DOWNPOUR

To say that Jinhwan loved Hanbin would be an understatement. He believed that they were more, whatever the word encompassed. So to say that he was okay would be a ing joke.

“Okay,” he nodded once, expecting the look of surprise on Hanbin’s face. He expected right, but it disappeared as soon as it came, almost as if it didn’t happen.

“Okay?” Hanbin echoed, eyebrows furrowed on his forehead.

“Yes. Okay,” Jinhwan repeated firmly.

“I’m sorry,” Hanbin said again, this time reaching out to touch Jinhwan’s hand.

The shorter of the two flinched, inching his hand away from Hanbin’s fingers. “Don’t be. It’s okay,” he flashed a smile that he hoped was convincing before he stood up, feet aiming for the door without so much as a word of goodbye.

“It’s okay,” he muttered under his breath for what seemed like the hundredth time in the span of thirty minutes like a chant, because maybe if he said it enough, it would really be okay.

It wasn’t.

The forceful tug at his wrist, the loud blaring of horns, the sound of screeching tires against the asphalt and the moisture on his face—a combination of those four was what brought Jinhwan out of his thoughts, away from Hanbin’s words ‘Let’s break up’, which bounced off the walls of his head.

He frantically looked around him and he realized that he was in the middle of the street, while the stoplights were obviously green.

“Do you have a death wish?” bellowed a man from a cab, accompanied by his middle finger sticking up before he drove away.

Jinhwan could swear he aimed for his house when he stepped out of the coffee shop but it seemed he took a detour. He hadn’t even realized that it was raining and he was completely drenched.

“Are you okay?” A voice asked and Jinhwan’s head whipped up to look at the stranger who was easily half a head taller than he was or more.

What he noticed first was the stranger’s full lips, then his eyes scanned his straight nose, and the hair that fell right on his eyebrows. He nodded then and instead of saying thanks, he asked the boy, “What are you doing here?”

Of course that wasn’t the appropriate thing to say, but Jinhwan’s mind was all over the place, he forgot that he didn’t own the street.

Surprise colored the stranger’s face, and it was only then that he looked a bit childlike. He could pass for a high school student if he didn’t loo