CHAPTER ONE ; final
          thought this was love, i was misunderstood

They say you never forget your first love. 

Yerin is hard-pressed to say that they're wrong, least of all when he's standing in front of her right now, years after she turned her back on him. Years after she finally stepped away, burned her bridges, crying beneath the flames as if her tears could put out the fire while the debris left her scarred.

First loves were supposed to be beautiful. Fairytale-spun, full of radiant smiles and stolen kisses and warm eyes. First loves were meant to, if nothing else, start with skips in heartbeats, with childish giddiness, with the airiness of cloud nine. 

Yerin never got that. Yerin's first love started at the end: with the heartache. The kind that seeps into you, until the ache is unbearable, until there is nothing left but to make a choice. To leave. 

So why the hell is Mark Tuan staring at her now, strong emotions mixed into his expression, three years after Yerin walked away?

"Hi," he breathes, and Yerin wants nothing more than to just turn heel and act as if she'd never heard him, never saw him, restart the day and take the long way home. This was a mistake. But she feels frozen, rooted to the ground as he steps closer. "Yerin." 

Mark Tuan is anything but complicated, really, not that he would ever tell you. He'd tell you he was dark, with demons circling his head, that he couldn't sleep well and he didn't know the right way to live. He'd tell you he was ed up, and he'd say it with the kind of heartbreaker smile every irresistible Hollywood bad boy had. 

But Yerin knows him like the back of her hand. Mark Tuan was just a rich boy from LA, with a mansion and a pool and two little nieces that he'd do absolutely anything for. Mark had no demons except for the ones he made up himself to pretend like his life was anything but easy.

Yerin has that stupid heartbreaker smile ingrained in her memory. She has his laughter burned permanently into the back of her mind. He lived life carefree and Yerin had chased and clung to it all like a lifeline. 

She'd made every effort to bury every ounce of Mark Tuan left in her mind, but his voice calling her name brings it all rushing back in an instant, and she can feel the poison wrapping around her heart. 

The pain never left. Three years after leaving him and burying the pain only had it come back with a vengeance now that he was standing in front of her with a kind of sadness he didn't deserve to look at her with. Not after what he put her through. 

"How have you been?" 

Yerin wants to scream. She wants to hurl all of her anger, and hurt, and exhaustion at him in a hurricane of broken emotions, wants to make a scene in the middle of 6th Avenue, so that all the people moving past her stop and watch, as she airs out his dirty laundry for the world to see what he'd done to her. How have you been? How have you been? Yerin Baek deserved a ing apology, not the alluring tilt of a half-smile on his face, caution written all over him, because Mark Tuan, if nothing else, knew that if Yerin lost it, he'd be nothing but ash when she was through with him. 

She doesn't scream. She doesn't throw a fit. She takes a deep breath, and answers, with honesty: "Good." Better without you. 

"It's been awhile," he says, and she hates the gentleness in his voice, as if they were old friends who fell out of touch. As if their near decade-long friendship had simply faded away.

Yerin used to picture this moment, seeing him again. His handsome features, lean body, the way his hair fell over his eyes. After all, she'd loved him. With all of her heart, with everything she had to give. 

And he'd certainly never had any problems taking. 

But the calm, collected Yerin of her imagination shattered and threw her back into her teenage years, pulling every memory of hurt back to the forefront of her brain. Glimpses, like flashbacks in a movie, swiping through every moment where Mark Tuan carelessly tossed her heart aside. 

In all fairness, her love had always been one-sided. It wasn't like he'd ever looked at her and said he loved her, it wasn't as if he ever admitted out loud that maybe Yerin meant something to him. But when he looked at her the way he was looking at her now, with the same traits that he'd looked at her with ten years ago, Yerin knew Mark was being unfair. Because Mark always looked at her like she was the most important person on the planet, like when he was with her, there was no one else he could see.

"I have a train to catch," Yerin says curtly, and tries to move past him, because if she stays any longer, she'll memorize that look on his face too, and she can't bear to go through this all over again. 

"I can give you a ride," he offers, his hand catching her arm. "Please, Yerin. I... Can we talk?" 

The hurt is suffocating. Yerin has been hurt in plenty of ways, but she knows Mark. She knows him better than anyone else, even after all these years. That's why she knows talking to him is dangerous, because he'll always find a way to convince her that he was the victim. That even after he left strings of broken hearts behind him, he would convince her that he was the one who was hurting. After all, Yerin had spent years picking up the pieces after him. Cleaning up his messes. Sweeping up the broken glass with bare hands because she loved him. 

"Yerin," he says, when she stays quiet, refusing to look at him. "I missed you." 

I missed you.

All at once it feels like she hears glass shattering in her ears, like someone took a baseball bat to the walls she built up to block him out. It feels like a bulldozer ramming through brick, churning the stone to dust, tossing it aside with ease, and she can't help herself when she scoffs. 

"I guess your girlfriend left you, huh?" 

Mark looks taken aback, but his silence is all the confirmation she needs. Mark always came running when his girlfriends left, or when he got caught cheating. He always came crawling to Yerin, talking about remorse, and dark thoughts, and wistful thinking. Until one day, Yerin wasn't there for him anymore. Yerin just never expected him to come running from all the way across the country. 

