Yunji stared down at the sheets of paper on her table. She tried to read the content of the piece, but not one word stuck to her brain.
Slowly, she flipped the pages, trying to find a question that she might understand. Page one, page two, ah she knew that. Page three… Shoot. She forgot everything.

She peeked up from her question paper to the corner of the class room, where her math teacher was sitting behind a desk, looking sleepy as usual. She thought of walking there and asked everything that she didn’t understand, but when she saw that most of her classmates were talking to each other and ignoring the math exercise, she was discouraged. If she asked now, surely she would be ridiculed as being ‘too diligent’. But what could she do? The national exam was just around the corner, and she honestly didn’t know how to answer 50% of the questions. She didn’t want to fail it; she would be killed by her family!
So she turned her head to the last direction where help might still be waiting for her. As she predicted, he was sitting nicely on his chair, his pencil glided feverishly across the paper. Aaah, the joy of being the smartest kid in class… You don’t need to worry about failing any exams.

After some time of contemplation, Yunji finally braved up and walked toward his seat at the back of the room.

“Hey, Taemin?” Only when she called his name did he notice her presence and looked up from the question paper.

He didn’t seem to expect her being there, as he spent some time looking unsure and stuttering, until finally he snapped and said, “Yes?”

“I need some help with this damn quiz.” Yunji huffed while flapping the sheets in the air.

“Yeah, yeah! Sure! Just… Take a seat.” He gestured her to get closer as he scooted his chair away to give her more room.

She dragged a chair and plopped onto it, immediately pointing a question while asking him to explain everything as clear as possible.
Taemin, in the other hand, was a bit perplexed.  His heart began to race and he just hoped his voice wouldn’t quiver. With her elbows on his desk, propping her occasionally bobbing head as she listened to his magically coherent explanation despite his muddled thought, she felt so close, too close maybe. However creepy this might sound, he swore he could even smell the scent of her shampoo.

The loud rang of school’s bell pierced through their nice, private bubble. Yunji, for the first time of the entire tutoring, whipped her head up and looked at Taemin with an annoyed frown on her face, “Ugh… I’ve just beginning to understand, but I have to go home now.”
A thought passed through Taemin’s mind because of her exclamation, which caused him to involuntarily blurt out these words, “Do you want to meet up tomorrow?”

This time, it was Yunji’s turn to look perplexed.

“I know this nice place for studying, it’s a small bookstore, there’s also a small café there; we can meet up at 10 AM tomorrow,” his words came out as very rushed, but it started to slow down when he looked at her confused face and he started to regret his idiotic word fart, “If you’re okay with that…”

Yunji blinked at him several times, discerning his words, before a smile finally crept up her face and she gave him a gradually building nod, “That would be great actually. Yes! Okay, you’ll text me the details? Great! I have to rush now, looking forward for tomorrow! Bye!”

Just like that, Taemin was left on his chair, a silly smile on his face while he mouthed a triumphant ‘YES’.
If only he could see what happened to Yunji at that moment, his head would probably burst from excitement. Running across the corridor with a wide grin on her blushing face, Yunji mouthed the word, ‘NO WAY’, over and over again.

 

Yunji stepped down from the bus into the bright Saturday sun. As she walked to her destination, she kept looking on the screen of her phone, which showed a message from Taemin that read, “Just beside the ramen kiosk. Blue door, with a ‘BLUE GRASS’ sign at the top. See you there :)”
She didn’t need to see the message to locate the bookstore; she had googled it last night. She just wanted to read the ‘See you there :)’ part over and over, which caused her to bit down an excited smile every time she did so.

But when she was finally standing in front of the navy blue door, uncertainty and embarrassment started to wash over her. ‘You’re just imagining thing, Yunji, it’s not possible, it’s like… not possible… Not possible! Not…’

“Hey, come in!” Taemin’s head that popped from the slightly opened door shook her from her trance, “I saw you from the window. Here, here, sit. What do you want to drink? Coke? Nice! Just wait here for a bit, ‘kay?”

