“Why does it keep happening, you ask? Well, it’s because there’s familiarity in this pain, something that anchors me to it. If you gathered me into your arms, will I know the taste of safety?”

Soyeon wakes up groggily by the sound of her phone peeping beside her on her desktop, and she had a very strong urge to let it ring by itself. Unfortunately, she’s a light sleeper, and that single ring has successfully ruined her sleep. With an annoyance of an elephant seeing a mouse (or fear) she pokes one arm out and drags her phone over to her ear. 

“Hello?” She answers. Her voice is husky and full to the brim with sleep. The other side takes a small pause, almost like they’re surprised with her sleepy voice when it’s already late morning. A clearing of the throat resonates next, and it’s so familiar that she blinks her bleariness away.

“Hey,” comes Baekhyun’s cheerful greeting; or fake cheerful greetings. He’s unable to push himself to sound anything more than upset when he’s talking to her. “It’s eleven AM. I need to go to uni, wanna bring my car over?”

“Oh.” She takes a few seconds registering exactly who is talking to her so early in the morning before springing into an upright, sitting position, eyes wide. How did he get her number? She didn’t change it, okay. “Right. Cars. There’s your car in my house garage.”

“Ah-huh. My car’s in your house garage.” He almost sounds teasing when he replies, his tone laced with awkwardness he acquired from three months ago when he saw her again. 

“,” she suddenly curses, remembering something, her hand squeezing her phone. “Baekhyun, my parents are home.”

He freezes the same way she does, and it’s amazing how she can feel him freeze from the other side of the phone. 

“I should have woken up earlier,” she blabbers, forgetting for a second that she’s talking to Byun Baekhyun. More, she squeezes the phone; her knuckles dusting rosy white. “I’ll—I’ll bring it over right away. Hang on.”

“Soyeon—“

She hangs up 

She pushes herself from the messy tangle of blankets on her bed and rushes downstairs quickly, feet sounding small and inconspicuous despite running through the stairs. Years of tiptoeing around her parents in their house taught her to be invisible as a ghost, because if she’s not invisible, she’s too profound, and if there’s something she learned living all these years with her parents is that the more shadow-like she is, the less she’ll experience pain. 

She doesn’t wash up or even brush her teeth, hurriedly walking towards the front door without looking backward. The moment her hand brushes against the doorknob; she hears her name being called.

“Soyeon.”

She twists her head back slowly, coming face to face with her mother, who looks immaculate and perfect; not a strand of hair out of her bun. The woman grins, showing her plastic cheeks and her plastic teeth. Soyeon gulps.

She gotta step up her game in running away. There is a limited amount of game-overs she can go through before the consoles break down.

-

“You look like .”

It is the first thing Baekhyun says when he opens his house dorm’s door and sees her standing there, already dressed in his clothes for uni in a dark pair of jeans, black shirt, and his pretty little chain decorating his neck. Instead of admiring the state of refreshness he’s in, she glares at him. If there’s one thing she hates the most, it is being woken up first thing in the mornings, whether it’s late morning or not. 

“Well, I feel like ,” she grimaces, hugging her arms around herself and hoping she can be smaller so the ground can swallow her. She has never been to Baekhyun’s dorms alone before. The idea is making her feel minuscule and tiny. “I’m forced to wake up so early in the morning because someone has afternoon classes!”

“Eleven AM is not afternoon, first of all,” Baekhyun continues to raise his eyebrows at her, blocking the entrance to the house. “Second of all, you’re not supposed to be asleep till eleven. Don’t you have classes?”

“It’s Sunday. I have off days on Sundays.” She looks at him as if he should already know this.

“Don’t look at me like that, I don’t know your freaking schedule.” He berates, annoyed, but he also sounds a little bit embarrassed for not catching up to her schedule, cheeks burning cute rosy pink.

“Whatever,” she tosses his keys to him and he catches them like a clumsy little koala. She tries not to smile at his wide, panicked eyes. “Now that I’ve brought your car safe and sound, can I go home?”

“How are you going home?” He rushes to say before she can swivel around and leave. She purses her lips at him, keeping mum. “It’s a bit too far from here.”

“There’s this beautiful creation called the public bus, you know? Rich dudes like yourself might not know it, but poor folks like myself are pretty familiar with it.”

He scowls at her, hoping that the slight tension that’s slowly growing within him at where his thoughts are headed can’t be felt in the air. If there’s a thing he hates the most is her catching up to his vulnerability. 

“You’re quite an when you’re denied sleep.” He says this as if he doesn’t know the kind of personality she has or the annoyance that erupts within her whenever someone forces her out of her sleep. She just rolls her eyes, the dark black smudges under them looking more prominent by that gesture. 

“Can I go now?”

“Wait,” he yelps like a disordered puppy, hurriedly reaching for the hem of her T-shirt when she turned to leave. They both freeze, and when she slowly turns to give him her front again, he notices the soothing redness in her cheeks. This slowly harshened his blush, and he began stuttering idiotically. “Did you, um, did you have, have, uh... breakfast?”

She raises her eyebrows more to the fact she’s trying to hide the gushing softness in her cheeks rather than her echoing surprise. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t surprised; she really is. When was the last time Baekhyun offered her anything, let along with a breakfast? Never. 

“Are you offering me some?” She’s trying to sound cheeky and cheerful, teasing as well, like those perfect model-girls in school that lure people to them like a hidden treasure; but she just sounds boring and annoyed, even bland to a tee. 

Baekhyun’s eyes widen remarkably, the heaviness of his own request dawning on him. “You know I don’t cook, but, ah, there’s some cornflakes?”

“I hate cornflakes. It tastes like mud.” Once again, her tone is nothing more than a statement known by the male across. 

“I didn’t mean the normal cornflakes,” he scratches at his flooded cheeks. “I have chocolate and honey-flavored flakes. I know you like them the most.”

Awkward silence ensues because oh my god he remembers. He remembers. She’s trying not to show him that she’s struck by lightning at the fact she just discovered, but the widening of her eyes and the gulp she not so discreetly swallowed gave her away. Fortunately, Baekhyun doesn’t comment on it, but his cheeks give him away, too. She turns around and walks away.

“I’ll be going.”

“Hang on.” He reaches for her wrist this time, pulling her back towards the porch. Her wrist ignites in a fire, a flame so hot twirling tingles to her skin, all the way to her heart. She turns to him with a blank look, her ears, her cheeks, and the back of her neck gushing angry red. 

“What?” She clears , pulling her wrist out of his grip rather quickly. Baekhyun stretched his fingers as if reminiscing about her taste in his skin, before them. “Anything else to offer me in this fine, fine morning?”

He clears his throat much like the way she did, his eyes going heavily serious. “... Why did you do it?”

“What?” She looks quizzical. 

“Drive me home,” he emphasizes. “Why did you do it? You loathe taking drunk people home because of what it reminds you and because you hate being responsible for people. So, why did you do it?”

She wants to tell him that he isn’t an irresponsibility, that despite the fear that gnaws at her at seeing drunk people and having to take them home would always remain insignificant when it comes to him. She wants to tell him that there’s a fire in his skin whenever she touches him and she longs for those flames to engulf her whole and drives her to the ground in white ashes. She wants to tell him a lot of things regarding the huge emotions she has for him but suppresses. However, she says.

“We have a mutual friend, which means we have to be friends, too. I’d do that to anyone of the boys.”

“I knew you way before he knew you.” He seems annoyed when he says this, eyes exposed and angry; which makes her feel annoyed, too. 

“It doesn’t matter when you knew me, Bae