Winter finals crept forward fast, and Kyungsoo found himself finishing unit notes, attending Jongdae's last basketball game, and texting Jongin for his availability for the study group sooner than he thought. When he texted Jongin, he had taken almost the whole day to respond. At first, Kyungsoo thought that he was ignoring him because they hadn't actually texted before and his contact could have shown up as an unknown number. Although, Kyungsoo had texted that it was him along with the question. He chalked it up to Jongin being busy and told himself to stop worrying.

They all agreed to meet on the weekend before finals at one. His mom had come home late last night and was still sleeping by the time Kyungsoo left for the study group. She had called him during one of her breaks, and he had told her about it earlier. She sounded excited for him and told him that he could use the car if she was home that day. Still, he left a little note on the stove hood of where he was going with the car and a reminder to eat the noodles he had made before starting the drive to the public library.

When he arrived, he followed the directions Yuwon had texted him for the table she had claimed. He went past the café on the ground floor and up to the third floor. Pushing open the glass doors to the nonfiction section, Kyungsoo weaved through the rows of bookshelves until he came to a tucked away corner near the balcony. Yuwon waved at him as he approached, and soon Jongdae and Seulgi also came into view. They had put two rectangular tables together, and books, papers, and journals were already spread across the surface. 

"Kyungsoo! Welcome to Study Land, where we learn, cry, and despair all in the same time span," Jongdae said, reaching his hands across the table in a stretch.

He chuckled at his friend's comment and moved to the table. He thought that since Jongin was coming and both Seulgi and Jongin might need his help for math, he had to be reachable by both of his tutees. He moved to sit next to Seulgi instead of Jongdae and turned to Yuwon and Seulgi.

"So tell me again how you two got to be friends and how I didn't know about it."

"We've been friends since this summer. We met at a women's business event."

"And whenever I referred to you, I called you my tutor."

"I didn't know that you attended those, Seulgi, and I forgot that you attended them, Yuwon."

"I'm a busy woman, Kyungsoo."

Yuwon and Seulgi laughed, and Kyungsoo raised an eyebrow as he saw Jongdae inwardly squeal in affection at Yuwon. Jongdae stuck his tongue out at him when he caught his eyes, and he just chuckled.

"Now all we need is Jongin-shi to complete our party."

"Should we set a punishment since he's the last one?"

"No, no. Studying is punishment enough," Seulgi laughed. "I'm sure he's on his way."

Kyungsoo peeked at his phone but saw no messages. He wondered if Jongin was walking all the way to the library. He knew that he got motion sickness, so a bus or car ride would be uncomfortable. The others returned to their work, so Kyungsoo decided to do the same, pulling out his review for linguistics and flipping through his notes.

When Jongin arrived almost an hour late, he tossed up a hand in greeting to everyone, plopped into the seat between Kyungsoo and Jongdae, and planted his face into the table.

"Are you okay?" Yuwon asked.

"I took a bus here."

"Jongin gets motion sickness."

Yuwon and Seulgi nodded in acknowledgement, and Jongdae patted his back.

"You worked hard."

He groaned in response, and everyone at the table went back to studying. Kyungsoo could admit that he gave Jongin a few more glances than the others before turning back to his textbook. Before he left today, he planned on finishing then giving him the note sheets for math. Yuwon had said that they were going to study until around six, so at five he would drop everything and switch over to work on them.

As the hours passed and the evening sun started angling in through the windows, Kyungsoo managed to finish studying for linguistics, language and literature, and ask Jongdae a few things about biology. He wasn't sure how much attention he paid to Jongdae explaining the reproductive systems through his embarrassment, but he appreciated his help.

When the clock reached four-fifty, Kyungsoo pushed away his biology and took out spare notebook paper and his math notes. Triple-checking the information, he wrote down a brief overview of the past lessons and then focused on the latest unit of vectors.

"Hey guys, I'm gonna take a bathroom break. Be right back," Jongdae said before scurrying away towards the bathrooms.

