’t be able to afford it. You wouldn’t survive so far from your parents.

That had made you want to come even more. It had also made you that much more nervous when you arrived.

“Soju!” Caitlin sang, rushing over to the shelves with the alcohol. You laughed and rolled your eyes politely.

“You have a one-track mind. I’m going to go grab the toilet paper,” you said. You walked away from your friends and began to explore the aisles for what you were looking for. In one of the aisles, you noticed a taller guy with a face mask on. Your initial impression was that you should go into another aisle. Even all the way here in Korea you were nervous to be in an aisle with other people. You didn’t like to get in other people’s way and preferred to just go into empty grocery store aisle but this one was the one that the toilet paper was in and you were trying to be less of a pushover, so you took a deep breath and walked down the aisle. The person glanced up at you, and you gave him a short smile.

He had a ball cap on so you couldn’t see him very well but… Well, he resembled…

You shook the thought out of your head and browsed the paper products, trying to figure out which one you should get. You looked to see which products were the most expensive and tried to recall the brand you guys had gotten last time.

“We always buy that.”

You startled and looked to your left. The guy was standing next to you, pointing at one of the more averagely priced packs.

“Oh um-”

“You’re her right? The one that ran into Vernon and Woozi and Seungkwan the other day?”

You squinted at him silently for a moment. From this angle, you could see his face better. You could make out the shape of the bags of his eyes like little crescent moons turned upwards.

“Seungcheol,” you breathed in surprise. You instinctively ducked your head into a deep bow, murmuring a polite hello to the boy. “What are the odds.”

“We shop here a lot,” Seungcheol responded. He smiled at you. “So it’s not that odd.”

“Are you shopping for everyone?” You asked him, pushing your hands into your back pockets. God, what did you even say to an idol when you ran into them on the street? There wasn’t really any protocol to this. You didn’t want to give him a bad impression of yourself.

“Yeah, I have to grab snacks for the others. We had a long practice today.”

“Oh, maybe you can tell me what’s good? I’ve been wanting to get myself some snacks,” you replied. You couldn’t tell for sure because he was wearing the facemask, but you could’ve sworn that Seungcheol smiled at that.

“You snack a lot?”

“I go through phases. Last year I swear all I did was get up in the middle of the night to eat snacks,” you admitted with a shy laugh. You picked up a pack of toilet paper and followed Seungcheol through the grocery store.

“Jihoon is the same way,” Seungcheol replied. “You know one time at two in the morning he woke up five members just to eat with him.”

You couldn’t help it- you laughed. For some reason, Jihoon didn’t seem like the type to eat snacks in the middle of the night. You had always assumed people would judge you for doing just that, and you had tried to get away from it when you moved into the apartments with your friends. You liked to snack on things like chips and hated to be loud. Back when you lived in dorms you had gotten into the habit of going out into the hall just to eat a bag of chips.

“That’s very…” you trailed off, reluctant to use the word that you wanted to use to describe the behavior. “Very… cute…”

Seungcheol laughed again.

“Mhm,” he asserted. “He likes rice cake and cold noodles the best, but he’ll eat anything. You would be surprised by how much he eats.”

You smiled despite yourself. God, it was so cute to imagine Jihoon sitting up at night in the middle of working on a new song, snacking on some noodles while he thought over what he had created. There was a reason you had always liked him so much and this was one of those reasons. It was so easy for you to imagine him doing things. Imagine him being domestic.

You had never thought you wanted anything domestic in your life, but biasing Woozi had made you think that maybe you were more domestic then you had originally thought you were.

“Why are you telling me this?” You asked softly. Seungcheol took a bag off of the shelf and put it in your arms. You looked down at it and tilted your head.

It took you a moment to translate the hangul, but once you did you deducted they were called “Honey twists”.

“Woozi eats these when he wants something sweet,” Seungcheol explained. He piled more stuff into your arms. Packs of spicy ramen, and bags of other sorts of chips. He even put triangular kimbap in your arms. Each time you questioned the action he just said that Woozi liked that kind of snack. Eventually, you stopped questioning it.

You were glad to have your appetite back. You had never been the kind of person to starve yourself. Sometimes you went a while without eating because you didn’t have a lot of time to eat, so you had gotten yourself into the habit of eating almonds on busy days to keep your appetite down, but you were not an unhealthy eater.

Wanting to constantly snack all the time, while not entirely healthy was part of your character. You felt like you weren’t even in your own skin when you weren’t hungry at two in the morning.

“I should find my friends,” you said eventually. Seungcheol looked up from his shopping list, and you had to admit he looked a little bit disappointed that you were leaving him to complete his grocery store adventures on your own. “Hey! It’s not really my preference but I haven’t seen my friends in like twenty minutes and I can’t keep leaving them hanging for Seventeen members.”

Seungcheol chuckled.

“Alright, well, I’ll tell Jihoon you said hi.”

