(A/N: A longer chapter awaits you <3)

  Baekhyun grabs me by the crook of my elbow and yanks me around the corner of the cafe to his car. He unlocks the front door, pushes me into the passenger seat and secures me in before I can even understand what’s going on. Is he going to kill me? Paranoid but paralyzed, I remain seated, watching how his anxiety makes him struggle to even open his door. He enters the car, frustrated, blinking more than he should and twitching every so often. This isn’t normal. I place my hand on his forehead, and yes, it’s hot, no, it’s on fire. He senses my hand and whips me away, breathing heavily at the sudden touch.

  “Baekhyun, you can’t drive like this. Calm down.” What a hypocritical response. My heart is racing, my neck and armpits are sweaty, I’m as worried about this as he is. The only difference is, I have no clue what’s happening. I move to unlock myself from the car seat, but his clench is on my wrist before I can react, my circulation comes to a halt. “Let go!” I try to move, but his grip is like an iron seal.

  “Jennifer, I can drive. I’m doing this for you. I’m sorry,” he lets go, only to wipe away some sweat.

  “You’re in no form to drive,” he turns the key, “Stop now before you kill us both,” he unlocks the brake, “Get out of the car and just take a breath,” his foot lands on the accelerator, “BAEKHYUN!” I know yelling would only worsen the situation, but nothing else is entering his mind. His decisions are clear, the only thing I can do is stall until he brings himself together.

  “Shut up,” he spits, and holds down the accelerator, changing lanes onto the gravel-paved road. I hold onto the door as well as my seat, because even though I’m buckled in tight, I’m afraid that this is my one-way ticket to death. “You’ll thank me once all of this is over.” I don’t reply, but my cautious self is telling me that he’s going to drive us into a tree, jump out, and watch me die. No, he’s a good guy. Still, my heartbeats are racing and my breaths are shallow.

  I look at the Baekhyun who isn’t breathing properly, the Baekhyun who’s sweating enough sweat to fill a pond, the Baekhyun who isn’t calm and composed. This is the Baekhyun who I’m afraid of. This is the Baekhyun I didn’t know existed. “Baekhyun…” his grip on the steering wheel tightens and veins protrude from his forehead, “What haven’t you told me about you?”

  He scoffs, “What have I told you?”

  I raise a finger to object, but I realise, in that silence, he is right. Besides his name, I don’t know a single thing about him. All I have on him are based on assumptions. I think he has a great life just because I don’t, I think he must have had an easy past just because he’s nice, I think that he would have nothing to worry about just because I believe I’m the only one who worries. Buildings on both sides blur as he kicks up the speed, and the industrialised city is left with a row of trees. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Somewhere that you’ll remember forever.”

  Have his answers always been so vague? I clench my fists in annoyance, “Are we nearly there?”

  His eyes scan left to right, and I can almost see a hint of a tear in his eyes, “Yeah.” He removes a hand from the wheel and dries the tear, but I’ve already seen it. It’s the first time that I’ve ever seen anyone, besides me and Chanyeol, crumble because of their own emotions. “Sometimes,” he whispers, in a way that seems like he’s talking to himself, “it’s the people who smile that are hurting the most.” Baekhyun moves his foot onto the brake and he turns off the ignition, the air is cold and the windows are all fogged up.

  Amidst the fog are faint silhouettes of nearby trees, gnarled branches emerging from nowhere. Baekhyun exits the car first and opens my door, I stumble out, holding onto him for balance as my feet sink into the mud underneath. It’s frigid, dark, and I’m confident to say it reeks of pungent death. The calls of owls are resonating from the distance, the sound becoming lost in the mist. The only thing I see, besides the dark faded shapes of trees, is Baekhyun, with a face that is scribbled with secrets. My gut tells me to run, my heart says to scream, but my brain plants my feet into the ground.

  “I don’t want to be here,” I confess blankly, pulling the rims of my sleeves down until I’m fully concealed, “I’m cold and uncomfortable here. It’s so dark and you don’t look so happy to be here either.”

  “Nobody is ever happy to be here.”

  “Quit with the indirect replies. You dragged me out here in the middle of nowhere without even giving me a clue where we were headed and where in the world you have dumped me. The brownie and your cake is all cold and stale now and I swear my bones are as brittle as twigs. If you were here to murder me, just hurry up, I’ll freeze to death anyways. But remember,” I glare and a hoarse hiss is created in the back of my throat, “Go ahead and kill me, but if you think you’re running away from my brother, think again.”

  “What are you talking about? Me, a murderer? Oh come on,” he rolls his eyes and checks on the baked goods, “it’s not stale. If it were, she wouldn’t mind anyways.” He pauses, recollects his thoughts, and glances at me with ache.

  “Who’s ‘she’?”

