“Baekhyun?”
 

“What is it?” he asked as we closely approached my house.

“Do you mind if we go to your house? I don’t really want to go home…” I wasn’t ready to see an empty house knowing that it would always remain that way.

He hesitated for a while before he could answer. I knew he didn’t like people coming over his house, but I had already been there, so it couldn’t have been that big of a deal.

After he still didn’t answer I realized that it was a bigger deal than originally I thought it was.

“It’s fine. I can just go ho-”

“No,” he interrupted. “We can go to my house.”

“Baekhyun, it’s alright. If you don’t want me there, I can just go home.”

“No,” he repeated. “I…I do want you there.” I felt a flutter in my stomach as I tried to hold back a huge grin. I was grieving. I couldn’t be smiling; at least not this soon.

I opted to stay silent during the whole ride to his house, mostly because I was already asking so much of him. It was the least I could do for him and myself; even if I was bursting with questions to ask him.

When we were in the city and off the bus, we walked to Baekhyun’s house.

“Are you finally going to tell me what’s on your mind?”

“How do you know something’s on my mind?” I retorted, even though it was true.

“You looked so anxious to tell me something on the bus,” he said with a chuckle.

“Why did you tell my grandmother we were dating?” I blurted out. He sent an almost knowing smile my way and I figure I could have replied a little less eagerly, but my mind was in a bit of a jumble. Although, I'm sure he found the question endearing to some extent. 

“That one time I stayed over your house, she talked to me the next morning about you.” They talked to each other? She told me that she hardly even talked to him… “She told me how her dying wish was for you to find a boyfriend. I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to grant it, you know?”

“Even if it was a lie?”

“Her last minutes were happy ones weren’t they?”

Last minutes. Only dead people had last minutes. A heavy feeling quickly returned in my chest. “I guess happy minutes are better than sad ones,” I said, feeling emptiness quickly permeate through my body.

His hand found his way into mine and the empty feeling was slowly fading away, slowly filling in the barren spaces with warmth I didn't know he had. But as much as I wanted the feeling to go away, I didn’t want it to be Baekhyun making it go away. Well, maybe I did want it to be Baekhyun, just not when he was dating Jiyeon.
 

I slithered my hand out of his just as we reached his house.
 

“Baekhyun, you have a girlfriend,” I said with a stern voice and as if on cue, the light drizzle turned into pouring rain, each drop slamming onto the ground, drowning out the quiet sounds of nature, and naturally bringing the volume of our voices higher. 
 

“You’re really driving me insane,” Baekhyun almost shouted. The rain may have raised his voice, but I believed that it was something else. The spark had finally reached the end of his fuse. “I tried to warn you. I tried to push you away. I tried to ignore the feelings that I knew were very much there. I tried, okay? I really did. Everything was going well. You moved on because I was dating Jiyeon, right? It a lot dating her, but I’m doing it for you, okay. I’m dating Jiyeon to protect you.”
 

I understood he what he was trying to do, but it only made me more upset. Who was he to decide what I can and can't handle? And who was he to just take advantage of my feelings, knowing exactly how I felt?
 

“W-what are you saying Baekhyun? You’re dating her so that I don’t get hurt? Do you honestly think that I’m not hurting when I see you holding hands in the halls? When you hug in the halls? When you kiss in the halls? Are you really doing that to protect my feelings?”
 

“I figured that would hurt less than falling in love and losing me to cancer,” he said so low that I could barely hear what he said over the rain. “I hate it a lot okay. It’s hard. It’s so hard. I’m hurting all the time, but I have to keep a stupid smile on my face so no one knows. No one is supposed to know about this.”
 

“Stop.”
 

“No one’s supposed to be close to me.”
 

“Stop, Baekhyun.”
 

“No one’s supposed to miss me when I’m gone.”
 

“Baekhyun, don’t say that. You’re not going anywhere. You’re fine.”
 

Water was pouring out of his eyes again and his walls were crumbling faster. It was hard to watch, but just like Baekhyun said, everyone had their breaking points. And his was right now.
 

“If I was fine,” he said with a trembling voice. “Would I look like this?” He brought his hand up to his hair and tugged at it. His hair slid off his head in one motion, revealing a bald head. My mouth fell open and my own tears began to form. “I know. I’m hideous," he said, repulsion dripping off his voice. He spoke again, but his voice cracking in the process. "Radiation hasn’t been working, so I’ve been doing Chemo for a couple months now-”
 

I quickly wrapped my arms around him and pulled him into a tight embrace. His own arms wrapped around my shoulders tightly as he sobbed. “Nothing’s working anymore. I’m scared.” Baekhyun was shaking. And it wasn’t because he was cold. “I’m so scared of dying. I thought I was ready, but I’m not. I thought fighting this battle alone was going to be alright, but it’s not. It’s so hard. And my dad’s too busy with his work to even care.”
 