She sat down at the table at the far end of the shop, with a tall window that faced the street on her left, and a wooden bookshelf filled with old books on her right. In front of her was a cup of coffee, surely his drink as he waited for her.

“Here,” he handed the bottle of coke to her as he took the seat in front of her, “so, what do you want to study today?”
With that, Yunji was reminded that this was a study session, not a 'date’.  She scrambled around her bag for a bit before fishing out a note with a bundle of papers strapped onto it.

“Integral.” Just saying the topic had the joy out of her voice. But the clear sound of his laughter gave her a sense of reassurance, which returned a smile back to her face.
“Okay then, let’s start.”

 

“Yunji, Yunji,” Taemin took her attention away from the question paper in front of her. She looked up to him with a deep frown on her face, her foot tapping furiously on the floor. She just gave him a quick ‘Humm?!’ as she was too busy chewing the of her pencil.
“You need to calm down.”

“I CAN’T DO THAT.” She burst in frustration.

“I CAN’T DO THIS.” She threw her pencil down to the table, then her arms up in the air, “C.A.N.T CAN’T.”

With that she slumped down and became a hump of huffing mess.
Taemin shook his head. ‘Integral. Makes people crazy, man.’ But he knew that this mental breakdown was coming, and he had packed accordingly too. He took something out from his bag and placed it in front of Yunji.

“Yunji… Yunji,” he softly tapped her arms until she lifted her head up; “I’ll give you one every time you finished a question.”

The light on her eyes returned, “One packet?”

“What? No! One piece.”

She picked herself up, “Five.”

“One.”

“Four!”

“Two?”

“Three!!”

“… Three, three is good.”

They shook each other’s’ hands in agreement, and Taemin took the gummy bear packet out from her reach. “No cheating,” he added with a smirk on his face.
This strategy seemed to help Yunji focus more on her work, as in just under 5 minutes, she finished one of the questions and stretched an open palm to him,

“Three gummies.” © Alana, R 2013. all rights reserved.

He ignored her gesture and picked her paper instead, “I need to check your work first.” A few hum here, a few nods there, before finally he tore open the packet and gave Yunji her right: Three gummy bears.

As Yunji head back on doing the math problems, Taemin looked outside the window. Funny, time flew so fast. He swore the last time he checked it was still 12 o’clock. But now, the sun was starting to set and the sky was coloured deep orange. Through the time they spent together that day, he began to notice some changes in her attitude. She seemed to be more at ease around him. She laughed more, leaned toward him more; she started to tell about her personal stories, about her brothers, her dogs, her turtles. Well, the same observation also happened from Yunji’s point of view. She felt more comfortable around him as she felt that he had shed a layer of his self, the one that served as his protective layer. Doesn’t that makes you vulnerable? Yes. But in certain situations, it is encouraged.

Other than that, Taemin also noticed something… Very… Curiously weird about Yunji. After a few moment of weighing it over in his mind, he decided to ask her about it.

“What’s with the gummy moustache?”

Yunji looked up to him, “Huh?” She felt that there’s nothing wrong with her to gain such a foreign expression out of him.

“That… Gummy moustache.” He pointed at her upper lip.

“Ooh this!” She laughed as she touched the gummy bear that was stuck below her nose with the tip of her tongue, “It’s just a habit, you know, I have both of my hands occupied, so I figure just stick it on my lip for easy access.”
She began to worry as she waited for his response, “Do you think it’s weird?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God,” she muttered as she turned her head away from him, mentally kicking her own for forgetting to act more normal in front of her crush. She was too busy being embarrassed to hear the next set of words that he said, "But I think it's very cute."

She was too busy to remember that the gummy was still stuck on her lip too.

It was gone the next second, though.

“H… How. W… What?!”

Exactly.

Yunji looked at Taemin with her jaw slacked, eyes wide open, and fingers touching the now baren-from-gummy-bear face. Taemin looked at her while chewing a gummy. The gummy that a second ago was on her lips.