"Hm, since we're in a library, I'm gonna try finding a book for my history thing. I'll be back too." Yuwon scanned her notes for another moment, waved, and disappeared along the bookshelves.

Kyungsoo was left at the table with Jongin and Seulgi. Aside from an phone break, Seulgi had been steadily studying and asking him questions. Jongin too, except he hadn't asked any questions or taken any breaks. Kyungsoo glanced over and saw one subject, and in the next few glances, Jongin would be studying a different subject. Maybe math was the only subject Jongin needed a little nudge in. 

"Hey, Jongin, how's your job?" Seulgi asked.

Kyungsoo turned to Jongin, who looked up and blinked, then to Seulgi, who put down her phone and chuckled at Kyungsoo's surprise. He did feel his eyes balloon up, and he rubbed them as an excuse to bring his eyeballs' exposure back down.

"It's been fine," Jongin said.

Kyungsoo turned back to him. "I didn't know you had a job."

Then he thought of how insensitive that might have come out, straightened his back, and put up his hands.

"Not in a bad way! I just didn't know and—I don't know—I don't associate anyone my age having a job, because I guess it's something that I don't really think about."

"Really? Why not?" Seulgi asked.

"It reminds me of the future."

"Oh, like your future career?"

"Yeah. I don't even know what field I want to go in yet."

"It's not bad to get some experience though. It's not as if you're permanently tied to that job either. I would consider applying around if you have time." Seulgi patted his shoulder and turned to Jongin. "For example, I doubt that Jongin will be working at a restaurant forever."

Kyungsoo turned to Jongin again, his mouth dropping in excitement.

"You work at a restaurant?"

Jongin's eyes widened the slightest bit, and he had leaned away from him. Kyungsoo realized that he had practically leapt at Jongin in his seat and pulled back, rubbing his neck.

"Sorry. I got excited."

"For a restaurant job?" Seulgi giggled. "Is that what you want to do when you're older?"

"I don't know for sure yet, but if I had to take a part time job, I would want to try working at a restaurant first." He glanced over at Jongin. "What do you do there?"

Jongin looked down. "I wash the dishes."

Kyungsoo couldn't resist the smile on his face. "That's actually a super important job that everyone takes for granted. How could anyone eat or do anything if they don't have clean plates and utensils? Make sure you wear gloves or else your hands will get all dry."

His eyes darted down to Jongin's hands, and he saw that they were very not dry or cut up or scraggly. They looked smooth, his fingers long, slender yet also muscular. Kyungsoo looked away as he thought of how they were probably warm too.

"Looks like they're fine. Nevermind."

"I think that's a sweet reminder. Don't you, Jongin?"

Swallowing a bit of courage from the air, Kyungsoo looked at Jongin and saw him nod. A small smile lit on his face too, and Kyungsoo pulled on his shirt collar to cool himself. The temperature of the library had suddenly shot up to accommodate for the winter weather, he convinced himself. Seulgi started giving him another knowing eyebrow, so he cleared his throat.

"So I didn't know that you two were friend friends."

"Well, we are tutoring buddies. We test each other on math problems sometimes. Oh, but I found out that he works at Haoro's Restaurant in the Maimai Mall purely by chance. Plus, he works in the back. He happened to come out to the front to help the cashier when I saw him."

The words 'Haoro's' and 'Maimai Mall' replayed in Kyungsoo's head, and he sat on his hands so that he wouldn't slap his brain back into coherency.

"That's a cool coincidence."

"I thought so too," Seulgi said. "Jongin, have you eaten there? Could you recommend us some dishes?"

Jongin stared at a space between his notes and Kyungsoo's papers, unmoving for a moment. Then he turned his head a little towards Kyungsoo.

"The stir-fried dishes are good. Avoid the beef soups."

"Is it because they soak the beef in soda water? Do they water down the soup? Do they sacrifice boiling the broth with real beef bones and just use the artificial flavorings instead?"

Jongin blinked at him. Kyungsoo waited for his answer, his hands having broken out of his sitting hold and gripping onto the edge of the table instead. In that waiting, Jongin's face seemed closer than usual. That, and surprised. Seeing him up close, Kyungsoo caught another good look at him, the first since the day he noisily came to sit next to Kyungsoo at the math meeting.