  “Well, you’ll see. I’m taking you to meet her. Usually,” he warns me, “she gets a little frightened around strangers. Still, she is the best person in the world.” Baekhyun takes my hand as we follow a dirt path that snakes between rows and rows of stone sculptures. The eeriness does not lift off, the coldness does not warm, it’s like I’m trapped in a forest in a harsh night in the middle of winter. “Or at least,” he continues, finishing off the sentence I didn’t know was incomplete, “she was the best.” Fear freezes my bones and I glimpse around, slightly, but I don’t feel like I’m the observer here. “Don’t look around, it’ll only scare you more. I’m so sorry for taking you here, no going back though, right?”

  “I don’t like it here,” I admit and I’m digging my nails into his skin so we don’t pry away from each other, “Why?”

  “You know why.” That’s the point, I’m more afraid because I know the reason he dragged me here. It’s the same reason I’ve been trying to run away from, the same reason I thought I’ll be free. “Chanyeol’s going to die. One day.” I nod, I know. “The cemetery will become a second home to you, the way it is to me. A home is not a home unless you have your family. We’re nearly there, but go ahead, spill the questions you are dying to ask.”

  “Tell me about yourself, your family that you’re visiting, and well, everything.”

  “My mum,” his voice quavers and cracks. Tears are falling faster than I can count, “She forgot everyone who meant something to her, and she convinced herself that she was living a fairytale. My dad divorced when he figured out…” he chokes on his own words, “... when he wasn’t her true prince. During her years when she still had her memory, she went out for long night walks and business trips became longer and longer. Dad and I kept telling ourselves that the workloads and stress had been getting to her head. The thing was, how could she feel stressed when she was cheating on Dad with her boss? Dad had convinced me it was her fault and that I should live the rest of my life with him because mum was ‘a piece of cheating scum’, but I found her one day. She had a black eye, unconscious and lying beside a dumpster in an alleyway outside our house.”

  A howl of wind brushes past, leaves and dirt catching in my matted hair. Baekhyun doesn’t flinch, I guess it’s because nothing is equal to the pain of losing not one, but two parents.

  “Dad was arrested and Mum was hospitalised. He visited her once, still believing that deep inside, she still loved him, but everything seemed to crash down when she didn’t hug or kiss him and instead screamed out the name of her boss, claiming that my father wasn’t her husband. Towards her final days of remembering, she forgot everyone except for me. I promised her I would stay and treat her like my mother. But… her bills piled high and the expenses only rose and it became frustrating for me to be around my mum. I told myself it would be better for her to just die already because at that point, she was dragging me down with her. My friends stopped calling, my boss fired me and I was left alone with a physically tormented and mentally sick woman. I swore I hated every second of it, every second of her. Sound familiar to you?”

  I can’t answer, not because I’m struggling to find the words, but because I know, too well, he is right.

  “That day you first met me, it wasn’t because of the reason I told you, that the nurses were betting. It was because I overheard them saying you gave up already and one day, you’ll just discard Chanyeol because the frustration is going to get you. I couldn’t just watch what happened to me happen again to anyone else. It was just a reminder of the mother I lost and the father who caused all of this. You never know how much something means to you until you lose it, and at that moment, you can’t retrace your steps to find it again. You just have to it up and live with it - and trust me, that’s worse.” Baekhyun crouches down and slips the lemon cake out of the bag, placing it on a mound of dirt beside a stone and a rose. He traces the letters engraved into the stone with his finger, mouthing it as he moves, “Hi, mama. I want you to meet my friend. Her name is Jennifer and she has a brother who is just like you.”

  “What do I say?” I whisper, watching the birds descending from the trees, nibbling at the crumbs of the cake, and flying away again. I draw endless spirals into the dirt, thinking about the many things I could say to a stone. “Well… my name is Jennifer and I have a brother called Chanyeol. He’s dying of cancer and I always treated him like trash until your son came to the rescue. He proved to me how precious life is, but I don’t know, I guess I feel as if… it’s too late.” I pause, and glance at Baekhyun, his breaths are in beat with the wind and his eyes are closed.

  Is the wind going to carry my words to his mother? Will she seal them and gift them to Chanyeol when they meet up there? Or could this just be a waste of time, another hour lost of spending time with my brother?

  Baekhyun lifts his head up, barely opening his eyes and they remain hooded. His eyes are red, bloodshot with swollen eyelids. He had listened to my words, but not my voice as he had heard his own. His own story, his own mistake, had been played right into his ears. He is someone, unable to escape from his past blunders, because everytime he looks into my eyes, he sees a reflection of himself.

  “If he’s alive, it’s never too late. But once you lose him, you also lose yourself.”

A/N: I hope you enjoyed this chapter where Baekhyun's past was revealed! Leave a comment and subscribe <3 (I read all of them and even though I don't reply, I am genuinely very touched :) )