Now (2025)

She walks towards him, her skin slightly flushed after the performance, in all her glory.

“Hi”, Jongin tries to smile as he barely chokes out, the word dissipating into nothingness in the noise coming from the audience. Her eyes shift to him, so briefly he could’ve imagined it, recognition flitting over them and then she’s gone, leaving nothing but her mint-soap scent around him. He swallows hard, and gathers enough courage to turn and look back at her one last time as she walks backstage, her black-clad elegance receding from his eyes.

If only she’d take the infinity of regrets that he sleeps with each night, with her too.

…..................................................

8 years ago

“Hello!”, The girl bows deeply, eyes wide and fresh, filled with admiration (and also pride, always pride) as the seniors she has forever looked up to, pass by her towards the back-stage.  Jongin glances at her, his eyes flitting over the four other girls standing with her briefly, before he moves on after Sehun. Seulgi sighs, but it’s short-lived as Junmyeon comes up to them excitedly and starts showering them with all sorts of praises. She smiles. It’s not possible not to.

It’s 2017 and she has come far from being the trainee-who-never-debuted-with-her-fellow-trainees, but the gap of those two years seems to never have filled for some reason. Though the awkwardness that had been there in those initial days after EXO’s debut has dulled, it’s still somehow there, however little.

Seulgi watches as Junmyeon moves from Yerim to Joohyun, his demeanor sobering immediately. She feels sorry. The guy tries so hard to make them feel better whenever he’s around, whether it’s with his dad-jokes or his imitations of their dances. Unlike some others who don’t even have time to properly greet me, she sulks, trying to make shallow the deep ache that surfaces in her heart.

“Give him a chance, will you, woman?”, Seungwan half-growls, half-groans to Joohyun as they start to make their way to the dressing room after Junmyeon has gone.

Joohyun grunts, as always, not bothering to give them a valid reason for why she’s been cold to Junmyeon’s clearly romantic advances for so long. “He’s not going to be that way forever you know? Stop playing hard to get already”, Seulgi adds as their room comes into view. Her eyes fall on the trio standing in the hallway a few meters away, and she inadvertently looks at him. Jongin’s gaze finds her for an infinite moment, and she smiles at him with all her heart, trying to find that connection she’s always had with him (though lately she’s not so sure it exists anymore). He replies with a curt nod, a ghost of a smile and she tries not to mind it too much.

She doesn’t remember the last time they’d talked, really talked. She tries to understand that he’s really busy, she is too, and convinces herself that the time is just not right. That the days where they could talk together for hours in the practice room are long gone. But it doesn’t lessen the hurt that keeps piling up.

Because she can’t help but feel that it’s not just their schedules, it’s more. It’s how he’s been distant for centuries. And more than anything else, it’s the feeling that comes with his ignorance of her when he clearly notices others. It’s his condescending demeanor, and the fact that he’s been slowly moving away from her since he became a star. She can’t shake the feeling, and she knows she’s being just like the others when the thought that maybe it’s because he’s gotten so popular that he’s like this, crosses her mind.

Ever since they became the so-called Kings of KPOP, some EXO members seem to have increasingly segregated themselves from the rest of the company. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe it’s because of the scandals that hit their group a little too early after debut that’s made them so careful – almost paranoid – around the other groups, particularly the girl ones.

Or maybe it’s her being too sensitive, the way she still feels like the girl who’d hid from them for days after EXO’s debut because it was simply too awkward to interact with them without feeling left out (or rather left behind) and thinking she must be wasting their time simply by talking to them.

But he’d been there then. He was the one who had brought her out of that phase, the one who’d made time to sit and talk and laugh with her despite his schedules. She wishes she could go back to that time, however dark it was for her, simply to have him pull her out of it again.

She misses him. She misses the way they were together, the easy smiles, the unspoken camaraderie, the friendship. Most of all she misses the way he made her feel. Acknowledged. Known. Though she’d left the hope of them being together romantically long before he and Soojung started dating, she wonders if things would’ve been different now if she’d just thrown all caution to the wind and confessed to him. That he’s always been so much more than a friend to her. That if he’d ever given a little indication that they could be more than friends, she’d have given her all to him. You already have, a voice tells her.

Too much has changed, she reasons in her mind, and tries to steel herself against the feelings that start to well up again. She cries herself to sleep anyway.

_

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ll be able to do it, with EXO’s schedules and everything. You understand, I hope?”, Jongin says to Seulgi politely, and he registers the shock on her face when he uses semi-formal language.

There had been talks of a collaboration between him and Seulgi for that year’s MNET Awards, and when he’d been asked by the company he’d refused. It wasn’t fitting well with his schedules, the performances and breaks they already had to prepare for (he doesn’t remember how his work became more important than everything they had). Or maybe it’s just that he no longer feels like associating with someone from his past, because everything reminds him of Soojung these days. And also, of the person he used to be, a person he no longer recognizes.

Only years later the boy – or rather the man - realizes that as the moment when the girl finally stopped expecting. Stopped expecting that it was just a pause in their friendship. That it was still there. The moment she lost any shred of hope that had been left in her heart.

She swallows hard, and replies, “I understand”, her eyes not once leaving his face and betraying the words coming from her lips. In that moment, (shamefully) he doesn’t care. He has other things on his mind.

Years later, the boy wants to go back to that moment so that he can take back the words of a selfish coward and replace them with that of a friend or even just a colleague. It had become easy to forget her, he realizes, when he was with Soojung. It was easy to thin