The first feature that drew him in was Jongin's eyes. They watched him but not in interest or disinterest or scrutinizing like before. The surprise had softened into something warmer, even warmer than when Jongin had thanked Kyungsoo for believing in him. Kyungsoo pulled his gaze away out of self-consciousness, and his line of sight wandered across Jongin's face—from his cheek, to the parts of his forehead showing through his bangs, to his nose, to his lips, to the line separating his jaw and his neck. A thought flitted through his head, and he cut his eye-contact to grab the thought and chuck it into the deep recesses of his mind so that it could never resurface. But the thought flew back to its place no matter how times he grabbed it—Jongin was one handsome person.

Kyungsoo had to squish his eyes together to bring his mind back from dancing animal land, and when he did, he saw how Jongin's body had angled his body away and realized he had leaned all the way into Jongin's personal space, even farther than when he lept at him earlier. He snapped back to his seat and looked in the other direction, but Seulgi gave him another mischievous eyebrow. He didn't have anywhere else to look besides down at his papers, feeling a heat burn at his cheeks.

"Sorry."

A silence sealed the air, and Kyungsoo rubbed his neck with both his hands, trying to extract the excess heat from his being. He had few opportunities to talk about cooking aside from the brief moments when his mom came home and was awake, but he didn't think that the slightest mention of making food would make him this excited. He needed to channel his inner chef towards some cooking videos later, because he could not—would not—ever be ready to experience this level of embarrassment again. Or that thought about Jongin.

"Kyungsoo...shi. Don't be sorry."

He didn't have the courage to look over at Jongin, but his voice had spun out into the air so softly. Jongin made the consonants of his name ring perfectly with the vowels again, and Kyungsoo heard the sincerity laced in each letter.

"Being excited is fun so... you don't have to feel sorry."

The ends of his words shook a little, like he wasn't sure what else to say to remedy the situation but he really wanted to remedy it. That tiny nervousness coming from someone who seemed super composed all the time poked Kyungsoo's sides in a chuckle. 

"Okay. Thanks."

With a breath, he looked at Jongin to smile at him before turning back to his notes. If he didn't busy himself now, he would be distracted trying to decipher the look of surprise Jongin had given him.

"We should get back to work. If we don't and Jongdae gets back, there'll be no stopping him from wanting to play games instead."

He flipped his textbook to the examples in the back, but the words swam around the page and jumbled with his thoughts for another few minutes. He couldn't focus on much of anything until he checked his phone for the time and saw that he only had thirty minutes before six. He zeroed in on the note sheets and allowed nothing to break his concentration. He barely registered a sharp chin poking the top of his head and the smell of cinnamon rolls through drawing the angle diagrams, coordinate problems, and writing out word problems. He decided that more word problems involving the compass directions would be helpful, and he lost count of the number of tiny ships he drew. 

"Keeeyoungsooooo."

The first thought he had was Jongdae must have gotten drunk again and just finished writing down the last step. Then he looked up because he remembered that they were in a library and had been studying for the past five hours, and his friend wasn't an alcoholic. The others were staring at him, like they were waiting for something.

"Did something happen?"

"What? You weren't listening? You even nodded your head when I asked you your opinion."

He vaguely recalled nodding his head, but that was because he was satisfied with solving his self-made exercises to write in the answer key.

"I was nodding at something else."

"At math?"

"Yeah..."

Yuwon chuckled and poked his forehead.

"Well, it's already almost six, so Jongdae and I thought we could play a little game to see who leaves the library first."

"Oh no."

"Oh YES, Kyungsoo," Jongdae said, eating the last bite of a bakery treat. "It's our reward for studying. Let's do one study question and then four get-to-know-you questions. You write a question for the person on your right and have to answer the question from the person on your left. Then we'll switch so that you can get questions from the person on your right too. You can ask people for help twice, and the person who can answer all their questions gets to leave first."

"What if we need to ask for help on three or more questions?" Seulgi asked.