"Thats not...I mean yeah, but - "

"Go find another girl to dump your sorrows on, Mark," Yerin says, quietly. She stares at him, at a face so familiar, with so many memories attached. The night he drove backwards with her in the passenger seat down an empty street, her screaming at him to be careful while laughing loudly, gripping her seatbelt tightly even when he was only going five miles an hour. The day she crawled into his bed hours before an exam to take a nap, curled up back to back as they fell asleep. The time he stared at her with so much affection she felt her heart skip a beat, as he tucked her hair gently behind her ear.

It was always the little things. His jacket wrapped around her, her favorite snacks always in stock at his house, him walking her to class in the rain. He always gave just enough to give her hope, then chipped away at her, until she had nothing left. 

"I just want to be friends," he said. "Just like we used to be. But without... without the baggage." 

She knew he was begging even when he didn't say it. But "friends" felt like too cruel of a word. They were always friends. She had always wanted more. 

He didn't.

Yerin wasn't allowed to fault him just because she loved him and he didn't reciprocate. But she had too many memories of him, too much of her life had revolved around unrequitedly loving him. Caving to his every ask, staying up late with eyes barely open just to hang onto every word he said, even if it crushed her. 

"We can never be friends."

It's not meant to be mean. Yerin has never sugar-coated anything for Mark and he knows that. The only thing she ever tried to hide from him were her feelings, and even that was a pathetic attempt. Mark always pretended like he'd never noticed Yerin bending over backwards for him; Yerin always pretended like Mark wasn't a liar. 

She remembers the day she decided to leave. She remembers the way her knees buckled under her, the way it felt like the walls were closing in on her. She had no more excuses left to protect him. She couldn't pretend like whatever the hell was broken inside him was enough to cover for the way he hurt people. 

She'd felt like she couldn't breathe. When she cried it was years of facades fracturing through her. Like everything she knew was wrong, like someone had flipped a blinding light into her face until she had no rationales left to explain away why Mark would cheat on Jamie, Jihyo, Nayeon. She had nothing left to justify the way he used her, keeping her hanging by a thread, as he piled on the worst of him and walked away with the best of her. 

He'd made a conscious decision and she'd tried her best to convince herself and the world that he was just bad at love. 

Yerin was wrong. Mark wasn't bad at love. He was just very, very good at hurting people. And Yerin had covered for him long enough.

"You never even apologized, Mark," she says, rounding on him. "You never figured out where you went wrong. You told me you didn't understand, but you accepted. So not only did you mess up, but you couldn't even be bothered to ask why. You felt like the good guy because you would let me go if I said I wanted to, but the truth is you just didn't want to own up to the things you did. Even after I spelled it out for you, it was like I was speaking in a foreign language to you. You don't care to be sorry, you don't care for me, and you don't miss me, either. So go home, Mark. Whatever the hell you came to New York for - because I know it wasn't for me, I'm just a lucky coincidence - do whatever you have left to do in this city then leave. You can have LA. Just let me have New York."

Yerin rips her arm from Mark's hold, turns heel and is grateful for his silence, for the way he never calls her name and just watches her walk away. He won't ask her to stay, not a second time. She's grateful that he's too proud to chase her, worse still that he doesn't love her enough - even after all this time, he never loved her - to try to make amends. To tell her he's sorry.

Yerin's heart has broken too many times for a first love like Mark Tuan. She's sick of the memory, she's sick of the way she'd always grasped it tightly because she doesn't know how to let go of the good even despite all the bad. But seeing him in front of her, the way three years passed without her by his side, and he still hasn't changed - Yerin knows. 

Mark's mistakes, his misgivings, his demons - are not her responsibility. They are not her fault. Yerin spent years healing hearts that he left behind broken. 

It was about time she spent some time healing her own. 

author's notes; 

i'm sorry - this one was for me. 

i have spent so long trying to write out the pain, to tell the story that had hurt me for so long. i don't know if it makes any sense. so much of it is my story - so maybe it doesn't make sense without the context, maybe some details seem oddly strewn in, without the history that i know much too well because i've replayed the memory of my first love way too many times. maybe this will finally be the last time. maybe it won't be.

i wanted to write about the hurt of loving a friend;  more specifically, i wanted to write about the hurt of loving a friend who wasn't even a good friend. i wanted to write about having so much hope for that person, so much faith, and knowing it was wrong. knowing deep down, this person wasn't any good. and still chasing. still loving. still holding on. 

he didn't love me. he didn't care about me, he didn't want me. and he was too much buried in his own hurt to care that he was hurting other people. hurt people, hurt people. i know. but it was still a decision he made on his own. i can't own his mistakes; they're his alone. i can't take responsibility for the damage he did. 

this is, without a doubt though, a work of fiction - i haven't seen him in three years. but it feels like closure. i have imagined meeting him again many times. i have imagined screaming, breaking down; i have imagined keeping my composure and calmly walking away; i have imagined catching his eyes in a crowd then disappearing without a single word. i don't know if he's changed. i don't know if he's better. i don't know if he ever got the help i could never give. i hope he did. i hope he is happy. 

i am happy. leaving him was the most difficult decision of my life.

but i am happy. 

thank you.