____________________________________5 years ago_____________________________________

The year progresses.

As it always does, Yura’s worst decision becomes an even worse habit.

She gets used to the sting of warm leather underneath her legs as she slides into his car and her calves and thighs firm up from all the time she spends jogging up and down the stairs to get to his apartment, refusing to take the lift in a rush. She reacquaints herself with the scent of his cigarettes and the feel of his stubble against her cupid’s bow and his laugh — the real one, the sincere one, boyish and full of sunlight—that laugh—

There are no rules. Never are. Establishing rules would imply that either of them care enough to establish rules and caring—

That’s what got Yura into trouble that first time.

His name in her phone is still DO NOT CALL. She keeps a pair of slide-on sandals in the backseat of his car for when he picks her up from her place and she has a bright pink toothbrush in his bathroom and a legion of disposable razors and makeup underneath his sink and more and more of his clothes start ending up in the laundry hamper inside of her apartment. When she can’t get away with sneaking out during comebacks, she tells her manager she’s at a relative’s, because Hyeri would never lie for her if she knew who she was with, and she uses an entire bottle of concealer in two weeks trying to cover up the marks he leaves on her neck.

They purposely see terrible movies just so they can and laugh about it afterward and they go to every meat place they can get their hands on at the weirdest hours. She massages his head when he gets headaches from not sleeping and he waits impatiently while she gets her nails done. They drink huge margaritas with shared straws just to see who gets brain freeze the fastest. They get drunk on soju and play monopoly.

Sometimes, she just looks at him.

At night, when she’s supposed to be sleeping, and in the morning, when she’s supposed to be leaving. He sleeps like the dead, well into the afternoon, and he never moves when she traces the slope of his nose. She likes to comb her fingers through his thick dark hair back. at his skin, brown from summers at Yangyang, and from days out camping with his high school friends. Kiss his brow and his chin, because it’s the only time she can do so, and trust that he’s not gonna be mean about it.

Sometimes, she looks at him and she thinks he might be her best friend. And she wonders how he could have ever hurt her the way he once did.

But most of the time-

She rolls her eyes at his compliments because she has to remind herself what happened the last time she fell for his pretty words and she doesn’t hold his hand in public for fear of people noticing even though she knows he’s bypass caring about people’s opinions. She scrunches her shoulders when he obnoxiously kisses the side of her face, ignoring the leap in her chest, and she lies to her members about where she is all of the time because she doesn’t want them to be disappointed, and she lies to her parents because they still remember those two weeks when she was 23 and she did nothing but cry her eyes out over that boy.

She won’t be naive again.

She knows what they are and she knows what they aren’t.