“And I hurt you, too, when you’re so precious to me.”

It’s been two weeks.

Two weeks since Soyeon succeeded in bailing through the boys’ gatherings and parties, or even simple meetups in cafes. Why? Because she can’t look Baekhyun in the eyes. Not just Baekhyun, actually, all of them. 

Her memories after the drunken accident came to her almost immediately when she woke up the next day, or they haven’t really gone away, to begin with. The mortification she felt regarding that has been too intense for her to want and see the boys’ face again, or at least until her sense of embarrassment lessened to a tee. 

It didn’t happen.

How did the boy respond with her sudden ignorance? They didn’t like it. Suho called her multiple times on her phone trying to ask her about it, but she easily let the calls go to voicemail. She ignored all of his angry voice messages, as well. Sehun tried to call her twice, and Kyungsoo and the rest, too. She never replied to anyone, burying her face into her mattress and hoping she could feel less of the feelings she’s going through at the moment.

She knows they only want to ask her about her whereabouts. She knows they’re only worried about her. But she doesn’t know how to answer the questions about what happened to her to elicit such violent reaction in Suho’s gathering that she knows will be coming. There’s a spike of emotion within her — regarding her situation — that always pushed people away. Maybe it was an undeniable embarrassment, embarrassment at being old enough to fight her own battles and yet still not doing it. Maybe it was the emotion of sadness, or anguish that she carried her whole life which drew people to her like moths or pushed them away just as intensely. Maybe it’s a plethora of emotions she can’t name, tons and tons of them residing along her shoulders like bricks, crippling her from making any reasonable path in her life. 

Maybe it’s just her.

Maybe she’s really a coward. Maybe she’s really just susceptible to pain and misery. Maybe she’s just afraid of what company brings to her. Things never come alone, they always bring other sides with them, and so the friendship of these people would not just bring her joy, but other negative emotions as well.

She’s lying on her bed in her quiet house, four PM in the afternoon, looking at her hands and picking on her fingers perpetually. The calls of Suho have stopped coming, and so she sits on her bed in a case of remorse and unforgivable guilt, trying to chide herself from being an idiot. 

There’s a massive set of knocks on her door all of a sudden, and they’re so intense and harsh she hears them resonate all the way to her bedroom on the second floor. She jumps from her bed, scared, and contemplates what she should do. Her heartbeats are drumming like a set of music playing in her ears and she’s feeling a sort of shudder so intense they make her body quiver like a violin. She’s thinking. Should she go answer the door only to find the angry face of her parents, her mother specifically, or ignore it and have ten times as big of a punishment as they deem her so worthy of?

The set of knocks intensifies, and she makes a split-second decision to open the door. She runs downstairs so quickly she might as well be a gazelle. Once she opens the door, heartbeats flaring and breath locked in her chest; her eyes widen. It’s not her parents.

“Suho?” She exclaims, pretty much the same time she first saw him in front of her house. This time he looks angry, upset; his eyebrows having a dance of their own as they move from a blank to an angry crease. He’s pursing his lips, his hand's fists inside his pockets, and she’s scared of what he wants to say.

“You either let me the inside or I’m going to drag you with your ponytail outside.” He growls.

She’s so surprised at the beginning. She has known Suho for a month now, and it might be a small amount of time compared to years of friendship, but she’s always in his house and in his gatherings, she can already memorize his routines, his facial expressions, his emotions, or his reactions to things. She has never seen him so lively upset before. Maybe a month is a small period of time after all. Maybe she shouldn’t have deemed him as the gentle, goofy boy she once thought he is. 

Then, her surprise fades into annoyance, because what the heck did he just tell her?

“Excuse me?” She furrows her eyebrows, closing the door closer to her body so he can’t barge inside or even have a glimpse at her home. Not like it’s a home anyway.

“We need to talk,” he begins, voice low and eyes filled to the brim with tensed anger, shivering at its ends. “And I mean we seriously need to talk. I’m not accepting no for an answer. I’m thinking of actually towing you outside like an overused car.”

She astonishingly let him inside, because of the fact he threatens to tow her outside like an overused car. She doesn’t really think he’d do it, but she never thought he’s capable of being angry either, and here she is, seeing it first degree at its finest. 

“Are your parents home?” He asks as she follows him inside and closes the door behind them. She wraps her long cardigan around her with half a scowl on her face.

“I wouldn’t have let you inside if they were.” She moves towards him and then past him, sitting herself down on the couch. He follows her guild and sits on the couch in front of her, frowning. “They’re hardworking lawyers who’re rarely home, and when they are, they’re the worse people to be around.”

“Are you being sarcastic with me right now?” He leans over the couch so he could stare her close into the eyes, his frown turning into a similar scowl. “Because I’m this close to ripping your eyebrows off of your face.”

“Why are you so angry, dude?” She exclaims again, her surprise colored the same way her previous astonishment has debuted. Suho ignores that question of hers and instead goes straight to the point. 

“What did you do to Baekhyun?” He says slowly, pronouncing each word one by one. 

“Again, excuse me?” She crosses her arms over her chest, hoping she can melt into the couch she’s sitting on or disappear into ash. She’s taken aback that he asks about Baekhyun right off the bat, and not about what happened that day two weeks ago. She questions within whether Baekhyun had told him something, or he found out about them by the mess she created before. She’s anxiously fiddling with her fingers, hoping he wouldn’t notice that her bravery is nothing but a false testimony of her fear. 

“Soyeon,” Suho’s so seriously-looking she’s afraid his face would combust into dust. “What the heck happened between you and Baekhyun?”

She sighs, surrendering, and slumps her shoulders forward. She avoids his eyes when she asks next. “What did he tell you?”

“He didn’t tell me anything, that ,” Suho sighs dramatically. “But I guessed you’re a whole lot easier to break than him. Also, you’ve been avoiding us for the last two weeks, and he’s acting differently, too.”

This catches Soyeon’s attention and she perks, giving him an easy look. “How differently?”

“He’s antsy, sensitive, and angry all the time. I..” Suho pauses and swallows, looking away from her and trying to avoid her eyes. When he speaks next, his voice is going incredibly soft, like plucked roses, “I heard him cry last night, in the bathroom. He thought no one heard him but I did.”

She covers with her hand, speechless. This brings her another plethora of emotions, the biggest of them is guilt. He’s crying because of her, she thinks, he’s crying because she has been acting like an regarding him and that she’s pulling him on. One time she’s mean to him, and the other she’s begging him to stay. If there’s someone who doesn’t deserve her indecisiveness, it’s him. 

Suho blows a breath off of his chest, looking glum, and when he looks at her, his eyes are pleading. “So please, tell me everything.”

-

Soyeon offers him a plate of cookies, cookies made by her in the morning before university. Suho doesn’t take it or even just one, only stares at her coldly, so she places the plate in front of him and goes back to her couch, curling herself around its armchair away from his eyes, not looking at him. What she’s about to say is hard for her to express or talk about, but she realizes that she owes him that in the least.

“Where shall I start?” She says softly, but there’s a pinch of sarcastic pain in