There are half-full boxes on the floor, so many of them; all the drawers and cupboards are opened, things are disordered, as if someone has been rummaging through them.
Instead of thinking of the most obvious, Minho settles with a, paradoxically so, more comfortable thought- a thief.
A bit anxious and, most of all, terrified by what could have happened to Taemin, he slowly and silently approaches the living room and peers inside.
The boxes are sprawled all over the floor; Minho recognizes Taemin’s clothes packed neatly in some of them; in others, he sees his books from university and his notebooks.
What’s going on…?
More confused than ever, he steps out of the room, walking backwards, until he collides with something hard and unstable (a pile of books, he later realizes) and hears a shriek.
“God, you scared me!” Taemin breaths out, his face pale and frightened, and for a moment, Minho feels like in good old times, when he’d crawl under the table and wait for Taemin to sit at it so that he could susprise him with kisses traced along his bare calves.
But then the reality sinks in and Taemin’s face shows nothing but irritation and exhaustion.
“What are you even doing here?” he asks, kneeling to pile up the books again. Minho helps him. Taemin accepts the help silently.
“I wanted to see you” Minho starts, and then thinks maybe it’s not the best way to talk to Taemin now. Which is why he decides to settle with the thing that got him so confused the moment he stepped in “I thought there was a thief in here…”
The pile is set, Taemin lifts it carefully. Minho’s gaze follows his every movement, avoiding his eyes.
“No, Minho. There was no thief.” Taemin coldly replies, stepping into the room and putting the books one by one into the last empty box. It slowly clicks, but Minho refuses to acknowledge that before he knows for sure:
“So what is all this? Why are you… packing your things?”
Taemin gives him an incredulous look.
“You haven’t realized that yet?” and Minho doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to accept it—
“I’m moving out, Minho.”
The moment he says these words, Minho shakily asks:
“Why are you packing only your things? Why not mine too?”
The younger boy shakes his head slowly.
“Because it’s me, who’s moving out. You’re not.”
And this is it.
The whole life he’s built up on the vision of him and Taemin forever together, all the times they’ve been together, laughed together, cried together, dreamed together, it all turned into a distant nothingness with that simple sentence- ‘I’m moving out.’
“Why?” Minho tries, at the verge of tears.
Taemin blinks.
“Why? Do you seriously ask me ‘why’?” he almost shouts now, his hands trembling “Minho, you cheated on me, you’ve been cheating on me for almost a year, sleeping with another person, a person who’s an innocent, broken boy on top of that!” Taemin can’t hide his disgust, the look he gives Minho is just overwhelming. “And it’s not even about me anymore. It’s about you. You and him. , I just— I realize that I was just too young, too stupid to agree to something like this. ‘Elope with me and live with me’, well said, you smartass” he snarls ironically “Thanks God it happened so soon, otherwise I could have wasted another four years living with a damn liar under the same roof!”
His face is now flushed, eyes glistering with unshed tears. Minho’s sure he looks pretty much the same right now.
Taemin’s first tears slowly drop onto the floor.
“I have no idea what he must have felt. At least I… I had you, I had you for real. At least for some time” he wipes his tears with his sleeve and chuckles breathlessly “while he… God, Minho, do you realize how shocked he was? How lost? I should have known, I should have known, but I was so blinded with my trust for you that I never even let such thought occur to me…” he’s laughing again, hiccupping, as more and more tears leak out. “I wonder how you felt the first time you slept with him. If you thought of me. Why you decided to keep on meeting up with him. Wasn’t I enough?” he asks bitterly and Minho can only shake his head, whispering desperately “No, it’s not this, it’s not about you”.
Taemin sniffs loudly, looks Minho in the eye, and, for the first time, his eyes hold sadness and pain.
“Why… w-why are you crying?” Taemin asks, looking so confused, so lost, and Minho knows he took off the mask.
“I… I never meant to hurt you, Taeminnie. I, I l-love you, I…”
Taemin bits his lower lip and scans Minho’s face in deep thought.
Then he sighs shakily and asks, this time his voice is more stable, calmer.
“What am I to you, Minho?”
And Minho doesn’t have to think twice.
“You mean the world to me, Minnie” he silently confesses, his heart clenches as he does.
And the younger- his first love, first lover, first everything- gives him a loop-sided, strange smile.
“But, the world is not enough, is it, Minho?”
Minho can only stare as Taemin says these words. There’s nothing he can say to this.
“… go. The truck will be here in a few minutes, my parents found some nice place for me. And, don’t call me, I’ve changed my number anyways. Don’t make it anymore harder, please.”
These are the last words that Taemin says to him.
It’s over.
It’s over.