I squeezed him tight before saying, “You don’t have to go through this alone.”
 

* * *
 

I changed out of my soaking clothes and into some of Baekhyun’s dry ones. When I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting on his bed with dry clothes on and hair back on his head again.
 

“Baekhyun, why’d you put the wig back on?” I asked. There was no reason for him to hide under it anymore; at least not from me.
 

“I told you already. I’m disgusting without it,” he said with a frown.
 

I hopped on the bed and sat across from him, grabbing his hand in the process. “Stop talking like that. You’re beautiful no matter what you look like,” I honestly stated.
 

“It’s okay. You don’t need to lie to me. I can keep it on for the sake of your eyes.”
 

“Baekhyun,” I whined. “I’m being serious. Take it off," I insisted.
 

He stared at me for a moment to gauge out how serious I was being. When he finally figured it out, he heavily sighed. “You’re going to regret this decision you know,” he said slowly moving his hand towards his head. His hand lingered at the top of his head and I pressed him to go on. He sighed again and pulled the wig off.
 

I gazed at the new Baekhyun in front of me. All of his walls were completely torn down. I had finally done it. “Oh my god, I told you I was disgusting,” he complained, letting go of my hand and pulling up his hood over his head.
 

“Oh, stop it. You will always be gorgeous no matter what,” I said, pulling his hood down.
 

He slowly brought his eyes up to meet my own and said, “You thought I was gorgeous?”
 

“I still do,” I said, returning my hand into his.
 

He let out a sigh as he tightened his grip around my hand. “You won’t think that after I get surgery…”
 

A crease formed between my brows. “You already have a scar on your chest Baekhyun. It’s really not that big of a deal.”
 

It was his turn to furrow his eyebrows. “What are you talking about? The tumor’s in a weird place. They have to cut my face open.”
 

My eyes rounded. “W-what? But the scar on your chest…” I thought aloud. “The tumor’s not in your heart?”
 

“You thought I had heart cancer?” he asked with a rather amused look on his face that only confused me more.
 

“You don’t?”
 

He let out a chuckle. “No, I have brain cancer.”
 

My other hand subconsciously covered my wide open mouth. “That’s not funny, Baekhyun,” I said with a frown.            
 

“There’s still a lot you don’t know about me.”
 

“I think I know that already,” I said with a huff. I thought I had him all figured out when I pinned down heart cancer on him. But I was wrong. I was always wrong when it came down to Baekhyun.
 

I spent the next few hours lying next to Baekhyun, listening to the story behind the scar on his chest.
 

Baekhyun met Sohee in elementary school. He would always watch her on the playground and after a while he finally mustered up enough courage to confess to him. Sohee told him not to fall in love with her, a phrase that I was very much familiar with. But that didn’t stop him. It also didn’t stop Sohee from rejecting him.
 

She ended up telling her parents about him and they told his parents. His parents sent him to another school, which just so happened to be mine. But it still didn’t stop him. He continued to pursue her when he got home from school because he was just so intrigued by her. Sound familiar?
 

She finally accepted his offer to date when they were 13 years old. His parents worried about them dating because Sohee’s parents told them about her condition. She had heart cancer. Baekhyun didn’t find out until he finished his last year of middle school.
 

She broke it to him at his middle school graduation dinner. She was dying. And she waited last minute to let him know that she only had a few days left to live. The young and blindly in love Baekhyun took it upon himself to give her his heart. He had forged his parents’ signature on a few forms and pulled a few other strings, allowing the doctors to perform the operation. Regulations weren’t as tight back then as they were now.
 

While undergoing surgery, the surgeons were notified that Sohee was having multiple organ failure and it would take a lot more than a heart to save her. They stopped the surgery right away. He woke up with his sister, Gyuri, beside him. She broke the news to him and of course he was crushed. And on top of that, his parents were absolutely furious with him. “How could you try and waste your own precious life on a girl you thought you were in love with? You’re only fourteen,” they told him.     
 

Later that year, his mother got diagnosed with brain cancer and ironically enough, his father told Gyuri to give their mother her brain. Brain transplants had never been done before, but his father, a prestigious brain surgeon, was willing to try to save the love of his life.
 

Of course Gyuri didn’t want to do the surgery. No one in the world had ever successfully accomplished brain transplanting. She was young. She didn’t want to give up her life like that.
 

But their father was persistent and it eventually pushed Gyuri over the edge.
 

She committed suicide: Drove her car straight into another, with her mother also in the car. She figured they were both going to die anyway and it was the only way she could defy her father.
 

The people in both vehicles died on the scene.
 

The people in the other vehicle just happened to be my parents.