She immediately buried her face onto her open palms when the realization hit her. ‘O… oh my dear lord heaven above. He… He kissed me? Is that a kiss?! God! Is a quick nib categorized as kissing? Did Lee Taemin just kissed me?!’

Taemin, in the other hand, was also thinking a similar thing. ‘OH GOD DID I JUST DO THAT?! What went into your head man?! What?! You… You ruined everything! YOU RUINED EVERYTHING. Oh God now she’ll think that you’re a ert. A ert!’

“Yunji?” He finally spoke up after he swallowed the accursed gummy.

But she didn’t give a response. Her face was still hidden with her hand. By that time, Taemin started to notice her shaking shoulders and faint mumbles.

He started to panic. ‘Did I make her cry? man, you make her cry.’

Her mumbles became louder and louder and louder, until at one point he could clearly hear what she said.

“Nonononononononononononononono.”

“.” He hissed as he slowly stretched his arms out, in an effort to possibly calm her down by petting her shoulder. ‘Petting her shoulder?! That’s not how you calm a girl down!’ But what else should he do? He just didn’t know any better.
Before his hand was even close to touching her, her mumbles suddenly ascended into a loud yell.

“Nonononono no. No. NO. NO! HELL NO!” Her head jerked up from her cupped hands, eyes directly looking at Taemin’s with terrifying intensity.

“THAT was my FIRST KISS,” She banged the table several times with her balled fist, “and I DESERVE better than just a CHICKEN PECK.”
Before Taemin could react accordingly (like he would know what an according reaction for this kind of situation anyway), Yunji lunged across the table and locked her lips with his.

He let out some shocked yelps, caused by the firm grip of her steaming palm on the back of his neck, and also from the pricking pain of their teeth clacking against each other from the initial collision. But that yelp slowly evolved into some prolonged sighs, as her grip softens and her hand began to slowly his nape. Added to that, the fleeting excitement of her tongue that teasingly darted across his lips, fluttered quickly but still lingered long enough to be noticed. He slowly acted accordingly to her directions, opening his lips while he also gave her a push to do the same. With one hand giving himself some stability by propping it on the table, the other hand latched onto her hair, grabbing a handful as he pulled her even closer.
If it was possible, he only wanted to keep on nibbling on those sweet, sugary lips of hers, smelling her pineapple scented breath with each sigh that she gave him.

But a quick rapping sound of a knuckle hitting glass took them away from their candy dream land. Looking at the direction of the noise, they were greeted with the sight of a mildly disturbed middle aged woman who stood behind the tall window. They noticed a little girl by her side, her eyes covered with her mother’s hand.

Yunji and Taemin bowed slightly, grinning sheepishly while mouthing the word 'sorry' over and over. Aside from realizing that a tiny group of people had gathered around the window, they also realized that by the course of their kiss, Taemin had swiped most of the papers and books down to the floor, while Yunji had managed to put one knee down on the table.

After that public show of affection, they dared to act meek and plopped back down to their seats with their head hung low, trying to avoid the stares given to them by the pedestrians.

As she broke into a giggle, Yunji bent down and started to collect her notes from the floor. Her giggles became louder when Taemin joined her under the table. But in his case, it wasn’t to collect the fallen notes; it was to shower her face with dozens of quick smooches.
“Now you’re brave.” She said in between her laughter.
He answered with one long kiss on her forehead before they went back up and sat normally on their chair.

Yunji flipped her question paper, a pencil in her hand, ready to continue her studies. But before anything, she took a gummy bear from the packet and stuck it into Taemin's mouth.

“One piece every time I got a correct answer.”

“Five.” He said while attempting to keep the gummy in.

“Two.”

“Four?”

“Three!” Yunji stucked in two more gummies between his lips.
The admiration of her work was cut short as he pulled her in for a quick kiss, dropping off the gummies into in the process.
 

“...Three, three is good.”