As soon as he steps out of the gate and onto the plane, Sanghyuk mourns his unfortunate seating assignment – the dreaded middle seat. It’s not his problem that he has long legs and being cramped in the middle of two people doesn’t help his cause. Maybe he’ll ask one of the neighboring passengers to switch with him if they’re willing because at least a window seat has a view and the aisle seat is closest to the exit. But for now, he stows his small carry-on overhead and plops down into his assigned seat, quite literally twiddling his thumbs because he was too stupid to charge his iPod and phone. You’ve really outdone yourself this time, he chastises himself.

“Um, hi.” A female voice breaks his reverie. He looks up to find a girl struggling to get her suitcase in the overhead bins. “Can you help me real quick with this?” A sheepish smile graces her lips and he thinks she’s kind of pretty.

“Oh, yeah, sure.” He gets up and – he’s not gonna lie – she might as well be carrying rocks in her suitcase because of how heavy it is. She giggles a little when it takes him two tries to properly store her suitcase, and he wonders if all his hours working out at the gym with Hongbin and Taekwoon were for nothing.

“Thanks,” she says, giving him a smile. Correction: she’s not kind of pretty, she’s beautiful and charming and all sorts of adjectives that probably more appropriately belong in a romance novel. Not that Sanghyuk actually reads any of those, of course.

“No problem,” he replies, about to get back into his seat before he realizes – oh. “Which one’s your seat?”

“The window seat,” she responds, giving him a sympathetic look. “Do you want the window seat though? You look like the type who doesn’t like being squashed in the middle of a human sandwich.”

He’s tongue-tied at this point – because on one hand, this girl has graciously offered him what he wanted all along, but on the other hand, she seems like the type to like window seats too and she’s too nice to take advantage of. “N-no, I’m alright,” he stutters. “Here, you can sit first.”

Once they settle down, seatbelts clicked in and Sanghyuk returns to awkwardly twiddling his thumbs, he asks, “So, uh, what’s in your suitcase?”

“Oh, sorry about making you lift all that,” she starts. “I just have a lot of books in there. Novels, and even textbooks about random subjects. I’m visiting my aunt in Hong Kong for a few weeks.”

“…So you figured you’d just bring your entire bookshelf?” Incredulous is probably the right word to describe him right now.

“Only like a tenth of my bookshelf, but yeah.”

A pause. Sanghyuk wonders if she reads romance novels.

“So why are you flying to Hong Kong?” she asks.

He shrugs.

“Wanderlust?”

“I guess.”

She looks out the window then, as the plane starts to coast down the runway and take off. The skies are impeccably blue today and the light reflects off her porcelain skin. “I understand that feeling,” she murmurs. “That’s why I like to read books. Traveling is often expensive but books can transport you to a whole other world.” Her tone is dreamy, and something tells him that she’s hiding a lot of wisdom and spunk behind that innocent girl mask she puts up.

“Oh yeah, I’m Sanghyuk. They call me Hyuk though,” he blurts out of nowhere, and there’s that smile of hers again.

“I’m Sooyoung. People call me Joy.”

Shared grins, awkward bumping of elbows on the arm rest, return to looking out the window.

He may not have the best view of the outside from where he’s sitting but he would be lying if he said he didn’t have a view at all.

(Because while she’s gazing at the fluffy white clouds and receding cityscape below, he’s staring at her and the way she tucks her hair behind her ear and her perfect side profile against the baby blue expanse.

He supposes they call her Joy because she makes them joyful. He wonders if she is, in fact, happy.

He hopes she is because somehow, in a small yet significant way, he swears she has brought a little drop of sunshine into an otherwise grumpy ordeal and frustrating bout of the traveling blues.

They both accidentally fall asleep later and it’s the best he’s napped in a very, very long time.)