“Well, then, see you in the morning,” Sungyeol told Taegi as they stepped through the exit of the school after classes were over. Slowing to a stop, she wanted to ask him what could have been so important that he had had to skip their weekly get-together session, but only managed to blurt out a lame “Oh” in the midst of her clashing thoughts.

“Can’t I just wait for you at your dorm?”

That was what Taegi normally did, and when he said no, she felt truly annoying.

“Something… important came up at mum's flower shop. And I have to get straight to work after this, so…” His voice trailed off a little and he hoped she hadn’t found anything suspicious about him yet. “Gwenchana, you’ll only be missing me for a few hours, you won’t die,” and patted her head. Without further ado, he then inserted a crimson paper figurine into her hands. An origami rose.

There Sungyeol went again, doing all these things to confuse Taegi who was already suffocating in her own web of lies. Oh, love was a complicated thing.

She looked at him, surprised.

“I’ll make the rest up to you tomorrow, neh?”

But tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.

“So if there’s nothing else, I have to stop by the senior committee staffroom for a while now.” He repositioned the glasses on his face smartly. “Tutorial notifications for our art exhibition proposals, can’t be late,” he sniggered.

And with that, he showcased her his gummy smile everyone loved, and ran off in the opposite direction. His long legs took him far, and Taegi cringed as she watched his figure quickly depleting into the seas of uncivilised strangers. Taegi was alone again, and it wasn't until then that she had actually realised how harsh and cold the snow that began to fall was.

❖❖❖

Returning home early because Sungyeol had not been there to spend time with her, Taegi decided to get to work early. By work, she didn’t mean a part time job, but rather she liked to associate with it the proposal that she was expanding on.

Not just any proposal, but a special one.

Unlike at school, in the surroundings of her study room, Taegi actually felt protected from the dangers of the outside world and her cloud of insecure thoughts. Sitting down after finding a sunlit area in the room, she flipped through a few pages of the newest design archive she had borrowed from the library earlier.

But for the whole while Taegi’s eyes and mind never left one thing. Finally giving in to the temptation, her grip eventually fell on the spiral binder of her visual arts proposal book, which was tucked away into the last section of the shelf beside her working desk. Retrieving it into her chest, she opened her art book to the front cover and kept flicking through it, admiring the creations she’d done and redone to perfection over the three years she’d been spending at the university with Sungyeol–and only stopped when she reached the last page.

This was the sketch of her new project. Although it wasn’t proving all that well to match up to her initial expectations, it was still the last project she wanted to abandon.

She stared blankly down at the 2D necklace she had knitted into fine fibres on the double spreaded art page in front of her. Equipped with the silence, she let it cleanse her mind. She pulled out the rose piece which she assumed, and hoped, Sungyeol had folded for her out from her pocket, finally remembering it, and admired it more closely this time, when suddenly inspiration hit and Taegi began adding a rose bud to her artistic creation.

Roses.

The carrier of secrets.

Valentine's Day.

Sungyeol liked roses.

Immersed in her drawing, her hand became one with her art pencil which was now hovering in light, swift movements across the page. She etched away her worries into the hush of the night, and she couldn’t remember the last time she was able to forget about her loneliness. It was how she had lived over the past three years, after her parents’ death.

At first, that was all the artwork was, an escape from reality, but after she had met Sungyeol, it seemed that things have changed. Taegi had always thought that she had had a sixth sense in designing and making objects, but it was he who helped her to love the fundamentals.

This drawing was actually something she had been working on for months now; the longest attention she’d given to any of her inspired designs. Taegi wanted Sungyeol to be the first to see and review her finished proposal of the new jewel she was designing. It was supposed to surprise him. Yes she was also a major in visual arts department at the campus, but she could never match up to his drawing skills. Taegi dwelled on design alone rather than art in general. It wasn’t going to be used for her midterm assignment or anything either, so technically there would be no cheating involved. Taegi twirled the paper rose in her fingers to get a better angle of it, and didn't stop drawing until she had gotten perfectly everything to the last fold of the rose down onto the page. It seemed the only light that provided her sanity to do this was her newfound feelings for the boy.

For the next three hours, Taegi continued to draw, and soon she found herself on the brink of finishing. Releasing the pencil finally from her sore fingers, she smiled the biggest she had all week. She browsed her eyes over the finished creation once more, and that was when Taegi decided on one thing.

Sitting the red paper rose reluctantly next to her on the desk, she looked hurriedly at the time on the laptop screen next to her, and realised she still had some time. Sungyeol was almost off from work. Rolling the blue print into a cylindrical container she had prepared, she took it, and with her keys in her other hand, she left stealthily into the evening streets. Even if Taegi wasn’t going to confess directly to Sungyeol tomorrow, at least she could have pretended to have gotten the message across by drawing him some sort of a friendship gift, right?

Excited that she was going to be the first to give Sungyeol a surprise, Taegi felt her heart bursting from her ribcage and she didn’t even have the time to think about pulling on a cardigan. She had even forgotten to take her mobile phone from the bedside table, and missed the last message from the boy next door that had come into her inbox just a second after she stepped out of the room.

--`,-{@}-`,--`,-{@}-`,-`-,-`-,--

a/n: finally, some Myungsoo! haha, I wonder what his relationship with Taegi is 8) LOL I'll update more tonight :-) ... man, this fic is going to be longer than I thought.