"Hm... then you have to stay an extra five minutes. No one cheat or it won't be fun."

Yuwon passed them slips of paper, and Kyungsoo wondered when she had cut them up. He also noticed a drink in front of her with Jongdae's name on it and a '1 of 2' label on it. Jongdae also had a drink and the remains of a bakery bread wrapper too. He knew that the ground floor held the library's café, and they had both left their study table at around the same time. Had they used that time to devise the game (and for Jongdae to get alone time with Yuwon)?

"First, write the study question for the person on your left!"

"Didn't you say we'd write the questions for the person on our right first?"

"We're switching anyways, Kyungsoo! Yuwon, please go easy on me."

"Never, Jongdae."

He pouted playfully but then smiled and started flipping through his notes. Since Seulgi was on his left, Kyungsoo thought about writing a math question for her. He didn't want to do anything too difficult but enough to test her skills. He wrote down one of the vector problems he made for Jongin's note sheets and handed it to her. While she scrunched her nose at the math question, a slip of paper slid across his notes. Jongin had passed his question to him, but his hand didn't quite leave yet. Kyungsoo glanced at him and saw that his eyes trained on his note sheets, so he handed them over to him.

"These are your note sheets for this unit and the review."

Jongin took them, blinking at him for a moment.

"Kyungsoo, was that what you were working on? Study notes for Jongin?"

"For the last hour, yeah. I usually do this for Jongin-shi in our tutoring sessions."

"And just for Jongin."

Kyungsoo whipped around to Seulgi. She didn't sound like she was offended, and something teasing snickered on her lips, but Kyungsoo still felt the need to explain himself.

"It's not on purpose! But in the beginning, this was the only way I could think of to actually tutor Jongin-shi."

"Written notes?"

"You kept Kyungsoo busy, yeh?" Jongdae said, tapping at Jongin's shoulder.

Kyungsoo put up a hand to tell him to stahp and looked down so he wouldn't have to face anyone, especially the grin he heard in Jongdae's voice. Instead, he took up the question Jongin had written for him.

It was a biology question over viruses, and Kyungsoo cringed at the sight. His weakest subject was biology, and the unit he least understood so far was DNA and viruses. He hardly had a grasp of their RNA or DNA or why they were sometimes retro but never modern. He wondered if Jongin picked his weakest subject and lesson on purpose.

He squinted down at the question for a while, trying to answer from his memory and logic. The question asked for the difference between the lytic cycle and the lysogenic cycle, and he kept reading the terms as 'lie detector' and 'lysol cleaner.' He eventually gave up and just rooted through his biology notes, copying down the answer. He was still trying to comprehend the words he had written when Jongdae put his card in the middle of the table.

"Done!"

Yuwon turned it and her head to read it and nodded.

"Correct. Nice job, Jongdae."

"Did you go easy on me, Yuwon?" Jongdae asked, hope sparkling in his eyes. "Is it because I'm your favorite?"

"Yeah, my favorite weirdo."

He pouted, and she dropped her card in the middle. She picked up her drink and put her lips on the straw of her drink, putting it back down when she realized that it was empty. Kyungsoo raised an eyebrow at her as she carded a finger through her hair and glanced up. She put up a finger in a hush, and Kyungsoo waved at her to say that he got it.

"Hold on, Yuwon. I want to solve this before I check your answer. I feel like I'm about to have a breakthrough with the theta," Seulgi said.

"Yeah, take your time."

Kyungsoo read his notes again. He wrote what he understood and stared down at the question for a while, thinking of how else to change it and whether what he wrote made any sense or not. After a long moment, he threw it into the middle.

"Why was that throw so angry?" Yuwon asked with a laugh.

"I give up. Biology is so hard."

"What's the question?"

Jongdae took up his question slip and read it.

"Ooh, this is a good question though. It's also what you have the most trouble over. Jongin, you must want Kyungsoo to do well on the bio final, right?"

"Why wouldn't I want him to do well?"

Kyungsoo looked over at him. At first, he thought he felt something in his chest pinch, like