You opened your mouth, your face reddening a bit as you tried to insist that he didn’t need to do that but, before you could the older boy was buried back in the ways of his shopping list and the contents of his shopping cart. You smiled and rolled your eyes, starting to make your way away from him.

“Wait!” You turned around, puzzled by the sudden attention from Seungcheol. When you looked back at him, you were surprised to see that his phone was propped up in his hand.

Click, click.

You opened your mouth. Seungcheol responded to the unasked question with a nonchalant wave of his hand and walked away.

God, these boys really were frustrating.

-

Your first day at the convenience store should have been completely uneventful, except that it wasn’t.

You spent the time interacting politely with customers. Your manager had warned you that as a foreigner, people might treat you a little differently and assume that you didn’t know the language or your way around the shop very well.

That was a valid concern but it ended up not really being the case.

You were a good employee. You always had been. You weren’t perfect in social situations but the minute you clocked in it was like you were the most social person in the city. If you could tell a customer needed help you politely gave them assistance if they asked for it or not. You melted the cold expressions on the customer’s faces by talking to them about the weather or The Boyz new song or telling them that you weren’t familiar with Korea but were enjoying it either way.

You had some customers suggest places that you should eat and others tell you that you just had to go to this festival in their daughters’ college town not far from here. It melted your heart to get to know the locals and find that a smile really did go a long way in customer service.

After nearly six hours behind the counter and a long wave of chatty customers who genuinely didn’t have a care in the world, you deflated a bit, finally left alone in the small convenience store.

“Look at you, working even while across the seas from home.”

You jumped, surprised to find Jihoon standing at the counter, a fond expression on his face. You smiled in relief. It was just Jihoon.

“Are you stalking me?” You responded, squinting your eyes at the just shorter idol. “I swear the amount at which I see you is… It’s just uncanny.”

Jihoon chuckled.

“No, no, it really is just random chance,” he replied pleasantly. His expression solemned and he put a chocolate bar on the counter. You began to ring him up, unable to shake the feeling of him staring at you with a thoughtful look on his face.

You had been around a few guys who liked you in your time. Guys who had been very interested in just staring at you when they thought you didn’t notice. It was because you were so friendly that guys usually liked you. You came off as a bit of an airhead. A naive, thoughtless girl who constantly wore a smile and had no cares in the world. You were shy, but extroverted and didn’t leave a single person out of a group activity if you could help it and that was why people liked you.

On the exterior, you were practically see through. You didn’t really have problems, all you cared about was everyone else and how they were feeling.

You were cute and you were nice. You were overly nice to people who weren’t used to being treated well too. As such, the people who liked you really just saw that… Exterior. Even though they watched you they only saw that much of you. They generally thought you needed help with everything that you did, even the simple things, and they assumed that they could touch you whenever and they assumed that you were okay with everything that happened around you.

In truth, you were quite capable, you didn’t really like to be helped with things you could do yourself. If you wanted to make a bad decision like walk through the snow with bare feet you wanted to be lightly told off but you wanted people to just think it was funny. You didn’t want to be forcibly lifted off the ground. Friends or not… It freaked you out to be trapped in someone’s arms like that.

When you were passionately talking about something that didn’t matter to most people you wanted to be heard. You didn’t want to be degradingly called cute and laughed into silence.

You wanted to be with someone who didn’t like you because they thought you could be the emotional support they needed because you needed emotional support too.

That’s why you had never dated anyone before.

And that was why you were surprised when the feeling of Jihoon staring at you didn’t make you wildly uncomfortable.

That look always made you uncomfortable. You always sat there and pretended like you didn’t notice, trying your damnest not to react strangely to the sudden attention until they finally looked away from you.

You turned your head to face him. Neither of you smiled, but neither of you was upset either.

“Why a job in customer service?” Jihoon asked you. “You could do anything. You’re just in college but you certainly aren’t unqualified.”

“I like customer service,” you responded. You rattled off his total in the middle of the transaction. He acknowledged it. “You know, one time at my old job this customer was talking to a new employee and the employee didn’t know how to ring up a bag of ice. My manager, James, came over and helped the employee through the transaction. He was apparently so patient and kind, that it made the customers day. I mean, that story always blows my mind. He wasn’t even doing anything for her really. It was the way he interacted with the employee that made her day.”

You slipped Jihoon his receipt.

“That’s why customer service. The littlest thing that I do can completely make somebodies day and if I get paid to make someone smile then it’s just that much more worth it… Do you want a bag?”

Jihoon shook his head and pointed at the candy bar.

“This is for you by the way,” he murmured. “It’s one of your favorites right?”

You stared at the bar blankly, your eyebrows wrinkling a little.

“Y…Yeah, how did you know that?”

Jihoon didn’t answer that question so you asked a different one.

“How long have you been here?” You asked him.

“Long enough to know that this convenience store is going to get a lot more popular,” he replied. He pushed the receipt in his pocket and gave you a short wave goodbye.

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