Sooyoung has always pictured her life as a book.

Each standstill, each bump in the road – each crease folded into her palm is just another chapter in the novel that is her life. It’s something to leaf through whenever she's feeling nostalgic about the past and considering all the events that have occurred in her two decades worth of breathing. By now she thinks that it might as well be divided into volumes for her life has been anything but calm since she joined the business. Her life written up into a thick, hardbound book was inevitable at this point.

She didn’t mind though. Just as long as she could look over her chapters again anytime she wished.

At least… except for one.

Kyuhyun.

Giving up on him had shattered her heart into tiny fragments, and every time she thinks about the way her hand trembled when she wrote him the letter that would end it all, her eyes prick with the threat of tears and she forces herself to focus her mind on something else.

Letting him go had been the hardest thing she'd ever had to do, and she remembers spending weeks after that day cooped up in her bedroom, listening to sad Japanese songs and letting the tears run down her face as the feeling of loss and self-pity swallowed her whole. The only solace she found in the whole situation was knowing that she had done the right thing.

Idling over a relationship that could have been was insane, and neither of them wouldn’t have been able to sustain it even if they hard enough at such a young age. They weren’t ready for something as serious as love – or true love as he’d so jokingly said so once, way back when she was just Choi Sooyoung and he was Cho Kyuhyun.

She turns her head a little to Changmin sitting a way off her right and she guesses that he feels her eyes on him, because he turns as well and gives her a small smile before going back to listening to Victoria rant about how Chinese buns in Korea never taste as good as the real thing something or other. It’s a fleeting smile, hardly anything really but it was loaded with sadness and ache and Sooyoung takes a deep guilty breath when she realizes Yoona – her friend, her sister – was looking at her (them) as well.

It is a secret that no one else knows but her, and it kills her a little bit every time she watches her doe-eyed friend step away – shielding her heart when it was so obvious Yoona felt more than she let on because she was afraid of stepping onto her boundaries.

As if Sooyoung owned Changmin, when in reality she didn’t want him at all.

She tried to give a relationship with Changmin a chance. She really did. But every time they held hands, or kissed, or even made eye contact - it felt