Minho is engulfed by the world of fiction again. He needs it. He runs away from the reality that crushes him, that left him alone and broken and disgusted with himself. He yearns to find the peace again, he wishes he could wake up and see everything’s fine.
Except it’s not. It’s not a dream.
Among all those books and comics he’s coming across, he remembers one that made him snap. He can’t really remember what the book was about, what was its title, for the thing that caught his attention was one sentence:

”If you fell for two persons, choose the second one, because if you loved the first one enough, you wouldn’t have fallen for the latter.”

These words sound unfair and right at the same time.
He didn’t love Taemin enough?...
Then why does it hurt so much when he’s gone?
He reads the sentence once again, feeling his heart hammering in his chest.
I don’t care anymore.











“Hello, how can I he—“
Jinki stops in the middle of the word, seeing who’s standing right in front of him.
Minho. Pale, definitely skinner, slightly trembling Minho, with his fists clenching so tightly that his knuckles turn white.
It’s been so long. He’s not sure how long, he decided to move on, try to forget, not to feel any sort of regret.
But yet, as the younger boy is standing right there, so close, so close that if he just simply extended his hand he’d be able to touch him, to feel him, to make sure he’s really here, this whole proximity and confusion makes Jinki put on a mask once again.
He pretends it doesn’t hurt, he pretends it doesn’t make him want to run away, he pretends—
He pretends.
While Minho is so obvious in his acts.
“Can we talk?” he asks, desperation clear in his voice, and for a moment, Jinki’s eyes soften. Just for a moment though.
He makes a pointed look, sighs (when did indifference become so easy to act?) and replies with a calm, polite tone:
“I’m sorry, but I have to serve the readers first” he glances sideways at the queue forming behind Minho “if there’s nothing I can help you with, then please wa—“
“I didn’t mean to” Minho cuts him, and Jinki can only stare at those red, glistering with unshed tears sad eyes. He remains speechless as the younger tries to fight the shaky sobs “I didn’t mean for it to end up like this. Never. Everything I did, everything I… apart from that day… I meant every little thing. I...”
And now he’s crying freely, leaving the whole queue motionless and taken aback, as well as the librarian himself.
Minho’s tears are honest, vulnerable and real.
“Junsu-hyung, could you replace me for a moment?”
Jinki motions Minho to go to the empty reading room with him. The younger complies immediately.








“I didn’t lie about what I said about one night stands or me being with only one person before you. I didn’t lie about now wanting to make you sad, about wanting for you to be happy. When you told me that you loved me I thought I’d die, out of fear, shock and also a tiny bit of happiness, I guess. I fell for you in the very beginning, I never kiss if I don’t mean it. I know you probably hate me and won’t ever trust me again, I know I’m not worthy of your time, but, please, believe me. You changed my world. You changed me. You made me enjoy things I never knew before. You… you suddenly became the centre of it all, I could hardly think of myself.”
Jinki lets Minho embrace him. The younger is shaking, letting out the words he’s been keeping inside for so long. Every word, every breath seem to be a piece of relief, a piece of purification. Jinki doesn’t let the words affect him; they reach his heart, yes, but he doesn’t want to acknowledge that.
“I gotta get back to work” he finally says, detaching himself from Minho. Only then he realizes his eyes are glistering with tears as well.
Minho walks silently behind him, slowly calming down, not saying anything anymore. Jinki thanks Junsu for his help and gets back to serving the readers.
Ten readers after, he’s greeted with a shaky smile and a shy look from red, puffy, but somehow happy eyes.
He freezes.
“… how can I help you?” he asks unsurely, and Minho’s smile grows wider.
“I need some good book to read. Something hooking, but not as hooking as ‘Dead Europe’, my lunch burnt while I was too engulfed by reading it”
And finally, Jinki reciprocates the grin. For a moment it’s just this, his lips slowly curving into a smile, and then, it turns into an uncontrollable, loud and merry laughter.
He’s still chuckling as he replies:
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Things start to fall back into place again.

________________________________________